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The Science of Freedom: Hegel's Critical Theory

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 June 2015

William Maker
William Maker*
Affiliation:
Clemson University
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Abstract

I am daily ever more convinced that theoretical work accomplishes more in the world than practical work. Once the realm of representation is revolutionized, actuality will not hold out. It is a sheer obstinacy, the obstinacy which does honor to mankind, to refuse to recognize in conviction anything not ratified by thought.

Hegel

Both Marx, the founding father of what later came to be known as critical theory, and those who follow in his footsteps, regard critical theory as distinctive in that it will combine the critically normative dimension of traditional philosophy with the strict attentiveness to given facts (to “the real … material world”) definitive of modern empirical science. Critical theory contends that its unique fusion of science and philosophy will overcome their respective defects, correcting both the uncritical passivity of natural science and the speculative utopianism of philosophy. By so doing, it promises to give birth to a new kind of theory with emancipatory power.

Critical theorists from Marx to Habermas also see a thoroughgoing critique of Hegel as decisive for a critical theory. In their view, whatever insights Hegel may otherwise have provided, his philosophy is irreparably flawed because of its methodological commitment to a speculative method which cuts theory loose from reality and leads it to a distorted, mystically idealistic view of the human condition which is at once both Utopian and quietistic. According to critical theorists, Hegel's fundamental theoretical error lay in privileging the ideal over the real; because he does that, he is unable to get reality right. Consequently, he can neither comprehend freedom properly, as a normatively critical concept, nor understand the real conditions for freedom inherent in the status quo.

Type
Hegel Today
Information
Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain , Volume 21 , Issue 1-2: number 41/42 , 2000 , pp. 1 - 17
Copyright
Copyright © The Hegel Society of Great Britain 2000

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References

1 Marx, Karl, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Fowkes, B. (Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1976), p. 102 Google Scholar.

2 For more extensive discussion of Marx and of the later critical theorists from the Hegelian perspective of this essay, see Chapter 8, “The Critique of Marx and Marxist Thought” in my Philosophy Without Foundations: Rethinking Hegel (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994)Google Scholar and “Critical Theory and Its Discontents: Rationality, Contextuality, and Normativity,” Idealistic Studies 26:1, Winter/Spring 1996, pp. 29–44 CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 See Marx, , Capital, vol. 1, p. 102 Google Scholar, and also The Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, trans. and ed. O'Malley, J. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), pp. 7f, 14, 15, 17, 100, 116, 122 Google Scholar; Marcuse, Herbert, Negations: Essays in Critical Theory (Boston: Beacon Press, 1968) pp. xii–xiv Google Scholar; Horkheimer, Max, ’On the Problem of Truth,” in The Essential Frankfurt School Reader, eds. Arato, and Gebhardt, (New York: Continuum, 1982), pp. 415–417 Google Scholar.

4 “From the beginning it [critical theory] did more than simply register and systematize facts. Its impulse came with the force with which it spoke against the facts and confronted bad facticity with its better potentialities. Like philosophy, its opposes making reality into a criterion in the manner of complacent positivism. But unlike philosophy, it always derives its goals only from present tendencies of the social process.” Marcuse, , “Philosophy and Critical Theory” Negations, pp. 142–143 Google Scholar.

5 See, for example, Hoy, David Couzens and McCarthy, Thomas, Critical Theory (Cambridge: Blackwell Publishers, 1994)Google Scholar. In The Two Marxisms: Contradictions and Anomalies in the Development of Theory (New York: The Seabury Press, 1980)Google Scholar Alvin H. Gouldner traces the roots of these problems to equivocations between the so-called ‘philosophical’ and ‘scientific’ Marx.

6 Hegel, G.W.F., Hegel's Logic: Being Part One of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), trans. Wallace, William (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1975)Google Scholar, Sections 3, 4, 6, 9, 12, 14, 16, 17, 28, 60 (Remark), 77, 232; also the Additions to Sections 24, 41, 52, 82, 238 and Hegel's Science of Logic, trans. Miller, A.V. (New York: Humanities Press, 1969), p. 27 Google Scholar. Of course, whether such a theory is even possible is disputed by Marxists, critical theorists, their postmodernist antagonists, and many others. A discussion of this lies beyond the scope of this essay. See Philosophy Without Foundations.

7 For an extended consideration of these issues, see Chapters 1 through 5 of Philosophy Without Foundations.

8 See my essay “The Very Idea of the Idea of Nature, or Why Hegel is Not an Idealist” in Hegel and the Philosophy of Nature, ed. Houlgate, Stephen (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

9 See for example Mikowski, Paul S., Metaphysics to Metafictions: Hegel, Nietzsche and the end of Philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press, 1998)Google Scholar.

10 Although the greatest freedom is attained in the activity of philosophical thought, Hegel realizes that the conditions of the possibility of such thought are dependent on various given factors: philosophy's attaining to self-consciousness of its nature and its freedom comes at the end of the system, after consideration of the natural and worldly circumstances without which philosophical reflection cannot take place. For Hegel however, while various givens may be needed for philosophy to be possible this does not mean that they necessarily determine the truth of what philosophy establishes in its own right. For example, some given language is necessary in order for philosophizing to take place. But just because language establishes the conditions for both true and false discourse, these same conditions cannot establish that very distinction; they enable philosophy to do that.

11 “The passage is therefore to be understood here rather in this manner, that the Idea freely releases itself in its absolute self-assurance and inner poise. By reason of this freedom, the form of its determinateness is also utterly free — the externality of space and time existing absolutely on its own account without the moment of subjectivity.” Hegel's Science of Logic, p. 843.

12 “Nothing can be more obvious than that anything we only think, or conceive is not on that account actual [wirklich]; that mental representations and even conceptual comprehension, always falls short of being.” Encyclopedia logic, Section 51, Remark, translation revised, emphasis added. See also Encyclopedia logic, Section 6.