Philip J. Kain

One of Hegel's major concerns is to decide the place, importance, and scope of reason. Grand claims have traditionally been made on its behalf--that it is the highest form of knowledge capable of knowing all that can be known. This article examines the central role that theoretical reason plays, for Hegel, in leading us toward idealism, its failure to live up to its grand claims, its failure to adequately establish idealism, and the way in which this failure, oddly enough, turns into a success by preserving idealism from solipsism.

THE FIRST STAGE OF COMMUNISM, FOR MARX, IS A MODIFIED EXCHANGE ECONOMY. THUS IT SHOULD BE MARKED BY ALIENATION OR FETISHISM. BUT MARX DENIES THIS IN CHAPTER 1 OF VOLUME I OF "CAPITAL". THE REASON BEING THAT THE WORKERS WOULD BE IN CONTROL OF THEIR EXCHANGE RATHER THAN CONTROLLED BY IT. IN EARLIER WRITINGS, THIS CONTROL SEEMED TO REQUIRE A POWERFUL STATE APPARATUS, AND THUS POLITICAL ESTRANGEMENT. IN SOME, BUT NOT ALL, OF HIS LATER WRITINGS, MARX ARGUES THAT SUCH A STATE APPARATUS WOULD NOT BE NECESSARY. THIS CONFLICT IS DUE TO THE FACT THAT MARX EMPLOYS TWO DIFFERENT MODELS FOR THE TRANSITION TO SOCIALISM.

This essay is concerned with Schiller, but it investigates themes that can also be found in other writers, especially in Hegel and Marx. All of these writers attempt (and ultimately fail) to work out a particular ideal model for labor and political institutions. This model was patterned after the ideal cultural conditions of ancient Greece and based upon modern aesthetic concepts, espe cially the concept of a synthesis between sense and reason. It was a model designed to overcome fragmentation or alienation in the modern world that had been brought about by the development of the division of labor.

The question has been raised whether Nietzsche intends eternal recurrence to be like a categorical imperative. The obvious objection to understanding eternal recurrence as like a categorical imperative is that for a categorical imperative to make any sense, for moral obligation to make any sense, it must be possible for individuals to change themselves. And Nietzsche denies that individuals can change themselves. Magnus thinks the determinism “implicit in the doctine of the eternal recurrence of the same renders any imperative impotent…. How can one will what must happen in any case?” At the other end of the spectrum, those who do hold that eternal recurrence is like a categorical imperative, for their part, tend to ignore or deny the determinism involved in eternal recurrence. This article explores the extent to which it can be claimed that eternal recurrence is like a categorical imperative without downplaying Nietzsche's dterminism.

On what might be called a Marxist reading, Hegel’s analysis of civil society accurately recognizes a necessary tendency toward a polarization of classes and the pauperization of the proletariat, a problem for which Hegel, however, has no solution. Indeed, Marxists think there can be no solution short of eliminating civil society. It is not at all clear that this standard reading is correct. The present paper tries to show how it is plausible to understand Hegel as proposing a solution, one that is similar to that of social democrats, and one that could actually work.

The question has been raised whether Nietzsche intends eternal recurrence to be like a categorical imperative. The obvious objection to understanding eternal recurrence as like a categorical imperative is that for a categorical imperative to make any sense, for moral obligation to make any sense, it must be possible for individuals to change themselves. And Nietzsche denies that individuals can change themselves. Magnus thinks the determinism “implicit in the doctine of the eternal recurrence of the same renders any imperative impotent…. How can one will what must happen in any case?” At the other end of the spectrum, those who do hold that eternal recurrence is like a categorical imperative, for their part, tend to ignore or deny the determinism involved in eternal recurrence. This article explores the extent to which it can be claimed that eternal recurrence is like a categorical imperative without downplaying Nietzsche's dterminism.

This article examines Hegel's treatment of Antigone and of women in the Phenomenology of Spirit. I differ from many other scholars in arguing that Antigone ought to be understood as like the Hegelian slave—both were dominated and oppressed, but, through that very domination and oppression, they subverted the master and ultimately made as significant a contribution to culture as he did. Antigone represents a form of individualism which, unlike liberal individualism, is compatible with the Sittlichkeit that Hegel wants to achieve for the modern world. Despite the fact that many of Hegel's views on women are not acceptable, he nevertheless has some things to say that can be of value for feminists. Certainly, his views are not as objectionable as the ones he seems to hold in the Philosophy of Right, and the latter should not be projected back into the Phenomenology.

While many philosophers have found Hegel's critique of Kantian ethics to be interesting in certain respects, overall most tend to find it rather shallow and to think that Hegel either misunderstands Kant's thought or has a rather crude understanding of it. For example, in examining the last two sections of Chapter V of the Phenomenology - 'Reason as Lawgiver' and 'Reason as Testing Laws' (where we get an extended critique of the categorical imperative)- Lauer finds Hegel's treatment to be truncated and inadequate.1 The only trouble, though, is that like most other readers of the Phenomenology, Lauer does not recognize that Hegel had been examining and criticizing Kantian ethics throughout a much greater part of-indeed, more than half of-Chapter V. Once we do understand this, I think we must concede that Hegel's treatment is hardly truncated and that it cannot be described as shallow or inadequate. I will try to show that Hegel demonstrates a rather sophisticated understanding of, and gives a serious and thorough critique of, Kantian practical reason.

