Review: Beyond the Fury of Destruction: Hegel on FreedomAuthor(s): Andrew NorrisReviewed work(s):

Hegel's Philosophy of Freedom by Paul FrancoHegel: The Restlessness of the Negative by Jean-Luc Nancy ; J. Smith ; S. MillerFoundations of Hegel's Social Theory: Actualizing Freedom by Frederick NeuhouserHegel's Idea of Freedom by Alan Patten

Source: Political Theory, Vol. 32, No. 3 (Jun., 2004), pp. 409-418Published by: Sage Publications, Inc.Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4148161Accessed: 14/09/2009 23:07

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BEYOND THE FURY OF DESTRUCTION

Hegel on Freedom

HEGEL'S PHILOSOPHY OF FREEDOM by Paul Franco. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999. 391 + xiii pp. $22.50.

HEGEL: THE RESTLESSNESS OF THE NEGATIVE by Jean-Luc Nancy. Translated by J. Smith and S. Miller. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2002. 168 pp. $17.95.

FOUNDATIONS OF HEGEL'S SOCIAL THEORY: ACTUALIZING FREEDOM by Frederick Neuhouser. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000. 352 + xiii pp. $29.95.

HEGEL'S IDEA OF FREEDOM by Alan Patten. New York: Oxford Univer- sity Press, 1999. 216 + xiii pp. $19.95.

The Hegel renaissance continues apace, producing ever more excellent monographs and steadily raising the general level of appreciation for the sub- tlety and importance of Hegel's political philosophy.' While Jon Stewart's 1996 collection The Hegel Myths and Legends is still invaluable, the claims once heard regularly concerning Hegel's totalitarian nationalism, his Prus- sian if not fascist warmongering, and the Alexander Pope-like blanket endorsement given the status quo by his Doppelsatz are no longer given enough credit to be the distractions they once were. All of the books under review begin from the evident fact that freedom lies at the center of Hegel's thought, and that that freedom is not enjoyed by some cosmic spirit "God knows where," but by real people and real communities. This reflects a gen- eral move away from Charles Taylor's excessive emphasis upon the Weltgeist of the lectures on world history, a move occasioned in the Anglo-American context by Allen Wood's persuasive defense of Hegel as a philosopher of eth- ical self-realization and Robert Pippin's explication of Hegel's work as the best version of the project of autonomy that defines modernity from Rous- seau on. If Wood and Pippin together focus attention upon the practical fea- tures of Hegel's thought as opposed to the speculative theodicy, they differ quite sharply on the question of what is viable in Hegel's logic. Wood's answer is, famously, "Nothing." Pippin in contrast has engaged in a sustained

POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 32 No. 3, June 2004 409-418 DOI: 10.1177/0090591703260694 ? 2004 Sage Publications

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if qualified attempt to defend and explain Hegel's logic and its political pur- chase.2 Most of the books under review follow Wood in downplaying the sys- tematic role of the logic. For those uncommitted to the full Hegelian sys- tem-that is, most readers of this journal-this can be a strength, as it opens Hegel's texts up to a variety of perspectives, from an analytic commitment to Rawls to a Heideggerian celebration of difference. Hegel may not in the end be compatible with all of these, but this collection of books suggests he may be consonant with more approaches to politics than even his stoutest defend- ers a generation ago would have thought possible.

