Postscript to the Previous Entry

 

With the way of thinking about metaphysics (i.e., the nature of the whole of reality or Being, seen as a limited whole sub specie aeternitatis) seems to make it immune to reason or argument, like we are in bubble, solipsistic. Here I draw on Plato's Good - as a symbol - as to the heart at least and the rational mind informed by the heart, as self-evident, when perceived sublimely, unmixed with ego-consciousness. The sublime is the key to reality. Vincent and House are metaphysically blind, or meaning-blind to put it in other words.

     On the one hand, there is the danger revealed by Vincent in Collateral: metaphysical pictures becoming closed psychological systems, self-protective interpretations rooted in woundedness, fear, pride, or despair. If this is all metaphysics is, then every worldview becomes merely autobiographical fate. Reason becomes powerless because arguments are always absorbed back into the deeper orientation of the self. One ends near solipsism or Nietzschean genealogy: every philosophy is just disguised temperament. On the other hand, there is the danger in what I wrote about Vincent of reducing truth to merely subjective projection. This implication I deny because I am certain that there are experiences in which reality discloses itself with a kind of self-evidence as to put them beyond real doubt.

    For Plato, the Good is not merely another object inside the world. It is that by which intelligibility/morality itself becomes possible. In the Republic, the Good is compared to the sun: not simply something seen, but that through which seeing occurs. And importantly, the ascent toward the Good is not purely deductive. It involves conversion of the soul, purification of attention, liberation from illusion, reorientation of desire.

      This is where the connection to the sublime becomes philosophically important. The sublime, in the tradition from Immanuel Kant through Iris Murdoch and even Raimond Gaita, is often an experience in which ego-consciousness is interrupted. One is seized by something that exceeds utility, control, self-interest, or conceptual reduction. The self becomes decentered.

In such moments, reality is not merely “constructed.” One feels addressed by Being itself. The experience carries an authority prior to argument, yet not irrational. It is closer to vision than inference.

      In A Common Humanity, Gaita tells the story set during his work in a psychiatric hospital of his encounter with a nun whose matter-of-fact love toward those patients revealed their humanity. The contrast is with some of the institutional attitudes around him: certain doctors, nurses, and caretakers who treated the profoundly disabled patients as if they were beneath full human concern, objects of management rather than persons, even when they tried to treat them as equals. The nun’s greatness lies precisely in the fact that she did not merely behave “kindly” toward them in a paternalistic or professionalized way. Her love was uncondescending. She responded to them as fully human beings, not as defective approximations of humanity. And this is what Gaita means when he says, in effect, that she “proved” their equal humanity. Her way of seeing exposed the spiritual blindness implicit in the colder institutional attitude. She did not construct their dignity through theory. She revealed it.

      That is why the example is sublime. It is not merely morally admirable behavior. It discloses reality. It shatters ordinary ways of seeing. One suddenly perceives that the worth of a human being is not dependent upon intelligence, productivity, beauty, autonomy, or social usefulness – like a “leak from another world” as Gaita put it in another context. The sublime experience has the character of revelation rather than deduction. (And this is not sentimentality. The nun does not romanticize suffering or deny the terrible realities of disability and institutional life. The sublimity lies in her truthful attention: she sees through degradation without denying it.)

 

. . .

 

   The sublime is a key, perhaps the most important key, to reality. The sublime breaks the enclosure of the ego. It reveals that meaning is not simply projected outward from consciousness but encountered. The beautiful face, moral holiness, profound love, sacrificial goodness, the starry heavens, liturgy, tragedy, music, even deep silence — these can function as disclosures of reality that relativize the smaller self.

     This also explains why the moral and metaphysical are inseparable. Ego-consciousness distorts perception. Pride, resentment, despair, and instrumental thinking flatten the world. But love, humility, attention, and reverence disclose deeper aspects of reality. In that sense, metaphysics is not immune to reason, but reason itself depends upon moral and spiritual orientation. That is close to Plato’s deepest insight: the condition of the soul affects what can be known.

     And perhaps the sublime matters because it momentarily frees one from captivity to the self. Not permanently perhaps, but enough to glimpse a world that is not organized around one’s wounds, appetites, or defensive narratives. The experience becomes a kind of phenomenological evidence that reality is richer, deeper, and more meaningful than nihilism allows.

     I think of Socrates arguments with Polus and Callicles in the Gorgias, how exasperated they became at the thought that it was better to suffer evil than do it. The emotional reaction of Callicles and Polus is philosophically revealing. Socrates is not simply presenting them with an abstract paradox. He is confronting an orientation toward reality and human flourishing. The claim that it is worse to do evil than to suffer it sounds absurd to them because they begin from assumptions tied to power, success, domination, self-preservation, and worldly injury. Harm is understood externally: loss, humiliation, weakness, pain. Socrates relocates the center of gravity inward, into the condition of the soul itself. That is why they become exasperated rather than merely unconvinced. If Socrates is right, then the tyrant, the manipulator, the successful predator, the person who “wins” outwardly while corrupting his soul, is actually miserable. And conversely, the victim who suffers injustice but remains inwardly ordered may be less damaged in what most truly matters. To Callicles this sounds almost pathological. He experiences Socrates as overturning the obvious structure of reality. One can feel in the dialogue that Callicles is not only intellectually resistant but existentially threatened. Accepting Socrates’ position would require revaluing everything: ambition, masculinity, pleasure, rhetoric, political success, even the meaning of freedom itself. It would turn the world on its head, as Callicles puts it.

     This connects directly to what I was saying about metaphysical pictures and fate. Callicles’ worldview is not merely a theory he could casually abandon after hearing a better argument. It is intertwined with desire, ego, social aspiration, pride, and identity. Socrates is challenging not just propositions but the structure of his soul – confronting it with the Good, with reality.

 

      Plato clearly thinks argument still matters. Why? Because argument can sometimes awaken recollection, unsettle self-deception, expose contradictions within a life. But argument alone is insufficient if the soul resists seeing. That is why the dialogue has such dramatic tension. The issue is not simply “Who has the better logic?” but “What kind of person is capable of recognizing the truth here?” Socrates seems to stand within a vision of reality in which the Good possesses a kind of luminous self-evidence. The integrity of the soul appears more real to him than bodily suffering or social success. Callicles cannot yet see this aspect of reality. He experiences Socrates almost as someone speaking from another world.

 

     Which returns me to Wittgenstein’s line: the world of the happy man and the unhappy man are different worlds. Or perhaps Plato would say: the just and unjust man inhabit different orders of reality because they love different things and therefore perceive differently. Plato never portrays this merely as subjective preference. One vision is truer than the other. But access to that truth requires transformation of attention and desire, not only formal reasoning. The Good is not simply an abstract metaphysical entity or construction. It illuminates beings so that they appear rightly. The nun’s love is a kind of participation in that illumination.

The Film Collateral and Metaphysics

I think the early Wittgenstein’s remark about the world of the happy man and the later Wittgenstein’s ‘being held captive’ by a picture of the world says a lot about the way individuals come to hold certain philosophical positions. I have already analyzed House MD in this respect. Now I want to give another example, the movie Collateral with Tom Cruise and Jamie Foxx.

