Hegel's Social Ethics: Religion, Conflict, and Rituals of Reconciliation - Hardcover

Farneth, Molly

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0691171904 ISBN 13: 9780691171906

Publisher: Princeton University Press, 2017

Synopsis

Hegel’s Social Ethics offers a fresh and accessible interpretation of G. W. F. Hegel’s most famous book, the Phenomenology of Spirit. Drawing on important recent work on the social dimensions of Hegel’s theory of knowledge, Molly Farneth shows how his account of how we know rests on his account of how we ought to live.

Farneth argues that Hegel views conflict as an unavoidable part of living together, and that his social ethics involves relationships and social practices that allow people to cope with conflict and sustain hope for reconciliation. Communities create, contest, and transform their norms through these relationships and practices, and Hegel’s model for them are often the interactions and rituals of the members of religious communities.

The book’s close readings reveal the ethical implications of Hegel’s discussions of slavery, Greek tragedy, early modern culture wars, and confession and forgiveness. The book also illuminates how contemporary democratic thought and practice can benefit from Hegelian insights.

Through its sustained engagement with Hegel’s ideas about conflict and reconciliation, Hegel’s Social Ethics makes an important contribution to debates about how to live well with religious and ethical disagreement.

About this title

About the Author

Molly Farneth is assistant professor of religion at Haverford College.

From the Back Cover

"In this elegant meditation on the ethics of reciprocal recognition, Molly Farneth journeys with Hegel into the enduring heart of democracy in the making. While respecting Hegel's distinction between representational thinking and fully liberated dialectic, which is roughly the distinction between religion and philosophy, she finds matter there, not for yet another domineering form of pseudorationality, but a self-emptying reason, where we have room to enter into one another's keeping and become reconciled. In these precarious times for democracy, Farneth's generously reasoned grassroots religiosity is especially welcome."--James Wetzel, Villanova University

"Molly Farneth has brought Hegel to the people. Her excellent book presents a fresh interpretation of one of the most important works in the history of philosophy, overcomes impasses in political theory and religious studies, makes a major contribution to the study of democracy, and initiates readers into the dialogic relationship that is the key to Hegel's social ethics. This book will command wide audiences in the humanities and social sciences for a long time."--Ian Ward, McMaster University

"This impressive book makes a timely contribution to the debate about Hegel's view of religion. It promises to broaden his readership by freeing his philosophy from misconceptions and giving it a contemporary relevance."--Paul Redding, University of Sydney

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Hegel's Social Ethics

Religion, Conflict, and Rituals of Reconciliation

By Molly Farneth

PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2017 Princeton University Press
All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-691-17190-6

Contents

Preface, ix, 
A Note on Primary Texts, xiii, 
CHAPTER 1 Social Ethics in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, 1, 
CHAPTER 2 Tragedy and the Social Construction of Norms, 13, 
CHAPTER 3 Culture War and the Appeal to Authority, 35, 
CHAPTER 4 Rituals of Reconciliation, 54, 
CHAPTER 5 Religion, Philosophy, and the Absolute, 81, 
CHAPTER 6 Commitment, Conversation, and Contestation, 101, 
CHAPTER 7 Democratic Authority through Conflict and Reconciliation, 115, 
Notes, 133, 
Bibliography, 151, 
Index, 159, 

CHAPTER 1

Social Ethics in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit

ON OCTOBER 14, 1806, Napoleon faced off with Prussian troops outside the city of Jena. It was the middle of the Napoleonic Wars, and this battle was the latest in a series of confrontations between the French and the Prussians. The Holy Roman Empire was collapsing. The Battle of Jena only lasted one afternoon, but the Prussians suffered a devastating defeat.

At the time, G. W. F. Hegel was struggling to make ends meet as an unsalaried lecturer at the University of Jena. He was also working on a long-promised, book-length exposition of his philosophical system. That autumn, he had almost completed it. That book would be the Phenomenology of Spirit. In a letter to Friedrich Schelling, Hegel claimed to have finished the book in the middle of the night before the Battle of Jena. He entrusted the final pages of the book to a courier who traveled through French lines to deliver them to Hegel's publisher in Bamburg. Hegel's student Eduard Gans would later write that "under the thunder of the battle of Jena [Hegel] completed the Phenomenology of Spirit."

Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit was conceived and written amid great political and social upheaval. Hegel was hopeful about the latent possibilities of his changing society but concerned about the collapse of old communities and ways of life. He watched as political and military alliances shifted, and he wondered what would hold the emerging society together. He anticipated the tensions between individuals and the political entities that would demand their allegiance and sacrifice. At the same time, Hegel noticed and began to theorize the way that traditional roles and duties, including gender roles, were constructed and performed within these local and national communities. He tried to make sense of the apparent authority of these socially constructed norms as well as their capacity to change. What emerged from Hegel's efforts to grapple with these issues was the brilliant and often maddening Phenomenology of Spirit — at once a highly abstract treatise on epistemology and an account of ethics rooted in communities.

This book holds these two aspects of Hegel's project together — epistemology and ethics, knowing and living well. In doing so, it gives an account of the relationships and practices that a community ought to cultivate, and of what happens when those relationships and practices are absent or deformed. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel shows what domination looks like and suggests that there is an alternative to it, a way of coping with conflict and forging solidarity. And, while Hegel was no democrat, he describes how conflicts can be confronted and hope for reconciliation sustained through just means in diverse communities. Read in this way, the Phenomenology of Spirit has much to teach the denizens of contemporary societies about what democracy ought to be.

The Structure and Movement of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit

The abstraction of the Phenomenology of Spirit, particularly in its early chapters, may not seem to bode well for social ethics. It is a notoriously difficult text. Hegel uses his own philosophical vocabulary throughout the text, and he warns his readers that the meaning of the terms he uses will only become clear as the book goes on. Their meaning will be specified by their use over the course of the text. Readers, therefore, ought not to import the familiar sense of words like "spirit," "God," "essence," and "absolute" into Hegel's use of them; readers are left in the dark for a long time about how to read and understand these words. This is also true of the argument of the text as a whole. In the preface, Hegel insists that he cannot provide a summary of his argument in advance. Light will dawn gradually. But it is nearly impossible to read or to consider the Phenomenology of Spirit without at least having a sense of what kind of text Hegel intends it to be, what his aims are, and what his method is.

In the introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel writes that the book is an epistemological project. It is concerned with our knowledge about the world and, in particular, with what "standard" (der Maßstab) we might use to assess our claims to such knowledge. An adequate standard would be a yardstick against which our claims could be judged as true, right, or good. Hegel believes that there is such a standard, and he promises that we (his readers) will understand what it is by the end of the book. But Hegel also believes that the standard cannot be assumed or specified in advance. We must arrive at it through a dialectical process of assessing the strengths and weaknesses of the various standards that one could posit.

Hegel refers to the Phenomenology of Spirit as a "voyage of discovery" — a voyage undertaken by his protagonist, whom he calls consciousness, in its search for an adequate theory of knowledge. Hegel and his readers only arrive at the destination by undertaking this voyage along with consciousness. The point of departure is the most straightforward account of the standard that consciousness could claim to rely on in assessing the truth or falsity of its judgments. Hegel calls this account "sense-certainty." The voyage leads, through experiences that reveal that initial account's internal conflicts and contradictions, to increasingly complex accounts. Along the way, Hegel and his readers themselves learn from consciousness's experiences.

Hegel characterizes his phenomenological investigation as "the path of doubt, or, more properly, as the path of despair" (§78/72). This doubt or despair must be distinguished from Cartesian doubt and Kantian skepticism; it is more like immanent critique. Hegel and his readers track consciousness as it gives an account of itself and its object, finds its account wanting, and reassesses it. Hegel calls this a "self-consummating skepticism" (ibid.), in which he shows what consciousness posits as its standard for assessing its knowledge claims, how it tries to apply this standard in practice, and what its experience of doing so reveals about the inadequacies of the standard that it has set for itself. Hegel shows his readers what the logical consequences of this failure are by way of a subsequent account of the standard that attempts to overcome the problems plaguing the previous one. The goal of the phenomenology, Hegel writes, "lies at that point where knowledge no longer has the need to go beyond itself, that is, where knowledge comes around to itself, and where the concept corresponds to the object and the object to the concept" (§80/74). Through this dialectic, consciousness eventually arrives at an adequate theory of knowledge. Hegel calls this "absolute knowing."

