German Idealism Today by Markus Gabriel Anders Moe Rasmussen

Author:Markus Gabriel,Anders Moe Rasmussen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: De Gruyter
Published: 2017-11-22T05:00:00+00:00

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This leaves us with many questions. For one thing, while Hegel invokes the concept of self-deception in an ancient context, it is not an ancient notion, does not it seem to have any resonance in that literature. Hence the question: when did it first become an important analytic tool, and might this show us some characteristic of the modern condition itself ?

There is also the question of its possibility, or how one might dispel the aura of complete paradox that surrounds it. I have already suggested one way in which that might go, given Hegel’s unusual understanding of the inner-outer relation in action. But the larger question involves a return to our earlier reflections on the bearing of Hegel’s treatment of historical Geist

In fact, there is, from Hegel’s point of view, reason to believe that the complexity of our situation has created something quite unprecedented that only his philosophy, with its ability to explain the “positive” role of the negative, and the reality of group agency and collective subjectivity, can account for. Life in modern societies seems to have created the need for uniquely dissociated collective doxastic states, a repetition of the various characters in the drama of self-deceit narrated by the Phenomenology. This is one wherein we sincerely believe ourselves committed to fundamental principles and maxims we are actually in no real sense committed to, given what we do. (This would be the sense in which Kierkegaard thought most modern people were (that is, were not) “Christians.” This is not an idle reference. How else might we explain something like some “association of wealthy robber baron Christians” (which must exist somewhere), or billionaire Communists?182 The principles can be consciously and sincerely acknowledged and avowed, but, given the principles they are, cannot be integrated into a livable, coherent form of life. (The social conditions for self-deceit in this sort of context can help show that the problem is not rightly described as one where many individuals happen to fall into self-deceit. The analysis is not a moral one, not focused on individuals. It has to be understood as a matter of historical Geist, in the sense in which it is the point of this paper to make plausible. Or we are committed to various policies that, nevertheless, we would, again in all sincerity and by means of the various representative practices available to Geist at a time, disavow, even though our actions again betray us.183 In his early works, Hegel claimed that the need for modern philosophy itself arises as an attempt at a reconciliation of what modern philosophy had left in “disunity.” [Entzweiung] (Hegel 1968, p. 9), and a striking sort of disunity is this dissociated relation to ourselves. This seems especially to be the case in the political world.

Of course, it is also the case that there is in modern politics, as perhaps there has always been, massive outright, deliberate deception and fraud. This is sometimes even praised, not just admitted as necessary. I mean Machiavelli’s famous case

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