Continental Philosophy Research Group Talk (Karen Ng, Vanderbilt)

The Continental Philosophy Research Group is pleased to welcome as guest speaker Karen Ng, an associate professor of Philosophy at Vanderbilt University. Dr. Ng, who also serves as director of graduate studies, specializes in nineteenth-century European philosophy (esp. Hegel and German Idealism) and Frankfurt School Critical Theory. Her book, Hegel’s Concept of Life: Self-Consciousness, Freedom, Logic (Oxford University Press, 2020), won the 2021 Journal of the History of Philosophy Book Prize. In addition to her research in post-Kantian philosophy, Dr. Ng is interested in the ongoing influence of Hegel and Marx for critical social theory, particularly as their legacies help us understand the relation between human beings and nature, possibilities and failures of mutual recognition, and conceptions of progress and critique.

Talk Title

What is the Gattungsprozess?
Social Freedom and Social Reproduction in Hegel and Marx

Talk Abstract

In this paper, I analyze the key features of what Hegel calls the Gattungsprozess — the process of species-life — and defend its importance for an account of social freedom. Specifically, I argue that we can view the Gattungsprozess as providing the basis for a broadly historical materialist approach to social freedom in which this depends upon and is articulated through two processes: first, the metabolic exchange with an environment that has both natural and social characteristics; and second, social reproduction. In developing this Hegelian-Marxian account of social freedom, I argue against existing accounts that focus exclusively on institutional recognition. Instead, I show that social freedom is the historical and self-conscious realization of a concrete Gattungsprozess, the central aim of which is the production and reproduction of free individuals. One of the key contributions of Hegel and Marx is thus to provide an account of free individuality as possible and historically realizable only within the context of species-life and its ongoing reproduction.

About the Continental Philosophy Group

One of six departmental research interest groups, the Continental Philosophy Group works in the traditions of textual interpretation of human consciousness, phenomenology, and post-structuralist critical theory, among other related traditions of thought.