Spirit and Social Death: Hegel, Historical Life and Genocide

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.

KEYWORDS:

• Genocide
• Hegel
• Claudia Card
• Robert Pippin
• Gillian Rose
• social death
• Holocaust
• modernity

Introduction

My aim in this essay is to demonstrate the potential relevance of certain aspects of Hegelian philosophy to the theorisation of genocide. I shall discuss the work of two writers who have advanced distinct, but broadly compatible interpretations of Hegel’s work – namely, Gillian Rose and Robert Pippin – and propose that they could help to develop Claudia Card’s contention that genocide can be understood as a form of ‘social death’.

Card presents genocidal social death as the destruction of the shared social and cultural formations that articulate the collective ‘life’ of a group. This is a useful means of thinking about genocide, and it comes close to views advanced by Raphael Lemkin, who first coined the term ‘genocide’. I will suggest, however, that Card’s claims invite supplementation and elaboration, and that Rose and Pippin can help in this regard. Card’s ideas require a fuller account of the operation of shared social norms within forms of collective ‘life’, and of the interrelation of individuals and groups. Rose and Pippin can provide this because their readings of Hegel afford an account of the shared patterns of meaning, thinking and interaction that articulate social life and individual agency.

In the first section of this essay, I introduce the concept of social death via a short discussion of Lemkin and Card. I also set out some preliminary remarks regarding the potential relevance of Hegelian ideas. In the second section, I look at Card in more detail and point out aspects of her work that invite supplementation. In the third section, I show that these issues might be remedied by drawing on Rose and Pippin. The essay concludes with some brief remarks concerning the perspective that these ideas bring to debates regarding the connections between genocide and modernity.

Genocide and social death

Lemkin and Card

The word ‘genocide’ is a relatively modern invention. It was coined towards the end of the Second World War by a Polish lawyer named Raphael Lemkin, and it became broadly adopted only in the aftermath of that conflict. Lemkin had been prompted to pursue a career in law by his study of the Ottoman government’s murder and expulsion of Armenians,¹ and was convinced of the need for an international law that could address and prevent such events. His subsequent campaign to bring this about led to the Genocide Convention of 1948. The term ‘genocide’ was a neologism, composed from the Greek genos for race or tribe, and the Latin cide for killing, and it was introduced in the ninth chapter of Lemkin’s Axis Rule in Occupied Europe of 1944. It was meant to denote not just mass murder, but rather the destruction of social and cultural formations. The term grew from his earlier attempts to establish international laws against ‘barbarism’ and ‘vandalism’.² In 1933, he had presented ‘barbarism’ as the attempt to destroy groups via the use of violence, brutality and humiliation against their members, and ‘vandalism’ as ‘the organised destruction of the art and cultural heritage’ of a group.³ ‘Genocide’ was intended to synthesise these earlier ideas, and to serve as a name for a range of processes used to destroy patterns of collective life (Axis Rule outlined political, social, cultural, economic, biological, physical, religious and moral ‘techniques’ of destruction).

Although the formulation of the 1948 convention retains many of Lemkin’s concerns – its wording entails that genocide can be committed without causing any deaths at all – genocide has since become commonly associated with mass killing. This has fostered the emergence of other terms, which serve to name the forms of destruction that are thereby omitted (‘cultural genocide’, ‘intellectual genocide’, ‘linguicide’, etc.). It has also prompted some writers to theorise genocide in ways that come closer to Lemkin’s original intentions.⁴ Claudia Card’s conception of social death is one such contribution.

Card’s ideas about genocide stem from Orlando Patterson’s influential Slavery and Social Death (1982),⁵ which described the ‘natal alienation’ of the slave (the slave’s forced separation from intergenerational familial and cultural ties) as a kind of ‘social death’. Similarly, Card uses the term ‘social death’ to denote a divorce between individuals and the social relations that afford subjective meaning, but she emphasises the idea that groups themselves have a collective ‘life’, and that this ‘life’ can ‘die’. ‘Social death’, in her view, follows the loss of ‘social vitality’. The latter refers to the operation of those ‘relationships, contemporary and intergenerational, that give meaning and shape to our lives’.⁶ These social relations animate, articulate, and characterise social groups, thus constituting their collective ‘life’. Damage to these relations, she writes, can undermine or eradicate a group, thereby separating its members from ‘a shared language, history, traditions and the like’.⁷ Such separation can occur in circumstances other than genocide – ‘slavery, banishment, disfigurement, illness’ and even ‘self-chosen isolation’ are all given as examples – but Card holds that, whilst social death ‘is not necessarily genocidal’, ‘genocide is social death’; it is ‘an extreme of social death’.⁸

Card’s work has the virtue of foregrounding some of Lemkin’s concerns. In his unfinished ‘Introduction to the Study of Genocide’, written during the 1950s, Lemkin presented groups susceptible to genocide as ‘families of mind’: groups of individuals who recognise and perpetuate themselves as a group through shared languages, arts, traditions, and collective histories.⁹ The harm of genocide was seen to lie not only in the infliction of suffering and death upon the individuals that compose such groups but in the destruction of the groups themselves. Card’s account of social death is very close to this. Yet as I shall show below, her account is marked by problems that derive, primarily, from her theory’s need for a fuller account of the ways in which shared norms mediate individuals within groups. Such an account can be provided by the Hegelian ideas that I shall discuss below. As we shall see, both Rose and Pippin treat Hegel’s notion of ‘Spirit’ in a manner that can address the plasticity, and indeed the fragility and finitude, of the shared patterns of meaning that enable forms of collective life. My suggestion will be that such a reading of ‘Spirit’ (or ‘Mind’, to use an alternative translation of Geist) could help us to think about the shared formations – the ‘families of mind’, to use Lemkin’s phrase – that genocide destroys.

