The Palgrave Hegel Handbook 9783030265960

Table of contents :
Series Editor’s Preface
Preface
Acknowledgements
Contents
Notes on Contributors
Introduction: Understanding Hegel and His Philosophical Project
Part I Intellectual Background and Philosophical Project
Chapter 1 Hegel: His Life and His Path in Philosophy
1 Early Life and First Encounter with Philosophy
2 Time in Tübingen: Acquaintance with Hölderlin and Schelling, and Lived Experience of the French Revolution
3 Pre-Jena Period: Despair, Uncertainty and Desire for a New Path
4 At Jena: Launching His Academic Career
5 Between Jena and Heidelberg: Another Period of Despair
6 Heidelberg Period: Return to the University
7 Call to Berlin: Realization of Goals and Ambitions
Bibliography
Chapter 2 Situating Hegel: From Transcendental Philosophy to a Phenomenology of Spirit
1 Kant’s Transcendental Philosophy
2 Early Skeptical Critiques of Kant’s Transcendental Philosophy
3 Fichte’s Philosophy of Freedom
4 Schelling’s Turn to Spinoza
5 On the Way to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit
Bibliography
Chapter 3 Kant, Hegel and the Historicity of Pure Reason
1 Introduction
2 Kant and the History of Pure Reason
3 Hamann, Herder and the “Meta-critique” of Pure Reason
4 The Profusion of Post-critique Alternatives
5 Hegel’s “Self-Consummating Skepticism”
6 The Twin Targets of Hegel’s Phenomenological Critique
7 Hegel’s Phenomenological, Critical History of Pure Reason in the 1807 Phenomenology
8 Hegelian Conclusions
Bibliography
Chapter 4 Hegel’s Epistemology
1 Problems of Scholarly Neglect of Hegel’s Epistemology
2 Hegel’s Striking Originality in Epistemology
3 Skeptical Naturalism and Reconceiving Knowing as a Dynamic Process
4 Kant’s Critical Self-Scrutiny of Reason is Achieved Historically
5 Hegel’s Systematic Philosophy Anticipates (inter alia) Structural Realism
6 Knowing is Anchored in Doing, in Practical Reasoning and Activities
Bibliography
Part II Phenomenology of Spirit
Chapter 5 The Role of Religion in Hegel’s Phenomenological Justification of Philosophical Science
1 Introduction
2 Hegel’s Ambiguous Discussion of the Presupposition Question
3 Hegel’s Scientific Proof Procedure
4 Consciousness Retreats into the Infinity of Life and Self-Consciousness
5 Self-Consciousness Retreats into the Transcendence of the Rational
6 The Emergence of the Irrational and the Retreat into Spirit
7 The Spirit of the Enlightenment
8 The Spirit of the Moral World and the Retreat into Religion
9 The Spirit of Religion and the Retreat into Absolute Knowing
10 Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 6 Absolute Spirit in Performative Self-Relations of Persons
1 Introduction and Main Results
2 Systematic and Conceptual Background
2.1 Ding an sich, Transcendental Apperception, and Intellectual Intuition
2.2 Self-Consciousness
2.3 Being an Object of Knowledge and Being as a Performative Attitude
2.4 Relative Self-Ascriptions and Absolute Performation
3 Investigating Real Human Consciousness
3.1 Deconstructing Empiricist Self-Knowledge
3.2 Deconstructing a Thinking Soul as the Master of the Body
3.3 Deconstructing Intuitive Appeals to Reason
3.4 Human Spirit as the Form of a Personal Subject in We-Groups
4 Absolute Spirit
4.1 Finite Knowledge and the Practical Role of Ideals
4.2 The Idea of the Good
4.3 Ideal Truth
4.4 Mundane Truth in Religion and Art vs. Parochial Views in Empiricism and Scientism
5 Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 7 Individuality, Individualism and Our Human Zoôn Politikon
Bibliography
Part III Science of Logic and the System of Philosophy
Chapter 8 Method in Hegel’s Dialectic-Speculative Logic
1 Form and Content of Thinking: Formal, Transcendental, Dialectic-Speculative Logic
2 Method and the Inner Self-Movement of the Content
3 Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 9 Aufhebung
1
2
2.1
2.2
2.3
3
4
Bibliography
Chapter 10 Freedom as Belonging: A Defense of Hegelian Holism
1 Introduction
2 A Tale of Two Stories
3 “Freedom Is Not Free”
4 Kill, Eat, Be Free
5 An Exercise in Idealism
Bibliography
Part IV Philosophy of Nature
Chapter 11 Levels of Reality or Development? Hegel’s Realphilosophie and Philosophy of the Sciences
1
2
Bibliography
Chapter 12 Causality, Natural Systems, and Hegel’s Organicism
1 Introduction
2 Conceptual Analysis and Philosophical Naturalism
3 Hegel’s Lessons from and Corrections to Kant’s Critical Philosophy
4 Hegel and Scientific Biology
5 Hegel’s Central Theses in “Force and Understanding”
6 Hegel’s Semantics: Conceptual Explication and ‘the Necessity of the Concept’
7 One Central Aim of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature
Bibliography
Chapter 13 Hegel’s Philosophy of Natural and Human Spaces
1 Introduction
2 Space from Mechanics to Physics
2.1 Nature as the Idea in the Form of Being-Other
2.2 The Quantitative Beginning of the Philosophy of Nature: Indifferent Spatial Externality in Mechanics
2.3 The Significance of Space in the Physics of Individualized Matter
3 Space in the Experience of Inhabiting the Earth
3.1 Animal Life and Its Space
3.2 Geognosy, Physical Geography and World History: Hegel’s Speculative Deduction of Natural Spaces
4 Space in Spirit
4.1 Space from the Natural Soul to the Phenomenality of Spirit
Bibliography
Part V Philosophy of Spirit
Chapter 14 Embodied Cognition, Habit, and Natural Agency in Hegel’s Anthropology
1 Ontology of Living Activity
1.1 Embodiment
1.2 Self-Organization
1.3 Interaction
2 Embodied Cognition
3 Habit as Sensorimotor Life Form
3.1 Bodily Memory and Imagination
3.2 The Integration of Holism and Associationism in Habit Formation
3.3 Lower and Higher Level Habits, and Animal Life
4 Embodiment Revisited. Physiological, Functional, and Phenomenological Aspects
5 Habits and the Conditions of Agency
5.1 Hegel’s Continuity Thesis
Bibliography
Chapter 15 Sentience and Feeling in the Anthropology
1 Introduction
2 On Waking up to Sentience
3 On Quivering, Sensibility, and Sentience
4 Transition from Sentience to Feeling
5 On Self-Feeling
6 Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 16 Intuition, Representation, and Thinking: Hegel’s Psychology and the Placement Problem
1 The Method
2 Intuition
3 Representation
3.1 Recollection (Erinnerung)
3.2 Imagination (Einbildungskraft)
3.3 Memory (Gedächtnis)
4 Thinking (Denken)
5 Conclusion: Overcoming the Dilemma
Bibliography
Chapter 17 Hegel on Poetry, Prose and the Origin of the Arts
1 Hegel on the Origins of Poetry and Art
2 The Development of Prose
3 Poetry in the Developed World of Prose: The Literary and Post-romantic Art
4 Conclusions and Questions
Bibliography
Chapter 18 Hegel’s Recasting of the Theological Proofs
1 Introduction
2 Hegel’s Critique of Kant’s Understanding of Religion
3 Philosophy of Religion Displaces Traditional Natural Theology
4 Kant’s Fact of Reason: From Immanence to Transcendence
5 Hegel’s Fact of Religion as Elevation of Spirit to God
6 The Cosmological Proof
7 The Defect in the Traditional Cosmological Proof
8 Differentiating Elevation of Spirit from the Traditional Cosmological Proof
9 The True Infinite: The Ontological Proof and the Unity of the Proofs
Bibliography
Part VI Practical and Political Philosophy
Chapter 19 Logic and Social Theory: Hegel on the Conceptual Significance of Political Change
1 The Logical Significance of the Objectivity of Political Spirit
2 The Logical Significance of Free Choice of Profession Open to Talent
3 The Logical Significance of Social Pluralism
4 Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 20 Sittlichkeit and the Actuality of Freedom: On Kant and Hegel
1 Criticism of Kant’s Formalism as Criticism of the Program of Transcendental Philosophy
2 The Perspective of Actualizing Freedom
3 On the Exposition of the Concept of Freedom in Kant and Hegel and its Ramifications
4 Hegel’s Criticism of Practical Formalism
4.1 Formalism as Frustration of Actualizing Freedom
4.2 Hegel’s Logic of Freedom
4.3 Externality as the Unfreedom of Action
4.4 Hegel’s Sittlichkeit as Rationalization of the Content
Bibliography
Chapter 21 Speculative Institutionalism: Hegel’s Legacy for Any Political Economy that Will Be Able to Present Itself as a Science
1 Speculative Political Economy: What Were the Questions?
2 Hegel’s Institutional Theory: A Tentative Reconstruction
3 Habit: A Redemptive Repetition
4 Corporations: Devices of Conformity
5 Hegel and Current Economics: Accepting the Prophet?
6 Conclusion: Political Economy of the Future
Bibliography
Chapter 22 Hegel’s Philosophy of Bildung
1 Introduction
2 On the Early History of the Term
3 Hegel and the German Tradition of Bildung
4 A Note on Sources
5 On the Relation Between Bildung and Spirit
6 Bildung as the Dialectic of Recognition
7 Otherness and Its Importance to Bildung
8 Dialectical Negation and Bildung
9 Mutual Recognition, Intersubjectivity and the Social Significance of Bildung
10 The Historical-Cultural Significance of Bildung: Acculturation and Freedom
11 Conclusion
Bibliography
Part VII Philosophy of World History and History of Philosophy
Chapter 23 Hegel’s Philosophy of World History
1 On the Tradition of the Lectures
2 The Systematic Position of World History
3 Types of Historiography: The “Introduction” 1822–1828
4 History and Reason: The Introduction 1830/31
5 The End of History
Bibliography
Chapter 24 Freedom and the Logic of History
1 Providence, Teleology and Freedom
2 Reason, Passion and the Universal
3 World History and the State as the Realization of Freedom
Bibliography
Chapter 25 History of Philosophy in Hegel’s System
1 Evolution and Change in Hegel’s Account of the History of Philosophy
1.1 Establishing History of Philosophy as a Philosophical Discipline
1.2 Dating Hegel’s Lectures on History of Philosophy
2 Problems with Michelet’s Record of Hegel’s Lectures on History of Philosophy
3 Hegel’s Introduction to His Lectures on History of Philosophy (28 October 1816, Jena)
4 Hegel: Introduction to the History of Philosophy, and its Concept
5 This Entails Further Consequences That Hegel Stresses
6 Sources of the History of Philosophy
7 Philosophy as “Its Epoch Captured in Thought”
8 Philosophy, its Distinctive Character, and the Role of the History of Philosophy
9 “Gestalt” of Recent German Philosophy in Hegel’s Concept of the History of Philosophy
10 Hegel’s Analysis of “the Latest German Philosophy” Through Its Central Concepts
10.1 Freedom of the Human Spirit
10.2 Hegel’s Historical-Philosophical Portrait of Kant
10.3 Philosophical Idealism as a Distinct Feature of German Classical Philosophical Teachings of Hegel’s Time
10.4 “Objective Spirit” and the History of Philosophy
11 The Place of History of Philosophy in Hegel’s System
12 “Final Result” of the History of Philosophy as Portrayed by Hegel
Bibliography
Part VIII Hegelianism and Post-Hegelian Thought
Chapter 26 Hegel and Recent Analytic Metaphysics
1 The Hidden Role of Hegel in the Development of Modal Logic in Twentieth Century
1.1 Hegel, Royce, Russell and C. I. Lewis
1.2 Hegel, Findlay and Prior
2 Hegel’s Idealism as Mediated Actualism
3 Conclusion
Bibliography
Chapter 27 Hegel’s Pragmatism
1 Mind and Knowledge in the Cartesian Tradition
2 Problems with Cartesianism, 1: The Case of “Experience”
3 Problems with Cartesianism, 2: Agency and Externality
4 Problems with Cartesianism, 3: Rational Being as Social Achievement
5 Yet Hegel Was Not a Pragmatist
Bibliography
Chapter 28 The “Pittsburgh” Neo-Hegelianism of Robert Brandom and John McDowell
1 Introduction
2 From Sellars to the Sellarsians: Rorty, Brandom and McDowell
3 The Creation of the Pittsburgh “Neo-Hegelians”
4 A Future for Pittsburgh Neo-Hegelianism?
Bibliography
Appendices
The Chronology of Hegel’s Life
Hegel’s Philosophical System in His Writings and Lecture Series
Conclusion: An Agenda for Future Research
Bibliography
Name Index
Subject Index

Citation preview

The Palgrave Hegel Handbook Edited by Marina F. Bykova · Kenneth R. Westphal

Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism Series Editor Matthew C. Altman, Philosophy & Religious Studies, Central Washington University, Ellensburg, WA, USA

Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism is a series of comprehensive and authoritative edited volumes on the major German Idealist philosophers and their critics. Underpinning the series is the successful Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism (2014), edited by Matthew C. Altman, which provides an overview of the period, its greatest philosophers, and its historical and philosophical importance. Individual volumes focus on specific philosophers and major themes, offering a more detailed treatment of the many facets of their work in metaphysics, epistemology, logic, ethics, aesthetics, political philosophy, and several other areas. Each volume is edited by one or more internationally recognized experts in the subject, and contributors include both established figures and younger scholars with innovative readings. The series offers a wide-ranging and authoritative insight into German Idealism, appropriate for both students and specialists. More information about this series at http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/14696 The Palgrave Kant Handbook Edited by Matthew C. Altman The Palgrave Schopenhauer Handbook Edited by Sandra Shapshay The Palgrave Hegel Handbook Edited by Marina F. Bykova and Kenneth R. Westphal The Palgrave Fichte Handbook (forthcoming) Edited by Steven Hoeltzel The Palgrave Handbook of German Romantic Philosophy (forthcoming) Edited by Elizabeth Millán Brusslan The Palgrave Schelling Handbook (forthcoming) Edited by Sean J. McGrath & Kyla Bruff The Palgrave Handbook of Transcendental, Neo-Kantian, and Psychological Idealism (forthcoming) The Palgrave Handbook of Critics of Idealism (forthcoming)

Marina F. Bykova · Kenneth R. Westphal Editors

The Palgrave Hegel Handbook

Editors Marina F. Bykova Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies North Carolina State University Raleigh, NC, USA

Kenneth R. Westphal Department of Philosophy Boğaziçi Üniversitesi İstanbul, Turkey

Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism ISBN 978-3-030-26596-0 ISBN 978-3-030-26597-7  (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26597-7 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: Berlin, Hegel (www.flickr.com/photos/dierkschaefer/9636385888/in/photostream/) by Dierk Schaefer, is licensed under CC BY 2.0 (creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/) This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

Series Editor’s Preface

The era of German Idealism stands alongside ancient Greece and the French Enlightenment as one of the most fruitful and influential periods in the history of philosophy. Beginning with the publication of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in 1781 and ending about ten years after Hegel’s death in 1831, the period of “classical German philosophy” transformed whole fields of philosophical endeavor. The intellectual energy of this movement is still very much alive in contemporary philosophy; the philosophers of that period continue to inform our thinking and spark debates of interpretation. After a period of neglect, as a result of the early analytic philosophers’ rejection of idealism, interest in the field has grown exponentially in recent years. Indeed, the study of German Idealism has perhaps never been more active in the Englishspeaking world than it is today. Many books appear every year that offer historical/interpretive approaches to understanding the work of the German Idealists, and many others adopt and develop their insights and apply them to contemporary issues in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, politics, and aesthetics, among other fields. In addition, a number of international journals are devoted to idealism as a whole and to specific idealist philosophers, and journals in both the history of philosophy and contemporary philosophies have regular contributions on the German Idealists. In numerous countries, there are regular conferences and study groups run by philosophical associations that focus on this period and its key figures, especially Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Schopenhauer. As part of this growing discussion, the volumes in the Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism series are designed to provide overviews of the major figures and movements in German Idealism, with a breadth and depth of coverage that distinguishes them from other anthologies. Chapters have been specially commissioned for this series, and they are written by established and emerging scholars from throughout the world. Contributors not only provide overviews of their subject matter but also explore the cutting edge of the field by advancing original theses. Some authors develop or revise positions that they have taken in their other publications, and some take novel approaches that challenge existing paradigms. The Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism thus give students a natural v

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Series Editor’s Preface

starting point from which to begin their study of German Idealism, and they serve as a resource for advanced scholars to engage in meaningful discussions about the movement’s philosophical and historical importance. In short, the Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism have comprehensiveness, accessibility, depth, and philosophical rigor as their overriding goals. These are challenging aims, to be sure, especially when held simultaneously, but that is the task that the excellent scholars who are editing and contributing to these volumes have set for themselves. Matthew C. Altman

Preface

This new volume in the Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism series focuses on Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whose work marks the pinnacle of the movement commonly known as German idealism. With Hegel’s death, German idealism came virtually to the end, giving way to new philosophical movements and schools, most of which first appeared in response or as a critical reaction to Hegel and Hegelian philosophy. Hegel secured himself an important place in the history of philosophy not only as the last of the great philosophical system builders of modern times who employed dialectic to emphasize the progress of history and of thoughts, but also as one whose groundbreaking ideas and far-reaching insights continue to influence work in philosophy and many other humanities and social science disciplines today. Indeed, Hegel made original and profound contributions to virtually all of the key areas of philosophical inquiry, including logic, epistemology, ontology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, ethics and moral philosophy, philosophical anthropology and philosophy of psychology, aesthetics and philosophy of art, philosophy of science, social and political philosophy, philosophy of law and philosophy of religion, philosophy of history and history of philosophy, as well as philosophy of education. Many philosophical ideas that become fashionable today could be traced to Hegel, and his systematic philosophy has been a source of inspiration and point of departure for numerous contemporary philosophical concepts and theories that vary in their contents and theoretical intentions. Despite differences in philosophical views and positions presented by the various philosophical schools and movements of today, most of them, directly or ­indirectly, have been impacted by Hegel. Thus, it is no wonder that Hegel’s work continues to attract the attention of scholars and broader audiences. The Palgrave Hegel Handbook provides a comprehensive overview of Hegel’s philosophy based on the best results in contemporary Hegel scholarship. This volume includes twenty-eight original chapters authored by highly qualified and accomplished scholars in the field, offering a series of well-researched, comprehensive—and comprehensible—discussions that together provide a reliable,

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accessible, and considered account of Hegel’s philosophical system and thoughts. Adding to established readings of Hegel and his philosophical project, contributors present new interpretations of his main ideas and writings. In addition, the volume presents detailed consideration of arguments against Hegel’s views and central contemporary controversies concerning his philosophy. The aim of the editors and contributors of this book is to help readers navigate the enormously complex and notoriously difficult system that Hegel developed and appreciate its philosophical value and historical importance. The volume is suitable for both established scholars and budding philosophy students seeking to advance their knowledge of the main aspects of Hegel’s thought. As a distinctive compendium of scholarship reflecting the current state of Hegel studies and offering an accessible yet not over-simplified comprehensive account of Hegel, it is a valuable contribution to an ongoing debate which inspires new thinking about Hegel and his philosophical legacy. Marina F. Bykova Kenneth R. Westphal

Acknowledgements

The editors, Marina Bykova and Ken Westphal, wish to thank first and foremost Matthew Altman for his kind invitation and constructive assistance in conceiving, commissioning and producing this volume. We thank heartily all our contributors for their superb contributions. It has been a great honor and pleasure to work with this group of such outstanding Hegel scholars! Our thanks also go to both the editorial and production teams at Palgrave. We appreciate their patience and understanding with such a large, complex Handbook. The production staff’s conscientious editorial and publishing efforts have been invaluable.

Permissions An earlier version of Chapter 11 (by Michael Wolff) was originally published in German as “Realitätsstufen oder Entwicklung? Hegels ‘Realphilosophie’ und die Philosophie der Wissenschaften” (Hegel-Jahrbuch 1989, 397–415). Permission for English translation has been granted by the author and the publisher as holders of the copyright. The detailed information is indicated in the citation to the chapter.

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About This Book

This Analytical Contents provides a topic outline of each chapter and of the entire volume, complementing the Table of Contents, the closing section of the Introduction (§0.5) and the Subject Index. A uniform numbering of §§ and s­ ub-§§ by legal decimals is used here which preserves the structure and numbering of the authors’ sub-section headings. The first digit is in each case the number of the chapter. Some section headings have been supplied for this Analytical Contents; these are placed in square brackets. Contentsxxi Notes on Contributors xxv Notes on Sources and Key to Abbreviations xxxi 0 Introduction: Understanding Hegel and His Philosophical Project, Kenneth R. Westphal and Marina F. Bykova 0.1 Introduction  0.2 Hegel’s Entré  0.3 Hegel’s Systematic Philosophy  0.4 Dialectic  0.5 The Palgrave Hegel Handbook: Aims and Scope 

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I. Intellectual Background and Philosophical Project 1

Hegel: His Life and His Path in Philosophy, Marina F. Bykova

1.0 [Introduction]  1.1 Early Life and First Encounter with Philosophy  1.2 Time in Tübingen: Acquaintance with Hölderlin and Schelling, and Lived Experience of the French Revolution  1.3 Pre-Jena Period: Despair, Uncertainty and Desire for a New Path 1.4 At Jena: Launching His Academic Career 

3 4 6 8 10 xi

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1.5 1.6 1.7

Between Jena and Heidelberg: Another Period of Despair  Heidelberg Period: Return to the University  Call to Berlin: Realization of Goals and Ambitions 

13 16 17

2 Situating Hegel: From Transcendental Philosophy to a Phenomenology of Spirit, Michael Baur 2.0 [Introduction]  2.1 Kant’s Transcendental Philosophy  2.2 Early Skeptical Critiques of Kant’s Transcendental Philosophy  2.3 Fichte’s Philosophy of Freedom  2.4 Schelling’s Turn to Spinoza  2.5 On the Way to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit 

23 24 26 30 35 38

3 Kant, Hegel and the Historicity of Pure Reason, Kenneth R. Westphal 3.1 Introduction  3.2 Kant and the History of Pure Reason  3.3 Hamann, Herder and the “Meta-critique” of Pure Reason  3.4 The Profusion of Post-critique Alternatives  3.5 Hegel’s “Self-Consummating Skepticism”  3.6 The Twin Targets of Hegel’s Phenomenological Critique  3.7 Hegel’s Phenomenological, Critical History of Pure Reason in the 1807 Phenomenology  3.8 Hegelian Conclusions  4

45 48 49 50 52 55 57 59

Hegel’s Epistemology, Giuseppe Varnier

4.0 [Introduction]  4.1 Problems of Scholarly Neglect of Hegel’s Epistemology  4.2 Hegel’s Striking Originality in Epistemology  4.3 Skeptical Naturalism and Reconceiving Knowing as a Dynamic Process  4.4 Kant’s Critical Self-Scrutiny of Reason is Achieved Historically  4.5 Hegel’s Systematic Philosophy Anticipates (inter alia) Structural Realism  4.6 Knowing is Anchored in Doing, in Practical Reasoning and Activities 

65 66 67 69 72 75 78

II. Phenomenology of Spirit 5 The Role of Religion in Hegel’s Phenomenological Justification of Philosophical Science, Ardis B. Collins 5.1 Introduction 

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5.2 Hegel’s Ambiguous Discussion of the Presupposition Question  5.3 Hegel’s Scientific Proof Procedure  5.4 Consciousness Retreats into the Infinity of Life and Self-Consciousness  5.5 Self-Consciousness Retreats into the Transcendence of the Rational  5.6 The Emergence of the Irrational and the Retreat into Spirit  5.7 The Spirit of the Enlightenment  5.8 The Spirit of the Moral World and the Retreat into Religion  5.9 The Spirit of Religion and the Retreat into Absolute Knowing  5.10 Conclusion 

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86 88 91 93 95 97 99 102 105

6 Absolute Spirit in Performative Self-Relations of Persons, Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer 6.1 Introduction and Main Results  6.2 Systematic and Conceptual Background  6.2.1 Ding an sich, Transcendental Apperception, and Intellectual Intuition  6.2.2 Self-Consciousness  6.2.3 Being an Object of Knowledge and Being as a Performative Attitude  6.2.4 Relative Self-Ascriptions and Absolute Performation  6.3 Investigating Real Human Consciousness  6.3.1 Deconstructing Empiricist Self-Knowledge  6.3.2 Deconstructing a Thinking Soul as the Master of the Body  6.3.3 Deconstructing Intuitive Appeals to Reason  6.3.4 Human Spirit as the Form of a Personal Subject in We-Groups 6.4 Absolute Spirit  6.4.1 Finite Knowledge and the Practical Role of Ideals  6.4.2 The Idea of the Good  6.4.3 Ideal Truth  6.4.4 Mundane Truth in Religion and Art vs. Parochial Views in Empiricism and Scientism  6.5 Conclusion 

109 116 118 119 120 121 121 121 122 122 124 125 125 127 128 128 129

7 Individuality, Individualism and Our Human Zoôn Politikon, Kenneth R. Westphal 7.1 [Introduction: Self-Consciousness and Self-Sufficiency]  7.2 [Social Ontology: Moderate Collectivism]  7.3 [Hegel’s (Kantian) Campaign against Logical Egoism]  7.4 [Individualistic Claims to Self-sufficiency, from ‘Sense Certainty’ through ‘Spirit’] 

133 134 135 135

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7.5 [Reconciliation, Reciprocal Recognition and Absolute Spirit]  7.6 [Why Autonomous Individual Rational Judgment and Justification are Fundamentally Social and Historical] 

143 144

III. Science of Logic and the System of Philosophy 8

Method in Hegel’s Dialectic-Speculative Logic, Angelica Nuzzo

8.0 [Introduction]  8.1 Form and Content of Thinking: Formal, Transcendental, ­Dialectic-Speculative Logic  8.2 Method and the Inner Self-Movement of the Content  8.3 Conclusion  9

151 153 161 164

Aufhebung, John W. Burbidge

9.0 [Introduction]  9.1 [Sublation: from Being to Dasein]  9.2 [As developed in the Science of Logic]  9.3 [As developed in the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Philosophy of Spirit]  9.4 [As developed in the Philosophy of Nature] 

167 169 172 178 180

10 Freedom as Belonging: A Defense of Hegelian Holism, Henry M. Southgate 10.1 Introduction  10.2 A Tale of Two Stories  10.3 “Freedom Is Not Free”  10.4 Kill, Eat, Be Free  10.5 An Exercise in Idealism  10.6 [Conclusion] 

183 186 187 190 194 195

IV. Philosophy of Nature 11 Levels of Reality or Development? Hegel’s Realphilosophie and Philosophy of the Sciences, Michael Wolff 11.0 [Introduction: ‘Realphilosophie’ and Philosophy of the Special Sciences]  11.1 [Why Special Sciences Afford and Require Realphilosophie]  11.2 [Hegel’s Creation Metaphor encloses a Notable Core] 

201 204 213

12 Causality, Natural Systems, and Hegel’s Organicism, Kenneth R. Westphal 12.1 Introduction 

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12.2 Conceptual Analysis and Philosophical Naturalism  12.3 Hegel’s Lessons from and Corrections to Kant’s Critical Philosophy  12.3.1 Singular Cognitive Reference  12.3.2 Matter and Dynamism  12.3.3 Deductive Scientia and Conceptual Analysis  12.3.4 Transeunt Causality  12.3.5 Metrics for Natural Phenomena?  12.3.6 Functional Explanation  12.3.7 Reductionism and Complex Systems  12.4 Hegel and Scientific Biology  12.4.1 Geosphere, Biosphere and Environment  12.4.2 Causal Powers vs Causal Activities?  12.5 Hegel’s Central Theses in “Force and Understanding”  12.5.1 [Six Central Theses from “Force and Understanding”]  12.5.2 [Hegel’s Critique of the Traditional Concept of Substance]  12.6 Hegel’s Semantics: Conceptual Explication and ‘the Necessity of the Concept’  12.6.1 [Philosophical theory of knowledge must take the natural sciences into close consideration.]  12.6.2 Hegel’s Co-determination Thesis  12.6.3 Conceptual Explication  12.7 One Central Aim of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature  13

220 221 221 222 222 223 224 224 225 226 226 226 227 227 227 228 228 230 231 232

Hegel’s Philosophy of Natural and Human Spaces, Cinzia Ferrini

13.1 Introduction 241 13.2 Space from Mechanics to Physics 242 13.2.1 Nature as the Idea in the Form of Being-Other 242 13.2.2 The Quantitative Beginning of the Philosophy of Nature: Indifferent Spatial Externality in Mechanics 246 13.2.3 The Significance of Space in the Physics of Individualized Matter251 13.3 Space in the Experience of Inhabiting the Earth 253 13.3.1 Animal Life and Its Space 253 13.3.2 Geognosy, Physical Geography and World History: Hegel’s Speculative Deduction of Natural Spaces 255 13.4 Space in Spirit 258 13.4.1 Space from the Natural Soul to the Phenomenality of Spirit 258

V. Philosophy of Spirit 14 Embodied Cognition, Habit, and Natural Agency in Hegel’s Anthropology, Italo Testa 14.0 [Introduction] 

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14.1 Ontology of Living Activity  14.1.1 Embodiment  14.1.2 Self-Organization  14.1.3 Interaction  14.2 Embodied Cognition  14.3 Habit as Sensorimotor Life Form  14.3.1 Bodily Memory and Imagination  14.3.2 The Integration of Holism and Associationism in Habit Formation  14.3.3 Lower and Higher Level Habits, and Animal Life  14.4 Embodiment Revisited. Physiological, Functional, and Phenomenological Aspects  14.5 Habits and the Conditions of Agency  14.5.1 Hegel’s Continuity Thesis  15

270 270 271 272 273 275 278 280 282 284 287 291

Sentience and Feeling in the Anthropology, Allegra de Laurentiis

15.1 Introduction  15.2 On Waking up to Sentience  15.3 On Quivering, Sensibility, and Sentience  15.4 Transition from Sentience to Feeling  15.5 On Self-Feeling  15.6 Conclusion 

297 299 302 304 307 311

16 Intuition, Representation, and Thinking: Hegel’s Psychology and the Placement Problem, Markus Gabriel 16.0 [Introduction]  16.1 The Method  16.2 Intuition  16.3 Representation  16.3.1 Recollection (Erinnerung)  16.3.2 Imagination (Einbildungskraft)  16.3.3 Memory (Gedächtnis)  16.4 Thinking (Denken)  16.5 Conclusion: Overcoming the Dilemma  17

317 319 323 325 327 328 329 330 332

Hegel on Poetry, Prose and the Origin of the Arts, Allen Speight

17.0 [Introduction]  17.1 Hegel on the Origins of Poetry and Art  17.2 The Development of Prose  17.3 Poetry in the Developed World of Prose: The Literary and Post-romantic Art  17.4 Conclusions and Questions 

337 338 341 343 347

About This Book

18

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Hegel’s Recasting of the Theological Proofs, Robert Williams

18.1 Introduction  18.2 Hegel’s Critique of Kant’s Understanding of Religion  18.3 Philosophy of Religion Displaces Traditional Natural Theology  18.4 Kant’s Fact of Reason: From Immanence to Transcendence  18.5 Hegel’s Fact of Religion as Elevation of Spirit to God  18.6 The Cosmological Proof  18.7 The Defect in the Traditional Cosmological Proof  18.8 Differentiating Elevation of Spirit from the Traditional Cosmological Proof  18.9 The True Infinite: The Ontological Proof and the Unity of the Proofs 

351 353 354 355 356 358 360 361 365

VI. Practical and Political Philosophy 19 Logic and Social Theory: Hegel on the Conceptual Significance of Political Change, Christopher L. Yeomans 19.0 [Introduction]  19.1 The Logical Significance of the Objectivity of Political Spirit  19.2 The Logical Significance of Free Choice of Profession Open to Talent  19.3 The Logical Significance of Social Pluralism  19.4 Conclusion 

373 376 379 382 386

20  Sittlichkeit and the Actuality of Freedom: On Kant and Hegel, Christian Krijnen 20.0 [Introduction]  20.1 Criticism of Kant’s Formalism as Criticism of the Program of Transcendental Philosophy  20.2 The Perspective of Actualizing Freedom  20.3 On the Exposition of the Concept of Freedom in Kant and Hegel and its Ramifications  20.4 Hegel’s Criticism of Practical Formalism  20.4.1 Formalism as Frustration of Actualizing Freedom  20.4.2 Hegel’s Logic of Freedom  20.4.3 Externality as the Unfreedom of Action  20.4.4 Hegel’s Sittlichkeit as Rationalization of the Content 

389 389 392 393 396 398 399 400 401

21 Speculative Institutionalism: Hegel’s Legacy for Any Political Economy that Will Be Able to Present Itself as a Science, Ivan Boldyrev 21.0 [Introduction] 

409

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21.1 21.2 21.3 21.4 21.5 21.6

Speculative Political Economy: What Were the Questions?  Hegel’s Institutional Theory: A Tentative Reconstruction  Habit: A Redemptive Repetition  Corporations: Devices of Conformity  Hegel and Current Economics: Accepting the Prophet?  Conclusion: Political Economy of the Future 

22

Hegel’s Philosophy of Bildung, Marina F. Bykova

410 413 416 417 418 420

22.1 Introduction  425 22.2 On the Early History of the Term  427 22.3 Hegel and the German Tradition of Bildung429 22.4 A Note on Sources  432 22.5 On the Relation Between Bildung and Spirit  433 22.6 Bildung as the Dialectic of Recognition  434 22.7 Otherness and Its Importance to Bildung  436 22.8 Dialectical Negation and Bildung  437 22.9 Mutual Recognition, Intersubjectivity and the Social Significance of Bildung  438 22.10 The Historical-Cultural Significance of Bildung: Acculturation and Freedom  440 22.11 Conclusion  444

VII. Philosophy of World History and History of Philosophy 23

Hegel’s Philosophy of World History, Andreas Arndt

23.1 23.2 23.3 23.4 23.5

On the Tradition of the Lectures  The Systematic Position of World History  Types of Historiography: The “Introduction” 1822–1828  History and Reason: The Introduction 1830/31  The End of History 

24

Freedom and the Logic of History, Simon Lumsden

24.0 24.1 24.2 24.3

[Introduction]  Providence, Teleology and Freedom  Reason, Passion and the Universal  World History and the State as the Realization of Freedom 

25

History of Philosophy in Hegel’s System, Nelly V. Motroshilova

25.1 Evolution and Change in Hegel’s Account of the History of Philosophy  25.1.1 Establishing History of Philosophy as a Philosophical Discipline 

453 454 458 460 464

467 468 473 478

485 485

About This Book

25.1.2 Dating Hegel’s Lectures on History of Philosophy 25.2 Problems with Michelet’s Record of Hegel’s Lectures on History of Philosophy  25.3 Hegel’s Introduction to His Lectures on History of Philosophy (28 October 1816, Jena)  25.4 Hegel: Introduction to the History of Philosophy, and its Concept  25.5 This Entails Further Consequences That Hegel Stresses  25.6 Sources of the History of Philosophy  25.7 Philosophy as “Its Epoch Captured in Thought”  25.8 Philosophy, its Distinctive Character, and the Role of the History of Philosophy  25.9 “Gestalt” of Recent German Philosophy in Hegel’s Concept of the History of Philosophy  25.10 Hegel’s Analysis of “the Latest German Philosophy” Through Its Central Concepts  25.10.1 Freedom of the Human Spirit  25.10.2 Hegel’s Historical-Philosophical Portrait of Kant  25.10.3 Philosophical Idealism as a Distinct Feature of German Classical Philosophical Teachings of Hegel’s Time  25.10.4 “Objective Spirit” and the History of Philosophy  25.11 The Place of History of Philosophy in Hegel’s System  25.12 “Final Result” of the History of Philosophy as Portrayed by Hegel 

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487 487 489 490 492 494 497 499 501 504 504 505 506 508 511 513

VIII. Hegelianism and Post-Hegelian Thought 26

Hegel and Recent Analytic Metaphysics, Paul Redding

26.0 [Introduction]  26.1 The Hidden Role of Hegel in the Development of Modal Logic in Twentieth Century  26.1.1 Hegel, Royce, Russell and C. I. Lewis  26.1.2 Hegel, Findlay and Prior  26.2 Hegel’s Idealism as Mediated Actualism  26.3 Conclusion  27

521 523 523 526 531 536

Hegel’s Pragmatism, Willem de Vries

27.0 [Introduction]  27.1 Mind and Knowledge in the Cartesian Tradition  27.2 Problems with Cartesianism, 1: The Case of “Experience”  27.3 Problems with Cartesianism, 2: Agency and Externality  27.4 Problems with Cartesianism, 3: Rational Being as Social Achievement  27.5 Yet Hegel Was Not a Pragmatist 

541 543 544 547 549 553

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About This Book

28 The “Pittsburgh” Neo-Hegelianism of Robert Brandom and John McDowell, Paul Redding 28.1 Introduction  28.2 From Sellars to the Sellarsians: Rorty, Brandom and McDowell  28.3 The Creation of the Pittsburgh “Neo-Hegelians”  28.4 A Future for Pittsburgh Neo-Hegelianism? 

559 561 564 567

Appendices573 The Chronology of Hegel’s Life 575 Hegel’s Philosophical System in His Writings and Lecture Series 577 Conclusion: An Agenda for Future Research, Marina F. Bykova and Kenneth R. Westphal581 Name Index 587 Subject Index 591

Contents

Series Editor’s Preface. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v Preface. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . vii Acknowledgements. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . ix About This Book. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xi Notes on Contributors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxv Notes on Sources and Key to Abbreviations. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . xxxi Introduction: Understanding Hegel and His Philosophical Project. . . . . xxxix Part I  Intellectual Background and Philosophical Project 1

Hegel: His Life and His Path in Philosophy. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 3 Marina F. Bykova

2

Situating Hegel: From Transcendental Philosophy to a Phenomenology of Spirit . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 23 Michael Baur

3

Kant, Hegel and the Historicity of Pure Reason . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 45 Kenneth R. Westphal

4

Hegel’s Epistemology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 65 Giuseppe Varnier

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Part II  Phenomenology of Spirit 5

The Role of Religion in Hegel’s Phenomenological Justification of Philosophical Science. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 85 Ardis B. Collins

6

Absolute Spirit in Performative Self-Relations of Persons. . . . . . . . 109 Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer

7

Individuality, Individualism and Our Human Zoôn Politikon. . . . . 133 Kenneth R. Westphal

Part III  Science of Logic and the System of Philosophy 8

Method in Hegel’s Dialectic-Speculative Logic . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 151 Angelica Nuzzo

9

Aufhebung . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 167 John W. Burbidge

10 Freedom as Belonging: A Defense of Hegelian Holism. . . . . . . . . . . 183 Henry M. Southgate Part IV  Philosophy of Nature 11 Levels of Reality or Development? Hegel’s Realphilosophie and Philosophy of the Sciences . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 201 Michael Wolff 12 Causality, Natural Systems, and Hegel’s Organicism. . . . . . . . . . . . 219 Kenneth R. Westphal 13 Hegel’s Philosophy of Natural and Human Spaces. . . . . . . . . . . . . . 241 Cinzia Ferrini Part V  Philosophy of Spirit 14 Embodied Cognition, Habit, and Natural Agency in Hegel’s Anthropology. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 269 Italo Testa 15 Sentience and Feeling in the Anthropology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 297 Allegra de Laurentiis 16 Intuition, Representation, and Thinking: Hegel’s Psychology and the Placement Problem. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 317 Markus Gabriel 17 Hegel on Poetry, Prose and the Origin of the Arts. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 337 Allen Speight

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18 Hegel’s Recasting of the Theological Proofs. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 351 Robert Williams Part VI  Practical and Political Philosophy 19 Logic and Social Theory: Hegel on the Conceptual Significance of Political Change . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 373 Christopher L. Yeomans 20 Sittlichkeit and the Actuality of Freedom: On Kant and Hegel . . . . 389 Christian Krijnen 21 Speculative Institutionalism: Hegel’s Legacy for Any Political Economy that Will Be Able to Present Itself as a Science. . . . . . . . . 409 Ivan Boldyrev 22 Hegel’s Philosophy of Bildung. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 425 Marina F. Bykova Part VII  Philosophy of World History and History of Philosophy 23 Hegel’s Philosophy of World History . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 453 Andreas Arndt 24 Freedom and the Logic of History. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 467 Simon Lumsden 25 History of Philosophy in Hegel’s System . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 485 Nelly V. Motroshilova Part VIII  Hegelianism and Post-Hegelian Thought 26 Hegel and Recent Analytic Metaphysics. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 521 Paul Redding 27 Hegel’s Pragmatism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 541 Willem de Vries 28 The “Pittsburgh” Neo-Hegelianism of Robert Brandom and John McDowell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 559 Paul Redding Appendices 573 The Chronology of Hegel’s Life. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 575 Hegel’s Philosophical System in His Writings and Lecture Series. . . . . . 577

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Contents

Conclusion: An Agenda for Future Research. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 581 Name Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 587 Subject Index. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 591

Notes on Contributors

Andreas Arndt  is Professor Emeritus in Philosophy at the Humboldt University, Berlin, and Director and Research Coordinator of the Schleiermacher Research Center in Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities, Germany. In his research, he focuses on nineteenth-century philosophy, most notably on Hegel, Schleiermacher, Feuerbach, and Marx. His latest book publications include Die klassische Deutsche Philosophie nach Kant (with Walter Jaeschke, 2012), Friedrich Schleiermacher als Philosoph (2013), and just recently, Die Reformation der Revolution. Friedrich Schleiermacher in seiner Zeit (2019). Michael Baur is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Fordham University. He currently serves as Secretary of the Hegel Society of America. He has published on a variety of thinkers (including Aristotle, Aquinas, Kant, Fichte, Hegel, Heidegger, Gadamer, and C. S. Peirce) and on a variety of topics (including German Idealism, American pragmatism, hermeneutics, the philosophy of law, and contemporary continental thought). He is the co-editor (with Stephen Houlgate) of The Blackwell Companion to Hegel (2011 and 2015), editor of G. W. F. Hegel: Key Concepts (2014), and, more recently, author of “Winckelmann’s Greek Ideal and Kant’s Critical Philosophy,” in Kant and His German Contemporaries: Aesthetics, History, Politics, and Religion (2018). Ivan Boldyrev is Assistant Professor at Radboud University Nijmegen, The Netherlands. His research interests include German idealism, critical theory, science studies, and history and philosophy of recent economics. His major publications include Hegel, Institutions and Economics (with Carsten Herrmann-Pillath, 2014) and Ernst Bloch and his Contemporaries: Locating Utopian Messianism (2014). He has recently completed a work on the dialectical imagery in Hegel’s Phenomenology. John W. Burbidge  is Professor Emeritus in Philosophy at Trent University, Canada. His research is concentrated on the logical transitions by which Hegel develops his systematic philosophy, particularly in the Science of Logic and the Philosophy of Nature. Recent examples are The Logic of Hegel’s Logic: An Introduction (2006) and Hegel’s Systematic Contingency (2007). Subsequently, he has been xxv

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Notes on Contributors

exploring philosophical puzzles: the distinction between ideas (representations) and concepts in Ideas, Concepts and Reality (2013); and the nature of casual processes in Cause for Thought: An Essay in Metaphysics (2014). He is Honorary President of the Hegel Society of Great Britain, and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Canada. Marina F. Bykova  is Professor of Philosophy at North Carolina State University. She is the author of Hegel’s Interpretation of Thinking (1990), The Mystery of Logic and the Secret of Subjectivity (1996), and co-author (with Andrei Krichevsky) of Absolute Idea and Absolute Spirit in Hegel’s Philosophy (1993). She is also the editor of the Russian translation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (2000) and most recently of Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit: Cambridge Critical Guide (2019) and The German Idealism Reader: Ideas, Responses and Legacy (2019). Ardis B. Collins  is Professor Emeritus in Philosophy at Loyola University Chicago and Editor-in-Chief of The Owl of Minerva, an international journal published by the Hegel Society of America. She is the editor of Hegel on the Modern World (1995) and the author of Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Dialectical Justification of Philosophy’s First Principles (2013), as well as various articles and book chapters on Hegel’s thought, focusing especially on epistemological, social-political, and religious questions. Most recently, her Hegel Society of America presidential address, entitled “Anonymity, Responsibility, and the Many Faces of Capitalism,” appeared in Hegel and Capitalism, ed. Andrew Buchwalter (2015). Allegra de Laurentiis  is Professor of Philosophy at Stony Brook University, New York. Her research centers on Hegel’s Aristotelianism, on Hegel’s philosophy of history, and on conceptions of morality, right and politics in Kant, Hegel, and Marx. Her recent publications include Subjects in the Ancient and Modern World: On Hegel’s Theory of Subjectivity (2005), the edited volumes, Bloomsbury Companion to Hegel (2013; co-edited with Jeffrey Edwards) and Hegel and Metaphysics. On Logic and Ontology in the System (2016), as well as the forthcoming monograph Life and Psyche in Hegel’s Anthropology (2020). Willem de Vries  is Professor of Philosophy at the University of New Hampshire. He works on issues in the philosophy of mind, metaphysics and epistemology, and the history of philosophy. His publications have focused principally on Hegel and on Wilfrid Sellars, with occasional forays into other topics. His books include Hegel’s Theory of Mental Activity (1988), Knowledge, Mind, and the Given: A Reading of Sellars’ “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind” (with Timm Triplett; 2000), Wilfrid Sellars (2005) and the edited collection, Empiricism, Perceptual Knowledge, Normativity and Realism: Essays on Wilfrid Sellars (2009). Currently, he serves as co-editor (with Henry Jackman) of the book series, Routledge Studies in American Philosophy. Cinzia Ferrini  is a researcher at the University of Trieste (2000), where she teaches history of modern and contemporary philosophy. She is a member of the Academia Europaea (2005). Her main research areas are Early Modern and classical German Philosophy. She has published widely in international peer-reviewed journals and

Notes on Contributors

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in book collections on Hegel’s logic, phenomenology, philosophy of nature, and on Kant and the sciences. She edited the international collection Eredità kantiane Bibliopolis (2004) and authored L’invenzione di Cartesio (2015). Markus Gabriel  is Professor of Epistemology, Modern, and Contemporary Philosophy at the University of Bonn. He has published widely on topics in metaphysics, epistemology, and the history of philosophy (most notably ancient philosophy and German Idealism). His major recent publications include Transcendental Ontology: Essays in German Idealism (2011), Die Erkenntnis der Welt. Eine Einführung in die Erkenntnistheorie (2012), Warum es die Welt nicht gibt (2013), Fields of Sense: A New Realist Ontology (2015), Ich ist nicht Gehirn. Philosophie des Geistes für das 21. Jahrhundert (2015; in English 2017), and Neo-Existentialism (2018). Christian Krijnen  is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. Kant, Hegel, Neo-Kantianism, and contemporary transcendental philosophy play a major role in his numerous monographs and articles. His recent book publications include Nachmetaphysischer Sinn (2001), Philosophie als System (2008), Recognition: German Idealism as an Ongoing Challenge (2014), The Very Idea of Organization (2015), Sozialontologie in der Perspektive des deutschen Idealismus: Ansätze, Rezeptionen, Probleme (2018), Metaphysics of Freedom? Kant’s Concept of Cosmological Freedom in Historical and Systematic Perspective (2018), and Concepts of Normativity: Kant or Hegel? (2019). Simon Lumsden  is Associate Professor of philosophy at the University of New South Wales, Sydney. He is author of the book, Self-Consciousness and the Critique of the Subject: Hegel, Heidegger, and the Post-Structuralists (2014) and of numerous essays, most recently, “The Satisfaction of Absolute Spirit” (Owl of Minerva, 49:1/2, 2018), “Hegel and Pathologized Modernity or the End of Spirit in the Anthropocene” (History and Theory, 57 (4), 2018), and “Community in Hegel’s Social Philosophy” (Hegel Bulletin, 49: 1, 2017). His research is primarily concerned with German idealism and environmental thought. He is currently completing a monograph on Hegel’s philosophy of history. Nelly V. Motroshilova  is Principle Research Associate at the Institute of Philosophy, Russian Academy of Sciences in Moscow, Russia. Her research focuses on an array of topics that include German idealism, most notably Kant and Hegel, as well as Husserl, Heidegger, and Russian philosophical thought. She is co-editor (with Burkhard Tuschlng) of bilingual Russian and German edition of Kant’s works, in 5 vols. (1994–2014). Among her most recent books are Russian Philosophy in the 50–80s years of 20th Century and Western Thought (2012), Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt: Being, Time, Love (2013) and The Early Philosophy of Edmund Husserl (Halle, 1887–1901) (2018). Angelica Nuzzo  is Professor of Philosophy at the Graduate Center and B ­ rooklyn College, City University of New York. Among her recent books are Kant and the Unity of Reason (2005), Ideal Embodiment. Kant’s Theory of Sensibility (2008), History, Memory, Justice in Hegel (2012), and Approaching Hegel’s Logic, Obliquely. Melville, Molière, Beckett (2018).

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Paul Redding  is Professor Emeritus in Philosophy at the University of Sydney. He is the author of Hegel’s Hermeneutics (1996), Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought (2007), Continental Idealism: Leibniz to Nietzsche (2009), and the co-edited (with Paolo Diego Bubbio) collection, Religion After Kant: God and Culture in the Idealist Era (2012). Henry M. Southgate  is a lecturer in philosophy and undergraduate career advisor at the University of Wisconsin–Madison. His research is situated at the intersection between rationalism, German idealism, phenomenology, and existentialism. His recent publications include, “Hegel and the Identity of Indiscernibles” (Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie, 2014), “The Paradox of Irrationalism: The Logical Foundation of Hegel’s Philosophy of the Absurd” (The Owl of Minerva, 2015); and a review of Wirklichkeit: Beiträge zu einem Schlüsselbegriff der Hegelschen Philosophie. (The Journal of the History of Philosophy, 2019). Allen Speight  is Associate Professor of Philosophy and Chair of the Department of Philosophy at Boston University. He is the author of Hegel, Literature and the Problem of Agency (Cambridge University Press, 2001) and The Philosophy of Hegel (McGill, 2008), co-editor/translator of Hegel’s Heidelberg Writings (Cambridge University Press, 2009) and editor of Narrative, Philosophy and Life (Springer, 2015). He has written numerous articles on aesthetics and the philosophy of art in Hegel and German Idealism. Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer  is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Leipzig. In 2008–2015, he served as the President of the Saxonian Academy of Science. His research interests include philosophical logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics; Plato, Kant, Hegel, and Wittgenstein. Among his recent books are Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes. Ein dialogischer Kommentar, in 2 vols. (2013) and the edited collection, The Pragmatics of Making it Explicit (2008), as well as essays, “Mathematical Thinking in Hegel’s Science of Logic“ (Internationales Jahrbuch des Deutschen Idealismus/International Yearbook of German Idealism, 2005), and “The Question of System: How to Read the Development from Kant to Hegel” (Inquiry 49:1, 2006). Italo Testa  is Associate Professor at the University of Parma. His research interests include classical German philosophy, critical theory, pragmatism, and social ontology, with a focus on the notions of habit, second nature, and the theory of recognition. Among his books: Hegel critico e scettico (2002), Teorie dell’argomentazione (2006), Ragione impura (2006) and La natura del riconoscimento (2010). He edited I that is We, and We that is I. Perspectives on Contemporary Hegel (2016) and a collection of essays of Theodor Adorno, La crisi dell’individuo (2010). Currently, he is editing Habits. Pragmatist Approaches from Cognitive Neurosciences to Social Sciences, which is under contract with Cambridge University Press. Giuseppe Varnier is Research Fellow and Professor of Epistemology in the Department of Social, Political and Cognitive Studies at the University of Siena. His research has focused on Kant, Hegel, and the influence of (ancient) skepticism

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on German idealism. Recently he has examined indexicality and the intersection of analytic philosophy of language, epistemology, and philosophy of mind. His publications include “Unity of the Mental and ‘Logical’ Identity: After Kant and Hegel” (2000); “‘Esilio’ fondazionalistico e nomadismo da Wittgenstein e ­Neurath a Quine,” (2006); “Quasi-Indexicals, Kaplanian Monsters, and Self-Consciousness” (2014), “Self-Consciousness and Language II: What can be Learned from de se Attitudes” (2016); “Reflections on Quasi-Indexicals, Self-Consciousness and Self-Knowledge” (2017), Filosofia come meditazione e filosofia come fondazione in Descartes e Husserl (2019). Kenneth R. Westphal  is Professor of Philosophy at Boğaziçi Üniversitesi. His most recent books include: How Hume and Kant Reconstruct Natural Law: Justifying Strict Objectivity without Debating Moral Realism (Clarendon, 2016), Grounds of Pragmatic Realism: Hegel’s Internal Critique and Transformation of Kant’s Critical Philosophy (Brill, 2018), and Hegel’s Civic Republicanism: Integrating Natural Law with Kant’s Moral Constructivism (Routledge, 2020). Robert Williams  (1940–2018) was Professor Emeritus of German, Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He authored and edited seven books. His last book, Hegel on the Proofs and the Personhood of God: Studies in Hegel’s Logic and Philosophy of Religion, was published in 2017. He also translated and edited Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit 1827 (2007). Michael Wolff  is Professor Emeritus in Philosophy at the University of Bielefeld, Germany. His current research areas include logic (both Aristotelian and modern), moral philosophy (in particular Kant’s metaphysics of morals) and philosophy of mind. Among his publications are such books as Geschichte der Impetustheorie. Untersuchungen zum Ursprung der klassischen Mechanik (1978), Das Körper-Seele Problem (1991), and most recently, Abhandlung über die Prinzipien der Logik. Mit einer Rekonstruktion der Aristotelischen Syllogistik (2nd ed., 2009) and Der Begriff des Widerspruchs (2nd ed., 2009). Christopher L. Yeomans  is Head and Professor of Philosophy at Purdue University. He is the author of two books on Hegel, Freedom and Reflection: Hegel and the Logic of Agency (2011) and The Expansion of Autonomy: Hegel’s Pluralistic Philosophy of Action (2014), both from Oxford University Press. He has research interests in German Idealism, political philosophy, and the philosophy of action.

Notes on Sources and Key to Abbreviations

Hegel is cited according to volume and page numbers of the German critical edition: Gesammelte Werke. (If important, line numbers added too; e.g.: GW 9:56.11–13.) Below is the list of abbreviations used for all references, as well as the list of English translations used. If the author provides his/her own translations, this is stated in a note and a reference to an appropriate German edition is given. References to the work of all major thinkers are keyed to the standard scholarly editions (examples: Kant, Akademieausgabe [AA]; Fichte, Gesamtausgabe [GA]; Schelling, Werke: Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe [HKA]; Marx, Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe [MEGA]). Recent translations of the works of Kant and Hegel contain pagination from their critical German editions. References to pages of English translations of Kant’s and Hegel’s works are only provided when the translation does not contain pagination from the critical edition of the thinkers’ works. As a rule, multivolume editions of Hegel’s works are cited by volume: page numbers; when needed, they are cited by volume: page.line numbers. Works divided into numbered sections are cited by section (§) number (see more below). Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is cited according to the critical edition in his Gesammelte Werke, vol. 9. Contributors quoting Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology use Terry Pinkard’s translation (Cambridge, 2018) or provide their own translations clearly state this in added notes. Hegel’s Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences and Philosophy of Right are composed as lecture syllabi. They contain three distinct kinds of text: Main sections, Remarks Hegel appended to those main sections, and “Zusätze,” lecture notes appended by Hegel’s editors to Hegel’s sections or remarks. Where Hegel’s published remarks are cited, the section number is followed by the suffix “R,” as in “§345R.” Where student notes from Hegel’s lectures are cited, the section number is followed by the suffix “Z,” as in “§345Z.” Where both a main section and a remark or a lecture note are cited an ampersand is interposed thus: “§345 & R” or “§345 & Z.” (In no case are all three kinds of text cited together.)

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xxxii

Notes on Sources and Key to Abbreviations

Kant Kants Gesammelte Schriften, 29 vols. Königlich Preußische (now Deutsche) Akademie der Wissenschaften. Berlin: G. Reimer, now De Gruyter, 1902–. [Listed as Ak and volume number.] CPR Kritik der reinen Vernunft: 1st ed., 1781 (A), Ak 4; 2nd ed., 1787 (B), Ak 3. The Critique of Pure Reason. P. Guyer and A. Wood (trs.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998. Anth. Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht (1798, rev. 2nd ed.: 1800), Ak 7. Prol. Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik, die als Wissenschaftlich wird auftreten können (1783), Ak 4. Prolegomena to any future Metaphysics. Günter Zöller (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003. MFNS Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft (1786), Ak 4. Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. M. Friedman (ed., tr.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004. CPrR Kritik der praktischen Vernunft (1788), Ak 5. Critique of Practical Reason. M. Gregor (tr.) in: M. Gregor (ed., tr.), Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy (pp. 133–272). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997. CJ Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790), Ak 5. Critique of the Power of Judgement. P. Guyer (ed., tr.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000. MM Metaphysik der Sitten (1797), Ak 6. Metaphysics of Morals. M. Gregor (tr.) in: M. Gregor (ed., tr.), Immanuel Kant, Practical Philosophy (pp. 353–604). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996. (Note: ‘MM’ without italics is used to designate Moldenhauer and Michel, eds., Werke in 20 Bänden. Confusion is avoided by the context of the citation––one involves an attribution to Hegel, the other to Kant––and by the use or lack of italics.) Gr Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten (1785), Ak 4 (4:387–463). Rel. Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft (1793), Ak 6. Religion within the Boundaries of Mere Reason. G. di Giovanni (tr.) in: A. Wood and G. di Giovanni (eds., trs.), Immanuel Kant, Religion and Rational Theology (pp. 39–216). New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996. R Reprint of Eberhard’s Vorbereitung zur natürlichen Theologie (1781), along with Kant’s annotations (18:489–606). [Refl. 6206–6310] In Metaphysics Nachlaß II (1928), xxiii, 725 pp., edited by Erich Adickes. - Ak 18. [Both Eberhard’s Vorbereitung and Kant’s annotations are translated into English in Eberhard [2016, 1–129].] AA

Fichte GA

J. G. Fichte—Gesamtausgabe der Bayerischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. R. Lauth and H. Jacob (eds.). Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1965–.

Notes on Sources and Key to Abbreviations

SK EPW FNR VM

xxxiii

The Science of Knowledge, P. Heath and J. Lachs (eds., trs.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. Early Philosophical Writings. D. Breazeale (ed., tr.). Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988. Foundations of Natural Right, Frederick Neuhouser (ed.). Cambridge University Press, 2000. The Vocation of Man, translated by Peter Preuss. Indianapolis, In: Hackett Publishing Company, 1987.

Schelling SW

Schellings Sämtliche Werke, 10 vols., edited by K. F. A. Schelling. (Originally published in 1856). Stuttgart: Cotta, 1956 (München: Beck, 1958); cited by vol: page numbers.

HKA

Werke: Historisch-Kritische Ausgabe. W. G. Jacobs and W. Schieche (eds.). Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog, 1976–.

Heath

System of Transcendental Idealism (1800). P. Heath (tr.). Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1978. The Science of Knowledge with the First and Second Introductions. P. Heath and J. Lachs (trs.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982. “Fernere Darstellungen aus dem System der Philosophie,” Neue Zeitschrift für speculative Physik 1(1):1–77, 1(2):2–174, 1802. (Reprinted in SW 1, 4:334–510.) “Further Presentations from the System of Philosophy,” §§2, 4. M. Vater (tr.), The Philosophical Forum 32.4:373–397, 2001. (Translated excerpts from FDSP.)

H&L FDSP

FPSP

Hegel GW

GWKat

MM

WVF

Gesammelte Werke, 21 vols. Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft, with the Hegel-Kommission der Rheinisch-Westfälischen Akademie der Wissenschaften and the Hegel-Archiv der Ruhr-Universität Bochum. Hamburg: Meiner, 1968–. Hegels Gesammelte Werke. Katalog anlässlich des 31. Internationalen Hegel-Kongresses 17.–20. Mai 2016 in Bochum, Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2016. Werke in 20 Bänden. K. Moldenhauer and K. Michel (eds.). Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1970. (Note: “MM” with italics is used to designate Kant’s Metaphysics of Morals. Confusion is avoided by the context of the citation––one involves an attribution to Hegel, the other to Kant––and by the use or lack of italics.) Werke, herausgegeben von einem Verein von Freunden des Verewigten, Berlin: Duncker & Humblot, 1832–1845.

xxxiv

SW

Diff.



Skept.

SkeptEng.

G&W

F&K SS SEL

Phil. Prop. JS I JS II JS III

PhG

PhG–P

Notes on Sources and Key to Abbreviations

Sämtliche Werke, edited by George Lasson. Leipzig: Verlag von Felix Meiner, 1917. Karl L. Michelet’s “Vorrede” and “Vorwort” to Hegel’s Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie printed in SW 13 (2. Aufl.), S. v–xviii. “Differenz des Fichte’schen und Schelling’schen Systems der Philosophie”. Kritisches Journal der Philosophie 1.1 (1801):111–184; rpt. GW 4:3–92. The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s Systems of Philosophy. H. S. Harris and W. Cerf (eds., trs.). Albany, State University of New York Press, 1977. “Verhältniß des Skepticismus zur Philosophie, Darstellung seiner verschiedenen Modificationen, und Vergleichung des neuesten mit dem alten”. Kritisches Journal der Philosophie 1.2 (1801):1–74; rpt. GW 4:197–238. “Relationship of Skepticism to Philosophy, Exposition of its Different Modifications and Comparison to the Latest Form with the Ancient One.” H. S. Harris (tr.) in H. S. Harris and G. di Giovanni (eds.) Between Kant and Hegel: Texts in the Development of Post-Kantian Idealism (pp. 311–62). Rev. ed. Cambridge, Mass.: Hackett Publishing Co., 2000. „Glauben und Wissen oder die Reflexionsphilosophie der Subjectivität, in der Vollständigkeit ihrer Formen, als Kantische, Jacobische, und Fichtesche Philosophie“. Kritisches Journal der Philosophie 2.1 (1802):3–189; rpt. GW 4:313–414. Faith and Knowledge. W. Cerf and H. S. Harris (eds., trs.) Albany, State University of New York Press, 1977. System der Sittlichkeit. Reinschriftentwurf (1802–1808). GW 5, pp. 277–361. System of Ethical Life (1802/3) and first Philosophy of Spirit. H. S. Harris and T. M. Knox (eds., trs.). Albany: State University of New York Press, 1979. „Kurse. Manuskripte und Diktate,“ GW 10:523–818. (Formerly designated „Texte zur Philosophischen Propädeutik (1801–1813).“) The Philosophical Propaedeutic. M. George and A. Vincent (eds.), A. V. Miller (tr.). Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1986. Jena Systemetnwürfe I (1803–1804). GW 6. Jena Systementwürfe II (1804–1805). GW 7. Jena Systementwürfe III (1805–1805). GW 8. The Jena System 1804–05: Logic and Metaphysics. J. W. Burbidge, G. di Giovanni, H. S. Harris (eds., trs.). Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1986. System der Wissenschaft. Erster Theil, die Phänomenologie des Geistes. (1807). GW 9. Phänomenologie des Geistes. H.-F. Wessels and H. Clairmont (eds.), with an Introduction by W. Bonsiepen. Hamburg: Meiner, 2006. Based on GW 9; provides a page concordance among the standard German editions of Hegel’s Phenomenology (pp. 621–627). The Phenomenology of Spirit. T. Pinkard, tr. & ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2018. (Provides pagination of GW 9, and correctly numbers each consecutive paragraph.) Cited without further reference to the page or paragraph numbers of the English translation.

Notes on Sources and Key to Abbreviations

M

PEA

WL SL HSL NR RPh PR HPR Enc.

Enc. 1 Enc. 1W Enc. 2 Enc. 2P Enc. 3 Enc. 3P ETW

NL

xxxv

Phenomenology of Spirit. A. V. Miller (tr.). Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1979. (Cited by paragraph numbers that refer to the original German edition of the text, and not to the Miller’s translation; translations revised without notice.) “Proceedings of the Estates Assembly in the Kingdom of Wűrttemberg 1815–1816.” In Heidelberg Writings, B. Bowman, A. Speight, 32–136. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2009. GW 15. Wissenschaft der Logik. Erster Band. Die objective Logik (1812). GW 11. Wissenschaft der Logik. Zweiter Band. Die subjective Logik oder Lehre vom Begriff (1816). GW 12. Wissenschaft der Logik. Erster Teil. Die objective Logik. Erster Band. Die Lehre vom Seyn (1832). GW 21. The Science of Logic. George di Giovanni (tr.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010. Contains pagination from GW.) Hegel’s Science of Logic. Transl. A.V. Miller. Amherst: Humanity Books, 1969. „Naturrechtsaufsatz“ (1802). GW 4. Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft im Grundrisse. Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts (1821). GW 14. Elements of the Philosophy of Right. A. Wood (ed.), H. B. Nisbet (tr.). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, 2nd ed. T. M. Knox, tr., S. Houlgate, ed. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 2008. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Translated by Alan White. Newburyport, MA: Focus Publishing, 2002. Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften (1st ed.: 1817, 2nd ed.: 1827, 3rd ed.: 1830), 3 vols., GW 19, 20; cited by §, as needed with the suffix ‘R’ for Remark (Anmerkung), or ‘Z’ for Zusatz (addition from student lecture notes). Hegel’s Encyclopedia Logic, T. Geraets, W. Suchting, and H. S. Harris (trs.). Cambridge, Mass.: Hackett, 1991. Hegel’s Logic. Being Part One of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences (1830), trans. William Wallace. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, A. V. Miller (tr.). Oxford: The Clarendon Press. Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, 3 vols. M. J. Petry (ed., tr.). London: George Allen & Unwin; New York: Humanities Press, 1970. Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, W. Wallace and A. V. Miller (trs.). Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1976. Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit (Enc. 3, §§377–482), 3 vols. M. J. Petry (ed., tr.). Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1978. (Also contains the ‘Berlin Phenomenology’.) On Christianity. Early Theological Writings of Friedrich Hegel. Transl. by T. M. Knox, with an introduction and fragment. transl. by R. Kroner. New York: Harper and Brothers, 1961. Natural Law. The Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law, Its Place in Moral Philosophy, and Its Relation to the Positive Sciences of Law. Transl. by T. M. Knox. Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975.

xxxvi

Notes on Sources and Key to Abbreviations

LPSJ

Hegel and the Human Spirit, A translation of the Jena lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit (1805–6) with commentary by Leo Rauch. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1983. Vorlesungen. Ausgewählte Nachschriften und Manuskripte. 16 vols. (to date). Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1983ff. Vorlesungen über die Logik. Vorlesungen vol. 10. Hamburg: Meiner, 2001. Vorlesungen ueber die Logik. Berlin 1831. Nachgeschrieben von Karl Hegel. Hg. v. Udo Rameil u. Mit. v. H.-C. Lucas. Hamburg: Meiner 2001. (Bd. 10 of the Vorlesungen series.) Vorlesungen über Naturrecht und Staatswissenschaft (1817/18). C. Becker, W. Bonsiepen, A. Gethmann-Siefert, F. Hogemann, W. Jaeschke, Ch. Jamme, H.-Ch. Lucas, K. R. Meist, O. Pöggeler, H. Schneider (eds.). Vorlesungen vol.1. Hamburg: Meiner, 1983. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie des Rechts (1819–20). Vorlesungen vol. 14. E. Angehrn, M. Bondeli, H. N. Seelmann (eds.). Hamburg: Meiner, 2000. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Kunst (1823). Vorlesungen, 2 vols. A. Gethmann-Siefert (ed.). Hamburg: Meiner, 1998. [Vol. 2 of GWF Hegel: Vorlesungen: Ausgewählte Nachschriften und Manuskripten (Meiner), and the English translation is Robert F. Brown’s 2014 OUP version; see below.] Lectures on the Philosophy of Art: The Hotho Transcript of the 1823 Berlin Lectures Together with an Introduction by Annemarie Gethmann-Siefert, trans. Robert F. Brown Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2014. Hegel’s Aesthetics. Lectures on Fine Art. 2 vols. T. M. Knox (ed., tr.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion. Teil 1. Einleitung. Der Begriff der Religion (1824, 1827, 1831). Vorlesungen vol. 3. W. Jaeschke (ed.). Hamburg: Meiner, 1983. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion. Teil 2. Die bestimmte Religion. Vorlesungen vol. 4. W. Jaeschke (ed.). Hamburg: Meiner, 1985. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion. Teil 3. Die vollendete Religion. Vorlesungen vol. 5. W. Jaeschke (ed.). Hamburg: Meiner, 1984. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, edited and translated by E. B. Speirs, J. B. Sanderson, and Kegan Paul. London: Trench, Trübner, & Co., 1895. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. 3 vols. Peter C. Hodgson (ed.), R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, J. M. Stewart (trs.). Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984; 1987; 1985. [Reissued in: Hegel. Lecture Series, in 3 vols. Oxford UP, 2006.] Vorlesungen Über die Beweise vom Dasein Gottes, Gesammelte Werke, Vol 18, Vorlesungsmanuskripte II (1816–1831), edited by Walter Jaeschke, Hamburg: Meiner Verlag, 1995. Lectures on the Proofs of the Existence of God, edited and translated by Peter C. Hodgson, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2007. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Natur (1819–1820). Vorlesungen vol. 16. M. Bondeli, H. N. Seelmann (eds.). Hamburg: Meiner, 2002. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Natur (1825–1826). Vorlesungen vol. 17. K. Bal, G. Marmasse, Th. Posch, K. Vieweg (eds.) Hamburg, 2007.

V VLog VL

VPhR1

VPhR

VKunst

LFAHotho LFA VRel1

VRel2 VRel3 LPRel

LPR1-3

VBew

LProofs VNat1 VNat2

Notes on Sources and Key to Abbreviations

xxxvii

UVNat Hegel, Vorlesung über Naturphilosophie. Berlin 1821/22. Nachschrift von Boris von Uexküll. Hgg. v. Gilles Marmasse und Thomas Posch. Frankfurt a.M. et al.: Lang, 2002. GVNat Hegel, Vorlesung über Naturphilosophie. Berlin 1823/24. Nachschrift von K.G.J.v. Griesheim, hrsg. v. G. Marmasse. Frankurt a.M. et al.: Peter Lang, 2000. VGeist Vorlesungen über die Philosophie des Geistes (1827–1828). Vorlesungen vol. 13. F. Hespe, B. Tuschling (eds.). Hamburg: Meiner, 1994. LPS Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit 1827–8. 2007. Robert R. Williams (ed.). Oxford: Oxford University Press. VPhSG Vorlesungen über die Philosophie des subjectiven Geistes. GW 25.1, Nachschriften zu den Kollegien der Jahre 1822 und 1825. Christoph Johannes Bauer (ed.). Hamburg: Meiner, 2008. VPhG Vorlesungen über die Philosophie des Geistes. GW 25.2, Nachschrift zu dem Kolleg des Wintersemesters 1827/28 und Sekundäre Überlieferung. Christoph Johannes Bauer (ed.). Meiner, Hamburg, 2011. VPhW Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte (1822–1823). Vorlesungen vol. 12. K. H. Ilting, K. Brehmer, H. N. Seelmann (eds.) Hamburg: Meiner, 1996. VPhGes Die Philosophie der Geschichte. Vorlesungsmitschrift Heimann (Winter 1830/1831), edited by Klaus Vieweg. Munich: Fink Verlag, 2005. LPWH Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Vol. I [1822–1823]. Translated by R. F. Brown and P. C. Hodgson. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011. LPWHIntro Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction. Reason in History (1837). Translated by H. B. Nisbet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. VPhWIntro Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Weltgeschichte. Bd. 1. Die Vernunft in der Geschichte (1837), ed. Johannes Hoffmeister. Hamburg: Meiner, 1955. VGPh1-4 Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie. Vorlesungen vols. 6–9. P. Garniron, W. Jaeschke (eds.) Hamburg: Meiner, 1986–1996. LHPHald Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy (1840). E. S. Haldane, F. H. Simson (trs.). Vol. 1–3. New York: Humanities Press, 1955. (1892–1896, 1955, 1963.) LHPBrown1-3 Lectures on the History of Philosophy: The Lectures of 1825–1826. 3 vols. R. F. Brown (ed., tr.), J. M. Stewart with assistance of H. S. Harris (trs.). Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. LHPIntro Introduction to the Lectures on the History of Philosophy. Translated by T. M. Knox and A. V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1985. EGP Einleitung in die Geschichte der Philosophie. ed. J. Hoffmeister. Hamburg: Meiner, 1940. Briefe Briefe von und an Hegel, 4 vols. J. Hoffmeister (ed.). Hamburg: Meiner, 1969–1981. Letters Hegel: The Letters. C. Butler, C. Seiler (trs.). Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.

Notes on Sources and Key to Abbreviations

xxxviii

Other Sources MEW MEGA Arist.

Essay

Marx-Engels Werke, 44 vols. (46 bks). Berlin: Dietz Verlag, 1956–1968, 1990, 2018. Marx-Engels Gesamtausgabe. Berlin: Dietz Verlag; Walter de Gruyter, 1975–. The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, 2 vols. Edited by Jonathan Barnes. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984.—Cited by the title, a book and chapter number, and an extra number to specify the part of the text. Locke, Jonh. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690). In The Works of John Locke in 10 vols., vols. 1–3. 1823. (Reprinted in Scientia Verlag Aalen, 1963.)—the work is divided into the “books” and “chapters.” The chapters, in turn, are divided into numbered and headed paragraphs. Cited by book.chapter.paragraph.

Introduction: Understanding Hegel and His Philosophical Project Kenneth R. Westphal and Marina F. Bykova

Introduction Hegel has always had an audience problem, not primarily of his own m ­ aking. These began with Kant’s readership, who were hardly prepared to grapple with, much less to comprehend, the philosophical revolution initiated by Kant’s Critical philosophy (di Giovanni 2000). Kant’s contemporaries—and not only they— remained deeply committed to their long-accustomed dichotomies between rationalism and empiricism, and with psycho-physiological issues about the origins or content of fundamental concepts and principles, to the neglect of Kant’s key insight, that our possession of concepts settles no philosophical issues about whether, or how, they can be used in any legitimate, humanly possible judgements. One key aim of justifying a priori concepts (concepts which cannot be exhaustively defined on the basis of, nor acquired solely from, sensory experiences) Kant learned from Tetens (1777): Demonstrating that any concept (or principle) has a legitimate (genuine, sufficiently accurate and justifiable) cognitive use requires localizing and indicating (pointing out, or to) at least one relevant instance of that concept. Tetens called this “realizing” a concept. Kant adopted this use of the verb “realize” from Tetens; Hegel adopted it from them both. Compounding readers’ perplexities was Kant’s further, central claim that some key “synthetic,” i.e., logically contingent principles (both they and their negations are logically consistent) can be known a priori. Kant argued that these synthetic a priori principles specify necessary conditions a priori for the very possibility of human self-conscious experience, even of the most minimal sense of it merely appearing to any one of us that some sensory appearances appear to occur before, during or after others; this is one way to restate the thesis of Kant’s “Refutation of Idealism” (CPR B275). However, Kant argued that these key synthetic a priori principles can only be known if a distinctive, very sophisticated version of idealism is true, according to which space and time are nothing but our human forms of sensory receptivity (CPR A37/B53, A381, B53–54). To those who believe in commonsense or in scientific knowledge of nature, Kant’s cure appeared worse than the skeptical disease. xxxix

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To those faithful to rationalism or to traditional theology, Kant’s restriction of the legitimate use of concepts and principles to judging only spatiotemporal phenomena appeared to be the skeptical disease, now bolstered by philosophical resources not even Hume could imagine. To Kant’s early converts, it appeared that grave difficulties arose from Kant’s apparent views about “noumena,” or about nonspatiotemporal “things in themselves,” so that Kant’s Critical philosophy required purification and refounding—mostly on borrowed, broadly Cartesian grounds. And to anti-rationalists and historicists it appeared that Kant’s magisterial claims about the powers of human reason and our capacity to develop a cogent critique of pure reason were woefully over-confident, because human reason is rooted in language, while language is rooted in human history and our inherited usage, metaphors and images. According to these critics, human reason is not at all competent to conduct Kant’s proposed critique of pure reason, because we altogether lack pure reason. To empiricists and to skeptics, on the other hand, it appeared that no new Critical Kantian philosophy was necessary; Hume had settled these matters definitively—never mind troubles reconciling the apparently skeptical and the apparently commonsense realist strands in Hume’s views. Empiricists remain convinced that any (purported) synthetic a priori claims must involve some sort of rational intuition into reality itself—a view Kant himself expressly rejected, though exactly this proposal was championed by Schelling’s (FDSP §2) intellectual intuitions of the absolute. What is to be done?

Hegel’s Entré Hegel’s first book is his unjustly dismissed De orbitis planetarum (1801), in which, among much else, he identifies some key methodological shortcomings in Newton’s Principia. One is that Newton’s limit-taking operations presuppose, but cannot demonstrate, that there is a limit approached by his successive approximations to any celestial orbit (planets, moons, comets). Another is that Newton’s methods of approximation lend themselves all too readily to reifying his analytical factors into distinct components (rather than momentary aspects) of any orbital motion. Hegel understood the natural sciences and mathematics of his day far better than his critics, and most of his commentators as well (ourselves included).1 He appreciated fully the importance of Johann Bernoulli’s refounding of Newtonian mechanics on mathematical analysis (calculus) (Enz. §270R), which inter alia both the misleading analytical reifications in Newton’s own calculations and also Newton’s fervent desire to use the Principia to bolster natural theology. Hegel’s Science of Logic (GW 21:273–299) contains a very cogent critical assessment of Cauchy’s landmark “first reform” of (mathematical) analysis (Wolff 1986). In short, Hegel recognized early on that philosophical theory of knowledge requires detailed knowledge of the empirical sciences, although philosophy can make distinctive contributions to our understanding of human knowledge (Westphal 2018, §§116–126). One question then is, whether or how this can be demonstrated

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to traditional epistemologists, who aim to proceed in an a priori manner, or to later-day “naturalists” who think philosophy has nothing distinctive to contribute to epistemological understanding? These are among the questions Hegel addressed in his second book, The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). Though he begins as blandly as possible in his Introduction, postponing any and all definite contentions on his own part to the body, if not to the end (and to the Preface) of his massive book, Hegel takes up knowledge—human cognition—as an appearance, or a range of a­ppearances, to try to examine whether any of these appearances may manifest genuine knowledge of the world. By proceeding as he does, Hegel implicitly though quite definitely addresses the “meta-critical” skepticisms of Johann Georg Hamann and Johann Gottfried Herder about the very possibility of Kantian Critical philosophy, the anti-Critical skepticisms of contemporaneous empiricist or skeptical Humean rejoinders to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, and also Pyrrhonian skepticism itself, which Hegel knew to be a far more serious philosophical opponent than empiricist skepticism, though also much more instructive (see below, Chapter 3). Hegel recognized that Gottlob Ernst Schulze’s anonymous “Aphorisms on the Absolute” (1803) had implicitly though pointedly countered Schelling’s (FDSP) intellectual intuitionism by re-stating and deploying the Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion. One of Hegel’s key achievements is solving that Dilemma by explicating the very possibility of constructive self-criticism (Westphal 2018, §§60–64; Bykova 2019b, Chapter 5). This solution undergirds Hegel’s critical examination of candidate forms of knowledge as “forms of consciousness” on strictly internal grounds: grounds provided by the core principles of a candidate account of human experience and knowledge, taken in conjunction with its favored domain of objects, known or unknowable (in the case of skeptical forms of consciousness). By critically examining the core principles and their use within plausibly human forms of experience or knowledge, Hegel proposes to demonstrate the competence of philosophy to examine (inter alia) epistemological issues, and more broadly: issues concerning the scope and character of rational judgement and justification in non-formal domains. In this regard, Hegel aims to reconstruct and to justify Kantian Critical philosophy, as a comprehensive critique of rational judgement and justification, without appeal to Kant’s transcendental idealism (nor to any such view: Hegel’s “idealism” is, as he indicates, a moderate ontological holism). The contrast between formal and non-formal domains is precise: The one strictly formal domain consists in a scrupulous reconstruction of Aristotle’s square of opposition (Wolff 2009a). All further domains require various semantic and existence postulates, at the very least, to specify their domains. Many such domains can be formalized on the basis of those postulates, yet which of these formalized domains may be cognitively useful is a further question, which cannot be addressed by formal considerations alone. This Kant had already recognized; it is one key reason why he rejects pure conceptual analysis and instead explicates key concepts to the extent necessary to examine his main topics in Critical philosophy (CPR A727–730/B755–758). Pure conceptual analysis aims to provide necessary and sufficient conditions defining and specifying the exact semantic content

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(intension) of any problematic concept or term. In contrast, conceptual explication cannot be known to be complete, does not provide necessary and sufficient conditions for a concept’s proper use, and must be assessed by whether, or how well, it may improve upon its predecessor in the original context of its use. This contrast between conceptual analysis and conceptual explication is among Kant’s reasons to address the content and a priori justificatory status of key synthetic principles. Logical empiricists have sought to avoid such principles, or to treat them only as conventions. Neither strategy suffices, in part because some logically contingent yet indispensably necessary semantic capacities and functions are presupposed even in the most elementary specification of any semantic use of any mark as a symbol, of any formation rules for sentences composed of such marks, and of any rules by which any sentence can (or cannot) be derived from any other (Quine 1936). More generally, “synthetic necessary truths” are required to structure any form of disciplined inquiry, even if those fundamental principles may be revisited or revised in the course of inquiry (Toulmin 1949). Wilfrid Sellars recognized that Kant was right to argue for the legitimacy of some key a priori synthetic principles. Yet, unlike Kant, though like Hegel, Sellars realized that such principles are required, necessary, and justifiable independent of Kant’s transcendental idealism, or any such metaphysical view. Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology is a propaedeutic to rigorous philosophical examination of such issues as these. In this work, Hegel seeks to explicate and justify basic a priori principles of judgement required by commonsense experience and knowledge of objects, persons, events and structures surrounding us—as also by more exacting empirical inquiry into any of these particulars. These principles Hegel identifies and justifies by regressive argument through a strictly internal critique of candidate accounts of human experience and knowledge which purport to succeed without any such principles, beginning in “Sense Certainty” with radically naive realism, according to which sensation alone suffices to account for our experience and empirical knowledge. The first three chapters of Hegel’s Phenomenology provide a counterpart to Kant’s “objective deduction” of the categories, demonstrating that we can, must, and do use key a priori concepts and principles to localize, identify, judge, and causally explain various particulars and events in our surroundings. In the remainder of the Phenomenology, Hegel provides an alternative to Kant’s detailed functionalist cognitive psychology (Brook 2016; Westphal 2020), because those details presume what is at issue in Hegel’s book: That we are—or can become—philosophically competent to examine such issues cogently. Instead, the remainder of Hegel’s Phenomenology examines, explicates, and justifies some of the core social and historical aspects of rational justification—implicitly, though quite deliberately, explicating and defending key features of Kant’s own transcendental doctrine of method, in particular, this thesis: Because we are such finite and fallible cognizant beings, in forming any considered, putatively justified judgement about any public phenomenon, we must first scrutinize our own judgement so as to determine as well as possible whether our judgement and its justifying grounds are such that they can be communicated to all others, such that others can understand and assess our judgement and its

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grounds, and can find them to be sufficiently accurate and justifying; and second, we must actually communicate our own judgement and its grounds to all others, and consider their considered assessment of our own best judgements, Kant indicates that the only alternative to such cosmopolitan modesty about our own finitude and fallibility is “logical egoism” (Anth. §2), which results in an intellectual counterpart to Hobbes’ state of nature; Kant names Hobbes in exactly this connection (CPR A751–752/B779–780). Hegel’s examination of what he calls “The Animal Kingdom of the Spirit” (PhG GW 9:216–228) elaborates exactly this scenario from Kant, to underscore the very same conclusions about the character and scope of our capacities to judge and to justify anything rationally. Hegel’s conclusion, expressly drawn in “Evil and its Forgiveness” (PhG GW 9:358–62), is that rational judgement and justification is humanly possible, though only as a social and historical phenomenon. This result thus expands the self-critical structure of our human consciousness into a recognitive community of finite, fallible, yet cognitively competent community of self-disciplined rational inquiry (see below, Chapter 7).

