Lydia L. Moland

.As editor of the National Anti-Slavery Standard in the early 1840s, Lydia Maria Child was responsible for keeping the abolitionist movement in the United States informed of relevant news. She also used her editorial position to philosophize. Her column entitled “Letters from New York” is particularly philosophical, including considerations of infinity, free will, time, nature, art, and history. She especially turned to German philosophers and intellectuals such as Kant, Schiller, Bettina von Arnim, Karoline von Günderrode, Jean Paul, Herder, and Hegel in an attempt to guide her readers to a rejection of slavery for the right philosophical reasons. I consider the influence of German philosophy on three particular themes in her writings: a Romantic-Spinozistic view of humans and nature; a Kantian conception of conscience; and a Hegelian description of the philosophy of history.

In Hegel on Political Identity, Lydia Moland provocatively draws on Hegel's political philosophy to engage sometimes contentious contemporary issues such as patriotism, national identity, and cosmopolitanism. Moland argues that patriotism for Hegel indicates an attitude toward the state, whereas national identity is a response to culture. The two combine, Hegel claims, to enable citizens to develop concrete freedom. Moland argues that Hegel's account of political identity extends to his notorious theory of world history; she also proposes that his resistance to cosmopolitanism be reassessed in response to our globalized world. By focusing on Hegel's depiction of political identity as a central part of modern life, Moland shows the potential of Hegel's philosophy to address issues that lie at the heart of ethical and political philosophy.

The early history of German patriotism is complex and illuminates many of patriotism’s potential virtues as well as its dangers. Throughout the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, patriotism’s overarching connotation was devotion to the greater good, but whether that greater was local, national, or global varied dramatically. Early uses of patriotism were devoid of national or military connotations and instead denoted local engagement in public projects and willingness to aid to those in need. The patriot moreover worked for enlightened political reform, convinced that good government could convert subjects into citizens. Patriotism also had distinct cosmopolitan connotations, indicating someone who had humanity’s good generally as a goal. In the early aftermath of the French Revolution, acting in the interest of humanity’s development meant supporting the revolutionaries as the best hope for furthering political progress. As the Revolution dissolved into the Terror, German intellectuals hoped that Germany could assume the mantle of progress: being a patriot meant supporting German culture as a means of furthering humanity’s enlightenment. The Napoleonic Wars, however, shifted Germans’ attitude significantly: years of French occupation culminated in patriotism being defined as favoring German culture and unity in the interest of defeating the French. Patriotism’s nationalist connotations from that point intensify significantly. But its early history argues for remembering and revitalizing its potential to unite the local with the global and to promote enlightened civic engagement in the pursuit of political progress.

Hegel’s philosophical system turns to a species of the laughable at three critical junctures of his dialectic: comedy appears both at the conclusion of classical art and of Hegel’s discussion of poetry, and romantic art ends with humor. But we misunderstand these transitional moments unless we recognize that Hegel did not use comedy and humor synonymously. Comedy refers to a dramatic genre with a 2000-year-old history; humor was a relatively recent aesthetic phenomenon that had become central to philosophizing about art in Hegel’s generation. Hegel also differentiated between subjective humor, which he associated with the novelist Jean Paul’s eccentric excesses, and objective humor. Focusing on the surprising examples Hegel offers of objective humor— from epigrams to Persian poetry to the obscure novels of T.G. von Hippel—I argue that we better understand Hegel’s “end of art” thesis by tracing ways both comedy and humor can end. By understanding those endings, we also come closer to imagining how art can continue.

Philosophers in the nineteenth century took laughter and its related concepts very seriously. Most philosophers before this period treated laughter as tangential to philosophy’s core concerns, but beginning with Kant’s immediate successors, the family of concepts relating to the laughable—including comedy, wit, irony, and ridicule—took on new significance. They went from describing something derivative about humans to telling us what we, in the most basic sense, are. Well-known philosophers such as Hegel, Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche offered substantial treatments of these topics; they were also taken up by lesser-known thinkers such as Rosenkranz, Solger, Jean Paul, Bahnsen, and Bergson. The nineteenth century also saw the introduction of humor in particular as a new and distinct aesthetic category. For several philosophers of this period, humor described nothing less than the relationship between the human and the divine and its implications for how humans should live. It described our awareness of our finitude—our fallibility, our petty concerns, our meaningless obsessions—and the amusement tinged with melancholy this awareness elicits. Despite this wealth of theorizing, the nineteenth century is often neglected in studies of the philosophy of laughter and humor. This essay introduces a volume of articles intended to remedy that neglect.

