Thomas Khurana

In this paper, I distinguish three varieties of naturalism in Nietzsche’s moral philosophy: (I) a naturalistic account of morality that serves broadly reductive purposes; (II) a form of ethical naturalism that aims to ground morality on given essential features of the human life form; and (III) a critical naturalism of second nature that allows for a critique of dominant forms of morality and accounts for the possibility of their transformation. Although one can find passages in Nietzsche that suggest that he endorses each of these types of naturalism, I shall argue that only the third option offers a comprehensive account that makes Nietzsche’s endeavor intelligible and original. The fact that the contemporary discussion has failed to recognize the distinct character of this type of naturalism has not only impeded our understanding of Nietzsche but also made important strands in post-Nietzschean continental philosophy unintelligible.

This article revisits Marx’s notion of Gattungswesen and his suggestion that we should consider nature as our inorganic body. Both are essential to the distinctive kind of dialectical and emancipatory naturalism he espouses. I will first revisit Marx’s fundamental notion of Gattungswesen to show that it is not speciesist and essentialist. Contrary to what the English translation of Marx’s term suggests, being a Gattungswesen does not amount to being a “species being.” To clarify the deep contrast between genus and species, Gattung and Art, I will turn to considerations in Hegel that are in the background of Marx’s conception. In the next step, I will examine the special relationship that a Gattungswesen has with the nature that surrounds it. Considering nature as the inorganic body of the human does not involve the defence of a one-sided appropriation and domination of nature, but aims for what Marx’s calls the “resurrection of nature”. Finally, I will characterise Marx’s position as a distinctive kind of naturalism: (i) as a naturalism that is neither hard nor soft, but dialectical; (i) as a naturalism that pursues an emancipatory agenda, not a reductive or therapeutic one.

n what sense can human beings be conceived of as social beings? I argue that sociality is not merely an attribute of the species to which we belong; rather, the way in which we belong to our own life-form is itself socially mediated. To bring this other sense of sociality into view, the article (I) distinguishes the logical sociality of all living beings from the material sociality of social animals and the political sociality of self-conscious social animals. (II) The political sociality characterizing human beings requires a complex second-personal articulation through which alone we can exist as members of our life-form and determine its content. (III) Constituted in this way, the human form of life is characterized by a particularly open and at the same time precarious character. (IV) Against this background, forms of objective spirit are necessary which grant us a generalized recognition and relieve us from the contingency of particular second-personal recognitions, without abandoning the openness of the sociality of the human form of life. This double requirement has led to paradoxical institutions in modern society which strive to protect and ensure the sociality of the human form of life precisely by naturalizing and individualizing our access to it.

Hegel has recently become the object of a trenchant critique: It is argued that in some of his key writings and lectures he has defended racist and pro-colonial views. What is more, it is argued that these racist and pro-colonial positions are not disconnected from his revered philosophy of freedom, but, on the contrary, internally related to his theory of human freedom. This relation is taken to be indicative of a broader complicity of our contemporary notion of freedom with colonial rule. As I aim to show in this article, this critique is clearly warranted, but does not invalidate Hegel's whole conception of human freedom. The article develops the essential resources Hegel offers us for elaborating a 'true critique' of the coloniality of our freedom.

In which sense can human beings be conceived as social animals? To elucidate this question, the present paper (I) distinguishes the logical sociality of all living beings from the material sociality of social animals and the political sociality of self-conscious social animals. (II) The self-conscious political sociality that characterizes the human genus-being requires a complex interplay of first and second person through which alone we can participate in our form of life and determine its content. (III) The human form of life thus constituted is characterized by a particularly open, and at the same time precarious, membership which involves specific forms of vulnerability and power. (IV) Against this back-ground, forms of objective spirit are necessary which grant us a generalized recognition and relieve us from the contingency of each particular second-personal recognition, without abandoning the openness of the sociality of the human form of life. This double requirement has led to paradoxical institutions in modern society which strive to protect and ensure the sociality of the human form of life precisely by naturalizing and individualizing our access to it.

