Clark Wade Butler

This book proposes a treatise on the Hegelian dialectical method as based on dialectical logic. Part One explores sources of dialectical logic before Hegel in ancient thought. Part Two examines dialectical logic and the dialectical method in Hegel, with attention to the relationship between dialectical logic and contemporary formal logic. Part Three concerns the dialectical method after Hegel, in which we seek to show that the method is available for uses other than the one to which the historical Hegel put it. My intention has been constructive. I want to take issue with those who have contested the existence or validity of any dialectical logic, and of the dialectical method as well.1 The payoff for studying dialectical logic is the dialectical method. By using it one can reconstruct, rethink, and relive a historical course of dialectical deduction with the purpose of achieving deeper self-comprehension, i.e., comprehension of oneself by retraveling one’s past path of dialectical assumptions, contradictions, and corrections. Dialectical self-comprehension is possible when one’s present identity has historically constituted itself through such a path. It is possible when the individual is conscious of herself as triumphant over the contradictions of the past. Part Three, treating the dialectical method after Hegel, includes a reconstruction of American history since World War II in chapter 8, according to INTRODUCTION 9 1 0 Introduction the dialectical method. We will see how a Hegelian use of the method can assist in comprehending a post-Hegelian historical standpoint present to us but unknown to Hegel.

The article explains my third argument for panpsychism, based on disolving all properties, including dispositional physical properties like mass, energy, and force, into phenomenal properties. I thus reject a dual-property version of panpsychism. I seek to show, contrary to Paul Churchland, that the general panpsychist hypothesis has some explanatory value, and makes a cosmology consisting in comparative psychology possible. The mental life even of so-called physical particles in physics is hypothesized to help explain their behavior.

The concept of the subject, of what Hegel calls absolute negativity, already appears early in the logic of being.1 Absolute negativity, negation of the negation, occurs throughout the logic as identity in difference understood as self-identification under different descriptions. First, the subject refers to itself merely under an incomplete description. Secondly, it refers to something other than itself under a second description which is logically required by the first. (For example, the description of being in general requires some determinate description of being in particular). But this second description is dialectically excluded by the assumption that the first description is complete. Thirdly, the subject negates its negation of the other. It discovers itself in the other, under the other description, and thus comes to refer to itself less incompletely. This is Hegel in the analytic mode.

Human Rights Ethics makes an important contribution to contemporary philosophical and political debates concerning the advancement of global justice and human rights. Butler's book also lays claim to a significant place in both normative ethics and human rights studies in as much as it seeks to vindicate a universalistic, rational approach to human rights ethics. Butler's innovative approach is not based on murky claims to "natural rights" that supposedly hold wherever human beings exist; nor does it succumb to the traditional problems of justification associated with utilitarianism, Kantianism, and other procedural approaches to human rights studies. Instead, Butler proposes "a dialectical justification of human rights by indirect proof" that claims not to be question begging. Very much in the spirit of Hegel and Habermas, Butler proposes to vindicate a "totally rational account of human rights," but one that depends concretely and historically on a dialectically constructed "right to freedom of thought in its universal modes."

This article vindicates human rights, not as natural rights holding wherever human beings are, but as reducible to one historically constructed right to freedom of thought and its universal modes. Universal morality is elicited from international human rights law. To be moral is first to help engender everywhere either mere inner recognition of the validity of rights or mere outer compliance with their requirements; and to engender finally inner recognition expressed in a duty of outer observance. Human rights ethics replaces the rights consciousness common in the West with a duty consciousness. This universal rational morality supersedes utilitarianism, Kantianism, and other rational theories. Yet moralities making no rational claim on all (e.g., Christian, Buddhist) may flourish within human rights ethics as the universal ethical minimum.

Clark Butler presents an innovative analysis of Hegel's most challenging work in _Hegel's Logic_ -- the first major English-language treatment of Hegel's _Science of Logic_ to appear in nearly fifteen years. Although earlier commentators on the _Logic_ have considered standard analytical philosophy-and with it modern logic-in opposition to Hegel. Butler views it as a legitimate approach in terms of which Hegel needs to be understood. This interpretation allows him to address the rigor of Hegel's thought on several levels as at once an exercise in purely conceptual redefinition and a full-bodied work in metaphysical ontology and even theology. The result is an account of the _Logic_ intelligible to analytical philosophers as well as non-specialists.

