A Philosophical History of Psychology, Cognition, Emotion, and Consciousness: Part Four Hegel, forms of experience and Communitarianism.

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Communitarianism, a form of political philosophy with which Hegel has been associated is a social-political philosophy that feeds off a dialectical confrontation with liberalism and so-called individualism that many associate with both Descartes and Kant. Indeed Hegel’s doubtful criticism of Kant’s Ethics as being subjective might have significantly contributed to the construction of the poles of the dialectical confrontation, especially if this is also taken in the light of an epistemological criticism of Kant which claims he unnecessarily divided the metaphysical unity of experience into the elements of subjectivity and objectivity. For Hegel, experience is constituted by a continuous interrelation of subject and object which takes the form of an awareness of an object: thus reducing the object to “experience” of the subject or alternatively the subject to the “experience ” of the object which, according to Hegel violates the experienced unity of these elements. The nature of this unity is what varies and gives experience its diverse forms as sense-experience, perceptual experience, aesthetic experience, moral experience, scientific experience, and religious experience. In his “introduction” to his English translation of Hegel’s “The Phenomenology of Mind”, J.B. Baillie has the following to say on this issue:

“The way in which objects are “given” in perception is very different from the way in which objects are “given” in moral experience or in Science…..The forms of experience have, as indicated, features in common. They also differ specifically from one another, and each type has its own claims, its own process, and its own value. And in general, this is clearly recognised in ordinary life: for no one would identify perceptual experience with scientific experience, or confuse either of these with moral experience. At the same time, they all fall within the whole experience of one mind, and some connection between them is both possible and necessary if experience is to be interpreted. Hegel’s interpretation consists in regarding the various forms of experience as differing, not only in kind but in the degree of completeness from one another. This implies a standard or end to which to refer each type of experience. The standard consists of the conscious interpenetration of the two factors constituting experience–subject and object. This is realised in various degrees in different types of experience: at the lowest in sense experience–the subject least of all finds itself in the object: at the highest, Absolute Knowledge, the object is the very substance of the mind, and this is the culmination of experience. Hegel connects the various types of experience with one another by treating them as a series of stages in the development of experience at its highest: thereby he at once gives value to each kind of experience, links all forms of experience together as stages in a continuous process and shows experience to be a systematic whole, permeated by a single principle–self-conscious Reason or Spirit—whose highest realisation is itself the final outcome of the whole process.”(The Phenomenology of Mind P. 54-55)

It is as if the translator believes that it is the fact of being situated in a hierarchy of forms that gives these different forms of experience their value. What gives the hierarchy its structure is a single principle that is expressed in terms that Kant would not have accorded any logical or rational equivalence. It is Spirit that, for Hegel, forms experience and this notion must somehow be connected with the logical categories of universality and necessity (characteristics which, for Kant are manifestations of self-conscious understanding, judgment, and reasoning). Kant, however, clearly points out the limitations of experience in relation to both universality and necessity: we can, that is, experience that something is to be conceptualised as something but not that it universally and necessarily must be so conceived. Kant speaks in this context in terms of conditions and in particular of a priori conditions of experience such as space and time. He also refers to more abstract categories and principles of logic. Amongst the principles of logic, for example, are the principle of non-contradiction which Kant retains an Aristotelian view of, and the principle of sufficient reason which refers to universality and necessity. This universality and necessity in turn provides us with the necessary and sufficient conditions for the judgments we make about phenomena. Both of these principles are related. This postulated connection is not accepted by some scientifically and “Logically” inclined Analytical Philosophers who maintain that Aristotelian Logic does not necessarily engage with reality. This, it is argued is “proved” by pointing to the fact that a so-called “valid” argument can (by using the “rules” of logic) produce a false or absurd conclusion. Logic as viewed by Kant, however, shapes experience only once it is conceptualised. When concepts are combined in a judgment, this judgment might also be related to the principles of the kinds of activity that gives rise to the judgments concerned, e.g. aesthetic judgments, moral judgments, scientific judgments, religious judgments, philosophical judgments. This complex account of experience is then further differentiated in terms of the faculties of mind Kant refers to: faculties which Hegel dismisses despite their obvious relation to Aristotelian powers or capacities of mind( powers that played such an important part in Aristotelian explanations of theoretical scientific activity, practical scientific activity, and productive scientific activity). Hegelian “Spirit” also has obvious connections to Aristotelian divine thinking which is the resting point of Aristotelian Hylomorphic Philosophy: divine thinking, however, is what the divine being does and is obviously not a “form of human experience”, i.e. it cannot be secularised and humanised in the way in which “Spirit” can .