Initially, this story about consciousness's voyage from sense-certainty to absolute knowing may appear irrelevant to what I am calling Hegel's social ethics. By Hegel's own description, the Phenomenology of Spirit is concerned with finding the standard against which knowledge claims are judged and conflicts are adjudicated. On this level, it is an epistemological project. But as the story of the Phenomenology of Spirit unfolds, it becomes clear that any adequate account of that standard would have to address the social and historical context in which people make knowledge claims. Hegel's account of spirit — the collection of norms and norm-generating practices of a form of life — highlights the ways that individuals' knowledge is mediated and judged in a community through its social practices. When Hegel begins to consider spirit, the Phenomenology of Spirit becomes a story about authority — the authority of norms (whether and why they count as good, right, or true) and the authority of the people who uphold and contest those norms. The ground of authority claimed by consciousness or by a community is, in Hegel's words, its essence.

The epistemological project, therefore, is inseparable from the ethical project. Hegel considers what relationships and social practices ought to be cultivated in order to overcome domination and to build solidarity among the members of a community. The relationships and practices that are capable of doing this are characterized by what Hegel calls reciprocal recognition. His discussion of reciprocal recognition comes toward the end of the Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel describes two individuals who have come into conflict but who manage to reconcile with one another through practices of confession and forgiveness. These practices are important because they express and embody each person's recognition of the authority of the other. Each person is a locus of authority — and of accountability — with respect to the other.

Without relationships and practices of the right kind, communities and societies can only be held together by violence, manipulation, or deceit. In what is perhaps the most famous section of the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel describes the emergence of a relationship between two individuals who find themselves locked in a conflict that results in a life-and-death struggle. Their conflict is overcome, and their struggle comes to an end, only when one of the two gives up the fight, submits to the other, and becomes his bondsman. This is the episode known as the master-slave dialectic or the lordship and bondage section of the Phenomenology of Spirit (§178–89/145–50). The lord forces the bondsman to acknowledge his power. Therefore, their relationship is drastically asymmetrical in its distribution of power and accountability. The lord claims power over the bondsman but no accountability for his treatment of him. The bondsman, meanwhile, is accountable to the lord but is not himself recognized as having power or authority. Because of this asymmetrical distribution of power and accountability, the coerced recognition that the bondsman offers the lord cannot possibly satisfy the lord's desire to be recognized as rightfully authoritative.

The lord dominates the bondsman, standing in a position to interfere arbitrarily with his desires, plans, and choices. The master-slave relationship may be the paradigm case of domination, but Hegel shows how the specter of domination hovers over every shape of consciousness or shape of spirit that does not achieve relationships of reciprocal recognition. By the end of the book, Hegel has not only considered domination in its abstract form; he has also discussed practical matters such as slavery, tragedy, the sacrifices of young men in war, burial rites, gender roles, religion, the culture war standoff between religious faith and secular rationalism, and political revolution.

Although Hegel identifies various accounts of the standard of knowledge with other philosophical positions, works of literature, and historical events, the Phenomenology of Spirit is not strictly a historical narrative. It does not describe the unfolding of actual historical events, let alone the progressive articulation and actualization of God in history. Instead, it is a conceptual narrative that uses a dialectical method to gradually specify what standard of knowledge a person in Hegel's social and historical context would be entitled to uphold. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, the collapse of one position leads to the development of the next in a conceptual, rather than historical, sense. This development unfolds at the level of thought. Hegel does not claim — in the Phenomenology of Spirit, at least — that historical events track, in any straightforward way, the conceptual progression presented here. It is not the case, for example, that slavery or bondage was left behind, historically, with the lord and bondsman. Among other problems, that reading would make no sense of Hegel's later invocation of ancient Greek life. Rather, the account of the standard of knowledge that he describes with reference to lordship and bondage is left behind, conceptually, owing to its inadequacies. The account of the standard of knowledge that Hegel describes with reference to Greek Sittlichkeit, or ethical life, overcomes those inadequacies (while introducing new problems of its own). On my reading of Hegel, the necessity of the conceptual development does not imply the necessity of historical development. There is nothing inevitable about the practical achievement of nondomination, reconciliation, or solidarity under actual social and historical circumstances.

