Ethics
In the phenomenology, he is searching for what seems to be of importance to know, and to be sure that it is true. What counts as being of importance.
As such, searching for a way in which we can have a full understanding of what is going on, and to see how we can know that we have reached such a position. He tried a lot of different strategies to reach this end, but many failed.
It is not just epistemological reserach, but also ethical research in that it is about what is at stake in the universe for us.
One of Hegel’s striking presuppositions is that the subject, lacks any real content like natural things have. The essence of a human being cannot be described in the same way as objects, rather it is a desiring thing that lacks completeness, and wants to be fulfilled. It wants to get content by negating, consuming, things that it desires. In confrontation with other human beings it becomes a desire for other human beings who themselves are desiring. As such, it is an infinite search for something which cannot be fixed or statically explained.
It wants to find something that is really worthwhile, but the question amounts to what this is?
It seems to have to do with counting, with being there, and being recognised as someone. You need someone else to recognise that you count, and are of importance.
Think about the fact that what we really want as human beings, apart from philosophy, is that the life we are living is somehow relevant. Each of us believes that they are aiming for something, or realising something into being, which is of importance. If you really believe that your life lacks meaning, and that there is nothing worthwhile to aim for, and that all which is aimed at is nonsense, then the human subject becomes depressive, feels useless, suicidal, and not at all for the universe.
Being human, is being aimed towards becoming with content.
In all different kinds of communities we take part in different projects, are appreciated for doing so, and feel that we count for doing so. If people cannot fit into a collective project, imagine that philosophy is seen as completely useless and absurd, it would be quite difficult to motivate oneself to do philosophy, and as such, we must feel that we are taking part in some sort of collective project that develops oneself among others.
What is quite important in the Hegelian perspective is that the subject cannot exist by itself, but exists solely in its immanent relations with other people together. An individual cannot exist without the whole.
Socrates was trying to identify himself with eternal ideas, and to go away from the world and the community in order to concentrate himself on those things which keep their identity for ever. Things that don’t need something else to be what they are. By denying interest in all kinds of perishable things, you can uphold your identity even in death. The idea is that you need to find these things yourself, because each has a remembrance of the eternal ideas from before you were born, and as such it is possible to become yourself independent of anyone in the world.
The Hegelian perspective is the other way around. There is no such self that is independent of anything else. What we are, are what we become. We try to identify, consume and negate, but it’s not because we try to follow a path that is already there, but happens rather in the interaction between people in communities. This relationship is not stable either, it changes depending on the historical moment. It depends on how the general mentality of a community develops, the spirit. And the spirit changes over time in the constant negation of things. This kind of historical development follows a kind of logic; things are tried, they fail, they are tried anew in a different shape etc.
We realise about ethics that we just cannot believe that there are universal, natural laws that are for everyone the same in every period of time, that we self-evidently need to follow. What we perceive as right and wrong, is rather of our own making. There are reasons why we arrange things in a particular way, but they can also be rearranged and reshaped. The awareness that we follow certain rules, and give authority to certain principles, is because we believe that certain things have authority, and as such we want to realise this authority. As such in argumentation we might say that things must be naturally as they are or should be, but in the interaction with opposing systems, we are confronted with the pure fact that social systems are immanently human made.
In that kind of confrontation, we can realise that following certain principles was a mistake, that we can judge ourselves as guilty, that we can ask for forgiveness for doing wrong and come to reconciliation for doing wrong.
In the moment of reconciliation there is acknowledgement that you have done so and so in a bad way, and there is the possibility to realise that in being a faulty human, the other recognises you as a human being, and you them, and as such you can understand the character of humans generally, without a character of domination being present in the relationship.
In this kind of approach, mutual recognition is not necessarily self-evident. In the process of becoming of importance, there is a lot of agression and violence; wanting to be first, fighting others by being the best and so on. A lot of people today think about realising themselves in trying to be the best, by congquering others, to reach positions which others cannot. To try to become a master towards the others. In our daily life, power structures are far from even. In trying to be of importance, blaming or despising others.