Schweickart and I both discuss market socialism. Neither of us accepts the traditional Marxist view that market economies necessarily produce contradictions that drive them toward collapse. Both of us think the socialist experiments of the twentieth century show that markets cannot successfully be eliminated. Thus, for market socialism, we keep a market and we work to prevent it from producing contradictions, alienation, and collapse. One question that arises here concerns the role of labor unions. Should they play a major role in market socialism, or are there respects in which they would obstruct it? There is another important issue that Schweickart should discuss. Market socialism, given its commitment to a market, must face the issue of market generated alienation or fetishism. Can market socialism avoid such problems? And if so how?

This article tries to explain how Hegel's Phenomenology is organized, what it is trying to do, and where it is trying to go. It argues that the Phenomenology gives a transcendental deduction of the absolute. Hegel's strategy is to keep setting out more and more complex forms of experience and to demolish any explanations of this experience that are simpler than the absolute--thus, to show that the absolute is the only explanation of experience. We finally get a paradigm with enough scope to include everything, make it a part of a whole, and leave nothing out.

Marx's historical-materialist philosophy of history has often been criticized for being ethnocentric. Jon Elster (1985, 490), for example, suggests that it has become a "conceptual straight-jacket for the study of much non-western history." Marshall Sahlins, in his book, Culture and Practical Reason (1976), as well as critics like Baudrillard (1975, 59, 65-67) Balbus (1982, 33-36), and Aronowitz (1981, 67-68), have argued that Marx develops a single, necessary historical pattern, worked up on the basis of the historical development of Western societies, which is then conceptually imposed on all societies, including non-Western ones. Also, that this pattern of historical development proceeds from "lower," more "primitive" stages to "higher," more "civilized" ones and culminates in modern Western capitalist societies as the highest stage before socialism. Marx's productivism, escpecially, has been criticized along these lines. The term productivism is shorthand for the claim that material conditions, economic conditions, or the forces and relations of production are the factors that predominate in determining all aspects of a sociocultural world. These critics argue that the productivist claim is true, at best, only for modern societies. It is certainly not true, as some of these critics think Marx holds it is, for earlier or "primitive" societies. In the latter societies, as Sahlins (1976, vii-viii) puts it, cultural modes of symbolization predominate and no symbolic scheme is the only one possible given a specific set of material conditions.

FOR HEGEL, ALIENATION ("ENTAUSSERUNG") IS NOT TO BE IDENTIFIED WITH ESTRANGEMENT ("ENTFREMDUNG"). ALIENATION CAN LEAD TO ESTRANGEMENT; IT CAN WORK TO OVERCOME ESTRANGEMENT; OR IT CAN SIMPLY BE POSITIVE AND DESIRABLE ON ITS OWN. WHILE ESTRANGEMENT IS NECESSARY FOR THE DEVELOPMENT OF CULTURE, ULTIMATELY IT IS NEGATIVE AND IS TO BE OVERCOME; ONLY POSITIVE ALIENATION WILL THEN REMAIN. FOR THE YOUNG MARX, ALIENATION NEVER OVERCOMES ESTRANGEMENT, AND ALIENATION IS NEVER POSITIVE. ALIENATION ALWAYS LEADS TO ESTRANGEMENT AND BOTH ARE TO BE OVERCOME COMPLETELY. AGAINST THIS BACKGROUND IT BECOMES POSSIBLE TO STUDY THE DIFFERENT WAYS IN WHICH THESE CONCEPTS OPERATE

In The German Ideology , Marx developed his notion of "the materialist view of the world," which differed from both the earlier 1844 Manuscripts and the later Grundrisse, Critique of Political Economy, and Capital. First, whereas Marx had distinguished human life from other forms of life as the result of an essence, Marx now argued that material conditions determine the human condition. Second, ideas can affect human life but they are themselves the product of material conditions. Third, though he later reverses himself, he rejects not only the identification but the value of abstractions and categories. Fourth, Marx no longer considers man's history to be a radical self-creation through labor, but a natural self-consciousness modified by productive and social intercourse. Finally, Marx inverted his theory of language and now considered it the product rather than the source of material conditions

The current issue over Marx's Grundrisse and Capital is whether these works represent a unity with or a rupture from his earlier writings. A third interpretation is more adequate than either of these: the new "dialectic method" of the later works transforms elements of his earlier outlooks into a new synthesis. In earlier works Marx describes three processes: the historical generation of the concrete, the historical development of categories, and the methodological ordering of these categories. However, his views changed on which of these processes are primary. In the later works, the third process becomes independent; this modifies his view of the other two processes, and thereby of the relation of consciousness and laws of social development to material conditions

The importance of Kant's political thought can best be understood if we do two things: if we compare it to political theory as it existed before Kant and if we see how it fundamentally depends upon his philosophy of history. It is Kant's philosophy of history that allows him to take a major step beyond previous political thinkers. Kant brings together for the first time two projects which had traditionally remained separate. He develops a theory of the ideal state and also a philosophy of history, i.e., a theory of how to actually realize the ideal state in history.