Remarks on the legacy of German philosophy and the significance of Hegel today
The contemporary world of thought has principal roots in the German-speaking world before Hitler, and these divide largely into two categories, belonging to Germany proper and the Austrian empire, which included much of what after the war became Central and Eastern Europe (including Hungary and Czechoslovakia). This division persists, most notably in philosophy and (via economics) political thought.
In philosophy, the dominant school in the English-speaking world is called “analytical.” Its origins are in the English school of Russell and Moore and its adoption of Austrians Frege and Wittgenstein. The other school, called “Continental,” is understood to be largely French. It too is popular in America, but among scholars of literature and the arts, and those influenced by them. It developed largely in university philosophy departments in France, and more recently also Italy. After Bergson, a very specifically French thinker (with a French idea of science uninfluenced by the German “romantic anti-capitalism” that drove much of secular Jewish left and liberal thought in both Germany and the Austrian empire) who dominated French philosophy in the 20s, French philosophy beginning around 1930 came largely under German influences, which it extended. The principal division in the philosophical world thus today is of the heirs of the Germans Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, and Heidegger, and at one time also Husserl, and the Austrians Frege and Wittgenstein. This represents two directions that German-language philosophy took after Kant, beginning with the German Idealists Fichte, Schelling and Hegel, all influenced by romanticism, and the Austrian Bolzano, whose concerns were more professionally limited to logic and mathematics, and epistemology and philosophy of science, which was equally the case with the decisively influential Frege.
In economics and political philosophy, the Austrian Hayek is the principal influence on the neoliberalism that was introduced in the 70s by the Americans and British. Here the division is largely of earlier origin. France historically was, and remains comparatively, bureaucratic, with a strong central government that is less tied to managing a market economy, while England already in the 17th century was more capitalist and this also drove philosophical empiricism and political liberalism (Locke, and later Mill and others). The Austrian empire, like England, was a conservative but tolerant monarchy. It was host to some great avant-garde and radical thinking in literature (Kafka, Musil, Broch, and others) and the arts around the fin-de-siècle, that were broadly European (and hugely influential: Kafka, writing in German, is perhaps central to Czech literature in cinema much as Dante has been said to be to postwar Italian film). More revolutionary projects right and left, leading in the worst cases to Hitler and Stalin, but certainly involving some more interestingly fruitful possibilities, flourished more in Germany proper, to which the French world is closer than it is to that of Austria, as Russia also was.
In psychology, Freud’s psychoanalysis effected a demarcation from (biological) psychiatry that the Americans have more recently been busy undoing (our philosophers’ love affair with the brain is based on an idea of science that is more English and American than German or French, one that is blatantly a project of the managerial state, in which philosophy is advice to princes, while ‘theory’ as critique, an idea that in America is linked to art but not science, is encouragment for radicals), but in its own terms it divided into two tendencies with Anna Freud and Melanie Klein in England and Jacques Lacan in France. Lacan would be taken up into Continental philosophy, a task encouraged by his own thinking, which was an eclectic borrowing from whatever he could find in contemporary ‘human sciences’ including linguistics and anthropology, philosophy, and even mathematics. Lacan’s thinking is what a psychology might be if it combined surrealism (itself influenced by Breton’s defense, to which Trotsky and his followers were sympathetic, and Bataille’s radicalization, of Freud) with readings of Hegel and Heidegger.
The English and American schools of thought may prove the stronger, as the English and French schools are bound to become integrated in various ways, and have been. It is also the more conservative. It continues capitalism on classical English liberal grounds. This is the dominant ideological force in the world still. Though it is, certainly, not unchallenged. Interestingly, most philosophers in the English schools ignore the Continentals, though, as I know from studying in France, the reverse is not the case. (See my article on this site on Analytical and Continental philosophy and the differences between them.) In brief, French philosophy ‘reads’ or is in dialogue with, the ‘analytical’ philosophers in the latter’s decisive domains of logic, mathematics, epistemology, and philosophy of science, while operating with other influences in its key domains, which tend to be thought together, of ethics, political philosophy, and aesthetics, and whatever metaphysics or ontology (or, with Badiou, what might be called meta-mathematics) inspires thinking in these fields.
