Hegel's Theory of Normativity: The Systematic Foundations of the Philosophical Science of Right
136
Hegel's Theory of Normativity: The Systematic Foundations of the Philosophical Science of Right
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| ISBN-13: | 9780810139923 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Northwestern University Press |
| Publication date: | 05/15/2019 |
| Pages: | 136 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.50(d) |
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CHAPTER 1
Method
The aim of this chapter is to set out the method of normative justification that Hegel employs in his philosophical science of right. By this I mean the form of argumentation by which the validity and soundness of the central doctrines of the Elements of the Philosophy of Right are established. But, as we have noted, no other aspect of Hegel's theory of right has been more controversial than the relationship between its core doctrines and what Hegel called its scientific or speculative method or, to put the issue more broadly, the relationship between the substantive normative claims of Hegel's practical philosophy and the metaphysical doctrines of his broader philosophical system.
Accordingly, the task of the present chapter is to consider two fundamental questions: (1) What exactly is speculative method? and (2) How does this method serve as a form of normative justification?
The strategy I will follow in addressing these questions will be to set out a comparison between Hegel's systematic conception of normative justification and the rationalist and empiricist forms of demonstration that have defined the Western tradition of political theory, particularly as these traditions shaped late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century German political thought. The chapter's principal thesis is that the distinctiveness of Hegel's methodology lies in the fact that, unlike the traditional approaches, it holds the justification of a normative claim to require showing that it is necessarily entailed as a moment in the immanent unfolding of the concept of freedom within a general systematic order of knowledge. The normative standing of a concept, principle, institution, or practice, for Hegel, on this reading, thus flows from its being established as a necessary moment in an arrangement of knowledge that is itself immune to skeptical challenge precisely by virtue of its systematic form. Normativity, in short, is a product of the systematic structure of the science of right.
The key to this view is Hegel's contention that the traditional forms of normative argumentation fail to establish the authoritativeness of their claims because they are rooted in the dogmatism of representation. As we have seen in the "Introduction," Hegel argues that representation renders any type of authoritative claims vulnerable to the challenges posed by skepticism, and this motivates his commitment to a distinctly presuppositionless form of justification. Accordingly, I begin by setting out an account of normativity and the forms of justification that developed in late eighteenth-century and early nineteenth-century German thought to secure the authoritativeness of fundamental norms and I show why these, on Hegel's analysis, fail. I then use this critique to construct an interpretation of systematicity as a general form of rational justification, and from this I develop, by means of a reading of the opening paragraphs of the Elements of the Philosophy of Right, an account of systematicity as a unique form of distinctly normative justification.
Normativity and the Traditional Forms of Justification
The Traditional Forms of Normative Justification: Rationalism and Empiricism
The conceptual space of German political thought in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries was defined primarily by two distinct, yet traditional forms of justification and normativity — rationalism and empiricism — and these provided the foundations for the specific doctrines and movements concerning the nature and purpose of the state and of social order that defined this fertile period. It will be useful to begin, then, with a brief sketch of these traditions.
In what are admittedly broad terms, rationalism, in this context, seeks to derive normative principles from properties it holds to be necessary features of the fundamental order of things, while empiricism claims that such standards derive their standing from various kinds of facts such as sentiment, inclination, tradition, language, or culture. The fundamental difference between these strands can be said to lie in their antithetical conceptions of rationality. For rationalism, reason is principally an intuitive power. It is able not only to engage in discursive thought — such as conceiving, judging, and inferring — but is also capable of perceiving or grasping the fundamental structure of being, the providential order of reality. For empiricism, reason is nothing more than its discursive ability. It simply conceives, judges, and infers things about the data it receives from the senses. Rationalism contemplates the order of things, while empiricism produces order out of random contingency. Each method can thus be said to be rooted in a different form of intuition. For rationalism, it is reason's own intellectual intuition that has insight into the fundamental order of being, while, for empiricism, it is sensible intuition that is the root of reason's creations. These different conceptions in turn lead to different understandings of normativity and correspondingly different forms of justification.