So, it is clear that there are disagreements between Aristotle and Hegel on several levels. Aristotle, for example, speaks of the role of memory in remembering an experience. This experience if repeated many times creates a process in which abstraction from differences between the experiences occurs in order to generate a principle or a concept of that experience(creates that is, a “form of experience”). Hegel, on the other hand, prefers to speak of the science and process of History in which a form of experience is repeated many times and constructs a type of experience. Presumably, the movement toward Absolute Knowledge is what is pulling the experience toward a meaning that the Historian must somehow use to organise the facts that he is studying. How this Absolute Knowledge or Spirit interacts with forms of experience is a mystery as is the relation between facts and forms of experience. Aristotelian explanations of Historical judgments would have been multidimensional, relating to 4 kinds of change, three principles of change and 4 causes. Hegel replaces this manifold of explanations with the one-dimensional self-conscious movement of spirit which is supposed to be rational as interpreted by his one-dimensional view of dialectical logic operating on the abstract principle of negation.

The issue of individualism and collectivism raises itself again in this historical context where the so-called individual and universal elements of experience become concretely identified and related. The question here, of course, is whether the idea of “universal experience ” makes sense in the way in which Hegelian theory requires: can there, for example, be degrees of universality mirrored in the different forms of experience? For Kant, the categories of universality and necessity can attach only to judgments about experience: judgments that conceptualise the experience in terms of categories and the logic and ideas of Reason.

Dialectical logic enabled Hegel to claim that one could see dialectical processes operating in what he called the “psychological” process of mental development where the “individual” mind moves from so-called sense-knowledge to perception or from consciousness to self-consciousness. Dialectical logic also manifests itself in the cultural evolution of society from a custom based(Greek village?) collective to a law-based(Roman) society. Dialectical logic was also involved in the movement of what Hegel described as the Kantian individualism of the 18th century and a movement to what he regarded as the more “Universal” ethical philosophy of his own day. There are several comments to make about this. Firstly Athens was a law based city-state: Socrates was convicted in a law court and sentenced to death because of a breach of religious customs(he was not stoned to death). Secondly what Hegel describes as Kantian individualism is based on a misunderstanding of the role of judgment, as the source of universality and necessity. Thirdly if we return to the Aristotelian idea of the mind or soul we would not encounter descriptions such as the mind moving from one state to another simply because the mind is not some insubstantial substance but rather a principle that explains phenomena connected to persons acting and thinking. In the context of this discussion Hegel also appears to connect both the American and French revolutions to the atomic view of individualism he attributed to Kant which he then contrasts in relation to his more “universal” and “Objective” (inner(?)) freedom of conscience.

The Phenomenology of mind provides as can be seen from the above insufficient analysis of the forms of experience referred to by Hegel and insufficient description and analysis of how these “move” toward a telos of the “Absolute Knowledge of everything”. The atomistic individual is paradoxically given Aristotelian powers of accomplishing this state of Absolute knowledge but without the Aristotelian system of intellectual powers and capacities that culminate in his comprehensive view of persons( rational animals capable of discourse?). The fact of the matter is that in spite of the putative hylomorphic manifest content of Hegel’s theory, the latent hylomorphic content is conspicuous by its absence and this may be partly the reason that the kinship between Aristotelian and Kantian philosophy goes unnoticed by Hegel.

Probably because of the uncomfortable fact that experiences are ordered temporally in terms of before and after, Hegel feels constrained to answer questions as to when Absolute knowledge will emerge and in what form and with what result(The end of History?). Neither Aristotle nor Kant are troubled with such questions about absolute knowledge because for them whilst knowledge may begin with experience it is also determined by the powers/capacities of the mind/person.These powers build upon each other in accordance with logical processes more complex than negation and dialectical logic. Hegel speaks of the “psychological” in very modern scientific/pragmatic terms which will in the future influence modern American movements of pragmatism and instrumentalism as well as English empiricism and romanticism.