In order to make this case, I shall concentrate primarily on Pippin, because he provides the fuller account of social normativity. But having indicated that this approach can help to elaborate Card’s notion of social ‘life’, I shall then turn to Rose, whose reading can develop the implications of these positions. Hegel’s concept of ‘ethical life’ (Sittlichkeit) concerns the operation of Spirit in a society’s customs, institutions and forms of interpersonal interaction (Sittlichkeit could also be translated as ‘customariness’).¹⁰ Rose’s work indicates that any viable form of ‘ethical life’ must be a form of historical life, insofar as its conduct towards the future needs to be informed by past failures. Indeed, Rose’s reading suggests that the flourishing of ‘social vitality’ may well depend upon an engagement with past and present forms of ‘social death’. I should begin, however, by addressing the worry that invoking Hegel in an essay on genocide may be a rather dubious choice.

Hegel and history

Hegel’s philosophy is often associated with Eurocentric apologism, an unworkable metaphysics, and a triumphant notion of historical finality. These and other such attributions are often held to entail an inability, on Hegel’s part, to address the sheer scale and gravity of the horrors proper to the modern world (according to Emil Fackenheim, for example, Hegel’s philosophy of history ‘leaves room only for world-historically insignificant evils to be disposed of as relapses into tribalism or barbarism’; any ‘inquiry into its truth must confront its claims with the gas chambers of Auschwitz’).¹¹ Yet many of these objections stem, broadly speaking, from understanding Hegel’s philosophy of history as an extension of a much broader and more ambitious metaphysics, and from viewing the latter as necessitating politically apologetic notions of completion and finality. Both Rose and Pippin understand Hegel in a rather different manner.

Pippin’s Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (1989) is the primary source of what has come to be known as the ‘non-metaphysical’ reading of Hegel. The term ‘non-metaphysical’ is inaccurate,¹² but it reflects the fact that this reading recasts some of Hegel’s more grandiose claims. Hegel’s metaphysics is traditionally understood as an exposition of the rational structure of all being (i.e. of reality itself). In contrast, Pippin’s Hegel tells us ‘all that being can intelligibly be’,¹³ and understands the latter as all that can be known through the operation of conceptual norms, i.e. norms governing the determination and use of concepts.¹⁴ These norms are not ‘given’ to us, and nor are they entirely fixed. There is no pre-existing cosmic structure of rationality here, which Spirit slowly discovers over time. Instead, norms arise through a historical process whereby we continually generate, employ, and reformulate our ways of making sense of ourselves, our world, our actions, and each other. Spirit’s final comprehension of the ‘Absolute’ (the conceptual structure of all being) is thus re-cast in terms of ‘making sense of making sense’, i.e. understanding the operation of normativity from within (comprehension of the Absolute thus becomes an understanding of Spirit’s ongoing operation: it is, Pippin writes, ‘a self-consciousness about such a process rather than its final completion’ or ‘termination’).¹⁵

On this view, then, Spirit need not be identified with any ‘implausible theodicy’, as Pippin puts it.¹⁶ His Hegel is not uncritically endorsing the political structures of his day, announcing a whiggish ‘end of history’,¹⁷ or thereby presenting the disasters and conflicts of the past as necessary steps towards that ‘end’. It thus avoids many of the charges that might render referencing Hegel in an essay on genocide and history somewhat misplaced.¹⁸ The same is true for Rose’s own ‘nonfoundational'¹⁹ reading of Hegel. It differs from Pippin’s in some respects, but he and other commentators have acknowledged a significant proximity between their claims.²⁰ It is set against any quiescent endorsement of the modern world, and against any view of history that might distance itself from past horrors (she wrote extensively about the Holocaust in this vein, as we shall see below). Such readings are not, therefore, inappropriate reference points in an essay on genocide. But having made that claim, let us now move to Card, and to the problems in her work that Rose and Pippin can help resolve.

Card, social death, and ‘evil’

Card on social death

Card’s conception of social death was first presented in a paper titled ‘Pernicious Injustice: The Case of Genocide’ in 2000. An expanded version of this paper was then published in Hypatia in 2003, under the title ‘Genocide and Social Death’, and a significantly revised and expanded version of that article appeared in 2010, as a chapter in her book Confronting Evils: Terrorism, Torture, Genocide. There is a slight difference between the article of 2003 and the book. The former is chiefly concerned with the way in which social death affects individuals, whereas the latter indicates more overtly that groups are themselves ‘living’ entities able to suffer harm.

The 2003 article distinguishes genocide from ‘nongenocidal mass murder’²¹ on the grounds that, because victims of genocide are targeted due to their group membership, a distinct kind of harm is inflicted upon them. This distinct harm is the denigration of their social vitality,²² and it entails separation from, or the destruction of, group-specific social relations that shape and give context to victims’ lives. The article thus tends towards presenting social vitality as an attribute of individual group members, and towards a focus on the existential experience of the individual victim.