 

Collateral follows Max (Jamie Foxx), a cautious and intelligent Los Angeles taxi driver who dreams of someday starting a limousine company but has become trapped in routine and hesitation. One night he picks up Vincent (Tom Cruise), a calm, sharply dressed man who offers him a large sum of money to drive him to several destinations across the city. Max soon discovers that Vincent is a professional hitman carrying out a series of murders connected to a criminal case. Forced to drive Vincent through the night, Max becomes unwillingly drawn into violence, police pursuit, and moral confrontation. During the course of  the film  we get  less a conventional thriller than a philosophical encounter between two radically different attitudes toward life. Vincent presents a cold, nihilistic vision of existence shaped by detachment, anonymity, and cosmic indifference, while Max, despite his fears and compromises, still retains a sense of human dignity and moral responsibility. Over the course of the night, Max is pushed to confront both Vincent’s worldview and his own passive way of living.  I am no movie critic, but it was artistically very well done at every level from the acting to the directing. Great job creating the atmosphere.

 

The first scene in the taxi, where Vincent tells the story of the dead man riding unnoticed on the train for hours, is an expression of a picture of the world: human beings are isolated, anonymous, fundamentally insignificant. After the first victim falls on Max’s taxi, Vincent expresses surprise at Max’s all-too-human horror and confusion over the murder, and this exchange takes place, in which Vincent tries to dissolve moral seriousness into statistical insignificance: “Max, six billion people on the planet, you're getting bent out of shape cause of one fat guy.” Then he continues: “Well, tens of thousands killed before sundown. Nobody's killed people that fast since Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Did you bat an eye, Max?” And finally, in response to Max’ reply he didn’t know any of them: “You don't know the guy in the trunk, either.” Vincent treats moral concern as irrational inconsistency. Since Max cannot emotionally respond to all suffering, Vincent implies he has no rational basis for responding to this suffering. It is almost a nihilistic parody of universalism: if compassion cannot encompass everything equally, then no individual life has ultimate weight.     

 

The last scene I want to mention is the explicitly cosmic one, as Vincent tells Max: “Millions of galaxies of hundreds of millions of stars, and a speck on one in a blink. That's us, lost in space. The cop, you, me... Who notices?” This is closely connected to the comment about how anonymous life in LA:

“Six hours he's riding the subway before anybody notices his corpse doing laps around L.A... Nobody notices.” Vincent moves between cosmology and urban anonymity. The immense universe and the disconnected megacity mirror each other. In both, the individual disappears into statistical insignificance.

     Vincent’s tragedy is not merely that he believes life is meaningless, but that he has become unable to see meaning anymore. Wittgenstein might say that an aspect of reality has disappeared for him. The world has become spiritually flat. And the ending matters here. Vincent dies in the same anonymous way he described earlier, alone on public transport, unnoticed by the world. The point is not simply irony. It is that he has interpreted existence through anonymity and emptiness for so long that he finally inhabits that very world completely. Vincent’s belief about the universe being indifferent or meaningless are not conclusions reached by detached reasoning. They function more like a lens through which all experience is interpreted. Wittgenstein’s remark in the Tractatus that “the world of the happy man is a different one from that of the unhappy man” is helpful here precisely because he does not mean that two different physical universes exist. Rather, the same events appear under radically different aspects depending on one’s relation to reality as a whole. The “world” changes because significance changes.

      Max, though anxious, compromised, and not fully alive, still inhabits a world where human beings matter. His concern for his mother, his unrealized dreams, his hesitations, even his moral fear, all testify that he still experiences persons as more than objects moving through empty space. Vincent sees these same things almost as illusions. He strips everything down to functionality, contingency, survival, and death. The film undermines Vincent’s world version. Max’s horror at the dead man in the trunk already refutes Vincent’s worldview existentially. Max cannot help noticing. That is why Vincent keeps trying to break him psychologically: Max’s spontaneous moral response threatens Vincent’s entire metaphysical posture. Thus Wittgenstein’s ‘world of the unhappy man….’ Vincent’s “world” is not a theory. It is a world emptied of aspect, presence, and human meaning. The unhappy man inhabits a world in which persons become interchangeable instances within a meaningless totality. Max for all his shortcoming still sees persons as persons.

 

. . .

 

Metaphysics is only theoretical when disconnected from life. Metaphysics is in the case of Vincent interwoven with fate (bad childhood); life choices and evil actions; resulting core attitude toward life; then the metaphysical pictures (he thinks about it, has to justify his life) to which is in then held captive for to question it would be to face the unbearably painful truth of his life. This seems like a paradigm of how philosophies are born, as interpretations crystallized out of suffering, action, guilt, love, disappointment, temperament, and fate.

     Vincent’s philosophy does not appear first as a syllogism. It appears first as a way of coping and rationalizing. If the world is fundamentally indifferent, then his emotional isolation makes sense. If persons are ultimately anonymous specks, then killing can be absorbed into the general machinery of existence. If meaning itself is an illusion, then his own damaged life no longer stands under judgment. And once a person has lived inside such a picture long enough, questioning it becomes existentially dangerous. For Vincent to truly see one victim as infinitely significant would threaten the entire structure holding his soul together. The metaphysical picture protects him from remorse, grief, vulnerability, perhaps even despair. The picture becomes spiritually necessary. This is very close to Wittgenstein’s notion of an Einstellung or “attitude toward the soul.” One does not merely believe certain things. One comes to see reality under certain aspects. And these aspects are bound up with forms of life. It is also close to what Nietzsche suspected when he asked whether philosophies are really disguised autobiographies. Or what Blaise Pascal meant when he observed that people almost always believe what suits their condition. Or what Iris Murdoch argued: that moral vision is conditioned by the quality of consciousness itself. A selfish or wounded consciousness literally sees a different world.  You could even formulate the process almost genealogically: fate → emotional formation → choices → habits of attention → moral injury or deepening → characteristic attitudes (Einstellungen) → metaphysical interpretation → reinforcement of the original life pattern. Then the metaphysics ceases to be merely theoretical. It becomes self-protective. To abandon it would require repentance, mourning, forgiveness, humility, or hope. Sometimes that is harder than maintaining even a bleak philosophy. This is why arguments alone rarely overturn fundamental worldviews. At the deepest level, people are not simply defending propositions. They are defending a lived orientation to reality, often one bound up with pain and identity.

   But the reverse can also happen. A person encounters goodness, beauty, forgiveness, love, or genuine attention from another person, and suddenly an older metaphysical picture becomes impossible to sustain. A new “world” appears. That too is deeply Wittgensteinian: the facts may remain the same, yet the world changes because significance changes. Thus philosophies are often less like mathematical systems than spiritual interpretations of existence.

   What makes Vincent philosophically interesting is that he may not simply be “held captive by a picture.”  Wittgenstein often speaks of philosophical confusion as captivity to misleading abstractions. But Vincent’s worldview feels less like conceptual confusion than like a hardened existential stance. His metaphysical outlook has become embodied in habit, profession, emotional desolation, and fate. His nihilism is lived before it is articulated. In that sense, the film points to something that thinkers like Gaita or Murdoch emphasize: metaphysical vision is morally and spiritually enacted. A person gradually becomes capable or incapable of seeing reality under certain aspects. Vincent has trained himself to see the world as fundamentally deadened. His “philosophy” both justifies and expresses the kind of man he has become.

    There is also something deeply anti-Cartesian about this. The film implies that metaphysical outlooks are not primarily produced by abstract proofs. They emerge from ways of inhabiting the world. Vincent’s ontology of meaninglessness corresponds to emotional isolation, instrumental rationality, and violence. Max’s lingering decency corresponds to a still-living sense that some things matter absolutely. A philosophically interesting film.

