HEGEL’S LECTURES ON THE PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION

Hegel lectured on the philosophy of religion for the first time in the summer semester of 1821 at the University of Berlin, lectures that he was to repeat on three occasions, in 1824, 1827, and 1831. His delay in addressing the topic of religion was not a sign of lack of interest. On the contrary, there was no topic in which he had a deeper and more abiding concern, as evidenced from his days as a theological student in Tübingen through the years in Frankfurt, Jena, and Nuremberg. Upon his departure from Jena, he wrote to a friend: “I was eager to lecture on theology at a university and might well have done so after some years of continuing to lecture on philosophy.” However, the opportunity to do so did not present itself until after his arrival in Berlin. He was stimulated to offer his own views by the impending publication of Friedrich Schleiermacher's Glaubenslehre, a work with which Hegel had reason to believe he would find sharp disagreements. As a philosopher, he did not lecture on theology per se but on philosophy of religion, a discipline that he took to be engaged not simply with the phenomenon of religion but with the nature and reality of the object of religion, namely, God. Since this transcendent referent had been rendered problematic by Enlightenment philosophy, history, and science, Hegel set out to develop a new philosophical theology that would reestablish the conceptual foundations of religion by offering a postmetaphysical and postcritical way of thinking about God.

Hegel played a large role in the development of modern hermeneutics (or interpretation-theory), inheriting richly from its past (especially from Herder) and bequeathing copiously to its future (especially to Dilthey and Gadamer).

Certain of Hegel's contributions in this area concern what one might call the scope and significance of hermeneutics, and are, I think, of unquestionable validity and importance. In this connection, he in particular championed several ideas which were to some extent already in the air, but to which he lent a new force and influence. Among these ideas are the following: First, he plausibly identified as expressions of mind or meaning requiring interpretation not only linguistic texts and utterances, but also nonlinguistic arts (especially architecture, sculpture, painting, and instrumental music), a broad set of social institutions and activities which he calls “objective mind,” and individual actions. For these positions, see, for example, respectively, Hegel's Aesthetics, his Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, and his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. Subsequent hermeneutics has largely taken over this broadening of focus. For example, the mature Dilthey and Gadamer take the meaningfulness, and hence interpretability, of nonlinguistic art for granteds; Dilthey adopts a version of Hegel's conception of “objective mind ” (explicitly singling this out as one of Hegel's most important contributions; and Dilthey stresses that in addition to intentional expressions of mind and meaning (such as linguistic texts and utterances, artworks, and social institutions), there are also unintentional ones, especially people's actions, which consequently stand just as much in need of interpretation in order to be understood.

INTRODUCTION

Though it was initiated by Pythagoras, expanded in Plato's Timeaus, comprehensively developed by Aristotle, and healthy throughout the Mediaeval, Renaissance and Modern periods well into the nineteenth century, in the twentieth century among analytic and scientifically minded philosophers, “philosophy of nature” apparently vanished. Fortunately, the increasing calibre of recent research in history, methodology and philosophy of science has once again revealed fascinating issues at the intersections among the natural sciences, scientific methodology, history of science, and philosophy of science, which today - precisely because no discipline can plausibly monopolize them - are rightly designated philosophy of nature. Placing Hegel's notorious Philosophy of Nature within this interdisciplinary area does not yet illumine it. Hegel classifies his philosophy of nature as rational physics. “Rational physics” may sound quaint, outdated, and even presumptuous. However, Newton identified the genre of the Principia as “rational mechanics” (a proper part of rational physics), and rational physics remains a serious discipline today, with professional journals and recent textbooks to show for it. “Rational physics” is physical theory which emphasizes the conceptual foundations and basic principles of physics and how these can be used to explain particular physical phenomena, rendering them comprehensible. This is the key aim of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, because sufficient analysis of the conceptual foundations of natural sciences requires philosophical resources which complement the resources found within scientific theories and methods, which alone, he argues, are insufficient to the task.

INTRODUCTION

Hegel has often been portrayed as a dogmatic metaphysician, uninterested in epistemological issues and in defending his philosophy against epistemic challenges. Indeed, the very idea of epistemology as a distinct philosophical focus or discipline was framed in part by those who opposed Hegelianism.

