Hegel's Moral View of the World - Annotated Bibliography Example

Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit: The moral view of the world. A Brief Intro of Friedrich Hegel: He was born on August 27, 1770 and passed away on November 14, 1831 in present-day southwest Germany. By profession, he was a German philosopher. He had put impact on a lot of people and was well-known among writers including the ones who were his fans and those who were his critics. He belonged to a well-established middle class family. He was educated at Tübinger Stift. Works of Spinoza, Kant, Rousseau and Goethe attracted him a lot. French revolution also charmed him. Current beliefs, philosophy, customs and civilization were just a load of disagreement and anxiety for him, and “such as those between the subject and object of knowledge, mind and nature, self and other, freedom and authority, knowledge and faith, the Enlightenment and Romanticism” Hegel’s major philosophical goal was to take the challenges and pressure of surrounding and understand them as a complete and developing form and has named this perception as “the absolute idea” or “absolute knowledge.” For Hegel, the fundamental feature of this perception was the fact that it was developed and gave evidence of itself in a form of disagreement and refusal. This disagreement and refusal have an active value, which at every manner in each area of truth ---- “Consciousness, history, philosophy, art, nature, society” ---- gives rise to continued establishment till a point is accomplished which helps in protecting the disagreement in form of stages or smaller parts of something as a “whole”. The “whole” is “mental” since it is the mind which can understand all the stages and parts of life as they are processing. What makes Hegel’s perception special from others is his idea of recognizing the variance bounded by his thought of disagreement and “negativity.” Kierkegaard, Feuerbach, Marx, and Engels were inspired by him despite of being against Hegel’s main idea of philosophy. During his life, only four books of Hegel were published, namely, Phenomenology of Spirit (or Mind), which talked about the progress of consciousness from sense-perception to absolute knowledge, published in 1807; Science of Logic , which was the center of his philosophy, consisting of 3 volumes, publish in 1811, 1812, and 1816; Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, an overall review of his whole philosophical system, published in 1816; and the (Elements of the) Philosophy of Right, consisting of his political philiosophy, published in 1822. He even wrote articles (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hegel). What is Phenomenon? “Phenomenon” is a term which refers to appearances. It is originally a Greek word, employed by Plato in order to differentiate simple worldy outlook from the everlasting Noumena of the Ideal Realm. Here, we can go back to Plato’s story about the shadows inside the cave, which originally were ‘appearances’ but were taken as ‘realities.’ According to Hegel, the reality can be known when we are fully aware of the appearances as appearances play a role of covering reality to some degree and showing reality to some degree in a strange behavior. There are two types of phenomena: Materical Phenomena and Mental Phenomena. The phenomena of mind also cover some part of reality and show part of reality. The learning of phenomena is called phenomenology. Since Hegel has given attention to mental phenomena, his book is called Phenomenology of Mind (http://philosophy.eserver.org/hegel-summary.html). Phenomenology of Spirit: Hegel’s work Phänomenologie des Geistes (published in 1807) is known as The Phenomenology of Spirit or The Phenomenology of Mind in English. Geist is a German word which can mean both spirit and mind in English. Phenomenology of Spirit is counted as Hagel’s most significant works. In fact even he considers this work of his as a basis of his upcoming works (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenology_of_Spirit). The Phenomenology of Mind is a “study of appearances, images, and illusions throughout the history of human consciousness. Hegel has specially shown the development of consciousness. The phenomena of mind started when homo sapiens started to think and feel (http://philosophy.eserver.org/hegel-summary.html). This work of his discovers the environment and progress of mind or spirit. It shows how mind passes through a procedure of inner progress from the ancient repect of sensing through all kinds of “subjective and ovjective mind” which constitutes of art, religion, and philosophy to “absolute knowledge” that understand the whole methog of progressing as a portion of itself. It also builds up a whole structure of metaphsics, ethics, and political philosophy. Just the introduction of Phenomenology which he has given in his book is counted as one of his chief works and it holds a significant place in the history of philosophy. In this book, he has laid out