This paper examines Hegel’s concept of experience and points out its relevance for current debates in philosophy of mind. Although Hegel does not deny that individuals have some privileged access to their experiences and draws heavily on the first person-perspective of consciousness, his conception emphasizes the social constitution of experience.
Michel Foucault (1970) pointedly questioned whether it was possible to “escape Hegel” and suggested what would be required were any such attempt to succeed. Adopting Foucault’s proposal as a starting point, this essay attempts to assess Deleuze’s claims to have finally ‘escaped Hegel.’ It highlights four central themes in Deleuze’s philosophy that are especially relevant to his critical strategy with respect to Hegel: “images of thought”; representation; identity, difference, and negation; and the nature of concepts. The essay concludes that, judged according to Foucault’s criteria, Deleuze could not fairly be regarded as succeeding in ‘escaping Hegel,’ and that, nonetheless, Deleuze’s critique of Hegel is perhaps the most trenchant post-WWII attempt to formulate a robust ‘anti-Hegelian’ alternative. Probably most controversially, the essay proposes that both Hegel and Deleuze are, each in his own way, a conceptualist, metaphysician, and constructivist and that their differences in understanding these stances demarcate a new ‘plane of ‘immanence’ for contemporary philosophical thought.
Focusing on Hegel’s account of civil society in the and the role of spirit in his social theory, this paper argues that theories of ideology of the kind that we find in the Frankfurt school tradition of critical theory find little purchase within Hegel’s social and political philosophy.
This paper makes an argument about how Hegel’s thought is relevant to contemporary critical theory. This paper refers mainly to the work of Axel Honneth as a proponent of contemporary critical theory, since Honneth has deliberately developed his version of critical theory in reliance on ideas and themes drawn from Hegel; nevertheless, the argument of this paper is relevant to others (such as Habermas) who share Honneth’s key premises about critical theory. The argument of this paper unfolds in three main stages. First, the paper explains Honneth’s basic approach to critical theory, including Honneth’s use of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic in articulating his critical theory. Secondly, the paper provides a Hegelian immanent critique of key premises at work in Honneth’s critical theory. Third and finally, the paper offers a reading of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic which not only rebuts Honneth’s reading of that dialectic, but also points the way forward to an alternative approach to critical theory. The main point of my Hegelian argument against Honneth can be briefly encapsulated as follows. Honneth holds that all, or virtually all, members of society implicitly accept or act in accordance with a common or shared social norm. Honneth offers an interpretation of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic in order to support his claims for critical theory. I argue that Honneth is an insufficiently dialectical thinker, and has not properly understood Hegel’s master-slave dialectic. My argument aims to show that, even if the master and slave implicitly accept or act in accordance with a common or shared social norm (as Honneth claims), it is impossible—contrary to what Honneth says—for master and slave themselves to recognize that they share such a norm.