The Sublime in Iris Murdoch "The Beautiful and the Sublime Revisited"

 

The Sublime has always been an important concept to me since I read Kant’s Third Critique and Thomas Weiskel, The Romantic Sublime, as as student in a course with Wolfgang Natter, a very interesting teacher.   I now think Weiskel’s psychologizing of the Sublime less interesting than the structure and the metaphysical implications. Thus it surprised me that Murdoch is so critical of it in “The Beautiful and the Sublime Revisited.”

      Murdoch is reacting against a modern moral-spiritual tendency she associates with the sublime once it becomes detached from transcendence and objective goodness. My attraction to the sublime is close to what one finds in Edmund Burke, Immanuel Kant, or the great Romantics: an experience of human finitude before something overwhelming, inexhaustible, or transcendent. In that tradition, the sublime is not necessarily egoistic. It can involve precisely the collapse of ordinary selfhood before being, nature, infinity, God, or mystery. This is why the metaphysical structure interested me more than Weiskel’s psychologizing. Weiskel, like much twentieth-century criticism, tends to internalize the sublime into structures of consciousness, anxiety, linguistic crisis, or psychic oscillation. But for me the real fascination of the sublime is ontological. Something appears which exceeds conceptual containment. One stands before a reality that cannot simply be reduced to utility, conceptual mastery, or empirical description.

   Murdoch thinks the modern sublime often becomes entangled with the apotheosis of consciousness itself. She sees a line running from Romanticism into existentialism and certain forms of modern art in which transcendence collapses into heroic subjectivity. The sublime becomes not reverence before being, but the drama of the self confronting abyss, chaos, or nothingness and constituting meaning through its own freedom. That is why she contrasts it with beauty. Beauty, for Murdoch, arrests the ego. It compels attention outward. The sublime, in the modern tradition she is criticizing, tends to intensify self-consciousness and will.

 

    I think the key question is whether the sublime is fundamentally ecstatic or Promethean, or even Satanic in the sense of Milton’s Satan: “The mind is its own place, and in itself Can make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” In Satan’s mouth the line becomes something more radical and metaphysical. The self claims sovereignty over reality itself. Meaning no longer derives from participation in a moral and ontological order beyond the self. The mind becomes self-grounding. That is why the line is spiritually intoxicating. It expresses absolute inward autonomy: nothing outside me determines meaning; consciousness itself constitutes value. And this is exactly what Murdoch fears in existentialism.

       It is interesting to use Weiskel’s description of the sublime to compare the two versions. Weiskel describes the sublime as a three-stage movement. First, there is ordinary cognition. The mind encounters the world through familiar conceptual structures and symbolic forms. Reality appears intelligible and proportioned to human understanding. Second, something appears that overwhelms those structures. Imagination or understanding fails. One encounters excess, magnitude, power, infinity, abyss, or indeterminacy. Existing conceptual frameworks break down. This is the moment of blockage, crisis, or “semantic overflow.” One cannot adequately represent what confronts consciousness. Third, a higher-order response emerges. Consciousness somehow reconstitutes meaning after the breakdown. A new symbolic or reflexive order is generated.

      Murdoch’s criticism is directed at the nature of this third moment in modernity. For me, and perhaps for older religious forms of the sublime, the third stage remains revealing. The breakdown of finite cognition opens the self toward transcendence. The symbolic recovery does not abolish mystery but acknowledges it. Symbol, myth, poetry, or contemplation become gestures toward what exceeds conceptual mastery. The ego is humbled. In Murdoch’s view, however, modern Romanticism increasingly transforms this third moment into an act of self-assertion.

The structure becomes something like this:

1. Ordinary reality is experienced as limited, dead, banal, or spiritually insufficient.
2. The self undergoes crisis before the infinite, the abyss, or the breakdown of ordinary meaning.
3. Instead of submitting to transcendence, consciousness reconstitutes the world through its own freedom, imagination, or will.

At that point the sublime ceases to be contemplative and becomes Promethean/Satanic. This is where Murdoch sees the connection to Hegel, existentialism, and eventually modern voluntarism. The self does not merely encounter transcendence. It dialectically absorbs or reconstitutes transcendence within consciousness itself. Using Weiskel’s structure, one might say Murdoch fears that the third stage no longer preserves genuine otherness. The “beyond” is recovered only as a moment within self-consciousness. Thus the failure of finite reason becomes the triumph of self-aggrandizing consciousness. The collapse of representation becomes an opportunity for the expansion of the self. That, I think, is the “heroic” element she distrusts.

      One can see how she would interpret Jean-Paul Sartre through this structure:

1. The world lacks objective meaning.
2. Consciousness confronts nausea, contingency, nothingness.
3. Freedom creates value through choice.

Murdoch sees something spiritually continuous between this and certain Romantic conceptions of imagination.

    So one version of the Sublime, one Romanticism remains receptive to transcendence. The imagination discloses meaning already present in reality. The other becomes constructive. The imagination creates meaning in the absence of objective order. Murdoch’s critique is aimed at the second, and I completely agree with her. But my embrace of  the metaphysical implications of the sublime points to something Murdoch underestimates: the sublime can also wound the ego. It can reveal not the grandeur of the self but the inadequacy of the self before reality. In that sense, the sublime may actually become an ally of her own notion of “unselfing,” which is how I see it and why I was at first surprised at her criticism of it.

 . . .

 

I once found Kantian philosophy so appealing precisely because it set up the Sublime so well. Locked in a phenomenal world with no cognitive access to reality. The Sublime is like a crack in the phenomenal world. Reality breaks through and overwhelms the mind. Morality is sublime. Only the imagination can reconstitute balance on a symbolic level. But even on my current view that we are not locked into a phenomenal world cut off from reality, if there is merely a difference between our limited grasp of reality and reality itself, I think there is space for the Sublime. So I would  disentangle the sublime from Kantian metaphysics while preserving its phenomenological and ontological force. I reject  Kant’s phenomenal/noumenal dualism as such but affirm the structure of disproportion between finite cognition and reality. The sublime does not require absolute epistemological imprisonment within phenomena. It only requires that reality exceeds our conceptual grasp. (Wittgenstein's Tractatus has the same structure: he calls the Sublime "the Mystical" in that work.)

     So Weiskel’s three stages still work as a description.

 

Ordinary intelligibility

The world appears within stable conceptual and perceptual forms. Reality is domesticated enough for practical and cognitive orientation.

 

Rupture or excess

Something appears whose depth, magnitude, power, beauty, terror, or ontological density exceeds those forms. The mind experiences inadequacy. Existing categories fail to contain what is disclosed.

 

Symbolic or imaginative reconstitution

Consciousness does not fully master what has appeared, but it develops symbolic, poetic, metaphysical, religious, or artistic forms capable of bearing the excess without reducing it.

 

Crucially, the third stage does not abolish transcendence. Symbolization is a finite response to inexhaustibility. The healthiest forms of symbolism preserve the wound of transcendence within the symbol itself. The symbol points beyond itself. It does not close the gap. Thus the sublime to survive outside strict Kantianism. Even in a realist or participatory metaphysics – say, something closer to Thomas Aquinas, Plato, Martin Heidegger –  finite beings still encounter reality partially, analogically, perspectivally, and incompletely. Reality can still exceed the intellect without becoming unknowable in principle. Contra Kant, reality is genuinely accessible, yet never exhaustively comprehensible. I think that position  fits experiences of the sublime better than Kant’s own framework. If reality were wholly inaccessible, then the sublime risks becoming merely a drama internal to consciousness. The “beyond” would become structurally empty, a limit-concept generated by the mind itself. But in the world  version I believe in, the excess belongs to being itself. The mountain, storm, moral greatness, music, starry heavens, death, beauty, tragedy, or holiness are not merely occasions for subjective crisis. They disclose dimensions of reality that surpass finite articulation. Thus the imagination becomes symbolic rather than constitutive. The imagination does not create transcendence; it responds to transcendence.