In America, the Continental school has flourished largely as critique. What is criticized is several different things, from patriarchy and heteronormativity to vestiges of colonialism, however that might be thought. That explains its influence on the art world (which is now largely defined by political thinking as critique; to see this, pick up any issue of Artforum or consider the most recent iterations, including the one just closed, of the Whitney Biennial). Professionally, philosophy proper in America continues to be wedded to science. It excludes critique as not scientific, and at best a secondary field, philosophy being concerned with the architecture of mind and world, not anything like their deconstruction, or even the criticism of existing forms in favor of some other still to be found. Perhaps because Americans have never stopped building their, no longer colonial or strictly patriarchal, empire. In America, ‘critical’ theories may well be socially critical, but they are essentially applied to art by its practitioners and scholars or curators, and philosophy can ignore all this because it builds tools of thought, for others to apply to whatever.
Our universities differ from those of France in being more tied to corporate and military research (these often go together), emphasizing technology, where America has continued to lead, while in France the university system is closely tied to primary and secondary education and an idea of the republic and its citizens that is as old as the English and America one of liberty and business. In America we have big business and government and little ideas of liberty with much purchase on how Americans think. It still remains to be seen how, or if, the critiques of our scholars and artists will, besides fueling resentments, much change things. It may make some difference who some people read, and how. In the world of thought, the imperial Austrians would have an afterlife in post-imperial (post-colonial) Britain and America.
Curiously perhaps, the hegemony of German thought in Germany proper from 1776 (the date of publication of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason) to 1933 continues to inspire images of thought and the political that may, paradoxically, continue to be at once more absolutist and more republican (until recently, witness the continuation of French republican thought in the Marxism of Lenin). French republicanism is itself, historically, a continuation of absolutism with society (or an idea of it) replacing the monarch as the sovereign. Socialist ‘totalitarianism’, a concept first applied by Marxists and others as an affirmative potentiality, not the horror that it later would be thought of as exclusively, is a form of this. Its blind spot was namable by thinkers in the English tradition as liberty; more specifically, can there be a liberal state? This question can be aptly put by asking if the state exists only in relation to capitalism, which it manages and for which it manages society, or its socialist equivalent, in which the state manages society as a single monopoly firm. Thus, the principle question politically might well be, how can the state be an agent of liberty, or organized so as to allow it? Or is liberty’s only hope the minimal state? That is, is government itself a necessary evil? What then becomes of governance, if, as Agamben has shown in the central works of his homo sacer project that analyze medieval Christian governmentality as articulated in philosophy and theory, government and ‘economy’ have always been thought together?
We know the contemporary answer: we must all be self-governing, as in the neoliberal model everyone is a petit bourgeois, a little business enterprise that can only succeed or fail (happiness is defined in terms of this dichotomy, happiness itself being the successful production of value as wealth facilitating enjoyment through purchase of commodities), which leads to the project of using psychiatry to manage individuals, whose principal potentiality is to succeed in business and/or fail in their ‘mental health’, the idea to which the pursuit of happiness becomes reduced. What an impoverished idea of happiness! Does it not reduce us all to destitution and policing? Under capitalism, the individual’s potentialities are essentially for wealth and enjoyment or violence, as crime (or ‘disorder’, the absence of ‘law and order’, a concept that does not require that those sanctioned be responsible for the deplored condition), the potentiality for which, as failure, is to be managed largely through regimes of sanctions. Psychiatry fits the bill by offering medications backed with, should they fail, sanctions that reduce to the possibility of imprisonment. It is notable that psychiatrists today only help people avoid or manage the symptoms of their ‘illness’ and their toolkit and models have nothing to do with maximizing individuals’ creativity. There is also nothing for the subject of medical psychiatry to learn, which is in practical terms how psychiatry and business-oriented, managerial, talk psychotherapy (cognitive therapy and its cognates) differ from Freudian psychoanalysis when it practiced with an openness to the expression of the unconscious, which makes it an exercise in thinking whose subject is the Socratic ethical one who pursues the good life through a self-understanding that cannot be acquired but only constructed). Perhaps because the lives to which people are regulated are not supposed to be interesting. But they can be.