When forms of experience supplant forms of judgment as the “material” of our theorising, and freedom is no longer related to the ideas and principles of Reason and Logic but rather to types of experience, one has no alternative but to seek an atomistic psychological basis for our moral and social identities. Hegel refers, for example, in his “Philosophy of Right” to social institutions(broadly understood) as organically evolving from custom based systems to law-based systems. Here we are clearly dealing with life systems at a high level of development: life systems that freely use thought and will to construct their institutions and thereby their society. As these life systems evolve, Hegel curiously argues, the institutions involved become more and more artificial, which is a problematic statement given his conviction that Mind is objectified in society. Just this last formulation indicates how far Hegel’s philosophy has traveled from that of Aristotle in which life forms(psuche) are principles. Principles obviously are not insubstantial somethings waiting to objectify themselves. To use Wittgensteinian language, they are not something but they are not nothing either. If something is moving ,as Hegel claims is the case with thought and will, then obviously something must be causing the moving and this Hegel claims is Spirit which he also claims is linked to practical life and freedom. Hegel postulates the psychological mechanism of mutual recognition as that which drives self-consciousness forward to its telos of Absolute knowledge. This kind of goal we may recall by the way is an impossibility for Kantian Philosophy. For Kant, we know what things ought to be given, e.g. the a priori intuitions of space and time, the categories of judgment, and the logic and ideas of Reason, but we cannot ever theoretically attain knowledge of things as they are in themselves given that the categories are limited to organising the phenomena of experience. The category of causality, if disconnected from the a priori logic of Aristotle and Kant, for example, must conceive of cause and effect as events that are not logically related to each other. If a cause is not however conceived of as an event but a rational principle such as the law of gravity then we must as a consequence know that heavy bodies must fall in areas of the universe where the law applies. Similarly with morality, if the cause of my action is a principle or moral law then the action must be done as a duty and must be categorically good. Here too, of course, there are not two logically unrelated events but a logically related law and its consequences.

Mutual recognition, for Hegel, is a form of experience or a type of experience that possesses dialectical relations to other forms of experience such as mutual disregard and its subsequent negation in a context of work(.e.g. the master-slave context). Mutual recognition, Hegel insists is a historically and psychologically necessary condition for the Respect that ought to exist between moral agents, but given the fact that the moral law must specify not the psychological state of the agent but rather how they ought to act, the formulation of the principle looks all too formal from the perspective of Hegel. This is in fact only partly true because Kant provides us with both a formal and a material formulation of the categorical imperative–e.g. So act that you can will the maxim of your action become a universal law: or alternatively, so act that you treat yourself and others not merely as a means but also as ends. Hegel’s general complaint about Kant’s ethical philosophy is that it is too formal but here we can clearly see that the more concrete account comes from Kant. It is, in other words not the experiential state of the agents involved in their moral interaction that will tell us how we ought to act. Furthermore, it is far easier to imagine the mutual recognition(Respect) required by the formulation of the moral law than it is to imagine the formulation of the moral law as implied logically from the experiential state of mutual recognition.

