Philosophy and the logic of modernity: Hegel's dissatisfied spirit.

Lumsden, Simon

HUMANITY'S FALL IS A CENTRAL THEME in Hegel's thought. In his case the Fall is inflicted by human cognition and thinking. It is not sinfulness per se that announces humanity's distinctiveness but the knowledge of good and evil. (1) This reflective capacity is what initiates humanity's separation from nature. Rousseau famously argued that man was in modern culture alienated from himself. (2) The issue that concerned him was the general corruption of natural man in modernity. He describes natural man as in harmony, someone who knows what he is and is identical with that. Modern man in contrast is unsure of himself and too disposed towards the views of others. Reflective thought is a sickness that takes us away from the pre-established harmony of nature. Hegel wryly comments that in this case it would seem as if the only way to recover this lost unity was by giving up thinking all together. (3)

Hegel also argues that thought inflicts an irrecoverable break from nature, but he turns Rousseau's assessment on its head. There is no freedom in nature for Hegel; freedom is possible only in society and in thought. (4) The schism between natural life and cognition is one that Hegel thinks is powerful, but it can be "sublated": "Spirit must return through its agency to union with itself, ... the guiding principle of that return lies in thinking itself. It is thinking that both inflicts the wound and heals it again." (5) Reflective thought is not a terminal disease but has the potential for us to determine ourselves and so to create a new realm in which the thinking subject can be at home with itself. It is the thinking social man that can heal the very wound that thinking and cognition inflict. That Spirit heals itself is a regular refrain in Hegel's thought.

The idea of Spirit, thought, and human subjects needing to find satisfaction and feel at home in the world has a special place in Hegel's thought. "This being at home with self [Beisichsein], this coming to oneself, may be called the supreme aim of the Spirit. What happens in heaven or on earth happens only in pursuit of this aim." (6) The prefaces to the Phenomenology and the Philosophy of Right and especially the introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy make repeated appeals to the notion of bei sich sein (being with oneself or at home). (7) This need to be at home manifests itself in two interconnected ways. Firstly, his social and political philosophy lays out the determinate changes in successive attempts to realize freedom, showing how these changes lead to the establishment of distinctly modern social and political institutions. From this perspective Hegel's social and political philosophy is the expression of Spirit's social theodicy, since its goal is to explain to his contemporaries why the emergence of the market economy and modern social and political institutions were developments that had broken forever the prevailing way of life in Europe and had created a new world that free rational subjects could in principle be at home in. (8)

Secondly, Spirit's satisfaction requires not just the right home but also requires telling coherent narratives to ourselves about this "home"; we have to be at home and know that we are at home. This requires a retrospective act of comprehension by which rational subjects come to comprehend the determinate features of the world they inhabit. In this case Hegel's social and political philosophy lays the philosophical ground for a subject to comprehend why the world has taken the shape it has. The collapse of established authorities of the church, state, and custom required a new normative framework. By describing these changes, conditions, and determinations in their conceptual necessity, philosophy allows the rational subject to comprehend how the world has come to be the way it is, thereby allowing a modern subject to recognize himself or herself in it and therefore to make it his own. (9) However, there is a third factor that appears in tension with this desire to be at home. This is the infinite striving of thought, the self-moving, self-transforming feature of Spirit that is dissatisfied with all claims to know, with all fixed knowledge, and with any complacency. The self-understanding that would resolve us to the world we inhabit also invariably makes us dissatisfied, since it also recognizes that the unity we seek is not achieved, that our attempts at self-comprehension are inconsistent, wrong, inadequate, and so on.

This gives Spirit two apparently competing directions. On the one hand, Spirit is restless thinking (self inflicting its wounds), and on the other hand, Spirit desires to be at home and to know that it is at home (healing itself). Much contemporary Hegel scholarship argues that the self-inflicted wounds of Spirit are healed when these three traits are brought together and given an objective expression in the institutions of modernity. In modern life self-determining subjectivity finds itself in a form of social and political organization that has self-determination and self-transformation as its governing principles. The skepticism, contestation, and dissatisfaction that characterizes reason and thought appear thereby to have been incorporated into the very structures of modern public and private life. In this case, it seems that modernity reflects the dynamism of thought in concrete political structures that mediate our relation to ourselves and which we recognize and represent to ourselves as objective expressions of our freedom.

Conceived in this way Hegel's project is a quest for a "new basis for reconciliation with the world." (10) The historical achievement of which is fulfilled in modernity. (11) There are differing views on what this historical achievement amounts to. Authors such as Raymond Geuss and Michael Hardimon take the historical achievement to be a social theodicy that is satisfied in modernity. By contrast, Frederick Neuhouser, Robert Pippin, Terry Pinkard, and Robert Brandom offer a sophisticated view of the historical development of norms of freedom, judgment, justification, and rationality as well as the development of an institutional framework that allows and underwrites these changes in norms. (12) This focus on reconciliation or freedom as historical achievements suggests that Spirit's dissatisfaction could be resolved and that it desires a complete reconciliation. Spirit may indeed be temporarily satisfied at the level of social and political life when freedom, civil society, and the state are genuinely serf-determined. However, my contention is that the underlying tension that drives Spirit to seek more adequate explanations of itself is not resolved or reconciled in any finite expression of Spirit.

Spirit's dissatisfaction is caused by an incongruity between what is experienced and what is comprehended. This incongruity motivates a movement of serf-comprehension that is, as many commentators remark, essentially retrospective. Philosophy strives to comprehend its own time in thought through a rational reconstruction of how things have come to be the way they are, that is, the historical achievements thrashed out in history, philosophy, and cultural life. In his social and political thought Hegel lays out the criteria by which modernity may be judged to be a home for the modern subject, by reconstructing the determinate insufficiencies of previous claims to freedom or by articulating the merely implicit norms of freedom.

While this retrospective reconstruction in thought is an important part of his project, it leaves unexplained the distinct role of philosophy. Philosophy, in Hegel's view, is motivated to provide a more adequate explanation when it is dissatisfied with its own expression of the world and of itself. What I want to argue in this paper, by paying particular attention to the role of philosophy as Hegel conceives it, is that the animating tension that causes this dissatisfaction operates at a more fundamental level than the retrospective reconstruction in thought. That tension, roughly conceived, is between concept and intuition or knowledge and experience. (13) The irresolvability of this tension ensures the reflective distance of philosophy, thus allowing for its ongoing attempts to comprehend itself and the world.

Philosophical comprehension (its serf-satisfaction) requires not just a discursive account of the necessary steps leading to the present, but the movement and arrangement of those concepts must also be adequate to the shape of life it is trying to explain. In Hegel's thought the form that is adequate to philosophy's serf-comprehension is the dialectic. Thought will continue to be unsettled and alienated because what it knows will fall out of alignment with what it experiences and this will motivate it to find a new form or method adequate to the shape of life it experiences. This tension, which, as we shall see, is underwritten by the concept-intuition distinction, cannot be overcome and consequently philosophical comprehension cannot be considered as striving for an ultimate reconciliation, and neither can it be incorporated into a social theodicy fulfilled in modernity. The healing of the fall that takes place in thought cannot heal the world. Philosophical reconciliation takes place only in the ideal, but because of the distinct character of philosophical reflection, that reconciliation is only ever temporary.