 

     This makes clear my distance from the modern subjectivist sublime Murdoch fears. In the  interpretation I embrace, the self is not heroically creating meaning after the collapse of foundations. Rather, the self is attempting to bear, articulate, and participate in a reality whose fullness always exceeds it. That is closer to religious symbolism, metaphysical poetry, and even negative theology than to existential self-assertion. The Sublime is transformed from a crisis of epistemology into an event of ontology. The important thing is not that the mind fails but that reality is deeper than finite conceptualization. It acknowledges both contact with reality and the inexhaustibility of reality. Being is intrinsically richer than any finite articulation of it. The sublime occurs when reality discloses more than finite conceptual consciousness can contain, yet not so little that nothing is disclosed at all.

 

 . . .

 

    The sublime is not a deductive proof of transcendence. It is not an argument in the strict sense. It is a mode of disclosure or encounter whose interpretation depends partly upon one’s larger metaphysical orientation.

     A reductionist can always redescribe the experience in causal or psychological terms: dopamine release, evolutionary adaptation, cognitive overload, pattern-recognition failure, neurological arousal, symbolic compensation mechanisms, and so forth. And in one sense those descriptions may even be true as far as they go. The experience obviously has neurological and psychological conditions. Human beings are embodied creatures. But such explanations do not necessarily settle the ontological question of what is being disclosed in the experience.

     This is very similar to what happens with love, beauty, moral conscience, grief, or religious experience generally. One can always describe the mechanisms involved. But the metaphysical question remains open: does the experience merely arise from matter, or does it place us in contact with aspects of reality not exhaustively describable in reductive terms? The reductionist tends to assume that if an experience has a biological basis, its transcendent interpretation is invalid. But that does not logically follow. After all, every human act of knowing has biological conditions, including mathematics, logic, and science themselves. The existence of neural correlates does not by itself determine the truth-status of the experience.

    I am not treating the sublime as a coercive proof. It functions more like a disclosure-event that invites metaphysical interpretation. In Wittgensteinian language, one might say it belongs less to demonstrative proof than to an “aspect” under which reality can be seen. Or perhaps closer to Raimond Gaita or Iris Murdoch themselves: the sublime can alter one’s sense of what kind of world this is. Not by logical compulsion, but by deepened vision. Thus such experiences often become existentially decisive even though philosophically underdetermined. Two people may stand before the same mountain range, requiem, cathedral, or night sky. One, the unhappy man, sees an adaptive cognitive-emotional response produced by evolutionary pressures. Another, the happy man, sees a disclosure of being whose depth exceeds instrumental explanation. Neither interpretation is forced by pure logic alone.

 

    At that point larger metaphysical orientations, moral sensibilities, prior experiences, and even forms of life begin to matter. Thus Murdoch’s notion of “attention” (which she takes over from Weil) is relevant. What one is capable of seeing depends partly on the kind of soul one has become. Reality is not disclosed equally under every moral and spiritual condition. And perhaps this is also why reductionism can sometimes feel existentially unsatisfying even when intellectually powerful. It explains the conditions of experience while seeming unable to account for the depth, seriousness, or apparent meaningfulness disclosed within the experience itself. A sunset can be reduced to wavelengths and neural processing. Yet such explanations seem strangely irrelevant to the actual phenomenon of beauty as lived. Not false but incomplete.

 

. . .

 

I want to give two examples of the good sublime and two examples of the Satanic/Promethean sublime. I think what emerges from the good examples is a conception of the sublime very different from the one Iris Murdoch fears. Not the sublime of heroic self-assertion, but what we might call an affirmative or participatory sublime: experiences in which reality appears as carrying a depth of meaning, goodness, or transcendence that exceeds conceptual grasp while simultaneously calling the self beyond egoism.  These examples are important because they are not experiences of terror, magnitude, or annihilation in the Burkean/Kantian sense. They are experiences of an excess of Being disclosed through goodness, beauty, longing, or love.

     First comes ordinary inhabitation of the world. Reality appears within familiar  practical and conceptual horizons. One lives among things functionally, habitually, instrumentally. The self remains relatively enclosed within its ordinary projects and categories. Then comes an event of disclosure. In Surprised by Joy, C. S. Lewis describes moments of Sehnsucht or Joy provoked by music, myth, northernness, nature, poetry. The experience is paradoxical: simultaneously piercing pleasure and painful longing. What matters phenomenologically is that the object immediately transcends itself. The experience is not exhausted by the empirical stimulus. Something “beyond” is intimated through it. Similarly, in A Common Humanity, Raimond Gaita recounts the nun in the psychiatric hospital whose way of loving the patients disclosed a different vision of human reality. The patients ceased to appear merely as cases, burdens, damaged organisms, or social problems. Through her attention, their absolute humanity became visible.

      In both cases there is a rupture in ordinary perception. But unlike the nihilistic or voluntarist sublime, the rupture is affirmative. Reality appears deeper, more meaningful, more real than previously grasped. The self simultaneously experiences the inadequacy of existing conceptual frameworks, the disclosure of transcendence or inexhaustibility, and attraction toward what exceeds it. The experience is like an invitation.  Lewis repeatedly insists that Joy is never possession. It is longing awakened by encounter. The object awakens desire for something beyond itself. The experience therefore preserves transcendence precisely by refusing closure. Likewise, Gaita’s account of the nun is not reducible to moral reasoning. Her love discloses a dimension of human reality irreducible to biological, social, or utilitarian description or theory. One does not infer dignity abstractly. One suddenly sees it. And involved are not just emotions; the experience is revelatory.

    Phenomenologically, one could say that the affirmative sublime contains several moments:

 Excess

Reality discloses more significance than ordinary conceptual schemes contain.

 Decentering

The ego’s ordinary self-enclosure is interrupted. One experiences humility, receptivity, astonishment, longing, reverence, or moral awakening.

 Symbolic overflow

Literal language becomes inadequate. Symbol, poetry, myth, music, religious language, or moral exemplarity become necessary because discursive concepts alone cannot fully bear what is disclosed.

 Participatory attraction

The subject is not merely overwhelmed but drawn toward transformation. The experience carries normative weight. It implicitly calls one beyond selfishness, reductionism, or indifference.

 Inexhaustibility

The disclosure cannot be totalized into a final concept or system. One genuinely knows something, but what is known exceeds complete articulation.

 The affirmative sublime is a phenomenology of transcendence encountered through finite mediations such as beauty, love, goodness, music, nature, suffering, moral holiness, and Sehnsucht. Not transcendence grasped directly or possessed, but genuinely intimated. This kind of sublime defeats the ego rather than magnifying it. The self is enlarged precisely through acknowledgment of what is not itself. 

