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Hegel and the New Historicism

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 June 2015

Robert Stern
Robert Stern*
Affiliation:
Department of Philosophy, University of Sheffield
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Abstract

… intellectual and moral process (is) a history of increasingly useful metaphors rather than of increasing understanding of how things really are.” (Richard Rorty, Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity, p. 9)

In an engaging recent paper, Ian Hacking has argued that Hegel is “speaking to us” once again, after a long period (in Anglo-American philosophy, at least), in which he appeared to be speaking to another audience, located in another world. He has our ear once more because our philosophical thought has once again begun to incorporate Hegelian themes, after decades in which our respective paths did nothing other than diverge. The aim of much Anglo-American philosophy has been to combine a Kantian “conceptual scheme” idealism with a late Wittgensteinian picture of the individual subject as embedded within a system of shared norms, practices and understandings; this has meant that it is now receptive to a form of “internal realism”, which also has a social, historical, contextual dimension, and it is this that many claim to have found in Hegel. As Richard Winfield has noted recently, after decades in the wilderness, Hegel is now an inspirational figure for the anti-foundationalism, anti-Cartesianism and anti-realism of the “new orthodoxy”:

Type
The Presence of Hegel in Contemporary Thought
Information
Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain , Volume 11 , Issue 1-2: number 21/22 , 1990 , pp. 55 - 70
Copyright
Copyright © The Hegel Society of Great Britain 1990

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References

1. Hacking, Ian, “Five Parables”, in Philosophy in History: Essays in the Historiography of Philosophy, ed. by Rorty, Richard, Scheewind, J. B. and Skinner, Quentin, OUP, 1984, pp. 103-24, p.107 Google Scholar.

2. Winfield, Richard Dien, “Hegel Versus the New Orthodoxy”, in Hegel and His Critics: Philosophy in the Aftermath of Hegel, ed. by Desmond, William, SUNY Press, 1989, pp. 219-35, p. 220 Google Scholar.

3. D'Amico, Robert, Historicism and Knowledge, RKP, 1989, p.x Google Scholar. Cf Bernstein, Richard J., Beyond Objectivism and Relativism, Basil Blackwell, 1983, pp. 3–4 Google Scholar: “We have been told that it is an illusion and a deep self-deception to think that there is some over-arching framework, some neutral descriptive language, some permanent standards of rationality to which we can appeal in order to understand and critically evaluate the competing claims that are made, and that we are limited to our historical context and to our own social practice. The dream or hope that many philosophers have had — to grasp the world sub species aeternitatus (sic) — is, we are told, a deceiving illusion that leads to dogmatism and even terror.”

4. See, for example, MacIntyre's attempt to meet what he calls the relativist and perspectivist challenges in Whose Justice? Which Rationality? Duckworth, 1988, pp. 352ffGoogle Scholar.

5. The reservation “appear to hold” is necessary because Rawls' actual position, as expressed in his more recent papers, is considerably less universal in its implications than this. He now merely claims that the principles of justice arrived at in the original position articulate our conception of justice. Moreover, even in A Theory of Justice itself, some of Rawls' comments are more historicist in tone; see, for example, A Theory of Justice, OUP, 1972, p. 548 Google Scholar: “Of course in working out what the requisite principles (of justice) are, we must rely upon current knowledge as recognized by common sense and the existing scientific consensus. We have to concede that as established beliefs change, it is possible that the principles of justice which it seems rational to choose may likewise change.” Richard Rorty has stressed the historicist and pragmatist side of Rawls' work in “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy” in Peterson, Merril D. and Vaughan, Robert C. (eds). The Virgins Statute for Religious Freedom, OUP, 1988, pp. 257–82Google Scholar (reprinted in Reading Rorty, ed. Malachowski, Alan R., Blackwell, Basil, 1990, pp. 279–302 Google Scholar) and Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, OUP, 1989, pp. 57–58 Google Scholar.

6. Sandel, Michael, “The Procedural Republic and the Unencumbered Self”, Political Theory, 12 (1984), pp. 81-96, pp. 90–91 CrossRefGoogle Scholar; cf. Sandel, Michael, Liberalism and the Limits of Justice, OUP, 1982, p. 179 Google Scholar.

7. Hegel, G. W. F., Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction, trans, by Nisbet, H. B., with an Introduction by Forbes, Duncan, OUP, 1975, p. 81 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. MacIntyre, Alasdair, Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, p. 4 Google Scholar.

9. “To be practically rational, so one contending party holds, is the act on the basis of calculations of the costs and benefits to oneself of each possible alternative course of action and its consequences. To be practically rational, affirms a rival party, is to act under those constraints which any rational person, capable of an impartiality which accords no particular privileges to one's own interests, would agree should be imposed. To be practically rational, so a third party contends, is to act in such a way a to achieve the ultimate and true good of human beings.” (Ibid., p. 2)

10. See for example Hegel, G.W.F., Phenomenology of Spirit, trans, by Miller, A. V., OUP, 1977, pp. 252–61Google Scholar; and Hegel, G.W.F., Philosophy of Right, trans. Knox, T. M.. OUP, 1952, pp. 75–104 Google Scholar.

