Hegel ve Modern Toplum

Modern European Philosophy

by Charles Margrave Taylor, Kadir Gülen (Translator), Frederick Neuhouser (Contributor)

Felsefe tarihine özgün katkılarıyla yirminci yüzyılın en önemli filozoflarından biri kabul edilen Charles Taylor bu zengin çalışmasında Hegel’in toplum felsefesinin günümüz için geçerliliğini ortaya koyuyor. Hegel’in özgürlük felsefesine yaptığı vurguyla, çağımızın en büyük sorunlarını düşünürken birey ve toplum ilişkisini, yabancılaşma ve öznellik meselesini tarihsel bir bakışla yeniden değerlendirmemize fırsat veriyor. Hegel düşüncesinin temellerini anlaşılır bir dille özetleyen bu çalışma Hegel’i keşfetmek isteyen okurlar için de çok değerli bir kaynak.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, Politics, Sociology, History

284 pages, Paperback

First published April 5, 1979

About the author

Librarian Note: There is more than one author in the Goodreads database with this name. This profile may contain books from multiple authors of this name.

Other authors with this name:

Charles Taylor
Charles Taylor, Journalist, Film critic

Charles Margrave Taylor CC GOQ FBA FRSC is a Canadian philosopher, and professor emeritus at McGill University. He is best known for his contributions to political philosophy, the philosophy of social science, history of philosophy and intellectual history. This work has earned him the prestigious Kyoto Prize, the Templeton Prize, the Berggruen Prize for Philosophy, and the John W. Kluge Prize, in addition to widespread esteem among philosophers. (Source: Wikipedia)

Reviews

[محمد شکری · Rating 4 out of 5]

در عالم فلسفه (هرمنوتیک) اصطلاحی رایج است به نام «از-آنِ-خود-سازی»*. از-آن-خود-سازی، به معنای جذب یک ایده اصیل و بازسازی آن بر اساس پیش فرضهای جدید و برای حل مسائل نو است. در اصل از-آن-خود-سازیِ هرمنوتیکی نه امری تجویزی، بلکه توصیفی است، ولی اگر آن را واجد مولفه های انتقادی بدانیم، میتوان گفت از-آن-خود-سازی هم خوب و بد دارد و هم بجا و نابجا

چارلز تیلور، فیلسوف کانادایی با یک خروار جایزه کوچک و بزرگ برای آثار خود، یک فیلسوف تمام عیار زنده است که با ترکیبی از اجتماع گرایی**، هرمنوتیک و چندفرهنگی نظریات مهمی در فلسفه سیاسی ارائه کرده است. تیلور یک کتاب مفصل درباره هگل (با همین عنوان) دارد که شرحی فلسفی از اوست. ولی «هگل و جامعه مدرن» کتابی شرحی نیست، نوعی بازسازی فلسفه هگل در قالب اجتماع گرایی و نقد لیبرالیسم است که اثر را نه تنها برای علاقمندان فلسفه، بلکه دوستداران جامعه شناسی و اندیشه سیاسی نیز بسیار جذاب کرده است. انسجام این اثر در بکارگیری فلسفه هگل و طرح بستر اجتماع گرایی نمونه عالی «از-آن-خود-سازی» و الگوی نوع خاصی از فلسفه تطبیقی است

کتاب در دو فصل ابتدایی به مفهوم دیالکتیکی آزادی و بیگانگی (دو مفهوم اصلی فلسفه سیاسی هگل) پرداخته و فصل سوم را به پیگیری تاثیر هگل در هگل گرایان بعدی، به ویژه مارکس اختصاص داده است



* appropriation
** communitarianism

[Humble · Rating 4 out of 5]

Something universal across the commentary on Hegel I've seen from everything from twitter to Schopenhauer to Kierkegaard to whoever else, is that Hegel is not only hard to understand he may be purposefully unclear. So here at least I sacrifice a vague ideal of the value of engaging with primary sources, because it really sounds like a pain to read this man directly. What this book does is briefly: the intellectual strains that Hegel takes on, Hegel himself, the way Hegel's legacy has been transformed in his successors, and how Hegel's categories and language are still useful in talking about both modern philosophy and modernity in general, "despite his ontology and conclusions being incredible if not untenable." One of its most recurring points is seeing Hegel as synthesizing the particularity and unity of self in expressivism (ex Herder), and the autonomous radical freedom of Kant, and setting himself against the purposeful irrationalism of the Romantics.

"I would like to claim that this ambition of combining the fullest rational autonomy with the greatest expressive unity was also central to Hegel’s philosophical endeavor. In this he was at one with his Romantic contemporaries...What separates Hegel from his Romantic contemporaries is his insistence that the synthesis be achieved through reason."

Among the number of things I found interesting about this book, it was genuinely exciting to read this after reading William Blake, who I encountered with a real kind of shock, as I really didn't know what the Romantics were all about except in broadest of terms like "reacting to the Enlightenment and taking up the French/American Revolution."