Hegel’s Systematic Philosophy In his Introductions both to the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit and to the later Science of Logic (1812–1816), Hegel stresses that philosophy cannot begin with any presuppositions; that instead, any and all presuppositions must be subjected to critical assessment within philosophy, even such presumptions as expressed in the generically Kantian notions of “cognitive capacities,” “capacity,” “power,” (Kraft) or “subjective cognizing” (Enz. 1817, §36R). This appears to raise incomprehensible problems about how to begin if we are not allowed anything with which to begin. Or perhaps we cannot avoid beginning with our being aware of ourselves as philosophically perplexed or dumbfounded, utterly lacking resources even to express ourselves or our perplexity? Hegel does not think philosophical thinking bootstraps itself into existence and functionality ex nihilo, nor even from the merest appearance to oneself of one’s own self-consciousness. Hegel is clear that our self-consciousness is only possible on the basis of our consciousness of something (or someone) else (Enz. §424; Cramer 1979). Hegel also agrees with Kant that we can only be conscious of other particulars in our surroundings if a host of sub-personal cognitive functions effectively enable us to be conscious of our surroundings, and hence also able to be self-conscious. Hegel’s point against “presuppositions” has a more nuanced sense: We are to relinquish our commitments to any and all of our philosophical preconceptions or presuppositions, and to identify these preconceptions and presuppositions—among others—so as to scrutinize them critically. Hegel’s verb aufzugeben has both of these senses (Grimm 1854). Hegel uses both connotations, even if he does not, in those brief Introductions, expressly emphasize them both; that would invoke too much philosophy prior to our commencing with his philosophizing. He does, however, indicate them both in

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the first edition of his Encyclopaedia Logic (Enc. §§35, 36+R), where he stresses that preconceptions and presuppositions are to be rescinded qua suppositions, centrally because these are presumed by taking them for granted, rather than expressly identifying and assessing them; their identification and assessment is a philosophical task commenced by Hegel’s Logic. Translations and commentaries often recognize only one of these two connotations, thus needlessly complicating Hegel’s starting points. Recalling his formulation in the Preface to the Phenomenology (PhG GW 9:26.21), Hegel reiterates in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy: “in philosophy the point is to know (erkannt) that which is presupposed as familiar (bekannt)” (MM 20:352, LHPHald 3:444, LHPBrown 3:237). For all he achieves in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel singles out one result required for his Science of Logic, namely that we can comprehend the fundamental constitutive structure and features of a host of natural, social, and historical phenomena. These constitutive structures Hegel calls “Sachen,” not a term unique to Hegel, though it lacks any adequate English counterpart. To comprehend such constitutive structures requires that we can develop our categorical thinking in ways adequate to these structures. A central feature of Hegel’s thought is revealed by an important common point linking three faults he finds in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Hegel expressly faults Kant for relegating concepts of reflection to an Appendix to his Transcendental Logic (WL II GW 12:19.34–38), for treating reason as “only dialectical” and as “merely regulative” (WL GW 12:23.12, .16–17), and for failing to scrutinize our most fundamental concepts to determine whether they “can be true” (WL GW 12:28.8–24, cf. Enz. §42Z3, Enz. 47R). Kant’s concepts of reflection include these pairs: “identity/difference” or “unity/diversity,” “inner/outer,” “form/matter,” and “agreement/contradiction” (CPR A263–266/B319–322). Kant examines the use of these concepts to specify the character of, and to individuate particular objects of pure understanding and of spatiotemporal phenomena. In regard to spatiotemporal phenomena, Kant’s key point is anti-Leibnizian: conceptual specifications alone suffice only to identify and to individuate objects of pure reason (such as mathematical constructions), but not to individuate spatiotemporal particulars, which requires localizing and specifying the spatiotemporal region occupied by any one spatiotemporal particular; qualitative specification does not suffice to identify or individuate single spatiotemporal particulars. Thus for any judgement about spatiotemporal particulars (of whatever kind or scale) to be a candidate for cognitive standing, requires ascribing features to at least one relevant, indicated, localized, differentiated, characterized spatiotemporal particular. Ascription is required for any judgement (or analogously, statement) to have a truth-value, or value as an approximation; it is required to be able to assess that truth-value or accuracy; it is required for that judgement to have any cognitive justification; and, it is required for any judgement to have sufficient accuracy and cognitive justification to count as knowledge. This may be called the Thesis of Singular Cognitive Reference. It is justified by Kant’s analyses of our competent use of the concepts “space,” “spaces,” “time,” “times,” “individuation” and “particular,” as the conjoint consequence of the Transcendental Aesthetic and the Transcendental Logic.

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Hegel too upholds and defends this thesis of singular cognitive reference, though he argues for it much more directly, and faults Kant for not using it more thoroughly. Any spatiotemporal particular (of whatever kind or scale) can be identified only by individuating or differentiating it from its surroundings, which requires identifying various of its features. Any such identification and individuation of spatiotemporal particulars involves conjoint, discriminatory use of Kant’s concepts of reflection, especially “unity/diversity” and “inner/outer.” These opposed concepts can only be used by contra-distinguishing particulars, their features, and their relations. Contra-distinguishing particulars, their features, and their relations requires competent use of discriminating classifications of those particulars, their features, and their relations. In such discriminatory judgements by which we identify and individuate particulars and their features, we do competently use integrated pairs or sets of counter-posed conceptual classifications (of particulars, features or relations) by which alone we can and do identify which particulars are unitary and so are distinct to others, by identifying which features or relations are internal to (or constitutive of) any one particular, which features or relations are outer, linking or contrasting it to other particulars, systems or processes. Hence, there is legitimate cognitive use of “dialectically” related or structured concepts, within our experience and knowledge of the spatiotemporal realm. Examining these concepts, their specific content, and their mutual contra-distinction is a central task of Hegel’s Science of Logic. When faulting Kant for not examining our fundamental categories to determine whether they “can be true,” at least one central point is that our fundamental categories must be specified sufficiently so that they can be “realized” (in the sense specified above). This requires properly specifying, differentiating and integrating their content, scope, and proper use, so that they can be instantiated, and so that we can determine that they are instantiated, by actual spatiotemporal phenomena. (These claims are deliberately modal; see below.) Classically conceived, “conceptual analysis” aims to identify the necessary and sufficient conditions for the proper use of any philosophically puzzling concept or term. Hegel follows Kant (as does Carnap) in recognizing that in all non-formal domains, conceptual analysis in this strict sense is unachievable. Instead, the substantive concepts, terms, phrases and principles relevant to morals or to epistemology (including history and philosophy of science) can only be partially explicated, perhaps through such explication also clarified and improved, although the sufficiency or adequacy of any conceptual explication can only be assessed by whether or how it may (not) improve upon the initial concept (etc.) subjected to explication in that original context of use (CPR A727–730/B755–758). Conceptual explication requires a fallibilist account of rational justification, and it requires important aspects of semantic externalism (context dependence). Much more than Kant or Carnap, Hegel developed, exploited, and augmented these fallibilist and externalist aspects of conceptual explication (Westphal 2018, §§100–110, 132–139). Using, developing, and assessing terms, concepts, or principles involve judgement and evaluative criteria and considerations. Accordingly, explicating our most fundamental terms, concepts, and principles (our “categories,” to speak with Kant) to determine whether, how or in what domain(s) they can be true (per above)

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requires explicating also the subjective aspects of logic, including judgement, inference, and syllogism, as well as the basic principles used in causal-mechanistic, chemical, functional(ist) and teleological explanation, together with the fundamental concepts and principles governing, indeed constituting, our bases for evaluating our own best conceptual explications and their possible, realizable use. These are all topics for Part II of Hegel’s Logic, the “subjective logic.” Hegel’s logic is expressly not limited to strictly deductive logic of inference or syllogism (WL GW 12:110.1–21). Hegel includes the basic forms of syllogism within his logic, but his use of the term is common in the Modern period, when to “logic” also belonged the use of concept, principles, judgements, and inferences within human knowledge. The developments within Hegel’s Science of Logic are to be “immanent,” but this term, or claim, does not yet address the question, immanent within what, exactly? The concepts (etc.) examined in Hegel’s Science of Logic are not expostulated ex nihilo; they were developed through and throughout intellectual history, including the histories of the sciences. Hegel purports to first examine these concepts (etc.) in relative isolation from their actual domains of use, the Realphilosophie of nature and of spirit, which are examined in the second and third volumes of his Encyclopaedia. One central aim of the opening sections of Hegel’s Science of Logic, from “Being” up through “Dasein” (“existence,” “beingthere”) is to argue regressively (via indirect proof by internal critique) that any candidate for cognitive judgement, or claim, must be at least as determinate (specific) as the concept “Dasein.” One central aim of Hegel’s Science of Logic, from “Dasein” up through “Wirklichkeit” (“actuality”)—the third and final section of the Doctrine of Essence—is to argue regressively (via indirect proof by internal critique) that any credible, determinate, informative, assessable use of distinctions between “appearance” and “reality” requires the full complement of concepts examined in the Doctrine of Essence. With those results in hand, Hegel commences his examination of our possible and proper judgemental and inferential use of those concepts and principles, including explanatory principles, within his “Subjective Logic” or “Doctrine of the Concept,” Part II of the Science of Logic. This is elaborate, yet neither artificial nor aimless. Hegel is aware of confusions easily occasioned by failing to distinguish, specify, and properly to appreciate and integrate which features of concepts (etc.) pertain to their logical or proto-cognitive character, roles, or prospective usage; which features of concepts (etc.) pertain to specified domains of actual inquiries which constitute and specify the various domains of Realphilosophie (within nature, spirit); and, which features of concepts (etc.) pertain to their actual use within any actual inquiry within any one specific domain within Realphilosophie. Such care and detail explicating and examining these issues and our resources for addressing them are required once we must, for sound reasons, rescind Cartesian self-transparency, introspective psychology, narrow construals of mental content, pure conceptual analysis and justificatory infallibilism (declared in 1277 by Étienne Tempier’s condemnation of neo-Aristotelian heresies; see Boulter 2011), while recognizing that empiricism fails to account for some of our most basic cognitive capacities.

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One recurrent theme in Hegel’s Science of Logic is that identification requires specification, which requires differentiation or discrimination. Our identification by discrimination of anything—spatiotemporal particulars, processes, structures, of whatever kind or scale, or their features, properties or constitution—requires comparative concepts (etc.) and involve relations. Hegel is aware of how easily and how often analytical distinctions, distinctions of reason, or comparative discriminations by contrast, are mistakenly reified by misconceiving them as mutually independent entities, beings, or factors. Accordingly, Hegel constantly highlights and discriminates the relevant, specific forms of relations, and also argues that proper use of these comparative, discriminatory concepts (etc.) can, and often do, properly identify constitutive relational features of the objects of inquiry within any branch of Realphilosophie. In both regards, Hegel emphasizes that relations are not themselves relata, even though some relations (partially) constitute particular relata. We have a chronic tendency to reify relations into presumably distinct, mutually independent particulars: relata misconceived—reified—as if they were not relata. Grasping, recognizing, or comprehending relations is altogether an intellectual achievement; relations are not objects we can perceive (sense) or stumble upon (or over); not even spatial or temporal relations are themselves sensory. To identify and to comprehend relations accurately, and to comprehend the relational features of particulars (of whatever kind or scope) requires enormous care and intellectual self-discipline. That is central to Hegel’s conceptual explications in the Science of Logic, continued much more concretely in the two branches of Realphilosophie, the Philosophy of Nature, and the Philosophy of Spirit, and further specified within the respective sections of his philosophical Encyclopaedia. Complementing Hegel’s logic, which so specifies our categories that they can be true, Hegel’s “Realphilosophie” aims to show that those realizable categories are realized within nature and in culture, the realms of spirit. Thus, we have the second volume of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia, “The Philosophy of Nature,” and the third, “The Philosophy of Spirit.” Hegel’s philosophy of nature is deeply informed, intensively and extensively, by the natural sciences and mathematics of his day. In it, Hegel seeks to coordinate the various special sciences with each other, and to integrate them into a comprehensive account of the fundamental features and aspects of nature, including how nature provides the prerequisites of organic life, sentience and our finite human rational agency (see below, Chapter 12). The first (and longest) part of his “Philosophy of Spirit,” the “Philosophy of Subjective Spirit,” addresses the anthropological, physiological and psychological pre-conditions of our human form of mindedness. In this regard, Hegel seeks to show how Aristotle’s account of the soul can be updated and integrated with Kant’s account of our sub-personal cognitive functions. Developing the philosophical understanding of our human form of embodied rational agency was extremely important to Hegel; his contributions to this domain are beginning to attract the attention they deserve (see below, Chapters 13–15; Bykova 2019a). The second part of Hegel’s “Philosophy of Spirit” is his account of “objective spirit,” or human social life. This is detailed extensively and systematically in his Philosophical Outlines of Justice (or, Elements of the Philosophy of Right,

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1821). The third part is Hegel’s account of the realms of “absolute spirit”: art, religion, and philosophy itself, including history of philosophy. Hegel never completed these as separate works for publication, but several excellent sets of transcripts of his famous lectures in Berlin on these topics have been preserved. More recently they have been properly edited (GW 28,1; 29,1; 30,1; 30,2) and several of the Lecture series have been translated into English (see, e.g., LFAHotho, LPR1-3, LHPBrown,). Hegel produced a holistic philosophical system, expounded as a “system of philosophical sciences.” His goal with the system is to show how reality (Being as such) is ultimately comprehensible in its all-inclusive totality. This quest for “absolute knowing” is not only a topic of the 1807 Phenomenology, but the focus of his entire system. Hegel argues that the most accurate and complete account of absolute knowing is attainable only in the form of an organized totality of cognitions constituting a scientific system (Wissenschaft). This system of knowledge develops from a kind of thinking that generates its categories internally and that dialectically—through self-criticism—overcomes its own limitations at each stage. Such knowledge is not produced at any intermediate stage; it results from and within the whole process of philosophizing, which resembles a circle that presupposes its end (goal), but becomes actual only when completed (PhG GW 9:18). In this sense, the very process (coming-to-be) of cognition is necessarily an integral part of the result reached. Thus, comprehensive knowing involves not only exploring the possibility of absolute knowing (shown in the Phenomenology), but also includes the actual grasp of this possibility as provided by the account of thought in and for itself (investigated in the Science of Logic). Yet, as Hegel insists, because knowledge results from internalization (active assimilation) of the materials of our historical experience, the philosophical account of knowledge must be necessarily “validated” in and through thought’s manifold relations to natural and social phenomena. The distinctive forms of this “validation” Hegel portrays in his Encyclopaedia’s Philosophy of Nature and Philosophy of Spirit.

Dialectic Hegel’s distinctive philosophical approach has become known as dialectical thinking. The dialectic is, in Hegel’s work, not merely a feature of concepts that holds among various shapes of consciousness and forms of thinking. Hegel is distinctive in his view that the dialectic occurs within and accounts for all movement and change, both in the world and in our thought about it; this is a progression in which each successive movement emerges as a dialectical overcoming (sublation) of deficiency ­inherent in the preceding movement. This overcoming is a process of both eliminating the deficient aspects and preserving those that are sufficient in a new, higher standpoint of thought or at a more advanced level of development.

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Hegel uses several kinds of “dialectic.” Dialectical explication determines the content and proper use of concepts or (likewise) principles. It begins with an elementary, general concept from a domain of inquiry, examines its content and range of application and critically assesses its adequacy, or failure, to account for salient features of examples in its purported domain. Such failures justify introducing a more sophisticated concept to account for the domain, which again is explicated and assessed critically. The result of such dialectical explication is an integrated series of concepts which specifies the proper domain of each and which preserves the legitimate content of earlier concepts in the final, most comprehensive and adequate concept. For example, Hegel’s Logic explicates concepts which purport to characterize the whole of reality. The first concept treated is “being,” which is criticized for its descriptive vacuity and for connoting stasis, which ill-describes a fundamental trait of reality, viz. change. These defects justify introducing the interim concept of “nothing” and then the concept of “becoming.” This concept is then in turn explicated and assessed. Dialectical arguments offer indirect proof. They justify controversial principles for a domain by criticizing the simplest principle from that domain. Hegel believes that inadequacies in a principle can be generated internally, between the principle and examples from its intended or preferred domain. These inadequacies specify more accurately the proper content, scope, and use of the principle, and they justify introducing a more sophisticated principle which purports to account for the original insights and successes, and also for the deficiencies of the previous principle. The dialectical examination is then repeated. Increasingly sophisticated principles are justified by showing that they are the simplest principles which can account accurately for the relevant phenomena in the domain. Such arguments often argue regressively from an obvious phenomenon to demonstrate either necessary or sufficient conditions for the possibility of that phenomenon. For example, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit begins its defense of a non-foundational epistemology by arguing against aconceptual knowledge, in the form of naive realism. He purports to show that no such view can account for obvious abilities to distinguish among different objects of knowledge or to specify the relevant spatial or temporal scope of ostensive reference without admitting that concepts are necessary even to the most elementary examples or episodes of human cognizance of our surroundings. This failure justifies introducing a view of knowledge that admits elementary concepts for sensory qualities. This view is then submitted to analysis and used in a further indirect proof. Dialectical relations hold between particulars, concepts or phenomena when two or more of them appear to be independent but are, in fact, interdependent. Typically, these dependencies would now be expressed as biconditional relations. Dialectical developments occur in history or in society when an historical or social phenomenon either depends upon or generates a distinct and opposed phenomenon, where these phenomena ultimately are encompassed within a larger framework. Dialectical explanations explain dialectical relations, or dialectical developments, by explicating their dialectical character.2

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The Palgrave Hegel Handbook: Aims and Scope From what has been said, readers will gather this Handbook is neither an introduction to Hegel’s philosophy, nor a dictionary of his elaborate, distinctive terminology. Excellent introductions and dictionaries precede this Handbook.3 Neither is this the first or only handbook to Hegel’s philosophy (in English). Our volume is designed to complement the others, primarily by aiming to address the full range of Hegel’s philosophical texts, issues, and views, by addressing them philosophically as well as textually, historically, and critically.4 This rationale is exhibited in this book’s Table of Contents and its divisions, beginning in Part I with the intellectual background and context of Hegel’s philosophical project, then turning in Part II to his 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit, following in Part III with Hegel’s Science of Logic, though focusing on its methodological underpinnings, in order next to consider the subsequent divisions of Hegel’s encyclopedic philosophical system: Philosophy of Nature (Part IV) and Philosophy of Spirit (Part V). Hegel’s moral philosophy, which conceptually belongs to his philosophy of spirit, is elaborated in much greater detail in two further areas of philosophical inquiry: his Practical and Political Philosophy (Part VI) and his philosophies of history, encompassing both Philosophy of World History and also History of Philosophy (Part VII). Part VIII considers subsequent and contemporary Hegelian thought; Part IX provides two important chronologies, one of Hegel’s own life, the other of his philosophical system as formulated in his writings and his justly famous lecture series, primarily those given in Berlin. Our Handbook then closes with a concise agenda of issues for further research. Each chapter, and the volume as a whole, is outlined in the About This Book. The Handbook consists of twenty eight chapters written by a group of internationally recognized Hegel scholars. All essays included in the volume are original works that offer a scholarly introduction to the subject under consideration. Despite being sizable, this volume does not intend to be comprehensive, and some omissions and gaps in coverage of Hegel’s vast philosophical legacy are unavoidable. In this volume our goal is to provide a series of well researched, comprehensible contributions, which together adequately and reliably take account of Hegel’s philosophical system and thought. We believe we have achieved our aim by presenting a state of the art understanding of Hegel’s philosophy, evaluating arguments made against Hegel’s views, and assessing central contemporary controversies concerning his philosophy. We hope our readers will appreciate the clarity and engaging style adopted by the contributors to this Handbook and shall benefit significantly from this compendious, robust examination of Hegel’s philosophy.

Notes 1. On Hegel’s De orbitis, see Ferrini (1991), (1994), (1995), (1997a), (1997b), (1998), (1999), and Nasti de Vincentis (1995), (1998). 2. Most of this section 4 was first published in Westphal (1992). The author is grateful to the editors and publisher for kindly allowing its revision and publication here.

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3. Among introductions in English we recommend especially—in alphabetical order—Caird (1896), Hartnack (1986), Hoffman (2015), Houlgate (2005), Mure (1940), Plant (1973), and Siep (2014). For Hegel dictionaries, see: Burbidge (2008), Inwood (1992), and Magee (2010). 4. As for misunderstandings still circulating as “received wisdom” about Hegel’s supposed views, see Stewart (1996). The image of Hegel’s philosophy as a monolithic block originates with Michelet’s editing his collected works; see Jamme (1984), and Michelet’s (1870) hagiographic title.

Bibliography Boulter, Stephen. 2011. “The Mediaeval Origins of Conceivability Arguments.” Metaphilosophy 42 (5): 617–641. Brook, Andrew. 2016. “Kant’s View of the Mind and Consciousness of Self.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by E. N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ win2016/entries/kant-mind/. Burbidge, John. 2008. Historical Dictionary of Hegelian Philosophy. Lanham, MD: The Scarecrow Press (Rowman & Littlefield). Bykova, Marina F., ed. 2019a. Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit: A Critical Guide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Bykova, Marina F., ed. 2019b. The German Idealism Reader: Ideas, Responses and Legacy. London: Bloomsbury. Caird, Edward. 1896. Hegel. London and Edinburgh: Blackwood and Sons; Reprint: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2002. Cramer, Konrad. 1979. “Bewusstsein und Selbstbewusstsein. Vorschläge zur Rekonstruktion der systematischen Bedeutung einer Behauptung Hegels im §424 der Berliner Encyclopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften.” In Hegels Philosophische Psychologie, edited by Dieter Henrich, 215–225. Bonn: Bouvier. di Giovanni, George. 2000. “The Facts of Consciousness.” In Between Kant and Hegel: Texts in the Development of Post-Kantian Idealism, edited by Henry S. Harris and George di Giovanni, 2nd rev. ed., 2–50. Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing. Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm Grimm. 1854–. Deutsches Wörterbuch. Leipzig: Verlag von S. Hirzel. Ferrini, Cinzia. 1991. “Features of Irony and Alleged Errors in Hegel’s De orbitis planetarum.” Hegel-Jahrbuch, 459–477. Ferrini, Cinzia. 1994. “On Newton’s Demonstration of Kepler’s Second Law in Hegel’s De Orbitis Planetarum (1801).” Philosophia naturalis 31: 150–170. Ferrini, Cinzia, ed. 1995. Guida al «De orbitis planetarum» di Hegel ed alle sue edizioni e traduzioni. Bern: Haupt. Ferrini, Cinzia. 1997a. “Die Bibliothek in Tschugg: Hegels Vorbereitung für seine frühe Naturphilosophie.” In Hegel in der Schweiz (1793–1796), edited by H. Schneider and N. Waszek, 237–259. Frankfurt a. M.: Lang. Ferrini, Cinzia. 1997b. “Il giovane Hegel critico di Newton.” Intersezioni 17 (3): 395–417. Ferrini, Cinzia. 1998. “Framing Hypotheses: Numbers in Nature and the Logic of Measure in the Development of Hegel’s System.” In Hegel and the Philosophy of Nature, edited by Stephen Houlgate, 283–310. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Ferrini, Cinzia. 1999. “On the Role of Newton’s Mechanics and Philosophy of Nature in the Genesis of Hegel’s Dialectic.” In Hegel’s Denkentwicklung in der Berner und Frankfurter Zeit, edited by M. Bondeli and H. Linneweber-Lammerskitten, 197–224. Paderborn: Fink. Harris, Henry S., and George di Giovanni, eds., trs. 2000. Between Kant and Hegel: Texts in the Development of Post-Kantian Idealism, 2nd rev. ed. Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing. Hartnack, Justus. 1986. From Radical Empiricism to Absolute Idealism. Lewiston, NY: Edwin Mellon Press.

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Hoffman, Thomas Sören. 2015. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: A Propaedeutic. Translated by D. Healan, 2nd ed. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Houlgate, Stephen, ed. 1998. Hegel and the Philosophy of Nature. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Houlgate, Stephen. 2005. An Introduction to Hegel, 2nd rev. ed. Oxford: Blackwell. Inwood, Michael. 1992. A Hegel Dictionary. Oxford: Blackwell. Jamme, Christoph. 1984. “Editionspolitik. Zur »Freundesvereinsausgabe« der Werke G.W.F. Hegels.” Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung 38 (1): 83–99. https://www.jstor.org/ stable/20483336. Magee, Glen Alexander. 2010. The Hegel Dictionary. London: Continuum. Michelet, Carl L. 1870. Hegel der unwiderlegte Weltphilosoph. Eine Jubelschrift. Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot. Mure, G.R.G. 1940. An Introduction to Hegel. Oxford: The Clarendon Press. Nasti de Vincentis, Mauro. 1995. “Gli argomenti hegeliani contro il modello newtoniano.” In Guida al «De orbitis planetarum» di Hegel ed alle sue edizioni e traduzioni, edited by Cinzia Ferrini, 203–240. Bern: Haupt. Nasti de Vincentis, Mauro. 1998. “Hegel’s Worm in Newton’s Apple.” In Hegel and the Philosophy of Nature, edited by Stephen Houlgate, 227–256. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Plant, Raymond. 1973. Hegel. London: George Allen and Unwin. Quine, W. V. O. 1936. “Truth by Convention.” In Philosophical Essays for A. N. Whitehead, edited by O. H. Lee, 90–124. New York: Longman’s; rpt. In idem. (1976), The Ways of Paradox and Other Essays, 2nd rev. ed., 77–106. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Siep, Ludwig. 2014. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by D. Smyth. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stewart, Jon, ed. 1996. The Hegel Myths and Legends. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Tetens, Johann Heinrich. 1777. Philosophische Versuche über die menschliche Natur und ihre Entwicklung, 2 vols. Leipzig: M.G. Weidmanns Erben & Reich. Toulmin, Stephen. 1949. “A Defence of Synthetic Necessary Truth.” Mind ns 58 (230): 164–177. Westphal, Kenneth R. 1992. “Dialectic: Hegel.” In The Blackwell Companion to Epistemology, edited by J. Dancy and E. Sosa, 98–99. Oxford: Blackwell. Westphal, Kenneth R. 2018. Grounds of Pragmatic Realism: Hegel’s Internal Critique and Transformation of Kant’s Critical Philosophy. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Westphal, Kenneth R. 2020. “Kant’s Analytic of Principles.” In Kant, edited by M. Timmons and S. Baiasu, Chapter 8. London: Routledge. Wolff, Michael. 1986. “Hegel und Cauchy. Eine Untersuchung zur Philosophie und Geschichte der Mathematik.” In Hegel und die Naturwissenschaften, edited by R.-P. Horstmann and M. J. Petry, 197–263. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Wolff, Michael. 2009a. Abhandlung über die Prinzipien der Logik. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. Wolff, Michael. 2009b. Der Begriff des Widerspruchs. Eine Studie zur Dialektik Kants und Hegels, 2nd rev. ed. Frankfurt am Main: Frankfurt University Press.

Part I

Intellectual Background and Philosophical Project

Chapter 1

Hegel: His Life and His Path in Philosophy Marina F. Bykova

Rightly considered the most systematic of German idealists, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831) elaborated a comprehensive philosophical system which, he believed, could consistently explain how everything in the world, including our thoughts, is interrelated. It is hard to overestimate his ambition and the complexity of his undertaking, which, together with the highly abstract metaphysical background of his philosophy, has led to a number of misinterpretations and misconceptions about both his philosophical project and its results. Hegel’s writings are difficult to read and comprehend, yet his many valuable insights into numerous topics remain philosophically significant today and secure for him a permanent place in philosophy and its history. This chapter sketches the thinker’s life and views him in the context of his historical time and intellectual milieu. It does not attempt to discuss all the nuances of Hegel’s intellectual development. There are many outstanding biographies of Hegel published only in recent years (Pinkard 2000; Althaus 2000; Fulda 2003; Vieweg 2019), and it would be hard to surpass either their details or their breadth. My more modest aim is to explore links between Hegel’s life, philosophical ideas, and specific intellectual context that together can provide the context necessary for a thorough understanding of the thinker and his ideas. This chapter examines the most formative and decisive periods of Hegel’s life, which either significantly impacted his thought or reflected some notable changes in his philosophical views. It begins with a discussion of the early stage of Hegel’s intellectual development, which focuses on his life in Stuttgart (most notably 1777–1788), then turns to Hegel’s time in Tűbingen and his interactions with Hölderlin and Schelling that proved to be instrumental to his philosophical self-awareness (1788–1793). The third section considers the transitional years between his time as a student and the beginning of his academic career, as he first tries his hand at writing philosophical essays (1793–1800), the fourth

M. F. Bykova (*)  North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 M. F. Bykova and K. R. Westphal (eds.), The Palgrave Hegel Handbook, Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26597-7_1

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turns to Hegel’s stay at Jena where he successfully launched his university career (1801–1806), the fifth section draws from Hegel’s years outside the university (1807–1816), the sixth examines a short two-year period at Heidelberg, and the final, seventh, section addresses the Berlin period, perhaps the most productive of Hegel’s philosophical career (1818–1831). I thus aim to consider Hegel in his natural setting, i.e. the historical and intellectual context that shaped him as an individual and influenced the development of his philosophical thought.

1 Early Life and First Encounter with Philosophy The son of Georg Ludwig Hegel and Maria Magdalena Louisa, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born on 27 August, 1770 in Stuttgart, the capital of the Duchy of Württemberg. The youngest of six children, only he, his sister Christiane Luise, and his brother Georg Ludwig survived into adulthood. Throughout his life Hegel was plagued by health difficulties and, in his early years, suffered through several life-threatening illnesses. Hegel’s father, Georg Hegel, had studied law at Tűbingen University and eventually became a secretary to the revenue office at the court of Wűrttemberg. Equally impressive, Hegel’s mother was unusually educated for a woman of her time. The Hegel family was moderately well off in comparison to other households, which allowed them to move close to the “non-noble notables” (Ehrbarkeit) “who staffed the Wűrttemberg assembly of estates and who had a near-monopoly on the better, more prestigious positions in Württemberg” (Pinkard 2000, 5). However, Hegel’s family was not part of this establishment and had to rely on education and the opportunities procured through their hard work and talent instead of familial or social connections. As a child, at the age of three, Hegel began attending German School. In addition, his mother taught him Latin at home, and by the time he was placed in Latin School, he already knew basic Latin. No doubt, this emphasis on education and learning would characterize Hegel’s views on the role education (both as schooling and as enculturation [Bildung]) would play in the modern world. When Hegel was eleven, his mother died from bilious fever (a sort of acute intestinal or malarial fever) that spread through Stuttgart. Hegel himself barely survived and, as a result of the disease, developed a speech impediment characterized by stuttering and periodic gasping, with which he had to cope his entire life. His mother’s death had a lasting, traumatic impact on the young boy, who was now left in the care of his father. In 1784, Hegel was admitted to the Gymnasium Illustre in Stuttgart. The school, like many others during this period, was unorderly and in a state of partial disarray. Nonetheless, it managed to combine Enlightenment thought with the Protestant humanism of the Renaissance, thus giving Hegel a sense of both tradition and progress in his youth. The decision to send the boy to the Gymnasium was likely a compromise between his father, who wanted to provide Hegel with an

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Enlightenment education, and his deceased mother’s desire to see her son studying theology at Tűbingen. As some of the seats at Tűbingen were reserved for students who attended the Gymnasium, Hegel could get an Enlightenment education and still be qualified for a theological career (Pinkard 2000, 8). One of the most significant influences on Hegel’s thought during this period was his friendship with Professor Jacob Friedrich von Abel, a faculty member of the Karlsschule, a unique educational institution founded by Duke Karl Eugen of Württemberg to train officials and high ranking military officers in the new sciences.1 Hegel’s sister wrote that von Abel “fostered” Hegel (or made him his “protégé”), so it should be no surprise that, when Abel voiced his opinion on the debate surrounding Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics through the publication of his 1787 book Versuch über die Natur der speculativen Vernunft zur Prüfung des Kantischen Systems (An Essay on the Nature of Speculative Reason for a Test of the Kantian System), Hegel would take his mentor’s opinion very seriously. Abel’s book sought to defend the traditional rationalist metaphysical stance against Kant’s claims that positive metaphysical knowledge of the world is impossible, and that all one can know is the negative claim that there are metaphysical things. Moreover, in light of the view that God is a metaphysical being, Kant’s argument held that one cannot know anything of God. It was this line of thought that Professor Abel attacked in his book, which claimed that the world simply must have a creator and that this divine creator establishes the relation of our experience to the world (Pinkard 2000, 13). This book was one of Hegel’s first introductions to Kant’s philosophy, and given the influence that his mentor had on him, it is likely that Hegel would have been inclined to have a highly critical view of Kant’s philosophy. Indeed, his anti-Kantianism seems to be confirmed by his dismissive attitude toward Kantian philosophy over the next several years. While Hegel might have held less than enthusiastic views about Kant’s philosophical system, he was greatly swayed by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729– 1781), whose attitude toward philosophy and education of the general public made a substantial impact on Hegel’s intellectual development. In a letter to Hegel, one of his contemporaries, Karl Joseph Hieronymus Windischmann, observes: The study of your system of science has convinced me that someday, when the time for understanding has come, this work will be viewed as the elementary text of human emancipation, as the key to the new Gospel announced by Lessing. (Letters 558)

Lessing, a philosopher, writer, publicist, and art critic, was widely regarded as one of the German-speaking world’s most prominent “men of letters.” In particular, Hegel became fascinated with Lessing’s role as an “educator of the people” (Volkserzieher) and envisioned a similar future for himself. His diary was filled with musings on what being an educator of the people entailed, and what exactly he would teach all of them.2

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2 Time in Tübingen: Acquaintance with Hölderlin and Schelling, and Lived Experience of the French Revolution In 1788, Hegel began his studies at the Tübinger Stift, a Protestant theological Seminary, which he entered with the intent of studying theology and eventually becoming a Lutheran pastor.3 Many commentators and biographers of Hegel underscore the idyllic setting of the Stift on the bank of the Neckar River and the glorious traditions of this oldest of theological institutions, whose roots can be traced to the Middle Ages (see Plant 1999). Yet, at the time of Hegel’s arrival, the Stift was in such a state of decline that it was in danger of closing altogether: the lecturing material was antiquated, the professoriate was comprised of amateurs who were only able to teach in virtue of their family relationships or friendship with the Stift administration, and the Seminary’s antiquated mission of providing corrective attitudes towards the students was oppressive. Thus, it should not come as a surprise that Hegel’s initial reaction was one of overwhelming disappointment and discouragement. Nonetheless, two major events that happened during Hegel’s stay in Tübingen altered the course of his life forever. The first event was not a single moment in time, but rather two separate happenings stretched over several years. Both of them involved developing lasting friendships that had a crucial formative significance. The first occurred during Hegel’s first year at the Stift, when he struck up a friendship with Friedrich Hölderlin (1770–1843), a same-year student who, like Hegel, felt alienated and frustrated with the way the school was being run. Hölderlin, who would grow into a key figure of German Romanticism and one of the most renowned poets of his era, tremendously influenced the direction of Hegel’s intellectual development and became an invaluable asset for Hegel later on in his life. Another of Hegel’s formative experiences was associated with an event that occurred a few years later, during the fall term of 1790. This is when Hegel and Hölderlin first crossed paths and developed a close friendship with a student several years younger than they. That student was Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775–1854), who himself would later become one of the most renowned representatives of the German idealist movement, eventually succeeding Hegel at the University of Berlin after the thinker’s death. The influence Hölderlin and Schelling had on Hegel’s intellectual development was immense, although this outcome could not have been predicted while the three were still in Tübingen.4 They might have shared similar views (they all vowed not to become pastors, for instance), but there were distinct ways in which their beliefs diverged that determined their later philosophical views and career paths. This was especially true with regards to Kantian philosophy. While Hölderlin and Shelling actively participated in a Kant club that students organized at the Seminary, Hegel decided not to join or even take part in discussions held there. At that point in his life, he still did not see himself as becoming a philosopher; rather, he still planned to follow in Lessing’s footsteps and become a religious and moral reformer of the people like the man he admired. Furthermore, his

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suspicion of Kant’s philosophy, which he had likely maintained since his time in Württemberg, surely dampened his desire to study Kant more fully, thus putting him at odds with Hölderin and Schelling on the matter. In January 1795, reflecting on his experience with Kant, Hegel wrote in his letter to Schelling: Some time ago I took up again the study of Kantian philosophy to learn how to apply its important results to many an idea still current among us…With more recent efforts to penetrate to more profound depths I am still just as little familiar as with the efforts of Reinhold. For to me these speculations, rather than being of great applicability to universally usable concepts, seem of more direct significance mainly to theoretical reason alone. Thus I am not more directly cognizant of these efforts with respect to aim, and my intimations regarding them are even more obscure. (Letters 30)

Hegel seemed to be skeptical about the applicability of Kantian philosophy to pressing practical questions of the time, whereas Schelling viewed it as a powerful tool for resolving not only theoretical but also most practical issues central to philosophy. The second major event that occurred during Hegel’s time at Tübingen was the French Revolution, which broke out in 1789. News of the Revolution sent shockwaves throughout the European continent; some welcomed the change (including Hegel, Schelling, and Hölderlin), while others, especially those with vested interests in the tradition of monarchy, were undoubtedly worried about the future of the crown. To protect themselves from the spread of the Revolution, Austria and Prussia pledged to defend their monarchic values, which culminated in the Declaration of Pillnitz in 1791. When an anti-revolutionary coalition was formed (spearheaded by émigrés of the French nobility), France declared war on 20 April, 1792. The struggle for power came to a head on 20 September with a decisive French victory over the coalition during the battle of Valmy (near Paris). The next day, the newly elected National Convention in France abolished the monarchy. Hegel and his friends were overjoyed at these developments. A persistent (but most likely false) rumor was spread that on the fourteenth of July 1793, Hölderlin, Schelling, and Hegel planted a “victory tree” in a field near Tübingen, then danced and sang the Marseillaise, which Schelling had translated into German (see Pinkard 2000, 24). Although Schelling actually translated the Marseillaise, the rest of the story seems to have little historical support. However, it is clear that the three friends undoubtedly shared a strong pro-French sentiment. In the aftermath, Hegel himself opted to join a political club created at Tübingen to discuss the Revolution, as did many of his friends and classmates. In the summer of 1793, during a particularly rough spell of bad health, Hegel decided to take time off from the Seminary and return to Stuttgart to recuperate at home. While there, he received an offer to become a Hofmeister, or house tutor, for a wealthy family in Berne. This was a common route for many educated young men to take during Hegel’s day, and given his desire to escape the oppressive atmosphere of the Seminary and start a life as a “man of letters,” Hegel gladly accepted the offer. After petitioning to take his theological exam early (which he easily passed), Hegel finished his studies ahead of schedule and set out to find his own pathway and calling in the world.

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3 Pre-Jena Period: Despair, Uncertainty and Desire for a New Path In October of 1793, Hegel began working as a house tutor for the two children of the Steigers, a wealthy family in Berne. Much like his original experience in Tübingen, Hegel was overwhelmed by disappointment. Indeed, the position of being a house tutor was in many ways fraught with unfairness and a lack of respect. Although the tutor was usually much more educated than the family he worked for, he was still treated as a domestic servant—esteemed slightly higher than regular servants—but by no means an equal to the family. As such, tutors were alienated both from their employers and from the other servants of the household. This alienation made Hegel feel depressed, but at the same time created opportunities for him to continue pursuing his own goals and visions. At this point, Hegel still wished to be an “educator of the people,” but, shifting away from the desire to be a strictly religious educator, Hegel now intended to be a “popular philosopher”; someone who would spread modern philosophy to enlighten the people and thus bring the spirit of the French Revolution to Germany. Although the intellectual landscape in philosophy was heavily influenced by Kantians and those who either sought to refute or refine Kant’s ideas, Hegel was still not involved in philosophical discourse, nor was he yet interested in working out its intricacies. In a revealing letter to Schelling, Hegel writes about how, in his mind, the particular points being debated around the Kantian philosophical system, while necessitating their understanding by intellectuals, would not be that important in what a popular philosopher (as Hegel already viewed himself) actually presented to the people (see Letters 35/Briefe I, #11). This is not to say that Hegel still remained largely anti-Kantian. To the contrary, he now thought that Kant’s ideas were central to the cultural reformation beginning to take hold in Europe. Yet Hegel thought that these ideas merely had to be applied in the right way, and that this task would be left to the popular philosopher to figure out. This point is further elaborated in the same letter to Schelling, where Hegel writes that from the Kantian philosophy and its highest completion I expect a revolution in Germany. It will proceed from principles that are present and that only need to be elaborated generally and applied to all hitherto existing knowledge. (Letters 35/Briefe I, #11)

While in Berne, Hegel had begun working on several manuscripts that focused on Christianity and its role in the modern world. However, he came to be dissatisfied with the content of his work and decided against publishing these manuscripts. Feeling isolated from the real intellectual milieu, Hegel’s despondency only continued to grow. His disappointment was evident in the letters he wrote to Hölderlin and Schelling around this time. Alerted by this development, Hölderlin, who had grown much closer to Hegel than Schelling ever did, began looking for a way to help his old Tűbingen friend. Eventually, Hölderlin, who lived in Frankfurt, learned that a local man, a wine merchant named Gogel, was looking for a

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Hofmeister for his children. The prospect of living closer to his friend encouraged Hegel to undertake the move. Furthermore, Hölderlin assured Hegel that Gogel’s family would be much more hospitable than the Steigers’ in Berne, and so, after getting permission from the Konsistorium (the church authorities) in Württemberg, Hegel set off to Frankfurt at the end of 1796. Frankfurt, which was centrally located and much larger than Berne, proved to be more suitable for Hegel’s intellectual interests, and he soon found himself surrounded by intellectuals involved in philosophical pursuit. Equally pivotal was Hegel’s reunification with Hölderlin, who had been developing his ideas on the post-Kantian movement for quite some time. Indeed, while Hegel was serving as a house tutor in Berne, Hölderlin was attending Fichte’s lectures at the University of Jena, which at that time became a breeding ground for post-Kantians and Romanticists. While there, he gave much thought to what he felt was wrong with Fichte’s system. Hölderlin’s influence on Hegel during his time in Frankfurt was immense. For one, it was Hölderlin who suggested that Hegel drop his colloquial writing style, which, up to that point, attempted to reframe the ideas of Kantian philosophy in a way that could be made accessible to the public. Instead, Hölderlin insisted that Hegel had to write in a way that would force the reader to learn and appreciate Hegel’s ideas in his own terms. Taking his friend’s advice to heart, Hegel quite suddenly changed his writing style and began presenting his thoughts in a highly dense and technical manner. Second, Hölderlin’s insights into Fichte’s idealism demonstrated to Hegel that he had been trying to apply a system of ideas that were in desperate need of resolution themselves. Upon reflection, Hegel realized that he had come to an impasse. He came to view his early dream of emulating Lessing, spreading popular philosophy, and aiding the spirit of the Revolution, as foolish. Already in his early thirties, Hegel was unpublished, had little money, and still had not accomplished anything important. This was especially visible in comparison to Hölderin, whose poetry was starting to gain significant attention, and Schelling, whose meteoric rise in philosophy was nothing short of breathtaking, Hegel knew that if he was to become a person who would drive the modern world forward, he had to establish himself in the academic world. On 2 November 1800, Hegel wrote to Schelling asking for advice on where to move, declaring (perhaps with false modesty) that he was not ready to live in a place like Jena, but nonetheless affirming his desire that the two would once again be friends. Hegel also added that in “[his] scientific development, which started from more subordinate needs of man, [he] was inevitably driven toward science, and the ideal of youth had to take the form of reflection and thus at once of a system” (Pinkard 2000, 85). The subtext of this confession-like statement is hard to miss. While earlier, Hegel had dismissed Schelling’s intellectual path as esoteric, he now tacitly admitted that Schelling had been correct to pursue systematic philosophy while he, Hegel, had gone down the wrong intellectual path. Schelling responded by inviting Hegel to move to Jena with him, an offer which Hegel accepted at once. He moved to Jena in January 1801, eager to launch his philosophical career in the academic world.

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4 At Jena: Launching His Academic Career At the time of Hegel’s arrival, Jena, which had just recently acted as a center of the post-Kantian and Romantic movements, fell into a state of gradual decline, although the situation was not as dire as what Hegel experienced in Tübingen. Indeed, following Fichte’s dismissal in 1800 (due to the infamous accusation that he was an atheist), much of the intellectual talent originally teaching at Jena began to migrate away from the city and its university. It was against this backdrop that Hegel moved into a garden apartment next to Schelling and, encouraged by his Tübingen friend, began shaping his academic career. In an attempt to secure a position at Jena, he wrote a habilitation thesis on the orbit of the planets, which he defended in 1801. He hoped to be installed as an “extraordinary professor” (a professor without a chair). However, this aspiration would not be realized until 1805, and for a while he had to content himself with a position as an unpaid lecturer (a Privatdozent). In order to make a living as a Privatdozent, he had to survive on the lecture fees he collected from his students, who were often few and far between during his early years of teaching. During Hegel’s first year in Jena, he published a book titled The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s Systems of Philosophy (1801). This work, commonly known as the Differenzschrift (see Diff.), was widely viewed as a ­vigorous defense of Schelling’s philosophy over Fichte’s. In this same year, he and Schelling began editing a journal called the Kritische Journal der Philosophie (or the Critical Journal of Philosophy). The journal, which appeared for two years (1802–1803) and consisted of two volumes and six issues, published essays that had mainly Schellingian themes and content. While the journal published a number of Hegel’s early works, the position he formulated there was still largely similar to the one argued by Schelling. However, minor tensions between Hegel and Schelling had already started to emerge during this time, foreshadowing their ­inevitable split. For one, Schelling was dissatisfied with the way Hegel edited his (Schelling’s) essays for their journal, noticing in Hegel’s revisions a visible departure from his own position. Schelling took the journal to be their joint project that should present philosophical views they both share. Certainly, this placed Hegel in a difficult situation. On the one hand, by adhering to Schelling’s ideas, Hegel did not have the space to develop his own position, despite the fact that so doing would help distinguish himself and his own intellectual prowess, thereby furthering his career. On the other hand, straying too far from Schelling’s ideas would have been viewed as a slight against a friend who had greatly assisted Hegel in starting his academic career and getting him settled in Jena. Adding to this, Schelling became embroiled in a controversy that forced him to leave Jena in 1803. The controversy concerned his private life but it impacted his relations with others, including his friends and colleagues. Around the same time that Hegel was launching his academic career in Jena, Schelling became romantically involved with the wife of August Schlegel,5 Caroline Schlegel.

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The two began an affair that lead to Caroline Schlegel divorcing her husband. Eventually, in 1802, she and Schelling got married. Hegel never developed friendly feelings towards Schelling’s new wife, who returned the attitude in kind. Only after Schelling’s departure from Jena to the University of Würzburg, did Hegel begin to establish himself as a thinker who was more than just Schelling’s disciple. Although he still shared many ideas with Schelling, Hegel’s views began to gradually form into a position that was entirely his own. In his Differenzschrift, Hegel had described what he saw as the fundamental difference between Fichte’s and Schelling’s philosophical positions and their understandings about the direction that post-Kantian philosophy should take. Whereas Fichte’s search for a first principle had led to a self-positing I (or more precisely to the self-identity of consciousness with itself [I = I]), Schelling (and Hegel at the time) had thought that the tension between the subjective and objective points of view, between the theoretical and practical, etc., were grounded in something more fundamental and original that made this distinction possible. Both Schelling and Hegel called this the “Absolute,” which Hegel would later identify with “all that is,” i.e. the ultimate reality and all of the moments of the history of thought (including human culture in all its entirety) taken up together as a whole. This Absolute is a unity of thought and being that underlies our ability to form a differentiated experience of the subjective and the objective; this unity thus lies at the heart of debates between realism and idealism (see Pinkard 2000, 158). Despite many similarities, already in Jena Hegel began to deviate from Schelling’s understanding of the Absolute as an absolute identity always revealed in some form in which the Absolute identifies with itself (or, as Schelling terms it, reaches the Absolute’s self-affirmation).6 In 1802, Hegel started tackling the Absolute (and some related philosophical questions) in a way that sought to synthesize productive ideas from Fichte, Hölderlin, and Schelling, which they developed in response to the shortcomings of Critical philosophy. Yet Hegel’s own approach differed decisively from all three thinkers. Hegel accepted Hölderlin’s insight that Fichte’s first principle was flawed insofar as he started from a purely subjective aspect of experience, and that there was some underlying fundamental unity before the divide of consciousness and its object (subject and object). For Hölderlin that unity was a kind of non-discursive, primordial Being. However, Hegel believed that this approach would be limited because it needed to start with something originally given as pure and true, and thus not prompted to undertake any changes and development. Instead, Hegel insisted that the Absolute should be the demonstration of the systematic unfolding of the history of thought in its totality. These and some other ideas began to take form in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, a book intended to show the necessity of completing a systematic philosophy that could ground and justify the modern realization of freedom. Without such a philosophical underpinning, modernity would be subject to Jacobi’s charge that world historical progress ultimately culminates in nihilism (Jacobi 2004).

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While Hegel was working on his Phenomenology, his life in Jena became increasingly difficult, and his options for finding a way to secure a livelihood were running out. His position as a Privatdozent meant that he could not have a constant income; even if he did have a university salary, a paid professor was still only barely able to make ends meet in Jena. At this point he had virtually no money, and although he had acquired a small inheritance after his father’s death, this sum was quickly depleting. Devastated by his unfortunate financial situation, Hegel wrote constant letters to his friends and colleagues asking for possible job openings at other universities. In the midst of this personal turmoil, one particularly crucial asset of Hegel’s was his friendly relation with the theologian Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer (1766–1848), whom Hegel had originally befriended while the two were studying in Tübingen. Niethammer, who for about ten years held a professorship at Jena, in 1804, like Schelling, had transferred to the University of Würzburg, but, after the city was given over to the Austrians, was dismissed on account of his Protestant beliefs, for which he was subsequently compensated with a job in the Bavarian civil service. Being in a bad financial situation, Hegel had to constantly borrow money from Niethammer. On top of Hegel’s financial woes, he had a liaison with Christina Charlotte Johanna Burkhardt, his landlady, who became pregnant with Hegel’s illegitimate child, Ludwig Fischer. Hegel now urgently needed to find money, and find it quickly. The extent to which Niethammer supported Hegel during this trying period was made especially clear when he published the Phenomenology. As Hegel was constantly having to push back the completion of his work, his publisher in Bamberg, Joseph Anton Goebhardt, became increasingly vexed with Hegel’s inability to give him a definite date for when the manuscript would be delivered. After several pleas from Hegel, Niethammer agreed to serve as his guarantor: he promised the publisher that he himself would buy up all produced copies of the book, should Hegel fail to turn the manuscript in by the deadline (see Pinkard 2000, 227). Immensely thankful to his guarantor, Hegel turned to work fully committed to submit the book on time. Yet, while he was finishing the Phenomenology, the situation in Jena changed for the worse. On 14 October—just four days before the Phenomenology had to be submitted—French troops led by Napoleon appeared outside of Jena to engage the Prussian forces that had amassed there. The Battle of Jena lasted only for a few hours and ended with the decisive defeat of the Prussian army. The city was partially destroyed and many houses were set aflame. Hegel stayed at a friend’s house, but the place where he lived was looted by the French and, as he himself wrote in a letter to Niethammer, his papers came to be “messed up … like lottery tickets” (Briefe I, #76; Letters 114). As a result of the French invasion, the University of Jena closed down, and Hegel was forced to leave the city. He had no money or recognition and expected to win neither upon publication of his Phenomenology, which he publicly announced as the Introduction to the System of Science.7 In dire need of employment, he hoped to receive a call from the University of Heidelberg, where many of his former colleagues and friends from Jena had gone. Instead, Niethammer, who

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was at that time already living in Bamberg, offered him a position as an editor for a Bamberg newspaper, which Hegel thankfully accepted, although not without a measure of disappointment. Hegel strongly felt that his place was at a university, an ambition he refused to abandon. “I must … stipulate that the engagement into which I am entering … not to bind me firmly for any length of time. … I cannot be entirely without hope of being formally called to Heidelberg,” Hegel wrote to Niethammer about Niethammer’s proposal (Briefe I, #89; Letters 127; see also letters to Voss, Letters 104–107). Hegel clearly believed that his job with the newspaper was only temporary, and he elucidated that should a better offer arrive, he would leave at once. In this way, he could work without feeling obligated to stay indefinitely.

5 Between Jena and Heidelberg: Another Period of Despair In 1807, about a month after the birth of Ludwig Fischer, his illegitimate son, Hegel came to Bamberg to assume editorship of a local newspaper, the Bamberger Zeitung. Before moving to Bamberg, he finally finished his long-anticipated book, and the Phenomenology of Spirit appeared shortly after his arrival in the Bavarian city. Publication of the Phenomenology put Hegel’s name on the map of the philosophical world, and he began to be regarded as an independent thinker, well positioned within the post-Kantian movement. Many of his former students and colleagues praised the book for its ability to successfully address shortcomings in previous philosophical theories. Hegel himself was praised for the originality of his position and novelty of his approach. Some commentators started to distinguish openly between Hegel’s own views and those associated with Schelling. Both thinkers were now viewed as equally important contributors to the progress of philosophical thought. A former student of Hegel at Jena, K. F. Bachmann, commenting on the impact that Hegel’s book and ideas had on his contemporaries, noticed that if Schelling was like the Plato of modern philosophy, then Hegel was “Germany’s Aristotle” (Briefe I, notes to #155/Letters 498–499). The independence of Hegel’s thoughts now became widely recognized. Yet this also meant that he was creating a distance between his own ideas and Schelling’s. This could not go unnoticed by Schelling himself, who grew more and more impatient about how Hegel portrayed his (Schelling’s) own philosophy in the Phenomenology. In particular, there was a passage in the Phenomenology that described Schelling’s identity philosophy as the “night in which all cows are black” (PhG GW 9:17.28–29). Schelling was outraged, and Hegel undoubtedly had to soften it for his Tübingen friend. On 1 May, 1807, Hegel wrote to Schelling to explain that his criticism of Schelling’s system was targeted at those who misappropriated Schelling’s ideas and insights. Schelling’s response was somewhat conciliatory, yet his feelings were clearly hurt. He replied that if Hegel had indeed aimed his criticism merely at those who misused his (Schelling’s) ideas, it would

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seem that “in the text itself the distinction is not made” (Briefe I, #107/Letters 80). Furthermore, Schelling was disappointed that Hegel broke away from what he thought was their shared project, namely, the articulation of the intellectual intuition. Commenting on this issue, Schelling wrote that concept and intuition were both aspects of “what [he] and [Hegel] have called the Idea—which by its very nature is concept in one of its aspects and intuition in another” (ibid.). Hegel never replied to this letter, and all written correspondence between the two ceased (Pinkard 2000, 257). Beyond Schelling’s reception of the work, many other interpretations of the Phenomenology flooded the scene—a fact evidenced by the competing claims about the book in the literature. During Hegel’s lifetime, some found the text to be indecipherable, yet others viewed the work as purely Schellingian. More recently, an epistemological reading of the work has developed (currently highly influential), which views Hegel’s project as an inquiry into the character and range of our knowledge, “questioning the notion of knowledge as an instrument by means of which one could take possession of the absolute” (Althaus 2000, 96; see also Westphal 2003). Another important interpretation points to Hegel’s attempt to outline a science of the experience of consciousness, which he describes as a history of the development of consciousness itself (Pinkard 2000, 204). In Bamberg, Hegel’s professional life as an editor was unfolding. However, it proved to be less than satisfactory, and he continued to make clear that his true vocation lay elsewhere. Moreover, he was annoyed by the political censorship of newspaper publications. Much effort had to be spent trying to avoid being entangled in undesired controversies and political intrigues that could cost him his job. In an attempt to escape further complications and to secure a better job, he turned again to Niethammer, who was then in charge of education in Bavaria. Niethammer responded on 26 October 1808, offering Hegel a highly demanding rector position at a Gymnasium in Nuremberg (see Briefe I, #133). Although Hegel gratefully accepted this offer, he noted that he still hoped to find a position in a university. At that point, he was ready to settle on any university and he believed that the most feasible would be perhaps the University of Altdorf which Niethammer had under his patronage. Hegel wrote to Niethammer in this regard: any prospect you would hold out for me there [Universität Altdorf] would by itself be most appreciated, but what completely elevates this prospect above all others is the hope of thus joining you in a common life of teaching and active endeavor. (Briefe I, #135/Letters 178)

He also noted that this new appointment would be “directly linked to his literary activities, [which] at least do not differ in type even if they do differ in shape” (ibid.). By November 1808, Hegel assumed his new post in Nuremberg. Although Niethammer likely assisted Hegel, out of consideration of their friendship, Niethammer, a neo-humanist by his philosophical views, also needed allies who could support him in his desire to reform the Bavarian (and eventually the German) educational system, and Hegel was certainly sympathetic in this regard (Wenz 2008). Both Hegel and Niethammer wanted to cultivate Bildung-ideals in

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their students, and to do this, both were convinced that philosophy would be central to achieving such an end. Indeed, when Hegel accepted the offer, he wrote that he was “ever more convinced that theoretical work accomplishes more in the world than practical work. [And that] once the realm of ideas is revolutionized, actuality will not hold out” (Briefe I, #135/Letters 178).8 In addition to serving as rector of the Gymnasium, Hegel was also appointed professor of the philosophical preparatory sciences. This position entailed teaching philosophy to the students of the Gymnasium and exposing them to speculative thought in order to prepare them for the philosophical courses they would encounter at university. Hegel also became the “head teacher” for philosophy, per Niethammer’s administrative directive that such a position be created. Niethammer believed that Hegel’s teaching efforts could not only improve students’ educational experiences in the Gymnasium but also serve as a sample to follow for other educational institutions. He also hoped Hegel would use his teaching as an opportunity to develop philosophy curriculum for Gymnasium. Unfortunately for Niethammer, Hegel quickly discovered that it would be better not to teach speculative philosophy to students at the Gymnasium, as only a few could grasp what was taught. In a letter to Niethammer, Hegel mentioned that “of the 160 pupils” only three or so were able to understand “such an abstract” subject (see Letters 191). Aside from his career, Hegel’s personal life was also moving forward. On 15 September 1811, Hegel married Marie Helena Susanna von Tucher, who was almost twenty years younger than he. The von Tuchers were well established in Nuremberg, and Hegel played to this situation by writing to Niethammer that his marriage to Marie was contingent on him landing a paid position at a university (which was certainly not true, because despite von Tuchers’ good connections, they did not have any standing within academia). In spite of his unrequited career ambitions, Hegel was nonetheless delighted at being married, and he expressed as much in a letter to Niethammer, stating that he had “reached [his] earthly goal” (Briefe, I, #196/Letters 255). However, it is clear that his sentiments were somewhat hyperbolic, for while Hegel was indeed generally satisfied with his marriage, other, more urgent philosophical issues remained to be worked out. The most important among these was the question about the paradigm of his philosophical system and its actual introduction. As his time in the Gymnasium had shown him, the Phenomenology’s place within Hegel’s overall system had gradually come to be less and less clear for him. He saw the need for rethinking the very idea of developing philosophy as “science,” a project that was central to Kant and his followers and which still remained uncompleted. This became Hegel’s central task in the Science of Logic, a notoriously complex philosophical study, on which he began to work almost immediately after the Phenomenology came out. Due to its complexity, the Logic found little to no audience immediately after its tripartite presentation of Being, Essence, and Concept were published between 1812 and 1816. In the Logic Hegel sought to reinvent the traditional fields of logic and metaphysics by creating a single comprehensive “science of logic” in which “system” and “method” were to be united as one (Althaus 2000, 126).

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6 Heidelberg Period: Return to the University Despite the initial rather cool reception received by the Science of Logic, this work earned Hegel a higher position in academia and rocketed him to the top, both professionally and in prestige. In the summer of 1816, Hegel accepted an offer from the University of Heidelberg and thus finally fulfilled his long-standing hopes of becoming a salaried professor and of being installed at the University of Heidelberg, of which he had dreamed since leaving Jena. Back in 1805, Hegel wrote to Johann Heinrich Voss, then a Professor at Heidelberg, that the spirit of Jena had moved to Heidelberg and taken root there (Briefe I, #55/Letters 105–106). Although this view proved to be only partially true by the time Hegel arrived, he seemed to still feel this way. Hegel’s old habits such as stuttering, gasping for breath and nervously shuffling about returned when he began teaching at Heidelberg, although these impediments were not as pronounced as they were during Hegel’s time in Jena. In 1817, during his second year at Heidelberg, Hegel published the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences.9 Originally meant as a supplement to his lectures, this work contained a condensed version of his tripartite system (including his Logic, now in somehow abbreviated form, thus known as the Lesser Logic). Yet an emphasis was put on the philosophy of nature and the philosophy of spirit (Geist), the two other central parts of his system.10 Hegel’s time in Heidelberg was further punctuated by his involvement in three controversies: the proposed constitutional reforms in German states, the codification of German law, and the new student fraternity movement—the so-called Burschenschaft. The first controversy over constitutionalism was grounded in the post-Napoleonic uncertainty of Germany’s political direction, which was contested by three groups: those who wanted to restore their aristocratic privileges, those who wanted to maintain their recent gains, and a minority group who wanted to unify the Germanic states. A compromise between these various interests came to fruition in June 1815 when the Congress of Vienna passed the Bundesakte (The German Federal Act), which created a loose confederation of German states, headed by the Bundesversammlung. The second controversy, the codification of German law, hinged on whether the traditional patchwork German legal system—which had particularistic and fragmented legal arrangements that varied across hometowns and principalities— ought to be reformed, and about the model such reform should take (here, the “Prussian general code,” enacted by Friedrich Wilhelm II, was the paradigmatic model favored by reform-supporters). Thirdly, the rise of a German national consciousness, rooted in the (false) belief that the Germanic people had retained their original identity and language from the Teutons, had spurred the formation of a national consciousness that, among other things, sought to replace the old student fraternities (the Landsmannschaften) with the more universally-orientated Burschenschaften.

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Hegel entered the debates concerning these issues with his essay “Proceedings of the Estates Assembly in the Kingdom of Württemberg 1815-1816,” which was published in the Heidelberger Jahrbücher in the winter of 1817–1818. In this work, Hegel argued that what was at stake had to do with the substantial differences between the “commitments underlying modern life” and those that determined the foundation of the previous way of life, which he took to be competing, mutually exclusive claims (PEA GW 15). The old order, he maintained, had collapsed under the weight of its own internal contradictions and deficiencies; further, he argued that the new, rationally orientated direction in which the modern world was now heading would be the rallying call of Germany’s future. Hegel’s clearly progressive position had its roots in his revolutionary and reform-oriented views, which he maintained throughout his life. However, many people disagreed with Hegel on the matter, including Niethammer, who argued that Hegel would not have written his essay if he “had been in the position of having to see these ruling rationalities face to face” (Briefe II, #327).

7 Call to Berlin: Realization of Goals and Ambitions After the death of the Grand Duke of Baden, Frederick I, Hegel began worrying that Heidelberg would fall under Bavarian rule, which, after his rather frustrating experiences in Bamberg, was something he undoubtedly wished to avoid. As if to answer Hegel’s worries, on 26 December 1817, Karl Sigmund Franz Freiherr vom Stein zum Altenstein, the newly appointed minister of culture, wrote to Hegel to invite him to come to the University of Berlin and assume Fichte’s former chair. Hegel was overjoyed at the offer, which he happily accepted, and he moved to Berlin with his wife Marie and their three children on 5 October 1818. Yet his time in Berlin, despite being professionally satisfactory and productive was, nonetheless, much like his stay in Heidelberg, marked with controversy and scandal. On 23 March 1819, the ultra-reactionary playwright August von Kotzebue was murdered by a twenty-three-year-old student, Karl Sand, who was greatly influenced by a particularly radical leader of the Burschenschaften, Karl Follen. Then, a few weeks later, Karl von Ibell, an official in the Land of Nassau, was murdered by another member of the Burschenschaften. These deaths greatly alarmed the reactionary forces in Prussia, who then began a search for potential “demagogues” connected with the Burschenschaften movement and their supporters, which unfortunately implicated Hegel. One of the first people to be arrested in the “demagogue” affair was Gustav Asverus, a former student of Hegel’s from his time at Heidelberg. Although Asverus had no direct connection to Karl Sand, he wrote a provocative letter praising Sand and Hegel, which was then intercepted by the police and used as evidence in his arrest. To make matters worse, Hegel’s brother-in-law, Gottlieb von Tucher, was also involved with the Burschenschaften movement, and was good

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friends with Asverus. Although Hegel was not under surveillance, he clearly had reason to worry.11 This situation came to a head on 13 November 1819, when Hegel exchanged bitter remarks with the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher over the recent firing of Wilhelm Martin Leberecht de Wette from the University of Berlin, who had written a letter of condolence to the mother of Karl Sand. Hegel was of the opinion that de Wette’s firing was acceptable, while Schleiermacher sharply disagreed. The two ended up hurling insults at each other, which caused a permanent rift between them. Unfortunately for Hegel, Schleiermacher was a member of the Academy of Sciences, which, coupled with his disdain for speculative philosophy, virtually ensured that Hegel would never join the Academy, and indeed, he never did. Remarkably, even during this trying period, Hegel remained committed to his revolutionary and reformist roots. On a trip to Dresden in 1820, Hegel publicly made a toast to the storming of the Bastille on 14 July 1789, much to the astonishment of those around him, given his precarious situation. During this time, Hegel was also working on the Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1821), which was largely a work in political philosophy that presented a richer and more detailed account of objective spirit than that developed in the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences. The central topic of the work is the question of freedom and what is needed for its actualization. The answer that Hegel provided links freedom to right (or justice), conceptualizing the latter as the necessary condition for the realization of the former. In this respect, Hegel disagrees with Kant’s notion that freedom entails a sort of non-natural causality on the part of the individual, or a “transcendental causality” as such. Rather, Hegel holds that having a will is to act in a minded way, which is simply to act according to norms. Moreover, the will is a form of thought. This form of thought as freedom is actualized when an individual acts in a way that is consistent with what they would rationally endorse for themselves, not from what they would be coerced into endorsing. Yet as the Phenomenology had shown, the individual here cannot be regarded merely in isolation, as the individual becomes who he is only within the social context of human life, that is, in reciprocal acknowledgement and interaction with other individual agents. This social context is objective spirit as such, the externalized form spirit develops in interacting with itself in the social dimension. However, the reception of the Philosophy of Right was extremely damaging to Hegel’s reputation. Many readers felt that Hegel had sided with the Prussian ­reactionary movement. The truth of the matter was very different, yet public opinion was largely indifferent to Hegel’s attempts to clarify himself and a misunderstood statement that precipitated the critical and controversial reception of the book. Namely, in the book’s Preface, Hegel stated that “what is rational is actual, and what is actual is rational” (PR 20).12 As this central idea was set in bold on the page, it made it impossible to miss. Although almost a decade earlier in his Logic, Hegel already explained that “what is rational is what is efficacious – its actuality announces itself through that which it brings forth” (WL SL 546), the line in the

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Philosophy of Right was interpreted as saying that the Prussian regime at that time (the actual) was also rational, and that therefore, any attempt at reform was irrational. Despite his multiple efforts to correct this interpretation (Enz. §6R), he was unable to fully recover from the negative public reception of his book, which is perhaps among the most interesting and influential works in political philosophy. During his years in Berlin Hegel taught a variety of courses based on his own philosophical system. In the various Lectures he developed different parts and sections of his enormously complex system.13 His Lectures still remain a trove of knowledge which—each in its own way—further elucidates and clarifies Hegel’s philosophical project and specific ideas he developed. In the years following the publication of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel’s health began to noticeably deteriorate. Hegel started to complain of headaches and suffer chest pains as his overall condition steadily worsened. Those around him also began to notice the pallor on his face, which likely indicated a form of anemia. Still, he was able to continue working despite his health. In addition to publishing two new, heavily revised editions of the Encyclopaedia (1827 and 1830), he also planned a new (expanded) edition of the Phenomenology. However, this plan never came to realization. When in the fall of 1831 the cholera epidemic struck Berlin, exposure to the disease proved lethal to Hegel. Infected with cholera, he died on 14 November 1831 in Berlin. He was 61 years old. He was buried near the University of Berlin, where he rests next to Fichte. *** Hegel’s legacy is vast and, like his philosophical system, very complex and difficult to navigate. His life too was filled with events and personal encounters that stimulated his thoughts and—to some significant degree—influenced their direction. External events, such as French revolutionary upheaval, political alterations in modern Prussia, the social and political controversies of the time, philosophical disputes, intellectual and personal disagreements—all those events undoubtedly shaped his personality and influenced his constantly evolving ideas. Thus, to fully understand Hegel’s philosophy and appreciate all its turns and peculiarities, it is crucial to view it in the context of the thinker’s life, placing him in dialogue with his contemporaries and his surroundings. The present study is a modest attempt to contribute to this task.

Notes 1. Originally conceived and run as a military academy, the Karlschule eventually grew into a broad university-like educational institution combining a medical school, business school, arts college, and music school (Beiser 2005, 13–14). Hegel’s older brother Georg attended this school. Similarly, Schiller was a student there from 1773 to 1780. 2. For more details about Hegel’s entries in his diary see Pinkard (2000, 15).

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3. Another possible career path for the graduates of this famous Swabian educational institution led to influential positions in the state administration; many of Hegel’s Stift classmates later grew into high-ranking state government officials. 4. For a discussion of Hegel’s friendship with Hölderlin and Schelling in Tübingen see Bykova (1990, 140ff.). Cf. Jamme and Schneider (1990), Harris (1972), Kondylis (1979). 5. A German poet, translator and critic, August Wilhelm Schlegel (1767–1845) was an influential representative of the Jena intellectual milieu. Along with his brother Friedrich Schlegel, he is known as a leading figure of Jena Early Romanticism. 6. The most programmatic text in this regard is Schelling’s Presentation of My System of Philosophy (1801), where he articulates his understanding of the Absolute as an absolute identity and explains the crucial significance of form as a manifestation of the Absolute. For Schelling, the Absolute always exists and is expressed only in form, and only through a mutual correlation of different forms the Absolute becomes revealed in its fullness. 7. That was an official subtitle of the Phenomenology of Spirit which Hegel supplied at the early stage of his work on the book. 8. Hegel’s emphasis on theoretical work was first mentioned and discussed in detail in Kaufmann (1978). 9. In 1817, Hegel published the first (concise) edition of the work, now known as the Heidelberg Encyclopaedia. Later, while already in Berlin, he brought to completion—much more expanded—the second and third editions of the book that appeared in 1827 and 1830 respectively. Whereas the Heidelberg Encyclopaedia was compiled as a single volume, the two later editions grew into a three-volume book, where most of the sections (§§) came to be supplemented by Hegel’s own additional remarks that sought to explain main ideas in greater detail. 10. Interestingly, the part on philosophy of nature garnered some controversy, partly from Hegel’s defense of Goethe’s theory of colors, which was to be contrasted by Newton’s account of color; consequently, this work was largely dismissed by the natural scientists at Heidelberg and elsewhere. How appropriate this reaction was, the reader can judge for him/ herself. Important insights into Hegel’s philosophy of nature are discussed in Part IV of this Handbook. 11. For more on this development see Pinkard (2000, 436ff.). 12. For excellent discussions of a true meaning of this statement, which is usually called the Dopplesatz, see Hardimon (1994) and Stern (2006). 13. For a complete list of Lecture series that Hegel taught during his tenure at Berlin, consult the Chronology, “Hegel’s Philosophical System in His Writings and Lecture Series,” provided in this volume.

Bibliography Althaus, Horst. 2000. Hegel: An Intellectual Biography. Translated by Michael Tarsh. Cambridge: Polity Press. Beiser, Frederick. 2005. Schiller as a Philosopher: A Re-examination. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Bykova, Marina F. 1990. “Was Hegel ein schrecklicher Mensch? Überlegungen über die Persönlichkeit des jungen Hegel.” Wiener Jahrbuch für Philosophie 22: 135–153. Fulda, Friedrich. 2003. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Műnchen: Verlag C.H. Beck. Hardimon, Michael O. 1994. Hegel’s Social Philosophy: The Project of Reconciliation. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harris, Henry S. 1972. Hegel’s Development: Toward the Sunlight 1770–1801. Oxford: Clarendon Press.

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Harris, Henry S. 1983. Hegel’s Development II: Night Thoughts (Jena 1801–1806). Oxford: Oxford University Press. Jacobi, Friedrich H. 2004. “Brief an Fichte.” In Werke, edited by W. Jaeschke and I.-M. Piske, 187–258. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag. Jamme, Christoph, and Helmut Schneider, eds. 1990. Der Weg zum System: Materialien zum jungen Hegel. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Kaufmann, Walter. 1978. Hegel: A Reinterpretation. 1st ed., 1965. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Kondylis, Panajotis. 1979. Die Entstehung der Dialektik. Eine Analyse der geistigen Entwicklung von Hölderlin, Schelling und Hegel bis 1802. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Magee, Glen Alexander. 2010. The Hegel Dictionary. London: Continuum. Pinkard, Terry. 2000. Hegel: A Biography. New York: Cambridge University Press. Plant, Raymond. 1999. Hegel: On Philosophy and Religion. 2nd ed. New York: Routledge. Rosenkranz, Karl. 1844. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegels Leben: Supplement zu Hegel’s Werken. Berlin: Duncker und Humblot. Schneider, Helmut, and Norbert Waszek, eds. 1997. Hegel in der Schweiz (1793–1796). Frankfurt am Main: Lang. Stern, Robert. 2006. “Hegel’s Doppelsatz: A Neutral Reading.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 44 (2002): 235–266. Vieweg, Klaus. 2019. Hegel-Biographie. Műnchen: Verlag C.H. Beck. Wenz, Gűnter. 2008. Hegels Freund und Schillers Beistand: Friedrich Immanuel Niethammer (1766–1848). Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht. Westphal, Kenneth R. 2003. Hegel’s Epistemology: A Philosophical Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit. Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company.

Chapter 2

Situating Hegel: From Transcendental Philosophy to a Phenomenology of Spirit Michael Baur

This chapter aims to situate Hegel’s philosophical outlook by illuminating it against the backdrop of Immanuel Kant’s transcendental philosophy, some early skeptical critiques of that philosophy, Fichte’s philosophy of freedom, and finally the Spinozistic thinking of Schelling and of Hegel himself. Hegel’s philosophical project does not represent a return to pre-critical (or “dogmatic”) metaphysics, even though Hegel does endorse some central ideas drawn from pre-Kantian metaphysics. Similarly, Hegel’s project is not an entirely negative or skeptical one, even though Hegel’s thought does incorporate some key insights drawn from postKantian skepticism. In a sense, Hegel’s philosophy can be seen as an attempt to pay off some of the promissory notes that Kant had issued in connection with his transcendental, “scientific” philosophy. The Hegelian pay-off, in rough outline, takes place through a strategy that seeks to combine the pre-Kantian thought of Spinoza with the post-Kantian thought of Fichte. In the spirit of post-Kantian skepticism, Fichte had argued that the mind (or knowing) is radically free and uncaused insofar as it is always possible for the mind (or knowing) to question, doubt, and negate (and therefore to abstract or separate itself from) what is merely given to it. In the spirit of pre-Kantian rationalism, Spinoza had argued that the mind and the world are not two independent or separable entities, and so it is a mistake to think that the mind is capable of abstracting from or separating itself from the world as given. Hegel seeks to unite these two seemingly incompatible perspectives by arguing in favor of what he calls “determinate negation.” Determinate negation is an ongoing, negating activity that is radically free and unbounded (quite in line with what Fichte had argued). But precisely because the activity of determinate negation is unbounded and infinite, it is also not an activity that takes place by means of abstraction or separation from the world as given (quite in line with what Spinoza had argued).

