Ethics
What was central in Kant’s conception of ethics, is that every human being is equal in as regards their dignity. We need to respect human beings as such, and needs a society that promotes this kind of freedom of individuals.
The French revolution is a moment at which this inequality that Kant and Rousseau explains becomes suddenly problematic.
The French state gathers the Etats Generale. There was suddenly a possibility to write down grievances, however the Etats Generale was horrifically unequal, every group of peopling having only one vote each.
As such the the middle class created their own political unit, to vote for laws with, without any general violence. However, this breaks down after the struggle at the Bastille.
From this moment on there is an anxiety that all that was reached by the middle class will be turned back by the nobility. They had to demolish the old structure of the nobility. The intention to change society was dramatic, as all referens to kings and nobility were thrown away. All traditional structures about how the state was organised was changed, and there is a kind of rationalisation; such as the metric system.
In Leuven during the French occupation, they entered the cafes and abolished all the glasses because they were all in pints. The French even tried to change the hour system into a day of 10 hours. There was also the idea of having a week of 10 days. They wanted to standardise all measurements into even ratios. All references to catholicism ended, priests were thrown away.
There was also the idea of promoting one French language and culture, making nationalism a thing.
In Leuven, all the schools and monastaries were abolished and sold to the market.
The Belgian revolution before was a revolution against rationalisation, and was rather reactionary in wanting to get rid of the middle class at a time when the middle class was progressive.
After the French revolution, christianity was restored.
Hilary Mantel A Place of Greater Safety, about the French revolution.
The mob was brought into the French revolution, and utilised by the middle class to overthrow the nobility.
Before the French revolution there was censorship and so on. This was problematic for mobilising the common people. Hume changes his essay on the freedom of the press: initially he says that freedom of press is good; then he sees that people make use of the common people through it, and changes it to say that it sucks.
In the American and French revolutions, people used a lot of propaganda.
Today people no longer think in terms of masters and servants anymore. Professor once met a rich family with servants though, and he thought that was kinda appalling.
Magnificent Reberls by Andrea Wulf. Human relations in Jena between Hegel, Schelling etc.
Göthe is friends with the duke of Jena. Göthe protects philosophers in Jena. WTF is the professor on about today.
Caroline Schelling was very important for the philosophical gatherings in Jena.
The Von Humboldt family were important in creating the modern university. Especially Alexander who travelled the world and stuff.
Before the French revolution, universities were just theological seminars. They changed it to think that universities did not inherently have to defend some kind of prior judgements, but are intrinsically motivated in curiosity and science for itself.
Kant made a big impact on the discourse at the time.
Fichte’s idea is that reality is completely the ’I’. We make the things be what they are. The I is 100% free and 100% owns and controls the world. There is purely subject. He comes up with a socio-ethical approach where he creates a socialistic utopian state. He defends freedom but also thinks that the state needs to plan ahead most of our doings. Radical enlightenment was quite sobering. It created the idea that all what we see are causal relations and science can help us to explain the workings of this, and the soul and essential inspiration was murdered and spoils the idea that there is something mysterious or transcendental in nature.
It is nature that wants to be conscious of itself, so it needs subjects of nature that discover it and expand themselves to perceive nature perfectly.
In comparison with Fichte and Schelling. Schelling became very young when he became famous, but then later on this fame was lost. Hegel became famous slower.
At the end of his stay in Jena he finished Phenomenology of spirit which was almost destroyed at the battle of Jena.
Phenomenology:
A lot happened after Hegel because of Hegel.
[Communitarism: we need society before being able to have individuality.] [In philosophy a lot is guided by fashion].
You see contradictions that collapse again and again.
The whole story is a story about doubt and despair.
It is very difficult to find a solid foundation.
It is not only about epistemological issues, but also about being sure about what we need to do ethically. What is at stake is more than just figuring out how reality is, but how we can be sure of what is right and wrong. Therefore it has important moral ideas.
It starts from the idea of how we can be sure about reality; which is about the immediate confrontation with reality itself. The immediate experience is that I can be sure that there is something. But if I am confronted with that immediate reality, how can one get some kind of understanding from it. From this immediate confrontation you need some kind of frame in which to make sense of it. Calling it ”it” is already more than the pure confrontation. You can’t say anything about it unless you have some kind of prior-to immediate judgement about.
Then he focuses on how to deal with a perception and what it is.
The object is made possible by myself, but it is quite difficult to have realisation that it is oneself that manifests objects, that we don’t realise this.
When we are confronted with reality, it is more than when animals are, because we are conscious of the way in which we are confronted by reality. Self-consciousness is crucial. If you are intoxicated by a lot of alcohol, you can be confronted with reality without knowing it, but it is not real. We need to be aware that we are aware. Then the question is about what makes self-consciousness possible?
We need to understand that what is really at stake is a desiring.
Desire: It’s that you want certain things. You want to negate them. You want to annihilate them. Desire just goes on and on, and this creates life. Human beings have desires that they want to be satisfied and they negate them by consuming those things; but this is mainly the animal life and not the Geist, it is flat.
