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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 June 2015
A friend once said to me that he would be glad to discuss postmodemity if only he knew what modernity meant. There are so many descriptions. We're all modern: Modern society, modern art, modern philosophy, modern science, modern technologies. The reformation, the wars of religion, the American revolution, the French revolution, the Paris Commune, the world wars. Civil society, capitalism, the liberal state, the procedural state. Luther, Galileo, Descartes, Locke, Kant, Manet, Cézanne, Rawls, Warhol. But also Novalis, Nietzsche, Heidegger and the German cultural conservatives. Derrida, Bataille, Levinas, Pynchon. And so forth.
Here is Robert Pippin's enumeration of what he sees as the common features of modern societies:
The new conception of nature required by modern science; the post-Cartesian notion of mind as subjective consciousness; a political world of passion-driven but rationally calculating individuals, or a “post-Protestant” world of individually self-reliant, responsible agents; a new political language of rights and equality; and, most of all, a common hope: that a secular, rational basis for moral and political order could be found and safely relied on, could inspire the allegiance and commitment necessary for the vitality and reproduction of a society. (I2)
Hegel had his own theory of modern life and thought, centering around the culmination of spirit's teleology in objective and absolute spirit, based on the logical patterns of the movement of spirit's development. Modern times brought decisive liberations and completions, but also permanent tensions, and a loss of immediate rootedness in a natural or social home. Modern selves are strong enough to be bei sich in the midst of modern tensions and negativities, but it takes work and maturity to deal with the inner complexities of modern thought and the built-in tensions of modern institutions.
1 Pippin, Robert, Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, hereafter referred to as “I”. Abbreviated references will also be made to Pippin's, Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, referred to as “H” and to Hegel's Encyclopedia (“E” followed by section number) and also to his larger Logic (“WL” followed by page references to the Gesammelte Werke, vol. 12 (Hamburg: Meiner, 1981)Google Scholar, to the Philosophische Bibliothek edition of the second volume of the Wissenschaft der Logik, vol. 2 (Hamburg: Meiner, 1963)Google Scholar, and to the Miller, translation (Hegel's Science of Logic (London: Allen and Unwin, 1969))Google Scholar, indicated by “SL”).
2 In this essay I emphasize theories of modernity that stress its formal processes and institutions. There is a related approach that is often found in the same thinkers, stressing the differentiation and independence of spheres of thought and value. Hegel also relates ambivalently to those theories. He would agree that modern art and politics have won their freedom from comprehensive cosmological doctrines, and that modern thought cannot be drawn from a substantive doctrine of nature. The normative must be separated from the natural, as pure thought must be separated from images. However because of the self-generation of pure thought, the various spheres do not go their own way. Or, rather, their differing ways are all opened by the same logical progression, embodied and further determined differently.
3 Pippin insists that as an outcome of our history there must be a self-reflectively legitimated rational process of self-orienting. This is more than formal self-consciousness facing factical givens. That is how the process of development starts, but as it goes along current practices are found insufficient by their own implied criteria. Differing from Hegel, Pippin argues that these failures motivate but do not define replacement practices. The new is justified because retrospectively it redoes the old better, but what it redoes becomes defined more and more in terms of autonomy. The failures of practices and social arrangements to meet their own goals are all due to built-in frustrations of or lack of acknowledgment of the autonomy of conceptual construction. Through the failures of local projects, it gradually becomes clear that there is really only one fundamental project, autonomy. Then that purer project can be taken up self-consciously as our goal, which happens in modern institutions and self-consciousness. In explicating this, Pippin combines Nietzschean and Kantian themes: “The ultimate Hegelian claim is that the problem of self-definition or identity is a problem of social power, not metaphysical truth, and that this process has a certain ‘logic’ to it.” (I 424) “There is no … external point of view, and so ‘we,’ ourselves inheritors and products of such self-transformations, must understand how such institutions and practices have come to assess themselves, what sort of reassurance they have achieved, how satisfying they have turned out to be, how they have led to ‘us.’” (I 336) We justify our practice by a historical account combined with the demonstration that the changes occurring in that history were rationally acceptable replacements for what was wrong with prior formations. The story of that process will reveal that the “basic failures are always due to the denial of … conceptual autonomy.” (I 172)
4 Hegel makes similar claims about the logical basis of developments in the histories of religion and philosophy: “The Bible is for Christians the basis … which strikes a chord within them, and gives firmness to their convictions … . But just as soon as religion is no longer simply the reading and repetition of passages, as soon as what is called … interpretation begins … certain presuppositions are made with regard to this content, and … everything depends on whether this content is true … . [The content] can only be forms that are genuine and logically developed in terms of necessity. But the investigation of these forms of thought falls to philosophy alone.” ( Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, ed. Hodgson, Peter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 399–402 Google Scholar). “Nach dieser Idee behaupte ich nun, dass die Aufeinanderfolge der Systeme der Philosophic in der Geschichte dieselbe ist, als die Aufeinanderfolge in der logischen Ableitung der Begriffsbestimmungen der Idee.” (Berliner Niederschrift 1820, in Einleitung in der Geschichte der Philosophie (Hamburg: Meiner, 1940), 34)Google Scholar.