This approach may seem most obviously applicable to protracted events such as the Holocaust, or to the aftermath of genocide (one might think here of Primo Levi’s account of the slow, enforced breakdown of social structures, of his own and Jean Améry’s account of Auschwitz, and of alienation after these events).²³ Indeed, the experience of survivors is a major focus of Card’s 2003 article. Yet Card indicates that her notion of genocidal social death also applies to instances of genocide that might otherwise appear to be straight-forward instances of mass homicide. The 2003 text holds that even those communities killed by the Einsatzgruppen without warning or prior captivity suffered social death. They were ‘given indecent deaths’; they were ‘robbed of control of their vital interests and of opportunities to mourn’; and although ‘most did not experience those deprivations for very long, inflicted en masse these murders do appear to have produced sudden social death prior to physical extermination’.²⁴

This identification of summary group execution with social death foregrounds a tension in the 2003 article. Its association of social vitality with individuals gives rise to a sense in which social death pertains to existential experience (significant ‘loss of social vitality’ leads to ‘a loss of identity and consequently a serious loss of meaning for one’s existence’).²⁵ Yet at the same time, we are told that social vitality is a collective feature of a group, a claim that supports Card's indications that the real crime of genocide lies in extinguishing or diminishing that collective ‘life’. This dual applicability of the concept of social death (to both individuals and groups) requires an account of the relation between social structures and individual experience.

Card’s Confronting Evils of 2010 handles the tension more effectively, but without resolving it. It holds that harm applies to ‘living systems’, and contends that not only individual organisms, but also collective structures can be viewed as such systems. Harm is understood in terms of the denigration of a broadly Aristotelian notion of ‘life’ (‘a setback to the well-being of an entity that has a good of its own, is capable of doing well or poorly, thriving or not, of having its own existence go well or not’),²⁶ and this is said to pertain not only to the ‘well-being’ of individuals, but also to the collective ‘life’ of a group.²⁷ The dual applicability of the concept is thus explained, but the relation between individuals and groups remains somewhat unclear.²⁸

Card’s conception of harm also supports some speculative assertions. In 1933, Lemkin wrote that ‘The contribution of any particular collectivity to world culture as a whole’ forms part of the ‘wealth of all of humanity’, as it is an expression of the ‘unique genius and achievement of a collectivity’.²⁹ Their destruction thus diminishes this ‘wealth’. Although Lemkin made this point in connection to the ‘vandalism’ of ‘art and cultural heritage’³⁰ (ISIS’ damage to Palmyra is an obvious and literal example of that idea), the implication is that the real object of ‘vandalism’ is the richness of human experience, memory and possibility.³¹ Card comes close to this view: towards the end of her book she associates genocide with ‘the destruction of a group’s history’,³² and with some caution, she also gestures towards the view that this might amount to a kind of harm to ‘humanity’.³³

That caution is understandable, because these suggestions invite risks that are raised more generally by her overall approach to the topic of genocide. The worry that humanism can entail the imposition of universal identity is well known, and emphasising the importance of trans-generational social relations and heritage can entail romanticising tradition, ethnicity and nation. Such ideas may inadvertently echo ideological positions that have served as alibis for genocide and political domination. And in a very similar vein, one might wonder if Card’s ideas entail that any group should be preserved, regardless of the nature of its characteristics.

Although Lemkin’s ideas were influenced by romanticism (Herder in particular),³⁴ he rejected the view that group membership involved imposed identities or ‘racial’ characteristics. He understood groups to be based around the adherence of individuals to revisable norms: shared, mutable and mutually recognised patterns of action and interaction.³⁵ This is implicit in Card’s account of the ‘relationships, social norms, processes, or other forms of social cohesiveness’³⁶ that make up the ‘social vitality’ of a group. Card’s response to the second problem is simple: she is not a cultural relativist. She is very clear that the ‘Forcibly imposed social death of a group is not genocidal if the group is itself an evil’,³⁷ and she thus neither sanctifies all groups qua groups or precludes their forced destruction when necessary (her prime example is the Ku Klux Klan).³⁸ The concept of ‘evil’ that this relies upon, however, requires discussion.

Card’s conception of ‘evil’

Card’s understanding of evil ‘begins from the premiss that atrocities are paradigmatic evils’.³⁹ She defines atrocities ‘ostensively’,⁴⁰ using a series of examples, and defines evil as ‘reasonably foreseeable intolerable harms produced by inexcusable wrongs'.⁴¹ Let us take the elements of her definition of evil one by one.

Her conception of harm has already been outlined. Harm is ‘intolerable’ when it ‘prevents a party harmed from doing minimally well’.⁴² This means that it brings a ‘living system’ below a minimum level of basic well-being proper to the ‘capacities’⁴³ that characterise it. The reference to ‘reasonably foreseeable’ outcomes pertains to agency and responsibility, as does the notion of inexcusability. Both centre around the availability of exculpatory explanations. According to Card, such explanations can either be ‘metaphysical excuses’ for the deed (which rely on the ‘ontology of agency’, and concern compulsion and diminished responsibility), or ‘moral excuses’ (which serve as ‘morally appropriate and defensible’ reasons for the action, even if such reasons do not carry enough moral weight to justify it entirely).⁴⁴ Card’s primary interest is with ‘moral excuses’, the absence of which serves to distinguish evil from wrong-doing.

