Review: Beyond the Fury of Destruction: Hegel on Freedom Author(s): Andrew Norris Reviewed work(s): Hegel's Philosophy of Freedom

by Paul Franco Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative by Jean-Luc Nancy ; J. Smith ; S. Miller Foundations of Hegel's Social Theory: Actualizing Freedom by Frederick Neuhouser Hegel's Idea of Freedom by Alan Patten Source: Political Theory, Vol. 32, No. 3 (Jun., 2004), pp. 409-418 Published by: Sage Publications, Inc. Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/4148161 Accessed: 14/09/2009 23:07
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BEYOND THE FURY OF DESTRUCTION Hegel on Freedom

OF HEGEL'SPHILOSOPHY FREEDOMby Paul Franco.New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1999. 391 + xiii pp. $22.50. OF HEGEL: THE RESTLESSNESS THE NEGATIVE Jean-Luc Nancy. by Translatedby J. Smith and S. Miller. Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2002. 168 pp. $17.95. FOUNDATIONS OF HEGEL'S SOCIAL THEORY: ACTUALIZING FREEDOMby FrederickNeuhouser.Cambridge,MA: HarvardUniversity Press, 2000. 352 + xiii pp. $29.95. HEGEL'SIDEA OF FREEDOMby Alan Patten.New York:OxfordUniversity Press, 1999. 216 + xiii pp. $19.95.

The Hegel renaissance continues apace, producing ever more excellent for monographsand steadilyraisingthe generallevel of appreciation the suband importanceof Hegel's political philosophy.' While Jon Stewart's tlety 1996 collection TheHegel Mythsand Legends is still invaluable,the claims once heardregularlyconcerning Hegel's totalitariannationalism,his Prussian if not fascist warmongering, and the Alexander Pope-like blanket endorsement given the status quo by his Doppelsatz are no longer given enough credit to be the distractionsthey once were. All of the books under review begin from the evident fact that freedom lies at the center of Hegel's thought, and that that freedom is not enjoyed by some cosmic spirit "God knows where,"but by real people and real communities.This reflects a generalmove away fromCharlesTaylor'sexcessive emphasisupon the Weltgeist of the lectures on world history,a move occasioned in the Anglo-American contextby Allen Wood'spersuasivedefense of Hegel as a philosopherof ethical self-realizationand Robert Pippin's explication of Hegel's work as the best version of the projectof autonomythat defines modernityfrom Rousseau on. If Wood and Pippin togetherfocus attentionupon the practicalfeatures of Hegel's thought as opposed to the speculative theodicy, they differ quite sharply on the question of what is viable in Hegel's logic. Wood's answeris, famously,"Nothing." Pippinin contrasthas engagedin a sustained
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if qualifiedattemptto defend and explain Hegel's logic and its politicalpurchase.2Most of the books underreview follow Wood in downplayingthe systematic role of the logic. For those uncommittedto the full Hegelian system-that is, most readersof thisjournal-this can be a strength,as it opens Hegel's texts up to a varietyof perspectives,from an analyticcommitmentto Rawls to a Heideggeriancelebrationof difference. Hegel may not in the end be compatiblewith all of these, but this collection of books suggestshe may be consonantwith moreapproachesto politics thaneven his stoutestdefenders a generationago would have thoughtpossible. Patten's was the first of these books to appearin English. Of the books underreview, it is the least committedto the sustainabilityof the Hegelian enterprise(pp. 5, 204) and the least comprehensivein scope. While Patten has a very good graspof the literature, aside fromevaluatingotherprominent in he interpretations his introduction, engages with scholarlyminutiaesparingly. He does not attemptan explication of Hegel's practicalthoughtin its totality,or even of the Philosophyof Right(PR) as a whole, offeringinsteada series of concise, connected essays on particularproblems in the mature work of Hegel's Berlin period.These include the reciprocityof freedomand duty in Kantand Hegel, Hegel's critiqueof contracttheory,his justification of privateproperty,and what Pattentermshis civic humanistconceptionof freedom.Throughout,Patten'sfocus is on what he termsHegel's Sittlichkeit thesis, the notion thatthe ethical norms that should guide our practicalreasoning "consist in nothingotherthanthe duties and virtuesembeddedin the centralinstitutionsof modernsocial life." Pattensuggests that whatis most attractiveabout this thesis is its implicationthat "practical reasonimplicitly or explicitly involves dialogue with others and finding reasons that are acceptableto those with whom we disagree"(p. 1). But why shouldsuchreasons be those imbedded in our central institutions?What, more generally, makes a reason good, or justifies our actions? Hegel's commitmentto freedom as rationalself-determination precludesappealingto immediatelygiven and feelings, desires, traditions, otherformsof authority-including the conventions of our common life (p. 36). But what is left? Building creatively upon Christine Korsgaard'sinterpretationof obligation in Kant, Patten arguesthatthe free will mustwill its own preconditions,and a justifiedvolitional act is one that affirms and supportsthose preconditions.Korsgaard argues convincingly that willing something differs from wishing for it: as Kantrecognizes, it is a "'causal'law" thatwilling a given end meanswilling the means to that end. Hence the false promisercontradictshimself because he commits himself to (wills) the very institutionof promisingthathis action Korsgaarddirects this argumentspecifically at Hegel and his undermines.3 charge of empty formalism. Patten nicely demonstrates that, ironically,

