Conjoining Hegel and Nietzsche comprehends German idealism’s view of freedom as established by philosophy. Hegel sees philosophy as articulating self-determining, rational categories that complete themselves and structure ordered liberty. Nietzsche sees philosophy – especially genealogy – as disrupting and overcoming convention, as compelling the subject to live in a perpetually unfinished state.
Anglo-American liberalism – Berlin’s negative liberty – is necessary but deficient in lacking a force of moral self-determination or personal responsibility. Moreover, Hegel and Nietzsche go beyond Kant in requiring philosophical practice to create understanding of what it is to be free.
Hegel: freedom results from transfiguring the subject’s finitude into the infinite, which occurs as the external is internalized. Humans are liberated through reconciliation, renouncing abstract independence. Socially this means recognizing Geist (Spirit), the current phase of the philosophy of history. In the slang, objective Geist considers spiritual beings to be willing beings: its components are abstract right, morality, and ethical life (which are external). Judgment is the act of dividing a concept between subject and predicate. It is both logical and ontological, reflecting how the word passes reality and how self-consciousness understands itself and the world.
In abstract right, the individual will identifies its freedom as something external. Its development toward freedom amounts to a progression of relationships among universal, particular, individual. The relation of will to will is the highest progression – true freedom. Should one commit a crime, punishment is for the sake of justice and freedom. The moral will thus divides itself as to individual and universal interests. Choosing may occur on the basis of the subjective (for its own will) or the objective (existing in the world, in accordance with freedom, in accordance with universal subjectivity): choosing universal interests of one’s own volition is the triumph of the moral over the abstract.
All that the moral will has is conscience. It depends on something else for judgment, for rationality. It is also capable of evil: both stem from self-certainty, since will cannot objectively know good. But the voluntarist corporation transforms the individual such that he has honor in the estate, provided the corporation seeks freedom and protects individuals from themselves; more formally, the corporate objectives embody freedom through documents, laws, etc.). The less self- control, the more external control is needed: the ethical subject knows itself as an objectification of will. This resonates of Rousseau’s general will? But where is the defense against tyranny of the majority or thumos? Can Spirit effectively say who should run the corporations, who should rule?
Purposive relations may be reconceived as a syllogism where subject equals major premise and object the minor, as a teleological outcome, a reuniting that overcomes finitude. This is the cunning of reason, its example par excellence is God’s will (i.e., the subject) acting via humans (the object). Dudley makes an analogy of swimming-pool chlorine (p.78). It is a finite structure, depending on logic of object, because genuine realization of subjective purpose is dependent on the objective. The natural world does not have as its purpose a rational state, but the subject may so impose. Hence the animating spirit remains subjective: willing good is subjective and so ‘in need of reconceptualization in the absolute idea’. For the willing subject does not comprehend ethical life required by freedom (lack of finitude). In ethical life, the willing subject experiences the community’s customs – the content of the universal will – as necessary and so free but cannot know if these customs are required by freedom. It lacks adequate understanding.
The solution to finitude borne of the subject – externality amounts to a syllogism of necessity (not formality), requiring integration of thought and being. Knowing that the objective world of nature is not forever external to the spiritual subject does not lessen the subject’s dependency but does show it’s bound to the self (via willing integration) and so is free. ‘To know one’s limitation means to know of one’s unlimitedness’. The externality is eliminated.
Hegel identified three activities of the absolute spirit (art, religion, and philosophy), all of them surmounting the subjectivity of the willing, of which finitude is the primary hurdle, that is, the presupposition that spirit and nature, subject and object are fundamentally alien. (Such a construction does not appear to encompass personal responsibility – how are we to distinguish between license and overcoming? And since change in immanent, how are we to separate progress from error? Hegel himself says progress is intelligible only retrospectively – the owl of Minerva.)
At any rate, the three activities cannot be the replacements for sociopolitical struggle to be free but only the guides to freedom. In order to be free, man must know he is free, to recognize the absolute spirit; no one is free unless all are free. Hegel does not believe political freedom requires philosophic justification: Dudley analogizes of a doctor who commands ‘don’t smoke’ but cannot not smoke for the patient. Yet it’s necessary interdependent categories of understanding conditions of freedom as well as actually existing socioeconomics.
