Yeomans, Christopher

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6/19/2019 Does History Make Sense?: Hegel on the Historical Shapes of Justice // Reviews // Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews // University of N…https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/does-history-make-sense-hegel-on-the-historical-shapes-of-justice/ 1/3College of Arts and LettersNotre Dame Philosophical Reviews2017.06.19EverythingTerry PinkardDoes History Make Sense?: Hegel on the Historical Shapes of JusticePublished: June 18, 2017Terry Pinkard, Does History Make Sense?: Hegel on the Historical Shapes of Justice, Harvard University Press, 2017, 272pp., $49.95(hbk), ISBN 9780674971776.Reviewed by Christopher Yeomans, Purdue UniversityTerry Pinkard's long-awaited contribution to the debate over the interpretation and contemporary significance of Hegel's theory ofhistory does not disappoint. In many respects, this seems the book Pinkard was destined to write for us, combining as it does themasterful storytelling of both his Hegel biography and his book on Hegel's Phenomenology with his post-Kantian reading of Hegel'score thoughts on self-consciousness (e.g., in Hegel's Naturalism).[1] When one considers Pinkard's recent work alongside PaulRedding's on Hegel's philosophy of religion[2] and Robert Pippin's recent work on modern art,[3] one feels that the dominant programin Hegel studies over the last half century has now come into full bloom as an interpretation of the whole of Hegel's significance for us.In addition, Pinkard's book comes at a time of renewed interest in Hegel's philosophy of history from a variety of different directions,and so joins a chorus of voices rising to articulate the different forms of significance of Hegel's treatment of history.[4] Since Hegel isperhaps the philosopher in the Western canon most closely associated with historicism in general, the belatedness of this developmentin the Anglophone literature is somewhat of a surprise. But better late than never, and both the renewed interest and Pinkard'scontribution are welcome indeed.Interestingly, the book is structured thematically more than historically. Instead of following Hegel's lectures in their chronological ortextual order, the book tracks the major issues that lie in the background of the reception of Hegel's philosophy of history. The firstchapter, "Preliminaries: The Logic of Self-Conscious Animals," summarizes and extends not only Pinkard's conception of our"amphibian" nature from his Hegel's Naturalism, but also equally serves as the best concise summary of the general trend of the post-Kantian research program over the last decade or so. The second chapter, "Building an Idealist Conception of History," extends thesethoughts to the construction of the topic of the philosophy of history itself. The third chapter is perhaps the most purely intriguing fromthe point of view of style, since it deals with the vexed question of Hegel's treatment of Africa and Asia. The fourth and longest chapterdeals with the heart of Hegel's theory, namely his treatment of European modernity as a distinctive kind of historical phenomenon, andthe fifth and final chapter takes up the question of teleology most explicitly.It would be fundamentally wrong to characterize the book as an apologetics for Hegel's theory (it is most certainly not that); butstructurally it clearly takes its brief from the series of objections to Hegel's view that characterizes the most common view of Hegel andof his philosophy of history in particular. Readers with such a background will think that they are being invited to drink the HegelianKool-Aid in its strongest form, and will certainly want to know just how strong it is on Pinkard's formulation of the mixture. In onerespect the answer is, 'quite strong': "Most crucially for Hegel, the philosophical comprehension of history is a comprehension of howhistorically the metaphysics of subjectivity itself -- and not merely our conception of the metaphysics of subjectivity -- has changed" (3-4).The ground for this view (and its plausibility) is largely constructed in the first chapter on the nature of self-conscious animality anddefended in the final section on infinite ends. In that first chapter the key move is to distinguish between having reasons and beingaware of reasons, where the second way of having reasons distinguishes the way self-conscious animals live out their animality (so thatit is a form of the latter rather than something added on to it). Thus our reflective need to make sense of our reasons is not somethingadded onto our freedom to act on reasons as another layer, but the very heart of how we act on reasons. To this is added a further layer6/19/2019 Does History Make Sense?: Hegel on the Historical Shapes of Justice // Reviews // Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews // University of N…https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/does-history-make-sense-hegel-on-the-historical-shapes-of-justice/ 2/3within reasons, namely the differenc  b twe n monadic and dyadic reasons: the former c ncern only the agent herself but the latterconcern authority relations between agents that constitute the structure of mutual recognition (28-9). And one final piece is thedistinction between finite and infinite ends:Finite ends may simply add up, but infinite ends are never exhausted by the actions that manifest them. Finite ends . . . expire, butinfinite ends have no intrinsic limit. They require a continual sustaining activity for them to be effective . . . An infinite end has no limitat which it has finally been accomplished. (42)All of the typically Hegelian goods -- e.g., freedom, justice, and reconciliation -- turn out on this account to be infinite ends. When oneputs these pieces together, one has the basic motor of historical change:A crucial part of Hegel's philosophy of history has to do with how the need to make sense of things leads to a conception of justice,which as history develops, transforms itself into a conception of the necessity of freedom. The infinite end at work in history is that ofself-comprehension and therefore that of justice, and, in our time, that demand for justice has become a demand for freedom . . . Thestruggle over recognition is the ongoing thread in history that is the basis of justice as an infinite end in historical movement. Thestruggle over authority that is at the basis of the dialectic of mastery and servitude has crystallized