This book offers an analysis of humor, comedy, and laughter as philosophical topics in the 19th Century. It traces the introduction of humor as a new aesthetic category inspired by Laurence Sterne’s "Tristram Shandy" and shows Sterne’s deep influence on German aesthetic theorists of this period. Through differentiating humor from comedy, the book suggests important distinctions within the aesthetic philosophies of G.W.F. Hegel, Karl Solger, and Jean Paul Richter. The book links Kant’s underdeveloped incongruity theory of laughter to Schopenhauer’s more complete account and identifies humor’s place in the pessimistic philosophy of Julius Bahnsen. It considers how caricature functioned at the intersection of politics, aesthetics, and ethics in Karl Rosenkranz’s work, and how Kierkegaard and Nietzsche made humor central not only to their philosophical content but also to its style. The book concludes with an explication of French philosopher Henri Bergson’s claim that laughter is a response to mechanical inelasticity.

Despite Hegel’s effusive praise for art as one of the ways humans express truth, art by his description is both essentially limited and at perpetual risk of ending. This hybrid assessment is apparent first in Hegel’s account of art’s development, which shows art culminating in classical sculpture’s perfect unity but then, unable to depict Christianity’s interiority, evolving into religion, surrendering to division, or dissipating into prose. It is also evident in his ranking of artistic genres from architecture to poetry according to their ability to help humans produce themselves both individually and collectively: the more adequately art depicts human self-understanding, the more it risks ceasing to be art. Nevertheless, art’s myriad endings do not exhaust its potential. Art that makes us alive to the unity and interdependence at the heart of reality continues to express the Idea and so achieves Hegel’s ambitions for its role in human life.

Towards the very end of his wide-ranging lectures on the philosophy of art, Hegel unexpectedly expresses a preference for comedy over tragedy. More surprisingly, given his systematic claims for his aesthetic theory, he suggests that this preference is arbitrary. This essay suggests that this arbitrariness is itself systematic, given Hegel’s broader claims about unity and necessity in art generally and his analysis of ancient as opposed to modern drama in particular. With the emergence of modern subjectivity, tragic plots lose their necessity and so their redemptive conclusions; comic plots disintegrate into mockery and entertainment. In many cases, the dramas in question consequently fail to be art. This does not, however, mean that art ends: insofar as it inspires humans to a better understanding of their unity with the divine, it will continue to meet its mandate. But the lack of necessity in modern drama means we are free to prefer happy endings. Hegel’s seemingly arbitrary preference is, in the end, systematically justified.

A subject’s ethical agency is closely tied up with her particular commitments: her ethnic group, her family, her beliefs, her occupation. The question of how these specific commitments relate to the subject’s actions is therefore pivotal to describing moral agency. Christine Korsgaard has proposed a theory whereby a subject’s commitments are an essential part of her moral agency, namely her practical identity. According to this theory, having commitments is normative, a necessary component of an agent’s respect for her own humanity. Obligation to other humans is an essential part of our practical identity, and our unavoidable responsiveness to the call of other humans assures that we will feel our obligation to them. I argue that explaining practical identity as necessary to ethical agency begins to describe the role of commitments in our agency, but that this description must go further to address the real import of commitments in ethical life.

Immanuel Kant's description of humans' first encounter with each other depicts a peaceful recognition of mutual worth. G.W.F. Hegel's by contrast depicts a struggle to the death. I argue in this paper that Hegel's description of conflict results in an ethical theory that better preserves the distinctness of the other. I consider Christine Korsgaard's description of first encounters as a third alternative but conclude that Hegel's approach better accounts for the specific commitments we make--as family members, works, and citizens --in ethical life.

