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Tragedy, Recognition, and the Death of God: Studies in Hegel and
Nietzsche
Robert R. Williams
ABSTRACT
This book explores convergences between Hegel and Nietzsche on four themes: (1) Philosophies of
tragedy that overcome the traditional suppression and exclusion of tragedy by both philosophy and
theology. (2) Their views of recognition and community as requiring struggle and contestation; their
contrasting discussions of master and slave, and friendship. (3) Their critique of Kant, including Kantian
morality and its doctrine of the postulates of practical reason that for Hegel constitutes the spurious
infinite and for Nietzsche the ascetic ideal. Kant’s restriction of cognition to finitude is for Nietzsche an
opening to tragedy, and Kant’s view that theology is a subjective postulate of morality is for Hegel the
death of God. Hegel responds to the death of God implicit in the Kantian frame with a reconstruction and
renewal of critical metaphysics, and with a theology based on a reconstruction and defense of the
ontological argument, i.e., a renewal of ontotheology. (4) Their views of the death of God: both agree that
the God who is dead is the moral-juridical God, the abstract, immutable apathetic divine. In order to
survive the death of God, theology must incorporate negation, tragic suffering, and the death of God as its
own themes.
Keywords: Hegel, Nietzsche, tragedy, recognition, difference, other, community, Kantian frame, postulates, the
ought, spurious infinite, the ascetic ideal, ontological argument, true infinite, death of God, tragic
absolute, heraclitus, theodicy, reconciliation
BIBLIOGRAPHIC INFORMATION
Print publication date: 2012
Published to Oxford Scholarship
Online: January 2013
Print ISBN-13: 9780199656059
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199656059.001.0001
Jake, it’s Avak here: The only value I see in you even glancing
through Williams’s “Introduction” is for … negative reasons. He
believes strongly—and his entire study makes a case for—what he
calls a “rapprochement” or coming together—of Hegel with Nietzsche.
His study is therefore almost if not entirely irrelevant to your interests.
Do not waste more than 15 minutes on the “Introduction.” It will
simply give you a (dis)taste for this scholar and his way of thinking,
which is pathetically hopeful and not in the anti-dichotomous way that
you are affirmatively hopeful. The “Introduction” will also give you a
quick taste of what his section and chapter break-downs are all about,
should you want to look at more of them, which I doubt. However, I
would take a look at his “Chapter I” which begins on page 35 of the
present document and which I have included after the “Introduction,”
because therein, he discusses Deleuze’s work on Nietzsche (The
Nietzsche and Philosophy book by Deleuze wherein Deleuze tries to
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take out Hegelian Dichotomies). Just bear in mind that only use, from
Williams, what is usable because his is an insufferably “feel-good”
study. If you cite from this work, note his in-text page break
references so that your reader knows which page from the hardcopy
you’re pulling from. Such in-text page breaks come in a purplish font
in parentheses.
Introduction
Robert R Williams
Despite its appearance, this is not a collection of essays conceived separately on
isolated topics only recently gathered in a book. What began as an invited essay
on Hegel’s and Nietzsche’s contributions to critical theory, to wit, their views on
master and slave, broadened quickly into an inquiry into their views on
recognition, community, and ethical life (Chapters 2, 3). Nietzsche’s remark that
the problem of pity launched his genealogical inquiry into morality not only
prompted the question whether Hegel’s account of recognition belonged to the
pro-pity tradition that Nietzsche linked genealogically to decadence, it also
demanded an investigation of their views of tragedy (Chapters 4–5). For pity and
fear are the emotions that, according to Aristotle, tragic dramas are supposed to
arouse and discharge. Although neither follows Aristotle here, Hegel and
Nietzsche together shape and define modern philosophical interest in tragedy,
which reverses nearly two millennia of its suppression by traditional philosophy
and theology. As Nietzsche points out, Socratism killed off tragedy.
In his Phenomenology, Hegel introduces the figure of the unhappy consciousness
and connects it with ancient tragedy, when he shows that it arose historically as a
successor to the tragic tradition. The unhappy consciousness is the endgame of
tragedy. With the collapse of fundamental values and institutions in the fall of
Greek culture and its subjection to the Roman Empire, tragedy in Hegel’s sense—
a conflict of right against right—is no longer possible. The result is dispirited
culture—nihilism. To portray this condition, Hegel introduces the term “death of
God” as the utterance of the unhappy consciousness that expresses the loss of
everything substantial.
The death of God is also part of the Christian theology of the cross. When
Christianity arrived in the ancient world, its theology revalued the cross in a
polemic against a dispirited empire, transforming the cross from a symbol of
death, loss, and marginalization into a symbol of love, hope, and reconciliation.
However, since that time, the theological themes of divine kenosis, suffering, and
death inherent in the theology of the cross became obscured by metaphysical
conceptions of divine impassibility. However, for Hegel the term ‘death of God’ in
christological context implies the death of that abstract, immutable ‘apathetic’
divine.
Hegel found that his was a time of broad cultural upheaval in which one era was
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ending and a new era was struggling to be born. Heralding the new era appeared
to be a new “death of God”: On the one hand, Kant’s restriction of cognition to
finitude and his attack on the theological proofs made God an unknowable
Beyond. On the other (p.2) hand, Jacobi’s fideist attack on rationalist philosophy
made the knowledge of God sacrilege because it rendered the infinite finite and
conditioned. In confronting such sweeping changes and criticisms of the
philosophical and theological tradition, Hegel sought to retrieve the death of God
as a formative event in Western culture, and to give conceptual expression to the
“infinite grief of the finite purely as a moment of the supreme idea, and no more
than a moment,”1 by re-establishing “the idea of absolute freedom and along with
it absolute suffering, the speculative Good Friday in place of the historic Good
Friday. Good Friday must be speculatively re-established in the whole truth and
harshness of its God-forsakenness.”2 In retrieving the death of God, Hegel also
rediscovered ancient tragedy.
Hegel’s interest in tragedy, like Nietzsche’s, led him to major philosophical and
theological reconstruction. The emergence of tragedy as a topic in German
idealism includes a critique, if not the end, of metaphysics and ontotheology. To
resume engagement with tragedy requires philosophical-theological
reconstruction in order to retrieve those tragic themes that were suppressed in
the post-Socratic development of Western philosophy and metaphysics, and to
find new ways to understand and express these. Theology must rethink its
alliance and reliance on the Western metaphysical tradition and reconsider its
rejection of a suffering absolute. In Hegel’s view traditional Christianity
suppressed its own tragic vision and thereby suppressed an essential part of
Christianity’s own story: the suffering, dying God of love.3 This early theology of
the cross was obscured in the synthesis of Christianity with classical metaphysics
that enshrined the monarchical metaphor of abstract transcendence and tied it to
moralizing, juridical interpretations crowned by an impassible absolute.
Nietzsche identified Christianity with the moral vision of the world and moral
God; he saw that these amounted to the practice of nihilism. He embraced Greek
tragedy with its suffering divinity Dionysus. Nietzsche also sought to address the
nihilism of a dispirited modernity through the concept of eternal recurrence.
Both Hegel and Nietzsche embrace a vision of tragic freedom that includes a
critique of traditional philosophy, metaphysics, and theology, and embrace
distinct versions of a suffering God. The project thus gradually assumed its
present form, in which the themes of recognition, tragedy, and the death of God
are integrally related.
Running throughout these themes for Hegel is the problem of the other, the
difference. This issue structures his concept of recognition, his concept of
tragedy, his reconstruction of the universal, the theological proofs and concept of
God as spirit. According to Iwan Iljin, recognition of the problem of the other is
systematically connected with Hegel’s concept of a tragic and suffering God; it is
also central to his (p.3) concept of love and reconciliation. If the other were non-
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serious or bogus, the concepts of tragedy, love, spirit, and reconciliation would
collapse.
These studies examine these themes and their interrelation, including the
possibility of a reconciliation that not only does not exclude, but cannot be
understood apart from, tragic conflict and loss. Both Hegel and Nietzsche believe
that tragedy is important, for philosophies and theologies of God, freedom and
recognition that avoid or suppress the tragic are not only naïve but inadequate.
Although they may disagree as to its ultimate meaning, shape, and significance,
both Hegel and Nietzsche are committed to a philosophy of the tragic and a
vision of life as involving struggle, conflict, and suffering that are inseparable
from freedom and creativity.
No doubt many will find odd the juxtaposition of Hegel and Nietzsche, rather
than Hegel or Nietzsche. The contemporary consensus is that Hegel and
Nietzsche are opposites: Hegel is widely regarded as the philosopher of the
system which is the culmination of metaphysics, while Nietzsche is the antisystem, anti-metaphysical post-modern tragic philosopher. Yet it is Hegel’s
interest in tragedy that is largely responsible for keeping modern interest in
tragedy alive; moreover Nietzsche’s philosophy of tragedy includes a view of a
tragic divine. There is a minority view of the relation between Hegel and
Nietzsche that Daniel Breazeale calls the rapprochement thesis.4 It is associated
with Walter Kaufmann, who asserts that there is an amazing parallel and even
convergence between Hegel and Nietzsche.5 For Kaufmann, both are dialectical
monists, and both put forth major modern interpretations of tragedy. Both even
make use of the same term: aufheben, sublimare, to express negation and selftransformation. Although not everyone agrees with every aspect of Kaufmann’s
interpretation, several philosophers accept some version of the rapprochement
thesis: Daniel Breazeale, Judith Butler, Stephen Houlgate, Eliot Jurist, Philip J.
Kain, Richard Rorty, Stanley Rosen, Robert Solomon, Alan White, and Will
Dudley.6 Perhaps Rosen’s acerbic comment sums up best the sentiments of this
unorganized camp: “those who insist on a sharp juxtaposition between Hegel and
Nietzsche have understood neither one nor the other.”7
Hegel and Nietzsche have a common opponent, to wit Kant’s philosophy; both
criticize Kant’s moral vision of the world and its postulates as illusory or
spurious. For (p.4) Hegel, Kant’s dualisms generate the spurious infinite, while
for Nietzsche Kant embodies the ascetic ideal and its projection of spurious
values. Both are fascinated with Greek tragedy; both develop the theme of the
death of God as a philosophical topic, the nihilistic dark side of modernity; both
reject Western substance metaphysics and favor Heraclitus’ becoming over
Parmenides’ pure being; both develop accounts of master and slave that are
relevant to social and political criticism. Of this rapprochement group, only
three—Houlgate, Jurist, and Dudley—have produced book-length studies, dealing
with Hegel and Nietzsche as critics of metaphysics, their theories of agency and
culture, and their views of freedom and society. Rapprochement has arrived only
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partially and piecemeal.
This study is likewise in the tradition of piecemeal rapprochement. It is indebted
to Houlgate’s Hegelian critique of traditional metaphysics and theology, to
Dudley’s study of Hegel and Nietzsche on the theme of freedom, and to Michel
Haar’s Nietzsche and Metaphysics for his account of the God who remains after
the death of the moral God. Two of the main themes of the present study, tragedy
and the death of God, identify areas of indisputable convergence between
Nietzsche and Hegel. It has frequently been noted that Hegel and Nietzsche
represent the most important discussions and influential philosophical
treatments of tragedy since Aristotle. Peter Szondi points out that Aristotle gave
us a poetics of tragedy, while Schelling, Hegel, and Nietzsche have developed the
philosophy of tragedy. According to Szondi, it is Hegel’s interest in and
discussion of tragedy, that more than any other has kept modern interest in
tragedy alive.8
Behind their mutual interest in tragedy lie similar conceptions of freedom, to wit,
that the strength and power of freedom is discovered, revealed, and actualized
through overcoming resistance and enduring conflict and contradiction. This
view of freedom, first formulated in the modern period by Fichte and probably
traceable to Jakob Boehme, is affirmed by both:
Hegel:
For the greatness and force [of spirit] are truly measured only by the greatness
and force of the opposition out of which spirit brings itself back to unity with
itself again. The intensity and depth of subjectivity come all the more to light, the
more deeply and infinitely it is divided against itself, and the more lacerating are
the contradictions which it has to endure and in which it has to remain firm in
itself…for power consists only in maintaining oneself within the negative of
oneself.9
Nietzsche:
How is freedom measured in individuals and peoples? According to the
resistance that has to be overcome, according to the exertion required.…Danger
alone acquaints us with our own resources, our virtues, our armor and weapons,
our spirit, and forces us to be strong. First principle: one must need to be
strong—otherwise one will never become strong.10
Out of life’s school of war: What does not destroy me, makes me stronger.11
(p.5) This view of freedom underlies both Nietzsche’s concept of the contest
(Agon), and Hegel’s famous portrait of the struggle for recognition as well as his
claim that the essence of tragedy is conflict. Since freedom is not a given but has
to become actual through struggle and overcoming opposition, it is vulnerable to
tragic realization. But the dramatic portrayal of tragic conflict is not a rehearsal of
disaster for disaster’s sake; tragic conflict can reveal the depths and strength of
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spirit. For this reason tragedy can possess profound spiritual and religious
significance.
This understanding of freedom and tragic conflict leads to the second major
theme around which Hegel and Nietzsche converge, to wit, the death of God. For
Hegel and Nietzsche the God who is dead is the moral God; both reject the legalpenal vision of the world. However, religion and theology are something other
than and more than a postulate of morality. The death of the moral God raises a
question: what is theology after the death of God? What sort of post-moral
theology is possible? Does an interest in tragedy include interest in what Paul
Ricoeur has called a tragic theology that is impossible and unavowable? Apart
from Kurt Vonnegut’s Cat’s Cradle, demonic tragic theology has attracted few
takers. For both Hegel and Nietzsche the death of God implies a post-moral
vision of a tragically suffering absolute—for Nietzsche Dionysus, and for Hegel
the Christological theology of the cross.
Hegel would agree with Nietzsche that any philosophy that fails to acknowledge
the tragic remains a naiveté.12 Speculative philosophy must retrieve and include
not only the tragic tradition, but also its Christian appropriation and
transformation. It is for this reason that Hegel’s interpretation of the death of
God differs significantly from Nietzsche, who identifies the Christian tradition
and God entirely with morality and alienation. For Hegel, Christianity need not,
and must not restrict itself to the moral God. In Hegel’s view, Christianity is postmoral and includes a tragic dimension. Traditional Christian doctrine suppressed
its own tragic vision and thereby suppressed an essential part of Christianity’s
own story: the theology of the cross, i.e., the revaluation of the death of God as
the suffering, dying, and rising God of love.13
Nietzsche’s account of the death of God is better known than Hegel’s. Nietzsche
saw that the impending nihilism Hegel diagnosed was becoming explicit. The
death of God was for Nietzsche becoming evident in the everyday consciousness
of culture: the highest values devalue themselves. When God dies the result is a
nihilism that empties all values and leaves human existence meaningless and
goalless. The death of God introduces the supreme crisis of culture, a struggle for
meaning in the face of nihilism. This drives Nietzsche, like Hegel, to a critique of
traditional values—including the moral God that he, unlike Hegel, identifies with
Christianity—and to embrace a tragic (p.6) vision of the world. Nietzsche is
fascinated by the culture of the ancient Greeks that demanded a tragic art; this
reflects a “pessimism of strength.”14
Having accepted the death of God and the resulting nihilism as a fact of
contemporary life, Nietzsche sought a way of living with it. If human existence
has become meaningless and goalless, and if the ascetic ideal of morality and the
moral God are dead, is there any way of finding something to will, a goal in life,
that avoids ressentiment against life and nihilism? Is there an alternative to the
ascetic ideal? Nietzsche’s answer is his doctrine of eternal return, which is
grounded in a joyous fatalism that restores the innocence of becoming. The
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theological symbol of innocent joyous fatalism is Dionysus.
Now for a word about the plan and organization of the material. The following
studies are organized into four thematic groups: Recognition, Tragedy, the
Kantian Frame, and the Death of God. In what follows I shall outline and
summarize the chapters. However, since Kant’s philosophy is both indispensable
and inadequate for understanding Hegel, and since the inadequacies of Kant’s
thought are most visible in the areas of logic, metaphysics, and philosophy of
religion, I shall interrupt the chapter by chapter summary to elaborate on what I
call the Kantian Frame. The issues posed by the frame are important and have
not disappeared. They have reasserted themselves in contemporary nonmetaphysical interpretations of Hegel’s thought that seek to make it compatible
with or acceptable within the Kantian frame. However, if religion and theology
are as important to Hegel’s thought as he claims them to be, then nonmetaphysical interpretations are probably untenable. Of course it is an open
question whether religion and theology are as metaphysically significant and
viable as Hegel believed them to be. Nietzsche did not think so; nevertheless he
was deeply troubled by the death of God and refused to let the theodicy issue go.
I. Recognition
We begin not with tragedy or the death of God, but rather with Hegel and
Nietzsche’s accounts of master and slave. Surprisingly, this is an underresearched area. Since Hegel shows that mastery and servitude arise out of a
struggle for recognition, the concept of recognition is indispensable for
understanding Hegel’s account. The figure of mastery and servitude presupposes,
but does not exhaust the concept of recognition. Mastery and servitude constitute
a one-sided, unequal, deficient shape of recognition that falls short of reciprocity.
Although mastery and servitude have tended to grab all the attention in
treatments like Kojève’s, they culminate in the figure of the unhappy
consciousness—an internalized master/slave—and not in reciprocal recognition.
But for Hegel mastery and servitude must be measured by the concept of mutual
recognition. When that is done, it becomes evident that they constitute an
unstable (p.7) relationship that contains the seeds of its own reversal. This
reversal implies a critique of mastery and domination as the self-contradictory,
ultimately futile coercion of a free being.
Nietzsche’s discussion of the master morality and the servile decadent morality is
not grounded in a phenomenology of mutual recognition like Hegel’s, but rather
in a philological and genealogical analysis of different types of moralities. The
noble type embodies the will as ascending, and the decadent type embodies the
will as declining. According to Nietzsche, the noble and the decadent types of
morality are not simply distributed into different sociological groups, but can
coexist side by side within the same human being, within a single selfconsciousness.15 Thus any conflict between these types is not exactly a struggle for
recognition in Hegel’s sense, where master and slave are determined from the
outcome of a life and death struggle. And because Nietzsche’s types of moralities
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can coexist within a single human being, it is possible that Hegel’s master, who
has prevailed in the struggle for recognition, might be servile or decadent in
Nietzsche’s sense. That is why Gilles Deleuze believes Nietzsche’s analysis
undermines Hegel’s account. We examine Deleuze’s account in Chapter 1.
