Search

The Russian invasion of Ukraine has challenged the ideals of peace that I and many other left-wing critical intellectuals hold dear. By the end of the 18th century, Immanuel Kant argued that the realist law of peoples and the idea of just war should be superseded by the idea of perpetual peace, and, fortunately, the principled opposition to war was institutionalized in the United Nations in the 20th century. However, when the aggressor has already taken possession of huge swathes of territory, calls for peace may be suspected of ideological bias. The right to defend yourself is almost universally recognized, but a military counter-offensive to reconquer lost territory is not merely defense but itself aggression, and thus an act of war. Many of us, however, want to support such efforts in Ukraine, and what is worrying is that this places us on a slippery slope, reopening the possibility of justifying war. As I will argue, this is nevertheless the path we must take, thus accepting the possible justification of war and the possible justification of specific activities and armaments but not others. We should take more seriously the justice of war, with all the specific normative challenges that this implies.

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit put alienation high on the philosophical agenda, as was readily recognized by Marx. Relatively well-known is also that Hegel’s concept of alienation was inspired by Goethe’s translation of Diderot’s dialogue Rameau’s Nephew, but the details and the conceptual implications of these details typically escape scholarly attention. Recognizing the basic idea of alienation as not-belonging to or being deprived of something, I emphasize that alienation implies a movement towards the limits of the human being, in which the mental suffering this involves is conditioned by social pathologies. To substantiate this claim, I show how Diderot’s satire implies uncompromising materialist social criticism, but that it does not employ the term ‘aliénation’ but instead reserves it for a kind of frenzy that borders on insanity. My claim is then that, in Goethe’s translation of Diderot’s dialogue, and in his translation of ‘aliénation’ to ‘Entfremdung’, Hegel found a general key for the conceptual critique of the spirit of Modernity. I therefore argue that, in the Phenomenology, Hegel employed alienation in more than one sense, raising madness to the level of a characteristic of Modernity, stressing the detrimental implications for consciousness under such living conditions, emphasizing how alienation works as negation, and, finally, pointing nevertheless to the possibility of embracing social and political reality.

In my response, I initially defend my preference for classical Critical Theory, emphasizing its continued relevance in capitalist modernity, stressing that the epistemological approach does not imply dogmatism with regards to scientific theory or Historical Materialism, just as it does not imply closure with regards to political democracy. When it comes to the dialectics of the classics, I also defend an epistemological approach, arguing that the dialectics aiming for truth implies critique and negativity. However, confronted with the duality of transcendental ideas and historical relativity, I express my confidence in human intuition. Following Hegel, determinate negation must sublate the intuitively conceived universality to a new conception that contains the result of the negation. Finally, I do not see how the conceptual aporias of general economy can be solved by the current political degrowth project. Still, politics is what we need more of, namely social democracy.