She says very little about what such exculpatory moral reasons might be. This is because one of her aims is to advance a theory of evil that could be compatible with a variety of different ethical frameworks. Her ‘analysis’, she states, ‘does not yield a comprehensive theory of ethics’: it ‘presupposes [my emphasis] that there are defensible norms of right and wrong’, but it ‘neither specifies a particular theory of those norms nor does it depend very much on what they are’.⁴⁵ One could argue, however, that Card presupposes rather more than this, or at least that her claims depend upon positions that could be developed further.

Firstly, on what might be termed a metaphysical or ontological level, we have the following. (1) Card’s account encompasses both the ‘well-being’ of individuals and of social groups but, as noted earlier, the relation between the individual and the social, and between the existential and the structural, is a little unclear. She handles this via (2) a broadly Aristotelian conception of vital capacity, which pertains to the flourishing of both individuals and socio-cultural structures. Her 2010 book builds this from a discussion of other writers who make related claims, and it remains rather schematic. Thirdly, Card’s remarks about the diminution of that vitality imply (3) a concomitant notion of its enrichment. This provides tacit support for (4) her humanistic gestures towards the importance of human culture and history. That importance needs to be qualified in a manner that avoids the problems posed by a reliance on romanticism or essentialism.

Secondly, we also have a set of claims about normativity. (5) The ‘life’ of these social structures is held to be articulated by the operation of shared, recognised norms, through which individual members of a society make sense of themselves, their world, and each other. This understanding of sociality qua normativity could be filled out further. (6) In addition, her account presupposes that there are ‘norms of right and wrong’ that allow judgements to be made about individual actions, events, and of social structures themselves. (7) The moral norms that enable these judgements must have a critical bearing upon the socially contextual norms that articulate social ‘life’ (i.e. item 6 in this list must have a critical bearing on item 5), but this relation is left unexplained. This poses a problem. Are we dealing with timeless, universal moral norms? If their source lies beyond social practice, where do they come from? If, on the other hand, they stem from social life, how can they be any more than a further manifestation of that life, thus undermining their critical purchase? Finally, (8) this entire vision presupposes communities of agents who can recognise their own shared norms, and who understand, justify and explain their actions and events to one another using them.

These elements of Card’s argument all merit further substantiation, and I would suggest that are particularly well-suited to a broadly Hegelian line of development. I shall begin to make this case by returning to Pippin’s reading, which takes as its starting point a particular aspect of Hegel’s response to Kant.

Pippin and Rose

Pippin

According to Kant, cognition has two bases: the forms of intuition, and the categories of the understanding, which govern the operation of concepts. We receive sensory data through the forms of intuition; that data is then framed and rendered intelligible by the understanding, which constructs a conceptually structured world of objects according to categorical rules. But because the forms of intuition are subjective (in the sense that they are rooted in the mind, and distinct from the world that they intuit), the categories that work upon intuited content can only generate a world of objects for us (i.e. a world that depends upon our forms of sensibility). We cannot claim, therefore, to be able to know the world as it is ‘in itself’. This gives rise to the classic Kantian contrast between a ‘phenomenal’ world of intelligible appearances, and an unknowable ‘noumenal’ world of things in themselves. That contrast invites a scepticism that undermines the necessity that Hegel associated with rational autonomy, in that it meant that the free, spontaneous operation of the mind remained dependent upon that which is ‘given’ to it.

Pippin holds that Hegel’s response to this issue grows from Kant’s own indications in the second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, where concepts and intuitions are shown to be more interwoven than Kant had otherwise indicated. Pippin’s Hegel follows this lead and holds that intuited perceptual content is always already interwoven with conceptuality.⁴⁶ There is no ‘two-step’ process from intuition to conceptuality: instead, intuited content is always framed by conceptuality, and is not pre-formed in a manner that depends upon the peculiarities of our intuition. This preserves reason’s autonomy and dissolves the grounds for contending that the intelligible world is only a world for us. Because conceptuality is held to be necessary for any kind of intelligible determinacy whatsoever, ‘there is, in Hegel’s final position, no possible contrast between our conceptual framework and “the world”’.⁴⁷ Any reference to a world ‘beyond’ the conceptual can only be just another instance of conceptual determinacy. Pippin thus maintains the classical Hegel’s claim that reality possesses a conceptual structure, but in a way that does not entail making first-order claims about the nature of the cosmos itself. On this reading of Hegel, there can be no God-like, transcendental entities: Spirit, the Absolute, etc., all need to be understood solely in ‘non-metaphysical’ terms.

The Hegelian Absolute is often figured as a kind of pantheistic God: as the fundamental source, structure and driving force of all reality. Spirit, on such a reading, is an emanation of this Absolute, and the vehicle through which it ascends, along a theodicean historical path, towards final self-consciousness. But in Pippin’s reading, Spirit is just reason, albeit reason instantiated in collective, cultural and historical social practice. Forms of Spirit are forms of ‘collective mindedness’⁴⁸ – shared, culturally and historically contextual and mutable patterns of thinking, acting and interacting. There is no goal or entity ‘outside’ Spirit, with which it slowly comes into accordance over historical time.⁴⁹ Instead, the Absolute is figured here as the operation of conceptuality itself. Spirit’s comprehension of the Absolute thus becomes only an understanding of its own conceptual articulation: ‘an ‘account of account-giving’⁵⁰ that affords the ‘intelligibility of intelligibility itself’.⁵¹ This means that there is no ‘end’ to Spirit’s movement. We attain only ‘a self-consciousness about such a process’, not its ‘final completion’.⁵² Understanding ‘account-giving’ does, however, afford greater insight into the actualisation of freedom.