M. Baur (*)  Fordham University, New York, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 M. F. Bykova and K. R. Westphal (eds.), The Palgrave Hegel Handbook, Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26597-7_2

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1 Kant’s Transcendental Philosophy Early in his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant explains: “I entitle transcendental all knowledge which is occupied not so much with objects as with our way of knowing objects insofar as this way of knowing is to be possible a priori” (CPR, A11–12). Transcendental philosophy thus involves a certain kind of “return to the subject that knows,” or a certain kind of “call to self-knowledge” (CPR, Axi); but this is not an unqualified return to the subject. Transcendental philosophy is concerned with our way of knowing objects “insofar as this way of knowing is to be possible a priori.” The term a priori refers to that which is independent of experience, and independent not merely of this or that instance of experience, but “absolutely independent of all experience” as such (CPR, B2–3). When Kant speaks of “independence” here, he is referring to the origin, or source, of that which is said to be a priori: that which is “independent” of experience is that which does not have its origin, or source, in experience. For Kant, experience is “cognition through connected perceptions” (CPR, B161); and perception is “sensation of which one is conscious” (CPR, A225/B272). Hence, to have experience is to have cognition of “objects” insofar as such cognition includes not only consciousness of what is presented in sensation (i.e., perception) but also an apprehension of the connectedness of the perceptions that are thus presented. The project of transcendental philosophy implies not only that there may be something about our way of knowing which is independent of experience in the sense described. It also implies that what is a priori about our knowing is itself a condition of our having any experience in the first place: it is “indispensable for the possibility of experience” (CPR, B5). Furthermore, that which is a priori about our way of knowing is not just an external condition of our possible experience of objects. What is a priori in our knowing also plays a role in enabling the objects of experience to be objects of experience in the first place. Without such an enabling condition, our experience could not be an experience of objects (interconnected perceptions) at all, but only a “blind play of representations, less even than a dream” (CPR, B112). Without the connectedness of perceptions made possible by the a priori in our knowing, nothing could even make an appearance as an “object”; for without such connectedness, “all relation of cognition to objects” would disappear, and what might otherwise count as an “object” would “be as good as nothing for us” (CPR, A111). Thus, the a priori conditions of possible experience are at the same time the conditions of the possibility of the experienced objects themselves (CPR, A111). Because that which is a priori in our knowing plays a role in enabling the objects of experience to be objects of experience in the first place, it is possible to speak not only about “our way of knowing” as a priori, but also about the knowledge itself as a priori. Kant thus speaks frequently about “a priori knowledge,” and offers a second, slightly different account of what is meant by the term, “transcendental”: the term “transcendental” has to do with “the a priori possibility of

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knowledge, or its a priori use” (CPR, A56/B80). This reveals a further aspect of transcendental philosophy as such. Transcendental philosophy involves a “return to the subject,” but transcendental philosophy cannot be solely concerned with the knowing subject; that which is a priori also belongs, in some sense, to the known object; and so the knowing subject, even in its pursuit of self-knowledge, “has to deal not with itself alone but also with objects” (CPR, Bix). Thus, for Kant, “what alone can be entitled transcendental is the knowledge that these [a priori] representations are not of empirical origin, and the possibility that they can yet relate a priori to objects of experience” (CPR, A56/B81). Transcendental philosophy is concerned with both our way of knowing and the object-character of the known objects insofar as these cannot be explained naturalistically (or on the basis of what happens within experience). It would be misleading, however, to think that transcendental philosophy aims at providing a kind of alternative “explanation” for the occurrences of experience or for what happens within experience. For one commonly thinks of explanation as a matter of tracing one state of affairs back to another, or of giving an account of one object (or set of objects) in terms of another (or others). As noted earlier, transcendental philosophy is concerned not with objects as such, but rather with our way of knowing objects and with the object-character of objects, insofar as these are a priori. Even if transcendental philosophy does offer what might be called an “explanation” of some kind, such an explanation would have to be understood in terms quite different from our more common notions of explanation. The kind of explanation characteristic of transcendental philosophy is not based on tracing one set of objects or states of affairs back to another. After all, transcendental philosophy is concerned with the very conditions of our being able to speak of “objects” or “states of affairs” in the first place. This feature of transcendental philosophy is also the reason why, for Kant, it is possible for transcendental philosophy to claim the status of a “science.” According to Kant, no explanatory system which takes its bearings from objects of experience can ever be assured of its unity and completeness as a system, since the domain of possible objects of experience is inexhaustible (CPR, B23; A12–13; B26). Because of this inexhaustibility, there remains the ineluctable possibility that the discovery of new objects, or features of objects, could force a revision of such explanations. By contrast, argues Kant, transcendental philosophy is concerned with our way of knowing and with the object-character of the known objects, only insofar as these are a priori. Since all that is a priori has its own systematic unity (CPR, Axiii; A67; B92; A474; B502; A845; B873), and since it is just such a unity which raises a mere aggregate of knowledge to the rank of science (CPR, A832/B860), it follows for Kant that transcendental philosophy can, at least in principle, claim the status of “science.” Here, “science” is not to be understood in terms of the more restricted, contemporary notion of “science,” which is commonly taken to denote “empirical science.” Transcendental philosophy, for Kant, does not focus on what can be discovered within experience about objects; it focusses instead on what is a priori about our way of knowing objects.

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Along these lines, Kant argues that transcendental philosophy is immune, and can recognize itself as immune, to the kinds of revision which might be demanded by the discovery of new objects or new features of objects within experience. Transcendental philosophy involves no extension of our knowledge of things (CPR, A11–12/B25–26; A135/B174); precisely because of this it can be called “science.” While the discovery of new objects can never be complete, one can rest assured that, in the field of the a priori, “nothing can escape us” (CPR, Axx). In fact, transcendental philosophy constitutes the very idea of science as the system of all that is a priori in our knowing and in the objects known (CPR, A13/B27). For Kant, a metaphysical system which is scientifically grounded by means of transcendental philosophy will likewise be immune to any further revision or elaboration, save in the manner by which it might be expressed or taught (CPR, Axx/ Bxxiv; Bxxxviii). Metaphysics, once it has been placed upon the sure path of science, will no longer have to retrace its steps, or attempt any new lines of approach (CPR, vii); for the sure path of science, “once it has been trodden, can never be overgrown, and permits of no wandering” (CPR, A850/B878). Kant suggests that transcendental philosophy will be able to place metaphysics on the “sure path of science” insofar as it imitates what has already been done in mathematics and natural science, where the scientific character of each was achieved by means of “a revolution brought about all at once” (CPR, Bxv–xvi). If transcendental philosophy succeeds in its scientific aspirations and thus in laying the groundwork for metaphysics as a science, then it becomes possible to adjudicate disputes in metaphysics going back to ancient philosophy by relying on the single, systematic vantage point that transcendental philosophy provides. For example, Zeno’s claim that God is neither finite nor infinite can be fully justified if understood properly in light of transcendental thought (CPR, A502–07/B530–35). Similarly, “if we set aside the exaggerations in Plato’s methods of expression,” we can appreciate “that which accords with the nature of things” in his doctrine of the ideas (CPR, A313–19/B370–75; see also A471/B499). Furthermore, the defects which characterize Aristotle’s table of categories can be remedied if the content and divisions of the table are “developed systematically from a common principle”; and this cannot be done inductively, as Aristotle tried, but only transcendentally (CPR, A81/B107). Finally, the Scholastic teaching concerning the convertibility of unity, truth, and goodness can be shown to have “its ground in some rule of the understanding which, as often happens, has only been wrongly interpreted” (CPR, B113–114).

2 Early Skeptical Critiques of Kant’s Transcendental Philosophy In 1792, the skeptical philosopher Gottlob Ernst Schulze published a relatively short work with a rather long title: Aenesidemus, Or Concerning the Foundations of the Philosophy of the Elements Issued by Prof. Reinhold in Jena Together with

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a Defense of Skepticism Against the Pretentions of the Critique of Pure Reason. This work was presented as a dialogue between Hermias (a representative of Kant’s transcendental philosophy) and Aenesidemus (a Humean critic of Kantian philosophy). Schulze’s argumentation was ostensibly aimed at the post-Kantian theorizing of Karl Leonard Reinhold, whose “philosophy of the elements” or “elementary philosophy” sought to show that Kant’s transcendental philosophy could be understood and formulated in a way that would make it defensible against the skeptical criticisms that at the time were being directed against the transcendental philosophy. In taking aim at Reinhold, Schulze succeeded in raising serious doubts not only about Reinhold’s reformulation of Kantian philosophy, but also about the viability of Kant’s transcendental philosophy in general. Using the character of Aenesidemus as his mouthpiece, Schulze argued that Kant’s transcendental philosophy did not and could not deliver on the promises that it had made. A fundamental problem was that transcendental philosophy sought to account for how we know certain features of objects which make an appearance within experience by appealing to what is a priori in our way of knowing, even though these a priori conditions of our own knowing do not themselves make an appearance as objects within experience. As part of his transcendental argumentation, Kant had directly acknowledged that we as knowers never know ourselves as we really are in ourselves, but only as we appear as objects within experience. Thus Kant writes that we “know even ourselves only through inner sense, thus as appearance” (CPR, A278/B334). Kant had sought to illuminate the object-character of those objects which make an appearance within our experience by giving an account of the transcendental conditions of such experience, even though the “transcendental” source of such “objectivity” remained outside the scope of our possible experience and thus unknowable as it is in itself. Focusing on Kant’s attempt at providing a transcendental or a priori account of human knowing, Schulze observed: For since we know nothing of what the mind is in itself, as the Critique of Pure Reason also concedes, by choosing one derivation over the other [by choosing a transcendental derivation over an empirical one], we do nothing more than substitute one form of non-knowledge for another. After all, if the origin of the necessary and synthetic judgements is to be more comprehensible when traced to the mind rather than to the objects outside of us, we must be able to know at least one property in the mind which objects lack that would indeed make the origin of those judgements in the mind more comprehensible. But the Critique of Pure Reason has failed altogether to identify any such property in the mind. (Schulze 2000, 118)

Kant’s transcendental philosophy, Schulze argues, amounts to an intolerable, unphilosophical attempt at accounting for what is more known to us (objects within experience) by appealing to what is less known (an unknown and indeed unknowable mind which allegedly underlies and makes possible experience, but never in itself makes an appearance as any object within experience). For Schulze, to explain what makes an appearance as objects for us within experience by appealing to the “mind” (which allegedly makes possible but in itself never appears within experience) is as philosophically respectable as explaining experience by discussing a transcendental author of nature:

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A young Johann Gottlieb Fichte was deeply moved and disturbed by the anti-Kantian criticisms which Schulze had formulated in his Aenesidemus dialogue, for Fichte realized that Schulze’s critique undermined not only Reinhold’s attempt at reformulating the Kantian system but also the entire Kantian system itself. As Fichte wrote in a 1793 letter to his friend J.F. Flatt: Aenesidemus, which I consider to be one of the most remarkable products of our decade, has convinced me of something which I admittedly already suspected: that even after the labors of Kant and Reinhold, philosophy is still not a science. Aenesidemus has shaken my system to its very foundations. (EPW, 366)

Furthermore, Fichte saw that the problem which Schulze had identified in Kant’s transcendental philosophy was related to other difficulties in the Kantian system. These other difficulties revolved around the fact that Kant’s transcendental philosophy was committed to the view that an adequate account of human knowing must take care to maintain a sharp distinction between human knowing and divine knowing. A key difficulty had to do with the question of how one can account for the finite character of human knowing without making knowledge-claims which, according to the Kantian system itself, were not sustainable as valid knowledge-claims. According to Kant, human knowing (unlike divine knowing) is essentially finite. Insofar as it is finite, human knowing is dependent upon that which is given to it by means of sensory (non-intellectual) intuition. Human knowing is dependent on sensible intuition, and such intuition “takes place only insofar as the object is given to us” (CPR, A19/B33). If our knowing were not dependent on such givenness by means of sensible intuition, then we would be capable of a kind of “originating” or “original” intuition (intuitus originarius). But if we human knowers were capable of “originating” or “original” intuition, then our activity in knowing would be the very origin or source of that which is known by us. In that case, our knowing could not be sharply distinguished from divine knowing (which, as “original intuition,” is the full and complete origin or cause of that which it knows). The difficulty was therefore the following: on the one hand, Kant argued that there is something a priori about our way of knowing; that which is a priori in our knowing is not caused by and does not arise out of any encounter with objects in experience but instead makes possible such experience in the first place. On the other hand, Kant argued that our way of knowing—even though it is not derived from or dependent on what is encountered within experience— must nevertheless be dependent on that which is given to it by means of sensible intuition. If human knowing is to be understood as finite and thus as dependent upon that which is given to it by means of sensible intuition, then how can one give a coherent and credible account of this givenness and this dependence? It would

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seem that, for Kant, this dependence could not be understood as a kind of causal dependence, since—according to Kant’s own theory—our knowledge of causal relations is valid knowledge only insofar as it pertains to objects which can appear as objects within possible experience. But if that which is “given” by means of sensible intuition and which renders human knowing finite and dependent is not to be understood in terms of any kind of causal dependence, then how is it to be understood at all? Kant ended up having to argue that human knowing, since it is finite and dependent on some kind of sensible “givenness,” is not fully self-determining but rather limited and determined by something apart from or independent of itself. Yet this givenness, which somehow limits and finitizes human knowing, cannot be known to stand in any causal relation (or relation of causal dependence) with the knower, since objectively valid knowledge pertains only to objects of possible experience. For Kant, then, we must think—but never quite know on theoretical, objective grounds—that human knowing is genuinely limited and finite; and we must think of such finitude by thinking of such knowing as being related to and finitized by an unknown and unknowable “transcendental object” or “thing-in-itself.” The Kantian system required us to think that human knowing is rendered finite and dependent because of its dependence on a “transcendental object” or “thingin-itself” that stands outside of such knowing. Nevertheless, according to Kant’s own argument, it is wrong to think of such a thing-in-itself as causally related to knowing, since the thing-in-itself stands outside of all knowing and all possible experience, and causality is valid only for relations within possible experience. And so Jacobi complained that Kant’s system of transcendental philosophy made it necessary to think of human knowing as being dependent upon an independent “transcendental object” or “thing-in-itself” that somehow finitizes human knowing. At the same time Kant’s system apparently made it impossible to think coherently about this independent something or thing-in-itself, since the system also holds that one cannot licitly think of the thing-in-itself as playing any kind of role within a causal relation or a relation of causal dependence. Thus, Jacobi observed: “without that presupposition [of a transcendental object or thing-in-itself], I could not enter into the [Kantian] system, but with that presupposition, I could not stay within it” (Jacobi 1994, 336). Fichte accepted the criticism that the finite or dependent character of human knowing could not coherently be explained on the basis of an allegedly independent “something” or thing-in-itself. Furthermore, Fichte saw that problems surrounding the Kantian notion of a thing-in-itself were related to problems surrounding the idea which Schulze had identified: the idea that the mind exists as a kind of “substrate” which is unknown and unknowable “in itself” but which nevertheless underlies and makes possible the object-character of the objects which are known within experience. These two ideas, then, are really two instantiations of the same idea: the idea of the mind as a non-experienced “substrate” which underlies and makes possible our finite experience of objects, even though in itself it never shows up as an object within experience; and the idea of a “transcendental object” or “thing-in-itself” which limits our knowing and ensures that our knowing

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is always a finite knowing of objects within experience, even though in itself it never shows up as an object within experience. Writing to his friend Friedrich Immanuel in 1793, Fichte put the two problems together. For Fichte, attempting to explain the character and scope of human knowing by appealing to an unknowable, underlying “substrate” which allegedly makes such knowing possible is not essentially different from attempting to explain human knowing by appealing to an unknowable, independent “thing-in-itself.” For as far as our own knowing is concerned, the idea of an unknowable, underlying “substrate” is nothing other than the idea of an unknowable, underlying “thing-in-itself”: Kant demonstrates that the causal principle is applicable merely to appearances, and nevertheless he assumes that there is a substrate underlying all appearances – an assumption undoubtedly based on the law of causality (at least this is the way Kant’s followers argue). Whoever shows us how Kant arrived at this substrate without extending the causal law beyond its limits will have understood Kant. (EPW, 369)

The system of philosophy that Fichte sought to develop during the 1790s and early 1800s—Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre—is nothing other than Fichte’s attempt at understanding Kant better than others had previously understood Kant; and indeed it is an attempt at understanding Kant better than Kant even understood himself. Interestingly, in his own Critique of Pure Reason, Kant had invited readers to try understanding him better than he understood himself, even if this invitation was not issued intentionally, or with full and transparent self-knowledge. Kant wrote: when we compare the thoughts that an author expresses about a subject, in ordinary speech as well as in writings, it is not at all unusual to find that we understand him even better than he understood himself, since he may not have determined his concept sufficiently and hence sometimes spoke, or even thought, contrary to his own intentions. (CPR, A314/B371)

In his own attempt to understand Kant better than Kant understood himself, Fichte went so far as to argue that a philosophical interpreter is not only permitted but is indeed required to go beyond “the letter” in order to apprehend “the spirit” of an earlier philosopher’s work. It is necessary to go beyond “the letter,” Fichte argued, because genuinely philosophical thinking must be pursued freely and actively. Adherence to the mere “letter” of an earlier philosopher’s work renders an interpreter both passive and unfree, and thus ultimately unphilosophical.1

3 Fichte’s Philosophy of Freedom Fichte’s attempt to reformulate and complete Kant’s transcendental philosophy can be viewed as an extended reflection on what it means for the finite human knower to apprehend itself as genuinely free. For Fichte, Schulze’s and Jacobi’s skepticism regarding the Kantian system can provide a good starting point for understanding the nature and extent of the human knower’s freedom. As Schulze

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and Jacobi had argued, there is something problematic in Kant’s suggestion that an account of human knowing can rely on an appeal to some unknowable, underlying “substrate” or some unknowable, independent “thing-in-itself” that allegedly makes human knowing possible. Other post-Kantian thinkers had regarded this unknowability (whether articulated in terms of the underlying “substrate” or an independent “thing-in-itself”) as a serious defect, which made the Kantian system ultimately untenable. By contrast, Fichte tried to show that this “unknowability” was a hidden strength, and that a careful, sustained unfolding of the implications of this “unknowability” would make it possible to develop a systematic philosophy. A key element in Fichte’s theorizing is the recognition that the “unknowability” of the underlying “substrate” or the independent “thing-in-itself” is not an altogether unknown or unacknowledged unknowability. Rather, it is a kind of unknowability that we knowers are able to recognize for what it is: what is unknowable—what cannot be known “in itself”—is any given content or determinacy or entity (any underlying “substrate” or independent “thing in itself”) that allegedly is what it is (and is known to be just what it is) apart from the knower’s own activity in knowing it. For Fichte, to recognize the inescapable unknowability of that which allegedly is what it is apart from our knowing, is to recognize that no given content or determinacy or entity outside of our knowing is able to cause or determine our knowing to be what it is. To recognize this, in turn, is to recognize that our knowing is in a crucial sense free (uncaused, or undetermined, by anything outside of it). Another way of saying this is that, regardless of what sort of content or material seems to be externally “given” and seems to cause or determine our knowing, it is always possible for us knowers to doubt whether such an apparently external givenness really is—as it is “in itself”—playing the externally determining or causal role that it might, at first, appear to be playing. For Fichte, then, our knowing of the “unknowability” of what allegedly is “in itself” (apart from our own activity as knowers) is itself an indicator of our radical freedom as knowers. In being aware of our own capacity to question, to doubt, or to negate the allegedly independent or “in itself” character of anything that seems to be externally “given” to us as knowers, we are also aware (if only implicitly) of our own radical freedom. And so an awareness of one’s own freedom is connected to a kind of radicalized skepticism about what can be known (a radicalized skepticism about the very knowability of anything that allegedly is what it is, “in itself,” apart from our activity in knowing it). Fichte’s emphasis is not on the skepticism as such, but rather on the kind of self-awareness that is operative or implicit in such skepticism. One might say that the aim of Fichte’s system of philosophy—his Wissenschaftslehre—is to begin with such skepticism about theoretical knowing (to begin with the inescapable unknowability of anything that allegedly is what is “in itself,” apart from its relatedness to our knowing), and to develop an entire system of freedom by unpacking what is implicit in such skepticism. A crucial step in Fichte’s development of a system of freedom is his argument to the effect that the unknowability of any independently given “in itself” cannot be understood as any kind of unknowability that is somehow inscribed into

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the nature of things as they are simply given. Rather, it is an unknowability that is manifest, or that prevails, or that counts as an unknowability, only because of the knower’s own activity—only because of what the knower actively does—as a knower. In his popular work, The Vocation of Man (published in 1800), Fichte sought to explain how the unknowability of things as they are “in themselves” is not really a function of any things “in themselves,” but rather a function—a product—of our own doing. First of all, argues Fichte, the knower is led to the idea of a thing that exists outside of knowing (a thing that simply is, “in itself,” apart from the knower’s activity of knowing), only because the knower is not satisfied with—the knower is able to question, doubt, or negate—the alleged self-sufficiency or independence of any entity that appears as an entity within the knower’s own consciousness or experience: I find something to be determinate in such and such a way. I cannot be satisfied with knowing that it is so, and I assume that it has become so, and that not through itself but through an outside force. This outside force which made it contains the cause, and the expression through which it made it so is the cause of this determination of the thing. That my sensation has a cause means that it is produced in me by an outside force. (VM 42; GA I/6, 230)

However, after having posited the existence of an “outside force” in order to explain the appearance of an object within the knower’s own consciousness, the knower also expresses dissatisfaction over the idea of an allegedly external force outside of consciousness itself. For the allegedly external force is not really an independent force that is altogether outside of consciousness, but is only a product of the knower’s own skepticism and dissatisfaction regarding what is present to it within consciousness. The knower thus extends the skepticism and dissatisfaction by questioning, doubting, and negating even the independent, “in itself” character of the external force that allegedly exists outside of consciousness. In other words: the demand that there be something “outside” of consciousness in order to explain what happens “within” consciousness—along with the positing of a connection between what is “inside” and what is “outside” of consciousness—is just a disguised expression of consciousness’s own ongoing dissatisfactions and its ongoing attempts to remedy those dissatisfactions. Of a connection outside of consciousness, however, I cannot speak. I have no way of conceiving such a connection. For, just in that I speak of it I know of it and, since this consciousness can only be of a thinking, I think this connection. And it is quite the same connection which occurs in my ordinary natural consciousness, and no other. I have not gone beyond this consciousness by a hair’s breadth, just as little as I can jump over myself. All attempts to think of such a connection in itself, of a thing in itself which is connected with the ego in itself, only ignore our own thinking. (VM 58–59; GA I/6, 246)

For Fichte, then, no appeal to something that simply is “in itself” apart from the knower’s own activity (whether this “in itself” is construed as an “underlying” substrate or as an “external” thing) can do any meaningful work towards explaining the knower’s own knowing activity. Even “the consciousness of a thing outside of us is absolutely nothing more than the product of our own presentative

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capacity” (VM 59; GA I/6, 246). In the final analysis, our activity as knowers can be adequately explained only by reference to what is internal to that activity itself. That is, it can be explained only by reference to the knower’s own activity of being skeptical and dissatisfied with the mere givenness of what appears within experience, and thus being motivated to come up with the ideas of determining causes and external things in themselves. Two important implications follow from Fichte’s account. First, the knower’s awareness of its own freedom as a knower (or what amounts to the same thing, the knower’s awareness that no given content can simply cause or determine its own knowing) cannot be a representational kind of awareness. More pointedly: the knower’s awareness of its own freedom as a knower can never be the awareness of any determinate content or entity that appears within experience (including even a content or entity that is imagined or thought to be some hidden “substrate” that somehow underlies the knower’s own activity as a knower). The knower’s own activity as free never directly makes an appearance—it always remains “invisible”—and never shows up as any kind of entity or presence within experience. After all, the knower’s awareness of its own freedom consists precisely in the awareness that every given content can be questioned, doubted, and negated, and therefore that no given content can cause or determine the knower’s own knowing. The knower’s awareness of its own freedom is thus a non-representational, non-representable kind of activity and nothing more. It is not an awareness of any determinate thing that shows up within experience, but consists only in the activity of knowing—or perhaps better, the activity of actualizing—the questionability, the doubtability, the negatability, or the non-self-sufficiency of any determinate thing that does show up within experience. Fichte thus writes that the knower’s awareness of its own freedom—an awareness that constitutes the knower’s very being as a knower—does not refer to any given content or fact [Tatsache] whatsoever, but is simply an activity [Tathandlung], namely the activity of being aware, in a non-representational way, of being essentially free and uncaused in one’s knowing. For Fichte, the self that engages in knowing: “is an act, and absolutely nothing more; we should not even call it an active something” (SK 21; GA I/4, 200). Fichte’s use of the term, Tathandlung (often translated as “fact-act”) indicates something about the kind of counter-intuitive argument he is trying to make. For Fichte, the self that engages in knowing is not nothing; it is a kind of “fact” or “deed” (Tat). However, it is a “fact” or “deed” that consists in nothing that can be “found” as merely present or representable; rather, it consists in being the pure act (Handlung) of knowing (in a non-representational way) that it is simply the uncaused, free activity that it is. The second implication that follows from Fichte’s claim is that it is altogether impossible for the knower to “step outside” or “go beyond” its own consciousness in seeking to give an account of that consciousness. That is, it is never possible for the knower to find any “outer limit” or “outer boundary” to its own activity as a knower. This is because any allegedly outer limit or outer boundary that might be found by the knower is—precisely because it is found and thus allegedly known to the knower—always within the knower’s own knowing

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or consciousness. Thus the knower’s activity as a knower has a certain kind of unbounded, unlimited, or infinite character to it. The knower can never discover that its own activity as a knower is limited or bounded from the outside by anything external to it. Precisely because the knower’s activity in knowing is free—it cannot be understood as being caused or determined by any underlying substrate or independent thing that lies outside of the knower’s own activity of knowing— the knower cannot account for its own activity by reference to anything that allegedly bounds or limits or finitizes this activity from the outside. Fichte wants to hold (just as Kant did) that the knower’s activity in knowing is somehow finite. At the same time, he also argues that it is never possible for the knower to account for such finitude by claiming to have knowledge of any externally-given constraint or limit or boundary (an externally-given thing in itself) which somehow impinges upon it and renders it finite. Thus, Fichte does not deny that the knower’s activity in knowing is somehow finite; what he does deny is that the knower can come to know the finite character of its own knowing by knowing the existence of some independent thing (a thing-in-itself) that the knower somehow knows to exist apart from its own activity as a knower. For Fichte, then, there is something infinite, unbounded, and unlimited about the knower’s activity as a knower: it is not limited or constrained or bounded on the outside by anything which is known to exist outside of itself, but is somehow limited or constrained or bounded only by means of its very own activity. The two implications of Fichte’s account are intimately connected with one another. If one were to hold (wrongly) that the knower’s awareness of its own freedom were a representational kind of awareness, then one would be h­ olding—in effect—that the knower’s free activity could make its appearance within experience as a limited, bounded thing (that is, an extensive magnitude) whose spatial-temporal limits and boundaries were determined by other, similarly limited and bounded things (extensive magnitudes) immediately surrounding it and abutting it in space and time. Yet, as we have seen, for Fichte, the knower’s awareness of its own freedom is not a representational kind of awareness, and so the knower’s activity is not any kind of representable thing (it is not any kind of extensive magnitude) that shows up as an item within experience. It is for this reason, furthermore, that the knower’s activity is also a kind of unbounded, infinite activity. Rather than being any kind of extensive magnitude (rather than being any kind of bounded, representable thing among other things), the knower’s activity is more like an unbounded whole (a kind of infinite magnitude) within which all bounded, representable things make their appearance but which does not, itself, make any appearance. Along these lines, Fichte sometimes refers to the activity of the knower as the activity of an “absolute I” (see, for example, SK, 97, 109). This is the activity of rational, knowing consciousness within which every representable thing shows up, even though the wholeness which is consciousness itself does not—and cannot—show up as any kind of thing at all.

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4 Schelling’s Turn to Spinoza Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling was an early Fichtean follower and enthusiast, but as he grappled with the problems and prospects of Fichte’s philosophy in the 1790s, he began to distance himself from the Fichtean system. Schelling grew increasingly uneasy about what he regarded as unresolved, interconnected problems in Fichte’s system. Two of these problems are especially relevant here. First, Fichte had argued that there was something absolute, unbounded, or infinite about the knower’s activity in knowing. However, he denied that this absoluteness or infinitude could itself ever become known to the knower as a matter of theoretical reason. For Fichte, what is absolute or infinite about the knower’s activity can never become an item of theoretical knowledge but must forever remain an article of faith. To be sure, such faith for Fichte was a matter of moral or practical faith, i.e. faith in the meaningfulness of one’s ongoing, infinite striving towards transforming the world as given and making it conformable to moral purposes. Yet, the absolute or the infinite in one’s activity remained for Fichte always a matter of faith and never one of knowledge. Secondly and relatedly, the way in which Fichte presented and argued for his system implied that there was something individualistic, subjective, and perhaps even arbitrary and voluntaristic about the way in which others were expected to appreciate and enter into the system. Fichte had argued, for example, that his own critical philosophy (his “idealism” or his system of freedom) was entirely incompatible with and thus dogmatically opposed to all systems of realism (or what he called “dogmatism”). For this reason, Fichte argued, it was impossible for him to provide any kind of theoretical or argumentative “bridge” that could lead realist (dogmatic) thinkers into accepting his system. In what has become one of his most frequently-quoted statements, Fichte reinforced the impression that entry into his system could be achieved only through an apparently arbitrary, unreasoned, and voluntaristic “all-at-once” leap into it: “What sort of philosophy one chooses depends, therefore, on what sort of man one is…” (SK, 16; GA, I/4, 195). Fichte even suggested that he would have regarded his own efforts as a failure if certain kinds of individuals (dogmatic or realist philosophers who have “lost themselves” through “protracted spiritual slavery”) were capable of appreciating his system: “I would be sorry if they understood me” (SK, 5; GA, I/4, 185). Starting in late 1794 or early 1795, Schelling began to develop the idea that the completion of systematic philosophy, and thus the overcoming of the remaining shortcomings in Fichte’s system, might best be accomplished by means of a passage through Spinoza’s seemingly dogmatic (pre-Kantian and unscientific) metaphysics. Writing to Hegel in February of 1795, Schelling excitedly explained, “I have become a Spinozist! Don’t be astonished. You will soon hear how” (Letters 32–33; Briefe I, 22). There can be little doubt that Schelling’s interest in Spinoza was heavily influenced by Friedrich Hölderlin, Hegel’s and Schelling’s mutual friend and former roommate at the Tübinger Stift (the Tübingen Seminary). In a letter that Hölderlin wrote to Hegel roughly one week before Schelling

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announced his own conversion to Spinozism, Hölderlin suggested to Hegel how it might be possible to think about Fichte’s philosophy of freedom by connecting it with Spinoza’s seemingly dogmatic metaphysics. According to Hölderlin, “… [Fichte’s] Absolute Self, which equals Spinoza’s Substance, contains all reality; it is everything, and outside of it, is nothing” (Letters 33; Briefe I, 19–20). In a document that was probably authored a year later (this document is now known as the “Earliest System Programme of German Idealism”), the possibility of connecting Fichteanism with Spinozism is spelled out further. The text of this document is written out in Hegel’s hand, even though it is not entirely clear whether Hegel or someone else was its original author.2 What is clear, however, is that the ideas expressed in the document were ideas that Schelling, Hölderin, and Hegel were together discussing and grappling with as they sought to make sense of Fichte’s philosophy in light of the metaphysics of Spinoza. The document explains that the knower’s unbounded activity as a knower is an activity that not only actualizes the knower’s own non-representational awareness of itself (its “being for self”) as a knower, but also actualizes the being of an entire world for the knower. The knower’s actualization of itself as a kind of unbounded whole is also an actualization of the unbounded whole that is the world. For this reason, it is possible to speak about the actualization of unbounded knower (mind) and unbounded known (world) as a kind of dual creation out of nothing—indeed, this is the only kind of “creation out of nothing” that the critical, post-Kantian philosopher can regard as worthy of intellectual assent. Through this activity of “creation out of nothing,” both unbounded knower (mind) and unbounded known (world) come to be “all at once,” so to speak: The first Idea is, of course, the presentation of my self as an absolutely free entity. Along with the free, self-conscious essence there stands forth – out of nothing – an entire world – the one true and thinkable creation out of nothing.3

The Spinozistic and thus anti-Cartesian lesson of the “Earliest System Programme” is clear enough: we should not think about mind and world in the way that Descartes suggested we should think about them. We should not think about mind and world as two different entities or substances (or kinds of substances) that somehow succeed or fail at entering into relation with one another. It is altogether wrong to think of mind and world as two different substances or entities at all. One might say that mind and world—understood properly—are something like infinite magnitudes that are fully co-extensive, fully inter-penetrating, fully inter-permeating, and fully overlapping with one another. What is in the world as such does not exceed and does not fall outside of what is in the mind as such; and what is in the mind as such does not exceed and does not fall outside of what is in the world as such. As Spinoza famously declared in his Ethics (Book II, Proposition 7): “The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things” (Spinoza 1985, 451). Finally, since mind and world are not two different entities or substances but rather two different ways of being of the one and the same infinite, unbounded, original activity (an activity outside of which there is nothing), it makes no sense to think that there is any kind of “third

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thing” (e.g., a transcendent God), which stands outside of this activity and somehow explains or guarantees the connectedness of mind and world. According to the Spinozistic view, mind and world are fully co-extensive with and fully overlapping with one another, and thus not related to and bounded by one another. For if they were related to and bounded by one another, they would not be infinite. This leads to the question: how does mind (or knowing) come to know itself as the free, unbounded, infinite activity that it is, and thus come to know its own co-extensiveness with a world that is seemingly given to it from the outside, even though this world is not at all given from the outside but is—like mind itself—equally infinite and unbounded from the outside? It should be clear by now that the mind (or knowing) cannot come to know this about itself by finding or discovering something that is present to itself as knower. For anything that is present to the mind is something that is related to the mind in the way that one thing is related to another thing. But if one thing is related to another thing, then both of the things thus related must be finite; neither thing can be co-extensive with everything that is (neither thing can be infinite), since each thing is related to (and thus bounded by) something that is other than it. Stated differently: if what is present to the mind is something other than the mind, then what is present to the mind is rendered finite; it is finitized insofar as it is related to something (mind) that is other than it. Reciprocally, something that is found or discovered by mind also renders the mind itself finite, since the mind itself is related to (and thus bounded by and finitized by) something other than it which it (as mind) has found or discovered. It appears, then, that mind (or knowing) cannot come to know itself as the free, unbounded activity that it is (an activity that is co-extensive with an equally unbounded world) by any kind of finding or discovery. Instead, it appears that mind (or knowing) can come to know itself only by virtue of what it does, or only by virtue of its own activity as infinite. This, however, also seems impossible. For how can mind know itself as the infinite, unbounded activity that it is, except by somehow becoming an activity that is present to itself (or that makes an appearance to itself) as something to be known? The problem is that anything made present to mind as something to be known (even if what is made present is an activity) cannot be mind as it is in itself. For what is made present to mind is something that is related to mind, and thus is something that is finitized—but in that case, it is not the infinite, unbounded activity of mind as it is in itself. In summary: it appears that mind can come to know itself only by somehow becoming present to itself, or by becoming objective, or by making an appearance to itself. If, however, it becomes present to itself, or becomes objective, or makes an appearance to itself, then it is thereby finitized and thus is not known as it really is in itself. Reflection on these difficulties led Schelling to conclude, by the end of the 1790s, that the infinite, unbounded activity that is the activity of mind (or knowing) could never become known to the mind (or knowing) as a matter of theoretical or speculative reason.4 Thus, in his System of Transcendental Idealism (published in 1800), Schelling argued that it is not philosophy but only art that can provide access to what theoretical reason vainly seeks to apprehend: “art is at

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once the only true and eternal organ of philosophy, which ever and again continues to speak to us of what philosophy cannot depict in external form…” (Heath 231; SW I/3, 627). In his later philosophy, Schelling continued to grapple with the meta-philosophical issues that he first sought to articulate in 1800. However, he never departed from his quasi-Romantic conviction that reason (or mind) can never provide a satisfactory theoretical account of the co-extensiveness of mind and world (or thought and being). According to what Schelling would later call his “positive philosophy,” the co-extensiveness of mind and world (or thought and being) cannot be comprehended or explained by mind (thought) itself, but must always be presupposed (in which case mind and world—thought and being—are not fully co-extensive with one another, after all).

5 On the Way to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel had been an early follower and ally of Schelling’s philosophy, but he was not willing to follow Schelling into holding that mind (or knowing) cannot come to know itself philosophically, or by means of theoretical reason, as the free, unbounded, infinite activity that it is (an activity that is co-extensive with an equally infinite and unbounded world). Hegel surely agreed that mind cannot come to know itself philosophically as any kind of object or entity or substance that appears to it, or is present to it, or is related to it. But for Hegel, it does not follow from this that mind is altogether unable to know itself philosophically as it really is in itself, that is, as it is in its unboundedness, its infinity, and its coextensiveness with an equally unbounded, infinite world. For Hegel, mind can come to know itself philosophically, as it is in itself, insofar as it can come to know itself as an unbounded activity that is reflected out of, or mirrored out of, an equally unbounded, infinite world. Yet how does mind come to know itself as thus reflected out of the world? It does so, as Fichte already suggested, only by means of its own activity: by means of its activity of being free always to question, to doubt, to negate that which is merely given to it; its activity of being always dissatisfied with the given as given; its activity of always driving itself beyond the merely given so as to posit (within itself and never beyond itself as mind) a cause whose positing is meant to account for the givenness of the given; its activity of knowing (in a non-representational way) that no given content as merely given is ever determinative of its own knowing. Hegel accepted these fundamental insights from Fichte’s philosophy of freedom; but Hegel developed them in a direction that Fichte himself did not anticipate. Hegel argued that this activity of being free to question, to negate, and to doubt, is never an activity that makes an appearance (or that can be known) allat-once as the kind of activity that it is. For Hegel (and contrary to the implications contained in the philosophy of Fichte and Descartes), the mind’s questioning, doubting, and negating activity can never be understood as a wholesale, global,

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all-at-once kind of activity. As Spinoza had already argued (against Descartes), the mind’s questioning, doubting, and negating activity never shows up and thus never knows itself as a global, wholesale, comprehensive doubting of everything (of all givenness) all at once. For Spinoza, mind is able to doubt something only because the idea being doubted is connected to something else that is not doubted: if the Mind perceived nothing else except the winged horse, it would regard it as present to itself, and would not have any cause of doubting its existence, or any faculty of dissenting, unless either the imagination of the winged horse were joined to an idea which excluded the existence of the same horse, or the Mind perceived that its idea of the winged horse was inadequate. (Spinoza 1985, 489)

Accordingly, the mind’s (the knower’s) activity of doubting never shows up as an all-at-once, global, wholesale, world-negating activity, but rather shows up only as a kind of movement, or a kind of passing over from one thing (one idea) which is doubted to some other thing (some other, connected idea) which is not (or not yet) doubted. In a similar vein, Hegel argues (against Fichte) that entry into a true system of freedom cannot be an entry that is actualized through the all-at-once “leap” of an individual thinker who—in making such a “leap”—sets herself in opposition to less capable (or morally obtuse) dogmatic thinkers. Another way of saying this is that for Hegel (unlike for Fichte), mind knows itself as the activity of being reflected out of the world—and thus knows itself philosophically as the activity that it is in itself—insofar as it knows its activity as the activity of ongoing determinate (and not merely abstract) negation. The activity of determinate negation is a doubting, negating activity that does not actualize itself by separating itself, or standing apart from, that which is to be negated. It does not actualize itself by operating as if there are given, fixed, discernible boundaries that can be erected and known as existing between itself (as negating activity) and what is given (what it is to be negated). Rather, determinate negation is a negating activity that negates only by seeping into and permeating and becoming immersed in the given. As we have already seen, the turn to Spinoza in post-Kantian thought is motivated by the idea that mind and world are infinities that are fully co-extensive, fully interpenetrating, fully inter-permeating, and fully overlapping with one another. The infinite and unbounded activity of mind, insofar as it is an activity of determinate and not abstract negation, is an activity which negates by seeping into, interpenetrating, inter-permeating, and mixing itself fully (and this means—as we shall see—mixing itself invisibly) into what appears as given. For Hegel, only determinate negation (and not abstract, external, boundary-erecting negation) can allow both mind and world to be the fully co-extensive, fully interpenetrating, fully inter-permeating, and fully overlapping infinities that they are. In determinate negation, mind genuinely actualizes the kind of unbounded negating activity that it is as mind. It is crucial that determinate negation is not any kind of activity whereby mind and world are somehow set alongside one another or bounded by one another or related to one another. Determinate negation is very different from abstract negation. With abstract negation, mind

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sees itself or finds itself as somehow standing apart from the world and negating the givenness of the world by means of a global, all-at-once, abstractive, discrete act of its own. By contrast, determinate negation is the activity of negating the givenness of the world by means of an activity that fully interpenetrates and inter-permeates the world: it is an activity that is immersed in the world and that negates the givenness of the world by dissolving this givenness “from within,” so to speak. The activity of determinate negation is an ongoing, continuous (i.e., “synechistic” in C.S. Peirce’s sense), laborious, world-permeating activity that does not apprehend the world from an external or abstractive point of view, but is in fact continuous with the world’s own (immanent) activities and negations. It follows from this account that mind as the ongoing activity of determinate negation does not and cannot immediately or directly make an appearance to itself (it cannot be known immediately or directly to itself) as any kind of entity or object or presence which shows up in the world. Rather, the activity of determinate negation shows up only as a kind of perpetually operative negativity or non-presence in the midst of what is present. It reveals itself only as the ongoing coming-to-be of absences or privations in the midst of what is present. It manifests itself only as the ongoing vanishings of presences which had been present to mind but have now been passed over (negated and doubted) as they make way for other presences (which are, for the moment at least, not negated or doubted). Some insight from the history of philosophy might be helpful in this regard. In Book IV, Chapter 12 of his Enchiridion, Augustine famously argued that what we call “privation” is nothing that is present or that has being in its own right. Instead, our talk of “privation” refers only to what is a kind of non-presence (or gap or void or hole or fissure or break) that resides within being or in the midst of what is present. It is significant that Spinoza himself held that error or ignorance is nothing in itself but only a kind of privation or not-knowing in the midst of knowing. In a similar vein, Hegel holds that the activity of determinate negation (which is the ongoing, infinite, unbounded, negating, interpenetrating, inter-permeating, dissolving activity of mind) does not itself show up or appear or become known as any kind of being or object or presence within the world. Rather, the activity of determinate negation makes its showing within the world only indirectly, insofar as it shows up negatively as the coming-to-be of privations or gaps or non-presences in the world of what is given. It makes its showing only negatively as the showing up of instances of absence or not-knowing which reside in the midst of what is present or known. As Fichte had already suggested (though not fully comprehended), the doubtability, questionability, and negatability of what is given within the world of appearances need not lead us into positing some kind of thing-in-itself or underlying substrate beyond (or beneath) the appearing world. Instead, this doubtability (which appears only as a kind of privation or “known not-knowing” in the midst of what is known) is only the reflecting-back of the knower’s (or mind’s) own activity, which is the negating activity of being dissatisfied, skeptical, doubtful, and unwilling to accept the given as given. Privations, negations, absences,

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gaps, fissures, and opacities, which show up within the world of being or presence, are able to show up as such (that is, show up precisely as nothing present at all) only because of the knower’s (or mind’s) dissatisfaction or unwillingness to accept being or presence as merely given. They show up as privations, only because of the knower’s (or mind’s) non-representational awareness that (1) in the midst of knowing what is merely given or present, it also knows that no given content or presence can cause or determine its own knowing; and (2) it is always free to negate what is merely present or given (and thus free to go “beyond” the merely present or given, even while never going “beyond” or outside of its own activity or its own consciousness of the world as a whole). Furthermore, as Fichte had suggested, the privations or absences, which show up within the world of appearance, are instances of a kind of not-knowing that resides in the midst of what is known, given, or present. But these instances of not-knowing are not altogether empty, blind, abstract, or wholesale instances of not-knowing; they are always instances of a known not-knowing. Accordingly, these privations or absences can show up in the world as the “little nothings” (the little non-presences or privations) that they are, only because they are instances of the knower’s own (indirect, non-immediate, “reflected back”) self-knowing; they are reflections of the mind’s (the knower’s) own activity of being aware (non-representationally) that no given content can cause or determine its own knowing; they are reflections of the knower’s perpetual dissatisfaction and skepticism about the allegedly independent or self-sufficient character of any determinate thing that is merely “present” or “given.” According to Hegel, Fichte had failed to recognize the possibility of an activity such as determinate negation. Accordingly, Fichte thought that entry into his own system of freedom could be accomplished by the knower only through a kind of individualistic, voluntaristic, all-at-once, wholesale, abstract negation of (or self-separation from) the world of appearance or being or givenness. By contrast, Hegel suggested that there was a way of entering into a system of freedom (which at the same time would be a post-Kantian, post-Spinozistic system of metaphysics) through the mind’s (or knower’s) activity of determinate negation. This is an activity which negates the mere givenness or being or presence of the world, not through separation and boundary-erecting, but only through the activity of immersion, inter-permeation, and seepage into the world as given. For Hegel, because the activity of determinate negation (the ongoing, negating activity of mind) does not and cannot itself show up or appear as any kind of being or object or presence in the world, it is an activity that mind, at first, does not and cannot know as its own. At first, mind knows the privations, negations, gaps, and absences that reside within the appearing world only in an immediate and direct way. As a result, it knows them at first only as privations, negations, gaps, and absences that appear to belong to the world simply on its own, as if the world could be the world itself apart from mind. Accordingly, mind at first apprehends the privations, negations, gaps, and absences that appear in the world as if these were only features of the interactions (the comings-to-be and the passings-away,

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the appearings and the vanishings, the births and deaths) of things within a world alone. This world apparently exists independently of the mind and needs no mind in order to be itself as world. For Hegel, even though mind (or knowing) does not know itself directly by means of what it sees within the world, it can come to know itself (or what amounts to the same thing: it can come to know its own activity) indirectly, by means of how it sees itself “reflected” or “mirrored” out of what it sees in the world as given. The activity of determinate negation might be likened to the activity of an invisible sculptor. Because the sculptor is invisible, the sculptor is unable to see herself; and so the sculptor’s own activity as a sculptor does not and cannot appear to the sculptor as anything that is immediately visible or present to be seen. However, the sculptor’s activity, not immediately visible to the sculptor herself, can be known to the sculptor insofar as this activity is reflected back to the sculptor out of what the sculptor does (that is, out of what the sculptor sees as the result of her doing). This activity can be reflected back to the sculptor by means of the differences that the sculptor’s own activity makes to what is seen; it can be reflected back by means of the privations, negations, fissures, and gaps that the sculptor herself brings about in the given medium (e.g. in the clay) by means of her own, invisible activity. The sculptor’s activity is reflected back to the sculptor, not as any kind of presence that is seen as one presence among others; rather, this activity is reflected back—and thus knowable—to the sculptor only through the non-presences (privations, gaps, and fissures) that the sculptor herself is responsible for introducing into the given. The invisible sculptor does not and cannot immediately see or know her own activity, but can come to know that activity insofar as she knows the coming-to-be of privations, non-presences, gaps, and fissures in the midst of what is visible or present to her. For Hegel, the mind (or knowing) is like the invisible sculptor in this respect. It cannot directly or immediately come to know itself as the kind of (invisible, non-object-like) activity that it really is. It can come to know itself only indirectly, as a kind of determinately negating activity which must be reflected out of what directly appears, where this appearing must seem as if it is the appearing of something other than the mind’s (the knower’s) very own activity. It is for this reason, Hegel argues, that the coming-to-be of self-knowing (in the Phenomenology) can be actualized only indirectly, i.e., only by means of a methodological distinction: the distinction between “observing” and “observed” consciousness. According to the argument of the Phenomenology, “we philosophical observers” look on in order to see how “ordinary” (“observed”) consciousness encounters various objects as given to it and how this other (“ordinary, observed”) kind of consciousness attempts (though always inadequately) to give an account of itself as the kind of knowing activity that it is. The argument of the Phenomenology is completed when “we philosophical observers” (we readers of the Phenomenology) come to recognize that the “ordinary, observed” consciousness which we have been observing all along is really nothing other than our own activity engaged in the activity of coming to know itself.

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Ultimately, for Hegel, mind knows itself as the infinite, unbounded activity that it is, (1) when mind knows that it cannot be itself as mind, if its activity as mind is not reflected out of a seemingly given otherness (world); and (2) when mind knows that the world—in turn—cannot be itself as world, if the world is not also the otherness (or “mirror”) which reflects mind back to itself and thereby enables mind to be itself (as mind) in the first place.5 According to Hegel, the Phenomenology of Spirit provides the “ladder” by means of which the unscientific knower is able to arrive at the standpoint of “scientific” philosophy. This is philosophy which recognizes itself as having come to recognize that mind and world are not two independent or separate entities but in fact are infinite, unbounded activities which fully interpenetrate and inter-permeate one another. In the Phenomenology, the activity by means of which “observing” consciousness comes to know that its own object (“observed” consciousness) is not really an object that is external to it, is identical to the activity by means of which “observing” consciousness comes to know itself as the fully infinite, unbounded activity that it is. For an activity that is not bounded by any object external to it, is an infinite, unbounded activity.

Notes 1. For more on this, see Fichte’s set of lectures, “Concerning the Difference between the Spirit and the Letter within Philosophy” (EPW, 185–215; GA, II, 3: 315–342). 2. Some scholars have argued that “The Earliest System Programme” was originally written by Schelling (or by Schelling and Hölderlin) and that the fragment which we now have is the result of Hegel’s having copied what he had read from a now-lost original text. However, Otto Pöggeler and H. S. Harris have both argued that this fragment was not only written out in Hegel’s own hand, but also originally authored by Hegel himself. See Harris (1972, 249– 257); and Pöggeler (1969, 17–32). 3. This translation of the text is taken from H. S. Harris (1972, 510). 4. Andrew Bowie has helpfully explained Schelling’s problem in the following way: “For Schelling, as for Jacobi and Hölderlin, it is clear that the Absolute cannot appear as itself, precisely because it cannot become an object…. The issue is simply the problem of reflexivity, or self-referentiality, which is the key problem of Romantic philosophy…. Any attempt to encompass a totality must adopt a perspective outside the totality, and thus include the totality in itself only as a relative totality, or face the problem that totalities cannot describe themselves as totalities, in that the description must then include a description of the description, and so on ad infinitum” (Bowie 1993, 49–50). Accordingly: “Philosophy therefore cannot positively represent the Absolute because reflexive thinking operates from the position where absolute identity has always been lost in the emergence of consciousness” (ibid., 53). 5. Thus there is an important way in which Hegel diverges from Augustine. For Augustine, the relation between being (positing, presence) and privation (negation, absence) is an asymmetrical one: there cannot be privation without being, but there can be being without privation. Hegel denies this asymmetry: for Hegel, privation cannot be privation without its being a privation within being; but conversely for Hegel (and not for Augustine), being cannot be being (it cannot be itself and actualize itself as being) if it does not show up (if it does not actualize itself) as having determinacy (negation, privation, being-for-other) within it.

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Bibliography Augustine. 1961. The Enchiridion: On Faith, Hope, and Love. Translated by J. F. Shaw. Chicago: Regnery Gateway. Bowie, Andrew. 1993. Schelling and Modern European Philosophy: An Introduction. London and New York: Routledge. Harris, Henry S. 1972. Hegel’s Development, vol. 1: Toward the Sunlight (1770–1801). Oxford: The Clarendon Press. Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich. 1994. The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill. Translated and Edited by George di Giovanni. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Pöggeler, Otto. 1969. “Hegel, der Verfasser des ältesten Systemprogramms des deutschen Idealismus.” Hegel-Studien 4: 17–32. Schulze, Gottlob Ernst. 2000. “Aenesidemus, Or Concerning the Foundations of the Philosophy of the Elements Issued by Prof. Reinhold in Jena Together with a Defense of Skepticism Against the Pretentions of the Critique of Pure Reason.” In Between Kant and Hegel: Texts in the Development of Post-Kantian Idealism, translated and edited by George di Giovanni and H. S. Harris, 104–135. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett Publishing Company. Spinoza, Baruch. 1985. The Collected Works Spinoza, vol. 1. Edited and Translated by Edwin Curley. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Chapter 3

Kant, Hegel and the Historicity of Pure Reason Kenneth R. Westphal

1 Introduction Having examined thoroughly the modest successes, serious shortcomings and endless controversies of previous philosophical aims, methods and results, Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason inaugurated a “changed manner of thinking” (CPR Bxi), innovating so profoundly that it baffled its reading public, even its first supporters.1 Indeed, Kant’s Critical alternative to both empiricism and rationalism remains foreign to most philosophers today, though not for lack of excellent critical literature (Guyer 1987; Melnick 1989; Rosenberg 2005; Bird 2006; O’Shea 2017; cf. Westphal 2017). The confusions about Kant’s Critical philosophy reigning in Hegel’s youth have been canvassed very well by di Giovanni (2000). Here one brief example may illustrate. Both Fichte (GA 1.2:368.25–369.2, 1.3:189.14–191.20) and Schelling (HKA 1.2:137.25–27) vaunted Maimon’s criticisms of Reinhold’s (1790) Kant-inspired theory of representation in his “philosophy of the elements” (Elementarphilosophie), though neither they nor others noticed that Maimon’s (1790) empiricist objections to Kant’s Critical philosophy neglected entirely Kant’s core analysis of the transcendental unity of apperception and its necessary a priori conditions.2 The main hindrance lay in persisting rationalist or empiricist predilections, both of which stress issues about the definition or the acquisition (source) of concepts, to the neglect of issues about their legitimate (justifiable) cognitive use to judge and to know (or even to err about) particular objects, events, persons or structures—the issue Kant designated as the objective validity of our cognitive judgements. Empiricists always stressed the sole role of empirical evidence in defining terms and in justifying claims, but persistently neglect the conceptual and intellectual preconditions for identifying any one ­spatio-temporal particular, or any one of its manifest features, so as to be able to

K. R. Westphal (*)  Department of Philosophy, Boğaziçi Üniversitesi, İstanbul, Turkey

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define any relevant term to designate that particular or its chosen feature, or to be able to cite its perception as evidence for or against any statement. These basic cognitive achievements require already possessing and properly using a host of concepts which cannot be defined in accord with concept empiricism, including: ‘space,’ ‘spaces,’ ‘time,’ ‘times,’ ‘individual,’ ‘I,’ ‘it’ or ‘that’ (spatio-temporal particular) and individuation (Westphal 2013). That Hegel agrees with Kant about these basic points in Critical epistemology has been needlessly obscured by three factors worth noting here. One is widespread preoccupation, on the part of fans and critics alike, with Kant’s transcendental idealism, and with Hegel’s alternative “absolute” idealism. Kant claims that his Critical philosophy requires transcendental idealism. Hegel’s critical re-examination of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason shows instead that transcendental idealism is unjustifiable, and yet is not required by Kant’s comprehensive critique of rational judgement, justification and knowledge. Indeed, Kant’s Critique of Reason, throughout his Critical writings, is more successful and more tenable without transcendental idealism. Elsewhere I have argued in detail that Hegel is quite correct about these surprising results (Westphal 1989, 2018). A second obfuscation is neglecting that, and how, Hegel learned from both Kant and Tetens (1775, 1777) what Kant had learned from the latter, that the key epistemological issue does not concern our possession of concepts, whatever may be their content, intension or origins, but rather our capacity to use concepts properly to classify and thus identify extant particular objects, events, persons or structures. Demonstrating that we can so use a concept by demonstratively indicating (ostending) a relevant, localized, identified particular instance Tetens called “realizing” that concept (realisiren). This terminological innovation was adopted by both Kant and Hegel. Like Kant, Hegel realized that the key epistemological task regarding any a priori concept is demonstrating whether we can, or cannot, “realize” that concept by locating, identifying and properly classifying or characterizing at least one relevant particular as an instance of that concept. Those a priori concepts which we can so realize are, in Kant’s lexicon, “objectively valid”; Hegel retained from Kant this issue and terminology, too (e.g., Enc. §§38, 126Z, 131Z, 468Z; WL GW 12:18–19, 28, 174). Now both Kant and Hegel do examine issues about concept acquisition, procedures and processes of inquiry, and about judgement. However, both Kant and Hegel are alert to the issues highlighted later by Frege’s (1884, 1893) critique of “psychologism.” Stated generally, as Kant does in the Introduction to the Critique of Judgement: No account of historical, psychological, social or causal etiology as such can or does address issues about the validity, justifiability or justification of whatever results from those generative processes.3 If processes do reveal anything about the validity of their products, they do so only insofar as those processes satisfy normative standards or constraints, not merely insofar as they are causal or historical events or effects.4 The third factor obscuring Hegel’s allegiance to Kantian Critical philosophy is the central topic of this chapter: His philosophy certainly does not look anything like Kant’s Critical philosophy, especially not in its first major installment, Hegel’s

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1807 introduction to his systematic philosophy, the Phenomenology of Spirit. Late in life, Hegel planned to re-issue his 1807 masterpiece, which is properly the propaedeutic to his systematic philosophy (or “Wissenschaft”), although it is, he noted, a peculiar early work; do not revise; pertains to the time of its composition; in Preface: the abstract absolute then predominated. (PhG GW 9:448)5

Perhaps Hegel’s philosophical success during his lifetime eclipsed the merely abstract conception of the absolute, but following his death, after Schopenhauer and Schelling were called to Berlin to “stamp out the dragonseed of Hegeli­ anism,”6 and with the persistence of empiricism, rationalism or logicism within subsequent philosophy, today we hardly have even an abstract conception of any absolute. In accord with Fulda (1975), Harris (1997) and Collins (2013), I (1989) have argued in detail that Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit retains its proper introductory function as propaedeutic to his systematic philosophy because it, and it alone in Hegel’s corpus, examines whether, and demonstrates that, human reason is competent to address philosophical issues cogently.7 Here I augment these findings by sketching how Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology addresses an astonishing constellation of issues, so as to justify the competence of philosophical reason—and more specifically: to justify its competence to conduct a cogent critique of reason, quite in accord with Kant’s Critical philosophy, though without any appeal to transcendental idealism. This constellation of issues can be appreciated by reconsidering the question, Why and how can Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit take human cognition itself as a phenomenon, as an appearance, which can be scrutinized, so as to determine whether human cognition is merely a semblance, or may instead (at least on some occasion or in some form) manifest genuine knowledge of the world or genuine self-knowledge— perhaps even both? Surprisingly, Hegel’s answer takes (in effect) the form of writing Kant’s unwritten, closing chapter of his transcendental doctrine of method, “The History of Pure Reason” (§2). These Critical issues about the historicity of human reason underscore issues about the very possibility of a rationally competent critique of reason—an issue highlighted by the attempted “meta-critique” of reason proposed by Hamann and Herder (§3). Their issues buttress those already mentioned about the confusions which greeted Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and the profusion of philosophical alternatives to it then proposed. That profusion exhibited once again a phenomenon highlighted by Pyrrhonian skepticism, the trope of relativity, which purports to reveal that claims to know anything which is in any regard obscure or controversial themselves appear to be no more than literally incredible semblances of knowledge. This constellation of factors highlights the importance of the Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion, and whether it can be solved. Without mentioning Pyrrho or Sextus Empiricus, this issue was highlighted anonymously by G.E. Schulze (§4). This constellation of issues (§§2–4) is so tightly interwoven that no piecemeal resolution or dissolution is possible. To address this constellation of epistemological, methodological and meta-philosophical issues comprehensively, Hegel took for his model the ancient

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masters of skeptical dialectic, so as to develop his own phenomenological ­skepticism regarding the entire range of merely apparent forms of human cognition through his capacious “self-consummating skepticism” (§5). These findings help identify the twin targets of Hegel’s phenomenological meta-critique, and why and how his 1807 Phenomenology integrates systematic, historical and pedagogical aims, issues and methods (§6).

2 Kant and the History of Pure Reason Having devoted over 850 densely argued pages to identifying the character, scope and limits of human thought and knowledge, so far as these are purely a priori, entirely independent of empirical evidence (CPR B2–3), the fourth, final chapter of Kant’s transcendental doctrine of method bears a surprising title: “The History of Pure Reason.” After all his detailed concern with normative validity, why is there any topic regarding history of reason, much less, any history of pure reason? One aspect of the answer is Kant’s experimentalism about rational inquiry. This aspect of his answer is reinforced by another: Kant’s extensive and sophisticated account of sub-personal cognitive processing, on the basis of which alone we can be aware of our perceiving anything whatever.8 One consequence of these views is that, whatever our innate cognitive capacities may be, and whatever may be the “original” (a priori, non-empirical; CPR B167) acquisition of our most basic categories on the basis of our forms of sensory intuition and of judgement, none of these aspects of, or factors in, human judgement, experience or knowledge is self-evident or transparent to our introspective reflection. Identifying these “elements,” as Kant calls them, of human cognisance requires “transcendental reflection” (CPR A260–3, 269–70, 295/B316–9, 325–6, 351), guided by the table of judgement forms and the central problem of how sensory intake over time and through space can be integrated, synchronically and diachronically, so that we can so much as appear to be aware of any apparent spatio-temporal particulars surrounding us, and can distinguish some sequences of appearances as appearing to occur before, during or after others. Such transcendental reflection, Kant insists, “is a duty no one can shirk, if [s]he shall judge anything a priori” (CPR A263/B319). Unfortunately, Kant said rather too little about his method of transcendental reflection, and about its resources. That is one key reason for confusion occasioned by publishing his Critique of Pure Reason. For example, his grounds for claiming his Table of Judgements is complete were not understood, barely recognized, until Michael Wolff (1995, 2000, 2004, 2017) discerned and explicated them. Human experimentation using our rational capacities to inquire into morals, nature, theology or metaphysics is a central theme of Kant’s concluding chapter, which he admits to be a mere place holder for an actual history of pure reason: This title stands here only to designate a place that is left open in the system and must be filled in the future. I will content myself with casting a cursory glance from a merely transcendental point of view, namely that of the nature of pure reason, on the whole

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of its labors hitherto, which presents to my view edifices, to be sure, but only in ruins. (CPR A852/B880)

In the philosophical controversies about our rational inquiries and their purported results Kant finds three themes marking key philosophical divides. Regarding the objects of rational inquiries, the main divide is between “sensual” (sensory) and intellectual accounts of knowledge. Regarding the origin of our most basic concepts, the main divide is between empiricists and “noologists,” i.e., those who contend that human noûs can grasp the cosmic noûs which structures and governs the universe. Regarding methodical procedure according to principles, the main divide is between (commonsense) naturalists and systematic “scientists,” i.e., either dogmatists or skeptics. Kant names Christian Wolff and Hume as key representatives of these latter two camps. Without detailing his specific findings, Kant has already argued en detail that none of these kinds of philosophy is adequate, though each offers some important considerations—yet their debates, if continued, are condemned to stalemate. In this judgement, Kant has been most prescient. He thus concludes that his radically innovative ‘changed method of thinking’ is altogether required, so that: The Critical path alone is still open. If the reader has had pleasure and patience in travelling along in my company, then he can now judge, if it pleases him to contribute his part to making this footpath into a highway, whether or not that which many centuries could not accomplish might not be attained even before the end of the present one: namely, to bring human reason to full satisfaction in that which has always, but until now vainly, occupied its lust for knowledge. (CPR A855/B883)

Thus concludes Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

3 Hamann, Herder and the “Meta-critique” of Pure Reason Kant published the Critique of Pure Reason well in advance of his Critical moral philosophy, and of his Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1793). Although the Transcendental Dialectic discusses moral and theological issues in considerable detail, it is understandable that Kant’s first readers had difficulty understanding, not to say: taking seriously, his claim to have found it necessary to delimit knowledge in order to preserve room for faith (CPR Bxxx), and they could not read this remark in Kant’s Preface to the second edition until 1781. Hamann and Herder both sought to secure their fervently Christian fideism, untrammelled by Kant’s Critical philosophy. Hamann (1784) sketched an infamous “meta-critique of pure reason,” in which he contends that human reason is rooted in human language, and human language is rooted in human history, indeed so deeply and obscurely, that neither language nor human reason can conduct any such inquiry as a critique of reason, much less: a critique of pure reason—for there is no “pure” reason at all within our human domain. Though unpublished, Hamann’s sketch

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was profoundly influential. A full-scale attempt at such an historicist-linguistic critique of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason was mounted by Herder (1799).9 Hamann and Herder both, however, neglected a key reflexive question: If human language and reasoning are as limited as they apparently contend, how can they conduct their rational inquiries into the origins—as well as the scope and limits—of human language? How could they even construct their purported meta-critique of Kant’s Critique? They also neglected Kant’s own use of linguistic similes in the Critique of Pure Reason (CPR A314/B370–371, A352; cf. Prol. §§30, 39/Ak 4:312, 323) to underscore the twin Critical issues: How is unity within human thinking or within human experience at all possible, even within any one thought, judgement or claim? Under what conditions is any such unity also cognitively valid—justifiable as sufficiently accurate, erroneous or refutable? Hamann and Herder were the first post-Kantians to again commit the methodological error of obscuring issues of validity by clouding them with speculations about mere processes—Frege’s point later against “psychologism.” Both Hamann and Herder were fans of Hume, but neither realized—as Kant had—that Hume’s empiricist theory of ideas cannot at all account, on any empiricist basis, for the fabulous capacities of Hume’s “imagination,” which alone provides us with meaningful words, as distinct to mere vocalizations, or provides us with the bevy of distinctions of reason which alone enable us to locate anything, or any sensory appearance, even apparently or approximately, within any, even merely apparent, spatial or temporal order (Westphal 2013, 2017). Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason examines the sub-personal cognitive functions required for us to be able at all to develop, learn or acquire language, so that we can understand (e.g.) a series of individual words as expressing any one thought (CPR A352). Without these ­capacities, and without our effective, competent exercise of them, there simply could be neither an origin, a history, nor any use of human language.

4 The Profusion of Post-critique Alternatives 3.1 It is unsurprising that Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and his further publications in Critical philosophy occasioned a surge of philosophical activity, both critical and favorable. Adickes’s (1894–1896) Bibliography of Writings by and on Kant in Germany up to 1804 runs to over 600 pages.10 Each philosophical faction Kant’s Critique undermined found its enthusiastic defenders, including rationalism (e.g., Eberhard 1788–178911), empiricism (e.g., Maimon), skepticism (e.g., Schulze), fideism (Hamann, Herder, Jacobi), and varieties of Kantianism propounded by avowedly friendly converts as Fichte, Bardilli and Reinhold, who sought to do better what they thought Kant had attempted.12 3.2 This flood of non-, anti- and pro-Kantian philosophical views is bewildering, especially to non-experts. Yet even the views of philosophical experts often diverge significantly, even radically. This profusion of apparent philosophical alternatives raises yet again an ancient skeptical concern, the Pyrrhonian Trope

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of Relativity. Pyrrhonian skeptics neither doubt nor dispute whatever is utterly ­obvious, such as (during sunshine) “it is day” or (when speaking) “I am now conversing” (PH 1:192–3, 208, 2:8–10, 97; AL 1:391, 2:144; M 8:144). However, they remain unconvinced that anyone has identified credible inferences from whatever is utterly obvious to the advocate’s favored account, explanation or theory of why and how the utterly obvious or the merely apparent came to be as it is, wherever and whenever it appears (e.g., PH 1:104, 135–40, 175–7, 2:132). They are, in the main, skeptics about claims to know what something really is, if that is said to contrast in any notable regard to what or how it merely appears to someone to be. Pyrrhonists are very content to trot out the irresolvable controversies amongst philosophers or other know-somethings as at least apparent evidence that none of the parties to the dispute uses a credible, genuinely cognitive method to identify how something really is (e.g., PH 1:202–4, 2:8, 95, 134–192, 3:7–12, 186). 3.3 If this threat of relativism is not trouble enough, soon a further ancient Pyrrhonian trope re-appeared on the philosophical scene. G.E. Schulze published the first skeptical attack on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, titled for one of the greatest ancient skeptics: Aenesidemus (1792). Schulze’s book gained such prominence that a decade later it was a central case in point when Hegel examined and highlighted the profound differences between ancient Pyrrhonian skepticism and modern empiricist skepticism, such as Schulze’s, in his extensive early article, “The Relation of Skepticism to Philosophy” (1802). There Hegel argued in detail (and quite rightly) that Pyrrhonian skepticism is far more searching and profound than is Modern empiricist skepticism. Yet at this time (ca. 1800–02), Hegel followed Schelling’s lead by contending that even those ancient skeptical tropes only undermined the various “finite” or limited claims of the understanding, due to its inevitable use of conceptual dichotomies (cf. Düsing 1988). These skeptical problems and appearances, Schelling and Hegel claimed, are transcended by intellectual intuition of the absolute. These “absolute idealist” claims and ambitions were burst by G.E. Schulze’s anonymously published “Aphorisms on the Absolute” (1803). Schulze wrote as if propounding Jena-style absolute idealism, yet he slyly and masterfully turned the rhetorical and philosophical tables on intellectual intuitionism, in part by ­re-invoking issues of criteria for distinguishing the absolute, or for distinguishing any genuine intellectual intuition of it, from any imposter, counterfeit or deliberate subterfuge, including issues of petitio principii (begging the question). Schelling (Schelling 1805, §64n./SW 7:153 n.2) believed Hegel had already resolved those issues in his previous article, “The Relation of Skepticism to Philosophy.” Hegel understood epistemology far better, and realized (by late 1804) that Schulze had called their philosophical bluff,13 in effect, by invoking the Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion, reported by Sextus Empiricus: in order to decide the dispute which has arisen about the criterion [of truth], we must possess an accepted criterion by which we shall be able to judge the dispute; and in order to possess an accepted criterion, the dispute about the criterion must first be decided. And when the argument thus reduces itself to a form of circular reasoning the discovery of the criterion becomes impracticable, since we do not allow [those who make knowledge

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claims] to adopt a criterion by assumption, while if they offer to judge the criterion by a criterion we force them to a regress ad infinitum. And furthermore, since demonstration requires a demonstrated criterion, while the criterion requires an approved demonstration, they are forced into circular reasoning. (PH 2:20; cf. PH 1:116–7)

Though stated regarding criteria of truth, this Dilemma holds equally of criteria of justification. In his early article, “The Relation of Skepticism to Philosophy,” Hegel merely mentions this Dilemma in passing (Skept. GW 4:212.9/SkeptEng. 328), confident that it is bypassed by intellectual intuition (Skept. GW 4:219.33– 220.24/SkeptEng. 335–337). In his 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel restates precisely this Dilemma exactly in the middle of his Introduction (PhG GW 9:58.12–22), directly in connection with distinguishing—if possible—between merely apparent knowledge and genuine manifestations of knowledge. Previously I have examined, reconstructed and defended Hegel’s solution to this Dilemma in detail (Westphal 1989, 2003, 2018; for concise summary, see Westphal 2009b). I now offer a further conjecture regarding Hegel’s describing his 1807 Phenomenology as “self-consummating” skepticism (sich vollbringender Skepticismus; PhG GW 9:56.12–13). This puzzling description is a crucial key to understanding that, and how, Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology completes Kant’s unwritten chapter on the history of pure reason.

5 Hegel’s “Self-Consummating Skepticism” In his Introduction Hegel proposes to examine all humanly possible forms of consciousness so as to distinguish, if possible, between merely apparent and genuinely manifest knowledge. Treating “knowledge” or claims to knowledge as mere appearances is Pyrrhonian stock-in-trade. In “The Relation of Skepticism to Philosophy,” Hegel had lamented the fate of those master teachers of ancient dialectic who were reputed to have taught to their students nothing but skeptical dialectic, for decades if need be, until the student finally could see through all the skeptical dialectic. Only then would the master begin with any positive philosophical views. The fate Hegel (Skept. GW 4:210.29–211.28/SkeptEng. 327–328) lamented is that only their reputation remained, though none of their texts or lectures.14 Concurrently, another proponent of positive use of Pyrrhonian skepticism ­recommended its careful study as the single best preparation for understanding and assessing Kant’s Critical philosophy. This advice was given by Buhle (1801) in his Preface to his translation of Sextus Empiricus’ Outlines of Pyrrhonism (Grundrisse des Pyrrhonismus), where he concludes: The same method of philosophizing which the Greek skeptics followed, by which they discovered the ungroundedness and conflict of the older philosophical systems familiar to them, can also be applied to the newer systems and equally well reveals to the probing reason their weaknesses. Thus is it indeed Greek skepticism which can be regarded as

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the ground upon which the Critical philosophy developed, and which it first and foremost aims to, and must, destroy, if it shall in other regards achieve its aims. To that extent the study also of Greek skepticism undeniably is not only the most instructive propaedeutic to the Critical philosophy, it also retains the inestimable advantage of teaching how to rationally doubt even this Critical philosophy, i.e., how to assess it cogently. (Buhle 1801, v–vi)

Though I cannot document Hegel’s having read Buhle’s advice,15 Buhle’s advice is in fact Kant’s own advice, which Hegel certainly did read. Yet more directly than Buhle, Kant indicates that Greek skeptical doubts about dogmatic philosophy can be used positively to identify the character, competence and limits of our cognitive capacities: Against the uncritical dogmatist, who has not first measured the sphere of his understanding and so has not determined the limits of his possible cognition according to principles, so that he does not already know in advance how much he can do, but instead thinks he can find this out merely by various attempts, these [ancient] skeptical attacks are not merely dangerous, but are to him utterly destructive. – Since if he is countered at any one single contention which he doesn’t justify and apparently cannot derive from principles, the suspicion falls upon all [his] contentions, however convincing they may otherwise be. And thus the skeptic is the master instructor of the dogmatic reasoner towards a sound critique of understanding and reason themselves. If he has achieved this [critique], then he need not fear any further [skeptical] attacks; for he then distinguishes his possessions from that which lies entirely beyond them, to which he makes no claim and so cannot embroil himself in controversies about it. Thus the skeptical procedure as such is indeed unsatisfactory for the questions of reason, although indeed it is propaedeutic (vorübend), to awaken its caution and to indicate fundamental means by which to secure its legitimate possessions. (CPR A768–9/B796–7, cf. A423–5/B451–3)

Now Hegel not only heeded Kant’s and Buhle’s advice about proper skeptical training and procedure, in some early Jena essays (1801–1802) Hegel had already begun working through Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in just this way, by which he discovered, on grounds strictly internal to Kant’s transcendental idealism, two decisive problems which begin to reveal how to disentangle Kant’s Critical philosophical method and his Critique of rational judgement and justification from his transcendental idealism, and how to develop Kant’s Critical philosophy into a far more cogent form of epistemological realism (Westphal 2018, §§25–36, 43–49). Prompted by Schulze’s “Aphorisms,” Hegel finally addressed rather evaded the Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion—restating it right in the middle of his Introduction; throughout, Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology exhibits exactly the strategy Kant and Buhle recommend. Thinking through Pyrrhonian skepticism from beginning to end, and likewise: thinking through the entire range and scope of apparent claims to philosophical knowledge (PhG GW 9:55.30–31, .36–37, 56.36–37), and these alone, suffice for “the thorough and explicit history of the formative education of consciousness itself” to be able to engage in cogent philosophical inquiry or “science” (Wissenschaft; PhG GW 9:56.19–21). This relentless critical skepticism directed to “the entire range of appearing consciousness” alone “makes spirit first able to examine what truth is” (PhG GW 9:56.29–31). Indeed, in this way Hegel aims to provide and to justify “the conscious insight

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into the untruth of [merely] apparent knowledge” (PhG GW 9:56.10–11). Hegel’s proposed “self-consummating skepticism” (PhG GW 9:56.12–13) thus expressly aims to justify our positive, demonstrable capacity to grapple with the truth about philosophical issues, and to achieve cogent, justified results. The central issue of the 1807 Phenomenology is whether we can attain absolute knowing, in the sense of knowing “what in truth is” (PhG GW 9:53.1–5, 54.21– 22). In Hegel’s lexicon, “the absolute” is not some special object; it is the world as it actually is—whatever that may prove to be. Hegel uses the term “absolute” adverbially, a sense already indicated by Kant: The word absolute is now often used merely to indicate that something pertaining to the matter at hand (Sache) is considered in itself and thus is valid intrinsically. (CPR A324/ B381)16

The kind of critical, skeptical training required to discern whether or when something known or claimed counts absolutely goes back at least to Parmenides, and was known to Plato and Aristotle as Parmenidean exercises, as Hegel knew (cf. Plato, Parm., 135c–136d, Theat. 162, 168; Aristotle, Met. 1:985a1, 2:994b32– 995a20, 4:1005b1; Hegel G&W GW 4:207.15–25, 211.20–28; Enc. §81Z2; Skept. GW 4:210.27–32/SkeptEng. 327; VGPh3:34/MM 19:79–81/LHPBrown2:205–206). When the character of young Socrates admits reaching a philosophical impasse, not knowing how to proceed, Parmenides admonishes him: you undertake to mark off something beautiful and just and good and each one of the characters too soon, before being properly trained. … train yourself more thoroughly while you are still young; drag yourself through what is generally regarded as useless, and condemned by the multitude as idle twaddle. Otherwise, the truth will escape you. What is the manner of training, Parmenides? [Socrates] asked. … Parmenides replied … it is also necessary to do this still in addition: to examine the consequences that follow from the hypothesis, not only if each thing is hypothesised to be, but also if that same thing is hypothesised not to be, if you wish to be better trained. In short, concerning whatever may be hypothesised as being and as not being and as undergoing any other affection whatever, it is necessary to examine the consequences relative to itself and relative to each one of the others, whichever you may choose, and relative to more than one and relative to all in like manner. And the others, again, must be examined both relative to themselves and relative to any other you may choose, whether you hypothesise what you hypothesise as being or as not being, if you are to be finally trained accurately to discern the truth. (Plato, Parm., 135c–136a)

The group then stress how extraordinary, extensive, and frightfully challenging is this proposed training (Plato, Parm., 136a–137a), yet Zeno adds: most people do not realise that without this kind of detailed ranging and wandering through everything, it is impossible to meet with truth and gain intelligence. (Plato, Parm., 136c)

Then Zeno joins Socrates in beseeching Parmenides to proceed, “so that I too may learn from you after all this time” (Plato, Parm., 136e). Zeno in his maturity still seeks tutelage from Parmenides! Parmenides acknowledges that, in this training required to comprehend truth, one must “drag” oneself “through what is generally regarded as useless, and condemned by the multitude as idle twaddle” (Plato, Parm., 135d), a condemnation often directed against Hegel’s writings, too.

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This coincidence is not accidental, I submit. Albeit a literary dialogue, all of these indications are to the philosophical point. Their topic was metaphysics; Hegel’s topic in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit is restricted instead to apparent claims regarding what human knowledge is, i.e.: epistemology, though for us homo sapiens sapiens, not for divinities, nor for mere logically possible beings. This is one key point of Hegel’s examining forms of consciousness—to examine basic core views and issues in epistemology, by examining their paradigmatic principles— expressed as the “certainties” defining the various forms of consciousness—in connection with paradigmatic examples of claims to know about various purportedly experienced particulars. Hegel agrees with the reputed Ancient masters, that the thorough study of skeptical dialectic, and its thorough application to known philosophical views, ultimately enables the student, not only to recognize the shortcomings of various philosophical views, but also to see through skeptical tropes themselves as mere appearances of knowledge or insight. This point Hegel captures in distinguishing between merely “abstract” negations, which settle for skeptical suspension of judgement—Sextus Empiricus’ convenient, calm resting point—and ‘determinate’ negations, which develop critical assessment strictly internally, sufficiently and accurately so as to identify at least clues of a superior view, by identifying the strengths or insights, as well as the omissions or shortcomings, of whatever view is examined (PhG GW 9:57.1–17). Unlike the reputed ancient masters, Hegel composed and published his masterful dialectical lessons, beginning with his 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit.

6 The Twin Targets of Hegel’s Phenomenological Critique The twin targets of Hegel’s phenomenological critique, both substantive and methodological, are on the one hand, naïve realism, e.g. Krug, Schulze or Jacobi, according to which philosophy is not at all necessary, and especially not Critical philosophy; and on the other hand, Hamann’s and Herder’s purported metacritique of reason, according to which Critical philosophy is not at all possible. To show that Critical philosophy is possible, and through that, to show that we can comprehend philosophically—and natural-scientifically—how things themselves actually are, i.e., we can know how the world is absolutely, Hegel cannot begin as Kant did, with a transcendental doctrine of the elements of human knowledge, based upon first demonstrating that we have a set of basic a priori concepts, the categories plus the concepts of space and of time, then demonstrating that we can use these a priori concepts in legitimate cognitive judgements about spatio-­ temporal particulars, and then third: that we can use these concepts in legitimate cognitive judgements only about spatio-temporal particulars (of whatever scale).17 Starting with any specific philosophical claim or analysis would invite his opponents to cavil about it endlessly, without first considering their own capacities to make, understand or assess any such claim. These issues arise already with merely terminological matters (PhG GW 9:53–5). Hegel’s Introduction is deliberately

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preliminary, general, even vague; he expressly reserves any and all definite contentions on his own part to his results within or at the end of his massive tome (PhG GW 9:58.10–11). His discussion of the models of knowledge as an instrument or a medium (PhG GW 9:53–54) is very vague, though it recalls the Pyrrhonian tropes directed against that “by which” anything is said to be known (PH 2:48–69) and Locke’s simile of our senses being the windows by which alone light can enter the otherwise dark room of our understanding (Es 2.11.17). His allusion to Kant’s distinction between phenomena and noumena (PhG GW 9:54.21–25), too, is no more than cursory. His most brilliant achievement in the Introduction—solving the Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion by explicating how constructive self-criticism is possible—is largely implicit, requiring careful disambiguation of distinctions Hegel marked by grammatical cases (Westphal 2018, §§62–63). The one point he states definitely concerns the commonsense notion of consciousness as our awareness of some object distinct from ourselves (PhG GW 9:58.25–35, 59.5–11), which he claims suffices for his phenomenological critique of apparent knowledge (PhG GW 9:60.2–3). This statement is made uncontentious by beginning with a naïve realist, commonsense form of consciousness in “Sense Certainty” (PhG GW 9:63). What Hegel achieved in the 1807 Phenomenology and how he achieves it requires and rewards the kind of detailed, systematically philosophical, historically sensitive and textually scrupulous examination, reconstruction and assessment characteristic of the very best scholarship on Ancient philosophy. Hegel’s strictly internal, phenomenological critique of forms of apparent knowing in the 1807 Phenomenology is tantamount to Parmenidean exercises, which only come into philosophical focus by exacting, comprehensive study through which the systematic philosophical, the historical and the textual analyses of Hegel’s sections, chapters, major parts and the structure of his whole book converge, so as to illuminate and corroborate each other. Much of this has been missed by Hegel’s expositors; here I can only mention briefly six related cases in point. 1. Hegel’s devotés have neglected Kant’s use of the term “realize” in connection with concepts or principles (above, §1), and so have missed just what philosophical issues and terminology Kant thus adopted from Tetens, and so have missed how Hegel uses this verb in exactly the same sense and with the same philosophical point, viz. 2. In “Sense Certainty” Hegel argues for Tetens’ and Kant’s point about why and how we must realise any concept involved in knowing by locating and identifying some relevant instance of it within space and time. Yet exactly this localization and individuation of relevant particulars requires possession and competent use of the a priori concepts of ‘space,’ ‘spaces,’ ‘time,’ ‘times,’ ‘I,’ ‘it’ or ‘that’ particular, ‘individuation’ and ‘situation’ or ‘circumstances.’ Hegel’s conclusions hold against naïve realism, a.k.a. ‘knowledge by acquaintance’, and they hold without appeal to any transcendental idealism. Hegel’s point concerns the character and necessity of singular, specifically cognitive reference to particulars; it rules out any and all purportedly cognitive use of concepts without referring them in judgements to localized, identified spatio-temporal particulars (of whatever kind or scale).

