5 Conclusion

The Best of All Possible Histories

of Western Europe.

Why then, is Hegel so afraid of pluralism? The answer may lie in part with his dialectical logic. Hegel’s dialectical has a cyclical aspect, but reflection always brings us linearly forward to a new Concept.67 The existence of other legitimate paths towards the realization of the freedom, paths that other cultures may have been on, would violate the stringent rules for progression in the Hegelian system.68

Hegel’s racism, like the rest of his philosophy is systematic. While racist attitudes appear in a relatively small minority of his texts, mostly confined to posthumously published texts, no aspect of Hegel’s philosophy can be taken in isolation. The root issues of cultural essentialism, genocide based on dehumanization, perpetual wrongs like enslavement, and the distorted lens of Orientalism, once identified, can be assigned causes and consequences throughout his philosophical system.

This study has focused primarily on tracing the implications of Hegel’s racism to the philosophy of objective spirit. Cultural essentialism is a significant background assumption to the Philosophy of Right, as it helps frame the assumption that societal progression is the realization of a national idea. Slavery helps us to identify the problems with Hegel’s concept of wrong, showing how making moral wrong a necessary evil can justify clearly horrendous actions as long as they serve the realization of freedom. The tacit indifference to genocide demonstrates how Hegel’s concept of personality excludes people from the category of human on the grounds of cultural and biological features. Finally, Hegel’s Orientalism reveals that his philosophical system struggles with any form of pluralism.

While these results are interesting, they leave many questions unanswered. There is still considerable ambiguity about whether Hegel’s racism is internally consistent with the rest of his system. To put it another way, would Hegel’s system be made more rational by removing the racist conclusions, or does the structure of his system necessitate these conclusions? Certainly, Hegel’s philosophy would appear more agreeable if racist passages were disregarded, but whether this can be done while preserving the cohesion of the full system is best left to scholars with a broader background in Hegel’s philosophy. Similarly, scholars with strong knowledge of other

67. Paul Redding, "The Logic of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia Philosophy of Spirit," in Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit: A Critical Guide, ed. Marina Bykova (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019), 18-19. 68. Nelson, "Hegel, Difference, Multiplicity."

27

The Best of All Possible Histories

sections of the system might try to trace the racial issues identified here to other sections of the philosophy of spirit, or to even earlier sections of the Encyclopedia.

The question remains though, what is a more general audience to do with this knowledge? One impulse might be to take an all or nothing approach, to simply throw Hegel out with the bathwater and move on, but this is a slightly immature reaction. As the tension between Hegel’s progressive vision and his conceptions of race and slavery demonstrate, the brilliant rationality of the Hegelian system often chafes against its creator’s more unflattering assumptions. The sheer leaps of logic and empirical falsehoods Hegel had to perpetuate to reach racist conclusions, if nothing else, demonstrate the irrationality of racism as a concept. And more optimistically, the generations of commitment to Hegel by black leaders and intellectuals suggest that perhaps Hegel’s system is worth saving, even if takes some considerable effort to get there.

28

Bykova, Marina. The Cunning of Reason in Hegel's Philosophy of History. 2021. Unpublished manuscript. Cited with the author's permission.

Chu, Andrea Long. "Black Infinity: Slavery and Freedom in Hegel's Africa." Journal of Speculative Philosophy 32, no. 3 (2018): 414-25.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Elements of the Philosophy of Right. Translated by S.W. Dyde. Dover Philosophical Classics. London: George Bell & Sons, 1896.

———. Lectures on the Philosophy of World History. Translated by J. Sibree. Dover Philosophical Classics. Boston: The Colonial Press, 1899.

Herder, Johann Gottfried. Ideen Zur Philosophie Der Geschichte Der Menschheit. Translated by Carl Hanser. Munich and Vienna: Carl Hanser Verlag, 2002.

Heurtebise, Jean-Yves. "Hegel's Orientalist Philosophy of History and Its Kantian Anthropological Legacy." Journal of Chinese Philosophy 44 (2019): 175-92.

Hoffheimer, Michael. "Hegel Race Genocide." Journal of Southern Philosophy 39 (2001): 3562.

Kirkland, Frank. "Hegel on Race and Devlopment." In The Routledge Companion to Philosophy of Race, edited by Paul C. Taylor, Linda Alcoff and Luvell Anderson, 43-60. New York: Routledge, 2018.

Nelson, Eric. "Hegel, Difference, Multiplicity." Journal of Chinese Philosophy 44 (2019): 12126.

Redding, Paul. "The Logic of Hegel's Encyclopaedia Philosophy of Spirit." In Hegel's Philosophy of Spirit: A Critical Guide, edited by Marina Bykova, 11-28. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.

Stern, Robert. "Hegel's Doppelsatz: A Neutral Reading." Journal of the History of Philosophy 44, no. 2 (2006): 235-66.

Westphal, Kenneth. "Hegel's Critique of Theoretical Spirit." In Hegel's Philosophy of Spirit: A Critical Guide, edited by Marina Bykova, 57-82. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019.

AB S T R A C T

This paper looks at John McDowell’s account of perception and its relation to conceptual understanding and experience. It unpacks a long-standing and seemingly unsolvable debate between John McDowell and Charles Travis. It posits a new way of looking at the origin of this debate and a way to reconcile their positions. The core of the paper is McDowell’s claim that the conceptual, as thought of by Kant, extends—as he puts it— passively all the way out to the edge of perception. The combination of the perceptual and the conceptual gives experience. The reason McDowell concerns himself with this is to avoid what Wilfrid Sellars called the Myth of the Given. The Myth of the Given states that when perception and the conceptual are melded together outside the moment of perception, there must be some awareness of the content of the perception outside the conceptual awareness. Travis thinks this is not an issue, and that saying the conceptual extends as far out as possible lands McDowell in Idealism.

31