Tag: Hegel

The Social Origin of Free Will

Posted on by Herbert Harris

by Herbert Harris

In 2023, Stanford neuroscientist Robert Sapolsky’s bestseller ‘Determined’ declared free will to be a complete illusion. Sapolsky gathered a wealth of data from neuroscience to quantum mechanics in an effort to deliver a final knockout blow to our intuitive ideas of freedom. He then explores a wide range of ethical and social issues where our questionable notions of freedom have led to misguided and often inhumane policies and practices. Since its publication, the book continues to attract criticism for its deterministic stance. Experts from many fields have engaged in this lively discussion.

Watching the debate unfold shows that while we have strong ideas about what free will isn’t, we lack a clear understanding of what freedom actually could be. We agree that whatever it is, it would be incompatible with both mechanical determinism and total randomness. We also think that free will is connected to that vaguely self-conscious feeling that we are the originators of our actions. If free will exists, it probably exists in a middle ground that isn’t too deterministic nor too random. But what exactly is it?

Neuroscience may not be as conclusive about the end of free will as Sapolsky suggests, but it has not been particularly effective in producing alternative explanations. Science generally depends on deterministic approaches — such as reproducible experiments — to test hypotheses that can be proven false. It might be, as critics like Jessica Riskin argue, that science is the wrong place to seek an understanding of free will. However, a potential way forward could come from an unexpected source. In the early nineteenth century, philosopher G.W.F. Hegel developed a theory of freedom, defining it as a result of human social interactions. Read more »

Sunday, June 15, 2025

Being Good After Hegel and Nietzsche

Posted on by Christopher Horner

by Chris Horner

What does it mean to live a Good Life in the secular west? Good can mean more than one thing, of course: apart from moral good – doing the right or ‘good’ thing, there is the idea of ‘good’ as flourishing, being happy, fulfilled. The latter matters to us a lot, judging by all the self-help books, YouTube influencers, Rules for Life and so on. For very many lucky enough not to have to worry about poverty or war there still seems a grinding anxiety about how to achieve a happy life. That life seems to be Elsewhere. But why? Some would argue that the angst is due a loss of a shared way of life, one grounded in a conception of human purpose. So, we get nihilism and sense of anomie. Yet lost wallets are returned, and courtesy is still exhibited in everyday situations. If this is moral anarchy, it is not as chaotic as one might expect. Nevertheless. I think something has changed for moderns.

With the decline of an Authority often associated with the Christian church in the West, many people experience the question of what one should do as a burden. As an unlamented Paternal Authority wanes, anxiety about happiness and fulfilment takes its place. The new Superego command is to enjoy oneself, be the best one can be, stay fit, be loved, and be attractive. Consequently, we turn to an army of experts and coaches eager to provide us with ‘rules for living’. And the appetite for moral judgment hasn’t left us either: yet more rules about what one ought to say or not say (rather than action that might change anything).

Modernity—however we define it—follows the Enlightenment. Kant described Enlightenment as the end of tutelage and the accession to maturity, with the responsibilities that come with freedom. Freedom is understood as the end of the tyranny of princes and prelates, the chance to fulfil one’s desires. However, greater knowledge of the self leads to greater doubts about those desires, and the causes of Desire itself. The  autonomy promised by Enlightenment seems compromised from the start. While Nietzsche, along with Freud, is regularly cited as the key figure in this creeping sense that the subject isn’t master in their own house, Hegel foreshadows both. For Hegel, too, there are no simple, undivided identities: we are divided subjects. Read more »

Wednesday, March 26, 2025

Things May Appear Bleak, And Yet…

Posted on by Marie Snyder

by Marie Snyder

Byung-Chul Han’s The Spirit of Hope is a beautiful book, the kind you want to treat with care and won’t dare dog-ear a page. Anselm Kiefer’s illustrations throughout provide a place for contemplative moments between ideas. It’s more immediately accessible than The Burnout Society, which took me weeks to wrap my head around, yet no less profound. 

A REVOLUTIONARY POLITICS OF HOPE

Book cover of Byung-Chul Hans' The Spirit of Hope

We like a secure illusion of control over the world, yet that hasn’t gotten us much further along. We recognize something’s missing. Han writes, “Amid problem-solving and crisis management, life withers. It becomes survival. … It is hope that opens up a meaningful horizon” (2).

