Hegel on Purpose

Laitinen, Arto; Sandis, Constantine

doi:10.1017/hgl.2019.12

Cited by 2 publications

(3 citation statements)

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“…Nearly forty years after the publication of Charles Taylor's seminal paper on Hegel and the Philosophy of Action (1983/2010), a both expressivist and normative understanding of Hegel's theory of social action has become the hegemonic model in contemporary literature (see Laitinen and Sandis 2010: 7). But how has Taylor's expressivist legacy been appropriated and transformed?…”

Section: Introduction: Assumptions and Shortcomings Of Contemporary ‘mentioning

confidence: 99%

Expressive Embodiment: Hegel, Habitual Agency and the Shortcomings of Normative Expressivism

Testa¹

2020

Hegel Bulletin

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In this paper I tackle the normative re-appropriation of the legacy of Charles Taylor's expressivist understanding of Hegel's theory of action. I argue that a normative understanding of Hegel's expressivist notion of agency by interpreters such as Robert Pippin, Terry Pinkard, Michael Quante and Robert Brandom, has been obtained at the price of losing sight of the principle of embodiment and of its relevance for our and Hegel's understanding of social action. I aim at relocating Hegel's notion of expressive embodiment at the core of his explanation of action. Rather than following Taylor's hermeneutical reconstruction of the principle of embodiment, I try to reconstruct it by putting at its core the notion of habit formation with the help of conceptual tools taken from contemporary embodied cognition approaches. I first discuss the Anthropology and argue that habit, understood as a sensorimotor embodied life form, is not only an enabling condition for agency, but in fact an ontological constitutive condition for all its levels of manifestation. According to this reading, the Hegelian approach to embodiment offers a model that not only assigns to habit a positive constitutive role in the formation of human mindedness, but also overcomes the dualism between habitual motor routine and intentional activities. If we approach Hegel's understanding of agency from this vantage point, we can gain a perspective which allows us to appreciate a naturalist strand of Hegel's expressivism about action and to free it from certain basic anti-naturalistic assumptions of contemporary normative expressivist interpretations of Hegel on social action.

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Section: Introduction: Assumptions and Shortcomings Of Contemporary ‘mentioning

confidence: 99%

Expressive Embodiment: Hegel, Habitual Agency and the Shortcomings of Normative Expressivism

Testa¹

2020

Hegel Bulletin

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“…This is what differentiates actions from (other) events. A careful reading of Hegel's text, as Pippin emphasizes, reveals that it is sociality that gives rise to a retrospective conscience of intentions: ‘only as long as it is manifested or expressed, then it is possible (even for the subject itself) to retrospectively determine what the intention must have been’ (Laitinen and Sandis 2010: 8).…”

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confidence: 99%

“…Opposing the individualist theoretical position, intended to capture the sense of an action from the agent's intention, Pippin claims that we cannot separate actions from other events without referring to ‘the position of a subject about what is happening and why’. The reference to the subject, in Hegel, does not allude to intention as an individual instance, for its interiority ‘cannot be understood regardless of social relationships; my relationship with myself is mediated by my relationship with others’ (Laitinen and Sandis 2010: 8). This is what differentiates actions from (other) events.…”

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Dialectics and Difference: Negative Dialectics as a Logic of Action

Sevilla¹

2019

Hegel Bulletin

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This paper argues that the different ways of facing Hegel's system, as an impossible attempt to harmonize tradition and openness to novelty, respond to an underlying malaise: that provoked by the disturbing question of “the actuality of philosophy” after Hegel. That question insistently arises with respect to different paradigms of contemporary philosophy, and is found in critical theory, in analytical philosophy of action, in Žižek's materialism, and in Derrida's deconstructive reading. Adorno's interpretation introduces the tension between universal concepts and laws, transmitted by the cultural tradition, and particular elements that the subject of the action must always take into account. As a consequence, the subject must include what is not reducible to a concept, which enables the construction of a language of experience that transcends the identifying thinking of the concept and makes negative dialectics possible as a theory of action.

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Hegel on Purpose

Cited by 2 publications

References 20 publications

Expressive Embodiment: Hegel, Habitual Agency and the Shortcomings of Normative Expressivism

Expressive Embodiment: Hegel, Habitual Agency and the Shortcomings of Normative Expressivism

Dialectics and Difference: Negative Dialectics as a Logic of Action

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