Author: Aliosha Bielenberg

Objectivity in Kant, Hegel, and Marx

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In this essay, I briefly sketch the trajectory of the “objective” or “objectivity” in three canonical German philosophers: Kant, Hegel, and Marx. My motivation for pursuing this essay is looking backwards from the place of “objectivity” today, especially as the word has been variously contested in the last forty years or so in the emerging field of science and technology studies (e.g., by Donna Haraway). Too often, in these debates objectivity is deployed as a strawman, a crude caricature of logical positivism to be hacked away at by (often equally crude) postmodern critiques. A more sophisticated account of objectivity is given by Lorraine Daston and Peter Galison in their seminal 2008 book, Objectivity, which traces the rise of successive “epistemic virtues” through a close study of scientific atlases from around 1750 to 1950. There have also been recent attempts to recuperate objectivity as part of the broad coalition of movements grouped under the “ontological turn.” I think a move of this sort was anticipated by Hannah Arendt in her late Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy. I think all these discussions would be enriched by a more nuanced understanding of the history of this word.

But enough of this talk. This paper is more proximately driven by a fundamental foreignness I perceived when reading the German philosophers of the early nineteenth century, for whom “objectivity” seems to mean something else quite different. For the purposes of this essay, I want to reconstruct as faithfully as I can the various meanings of objectivity and objects in the work of Kant, Hegel, and Marx. I bracket both my motivations and the later development of the term to focus on an immanent account of each of these thinkers in turn. One more preliminary note: part of the foreignness can be attributed (as so often it is) to difficulties of translation. In particular, “subject” is also a Latinate term in German (Subject or Subjekt). By contrast, “object” can be either Object/Objekt (the Latinate term) or the Germanic Gegenstand, whence also Gegenständlich (“objective”) and Gegenständlichkeit (“objectivity”). Gegenstand has the distinction that it literally “stands against” something. Kant talked mostly of Objecte — but not really, since he divided the world into the realm of appearances (phenomena) and things-in-themselves. The Subjekt has a double meaning, of course: it is both subject-matter (“what is the subject of this book?”) in which case it can be rather synonymous with “object”; and it is the ethical or epistemological subject, the self that knows or acts. So much for a bird’s-eye view of the development. Let us now dive in and get our hands dirty.

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An Articulation of Hegel’s Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit

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For Hegel, philosophy requires systematic exposition. It should not be a matter of feeling or intuiting. Nor should philosophy undertake the task of “edification,” a kind of “fog” of “inflamed inspiration.” Rather, philosophy has as its aim material completion that opposes “utterly vacuous naiveté in cognition.” This kind of systematic, complete, ultimate truth is not in substance but in subject, namely the universal individual, the world spirit. Science consists not in an end, but rather in the reflection: the process is of absolute importance.

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An Articulation of the Prefaces to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason

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In his preface to the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant sketches his vision of philosophy’s task after the transcendental turn. For the purposes of this essay, I will limit my discussion to metaphysics, which is also the subject of this first Critique. Kant famously calls metaphysics “the queen of all the sciences” (A viii). He traces a path between the dogmatism (despotic tyranny) and skepticism (complete anarchy) that he says have characterized most previous metaphysics. Kant notes that Locke had attempted but failed to “put an end to all these controversies … through a certain physiology of the human understanding” (A ix). Kant puts this point more strongly still in the preface to the second edition, where he compares the path of metaphysics to other sciences. Logic has “travelled the secure course of a science” since Aristotle (B vii). The path of logic has been relatively easy, though, since it “has to do with nothing further than itself and its own form” (B ix). Metaphysics, by contrast, “has to deal with objects [Objecte] too,” and therefore “logic as a propaedeutic constitutes only the outer courtyard, as it were, to the sciences” (B ix).

