Probably the most important lesson I’ve yet taken from reading Robert Pippin’s tremendously compelling 1989 study (and reevaluation) of Hegel’s philosophy, titled Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness, is that we might best understand the numerous references to forms of political and social conflict or “opposition” in the Phenomenology through the lens of the “problem of objectivity” Hegel inherited from Kant. Pippin’s discussion of Hegel’s attempt at providing a general account of how “Spirit’s knowledge of itself” ultimately resolves the various forms of sceptical doubt encountered in the Phenomenology raises the possibility of understanding political struggle as a form - expressed historically and socially - of the kind of opposition, or dissatisfaction, of consciousness with itself that Pippin thinks motivates the phenomenological subject of Hegel’s narrative. The issue is at once supremely general and abstract in the extreme; some time spent with Pippin’s reconfiguration of Hegel’s philosophical priorities will help to foreground the claim about political struggle that I’m interested in making, and a few, tidy, real-life examples should serve to illustrate the implications of such an attitude to the origins of political and social conflicts.
Pippin’s book forms a part of the so-called “Hegel Renaissance” in English-speaking philosophy, a resurgence of scholarship and interest that began to gather pace in the 1980s and continues to this day.1 This “return to Hegel” reversed the polemical dismissal of idealism that signalled the maturing of the analytic school, summed up by G. E. Moore in his infamous paper “The Refutation of Idealism”.2 A key step in the rehabilitation process was to dispel the impression that linked Hegel to a form of “spirit monism” and took his criticisms of Kant to amount to an endorsement of pre-critical, dogmatic metaphysics. The solution was to articulate a “non-metaphysical” reading of both the intent and content of the Hegelian project; Pippin’s contribution rests on what I call a “continuity thesis”, a simple claim of continuity between Kant, Fichte, and Hegel which insists on reading their differences not as evidence of a fundamental difference of opinion, but as outcrops of a shared concern with a central problem. This problem is one of “objectivity”. The problem goes something like this: What are the conditions for the possibility of knowledge of the objects of experience? How are these conditions to be established? How do we defeat sceptical objections? And how does consciousness come to acquire the kind of multipolar relation between self, object, and justification that qualifies as “knowledge” or “science”?
Pippin does not think it is difficult to refute the attribution of a metaphysical ambition to Hegel’s work; the idea that the Phenomenology is a story about the necessary activity of a “world-soul” with theological connotations, intervening in history to obtain the desired teleological outcome, is dismissed out of hand, on the grounds that there is no way of reconciling such a motivation with Hegel’s explicit praise for the critical method of Kant. Statements to such an end are so frequent that "[j]ust attributing moderate philosophic intelligence to Hegel should at least make one hesitate before construing him as a post-Kantian philosopher with a precritical metaphysics."3 Of course, I’m inclined to agree, not just because the caricaturing of Hegel as a kind of retrograde, eleventh-hour Rationalist has never seemed very compelling, but because the “non-metaphysical” rendering of his writings is so much more productive (and rids us of baggage which would otherwise render large parts of the doctrine indefensible). But what is it that this manoeuvre really buys us? I like to think of it this way; that the Phenomenology really makes much more sense if we are permitted to think of Hegel’s idealism as involving some claims about the “internal” or “ideal” conditions governing Spirit’s progressive self-determination (I will explain what this means), rather than a claim about how the “stuff” of history or reality is all made out of Spirit (i.e. “spirit monism”), and that we enjoy direct rational access to its structure (“as in Spinoza’s famous claim in the Ethics that the order and connections of thoughts ‘is the same’ as the order and connection of things”).4
Defining the scope of a “non-metaphysical” reading involves, as I said, the pursuit of a “continuity thesis” linking Kant, Fichte, and Hegel with reference to a “problem of objectivity” that ensnares all three of them. A very high-level description of how Pippin goes about this might read as follows: in Kant, the question of the objective validity of the Categories (which subjectively define the shape of conscious experience) is left unsettled (leading, infamously, to the problem of relativism, since if under a different conceptual framework the description of objects would change, how is the “objectivity” of our experience under any conceptual framework certain?); Fichte’s response is to claim that the apperceptive unification of the disparate sense-data of any subject into a unified experience involves a free and spontaneous initial “self-positing”, and that the question of the objective validity of a conceptual framework governing experience could be settled by investigating the conditions for this absolute “self-positing”; but Hegel, recognising the issue that had arisen in light of Kant’s transcendental Deduction of the Categories, and noting both the futility of his attempt to address the issue via the notion of “pure intuitions” and the intractability of Fichte’s purported solution (the insight that our conscious activity requires a prior “self-positing” does not help us to get outside of that “self-positing” and verify the objectivity our experiential results), forges another path, one in which a solution to the problem of the objectivity of any conceptual framework (or “Notion”) can be deduced internally, by an investigation into (or reconstruction of) how rival Notions appear to consciousness and are defeated by sceptical objections, each defeat giving rise to a strengthened account of the objectivity of a plausible Notion, and ending in the realisation of an Absolute Notion (which I take to a kind of global defeater to all other candidate Notions).
