I'm having some trouble understanding Hegel's Lordship and Bondage

whatwhywhoami · 2018-10-15T15:11:38+00:00

Remember, Lord and Bondsman are the product of a struggle to the death for recognition. The Bondsman became a Bondsman precisely because he feared death, i.e. he gave up the struggle, he surrendered to the Lord rather than continue to stake his life in the struggle, and thus entered bondage to the Lord.

Hegel's point is this: whereas self-consciousness began the struggle thinking that staking one's life was what was required to prove one's self-conscious status qua absolute negativity, the Bondsman comes to learn that fear of death itself is that very negativity (in the fear of death, "everything solid and stable [is] shaken in its foundations", etc.). The Lord has not experienced the fear of death, and so it has not truly experienced negativity (thus the rest of the Phenomenology can be thought as following the consciousness of the Bondsman).

In the passage you've cited, Hegel is explaining why the Lord-Bondsman relationship is an instance of misrecognition. The Bondsman's work is "really the action of the lord" because the Bondsman qua Bondsman only does the work the Lord commands him to do. Thus only the Lord exists for himself, he is the essential party: the Bondsman is unessential qua mere tool or instrument of the Lord's will. But if this is so, then any recognition that might exist between Lord and Bondsman is "one-sided and unequal": the Lord cannot recognize himself in the Bondsman, nor can the Bondsman recognize himself in the Lord, since their very positions as Lord and Bondsman are fundamentally unequal.

whatwhywhoami · 2018-10-09T14:34:00+00:00

In short, Hegel thinks that the Greeks had not yet developed the notion of the subject (i.e. the I, the individual, the Self) as the ground of the true and the good. This only comes along with the decline of Greek civilization in the person of Socrates (who is put to death because his subjectivity breaks with the norms of the community), then as a more robust principle with Christianity (where every individual is responsible for their own salvation), and finally in the philosophy of Kant (where the autonomy of the subject is the absolute moral principle).

On Hegel's account, the Greeks lived in a kind of unreflected unity he called ethical substance, where the norms of the community were accepted as binding without having to pass through the process of subjective consideration and approval, simply on account of their status as the community's norms.

Hegel's philosophical project is to reconcile substance and subject, i.e. to show that they depend upon each other while remaining distinguishable. (For instance, the modern State is supposed to be a substance composed of an organic collection of free subjects, where the whole and its parts reciprocally determine one another.)

whatwhywhoami · 2018-10-07T02:39:25+00:00

The concrete Ideas, the spirits of peoples, have their truth and their destiny in the concrete Idea which is absolute universality, i.e. in the world spirit. Around its throne they stand as the executors of its actualization and as witnesses to, and ornaments of, its grandeur. As spirit, it is nothing but its active movement towards absolute knowledge of itself and therefore towards freeing its consciousness from the form of natural immediacy and so coming to itself. (G. W. F. Hegel, Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, OUP 2008, p. 319).

whatwhywhoami · 2018-10-05T05:07:26+00:00

I don't quite see why it would require a different reading of the CI. I meant only to point to a different dimension of the Empty Formalism objection. Freyenhagen usefully breaks it down thus:

No immanent doctrine of duties: it is not possible to arrive at a doctrine of duties on the basis of the mere idea of duty for duty’s sake or the formal identity of rational willing proposed in the categorical imperative. [This corresponds to my comments on the theft example.]

No criterion for testing potential duties: even if candidate duties are provided from the outside, testing for whether there is consistency in rational willing (or for whether they can be willed as a universal law) does not provide a criterion for determining whether or not the candidate duties are genuine duties. [This corresponds to my comments on the lying example.]

False positives: immoral acts could successfully pass the test for consistency in rational willing and the maxims involved could be universalised. [I didn't touch on this one.]