Kant’s task is to put metaphysics on the same “secure course of a science” as mathematics and physics. The task of the philosopher is to undertake this kind of scientific inquiry with respect to reason itself. What does this path of metaphysics as science consist in? Well, Kant says, up to now “it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to the objects.” Since this has “come to nothing,” Kant tells us, “let us once try whether we do not get farther with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition” (B xvi). Here he makes an analogy with Copernicus. Before the Copernican Revolution, celestial phenomena were explained as dependent on the motion of heavenly bodies alone, since the Earth was stationary; after Copernicus, these same observed phenomena were explained as dependent on both the motion of heavenly bodies and the motion of the Earth. Kant proposes something analogous: before him, the phenomena of human experience were explained as dependent on the sensible world, with the mind uninvolved in structuring these phenomena; Kant argues, by contrast, that the phenomena of human experience are structured by both sensory data and a basic structure supplied by the human mind. Instead of a sensible world orbiting around a stationary mind, both the mind and objects are involved in structuring the phenomena of human experience. “This experiment,” Kant says, “promises to metaphysics the secure course of a science,” not least because it borrows its structure from the very revolution that also set astronomy on the secure course of a science. Kant is thus “undertaking an entire revolution [in metaphysics] according to the example of the geometers and natural scientists” (B xxii).

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John Wesley Gilbert, W. E. B. Du Bois, and Classical Education

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I have previously written about John Wesley Gilbert, the early Black archaeologist and classicist and the first African-American to receive a graduate degree from Brown. Recent work, especially by John W. I. Lee, has focused on Gilbert’s life in the discipline of classics, and especially at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens. But Gilbert’s thought and actions reflected not just his situation at Brown and in the discipline of classics. He was also an important participant in various debates among black intellectuals around the turn of the century. Thus, we see his name brought up repeatedly in the 1890s and the 1900s in prominent African-American newspapers and journals. For instance, Gilbert was widely acclaimed in 1891 as a symbol of black success. Take the following short notice included in the 1891 issue of The Appeal, a Midwestern African-American newspaper:

One colored young man, John Wesley Gilbert, of Georgia, has gone to Athens to enter the American school there. He will find very little race prejudice in that classic land.

([‘One colored young man…’] 1891)

At this time in his life, Gilbert was seen as successfully escaping the conditions of slavery he was trapped in at birth — by joining the prestigious (and overwhelmingly white) institution of classics and archaeology and attending the (entirely white) institution of Brown.

Gilbert’s reception changed significantly later in his life, as he became known for his ideas — not just his academic success. We thus see a scathing article published in 1909 in the same newspaper, The Appeal (‘A Reverend Flunkey’ 1909). The authors were reacting to a speech Gilbert gave to the Arkansas Southern Methodist conference. The Associated Press reported that Gilbert said that “the teachers sent down from the North know nothing of the real need of his race, and, that as a result, a false perspective was given his people.” For The Appeal (editorializing the AP excerpt) Northern missionaries instead “inspired in the Afro-American a spirit of manhood which led him to aspire to higher and better things.” In prose dripping with sarcasm, the newspaper notes that it is this “unfortunate tendency” of northern missionaries that “Rev. Gilbert is laboring to reform.” Gilbert, they say, is aligning himself with “those eminent statesmen, Tillman and Vardaman” and Senator Stone — all notoriously racist legislators. For The Appeal, not only was Gilbert betraying black dreams by giving cover for Jim Crow, but his program of interracial partnership would in fact “make the Afro-American … just as he was in the times of slavery, perfectly willing to accept the white man as massa.”

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Critical Abstracts: Overview

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In summer of 2017, I worked for Professor Susan Harvey as a research assistant on her book project, Women’s Singing, Women’s Stories in Ancient Syriac Christianity. One of my main tasks was to read articles and provide short, critical abstracts for her. I’ve made these abstracts available here, accessible under the category “Critical abstracts — late antiquity”:

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How Do We Make A World? Hannah Arendt, the Khoi-San, and the Problems of Alterity and Humanism

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I presented this 10-minute talk at the senior thesis presentations for the Joukowsky Institute for Archaeology and the Ancient World on 19 May 2020. A video recording is available here; my presentation begins at 30:00. The full thesis is available through the Brown Digital Repository. A 26-page revised and condensed version is available here.