the center of his philosophical system and has mentioned how his philsophy is different from the philosophy of past philosophers, including Kant, Fichte, and Schelling. His philosophical system includes the inspection of the consciousness’s practice of both “itself and of its objects” and extracting the active working that gains attention by looking at the consciousness experience. “Pure looking at” is the phrase which describes his philosophical system. Hegel had a firm belief that philosophy is not dependent on arguments and debates just based on reasonings and explanations. Instead, one should observe the true consciousness since it is not virtual and is in existence Hegel believes that we should explore of what really occurs or appears in reality. That is why he has applied the term “phenomenology”, which has come from the Greek word, meaning “to appear.” This gives us the full understanding of “Phenomenology of mind” as the “study of how consciousness or mind appears to itself.” In Hegel’s active method, it is the “study of the successive appearances of the mind to itself, because on examination each one dissolves intoa a later, more comprehensive and integrated form or structure of mind.” (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenology_of_Spirit). Hegel has outlined the development of consciousness from “savage and barbaric” types. The first type of consciousness is Sensory Consciousness. It’s a straightforward ‘you seen one thing you seen ‘em all’ consciousness. In this consciousness, we learn that various stuff have various importance of them and get knowledge about them. As we gain knowledge, this enforces Sensory Consciousness to take the shape of Perceptual Consciousness. We can see that everything in this world, let it be animals, things, places, etc, are worked and divided in a proper manner of Natural Science. Our Perceptual Consciousness gives us the ability to distinguish among the relationships and links between the objects. Now once we get the ability of having perception of different things, we now want to know more inner details of objects like how it works, what is the theory behind it and so forth. This leads our Perception Consciousness into Understanding Consciousness. We can refer to Kant here. Kant was the one who sketched the fundamental factor of the human mind and explained to consciousness its own self. Remembering this, Hegel put Kant’s achievement in his work. The Understanding Consciousness gathers up the uniqueness of the world’s countless things. If close attention is paid, then we can see that no matter what, the Understanding Consciousness also has its boundries and is not totally satisfactory. So, Hegel further progressed another step and comes up with the fourth step of consciousness, namely Self Consciousness. This consciousness was a step ahead of just plain consciousness of mind. Here Hegel can take us back in ancient times. Originally, Self Consciousness was developed long ago in the range of politics. This began with Desiring Self Consciousness, in which humans powerfully wanted to satisfy their requirements and requirements of their families. For this sake, they considered all others as enemies and as a result wars and fights broke out among them. Then, after many centuries, Self Consciousness was divided into two types: Mastery Self Consciousness and Servant Self Consciousness. Mastery Self Consciousness was the mind border of a ruler, who brought fear to daily life and ordered people of lower class. Master did not progress; all he did was fight and keep his mastery. Servant Self Consciousness suffered a lot but also developed new technologies and methods to serve the Master. Servant developed few philosophies: Stoic Self Consciousness (model of sincere effort and asset), Skeptic Self Consciousness (relief in distrust, and acceptance to the tough life), Unhappy Self Consciousness (complex attitudes). After the Self Consciousness, came the Idealist Consciousness. It decreased the world to a special idea and made all ideas real to them. It did not include the non-ideal half of truth. Then Consciousness was further developed into Rational Consciousness, which gave the “scientific faith.” A correct form of Idealism came with the name Empirical Consciousness, as Idealism did not include the non-ideal reality. This consciousness believes that the reason is in the subject. It studies the human mind. From Empirical Consciousness, we move on to Ethical Self Consciousness. This starts off with the instant existence of a family, without which a Self does not survive. The bad part of it is that it goes against the worldliness at its peak. We all know that we do not have total control and that other people have rights too, which makes us reach to the Legal Self Consciousness. The “social person with desire on one hand and respect on the other” reaches the Spiritual Consciousness, which comprehends “Spirit is Objective.” We can now view the consciousness built in our society and culture. The first