an international and interdisciplinary journal of postmodern cultural sound, text and image
Volume 15, Spring 2018, ISSN 1552-5112
Becoming One Who Is: Self-Consciousness, Stance and Literary Art
in Hegel, Lukács
and Adorno
Whatever else they are and however they
come to be so, human beings are at least self-conscious, self-interpreting,
stance-taking animals. Kant took this to be a matter of transcendental
psychological fact, that is, a thesis that cannot plausibly be denied by any
claim-making rational finite animal––simply an obvious and irrepudiable
fact as it were, that is built into our possession of the faculties of sensible
intuition, understanding, and reason.
This
claim naturally prompts puzzlement about how, as evolved animals, we have come
to have such faculties. As is well known, Fichte, Schelling, and others
proposed variants of Kant’s irrepudiability-of-apperceptive-awareness
thesis, to explain why it is true. But on the whole
they failed to ground their accounts in a plausible story about natural
processes and mechanisms in which apperceptive awareness might be embodied. As
a result, from a contemporary scientific point of view, their positions, along
with the claims of faculty psychology in general, seem merely stipulated or
posited, and they fail to be convincing.
Within contemporary scientific psychology, in contrast, we find
mysterious talk of inner representations that possess syntactic structure, are
inferentially related and embodied in brain states–––talk that is scarcely less
mysterious than the claims of faculty psychology. Or instead, we find various forms of eliminativism that implausibly deny the existence of
genuine claim-making powers and self-consciousness.
Is
there, then, another way to think about self-consciousness, apperceptive
awareness, and what it is to be a claim-making rational animal? In paragraphs 394 and 395 of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, the very
opening paragraphs of Section C - Reason, Chapter V - The Certainty and Truth
of Reason, Subsection C - Individuality Which Takes Itself to be Real in and
for Itself, ¶394 begins as follows:
Self-consciousness
has now grasped the Notion of itself which, to begin with, was only our Notion of it, viz. that in its
certainty of itself it is all reality; and End and Essence are for it
henceforth the spontaneous interfusion of the universal—of gifts and
capacities--and individuality. The
individual moments of this fulfilling and interfusion, prior to the unity in which they have coalesced, are the Ends
hitherto considered. These have vanished, being abstractions and chimeras
belonging to those first shallow shapes of spiritual self-consciousness,
and having their truth only in the imaginary being of the heart, in
imagination and rhetoric, not in Reason. This, being now in and for itself
certain of its reality no longer seeks only to realize itself as End in an
antithesis to the reality which immediately confronts it, but, on the contrary,
has the category as such for the object of its consciousness.[1] (236).
This is, to put it mildly, highly
specialized vocabulary that is far from transparent; hence more than a little
unpacking of it is in order. This opening idea is that we have now changed our
standpoint for understanding self-conscious beings. Initially—that is, in
Chapters I to IV—self-conscious beings, which are human beings with distinctive
points of views on things and who engage in discursively structured activities
of claim-making and reflective claim-assessing—were taken to be special kinds
of objects, or objects with special powers in the world. The facts of simply
being made with faculties or powers a) of the sensible intake and recognition of particulars, b) conceiving of kinds, c) of describing
relations between particulars under laws, and d) of asserting oneself and
seeking recognition from another subject, were, successively, simply taken as
given. In each case, the proposed understanding of the subject as a special
kind of object failed to explain how claim-making activity and the reflective
assessment of claims are possible. If any proposed explanation of what it is to
be a subject fails to explain this, then it is, by Hegel’s lights, obviously
inadequate, for we are undeniably the kinds of beings who make claims and who
reflectively assess them. Hence we now consider a new
conception of ourselves as spontaneous end-pursuers.
One
might of course from a natural scientific point of view reject Hegel’s move
here. After all, the human being is an evolved biological animal, and surely
what makes the human being to be whatever it distinctively is must, one might
think, somehow in the end be explained by appeal to facts about the human brain
and its evolutionary history. Perhaps, contra Hegel, we just are objects in the
world with special kinds of biologically-evolved powers. Psychology in Hegel’s
time might have been insufficiently developed to account for human claim-making
activity and reflection on it (as it remains insufficiently developed in ours),
but surely—it might be objected—it must be somehow possible to do so, at least
in principle.