Nietzsche, as unsystematic as Hegel is structured, presented the stages of freedom as decadent, noble, and tragic. Like Hegel, the subject’s ability to choose (the liberal definition of freedom) does not guarantee willing is autonomous: forces external may remain determinative.
‘Revenge and hatred as metaphysical concepts insist the strong are free to be weak, thus dragging themselves down, thereby suggesting the essence of weakness is a voluntary choice’. Subjection of will to reason is seen by decadents as self-denial of evil instincts and therefore virtue. Then morality justifies caring for others more than oneself. The highest value of the decadent reality is lack of suffering. Faith in the metaphysics of weakness is guaranteed by prohibiting thinking – but what happens to excoriating rationalism? Nonetheless it allows the weak to will. Morality is a symptom of weakness because one cannot organize one’s thoughts and instincts for achievement. The ‘ban’ on knowledge and doubt makes faith the only ground for purposeful action. Submitting to faith is equivalent to submitting to a common law – which is herd morality because there is no evidence of individual will. The weak can will but it’s not their own choice. Herd morality uses all the experience of some established categories, and gets the same outcomes – too quickly. Hence to be educated is to learn to defer judgment. Knowledge and thus freedom require losing oneself, one’s conventional will, one’s perspective. He echoes Rousseau in seeing social convention, institutions are inherently corrupting of will to be free, are for the week.
Reason and language shore up metaphysical belief: ‘philosophical mythology lies concealed in language’. For humans to become free they must will the ascension of the will. Science also rests of belief, in rationalism. Wagner evidenced simplification of one’s drives. Genius improves humanity for the future. (But what if it’s a false path?) A genius can strike the balance between memory and forgetting; the weaker have the greater need to forget external stimuli. Will should vary by person (which is disastrous as a policy prescription). The noble will remains unfree because it’s still subject to external compulsion: indeed it requires a tyranny to organize disintegrated instructions into a unified will. They are invented from personal needs: one must be selfish but constituted by fixed categories, which is limited by the very success of escaping the herd. Independence cannot be outside of the other bust must be enmeshed in it. Hence ‘sickness’ is necessary to become healthy. The free spirits must cycle through the range of possibilities, no sacrifice being too great.
The coming century (i.e., the 20th) could be dangerous: there is no morality with an exclusive monopoly on the moral (p. 187). As an individual prescription, many will not return from license; as communities, the tyrant or social engineer will force us to be free. (So close to Rousseau, so far from Burke.)
Freedom’s requirements establish distinction between scientists and scholars, who are merely skeptics, and philosophers, whose skepticism is in service of constructing the larger whole with new values – true creators. The will to power wills overcoming the other, willing its incorporation, and refuses to engage with what it cannot so incorporate. This is ‘great health’.
The eternal return is both metaphysical and psychological. The tragic journey creates nothing unless something is destroyed, and the creation too must pass. But re-creation doesn’t have to repeat itself precisely in sequence, though it could be over and again. This is a test of affirmation. Only great health of the tragic will love sickness-and-restoration. Is this a kind of Stoicism? – no says Nietzsche. Nihilist ennui is the fate of those who think the permanent is valuable (i.e.. natural law); these do not have a free future. The tragic sees impermanence as virtuous. (Nietzsche’s becoming seems to preclude recourse to what has happened.)
There are three challenges for the tragic: determining the extent of the unalterable, improving the alterable, and not acting in ways that make the present worse. (At last, responsibility!) To see the abyss is to know there’s no firm ground for taking one’s bearings: the past must always be justified by the present, and every such justification is impermanent.
The death of God celebrates the shedding of herd morality, of permanence. It is man’s responsibility to redeem himself. To be original is to be misunderstood; for the paradox of avoiding convention must mean not wanting to be comprehended.
But Nietzsche cannot tell us of conditions hostile to freedom because of his hostility to particularity. He cannot ground norms, Dudley says.
Every word contains prejudice toward that which is to be surmounted by the tragic will. Freedom requires understanding the current hegemony is supported by words, is unfree. Philosophy is a primary source of linguistic exposition and transformation, and so a primary source of freedom. Discovering these prejudices is genealogy. Transforming one’s will and one’s language are two side of the same coin. Freedom depends on successfully a) disrupting conceptual structures through genealogical research and b) transforming those structures through linguistic experimentation, the two intertwined.