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essentially the same reasoning underlies Hegel's own claim that "thefree will.., wills thefree will" (PR, 27). The necessary preconditionsof the free will are on this account the institutionssketched out in the PR: the family, civil society, and the state. This attributesto Hegel a more Kantianunderstandingof self-actualizationthanthatfound in, say, Wood (p. 54), while at the same time demonstratinghow Hegel marks a real advance upon Kant: Instead of a contingent instrumentalcommitment to an isolated institution (promising),a full set of political, social, andeconomic relationsarejustified as being necessary for the actualizationof the free will. One difficultyhereis thatof evaluatingthis claim in the absence of empirical confirmation(p. 162). Anotheris seeing how any set of concretedeterminations such as these institutions could be adequate to a will capable of abstractingitself from all determination.Once the will has so abstracted itself, how can it determineitself withoutlosing itself? This is the basic probPatten'sansweris that lem thatin PR 5R generates"thefury of destruction." freedom is "recursive:the determinationsthat give content to freedom turn out to be the ones the agents must pursue if they are to be in a position to deliberateand pursuethe ends and determinationsthat give content to freeis dom"(p. 100). The momentof abstraction a momentof deliberativereflection in which one asks whether the desire motivating one is reasonable of (pp. 57, 124). And, as Hegel's characterization the pre-SocraticGreeks acculturation-a fact makesplain, this is an activitythatrequiresa particular intimatelybound up with Hegel's objectionto the kind of freedom defended by Hobbesian-stylecontracttheories (p. 116). A freedom to do whateverI ends and dispowant will neitherproducenor maintainthe "other-regarding sitions thatwill encourage [me] to accept the burdensand sacrifices presupposed by a self-reproducingsocial orderthatis hospitableto personalityand subjectivity"(p. 185). Patten'sskeptical,measureddiscussion of this as well as the other topics he treats is trenchantand clear, and his book is highly recommended. While thereis as yet no companionin English to Hegel's ethical andpolitical corpuslike HerbertSchnidelbach'sHegelspraktishePhilosophie (2000), Franco'sbook comes as close as most readerswill require.Franco devotes chaptersto all of the centraltexts, from the writings of the 1790s to the PR, providinga lucid review of Hegel's developmentand his debts to and differences from Kant and Fichte. Throughout,Franco's central aim is as much expositoryas it is critical,and he proceedsby "explicatingand interpreting" the PR and associatedworks (p. xi). The book's regularreferencesto Burke, Oakeshott,de Tocqueville,andM. B. Foster's still helpful 1935 ThePolitical Philosophies ofPlato and Hegel confirmFranco'sdistinctionof his approach fromWood's analyticandleftist perspective.But the defense of this approach