In
favor of Hegel’s move, however, it can plausibly enough be argued that there is
a kind of self-defeating paradox attaching to the suggestion that we can fully
understand human claim-making activity scientifically as a function of the
brain and its evolutionary history. Surely the brain is the evolved locus of
certain basic capacities of perception, spatial orientation, memory, and so on.
But will a natural scientific account of these suffice to yield an explanatory
account of claim-making and reflective assessment? As long as
natural scientific theories centrally take the form of law formulations
relating causes and effects, there is at least some reason to be skeptical.
Law formulations cast effects as brought
about by their causes with natural necessity. Ideally, in a fully specified law
formulation with all independent variables registered in the account of the
cause, that natural necessity amounts to inevitability. Yet the products we
produce in our claim-making activity seem not to occur with inevitability. Ask
me in relevant circumstances whether the cat is on the mat. Will I inevitably
utter the syllable “yes,” as an automatic output of my brain activity? No, not inevitably, but rather only as long as I have heard and understood the question, have
paid attention, have found the light good enough, have decided to be sincere in
replying, have not taken the question as metaphorical or allegorical, and so
on. Claims about causes of human actions, including expressions of beliefs, are
strongly ceterus paribus or “all other things being
equal” hedged, in a way that it seems difficult to sublime away by
incorporating the hedges into independent variables in the antecedent of a law
formulation. Analytic or definitional reductions of states of epistemic
commitment, such as beliefs about cats on mats, to discrete, causally activated
dispositions or brain states just do not seem to be in view. In involving strong
ceterus paribus hedging, the logic of belief is
just different from the logic of cause-effect relations in nature that fall
under natural necessity. We make strongly hedged and active contributions to
our expressions of our beliefs, as we choose to act on some among many
available motives, with various degrees of attentiveness and alertness. To deny
this is to deny the existence of the very phenomenon that wants explanation.
If
this is right, then we must at the very least understand ourselves as ineliminably active beings, beings who both make a contribution to the structure of our consciousness
insofar as it has discursively structured contents and who rank-order their
motivations and decide to act on some of them rather than others at any given
moment.
And this is Hegel’s point.
We are now to understand ourselves—our
discursive consciousness, our claim-making activities, and our actions that
express them—as somehow self-grounding, not the result of natural necessity
alone. We are to understand that form of being as itself “all reality,” that
is, as not fully grounded in and not adequately explained only by any physical
or biological natural facts.
From
this point of view, Hegel goes on, for any existent human, discursively structured
point-of-view-bearing subject, “End and Essence are for it henceforth the
spontaneous interfusion [of the universal …and individuality.”[2] That
is to say, we are now considering human subjects who think of themselves as
just so happening to have projects and ends that they as individuals freely
choose to commit themselves to and to sustain.
They as it were find themselves as just so happening to have one or
another gift or talent—for example, an ear for music, a memory for historical
facts, or athletic ability—not in virtue of material givens such as brain
states or muscle mass alone, but also as something they are just freely good at
and to the development of which they might freely commit themselves.
Such gifts and talents might be shared
by anyone and are shared by many, so that it makes sense to think of them as
universals: things that can be in more than one individual or place at one
time. The issue for any subject who thinks of itself in this way is then: can I
over time develop and exercise my talents freely in a way that both solicits
continuing recognition of the worth of my course of life and sustains my own
cathexis to it? The ends, goals, or projects to which one commits oneself are
now understood not simply as ends, goals, or projects that one just happens to
have and that mysteriously putatively demand one’s allegiance as simply given,
say by one’s heart or imagination. These very same ends, goals, and projects
are now understood as things to which one might freely commit oneself on the basis of reasons and as things the pursuit of which
over time may require learning and the modification of strategies for their
pursuit. Under this conception, one does not, for example, simply become a
teacher, craftsman, parent, or professional ‘just like that,’ for no reason and
as a finished product. Rather one tries out one’s gifts and talents over time,
reflects on them, and modifies their exercise, as one freely goes on with a
developing project. Moreover, having given up the strategies of brute domination,
servitude, and withdrawal from the world, the human subject now confronts its
environment or world not as something absolutely and inflexibly hostile and
foreign to it, or antithetical to it, but rather as a set of material
circumstances within which and on which it can work over time, through forming
and revising strategies through which gifts and talents might be successfully
expressed. In this sense, the rational human, project-having and reflecting
subject is certain of its own reality; it sets itself to a course of work and
development with reasonable enough confidence that its efforts are not
necessarily doomed to failure. As Paragraph 394 goes on to put it, for such a
human subject, “Action is in its own self its truth and reality, and individuality
in its setting-forth or expression is, in relation to action, the End in and
for itself.”[3] To
undertake the active expression of individuality, developed and freely
maintained according to reasonable standards and in response to circumstances,
is just what it is to have a life as a human subject.