I

In his social and political philosophy Hegel was at pains to show how modern social and political life was, at least in principle, able to resolve the tension between, on the one hand, the desire of conscious subjects to be at home in the appropriate objective conditions, that is in a culture, society, and state in which one could be unreflectively immersed and on the other hand, the Kantian and enlightenment focus on individual autonomy. The enlightenment conceived human freedom such that either we could be reflective and free, with a critical distance from all our beliefs, or else we could be at home in the world, unreflectively identifying with our beliefs and values. (14) We could not have both. Our critical rationality could not be at home in a social and political system because to be at home was to give up the reflective distance that underpinned the authority of reason. The Philosophy of Right can be conceived as an attempt to present the social and political institutions in which the type of reflective autonomous subject that Kant's moral philosophy describes (which expresses transcendental freedom as an island of rational determination) could live with others in a social setting where its reflective and self-determining capacity was part of the culture as a "second nature." (15)

Terry Pinkard captures well in his biography of Hegel the various forces at play in Germany at the end of the eighteenth century: cultural, economic, political, social, and religious forces that had permanently destabilized the continuity of premodern cultural life. (16) What was distinctive about the clash of competing authorities and the general upheaval that emerged at this time was that the resolution of this conflict and instability did not produce a new order with a fixed set of values. The diverse and disparate forces unleashed in modernity required a social and political system that could preserve the necessity of its self-movement, about which we will have something to say shortly. Some commentators, like Charles Taylor, have argued that Hegel contains those competing forces by reverting to a precritical metaphysics. (17) Taylor's interpretation effectively contains Kantian freedom in a Spinozistic substance. Taylor's interpretation runs against the entire movement of thought and history that Hegel is at pains to capture in all his works. There is no retreat from the Enlightenment. Once the authority of tradition, church, and religion had been broken, the possibility of a transcendent or a fixed ground for norms was also unrecoverable. The self-determined freedom so central to the enlightenment project could not be philosophically rejected. What Hegel tries to articulate is the way in which this subjective freedom could create a social and political environment in which an autonomous subject was at home. That is, as numerous commentators have pointed out, Hegel, at the very least, sees adumbrated in modern life a dynamic social and political system that could cohere with the kind of self-legislative freedom that Kant saw as the very basis of what it is to be a modern subject. Hegel recognized a set of distinctive social and political conditions emerging at the end of the eighteenth and in the early nineteenth century that could harmonize these objective and subjective spheres. This is what is examined in the Philosophy of Right. (18)

Influential Hegel commentators like Pippin, Pinkard, Neuhouser, and others take Hegel's project to be concerned with capturing this distinctly modern serf-understanding, the comprehension of which would enable the modern subject to identify with the self-transforming nature of norms. On this view, Hegel articulates a new form of subjectivity that emerges in modernity, a subject who is not bound unreflectively to his or her world. There are two perspectives to this--subjective and objective. Subjectively the modern subject "desires to satisfy himself in himself, to convince himself, through his reflection of what is binding upon him." (19) This way of conceiving the rational subject was the one taken by Kant, (20) but what had not yet emerged was the consciousness of the self-determined and self-governed character of human development as a whole.

For Hegel the role philosophy had to play in modern life was, in part at least, to make apparent that the world the citizens of early nineteenth century Europe inhabited was one in which the idea of self-determination was already a feature of modern subjectivity. Modern subjects do not just act as if they are free, their knowledge of their freedom is central to this freedom. Modernity is characterized by the self-consciousness that the authority of norms can no longer be grounded on God, a platonic universal, fixed tradition, or natural law. What distinguishes modernity is its persistent problematizing of norms and the basis of normative categories. The ideal of modernity is that it subjects its norms to constant criticism and contention, and this persistent self-criticism is what gives it its dynamism. (21)

The problem remains, however, of how a finite being can make itself at home in a world in constant motion. How do we orient ourselves in a world in which there is no certain and fixed measure, no reified values by which our identity can be expressed? This is the core problem of modernity: how can we be at home in a form of social, political, and economic life that constantly transforms itself?

What was missing were the objective political and social conditions that allow modern consciousness to adopt the standpoint of movement, of a world in perpetual transition, as genuinely its own. The critical disposition that Kant and the Enlightenment more generally had adopted was not enough, as their focus had been on the reflective self-legitimating disposition of an individual rational subject. What was needed was a set of social and political institutions that such a subject (who was aware that the norms governing his life were in a constant state of transformation) could identify with, that is, institutions that embodied and enabled the capacity for individual and collective transformation. Only in such an institutional and culture milieu, which did not take the authority and legitimacy of norms to be grounded in something external and fixed, could the modern subject be at home. In this context the Philosophy of Right is concerned with showing the rational (and hence necessary) progressive transformation of social, political, and economic spheres such that a modern subject ought to come to see himself, and his self-consciousness of change, in those institutions. These institutions are construed such that one could be "at home" [bei sich] in this world set in motion.

Hegel's social and political philosophy articulates the philosophical and conceptual changes that have evolved over time. These changes are the necessary antecedents to the modern social and political setting in which the constant revision of the standards of judgment are possible. The institutions of modernity and the various ways in which the subject inhabits it (as agent, equal, bearers of rights, responsible, and so on) must be considered to be "historical achievements." (22) They are the determinate manifestations of Spirit striving to realize freedom. Those achievements are not the result of a rational cosmic Spirit progressively unfurling itself, but are hard won developments thrashed out over time in the to and fro of social and political life. (23)

The crucial feature of modernity and the reason it is taken by Hegel to be the most rational form of social organization is its capacity for self-correction. Spirit transforms itself (in the movement of the negative) through the recognition of deficiencies in existing or prior norms. Rational thought is open and revisable, and in modernity it is lived through concrete social and political institutions. Modern political life provides the conditions under which we can revise existing norms and claims to know as well as providing the social and institutional conditions in which our norms can be rationally self-legitimated. (24) We individually have to see ourselves in those institutions and social relations that so define us, that is, we have to be able to reflectively see the reasons we give as our own and recognize that these achievements are the result of rational developments that have occurred in history. In modernity we can, with the right philosophical encouragement, come to a consciousness of the self-determined and self-governed character of human development and recognize this freedom objectified as institutions that reflect and facilitate that capacity for self-transformation.

In early modernity there are no institutions to reflect this realization, consequently there is a dissonance between, on the one hand at the subjective level, the Enlightenment consciousness of the necessity of our self-determination and, on the other hand, at the objective level, the established religious and political institutions that see norms as fixed by tradition, nature, or God. The challenge is to have the subjective correspond to the objective: the activity of the will consists in cancelling the contradiction between subjectivity and objectivity and in translating its ends from their subjective determination into an objective one, while at the same time remaining with itself [bei sich] in its objectivity. (25)

This paragraph sums up the entire movement of the Philosophy of Right. Modern social and political institutions provide the objective conditions for the dynamism of self-determining freedom. A modern subject is at home in this world because this world is also in his, The objective is inscribed through Bildung [culture] and habituation onto the very structure of subjectivity, and this subject also knows this to be the case.

In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel presents modern political life as capable, at the very least, of resolving the tension between the subjective free thinker (the kind that, for example, a figure like Socrates represents, whose self-critical and reflective thought was unbounded) and the objective world of society, culture, and institutional life (which in the case of Athens was incapable of "housing" Socrates without threatening its very character). In modernity the individual who has "self-determined certainty" does not have to be in opposition to the state. (26) In modern society, "philosophers occupy no specific position in the state; they live in bourgeois circumstances or participate in public life." (27) Only modern political societies could accommodate such ongoing self-criticism because the authority of the norms governing those societies is constantly evolving and contested.

It would seem from what has been said above that philosophy's role is to reconcile us to modern social life, or at least its idealized version in the Philosophy of Right, because modernity meets the key criteria for human freedom. However, philosophy's quest to be at home with itself is not motivated by the same criteria as the finite "social theodicy" of objective Spirit. Reason and thought's restlessness (the topic of the next section) is self-consciously harnessed in modern life, but it cannot be internalized in a finite social and political domain. As we will see below, philosophy's distinctive representing activity means it cannot be reconciled within objective Spirit. Reconciliation at the philosophical level is not normative, that is, it does not aspire to achieve some kind of, for example, specific conception of the social. (28) The criteria for philosophy's satisfaction (self-comprehension and a form adequate to its content) as well as the basis of its dissatisfaction (the fundamental tension between its self-understanding and experience or between concept and intuition) are structural features of philosophy that undermine any claim that Spirit seeks some kind of ultimate or absolute reconciliation. However, before moving on to examine the distinct features of philosophical comprehension, I want first to describe the form of philosophical movement expressed in Hegel's thought.

II

The preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit outlines the general movement of Spirit. (29) As we can see in this representative passage from the preface, Hegel tries to capture the succession of changes in Spirit's serf-understanding and the way in which those transitions can be comprehended. Spirit is indeed never at rest but always engaged [begriffen] in moving forward.... Spirit in its formations matures slowly and quietly into its new shape, dissolving bit by bit the structure of its previous world, whose tottering state is only hinted at by its isolated [einzelne] symptoms. The frivolity and boredom which unsettle the established order [die im Bestehenden einreifien], the vague foreboding of something unknown, these are the heralds of approaching change. The gradual crumbling that left unaltered the face of the whole is cut short by a sunburst which in one flash [einemmale], illuminates [hinstellt] the features of the new world. (30)

Initially there are inklings and "vague foreboding" that things are not right (for example, that the core values of a society are in conflict, that the self-understanding is inadequate, the culture stagnant, and so on).

