Does History Make Sense?: Hegel on the Historical Shapes of Justice by Pinkard Terry

Author:Pinkard, Terry [Pinkard, Terry]
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Harvard University Press
Published: 2017-02-27T05:00:00+00:00

5

Infinite Ends at Work in History

Substances and Subjects?

The nature of temporal human subjectivity itself did not imply on its own that the French Revolution had to happen. Nor did it imply that Rome had to collapse, nor that feudal monarchy had to fade out into constitutional monarchy.

Even if there were such a thing as a people who just happened to possess a standing desire to achieve freedom—of the kind that the mythical Germanen were supposed to have had but which needed to be disciplined into the rule of law—such a standing desire itself would not guarantee that those events had to take place. There is no argument—or at least no discernibly good argument—in Hegel that supports the conclusion that these events, or even ones similarly like them, had to occur by virtue of some kind of metaphysical/causal necessity. Thus, the only conclusion is that the French Revolution, indeed the whole path to modernity, was not necessary at least in the sense that it did not have to happen in any conceptual sense implied by the very nature of subjectivity, Geist, itself. The modern world was not willed by fate.

Where then is Hegel’s case for any kind of necessity in history?

Hegel’s broad claims for his philosophy of history have to do with the success or failure of some other big claims he makes. First and foremost is the claim made in the Phenomenology that everything hangs on apprehending and expressing the true not just as substance but equally as well as subject”—as Hegel stresses, it is not just “some things” but “everything” depends on that view.1

This has several sides to it. First, there is the extended argument of the Science of Logic that a comprehension of the objectivity of things requires an equal comprehension of the subjectivity of the subjects making the judgments about objectivity. This is not the claim that the existence of things depends on the existence of minds, nor even that the existence of “mere” things is somehow “perfected” by the addition of minded creatures to the furniture of the universe. According to the Logic, very roughly, to make sense of things, we necessarily judge in two general ways—in terms of “Being” or “Essence,” that is, by pointing out, classifying, generalizing, or counting; and by explaining things in terms of some underlying condition that is not immediately apparent in the mere observation of them and which ultimately requires various modal concepts (possibility, necessity, etc.) to make sense of itself. These two metaphysical structures of making sense of things require us to make sense of making sense, to look at the conditions in which we can say that sense has genuinely been made. (That is the logic of “Concept,” and is thus capstone to the three “books” of the Logic: Being, Essence, Concept.) This thereby requires us to understand the role of the “concept” in making sense, and that way of speaking of the necessity of the “concept” works out into speaking of the necessity of self-consciousness in judgment.2

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