Deleuze’s claim that Hegel and Nietzsche are opposites is refuted in the course of
his own attempt to establish it.
The chapter concludes with a puzzling text of Nietzsche’s that on the one hand,
includes sympathy [Mitgefühl] on its list of noble virtues, and on the other hand,
claims that all community [Gemeinde] makes men—somehow, somewhere,
sometime common [gemeine].16 How can sympathy, here described as noble
virtue and obviously implying some sort of intersubjective empathy and
communication, be a virtue if it is true that all community between humans is
essentially a contamination of solitude and cleanliness, i.e., of subjective purity?
If that is true, isn’t community equivalent to herd morality? Does Nietzsche have
any affirmative conception of recognition and community?
This question is pursued in Chapters 2 and 3. Chapter 2 takes up the issue of
friendship, i.e., philia, in Aristotle, Hegel, and Nietzsche. Walter Kaufmann
maintains that Nietzsche retrieves Aristotle’s view of noble friendship, modeled
not on Christian love, but on magnanimity. Aristotle’s concept of the great soul
(megalopsychos) is important for Nietzsche, because it includes relation to other
in the self-relation, and thus appears to avoid the opposition between egoism and
altruism that Nietzsche criticizes.17 However, it is far from clear that Aristotle’s
praise of megalopsychos is straightforward and unambiguous. On the contrary,
Martha Nussbaum persuasively argues that the Nicomachean Ethics is an
extended polemic against the view that virtue and the good life could be purely
solitary.18 Aristotle’s claim is that the good life, including all the virtues, is social.
Aristotle treats great soul ironically: it would be strange, he says, to make the
eudaimon a solitary, for no one would choose the whole (p.8) world on the
condition of being alone, since man is a political creature and one whose nature it
is to live with others.19 Moreover, Aristotle cannot formulate his concept of
friendship (philia) without bringing in the concept of recognition. Hegel not only
gets Aristotle’s point, but also agrees with Aristotle that love, philia, friendship
are the intersubjective origins and foundations of justice and ethical life.
Chapter 3 explores Nietzsche’s concept of the contest. His early essay on Homer’s
Contest shows that the contest is an institution that restrains and limits violence,
and thus is comparable to Hegel’s account of the struggle for recognition and of
mastery and servitude. The contest is oriented towards competition, but not in
order to produce a winner and a loser or victor and vanquished. Instead the
guiding idea of the contest is that no one should be the best. The idea of the
contest is that contestation itself is intrinsically worthwhile because it drives the
competitors to greater levels of excellence. This assumes that the other has an
affirmative rather than a merely negative significance. The contest therefore is a
social institution, grounded in an intersubjectively constituted common will, even
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though it is justified principally by instrumental considerations about producing
greater individual excellence. Behind the contest is an agonistic view of the will to
power, and the germ of a theory of affirmative, noble community, one that has
potential convergences with Hegel’s concepts of recognition and ethical life.
II. Tragedy
Part II is an examination of Hegel’s and Nietzsche’s views of tragedy. I was led to
this topic by Nietzsche’s remark that the problem of pity played an important
part in launching his genealogical critique of morality.20 Nietzsche detected in
pity a will turned against itself and by extension against life. Pity constitutes its
object as diminished. Nietzsche found in pity the herd practice of nihilism.
Moreover, pity and fear are the very emotions that tragic drama is supposed to
engender and to discharge in the tragic catharsis. However, the tragic catharsis is
not nihilistic, but an affirmation that, despite suffering, life is fundamentally
good. A consideration of pity and fear thus leads to the topic of tragedy.
As already noted, both Hegel and Nietzsche are drawn to tragedy because it
constitutes a supreme resistance and challenge to the will that measures the
strength of spirit. Tragic conflict reveals what is at stake, both for freedom and for
its world, i.e., ethical life. Through the action of the tragic hero the main
institutions of ethical life, the family and the state, come into conflict. In Hegel’s
view the essence of tragedy is conflict, not a moral conflict between right and
wrong, but a conflict between legitimate rights and institutions. Such conflict
moves the unmovable, i.e., the norms and institutions of ethical life, threatening
them with destruction. Such conflict arises (p.9) out of the false consciousness of
the tragic hero, who, convinced of his own rectitude, embodies a stubborn fixity
of will that issues in one-sided action that both violates another legitimate right
and plunges the hero into self-contradiction. S/he refuses to recognize what, if
s/he were true to her/himself, s/he should honor. Like Aristotle Hegel believes in
tragic resolution. In Hegel’s view the tragic resolution demands that the hero
yield, give a little, recognize what s/he refuses, enlarge her perspective. If s/he
yields, the drama does not have to end tragically; but if s/he refuses to yield, then
the hero is destroyed by the very powers s/he refuses to recognize. The tragic
resolution signifies, on the one hand, that we are shattered by the destruction of
one who is noble and excellent, but on the other we are fundamentally reconciled
to this destruction because a conflict and loss of essential institutions that hold
everything together would be even more unbearable.
We examine Nietzsche’s treatment of the tragic myth and break with
Schopenhauer’s pessimism, his thesis that tragedy is a synthesis of Apollinian
and Dionysian elements, and the problem of the philosophical interpretation of
the tragic myth. Nietzsche asks why did the Greek poets create the magnificent
Olympian gods and world? He claims that these figures represent an attempt to
overcome pre-Homeric violence and chaos. Homer reverses the wisdom of
Silenus that viewed non-being as preferable to being; this reversal is the
hermeneutical key to the significance of the Olympian figures: out of the ancient
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Titanic order of terror, the Olympian order of joy evolved through the Apollinian
drive towards individuation and beauty. Thus in spite of terrible irrational depths
of existence, the Greeks affirmed that existence was good. The spirit of tragedy
arises as a discordant yet affirmative note: a pessimism of strength, to wit, not
Apollinian beautiful individuation, but rather the excess of a bliss born in pain
and suffering is the comprehensive tragic vision.
The tragic myth is a symbolization of Dionysian wisdom through Apollinian
artifice. It symbolizes a mystical ecstasy in which the destruction of the tragic
hero appears as necessary. Such destruction is actually a healing, a reconciliation.
The latter claim points up the problem of the philosophical interpretation of
tragedy. For Nietzsche the spirit of Socratism, with its superficial, optimistic
rationalism that believes it can not only understand but also correct and improve
existence, killed off tragedy. Nietzsche approves of Kant’s restriction on cognition
as opening the possibility of an affirmative philosophical interpretation of
tragedy, to wit, a tragic sublime. However, while Kant opens the door to tragedy
and Dionysian excess, if one embraces the latter, one may not be able to remain
within the limits of Kant’s Apollinian-Socratic view of philosophy.
III. The Kantian Frame
Kant is both indispensable for understanding Hegel and Nietzsche, and yet
insufficient. Nowhere is Hegel’s view of Kant’s insufficiency more apparent than
in theology and metaphysics. Both are of decisive importance for Hegel. Kant is
the originator of a new (p.10) philosophical culture; Hegel is both part of and yet
finds it necessary to correct and overcome this culture. However, many believe
that Hegel went too far in this endeavor when he reconstructed both
ontotheology and metaphysics. Paul Ricoeur spoke for many when he asked
Should we renounce Hegel? and characterized himself a post-Hegelian Kantian,
indicating a movement from Kant to Hegel, and a second critical movement back
to Kant. In the latter the Kantian frame has “reasserted” itself. It finds expression
in contemporary non-metaphysical readings of Hegel. While the consensus of the
non-metaphysical readings may be that Hegel failed to overcome Kant, the nonmetaphysical readings of Hegel are judged by others to be untenable because the
metaphysical and theological aspects of Hegel’s thought have proven to be
irreducible. At the center of these disputes is the question of the importance of
religion and theology for Hegel. Equally at issue is the adequacy of the Kantian
frame, its doctrine that theology is a postulate of morality. We interrupt our
chapter by chapter summary to elaborate on these issues.
1. Hegel’s Criticism of Kant and Jacobi
Hegel writes: “The great advance of our age is that subjectivity has been
recognized as an absolute moment. This subjectivity is an essential condition.
However, everything depends on how one understands this turn to the subject.”21
In Hegel’s view, Kant, Fichte, and Jacobi demonstrate how not to ‘take the turn’
to the subject. Although they oppose each other, they nevertheless share a
common ground, to wit, they are reflective philosophies of finitude. In these
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subjectivity is defined by an absolute opposition between finite and infinite.22 The
opposition between finite and infinite is not simply a modern invention; it has
had a long history in Western metaphysics and traditional theology. That
opposition persists in modern thought despite claims of a radical break from the
past. It is intensified into an absolute one when transcendental philosophy
invokes subjectivity in a foundationalist sense.
Within this common ground, Kant, Fichte, and Jacobi oppose each other, yet they
have also exhausted the totality of possible forms of the principle.23 The common
ground shared by all three is this: an absolute subject that is restricted to
finitude. This restriction is an absolute limit that makes transition to the infinite
impossible. Thus modern subjectivity is self-excluded from the infinite, and
restricted to finitude. Hegel writes:
The one-self-certifying certainty…is that there exists a thinking subject, a reason
affected with finitude; and the whole of philosophy consists in determining the
universe with respect to this finite reason. Kant’s so-called critique of the
cognitive faculties, Fichte’s doctrine that consciousness cannot be
transcended…Jacobi’s refusal to undertake anything impossible for reason, all
amount to nothing but the absolute restriction of reason to the form of finitude,
an injunction never to forget the absoluteness of the subject in every rational
cognition.24
(p.11) According to Hegel, “these philosophies have to be recognized as nothing
but the culture of reflection raised to a system.”25 Within this culture, moral faith,
practical action, and religion are shapes of what Hegel will later describe as the
unhappy consciousness, a subjectivity that understands itself burdened with an
absolute barrier that cannot be crossed. Kant’s moral faith and Jacobi’s faith
consists in a self-contradictory double movement that yearns for that which lies
beyond the barrier, together with the conviction that it is impossible to cross the
boundary, or as in Jacobi’s case, that a leap is required.
The absolute opposition of finite and infinite means that the infinite is
constituted as an inconceivable, empty Beyond, an unknowable God beyond the
limits of reason.26 Hegel observes
the doctrine that we can know nothing of God…has become in our time a
universally acknowledged truth, a settled thing, a kind of prejudice.…There was a
time when all science was a science of God. It is the distinction of our age, by
contrast, to know each and every thing, indeed to know an infinite mass of
objects, but only of God to know nothing.…It is no longer a grief to our age that it
knows nothing of God; rather it counts as the highest insight that this cognition is
not even possible.27
This is the fixed standpoint that the all-powerful culture of our time—the Kantian
frame—has established for philosophy. For Hegel it means that “In this situation
philosophy cannot aim at the cognition of God, but only at what is called the
12
cognition of man.”28 In Hegel’s view, this culture is not only the death of God, it is
the end of philosophy: “What used to be regarded as the death of philosophy, that
reason should renounce its existence in the absolute, excluding itself totally from
it and relating itself to it only negatively, became now the zenith of philosophy.”29
Elsewhere he puts this point even more polemically:
Kant’s philosophy ends in dualism, a relation that is an unresolved contradiction,
an ‘ought to be’ that is absolutely essential. It is otherwise with Jacobi’s faith.
Jacobi finds the representation of God and immediate being—indeed all
mediation—to be untrue. With Kant therefore the result is, “we know only
appearances.” With Jacobi the result is “we know only what is finite and
conditioned.”
Over these twin results there has been unalloyed (but empty) joy among men,
because the sloth of reason considered itself excused from every call to reflect
(Heaven be praised!), excused from the trouble of penetrating to the depths of
nature and spirit, and believed itself granted the absolute right of freedom to go
on a holiday. The further result of this is the autocracy, the absolute sovereignty,
of the subjective reason, which, because it is abstract and not yet recognized, has
only subjective certainty and not objective truth. That was a second cause of
rejoicing, namely, that I possess this autarchy, which I can neither know nor
justify, and need not do so; my subjective certainty and freedom of conviction are
self-sufficient and count for everything.
(p.12) A third cause of rejoicing was added by Jacobi, who asserted that the
desire to know the truth amounts to sacrilege, because through cognition the
infinite is only rendered finite.
Truth is in a fine mess when all metaphysics and philosophy have become mere
things of the past, and the only philosophy that counts is no philosophy at all! 30
2. Critique of Foundationalism: Decentering the Subject
Hegel criticizes Cartesian–Kantian foundationalism. The subject has to be
relieved of its foundational role that culminates in egology or solipsism.31 This
Aufhebung does not require the elimination of the subject (as if that were
possible!) but rather allowing it to be what it is, namely not a “prison of
subjectivity,” but an openness to the world in the broadest sense. In this regard
subjectivity undergoes a twofold, or double decentering that corresponds to the
reciprocity constitutive of relation.32
One decentering of the subject is carried out in Hegel’s account of recognition. In
the struggle for recognition the unrestricted violence of desire that seeks the
elimination of the other is aufgehoben, negated. Violence is negated,
transformed, and preserved on a higher level, to wit, the, unequal, coerced
recognition of the master by the slave. The master and slave relation puts an end
to violence but legitimates inequality and coercion.33 Such coercion and
domination have to be overcome, because the immanent telos and actualization
of recognition is reciprocal recognition. The latter presupposes and includes a
13
relative decentering and transformation of the subject so that it becomes an I that
is a We, and a We that is an I. The decentered subject is an enlarged mentality
that corrects the Kantian account. Although this is somewhat intelligible within
the Kantian frame, Hegel criticizes Kant’s moral consciousness and world-view
for lacking the moment of recognition.34
However, a second decentering of the subject calls into question the Kantian
frame itself, insofar as the latter claims that morality is the highest sphere of
existence and that religion and theology are adequately understood as postulates
of morality. Decentering the subject here includes and involves the displacement
of morality by religion as the relation of humans to the sacred. Here the
decentering of the subject occurs on the axis of the relation of finite and infinite.
Hegel is critical of anthropocentric understandings of religion and ethical
theologies oriented to Kant’s primacy of practical reason. Post-Kantian theologies
and philosophies of religion are conceived in continuity with and as (p.13) a
legacy of the classical metaphysics and traditional theology that separated infinite
from finite, God from world.
This separation is sharpened and radicalized by the modern turn to the subject as
epistemological foundation. According to Hegel, for the pure reason that has
critically reduced itself to the understanding, “finitude is the negation fixed in
itself.”35 Accordingly finite and infinite are separated and mutually external to
each other. In its most extreme interpretation this separation means that no
transition from finite to infinite is possible. This is the anti-metaphysical, antitheological conviction of modernity. Less extreme interpretations of the principle
include anthropocentric philosophies of religion and theologies that maintain
that the relation of finite to infinite is asymmetrical and one-sided: the finite is
related to the infinite, but not vice versa. These theologies are also authorized by
Kant’s moral faith and its god-postulate. But for Hegel the content of the godpostulate is contradicted by the subjective form of the postulate and remains tied
to finitude. The god-postulate is the spurious infinite (Hegel) or the spurious
value projected by the ascetic ideal (Nietzsche). Both Hegel and Nietzsche seek to
dissolve what Hegel calls the stubbornness of finitude. This dissolution displays
the transition to infinity and the infinity itself that the Kantian frame forbids
and/or denies.
For Hegel this issue requires a revision of the traditional concept of the
asymmetrical relation between God and world. Hegel’s objection to this is that it
is a one-sided relation: the world is related to God but God is not related to the
world. The asymmetry underlies the monarchical metaphor of the God–world
relation, as well as master and slave. Hegel criticizes this asymmetry: a one-sided
relation is no relation at all. If it is true that religion is to be understood as
relation of humans to God, this implies that God gives godself a relation to
humans, and that the human relation to God is a two-sided reciprocal relation
grounded in God who is self-relating. Hegel’s conception of religion is
ontotheological.36 The term ontotheology designates here not the traditional
14
theology of a highest being that Hegel criticizes and rejects along with substance
metaphysics, but a theology founded on the ontological proof according to which
God is self-grounding and self-relating. The decentering of the human subject in
religion is correlative not to a postulate, but to the actual infinite, the self-relating
God. Hegel’s ontotheological conception of religion implies that the human
subject sublates itself; it is utterly dependent; it finds itself surpassed by, relative
to, and grounded in God. This grounding is not annihilation; it takes the form of
human self-recognition in God. Spinoza’s substance will not do; the ontological
argument, rightly understood, implies absolute idealism. If “spirit is the idealist
proper” (in relation to which humans discover themselves as ideal moments) this
implies that (p.14) God must be subject.37 Hegel’s alternative philosophical
theology is found in the true infinite, the speculative nucleus of Hegelianism. I
shall say more about this later.
Hegel criticizes views that separate finite from infinite; he holds that the
transition from finite to infinite is not merely possible but already actual in
religion as God’s self-relation to humanity. For this reason the human heart will
not accept the understanding’s assertion of a fixed absolute separation of infinite
from the finite.
When…it is said that the being of the finite is only its own being and not at all the
being of an other, it is declared that there is no possible passage from finite to
infinite and thus no mediation between them, neither in themselves nor in and
for knowledge. The result is that, although the finite may…indeed be mediated
through the infinite, the reverse is not true, which is just the point of interest.
Appeal is made to the fact that the spirit of humanity elevates itself out of the
contingent, temporal and finite to God, the absolutely necessary…Appeal is made
to the fact that the so-called gulf does not exist for spirit, that spirit actually
makes this transition—that the human heart will not accede to the
understanding’s assertion of this absolute separation, will not admit that there is
any such gulf, but on the contrary actually makes this transition in the elevation
to God.38
Having said this, the Philosophy of Religion neither produces this transition nor
provides its foundation. “That would be like trying to introduce spirit into a dog
by letting it see spiritual creations, or eat witty remarks, or chew on printed
matter, or like trying to make a blind person see by talking to that person about
colors.”39 Nevertheless Hegel maintains that religion itself is this transition: the
infinite is not alien or external to the finite but already immanent in it, the prius
and presupposition of the question of its possibility. Before philosophy comes on
the scene, religion itself is already this transition: “there may be religion without
philosophy, but there cannot be philosophy without religion, because philosophy
includes religion within itself.”40 Although philosophy does not produce the
transition, it seeks to comprehend it.
