28.10.2006
The last three days I was at a philosophy conference, held in Jena to
celebrate Hegel's masterpiece work, the Phenomenology of Spirit, which
he finished there two hundred years ago. Jena is also my home university,
where I studied philosophy for three years. I still know some people there,
and it was a great pleasure to be there again, to talk to them, and to learn
about Hegel and the Phenomenology from the conference talks.
For me, the highlights were John McDowell and Wolfgang Welsch. (I joined
the conference only from the fourth day, so I don't know what further
highlights I may have missed from the first part.) What distinguished both
was that they did more than just develop a reading of Hegel, but had
something to say of their own. Many of the other contributions were bright
and illuminating interpretations of chapters in the Phenomenology;
but there should be more to philosophy (when it is at its best) than just
unfolding the ideas that are buried in old books, shouldn't there?
McDowell's contributions to philosophy often take the form of offering
new paths through areas of contemporary discussions where it seems that
all alternatives have been examined and none of the discussed solutions are
entirely satisfying. In this instance, he discussed the question how it might
be possible to give an account of the normative force of reasons for a
rational agent. Without falling into a naturalistic or intuitionistic extreme
on either side (both are assumed not to carry much plausibility), it may seem
that the only viable way to do so is a constructivism (which takes
normativity to rest solely on the factual recognition of agents as rational
agents among each other). McDowell argued that there is a further
possibility, which he developed as a reading of the 'Reason'-chapter of the
Phenomenology.
Welsch explored the connections between Hegel's thinking about
conceptual structure, i.e. his 'Logic' (which is different from what we
commonly understand today when we use that term) and modern theory of
evolution. After emphasizing the distinction between autopoietic,
free-standing evolution of novel structures (sometimes also called
'emergence') and the development of structures that is just an unfolding
of a pre-scripted program, he argued that Hegel saw the former at work
in the evolving conceptual structures, but the latter in the development
of Spirit (and none of them in Nature). Welsch's own project is to
examine both Hegel's ideas about the conceptual and the results and latest
ideas from the natural sciences (which emphasize evolution as a primary
theoretical tool in a broad range of areas) and form a coherent new picture
of human life (and thought) in the world from that.
