The world we live in proves best understood as a cultural world. Cultural worlds are examined in this article regarding their aesthetic and ethical dimensions, with the help of Hegel and Husserl. The ethical realm is characterized by a tension between ethical conscience and cultural norms. Even Hegel, who is often conceived as a philosopher of customs, explores the significance of conscience in a detailed phenomenology. Husserl provides a curious perspective on ethics when he, under the heading of a renewal (Japanese Kaizo) of reason, provides an account of a vaguely dialectical development of reason as logos which goes beyond the division between the ‘descriptive’ and ‘ethical’. In the wider sense of ethics, it is also ‘good’ to write about the world we live in. Literature (Hermann, Wallace) will be treated here as an exemplary art-form that stands in close proximity to philosophy since both strive to capture in language the world we live in.

Rae Langton (1998) offers a non-idealist interpretation of Kantian things in themselves according to which we have no knowledge of things in themselves – the intrinsic nature of things – just because our epistemic access to things is via their relational, non-intrinsic properties. Whatever the merits of her account as an interpretation of Kant's metaphysics, its plausibility presupposes the coherence of her notion of intrinsic properties. According to the account of intrinsic properties Langton uses, as we will see, there are only intrinsic properties if certain worlds are possible. Allais (2006) attacks one half of the modal intuitions on which Langton relies, but is adequately rebutted by Langton (2006). This paper discusses another, far more radical critique of the other half of the modal intuitions underlying Langton's account of intrinsic properties, intuitions which are also the basis of Langton and Lewis' (1998) account of the same. The account of intrinsicness under fire here depends on the possibility of objects existing alone in worlds in which no other objects (not counting their parts) exist. But according to Hegel's Logik, such worlds are simply not possible. To develop this critique, we cast a broad net by linking Langton (1998) with Lewis (2009) and Langton and Lewis (1998), and then consider (in a necessarily limited fashion) claims from the 1832, Lehre vom Sein in Hegel's Wissenschaft der Logik, which we consult in the edition of Hegel (2008). The primary aim of this paper is to offer a clear model of the modal error which Hegel purports to identify, and to show its application to Langton's work.

The rise of computers and robots, heralded in science fiction and pervading ever more daily experience, has fostered a rampant temptation to model mind as a mechanism and expect machines one day to simulate all mental reality. This temptation reflects more than technological developments, however. It arises from the perennial dilemma of two complementary approaches to mind that proceed from the assumption of a mind/body duality: one conceiving mind to be wholly immaterial and the other reducing mind to inanimate matter. Exploring the difficulties of these views puts us in a position to evaluate the relation of mind and machine, helped along the way by key insights from Hegel.

The notion that mind cannot be material seems confirmed in every moment of self-consciousness, whose purely temporal flow of mental content testifies to the apparent nonspatial existence of mind. Yet so long as mind is construed as immaterial, it lacks the resources to have any temporal ordering, possess any unity, or retain any specifically mental character. Deprived of materiality, mental life is hardly distinguishable from a succession of logical categories that exhibit determinacy in general rather than anything particular to mind. The possibilities of any non-logical content are excluded. Lacking any embodiment, mind has nothing with which passively to receive content in the manner of sensibility, or to retrieve and refashion any such sensible content in images. Mind could perhaps generate conceptual content, but this would be indistinguishable from the thoughts that logic produces in its thinking of thinking.