The Philosophy of Religion includes a phenomenological explication of the
15
transition that religion is. It translates religious experience and practice into
representations and concepts. It has the job of uncovering and making explicit
the intelligibility and truth of religious experience. It does so not by producing
that experience, but rather by comprehending and explicating the objective
necessity inherent in it:
In philosophy of religion we have as our object God himself, absolute reason.
Since we know God who is absolute reason, and investigate this reason, we
cognize it, we behave cognitively. Absolute spirit is knowledge, the determinate
rational knowledge of its own self. Therefore when we occupy ourselves with this
object…we are dealing with and investigating rational cognition.…Our scientific
cognition is itself the required investigation of cognition.41
Since religion is a domain of absolute spirit, it belongs to the speculative nucleus
of Hegelianism.
(p.15) 3. Hegel’s True Infinite as Social Infinity: Panentheism
Neither the Philosophy of Religion nor the Logic corresponds to the older natural
theology, for natural theology is a science of the understanding. The latter sought
to abstract from religion and turn God into the theme of an abstract special
metaphysics. However, to the extent that God is conceived as an abstract essence,
God is not yet grasped as spirit. Hegel’s philosophy of religion participates in the
modern turn to the subject to this extent: its speculative theology or doctrine of
God are part of and belong to the doctrine of religion, and the doctrine of God
and doctrine of religion are enfolded within a doctrine of recognition and
community.
Our concern here is…not with God as such or as object, but with God as he is
present in his community. It will be evident that God can only be genuinely
understood…as spirit, by means of which he makes himself into the counterpart
of a community.…thus it will be evident that the doctrine of God is to be grasped
and taught only as the doctrine of religion.42
The focus of the Philosophy of Religion is not on God alone, or religion
(anthropology) alone, but rather on divine–human relation and community.
The object of our concern, the community [Gemeinschaft] of God and humanity
with each other, is a community of spirit with spirit. This involves the most
important questions. First, it is a community. This very circumstance involves the
difficulty of holding fast to the difference and defining it in such a way that
community is maintained and preserved. Second, that humanity knows God
implies, according to the essential nature of community, a communal
[intersubjective] knowing and knowledge. That is, humanity knows God only
insofar as God knows godself in humanity. This knowledge is the selfconsciousness of God, but it is equally a knowledge of God on the part of
humanity. And this knowledge of God by humanity is the knowledge of humanity
by God. The spirit of humanity—to know God—is simply God’s spirit itself.43
16
For Hegel God is spirit in his community. This assertion is explicated as a
speculative theology of the true infinite.
Despite the pantheistic overtones of Hegel’s formulations of finitude as not its
own being but rather the being of its other, Hegel’s speculative theology is best
understood not as pantheism, but as panentheism. Hegel himself does not use
this term. Nevertheless panentheism is a unity-in-difference that preserves the
difference and fulfills the requirement that the difference be determined in a way
that preserves the community of spirit with spirit. Second, panentheism best
characterizes both the decentering of the subject in a foundationalist sense, and
its preservation as the entry portal to the domain of absolute spirit. Third,
panentheism is the concept that best corresponds to Hegel’s concept of freedom
as being at home with self in another, and with Hegel’s claim that Christianity is
not to be understood as a form of heteronomy—an alienated unhappy (p.16)
consciousness—but rather as a religion of mediated freedom and reconciliation.
Fourth, this passage clarifies Hegel’s claim that the transition from finite to
infinite is not produced by autonomous human freedom or by philosophy. Both
philosophy and the philosophy of religion presuppose this transition is already
made, because the human spirit that recognizes itself in God is established and
supported by the divine spirit knowing itself in humanity. Hegel agrees with
Spinoza that the intellectual love of God by humans is founded on and included
in the love of God for godself. However Hegel criticizes Spinoza’s metaphysics, its
monism and acosmism, and his concept of abstract impersonal substance.44 Fifth,
the decentered human subject exists as a member of Spirit’s community. In this
membership the human being is conscious of itself as the object of divine love. As
object of divine love, the human being is grounded affirmatively in the being of its
other. God’s love bestows on it an infinite worth. This infinite worth is
incompatible with slavery. When the infinite worth of the human being is
acknowledged in the historical development of ethical life and political culture, it
leads to demands that slavery be abolished.
4. A Contemporary Expression of the Frame: Non-Metaphysical Readings of
Hegel
The Kantian frame is principally but not exclusively a story about Hegel’s critique
of Kant; it is also about contemporary interpretations of Hegel. The antimetaphysical, anti-theological ethos of this frame is not only an issue for Hegel; it
is still very much alive in contemporary philosophy and has influenced
contemporary interpretations of Hegel. Frederick Beiser characterizes these
interpretations as “the puzzling Hegel renaissance.”45 This “renaissance” is
puzzling because of its non-metaphysical interpretations and deflationary
readings of Hegel’s concept of absolute spirit that collapse it into objective
spirit.46 In such readings the influence of the Kantian frame is evident.
Beiser notes that “Since the end of the Second World War, the predominant
concern of Anglophone scholarship on German idealism has been to emasculate,
17
domesticate and sanitize it, to make it weak, safe and clean for home
consumption.… The heart of this domestication program has been the tendency
to read the metaphysical themes and issues out of German idealism.”47 This is
what Paul Kristeller called the ventriloquist’s approach to the history of
philosophy in which an interpreter reads his own views into a historical figure
and “discovers” them there. In Beiser’s estimation, (p.17) the result of the
domestication program has been interpretive failure. He points out that the
various “non-metaphysical Hegels”—including Hartmann’s category theorist,
Pippin’s transcendental idealism as anti-realism, and Brandom’s reading of spirit
as the normative dimension of mutual recognition—fall short of the “real
historical Hegel” because “the metaphysical dimensions of Hegel’s thought have
proven to be stubbornly irreducible.”48
Nowhere is it clearer or more evident that Hegel’s systematic project involves a
critical response to and overcoming of the anti-metaphysical and anti-theological
ethos of the Kantian frame than in his Philosophy of Religion and Logic. Hegel
was referring to Kant when he observed that it counts as the highest insight of
contemporary philosophy that the knowledge of God is not even possible; this
view has become a settled issue, a kind of prejudice.49 This prejudice constitutes
the death of God in modern culture. Hegel tells us that his Philosophy of Religion
is intended to disrupt this settled prejudice because “I believe it has never been so
important and so necessary that this cognition [of God] should be taken seriously
once more.”50 On this issue Beiser agrees with Hegel (and with me) when he
asserts that if theology is as central to Hegel’s project as it appears to be and as he
claims it is, non-metaphysical interpretations of Hegel are untenable.51
Robert Pippin offers a limited response to Beiser’s criticisms. He asserts that the
alternatives are not restricted to pious paraphrases of Hegel texts or radical textfree reconstruction as he thinks Beiser often assumes.52 He is certainly right that
these are not the only alternatives. However, this observation scarcely disposes of
Beiser’s question: whether, in view of the stubborn irreducibility of metaphysical
elements in Hegel—including religion and theology—non-metaphysical
interpretations of Hegel are tenable.
If some metaphysical and theological reading of Hegel is necessary, what
metaphysics and what theology? Beiser’s sense of interpretive alternatives is
rather constricted. On the philosophical side Beiser criticizes the Neo-Kantian
view that the alternatives for understanding Hegel are either pre-critical
metaphysics or transcendental-critical philosophy. The Neo-Kantian view is
dogmatic because it presupposes epistemology is self-sufficient. Hegel challenges
that presupposition: There is no epistemology without an implied ontology, and
vice versa. The Neo-Kantian view is also dogmatic because it equates theology
with pre-critical metaphysics. If theology is rejected because it is (p.18) precritical metaphysics, that leaves atheism, or covert atheism as the alternative. But
Hegel’s view is none of these. Hegel’s thought does not fit any of these
alternatives and is critical of all of them. Beiser recognizes this. Such recognition
18
implies a post-critical metaphysics, but he seems unsure what that might be or
whether it includes theology.
Pippin is not any clearer. He rejects construing Hegel as a post-Kantian
philosopher with a pre-critical metaphysics because that makes puzzling how
Hegel could have been the post-Kantian philosopher he understood himself to be,
accepting Kant’s criticisms that “forever discredited metaphysics of the beyond,
of substance and traditional views of God, and then created a systematic
metaphysics as if he never heard of Kant’s critical epistemology.”53 The
implication that a post-Kantian theological Hegel is an “impossibility” reflects the
Neo-Kantian view that Beiser criticizes.54 Since Hegel is both post-Kantian and
proposes a critical metaphysics and theology, he doesn’t fit Pippin’s grid either.
In his response to Beiser, Pippin points to a passage in Robert Wallace’s Hegel’s
Philosophy of Reality, Freedom and God, as an example of what Pippin calls a
“pious paraphrase of text” that produces “impenetrable Hegelese.” However, in
this passage Wallace is examining Hegel’s concept of the true infinite. Wallace
points out that since the true infinite is a difficult and elusive concept, many
philosophers have trouble identifying what it is:
It is because Hegel combines a truth of traditional religion and theology (that
finitude is only as a transcending of itself) with a truth of Enlightenment
naturalism (that we can’t intelligibly postulate two disparate and unrelated kinds
of ‘reality’) into a coherent combination, that his doctrine is so unfamiliar that
readers have great trouble simply identifying what it is. It is neither traditional
theism, nor traditional atheism, nor pantheism, nor deism, nor Feuerbachian
‘anthropotheism’ because none of these does justice both to theism and to
Enlightenment naturalism in the way that Hegel’s doctrine does.55
In his discussion of the true infinite text, Pippin complains that here Hegel is at
his most opaque, but that the most meaningful criticism of it is that instead of
introducing controversial metaphysical claims like a monist absolute, “Hegel is
not doing much at all.”56 But what Pippin decries as “pious paraphrase” and
“impenetrable Hegelese” in a passage where Hegel “is not doing much at all” is,
according to Wallace, an analysis of the concept of the true infinite, a concept that
in Hegel’s estimation is “the basic concept of philosophy.”57 Giacomo Rinaldi
points out what is at stake: the true infinite belongs to the speculative nucleus of
Hegelianism; it is the first conspicuous (p.19) example of the concept of
systematic totality in the Science of Logic. The true infinite prefigures the
doctrine of the concept and the absolute idea, the ultimate category of the Logic.
Rinaldi adds that the true infinite is substantially different from traditional
metaphysics in all its versions.58 Both assessments—Pippin’s and
Wallace/Rinaldi’s—can’t be correct.
Moreover, when Pippin characterizes Wallace’s commentary on the true infinite
as “impenetrable Hegelese,” Wallace gets no credit for identifying and struggling
with what Hegel himself considers “the basic concept of philosophy.” Surely if the
19
“Hegel Renaissance” can find time to examine and discuss any of Hegel’s texts,
this should be one. Pippin’s downplaying of the importance of this anti-Kantian
text is consistent with his pro-Kantian anti-realist reading of Hegel’s idealism.59
Such a reading lays Pippin open to Beiser’s general criticism of non-metaphysical
readings, to wit, of saying “what Hegel should have said if he had agreed with
Kant and accepted the Kantian frame.” But while Kant is indispensable for Hegel,
he is also inadequate and insufficient. On the issues of theology and metaphysics,
Hegel doesn’t agree with Kant. On the contrary, for Hegel Kant’s attack on
theology is one aspect of the death of God gnawing at the vitals of modern
culture: “Truth is in a fine mess when all metaphysics and philosophy have
become mere things of the past, and the only philosophy that counts is no
philosophy at all!”60
For his part Beiser recognizes that Hegel’s philosophy, including its metaphysics,
is post-critical. However, his own account of this is formulated in NeoAristotelian terms. This raises questions concerning what he means by postcritical metaphysics. Beiser seeks to chart an interpretation of Hegel that runs
between inflationary, quasi-Platonic terminology that separates God from world
(Beiser labels this the classical Christian view) and deflationary terminology that
reduces God to a mundane entity, a part of the whole sans the whole (Beiser
labels these naturalistic-humanist readings). The middle ground according to
Beiser is that for Hegel the divine is first in the order of explanation but not first
in the order of existence because God exists only in nature and history.61
However, the latter claim comes up short against Hegel’s critique of Kant’s
practical faith and Jacobi’s immediate knowing, to wit, that in both of these the
human subject is taken as essential and foundational while the theological object
is taken as derivative and denied independent existence.62 For Hegel, Beiser’s
view (p.20) stated above would not be an alternative to the Kantian frame but
rather an embodiment of it.
The last point becomes clear in further ironies in Beiser’s account: in spite of his
polemic against non-metaphysical interpretations of Hegel, Beiser excludes
theology from the list of metaphysical topics he deems essential for a proper
understanding of Hegel. Like Nietzsche and Hegel, Beiser appreciates that in
contemporary culture traditional religion and theology are on their way to
becoming fossils that possess merely antiquarian interest. This makes all the
more puzzling the fact that Beiser continues to invoke classical theology as a valid
contemporary norm for measuring Hegel’s thought. For example Beiser claims
that Hegel undermines the classical protestant doctrine of salvation by
undermining the metaphysics that gives this doctrine literal meaning, to wit, “its
beliefs in the immortality of the soul and the supernatural realm of heaven.”63 He
further tells us that for Hegel trinity and incarnation are “merely metaphors” for
Hegel’s quite different ontology, and that Hegel’s theology is the opposite of
Luther’s.64
Although Beiser may sound like a theological conservative criticizing Hegel for
20
undermining the literal meaning of salvation, as a historian of philosophy he is
scarcely concerned to endorse classical theology and its metaphysics as deposits
of eternal and immutable truth. He does not show interest in Hegel’s
reconstruction of Lutheran theology because such issues, like theology itself, are
for him of merely antiquarian interest. Even though Beiser recognizes that Hegel
does have theological interests and that these imply that non-metaphysical
readings are untenable, he doesn’t know what to make of this. Instead he blunts
his criticism of non-metaphysical interpretations when he treats theology and
metaphysics as antiquarian, devoid of contemporary significance. Since theology
is for Beiser an antiquarian issue, classical theology remains for him the
definitive expression; as such it is an adequate measure of Hegel’s theological
reconstruction. By treating Hegel’s reconstruction of theology as an idiosyncratic,
non-traditional view of a merely antiquarian topic, Beiser undermines his own
claim that Hegel’s theology renders non-metaphysical interpretations untenable.
That Hegel’s theology is post-death of God, that his metaphysics is post-critical
and that both might be of more than merely antiquarian interest, perhaps even
“true”—are not Beiser’s agenda. In this respect Beiser agrees with the nonmetaphysical interpretations he criticizes; while he may not “throw out the baby
of metaphysics with the bathwater of pre-Kantian dogmatism,” he still continues
one aspect of the Hegel-domestication program—Hegel sans theology and
metaphysics—that he deplores.
(p.21) Accounts of Hegel’s thought that ignore, pass over, or don’t quite know
what to make of the true infinite, theology and metaphysics, confirm Wallace’s
point: either they fail to identify the position correctly, or like Beiser have decided
that since theology is of merely antiquarian interest, this excuses them from the
necessity of having to deal with it as an essential aspect of Hegel’s thought. Such
keeping theology and metaphysics at arm’s length when interpreting Hegel
resembles Hegel’s portrait of the merely historical treatment of religion and
theology by theologians:
In all this one is always dealing with religion and its content, and yet it is only
religion [itself] that is not taken into account. A blind man can be concerned with
the size of a painting, the canvas, the varnish, the history of the painter, the fate
of the picture, its price, into whose hands it has fallen, etc., and yet see nothing of
the picture itself.65
Those who accept the Kantian frame as the final determination of the limits of
cognition and its view of religion as a subjective postulate of morality, fail to ‘get
the picture’. Hegel continues the above passage, stating the underlying issue:
This situation confronts religion especially in our time. [Philosophical] cognition
is not reconciled with religion; there is a dividing wall. [Philosophical] cognition
does not risk a serious consideration of religion or take a fundamental interest in
it. Philosophy of religion has to remove this hindrance. On the other hand,
philosophy of religion has to give religion the courage of cognition, the courage of
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truth and freedom.66
5. Overcoming the Kantian Frame
George di Giovanni outlines different interpretations of Hegel’s Logic in his
translator’s introduction.67 He distinguishes (1) interpretations such as Charles
Taylor’s that identify a theological dimension of Hegel’s thought, a ‘large entity’
interpretation that falls back into pre-critical metaphysics; (2) interpretations
that stress the importance of Kant’s transcendental idealism and interpret the
Logic as a continuation of Kant’s transcendental logic; these interpretations tend
to minimize Hegel’s metaphysics, or are simply non-metaphysical
interpretations; Hegel carries out and completes Kant’s critique of metaphysics;
(3) interpretations that acknowledge that the Logic is also ontology and has a
distinctive ontological thesis, to wit, that being is becoming. In adopting this
position, di Giovanni claims (rightly) that Hegel takes a stand against the
Western metaphysical tradition back to Parmenides.68 Di Giovanni asserts that
Hegel’s Logic is identical with metaphysics, but only in a sense that is definitely
post-Kantian.69 Hegel’s thought is both a critique of traditional metaphysics, and
it is irreducibly metaphysical in a post-Kantian revised-critical sense.
(p.22) Paul Redding agrees with Di Giovanni on (1) and (2), but identifies a
further variation on (3) to wit, the revised metaphysical view of Hegel.70
Proponents of this view acknowledge the irreducibility of metaphysics in Hegel’s
philosophy, but not in order to dismiss it as does (2). Rather Hegel is interpreted
as a Neo-Aristotelian or conceptual realist who subjects Kant’s critique of
metaphysics to a telling metacritique. Where Kantian interpretations of Hegel
claim that he completed Kant’s critical project of purging philosophy of
metaphysics, the revised metaphysical interpretation regards Hegel’s critique of
Kant as involving a rejection of Kant’s anti-metaphysical attitude, and as
reconstructing a metaphysical program derived from Aristotle on a new basis.