Source: Kevin Davie, “The Storyteller’s Map,” Atavist, 2015.  Original held in the Bleek-Lloyd collection at the University of Cape Town.

I begin my thesis with this map. This object was created by //Kabbo, a prisoner in Cape Town who spoke /Xam, an indigenous language of South Africa, in collaboration with two philologists: Wilhelm Bleek and his sister-in-law Lucy Lloyd. Between 1865 and 1875, they spoke with many prisoners in Cape Town who spoke San languages, to record stories and otherwise document their culture. Bleek and Lloyd, and many of the people who have accessed their collection since, saw their work as saving the relics of a people soon to be washed away by time. Thus, a nineteenth-century historian wrote that it was “a mere matter of time in an unequal struggle between the primitive bow and arrow, with which they fought, and the deadly gun in the hands of their invaders.” Indeed, the history of the San is marked by genocide and assimilation. Dutch settlers saw them as vermin; shooting four of them, an English traveler wrote in 1797, was discussed with “as much composure and indifference as if he had been speaking of four partridges.” In the nineteenth century, the San assimilated into the Coloured people of the Cape, a laboring underclass with mixed slave and indigenous origins. Since the end of apartheid, San people have re-asserted their indigeneity.

Starting from these objects and this history of representation, we come face-to-face with questions of objectivity and humanism. It is these questions that I elaborate on in my thesis in ways that I will show the contours of in my presentation today, before returning to another object of the Bleek-Lloyd collection. The question driving my project is: how can we assert both common rights and uncommon differences?

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Ethos Between Ethics and Ethology: Middlemarch and Spinoza

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In George Eliot’s Middlemarch, the narrator writes with empathy and concern for the human characters she conjures. In a famous passage early in the book, Eliot writes of the narrator’s task:

I at least have so much to do in unravelling certain human lots, and seeing how they were woven and interwoven, that all the light I can command must be concentrated on this particular web, and not dispersed over that tempting range of relevancies called the universe. (91)

The “particular web” in this case is the fictional village of Middlemarch. Eliot’s novel is a study of the behavior of some of this village’s inhabitants, yet the “web” that is Eliot’s overriding concern is the universe and everything that inhabits it. It is her ultimate aim to expand the horizons of her readers and their knowledge of emotions, an aim that drives her provisional focus on a particular web of human lots. In other words, Eliot’s ethology (or “the science of the formation of character,” as John Stuart Mill described it in 1843) establishes an ethics. In this essay, I explore Eliot’s concerns with ethos in both its forms to elaborate on her non-humanist humanism: that is, how she puts the human front and center without demeaning the non-human. As I will show, Eliot’s overriding concern for human flourishing is undergirded by theological and ontological commitments to the more-than-human.

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Black Studies and Geological Thinking

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In this time of crisis, I and many others find comfort in imagining what thinkers we feel close to would say about the COVID-19 pandemic. I have been thinking a lot about Hannah Arendt’s idiosyncratic conception of the world. For her, it is human interaction that creates a world out of the earth; in The Human Condition, Arendt writes thatwe make a “home for men during their life on earth” by acting together and speaking to each other in a common space. It seems, then, that social distancing is quite literally the end of the world. What Arendt dreads has come to pass: men have become entirely private — that is, deprived of physical interaction with other human beings. What, then, do we do after the end of the world from COVID-19?

To answer this question, I want to suggest that we look to a bevy of recent works in indigenous and black studies that take seriously the ends of the world that have already happened. The apocalypticism of the climate crisis and of COVID-19 is not novel to people who survived the genocidal onset of modernity. The diseases that devastated indigenous populations in the Americas were many times more deadly than the novel coronavirus; the Middle Passage, too, cut short not just many lives but also spelled the end of entire families, languages, and cultures. In short, the creation and discovery of a new world spelled an end to many old ones. For people who survived these catastrophes and their descendants, the end of the world has long been on their minds.

