Hegel, Part 3b
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 (impossible).
·
The above is to
introduce the original reading-text: Blunden,
Hegel, Phenomenology and Kant, 2007.
