Taylor on Hegel and Weber on politics

Charles Taylor, Hegel and Modern Society is a condensation of the earlier and larger Hegel. The first chapter outlines Hegel’s philosophy and is very admirably done in such a brief space. Taylor takes the Absolute and Geist to be references God (rather than, say, culture or collective consciousness or general will). On Taylor’s account Hegel must prove that everything can only be understood with reference to Geist and vice versa, which is the aim of the Logic by starting with ‘being’ as the most empty category and showing it is dialectically related to nothingness and so becoming. This then grounds the relation between identity and opposition in the speculative form of reasoning, where A is A and A is not A, and we proper understanding comes only from the movement between these positions, not from frozen predicative propositions. Taylor is skeptical of Hegel’s proof here but thinks that Hegel still frames questions much more productively than many others, especially as regards to freedom. His importance springs partly from his attempt to combine the Enlightenment emphasis on reason, with the Kantian call for radical freedom, and the Romantic protest against the Enlightenment for an integral wholeness (what Taylor calls ‘expressivism’). Current society does not wish to lose the gains from the Enlightenment but still feels the force of the Romantic critique, so that Hegel continues to speak to us.

Hegel’s political philosophy is neither conservative nor liberal. Hegel wants to include Sittlichkeit, existing cultural obligations, within political philosophy and culture/institutions but by exposing it to the demands of reason. By contrast, he thinks Kantian Moralität is vacuous and this was why the Jacobin Terror was so destructive, because it could only be against any determinate political form. This Sittlichkeit involves three things (p.93): 1) what is most important in human life can only be attained in relation to a community; 2) this community must not be partial but be self-sufficient – and so it must be at the level of a state; 3) the community/state is important for us because it expresses the Idea (which means something like our most articulate form of self-consciousness so far, perhaps vaguely like Herder’s national spirit idea, except Hegel can ward off the dangers of nationalism through a dialectical openness to the collapse of a historical formation at the recognition of its limits and contradiction).

Another of Hegel’s critiques of absolute freedom is that it requires homogeneity, massive decentralization, and it cannot allow for the majority to impose its will on the minority, it cannot allow for some sort of political differentiation (which is necessary in a community as big as the state). Thus ideals of equality and participation lead to homogenization, loose people from their communities but then cannot replace them as forms of identity (except by bad nationalism, say). Modern society needs some way to generate meaningful differentiation without pitting the different groups against one another but knitting them into a larger whole (similarities with de Tocqueville and Montesquieu).

Max Weber’s ‘Politics as a vocation’ begins with the famous claim that ‘a state is a human community that (successfully) claims the monopoly of the legitimate use of physical force within a given territory. Politics is the attempt to share or influence power, within or between states, which ultimately rests on this right to use violence. Legitimation of claims to the right to force rest on tradition, charisma or legality. Weber contrasts politicians, whose task is to be passionate and take personal responsibility, with civil servants, whose task is to impersonally execute orders as if they agreed with them, with lawyers, whose task is to make strong technical arguments for interested parties (irrespective of the strength of their moral argument).

Towards the end of the essay Weber discusses the politician’s need to have a ‘passionate devotion’ to a cause, where passionate means ‘matter-of-factness’. That is, the politician must have ‘distance’ from events and people and a ‘sense of proportion’ to be able to act always in the interest of the cause. The politician will only be able to keep going because of this devotion to a cause and from a sense of faith (or hope) because the results of political action are ‘regularly’ different from what was intended. This leads to a fascinating discussion of the relation between ethics and politics. Weber denies that they are unrelated but equally that the same ethical considerations obtain in politics as they do in ‘erotic, business, familial, and official relations’. Since politics has the unique means of ‘power backed up by violence’ it has a unique ethics. Weber contrasts two attitudes that he calls an ‘ethic of ultimate ends’ and an ‘ethic of responsibiliity’. The former advocates actions according to its own lights but does not consider the consequences of those actions as relevant to moral guilt or innocence; the latter acts on the assumption that the actor must account for the ‘foreseeable’ consequences of her actions. For example, the responsible actor must take into account the ‘average deficiencies’ of people. (Weber identifies the ethics of ultimate ends with religion and the Sermon on the Mount but it sounds Kantian). Weber also claims that the use of bad means to bring about good ends is unavoidable and that no ethical system can decide when and to what extent which bad means justify which good ends (presumably with certainty rather than offering any guidance at all). At the end of the essay Weber suggests these two ethics are supplementary rather than mutually exclusive, which we could perhaps understand in terms of the tension between political interests and values.