It is thrilling to read an author move through the lineage of ideas, to say what was revolutionary about Kant, the Romantics, Hegel, and many others. To read what what they picked up from their forebears. How they reacted to the Enlightenment. What they synthesized or discarded for their own projects. What Marx transformed about Hegel or what Nietzsche stretched about the Romantics and Hegel's conceptions of freedom. It's both a grand introduction to a narrative of the relational and historical tapestry of ideas, and a temptation as secondary literature that such a book can substitute for taking in the substance of each of those loci and finding those connections yourself.

As far as the thesis of the book, it seems like a fine one, though it's hardly a presentation of prescriptions for the troubles of this age, it's more modestly presenting ways in which Hegel can be used to diagnose, critique (and how he anticipated), modern contradictions.

Quotes (from the book, rarely Hegel, and honestly I mostly ended up listing wayyy more stuff not directly dealing with the thesis of the book. I also highlighted like 40% of the entire ebook, mostly not listed here, within my color scheme):

"The influence of Romantic ideas has largely been on the definition of individual fulfilment, for the sake of which these larger structures operate. Modern civilization has thus seen the proliferation of Romantic views of private life and fulfilment, along with a growing rationalization and bureaucratization of collective structures, and a frankly exploitative stance towards nature. Modern society, we might say, is Romantic in its private and imaginative life and utilitarian or instrumentalist in its public, effective life."

" The prime tasks of thought and sensibility were seen as the overcoming of profound oppositions which had been necessary, but which now had to be surmounted. These were the oppositions which expressed most acutely the division between the two ideals of radical freedom and integral expression. These were: the opposition between thought, reason and morality on one side, and desire and sensibility on the other; the opposition between the fullest self-conscious freedom on one side, and life in the community on the other; the opposition between self-consciousness and communion with nature; and beyond this the separation of finite subjectivity from the infinite life that flowed through nature, the barrier between the Kantian subject and the Spinozist substance."

Hegel’s Spirit, or Geist, although he is often called ‘God’ and although Hegel claimed to be clarifying Christian theology, is not the God of traditional theism; he is not a God who could exist quite independently of men, even if men did not exist, as the God of Abraham, Isaac and Jacob before the creation. On the contrary, he is a spirit who lives as spirit only through men. They are the vehicles, and the indispensable vehicles, of his spiritual existence, as consciousness, rationality, will. But at the same time Geist is not reducible to man; he is not identical with the human spirit, since he is also the spiritual reality underlying the universe as a whole, and as a spiritual being he has purposes and he realizes ends which cannot be attributed to finite spirits qua finite, but which finite spirits on the contrary serve. For the mature Hegel, man comes to himself in the end when he sees himself as the vehicle of a larger spirit.

"On Hegel’s view there is an inner link between the Romantic subject’s claims to boundless creativity and his experience of the world as God-forsaken"

"Hegel’s answer is that each term in these basic dichotomies, when thoroughly understood, shows itself to be not only opposed to but identical with its opposite."

"Hegel’s notion of subject was. And this is the more worth while in that his notion is important philosophically in its own right, that is, as a conception of the human subject which breaks with the dualism which had become dominant in philosophy since Descartes among both rationalists and empiricists.6Hegel’s conception builds on the expressivist theory, which was developed by Herder and others. As we saw, this brought back Aristotelian categories in which we see the subject, man, as realizing a certain form; but it also added another dimension in that it looks on this realized form as the expression, in the sense of clarification, of what the subject is, something which could not be known in advance. It is the marriage of these two models, of Aristotelian form and modern expression, which enables us to speak here of self-realization." (the pages following this show how Hegel and expressivism was anti-dualist/anti-Cartesian)

"Thus expressivist theory as a marriage of hylomorphism and the new view of expression is radically anti-dualistic. And so was Hegel’s theory of the subject. It was a basic principle of Hegel’s thought that the subject and all his functions, however ‘spiritual’, were inescapably embodied...This principle of necessary embodiment, as we may call it, is central to Hegel’s conception of Geist, or cosmic spirit...this universe was his embodiment...The universe must therefore both be grasped as something analogous to a life form, hence understood by the Aristotelian-derived category of ‘internal teleology’; and it must be read as something analogous to a text in which God says what he is...it's goal is self development and knowledge" (might not include a quote that distinguishes Hegel from pantheism)

What distinguished Hegel’s position from pantheism in his own mind was the rational necessity which, it is true, could not exist without the world as the ensemble of finite things, but which was in this sense superior to the world; that it determined its structure according to its own exigencies. Hegel’s Geist is thus anything but a world-soul, whose nature would be given just as ours is, however great and awe-inspiring. And it is this same insistence on rational necessity which distinguishes his view from that of certain Romantics, whose notion of an unfathomable cosmic spirit or an endless process of creation resembles that of a rationally impenetrable world-soul.

"Hegel took over the notion from Kant and Fichte that consciousness is necessarily bipolar, that it requires the distinction of subject and object."

To state the whole, we have to bring out two terms in opposition and yet in necessary relation (and hence mediate), and characterize the whole as the overcoming of this opposition (and hence also mediate).Everything is thus mediate. For it cannot exist on its own. But its inability to exist on its own is supposed to spring from inner contradiction. Hence for Hegel contradiction must also be a universally applicable category. Hegel says in a famous passage (WL, II, 58) that contradiction is as essential to reality as identity. Indeed, if he had to choose between these two as to which was more important, he would choose contradiction, for it is the source of all life and movement.