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takesa backseatto a summaryof Hegel's views thatmay appealmostto those new to Hegel. As sympatheticexposition, it is extremely successful:of all of the books on the subjectit is the best to refer undergraduates andthe most to likely to takethe place of Avineri'sclassic 1972 Hegel and theModernState. Not only are the main lines of Hegel's political thought laid out with great clarity and insight, but thereare valuablediscussions of Hegel's rejectionof Kant'sandFichte's categoricaldistinctionbetween moralityandpolitics;the nuancesof his "Hellenism"; way war'sunifyingpower the underappreciated is supplementedin the PR as it is not in earliertexts;the differentversionsand roles of the strugglefor recognition;andthe compatibilityof Hegel's defense of a minimalstatewith his rejectionof the individualismthatso often accompanies this. Of the books underreview, Franco'sgives the fullest pictureof Hegel's thoughtand containsby far the best accountof Hegeliantexts other than the PR that discuss politics and political philosophy. No one book can do everything,however, and in providing such a clear review Francois sometimesled even in a fairly long book to gloss overdifficulties. Hegel's empty formalismcharge against Kant, for instance,is dealt with in a brisk three pages, with about the same being devoted to Hegel's complex justification of privateproperty.At raremoments Francocan also appearunduly conservativeand defensive of Hegel. Dieter Henrich,Wood, of Avineri,and a host of othershave drawnourattentionto Hegel's treatment poverty, arguing that it shows either his perspicuity, his awarenessof the legitimacyof some formsof revolutionary activity,or the possibilitythatours is a transitional in which the claims of moralitymighttrumpthoseof ethiage cal life. Franco'sresponseto all of this is both dismissive and unconvincing. To the objection thatHegel minimized the problemof povertyby assuming thatthe poor will belong to corporations carefor them like a secondfamthat ily, he replies, "Itis not clearwhat Hegel's response to this questionwouldbe except to say that every memberof civil society who does not belong to the agriculturalor universal estates should be urged to join a corporation" (p. 274). But this is like telling a lonely friend that he'd be happierwith a beautiful,intelligent,andwitty girlfriend.Not all of the poorhavetheneeded skills to be attractivepotentialmembersof a corporation.Hegel recognizes this, albeit fitfully, and it clearly does pose a real problem for his claim that the society that generates the poor and the rabble (Pibel) is a rationaland desirableone. While Franco and Patten also note that Hegel is no communitarian, Neuhouser'sbook is distinguishedby its extendedargumentation support in of the claim that Hegel shares as much with Rawls as he does with Sandel. Not only is the communityHegel celebratesone thatmeets externalrational criteria,it is one that,properlyunderstood,includes almost all of the univer-

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sal individual freedoms championed by liberals. What, according to Neuhouser, Hegel adds to this is modem philosophy's "most comprehensive" attemptto do justice to the need for a sense of belonging articulatedby the Romantics(p. 16). A rationalsocial orderis rationalin so far as it allows for the freedomof its members;this freedomis achievednot by simply removing restrictions,but by establishing political and nonpolitical institutions that foster a distinctivekind of identity-as family member,as memberof a profession, and as citizen-that allows for the harmoniousunion of particular and general wills within the individual:"individualscan be broughtto will and work freely for the collective good of the social groups to which they belong, insofaras doing so is at the same time a way of giving expression to a particular identity that they take to be centralto who they are"(p. 13). This emphasis upon the noninstrumentalquality of identification distinguishes Neuhouser's analysis from Patten's(cf. Patten,pp. 195-96), and it produces an extremely appealing picture that shows clearly how far Hegel is from a Prussianor American reactionary.As Neuhouser emphasizes, these conditions will be met only in a society thatsafeguardsenough "negativefreedom" to avoid a widespread feeling of being coerced; that has a political system with sufficient transparencyand intelligibility to do the same; that has an economy thatprovides meaningful work with social recognition of the contributions made by thatwork;andthatenables individualsto escape "theanomie, alienation, and rootlessness that have come to characterizeWestern societies" (p. 284, n. 9, and p. 14). It speaks well for the criticalresourcesof Hegel's political philosophyto note that,in an Americagoing to war to bring "freedom" others, few of these conditions are widely met. to This doesn't imply that Hegel is after all laying out a set of ideals moral agents and societies "ought"to achieve, as his critique will always be an immanentone thatholds our institutionsup to the standards implicit in them Neuhouser'sbook is a painstakingattemptto use Hegel to help (pp. 257-59). us see that these standardsare conceptions of personal, moral, and what Neuhousertermssocial freedom, "themost distinctiveinnovationof Hegel's theory and its single most importantcontributionto social and political philosophy" (p. 5). In his explication and defense of this concept, Neuhouser focuses on how Hegel's conception of social freedom develops Rousseau's "centralidea" that social institutions are both preconditions and embodiments of the freedom of theirmembers(p. 81). Neuhouser's analysis of how Hegel deepens this claim while eliminating the unnerving possibility of its being used to force someone to be free is the most thoroughI have seen. His habitof finding two reasonsfor any claim andtwo ways thatany claim might be understoodcan be distracting;but his prose is also very clear, and he provides exceptionallyvivid andhelpful examples of the differentways individ-