The Phenomenology of Spirit tells its conceptual narrative in three sections, which are divided into eight chapters. Following the preface and introduction, Section A ("Consciousness") comprises three chapters: "Sense-Certainty," "Perception," and "Force and the Understanding"; Section B ("Self-Consciousness") includes only one chapter: "The Truth of Self-Certainty"; and Section C comprises four chapters: "Reason," "Spirit," "Religion," and "Absolute Knowing." The transition from Chapter V ("Reason") to Chapter VI ("Spirit") is particularly pivotal for understanding the book's social and ethical import because it begins with the moment in which consciousness's account of the standard of knowledge acquires its social and historical context. Unlike the first five chapters, which discuss what Hegel calls "shapes of consciousness," Chapter VI focuses on "shapes of spirit." This is a significant shift. Whereas a shape of consciousness is an abstract conceptual scheme — the way a particular person or group characterizes itself, the ground of authority for its beliefs or norms, and its relationship to the world in which it finds itself — a shape of spirit is an embodied form of social life, including its norms and laws, social practices, and language. As Terry Pinkard notes, "A 'shape of spirit' is thus more fundamental than a 'shape of consciousness,'" for it provides the social and historical context in which particular conceptual schemes can even appear as live options. In Hegel's words, "Spirit is thereby the self-supporting, absolute, real essence. All the previous shapes of consciousness are abstractions from it" (§439/325).

In Chapter VI, Hegel discusses a succession of shapes of spirit, considering not only the accounts that individuals and communities within these shapes of spirit give of themselves but also the norms and social practices that appear in them. Hegel presents a progression of people and communities who, for reasons that will become clear, cannot give an adequate account of why their norms, laws, institutions, and practices ought to be binding on them. He describes the ways that these people come into conflict with one another and the ways that their own understanding of the authority of their norms fails to help them confront and overcome these conflicts. Some of these communities and conflicts are familiar to readers. The conflict between Antigone and Creon, which Hegel draws from Sophocles's Antigone, ends in tragedy. The standoff between Faith and Enlightenment — Hegel's labels for the kinds of positions held by early modern Pietists and their secular rationalist opponents — devolves into a seemingly intractable culture war. Both of these conflicts are confronted in ways that reveal the inadequacies of those shapes of spirit; the conflicts make it clear that something is wrong with that way of organizing a community and justifying its beliefs, practices, and institutions. Again and again, Hegel describes how shapes of spirit fall apart, only to be replaced by other shapes of spirit that try to compensate for the weaknesses of what came before. It is only at the end of Chapter VI that he depicts a conflict that ends in reconciliation rather than self-destruction — in part because of the conflicting parties' participation in sacramental practices of confession and forgiveness. At that point, full-fledged reciprocal recognition and what Hegel calls "absolute spirit" emerge.

Religion, Ethics, and Post-Kantian Interpretations of Hegel

But what is absolute spirit? The answer to that question is highly disputed among contemporary interpreters of Hegel. It is clear that what Hegel calls "absolute" is the shared object of religion and philosophy. It is also clear that religion and philosophy grasp the "absolute" in different forms, with religion representing it as "God" and philosophy knowing it as "spirit." But interpreters disagree about how to understand these related concepts and the significance of the differences between religious and philosophical reflections on them.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from Hegel's Social Ethics by Molly Farneth. Copyright © 2017 Princeton University Press. Excerpted by permission of PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS.
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Edition details

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0691171904
• ISBN 13: 9780691171906
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 184