A little bit of Hegelian-Christian ethics

Below is a draft section from a lecture I’ll be giving on Christian ethics later this term. Excuse the note-like form of some of it but any comments would be more than welcome. I’m mostly channelling Andrew Shanks and J Bernstein on Hegel.

The non-totality of Christian ethics

The Christian tradition is not a whole culture or form of life but requires some pre-existing culture on which to fix itself. In this process it transforms the culture and is transformed. It learns about itself and teaches the other. It does not possess all the truth there is. So assessment of other philosophies and cultures is needed in order to syncretize with them. This means Christianity is not always superior, not always in a position to judge. It must sometimes be judged. So the great errors of Christianity – Crusades, suppressing heretics, slavery, subjugation of women, persecution of homosexuals, colonialism – are not accidental to it so that we can say that’s not ‘true’ Christianity. They have to be owned up to and Christianity must be worked on to transform it so it changes and won’t do those things again.

Any ethical system or tradition must work to meet new situations and if it can be shown that an ethical system has nothing to say about a topic within ethics, then that is a problem for that ethical system. The question is whether the ethical system, or perhaps better, tradition, can take that on board and change to meet the criticism. MacIntyre perhaps suggests Christianity can do that as a self-enclosed, or self-sufficient, tradition. I’m suggesting that such a thing does not exist. E.g. it was Wilberforce’s liberalism as much as his Christianity that pitted him against the slave trade. If it can do that then it survives as a tradition, but necessarily in a changed form.

So Christianity needs openness to other traditions and humility. Must learn from them.

Forgiveness and dissidence

The work of Andrew Shanks in God and Modernity gives this further support. ‘Magic’ is about consolation, about catering to people’s anxieties about material interests. You go to get a spell to seek good fortune (or bad fortune for someone else). ‘Religion’ is about the infinite ethical demand, about making things more difficult, furthering radical self-critique (what Christians call repentance). You don’t do this by insisting on your interpretation of things. On the contrary, we must be open to revising our beliefs when necessary.

Pre-theology= recognising being shaken.

Shanks interprets Heidegger: what matters is to own and assimilate the experience of shakenness, the encounter with Being. Any truth as correctness, any set of propositions, any philosophical project, will fall short of that. It is a relationship, attitude, not system or answers. This is being post-metaphysical.

Many religions have a central insight: the transcendent. We express it in cultural or confessional form but it is not the same as the Transcendent itself, which is beyond all formulation. Heidegger’s critique of metaphysics is the same thing. But Heidegger will still let us talk about being, just not let us think we have exhausted it or captured it (contrast with Kant’s noumenal/phenomenal). So we have serious cultural relativism: truth exists but our only access to it is through culture. So we can never claim to have the only right way. And, we need to preserve different cultures because they have different aspects of the truth that our tradition does not. (Is it possible to have the best or most complete account of truth? Perhaps if you thoroughly compared traditions, but you’re talking about accounting for all of reality so very difficult to judge).

What is needed, then, for us to maintain openness to truth, is a culture with coherence that can pay the ‘greatest possible respect to properly thoughtful conscientious dissent’. This requires mutual forgiveness. The church is supposed to have this cultural-ethic (Sittlichkeit) because it is founded on the crucified dissident revealed as God. The resurrection is God’s verdict ‘in favour of thoughtful conscientious dissent; a dramatic incitement to free-spiritedness, vindicating the necessary self-confidence, wherever appropriate, to be a dissident.’ (80)

BUT Christian theology, especially Christology, contains a risk or danger. ‘Instead of a universal divine vindication of shaken human individuality as such, we are presented at the level of Vorstellen with the exaltation of one particular individual, precisely in his particularity as the founder of the church; in effect, occluding the universalist symbolism. So the gospel is reduced to church-ideology, a pioneering example of what we nowadays call a ‘cult of personality’.’ (81) So (for Hegel) ‘it is only with the gradual emergence of the secular liberal state that we are…at long last finally enabled to comprehend the real truth for which the Incarnation stands.’ Hegel sees the secularization of the enlightenment as carrying forward the original gospel struggle for freedom that had been lost in church ideology. So this is a theological celebration of secularization, and the secular state, for the way it removes, at any rate, the grosser political motives for the distortion of the gospel.’  A church with power in competition with the state is more likely to hold onto the theology of the unhappy consciousness that suppresses dissent (before it can begin), i.e. that serves the libidino dominandi. So a secular state frees the church to be the church.

