In his Science of Logic, Hegel treats life as a pure concept. This means that we know what it is to be a living being, and so how to distinguish living from non-living beings, non-empirically. We know it as an implication of the “science of pure thinking” that the Logic develops. The Philosophy of Nature in the Encyclopedia also treats living beings as categorically distinct, and the treatment is also not an empirical one. But it is not derived from the science of pure thinking as such. This suggests that the latter treatment is not absolutely a priori but, as is sometimes said of other aspects of Hegel’s work, “relatively a priori.” (Stated another way, The Philosophy of Nature is philosophy, not natural science.) What “relatively a priori” might mean is the topic here, and the aim is to show by such an analysis the general form of the relation between the Science of Logic and the Encyclopedia. The main point of comparison and contrast will be Kant’s understanding of the relation between “Transcendental Logic,” The Metaphysical First Principles of Natural Science and The Metaphysics of Morals, a similar, albeit quite differently conceived, tri-partite structure to Hegel’s system.

This chapter explores what Gadamer might mean by giving hermeneutics the task of “overcoming the primacy of self-consciousness” and asks whether it is really Hegel in his sights as he attempts to do so. The chapter first attends to the conflicting strands of deep solidarity with Hegel, coupled with just as deep a rejection. Gadamer’s final answer is that Hegel’s philosophy, whatever Hegel may have intended, did not completely break free of “subjectivism.” Of fundamental importance for Gadamer is the idea of finitude. Gadamer embraces what Hegel calls “the bad infinite” when he claims that the “soul’s dialogue with itself” has no teleological end point and is inexhaustible. Gadamer points to the limits of reflection.

The ways in which serious thought about film and philosophical reflection might intersect are various, and those dimensions have been much explored in the twentieth century, especially with the establishment of the academic study of film in the seventies and eighties.1 At that intersection, there are various philosophical questions that can be raised, primarily but not exclusively, about filmed fictional realist narratives, or “movies.” There are related questions about photography and other types of recordings of movement or figuration: documentaries, art videos, and non-representational avant-garde films, for example. But both Hollywood (or commercially produced narrative films) and art cinema, considered as new art forms, have drawn the most attention.

The general issue that is covered in this chapter is what Nietzsche might mean in subtitling Beyond Good and Evil a “Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future.” What is it that prevents the continuation of past philosophy; in what sense is the philosophy of the future a restoration of “psychology” as the “queen of the sciences”? Apparently such a new philosophy requires a more literary and aphoristic style, and will be esoteric; a kind of “mask.” Why? The focal question in this chapter concerns Nietzsche’s account of religion. How might a new philosophy of the future account for and evaluate its rival for a claim to wisdom about the highest or first things, the most important values – religion?

I WANT TO SUGGEST a way of appreciating the achievement of J. M. Coetzee's book, Elizabeth Costello, and its eight “lessons.” Given the nature of these lessons, this will make inevitable an attempt to raise the question of understanding the work in terms of what I shall call “philosophical fiction.” In this, I take myself to be following the lead given us by the book itself, in which philosophy obviously plays a large role. The idea will not be to show that fiction is philosophy. Of course, it is not. The book is literary fiction, even if a unique genre; not quite a short story collection, and certainly not a mere device for ventriloquizing philosophical claims. But the idea that fiction can be philosophical requires a defense of the claim, first, that fiction can be a distinctive form of thought, even a form of knowledge; and second, that such knowledge is relevant to, has a bearing on, the sort of knowledge philosophy, or at least some version of philosophy, tries to achieve. The bearing of fiction on philosophy is not that fiction is a form of philosophy. It has this bearing precisely because it is not. It has this bearing even, and especially, when what fiction achieves throws into some doubt the prospects for philosophy to achieve what it is trying to achieve. The immediately problematic or paradoxical nature of this thought can be put by saying: if the idea is that fiction is “philosophy by other means,” then the emphasis must first of all be on the phrase: “other means.” And that already threatens the claim that it can be philosophical. (How “other” can such means be, and still be means to philosophy?)

As a strictly theoretical question this leads us immediately to the notion of the form of literary fiction. Knowledge is knowledge by being of some generality, and generality is formal. It extends to many instances. This problem is dual. It concerns the distinctive form of all literary thought, as contrasted, say, with forms like mathematical or religious thought. And it concerns the specific content of any fictional insight. If a drama can be philosophical, then, say, the play, Othello, cannot be about, be a way of understanding, Othello's jealousy without also being about, showing us something about, jealousy in general.

Kantianism

In 1781 Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason, delivered the bad news that the human mind can (even worse, must) pose important, unavoidable philosophical questions that it cannot possibly answer. These were distinct, perennial philosophical questions, answerable, if at all, by pure reason alone, independent of any appeal to experience. (Kant thought the most important ones concerned freedom, the existence of God, and the immortality of the soul, but the scope of his critique also extended to issues like the nature of the mind, the human good, the purpose of nature, or any attempt to know “things in themselves.”) While, according to Kant, we could at least settle once and for all just what those limits to knowledge were and why we were not able to cross such a boundary, that seemed small consolation. Metaphysics, the “queen of the sciences,” had understood itself as capable of knowing how things must be or could not be and so had prided itself on the certainty of its claims and on a rigor in its method rivaled only by mathematics. So it was not for nothing that Kant became known as the allzerstörende, the “all-destroying.” The skeptical sentiment expressed in Kant’s critical work was not of course isolated in Königsberg. The latter half of the eighteenth century can be viewed as a collective debate about the nature and even future of rationalist philosophy, or philosophy as it had come to be understood since Plato (especially as the impact and advances of Newtonian physics were more and more felt), and about the right way to state the principles underlying an ever more popular empiricism.