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3. This semantic, referential thesis thus secures the key aim of verification empiricism, without invoking any thesis about meaning, intension or conceptual content! That alone suffices to rule out experience-transcendent metaphysics as cognitively vacuous, however clearly or cleverly conceived it may be. 4. In “Perception” Hegel demonstrates by reductio ad absurdum of Hume’s empiricism, specifically, of Hume’s insightful analysis, “Of skepticism with regard to the senses” (T 1.4.2), that also the concept of any one thing with a plurality of characteristics is a priori, and that the distinction ‘substance/attribute’ or ‘thing/ property’ is a distinction of reason which cannot be replaced by, nor reduced to, the relations ‘one/many’, ‘whole/part’, ‘set/member’ nor ‘product/ingredient’. 5. Hegel’s critique of substantive individualism, and his case for our being fundamentally interdependent, social beings, only begins in the infamous discussion of “Lord and Bondsman.” Hegel’s critical re-examination of individualist analyses of human phenomena persists through to the very end of “Spirit,” culminating only in “Evil and its Forgiveness,” after critically assessing an extremely dense series of individualistic forms of consciousness (Westphal 2020a, b). 6. In these regards, the first part of Hegel’s Phenomenology, “Consciousness,” provides a direct counterpart to Kant’s “objective deduction” of the categories, to demonstrate that we can use concepts, including those a priori concepts just indicated (Nos. 2, 4), in genuine, legitimate, justifiable cognitive judgements about spatio-temporal particulars. The remainder of Hegel’s Phenomenology provides an alternative “subjective deduction,” aiming to identify and to justify the key social and historical structures and achievements required for us to be able to know the natural world in which we live, and to know ourselves as the social and historical beings we are, and what we have collectively achieved, in knowing about nature and about our own rational agency and cognizance (Westphal 2009b).

7 Hegel’s Phenomenological, Critical History of Pure Reason in the 1807 Phenomenology Having so sharply contrasted issues of process, including historical sequence, to those of validity (above, §1), consider now why and how Hegel’s Phenomenology fills in Kant’s unwritten chapter on the history of pure reason. Because Hegel’s phenomenological critique of forms of consciousness provides indirect, regressive proof of some main Critical theses, and because the series of forms of consciousness Hegel examines itself forms a cogent structure of (regressive) proof, to demonstrate that non-social, non-historical, non-conceptual or also non-Critical accounts of our cognizance, agency and the particulars we know and act upon in our surroundings all demonstrably fail to account for our human forms of mindedness and for our human spirit through history and, ultimately, across the globe, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit does indeed present our collective and individual history of formative education, through a series of key problems, partial solutions, reconsiderations and eventual comprehension of who we are, what we

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can know, and how we can comprehend all this. The history of thought, inquiry, critical assessment and sharpened ingenuity all matter to specifying as exactly and comprehensively as possible what we can and do know, how we know it, and who we are who can and do know such actual things or achievements for what they unqualifiedly are—absolutely. Much of Hegel’s re-examination of “Self-Consciousness,” “Reason,” “Spirit” and “Religion” are expressly or at least quite evidently historical, though Hegel’s examination of “Reason observing nature” closely examines important episodes in history and philosophy of science (Ferrini 2009), as also does his examination of “Force and Understanding” (Westphal 2015). Although “Sense Certainty” centrally aims at aconceptual sensory knowledge of particulars—at naïve commonsense realism—such naïve confidence in human cognition has a very close cousin amongst early Ionian thinkers; and as Hegel elsewhere indicates, much of his dialectical critique of “sense certainty” draws upon Ancient Greek skepticism (Düsing 1973), as well as upon Stoic logical analysis of deixis (ostensive or indexical reference; cf. AL 2:93–103, 112–17, 418–19; Hegel, VGPh3:104, 107–8). Although Hegel’s central target in “Perception” is Hume, the host of issues relevant to sensation, such as the proper and the common sensibles and their relation(s), if any, to things in our surroundings, go back at least to Plato’s Theatetus (156a–157c, 159c–160d, 177c–183c), and indeed to Protagoras, at least as reported by Plato. Finally, although the central issues in “Force and Understanding” are the character and possibility of casual explanation of spatio-temporal phenomena, these issues involve relations between (purportedly) universal causal laws of nature and the plethora of distinctively individuated, manifest, phenomenal natural instances to which they are said to pertain. These issues about relations between universals, which we do not literally sense or perceive, and particulars and their features, which we do, are age-old, as Hegel makes plain in his lectures on Greek philosophy. More specifically, in “Force and Understanding” Hegel exposes a key equivocation in the terms ‘inner’ or ‘internal’ which plagues ontology and epistemology at least from Aristotle through Kant and into the present day. One sense of ‘inner’ or ‘internal’ used to characterize features of any one individual means that a feature is (partly) constitutive of that individual; another sense of these terms means that the feature is contained solely within that individual, so that it is non-relational. Failure to distinguish these distinct senses directly generates the pervasive idea that no relational feature of an individual can be constitutive of it. This idea entails that no causal relations can be constitutive of an individual. Humean skepticism about causal powers awaits in the shadows of this conflation. In “Force and Understanding” Hegel exposes this equivocation, inter alia, to support Newton’s causal realism about gravitational force (Westphal 2015), and the scientific legitimacy of distance forces generally. Finally, the purported skeptical regress of manifest forces triggered by forces of solicitation, which themselves are said to be triggered by yet further forces of solicitation, ad infinitum, against which Hegel argues (cogently) in “Force and Understanding’ (PhG GW 9:85.9–87.37; cf. Enc.

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§136R) is a view of causal “solicitation” not found in Kant or Leibniz, but solely, explicitly (and especially, Hegel notes) in Herder (1787).

8 Hegelian Conclusions The history of “pure” reason is in fact the history of our development and use of our innate conceptual capacities (whatever these may be) in connection with the natural, individual, social, moral or historical phenomena into which we inquire, however informal or exacting our inquiries, methods or findings may be. The history of “pure” reason is the history of reason applied to figuring out, understanding, explaining and comprehending our world and ourselves. Distinguishing and identifying which aspects of our concepts, or the principles and judgements we formulate with them, trace back to any set of innate or “originally acquired” Grundbegriffe, and which aspects are more indebted to our own ingenuity in our cognitive inquiries, must be a retrospective, reflexive achievement of regressive philosophical inquiry and explication. As Hegel indicates, our most basic categories—and, of course, many more of our compound or derivative categories— are embedded in human language (WL GW 21:10–11, 17–8, 41–2; Enc. §24Z2). Transcendental reflection must consist in regressive, analytical explication, deeply informed by actual inquiries and the critical assessment of their scope, achievements, limits and short-comings. A properly “naturalized” epistemology need not, and should not, appeal to empirical psychology (á la Quine); that was the pervasive error of later nineteenth-century “psychologism.”18 Instead, any cogent epistemology must be Critical epistemology, and must appeal copiously to credible history and philosophy of science. Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit is but the propaedeutic to showing that, and how, this can be achieved philosophically—though only if philosophy is systematic, historical and linguistically scrupulous. These results redound upon the twin targets of Hegel’s phenomenological meta-critique by demonstrating against those two forms of skepticism about philosophical inquiry that, on the one hand, naïve realism is not humanly possible, and so cannot evade our obligation to engage in scrupulous transcendental reflection; whilst on the other hand, our capacities for, and our development and use of our intellectual disciplines alone enables us to investigate nature, society or history credibly, and further that reviewing the philosophically salient episodes and structures of the historical development of our cognitive disciplines and self-understanding exposes Hamann’s and Herder’s putative meta-critical skepticism to be nothing but empty verbal cant—a conclusion which holds not only against their presumptions. This is why and how Hegel’s “rigors of the concept” (PhG GW 9:41.24–25) require and involve such extensive and intensive Parmenidean exercises. This is also why the fate of reason—philosophical and otherwise—depends entirely upon how well we train and discipline ourselves rationally (Westphal 2016b).19

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Notes 1. I dedicate this chapter to Robert G. (Bob) Turnbull (1918–2004), in abiding esteem, fond recollection and profound gratitude. 2. Neither I nor Engstler (1990) found the slightest mention of Kant’s central doctrine anywhere in Maimon’s published writings. 3. “However, if one presumes to demonstrate the origin of these principles, and attempts to do so psychologically, this is entirely contrary to the sense of those principles, for these do not state what happens, i.e., according to what rules our cognitive capacities actually function, and how we do judge; instead they state how one ought to judge; and this logically objective necessity is not forthcoming, if the principles are merely empirical” (CJ Einl./Ak 5:182.26–32). 4. On Hegel’s sensitivity to this issue see Michael Wolff’s contribution to this volume (below, Chapter 11). 5. All translations from German sources are my own. 6. Friedrich Wilhelm IV to Bunsen, 1 Aug. 1840, in: Bunsen 1869, 2:133; cf. Engels (1842). 7. The “Phenomenology of Spirit” in Hegel’s Encyclopaedia (§§413–468) has very different aims, method and content. For discussion of this topic see Westphal (2019). 8. Kant’s account of sub-personal cognitive processing is charted at the end of Westphal (2020c). 9. On Hamann’s and Herder’s meta-critiques, see resp. Butts (1988), Seebohm (1972). As for their fideism and its ilk, Kant rightly reflected, “The nonsense rests mainly upon the twaddle (Geschwätze) about religion without prior specification by theology, and indeed first of all by that which originates solely from reason and which must be laid down as the basic criterion for the adequacy (Richtigkeit) of any other, whether it be grounded in history or in immediate devotion (Eingebung). Thus especially in our times it is most urgent to develop a thoroughly thought through and completely executed [theology] of reason alone, which can be achieved, since it does not require knowing everything pertaining to its object, but rather [to know] what human reason can know about God” (Refl. 6215, Ak 18:505; cf. CPR A642–643/B670–671). Hegel agreed; cf. Westphal (2020b, §6). Both Kant and Hegel argued cogently and in detail that the foremost virtue, both cognitively and practically (morally), is the modesty and humility to recognize one’s own incomplete understanding and comprehension, together with our own fallibility, so as not to impose our views or aims upon others. This virtue and conduct alone affords domestic and international justice, peace and cosmopolitan hospitality. 10. A very useful reprint series is Aetas Kantiana; titles list: https://de.wikisource.org/wiki/ Aetas_Kantiana?oldid=2356333; also see Landau (1991). 11. Eberhard co-founded a journal expressly to “assess” Kant’s Critical philosophy, the Philosophisches Magazin. Eberhard published his objections to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason in several installments across the four issues of this journal’s first volume, as indicated below in the references, together with several other reviews or criticisms of Kant’s Critique, all unfavorable. 12. A very good introduction to this fertile period is Beiser (1987). 13. A conspectus and corroboration of Schelling’s bluffing is provided by Götz (1807)—unwittingly; cf. Engels (1842). Schelling’s intellectual adventures nevertheless had salutary influence upon the development of life sciences (Richards 2002). The occasion of Hegel’s methodological volt face is examined in Westphal (2018, §§37–42). 14. Compare Hegel’s remarks on Carneades’ skeptical appearances in Rome; VGPh3:139–40/B 2:298–9/MM 19:348–9. 15. Records (thoroughly reconstructed in the late 1990s) do not indicate it held in Jena’s library; Hegel used the Greek original.

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16. “Das Wort absolute wird jetzt öfters gebraucht, um bloß anzuzeigen, daß etwas von einer Sache an sich selbst betrachtet und also innerlich gelte” (CPR A324/B381). On the character of Hegel’s “idealism” see Westphal (1989, 140–145; 2018; forthcoming). 17. A synopsis of what Kant means by specifically “Critical” philosophy is provided in Westphal (2018, §§2–3). 18. On Hegel’s critique of such views, see Westphal (2018, §§140–148). 19. In his brief note regarding renewed publication of his 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel mentions a “logic. Behind consciousness.” Whether this use of “logic” may denote his contemporaneous manuscripts on logic and metaphysics, or his anticipated Science of Logic, cannot be determined by this note, though there are significant parallels between the 1807 Phenomenology and those early manuscripts; see Heinrichs (1974). My observations here may help to address a question raised by Michael Wolff (1989; see below, Chapter 11) about whether or how Hegel accounts (or presumes to account) for the origins or source(s) of the semantic content or “intension” of our basic categories. (Research on this paper was supported in part by the Boğaziçi Üniversitesi Research Fund (BAP), grant codes: 9761, 18B02P3.)

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Eberhard, Johann August. 1789b. “Ueber das Gebiet des reinen Verstandes.” Philosophisches Magazin 1 (3): 263–289. Eberhard, Johann August. 1789c. “Ueber den wesentlichen Unterschied der Erkenntniß durch die Sinne und durch den Verstand.” Philosophisches Magazin 1 (3): 290–306. Eberhard, Johann August. 1789d. “Ueber die Unterscheidung der Urtheile in analytische und synthetische.” Philosophisches Magazin 1 (3): 307–332. Eberhard, Johann August. 1789e. “Ausführliche Erklärung über die Absicht dieses philosophischen Magazins.” Philosophisches Magazin 1 (3): 333–339. Eberhard, Johann August. 1789f. “Ueber den Ursprung der menschlichen Erkenntniß.” Philosophisches Magazin 1 (4): 369–405. Eberhard, Johann August. 1789g. “Ueber die Antinomie der reinen Vernunft.” Philosophisches Magazin 1 (4): 469–495. Engels, Friedrich. 1842. Schelling und die Offenbarung. Kritik des neuesten Reaktionsversuchs gegen die freie Philosophie. Leipzig: Binder (Rpt.: MEW 41: 173–221; MEGA 1, 3: 265–314). Engstler, Achim. 1990. Untersuchungen zum Idealismus Salomon Maimons. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstadt: Frommann-Holzboog. Ferrini, Cinzia. 2009. “Reason Observing Nature.” In The Blackwell Guide to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, edited by K. R. Westphal, 92–135. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Frege, Gottlob. 1884. Grundlagen der Arithmetik. Breslau: Koebner (English translation: idem., 1953). Frege, Gottlob. 1893. Grundgesetze der Arithmetik. Jena: Pohle (English translation: idem., 1964). Frege, Gottlob. 1953. The Foundations of Arithmetic, 2nd rev. ed. Edited by J. L. Austin. New York: Harper. Frege, Gottlob. 1964. The Basic Laws of Arithmetic. Edited and translated by M. Furth. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Fulda, Hans-Friedrich. 1975. Das Problem einer Einleitung in Hegels Wissenschaft der Logik, 2nd rev. ed. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. Götz, Johann Kaspar. 1807. Anti-Sextus, oder Über die absolute Erkenntniss von Schelling. Heidelberg: Pfæhler. Guyer, Paul. 1987. Kant and the Claims of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Hamann, Johann Gottlieb. 1784 (unpublished ms). “Metakritik über den Purismum der reinen Vernuft”. Hamann, Johann Gottlieb. 2007. “Metacritique on the Purism of Reason.” In Writings on Philosophy and Language, translated by K. Haynes, 205–218. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Harris, Henry S., 1997. Hegel’s Ladder. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing. Harris, Henry S., and George di Giovani, eds. 2000. Between Kant and Hegel: Texts in the Development of Post-Kantian Idealism, 2nd rev. ed. Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing. Hegel, G. W. F. 2009. Hegels Werk im Kontext. Edited by K. Worm. 5th Release. Berlin: InfoSoftWare. Heinrichs, Johannes von. 1974. Die Logik der Phänomenologie des Geistes. Bonn: Bouvier. Herder, Johann Gottfried von. 1787. Gott. Einige Gespräche. Gotha: Ettinger. Herder, Johann Gottfried von. 1799. Verstand und Erfahrung, Vernunft und Sprache. Eine Metakritik zur Kritik der reinen Vernunft. 2 vols. Wien and Prag: Haas. Hume, David. 1739–1740. A Treatise of Human Nature. Cited as ‘T’ by Pt.Book.§.Par. numbers, as in Hume (2000). Hume, David. 2000. A Treatise of Human Nature. Edited by D. F. Norton and M. J. Norton. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kant, Immanuel. 2009. Kant im Kontext III – Komplettausgabe, 2nd ed. Edited by K. Worm and S. Boeck, Release 6. Berlin: InfoSoftWare. Landau, Albert. 1991. Resensionen zur kantischen Philoosphie 1781–87. Bebra: Landau.

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Locke, John, 1690. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Edited by P. Nidditch. Oxford: The Clarendon Press, 1975. Cited as ‘Es’ by Book.Chapter.§ numbers. Maimon, Solomon. 1790. Versuch über die Transscendentalphilosophie. Berlin: Voss. Melnick, Arthur. 1989. Space, Time and Thought in Kant. Dordrecht: Kluwer. O’Shea, James, ed. 2017. Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: A Critical Guide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Plato. 1997a. Parmenides, 2nd rev. ed. Edited and translated by R. E. Allen. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Plato. 1997b. Complete Works. Edited by J. M. Cooper, with D. S. Hutchinson. Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing. Richards, Robert. 2002. The Romantic Conception of Life: Science and Philosophy in the Age of Goethe. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rosenberg, Jay. 2005. Accessing Kant: A Relaxed Introduction to the Critique of Pure Reason. New York: Oxford University Press. Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von. 1805. “Aphorismen zur Einleitung in die Naturphilosophie.” Jahrbücher für Medizin als Wissenschaft 1: 2–88 (Rpt. SW 1,7:140–197; HKA 1,15). Schulze, Gottlob Ernst. 1792. Aenesidemus: oder über die Fundamente der von dem Herrn Prof. Reinhold in Jena gelief. Elementar-Philosophie; nebst eine Verteidigung des Skeptizismus gegen die Anmassung der Vernunftkritik. Hehnstaedt, n.p. (Rpt. Berlin: Reuther & Reichard, 1911). Schulze, Gottlob Ernst (Anon.). 1803. “Aphorismen über das Absolute.” In Neues Museum der Philosophie und Literatur, edited by F. Bouterwek, vol. 1(2), 107–148. Leipzig. (Rpt. in Transzendentalphilosophie und Spekulation: Der Streit um die Gestallt einer Ersten Philosophie (1799–1807), edited by W. Jaeschke, Quellenband, vol. 2(1), 337–355. Hamburg, Meiner, 1993). Schulze, Gottlob Ernst. 2020. “Aphorisms on the Absolute,” translated and edited by K. R. Westphal, with J. Sares, and Caleb Faul, translators. (Translation of previous item; indicates original pagination). The Owl of Minerva 51. (Forthcoming). Seebohm, Thomas. 1972. “Der systematische Ort der Herderschen Metakritik.” Kant-Studien 63 (1): 59–73. Sextus Empiricus. 1933a. Against the Logicians. In Works in 4 vols., vol. 2, translated by Rev. R. G. Bury. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (Loeb Library). Cited as ‘AL’ by Book. paragraph numbers. Sextus Empiricus. 1933b. Outlines of Pyrrhonism. In Works in 4 vols., vol. 1, translated by Rev. R. G. Bury. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (Loeb Library). Cited as ‘PH’ by Book.paragraph.numbers. Tetens, Johann N. 1775. Über die allgemeine speculativische Philosophie. Bützow and Wismar: Boedner. Tetens, Johann N. 1777. Philosophische Versuche über die menschliche Natur und ihre Entwicklung. 2 vols. Leipzig: M.G. Weidmanns Erben & Reich. Tetens, Johann N. 1913. Über die allgemeine speculativische Philosophie – Philosophische Versuche über die menschliche Natur und ihre Entwicklung. Edited by W. Uebele, vol. 1. Berlin: Reuther & Reichard. Turnbull, Robert G. 1998. The Parmenides and Plato’s Late Philosophy: Translation of and Commentary on the Parmenides with Interpretative Chapters on the Timaeus, the Theaetetus, the Sophist, and the Philebus. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Westphal, Kenneth R. 1989. Hegel’s Epistemological Realism: A Study of the Aim and Method of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Westphal, Kenneth R. 2003. Hegel’s Epistemology: A Philosophical Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit. Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing. Westphal, Kenneth R., ed. 2009a. The Blackwell Guide to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

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Westphal, Kenneth R. 2009b. “Hegel’s Phenomenological Method and Analysis of Consciousness.” In The Blackwell Guide to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, edited by K.R. Westphal, 1–36. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Westphal, Kenneth R. 2013. “Hume, Empiricism and the Generality of Thought.” Dialogue: Canadian Journal of Philosophy/Revue canadienne de philosophie 52 (2): 233–270. Westphal, Kenneth R. 2015. “Causal Realism and the Limits of Empiricism: Some Unexpected Insights from Hegel.” HOPOS: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 5 (2): 281–317. Westphal, Kenneth R. 2016a. “Cognitive Psychology, Intelligence and the Realization of the Concept in Hegel’s Anti-Cartesian Epistemology.” In Hegel’s Philosophical Psychology, edited by S. Herrmann-Sinai and L. Ziglioli, 191–213. New York and London: Routledge. Westphal, Kenneth R. 2016b. “Back to the 3 R’s: Rights, Responsibilities and Reasoning.” SATS—Northern European Journal of Philosophy 17 (1): 21–60. Westphal, Kenneth R. 2017. “Kant’s Dynamical Principles: The Analogies of Experience.” In Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: A Critical Guide, edited by J. O’Shea, 184–204. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Westphal, Kenneth R. 2018. Grounds of Pragmatic Realism: Hegel’s Internal Critique and Transformation of Kant’s Critical Philosophy. Leiden: Brill. Westphal, Kenneth R. 2019. “Hegel’s Critique of Theoretical Spirit: Kant’s Functionalist Cognitive Psychology in Context.” In Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit: A Critical Guide, edited by M. F. Bykova, 57–80. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Westphal, Kenneth R. 2020a. “Individuality and Human Sociality: Individualism and Our Human Zoôn Politikon.” In The Palgrave Hegel Handbook, edited by M. F. Bykova and K. R. Westphal, 133–148. London: Palgrave Macmillan (Springer Nature). Westphal, Kenneth R. 2020b. “Kant, Hegel and Our Fate as Zoôn Politikon.” In Hegel and Contemporary Practical Philosophy: Beyond Kantian Constructivism, edited by J. Gledhill and S. Stein, Chapter 10. London: Routledge. Westphal, Kenneth R. 2020c. “Kant’s Analytic of Principles.” In Kant, edited by M. Timmons and S. Baiasu, Chapter 8. London: Routledge. Westphal, Kenneth R. Forthcoming. Hegel’s Critique of Cognitive Judgment: From Naïve Realism to Understanding Causal Force. Wolff, Michael. 1989. “Realitätsstufen oder Entwicklung? Hegels ‘Realphilosophie’ und die Philosophie der Wissenschaften.” Hegel-Jahrbuch 8: 397–415; rev. English translation in this volume, 201–218. Wolff, Michael. 1995. Die Vollständigkeit der kantischen Urteilstafel. Mit einem Essay über Freges ‘Begriffsschrift.’ Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann. Wolff, Michael. 2000. “Kantische Urteilstafel und vollständige Induktion: Nachtrag zu meiner Kontroverse mit Ulrich Nortmann.” Zeitschrift für Philosophische Forschung 54 (1): 86–94. Wolff, Michael. 2004. “Kants Urteilstafel. Nicht nur eine Replik.” In Metaphysik und Kritik, edited by S. Doyé, M. Heinz, and U. Rameil, 109–136. Berlin: De Gruyter. Wolff, Michael. 2017. “How Precise is Kant’s Table of Judgments?” In Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason: A Critical Guide, edited by J. O’Shea, translated by K. R. Westphal, 83–105. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chapter 4

Hegel’s Epistemology Giuseppe Varnier

Focusing on Hegel’s epistemology requires, to begin with, abandoning strictly “onto-theological” and “post-modernist” interpretations, in order to stress the possibility, if not of an “analytic” interpretation of Hegel’s works, at least of one that connects him to the main tradition of modern theory of knowledge centered on subjectivity, from Descartes to Kant. Indeed, Hegel’s philosophy systematically reconstructs both the thought and sciences of his age, and the concepts of knowledge and inquiry, to improve their rational justification. To understand Hegel’s epistemology, consider first the evolution of his philosophical system. In his first systematic drafts in Jena, along with a Schellingian metaphysics of the one, absolute Substance, Hegel develops a negative, skeptical epistemology, denying all value to appearances (doxa), which constitutes the “negative side of knowledge of the Absolute.” This strongly metaphysical position opposes a prevalent, contemporaneous form of naive, scientistic naturalism (G. E. Schulze was perhaps its foremost representative), with roots in a simplistic understanding of Locke and Hume. Schelling and Hegel called it “Lockeanismus.” Even in his mature system, Hegel insists that there is no truth in the simple Givens of consciousness, in the “Tatsachen des Bewußtseins.” He is thus one of the first critics of the Myth of the Given, of the idea of uninterpreted, basic sensory data. Hegel’s view—throughout his writings—is decidedly anti-empiricist and anti-foundationalist. Starting from 1803, however, Hegel basically rejects the philosophy of Substance, and re-discovers the Fichtean principle of subjectivity as a (necessary but not sufficient) guide to completing a system of philosophy. This prompts the main ideas of his first masterpiece, the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit. In particular, it prompts a deeper reading of ancient skepticism, that of Pyrrho and of Sextus Empiricus, which enables him to pose the dilemma of the criterion of truth, and to solve it by posing within self-consciousness and its methodic confrontation

G. Varnier (*)  Department of Philosophy, University of Siena, Siena, Italy e-mail: [email protected]

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between itself as knower and the structure of knowledge itself. In this regard, knowing and consciousness as processes are all that survive Hegel’s methodological skepticism. The 1807 Phenomenology is not only a unique work of historical and social epistemology, but also an introduction to Hegel’s philosophical “Science.” In this regard, it merits comparison to Hegel’s other introductions to his systematic philosophy: (i) ancient (or genuine) skepticism itself; (ii) the three attitudes of thought regarding objectivity (Enc. §§19–78); (iii) the “resolution to think purely” in the Science of Logic; and (iv) the historical introductions to Hegel’s lectures on history of philosophy and on philosophy of history. Hegel’s epistemological thinking thus does not end with the 1807 Phenomenology; e.g., the structure of the tropes used to criticize and sublate (aufheben) finite determinations is also used in later works, such as the Encyclopaedia and the Science of Logic. Eventually, in these systematic works, skepticism, which is true in all its particular aspects, in the end is itself sublated. In particular, the distinction between concept and instantiation, or likewise, the text of the system and reality itself, is shown to be only an aspect of the development of thought. This is as close as Hegel comes to proving the identity of subject and object, and thus to secure epistemologically the certainty of knowledge. To appreciate these “proofs,” one must consider the final part on “Cognition” in the Science of Logic, the section on “Theoretical Spirit” in the Encyclopaedia, and the Three Positions of Thought in the Encyclopaedia. These texts, with the Phenomenology, probably contain the summa of Hegel’s epistemological reflection. The final result is an epistemology that rejects all Givens and all kinds of immediacy. I suggest that Hegel was a Cartesian and Kantian epistemologist, but went beyond Kant, and a realist in an epistemological regard, whereas he was an idealist or monist in ontology. He believed that correspondence somehow “supervenes” on coherence. After considering these aspects of Hegel’s epistemology, I conclude with some remarks on such questions as the impossibility of formalizing dialectical logic, and about the possible influence of his thought on contemporary analytic philosophy, including whether Hegel was an externalist in any significant regard.

1 Problems of Scholarly Neglect of Hegel’s Epistemology Discussion of Hegel’s epistemology faces one main problem: Even if possible, it is very hard, and simplistic, to downplay the fact that the main tradition(s) in Hegelian scholarship up to the present day have not focused on the line connecting Descartes and then Kant to contemporary epistemology, whether analytic, phenomenological or neo-Kantian. The problem is that Hegel is not commonly seen as a proper member of this more “scientific” tradition of thought, with the exception of some “minor” elements, including important scholarly works on Hegel’s

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Naturphilosophie. Analytic philosophy saw Hegel as a foe, and, since Heidegger and hermeneutics, Erkenntnistheorie (theory of knowledge) seemed to have nothing at all to do with Hegel, other than as a milestone in the history of onto-theo-logic, leading from Kant (seen as a metaphysician) through Hegel, Schelling, and contemporary thinkers of the tradition prevailing today on the Continent, and beyond. It is not important that today onto-theo-logic is not on the forefront, but rather deconstruction, post-modernism, or critical theory. Even in the so-called “HegelRenaissance” in the USA, these remain the typical glossary entries under which Hegel’s philosophy is mentioned, and occasionally carefully read and interpreted.

2 Hegel’s Striking Originality in Epistemology Although he rejected some parts of the preceding epistemological tradition, Hegel was an epistemologist, and a strikingly original one. To understand how this is so, one must understand the particular historical context in which his thought developed, and abandon the typical and partly misleading, though often fascinating, reconstructions of his thought by critical theorists and postmodernists. There are now many studies, both in America and on the Continent, which stress the continuity of Hegel’s thought with the tradition of inquiry on knowledge and science beginning with Descartes and finding its culmination in Kant. Unfortunately, in most of these studies the role of Hegel’s main work, the Science of Logic, is neglected in favor of the Phenomenology of Spirit. It is impossible to restore Hegel to the epistemological tradition, or to vindicate some continuity with analytical philosophy, without a new interpretation of the Science of Logic, an interpretation that does not see it as an ontological theory of the absolute in a historical, onto-theological sense. I think this is possible, though it cannot be undertaken here. Here we assume that the Science of Logic is (or includes) an ample theory of all ontological structures of science and of common knowledge, which make knowledge possible and certain. The Phenomenology, like other types of “introductions” to the Logic Hegel offers, “provides [the individual] …with the ladder” (PhG GW 9:23.3–4) to ascend from his or her present condition to the dimension proper of the Logic. The plurality—and necessity—of these other introductions is accentuated by the fact that Hegel, in his notes to a new edition of the Phenomenology, calls it “Voraus, der Wissenschaft” (“Prelude, to Science”) (PhG GW 9:448). One introduction is skepticism itself; if rightly understood, it does the very work of the Phenomenology, which is, as Hegel states, the “self-consummating skepticism” (PhG GW 9:56.12–13). Another introduction, provided by the Three Attitudes of Thought with Regard to Objectivity in the beginning of the Encyclopaedia, emphasizes very clearly both the role of empiricism and the importance of the negative, critical moment of skepticism. Another kind of introduction, I suggest, is provided by the first, introductory book of Hegel’s Lectures on the History of Philosophy. A methodological masterpiece, this volume ends by specifying two essential consequences of historical development itself:

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the theoretical principle of the independence of the “I,” and the practical ­principle of the independence and freedom of every individual. The co-essential nature of these two principles, and the necessity and sufficiency to grasp them in order to achieve clarity about the nature of philosophy, can explain the surprising thesis of Hegel’s published Remark to §78 of the Encyclopaedia, which concludes the third of the three “Attitudes of Thought towards Objectivity”: the introduction to Hegel’s logic, as “fully completed skepticism” seems to be replaceable by “the resolution to will to think purely.” This is also the final meaning of the Phenomenology, and, I suggest, the main condition imposed by Hegel on an epistemology of Science. As a consequence, Hegel’s metaphysics is deeply revisionary, and so is his epistemology, even with respect to Kant.1 His epistemology also exhibits “therapeutic” aims and aspects, which today we would call a Wittgensteinian theme. His two main achievements in epistemology are: (1) an original “neutralization” of skepticism—not a hasty refutation of the skeptic, but embracing all the good points of skepticism, all the “negativity” of reality and thought, as he would say; (2) a complex criticism of empiricist epistemology and of all forms of phenomenalism about knowledge, including those aspects of Kant’s philosophy that can be so characterized. We shall start from the second, which includes one of the earliest attacks on the “Myth of the Given” in the history of philosophy, and on foundationalism, and then consider the neutralization of skepticism. Some historical background is necessary. Perhaps the dominant trend (a sort of theoretical “popular philosophy”) in Germany during Hegel’s youth, alongside Reinhold’s and Fichte’s Kantianism, was a skeptically-minded, empiricist blend of (subjectivistic) Kantian epistemology with Humean doubts about everything metaphysical. This is interesting historically because, taking empirical science as its only guide, this philosophical current can be seen as an early, if fledgling, forerunner of contemporary naturalism or physicalism. Schelling and Hegel disparagingly called it (and similar trends, such as materialism) “Lockeanismus.” The main exponent of this current was perhaps Gottlob Ernst “Aenesidemus” Schulze, the author of a critique of Reinhold and of a ponderous Critique of Theoretical Philosophy (1802), which Hegel reviewed in his Essay on Skepticism of the same year. Hegel’s epistemology develops, before and after the Phenomenology, that is both before and after his re-discovery of the primacy of the Kantian–Fichtean subject over Spinoza’s substance, as a sustained criticism of rather bald naturalistic and scientistic philosophy. As such, it presents from the start, if we reconstruct his texts with a contemporary eye, many positions typical of such criticism, and some specific to Hegel. These include: (a) synthetic a priori judgements are possible; (b) there are no basic data of knowledge nor any “transcendental constitution of things” (Skept., GW 4:220)2; (c) any account of “reality” is radically theory-laden, and all empirical theories not metaphysically secured are underdetermined by data; (d) metaphysics is possible, first of all in the form of a “genuine skepticism” that proves by equipollence both the utter meaninglessness of ultimate foundations, and also trust in empirical phenomena as fixed grounds of knowledge; (e) there is no ultimate principle of philosophy, only (after 1803–1804)

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consciousness, understood as a non-immediate, dynamic process of thinking analogous to Kant’s transcendental apperception (WL GW 21:57–58, cf. Enc. §10R); (f) knowledge is circular: the process of epistemological securing of truth and certainty eventually ends with the starting point itself (sensible certainty), which we can then look at in a new, positive, fully differentiated and integrated way, to proceed further anew; (g) the True cannot be expressed in one word, one proposition, nor at the beginning, but is a result; Hegel stresses holism and systematicity (though not any Duhem-Quine thesis), that follows the dynamics of the subject matter. (Of these points, (f) and (g) are central to the Phenomenology, and further developed in later works.)

3 Skeptical Naturalism and Reconceiving Knowing as a Dynamic Process Behind all these theses lies Hegel’s early idea that the skeptical naturalism of his own times, which cleaves to utterly “certain facts of consciousness” (“Tatsachen des Bewutseins”; Skept.), is neither genuine nor effective skepticism; its own claims notwithstanding, it is a barbarous form of empiricism, of immediacy in knowing raw Givens. True skepticism is ancient, the skepticism of Pyrrho and Sextus Empiricus. In particular, the five later tropes of Agrippa are suitable to describe the Absolute. They are: (1) diversity; (2) regress into infinity; (3) the relationship, or pros tí; (4) hypothesis, or petitio principii; and (5) dialleles or circularity. The Absolute is defined, rather than refuted by these tropes; it survives and supercedes them all. Prior to the Phenomenology, during the period of the Spinozistic Absolute, (4) was the most important trope in this regard. Later, the central trope became (3), which stresses the infinite inter-connectedness of all finite determinations. Theses (a)–(g) are partly positive theses, far transcending skepticism, as the “negative side of knowledge of the Absolute” (Skept. GW 4:207, cf. 222). These must be articulated in a system, metaphysics, which Hegel calls “Science.” How can this be done? Hegel sees the problem starting from 1803. It is a complex problem, which is decisive for his first masterpiece, the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). Starting from 1803 Hegel distances himself from Schelling, and, probably through a new reading of Plotinus and Sextus Empiricus, takes up again the Fichtean principle of the self-identity of the I (“I = I”) as a provisional definition of self-consciousness, which is now the starting point, though by no means the end, of Hegel’s system. (It is also identified with the critical principle of modernity, in contrast to the neutrality of Schelling’s Substance.) This also requires, however, to address the dilemma of the criterion posed by Sextus Empiricus (PH II, 4, §20), if indeed reality is restored as the possible object of knowledge (Wissen) by consciousness, and the subjectless metaphysics of absolute, substantial identity is put aside. Sextus’ dilemma (or trilemma) asks how it is possible to solve a dispute about the truth of competing propositions, before the dispute about the very criteria for

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solving such dispute is settled. Since it seems that the dispute about the criterion is itself a matter beyond normal assessment of competing propositions, there is a regressus in infinitum, and no criterion of truth can be found or stipulated. Hegel poses the problem expressly (PhG GW 9:58.12–22); we cannot detail Hegel’s solution here. It involves the (Heraclitean) “identity of identity and of non-identity,” one of Hegel’s earliest ways to express the Absolute; it involves distinguishing between Wissen and Erkennen (considered below). In the Phenomenology Hegel discovers that this also expresses the structure underlying the problem of the criterion for consciousness, because consciousness itself, having two possible objects of attention, can itself solve the dilemma (see in particular PhG GW 9:61). In his Introduction to the Phenomenology, Hegel stresses that the basic relation (Wissen) to the world is the relation of consciousness to its intended object, which it conceives to be independent from consciousness’s putative cognitive relation to it. Second, Hegel suggests that Sextus’s dilemma errs, because there is no vicious, but rather a virtuous circle, in comparing consciousness’s putative knowledge of its object, its way of approximating a true idea of what known things must be like, and its relative conceptions of knowledge as such—the way in which the alleged true object is organized. Consciousness itself is, in short, capable of self-criticism, because knowing is a temporally extended process, and consciousness has both an object it experiences, and its conceptions of that object, and of its knowing of that object; consciousness is not only object-directed, but also reflexively self-conscious. This holds even in the initial case of generalized skepsis, according to which all its beliefs about anything outer or external are false and deceptive.3 It is interesting to note that the application of skepticism to itself (early in the Jena period, prior to Hegel’s mature conception of consciousness) is already, implicitly, a form of such a structure, because it reduces Givens to pure, groundless phenomena that are, as such, comparable to shared appearances and conceptions of objects known according to some criterion, however fallacious. Better still, we can compare phenomena—objects as they appear to us, and our knowledge of those objects as this knowledge appears to us—to the pretentions of cognitive systems of beliefs, both empirical and second-level, i.e. about the structure of what knowledge is. This procedure Hegel comes to recognize as the internal dynamics of self-conscious Wissen in the Phenomenology (Varnier 1996, 303–305). This internal, dynamic structure of Wissen marks Hegel as an interestingly heterodox epistemologist. Hegel appears to accept the idea that knowledge is, by definition, justified true belief, and that truth is, concretely, the adequation of subject and object, although adequate cognitive justification is systematic and extremely complicated. In the Preface to the Phenomenology, he writes repeatedly that we can encounter our own presumtive, untrue, indeed false knowing; Hegel states: “To be sure, we can know falsely. For something to be known falsely means that knowing is unequal to its substance” (PhG GW 9:30.36–38). We could say that such wissen is not objective, according to Hegel; for exactly that reason it is connected to what is insubstantial, but can further develop toward substantiality and objectivity from a systematic viewpoint. Non-substantiality is still a part,

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sometimes a central part, of negativity, of the logical content of thinking, so that “knowing falsely” still means to have an object, though not the right object, or not yet adequately to grasp the object known, and certainly not the right justification. (These are implicit references to Plato’s Theaetetus, and to the polemic against the Eleatics.) Throughout his works, Hegel distinguishes between sentences or propositions that can be true, or better known, but are outside the comprehensive system and so are not contextually connected to its nexus of arguments and reasoning: he calls them Sätze, (mere) propositions. The propositions true within the system he calls Urteile, judgements. What we can know falsely are Sätze. Note Hegel’s use of “Wissen,” not “Erkennen.” Metaphysical truth, so to speak, “supervenes” on the mere act of Wissen, which is just the pretention of having an object whatever; also recall point (b) above. The negative, destructive epistemology of skepsis, that all singular determinations are prey to skeptical tropes and so are untrue, and Hegel’s solution to the dilemma of the criterion are thus deeply interconnected. This happens as follows. Truth, and the solution of the dilemma of the criterion, are achieved by cognition through self-consciousness, as ordered in a system. However, cognition in itself is ‘naturally’ seen and considered as divorced from the process of self-consciousness. This is what Dieter Henrich calls a “natural ontology,” and the reason why such an ontology is, in itself, false, or rather: misleading. Although the constant application of tropes and of counter-positions to determinations is not always complete, or clear, according to Hegel, ideally every proposition is ‘counterbalanced’—to employ R. Chisholm’s term for skeptical activity—by a counter-proposition, or an argument to an opposite conclusion. At every point of the system, so to speak, there is no truth, but only skeptical criticism. In the whole development of the system truth is made manifest, as consciousness itself progresses through various stages of knowledge. For this to be possible, the Phenomenology must have already shown that the “opposition of consciousness” (Gegensatz des Bewußtseins) is overcome. This means to have shown that the subject has, in principle, genuine access to forms of knowledge at the level of the Concept, the level at which the objectivity of subjective thought is made thematic. In the Introduction to the Science of Logic we read that the concept of “pure science” is presupposed, because the Phenomenology is nothing but the very “deduction” (Deduction), i.e. justification of it. Hegel continues: Absolute knowing is the truth of all modes of consciousness, since, as that movement (Gang) brought it forth, it is only in absolute knowing that the separation of the object (Gegenstand) from the certainty of itself has perfectly resolved itself, and the truth has become equal (gleich) to this certainty, just as this certainty has become equal to truth. Pure science [viz., the Science of Logic] thus presupposes the liberation from the opposition of consciousness. It contains the thought, inasmuch it is also the thing (Sache) itself, or the thing itself, inasmuch as it is also pure thought. As science, the truth is the pure, self-developing self-consciousness, and has the form (Gestalt) of the Self, that the known concept being in and for itself, the Concept as such, thought, is the one [Concept] being in and for itself. (WL GW 21:33)

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4 Kant’s Critical Self-Scrutiny of Reason is Achieved Historically From the preceding, Hegel clearly intends that all kinds of skepticism—Pyrrhonian, Cartesian, “veil of perception” skepticism, skepticism about appearances of things in themselves—are in this way overcome (this is point 1, above), but not in a preliminary, abstract way, but rather insofar as systematic philosophy can reconstruct knowledge in all forms concretely so as to undermine any and all grounds of doubt. This is the systematic aim of Hegel’s Logic, which culminates in the Concept, in the “subjective” Logic. Hegel makes clear that “subjective” here no longer means “arbitrary” or “contingent,” etc. (WL GW 21:49.18–22), but only the pure procedure of the knowing subject once it becomes possible to describe philosophically the methods and strategies by which it obtains and organizes knowledge. Hegel writes: “The subjective Logic is the Logic of the Concept, – of the essence, that has sublated its relation to a Being or an appearance (Schein), and in its determination is no longer external, but is the freely autonomous subjective determining itself within itself, or rather is the subject itself” (WL GW 21:49.15–18). The principle of self-consciousness, and it alone (as such and as noted: not as contingently subjective), survives even the skeptical tropes, which are able to show the equivalence and nothingness of every finite, empirical determination, according to Hegel. As such, indeed, it contains both the solution to the dilemma of the criterion and the guide to further development of that skepsis-turned-positive that Hegel calls “dialectical method.” In this function, consciousness in its definitive form, discussed above, is prefigured in the whole development of the Phenomenology, not only because it applies skeptical arguments to all determinations of thought, it also shows how proposed, initial definitions of knowledge across the range of their progression are not adequate to capture conceptually what knowledge is. Hegel uses the language of correspondence between “object” and “concept” to make such failures clear. The method is reminiscent of the progressive realization of a sentient, conscious human being out of a statue by Condillac. At first, we see that consciousness as “sense certainty” cannot even designate particulars. It needs “perception” to do that, to comprehend indexicality. “Perception” in turn requires a further ascent to “force and intellect,” because without such an organization, and yet remaining empirical, it could not go beyond observation terms. It then turns out that, in order to make sense of a Newtonian world, more still is needed. Here comes a decisive, Kantian move. Mere intellect cannot organize itself unless it is centered on self-consciousness. Self-consciousness, in itself, must come to recognize its independency and autonomy in confrontation: we have the master-slave dialectic, and, at the end of it, the requirement that self-consciousness is free. There is probably a break in the structure of the work with the chapter Reason (Vernunft), but this line of thinking continues. Hegel appears to argue that the conditions which make adequate Erkenntnis possible (and there are different forms of contextual knowledge we meet in the process) are socio-cultural,

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and even historical. In contemporary terms, we could say that Hegel in the sequel performs a thorough criticism also of the roots and presuppositions of the Kantian conception of subjectivity: also the “absolute” subject, not just objectivity, must be put into question. This requires its examination, not merely stating the question; Hegel’s Phenomenology may be his proposal to supply the unwritten chapter of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason which Kant merely titled: “The History of Pure Reason” (CPR A852-856/B880-884). This progression, though very convoluted and “historied” in the Pheno­ menology, is much like other such progressions in Hegel’s works. It is a necessary, skepticism-based progression, in which figures, principles or categories turn out to be insufficient to grasp truth. And it is a progression toward definitive truth defined as the final goal, knowledge of the conclusive adequation of concept and object, conducted through the continual comparison between given knowledge, and ideals of cognitive success implied in a definition thereof. Hegel retains the classical definition of knowledge, according to which “faith” or “belief” (Glauben) is part of “knowledge” (Wissen), but Wissen need not be propositional; and it is also the internalized form of belief justified by some cognitive practice, or forms of life in the Phenomenology, such as “skepticism” as an historical figure of the “truth of self-certainty”; each successor being a better attempt at cognition. Coherence in the progression is not mere logical consistency, and the adequacy of a system of beliefs is only a temporary stage in it, not adequate truth. Mere “belief” (Glauben) thus must become Science; it must not stop at mere feeling or sentimental assent (whence his criticism of Jacobi and of the idea that religion is a feeling). What counts is the very progression leading to new forms of partial adequation? They constitute a nexus of “dialectical configurations” (Gestalten) in the Phenomenology, or in other works, (sets of) categories. Only by their totality is Glauben (“faith” or “belief”) transformed into Wissen, and ultimately into knowledge proper (Erkenntnis), i.e. into Science. The constraints placed on the succession of configurations are obviously stronger than mere logical consistency; there is relevancy and conceptual, and even historical, connection. Hegel is a coherentist, in this regard; he works with a provisional idea of correspondence to bring his dialectical arguments to completion. A sort of final correspondence then supervenes on coherence (with some analogy to Davidson’s notorious strategy, though general agreement plays no role in Hegel’s view) (Davidson 1984). Truth as adequate comprehension is finally regained, unqualifiedly, only in the eventual self-reflection of Spirit on itself, as Idea, which is the objective, abstract structure of both the world and of knowledge. We see here again that what is built by using the five skeptical tropes—at first: self-consciousness, eventually: absolute knowing of Spirit itself—cannot itself be criticized by those very tropes; it survives them, and dictates the very development of the system also as an epistemological treatise. In an important section of the Encyclopaedia we find perhaps Hegel’s best real and objective, not merely nominal, definition of knowledge. Note that, at least in the Encyclopaedia, Wissen is (again) the formal counterposition of the subject

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to an object, which is already possessed by consciousness. The concrete form of knowledge is proper Erkennen, which always involves pure will, i.e. to pure, autonomous judgement by the individual, in Kant’s sense. Towards the end of the Remark to §445, in “a. Theoretical Spirit,” we find an impressive discussion of Erkennen, which comes very close to a skeptical result. Hegel writes: The action and deed of intelligence as theoretical spirit has been called Knowing (Erkennen), not in the sense that spirit, among other things, also knows, and intuits, represents, remembers, imagines and so on; such a position depends already upon the isolation of spiritual faculties we faulted just above, and furthermore also on the great question of modern time, whether true knowing, that is knowledge of truth, is possible; so that, when we have the insight that it is not possible, we must abandon all this effort. … Here is the place of the simple concept of knowing, which goes against the wholly general point of view of that question, that is, to put into question the possibility of true knowing in general, and to pretend it to be just a possibility and an arbitrary caprice, whether to pursue or instead to abandon knowing. The concept of knowing has revealed itself [here] as intelligence itself, as the certainty of Reason; the reality of intelligence is now knowing itself. … To the contrary [of that alleged caprice], knowing is true (wahrhaft), exactly inasmuch as [intelligence] makes it real, that is, posits for itself the concept of knowing itself. This formal determination has its concrete sense in that very same thing in which the knowing has it. The moments of its realizing activity are intuiting, representing, remembering and so on; these activities have no other immanent sense. … The True, which is ascribed to this satisfaction [of these activities as knowledge] lies in this: that intuiting, representing and so on are not isolated, but are present only as moments of the totality, of knowing itself. (Enc. §445R)

This passage cannot be dissected here, but the epistemological point should be clear by now (it is elaborated in §§465–468). The (Cartesian) question of the possibility of knowledge is emptied from within, and explained away. The knowing application of concepts to reality is indeed not possible, it is rather necessary, as for Kant—if and whenever we think at all. (Compare §13 of the B Deduction, and Kant’s treatment there of the concept of the “unity of the understanding.”) At the beginning of §445, Hegel had already written: “This activity [of intelligence] is knowing. The formal knowing (Wissen) of certainty ascends, as reason is more concrete, to determined and concept-adequate knowing. The proceeding of this ascending is itself rational.” In the Zusatz to §449 we read: “The achieved knowing belongs only to the pure thinking of conceptual (begreifenden) reason.” So, one is free to abandon the pursuit of knowledge, on whatever grounds. However, this option alone proves nothing; perhaps such skepticism is irrefutable, but it need not be refuted. Knowledge is possible, if we insist on using such inadequate locutions, Hegel suggests, because it is one and the same as intelligence and will, whereas all our cognitive capacities are artificially isolated from knowledge by so many philosophers. In the (Aristotelian) unity and action of these capacities in theoretical and practical spirit, knowledge is very real, indeed unavoidable. The so-called “Cartesian question” is misleading. If we pursue systematic knowledge, to its very end in Hegel’s very Aristotelian sense, we not only do know, but know truly and not “falsely,” as is the fate of skeptics, bald naturalists, and ultimately of all those who refuse to philosophize systematically.

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Hegel’s conception of a Science of Logic, and of the structure of an adequate philosophical system in which this definitive “solution” of the epistemological problem is embedded, can only be sketched here, to identify an epistemological core. There are three realms: Logic, Nature, and Spirit. (The contemporary reader will find some affinities here with Roger Penrose’s view.) Logic is the science of the abstract Idea. It alienates itself freely into Nature (frei entläßt: “to alienate itself freely as Nature starting from itself,” §244). When the “development” of Nature reaches Man, who is capable of conscious thinking and language, the “logical element” experiences a “resumption” (sometimes called “Resumtion”) that culminates in “absolute Spirit,” to which the Idea is transparent, and in which the knower and the known are fully adequate to each other. The third part of this system is the Philosophy of Spirit. The whole of the first section, Subjective Spirit—this is the “resumption” noted above—is similar in idea and intent, I maintain, to the structure of the System of Transcendental Idealism by Schelling (and even to the Fichtean idea of a “pragmatic history of self-consciousness”). It is enriched by a brief version of the Phenomenology, but also wisely shortened with respect to this model, as there is no place in it for an “organon” (like art) of absolute knowing, contra Schelling. Instead, this is replaced by Hegel’s two great innovations: “objective Spirit” (later developed in the Philosophy of Right), and “absolute Spirit,” by which a new, non-romantic and much less metaphysical description of the nature and limits of philosophical thinking, and especially of romantic subjectivity, is achieved. If this is so, then within the whole structure of Hegel’s complete system, the greatest innovation is the very first part, the Logic—realized also as an autonomous work, the Science of Logic. The Science of Logic can itself be seen as a work of philosophical epistemology: an almost formal (tropological) treatise on the conditions and constraints under which knowledge of ontology (in the first part, the “objective logic”) and knowledge of logic and epistemology themselves (in the second part, the “subjective logic”) are possible and must be conducted (or, if you insist, narrated). This is why it is so important to take into account also the Logic in trying to understand Hegel’s epistemological ideas. For this same reason, there is a rich textual basis to envisage Hegel as a proper epistemologist.

5 Hegel’s Systematic Philosophy Anticipates (inter alia) Structural Realism Given these provisos, one may wonder what kind of philosopher Hegel really is. First of all, he is a systematic philosopher, in the very strong sense that actual knowledge (Science), hence reality, and the exposition of it in the system coincide: the more comprehensive and specific the exposition, the wider and deeper the knowledge. (Hegel was conscious that he had only sketched the whole of an ideal total system.) Below we shall consider the epistemological ground of this surprising view. Note first that adherence to the system means not to adhere to any of the finite determinations it examines—not even the very final one: absolute Spirit.

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Only this can avoid skepticism and the equipollence of reasons at every stage. Hegel’s idealism consists exactly in this irreality at every stage of any and every finite standpoint, at least for the genuinely knowing subject: truth is in the circular process and in its infinite expansion (see Rockmore 1986, 2005). The criterion is in the ability to conduct infinite criticism. In a sense, everything is put at stake in the system, from the absolute object to the absolute subject, and at the same time. This is how we renounce all presuppositions, as Hegel intends. There is by now some agreement among scholars that Hegel was a realist, and pluralist, in epistemology, and an idealist, and monist, only in ontology (Westphal 1989, 2018; Halbig 2002; Halbig et al. 2004).4 He believed that only the Idea, or better: its dynamic structure, exists—not as any finite entity, but as a continuing structured process. This process is absolute Spirit, which has itself, and also many (subordinate) manifestations, as its objects, and we human beings can and do achieve objective knowledge of these manifestations, epistemically secured by the system in the ways we saw. In contemporary terms, it is possible to regard Hegel’s trust in the possibility to understand the forms of the world and of the theories describing them as a form of structural realism, as prefigured also in Russell (Worrall 1989). His theory can also be seen as a theory about the identity of subject and object in knowledge. A fragment from the Nürnberg or Bamberg period seems to corroborate this hypothesis right at the start: “Knowing has essentially itself as an object, or the object is, to it, itself. The determination or realization of itself is therefore the prosecution of the determination of its object; because this object is the making and the existence of that knowing; but as separated from its object this is the simple essential unity, or precisely the abstract moment of this self-equality (Selbstgleichheit) with itself” (WL GW 12:257.1–5). In “The Idea of the Knowing,” Hegel states that the Idea has two sides, the Concept as aim, and the “limit (Schranke) of the subjective, the objective world”; and “this unity is now posited by the knowing” (WL GW 12:199.9ff., and line 18). It is clear that we can compare this with our previous comments on the phrase “it is certainly possible to know falsely”: knowing must be developed in a systematic way, in order to be more than a merely possible, abstract identification of subject and object. Everything indicates that, according to Hegel, this is possible within the system. Through argument (i.e., a form of cognitive mediation), in the Science of Logic, Hegel argues that it is superfluous to assume a world “behind” the world, so to speak, and then to hold that we know only mere appearances. Epistemologically, this “proof”—described as the exposition of Wirklichkeit (actuality)—is contained especially in Hegel’s transition from essence (Wesen) to Concept (Begriff). If it is a proof, it is hugely complicated, and impossible to examine here. It brings us, however, to the point indicated above: knowing as the necessary synthesis of the two sides of the Idea is knowledge of structures of cognitive procedures and forms of description of their objects. It would be not wrong, though highly misleading, to conclude from this anti-Kantian proof that Hegel claimed that we can know things in themselves in Kant’s sense. First of all, in common sense we lack genuine knowledge of things

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or isolated states of affairs. We have knowledge (only) of a totality—or of totalities, of connections among things. The very idea of “noumena” is a foundationalist illusion: after knowledge is secured in the sense shown, only proper reality (independent of the finite, empirical subject), and not “appearance” (dóxa), remains to be known. What then is “proper knowledge”? This is difficult to answer briefly and directly, but recall what was said about “structural realism.” The “thing in itself,” Hegel argues, is posited as “identical with exterior existence,” and also as “the empty abstraction from all determination” (WL GW 11.328–332); to be merely something “in itself,” it must lack any and all constitutive features and relations, even the purported relation of being external to us. The “thing in itself” is unknowable because there is nothing to know about it, other than that it is an empty, cognitively useless expostulation. How can we appreciate the idea of a dialectical logic that leads us to such conclusions? How can such conclusions be cognitively adequate? According to the Cartesian tradition, the logic of the mind never errs, unless it deceives itself by mis-judgment; it cannot, and need not, be artificially improved. This logic is deposited in language, and deceives itself only insofar as it overlooks the true nature of the linguistic medium. According to this tradition in epistemology, thinking pursued with due attention and from correct premises can never fail: our inferential abilities are, in themselves, infallible. According to another tradition, that of Leibniz and John Stuart Mill, we need aid in thinking through logic and exercise in using it. Hegel bridges both traditions; he acknowledges the centrality of cultural, social and historical developments in thinking, and strongly rejects “immediate knowledge.” According to Hegel, all that is penetrated by thought exhibits a dialectical structure that human beings are able to discern and to trace back, through dialectical counter-balancing of arguments and ideas, without fail to its source in “absolute knowledge”—“absolute,” although it must be spelled out as such for the finite subject. And everything is ultimately comprehensible by thought. These views are the among the main reasons why Hegel always opposed merely “formal” (deductive) logic (WL GW 12:110). Hegel’s “logic” also includes—as was common in the Modern period—accounts of judgement and syllogism, and their cognitive roles and use. This non-formal, substantive “logical” element of cognition is present, though not immediately, in language and in conceptually structured thought. Deposited in language as linguistic thought is “das Logische,” i.e.: objective thought (Enc. §§474, 475, cf. §419; WL GW 21:15–16; GW 11:22, 28; 12:11ff., 236–238). If we elucidate this properly, which Hegel purports to do in and with his “system,” it is necessary that we come to knowing, in the ways indicated above. There is, in thought, as we saw in connection with “Sense Certainty” and “Perception,” both a (non-conceptual) representational element, which is immediately present and often image-like, and a logical element, which belongs to language and of thinking, but is obscured by the former, and thus requires “mediation,” and even a holistic analysis of our thinking and speaking, in order to be fully grasped; only then is it true and fully justified. This latter achievement is properly infallible; it comprehends the very heart of reality; whereas the former is,

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according to Hegel, “abstract,” it can neither make nor assess and properly integrate the subtle distinctions necessary to objective thinking and knowledge. Improving our thinking and knowing means not restraining it with external rules, but making it ever more acute and accurate until it becomes wholly and naturally independent of prejudices and incomplete, partial representations: until it becomes “absolute” with respect to the contents it entertains and judges. This is the task of Hegel’s dialectical method; critical circularity is its procedure: “the true is the whole” (PhG GW 9:19.12). As a consequence the substance must become subject, a process that runs through Hegel’s system. (On the transformation from “substance” to absolute subject in the Logic see Düsing 1995.)

6 Knowing is Anchored in Doing, in Practical Reasoning and Activities Especially in the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences (Psychology: Spirit), as we saw, Hegel proposes yet another way of regarding knowledge. Knowledge is closely connected to practical thinking. It is in a sense a dianoetic virtue (an Aristotelian idea) that cannot be divorced from acting practically in the proper way. In this perspective, knowledge (Wissen) is the right way of thinking and doing in and about the world and ultimate reality. Knowledge, also Erkenntnis, is not separate from pragmatic conditions or social effectiveness. Hence we can speak of a kind of “virtue epistemology” in Hegel, and that knowledge requires an adequate social setting and so on. (In the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, knowledge is intrinsically connected to ethics, to the knowledge of good and evil.) Also in this perspective, we can appreciate one of the particular meanings of the word “absolute,” for instance in “absolute knowing.” “Absolute” (ab-solutum) means “independent,” that which is not relative to anything, and in respect to which everything else is dependent. Absolute knowing thus allows us to pass a definitive judgement on reality in all its facets: what is true, and what is good, independently of all presuppositions, that must have been discarded in the course of the system, the “science without presuppositions.” Ultimately, in these systematic works skepticism, which is valid in all its particular aspects, is consumated by being sublated and superseded. In particular, the distinction between concept and instantiation, or, if one prefers, text of the system and reality itself, is shown to be itself only a part of the development of thought.5 This is as close as Hegel comes to prove the identity of subject and object, and thus to secure epistemologically the certainty of knowledge. It is clear also that Hegel’s system, including his Science of Logic, is an epistemology, not a system of formal logic, nor a system which can be usefully formalized. In the end, what kind of an epistemologist was Hegel? It is clear that he was anti-foundationalist. The whole totality of mediations spirit requires to reach knowledge and effective, accurate reference to reality does suggest that he is a kind of externalist in semantics and epistemology. (A large part of the mediation is social and cultural, given in the history of thought itself.) In strictly Hegelian

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terms this applies, however, only to the finite, empirical subject, who is the typical prey of representation and over-confidence in the raw “data” of experience (and commonsensical belief). When this subject ascends to absolute knowing, as it must, the situation is different. As we saw, Hegel is still, after all, a Cartesian epistemologist of a sort. The absolute subject or spirit is supposed to know all mediations and to be able to judge about truth and reference independently, wholly on its own. In this respect, justification is internal to the subject, though the grounds for it are constituted by the whole system that the subject itself realizes and inspects. This is also the reason why, since in the end “absolute spirit” entails the justification of all “valid knowledge” from as independent a standpoint as possible, Hegel is no relativist, though he was certainly a historical source for relativism. This is also why he is not, in the end, a skeptic, although he does not believe in the independent self-sufficiency of empirical knowledge and accepts, in a sense, all the skeptic’s objections to such knowledge and to scientific knowledge, and foundations. Hegel is an anti-foundationalist, infinitist,6 circular epistemologist: at the conclusion of the system, one is not dogmatically certain of reality, one is back to the initial situation (sinnliche Gewißheit, the “certainty of the senses”) with an enhanced trust in the powers of the human mind for criticizing and reasoning away alleged, though inadequate (usually merely empirical) knowing. And the process must be repeated ad infinitum. All the “presuppositions” of Science must have been sublated, along with the possible errors of representations; this is a continuing process, not an end-point. Hegel’s epistemology is clearly anti-representationalist, too. Hence some open questions remain. Is knowledge a direct relation to its object, or to a complex, general object? (This relates to possible influences from the Scottish School, by Hume.) Is his epistemology coherentist or correspondentist? It seems that systematic coherence, a concept to be defined only in terms of the “dialectical method,” ultimately lends credibility to the notion that correspondence, and perhaps directness too, supervenes on the results of the systematic path at the “end” of the system. But such conjectures require further elaboration than is possible here. We can end by remarking that Hegel’s way of reconstructing epistemological theories, its extreme (historical and conceptual) complication notwithstanding, is full of important suggestions for contemporary thought, in addition to offering an historically unique way of addressing skeptical challenges.

Notes 1. See Bristow (2007), also about our further considerations on the criterion and the central role of the modern, free subject of epistemological inquiry. 2. Hegel’s essay on scepticism is very early (1802); his rejection of any transcendental constitution of things represents a Kantian position about reality being a product of the activity of consciousness; at this time, Hegel considered Kant a metaphysician who had not pursued metaphysical thinking to its necessary end, and got then stuck with the problematic “Ding an sich.”

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3. This mode of self-criticism is examined and justified in detail in Westphal (1988). My whole discussion of criterion depends on his analysis. 4. See also Paul Redding’s several recent articles on Hegel’s theory of judgement. 5. Along with the conception that the trope of relationship is central, this seems to me to be the key idea formulated by Forster (see Forster 1989). 6. See Aikin (2010). For anti-foundationalism, see Dancy (1985, 277ff.), and already Sellars (1997). Acknowledgements  Translations are all mine, and as literal as possible. I thank Dr. P. Masciarelli for help and suggestions.

Bibliography Aikin, Scott F. 2010. “The Problem of the Criterion and Hegel’s Model for Epistemic Infinitism.” History of Philosophy Quarterly 27 (4): 379–388. Bristow, William F. 2007. Hegel and the Transformation of Philosophical Critique. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Chisholm, Roderick. 1989. Theory of Knowledge, 3rd ed. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Dancy, Jonathan. 1985. Introduction to Contemporary Epistemology. London: Blackwell. Davidson, Donald. 1984. “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge.” In Kant oder Hegel? edited by Dieter Henrich, 423–438. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Düsing, Klaus. 1995. Das Problem der Subjektivität in Hegels Logik. Systematische und entwicklungsgeschichtliche Untersuchungen zum Prinzip des Idealismus und zur Dialektik, 3rd ed. Hamburg: Meiner Verlag. Feuerbach, Anselm. 1795. “Über die Unmöglichkeit eines ersten absoluten Grundsatzes der Philosophie.” Philosophisches Journal einer Gesellschaft teutscher Gelehrten 2 (4): 306–322. Forster, Michael N. 1989. Hegel and Skepticism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Forster, Michael N. 1998. Hegel’s Idea of a Phenomenology of Spirit. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Halbig, Christoph. 2002. Objektives Denken: Erkenntnistheorie und Philosophy of Mind in Hegels System. Stuttgart-Bad Canstatt: Frommann-Holzboog. Halbig, Christoph, Michael Quante, and Ludwig Siep, eds. 2004. Hegels Erbe. Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp. Harris, Henry S. 1983. Hegel’s Development: Night Thoughts (Jena 1801–1806). Oxford: Clarendon Press. Henrich, Dieter, 1982. Selbstverhältnisse: Gedanken und Auslegungen zu den Grundlagen der klassischen deutschen Philosophie. Stuttgart: Philipp Reclam. Marconi, Diego. 2001. Filosofia e scienze cognitive. Roma-Bari: Laterza. Meist, Kurt Reiner 1993. “‘Sich vollbringender Skeptizismus.’ G. E. Schulzes Replik auf Hegel und Schelling.” In Transzendentalphilosophie und Spekulation: Der Streit um die Gestalt einer ersten Philosophie (1799–1807), edited by Walter Jaeschke, 192–230. Hamburg: Meiner Verlag. Petry, Michael J. ed. 1987. Hegel und die Naturwissenschaften. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt. Fromann-Holzboog. Petry, Michael J. ed. 1993. Hegel and Newtonianism. Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog. Pippin, Robert B. 1989. Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pippin, Robert B. 1991. Modernism as a Philosophical Problem: On the Dissatisfactions of European High Culture. Oxford: Blackwell.

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Pippin, Robert B. 1997. Idealism as Modernism: Hegelian Variations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Plato. 2006. The Republic. Translated by R. E. Allen. New Haven: Yale University Press. Rockmore, Tom. 1986. Hegel’s Circular Epistemology. Bloomington: Indiana University Press. Rockmore, Tom. 1996. On Hegel’s Epistemology and Contemporary Philosophy. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press International. Rockmore, Tom. 2005. On Constructivist Epistemology. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield. Rockmore, Tom. 2016. German Idealism as Constructivism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Schulze, Gottlob E. 1801. Kritik der theoretischen Philosophie. 2 vols. Hamburg: Bohm. Schulze, Gottlob E. 1803. “Aphorismen über das Absolute.” In Neues Museum der Philosophie und Litteratur, edited by Fr. Bouterwek, vol. 1(2), 105–148. Sellars, Wilfrid. 1997. Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, with an Introduction by Richard Rorty. Boston: Harvard University Press. Sextus Empiricus. 1933. Outlines of Pyrrhonism. In Works in 4 vols., vol. 1, translated by Rev. R. G. Bury. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (Loeb Library).—Cited as ‘PH’ by Book, paragraph numbers. Varnier, Giuseppe. 1996. “Versuchte Hegel eine Letztbegründung? Bemerkungen zur wissenschaftlichen Skepsis als Einleitung und zum Begriff einer ‘skeptischen Wissenschaft.’” In Skeptizismus und spekulatives Denken in der Philosophie Hegels, edited by H. F. Fulda and R.-P. Horstmann, 285–330. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Westphal, K. R. 1988. “Hegel’s Solution to the Dilemma of the Criterion.” History of Philosophy Quarterly 5 (2): 173–188 (Expanded version: In The Phenomenology of Spirit Reader: A Collection of Critical and Interpretive Essays, edited by J. Stewart, 76–91. Albany: State University of New York Press, 1997). Westphal, K. R. 1989. Hegel’s Epistemological Realism: A Study of the Aim and Method of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Westphal, Kenneth R. 1998. Hegel, Hume, und die Identität wahrnehmbarer Dinge. Historischkritische Analyse zum Kapitel ‘Wahrnehmung’ in der Phänomenologie von 1807 (Philosophische Abhandlungen. Bd. 72). Frankfurt/Main: Vittorio Klostermann. Westphal, Kenneth R. 2003a. “Hegel’s Manifold Response to Skepticism in the Phenomenology of Spirit.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 103 (2): 149–178. Westphal, Kenneth R. 2003b. Hegel’s Epistemology: An Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit. Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing Co. Westphal, Kenneth R. 2018. Grounds of Pragmatic Realism: Hegel’s Internal Critique and Transformation of Kant’s Critical Philosophy. Leiden: Brill. Worrall, John. 1989. “Structural Realism: The Best of Both Worlds?” Dialectica 43 (1/2): 99–124.

Part II

Phenomenology of Spirit

Chapter 5

The Role of Religion in Hegel’s Phenomenological Justification of Philosophical Science Ardis B. Collins

1 Introduction Hegel suggests in various statements that philosophical science from its beginning has a religious dimension. The subject matter of philosophy is already familiar, he says, because it belongs to religion (Enc. 1 GW 19, §1). The Science of Logic describes this first part of Hegel’s philosophical system, as “the exposition of God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and of a finite spirit” (WL GW 21:34). Hegel’s examination of three positions on objectivity rejects the way Kant’s Critical Philosophy restricts reason to the rationality of human reason and human morality, because it fails to recognize that truth is made actual by God, whose absolute truth resolves the oppositions typical of human reason (Enc. 1 GW 19, §§41–44, 58–60). The same examination endorses Jacobi’s claim that the human spirit knows the infinite, all-encompassing truth that God is, and also the way Jacobi conceives this truth as thought identified with the self-standing, independent reality of being. The examination rejects, however, the way this knowing takes the form of an intuition that asserts the actual existence of the infinite based on nothing but the knower’s own felt conviction, the way it excludes all mediation and thus all dependence on a demonstration that proves its truth. According to Hegel, this “excluding posture” reduces our knowledge of the infinite to a fact of consciousness, “a psychological phenomenon”, an experience (Erfahrung). As such, it can make no claims on the consciousness of anyone else, and thus loses its status as the universal, necessary truth required for philosophical science (Enc. 1 GW 19, §§63–66, 69–71, 76).1 According to these statements, therefore, philosophy begins with a concept of truth that carries with it transcendence claims usually associated with religion, this concept requires a demonstration

A. B. Collins (*)  Loyola University Chicago, Chicago, IL, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 M. F. Bykova and K. R. Westphal (eds.), The Palgrave Hegel Handbook, Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26597-7_5

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of its truth, and this demonstration must prove that the conclusion has the kind of necessity that compels assent from every knower. The discussion developed in this chapter examines the way Hegel interprets the Phenomenology of Spirit as the fulfillment of these proof requirements. The examination focuses first on the structure of the proof procedure and the role it plays in Hegel’s claim that philosophy begins without presuppositions. With this established, the focus shifts to the way the proof structure governs specific moves in the Phenomenology. The whole discussion seeks to show how Hegel’s proof procedure preserves strong, even radical, otherness within the sameness of a whole, and how this determines the way the transcendence of religion’s God persists in the beginning concept of philosophical science. The limited domain of a single chapter, however, cannot provide a careful analysis of all the moves involved in the topic proposed. This presentation, therefore, reconstructs the proof in a schematic form, sometimes only suggesting the way it develops over large sections of Hegel’s text, and in some parts simply selecting the elements most relevant to the topic. It also takes for granted an analysis I have published elsewhere, in which I address questions raised about whether the move from the conclusion of the Phenomenology to the beginning concept of philosophical science involves a transition in which fundamental changes are developed (Collins 2013, Chapters 18 and 19). In the discussion presented here, I will assume that the truth conceived in absolute knowing at the end of the Phenomenology is fundamentally the same as the truth conceived in the beginning concept of philosophical science, although the form of knowing it is different.

2 Hegel’s Ambiguous Discussion of the Presupposition Question Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is an early work (1807), and some scholars have suggested that Hegel in his later years no longer considered it a correct or adequate representation of his thought.2 In order to take this into account, we focus here on a set of texts selected from the introductory essays of the Science of Logic. These essays, composed in the final years of Hegel’s life, belong to the later developments of Hegel’s thought.3 The Logic develops the interpretation of the Phenomenology within the context of a distinction between ordinary phenomenal (erscheidenden) consciousness and philosophical thought. Ordinary phenomenal consciousness assumes that the object stands alone, that it is what it is whether or not it is involved in a relation to knowing, whereas thought cannot be thought unless it is completed by its relation to the content provided by the object. A more reflective version of this consciousness makes explicit what other versions leave undetermined, namely that thought and its object belong to different spheres with no pre-established appropriateness

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between them. Hence whatever thought does to make the object intelligible reveals not what the object itself is, but only what thought has made of it (WL GW 21:10–15, 27–29). Hegel distinguishes this set of assumptions from those of philosophical science. Philosophical science, he says, “presupposes” thought liberated from the opposition that separates thought from the independent objectivity of what it thinks. The concept that identifies the subject matter of philosophical science is pure thought, thought focused on itself, but with the presupposition that pure thought identifies what being in its own independent reality truly is. Since ordinary phenomenal consciousness challenges this presupposition, Hegel says that overcoming the opposition in phenomenal consciousness is a necessary condition for entering the standpoint of philosophical science (WL GW 21:33–34; see also Enc. 1 GW 19, §§26–29.). The introductory essays of the Logic explicitly and repeatedly assign the task of “overcoming” the opposition in consciousness to the Phenomenology. Moreover, they call this “overcoming” a “deduction” that produces as its result the beginning concept of philosophical science; and they insist that this concept cannot be justified in any other way. According to these same texts, this justification demonstrates that free self-contained thought is the truth of consciousness. Overcoming the opposition in consciousness does not set aside ordinary phenomenal consciousness; it exposes what phenomenal consciousness truly is (WL GW 21:32–34, 45). In the essay, “With What Must the Beginning of Science Be Made,” Hegel considers an alternative to this way of entering philosophy. He calls the alternative “beginning with the I.” He opens the discussion by explaining why this approach seems appropriate for philosophy. If the beginning of philosophy cannot depend on anything else, precisely because it is the beginning, then philosophy must begin with something immediately accessible. Moreover, this immediately accessible truth must carry with it a legitimacy that goes beyond the subjective feelings of a particular subject. It must be true for every knower. Finally, the beginning of philosophy must be detached from all content, so that it can derive all its determinations from itself. The structure of a self that knows immediately its own identity with itself seems to fulfill all these requirements (WL GW 21:62–63). Hegel, however, challenges the claim that this empty “I am I” is immediately accessible. The thinking subject has direct access only to ordinary consciousness, the ego absorbed by its relation to the concrete, diversified content of empirical consciousness. Before this ego can become the beginning of philosophy, it must separate itself from its content and become conscious of itself as the empty “I am I” in which the difference of subject and object disappears. If, however, philosophy begins by simply demanding that the individual ego assume this position, then it reduces the beginning of philosophy to an arbitrarily chosen (willkürlicher) standpoint, “a subjective postulate,” or even to an empirical state of consciousness that may or may not be found or produced in each and every thinker (WL GW 21:62–64).4

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Thus, the introductory essays of the Logic state explicitly that philosophy begins with a concept that emerges from and is justified by the critical examination of knowledge developed in the Phenomenology. The same claims appear in the introductory essays of the Encyclopedia (Enc. 1 GW 19 §25R). These essays also say, however, that philosophy begins without presuppositions, that one can begin philosophical science by a simple resolve to focus on thought as such without any determinations or predicates (WL GW 21:56; Enc. 1 GW 19 §§17, 78 & R). Yet the Logic’s “With What Must the Beginning of Science Be Made?” explicitly rejects a beginning that simply chooses to assume the position of an abstract “I am I” that derives all its determinations from its development within philosophical science.5

3 Hegel’s Scientific Proof Procedure6 Hegel says explicitly and repeatedly that the same scientific procedure operates in philosophical science itself and in the Phenomenology. Indeed, he uses the ­procedure developed in the Phenomenology as an example for explaining the general structure of the procedure (WL GW 21:8, 37–38, 57–59). Hegel explains the structure of scientific procedure by comparing it to other sciences. Every science has an ambiguous relation to the concept with which it begins. Each science begins with a concept that identifies the subject matter to be investigated. The investigation itself produces the concept as a result by exposing its full meaning. Other sciences, however, take from an external source the beginning concept and the method used to develop its full meaning. Biology, for example, assumes that there is life in nature, begins with the generally accepted understanding of what life is, and investigates life by using the established procedure of the empirical sciences. Philosophical sciences, however, must justify the beginning concept itself by demonstrating the necessity of its beginning definition and by proving that it cannot be dismissed as an empty, meaningless notion; and they must derive the full meaning of the concept from necessities implicit in its beginning definition (WL GW 21:7, 27, 39–40). The philosophy of right, for example, begins with a definition of right whose necessity has been demonstrated by what precedes it in the philosophical system; and it develops the fuller articulation of what right is from necessities implicit in the definition with which the science begins (RPh GW 14 §§1, 2 & R, 4, 29, 31 & R). The presupposition issue, therefore, involves two different questions. Every philosophical science derives all the determinations of its subject matter from the necessities implicit in the minimal concept that identifies the subject matter of the science. In this sense, the science presupposes nothing; the determinations of the subject matter emerge within the science itself. Philosophical science as a whole begins by focusing on the logical or rational, and it produces as its result a full articulation of what the logical is. Logic itself proves what the determinations of the logical are (WL GW 21:27). However, philosophical necessity also requires

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proof that the beginning concept of the logical or rational must be accepted as a correct definition and cannot be dismissed as an empty notion. Hegel analyzes the inference structure of scientific procedure as a series of determinate negations, which he describes as “correct inferences,” in which “nothing extraneous” is introduced (WL GW 21:37–38, 57–58). The negation emerges from a necessity implicit in the concept that it negates, which determines the move to a higher form (WL GW 21:37–38). Because the result, the negation, is a determinate negation, it has a content. It is a new concept but one higher and richer than the preceding – richer because it negates or opposes the preceding and therefore contains it, and it contains even more than that, for it is the unity of itself and its opposite. (WL GW 21:37–38; see also PhG GW 9:56–57, ¶79)

This necessary connection between opposites is what Hegel calls the ­self-contradictory. Hegel’s self-contradictions, however, do not assert and deny the same claim. They emerge in opposition relations to which both the original concept and its opposite belong as opposed, necessarily different extremes. This proves the necessity of shifting to a concept that holds the necessary differentiation of the opposites within the sameness of the whole dynamic. Hegel explains the full development of this process as a retreat into a ground. The demonstration begins with something accessible and accepted as true. It proceeds to show that this truth depends on a ground from which it has been derived and by which it has been determined. Thus, the process of coming to know the truth reverses the priorities of the truth itself. Coming to know begins with what has been derived from the ground; and it uses its knowledge of the derivative truth to prove, to ground, its knowledge of the ground itself. In order to know the truth in its proper form, however, knowledge must reverse direction and derive its knowledge of what is determined by the ground from its knowledge of the ground. Knowledge begins this process by asserting the ground as not mediated, i.e. as independent of relations to anything other than itself, and hence as without presuppositions. Knowledge can do this because this immediate knowing asserts the originating principle, the ground, of the evidence that has retreated into it. In the Phenomenology, therefore, scientific procedure exposes determinate negations in which each form of phenomenal consciousness dissolves in a necessary connection to its opposite, until the whole field of phenomenal consciousness collapses into a connected whole and retreats into the ground that governs its diversification and unification. Philosophical science asserts this ground in its immediacy, independent of its relations to phenomenal consciousness, because this is what the Phenomenology has proved it to be. Hence, logic begins with the concept of pure knowledge, cut off from all determining relations, in order to think it as the source, not the result, of the forms of consciousness through which its necessity has been proved (WL GW 21:32–34, 44–45, 54–59). From this analysis of the phenomenological project, Hegel develops a threefold way of conceiving the beginning of logic. First, the beginning concept of logic, thought as such or pure knowledge, presupposes the necessity of its emergence in consciousness, which the Phenomenology has demonstrated. This is the beginning

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as mediated, conceived as the truth of consciousness. Second, the examination developed in the Phenomenology sets up pure knowing as not a phenomenal consciousness kind of knowing. Consciousness has its truth not in phenomenal consciousness itself but in pure knowledge or thought as such. This is the beginning as mediation sublated; its emergence in consciousness separates it from phenomenal consciousness. Third, logic begins with the resolve to consider thought as such, to begin with thought simply being. This is the beginning cut off from all mediation. The beginning, however, depends on the examination of consciousness, which proves that the logical or rational is properly conceived as thought liberated from its relation to consciousness, thought standing in itself, on its own, not conceived in terms of consciousness (WL GW 21:55–56).7 According to Stephen Houlgate and Kevin Thompson, beginning philosophy with the immediate and presuppositionless form of thought thinking itself can qualify as an alternative to a beginning derived from the Phenomenology’s critical examination of consciousness (Houlgate 2006, 144–150, 157–162; Thompson 2014–2015, 120–122). According to my interpretation, this presuppositionless beginning is not an alternative; it is the last move in the transition that derives the beginning concept of philosophy from the retreat into a ground developed in the Phenomenology. It thinks the ground as what the Phenomenology has proved it to be, the origin and determining principle of everything that has led up to it (WL GW 21:54). If, however, the Phenomenology operates according to a scientific procedure, then we must ask how the beginning concept of the Phenomenology itself is established. The Introduction to the Phenomenology presents the beginning concept not as a concept formulated by thought, but as the fundamental structure of consciousness, the minimal conditions for any form of consciousness to appear, consciousness conscious of something (etwas) (PhG GW 9:57–58, ¶¶80–82).8 The Phenomenology has as its subject matter the reality of consciousness engaged in being conscious of something (etwas). Hence, it must develop the necessary implications of this concept from the internal dynamics of an actual experience, beginning with its minimal form (PhG GW 9:61–62, ¶¶88–89). Hegel finds in this minimal form a self-critical dynamic between the object for consciousness and the object in itself. Although Hegel interprets the object in itself as “external to” (außer) the consciousness relation, he insists that the distinction between the object in itself and the object for consciousness falls within consciousness, that consciousness itself compares them, and that the whole dynamic is “present in the very fact that consciousness knows an object at all” (PhG GW 9:59, ¶85). Consider, for example, consciousness of blue. Being conscious of blue does not make it blue. It just is blue. Yet blue is also “for” consciousness, since consciousness is conscious of blue. Thus, the simple fact that consciousness is conscious of blue contains both blue being blue and blue being “for” consciousness. Consciousness conscious of something expects the truth to be what an object is in itself, on its own, simply because it cannot complete the consciousness relation, and hence cannot happen, unless this independent content is provided. Consciousness tests the truth of its consciousness by whether the experience of

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the object, its being for consciousness, meets this truth expectation. The truth criterion changes if this experience exposes a necessary connection between the original truth criterion and something else; and the new truth criterion must assert nothing more than the dynamic unity implicit in the connection thus exposed. The Phenomenology, like the introductory essays of the Logic, analyzes these moves as determinate negations (PhG GW 9:56–57, ¶79; 59–60, ¶¶84–86). The Phenomenology develops its examination of cognition by taking the position of an observer consciousness detached from the truth expectations of the various forms of cognition examined. In order to meet the requirements of scientific procedure, however, the observer must not interfere with the internally determined dynamics of the consciousness being examined. Consciousness in its minimal form must experience whatever it is conscious of according to its built-in orientation toward an object with a content of its own. It must shift its norms according to the necessities exposed by the determinate negations that emerge from this experience; and these negations not only negate, they also positively determine what the new orientation must be. Everything that develops in the process must emerge from the necessary implications of the beginning structure, without introducing anything “extraneous.” The observer consciousness follows the track of the negations that emerge until it finally retreats into a ground that identifies the subject matter of philosophical science and functions as its beginning concept (PhG GW 9:59–60, ¶¶84–85, 89; WL GW 21:54–55, 57–58).9

4 Consciousness Retreats into the Infinity of Life and Self-Consciousness The Phenomenology begins with the truth expectations defined by the minimal concept of its subject matter, which takes the truth to be what the object is in itself, independent of its relation to consciousness, and takes consciousness to be a pure relation completely receptive to and dependent on this independent content. When, however, consciousness tries to become conscious of what the object is, the object dissolves into a continuity of different objects sensed in a series of different conscious states. In order to catch hold of an object standing firm in what it is, consciousness must focus on a content that spreads out and persists within a part of the continuity cut off from the rest. This calls for a shift into the truth expectations of perception, which takes the truth to be a separate, self-identical thing. Perception finds that consciousness of a thing in its separateness depends on a dynamic in which the thing displays itself as a diversity of properties involved in contrast relations to other properties, and manifests its separation from the perceptual field as these same properties overlapping and belonging to each other. Thus, perception succeeds in becoming conscious of a separate, self-identical thing only to find that its separateness dissolves into excluding relations to other things.