So what Shanks and Alison are recommending in their different ways is for the church to try to be a society or culture that is coherent and yet capable of maximum openness to disintegrative truth without disintegrating. To try to maintain a way of life and understanding that is as wise and truthful as it can see by its own lights, whilst being open to the possibility of other truths from other quarters. To try to be forgiving and open to all, universally inclusive. It is constantly on the verge of dissolving itself perhaps, because it is open to critique from others and from itself, open to changing its way of being depending on the influences it encounters. This would be an institutional embodiment of repentance and humility. Clearly extremely difficult. Shanks in fact thinks it is the most difficult form of society to create because it tries to hold together maximum space for and respect to dissidence with the coherency of a (malleable!) Sittlichkeit. I’m not sure any organization would want to claim to live up to this, and I’m not sure how far it’s even possible (how much patience do people have for the negative moment, bearing in mind this is a community open to those who will never read Hegel?!), and yet it seems to me to be a most worthy aim for a polity.

Conscience in Hegel. (Bernstein tapes). Conscience is not a property of the agent but exists only in agents by virtue of the type of community they inhabit. The community must recognise the possibility of taking a position with respect to your action and yourself. It must recognise a ‘duplex structure’ to acts: they have intentional content (what I intend to do) and expressive content (how I relate to myself in doing this act). We can disagree with someone’s action but recognise they did it in conscience. So we disagree with the content of the action (its intent) but not its form (its expression). Just as there can be no private language, there can be no isolated conscience. For conscience to exist, there has to be a linguistic expression of how to relate to oneself in action that allows for this disagreement about content but respects the form. (Antigone is a tragedy because they didn’t have this possibility. That is why individuality is an advance. Once people are no longer exclusively defined by their social roles this possibility can emerge).

What type of community can recognise this? Two types are possible. The ‘hippy community’: PS §655 Conscience is ‘the moral genius which knows the inner voice of what it immediately knows to be a divine voice; and since, in knowing this, it has an equally immediate knowledge of existence, it is the divine creative power which in its Notion possesses the spontaneity of life. Equally, it is in its own self divine worship, for its action is the contemplation of its own divinity.’ So everyone does what their conscience tells them and that must be right, no matter what it is. But really this denies the possibility of really serious disagreement. We’re meant to feel that no-one can hurt anyone else. So this is a denial of the significance of action. This is the community elevated at the expense of the individual because there’s nothing the individual can do to challenge the community.

On the other hand we need a community that recognizes the significance of action and the place of the individual. It allows for the negativity of action, i.e. that significant action can challenge and oppose the current norms. E.g. civil disobedience – against the laws of the community for the sake of the community. Or the church (ideally!) where we recognize differences of opinion and that they really do matter and that we have to forgive one another for doing what we think is wrong and keep talking. So, e.g., the Anglican communion in which they are strenuously disagreeing about homosexuality’s place in the church but (some) are trying to keep talking nonetheless. So you just have to accept that it’s painful. So it may seem as though the Anglican church is failing because it is being torn apart and it may well split, but that is precisely its success. Whereas the Orthodox and Nazarenes and many Catholics aren’t even having the conversation (some RC are). So they seem united and strong on this front and that is precisely their failure. That’s success and failure in the kingdom.

Now the norms of the community come from social use and creation, from culture. But that means they cannot be eternal or infallible. And the way to respond to this philosophical situation is not with a theory but with a confession: to admit that our norms that we are proposing are as ungrounded as the community norms that we are opposing. So if you commit significant moral action that is outside/in disagreement with your community, you know this, you recognise that others legitimately disagree with it. In a sense you act knowing your act may be wrong or evil. This is the situation of modernity (as opposed to traditional societies). This is why forgiveness and confession are so essential. We reach a philosophical impasse (there’s no way to decide who is right) and so we must be willing to admit we have trespassed the community’s norms and be willing to take the punishment, but equally the community must be willing to forgive. And all must be willing to talk about who may be right.

(NB: this is not the same as criminal action. Criminal action doesn’t seek to change the community’s norms, it seeks simply to violate those norms for personal gain. The thief doesn’t want everyone to go around stealing nor does he wish to be caught. The protestor, however, is self-conscious about breaking the norms and deliberately does it in public precisely so the community can question its own norms.)

So think back to RW and Shanks. Disagreement in the church without any way to know in the immediate future who is right (perhaps church will decide over time). This is possible and the church should be the type of place that allows for this possibility, that is open to the shaking this gives to our beliefs, that works through the trauma of it. Of course we try to create a coherent culture, but at the same time we must be open to the disintegrative truth, the truth that our culture has overlooked. We must be open to our victims (since we have an innocent victim at the heart of our worship).

So this is about attitudes. It’s about how we approach dialogue and debate. For instance, having the attitude of knowing you’re right before you start a debate is wrong. The attitude of not being open to changing your mind. E.g. in debates about homosexuality in the church, for instance, if you are convinced already that you are correct and there’s no possibility of changing your mind.