For Pippin’s Hegel, freedom requires the acknowledgement of an identity between actor and action (in other words, my actions are only mine insofar as I can account for them). This requires ‘being able to own up to my deeds because I can stand behind them on the basis of, and can give and demand, reasons, can understand why that ought to have been done’.⁵³ That in turn requires a norm-governed social capacity for giving and asking for the reasons through which responsibility for the deed and its meaning can be established; and for Pippin, this means that actions ‘must fit in intelligibly with a whole complex of practices and institutions within which doing this now could have a coherent meaning’.⁵⁴ The norms used in social activity, in other words, are only binding insofar as they are recognised by their producers and adherents as viable explanatory and justificatory reasons.⁵⁵ Crucially, they can shift and change over time (we have undergone major shifts since Hegel’s day: our slow, incomplete move away from gender- and race-based claims to authority, for example).⁵⁶

On this view, the entire edifice of Spirit’s formations and histories is, as Pippin often puts it, an ‘achievement’ (because nothing is ‘given’). It depends upon, and emerges from, the generation and use of social frameworks that enable the mutual recognition of participants as ‘agents or moral persons’, capable of ‘appealing to reasons and of holding each other to account’⁵⁷ in the use of such reasons. (To be a ‘person’, it should be added, is not an ontological fact, but a constructed normative status). This is a process of immanent self-legislation. And because it depends upon the generation of norms that allow and articulate recognitive practices, collective Spiritual life is something that we can do well, or badly:⁵⁸ the institutions and patterns of social action that we generate can be deemed to be better or worse depending on the degree to which they afford the collective freedom enabled by mutual recognition.

Pippin and Card

I shall now try to show that Pippin’s reading of Hegel can assist Card’s claims. I shall start with the suggestion that it could develop the vexed connections between the individual and the social, and between the existential and the structural, noted above.

Hegel described Spirit as an ‘I that is we’ and as a ‘we that is I’.⁵⁹ This does not signify imposed uniformity. Instead, it means that individual autonomy and collective social structure are interwoven; that the former depends upon the latter, and that the latter is shaped by the former. As Pippin puts it:

while any individual I comes to be the I it is and maintains its sense of itself within a common mindedness, it is also the case that this common mindedness is only possible by the attitudes and commitments of distinct, individual ‘I’s’.⁶⁰

The result is not a stable, unitary group identity – different normative commitments and group affiliations can pull in different, and sometimes incompatible directions – but it amounts to a mode of collective life, enabled by the ‘shared beliefs, attitudes [and] dispositions that the sharing members know are shared’.⁶¹

We saw earlier that Card’s account invites a more involved explanation of the mediation between individuals and groups through shared norms. The Hegelian interrelation of individual agency and social structure can help here: It accounts for such mediation, thereby indicates how harm to a group can entail harm to its members and vice versa, and thus accommodates the relation between the existential (identity, agency, meaning) and the structural. It can, in short, help in theorising the operation and collapse, to quote Card, of ‘relationships … that give meaning and shape to our lives’.⁶² It also affords a means of thinking about social death.

References to ‘life’ and ‘liveliness’ appear throughout Hegel’s work, often in ways that suggest a kind of romantic and vitalistic metaphysics.⁶³ Yet there can be no such metaphysics in Pippin’s interpretation. He explains these remarks by pointing to the homology that can be drawn, in Hegel, between the structure of a living organism and the structure of rational thought that animates Spirit. This is complex, but all we need note here is that forms of Spirit can be seen as ‘alive’.

Spirit is a ‘living’ collective subject, and a subject, for Hegel, is a kind of processual unity. Such a subject generates differentiation within itself, maintains its unity throughout those differentiations, and thereby furthers ends that are ‘internal to it by its nature’, as Pippin puts it, rather than imposed ‘by an external source’⁶⁴ (the term ‘subject’ is used very broadly in Hegel: even plants are ‘subjects’ in this sense)⁶⁵. There is a close correspondence here between Hegel’s position and Card’s broadly Aristotelian notion of vitality (Pippin in fact notes the ‘enormous importance of Aristotle for Hegel’),⁶⁶ and it entails that not just living organisms and human individuals, but forms of Spirit, communities, and political formations, are all ‘alive’ in this sense. This is because all involve cohesive, processual unities of diverse, interactive elements. Crucially, they can also ‘die’.

According to Pippin, patterns of social life are susceptible to ‘breakdowns’,⁶⁷ clashes and incompatibilities, and any given instance of Spirit’s norm-based interaction ‘can fail, go dead [or] lose its grip’⁶⁸ due to the degree to which it no longer provides agents with a meaningful expression of their own agency. They can feel empty or hollow to the actors involved, because they form ‘part of a [social] practice that has … gone dead in a certain way’.⁶⁹ This is close to Card’s notions of ‘social vitality’ and ‘social death’, and could serve as a basis for theorising the latter’s extremities in genocide (as in the situation in Rwanda, for example: a context in which individual lives have been lost, forms of group cohesion destroyed, and in which attempts at reconciliation feel hollow and brutal).⁷⁰

