The following is an excerpt from the first lecture of our Hegel Masterclass which Dr. Filip Niklas will teach again starting April 30th. If you have any questions on the course, please just respond to this email or leave a comment. When you’re ready to enrol you can do so here.
LECTURE TEXT (Filip Niklas)
“[T]he supreme and ultimate purpose of science [is] to bring about the reconciliation of the reason that is conscious of itself with the reason that is, or actuality.”
So writes Hegel in the opening sections of his major systematic treatise The Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences. And along with this, he writes at numerous places—directly and indirectly—that the task of philosophy is to justify the contents of experience, be they phenomenological, scientific, religious, historical, ethical, political or aesthetic. He presses the importance of this because he sees a danger looming on the horizon. A danger that has always been with us, but one which perhaps modernity has made more apparent—or at least harder to unsee. This is the danger of indeterminacy—or what we can also call—nihilism. The danger that ultimately nothing has value, there is no reason to do anything and there is nothing precious, dignifying or even worthwhile. That one value or interest is just the same as another; nothing has intrinsic value—everything is just lost in a sea of contingency and is determined only by outer circumstances.
But for Hegel this danger is not something simply personal, though it does not exclude the personal. What is most urgent, however, is not that the individual is unable to find meaning, but that society as a whole is unable to find meaning. We need not travel far back to see in history how society and grand ideals have brought devastating conflicts and momentous suffering. Hegel’s approach, however, is to observe and analyze the social dimension already around us and understand that our customs, morals, rights, and institutions are, in fact, wellsprings of meaning; they are already something rational which gives rise to and helps foster our own ideas, vocations and self-determining activities. Certainly, there are failings within this dimension notwithstanding, but Hegel’s strategy is to look at what is already rational and realized, such that we can better understand how precisely they fall short. For example, Hegel in his own time thought that civil society with a marked was a necessary expression of subjective freedom within society—looking at the current state of capitalism, the failed attempts of communism to overthrow it, the ecological problems, can we find agreement with him here? Perhaps it is not that we should abolish the marked but envision a better marked?
Hegel noted that we as human beings are always on the lookout for meaning and new ideals. We are constantly revising and negotiating our life in light of new experiences, new knowledge and new ideas. Or perhaps something has become stale or all-too familiar and prompts us outwards. But what if the social domain is unable to provide meaning to its denizens; what if a state is unable to justify the existence of its institutions or the law with its rights does not speak to its people, then society, instead of being a source of the good, becomes a force of alienation. The real danger of indeterminacy and nihilism is that people can become vulnerable to be hijacked by substitute, less-than-rational ideals. Ideas that may seem immediately good but have little to no grounding behind them.
Geist, or spirit, is in Hegel’s philosophy the ultimately rational domain, or the most explicit sphere. It is the activity of reason by self-conscious creatures whereby these become aware of their surroundings (nature) and themselves as rational for themselves. Unfortunately, spirit does not have the same connotations in English as it does in German, where it means something akin to the humanities or liberal arts (liberal arts being the disciplines that teach human beings about their freedom, their capacities of critical reading, critical thinking, communication of complex ideas, and logical reasoning), and otherwise creative, cultural or intelligent activity. One philosopher (Markus Gabriel) substitutes it in English as “human minded activity” or “the mind-dependent domain”, such that spirit is the logic of the contents which pertain to the things human beings do particularly as human beings (doing science, making art, having sublime experiences and creating religion, making history, stand-up comedy and thinking about thinking or philosophizing). One could say there is nothing mysterious about this domain since it concerns the things which are most native and obvious to us, yet, there really is something truly of wonder, fascination and mystery here since, how is it there are beings that can be self-conscious, project themselves with various identities in social groups and articulate their thoughts in a language—and we are drawn to make sense of precisely this. I do not think we should deprive the mystery latent in the term spirit but appreciate it as a mystery that is immanent to us as both individual- and social beings, which is there for us to discover and comprehend.
Now, Hegel’s philosophy approaches the contents of the natural- and the human world with the purpose that there is a rationality there to uncover and realize, but additionally this approach already has a basic idea that there is rationality already realized. Indeed, we are thinking before we begin to think philosophically, or we use a language before we use it for philosophical purposes. And so there are implicit rational things at work, but do we simply take these for granted? This might seem to side-step the whole issue of indeterminacy. One may accuse Hegel of not taking nihilism seriously by starting from a position of grounded reason, as if Hegel were a rationalist. But here Hegel’s systematic discipline comes in; Hegel is keenly aware of the power of skepticism to put anything to question and how the history of philosophy has developed through this. So instead of dismissing skeptical worries, Hegel takes them on board and makes the skeptic, so to speak, the driver of the project. Taken to its furthest extreme—which we shall examine in the next lecture—we cannot justifiably speak of what is nature, what is human, animal or mind, and even what reason is, whether there is rationality or even meaning, or even determinacy. In this way, Hegel’s philosophy takes nihilism on by going deeper and more thoroughly than the nihilist: our values might be meaningless or the goals of society might be indeterminate, but what about the nature of value as such and what makes something determinate in the first place? This leads Hegel to examine systematically the whole repertoire of concepts and logical conditions through which anything is made intelligible, and this is the demand put on us, Hegel thinks, by our own reason.
We shall explore the radical lengths Hegel goes to consider indeterminacy logically, but we can appreciate that this is not done merely as a logical puzzle but from an urgent concern to better understand social and ethical issues and what constitutes a good life. Hegel lived through the time of the French revolution and witnessed a society break up from internal contradictions, bring forth something new and exciting, but also new terrors. Hegel wanted to understand just these processes; how it is a call for absolute freedom can turn into absolute terror. That being said, when those purely logical concepts are being considered, they are not looked at because of something else (such as ethical concerns) but are looked at absolutely—in and for themselves. Hegel stays with the subject matter itself (die Sache) and if there is rationality to it, it will unfold immanently, and so will the system.
When you’re ready to enrol you can do so here.