This question has some interesting threads of an answer in some recent political philosophy and philosophy in other domains, including metaphysics, that have bearing on the political. They may lie partly in a more robust idea of reason and how ‘political’ social practices involving it may institute or realize forms of liberty in a way different from that of markets alone, were we to be stuck with the old liberty vs. the state dichotomy that was still operative in the Cold War (defining its deadlock and the ultimate end of state socialism). And that is a reason for the importance of the recent Hegel renaissance in America, as Hegel was the modern thinker after Kant and Smith (who influenced him) who took the ‘bourgeois’ idea of liberty in a different direction, which thanks to some conservative motifs in Marx that were part of the (colonialist and capitalist) developmental model of the time (and model of time itself: linear, accumulative, teleological, or ‘progressive’, tying social ‘liberation’ to a model based on production and the development through technique of productive forces), blind to the ways of the political outside economics, were misread in an anti-liberal way instead of being developed more fruitfully. For we still do not know how persons might live lives of flourishing liberty beyond the business models that have been so effective in producing wealth and in limiting the horizons or reducing the effective potentialities of untold millions of people, to opportunities to create wealth or face punitive sanctions for failure to succeed in business. For the latter, we have kinder, gentler concentration camps, scant succor for the more imaginative Berliners among us.
What the Freudian unconscious exposes us to is not only the radical sublime experience of impossibility and the universality in a post-Holocaust world of evil as horror and the will to destruction, which is what it seems to be for Slavoj Zizek, but also a more productive relationship between the latent and the manifest, and in consequence partly of that, a different way of understanding the possibilities of the political. ‘Totalitarian’ socialism monopolized its meaning, prescribing its scope and objects, and so politicizing society (everything became political) in a way that is ultimately depoliticizing. Nazism, curiously, totalized the political on the basis of its own critique of evil, which it radically misconceived in ways that can partly be explained through the political legacy of Christian Manichaenism. The Nazi subject thinks itself as innocent and threatened with contamination by a dangerous Other with a problematic relationship to universality. It constructed this ‘evil’ as naturalized, and so made it the figure of a war of cleansing that was not just an ethnic project but an ethical one, purifying the ethnos for strong and vital subjects. A similarly Manichaean construction of evil as something outside the self to be opposed can be found in much contemporary politics, including on the ‘left’, particularly when it involves 'oppressed’ subjects defined positively by their (demographical) identities. (Demography is a project of an absolute state managing its populations.). There are also forms of Marxism that ascribe this destructiveness to capitalism, and the will involved to its economically rooted need to manage populations (“capital hates everyone,” Maricio Lazzarato assures us credibly in his eponymous recent essay). The post-Holocaust liberal ethical subject has learned from Hitchcock and elsewhere (including the later Freud) to find a troubling will to destruction in the self or subject himself. What can be done but recognize this a manage life so as to limit this will to power? A democratic political and social project today would draw on a fuller knowledge of the potentialities available to us of both evil and good. It might also be more indulgent in attending to the permeable boundary between the manifest and the latent, which was a lesson of the early Freud. This is what state socialism was unable to do, and why it could not tolerate a robust ‘civil society’ or ‘public sphere’: the Party, ruling the whole society through its direction by the state of the economy (which was primary), had always already decided what are the terms (objects, methods, etc.) in which social life is to be (in some versions of this, finding its ultimate expression in Maoism) problematized. An inventive ‘democratic’ socialist working in one of the arts could problematize relationships of inequality in social institutions, including families, and some did (see, e.g., the work of the Hungarian filmmaker Marta Meszaros). But it was largely already know how any social situation might be problematized. In a truly open and democratic society (where participation is broad), not only would what might be problematized, or who criticized, be broadly open (as in America, anyone might wind up being criticized for participating in an oppression or perpetrating a crime, and our suspicion of individuals reveals our broad limitation to the bourgeois project of criticizing the individual tyranny of presumptuous persons who act like the aristocrats who are in fact outlawed in our Constitution). So too would be the ‘how’ of the criticism, something that perhaps can only be wide open in the arts. And a very hopeful sign is that the arts (certain of them anyway) are flourishing today like never before (everyone watches television or sees movies, listens to (at least popular) music, etc., even if fewer people read books or magazine articles anymore. The only thing that isn’t widely done with our popular arts besides disseminate them is talk about what anyone of them mean. It is funny how in America today people talk so much about so many things, yet in another way talk little about anything. This is partly because of the organization of life by labor, but also because of the organization of leisure by capitalist market and profits, which is probably only begin to replace the former. What Freudianism can tell us about our civil society is that we should want to talk and think more about both the things we might want to talk about, and those we probably would prefer not to. I think in this Zizek is right that we should read Freud with Hegel; I am not sure if his way of doing so fully captures what they might involve.