But the portrayal is a caricature. Hegel is interested in epistemological issues and, as several interpreters have recently observed, has a sophisticated view of the epistemic status of his philosophy.

Central here is Hegel's relation to skepticism, a recurring theme throughout his career. This chapter is concerned with the view of skepticism expressed in Hegel's early Jena writings - not only in his essay on ancient and modern skepticism, the topic of recent discussion, but also in his writings about Jacobi. Others have explored, to great effect, Hegel's preference for ancient over modern scepticism. I will argue that the modern skepticism disparaged by Hegel should be understood as a kind of naturalism, and that, notwithstanding his view of its philosophical merits, it remains in competition with his own philosophical project. I will also argue that the ancient skepticism taken by Hegel to be of philosophical importance is not merely retrieved from the pages of ancient books, for Hegel views it as intimately connected to modern philosophy's nihilism, thematized by Jacobi. While Hegel's views about skepticism and other important matters shifts significantly after Schelling's departure from Jena in 1803, his early views constitute the indispensable backdrop against which to understand the Phenomenology and his later writings. Nowhere is this more true than in the case of skepticism.

No one who looks at the bibliography to this new edition of The Cambridge Companion to Hegel will be unimpressed by the remarkable growth of interest in Hegel. The bibliography covers only the last fifteen years - roughly those since the appearance of the first edition of this book - and it deals with books in English alone. To prevent it from ballooning to twice, thrice, or four times its size, the editor had to exclude French, German, and Italian books on Hegel. Such a surge in interest is remarkable for any philosopher, but especially for one who, some fifty years earlier, would have been treated as a pariah.

How do we explain the great contemporary interest in Hegel? It is necessary to admit that it is rather puzzling. After the rise of analytic philosophy in the 1920s, and due to the growing influence of positivism in the 1930s, Hegel's reputation fell into steep decline in Britain. The patron saint of British Idealism had become the ogre of positivism and the very model of how not to do philosophy. Hegel's fortunes began to change in the 1960s as the result of the growth of interest in Marxism. For the student rebellion and trade union movements of the 1960s, Marx became the guiding spirit; but the Marx that inspired them was not so much the mature Marx of Das Kapital but the early Marx of the 1844 Paris manuscripts. The concepts and terminology of the early Marx - “alienation,” “self-consciousness,” “mediation” - made Marx's debts to his great forbear obvious. It was clear that one could understand the precise meaning of these important but strange concepts only if one made an intensive study of Hegel, who had not been studied in Britain since the early 1900s. Although Marx claimed that he broke with Hegel - that he stood Hegel on his head - it was obvious that one could appreciate this only with a good grasp of Hegel.

Hegel accords great philosophical importance to Kant's discussions of teleology and biology in the Critique of the Power of Judgment, and yet also disagrees with Kant's central conclusions there. More specifically, Kant argues for a generally skeptical view of teleological explanation of living beings; Hegel responds that Kant should instead defend such explanation - and that the defense of teleology should have led Kant to different conclusions throughout his theoretical philosophy.

To be sure, Kant's view is not entirely skeptical. Kant actually argues that we necessarily conceive of living beings in irreducibly teleological terms. But we cannot know that living beings themselves truly satisfy the implications of teleological judgment. We cannot know whether teleology truly explains anything in biological cases. And this skepticism requires Kant to carefully limit his positive claims about teleology: it is subjectively necessary we conceive of living beings in teleological terms, and this conception is legitimate when employed not as an explanation but as a heuristic aid for scientific inquiry.

Hegel's response in his Science of Logic and Encyclopedia is by no means entirely critical. Hegel frequently praises a distinction central to Kant's analysis of teleology - the distinction between “external” and “inner purposiveness” [innere Zweckmä Bigkeit]. On the one hand, there is the concept of a complex system, like a pocketwatch with many parts, which satisfies the implications of teleological judgment in virtue of the work of a separate or external intelligent designer. Here the parts of the system are means to the external ends or purposes [Zwecke] of a designer (e.g., reliable indication of the time).