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This dynamic preserves the being-for-self exclusiveness of the thing’s self-identity within a continuity that joins its exclusiveness to that of other things. As a result, the separateness of things becomes a separation and relation dynamic between opposed forces, which transforms the whole perceptual field into an interconnected system (PhG GW 9:74–75, ¶117; 78–79, ¶¶125–128; 83–88, ¶¶136–141). In order to become conscious of the field in this form, consciousness distinguishes the unity of the system from the diversity of its appearances. The unifying principle, however, has no other content than the manifested diversity itself re-conceived as a connected whole. Hence, consciousness cancels the distinction, and thinks the diversity as intrinsic to the unifying principle itself. The principle explains not only the connection that integrates the diversity of its appearances into the same whole, but also the diversifying dynamic that separates the whole into mutually exclusive identities setting themselves off from each other. This unification-diversification dynamic, which Hegel calls infinity, re-defines the objective order as a life system. A universal life force distributes and diversifies itself in the separate self-identity of individual organisms situated within a continuous space-time environment. This same force reunites with itself by driving the organisms through their life needs into dynamic relations with each other and the environment. The whole system operates as a life and death process in which different self-identities emerge and are negated. The “distinction cancelled” move also cancels the distinction between the unifying principle that preserves the independence of the objective system and the appearances in which this principle makes itself manifest to consciousness. The “beyond” is re-conceived as an inner truth whose very essence requires its appearance in the perceptual field’s being-for consciousness. The life system determines itself as an independent world that necessarily relates itself to and exists for the conscious self. The unification-diversification dynamic of the objective life-system, in which unity is one of the participating opposites, brings itself to a persistent self-sameness in its being-for the conscious self (PhG GW 9:88–91, ¶¶143–149, 94–102, ¶¶154–165).10 This move calls for and justifies a shift to a different set of truth expectations. According to the truth expectations of consciousness, the object dominates the whole relation and defines the other member of the relation, i.e. consciousness, in terms of the object. Consciousness is true by knowing what the object is. According to the truth expectations of self-consciousness, the conscious self dominates the whole relation, and defines the other member of the relation, i.e. the independent objective world, in terms of the self. To know what the object truly is requires knowing it as being-for the conscious self (PhG GW 9:103–104, ¶¶166–167). Self-consciousness preserves the independent otherness of the objective world, but situates this otherness within the dynamics of self-consciousness. Relation to the object’s otherness becomes a self-relation.

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5 Self-Consciousness Retreats into the Transcendence of the Rational The examination of self-consciousness begins within the consciousness of a single self. The self experiences the independent character of natural things as predisposed to satisfy the self’s desires. The desire experience also reveals a self related to and dependent on what the independence of the natural world provides. In order to know what self-consciousness takes the truth to be, therefore, the self must withdraw from this involvement in life, assert its dominance over the whole natural system, and confront a natural world in which this dominance is manifest. Selfconsciousness confronts the whole life system summed up in its being for another self, and engages this self in a battle to the death. The willingness to risk life earns recognition for each combatant’s independence of life, and in the process challenges the opponent’s appropriation of the natural world. Thus, the life world confronting the self expands to include another self claiming the natural world as its own (PhG GW 9:103–105, ¶¶167–168; 107–109, ¶¶173–177; 109–110, ¶¶179–183; 110–111, ¶¶186–187). Victory, however, deprives the victor of the recognition provided by the defeated combatant and restores the resistant otherness of the natural world. As a result, self-consciousness seeks the truth in a master-servant dynamic, which preserves the negated life of the defeated self as a servant whose whole self dissolves in fear of the master. This all-consuming fear identifies the servant self with the natural world’s subordination to the master, and makes this manifest in service and work. Because work belongs to the servant’s self-surrendering service, it acts as an extension of the master’s mastery. The servant’s work becomes an additional force integrated into the natural system, which transforms the natural world into a world existing for the master. Thus, the relation that surrenders the servant’s self to the master identifies the servant with what self-consciousness takes the truth to be, a self independent of life for which the whole objective life system exists. In the process, however, mastery becomes dependent for its actualization in the natural world on the work of the servant self. Thus, the master-servant dynamic identifies each self, master as well as servant, as a self necessarily related to and identified in terms of the other (PhG GW 9:111–116, ¶¶188–196; 118, ¶199). This result refers the dynamics between self and world to an inner truth in which the self in its independence of life and the self engaged in transforming and appropriating the life system become a distinction within the same truth. Self-consciousness detached from its involvement in life becomes thought knowing the true essence of the life world as an inner truth and goodness, which transforms the resistant otherness of this world into a reflection of the self’s detached thought. This is Stoicism (PhG GW 9:116–118, ¶¶197–199). At this point in the phenomenological project, however, “thought” has no other determination than the detachment that separates it from the otherness of life. In order to become conscious of itself as the true essence of this other, thought must become actively involved in exposing the self-defeating dynamics of this otherness, which makes

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the self appear as the self-same negativity of thought persisting throughout the process. This is Skepticism. Skeptical thought, however, dissolves the thoughtful self into a contradictory dynamic in which independent self-conscious thought turns itself into thought negatively involved in and identified with the otherness of life, whereby it re-establishes its original detachment. The self becomes conscious of itself as a divided self, constantly changing into its opposite, and hence as not the self-sameness that it takes the truth to be. This is unhappy consciousness (PhG GW 9:118–121, ¶¶200–207; 122–123, ¶209). At this point, the examination of self-consciousness shifts into a distinction made and cancelled move. Unhappy consciousness takes the truth to be detached independent thought turning into thought immersed in the objective otherness of the natural world while remaining unchangeable. Unhappy consciousness knows itself as thought divided against itself in this dynamic. For this form of self-consciousness, therefore, truth is other than the self. This other, however, is a truth demanded by what unhappy consciousness itself is. Hence, the unhappy self takes the truth to be the otherness of the unchangeable identified with a singular self who belongs to the unhappy self’s own world. Unhappy consciousness becomes true by completely surrendering its self to the life of this true self (PhG GW 9:122–125, ¶¶208–213). Hegel’s account of the ways in which unhappy consciousness moves toward this truth brings the contingency of time and place into the dynamics of self-consciousness. The unchangeable formed into a singular self takes on the exclusivity of a self and the place-time contingency of its existence, which separates the true self from unhappy consciousness (PhG GW 9:124, ¶212). In order to become identified with the otherness of the true self, unhappy consciousness surrenders in obedience to the will of a mediator who represents the will of the unchangeable, and lives this surrender in asceticism. Asceticism lives every aspect of life as a vanity of vanities. This development reduces the self of unhappy consciousness to the unimportance and subordinate status of a thing, an element belonging to the dynamics of objective existence, and hence existing for the self-consciousness of an other. Through the assurances of the mediator, unhappy consciousness knows its surrender to be acknowledged and its self to be accepted into the life of the unchangeable (PhG GW 9:128–131, ¶¶224–230). Cancelling the distinction between unhappy consciousness and the unchangeable, therefore, does not reduce the unchangeable to the limited self of unhappy consciousness. It elevates the divided unhappy self into the transcendent self-sameness of another self-consciousness in which thought identified with the independence of the self persists without change in the independent otherness of objective existence. Thus, the phenomenological examination of consciousness and self-consciousness retreats into a ground in which these opposite forms of thought are one and the same rationality (PhG GW 9:131–132, ¶¶230–232; 193–194, ¶348).11 The transcendence of the rational, however, is not a religious transcendence. Reason as it emerges from the pain of unhappy consciousness has no religion, because rational self-consciousness knows itself, its own rationality, in what stands immediately before consciousness (PhG GW 9:363, ¶673).

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6 The Emergence of the Irrational and the Retreat into Spirit Reason begins as a retreat into a ground must begin. It reverses direction by asserting as an immediate, ungrounded intuition the truth proved by the prior demonstration. The critical examination of consciousness and self-consciousness proves that these forms of knowing belong to and are governed by a more fundamental truth. In order to know this truth in its proper form, reason must know itself as the origin, not the result, of what has retreated into it. Hence, reason asserts itself as the immediate, ungrounded certainty of being all reality, and proceeds to re-think the developments of consciousness and self-consciousness as developments derived from this certainty. The development begins with idealism in which thinking the original certainty spontaneously develops different ways of thinking, all belonging to the same unity of self-consciousness, and carries thought into relations with a diversity of sensations presented by the otherness of a thing. Unlike self-consciousness, which seeks to suppress and master the otherness of the world, reason seeks the very otherness of the thing expecting to find in this otherness only reason’s own “infinitude.” Truth requires, however, that reason show itself realized in all the multiplicity and difference of a world immediately confronting it, a world that Hegel characterizes as an indifferent alien other (gleichgültiges Fremdes). Reason’s truth expectation begins, therefore, as a contradiction dynamic between self-sameness and the strong otherness of alien difference. As a result, reason as actual reason acknowledges that it must devise strategies for actively exposing the self-sameness of reason in the alien otherness of the world (PhG GW 9:132–138, ¶¶231–241). Reason as observation expects to find universal rationality in what is presented immediately to consciousness, using as its strategy an active engagement in running experiments to expose universal laws operating in the given data. This approach fails because in every part of the external world—the continuity of matter, the individual organisms situated in it and interacting with it, the self-conscious individuals occupying it—reason observes relations and associ­ ations that lack the necessary connectedness required for a persistent, universal self-sameness (PhG GW 9:142–146, ¶¶249–255; 154, ¶275; 159–166, ¶¶283–297; 179–180, ¶323; 185–186, ¶335; 188–189, ¶340). In Hegel’s account of reason observing the dynamics of life, such contingencies play a necessary dialectical role in the development of reason itself. They manifest “the freedom of Nature released (entbundene) from the control of the concept,” which Hegel interprets as reason’s opposite, the irrational (Unvernunft) (PhG GW 9:154, ¶275). In the examination of phrenology, which tries to know the character of a self-conscious being by what is presented in the shape of the skull, reason finds itself “presented as its own self and its opposite” and hence is “apprehended irrationally (unvernünftig); …” (PhG GW 9:191–192, ¶346). From this point on, the development of reason must work with an element of contingency that reason cannot escape and cannot completely control, which manifests reason’s necessary relation to a resistant, opposed otherness.

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At this early stage, this irrational element provokes a shift from reason as observation to practical reason. The examination of practical reason shows how the rational agent integrates the contingencies of life into the dynamics of rationally motivated actions, so that rational self-sameness appears as the sameness between the agent and the agent’s produced effect (PhG GW 9:196, ¶356). In this framework, Hegel introduces the law of individuality, which he calls the way of the world. A rational agent asserts as a law for everyone a law that belongs to the agent’s own exclusive individuality, a law of the heart, only to be challenged by others whose law belongs to their exclusive individuality. Since reason expects the truth to be a persistent sameness played out in the dynamic between self, world, and other self-conscious individuals, the phenomenological examination shifts to a form of reason whose aim is to negate this way of the world and transform it into a world in which everything and everyone is harmoniously one. This virtuous aim fails, however, because the agent cannot act without getting involved in the dynamic individuality of the real world. Reason cannot exist in the reality of the world without becoming divided against itself in the dynamics of mutually ­exclusive individuality (PhG GW 9:201–214, ¶¶367–393). Reason taking itself to be real in and for itself, which I call self-confident individuality, integrates into these dynamics the given determinate content of each agent’s self and the contingent relations that emerge from this determinacy. In the process, it expands the self-assertion of each agent to include the agent’s appropriation of what other agents contribute to the shared field of action (PhG GW 9:214–228, ¶¶394–417).12 This result provokes a shift into the truth expectations of law-governed reason. The rational agent acts according to laws that spontaneously emerge from the dynamics of rational agents interacting with each other, which gives the action a kind of universality. These actions show, however, that the tensions played out in self-confident individuality persist as an opposition within the law itself, between the way the law is understood and willed by the individual agent and the way it exists in the world outside the self. Reason, therefore, distinguishes the sameness of the law from the diversity of law-governed action by taking self-sameness to be a criterion for determining whether a given law can indeed be a law (PhG GW 9:228–232, ¶¶418–427). It finds, however, that every law becomes divided against itself in real action because action necessarily operates in the dynamics of individuality. Thus, reason as criterion develops a necessary connection between the unification of what is opposed and the opposition of what is the same, which dissolves the dynamics of universal reason into the unification-diversification dynamics of a whole (PhG GW 9:232–234, ¶¶428–430). Reason retreats into a ground that governs the whole process, which transforms the whole into the sameness of reason actualized in the concrete, diversified, shared life of a community (PhG GW 9:235–240, ¶¶435–440). The universal status claimed by the rational individual belongs to a spirit shared with other participants in the same social whole. Hegel makes strong claims for the otherness preserved within this whole. The other members of my folk or country confront me as my own being-for-self. Even in their independence as a free thing that I am not, and as self-confident individuals who appropriate my works and deeds into their own being-for-self, in spirit

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they stand before me as my other self. The spirit we share transcends its being identified with my exclusive singular self, as it also transcends its being identified with the exclusive singularity of others. Because my spirit lives in them, they become an extension of who I am, even in their exclusive otherness. This retreat into a ground demonstrates the necessity of reversing direction. The self knows itself immediately identified with the spirit of the social whole, accepts without question or justification the authority of its laws, and derives from the social dynamics of the whole the diversifying dynamics of the rationality that has retreated into it (PhG GW 9:193–195, ¶¶347–350; 238–239, ¶437–439).

7 The Spirit of the Enlightenment Spirit begins its development as a human spirit actualized in a shared culture and custom. Religion appears in this development as a feature of some cultural forms, and hence belongs to the spirit of a people and the dynamics of human social relations. We begin our discussion of spirit with the spirit of the Enlightenment, in which religious faith and human reason compete for the mind and heart of the whole society. The presuppositions that govern the spirit of the Enlightenment emerge from the determinate negation of a culture that Hegel calls self-alienated spirit (PhG GW 9:239–241, ¶¶437–442). The critical examination of this spirit introduces language into the dynamics of communal relations, and one form of language introduced here becomes a crucial element for interpreting the transcendence that persists in the final moves of the Phenomenology. Self-alienated spirit takes the form of an independent social order confronting the members of society as an external authority. Individuals become identified with the spirit of society by dedicating their lives to their role in the social system. This identification with the cause of society as a whole, functions as the norm that determines what is good, and this normative judgement makes itself manifest in the noble life. An individual sacrifices his own particular interests to serve the ruler, whom he acknowledges as the ruling element in the social order. The ruler acknowledges the individual’s service to society by transferring to the individual’s control some of society’s wealth (PhG GW 9: 263–265, ¶¶485–486; 267–268, ¶¶487–489; 270–271, ¶494; 274–275, ¶502–504). The judgement implicit in the noble life, however, separates what it judges as good from an element that persists as a significant force in the social structure. Particular interests are manifest in the way society breaks up into different classes and estates, each with its own specific concerns, interests, and values. A noble individual who does not lose his life defending the cause of society as a whole continues to be a definite individual with a will of his own and interests specific to him. This renders his service ambiguous and suspect. Does it serve the good of the kingdom, or only the particular interests of his class or estate (PhG GW 9:275, ¶505)? In order to achieve complete identification with society as a whole, the individual must somehow separate himself from particular interests.

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He achieves this in a form of speech that Hegel calls “language authoritative as language” (gilt als Sprache), which has the form of speaking itself as its content. What, then, is the pure form of speaking? Speech expresses what the self experiences as its own consciousness; and consciousness belongs only to the one whose experience it is. Speech brings this inner consciousness out into a domain shared with others and delivers it over to them. Unlike work, the speech does not become existent outside consciousness in the objective reality of the world. It disappears into the consciousness of the one who hears it. Thus, the inner, private consciousness of the speaker comes to exist as the inner, private consciousness of someone else. What, then, does it mean for language to say nothing more than what the form of speaking itself does? It means that the speaking surrenders the speaker’s own exclusive singular self into the domain shared with others, to become existent as the exclusive singular self-consciousness of the one to whom the speech is spoken. The noble individual says to the ruler, “I am your man.” He surrenders his very self, the singularity of self that he alone is, to the ruler. By doing so, he relates to the ruler no longer as an institution, as part of the social order, but as another, singular self who hears the self-surrendering speech and thus becomes, in his otherness, the speaker’s true self. Since what is spoken is the very self of the speaker, this self lives now in the self of another. The noble individual says to the ruler, “I am your man, you are my king,” and this speech gives the ruler his kingly self, his being the personification of society itself in whom the noble becomes universal (PhG GW 9:275–278, ¶¶506–510). The phenomenological examination of self-alienated spirit shows how the social order falls apart in a struggle between three opposing claims to primacy in social affairs. The head of state represents the governing will and the interests of society as a whole distinguished from special interests and individual s­ elf-concern. Special interests acquire status and wealth by serving the government, are treated with suspicion because of their special interests, and represent a constant threat because of their power to undermine the government’s authority by refusing to cooperate with it. The whole system of social roles treats individuals as members existing for its purposes, while individuals treat the social system as a system accountable to them. Thus, every part of the social dynamic negates and compromises the primacy of the others in social affairs (PhG GW 9:275–281, ¶¶506–517); 285–287, ¶¶524–525). The Enlightenment spirit defined by this result preserves the self-negating dynamic that exposes the meaninglessness of the established social structure. It rejects the values that belong to this structure—state power and wealth, pleasure and prestige—as it also rejects the social divisions caused by conflicting social roles and expectations. It seeks a higher value as the true essence and real meaning of the existing social order. Enlightenment faith finds this higher value in a transcendent kingdom of God, which restores the social world to harmony and peace. Enlightenment insight conceives the true essence as the universality of the self’s own reason. Both agree that the public social order must belong to some unifying principle that integrates its opposing forces into a meaningful whole.

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For faith, this unifying principle is an other, the kingdom of God; for Enligh­ tenment insight, the unifying principle is the rationality of the human self (PhG GW 9:287–291, ¶¶528–535). Enlightenment insight discredits faith by demonstrating that what faith represents as a transcendent other is really only a projection of the self’s aspirations. Faith conceives a God in whom the self is not lost but found, a God whose acceptance gives the self its true worth. Self-sacrifice signals the self’s desire to detach itself from its worldly condition and attach itself to something more meaningful. Faith accepts the authority of unreliable historical texts only if and because its own inner witness acknowledges their message. All this shows that faith’s transcendent world is only the otherness dimension of a reality that gets its true meaning by being a reflection of the self. Thus, insight’s critique of faith restores the independent otherness of the social world to insight’s own position, but reduces it to an empty “other” whose determinate content has meaning only as something appropriate to the human self’s own rationality. The result is a social world without substance. It has no integrity of its own. By itself, it is dispersed and destabilized by conflicting social forces. Only as a reality existing for the rational self is it held together and given a unifying, stable orientation. Thus, the spirit of the Enlightenment treats the whole natural and social world as a reality in service to rational individuals, its value reduced to being useful (PhG GW 9:297–298, ¶549; 299–303, ¶¶552–556; 305–310, ¶¶562–570; 310–311, ¶¶572–573). With the advent of the Enlightenment, the principle of equality enters the dynamics of social existence. Each individual, as a rational self, claims the rights of rationality. Individuality isolated in its own separate singularity claims the rights of the universal. Enlightenment insight, however, separates the rational self from the content of the world, even from the self’s own concrete interests and social role. Nothing has value or meaning except as the embodiment of the individual’s independent will. The Enlightenment self has nothing left to think and to will except the singular self’s existence as the free individuality whose independence dominates and appropriates the whole social world. Since, however, the rights of universal rationality belong to the exclusivity of a singular self, the self cannot maintain its status without challenging by its mere presence in the world other equally exclusive individuals with the same status. Hence, Enlightenment rationality dissolves in the world of absolute freedom and terror (PhG GW 9:314–320, ¶¶580–591; 423–424, ¶791)

8 The Spirit of the Moral World and the Retreat into Religion13 As the determinate negation of absolute freedom, the moral view of the world preserves the will’s complete detachment from the dynamics of the established social system; and it also negates absolute freedom’s divisive individual will.

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Duty requires that the moral will overrule not only its own particular interests but also its singularity and exclusivity. The dutiful will wills the principle that integrates each will into the same intention, the same willing (PhG GW 9:321–323, ¶¶594–595; 325, ¶¶599–600). Moral action, however, wills as duty a particular concern that the agent feels as her or his own; and it seeks the happiness of having achieved its purpose. The universality of dutiful intentions, therefore, becomes inevitably mixed up with the particularity of the agent’s interests and the exclusivity of this agent’s will and accomplishment. Moreover, duty in action needs a world alien to it, a world that must be overruled by it, so that the moral agent can know the moral essence of the world as the agent’s own act. In order to think the unifying principle that integrates self and world into the same rational spirit, therefore, the moral spirit distinguishes the self-sameness of moral subjectivity and objective existence from the compromises manifest in the field of moral action, referring to this self-sameness as a consciousness, a holy will, a God postulate. The same spirit cancels the distinction by expecting happiness to be granted by the grace of God, even if moral action is inevitably compromised and hence cannot be worthy of this reward. This transforms the field of moral action into the unifying spirit of morality appearing as the same spirit distinguished from itself in the different elements of moral agency, which re-defines the moral spirit as the spirit of conscientiousness. The conscientious agent brings together the concern for duty, the particular interests of the agent, the given circumstances of the action, and forms a conviction about what is concretely right, which the spirit of conscientiousness accepts as the inner voice of God (PhG GW 9:325–328, ¶¶601–604; 329, ¶607; 333–342, ¶¶618–634). In this way, duty becomes identified with the exclusivity of the individual’s singular self-consciousness, and everything comes under its authority. No content, no law or principle, no social order has a moral legitimacy of its own. Everything gets its validity from the individual’s personal conviction (PhG GW 9:342–344, ¶¶634–638; 345–349, ¶¶641–646). This form of conscience, however, is the spirit of a social world. The individuality of the agent’s conscientiousness must actually exist as the will of society itself. Here again language plays the role proper to language as such. It brings the inner, private self of the individual into a domain shared with others and gives it existence in those who hear the word and acknowledge it. The agent must say that the act is an act of conscience, that it is driven by the inner moral conviction of the agent. This, however, is not enough. One who justifies an act to others by an appeal to the agent’s conscience alone asserts blatantly that the act wrongs them. The agent must declare that the duty is an acknowledged duty, that the agent’s personal conscience exists in the conscience of others as well (PhG GW 9:344–345, ¶¶639–640; 351–353, ¶¶652–654; 356–357, ¶662). Thus, inter-subjective linguistic communication situates the individuality dynamics of moral action within an interpretive framework that makes explicit in the actual world its belonging to a universal moral spirit. The spirit of conscientiousness, however, becomes divided against itself in its talk. The agent’s works satisfy the agent’s own interest in a project; and they give the agent alone the satisfaction of having accomplished it. Hence, what the agent does manifests the agent’s exclusive self-concern, which belies the universality

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claimed by the agent’s conscientious talk. Others refuse to acknowledge the conscientiousness of the action and accuse the agent of hypocrisy. In order to protect their own purity of purpose, however, these critics must avoid all involvement in real action, since the structure of action itself focuses the work on the exclusiveness of the agent. The conscientiousness of the critics exists in a community that talks about nothing but the purity of their intentions; and it exists in judgmental talk that condemns the self-interest and hypocrisy of those engaged in particular projects. Those engaged in works and projects condemn this withdrawal from the field of action as itself hypocritical. Those who withdraw pass off judgmental talk as an act of conscience. But the talk commits the speaker to no practical pursuits that claim the world for moral purposes; and it separates the conscience of the speaker from the conscience of others by refusing to acknowledge the conscientiousness of those engaged in practical pursuits (PhG GW 9:350, ¶¶648–649; 352–360, ¶¶655–668). Thus, the moral world dissolves into a dynamic of unification and diversification. The singular, exclusive self-consciousness of conscientious individuals cannot become a communal self-consciousness unless their commitment to the moral fellowship overrules their preoccupation with their own personal projects. The unity of the moral fellowship cannot claim the world as its own, nor can it claim as its own the singular, exclusive self of moral individuals, unless it lets itself go in the personal projects of conscientious agents. This development demonstrates that the spirit of the community exists in the whole opposition dynamic between the two positions, and this changes the fundamental issues. Each party in the dynamic must acknowledge the very opposition of the other as an essential element in its own spirit. The righteousness of morality talk must give way to words of forgiveness and reconciliation, in which the divisive conscientiousness of real action and the self-righteous conscientiousness of unified fellowship acknowledge that each belongs to the true spirit of the community and neither by itself can be the whole truth. The true spirit of the community, therefore, is not the dynamic of morality itself, since nothing within this dynamic encompasses the whole. Morality retreats into a ground in which the spirit distributed in the dynamic of unification and diversification is one, self-same spirit, the absolute spirit of religion, which makes itself manifest in human self-consciousness as the spirit of forgiveness and reconciliation (PhG GW 9:359–362, ¶¶667–671; 364–367, ¶¶678–680). Hegel does not tell us exactly why this move shifts from truth defined as spirit to truth defined as absolute spirit. His discussion at the end of the Phenomenology shows that at some point along the way, Hegel has shifted from the spirit of a particular society to the all-encompassing spirit of human history (PhG GW ­ 9:433–434, ¶¶807–808). I will only suggest here how this might work. Since the moral spirit conceives the truth as a spirit common to all rational beings, the concept that emerges from its determinate negation must know the spirit of truth as a spirit not limited to a particular society or culture. Religion may belong to a particular culture at a particular time in history. But it interprets the culture as a society that belongs to a spirit that transcends the particularity of the culture and its confinement to a particular place and time (PhG GW 9:359–362, ¶¶667–671; 364–367, ¶678–680).

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Now we must ask what has happened to reason’s victory over faith in the spirit of the Enlightenment. When spirit loses its anchor in a spirit that transcends the dynamics of the human social world, it exposes the limitations of the human spirit. This spirit, left to its own devices, reduces objective existence to utility in service to a self preoccupied only with itself; and it reduces this self to a free individuality that must wipe out the existence of other free individuals for no reason except that they are other. The shift into morality tries to rescue the rational self with the universality of moral principles. In the moral view of the world, however, moral righteousness depends on a transcendent principle, a God postulate, which posits the self-sameness of moral subjectivity and objective existence not in the dynamics of human morality, but in a holy will that must be distinguished from it. In the spirit of this postulate, the moral view conceives human morality as a compromised righteousness redeemed by God’s grace, which accepts the flawed universality of human moral agency as if it were truly universal and worthy of reward. In the spirit of conscientiousness, the universality of rational individuals takes the form of an indwelling divine spirit that gives moral worth to the convictions of moral individuals, and this ultimately reveals that human morality has its ground in a spirit that transcends the rationality of the human spirit. As a retreat into a ground, this calls for a reversal that shifts into the immediate, un-derived assertion of the ground itself and a demonstration of the way the moral world is derived from and determined by it. Hence, Hegel begins the examination of religion’s truth expectations by distinguishing religion as it appears in the preceding forms of consciousness from religion as it emerges in the determinate negation of the moral spirit. In the preceding forms, religion appears according to the truth expectations of these forms, which look for truth in the way human consciousness knows an object. Even self-consciousness knows itself in the way the object makes the self known to itself; as reason and spirit, it knows itself realized in the independent reality of the objective world. In these forms of consciousness, therefore, absolute being, which is religion’s object, appears as a transcendent other in which a particular form of human knowing becomes conscious of what the truth is. Religion as it emerges from the moral spirit takes the truth to be the form of knowing proper to absolute being itself. Human experience shifts to the object side of the knowing relation, and conceives itself as the other in which absolute being manifests itself (PhG GW 9:363, ¶672).

9 The Spirit of Religion and the Retreat into Absolute Knowing14 Before proceeding to the critical examination of religion, Hegel identifies something missing in the way reason’s certainty of being all reality has developed up to this point. He points out that the moral spirit and the concept of religion that emerges from it accomplish the aims of knowledge by finding the true essence of

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objective reality in a universal, rational element that reflects the rational spirit of the human self. This, however, leaves out the irrational element in natural existence and as a result does not give the radical otherness of nature its due. The spirit of conscientiousness accepts as necessary the compromises of natural existence, but only as vehicles of the universal. The element of otherness is forgiven for the sake of the conscientiousness that cannot become real without it. As a result, the move into the concept of religion conceives the actual social world, in which thought remains attached to the content of natural existence, as a reality in service to a spirit not properly its own, the unifying spirit of religion. Before the world of conscientiousness can become a true manifestation of absolute spirit, it must bring into its certainty of being all reality the contingent, irrational element of natural existence and the alien otherness exposed in it (PhG GW 9:330–331, ¶¶611–612; 364–365, ¶¶677–678; 367–368, ¶¶682–683). The critical examination of religion reproduces the forms of consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, and spirit as different ways in which absolute being makes itself manifest in human experience (PhG GW 9:366, ¶680; 9:367, ¶683). In the form of consciousness, absolute being manifests itself as the independent objectivity of a natural thing, e.g. God as light (PhG GW 9:368–372, ¶¶684–688). In the form of self-consciousness, it manifests itself as a divinely inspired work of art, e.g. epic poetry and Greek tragedy, which tell of gods involved in the culture and history of the artist’s community and reflect the Muse acting in the artist’s self-consciousness (PhG GW 9:376–378, ¶¶699–704; 388–397, ¶¶727–743). In the form of reason, absolute being reveals itself as the self-sameness of independent being and pure thought, conceived as opposites reconciled in morality’s God concept, and as this concept actualized in the dynamics of conscientiousness. Revelatory religion gives this rational form the form of a divine being knowing itself in its absolute opposite. Hegel says explicitly that the way revelatory religion represents God meets the requirements implicit in the determinate negation of conscientiousness (PhG GW 9:361–362, ¶671; 419–420, ¶786). Revelatory religion represents absolute being as a divine essence that speaks a word into which it pours its very self. The hearing of the word by the other becomes the very self of the other. In this self-speaking and self-hearing, each self knows the other as its own self; and nothing alien or discordant belongs to their relation. This is the purity and self-sameness of absolute spirit existing on its own, completely enclosed within its own tranquility and transparency. Spirit in this form, however, also excludes everything that stands opposed to it, everything alien and discordant. Thus, absolute being, by being exclusive, posits a world whose being is the opposite of God’s harmonious self-sharing. The world is God’s alien other, torn apart by the self-centeredness of self-consciousness, tangled up with the contingencies that manifest nature released from the control of the rational. From this perspective, the world of the human spirit becomes a struggle between good and evil, with evil characterized as enclosed, disconnected separateness, and good characterized as the unifying self-sameness of spiritual belonging. This is the purity and self-sameness of absolute being necessarily ­connected to its opposite through its excluding relation and opposition.

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Revelatory religion moves beyond this opposition and separateness in the doctrine of the Incarnation. According to this doctrine, the word of God enters the broken world of God’s alien other, takes the form of a human self, and thus becomes an individual participant in the human spirit, subject to its limiting conditions. God incarnate identifies the divine spirit with the evil element that isolates the human spirit in a singular self and creates an alien otherness between self and nature. This is absolute being related to its absolute other as its other self; and this other includes within itself the element that manifests nature released from the control of the rational (PhG GW 9:404–407, ¶¶758–762; 9:410–418, ¶¶769–783). The death of God transforms the absolute otherness of the human world into the absolute spirit of God given away to its other. In its natural meaning, death belongs to the dynamics of the life system, which absorbs individual organisms into the universal process of life coming to be and passing away in its different forms. In the death of God, death “loses its natural meaning,” the incarnate self of God “does not actually die, as the particular self-consciousness is represented as being actually dead.” The death of the incarnate God negates the exclusive particularity that isolates the divine self in one individual situated in a particular time and place, and absorbs the divine self into the movement of human history. Death also negates the detached transcendence that keeps God isolated in the otherness of divine being, and releases the divine self to live as “the universality of the Spirit who dwells in His community, dies in it every day, and is daily resurrected” (PhG GW 9: 418, ¶784–785). The absolute being of God becomes actual for itself in the world of the human spirit (PhG GW 9:419–420, ¶786). These religious representations bring to consciousness the negative side of the determinate negation that emerges in the spirit of conscientiousness: the world of human experience and human rationality is not in itself the truth; the human spirit belongs to a truth that transcends human reason. Hence, religious representation preserves the form of consciousness. It represents God as an other, a “beyond.” Religious representation does not articulate the positive result implicit in morality’s determinate negation, that morality’s spirit of forgiveness and reconciliation manifests a necessity within the transcendent being itself. The transcendent unity of thought and being manifests itself not only as the negation that collapses the otherness of thought and being into the sameness of a whole, but also as the positive distribution and diversification of this unity in the dynamics of the human world. The distinction made must also be cancelled. The transcendent other necessarily pours itself out into the human world, to live as the spirit of human history, to be actualized as the act and responsibility of human moral agents, to be involved in the irrational, unpredictable contingencies of the natural element (PhG GW 9:420–422, ¶¶787–788). Absolute knowing makes this explicit. What revealed religion represents as an other becomes in absolute knowing a concept within human thought (beautiful soul) that necessitates the actualization of truth thus conceived (conscientious action), so that the independence of pure thought knows the independence of the objective world as the same absolute spirit of truth distinguished from itself. This transforms conscientiousness into a knowing with content. Conscientiousness wills as the content of its action the self-sharing

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life of God actualized in the substantial reality of the human spirit’s natural and social-historical existence, with the irrational contingencies of nature and history preserved in it (PhG GW 9:419–423, ¶¶787–789; 425–427, ¶¶795–798). Thus, the Phenomenology retreats into a ground that transcends human rationality, reveals itself as the inward spirit of the human self, and thus identifies human knowing with the absolute truth of thought identified with being. The shift into the beginning of philosophical science asserts this ground in an immediate intuition, which gives it the form proper to what the Phenomenology has proved it to be, the original and presuppositionless principle of the phenomenological development that retreated into it (PhG GW. 9:431–434, ¶¶804–808; WL 21:32–34; 54–56).

10 Conclusion We began this discussion with the aim of determining precisely what kind of transcendence, if any, persists in the beginning concept of philosophical science, which emerges from and is justified by the critical examination of consciousness developed in the Phenomenology. We have shown that when the examination of unhappy consciousness cancels the distinction between the transcendent unchangeable and unhappy consciousness itself, it does not dismiss the unchangeable and its transcendence as a mistaken notion, nor reduce it to the limited form typical of unhappy consciousness itself. Rather it transforms the unchangeable into a self-differentiating unity, and the contradictions of unhappy consciousness into mutually exclusive differences within the same ground. This move, however, does not preserve the strong otherness of the unchangeable and thus transform unhappy consciousness into a religious form of knowing. Rather, it reveals a transcendent dimension within human consciousness itself. The determinate negation of unhappy consciousness carries the examination of consciousness beyond the alien otherness between consciousness and objective existence, which is typical of consciousness in its first two forms. Since, however, it retreats into a rational ground that belongs to human consciousness itself, it does not carry the examination of consciousness into a transcendence that is beyond the human. The focus of our original question must be changed. We must now ask whether the phenomenological project gives evidence of something that transcends human reason. In order to answer the question in this form, it is necessary to pay close attention to the examination of the Enlightenment spirit and the spirit of morality that emerges from it. The examination demonstrates that these forms of consciousness cannot stand on their own, that their own internal structure carries them into a ground that transcends their spirit and exposes their belonging to a rationality that cannot be contained within their limits. When, therefore, Hegel represents the death of God as the negation of God’s independent substantial being and the collapse of divine transcendence into a spirit dwelling within human self-consciousness, this cannot mean that divine transcendence is dismissed or transformed into what is merely human. It means rather that the human spirit is

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transformed into the spirit of God spoken and given away to another, to live as the true essence and ground of spiritual relations played out in the dynamics of the moral world. If, therefore, the Phenomenology is a retreat into a ground, then the transcendent principle that completes the phenomenological project carries over into the beginning of philosophical science. Philosophical science reverses the direction of the Phenomenology’s critical examination of phenomenal consciousness by asserting the ground in its immediacy and developing it as the origin not the result of the determinations that have retreated into it. Philosophical science begins with being in its immediacy conceived as a transcendent ground in which thought and being are one. We must ask, however, whether this reduces the transcendent otherness of God to a transcendent spirit that loses its separate self and becomes absorbed by and reduced to spiritual relations among human beings? The texts of the Phenomenology might allow this interpretation; and it would be enough to justify the presuppositions of philosophical science. It would justify conceiving the truth as the independent reality of being identified with the necessities of pure thought, a truth identified with and revealed in the dynamics of human knowing. It would confirm Hegel’s religious way of speaking about the content of philosophical science and its beginning principle. But would it satisfy to the fullest the aspirations of the human spirit articulated in at least some of its religious forms, those in which God is represented as a self engaged in inter-personal relations— covenant, love, and communication relations—with human beings? I leave this as an open question, and add another question to it. Why does Hegel not insist on preserving the transcendent individuality of God in God’s relations to the human community? In his accounts of family and state, he insists that there must be an individual whose individuality represents to the community the spirit of the community as a whole (PhG GW 9:242, ¶447; 9:245–246, ¶454; 9:262–263, ¶480; 9:275–276, ¶¶506–507; 9:319–320, ¶591). Yet the head of state and the head of a family do not lose the separateness of their individuality in the process. Why not develop a conception of absolute spirit that preserves the independent being of the divine self as one whose spirit represents to the community of humankind the spirit of the community as a whole? Hegel casts revelatory religion in the role of a determinate negation, the negation that governs the transition from the spirit of conscientiousness to the absolute spirit of religion. According to Hegel’s account, revelatory religion represents God as a self-enclosed tranquil and transparent self-sharing, which creates an excluding relation that sets it off from the absolute otherness and divisiveness of the human world? Does the death of God conceived as the surrender of God’s transcendence wipe out this self-enclosed separateness and reduce the divinity to a presence distributed in relations among human beings? Or does it expand the original conception of the Trinity to include its necessary relation to its opposite, which is the way determinate negations are supposed to work? The latter alternative preserves the excluding relation that separates the divine self from the otherness of the human world, but preserves it within

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a relation in which each belongs to the same self-sharing dynamic with the other. In other words, according to this alternative, God lives not only as the spirit of relations among human beings, but also as a relation between a divine self and the community of humankind.15

Notes 1. For more details, see Collins (2013, Chapter 5, 91–103). 2. See, for example, McCumber (1993, 372 n. 98). 3. For an analysis demonstrating that Hegel’s position on the role of the Phenomenology remains consistent in the early and later works, see Collins (2013, Chapter 10). 4. For more details, see Collins (2013, Chapter 6; Chapter 7, §§1–3). 5. For a full discussion of the debate provoked by this ambiguity, see Collins (2013, Chapters 2 and 11). 6. Paragraph (¶) numbers for citations of the Phenomenology of Spirit follow the sequence of paragraphs in the original German text. Paragraph numbers in Miller’s English translation depart from this sequence between ¶404 and ¶549. For these paragraphs subtract 1 in order to locate the paragraphs in the Miller translation. 7. See also Collins (2013, Chapter 4, §§3–6; Chapter 7, §§4–8). 8. Note especially “Das Bewußtsein aber ist für sich selbst sein Begriff” (PhG GW 9, 57). 9. See also Collins (2013, Chapter 9). 10. For a full explanation and defense of this interpretation, see Collins (2013, Chapter 12, especially §§4–5). 11. For a full explanation and defense of this interpretation, see Collins (2013, Chapter 13). For a critique of Alexandre Kojève’s interpretation of the master-servant dialectic, see 288–290. 12. For a more complete analysis of practical reason in this form, with examples to clarify how its complications are experienced, see Collins (2013, Chapter 14, §6). 13. For a fuller discussion of these issues and the debates that have developed around them, see Collins (2013, Chapter 15, §§6–9, and Appendix). 14. For a fuller discussion of this, and a closer examination of the texts, see Collins (2013, Chapters 16 and 17). 15. For an excellent examination of these questions based on Hegel’s Science of Logic, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, and Lectures on the Proofs of the Existence of God, see Williams (2017).

Bibliography Collins, Ardis B. 2013. Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Dialectical Justification of Philosophy’s First Principles. Montreal & Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Houlgate, Stephen. 2006. The Opening of Hegel’s Logic: From Being to Infinity. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press. Kojève, Alexandre. 1947. Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, edited by Raymond Queneau. Paris: Gallimard. McCumber, John. 1993. The Company of Words: Hegel, Language, and Systematic Philosophy. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.

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Thompson, Kevin. 2014–2015. “Book Review: Ardis B. Collins, Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Dialectical Justification of Philosophy’s First Principles.” The Owl of Minerva 46 (1–2): 116–128. Williams, Robert R. 2017. Hegel on the Proofs and the Personhood of God. Oxford: University Press.

Chapter 6

Absolute Spirit in Performative Self-Relations of Persons Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer

1 Introduction and Main Results Hegel’s first book, the Phenomenology of Spirit, had a working title prior to publication: Science of Apparent Consciousness, and was announced as the First Part of the System of Sciences (see PhG GW 9:3). If we recall the meaning of Latin con-scientia, we should not be surprised to find a (meta-)logical treatise on the difficult notions of knowledge, self, conscience, and conscientiousness, and, at the same time, a roadmap for a possible science of spirit in the sense of a philosophy of science,1 according to the Aristotelian expression noesis noeseos, knowledge about knowledge. The emphasis on a phenomenology expresses the insight that philosophical reflection on knowledge is essentially the same as (meta-)logical analysis of scientia. Its task is to explicate the real performances of cognitive and normative claims in all their real appearances, including corresponding evaluations. Such evaluations can take the form of talking about truth, if a sufficient contrast to error or negated propositions is presupposed, together with forms of evaluating correctness or proprieties in quite different dimensions like meaningfulness, rationality, or reasonability. Though this may surprise many readers, I claim there is only a change in the order of presentation when Hegel later develops the topics and methods of the sciences under the title Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences. The received wisdom seems to overlook the basic fact that Hegel’s philosophical science is just the self-consciously reflected Wissenschaft, and that Hegel’s talk of a system here does not designate his own system of philosophical convictions, nor a system of philosophical disciplines, but rather the one and only system of scientific knowledge.

P. Stekeler-Weithofer (*)  University of Leipzig, Leipzig, Germany e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 M. F. Bykova and K. R. Westphal (eds.), The Palgrave Hegel Handbook, Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26597-7_6

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Accordingly, the main topic of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit is the Geisteswissenschaften (avant la lettre), or “moral sciences”, including philosophy itself. Under the titles of “nature” and “philosophy of nature,” Hegel reflects in the Encyclopedia on the topics and methods of the natural sciences. Under the title of “logic,” he first reflects on qualitative distinctions, then on sortal or discrete entities in pure or ideal discourse, which means that there are clear equalities N = M and inequalities N ≠ M for their representations N, M defined. Finally, he looks at the measures needed in order to project quantitative magnitudes and mathematical models onto the real world of possible experience. Hence, the real placement problem of philosophy is, if we follow Hegel, not how to fit spirit or sapience into a material world but how to place the physical sciences into our overall knowledge of what there really is. In other words, we have to understand the natural sciences as an achievement of human spirit. As institutions, they are topics of the Geisteswissenschaften and philosophy. As a result, science without philosophy is technics without self-consciousness. Already in the case of animal life, biological knowledge transcends the limitations of physics. This statement contradicts the utopian promise that an ideal (divine?) physicist could, in principle, explain life causally. It is, however not easy to understand the difference between counterfactual possibilities, that are only verbal fictions, like talking about gods, thinking animals or machines with consciousness, and really possible cases with which we should count in our real world, not just in science fiction or utopian novels. We find another impossibility in reducing the phenomena of Practical Philosophy and the Social Sciences to physics. Developments of our systematic knowledge about institutions depend upon norms, rules, laws and the state. We reflect on them systematically in philosophy, ethics, political economy, jurisprudence, and legal studies, but also in the historical sciences and the humanities of letters. In empirical and rational psychology, we develop our knowledge about behavioral and action-related forms of attitudes to the surrounding world and to oneself. The metaphysical agenda in Hegel’s Phenomenology, Logic and Encyclopedia can now be roughly sketched as the insight into the absoluteness of subjectivity. This very expression already explains the label “Absolute Idealism.” It corresponds to a radical acceptance of, and reconciliation with, the finiteness of being and knowledge—in robust criticism of any transcendent metaphysics, to which almost all so-called “isms” belong, from naïve theism to naïve materialism.2 According to the proposed reading, Hegel does not present a phylogenetic or ontogenetic story of an educational development of homo sapiens or (self-)consciousness, starting with animal sentience and ending at some mythical absolute knowledge. This interpretation was suggested by one of Hegel’s greatest admirers, Karl Marx and is shared by Georg Lukács (1986), Alexandre Kojève, and Jean Paul Sartre. Today it seems that almost everyone follows it, including Axel Honneth and Robert Brandom in his very interesting, fresh and new approach to the Phenomenology.3 Even John McDowell expresses a similar position when, in the first paragraph of his “The Apperceptive I and the Empirical Self:

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Towards a Heterodox Reading of ‘Lordship and Bondage’ in Hegel’s Pheno­ menology” he writes: “Hegel’s Phenomenology traces an education of consciousness, as a result of which it is to attain the standpoint of absolute knowing” (McDowell 2009, 147). I find no such path of education in Hegel’s text, nor a fixed standpoint of absolute knowing. Instead, I developed a different reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology (Stekeler 2014), a very short sketch of which is presented here. According to my reading, Hegel’s Phenomenology shows how to understand truth as the fulfilment of specified criteria, in contrast to the pragmatically much more basic performative attitudes and other subjective and expressive acts. In the case of a claim that says, for example, that what I see before me is a deer and not a cow, the question of truth refers to the relation between assumed satisfactionconditions for assertions, on one side, how things stand in the world, on the other. If we do not confuse empirical statements with generic sentences that, instead of representing anything, express conceptual rules presupposed in truth conditions a priori (in a sense even more general than Kant’s), it is harmless to speak of representations in our assumptions, in information, or in hopes (pace Richard Rorty and Robert Brandom). Based on its content, a claim is true only relative to the fulfilment of the relevant criteria or conditions a posteriori. The content is a very complex fulfilment condition due to its presupposed conceptual inferences, which may reach far into the future. The fact that I make some claim in a speech act, or express my attitude to a proposition, is not in this sense relative. It is as absolute as any other performance of an action. According to my reading, Hegel’s Phenomenology disambiguates our usual talk about absolute knowing and truth. Subjective performances are finite but absolute, whereas speculative reflections on “absolute” objectivity of nature as a whole—for example by some implicit appeal to a divine infinite view sideways on, sub specie aeternitatis—are merely counterfactual fictions that may help to articulate the finitude of all real things and all real knowledge ex negativo. This reading may be contested, but it should at least be taken seriously as a possible reading; if it may not capture the whole of Hegel’s protean Phenomenology, it highlights important aspects that have been chronically neglected, and sets a crucial baseline for the adequacy of social theory. We must distinguish between the act a subject actually performs and the generic action the subject means to enact. If I say that it is raining, the information may be wrong, if the truth condition defining the content of the assertion is not fulfilled; but the commitment I undertake by my assurance or belief is absolute in Hegel’s sense, as I read it: it is not relative to what in the end is or was the fact. John Searle’s talk of a direction of fit can be nicely applied here: We can distinguish between cases in which “doing so makes it so” from those claims that “fit” or are true, only if specifiable conditions (typically, in the world) are satisfied, whether by chance or some relative necessity. Systematically, Hegel’s understanding of the absoluteness of performances goes back to Descartes’ insight that any act of doubt already is an act of thinking, of performing a (silent) speech act.4 Fichte’s proto-pragmatist insight into the primacy of (free) action with respect to all knowledge claims has the same root.

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Actions are changes in the world. This holds for acts and speech acts as well as for adopting or rejecting propositional attitudes, if we understand the latter in contrast to alternative attitudes and orientations, which we can or could choose as well. In a sense, the insight into the absoluteness of subjective performances is an elucidation of Kant’s rather obscure talk about the spontaneity of action and thinking. In determining how to act properly, however, the generic content and goal of the action, taken as a type, form and schema of an action, always already depend on general knowledge and belief, i.e. on propositional attitudes, presupposing a determinateness and understanding of the propositions in question. A maxim (Kant), plan (Vorsatz) and intention (Absicht) can exist only relative to such general knowledge and general belief, because there is no access to any possible future if not mediated by conceptual representation, which presupposes language, the basic medium of human intelligence. If we do not forget the truism that we cannot see or perceive, sense, feel or intuit mere possibilities, all forms of empiricism collapse—and we must reflect on the real way to represent possibilities by thinking, i.e. in a public or silent use of language, including pictures and diagrams. Moreover, the generic identity of any action is always contrasted to other relevant action-schemes; it cannot be specified without (at least implicit) reference to a presupposed set of general alternatives. There simply is no well-determined singular act, event or thing, which is not a particular version of instantiating a generic type within a finite set of generic alternatives. Individuum est ineffabile, says Goethe; there are no infimae species, says Kant (GS 24:569) (very much in the spirit of Aristotle). A token in an absolute sense does not exist as a well-defined object of meaningful talk or thought in the real world. In the same way, the notion of a moment now as a time-point with no extension (PhG GW 9:64–68) refers at best to the general form of distinguishing between what happens now and what has happened or will happen at other times. This corresponds to Hegel’s insight that a naked demonstrative like “this” with no indication of the kind of objects to which one wants to refer, has no referent at all (PhG GW 9:63–65). Quine’s famous example is congenial to Hegel’s thought if we want to interpret deictic introductions of a word like “Gavagai” in the foreign language of an unknown tribe properly: we must already surmise that the word might refer to rabbits in contrast to rabbit-parts or to past rabbit shapes (Quine 1960, 31, 90). Hegel distinguishes the generic form, i.e. the type or species of things, events or doings by using the expression “an sich” (“as such,” “in-itself”), from its actualization, the thing, event or action in-and-for-itself. At the same time, Hegel criticizes Kant’s misleading use of the logical expression “an sich.” If we say that a cat as such has four legs, we talk in the mode of the “an-sich” and express a conceptual principle or default rule, referring to the whole genus and the corresponding generic inference(s) or normal expectation(s). If we realize this, we know there are exceptions and that particular cases can contradict the general rule. This is the basic ground for Hegel’s dialectic as the logical insight that applying generic norms in particular cases is, in general, non-monotonic.5 This is a categorical contrast to merely formal logic in sortal domains, as we find them in a pure form only

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in mathematics. In dialogues about the real world, a speaker is supposed to signal important exceptions if he knows that a normal expectation does not hold in a particular, exceptional case. The hearer, in turn, must be aware of the limitations of default entitlements provided by his informants. We know generic things an sich much earlier than their relevant particular exceptions, just as young children already learn about dogs and their typical behavior by looking at picture books and listening to adults, not merely by experiencing real dogs in the external world. In contrast to this, Kant’s Ding an sich refers to the totally empty idea of a world of entities and facts “in itself,” detached from any access by us. To such a thing an sich only a fictional God beyond space and time could have access, whereas we humans are always limited to our forms of thinking or speaking and to our local sensory intuitions, i.e., to our actual relations to spatial and temporal processes at present. Kant’s unfortunate contrast between our limited forms of intuition (and thinking) to God’s intellectual intuition, viewed as a direct access to the world an sich in all past and future, leaves to us only the immanent point of view. We can agree as far as it goes if we only do not forget the fact that in our reflections on our epistemic relations to the world, we ourselves construct a counterfactual view from the side, a fictional divine perspective. Hegel therefore seeks to rectify Kant’s contrast through his phenomenological approach. It includes a critique of dealing schematically with our own speculative views on the world an sich “beyond all appearances.” Here, the principle of formal consistency do not hold. There is no way of talking about God without inner incoherence. Nevertheless, we need such speculative reflections in reflecting on the very notions of truth and knowledge in their tension between actual knowledge and ideal (divine) truth. Moreover, consistency is not enough for serious possibility. Many sets of sentences are formally consistent but do not deserve to be taken seriously at all—such that their content should not count as possible at all, but may be conceptually impossible—as Hegel sees much clearer even than modern Analytic Philosophy. For example, it does not at all suffice to prove the formal consistency of the assumption of a free will in some merely intelligible world. Instead, we require an immanent distinction between acts performed at will and other behaviors or accidents to which the adverbial label “voluntary” is inappropriate. Whereas Fichte seems to urge us to make a basic decision in favor of the pragmatic approach, Hegel develops Fichte’s original insight by contrasting not just the I as the subject and the non-I as the object, but also contrasting force and content, long before Frege invents a notational expression in written formulas for it, namely his assertion sign. The performance of a particular act in and for itself— for example an actualization of a particular illocutionary act in the sense of Austin (1977)—stands in a certain contrast to the generic act in itself. Absolute spirit in the Hegel’s final paragraphs of the Phenomenology is the practice of making speculative self-consciousness explicit, at first in religion and art, and then in philosophy. In these forms of practices, we reflect upon and develop conscious attitudes to our whole being (within the world) as persons. Finite contents of objective knowledge-claims about local facts (in the world) do

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not play a decisive role for such an infinite attitude, which is, rather, an attitude to the indefinite world (of everything that is, as we say, and to all possibilities). Hegel’s emphasis on becoming (Werden) then expresses the insight that the world of things, facts, events and processes goes far beyond the domain that can be explained by the limited means or methods of mechanisms in the physical sciences. This is so even though all things are made of (chemical) matter and all changes can be viewed, at least in principle, as movements of matter and things. The real problem of physicalism or materialism is its mechanism, as Hegel will show again in the Logic of the Concept. The problem consists in the dogmatic claim that all processes can be explained by forces, ideally represented by pre-determined mathematical functions. The danger of such a sweeping exaggeration of actual possibilities of explanation results from a neglect of the difference between generic pre-knowledge as we develop it in our biological knowledge about the normal and exceptional behavior of living beings and universal generic predictions. Functions that at least in part are only described ex post facto as courses of values are not yet functions by which we can calculate some values and, via some projective applications of the values, predict some typical events in the future. Any (finite) content or concept consists, according to Hegel’s recollection of Plato’s Eidos (see PhG GW 9:40), of the following moments: a differentiation or specification (the Horos of determinateness, as Hegel says; PhG GW 9:14), some normal inferences or expectations attached to the expression (the Logos), and its related default forces or generic dispositions. A world-related conceptual form is such a unity. Science is the institution of working on the concept. In it, we develop a harmonized unity of our conceptual differentiations with some attached normal expectations or dispositions. In contrast to the sciences, philosophy in its modern form reflects on the whole framework of scientific conceptualizations. It does so from a very general point of view. The word “speculation” signals this highest level of (logical) reflection. (“Speculation” derives from speculari [Latin], meaning to observe or examine.) The world of facts and concepts, of physical bodies and intelligent minds, is the one and only world we live in. This monism is the true message of Spinoza’s Ethics and Schelling’s Naturphilosophie. This world contains all possible aspects, not only its physical (mechanical) features. It is therefore not only the cosmos, the universe of stars and planets, nor merely the earth and its creatures that arose after an imagined beginning of a limited cosmos; it is also the institutional world of spirit. Where the scientific worldview turns into physicalism or mechanism, it shifts unwittingly from knowledge and beliefs about things or processes in the world to speculative and metaphysical sentences about the whole world, from pragmatic or instrumental knowledge to a kind of total attitude. Such attitudes are traditionally the topics of religious discourse. Spinoza, Hume, Schopenhauer, and their followers do not seem to see, for example, that their view of human subjects as animals with more or less developed skills and inner drives as the alleged final cause of all human behavior, triggered by enactive perception (Alva Noë), already belongs to

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a quasi-religious, speculative, self-image and not to scientific knowledge at all.6 Hegel agrees only insofar as there is no human action and no act of thinking that does not already make some use of our bodily desires and feelings of satisfaction. We need, however, a sufficient account of their transformation into subjective evaluations of conceptual fulfilment conditions: It is always wrong to remain content with subjective feelings of satisfaction or of discontent; we must instead evaluate propositions as good or bad orientations. Skepticism has a similar logical form as pessimism. To doubt everything or to accept with Hume and his empiricist followers only one’s own perceptual experiences as grounding cognitions means to turn oneself into an animal. Unfortunately, no argument can force such a skeptic or empiricist to admit this verbally, since verbal self-declarations are fundamentally free. Furthermore, nothing follows for me from an (speech–)act without my recognizing freely that something should be inferred on the base of conceptual, standard, typical, species-related knowledge. We therefore must characterize knowledge as the jointly developed and individually learned canon or system of norms of generic and conceptual differential inferences from empirical cognition of singular and particular cases. The canon defines normal or generic correctness of default rules of inferences. Empirical cognition is essentially indexical, referring to some or many singular worldly cases. Generic knowledge is, at least according to its ideal form, time-general. As long as the binding power of generally accepted norms for correct inferences is suspended by a skeptic at will, or if he asks too much in his quest for certainty and justification, no one can convince him to change his attitude. As long as his free will to doubt remains his heaven, all love’s labor is lost. The skeptic’s attitude is absolute, in fact, absolutely arbitrary and subjective when he refuses to see the robust contrast between arbitrary and other kinds of attitudes or judgements, or does not want to take part in distinguishing good and bad, sufficient and insufficient reasons. The difference between an animal and a skeptic is that the animal cannot develop sapience or conceptual competence in our sense at all, whereas the skeptic tries to justify his unwillingness to use free judgement in applying generic knowledge and conceptual norms. He also overemphasizes the truism that the real world always presents us with middling or border-line cases of continuous ranges or classifications, so that we must disregard such specifics in order to focus on sufficiently clear and distinct central cases or normal types. This excludes mere schematic understanding without experienced judgements about what is rational or reasonable in view of our faculty and competence to master joint distinctions and to work with norms of default inference. Asking reasonable questions is an art, not a schematic technique. We make distinctions and check on different levels of reflection the corresponding joint practice of differentiating relevant cases for relevant inferences. This holds also for the corresponding practice of identifying cases, i.e. not differentiating them in an act of negating a negation, but counting them as generically equivalent, or as Hegel says: as “gleichgültig” (equally valid). Improvements in such a practice do not question the practice as a whole.

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Although no arguments can force a skeptic to take part in a free evaluation of where to stop his doubts and quest for reasons, and where to start cooperative trust in generic knowledge or conceptual truths established by the sciences and philosophy in the past, we know that skepticism and pessimism are wrong attitudes. The main result of the Phenomenology is, in the end, the insight that speculative attitudes to the whole world (a.k.a God) are absolute. Hence, they must be evaluated as good or bad by totally different criteria than empirical facts or generic laws, systematically expressed in scientific theories. The upshot of this path of reflection is a secularization of theodicy, from the book Hiob in the bible to Leibniz. Hegel does not attempt to refute a possible accusation of God or nature (deus sive natura) as being not good but dissolves it by self-conscious reconciliation or sublation (Aufhebung): God cannot be viewed as a finite subject and nature does not act at all. The actual world is the best possible world only because there is no other real world. Any alternative possible world is only a content of a fictitious novel. Living in the real world thus stands against not living at all. The belief in a benevolent God is just a mythical, or rather allegorical, expression of the very insight that there is only one world, the world in which we live, together with the judgement that living is still better than not living. The true solution to théodicée is a generically positive attitude to life and the world as a whole despite all pain and horror in particular cases. Fictions of better worlds than the real world may have some good functions, as fairy tales and novels also do, but only if we remain the masters in using our own sketches of alternative possibilities, ideals, ideas, and hopes. This reading of the Phenomenology is much more radically heterodox than McDowell’s or Brandom’s.

2 Systematic and Conceptual Background Hegel’s original goal in writing the Phenomenology of Spirit seems to have been a comprehensive explication of the notion of knowledge as the subjective moment in a logic of truth. In the course of the work, Hegel’s topic shifted more and more to the task of giving a differential account of animal and human consciousness, and of the notoriously obscure notions of “self” and “identity” in any sort of practical self-relation, including all kinds of “self-consciousness.” Developing our knowledge about the apparent reality of (self-)consciousness turns the Cartesian proposition “I think therefore I am” into a version of the principle “saying so, makes it so” in performative speech acts. As a result, the ominous “intellectual intuition,” which Kant only attributed to God, is, ironically, just the absolute form of practical (self-)relation according to the maxim: “doing so, makes it so.” Absolute spirit is, in the end, the overall form in meta-level self-knowledge of what it is to be a person, performing conscious acts and reflecting on their

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forms. Speculative reflections are first actualized in religious contexts that separate general spirit conceptually from individual subjects and their limited faculties. In a similar way, we talk about a spiritual soul in order to represent our own generic or transcendental “I” in a figurative, anthropomorphic, way. We do this in order to point to our participation in humankind—such that critical philosophy must reconcile the split between me and us, between my subjective mind and our trans-subjective spirit, intelligence, or sapience—and “sublate” the possibly wrong readings. Later, mankind realizes that all representations of the divine, of gods or spiritual powers, go back to our own crafts and arts, to Holy Scriptures and poetry. Art shows up in the architecture of temples and churches with their statues, sculptures, paintings, but also in music and dance. Hegel sketches, indeed, a kind of development from abstract religion to a religion of artists, especially in the Egyptian, Greek and Roman realms, but also in the Renaissance and following epochs. Under the disguise of the divine, the community celebrates itself, namely a (relatively) free society, sheltered by state law, which makes free personal relations between citizens possible. These relations surpass by far the merely communitarian forms of cooperation within the limits of families, tribes, races, or religions. Speculative philosophy is, in the end, meta-meta-level reflection on the real meaning of religion and art, and on the real truths achieved in the sciences and used as conceptual presuppositions or generic knowledge even in everyday language. Religion, art, and philosophy thus are human institutions parallel to the sciences, distinguished by their specific task of reflecting on whole contexts and producing maps of our entire human world, not only of the physical cosmos, from a speculative point of view. The system of education, health care, economy with its contracts and treaties, and the state with its laws and orders are other systems and special topics of speculative reflection: the topics of objective spirit, sc. the Geisteswissenschaften, once designated in English as the moral sciences, but since degraded into mere “humanities” and social sciences. As institutions, they are collective practices, performed by us, and stand beside religion and philosophy. Philosophy as logical reflection, in turn, talks about the expressive forms and speculative roles of religion, art—and of philosophical wisdom itself. Only on this high level of a formally infinite ascent of possible self-reflection do we reach the status of self-consciousness in theoretical and practical matters and learn to know who we are. We are persons and citizens in a cooperative system that makes it possible to become a person. Hegel’s new version of a categorical imperative therefore takes the following form: “be a person and respect the others as persons,” as we find it in §36 of his Philosophy of Right. The gnomic oracle entails Nietzsche’s similar but much less precise version “become who you are,” which, of course, goes back to Pindar (2. Pyth. Ode 72), who says „genoi hoios essi mathōn“, which means that we should become persons by learning.

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2.1 Ding an sich, Transcendental Apperception, and Intellectual Intuition According to my understanding, Hegel begins his considerations in a context in which Schelling and others worried about Kant’s talk about a Ding-an-sich (thingin-itself) and reflected on the sense of Kant’s transcendent “ideas” of God, the World, and the Soul. Further topics are Kant’s talks about (receptive and apperceptive) intuition (Anschauung) in contrast to a “transcendent” notion of “intellectual intuition” as the power of God to produce the whole world just by thinking and willing it (as we find it in all theological religions influenced by Hellenism, e.g. in the Islamic thought of Avicenna). These problems stand in close connection to the basic principle of transcendental apperception and Descartes’ res cogitans. Fichte sees that Descartes’ argument leads from the performance of an act to the existence of me as the actor. As such, the argument has the same form as “intellectual intuition:” thinking a thought makes me into a thinker of that thought. However, as a thinker I am no peculiar res cogitans, but a human being performing (or trying to perform) an act of a certain form. Insofar, a self-conscious inference from “ambulo,” I am walking, to “I am a walker” and from there to “I exist walking” is of the same form, even though Descartes did not agree. All this is closely connected with Kant’s claim that any (conscious) presentation or representation (Vorstellung) of anything in the world must be possibly (or even actually) accompanied by some “I think (of it).” Hegel seems to ask what this all means. In contrast to Hume and to contemporary empiricism (self-)consciousness or con-scientia is, in the usage of Descartes, Kant, and Hegel, much more than (self-) awareness, (self-)attention or vigilance, which we share with animals and their enactive sentience. Descartes even defines thinking as an “inner action” of the “mind,” accompanied by self-control (“conscientia”)—which we should understand with Hegel as merely subjective spirit. An example for such an inner action is our silent reading of books, but even more so our verbal planning or silent intention to perform an action-scheme. “Inner actions” like intending are indeed (necessarily) accompanied by some forms of (self-)consciousness, as Kant unconsciously repeats Descartes. This holds for conscious knowing how to do something, i.e. how to execute a generic form of action, but also for how to make that form of action, its leading maxim (plan and content, intention or form), explicit— and goes far beyond merely behavioral performances. Consciousness and self-consciousness in the sense of con-scientia are already mixtures of knowing how to do things and knowing that we do this or that action. Thinking is thus always already partaking in joint practices of common knowledge (con-scientia) by performing acts of knowing-how-to-do-things-properly and knowing what something is—in view of the relevant norms of conceptual distinctions. Animals do not have consciousness in the proper, normative, sense of the word. They do not have joint knowledge, which is, indeed, one of the meanings of Latin con-scientia and its Greek origin syn-eidesis (see Hennig 2006).

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The more special meaning of conscience develops from the need of self-control in judging one’s own executions and fulfilments of normative conditions of good judgements and actions. Sincerity or good intentions are not enough, as already Hegel and recently Bernard Williams in his last book had pointed out against a merely “coherentist” morality of Kant with its merely subjective sincerity.7 What we need is accuracy (Williams 2002), which I propose to identify with Hegel’s conscientiousness, “Gewissenhaftigkeit,” which alone is ethical self-consciousness about the cultural and social background of all moral norms and ethical duties; this is Hegel’s “Sittlichkeit.” It is, of course, still open how to understand the words “self” and “I” and our talk about the “subject” of thinking and consciousness. What thinking is, who is the thinker, and how to understand the subject of thinking, are leading questions of Hegel’s enterprise in his Phenomenology of Spirit. Parts of the question concern the difference and the identity of me as the object of my reflection with me as subject, i.e. between the “I” and the “Me,” “Myself” or “my Self,” as we can say in generic reflection. These questions are crucial for any human or personal selfconsciousness. We cannot and we should not reduce self-consciousness with Fichte or Henrich to the immediate subjectivity of the performing actor, because the relevant logical form of self-reflection is “I affirm about myself that I have a property P.” In other words, we must include the performative form of self-assurance within the logical analysis, as Frege had also seen when he introduced his assertion sign, expressing the “force” of affirmation. This move is criticized by Wittgenstein (in the Tractatus) and is still contested today—a sign for the fact that it is not yet really understood. According to my reading, Hegel radicalizes and demystifies the Cartesian approach to the human mind insofar as he dismantles ontic talk about a detached soul, as we know it from “rational psychology” and from theological traditions, yet without adopting “materialism,” which identifies the power of the mind with the functions of the brain. Hegel further re-categorizes all talk about God in religious and rational theology.

2.2 Self-Consciousness The Phenomenology is, from the beginning to the end, a project to make explicit the actual and real forms of (self-)consciousness. To understand this goal properly, we must remain aware of how Hegel uses words like “understanding,” “(self-)consciousness” and “reason” (also) as (sub-)labels for limited aspects (or concepts) of spirit. That is, “spirit” is his word for comprehensive (self-)consciousness, which contains, as such, all forms of singular and generic (implicit and explicit, practical and reflective) knowledge about the essential forms of our human life. As a general capacity or competence, spirit is not an object of subjective introspection or intuition. If it is an object, then only as the generic topic of our

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reflections on performative forms of joint practices and institutions. These forms exist as moments in individual and collective actualizations of types of judgements and actions. Subjective mind is the performative I of a personal subject which is different from the objects or themes of self-knowledge. The same holds for the societal, institutional and, as such, generic, We, which is not immediately identical with what I or we say about ourselves. On the other hand, the I is a We and the We is an I (PhG GW 9:108): I do what we can do; and it is always a personal subject who says or assures in an expressive mode “we do this.” Only in a choir we sing the word “we” together if it appears in a song. Only later, in the chapter titled “Spirit,” Hegel makes clear in which sense spirit is the generic We and, at the same time, the generic I. Moreover, this We is, in a sense, the actualized form of a joint human life. This form is not a utopian idea or a mere thought, as the English words suggest. It rather corresponds to Plato’s “highest idea,” the idea of the real good, the true and beautiful form of life, idea tou agathou. As such, “the idea” contains the whole system of norms presupposed in all judgements, in the real forms for all proprieties in reflecting judgements about correctness, rationality, truth, and reason.

2.3 Being an Object of Knowledge and Being as a Performative Attitude Hegel seems to see long before Heidegger the importance of the ontological difference between ourselves as objects of reflective talk and ourselves as subjects of practical life, of mental attitudes, judgements and joint actions. A similar difference concerns nature as the object of the natural sciences and the world, in which we live, the earth as our human habitat together with all other creatures and the surrounding cosmos. The crucial point is that our very presence or Dasein here and now is conditioned by cosmos and nature, but our knowledge and our images of the cosmos, of nature and of ourselves within nature are, in turn, conditioned by our ways of being personal subjects. Moreover, long before George Herbert Mead and his followers (Mead 2009), Hegel realized that each of us in our mental capacity largely depends upon education in community surroundings of family and peer-groups. The forms of thinking and acting together are provided by the tradition and social context in which we live, by the grouping of the We to which we belong. This holds even for our capacities to develop new forms and norms of judgements and actions. Understanding freedom of thought and action correctly is the central task of Hegel’s entire philosophy. Hume and Kant shared that goal; Hume missed it because his picture of man collapses into a picture of a clever social animal, whereas Kant’s transcendental arguments for free will as an existing noumenon mystifies the reality of freedom and action, just as Descartes and Leibniz had done before.

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2.4 Relative Self-Ascriptions and Absolute Performation Performing an illocutionary act such as: “I promise that I will come,” or: “I think about myself (and about you) right now,” is absolute in the sense that it cannot be false in contradistinction to any judgement about another person or myself or any (self-)attribution of some property or faculty. In other words, such judgements and attributions are always relative and subjective in the following sense: They express a claim about a relation between the speaker and the object which can be satisfied or not, true or false. As in the Cartesian proposition “I think,” performing any illocutionary act is, as such, absolute. This does not mean that it involves some absolute knowledge. On the contrary. Later Wittgenstein sees again that the performative reading of this absolute only denies that it is a matter of theoretical knowledge. It is instead a matter of performative practice.

3 Investigating Real Human Consciousness 3.1 Deconstructing Empiricist Self-Knowledge Hegel’s phenomenology proceeds more destructively than constructively; i.e., Hegel deconstructs immediate intuitions about what thinking or mind or (self-)consciousness is. One opponent is the empiricist idea that consciousness is awareness, i.e. a direct perceptual relation either to some objects of my inner sense (such as sense data or raw feels) or to physical objects of the outer world as alleged causes of my sensations and perceptions.8 Hegel, the great foe of immediacy (Sellars), is the first to dismantle the myth of the given (Sellars, McDowell, Brandom). It is the myth of sense-data as we find it in Hume, Berkeley avant la lettre, i.e. before Russell, Carnap, or Ayer. But the idea of impressions, causally produced by physical objects, as we find it already in Locke down to Quine’s epistemic naturalism, is no less problematic. It presupposes quite high-level theories and commentaries about perception and talks about them sideways on. Any referential relation to things in the world is, as Hegel argues, always already conceptually mediated. Therefore, it presupposes generic knowledge together with linguistic and practical competence. The first steps in Hegel’s arguments lead us away from identifying consciousness with immediate awareness or attention to develop an insight into the difference between a merely habitual attitude of desire, i.e. animal appetite, and an already self-reflexive intentionality and self-conscious intention. Self-consciousness as a necessary aspect of human consciousness is due to our need to control the proprieties of proper intentional relations, including our own intentional actions. I must control these proprieties, even when I control or judge about the truth or normative correctness of your claims, judgements or actions. As a result, it sounds as if this I or Self is some kind of

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higher or spiritual entity called “self-consciousness,” which is the master of all judgements and actions, addressed under the word “soul” as the subject or master of thinking and under the word “will” as the subject or master of action. The body seems to be the mere tool of this spiritual master. This is an age-old picture of the relation between my self-consciousness and my body.

3.2 Deconstructing a Thinking Soul as the Master of the Body Hegel shows, according to my reading of the most famous passage of the Phenomenology of Spirit, the chapter on master and slave, that the image sketched above is not only wrong; it is inconsistent and incomprehensible. Unfortunately, the usual reading jumps far ahead into a social reading of joint self-consciousness, of acknowledging other persons. The real problem is to understand what it means to recognize norms as binding in judgements. As such, the usual reading loses track of Hegel’s deconstructive arguments. Stoicism is wrong in identifying the master with pure thinking. Skepticism is wrong because it is the position of the slave in the sense of a thoughtless pragmatism, which is, as such, behaviorism. It is not easy to make sense of all moves in Hegel’s text. Especially, his transitions to new chapters or aspects are hard to understand. It seems clear, however, that the transition from the chapter on self-consciousness to the chapter on reason rests on the insight that any judgement of correctness, truth or rightfulness presupposes a distinction between me as the singular subject performing an assurance on one side, and normative criteria or distinctions between good, true or reasonable assertions or orientations on the other. I always appeal to such normative criteria when I say that something is true, right, correct, reasonable, or real—or not. And such criteria are established by us—in a generic sense of this Us and We. In the chapter on reason, Hegel first shows that we must overcome the mystifying dualism between sentience and sapience, sensitivity and reason. Reason is no transcendent instance to which we can appeal. What is it then? How can I know about reason? How can reason guide me or us? What exactly guides us, if the guide should be reason?

3.3 Deconstructing Intuitive Appeals to Reason One aspect of the chapter on reason is to leave mental subjectivity and solipsism behind and to accept the objectivity of reason. In contradistinction to Kant and most Kantians, Hegel realizes long before Nietzsche, Foucault and post-modernist critics of the self-declared ages of reason and enlightenment that any appeal to reason can hide a version of subjectivism that is even more dangerous than

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immediate egoism. The problem is that in a certain moral stance, the stance of Kant’s Practical Reason, the individual appears as having, allegedly, the last word about all the norms and forms of reason. Thus, the individual subject becomes the master of reason. To assume that I have the last word about anything confuses the performative act with its content and truth, the feeling of certainty with knowledge. Hegel sees, moreover, that the deep mistake in Kant’s subjective philosophy rests on overestimating consistency. If my proposals about what could be acknowledged as moral norms are consistent with what I do, it neither follows that what I am doing is ethically right, nor that those norms which could be consistently accepted can function already as sufficient conditions for evaluating a form of action or maxim as morally allowed or good. The same holds for theoretical knowledge and for speculative images or maps of the whole world. Consistency is never a sufficient condition for truth and knowledge, not even for serious possibility. At best, it rules out a certain form of mistakes, failures, or shortcomings. Hegel’s critique of Kant thus rests on a rather trivial logical insight, which is, in the end, as true as it is important: consistency and sincerity are not nearly good enough. Consistency and sincerity are necessary conditions for true and good judgements, but they are not sufficient for the truth or the ethical goodness of the judgement or corresponding action. This insight corresponds to the important thesis defended in Hegel’s habilitation in Jena. One of Hegel’s theses states: Contradictio regula veri, non-contradictio falsi—contradiction is the limiting rule for what is right, non-contradiction for what is wrong. I.e. non-contradiction or consistency can only be used as a demarcation for what is wrong, it is not sufficient as a criterion of truth. Only now can we understand the basic points in Hegel’s attack on what he calls the “position of reason” in Kant’s subjective idealism: What is reasonable in the sense that it is a possible form or norm of judgement and action, is, as such, not yet true or good. Hence, the mere possibility of a consensus, say, about a proposal “p” to give a normative answer to such questions as, e.g., where it should be permissible to smoke or how to treat embryos, does not at all suffice for using “p” as a norm. In other words, not possible acknowledgments but real agreements are the foundation of ethical judgements. The same holds for the criteria of theoretical truth. The subjectivity of the standpoint of reason is the subjectivity of mere sincerity. Sincerity is never enough. On the contrary, sincere well-meaning without accuracy (Bernard Williams) tends to self-righteous hypocrisy. Therefore, the standpoint of morality, which Hegel identifies with Kant’s Practical Reason and its alleged basic principle, the Categorical Imperative, appears from the standpoint of real ethics as the culmination of subjectivism. Hegel’s irony becomes sarcastic when he says that the principle of moral reason thus turns into a principle of ethical evil. The road to hell is not only paved with good intentions, it is guided by signposts proclaiming: We all should act in such a way that I consistently can think that all could and should act according to it. Of course, a defender of Kant might claim that he did not mean his principle of morality or Practical Reason in this way.

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However, the point is what Kant actually says, not what he means in the sense of what he should have said, given the problems of interpretation Hegel fingers. The standpoint of reason is not sufficiently objective. The objectivity of ethics (Sittlichkeit) only rests on real institutions of cooperation in practice and joint evaluation of judgements. Hence, not subjective moral reason but the state, understood as the entire system of actually instituted norms and forms of proper judgement and action, is the (generic) subject of Sittlichkeit. Not subjective reason but the system of epistemic and ethical institutions is the spirit of laws. The same holds for truth and knowledge, even for good aesthetical judgement. In the chapter on Reason, Hegel deconstructs another attempt to overcome the mystifying idea of a subjective mind by an objective turn, the turn from talking about the soul to talking about the brain. This turn continues the course of argument, which Hegel had developed in the famous passages on master and slave: The real master cannot be a paper tiger of pure thinking, as in stoicism. The real master is the acting body, the slave. From this it is only a short step to assume that my self and my brain are essentially the same and that consciousness and self-consciousness consist of the images or pictures the brain creates about the world at large and the person’s body in this world. However, Hegel ridicules this account, too, where he replaces the soft brain by the hard skull and shows that no observation of living or dead brains or skulls can show us the mental or even intelligent parts and processes in our behavior and action. In other words, brain-watching as an approach to understanding the human mind is superstitious and fundamentally wrong, as mistaken as trying to find the areas of Haydn’s real musical genius or Lenin’s alleged political genius by investigating his skull.