one to begin with is Tragic Consciousness. This is employed on both “duty and guilt.” This can be shown with the help of two examples. When a soldier goes to war and die away, this is his DUTY. When a person is drunk and gets into an accident and die away, this is GUILT. The person who has ability for ‘self –sacrifice’, hard efforts, and alienation can become civilized. Thus, achieving Alienation Consciousness. In Hegel’s view, alienation is counted as the extra efforts and work required elevating an average person to a high level of culture. This include doctors, engineers, educators etc. There are people who are neither average nor included in the civilized group. Such people make their own empire, giving rise to Lacerated Consciousness. Next is the Duty Consciousness, which is essential for human matters in all cases. “My self confidence and send of duty are joined by my free will and combine to support my “Freedom Consciousness.” Anything can be done for the freedom of oneself or for the community’s freedom. Forgiving Consciousness successfully overcomes out darker side. Just like we have consciousness for society and culture, there are some consciousnesses for the religion too. Religious Consciousness begins back in Middle Ages. Hegel begins with Natural Religious Consciousness, which talks about how people used Nature objects for worshipping like sun, moon, stars, animals and so on. At humans developed, they found more different ways of worshipping; they built temples, sculptures, etc making the new development named as Artistic Religious Consciousness. The third form is the Revealed Religious Consciousness, in which, “the word is uppermost, morality is uppermost, love is uppermost, with its promise of harmony, resolution, synthesis, cooperation and a positive feeling far beyond peaceful co existence.” Though it seems like this will be the last and the superior consciousness, this is not true. Hegel viewed a higher consciousness, Spiritual Consciousness, which answered queries which could not be found in religion. Spirit does not specifically talks about just religious or mystical thing, but it’s the one important in social organizations and gatherings and in which a person becomes a social leader. To be an excellent social person, one should be able to explain the actions and motives better, leading to an upper level of consciousness, namely, Philosophical Consciousness. “When the love of the religious consciousness joins the analysis of the philosophical consciousness, the highest consciousness, ABSOLUTE CONSCIOUSNESS, is the shining result” (http://philosophy.eserver.org/hegel-summary.html). Another attractive part of Phenomenology of Spirit is the “dialectic of the lord and the bondsman.” In order to become open, every person should make himself busy in a life-death effort. The people who ignore this effort and lives in scaredness of “losing” the life, takes form of bondsman under the authority of lord. With respect to Hegel’s thought, the bondsman will figure it out one day that life does not mean anything. According to Hegel’s mind, taking risk is the only factor which can help in gaining freedom (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenology_of_Spirit). What is dialectical? Hegel is familiar with the fact that a brain seeks to find out the whole truth, but this cannot be done purely, and some kind of difference comes in between. Since everything has two sides, consciousness can concentrate on one side at a time. So, the procedure goes this way that first one side is solved, then the second side, then at last it comes to rest. This procedure of repairing and rest is considered as dialectic. Dialectical motion has three stages: Thesis, Antithesis, and Synthesis (http://www.wpunj.edu/cohss/philosophy/COURSES/HEGEL/DIALECTX.HTM) We can consider two cases of dialectic to further understand this concept: Dialectic of Personhood: THESIS: Start here: "I am born; I am a child." ANTITHESIS: Negation of the thesis. "I have grown; I am an adult; so, I am NOT the child I used to be." SYNTHESIS: Negation of the opposition between thesis and antithesis. "I am NEITHER child NOR adult, but a whole person." Dialectic of Existence: THESIS: Being ANTITHESIS: Nothingness. SYNTHESIS: Becoming (http://www.wpunj.edu/cohss/philosophy/COURSES/HEGEL/DIALECTX.HTM). Another concept introduced in this book is the “master and slave relationship.” This connection was already argued well enough in the 20th century, mainly due to its link to Karl Marx’s idea of public expansion. This relationship also reflected Soren Kierkegaard’s view of the God (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenology_of_Spirit). In Hegel’s view, what is master slave dialectic? This concept arises when two self-consciousnesses face each other. Here, both of them are thinking about each other from the percetption of their own. These two self-consciousnesses can be regared as mirrors to each other. By comparing them with mirrors mean that each one is reflecting the