The transformation of any culture has its seed in many layers of contention and conflict that are internal to the culture. All aspects of cultural life are involved in this reflection and questioning. "The onset of the new Spirit is the product of a widespread upheaval in various forms of culture [Bildung], the prize at the end of a complicated, torturous path and of just as variegated and strenuous an effort." (31) The source of that discontent has its basis in the implicit dissatisfaction with its own serf-understanding or with the way that self-understanding is realized. Spirit is unsettled and constantly moving forward; reason and thought, through the determinate power of the negative, break things apart because they are dissatisfied with established explanations, always questioning claims to truth and rigid explanation. (32) This labor of the negative examines determinate modes of life and sees what is inadequate or inconsistent, what has become stale, and what has outgrown itself. Rational thought breaks apart and analyses the concepts and principles underlying our judgments and actions. When things are in transition to a new shape of Spirit, established truths and the reasons that are given for habits, norms, and judgments are questioned, tested, and disputed. This dissatisfaction is the basis of the distinctly human capacity to transform ourselves and is the basis of the self-correcting logic of modernity.

Weaknesses, inadequacies of explanation, things "hinted at by isolated symptoms" emerge from within that suggest an implicit change in self-understanding. It is the job of art and philosophy to take those isolated symptoms and show systematically the limitations, contradictions, or irrelevance of governing principles, norms, and so on. Spirit strives to represent that inconsistency, and reason sets to the task of resolving it. Spirit does this because it is trying to make sense of itself, to make its explanations of itself coherent. There is a totality of events that Spirit's current self-understanding cannot have knowledge of. It is the work of "the heroes of thinking reason," who embody in their consciousness the infinity of thought, to translate into determinate thought (concrete universals) the diverse factors animating a shape of life. (33) Nonetheless, the whole is always more than what has been articulated, and that is the basis of Spirit's dissatisfaction with its serf-expression. Spirit's desire to comprehend itself, which is the motor behind its self-correcting movement, originates in this lack of fit between the whole that it experiences (which has not been rendered intelligible) and its knowledge. [Consciousness] is something that goes beyond limits, and since these limits are its own, it is something that goes beyond itself.... If it wishes to remain in a state of unthinking inertia, then thought troubles its thoughtlessness, and its own unrest disturbs its inertia, or ... if it assures us that it finds everything to be good in its kind, then this assurance suffers violence at the hands of reason, for, precisely insofar as something is merely a kind, reason finds it not to be good. (34)

The dialectical movement of Hegel's systematic works, as we will see below, gives form to thought's unrest and the way it resists ossified knowledge claims. The dialectic is Hegel's attempt to give adequate expression to the serf-transforming power of comprehension and the form of reason that governs that self-transformation.

The project of the Phenomenology can be understood as an attempt to try to establish a self-consciousness of our self-transforming capacity. It charts the progressive changes in self-understanding, from the naive realism of sense-certainty through to the self-consciousness of the self-determined character of our collective sense making practices in absolute knowing. It offers us a distinctly modern perspective for being in and interpreting the world. Modern institutions represent the best-achieved conditions for housing the instability and restlessness of thought that Hegel describes in the preface and introduction to the Phenomenology. In modernity there is a self-consciousness of thought's self-producing and self-determining capacity. At the level of reflective thought, that dissatisfaction may take a very long time to be crystallized in works of art or coherent philosophical explanations. Nevertheless, the experience of such a dissatisfaction lies behind the self-correcting movement that characterizes Hegel's systematic works. The determinate forward movement is propelled by Spirit's desire to comprehend itself, to make the implicit something explicit. This is effectively the method of the Phenomenology in which the experience of the natural consciousness pushes the text forward because of its suspicion of the inadequacy of claims to know. The comprehension of the necessity for its transformation only comes afterwards or from the perspective of the phenomenological observer. As we will see below, this experience of dissatisfaction provides a more adequate account of the role of philosophy than those approaches that largely take a model of explicit self-conscious transformation of norms as the model for understanding Spirit and philosophy.

Hegel has little to say about what drives philosophy to comprehend itself other than that it has the "urge [Trieb] to give itself some further determination." (35) We can, however, interpret this in light of his comments on the relation of philosophy to history and the statement of method he gives in the introduction and preface to the Phenomenology. This "urge" emerges when current explanations do not satisfy it, when the explanations offered are no longer coherent because they are out of alignment with the in-itself. When a shape of life has grown old, Spirit no longer knows itself; it is not satisfied and so strives for a self-understanding that reflects what it has implicitly become (though it is only fully realized when that in itself is expressed as concept). The discussion of method in the Phenomenology, where Hegel maps out the structure of the text's unfolding, relies heavily on a dissatisfied reason that is able to discern the inadequacy of each of the individual claims to know that broadly correspond to the various chapters of the Phenomenology.

The vast array of commentaries on this section tend to be concerned with how the natural consciousness is able to recognize the inadequacy of its claims to know, or to put it another way, are concerned with what the basis of its dissatisfaction or skepticism is. This is not the place for a detailed engagement with the method of the Phenomenology; nevertheless, one useful way of understanding how the tension between for-itself and in-itself moves the natural consciousness's understanding forward is through the lens of Hegel's response to the concept-intuition dualism. (36) The issue of concern here is not whether or not this dualism can be accurately mapped onto the method of Hegel's Phenomenology, but rather, that the way Hegel responds to this distinction explains the dissatisfaction of the natural consciousness and Spirit and also establishes the distinct reflective distance of philosophy.

Kant's two faculty approach to cognition divided consciousness from world by assuming these two were antithetical. (37) Kant's division of cognition into receptive and spontaneous branches was still, according to Hegel, plagued by the very division between rationalism and empiricism that Kant had sought to reconcile precisely because intuition preserved to much of its empiricist origins. Despite Kant's claim that concept and intuition were inseparable, he presupposed that truth "rests on sensuous reality," which in Hegel's view still preserved truth as a given, cut off from knowing. (38) The separation of intuition and concept was for Hegel unsustainable. Hegel establishes the genuine inseparability of concept and intuition by stripping the intuitive of any appeal to the given. Experience supplies the content of concepts, but that experience is not of given empirical realities but instead must be understood as forms of life or shapes of Spirit that have to be conceived in a historically and socially mediated way. Importantly, that does not make the content of intuition purely conceptual, but neither does it make it empirically given. This is a difficult balancing act to maintain, but it is clearly essential to avoiding one of the most problematic aspects of Kant's legacy.

Hegel preserves some sense of the intuitive, though an intuition stripped of its pure receptivity. It is a restraint on thought, or a quasi-discursive domain that conceptuality can use to transform its inadequate self-understanding. Intuition so conceived, while not delivering the world to us unmediated, does nevertheless express non-discursively the complex web of affects, mediations, determinations, norms, and so on that are constitutive of experience and which are bound to concepts but are not reducible to them. They are at play in our basic judgments, and even though they are not concepts they cannot be conceived in purely receptive terms either. By conceiving intuitions in this way, Hegel does not reassert the division between mind and world that he is so worried about in Kant's thought. (39) Hegel preserves the receptivity-spontaneity distinction in such a way that they remain distinguishable yet "inseparable." (40) Intuition cannot do the legitimating of a particular claim or judgment; nevertheless, as we shall see below, it is instrumental in guiding the way in which those claims come to be conceptually articulated, as it prefigures those concepts in a non-discursive form.

III

The retrospective character of philosophical comprehension is inscribed on every page of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, but it has its most explicit account in the last couple of pages of the preface to the Philosophy of Right and in the addition to paragraph [section] 4. The "T is at home [zu hause] in the world when it knows it and even more so when it has comprehended it." (41) There is a strongly Kantian sentiment to this claim: only by knowing something can it be one's own. The act of comprehension is an appropriative movement that is also an expression of freedom. (42) At the level of an individual agent comprehension involves coming to see why we did something, why something is the case, as well as being able to see oneself in one's actions and beliefs. At the level of Spirit this involves understanding of how things have come to be the way they are. The clear implication of this is that the appropriative act of self-understanding is necessarily retrospective.