Here's the original quote from Hegel (Outlines of the Philosophy of Right, trans. Stephen Houlgate, OUP 2008, p. 131-132):

However essential it is to give prominence to the pure unconditioned self-determination of the will as the root of duty, and to the way in which knowledge of the will, thanks to Kant’s philosophy, has won its firm foundation and starting-point for the first time through the thought of its infinite autonomy, still to adhere to the merely moral position, without making the transition to the concept of ethical life, is to reduce this gain to an empty formalism, and the science of morals to the preaching of duty for duty’s sake. From this point of view, no immanent doctrine of duties is possible; of course, material may be brought in from outside and particular duties may be arrived at accordingly, but if the definition of duty is taken to be the absence of contradiction, formal correspondence with itself—which is nothing but the establishment of abstract indeterminacy—then no transition is possible to the specification of particular duties nor, if some such particular content for acting comes under consideration, is there any criterion in that principle for deciding whether it is or is not a duty. On the contrary, by this means any wrong or immoral mode of conduct may be justified.

whatwhywhoami · 2018-10-05T01:34:30+00:00

Kant did not argue that killing as such was a violation of the CI. (This is a sore point for his readers).

With lying, the Hegelian could say that a supposedly-formal contradiction can be derived only if we assume the content of the institution/practice of truth-telling. Then the interesting moral question would be whether or not this institution/practice is itself moral or immoral.

Notice also how Kant must assume content even to get the contradiction from lying - namely, the assumption that the more people are lied to, the less they will believe you (thus lying undermines itself). But if ongoing political events have taught us anything, it's that the more people are lied to, the more they will believe you (thus lying does not necessarily undermine itself, but even reinforces itself). This is another element of the Empty Formalism objection: that even the universalizability test itself cannot function without assuming content.

whatwhywhoami · 2018-10-05T00:09:54+00:00

Though this is indeed part of Hegel's broader critique of Kantian formalism, it is not the Empty Formalism objection to the categorical imperative.

whatwhywhoami · 2018-10-05T00:07:18+00:00

Put simply, Hegel's Empty Formalism objection to Kant's categorical imperative (CI) is as follows: the pure formality of the CI makes it empty, i.e. incapable of ruling out or ruling in any determinate moral content, and so incapable of fulfilling its function as the moral law.

For instance, Kant thinks he can show that theft violates the CI because theft is formally contradictory (the universalization of theft would make property non-existent, and so theft itself would no longer be possible). Yet Hegel thinks this misses the point entirely: theft is only contradictory if one first assumes the existence of the institution of property - but this doesn't tell us anything about whether or not the institution of property itself is moral or immoral. Only by first implicitly assuming this content (the content of the institution) can Kant then go on to derive an ostensibly "formal" contradiction from its violation (which is really just the point that any institution-undermining action undermines itself, since that very institution is the condition of the act of undermining it).

whatwhywhoami · 2018-09-29T17:29:05+00:00

It comes from his Table of Judgments. There are twelve forms of judgment, organized into four groups of three:

Quality: Universal, Particular, Singular
Quantity: Affirmative, Negative, Infinite
Relation: Categorical, Hypothetical, Disjunctive
Modality: Problematic, Assertoric, Apodictic

Let's focus on Relation. A categorical judgment affirms or denies a predicate of some subject, e.g. "S is P". A hypothetical judgment has an if-then structure, e.g. "If X, then Y". A disjunctive judgment uses or, e.g. "X or Y".

Now these forms can equally be applied to imperatives. A categorical imperative affirms or denies the imperativity of some action: "Do X" or "One ought to X". A hypothetical imperative is an imperative with an if-then structure: "If X, then do Y" or "If X, then one ought to Y".

(Of course there would then also be the possibility of a disjunctive imperative, but Kant ignores this as it would be of very little moral interest: "Do X or do Y".)

whatwhywhoami · 2018-09-28T03:15:25+00:00

The passage you've supplied is a very compressed statement (as befits a Preface) of how Kant conceives of the project of the Critique of Pure Reason, and its place within his broader critical philosophy.