"We can see from this how closely related the two kinds of dialectic are in Hegel’s work. Each figures in the explanation of the other. Hegel’s philosophy of history refers us to his ontology; and his ontology requires historical development."

"Hegel says of the belief that there is Reason in history that ‘It is not simply a presupposition of study; it is a result which happens to be known to myself because I already know the whole. Therefore, only the study of the world history itself can show that it has proceeded rationally'" (my note: lmfao)

"The Romantic origins of Fascism have been widely remarked, indeed perhaps too facilely traced at times. But Marxism too incorporates in its own way, through its Hegelian parentage, the twin aspirations to radical autonomy and expressive unity, claimed now not on behalf of the individual, but of the ‘generic being’ (Gattungswesen) of man."

"Hegel is important today because we recurrently feel the need for a critique of the illusions and distortions of perspective which spring from the atomistic, utilitarian, instrumental conceptions of man and nature, while at the same time puncturing the Romantic counter-illusions they continually generate."

"The dilemma of radical freedom can be restated succinctly as follows: if freedom is to renounce all heteronomy, any determination of the will by particular desires, traditional principle or external authority, then freedom seems incompatible with any rational action whatsoever...Hegel’s free rational will escapes vacuity because unlike Kant’s it does not remain merely universal but produces a particular content out of itself...(really long paragraph expansion follows this)...No wonder Hegel has been difficult to classify on the liberal/conservative spectrum. For he rehabilitates the notion of a cosmic order as a corner-stone of political theory; he speaks of the state as divine. And this kind of thing we think of as the hallmark of conservative, even reactionary thought. But this order is utterly unlike those of the tradition. There is nothing in it which is not transparently dictated by reason itself. It is thus not an order beyond man which he must simply accept. Rather it is one which flows from his own nature properly understood. Hence it is centred on autonomy, since to be governed by a law which emanates from oneself is to be free. The order thus gives a central place to the autonomous, rational individual.

"Alienation arises when the goals, norms or ends which define the common practices or institutions begin to seem irrelevant or even monstrous, or when the norms are redefined so that the practices appear a travesty of them."

"The general-will theory cannot admit of representative institutions, as we see with Rousseau."

Hegel gave little importance to nationalism. And this was the cause of his failure to foresee its pivotal role in the modern world. As an allegiance it was not rational enough, too close to pure sentiment, to have an important place in the foundations of the state. But it is also true that it cannot provide what modern society needs in his view. And this is a ground for differentiation, meaningful to the people concerned, which at the same time does not set the partial communities against each other, but rather knits them together in a larger whole.

"The revolution may ‘imagine that it is willing some positive state of affairs, such as universal equality’, but in fact it can realize nothing. For such actuality leads at once to some sort of order, to a particularization of organizations and individuals alike; while it is precisely out of the annihilation of particularity and objective characterization that the self-consciousness of this negative freedom proceeds. Consequently, what negative freedom intends to will can never be anything but an abstract idea, and giving effect to this idea can only be the fury of destruction.(PR, §5)"

Sittlichkeit and Moralität (important concepts I won't include a quote to explain)

"The worrying thing is that these modes of Sittlichkeit seem to be breaking down or at least undergoing extreme strain through all the industrialized world. Can any of them provide for a post-industrial state? What is the underlying conception of man and society which can provide a pole of identification for us? Are any of the modes which sprang from the liberal or revolutionary traditions adequate to the task? Hegel’s philosophy provides a valuable starting point if we want to ask questions of this range. For it not only has the theoretical language, but also has identified some of the forces at work"

(On Marx) "This potent combination of the radical Enlightenment and expressivism comes from a transposition of Hegel’s synthesis from Geist on to man... not man as an individual, but as a ‘generic essence’... The transformation of human society is not aimed at an eventual recognition of a larger order but ultimately at the subjugation of nature to a design freely created by man...Under communism men freely shape and alter whatever social arrangements exist. They treat them as instruments. But at the same time this collective shaping of their social existence is their self-expression."

(On ML) "...this massive social engineering is presented as the outcome of the laws of history, emerging from the masses as their inescapable will and destiny. There are colossal contradictions in this position: the laws of history cannot be the basis of social engineering and reveal the inevitable trend of events; the mixture of voluntarism and engineering allows no place for the growth of freedom."

"Schopenhauer’s vision provides a model for a deeply pessimistic view of human freedom, based on the sense that man’s instinctual nature is other than and uncombinable with rational freedom, and at the same time unconquerable. It is this latter point which differentiates Schopenhauer from his mentor, Kant. This conception of man can lead to despair about freedom understood as self-dependence, either because the untrammelled ‘freedom’ of the instinctual self seems worthless if not loathsome, or because the self defined in opposition to the instinctual seems relatively powerless."