For both Hegel and Nietzsche, liberalism fails to require freedom that entails individual willing to produce the world’s content. For Hegel, formal freedom is the freedom to choose and act without rational guidance. Absolute knowing is reason determining (revealing) itself, generating and justifying its own categories. We must know what we ought to will, and then we ought to act on it because it is right not because we are compelled. (External categories are revelation, empirical science, social convention, given consciousness, even nature). Reconciliation with nature (i.e., the other) is superior because it’s not one-sided. Alienation between subject-object is overcome. Philosophy is the rational bond (as well as art, religion, the other activities of the absolute spirit).
For Nietzsche, rationality is no guide to an impermanent world. Where Hegel sets the course of Spirit, Nietzsche says there is no course but only eternal return. Where Hegel, sees philosophy as self-deterministic of thought, the subject becoming free by following the laws and mores reason has produced, Nietzsche understands philosophy as disruption of received thought (convention), pursued by genealogy. Freedom is perpetually incomplete.
Yet they are complementary is the sense that one sets the bounds of order, and the other calls for constant challenge of the bounds. Both ask how thought can be free, avoiding dependency or convention. What is the relationship of thought and the world? Hegel says rational completion, Nietzsche says perpetual becoming. What for Hegel is attractive about systemic autonomy is for Nietzsche the danger of ossification. The two schools should take each other’s warnings more seriously, Dudley says.
In Hegel, metaphysical progress leads to the individual’s ethical reconciliation with nature. In Nietzsche, metaphysical recurrence creates the need for psychological affirmation; otherwise ones falls into nihilism (!) and ressentiment (i.e., envy and hatred which cannot be acted on). The free subject is reconciled with the world in that free subjects and communities must develop symbiotically because they share language. Hence they ought to be ‘open to transgression and reorganization’ (p242), within the general limits of freedom. Eternal return is metaphysical, a cosmological hypothesis, in that the Nietzsche suggests the universe is finite but time infinite, therefore all configurations recur infinitely. This is to reject Hegelian teleology. Dudley therefore argues against French interpretations which endow the doctrine with psychological flavor, of willingness to be comfortable being uncomfortable. Though a psychological element is present, it’s inferior to cosmology.
German idealism’s view of freedom is overly rational, underestimating what Burke or Berlin would see as necessary or immanent tension. The idealists, replacing moral limits with reason, required an objective reconciliation that Nietzsche himself showed was never compete and final. Freedom lost its character of principled refusal or resistance: at the intersection of freedom and thumos, the power of the institution grew. Necessitating a philosophic understanding privileged an elite, downgrading ordinary agency and leaving the people to Rousseau’s coercion.
Georg Hegel
7. Dudley, Understanding Germany Idealism (25 Mar 2021)
German idealism, commencing with Kant’s initiative to defeat Humean skepticism and determinism and culminating in Hegel’s efforts to ground philosophy in an unassailable base, simultaneously pursued rationality and freedom in ways overlooked by European Enlightenment and English empiricism.
Hume asserted metaphysics must be grounded in scientific demonstration (i.e., fact) not Spinozan geometry (relationship). Induction is circular and so lacks rational justification; causal inference must rest on custom (past experience). Empiricism shows the individual incapable of rational self-determination and also epistemological, moral, and political autonomy – freedom.