Christine Korsgaard attempts to reinterpret Kantian ethics in a way that might alleviate Bernard Williams’ famous worry that a man cannot save his drowning wife without determining impartially that he may do so. She does this by dividing a reflective self that chooses the commitments that make up an agent’s practical identity from a self defined as a jumble of desires. An agent, she then argues, must act on the commitments chosen by the reflective self on pain of disintegration. Using Harry Frankfurt’s emphasis on love as a final end, I argue that disintegration as motivation is not a more acceptable motivation than impartiality and so does not adequately address Williams’ criticism. I also argue that the idea of a divided self either leads to an infinite regress or to an implausible description of how our commitments evolve and change. To make this last claim, I discuss a case from John Updike’s novel 'In the Beauty of the Lilies.'

Philip Roth’s novel 'The Human Stain' recounts an instance of racial passing: its protagonist, Coleman Silk, is African-American but light-skinned enough to pass as white. Coleman’s decision to pass and his subsequent violent death, I argue, confront us with complex ethical questions regarding unjust social roles, loyalty, and moral luck. I also argue, building on Hegel’s definition of tragedy, that 'The Human Stain' is a particularly modern tragedy. The novel highlights conflicting role obligations, inadequate conceptions of freedom, and the tensions of cultural paradigm shifts—all characteristics typical of modern tragedy. I claim that parsing 'The Human Stain' as a tragedy deepens our understanding of the novel as well as drawing our attention to its philosophical significance.

Nurses all too often experience situations that threaten their identification with the caring aspect of their profession. This article examines systematic reasons for the loss of integrity they describe as their lived work experience conflicts with their self-conception. I examine Ruth Barcan Marcus' description of moral dilemmas and the role of regret, arguing that the real experience of regret should not be associated with a lack of integrity. I conclude that a more complex understanding of care in nurses' self-understanding is needed in order to describe the kinds of moral dilemmas they frequently face.

Abstract: This article argues that Christine Korsgaard's stimulating claim that practical identity is at the foundation of agency is weakened by her reliance on a Kantian conception of freedom. The commitments that make up our practical identity are, the article suggests, better described through a system like Hegel's that attends to the nature of and connection among different kinds of commitments. Beginning with such an analysis allows us better to describe human agency; it also enables us to reflect the place commitments have in our lives more accurately. Hegel offers a description of ethical life in which commitments are central but still subject to norms that themselves better allow humans to achieve concrete freedom

In his description of patriotism in the Philosophy of Right, Hegel essentially neglects contemporary patriotism's defining characteristic, namely loyalty to or pride in one's country. I argue that the historical context of patriotism explains this neglect. German patriotism during Hegel's lifetime encompassed disparate political trends, including an emphasis on engagement in local community, attention to political ideals, and burgeoning nationalism. Hegel's comments on patriotism incorporate the first two trends; Hegel broadly rejected the later, nationalist trend. I also claim that Hegel's comments on patriotism in his lectures on Rechtsphilosophie enhance our understanding of Hegel's political philosophy generally: in the lectures, the connection between patriotism and good government becomes explicit; the need for local civic engagement becomes clearer; we understand better the place of sentiment in a citizen's attitude towards the state. I also argue that Hegel differentiates between true patriotism, which protects individuality within the state, and inferior forms of patriotism that threaten modern political life as Hegel understands it

According to Thomas Pogge’s theory of human rights, those of us in the developed world have a negative duty to the global poor. In other words, our responsibility to them is not merely to help them but to stop harming them by hoarding natural resources and imposing unfair institutional structures. I argue that Hegel would agree that we have a responsibility to the global poor and that he would also agree with some of Pogge’s institutional diagnosis. Hegel thought that civil society, as a new institution in his time, generated new responsibilities; he would, I argue, have thought the same about a globalized civil society. I discuss recognition as a possible foundation for this obligation and emphasize Hegel’s preference for a representative structure based on economics rather than geography as part of a possible solution.

Hegel’s “Anthropology” considers components of an agent’s practical identity that are not chosen but rather inherited: components such as the agent’s temperament, talents, and ethnic background. Through a discussion of habit and happiness, Hegel explores how these inherited traits can become part of the agent’s self-determination. I argue that this process provides a model for explaining how we are obligated within roles we do not choose—roles for instance within the family or as citizens of a state. Through evaluation of an inherited role itself and assessment of her own place in it, the agent earns and eventually comes to own her actions within the role. In this way an inherited role, like an inherited trait, can contribute to an agent’s freedom.