Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of history chart the development of free, reflective self-conscious selves, but what exactly does that mean? For skeptics, it doesn’t mean much, as Hegel notoriously appears to ground this development in the development of the state. This has inspired Popper’s well-known accusations that Hegel was a puppet of the Prussian monarchy, the “enemy of the open society,” etc., etc., and that the “free” subjects of the state as Hegel describes it are anything but. Further, from Marx to Habermas, Hegel is indicted as one who adopts a quietist attitude of priestly monasticism, so while those imbued with the proper critical, historical consciousness are busy trying to change the world according to the dictates of one or another praxis philosophy, Hegel is content to contemplate it as it goes up in flames. Habermas sees in Hegel’s mature work a “blunting of critique” and a “stoic retreat” from the problems of modernity, the very ones that Habermas believes the younger Hegel so incisively diagnosed.
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In this video from the 2014 Telos in Europe Conference, Christopher Coker discusses why the idea of the West is an idea whose historical moment has come and gone, and how the collapse of the Western project is reflected in the crisis of liberal internationalism and the problems arising out of identity politics. As an occasional feature on TELOSscope, we highlight a past Telos article whose critical insights continue to illuminate our thinking and challenge our assumptions. Today, Robert Wyllie looks at Alain Manville’s “Hegel and Metaphysics,” from Telos 42 (Winter 1979). Wesley Phillips’s “Melancholy Science? German Idealism and Critical Theory Reconsidered” appears in Telos 157 (Winter 2011). Read the full version online at the TELOS Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here. Lauren Coyle’s “The Spiritless Rose in the Cross of the Present: Retracing Hegel in Adorno’s Negative Dialectics and Related Lectures” appears in Telos 155 (Summer 2011). Read the full version online at the TELOS Online website, or purchase a print copy of the issue here. |
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In his Critique of Judgment, Kant explains how “subjective judgments” resemble theoretical claims about truth in that they claim universal assent, even though they do not have an objective basis for doing so. In other words, although they are subjective, they assert a strict sense of objectivity and claim a universal ground for truth. Therefore, the proof of the validity of these judgments cannot be found in a specific “observable feature” of the object, but rather in the “actual intersubjective agreement.” While truth in his third Critique is neither a matter of the intellect nor a thing reducible to conceptual realm, it seems that he offers a different sense of truth that influenced the major trends in continental philosophy. One can trace this sense of truth as it provides a ground not only to “test the limits of our historical era” but also “to go beyond them.” 
In “Hegel and Metaphysics,” Alain Manville joins the echelon of French theorists who attempt to focalize Hegelianism around one core concept. In the vanguard, Jean Wahl turned unhappy consciousness into an organizing principle for reading Hegel. More famously, Alexandre Kojève pared Hegelianism down to the core master-slave dialectic. Manville focuses upon the annihilation of metaphysics in Hegel’s speculative recognition that being equals nothingness. Speculative thought transcends the understanding (Vernunft), which sees only an ontological contradiction. Hegel dismisses Vernunft and metaphysics, Manville argues, to grasp concrete reality in a postmetaphysical sense. 
What is the relationship between theory and praxis today? During the 1960s, Adorno’s melancholy science was reproached with the charge of resignation, echoes of which have continued up to the present day—whether in Agamben or in praxis-oriented radical thought. In what is the most substantial critique to date, Gillian Rose initially sympathized with Adorno only to reject his neo-Kantian Marxism—the problem being that the melancholy science would involve a masochistically infinite task concerned with the recovery of an irretrievable utopia, leading to a methodological detachment from the social object. Understood in this way, the question of finite social praxis becomes an immanently philosophical matter. While following Rose’s orientation toward German idealism—for its imagined critique of neo-Kantianism and theory-ism—this article argues that, due to his unsatisfactory treatment of historical suffering, a return to Hegel alone (albeit after Marx) is insufficient. Rather, a dialectic of Hegel and his adversary Schelling suggests a distinctive account of determinate activity that avoids Melancholia without rejoicing the actuality of world spirit. This is made possible by way of an affinity between conceptions of melancholy and history in Schelling and Benjamin, from whom Adorno develops his traurige Wissenschaft. 
In response to the general theoretical uncertainty concerning Adorno’s reception of Hegel, this article delineates and interrogates the “Hegelian” and “anti-Hegelian” aspects of Adorno’s Negative Dialectics in view of the recently published lectures. The first section of the article elaborates Adorno’s central points of adherence: (1) in the notion that there is no priority of the subject and that critical theory must return the “freedom to the object”; and (2) in the understanding that there are no “mere facts,” but only mediated appearances of immediacy that should be understood through the historical dialectical unfolding of “objective underlying trends” and “proximate triggers.” The second section outlines and critiques Adorno’s signal departures from Hegel: (1) in Hegel’s notion that determinate negation necessarily yields a positive affirmation, which opens out into to his notions that: (a) all history is progressive becoming despite present suffering and (b) absolute freedom consists in the Spirit’s recognizing itself as all reality, in the final reconciliation of subject and object in the full realization of the identity of subject-object identity and subject-object non-identity; (2) in Hegel’s alleged privileging of the universal over the particular despite the demands of his own dialectic of universal and particular; and (3) Hegel’s ostensibly uncritical use of the antinomy of totality and infinity, which Adorno argues is in fact reflective of a key bourgeois antinomy between the notion of freedom in “closed” political communities, on the one hand, and the “endless” need for the expansion of capitalist value, on the other. The article concludes by positing several points left unresolved in Adorno’s enlistment of Hegel, principally with regard to determinate negation, the dialectic of capital, and the immanent emergence of freedom in the wake of the mass atrocities of modernity. 