Now, one might ask, what on earth does this have to do with politics, let alone conflict? Well, as Pippin notes, Hegel’s “dialectical” approach to the problem of objectivity, which is to say, as before, simply the idea that there is available to us some internal description of how particular ways of seeing the world (Notions) conflict with and successively replace one another (this is what is meant by “Spirit’s progressive self-determination”), introduces all the classic historical, social, and existential themes of the Phenomenology (think Master/Slave; think “shapes of history”; think Napoleon as “world-soul on horseback” (die Weltseele zu Pferde)) which have been ever since the pet obsession of Marxists, critical theorists, and social and political philosophers. The “opposition” that defines the life-and-death struggle between Master and Slave, for instance, or that motivates the Napoleonic conquest of Europe, is thus in some way downstream of the more basic type of “opposition” experienced by a subject between its self-determining activity (i.e. its application of a Notion/conceptual framework to sense data to produce a unified experience of objects) and the things that that subject is straining to safely determine (or objectify), and might be explicable precisely with reference to such a basic experience of “opposition”. The following lengthy passage should help to more clearly define the insight at play here:
"Hegel is attempting both to alter the way in which the objectivity of the results of ‘Spirit's experience to itself’ are assessed and to defend such a newly defined objectivity. In fulfilling the former goal, he takes it upon himself to provide an account of how and why an idealized [sic] subject (any possible subject) would experience an ‘opposition’ between its self-determining activity and what it is trying to determine - in our earlier language, why a subject would doubt that the way it takes thing to be is the way things are. If such an account is to have a chance of providing a general enough description of such experienced opposition to be used in the kind of deductive strategy described earlier, the one that results from the rejection of pure intuition and that will fulfil the latter goal, it must be very general indeed, comprehensive enough to explain the nature of such ‘opposition’ and so the skeptical doubts that originate from it. And, true to form, Hegel charges ahead and tries to provide such an extraordinarily general account. He tries to account for such things as how and why a subject would find its views of another subject ‘opposed’ by such a subject; how social subjects, groups, or classes find their desires, and especially their view of their own desires, opposed and negated by other social subjects, groups, or classes; how political subjects with certain Notions about political life would (and did) find themselves in sometimes ‘tragic’ opposition; in what way laboring [sic] or even worshipping subjects find their experience of their own activity ‘in opposition with itself’; and so forth."5
I take from this the following view: namely, that the kind of opposition characteristic of political and social conflict, both at the level of the individual actor and of the mass group, is conformable to the basic experience of opposition which motivates the phenomenological subject to revise the Notional backdrop to his apperceptive (and theorising) activity in light of sceptical objections. Stated more generally, and in non-Hegelian language, political conflicts are motivated by differences of opinion as to what really is the case, and these differences of opinion tend to stem from differences in the conceptual frameworks ordering the actual experience of political subjects; subjects who also constantly experience an opposition between the results of their respective efforts at conceptual determination and the world in-itself; and so conflict at the political and social level becomes a means of resolving both types of opposition by testing rival frameworks against one another in the pursuit of victory (that is, submission of the other). Conflict, or struggle, is progressive in so far as the breadth and depth of such “opposition” is slowly narrowed. The payoff from this conclusion is twofold; first of all, the history of political and social difference comes to have epistemological implications; and second, we discover that such paradigmatically epistemological an issue as disagreement over what counts as knowledge, or over what framework for organising experience is objectively valid, plays out well beyond the classroom or seminar hall, as far, in fact, as the field of Austerlitz or the ruins of Stalingrad.