It was Nietzsche who pushed this to its most uncompromising expression. If the radical freedom of self-dependence is ultimately empty, then it risks ending in nihilism, that is, self-affirmation through the rejection of all ‘values’. One after the other, the authoritative horizons of life, Christian and humanist, are cast off as shackles on the will. Only the will to power remains. The power and impact of Nietzsche’s work comes from his fierce espousal of this destructive movement which he pushes to the limit. And yet he also seems to have held that the will to power of self-defining man would be disastrous. Man as a purely self-dependent will to power must be ‘overcome’, to use Zarathustra’s expression. Nietzsche had an idea of this reconciliation between man’s will and the course of the world in his vision of eternal recurrence, which is not easy to follow. But this idea seems to have been that pure self-affirmation must lead to an impasse, that it has at some point to link up with a deep endorsement of the course of things. ‘To redeem the men of the past and to change each “Thus it was” into a “Thus I would have it!” – this alone I call redemption.’

[Jacob Aitken · Rating 5 out of 5]

Charles Taylor claims this isn't merely a summation of his earlier tome on Hegel. That's not really true. A number of pages are lifted but I think he succeeds in succinctly tying Hegel's ontology to Hegel's politics and showing the latter's relevance for the modern age.

Hegel's Ontology

Hegel sought to synthesize the Romantic desire for freedom and expression with the Rationalist desire for Reason. The Romantics saw Enlightenment science severing man’s unity. Man can only be self-conscious when he abstracts himself from the world. But when he does that, he severs himself from the organic unity of life. Reason and Life are thus opposites. But they are opposites which can’t exist without the other.

This leads us to Geist (God, sort of) as the Embodied Subject. A rational subject must be embodied because their must be an opposite pole in which it may flourish. Hegel rejects both Christian theism (God independent of the world) and naturalism (God as not absolute). Self-positing: God eternally creates the conditions of his existence. Hegel is not so much arguing for an existent reality, but for the conditions that Geist be.

What is the Dialectic?

we start with the most elementary notion of what consciousness is, “to show that this cannot stand up, that it is riven with inner contradiction and must give way to a higher one, which is also in turn shown to be contradictory” (55).

Politics as Alienation Overcome

Modern society has seen the proliferation of Romantic views of life along with the rationalization and bureaucratization of collective structures and an exploitive stance toward nature (71). The adequate form of Spirit (remember, Spirit must be embodied) is social. Man has to be part of something larger than himself, since man cannot exist by himself.

alienation: this happens whenever the public existence no longer has meaning for me: e.g., the perceived futility of voting; nominal religious belief in Church-States. Individuals then strike out on their own to define their individuality. They then (ironically) come together as a new social unit.

Negative freedom would require that the whole outcome be decided by me. Yet, the whole outcome is a social one, so it cannot be decided by me alone. Thus, negative freedom is impossible.

The Modern Dilemma

Here is why modern liberal society is doomed: radical participation in civic structures is only possible if there is a ground of agreement, or underlying common purpose (Augustine’s common objects of love).Democracy and participation cannot create this; they merely presuppose it. The demand for absolute freedom by itself is empty.
Modern ideology and equality leads to homogenization [Taylor isn't always clear on what he means by homogenization] of society. It is an acid drip on traditional structures, yet it cannot replace them.

Hegel and Marx

This is where Charles Taylor, using Hegel's analysis, cuts Marxism to the bone. The Soviet view sees the proletarian party as “engineers of building in conformity with the laws of history…[combining] two opposed pictures of the human predicament. It shows us man, on one hand, imposing his will on the course of history...On the other hand dialectical materialism sets out the laws which govern man and history with an iron necessity” (151). “The laws of history cannot be the basis of social engineering and reveal the inevitable trend of events” (152).

Analysis and Conclusion

A Christian cannot accept Hegel's ontology. It echoes pantheism and is openly process theology. Hegel's analysis of epistemology on lower levels is sometimes interesting. Hegel's insights on politics (if not his conclusions!) are occasionally brilliant.

The concepts of social alienation are more pronounced today than ever before. Hegel was spot on. His critique of Negative Freedom of the French Revolution applies equally to Marxism (and its body count) and the Cultural Leninism of today's America.

[Peter Bradley · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hegel and Modern Society by Charles Taylor



I read this book as part of my Romantic Revolution to Marx reading arc. Charles Taylor is a well-known modern philosopher. He is probably best known for “A Secular Age.”[1] In the early 1970s, Taylor wrote a lengthy text on Hegel. In 1975, he trimmed his longer work into “Hegel and Modern Society.” I am emphasizing the 1975 date because some of Taylor’s comments about the society he was living in can map onto our society in 2025.

Taylor’s book is both longer than Peter Singer’s “Hegel: A Very Short Introduction” and not as reader-friendly. Where Singer moved from History to Metaphysics out of consideration for the reader, Taylor tosses the reader into the deep end right at the beginning. That doesn’t mean that the book is inaccessible. I read Taylor first and got a lot out of it.