Pippin’s reading also offers a means of developing Card’s remarks about harm to ‘history’ and ‘humanity’ in a manner that need not hypostatise those terms. The idea that modern personhood is ‘a kind of normative status’⁷¹ is important here. For Pippin, we do not have value because of the kind of things that we are, but rather because we must value our collective capacity to accord value if we are to value anything at all. This means that we must, on some implicit level, value each other and the Spiritual formations that enable this (‘To value anything and to hold oneself to the commitments necessary to attain it, is already to have valued this capacity itself … we must posit ends and hold ourselves to norms, and so valuing that capacity above all is inescapable’).⁷² And because no directions as to what we should value are given to us from ‘outside’ the operation of Spirit, we can only learn through getting it wrong, and through learning to identify failures as wrong (we ‘establish practices over historical time, create institutions and a historical memory within which, and only within which [my emphasis], the significance and normative force of various deeds can be assessed’).⁷³ These ideas underscore the pertinence to the present moment of a critical study of the past, and imply that the success of forms of social vitality may well depend upon attention to forms of social death. They can also add philosophical weight to Lemkin’s references to ‘wealth’ (understood now as history’s illumination of the scope of human possibility) and to Card’s related concerns about harm to ‘humanity’ (understood, roughly, as a corrigible collective enterprise).⁷⁴ But to sum up:

When discussing Card’s ideas, I listed several elements that seemed to require further substantiation. These were, in brief: the relation between individual and group; the notion of social ‘life’, and its enrichment, denigration, and attendant humanistic ideas; the centrality of shared, mutable norms to that life; the source of evaluative norms, and their bearing upon extant patterns of social interaction. I hope to have shown that these elements can all be developed by parsing Card’s claims through Pippin’s version of Hegel; and as I shall now indicate, this can be taken further via Rose’s reading.

Rose

The salience of Rose’s ideas can be introduced by returning to Card’s theory of evil. As we saw, she defines the latter as ‘reasonably foreseeable intolerable harms produced by inexcusable wrongs’, i.e. as harms that cannot be justified by valid moral excuses. As we also saw, she does not prescribe a moral framework for such excuses, but ‘presupposes that there are defensible norms of right and wrong’. She holds that ‘atrocities are paradigmatic evils’,⁷⁵ and defines atrocities ‘only ostensively’, holding that in them ‘the ingredients of evil are writ boldly’.⁷⁶ Card thus starts out by assuming that a value (evil) has been ascribed correctly (atrocities); she then presupposes the availability of valid moral norms that correspond to that axiomatic value. This seems very reasonable, but Rose’s critique of sociology, and her work on the Holocaust, in particular, indicate some subtle dangers in this approach.

Rose’s most celebrated book is her second work, Hegel contra Sociology. Its primary concern is with the identification of arbitrary, unjustified normative authority, and it discusses the degree to which critical social theory tends to rely upon such authority. The book begins with a detailed critique of sociology’s neo-Kantian roots. This is used to highlight tendencies in social theory towards a reliance on unjustified positions. The worry here is twofold. If such positions are merely ‘given’ and assumed, the analyses and prescriptions that follow from them amount to arbitrary impositions; and if, as Rose holds, all such positions arise from society itself, those analyses become circular, because the criterion of analysis is an extension of its object.⁷⁷

The unjustified positions that she is concerned with are perhaps best thought of as arbitrary starting points: conditions that explain a conditioned, but which are not themselves adequately explained. By way of a discussion of neo-Kantianism, she presents this in terms of a choice between prioritising the values held in society, and the social validity of those values. For example: sociology might begin by focussing on social values and phenomena, and then develop an account of the laws that govern and explain them (she associates this with Weber; the values that we hold, and the goals that we pursue, are taken as ‘axiomatic’, as seems to be the case with Card). Alternatively, it might start with existing law-like frameworks of validity (e.g. science, education or public law), and then explain how they frame their objects and agents (this is associated with Durkheim; society is posited as the explanatory condition for conditioned values, e.g. ‘social facts’). But whether they prioritise values or validity, or the classic notions of ‘structure’ and ‘agency’ that she claims stem from them, such analyses tend to remain dependent upon a merely ‘given’ element. That element takes inevitable primacy, its formation is left insufficiently questioned, and the theory’s critical purchase and analyses are thus undermined.

Rose’s book argues that Hegel can help with these problems because he shows that both poles (values and validity, subjectivity and structures) are revisable and historically constructed. Neither one nor the other should be reified, and their emergence from the actual conduct of historical social life should be acknowledged. Moreover, the apparent dichotomy between the two poles must itself be contextualised. Rose treats it as symptomatic of the flawed nature of the normative structures of modern society, which posit agents as abstractly free, equal, individuals, but which also form coercive, unequal social institutions.⁷⁸ Sociology’s flaws, in other words, are symptoms of the flaws of modern ‘ethical life’. The latter gives rise to two opposing types of normative authority, both of which can be hypostatised in a host of ways (e.g. faith and reason, subjective freedom and structural determinism, etc.), but which she gathers together under the rubrics of the ‘soul’ and the ‘city’ (she also uses ‘religion’ and the ‘state’). Both are crucial aspects of social life; yet when privileged over their opposite and left unquestioned, each can serve as sources of imposed authority (fanaticism on the one hand, Terror on the other).