Patten's was the first of these books to appear in English. Of the books under review, it is the least committed to the sustainability of the Hegelian enterprise (pp. 5, 204) and the least comprehensive in scope. While Patten has a very good grasp of the literature, aside from evaluating other prominent interpretations in his introduction, he engages with scholarly minutiae spar- ingly. He does not attempt an explication of Hegel's practical thought in its totality, or even of the Philosophy of Right (PR) as a whole, offering instead a series of concise, connected essays on particular problems in the mature work of Hegel's Berlin period. These include the reciprocity of freedom and duty in Kant and Hegel, Hegel's critique of contract theory, his justification of private property, and what Patten terms his civic humanist conception of freedom. Throughout, Patten's focus is on what he terms Hegel's Sittlichkeit thesis, the notion that the ethical norms that should guide our practical rea- soning "consist in nothing other than the duties and virtues embedded in the central institutions of modern social life." Patten suggests that what is most attractive about this thesis is its implication that "practical reason implicitly or explicitly involves dialogue with others and finding reasons that are acceptable to those with whom we disagree" (p. 1). But why should such rea- sons be those imbedded in our central institutions? What, more generally, makes a reason good, or justifies our actions? Hegel's commitment to free- dom as rational self-determination precludes appealing to immediately given feelings, desires, traditions, and other forms of authority-including the con- ventions of our common life (p. 36). But what is left? Building creatively upon Christine Korsgaard's interpretation of obligation in Kant, Patten argues that the free will must will its own preconditions, and a justified voli- tional act is one that affirms and supports those preconditions. Korsgaard argues convincingly that willing something differs from wishing for it: as Kant recognizes, it is a "'causal' law" that willing a given end means willing the means to that end. Hence the false promiser contradicts himself because he commits himself to (wills) the very institution of promising that his action undermines.3 Korsgaard directs this argument specifically at Hegel and his charge of empty formalism. Patten nicely demonstrates that, ironically,

Norris / REVIEW ESSAY 411

essentially the same reasoning underlies Hegel's own claim that "the free will.., wills the free will" (PR, 27). The necessary preconditions of the free will are on this account the institutions sketched out in the PR: the family, civil society, and the state. This attributes to Hegel a more Kantian under-

standing of self-actualization than that found in, say, Wood (p. 54), while at the same time demonstrating how Hegel marks a real advance upon Kant: Instead of a contingent instrumental commitment to an isolated institution

(promising), a full set of political, social, and economic relations are justified as being necessary for the actualization of the free will.

One difficulty here is that of evaluating this claim in the absence of empiri- cal confirmation (p. 162). Another is seeing how any set of concrete determi- nations such as these institutions could be adequate to a will capable of

abstracting itself from all determination. Once the will has so abstracted itself, how can it determine itself without losing itself? This is the basic prob- lem that in PR 5R generates "the fury of destruction." Patten's answer is that freedom is "recursive: the determinations that give content to freedom turn out to be the ones the agents must pursue if they are to be in a position to deliberate and pursue the ends and determinations that give content to free- dom" (p. 100). The moment of abstraction is a moment of deliberative reflec- tion in which one asks whether the desire motivating one is reasonable

(pp. 57, 124). And, as Hegel's characterization of the pre-Socratic Greeks makes plain, this is an activity that requires a particular acculturation-a fact

intimately bound up with Hegel's objection to the kind of freedom defended

by Hobbesian-style contract theories (p. 116). A freedom to do whatever I want will neither produce nor maintain the "other-regarding ends and dispo- sitions that will encourage [me] to accept the burdens and sacrifices presup- posed by a self-reproducing social order that is hospitable to personality and

subjectivity" (p. 185). Patten's skeptical, measured discussion of this as well as the other topics he treats is trenchant and clear, and his book is highly recommended.

While there is as yet no companion in English to Hegel's ethical and politi- cal corpus like Herbert Schnidelbach's Hegelspraktishe Philosophie (2000), Franco's book comes as close as most readers will require. Franco devotes

chapters to all of the central texts, from the writings of the 1790s to the PR, providing a lucid review of Hegel's development and his debts to and differ- ences from Kant and Fichte. Throughout, Franco's central aim is as much

expository as it is critical, and he proceeds by "explicating and interpreting" the PR and associated works (p. xi). The book's regular references to Burke, Oakeshott, de Tocqueville, and M. B. Foster's still helpful 1935 The Political

Philosophies ofPlato and Hegel confirm Franco's distinction of his approach from Wood's analytic and leftist perspective. But the defense of this approach