Taylor starts out with the observation that Hegel combined two trends of “thought and sensibility of his day.” These trends were “reactions in late eighteenth-century Germany to the mainstream of the Enlightenment.” One was something Taylor calls “expressivism,” which arose with the “Sturm und Drang” movement. The Enlightenment viewed man as an object of scientific analysis. Romanticism imagined man as an “expressive object.” “Human life was seen as having a unity rather analogous to that of a work of art, where every part or aspect only found its proper meaning in relation to all the others. Human life unfolded from some central core – a guiding theme or inspiration – or should do so, if it were not so often blocked and distorted.” (p.1) Human beings were compounded of different elements, e.g., soul, body, reason, and feelings, that gave rise to a ”living expressive unity.” This perspective placed man in natures and insisted that man had to recover “communion with nature.”

The other trend was the Kantian perspective on freedom. From this perspective, man existed apart from nature by reason. Man did not have to operate according to external influences; rather, he could be autonomous and rely exclusively on reason, not on natural desires. Kant separated morality from contingent motivations, such as happiness or pleasure, and made morality a matter of rational will.

For intellectual Germans of the 1890s, the ideas of expression and radical freedom became key issues. Hegel’s purpose was to unite these “trends” – freedom and integral expression – into a single unity, when, in fact, they appeared to be in opposition to each other.[2]

Prior to Hegel, Friedrich Schelling (1775-1854) had sought to unify freedom and integral expression with the idea of a cosmic soul in Von der Weltseele (1798) (“On the World Soul”). Schelling posited that man is “the vehicle whereby the cosmic spirit brings to completion a self-expression the first attempts at which life before us in nature.” Schelling defined his idea of the identity of nature and thought as “Nature is visible spirit, spirit invisible nature.”

Enter Hegel, who posited Geist (or Spirit), although “he is often called ‘God,’” but not the God of traditional theism. For Hegel, spirit cannot exist without being embodied.[3] The substrate that embodied the Geist was the universe, particularly that part of it capable of reason, i.e., humanity. [4]

Hegel’s relationship with the Romantic matrix he lived in was ambiguous:

For this point of view, Hegel’s synthesis can be seen as a realization of the fundamental ambition of the Romantic generation. And this may seem a little surprising at first, since we rightly do not look at Hegel as a Romantic. Rather we know him to be one of the sharpest critics of the Romantic generation.

Taylor, Charles. Hegel and Modern Society (Cambridge Philosophy Classics) (p. 11). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

Specifically, Hegel insisted that the synthesis be achieved through reason, which distinguished him from the Romantics, who preferred appealing to intuition. Reason involves a clear definition of distinctions, e.g., between subject and object, self and other, but Hegel would meet the Romantic concern about reason’s division of the human subject by “insisting that the ultimate synthesis must incorporate division as well as unity.” This approach was clearly evident in the dialectic, where a proposition generated its own opposition, which required a resolution (or reconciliation) by moving to a higher level of abstraction.[5]

This approach applies not only to man but to cosmic spirit, or Geist, as well. The Geist was also referred to as “the Absolute” by Hegel, by which he meant the “subject” that underlies and manifests itself in all reality. Since spirit or subjectivity is necessarily embodied, Giest, or God, cannot exist separately from the universe he sustains and in which he manifests himself.

The nature of spirit (or mind) is reason. The nature of the mind is to realize reason, freedom, and self-consciousness.[6] Freedom is necessary for reason: Spirit (or mind) is self-conscious, which means that it is rationally aware of a self which has been expressed in its embodied form. Full self-awareness is not possible without freedom, since awareness would not be of the self but of some distorted version of it. Conversely, freedom is impossible without self-awareness. Taylor explains:

Now let us transfer this from man on to Geist, and see what it shows us about the necessary structures of the world. If Geist as subject is to come to rational self-awareness in freedom, then the universe must contain, first, finite spirits. Geist must be embodied. But bodily reality is external reality, it is partes extra partes, extended in space and time. Hence for consciousness to be it must be located; it must be somewhere, sometime. But if a consciousness is somewhere, sometime, it is not somewhere else, sometime else. It thus has a limit between itself and what is not itself. It is finite.

Taylor, Charles. Hegel and Modern Society (Cambridge Philosophy Classics) (p. 25). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

Geist must be embodied in finite spirits. But if Geist is to progress, it must be embodied in beings capable of expressive activity. Thus, “if Giest is to be, the universe must contain rational selves.”

So, Hegel posits a God who must be embodied. This rules out theism:

Thus there are two clearly defined and relatively comprehensible views which could be mistaken for Hegel’s. The first, which we could call theism, looks on the world as created by a God who is separate and independent of the universe. This makes the idea readily understandable that the world is to be seen as designed, as having a structure dictated by purpose. But this cannot be accepted by Hegel, for it violates the principle of embodiment. A God who could exist without the world, without any external embodiment, is an impossibility.