From a completely different angle, Richard Burridge, Imitating Jesus: anti-apartheid theology in South Africa imitated Jesus when it ‘listened to the ‘voices of protest’ and opened up the interpretative community to include those who were suffering under it’. So who are our victims and how can we hear what they’re saying?

How many Hegelians…

…does it take to change a light bulb? Just one, but that’s a diversified, internally complex unity.

Does Hegel overcome Nietzsche?

In Hegel and the Other, Philip J. Kain argues for serious cultural relativism. Serious cultural relativism does not claim that moral right is whatever a culture says and so no critique is possible. It does not say there is no truth, but that we arrive at truth through culture.

Say two groups meet; one believes its beliefs are true; the other believes that beliefs are truth for those that hold them. They could hide their views from one another, or they could share their views. If the latter, the idea that views are only true for those that hold them will impose itself on the other group because it is meta-belief rather than a belief. I think this is what Nietzsche spotted in his belief that nihilism is the driving force of Western history.

Instead of assuming that beliefs are only true for those who hold them, we should believe that each culture may have understood some part of or access to truth. Kain thinks this will avoid ethnocentrism, refuse vulgar relativism and the erosion of values it creates [Nietzsche], and allow for real multiculturalism and respect for diversity. It is in fusing the search for truth and objectivity with embeddedness in culture that Hegel does this.

It is important for Kain that ‘we strive for truth, but we never finally get there.’ He continues: ‘The virtue of this model is that (1) it posits an objective truth that incites us to strive for it; (2) it allows us to envision all cultures as having access to, but different perspectives on, truth; and (3) it does not allow us to impose this truth upon others.’ To destroy another culture is to close an avenue to truth; difference should be preserved, for ourselves as much as for the culture in question. So this is genuine respect not patronising toleration.

We must be aware that we will not be able to synthesise truth into one scheme and that we will find truths with which we disagree. Kain’s answer is to deny or indefinitely postpone the Western idea of the necessary consistency of all truths. He suggests parallels in Gödel’s theorem and the Kuhnian take on paradigms. In this way, criticism between cultures need not be oppressive or groundless. Criticism is not an attempt to impose one set of values rather than another, values that are equally groundless. It is an attempt to draw closer to the truth. Reason is limited and conditioned but will have to judge the world as best it can and continue to reform itself. That’s all we have available to us.

This seems to capture the difference in values that Nietzsche saw, and his idea that values would transvalue themselves, but it allows for some explanation of interaction that is not only a will to power but is based on a genuine respect of and learning from the other. I think it also explains the deep-seated feeling we have that truth exists (though perhaps Nietzsche could respond that this feeling is a mistake). Rather than freezing history and being at the stage of the will to power and nihilism, we have here the possibility of moving forward, of refining our vision and reason.

Hegel and German theology resources

The Meissen Library at Durham Cathedral has over 14,000 German language titles catalogued so far (and counting). A great resource if you’re studying German theology and/or history.

Hegel’s introductions are available for free from the good people at re:press. As is a collection of essays on Hegel. Also, the excellent Jay Bernstein lecture on Hegel (and Kant) are here. Finally, Bernstein’s syllabus for a two module advanced master’s class on Hegel’s Phenomenology is

View this document on Scribd

">here (PDF). (Tip: read pages 16 and 17 of the pdf before you read the book!)

Hegel Bagel

Today, whilst taking a break from reading Hegel, I ate a bagel. I took an abstract, undifferentiated bagel and found it dirempted itself when I cut it in two. As it came out of the toaster I found it had been truly Aufgehoben: the bread had disappeared, yet its soft texture had been retained within the outer crust and lifted up into an altogether more sublime synthesis: toast. Its being-for-itself was now united with its being-in-itself. This, in turn, raised my level of consciousness as I became aware of myself: I desired the bagel, and when the bagel was gone I was aware of myself as satiated. I had objectified my consciousness in the world through work and proved myself worthy of recognition.

Kojeve, Girard, Nagel: surprising affinities

I was reading the beginning of Kojeve’s Introduction to the Reading of Hegel and was struck by how similar his account of desire was to that found in Girard and in Nagel. Kojeve speaks of how we learn to desire what others desire. This is the beginning of what Girard terms mimetic desire. Kojeve then says when we love others, we desire their desire in return. This is an insight Nagel arrives at quite differently in his essay on sexual perversion (though Nagel does say he is offering a sort of phenomenology of sexual desire, and Kojeve is writing on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, and Nagel rhymes with Hegel). Whether there’s much more in it I don’t know, but when several people independently (if it is independent) arrive at a similar conclusion it surely makes it more plausible.