I think it would be fair to say this book is almost as much about the philosophy of Taylor as it is about the philosophy of Hegel. Or at the very least, Hegel through a Taylorian lens. Because of this, it is fascinating. Taylor begins, “Hegel’s spirit, or Geist, although he is often called ‘God’, and although claimed to be clarifying Christian theology, is not the God of traditional theism; he is not a God who could exist quite independently of men…. He is a spirit who lives as spirit only through men. They are the vehicles, and the indispensable vehicles, of his spiritual existence, as consciousness, rationality, will. But at the same time Geist is not reducible to man, he is not identical with the human spirit, since he is also the spiritual reality underlying the universe as a whole.” Hegel stated, “The geological organism is only vitality in itself, the truly living organism is its other.” Taylor expands, “For the mature Hegel, man comes to himself in the end when he sees himself as the vehicle of a larger spirit.”
Hegel’s Geist can be thought of as the embodiment of reason. “Our conception of spirit and its self-realization must have a place for reason if man is to be the vehicle of cosmic spirit and yet retain his autonomy…. Rational understanding is not possible without a clear consciousness of the distinction between subject and object, self and other, the rational and the affective. And just because of this, Hegel will insist that the ultimate synthesis incorporate division as well as unity…. Thus Hegel in his mature system developed an original stand vis-a-vis the generation to which he belonged in time and aspiration. He did not slough off their aspirations—to combine the fullest moral autonomy of the subject with the highest expressive unity within man, between men and with nature. He shared the hope that this unprecedented and epoch-making synthesis could be made only if one could win through to a vision of a spiritual reality underlying nature, a cosmic subject, to whom man could relate himself and in which he could ultimately find himself.” Hegel proclaimed, “In self-consciousness as the concept of Geist, consciousness comes to a turning point, at which it steps out of the multi-colored show of sensible immanence and the empty night of suprasensible transcendence into the spiritual daylight of presence.” Furthermore, Hegel believed it fell upon philosophy the task of “the cancellation of division.” He went on, “The Absolute itself is thus the identity of identity and non-identity; opposition and unity are both in it.” Taylor explains, “In Hegel’s final position, philosophy occupies the highest place, just because it is the only fully adequate expression of the highest unity, the medium in which spirit comes totally to itself, and hence the development of philosophical thought is essential to the perfection of this highest synthesis.”
Hegel considered himself a Christian. He tried to square the circle between reason and faith. Taylor exposits, “Faith triumphantly returns; indeed, [Hegel] would not agree to call it ‘faith’; it is the cornerstone of his philosophical system, the Hegelian notion of Vernunft (Reason)…. The fact that he pondered so long on man’s religious and social development made him use the categories of post-Kantian idealism with a much richer field of reference and to incomparably greater effect…. With Hegel philosophy is used to illuminate the whole field of human history—political, religious, philosophical, artistic.” Hegel had this to say about the effect of disenchantment brought on by the Protestant Enlightenment, “Christianity has depopulated Valhalla, hewn down the sacred groves, and rooted out the phantasy of the people as shameful superstition, as a diabolical poison.” He would also claim, “The Enlightenment, this vanity of the understanding, is philosophy’s most forceful opponent.”
Taylor describes Hegel’s dialectics of thought and being, as well as between subject and object, “Our thinking as finite subjects, turns out to be that of the cosmos itself, or the cosmic subject, God, whose vehicles we are. In the higher vision of speculative philosophy, the world loses its otherness to thought, and subjectivity goes beyond finitude, and hence the two meet. We overcome the dualism between subject and world, between knowing man and nature, in seeing the world as the necessary expression of thought, or rational necessity, while we see ourselves as the necessary vehicles of this thought, as the point where it becomes conscious…. This means that we come to see ourselves not just as finite subjects, with our own thoughts as it were, but as vehicles of a thought which is more than just ours, that is in a sense the thought of the universe as a whole, or in Hegel’s terms, God…. Hegel solves the problem of uniting finite to infinite spirit without loss of freedom through his notion of reason…. The rational agent loses none of his freedom in coming to accept his vocation as vehicle of cosmic necessity…. The infinite subject is such that in order to be he must have an external embodiment; and who says external embodiment says embodiment in space and time, an embodiment which is somewhere and sometime, in a particular living being, with all that this involves. The infinite subject can only be through a finite one.” Hegel pontificated, “The Oriental world knew only that one man was free—the king represented the absolute principle…. The Greek world won through to an intuition of freedom, but saw only that some were free…. Only with Christianity do we win through to the intuition that man as such is free.”