The problem of freedom in modern philosophy has three basic components: (i) what is freedom, or what would it be to act freely? (ii) Is it possible so to act? (iii) And how important is leading a free life? As the last question indicates, the issues concern both a philosophical question and a human aspiration. And the questions are also obviously linked; one can aspire to a sort of freedom that is a philosophical fantasy, not possible; a true theory of freedom might reveal that the importance attributed to a free life in Western modernity is misplaced.

An affirmative answer to the third question, such that freedom is the most important dimension of a worthy life, provokes two others besides the obvious one (why should it be so important, when compared, say, to piety or security?): what sort of political order and social system best realizes such a capacity, or both allows and makes more likely that individuals can act as free subjects? And there is the historical question mentioned in chapter 1 – what is the unique importance of freedom in the modern Western epoch in philosophy?

Hegel's “philosophy of objective spirit” comprises his answer to the former question. He gave the most ambitious and speculative answer in the history of philosophy to the second. And he proposed unprecedented and highly controversial answers to the three main questions.

I suggest with Hegel that what we want to be able to explain when we ask “what is freedom?” are the conditions that must be fulfilled such that my various deeds and projects could be, and could be experienced by me as being, my deeds and projects, as happening at all in some way that reflects and expresses my agency.

In Hegel's Encyclopedia system, what contemporary philosophers would call practical philosophy is called the “philosophy of spirit [Geist].” By “practical philosophy” most philosophers nowadays would mean an account of the distinct sorts of events for which we may appropriately demand reasons or justifications from subjects whom we take to be responsible for such events occurring. As it is sometimes put, to focus appropriately on that issue we also need to ask for a broad delimitation of the practical normative domain (whatever is done for reasons, purposively, where reference to such reasons is essential in understanding what was done), and so are asking about the possibility that there are these distinct sorts of events, actions, things done for reasons. That there may be no such distinction, that there might be just natural objects and their properties and ontologically uniform natural events, has been a major issue in modern practical philosophy for some time now. We often ask as well, sometimes as an independent question in practical philosophy, sometimes as tightly interwoven with an answer to the first, for an assessment of what rightly should count as such reasons or justifications, as distinct from what subjects might as a matter of fact themselves count as such reasons. In accounts that tie acting well to the exercise of practical reason, these discussions obviously include claims we take to be of the highest importance – ethical and moral sorts of reasons, questions of right or justice, etc.

RECOGNITIONAL DEPENDENCE:THE POLITICAL CLAIM

Hegel's theory of recognition amounts to an unusual social theory of subjectivity (an account of what it is to be an independent and dependent “I”) and therewith a social theory of freedom (an account of the form of social relations said to be necessary for an “I” to be the subject of deeds, an agent). I have been arguing that the full scope and ambition of Hegel's theory needs to be taken account of before its significance for a concrete social and political theory can be appreciated. I want in this chapter and in chapter 9 to make a start at least at spelling out those more concrete issues. I want to do so by means of a contrast, one that comes up very frequently in discussions of freedom in Hegel.

Most modern liberal versions of the state depend on a philosophically ambitious theory about the nature of human individuality and the normatively relevant implications of such individuality. It is often assumed that contrasting theories about the putative ultimacy of intersubjective relations and the derivative or secondary status of individuality are potentially if not actually illiberal, and Hegel's putative organic theory of the state is often cited as an example. A major arena for such disputes has been the claim by such neo-Hegelians as Charles Taylor and Axel Honneth that the key liberal notion of the free and rational individual depends for its possibility and rational sufficiency and empirical sustainability on a social condition of great political relevance: mutual recognition.

The topic we have arrived at is Hegel's “social theory of agency,” and that topic, given how the problem of agency is usually understood, raises the immediate question of why anyone would think that sociality would have anything at all to do with the problem of agency. So it might be a good idea to back up a bit and get a running start at the problem.

As we have seen several times, that problem is understood in a number of ways; most generally – what distinguishes naturally occurring events from actions (if anything)? (Sometimes the question is: what, if anything, distinguishes responsible human doings from what animals do?) The most prominent approach has it that actions are things done intentionally by individuals, purposely, for a purpose. This is sometimes said to mean: acting from or on or because of an intention, although, as we shall see, this nominalization can be misleading. Or, of the many possible descriptions of some occurrence, it is an action if there is a true description under which it is intentional. This is often taken to mean simply that if you ask a person why he is doing something he can express this intention to explain himself, most often in the form of a reason. He does not (except in extraordinary circumstances) describe why he is acting in the way he might describe what caused his lungs to deteriorate; instead he reveals something about his own relation to his psychological inclinations and aversions; his “evaluative” relation to them, as it is sometimes put.