ABSTRACT
This essay proposes that the interpretations of Hegelian philosophy advanced by Gillian Rose and Robert Pippin may be relevant to the theorisation of genocide. This argument is presented via a discussion of Claudia Card’s contention that genocide can be understood as a form of ‘social death’. According to Card, genocide damages or eradicates what she calls ‘social vitality’: inter-generational social relations that animate, articulate and characterise social groups, and which give meaning and context to individual lives. The essay points out limitations in Card’s claims and proposes that Pippin and Rose could help to respond to those problems. It argues that Pippin’s reading can develop Card’s ideas regarding the collective ‘life’ of groups, and that Rose’s interpretation can remedy difficulties posed by Card’s conception of evil. The essay suggests that, when taken together, this combination of ideas may point towards a means of thinking about Hegel that serves to foreground the pertinence of past disasters to any critical assessment of the present.
Acknowledgements
I am very grateful to Robb Dunphy, Eugene Michail and the two anonymous reviewers of this essay for their helpful comments and suggestions.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
4 See Shaw (Citation2007) for a useful overview of these issues. See also Weiss-Wendt (Citation2008) for concerns about generalisation when addressing genocide, and Snow (Citation2016) for a Wittgensteinian argument against the pursuit of abstract, generic definitions. See Moses (Citation2012) for useful remarks concerning the relationship between Lemkin's ideas, the Holocaust, and older instances of genocide.
12 On this reading, Hegel is still making claims about the nature of being, about how and why we take the world to be a particular way, and is, therefore, metaphysical (see Pippin Citation2017, 366 and Brower Latz Citation2018, 16–18, for commentary).
14 Such norms are available, intelligible moves in the necessarily social game of ‘giving and asking for reasons’ that comprises, on this view, the ways in which self-conscious agents make sense of things. Pippin often refers to Brandom when making this point (e.g. Pippin Citation2008, 32).
18 See Woessner (Citation2011). To quote Pippin: ‘no serious student of Hegel should … want to deny that the results of Darwin or the experience of the Holocaust can be “Notionally” relevant [i.e. significant to and within Hegel's own philosophy], even while preserving a great deal of what Hegel wants to claim’ (Pippin Citation1989, p. 259).
46 See Pippin (Citation2004) for clarifications on this point.
63 For example: the Concept is said to be the ‘universal blood’, the ‘soul of the world’ (Hegel Citation1977, 100), and its ‘life-pulse’ (Hegel Citation1969, 37).
74 Developing this point would, however, involve some divergence from Hegel's ostensible views. I am thinking here, primarily, of his bleak remarks about the apparent inevitability of war for the kind of society described in The Philosophy of Right (e.g. ‘war is not to be regarded as an absolute evil’ (Hegel Citation2005, p.192; see Stewart Citation1996 for commentary)).'
81 See Sonbonmatsu (Citation2009) for an overview and similar concerns.
89 A first step would be to note that, if the items that Rose places under the heading of ‘soul’ (feeling, faith, intuition (Rose Citation2009, 111)) are to be significant to social agents, then they must be intelligible to some degree, and identified as significant by agents enmeshed within the social and historical contexts that Pippin describes (Cf. Pippin Citation1989, 151).
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Tom Bunyard
Tom Bunyard teaches philosophy and cultural and critical theory at the University of Brighton. Much of his previous work has focussed on the Hegelian and Marxian dimensions of Guy Debord's theoretical writings. His current research is an attempt to develop some of Debord's ideas about history by drawing on the readings of Hegel advanced by writers such as Robert Pippin and Gillian Rose.
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