For Kant, matters of fact can be known by reason alone. His response to Hume is tantamount to Copernicus’ astronomical revolution: instead of knowledge conforming to the world as it is (noumena), the world conforms to the structure of the mind. Metaphysics is saved by reexamining the subject’s capacity for representation and experience, provided we are agnostic about that which transcends our experience. Such agnosticism is justifiable only in respect of free will: we cannot know, which creates license to act as if we are free. Hence freedom is the keystone to pure reason. Pure concepts of understanding do not derive from impressions, but their application in experience is legitimated (the transcendental argument), leading to synthetic a priori knowledge. A central claim of critical philosophy is arguments about the soul, freedom, and God cannot yield knowledge because they transcend experience and play no role in making it possible. Further, ideas of reason (‘pure’ ideas) which derive from the mind’s operation do not lead to knowledge but transcend illusion. Because we can’t know if there is immortality, freedom, or God, Kant considers the possibility that remains defeats skepticism. Rational willing for Kant is borne of the nature of reason, it cannot be contingent. Morality depends exclusively on what we do in full knowledge and motive. Doing one’s moral duty for its own sake establishes dignity and rationality of man, and therefore establishes freedom. The use of practical reason, especially in moral resolutions, both demands and generates ‘rational faith’, belief in God and a human soul, to which theoretical reason must agnostic. To appreciate aesthetics, we must abstract from cognition and sensory satisfaction. Only through disinterested appreciation of the object and its appeal to desires can we appreciate the form of qualities for their own sake. Nature is purposive only if we regard it as intelligently designed: God has arrayed matters seen of science is such a way that they orient toward the emergence of rational creatures. Seeing the world as governed by providence bridges the gap between nature and freedom: nature’s purpose is to create conditions for humanity exercising freedom for moral ends.
Transcendentalism distinguishes between the possibility of experience and of being (subjective idealism), seeking to define conditions of the former, the conditions of synthetic a priori. Transcendental idealism presumes experience can be explained only by supposing the external world. This was disputed: Jacobi asserted Kant’s philosophy is an idealism that makes all knowledge dependent on faith in the senses and is thus dependent on finitude of humanity. Reinhold, the bridge to Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, each of whom argues over unconditional, self-determining starting points, sought to defend transcendental idealism; but concluded Kant’s foundation lacked an explanation of how cognition works (i.e., understanding the senses). He recognized Kant’s cognitive capacities – sensibility, understanding, reason – as well being modes of receiving or processing mental representations; but concludes Kant has not established a ‘science of representation’. Whereas rationalism commences from defined terms and axiomatic principles, but a lacks defensible starting point.
Fichte: the core problem is the basis of synthetic a priori, not explaining things-in-themselves, which we can’t know. Philosophy cannot take Reinhold’s representation as a foundation, but must deduce the necessity of representation from more basic self-consciousness. The former is contingent, the latter necessary. Philosophy is concerned solely with necessary operations of mind, making it a closed system, unlike all other senses: constitutive elements of consciousness are generated by the mind itself. This has the effect of rejecting transcendental deduction of categories, since the world of objects is constituted by the conditions which make experience possible. Fichte’s influence foundered on the difficulty of his argument. NB: it was Fichte, not Hegel, who invented the thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectic, not Hegel.
The primary appeal of practical (political) philosophy is concern with freedom of the individual in a sociopolitical setting, as determined by individual use of reason. But Fichte substitutes Kant’s individual (uncaused cause) with a communitarian ideal: if rational agents are well-ordered among one another, then they are free. For Kant, by contrast, freedom is a metaphysical postulate which underpins moral obligations: politics serves morality, as does education and religion. For Fichte, freedom is not given but an end in itself, available only to certain communities (i.e., with certain characteristics): thus, economic resources and opportunities become involved in what we now call social justice. Fichte’s revision of the categorical imperative means there can be no truly human persons without just communities fostering the individual’s capacity for rationality. Sociopolitical relations are a prior condition to moral agency, a view embraced by Hegal and Marx.
Schelling changed his mind thrice, albeit honestly. Hegelians often him a waystation, while critics take his final rejection of metaphysics as a precursor to Kirkegaard, Marx, Heidegger, and postmodernism. He first sought epistemological grounds, then abandoned the search in favor of the ontological – from Kant to the Spinozan tradition. Kant has insisted we could not treat ideas of reason as if they can inform us of the world, asking the epistemological question ‘How is it possible to know anything to be true that is not an analytic, conceptual relation?’ Schelling replied asking an ontological question ‘How is it possible for there to be differentiated subjects and objects, without which there would be no need for a cognitive synthesis?’ Philosophy is to explain how anything emerges from an undifferentiated subject, and to reconcile this all-encompassing subject with the freedom of individual subjects, he thought, breaking with Kant and Fichte and anticipating Heidegger. That is, the objective is not understanding cognition but essence / being. Kant would have replied the ontological question is outside the scope of transcendental idealism, because it is beyond rational inquiry. In his middle period Schelling contrasted idealism which commences with the subject and ‘philosophy of nature’ which starts with objective or natural world to determine why self-conscious subjects should emerge. His paradigm of the object is math, such as the concept of triangles: science determines not merely how we think but how they must be. He tried to reconcile a philosophy of identity, but could not and so abandoned the a priori system. It was a pursuit akin to speculative physics, in which the first problem is to explain the absolute cause of motion.