In the middle of this tome, Taylor goes into minute detail breaking down the chapters of “The Phenomenology of Spirit” (PhG) line by line. It is a critique in which he seeks to articulate how Hegel returns again and again to the basics of his dialectic, as he moves forward through human history, “The PhG intends to start with our ordinary consciousness of things (das naturliches BewuBtsein), and to take us from there to the true perspective of Geist. The work is called a ‘phenomenology’ because it deals with the way things appear for consciousness, or with forms of consciousness. But ‘appearance’ here is not to be contrasted with ‘reality’; what is most real, the absolute, is essentially self-appearance…. Our ordinary consciousness takes us to be individual, finite subjects set over against the world. The perspective of Geist, on the other hand, shows us as vehicles of a spirit which is also expressed in the world, so that this world is no longer distinct from us…. It is to show how ordinary consciousness carefully examined breaks down in contradiction and itself points beyond itself to a more adequate form…. This means that we must follow the dialectical movement in consciousness…. If the argument follows a dialectical movement, then this must be in the things themselves, not just in the way we reason about them…. And yet these partial realities, just because they exist externally, each alongside the others, make a standing claim to independence which belies their status as posited vehicles of the whole…. The whole furniture of the world is there in order to embody Geist and to manifest what he essentially is, self-knowing spirit, self-thinking thought, pure rational necessity.”
In the PhG, Hegel continued on with the concept of self-consciousness. Taylor argues, “With self-consciousness, the dialectic will be between the idea of ourselves, what we claim to be, and what we actually are. These are the two moments Hegel calls self-certainty and truth…. The dialectic of self-consciousness is thus a dialectic of human longing and aspiration, and their vicissitudes…. What is aimed at is integral expression, a consummation where the external reality which embodies us and on which we depend is fully expressive of us and contains nothing alien. This goal, which we can call a state of total integrity, is identified in Hegel with his conception of infinity, a condition in which the subject is not limited by anything outside…. The real thing can only be attained when men come to see themselves as emanation of universal Geist. For it is only then that they will not see the surrounding universe as a limit, an other.” Vocation is the means by which the self-consciousness is reconciled with external reality. Taylor states, “Work thus plays a crucial role in man’s struggle for integrity…. This is why the principal path to integrity lies through recognition by another…. Man can come to see himself in the natural environment by making it over in conformity with his own project…. In transforming things we change ourselves. By creating a standing reflection of ourselves as universal beings we become such beings.” Taylor reasserts Hegel’s dialectic of the finite reconciled with the infinite, “We are condemned to particular existence as finite spirits. All we can do is to work through our particular existence in order to realize a form of life capable of carrying universal consciousness. We have to work through sin to atonement; sin itself is unavoidable.” Hegel stressed, “Only inaction is innocent, like the way of being a stone, but not even that of a child.”