Taylor, Charles. Hegel and Modern Society (Cambridge Philosophy Classics) (p. 37). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

The other option is “naturalist,” i.e., the world is not created but exists, and on it beings evolve who are vehicles of rational life and come to see themselves as vehicles of a rational life larger than themselves. Taylor says that this is unsatisfactory for Hegel because it makes the world a “brute fact” or “given” which would define the Geist and deny him his radical, unconditioned freedom. Taylor further explains:

Hegel can accept neither of these views. What he needs is some combination of the features of both. Like the theist, he wants to see the world as designed, as existing in order to fulfil a certain prospectus, the requirements of embodiment for Geist. But like the naturalists, he cannot allow a God who could design this world from the outside, who could exist before and independently of the world. His idea is therefore that of a God who eternally makes the conditions of his own existence. This is what I have been trying to express, following a frequent usage of Hegel, with the term ‘posit’ (setzen).

Taylor, Charles. Hegel and Modern Society (Cambridge Philosophy Classics) (p. 38). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

This view has been called “panentheist” or “emanationist.”

At this point, Hegel’s dialectical method is applied to Geist working through history. Geist faces a contradiction: it must be embodied in external, finite reality, but its life is infinite and unbounded. The resolution for Giest is that men become capable of reason and live according to reason. The life of the Geist (as Absolute (subject)) is a process of movement that overcomes its own opposition and negates its own negations. Contradiction is the source of movement “because whatever is in contradiction must pass over into something else.” Taylor explains how Geist is able to reconcile freedom and integral expressivism:

This term ‘reconciliation’ often comes to the fore in connection with the opposition between man and God, between finite and infinite spirit, as can well be imagined. As far as the theoretical opposition is concerned, its resolution is already implicit in the foregoing discussion of the duality man/world. For this latter was overcome by our showing the ultimate identity of God’s self-knowledge with man’s knowledge of the universe. That is, ultimately art, religion and philosophy, what Hegel called ‘absolute spirit’, give us the self-knowledge of Geist. The idea of God as necessarily hidden and unknowable is therefore overcome, although like the idea of the Ding-an-sich it belongs to a necessary stage of human development.

Taylor, Charles. Hegel and Modern Society (Cambridge Philosophy Classics) (pp. 48-49). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

Giest (or God) reconciles freedom and expressivism for man by unifying God’s self-knowledge with man’s knowledge of the universe in art, theology, and, most importantly, philosophy.[7] In achieving this synthesis, Giest (or God) must work through a real culture/State:

Freedom is only real (wirklich) when expressed in a form of life; and since man cannot live on his own, this must be a collective form of life; but the state is the collective mode of life which is backed by the full power of the community; and thus freedom must be embodied in the state.

Taylor, Charles. Hegel and Modern Society (Cambridge Philosophy Classics) (p. 50). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

Hegel “demonstrates” that he has answered the “aspiration of the age” in uniting the greatest rational autonomy with the fullest expressive unity with nature.” (p. 51.) One demonstration consists of the dialectical method[8] applied to the “hierarchy of being,” which passes through the various levels of life from inanimate object to spirit. Another demonstration involves applying the dialectical method to various categories starting with “being” and moving up to the category of Idea (since, after all, Hegel is an Idealist.) A third kind of demonstration is based on consciousness. It starts by the “poorest, most elementary notion of what consciousness is, to show that this cannot stand up, that it is riven with inner contradiction and must give way to higher one.” This continues until we come to the true understanding of consciousness as self-knowing Geist, or absolute knowledge.[9]

Is this confusing and not very persuasive? Taylor agrees. In Chapter 2, Taylor acknowledges that Hegel’s “ontology of Geist is close to incredible.” However, Hegel’s straddling of the Enlightenment and Romanticism has been important for modernity, which amalgamates them like a tossed salad. Taylor explains:

But the Romantic strain has been contained, as it were, in modern Western civilization. The major common institutions reflect rather the Enlightenment conception in their defining ideas. This is obviously true of the economic institutions. But it is as true of the growing, rationalized bureaucracies, and it is not much less so of the political structures, which are organized largely to produce collective decision out of the concatenation of individual decisions (through voting) and/or negotiation between groups. The major collective structures of an advanced industrial society tend to appear at best as instruments of production or decision (at worst, as threatening oppressors), whose value must ultimately be measured in what impact they have on the plight of individuals. The influence of Romantic ideas has largely been on the definition of individual fulfilment, for the sake of which these larger structures operate.

Modern civilization has thus seen the proliferation of Romantic views of private life and fulfilment, along with a growing rationalization and bureaucratization of collective structures, and a frankly exploitative stance towards nature. Modern society, we might say, is Romantic in its private and imaginative life and utilitarian or instrumentalist in its public, effective life. What is of ultimate importance in shaping the latter is not what its structures express, but what they get done. The bent of modern society is to treat these structures as a neutral, objectified domain, to be reorganized for maximum effect, although this may be held in check or even periodically overridden by powerful collective emotions, principally nationalism, which have their roots in the Romantic period.

Taylor, Charles. Hegel and Modern Society (Cambridge Philosophy Classics) (pp. 68-69). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

Historically, the murderous 20th century was fostered by Hegel:

The Romantic origins of Fascism have been widely remarked, indeed perhaps too facilely traced at times. But Marxism too incorporates in its own way, through its Hegelian parentage, the twin aspirations to radical autonomy and expressive unity, claimed now not on behalf of the individual, but of the ‘generic being’ (Gattungswesen) of man.