Rose theorises this by turning to Hegel’s own diagnoses of disparities between forms of universality and particularity. The way she does so, however, is idiosyncratic. Like Pippin, she draws on Hegel’s response to the separation of concept and intuition in Kant; but unlike Pippin, she uses Hegel’s early work. There, ‘intuition’ is understood very broadly, so that it encompasses not just sense-data, but also the faith, feeling and subjective desire that she associates with ‘soul’. The integration of concept and intuition becomes a general motif for a truly adequate, harmonious, ethical life, which integrates law and society (concept) and individuality, freedom and feeling (intuition). Rose takes from this the task of pursuing what she calls an ‘absolute ethical life’: a harmonious common ground in which these two aspects of sociality could be unified (hence her dictum that ‘Hegel’s philosophy has no social import if the absolute cannot be thought’).⁷⁹

It is crucial, for Rose, that Hegel did not achieve or announce such a unity. He only diagnosed its absence from the modern world. Modern society is broken, and her Hegel only reveals the flaws in its unrealised dreams. Yet for Rose, it is in the full, unswerving identification of the absence of harmony, and of the failures and limitations of our attempts to instantiate it, that absolute ethical life can be glimpsed.

On this view, we can only think the good by ‘tarrying with the negative’ and confronting the very worst; a point that bears obvious relation, as was the case with Pippin’s ideas, to the study of past and present genocides. And like Pippin, Rose emphasises that we can only do this from within our current social and intellectual formations. Any attempt to think absolute ethical life must always be posited from our own position, on our terms, and it will be shaped by a sense of the unity that our present forms of disunity lack. But if this is recognised – if the posited absolute is understood as posited, as a reflection of the ‘brokenness’ of our own moment, and not as an abstract, timeless good – then the dangers of abstractly imposing utopia from an arbitrary position can be avoided. So too can those involved in employing an equally timeless notion of the bad, or of ‘evil’; a point foregrounded by Rose’s careful handling of the Holocaust.

Historical evil

In 1990, Rose worked as an advisor to the Polish Commission on the Future of Auschwitz. This led her to advance a criticism of what she termed ‘Holocaust piety’.⁸⁰ Such piety involves treating the Holocaust as something transcendent and fundamentally other to our way of life. This is perhaps most obvious when the Holocaust is treated as sublime, unthinkable, or unrepresentable,⁸¹ but Rose also finds fault in narratives that present it as the exposed truth of modernity.⁸² In the former case, the event is treated in terms that save us from any difficult engagement with our potential complicity in the same normative structures than enabled it. The event is alien and distant, allowing the comforting thought that we are not them, and would never do that. This serves to ‘mystify something we dare not understand’: something that ‘may be all too understandable, all too continuous with what we are’.⁸³ In the latter case, complicity may be acknowledged, but it stems from an overarching structural law that cannot be controlled, and which ‘eliminates the possibility of any specific investigation into the contingencies of collusion by making collusion already a foregone conclusion’.⁸⁴

Thus, as above, analysis stems either from axiomatic values or effectively given laws, preventing what Rose describes as a ‘recognition of our ineluctable grounding in the norms of the emotional and political culture’⁸⁵ – the forms of ‘soul’ and ‘city’ – that made the event possible. Against this, she argues, we should see it as ‘arising out of, and as falling back into, the ambitions and the tensions, the utopianism and the violence, the reason and the muddle’⁸⁶ of modern life. If we don’t, we will just ‘engender new pieties and leave untouched our fundamental – even cherished – complicities’.⁸⁷ The task, then, is to try to identify the failures of the present, to understand them as connected to those of the past and, in identifying them, begin to establish a notion of what is missing.

Ethical life as historical life

I argued earlier that Pippin’s reading of Hegel could help to develop Card’s notion of social death by providing an account of the operation of social norms upon which her vision of ‘social vitality’ appears to rely. I hope to have now shown that Rose’s reading can take this further.

When discussing Pippin, I highlighted his emphasis on the interrelation of social structure and subjectivity. He presents ethical life as characterised by constant ‘tensions, pulls and counter-pulls’⁸⁸ from different normative commitments. Rose’s thematic of clashing instantiations of ‘soul’ and ‘city’ could be placed within that picture, deepening this model of social life. Pippin also holds that Spirit is a historical construction, subject to constant failure and revision, and directed by goals that are internal to its own operation. Rose’s contribution underscores the importance of engaging with past and present failures when deriving such goals, and highlights the dangers of presupposed values. If we are to identify the failures of the present, we cannot neglect the complicities of current social formations with those of the past. Both past and present need to be viewed holistically, in the light of that which they still lack (the contemporary politics of ‘race’ is a case in point). Rose shows, in other words, that the conduct of Pippin’s ‘ethical life’ must be a form of historical life, insofar as its orientation towards the future requires engagement with the failures of the past; and that the success of what Card calls social vitality depends upon acknowledging past and present forms of social death.

Admittedly, much more needs to be done in order to work through the technicalities of combining these readings.⁸⁹ Nonetheless, I think it is possible to argue that the constellation of ideas set out here may be of interest beyond its ability to develop Card’s arguments. This can be indicated, very provisionally, by its bearing on questions concerning the relation between genocide and modernity.

Bauman’s classic Modernity and the Holocaust (1989) presented modernity as a social context characterised by bureaucracy, impersonality and technical power, and as inherently fertile ground for genocide. Many others have advanced similar views,⁹⁰ notably Adorno, who also cast Hegel as a paradigmatic figure of modernity’s discredited and hubristic ambitions (e.g. ‘No universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb’).⁹¹ The versions of Hegel that I have discussed here, however, suggest a rather different view: modernity is the predicament of finding ourselves immersed in a world that is, in effect, our own creation, and in which any ‘given’ and ‘natural’ bases for normative authority have been eroded.