Taylor next returns to Hegel’s conception of the movement of the world through history—the dialectic of particular and infinite existence through the process of death and becoming. “Hence infinity, the self-subsistent whole which we are forced to assume once we grasp the mortality of the finite, can only be the whole system of changing determinate beings. There is no foundation for finite things outside the system of the finite. Hence there is no source outside the system on which we can draw to explain the coming to be of new finite things. Their coming to be is just the passing away of their predecessors…. Not only the passing away but the coming to be of finite things happens of necessity…. Thus the infinite as the whole system of changing finite things is the unfolding of conceptual necessity, for these things change and deploy themselves in a perpetual attempt to resolve contradiction. Contradiction is the motor of things. And it touches everything, so that everything is swept along in a perpetual becoming…. It is a totality, a whole whose parts are intrinsically related to each other, that is, where each can only be understood by its relations to the others…. It makes all the difference between seeing the whole as a contingent grouping of finite things, and seeing it as a totality which deserves to be called ‘infinite’ in Hegel’s sense of the term, and in which the finite is seen as having its truth in the Idea…. But Infinity is still a poor and abstract version of the Idea. For we only know that it has a necessary structure deployed in space and time.” Taylor later expands, “The infinite only achieves its identity by reconciling contradiction, by finding itself in its other…. The Idea is thus a process of positing its other and then recovering its unity with itself in its other (EL, 215, WL, II, 412)…. Thus the unity of Idea and reality cannot be simply an sich [in itself], as it is in Life, it must also be fur sich [for itself].” Hegel opined, “The Idea, by virtue of the freedom which the Concept attains in it, has also the most stubborn opposition within itself; its repose consists in the security and certainty with which it eternally creates and eternally overcomes this opposition, and comes together with itself in it [in ihm mit sich selbst zusammengeht].”
Taylor next interrogates Hegel’s conception of freedom. “The freedom of a civilized man is not to be found in defiance of the laws which necessitate his being other than he immediately is, but rather in his finding his own identity in this change, in this transformation of himself. He then understands and lives the rational necessity which corresponds to his own nature, which came first in the guise of external necessity, but which as rational, and his own, is freedom. Freedom is in living in rational, i.e., one’s own, necessity.” Hegel contrasted this with an absolute freedom, “Universal freedom can produce no positive work or deed; only negative action remains to it; it is only the fury of destruction.”
Unlike Kant, Hegel felt that mankind could grasp ontological reality. The real was not destined to be forever masked behind a veil of appearances. Taylor states, “The search for self-subsistent necessity only reaches its end in a vision of reality as a necessary totality…. Reality constituted a totality governed by necessity and which manifested this necessity…. The whole must display contingency on its surface, as it were, since this is inseparable from exteriority…. Reality as absolute or unconditioned necessity is structured by concepts…. Subjective thought reaches the same culmination as reality, that the concept in the mind is fundamentally one with the ontological concept…. The motor of this development is the ‘absolute contradiction’ (EL, 194) which consists in the fact that the real is at once a totality, whose parts are thus inwardly related, and yet also made up of parts which are integral and independent (selbstandig and vollstandig)…. We start off with things purely external and independent. Each thing is external and indifferent to the others. But this means that it is a mere aggregate in itself, for there is no reason to draw boundaries of a thing or object at any given level…. In teleology we have the fullest embodiment of internal necessity…. For this is the notion of a sense or purpose which is inherent in the object itself. The purpose is its essence, its most profound characterization…. Their form is also a necessity…. To conform to it is freedom for them.” Hegel related, “But men have a fate because they act out of their universal nature, and yet inevitably sin against this nature, fate being the retribution of the genus on the particular acting man.”
Taylor returns once again to the dialectic of embodied particulars, living in contingency, against the universal Idea, “We only achieve the return of Being to itself with the Idea, that is, with the understanding that reality is the locus of a double movement, only one of which starts from Being. The other, which is the more fundamental one, starts from the inner necessity, from the Idea, itself…. The multiplicity of determinate beings is bound together by necessity. The real return to unity comes when we see this necessity as absolute. But if necessity is absolute, then everything that exists, all being, exists for a purpose. So that the starting point is really this purpose itself, the inner formula of necessity, or the Idea…. So Hegel establishes his ontology. What is primary is subject or reason or conceptual necessity…. Hence both that the world exists and what it is like are necessary, given that reason, subject, necessity must be…. For in starting with Being, the simplest, emptiest, most inescapable postulate, that there is (some kind or other) of reality, he claims to have shown that the dependence of everything on reason or the Idea follows inescapably. Hence the circle is closed…. The teleology is internal.”