412 POLITICAL THEORY / June 2004

takes a backseat to a summary of Hegel's views that may appeal most to those new to Hegel. As sympathetic exposition, it is extremely successful: of all of the books on the subject it is the best to refer undergraduates to and the most likely to take the place of Avineri's classic 1972 Hegel and the Modern State. Not only are the main lines of Hegel's political thought laid out with great clarity and insight, but there are valuable discussions of Hegel's rejection of Kant's and Fichte's categorical distinction between morality and politics; the underappreciated nuances of his "Hellenism"; the way war's unifying power is supplemented in the PR as it is not in earlier texts; the different versions and roles of the struggle for recognition; and the compatibility of Hegel's defense of a minimal state with his rejection of the individualism that so often accom- panies this. Of the books under review, Franco's gives the fullest picture of Hegel's thought and contains by far the best account of Hegelian texts other than the PR that discuss politics and political philosophy.

No one book can do everything, however, and in providing such a clear review Franco is sometimes led even in a fairly long book to gloss over diffi- culties. Hegel's empty formalism charge against Kant, for instance, is dealt with in a brisk three pages, with about the same being devoted to Hegel's complex justification of private property. At rare moments Franco can also appear unduly conservative and defensive of Hegel. Dieter Henrich, Wood, Avineri, and a host of others have drawn our attention to Hegel's treatment of poverty, arguing that it shows either his perspicuity, his awareness of the legitimacy of some forms of revolutionary activity, or the possibility that ours is a transitional age in which the claims of morality might trump those of ethi- cal life. Franco's response to all of this is both dismissive and unconvincing. To the objection that Hegel minimized the problem of poverty by assuming that the poor will belong to corporations that care for them like a second fam- ily, he replies, "It is not clear what Hegel's response to this question would be except to say that every member of civil society who does not belong to the agricultural or universal estates should be urged to join a corporation" (p. 274). But this is like telling a lonely friend that he'd be happier with a beautiful, intelligent, and witty girlfriend. Not all of the poor have the needed skills to be attractive potential members of a corporation. Hegel recognizes this, albeit fitfully, and it clearly does pose a real problem for his claim that the society that generates the poor and the rabble (Pibel) is a rational and desirable one.

While Franco and Patten also note that Hegel is no communitarian, Neuhouser's book is distinguished by its extended argumentation in support of the claim that Hegel shares as much with Rawls as he does with Sandel. Not only is the community Hegel celebrates one that meets external rational criteria, it is one that, properly understood, includes almost all of the univer-

Norris / REVIEW ESSAY 413

sal individual freedoms championed by liberals. What, according to Neu- houser, Hegel adds to this is modem philosophy's "most comprehensive" attempt to do justice to the need for a sense of belonging articulated by the Romantics (p. 16). A rational social order is rational in so far as it allows for the freedom of its members; this freedom is achieved not by simply removing restrictions, but by establishing political and nonpolitical institutions that foster a distinctive kind of identity-as family member, as member of a pro- fession, and as citizen-that allows for the harmonious union of particular and general wills within the individual: "individuals can be brought to will and work freely for the collective good of the social groups to which they belong, insofar as doing so is at the same time a way of giving expression to a particular identity that they take to be central to who they are" (p. 13). This emphasis upon the noninstrumental quality of identification distinguishes Neuhouser's analysis from Patten's (cf. Patten, pp. 195-96), and it produces an extremely appealing picture that shows clearly how far Hegel is from a Prussian or American reactionary. As Neuhouser emphasizes, these condi- tions will be met only in a society that safeguards enough "negative freedom" to avoid a widespread feeling of being coerced; that has a political system with sufficient transparency and intelligibility to do the same; that has an economy that provides meaningful work with social recognition of the con- tributions made by that work; and that enables individuals to escape "the ano- mie, alienation, and rootlessness that have come to characterize Western societies" (p. 284, n. 9, and p. 14). It speaks well for the critical resources of Hegel's political philosophy to note that, in an America going to war to bring "freedom" to others, few of these conditions are widely met.