Han explains how a lack of hope furthers the current neoliberal capitalist trajectory: 

“Fear and resentment drive people into the arms of the right-wing populists. They breed hate. Solidarity, friendliness and empathy are eroded. … Democracy flourishes only in an atmosphere of reconciliation and dialogue. … Hope provides meaning and orientation. Fear, by contrast, stops us in our tracks. … Hope is eloquent. It narrates. Fear, by contrast, is incapable of speech, incapable of narration” (2-3).

Climate activist Roger Hallam recently wrote that the human race is likely going extinct this century, yet he demonstrates his hope in the very action of continuing to write our way through and by suggesting public alternatives to political capture. When we’re no longer open to seeing possibilities, we get held fast by fear, but it appears to be a feature of the system, not a bug. 

“The current omnipresent fear is not really the effect of an ongoing catastrophe. … The neoliberal regime is a regime of fear. It isolates people by making them entrepreneurs of themselves. … Our relation to ourselves is also increasingly dominated by fear: fear of failing; fear of not living up to one’s own expectations; fear of not keeping up with the rest, or fear of being left behind. The ubiquity of fear is good for productivity. … To be free means to be free of compulsion. In the neo-liberal regime, however, freedom produces compulsion. These forms of compulsion are not external; they come from within. The compulsion to perform and the compulsion to optimize oneself are compulsions of freedom. Freedom and compulsion become one. … We optimize ourselves, exploit ourselves, to the bitter end, while harbouring the illusion that we are realizing ourselves. These inner compulsions intensify fear, and ultimately make us depressive. Self-creation is a form of self-exploitation that serves the purpose of increasing productivity” (9-10).

This brings to mind the many life hacks promoted to help self-automate our lives by creating habits to try to help us blow through chores and work without noticing it, as if to better sleepwalk through it all in a psychological version of Severance. As long as we’re optimizing ourselves, we’re not being; we’re merely objects that can work more efficiently, which further prevents our connection with others. Social media also paradoxically erodes social coherence, but “Hope is a counter-figure, even a counter-mood, to fear: rather than isolating us, it unites and forms communities” (10-11). Read more »

Thursday, August 22, 2024

Path and Pathology: Some Philosophic Aspects of Psychotherapy

Posted on by Gary Borjesson

by Gary Borjesson

I came to psychotherapy from philosophy, first starting therapy in my forties while on sabbatical from St. John’s College. I was struck by its transformative power—so struck that I ultimately resigned my tenure and returned to graduate school to train as a therapist. But I’ve hardly left philosophy behind. Freud reminds me of Nietzsche. Socrates’ fingerprints are all over the motives and methods of psychoanalysis. Donald Winnicott and Erik Erikson bring to mind Hegel, and the list goes on.

Philosophy and psychotherapy (and the humanist tradition in general) see our lives as developmental journeys. In the spirit of Socrates, they view self-exploration and self-awareness as essential to self-actualization. This may seem obvious, but it’s easy to lose sight of. Which makes it remarkable that many academics don’t believe being a “philosopher” need include examining themselves. Yet, how could it not? After all, philosophy means the love of wisdom, and who would say of a true philosopher what Regan said of her father, King Lear, that “he hath ever but slenderly known himself.”

It’s equally remarkable that the Socratic spirit is often absent in therapists, in their own lives and in their work with clients. A variety of forces (not least insurance companies) lead many therapists and clients to focus on techniques and tools for reducing symptoms; this draws attention away from the person as a whole. There is nothing wrong with focusing on symptom-relief, as the advertised “evidence-based” “solution-focused” therapies like CBT do. After all, people vary in what they want and need from therapy, so we should welcome experimentation and a variety of approaches.

That said, if therapy is to encourage deeper self-exploration, it needs to go beyond symptoms to the whole person suffering them. Read more »

Monday, April 15, 2024

This Mediated World

Posted on by Christopher Horner

by Christopher Horner

Immediacy itself is essentially mediated —Hegel

Look at that desk in front of you right here, now. Isn’t it just there, a bare existence, a simple immediate thing right in front of you? The senses register its presence. This, at least, is a bare fact that you know.

