Numerous attacks on earlier versions of this essay make it necessary for me to try to put the pieces together, again.
G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit (trans. A.V. Miller) (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977).
Fredrick Beiser, Hegel (London: Routledge, 2005).
Terry Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).
Ronald Dworkin, Justice in Robes (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006).
Drucilla Cornell, Beyond Accomodation: Ethical Feminism, Deconstruction, and Law (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999).
Judith Butler, Precarious Life: The Powers of Mourning and Violence (London: Verso, 2004).
"The most lasting contribution of Hegel's Logic -- [is] the insight that identity is constituted in and through otherness."
Drucilla Cornell, The Philosophy of the Limit (London: Routledge, 1992), p. 21.
With the appearance of Popper's The Open Society and Its Enemies, Hegel has become a target for those who are hostile to all metaphysics and speculative thinking, both of which are highly necessary. Hegel -- along with Popper's other target, Plato -- is often demonized as a "totalitarian" and "anti-scientific" thinker. I doubt that Hegel was either of those things.
"Hegel is one of those thinkers just about all educated people think they know something about." Terry Pinkard comments: "His philosophy was the forerunner to Karl Marx's theory of history, but unlike Marx, who was a materialist, Hegel was an idealist in the sense that he thought reality was ultimately spiritual, and that it developed according to the process of thesis/antithesis/synthesis. Hegel also glorified the Prussian state, claiming that it was God's work, was perfect, and was the culmination of all human history. All citizens of Prussia owed unconditional allegiance to the state, and it could do with them as it pleased. Hegel played a large role in the growth of German nationalism, authoritarianism, and militarism with his quasi-mystical celebrations of what he pretentiously called the Absolute."
Pinkard concludes: "Just about everything in [this] paragraph is false except for the first sentence." (Pinkard, p. ix.)
Philosophy is vital to intellectual life. The cost of abandoning disciplined rational speculation of a philosophical sort -- that is, theory -- is the popularity of that mixture of New Age mysticism and psychobabble which is often mistaken for wisdom in America today. Worse, rampant scientism that denies the reality of anything that can not be examined in a laboratory.
Feminists have to be better than the options presented to them, usually by a male-dominated power-structure that wants you to believe that heavy philosophy is not for you, whereas chi-chi, fashion magazine "light" feminist theory ("feministing!") is the best you can do. That's bullshit. Feminists cannot afford to be stupid or ignorant of philosophy. ("Judith Butler and Gender Theory.") Feministing is fine; real feminism is in the streets.
Women who are philosophers are doing some serious thinking about political and legal theory, reinventing the work and traditions of guys and gals like Kant and Hegel, Marx and Nietsche, Wollstonecraft and De Beauvoir, Sartre and Weil, Butler and Davis. The best women thinkers on these topics today have figured out that culture is where the action and power is found in postmodernist societies. If we are going to rumble with antifeminists, then culture is where the brawl will take place. You better be ready. ("David Stove and the Intellectual Capacity of Women" then "Let's Hear it For the Boys" and "Thoughts of a Domestic Revolutionary.")
Culture "wars" does NOT mean censorship. It means a willingness to engage with intelligent adversaries and to consider and weigh opposing philosophical views, also a willingness to engage in life-long study and effort in order to achieve political objectives. You always have to be in shape for that title fight.
You can still be a scientist, by the way, and a philosopher -- in fact, you can be philosophical about science. You can do better than Full Frontal Feminism. True science -- as distinct from "scientism" -- is not something that any rational person is against. As I say, Hegel certainly was not anti-science. Hegel was not opposed to scientific inquiry. Hegel believed that science (like spontaneity) has its time, place, and concerns. But then, so does philosophy. ("A Doll's Aria.")
What's wrong with Full Frontal Feminism? Well, for one thing, it is ghettoizing. Feminism is relegated to the status of an eccentric taste for a discreet group of people, like the chess section of the bookstore. Yes, you can spell "discreet" that way. Either feminism is about everything in society changing, or it's about not very much that matters. There's nothing wrong with "in your face feminism." But if you're going to address issues of government policy with respect to war and poverty, conflicts between religion and developments in popular culture for all of humanity, as a feminist (and you should!), then you have an obligation to engage with adversaries in an intellectually sophisticated way and not to be stupid and angry for the wrong reasons. ("Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin.")