This doesn't imply that Hegel is after all laying out a set of ideals moral agents and societies "ought" to achieve, as his critique will always be an immanent one that holds our institutions up to the standards implicit in them (pp. 257-59). Neuhouser's book is a painstaking attempt to use Hegel to help us see that these standards are conceptions of personal, moral, and what Neuhouser terms social freedom, "the most distinctive innovation of Hegel's theory and its single most important contribution to social and political phi- losophy" (p. 5). In his explication and defense of this concept, Neuhouser focuses on how Hegel's conception of social freedom develops Rousseau's "central idea" that social institutions are both preconditions and embodi- ments of the freedom of their members (p. 81). Neuhouser's analysis of how Hegel deepens this claim while eliminating the unnerving possibility of its being used to force someone to be free is the most thorough I have seen. His habit of finding two reasons for any claim and two ways that any claim might be understood can be distracting; but his prose is also very clear, and he pro- vides exceptionally vivid and helpful examples of the different ways individ-

414 POLITICAL THEORY / June 2004

uals can participate in the life of a larger whole (pp. 37f., 177). He uses these as well as a good contrast between methodological atomism and method- ological individualism (pp. 176, 181) to demonstrate persuasively the extent to which Hegel's social theory-contrary to appearances and, at times, in contrast to Hegel's stated intention (pp. 180, 244, n. 48)-is compatible with liberal rights. The few exceptions that remain when Neuhouser is done- Hegel's insistence "that individuals figure in the state only as members of a particular estate" and his lack of support for public debate and critique (pp. 205-6, 256-60)-are not, he argues persuasively, necessary parts of Hegel's social theory.

A similar conclusion is also reached, though in far less detail, by Franco (p. 344). But differences remain, and it is a shame that these books appeared in print so close together in time that they are not able to engage with one another. Franco's critical comments on a review of Wood's book written by Neuhouser indicate how the debate might proceed: Franco takes exception to Neuhouser's suggestion that Hegel's treatment of women and peasants appears to violate the moral equality of persons in so far as their allegedly plant-like trust in authority does not allow for the realization of their freedom in conscious reflection and knowledge (PR, 166A, 203). "It remains the case," Franco responds, "that the members of the agricultural estate know and will the universality of the state no less than any other estate" (p. 260). But the passage he cites as evidence, PR 203R, says nothing of knowledge, and the fact that Hegel gives the nobility of that estate a political function does not, contra Franco, imply anything about the point at issue. Thus, Neuhouser's emphasis upon the need for a general reflective relationship with the state survives Franco's criticism, but that hardly settles the issue since Hegel himself seems genuinely unsure about how much philosophical reflection is required for us to actualize our freedom. One of the central les- sons of Neuhouser's book is that a fuller "moral freedom" is achieved by those who can follow the arguments of the PR (p. 246; cf. 287, n. 10; compare Patten, pp. 61, 75). Philosophy, in other words, is practical in ways that Hegel himself may not have fully appreciated.

Nancy is the odd man out here, approaching Hegel as he does with philo- sophical allegiances that are not obviously compatible with the subject. In his most widely read book in English, The Inoperative Community, the French Heideggerian described Hegel's State as paradigmatic of those "political or collective enterprises dominated by a will to absolute immanence." This essentially sided Nancy with Karl Popper, insofar as he also argued that "what we have called 'totalitarianism' ... might be better named "immanen- tism,'" as that better indicates that what is dangerous is not so much the claim

Norris / REVIEW ESSAY 415

that the political is the total as the assumption that the political community is an immanent essence that needs to be manifested through the activity of elim- inating what it is not: Jews, gypsies, and enemies in war.4 If Nancy sounds a less critical note here, explicitly defending Hegel from such charges (p. 8), this is in part because he scarcely mentions the PR and dismisses as essen- tially un-Hegelian Hegel's "incontestably naive and dated confidence in a certain model of the state" (p. 119). Instead Nancy reads Hegel against him- self, making him in the process sound surprisingly like Nancy. Hegel is cred- ited with exposing "what will become in our time the primary political theme: no longer the institution and nature of government, but the contradic- tion of the separation and nonseparation of the 'common' considered for itself' (p. 119). This is the main theme of Nancy's own work, which opposes the thought of a common if immanent political essence to that of "the in of [Heidegger's] being-in-common," and argues that thinking the latter forces us to experience a disorientation-a loss of meaning, direction, sens-in which we find a higher, nonmetaphysical "sense ... understood beyond all sense."5 It is doubly striking then, to see Nancy propose that "the infinite work of negativity" is the same thing as "the restlessness of sense" (p. 5); as the second is a reference to the claims just canvassed and the first an obvious gloss on Hegel's logic, this essentially identifies the two. While Nancy's admirers may greet this with approval, Hegel's may well not, and many will conclude that, in contrast to, say, Deleuze in his self-effacing and helpful Kant's Critical Philosophy, Nancy has not written a book on Hegel at all, but on himself and his own thought.6