      The affirmative sublime and the Satanic or Promethean sublime may share an initial structure of rupture, excess, and transcendence of ordinary consciousness, yet they diverge radically in the spiritual interpretation of that rupture. In the affirmative sublime, transcendence humbles and draws the self outward toward participation in reality. In the Promethean sublime, transcendence becomes internalized into the drama of consciousness itself. The self survives the collapse of ordinary meaning by identifying with negation, power, lucidity, or self-creation.

     One can indeed see this  in Friedrich Nietzsche’s reading of Hamlet in The Birth of Tragedy. Nietzsche says Hamlet does not fail to act because he thinks too much in the ordinary sense. Rather, he has seen too deeply. He has perceived the terrible truth beneath appearances: the abyss beneath individuation, purposiveness, rational order, and moral optimism. Action becomes impossible because knowledge has dissolved the ordinary structures that make action meaningful.

     This is already a sublime structure: ordinary conceptual world, rupture through terrible insight, reconstitution of consciousness beyond ordinary meaning. But in Nietzsche the third moment becomes ambiguous and dangerous. The highest response is not humble participation in transcendent goodness, but aesthetic affirmation of existence despite its horror and groundlessness. The tragic artist says Yes to the abyss. That is sublime, but no longer in the participatory sense. Indeed, Nietzsche’s tragic heroism often consists precisely in refusing consolation through metaphysical transcendence. Meaning is created aesthetically in full awareness of contingency and suffering. This is why Murdoch would see Nietzsche as a culmination of the Romantic trajectory she fears, i.e., the heroic consciousness that survives nihilism through self-overcoming and aesthetic affirmation.

       And Adrian Leverkühn in Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus may be one of the greatest literary phenomenologies of this Satanic sublime. Leverkühn seeks transcendence through radical artistic and intellectual extremity. Ordinary human goodness, affection, warmth, bourgeois morality, and ordinary happiness appear inadequate or artistically inferior. Genuine greatness requires rupture, coldness, isolation, even demonic renunciation. The structure again resembles the sublime: ordinary reality appears spiritually insufficient, a terrifying disclosure or negation occurs, consciousness attempts transcendence through radical creativity, lucidity, or self-overcoming. But now transcendence is no longer participation in being or goodness. It becomes transgression. And importantly, the Promethean-Satanic sublime often involves a peculiar inversion: suffering, alienation, and negation become signs of superiority. The self identifies with what exceeds ordinary morality precisely through refusal of dependence, tenderness, limitation, or reconciliation. The Satanic sublime transforms transcendence into spiritual aristocracy. The affirmative sublime says: Reality is greater than I am. The Promethean-Satanic sublime says: I become greater through confronting or mastering abyss, negation, or isolation. This is why figures like Satan, Nietzsche’s tragic artist, or Leverkühn possess such aesthetic fascination. They enact a terrifying form of transcendence through refusal.

     And phenomenologically, the emotional tone differs from the affirmative sublime. The affirmative sublime tends toward wonder, gratitude, longing, humility, reverence, participation, love. The Promethean-Satanic sublime tends toward lucidity, defiance, ecstatic isolation, self-intensification, spiritual pride, heroic suffering, aesthetic hardness. Both begin from an authentic perception that ordinary bourgeois reality is not ultimate. But they diverge over what transcendence means. For Lewis or Gaita, transcendence points toward goodness deeper than ego. For Nietzschean or Satanic forms, transcendence often appears through the destruction of comforting illusions and the heroic endurance of what remains. And perhaps the deepest issue between these visions is over whether transcendence culminate in communion or in isolation. That may be the spiritual fork in the road between the affirmative and the Promethean-Satanic sublime.

 

. . .

 

For Gaita, authoritative examples matter because certain moral realities are not first grasped through abstract principles or deductions but through revelatory encounters with persons whose way of seeing discloses reality more deeply. The nun in A Common Humanity is authoritative not because she possesses institutional power or theoretical arguments, but because her love reveals the full humanity of the patients in a way others had failed to see. Love discloses its object. This connects deeply to the affirmative sublime as I just developed it. In both cases, ordinary conceptual frameworks are ruptured by an encounter with a reality whose depth exceeds previous understanding. The self experiences both inadequacy and disclosure. One suddenly sees more than one could previously conceptualize. The authoritative example functions almost as a moral analogue to the sublime. Through goodness, love, holiness, or attention, reality appears more real than before. And the response is not Promethean-Satanic self-assertion but humbled acknowledgment. The authoritative figure does not create value arbitrarily; rather, he or she discloses what was always there but unseen.

 

. . .

 

    The descent of the Holy Spirit during the Pentecost can be understood as an affirmative form of the sublime. The disciples at Pentecost are not simply ordinary people prior to any encounter with transcendence. They have already undergone earlier sublime ruptures through both the Resurrection and the Ascension. Pentecost comes after a long destabilization and transformation of their world. One could almost describe the sequence phenomenologically as successive intensifications of transcendence. The Crucifixion shatters their ordinary moral and messianic expectations. Meaning collapses into apparent defeat, abandonment, and catastrophe. The Resurrection then ruptures the limits of ordinary reality itself. Death is no longer absolute. Reality suddenly appears deeper and stranger than previously imaginable. The disciples encounter something both continuous with and exceeding ordinary embodied existence. Fear, astonishment, doubt, wonder all intermingle. The Ascension introduces yet another movement. Christ is no longer simply present within ordinary empirical immediacy. Presence becomes paradoxical: absent yet more universally present. The disciples are left in a state of longing, expectation, incompletion, and openness toward transcendence. So by the time of Pentecost, they already inhabit a transformed horizon. Their previous conceptual world has already been broken open repeatedly.

     And this changes the phenomenology of Pentecost itself. The event is not a first rupture but a consummating indwelling. If one used the structure of the affirmative sublime, it might now look something like this.

 

The world ruptured open

Through Resurrection and Ascension, ordinary finite categories have already proven insufficient. Reality has disclosed depths previously unimaginable.

 

Longing and suspended incompletion

The disciples now inhabit a state somewhat analogous to C. S. Lewis’s Sehnsucht: expectancy, absence, desire for fulfillment, openness toward transcendence.

 

Descent and participation

At Pentecost, transcendence no longer appears merely externally or episodically. Divine reality enters into participatory communion through the Holy Spirit.

 

And this perhaps reveals why Pentecost differs from many other forms of the sublime. The culmination is not simply awe before transcendence, but inhabitation by transcendence. The sublime becomes interiorized without becoming subjectivized. In the Promethean sublime, transcendence collapses into self-consciousness and autonomous will. At Pentecost, transcendence becomes interior without ceasing to remain genuinely other and divine. The Spirit dwells within persons while remaining infinitely beyond them. And because the Spirit is identified with divine love and goodness, the result is neither annihilation nor self-exaltation, but communion. The disciples do not become isolated heroic consciousnesses. They become capable of mutual understanding, courage, forgiveness, proclamation, and shared life.

    There is a sublime structure here: 1) the Resurrection discloses that reality transcends death, 2) the Ascension discloses that transcendence exceeds empirical immediacy, and 3) Pentecost discloses that transcendence is love seeking communion. The ego is not glorified or annihilated but transfigured through participation in divine love.

 

 

In memory of my teacher, Wolfgang Natter, and his seminar on the Sublime.

Works Cited 

Gaita, Raimond. A Common Humanity: Thinking about Love and Truth and Justice. 2nd ed., Routledge, 2000.

 Kant, Immanuel. Critique of the Power of Judgment. Translated by Paul Guyer and Eric Matthews, Cambridge UP, 2000.

