In his Science of Logic, Hegel treats life as a pure concept. This means that we know what it is to be a living being, and so how to distinguish living from non-living beings, non-empirically. We know it as an implication of the “science of pure thinking” that the Logic develops. The Philosophy of Nature in the Encyclopedia also treats living beings as categorically distinct, and the treatment is also not an empirical one. But it is not derived from the science of pure thinking as such. This suggests that the latter treatment is not absolutely a priori but, as is sometimes said of other aspects of Hegel’s work, “relatively a priori.” (Stated another way, The Philosophy of Nature is philosophy, not natural science.) What “relatively a priori” might mean is the topic here, and the aim is to show by such an analysis the general form of the relation between the Science of Logic and the Encyclopedia. The main point of comparison and contrast will be Kant’s understanding of the relation between “Transcendental Logic,” The Metaphysical First Principles of Natural Science and The Metaphysics of Morals, a similar, albeit quite differently conceived, tri-partite structure to Hegel’s system.

This chapter explores what Gadamer might mean by giving hermeneutics the task of “overcoming the primacy of self-consciousness” and asks whether it is really Hegel in his sights as he attempts to do so. The chapter first attends to the conflicting strands of deep solidarity with Hegel, coupled with just as deep a rejection. Gadamer’s final answer is that Hegel’s philosophy, whatever Hegel may have intended, did not completely break free of “subjectivism.” Of fundamental importance for Gadamer is the idea of finitude. Gadamer embraces what Hegel calls “the bad infinite” when he claims that the “soul’s dialogue with itself” has no teleological end point and is inexhaustible. Gadamer points to the limits of reflection.

The ways in which serious thought about film and philosophical reflection might intersect are various, and those dimensions have been much explored in the twentieth century, especially with the establishment of the academic study of film in the seventies and eighties.1 At that intersection, there are various philosophical questions that can be raised, primarily but not exclusively, about filmed fictional realist narratives, or “movies.” There are related questions about photography and other types of recordings of movement or figuration: documentaries, art videos, and non-representational avant-garde films, for example. But both Hollywood (or commercially produced narrative films) and art cinema, considered as new art forms, have drawn the most attention.

The general issue that is covered in this chapter is what Nietzsche might mean in subtitling Beyond Good and Evil a “Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future.” What is it that prevents the continuation of past philosophy; in what sense is the philosophy of the future a restoration of “psychology” as the “queen of the sciences”? Apparently such a new philosophy requires a more literary and aphoristic style, and will be esoteric; a kind of “mask.” Why? The focal question in this chapter concerns Nietzsche’s account of religion. How might a new philosophy of the future account for and evaluate its rival for a claim to wisdom about the highest or first things, the most important values – religion?

I WANT TO SUGGEST a way of appreciating the achievement of J. M. Coetzee's book, Elizabeth Costello, and its eight “lessons.” Given the nature of these lessons, this will make inevitable an attempt to raise the question of understanding the work in terms of what I shall call “philosophical fiction.” In this, I take myself to be following the lead given us by the book itself, in which philosophy obviously plays a large role. The idea will not be to show that fiction is philosophy. Of course, it is not. The book is literary fiction, even if a unique genre; not quite a short story collection, and certainly not a mere device for ventriloquizing philosophical claims. But the idea that fiction can be philosophical requires a defense of the claim, first, that fiction can be a distinctive form of thought, even a form of knowledge; and second, that such knowledge is relevant to, has a bearing on, the sort of knowledge philosophy, or at least some version of philosophy, tries to achieve. The bearing of fiction on philosophy is not that fiction is a form of philosophy. It has this bearing precisely because it is not. It has this bearing even, and especially, when what fiction achieves throws into some doubt the prospects for philosophy to achieve what it is trying to achieve. The immediately problematic or paradoxical nature of this thought can be put by saying: if the idea is that fiction is “philosophy by other means,” then the emphasis must first of all be on the phrase: “other means.” And that already threatens the claim that it can be philosophical. (How “other” can such means be, and still be means to philosophy?)