5 This passage is from Hegel's, Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1986), vol. 13, 411 (henceforth A)Google Scholar. The translation is modified from Knox's, T. M. Hegel's Aesthetics (Oxford: Clarendon, 1998), vol. 1, 317 Google Scholar.
6 “The logical idea has itself as the infinite form for its content — the form which constitutes the opposite to content to the extent that the content is the form-determination withdrawn into itself and sublated into identity in such a manner that this concrete identity stands opposed to the identity developed as form. The content has the shape of an other and a given as against the form which as such stands simply in relation, and whose determinateness is at the same time posited as appearance. More exactly, the absolute idea itself has for its content merely this, that the form determination is its own fulfilled totality, the pure concept. The determinateness of the Idea and the entire course followed by this determinateness is the object of the science of logic, from which course the absolute idea itself has emerged for itself. It has shown itself for itself that determinateness does not have the shape of a content, but exists wholly as form, and that accordingly the Idea is the absolutely universal idea.” (WL 12.236 / 2.485 / SL 825)
7 The entire passage reads: “The manifestation of itself to itself is therefore itself the content of spirit and not, as it were, only a form externally added to the content; consequently spirit, by its manifestation, does not manifest a content different from its form, but manifests its form which expresses the entire content of spirit, namely, its self-manifestation. In spirit, therefore, form and content are identical with each other. Admittedly, manifestation is usually thought of as an empty form to which must still be added a content from elsewhere; and by content is understood a being-within-self which remains within itself, and by form, on the other hand, the external mode of the relation of the content to something else. But in speculative logic it is demonstrated that, in truth, the content is not merely something which is and remains within itself, but something which spontaneously enters into relation with something else; just as, conversely, in truth, the form must be grasped not merely as something dependent on and external to the content, but rather as that which makes the content into a content, into a being-within-self, into something distinct from something else. The true content contains, therefore, form within itself, and the true form is its own content. But we have to know spirit as this true content and as this true form.” (E §383 Addition)
8 A less dialectically determined particularity in Spirit's motion might be suggested by Hegel's comment that “Spirit endures contradiction because it knows that it contains no determination that it has not posited itself, and consequently that it cannot in turn get rid of. This power over every content present in it forms the basis of the freedom of spirit …[;] actual freedom does not therefore belong to spirit in its immediacy but has to be brought into being by spirit's own activity. It is thus as the creator of its freedom that we have to consider spirit in philosophy. The entire development of the concept of spirit represents only spirit's freeing of itself from all its existential forms which do not accord with its concept; a liberation which is brought about by the transformation of these forms into an actuality perfectly adequate to the concept of spirit.” (E §382 Addition) However, the way spirit frees itself from inadequate forms is not by an act of sovereign Sartrean creativity, but by the process described in the Phenomenology and the Logic.
9 Hegel's refusal to melt down all identities is evident from his carefully legitimated divisions within the state, and from his worries about the effects of enduring interest groups upon the legitimacy of democratic governments. His strong emphasis on patriotism and religion are meant to counterbalance the plurality of interests and identities that will continue within the rational state.
10 The writings of Richard Winfield show how one might try to answer this question in the affirmative.
11 The necessity of determinate negation has problems even within Hegel's text, not just because the details seem to go too far. See my Critique of Pure Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1986)Google Scholar.
12 To decide between a hermeneutic Hegelianism and a modest poststructuralism would involve arguments about the role of rational judgment. Roughly speaking, the former would find rational judging as a factor within the process of hermeneutic appropriation and extension, while the latter would take rational schemes as products of the process. In either case, it might seem that lacking either Hegel's assured list of particular moments, or Pippin's relatively self-transparent goal of rationality, a move away from formal modernism would end in a facile relativism. It is true that in a more hermeneutical mode the imperative of increasing self-awareness of the process does not on its own provide usable criteria. But it is never on its own. There are always factical spaces of alternatives and directions and suggestions about ways to go on. Logical space is more Aristotelian than Newtonian. A parallel might be drawn with values such as simplicity in decisions among rival scientific theories. Stated formally, simplicity provides no usable criterion since there are indefinitely many ways in which simplicity might be measured. But some of those ways are already salient, schematizing the formal criterion. That salience is itself changeable, but again there will always be a factical set of axes already in play guiding such change, though, again, those can be changed in similar fashion. In all these changes, on whatever level, there are factical guides and the possibility of changing them, but there is no final court of appeal or formally defined platform which gives the definitive schematization of the relevant values.
13 It is a separate issue to what degree such self-awareness is found only in recent times. In several essays in Postmodern Sophistications (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990)Google Scholar, I argue that the awareness is not so restricted, though its institutionalization as central to modes of mutual recognition is new to modernity.