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The Great Conversation How Should We Live? Volume IV: Ideology and Emancipation TGC IV: Ideology and Emancipation This semester we ask the question, \How should we live?," in conversation with thinkers of our own time. This is the age of Western (European and American) hegemony over the world, the age of modernity's full flowering after the American, French, and Industrial Revolutions. Our everyday lives are now determined by the secular nation-state, multinational corporations, ceaseless technological innovation, and consumerist society. Political realignment and religious reform of medieval Catholic Europe in the Renaissance and the early modern period coincided with seismic changes in the forces and relations of production: a fulfilling human life in this world became possible for more and more of humanity|a life without slavery, a life above subsistence, a life free of clerical and aristocratic control, an enlightened life of literacy, democratic and republican self-government, personal development, free pursuit of desires, mutual recognition. Liberty, equality, fraternity. This dream of human emancipation magnetically draws the scattered filings of contemporary existence|but the dream is contested. The range of reactions to the French Revolution has determined left, right, and center ideological positions to this day. Napoleon contained many of the contradictions; Hegel theorized them most profoundly. Is modern liberty about the individual or the community, about truth or power, about politics or society, about ideals or economics? Is it rooted in localism or cosmopolitanism? Is it spiritual or materialist? Can \reason" take over completely from authority? ii Intellectuals still thought themselves masters of reality in the nineteenth century (think a thing and it is so: that, the very pretense of ideology, being fostered by the modern research university). As the most conservative element in Europe, the Catholic Church (the bridge between antiquity and modernity) attempted to restrain, or moderate, the titanic forces unleashed. Liberal Protestantism became the religion of the new bourgeois world|but the West continued to lose its religion. Marx and Darwin made an ever more comprehensive mechanism seemingly inescapable, sitting strangely to our dreams of fullness of liberty. Attention shifted from political towards social and economic questions. \Society" became the central arena of emancipation, with identity \politics" (including nationalism) increasingly essential to the project. The bourgeois and scientistic faith in this-worldly progress met an astonishing crisis in the trenches of the First World War|and (again!) in World War II. The contradictions of modern emancipation are to be seen in anti-Semitism, imperialism, totalitarianism, consumerist conformism. Yet technological innovation, global capital, and the bureaucratic administration of life roll on. What has happened to the promise of modernity? What can possibly check the unprecedented accumulation of power in the nation-state and global capital? Is the dignity of this world sustainable without the open horizon of another world embracing it? Is a postmodern renaissance of religious humanism necessary for emancipation? Is modernity capable of a new beginning: of earnest thinking, of energetic conversation, of loving responsibility? How should we live this day? iii iv Contents Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right 1 Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question 17 Søren Kierkegaard, Philosophical Fragments 43 Charles Darwin, The Descent of Man, and Selection in Relation to Sex 71 John Stuart Mill, Utilitarianism 105 Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols 145 T. S. Eliot, The Waste Land 179 v Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Ba- nality of Evil 195 Malcolm X, The Ballot or the Bullet & Martin Luther King, Jr., Letter from Birming- ham Jail 243 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, \Right of Death and Power over Life" 275 Judith Butler, The Force of Nonviolence 299 Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, Harvard Commencement Address, 1978 339 vi Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right 1 Elements of the Philosophy of Right With Kant, philosophy's center of gravity shifted into German-speaking territory. Indeed, Kant and Hegel stand as the two greatest philosophers of the post-Catholic age. It was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's ambition to be the prophet-philosopher of the modern world, to realize in thought what was happening in history. His origins were not the likeliest for such ambition, as \Germany" did not yet exist as a nation. It was a philosophical backwater compared to England and France, the former being the driver of modernity until the French Revolution, which made France an ideological force in revolutionary modernism. Hegel was born in Stuttgart in 1770, the capital of the Duchy of W¨urttemberg in southwestern Germany, one of the more than 300 principalities and free