The political is like art and science, as Alain Badiou insists, in being a matter not just of solving certain problems (in the old monarchist paradigm that persists in the English-speaking world, this is the discourses and practices of professional experts managing the society’s individuals and populations, and doing so largely externally to them, needing their ‘compliant’ cooperation but not true participation), but of posing them. Problems are posed in art, science, and politics through a problematization, which is a work in a situation that aims to identify what is the most useful model of the problem it poses, and what questions are the ones to be asked. Science is far less a project of finding new true facts, which is how it is treated publicly in the English-speaking world (where it is even rivaled by the authoritarian medieval God), than of developing theories as models.
That a question is never innocent but always supposes already, not its answer but, a certain position and a set of beliefs about what is relevant, what the problem is that enables us to define an otherwise vague and ichoate situation—this is an idea the both Hegel, and much of philosophy in the German and French tradition since, grasps easily that Americans are usually blind or unreceptive to; certainly, if someone in an authority asks you a question, you cannot normally reply by questioning the premise behind their asking it. You can only comply or refuse, and it is intelligible in our society to refuse to obey, which is often angrily, most often if the person is not a boss but acting presumptuously as if he were one, but you cannot normally continue a conversational engagement while criticizing the way the other person has formulated the problem. And yet that is exactly what a Hegelian philosophy of discourse would have us able to do anytime, as Hegelianism makes it possible on a plane of what the American Hegelian Wilfird Sellars called ‘the space of reasons’, to make explicit any presupposition (available to thought for either party) and criticize it. In this mode, there is not debate about a given proposition as a way of solving a pre-defined or agreed-on problem, so much as an open process of inventively critical dialogue. This is rare enough in our university seminars, where the professor has usually set the topic in light with their own research agenda; just imagine trying to do it in a case where there is some tangible basis of disagreement! And yet that is exactly what a Hegelianism might aim to make possible politically.
Interestingly, the two different ways of thinking about science are also partly rooted in the difference between the English language and that of French and others, which construct meaning through syntax more than diction. In French, it is common for complex sentences to link a pair of clauses in a consequential manner that shares this feature with the figure in logic of the syllogism. English sentences tend to be shorter and the saying of something is an affair more of the word and what it represents. In everyday life in an English-speaking country, people are more apt to say what they want and just agree or disagree based on whether they ‘like’ or want to buy what the other person is selling. Our ideas of liberty are based on this. The psychology popular decades back of Fritz Perls’s Gestalt psychology puts this aptly in a slogan: “You do your thing, I do mine. If we meet, it’s beautiful; if not, it can’t be helped.” Or you say what you believe while talking about what you find important; if I agree, I buy, and if not, adieu. This places liberty as paradigmatically the freedom of a potential customer to buy things (commodities) or not. He doesn’t have to agree, nor participate in the conversation.
In English thought, truths are represented and the thought/world relationship is of crucial importance, whereas in Continental thought the relationship between ideas is the more decisive one. This may explain the popularity in French psychoanalysis of the linguistics of Saussure and the dogma that signifiers are arbitrary in reference and defined by relationships with other signifying elements. The fullest expression of a system of thought that subordinates (it does not ignore) the representation of ‘reality’ by ways of thinking to the latter’s internal development is, surely, the thinking of Hegel.
Hegel thought of his philosophy as one of both liberty and reason. This doesn’t exclude market-based liberty but adds another dimension to it. Hegel thought reason and liberty are linked in the structure of thinking. This means among other things that part of my freedom must lie not just in our existence as separate individuals, but in something we share; and surely there is, for if we don’t share anything, what are we doing talking to one another? Yes, I can say no and leave the conversation; but that is not the only thing I can rationally do and in liberty. In the ideal Hegelian ‘rational’ conversation, I cannot hold you to stay and listen to me; it would be a tyrannical ethics of reason to suppose that some topics impose a duty on the other person to either refute the claim or ‘buy’ the supposed ‘truth’, when it may be only a seller or boss who is interested. However, the Hegelian gambit is that there is something in both liberty and any tenable idea of the good that in some way entails the use of reason as a feature internal to propositional thought, whether constantive (saying what ‘is’ or is ‘true’) or performative (like giving orders or making requests), such that true liberty will only be found in a society that ‘thinks’ in the (an only seeming paradox) totalizing yet also open way of managing our relationships to the world, self, and others through our practices of speaking.
