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HEGEL IS ETHICALLY UNSOUND
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- HEGELIANISM IS LITTLE MORE THAN A POLITICAL TOOL
- HEGELIANISM IS TOTALITARIAN
HEGEL IS ETHICALLY UNSOUND1. HEGEL JUSTIFIES EVIL ACTIONS Frederick Engels, socialist philosopher and economist, LUDWIG FEURBACH AND THE END OF CLASSICAL GERMAN PHILOSOPHY, 1969, P. 33. “One believes one is saying something great,” Hegel remarks, “if one says that man is naturally good. But one forgets that one is saying something far greater when one says man is naturally evil.” With Hegel evil is the form in which the motive force of historical development presents itself. This contains the twofold meaning that, on the one hand, each new advance necessarily appears as a sacrilege against things hallowed, as a rebellion against conditions, though old and moribund, yet sanctified by custom; and that, on the other hand, it is precisely the wicked passions of man--greed and lust for power--which, since the emergence of class antagonisms, serve as levers of historical development--a fact of which the history of feudalism and of the bourgeoisie, for example, constitutes a single continual proof.
Drucilla Cornell, Professor of Law, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University; CARDOZO LAW REVIEW, 1995, p. 729. In Levinas, my responsibility to the Other demands that I guard her alterity against her appropriation by any system of cognition including a system of morality when it is established as moral law. As we will see, both Lacan and Levinas argue, if for very different reasons, that the ontological elaboration of the Sovereign Good attempted by classical ethics is philosophically unjustifiable, and even unethical. 3. REAL ETHICS CANNOT BE SYSTEMATIZED; TO DO SO INVARIABLY HURTS PEOPLE Drucilla Cornell, Professor of Law, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University; CARDOZO LAW REVIEW, 1995, p. 731. Levinas, on the other hand, rejects any identification of the ethical relationship and the moral law, whether the latter is understood as the Ten Commandments or the Kantian categorical imperative, two examples of the moral law that Lacan discusses in his seminar on the ethics of psychoanalysis. For Levinas, the Good which provides the sanctity for the Other can never be reduced to a set of commandments because the Other calls “me” only as “herself.”Since her call is unique to her, how to heed it cannot be known in advance or simply through her identification with “me” as another moral subject. To reduce her to a set of definable categories would violate her alterity. HEGELIANISM IS LITTLE MORE THAN A POLITICAL TOOL1. HEGELIANISM IS USED TO JUSTIFY WHATEVER CLASS IS IN POWER Frederick Engels, socialist philosopher and economist, LUDWIG FEURBACH AND THE END OF CLASSICAL GERMAN PHILOSOPHY, 1969, p. 13 In this way, however, the whole dogmatic content of the Hegelian system is declared to be absolute truth, in contradiction to his dialectical method, which dissolves all dogmatism. Thus the revolutionary side is smothered beneath the overgrowth of the conservative side. And what applies to philosophical cognition applies also to historical practice. Mankind, which in the person of Hegel, has reached the point of working out the absolute idea, must also in practice have gotten so far that it can carry out this absolute idea in reality. Hence the practical political demands of the absolute idea on contemporaries may not be stretched too far. And so we find at the conclusion of the Philosophy of Right that the absolute idea is to be realized in that monarchy based on social estates which Frederick William III so persistently but vainly promised to his subjects, that is, in a limited, moderate, indirect rule of the possessing classes suited to the petty-bourgeois German conditions of that time; and, moreover, the necessity of the nobility is demonstrated to us in a speculative fashion. 2. HEGEL CAN BE USED TO JUSTIFY ANYTHING Frederick Engels, socialist philosopher and economist, LUDWIG FEURBACH AND THE END OF CLASSICAL GERMAN PHILOSOPHY, 1969, p. 15 It was precisely in this period that Hegelian views, consciously or unconsciously, most extensively penetrated the most diversified sciences and leavened even popular literature and the daily press, from which the average “educated consciousness” derives its mental pabulum. But this victory along the whole front was only the prelude to an internal struggle. As we have seen, the doctrine of Hegel, taken as a whole, left plenty of room for giving shelter to the most diverse practical party views.
1. HEGEL SACRIFICES THE INDIVIDUAL FOR AN ABSTRACT STATE Drucilla Cornell, Professor of Law, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, Yeshiva University; CARDOZO LAW REVIEW, 1995, p. Hegel was the first to elaborate the logic of individualization as secondary, substitute identification: if a subject is to assert himself as “autonomous individual,” he has to tear himself away from his primordial “organic” community (family, ethnic group, etc.), to cut off his links with it and as it were to shift his fundamental allegiance, to recognize the “substance”of his being in another, secondary community which is “abstract,” “artificial,’ no longer “spontaneous,” but mediated-constituted-sustained by the activity of independent free subjects (nation versus local community; profession in the modern sense - job in a large anonymous company, for example - versus personalized relationship to a paternalist master artisan; academic community of knowledge versus traditional wisdom passed on from generation to generation, etc., up to a mother who relies more on child care manuals than on parental advice).
Michael H. Hofflieimer, Associate Professor of Law, University of Mississippi Law School, TENNESSEE LAW REVIEW, SUMMER 1995, pp. 836-7 It was crucial to Hegel’s intellectual evolution, however, that he watched the Revolution from the seminary. While he privately viewed the political events in France with sympathy and adhered to a rationalized faith, influenced heavily by Enlightenment writings and Kant, he submitted outwardly to the Duke’s authority and conformed publicly to the religious orthodoxy. Hegel struggled for years with the conflict between his public and private views, and this conflict shaped in important ways the ultimate expression of his philosophy of law.
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