First of all, I am very grateful to both commentators for the attention they have devoted to Hegel's Idealism; I am heartened by the kind words and humbled by the magnitude of the problems introduced by their criticisms. These criticisms both rightly refer to what is the heart of my interpretation, the Kant-Hegel relation, and, interestingly enough, raise objections from roughly opposite directions. Professor Pinkard, in effect, charges that I have made too much of that relation and thereby confused transcendental and speculative concerns. He argues here, as he does at greater length in his recent book (Hegel's Dialectic: The Explanation of Possibility), that the philosophically valuable core of Hegel is a ‘category theory’ limited to an ‘explanation’ of the conceptual ‘possibility’ of various judgments, practices, institutions, etc. Professor Harris charges, on the other hand (and with some irony), that I have made too little of the Kant-Hegel relation, or have construed it too narrowly, that the interpretation of Hegel's idealism which I provide thus either unfairly neglects, or does not have the resources to deal with, Hegel's full theory of the ‘whole’, or of Absolute Spirit, his account of the modern community's reconciliation with itself in time. I am thus alleged to have provided an interpretation that is at once too ambitious, and not ambitious enough, and I hope that such responses, at least for the Aristotelians in the audience, count as prima facie evidence that I must have said just the right thing.

My claim in Hegel's Idealism is that the well-known Hegel Renaissance, in post-war Western Europe especially, has still failed to produce a contemporary reconstruction of Hegel's fundamental position, his ‘identity theory’, his identifying the ‘self-actualization’ of the Notion with ‘actuality’, or his theory of the reality of the Absolute Idea.

There is no precise record when and why T.M. Knox decided to translate Hegel's Philosophie des Rechts. In the corpus of the writings of the British Idealists (with which Knox was familiar) the work had not featured very much. Although the Idealists developed a distinct social philosophy based on Hegel's thought they drew their inspiration from his fundamental meta-physical and religious ideas rather than directly from Hegel's most important philosophical work dealing with social reality. According to his correspondence he discussed publication of a translation with a representative of the London firm of Methuen in 1935 so he must have started work soon after returning to Oxford. Whenever it was, the translation only flourished in the mare tranquil atmosphere of St. Andrews. On 16 April 1938 Knox wrote to the Clarendon Press - the academic branch of the Oxford University Press - offering them the translation almost ready for publication. He justified it by the need to make Hegel's work accessible to English readers, especially undergraduates, at a time when there were signs of a revival of interest in Hegel's thought (he mentioned Sidney Hook's and M.B. Foster's recent books in this connection), and when ignorance and prejudice clouded people's judgement. Knox pointed out that the only complete English translation of the work by the Canadian professor S.W. Dyde (1896) was defective, without notes and long out of print. The response of the Clarendon Press was somewhat lukewarm. There was doubt whether the work merited retranslation and whether there was really a market for it.

Of all the major episodes in Hegel's Rezeptionsgeschichte, British Hegelianism can seem the most foreign and outmoded, to have the least relevance to our current understanding of Hegel's thought. Even today, we are lead back to the Young Hegelians for the problems they pose in reading his work; we can sympathise with the concerns of Peirce, Royce and Dewey that drew them to him, and the interpretative picture they developed; we can take seriously the attempts by Croce and Gentile to bring about their “reforms”, given our contemporary ambivalence to his project; and we can see how in different ways the influence of Hegel on Kojève, Sartre, Lukács and the Frankfurt School have made some of his ideas central to our times. But few feel this sense of identification and illumination on encountering the work of Hegel's British interpreters from the turn of the century; rather, in their writings we seem to find a Hegel that is darker, more distant, more difficult for us to relate to contemporary concerns.

This is not true in every respect, of course. In particular, several recent commentators have stressed how far it is possible to find here a reading and assessment of Hegel's political thought that does connect directly with many current issues, and that in this respect the thought of T H Green, Bernard Bosanquet and Henry Jones is not dead, either as a tradition within political philosophy, or as an interpretative approach to Hegel's theory of the state. Nonetheless, even those who seek to defend the importance of British Hegelianism in this regard clearly recognize that this is a fairly modest claim: for it fails to resurrect and revitalize the more fundamental aspect of the their encounter with Hegel, which was with his metaphysics – on which, as for Hegel, their political theories were based, rather than being primary in themselves. Those concerned with the political thought of the British Hegelians have not tried to take on this wider issue, leaving unchallenged the assumption that in their appropriation of his metaphysics, the British Hegelians have little to offer us either interpretatively or philosophically.