Spirit's inadequate self-understanding, as we have seen, is the basis of its restlessness. Its experience of a disjuncture or gap between the world it experiences and its current explicit self-understanding motivates it to seek a coherent self-understanding. Robert Pippin expresses this dynamism in this way: in any ... commitment to a claim or a course of action, there is a possible gap, between my own self-certainty, my subjective take on what is happening and what is called for, and the 'truth,' often manifest when it is apparent that others attribute to me commitments ... other than those I attribute to myself. The experience of such a gap, itself a kind of social pathology, is what Hegel appeals to as the engine for conceptual and social change, a struggle or striving for reconciliation and mutuality in such a context. (43)

In this case, at the level of an individual agent, the retrospective movement of comprehension strives for reconciliation when the type of reasons given to justify actions or beliefs no longer fit with what counts as socially sanctioned reasons for doing something. In this situation there is a discord between what is socially sanctioned as a justification and what is offered as a justification. That discord causes more than just a need for conceptual retuning; it is expressed in concrete experiences of conflict, for example, as an individual's striving to make sense of his own values in relation to his culture. At this level the aspiration for reconciliation is a striving to establish a new basis upon which one could be at home in society. Reconciliation is achieved when an individual can identify with that social order, that is, when he can see the inadequacy of the reasons he had previously offered for his action and why this individual and his peers should not recognize these as legitimate reasons.

For example, it may be that when you are asked at some time in the future: "Why do you eat meat?" and you reply, in what had been a perfectly acceptable response in the early 21st Century, "I eat it because I like it," that simply liking it is no longer publicly sanctioned as an adequate justification. The justification shows itself to be anachronistic because the evolution of social life has, as it were, left that "reason" behind. In this case a gap is experienced between your reason and what now counts as a justification. This gap makes you reflect on your belief and you come to comprehend that, for example, the widespread recognition of the sentience and intelligence of domesticated animals requires the extension of certain rights to them (rights now recognized by your peers or in legislation). Consequently, merely liking the taste of meat is no longer an intelligible reason for eating it. In this case, the subjective justification and what has now come to be an Intelligible justification to others is out of alignment. Reconciliation can be achieved by closing the gap between these points of view, by reexamining, questioning, and adjusting my original reasons and intentions. This comprehension is necessarily retrospective. I come to see why I was wrong and why the self-understanding of the new prevailing rational norm is incompatible with my desire and the reasons I offered for it.

This narrative shows, at the level of an individual agent, that the misalignment between a subjective point of view and the view of the whole demands reconciliation. While Pippin uses this model to try to make sense of how an individual agent comes to change his mind, Brandom and Pinkard use this model to explain the way in which both Spirit and Hegel's social and political philosophy develop. Both of them are concerned with a fundamentally Kantian concern with showing how things come to be binding on us. (44) Hegel is clearly concerned with this issue, but what is problematic in their accounts is that this concern becomes the exclusive way of conceiving Spirit's development rather than something specific to certain developments in late modernity. There is another way of conceiving this retrospective comprehension which articulates a distinct form of philosophical comprehension that is essential to Spirit's ongoing development and that is more fundamental to Spirit's movement than the giving and asking for reasons.

The need for philosophical comprehension emerges through the experience of the gap between, for example, existing explicit socially sanctioned norms and the as yet only implicit norms that are evolving and gradually emerging that will undermine the prevailing norms. This philosophical comprehension is instrumental in establishing a new norm, rather than just reconciling us to existing norms. The philosophical aspiration to comprehension emerges out of the misalignment of its self-understanding with its experience. This gap between experience and self-understanding is fundamental to the freedom of philosophy. Philosophy's striving to reconcile itself or satisfy itself shows the freedom of thinking to be of a qualitatively different order than the finite model of freedom that is given expression by the liberal state. Philosophy is at home with itself when it has a form adequate to its content (that content is both philosophy itself and the world it experiences). The movement of thought, conceived for example, as we have done above, as the ongoing tension between concept and intuition, is not reconcilable in the way that subjective freedom is in the Philosophy of Right. The very dissonance between knowledge and experience or intuition and concept that is the basis of philosophy's freedom, as we will see below, does not mirror the explicit process of giving and asking for reasons that might be applicable to the kind of freedom expressed in modernity.

The distinct and fundamental philosophical comprehension that I am referring to here can be conceived as doing two things: firstly, discerning a discord between what is socially sanctioned as a justification and what is only intuited, felt, or experienced as the inadequacy of those justifications; and secondly, and most importantly, turning that intuition into a concept. Let us return to our example. In the western world eating meat is still an unquestioned habit. One does not have to give reasons for doing it. Even if one is asked to give reasons for it, it is enough to say: "I eat it because I like it." But, can we really in this era say that "liking it" is an adequate justification? Such a justification is experienced by many as anachronistic because the evolution of social life has, as it were, left those reasons behind, even though exactly why those reasons have been left behind has not yet been articulated in its necessity and universality. In this case there is a dissonance between what is experienced or intuited and the publicly articulated and accepted reasons. What philosophical reflection experiences is an intuition of a merely implicit and incipient norm. This may manifest itself initially only as a skepticism of the authority and legitimacy of the explicit reasons. In line with what we have just seen with regard to the movement of thought expressed in the preface to the Phenomenology, the authority that both undermines the initial reason and is set to replace it has not emerged as a clearly articulated concept that one could hold oneself and others to. The philosophical labor is to make explicit why the established reason is inadequate and to turn into a concept what is intuited. We need to remember here that the intuition, as we saw at the end of the last section, is not of a given or a passively delivered empirical content. What is intuited must be understood to be in the most minimal of senses self-determined, otherwise we are delivered back into the quagmire of Kant's mind-world dualism. In philosophical reflection we can come retrospectively to understand the deficiencies in earlier forms of Spirit and recognize that those deficiencies are determinate. We might for example come to see an unsustainable inconsistency between the rights and responsibilities that underpin western democratic society and the treatment of animals. Alternatively, these principles may reveal themselves to be inadequate because of their inability to reorientate the human-animal relation such that a genuine responsibility to animals could be incorporated into them. The broad issue here is that there are many more implicit determinations that make up a culture than those currently authorized as meaningful or affirmed as the defining concepts of its self-understanding. At the level of reflective thought it is the gap between this inadequate explicit knowledge and the emerging, as it were, rough shape of knowing, which is initially only intuited, that reason wants to close. Another way of putting this is that reason aspires to render self-understanding coherent and hence reconciled by bringing into alignment intuition and concept. However, even when this gap is closed, this social and historical world will inevitably fall out of alignment with thought's understanding of it, so any reconciliation is only transient, that is it reflects a self-comprehension that is here and now.

We can think of the gap that thought's movement tries to close as being between current serf-understanding and the complex interplay of history and sociality that produces changes in society that have not yet been conceptualized and comprehended but that are intuited. (45) Conceived in this way, there is a misalignment between what the world has become in-itself and the current accepted self-knowledge (the for-itself). The instability of thought that characterizes philosophical reflection is the direct result of the experience of this misalignment. Philosophy strives to satisfy itself through its retrospective comprehension, by which it might close the gap created by its inadequate self-understanding. We might understand a given social order as a system of norms or as it has been usefully described in Sellarsian terms as the "space of reasons." (46) Yet, we can interpret the space of reasons and norms very broadly here, in a way I think Pinkard and Brandom do not, such that it includes reasons and norms we do not explicitly hold ourselves to, but which are, as it were, fermenting under the surface and which are not yet explicit.

How things come to be meaningful for us in a specific point in time is the result of a set of socially and historically mediated conditions that are in a constant state of transition, as is our understanding of them. The tensions, contradictions, and conflicts that emerge in a culture reveal themselves in manifold ways: in the clash of principles that emerge in Sophocles' plays, post-colonial conflict, public contestation about specific issues and principles, and so on. In such cases, what is needed is an articulation of a new measure by which this society can judge itself. Philosophy clearly has a normative, or what Hegel calls in another text "corrupting," role to play. (47) The cue for this philosophical examination emerges when a determinate mode of life has become in some sense indeterminate, when the reasons animating a culture have become stale, that is, when the authority of values and customs no longer has an unquestioned hold on its citizens. (48) Changes in any number of factors that are constitutive of and are at play in any culture can necessitate a change in society, but it is thought that is "corrupting" because it recognizes the inadequacies of existing authorized norms. In so doing, philosophical comprehension can contribute to a new form in the development of Spirit. Philosophy can be, Hegel remarks, an "inner birthplace which appears later in actuality." (49) The implication of this is that philosophy can have an important, though limited step in the transformation of society. (50) By presenting the tensions at play in any society in their universality and necessity, philosophy opens the possibility for its transformation.

