ABSTRACT

It is widely acknowledged that Hegel holds the view that a rational social order needs to reconcile us to our status as natural beings, with bodily needs and desires. But while this general view is well-known, one of its most surprising implications is rarely explored: namely the implication that, for Hegel, a rational social order also has to reconcile us to the inevitable fate of everything natural and organic – it needs to reconcile ourselves to our own mortality. This paper explains this largely unknown dimension of Hegel’s view, as well as its implications for contemporary social philosophy. The main contemporary upshot is going to be that Hegel’s argument can be read as presenting the case for a ‘politics of mortality’: for a type of social critique that holds society to the standard of how easy it makes it for social members to face death with a reconciled attitude.

摘要

众所周知，黑格尔认为理性的社会秩序需要使我们与自然人的地位、身体的需要和欲望相协调。但是，尽管这一普遍观点众所周知，但其最令人惊讶的含义之一却很少被探索：即，对于黑格尔来说，理性的社会秩序也必须使我们适应自然和有机的一切不可避免的命运——它需要与我们自己的死亡和解. 这篇论文解释了黑格尔观点的这个很大程度上未知的维度，以及它对当代社会哲学的影响。当代的主要结果将是，黑格尔的论点可以被解读为提出了“死亡政治”的案例：一种社会批判，它使社会达到让社会成员面对死亡的难易程度的标准以和解的态度。