Berkley Center

Prof. Pinkard, University Professor at Georgetown, presented on Hegel’s philosophy of history. Contrary to common understandings thereof, which see Hegel as charting Spirit’s dialectical march towards some sort of definite telos—and so as supporting a strong account of some sort of moral progress—Prof. Pinkard’s reading offers us a Hegel who is quite resistant to the idea of moral progress.

Since, on his interpretation, Hegel’s philosophy of history focuses on the history of ways in which we seek to make sense of things, the effort involves, at its core, a normative idea: that of an agent moving in a space of reasons towards (what it conceives as) its good. As soon as this idea appears, however, a struggle for authority and recognition arises. Although the idea of agency sounds like it might be individualistic, these struggles for recognition—for something like respect for one’s conception of the good—reveal the depth of our dependence on one another. (The first half of Hegel’s Phenomenology is about the failings of individualism.) So the content of conceptions of the good becomes the object of a social struggle. The same is true with conceptions of agency, which change over time in a path-dependent way (although not necessarily in a way that’s beyond normative assessment). Thus, although there is a normative core to Hegel’s philosophy of history, this does not count as an objective moral core with any substantive content.

Anyone seeking to engineer a confrontation between Hegel’s philosophy and contemporary moral theory should first realize that Hegel is unconcerned with the division of moral theories into teleological, deontological, and virtue-based ones. Instead, he insists that we look at how an ethics makes sense in the context of a society—how it animates an entire form of life. Sometimes, a society’s animating ethic well coheres; sometimes not. In the latter cases, the form of life it supports breaks down, leaving people babbling.

The question of the ethical coherence of a form of life is in part a question of how well it integrates the “building blocks” it has inherited from the past. Hegel’s well-known conception of Sittlichkeit is a reconstruction of how post-1789 Europe was positioned coherently to combine three such inherited elements: abstract rights, universal duties, and concrete goods (of family, civil society, and the state). The broader historical narrative that Hegel puts forward as the backstory to this European moment, however, is highly defective. This for two reasons. First, Hegel was far off in his assessment of the civilizations of Asia and Africa. Second, his account of the beginnings of this story relied on Tacitus’s since discredited account of the “German” tribes as a racially pure people speaking their own language in their own homeland.

Some of the lively discussion at the seminar revolved around the question of whether this philosophy of history would support any conception of moral progress. It does distinguish between coherence and breakdown; but is there any progression as one moves, via a period of breakdown, from one coherent social state to another? Professor Pinkard was resistant to that idea. Conceptions of agency—and, indeed, the metaphysics of agency itself—change. It is not that we become more enlightened. Rather, new norms simply appear in history. This is what happened, for instance, with slavery. On Hegel’s view, as interpreted by Prof. Pinkard, there wasn’t anything wrong with slavery in Aristotle’s time; but the changes in norms that have happened in recent centuries make it now true that slavery was wrong in Aristotle’s time. How this avoids being inconsistent without invoking an historicist relativization of truth was something that we lacked the time fully to explore. Prof. Pinkard did point out, however, that, unlike Aristotle and people for many centuries to follow, we are in a position to see how slave society broke into incoherence. Similarly, those who succeed us might be in a position to see how some of our cherished verities rest on incoherencies in our form of life that we are not in a position to discern.

Prof. Pinkard was asked about how the incoherencies that result in breakdown differ from the conflicts among values that value pluralists take to be pervasive. His answer was that, according to Hegel, the breakdowns occur when Spirit (or the Absolute, or the social collectivity) no longer understands itself and when the infinite ends it has posited—in the case of we post-1789 quasi-Europeans, freedom—become impossible to fulfill. The fact that we are able to speak comfortably about value pluralism, however, suggests that this one has not become impossible to fulfill. Such a pluralism is an achievement of the modern, post-1789 world, shielded by the freedom it posits as an infinite end.

Another element of Hegel’s view that also came in for considerable discussion, and that also pulls in the direction of historicism, is what Professor Pinkard called Hegel’s “peculiar form of ethical internalism.” This is his view that norms must be tied into the passions of individuals to have any Geltung (validity and force). One participant challenged the attribution of this view to Hegel, noting that Hegel is quite dismissive of the normative importance of wants and needs when he discusses property law in the Philosophy of Right. Prof. Pinkard’s response was that the link to individuals’ passions is located at a deeper structural level—in this case, in the fact that property is necessary to be an agent in the form of life in question. Relatedly, Prof. Pinkard was asked about Hegel’s understanding of alienation. His answer was that what it is for a norm to have a grip on someone—the kind of issue central to Hegel’s internalism—is conceptually connected to its ability to enable an agent to make sense of what she is doing. When a norm can no longer enable an agent to do this, an agent experiences alienation.

On an account of indeterminacy-reducing moral progress such as Prof. Richardson’s, moral progress can come about on account of authoritative moves made by the moral community. Does Hegel allow that this can happen? Prof. Pinkard suggested that the answer is “no.” It is never that anything that people lay down as supposedly authoritative turns out to be so simply because they have so laid it down. Rather, something can become authoritative for some set of agents because of how they take it up as a building-block in their (new) form of life. This latter sort of authority, however, is historically bounded and unintentionally achieved. It does not seem to introduce any directionality to history.