Moreover, there is another way to interpret Hegel as revised metaphysics that is
not entertained either by Di Giovanni or Redding, to wit, Hegel’s thought is
panentheist. Although it is not included in Redding’s survey, the panentheist
interpretation of Hegel—advanced in the present study—is also a revised
metaphysical view of Hegel. Alfred North Whitehead observes that Process and
Reality is the translation and “transformation of some of the main doctrines of
idealism onto a realistic basis,” a “Hegelian development of an idea.”71 One such
translation is Whitehead’s independent reformulation of Hegel’s Aufhebung and
concept of concreteness:
The ultimate metaphysical principle is the advance from disjunction to
conjunction, creating a novel entity other than the entities given in disjunction.
The novel entity is at once the togetherness of the ‘many’ which it finds, and also
one among the disjunctive ‘many’ which it leaves; it is a novel entity, disjunctively
among the many entities which it synthesizes. The many become one, and are
increased by one.…This category of the ultimate replaces Aristotle’s category of
22
‘primary substance.’ Thus the production of novel togetherness is the ultimate
notion embodied in the term concrescence.72
I shall have more to say about “concrescence” as an interpretation of Hegel’s
Aufhebung in Chapter 8 below. Suffice it to say here that Iljin’s great study of
Hegel identifies the speculative concrete as the core operative concept of Hegel’s
philosophy, and this sets up the fundamental systematic contrast between what is
abstract and what is concrete and mediated. Iljin’s interpretation of concreteness
as concrescence [zusammenfließen] suggests an important terminological
convergence between Hegel and Whitehead.
Panentheism implies a dipolar concept of God. Whitehead distinguishes between
God’s primordial nature—the abstract envisionment of possibilities—and God’s
consequent nature that undergoes modification in God’s interaction with the
world. This is comparable to Hegel’s systematic distinction between the abstract
idea of the Logic and the absolute spirit of the Philosophy of Spirit, of which the
Philosophy of Religion is the (p.23) concluding discipline that propounds
Hegel’s speculative philosophical theology. The dipolar concept of God is
inherent in Hegel’s true infinite, according to which nature and finite spirit are in
God as ideal moments (Chapter 6). It is evident in Hegel’s reconstruction of the
ontological argument that is critical of and distinct from Anselm’s. For Hegel the
logical transition to objectivity is carried out through disjunctive syllogism in a
reconstruction of the ontological argument (Chapter 7).
It should be noted that Hegel’s dipolar panentheism is not a merely idiosyncratic,
non-standard version of traditional theology and metaphysics. It is the result of
Hegel’s struggle to construct a philosophy and theology that can acknowledge and
incorporate tragic elements rather than suppress these like traditional thought.
Dennis Schmidt frames the issue: the emergence of the topic of tragedy in
German idealism is contemporaneous with the end of the possibility of
metaphysics and ontotheology.73 Hegel would claim that Schmidt’s expression of
this important point is overblown, and that Schmidt’s either/or reflects the NeoKantian view examined above. Schmidt clearly believes that the emergence of
tragedy puts metaphysics and ontotheology out of business. Hegel does not, but
rather believes that theological-philosophical reconstruction is necessary.
Schmidt fails to acknowledge that Hegel not only criticizes traditional
metaphysics and ontotheology, he also reconstructs and renews them.
Hegel’s dipolar panentheism is his solution to the problems created by and/or
insoluble within traditional monopolar modes of thought, e.g., its suppression of
the tragic aspect of existence, the exclusion of otherness from abstract identity,
the abstract immutable and apathetic divine. No other concept of God does the
job of including tragic elements as well as dipolar panentheism. Hegel affirms
there is negation and suffering in God that in turn condition the death of God as
an affirmative theological theme. Theology can acknowledge atheism and tragedy
as its own themes only if it can incorporate negation, otherness, the possibility of
23
suffering, and overcome these in its own concept of God. That requires a tragic
absolute, to wit, a dipolar conception in which God includes difference,
otherness, and is exposed to negation, suffering, and death (Chapters 8, 10, 12).
The union in love of God and death constitutes the basic speculative intuition of
Hegel’s thought. This monstrous intuition requires fundamental revisions of both
classical substance metaphysics and classical theology. The inseparability of love
and anguish, of reason and the understanding, not only articulates Hegel’s postcritical metaphysics, it is the critical principle Hegel employs to distance himself
from and to take the measure of modern secular culture (Chapter 10).
We now resume the chapter summary we interrupted to elaborate the Kantian
Frame. Chapters 6 and 7 deal with Hegel’s critique of and alternative to the
frame. Chapter 6 treats the true infinite, the first appearance of the concept of
systematic totality in the Science of Logic. It belongs to the speculative nucleus of
Hegelianism, anticipating the categories of ground, disjunctive syllogism,
absolute idea, and absolute (p.24) spirit. The true infinite is a criticism of
traditional metaphysics and the Kantian concept of theology as a postulate of
morality: both of these are versions of the spurious infinity.
Hegel’s concept of the true infinite is laid out in one of the densest yet most
important passages in the Science of Logic. The true infinite is both a category of
the logic (its abstract pole) and a theological conception of God as an inclusive
social infinite, or absolute spirit (concrete pole). The latter is explicated in the
Philosophy of Religion. The 1824 Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion includes
a commentary on the true infinite discussed in the Logic. No other category of the
Logic is so closely and directly treated in the Philosophy of Religion. Since they
mutually illumine each other, it is crucial to take these accounts together.
However, this is almost never done, and the result is misinterpretation. But when
it is done, it becomes clear that Hegel’s true infinite is a holistic social conception
of religion and theology that sublates and overcomes the dualist Kantian
framework. Religion is not reducible to morality; nor can an adequate theology be
reduced to a subjective postulate of practical reason (Chapter 6). The true infinite
includes the finite within itself.
Hegel is not a defender of traditional Christian thought, but is critical of its
corruption by traditional metaphysics and theology; e.g., its positive,
authoritarian forms. However, these criticisms of traditional theology do not
necessarily imply that he is a covert atheist. As his philosophy of religion makes
clear, he also rejects atheism and a merely secular alternative. For Hegel the
alternatives are not either traditional Christian theology or atheism; he rejects
both. Hegel breaks with traditional theology and pre-critical metaphysics but
remains determined to find adequate philosophical expression of what he takes
to be the profoundest religious intuitions, including both the tragic and the death
of God.74
Hegel’s relation to both religion and philosophy is complicated. On the one hand
he accepts modern historical criticism and draws upon it to criticize traditional
24
authoritarian forms of theology and religious institutions that have become
positive, i.e., alienating. However, he does not reject, but rather retrieves a
conception of Christianity as a religion of freedom founded on divine love,
suffering, and reconciliation. Then on the basis of his reconstruction of
Christianity, in which tragedy and the death of God figure prominently, Hegel
turns around and criticizes Enlightenment modes of thought and the emerging
secular culture. In its liberal forms such culture is committed to a self-sufficient
finitude, an atomistic individualism, and an anthropocentric utilitarianism that
are headed in an atheistic, i.e., nihilistic direction. Its belief in secular progress
suppresses tragic aspects of existence. Criticizing such optimism, Hegel declares
that humanity is by nature evil, which is the tragic thesis that evil coincides with
finitude.75 But he also holds that humanity is capable of and destined for good.
(p.25) Hegel is a liberal protestant revisionist; it was his interest in socialpolitical and religious reform that led him to a career in philosophy where he was
also a revisionist. Such revisionism makes Hegel a modern Gulliver among the
Lilliputians: “too philosophical” for the theologians and “too theological” for the
philosophers, and “too tragic” and “too metaphysical” for both. For some, these
“excesses” are not necessarily discrediting, e.g., those who, like Nietzsche,
appreciate that terms such as “Christian,” “religion,” “theology,” “philosophy,”
“tragedy,” and “truth” have become ruined and are “dying” in contemporary
culture. Hegel’s discussion of the issues in philosophy of religion and theology
outstrips Nietzsche’s. However, if Michel Haar’s complicated analysis is correct,
Nietzsche may take similar positions. Since there is nothing in Nietzsche
comparable to Hegel’s Logic or Philosophy of Religion, our focus for this part of
the story must be on Hegel because his thought, including the critique of the
Kantian frame, is richer.76
In Chapter 7 the focus is on Hegel’s response to Kant’s attack on the theological
proofs. On the one hand, Hegel agrees with Kant’s critique of pre-critical
metaphysics and the proofs. In their traditional forms the proofs are obsolete,
just as traditional metaphysics is pre-critical and obsolete. On the other hand,
Hegel believes that metaphysics and theology reflect enduring human interests in
cognition and truth. So he reconstructs the proofs, not as forms of finite cognition
that Kant discredited, but rather as the ascent of spirit to God. However, this does
not mean that what the proofs are about is not taken seriously. Hegel criticizes
Kant for failing to appreciate the religious significance of the proofs and
dismissing as mere sophism the natural inclination of the mind as it rises from
contingency to necessity, from the conditioned to the unconditioned.
Hegel criticizes Kant’s attack on the ontological proof for confusing the concept of
God with the concept of one hundred thalers, agrees with Kant that existence is
not a predicate, but charges that Kant failed to think this negation through to the
end. The ontological proof is of vital importance for both Hegel’s logic and his
philosophy of religion. Hegel incorporates the Gaunilo–Kant objection into his
dialectical reconstruction of the ontological proof. The defect of Anselm’s
25
argument is its presupposition that perfection implies existence. Hegel
reconstructs the ontological argument in his discussion of disjunctive syllogism
and the transition to objectivity. Objectivity is both opposite to the subject and
the realization of the subject. Hegel shows that the concept and being are both
different and identical. Being is other than the concept but only as a
determination of the concept. Hegel renews ontotheology through a dialectical
correction and reconstruction of the ontological proof as objective idealism.
Hegel’s thought is ontotheology in the sense that the reconstructed ontological
(p.26) proof is fundamental not only for his Logic, but also for his account of
self-determining, self-communicating absolute spirit. Hegel’s ontotheology is not
a pre-critical metaphysics of a highest being as in the tradition from Anselm to
Spinoza,77 but rather an absolute, objective idealism wherein being is shown to be
a necessary aspect of the absolute idea. Absolute idealism implies a concept of
divine personhood as spirit in its community set forth in the Philosophy of
Religion. In the latter God is absolute spirit, and love expresses God’s ethical
aseity.
IV. The Death of God and Theodicy after the Death of God
In part IV we turn to the topic of tragic theology and the death of God as an
affirmative theological theme. In Chapter 8 the topic is Hegel’s tragic absolute.
The focus is on Iwan Iljin’s Die Philosophie Hegels als kontemplative Gotteslehre
(1918, 1946).78 Iljin’s commentary on Hegel is an important one for our purposes.
Iljin argues (1) Hegel originally intended to write a panlogist, pantheistic system
much like Spinoza. (2) But Hegel’s confrontation with the problem of the other
created a crisis for his original rationalist project. (3) The result of this crisis is a
compromise, and the compromise leads to the concept of a tragic absolute. Iljin
has seen more clearly than any other commentator that Hegel’s God is a tragically
suffering absolute. But how should this be understood? Iljin himself rejects the
tragic absolute. Cyril O’Regan provides another answer, to wit, that Hegel’s
project is a theogony indebted to Jacob Boehme. A theogony asserts a demonic
divine with an abysmal origin. God is not God at the beginning, but comes to be,
and this coming to be requires that God overcome and tame an abysmal origin.
However, Iljin denies that Hegel’s tragic absolute is a theogony in Boehme’s
sense. He distinguishes between theogenesis and theogony. The difference is that
in theogenesis, God does not come to be out of some blind, abysmal condition,
whereas in ancient theogonies, perhaps including Boehme’s, such a blind origin is
affirmed. I am inclined to agree with Iljin, because Hegel agrees with Plato and
Aristotle that God is not jealous. He confines tragedy to the level of a theological
anthropology, but conceives God as tragically suffering—a christological thesis—
expressing divine love.
Chapter 9 examines Nietzsche’s treatment of the death of God. For Nietzsche the
God who is dead is the moral God, and the moral God is the Christian God.
Nietzsche’s critique of the herd morality is an anti-Christian polemic, aspects of
which Hegel could share. However, Nietzsche understands himself as a tragic
26
(p.27) philosopher, and embraces a tragic vision of the world. If God is dead,
then values become relative to the human being. But what can be created by
human agency can also be undone by human agency. The recognition of the
primacy of the subject empties values of intrinsic worth. To overcome nihilism,
Nietzsche develops the doctrine of eternal return. It is supposed to provide a new
goal and meaning for a human existence that has become meaningless and
goalless. Formulated as an imperative it directs us to will only that which we can
will to be repeated eternally. Thus eternal return counterbalances the emptiness
of values.
However, the doctrine of eternal return may be incoherent. It is both an
existential imperative, and a cosmological doctrine about world-cycles. Karl
Löwith believes that each aspect of eternal return undermines the other.
Underlying this dispute is a deeper issue, whether Nietzsche finds an alternative
to the Kantian dualisms that he criticizes, or serves up another version of
dualism. Michel Haar shows that Nietzsche presents an anti-Christian tragic
theology—a religion without creed, but nevertheless with a mystical ecstasy of
joyous fatalism wherein even tragedy and destruction seem necessary.
Chapter 10 focuses on Hegel’s treatment of the death of God as an affirmative
theological thesis. Hegel retrieves the classical Christian theology of the cross that
has been obscured by Christian appropriation of Platonic metaphysics and its
suppression of the tragic. Hegel rejects Dante’s Divine Comedy, because in it the
absolute exists without serious opposition. Traditional Divine Comedy is a
monism of divine grace, but a monism nevertheless.
Hegel is neither a monist, nor a dualist. His view is closest to panentheism, to wit,
a dialectical unity in duality that threads the needle between monism and
dualism. The true infinite does not stand aloof from the world in isolation, but
includes negation, suffering, and death, and endures these. The inclusion of these
does not mean ontotheological triumphalism like that of the traditional Divine
Comedy. Such triumphalism embodies what Hegel calls the impotence of reason,
i.e., reason’s lapse into the abstract identity that suppresses difference, and a
metaphysics that one-sidedly favors being over becoming. The task of reason is to
correct such one-sidedness. But there is a price for this correction: for Hegel,
reconciliation cannot be understood apart from the opposition and alienation
that it corrects. Divine love cannot be separated from divine anguish and
suffering. This inseparability of love and anguish implies and reflects the God
who in the cultus dies daily and rises daily.
This inseparability of love and anguish becomes the critical principle from which
Hegel criticizes modern culture for its vacillation between optimism and despair,
of which the dialectic of civil society is an example. The disintegration of civil
society into the extremes of wealth and poverty tends to separate love from
anguish and anguish from love. Love separated from anguish becomes mere
enjoyment—e.g., the self-indulgence of consumer culture. Anguish, separated
from love, constitutes the plight of the poor and marginalized who are abandoned
27
to their misery, not only by civil society, but also by their religious teachers and
institutions. Hegel is a critic of capitalism not in spite of his theology, but because
of it.
(p.28) The final chapters take up the question concerning theodicy. After the
death of the moral God, theodicy is no longer a defense of the justice and
goodness of God despite the existence of evil. Rather Hegel and Nietzsche
understand theodicy in a broader sense of reconciling human beings with a world
that presents tragic conflicts and suffering—the lacerations of spirit. Hegel and
Nietzsche both agree that one of the lacerations of spirit is morality itself—the
Kantian moral vision of the world: the internalized master/slave, the herd
morality. Another, higher laceration of spirit is tragedy.
Nietzsche’s aesthetic theodicy embraces a vision of the world as a tragic sublime
beyond morality and practical reason, to wit, joyous fatalism. The discussion of
Nietzsche’s aesthetic theodicy examines the views of Karl Löwith, Will Dudley,
and Michel Haar’s careful analyses of Nietzsche and the question of metaphysics.
In spite of his critique of metaphysics, Nietzsche’s aesthetic theodicy continues a
revised version of it.
Nietzsche’s world-view is close to Hegel’s in valuing becoming as the primary
category and in regarding being as an abstraction. In this respect both are
influenced by Heraclitus. Both draw upon Heraclitus to dissolve the fixed
oppositions of the Kantian frame. What is less clear is whether Nietzsche’s
eternal recurrence and joyous fatalism, which are Dionysian, are compatible with
the Kantian frame, which is Apollinian-Socratic.
Turning to Hegel, what does theodicy mean after the death of God? If the moral
God is dead, what sort of theodicy is possible? Harris and Iljin offer divergent
accounts of Hegel’s theodicy, neither of which adequately captures Hegel’s
thought. Harris excludes the tragic tradition and takes Hegel in the direction of
Spinoza’s vision sub specie aeternitatis where evil finally disappears. Iljin
appreciates that Hegel’s God, confronting serious otherness, is tragic, but
believes that this implies a demonic but finite divine that struggles infinitely
without achieving a final victory. Neither Harris nor Iljin does justice to Hegel’s
fundamental speculative intuition of the union in love of God and death. Nor
does either appreciate sufficiently the historical incorporation of tragic vision
within the Jewish-Christian tradition in the book of Job.
I examine Hegel’s theodicy in his Philosophy of World History. This is usually
interpreted as affirming a view of history in which freedom is progressively
achieved and evil gradually disappears. I argue on the contrary that Hegel makes
two basic assertions concerning world history: (1) World history is not a
progressive elimination of evil, but rather a slaughterhouse. Evil and destruction
remain permanent possibilities. This is ignored or minimized by interpretations
of history as progress. (2) That evil is a permanent possibility does not mean that
choosing it is intelligible or that it is justified with equal standing alongside the
good. The criterion of Hegel’s theodicy is not retribution but rather
28
reconciliation. However, as Eberhard Jüngel points out, world history may be
regarded as a theodicy only to the extent that reconciliation can be discerned in
it. More precisely, reconciling cognition is the criterion of Hegel’s theodicy, and it
includes tragic features: it is a bliss, but a troubled bliss in disaster. Consequently
Hegel also speaks of divine consolation (Trost).
(p.29) I conclude with Hegel’s tragic conception of divine love as elaborated by
Paul Tillich.79 Tillich takes over Hegel’s ontological analysis of love as the reunion
of the separate, and explores its relation to being, power, and justice. When love
is separated from power it becomes mere emotion and sentiment, and power
becomes sheer compulsion. Tillich argues that love and power are not exclusive,
but complementary. Tillich draws on Luther’s distinction between the alien work
of love (destruction of what is opposed to love) and the proper work
(reconciliation, reunion). Luther failed to appreciate that the alien work of love is
tragic: love must destroy what is against love. To accomplish its alien and tragic
work, love must be united with power and justice as their foundation. But its
proper work is reconciliation. This means that love’s destruction of what opposes
it aims not at the destruction of the one who acts against love, but rather at his
fulfillment. As Hegel observes, to say that love has conquered does not mean the
same as saying duty has conquered, i.e., subdued its enemies; rather it means
that love overcomes enmity and hostility, i.e., it aims at reuniting the separated.
