Zeitschrift für Kulturphilosophie 2008/2: Hegel

Hegel’s central concept of „spirit“ has been repeatedly misinterpreted, as if it stood for spiritualist metaphysics or even a subjective idealism. Hegel’s use of this term apparently needs translating, whereby in the context of his early writings up to The Phenomenology of Mind, the term „culture“ seems like a good equivalent, although it was not available to Hegel in its present-day broad sense. This possibility is admittedly limited by Hegel’s later determination of mind and nature, which we are not able to follow without transforming his absolute idealism into a speculative idealism, but this does not come into question as a possibility for a philosophy of culture.

Within the Kantian ethics consciousness of the moral principle is a fact of reason which cannot be grounded in any antecedent data, empirical or rational. Hegel however argues that the fact of reason is necessarily embedded in the fact of „Sittlichkeit“, that a pure reason is an empty and chimerical construction, that moral knowledge is unavoidably rootet in the contingent moral convictions of the given cultural and social environment. This essay defends Hegel’s critique of Kant’s moral philosophy and – by generalizing Hegel’s hermeneutic approach – sketches the outlines of an explicatory concept of ethics which contradicts the scientistic understanding of moral philosophy characteristic for Kant, the utilitarianism and the supporters of discourse ethics likewise.

Derrida’s discovery of „supplementary“ logic as the basis of Rousseau’s thinking is assessed in the historical contexts both of modern philosophy and metaphysics between Leibniz and Hegel. Rousseau’s supplementary proposition proves not to be identical with the modern propositional function, but with the „infinite proposition“ („das unendliche Urteil“) in Hegels Science of Logic. It is shown that this proposition structures Hegel’s concept of disunion („Entzweiung“) in the productive overcoming of Rousseau’s anthropological critique of representation as developed in the Phenomenology of Spirit.

The essay treats the development of Hegels concepts of imagination, recollection and memory. Mentalistic restrictions which are significant for the Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften (1830) are confronted with central arguments in the Phänomenologie des Geistes and the Wissenschaft der Logik, but especially with Hölderlins concept of a „procedure of the poetic mind“. The discoveries Hölderlin makes let realize what the hegelian keyword of a „sign making phantasy“ promises.

The paper argues that a philosophically sound theory of cultural memory has to clarify three presuppositions. First, the relationship between individual and collective memory has to be explained. Second, the empirical data on recollection and memory provided by neurological and historical research has to be discussed in terms of a philosophy of culture. Third, the specific material and/or immaterial „memory-bearers“ or memory-media („Trägermedien“) in which cultural memory takes shape have to be examined. The article, then, shows that the first elaborate account of cultural memory was given by 19th century „Völkerpsychologie“, inaugurated by Moritz Lazarus and Heyman Steinthal. Their theory of cultural memory was much indebted to a critical interpretation of Hegel’s conception of „objective spirit“. Accordingly, the last sections of the paper give a reexamination of Hegel’s theory of recollection and memory and deal with the question whether this theory can contribute to present cultural memory discourse.