Taylor finishes by delving into Hegel’s views on history, politics, culture, art, religion, and philosophy. It is in the nature of man to relate to other men through the external world. Man is, by necessity, embodied, finite, and particular. Taylor begins by relating Hegel to Herder’s theory of language, “When we think of a human being, we do not simply mean a living organism, but a being who can think, feel, decide, be moved, respond, enter into relations with others; and all this implies a language, a related set of ways of experiencing the world, of interpreting his feelings, understanding his relation to others, to the past, the future, the absolute, and so on. It is the particular way he situates himself within this cultural world that we call his identity…. What we are as human beings, we are only in a cultural community…. The life of a language and culture is one whose locus is larger than that of the individual.” This culture has its unity in the State. Hegel claimed, “The state is not there for the sake of the citizens; one could say, it is the goal and they are its instruments. But this relation of ends and means is quite inappropriate here. For the state is not something abstract, standing over against the citizens; but rather they are moments as in organic life, where no member is end and none means…. The essence of the state is ethical life [die sittliche Lebendigkeit].” Hegel further explained how the individual and the State related to each other, “The principle of modern states has prodigious strength and depth because it allows the principle of subjectivity to progress to its culmination in the extreme of self-subsistent personal particularity, and yet at the same time brings it back to the substantive unity and so maintains this unity in the principle of subjectivity itself.” Taylor claims, “Thus what is strange and contestable in Hegel’s theory of the state is not the idea of a larger life in which men are immersed, or the notion that the public life of a society expresses certain ideas, which are thus in a sense the ideas of the society as a whole and not just of the individuals, so that we can speak of a people as having a certain ‘spirit’. For throughout most of human history men have lived most intensely in relation to the meanings expressed in the public life of their societies…. But where Hegel does make a substantial claim which is not easy to grant is in his basic ontological view, that man is the vehicle of cosmic spirit, and the corollary, that the state expresses the underlying formula of necessity by which this spirit posits the world… the thesis that men—and hence in their own way these Volkgeister [spirits of the peoples]—are vehicles of a cosmic spirit which is returning to self-consciousness through man…. Thus his ideal is not a condition in which individuals are means to an end, but rather a community in which like a living organism, the distinction between means and ends is overcome, everything is both means and ends…. The rational state will restore Sittlichkeit [ethics], the embodiment of the highest norms in an ongoing public life.”
Taylor expands on Hegel’s conception of morality. In this, Hegel somewhat follows Kant’s deontological reasoning. Taylor states of Hegel, “Man is a moral agent because as a bearer of will he ought to conform his will to universal reason…. But as the subject of morality man still figures as an individual. The demand of morality is that I come to recognize that I am under the obligation of willing universal reason, simply in virtue of being a man…. The demands of morality in other words are inner as well as outer…. I have to do the right because it is the right; and it follows from this that I have to understand the right myself…. Morality touches our intentions and not just our acts.” As a self-professed Christian, for Hegel, religion comes into ethics. Taylor asks, “How does a Hegelian philosopher pray? Certainly the prayer of petition has no meaning for him. Nor can he really thank God. What he does is to contemplate his identity with cosmic spirit…. Thus the Hegelian ontology itself in which everything can be grasped by reason because everything is founded on rational necessity is ultimately incompatible with Christian faith. Hegel’s philosophy is an extraordinary transposition which ‘saves the phenomena’ (that is, the dogmas) of Christianity, while abandoning its essence.” Taylor concludes, “Hegel himself was the first ‘death of God’ theologian. For we have seen that Christ’s death plays a crucial and necessary role as the indispensable basis for the coming of the Spirit and hence the Spiritualization of God’s presence, which is the same as the building of this presence into the life of the community. Men must first of all see God concentrated in a single man. But this point of concentration has to disappear, if the fuller truth is to emerge that men carry God as a community, that God is in each and beyond each. God is like a flame which passes from mortal candle to mortal candle, each destined to light and go out, but the flame to be eternal.”
No comments:
Post a Comment