Is Hegel's conception of objectivity functionally impossible?

64bithuman

I am studying Hegel and am struggling to understand Hegel's dialectic and his claims of objectivity. If I understand Hegel correctly, then he claims that the philosopher's task is to understand history. To understand history is to form ideas - ideas are content and form - which Hegel compares to body and soul, meaning one can't exist without the other.

Content is conceptual and form is actual. Thus, I understand Hegel to be suggesting that, for example, within the concept of justice the actual could be called the 'law'. As we collectively strive to unfold rationality, we gain a better and better rational understanding of justice by continually progressing through history and improving our laws. I understand him to claim that, for example, within the concept of justice lays an objective actuality of justice that we are striving towards. Or that to understand the idea of justice, one must form a concept of justice which is circularly informed by the actuality of justice, that is, the long human history of recorded law.

However, I do not understand how our collective historical striving towards Hegel's objective actuality of a concept can functionally be separated from subjective knowing. I can understand, for example, the idea of the 'look', but I fail to recognize how constructing a narrative of understanding from history is anything except a massive scattering of subjective 'looks' throughout recorded history. Does a 'look' in a given time not simultaneously suggest both subjectivity and objectivity?

For example, one could claim that justice in Sharia law is cutting the hands off a thief. Wouldn't a traditional and literal Muslim scholar claim that this conception of justice is the true actuality of justice? Hegel might argue that this is not, but how can this be understood in any way except subjectively?

Hegel himself acknowledges that man is a 'child of his time'. Does being a child of one's time not assert a subjectivity inherently?

Therefore, to understand the idea of justice, isn't Hegel dependent on a very long and distinctly European subjective historical tautology? In other words, both the conception of justice and the actuality of justice are not objective, but constantly in flux? If they are in flux, how does Hegel know that there lays an objective idea of justice? Doesn't that become an act of pure faith in a distinctly European vision of a utopian future? If, for example, we assume that progress is not moving us to utopia, but rather to dystopia, then couldn't we argue that within the concept of justice there lays a final actuality of tyranny?

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introbert

Hegel has his own way of defining/ conceptualizing objectivity. I'm not sure Hegel's definition of objectivity is sound, but he was before structuralist thought, so the idea of an object being sort of self defining rather than being defined in relation to other things could be held in contrast. My understanding of Hegel's objectivity is that he loathed a kind of subjective philosophy of concepts that give meaning to eachother, so that the end result is not based in reality but in a mental construct. I guess to Hegel if a concept had objectivity it wouldn't rely on an interrelated web of concepts. I figure the way Hegel divides up the object into a form and content kind of acknowledges there has to be some relational nature of concepts, but he makes it with itself.

Fooloso4

If I understand Hegel correctly, then he claims that the philosopher's task is to understand history. — 64bithuman

To understand history it to understand the development of geist - spirit or mind. This is not simply a matter of an individual studying the past as a subject matter separate from or other than the individual, but to know it from within as part of this development, to know it from the standpoint of the "universal individual".

From a thread a few years ago on the Phenomenology

The quoted material is #27 and #28 from the Preface. The quotes are followed by my attempt to explicate the text. There are earlier posts in the thread that also address your questions.

27:

Knowing, as it is at first, or, as immediate spirit, is devoid of spirit, is sensuous consciousness. In order to become genuine knowing, or, in order to beget the element of science which is its pure concept, immediate spirit must laboriously travel down a long path.

Immediate spirit is devoid of spirit because it is consciousness of something other, that is, it is not self-consciousness. The path from consciousness of what is other to self-consciousness is the development of genuine knowing.

28:

However, the task of leading the individual from his culturally immature standpoint up to and into science had to be taken in its universal sense, and the universal individual, the world spirit, had to be examined in the development of its cultural education.

The universal individual, the world spirit, is not any particular individual:

... the particular individual is an incomplete spirit, a concrete shape whose entire existence falls into one determinateness and in which the other features are only present as intermingled traits.

The universal individual is one formed by the development of Western culture. Although genuine knowing involves both subject and object and is in that sense subjective, it is not a matter of whatever any particular individual declares or thinks or believes. It is universal subjectivity. But it is not simply a matter of consensus, that is, what is true is not so because most or all at any given time take it to be true.