In this article, I explore the extent to which it is illuminating to analyze Hegel’s notion of ethical life in terms of a lifeworld. I start (I) by distinguishing two ways in which Sittlichkeit is alive: first, insofar as it is realized as a spiritual form of life actualizing the living good; secondly, insofar ethical life takes up and transforms the natural lives of its members. Developing the peculiar vitality this lends to Hegel’s notion of the ethical (II), we can see that it is instructive to consider Sittlichkeit in terms of a lifeworld. However, the Hegelian framework allows us to overcome two worries we might have with regard to this characterization (III): the worry that “lifeworld” restricts the ethical realm to a narrow particularity of a certain life-form and the concern that “lifeworld” involves an organicist understanding of the social. Hegel’s account reveals that the vitality of the lifeworld depends on the way it exceeds itself and reaches beyond an organic mode of integration. This becomes clear in Hegel’s conception of modern ethical life which contains an essentially inorganic mode of actualization in civil society. This inorganic modality is not to be understood as a deterioration of ethical life but as a mode of its liberation and intensification. It allows for a deeper recognition of the inherent right of the individual subject, even where it stands in opposition to ethical unity, and an acknowledgment of the elusive vitality of ethical life itself which constantly pushes beyond each of its found forms. Understood in this way, the inorganic ethical life of civil society does not simply enforce the norms of ethical life in a non-conscious manner, but uncovers and explores a dynamic unconscious dimension of ethical life. A modernity that takes on the task of liberation in all its depth has to recognize not only the right to particularity and the right of subjective will but also the right of the unconscious

This article revisits Marx’s notion of Gattungswesen and his suggestion that we should consider nature as our inorganic body. Both are essential to the distinctive kind of dialectical and emancipatory naturalism he espouses. I will first revisit Marx’s fundamental notion of Gattungswesen to show that it is not speciesist and essentialist. Contrary to what the English translation of Marx’s term suggests, being a Gattungswesen does not amount to being a “species being.” To clarify the deep contrast between genus and species, Gattung and Art, I will turn to considerations in Hegel that are in the background of Marx’s conception. In the next step, I will examine the special relationship that a Gattungswesen has with the nature that surrounds it. Considering nature as the inorganic body of the human does not involve the defence of a one-sided appropriation and domination of nature, but aims for what Marx’s calls the “resurrection of nature”. Finally, I will characterise Marx’s position as a distinctive kind of naturalism: (i) as a naturalism that is neither hard nor soft, but dialectical; (i) as a naturalism that pursues an emancipatory agenda, not a reductive or therapeutic one.

In The Culmination, Robert Pippin offers a stunning reassessment of the achievements of absolute idealism. Having developed some of the most persuasive defenses of Hegel's absolute idealism to date, Pippin now argues that Heidegger's trenchant critique of Hegel has revealed a dogmatism at the very heart of absolute idealism: an unwarranted identification of what is with what is discursively knowable. This dogmatic identification leads to a distorted understanding of the meaning of Being, a reifying account of beings, and a neglect of our own finitude. In this article, I defend Hegel against these charges. The upshot of this discussion is twofold. Rather than evading the question of the exteriority of being, I argue, Hegel in fact aims to reveal that this exteriority is internal to thinking itself. And rather than identifying the meaning of being with discursive knowability, Hegel shows that the meaning of being resides in a form of freedom that goes beyond the self‐transparency of knowing.

Art has long been said to open up a different relationship to nature for the subject than ordinary theoretical or practical knowledge allows. Instead of making nature the distanced object of our contemplation or the mere material and means of our practical constructions, art discloses to us an intelligibility of nature that reaches further than our concepts and a naturalness of ourselves that connects us with what we usually relate to as our other. Against this backdrop, it does not seem surprising that the discussions about the problematic relationship to nature that have characterised the Anthropocene repeatedly turn to art and highlight its ability to overcome the problematic modern opposition of subject and object, spirit and nature, which has got us in this mess. In what follows, I want to argue, however, that art and aesthetic experience can only help here if it leads beyond the classical aesthetic paradigms of the beautiful and the sublime. The beautiful dwells in a dream of a harmonic fit between subject and nature that is precisely in question in the Anthropocene, and the sublime presents the superior power of nature only to bring out a different kind of power in the intelligent subject that remains untouched by natural might. These classical figures of aesthetic experience thus obscure how profoundly we need to revise our relation to nature in order to respond to the Anthropocene. In order to see this, it is helpful to first take a look at how (I) modern aesthetics around 1800 fundamentally conceived of art as a second or other nature. Against this background, we can understand more precisely (II) in which sense the figures of natural beauty and the sublime conceive of the relationship to nature. In view of the Anthropocene, these figures threaten to become part of an aesthetic ideology. We therefore need (III) other aesthetic strategies which I will point to in the third part.