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uals can participate the life of a largerwhole (pp. 37f., 177). He uses these in as well as a good contrastbetween methodological atomism and methodological individualism(pp. 176, 181) to demonstratepersuasivelythe extent to which Hegel's social theory-contrary to appearancesand, at times, in contrastto Hegel's statedintention(pp. 180, 244, n. 48)-is compatiblewith liberal rights. The few exceptions that remain when Neuhouser is doneHegel's insistence "thatindividualsfigure in the state only as membersof a particularestate" and his lack of support for public debate and critique (pp. 205-6, 256-60)-are not, he argues persuasively, necessary parts of Hegel's social theory. A similarconclusion is also reached,though in far less detail, by Franco (p. 344). But differencesremain,and it is a shame thatthese books appeared in print so close together in time that they are not able to engage with one another.Franco's criticalcomments on a review of Wood's book writtenby Neuhouserindicatehow the debatemightproceed:Francotakesexceptionto Neuhouser's suggestion that Hegel's treatment of women and peasants appearsto violate the moral equality of persons in so far as their allegedly does not allow for the realizationof theirfreedom plant-liketrustin authority in conscious reflection and knowledge (PR, 166A, 203). "It remains the case," Franco responds, "thatthe membersof the agriculturalestate know and will the universalityof the state no less than any other estate"(p. 260). But the passage he cites as evidence, PR 203R, says nothing of knowledge, and the fact that Hegel gives the nobility of that estate a political function does not, contra Franco, imply anything about the point at issue. Thus, Neuhouser's emphasis upon the need for a general reflective relationship with the state survives Franco's criticism, but that hardly settles the issue since Hegel himself seems genuinely unsureabouthow much philosophical reflection is requiredfor us to actualizeour freedom. One of the centrallessons of Neuhouser's book is that a fuller "moral freedom"is achieved by those who can follow the arguments the PR (p. 246; cf. 287, n. 10;compare of in otherwords,is practicalin ways thatHegel Patten,pp. 61, 75). Philosophy, himself may not have fully appreciated. Nancy is the odd manout here, approaching Hegel as he does with philosophicalallegiancesthatarenot obviously compatiblewith the subject.In his most widely read book in English, TheInoperativeCommunity, French the HeideggeriandescribedHegel's State as paradigmaticof those "politicalor collective enterprises dominated by a will to absolute immanence."This essentially sided Nancy with Karl Popper, insofar as he also argued that "whatwe have called 'totalitarianism' might be betternamed"immanen... tism,'"as thatbetterindicatesthatwhatis dangerousis not so muchthe claim

