Repression and Return of Nature in Hegel and Beyond
Abstract
:1. Introduction
2. Natural Belonging or the Structure of Consciousness as Constituted by Lifeworld
3. Suppression and Othering of Nature in the Ethical Community
4. Return of Suppressed Nature as Fractured Subjectivity and Guilt
5. Conclusions
Funding
Institutional Review Board Statement
Informed Consent Statement
Data Availability Statement
Conflicts of Interest
1 | The notion of divinity in nature, as far as Hegel’s philosophical milieu and his interlocutors are concerned, appears in Friedrich W. J. Schelling’s Philosophical Investigations into the Nature of Human Freedom (1809) [3]. As Dieter Wandschneider writes, Schelling, “[t]he protagonist of the romantic philosophy formulated the matter in complete conformity with “hen kai pan” (oneness of all), the motto of the three friends—Schelling, Hegel, Hölderlin—studying in the Tübingen Stift: ‘the whole of nature [is] connected to a universal organism’, and in ‘that being, which the most ancient philosophy [had considered] the common soul of nature’ (2:569) Schelling saw the ‘world-soul’” (2:369). “Nature” Wandschneider continues, “is thus also an appearance of the absolute; matter is ‘nothing other than the unconscious part of God’ (7:435), ‘the extinguished spirit’, as it were (3:182; 453), ‘the embodiment of divine forces and the first image of the universe’ (7:210); nature in its entirety is ‘the visible spirit’, and spirit conversely is ‘the invisible nature’ (2:56)” [4] (80). Schelling’s ideas are further taken up by Martin Heidegger in Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom (1936) [5]. See also a recent article that addresses both Schelling’s and Heidegger’s accounts by Marina Marren, “Analysis of Evil in Schelling’s Freiheitsschrift Through Heidegger’s Account of Dissemblance and Aλήθεια” [6] (97–115). On temporalization and historicization of the Absolute in Hegel, including in relation to Schelling’s view of divinity, see Nerijus Stasiulis, “Heidegger: German Idealism and Ecstatic Temporality” [7] (24–32). On the role of Hegel in relation to ontotheology in the history of philosophy, see Jussi Backman, Complicated Presence: Heidegger and the Postmetaphysical Unity of Being [8] (esp., 54–68.) |
2 | I use the German edition of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit throughout. G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes. Werke 3 [1] and I also rely on Terry Pinkard’s text, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit [2]. Where translations of the Phenomenology differ from the Pinkard’s edition, they are by the author. |
3 | In respect of my focus on the suppression of nature in the Phenomenology, and especially in self-consciousness sections, see recent feminist and psychoanalytical studies of the subject, including in Hegel’s Phenomenology, by Karin de Boer, “Hegel’s Antigone and the Tragedy of Cultural Difference” [9] (31–45); Mikkel Borch-Jacobsen, “The Freudian Subject, from Politics to Ethics” [10] (109–127). Hereafter, “The Freudian Subject”; Luce Irigaray, “Love Between Us” [11] (180–190); Anna Mudde, “Risky Subjectivity: Antigone, Action, and Universal Trespass” [12] (183–200); Tuija Pulkkinen, “Differing Spirits: Reflections on Hegelian Inspiration in Feminist Theory” [13] (19–37). See also Jacques Derrida’s account of Hegel’s examination of Antigone in Glas [14]. See further an analysis of Derrida’s account by Tina Chanter, “Does Antigone Stand or Fall in Relation to Hegel’s Master-Slave Dialectic: A Response to Derrida’s Glas” [15] (202–219). |
4 | See, for example, Andrew Cutrofello, Continental Philosophy: A Contemporary Introduction [16]. He traces out some of these historical continuities e.g., 58, 147, 172–173. |
5 | However, see John MacDowell who argues against the orthodox view in “The Apperceptive I and the Empirical Self: Towards a Heterodox Reading of ‘Lordship and Bondage’ in Hegel’s Phenomenology” [17] (1–16). See further, Matthew Peters, “The Self-Sublation of Empirical Consciousness: Developing McDowell’s Heterodox Interpretation of Hegel’s Lord/Bondsman Dialectic” [18] (56–92). See also Kevin Marren and Marina Marren, “Doubling Consciousness in Fichte and Hegel” [19] (124–153). Hereafter, “Doubling Consciousness”. |
6 | “Doubling Consciousness” [19]. |