Until the 1990s, the discipline of art history, as developed in Europe and North America from the nineteenth century onward, refused to acknowledge the crucial role of the body in the production and reception of works of art. Art history and its discursive and institutional corollaries, the art gallery, the auction house, and much of art criticism, thus systematically ignored the body, even (after 1960) in the face of the development of an explosive interest in representing, enacting, or otherwise foregrounding the body as central to the experience of visual culture. This chapter addresses why this was the case and explores how shifting emphases on the body in the production and reception of visual arts practices in the post-Second World War period insistently wore away at the occlusion of the body in art discourses and institutions. It will then examine the fact that, in the 1990s, a new generation of art historians and critics had began to theorize the central importance of the body as a crucial matrix, ground, and activating source for meaning and value in the visual arts and visual culture in general. The suppression or erasure of the live or inhabited body in institutionalized versions of art discourse and in art institutions has a long history in Euro-American culture.

Oral history studies are fed by many research streams, including folklore, memory studies, trauma studies, anthropology, psychology, communication studies, critical cultural studies, and, increasingly, performance studies, raising the critical question: how do performance analytics change our understanding of and approach to experience narrative (oral history, life history, stories of collective experience)? / Performance and narrative / In the late 1970s, after the publication of Richard Bauman's landmark “Verbal Art as Performance,” folklore/vernacular studies attended more vigorously to processes of transmission, shifting the focus of study from the re-presentation of verbal art as fact (or artifact) to the rehearsal of site-specific interaction identified as performance. This shift relied on Bauman's four criteria: competency (demonstrable skill or status as a storyteller); intensity (the sense of a special time, space, and ways of seeing and knowing experience to which performance indicators “key” in audiences); emergence (the unpredictable and uncontrollable shape, affect, and outcomes of time-space aesthetics); and changing structures of social relations (immediate changes among participants heralding change on a larger scale “as if” by proxy). Bauman positioned performance as a critical frame that illumined the authority, reflexivity, and transformative power of some art acts. Thus Bauman encouraged us to answer the persistent question, what is performance?, by asking instead: in what ways is it useful to call a particular act or set of interactions “performance”?

““In my innermost heart I am a Minimalist with a guilt complex.” - Santiago Sierra / “Touchable Stories began in 1996 with the idea of using the talents of contemporary artists to help individual communities define their own voice and give it public expression.”” - Shannon Flattery, Touchable Stories website (italics in original) / The above quotations come from two artists whose work differs enormously, yet both artists' work has been called “social practice.” As I noted recently in the “Lexicon” special issue of Performance Research, social practice is a term that has allegiances with a number of movements in experimental art and performance studies. Those allegiances bring to mind other terms that share some kinship with social practice: activist art, social work, protest performance, performance ethnography, community art, relational aesthetics, conversation pieces, action research, and other terms that signal a social turn in art practice aswell as the representational dimension of social and political formations. However, “social practice” is also embedded in a longer history of terms that have not always enjoyed triumphant celebration in the history of aesthetics: literal art, functionalist art, dumbed-down art, social realist art, victim art, consumable art, and related terms that have been coined to lament the capitulations to accessibility and intelligibility that can occur when art practice and social practice - aesthetics and politics - combine. How should we come to terms with this difference? Do the barometers for assessing aesthetic innovation differ so enormously from those that assess social innovation?

“Theatre is different from all other forms of theatrical presentation because it is live. . . . “At the heart of the theater experience, then, is the performer-audience relationship: the immediate, personal exchange; the chemistry and magic which gives theater its special quality.”” / I use this quotation, from an introductory course document prepared by Professor Kaoime Malloy, to stand for what I shall call the traditional view of live theatrical performance. The key word is immediate, which suggests that the traditional definition of live performance is founded on an opposition between the immediate and the mediated. From this perspective, the performer/audience relationship in film, for instance, is thought to be mediated by the camera and the rest of the filmic apparatus; in the theatre, by contrast, this relationship is seen as direct and unmediated. Such distinctions are largely commonsensical. Whereas stage actors can appropriately be considered the “authors” of their performances, film actors cannot. As the actor Willem Dafoe emphasized when I interviewed him, film actors basically provide raw material that is shaped into performances by directors and editors and therefore need not be as concerned about the through-lines of their performances as stage actors. Audiences witness theatre actors in the moment of performance but see performances by film actors only long after the actors have done their work. Stage acting is therefore temporally immediate to its audience in a way that film acting is not. Perhaps because of its disciplinary genealogy, performance studies often exhibits a bias toward live events and a resistance to including technologically mediated ones among its objects of inquiry. Performance studies is rooted in the fields of theatre studies, anthropology, sociology, folklore, speech, and oral interpretation, all of which take live events as their major points of reference, whether those events be aesthetic performances, cultural performances, rituals, or everyday behavior and conversations.