1. Ontological Historical Materialism. The Hegel-Marx relationship remains an issue both for Hegel scholars aware of underlying world historical causes of the recent Hegel Renaissance and Marx scholars attentive to the philosophical roots of Marxism. It may be questioned, however, whether the relation is merely historical and circumstantial or necessary and internal as well. Marx claimed to have overturned the Hegelian system. Yet the classical formula, according to which Marxism shares with Hegelianism its method but not its system, that the Hegelian system contradicts the dialectical methodology it shares with Marxism has exercised wide influence. On numerous issues, e.g., the state, the universal class, the alienation of labor, Hegelian and Marxist doctrines are admittedly not only different but contradictory. To this extent Engels’s classical formula is correct. But surely the more important consideration is method, though doctrine has so overshadowed methodological considerations in both Marxism and Hegelianism that it has been rare to define either school except in terms of specific tenets. Doctrinal definition of any movement resembles a death warrant. If either Marxism or Hegelianism is scientific and thus capable of breaking loose from nineteenth-century chains, it must be defined methodologically, programmatically. Contrary to Engels’s formula, I shall distinguish between Marxist and Hegelian methods, but shall argue that the methods are not only compatible but complementary.

Rosen’s book renews the skeptical attack on Hegelianism. He pursues the attack well - perhaps as well as the case permits - and thus exposes Hegelianism to the discipline of an instructive test. He in fact concedes less to Hegel than his fellow anti-Hegelian in the skeptical tradition, Jacques Derrida. For where Derrida admits that Hegel is rationally impregnable and thus resorts to mockery and jest, Rosen ultimately denies such impregnability. True, Hegelianism cannot be criticized except from a standpoint within the system - which rules out negative criticism of the system. Yet behind this seeming imperviousness to criticism lurks a fatal criticism: the mere existence of internally rational standpoints outside the system refutes its claim - and apparently the claim of any philosophy - to being the universal system of human reason.

Jacques D'Hondt, coming from the French Left, has spent a career uncovering the essential, secret Hegel underlying the surface expressions of the philosopher. He is already known in English through Hegel in His Time: Berlin 1818-1831. He writes the present biography as one would write a detective novel. Suspicious of appearances, a keen and politically astute sixth sense finds that remarkably little in Hegel's life is what it first seems. He seeks the truth in what Hegel does not say or do, or through the missing context of what he does say. And yet, despite the hypocrisy and compromise forced on Hegel as the price of professional success at the best German university of the era, D'Hondt finds in Hegel, if not a martyr, at least a hero in the cause of freedom with whom he can identify. But as daring as Hegel's works were in their esoteric content, just as cautious was Hegel the man in the exoteric form given those works.

Earlier in the century, Richard Kroner in Von Kant bis Hegel gave us an orderly reconstruction of the development from Kant to Hegel. He thematized German idealism sympathetically from the inside, aiming to present it in and for itself. But a writer such as Kroner prefers a logical march of concepts, thus paying comparatively less attention to the often strange empirical details of intellectual history. The danger is that with such a writer the school’s self-consciousness, its being-for-itself, might be a false consciousness, a being-outside-itself, a merely posited being-for-self, not a self-positing being-for-self, not a being-in-and-for-itself. Historical scholarship since Kroner has grown increasingly sensitive to the risks of over-schematization and the excessive systematization of history. It has come to be inspired by reverence for the original text, the scholarly thing in itself.

This article compares Freud and Hegel, arguing that Freud independently uncovered and used the Hegelian dialectical method. It is argued that Freud used the method in reconstructing the psycho-sexual development of the individual begining with sense-certainty in the Phenomenology of Spirit and proceeding through the dialectic of self-consciousness. The development in prehistory from food-gathering (oral assimilative stage) through hunting (anal aggressive stage), the pastoral and agricultural stages (lordship and bondage) to the city state (stoici stage), is briefly presented. This article was revised and developed further in the author's The Dialectical Method: A Treatise Hegel Never Wrote (Prometheus Books: 2012), ch. 8.