Tillich’s analysis complements and extends Hegel’s tragic vision of the suffering
and the creativity of divine love.
V. Acknowledgments
I wish to acknowledge several colleagues who read earlier versions of these
studies, Robert F. Brown, Peter C. Hodgson, Stephen Houlgate, and John
McCumber. While I have agreed with most of their comments and suggestions, I
alone am responsible for the defects that remain.
I owe a special debt of gratitude to Peter Hodgson for his work on Hegel’s
Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion which appeared at the same time as my
work on Hegel’s concept of recognition, and more recently for calling my
attention to Hegel’s Lectures on the Proofs for the Existence of God, and Hegel’s
Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, while he was translating these
from newer critical editions. Hodgson’s interest in these materials is contagious,
and his encouragement of this project is greatly appreciated.
I am indebted to Stephen Houlgate who brought to my attention the interesting
convergences and divergences between Hegel and Nietzsche, whose interest in
and analysis of Hegel’s view of tragedy I share, and whose recent book on Hegel’s
Logic helped me understand better issues in the interpretation of that work.
I am indebted to Will Dudley from whose outstanding work on Hegel and
Nietzsche I have learned much, and that has provoked many interesting
conversations and exchanges. I am indebted to Charles Scott for his critical work,
both written and in extended conversation, on Nietzsche’s ascetic ideal, which I
am inclined to read as a parallel concept to Hegel’s spurious infinite and critique
29
of Kant’s postulate doctrine.
(p.30) I should also like to express my gratitude to Paul Redding for his support
for a Visiting International Research Fellowship at the University of Sydney, that
made possible an interesting collaboration with Redding and presentations of my
research in lecture form. I wish to express my appreciation to Simon Lumsden,
Nick Smith, and Robert Sinnerbrink for their criticisms and discussions of the
material presented as lectures at Macquarrie University and the University of
New South Wales. Thanks go to Heikki Ikaheimo and Arto Laitinen for extending
me the opportunity to lecture at the University of Jyväskylä.
A special word of thanks goes to Philip T. Grier, who introduced me to Iwan
Iljin’s The Philosophy of Hegel as a Doctrine of the Concreteness of God and
Humanity (1918). Iljin was among the first to have appreciated not merely that
Hegel’s speculative philosophy includes a philosophical theology, but a
philosophical theology of a tragic, suffering absolute. According to Grier, it was
the problem of the other that led Iljin to his view that Hegel’s absolute is tragic.
Iljin demonstrates that the themes of these studies—recognition, otherness,
tragedy, and the death of God—are systematically connected.
A sabbatical leave and a Humanities Institute Fellowship from the University of
Illinois–Chicago and a research grant from the University of Malaga in support of
this project are gratefully acknowledged.
Finally I acknowledge and thank my wife Irma Olmedo, not only for her patience,
encouragement, and support of an apparently interminable Hegel–Nietzsche
project, but also for her adroitness, tenacity, and resourcefulness in keeping our
household running smoothly—both at home and on the road—during my
presence/absence. This book is dedicated to her.
Some of the chapters in this study have appeared in earlier versions. Chapter 1
was published as “Hegel and Nietzsche on Recognition and Master/Slave,”
Philosophy Today, Thinking in Action: Selected Studies in Phenomenology and
Existential Philosophy, Vol. 27, ed. Walter Brogan and Margaret Simons, Vol.
45:5, SPEP Supplement 2001.
An abridged earlier version of Chapter 2 was published as “Hegel and Aristotle on
Recognition and Friendship,” in The Plural States of Recognition, ed. Michel
Seymour and Martin Blanchard, Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Permission of
Palgrave Macmillan to reprint it in the revised full version is acknowledged.
An earlier version of Chapter 6 was published as “Hegel’s Concept of the True
Infinite,” The Owl of Minerva, Vol. 42:1–2, 2010–11, 89–122.
An earlier, abbreviated version of Chapter 10 appears in Hegel on Religion and
Politics, edited by Angelica Nuzzo, Albany, NY: State University of New York
Press, 2012.
Notes:
(1) Hegel, FK 190.
(2) Hegel, FK 191; I have modified the translation of “Leiden.”
(3) For Nietzsche’s version of this, see AntiChristian §§39–44. “The very term
30
‘Christianity’ is a misunderstanding: in truth there was only one Christian, and he
died on the cross. The ‘evangel’ (good news) died on the cross.” AntiChristian, PN
612.
(4) Daniel Breazeale, “The Hegel–Nietzsche Problem,” Nietzsche-Studien, Vol. 4,
1975, 146–64
.
5
( ) Walter Kaufmann, Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, New
York: Vintage 1968, p. 236
.
(6) Breazeale, “The Hegel–Nietzsche Problem”; Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of
Power, Stanford University Press, 1997
; Stephen Houlgate, Hegel, Nietzsche
and the Criticism of Metaphysics, Cambridge University Press, 1986
; Eliot
Jurist, Beyond Hegel and Nietzsche, Boston, MA: MIT Press, 2000
; Philip J.
Kain, “Nietzschean Genealogy and Hegelian History in the Genealogy of Morals,”
Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 26, No. 1, Mar. 1996, 123–48
; Richard
Rorty, Contingency, Irony and Solidarity, Cambridge University Press, 1989
Stanley Rosen, The Ancients and the Moderns, Yale University Press, 1989
Robert Solomon, “One Hundred Years of Ressentiment,” in Nietzsche,
Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, ed. R.
;
;
Schacht, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994
; Alan White,
“Nietzschean Nihilism: A Typology,” International Studies in Philosophy, Vol. 19,
No. 2, 1987, 29–44
. Will Dudley, Hegel, Nietzsche and Philosophy: Thinking
Freedom, Cambridge University Press, 2002
.
(7) Rosen, The Ancients and the Moderns, p. 204.
(8) Peter Szondi, A Essay on the Tragic, trans. P. Fleming, Stanford University
Press, 2002
.
(9) Hegel, Aesthetics I 178; Werke Suhrkamp Ausgabe, 13:234. My italics,
translation revised.
(10) Nietzsche TI PN 540.
(11) Nietzsche TI PN 469.
(12) BGE §225, BW 344; EH BT 3, BW 729.
(13) For Nietzsche’s version of this, see AntiChristian §§39–44. “The very term
‘Christianity’ is a misunderstanding: in truth there was only one Christian, and he
died on the cross. The ‘evangel’ (good news) died on the cross.” AntiChristian, PN
612.
(14) BT Attempt at Self-Criticism.
(15) BGE §260.
(16) BGE §284.
(17) BGE §212, n. 35.
31
(18) Nussbaum, FG.
(19) Aristotle, NE IX.9, 1169a 3–20.
(20) GM Preface, §6, BW 456.
(21) Hegel VPR 3:101; LPR 3:166. Translation modified.
(22) Hegel
, FK 62.
(23) Ibid.
(24) FK 64
. My italics.
(25) Ibid
.
26
( ) FK 60.
(27) LPR 1:86–7.
(28) FK 65.
(29) FK 56.
(30) Hegel, LHP (1840) 3, 476–7; Hegel, Werke, Theoriewerkausgabe, Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp Verlag, 1971, Bde 20:384. I have modified the translation.
(31) Cf. Frederick Beiser, The Fate of Reason, Harvard University Press, 1987, pp.
8–86
, 123.
32
( ) See my article, “Double Transition Dialectic and Recognition,” in Identity and
Difference: Studies in Hegel’s Dialectic, ed. Phillip Grier, Albany: SUNY Press,
2007
.
33
( ) The asymmetrical pattern of master and slave Hegel first analyzed in his
Early Theological Writings as a theological-political conception linked to the
royal metaphor of the kingdom of God. Hegel criticizes the royal metaphor of
kingdom because “it means only a union through domination, through the power
of a stranger over a stranger.” ETW 278. Cf. PR §57 Z, where master and slave
belong to a transitional period in which what is wrong counted as right.
(34) PhS §640.
(35) SL 130.
(36) Hegel criticizes both traditional metaphysics and the traditional forms of the
argument. See below section III.5 and Ch. 7. For Hegel, the ontological proof
implies absolute idealism and divine personhood.
(37) SL 155. See Ch. 7.
(38) Lproofs 119. My italics.
(39) LPR 1:89.
(40) EL, Preface to 1827 edition, p. 12.
(41) LPR 1:170.
(42) LPR 1:116 (1824). My italics.
(43) Lproofs 126. My italics. Cf. EPS §564; Hegel’s Review of Göschel’s Aphorisms,
in Miscellaneous Writings of G. W. F. Hegel, ed. Jon Stewart, Northwestern
University Press, 2002, pp. 401–29
(44) Cf. below Section 5, pp. 22–6ff.
.
32
(45) See Frederick C. Beiser, “The Puzzling Hegel Renaissance,” in Cambridge
Companion to Hegel and 19th Century Philosophy, ed. F. C. Beiser, Cambridge
University Press, 2008, p. 5
. See also Beiser, “Dark Days: Anglophone
Scholarship Since the 1960s,” in German Idealism: Contemporary Perspectives,
ed. Espen Hammer, New York: Routledge, 2007, pp. 70–90
. Beiser writes
“Advocates of the non-metaphysical interpretation [of Hegel and German
idealism] have thrown the baby of metaphysics out with the bathwater of preKantian dogmatism” (p. 81).
(46) See H. F. Fulda, “Hegels Begriff des absoluten Geistes,” in Hegel-Studien, ed.
Walter Jaeschke and Ludwig Siep, Hamburg: Meiner Verlag Band 36, 2001, pp.
167–98
. Fulda targets Habermas and others.
(47) Beiser, “Dark Days,” p. 70.
Even Kant suffers interpretive violence from
the positivist legacy and anti-metaphysical bias of Anglo-American analytic
philosophy.
(48) Beiser, “The Puzzling Hegel Renaissance,” p. 5.
“Hegel: A Non-Metaphysical View” (1972)
Cf. Klaus Hartmann,
; Robert Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism
(1989)
; Robert Brandom, Tales of the Mighty Dead (2002)
. I agree that
metaphysics is an essential dimension of Hegel’s thought and that this raises
questions concerning the tenability of non-metaphysical interpretations, but I do
not share Beiser’s blanket assessment that all such endeavors simply read
contemporary philosophical concerns into Hegel. The latter issues are beyond the
scope of this project.
(49) LPR 1:86–7
(50) Ibid
.
.
(51) Frederick Beiser, Hegel, New York: Routledge, 2005, p. 125
.
52
( ) Robert Pippin, Hegel’s Practical Philosophy, Cambridge University Press,
2008, p. 33
n. 34.
(53) Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism, p. 7.
(54) Beiser, Hegel, pp. 107–8.
(55) Robert Wallace, Hegel’s Philosophy of Reality, Freedom and God, Cambridge
University Press, 2005, p. 100
.
(56) Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism, pp. 189, 197.
(57) EL §95 R.
(58) Giacomo Rinaldi, A History and Interpretation of the Logic of Hegel,
Lewiston: Edwin Mellen Press, 1992, pp. 217–18
. Rinaldi agrees with George
33
di Giovanni. Cf. Section 5 below.
(59) See SL 154–6, Remark 2, Idealism. See also Kenneth R. Westphal, Hegel’s
Epistemological Realism, Dorchrecht and Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers,
1989
.
(60) Hegel, LHP (1840) 3, 476–7; Hegel Werke, Theoriewerkausgabe, Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp Verlag, 1971
, Bde 20:384. My translation. Hegel refers to Kant
here. It should be noted that Hegel holds that religion and philosophy both have
truth in the highest sense for their object, “for both hold that God and God alone
is the truth.” EL §1 R. An ‘inconvenient truth’ for non-metaphysical
interpretations.
(61) Beiser, Hegel, p. 138.
(62) See FK 60–5; see below Chs. 6–7.
(63) Beiser, Hegel, p. 146.
(64) Beiser, Hegel, p. 145.
Luther’s God is free and his theology is based on
dualism; Hegel’s God is rational necessity and Hegel opposes all forms of
dualism. These contrasts are overdrawn, and ignore different assessments of
Hegel and Luther such as Eberhard Jüngel’s view that Hegel’s explication of the
systematic relation between trinity and christology is a high water mark of
Christian theology, and that Luther’s insights concerning the death of Christ as
the death of God are first made hermeneutically fruitful by Hegel.
(65) LPR 1:108 (1821) Hegel’s Lecture Manuscript.
(66) LPR 1:108–9. I have modified the translation.
(67) Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. and ed. George di Giovanni, Cambridge
University Press, 2010
.
(68) Di Giovanni, xxxviii.
(69) Di Giovanni, liii.
(70) See Paul Redding, “George Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,” in Stanford
Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Edward N. Zalta. See also Ch. 8, section I.
(71) PAR viii, 254. For a further elaboration, see Errol E. Harris, “The
Contemporary Significance of Hegel and Whitehead,” in Hegel and Whitehead:
Contemporary Perspectives on Systematic Philosophy, ed. George Lucas, Jr.,
Albany: SUNY Press, 1986
. In this essay Harris breaks with his own Spinozan
reading of Hegel.
(72) PAR 32.
(73) Dennis J. Schmidt, On Germans and Other Greeks: Tragedy and Ethical
Life, Indiana University Press, 2001, pp. 77–8
.
74
( ) DG 197, 219–20.
(75) LPR 3:298. Hegel observes that if the opposite proposition is true—that
humanity is by nature good—then humans have no need of reconciliation and his
34
Philosophy of Religion is superfluous. Hegel’s assertion resembles Kant’s
doctrine of radical evil that was never integrated into his concept of autonomy.
Kant’s philosophy has tragic aspects, but is not a tragic philosophy. Cf. Nietzsche,
AntiChristian §§9, 11, see also Schmidt, On Germans and Other Greeks, pp. 73–
83.
(76) However, as we will see, Hegel and Nietzsche are both fans of Heraclitus,
whose thought they retrieve to dissolve the dualisms of Kantian frame.
(77) On this important point, cf. DOG; and George di Giovanni, “Hegel’s AntiSpinozism: The Transition to Subjective Logic and the End of Classical
Metaphysics,” in Hegel’s Theory of the Subject, ed. D. G. Carlson, Palgrave
Macmillan, 2005, p. 40
. For Hegel’s post-critical metaphysics, cf. below Ch.
10, section V, “Traditional Ontotheology as the Subjective Impotence of Reason.”
(78) Iljin’s commentary is now available in English: The Philosophy of Hegel as a
Doctrine of the Concreteness of God and Humanity, trans. and ed. Philip T.
Grier, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2011
.
(79) Paul Tillich, Love, Power and Justice, Oxford University Press, 1954
.
35
Hegel and Nietzsche: Recognition and Master/Slave
Robert R Williams
DOI:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199656059.003.0002
Abstract and Keywords
This chapter compares Hegel and Nietzsche on the topic of master and slave. For
Hegel master/slave results from the struggle for recognition; for Nietzsche it is a
typology of morality: the life-affirming or the decadent. The chapter examines
Gilles Deleuze’s claim that Hegel and Nietzsche are opposites and that Hegel’s
recognition is inherently servile in Nietzsche’s sense. However, when Deleuze
gives his account of affirmation in Nietzsche, it becomes clear that affirmation is
double: The primary, Dionysian affirmation is actual only as the object of a
second affirmation. Such double affirmation is indistinguishable from Hegel’s
analysis of mutual recognition, an irony that undermines Deleuze’s central claim
that Hegel and Nietzsche are opposites. Nietzsche’s thought concerning
community remains ambiguous. When Nietzsche criticizes sympathy, he claims
that all community makes humans common and impure; this implies that
community is essentially herd community and essentially negative and
homogenizing, lacking in solidarity. Yet Nietzsche also maintains that there is
such a thing as a noble community that is both affirmative and dependent on
preservation of strong differences. This apparent contradiction requires further
investigation.
Keywords: recognition, master/slave, noble/decadent, Deleuze, affirmation, community
One of Hegel’s main contributions to critical theory is his concept of the struggle
for recognition and the related concepts of lordship and bondage. For these have
become central to any account of oppression, marginalization, and
communicative freedom or liberation. Hegel’s analysis of desire, the need to raise
parochial self-certainty to public, intersubjective truth, the life and death struggle
for recognition, the constitution of the one who fears death as servile and who has
to work off his fear, and the final self-subversion of mastery are important
themes for critical theory from Marx through Habermas and Honneth.1 However,
to take up the themes of recognition and master/slave is to find oneself
confronted with an alternative, possibly incompatible interpretation of master
and slave, namely Nietzsche’s. But is Nietzsche’s account of master morality and
slave morality opposed to Hegel? After all, both see master and slave as posing
fundamental obstacles and problems for the realization of autonomous freedom.
Moreover, both Hegel and Nietzsche agree that the slave is successful in rebelling
against the master; however, they interpret both servitude and this successful
revolt quite differently. For Hegel it constitutes a potential, if not actual,
liberation, whereas for Nietzsche it is a historical and cultural catastrophe that
36
has produced the herd morality. Nietzsche thus has been interpreted as seeking
an alternative, namely, the return of the master,2 i.e., the recovery the heroic
noble and tragic tradition. Deleuze claims that Nietzsche’s genealogy of morals
undermines Hegel’s account and provides the true critical theory of domination.3
Thanks to Deleuze we are thus plunged into the middle of what Daniel Breazeale
has aptly called “The Hegel–Nietzsche Problem”.4 The “Hegel–Nietzsche
problem” was identified long ago by Karl Joel, who wrote: “Hegel and Nietzsche!
Here lies a problem yet to be solved.”5 Joel’s “problem” has received some
attention, but the (p.34) relation between Hegel’s thought and Nietzsche’s has
never been adequately sorted out, much less resolved. Critical theorists like
Habermas and Derrida, who otherwise disagree, both affirm that Hegel and
Nietzsche are opposites. Deleuze also belongs to this camp.
