This collection of essays brings together an impressive line-up of thinkers who do not usually share the pages of a single volume. The wide array of topics it covers is held together by several overarching themes. The first of these is the title theme, namely history. In their introduction to the volume, the editors tell us that while few philosophers working today explicitly define philosophy in relation to its history, their work is often implicitly informed by underlying historical narratives. In order not to be determined by these presuppositions as vis a tergo, so to speak, we need to bring them to the light of philosophical reflection. This, in turn, leads us to what the editors identify as ‘Hegel’s question’, namely, the question whether ‘the historical character of philosophy itself sets a philosophical task’.
Hegel’s work is thus a good starting point for examining the relation between philosophy and its history. However, the concept of ‘history’ is extremely far-reaching, and Hegel’s concept of ‘philosophy’ is (most likely) not ours. The editors helpfully narrow the theme down by framing it in terms of contemporary currents. These are best viewed as a spectrum, with two extreme positions on each side. One end is occupied by those who believe that advances in the natural sciences, symbolic logic, or formal methods can establish philosophy as a discipline that is able to produce timeless truths. The other end is occupied by those who are sceptical about the capacity of philosophy to rise above its history, and as a result often hold some form of historical or cultural relativism. As the editors point out, Hegel has been recruited for both camps. What particular lessons, then, can we take from Hegel? An answer to this question requires a fresh interpretative look at the nature of the relation between philosophy and history as Hegel conceives it, and that is the first theme that the present volume proposes to explore.
The volume was, furthermore, put together in honour of Robert Pippin, whose work represents the second theme running through the collection. Many contributors develop topics articulated by Pippin, express their disagreement with him, or arbiter debates with other philosophers that Pippin has engaged in. Much like Hegel’s, Pippin’s work is extremely broad-ranging, but the two themes converge in so far as, the editors tell us, Pippin is the philosopher who has ‘most explicitly and extensively worked out a sophisticated Hegelian answer to Hegel’s question’. Pippin’s answer is said to represent an alternative option to the two positions at each end of the spectrum identified above. Pippin’s position, in brief, is that we should conceive of the history of philosophy as an open-ended process tending toward modern philosophy. This position, presumably, is intended to firmly embed philosophy in its historical development while avoiding historical relativism. Thus, one particular way to engage Hegel’s answer to the aforementioned question is to engage Pippin’s interpretation of this answer. Does Pippin’s interpretation of the relation between philosophy and history accurately represent Hegel’s position? Does it, furthermore, provide a compelling alternative to the dilemma articulated by the editors? In what follows, I will focus primarily on those contributions that address these themes most directly, and discuss the extent to which they shed light on the questions raised by the editors in this context.
In his contribution, John McDowell poses the question of why it matters to Hegel that Geist have a history. As a preliminary, McDowell draws an analogy between Hegel’s concept of Geist and Aristotle’s concept of the human soul. Both concepts, according to McDowell, are intended to capture those characteristics in virtue of which a human being is a human being. But, McDowell points out, this essentialist account of Geist is in tension with the socio-historical account that Pippin provides. While Pippin argues that we make ourselves into agents over time, McDowell argues that we are agents in virtue of belonging to a certain species that is essentially ‘geistig’. McDowell identifies a disagreement about how Hegel’s relation to Kant is to be conceived as the source of the difference in these conceptions of Geist. While Pippin believes that Hegel’s socio-historical account of Geist results from a response to paradoxes in Kant’s conception of self-constitution, McDowell argues that Hegel proposes a developmental account of the categories that make up Geist in order to overcome the arbitrariness of the table of categories.
McDowell then distinguishes between two levels of free agential activity, namely, the freedom to exercise one’s rational capacities, and empirical freedom from external constraints. For example, a human being who is locked up in a prison is free in the first sense by virtue of being a rational being but not in the second sense (or at least not fully, because the latter comes in degrees). This, finally, enables McDowell to distinguish between a developmental account of the self-unfolding of Geist, which pertains to the first sense of free agential activity, and a historical account that tracks the social-empirical levels of freedom in a given society, which pertains to the second. This distinction, we are told, means that Hegel’s developmental account of Geist does not map onto particular historical periods. This leads to the surprising conclusion that Hegel’s Phenomenology is not historical until the Geist chapter, which according to McDowell marks the beginning of the transition between the first and the second senses of freedom.
In many respects, McDowell’s contribution symbolizes the aims of the present volume: it contains an engagement with Pippin’s account of history, it draws on historical precedents (in this case Aristotle) to explain Hegel, it provides a narrative of the development from Kant to Hegel, and finally it circles back to the question of the role of history in Hegel’s philosophy. However, the question of the relation between developmental and historical components, and thus the response to the overarching question of the volume, is in my view somewhat underdeveloped. Both McDowell’s criticism of Pippin and his own alternative account rest on a diagnosis of a problem in a predecessor (in this case Kant) to which Hegel’s account is supposed to respond. A brief look at two other influential figures between Kant and Hegel somewhat clouds the picture McDowell wants to present. Much like McDowell’s Hegel, both Fichte and Schelling attempted to redress the apparent arbitrariness in Kant’s table of categories by presenting a developmental account of consciousness. However, both these figures seem to blur the lines between the developmental and the historical. Fichte refers to his developmental deduction of the categories in the Wissenschaftslehre as at the same time a ‘history of consciousness’; Schelling, more explicitly, states that he introduced history into philosophy by mapping the developmental stages of consciousness onto historical periods in his 1800 System. Hegel, of course, would have been alive to these attempts—indeed, as Siep’s contribution to this volume points out, ‘History of Experiences of Consciousness’ was the first title Hegel considered for the Phenomenology. Even though it is probable that Hegel sought to modify the frameworks of these predecessors, more detail would have been desirable on this question.
