This month Philosophy Portal is launching its fifth solo course on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Class starts May 18th, you can learn more or sign up here: Philosophy of Right.
This month in The Portal we are focused on the concepts of Home and Origin, and welcome three special guests,
of The Artemisian, Daniel L. Garner of , and of . You can find out more or get involved here: The Portal.Philosophy Portal’s general aim as an educational platform has always been to teach the foundational discourses of the modern world, with a special emphasis on the continental tradition originating from the work of Hegel, and framed by the contemporary work of the Slovenian school.1 This foundation and framing will open to new significance this May in the teaching of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, as it will represent our first attempt to approach the political from a philosophical perspective.
Hegel’s philosophy points towards the importance of not only dialectics, but also speculative cognition, in the concrete actuality of thought. In fact, one might even say that Hegel’s entire philosophical effort is to emphasise the necessity of speculation as opposed to reductions to science and pragmatism, a tendency that he perceived as stemming from the Kantian philosophy.
I have come to think along the lines of “spirit cannot live on science and pragmatism alone”: one must defend a concrete space for speculative cognition.2
However, when we think of speculative cognition, we tend to think of getting lost in the clouds of abstraction. In fact, many post-Hegelian philosophies suggested that Hegel’s philosophy itself keeps us at a distance from embodiment and organic life, in privileging and centring the concept and ideation.
This criticism could not be further from the truth. What is most remarkable about Hegel’s philosophy is that he manages to privilege the concept and ideation, especially on the level of speculative cognition, while remaining deeply committed to (what he often calls) “concrete embodiment” and “organic filling”. Moreover, and more to the point of this series preparing for teaching the Philosophy of Right, Hegel’s philosophy manages to unify life and concept, embodiment and ideation, in a way that strives for true political universality.
Most of the post-Hegelian philosophers who criticise Hegel on the grounds of “embodiment” and “organicism”, do not come close to such an achievement. We might even be so bold and insane as to claim that there are no works of political philosophy that offer us such a thorough treatment of rights embedded in a theory of the state. Indeed, rather than tarrying with such a political philosophy, much continental philosophy after Hegel has come to view rights of the individual as itself an antiquated and even an oppressive notion.
Such thinkers are simply missing out on a special key. The level of dialectical rigour on display in the Philosophy of Right is truly mind blowing, a true delight for any spirit that is interested in cognising the meaning of freedom as situated within the totality of historical society, as opposed to striving for freedom in separation and antagonism with the totality of historical society.
To start the Philosophy of Right, Hegel suggests that his work is applying the speculative logic he developed in the Science of Logic to politics specifically. Philosophy of Right is the application of speculative logic to the concrete actuality of human political organisation. His main focus or object includes the politics of rights, ethics, and state. For Hegel, the truth cannot be separated or disconnected from a fully political analysis or exposition of the history of:
rights, which he both privileges to responsibility while sublating responsibility, as well as extends beyond reduction of rights to their civil dimension; as well as
ethics, which he places in a higher dimension or system in relation to both property (which is dialectically necessary but abstract) and morality; and finally
state, which is seems to suggest is the highest human political organisation, with the only dimension existing above it, the interrelation between states themselves
Moreover, he suggests that the truth of rights, ethics, and state are openly on display for us, most notably in the history of law, morality, and religion. In an age where our culture is struggling deeply to come to terms with law, morality, and religion without regressing to pre-modern or medieval or ancient ways of thinking, Hegel’s work is precious insofar as he is both deeply historical and also deeply modern, even our contemporary. Hegel does not reduce rights to notions of law that exclude the subjective side of the equation (as if the question of motive for the good is irrelevant); Hegel does not reduce ethics to a moral code that can be given from on high (as if there were a big Other); and Hegel does not reduce the state to religion (as the theocratic mind so unthinkingly does as a result of being submerged in its own particular sensuousness).
Hegel’s politics, at the same time, does not consider the history of our laws, moral codes, and religions to be irrelevant, but rather historical guiding posts to the modern mind, that call us and challenge us to the process of sublation if we are really willing to think, to engage speculative cognition. In other words, we can at once cancel and lift the history of our laws, moral codes and religions to a higher level, with a new politics of rights, ethics, and state (as well as their interrelations). The way human society conceived of law before modern times is not adaptive enough to the real of our inner life or reflective enough regarding our motivational structures; the way human society conceived of morality before modern times was too dependent on an external independent substance and thus not capable of understanding the subjective grounds for an objective system of ethics; and the way human society conceived of religion before modern times did not allow for genuine cultivation and expression of human freedom on the level of a pluralistic global society.
The Philosophy of Right takes aim at sublating all three.
Hegel is quick to remind us, when we start our journey into the dialectical process that unveils the structure of rights in the “concept qua concept”, that the thinking spirit by its very nature rejects truths that are given by either authority or feeling. While Hegel suggests that thinking spirit was too much held by the power of authority in pre-modern times, he is also concerned that the thinking spirit is too much held by the power of feeling in modern times. While the former may well be represented by the archetype of Platonic thinking, the latter, Hegel suggests, may well be represented by the archetype of Kantian thinking. While authority tends towards the reification of a transcendental law, morality, and religion; feeling tends towards the reification of its own immediate and particularist affects as bright ideas. Both suffer under the absence of a dialectical process that can hold within itself speculative cognition as the infinite thing-in-itself that includes self-reference as the only given we can truly rely on.
As Hegel is aiming his speech and discourse towards a modern audience, he is focused on the problem of a politics that is too swayed by and dependent on the immediate expression of affect. Hegel is specifically concerned with this tendency when it leads to thinking processes that can only conceive of freedom independently of the state, or in antagonism with the state, as an immediate feeling of hatred for the law. Here one can easily imagine those who, without thinking, imagine that the immediacy of their speculative cognition knows the truth about world history and state organisation. Here one can easily imagine those speaking in ways that suggest that if only they were able to impose their morality on world spirit in the abolition of borders and property, or the decentralisation of government, or the implementation of blockchain, or the enforcement of a theocratic organisation, or whatever other irrational idea has gripped them in its immediacy, then everything would be resolved, and the human species would be guaranteed its concrete freedom.
Things are not so simple, and Hegel would have no time for such speculation. While Hegel privileges speculative cognition as the thing-in-itself, our freedom in infinite self-reference, he does not give us an easy way out in terms of world history and the concrete actualisation of freedom. To really make the most of what is most precious, our speculative cognition, we must work for the maturation of our speculative cognition in processes of dialectical rigour that help us build a “ladder” toward a standpoint that will enable us to think ideas that we could not have dreamed of thinking without such an apparatus.
In the Phenomenology of Spirit that “ladder” was the science of experience towards the standpoint of absolute knowing; in the Science of Logic that “ladder” was the science of concept towards the standpoint of the absolute idea; and in the Philosophy of Right that “ladder” is the science of rights towards the standpoint of absolute freedom.
This month Philosophy Portal is launching its fifth solo course on Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Class starts May 18th, you can learn more or sign up here: Philosophy of Right.
This month in The Portal we are focused on the concepts of Home and Origin, and welcome three special guests,
of The Artemisian, Daniel L. Garner of , and of . You can find out more or get involved here: The Portal.The Portal is such a concrete space.