Deleuze’s analysis of the topic of master/slave in Nietzsche and Hegel remains
one of the most extensive to date; it presents a Nietzschean critique of Hegel that
has helped to shape the current consensus. Deleuze contends that recognition is
inherently servile, and that Hegel’s master, who depends on the slave’s
recognition, is for this reason likewise a slave in Nietzsche’s sense. I shall offer
criticisms of Deleuze’s reading of Hegel’s dialectic, recognition, and master/slave,
and conclude with a look at an ambiguity in Nietzsche’s concept of the
community. I begin with a brief summary of Hegel’s view.
I. Hegel: Recognition and Master/Slave6
Elsewhere I have developed at length an interpretation and commentary on
Hegel’s concept of recognition and depiction of master/slave.7 I claim that the
concept of recognition is not confined to or simply identified with the analysis of
master and slave. Recognition constitutes not only a mediated autonomy and
mediated self-realization as set forth in Part I of this book, it also constitutes the
existential phenomenological genesis of the concept of spirit (Geist) and the
general structure of Hegel’s concept of ethical life (Sittlichkeit). As such it
constitutes the ethical sphere of objective spirit, and is immanent in Hegel’s
account of the virtues.
For Hegel, master and slave are constituted as a deficient outcome of a struggle
for recognition. Pace Kojève, the concept of recognition is a presupposition of,
and not synonymous with, master and slave. The concept of recognition implies
that the consciousness of freedom is not something that someone can achieve by
himself, but is rather intersubjectively mediated and conditioned. Recognition
also completes and fills out Hegel’s analysis of desire (Begierde) which is an
experienced contradiction that drives the living subject towards satisfaction.
Desire is satisfied when it cancels (aufhebt) the independence of its object, and
demonstrates the object’s inner nullity by consuming it. Since the object is
consumed, the satisfaction of desire is short-lived; the life- (p.35) process is
endlessly repeated. However, the subject’s satisfaction is increased when its
object is not merely consumed, but is and remains independent, i.e., is a selfconsciousness capable of negating itself, and is capable of both resisting and
37
cooperating with the subject’s desire. In this sense “The self consciousness attains
its satisfaction only in another self-consciousness.”8 The satisfaction resulting
from recognition is not ephemeral, because in this case, the other is not simply
consumed, but survives and endures its own negations, and can satisfy the need
for recognition. “Self-consciousness is in and for itself when and through the fact
that it is in and for itself for an other, that is, it exists only as recognized.”9
Hegel conceives recognition as a joint, two-sided process involving first the
doubling of consciousness in a ‘raw’ unmediated encounter that, because of its
abstract immediacy, is experienced as self-othering and self-loss. As Sartre
observed, the presence of the other means that I am no longer in control of the
situation. Second, the opposition or conflict between consciousnesses driven by
the contradiction of needing, but not being able to control, the recognition of the
other. Third, the overcoming of opposition when either (1) one is subjugated by
the other, or (2) each renounces coercion and allows the other to be. Hegel
portrays the process of recognition as a “syllogism” in which each party plays the
role of extreme (qua recognized) and mediator (qua recognizing). Each
reciprocally plays the role of mediator to the other, evoking and conditioning the
consciousness of freedom and shaping self-identity.
The process is therefore absolutely the doubled action of both selfconsciousnesses. Each sees the other do the same as it does; each does to itself
what it demands of the other and therefore does what it does only insofar as the
other does the same. A one-sided action would be useless, because what is
supposed to occur can only come about through both acting together. The action
is therefore double sided, not only because it is an action directed towards oneself
as well as towards another, but also because it is indivisible, the doing of the one
as well as the other.10
The “conclusion” of the “syllogism” is that “They recognize themselves as
reciprocally recognizing each other.”11 The result of reciprocal recognition is
supposed to be an I that becomes a We, or spirit.12
Note that the full consciousness of freedom is achieved only in union and
solidarity with another. I have argued elsewhere that the spirit-constituting
process of recognition involves four elements: autonomy, union, self-overcoming,
and Freigabe.13 Freedom is not realized in isolation as ‘heroic’ individuality;
rather it is realized in relation to and union with other. This union with other
implies a breaking through and surpassing of the limits of individuality; it is at
once a self-externality (Aussersichsein) in the recognition of the other, and a selfovercoming through the incorporation of the other’s perspective into one’s own.
Self-externality in union with other is a (p.36) quasi-Dionysian element in the
concept of recognition.14 This quasi-Dionysian breaking through the limits of
individuality produces an enlarged mentality, an I that is also a We. The union
with other which includes the elements of autonomy, union, self-overcoming, and
Freigabe, is an ethical (sittliche) union in which coercion is renounced and the
38
individual members are not suppressed but affirmed and allowed to be
(Freigabe). In this union individuals are not subjugated or eliminated but
liberated while remaining distinct; the union presupposes their continued
differentiation. The union is a unity in difference arising out of the double
transition of the ‘syllogism’ of recognition.
Thus far we have focused only on Hegel’s analysis of the concept of recognition.
He turns next to an examination of how this concept appears in human
experience, and he begins with a situation which exhibits a deficient recognition.
The deficiency consists in the inequality, the asymmetry between the parties, in
which only one, not both, is recognized, and only one, not both, does the
recognizing. The deficiency is manifest when the middle, which is crucial to
mutual mediation, disappears into the extremes which remain opposed to each
other. In other words, no enlarged mentality, no ‘We’ results.
Hegel’s account of master and slave is well known. The two parties face each
other in the absence of mediating institutions. Each is certain of itself but must
seek confirmation of its self-certainty, for only then is its self-certainty true and
actual in the world. Each is uncertain concerning the other, yet it depends on the
other for its self-realization: the other must confirm and recognize that what it is
for itself it is for the other. But what is each for itself? At the point of zero
mediation, each is only the abstract exclusive certainty of freedom and desire,
and this freedom can be manifest only by demonstrating that there is nothing
present in the self that cannot be regarded as a vanishing moment. This requires
a gesture which shows the self is not bound by any determinate existence, not
even its own life. This can be done by canceling the other, i.e., by seeking his
death.15 However, owing to the double-sidedness of action, what is done to the
other is also directed at oneself, and so this very action also places one’s own life
at risk. The life and death struggle ensues.
In this struggle both must face the possibility of death. But the point of the
struggle is not to kill each other, for then no freedom and no recognition would
be possible. Murder is abstract negation, which, if carried out, would show only
that both despise each other and life itself. Such abstract negation is not “the
negation of consciousness which cancels in such a way that it preserves what is
canceled and so survives its (p.37) cancellation.”16 What is sought in this struggle
is not the elimination of the other, but his recognition. Such recognition would
legitimate self-certainty while removing from the other the uncertainty and
possible enmity that make trust impossible.
In the life and death struggle, one party makes the discovery that life is just as
essential to him as is recognition. In order to preserve his life, he gives up his
independence and demand for recognition. Thereby he preserves his bare
existence in the shape of mere dependent thinghood. He becomes slave, and the
winner of the struggle, who does not fear death, preserves his independence and
becomes master. Thus master/slave puts an end to the lethal dimension of the
life and death struggle. In this sense it represents an advance over the lethal
39
violence (abstract negation) of the life and death struggle. Master/slave sublates
violence, but transforms it in a one-sided, unequal recognition. This inequality is
both a ‘solution’ to the violence of the state of nature and, viewed from a higher
level, an institutionalization of domination and injustice that remain to be
overcome.
The master is the apparent victor of the struggle; he has succeeded in coercing
the slave’s recognition. The master regards himself as the essential one, while the
slave is non-essential and does not count. However, mastery proves to be the
opposite of what it intends. For the master now confronts, not an independent
being, but a dependent one. However, since he has established this relationship
on the basis of coercion, the master has deprived himself of an independent
recognition and confirmation of his own freedom and independence. The master
cannot be certain of the truth of his independence, because he has the recognition
of this truth only through the inessential, dependent slave, whose recognition is
coerced and thus worthless. The truth of mastery is manifest in the dependent
servile consciousness of the slave. In his apparent victory, the master has
undermined himself.
The slave also undergoes a dialectical reversal. He becomes a slave because in
confronting the possibility of death—the absolute master—he prefers survival,
albeit as a slave. His desire to preserve his natural existence holds him in thrall to
the master. He not only becomes a slave, but is servile because he allows himself
to be coerced. Confronting death, the slave finds everything, including his selfcertainty, shaken to its foundations; everything solid is rendered fluid and
unstable. He has discovered absolute negativity. But the slave does not yet realize
that consciousness is also absolute negativity: the ability to dissolve everything
fixed and stable and render it fluid. Or rather, his awareness of this negative
power of rational freedom locates it entirely in the master; he does not yet realize
this power is also his own. But through his service he brings about world
transformation; through his world-transforming labor the slave comes to himself.
His ability to transform the world effects a transformation in the slave: “Through
his service he suspends and rids himself of his attachment to his natural
existence.”17 Thus the slave works off his fear of death. In Hegel’s history of
consciousness, it is the slave through whom a historical advance is made, because
the (p.38) slave, and not the master, breaks with desire and its immediate
satisfactions. It is the slave who learns to hold desire in check, to postpone
gratification, and who overcomes the fear of death; it is the slave in whom labor
and suffering become transforming and liberating.
Finally, it must be noted that for Hegel the revolution of the slave is not simply to
replace the master while retaining the unequal hierarchical recognition. Hegel is
not interested in merely inverting the master/slave relation, but in overcoming its
unequal recognition. The point is to get beyond the patterns of domination,
inequality, and the like. This is especially clear in Hegel’s account of recognition
in the Philosophy of Right and the Encyclopedia Philosophy of Spirit.18 The
40
master is not yet free, but becomes free only with the liberation of the slave. The
contradiction between human freedom and slavery becomes clear when it is
recognized that freedom is truly actual only in the state as a leading institution of
ethical life.
II. Deleuze: Nietzsche Anti-Hegel
Deleuze’s Nietzsche and Philosophy, written in 1962, is part of the reaction
against the Hegelianism dominant in French philosophical schools between 1930
and 1960.19 This reaction against Hegelianism included a turn to Nietzsche and
genealogy, as well as to structuralism and post-structuralist thought. According
to Deleuze, Nietzsche is an anti-Hegelian, anti-dialectical thinker. Deleuze argues
that “Anti-Hegelianism runs through Nietzsche’s work as its cutting edge.”20
Nietzschean genealogy undermines Hegel’s dialectic: “There is no possible
compromise between Hegel and Nietzsche.”21
There is much to be learned about Nietzsche from Deleuze. Central to our
purposes—and important to Deleuze’s anti-Hegelianism as well—is the
Nietzschean interpretation of master and slave.22 For Deleuze, the Nietzschean
genealogy of morals undermines Hegel’s master/slave; Deleuze believes that
Hegel’s entire account of recognition reflects a servile, ressentiment-laden
mentality, and that the liberation of the slave represents the triumph of the herd
and herd values.
Deleuze formulates Nietzsche’s famous distinction between master morality and
slave morality with two strikingly different formulae. “I am good, therefore you
are evil.—You are evil, therefore I am good.”23 Who utters such formulae?
According to Deleuze, “the same person cannot utter both because the good of the
one is precisely the evil of the other.”24 These are formulae for two entirely
different sorts of people (p.39) holding two different moralities which have
nothing in common with each other. The one who says “I am good therefore you
are evil” is “certainly not the one who compares himself to others, nor the one
who compares his actions and his works to superior and transcendent values:
such a one would not begin…The one who says ‘I am good’ does not wait to be
called good. He refers to himself in this way, he names himself and describes
himself…”25 The master morality is a morality of self-glorification. Its assertion “I
am good therefore you are evil” is not supposed to originate out of or depend on a
comparison with another. It is sheer self-affirmation. “But no comparison
interferes with the principle. It is only a secondary consequence, a negative
conclusion that others are evil insofar as they do not affirm, do not act, do not
enjoy.” The “I am good therefore you are evil” in the mouths of masters is not a
comparison but “is merely advanced as the consequence of a full affirmation.”26
Thus in the case of the master morality, aggression is negative, but it is a negative
that is a conclusion from positive, life-affirming premisses.
In contrast, the slave morality begins with a negation born in ressentiment. “You
are evil, therefore I am good.” The slave morality is reactive; the decadent slave
“needs others to be evil in order to be able to consider himself good.…The slave
41
needs to set the other up as evil from the outset.”27 The slave mentality and its
values are reactive and invert the valuations of the master morality. Moreover, its
apparent affirmations conceal negation: the affirmations of servile morality are
conclusions from negative premisses. According to Deleuze, the slave must have
premisses of reaction and negation, of ressentiment and nihilism in order to
obtain an apparently affirmative conclusion. But this affirmative conclusion is a
nihilistic sham, a sham that is deeply rooted in the philosophical tradition (=
metaphysics), and which Deleuze claims continues in Hegelian dialectic. “The
dialectic is the ideology of ressentiment.”28
How does Deleuze manage to turn an interesting exposition of Nietzsche’s master
morality and slave morality—which for many is a parallel to and gloss on Hegel’s
master/slave—into an indictment of Hegel? By reading Hegel’s entire account of
recognition and master/slave as slave morality in Nietzsche’s sense. To pull this
off, Deleuze misreads Hegel’s concept of recognition, i.e., the mediated autonomy
and mediated self-actualization of freedom, and confuses it with Nietzsche’s
psychological concept of approval: “The noble type of human being experiences
itself as determining values; it does not need approval; it judges ‘what is harmful
to me is harmful in itself’; it knows itself to be that which first bestows honor to
things; it is value-creating.”29 By confusing Hegel’s concept of recognition with
approval, Deleuze suggests that the need of recognition—which for Hegel is
ontological and shared by both parties in the struggle for recognition—is merely a
contingent psychological need for approval or permission. The noble, the master,
does not need such approval or permission; only the (p.40) weak, the decadent,
the servile require approval of others. Deleuze concludes that the entire Hegelian
concept of recognition—including both master and slave—is reducible to approval
or permission, and thus is servile: “Underneath the Hegelian image of the master
we always find the slave.”30
Deleuze does not challenge Hegel’s account in which the slave triumphs over the
master. Instead he inverts the valuation and significance attributed to it by Hegel.
Recognition and liberation are merely the triumph of slave morality and its
values over the truly creative master morality. The following passage makes clear
the steps in Deleuze’s critical assessment of Hegel and raises important issues
that need to be addressed.
the relation of master and slave is not, in itself, dialectical. Who is the
dialectician, who dialectizes the relationship? It is the slave, the slave’s
perspective, the way of thinking belonging to the slave’s perspective.…What the
wills in Hegel want is to have their power recognized, to represent their power.
According to Nietzsche we have here a wholly erroneous conception of the will to
power and its nature. This is the slave’s conception, it is the image that the man
of ressentiment has of power. The slave only conceives of power as the object of
a recognition, the content of a representation, the stake in a competition, and
therefore makes it depend, at the end of a fight, on a simple attribution of
established values. If the master/slave relationship can easily take on the
42
dialectical form, to the point where it has become a…school exercise for every
young Hegelian, it is because the portrait of the master that Hegel offers us is,
from the start, a portrait which represents the slave, at least as he is in his
dreams, as at best a successful slave. Underneath the Hegelian image of the
master we always find the slave.31
Several issues deserve notice. First, Deleuze’s interpretation of recognition not
only confuses it with approval, but also orients recognition to the epistemological
problem of representation and issues in Kant’s transcendental deduction.32
Second, Deleuze asserts that recognition is inherently servile in Nietzsche’s sense
because it arises from a negative comparison of self with other; recognition is
reactive and ends up confirming established values. Third, difference, of which
the other is a special case, is interpreted as a negation, a non-ego, rather than
being affirmative in its own right, i.e., the other is reduced to the same. Fourth,
affirmations such as mutual recognition conceal negations and merely confirm
conventional or established values.
III. Recognition and Representation
Daniel W. Smith has pointed out that Deleuze was interested in the history of
philosophy, and sought to interpret Hegel in the larger Kantian and post-Kantian
(p.41) context in this case, the problem of the representation.33 The problem of
the representation (Reinhold) is connected with Kant’s transcendental deduction,
which deals with the question how can apparently subjective thoughts and
categories have objective validity? In the transcendental deduction Kant speaks
of a “Synthesis of Recognition.”34 Kant uses the English term “recognition,” not
the German Wiedererkennen. The synthesis of recognition is related to the
synthesis of reproduction of transcendental imagination. In this synthesis, the
subject reproduces what is already there. “Recognition” in Kant’s sense means
that thought rediscovers itself in its object. As Kant puts it, “The order and
regularity in the appearances which we entitle nature, we ourselves introduce. We
could never find them in the appearances had we not ourselves, or the nature of
our mind, originally set them there.”35
Deleuze reads Hegel as a philosopher of the subject, placing him in the Cartesian
tradition. In this tradition, Deleuze claims, “difference is crucified.…only that
which is identical…or opposed can be considered different: difference becomes an
object of representation always in relation to a conceived identity…”36 Placing
Hegel’s concept of recognition in this context condemns recognition to
sanctioning established values:
The form of recognition has never sanctioned anything but the recognizable and
the recognized; form will never inspire anything but conformities.…Insofar as the
practical finality of recognition lies in ‘established values,’ then on this model the
whole image of thought . . bears witness to a disturbing complacency.…What is a
thought which harms no one? Recognition is a sign of celebration…in which
thought ‘rediscovers’ the state, rediscovers ‘the church’ and rediscovers all the
43
current values.…Struggles occur only on the basis of a common sense and
established values, for the attainment of current values (honours, wealth and
power).…Nietzsche…called both Kant and Hegel ‘philosophical laborers’ because
their philosophy remained marked by this indelible model of recognition.37
Deleuze wants a difference that is not a negation, or derived from a dialectical
opposition that reinstates identity, but an unrecognized and unrecognizable
difference,38 a difference affirmative in itself.39 He believes this differential
affirmation is found in Nietzsche’s master morality and overman.
However, to interpret Hegel’s concept of recognition (Anerkennung) simply as
“recognition” and tied to Kant’s synthesis of recognition, is a misinterpretation.