3.4 Human Spirit as the Form of a Personal Subject in We-Groups Mental processes can only be understood in the context of a social philosophy or theoretical (micro and macro) sociology, not in the context of physiology or merely behavioral psychology. These are the results of Hegel’s analysis, if we translate them into modern language: The human mind is a function of our human social life. It is defined by competent participation in social institutions like language and learning, ethics and legal justice, aesthetics and religion. Mental competence is, in the end, personal competence, which depends, as such, on social competence. Nevertheless, Hegel supports the turn of investigation to the real processes, even in the brain. We cannot or should not simply presuppose a spiritual mind or transcendent soul; but the turn to bodily parts is a bad idea, if we neglect the whole person’s and not just the brain’s social and historical context. A brain as such is as dead as the skull. Not the brain makes humans intelligent; a specific use of it can

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be intelligent (or not so intelligent). The same holds for language, which is a social institution, but also requires good usage, good application. From here, it is no great step to the most general and at the same time basic structures of objective spirit. This domain ranges from the informal communities of families and clans to formal society and the state or nation. Families and clans form the realm of the sacred, divine, communitarian law of kinship. The state is the domain of the positive law as the framework for a civic society with its institution of property, free division of labor and all the norms of habeas corpus, of bodily integrity, which define, for example, murder, robbery and kidnapping as crimes. Karl Popper, for one, totally missed all these points and overlooked entirely Hegel’s most radical liberalism in his analysis of human rights and the ‘philosophical’ foundations of a lawful society.

4 Absolute Spirit Subjective idealism appears in the version of the empirical idealism of Descartes or the mystical and sweeping enthusiastic empiricism of Berkeley, as Kant writes in the Prolegomena (GS 4:375 note). Locke’s physiology of understanding wavers between empiricism and materialism in the tradition of Hobbes, i.e. between a subjectivist foundation of cognition and a dogmatic belief in theoretical entities and causes as they belong to our explanations in physics and physiology. Hume’s skeptical behaviorism tries to be more radical but does not succeed in accounting of the very possibility of mathematical physics nor the very notion of cause in scientific explanation. Despite its obvious shortcomings, Hume’s Treatise had been the starting point of Kant’s analysis. However, not only empiricist followers of Locke and Hume overlook even today that they fall into the trap of viewing the world and our knowledge of it sideways-on, silently appealing to some divine or absolute knowledge of a God. Kant himself does not stick radically enough to a phenomenological analysis of our real forms of knowledge and cognition.

4.1 Finite Knowledge and the Practical Role of Ideals In contrast to the basic fact that any (finite and fallible) knowledge of (finite and inner-worldly) things always already is relational and perspectival, there is absolute, i.e. non-relative, knowledge, namely practical knowledge. Practical knowledge is, as such, a kind of self-knowledge. It proves itself as knowledge in doing things. This is, I submit, the deep kernel of Hegel’s pragmatism that foreshadows the primacy of knowing-how to knowing-that as we find it in Peirce, Dewey, Heidegger and Ryle. It is not an instrumentalist but an analytical pragmatism because it vindicates Fichte’s insight that absolute knowledge is practical knowledge and practical knowledge consists in actually performing actions on the

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ground of rational competence that is manifest in our actual acts. I hasten to add, however (pace Timothy Williamson’s reading of Ryle) that practical knowledge does not necessarily involve all possible versions of knowing what I do. Whatever I do, however, I do in part independently of the relative truth of assertions or judgements about my doings, including my own. What I do thus may differ from what I think, believe or intend to do. Differentiating between self-ascriptions of intentions and accurate judgements of what I actually intend is a complicated matter of evaluation with potentially infinite steps of critical reflection. In all actual cases, however, we stop at some level and declare some judgement as sufficient to establish the relevant distinction between (self-)ascription of mental or rational properties like intention, and actually having these properties, i.e. between (self-)appearance and (psychological) facts. This cannot be decided by merely (neuro-)physiological methods in objective brain-watching, though this may be the dream of those scientists who want to circumvent the more difficult questions of hermeneutics and joint understanding. As we see now, the word “absolute” refers here to the identity of subject and object in practical knowledge. If this is correct, the usual idea that Hegel was heading for some absolute knowledge about some transcendent absolute world is misleading. Instead, we can read Hegel’s insight into the absoluteness of performing acts or actions as a revised version of Fichte’s claim that there is a primacy of being an actor over being a theoretical thinker. There is a primacy of actions over the objects of thought. There is a primacy of practical recognition as it is manifest in actions over theoretical, as such mainly verbal, acceptance, avowal or ‘knowledge.’ This insight into the ‘absoluteness’ of our performances in contrast to the relative truth of generic content corresponds in some regards to Descartes’ primacy of the thinking I in contrast to the content and truth of what is thought, and to Kant’s principle of transcendental apperception, as we have already seen in outline above. Hegel’s Logic ends in a kind of proof of the logical primacy of our performative forms of actions and practices: It is presupposed in any claim about the real world. Moreover, we even presuppose the Idea or Spirit, which is nothing other than the implicit life-form of being a human person. This idea can be identified with the very capacity to make rational, reasonable, responsive and responsible judgements. In exercising this capacity (more or less adequately), any person takes part in the Idea. The Idea is the generic totality of practical forms we can perform as persons. In reflective acts, the person identifies him- or herself explicitly with our human form of life, i.e. Spirit. In doing so, he or she takes part in a practice of Absolute Spirit. The celebration of Spirit in the religions and the arts turns us humans into self-conscious persons on the speculative level of most general reflection. Indeed, we must understand religion, art, and philosophy as performative practices, not as claims to theoretical knowledge about local things or topics, events or processes in the world.

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4.2 The Idea of the Good From here, it is only a small step to the absolute presuppositions of the knowing I in the sense of our actively taking part as living persons in joint practices. Hegel brings these practices, taken as performative forms, under the label “idea”, which I propose to translate as effective form or performative form. The Idea in a generic and holistic sense is almost the same as Plato’s idea tou agathou, the idea of the Good as the master of the idea of the True. The Idea makes individual personal life and action possible. Accordingly, Hegel declares that the Concept is the real substance of the whole world as an object of our generic knowledge; it is the situation-invariant conceptual framework giving content to singular empirical knowledge-claims. As such, generic knowledge is categorically distinguished from merely subjective appearances, or from how the world merely seems to me or you. Hegel uses his generic expression “the Idea” in implicit reference to Kant’s notion of Idee as a regulative and speculative form of talking about the world or our lives as a whole. Like the term “world,” it is a singulare tantum. Its speculative use is similar to the object-level use of mass terms like “water” or “wellness.” The Idea is, indeed, the overall performative form of human life (Lebensvollzugsform). As such, it is the realization of Plato’s idea of the Good, as far it goes. The Idea embraces all norms for goodness, beauty, and truth. It contains the whole system of criteria, according to which we can judge whether a certain part of our life is good and true. The Idea (of the Good) thus is the (normative) form in which we also evaluate a singular subject or person as a good one—with respect to presupposed standard or paradigm. Judging about the generic good is much more basic than judging about particular truth. With the word “true,” we evaluate sentences and propositions, speech acts and responses as good enough, presupposing a corresponding canon or standard for what we normatively evaluate as true, what not. It would be misleading to object to this logical or analytical pragmatism, which I ascribe to Hegel, that any such evaluation is always subjective and does not grasp the real meaning of being true. Rather, we must remain aware of the fact that we proceed in this way, even if we may not notice it. Of course, there can be disputes about the quality of the standard or the relevance of the paradigm in question. On the other hand, what Hegel calls “the Idea” is the actually acknowledged set of normative forms. It has real power in our lives. It is real or actual, in so far as it explains actions and judgements not only with respect to their genesis, but also to their teleology and their effectiveness. Here is not the place for more detailed examination of the difficult notion of the Idea and speculative Truth. However, we can already understand the central points: In the end, the only absolute knowledge consists in how we do things; or rather, the only absolute being is performative being, either the being of an individual I or of a collective We. This I is a We with respect to the content of its competence; and this We exists through the doings of singular persons. Both are absolute in the

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sense that doing something is, in its direction of fit, only relative to its content, form or intention. In and for itself, doing is absolute. I can lie and err, but the speech act is what it is. Performing one’s own individual life is thus absolute and depends on fulfilling conceptual conditions only insofar as we evaluate its form as good or bad, rational or unintelligent. As brute performance or behavior, human life has the same feature of absolute subjectivity as animal life. This does not hold for leading a personal life, for fulfilling norms of good cooperation or for taking part in a practice of joint knowledge. Actually leading our life is presupposed in any intuition or judgement. True judgements and drawing the right, canonized, inferences in evaluating future or past possibilities are distinguishing features of a personal life. In other words, we are subjects as animals but we are persons only by taking part in a practice of spirit.

4.3 Ideal Truth Ideal truth is formal truth. It plays a certain part in our reflective talk about the form of our practice of articulating knowledge. Amazingly, most of his critics accuse Hegel of exactly what he himself had fiercely opposed, namely confusing ideal forms of (speculative) reflection with a transcendent notion of objective or absolute truth an sich. After turning away from mythological theism, we can, if we wish, still use the word “God.” But we must not forget that if we say that God is the truth or that God is good we do not say that there is an entity called “God.” Rather, we use the word in a metonymic way in order to talk about the idea of truth, objectivity or, when it comes to questions of ethics, about goodness. In using such a holistic term of reflection on a totality, we refer to the whole project of developing human practice.

4.4 Mundane Truth in Religion and Art vs. Parochial Views in Empiricism and Scientism What is the (particular mode of) truth of speculative statements in our high-level reflections on being, truth and knowledge? This question does not only concern traditional theology. When we, for example, believe that the physical sciences present the only real knowledge of the real world, we just express a view of the world. Hegel, accordingly, criticizes metaphysical mechanism as a wrong understanding of a limited form of explaining some features of nature by its mechanic laws for movements and change. As such, the topics of physics and chemistry cover only a province of human knowledge, which is, as knowledge, but one

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province within human ethical life. Empiricism and scientism are, in fact, parochial in their unnoticed presuppositions. Therefore, it is deeply ironic that Hegel is attacked for talking about the absolute; the messenger gets punished for the message. The message is that atomistic and mechanic materialism is a speculative, not a scientific theory. It defends allegedly objective and universal claims and produces a skeptical attitude towards knowledge about life and spirit by proposing the idea that any real knowledge must be as exact as that of our mathematical physics and that any true explanation presupposes a reduction to physical laws of movements and change. This physicalism or mechanic materialism is an ideological metaphysical belief. For Hegel, “the absolute” is just a title for all actualizations and performances. The existence of us together with our practices of knowledge, science, reflection, and philosophical criticism is silently presupposed in any epistemic act. In the end, we find here the truth of Descartes’ attempt to overcome methodological skepticism: To doubt that there is such a practice of knowledge destroys any sense of doubting. Hegel addresses this logical form as “sich vollbringender Skeptizismus,” as self-consummating skepticism.9

5 Conclusion The term “(personal) subject” stands for what I am, the term “object” stands at first for the topic (“subject-matter”) of my judgements or for any semi-sortal entity with presupposed identity conditions like an animal or a physical thing to which I refer in empirical deixis or statement. Acknowledgement is a performative attitude to judgements (also about myself) or to actions (which may be my own or others’). The question whether a self-model or judgement about myself really is true, i.e. if it should be acknowledged, or if I merely take it to be true, can only be answered in dialectical moves back and forth between my immediate (performative, expressive) self-judgements, your judgements about me, my doings and your answers—and so on. Sometimes, however, I make self-models and judgements about myself true, by acting in a certain way. In this case, self-knowledge turns into active and practical self-determination. In such cases, self-knowledge develops from an unmoving (bewegungslos) tautology as in Fichte’s formula “I am I” to self-determination. This move from theoretical self-consciousness to practical action is the deepest move in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Being in the sense of performing forms of life presupposes being a personal subject or free actor of my actions and speech acts. This is the topic of Hegel’s talk about “Gestalten des Seins,” forms of our performances in our actualizations of our competence to live a human life. In such performances—in being who I am, so to speak—self-knowledge and self-consciousness turn into practical reality.

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Notes 1. Roi Bar develops this reading in his recent dissertation on Hegel’s Philosophy of Science, Leipzig 2017. 2. “There is no place for “isms” in philosophy,” says Gilbert Ryle (1937, 161). 3. Brandom’s book A Spirit of Trust is published in 2019 by Harvard University Press. 4. Thinking and reflective consciousness (in the full sense) mark the difference between the personal mode of being homo sapiens sapiens and mere animal life: “Es ist ein altes Vorurteil …, dass der Mensch vom Tiere sich durchs Denken unterscheide” (Enc. §2). Descartes had already distinguished a human person as veraloquens, or having a true language, from social animals like ants, termites or bees that use signals for coordinating their ongoing, merely present, behavior, but have no language to represent thoughts nor any possibilities to provide for meta-level judgements about their rationality and importance. 5. Non-monotonicity means that even though we can conceptually or generically infer from p (“the creature is a cat”) in normal cases r (“it has four legs”), p&q (“the creature is a mutilated cat”) can bar us from inferring r. Mere taxonomies in (quasi-)sortal domains are always monotonic, which drastically limits the significance of non-monotonic calculi in formal logic (and vice versa). 6. This image resembles Buddha’s talk about self-centered thirst, a metaphor for animal appetite or Begierde. Nietzsche’s heroism contradicts Buddha’s and Schopenhauer’s rhetoric of altruism by declaring that will to power is the basic principle of an authentic person. 7. Williams knows very little about Hegel and misreads Kant altogether, though Kant’s notion of moral duty really deserves some criticism. 8. Cf. the beginning of Chapter IV of the Phenomenology (PhG GW 9:103): “What the object immediately was in itself—i.e. at first mere being in sense-certainty, then the concrete thing of perception, and finally, for the Understanding, a Force producing sensations or other reactions in observers or other objects—proves to be in truth, not this at all” (here and thereafter, translations from the Phenomenology are mine). That is, we realise that what we take as the object perceived is neither a bundle of sense data nor an object with a power to produce sense-impressions. Talking about such a power or force of objects transcends by far immediate perception or direct experience and presupposes thinking on the ground of some generic knowledge about what things of a certain type usually can do. Hegel continues: “instead, this in-itself turns out to be a mode in which the object is only for an other,” namely in our system of differentiations and relations between generic types (ibid.). 9. Cf. PhG GW 9:56, Introduction: “Dieser sich vollbringende Skeptizismus ist darum auch nicht dasjenige, womit wohl der ernsthafte Eifer um Wahrheit und Wissenschaft sich für diese fertig gemacht und ausgerüstet zu haben wähnt; nämlich mit dem Vorsatze, in der Wissenschaft auf die Autorität [hin] sich den Gedanken anderer nicht zu ergeben, sondern alles selbst zu prüfen und nur der eigenen Überzeugung zu folgen oder, besser noch, alles selbst zu produzieren und nur die eigene Tat für das Wahre zu halten.“ – ” This scepticism, which is so consequent that it transcends itself [namely in a philosophical development of self-conscious science], is therefore also not just that, with which a serious [i.e. merely subjectively sincere] striving for truth and science holds itself to be prepared and equipped, namely with the [Kantian] maxim that true knowledge may never surrender oneself to the authority of the thoughts of others, but rather has to examine everything oneself and to follow only one’s own conviction, or, better yet, to produce everything by oneself and take only one’s own act for true.”

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Bibliography Austin, John L. 1977. How to Do Things with Words, edited by Sbisà Urmson. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Hennig, Boris. 2006. „Conscientia“ bei Descartes. Freiburg: Alber. Lukács, Georg. 1986. Der junge Hegel und die Probleme der kapitalistischen Gesellschaft. 2nd ed. Berlin and Weimar: Aufbau-Verlag. McDowell, John. 2009. Having the World in View: Essays on Kant, Hegel, and Sellars. Cambridge, MA and London: Harvard University Press. Mead, Georg H. 2009. Mind, Self, and Society: From the Standpoint of a Social Behaviorist. Vol. 1 “Works of George Herbert Mead,” edited by Charles W. Morris. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Quine, Willard V. O. 1960. Word and Object. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Ryle, Gilbert. 1937. “Taking Sides in Philosophy,” Philosophy XII, 1937, Chapter 11. In Gilbert Ryle, Collected Papers, Vol. II (1929–1968). (2009: Routledge). Stekeler, Pirmin. 2014. Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes. Ein dialogischer Kommentar. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag. Williams, Bernard. 2002. Truth and Truthfulness: An Essay in Geneology. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press.

Chapter 7

Individuality, Individualism and Our Human Zoôn Politikon Kenneth R. Westphal

The examination of “Life and Desire” which opens Hegel’s critique of “Self-Consciousness” is the first step in Hegel’s phenomenological demonstration that we Moderns are, as ever, a zoôn politikon. That preliminary, and the “Battle unto Death,” show (inter alia) that living embodiment is necessary for individual human self-consciousness. Hegel’s infamous examination of “Lord and Bondsman” is, however, only the first step in Hegel’s phenomenological demonstration that our individual rational self-consciousness is fundamentally a social (and historical) achievement, insofar as it is both socially acquired and is— constitutively—socially exercised. That very portentous thesis requires demonstration, for the reader qua observer, extending from the outset of “SelfConsciousness” through to the end of “Spirit”; yet this thesis is only demonstrated for the forms of consciousness observed in the Phenomenology of Spirit in the final chapter, “Absolute Knowing.” The form of consciousness Hegel designates “Self-Consciousness” takes apperception as the model for all human knowledge and experience, and regards apperception not only as necessary, but as sufficient for all human consciousness of any- and everything of which one is aware. This purported self-sufficiency of self-consciousness is expressly Hegel’s critical target; his section title is: Selbständigkeit und Unselbständigkeit des Selbstbewußtseyns. (PhG GW 9:109)

Literally if not quite fluently translated, his section title is: Self-Sufficiency and Self-Insufficiency of Self-Consciousness.

This significant terminological point is, for the first time, correctly though more fluently rendered by Terry Pinkard in his new translation (PhG–P). The thesis presumed by the individualistic form of consciousness designated ‘Self-Consciousness’ may be stated generally thus:

K. R. Westphal (*)  Department of Philosophy, Boğaziçi Üniversitesi, Istanbul, Turkey

© The Author(s) 2020 M. F. Bykova and K. R. Westphal (eds.), The Palgrave Hegel Handbook, Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26597-7_7

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The General Self-Sufficiency Thesis: In being aware of particulars (individualist) SelfConsciousness is only aware of itself; or: Self-conscious awareness of objects is nothing but a mode of (individualist) Self-Consciousness.

Hegel also states his counter-thesis at the outset of “Self-Consciousness,” at the very end of his preliminary discussion of “Life and Desire,” that human subjectivity requires intersubjectivity, specifically, the equality of mutual recognition involved in The I that is we and the we that is I. (PhG GW 9:108.39)

However, Hegel’s justification of this thesis regarding the constitutive necessity of mutual equal recognition is not completed within “Lord and Bondsman,” nor even within “Self-Consciousness.” Hegel’s examination of these issues, and his justification of his thesis, culminate only at the very end of “Spirit,” in “Evil and its Forgiveness.” This is because a host of putative individualisms must be distinguished, identified and critically examined in order properly to formulate and to justify that portentous thesis, on the basis of strictly internal phenomenological critique of all relevant alternative—in this case, individualistic—forms of (humanly possible) consciousness.1 Hegel’s view and analysis have been unnecessarily occluded by the false though ideologically all too useful dichotomy between substantive, “atomistic” individualism and monolithic collectivism, according to which either individuals are fundamental, and social structures, groups, processes or activities are only aggregations of individuals and their actions; or social groups are fundamental, and “individuals” are derivative from and subservient to the social whole to which they belong. Both options are false, and have been known to be false for literally eons. Aristotle is right that we are a zoôn politikon; Kant and Hegel agree, emphatically, for the same reasons (Westphal 2020, §§18–30). Hegel’s alternative social ontology, which I call “Moderate Collectivism,” consists in three theses: mc1.  

Individuals are fundamentally social practitioners. Everything a person does, says, or thinks is formed in the context of social practices which provide material and conceptual resources, objects of desire, skills, procedures, techniques, and occasions and permissions for action, etc.

mc2.  

 hat individuals do depends on their own response to their social and natural W environment.

mc3.  

 here are no individuals, no social practitioners, without social practices, and T vice versa, there are no social practices without social practitioners, without individuals who learn, participate in, perpetuate, and who modify those social practices as needed to meet their changing needs, aims, and circumstances (including procedures and information).

Where others see only an exclusive dichotomy, Hegel identifies a biconditional relation (see Westphal 1989, 169–170, 176; 1994; 2003, §§32–37).2 Hegel’s argument for moderate collectivism, and its capstone, mutual equal recognition as constitutive of our capacities of rational judgement, is so extensive because there has been such pervasive individualistic neglect or rejection of our fundamentally social character as individuals. Here I briefly characterize each of these putative

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forms of (substantive, individualistic) individualism and their key points within Hegel’s over-arching presentation and assessment of them. In his Introduction to the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel restates the Pyrrhonian Dilemma of the Criterion (PhG GW 9:58; cf. PH 2.4.20, 1.14.116– 117, AL 1.316–317). In posing the key substantive and methodological issue about genuine philosophical knowledge or “science,” its apparent alternatives or counterfeits, untutored common sense and outright skepticism about the very possibility of philosophical knowledge, Hegel points out the futility of offering mere assurances that one has, or that one cannot at all have, knowledge of the truth, thus underscoring a key Pyrrhonian point against any and all merely immediate claims to know (e.g., Jacobi, Schelling, foundationalists, whether empiricist or rationalist), or also denials of knowledge (e.g., Hamann’s or Herder’s self-styled “meta-critiques” of pure reason): One bare assurance is worth as much as another. (PhG GW 9:55; cf. AL 1.315, 2.464)

That is, bare assurances—mere claims to know, or to deny knowledge—are all equally worthless. There is no humanly possible alternative to critical scrutiny and assessment of any and all claims to know or to justify anything. Claiming to know something is a public act. In this regard, Hegel raises an issue central to the entire 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit, which Kant called logical egoism: The logical egoist considers it unnecessary also to test his judgment by the understanding of others; as if he had no need at all for this touchstone. (Anth. §2, Ak 7:128)

Kant then argues, if briefly, for a central tenet of his transcendental Doctrine of Method and of his answer to his titular question, “What is it to Orient Oneself in Thinking?” (1786), namely: our cognizance is finite and fallible so that in principle and in practice we must check whether any judgement we make about any public phenomenon, and our grounds justifying that judgement, are such that they can be communicated to all others, who in turn can understand and assess them, and find them sufficiently accurate and justified, or not. In the 1807 Phenomenology Hegel argues for this very same conclusion, beginning in “Lord and Bondsman” and culminating in “Evil and its Forgiveness”; i.e., through nearly two-thirds of his book! His method of strictly internal phenomenological critique requires him to justify his conclusion by thorough, comprehensive critical assessment of a dense series of individualist views, each of which asserts its individualistic independence from public scrutiny and assessment. This is to say, in various ways these individualistic forms of consciousness are varieties of logical or also moral egoism. Accordingly, the Self-Sufficiency Thesis examined in “Self-Consciousness” is but the first of a series of such theses examined in “Self-Consciousness,” “Reason” and “Spirit” (PhG Parts IV–VI). This series includes the self-sufficiency of rational thought proclaimed as “The Certainty and Truth of Reason” (Ferrini 2009), the three forms of consciousness considered in “The Actualisation of Rational SelfConsciousness through itself” and the three considered in “Individuality which is Real in and for itself” (Pinkard 2009), especially in “The Animal Kingdom of the Spirit.” It includes the dogmatic self-assurance of both Creon and Antigone and

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the presumed normative sufficiency of rule by edict in “True Spirit: Ethical Life,” in “Legal Status” (J. B. Hoy 2009) and in “Absolute Freedom and the Terror” (Stolzenberg 2009, 203–204). It includes Enlightenment individualism and its struggle against Faith examined in “Self-alienated Spirit: Enculturation and its Realm of Actuality” (Stolzenberg 2009), along with the individualistic varieties of morality examined in “Law-Giving Reason,” “Law-Testing Reason” (D. C. Hoy 2009) and “Morality,” especially in “Conscience” (Beiser 2009). These forms of presumed individual rational self-sufficiency have precursors in the problem of petitio principii and the Dilemma of the Criterion in Hegel’s Introduction (Einleitung) and to an extent in the second phase of “Sense Certainty” (Westphal 2009b, §6; de Laurentiis 2009; Bykova 2009). In the following summary, titles of sections of Hegel’s Phenomenology examining these forms of individualistic consciousness are set in small capitals. Preserving Hegel’s complex outline structure would impede reading; outline designations are indicated only if unobtrusive. Those interested in these important structural features of Hegel’s critical examination of these forms of individualism should please consult the concluding chart in Westphal (2009b). In Consciousness, Sense-Certainty in its second phase declares to find its abiding, unmediated simple truth in its own claim first-person to have immediate sense-certain knowledge of any one thing: I, this I see the tree, and maintain the tree as the here; an other I sees instead the house, and maintains, the here is not a tree, but rather a house. Both truths have the same certification, namely the immediacy of seeing, and the security and assurance both have of their knowing; but the one truth vanishes in the other. (PhG GW 9:66)

Naïve realism is too naïve about its own mastery and use of concepts, judgements and implicit spatio-temporal coordinates centered upon any one speaker, all of which are required to make any humanly possible claim first-person, and to distinguish one’s own claim from any- and everyone else’s counterpart claims to sense any specific particular. Skepticism about other minds is irrelevant, because it requires far too much conceptual sophistication to pose, understand or regard as relevant to these naïve realist commonsense cognitive claims. In the first main part of Self-Consciousness (IVA), Self-Sufficiency and SelfInsufficiency of Self-consciousness, Hegel criticizes subjective idealists, in effect, for failing to distinguish two very different phenomenological senses of the constitution of objects. In one sense, to constitute objects of consciousness is to generate those objects, including all their structure and features. In another sense, to constitute objects of consciousness is to constitute them as objects of our awareness. The first sense involves subjective idealism; the second does not. Against the claim that self-consciousness is the paradigm case or model of all human consciousness, including all our apparent consciousness of other individuals, Hegel argues that self-consciousness cannot generate all the objects of which we are aware, because we are aware of other people, who have their own minds and mindedness, and so are self-conscious human beings unto themselves, and so are not merely modes of one’s own self-consciousness. This is one horn of the dilemma leading into battle

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unto death: The arrogant self-consciousness aims to destroy the counter-evidence to his over-blown Thesis of Self-Consciousness (to constitute by generating all of which he is aware) by murdering the counter-examples—other minds. Murdering the counter-evidence (i.e., other minds) impales the victor on the other horn of the original dilemma: Neither his bodily desires nor the distinctive recalcitrance of distinct objects which satisfy those desires are generated at will, nor can they be satisfied merely at will. The purportedly all-constituting generative powers of self-consciousness thus appear to depend both upon his own embodiment and upon the distinct reality of the natural world. To salvage his arrogant thesis, the willingly combative self-consciousness enslaves the next available person. In Lord and Bondsman, Hegel argues that only the bondsman validates the initial thesis of self-consciousness, of being self-conscious in being conscious of objects—though only within a very restricted range: one’s own artefacts. Although Hegel begins Self-Consciousness by stating his own key thesis, the equality of mutual recognition constitutive of individual human rationality, this conclusion is only drawn at the very end of Spirit, in Evil and its Forgiveness, because a host of putative individualisms must be critically examined in order to properly formulate and to justify that portentous thesis. The second part of Reason, on Active or Practical Reason (C (AA) VB), Hegel examines a series of forms of individualism which count as moral egoism, in the sense specified by Kant: The moral egoist limits all ends to himself, sees no use in anything except that which is useful to himself. (Anth. §2, Ak 7:130)

In The Actualization of Rational Self-consciousness through itself, Hegel examines The Law of the Heart and the Insanity of Conceit. This form of consciousness seeks to generate its own necessity, proclaiming that particular acts and aims are required by the universal imperatives it intuits. This is still an ‘immediate’ form of consciousness (PhG GW 9:202.11). The law it seeks to actualize is underived, and its activity is unmediated by others or by the world. To this form of consciousness, the world appears as an inexorable order subjugating the populace (PhG GW 9:202.19–23). The key principle for these self-assured, high-minded reformers is obeying only the heart’s dictates (PhG GW 9:203.23–27). This entails that success is impossible: Either the reformer fails to reform anything, and so fails to get social reality to conform to (allegedly) proper principles, or else the reformer changes social reality, only to find that his principles are no longer his own but are taken over by society. Since his conception of the status of social norms has nothing to do with social institutions, he cannot acknowledge his own effectiveness (PhG GW 9:203.28–204.11). If others take his lead, they will propound their own conflicting imperatives (PhG GW 9:204.12–30). The reformer’s effort to actualize an imperative also reveals that extant ordinances (social practices) aren’t dead obligations in the way he had supposed, for those ordinances are effective only because others find their hearts’ intentions expressed in them (PhG GW 9:204.31–205.10, cf. 206.33–207.11). Successful reform must generate crisis for the romantic

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reformer, because he then finds himself and his reforming activity implicated by a social order that he regards as hostile to the (alleged) true basis of obligation— sincere avowal (PhG GW 9:205.11–206.4). If established as a universal basis of obligation, the law of the heart wouldn’t bear the same content in each case. A “public order” resulting from people’s heart-felt convictions can only be a universal struggle of power politics in which each maneuvers to get whatever presumptively moral predominance one can. This is the ironic yet devastating criticism: “The law of the heart” would at best produce the very “way of the world” it officially opposes (PhG GW 9:207.12–27)! In Virtue and the Way of the World, Hegel scrutinizes a “knight of virtue” (PhG GW 9:210.25), a successor to the forms of consciousness just considered (PhG GW 9:208.3–10). This knight is an improvement: he no longer seeks his own self-satisfaction or to proclaim his own imperatives, and he no longer regards the “the way of the world” as inherently corrupt (PhG GW 9: 208.10–16). He seeks only to restore the inherent worth of social practices, and devotes himself to this service (PhG GW 9:208.22–28, 209.16–19). The problem is that, in abstraction from a determinate, socially constituted concept of virtue (such as in the ancient world), this form of consciousness cannot specify any content to its proclaimed principle, and so can only issue inflated platitudes (PhG GW 9:212.4–6, 212.24–213.11). “The way of the world” is revealed as the joint product of individual activities, where individuals seek to attain what is good for themselves. In achieving their own good they also contribute to the maintenance of social practices (PhG GW 9:213.12–32, 214.1–5). Hegel insists that of course people act on their self-interest, but that this is not all they achieve in so acting. Individual actions inevitably contribute to others as well (PhG GW 9:213.30–34). This claim is crucial to Hegel’s social philosophy; it is the key to integrating classical economic theory into his socially based moral philosophy (Plant 1977a, b, 1980). In Individuality which is Real In and For Itself ((AA) VC), Hegel examines a series of more recognizable forms of moral egoism, which presume that individual rationality suffices to determine what is morally justified. In The Animal Kingdom of the Spirit and Humbug, Hegel develops Kant’s clue in the Transcendental Doctrine of Method (CPR A752/B780), that the only humanly possible alternative to constructive, public, mutual critical assessment is an intellectual counterpart to Hobbes’ state of nature as a war of all upon all. Hegel’s literary counterpart savages the mythology of romantic genius, according to which each romantic genius is naturally inspired to give form and expression to his dazzling insights into what most matters to everyone, and these insights are so supremely important that the creative genius can and does use any- and everyone else’s literary expressions as mere raw materials for his own inspired, ingenious creations. The direct result of this kind of literary-artistic arrogance is that no one can express anything of any importance to anyone. Identifying and expressing what is of supreme importance to everyone requires first considering everyone else too, and assessing one’s own best judgement of what matters to all, oneself included, though not as primus inter pares. The problem with originality, Kant drily observed, is that there is also original nonsense (CJ §46, cf. §50).

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In Legislative or Law-Giving Reason, Hegel examines the typical misunderstanding of Kantian autonomy, according to which to be morally autonomous is to make up one’s own code of conduct. The obvious problem is that we are such dependent and interdependent beings, inhabiting a finite, approximately globular surface (Earth), that we simply must coordinate our behaviors, which is only possible by identifying, justifying and establishing publically identifiable, shared principles to structure our social interactions and institutions, including the moral basics of our common life. Both the means of communication and the requirements of minimum moral decency must be public, and must be publicly identified, scrutinized, assessed, justified, and institutionalized—collectively and individually. In Law-Testing Reason, Hegel examines a common misunderstanding of Kant’s universalization tests, testing given or proposed laws, without regard to the practical anthropology Kant consistently maintains is necessary to apply the principle of the Categorical Imperative to us human beings (Gr Ak 4:388, 412; MM Ak 6:216–217),3 and purports to examine laws for absence of logical contradiction (PhG GW 9:233.3–11). This criterion fails to address the fundamentally social necessities of, and constraints upon, basic legitimate moral (including juridical) principles and their institutionalization—such institutions as rightful acquisition, possession and use—because no moral principle is logically necessary, nor logically self-contradictory. The principle of non-contradiction is merely a necessary, not a sufficient, condition of truth; also in matters moral it can be no more than that (PhG GW 9:234.8–16). This is not to reject the necessity of individuals (moral) law-giving and law testing, but only to reject their (individualistic) self-sufficiency. Instead, individual moral reasoning and assessment can only transpire within a determinate social context (PhG GW 9:234.23–27, 235.13–236.5). Hegel notes that any plausible moral “intuitionism” in fact incorporates communal norms. One can follow one’s dictates of conscience only insofar as those dictates (typically) accord with credible, effective principles of justice or moral law because they are, in fact, socially derived and socially responsive (PhG GW 9: 235.19–37). Moral individualists retort that recourse to social aspects of morality can only lead to conventionalism, relativism or totalitarianism. Hegel knows better, though he develops his moral philosophy only in his Philosophical Outlines of Justice (Westphal 2020). Here in Law Testing Reason Hegel instead cites the firm, fundamental communal trust in the unwritten laws of divine justice to which Antigone appeals (PhG GW 9:236.6–19). Elsewhere Hegel lauds the re-birth of natural law within the greatest system of positive law in history: Roman law, as codified under Justinian. In the first part of Immediate Spirit (C (BB) VI),4 True Spirit: Ethical Life (Sittlichkeit), Hegel examines the normative instability of traditional communal life, epitomized by Sophocles’ Antigone. The instability latent in normative authority within traditional communal life is due to its twin roots: cultural tradition as such, and human law in the form of a leader’s edict. In Antigone, Creon and Antigone disagree diametrically about the justice of last rites for her brother, Polynices. Though plainly one is right whilst the other errs profoundly, both Creon and Antigone are dogmatists: They each proclaim their judgements about what

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justice requires in this most unfortunate case, but neither is able to justify rationally his or her judgement (Westphal 2003, §§3–8). In Legal Status, Hegel points out that the multitude of distinct individuals are, for all their mutual independence, a multitude (PhG GW 9:260.26–29, 261.12–15). These individuals act for their own ends and they act within an expressly ­articulated context of promulgated (Roman) law. However, these allegedly self-sufficient, mutually independent individuals are persons, proprietors, i.e. property holders, only insofar as they are legally recognized to be persons (PhG GW 9:261.12–13). Locke was profoundly mistaken to hold that rightful possession can be defined exhaustively by reference only to some one person, some one thing—and perhaps also the Almighty (Westphal 2016a, §45). Proprietary relations are human interrelations, which can obtain only by means of publicly acknowledged and established institutions and procedures by which any one person can acquire and hold identifiable, recognized title to the use of any one thing, within specified limits of its morally or legally responsible use. Hegel’s examination of Self-Alienated Spirit; Enculturation—the second section of Spirit (VIB)—examines central aspects of the Enlightenment, devout religious faith and the cataclysm of absolute freedom and the Reign of Terror in complex, integrated ways bearing upon various individualistic accounts of our individual human cognizance and agency. These are too intricate—and too important—to be epitomized here. For discussion see Shklar (1976), Stolzenberg (2009); on Hegel’s philosophy of history within the 1807 Phenomenology, see Harris (1997). In the third section of Spirit, Self-Certain Spirit; Morality (VIC), after examining a host of deficiencies in Kant’s theory of moral action (Westphal 1991), in the final (third) subsection Hegel examines the purported moral self-sufficiency of individual conscience. This subsection is difficult, both because it is studded with allusions to Hegel’s romantic contemporaries (Gram 1978) and because, even after those are deciphered, the argument is compressed. Hegel nevertheless gives this section extreme weight and ultimately relates it to issues in epistemology. These facts warrant emphasizing this subsection. Hegel considers individual(istic) conscience as an account of the content and justification of normative principles (PhG GW 9:342.1–3, 347.16–18). The central feature of the romantic form of conscience Hegel examines is conviction (PhG GW 9:346.32–34, 351.34–37, 352.6–7, 352.17–20), where romantic conscience purports to justify an action by reporting its conviction that this act is its duty (PhG GW 9:338.8–10; 351.30–32, 34–37; 424.28–30). This view makes norms dependent upon the individual, rather than obeying independently legitimate norms (PhG GW 9:344.17–18). If Hegel can demonstrate the social bases of normative principles by an internal critique of this extreme individualistic ethical intuitionism, he has a very powerful demonstration indeed. An important part of his demonstration turns on the fact that romantic ­conscience is a normative view, a view concerning the correctness and legitimacy of normative principles and their application to actions. Thus romantic conscience makes claims on its own behalf about what is right to do for anyone in the given

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(type of) situation (PhG GW 9:344.33–35, 345.5–10). Including this tenet may seem to prejudice the issue in Hegel’s favor, yet it does not because such generality is essential to conscience being a view of the legitimacy of principles. If this tenet were dropped, then putative expressions of moral conviction would be empty vocables, devoid of any kind of appropriateness, and so neither offering an assessment of a situation nor itself requiring assessment. It is appropriate for Hegel to assess conscience with regard to action (PhG GW 9:355.9–10), because claims about duties are claims about obligatory actions (or omissions) (PhG GW 9:357.36–37). An action transpires in specific circumstances, the character of which is a function of their antecedents, present relations and consequences (PhG GW 9:346.14–17). Acting embroils conscience in the complexities of that situation (PhG GW 9:346.25–26); these complexities can and often do ground a variety of obligations (PhG GW 9:346.28). Acting conscientiously would appear to require taking these complexities into account (PhG GW 9:346.4–7). However, weighing various considerations would require appeal to independently legitimate principles, whilst conscience claims that there are no such principles because all legitimacy is a function of individual conviction (PhG GW 9:349.7–9; cf. 346.29–30). Accordingly, conscience takes whatever knowledge of the situation it has to be sufficient and decides the case as it sees fit (PhG GW 9:346.7–9, 17–23). Using Kantian terms, Hegel avers that in fact conscience bases its willful decisions upon “natural impulses and inclinations” (PhG GW 9:346.39–347.1, 347.22–23, 349.20). This reveals that conscience, as a self-sufficient account of the validity of norms, is empty, because any action can be declared dutiful with conviction, and on this basis no action is any more appropriate than any other (PhG GW 9:346.34–36, 347.22–23, 352.35–36). Principles of justification are supposed to discriminate between justified and unjustified claims. However, any (supposed) principle of justification which equally well warrants a claim and its negation is no principle of justification at all. This is precisely the fate of purportedly self-sufficient, individualistic conscience as an account of the sole, self-sufficient basis of normative claims (PhG GW 9:347.27–348.7).5 Hegel also criticizes conviction as a principle for assessing actions. He notes that amongst the complexities of any given situation are a variety of grounds of obligation and various ways in which an agent’s interests can be or are served by its action (PhG GW 9:358.7–9). These need not be distinct aspects of the situation. What serves the interests of the individual agent may also serve others; fulfilling an obligation may also serve (legitimate) interests.6 These putative facts about action insure that anyone who assesses an action justified by the agent’s appeal to his conviction of duty can always find grounds for charging that the agent was either evil, for having claimed as dutiful an act contrary to duty, or base, for having advanced private interests under the guise of moral behavior (PhG GW 9:356.4–10, 358.14–16). The issue is: What is the basis and justification of judgements about actions? If assessments are based on nothing more comprehensive than individual conviction, then issuing such judgements, because they are mere assertions, instantiates and licenses petitio principii and indeed grants legitimacy to the very principle of conscientious conviction to which it objects (PhG GW

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9:357.9–14). No rationale for assessment can be established, justified, nor even specified in this way. The Beautiful Soul examines self-styled conscientious individuals—moral geniuses (PhG GW 9:352.35–353.2)—who, in order to live morally upright lives, withdraw from society to live in seclusion with a few like-minded souls (PhG GW 9:354.33–34; Beiser 2009), thus presuming to evade the social entanglements plaguing the previous individualistic forms of conscience. However, in its selfstyled moral purity it, too, has no determinate, and certainly no credible, criterion of what is right, wrong or permissible, and it strives to avoid sullying itself by actually acting (PhG GW 9:354.30–33, 355.7–33). However, even in seclusion amongst like-minded moral geniuses, the beautiful soul cannot evade or avoid issues about whether it is virtuous, vicious, self-serving, evil or hypocritical (PhG GW 9:355.34–357.7), whether it judges itself or especially when it is judged by its dear companions (PhG GW 9:357.8–37). These judgements, too, count as actions, with the same risks of sullying the beautiful soul’s own purity by engaging with the complexities of anyone’s acting in any concrete circumstances, no matter how secluded (PhG GW 9:358.1–359.23).7 In these regards, each agent and each observant judge are equally on par, equally compromised and equally suspect (PhG GW 9:359.24–360.16). However, even if one beautiful soul confesses to error (PhG GW 9:359.17–28), the companion’s uncompromising moral purity leads it to be uncompromisingly hard-hearted, indeed treacherous (PhG GW 9:359.3) in condemning he who confessed (PhG GW 9:359.24–360.30). Fixation upon simple, unperturbed moral purity blocks all prospects of any possible human action, even the possibility of judging another’s act (PhG GW 9:360.17–30). Such fixation upon one’s own purported moral purity entails self-exile from any and all human existence, including one’s own daily life—which cannot long persist through studied inaction. (This problem confronted the victor after the Battle unto Death.) The only humanly possible solution for the morally purist, self-appointed judge is to confess likewise his own inextricable engagement with the ineluctable complexities of human action, even those acts of thought by which one judges others. This is the breaking of the hard heart (PhG GW 9:360.31–361.10), which ushers in the culminating sub-section of Spirit. In Evil and its Forgiveness Hegel notes that others’ assessments of an action can themselves be scrutinized for correctness or self-servingness. Agent and judge are in this regard on a par (PhG GW 9:359.9–13, 360.31–34); moreover, neither can substantiate the claims each seeks to make without appealing to shared principles and shared knowledge of the complexities of any given situation and action. The unstated import of Hegel’s examination is three-fold: The factual and moral complexities of any given situation and action must be considered, the parties to the situation (agent and observer) are both in position to assess and correct one another’s misapprehensions, and normative principles are generated and assessed in a temporally extended social setting of mutual assessment. Hegel returns to issues of epistemology at the end of this last subsection of Self-Certain Spirit (PhG GW 9:362.22–25). The position he develops regarding normative principles extends directly to cognitive issues. This extension is

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effected by reading his discussion of claims about duties as a discussion of claims about facts or truths. Indeed, the case of cognitive claims and epistemic principles is simpler, since for many cognitive claims there are many obvious, relevant facts of the matter. Not all cognitive claims are obvious, however; the analog of self-interested action is self-interested or willful belief (or incredulity). All cognitive claims can be assessed in view of their formulation, accuracy, truth, adequacy to the purposes at hand and their justifying grounds, evidence or reasons. The self-critical structure of consciousness (Westphal 2018, §§62–63) is thus augmented by exploiting the distinctions between contexts of assertion, contexts of application, use or action, and contexts of assessment, where these contexts are occupied by different persons or by the same person at different times (or both). When others assess or adopt and use one’s claims, they can generate much important information, whether corrective or corroborating, and by distinguishing, where need be, amongst the various aspects of one’s consciousness of, claims about or actions within and upon the world. In either case, moral or cognitive, action, judgement, rational justification and their assessment are part of one concrete social process transpiring within a natural setting. This Hegel states in these terms: The actualizing self, the form of its act, is only a moment of the whole, and likewise so is the knowledge which by judgement determines and establishes the distinction between the individual and universal aspects of that action. (PhG GW 9:361.1–4)

The process of social assessment and revision of claims and principles supports Hegel’s fallibilism.8 Most important is Hegel’s claim that this social process of mutual assessment is absolute spirit! Each individual who charged the other with subjective caprice (in Evil and its Forgiveness), relinquishes the principle of (self-sufficient, individualistic) conviction and: The word of reconciliation [between them] is the extant spirit, which beholds the pure knowledge of itself as universal essence in its opposite, in the pure knowledge of itself as the absolute individuality existing in itself, – a reciprocal recognition which is absolute spirit. (PhG GW 9:361.22–25)9

The “universal essence” Hegel mentions is the knowledge and principles shared in common amongst the members of a social group. Four points in the final paragraph of this subsection are important here. First, Hegel insists that ‘absolute spirit’ is introduced in principle (for us, his readers) once this collective, social basis of individual thought and action is achieved (PhG GW 9:361.26–27). Second, he claims this is the basis of consciousness (PhG GW 9:362.14–15), that is, of our conscious awareness of worldly objects—including centrally our capacity to examine and assess when, whether or how we are cognizant of public, worldly objects. This is because our being genuinely conscious of worldly states of affairs requires that we can and do discriminate between how these affairs appear to us to be, and how they actually are, and because our effective and reliable discrimination between these is, for us very finite, fallible and interdependent beings, an intersubjective, social activity. Third, this basis

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of consciousness is not yet explicit for this observed form of consciousness (PhG GW 9:362.15–16). Finally, this collective social self is God manifest in the midst of those who know themselves as pure knowledge. (PhG GW 9:362.28–29)10

These last two points introduce the theme for Hegel’s discussion of religion, how religion facilitates the human community’s becoming self-conscious (di Giovanni 2009, 2018; Westphal 2019). In this regard, and in these ways, Hegel has argued against a host of humanly possible forms of rational individualism, demonstrating that they are each untenable forms of what Kant identified as logical or moral egoism, because we very finite cognizant beings constitutively require the publicity—the communicability in principle—of our most considered rational judgments and the actual critical scrutiny and assessment of others, in order to distinguish accurately and reliably, so far as we fallible rational beings can, between: • Grasping a truth, and only thereby (rightly) being convinced one has grasped that truth. • Being convinced one has grasped a truth, and thus alone (falsely) claiming to grasp that alleged truth. Hegel repeatedly points out that all forms of intuitionism fail in principle and in practice to distinguish between these two very different cognitive states or achievements in any principled, practicable or reliable way.11 Due to our fallibility, we must examine which is the case, in each and every case, and in each and everyone’s case. For this reason alone (though not only for this reason), there is no humanly possible “immediate knowledge.” In these regards, Hegel has argued en detail for Kant’s sole alternative to egoism, which is nothing less than Kant’s cosmopolitan analysis of human rationality and rational justification, stated summarily in his Anthropology in these terms: The opposite of egoism can only be pluralism, that is, the way of thinking in which one is not concerned with oneself as the whole world, but rather regards and conducts oneself as a mere citizen of the world. (Anth. §2, Ak 7:130)

The genuine Kantian sense of our rational autonomy is to hold ourselves responsible to the requirements of rational justification, both in cognition and in morals (Westphal 2020, §§18–24). All of these considerations and measures are required, understanding them all is required, and actively using them all is required, in order rationally to judge that “I judge,” and not merely to utter the words “I judge,” thereby merely feigning rationality. The central significance of Hegel’s account of equal mutual recognition (Anerkennung) for rational justification is this: For anyone accurately and justifiably to judge that s/he is a rationally competent judge requires: 1. recognizing one’s own rational fallibility, 2. judging that others are likewise rationally competent judges,

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3. recognizing that we are equally capable of, and responsible for, assessing rationally our own and each other’s judgments, and 4. recognizing that we each require each other’s assessment of our own judgments, in order to scrutinize and thereby maximally to refine and to justify rationally our own judgments. This rich and philosophically crucial form of rational self-consciousness requires our correlative consciousness of others, that we are all mutually interdependent for our capacity of rational judgment, our abilities to judge rationally and our ­exercise of rational judgment. This requirement is transcendental, for unless we recognize our critical interdependence as fallible rational judges, we cannot judge fully rationally, because unless we acknowledge and affirm our judgmental interdependence, we will seriously misunderstand, misuse and over-estimate our own individual rational, though fallible and limited powers of judgment. Therefore, recognizing our own fallibility and our mutual interdependence as rational judges is a key constitutive factor of our being fully rational, fully autonomous rational judges, so far as is humanly or individually possible. Only by recognizing our judgmental interdependence can we each link our human fallibility and ­limited knowledge constructively with our equally human corrigibility, with our ability to learn: especially from informed, constructive criticism. This form of mutual recognition involves mutually achieved recognition of our shared, fallible and also corrigible rational competence. This recognition involves recognizing the crucial roles of charity, tolerance, patience, humility and literal forgiveness in our mutual assessment of our rational judgments and those of others, to acknowledge that oversights, whether our own or others’, are endemic to the human condition, and not as such grounds for blame or condemnation of anyone’s errors. Therefore, fully rational justification requires us to seek out and to actively engage with those who critically assess our judgments. (For full explication and defense, see Westphal 2016b, 2018.) These views—only briefly summarized here—underwrite Hegel’s concluding observation in the Preface (Vorrede) to the 1807 Phenomenology (and to its anticipated second systematic part): Insofar as each calls on feeling, on his inner oracle, he is finished with whoever disagrees; he must declare that he has nothing more to say to him who within himself doesn’t find or feel the same; – in other words, he tramples the roots of humanity under foot. For the nature of humanity is to strive towards agreement with others, and to find its existence only in the achieved community of consciousness. (PhG GW 9:47.34–48.2)

Kant and Hegel are right: The only humanly possible alternative to a Hobbesian state of nature is genuinely cosmopolitan communication, understanding, respect, humility and community. These are neither merely theoretical issues nor empty pious hopes: They are supremely important matters of justice, crucial to our personal and moral integrity.

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Notes 1. Even so acute a commentator as Michael Quante (2009) recognizes that Hegel does not justify his positive thesis regarding mutual recognition in “Lord and Bondsman,” but claims Hegel does not justify that thesis at all. Quante neglects how “Lord and Bondsman” is only the first stage of Hegel’s justification, although I pointed this out elsewhere (Westphal 1989, 161–2, 182–183); for full-scale analysis see my (2018), §§71–91. 2. On Hegel’s critique and rejection of alleged psychological determinism (in mc2), see Westphal (2018, §§140–148). 3. See Westphal (2016a, §§18–23). Hegel’s infamous charge of “empty formalism” is not directed at Kant, but at the dozens of pseudo-Kantian natural law theories published between Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (1785) and his own Doctrine of Justice (1797); see Westphal (2020), §48. 4. Only later does Hegel indicate that ‘Spirit’ examines ‘immediate spirit’ (PhG GW 9:240.1– 4, 365.23); properly mediated, self-conscious spirit is achieved only in the final chapter, “Absolute Knowing.” 5. In the conceptual preliminaries (Vorbegriff) to the Encyclopaedia Hegel makes a similar criticism of Jacobi’s doctrine of “immediate” or intuitive knowledge, a view with many parallels to (individualistic) “conscience”; see Westphal (2018, §§92–99). 6. Hegel in fact holds that this is quite commonly the case. This is the key to his appropriation of classical economic theory for his civic republicanism; see Plant (1977a, b, 1980); Westphal (2020). 7. Note that after his shipwreck, Robinson Crusoe can only survive because he has been trained in a host of necessary skills—by other human beings. 8. Hegel’s emphasis on the cognitive importance of socially-based mutual criticism comes very close to the kinds of considerations Tyler Burge (1979, 1989, 2003) has mounted in opposition to individualistic conceptions of the mental. Mutual criticism is productive in cases of partial ignorance, and Burge’s original essay opposing individualism focused on the correlative (perhaps identical) phenomenon of partial understanding. Like Hegel, Burge recognizes that these social dimensions to linguistic usage and social correctives to categories of thought do not entail that society is the ultimate arbiter of the content or the truth of thoughts, that for many cognitive states the natural world is the ultimate determinant of these matters. 9. Hegel states: “Das Wort der Versöhnung ist der daseyende Geist, der das reine Wissen seiner selbst als allgemeinen Wesens in seinem Gegentheile, in dem reinen Wissen seiner als der absolut in sich seyenden Einzelnheit anshaut,—ein gegenseitiges Anerkennen, welches der absolute Geist ist” (PhG GW 9:361). 10. Hegel states: “Das versöhnende ja, worin beyde Ich von ihrem entgegengesetzten Daseyn ablassen, ist das Daseyn des zur Zweyheit ausgedehnten Ichs, das darin sich gleich bleibt, und in seiner vollkommnen Entäusserung und Gegentheile die Gewißheit seiner selbst hat;—es ist der erscheinende Gott mitten unter ihnen, die sich als das reine Wissen wissen” (PhG GW 9:362.25–29). “Es” in the final clause refers back to “das versöhnende ja”; “ist” expresses the identity of this “versöhnende ja” with “Gott.” 11. “Intuitionism” in logic and mathematics is not at issue, as these involve rigorous constructive methods. (Research on this paper was supported in part by the Boğaziçi Üniversitesi Research Fund (BAP), grant codes: 9761, 18B02P3.)

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Sextus Empiricus. 1912/1954. Sexti Empirici Opera. 3 vols., edited by H. Mutschmann, J. Mau, and K. Janáček. Leipzig: Teubner (Abbreviated in text as Opera). Sextus Empiricus. 1933a. Works. 4 vols. Greek/English, translated by Rev. R. G. Bury. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (Loeb Library) (Abbreviated in text as Works). Sextus Empiricus. 1933b. Outlines of Pyrrhonism. In Works in 4 vols., vol. 1, translated by Rev. R. G. Bury. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (Loeb Library) (Cited as PH by Book. paragraph numbers). Sextus Empiricus. 1933c. Against the Logicians. In Works in 4 vols., vol. 2, translated by Rev. R. G. Bury. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (Loeb Library) (Cited as AL by Book. paragraph numbers). Shklar, Judith. 1976. Freedom and Independence in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Stolzenberg, Jürgen. 2009. “Hegel’s Critique of the Enlightenment in ‘The struggle of the Enlightenment with Superstition.’” In The Blackwell Guide to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, edited by K. R. Westphal, 190–208. London: Blackwell. Westphal, Kenneth R. 1989. Hegel’s Epistemological Realism: A Study of the Aim and Method of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Westphal, Kenneth R. 1991. “Hegel’s Critique of Kant’s Moral World View.” Philosophical Topics 19 (2): 133–176. Westphal, Kenneth R. 1994. “Community as the Basis of Free Individual Action.” Translation and annotation of excerpts from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. In Communitarianism, edited by M. Daly, 36–40. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth. Westphal, Kenneth R. 2003. Hegel’s Epistemology: A Philosophical Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit. Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing. Westphal, Kenneth R. ed. 2009a. The Blackwell Guide to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Westphal, Kenneth R. 2009b. “Hegel’s Phenomenological Method and Analysis of Consciousness.” In The Blackwell Guide to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, edited by K. R. Westphal, 1–36. London: Blackwell. Westphal, Kenneth R. 2016a. How Hume and Kant Reconstruct Natural Law: Justifying Strict Objectivity without Debating Moral Realism. Oxford: The Clarendon Press. Westphal, Kenneth R. 2016b. “Back to the 3 R’s: Rights, Responsibilities and Reasoning.” SATS—Northern European Journal of Philosophy 17 (1): 21–60. Westphal, Kenneth R. 2018. Grounds of Pragmatic Realism: Hegel’s Internal Critique and Transformation of Kant’s Critical Philosophy. Leiden: Brill. Westphal, Kenneth R. 2019. “Hegel’s Critique of Theoretical Spirit: Kant’s Functionalist Cognitive Psychology in Context.” In Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit: A Critical Guide, edited by M. F. Bykova, 57–80. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Westphal, Kenneth R. 2020. Hegel’s Civic Republicanism: Integrating Natural Law with Kant’s Moral Constructivism. New York and London: Routledge.

Part III

Science of Logic and the System of Philosophy

Chapter 8

Method in Hegel’s Dialectic-Speculative Logic Angelica Nuzzo

As puzzling as Hegel’s Logic is often considered by contemporary interpreters when at stake is its status as a logic, Hegel is often explicit in stressing the fact that there is not much new in it at least with regard to its content.1 And yet, much of the most recent debate on this part of Hegel’s system concerns precisely its content. It is the content that raises questions such as, first and foremost, whether this logic is an ontology or more generally a metaphysics, and what kind of metaphysics it may be given its place after Kant’s critique. But in the aftermath of a longstanding debate, Hegel’s logic also raises more specific issues concerning the logical legitimacy of determinations such as “mechanism,” “chemism,” “teleology,” which are often seen as a topic foreign to traditional logic and which instead, as determinations of (logical) “objectivity,” follow, for Hegel, the usual forms of judgment and syllogism that he sees belonging to (logical) “subjectivity.” Hegel’s general suggestion is that whereas with regard to the content his logic is simply taking up—and indeed somehow summing up—what metaphysics, traditional formal logic, and Kant’s transcendental logic have considered the fundamental determinations of thinking (and being), the real novelty of the dialectic-speculative logic is the way of treating, displaying, and presenting this content. In other words, Hegel’s point is that the distinguishing feature of the first part of his philosophical system lies not in the content itself but in the mode of its Behandlung and Darstellung as specifically logical Darstellung. Significantly, this holds true both with regard to what constitutes the novelty of Hegel’s logic in relation to the tradition, and with regard to what justifies the content under consideration to be the peculiar topic of a new logic. Of course, things get immediately more complicated as Hegel also argues that in the framework of his dialectic-speculative logic, logical content and logical Darstellung are not (and are no longer) to be distinguished from each other. This, he submits, is precisely what sets the “logical science” apart from the

A. Nuzzo (*)  Brooklyn College and Graduate Center, CUNY, New York City, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 M. F. Bykova and K. R. Westphal (eds.), The Palgrave Hegel Handbook, Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26597-7_8

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other sciences. For, in the latter, the topic at issue—the Gegenstand or the Sache selbst—and the “scientific method (wissenschaftliche Methode)” are instead separated (MM 5:35).2 Moreover, this claim should be read together with Hegel’s further warning that the peculiarity of philosophy in relation to the other sciences consists in the fact that neither its content nor its method can be assumed as given at the beginning of the investigation (Enz. §1). This is true a fortiori for the logic, which begins, systematically, with no given presupposition.3 Its task is rather to offer the genetic exposition of its content and, with it, of the method of its presentation. On this view, then, the logical science must be such as to be able to generate from and by itself both its content and its method. Ultimately, Hegel’s point is not only that the logical method does not exist in separation from the logical content; but also that the logical method does not exist outside of the method’s actual use. In this framework, then, the central question concerns what is, for Hegel, the new way of handling and presenting the logical material—the Behandlung and Darstellung that constitute the “science of logic” as the dialectic-speculative foundation of the philosophical system. Now, there is an obvious, generic sense in which one can certainly refer to the way of presenting—of arranging and structuring—the science as its “method.” And this seems indeed the sense in which Hegel uses the term when referring to the peculiar identity of content and method proper to the logical science in relation to the other sciences (MM 5:35). However, if one takes up the traditional definition of the logical discipline as the science of the formal laws of thinking as such, independently of the object that is thought, the method seems to refer to the series of rules or prescriptions regarding how to think (correctly, according to truth, and the like)—and this is certainly not the meaning of logical method that Hegel wants to endorse. Indeed, in the Science of Logic, Hegel is not even remotely close to addressing this issue. If anything, this is rather a problem that he considers the task of the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit to have finally exposed once and for all as being based on a wrong conception of thinking (hence as betraying a wrong conception of both logic and method). And after the crucial critical step of the Phenomenology, it is an issue that may be seen re-emerging, this time, however, fundamentally transformed by the course of the logic, when addressing the specific “method” of the Realphilosophie, namely, the philosophy of nature and spirit. If the logic is indeed concerned—again, with regard to its content—with the determinations of thinking (insofar as this is formal, pure, abstract thinking), it certainly does not set out to prescribe rules on how to think. To this extent, any reference to “method,” viewed as an instrumental and prescriptive set of given rules addressed to a thinking subject, seems to be inappropriate when at stake is the specificity of Hegel’s dialectic-speculative logic. And yet, on the other hand, it does not seem so far-fetched to address as “method” Hegel’s chief concern with finding a new way of treating and presenting the determinations of thinking generally accepted and thematized by traditional and transcendental logic. This back and forth argument clearly—and quite simply—portrays the difficult predicament of the interpreter who sets out to tackle the peculiarity of Hegel’s logic with regard to its content and method, thereby calling for a closer account

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of the problem of method in Hegel’s first systematic division. It seems that the more one refers to traditional positions on the issue and uses of the term, the less one is able to understand the problem at hand, although, on his part, Hegel insists on not discarding those uses and positions outright. Again, while Hegel’s claim seems often to be that there is nothing programmatically and explicitly revolutionary in the contents of his logic, he does strongly advocate the need for a “complete re-working (totale[n] Umarbeitung)” and a radical “Umgestaltung of logic” (MM 5:46). How should these two claims be reconciled? My task in this essay is to shed some light on the issue of “method” in Hegel’s logic as that on which hinges the continuity as well as the discontinuity between the logical tradition and Hegel’s dialectic-speculative reworking of the discipline. I shall pursue this aim by first bringing to the fore the historical and systematic connection that links Hegel’s dialectic-speculative logic both to traditional formal or general logic and metaphysics and to Kant’s transcendental logic and critique of dogmatic metaphysics. I shall then turn to some passages in which Hegel thematically addresses the issue of method in his logic. This will allow me to indirectly shed some light on the longstanding question of the status of “dialectic” in Hegel’s philosophy: what is the connection between dialectic and method? In what sense is dialectic a method or even the method of (logical) thinking; and in what sense is it not? For, as I shall claim in what follows, both propositions may be actually true provided that a fundamental clarification is offered of the new meaning that the “method” assumes in Hegel’s logic.4 Thus, reciprocally, one should also ask in what sense and to what extent the scientific method that Hegel thematizes and also uses in the logic is “dialectical” and in what sense it is (additionally) “speculative.” Indeed, in both regards, Hegel’s position can be usefully understood on the background of his appraisal of traditional formal logic and Kant’s transcendental logic. While this is not directly my topic here, my argument has important and clear implications in this regard.

1 Form and Content of Thinking: Formal, Transcendental, Dialectic-Speculative Logic Hegel’s confrontation with traditional formal or general logic shapes his project of a new, dialectic-speculative “science of logic.” This confrontation, however, is complicated by the presence of Kant’s transcendental logic as a third intermediary term—a third term when considered both historically and systematically. Transcendental logic, in its turn, is the result of Kant’s own assessment of the merits and shortcomings of traditional general logic. In this discussion, formal logic is largely the traditional Aristotelian logic of the modern period up to Leibniz and the Leibnizian scholastic. The felt need of a reform of this logic but also the necessity to build on this foundation is the common root of both Kant’s and Hegel’s logical projects, who

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both take as their springboard the unchanged status of the discipline after Aristotle (CPR Bviii; MM 5:46). The Hegelian notion of Aufhebung should be taken seriously here: as much as the overcoming of formal logic indicates the stance of leaving its abstract formality and formalism behind, it also implies a crucial inheritance that remains at the basis of such new projects. This is a point that will prove useful in order to assess the issue of formal logic’s often underscored “lack of content” and the extent in which Hegel’s logic does or does not itself display content, and may somehow even share the notion of formality with general logic against Kant. My claim is that Hegel’s dialectical-speculative logic is closer to the much-criticized formal logic of the tradition than generally assumed, and that this closeness can be discerned by evaluating Hegel’s assessment of Kant’s own take on formal logic. The understanding of the type of formality characterizing Hegel’s logic, in turn, is crucial to the appraisal of his conception of logical method. It is relevant to this discussion that Hegel’s relation to formal logic sees Kant as an indispensable intermediary. Unlike many contemporary analytic re-appropriations of Hegel that seem to thread a path alternative to the generally accepted Kantian one, Hegel views the line going from traditional formal logic to transcendental logic to dialectic-speculative logic as one progression in which at stake seems to be one and the same fundamental issue. In the introduction to the Science of Logic, Hegel presents the program of this first systematic division of philosophy in a “General Concept of Logic” (MM 5:35–62) in which, from the outset, he engages in a close confrontation with that section of the Critique of Pure Reason in which Kant, in turn, first offered his own “idea of a transcendental logic” by contrasting it to the “general logic” of the tradition (CPR B74–88/A50–64). The confrontation with this section of the first Critique proves so important for Hegel that he comes back to it yet again as he introduces the second main division of the Science of Logic, i.e., the Logic of the Concept raising, as Kant had done before him, Pilatus’ question: “what is truth?” (CPR B82/A58; MM 6:244, 264). By referring back to Kant’s discussion, Hegel places the new logic within the same historical progression in which Kant, following the demands of his transcendental philosophy, had proposed to integrate traditional formal logic with a new transcendental logic.5 Thereby Hegel frames his own logic in terms of an apparently similar problematic as Kant’s. At the center for both Kant and Hegel is the value and function of general logic in relation to the broader demands respectively of transcendental and speculative philosophy. And yet, as Hegel aligns himself with Kant, he seems to distance himself from the logical tradition including the project of transcendental philosophy, stressing the need for a “complete re-working” (MM 5:46) of the logical discipline and the necessity that “the standpoint of this science be conceived as higher so as to receive an entirely new form” (MM 5:36). In other words, historical continuity is emphasized in order to underscore the fundamental discontinuity that Hegel sees inaugurated by his dialectic-speculative logic. It is here that the issue of method becomes relevant.

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Hegel’s remarks on Kant’s discussion of logic in the first Critique and his use of Kant’s own position to assess the merit of formal logic are often glossed over by those many interpretations that privilege the question of how the idea of a “science of logic” obtains from the conclusion of the Phenomenology. Significantly, for Hegel, the appraisal of Kant’s logic and transcendental philosophy more broadly seems often to converge with the latter question, which concerns instead the relation between the Science of Logic and the Phenomenology. This convergence, however, is all but self-explanatory. What is the affinity between the need to correct the shortcomings of Kant’s transcendentalism and the gesture that overcomes the phenomenological “science of the experience of consciousness” in a “science of logic”? On the other hand, on the Kantian front, interpreters generally quote Hegel’s passages of the introduction to the logic only to outright dismiss them as paradigmatic examples of his misunderstanding of Kant (Pinder 1979, 309f.; Baum 1983, 230). To be sure, taken in its own right, the section of the first Critique on the idea of a transcendental logic and its own relation to general logic is far from uncontroversial. And this compounds the difficulty of interpreting Hegel’s own reading of it when at stake is the task of holding Kant’s views up to Hegel’s position. What is, for Kant, the relation between formal logic and transcendental logic and what is the chief question with regard to which the two types of logic are evaluated? Hegel’s part of the question should then be tackled on the basis of the answer offered to this question. Does Hegel discriminate between formal logic and transcendental logic or does he treat them as one and the same, because similarly flawed, forms of “logic of the understanding” (Verstandeslogik)? And most compellingly, does Hegel evaluate merits and shortcomings of formal and transcendental logic according to the same criterion in relation to which Kant had considered them or does the dialectic-speculative framework of his philosophy change the conversation entirely? The answer to these questions provides the historical constellation in which Hegel’s new idea of logical method should be placed if we want to understand the specific novelty of his dialectic-speculative logic. My claim is that some distinctive objectives of the general program of Hegel’s logic as well as some distinctive features of its method arise out of his appropriation and fundamental transformation of formal logic by way of Kant’s transcendental logic. Hegel opens the “General Concept of Logic” turning to Kant’s first Critique. His starting point is a confrontation with the “current concept of logic” or what “is commonly called logic” (MM 5:36, 59). While he presents such a concept paraphrasing the definition of “general logic” that Kant offered in the introduction to Transcendental Logic, Hegel immediately conflates it with the standpoint of transcendental logic itself so that the two seem in the end hardly distinguishable. “When logic is taken as the science of thinking in general, it is understood that this thinking constitutes the mere form of a cognition, that logic abstracts from all content” (MM 5:36). It is striking that Hegel seems to erase the difference between formal and transcendental logic on which instead Kant’s argument so forcefully insisted. Now, if this conflation is not to be simply dismissed as an outright misunderstanding on Hegel’s part, it should be somehow functional to Hegel’s twofold

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claim (i) that the discipline of logic needs to be totally re-worked and re-shaped and brought to a higher standpoint in order to respond to higher philosophical demands, and (ii) that this higher standpoint can be attained only by a dialecticspeculative transformation of the logical discipline. This transformation, I shall argue, is for Hegel a crucial methodological transformation. In other words, it does not consist in the extension or alternatively limitation of its thematic content as a logic. It is rather a transformation that regards the way in which the logical content taken up and presented within the logical form constitutes the logical form itself in its identity with the logical Darstellung. In the passage quoted above, Hegel offers two important insights. On the one hand, he presents a view of formal logic evaluated in relation to the problem of the cognition of objects, that is, in relation to the issue first raised by transcendental logic, an issue that is instead constitutively foreign to formal logic (which programmatically makes abstraction from it). On the other hand, Hegel offers an appraisal of Kant’s transcendental logic as being still a form of general logic— and this despite Kant’s crucial insistence that transcendental logic is instead the logic of a particular (not of the general) use the understanding (CPR B77/A52). It should be noted that for Kant the formality of formal logic, on which Hegel seems to concentrate his dissatisfaction, is not due to its ‘generality’, i.e., to its making abstraction from all content. For, transcendental logic is formal as well. And yet it is undoubtedly a “particular” logic (Pinder 1979, 319). Transcendental logic is a particular logic in two respects: first it is “the logic of the particular use of the understanding” (CPR B77/A52), i.e., of the use of the understanding when the “origin” of cognition is a priori and does not lie in the object (CPR B80/A56); and second, it contains “the rules concerning the correct way of thinking of a particular kind of objects” (CPR B77/A52), i.e., rules of thinking in relation to objects of possible experience. This particular logic is still formal (and because of its formality it is developed on the model of general logic). For, Kant explains, unlike general logic, the pure concepts of transcendental logic contain “the form of thinking of an object in general” (CPR B74f./A50f.)— thinking is thematized therein both in its formality and in its relation to objects. Since both types of logic are formal, the discriminating opposition, for Kant, does not concern form and content. It concerns, instead, the opposition of thinking “in general,”6 with no regard to the determination of objects and their differences7 on the one hand, and thinking of objects on the other hand. The former is the case of general logic, the latter of transcendental logic. Only the latter is a theory of knowledge, for only transcendental logic can give an account (i) of the origin of our representations; (ii) of how our concepts can relate to objects; hence (iii) of the different types of objects to which our concepts refer.8 It is clear that Hegel’s discontent with what he deems the (abstract) formality of logic is truly his concern with the failed relation to the object, which for Kant is not the same as formality (both general and transcendental logic are formal, but only the latter addresses the relation to the object). But since Hegel conflates formality with failed relation to objects he also brings together general and transcendental logic. It is on this point that Hegel’s position differs radically from

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Kant’s. For both Kant and Hegel formal logic does indeed programmatically make abstraction from all content—whereby Kant means both that general logic does not account for the origin of our representations in our cognitive faculties and that it cannot account for the concepts’ relation to objects.9 For Kant transcendental logic does not make abstraction from the content of cognition. And this is the main reason he introduces this logic in the first Critique, given the problem with which transcendental philosophy is concerned, namely, the problem of our a priori cognition of objects.10 Hegel, instead, while upholding the instance to which transcendental logic responds, i.e., the need for thinking to be thinking of objects, considers Kant’s logic to be as general and abstract as formal logic. The point is that the latter is abstract programmatically; the former is abstract (or insufficiently objective) because it rests on Kant’s separation of sensibility and understanding as a separation of content and form. The understanding, which logic considers in its forms, is not able by itself to produce the content for those forms but must instead rely on a separate source, which is intuition. This is, in short, the thesis of transcendental idealism. It is precisely on this issue that hinges both Hegel’s critique of Kant’s logic and the argument in favor of a dialectic-speculative logic uniquely capable of gaining the true relation to objectivity and “real truth” which Kant reclaimed yet failed to guarantee. At stake is the need for a new understanding of logical form. But this is also the point that allows Hegel, on the basis of his critique of Kant, to go back to an idea of formality perhaps closer, again, to formal logic and rejected instead by Kant. In effect, Hegel does take general logic’s programmatic abstraction from all content as equivalent to transcendental logic’s commitment to the thesis of transcendental idealism (i.e., to the recognition that the understanding depends on sensibility for the content of cognition). Hegel’s claim is that insofar as logic as such assumes “thinking in general” or thinking as “mere form of cognition,” “the so-called second element belonging to cognition, namely, its matter, must come from elsewhere; and since this matter is absolutely independent of logic, logic can provide only the formal conditions of true cognition and cannot in itself contain any real truth” (MM 5:36). Herein, the decisive opposition is not the opposition of form and content of thinking—the formal rules of the use of understanding (rules of inferences and predication) do constitute, after all, the content of formal logic— here Kant would agree with Hegel’s point. In transcendental logic at stake is rather the separation between form and matter of cognition. Herein, Hegel takes up Kant’s terminology: the “matter” of cognition is its objective content (CPR B83/ A58f.). Hegel’s point is that although transcendental logic does not make abstraction from the object since for it the “transcendental” source of content is of crucial import, the content as the “matter” of cognition must be provided by a different source than the understanding, hence is “independent” of and remains foreign to logic as such. Ultimately, the point is that if, as Kant insists, (our) understanding is unable to give itself the matter of cognition (i.e., is not intuitive) but must rely on sensibility for the object to be given to it, i.e., in order to think of some object, then logic remains a purely formal and abstract discipline that cannot gain any

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constitutive relation to the object, no matter how much one insists on qualifying its transcendental nature by bringing in an alleged relation to objectivity. Kant famously brings the two elements of cognition back to their source in the human cognitive faculty of which sensibility and understanding are the two distinct “branches” (CPR B30/A15). From this the division of the Critique into a “transcendental aesthetic” and a “transcendental logic” follows—the former being the “science of the rules of sensibility,” the latter being the “science of the rules of understanding” (CPR B77/A52). In the section On Logic in General Kant refers this division to the thesis of transcendental idealism. Since the “spontaneity” of the understanding can give no object to cognition, its activity concerns the application of thinking to objects given by intuition. This “application” of the understanding must fall under rules, and these rules—rules of inference, judgment, syllogism— are the province of logic. Hence Kant’s definition of logic as “science of the rules of understanding in general” (CPR B77/A52). While for Kant this justifies the peculiar character of transcendental logic as a particular logic concerned with the cognition of objects, hence different in its aim from formal logic but also necessarily indebted to it for its formal content, for Hegel the fact that the matter of cognition is “independent” of thinking reveals the insufficiency of transcendental logic in the fulfillment of the conditions of “true knowledge.” In this regard, Hegel detects no difference between general and transcendental logic for both require an additional external element to fulfill the relation to objects that is necessary for truth and yet remains beyond the competence of both (MM 5:36). To this extent, both general and transcendental logic (and not only general logic, as claimed by Kant) offer only a “negative condition” of truth (CPR B84/A59). For Kant as well as for Hegel at stake is “the old and well-known” question— Pilatus’s question: “what is truth?”—which infallibly embarrasses the logician (CPR B82/A57f.; MM 6:244; Baum 1983; Prauss 1969; Wagner 1977). Kant’s point in arguing for the distinction of formal and transcendental logic is that the demand for a universal yet material criterion of truth is contradictory. The universal criterion of truth, making abstraction from all object of cognition, indicates the mere coherence of the understanding with its formal rules, hence is not a criterion for the truth of knowledge (CPR B84/A59). The material criterion of truth, referring to the objects of cognition, offers a condition for the truth of knowledge that only transcendental logic, not formal logic, can address. This, however, is no universal criterion of truth. For Kant, the material condition of truth is the condition of possible experience. Significantly, not only for Kant but also for Hegel at stake in logic is the truth of cognition as implying an account of thinking’s object-relation.11 To this extent, Hegel’s logic is indeed aligned with transcendental logic. And yet, while bringing the necessary moment of object-relation to the fore, transcendental logic must refer to the extra-logical giveness of intuition. For this reason, in Hegel’s view, the novelty of Kant’s idea of truth points at the same time to its insuperable limit—for, “the essential of truth, the content, lies outside of it” as “its other (sein Anderes)” (MM 5:37) and remains utterly foreign to logical thinking.

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Here the task of the new logic consists in reclaiming to logical thinking the objectivity that constitutes merely formal truth into “real truth.” (MM 5:36). Only on this condition can the dependence of logic on the giveness of intuition be eliminated while maintaining the cognitive commitments proper of transcendental logic, and yet taking up, at the same time, an idea of thinking’s formality that lacking the opposition to content first instituted by transcendental idealism is in fact closer to general logic. This is the delicate route that Hegel’s dialectic-­speculative logic attempts to navigate between Kant’s transcendental logic and formal logic. The question, however, is whether the claimed continuity with transcendental logic is, in fact, compatible with the way in which Hegel reclaims objectivity to thinking. Thinking becomes dialectical and speculative; its truth becomes universal and material at the same time. This transformation, which is the specific task of the method of the new logic to achieve, requires the elimination of the thesis of transcendental idealism. Herein Hegel presents this Kantian thesis as the presupposition “that the material of cognition is present on its own account as a readymade world apart from thinking, that thinking in itself is empty and comes as an external form to its matter, fills itself with it, and only thus acquires a content and so becomes real knowledge” (MM 5:36f.). Hegel expresses Kant’s fundamental commitment (i.e., ultimately, the thesis of transcendental idealism which renders the material of cognition “alien” to logic), in terms of the “presupposed separation of truth and certainty” (MM 5:36). This distinction hints at Hegel’s reasons for aligning Kant with the standpoint of consciousness—or more precisely, with the “opposition of consciousness (Gegensatz des Bewusstseins)”—exposed in the Phenomenology. This is the standpoint that opposing subject and object, content and form, needs to be fully and completely overcome in order for the logic to begin (MM 5:43, 45, 60). But that separation (of truth and certainty, form and content, subject and object) also explains why for Hegel the relation of dependence with which Kant connects understanding and sensibility in the cognitive synthesis—but truly sanctions their radical separation—easily translates in the claim that the logical forms have “no application to the thing in itself” (MM 5:37, 40, 60). Unlike Hegel’s rendering, however, Kant’s claim here is a qualified and a conditioned one: such an “application” is impossible only under the material condition of truth provided by transcendental logic. While for Kant this is the case because the thing in itself is not an object of intuition (hence cannot be matter of cognition); for Hegel, the gesture that places the matter of sensibility outside of the concept (as appearance) already limits the real validity of the concept, and is accordingly identical to positing a reality impenetrable to it (the thing in itself). Indeed, what Kant’s Transcendental Dialectic displays is precisely the failed application of the categories when the material condition of truth is disregarded. In contrast to this Kantian position, Hegel does appreciate the notion of formality proper instead to formal logic (and which, importantly, underlies the claims of traditional metaphysics)—a formality that does not discriminate among objects (and does not posit an unreachable thing in itself). Again, the only way to remove the Kantian limitation is to reject the claim that “the material of cognition” lies “as a

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ready-made world outside of thinking,” reclaiming, instead, the pervasive notion of formality proper of general logic but with a fundamental change, namely, by reclaiming the “liberation (Befreiung)” of logical form from the opposition to content (MM 5:43). Accordingly, dialectical opposition is now rendered internal to the logical form itself, and since the logical form is generally extended to all objects (not limited only to objects of experience), dialectic becomes the omnipervasive form of all objectivity. On Hegel’s view, thinking should be rendered capable of giving itself objective content independently of other sources. Thereby we reach Hegel’s thesis of “objective thinking” (MM 5:40, 43; Enz. §§24–25) which replaces not only the forms presented “in common logic” (Enz. §24), but also Kant’s thesis of transcendental idealism thereby becoming the cornerstone of his dialectic-speculative logic. “The expression of objective thinking,” Hegel explains, “indicates truth” as “the absolute object” of philosophy (Enz. §25). Hegel’s notion of “objective thinking” is the framework in which his new conception of logical method is inscribed. In contrast to the Kantian separation of cognitive faculties and their skewed relationship to truth (which replicates the separation of truth and certainty presented in the Phenomenology), in the dialectic-speculative logic “das Logische” is “das Rein-Vernünftige” (MM 5:45)—no longer mere understanding separated from objectivity; no longer thinking affected by the “opposition of consciousness” (MM 5:45, 59) but the sphere of the rational as such. In Kant’s Transcendental Dialectic, “reason” is the faculty of mediated inferences or syllogisms but is also the site of speculative ideas, i.e., of concepts for which no objective reality can be provided. However, Hegel’s speculative reason—and his speculative “concept”—as topic of the dialectic-speculative logic are not dialectical in the same sense. Hegel’s rejection of transcendental idealism leads him to a radical reformulation of the nature of conceptual form and content, of the extent of reason’s province, and of the power of dialectic. Kant’s division of transcendental logic into Analytic and Dialectic—a division inherited by the Aristotelian tradition—can no longer be maintained. For Kant the basis of this division lies in the formality of transcendental logic and in its dependence on the matter given in intuition: the transcendental analytic is a “logic of truth,” the dialectic a “critique of the dialectical appearance” (CPR B87/ A62; B88/A63). The analytic contains the formal principles that no cognition of objects can contradict without losing its relation to objects. But if thinking upholds the understanding’s principles and yet pretends to be independent of intuition, it trespasses the limits of experience and runs the “risk of making … a material use of its pure and merely formal principles” (CPR B88/A63), thereby judging of and inferring to objects that cannot be given in experience. Although the procedures of reason presented in Kant’s Dialectic may bear some resemblance to Hegel’s dialectic, at no point in Kant’s Dialectic is the thesis of transcendental idealism abandoned. For Kant the Dialectic confirms transcendental idealism; for Hegel reason’s dialectic can start only at the condition of abandoning it. The relationship between traditional formal logic, Hegel’s dialectic-speculative logic, and Kant’s transcendental logic can be summed up in Hegel’s claim that the Objective Logic, the first division of the Science of Logic, “would in part

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correspond to what for Kant is transcendental logic” (MM 5:59). It is a qualified “correspondence,” however, that seems connected to the two main differences that Hegel, paraphrasing Kant, detects between formal and transcendental logic, namely, that the latter a. considers concepts that refer a priori to objects, hence do not make abstraction from all content of objective cognition, or, that such logic contains the rules of the pure thinking of an object; and b. regards, at the same time, the origin of our cognition insofar as this cannot be attributed to the objects. (Ibid.)