other one; “buyt it also reflects the other reflecting itself; it reflects the other reflecting itself reflecting the other.” This keeps on going and develops anger and agitation. This mirroring can only be broken in one way, that is to fight: then the winner will be regarded as the master while the loser will be regarded as the slave (http://www.wpunj.edu/cohss/philosophy/COURSES/HEGEL/CONSCI.HTM). Comparison between Hegel and Kant: Kant has been linked to various kinds of thoughts. For example, things like just simple consciousness, logic, mathematics, etc. The basic principle is the character of the resource or resources from which the information is driven. Kant required religion as the assurance of both the information of natural world and of ethics. For Hegel, the “meditating” term between body and soul is not God, its judgment and this shows an important difference. For Kant, time and space were not primary truths, like for Hegel, but were just types of appearance for Kant. “Hegel’s triadic manner of reasoning also looks less strange when we notice that Kant argues ‘that in each class the number of the categories is always the same, namely, three’, and that ‘the third category in each class always arises from the combination of the second category with the first’. So, for example, in relation to the categories of quantity, Kant claims to derive the concept of totality from a combination of unity and plurality; similarly, ‘limitation is simply reality combined with negation; community is the causality of substances reciprocally determining one another’, and ‘necessity is just the existence which is given through possibility itself’.” For Hegel, his judgment came from a mixture of BEING and NOTHING while for Kant, its just the concept of NOTHING. “One may even wonder whether the tripartite arrangement of Hegel’s system into the moments of logic, nature, and mind owed something to Kant’s suggestion that ‘concepts of reason may make possible a transition from the concepts of nature to the practical concepts’” For Hegel the word “absolute” means something different than for Kant, meaning its UNCONDITIONED for Kant and CONDITIONED for Hegel. The idea of WHOLE is for Kant part of the ‘transcendental substrate’ of reason and means “nothing in itself.” While Kant insists that “the whole is not in itself already divided.” “For Kant, while space (because it is simply appearance) allows of infinite divisibility, the idea of ‘an organized whole…itself again so organized that, in the analysis of the parts to infinity, still other organized parts are always to be met with’ is not a ‘thinkable hypothesis’ outside the empirical world of appearance. But Hegel does not think that if the organization typical of this ‘false infinite’ cannot be applied to ‘things in themselves’ that therefore nothing else can. He is very much convinced that things in themselves are knowable, and that the Absolute has a discernible internal structure ‘in itself’. Hegel also rejected Kant’s general conception of Idealism as ‘the theory which declares the existence of objects in space outside us either to be merely doubtful and indemonstrable or to be false and impossible’. Hegel believed neither of these things; his remarks on eating are intended to make this quite clear. In addition, Hegel wanted to challenge some of Kant’s specific claims about just how much we can know from experience. Things like ‘a special ultimate mental power of intuitively anticipating the future (and not merely inferring it), or…a power of standing in community of thought with other men, however distant they may be’ are possibilities which Kant dismisses as phenomena lying outside experience (B270, A223). Hegel, however, tries to find a place for these unusual powers in his philosophy of mind. Most people would of course find Kant’s view preferable; Hegel is addressing what is ordinarily considered to be the paranormal (http://www.blog.co.uk/main/index.php/cogitoergo) In the Critique of Pure Reason Kant argued that, if there were not a certain degree of variety and regularity among the content of sensations, we could make no cognitive judgments and so could not have self-conscious experience. Kant called this necessary transcendental condition for the possibility of unified self-conscious experience the "transcendental affinity of the manifold of intuition"; it concerns the contents of sensations and their relations. Kant argued that only transcendental idealism can explain this condition. By 1801, Hegel realized that Kants transcendental idealism cannot explain this condition at all; quite the contrary. Kants purported "explanations" all conflate the ground of knowledge of this condition (ratio cognoscendi) with the ground of the condition being fulfilled (ratio essendi). The ratio cognoscendi of transcendental affinity is this: we know this condition is fulfilled insofar as we are self-conscious, and insofar as we understand Kants proof that transcendental affinity is a necessary condition of possible