Paul Redding

As Jean-Philippe suggests in his sketch of my account of Hegel’s concept of recognition, Hegel doesn’t think of self-reflection as basically achieved by “stepping back” and viewing one’s ideas from a type of metaperspective. Rather, self-consciousness comes primarily via engagement with another, differently located subject. (If I had a badge slogan for this, it might read “Other, not Meta”.) While at a theoretical level I’ve held to a dialogical model of philosophizing for a considerable time, it is in contexts such as these that one gets a deeper sense of just how dependent on dialogical engagement any thinking actually is. There is too much in what my four interlocutors have said to respond adequately here to all points, but I’ll try to pick up on what strike me as important issues. I’ll reply to each in turn, but each reply will address issues that overflow the boundaries between separating them

My first experience of philosophy at the University of Sydney was as a commencing undergraduate in the tumultuous year of 1973. At the start of that year, there was one department of philosophy, but by the beginning of the next there were two. These two departments seemed to be opposed in every possible way except one: they both professed to be committed to a form of materialist philosophy. One could think that having a common enemy at least might have been the cause for some degree of unanimity, but no: the traditional enemy of materialism—idealism—was regarded to have been long dead and buried. For the Marxists in the then “Department of General Philosophy”, it had been Marx who, in the second half of the nineteenth century, had “inverted” Hegelian idealism into a form of materialism, while for the analytic philosophers in the “Department of Traditional and Modern Philosophy”, it had been Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore who had triumphed over British idealism at the turn of the twentieth. There may have been many things that were atypical about philosophy as it was done at Sydney in the early 1970s, but its resistance to idealism was not among them.

The late Richard Rorty was no stranger to provocation, and many an analytic philosopher would surely count as extremely provocative comments he had made on Robert Brandom’s highly regarded book from 1994, Making It Explicit.1 Brandom’s book was, Rorty asserted “an attempt to usher analytic philosophy from its Kantian to its Hegelian stage.”2 The reception of Kant within analytic philosophy has surely been, at best, patchy, but if it is difficult to imagine exactly what Rorty could have had in mind by analytic philosophy’s “Kantian phase,” the idea of an immanent Hegelian one would strike many as ludicrous. Given that the beginnings of analytic philosophy are conventionally described in terms of the radical break initiated by Russell and Moore with the Hegel-inspired idealism of their teachers at Cambridge in the closing years of the 19th century, the distinctly anti-Hegelian character of analytic philosophy has been held to be central. Moreover, the increasing naturalistic tenor of recent analytic philosophy would seem hardly propitious for a revival of 19th century idealism. And yet Rorty’s description should not be dismissed as mere provocation.

Can Hegel, a philosopher who claims that philosophy lsquo;has no other object but God and so is essentially rational theologyrsquo;, ever be taken as anything emother than/em a religious philosopher with little to say to any philosophical project that identifies itself as emsecular/em?nbsp; If the valuable substantive insights found in the detail of Hegelrsquo;s philosophy are to be rescued for a secular philosophy, then, it is commonly presupposed, some type of global reinterpretation of the enframing idealistic framework is required. In this essay, this assumption is challenged. br /br /Kantrsquo;s interpretation of space and time as a response to Newtonrsquo;s theologically based spatio-temporal emrealism/em is taken as a model of what it is to be a Kantian emidealist/em about God and the self. In turn, Hegelrsquo;s philosophy is taken as a development of this approach that overcomes the limitations of Kantrsquo;s formal approach. Hegelrsquo;s major contribution to Kantrsquo;s revolutionary transformation of the task of philosophy is, it is argued, his recognitive conception of lsquo;spiritrsquo;. While this has been widely appreciated with regard to the relations between lsquo;subjectiversquo; and lsquo;objectiversquo; spirit, it is suggested that a fuller understanding of the nature of Hegelrsquo;s emabsolute/em idealism requires a proper understanding of how this approach also applies to the domain of lsquo;absolute spiritrsquo;. br /br /