Paul Ricoeur shows why this is so. Ricoeur notes that the term recognition has
several different lexical senses that almost defy any unity and make one wonder
whether recognition might be a false concept that misleads people into believing
there is a unity (p.42) where none in fact exists. Lest anyone think that the term
recognition has some obvious coherent sense, Ricoeur asks: What do Kant’s
synthesis of recognition in the transcendental deduction, Bergson’s account of
reconnaisance as the mnemonic act par excellence, and Hegel’s account of
Anerkennen as a struggle which culminates in an I that is a We, have in
common?40 Kant’s term “recognition” in German should be Wiedererkennen, to
recognize again what one knew previously but temporarily lost sight of. In
contrast, Anerkennen refers to something quite different. The sense of
Anerkennen can be gleaned from its opposite: aberkennen, which means to strip
someone of an honor, or status, or right. Anerkennen designates a conferral of
honor, praise, right, or title.
What does Anerkennen’s etymology add to the etymology of recognition? It
decenters the sovereign subject by raising the general problem of the other and
opening the sphere of the interhuman (Zwischenmenschliche). It further implies
that human self-identity is not an isolated atomic fact or datum, but rather is
problematic, confronted with the task of realization in the world. This having to
become realized in the world implies that self-identity is not a simple given, but
something achieved in a process of contestation. It implies that self-identity is a
mediated, vulnerable, and dependent on the reception and influence of others.
Mediation by other is not implied or inherent in reconnnaissance, or in
recognition; on the contrary it is suppressed.
Ricoeur wagers that the potential philosophical uses of the verb “to recognize”
can be organized along a trajectory running from its use in the active voice to its
use in the passive voice. To recognize as an act of identification expresses a claim
to exercise intellectual mastery over a field of meanings and assertions, i.e., the
primacy of the transcendental subject in Kant’s sense, the I think that must
accompany all its representations. Here “recognition” does not differ from
knowledge. But for Ricoeur the course of recognition does not end here, it leads
through the topic of self-recognition, which implies an ability to narrate oneself,
44
to make and keep promises, faithfulness, etc. This opens up the problems of
betrayal, conflict, and struggle, and with these the problem of achieving mutual
recognition arises. At the opposite end of this trajectory the demand for
recognition expresses an expectation that can only be satisfied by mutual
recognition. Between these lies a reversal from active voice to passive voice, a
reversal which affects the intellectual mastery inherent in cognition, a reversal
wherein recognition acquires a status more and more independent of cognition.
These issues are suppressed by Deleuze’s misinterpretation of recognition and of
Hegel as a philosopher of the subject. Anerkennung is not a continuation of the
philosophy of the subject, but a correction to it. Hegel criticizes the subject as the
abstract identity of the I = I, because it excludes serious difference: Hegel
observes, “I am I, but the difference is completely lacking, I am only conscious of
myself and know (p.43) only of my own experience…”41 In contrast, recognition
(Anerkennung) in Hegel’s sense is an anti-Cartesian term and move. Spirit
(Geist) is not simply another term for a transcendental subject, and Hegel’s term
Anerkennung is not another term for Kant’s synthesis of recognition.
Hegel’s terminology rather reflects Fichte’s Grundlage des Naturrechts,42 where
Anerkennung signifies an intersubjectively mediated consciousness of freedom.
The self-consciousness of freedom—the self’s relation to itself—is mediated by
another. The other introduces serious difference into the ego, producing
disruption and irrevocable alteration, but also making possible an enlarged
mentality. Deleuze ignores or suppresses Hegel’s concept of recognition that
corrects the “philosophy of the subject.”
Deleuze also raises a logical issue: whether Hegel thinks difference in a way that
crucifies it, i.e., subordinates difference to identity, or reduces the other to the
same. In the Logic Hegel points out that speculative dialectical truth cannot be
expressed in standard propositional form or in the form of judgments. Judgment
is the form in which understanding (Verstand) expresses its truth, but Hegel’s
complaint is that judgment suppresses the difference. For example, judgments of
the form “S is P” express the identity and unity of S and P. However, this
judgment does not also express their difference. The apparent suppression of
difference then becomes a matter of concern. Of course difference can be
expressed by the negative judgment, “S is not P,” but then only difference and not
identity is expressed; the identity of S and P is excluded. For this reason Hegel
believes that both judgments are inadequate and distortions, as he explains:
“Judgment is an identical relation between subject and predicate; in it we
abstract from the fact that the subject has a number of determinatenesses other
than that of the predicate…Now if the content is speculative, the non-identical
aspect of subject and predicate is also an essential moment, but in the judgment
this is not expressed.”43 Taken by itself, each judgment expresses only one aspect
of the truth, while omitting the others. Judgment is for Hegel not incorrect, but
misleading, because it expresses identity while suppressing the essential nonidentity or difference and thus distorts or even suppresses ‘the whole truth.’
45
In the logic of essence, Hegel points out that all the categories of essence are
relative. What appear initially to be absolute differences and distinctions break
down and subvert themselves. This means that, as categories of essence, neither
identity nor difference can be thought apart from each other, but only through
and by means of each other. Hegel shows that the attempt to isolate difference
completely from identity (p.44) (or identity from difference) fails. Absolute or
pure difference must differ from itself. Hence absolute difference “is not itself but
its other.”44 (Otherwise it would be identical to itself.) If pure difference differs
from itself, it can differ from itself only by being other than itself. “But that which
is different from difference is identity. Difference is therefore itself and identity.
Both together constitute difference; it is the whole and its moment.”45
Deleuze objects that this subordinates difference to identity by thinking it as a
negation and contradiction. Deleuze maintains that when difference is pushed to
the limit in contradiction, difference becomes one with identity and is therefore
eliminated. Deleuze is correct that difference is inseparable from and identical
with identity, but then he interprets this identity one-sidedly and incorrectly as
an elimination of difference. However, Hegel’s point is that identity and
difference both negate each other and yet depend on each other. They can be
neither wholly identical nor wholly different, and they can be neither wholly
identified nor wholly separated. Each is both itself and its other. Hegel corrects
the apparent one-sidedness of Deleuze when he writes: “Sublated contradiction is
not abstract identity, for that is itself only one side of the contradiction.”46 Hegel
continues: “When we say that ground is the unity of identity and difference, this
unity must not be understood as abstract identity, for then we would just have
another name for a thought that is once more just that identity of the
understanding which we have recognized to be untrue. So in order to counter the
misunderstanding, we can also say that ground is not only the identity, but
equally the difference of identity and difference.”47 This may not satisfy Deleuze,
because he wants to affirm difference as difference apart from identity. If Hegel is
right, what Deleuze wants is impossible.
IV. Is Recognition Inherently Servile?
Deleuze argues that the need for recognition is servile, because the master, as
self-affirming and self-glorifying, does not need the recognition of others. The
master does not compare himself with others or depend on their recognition for
confirmation of who he is. He simply asserts “I am good therefore you are evil.”48
It is the slave who compares himself with others, and, coming out on the short
end of the stick, says “No.” It is the slave who carries out a ressentiment-laden
negation of the master and inversion of the master’s values. “You are evil,
therefore I am good.” Note that Deleuze misquotes Nietzsche. According to
Nietzsche, the master morality has as its basic contrast “good and bad [schlecht]”
whereas the slave morality has as its fundamental contrast “good and evil.”
Consequently for Nietzsche the two are not simple opposites or the inverse of
each other. Deleuze’s misquote may derive from Hyppolite’s (p.45) summary of
46
Hegel’s master/slave dialectic, that the master ends by becoming the slave of the
slave and the slave ends by becoming master of the master.49
Deleuze inverts Hyppolite’s inversion of master by slave, namely, the apparently
successful revolt of the Hegelian slave produces only herd morality and its values.
This serves Deleuze’s purpose of portraying the Nietzschean master/slave as the
inversion and the subversion of the Hegelian. According to Deleuze, Hegel’s
entire account, including his concept of recognition, is servile. As Deleuze sees it,
the Hegelian master needs and depends on recognition of the slave;
consequently, the Hegelian master is the slave of the slave. Recognition is thus
assimilated to servility and slavish dependency.
This reading of recognition as reactive, servile comparison has nothing to do with
Hegel’s account, which identifies recognition rather as an existential ontological
condition of the consciousness of freedom and its actualization. Hegel locates the
origins of servility not in an empirical-psychological comparison with the master,
but in the fear of death. But Deleuze does not bother to deal with Hegel’s texts.
His target is not so much Hegel as the Hegelianism represented by his teachers.50
For example Kojève explicitly portrays recognition as a comparative struggle for
prestige,51 and this may be one source from which Deleuze may have gathered the
impression that recognition is a reactive comparison. I would propose yet
another source, namely Rousseau.52
Whatever the source, it is something like Rousseau’s version of recognition as
involving a comparison with others that Deleuze mistakenly attributes to Hegel in
order to castigate recognition as inherently servile. Norman Dent ascribes to
Rousseau a concept of recognition linked to amour propre, self-love, which he
describes as follows: “The most significant aspect of its meaning has to do with
seeing what is good and valuable in and for oneself in terms of others’ lack of
these things, in terms of others being of little or no account in comparison with
oneself. Amour propre, so understood, is an aggressive desire containing the
need to control others and to obliterate them.”53 For Rousseau amour propre, or
inflamed self-love, arises not in the pre-social state of nature, but only in an
already existing social condition and its conventional values. Amour propre is a
reactive, negative comparison of self with others. As reactive it (p.46)
presupposes that against which it reacts, namely, an already existing social
relation. This means that the social is understood from the beginning as a
negative condition and restriction on freedom against which the self reacts, and
when it so reacts, amour de soi becomes amour propre. The point is that the
social is heteronomous, an alienation. Despite differences, the idea that the social
is an alienation is shared by Rousseau and Nietzsche.54 On this assumption, no
recognition in Hegel’s sense is possible.55
In contrast, recognition for Hegel is that act and process through which the social
itself is constituted, whether in unequal shapes of domination e.g., master/slave,
or in shapes of mutuality, e.g., as in reciprocal recognition and ethical life. The
social is not essentially heteronomous, but ultimately a condition of freedom’s
47
realization in the world. Recognition is not reducible to amour propre, or even to
master and slave. These are distorted, one-sided, unequal shapes of recognition
in the Hegelian sense. Recognition proper can come about only through a joint,
two-sided action that renounces coercion and overcomes master/slave. For
Hegel, recognition implies the intersubjective mediation of the consciousness of
freedom, and spirit is the result of a mediated autonomy. Mediated autonomy
introduces union or community with other into the very meaning of individuality
and individual self-realization. Because this is the case, the social cannot be
regarded as merely external or heteronomous; it is an extension and condition of
individuality. The common element or “We” does not exist prior to reciprocal
recognition, but rather results from it. Hence recognition is for Hegel neither a
comparison nor reactive in Nietzsche’s sense. Freedom is actual only in relation
to and union with other. Hence spirit is not reducible to a mere herd nor is ethics
reducible to herd morality.56
Hegel’s view of the state of nature is closer to Hobbes than to Rousseau.57 The
state of nature is without any social conventions or rights, and thus is
characterized by lawless conflict—might makes right—that must be overcome by
the creation of a commonwealth. According to Hegel, it is the sheer encounter
with other, prior to and unmediated by any social conventions, and not a
comparison (which presupposes social conventions) that plunges the self into
difference and self-alteration. For Hegel it is because the selves in the state of
nature have not yet learned to abstract from their (p.47) particularity and regard
it as absolute, that the encounter with the other is (erroneously) experienced as
an intolerable loss of self. This loss of self ignites the life and death struggle that
culminates in master/slave. However, the inequality of master/slave is not a
natural or social-psychological given; rather it is a freely constituted result arising
from conflict and coercion. Although inequality is socially constituted, it is not
constitutive of the social as such, much less its justification. It is a contingent
historical outcome that must be and can be overcome, and it is overcome in part
by the concept of right (law).58
For Hegel, as for Fichte, right deals with the question of the presence of freedom
in the world, and recognition grounds the concept of right. Any putative
individual right of freedom to presence in its body and in the world is not actual
unless and until it is recognized and guaranteed by a community.59 For Hegel the
social is not simply the origin of inequality as in Rousseau, but also the possibility
of overcoming it.
V. Genealogy, Hierarchy, and the Question of Community
Deleuze observes that the genealogy of morals puts forth a hierarchical
conception of human beings: “The origin is the difference in the origin, difference
in the origin is hierarchy, that is to say, the relation of a dominant to a dominated
force, of an obeyed to an obeying will. The inseparability of hierarchy and
genealogy is what Nietzsche calls ‘our problem’ [HH Preface 7]. Hierarchy is the
originary fact, the identity of difference and origin.”60 Deleuze and Nietzsche have
48
the problem of hierarchy because it is the originary fact or situation that
genealogy of morals discloses, namely the hierarchy of mastery or active, lifeaffirming forces that seek to increase and augment themselves (the Will to
power) and servility, or reactive, life-denying forces.61 The ‘originary fact’ (p.48)
of hierarchy is a problem, because as Nietzsche points out, it means “that
injustice is inseparable from life, that life itself is determined by perspective and
its injustice.”62
Deleuze appears to identify Nietzsche’s Dionysian affirmation and Übermensch
with mastery in the Hegelian sense.63 This creates a problem, because as Ofelia
Schutte has pointed out, if the Übermensch is conceived in relative, oppositional
terms, i.e., in a hierarchical opposition to the slave morality, then the problems of
hierarchy, domination, and nihilism have not been addressed, much less
overcome.64 Nietzsche and Deleuze would thus not succeed in transcending
master/slave, but merely offer another, genealogically grounded, version of it.
Deleuze identifies the overman with mastery, but in order to meet the above
objection, he tries to uncouple the life-affirmation of the master from the lifedenying ressentiment of the slave. He wants to connect Dionysian affirmation of
master morality with anarchical nomadism. Dionysian difference must have no
negation in it and be pure affirmation, an affirmation without any relation to the
slave and its reactive negation. “Negation is opposed to affirmation, but
affirmation differs from negation. We cannot think of affirmation as being
opposed to negation: this would be to place the negative within it.…Affirmation is
the enjoyment and play of its own difference, just as negation is the suffering and
labor of the opposition that belongs to it.…Affirmation is posited for the first time
as multiplicity, becoming and chance.”65 Descombes explains that Deleuze wants
to maintain that the relation of master to slave is not simply the inverse of the
relation of slave to master, nor is the one superimposable on the other. In one
there is a relation of differential self-affirmation; in the other a ressentiment
relation of opposition.66 Thereby Descombes confirms that Deleuze understands
mastery in a Hegelian sense, hence he has the need to differentiate Nietzsche
from Hegel.
I doubt that Deleuze’s differentiation is successful, because mastery and servitude
are relative concepts constituted through and resulting from the struggle for
recognition. But even if Deleuze were successful in extending their asymmetrical
relation to their separation and decoupling, his differentiation would undermine
any relationship between master and slave; each would be a beautiful soul living
in its own world.67 This would be nomadism, but it would come at a high price.
For on nomadic, nominalistic grounds, there is only difference, and since
comparison presupposes a common ground, no comparison would be possible.
There would be nothing for the (p.49) slave to react against, and no
ressentiment. But it was just such a comparison that led Nietzsche to distinguish
between master and slave moralities in the first place—the master needs no
comparison and the decadent’s affirmation is tied to a negative comparison—and
49
to claim that the former is preferable to the latter.
If decoupling master from slave does not work, then the two are inseparable and
related. Not only would this confirm Hegel’s point that difference cannot be
conceived apart from identity (and vice versa), it would imply that the master’s
self-affirmation is not, in the final analysis, distinguishable from inequality and
domination. As Nietzsche says, injustice is inseparable from life. To avoid this
conclusion, Deleuze draws upon Nietzsche’s metaphor of the bird of prey as an
active force overflowing in power that dominates the reactive weak, negative, and
passive forces and condemns them without comparison as bad.68 Here negation
of the slave is not an intended consequence of self-affirmation, but a secondary
consequence. The master supposedly does not compare but merely affirms; only
the slave compares and negates.
In spite of this distinction, Deleuze concedes that in mastery there is a
comparison. He tries to avoid the onus of domination thus: “To affirm is still to
evaluate, but to evaluate from the perspective of a will which enjoys its own
difference in life instead of suffering the pains of the opposition to this life that it
has itself inspired. To affirm is not to take responsibility for, to take on the
burden of what is, but to release, to set free what lives.”69 This last sentence
approximates to the final moment of the process of recognition as Hegel portrays
it, namely the Freigabe, allowing the other to be in an affirmation of the other as
other.70 But Deleuze’s release is not equivalent to Hegel’s because it refers to the
self-affirmation of the master, not the slave. Even if Deleuze did intend the
release of the other (slave), this would not be an affirmation of the other (slave),
because that would imply that the other is a limit on self-affirmation and that
would be too servile for Deleuze.
In his final chapter on Dionysus and Ariadne, Deleuze characterizes Dionysian
affirmation one last time. Here he argues that full affirmation is not that of an
isolated nomad. Genuine and full self-affirmation is a double affirmation:
“affirmation in all its power is double: affirmation is affirmed. It is primary
affirmation…but only as the object of the second affirmation. The two
affirmations constitute the power of affirming as a whole.”71 But surely this
double affirmation is not that of two unrelated nomads, or two beautiful souls as
it were,72 but the double affirmation of a couple standing in relation to each other.
The primary, Dionysian affirmation is actual only as the object of a second
affirmation. In other words, it depends on recognition by another for its own selfactualization. This is indistinguishable from Hegel’s analysis (p.50) of the
actualization of freedom in mutual recognition. If so, Deleuze’s argument is not
only inconsistent with his earlier dismissal of recognition as inherently servile
and decadent, it also happens to be making Hegel’s point, an irony that escapes
Deleuze.
In conclusion, it is difficult not to agree with Daniel Breazeale when he claims
that Deleuze’s zeal to depict Hegel and Nietzsche as opposites vitiates his
interpretation of both Hegel and Nietzsche.73 Perhaps the two are not opposites. I
50
should like to conclude with some corrections of Deleuze’s reading of Nietzsche.
First, when Deleuze contrasts master morality and slave morality with the
formulae, “I am good therefore you are evil,” and “You are evil, therefore I am
good” he claims that “the same person cannot utter both because the good of the
one is precisely the evil of the other.”74 This contradicts Nietzsche’s express
declaration that master morality and slave morality “at times occur directly
alongside each other—even in the same human being, within a single soul.”75
These crucial qualifications show (1) that Deleuze errs when he separates master
morality from slave morality and distributes them into two different selves, and
(2) that Nietzsche regards modern moralities as mixtures of the two types. In this
he parallels Hegel, who considered the dualism between reason and inclinations
in Kantian morality as an internalized master/slave.76 Thus both Hegel and
Nietzsche have a keen sense of the tensions, contradictions, and hypocrisies of
modern morality, and both are critics of Kantian morality and its dualisms
between reason and sense, reason and inclinations.