You must display the scholarship and intellectual daring -- not mere spouting of slogans -- that commands the respect of intellectuals disagreeing with you or hostile to your views. You cannot read only a small list of canonized feminists and imagine that you are in a position to debate complex issues with rivals. By the way, I am not a rival of feminism. I am only opposed to stupidity and intolerance regardless of the "faction" endorsing these things. ("Skinny People Dressed in Black" and "David Stove and the Intellectual Capacity of Women.")
At the center of much of this contemporary debate concerning Hegelian dialectics is the issue of whether Hegel was an apologist for Prussian proto-fascists in the nineteenth century, whose work was amenable to later use by Nazis and other dictators in the twentieth century, or whether Hegel was a "utopian" who was ahead of his time. "Utopian" is a dirty word in American academia and society, which happens to be highly utopian and idealistic, especially about what it calls "realism" and "pragmatism."
" ... we share what we might call an aspirational concept of law," Ronald Dworkin writes, "which we often refer to as the ideal of legality or the rule of law. [emphasis added] For us this aspirational concept is a contested concept: we agree that the rule of law is desirable, but we disagree about what, at least precisely, is the best statement of that ideal. [emphasis added] Some philosophers hold that the rule of law is a purely formal ideal: that legality is fully secured when officials are required to and do act only as established grounds permit. Other philosophers argue for a more substantive conception of the ideal: they think that legality holds only when the standards that officials accept respect certain basic rights of individual citizens." (Dworkin, p. 5.)
To have a proper sense of Hegel's politics, however, one must see what Hegel meant by the State. He did not encourage an uncritical worship of those in power nor a total deference to the wishes of the aristocracy in his native land. What Hegel understood by the State, as set forth in The Philosophy of Right, is "the actuality of the ethical idea." This is really a proposed reconciliation of individualism with communitarianism through a system of law. ("Manifesto for the Unfinished American Revolution" and "The 'Galatea Scenario' and the Mind/Body Problem.")
Hegel agrees with the second group of American legal philosophers to which Dworking refers -- and so do I. There is no law separable from our understanding of justice and ethics. To analogize further to the American situation, for Hegel, the United States is not the messy actuality of what and how we do things at any given time; rather, the U.S. is the best understanding of the Constitutional order "called into being" by the appropriate interpretative community of "philosophers."
The "philosophers" includes the Supreme Court, legal interpreters and critics, participants in government and the intellectual community, that is, the people. The State is the "moral project of the community." This means the "coming into being of freedom and justice" within our Constitutional system is the only truth of the American national "idea." ("What is Law?" and "A Commencement Address by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham-Clinton.")
"The State" does not refer to one of "the things in flux," but to an idea and a standard of judgment, to what states would be like if they lived up fully to their reasons for being. The State -- our legal community -- is always now:
"... This reason is to be found partly in a higher sphere ... The whole realm of Objective Spirit and human institutions that culminates in the state is but the foundation of a higher realm of Absolute Spirit that comprises art, religion and philosophy." (Kaufman)
Students of the film "Gladiator" will recall the emperor's question to Maximus: "What is Rome, Maximus?" The answer from Maximus was "Rome is an idea." Well, the United States is also an idea. Revolution? Law? These are ideas and ideals.
America is an idea of the dignity of individuals who are guaranteed inviolable rights under law, rights even against government. Those of us who have reason to believe that -- much too often -- this promise is a cruel lie may nevertheless continue to believe in that promise as a hope if not a reality. I admit that, in New Jersey, such a hope may be naive or an impossible wish. Fortunately, New Jersey is not typical of the United States of America. ("Manifesto for the Unfinished American Revolution.")