Within the individual themselves, it is not just that we are always pleased with ourselves, but rather there must be a mutual agreement that we are doing things in the right way, and due to a kind of superego we might be so severe towards ourselves that without this recognition we cannot stand ourselves due to not reaching the expectations we have of ourselves.
Jeremey Bentham was older than Hegel and lived in the same period. The influence of utilitarianism is still tremendous. When people think about ethics, they don’t expect a historical explanation of how it developed. Utilitarianism is a kind of hedonism.
The idea that it is a very simple theory is misleading. If we jump into Mill and Bentham, and we think of how to deal with politics, and make the economy develop, the kind of result of this simple approach is very different depending on the kind of person you deal with. It’s not that this kind of system offers a way of dealing with reality that everyone who follows the principle will amount to the same opinion on a matter.
There is something different about how Mill interprets utilitarianism and how it is used now.
When we were discussing John Locke, we discovered that for him, the solution to religious issues is to make a distinction between the church and the state, believers and regulation. Religion is about trying to be justified by believing which is a personal and private matter. No one can decide on this matter in your place, there is no power instance that can make you believe in a particular way. At the same time he suggests that it is relative because we can’t know which is right. This is a strategy to defuse conflicts. In a lot of discussions on morality and beauty, this same method is often concluded; it depends on the kind of person you are. Then no one can claim to be correct and the other is wrong.
This presupposition is not a the position of Mill. What is good? What is pleasurable? Now people often speak about it depending from person to person. This is a consumerist paradigm. As long as you have money you can buy whatever you like, and there is no morality instance. The only regulating principle is the payment itself. If you have sufficient money you can enjoy whatever you like. If there is a discussion on the quality of media and journalism, people will say that whatever you like is a matter of choice. When Mill discusses education and what needs to be taught, and about what kind of experiences you need to be human, this is incomprehensible. He believes that every student needs to have the possibility to experience what it means to read Greek, or to deal with Homeros and classical literature.
Mill thinks that there is an aristocratic idea of high and low-culture for people to be trained in a better way. As such utilitarianism cannot be interested in how pigs are happy. The idea for Mill is that if you have the chance to experience personally what it means to be trained in high culture, you will opt for these positions. There is a possibility for a progression for a fundamentally more human society.
If we consider the ideas of Mill about how society needs to be lived, he defends a kind of socialism, a kind of system where you tax rich people and try to divide the means. At the end he defends a socialistic position. And other utilitarians, especially today, defend an ancap society. So what is guiding them now, compared to Mill?
As such utilitarians doesn’t function as people think it functions today.
We have already ethical intuitions of what is right and wrong because of our engagement in society and are part of a whole. And in this situation we have to think about what is right and wrong, and so we come up with arguments. As such, these arguments do not come first, but come only later to rationalise what we have done. Imagine that we have an ethical theory which is sound and rational and which cannot be argued against, and the conclusion of it is that it is better to kill all the people above 60 years old, what would be the feeling of this kind of theory. As such there is an intuition that guides whether the theory makes sense or not. That doesn’t mean that we cannot have reflexion and take a step back on the kind of intuitions we have. Most often, ethical theories are rationalisations.
”That property in any object, whereby it tends to produce benefit, advantage, pleasure, good, or happieness or to prevent the happening of mischief, pain, evil, or unhappiness to the party whose interest is considered.”
Ethics is not a result of deciding whether I as a person is rich enough. It is not individualistic and about lifestyle.
Bentham tried to organise a lot of things in a rational and clear way, such as the panopticon.
In this kind of utilitarianism there is a kind of materialism, thinking about how to organise the use of things in a rational way. Therefore it is usually seen as quite superficial and cheap. Which is a kind of restriction of the kind of things that are at stake in life. The critique of hegelianism towards utilitarianism is about showing that in the common life about how we deal with people generally, we rarely take into account pure pleasure and pain. Rather it is about engagement, awareness of the bigger whole.
Mill is also a defender of liberty in a very strong way. He lived in a time where the religious puritan spirit was suppressing. Being non-confirmistic was dangerous. So in Mill’s approach there is a lot of sympathy towards creative and strong people who do things in an original and new way. He believed that creativity needs to be stimulated, and you cannot suffocate this desire because of a mentality of puritanism. His project of liberty is inspired by fighting a dull conservatism.