To justify a norm for rationalism is to do nothing less than to see that the principle, concept, institution, or practice making a claim to binding authority is itself specified by or determinable within the providential order of being, the fundamental structure of reality. For instance, the fact that crimes require punishment may be grasped as part and parcel of the objective moral order. But this principle is normative, that is, it is vested with obligatory moral force, because it is itself the ground or it is grounded in the law of nature. Normative justification, on this view, establishes the authoritativeness of something by showing that the claim in question possesses the requisite status within the totality of the moral order of the world or that it is deducible from a claim that does. It follows that, for rationalism, one acts rightly or one's disposition is virtuous when one is in accord with the laws of being discoverable by reason through intellectual intuition.
In the empiricist construal, a principle, concept, institution, or practice is normative to the extent that it is endorsed or is laid down as binding by some individual or corporate willing. Crime requires punishment, on this view, not because some fundamental moral order dictates this, but because an authoritative person or group holds to this principle, concept, institution, or practice as necessary, and required, for instance, for the maintenance of social order. Justification is thus a matter of there being an appropriate desiring of something to be normative and this alone being sufficient to make it so. For empiricism, then, one acts rightly only when one follows conventions; reason here is subservient to the demands of what is found in and through sensible intuition.
Rationalism's insight into the natural moral order was taken, by theorists of Enlightened Absolutism such as Seckendorff, Wolff, Garve, Eberhard, and the cameralists (Justi and Sonnenfels), to support the notion that the authority of the ruler lies in his commitment to providing and promoting the material and spiritual welfare of his citizenry and that these goals were to be achieved through the strict and centralized regulation of industry and trade, price controls, public education, and censorship of the press. State paternalism was thus thought to be the means to secure the principles and attendant blessings of the providential order.
Empiricism, on the other hand, bore a more complex lineage in this period of German political thought since it was the root of both Conservatism and Romanticism. For Conservatives, such as Möser, Rehberg, Gentz, and Wieland, the reliance upon empirical warrant was taken to mean that the authority to rule is properly derived from historical sanction and that the well-being of society was to be ensured by the establishment and support of the ties of tradition afforded by religion, culture, language, and the public rituals whereby a people are bound to one another as a cohesive community. However, for Romantics like Herder, the Schlegels, Schleiermacher, Novalis, Fries, and Savigny, the purpose of the state was to promote and provide for the rights and freedoms of its citizens to form communal associations, and the requisite principles for creating this social order were freedom of the press, religious tolerance, and equality of opportunity. For them, the authority of the sovereign lay in the devotion of the citizenry spurred by the majestic aura that true artists and tradition created around him.
Hegel's decisive insight here was to recognize that these divergent strands of political rationality could all be traced back, in differing ways, to the traditional forms of normative justification. He was thereby able to cut through their ideological and programmatic differences and unearth their underlying fundamental methodological orientations. Following from this, he was able to see that these traditional forms of normative justification took their respective subject matters and procedures for granted because they shared a common reliance upon representation and it was this, he argued, that rendered them all vulnerable to the charges of arbitrariness, regressivity, and vicious circularity, the skeptical trilemma.
Normativity and the Problem of Representation
Hegel's critique of rationalism and empiricism as forms of normative justification can be said to develop in three distinct stages: he first sets out a basic critique of representationalism as a form of philosophical knowledge; from this analysis, he then proposes general criticisms of rationalism and empiricism as distinct kinds of representational knowledge; and then, based on this, he derives specific objections to each as accounts of distinctly normative justification.
In the opening paragraph of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Outline (1817), Hegel draws a sharp distinction between representation and the philosophical forms of knowledge:
All sciences other than philosophy have objects that are given [zugegeben] as immediate from representation [Vorstellung], and they are thus presupposed [vorausgesetzt] as assumed [angenommen] from the beginning of science, so that in the course of further development, requisite and needed determinations are taken from representation. (Enz. 1817, §1)
The distinction that Hegel wishes to draw in this passage is between bodies of knowledge that are composed of, or at least rooted in representational images and philosophical forms of knowledge, which take concepts rather than representations as their resource and object. A concept, for Hegel, is distinctive in that it comprehends the fundamental essence of a thing without recourse to any kind of symbolic or figurative elements derived from sensible intuition. It is a setting forth of the fundamental structure of a thing purely in terms of its essential properties, where the relationship between these is a matter of logical necessity. By contrast, representational forms of knowledge draw their objects ready-made from the power of representation; they thus take over their objects from sensible intuition and thus presuppose, rather than deduce, both the subject matter of their inquiry and the relations between its various objects.