More Schelling: latterly, he asserted the product (content) of true art is the absolute identity. It is the pinnacle of human activity, the unconscious element of acting and producing, generating identity via consciousness. His idea of freedom comes from Spinoza: that which is free acts according to laws of inner being, unimpeded by anything else. He tries to reconcile this freedom with the emergence of everything from the absolute being. (Whereas (to repeat) Kant’s assertion that the cognizing subject cannot conform to the object of cognition, if there is to be metaphysical knowledge, was transcendental idealism’s Copernican revolution, its point of departure. The object must be understandable by the subject.) The French Revolution theorists argued freedom is impossible if the populist must conform to ruling authorities, and so sought to establish an entirely rational polity with no such authorities.
Hegel, following Schelling, denies that Kant (and Fichte) established an identity of subject-and-object; Hegel calls true identity ‘reason’ – actuality must be rational. The Phenomenology claims rational cognition is possible only if the determinations of thinking and being can be established; this is to reject Kant’s view that philosophy is incapable of rational cognition; he joins Schelling in restoring metaphysics as queen of the discipline, rejecting Kant’s view that thinking cannot determine the truth of being. Therefore his project is ontological, an account of what it is to be.
For Hegel, ‘consciousness’ means self-understanding: knowledge requires the thinking subject to truly appreciate the realm of objectivity it confronts and distinguish itself from it. Dualism is suspended, one achieves knowing by result of the subject undermining one’s assumptions via synthesis achieving reason (‘science’). While Fichte and Schelling accepted selfhood (consciousness) as a fact, Hegel in Phenomenology describes how consciousness seems; how it can only be determined by dialectical reason.
To appreciate ancient skepticism is to suspend the Cartesian subject-object dualism. Presuppositionless knowledge (i.e., phenomenology), or presuppositionless philosophy is a systematic philosophy beginning with indeterminate being of thought and unfolding as logic, or what must be thought of being, and ontology, what must be of being. Thought can only be self-determining if it allows immanent dialectic to emerge; otherwise it is beholden to the subject. However, the natural world exists independent of thought and also thinking subjects; but Hegel is an idealist in that nature has a structure which thinking can comprehend. The rational is actual and vice versa, but all is implicit, not empirical.
There is a limit to systematic philosophy’s explanation of the natural world – we know there are contingencies, such as the form matter will take. Thus Hegel is not totalizing. The systematic philosophy provides an account of being and comprehends rational aspects of empirical phenomena but stops at contingency and chance. Hegel rejects Kant’s view that freedom transcends nature; freedom depends on thinking being the achievement of reconciliation with the natural world from which it differs. Hegel sees, as does Fichte, the moral will is self-certain and hence capable of evil by mistaken conclusion – there is no objective standard. It is not objective freedom. The will cannot reconcile with the natural world: ethics and purpose (of the subject) do not guarantee freedom. Only spirit (geist), art, religion, and philosophy can reconcile. Peoples with different understandings of freedom develop different sociopolitical arrangements and customs. Philosophy is first of equals because of spirit, the interpretation of which is philosophy’s job.
For Kant, freedom is transcending natural causes and acting purely from rationality and moral law it imposes. Since all of his conclusions depend on an account of cognition, his successors pursued refinement of criticality – unassailable foundations. Fichte pursued self-consciousness and relations to the object. Schelling replaced dualism with a single indeterminacy. Hegel thought the defeat of skepticism turned on systematic examination of necessary structure of thought, the dialectic. He was the last idealist to attempt Kant’s project based on a priori grounds. The Romantics succeeded this idealism, asserting philosophy’s limitations were fulfilled by art. Romantics deemed such rationality could justify moral and ethical commitments, prompting Hegel’s violently disagreement.