CU Course on Hegel, 03b
Hegel, Phenomenology and Kant
Andy Blunden’s second lecture contains this useful passage:
“Most writers interpret Hegel by
importing into their reading of Hegel Kant’s concept of subject. This is wrong.
Now it is true that on occasion, especially when he is commenting on Kant,
Hegel does use the word ‘subject’ in the Kantian sense, that is to say, as
meaning an individual, an individual adult citizen, to be a little more
precise. This is invariably the sense in which the Kantian subject is used
today, and the same sense is usually, rather kaleidoscopically, read into
Hegel. Normally, Hegel simply uses the word ‘person’ to convey this meaning.
For Hegel, ‘subject’ is not a philosophical synonym for ‘person’. It is really
important to remember this.
“The word subject went through
some transformations since the Romans translated Aristotle, particularly with
Descartes, but the core idea that Kant has imparted with the word is the
coincidence of three things: the cogito
of Descartes, the bearer of ideas and knowledge, the idea of self-determining
agent who bears moral responsibility for their actions, and identity or
self-consciousness. All three of these entities coincide in the Kantian
subject, and Hegel is true to this
concept, but it is not an individual person.
“The individual is just a single
atom of the whole entity constituted by the collective activity of the
community as a whole. Of course, nothing other than an individual human being
can think or bear moral responsibility for actions, but they cannot do so as
isolated atoms; the content of our thinking is thought-objects which are
constituted by the activity of the entire community and past generations. And
our actions are vain and meaningless except insofar as they take on
significance through the relation of the individual to the whole community. The
point is, how to elaborate this idea of thought and moral responsibility as
collective activities, and at the same time develop the conception of
individuality which constitutes the essence of modern society.
“In the “System of Ethical Life,”
Hegel approached the question of labour not so much from the standpoint of how
individuals acquire knowledge,
as how the universal, that is, a culture, is constructed. At the basic level, people work with plants, and
then animals, and then machinery, and in doing so produce crops, herds and
means of production which are passed on to future generations. Likewise, in
using words the language is maintained and developed and passed on to future
generations, and finally, in abstracting the knowledge of culture and imparting
it to a new generation in the raising of children, people are constructing and
maintaining their ‘second nature’, the universals which are the content of all
thought. When an individual thinks, they think with universals actively
maintained by and meaningful only within their community.
“So to provide an adequate
concept of the subject, Hegel has to let go of the idea of an individual locus
of experience, with access to universal principles of Reason existing in some
fictional hyperspace on one side, and on the other side, unknowable
things-in-themselves. The content of experience is thought objects which have
been constructed by collective activity…”
What we are therefore gaining here, from Hegel, is a philosophy that
can reckon with the collective subject, or what Marx and Engels referred to in
the last paragraphs of the second part of the Communist
Manifesto as a “vast association
of the whole nation”. This is a democracy not as formality or mechanism,
but as collective consciousness manifest as fact.
There is no possibility of communism without a conception of this kind.
In the same part of the Manifesto, Marx and Engels wrote that in the “vast association”, the “free development of each [would be] the condition for the free development of
all”. The individual subject is not excluded. On the contrary, the
individual subject is the basic building-block of society. There is no society
without individuals. But what we have, as well, is the collective, social
subject.
What we get with Hegel, it seems, and we must confirm this with more
reading of the original texts, is the first philosophical treatment of the
collective that is not merely presumptuous and declaratory of its existence. We
get a working model of the collective subject, and we get a description of how
the collective consciousness is formed, and how it is maintained.
Let us finish off this instalment with a direct quotation from one of
Hegel’s predecessors - the great Spinoza
- and in the last instalment of this third part of the course, look again at
some of Kant’s original writing. Then we will follow Andy Blunden’s route
through Hegel for three more parts, until we come back to look at some of
Hegel’s successors, such as Marx, Lenin, and Ilyenkov.
Here is Spinoza:
“As far as the 'method for
finding out the truth' is concerned, 'the matter stands on the same footing as
the making of material tools.... For, in order to work iron, a hammer is
needed, and the hammer cannot be forthcoming unless it has been made; but, in
order to make it, there was need of another hammer and other tools, and so on
to infinity. We might thus vainly endeavour to prove that men have no power of
working iron.
“But as men at first made use of
the instruments supplied by nature to accomplish very easy pieces of
workmanship, laboriously and imperfectly, and then, when these were finished,
wrought other things more difficult with less labour and greater perfection. .
. . So, in like manner, the intellect, by its native strength, makes for itself
intellectual instruments, whereby it acquires strength for performing other
intellectual operations, and from these operations gets again fresh
instruments, or the power of pushing its investigations further, and thus
gradually proceeds till it reaches the summit of wisdom.”
B. de Spinoza (1632-1677)
Improvement of the Understanding, Ethics and
Correspondence
Picture: an anarchist
ant.
Please download and read
this text via the link:
Hegel,
Phenomenology and Kant, 2007, Andy
Blunden (4889 words)
Further reading:
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