My destination is “Universal Experience: Art, Life, and the Tourist Eye,” an exhibition exploring the phenomenon of global tourism, at the Hayward gallery in London's Southbank Centre. The irony is that I can't find the entrance to the Hayward despite the fact that I'm a native Londoner and have been going to the gallery since it opened in 1968, and despite the fact that I'm now a tourist in London (living away from the city for more than twenty years) and so, apparently, hailed by the exhibition's claim to universality. But, then again, I've never been able to find the entrance to the Hayward. Although the building is easily visible from street level, and stairways and walkways provide helpful signage, the actual entrance is obscure and absorbed into an unrelenting concrete landscape, populated chiefly by the usual skateboarders and other (lost?) cultural visitors. The Hayward was designed by the Department of Architecture and Civic Design of the then Greater London Council (GLC) to be a significant cultural contribution in the ongoing renaissance of central London in the postwar period. Notably, some of the department's staff were contributors to the 1960s avant-garde architectural magazine Archigram, and today the Hayward is often heralded as a textbook example of Brutalist architecture championed by, among others, the Archigram Group. The gallery is elevated above street level, a severe mass of concrete among multilevel surfaces, connecting walkways, and oddly positioned circular staircases; as critics often observe, this part of London's Southbank Centre complex more resembles a public car park than a cultural space. And, in this vein, the Hayward is perhaps best captured by the architectural critic Hugh Pearman: “this is uncompromising concrete at its most heavyweight, most muscular, most brutal. But I do like it, for it is a unique record of the period. It is the Mike Tyson of arts buildings.”

In the last days of 1965 and the first three months of 1966, between 80,000 and 100,000 people were killed in Bali, Indonesia. Many of these were artists and teachers associated, however loosely, with the Indonesian Communist Party (PKI). Since many of the bodies were mutilated and dumped into mass graves or rivers - preventing cremation and possibly rebirth - we will probably never know a more exact number. In 1965 80,000 people constituted 5 to 7 percent of Bali's population: approximately the same percentages for those lost, a few years later, in the killing fields of Cambodia. In Cambodia, though, it took four years and a deal of organizational planning for the Khmer Rouge to effect such carnage; in Bali it took under four months. In all, 500,000 to a million people perished in Indonesia. The American CIA (which supplied information to the Indonesian army) stated in an intelligence report of 1968, “In terms of the numbers killed the . . . massacres in Indonesia ranks as one of the worst mass murders of the 20th Century . . . far more significant than many other events that have received much more attention.” No place had a higher percentage of dead than Bali.

Can performance, normally thought of as “intangible” and “ephemeral,” be protected and safeguarded? What would that entail? The two questions, which sound straightforward, are extremely complicated, maybe even irresolvable. When Lourdes Arizpe, an eminent Mexican anthropologist who served as Assistant Director-General for Culture for UNESCO (1994-8), and I met in New York in 2000, these were the questions we asked each other. As someone who has worked on multiple international cultural preservation projects, including UNESCO's World Heritage program, Lourdes Arizpe insisted that protecting intangible cultural heritage was vital - just as great works of art must be conserved, she said, cultural expressions of great significance must also be preserved, particularly those that are rapidly disappearing owing to economic and social change. Furthermore, safeguarding ancient or original forms of expressions allows the preservation of unique creativities that give continuity to meanings and loyalties vital to many groups. Some in UNESCO argued that some societies do not have buildings they want to preserve - no Taj Mahals or Auschwitzes or cathedrals - and thus world heritage sites have been disproportionately located in the “First World.” These are signs of cultural power and capital, but underrepresented communities have defining practices and traditions that need crediting and safeguarding. Some are disappearing, while others are changing drastically. Without UNESCO's development of a Convention to Safeguard Intangible Cultural Heritage, communities of practice could not make claims for recognition and support. They would be threatened with extinction. That was Arizpe's commitment to the question.