7 | In the face of the global environmental degradation and increasingly alarming environmental crises, we simply do not have this luxury now of playing out the dynamic between the Lord and Bondsman consciousness on the global scale. We cannot expect to consciously recognize our belonging to nature only in the face of the imminent annihilation. Thus, denying to ourselves the fact that there is a deep interplay between consciousness and nature, as well as between self-consciousness and life, necessarily is bound to lead to the utter destruction of life, including human life. |
8 | This latter dynamic is the case up to and including the Ethical Community (PG §443), but it is present also in the subsequent sections. |
9 | “Un/Limited Ecologies” [20] (121–140, 121). On the question of ecological catastrophe, as it is addressed by continental philosophy thinkers, see other essays in the same volume. See also a collection edited by Charles S. Brown and Ted Toadvine, Eco-Phenomenology: Back to the Earth Itself (Suny Series in Environmental Philosophy and Ethics) [21]. On the Anthropocene and the destruction of the human and the non-human world, see Christine Cuomo, “Against the Idea of an Anthropocene Epoch: Ethical, Political and Scientific Concerns” [22] (4–8); Christophe Bonneuil, Jean-Baptiste Fressoz, The Shock of the Anthropocene: The Earth, History, and Us [23]; Donna Haraway, Staying with the Trouble: Making Kin in the Chthulucene [24]; Jason M. Wirth, Mountains, Rivers, and the Great Earth: Reading Gary Snyder and Dōgen in an Age of Ecological Crisis [25]; Kathryn Yusoff, A Billion Black Anthropocenes or None [26]. |
10 | “Hegel, Derrida and the Subject” [27] (32–50, 45). |
11 | “Life, Self-Consciousness, Negativity: Understanding Hegel’s Speculative Identity Thesis” [28] (33–67, 50). Hereafter, “Life, Self-Consciousness, Negativity”. |
12 | [28] (50). |
13 | [28] (50). |
14 | A thorough assessment of the Truth of Self-Certainty section appears in Scott Jenkin’s essay, “Hegel’s Concept of Desire”, Journal of the History of Philosophy [29] (103–130). Jenkins takes up McDowell’s, Pippin’s, and Pinkard’s positions and then offers his own reading of Desire in the Phenomenology, which traces out Hegel’s indebtedness to Fichte. Jenkins sets up his discussion by pointing out a dilemma in Hegel’s presentation. Namely, the presentation “in which consciousness relates to objects as independent and essentially other, … and one in which consciousness sees this difference between itself and its objects as one without being (der an sich kein Sein hat) (¶ 167). These two moments of consciousness”, Jenkins continues, “are prima facie incompatible. One and the same subject, it would seem, cannot relate to objects both as independent and as nothing more than appearances for it. But”, as Jenkins concludes, “the observed consciousness has by this point in the Phenomenology discovered that these two points of view are essential to it. … This revelation might be regarded as motivating the task of constructing a self-conception that enables the observed consciousness to see these two moments of consciousness as compatible” [29] (105). In my view, not only are these two moments compatible, but they are mutually constitutive of subjectivity. This becomes clear especially if we realize that Jenkins somewhat overplays the stark contrast between appearance and objective otherness. |
15 | [28] (51). |
16 | Italics are in the original. |
17 | If Hegel were to insist on complete and utter separation of consciousness from nature, then the division that he himself criticizes would be reintroduced in his philosophy. Namely, the division that Hegel observes in Kant—the rift between the cognizing subject and the world that is free from this consciousness. Given his accounts of the self-determination of nature and nature’s manifestation in living conscious beings, Hegel is not insisting on such a separation throughout his oeuvre. On Hegel’s view of nature as self-determining, see, for example, Sebastian Rand, “Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature” [30] (384–406). Contrary to my view, Kirill Chepurin claims that the relationship between Spirit and Nature in Hegel is such that nature is only properly conceived from within Spirit. See his article entitled, “Nature, Spirit, and Revolution: Situating Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature” [31] (302–314). However, see Nicholas Mowad, who argues against a strict division between the human and the natural world in Hegel. See his “The Natural World of Spirit: Hegel on the Value of Nature” [32] (47–66). On the entwinement of nature and Spirit, see Angelica Nuzzo, “Anthropology, Geist, and the Soul-Body Relation: The Systematic Beginning of Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit” [33] (1–17). On the tendency to anthropomorphize nature to make it serve the idea of historical progress in one of Hegel’s key predecessors (i.e., Immanuel Kant), see Zachary Biondi, “Kant’s Hermeneutics of Progress” [34] (76–93). |
18 | In the Differenzschrift, in the section on “Transcendental Intuition”, Hegel establishes a productive opposition between intelligence/consciousness, on the one side, and nature/unconscious, on the other, then showing that this opposition no longer holds in philosophical knowledge. The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy in Connection with the First Fascicle of Reinhold’s “Contributions to a Mere Convenient Survey of the State of Philosophy at the Beginning of the Nineteenth Century” (1801) [35] (109–111). |
19 | Such subjectivity suppresses nature, which, as Arthur Kok sees it, the individual must do in order to “maintain itself”. See his analysis of the interplay between self-conscious subjectivity and nature in “Metaphysics of Recognition: On Hegel’s Concept of Self-Consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit” [36] (67–98, 93). |
20 | [37] (67–90). |
21 | [37] (69). |
22 | [37] (70). |
23 | [37] (70). |
24 | [37] (70). |
25 | See also Andrew Cutrofello’s The Owl at Dawn: The Sequel to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit where he examines the division of genders in the Phenomenology through the psychoanalytic lens [38] (136 ff). |
26 | See Martin Heidegger’s analyses of nature as a “standing reserve” (Bestand) in The Question Concerning Technology [39]. |
27 | On emptying out of the divine character of nature, see, for example, Charles Taylor, A Secular Age [40] (esp. 222–224). As far as the various philosophical attempts to reintroduce divinity into nature, see Richard Kearney, Anatheism: Returning to God After God [41] (90 and ff). See further Kearney’s novel, Salvage, which traces out the relationship of nature and the divine [42]. |
28 | On the “phallic signifier”, see Jacques Lacan, who develops the concept in The Formations of the Unconscious 1957–1958, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book V [43]. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference [44]; Judith Butler, Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity [45]; See further, Page duBois, “Phallocentricism and Its Subversion in Plato’s ‘Phaedrus’” [46] (91–103); Allison Weir, “The Subversion of Identity: Luce Irigaray and the Critique of Phallogocentricism” [47] (160–178). |
29 | [37] (71). |
30 | [37] (84). |
31 | [37] (84). |
32 | [37] (84). |
33 | [37] (84). |
34 | [37] (84). |
35 | |
36 | On the return of nature in ancient Greek philosophy, see John Sallis, The Return of Nature: Coming as if From Nowhere [48]. |
37 | On fractured subjectivity in Hegel’s philosophy see, for example, Nigel Clark and Bron Szerszynski, “Rifted Subjects, Fractured Earth: ‘Progress’ as Learning to Live on a Self-transforming Planet” [49] (385–401). |
38 | By “divine nature” I do not mean a transcendent supra-natural Christological nature. My meaning is closer to the ancient Greek sense of divinity that indwells in the natural world and manifests as the surging up and the unfolding of phusis. |
39 | [10] (73). |
40 | |
41 | Thinking Nature: An Essay in Negative Ecology. New Perspectives in Ontology [50] (145). |
42 | [50] (20). |
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Marren, M. Repression and Return of Nature in Hegel and Beyond. Philosophies 2023, 8, 80. https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies8050080
Marren M. Repression and Return of Nature in Hegel and Beyond. Philosophies. 2023; 8(5):80. https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies8050080
Chicago/Turabian StyleMarren, Marina. 2023. "Repression and Return of Nature in Hegel and Beyond" Philosophies 8, no. 5: 80. https://doi.org/10.3390/philosophies8050080