11. Of Rorty, Richard, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, p. 48 Google Scholar: “To accept the claim that there is no standpoint outside the particular historically conditioned and temporary vocabulary we are presently using from which to judge this vocabulary is to give up on the idea that there can be reasons for using languages as well as reasons within languages for believing statements, this amounts to giving up on the idea that intellectual or political progress is rational, in any sense of “rational” which is neutral between vocabularies.”

12. Larry Laudan has explained this connection as follows: “Specifically, it has normally been held that any assessment of either rationality or scientific progress is inevitably bound up with the question of the truth of scientific theories. Rationality, it is usually argued, amounts to accepting those statements about the world which we have good reason for believing to be true. Progress, in its turn, is usually seen as a successive attainment of the truth by a process of approximation and self-correction. ( Laudan, Larry, Progress and Its Problems: Towards a theory of Scientific Growth, RKP, 1977, p. 125)Google Scholar

13. Laudan, Larry, “A Problem-Solving Approach to Scientific Progress”, in Scientific Revolutions, ed. by Hacking, Ian, OUP, 1981, p. 145 Google Scholar.

14. MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. 2nd edn., Duckworth, 1987, pp. 268–9Google Scholar. For a similar attempt to compare the history of moral systems to the history of scientific theories, see Schneewind, J. B., “Moral Knowledge and Moral Principles”, in Revisions: Changing Perspectives in Moral Philosophy, ed. by Hauerwas, Stanley and MacIntyre, Alasdair, University of Notre Dame Press, 1983, pp. 122–3Google Scholar.

15. Collingwood, R. G., The Idea of History, OUP, 1946, p. 326 Google Scholar; cited Laudan, , Progress and Its Problems, p. 121 Google Scholar.

16. For a recent reading of Hegel along these lines, see Pippin, Robert, Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness, OUP, 1989 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

17. “How ought we to decide among the claims of rival and incompatible accounts of justice competing for our moral, social and political allegiance? It would be natural enough to attempt lo reply to this question be asking which systematic account of justice we would accept if the standards by which our actions were guided were the standards of rationality. To know what justice is, so it may seem, we must first learn what rationality in practice requires of us. Yet someone who tries to learn this at once encounters the fact that disputes about the nature of rationality in general and about practical rationality in particular are apparently as manifold and intractable as disputes about justice.” ( MacIntyre, , Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, p. 2 Google Scholar)

18. Of Winfield, Richard Dien, “Hegel Versus the New Orthodoxy”, p. 232 Google Scholar: “If, on the contrary, one were to adopt the new orthodoxy's view that standards of justice are rooted in historically conditioned practices, as MacIntyre argues, there is no way to escape the nihilistic conclusion that all ethics are corrigible conventions relative to prevailing institutions.”

19. “What each person is confronted with is at once a set of rival intellectual positions, a set of rival traditions embodies more or less imperfectly in contemporary forms of social relationship and a set of rival communities of discourse, each with its own specific modes of speech, argument and debate, each making a claim upon the individual's allegiance. It is by the relationship between what is specific to each such standpoint, embodied at these three levels of doctrine, history and discourse, and what is specific to the beliefs and history of each individual who confronts these problems, that what the problems arc for that person is determined.” ( MacIntyre, , Whose Justice? Which Rationality?, p. 393 Google Scholar)

20. This phrase has been used recently by Taylor, Charles in his Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity, OUP, 1989 Google Scholar.

21. Of Kuhn, Thomas S., The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, University of Chicago Press, 2nd edn. 1970, p. 206 Google Scholar: “A scientific theory is usually felt to be better than its predecessors not only in the sense that it is a better instrument for discovery and solving puzzles but also because it is somehow a belter representation of what nature is really like. One often hears that successive theories grow ever closer to, or approximate more and more closely to, the truth. Apparently generalizations like that refer not to the puzzle-solutions and the concrete predictions derived from a theory but rather to its ontology, to the match, that is, between the entities with which the theory populates nature and what is “really there” … (But) There is, I think, no theory-independent way to reconstruct phrases like “really there”; the notion of a match between the ontology of a theory and its real counterpart in nature now seems to me illusive in principle. Besides, as an historian, I am impressed with the implausibility of the view. I do not doubt, for example, that Newton's mechanics improves on Aristotle's and that Einstein's improves on Newton's as instruments for puzzle-solving. But I can see in their succession no coherent direction of ontological development.”

22. Hegel, G. W. F., Hegel's Logic, trans. Wallace, W., 3rd edn., 1975, §163 Z, pp. 227–8Google Scholar.

23. Rorty claims that “for the purposes of liberal social theory, one can do without … a model (of the human self)”, insisting that only those with “a taste for philosophy” will try to incorporate such ontological items within their social theory. ( Rorty, , “The Priority of Democracy to Philosophy”, p. 270 Google Scholar) Cf also: “The view I am offering says that there is such a thing as moral progress, and that this progress is indeed in the direction of greater human solidarity. But that solidarity is not thought of as recognition of a core self, the human essence in all human beings.” (Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, p. 192)