The subject of the contemporary American state and the psychology that supplies its principal rhetoric and tactics of management is a subject who is an object of management for others, particularly relevant experts, and himself. He or she is not the subject of ethical thought that he is in Lacanian psychoanalysis, nor the citizen-subject of Hegel who emerged decisively with the American and French revolutions. The American revolution never found much that was novel in the way of its reflection in thought. Politically, American thought remains essentially British; it is driven, still, by the liberalism of Locke (and Mill and others). This is equally true of feminist and anti-racist thought, which add other dimensions to it without subtracting this main one. They also extend it to a larger field; sharing the common complaint that the early modern liberal project that culminated in the American and French revolutions was one of the liberty of a male, property-owning (often including property in slaves) subject of a colonial empire, they demand the extension of the old ideas of liberty based on property to include all persons, an idea historically realized as its progressive extension by adding new groups to be included. Whether or not this is the most progressive idea going, this whole idea can be thought (problematically, to be sure) realized in the American model of global imperialism that no longer depends on direct colonial subjection through the neo-feudal ideas of authority that early modern colonialism was based upon. The proper subject of the ‘American’ empire—which is not exclusively American, but in whose construction this country played a key role, and partly by militantly opposing the old empires and favoring as universal model the national state and its characteristic project of formation as collective self-determination through the national liberation movement—is anyone and everyone who can buy and pay. Our imperialism is intentionally to be cleansed of all projects of personal mastery over others.
Pragmatism, the most important native American philosophical trend, is also a philosophy oriented to business. Critique, the dominant mode of thinking in the arts, has had mostly negative uses, as the concept might seem to imply. Our liberalism is critical of ‘white’ and 'masculine’ thinking, which I take to be a thinking of the Subject as Master, or ‘heteronomativist’ thinking, which I take to be a critique of the idea of normality, which is the society of Masters considered through the categories of propriety (an adjunct of property?) and norm. A society of normal and normative subjects is a society of subjects of mastery in both senses—as subjects who master and are subjected to those who do, or to practices of self-mastery that everyone is obliged to perform, with the market now acting as principal disciplining force, in terms of which people, of necessity in order to survive, organize their own exploitation and the diminished quality of life that results (and do so freely, in a manner as misleading as the labor contract entered into freely already was for Marx in his critique of Hegel’s political philosophy). A robust image of ethical and political subjectivity is doubtless not enough, but may be one place to start. Critique might be best directed not just at those who aim too much at mastery and so may become criminals or (the leftist version of the criminal) ‘oppressors’, but at the subjective potentialities of all of us. What are these potentialities? In my picture of the capitalist society of today, which can only imagine the alternative to a society of management that must also be one of policing and prisons in terms of the figure of the liberal subject of markets (and personal experiences and action), what it offers us is: not enough. Capitalism frees the mind only for entrepreneurial projects governed by the market; it greatly limits it otherwise (why not curiosity, interest, and desire no longer linked to the market (or by repressive state authority acting, as in ‘socialism’, on behalf of ‘the economy’)? The subject of action, experience, and thought who is worker, citizen, and private person is a figure that has been distorted by the predominance of capitalist forms of labor and exploitation, extracting value from and limiting what we do out of interest or enjoyment. (Facebook, at its best, does a wonderful job of selling me as interesting today everything that I thought about yesterday, and of enjoying conversations that are limited to a small number of people and in ways that tend to be averse to more creative thinking. Capitalist social media have facilitated some of the most reactionary and criminal enterprises. We could certainly find better ways to develop and use the technologies that have made possible much more open and participatory communications and the consumption of art and ideas.) It seems to me that what life and its prospects are for most people today is best described as: limited. What we need above all is some new and better set of institutions for facilitating the life and work of the mind as heritage and opportunity for everyone. If our society had ever had a genuine social revolution, it would have in some far more effective ways universalized that.
And it would proceed to politicize, meaning criticize and sometimes oppose, not so much individuals who abuse their rights or their power, as the social systems and forms of life we are caught up in.