In the Remark to this paragraph, Hegel offers examples of representations as they function as the subject matter or object of inquiry in various sciences: magnitude is taken to be the object of mathematics, space is the object of geometry, number is the object of arithmetic, disease is the object of medicine, animals are the objects of zoology, and plants are the objects of botany (Enz. 1817, §1A). He contends that, despite the rather wide array of objects and sciences invoked here, each of these is nothing other than a generic conception that has been forged through generalization and comparison from the raw material of sensible experience. The details of how this works in each case need not concern us here. What is important to note is that all of these objects possess a necessarily indeterminate epistemic, and as we shall see, normative, status. As representations, each of these objects of inquiry stands between the spatiotemporal individuals of empirical intuition and the unbounded universalities of conceptual thought. And this means that these objects are necessarily defined by an admixture of contingent and arbitrary associations, ones either produced in the formative process itself or already present as a feature of the existing empirical source from which they were derived. Hegel's argument is that this intermediate status is what renders not just the objects, but the methods of representational argumentation that draw upon them, impotent before the skeptical trilemma.
Consider first the objects. Representational forms of knowledge take the objects they wish to investigate for granted since representation, as a faculty, continually makes them available; it literally places (stellen) them before (vor) us for investigation. Accordingly, these objects are always on hand, ready to be explored. But this means that in accepting these objects as they are, their existence is never called into question. They simply are, and, as such, they can be presupposed: "Such a science does not have to justify the necessity of the objects that it treats ... because they [its objects] are assumed to be existent from representation" (Enz. 1817, §1A). But if an account of the very existence of some object is not required, then its warrant to be a valid subject matter for rational explanation is left outstanding and any concepts, inferences, and claims derived from or about this object are necessarily open to the accusation of being mere assumptions rather than genuine knowledge.
If we turn now to the methodologies of such forms of knowledge, we find that the examination of a representational object amounts to nothing more than unpacking the determinations it already contains. With the givenness of the object comes the givenness of its properties. The methodological task, then, is simply to extract these determinations and, by doing so, to claim to have derived genuine knowledge about the subject matter. Hegel provides a succinct description of this process: "At first, such an object is given its familiar name. This is fixed, yet it initially gives only the representation of the matter. But more determinations of the matter must be given. These can, certainly, be taken [aufgenommen] from the immediate representation" (Enz. 1817, §1A). The procedure Hegel describes here is a mix of analysis and observation that, in the end, produces a set of features that can only be contingent generalities, instead of the necessary and essential properties that genuine knowledge requires.
Accordingly, representation renders the method and objects of representational forms of knowledge necessarily arbitrary, unwarranted, and presupposed, which are the core charges of the skeptic. But how does this general critique of representationalism apply to rationalist and empiricist forms of epistemic justification?
Hegel examines the representational underpinnings of rationalism as the rubric common to the metaphysical projects of the classical, medieval, and modern periods. He argues that this form of knowledge takes its object, the structure of reality, from the empirical world by abstracting from it all that it deems to be in conflict with the universality of natural law. This order's existence as well as its intellectual intuitability are thus both taken for granted, and as such, the supposedly natural order of being — defined by its principal objects: the soul, the world, and God — is a foundation lacking a warrant to be what it purports to be. Hegel makes this point quite precisely:
Its objects are certainly totalities, which in and for themselves belong to reason — soul, world, God — but metaphysics took them from representation, establishing itself on them as complete, given subjects by applying the determinations of the understanding and had only its representation for its criterion as to whether the predicates fitted and were satisfactory or not. (Enz. 1817, §20)
Similarly, rationalism's methodology seeks to produce genuine knowledge by taking various properties — such as existence, finitude, simplicity, and so on — all of which have been abstracted from experience, and ascribing them to the natural order, or what Hegel calls trying "to determine the absolute through the attribution of predicates" (Enz. 1817, §19). In this sense, rationalism strives to construct an account of the in-itself, the unconditioned, with the finite determinations of representation. It thereby substitutes the contingent for the necessary, the transient for the essential. The result is a rigid, exclusionary conception of truth in which only one side of opposed attributes can be true, a position Hegel designates as the very epitome of dogmatism (Enz. 1817, §21).
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
AbbreviationsIntroduction
1. Method
2. Freedom
3. Right
Conclusion: Hegel's Critical Theory
Notes
Bibliography
Index