Recent interventions have brought this rich legacy of thought to bear on the apocalypticism of the climate crisis. We would do well to turn to these recent works as we face another crisis. Just as we can learn much about crisis mobilization from the response to the pandemic, we can begin to imagine a different world post-pandemic by listening to the voices that remind us about the ends of the world that have already happened. In other words, we should think together the end of the world due to colonialism, climate change, and COVID-19. The point of this comparison is not to inspire unfounded hope: to say that the end of the world has happened should never be to diminish its severity. Yet the fact remains that people have always survived and persisted. We should turn to these voices to learn more about the stakes of apocalypticism and what to do after the end of the world.

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What is the world for Hannah Arendt?

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Hannah Arendt once wrote that to grasp Heidegger’s philosophy one needed to properly explicate the place of the world in his writings. One could say much the same about Arendt. Arendt draws on Heidegger’s understanding of the world as developed in Being and Time. For Heidegger, “the world” at first means quite simply the environment, that is what is around us. He writes that:

The answer to the question of the “who” of everyday Dasein is to be obtained by analysing that kind of Being in which Dasein maintains itself proximally and for the most part. Our investigation takes its orientation from Being-in-the-world — that basic state of Dasein by which every mode of its Being gets co-determined. … In our ‘description’ of that environment which is closest to us — the work-world of the craftsman, for example, — the outcome was that along with the equipment to be found when one is at work [in Arbeit], those Others for whom the ‘work’ [“Werk”] is destined are ‘encountered too.’ (153)

This is quite intuitive to grasp, really — our world consists of not just other objects but other subjects, too. Our mode of being with these other subjects is very important for Heidegger’s own project, which is to answer the question of Being (the Seinsfrage). Our mode of encountering Others is different than how we encounter Things:

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Forest History of Southern New England

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The following analysis uses data published in W. Wyatt Oswald et al., “Subregional Variability in the Response of New England Vegetation to Postglacial Climate Change,” Journal of Biogeography 45, no. 10 (2018): 2375–88, https://doi.org/10.1111/jbi.13407. The spreadsheet I used is available upon request.

Key points:

  • High-resolution data permits reconstruction of Holocene forest cover changes
  • Initial forestation after deglaciation in 12 000 BCE led by birch and pine
  • Dramatic decline in forest canopy between 1630 and 1708; almost complete recovery by 2001

Berry Pond is an unimaginatively named site north of Boston, Massachusetts (figure 1). Its low elevation (42 m), regular precipitation (1236 mm per year), and soil (mostly glacial till) make it a site typical of southern New England. The authors of this study present an impressively detailed pollen count stretching back to 16 000 years before present (BP), or 14 072 BCE. The sampling gives us data at a very high resolution. This data is freely available through the Neotoma Paleoecology Database. I downloaded this data and here present a brief analysis and interpretation with an eye to tracing the Holocene forest history of New England.

Figure 1

The graph tells a remarkably coherent story of the forest’s response to disturbance (figure 2). The canopy tree count includes species such as maple, chestnut, hickory, oak, and hemlock — characteristic trees of a well-established forest in southern New England. In this category, I also included pioneer trees, namely pine and birch. These trees like open canopy, so they are the first to “pioneer” an area that has no other trees in it. Thus we see that the initial response to deglaciation at 12 000 BCE is a steep climb in the percent of canopy trees, from 56% to 97% in less than 2 000 years. This dramatic increase in forest cover is led by birch and pine, which rise to their all-time high of 75% in 10 800 BCE. Over the next 11 500 years, the relative pollen counts stay pretty similar, with canopy trees at 95–100% and the percent of flowering grasses (indicators of open land) below 5%. In other words, the landscape that native people of New England encountered was mostly forest, without much open land (at least in the area of Berry Pond).

Figure 2
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