The way in which a schema represents something is precisely by abstracting from some of its features; in a schema, representation and abstraction are thus not opposed to each other but rather internally related. The first part of this paper investigates this internal relation by delineating Kant’s concept of schema as the term mediating concept and intuition. Due to its pivotal position, however, the schema tends to collapse either into the conceptual or into the intuitive. The second part of the paper turns to Heidegger who tries to overcome this difficulty: he does not conceive the schema as a supplementary representation that connects already determinate concepts and intuitions, but rather locates schematization immanently in the very articulation of concept and intuition themselves. The third part of the paper proposes that the schematicity of our representations can be reflected in three pictorial strategies that are important for contemporary art: reduction, serialization, and reconstruction. These strategies are exemplified in certain images which put us in a position to see through our own representational form, as it were, and observe the procedures of figuration involved in that very form.

In this chapter, I consider the unity of self-consciousness and objectivity. Starting from the notion that the objective character and the self-conscious character of thought seem in tension, I discuss Sebastian Rödl’s Self-Consciousness and Objectivity and his thesis that this tension is merely apparent. This resolution suggests an immediate route to absolute idealism. I recall two Hegelian objections against such an immediate route. Against this background, it transpires that the dissolution of the apparent opposition of objectivity and self-consciousness can only be a preliminary step, opening our eyes to an actual opposition animating the pursuit of knowledge: the opposition of knowledge of nature and self-knowledge. This actual opposition cannot be removed as merely apparent and instead has to be sublated through articulation of its speculative unity. I consider two paradigms for the exposition of such a speculative unity: Kant’s account of judgments of beauty, and Hegel’s account of the speculative unity of life and self-consciousness. I close by contrasting these two approaches with Rödl’s characterization, which strikes me as one-sided. Absolute idealism, properly understood, requires us to develop the speculative unity of knowledge of nature and self-knowledge from both sides, showing us that knowledge of nature is self-knowledge, but equally: that self-knowledge requires knowledge of ourselves as nature.

While the concept of “second nature” has received remarkable attention in recent years, the discussion has mainly focused on neo-Aristotelian accounts. In this paper, I develop a neglected post-Kantian alternative. Instead of focusing solely on the model of habit, this conception shifts our attention to a different paradigm for second nature: the work of art. Following Kant’s account in the third critique, producing a work of art can be understood as the production of an “other nature”, expressive of freedom. As the post-Kantian tradition from Schiller and Hegel to Marx and Nietzsche suggests, the work of art can thus serve as a model for the kind of second nature we require in order to realize an ethical life. Thus, the production of an ethical second nature is not a matter of mere habituation, but a challenging “art”: it is an aesthetic task, a complex dialectical exercise, and a social practice of objectification. This conception of second nature not only allows us to grasp the relation of freedom and nature more adequately than the dominant neo-Aristotelian conceptions – it also opens up a critical perspective on our contemporary aesthetic self-understanding.

Habermas’s exchange with Jacques Derrida is situated within the debate about modernity and postmodernity. When he was awarded the Adorno Prize in 1980, Habermas defended the “unfinished project of modernity” in his acceptance speech; the opponents of modernity he identified included — in addition to old conservatives and neoconservatives of the recognizable variety — a group of “Young Conservatives,” among whom he numbered Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida (“Modernity,” 53). The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity (1985) devotes two chapters to Derrida, in which Habermas details, at greater length, what prompted this judgment. In his estimation, Derrida’s philosophy represents a radicalized critique of reason (Vernunftkritik), which amounts to an inadequate response to the diremptions and dualisms of modernity. This account — as well as the debate in Germany, France, and the United States that followed — was marked by polemical intensity and political vehemence; the effect on institutional and theoretical-political lines of allegiance was far-reaching. There is good reason to doubt whether Habermas portrayed Derrida’s writings accurately and whether he situated them in the appropriate cultural and political contexts. Instead of tracing, point for point, the specific problems within Habermas’s account and the critical responses they elicited, it is more illuminating to remain at a certain remove from the debate. This will allow us to identify the common points of departure that Habermas’s and Derrida’s projects share and to indicate the way in which they challenge each other in systematically fruitful ways.