As I said earlier, the generality of the problem, and the abstraction involved in its presentation, makes an intuitive grasp of the thinking here somewhat tricky to get hold of. I also said that some “real-world” examples would help to illustrate the point. Conveniently, my return to reading Pippin coincided with the UK Supreme Court’s landmark verdict in For Women Scotland v Scottish Ministers, the latest shock development in a long-running (and very British) saga regarding the legal definition of sex and its interaction with equality legislation in respect of those who espouse a gender identity at odds with the sex in which they were born.6 What is interesting about the case is precisely that it exemplifies the understanding of political and social conflict which I have been labouring to draw out. The dispute is a species of the “opposition” between social groups which Pippin mentions earlier; in which “social subjects, groups, or classes find their desires, and especially their view of their own desires, opposed and negated by other social subjects, groups, or classes”. Without thinking in much detail about the sort of “desire” that might be in question when dealing with issues of gender and identification with gender types7, we can move on directly to thinking about the case in terms of a difference over how a group views its own desires, in this instance, how a conceptual framework is applied to the experience of a political subject to deduce the validity of claims it might make on the relevant authorities for legal recognition, moral dignity, political representation, and so on. The two parties owe their opposed positions to radically different conceptions of what is going on when someone identifies in a particular way, with a particular package of gendered notions about behaviour and presentation, or not, and this gives rise to a disagreement over whether claims for recognition made on the basis of such an identification should be viewed as legitimate or illegitimate. In the background, there is also a disagreement taking place over whether any notion of gender, indeed, of any concrete notion of a social kind in general, can acquire objective validity, and thus also disagreement over whether an organ of the state might legitimately adjudicate over related claims. The latter disagreement is particularly problematic since the rejection of the mere possibility that any one account of what gender really is can genuinely acquire objective validity amounts to a rejection of the whole enterprise of truth which is philosophy’s raison d’etre, and the denial that an organ of the state (say a court) can adjudicate on such matters is a denial of the historically-embodied process of Spirit’s progressive self-determination which Hegel endorsed and envisaged.
Anyway, the essence of the point is this: political struggles are struggles about what is really the case, and these questions are quintessentially manifestations of the “problem of objectivity” (is the conceptual framework ordering my experience objectively valid?); the dispute between certain radical feminists (For Women Scotland) and their opponents in government, civil society, and beyond (Scottish Ministers), is a dispute over the question what is gender, really? and this question only begs opposition because there is initially some doubt about the objectivity of any given Notion (returning to Hegel’s language) determining my experience of gender, some gap between the presumptions behind my activity and the thing-in-itself, which must be resolved. In this respect then, a dispute over legal definitions is much the same as a war fought over resources; in either instance, the difference at hand has to do with what is really the case (e.g. do the rivers of the Indus Valley belong to India or to Pakistan?), what claims flow legitimately as a result (does India have the right to siphon water upstream?), and what authorities might legitimately adjudicate (the ICJ? the global hegemon?).8 The consequences of this attitude to political conflict are myriad and run deep; Richard Rorty took to considering the whole debate between realists and anti-realists about an external, mind-independent reality and our means of acquiring knowledge about it as derivative of a higher-level political debate over whether or not philosophers should assume an “anti-authoritarian stance”.9 For Rorty, capital-R “Realism”, of the sort that For Women Scotland seem to endorse (there is one, external, mind-independent reality which holds regardless of the content of people’s beliefs and social practices, in this case, “Biological Sex”) always implied authoritarian political results. But as I hinted at earlier, the denial that any account of, say, social kinds, could acquire objective validity, itself warns of the possibility of a kind of dissimulated and diffused authoritarianism, cloaked in the language of autonomy.
This view of conflict, if taken on, forecloses the possibility of several other common explanations. Simple empirical accounts of conflict which locate its cause in the brute fact of scarcity or competition over resources fail to take into account the way in which such issues must first be raised and brought before consciousness in accordance with a conceptual framework and can be dismissed. Relations of possession and ownership must be constructed and then problematised before the possibility of a conflict-causing disagreement over such relations between two or more parties can arise. Likewise, Hobbesian accounts of conflict which rely on notions of “natural desire” or “natural self-interest” for their motivation are not compatible with the Hegelian view, which takes conflict and the desires which attend it to be historically productive and socially formative in a way that contradicts the stated intention of a pacifying Leviathan. What is unique about the account I have sketched here, and decisive for our understanding of the Phenomenology and Hegel’s social and political theory more broadly, is the way in which conflict or “opposition” acquires a productive or progressive function, in both the world-historical and epistemological domains.
Frederick Beiser. ‘Introduction: The Puzzling Hegel Renaissance’, in Hegel and Nineteenth-century Philosophy, (ed.) Frederick Beiser (Cambridge University Press, 2008)
G. E. Moore. “The Refutation of Idealism.” Mind 12, no. 48 (1903): 433–53.
Robert Pippin. Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness. (Cambridge University Press, 1989) pg.7
Pippin. Hegel’s Idealism. pg. 84
Pippin. Hegel’s Idealism. pg. 101
Judgment in For Women Scotland v Scottish Ministers. 16 April 2025. https://supremecourt.uk/uploads/uksc_2024_0042_judgment_aea6c48cee.pdf
See, naturally, Judith Butler. Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity. (Routledge, 1990) p. 3-33
In 1960, India and Pakistan signed the Indus Waters Treaty (IWT), regulating the use of various rivers in the Indus Valley drainage basin. During the recent flareup over a terror attack targeting primarily Hindu holidaymakers in Indian-administered Jammu & Kashmir, policymakers in Delhi chose to unilaterally suspend the treaty.
Richard Rorty. Pragmatism as Anti-Authoritarianism (Harvard University Press, 2021)