Philosophy responds to Spirit's implicit dissatisfaction with its existing self-understanding by examining the rigidities and deficiencies that emerge in a society and presenting them in their universality and necessity. (51) This "holding to account" may well corrupt the existing shape of life to the point where it is no longer viable, but for Hegel the demise of this shape of life is not created by philosophy, it is already present (but only implicitly) in the to and fro of social, natural, and historical forces. Philosophy can contribute to the development of a new shape of life through the articulation of a new norm, which had only been implicit in a shape of life, and which was not sufficiently rational to recognize it. (52) The example he uses to illustrate this is one of his favorites: "what Greek philosophy had been, entered actuality in the Christian world." (53) Greek ethical life had as its guiding principle the subjective freedom of its citizens, (54) this was what gave the polis its strength, diversity, and unrivalled vitality, but it could not recognize the equality of all individuals. A universal principle of freedom required that individuals recognize "that this good, which has by me to be esteemed as a substantial end, must be known by me; with this the infinite subjectivity, the freedom of self-consciousness breaks out." (55) Socrates recognized that Athenian social and political life was corrupt. He recognized that the principles animating this society had decayed. He could not participate in "public life," and there was no public space and no intersubjective arena in which his claim could be recognized. Socrates argues that one should "attain truth through himself." (56) By so arguing he makes autonomy his guiding principle. This incipient claim to the universality of human equality is given concrete social and political life in Christianity.

Among Descartes's innumerable philosophical innovations was to make the reflective and critical subject, which Socrates had established by setting aside a space for reflective thought outside the vicissitudes of Athenian society, (57) a universal feature of humanity. Descartes and all the great figures of the Enlightenment who followed him took the distinctive feature of humanity to be their autonomy. Hegel describes Descartes's achievement this way: Human beings must acknowledge and scrutinize in their own thoughts whatever is said to be normative, whatever in the world is said to be authoritative; what is to rank as established must have authenticated itself by means of thought. (58)

Hegel argues that by making such a subject the centre of his philosophical project, Descartes begins modern philosophy. (59)

Philosophy alone cannot satisfy the restlessness of Spirit. Spirit has to be able to realize the new criteria in a new determinate shape of social and political life that could, for example, embody the principle of subjective freedom. The retrospective movement of comprehension might well be compatible with and even incorporated self-consciously into the logic of the self-correcting movement of modernity. However, there is an important strain of the representing activity of philosophy that cannot be internalized into modern social and political life. This, as we have already seen, is the experience of this dissonance, roughly conceived as the gap between knowledge and experience or concept and intuition, which is the genesis of the philosophical desire for comprehension. This methodology is not straightforwardly a moment of the space of reasons and cannot be subsumed into Hegel's social and political philosophy. Philosophy strives to capture this movement (in the form of the dialectic) precisely because, as we will see, philosophy's own desire for comprehension is plagued by the experience of this dissonance. There is a distinct form of philosophical reconciliation that takes place in the "ideal," a form of self-knowledge distinct to philosophy. We can consider the core criteria and concepts by which philosophy judges itself and the world (understanding, reason, universality, and in Hegel's case dialectic) as philosophy's own historical achievements that have become the authoritative measures for delivering certainty in knowledge. Nevertheless, philosophy's reflective position cannot be relinquished. It cannot be incorporated even into the self-correcting logic of modernity or social and political life because this basic tension between concept and intuition is, as it were, a kind of transcendental structure of philosophical experience that could not be given up unless all intuition has become concept. As we will see below, the ongoing aspiration of philosophy to provide itself with a form adequate to its own content (in Hegel's case as the dialectic) demonstrates the fundamental and ultimately irreconcilable tension between concept and intuition.

Philosophical reflection cannot be satisfied by making itself adequate to any finite criteria because the dissonance between concept and intuition that motivates its project of self-comprehension is, as we will see, never able to be overcome, but this is also what gives it its distinctive freedom. While thinking can heal, it also continues to self-inflict injury. Thought cannot produce some kind of final harmony or ultimate reconciliation because it is always in motion, always pushing itself forward in its attempts at self-understanding.

IV

Raymond Geuss argues that two conditions need to be met for reconciliation: firstly, "the existence of a state of reconciliation requires that Spirit must be the kind of place that Spirit can be at home with itself"; (60) secondly, "for spirit to be reconciled, it must not only be the case that its social world is one in which it can find itself at home, but spirit must have represented this to itself in an appropriate way." (61) We have seen above that Hegel's social philosophy can be seen as meeting this first condition. Hegel's social and political philosophy can be understood to be a project of reconciliation or a social theodicy to the extent that it presents the kind of objective conditions in which the Kantian autonomous subject can be at home. We have also seen that Geuss's second condition for reconciliation is a central part of Hegel's project, namely, Spirit must represent itself to itself in an appropriate form, and the most adequate form, as Hegel never tires of telling his readers, is philosophy. However, the problem with the way Geuss conceives Spirit's quest for reconciliation is that it is entirely subsumed by the social theodicy. This is affirmed in the way Geuss conceives reconciliation in the second condition of reconciliation where the representing activity, which has its purest form in philosophical reflection, is conceived as wholly part of the reconciliatory moment of objective Spirit.

While Geuss's position has much to commend it as an understanding of Hegel's social and political philosophy, it is a mistake to equate philosophy and Spirit with a social theodicy. There are two different levels to philosophy's representing activity, and they correspond to distinct forms of reconciliation. There is the aspiration to self-comprehension that takes place purely at the level of thought. This is the retrospective self-comprehension that we have just examined, which explores the ways in which norms change and how our self-understanding can change or ought to change in light of this. This representing activity has been self-consciously incorporated into the self-correcting logic of modernity. However, there is also a further feature of self-comprehension that of necessity keeps its reflective distance from objective Spirit.

This form of philosophical comprehension is not identical to the concrete freedoms made possible by a finite social system, even if that system now reflects the self-critical and serf-correcting features of philosophical reflection. The criteria and norms by which social and political life assess itself are products of their own making. (62) Philosophy can have a role in setting out the norms in their universality and necessity, assessing if a social and political order measures up to them, if they are contradictory, and so on. However, philosophy's understanding of why these norms are out of alignment with current self-understanding and its assessment of its own attempt to render that shape of life adequate in thought demarcate a distinct role for philosophy. The disjuncture between these two levels makes any claim that Hegel's thought strives for a "complete reconciliation" implausible. (63)

In the Lectures on the History of Philosophy Hegel makes a clear distinction between the form of philosophical refection and the content of the social world it inhabits. Thinking enters. The consequence is that the existing world, the spirit realized in the morals and force of life at that time, is negated; thought, spirit's substantive mode of existence, attacks and weakens simple morals, simple religion and so forth, and this ushers in a period of corruption [Verderbens]. Then the next step is that thought concentrates itself in itself, becomes concrete and so produces for itself an ideal world in opposition to the real one. Thus when philosophy is to emerge among a people, there must first have been a break in the real world. At that point philosophy is the reconciliation of the corruption which had been begun by thought. This reconciliation happens in the ideal world, in the world of spirit into which men take flight when the earthly world satisfies them no longer. Philosophy begins with the downfall of a real world. (64)

We can see the movement Hegel describes in the first part of this passage playing itself out in premodern society. In premodern society the serf-transforming character of Spirit cannot express itself in any objective shape of Spirit, but the kinds of polarities that Athens could not resolve are no longer fatal in modernity because movement, change, and the mediation of conflict (the central features of thought and Spirit) are inscribed in the very nature of its institutions and its collective serf-understanding. Incompleteness, change, and self-correction are written into modernity's script like no other culture ever before. Thought's infinite capacity to reflect, examine, and dismantle is inscribed into the very structure of modernity since rational serf-improvement and serf-correction are its defining principle.

However, philosophy expresses not just the serf-understanding of a determinate shape of life. The very form of that expression should, if philosophy is to be at home with itself, reflect the very movement and transformation of that shape of life itself. (65) This distinct representing activity is reflected in the structure and movement of Hegel's systematic works themselves. The method of the dialectic, especially in the Logic and the Phenomenology, is designed to give philosophy a form appropriate to philosophy itself and to modern life. Hegel remarks in the Logic and the various prefaces and introductions to his major works that philosophy (including his own) must be a reflection of its own time in thought. In Hegel's case this is more than a remark about the necessarily situated character of all knowledge. It is in fact a demand that the self-comprehension that each text undertakes be adequate to its content: thought, experience, history, and so on. Philosophical comprehension is not just a static giving account (for example, as logic or phenomenology) of how we have got to where we are. The very expression of that content in the body of the Phenomenology or the Science of Logic strives to embody in the form of thought the shape of life it examines.