The first condition is connected to the designation of Kant’s logic as a “particular logic” concerned with the problem of knowledge and with objective truth; the latter addresses the properly transcendental nature of this logic. Hegel’s objective logic endorses the first condition but abandons the second. However, by abandoning the transcendental tenet, which is ultimately responsible for the separation between form and content, truth and appearance, analytic and dialectic, Hegel embraces a notion of formality that is closer to general logic to the extent that the logical form is the form of all thinking as such but also the form of all objectivity (independently of the type of objects being thought). Now, this is the basis on which Hegel develops his new notion of logical method.

2 Method and the Inner Self-Movement of the Content Hegel overcomes the Kantian—and phenomenological—opposition and separation of form and matter, truth and certainty by proposing a new conception of logical form, which, as “absolute” (MM 5:44) or “infinite form” (MM 5:61; 6:550; De Boer 2011, 52) is no longer opposed to its allegedly foreign, extra-logical content—a content consequently always in need to be synthetized and deduced in order to produce meaningful and successful cognition. As the very form of “pure thinking,” which is in itself “objective thinking,” the logical form is instead capable of generating from itself its own content, of producing the “difference” which this content as content upholds against the form in a way that such difference is not “alien” to thinking—is “kein Anderessein”—but rather expresses the very movement of thinking in its formality, i.e., as logical movement (MM 6:550). Now the “method,” which at the final stage of the development of the logic is “absolute method” (MM 5:17; 6:555), is precisely the way in which the generation of content from within the logical form of pure thinking takes place. Method, Hegel explains, is the “Art und Weise” (MM 6:550), the ‘how’ or the modality of the progressive generation of content from the logical form when this generation does not appeal to an external source (an a priori intuition, the material giveness of sensibility, an object standing opposite to consciousness as its Gegen-stand or its “other”) but is rather the immanent, dynamic relation that unifies form and content within the realm of “objective thinking.” Thus, Hegel contends that the “absolute method” of cognition is, at the same time, “the immanent soul of the

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content itself” (MM 5:17)—it is the force that brings the content to life imparting movement to it, that makes the content known as content, and renders it relevant as known. To display the full progression of this movement, i.e., the movement whereby the content becomes alive and consciously known in its form is the task of Hegel’s logic. “Method is the consciousness of the form of the inner self-movement of its content” (MM 5:49; Nuzzo 2011, 116f.; Wolff 2014). The central tenet on which Hegel’s conception of method hinges, then, regards precisely the way in which the logical content is immanently produced from the logical form and in unity with it.12 Right at the beginning of the preface to the 1812 edition of the Science of Logic Hegel remarks that what constitutes the peculiar and indeed “essential viewpoint” of the new discipline is “a new concept of the scientific treatment (Behandlung)” of logical determinations. As I mentioned above, Hegel insists that in the case of the logic the “method” should not be taken from other, subordinate disciplines (such as mathematics, for example) and should not be imposed by an “external reflection” on a material presupposed as given (MM 5:16; Enz. §1). Instead, it must be developed, along with the specific logical content, within the logic itself. Hegel argues that “it can only be the nature of the content which moves itself in scientific knowledge, for it is the content’s own reflection (eigene Reflexion des Inhalts) that first posits and generates the determination (Bestimmung) of such content” (MM 5:16). The outline of Hegel’s new conception of method is already present in this claim. Method is the modality—the Art und Weise—of the discursive unfolding or, rather, of the “movement” of the content which is the movement of the content’s progressive (self-) “determination.” This means that what the logical content properly is, i.e., its proper “determination” as logical content, obtains from the logical movement itself and from this movement only (it can neither be presupposed from other disciplines nor given externally from non-logical sources nor argued for by appealing to “inner intuition” or the like (MM 5:49). This also means that the method is the form that the logic assumes as “science of logic” when the process of determination of its content is at issue. Form and content are here one. In sum, the method is the (conscious) form assumed by the process of self-movement and self-determination of the content. This is also an adequate description of the program of Hegel’s new logic. So conceived, the method ultimately constitutes the logic into a “science” and into the complete “system” of logical determinations or “concepts” (MM 5:49),13 thereby providing that “system of pure reason” that Kant’s Critique had promised but was unable to offer (MM 5:44). The method is the form that only the immanently generated content of pure objective thinking can assume. It is not some extrinsic organization that external presuppositions, aims or interests can impose from without on scientific cognition or on a thinking subject. Content and method are closely connected in Hegel’s view of logical form. Method is the form of the “content’s own reflection” (MM 5:16); it is “the immanent soul of the content itself” (MM 5:17); as such, it is “objective, immanent form” (MM 6:555). Reciprocally, however, the logical content is that which only

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the activity of thinking’s progressive self-determination and self-reflection can generate within itself. Thereby Hegel posits the unity of logical content and logical form in the dynamic of the content-form movement of self-determination. Such movement is the method. “The form,” Hegel argues “when thought out in its purity, will then have within itself the capacity to determine itself, that is, to give itself a content, and to give it as a necessary content—as a system of thoughtdeterminations” (MM 5:61). Thereby Hegel brings together the idea of absolute form, content, and method in the conception of a dialectic-speculative logic that embracing both the pervasive formality of general logic and Kant’s attention to logical content, overcomes the former’s abstractness as well as the latter’s confinement of the content to extra-logical sources. The emphasis on the fact that the self-determination of the form-content unity taking place in the logic is a movement, which is properly the self-movement characterizing all living beings (being the mark of “all natural and spiritual Lebendigkeit” [MM 5:52]) is here crucial. Hegel’s claim is that to the extent that the logic is not viewed and developed as an ongoing discursive process but is instead presented as a static and fragmented “table” of categories or inert, “dead,” and unmoved or “lifeless” determinations (as is the case of Kant’s logic and traditional general logic),14 form and content remain inexorably separate and set in opposition to each other, in need of an external reflection—or indeed of an external, ad hoc method—which alone could bring them extrinsically (and arbitrarily) together in order to confer meaning to them. Ultimately, this is, yet again, the flawed position of both transcendental subjectivity and phenomenological consciousness. On Hegel’s dialectic-speculative view, by contrast, the logical form is able to produce its content from within—immanently, as it were, working as its “immanent soul” (MM 5:17) and “moving principle” (MM 5:52)—and also with necessity, i.e., is able to produce it as a “necessary content” (MM 5:61) only under the condition of considering the logical content as a living, moving process of self-determination. This is the crucial methodological assumption of Hegel’s dialectic-speculative logic. We can now understand how the novelty of the dialecticspeculative method, for Hegel, does not consist in introducing new material in the logical disciple. Rather, it consists in giving life and, by giving life, in conferring new meaning and a new consciousness, to the otherwise “dead” and unmoved contents found in the historical tradition. It is this view of method that places “dialectic”—heretofore considered, even by Kant, only as a “part” of the logic (MM 5:51)—in a thoroughly new perspective and recognizes it a chief function in generating the movement of determination. On Hegel’s view, dialectic is not a part of the logic but its pervasive underlying dynamic structure. Along with the speculative element or moment— “das Spekulative” (MM 5:52)—the negativity characterizing “das Dialektische” (MM 5:51) constitutes the “moving soul, the principle (Prinzip) of all natural and spiritual life” (MM 5:52; Enz. §§79–82). Thus, while the material of the logic can be seen as inherited from the tradition, its formal connection into a dynamic systematic whole is not, so that the new problem that speculative logic,

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and specifically its method, is called in to solve is a problem of dynamic “order,” namely, how to produce the “inner necessary connection” of the systematic whole, how to “immanently generate the differences,” and how to achieve the “transition” among successive determinations and spheres of determination (MM 5:51). This is the methodological problem of the dynamism of the logical progress—the problem that Hegel addresses by conferring to the method a nature that is both dialectic and speculative.15 The method is the “spirit” of the content—its living spirit (MM 5:48). On this view, to follow the adequate hint of a spurious etymology, method is indeed the meta odos of the movement of pure logical thinking. It is the odos or the “path” (Weg) that pure thinking has travelled as it is reconstructed a parte post after the movement that has followed the path has fully taken place, although, in a somewhat circular way, that path has been there all along as the path to be followed. Despite its appearing as an actual path only after one has traveled it, the path one travels has been there all along in order to make travel possible. The “absolute method,” Hegel suggests, is the “self-constituting path (sich selbst konstruierenden Wege)” of thinking which alone can institute philosophy into an “objective demonstrative and demonstrated science” (MM 5:17). Its thematization, however, just as the retrospective glance at the “path” which the movement of thinking has followed (and had to follow in order to immanently and necessarily generate its own content), can take place only after the path has been followed, i.e., at the end of the entire logical development, in its last conclusive chapter.16 Not only is the method not presupposed to science; just as the content, the method is, instead, the very result of its inner movement and development (Nuzzo 2011, 116f.; Nuzzo 2005).

3 Conclusion I shall conclude by briefly summing up the argument presented above. My claim has been that the fundamental novelty and distinctive character of Hegel’s “science of logic” consists not so much in the content it presents—a content that this logic shares with the tradition (with traditional formal logic and metaphysics as well as with Kant’s transcendental logic and critique of metaphysics)—but rather in the “method” according to which such content is immanently generated within the logical presentation. Hegel’s view of method is, most properly, a peculiar conception of the dynamic, unfolding unity of logical form and content, and of the way in which such unity is constituted throughout the living movement of pure thinking’s self-determination. This conception arises from Hegel’s considered confrontation with both general logic and transcendental logic. Kant’s program in his transcendental logic is the introduction of content in the otherwise merely abstract logical forms of general logic, a gesture that turns formal logic into a transcendental theory of cognition of objects. Hegel builds on this view. However, he criticizes Kant’s limited and limiting view of thinking (properly of the understanding or of reason conceived only as understanding, i.e., truly, in a

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non-speculative way). As thinking, for Kant, remains incapable of generating content out of itself, such content, although necessary to cognition, remains foreign to logic, dependent on extra-logical sources (namely, intuition and sensibility more generally). This position goes hand in had with Kant’s limited and limiting view of logical form as applying meaningfully only to objects of possible experience. In contrast to Kant, then, Hegel upholds the more pervasive and comprehensive conception of formality proper to general logic. Logical form, however, is now “absolute” and “infinite” form—form capable of generating content out of itself in the dialectic-speculative movement of logical thinking.

Notes 1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

See MM 5:19, 58–59; 6:243 for example. For the proximity of Darstellung and Methode see MM 5:53. See MM 5:73. This is the question left open by Michael Wolff (Wolff 2014). To this extent, my task is different, although somehow obviously related to his, as my chief aim is to clarify what is Hegel’s understanding of the logical method, not his conception of dialectic. I use ‘integration’ at this stage in a sort of neutral and uncommitted sense. The relation between the two types of logic is a complex one and the discussion among interpreters is open in this regard: see Pinder (1979), Prauss (1969), Wolff (1984), Paton (1957). For Hegel’s relation to general logic, see Hanna (1986). “Der Inhalt mag sein, welcher er [der Verstand] wolle”: CPR B77/A53. CPR B75/A52: general logic concerns the employment of the understanding “unangesehen der Verschiedenheit der Gegenstände auf welche er gerichtet sein mag.” For example, objects of possible experience, intelligible objects, entia rationis. Ultimately, this is the reason why the synthetic-analytic distinction and the issue of synthetic a priori judgment can only be raised by a logic that is transcendental. CPR B78, 79/A54, 55. Hegel recognizes both points as the main difference between general and transcendental logic (MM 5:59). See the general definition of “transzendental” in relation to cognition in CPR B25/A12, and the corresponding B80/A56 in the discussion of logic. See Wagner (1977, 75) arguing against Prauss (1969). While presently I shall concentrate on one point of this central issue, I have addressed this topic extensively in Nuzzo (2005, 2011). This is indeed clear in the last chapter of the logic, the “Absolute Idea,” see MM 6:567ff. in particular. See the “dead limbs” at MM 5:48, and the analogy with the “lifeless bones of a skeleton” at MM 5:19. This point is extensively discussed in Nuzzo (2005, 2011). See Nuzzo (2014) for the relation of Hegel’s final thematization of method at the end of the Science of Logic to Kant’s similar task at the end of the Critique of Pure Reason.

Bibliography Baum, Manfred. 1983. “Wahrheit bei Kant und Hegel.” In Kant oder Hegel? edited by Dieter Henrich. 230–249. Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog.

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De Boer, Karin. 2011. “Transformations of Transcendental Philosophy: Wolff, Kant, and Hegel.” Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 32 (1–2): 63–64, 50–79. Hanna, Robert. 1986. “From an Ontological Point of View: Hegel’s Critique of the Common Logic.” The Review of Metaphysics 40: 305–338. Nuzzo, Angelica. 2005. “The End of Hegel’s Logic: Absolute Idea as Absolute Method.” In Hegel’s Theory of the Subject, edited by David G. Carlson, 187–205. London, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Nuzzo, Angelica. 2011. “Thinking Being: Method in Hegel’s Logic of Being.” In A Companion to Hegel, edited by Stephen Houlgate and Michael Bauer, 111–139. Oxford: Blackwell. Nuzzo, Angelica. 2014. “Transcendental Philosophy, Method, and System in Kant, Fichte, and Hegel.” In Fichte and Transcendental Philosophy, edited by Daniel Breazeale and Tom Rockmore, 58–70. London, NY: Palgrave Macmillan. Paton, Herbert J. 1957. “Formal and Transcendental Logic.” Kant Studien 49: 245–263. Pinder, Tillmann. 1979. “Kants Begriff der Logik.” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 61: 309–336. Prauss, Gerold. 1969. “Zum Wahrheitsproblem bei Kant.” Kant Studien 60: 166–182. Wagner, Hans. 1977. “Zu Kants Auffassung bezüglich des Verhältnisses zwischen Formal- und Transzendentallogik. Kritik der reinen Vernunft A57-64/B82-88.” Kant Studien 68: 71–76. Wolff, Michael. 1984. “Der Begriff der Widerspruch in der Kritik der reinen Vernunft.” In Probleme der Kritik der reinen Vernunft, edited by Burkhardt Tuschling, 178–226. Berlin: De Gruyter. Wolff, Michael. 2014. “Hegels Dialektik – eine Methode? Zu Hegels Ansichten von der Form einer philosophischen Wissenschaft.” In Hegel – 200 Jahre Wissenschaft der Logik, edited by Anton Friedrich Koch, Friederike Schick, Klaus Vieweg, and Claudia Wiersig, 71–86. Hamburg: Meiner.

Chapter 9

Aufhebung John W. Burbidge

In Hegelian scholarship the German term Aufhebung plays a special role. Hegel himself capitalizes on the fact that, in colloquial German, it can be used to express both “annulling” and “preserving”, as well as “transforming” or “overcoming”. To capture that multiple sense, translators and interpreters have adopted a number of English terms; in addition to those already mentioned, one can list “supersede”, “sublimate”, and the technical term “sublate”. Because of this complex of meanings, the term has become a kind of deus ex machina, used by interpreters to justify any unusual transition in Hegel’s system where one stage suddenly gives way to another at a more complex and higher level. Yet few people have endeavoured to unpack what is involved in the process it is supposed to name, explaining how it performs its magic. Not surprisingly, it has become another bit of evidence, used by his critics, for his mysticism and obscurity. Errol Harris is one of the few who has provided an explanatory model: “It is the immanence of the whole that constitutes the potentiality of the part (or of the lower stage of development) and that accounts for what is preserved in Aufhebung, as well as for what is annulled” (Harris 1993, 52). For Harris there is a kind of teleology whereby the whole draws the dismembered pieces back towards its completeness. It is this pull which transforms them by preserving what is valuable and cancelling their limitations. Harris’s proposal assumes an integrated whole to be present, at least as a possibility, from the beginning. In other words, one understands the dynamic only after the development is complete when we know what the whole is to be. However, in developing his system, Hegel never starts from some assumed totality, which he then breaks up into its component parts in the way Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason assumes that there is knowledge and then breaks up the process by which we acquire knowledge into the passive moment of intuition and the active

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moment of understanding. Instead, he begins from a primitive concept, explores its implications, and suggests that the complexity emerges from its original simplicity. In the Logic the starting point is the pure indeterminacy of the thought of “being”; in the Phenomenology it is the pure passivity of unmediated sensation; in the Philosophy of Right it is the basic structure of an act of will. By restricting his starting points to these abstracted and isolated moments, Hegel has deliberately excluded any larger perspective, any implicit reference to an all-inclusive whole. Given this evident refusal to adopt a teleological strategy from the outset, Hegel does not seem to suggest that the process called Aufhebung achieves its transformation by some kind of magic wand, wielded by a hidden Absolute, that has the power to transform partial pumpkins into complete chariots. He appears to draw on nothing more than the conditions already implicit in the preceding stages of his analysis. If he is unable to explain the mechanics of that transmutation in those a posteriori terms, then his whole systematic project loses its power. The purpose of this paper is to shed light on the nature of this transition by looking for clues within Hegel’s major systematic texts. I shall start from the Anmerkung (Remark) in the Science of Logic where he spells out his delight in finding that Aufhebung integrates the three contrary senses, and explore the context within which it is placed. As the culminating comment on Hegel’s first chapter, it is clearly meant to throw light on the way a simple, indeterminate beginning develops complications. To give flesh to this initial perspective I shall look at several passages where Hegel introduces significant comments and modifications when revising his Logic and Encyclopaedia texts for their second editions, and then turn back to discussions in Kant that could well have been in Hegel’s mind. By combining these two bits of evidence, I shall develop a proposal spelling out in detail how Aufhebung performs its magic. To test the adequacy of this proposal, I shall then look at several significant transitions within Hegel’s system to suggest, not only that it captures the dynamics of his narrative, but also that it provides a more satisfactory explanation for the systematic structure of his philosophy than that found in much of the contemporary literature. Finally, I shall turn to Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature where, having rejected the theory of evolution with its claim that nature has a history, he justifies the move from stage to stage by appealing to conceptual thought. I shall venture to suggest that, once one has recognized that nature has a history in which complexity emerges from simpler components, one may discover in nature processes closely resembling Aufhebung—processes that do not have to rely on the concept to move from a simpler to a more complex stage. I conclude with some implications for our understanding of Hegel’s systematic project.

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1 Hegel’s Remark on the term Aufhebung primarily focuses on its difference from complete annihilation (WL GW 21:94–95). What has been aufgehoben or sublated does not simply revert to an unmediated nothingness but continues as something mediated, as a result. While its immediacy has been cancelled, it is nonetheless preserved, although in a form that is no longer completely open to external influences. This double sense makes it a peculiarly appropriate term for Hegel’s speculative project. The Remark, however, makes no mention of the process involved—how it performs this transformation. To get some sense of that dynamic we have to turn to the text of the chapter to which it is appended. The basic argument of the chapter is found in five short discussions. The first two detail how an initial focus on pure being discovers that it is thinking nothing, and that an initial focus on a pure nothing comes to the realization that this thought is exactly the same as the thought of pure being (WL GW 21:68–69). The other three sections explore the consequence of this double discovery. Initially, in the third section, it would appear that pure being and pure nothing are simply the same. But when one thinks back on what was described in the first two sections, one realizes that this does not capture what went on. They appear to be the same because each one has passed over to the other. And that passing over presupposes that one is distinguished from the other. So the identity is not undifferentiated. The two terms, “pure being” and “pure nothing” are in fact opposites; and what happens is that each one disappears into what looks like its contradictory. What is significant is the process of disappearing, which we can identify with the term “becoming”, a process in which the two terms are differentiated from each other, yet each immediately dissolves into the other (WL GW 21:69–70). This leads to a fourth moment. For once one unites pure being and pure nothing into this dynamic identity they change their character. They are no longer simple and immediate, but aufgehobene, sublated. They have become differentiated moments, but in their difference each retains a connection or link to the other. For at one moment, pure being is primary and immediate and nothing is the mediated result, and in the other moment pure nothing is primary and immediate while being is the result. So there are two types of becoming: in one nothing becomes being— which can be called “coming to be”—and in the other being becomes nothing—or “passing away”. It is not so much that one brings about the demise of the other, but each one brings about its own transition to the other (WL GW 21:92–93). In the fifth and final section, called “Aufheben of Becoming”, Hegel makes a further move. For when one considers from a unified perspective the two transitions—the coming-to-be and the passing-away—one discovers that each of the two moments, pure being and pure nothing, is continually disappearing and reappearing as its contrary. Pure becoming has this contradictory character in which the differentiation of its moments disappears only to re-emerge as significant. That contradiction cannot maintain itself. So the double dynamic collapses into

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a single complex movement, in which the unceasing transition from one into the other becomes a simple, peaceful result. In other words, because of the contradiction, the mutual disappearance of being and nothing itself disappears into an unmediated unity. The term for an unmediated unity of pure being and pure nothing where each is continually passing over to its opposite is “Dasein”, or “a being”. The “being” that is now the focus of attention is not the abstraction of pure undifferentiated being, but a being whose inherent character is to come to be and pass away (WL GW 21:93–94). In this narrative, Aufhebung has surfaced at two different points. In the first, a simple transition from one thought to another involves the sublating of the primary moment as it passes over to its contrary. In the second, a double movement collapses (or disappears) and is sublated into a simple unmediated unity. Our next task is to explore further the role these two features play. A couple of passages that Hegel added to the second editions of his published works can throw light on this process. Just before he died in 1831, Hegel sent off the final corrections to his revision of the first book of the Science of Logic. At the end of his discussion of magnitude, or quantity, he had previously noted that the discussion of quality in the first section had concluded by passing over to the discussion of quantity; in contrast, the discussion of quantity in the second section culminated in a move whereby its externality became a self-referential determination, or quality. At this point he adds in 1831 the following passage: For totality to be established, it requires the doubled transition, not only of the one determination into its other, but equally the transition of this other – its return – into the first. By means of the first, there is only inherently [an sich] the identity of the two at hand; quality is contained in quantity, but that is only a one-sided determination. But that this latter, in reverse, is equally contained in the former – is equally present only as sublated [aufgehoben] – results from the second transition, the return into the first. This remark concerning the necessity of the double transition is of great significance for the whole of the scientific method. (WL GW 21:320.21–29, my translation; compare WL GW 11:187)

The emphasis Hegel inserts in this passage suggests that it is not the “whole”, central to E. E. Harris’s explanatory picture, that generates the process, but rather the emergence of a double transition—not only the transitions from quality to quantity and from quantity to quality, but also, as we have seen in the primitive stages of the Logic, from being to nothing and from nothing to being. Hegel’s reference to the importance of this pattern for the whole scientific method is made explicit in a second passage. For when, in 1827, he revised the final section of the Encyclopaedia Logic of 1817 on the Absolute Idea, he added a new paragraph and a half to his discussion of the logical method: §241 In the second sphere the concept, which is present at first only implicitly, has come to be shown, and is thus implicitly the Idea. – The development of this sphere becomes the return into the first, just as the development of the first is a transition into the second. Only through this doubled movement does the distinction acquire its just due, in that each of the two differentiated [moments] is considered with respect to itself, completes itself in a totality, and thereby activates itself into a unity with the other. Only the self-sublating [Sichaufheben] of the one-sidedness of both on its own [terms] prevents the unity from being one-sided.

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§242 The second sphere develops the relation between the differentiated into what it is at first, into the contradiction in itself – within an infinite progress – which then [third sphere] dissolves into the end, wherein the differentiated are posited as that which they are in the concept.1 (Enc. GW 19:179.4–17; in third edition—Enc. GW 20:230.11–24, my translation; compare GW 13:109–110)

From this passage we learn further features of the doubled transition. It is a critical stage in the development of conceptual thought, making its inherent dynamic evident, and setting the stage for the complete identification of the differentiated moments. This final move comes about because the inherent contradiction between the two initial transitions or moments generates an infinite progress of one becoming the other, which in turn collapses, or dissolves, into a final conceptual unity. The dissolution of the double transition, Hegel suggests in the Encyclopaedia, in some way involves “the concept”. A passage in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, where he introduces the “pure concepts of the understanding”, provides some background for Hegel’s use of this term. For Kant, intuitions rest on affections, while concepts rest on functions. “By a function … I understand the unity of the action of ordering different representations under a common one” (CPR A68/B93). An initial function involves synthesis, taking a manifold of intuitions in space and time and “comprehending their manifoldness in one cognition” (CPR A77/B103). Kant attributes the synthesising function primarily to the imagination, and points out that it is not sufficient on its own to provide knowledge. For that to happen we need a third step beyond intuition and imagination: “The concepts that give this pure synthesis unity, and that consist solely in the representation of this necessary synthetic unity, are the third thing necessary for cognition of an object that comes before us, and they depend on the understanding” (CPR A79/B104). Kant thus distinguishes between an act that brings a manifold together into a single perspective, which he calls “synthesis”, and a further act which then integrates that synthesis into a unity. This second function—the one that generates the concepts critical for acquiring knowledge—is the work of “understanding”. When we return to the passage cited from the Encyclopaedia, we can see how Hegel has built on Kant’s distinction between synthesis and unity. Within the Logic images and imagination have no role to play, for we have already moved beyond any empirical encounter with the world through sensation or reflection. Pure thoughts are the focus of attention. If, however, such thoughts were brought together by a purely spontaneous act of synthesis, then thought would still be prey to arbitrary whim. Hegel solves this problem by showing how the focus on a particular thought to clarify and determine its precise sense leads over to its opposite or contrary. “Being” turns into “nothing”; “nothing” turns into “being”. The act of synthesis simply looks at the transition as a totality which includes both its initial and its concluding moment, and notices that a sublation (Aufhebung) has occurred. When the result of the first act is submitted to the same examination, a reverse movement occurs. At this point synthesis recurs at a second level in which thought considers the double movement as a whole. And this sets the stage for the unifying function of conceptual thought.

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In the context of the first chapter of the Logic, the first synthetic move happens in the third section discussed above entitled “Unity of Being and Nothing” (WL GW 21:69.23–70.2), where the two transitions from being to nothing and from nothing to being result in the two terms being taken as identical; the second emerges through the fourth section, “Moments of Becoming” (WL GW 21:92. 18–93.17), where those two initial transitions are distinguished in terms of their initial moments, and yet seen as reciprocal. The function Kant calls “unity” then surfaces in the fifth section, “Aufhebung of Becoming”. The understanding takes the total double movement, which involves a continual ongoing circle from one moment to its contrary and back again, and dissolves it into a unity that can be isolated and conceived as a single thought. It retains all the features of the double dynamic, yet integrates them into a new simple concept. “The activity of separating”, Hegel notes in the Phenomenology, “is the force and labour of the understanding, the most astonishing and the greatest of all the powers, or rather, which is the absolute power”. The sentences that follow are also significant for our purposes: “The circle, which, enclosed within itself, is at rest and which, as substance, sustains its moments, is the immediate and is, for that reason, an unsurprising relationship. However, the accidental, separated from its surroundings, attains an isolated freedom and its own proper existence only in its being bound to other actualities and only as existing in their context; as such, it is the tremendous power of the negative; it is the energy of thinking, of the pure I” (PhG GW 9:27.18–25). In other words, the critical second type of Aufhebung, by which the double transition collapses, dissolves, or disappears into a new simple thought, involves the ability of conceptual thought to isolate and focus solely on the unity of the circular movement. The double movement of coming to be and passing away vanishes into the simplicity of Dasein, determinate being. To the question posed earlier about the specific dynamic involved in sublation, then, we have two distinct answers. There is, first, a dynamic inherent in any clearly defined thought to shift its meaning and move over to its contrary or opposite. This happens not only once but twice as that opposite in turn shifts its meaning and moves back to the first. Second, there is understanding’s “power of the negative”, which collapses the double transition with its inherent contradiction and infinite progress into a simple, unified concept.

2 As Hegel moves through the Logic this process becomes more sophisticated as the definitions of the initial concepts become more detailed. To illustrate this developing complexity, I shall, in this section, first consider the next chapter in the Logic, which moves from Dasein or determinate being to infinity and beingon-its-own-account (or Fürsichsein) (WL GW 21:96–143). Then I shall step back from the close detail and consider how the structure of Aufhebung throws

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light on the Science of Logic as a whole. Finally, I shall look at how that pattern finds expression in the real world, as described in the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Philosophy of Right. In the next section, I shall turn to Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, which adopts a quite different kind of analysis, both to show the way Hegel was able to maintain his systematic project within a static universe and to suggest how that project may need to be adapted once one takes into consideration the current scientific world view, where nature has a history.

2.1 For our purposes, we need not explain in detail all the various moves Hegel makes in the second chapter of his Science of Logic (WL GW 21:96–137). It will be sufficient to indicate not how patterns of double transitions emerge (which depends on the specific significance of the terms being considered), but the way they disappear into new basic terms.2 Hegel starts this chapter with the term that emerged from the Aufhebung of becoming at the end of the previous one: Dasein. This has been translated as “determinate being”, “present being” and “existence”, but all three terms suggest a more explicit thought than Hegel intends. Something of the way it combines an element of determination with a residual indeterminacy can be captured by the expression “a being” or “beings”, as distinct from the purely abstract “being” (or Sein) of the first chapter. To articulate the differentiation between these two related terms we can say that a being is qualified, whereas pure being is not. When we turn to the thought of “quality” that has thus been introduced, we realize that a quality necessarily requires reference to the being it qualifies. This initial double transition between “a being” and “quality” then collapses into the thought of a qualified being, or “something”. “Something” leads to the thought of “something else”, or “something other”; and this “other” similarly leads us back to the thought of “something”. The challenge that arises from this second double transition is to explain the difference that distinguishes each of the terms from its contrary. A “determination” focuses on the way something is distinct on its own; but its differentiation is equally “constituted” by its relation to the other. The double dynamic that moves back and forth between determination and constitution is then captured in the single term “limit” which marks the point at which something passes over into its other. But “limit” also marks the final stage of a logical development that began with the interplay between “something” and “other”; and it makes sense only if it limits “something”, leading us back to the point from which we began. Integrating these two moves—from “something” to “limit” and from “limit” to “something”—gets us to a “limited something”, which is captured by the term “finite”. “Something finite” cannot pass beyond its limits without ceasing to be what it inherently is. In Hegel’s terms, what it “ought to be” confronts a “boundary” even

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as the boundary limits what ought to be. When one combines these two into a single thought we have an “ought to be” that incorporates its boundary and thereby goes beyond it. What is beyond the finite is the “infinite”, a being that is unlimited. In the final section on infinity, particularly in the second edition of the Logic (WL GW 21:124–137), the discussion becomes quite complicated. For the “infinite beyond” is itself limited by the fact that it is not the finite. So it too is confronted with a barrier that prevents it from becoming what it ought to be and hence is finite. There are a number of ways in which the “finite” strives to overcome its limitation and reach the infinite; whereas the infinite in turn regularly finds that it is determinate and limited, and so finite. And those double transitions end up continually reproducing themselves in an infinite progress, which becomes a second sense of the term “infinite”. As Hegel notes in his addition to the second edition of the Encyclopaedia Logic (Enc. GW 19:179; 20:230, §242) an infinite progress provides the key condition which enables the understanding to collapse a cycle of double transitions into a simple concept. In this context, the synthesis of the double transition can be called the “valid infinite” because it describes the dynamic as a whole in which the finite and the infinite continually emerge and disappear. But once that synthesis is unified into a simple concept, the appropriate term is “being-on-its-own-account” or Fürsichsein.3

2.2 In the discussion to this point I have tried to show the role double transitions play as Hegel makes his way from Dasein to Fürsichsein. However, rather like the Mandelbrot set,4 patterns repeat at different levels, ranging from the specific to the comprehensive. I shall suggest some of the forms that development takes within the Science of Logic as a whole. Being-on-its-own-account as a self-contained unity finds itself reciprocally related to other units, leading to the concept of magnitude or quantity—the counterpart or contrary of quality, which is the focus of the previous development. Then the section on quantity concludes by arriving at the concept of quality, setting the scene for Hegel’s addition to the second edition on double transitions cited above. That doubled movement disappears into the dynamic of measuring, in which we integrate quantities with qualities. This time, however, the doubled movement between quality and quantity results not in an integrated unity, but in a fully articulated distinction, much in the way that limit emerged from the reciprocal interaction between something and other. For one arrives at forms of measurement where, on altering quantitative ratios gradually, one generates leaps from one qualitative feature to another. That distinction between the way qualitative being presents itself, and what is going on inherently within the quantitative dynamic sets the stage for the second book of the Logic, where an underlying essence is differentiated from mere being.

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The second book of the Science of Logic (see WL GW 11:233–409) focuses on how essence is related to the show of mere being by tracing the dichotomies that reflection uses to distinguish between them: ground and grounded, essence and existence, inner and outer, actual and possible, substance and accidence, cause and effect. In each of those pairs there is a movement back and forth from one to the other that reaches its most explicit form in the concept of reciprocity. At that point the doubled movement collapses (or disappears) into a single integrated thought, a process which is nothing other than the function of uniting that Kant attributes to the concept in the Critique of Pure Reason. In sum, the two first books as a whole may be read as describing two transitions: one from the indeterminacy of being to the bifurcated duality of the essential and the inessential; the other working out the implications of that doubled movement until it collapses into a new simple unity. The third book, then, explores the way double transitions work within that unity. Conceptual thought or understanding bifurcates into a tension between conceiving abstract universals and referring to brute singulars, although this turns out to be mediated by particulars which are both more determinate than the universals, but more conceptual than pure singulars. The subjectivity of thought ends with a mediated conceptual structure that formally articulates objective necessity. Then the objectivity of pure mechanical externality moves through the intermediate stage of chemical interaction until it reaches the mediated dynamic of teleology, in which the subjectivity of conceptual thought has a key role to play. The integration of that double transition between subjectivity and objectivity leads to the thought of what Hegel calls “the idea”—the union of subjectivity and objectivity. This finds its basic expression in the idea of life, develops its internal bifurcation into the opposing processes of theory, with its idea of the true, and action, with its idea of the good; and culminates in the absolute idea, which turns out to be nothing but a detailed description of the logical method originally introduced as Aufhebung in the first chapter of the Logic.

2.3 Within the Science of Logic sublation can collapse a double transition because in thought the end of the second movement is the same as the concept from which the first movement began. The “being” that emerges from “nothing” is none other than the “being” that led to it in the first place. In the process it may have become more dynamic, but it is none the less a return to the same. When we turn to the real world, however, the situation becomes much more complicated. For time resembles “becoming” in that the non-being of the future becomes the being of the present only to disappear into the non-being of the past; yet the non-being of the past is determinate and cannot be changed while the non-being of the future is indeterminate and flexible. As a result, the Philosophies of Nature and Spirit cannot simply mimic the patterns of the Logic, in which the double movement between

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contraries becomes a circle that can continue into an infinite progress. Aufhebung will have to adopt a different strategy. We can catch a glimpse of what is involved most easily in the philosophy of spirit, for spiritual life involves the interaction between conceptual thought and practical action in the real world of space and time; and conceptual thought, for all of its fallibility when put into practice, is inherently and implicitly logical. In Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, the most familiar example of the way double transitions collapse into a unity is found in his discussion of recognition, where the reciprocal interaction between individuals results in what he calls “spirit”— “the unity of its oppositions in their complete freedom and self-sufficiency, namely, in the oppositions of the various self-consciousnesses existing for themselves: The I that is we and the we that is I” (PhG GW 9:108). What is not often noticed is the role Aufhebung plays in the development of the argument of the work as a whole. In the Introduction to the Phenomenology Hegel refers to “this dialectical movement which consciousness practices in its own self (as well as in its knowing and in its object)” (PhG GW 9:60.15–16). That movement starts when consciousness claims to know how to get at the truth of an object. When, however, one puts that claim into practice one discovers that the object is not what one thought it to be. The world as it is in itself controverts confident expectations, revealing that what was supposed to be the object as it really is is nothing but the creation of consciousness. In other words, the movement of consciousness in putting the claim into practice is countered by a resistance from the very object that one is trying to know—a counter move that demolishes one’s self-confidence and leads to doubt and despair. The “dialectical movement” is thus not simply the action of the agent consciousness but also one’s experience of the reaction of the world as it is in itself; it involves a double transition. Hegel then identifies a move “where the exposition seems not to correspond with what is ordinarily understood by experience” (PhG GW 9:60). This is the shift from one knowledge claim to a succeeding one that has benefited from the moment of despair. The nature of this move can be clarified by drawing on our earlier analysis of Aufhebung. For there, double transitions collapsed or disappeared into a new integrated unity. What happens when perception emerges from the failure of sense certainty, then, is that the double transition between the naive belief in unmediated knowing and a series of experiences that involve an inescapable mediation collapses into a direct knowing that incorporates a basic form of mediation into its understanding of what is going on when we sense the objects of experience, or perception. In other words, the motor that drives the ongoing sequence of stages in the Phenomenology of Spirit is a form of sublation: of double transitions in which consciousness interacts with the world it is trying to know, and of the disappearance of each such interaction into a new, more complex, stage. At the same time, Aufhebung plays a role in the overall structure of the work. Consciousness starts in sense certainty with the claim of unmediated knowledge of the object, only to discover at the end of one’s struggle to understand objects that all attempts produce nothing but the explanatory creations of one’s self-consciousness.

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This poses the need to know the truth about oneself which, in its most primitive form, finds expression in desire. But the discussion of self-consciousness ends with the stage of self-mortification, in which the only way to achieve self-knowledge is to alienate oneself into an objective unchanging other. The two movements, one through consciousness and the other through self-consciousness, run in contrary directions, each resulting in the opposite of what was initially claimed. Trying to know the object ends up with being enmeshed in subjectivity; while the quest for self-knowledge alienates itself into objectivity. Reason, then, collapses that double transition into a new simplicity; and explores what happens when one works with unchanging categories that are common to self and object. Within that unity a doubling emerges because there are different selves whose truth claims stand in polar opposition, producing complicated structures of recognition that Hegel calls “spirit”. Religion represents in a variety of ways how the world of finite spirit understands the spiritual dynamic of the cosmos as a whole. The chapter on absolute knowing, finally, identifies the single dynamic structure that religion in its most comprehensive form shares with the culminating achievements of spiritual action. The task of the Phenomenology of Spirit is to show how we are able to arrive through experience at concepts that capture the way the world actually is—how we acquire knowledge. The Philosophy of Spirit faces a different challenge: to take the dynamic life of spirit as a whole and expose its fundamental rationale. Conceptual thought needs to articulate the network of relationships that make up its complex structure. So it is not surprising that Hegel uses the rational tools he has articulated in the Logic, and starts from the most basic and indeterminate features, before exploring how those features develop reciprocal relations which produce more complex structures that have their own internal dynamic. We can illustrate this strategy in his Philosophy of Right. Will is the primitive function spirits use to make their subjectivity objective. Beginning with the most basic way it does so—by taking possession of things—Hegel ends by showing how the emergence of deception and crime demands reference to subjective motivation. The second stage is to examine the subjective demands of morality, which realizes that the immediate conviction of conscience needs as its counterpart the objectivity of the good it seeks to realize. Ethical life collapses this double transition into institutions which integrate the objectivity of possessions and things with the subjectivity of choice and commitment. The family unites both moments with the bond of feeling; civil society recognizes the differentiation of individuals and the way they nonetheless combine into associations and corporations; the state integrates the individualism of civil society with the bond of patriotic sentiment. But even that is not a final stage, for the state stands in contrast to other states, and the resulting structure of international relations stretches back through the historical past, and looks forward into the indefinite future in a series of cultures and civilizations that emerge into complex interactive forms only to come to grief when counter forces emerge to challenge their limitations. In other words, the conceptual structure of Aufhebung, with its pattern of double transitions that collapse into more complex unities, provides the infrastructure that frames the way the realm of spirit is understood not only philosophically, but also historically.

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3 For all that Hegel, on the title page of his Phenomenology of Spirit of 1807, announced his credentials as an assessor of the Ducal Mineralogical Society of Jena (PhG GW 9:3), the geological expedition he took into the Harz mountains in 1804 did not stimulate any prescience into the fact that nature has a history. For Charles Lyell’s Principles of Geology, which first proposed that hypothesis, did not appear until 1830, and even then it took some time before the hypothesis became accepted scientific wisdom. To be sure, Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature considers nature as “a system of stages, one arising necessarily from the other”, but each stage “is not generated naturally out of the other, but only in the inner idea which constitutes the ground of nature”. Unlike the Philosophy of Spirit, then, where the structure of Aufhebung is found already prefigured in the dynamics of experience and human history, the Philosophy of Nature has to base its systematic structure on philosophical grounds alone. “Metamorphosis pertains only to the concept as such, since only its alteration is development” (Enc. §249/GW 20:238–239; Enc. 2, 20 modified). So, when one examines the Philosophy of Nature in detail one is not surprised to discover that, whenever Hegel wants to move from one stage to the next, he makes explicit reference to “the concept”. Conceptual thought establishes the initial parameters, Hegel then explores the natural processes and characteristics that exemplify that framework. This appeal to empirical evidence is structured by the expectations of conceptual thought: what are the significant differences; the processes that move from one characteristic to its contrary or opposite; the moves from the most general to the particular and singular, or vice versa? He then concludes the section by bringing together the evidence just outlined with the initial conceptual framework and integrating them into a new singular concept that sets the parameters for the next stage.5 Double transition finds expression in the move from concept to evidence and back to concept, but Hegel also finds instances of reciprocal processes in the empirical material itself. In chemistry, for example, there are processes that decompose compounds into elements, and processes that combine and recombine elements into compounds; and animal organisms have integrated structures where organs reciprocally interact.6 Nonetheless from the perspective of his times, nature did not furnish any evidence of moves from simpler, more elementary stages to ones that are more complex, which would capture the distinctive feature of Aufhebung. That, he claimed, requires the initiative of conceptual thought, which takes seriously what is given in nature, but nonetheless understands it by relying on its own capacity for explanation. At the same time, the fact that he could show how the evidence provided by natural phenomena does fit into a comprehensive conceptual framework provided support for Hegel’s conclusion that the universe is inherently rational—that nature can be incorporated into what he calls “the idea”, the integration of subjectivity and objectivity.

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Once Lyell and Darwin offered explanatory models in which changed conditions produce transformations in nature, Hegel’s calm assurance that “metamorphosis pertains only to the concept as such” (Enc. GW 20:239.2, §249; Enc. 2, 20) is no longer credible. Not only are rocks metamorphosed when they are subjected to geological stresses and strains, not only are genera and species transformed as environmental changes transmute the forces that decide between survival and extinction, but science is exploring how matter emerged from the pure energy of the “big bang”, how planets form, how plants and animals diverge, and how life itself emerges from potent chemical interactions. This opens the question: could Hegel’s conception of sublation contribute to our understanding of the way natural processes function over time? Developments in particle physics are suggestive. In exploring the structure of the neutrons and protons that make up the nucleus of the atom, the “standard model” distinguishes between particles of mass, called quarks, and particles of energy, called gluons. Quarks are distinguished by several characteristics; one of which is called the direction of spin which gives them their positive or negative charge (“up” or “down”); the other is indicated by using a colour term (“red”, “green”, and “blue”). There are eight types of gluons, which are distinguished by the way they link quarks of opposite charges: a positive red with a negative green; a negative red with a positive green; a positive red with a negative blue; a negative red with a positive blue; a positive green with a negative blue; and a negative green with a positive blue. The final two gluons connect quarks of opposite charge but the same colour. In other words, the units of energy are uniquely distinguished from each other by the character of the quarks they bond together, which suggests, in turn, that both quarks determine the dynamic interaction that develops between them. Two further aspects of this model are significant for our purposes. In the first place, the quarks make up only a small part of the mass of the proton or neutron. The bulk comes from the energy generated by the activity of the gluons. In the second place, this energy generates a force which has a very distinctive character. Whereas gravitation, electro-magnetism, and the “weak nuclear force” (which bonds the neutrons and protons in the nucleus of an atom) become weaker as the units of mass move further apart, the force working inside the protons and neutrons becomes stronger as the distance between the quarks increases. For this reason, it is called the “strong nuclear force”. This implies that, when the doubly determined gluons bind the quarks together, they in effect collapse the whole structure into a strongly integrated unity.7 The standard model of particle physics, then, attributes to basic elements of the natural order a structure that is remarkably close to that captured in Hegel’s term, Aufhebung. Something rather like double transitions collapses into an integrated unity. In the field of biochemistry, scientists have been exploring candidates for a process which produced the first metabolism, the first “network of chemical reactions that [could] harvest energy and combine chemical elements” into the molecular building blocks of life. One possibility, which appears in the earth’s oldest known life forms is the citric acid cycle. “The citric acid cycle uses ten chemical reactions

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to transform one molecule of citric acid … through several intermediates with uncommon names – pyruvate, oxaloacetate, acetate, and others – until it has completed one turn and manufactured another molecule of citric acid” (Wagner 2014, 42, 53). Rather than the two processes of a doubled transition, there is a sequence of processes which none the less ends up where it started, having replicated the original molecule. A complex circular dynamic collapses into a new immediate starting point. Biology offers other examples where two interacting agents generate a more complex, persisting relation. One thinks of the symbiotic interaction between an alga and a fungus that produces a particular species of lichen, or the relationship between parasites and their hosts. Further investigation is needed to determine exactly what processes are involved and how they interact. But problems faced by biologists exploring the relationship between parasites and their hosts suggest that the difficulties involved in documenting such processes should not be underestimated. In several cases, when for purposes of experiment they isolate the parasite to identify the nature of its operations, they found that it does not function in the same way as it appears to do when attached to its host. In other words, the need for rigorously controlled experiments that isolate the objects being investigated from outside influences may systematically frustrate attempts to identify genuine double transitions.

4 Nonetheless, the evidence provided by biology and the standard model of particle physics offers intriguing implications for the contemporary relevance of Hegel’s philosophy. If nature organizes itself using networks of double transitions that are then integrated or emerge into new kinds of entities—and one must admit that this still remains a very big assumption—then we need to reconsider the role spirit and conceptual thought play in generating the process Hegel calls Aufhebung. As we have seen, for Hegel, the collapsing of a double transition into a new integrated unity is the work of conceptual thought, as embodied in finite spirit. In contrast, under this revision, nature is not impotent, but integrated entities emerge within nature from the reciprocal interaction of diverse agents. There is no need to presuppose that the universe is grounded in a rational structure that is prior to, and independent of nature. Rather, the dynamic by which double transitions collapse into integrated unities turns out to be a fundamental feature of the world that has emerged in space and time. On this reading, then, the strictly logical pattern of thought which Hegel calls Aufhebung is not primordial, setting the framework for our understanding of the universe; it has rather emerged as the way we make explicit a dynamic inherent in the cosmos. When it finds expression within a philosophical system, it cannot claim that it has reached some final, absolute truth; rather the logic has emerged

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from disciplined self-conscious thought reflecting on our experience over time, and it is determined by the conditions and circumstances out of which it has developed and the particular cultural context in which such reflective thinkers live. There is no a priori logical structure, but human thought is affected by what it discovers in the changes and transformations of nature. As in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, a doubled dynamic moves from the questions thought asks when trying to discover whether the world confirms or disconfirms its expectations to the evidence provided by rigorously controlled experiments and back to reformulating the questions. The integrated results of that doubled movement continually provide more comprehensive perspectives, not only with regard to the details of natural processes, but also with regard to the logic used to understand them.8 The details of our logical explanations and our scientific understanding would continually be subject to change, but the pattern by which some processes generate reciprocal interactions of double transition and then collapse that complexity into new integrated unities would continually reaffirm its own validity. The pattern of Aufhebung, which Hegel calls the logical method, would persist through all the many variations. So we should not be surprised when Hegel writes: “How would I be able to pretend that the method which I follow in this system of logic – or rather that this system follows on its own – is not capable of yet greater perfection, of a much more thorough working out of details; but at the same time I know that it is the only one that is valid” (WL GW 21:38, compare WL GW 11:25).

Notes 1. This addition suggests that, had Hegel been able to revise the final volume of the Science of Logic, he would have included a more detailed discussion of this double dynamic in his chapter on the absolute idea. 2. An attempt to provide a more fully articulated picture can be found in Burbidge (1981, 46–60). 3. In colloquial German “für sich” is similar to the English use of “of itself” to indicate something considered on its own. It should not be confused with Hegel’s use of “für es” or “for consciousness” which is contrasted with “an sich” or “in itself” in the Phenomenology of Spirit. 4. The Mandelbrot set is a set of complex numbers which, when plotted on Cartesian co-ordinates, reveals patterns that repeat themselves in finer detail at increasing magnifications. 5. Support for this reading of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature can be found in Burbidge (1996, passim) and Burbidge (2007, Chapters 8 and 9). 6. In the Critique of Judgment, Kant recognized that, in nature, there was a kind of product where “each part is conceived as if it exists only through all the others, thus as if existing for the sake of others and on account of the whole”, and also “as an organ that produces the other parts” (CJ §65:373–374). While he believed that ultimately those phenomena would be explained in a strictly mechanical way, so the pattern of double transitions was simply a convenient way of understanding organisms, his successors, particularly Schelling and Hegel, incorporated organic causality into their philosophies of nature.

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7. This discussion is based on Susskind (2008, 320–327) and Baggott (2012, 136). Much more is involved in the standard model than is suggested here. I have identified those features significant for the present discussion. 8. I develop the metaphysical framework for such an approach in Burbidge (2014, passim).

Bibliography Baggott, Jim. 2012. Higgs: The Invention and Discovery of the “God Particle”. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Burbidge, John W. 1981. On Hegel’s Logic: Fragments of a Commentary. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Burbidge, John W. 1996. Real Process: How Logic and Chemistry Combine in Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature. Toronto: University of Toronto Press. Burbidge, John W. 2007. Hegel’s Systematic Contingency. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Burbidge, John W. 2014. Cause for Thought: An Essay in Metaphysics. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Harris, Errol E. 1993. The Spirit of Hegel. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press. Susskind, Leonard. 2008. The Black Hole War. New York, Boston, and London: Little, Brown & Co. Wagner, Andreas. 2014. Arrival of the Fittest: Solving Evolution’s Greatest Puzzle. New York: Current.

Chapter 10

Freedom as Belonging: A Defense of Hegelian Holism Henry M. Southgate

1 Introduction Hegel has a P.R. problem, and that puts his expositors in a tight spot. For if you are going to explain Hegel, much less defend him, you have to meet your audience where they are, and talk to them in words that they will understand. Hegel does not give us much to work with here. It is one thing to have “common sense” going against you—all philosophers have to contend with that problem. Yet, when you compound this with generations of philosophers either misreading you or never bothering to read you because of those misreadings, and you pile on top of that the primary texts, which are, let us face it, really quite a struggle to read, then you have a real problem. Before you have said three words—and if the word is “sublation,” then you can make it just one—your audience has written you off for talking about something that is not only unintelligible, but also quite stupid. This situation is worth comparing and contrasting with teaching Peter Singer to a room full of undergraduates. When I lecture on “Famine, Affluence, and Morality” (Singer 2014), I know that out of a lecture hall of eighty students, only about two or three will agree with Singer’s extreme utilitarian position. That puts Singer about two votes ahead of Hegel by my count—so, he is right up there with the ontological argument in terms of popularity. Still, the students and I can actually discuss Singer’s arguments, because they are very direct, in language that is simple and unadorned. Moreover, Singer invokes premises that we can all get on board with—like the claim that “suffering and death from lack of food, shelter, and medical care are bad” (Singer 2014, 555). By contrast, when I give talks on Hegel to the uninitiated, my audience and I lack any kind of common ground. It is not as if I can point them to some passage from Hegel that we can all readily relate to, because any passage one excerpts

H. M. Southgate (*)  University of Wisconsin–Madison, Madison, WI, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 M. F. Bykova and K. R. Westphal (eds.), The Palgrave Hegel Handbook, Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26597-7_10

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from Hegel is going to be complicated by systematic qualifications, and those qualifications must be qualified as well. Granted, this is what we should expect from the philosopher who teaches us to be wary of immediacy—who defines his very metaphysics in terms of the idea that “the finite is ideal” (WL GW 21:142). Still, this kind of holism—which I hope to convince you of by the end of this essay—is a tough sell. Because unlike when I teach Singer, when I teach Hegel I cannot say, “let us take a look at this passage and talk about it.” For, in order for us to talk about it, you, my reader, need to be able to understand the sentences you are reading and relate them to the context in which they are uttered, and you also need to be able to relate them to your own life-experience and outlook. What, then, are you going to do when you are dropped in media res into Hegel’s “Doctrine of Essence”—my focal point for today? The sentences in that book of the Science of Logic are, by Hegel’s own admission, some of the most obscure he ever penned,1 which is saying something, considering the general difficulty of his work. Here is a choice example of the writing on offer there (it also happens, by no coincidence, to concern the subject matter of this essay): If, now, the first determinations of reflection, namely, identity, difference, and opposition, have been put in the form of a law, still more should the determination into which they pass as their truth, namely, contradiction, be grasped and enunciated as a law: all things are in themselves contradictory, and in the sense that this law in contrast to the others expresses rather the truth and the essence of things. (WL GW 11:286/HSL 438; translation slightly altered)

Now, let us compare this passage with Singer’s claim that starving to death is bad. I expect you can appreciate the force of Singer’s idea straightaway: you have likely been hungry before, and it was unpleasant; you can also likely extrapolate to some degree from the discomfort of being mildly hungry to the extreme pain of literally starving to death. But I would wager that each line, if not every phrase, in the passage above is confusing, and that the parts that are at least syntactically and linguistically clear—like “all things are in themselves contradictory”—may well strike you as false. You know what these words mean in plain English, and their combination in one sentence produces a thought that verges on absurdity. Contradictory things—square triangles, maximum velocities, and the like—are impossible.2 Now let us say you look up from this text and happen to glance at some of the everyday objects around you: a cup of coffee, a desk, a computer, a chair—all the things that populate an academic’s life. None of them seems impossible—after all, there they are. And they do not appear contradictory either, at least not if that term means anything like what it means when competent speakers use it. In doing this, you begin to appreciate the longstanding opinion that not only is Hegel obscure, but that he uses obscurantism to shield his own imbecility. Now, suppose I tell you that, if only you place this passage in its proper context, it will make sense, and not only that, but that you will see that it expresses something deeply true and important to human existence. Suppose you ask me, Well, what do you mean by “its proper context”? And suppose I tell you, Why, the whole of the Logic, and while you are at it, you might as well read the Phenomenology of Spirit, as well as Hegel’s Encyclopedia and his Philosophy of

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History, to say nothing of Kant’s Critical philosophy, its German idealist reception, and the German rationalist tradition too. You see the scale of the problem that Hegel’s expositors are facing. They are asking a lot of their audience. Too much, if truth be told. The problem is not simply one of language, or even of the historical distance separating contemporary readers from the nineteenth-century philosophical climate. Germans struggle with Hegel,3 and Hegel’s contemporaries did too.4 No, the problem is one built into the very nature of Hegel’s systematic philosophy as a presuppositionless science. If you embark on the road that begins with the concept of “Being, pure Being” (WL GW 11:43), you will arrive, undoubtedly, at the wondrous and strange declarations of the “Doctrine of Essence.” You will grasp that reality is a dynamic system of finite particulars whose very natures are constituted by the tensions of maintenance and collapse, whose very being is shot through with struggle and opposition. And yet, having arrived at these truths, you will realize you are in the same situation, vis-à-vis non-Hegelians, as any who take the time to study Hegel: the truth you know, you cannot describe, and what you do describe sounds like folly. What, then, do you do? How do you connect with new audiences, who are increasingly removed from the idiom and intellectual climate of nineteenthcentury German idealists? First, you meet them where they are, in terms that pertain to how they live—and you make that very way of living your theme. Truth, after all, as Kierkegaard was fond of saying, exists in the relation to the knower.5 In existential matters, one’s way of life shows up in one’s way of thought, and which philosophy one accepts or rejects often reflects one’s own way of being in the world. I have yet to meet a student from a sheltered, affluent background who is willing to act on Singer’s precepts, and I have yet to meet an academic philosopher who is willing to accede to Hegel’s holism. These two findings have more to do with one another, and with the persons themselves, in their embodied social existences, than we are perhaps willing to admit. In terms of teaching Hegel, meeting audiences where they are means drawing upon examples from common life that bear out Hegel’s theses. I hope to let readers experience for themselves the truth of Hegel’s philosophy, to help them feel it and not just think it. One does not have to be a Hegelian to grasp Hegel’s deepest insights. If your head is turned the right way, and your guide points and tells you, “Now, look there! Up in the cherry tree, third branch to the right. There is the Cedar Waxwing,” then you will see the bird even if you are no birder. Likewise, my hope is that if I say, “Now go for a run, and come back when you are exhausted,” that you will be able to experience the concepts of identity, difference, opposition, contradiction, freedom, and holism that are at issue in my discussion of the “Doctrine of Essence”—even if you are no Hegelian. It is not enough, however, to call upon experience to vindicate Hegel, any more than it suffices for Hegel to rely on his Remarks (Anmerkungen) and students’ Additions (Zusätze) to make good on the claims of both the Science of Logic and Encyclopedia Logic. The logical argument that is at the core of their examples must be given as well. But how to do that? We saw in the sample passage above that the language of the Logic is nigh intractable for those new to Hegel, and it

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really will not do to tell readers to devote a couple years of their lives poring over the requisite reading lists in order to get a foothold. Instead, I propose giving them a foothold by directing their attention to an observation that Hegel makes in the Encyclopedia Logic about the comportment of a free man: We may note in passing how important it is for any man to meet everything that meets him with the spirit of the old proverb, in which it states: each is the smith of his own fortune. In this lies that man in general has only himself to enjoy. The other way would be to lay the blame of whatever we experience upon other men, upon unfavorable circumstances, and the like. And this is a fresh example of the language of unfreedom, and at the same time the spring of discontent. If man saw [anerkannt], on the contrary, that whatever happens to him is only the outcome [die Evolution] of himself, and that he only bears his own guilt, he would stand free, and in everything that came upon him would have the consciousness that he suffered no wrong. (Enc. §147Z/MM 8:292/Enc. 1W, 210)

What insights and what strength of spirit are necessary for us to recognize that whatever befalls us is an “outcome” or “evolution” of ourselves? How might we avoid thinking, as most of us generally do, that what happens to us, happens from without, as a matter of unhappy circumstance? And how might that truth set us free? The answer to these questions, I claim, is given in Hegel’s conception of personal identity as a dynamic, expressive relation between self and world, which can be briefly summarized as follows: I am the world, and the world is me. I am the world in the sense that I am who I am only in relation to the world, to such an extent my very identity includes this relation to the world in every aspect of who I am: there is no “remainder” to myself, which can be abstracted from the rest, and in which my true self resides. So too, the world is me. This reciprocity between self and world underlies Hegel’s intonation that philosophy seek the “inner unity of everything that is” (Enc. §118Z/MM 8:243) and it is the existential implication of his doctrine of identity in difference. By reflecting on the concepts at work in Hegel’s conception of the free man, I mean to answer these questions, and to use these answers to shed light on some of the most difficult but essential concepts in Hegel’s Logic: the concepts of identity, difference, diversity, opposition, and contingency. These concepts are central to Hegel’s notion of freedom as “being at home with oneself in the other” and to his holism that undergirds freedom so conceived. Having provided the reader with the conceptual apparatus necessary to appreciate Hegel’s model of free existence, I conclude with a real-life exercise—longdistance running—in order to enable readers to experience for themselves how Hegel’s concepts are at work in real life.

2 A Tale of Two Stories Let us take stock of where we are: an assurance that, if we begin with one exemplary passage in the Encyclopedia, the knotted problems of Hegel’s Logic will unravel before us. Since I will not assume your familiarity with this corner of

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Hegel’s system, or indeed any familiarity with Hegel at all, let us start with the material we have. Here is a tale of two men: one free, the other unfree. The one sees whatever befalls him as an evolution of himself, whereas the other lays the blame on other men and circumstance. We might begin by asking: Who is right? The tale of the free man has a certain romantic, stoical appeal to it: “Do not demand that things happen as you wish, but wish that they happen as they do happen, and you will go on well” (Epictetus 2009, §8). Yet, once that warm haze has dispersed, we might start thinking of any number of awful things that happen to people and shake our heads: surely, this idea of seeing ourselves in such peaceful unity with the world is but a happy delusion. The “unfree” person sees things more clearly, even if his vision is not a pretty one. We can give a fuller presentation of this skeptical worry by adding to our Tale of Two Men another story, this one from Hegel’s 1817/18 Philosophy of Right (Die Mitschriften Wannemann [Heidelberg 1817–18] und Homeyer [Berlin 1818–19]): A woman who was traveling with her husband and children was surrounded by wolves; confronted with the danger that all would be lost, she threw one child to the wolves, thereby saving herself, her husband, and the other children. One cannot say that she did wrong; but never again was she at peace. (RPh HPR 102)

If there is one thing that is true, it is this: it would be impossible for any mother to think of her child being eaten by wolves as the “outcome” of herself. This wolf-ate-the-baby story would seem to belie Hegel’s claim in the Encyclopedia that a free man can maintain his “harmony of soul” and “peace of mind” in any “unwanted matter” (das Mißliebige) (Enc. §147Z/MM 8:292). No, we want to tell him, sometimes things happen that we simply cannot cope with. There are cases where we just cannot find any reconciliation, much less identification, between our circumstances and ourselves. Not all of us are as lucky as the free man. We might be thus tempted to dismiss Hegel’s tale of the free man as a mere flight of fancy, a pedagogical flourish, were it not for the fact that his Logic entails it and that it is not an isolated expression of Hegel’s belief that equanimity follows from regarding the world as a free person does.6 For Hegel, at any rate, the outlook of the free man is no illusion. That is enough to give anyone reason for pause. You might well think, if the Logic entails the free man’s perspective, then so much the worse for the Logic—I was right not to waste my time reading this book after all.

3 “Freedom Is Not Free” However, Hegel himself acknowledges that there are genuine cases of breakdown: “never again was she at peace.” The mother’s inconsolable grief is no mistake. She is right to feel the way she does. And were that tragedy to befall our free man? How might he bear up? I would wager that it would be too much for him as well. He would suffer a breakdown, but precisely for the reasons that Hegel

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would provide: were he a father, there would be no conception of himself he could imagine that could be reconciled with such a horrific loss of his beloved child. So we know this much: Hegel is well aware that there are irreconcilable tragedies, yet he also adheres to this notion of the free individual—and not just as an esoteric philosophical ideal, but as an old folk proverb: “each is the smith of his own fortune.” Our initial question of “Who is right?” between the free man and the unfree man now seems misplaced. Perhaps we would do better by thinking about the notion of freedom differently, by considering it as more of an achievement than a fact: some people manage to live freely, and others, sadly, do not. Before we were asking about whether there was some state of affairs that decided the truth and falsity of the free and the unfree person’s beliefs. One of them, it seemed, was missing some fact of the situation: the unfree person blamed circumstance and others, whereas the free person blamed nothing and no one, and the free person was right to look at things this way. The wolf-ate-the-baby story, however, called into question whether the free person would always be right to look at any circumstance whatsoever as an “outcome of himself”—and it seemed that he would not be. Now, the takeaway lesson here, I think, is not so much that the free person would be wrong to regard this tragedy with perfect equanimity, but rather that he could no longer be a free person in such a circumstance. Indeed, we might well think, with Hegel, that he would never again be at peace. What is this connection between inner peace and freedom? To answer that, we need to know what freedom is, and how we might obtain it—or lose it. The third volume of Hegel’s Encyclopedia, The Philosophy of Spirit, provides an excellent starting point. There, Hegel describes freedom as a kind of perspective on oneself, a self-relation that gives one an independence from other things—he calls it the self’s relating of itself to itself, Sichaufsichselbstbeziehen (Enc. §382Z/MM 10:26). One gains this independence not by severing one’s connection with external things—walling oneself off from their interference, as it were—but by coming to see that those things are not other than, or foreign to, oneself, but that they represent a continuation of oneself. When looked at in this way, the things that are not ourselves can be regarded not as foreign to us, or as potential threats to our independence,7 but as being a part of ourselves. Here is Hegel: Freedom of spirit is not, however, simply an independence from the other achieved [errungene] outside of the other, but rather one achieved in the other, — it does not come through a flight from the other, but rather through its overcoming to actuality. (Enc. §382Z/MM 10:27)

In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel notes that a familiar experience of this kind of freedom of “being with oneself in the other” can be found in relationships of “friendship and love”: Here one is not one-sided in himself, but rather one limits himself gladly in connection [Beziehung] to the other, knows himself however in this limitation as himself. (HPR §7Z/ MM 7:57)8

We do not feel constrained by our relationships with our friends and loved ones; on the contrary, we actually feel most ourselves in their company—hence it is

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perfectly natural to say that they are a part of our lives, that they make us who we are.9 Hegel’s bold idea of freedom, then, is to extend this notion of finding ourselves in others beyond our circle of friends and loved ones to include not only other people, but literally anything we might encounter in this life: “the other [das Andere]” at large. The free person is the one who is able to “achieve” this feat, and only on the condition of achieving it does he realize Hegel’s ideal of spirit, which all persons10 are called to be: And this relation to the other is not only possible for spirit, but necessary, because through the other and the sublation of the same does it [spirit] come to be what it should be according to its concept, namely the ideality of the external, the idea which returns back into itself out of the other, or, more abstractly expressed, the self-differentiating and in its difference universal existing in and for itself. (Enc. §382Z/MM 10:26)

The sine qua non of freedom, as Hegel conceives it, is thus the ability to overcome (or “sublate”) the other’s difference from ourselves through appropriation, where appropriation takes the form of forging an identity between ourselves and what we are not: earth that must be cultivated to sustain us, elements that must be contended with if we are to survive, communities in which we have our dwelling, and hardships that must be surmounted if we are to carry on. Forging a continuity between oneself and what is not oneself, so that the other becomes, in a very real sense, part of one’s self—one’s very “identity,” to use Hegel’s term—is a tall order, to say the least. What if we are not up to the task? Then, according to Hegel, we lose our freedom. We suffer and we die. In the same passage of the Encyclopedia where Hegel lays out his conception of true freedom, he makes it plain that freedom must be won through painful struggle: The other, the negative, the contradiction, the diremption thus belongs to the nature of spirit. In this diremption lies the possibility of pain. Pain thus has not come to spirit from without, as one imagines, when one throws out the question, in which way did pain come into the world …. In this its highest diremption … in this fullest contradiction with itself, does spirit thereby contrarily remain identical with itself and thereby free. (Enc. §382Z/ MM 10:26)

Freedom is not for the fainthearted. Only someone with true grit can manage to reconcile the contradiction of finding herself in what is not herself. Nor is there any guarantee that this reconciliation between self and other, once achieved, will remain in perpetuity. Because “actual freedom,” in Hegel’s understanding, is not just some “immediate” property of spirit, “but rather something to be brought about through its activity” (Enc. §382Z/MM 10:26), it follows that when this activity ceases, so too does that spirit’s freedom. What might cause this activity to cease? In Hegel’s view, the answer is nothing else than the loss of “the force to preserve oneself in contradiction, and consequently in pain” (Enc. §382Z/MM 10:26). Some heartaches are too great to bear, some losses too deep to be overcome, because it is impossible for us to “be at home with oneself in the other” if the other rages against everything we are. In such moments, we can no longer be the people we once were—like the grieving mother, we will never again be at peace.

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The mother’s trauma here, I think, is readily understandable. Still, I suspect that many readers who are new to Hegel may be wondering about some of the jargon that has crept in during the course of this discussion. Heartache, loss, pain—yes, those are plain enough. But “preserving oneself in contradiction” and “remaining identical with itself”? Why think of freedom in those terms? And what do they even mean?

4 Kill, Eat, Be Free Here we come to the conceptual core of the “Doctrine of Essence,” which is the context of Hegel’s comparison between the free and the unfree man. To gain further insight into that comparison, and to further appreciate Hegel’s metaphysical holism that underlies his conception of freedom as being oneself in the other, we need to discuss the logical concepts that are at work therein. Only then can we come to understand Hegel’s holism, and, hopefully, recognize its truth. How, though, to proceed? Because we are working in the midst of Hegel’s system of logic, we could of course begin at the beginning, with the concept of Being, and work our way through all the deductions that lead up to the notions of identity, difference, and contradiction that have arisen in the course of Hegel’s discussion of freedom. Yet, we do not have the time for that. Fortunately, we do not need to take this arduous route. We can make do with what we already have on hand. Let us take this notion of the free person as someone who is able to regard what happens to him as an outcome of himself. He is able to do this because it is recognized that there is a deep continuity between himself and his situation, whatever it may be—well, almost whatever. But skipping this business about heartache and breakdown for a moment, let us dwell on this notion of continuity. It is not as if the free person just finds it there ready-made. Rather, like an artist, the free person has a special talent for seeing everyday things differently than the rest of us. He knows how to make them his own. But how does he pull this off? Hegel has been clear—well, as clear as he knows how—that this is not a mere flight of fantasy. The free person recognizes a deep truth about his situation: that he is at one with the other, that he is the world. This is metaphysical fact. Supposing that is so, we might then approach the free person’s appropriation of his environment from both the subject- and the object-side of the relation, and ask, “What must the object be like, such that it is appropriable by the free person, and what must the free person be like, such that he can appropriate it?” To set up my answer to that question, I am going to make an assumption about you. I think it is safe to say that, sometime in the past few days, you had something to eat and something to drink. Maybe you are eating and drinking right now. And I also think it is a fair bet that you are breathing, and that you just breathed again. Of course, you could think about your food and drink and the air you are breathing and you yourself as a mere congeries.11 You could think that, but you would be wrong. Because the truth of the matter is that you cannot do without any

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of these things. You “cannot be without air” and you are “always in struggle with it in breathing” (VLog 143), and in your hunger and thirst, you encounter food and drink not as mere objects but as consumables—as things to be literally ingested by and integrated into you (VLog 143). The cup of coffee and slice of toast you had for breakfast are now part of your body, and, unless you are the kind of person who refuses to recognize your body as part of yourself, which I will assume you are not, then they are in a real way part of who you are. They help make up your identity. But how is that relationship between you, on the one hand, and the air and your breakfast, on the other, possible? There are several levels at which we might answer that question, but since our business here is the Logic, let us skip down from the levels of atmospheric science, biology, and physiology and see if we can answer that question in the most fundamental way. Well, certainly the relationship is one between consumer (you) and consumed (air, food, drink). Even deeper than that, we might say, is the relationship between condition and conditioned. The consumer exists on the condition of the consumed, and the consumed conditions the consumer as one dependent on it—the consumer is the conditioned. Moreover, if you think about your food, it is not a stretch to say that, were it not for your eating choices, the source of your food would still exist—certainly vegans like to use that observation as a stick with which to beat omnivores. The pig goes on to wallow another day on the condition that you do not eat it. Both you and the pig are thus “in essential relation to one another,” and each of you only exists insofar as you “exclude the other from [your]self and thereby relate [your]self to the other” (Enc. §119Z1/MM 8:246). Condition and conditioned thus stand in reciprocity to one another. As it turns out, though, we can delve even deeper into the ground of the possibility of this relationship between condition and conditioned.12 How does something first of all come to be a condition? That is, how can something “be the possibility of an other” (Enc. §146Z/MM 8:287) in the first place? Again, let us not get too far out of our depth, but rather return to familiar matters. The wheat that went into your toast—is it still living? Of course not. It died during the harvest. How did it die? The answer to that question depends on the level at which you are asking. Here, in the Logic, we are going to ask the question in a very general metaphysical sense: Why does anything, as a being, cease to be? For Hegel, the answer is this: because it is self-contradictory. Hegel formulates this idea in a remark to the concept of contradiction in the “Doctrine of Essence,” where he describes contradiction as both the root of life and death: Similarly, internal self-movement proper, instinctive urge [Trieb] in general … is nothing else but the fact that something is, in one and the same respect, self-contained and deficient, the negative of itself. Abstract self-identity is not as yet a livingness, but the positive, being in its own self a negativity, goes outside itself and undergoes alteration [setzt sich in Veränderung]. Something is therefore alive only in so far as it contains contradiction within it, and moreover is this power to hold and endure the contradiction within it. But if an existent in its positive determination is a the same time incapable of reaching beyond its negative determination and holding the one firmly in the other, is incapable of

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containing a contradiction within it, then it is not the living unity itself, not ground, but in the contradiction falls to the ground [zugrunde geht]. (WL GW 11:287/HSL 440)

This is bound to be a dizzying passage for those new to Hegel, so let us begin with something in it that we all can relate to: motion. What is motion? A change in place, position, or state. What is a change? An alteration from something to something else, a shift from being this to not being this—to being different: being in this location, and then in another location; being in one state, and then being in a different state. Motion thus involves an alteration between being and nonbeing, identity and difference. Now, if we have only two states or determinations, A and −A, we do not have motion. Motion is about the process or fluidity of change: something moves or changes only insofar as it is at once A and −A, this and not this, identity and difference. There is, then, something paradoxical about motion, as the Eleatics were keen to point out. For Hegel, however, the conclusion to draw from that paradox is not that “there is no motion, but on the contrary, that motion is existent contradiction itself” (WL GW 11:287/HSL 440).13 Now, motion is all around us, but not everything that moves is alive. It is true, as Heraclitus remarked, that you cannot step into the same river twice, but rivers are hardly alive. No, life requires “internal self-movement”—to be alive, something must “place itself in alteration”—setzt sich in Veränderung, as Hegel writes (but which Miller’s translation above obscures). Life is the process of maintaining self-identity, or homeostasis, through change, through difference: it is being what one is through another. Let us go back to your daily habit of eating, drinking, and breathing. You are not a piece of toast, a cup of coffee, or the air you breathe. Yet you could not be what you are—you could not live—without them.14 This is what Hegel means when he says in his Lectures on Logic that man “cannot be without placing the same [i.e., food] identical with himself” (VLog 143). In breathing and ingesting, we living organisms manage to make something other than ourselves part of ourselves—we use the encounter with the other in order to maintain what we are. Thus, Hegel remarks in the Encyclopedia Logic, “The living thing thus associates only with itself in the other” (Enc. §219Z/MM 8:376). By contrast, inorganic matter cannot maintain itself through its encounter with its other, but rather loses itself. Hegel is fond of drawing examples from chemistry: acids and bases resolve themselves upon contact with their opposites (Enc. §§119Z, 219Z/ MM 8:245–247, 375–376), and should the atomic weight of, say, gold, change, it would no longer be gold (Enc. §382Z/MM 10:26). However, contradiction, the very force of life, is also the force of death. When an organism is no longer capable of appropriating the other in itself by resolving the contradiction of forging its identity through difference (Enc. §337Z/MM 9:338), it dies. Hegel observes in the Philosophy of Nature that living things are always in danger of sickness and death—their bodies are always on the cusp of being overtaken by chemical forces of decay and putrefaction15—because the inability to cope with one’s other is always lurking around the corner. When you lose the ability to breathe, you die; when your body begins rejecting food and water, you die; when you are shot and your body cannot handle the physical trauma, you

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die. It is a matter of not having the “right stuff” to deal with the situation. We begin to see, then, what Hegel meant earlier when he claimed, “Pain thus has not come to spirit from without, as one imagines” (Enc. §382Z/MM 10:26). On the contrary, pain issues from within us. Pain is the feeling of one’s own failure—the failure to resolve the contradiction of bearing alterity within one’s self.16 We thus come to understand more deeply the grief of the mother who lost her baby to the wolves. Something has happened to her that she cannot deal with. Unlike the free person, she cannot find peace because she cannot resolve the contradiction of the loss of her child with any conception of herself as a mother: she had a duty to protect this, her beloved baby, and she threw it to the wolves. How could she live with herself after that? But how can we also not see that the mother’s pain issues from her and her alone? We read about the event, and we are disturbed—or, maybe, as when we see the latest atrocities in Syria, we simply say, “Oh, that’s terrible,” and turn our attention elsewhere. She is, however, devastated. And it is her conception of herself as a mother, and her failure to reconcile that with the contradiction of her failure as a mother, that makes the event so awful.17 And yet, there can be salvation from despair—in death, there is life, just as in life, there is death. Let us return to the example of our daily bread. The wheat that went into it is no longer alive: it died during the harvest. Earlier, we asked, “How did it die?” And now we have our answer: it died on its own account. It died because it could not withstand a contradiction to its nature. As an organism, the wheat-plant’s life depended on its positive abilities to photosynthesize, to take in water and nutrients from the soil, and its negative abilities to defend itself against pathogens and herbivory.18 But these abilities only reach so far: the wheat does not have any natural defenses against a combine harvester. There is no way that it can withstand being cut down. And thus we see the applicability of Hegel’s abstract account of death: But if an existent in its positive determination is a the same time incapable of reaching beyond its negative determination and holding the one firmly in the other, is incapable of containing a contradiction within it, then it is not the living unity itself, not ground, but in the contradiction falls to the ground. (WL GW 11:287/HSL 440)

The assault of alterity, the “negative determination”—in this case, the cutting blades of the combine—is simply too great. The wheat can no longer maintain itself against its other; it can no longer withstand its own contradiction. Just as in the case of the mother’s pain, the wheat’s death comes not from without, but from within: “It is a finite actuality with an inherent flaw, and its vocation is to be consumed” (Enc. §146Z/MM 8:287).19 But we are, ourselves, the consumers. It is because wheat is the kind of thing that perishes through self-contradiction that we are able to eat it. And how fortunate that is for us. Because wheat can die, we can live: it becomes, along with the air we breathe and the coffee we drink, one of our conditions (cf. Enc. §147/MM 8:288). I find this a comforting thought, and it is one that leads us right back to the story about the free man with which we began. The bread you eat gives you the

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energy you need to do the things you do each day, the activities that go into making you, you. But you would not have that bread were it not for the wheat, were it not for the farmer, were it not for the sun, the rain, the soil. Each of these, in turn, is related to a host of other things, and is what it is, in relation to those things. We find ourselves not just drawn into this nexus of relations, but drawing ourselves out of them, sustaining and nurturing ourselves in and through and by them. We cannot be what we are independent of the world-system in which we live, and what happens to the world happens to us because there is no firm divide between the world and ourselves, any more than there is between self and other. Rather, if each self-defines itself through its other, then we cannot think of external events as external to us. We come to see what happens as the free man sees them: as an outcome of ourselves. Our ability to recognize of our unity with the world-all is our distinction. The wheat, in itself, partakes of this unity, but it does not know it. We can know this, and in our more exalted moments, we do. We can make that vision our guiding light, our solace. Unlike any other living thing, we humans can bring to consciousness the principle of freedom—that “all are free”20 who are at home with themselves in the other. This capacity for freedom is what gives man his infinite adaptability. It is an adaptability borne not out of wishful thinking or optimism, but out of recognition of our place in the world. Such an outlook as is freedom is a natural outgrowth of the principle of life, of maintaining oneself in what is different—but to man, and man alone, belongs freedom, because out of all creation, he has realized this potential about existence.21

5 An Exercise in Idealism I want you to stop what you are doing now, and go for a run. A long run. Three or four hours should do the job, but ten or twenty hours on your feet would be better. Run until you stop thinking about yourself, until you stop thinking about what you have going on today, and just run. Why running? Because I want you to experience what I am talking about—and not just ruminate about your breakfast. *** Welcome back. Obviously, I cannot say how the run was for you, but I hope it was a good one. The kind of run that reminds you who you are by letting you, no, making you, just be, out there in the world. To those of you who did not lace up your shoes several hours ago, this is going to sound like hippie nonsense. Well, so much the worse for you. There are things that cannot be explained but which must be lived to be known, and what it is like to run for a very long time is one of them. You can either take my word for it, or you can get out there and go see for yourself. ***

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When you are running, several things happen that will allow you to live like a free person. One of them is that your sense of identity changes. Who you are after you have been out for fifty or one hundred miles is not the same as who you were before you began. Your sense of self, your sense of where you begin and the world ends, changes. In certain moments, the separation between yourself and your environment breaks down completely—there is simply a continuum between your thought and body, your body and its needs, and the surroundings that meet or frustrate those needs. You are no longer some disembodied, reflecting Cartesian ego, but rather I-this-runner-in-pain-who-needs-to-eat-that-peanut-butter-sandwichor-I-will-expire-on-this-pile-of-rocks-but-first-I-must-catch-my-breath-or-I-willsurely-die. Now, it just so happens that Hegel said something along these lines in his Lectures on Logic, which I mentioned above: Man is different from [verschieden von] tree, air, but air is also [an] opposed, yes it is even his other, according to a side of his living nature. He cannot be without air and is always in struggle with it in breathing. This is [the] process of living things generally. In hunger man is directed at his other, food is not only other generally, but rather his opposite, he cannot be without placing the same identical with himself. (VLog 143:268–275)

I somewhat doubt that Hegel ran ultramarathons. However, rumor has it that in his younger days he enjoyed strolls out to the Wurmlinger Kapelle from the Tübinger Stift with his pals Schelling and Hölderlin, and perhaps that is all the exercise he needed to work up a hearty appetite. Still, the point holds: when you are active, you realize that who you are includes what you are not, and not in some superficial kind of way (where of course beingthis entails being not-that), but in a deep, embodied sense of your existence in the world. Breathing in, catching your breath, you take in the air of a place. Sometimes it is dusty and hot, sometimes clean and cool; you fill yourself with it, one lungful at a time, sometimes deeply, sometimes shallowly, in, out, in, out, and become attuned to this simple rhythm and exchange of yourself and your surroundings in this act of respiration without which you would be nothing. That act and the continuous ongoing movement, now over rock, now over tree root, up and down, and always onward, outward, fills and consumes you. Yes, you are but one lone runner on the prairie, but you are more than that—you are a-body-in-motion-on-theprairie, taking in the prairie, one footfall at a time. You are the prairie. And this brings us to another thing that “happens to” you when you run that helps you live like a free person. You achieve the “harmony of soul and peace of mind” (Enc. §147Z/MM 8:292) that comes with identifying yourself with a place. When you have come to appreciate that your physical environment makes you who you are, that you stand in a deep unity with your surroundings and are part of the “process of living things generally,” then what happens to you on the trail can be taken in stride. Every happenstance becomes an opportunity for selfexpression, when correctly appreciated. Have you stumbled? Then pick yourself up. Have you been unable to keep anything down for hours? Now you can show true grit. Has a bee flown into your mouth? Well, how funny is that? These events

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are contingent, but as contingent, they become conditions for you to manifest yourself, to show the kind of person you are.22 There is no guarantee, of course, that the good times will continue to roll. You may not always live like a free person—in fact, we can be quite sure of that. You have it built into the logic of your existence, as the kind of being who thrives on the very thing that will be its undoing: contradiction. One day, perhaps, you will return to the prairie where you ran, and discover that a housing development has taken its place. To anyone else, perhaps, this would be matter of indifference, but to you who had identified with this place, it goes to your core. Why do we identify with a place? Why does it sadden us to see the old oak cut down, the prairie razed? Why, if not because we put a part of ourselves there, if not because that is where we belonged. Now, that place is gone, now, that part of ourselves is dead, and we mourn its passing. We are more than our bodies. We are the intimate and fragile natural places to which we belong.