 Kant, Immanuel. Kritik der Urteilskraft. Edited by Heiner F. Klemme, Felix Meiner Verlag, 2009.

 Lewis, C. S.. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. Geoffrey Bles, 1955.

 Mann Thomas. Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend. Translated by John E. Woods, Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.

 Murdoch, Iris. “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited.” Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, edited by Peter Conradi, Chatto & Windus, 1997, pp. 261–86.

Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Birth of Tragedy. Translated by Walter Kaufmann, Vintage Books, 1967.

Weiskel, Thomas. The Romantic Sublime: Studies in the Structure and Psychology of Transcendence. Johns Hopkins UP, 1976.

 

 

 

Iris Murdoch's Critique of Hegel and Romanticism

 In “The Beautiful and the Sublime Revisited,” Iris Murdoch is not using “Romanticism” to refer to the historical literary movement of Wordsworth, Novalis, or Shelley. She means something broader and more philosophical: a conception of the self in which consciousness becomes the source of value and meaning (as in Existentialism). Romanticism, for her, is the turn inward toward the will, imagination, authenticity, sincerity, self-expression, and the creative or autonomous ego. It is connected to the decline of the older Platonic and Christian picture in which truth and goodness are realities independent of the self, realities to which the self must conform to be what it is by nature. 

      Murdoch thinks modern philosophy after the Enlightenment increasingly relocates value inside consciousness itself. Instead of the soul looking outward toward the Good, modern thought turns inward toward freedom, will, authenticity, or self-creation. The Romantic artist becomes emblematic of this shift: the imagination no longer discovers meaning in reality but projects meaning onto reality. Romanticism culminates in the “heroic consciousness” of the modern self.

     Thus she sees Hegel as Romantic. For Murdoch, Hegel transforms reality itself into the unfolding self-development of Spirit. Being becomes intelligible through a historical dialectic in which consciousness progressively comes to itself. Reality is no longer something wholly other which humbles the self. Rather, reality is increasingly understood as mediated through the self-unfolding of mind or Spirit. She claims that this dissolves the independent, resistant reality of persons and things. In Hegel, contradiction and negation are aufgehoben — preserved and overcome within a larger rational totality. But Murdoch fears that this “sublation” can morally and spiritually endanger our sense of the irreducible particular individual. The individual risks becoming meaningful only as a moment within a larger historical process. As perhaps Christians think the lives of pre-Christian pagans were only a stage in Providence. She thinks this tendency appears not only in Hegel but throughout modern thought: the concrete individual person is sacrificed to systems, movements, historical necessity, or grand narratives of liberation.

     This she connects to the distinction between the beautiful and the sublime. The sublime, in her reading of modernity, becomes associated with power, will, transcendence, self-assertion, and the triumph of consciousness over contingency. The beautiful, by contrast, involves loving attention to what is other than oneself. Beauty humbles and decenters the ego. One does not create it; one attends to it. This is why Murdoch is drawn toward Plato. For her, genuine moral life requires “unselfing,” a patient attention to reality independent of our fantasies and ambitions. She fears the moral metaphysics of the sovereign self. Romanticism, in her sense, replaces contemplation with self-expression and replaces transcendence of ego with enlargement of ego.

     Thus she is suspicious of all philosophies that turn history into a salvific drama. In Hegel, history itself becomes the medium through which Spirit realizes freedom. Murdoch claims that such views can justify the suffering of concrete individuals by absorbing them into an allegedly rational historical whole. She thinks something morally essential disappears when tragedy and evil are too easily integrated into a dialectical/historical process.

       I am inclined to object that Hegel does not simply glorify the ego or subjective will; he is trying to overcome isolated subjectivity by showing how freedom is realized through ethical life, institutions, recognition, and participation in objective spirit i.e. reality, which is meaningful. Hegel’s “Absolute” is not an inflated individual self but something more like a reconciliation of subject and object, mind and world. But Murdoch identifies what she sees as a spiritual tendency in modernity: the gradual enthronement of consciousness, freedom, and will over reality, goodness, and attention. Hegel becomes, for her, one of the greatest and most sophisticated expressions of that tendency. She  is focusing on the inflation of subjectivity and the temptation to make consciousness itself the source of value. She fears that certain modern philosophies replace attentive love of reality with self-dramatizing visions of consciousness, will, creativity, authenticity, or historical destiny. We are not in essence a moment in Spirit or an expression of historical necessity; not a self-positing will or a creator of values. Morality begins in just and loving attention to what is real and other than oneself.

    For Murdoch, genuine morality often involves a kind of unselfing, which is to say, a patient acknowledgment of the independent reality of another person. And this is where she goes against some Hegelian tendencies. In Hegel, the individual can sometimes appear as meaningful primarily through participation in larger historical wholes like the family, ethical life, the state, or history. Murdoch claims that such frameworks can make concrete persons too easily “explainable” or “absorbable” into abstractions. A mother grieving a child or a lonely old man; an obscure act of goodness to a disabled person —

these realities matter absolutely, not merely as moments within historical rationality.

    And so it is clear why Murdoch rejects philosophies that too readily reconcile suffering into “the whole,” which connects to her critique of Romanticism more broadly. Murdoch thinks Romantic philosophy – by which she sees Sartre as the paradigm, I think – glorifies

will, sincerity, authenticity, heroic selfhood, or the dramatic individual consciousness.

This reduces genuine attention to reality because the self becomes too central. True goodness, for Murdoch, is quieter, humbler, less theatrical. No one creates value ex nihilo.

We discover and attend to it. I am very attracted to this line of thought. But also to the historical and communal development of understanding emphasized by Hegel. I think the tension is philosophically fruitful.

 

Hegel's Conception of Reality

 

      I feel I have missed something.  Again, I don’t pretend to be a Hegel scholar. I am just trying to make sense of what little I know of his work, still guided by my teacher and Charles Taylor. I feel like a minor league baseball player critiquing Willie Mays, but what else can I do? For Hegel, I believe, it is not just that our conceptual understanding of Being – which is ‘out there’ – deepens in history. Being reveals itself to itself over time through concepts. I don't really grasp that. But it's like nature itself matures over time towards a telos not yet fully clear. This is the difficult and strange heart of Hegel.

     I have wanted to understand Hegel a relatively modest way: e.g., human understanding develops historically. But Hegel means something deeper and more metaphysical than merely our ideas change over time. For Hegel, reality itself is not static substance but living process. Being is not inert presence sitting there complete and finished apart from manifestation and development. Reality itself unfolds “dialectically.” This is where I lose my footing though it is fascinating philosophical-mythology at the same time.

    I guess the crucial thing is that Hegel rejects the sharp separation between thought and being, or concept and reality. The world is not merely a collection of dead objects externally observed by consciousness. Reality has an inner rational dynamism. This is why Spirit (Geist) becomes so important, though I have only the vaguest of notions of how to state in my own words what that means. I suppose one could say that “Spirit” does not simply mean ghostly substance or private mind. It means something more like:

living self-interpreting intelligibility becoming conscious of itself through nature, history, culture, institutions, art, religion, and philosophy. Thus Hegel sees history as metaphysically significant. History is not merely one thing after another happening externally in time. It is the gradual coming-to-self-consciousness of Spirit (God? Being?) I mean we are made of star dust, star dust being part of the universe/nature that has become self-conscious and can partially know a partially knowable universe.