For Nancy, "what Hegel first gives to think is this: sense never being given nor readily available, it is a matter of making oneself available for it, and this availability is called freedom" (p. 7). Nancy's rather unconvincing denials in his final chapter aside, this is at best the freedom of a (postphilosophical) phi- losopher, not a citizen. If it is unclear whether the citizen must be something of a philosopher to truly act "in conscious awareness" of the rationality of his state (PR, 260), it is clear enough that the philosopher must also be a citizen, an important part of whose freedom is found in the duties with which citizen- ship is bound up. In disregarding this Nancy is not simply emphasizing free- dom over governance, as modems typically do, or rejecting, as in the quota- tion above, the Hegelian model of the state. He is dismissing as un-Hegelian the idea of the will itself, the central idea of Hegel's practical thought. Nancy glosses over this when he suggests in his chapter on Desire that Hegel's account of freedom as "being-with-oneself-in-another" anticipates the Heideggerian ecstatic self in that it too is not self-contained. Nancy empha- sizes that for Hegel this is revealed in love.7 The relevance of love here is sug-

416 POLITICAL THEORY / June 2004

gested by Hegel himself in PR 7A, but Hegel's point is quite different than Nancy's: for him, in love and friendship we experience "in the form of feel- ing" the third moment of the will, in which the universal determines itself and posits itself as an other. That is, I am neither an isolated particular body nor an empty abstraction, an "I" that, as in the Phenomenology's opening chapter, is everyone and hence no one. In loving my friend, I become an individual, an entity in which universal concepts like love, friendship, and duty (a very Hegelian word that plays no role whatsoever in Nancy's text) are given par- ticular interpretations, just as particular relations-between myself and my friend-are deepened and transformed by virtue of being understood and experienced in the light of these concepts. The result is a relationship between two different people that each party sees as constitutive of an important part of who he or she is: a mediated unity.

Although Nancy is adamant that his version of Hegel avoids the extremes of empty indeterminacy and self-enclosed and empty particularity (p. 56), neither this back and forth nor the fact that I undergo it in a particular commit- ted relationship (with a friend, family member, or fellow citizen) is present in his text. Instead, one is enjoined to embrace the fact that one is always already open to others as such, an injunction that looks suspiciously like a form of the (falsely) infinite project of the Sollen. Hence, in a passage in which Nancy explicitly registers the notion that freedom should not collapse into the I's pure reflection into itself (PR, 5), he claims that "if 'I' surge up [surgit], each time, as the identity of the universal and the singular-'I' being nothing but an upsurge, a throw of sense in itself, without determined content-this takes place only insofar as 'I' is shared out equally between everyone" (p. 37). The Heideggerian language of the upsurge (Aufbruch) is paired with a notion of individuality that lacks the moment of particularity or "determined content." As Nancy puts it on the same page, "to liberate freedom itself.., is to unbind the self from every determination to which it would be attached." Where Hegel speaks of a decision and a resolution in which "the will posits itself as the will of a specific individual" (PR, 13), Nancy speaks again and again of "the philosophical decision [dicision]" (pp. 14, 37) that "decides, as undeter- mined, either for the pure determinacy of "I=I," or for the infinite determina- tion of the "I=becoming-other" (p. 74). As I have argued elsewhere, this is a version of Heidegger's Eigentlichkeit, in which authenticity is identified as being true to one's nonidentity with oneself-a fidelity that can be mani- fested only in an ironic distance from all identifying features and relation- ships." In the end, we are leaving Hegel's philosophy of Recht behind if we grant with Nancy that "Freedom ... is indeed autonomy, but the law it gives itself is ... the law to have no law" (p. 68). As Hegel makes abundantly clear,