But look again at the desk in front of you. What is it you are aware of? A desk: not a carpet or a parrot, its colour (brown), its shape (rectangular), all that is that negates what might have been (it isn’t grey, it isn’t circular, etc). Your awareness of the desk is mediated by concepts and you, a language user, can only make sense of the thing through those concepts, the universal terms that enable you to pick out this thing here, now. And you are aware of it now as you were 5 minutes ago, although the light has changed and you, a namable person, not a disembodied spirit, have shifted your position on your chair to look back at the clock on the wall.  Time, place, objects: everything is mediated: that is, nothing is simply ‘there’ in splendid isolation to be passively registered by your senses.[1]

Consider again the wooden desk. It was once part of a tree, like the ones outside your window. It became a bit of furniture though a long process of growth, cutting, shaping buying and selling until it got to you. You sit before it as it has a use – a use value – but it was made, not to give you a platform for your coffee or laptop, but in order to make a profit: it has an exchange value, and so had a price. It is a commodity, the product of an entire economic system, capitalism, that got it to you. Someone laboured to make it and someone else, probably, profited by its sale. It has a history, a backstory.

All of this is the case, but none of it simply appears to the senses. Capitalism itself isn’t a thing, but that doesn’t make it less real. The idea that all that there really is amounts to things you can bump into or drop on your foot is the ‘common sense’ that operates as the ideology of everyday life: “this is your world and these are the facts”. But really, nothing is like that: there are no isolated facts, but rather a complex, twisted web of mediations: connections and negations that transform over time. 

This doesn’t mean that the way things show up for us is somehow false, an illusion that masks a hidden essence. The essence of a thing is reflected in the way it appears, in the connections and negations with everything else, and in the way in which it develops over time. Read more »

Stoicism as Symptom

Posted on by Christopher Horner

by Chris Horner

The general terms ‘true’ and ‘good’ or ‘wisdom’ and ‘virtue’, with which stoicism is stuck, are on the whole undeniably uplifting, but because they cannot in fact end up in any kind of expansion of content, they quickly start to become tiresome. —Hegel [1]

Stoicism seems to be everywhere at the moment, on Tiktok, Instagram, YouTube (‘The Daily Stoic’) and in plenty of best selling books on how to be a Stoic. But why would a philosophy from the Ancient world be found so appealing to so many, right now? I think I can at least give a partial answer to that. And I also want to raise some of the problems of this Neostoicism. In what follows I will be less concerned with the details of the philosophy as it was taught in ancient times, the developments it went through or the logic and metaphysics it involved, than with the way it has been received in the 21st century. Stoicism is a symptom of a malaise, a problem in the modern world, rather than any kind of solution to its ills. But first – what is, or was,  Stoicism? [2]

Originally associated with Zeno of Citium in the 3rd century BCE, It is a philosophy focused on developing self-control, fortitude, and reason as a way to overcome destructive emotions and to achieve inner peace, and resilience, by  focusing on what is within one’s control, (one’s own feelings, thoughts) while letting go what is outside one’s control. External events and other people’s actions should not disturb one’s inner tranquility. Rather, one cultivates an attitude of calm and detachment from external events. Stoics believed in the importance of reason, logic and self-discipline as essential for leading a fulfilling life, based on following Nature, which has a logos, an order with which we must harmonise our thoughts, feelings and actions.

 It was a philosophy that developed and changed during the ancient world, but these main points can be held to be true to the philosophies of such famous Stoics as Seneca, Epictetus, and Marcus Aurelius. Read more »

Monday, November 29, 2021

Philosophy of Right: Hegel in the 21st Century

Posted on by Christopher Horner

by Chris Horner

Among the books of the nineteenth century that have something important to say to us now Hegel’s  Elements of the Philosophy of Right  (1820) deserves a prominent place. It’s not the obvious contender for a popular read in the 21st century. He doesn’t make it easy for himself, if getting readers was the aim as his  ‘grotesque and rocky melody’ (Marx) takes some getting used to, and one has to work a bit to to grasp his arguments. So its not a surprise that is more written about than actually read. This is a pity, as it is right up there with Plato’s Republic and Hobbes’ Leviathan as one of the great works of ethical and political philosophy, with arguably even more direct and relevant things to tell us about our society than those other two classics.  It’s a text that has been seriously misunderstood and misrepresented – most notoriously by those who represent him as having announced ‘the end of history’.  It is true that something, for Hegel, is coming to an end in our time, but it isn’t exactly history.  Hegel gives us an acute and pressingly relevant diagnosis of both the promise of modernity, and the contradictions that threaten it. Citizens in the age of Trump, Johnson, Xi Jinping and Biden would do well to attend to what he has to say in these pages. 