Communitarian philosophers see in Hegel’s “Philosophy of Right” two important features. Firstly they see the individual exercising thinking powers and will, in experiential terms, and are therefore unable to see how such experiences could ever be the basis of attributing human rights to such individuals. Secondly, it is clearly the case both for Hegel and for these philosophers that it is only because the individual finds themselves embedded in a larger context of historical and social structures and institutions that this can claim any rights at all–someone has to have the power, namely to protect these rights. Rights are not self-determined, it is argued, i.e. they are not determined in virtue of an individual being a representative of humanity: rather they appear to require a kind of recognition by the state, presumably in relation to the conditions of being both a knowledge bearer(knowing one’s rights) and being an ethical agent(being capable of knowing the rights of others ). This form of the dialectic of recognition seems, however, to unnecessarily anthropomorphise the more objective progression of actualisation of ethical capacities that we find in Aristotle. The first social unit for Aristotle is the family but even here we find ethical assumptions in play that are not based on mutual recognition. Children are treated ethically by their parents in spite of their lack of recognition of the authority of their parents at different times of their lives. Ethical objectivity and universality here clearly outdates the dialectical movement of the process of mutual recognition that might or might not occur when the children become adults and have children of their own. The family for Aristotle is inevitably embedded in a village that perhaps does not have the resources to recognise the rights of everybody, leaving the major responsibilities for the conferring of rights up to the families. Historically Villages united to form city-states that, in order to protect the resources available for citizens, required defence by these citizens when attacked. The status of citizenship emerged with the emergence of city states that were formed by a number of villages combining and cooperating. At this point certain rights(e.g. to bring charges against other citizens) became important to keep order in the city and this state of affairs mirrored the relation between the ethical virtue building activity of the family and the resultant social benefits that accrued to the good men of the village/city-state. A certain expectancy of a better more flourishing life naturally emerged from the responsibility that the family and the good men of the village/ city state took in relation to the virtue building process(widely considered by the Greeks in terms of areté, doing the right thing in the right way at the right time). We find no psychological process of mutual recognition at work in this Aristotelian process of community building. What we do find are more objective ethical processes steered by ideas of what is right and wrong(steered by principles). We find the warrior fighting for his city-state also being trained in the virtue of courage. The warrior, for example, who fails to keep his promise to his city and runs away from the battle, is admonished on the basis of principle, for doing something wrong. By “wrong” here is not meant a simple negation of experience of right as is testified to by the fact that such a warrior in the next battle may fight furiously but perhaps too furiously to pay attention to the advance and retreat of battle lines thereby disrupting overall army strategy. His response is wrong as determined by areté–doing the right thing at the right time in the right way. According to Aristotle this process of installing virtue is not dialectical in the Hegelian sense, but rather in accordance with the principle of the golden mean between extreme alternatives(of which there may be more than two). The use of the principle of the golden mean in the installation of the virtue of courage then results in the judgment of areté used either in relation to his actions or his character.

For Aristotle, cities are built on virtues and can be destroyed by vices. Politics, for him, is fundamentally ethical. Courage, of course, is largely an instrumental virtue and as important as it is to the city it is not the most important virtue of the virtues the city values. The good and the beautiful may be valued higher because these are required at all times not just in times of war. The rational passing of laws by the great-souled statesman may, for example, be more important for the longevity of the city in peace-time circumstances. The danger in peacetime is, of course, internecine strife and conflict which hopefully rational liberal laws respecting the rights of the citizens to lead a flourishing life would help to avoid.

Aristotle’s Political Philosophy, in other words, is the original form of communitarianism which refuses to contradict the values of liberalism because the practical rationality of laws will not curtail earlier forms of family or village life in which our freedoms and duties are generated. The theoretical liberalism of Aristotle is also manifest in the importance of citizens being knowledge bearers and being perhaps familiar with the theoretical, practical, and productive sciences.

It is impossible to know what Aristotle would have thought about the notion of Human Rights unless one, of course, sees Kantian Ethical Philosophy to be a restoration of Aristotelian thought. The differences between Königsberg and Athens might not be that significant especially if one asks how we should in the name of freedom interpret the second formulation of the Kantian Categorical Imperative: so act that you treat both yourself and others never merely as a means but also as an end. Kant claimed that this formulation entailed that you exercise your freedom correctly if you do not in your actions infringe upon the freedom of others. This claim has been at the forefront of Human Rights thinking since the creation of the United Nations over 70 years ago–an institution that was deemed necessary as early as Kant’s suggestion during the 1790s, presumably as a consequence of the political and international implications of his ethical theory. You will find no confrontation between communitarianism and individualism in Kant, who like Aristotle sees the city to be the soul writ large functioning in accordance with the same principles.

Indeed Kant’s final end for the political process might even, in a sense, be more communitarian than Aristotle’s account insofar as it postulates not a flourishing life for the individuals living in the city-state but a Kingdom of Ends, a political cosmopolitan state in which there is universal agreement as to the rationality of the laws because rationality(after a process of one hundred thousand years) will have finally actualized itself in the human species who will long since have abandoned the irrational activity of warfare.