Christoph Menke

While in neo-Aristotelian conceptions of virtue and Bildung the concept of “second nature” describes the successful completion of human education, Hegel uses this term in order to analyze the irresolvably ambiguous, even conflictive nature of spirit. Spirit can only realize itself, in creating (1) a second nature as an order of freedom, by losing itself, in creating (2) a second nature—an order of externality, ruled by the unconscious automatisms of habit. In the second meaning of the term, “second nature” refers to spirit’s inversion of itself: the free enactment of spirit produces an objective, uncontrollable order; "second nature" is here a critical term. On the other hand, the very same inversion of free positing into objective existence is the moment of the success of ("absolute") spirit. The paper exposes this undecidable ambiguity of second nature and claims that its acceptance and development are the conditions of an adequate understanding of the constitution and forms of second nature.

The freedom of spirit, Hegel claims, consists in “the emancipation of spirit from all those forms of being that do not conform to its concepts.” That is, freedom must be understood as “liberation [Befreiung].” The paper explores this claim by starting with Hegel’s critique of the (Kantian) understanding of freedom as autonomy. In this critique Hegel shows that norms or “laws” have to be thought of as “being”—not as “posited.” This is convincing, but it leaves open the question of the relation between law and freedom (i.e., the very question that the concept of autonomy was meant to solve). In its second part the paper claims that Hegel’s solution to this problem consists in the analysis of freedom as the “historical” process of “social” transformation. While social norms ordinarily or habitually exist in the form of a second nature—according to Hegel, this is the form they necessarily take on in their social reality—, the act of liberation radically changes their mode of being: liberation is the momentary and transitory act of the ontological transformation of social norms from nature into freedom.

“Life” has become an enigmatic keyword in diverse fields of contemporary philosophy in the past years – from political thought and its reflections on biopolitics to practical philosophy and its recourse to forms of life, to aesthetics and its reflections on the modes of life and liveliness in aesthetic representation. The contributions included in the following special section investigate the peculiar way this keyword functions in a diversity of fields, in order to bring to light the underlying conceptual and structural implications of this term in these different domains. As these contributions show, the use of the marker “life” is more than a fleeting fashion – it articulates a modern predicament with deep historical roots.

Der Gedanke, der sich in der modernen Idee der Autonomie verdichtet, ist ein doppelter: Die Figur der Autonomie enthält zugleich eine neue Auffassung von Normativität und eine eigene Konzeption von Freiheit. Dem Gedanken der Autonomie zufolge ist ein Gesetz, das wahrhaft normativ ist, eines, als dessen Urheber wir uns selbst betrachten können; und eine Freiheit, die im vollen Sinne wirklich ist, drückt sich in Gestalt eben solcher selbstgegebener Gesetze aus. Die Idee der Autonomie artikuliert so die Einsicht, dass man Freiheit und Gesetz nicht durch ihre Entgegensetzung bestimmen kann, sondern durcheinander erläutern muss. Wirkliche Freiheit ist nicht Freiheit von Gesetzen, sondern Freiheit in Gesetzen; verbindliche Normen sind nicht das, was Freiheit äußerlich beschränkt, sondern das, was Freiheit innerlich verwirklicht. Die Idee der Autonomie, die für die moderne praktische Philosophie seit Rousseau und Kant grundlegend ist, zielt so darauf, Freiheit und Verbindlichkeit in einem Zuge zu artikulieren: durch die Form selbstgegebener Gesetze. Mit Beiträgen von Robert Brandom, Judith Butler, Thomas Khurana, Christoph Menke, Terry Pinkard und Sebastian Rödl.

The paper asks for the preconditions and the consequences of the emergence of aesthetics in and for philosophy. The question is: what does it mean for philosophy to engage the question of the aesthetic? My answer will be: it means nothing less than putting philosophy in question. Or, more precisely: by engaging the question of the aesthetic, philosophy puts itself in question. In order to show this, I will refer to a brief passage in the Phenomenology of the Spirit and then attempt to turn it against what I take it to be Hegel’s own intention. The paper attempts to sketch this argument in three brisk moves by (1) distinguishing a philosophy of the “poetic” from a philosophy of the “aesthetic”; (2) describing the aesthetic as “regressive” and “(self-)reflexive”; and (3) sketching the paradoxical place of aesthetics within philosophy. &nbsp