The dialectic captures in thought the distinct movement of modernity that we have outlined above. Thought can be at home in Hegel's Logic not because thought is simply with itself--that is not enough. The comprehension itself is not enough to satisfy Spirit, that comprehension must also be given a form that is adequate to what it is striving to comprehend, namely, modern life and thought itself (the shape of life of the historical world it inhabits): [method] is not something distinct from its object and content; for it is the inwardness of the content, the dialectic which it possesses within itself, which is the mainspring of its advance. It is clear that no expositions can be accepted as scientifically valid which do not pursue the course of this method and do not conform to its simple rhythm, for this is the course of the subject matter itself. (66)

His systematic works therefore provide a new home for thinking. They can do this because they meet the historically agreed demands of science (universality and necessity), but also they express these in a way that strives to capture the speculative and dialectical movement of the whole it is trying to comprehend, something clearly lacking in prior approaches.

Hegel's systematic works embody the movement of the dialectic; however, it is in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy and his various prefaces and introductions that he theorizes the distinct role of philosophy. Philosophy, Hegel remarks in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, is "identical with the spirit of the age in which it appears." It is not abstract, disembodied, and ahistorical but is grounded in the specificities of historical eras: "no philosophy can overleap its own time." (67) While its knowledge can have no other "content" than that given it by the epoch it inhabits, philosophy nevertheless "does stand above its time" in so far as it produces "a new form in the development of Spirit." (68) It is the specific way in which it "knows" the content that gives philosophy a reflective distance from its time. While the content cannot be other than what is immanent to the historical era it belongs to and the accrued developments of the history of philosophy, nevertheless, philosophical knowledge is qualitatively different.

Hegel comments in the Lectures on Aesthetics that "the universal and absolute need from which art springs has its origin in the fact that man is a thinking consciousness, that is that man draws out of himself and puts before himself what he is and whatever else is." (69) The distinct features of philosophy, (the form of its representing activity, to "put before himself what he is"), strive to capture the character of the world as thought, not just as a static representation of it, but in an "ideal" form of thinking itself. That representation of "what he is" can of course take a nonphilosophical form, in, for example, religion or a work of art. In the Phenomenology, Hegel's discussion of Rameau's Nephew presents it as offering in literary form the concepts, tensions, and pathologies of modern life. (70) However, Spirit discloses itself in its highest form in thought, that is, philosophically. Philosophical expression strives for explanations that are universal and necessary. (71)

Philosophical inquiry is not content simply to examine how things have come to be the case; it is not exhausted by the retrospective movement of self-comprehension. The philosophical expression of a new shape of life demands a form adequate to the thought that is given life in that content: "Consciousness misses in the newly emerging shape ... the articulation of a form whereby distinctions are securely defined, and stand arrayed in their fixed relations." (72) The important issue here is that what motivates philosophy to find this more adequate expression of itself is a philosophically intuited dissonance between the adequacy of philosophy's own form (its method and the way it articulates its concepts) and the whole that it is trying to express. The critical role of intuition here is that it has some sense of the whole or has a more adequate "grasp" of how philosophy should understand itself, but reason has to transform that intuition into concept and give it an adequate form. Hegel remarks in numerous places throughout his works that the form of philosophical expression that dominates philosophy is plagued by the model of the understanding [Verstand], which is one-sided, static, pigeon-holed, fixed and so on. (73) This form of philosophical expression (Verstand), which is "one-sided and restricted," ought not "have the last word" since it is at odds with both the movements at play in the modern world (self-transforming, dynamic, self-grounding, and so on) and with the dialectical movement of rational thought more generally. (74) This lack of fit between form and content, that is, between thought (currently expressed by the static mode of Verstand) and what it strives to express (the dynamism of thought and modernity), renders philosophy itself inadequate to the task of comprehending both Spirit and itself. It discerns this inadequate self-understanding on the basis of a distinct experience of itself: the dissonance between concept and intuition.

The experience of the inadequacy of philosophy's self-comprehension necessitates a change so that its form or method reflects modern life: "the method [of the Science of Logic] is the consciousness of the form of the inner self-movement of the content of logic." (75) This is why Hegel's systematic works strive to be concrete expressions of the dialectic and the speculative. He tries to articulate and capture a form of thought in the very fabric and movement of his systematic texts that is adequate to what each text is trying to comprehend. That "adequate" form is the dialectic. This quest for a method that is adequate to its self-comprehension is motivated by the gap between self-understanding and what is experienced (between concept and intuition).

Thought can only be at home with itself when it comprehends itself, and that satisfaction is achieved not just through a retrospective reconstruction of how we have got to where we are. For philosophy and reason to be satisfied they require a form of thought that can capture the movement of modernity and thought: thinking affirms the stubborn determination only to be reconciled with the solid content so far as that content has at the same time been able to give itself the shape that is most worthy of it. (76)

As we have already seen, the shape it gives itself can only bring to consciousness a content that is already present in its own era. (77) Thought always occurs in relation to the totality of history and the position we find ourselves in, but the way in which philosophy theorize that history, as self-transforming, self-correcting, and so on must itself be judged in order to see if the current expression of it is adequate to the content. This is philosophy's own experience of itself.

Hegel argues that all prior philosophical claims to truth show a lack of self-consciousness that their particular truth is only a claim to absoluteness. The truths they propose are finite and will collapse precisely because of the absoluteness of the claims. It is this very one-sidedness that Hegel tries to capture and show the limitation of throughout his system. Unlike other philosophical claims to truth that posit some kind of absolute claim (self-positing I, Cogito, substances and table of categories, and so on) Hegel provides no such final account of the absolute. (78) All prior philosophical claims to "truth" show themselves in retrospect to be inadequate, but they are not thereby banished by being refuted. Philosophy moves by refutation, but no principle is lost. (79) All that is lost is the claim to absoluteness. What Hegel attempts to grasp and give form to is what all these various claims to truth fail to grasp--the self-correcting process of philosophy as such. (80)

No single claim to truth will capture the totality: "the totality exists completely only in the course of the development." (81) This precisely is what Hegel's vision of a serf-developing Spirit is designed to capture. All Hegel's claims to truth are highly qualified expressions of the unconditioned. The only absolute that he puts forward is Spirit's capacity for infinite serf-transformation. This is what lies at the heart of his often repeated claims that the "true is the whole." Everything other than the whole of the serf-transforming process is finite and perishable; that is, they are always expressions of Verstand (understanding) not of Vernunft (reason). The dialectic tries to capture the movement of this serf-supersession. The dialectic is the methodological reflection of reason and of speculative philosophy itself.

This distinctly modern form of experience and thought (the dynamism of serf-transformation, the negative, and so on) is not reflected in Kantian logic and his critical theory in general. The capacity for serf-transformation and movement needs to be reflected in the categories and method of logic itself--that is what the dialectic is. Kant had gestured at the dynamism of the dialectic, but this insight was not developed by him, (82) thus Hegel's condemnatory reference to the Kantian program of attempting to create a fixed table of categories of judgment. In Hegel's thought the dialectic is given expression in a new method, a method adequate to modernity and thinking itself. All philosophy can do is give a form adequate to that content, and this is why in the latter part of the passage quoted at length above Hegel remarks that "reconciliation" is achieved by philosophy "only in the intellectual world, not in the earthly one." (83) The reconciliation occurs at the level of serf-comprehension, which is an "ideal world." Philosophy is reconciled when it provides a representation (the right concepts expressed with the right form) that is adequate to the content, that is, to the world as experienced, and is thereby at home with itself.

Hegel's social and political thought could be described as the determinate unfolding of successive attempts to realize human freedom. We can see that the developments of objective Spirit in modernity are (to date) best equipped to make Spirit at home. Modern life provides for Hegel the best conditions for achieving a collective self-understanding because its institutions both mirror and enable subjective freedom. In such an environment the comprehension of changes in our self-understanding is facilitated because collective self-production and self-transformation are explicit in the very idea of modern life. In this light the Philosophy of Right can be considered in part as an attempt to reconcile his contemporaries to an idealized version of the modern social order, which rational subjects could recognize as their own. Nevertheless, even if we take objective Spirit to be a social theodicy and modernity to be the highly qualified fulfillment of this, which inscribes the instability of thought self-consciously into itself, there are of course determinations at play that will render modernity's self-understanding inadequate, limited, and no longer authoritative.