In any spirit that stands higher than another, the lower concrete existence has descended to the status of an insignificant moment; what was formerly at stake is now only a trace; its shape has been
covered over and has become a simple shading of itself. The individual whose substance is spirit standing at the higher level runs through these past forms in the way that a person who takes up a higher science goes through those preparatory studies which he has long ago internalized in order to make their content current before him; he calls them to mind without having his interest linger upon them.

Each stage of development is secondary to the completion of the movement of spirit. By way of analogy, one's first steps are of momentous importance but cease to be important as one learns to walk and run. Hegel is not minimizing the importance of what those before him have accomplished. Their accomplishments, however, have become internalized, part of one's cultural education. However great the accomplishments of Plato or Kant or Newton or anyone else, they are only moments in the development of knowledge and the world spirit. Although we may never accomplish what they did we are able to see further than they by standing on their shoulders.

In that way, each individual spirit also runs through the culturally formative stages of the universal
spirit, but it runs through them as shapes which spirit has already laid aside, as stages on a path that has been worked out and leveled out in the same way that we see fragments of knowing, which in earlier ages occupied men of mature minds, now sink to the level of exercises, and even to that of games for children. In this pedagogical progression, we recognize the history of the cultural formation of the world sketched in silhouette. This past existence has already become an acquired possession of the universal spirit; it constitutes the substance of the individual, or, his inorganic nature. – In this respect, the cultural formation of the individual regarded from his own point of view consists in his acquiring all of this which is available, in his living off that inorganic nature and in his taking possession of it for himself.

Our inorganic nature is our spiritual nature. We are as we are not because of some timeless and invariant human nature or individual particularity. It is as it is because our spiritual nature is cultural and historical. The " cultural formation of the individual regarded from his own point of view" appears to be a matter of what he or she acquires on his own, but:

... this is nothing but the universal spirit itself, or, substance giving itself its self-consciousness, or, its coming-to-be and its reflective turn into itself.

It is not the individual person but the instantiation or indwelling of spirit manifest in the individual.

Tom Storm

↪Fooloso4

Thank you. Do you find Hegel's positions convincing?

Fooloso4

Do you find Hegel's positions convincing? — Tom Storm

I think he made an important contribution to philosophy with the idea that thinking is cultural and historical. I do not accept his metaphysics though. I do not think the movement of thought is teleological.

180 Proof

↪Fooloso4

:up:

alan1000

"I am studying Hegel and am struggling to understand Hegel's dialectic and his claims of objectivity"

Take heart, Bertrand Russell had the same problem.

Agent Smith

Syat, subjective opinions tend to cancel each other out while objective facts tend to last, quite literally forever. Dialectics is the setting in which issues are purged of subjectivity and what's left is objectivity.

Paine

↪Agent Smith

I read the dialectic as an interaction between people where there are always subjects acting in objective conditions. The subjects are changed through the interactions, and this creates new conditions.

For example, the subjective experiences before the master/slave conflict are different from those that happen after it has gone down.

Agent Smith

↪Paine

Syād ...

Gregory

In 1911 Husserl wrote his essay "Philosophy as a Rigorous Science" in response to the historicism of writers such as Wilhelm Dilthey. It is true that Hegel shared a *kind* of historicism with Herder yet it is quite clear he had an ontology that was far more objective than subjective. See Hegel's final "Lectures on the Proofs for the Existence of God" published by Oxford University Press... Hegel was a forerunner to modern phenomenology, not cultural relativism, if read correctly

Paine

↪Gregory

I see where you are going with that. Do you have a passage that underlines that for you?

Gregory

↪Paine

Yes:

"The first thing to be considered in the sphere of the revelatory religion is the abstract concept of God; the basis is the free, pure, revelatory concept. God's manifestation, God's being for an other, is God's determinate [ontological] being or existence [Dasein], and the soil of God's determinate being is finite spirit."
Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (1831)

To reveal is to allow truth to be seen. He uses subjective terms ("negative", "movement", "ideal", ect) and yet structures his Objective Logic against his Subjective Logic in a war in which the former wins out, resulting in the picture of concrete, universal, Platonic reality. One of his followers (sic), Heidegger, helped clear up how history and philosophy sublate each other in dialectical combat:

"In his 1925 Kassel lectures on Dilthey, Heidegger argued even more strenuously that 'the struggle for an historical worldview' could not be left to historical study but required a genuinely philosophical confrontation with Daisen's sense of itself as a historical being." Continental Divide written by Peter Gordan pg 178-179

Gregory

I recently read the "proofs" Lectures and am now into the Davos book

Is Hegel's conception of objectivity functionally impossible?

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