It is no doubt a coincidence that the internet user eager to know what democracy might be who types the question “What is democracy?” into Google should be directed first to a page on the website of the US Department of State. That the second-ranked hit leads to a lecture given by Larry Diamond at Hilla University in Iraq in January 2004 is similarly fortuitous, since Diamond, an academic expert in democracy who served as an advisor to the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq in 2004, went on to write a widely praised book that offered a sharply critical account of American efforts to promote democracy in the wake of the invasion of 2003. Despite Diamond's later criticism of the implementation of democracy in Iraq, he is broadly in agreement with the State Department in his answer to the initial question. The State Department's website offers this: “Freedom and democracy are often used interchangeably, but the two are not synonymous. Democracy is indeed a set of ideas and principles about freedom, but it also consists of a set of practices and procedures that have been molded through a long, often tortuous history. In short, democracy is the institutionalization of freedom. For this reason, it is possible to identify the time-tested fundamentals of constitutional government, human rights, and equality before the law that any society must possess to be properly called democratic.”

This chapter pursues answers to a question, most urgently posed in relation to dance events, but equally central to all performance: what do you feel, physically, when you watch another body performing? How and why do you respond to the motions of another body? What do you sense? How does your physical experience of what you are seeing help you understand what you are watching? Focusing the inquiry with these questions, I seek to emphasize the sensations of our bones, muscles, ligaments, tendons, and joints. The sensory experience provided by these corporeal elements, often referred to as the kinesthetic sense, has been largely ignored in theories of performance, yet for those of us in dance studies, it remains a predominant aspect of aesthetic experience, one that must be interrogated as part of any inquiry into dance's significance. In the 1930s the dance critic John Martin described movement's effect on viewers as contagious, a term that is defined as the rapid spread of influence or emotion from one body to another, but that also suggests pollution and disease. More recently, the neurophysiologist Vittorio Gallese has described the phenomenon of yawning when someone yawns, or laughing when they laugh, as contagious behavior. What kind of interkinesthetic connectivity forms the basis for such claims? What hold does the kinesthetic have over subjectivity such that its influence would be described as contagious?

The word “queer,” like the word “performance,” has a vexed historical trajectory. Once a pejorative slur targeted at gender and sexual nonconformists, queer is currently also a hip signifier of postmodern identity. To embrace “queer” is to resist or elide categorization, to disavow binaries (that is, gay versus straight, black versus white) and to proffer potentially productive modes of resistance against hegemonic structures of power. This deployment of queer, then, exemplifies the traits of performance in that “its definitional indeterminacy, its elasticity, is one of its constituent characteristics.” In academic circles queer has become a catalyst for theorizing not only gender and sexuality in ways that detach them from singular or rigid identitarian markers, but also a way to discuss race and class in antiessentialist ways. A poor, fifty-year-old, African American female rugby player from the southern United States might be considered “queer,” for instance, because each of the adjectives that describe her do not comport with the traditional ideas of who plays rugby. According to this logic, this particular player is queer because she is anomalous, odd, or strange in the world of rugby. It is this oddity and strangeness that queer theorists would use to argue that all identity is fraught because it is always already mediated through language and ceded to those who have the power to control representation. Thus this player's queerness can be taken as subversive because her presence in the rugby league - a sport typically populated by white middle-class men - transgresses the image of the “rugby player” in the social imaginary and potentially deconstructs power relations within the context of rugby as a sport. Through the slide from personal pronoun to active verb (for example, “I am a queer” to “The actor queered the character”), the term has been reappropriated to activate a way to theorize subjectivity, social relations, and culture in general.