In his 2003 book Kierkegaard's Relations to Hegel Reconsidered, Jon Stewart challenges the classical interpretation of Kierkegaard's response to Hegelian philosophy. Stewart convincingly argues that Kierkegaard's work addresses Danish Hegelians rather than Hegel himself. However, in my view the conclusion Stewart draws from this — that Kierkegaard's thought on the whole has much less to do with Hegel than earlier commentators have presumed — goes too far in undermining the philosophical and historical significance of Kierkegaard's work, and, perhaps more importantly, closes down too quickly the question of his relation to Hegelian philosophy. The following passage exemplifies Stewart's position:

For politics to measure up to reason, two requirements have long been acknowledged: first, that the ends of political action be universal, and second, that the pursuit of such universal ends consist in political self-determination, that is, in self-government.

Aristotle set the stage for all further political inquiry by distinguishing political association through the universality of its end or good, while identifying the end of politics with political activity itself, an activity in which citizens rule over one another while presiding over all other associations, which fall under political dominion owing to the particularity of their pursuits. Aristotle joined the universality of politics with the activity of self-rule by recognising political activity to be an end in itself that is also a master end for the sake of which all other conduct is to be pursued. As such, politics was itself the highest good, making ethics possible by overcoming the hegemony of instrumental action, whose every end is devoid of intrinsic value, leaving conduct ultimately pointless (see Aristotle 1984b: Nicomachean Ethics, 1094a18-1094b12).

Two corollary difficulties, however, undermine Aristotle's enterprise. On the one hand, he is unable to give the universal end of political association a non-arbitrary content. Politics may claim universality by being both an end in itself and a master end, but this is just a recipe for ‘might makes right’, where any prevailing rule would be identical with the highest good. Appeal to a distinctly human function or to forms of rule that pursue the common good rather than the particular interests of some ruler can provide no remedy.

In section 82 of Being and Time Heidegger calls Hegel's account of time ‘the most radical way in which the ordinary [or vulgar] understanding of time has been given form conceptually’ (BT 480). For Heidegger, in the vulgar conception ‘the basic phenomenon of time is seen in the “now”; by contrast, Dasein's own “ecstatico-horizonal temporality temporalizes itself primarily in terms of the future (BT 479). Hegel's problem, it seems, is that he has no time for the future.

As Heidegger explains in his 1924 lecture on the concept of time, Dasein is futural because it is essentially possibility — ‘the possibility of its certain yet indeterminate past (CT 12). That future pastness is, of course, Dasein's death. Dasein is thus oriented towards the future because it is being-towards-death — the death that is certain to come, one knows not when.

The vulgar interpretation of time represents a flight both from Dasein's death and from its futural temporality, since it places the present at the centre of concern. Time, for the vulgar understanding, is simply ‘a sequence of “nows” which are constantly “present-at-hand”, simultaneously passing away and coming along’ (BT 474). The past and future are thus understood to be no more than the now that is no longer or is not yet. The future in particular is hereby distorted: for it is not thought to be the certain though indeterminate possibility in relation to which our present existence is first constituted, but is conceived as present existence that is yet to come.

Hegel’s Logic argues in a manner that is supposed to support a systematic philosophy. But it is difficult to explain how such a systematic argument is supposed to work. For answers, I look to the key transition from the Doctrine of Essence to the Doctrine of the Concept. Here we find discussions of both Spinozist and Kantian systems of philosophy: both are supposed to be helpful, and yet also to be lacking in instructive ways. So the initial hope is that these comparisons can help us to understand Hegel’s own systematic argument, and what it means to transition from an objective to a ‘Subjective Logic’. But the comparisons bring additional difficulties. First, to defend a comprehensive system involves refuting rivals, and the discussion of Spinoza demonstrates that refutation is difficult. Second, it is hard to see how any argument for Hegel’s system could be akin to those in Spinoza and Kant given the extent of the differences between them. I argue that the best way to deal with these difficulties is to explain the systematic argument of the Logic as modelled on the Transcendental Dialectic of Kant’s first Critique.