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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 June 2015
Allen Wood's treatment of Hegel's ethics is one of the deeper, more informed and thorough treatments of the subject to come along in any language. Wood treats Hegel as offering something like an ethical theory in the sense in which ethical theory is done in contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. Different themes - happiness, freedom, self-actualization - are treated in terms of how they fit into Hegel's own view and how they compare with alternative accounts (particularly, Kantian and utilitarian accounts). The usual treatment of Hegel's thought is almost always the opposite, following Hegel's own exposition of his ideas.
It is not due to accident, failure of nerve or slavish devotion to the text that most commentators closely follow Hegel's own exposition. In Hegel's case, this has a definite logic to it, since Hegel claims the really significant body of what we would call his “arguments” for his position are supposed to be found in his serial dialectical exposition of his ideas. Each new development is supposed to follow dialectically from the preceding one. Thus, if Hegel is right about what he says, then one should not be able to find any arguments on his part for his views outside of his dialectical exposition of them. To expound Hegel's reasons for holding his views quite naturally leads to the idea that we must expound them in the order he gave them.
1 In this way, Wood's book parallels Inwood's, Michael Hegel (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1983)Google Scholar in that both attempt to offer a more Anglo-American treatment of themes rather than following Hegel's expository lines.
2 Wood maintains that the concept of being with oneself began to be used by Hegel only after he went to Berlin and began lecturing on the Philosophy of Right, even though the phrase has several occurrences in the much earlier Jena Phenomenology of Spirit. For example, Hegel says in the chapter on “Absolute Knowing”: “The content is only comprehended (begrifFen) when the I is with itself in its otherness”. (Phänomenologie des Geistes, p 557 (my translation); §799 in the Miller translation, p 486 (where Miller translates bei sich selbst as “communes with itself.”)
3 deVries, Willem in his important work, Hegel's Theory of Mental Activity (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988)Google Scholar offers a similar account of Hegel's theory of mind. DeVries persists, however, in seeing the Logic not in terms of this overall idea of conceptual space but as a kind of metaphysical treatise, even though his own view gives the possibility of seeing it differently.
4 This idea of teleology was actually suggested to me in a conversation with Allen Wood, in which he criticized the version of teleology I defended in Hegel's Dialectic: the Explanation of Possibility (Philadephia: Temple University Press, 1988)Google Scholar. It seems to me, however, that this idea also fits the conception of social space which I am sketching out here. A caveat is therefore in order about whether the position I am sketching here and Wood's position are that far apart.
5 Hegel speaks of this in several places, but a straightforward statement is found in the Philosophy of Right, §124: “What the subject is, is the series of his actions”.
6 Pippin, Robert in his Hegel's Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar makes one of the best cases for such a non-metaphysical understanding of the Hegelian project. However, Pippin himself ties this to an understanding of the project in terms of a rather Kantian theory of apperception rather than seeing it as intrinsic to social space. To put it in Hegelian terms: Pippin sees Hegel's project in terms of consciousness rather than Spirit or Idea. I have argued this point in my “The Categorial Satisfaction of Self-Reflexive Reason”, Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain, 1990; and “How Kantian Was Hegel?”, Review of Metaphysics, 1990 (see Pippin's reply, “Hegel and category theory” in the same volume). In a more recent book, Modernism as a Philosophical Problem (London: Basil Blackwell, 1990)Google Scholar, he sees Hegel in terms of a theory of what it means to make a theory self-grounding without bringing in the earlier ideas about apperception which figure so prominently in Hegel's Idealism. This is not to say that the two themes contradict each other; it is only that they are not mutually self-supporting. In the latter work, Pippin sees the organizing idea of Hegel's system not in his apperceptive idealism but in his understanding of a very basic theme in Western culture, that of autonomy. It remains to be seen if and how Pippin will integrate these two approaches in his future work.
7 In Modernism as a Philosophical Project, Pippin takes something like this line. Pippin argues that Kant's successors saw Kant as failing in certain key respects (for example, in failing to show that only twelve categories were necessary). The question thus facing them was what sense could be given to the idea that a rational being could be said to be self-determining. Kant's own answer, his appeal to the “fact of reason”, an unavoidable realization of our rational natures that led to respect and the feelings that would motivate us, was insufficient. (Modernism, p 64) This set the stage for Hegel's view that communities are what they are because of they way in which they understand themselves. They do this because of the insufficiencies of prior attempts at self-understanding and self-legitimation. (Modernism, p 69) Hegel thus sees that what we require is a both a historical and a philosophical account of why spirit has some ground rules rather than other as authoritative for itself. (Modernism, p 70) I have also argued that Hegel should be seen as completing the Kantian project (“How Kantian Was Hegel?”), and my views there are largely in agreement with Pippin's views in Modernism, even though I continue to have great skepticism about his view of Hegel's philosophy as a theory of apperception as he develops it in Hegel's Idealism. Pippin treats in some greater length how Hegel's ethical thought can be construed as continuing the Kantian project of undertanding what it means to be an autonomous agent in “Kant, Hegel and Ethical Reasons”, to appear in Philosophical Topics, vol 19, no 2 (1991)Google Scholar. This latter piece seems to be more of an outgrowth of the themes treated in Modernism and a downplaying of the apperceptive themes of Hegel's Idealism.
8 This is something that I severely underplayed in my Hegel's Dialectic: the Explanation of Possibility (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1988)Google Scholar. This marks a genuine shortcoming in that work which I hope to rectify in a forthcoming book, tentatively titled, History and Self-Identity - Hegel's Phenomenology of the Human Community.