Taylor, Charles. Hegel and Modern Society (Cambridge Philosophy Classics) (p. 69). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

In the second part of his book, Taylor addresses Hegel’s History of Philosophy. Hegel’s central thesis is explained by Taylor as involving the following steps:

First:

This is another way of putting the point that Spirit is initially divided from itself, and has yet to return to itself. If man is to rise to the point where he can be the vehicle of this return, he has to be transformed, to undergo a long cultivation or formation (Bildung).

Taylor, Charles. Hegel and Modern Society (Cambridge Philosophy Classics) (p. 71). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

Second:

Spirit can only return to itself through the transformation of man’s form of life in history.

Taylor, Charles. Hegel and Modern Society (Cambridge Philosophy Classics) (p. 71). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

Third:

What then is the form of life which man must attain in order to be an adequate vehicle of Spirit? First of all, this must be a social form. We saw in chapter 1 how the existence of finite spirits, in the plural, was part of the necessary plan of Geist. Thus, in order to know itself in the world, Spirit has to bring about an adequate embodiment in human life in which it can recognize itself. ‘The goal of world history is that Spirit come to a knowledge of what it truly is, that it give this knowledge objective expression [dies Wissen gegenständlich mache], realize it in a world which lies before it, in short, produce itself as an object for itself [sich als objectiv hervorbringe]’ (VG, 74). That is why the state as the highest articulation of society has a touch of the divine in Hegel’s eyes. In order to realize God’s (Spirit’s) fulfilment, man has to come to a vision of himself as part of a larger life. And that requires that as a living being he be in fact integrated into a larger life. The state is the real expression of that universal life which is the necessary embodiment (it would not be inappropriate to say ‘material base’) for the vision of the Absolute.

Taylor, Charles. Hegel and Modern Society (Cambridge Philosophy Classics) (p. 71). Cambridge University Press. Kindle Edition.

So, the Geist is working through history to create a state at a stage of development where it can “return to itself,” i.e., recognize its own rationality. [10]

Taylor opposes Hegel’s approach to Kant's. The Kantian approach achieved rationality at the price of emptiness. Kant’s theory does not contain the content of rational structures in a fixed culture. The best expression of this emptiness is seen in the Terror of the French Revolution. Hegel argued that the drive for absolute freedom during the Jacobin period of Revolutionary terror stemmed from the absence of positive principles.

This helps to explain how Taylor thinks he squares rational autonomy with the ability of humans to express themselves as embodied beings:

It is that Rousseau and Kant, and both revolutionary and liberal protagonists of radical autonomy, all defined freedom as human freedom, the will as human will. Hegel on the other hand believed himself to have shown that man reaches his basic identity in seeing himself as a vehicle of Geist. If the substance of the will is thought or reason, and if the will is only free when it follows nothing else but its own thought, the thought or reason in question turns out not to be that of man alone, but rather that of the cosmic spirit which posits the universe.

This transforms the situation. The vacuity which bedevilled the theory of radical autonomy is overcome. The dilemma of radical freedom can be restated succinctly as follows: if freedom is to renounce all heteronomy, any determination of the will by particular desires, traditional principle or external authority, then freedom seems incompatible with any rational action whatsoever. For there do not seem to be any grounds of action left which are not wholly vacuous, that is, which would actually rule some actions in and others out, and which are not also heteronomous. But everything changes if the will whose autonomy men must realize is not that of man alone but of Geist. Its content is the Idea which produces a differentiated world out of itself. So that there is no longer a lack of determining grounds of action. To put this less succinctly, Hegel’s free rational will escapes vacuity because unlike Kant’s it does not remain merely universal but produces a particular content out of itself.

But this is its prerogative as cosmic subject. It is the absolute Idea which deploys a differentiated world. Human rational will finds a content not by stripping itself of all particularity in the attempt to attain a freedom and universality which can only be formal, but by discovering its links to cosmic reason, and hence coming to discern what aspects of our lives as particular beings reflect the truly concre

[Alexander]

If one wants a book that aspires to a comprehensive treatment of Hegel's thought, then Taylor's earlier book is a good one; however, if one is looking to understand Hegel's social and political theory, then this is a good place to start. While it may not be the only essential book on this subject, it's undoubtedly among them, and a pleasure to read.

[Blair · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book does two things at once: It gives the reader an introduction to Taylor's work on Hegel that is more fully realized in his great book, entitled Hegel; it attempts to bridge the work in the earlier book (published in the 1970s) to a more contemporary context. Great work.

[Reinhardt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Hegel

Charles Taylor does an admirable job attempting to clarify Hegel’s philosophy as well how his philosophy is relevant to modern society.

Hegel metaphysic is founded on the idea of Spirit (Geist). In his ontology, everything, nature, is undergirded with Spirit. Or as Hegel says, the spirit is embodied in nature, and in fact needs to be in order to have an influence on the world. The absolute Spirit is the ultimate ground of reality. It is this Absolute Spirit that has absolute freedom of action. This absolute spirit works the the objective spirit, which is contained in the societies, communities, and institutions of humans. The objective Spirit is the means of action in the world. In Hegel’s thought, the state plays an especially important part in the achieving the objectives of the objective spirit. The objective spirit works through the subjective Spirit which is our inner self consciousness.