Discussions of the State lead immediately to the concept of Law. The word is capitalized when referring to Law in the abstract, as an idea. Hegel uses the word Recht. Law must not be corrupted, violated, tainted or deviated from merely for the sake of momentary expediency in a Constitutional democracy, especially not by the State or mechanisms of law enforcement. Rights must never be sacrificed to expediency or social experiments:
" ... the hatred of law, of right made determinate by law, is the shibboleth which reveals and permits us to recognize infallibly, fanaticism, feeble-mindedness, and the hypocrisy of good intentions, however they may disguise themselves." (Hegel)
Professor Drucilla Cornell (I love the two "l's" -- twice!) is really smart and scary in her knowledge of Hegel and every other intimidating Continental thinker of the last two hundred years. You do not want to tangle with her in any debate on these issues nor would it be wise to bump into her in a dark seminar room when she's pissed off. Get this:
"As we have seen in Hegel, legal rules are given ethical meaning by reference to the realized Good of relations of reciprocal symmetry. Let me emphazise that when I use the word meaning, I am not referring to institutionalized linguistic meaning in the sense of the intelligibility of sentences, but instead to ethical meaning. Hegel understood that the dilemma of legal interpretation does not turn on whether we can cement linguistic meaning. Legal rules are justified in Hegel through the appeal to the realized relations of reciprocal symmetry which give them ethical justification. [Justice of Legal Institutions.] The Good, in the strong sense of the ultimate universal, in Hegel, is imminent in social institutions and therefore capable of being grasped by the human mind." (Again: "What is Law?" and "A Commencement Address by Secretary of State Hillary Rodham-Clinton.")
If you're a philosopher, then Aristotle, Spinoza and Kant should immediately leap into your mind when reading Hegel. The philosopher's "anxiety of influence" may be even greater than what is felt by poets. (Harold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence.)
The truth of the U.S. Constitution is not to be found in a realm of Platonic forms, in other words, but here on earth, in better realizing the meaning of its provisions through constant revisions and progress towards completion of our "unfinished" American revolution. The truth of the American idea, in Hegelian terms, is historical. That truth consists in the progressive realization of freedom and also equality through overcoming the economic and political or military challenges faced by every generation of Americans.
What is the third movement that reconciles freedom and equality? Hegel says: "Right" or "Law." (See my discussion of Bradley's "Concrete Universal.")
Individually and socially, we grow in self-knowledge -- which is the same as liberation in Hegelian terms -- in order to become the nation we are. It follows that the truth or meaning of legal rules is found in their purposes and in the purposes of the legal system -- of legality as a whole -- as opposed to being identified with a mechanical and technical adherence to the narrowest interpretations of specific rules in particular cases. ("What is Law?")
Ronald Dworkin's discussion of judges interpreting and adding to a collectively constructed narrative comes to mind at this point. We do not sit back, contemplate our navels and ponder the meaning of it all in order to "realize" our Constitution or America; but rather, we look around us and study the evolution of our flawed and oh-so human institutions, together with the crises that we have survived and that we face at this historical moment, in order to decide how they make clearer the always hidden (or only partly revealed) meaning of the Constitution, as an ideal. We are practical romantics, idealists in a cynical world -- in other words, we are Americans.
Michelangelo said that he imagined the figure he hoped to carve was buried in the stone and that he was trying to "free" it from excess marble. Great jurists -- according to this Hegelian understanding -- seek to liberate the proper Constitutional order or to define the relationship between individuals and the State, through an ever-sharper clarification of what "is," of the legal reality all around us, by the resolution of very specific disputes.
This process of Constitutional interpretation is historical because it always means coming to terms with what has happened. In other words, how we got to where we are now. It is also forward-looking, since it is an attempt to take the next step towards where we should be. Transcendence is a goal. Constitutional adjudication is like dancing the mambo. One new member of the current U.S. Supreme Court may have an edge in that dance competition. I bet Scalia is taking lessons.
For Hegel, this is also what each of us must do, personally, if we are to be free. This Hegelian insight concerning "self-knowledge as liberation" is mixed with Schopenhauer's ideas concerning the will and the ubiquity of sexuality, when it resurfaces in Freudian psychoanalysis almost a century later. ("Arthur Schopenhauer's Metaphysics of Art.") I will give the final word to Hegel:
"One word more about giving instruction as to what the world ought to be. Philosophy in any case always comes on the scene too late to give it. As the thought of the world, it appears only when actuality is already there cut and dried after its process of formation has been completed. The teaching of the concept, which is also history's inescapable lesson, is that it is only when actuality is mature that the ideal first appears over against the real and that the ideal apprehends this same real world in its substance and builds it up for itself into the shape of an intellectual realm. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey in grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk."