At a central point in his much-discussed book Real Presences, George Steiner writes of the “mountebank’s virtuosity... of a Hitler,” that realises “a counter-logos which conceptualizes and then enacts the deconstruction of the human.” It was clear to Steiner’s American readers what was meant by this transposition of the term ‘deconstruction’ from the field of aesthetics and philosophy, of literary and cultural criticism, to the context of political and ideological struggle against fascism and totalitarianism in general. Steiner discusses this in another context, but again with all the pathos of confession at his disposal: “I believe that the eclipse of the humanities, in their primary sense and presentness, in today’s culture and society, implicates that of the human.” This creed closes Steiner’s discussion of the “liberals” who are treated with contempt because they preach tolerance in the face of the triumphal procession of deconstruction in the humanities. According to Steiner, such a policy of appeasement once again misjudges the degree of threat to which our social order is exposed: what starts in the humanities ends in society as the nihilistic corruption of binding human values. With the establishment of deconstruction in literary studies at elite American universities, the Occident succumbs to the powers of disintegration and ‘brutalization’ for the second time in the twentieth century—Yale of the seventies and eighties repeats Munich of 1938.

It is a well-known fact that the term ‘subject’ acquired its still predominant meaning only as late as the mid-eighteenth century, and that this led to the formation of the term ‘subjectivity’ at the end of the century. In this recent or ‘modern’ use, the term ‘subject’ is no longer taken just in its grammatical meaning where a subject is that of which something can be predicated, but refers to anything that can say ‘I’. In this sense, the predicate ‘subjectivity’ is not coextensive with, but is confined to, the realm of human beings. There are human beings who are not yet or are no longer subjects, but there are no subjects who are not human beings. Only human beings have the capacity to say ‘I’. This describes the new meaning the term ‘subject’ gains at that moment in the eighteenth century, but it does not yet grasp why this new use of the term ‘subject’ marks the beginning of a new, ‘modern’ way of thinking. For that semantic shift of the word ‘subject’ does not of course mean that subjectivity, referring to the capacity to say ‘I’, was discovered only then and unknown before. Rather, the epochal significance of the new use of the term lies in the fact that—and the way in which—the reference to beings capable of saying ‘I’ is often mixed up in an opaque way with the indication of a quite different determination: namely the specifically modern determination of the subject of reflection. The modern emphasis refers to the subject as the instance or place of a process of reflection in which anything objectively existing or pregiven is dissolved. This is what makes the shift in our speaking of a ‘subject’, some time in eighteenth century philosophical discourse, into a decisive fact for our understanding of modernity: it connects the reference to I-saying beings with the emphasis on a new practice of reflection.

In Philosophy and Real Politics, Raymond Geuss outlines the program of a “realistic” investigation of politics and develops a critique of the normativistic approach that defines the mainstream of contemporary analytic political philosophy. The paper discusses the question of how these two elements, “realism” and “critique”, are related in Geuss. Drawing on some of Geuss′ considerations in Outside Ethics the paper argues that the very existence of “real politics” depends on the critique of those normativistic forms of thinking that threaten to dissolve the reality of politics. The critique of ideology and the disclosure of reality are internally related

The „left Hegelian” interpretation of Hegel′s theory of Sittlichkeit has shown that the claim of the concept of autonomy to establish an internal connection between normativity and freedom can only be carried out, if the subject of autonomy is defined by its participation in social practices. While the left Hegelian interpretation thereby solves the paradoxes of the Kantian tradition of understanding autonomy, it is destined to repeat the paradoxical structure of autonomy in a new and fundamental form. This follows from the insight – articulated by Hegel′s anti-Aristotelian concept of “second nature” – that participation in social practices is at the same time the medium and the other of autonomy. Autonomy thus remains dependent on an act of liberation that cannot be an autonomous action itself

Hannah Arendt's 1949 essay on the critique of human rights was published in English and German in the same year under two quite different titles: while in English the title asks the skeptical question: "'The Rights of Man'. What Are They?", the German title claims: "Es gibt nur ein einziges Menschenrecht " - "there is only one human right". The article shows that the English title's skepticism and the German title's assertion represent two internally connected moves of Arendt's argument. For Arendt aims at a fundamental critique of the modern natural law tradition of human rights which, at the same time, hints at a possible alternative understanding of a " right to have rights" in terms of a political anthropology - a new understanding of human dignity