Next, we have to integrate Hegel’s logic into his ontology. His logic is based on his metaphysics in that truth, or what truth is, is revealed in history through a dialectical process. There is no a-historical truth. Hegel’s objective spirit works historically through thesis, antitheses and synthesis (although Hegel never used those terms, his terms emphasized the dynamic nature of dialectic). The movement of time is critical to understanding Hegel’s logic. As with any language, this thesis, negation, synthesis only operates through the passage of time. This is a different than the understanding of timeless logic of Aristotle that is not conceptually time bound.
Hegel’s dialectics play a key role in his political philosophy given that Hegel embedded the dialectic process in history, he see it also at work in states and societies. They develop over time toward the absolute spirit. This places him firmly in the camp of evolutionary change vs revolutionary change. A state or society that is based on an a-historical reason alone is untenable to Hegel. The idea of a 'Year 0' society built on pure reason is untenable.

In addition, Hegel thought the institutions of a society and state were critical to its functioning. Without the institutions, and the ‘Stände’ as he called them the society would devolved into chaos. There needs to be differentiation in society. Estate, or classes if you want to use Marxist terminology. When in a society, absolute freedom is appropriated by humans rather than through the inherent order of the objective spirit, the result is every increasing alienation. In a state or society that demands absolute freedom of self-expressive choice, the result is every increasing homogeneity. There is no room for difference in a society when each man or woman has absolute freedom of action. Any differentiation results in inequality which limits the absolute freedom. The increasing lack of differentiation leads to increasing alienation, especially for minority groups who are promised absolute freedom of self-expressive living that can never be achieved. The result is an undifferentiated society that no one can identify with. No one derives meaning from undifferentiated homogeneity. All situations themselves must be eliminated as any difference of situation encroaches on the absolute freedom of the individual to define the self.

This type of absolute freedom is destructive when assigned to humans rather to the absolute spirit working through he objective spirit of institutions and Estates. Institutions are subset of state and society and provide meaning that a person can derive identity from.

Taylor touched on how Marx, a disciple of Hegel, appropriated the dialectic, but stripped out the idealism of Sprit and replaced it with a dialectic of material conditions. Stripping out the Spirit also located the absolute freedom in the individual with the resulting demand for absolute homogeneity. Freedom is cast wholly into the negative, free from something, rather that Hegel concept of freedom as positive, free to do something. Hegel’s freedom is realized in the structures of society. Only when we realize that freedom is bound up in these orders, can we actualize freedom.

Charles Taylor brings Hegel directly into engagement with the modern society. One would think this was written in the last 4 yeas, but it was published in 1979. Hegel’s foresaw the alienation that derives from the demand for undifferentiated, absolute freedom. The last part of the book reads more like the history of the last 50 years than prognostication of 200 years ago. Although Hegel’s solution are no longer tenable, as he himself would recognize–the historical dialect today doesn’t include an option for aristocracy–his insights are profound.

Well worth reading, but it’s not a simple work. Taylor writes clearly and concisely but the resulting text is dense and terse.

[Hooper Bring]

“To understand the evolution of the romantic elevation of art in the 1790s, Charles Taylor’s book on Hegel, a contemporary of the romanticists, proves a valuable source. Two great events in European history helped to formulate the bold ideas of the generation that began to write in the 1790s. One was the French Revolution, which according to both Heine and Marx was fought with pen strokes in Germany; the other was the emergence of
Kant’s philosophical critiques.?? Although the romanticists reacted more often to Fichte, his starting point had been Kant’s equation of freedom with moral freedom. Taylor links the expressive theory emerging from Sturm und Drang—that man’s highest goal is self-
expression—with the moral freedom outlined in Kant’s Critique of Practical Reason. “The expressive theory points us toward a fulfill-
ment of man in freedom, which is precisely a freedom of self-determination, and not simply independence from external impingement.
But the highest, purest, most uncompromising vision of self-determining freedom was Kant’s. No wonder it turned the head of a whole
generation.” Taylor goes on to specify that this whole generation was composed of the intellectuals of the 1790s, and the force of this newly gained freedom “was multiplied many times by the sense that the old order was breaking and a new one was being born which arose from the impact of the French Revolution.”

[Stephen Dedalus · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a fantastic, eye-opening read. Charles Taylor is an excellent scholar of Hegel.

Although a difficult text which will require a re-read at some point, it was a great introduction for the layman into Hegel's ontology and 'politics'.

I particularly enjoyed the chapter on 'politics and alienation' which I thought was the most approachable and offered cogent insights into what is going on in modern society.

The tensions between freedom and nature has never been more apparent - a soceity of free individuals whose social activity is expressive of who they are seems forlorn and futile. Nevertheless, if we are to progess in our hyper globalised and industrialised society, it is important to understand how we got here and what we should aim towards going forward.

[Wendelle]

Read 1/2 only. Very hard for layman in philosophy despite brevity. I give up

[William West]

A very clear, but not simplistic, explication of Hegel. Taylor is a superb writer.