The
question for Hegel will then be: is this conception of what it is to be a human
subject, or what being a human subject ultimately consists in, adequate? Can it
make sense of actually existing human subjects and
their courses of life? And for Hegel the answer to this will be “No;”
ultimately, the having and executing of projects on the part of individual
subjects, taking themselves to have gifts and talents, must itself be
understood as possible only through the inheriting, maintaining, and revising
of historically developed forms of shared social practice and institutional
life that have established themselves as reasonable enough among a people over
time. Individuals will turn out to become the distinctive individuals they are
and to maintain themselves in their individualities not only by taking
themselves to have particular gifts and talents and
then working to develop and express them over time, but also by being, and by
thinking of themselves as being, essentially participants in shared,
good-enough practical, social, and institutional forms of life, including forms
of familial, economic, political, religious, and philosophical life. Here,
moreover, the idea of being good enough counts for something. Broadly
characterized, only a modern, more or less post-European
way of life that includes the central institutions of the nuclear family, a
regulated free market economy, and a parliamentary democracy is reasonably
endorsable and hence stable and good enough.
For
the moment, however, never mind this further argument. Consider only the
account of what it is to be a human subject that has so far been sketched. Two
things about it might immediately occur to you. First, it is plausible enough,
at least in describing a certain stage of life: late adolescence. Like me, many
of you spend a fair amount of your time around 18 to 22
year-olds. If they are lucky enough not to be fully dominated by
economic necessities, then one of the things that is frequently, even centrally
on their minds, as they seek to define themselves both in relation to and
against their parents and peers, is how to become the grownup individual whom
they inchoately take themselves to be. They seek somehow to define themselves
by acting and choosing, while also maintaining a sense that this
self-definition is a kind of exploration of who they really
already are. Or as Hegel puts it
in ¶401:
The
individual who is going to act seems, therefore, to find himself in a circle in
which each moment already presupposes the other, and thus he seems unable to
find a beginning, because he only gets to know his original nature which must be his End, from the deed, while, in order to act, he
must have that End beforehand. But for that very reason he has
to start immediately, and, whatever the circumstances, without further
scruples about beginning, means, or end, proceed to action.[4]
If one is lucky in such things as
finding a good range of opportunities, helpful teachers, coaches, and mentors,
and the support of friends, lovers, and family, all within a framework of an
institutional life that is not brutely coercive and
repressive, then one will more or less muddle through.
But in any case, the central claim seems
right: there is a moment in human life, at least in modern pluralized
societies, where how one is to become more fully who one already inchoately is
presents itself as a problem.
Second,
Hegel’s claim about how individuals address the problem of becoming who they
are is not in any important sense inner, and it does not separate cognition
from emotion. That is, the kind of self-understanding one seeks as one seeks
cathexis to nexes of activities and relationships
involves reflection on how things have gone and are going within courses of
worldly activity. One asks not, “What is in my mind?”, but instead “Does this
activity or relationship feel right? Is it going well? Is it significant? Am or
am I not developing talents and powers of attention and interest within this
setting?” Here thought and principle are not separated from passion and
feeling. Ripeness is all. As Hegel observes in his Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, “Laws and principles
have no immediate life or validity in themselves. The activity which puts them
to work and endows them with real existence has its source in the needs,
impulses, inclinations, and passions of man.”[5] From within complexes of passions,
principles, internalized commands, practical and institutional possibilities,
and senses of talent and gift, individuals in the process of self-formation
seek to find their way to articulate clarity about who they are and what they
are up to.