It is a troubling text for liberals, not because it is anti liberal in the sense of being opposed to the values liberals hold dear (dignity of the individual, freedom of conscience, rights and so on) but rather because its author regards the insights of liberals as dangerously limited. Liberalism, with its focus on the freedom of the individual, sees the function of the state as guarantor of the freedom of the individual, in the context of a civil society and free market. But for Hegel, genuine freedom means more than this. Read more »

Monday, July 13, 2020

Moral Relativism and the Concrete Universal

Posted on by Christopher Horner

by Chris Horner

Photograph taken by author
                                                                                                                                    

There are some notions, ideas and arguments, that no matter how often they are exposed as fallacious, are rebutted and refuted, seem to recur again and again. Moral relativism is one of them.[1] Put simply, this is the view that one’s moral judgments are delimited by the culture or period in which one lives, so that it is impossible to make meaningful moral judgments about other times and places, since they had or have criteria for what is good or bad that may be quite different from one’s own. It seems to be stuck on ‘repeat’. The perennial nature of such ideas ought itself to make us pause before we repeat the ritual of refutation. We need to ask, what, exactly, the attraction is  – what is it about the idea that seems to make it so irresistibly attractive and inevitable? Rather than an error to be corrected by better reasoning, it looks more like a symptom. Moral relativism never seems to go away, no matter how often philosophers try to swat it. The same is true of a related notion – ethical subjectivism (the view that  moral judgments rest on personal taste, or emotions and nothing more). So rather than just show for the umpteenth time why the arguments for moral relativism are flawed, it would be better to go on to ask why they have this quality of eternal recurrence. There is an insight at the bottom of the idea that has got twisted, and its ‘symptomatic’ aspect has something to do with the nature of alienation in modern society. Read more »

Monday, June 15, 2020

A Shift In The Ethical Ground

Posted on by Christopher Horner

by Chris Horner

The statue of  Edward Colston, 17th century slave trader, is dumped into Bristol Harbour.

There are times when customary evils become outlandish and intolerable. Then there is a call for irreversible ethical change, a transformation of more than the way we judge this or that, times in which which old laws are struck down and new ones framed. I want to suggest that a change in the structure of feeling occurs, when the ethical substance of our lives is transformed. This can happen at a glacial pace, or – as now -very quickly indeed. In Lenin’s famous remark ‘There are decades where nothing happens; and there are weeks where decades happen’. 

In such a time as this, people are mobilised in new ways; symbols like statues and flags that might once have been barely registered take on the significance of exemplars. And an act of cruelty that might once have been part of the drab monotony of unchangeable oppression takes on a paradigmatic, mobilising force. Then everything seems to be moving. Of course, one can see change as merely exchanging one kind of ethical outlook for another, with no way of choosing which is best, the view of the moral relativist. ’They thought X was OK back then, and we don’t. Whose to say who is right?’  This is quite mistaken. For a start there were people ‘back then’ who condemned slavery, the subordination of women, empire and much more. The society of the past, as now, did not speak with one voice: it had dissidents, reformers and heretics. Nor is the past hermetically sealed off from the present: we are what they became.  Read more »

Monday, April 20, 2020

Politics and the Beautiful Soul

Posted on by Christopher Horner

by Christopher Horner

If you want to deserve Hell, you need only stay in bed. The world is iniquity; if you accept it, you are an accomplice, if you change it you are an executioner. —Jean-Paul Sartre

We need to learn, or re-learn, how to build comradeship and solidarity instead of doing capital’s work for it by condemning and abusing each other. —Mark Fisher

Hell is other people —Jean Paul Sartre

Politics is difficult. Doing politics, that is. The boring meetings, the leafleting, the marching in the wind and rain (if you can leave your house), the arguments, the confrontations and the blank incomprehension, the ad hominem attacks and much more. But the largest problem by far is other people. Some are the unconvinced, some are the apathetic and then there are the hostile, those you are opposing. More problematic, though, can be those who are supposed to be on your side. They can be difficult to endure. How many of them would you want to meet if you had the choice? Too often, in my experience, it is only a few, as the sheer hard work of trying to arrive at something like a collective will wears everyone out and tries everyone’s patience. Not all politics is like that of course:  there can be the sense of comradeship from working with others one wouldn’t otherwise get to know. The experience of making a difference and working for a meaningful goal can be a wonderful thing.