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thatthe political is the total as the assumptionthatthe political communityis an immanentessence thatneeds to be manifestedthroughthe activityof eliminatingwhat it is not: Jews, gypsies, and enemies in war.4If Nancy sounds a less critical note here, explicitly defending Hegel from such charges (p. 8), this is in partbecause he scarcely mentions the PR and dismisses as essentially un-Hegelian Hegel's "incontestablynaive and dated confidence in a certainmodel of the state"(p. 119). InsteadNancy reads Hegel againsthimself, makinghim in the process soundsurprisinglylike Nancy.Hegel is credited with exposing "what will become in our time the primary political theme:no longer the institutionandnatureof government,but the contradiction of the separationand nonseparationof the 'common' considered for itself' (p. 119). This is the main theme of Nancy's own work, which opposes the thoughtof a common if immanentpolitical essence to that of "the in of [Heidegger's]being-in-common,"and argues that thinking the latterforces us to experience a disorientation-a loss of meaning, direction, sens-in which we find a higher, nonmetaphysical"sense ... understoodbeyond all sense."5It is doubly striking then, to see Nancy propose that "the infinite work of negativity"is the same thing as "therestlessness of sense" (p. 5); as the second is a referenceto the claimsjust canvassedand the first an obvious gloss on Hegel's logic, this essentially identifies the two. While Nancy's admirersmay greet this with approval,Hegel's may well not, and many will conclude that, in contrast to, say, Deleuze in his self-effacing and helpful Kant's CriticalPhilosophy,Nancy has not writtena book on Hegel at all, but on himself and his own thought.6 For Nancy, "whatHegel firstgives to thinkis this: sense neverbeing given nor readilyavailable,it is a matterof makingoneself availablefor it, and this availabilityis called freedom"(p. 7). Nancy's ratherunconvincingdenialsin his final chapteraside, this is at best the freedomof a (postphilosophical)philosopher,not a citizen. If it is unclearwhetherthe citizen must be something of a philosopherto trulyact "inconscious awareness"of the rationalityof his state (PR, 260), it is clear enough thatthe philosophermust also be a citizen, an important partof whose freedomis found in the dutieswith which citizenis bound up. In disregarding Nancy is not simply emphasizingfreethis ship dom over governance,as modems typically do, or rejecting, as in the quotation above, the Hegelian model of the state. He is dismissing as un-Hegelian the idea of the will itself, the centralidea of Hegel's practicalthought.Nancy glosses over this when he suggests in his chapter on Desire that Hegel's account of freedom as "being-with-oneself-in-another" anticipates the Heideggerianecstatic self in thatit too is not self-contained.Nancy emphasizes thatfor Hegel this is revealedin love.7 The relevanceof love here is sug-

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gested by Hegel himself in PR 7A, but Hegel's point is quite differentthan Nancy's: for him, in love and friendshipwe experience "in the form of feeling" the thirdmomentof the will, in which the universaldeterminesitself and posits itself as an other.Thatis, I am neitheran isolatedparticular bodynoran an is empty abstraction, "I"that,as in the Phenomenology'sopeningchapter, everyone and hence no one. In loving my friend,I become an individual,an entity in which universal concepts like love, friendship, and duty (a very Hegelian word thatplays no role whatsoeverin Nancy's text) are given particularinterpretations, as particularrelations-between myself and my just friend-are deepened and transformedby virtue of being understoodand experienced in the light of these concepts. The result is a relationship between two different people that each party sees as constitutive of an importantpartof who he or she is: a mediatedunity. AlthoughNancy is adamantthathis versionof Hegel avoids the extremes of empty indeterminacyand self-enclosed and empty particularity 56), (p. neitherthis back andforthnorthe fact thatI undergoit in a particular committed relationship(with a friend,family member,or fellow citizen) is presentin his text. Instead,one is enjoinedto embracethe fact thatone is alwaysalready open to othersas such, an injunctionthatlooks suspiciously like a formof the (falsely) infinite projectof the Sollen. Hence, in a passage in which Nancy explicitly registers the notion that freedom should not collapse into the I's purereflectioninto itself (PR, 5), he claims that"if 'I' surgeup [surgit],each time, as the identity of the universaland the singular-'I' being nothingbut an upsurge,a throwof sense in itself, withoutdeterminedcontent-this takes place only insofaras 'I' is sharedout equally between everyone"(p. 37). The is Heideggerianlanguage of the upsurge(Aufbruch) pairedwith a notion of or content." individualitythatlacks the momentof particularity "determined As Nancy puts it on the samepage, "to liberatefreedomitself.., is to unbind the self from every determinationto which it would be attached." Where Hegel speaks of a decision and a resolutionin which "thewill posits itself as the will of a specific individual"(PR, 13), Nancy speaks again and again of "thephilosophicaldecision [dicision]" (pp. 14, 37) that"decides,as undeteror mined, eitherfor the puredeterminacyof "I=I," for the infinitedetermination of the "I=becoming-other" 74). As I have arguedelsewhere,this is a (p. version of Heidegger's Eigentlichkeit,in which authenticityis identifiedas being true to one's nonidentitywith oneself-a fidelity that can be manifested only in an ironic distance from all identifying featuresand relationships."In the end, we are leaving Hegel's philosophy of Recht behindif we grantwith Nancy that"Freedom... is indeed autonomy,butthe law it gives itself is ... the law to have no law" (p. 68). As Hegel makes abundantly clear,

