Eskil Elling

Hegel's concept of habit is key to his account of social freedom. But it also appears preclude free reflection on social norms. Recent readers have either minimized this problem or concluded from it that social freedom necessarily implies new forms of unfreedom. This paper aims to avoid the latter conclusion while taking seriously its critical insight. I do this by noting Hegel's association of habit with death, which he sees not as an abstract end to life but as the source of more complex forms of life. Modern social habits structure life in ways that are not transparent to the individual subject. That subject thus retreats into the moral idea that they are individually the source of the legitimacy of those norms. But this undermines their binding force, and without this force, subjects lose their habitual grounding in the world. They are thus tempted to reverse into an unreflective submission to social habits that I call spiritual death. But, I argue, construing the problem in this way also allows us to see its solution: before spiritual death ensues, our habitual relationship to norms is momentarily disrupted in a way that allows us to develop a new relationship to them.

Hegel's concept of habit is key to his account of social freedom. But it also appears preclude free reflection on social norms. Recent readers have either minimized this problem or concluded from it that social freedom necessarily implies new forms of unfreedom. This paper aims to avoid the latter conclusion while taking seriously its critical insight. I do this by noting Hegel's association of habit with death, which he sees not as an abstract end to life but as the source of more complex forms of life. Modern social habits structure life in ways that are not transparent to the individual subject. That subject thus retreats into the moral idea that they are individually the source of the legitimacy of those norms. But this undermines their binding force, and without this force, subjects lose their habitual grounding in the world. They are thus tempted to reverse into an unreflective submission to social habits that I call spiritual death. But, I argue, construing the problem in this way also allows us to see its solution: before spiritual death ensues, our habitual relationship to norms is momentarily disrupted in a way that allows us to develop a new relationship to them.

The dissertation examines Hegel’s account of art’s importance to the actualization of freedom by exploring how he takes art to be a form of absolute spirit. Hegel was convinced that art plays a crucial role in human life by realizing a form of freedom which expands on the freedom realized by social institutions without undermining it. The central thesis of my work is that Hegel provides a unique description of the way in which art changes our attitude to ethical norms. Art encourages and enables what I term normative lingering: instead of having us pull back from ethical norms and criticize them from an external position, art allows us to linger with them long enough to bring out their deeper significance and potential contradictions. Art mediates between subjective experience and objective social institutions in a way that changes our relationship to the ethical norms embodied in those institutions. Rather than seeing them as fully determinate demands imposed on us externally, we come to understand them as historically variable realizations of a deeper political principle which we can affirm or criticize. Art, in other words, helps us relate freely to socially constituted ethical norms.

Nous proposons d’examiner les affinités et les différences de Lyotard avec la lecture arendtienne de Kant, pour illustrer en quelque sorte les tensions inhérentes de la tentative de tirer des conclusions politiques de l’esthétique kantienne. Notre question directrice sera celle de savoir pourquoi la relecture de Lyotard se focalise sur la catégorie du sublime. Mais pour répondre à cette question, il sera essentiel de souligner que celle-ci ne se focalise pas que sur le sublime. Pour bien saisir la conception lyotardienne du sublime comme catégorie politique, il faudra aussi rendre justice au fait qu’il se base sur le diagnostic du potentiel politique énorme du jugement esthétique en général, du beau comme du sublime. Ceci nous laissera comprendre la raison historique pour laquelle le sublime, et non pas le beau, est devenu la référence esthético-politique essentielle chez Lyotard (et chez bien d’autres auteurs par la suite). Nous proposons alors le suivant comme, pour ainsi dire, des prolégomènes historiques pour revisiter le sublime á l’époque contemporaine.

This paper suggests that the phenomenon identified by Miranda Fricker as hermeneutical injustice—the distorted experience of oppression—reaches both wider and deeper than her initial account of it suggests. Accounting for this in no way requires us to reduce the epistemic to effects of power, but it does require us to chart the relation between hermeneutical injustice and the broader field of ideological practices in which it operates as a distinct phenomenon. My argument will proceed in four steps. (1) I first sketch Fricker’s account of hermeneutical injustice and reconstruct her suggestion that it can be overcome through collective organizing and experience sharing. (2) Next, I challenge this account from the perspective of ideology critique, focusing in particular on how ideological individualism complicates the collective organizing on which Fricker relies. (3) I then examine the reasons Fricker might have for rejecting this challenge, clarifying in the process the relation between hermeneutical injustice and ideology: hermeneutical injustice identifies the effects of power within a particular social and epistemic practice, while ideology describes the effects of power across a range of practices, including epistemic ones. (4) Finally, I explore the implications of the preceding discussion for a normative account of the collective struggle against oppression, showing how ideology critique helps bridge the gap between diagnosis and remedy in Fricker’s account. I also suggest, however, that awareness of hermeneutical injustice as a specific phenomenon remains crucial to the contemporary practice of ideology critique.