This paper challenges the commonly made claim that the work of Pierre Bourdieu is fundamentally anti-Hegelian in orientation. In contrast, it argues that the development of Bourdieu's work from its earliest structuralist through its later 'post-structuralist' phase is better described in terms of a shift from a late nineteenth century neo-Kantian to a distinctly Hegelian post-Kantian outlook. In his break with structuralism, Bourdieu appealed to a bodily based 'logic of practice' to explain the binaristic logic of Lévi-Strauss' structuralist analyses of myth. Effectively working within the tradition of the Durkheimian approach to symbolic classification, Lévi-Strauss had inherited Durkheim's distinctly neo-Kantian understanding of the role of categories in experience and action—an account that conflated two forms of representation—'intuitions' and 'concepts—that Kant himself had held distinct. Bourdieu's appeal to the role of the body's dispositional habitus can be considered as a retrieval of Hegel's earlier quite different reworking of Kant's intuition-concept distinction in terms of distinct 'logics' with different forms of 'negation'. Bourdieu commonly acknowledged the parallels of his analyses of social life to those of Hegel, but opposed Hegelianism because he believed that Hegel had remained entrapped within the dynamics of mythopoeic thought. In contrast, Durkheim and Lévi-Strauss, he claimed, by instituting a science of myth, had broken with it. This criticism of Hegel, however, relies on an understanding of his philosophy that has been rejected by many contemporary Hegel scholars, and without it, the gap separating Hegel and Bourdieu narrows dramatically.

Recent scholarship has helped to demythologise the life and work of Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg who, as the poet “Novalis”, had come to instantiate the nineteenth-century’s stereotype of the romantic poet. Among Hardenberg’s interests that seem to sit uneasily with this literary persona were his interests in science and mathematics, and especially in the idea, traceable back to Leibniz, of a mathematically based computational approach to language. Hardenberg’s approach to language, and his attempts to bring mathematics to bear on poetry, is examined in relation to debates that developed late in the eighteenth century over the relation of language to thought—debates which share many features with contemporary ones in this area.

The historical origins of the analytic style that was to become dominant within academic philosophy in the English-speaking world are often traced to the work of Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore at the turn of the twentieth century, and portrayed as involving a radical break with the idealist philosophy that had bloomed in Britain at the end of the nineteenth. Congruent with this view, Hegel is typically taken as representing a type of philosophy that analytic philosophy assiduously avoids. Thus, while Hegel’s writings are regarded as indirect, metaphorical and “darkly Teutonic”, analytic philosophers usually think of themselves as prizing the clarity of plain speech, except when making use of the precision of scientific logical notation. This analytic directness, furthermore, is usually seen as consonant with the increasingly “naturalistic” outlook of analytic philosophy, especially as practiced in the United States. In contrast, Hegel is seen as regarding philosophical thought as mysteriously engaging with a content that is somehow generated out of the mind’s own activities, linking philosophy more to art and religion than natural science. Moreover, it is usually accepted that Russell had shown Hegel’s bizarre metaphysic doctrines to be based on a few fundamental logical mistakes, even if the details of Russell’s criticisms have been largely forgotten

Putting it very crudely, it might be said that in the much discussed opening three chapters that make up the section “Consciousness” of his Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel sketches and “test-drives” various models for a consciousness able to experience and know the world.1 Kant had thought of objects of experience as necessarily having conceptual (as well as spatio-temporal) form, but non-conceptual (“intuitional”) content. But for Hegel, that objects show themselves to have a conceptual form emerges as one the first lessons of experience as tracked in Chapter 1. Moreover, in contrast to Kant’s focus on the unity and stability of such form, Hegel wants to display a series in which successive “shapes of consciousness” emerge from the resolution of contradictions affecting their predecessors.2 We might say that while Kant had famously asserted the identity of “the conditions of the possibility of experience in general” and the “conditions of the possibility of the objects of experience”,3 Hegel points to the ever-present tension between them, examining the fate of particular conceptions of the constitution of objects in the light of the “experience” based upon those conceptions, and with this transforms philosophy’s task, as Kant conceives it. Thus in the place of the reconfigured metaphysical project signalled by Kant which gives a definitive map of “what reason brings forth entirely out of itself” via the discovery of “reason’s common principle”,4 Hegel radically historicizes reason into a series of particular finite forms, each driven to selfovercoming because of the constitutive contradictions at its centre

Prior to Kojève's well-known account in his Introduction to the Reading of Hegel there seems to have been relatively little interest in Hegel's concept of recognition— Anerkennung.1 After Kojève, however, a popular view of Hegel's philosophy emerged within which the idea of recognition plays a central role: what distinguishes us as selfconscious beings from the rest of nature is that we are driven by a peculiar type of desire, the desire for recognition leading to struggle's over recognition. While Kojève directed attention to the importance of Hegel's use of notion of recognition in the famous dialectic of "lord and bondsman" in chapter 4 of the Phenomenology of Spirit,2 his reading, inspired equally by Marx and Heidegger, was nevertheless difficult to reconcile not only with the more systematic features of Hegel's philosophy, but also with what Hegel had to say on the topic of recognition within chapter 4, but especially, elsewhere in the Phenomenology.