Philosophy has to keep its reconciling role only in the ideal. It is only in this sphere that the determinate insufficiency of modernity's self-understanding will be worked out and so assist in the ongoing "bitter labour" of Spirit's "attempt to satisfy itself." (84) Philosophy seeks a coherent and rigorous self-understanding. (85) That desire emerges when it recognizes a gap between what it takes itself to be and what it experiences. It is this gap that thought strives to close by turning the in-itself it intuits into something it can comprehend. It only strives to close this gap; it cannot of course on its own resolve the historical tensions that produce it. Hegel's Logic and the Phenomenology, particularly the way they theorize and exemplify their dialectical method, try to capture and thereby to bring to consciousness the logic of change and the self-transforming character of modernity. By so doing they make thought at home in this change at a conceptual level. Modernity will contradict itself, but philosophy is not a solution to the contradiction. All philosophy will provide is an expression of the contradiction or of its temporary resolution. The dialectic does not have a historical teleology. The dialectic will come to an end, but only when this form of thought reveals itself to be no longer adequate to the movement of thought and content it is supposed to capture. Hegel's thought is not the end of Spirit's development; it has not fulfilled a historical destiny and this has not accomplished a complete reconciliation.

Hegel's thought gives a form to the movement of modernity, a logic that he thinks is adequate to thought and the self-correcting path of philosophy, but that form can be adequate only to the finite shape of the life of his era. Part of the battle for the next competing generation of philosophers is to find a philosophical form that represents the determinate insufficiencies of modernity and the shape of life modernity is transforming into, perhaps that form is the negative dialectics of Adorno, Heidegger's ontological difference, Derridean Differance, (86) Deleuzian rhizomatic thought, and so on. Probably all of these figures capture in a new form the developments of Spirit. Hegel expected such innovations. These contemporary innovations are a reconciliation in that they give conceptualized form to the new shape of Spirit that is intuited. They represent feats of self-comprehension that strive to be a thought that is adequate (in the concepts, method, and style) to the emerging shapes of life in late modernity.

Because thought and Spirit are not stagnant, all such reconciliation is temporary. What Hegel gives us in his view of philosophical freedom is the methodological form (the tension between experience and concept or concept and intuition) that underlies this ongoing striving to provide an adequate form to that content. This dissonance between concept and intuition that underlies the aspiration to self-comprehension is just as pertinent to the shape of our own time as to Hegel's. That self-comprehension is a reconciliation, if by this term we mean that thought is now at home with itself, but only because the gap between what it intuits and what it has already conceptualized is now (temporarily) closed. (87)

University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia

Correspondence to: Simon Lumsden, School of History and Philosophy, University of New South Wales, Sydney, Australia, 2052.

(1) In the Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy he says the fall presents man's transition from paradise "to consciousness of, the knowledge of good and evil." Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. T. M. Knox and A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985) (hereafter "ILHP"). German edition Einleitung in die Geschichte der Philosophie, ed. J. Hoffmeister, (Hamburg: Meiner, 1966) (hereafter "EGP"). He has an extended discussion of this issue in The Encyclopaedia Logic: Part One of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, trans. T. F. Garaets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1991), [section] 24z3 (hereafter "EnL"). "z" denotes additional material transcribed from Hegel's lectures by his students and posthumously incorporated into his texts. "A" and "R" denote additions made by Hegel himself.

(2) As Rousseau puts it in the Second Discourse: "If [Nature] destined us to be healthy then, I almost dare assert, the state of reflection is a state against Nature, and the man who meditates is a depraved animal." The Discourses and Other Early Political Writings, trans. V. Gourevitch (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 138. Though as Richard Velkley's discussion of this passage points out, it is highly ambiguous if Rousseau means what he says here since he does not in reality think that the natural realm is an altogether healthy domain for man and his distinctive powers. Being After Rousseau (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 42.

(3) EnL, [section] 24z3.

(4) "the natural man, who is determined only by his drives, is not at home with himself, however self-willed he may be, the content of his willing and opining is not his own, and his freedom is only a formal one." EnL [section] 24z2. Emphasis in original.

(5) EnL, [section] 24z3

(6) ILHP, 79-80; EGP 110. Mark Lilla interprets this as an urge for "ultimate reconciliation" (860, 870) and that "Dialectic and History have their ends" (860). See his "Hegel and the Political Theology of Reconciliation," Review of Metaphysics 44.4 (2001): 859-900. This is a claim that I am disputing in this paper.

(7) There is a good discussion of this notion in Hegel's ethical and political thought in Allen Wood's Hegel's Ethical Thought, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 45-7. See also Hans-Friedrich Fulda, "Freiheit als Vermogen der Kausalitat und als Weise, bei sich selbst zu sein," in Inmitten der Zeit, ed. T. Grethlen and H. Leitner (Wtirzburg: Konighausen und Nemann, 1996).

(8) This view is most clearly represented by Michael Hardimon in Hegel's Social Philosophy: The Project of Reconciliation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994) and his "The Project of Reconciliation: Hegel's Social Philosophy," Philosophy and Public Affairs 21.2 (1992): 165-95. Hardimon argues that conceiving his project this way does not necessarily make his project conservative. Because Hardimon focuses on Hegel's political philosophy, his account of reconciliation does not deal in sufficient depth with the role played by comprehension and understanding in reconciliation. The role they play, as we will see below, makes problematic the account Hardimon gives.

(9) The clearest statement of this is in Hegel's Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, vol. 1, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 98.

(10) Robert Pippin, The Persistence of Subjectivity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 23

(11) Raymond Geuss, Outside Ethics (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 47. See also his Morality, Culture and History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), especially chapter 4.

(12) See for example Frederick Neuhouser, Foundation of Hegel's Social Theory (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000); Robert Brandom, Tales of the Mighty Dead (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002); Robert Pippin, Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997); and Terry Pinkard, Hegel's Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).

(13) The concept-intuition distinction, as we will see below in section II, is not to be understood in the way Kant conceives it in his critical and pre-critical writings. Hegel's thought ought to be understood as overcoming this dualism, though he does preserve the distinction.

(14) The way Hegel talks about the Oriental world in the History of Philosophy presents it as a largely unreflective sphere in which the individual is "submerged in the objective." ILHP, 167; EGP, 227.

(15) Sittlichkeit brings together feeling and reason in order to make modern subject at home. "But it is simply identical with the actuality of individuals, the ethical as their general mode of behaviour, appears as custom [Sitte]; and the habit of the ethical [das Sittliche] appears as a second nature which takes the place of the original and purely natural will and is the all-pervading soul, significance and actuality of individual existence [Dasein]." Elements of the Philosophy of Right, trans. H. B. Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), [section] 151 (hereafter "PR").

(16) Terry Pinkard, Hegel: A Biography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999).

(17) Charles Taylor, Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 80-94 and 110.

(18) To be fair Taylor recognizes this, but he still thinks that this is undermined by Hegel's metaphysics. This parallels Wood in Hegel's Ethical Thought, who adopts a similar approach except that he thinks the "diseased" Spirit can be separated from the healthy socio-political body without too much problem.

(19) Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. E. S. Haldane (London: Kegan Paul, 1892), 1:357 (hereafter LHP); German edition is from Werke, ed. Eva Moldenhauer and Karl Markus Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1969), vol. 20:411 (hereafter "W" followed by volume number).

(20) PR, [section] 279R. See also Richard Velkley's fine discussion of Socrates as a proto-Kantian in "On Possessed Individualism: Hegel, Socrates' Daimon, and the Modern State," The Review of Metaphysics 59.3 (2006): 577-99.

(21) This discussion of the way Hegel is concerned with trying to capture the movement of modernity is heavily indebted to extensive conversation, input, and revision from Amir Ahmadi.

(22) Pippin, The Persistence of Subjectivity, 12.

(23) "The possession of self-conscious rationality, a possession belonging to us, to our contemporary world, has not been gained suddenly nor has it grown merely out of the soil of the present. On the contrary, it is essentially an inheritance and, more precisely, the result of labour, the labour of all preceding generations of the human race." ILHP, 9; EGP, 12.

(24) This does not mean that we can of course understand everything and everyone within modern life as at home. Hegel's well known discussion of poverty undermines any such claim, moreover there are a number of pathologies that play themselves out through the experience of either being left behind by changes in norms and the failure of these changes to actually correct what was indeterminate in a given society. For a discussion of this see Axel Honneth's Suffering from Indeterminacy: an attempt at a Reactualization of 'Hegel's Philosophy of Right' (Assen: Van Gorcum, 2000).

(25) PR, [section] 28.

(26) PR, [section] 279R.

(27) Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol. 3, trans. R. F. Brown and J. M. Stewart (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 110.

(28) This is Hardimon's position, see "The Project of Reconciliation: Hegel's Social Philosophy," 166, n. 4.