Norris / REVIEW ESSAY 417

one of his principal targets is "the hatred of law," a feeling that "does not rec- ognize itself in the law and thereby recognize its own freedom in it" (preface, p. 17, and PR, 149). If Nancy here tries to finesse the difference between these two views, he was closer to the truth in The Experience of Freedom when he described his understanding of the "absoluteness" of freedom as "the exact reverse of Hegel."9

NOTES

1. All references to the Philosophy ofRight will be to Nisbet's translation (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1991) and the Suhrkamp edition of the Werke and will be made in the main body of the text, identified by PR. Additions and remarks will be indicated by A and R, respectively.

2. The qualified nature of Pippin's defense of the logic in Hegel's Idealism is demonstrated by the number of times he says that Hegel "takes himself to have shown" the necessity of a given move in the unfolding of the Concept, as opposed to Pippin or us taking Hegel to have done so, and for good reasons.

3. Christine M. Korsgaard, "Kant's Analysis of Obligation," in Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 64.

4. Jean-Luc Nancy, "The Inoperative Community," trans. Peter Connor, The Inoperative Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 12, 3.

5. Nancy, Inoperative Community, preface xxxix; idem, The Sense of the World, trans. J. Librett (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 2, 3.

6. Approval will not, however, be limited to Nancy's fans. Slavoj Zizek-a self-professed reformed Heideggerian who shares few of Nancy's allegiances-finds Nancy's book to be one of the best accounts of the "vertiginous abyss in which [Hegel's] Understanding is caught." Slavoj Zizek, The Ticklish Subject (New York: Verso, 1999), 122, n. 26. The concrete universal on this account is not a bridge crossing the gap between universal and particular opened up by the for- malism of the Understanding, but a paradoxical, ungrounded, and unjustified decision that some given particular embodies the universal. That Zizek seconds Nancy's reading in this way is sig- nificant; but the fact that he does so in the process of arguing that Ernesto Laclau and Carl Schmitt are "the true heirs of Hegel" (pp. 100-101, 113) also confirms the accuracy of the argument given here: whatever else it may be, the Philosophy of Right is not Schmitt's Political Theology.

7. Though, somewhat confusingly, Nancy does not argue as he has elsewhere that conceiving of the in-common as love is an apolitical conception-a conflation he there claims "occurs exemplarily in Hegel." Nancy, "Politics I," in Sense of the World, 88-89, n. 93, 188.

8. Andrew Norris, "Jean-Luc Nancy and the Myth of the Common," Constellations 7, no. 2 (June 2000).

9. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Experience of Freedom, trans. B. McDonald (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1993), 109. The difficulty here is hardly Nancy's alone. Hegel's thought is dis- tinctive and powerful enough that it resists being synthesized with that of others. It is significant, for instance, that Will Dudley's Hegel, Nietzsche, and Philosophy: Thinking Freedom (Cam- bridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2002) devotes only 12 out of 242 pages to its central aim of suggesting that a symbiosis between the two philosophers is the proper approach for phi- losophy. And this symbiosis, it turns out, requires Hegel and Nietzsche to split the labor of philos-

418 POLITICAL THEORY / June 2004

ophy in way that neither openly calls for, Hegel explaining how our necessary concepts are devel- oped and justified, and Nietzsche practicing a relentless genealogical critique to separate the necessary from the unnecessary and to determine which nonnecessary concepts will be most life affirming (p. 236).

-Andrew Norris University of Pennsylvania

Andrew Norris is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Pennsyl- vania. His recent publications include "Against Antagonism: On Ernesto Laclau's Polit- ical Thought" (Constellations, 2002) and "Political Revisions: Stanley Cavell and Politi- cal Philosophy" (Political Theory, 2002). His edited collection, Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben's Homo

Sacer, is forthcoming from Duke

University Press.