As a strictly theoretical question this leads us immediately to the notion of the form of literary fiction. Knowledge is knowledge by being of some generality, and generality is formal. It extends to many instances. This problem is dual. It concerns the distinctive form of all literary thought, as contrasted, say, with forms like mathematical or religious thought. And it concerns the specific content of any fictional insight. If a drama can be philosophical, then, say, the play, Othello, cannot be about, be a way of understanding, Othello's jealousy without also being about, showing us something about, jealousy in general.

I

The question of freedom in the modern German tradition is not just a metaphysical question. It concerns the status of a free life as a value, indeed, as they took to saying, the ‘absolute’ value. A free life is of unconditional and incomparable and inestimable value, and it is the basis of the unique, and again, absolute, unqualifiable respect owed to any human person just as such. This certainly increases the pressure on anyone who espouses such a view to tell us what a free life consists in. Kant's famous answer is ‘autonomy’, where this means first or minimally freedom from external constraint, coercion and intimidation (‘thinking for yourself’), but even more importantly, being in a certain specific sort of self-relation. I can only be said truly to be ‘ruling myself’ when the considerations that determine what I do are reasons. But if, finally, in exercising reason I am merely rationally responsive to inclinations and desires and aversions, I am (according to Kant) still letting such contingent impulses ‘rule’ my life, however strategically rational or hierarchically ordered my plans for satisfaction turn out to be. So, Kant concludes, I am only truly autonomous, self-ruling, when the one consideration of importance (that is, normatively authoritative) in what I do is, as he says so frequently if still mysteriously, the ‘form of rationality’ as such. The more familiar name for such a necessary condition of autonomy is the Categorical Imperative. To make clear that this subjection to the ‘form’ of rationality counts as autonomy, Kant also insists that this moral law be understood as ‘self-legislated’, that we must be able to regard ourselves as its ‘author’, and that we are bound to such a law because we bind ourselves to it.

I must begin with a disclaimer: as readers will no doubt realize, I do not quite belong with the Tocqueville experts in this volume. I do not write or, as we now must say, do research, on Tocqueville, and my main acquaintance with Democracy in America consists in teaching it nearly every year for the past 17 years in the Classics Core at the University of Chicago. However, Tocqueville shares a lot with a philosopher whom I do know something about – Hegel – and he raises issues that also concern a visual poet whom I also have some interest in – that great mythologizer of America's idea of itself, John Ford. So I entertain the hope that out of this mix of overlapping interests, I might have something to contribute to the discussion.

What Tocqueville and Hegel share, I want to say, is an approach to political matters. Neither of them directly asks the central question of classical political philosophy: What is the best human regime? Neither is indifferent to the question of the worthiness of some regime or other, but they do not propose to address that issue by wondering how best to approximate some ideal paradigm. Both, that is, do not separate the question of political philosophy itself from political actuality, where that especially means historical actuality. So let me start with a general remark about that issue and then discuss how that frames the way Tocqueville and Ford address the question of equality and its worthiness.

Kantianism

In 1781 Kant, in his Critique of Pure Reason, delivered the bad news that the human mind can (even worse, must) pose important, unavoidable philosophical questions that it cannot possibly answer. These were distinct, perennial philosophical questions, answerable, if at all, by pure reason alone, independent of any appeal to experience. (Kant thought the most important ones concerned freedom, the existence of God, and the immortality of the soul, but the scope of his critique also extended to issues like the nature of the mind, the human good, the purpose of nature, or any attempt to know “things in themselves.”) While, according to Kant, we could at least settle once and for all just what those limits to knowledge were and why we were not able to cross such a boundary, that seemed small consolation. Metaphysics, the “queen of the sciences,” had understood itself as capable of knowing how things must be or could not be and so had prided itself on the certainty of its claims and on a rigor in its method rivaled only by mathematics. So it was not for nothing that Kant became known as the allzerstörende, the “all-destroying.” The skeptical sentiment expressed in Kant’s critical work was not of course isolated in Königsberg. The latter half of the eighteenth century can be viewed as a collective debate about the nature and even future of rationalist philosophy, or philosophy as it had come to be understood since Plato (especially as the impact and advances of Newtonian physics were more and more felt), and about the right way to state the principles underlying an ever more popular empiricism.