into various institutions and practices-- the "universal self-consciousness" of which Hegel speaks -- that anchor the authority that percolates out of it in practice (or, we mightsay, which attempts to anchor it while often failing to do so in either the short or the long term). (44)But to come back to the question of the strength of the Kool-Aid, there is another sense in which the answer is substantially weaker, forthese conceptual resources generate a radically open version of Hegel's philosophy of history -- and given his mistakes about non-European history, even more open than Hegel himself thought (165). The core of the infinite end is not any particular human need orstructure, but only the abstract conception of subjectivity Hegel develops in the Logic. That abstract conception is the necessary key tomaking sense of history, even though both the particular path taken by history and even the fact that it makes sense in light of thatconception of subjectivity are contingent (148-9).Unfortunately, there is no room in a short review to get into the details of Pinkard's illuminating treatment of specific historicalepisodes and their relation to each other. But it is nonetheless worth saying something briefly about the third chapter, "Hegel's FalseStart: Non-Europeans as Failed Europeans." It is a kind of stylistic masterpiece of recognition that manages to constantly foregroundthe lazy and racist aspects of Hegel's treatment of Africa, China, India, Persia and Egypt while also disentangling the importantarguments Hegel wanted to make to his contemporaries by means of those examples. Pinkard's concluding paragraph is worth quotingin full:In the last analysis, Hegel's rather negative characterization of non-European shapes of life turns out to be less about them (despitewhat Hegel himself actually thought it was about) and more about the problems inherent in any collective enterprise that either takessomething like the "moral" to be equivalent to "actually existing social rules" or which takes its own collective project to be simplyunintelligible and thus available only [to] the mystical. Even though that may be a fundamental mischaracterization of the non-European shapes of life Hegel discusses, both options were live in Hegel's time for European life itself. In effect, Hegel was saying: Seewhere this leads you? (67)Of course, if the examples are essentially misdescribed, the strength of Hegel's argument with his contemporaries is substantiallyundermined. But we are not Hegel's contemporaries, and particularly in the philosophy of history there is no point in pretending thatwe are. As scholars interested in the interpretation of Hegel's thought, the key point here is that Hegel is using these (inaccurate)descriptions of non-European forms of life as a way to argue against two views that have often been mistaken for Hegel's own, i.e. onewhich reduces all normative obligations to my station and its duties, and another which dissolves all finite better-and-worse ofinstitutions into a divine synthesis of the state.One final comment, on the layout of the text itself: it is designed more with the beginning Hegel student or scholar from outside thefield of Hegel studies in mind than those already deep into an engagement with Hegel's texts. There are 75 pages of endnotes, in whichvirtually all of the work with Hegel's texts and all of the interventions in the debates of the secondary literature are confined. For a Hegelwonk such as myself this seems a shame, as Pinkard's facility with Hegel's messy German texts and his knowledge of the relevantsecondary literatures in both history and Hegel studies is second to none.[5] In particular, Pinkard's interventions into the debates aboutthe proper interpretation of the form of historical necessity and the relation between historical periods are full of insights, but only forthose willing to go on the expedition into the notes themselves. (There are some helpful summaries, however, that provide a map to the6/19/2019 Does History Make Sense?: Hegel on the Historical Shapes of Justice // Reviews // Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews // University of N…https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/does-history-make-sense-hegel-on-the-historical-shapes-of-justice/ 3/3territory; see, e.g., 165-6.) On the other hand, it does create n extraordinarily readable text for the first 168 pages, one designed aboveall to combat the dominant view that Hegel's theory of history is ridiculous at best and pernicious at worst, a part of Hegel's thought tobe either outright ignored or at least hollowed out of any particular commitments to the understanding of particular places and times.Depending on where one takes the current state of knowledge to lie, one might think that this is the primary issue to be addressed. Andanyone who takes addressing this issue to the order of the day would be hard-pressed to find a better place to start than Pinkard's book. [1] Hegel : A Biography (Cambridge University Press, 2000); Hegel's Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason, (Cambridge UniversityPress, 1996); and Hegel's Naturalism: Mind, Nature, And The Final Ends Of Life (Oxford University Press, 2013).[2] Paolo Diego Bubbio and Paul Redding, eds., Religion After Kant: God and Culture in the Idealist Era, (Cambridge ScholarsPublishing, 2012).[3] After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism (University Of Chicago Press, 2015).[4] See Mark Alznauer, Hegel's Theory of Responsibility (Cambridge University Press, 2015); Tim Rojek, Hegels Begriff derWeltgeschichte. Eine wissenschaftstheoretische Studie (De Gruyter, 2017); Rebecca Comay, Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the FrenchRevolution (Stanford University Press, 2010); Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (University of Pittsburgh Press,2009); Eric Michael Dale, Hegel, the End of History, and the Future (Cambridge University Press, 2014); and Rachel Zuckert andJames Kreines, eds., Hegel on Philosophy in History (Cambridge University Press, 2017).[5] On the many issues surrounding the textual basis for interpreting Hegel's view, see Rojek, Hegels Begriff der Weltgeschichte, chap. 1.Copyright © 2019  ISSN: 1538 - 1617 College of Arts and Letters  Accessibility InformationNotre Dame, IN 46556

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

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

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