This is hard to sustain though, when we experience defeat and frustration. The bitter moment in which one realises that for now (for how long?) the other side has the day. This has been a recent and bitter experience for the UK  Labour Party supporters of Jeremy Corbyn in 2019, and of the many in the USA who marched and canvassed for Bernie Sanders in 2020, only to see him him stopped in the primaries. And quite apart from one’s official enemies, there have been real battles within those parties. With failure comes the temptation to have done, to walk away, either into inaction or in order find another, and inevitably smaller, group of like-minded activists. This latter has been a reliable feature of left politics for as long as anyone can remember: an addiction to splitting.  After all, if the others aren’t part of the solution, they must be part of the problem, right? Read more »

Monday, March 23, 2020

Morbid Symptoms: COVID-19 and Pathologies in the Body Politic

Posted on by Christopher Horner

by Chris Horner

The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear. —Gramsci

Frontispiece to Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan (1651)

Does a crisis show us what we are ‘really like’? Whether it does or not, it has already been instructive to experience this one, in which our institutions are being stress tested, perhaps to destruction. As many have noted, COVID-19 is a political and economic crisis as well as a medical one. Its size and complexity can leave us groping around for the right interpretive and predictive tools. There are a number of models that we can turn to to help us understand how we react, or might react, and these often rest on assumptions about ‘human nature’. The problem is that they don’t agree on some basics, and thus can’t all be right. So which is the best one to turn to in a crisis?

Two Views of Human Nature

The view of humans and their social arrangements associated with Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) is a bleak one: the human animal in the ‘state of nature’ – that is, without government or law – is in a state of constant war, or preparation for war, since no one can be sure of their own security. In the state of nature, life is ‘continual fear, and danger of violent death; and the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short’ (Leviathan, chapter XIII, 1651).  Only a strong sovereign power can ensure peace by imposing it through force, or the threat of force. If the civil and political bonds of such a peace are broken, we can expect people to revert to type as self interested individuals, with “war of all against all” (bellum omnium contra omnes ): a return to the state of nature triggered by the breakdown of the central authority, driven by fear of the other and only restored by force or the threat of force. Read more »

Monday, August 4, 2014

Karl Marx’s Guiding Idea

Posted on by Emrys Westacott

by Emrys Westacott

Imgres

“Nothing human is alien to me.” This was Karl Marx's favourite maxim, taken from the Roman writer, Terrence. But I think that if Marx had lived a century later, he might have added as a second choice the famous phrase sung by Sportin' Life in Gershwin's Porgy and Bess: “It ain't necessarily so.” For together these two sayings capture a good deal of what I think of as Marx's Guiding Idea, the idea at the heart of his philosophy that remains as valuable and as relevant today as in his own time. Let me explain.

Human beings have been around for a few million years, and for most of that time most people's material and social circumstances have been quite stable. The experiences of one generation were pretty much the same as the experiences of their forbears. In this respect the lives of humans were like those of other animals. Unlike other animals, however, human beings reflect on their lives and circumstances; moreover they communicate these reflections to one another. The result is religion, mythology, philosophy, history, literature, and the performing arts (all of which can arise within a purely oral culture), and eventually the natural sciences, and social studies of various kinds, such as psychology, sociology, economics, and political theory.

These diverse forms of reflection on the human condition perform various functions. One function is to explain why things are the way they are. For instance, the bible explains why the Israelites lived in Israel (God made a promise to Abraham, and kept it, enabling Joshua's army to conquer the land); the theory of the four humours purported to explain personality differences between individuals. Another function is to justify a certain order of things. Thus, the doctrine of the divine right of kings sought to justify the institution of a powerful executive who stands above the law. The doctrine that individuals have a right to freedom of thought and expression is often cited to justify a policy of religious tolerance.

These two functions are sometimes hard to disentangle. For example, the alleged cultural inferiority of a people might be taken both to explain why they have been conquered and to justify that conquest as legitimate or even desirable. The “laws” of market competition provide an explanation of why some individuals and businesses do better than others, and these same laws are appealed to by those inclined to endorse the the outcome of the competition.

Read more »