    Perhaps human freedom as Hegel conceived it would help. Nature contains implicit possibilities (even they transcend natural science) such as life, consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, the ethical life, etc. These are not externally inserted into a meaningless universe. They emerge from within reality itself. I like that about Hegel for it is what I also believe. Matter gives rise to life. Life develops into consciousness. Consciousness develops into self-consciousness.Self-consciousness develops into ethical, artistic, religious, and philosophical forms.Reality increasingly becomes able to know itself. Human beings are therefore not accidental spectators standing outside Being. They are one way in which Being becomes self-aware.

     This is why Hegel sometimes sounds almost theological. The Absolute is not a static perfection existing outside history. The Absolute realizes or manifests itself through historical becoming. There is something like maturation here, something teleological. An acorn becoming an oak is a favorite kind of Hegelian image. The oak is not externally added to the acorn. The acorn contains the inner dynamism toward fuller realization. (recalls Aristotle). Analogously, Spirit unfolds historically toward fuller self-consciousness. Ancient societies embodied certain truths like unity with communal life,

ethical belonging, immediacy. Modernity develops other truths individual freedom, subjectivity, reflection. (I have often thought of Germany’s political parties like this: each contains a kernel of truth which they exaggerate at the expense of the whole truth to oppose each other.) Each stage both reveals and conceals aspects of Spirit.

     At this point, I hesitate. In some passages Hegel indeed seems to speak as though the universe itself strives toward self-consciousness. Before Hegel, “Being” was often thought as timeless presence. After Hegel, one can begin to think that Being reveals itself historically. That is revolutionary. But Hegel believes he has reached full philosophical communism, so to speak: full self-consciousness, the end of history, Being revealed in fullness. So – like many others – I am drawn to the historical disclosure of intelligibility, the developmental character of understanding, the embeddedness of reason in history, while resisting the stronger metaphysical claim that reality culminates in complete self-presence to thought. I acknowledge that Being is revealed or reveals itself historically but do not accept that it (through us) every becomes fully transparent.

 

. . .

 

  Hegel’s philosophy sounds like a kind of “cosmicized Incarnation.” Not in the orthodox Christian sense, where the Incarnation is a unique historical event in which God becomes man in Jesus Christ, but in the sense that Spirit externalizes itself into finitude, history, nature, and human consciousness in order to come to self-manifestation and self-knowledge. Hegel places enormous importance on Christianity, especially the doctrines of Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection, which may have served as the guiding metaphor for his dialectical conception of reality. For Hegel, these are not merely supernatural events accepted by faith alone. They express profound metaphysical truths about reality itself. God is not a remote static substance outside history. Spirit “goes out” into otherness, finitude, suffering, and alienation. Through this estrangement, Spirit returns to itself at a higher level of reconciliation and self-consciousness. That movement is dialectical.

      The Incarnation becomes, in Hegelian terms, a revelation that the infinite is not opposed absolutely to the finite. Spirit manifests itself in and through historical existence, i.e., the universe becoming conscious of itself through humanity. Human history becomes the theater of Spirit’s self-revelation talk about philosophical drama! While I am attracted to the ideas that reality is not dead mechanism, that history genuinely discloses meaning, that spirit and intelligibility belong to Being itself, and the human relation to truth has something participatory about it, I cannot follow the idea that all alienation is ultimately aufgehoben (cancelled, preserved, and raised into a fuller form at the same time) into total self-conscious reconciliation. (I am following many others in this, starting with Kierkegaard.) But there is something attractive (romantic!) about Hegel’s imaginative philosophy. Spirit is not alien to reality. History matters metaphysically. Finite existence somehow participates in the disclosure of the infinite. Meaning!

. . .

Often the word “Providence” pops into my head when I think about Hegel, though transformed from the Christian meaning. History is not merely accidental succession. There is an intelligible movement running through it, though not usually visible to individuals from within their own limited standpoint. This is why Hegel sometimes speaks of the “cunning of reason” (List der Vernunft). Human beings pursue their finite aims involving the standard motives -  ambition, love, conquest, reform, wealth, glory, survival etc. But through these partial and often selfish actions, larger historical transformations occur that no individual fully intended. Napoleon sought power; the Protestant Reformers sought religious renewal; capitalists always seek profit; revolutionaries seek liberation, etc. Yet history as a whole moves in directions exceeding individual consciousness. That feels providential but at the level of peoples, civilizations, or humanity rather than at the level of individual happiness.

    Hegel can feel simultaneously profound and chilling. Individuals suffer, perish, and are often sacrificed within larger historical development. Hegel seems so detached when writing in this vein. World-historical figures become instruments through which Spirit advances, often without understanding the larger significance of their own actions. Hegel’s “Providence” is not usually the intimate providence of biblical religion: God caring personally for each sparrow, each child, each suffering soul. It is something more like the rational intelligibility of the historical whole unfolding through time, which he sees from a perspective outside the movement. What seems to get lost in all of this is the irreducible dignity and mystery of the individual person. Or to put it another way, tragedy that cannot simply be justified retrospectively, or suffering that resists absorption into historical necessity. I think of Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov again and the discussion with his brother Alyosha.

    So I feel a tension with Hegel. On the one hand, history is not meaningless, human consciousness participates in something larger; on the other, I resist sacrificing the concrete person to the species or historical process. I am a father who loves his children after all. So I am more on the side in this of Hegel’s most ferocious critic, Kierkegaard, who rejected root, tree, and branch the notion that the single individual before God is dissolved into world-history. Also on the side of Weil, who wrote that attention to the afflicted person interrupts all grand historical rationalizations. And of Raimond Gaita and Iris Murdoch, who write of the absolute significance of the individual human being against reduction to social function or historical abstraction. But I also think Hegel is right in his belief that history matters, that consciousness develops, that humanity can deepen morally, that truth is not static repetition. There may indeed be a providential or meaningful movement within history but it never abolishes the transcendence and irreducible reality of the individual person.

Hegel and Political Philosophy

  Charles Taylor considers Hegel important partly because he is deeper than abstract formal rationality in politics concerning rights and the state. The role of history and civil society makes the abstract concrete. Taylor thinks much modern liberal theory tends toward an overly abstract picture of the human person and political life. It often begins with isolated individuals possessing rights prior to history, culture, language, institutions, and communal life. Political reasoning then becomes largely procedural: How do we protect autonomy? How do we secure neutral rules? How do we regulate competing preferences fairly? Hegel thinks this picture is too thin because it abstracts the individual from the concrete historical and social conditions that make freedom possible in the first place.

      For Hegel, freedom is not only the ability to choose arbitrarily in isolation. Genuine freedom requires formation within ethical and social life. (Aristotle and Aquinas would agree.) A person becomes capable of rational agency only through participation in the family, civil society, education, law, language, economic life, and political community. This is why Hegel’s political philosophy is often described as “concrete” rather than merely formal.

      Take rights. A purely abstract theory might say that all persons possess equal rights. Hegel would agree in principle. But he would ask what social conditions make those rights real rather than merely theoretical? A starving person formally possesses freedom of contract, but this freedom may be hollow if economic desperation leaves no meaningful alternatives. That seems like common sense and yet it is lost on liberal (capitalist) political philosophy. Likewise, freedom of speech presupposes education, linguistic formation, public institutions, and a culture capable of rational discourse.