However, it ends in the conclusion that my liberty ends wherever the liberty of the other starts. It is a kind of negative definition of liberty. If you have a libertynotion like this, and if the ideas of freedom; being free insofar as you don’t interfere with other’s freedom; and what is a good thing is a thing that end up with less suffering.
These definitions do not lend to identity or creating an atmosphere where we do something of value. In the welfare state, we want to prevent that people suffer from too little money, have healthcare and education, so that everyone can be free of pain. But there is no definition of what you actually need to do, there is only avoidance. There is no society, and there is no society in which life is made worthwhile. There must be something more in life to feel that life counts than having access to the bare minimum.
Belgium is a welfare state still. And the education system is still quite cheap. Still a lot of people are frustrated, they don’t feel pleased to live in our society. People vote for the anti-establishment. They don’t feel like there is some common project which makes them feel like they have done something worthwhile, because all you do is just survive. The utilitarian positon of liberty ends up with low amounts of positive content. This is something the neohegelians seemed to offer, a project of self-realisation, and it was bound with duties, to your station, to your task within a bigger whole. However this also has problems, as the nation now dictates what is a positive life.
Mill does not have the trolley problem in focus.
”If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind.”
”It is permissible that one should be harmed so that the majority could benefit”.
We distinguished between ethics as praxis, and ethics as reflection. The first is ethics as it happens, the second a description, or in some cases a normative system. If we are busy with self-justification, we are not dealing with what needs to be done. Trying to figure out whether one was right or wrong, is a question all about the individual. Developing ethics as a system to ensure to people that they did all they needed to not be bad people, we aren’t really trying to actually think about how we live together. We can as a society think that certain things need to be organised in a particular way, like in cooperation, so indeed to realise that it is perhaps better not to use too much fossil fuels etc. etc.
But is it then forbidden and unjustified to use? Not necessarily, but it is also a problem on a completely different level. We need to think about how to organise ourselves generally. Whether someone is justified or not is just narcisstic.
What is going on in this course?
A lot of intutions we have today, are the result of what has happened in the past, and by knowing these facts, we can realise the why of our intuitions. The ideas we study in class have made history, and to understand history is to understand ourselves.
There was a harvard professor who complained about how stupid many of his students were.
He asked his students what they thought of socialism, and they answered that they like being social.
A documentary on Antwerp, were 4 racists gathered, and he wanted to explain why they acted like they did. He wanted to explain to his partner what he was doing, and in the discussion the result was that she didn’t know what the holocaust was, and as such, it was impossible to know what was at stake in left-right-wing positions. You need to know about the past, to realise sufficiently what we deal with in the present. There is not necessarily a story that connects the positions that exist, but we need to know how they developed.
Aristoteles and Hobbes are completely different. Hobbes thinks that ethics starts the moment of society, whereas Aristotle thinks it is about seeking happiness in the world for the individual.
These approaches are diametrically different.
He doesn’t want us to learn it by heart for the oral exam. You need to realise what you are saying and to take a position which is not in favour of the course, as long as we argue it originally, or at least makes his original information less evident. This kind of struggle is the point at which you actually learn something. Fun!
What happened after Hegel?
There were people who smelled that if you start from a Hegelian perspective, there is a problem of religion. You can interpret the Hegelian approach as the spirit that develops logically in the world; and this spirit is God. But you can also turn this upside down, there are a lot of instances of projections of meaning; such as God being a projection of humanity.
In Hegel this is kind of wrong, because Hegel’s approach is quite secular. In humanity, we develop knowledge together and realise that what we perceive, is the result of how perceived things together in history, it is a recognition that the things we perceive are the things we have created together in the long run. This position is already quite hostile against organising the world in a particular way.
People like Feuerbach come up with a more particularly atheistic position. Instead of thinking that God created the world, people created God.
This returns in Bauer and Strauss.
Already in Spinoza there is a secular exegesis of the bible. Moses was the representer of the persona of the state of isreal that came up with all kinds of laws, and this is the jewish people. There is no revelation, it is just a moment when people acknowledged that Moses represented their persona.