self-conscious experience. The ratio essendi of transcendental affinity lies, as Kant twice recognized, in the object of knowledge. Thus it cannot derive from the subject, in the way in which Kant held our forms of intuition (space and time) and forms of judgment (the twelve categories) do. Hegel developed this line of argument against the subjective idealisms of Kant and Fichte in detail in his section on "Self-Consciousness" and especially in "Reason". Hegel, taking skepticism about realism much more seriously than Flay realizes, proceeded to justify--on a naturalistic basis--Kants thesis that "inner experience in general is only possible on the basis of outer experience in general. “Finally, although Flay identifies Sense-Certainty as a naive realism, he doesnt identify the main thesis Hegel refuted: the thesis that a conceptual "knowledge by acquaintance" is humanly possible. In order to distinguish Hegels idealism from the views of the British Idealists--and so to protect Hegels views from Russells and Moores criticisms of British Idealism--Robert Pippin has developed a neo-Kantian view of Hegel that is similar to Hartmanns. Pippin proposes that Kants idealist successors dispensed with his doctrine of space and time as a priori forms of intuition, and that they extended further than Kant the view that transcendental categories concern the a priori conceptual conditions presupposed by any self-conscious determinate judgment about objects. They stressed our spontaneity of thought, and thus our rational freedom and cognitive independence, i.e., our autonomy. This precluded empiricist and naturalist accounts of concepts. Such a framework generates the problem confronting all German idealists: how free, autonomous, spontaneous thinking subjects can ground their own subjective conceptual activity. Pippin claims that Hegels continuity with this tradition is deeper than Hegel admits (Idealism, 60). Pippin thus views Hegels idealism as an extension, not a radical transformation, of Kants. Pippin ascribes to Hegel a comprehensive theory of "thoughts self-determination." This theory is supposed to retain Kants idealist insights while rejecting Kants account of space and time as a priori forms of sensory intuition. Pippin contends that Hegel rejected Fichtes account of subjectivity because its conceptual posits are arbitrary. According to Pippins Hegel, conceptual positing presupposes an identified insufficiency in the previous conceptual posit, and always anticipates a presupposed goal. Ultimately, this goal is a full articulation of the wholly internal conceptual conditions for determinate, self-conscious judgments. Conclusion: Thus to sum up the whole discussion, a word or two about Hegel would be added here so that his personality and his moral view could be combined into one single place. In addition, Hegel never inferred the "irreality" of a relation from its "internality." This distinguishes Hegels ontology in a decisive manner as compared to that of Bradleys, and insulates it from Russells critique. Moreover, Hegel militated against any unbridgeable cleft between appearance and reality, and, at least from 1804 onwards, Hegel insisted on discursive knowledge of the absolute, an absolute that consists in the integrated sum total of appearance. All three of these fundamental points of Hegels views are directly opposed to Bradleys. Unfortunately, such inattention to crucial detail is characteristic of Pippins interpretation of Hegel. A quite different approach to Hegels epistemology has been developed by Michael Forster, whose interpretation is based on Hegels early essay on ancient and modern skepticism. According to Forster, Hegel sought to meet Pyrrhonian equipollence arguments (the trope that finds, for any thesis or position, an apparently equally plausible counter-thesis or position) by developing a position that includes all alternative theses or positions (so that his view has no alternative), by arguing that all supposed alternatives to this position are ultimately incoherent. This strategy also meets the challenge of "concept instantiation," namely, the problem posed when the central concepts of a philosophical view are not, in fact, instantiated. According to Forster, Hegel develops a system that disallows any ultimate distinction between concepts and their instantiation. References: Prof. Eric Steinhart, 1998, Dialectic: http://www.wpunj.edu/cohss/philosophy/COURSES/HEGEL/DIALECTX.HTM Wikipedia, 30 April, 2006, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hegel Wikipedia, 1 May 2006, Phenomenology of Spirit: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenomenology_of_Spirit Prof. Eric Steinhart, 1998, Consciousness: http://www.wpunj.edu/cohss/philosophy/COURSES/HEGEL/CONSCI.HTM Paul Trejo, August 1993, Summary of Hegels Philosophy of Mind: http://philosophy.eserver.org/hegel-summary.html Kants Critique of Pure Reason and the forms of thought, 2005, http://www.blog.co.uk/main/index.php/cogitoergo Word Count: 3,744 Read More