Frederick Neuhouser

ABSTRACT Hegel calls social life “the living good,” but what this means is unclear. The idea expresses an ontological claim about the kind of being that human societies possess, but it is also normatively significant, clarifying why the category of social pathology is an appropriate tool of social critique. Social life consists in processes of life infused with ethical content. Societies are normatively and functionally constituted living beings that realize the good similarly to how organisms achieve their vital ends: via specialized, coordinated functions. In distinction to living organisms, the living good realizes itself through the consciousness and will of individual social members.

This paper rebuts four objections to my attempt, in Foundations of Hegel's Social Theory, to reconstruct Hegel's social philosophy in abstraction from his metaphysics and theodicy: 1) that social philosophy requires the Logic as its ground; 2) that only an independent metaphysics can justify the norms employed by social philosophy; 3) that empirical considerations can play no role in Hegel's arguments; and 4) that, robbed of his "ontology of the self," Hegel cannot respond to romantic critics. In response to a fifth objection, I acknowledge that my book fails to consider the extent to which art, religion, and philosophy are conditions of practical freedom.

This chapter examines the philosophical underpinnings of Durkheim’s account of anomie as social pathology. It examines and evaluates Durkheim’s conception of social pathology and his claim that social problems must be understood as analogous to illnesses. Further, it explores the vision of social ontology—of the kind of being that human societies have—underlying Durkheim’s position, which involves articulating the ways in which human societies are both different from and similar to biological organisms. Because Durkheim conceives of the task of social theory as similar to that of medicine, his account of anomie can be regarded as compatible in important ways with the tradition of Frankfurt-style critical theory. Both approaches to social reality attribute to social theory three inter-related tasks: theoretical understanding, normative evaluation, and guidance for practical action directed at changing the pathologies it diagnoses.

This paper reconstructs Nietzsche’s conception of spiritual illness, especially as exhibited in various forms of the bad conscience, and asks what positive, ennobling potential Nietzsche finds in it. The relevant concept of spirit is arrived at by reconstructing Nietzsche’s conception of life and then considering what reflexive life – life turned back against itself – would look like. It distinguishes four independent features of spiritual illness: the measureless drive to make oneself suffer, self-opacity (or mendaciousness), life-denial, and a self-undermining dynamic in which life exhausts the sources of its own vitality. The paper ends by considering various suggestions as to how these features of spiritual illness might also be preconditions of great spiritual health, including the preconditions for erecting new “ideals.”

In the history of philosophy, Fichte's thought marks a crucial transitional stage between Kant and post-Kantian philosophy. Fichte radicalized Kant's thought by arguing that human freedom, not external reality, must be the starting point of all systematic philosophy, and in Foundations of Natural Right, thought by many to be his most important work of political philosophy, he applies his ideas to fundamental issues in political and legal philosophy, covering such topics as civic freedom, rights, private property, contracts, family relations, and the foundations of modern political organization. This volume offers a complete translation of the work into English, by Michael Baur, together with an introduction by Frederick Neuhouser that sets it in its philosophical and historical context.

The Hegelian-Marxist idea of alienation fell out of favor after the postmetaphysical rejection of humanism and essentialist views of human nature. In this book Rahel Jaeggi draws on the Hegelian philosophical tradition, phenomenological analyses grounded in modern conceptions of agency, and recent work in the analytical tradition to reconceive alienation as the absence of a meaningful relationship to oneself and others, which manifests in feelings of helplessness and the despondent acceptance of ossified social roles and expectations. A revived approach to alienation helps critical social theory engage with phenomena such as meaninglessness, isolation, and indifference. By severing alienation's link to a problematic conception of human essence while retaining its social-philosophical content, Jaeggi provides resources for a renewed critique of social pathologies, a much-neglected concern in contemporary liberal political philosophy. Her work revisits the arguments of Rousseau, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Heidegger, placing them in dialogue with Thomas Nagel, Bernard Williams, and Charles Taylor.

The aim of the dissertation is to examine Fichte's attempt at demonstrating the unity of theoretical and practical reason. Chapter 1 discusses the young Fichte's dissatisfaction with Kant's two separate accounts of reason in the First and Second Critiques. It also analyzes the relationship between the issue of the unity of reason and what Fichte takes to be another crucial problem in Kant's moral philosophy, the lack of a positive proof that pure reason is practical. ;Chapter 2 traces Fichte's development from his early criticisms of Kant through the Wissenschaftslehre of 1797-9 and examines the various strategies he considers in his attempt to demonstrate the unity of reason. The main concern here is to clarify the sense in which Fichte ultimately comes to regard theoretical and practical subjectivity as unitary. It is argued that his main strategy is to show that a single structure underlies consciousness in both its theoretical and practical forms, a structure which he intends to capture with his distinctive notion of the subject's "self-positing" activity. ;Chapter 3 examines Fichte's theory of the self-positing subject as it relates to the phenomenon of theoretical self-consciousness. It focuses on three reasons behind Fichte's central claim that subjectivity cannot be grasped by the same concepts employed to understand objects: The subject must be understood as an activity rather than as a thing. The subject's existence is distinct from that of an object, for in the former case self-awareness is essential to the subject's being. This implies that the subject, in a sense, constitutes itself through its own conscious activity. The self-referring activity which constitutes the subject must have a structure that is distinct from the dual, subject-object structure of representation. ;Chapter 4 investigates Fichte's use of the doctrine of the self-positing subject to construct a theory of practical self-determination which explains the autonomous subject's relation to itself without recourse to a "two-worlds" view in which the subject of experience is determined by a rational but unknowable noumenal self. ;The conclusion assesses the extent to which Fichte's theory succeeds in showing that an identical structure informs both theoretical and practical subjectivity