The conception of property at the basis of Hegel’s conception of abstract right seems committed to a problematic form of “possessive individualism.” It seems to conceive of right as the expression of human mastery over nature and as based upon an irreducible opposition of person and nature, rightful will, and rightless thing. However, this chapter argues that Hegel starts with a form of possessive individualism only to show that it undermines itself. This is evident in the way Hegel unfolds the nature of property as it applies to external things as well as in the way he explains our self-ownership of our own bodies and lives. Hegel develops the idea of property to a point where it reaches a critical limit and encounters the “true right” that life possesses against the “formal” and “abstract right” of property. Ultimately, Hegel’s account suggests that nature should precisely not be treated as a rightless object at our arbitrary disposal but acknowledged as the inorganic body of right.

This chapter investigates the Kantian idea that a rational life is a life of “mere form”—a life in which a “mere form” is the force or spring of action. I start by developing Kant’s practical notion of life—the capacity to be the cause of what one represents. In a second step, I investigate the way in which Kant characterizes a rational life—the capacity to act in accordance with the representation of laws and to determine ourselves by the mere form of a practical rule. In the third section, I point to some of the attractions and some of the problems of such an account. I close by considering a Hegelian alternative: the notion that a rational life is not the life of “mere,” but of “absolute form.”

In his 1844 Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, Marx famously claims that the human being is or has a ‘Gattungswesen.’ This is often understood to mean that the human being is a ‘species-being’ and is determined by a given ‘species-essence.’ In this chapter, I argue that this reading is mistaken. What Marx calls Gattungswesen is precisely not a ‘species-being,’ but a being that, in a very specific sense, transcends the limits of its own given species. This different understanding of the genus-character of the human being opens up a new perspective on the naturalism of the early Marx. He is not informed by a problematic speciesist and essentialist naturalism, as is often assumed, but by a different form of naturalism which I propose to call ‘dialectical naturalism.’ The chapter starts (I) by developing Hegel’s account of genus which provides us with a useful background for (II) understanding Marx’s original notion of a genus-being and its practical, social, developmental character. In the last section, I show that (III) the actualization of our genus-being thus depends on the production of a specific type of ‘second nature’ that is at the heart of Marx’s dialectical naturalism.

In which sense can human beings be conceived as social animals? To elucidate this question, the present paper (I) distinguishes the logical sociality of all living beings from the material sociality of social animals and the political sociality of self-conscious social animals. (II) The self-conscious political sociality that characterises the human genus-being requires a complex interplay of first and second person through which alone we can participate in our form of life and determine its content. (III) The human form of life thus constituted is characterised by a particularly open, and at the same time precarious, membership which involves specific forms of vulnerability and power. (IV) Against this background, forms of objective spirit are necessary which grant us a generalized recognition and relieve us from the contingency of each particular second-personal recognition, without abandoning the openness of the sociality of the human form of life. This double requirement has led to paradoxical institutions in modern society which strive to protect and ensure the sociality of the human form of life precisely by naturalising and individualising our access to it.

In this paper, I discuss Karen Ng's reconstruction of Hegel's concept of life. On Ng's account, Hegel's conception of life has a remarkable double role to play: Life is both the proper object of judgment as well as a fundamental characterization of the activity of the judging subject. In a first step, I highlight the insight that Ng's account sheds on the internal connection of life and self-consciousness and the peculiar normativity of life. In a second step, I raise three concerns about Ng's strong focus on the logical notion of life which she characterizes as non-empirical and a priori. I argue that in order to uncover the full significance of the notion of life for Hegel we have to turn to his Philosophy of Nature and Spirit.

In this introductory paper, I discuss the second-personal approach to ethics and the theory of recognition as two accounts of the fundamental sociality of the human form of life. The first section delineates the deep affinities between the two approaches. They both put a reciprocal social constellation front and center from which they derive the fundamental norms of moral and social life and a social conception of freedom. The second section discusses three points of contrast between the two approaches: The accounts differ in that the second-personal approach opts for a narrower conception of recognition focusing on mutual moral accountability, whereas recognition theory suggests a broader conception including relations of love, respect, and esteem. Secondly, the accounts differ as to how they conceive of the interrelation of the I-thou and the I-We relationship. Finally, they differ with regard to the way they think of struggles for recognition. Whereas the second-personal approach suggests that we can understand struggles on the basis of a transcendental infrastructure of second-personal address, the theory of recognition considers norms of recognition as themselves constituted by dialectical social struggles. The paper closes with a reflection on the ways in which both approaches can help us understand the social vulnerability of the human form of life.