Giles Fraser on Hegel

July 18th, 2006

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Posted by ChrisG at 10:42 am

(Reposted from 19 June 2006)

While I’m not exactly involved in the frontlines (or even slightly interested) in the current debates exercising Anglicans over just what to do with all them troublesome women and gays, this piece by Giles Fraser in Saturday’s Graun caught my eye.

Firstly because it uses a very bad bowdlerisation of Hegel, based on that much-flogged dead horse, the “spiritless scheme of the triplicity of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis” (Hegel’s own words from the Lectures on the History of Philosophy), with which to beat Rowan Williams for his commitment to an ideal of ‘reconciliation’ – I find this particularly odd from Fraser, because of his record of writing sophisticatedly dialectical and genuinely Hegelian pieces like this one:

Earlier this year the Catholic League of America was up in arms about an exhibition in Napa, California, which included the “caganer”, a traditional Catalan figurine who is placed squatting in the corner of the Christmas crib, trousers around his ankles. Perhaps predictably, the Catholic League was offended by the presence of a defecating peasant in the holy stable. What it didn’t appreciate, however, is that the Christmas story is supposed to be offensive, and that the caganer is a reminder of the theological revolution that scandalised sophisticated opinion of the first few centuries of the Christian era: that God became human, that the sacred was no longer to be protected from the profane.

Secondly because the issues behind it play out a familiar problem for liberal politics within the Anglican context: just what do you do with anyone who’s nasty enough to want to exploit the forum you as a good optimistic liberal (or Anglican) have set up for the free and robust exchange of opinions to promote an agenda that involves overthrowing that forum and replacing it with something where such exchanges are prevented by force – and what, by extension, is the significance of the fact that any such forum has, at some point, to implicate violence in its own foundation.

Thirdly (and this is what I want to focus on here) what is the normative content of Hegel’s philosophy, taken in relation to a moral or ethical problem? Is this concept of reconciliation the way to understand its significance? Would the Hegelian prescription be, as Fraser takes it to be, to promote/seek the reconciliation of all opposing viewpoints within some higher synthesis, a “structured wholeness nuanced enough to contain what appeared to be contradictories”. One of the easiest ways to point out what’s wrong with Fraser’s use of Hegel, and also with the quotation from Isaiah Berlin concerning the immorality of dialectics, is that Hegel’s method is always phenomenological, that is, descriptive in intent and concerned with the articulation of die Sache selbst from within. In describing what happens when apparently counterposed categories, subject-positions or whatever, collapse and come to be replaced by something else, Hegel never stands beyond the movement. What is left out is the historical arrangement of contingency by which the ‘something else’ came to be. The only necessity at work in this movement is after the event, discovered by Reason in its work of Nachdenken. Only once the dust has settled can you understand the relationship between sense-certainty and perception on the one hand, and the Kantian Understanding on the other, and see how the contradictions within and between the first two are contained and reconciled within the latter. Which does not mean that the Understanding as a comprehensive ‘totality’ is, as it were, a total totality: it still has its own determinate meaning, and as such will find its own demise. But from the contingent, historical viewpoint of the Kantian understanding, wherever it serves as the structural basis of a point of view on the world (arguably in classical mechanics, 19th and 20th century science up to the recognition that the observer is never just an observer – but also as replayed in sociology, economics etc at different levels of intersubjective organisation (Geist)), then how its contradictions might be reconciled is not foreseeable for it. When its Aufhebung does arrive, it probably won’t recognise it, and will go on persisting. Even the phenomenon that serves as Aufhebung most likely won’t be aware of what it has done.

The most common misinterpretations of Hegel’s work take him to be arguing that there is always an internal necessity in the conflict between two phenomena/categories/subject-positions that itself produces the Aufhebung. Which then gets us to a general affirmation of conflict as possessing its own normative force: it should be overcome in a third that reconciles the conflict. But there is no such necessity: within the historical/empirical field, there are all kinds of conflict. But, to borrow Hegel’s description of things which just ‘ought to be’, then just because something ought to be overcome – and this is the fervent wish that proves that self-limiting reason, Kant’s Understanding, is on the scene – means that there is no power there to actually overcome it. What will enable the conflict to be resolved is something else, elsewhere, diverse in space and time – a judgement, an accommodation, an insight, whatever – that may have no immanent causal dependence on the conflict at all. But if it is discovered, somehow, that it does serve as a way of reconciling things, then the immanent connection becomes expressed. Creon and Antigone cannot perhaps be reconciled from within their conflict – but the logic of it can be overcome elsewhere, in a different civic order. Their conflict, however, does not produce this solution. It is constituted as a solution by the work of reason, afterwards.

So as far as the normative content (in the most general sense, i.e. at the level presented by Fraser) of Hegel’s thinking goes, there is a recognition that in every conflict there is a logic of ‘ought-to-be’ at work, but that this desire for reconciliation (fairly obviously) demonstrates the powerlessness of the parties to the conflict to reconcile. The actual reconciliation of the conflict most probably lies elsewhere, and will emerge out of a set of resources perhaps unavailable to the parties involved. In this way, the familiar charge levelled by Berlin and Fraser, that the dialectic is a meatgrinder to which any number of individuals must be fed to achieve the goal of total reconciliation, is completely false: the necessary, Zizek-style rejoinder to this is that what powers the meatgrinder is an excess of Kantian Understanding, a desire for reconciliation that forces itself into the present, via any number of elaborate schemes of symbolic and/or physical violence.

The basis of a Hegelian ethics is much more difficult to get at: see here for some ideas, featuring some reference to Rowan Williams himself. The problem is, perhaps, that we tend to think of ‘ethics’ as meaning a system of rules designed to bring to a conclusion the deliberative background to decision making here in the present. The fundamental orientation of ethical thought has traditionally been therefore to articulate a standard of behaviour to which all subsequent behaviour must measure up: this kind of temporal orientation, in which the future is pre-designed to repeat, in essence, the past, is arguably not the kind of temporality which ultimately matters in ethics – ways of thinking about the good life which emphasis narrative, looking backward in order to anticipate, anticipating in order to understand what has already been, are arguably more useful. Action, decision, trying to bring about what ought to be is one dimension of ethical thought which needs to be supplemented by others: phronesis implies eudaimonia, the individual will implies a temporal, spatial and social context of justices and injustices for its articulation. This is where Hegel belongs; the abstract desire for reconciliation is about as far away from here as you can get.