cities into which \Germany" was fragmented (the federal system of territories of the Holy Roman Empire). Napoleon unleashed the forces of nationalism across Europe, not least by destroying that millennium-old empire|inspiring and practically facilitating the eventual consolidation of a smaller Germany (excluding Austria) under the hegemony of Prussia. The question of Christianity's relationship to modernity motivated Hegel from the start. During the early years of the French Revolution, he attended the Protestant seminary at T¨ubingen, where, remarkably, his roommates were the great poet H¨olderlin and the brilliant philosopher Schelling. As most young minds were, Hegel was fired by the principles of the Revolution. After seminary, he served as a house tutor, finally entering academia as unpaid lecturer at the University of Jena in 1801. It was there he wrote The Phenomenology of Spirit, as Napoleon triumphed over Prussian forces outside the city in 1806. Hegel ended up becoming headmaster of a prep school for eight years. Eventually he would succeed to the chair Fichte held at the University of Berlin in 1818, where he published Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1821), holding this post until his death in 1831. 3 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel The expanding sense of the possibilities of modern life summoned the romantic demand for harmonic integration|of spirit and matter, self and society, history and nature. Hegel provides a metaphysics for such integration in the rationalist mysticism of his absolute idealism, an idealism that realizes itself through a process both logical and historical. Whereas \dialectic" in Kant was the generation of metaphysical illusion by pure reason's overreach, it becomes in Hegel the process by which reason, in history, transcends partial viewpoints into self-consciousness as both subject and object: total comprehensiveness. While maintaining a kind of Trinitarianism, Hegel argues that the divine and the human spirit (Geist) are not different from each other. This collapse of the analogy of spirit enables Hegel to present human reason as master of the very processes of nature and history. 4 Elements of the Philosophy of Right Introduction §20 The reflection which is brought to bear upon impulses, placing them before itself, estimating them, comparing them with one another, and contrasting them with their means and consequences, and also with a whole of satisfaction, namely happiness, brings the formal universal to this material, and in an external way purifies it of its crudity and bar- barism. This propulsion by the universality of thought is the absolute worth of education (§ 187). Addition: In happiness thought has already the upper hand with the force of natural impulse, since it is not satisfied with what is momen- tary, but requires happiness as a whole. This happiness is dependent upon education to the extent to which education confirms the univer- sal. But in the ideal of happiness there are two elements. There is a universal that is higher than all particulars; yet, as the content of this universal is in turn only universal pleasure, there arises once more the individual, particular and finite, and retreat must be made to impulse. Since the content of happiness lies in the subjective perception of each individual, this universal end is again particular; nor is there present in it any true unity of content and form. Third Part: Ethical Life §151 But when individuals are simply identified with the actual order, eth- ical life (das Sittliche) appears as their general mode of conduct, i.e. as custom (Sitte), while the habitual practice of ethical living appears as a second nature which, put in the place of the initial, purely natu- ral will, is the soul of custom permeating it through and through, the significance and the actuality of its existence. It is mind living and present as a world, and the substance of mind thus exists now for the first time as mind. Addition: Just as nature has its laws, and as animals, trees, and the sun fulfil their law, so custom (Sitte) is the law appropriate to free mind. Right and morality are not yet what ethics (Sitte) is, namely mind. In right, particularity is still not the particularity of the concept, but only that of the natural will. So, too, at the standpoint of morality, self-consciousness is not yet mind's consciousness of itself. At that level it is only the worth of the subject in himself that is in question, i.e. the subject who determines himself by reference to good in contrast with evil, who still has self-will as the form of his willing. Here, however, 5 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel at the standpoint of ethics, the will is mind's will and it has a content which is substantive and in conformity with itself. Education is the art of making men ethical. It begins with pupils whose life is at the instinctive level and shows them the way to a second birth, the way to change their instinctive nature into a second, intellectual, nature, and makes this intellectual level habitual to them.