In his critical review of Recht und Gewalt Andreas Fischer-Lescano has suggested that the critical insight into the paradoxical entwinement of law and violence should lead towards the utopian idea of a “transcendence” of law. The response to Fischer-Lescano rejects this idea as a false leveling of the - decisive normative - difference between law and society. This difference is the condition of possibility of law’s critical and hence transformative relation to society. The response thus defends the idea, brought forward in Recht und Gewalt by way of an interpretation of Benjamin’s formula of the Entsetzung of law, that the break with law’s fateful violence cannot consist in the “transcendence” but rather the “depotenciation” of law

Der Gedanke, der sich in der modernen Idee der Autonomie verdichtet, ist ein doppelter: Die Figur der Autonomie enthält zugleich eine neue Auffassung von Normativität und eine eigene Konzeption von Freiheit. Dem Gedanken der Autonomie zufolge ist ein Gesetz, das wahrhaft normativ ist, eines, als dessen Urheber wir uns selbst betrachten können; und eine Freiheit, die im vollen Sinne wirklich ist, drückt sich in Gestalt eben solcher selbstgegebener Gesetze aus. Die Idee der Autonomie artikuliert so die Einsicht, dass man Freiheit und Gesetz nicht durch ihre Entgegensetzung bestimmen kann, sondern durcheinander erläutern muss. Wirkliche Freiheit ist nicht Freiheit von Gesetzen, sondern Freiheit in Gesetzen; verbindliche Normen sind nicht das, was Freiheit äußerlich beschränkt, sondern das, was Freiheit innerlich verwirklicht. Die Idee der Autonomie, die für die moderne praktische Philosophie seit Rousseau und Kant grundlegend ist, zielt so darauf, Freiheit und Verbindlichkeit in einem Zuge zu artikulieren: durch die Form selbstgegebener Gesetze. Mit Beiträgen von Robert Brandom, Judith Butler, Thomas Khurana, Christoph Menke, Terry Pinkard und Sebastian Rödl.

While in neo-Aristotelian conceptions of virtue and Bildung the concept of “second nature” describes the successful completion of human education, Hegel uses this term in order to analyze the irresolvably ambiguous, even conflictive nature of spirit. Spirit can only realize itself, in creating (1) a second nature as an order of freedom, by losing itself, in creating (2) a second nature—an order of externality, ruled by the unconscious automatisms of habit. In the second meaning of the term, “second nature” refers to spirit’s inversion of itself: the free enactment of spirit produces an objective, uncontrollable order; "second nature" is here a critical term. On the other hand, the very same inversion of free positing into objective existence is the moment of the success of ("absolute") spirit. The paper exposes this undecidable ambiguity of second nature and claims that its acceptance and development are the conditions of an adequate understanding of the constitution and forms of second nature.

In the Critique of Judgment, Kant quotes the traditional view of the relation between the ethical and the aesthetical ('the beautiful is the symbol of the morally good'). However, he elaborates this view in a radically new way: as equivalence between two forms of reflection, between ethical and aesthetic reflection. The article distinguishes three different aspects of aesthetic reflection in Kant and discusses their respective ethical meaning. It shows the unresolved tension between Kant's program of an 'aesthetics of autonomy' on the one hand, and his reference to sensualistic and vitalist motifs of an aesthetic 'energetism' on the other

Das Konzept der Negation ist der zentrale Operator bei der Unterscheidung zwischen historischem Wandel und natürlicher Evolution, welche grundlegend für das moderne Denken ist. Die Krise dieser Abgrenzung ist somit auch eine »Krise der Negation« (AlainBadiou). Der vorliegende Text untersucht die Krise, indem er zuerst Hegels Konzept der »bestimmten Negation« und deren Auswirkungen auf das moderne Verständnis von Revolution beleuchtet und erörtert im Anschluss zwei mögliche Alternativen, wie Negation noch verstanden werden kann: als abstrakte Negation (Luhmann) und als endlose Negation (Agamben). The concept of negation is the central operator in distinguishing between historical change and natural evolution, which is constitutive of modern thinking. The crisis of this distinction is therefore the »crisis of negation « (Alain Badiou). The text examines this crisis by first considering Hegel’s concept of »determinate negation« and its impact on the modern understanding of revolution and then discusses two possible alternative understandings of negation: abstract negation (Luhmann) and infinite negation (Agamben)