Second, Nietzsche, unlike Deleuze, does have a theory of the social relation.
Admittedly it is not well developed, or unambiguous, but it does exist. In Gay
Science, for example, Nietzsche argues that self-consciousness and reason
developed only insofar as humans are social animals.77 Consciousness, the
capacity for communication (intersubjectivity?) developed because the human
animal, as the most endangered, needed help and protection. Cleverness and
subtlety in reasoning developed as useful capacities relative to the community.
But the community develops morality as an instrument for keeping individuals
subordinate. “Morality trains the individual to be a function of the herd and to
ascribe value to himself only as a function.”78 Thus for Nietzsche the social
appears to be synonymous with the herd and herd morality. Herd morality
subordinates the individual to the herd, and prevents authentic individual
autonomy.79
(p.51) The difference between Hegel’s and Nietzsche’s view of community can
perhaps be summed up in their attitudes towards equality and inequality. For
Nietzsche equality is a suspect value because to genealogical critique it appears as
the leveling of the noble and the triumph of the herd.80 But equality may be thus
suspect only if all community is herd community. While this is an important
theme in Nietzsche’s polemics against herd morality, it is counterbalanced by
another theme in those polemics, to wit, that the herd type is incapable of
genuine community because of their impotence, their inability to requite, to make
a return.81 This impotence means that herd communities lack strong social
solidarity and cohesion, and are rather held together only like piles of dust.
Nietzsche’s point then is that communities possess significant social cohesion
and have strong senses of solidarity only if they are held together by the power of
requital, and this power is evident only in the affirmative noble type of morality.
The genealogical critique of equality identifies it initially as a herd value which
implies that community is synonymous with the herd and herd morality. Herd
51
equality is conceived as an abstract identity or abstract universal that is external
to and excludes or suppresses the particular. Hegel would agree with and share
Nietzsche’s critique of herd equality, but deny that this is true or genuine
equality.
Nietzsche admits that for genealogy inequality and hierarchy are “our problem.”82
The depth of the problem may be gauged from Nietzsche’s analysis of “What is
Noble” in Beyond Good and Evil. The hard truth is that cultural advances have
been the work of aristocratic society that not only creates an order of rank, but
also “needs slavery in some sense or other.”83 The “fundamental faith” of the
value creating aristocracy “simply has to be that society must not exist for
society’s sake but only as the foundation…on which a choice type of being is able
to raise itself to its higher task and to a higher state of being…”84 Here Nietzsche
conceives society not as an end in itself but as instrumental to the development of
higher individuals. He opposes a hierarchy of abstract individualism to the
abstract universal of herd equality. For Nietzsche the alternatives seem to be
either the herd, suppressing genuine individuality, or the hierarchy-creating life
affirmation of the overman. In these texts self-affirmation and self-overcoming
are not achieved in union with other that results in an enlarged mentality as in
Hegel, but rather are confined to becoming an individual. (p.52) Murray Greene
was probably right when long ago he pointed out that there is in Nietzsche no
equivalent for the Hegelian “We” or spirit.85
Nevertheless, Nietzsche’s thought is not entirely clear or consistent on the status
of community. Consider the following remark from Beyond Good and Evil:
to remain master of one’s four virtues: of courage, insight, sympathy and
solitude. For solitude is a virtue for us, as a sublime bent and urge for cleanliness
which guesses how all contact between man and man—‘in society’—involves
inevitable uncleanliness. All community makes men—somehow, somewhere,
sometime ‘common’.86
This passage contains a contradiction. The contradiction is between Nietzsche’s
flat assertion that all community makes men common (gemeine), on the one
hand, and his assertion that sympathy (Mitgefühl) is a (noble) virtue. If all
community makes men common, unclean, and impure, then community is
essentially a herd and equality is merely a herd value. On the other hand,
sympathy is apparently intersubjective; it cannot be a merely private virtue.
Sympathy is the ability to identify with others and feel what they feel, hence
Mitgefühl.87 Sympathy includes emotional identification and participation. If this
is a virtue, then sympathy cannot simply be emotional contamination. Although
there may be a certain asymmetry in sympathy, as a noble virtue it should not be
confused with the herd pity which Nietzsche rejects because it demeans its
recipient and is close to contempt.88 Further, if sympathy is a virtue, then it
cannot be the case that all community makes humans common, vulgar, unclean,
and the like. Not all community is herd community. Thus in this contradictory
52
text Nietzsche stands before a third alternative to the herd that suppresses
genuine individuality and creativity, and to an authentic, but solitary
Übermensch. In an early writing on Fichte, Hegel posed the issue facing
Nietzsche thus:
If the community of rational beings were essentially a limitation of true freedom,
the community would be…the supreme tyranny. [However] the community of a
person with others must not be regarded as a limitation of the true freedom of the
individual but essentially as its enlargement. Highest community is highest
freedom…it is precisely in this highest community that freedom as a merely ideal
factor [an ought vs. is] and reason as opposed to nature disappear completely.89
From the Hegelian perspective, inequality and hierarchy are the problems.
Hierarchical inequality is not an originary fact, but a result of violence and
coercion. It constitutes an injustice that must and can be overcome. Reciprocal
recognition is not slavish, but constitutes an enlarged mentality which must
become embodied in institutions of (p.53) freedom and justice. Hegel rejects the
“interesting but debilitating choice” ascribed by one writer to Nietzsche, “between
the overman and the herd, in which…the overman assumes the guise of
Aristotle’s God (or beast) capable of living beyond or without the polis.”90 For
Hegel the problem is to overcome domination, to get beyond the forced
inequality of master and slave. This is possible only if both master and slave are
mutually liberated from their opposition. For the two are not in fact separable
and do not live in two different worlds. Because they have to share a common
world, they have to get beyond postures of inequality and domination—as well as
ressentiment—in order to achieve an affirmative relation to each other and
thereby become actual. “Only in such a manner is true freedom realized, for since
this consists in my identity with the other, I am truly free only when the other is
also free and is recognized by me as free.”91 Again, “it is only when the slave
becomes free that the master, too, becomes completely free.”92 Thus Hegel
contends, and in spite of himself Deleuze confirms, that only when the “We”
arises out of reciprocal recognition does it cease to be an abstract identity that
excludes and dominates its opposite, and becomes rather a concrete universal or
an inclusive totality.
Notes:
(1) Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. F.
Lawrence, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987
; Axel Honneth, The Struggle for
Recognition, trans. J. Anderson, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996
.
(2) Richard J. White, Nietzsche and the Problem of Sovereignty, Chicago:
University of Illinois Press, 1997
.
3
( ) Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. H. Tomlinson, New York:
Columbia University Press, 1983
. Hereafter NAP.
53
(4) Daniel Breazeale, “The Hegel–Nietzsche Problem,” Nietzsche-Studien, Vol. 4,
1975, 146–64
.
5
( ) Karl Joel, Nietzsche und die Romantik, 1905, cited by Walter Kaufmann,
Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist, 3rd edition, New York: Vintage,
1968, p. 241 n. 15
.
6
( ) In this chapter I am translating Knecht as “slave.” Other possible translations
are “servant,” “bondsman.” In Hegel’s analysis of the struggle for recognition, the
one who fears death and seeks to preserve himself by renouncing his claim to
recognition becomes “der Knecht.” Under the threat of death he makes himself
into a slave for the master, but the master does not fear death. Thus for Hegel,
the master is the independent self-consciousness, and the slave is the dependent
self-consciousness. In this context “slave” captures this servitude enforced by
threat of death better than “servant” or “bondsman.” A second reason for
translating Knecht by “slave” is that this is the term Kojève used in his lectures,
that influenced the French philosophical scene that influenced Deleuze, who
likewise uses the term “slave” rather than servant, and who believes a comparison
of Hegel and Nietzsche on master and slave is both possible and important.
(7) Robert R. Williams, Recognition: Fichte and Hegel on the Other, Albany:
SUNY Press, 1992
; Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1997.
(8) PhG 139, translations are my own.
(9) PhG 141.
(10) PhG 142.
(11) PhG 143.
(12) PhG 140.
(13) Williams, Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition, Ch. 4.
(14) For a similar account of the Dionysian element in Nietzsche, see Ofelia
Schutte, Beyond Nihilism: Nietzsche without Masks, University of Chicago Press,
1984, pp. 13–14
. Schutte writes: “There is joy in self-forgetfulness and joy in
union with other human beings and with the earth. All oppressive relations
between humans are eradicated. The slave is now a free human being…” (p. 14).
(15) However, eliminating the other is not the only way freedom can be
demonstrated or made objective. Such violence can be renounced, and the other
can be allowed to be. But that would require a reciprocal recognition, which is not
Hegel’s concern here.
(16) PhG 145.
(17) PhG 148.
(18) Hegel, PR §57; see also EPS §§430–6.
(19) Cf. Vincent Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, Cambridge University
Press, 1980
(20) NAP 8.
.
54
(21) NAP 195.
(22) There is irony in the fact that Deleuze pits Nietzsche’s interpretation of
master/slave against Hegel’s; as Descombes observes, it shows the continuity of
master/slave in French philosophy in spite of its anti-hegelian turn. Descombes,
Modern French Philosophy, p. 158.
(23) NAP 119. Note that Deleuze misquotes Nietzsche
below.
(24) Ibid.
. I return to this issue
Ellipsis in original.
(25) Ibid.
(26) NAP 120.
(27) NAP 119.
(28) NAP 121.
(29) Nietzsche, BGE §260, Nietzsche: Basic Writings, p. 395.
(30) NAP 10
.
(31) Ibid
. Italics in original.
32
( ) See Daniel W. Smith, “Deleuze’s Theory of Sensation: Overcoming Kantian
Duality of Sensation,” in Deleuze: Critical Reader, ed. Paul Patton, Oxford:
Blackwell Publishers, 1996, p. 30
. Smith notes that Deleuze conceives
recognition in Kantian terms.
(33) Daniel W. Smith, “Deleuze, Hegel and the Post-Kantian Tradition,”
Philosophy Today, Vol. 44, Supplement, 2000, 119–31
.
34
( ) Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1781, Kants Werke, Akademie Ausgabe
Band IV, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter 1968, p. 79
; ET Critique of Pure Reason,
trans. N. K. Smith, New York: St. Martin’s, Press, 1965
, A103ff. Deleuze’s
references to Kant are found in Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton,
New York: Columbia University Press, 1994, pp. 132–8
. Hereafter cited as
DR.
(35) Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A125.
(36) DR 138.
(37) DR 135–6.
(38) DR 136.
(39) DR 45.
(40) Paul Ricoeur, The Course of Recognition, trans. David Pellauer, Harvard
University Press, 2005, p. 18
.
(41) Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, ed. and trans. M. J. Petry, 3 vols., Dordrecht
and Boston: D. Reidel, 1979, Vol. 3, p. 316
, italics mine. Vol. 3 contains the
55
Griesheim transcript of the 1825 lectures. This transcript has also been published
as G. W. F. Hegel: The Berlin Phenomenology, trans. M. J. Petry, Dordrecht:
Reidel, 1981
. Cf. my Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition, pp. 70–3.
42
( ) J. G. Fichte, Grundlage des Naturrechts, Fichte Werke, Band III, ed. I. H.
Fichte, Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1971
; ET The Foundations of Natural
Right, ed. F. Neuhouser, trans. Michael Baur, Cambridge University Press, 2000
.
(43) SL 91. My italics.
(44) Hegel, Science of Logic, p. 417
.
(45) Ibid.
(46) Hegel, EL §119 Zusatz 2.
(47) EL §121 Zusatz.
(48) NAP 119.
(49) Hyppolite, Genesis and Prospect of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, cited by
Murray Greene, “Hegel’s ‘Unhappy Consciousness’ and Nietzsche’s ‘Slave
Morality,’” in Hegel and the Philosophy of Religion, Wofford Symposium, ed.
Darrel Christensen, The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1970, p. 125
. Hyppolite’s
formulation, while correct, is also misleading because it suggests that the
liberation of the slave retains inequality and coercion and transposes them into
ressentiment, instead of overcoming them.
(50) See Smith, “Deleuze, Hegel and the Post-Kantian Tradition,” p. 121.
(51) Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, ed. A. Bloom, trans.
J. H. Nichols, New York: Basic Books, 1969, p. 41
.
52
( ) I do not know whether Deleuze read or knew Rousseau; certainly Nietzsche
did and rejected him. See Keith Ansell-Pearson, Nietzsche Contra Rousseau,
Cambridge University Press, 1996, pp. 62–74
. Nietzsche’s trenchant critique
of pity as close to contempt is directed not at Hegel but at Rousseau’s pitie, or
compassion. See pp. 111–12. Hereafter cited as NCR.
(53) N. J. H. Dent, A Rousseau Dictionary, Oxford: Blackwell, 1992, p. 34
.
54
( ) “One of the great political ironies of modern liberal society for both Rousseau
and Nietzsche is that it is a social form which seemingly promotes an
individualist culture, but which in fact ends up producing conformity…” NCR, pp.
2–3. Nietzsche inverts Rousseau’s prescriptions and solutions to the problems of
social domination and alienation. See NCR, pp. 111–12.
(55) Hegel, Difference, p. 145.
(56) Neither recognition nor Begierde are reactive in Nietzsche’s sense, although
Hegel is not unaware of and has his own portrait of ressentiment. For Hegel’s
account of ressentiment and reactive judgement, cf. his discussion of the valet’s
56
interpretation of the hero. Goethe wrote that no one is a hero to a valet, and
Hegel added “not because there are no heroes, but because the valet is only a
valet.” Hegel regards the valet’s attempts to level and minimize the actions of the
hero as vile (niederträchtig). See PhG, pp. 467–8. ET PhS, Ch. VI, p. 404.
(57) Hobbes assumes a basic equality prior to conflict of the state of nature. Robert
Solomon, “Nietzsche’s Virtues: A Personal Inquiry,” in German Philosophy Since
Kant, ed. A. O’Hear, Cambridge University Press, 1999, p. 107
.
(58) For Hegel right does not exist by nature or in the state of nature; rather the
state of nature must be overcome: “…the whole law…is based on freedom alone—
on self-determination or autonomy, which is the contrary of determination by
nature. The law of nature—strictly so-called—is for that reason the predominance
of the strong and the rule of force, and a state of nature [is] a state of violence and
wrong, of which nothing truer can be said than that one ought to depart from it.
The social condition on the other hand, is the condition in which alone right has
its actuality: what is to be restricted and sacrificed is just the willfulness and
violence of the state of nature.” Hegel, EPS §502.
(59) Rights do not exist by nature, but only in communities that recognize, defend,
and preserve them. Such rational and law-governed communities of recognition
overcome lawlessness (the state of nature) or the merely positive assertion of
rights. Master/slave represents a transitional stage in human social and cultural
development, a stage of unequal recognition in which the wrong of slavery is
regarded as right. Cf. Hegel, PR, §57. Elsewhere Hegel observes, “although the
state may originate in violence, it does not rest upon it.” Hegel, EPS, §432 Zusatz.
Cf. §433: “Force, which is the basis of this phenomenon, is not on that account
the basis of right.…Force, then, is the external or phenomenal commencement of
states, not their underlying or essential principle.”
(60) NAP 8. Italics in original.
(61) NAM 8.
(62) Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, preface §6, trans. M. Faber, Lincoln, NE:
University of Nebraska Press, 1984, p. 9
.
(63) Deleuze’s view is widely held. But Walter Kaufmann (Nietzsche: Philosopher,
Psychologist, Antichrist) rejects it, as do Richard Schacht (cf. his Nietzsche,
London: Routlege, 1983, pp. 466f.)
and Schutte, Beyond Nihilism.
(64) See Schutte, Beyond Nihilism, pp. 94–8.
(65) NAP 188–9.
(66) Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, p. 164
.
(67) Descombes, Modern French Philosophy, p. 165
DR 52; see also Hegel, PhS 383–409.
(68) NAP 120.
(69) NAP 185. Italics in original.
. On the beautiful soul, see
57
(70) For a discussion, see my Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition, Ch. 4.
(71) NAP 189.
(72) Deleuze tries, unsuccessfully in my opinion, to head off this possible Hegelian
rejoinder in DR 52.
(73) Breazeale, “The Hegel–Nietzsche Problem.”
(74) NAP 119.
(75) Nietzsche BGE §260.
(76) Hegel, ETW 211; this internalized master/slave is constitutive of the unhappy
consciousness portrayed in Hegel’s Phenomenology. Cf. PhS §206 126.
See
also Difference, 149–50.
(77) Gay Science §354. Hereafter GS.
(78) GS §116.
(79) GS §328. Nietzsche’s critique of the herd morality both continues the long
German critique of utilitarianism and approximates Hegel’s account of civil
society where everyone is treated in terms of social interdependence and
economic function, and everyone exploits everyone else. Hegel regards civil
society as the external state; its concept of freedom is inadequate.
(80) Hegel makes a similar point about equality in PR §49, and connects equality
with envy.
(81) See this volume, Ch. 3.
(82) Deleuze distinguishes two senses of hierarchy in Nietzsche. First hierarchy
signifies the difference between the active and reactive forces, and the superiority
of the active to the reactive. This is an “unalterable and innate order of rank in
hiearchy” (BGE §263). But hierarchy also designates the triumph of the reactive
forces. The second is the reverse of the first, parallel to the distinction between
master morality and slave morality (NAP 60). From Hegel’s perspective,
Deleuze’s distinction between a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ hierarchy is a distinction
without a difference. The point is to overcome hierarchical inequalities, not to
perpetuate them.
(83) BGE §257.
(84) BGE §258.
(85) Greene, “Hegel’s ‘Unhappy Consciousness’ and Nietzsche’s ‘Slave Morality,’”
p. 131.
(86) BGE §284.
(87) Consider Nietzsche’s sympathy with Jews and critique of anti-semitism for
example. Cf. Yirmiyahu Yovel, A Dark Riddle: Hegel, Nietzsche and the Jews,
University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1998
.
(88) Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale, Cambridge University Press, 1997
§135.
(89) Difference, 145.
(90) NCR 24.
,
58
(91) Hegel EPS §431 Zusatz. My italics.
(92) EPS §436 Zusatz.