(29) Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), see in particular [section] 10-17 (hereafter "PS"). German edition is from Gesammelte Werke, ed. H.-F. Wessels and H. Clairmont (Hamburg: Meiner, 1988), 9:9-14 (hereafter "GW").

(30) PS, [section] 11; GW9:10.

(31) PS, [section] 12; GW, 9:10.

(32) See the discussion of this in the introduction to the PS, [section] 80; GW, 9:62-3.

(33) ILHP, 92; EGP, 124.

(34) PS, [section] 80; GW, 9:63.

(35) ILHP, 92; EGP, 124. On the same page he says: "Philosophy is the thought which comprehends [erfassende] itself.... This self-comprehension is a self-developing comprehension."

(36) I have argued for the centrality of Hegel's response to the concept-intuition dualism in "Satisfying the Demands of Reason: Hegel's Conceptualization of Experience," Topoi: an International Review of Philosophy 21.1 (2003): 41-53.

(37) As Hegel remarks "according to Kant, thoughts, although they are universal and necessary determinations, are still only our thoughts, and are cut off from what the thing is in itself by an impassable gulf." EnL, [section] 41z2.

(38) Hegel's Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (London: Allen and Unwin, 1969), 45. German edition: Gesammelte Werke vol. 21, ed. Hans-Jurgen Gawoll (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1989), 28.

(39) See also Sally Sedgwick's, "Hegel, McDowell, and Recent Defenses of Kant," Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 31.3 (2000): 229-47.

(40) Pippin puts it this way: "concept and intuition, even mind and world, must be understood as inseparable, but precisely not as indistinguishable, as if collapsed into one another." The Persistence of Subjectivity, 51.

(41) PR, [section] 4A. See also ILHP, 11; EGP, 14.

(42) "the fact that consciousness is clearly present in all that it thinks, and must necessarily be at home with itself [dabeisein in allem], is in our time constantly and plainly demanded; the substantial although eternal in and for itself must as truly be produced through me." LHP, III:386; W, 18:442.

(43) Robert Pippin, "Recognition and Reconciliation: Actualized Agency in Hegel's Jena Phenomenology," International Yearbook of German Idealism 2 (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2004), 260.

(44) See Terry Pinkard, "Subjects, Objects, and Normativity. What Is It Like To Be an Agent?" International Yearbook of German Idealism, vol. 1, ed. K. Ameriks and J. Stolzenberg (Berlin: de Gruyter, 2003): 201-19; and Robert Brandom, "Some Pragmatist Themes in Hegel's Idealism," European Journal of Philosophy 7.2 (1999): 164-89.

(45) Rudiger Bubner describes this as the "disturbing remainder" in The Innovations of Idealism, trans. Nicholas Walker (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 175, 181.

(46) See Terry Pinkard's, "Hegel's Phenomenology and Logic: an Overview," in The Cambridge Companion to German Idealism, ed. Karl Ameriks (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000).

(47) ILPH, 112; EGP, 150. This passage is cited at length below.

(48) "When the might of union vanishes from the life of men and the antitheses lose their living connection and reciprocity and gain independence, the need of philosophy arises," The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy, trans. H. S. Harris and W. Cerf (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1977), 91.

(49) ILHP, 111-2; EGP, 150

(50) For example: "as soon as thought arises it investigates the various political constitutions: as the result of its investigation it forms for itself an idea of an improved state of society, and demands that this ideal should take the place of things as they are." Philosophy of History, trans. John Sibree (New York: Dover Publications, 1956), 268; W, 12:326.

(51) See ILHP, 71; EGP, 101. Also Hegel's Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art, vol. l, p. 51.

(52) "In the spirit of more modern times deeper ideas slumber, and to waken them [um sich wach zu wissen] demands an environment and a present life different from those abstract, vague, and colourless reflections of the ancient world." ILHP, 52; EGP, 75.

(53) ILHP, 112; EGP, 150.

(54) "[The Athenian] was subject, but he had not yet established himself as such, he knew himself only in his essentially moral unity with the world, in his duties to the state. The Athenian and the Roman knew that his essence was to be a free citizen. That man as such is free in his essence this neither Plato nor Aristotle knew. Essentially it is only in the principle of Christianity that the individual personal spirit has infinite and absolute worth." ILHP, 106; EGP, 144. See also LHP, I:366; W, 18:421.

(55) LHP, I:386; W, 18:442. Hegel says European society now demands this principle. This is a clear statement of the normative role of philosophy.

(56) LHP, I:386; W, 18:442.

(57) "The rise of the inner world of subjectivity was the rupture with existing reality [Wirklichkeit]." Philosophy of History, 270; W, 12:329. See Velkley's persuasive and elegant discussion of the tension between reason and the demands of the modern state in "On Possessed Individualism: Hegel, Socrates' Daimon, and the Modern State," 595-6.

(58) LHP, 3:132; W, 20:120.

(59) "Cogito ergo sum are the first words in Descartes' system; and it is precisely these words which express modern philosophy's difference from all its predecessors." ILHP, 183; EGP, 252.

(60) Geuss, Outside Ethics, 47.

(61) Geuss, Outside Ethics, 48. In Morality, Culture and History, 80 he describes that need as absolute. Geuss's discussion of these issues is a model of clarity and brevity and is extraordinarily insightful.

(62) For a good discussion of the distinct role of philosophy in Hegel's thought see Will Dudley, Hegel, Nietzsche and Philosophy (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2002), 104-19.

(63) Raymond Geuss, Outside Ethics, 49.

(64) ILHP, 113; EGP, 151.

(65) This discussion of Hegel's dialectic as giving form to modern life has greatly benefited from Angelica Nuzzo's fine paper on this issue "Dialectic as Logic of Transformative Processes" in Hegel: New Directions, ed. Katerina Deligiorgi (Chesham: Acumen, 2006).

(66) Hegel's Science of Logic, 54; GW, 21:39. See also EnL, 129-32; W, 8:172-6, especially toward the end of the long remark in EnL, [section] 81R.

(67) ILHP, 111-12; EGP, 150.

(68) ILHP, 112; EGP, 150.

(69) Hegel, Aesthetics, 30-31;W, 13:50-1.

(70) See the detailed examination of this issue by Allen Speight, Hegel, Literature and the Problem of Agency (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001).

(71) "Only what is completely determined is at once exoteric, comprehensible, and capable of being learned and appropriated by all." PS, [section]13; GW, 9:11.

(72) PS, [section] 13; GW, 9:1 1.

(73) See in particular EnL, [section]79-82, but also there are numerous other well known discussion in the preface to the Phenomenology and the introduction to the Science of Logic.

(74) EnL, [section]81R.

(75) Science of Logic, 53; GW, 21:38. He goes on to say that the Phenomenology is an example of this method and that the logic is the articulation of this method in its purity.

(76) EnL, 17; W 8:31.

(77) "Each philosophy has thus appeared of necessity at the right time of its appearance.... None has outsoared [ubersprungen] its own time; all of them have comprehended the spirit of their own time in thought. The philosophies have brought into consciousness what was present in their time" ILHP, 93; EGP, 125.

(78) I have tried to show that even absolute knowing cannot be understood in this way in "Absolute Knowing," The Owl of Minerva: Journal of the Hegel Society of America 30:1 (1998): 3-32

(79) See the discussion in ILHP, 49, 95-7; EGP, 71, 127-30.

(80) "The disposition of our and every age is to apprehend the science that exists, to make it our own, and just in that process, to develop it further and to raise it to a higher level. By making it our own we make out of it something our own, different from what it was before.... Philosophy has essentially come into existence only in connection with what was before.... And it is the course of history which displays to us not the becoming of things alien to us, but our own becoming, the becoming of our philosophy," ILHP, 10-11; EGP, 13-14.

(81) ILHP, 97; EGP, 130.

(82) See Hegel's comments Science of Logic, 56; GW21:41.

(83) ILHP, 113; EGP, 151

(84) ILHP, 99; EGP, 134.

(85) "Development is precisely the Spirit's self-deepening in such a way that it brings its depths into consciousness. In this way of speaking Spirit's aim is to comprehend itself, so that it is no longer hidden from itself." ILHP, 81; EGP, 111.

(86) Derrida in particular is very self-conscious that the dialectic is the highpoint of the conceptual form of modernity and that escaping it is no easy task.

(87) Thanks are due to audiences at the University of Sydney and Macquarie University who provided helpful comments on an early draft of this paper, in particular Nicholas H. Smith, Jean-Philippe Deranty, and Paul Redding.