Alice Ormiston

The dissertation is an examination of the ontology underpinning Hegel's social and political thought, and his attempt to comprehend how this ontology is realized in modernity, through the modern principle of will. Hegel's thought generally is seen to fall within the Rousseauian and German Idealist aspiration to articulate a general will at the foundation of a uniquely modern political community that can harmonize individual freedom with social unity and a sense of belonging. Hegel's ontology of the general will is identified as being of a religious or spiritual nature, deriving from Holderlin's notion of an Identity that exists in Being, and manifest in human existence in the experience of love. The dissertation traces Hegel's legacy in terms of his encounter with the problem of the antagonism between the experience of love on the one hand, and the modern principle of reflective rationality and will that have come to dominate the secular world on the other, and his subsequent attempt to work out how these two principles could be reconciled. It is argued that, for Hegel, in spite of the will's self-alienation from love, its drive to assert itself in the world around it is ultimately rooted in the subconscious knowledge of love, and that this experience of love is re-encountered in achievements of moral action and forgiveness. It is further argued that this expression of love through the will is at the root of the objectification depicted in Hegel's Philosophy of Right, in the valid laws and institutions of the modern state. The failure of Hegel's state to find historical realization is explained from within Hegel's own terms, in the notion that the colonizing impulse of reflective rationality could eclipse the consciousness of the divine upon which objectification depends. In light of this, the need to cultivate a consciousness of the divine, or of love, is identified as the most pressing issue of our age. Overall, the study seeks to illuminate Hegel's invaluable contribution to our understanding of the existential tension between love and the will, and of the role that philosophy must play for moderns in vindicating the experience of love

ExcerptThe desire for a better future, for a justice that can be realized in the world, is intrinsic to the modern democratic project. At the same time, this desire has been fraught with disappointment and, in some cases, bound up with frightening atrocities and rigid ideological impositions. Hence the desire itself is paradoxical—indeed, as I shall argue, tragic. This article is an attempt to explore the nature of this tragic desire. It does so through an examination of Rousseau, whose writings embody so clearly the insistent desire for justice at the root of the modern democratic project, who plays this…