A
set of interrelated further questions about this picture of the development of
partially articulated, passionate, self-conscious individuality naturally
suggest themselves. How is this development conditioned? More specifically,
what about the roles of biology, parents, teachers, siblings, peers, and
surrounding social forms and practices? Don’t these influences set stronger limits
to the development of self-conscious individuality than Hegel suggests? For Hegel, these limiting conditions are both
real and yet also ultimately enabling. As already suggested, how they operate
will get cashed out in a larger story about the development of Sittlichkeiten or
forms of ethico-social life that are in the end
beneficent for the development of meaningful self-conscious individuality
within good enough social settings. For obvious reasons, we cannot be as
confident as Hegel that all will go well and that these limiting conditions
will prove to be beneficent and enabling in fact. As Robert Pippin remarks in
commenting on the continuing need for art in modernity as a vehicle for the
development of individuality against the grains of social forms, modern life is
“a world of freedom realized, or reconciled social relations of persons who are
free because they actually stand in relations of at least institutionally
secured mutuality of recognition” which, contra Hegel, is “clearly false as a
claim about European modernity [both] in the first third of the nineteenth
century” and on into the present.[6] We are all too aware of the diversities
of social forms and of the agonies and horrors that many of them, perhaps all of
them, often enough impose on subject development. The accomplished end of
history in a life of right is clearly not at hand, and the development of
individual subjectivity frequently involves normalization into a role that does
not support reasonable cathexis to it, but is instead
marked by remainders and shards of unacknowledged or unexpressed feeling,
desire, and attitude.
Nonetheless,
human subjects are not simply things. As the contemporary German philosopher
Georg Bertram aptly puts it, “the human form of life is one that is reflexively
constituted in a particular way. Human beings are not what they are by nature
alone. Nor are they constituted as what they are as a simple result of
tradition. Rather, human beings must also always determine what they are ever
anew. The human being is what he is always also through the fact that he takes
a stance.”[7]
How then, in our actual setting now,
might this stance-taking be done more self-consciously and more effectively
than it, mostly implicitly, is? At the very opening of The Theory of the
Novel, Lukács writes that "happy ages have no philosophy; ... philosophy as a form of life or as that which determines
the form and supplies the content of literary creation,
is always a symptom of the rift between 'inside'
and 'outside', a sign of the essential
difference between the self and the
world, the incongruence of soul and deed."[8] (29). Given the essential interrelations between philosophy, literature, and history, one might say the
same thing about these latter forms of thought and writing, too. Lukács regards
8th century BCE Greek life as exempt
from this sense of rift and frustration and as able to maintain
senses of orientation and value among its members simply by retelling the Homeric epics. But one may wonder whether Lukacs is quite right about early Greek life, and in any case he concedes
that the sense of living within what he calls a ‘rounded
totality’ is already lost by the time of the emergence of tragedy around
550 BCE. Surely for us times of rounded totality are well lost, along with all their
aching joys and dizzy raptures.
Given the standing occasioning circumstances of philosophy, literature, and history in frustration and disappointment, coupled with a sense of powers yet to be fully actualized, one might think of books that aim at
describing transfigurations of life into fuller meaningfulness, egos, and historical social
forms as comparable with with each other, insofar as they each exist, as it were, as emergent entities caught
between impulse and rational order.
The comparison I have in mind can be set out as follows:
Philosophical theories as completed rational summae of conditions of meaningful
life; Historical forms of social life as ensembles of semi-stable, evolving, contested
roles, rights, and responsibilities; Superego; Requirements for complete
rational intelligibility; Ego; Serious books of history, philosophy, and
literature as interrogations of possibilities of meaning-making, infused with
tension and conflict; Erotic longings; impulses toward meaning outside
preformed social scripts and toward transformations of social scripts; Id,
Libidinal Energies, Primary Process; Erotic longings for life otherwise, for
fullness of lived sensuous meaning.