For Pippin, Hegel’s philosophy is suited to thinking this condition, because it articulates a constant drive towards establishing, questioning and reformulating forms of normative authority. Rose is similar: she presents Hegel as a means of addressing the problems and perplexities of the modern condition, warning against their comforting disavowal. For both, this does not afford the identification of a triumphant conclusion, but rather an intractable problem that can be, and has been, handled terribly badly: how to pursue collective freedom?

The recognition of this condition of self-authorship is hardly cause for hubristic celebration, particularly when faced with the history of genocide. It means that it would be misleading to regard instances of the latter as aberrations that lie ‘outside if not beyond history', however much we might sympathise with such horrified reactions, and that it would be similarly misleading to hold that ‘Nazi hatred' is ‘not in us', and ‘outside man’.⁹² On this view, there is no ‘outside’; there is just us, and there always has been. Likewise, historical disasters cannot be viewed as necessarily bloody steps on a preordained route towards apotheosis (as in the popular conception of Hegel); they are instead catastrophic failures of Spirit. The combination of Rose and Pippin’s readings of Hegel, when inflected by Card’s concern with social death, might then allow a form of Hegelianism that would rely upon a commitment to engaging with, rather than disavowing, such events.

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.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

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.

Notes

1 Irvin-Erickson (2017, 27–28).

2 Lemkin (1944, 91).

3 Lemkin (1933).

4 See Shaw (2007) for a useful overview of these issues. See also Weiss-Wendt (2008) for concerns about generalisation when addressing genocide, and Snow (2016) for a Wittgensteinian argument against the pursuit of abstract, generic definitions. See Moses (2012) for useful remarks concerning the relationship between Lemkin's ideas, the Holocaust, and older instances of genocide.

5 Patterson (2018).

6 Card (2010, 237).

7 Card (2010, 237).

8 Card (2010, 237).

9 Irvin-Erickson (2013, 274).

10 Pippin (1997, 417).

11 Fackenheim (1996, 49).

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 2017, 366 and Brower Latz 2018, 16–18, for commentary).

13 Pippin (1989, 98).

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 2008, 32).

15 Pippin (1989, 247).

16 Pippin (1997, 424).

17 Pippin (2019, 307–314).

18 See Woessner (2011). 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 1989, p. 259).

19 Rose (2009, vi).

20 See in particular Pippin (1989, 272) and Pippin (1999, 194–195); see also Brower Latz (2018, 16, 20, and 41).

21 Card (2003, 68).

22 Card (2003, 68 and 73).

23 Améry (1999), Levi (1994, 2013).

24 Card (2003, 77).

25 Card (2003, 63).

26 Card (2010, 96).

27 Card (2010, 114–117; see also 278–279).

28 See Wise (2017, 845) for related concerns; see also Abed (2006).

29 Lemkin (1933).

30 Lemkin (1933).

31 Lemkin (1933).

32 Card (2010, 278).

33 Card (2010, 253–254; see also 279) and passim.

34 Irvin-Erickson (2013, 276).

35 Irvin-Erickson (2017, 200).

36 Card (2010, 63).

37 Card (2010, 251).

38 Card (2010, 250–251).

39 Card (2010, 14).

40 Card (2010, 6).

41 Card (2010, 5).

42 Card (2010, 102).

43 Card (2010, 103).

44 Card (2010, 16–17).

45 Card (2010, 6).

46 See Pippin (2004) for clarifications on this point.

47 Pippin (1989, 91).

48 Pippin (2017, 334).

49 Pippin (2008, 259).

50 Pippin (2008, 53).

51 Pippin (2019, 252).

52 Pippin (1989, 247).

53 Pippin (2008); see also Pippin (1997, 10).

54 Pippin (2008, 5, emphasis in the original).

55 Pippin (1997, 428).

56 Pippin (2008, 276).

57 Pippin (2008, 17).

58 Pippin (2008, 62).

59 Hegel (1977, 110).

60 Pippin (2017, 335).

61 Pippin (2017, 334).

62 Card (2010, 237).

63 For example: the Concept is said to be the ‘universal blood’, the ‘soul of the world’ (Hegel 1977, 100), and its ‘life-pulse’ (Hegel 1969, 37).

64 Pippin (2019, 289).

65 Pippin (2019, 277).

66 Pippin (2019, 86).

67 Pippin (2017, 339).

68 Pippin (2008, 6).

69 Pippin (2008, 5).

70 See Brodholm and Rosoux (2009).

71 Pippin (2008, 25).

72 Pippin (2008, 87).

73 Pippin (1989, 153).

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 2005, p.192; see Stewart 1996 for commentary)).'

75 Card (2010, 14).

76 Card (2010, 6).

77 Rose (2009, 17), and passim.

78 See, for example, Rose (2017, 254–255).

79 Rose (2009, 218).

80 Rose (1997, 41).

81 See Sonbonmatsu (2009) for an overview and similar concerns.

82 See Bauman (1989).

83 Rose (1997, 43).

84 Rose (1997, 33).

85 Rose (1997, 54).

86 Rose (1997, 34).

87 Rose (2017, 36).

88 Pippin (2008, 265).

89 A first step would be to note that, if the items that Rose places under the heading of ‘soul’ (feeling, faith, intuition (Rose 2009, 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 1989, 151).

90 See Moses (2008) for a useful overview.

91 Adorno (2004, 320).

92 Wiesel, quoted in Rothberg and Levi (2003, 445), Levi (2013, 396).