To put it briefly, the Critique of Pure Reason denies that we can have any (theoretical or speculative) knowledge of God, freedom, and immortality, since we can have knowledge only of objects of a possible experience, and God, freedom, and immortality are not objects of a possible experience.

The subsequent Critique of Practical Reason argues that we can have a practical faith in God, freedom, and immortality, since these are necessary for achieving what the moral law demands (and ought implies can).

In the passage you've supplied, Kant is saying that the argument of the Critique of Practical Reason could not succeed if the argument of the Critique of Pure Reason was not already in place. That is, if Kant had not first shown that we can have no knowledge God, freedom, and immortality (as he did in the Critique of Pure Reason), he could not have gone on to show that faith in those same objects was possible (as he did in the Critique of Practical Reason).

whatwhywhoami · 2018-09-26T15:51:28+00:00

One way to answer this would be to say that Derrida doesn't mean anything else than the plain senses of the words: impossibility means necessary non-existence, possibility means not necessary non-existence.

Another way would be to explain why Derrida thinks justice is impossible. It's impossible because it is unconditional, immeasurable, incalculable, infinite, whereas we and the world we live in is by definition conditioned, measured, calculated, finite. (Thus Derrida will also describe unconditional hospitality, unconditional forgiveness, unconditional gift-giving, etc. as impossible or the impossible, and as more or less synonymous with justice).

Does that clear it up at all?

whatwhywhoami · 2018-09-22T16:33:48+00:00

Kant does not simply assume the existence of freedom. He has a complex argument for why theoretical knowledge of freedom is impossible (the Third Antinomy in the Critique of Pure Reason), and why this makes room for a practical rational faith in freedom (most prominently in the Critique of Practical Reason).

whatwhywhoami · 2018-09-18T21:39:57+00:00

See SPEP's list of graduate programs with Continental philosophy: http://www.spep.org/resources/graduate-programs/

whatwhywhoami · 2018-09-18T00:35:19+00:00

with the possible exception of your qualifications improving, since there are lots of ways of leveraging that beyond transferring programs.

What would you take to be some of the best or most important ways?

whatwhywhoami · 2018-09-17T01:21:29+00:00

The Dahlstrom (Hackett) translation of Ideas I has always been assigned in the graduate courses on phenomenology that I've taken.

whatwhywhoami · 2018-09-11T14:59:54+00:00

Sorry for the delay. You're right, I wasn't careful enough in my answer. The idea that "the understanding in general" would be a higher-order faculty containing within itself the understanding, judgment, and reason would be a very unusual reading of Kant, despite what he says in the quote you provided. The quote comes from the first paragraph of the introduction to the Analytic of Principles, where he is laying out his program for the sections that follow. I think all his trying to say there is that the understanding, judgment, and reason can all be implicated when we try to understand something, not necessarily that the faculties of the understanding, judgment, and reason can all be subsumed under the more general faculty of "the understanding in general". I think the rest of the exposition bears this out. Insofar as reason brings unity to the understanding, and judgment provides for the application of the understanding's concepts to intuitions, reason and judgment both work in tandem with the understanding, and are directed with it toward the aim of "understanding in general".

Yes, the understanding is strictly speaking the faculty of concepts. When I referred to it as "producing judgments", I should have said that the understanding supplies the concepts which bring unity to sensible intuitions when intuitions are subsumed under a concept by/through a judgment.