    So Hegel tries to think freedom not merely juridically but institutionally and historically. This is where “civil society” becomes crucial.For Hegel, civil society is the sphere between isolated private life and the state proper: that is, markets, professions, associations, guilds, voluntary organizations, public discussion, educational institutions, and the complex web of social interdependence. It is within these mediating structures that abstract individuality becomes concretely formed human personality. Taylor finds this important because it resists both atomistic individualism, and totalitarian collectivism, distortions of the human person. The individual is not dissolved into the state, but neither is society reduced to isolated choosers connected only by contracts, as in capitalist society. Instead, identity itself is socially and historically constituted.

     This is also why history matters so deeply for Hegel. Reason does not appear fully formed outside time. Human beings gradually come to understand freedom through historical development. For example, ancient societies recognized civic belonging but often lacked strong individuality; modern liberal societies recognize subjective freedom and rights but modernity also risks fragmentation, alienation, and loss of shared ethical substance. Each stage contains truth and limitation.

      Taylor appreciates that Hegel avoids the fantasy of a purely neutral political order detached from substantive conceptions of human flourishing.Every society already rests upon inherited moral intuitions, historical practices, shared languages of value, institutions embodying visions of the good. Even liberal rights depend upon cultural and historical conditions sustaining respect for persons and mutual recognition. This is humanly important even if it is only raw material for capitalism. This strongly influenced Taylor’s critique of what he calls the “procedural” or “atomistic” self in some strands of liberalism.

    And this connects to what is important to me. The need for roots. The importance of tradition, formation, practices, moral education, educated emotions and imagination, and indeed the insufficiency of purely formal rationality. We do not first exist as detached rational calculators and then later enter community. Rather, meaning, language, judgment, and even rationality itself arise within historically formed worlds of significance. True, my stress on transcendence and the inexhaustibility of reality keeps me from fully accepting Hegel’s confidence that the modern state can embody rational reconciliation in anything like a final form. That places me closer to the hermeneutic and phenomenological descendants of Hegel than to Hegel himself.

 . . .

     And yet Hegel was connected with fascism, also in Italy. I recall Dan Breazeale telling us of a pro fascist Italian film where a character after justifying it says "that is what Hegel said". I cannot recall the film. Hegel was indeed appropriated by some authoritarian and fascist thinkers, especially in Italy, even though the relationship between Hegel and fascism is wrong-headed. The key figure here is Giovanni Gentile, sometimes called “the philosopher of Fascism.” Gentile was heavily influenced by Hegelian idealism, though in a distorted way. He developed what he called “actual idealism,” in which reality was understood as the act of thinking itself, and he interpreted the state as the ethical realization of collective spirit. Under Mussolini, Gentile became Minister of Education and helped shape fascist intellectual culture in Italy. Fascist theorists sometimes used Hegelian language about the ethical state, individuality fulfilled in the whole, and the inadequacy of atomistic liberalism.

     Hegel certainly criticized atomistic liberal individualism – itself probably “fascist” for hardcore liberals – and believed that freedom is realized concretely within ethical and political institutions. He unfortunately also spoke of the state in extremely exalted language, calling it at one point “the actuality of the ethical Idea.” Those passages made later authoritarian appropriations possible. But Hegel’s actual political philosophy is far more complex than simple statism or proto-fascism. He defended constitutional government, the rule of law, civil society, mediating institutions, property rights, and aspects of modern individual freedom. And fascism fundamentally involved elements profoundly alien to Hegel such racial mythology, a cult of violence, irrational nationalism, charismatic will, anti-rational propaganda, biological tribalism, and contempt for universal rationality. Fascism was closer to a revolt against the rational universalism central to German Idealism.

     The danger in Hegel lies elsewhere. Because he viewed history as rationally intelligible and the state as an embodiment of ethical life, later thinkers could interpret existing political power as historically justified or necessary. The language of reconciliation between individual and state could slide into sanctification of political authority. This is one reason thinkers like Karl Popper attacked Hegel in The Open Society and Its Enemies, though his reading of Hegel was highly reductive and historically unfair.

      What I find deep in Hegel resists such appropriation. If reality transcends our systems, if understanding remains partial, if history discloses truth but never fully contains it, then no political order fully incarnates reason and tragedy reveals irreducible finitude. Those aspects of Hegel's thought weaken the tendencies that could be turned into political triumphalism.

Hegel on Greek Tragedy

 I think Hegel's understanding of Greek tragedy is a great illustration of his picture of reasoning as well as the limits to absolute understanding. And a window into both the power and the limits of his conception of reason.

    For Hegel, tragedy is not fundamentally a conflict between simple good and evil. The deepest tragedies arise when two legitimate ethical claims collide, each embodying a partial but genuine truth. His classic example is Sophocles’ Antigone, perhaps my favorite Greek tragedy. Antigone represents the sacred obligations of family, kinship, burial, piety toward the dead, and what Hegel sees as the “divine law” rooted in the household and the unwritten moral order. Creon represents the claims of the political community, public law, civic order, and the necessity of the state. Neither side is simply irrational or evil. Each embodies a real ethical principle. Each is justified but only partially. The tragedy emerges because each absolutizes its own principle and fails fully to recognize the legitimacy of the other. That is a picture of Hegel’s philosophy. Conflict reveals limited understanding. The collision discloses a deeper truth about ethical life itself, namely, that human goods are plural, internally related, and sometimes tragically unreconciled at a given historical moment. This is already very far from caricatures of Hegel as a thinker who flattens everything into simplistic synthesis. Tragedy shows that finite forms of ethical life can become one-sided precisely because they contain truth.

     But here is both the strength and limit of Hegel. Hegel avoids simplistic moralism, or rather sees Greek tragedy as deep because it does so. He recognizes that some conflicts arise not because one side is purely wicked, but because reality itself contains differentiated goods and obligations that finite human beings struggle to reconcile.But tragedy also reveals a tension within Hegel’s own system.Hegel tends to think tragedy can ultimately be comprehended within a larger rational whole. Iris Murdoch put the thought well: Iris Murdoch put the point well: "tragedy is a product of appearance and not reality. It is the mutual misunderstanding of parts of the whole. From the point of view of the whole itself there is no tragedy. Meanwhile however there the conflict, the self locked in struggle with itself and evolving through the struggle. There is only one being in the Hegelian universe, the whole, which cannot allow anything outside itself and which struggles to internalize all that is apparently other ("The Beautiful and the Sublime Revisited")." Philosophy retrospectively understands why the conflict occurred and how spirit develops through it. But like many others I suspect something remains irreducibly tragic. And one could even say that tragedy reveals the limits of “absolute knowing” because human beings remain finite participants within reality rather than spectators standing wholly above it.

      In Antigone, even after reflection, I still feel the force of both claims that Antigone should bury her brother and Creon cannot simply allow private conscience to dissolve public law. The tension is not completely dissolved by explanation. This is where my own instincts diverge from Hegelianism. I am drawn to the dialectical insight that understanding deepens historically through conflict and partiality, while resisting the claim that all tensions can ultimately become transparent within a completed rational system. And Greek tragedy really does support that intuition. It intimates that reality may be intelligible without ever becoming exhaustively intelligible to finite minds.

   And most obviously, while Hegel’s thought on tragedy is really profound, it is not the last word on tragedy. It highlights – uncovers – on very important aspect of tragedy among others.

Works Cited

Murdoch, Iris. “The Sublime and the Beautiful Revisited.” The Yale Review 49, no. 2 (December 1959): 247–271. Reprinted in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, edited by Peter Conradi, 261–286. London: Chatto & Windus, 1997; New York: Penguin, 1999.