Sally Sedgwick’s contribution provides an interesting counterpart to McDowell’s. Her contribution aims to challenge a picture of Hegel’s logic according to which the conceptual developments are based on an analysis of pure thought and thus possess a deductive necessity. She argues that Hegel takes the concepts he operates with from the history of philosophy and, thus, that the developmental justification of the categories has an element of contingency. Although attempts to refute the picture of Hegel as the confident a priori deducer of all human history may appear like beating a dead horse, Sedgwick presents a well-argued account that provides a plausible counter-model. Furthermore, the claims that 1) the developmental account of the categories has an element of contingency, and that 2) the logic of the concept has a historical aspect to it, provide a challenge to McDowell’s account of the categories, as well as an interesting counter-proposal about the role of history in Hegel’s work. Nonetheless, the picture of Hegel that Sedgwick challenges is somewhat of a caricature, and it is not clear whether it would find many supporters today. For this reason, it would have been interesting to see Sedgwick confront her reading with a more nuanced universalist view of the development of the categories such as McDowell’s. Ludwig Siep’s contribution loosely ties into both of the above accounts. Siep points out ways in which Hegel’s text resists Pippin’s open-ended reading of historical development, and provides interesting suggestions for how Hegel can be viewed as having one foot in history and one foot out. That essay rounds out the first section of the volume, entitled Philosophy and History in Hegel.
The next section, entitled Hegel and Before, aims to explore Hegel’s relation to his predecessors more concretely. Here, most relevant to the overarching theme of the volume is the contribution by Karl Ameriks, which provides a framing of the problem that is similar to that of the editors, although shifted back into Hegel’s own historical context. The poles of Ameriks’ spectrum are occupied by what he calls the foundationalist, system-building ‘imperialist’ philosophers of the seventeenth century and, on the other hand, relativists such as Nietzsche, Heidegger and Foucault. Ameriks argues that the Jena Romantics, principally Hölderlin, Friedrich Schlegel and Novalis, were able to marry universalism with a historical outlook in a compelling manner.
A challenge that arises for Ameriks is to differentiate the Romantics from two less extreme versions of the two poles identified above, namely, Kant and Hegel. Ameriks provides a compelling list of factors that distinguish the Romantics from Kant. For example, despite Kant’s interest in history, he believed that his critical system had once and for all settled the basic issues driving the history of philosophy, and this is in sharp contrast to the Romantics’ recognition that the ‘imperialist’ ambition to create a complete philosophical system was untenable. However we cash out the doctrinal implications of such a recognition, it inevitably pushes the Romantics closer to the historicist, Pippin-inspired reading of Hegel, and makes the question of how to distinguish their respective positions more pressing. According to Ameriks, the most obvious difference lies in the Romantics’ adoption of a ‘nonprosaic form’. Although he dedicates some space to a discussion of what substantive differences arise from this, it seems implausible that the novelty of their understanding of the relation between philosophy and its history comes down to a style of presentation. Nonetheless, Ameriks makes a strong case for the inclusion of the Romantic alternative on the spectrum of positions sketched out by the editors.
Overall, the essays in this section are much more loosely connected with the twin themes of the volume, or only explore aspects of one or the other. For example, the contributions of Robert Stern and Terry Pinkard provide a lucid look at the Pippin-McDowell debate on self-legislation, this time in the context of ethics. Stern proposes (in somewhat Hegelian fashion) a third way as a means of resolving the standoff, while Pinkard assesses the extent to which a kind of Aristotelian naturalism can be ascribed to Hegel. Other essays, such as Rolf-Peter Horstmann’s, focus on Hegel’s relation to Kant’s metaphysics, and seem to deal with the theme of philosophy in history merely in the sense that doing philosophy about a historical figure necessarily does. However, Horstmann’s metaphysically robust account provides an interesting contrast not only to Pippin but also to other contributions in the volume.
The third section, Hegel and After, explores Hegel’s philosophy in light of contemporary positions. This section, perhaps furthest removed from the themes raised by the editors in the introduction, contains contributions from some of the leading proponents of classical critical theory (Jay Bernstein), third generation critical theory (Honneth and Menke) and contemporary psychoanalytic theory (Žižek and Lear).
Overall, the impression one has in reading this volume is that several of the essays, especially those contained in the first section, shed some real light on the pertinent questions identified by the editors, but that the rest drift further and further away from them. Taken together, the essays tend more toward thematic diversity than toward a sustained exploration of a unified theme. This is not necessarily a negative, and the richness of topics addressed represents perhaps the main strength of the volume. However, in many ways the editors fall victim to their own eloquence: the problem of the relation between history and philosophy is painted in such clear brush strokes that the reader is bound to be disappointed by a collection of otherwise interesting contributions that attempt to resolve this problem only obliquely.