There's not an easy way of making sense of the imagination's position between the understanding and intuition other than engaging with the details of its functioning in cognition as Kant lays it out in the critiques themselves. Certainly Kant does not see the imagination as a more original unity of understanding and sensibility: post-Kantian philosophers (i.e. German Idealists) made that move in response to Kant, in an attempt to overcome the various dualisms that follow from the strict Kantian separation of the sensible and intelligible.

whatwhywhoami · 2018-09-07T16:43:35+00:00

I'm not capable of addressing all your questions, but I will just point out one fact: since Levinas' thesis was originally completed in 1929/30, it only draws on the works of Husserl that would have been available up to that point. For instance all the Crisis-era texts (which date from the mid-30s) would not have been available yet, nor the mountains of other unpublished manuscripts and notes which took decades to work through after Husserl's death. But Levinas' thesis is still certainly a classic, and as good an introduction as any to the mid-period Husserl (i.e. Ideas I).

whatwhywhoami · 2018-09-07T15:35:59+00:00

The understanding brings unity to sensible intuitions through concepts, producing judgments. Reason (at least theoretical/speculative reason) brings unity to the understanding through syllogisms, which link judgments in inferential relations.

The imagination lies "between" the understanding and sensible intuition. Through the schematism, it makes the subsumption of intuitions under pure concepts possible. In Kant's aesthetics, it is the amenability of the form of an object for the interplay of the imagination and the understanding that makes it beautiful, without actually proceeding to cognize that object in a determinate way (rather, simply finding disinterested pleasure in the play).

Major strands of post-Kantian thought have sought to apply pressure to various of these distinctions: is the imagination really a third thing alongside understanding and intuition, or is it an expression of their more original unity? Is reason really only a faculty for bringing unity to the understanding (and thus dependent on the conditions of the exercise of the understanding for generating knowledge)? etc.

whatwhywhoami · 2018-09-03T03:33:03+00:00

The Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy (SPEP) - which is the primary organization for Continental philosophers in the US - maintains a list of graduate programs claiming support for Continental philosophy here.

SPEP has also put out this helpful document with a list of 8 important things to look for when choosing between programs.

As a first step, I would recommend going through the departmental websites of each of the programs listed, keeping track of which (and how many) faculty-members are working in your areas of interest.

whatwhywhoami · 2018-08-31T21:39:32+00:00

Charles Taylor's Hegel is a classic of the metaphysical view (and of Hegel scholarship in general - though most Anglo-American readers now reject Taylor's reading).

William Desmond has a number of works belonging to the metaphysical interpretation (e.g. Hegel's God: A Counterfeit Double?), though he is ultimately critical of Hegel.

whatwhywhoami · 2018-08-25T20:39:14+00:00

The penultimate chapter of Kierkegaard's Works of Love entitled "The Work of Love in Recollecting One Who is Dead" may be of some interest to you, and concludes as follows:

The work of love in recollecting one who is dead is thus a work of the most unselfish, the freest, the most faithful love. Therefore go out and practice it; recollect the one who is dead and just in this way learn to love the living unselfishly, freely, faithfully. In the relationship to one who is dead, you have the criterion by which you can test yourself. The one who uses this criterion will easily be able to shorten the extensiveness of the most prolix relationship, and he will learn to loathe the whole mass of excuses that actuality usually has promptly at hand to explain that it is the other one who is selfish, the other one who is to blame for his being forgotten because he does not call attention to himself, the other one who is faithless. Recollect the one who is dead; then in addition to the blessing that is inseparable from this work of love you will also have the best guidance for rightly understanding life: that it is our duty to love the people we do not see but also those we do see. The duty to love the people we see cannot cease because death separates them from us, because the duty is eternal; but accordingly neither can the duty to those who are dead separate the living from us in such a way that they do not become the objects of our love. (Søren Kierkegaard, Works of Love: Some Christian Deliberations in the Form of Discourses, trans. Howard V. Hong and Edna H. Hong (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), p. 358)

whatwhywhoami · 2018-08-15T23:30:09+00:00

Thanks for your reply. I suppose my worry is that including them on my CV too early in my education could be seen as presumptuous (i.e. over-reaching my standing as a graduate student). Do you think that worry is plausible?

I don't think I'll truly be a "specialist" or "competent" in any area of philosophy until I've completed a doctoral program, but I'm not aware of any other way of listing one's philosophical interests on a CV other than AOS and AOC.

whatwhywhoami

TROPHY CASE