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one of his principaltargetsis "thehatredof law,"a feeling that"does not recognize itself in the law andtherebyrecognize its own freedomin it" (preface, p. 17, and PR, 149). If Nancy here tries to finesse the difference between these two views, he was closer to the truthin The Experience of Freedom when he described his understandingof the "absoluteness"of freedom as "the exact reverse of Hegel."9

NOTES
1. All referencesto the Philosophy ofRight will be to Nisbet's translation(Cambridge,UK: and CambridgeUniversityPress, 1991) and the Suhrkampedition of the Werke will be made in the main body of the text, identifiedby PR. Additions and remarkswill be indicatedby A andR, respectively. 2. The qualifiednatureof Pippin'sdefense of the logic in Hegel's Idealismis demonstrated by the numberof times he says that Hegel "takeshimself to have shown"the necessity of a given move in the unfoldingof the Concept,as opposed to Pippin or us taking Hegel to have done so, and for good reasons. 3. ChristineM. Korsgaard,"Kant'sAnalysis of Obligation,"in Creating the Kingdom of Ends (Cambridge,UK: CambridgeUniversityPress, 1996), 64. 4. Jean-Luc Nancy, "The InoperativeCommunity,"trans. Peter Connor, The Inoperative Community(Minneapolis:Universityof Minnesota Press, 1991), 12, 3. 5. Nancy, Inoperative Community,preface xxxix; idem, The Sense of the World,trans. J. Librett(Minneapolis:Universityof MinnesotaPress, 1997), 2, 3. 6. Approvalwill not, however, be limited to Nancy's fans. Slavoj Zizek-a self-professed reformedHeideggerianwho sharesfew of Nancy's allegiances-finds Nancy's book to be one of the best accountsof the "vertiginousabyss in which [Hegel's] Understanding caught."Slavoj is Zizek, The TicklishSubject(New York:Verso, 1999), 122, n. 26. The concrete universalon this account is not a bridge crossing the gap between universaland particular opened up by the formalism of the Understanding, a paradoxical,ungrounded,andunjustifieddecision that some but embodies the universal.ThatZizek seconds Nancy's readingin this way is siggiven particular nificant;butthe fact thathe does so in the process of arguingthatErnestoLaclauandCarlSchmitt are"thetrueheirs of Hegel" (pp. 100-101, 113) also confirmsthe accuracyof the argumentgiven here: whateverelse it may be, the Philosophy of Right is not Schmitt's Political Theology. 7. Though,somewhatconfusingly,Nancy does not argueas he has elsewherethatconceiving of the in-common as love is an apolitical conception-a conflation he there claims "occurs exemplarilyin Hegel."Nancy, "Politics I,"in Sense of the World,88-89, n. 93, 188. 8. AndrewNorris, "Jean-Luc Nancy and the Myth of the Common,"Constellations7, no. 2 (June 2000). 9. Jean-LucNancy, TheExperienceof Freedom,trans.B. McDonald(Stanford,CA: Stanford UniversityPress, 1993), 109. The difficultyhere is hardlyNancy's alone. Hegel's thoughtis distinctive andpowerfulenough thatit resistsbeing synthesizedwith thatof others.It is significant, for instance, that Will Dudley's Hegel, Nietzsche, and Philosophy: ThinkingFreedom (Cambridge, UK: CambridgeUniversityPress, 2002) devotes only 12 out of 242 pages to its central aim of suggesting thata symbiosis between the two philosophersis the properapproachfor philosophy.And this symbiosis, it turnsout,requiresHegel andNietzsche to split the laborof philos-

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ophy in way thatneitheropenly calls for,Hegel explaininghow ournecessaryconceptsaredeveloped and justified, and Nietzsche practicinga relentless genealogical critique to separatethe necessaryfrom the unnecessaryandto determinewhich nonnecessaryconcepts will be most life affirming(p. 236).

-Andrew Norris University of Pennsylvania

AndrewNorris is an assistantprofessorof political science at the Universityof Pennsylvania. His recentpublications include "Against Antagonism:OnErnestoLaclau'sPolitical Thought"(Constellations,2002) and "PoliticalRevisions:StanleyCavellandPolitical Philosophy" (Political Theory,2002). His edited collection, Politics, Metaphysics, and Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben's Homo is Duke Sacer, forthcoming from UniversityPress.