When we try to develop an idea of ourselves, which means that we are intentionally interested. We are guided towards desire, something that is desiring. The problem with the idea of desire according to Cojeve, is that it is empty. It has no content. It desires. Or as Lacan would say, it is an emptiness that wants to be filled, but lacks any content to fill. It is on the move, it evolves. It cannot be a thing on its own, independent of anything else because that would be dead. Human beings and animals are on the move. This becomes a little different when we encounter other human beings. In confrontation with them, you want to negate someone who is negating. There is a relation between my desire and the desire of another. And what happens then, is that you want that the other desires you, and takes into you into account as someone that counts. You want the other to recognise that you are there. They want that you recognise their static status. You both want to be recognised, and they both force each other to do it, and as such there is a fight that manifests. The moment this fight is not afraid of dying, is the moment that the static order is contented. There is something that is so important that you want to give your life for it, and at this moment, you are no longer animal because you want to be something of meaning; something of Geist. You want to find your certainty in the recognition of another, but that other is not prepared to give it because they also want yours. Until one of them gives in, and is not prepared to die, and accepts that the other is dominating, at which point the master-slave moment appears. The master is now assured of recognition as they have forced the slave to recognise the master, and the slave is not recognised. Then you are recognised by someone you don’t belive is of importance. And then later the slave surpasses the master through being one who learns and knows to do, whilst the master relies on the slave.
It becomes self-consciousness the moment there is the idea that someone is recognising you. And this kind of struggle is then ended by a master-slave situation. The most ideal solution however is that there is a mutual recognition among equals. Everyone needs to be seen as valid enough to be recognised as subject, so it already projects into the future the kind of world wherein we mutually recognise each other.
In the master-slave relation, it sometimes becomes interiorised, with a super-ego that becomes incredibly dominant. As such there is slave-instance implicitly apart of myself. This kind of super-ego can be thought of as God, or whatever, and all of humanity must subject itself to that principle. Whatever the master is asking I must obey, but I will not be moved by it internally because I can retain myself by not desiring and longing for freedom, an ascetic solution.
What is interesting is that he tries all these models and shows that this kind of conceptual position is sometimes recognised. It is not a historical account however, it is more an exploration of how the relations develop, and some are recognisable in history.
The ascetic position of christians for example seems to be placed quite clearly in the dynamic.
The individual is not only there as an individual. They are surrounded by a community. So it is not only a story about how the individual develops, but also about how the environment evolves to make individuality and conceptualisations possible. The kind of world-view of a particular situation in time. So he is thinking a lot about culture and how they develop.
In the phenomenology, he talks about, instead of being busy with self-consciousness, we must talk about the Spirit. Robert Pippin thinks that we need to interpret the spirit as the mentality of a particular society. How people together frame their context and make what appears meaningful in that particular context. For instance, he describes how in the Greek context, where Greek polis was idealised by the Germans, and seen as a community had mutual recognition and lived in harmony; Sittlichkeit, the Greek Sittlichkeit is idealised; It’s not as harmonious as the Germans thought. On the one side there is the political order, owned and maintained by men only, and these men only make up 10% of the population, the rest being slaves. And at the same time you have religious laws which you can’t go against. In the family it’s about how the family takes care of themselves, and there is a tension between the sons and the mothers, who see the children struggling and offering their lives for the state as bad. I don’t really know what he wants to say here, but I guess he is saying that Greece isn’t as the idealised version of it idrk.
Hegel suggests that the tension of the sittlichkeit is there, because there is no possibility to see that the rules are social constructs, are not a matter of choice which I can argue about. It is so self-evident to follow it, that no other way is possible. There is a kind of fate to the social constructs at place. There is a kind of isolation, and tendency to turn oneself on oneself, because the social structures come from without. This refers to what Durkheim explains when he talks about anomie, the collective emotions being gone, and people turn themselves on themselves and will commit more egoistic suicide.
The truthful destination is then with the Absolute Idea of God. I don’t know how he got here. Hegel says that people critiquing God sees themselves as individuals that critique ’the world’, and what they miss is the awareness that the reason they feel that they are doing something meaningful is the community with rituals and a system of norms that make it possible that the religious experience is valued. If there is no group, no people, no community that is there, it is quite difficult to uphold the idea that anything matters. Religious people however have these gatherings, and if one has them, one can create the experience of being in contact with God. If there were no rituals there would never be religion. These religious people have something that the people of enlightenment seem to miss. What they don’t realise, is the fact that certain things can appear as meaningful, can only be done when in a community of people that perceive the world in a particular way.
We started by trying to figure out the truth of reality by confrontation with it, and now we are making sense of what appears to us from a community position. We allow the judgements we have on reality to embroaden us.
If we see a table, it’s more than just an object. We are immediately aware of what the table is used for. We sit at them for meals and meeting and so on, there are usually chairs around it. Immediately we do not see the object as object, but we see how we use them and the object is used as a table. The fact that the table is framed in such a way is not about something I do individually, but is rather done as a community. I will check if my perception is correct by asking others. What we do is to unite a lot of impressions, and then make a kind of judgement by saying it is this or that. But that judgement is a kind of act, and that judgement can be evaluated as wrong or right. And the instance that evaluates it is the community around you. If you mistake an object the community around you will question you. The community is always there when we make judgements. There is a responsibility to make the right judgements. Instead of having the idea that we need to be confronted with objects, we need to be confronted with a community that gives to us the kind of objects we know and understand. The intention is to conceptualise the thing society perceives in order to get closer to what is of importance.
Reaching a situation where we are aware of this, we have reached the absolute point of realising what truth and ethical relevance is.
He doesn’t come up with definite solutions of what is right and wrong.
The Hegelian framework has however created a perspective that questions that classical idea that development is development of what is already there, but development is really a negation of what is there, and negation of that, in time. It is embracing the kind of historical contingency of development. It goes against the idea of the indestructible self, the self is rather a specific thing in a specific spirit.