Bauer and Strauss tried to analyse the bible in an atheistic way. They try to understand how images are created. A lot of things in the new testament, is inspired by models given by the old testament. You can analyse this by showing certain affinities in language. Especially the septuaginta (LLX) has very similar words as is used in the old testament. The Leben Jesu approach is one of these.
The impact of this kind of exegesis has changed the approach of the bible generally.
This is also the result of a kind of Hegelian awareness of the importance of the historical environment that influenced what people saw to appear.
Albert Schwietzer Geschichte der Leben-Jesu-Forschung. The exegesis done by priest, follows the historical critical method. They do is quite thoroughly, but they do it without a conclusion. One studies the fact that there were female priests in the acts of the apostles, and the professor explains all these technical details about how this function, but the fact that there were female priests was not concluded about. By showing the language similarities between the septuaginta and the gospel of st. John, was problematised, but not used for any real conclusions.
A lot of priests at the institute were fascinated by Hegel, but it hinted at a possibiltity of a transcendental order that guides history, and a lot of people thought they had found a theory in Hegel, and later Levinas, which is religious and transcendental. Because Hegel is so difficult to interpret, it was possible to also interpret him as such, but no actual Hegel scholar was gonna claim this.
From the moment you accept the interpretation of someone like Feuerbach, Hegel is idealistic and so on.
The material situation of people is the engine of what motivates what they do. It is not the ideas themselves, which are only projected afterwards. The real reality moves in an economically guided situation. What is necessary is that this situation changes.
This movement can be researched, and the whole capitalistic system is going in a bad direction.
The marxist approach inspired a lot of people to fight against unjust social relations. The 19th and 20th centuries is a lot about the struggle between classes. The reason why the western societies have social security system is the material relations that were present after WWII. When rawls started his theory of justice, social security was already going downhill. And the reason we have these welfare opportunities are because of how afraid the leading class was of a revolution. Now this fright is forgotten.
When the professor came to Leuven, practically all the student organisations were communist. They were driven by Mao. Their idea was that we need to struggle for equality and support the miners. There was a strong socialist spirit, and it was bad to become a businessman. You needed to become someone who is doing something for the common people, like studying psychology and so on. Then suddenly, there were people who were wearing Milet, an expensive clothing brand. The socialists wore green military colored parkas. The new guys defended the idea that becoming rich is not so bad. Now there aren’t that many student organisations that declare themselves as communist, so the spirit has changed.
In france, Hegel was stimulated by Alexander Kojeve, a russian-french philosopher. A lot of prominent philosophers followed kojeve’s seminars on Hegel. Especially his interpretation of desire as central in Hegel.
Because human beings have no content by themselves, they must desire, and want to become not-so. They are in search of content. This kind of desire never ends. When you are a human being, it is in your relation with other people that this desire is somehow at least partially fulfilled.
For Kojeve, it is in the struggle of self-development, in thinking and reasoning, that culture and arts develops. These things becomes the rich content that gives meaning to things. It is in labour that things become meaningful. In this approach of Kojeve, the whole development that gives content to the human being, is not the result of a natural pre-determined essence, but is rather done during history. We become what we were not. You cannot think away history and have human beings.
This opens the idea of socialisation. Of learning a language, and realising what the world is by talking and having discussions. Hegel is easily associated, in this kind of thinking, with structuralism. Because realising what is at stake, is realising how things are organised in a particular culture, and how this relates to habits and thoughts. This is necessarily communicated by langauge. Reality appears because of language. Without it, we cannot make sense of anything.
The idea is that there is not just being determined and compelled to what is expected from you, but it is acknowledging and embracing your station; finding a project of self-realisation. It is not purely about answering what is expected of you. In becoming something, I realise myself. It is a happy marriage between what is asked of you and what you yourself desire. Often people think these things are in opposition. The more society asks, the less the individual has for itself. This is false.
If there is no project that is appreciated by someone, the individual will not find something to become someone through. There is no calling or positive doing. It is rather a kind of society where people just live without these kinds of ideas.