Notes 1. Hegel refers to the “Doctrine of Essence” as “this (the most difficult) part of the logic” (Enc. §114). 2. To which Hegel also agrees: see WL GW 11:382/HSL 543. For discussion of what Hegel means by that, see Southgate (2014–2015, 14–22). 3. When I was a student in Tübingen, the philosophy department put up a placard in the Hegel section of the reading room that read, “Please do not throw Hegel out the window.” 4. Thus we read of Kierkegaard’s sardonic lament in the Introduction to the Concluding Unscientific Postscript, “And, alas! the famous man has it in his power to decide [the youth’s] fate; for if he does not understand him, the youth is rejected, and his one desire must suffer shipwreck. Hence he does not yet dare to confide in anyone else, so as to initiate him into his misfortune, his disgrace, the fact that he cannot understand the famous man” (Kierkegaard 1941, 17). 5. See Kierkegaard (1941, 173–186). 6. See, for instance, just a couple pages earlier in the same Zusatz that frames our story of the free man. 7. Cf. Philosophie der Geschichte (MM 12:30): “Just this is freedom, for when I am dependent, I thus relate myself to an other that I am not; I can not be without an external; I am free, when I am with myself.” 8. For a lucid discussion of this conception of freedom in the Philosophy of Right, see Neuhouser (2000, esp. 18–20). 9. See Barba-Kay (2016) for an excellent presentation of the development of Hegel’s views on love in his Jena writings. 10. See Hegel’s Philosophie der Geschichte (MM 12:31). 11. To borrow a line from Hegel, “One thus says: I am a man, and around me is air, water, animals and other things in general. Everything there falls asunder” (Enc. §119Z1/MM 8:246). 12. Which should come as no surprise, since we are reverse-engineering the results of the Logic. 13. For a penetrating discussion of Hegel’s concept of motion as an “existent contradiction,” see Wolff (1981). 14. OK, fine—yes, you could live without toast, and some people, I’m told, live without coffee, but you get my point: you need food and drink to survive.

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15. See Enc. §337Z/MM 338–339, and also ibid., §219Z/MM 375–376 (from the Encyclopedia Logic). 16. This is why a protracted illness affects us so deeply: we used to be able to do things that we can no longer do—we once were fit and active, and now we are bedridden; we used to be independent, and now we must call for help for nearly everything. In a proto-existentialist moment, Hegel observes in the Encyclopedia Logic that “what the human does, he is” (Enc. §140Z/MM 8:277). In connection to sickness, we can see just how right he is: sickness is devastating because it changes who we are by changing what we can do. 17. One thus sees the Stoic resonance of Hegel’s conception of the free person: “Men are disturbed, not by things, but by the principles and notions which they form concerning things” (Epictetus 2009, §5). 18. Thus, for Hegel, the characteristics of things are not only marks by which we can tell them apart—they are also, and in the first place, that whereby they contradistinguish themselves from their environments: “Not only we differentiate the animal through its claws, rather it differentiates itself essentially thereby, defends itself, preserves itself” (MM 20:241). For further discussion of this passage and its bearing on Hegel’s critique of Leibniz’s Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles, see Southgate (2014). 19. For a much more extensive account of the context of this passage in Hegel’s system, see Southgate (2014–2015). 20. See Lectures on the Philosophy of History (MM 12:31). 21. For a step-by-step progression of the scala natura in Hegel’s estimation, see Enc. §337Z/ MM 9:340–342. 22. See Yeomans (2012) for a brilliant discussion of the relationship between identity and self-expression.

Bibliography Barba-Kay, Antón. 2016. “Why Recognition Is a Struggle: Love and Strife in Hegel’s Early Jena Writings.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 54 (2): 307–332. Epictetus. 2009. The Enchiridion. Translated by Elizabeth Carter. http://classics.mit.edu/ Epictetus/epicench.html. Kierkegaard, Søren. 1941. Concluding Unscientific Postscript. Translated by David F. Swenson and Walter Lowrie. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Neuhouser, Frederick. 2000. Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory: Actualizing Freedom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Singer, Peter. 2014. “Famine, Affluence, and Morality.” In Ethics in Practice: An Anthology, edited by Hugh LaFolette, 4th ed. Malden: Wiley Blackwell. Southgate, Henry. 2014. “Hegel and the Identity of Indiscernibles.” Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 96 (1): 71–103. Southgate, Henry. 2014–2015. “The Paradox of Irrationalism: The Logical Foundation of Hegel’s Philosophy of the Absurd.” The Owl of Minerva 46 (1–2): 1–42. Wolff, Michael. 1981. Der Begriff des Widerspruchs: Eine Studie zur Dialektik Kants und Hegels. Königstein: Anton Hain. Yeomans, Christopher. 2012. Freedom and Reflection: Hegel and the Logic of Agency. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Part IV

Philosophy of Nature

Chapter 11

Levels of Reality or Development? Hegel’s Realphilosophie and Philosophy of the Sciences Michael Wolff

The term “Realphilosophie” (philosophia realis: philosophy of the real) sounds to us old fashioned and quaint.1 It was introduced to designate that part of Hegel’s philosophy devoted to existing things, which we or the sciences believe to exist, not merely through reflection, but through disciplined inquiries or experience.2 Why has this term become foreign to us? Perhaps because such extant things have become foreign to us? Hardly. For still today there is philosophy devoted to extant things, especially to those things examined by the sciences, more or less in the form we call “philosophy of science.” Hegel’s Realphilosophie is, centrally, nothing other than a philosophy of the sciences, if not of the kind whose first task—as in contemporary “general theory of science”—concerns general questions of method, but instead concerns the appropriate and comprehensive understanding of specific things and issues which are the objects of the individual sciences. Hegel’s Realphilosophie thus examines themes which today are the concern of the several philosophies of specific or “special” sciences, such as “philosophy of mathematics,” “philosophy of physics,” “philosophy of biology” or also “philosophy of language,” or even “philosophy of the infinite,” etc. These philosophies of special sciences could well be called “Realphilosophien,” though these would rather be plural: “philosophies of the real,” each, that is, pertaining to one of indefinitely many areas of research, rather than one unified account of the totality of the sciences. Today, such a comprehensive Realphilosophie is nowhere in sight; this may be why the term “Realphilosophie” in the singular has fallen into disuse. Today Realphilosophie is thus as divided into distinct domains, as are the sciences themselves, to which it refers. Even the division of these domains, which one might regard as a comprehensive philosophical task, is today almost universally only an administrative point, addressed ad hoc when needed. Thus the division into natural and human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften), which may well (also) trace back to Hegel’s division of Realphilosophie into the philosophy of

M. Wolff (*)  Department of Philosophy, University of Bielefeld, Bielefeld, Germany e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 M. F. Bykova and K. R. Westphal (eds.), The Palgrave Hegel Handbook, Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26597-7_11

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nature and the philosophy of spirit (des Geistes),3 is held to be appropriate, if one may wish, e.g., to distinguish between more and less expensive forms of research, although in principle this division is an historical relic, as often said, though no one really knows why it is obsolete. Like administrative divisions, so too do philosophical positions regarding scientific issues typically arise ad hoc. They arise as reactions to specific theoretical problems, most of which are raised by specialists in the relevant discipline(s), who feel them to be somehow philosophically significant. Hence it is no more than a phenomenon of the division of labor, so that, rather than scientists themselves, professional philosophers continue discussing these questions and proposing to answer them. This they do in hopes that their proposals may re-enter the domain of interest to the relevant special science(s). This kind of Realphilosophie is related to science like an appendix or footnote to a specialist book containing trans-disciplinary observations. Such remarks typically contain neither an internally organized systematic examination, nor do they relate systematically to neighboring scientific domains. The Owl of Minerva has borne a multitude of descendants, each of which keeps within its own hunting preserve. It would not be appropriate merely to regret this philosophical circumstance, whether because philosophy must altogether renounce engagement with realia, or if it ignores the findings of the special sciences, must thus prove itself incompetent to address those realia, namely actual empirical phenomena or mathematical structures. Nevertheless one may regret that, due to this circumstance and to the increasing self-sufficiency and specialization of the sciences, it is increasingly unclear where to identify any specifically philosophical competence in scientific matters, if indeed there is any such competence: What exactly makes a question which arises within mathematics, physics, law, etc. specifically a philosophical question, a question of Realphilosophie? Posed so generally, the problem easily appears once again to belong to Realphilosophie in the singular. How can one seek to resolve this problem without first having clearly in mind a general, comprehensive structure of the objects of the special sciences? To address this problem, must one not find something common to them all? However this question may be answered, it appears that fundamentally the processes and progress of scientific inquiry tends either to efface Realphilosophie altogether, or to require that Realiphilosophien in the plural and Realphilosophie in the singular mutually support each other. If Realphilosophie in the singular has not long since become a chimera, one might pin on it the hope that its specific task is to provide a determinate, comprehensive set of relations amongst the special sciences, and perhaps even in the sense that Realphilosophie is to address a set of problems common to all special sciences. How can a Realphilosophie do any such thing? Undeniably, Hegel’s Realphilo­ sophie sought to satisfy exactly this expectation, insofar as Realphilosophie constitutes part of a “philosophical encyclopedia” which sets the special sciences into an orderly connection, not merely by recounting their contents, but instead by addressing a common kind of questions. In what consists this alleged type? How can this orderly connection Hegel purports to construct be positively described?

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Upon what fundamental idea is his Encyclopaedia based? How might this idea be justified? In view of these questions it appears at least to be sensible to examine Hegel’s Realphilosophie, not only in regard to his interesting positions on issues which remain today fundamental problems within special sciences, but regarding the prospect that in taking these positions Hegel adheres to a comprehensive, integral conception of Realphilosophie. Such investigation is interesting for three reasons. First, Hegel was of course the last, perhaps indeed even the first, of the great philosophers who, even if only in “outline,” actually executed a systematic Realphilosophie, and indeed, so as to provide through this systematic comprehension of special sciences a criterion for assessing their scope and success. Second, Hegel treats these topics in Realphilosophie almost always on the basis of first-hand, detailed knowledge of what one calls in mathematics or empirical sciences “the state of the art.” Therein lies the quite evident modernity of his Realphilosophie: Hegel uses the results of contemporaneous research as his point of departure and also as his final negative criterion of truth; he doesn’t substitute for them mere armchair inspirations. Third, Hegel’s Realphilosophie is not only distinguished by its encyclopedic scope, but also by its encyclopedic form. This form consists in securing the domains of inquiry of the special sciences, rather than reducing them to one another: the “matter” of Mechanics is not reduced to geometrical extension; Physics is not reduced to Mechanics, and similarly Hegel is convinced that all of the other sciences, from geology to religious studies and historiography of philosophy, each have their specific, irreducible domain of inquiry. Hegel’s anti-reductionism exhibits his rejection of the mechanistic programme of modern philosophy, and also a modern, liberal conception of science, which does not ab initio limit the concept of science to mathematics and mathematical natural science, as for example Kant still thought appropriate, and so regarded contemporaneous chemistry as a mere “technical art” and envisaged a biologist as a “Newton of a blade of grass”; Kant believed he could reduce the “metaphysical first principles” of natural science to mechanics alone. What may appear most unmodern in Hegel’s non-reductionist conception of science is his thesis that there is need for, not only a kind of interdisciplinary research, but indeed an interdisciplinary philosophy, to properly coordinate and integrate the mutually irreducible domains of experience and of the special sciences. Hegel sought to sequence these domains according to a “speculative” system of stages, one which even Hegel’s scholars often suspect of being “speculative” only in the sense of unencumbered fancies imposed from out of the blue. Today the relations among the objects of empirical sciences are mostly presented in an entirely different manner, namely as a huge historical, self-organizing evolutionary process stretching from the Big Bang to the mental structures of homo sapiens sapiens, and from these to modern civilization. Our knowledge of this comprehensive developmental process is of course quite incomplete and gappy; it is regarded—surely rightly—as a task for empirical research, so far as possible, to fill these gaps. Hegel’s system of stages would thus be, not as such empirically refuted, but its previous speculative need could only be satisfied by entirely non-speculative means. Furthermore,

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it appears that Hegel’s attempt to arrange the stages of nature in a non-temporal developmental sequence might anticipate modern evolutionary ideas, though only in inadequate, distorted ways. In this regard philosophers such as Friedrich Engels or R. G. Collingwood have stressed the limits of Hegel’s Realphilosophie, that it neglects the historical dimension and the evolutionary character (the “development”) of nature, and so represents a step backwards from Kant’s (1755) Universal Natural History and Theory of the Heavens.4 This is indeed correct: Hegel reconstructs the sprouts of the scala naturae—the Great Chain of Being, or series of natural orders—not as a consequence of the natural-historical (chronological) development of matter, but instead as forms of expression of a system of categories which presents the order of nature as a system of levels or stages of reality.5 These are of course the key terms of my title: “stages of reality” and “development.” The manner in which I have here introduced these terms may immediately prompt the question, whether the views they designate—the concepts of “stages” or “development”—are mutually exclusive alternatives. Ultimately, I do not believe they are. (Indeed it appears to me that Hegel valued their compatibility.) The question of course is: If they are compatible, how are these apparent alternatives related to Hegel’s programme in his Realphilosophie? And what exactly is the relevant concept of “stages,” and whence does it derive? In view of these questions, the following divides into two parts. First I begin with a systematic sketch of the fundamental convictions underlying Hegel’s Realphilosophie, which afford a proper understanding of Hegel’s encyclopedic construction of these stages. Granting that Hegel’s use of the phrase “self-­ development” is subject to misunderstanding, the second part defends those fundamental convictions against objections.

1  I begin with the question why, according to Hegel’s view, scientific knowledge not only leaves room for Realphilosophie, but makes it necessary. Hegel answers, that the various sciences are indeed self-sufficient regarding their own theory construction; yet each scientific theory contains in its principles specific basic principles which are fundamental to the rest of the theory, because they inform us first, about the significance of the basic concepts of this theory, and second, about the existence of the objects within that theory’s domain. Hegel calls these basic principles “the beginnings of the special sciences” (Enc. §16). He contends that precisely these beginnings are the object of his philosophical Encylopedia. The term “beginnings” (Anfänge) translates the Greek term “archai.” Aristotle, too, holds that these archai of the special sciences belong to the object of philosophy. Likewise, Aristotle (Met. VI, 1) holds that these archai are principles which answer two kinds of question: first, what are the primary objects of any special science (put otherwise: how are these objects defined); and second, whether and to what extent do these objects exist? Above all, Aristotle has regard to mathematics.

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For example, the geometer first uses definitions, e.g., definitions of the point and the line, and then postulates in his basic principles that these objects—points and lines—exist. However, the geometer, qua geometer, is unable to demonstrate the existence of any point, nor can he specify in what sense it is significant to say that there is any one point; neither can he provide a proper technical definition of the point. For example, if Euclid (I, Df. 1) says, “a point is that which has no parts,” this definition may suffice to distinguish conceptually points from other geometrical objects. However, this definition provides no account of how, exactly, an object without parts must be constituted so as to be a point. Strictly speaking, Euclid provides merely an apparent definition. According to Aristotle, it is not even the task of geometry (nor likewise of any other science), first to define its own basic concepts, nor second to elucidate whether or in what sense the objects so classified exist. This is instead the task of philosophy. Hegel follows Aristotle. Hegel’s “real philosophy” (Realphilosophie, ‘philosophy of the real’) addresses in exactly Aristotle’s sense the principles of geometry and likewise the “beginnings” (archai) of the other special sciences: Philosophy first tells us, what are points, lines, surfaces, etc.; and secondly, whether, why or to what extent existence can be ascribed to these objects. Entirely in accord with this, Hegel likewise treats the principles of mechanics; thus he inquires, e.g. regarding the basic definitions of Newton’s Principia, first, what exactly is mass, and in precisely what does its inertia consist; and second, in this connection he elucidates in what sense there is anything such as the inertia or the mass of the objects of mechanics. The question of the constitution and existence of scientific objects is the lead question of Hegel’s Realphilosophie, also regarding those sciences which, unlike geometry and mechanics, are not developed in axiomatic form, so that it is far from obvious which of its principles are or ought to be characterized as basic principles or fundamental beginnings (archai). Thus, already within mechanics, Galileo’s square law of free-fall (distance ∝ time2) and Kepler’s three laws of planetary orbits are treated as basic assumptions of mechanics, namely, as definitions of (1) uniformly accelerated and of (2) absolute mechanical motion; and as regards the existence of such motions, i.e., of free fall and planetary orbits, Hegel ascribes to them specific, differentiated degrees or levels of reality; neither of them is assigned any “absolute reality.” Hegel undertakes similar examinations in connection with non-mechanical sciences. Here I do not propose to review the series of these sciences, from physical optics (the theory of the motion and material of light) through historiography of religion and philosophy, nor to detail how Hegel answers his key questions regarding the basic principles of each special science. Instead I pose the question, On what basis does Hegel support his view that philosophy can examine and identify the basic constitutive principles of each special science; that is to say, first, what exactly are their objects, and second, whether, why or to what extent these objects exist? I believe one can only understand Hegel’s procedure appropriately if one conceives it as a modification of Kant’s transcendental philosophy. Kant’s ­“revolution in how to think” (Denkungsart; CPR Bxi) consists, inter alia, in providing a new programme for founding the principles of the sciences, specifically

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of mathematics and the natural sciences (since according to Kant, these are the only genuine sciences, properly speaking). Prior to Kant, only empiricist or rationalist programmes for founding science were developed; it was presumed that the basic principles of any science could only be supported either by observations and sensory perception; or they could be derived from evident, universal principles, which themselves neither required nor admitted any proof. In contrast, Kant presumed that it is conceivable that the principles of mathematics and of the natural sciences contain principles which hold a priori, and though not analytically true, can be proven on the assumption that human experience is possible, by demonstrating of those principles that they are conditions of the possibility of experience. This fundamental thought provided Kant’s transcendental method for founding basic principles, which paved the Critical route between the Scylla of empiricism and the Charybdis of rationalism. In connection with Hegel it is worth noting here that Kant always stressed that propositions regarding existence can never be true a priori. Kant held that it follows from this, that propositions regarding existence can only be grounded ­empirically, never transcendentally. I shall henceforth call this Kantian consequence Kant’s “existence-empiricism.” Although ultimately in his Opus Postumum Kant expressly rescinded his existence-empiricism, in his published works he never distanced himself from this thesis (cf. Tuschling 1971, 126ff., 137ff., 151ff.; 1973, 187). Because the existence of objects is only known through experience, Kant believed he could assume that this existence is not an a priori (i.e., not a necessary and universal) condition of possible experience, and so could not be grounded transcendentally. When Kant discusses the conditions of the possibility of experience, he never considers the objective conditions of knowability, but only the subjective presuppositions, i.e., those conditions concerning the capacities required for experiential consciousness, namely, forms of intuition, concepts and (rational) ideas. Consequently, according to Kant there can be no transcendental knowledge of how objects, however they may be, can become objects of our experience. In addition, there are ideas of reason, but these ideas are nothing known; they are mere fictions: According to Kant, we nevertheless are advised to suppose that things exist, which unto themselves (an sich) are constituted in accord with these rational ideas, because without them systematic knowledge based upon experience would not be possible. However, these fictions can be proven neither empirically nor a priori. The supposed “transcendental thing” which corresponds to an idea is no more than a “schema” of a regulative principle, by which “reason, so far as it is able, expands the systematic unity of all experience” (CPR B710). The so-called “object in the idea” is thus merely a creature of thought (Gedankenwesen), which is “to be assumed as objective and hypostatic,” though only insofar as this assumption is merely an instrument by which to achieve systematic unity of the manifold of empirical cognitions as such. For example, the idea of a supreme intelligence is not a concept of any extant, given object, but only the rule by which to consider worldly things “as if they derived their existence from a supreme intelligence.” The theological idea commands so to regard everything that belongs to a possible

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experience, as if they were thoroughly dependent and so within the sensible world constitute a conditional unity, yet also to regard the sensible world itself as having a single supreme ground outside itself, as it were: a self-sufficient creating reason. The cosmological ideas instruct us to research the conditions of natural phenomena as if they were endless, with no first or highest member. Finally, the psychological ideas, according to Kant, provide the rule so to connect all states of consciousness, as if the mind were a simple, persisting, self-identical substance. According to Kant, by using these ideas reason orders the unsystematic contribution of the understanding to experience, and thus reason first makes experience into a systematic cognition, that is, into a science. The chaotic understanding alone is insufficient to produce any science. Its contribution to scientific experience consists in applying categories to perceptions so that these perceptions achieve objectivity. This objectification of perception by categories, that is, through a priori concepts, is however, Kant stressed, no production or generation of objects “as regards their existence,” but only “as regards the form of thinking” (CPR B125ff., 192, 303; cf. A128–30). One cannot judge of existence a priori (CPR B279), for “In the mere concept of a thing”—and one may here add, in the mere concept of an existing thing—“no character of its existence can be found” (CPR B272). That something “exists can only be known through experience” (Refl. 6413, cf. 5231, 5772). Comparing Hegel’s programme in Realphilosophie to Kant’s transcendental counterpart quickly reveals several obvious similarities. First, even a superficial reading of, e.g., the third edition of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia (1830) shows that, like Kant, Hegel rejects both empiricist and rationalist groundings of empirical sciences: Scientific principles cannot be identified by abstracting them from sensory perceptions, nor by deduction from non-empirical universal principles. In opposition to rationalism, Hegel shares Kant’s view that we have no knowledge which is not “in experience” (PhG GW 9:429.20–21). In opposition to empiricism, Hegel shares Kant’s view that the validity of categories, hence of non-empirical concepts, also as they occur within scientific principles, despite their non-empirical character, are provable, namely, insofar as it can be shown that we require these concepts in order to objectify perceptions, or very general contents of consciousness, by referring them to objects. Second, it appears at least at first glance that Hegel’s Realphilosophie is to achieve something like what is provided by Kant’s doctrine of rational ideas (cf. Falkenburg 1987). Very much like Kant’s ideas of reason, Hegel’s Realphilosophie organizes the application of those categories deduced in Hegel’s Logic to the systematic whole of experience. As Kant’s reason organizes the chaotic understanding, Hegel’s Realphilosophie orders the chaos of scientific theories by referring the objects of those sciences to the objective, orderly structures of nature and of spirit. Nature and spirit present themselves here as two such systematically structured orders: Nature is an integrated scale of external objects of experience; spirit is a perduring whole which structures itself and also changes in the form of temporal development. To that extent, nature and spirit correspond to Kant’s so-called “transcendental objects” of the cosmological or (respectively) psychological ideas.

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The complete object of these ideas is shown in Hegel’s exposition, of course, only at the highest level of nature, or (respectively) only at the temporal end of spiritual development: Within the sphere of nature, nature as a whole is the one living organism, manifest as the existing idea; i.e., as one such systematic whole that is to be met with objectively, which is the ground of the order of its parts and members, and which presupposes all other stages or levels of nature in their relative order. Within the sphere of finite spirit, this comprehensive object is scientific knowledge itself, which in its historical phases and forms indeed never can be a closed systematic totality, but yet its systematic character is always more or less differentiated and complete, though always as a subjective idea—a represented totality or Vorstellungsganzes. The concepts of both of these objects appear already at the end of Hegel’s Science of Logic as specific categories, as the category of the idea of life and as the category of the idea of cognition. Here, at the end of the Logic, it is also clear that even the third of Kant’s ideas of reason, the theological idea, plays a role. It appears under the heading of the absolute idea. It is “absolute” because it is neither the concept of an objective systematic whole (like the idea of life), nor the concept of a merely subjective whole (like the idea of knowing). Instead, the “absolute” idea has for its content the correspondence of a subjective to an objective systematic whole. According to Kant we require the theological idea in order even to conceive this very correspondence. We must presume, Kant maintains, that things in themselves are called into existence by a creator, in order to be able to assume that these things as such are appropriate objects to be known through our scientific experience. Hegel too conceives this pre-established harmony in the metaphorical form of the creation myth. The absolute idea is nothing other than the concept of absolute spirit which creates precisely this harmony (and indeed, through the mere activity of thinking), and so cannot be any finite spirit, because it cannot exist merely as something subjective nor as merely objective. (I return to the concept of the absolute idea below.) Finally, a third commonality with Kant is that Hegel too holds that from mere concepts no existential assumptions can be derived. According to Hegel, too, we can know of the existence of objects ultimately only on the basis of experience. Thus the categories examined in the Science of Logic, including the concept of the absolute idea, are as such merely concepts, regarding which, on the basis of their examination in the Logic, we do not yet know whether they are “empty” (Enc. §43+Z), or whether extant objects correspond to them, objects which can be properly comprehended and characterized using these concepts. Whether, to what extent or in what regard(s) there are such objects is exactly the topic of Hegel’s Realphilosophie. Put otherwise: Hegel’s science of logic examines the logical categories only within the form—or, as Hegel says, in the “element” (Enc. §19)—of thinking; i.e., they are examined by Hegel’s logic only in regard to their intensional, intended significance or conceptual content; Hegel’s Realphilosophie examines these same concepts partly “in the element of externality (Äußerlichkeit)” (Enc. §§ 248R, 381Z), i.e. in connection with external objects of thought, and partly “in the element of the concept” (Enc. §384), i.e., as concepts given to us and used in our thinking. Thus to this extent Hegel’s Realphilosophie

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concerns the application of categories and their use as concepts; it is thus also a task of Realphilosophie to provide a critique of the sciences, insofar as they always already, if unwittingly, use or consider categories as pure (non-empirical), but given concepts. Now the differences between Kant’s and Hegel’s views must not be neglected. The most important difference is that Hegel rejects Kant’s existence-empiricism. That may seem paradoxical, since Hegel, as noted, appears to grant that one cannot derive existential assumptions from mere concepts, but only from experience. Hegel’s view on this issue may be understood as follows. Consider first that the expression, “to know on the basis of experience,” is ambiguous. We know on the basis of experience that p, thus from an object, that it exists, when we first meet it, or the state of affairs p, in our experience. Then we know something through experience, or the object is presented to us through experience. This sense of ‘knowing through experience’ underlies what I have called existence-empiricism. In a different sense, however, we know something on the basis of experience when we meet with it, not in, but rather with experience. In this case, the issue is not some specific content of experience, but concerns instead presuppositions which must be satisfied so that experience is possible at all. In this sense Kant also speaks of forms of intuition, categories and ideas as “given” elements of experience. That there are such elements we indeed know through particular experiences; but that there are such is just as much also a condition of the possibility of experience. That is why Kant’s transcendental inquiry concerns these elements. That there are these elements we thus know, according to Kant, strictly speaking, on the basis of dual grounds: First, because without the existence of these elements there would be no knowledge for us at all; second, because we encounter these elements empirically within ourselves. Kant’s transcendental investigation is for this reason on the one hand logical, and on the other (as Hegel calls it) “psychological-historical” (Enc. §4f.). Due to the logical component of his transcendental philosophy, Kant could have had a substantive reason to depart from his existence-empiricism. However, he nevertheless believed that the historical-psychological component somehow has priority. Here we can only ask, whether it is conceivable that—apart from historical-psychological—there be such existence-presuppositions of our knowledge which we encounter, not in ourselves, but instead outside ourselves. That Kant of course would have denied this question, appears obvious to me. However, his arguments for this are anything but clear. Kant seems to have somehow granted priority to the inner presuppositions of experience over the outer, and he appears to have assumed that these outer presuppositions belong to a realm we cannot know: the realm of “things in themselves.” To “things in themselves” categories cannot be applied. The validity of the categories can be justified, though only insofar as we limit their application to experience. We thus know nothing of their absolute validity; we know only their validity for us. We thus do not even know whether it is appropriate to ascribe existence to whatever is not given in experience, since “existence” is itself a category. Thus the category of existence, like all categories, has only a relative validity for us: about its absolute validity (“its

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absolute reality”) we cannot know anything at all, according to Kant. From these grounds, Kant appears to have concluded that we cannot judge anything about objective conditions of experience. Hegel rejects this line of argumentation. Hegel agrees with Kant that the logical categories (including the category of existence) have no unqualified validity for us. It is exactly the aim of Hegel’s proofs in the Science of Logic to explicate, specify and demonstrate the qualified validity of the logical categories. Hegel thus seeks to justify a result which coincides with Kant’s view in this regard, that the logical categories are only valid for the realm of possible experience, hence only for ‘nature’ and for ‘spirit’. However, Hegel intends to demonstrate that the validity of the categories is not merely for us, but also (as Hegel expresses it) “in itself” limited or qualified: In the Science of Logic Hegel seeks to show that, for each category, assuming its absolute validity leads to contradictions, so that its validity must be limited to a specific domain, which must be specified by a new logical category. According to Hegel, these contradictions arise—not as Kant assumed in his doctrine of the Antinomies through a specific “application” of categories to things which are not appearances, and so are not possible objects of experience—but rather out of the intensional significance or content of each category, which is to be analytically explicated. This significance of the categories does not arise, as Kant held, from their application. From this it follows that, due to their intrinsic significance unto themselves (“an sich”), the logical categories have no absolute validity. Accordingly it is incorrect to maintain, as Kant did, that we cannot know whether their validity may extend beyond the domain of validity they have for us. Instead we know positively and absolutely—Hegel calls this absolute knowing “speculative”—that making any individual category absolute is logically illegitimate. Thus it is inadmissible to grant, even problematically (as Kant says), so-called “things in themselves” any existence; there are no such things. Even this judgment is an existential judgment, albeit negative. Hegel derives this result from his logical examination of the category of existence as such. The results of Hegel’s analysis and arguments against Kant can be summarized in this way: None of the logical categories is absolutely valid. However, this very thesis itself—of this merely relative validity—is absolutely valid. The complete development or explication of this thesis is nothing other than the system and method of Hegel’s Science of Logic. The concept of the “absolute idea” is to summarize exactly this thesis. Above we already saw that the absolute idea substitutes for Kant’s theological idea: It is the concept of something which guarantees the correspondence of, or harmony between, our category-bound thinking, on the one hand, and the reality of what we think, on the other. Now another serious difference between Kant and Hegel is apparent: the absolute idea is no mere fiction and no mere object or content of faith; for that of which “the absolute idea” is the concept, is nothing other than our own logical, or more precisely: dialectical thinking—our thinking by which we know the contradictory character of the categories. The logical insight into the necessity of limiting or qualifying the categories is not merely a negative result which would proscribe our application of a category to arbitrary objects; instead, it also has the positive or ‘speculative’ sense, to know

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that there are no objects to which categories cannot be applied. Conversely: all extant objects must be thought in and through categories. Now it is clear why Hegel’s philosophical encyclopedia not only contains a logic (i.e., a presentation of a system of logical categories), but also a system of Realphilosophie. Logic only concerns concepts, which of course have an intensional significance or content, although from this alone it does not follow that there are objects properly classified under these concepts. Obviously, this holds too for the concept of the absolute idea. The object which Hegel designates with the name “absolute idea” is nothing other than logical thinking itself, which is expounded in the Science of Logic. However, that this object exists does not follow directly from the mere concept of thinking, however thoroughly and completely this concept may be explicated. This existence follows only from the actual, discursive execution and consummation of this thinking, and this execution is something within space and time, an historical phenomenon, a phenomenon which we encounter in the form of a philosophical work undertaken between 1812 and 1816 (with substantive revisions to its first book in 1832) by the author G. W. F. Hegel. This phenomenon is thus not a logical, but a real circumstance, which thus cannot be a topic for logic, yet can be one for Realphilosophie. Hegel treats it as the phenomenon of the consummated absolute spirit. The distinction between logic and Realphilosophie consists precisely in this: the latter examines extant, existing objects, from the point of view that there are such objects. From a strictly logical point of view, truth is only the internal consistency of thinking, its correspondence with itself, the sublation of its internal contradictions. From the point of view of Realphilosophie, truth also includes the existence of objects. That in fact there are such objects to which we apply the logical system of categories, is itself neither a topic belonging to logic, nor can it be derived from the propositions of logic. Yet the existence of objects, however they may be more narrowly specified, is factually a presupposition of logical thinking, which itself can be made an object of thinking; Hegel calls this Nachdenken, or reflection. This reflection is the business of Realphilosophie. If thinking becomes Nachdenken, reflection, merely logical thinking, ceases. This self-assigned task Hegel has in mind, at the end of the Science of Logic, when he speaks of the “resolve” of the absolute idea to “freely discharge itself” (der Entschluß … sich zu entlassen). The thought that there are objects, or more precisely: that there is at least one concrete, specific object, indicates according to Hegel and to Kant nothing more than a mere fact. This fact is distinct to other empirical facts, insofar as this mere fact is equally an objective condition for the possibility of truth: If there is to be truth, then there must be objects; at the very least, there must be objects if the verific or affirmative being (discussed at the beginning of Hegel’s Logic) is not as such identical to what is signified by the word “nothing.” Truth presupposes objects; that there is truth is, however, itself a presupposition of Hegel’s Science of Logic. From these considerations derives the following task for Realphilosophie: It must be shown that, to those objects which are inevitably, immediately and

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without proof assumed in the principles of the various special sciences to exist, cannot be ascribed any absolute reality, if it is possible to specify these objects using logical categories. The sole object to be excepted from such a proof is logical thinking itself, the proper concept of which is the “absolute idea”; this is to have been demonstrated by Hegel’s logic. The aim of the Realphilosophie is thus in fact an attempted indirect proof; in this sense it is “the ultimate test” of Hegelian logic, as Friedrich Engels (1842) perceptively remarked (MEW 41:197/MEGA 1,3:291). Initially Hegel proceeds as if the immediate objects of the special sciences count as absolutely real, as if the absolute idea were not what it is; this Hegel expresses as considering the idea “in the form of being other (Andersseins)” (Enc. §247). Hegel then purports to show that speaking of the reality of these objects can only be made consistent, if the existence of these objects is conceived and comprehended as the existence of other, more concrete objects. For example, at the outset of the second part of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia, i.e., at the beginning of his Realphilosophie (Enc. §§253–254), Hegel shows that just the mere, entirely undetermined, unspecified having (possession) of a logical extension (“das Außersichsein der Idee”), due to the intrinsically quantitative structure of extension and due to its qualitative indeterminacy (utter lack of specificity or differentiation), can only be thought as “space,” i.e., as the existence of that which since Christian Wolff has been called “mutual externality” (das Außereinandersein)—familiar to Anglophone readers from the notion of space as partes extra partes; Hegel also speaks of the “existence of pure quantity.” As the existence of pure quantity, however, space is already subject to those antinomies developed in the Logic: Abstract space can only be thought as an internally undifferentiated continuum, and yet it must exhibit internal differentiations or distinctions. That, however, already suffices to demonstrate that there can be no self-sufficient (absolute) existence of (abstract) space as such. Nevertheless, if there can be no space utterly lacking internal (or intrinsic) differentiation, there can be internal, intrinsic spatial differences or distinctions. Even if one thinks of these differences as abstractly as space itself, i.e., only by use of quantitative specifications (Bestimmungen), one has already advanced to the principles of the most abstract of all special sciences: geometrical points, lines and surfaces. Hegel defines these as (simple or double) negations of space and seeks to show that the existence of points requires the existence of quantitatively specified lines, and these in turn require the existence of surfaces, and thus presuppose a specific, determinate dimensionality of space. Hegel’s detailed considerations of space and geometry cannot be pursued further here, nor can I examine why, according to Hegel, geometrically specified spaces are only conceivable as aspects of spatio-temporal structures, which as such are in turn the primitive objects of the specific, less abstract special science of mechanics. Here I can only consider the basic thought by which Hegel attempts to show that the primitive objects of a special science exist as moments (or aspects) of the existence of the primitive objects of some more concrete science. The progress from one form of existence to the next is in Hegel’s Realphilosophie always a progress from higher to lower levels of abstraction. This is a consequence of how this progress always results by showing

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that, and how, the specifications of these primitive objects contain categories which generate antinomies which make it necessary to sublate those objects within the existence of objects which are specified by more concrete categories. This progress from higher to lower levels of abstraction is thus also a progress from lower to higher levels of reality, because from stage to stage this progress appears as a progress from a form of existence lacking self-sufficiency to a form which is (or at least appears comparatively to be) self-sufficient. To my mind this makes apparent that, and why, the concept of levels of reality is fundamental to Hegel’s Realphilosophie, which does not derive more specific forms of existence from less specific forms historically, cosmologically, nor as a matter of natural history (chronology). Such attempts would be utterly senseless, because the various levels of reality are distinct levels of abstraction. There simply can be no historical, nor natural-historical, nor merely temporal (sequential) relation between space and specific spatio-temporal structures, nor between the existence (or the form of existence) of the human species and the occurrence of human mental skills and abilities; hence likewise not between the objects of philosophy of spirit (or the moral sciences, comprehended together) and those of natural science. The relation Hegel assumes between levels of reality is instead similar to that which Aristotle assumed between the existence of accidents and the existence of substances. Hence it is not like the development of species (speciation), as this holds according to natural evolution between simple and complex organisms, nor like the relation which holds, according to thermodynamics, between various forms of energy or between different states of entropy. Now this only affords a vague analogy, by which different degrees of abstraction can also appear to be higher degrees of complexity or degrees of order.

2  It seems to me that Hegel’s critics have exploited this vague analogy when they object that Hegel failed to recognize the historical evolutionary character of nature, because he interpreted differences in complexity of the states of motion or arrangements of matter merely as levels of reality and abstraction, without invoking natural dependencies between them. In fact, all such critics fail to recognize that the concept of levels of reality is not to be confused with nor mistaken for an evolutionary view of nature; they likewise neglect that distinguishing levels of reality does not preclude natural forms of evolution. The preliminaries of natural history (as a chronological process, or processes) proposed by Kant and other authors Hegel expressly acknowledged; he merely regarded them as philosophically irrelevant and poorly supported empirically (Enc. §§268Z, 339Z, 326Z). In Hegel’s day the natural sciences were far from being able to understand thermodynamic, evolutionary or social processes as law-like necessary regularities. There were of course models, that is: analogies, but no scientific theories of such kinds of developmental processes, the basic concepts and existential postulates of

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which Hegel’s Realphilosophie must consider. Hegel’s Realphilosophie is to be based upon empirical sciences, not upon fantasies, suggestions or mere hypotheses. Even if Hegel had such lawfully regular processes to consider, he surely would have rejected the suggestion that they should be understood as evolutionary laws (Entwicklungsgesetze). Consider: What is supposed to develop in such cases? Nature as such does not develop; there are no developments of nature, there are only developments within nature. In Hegel’s lexicon “development” designates a kind of process which only pertains to very few natural objects, namely: those objects which are organisms. Only organisms develop—not kinds or species of organisms (nor in modern terms: populations), and certainly not the objects of inorganic nature, nor their totalities. “Development,” in the strict and proper sense of the term, pertains only to organically differentiated wholes with specific internal capacities and abilities, where changes of states of such a whole organism can only be called “development” insofar as the end state cannot be explained by external, nor by contingently occurring, causes. An organism capable of development is, in this sense, always the individual living creature; only in an extended, imprecise, metaphorical sense, according to Hegel, can such entities as explanatory concepts, consciousness, the nation-state or philosophy itself count as an organism capable of development. (Perhaps Hegel should have allowed that a society’s totality of productive forces, as conceived by Marx, constitutes a kind of organism, of which it is sensible to say that it develops.) It is quite clear that what is called “evolution” within the theory of natural selection is not a “development” as Hegel uses the term. The modern evolutionary image of nature, to the extent it has an empirical scientific basis and is not misunderstood as a theory of “the development of nature,” thus affords no objection to Hegel’s non-evolutionary interpretation of the great chain of being, the scala naturae. Yet there is another ground for this objection, namely, the non-metaphorical interpretation of Hegel’s creation metaphor, which is an utter misunderstanding. Hegel’s concern to discover in the concepts of the absolute idea and of absolute spirit the rational content and the grain of truth within the Christian faith, has been taken as a pretext to ascribe theism to Hegel and—condemned as “panlogism”—to accuse him of a gross logical blunder. Hegel, it is said, derived existential conclusions from mere logical propositions, and sought to support this logically invalid derivation with the creative power of the absolute idea; supposedly, the relation between Hegel’s Logic and Realphilosophie is one of deductive derivation. This is the core of the traditional criticism of Hegel, beginning with Schelling, Schopenhauer, Feuerbach and the young Marx, all the way up through Ernst Bloch and the mass of recent Hegel interpreters. A rare exception among Hegel’s early critics is the young Engels, who in his review of Schelling (1842) hit the interpretive nail squarely on the head by remarking that Hegel’s Realphilosophie doesn’t derive existence, but rather only (relative) necessity of existence, but otherwise grounds existence claims upon experience (MEW 41:189ff./MEGA 1,3:284ff.). Note that the later Engels, and with him also the later Marx, declared Hegel’s creation metaphor to be, not a veil obscuring a logical blunder, but rather a “mystification” surrounding a kernel of

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truth, a “rational core.” An exact description of this core they did not, however, provide. They also did not say, precisely and un-metaphorically, how to extract the kernel of truth in Hegel’s absolute idea, or through what sort of “inversion” (Umstülpung) the “rational core” could be freed from its “mystical husk.”6 This chapter aims to reveal something of the notable core Hegel enclosed in his creation metaphor. The central point of this core appears to me to be Hegel’s critique of existence-empiricism. If one grasps the precise structure of this critique, then it becomes clear that any de-mystification of the absolute idea, if any be required, must involve more than merely removing metaphors. The mere use of the creation metaphor itself constitutes no genuine philosophical problem. Whoever wants to demystify Hegel’s philosophy may perhaps have in mind unjustifiable ideological motives for the obfuscation of its truth. However, then it must also be shown exactly where the truth lies and how one can know this. This is to say, nothing less than identifying a latent, yet soluble problem must be identified. This latency of the problem thus belongs to the (alleged) problem; it is like the obscuring and obliterating which accompanies the image cast in a camera obscura, whether it be upright or inverted—to which Engels and Marx (1845–1846) compared Hegel’s “mystified” dialectic (MEW 3:26/MEGA 1,5:15/CW 5:36). It appears to me that the absolute idea conceived as a self-developing concept contains just such a latent problem, and that its resolution would in any case be possible through a transformation of absolute idealism itself. I now attempt, briefly, to indicate just this problem. I have sought to show that the absoluteness of the absolute idea is a consequence of Hegel’s thesis, that the validity of each single category is relative and that its relativity holds absolutely. I also noted that this thesis contains a presupposition: To demonstrate this relativity Hegel must presume that each individual category itself contains a specific, contentful (i.e., “intensional” or “intended”) significance, which does not first derive—as Kant assumed—from their application to objects of possible experience. The philosophical problem which occurs here, which (so far as I can see) Hegel nowhere addressed, is the semantic question: How do these logical concepts—the categories—have or obtain any such content or significance? Against Kant, Hegel always maintained that the mere application of logical categories cannot be the source or basis of their significance, because utterly empty concepts are, as such, utterly indistinguishable and indeed indistinct, and so cannot be applied at all, in any way, to anything! This is correct, but cannot count as answering the question. If an empiricist theory of categories were possible, one could account for their semantic content as resulting by abstracting from experience. However, since Hume this empiricist strategy is foreclosed. Even Marx and Engels, who with Hegel reject empiricism, cannot have meant this theory of abstraction when they describe the content of Hegel’s logic as a product of abstraction. The categories of Hegel’s logic are, to begin with, “abstract” only in the sense that they are not abstracted out of experience, but instead abstract from experience altogether. The surmise, that Hegel’s absolute idea is no demiurge of actually existing things, but instead—“conversely”—merely abstracts from actual things altogether, thus does indeed point to a latent problem, but does not solve it.

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It appears to me that a distinction may help here, to the importance of which I have already alluded: the disambiguation of the phrase, “to know on the basis of experience.” Kant assumes that categories arise, not from, though always with experience. Of course Hegel did not deny this connection of categories to experience, though he greatly obscured it by giving the impression that his logic not only deduces the validity of logical categories, but also generates their semantic content. Hegel designates this procedure as the “development of the concept” (Entwicklung des Begriffs), or of the logical idea, and so presents this procedure as a process lacking any connection to experience. In fact and by the nature of the case, however, the deduction of the validity of logical categories must be clearly distinguished from the generation of their semantic content or significance. Only if the categories with their content or significance are specified, can Hegel’s method presume to demonstrate that their validity is either necessary or is subject to qualification (or restriction) due to the validity of other categories—hence not merely because there are such further categories. The idea that the semantic content of categories can itself be generated—or can generate itself—out of one another has in fact no basis in Hegel’s theory and is no more than merely suggested by him. Thus the question is: How do these categories have or gain their significance or semantic content? How is the significance or semantic content of categories produced, generated or identified? In this regard, considering again the levels of reality in Hegel’s Realphilosophie can help. That there are such and so specific things, which we encounter at a specific level of reality, we know experientially, i.e., in part from and in part with experience. Accordingly, each level of reality concerns a specific range of categories (cf. Henrich 1971, 139–140+n. 11; Hegel 1969, 21f.). This is because those specifics of things pertaining to what we experience at some one level of reality, also provide us categories, and indeed, not all, but at most some categories. From this it follows that it is at the very least misleading to say that “experience” as such, all at once, provides the totality of categories. Instead, experience comprehends many experiences, each of which can be defined by a specific context of extant objects, which in fact usually coincides with the experiential context of some special science. Experience in general makes known to us that there are objects at all, or that to our judgments some “being” corresponds, namely, some “being without further specification” (Sein – ohne alle weitere Bestimmung). This reflection at most leads us to the beginning of Hegel’s logic, though not a single step further. First experiences in the plural—experiences with more narrowly specified objects within more narrowly specified contexts—provide us familiarity with higher categories. Each single experience contains a certain combination of individual intuitions, sensations or perceptions, and each of these combinations is based on the use of a certain category. For categories are concepts that are given with experience just because every experience is based on some specific combination of intuitions, sensations, perceptions, or experiences, and this combination (insofar as it has objective validity) consists in the use of a certain category (or categories). This particular use constitutes the particular meaning of a category.

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Since Hegel’s Realphilosophie is where the categories of his Logic are applied, it is also the systematic place in which to show how categories obtain their particular meaning insofar as this meaning consists in combining matters of thinking which belong, not to Logic, but to Realphilosophie. Hegel’s statement, that in his logic a self-development of the absolute idea occurs, mystifies this fact. For it can be construed as meaning that this idea is produced by itself, without depending upon the use made of categories in bringing about experience, which use constitutes their semantic content. This understanding is obviously a misunderstanding. The concluding four paragraphs in Hegel’s Encyclopaedia (third edition, 1830) point out, clearly enough, that there is by no means only a unilateral dependence between the subject matter of his Logic (dem Logischen, i.e., the logical categories) and the subject matters of the two parts of his Realphilosophie, nature and human spirit. Translated by Kenneth R. Westphal

Notes 1. Originally published as: “Realitätsstufen oder Entwicklung? Hegels ‘Realphilosophie’ und die Philosophie der Wissenschaften,” Hegel-Jahrbuch, hg. v. H. Kimmerle, W. Lefèvre, R. W. Meyer, Bochum 1989, 397–415. Revised by the author and, in consultation with him, translated for the Palgrave Hegel Handbook by K. R. Westphal. The term “Realphilosophie” is henceforth retained; it is obviously cognate, its sense is explicated in the following. 2. Hegel himself does not use the term “Realphilosophie,” though he divides philosophy into logic and “the two real sciences (die beyden realen Wissenschaften) of philosophy, the Philosophy of Nature and the Philosophy of Spirit” (WL GW 21:9). Compare Kant’s analogous division into logic and two real philosophical sciences, each restricted to its specific “object of the understanding” (Gr Ak 4:387–388). 3. Another background consideration regarding the division into natural and human sciences (Natur- und Geisteswissenschaften) is discussed by Köhnke (1986, 86). 4. See Engels (1873–1882, MEW 20:504/MEGA 26:108/CW 25:517), and Engels (1894, MEW 20:12/MEGA 27:495/CW 25:11–2); Collingwood (1945, 131). 5. The English designation, “natural history” has a peculiar ambiguity due to the natural history of its use. Originally, the term “history” designated empirical experience or inquiry, in contrast to “reason,” but lacking any chronological sense. Herodotus is credited with founding “historical studies” by writing important historical chronicles. Nevertheless, “natural history” remained in use to designate empirical inquiry, without chronological connotations, though with emphasis upon observation and classification (rather than experiment), until it was largely superseded during (roughly) the nineteenth century (C.E.) by “natural science.” Locke’s “plain, historical method” in his Essay is empirical, not chronological. (Translator’s note.) 6. According to Engels (1873–1882), Hegel’s mistake consists in choosing a wrong “starting point: that spirit, thought, the idea, is the original and that the real world is only a copy of the idea” (MEW 20:33/MEGA 26:34/CW 25:34). “This itself [is] mystical on Hegel’s part, because the categories appear as pre-existing and the dialectic of the real world as their mere reflection (Abglanz)” (MEW 20:475/MEGA 26:346/CW 25:485—tr. rev.).

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Bibliography Collingwood, George Robin. 1945. The Idea of Nature. Oxford: The Clarendon Press. Engels, Friedrich. 1842. Schelling und die Offenbarung. Kritik des neuesten Reaktionsversuchs gegen die freie Philosophie. Leipzig: Binder (Rpt. in: MEW 41:173–221; MEGA 1,3:265– 314) (untranslated). Engels, Friedrich. 1873–1882. Dialektik der Natur. In MEW 20:311–455; MEGA 26; in English: Dialectics of Nature, CW 25:313–588. Engels, Friedrich. 1894. Herrn Eugen Dühring’s Umwälzung der Wissenschaft, 3. durchgesehene und vermehrte Auflage. Stuttgart: Dietz (Rpt. in MEW 20:1–303; MEGA 27; in English: AntiDühring, CW 25:5–310). Falkenburg, Brigitte. 1987. Die Form der Materie. Zur Metaphysik der Natur bei Kant und Hegel. Frankfurt am Main: Athenäum. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. 1969. “Unveröffentlichte Diktate aus einer EnzyklopädieVorlesung Hegels,” edited by F. Nicolin. Hegel-Studien 5: 9–29. Henrich, Dieter. 1971. Hegel im Kontext. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Köhnke, Karl Christian. 1986. Entstehung und Aufsteig des Neu-Kantianismus. Die deutsche Universitätsphilosophie zwischen Idealismus und Positivismus. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Marx, Karl, and Friedrich Engels. 1845–1846. Die deutsche Ideologie. In MEW 3:9–530; MEGA 1,5; in English: The German Ideology, CW 5:19–581. Marx, Karl, und Friedrich Engels. 1967. Werke. 43 vols. + indexes. Berlin: Dietz. Cited as ‘MEW,’ by volume:page numbers. Marx, Karl, und Friedrich Engels. 1975–. Gesamtausgabe. 65 vols. (to date). Berlin: Dietz, Now: de Gruyter. Cited as ‘MEGA,’ by division,volume:page numbers (all references herein are to the first division or Abteilung). Marx, Karl, und Friedrich Engels. 1987–. Collected Works. 50 vols. Moscow: Progress Publishers; New York: International Publishers. Cited as ‘CW,’ by volume:page numbers. Tuschling, Burkhard. 1971. Metaphysische und transzendentale Dynamik in Kants opus postumum. Berlin: de Gruyter. Tuschling, Burkhard. 1973. “Kant’s Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft und das Opus Postumum.” In Kant. Zur Deutung seiner Theorie vom Erkennen und Handeln, edited by G. Prauss, 175–191. Köln: Kiepenheuer & Witsch.

Chapter 12

Causality, Natural Systems, and Hegel’s Organicism Kenneth R. Westphal

1 Introduction Famously, Kant granted constitutive status only to mechanical, efficient causation and relegated all teleological principles in biology to mere heuristic status. Schelling declared that the teleology apparent in biological organisms is not merely apparent: it is a real feature of natural biological organisms; this gave enormous impetus to the development of scientific biology (Richards 2010). However inspiring, Schelling’s own philosophy is unscientific, in part because it lacks epistemological discipline (cf. Schulze 1803). Far too often Hegel has been likened to Schelling in these regards, yet those myths are as superficial and ignorant as the views they ascribe to Hegel (Stewart 1996). Hegel’s philosophy of nature is a work of philosophy, not natural science. Nevertheless, Hegel’s careful scrutiny, explication and systematic integration of fundamental scientific concepts and principles is by design relevant to natural sciences and to our proper understanding of them. One key reason for this is how Hegel’s explication and integration of those concepts and principles show that the ‘metaphysical’ questions expressly set aside by (e.g.) Galileo, but taken up by (e.g.) Descartes and Kant, are not genuine questions at all but rather mistakenly reify mis-understood abstractions. This essay cannot assay the details of Hegel’s examination of biological topics; thankfully, others have done so admirably (Ferrini 2009c, 2011, 2020). Instead, I highlight core features of Hegel’s accounts of causality and of complex systems to show how Hegel anticipates fundamentals of subsequent ‘organicism’ in biology (Nicholson 2014; Nicholson and Gawne 2015), contemporary work in systems biology (cf. Boogerd et al. 2007), the new approaches to explanatory mechanisms within biology (Glennan 2002, 2010; Huneman 2013; Craver and Tabery 2017) and the sophisticated account of ‘emergence’ developed by William Wimsatt (2007, 2013).

K. R. Westphal (*)  Department of Philosophy, Boğaziçi Üniversitesi, Istanbul, Turkey

© The Author(s) 2020 M. F. Bykova and K. R. Westphal (eds.), The Palgrave Hegel Handbook, Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26597-7_12

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2 Conceptual Analysis and Philosophical Naturalism Hegel’s philosophy of nature is non-reductive and anti-reductionist, yet Hegel’s standard strategy of strictly internal critique underscores this simple though decisive methodological point: Identifying which systems are complex, and in what regards they and their behaviour are systematically complex—i.e., non-aggregative—requires attempting to explain them reductively, so as to specify as precisely as possible the limitations of such reductive accounts, and thereby to identify their specifically systemic features and behaviours. In this regard Kant is right that we must attempt so far as possible to explain natural phenomena merely mechanically (CJ §70) by aggregating system-independent efficient causality amongst separate components or elements, and their assembly into more complex components. This is a scientific, not a philosophical, task. Yet as Wimsatt rightly stresses, any and all functionality is systemic and ‘emergent’ rather than aggregative. LaPlace titled his second major work in astronomy L’exposition du système du monde (1796). Despite his early work on cosmogony, Kant did not understand the ‘systematic’ character of Newton’s and more broadly of Newtonian mechanics: Newton demonstrated that our solar system is a system because it is a complex mechanical oscillator. There are systematic reasons for Kant’s systematic scientific blind spot, to which Hegel was shrewdly sensitive. I elucidate these by indicating what Hegel learned from, and what he corrected in, Kant’s Critical philosophy—in part by studying empirical natural sciences far more carefully than had Kant.1 Appeal to relevant natural sciences bears stress, because the relevant kind of ‘emergent’, non-aggregative behaviour of systems is not illuminated, but rather is obscured by philosophical notions of ‘supervenience’, ‘supervenience emergentism’ (O’Connor and Wong 2015, §3.1) or ‘metaphysical grounding’ (Bliss and Trogdon 2016). ‘Supervenience’ amounts to no more than stipulated ­co-instantiation of whatever properties philosophers find indispensable to understand mind, thought or language along with those physical properties or entities which alone they officially admit into their ‘naturalist’ ontologies. The vacuity of such accounts finally led one of its key exponents, Jagewon Kim (1999), to rehabilitate emergentism, with a correlative if belated rehabilitation of some of its later Nineteenth- and early Twentieth-Century proponents. ‘Supervenient emergentism’ is merely a terminological recasting of supervenience; ‘metaphysical grounding’ is no better. The ‘emergent’, non-aggregative behavior of complex systems must be identified and analyzed exactly, which cannot be done a priori in a philosopher’s armchair. No philosopher understood nor acted upon this better than Hegel— although rigorous study of many striking correspondences between the tables of contents to Hegel’s Science of Logic and to Whewell’s (1847) Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences is much needed. The next section (§3) identifies two reasons, stemming directly from Kant’s philosophy, to rescind Kant’s ‘top down’ deductivist model of a proper science (scientia) and correlative philosophical dreams of pure conceptual analysis.

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3 Hegel’s Lessons from and Corrections to Kant’s Critical Philosophy I begin with a widely neglected though decisive lesson Hegel learned from Kant. 3.1 Singular Cognitive Reference. The joint implication of Kant’s analyses of space, time and our capacity to individuate particulars in the ‘Transcendental Aesthetic’ and in the ‘Paralogisms of Pure Reason’ is that the classificatory content, intension or meaning of our concepts, principles, thoughts or claims is necessary though not sufficient for specifically cognitive reference to particulars. Specifically cognitive reference requires not merely grammatically predicative forms of thought, but ascriptive acts of predication of what is thought to one or more particulars Someone has (putatively) localized within space and time. Within all non-formal domains, ascribing characteristics to some localized particular(s) is necessary for a thought, judgment, statement or utterance to have any truthvalue or value as an approximation. It is also necessary for anyone to assess that truth-value or accuracy, and to assess any cognitive justification for that thought, statement, judgment or claim. According to what I call Kant’s “Thesis of Singular Cognitive Reference,” terms or phrases have meaning, and conceptions have classificatory content (intension), as predicates of possible judgments, although in non-formal, substantive domains no statement has specifically cognitive significance unless and until it is incorporated into a candidate cognitive judgment which is referred to some actual particular(s) localized (at least putatively) by the presumptive judge (a cognizant subject, S) within space and time. Cognitive significance, so defined, is required for cognitive status (even as merely putative knowledge) in any non-formal, substantive domain. Kant left this decisive epistemological thesis for readers to rediscover as the conjoint implication of two disparate chapters of his Critique of Pure Reason, yet it is fundamental to his account of ‘objective validity’ and to the ‘realization’ of concepts. Kant’s use of the verb ‘to realize’ in regard to concepts and principles he learned from Tetens, according to whom to ‘realize’ a concept or principle is to demonstrate or indicate an actual particular which properly instantiates or exemplifies that concept or principle. Kant realized that this task is crucial to establish which a priori concepts or principles have genuine, legitimate cognitive use, and to distinguish these from other a priori concepts or principles which we cannot realize in this sense. Hegel recognized the cardinal importance of Kant’s Thesis of Singular Cognitive Reference, and demonstrated it by strictly internal critique of both knowledge by aconceptual acquaintance and knowledge by mere descriptive phrases in ‘Sense Certainty’, the first chapter of his 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit (Westphal 2002, 2002/2003).2 Hegel also recognized that this Thesis altogether undermines experience-transcendent metaphysics—without recourse to transcendental idealism (nor to any such metaphysical view). Hegel further recognized that this semantic-cognitive thesis refutes infallibilism about cognitive justification in all non-formal domains. Strict deduction suffices for justification within purely

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formal domains because within such domains it constitutes justification, and constitutes those domains as purely formal. However, all non-formal domains require semantic and existence postulates the adequacy and use of which must be assessed and justified, though these cannot be assessed or justified by formal means alone (Wolff 2009). 3.2 Matter and Dynamism. To counter corpuscular and Cartesian concepts of matter, Kant advocated a dynamic theory of matter, according to which matter is constituted by two counter-balancing forces of attraction and repulsion. Kant’s method of metaphysically constructing this Critical concept of matter requires that there can be only two fundamental forces: one attractive, the other repulsive. Though the first reviewer (Anon 1786) found Kant’s theory of matter in the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science hopelessly inadequate, as did LeSage,3 it took Kant a decade finally to recognise its failure. At this point, Critical philosophy faces a decisive fork in the philosophical road (Westphal 2004, §59): either to maintain Kant’s deductivist, top-down model of scientia at the cost of ever more ambitious, ever less plausible claims on behalf of transcendental idealism; or to rescind that top-down model of scientia, together with transcendental idealism, and to make the most of Kant’s own account of conceptual explication, in contrast to conceptual analysis (CPR A727–30/B755–758). In his late manuscripts, Kant doggedly pursued the first option; through his internal critique of Kant’s transcendental idealism, by 1802 Hegel knew to take up the latter option. Matter is constituted by forces, but which forces these are only natural sciences can identify. Kant’s dynamic account of matter founders on the fact that gravity cannot account both for attractive forces between material particulars, and also serve as the fundamental attractive force said to be constitutive of matter, counter-balanced by one basic repulsive force; i.e., Kant cannot avoid appeal to two distinct, fundamental attractive forces. Perhaps broadly speaking there are two kinds of forces: attractive and repulsive, but philosophical analysis, reflection or ‘metaphysical’ construction as Kant (or later Shelling) understood it cannot specify which species of attractive or repulsive forces are active within nature. This may be a point on which Hegel’s role as assayer in the Herzoglichen Societät für die gesammte Mineralogie zu Jena (Lenz 1804, 7; cf. Ziche 2000; Ferrini 2009b) bolstered his greater confidence in empirical natural sciences to determine which forces are indeed natural, and which are constitutive of what kinds of matter. 3.3 Deductive Scientia and Conceptual Analysis. Kant recognized that at most we can claim to explicate our key concepts, sufficiently to address some important issue, yet we cannot claim to completely analyse and define any non-formal or non-stipulative concept. However, he never realised that this is sufficient reason to rescind the deductivist model of a proper science, generally known as ‘scientia’. The infallibilist thesis that knowledge requires eliminating every logically possible alternative to what is (claimed to be) known was raised to canonical status, not by Descartes, but by Étienne Tempier, acting upon authority of the Roman Pope, as Bishop of Paris, who in March 1277 condemned two hundred twenty neo-Aristotelian theses in natural philosophy as heresies (Boulter 2011; Piché 1999). Then and there Aristotle’s avowedly flexible model of a science, likened to Euclidean

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geometry, yet tailored to the precision afforded by any domain of phenomena, was transfixed into the strict infallibilist deductivism bequeathed to mainstream epistemology by Cartesians unpersuaded by Descartes’ reckoning with his methodological mauvais genie.4 That same deductivism is constitutive of conceptual analysis, understood to provide necessary and sufficient conditions for the proper use, meaning or truth conditions of a philosophically puzzling concept or principle. In that strict form, conceptual analysis is confounded by the Paradox of Analysis. The only tenable responses to that paradox rescind conceptual analysis by adopting conceptual explication—if perhaps not so named (e.g., Hare 1960). Adopting conceptual explication requires rescinding the a priori aspirations of Cartesian philosophy— also in its empiricist, Humean strains. The same fate awaits most if not all of contemporary “analytic metaphysics.”5 Very shrewdly, Hegel realized that this key shift away from infallibilist scientia and towards a renewal of philosophical explication based upon the results of inquiries into nature—as was Aristotle’s approach, and had been the philosophical sense of the title given to his justly famous books: metà tà physikà (cf. McKeon 1994)6—does not require simply telling sceptics to get lost (Rorty 1986; Davidson 1987/2001, 154), because in three central cases Kant’s transcendental reflections upon the constitutive conditions of human experience provide the materials and most of the argument for three transcendental proofs of (not from) mental content externalism. These proofs are genuinely transcendental, and yet they undermine Kant’s own core arguments for transcendental idealism. Hegel exploits these key methodological and substantive findings brilliantly in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit to demonstrate that, and how, transcendental reflection and proof can be used effectively—without any transcendental idealism, nor any similar view—(Westphal 2009b, 2018), and promptly uses them to begin re-considering nature philosophically, especially as it is investigated and manifested by natural sciences (Ferrini 2009a, b). 3.4 Transeunt Causality. Kant analyzed and justified a transeunt account of causality, according to which something within one particular ‘goes out beyond’ that particular to effect a change in another particular. This is central to Kant’s response to Hume’s regularity account of causality. Kant’s achievement in this regard is very important, yet Kant neglected an important underlying issue. Hegel identified a key equivocation in the traditional concept of substance which bears directly on our understanding—or misunderstanding—of causality. This equivocation concerns a very basic feature of the traditional concept of substance which remained unchallenged (because unnoticed) from the Greeks up through Kant and the British Idealists into contemporary ‘analytic metaphysics’. The equivocation concerns two distinct senses of the term ‘intrinsic’ when used in connection with the characteristics or properties of individual substances. One use of the term ‘intrinsic’ in this context is to designate a characteristic which is essential to a substance, so that the substance would not be what it is without that characteristic. A second use of the term ‘intrinsic’ in this connection contrasts with ‘extrinsic’ in the sense of ‘relational’. In view of this contrast, an ‘intrinsic’ characteristic is contained solely within the one individual substance; it is

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non-relational. These two senses of ‘intrinsic’ have been conflated throughout the history of Occidental philosophy; conflating them generates the standard assumption that relational properties cannot be essential to (nor constitutive of) individual substances. Against this presumption, Hegel argues that Newtonian gravitational theory ultimately shows that gravity is constitutive of matter and that material particulars are inherently interrelated gravitationally. The term ‘inner’ or ‘internal’ have been used in the same equivocal way, where to say that a characteristic is ‘inner’ or ‘internal’ either can mean that it is essential to or constitutive of something, or can mean that the characteristic is solely contained within some one thing. Of course, either term can be used to connote either of these concepts; the questionable assumption—or the unwitting conflation or equivocation—is that either term univocally or indifferently connotes both concepts. Put semantically, the questionable assumption is that relations are expressed only by polyadic predicates, whereas only monadic predicates can express essential or constitutive characteristics of any one individual substance—whence the (broadly) ‘atomistic’ orientation of Occidental philosophy, that individuals are ontologically basic, whilst relations are derivative, ideal or irreal because they depend upon individuals, whereas individuals do not depend upon their relations for their existence or their constitutive (or essential) characteristics (cf. Collins 1990). By exposing this equivocation, Hegel exposes an unfounded presumption underlying reductionist thought, that only particular individuals can be fundamental; whilst ‘systematic’ behaviors can only be aggregate behaviors of particular individuals. I surmise that Kant was misled by this presumption. 3.5 Metrics for Natural Phenomena? One result Kant claimed from transcendental idealism is an account of why and how natural phenomena can be quantified, so that they are measurable. I do not believe Kant’s claim can be justified even within the terms of his own idealism, but once his transcendental idealism is rescinded, the question recurs: How are natural metrics possible? This is central to Hegel’s logical examinations of quantity and of measure (Maß), which are fundamental to his subsequent logical examinations of appearance and of actuality—including, centrally, causal relations (Moretto 2004). Hegel’s concerted attention to fundamental issues of appropriate metrics for natural phenomena is central to the massive revisions he made to the second edition of his Doctrine of Being (Ferrini 1988, 1991/1992, 2020); it is also central to Hegel’s penetrating critical analysis of Cauchy’s ‘first reform’ of (mathematical) analysis (Wolff 1986). (Many of the closest parallels between Hegel’s Science of Logic and Whewell’s Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences concern these issues about proper quantification and measurement of natural phenomena.) 3.6 Functional Explanation. Despite his profoundly functionalist cognitive psychology in the Critique of Pure Reason (Brook 1994, 2016),7 Kant insisted upon a dualistic account of life (Ak. 4:544.7–19), and granted a constitutive role only to

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mechanical causes, not to teleological principles (CJ §71–75), which are merely heuristic—though with some later reconsiderations about self-organizing matter, e.g. crystallisation and chemical bonding (Ferrini 2004). Hegel’s critique of teleology considers how sub-systems can subserve systematic functions required for the existence, maintenance or functioning of the particular system to which they belong as components or organs (de Vries 1991). Such functionality and functionalism is fundamental to the anthropological and psychological bases of our embodied form of semi-rational cognisance and agency (de Vries 1988). Conscious purposes—which Kant took to be paradigmatic for, and indeed constitutive of teleology (CJ §10)—are one very sophisticated kind of functionality, Hegel recognized. 3.7 Reductionism and Complex Systems. Kant’s regulative maxims of theoretical reason (CPR B670–96; CJ, Einl. §V), to search for unity of genus where there is variety of species, and conversely to search for variety of species where there is unity of genus, are an important indicator of the distinction between the integration and the reduction of laws of nature. Famously, Newtonian mechanics integrates both Galilean terrestrial and Keplerian celestial kinematics within a common, more fundamental dynamic explanation. Hegel recognized that Newton’s success in this regard consists in integration, rather than theoretical reduction. Natural laws are fundamental, though insufficient to any causal explanation; explaining any event, structure or kind of behaviour causally requires specifying the relevant system of individuals or components and their initial conditions (PhG GW 9:92.10–19, 91.31–37). These specifications further require specifying how these specific elements or components properly instantiate the terms of the fundamental laws used to explain their intra-systematic behavior. This basic point, now well-established and familiar, may seem far from biology, but it is not. I surmise that, due to his focus on causal interaction between individual particulars, and to his top-down model of scientia, Kant failed to appreciate a fundamental fact about our solar system, and a fundamental fact about Newton’s dynamic explanation of the behaviour of our solar system, namely, it is a system: our solar system is a mechanical oscillator, or rather, it is an integrated system of mechanical oscillators. Mechanical oscillators are functionally organized systems of integral components; their behavior is not merely an aggregate result of the respective properties of their individual components. Hegel recognized from the start that the celestial mechanics of our solar system exhibits systematic interdependencies between all the orbiting bodies—planets, comets and the Sun—and kinds of systematic interdependencies which provide for sufficient environmental homeostasis on Earth for organic life to be possible. The organic functions most obviously manifest in biological organisms are only possible within the implicitly ‘organic’ or systematic functions of the structure of our solar system (JS I, Frag. 1–3; JS II, zur Naturphilosophie; Enc. GW 20 §§274–286).

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4 Hegel and Scientific Biology 4.1 Geosphere, Biosphere and Environment. In examining organic life Hegel ­highlights the reciprocal interdependencies between an organism and its environment. Due to its structure, composition and functional needs, only some aspects of an organism’s surroundings are relevant to it. Hegel presciently distinguished the organism’s environment from its general surroundings, in a way precisely ­anticipating recent conceptions of habitat and ecological niche (Ferrini 2009c, 2010, 2011). 4.2 Causal powers vs causal activities? Recent discussions of mechanical explanations in biology have debated which is more important, causal powers or causal activities? Hegel’s answer is: neither, because both are equally fundamental to causal processes, whether these processes involve stasis or change. Some causal processes are (relatively) simple aggregate phenomena, as in marbles games or rudimentary billiards. (Serious billiards play is systematic!) We are now familiar with such biological functions as the citric acid (Krebs) cycle. Diagrammed in the standard way,8 we have a flow chart of the stages of chemical transformations involved in this organically vital cycle. We have an account of a regular sequence of events, which occur due to the active causal powers—dispositions—of the relevant biochemicals and their proper sequencing within a healthy cell. Yet we only have a causal explanation of the Krebs cycle when we have the relevant sub-cellular anatomy of the relevant organelles: mitochondria, together with bio-chemical accounts of the structure, components and functioning of each associated organelle, and of their integrated functions and functioning within the cell. When these explanatory components are properly integrated, then—but only then—have we a causal explanation of this complex vital process; and likewise for each vital process. Such functional biochemical structure is today most familiar from the DNA double helix9; yet DNA only functions within a much more complex system of cellular control, which selects specific segments of any one DNA strand to use (in effect) as templates for synthesis of specific proteins (Nobel 2008, 2016). Understanding and explaining causal processes requires both an account of the relevant causal powers of the individual molecules involved—which are functions of their component atoms within their structural arrangement which is that molecule—and an account of how these molecules are structured within an organelle so that some molecules can be—and are—metabolized by other molecules. Causal processes involve both stasis and change. For any structure to function requires the causal integrity of that structure. Its causal integrity is a function of the sufficiently robust stability of the causal powers of its individual components: molecules of organelles, atoms of molecules, and if needed we can pursue sub-atomic structures of atoms, though that is rarely relevant to biology—until we investigate toxicology. Having sketched these framework considerations of Hegel’s nascent philosophy of biology, I now turn to some structural details regarding his analysis of causality.

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5 Hegel’s Central Theses in “Force and Understanding” 5.1 In chapter three of his 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel argues for these central theses10: (1) Distance forces are constitutive of matter, and so of individual physical substances. (2) Distance forces are constitutive interrelations amongst (i) the constituents of any individual physical substance, and amongst (ii) interacting individual physical substances. (3) (1) and (2.ii) are proven empirically by Newtonian theory of universal gravitation. (4) The traditional ontological presumption that relational characteristics cannot be constitutive of individual substances makes it impossible to understand the causal necessity involved in distance forces, because it makes (1) and (2) inconsistent. (5) The causal necessity of distance forces can be understood properly only if the traditional conflation of the two senses of ‘intrinsic’ (etc.) is rejected, so that we can recognise that relational characteristics can be (and indeed some are) constitutive of individual substances. (6) (1) and (2) can be demonstrated philosophically, in ways attempted in “Force and Understanding” (and detailed in Hegel’s mature systematic philosophy). 5.2 Hegel’s argument against the traditional concept of substance (expressed in (4) above) may be summarized thus: (1) Spatio-temporal material objects (hereafter ‘particulars’) are fundamentally constituted by distance forces. Hence (2): The central identity conditions of particulars can be specified only in terms of their constitutive forces (from (1)). (3) Distance forces exist only in and through their manifestations, that is, in and through causal interactions amongst the material constituents of any particular and between particulars. Hence (4): Any causal action over a distance is causal inter–action (from (1)–(3)). (5) Gravitational force is inherent in matter (because it is constitutive of matter) and generates causal interactions between particulars. Hence (6): Spatio-temporal particulars are fundamentally interrelated (at least gravitationally) by their causal characteristics and interactions (from (2), (4), (5)). (7) We know spatio-temporal particulars through their causal effects upon each other as well as upon us as perceivers (from Newton’s Principia and from Hegel’s analysis of causal judgments). Hence (8): We can and do (at least to some extent) know spatio-temporal particulars as what they are (from (6), (7)). Hence (9): The traditional metaphysical presumptions that (i) no individual can consist merely of relations, or that (ii) relational characteristics cannot be essential to individual substances, are false (from (1)–(8)). Hence (10): The traditional conception of substance as something constituted solely by intrinsic, non-relational properties is irrelevant to understanding spatio-temporal particulars and events (from (1)–(9)). (11) These traditional conceptions and principles (9.i, 9.ii) distort (or even thwart) our understanding of causality. (12) These traditional conceptions and principles (9.i, 9.ii) provide spurious premisses for sceptical arguments against empirical knowledge. Hence (13): These traditional conceptions and principles (9.i, 9.ii) must be rejected as both false and seriously misleading (from (1)– (12)). (14) Something which does not contain the ground of its own existence is ‘ideal’, ‘appearance’ (Westphal 1989, 140–148). Hence (15): Spatio-temporal

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particulars are not merely appearances to us (à la Kant), they themselves are as such appearances, insofar as they are causally (inter)dependent beings (from (1)– (14)). Hegel’s causal realism about causal dispositions, causal interactions and causal laws is directly relevant, not only to physics, chemistry and geology, but also to biology.

6 Hegel’s Semantics: Conceptual Explication and ‘the Necessity of the Concept’ 6.1 Already in the 1807 Phenomenology Hegel developed the view stated in his Philosophy of Nature: “not only must philosophy accord with the experience nature gives rise to; in its formation and in its development, philosophic science presupposes and is conditioned by empirical physics” (Enc. GW 20 §246 R). This is an important, distinctive, defensible, generous and deeply anti-Cartesian sense of naturalized epistemology. Hegel’s point is: Any tenable philosophical theory of knowledge must take the natural sciences into very close consideration. This rejects the anti-naturalism of traditional Cartesian (including Humean) epistemology, which dominated analytical epistemology up to Gettier (1963), according to which epistemology must be a priori because it must first establish the possibility—one hopes also the reality—of empirical knowledge in order to justify empirical knowledge. Such views proscribe any epistemological appeal to empirical knowledge. Note further that Hegel’s holistic ontology is based on an analysis of causal forces which is both philosophical and natural-scientific (Ferrini 2007, 2009b). Hence Hegel’s ontology is not based merely upon conceptual analysis. Hence it is not based simply on the conceptual considerations which drove the theories of internal relations developed by the British Idealists. Third, in this important regard Hegel’s epistemology is realist about the objects of human knowledge, including the objects of much of natural scientific ­knowledge, specifically: interactive distance forces. Hegel rejected prior asymmetrical concepts of force. However, he understood gravity as a causal power of attraction producing gravitational forces between material particulars, which forces exhibit the physical law of gravity. The interpretive point regarding Hegel’s realism about such forces turns not on Hegel’s terminology, but rather how he understands gravity and the law of gravity in his extensive discussions of these concepts and the natural phenomena they comprehend in the Science of Logic and in his Philosophy of Nature, as well as in “Force and Understanding” and in “Reason Observing Nature.” The remark quoted above (Enc. GW 20 §246 R), made very early in Hegel’s Introduction to the Philosophy of Nature, concerns not only the second part of his Encyclopaedia. Nor does it concern only the development of spirit out of nature in part three. It also and fundamentally concerns Hegel’s Logic. Above is quoted the

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second sentence of Hegel’s Remark; the first sentence refers to Hegel’s discussion of the relation between philosophy and the empirical sciences in the Introduction to the Encyclopaedia as a whole. There Hegel states directly that philosophy is stimulated by and grows out of experience, including natural-scientific experience, and that the natural sciences develop conceptual determinations in the form of generalizations, laws and classifications which must be reconsidered philosophically (Enc. GW 20 §12). Thus Hegel insists that his Logic cannot be properly understood apart from his Philosophy of Nature, nor can his philosophy of nature be understood apart from Hegel’s knowledge and understanding of the methods and content of the natural sciences. Hegel’s examination, assessment and use of those materials can only be properly understood within the context provided by the proper philosophical introduction to his philosophical system, which alone justifies his starting point of the Logics: Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit (Fulda 1975; Westphal 1989, 2009b, 2018; Collins 2013). Hegel’s Logic examines the ontological and cognitive roles of ontological categories (e.g., being, existence, quantity, essence, appearance, relation, thing, cause) and principles of logic (e.g., identity, excluded middle, non-contradiction). His Logic also analyses syllogism, judgment and principles of scientific explanation (force, matter, measure, cognition; mechanical, chemical, organic and teleological functions), by using which we are able to know the world. This brief list suffices to undermine the prevalent notion that Hegel’s Logic must be purely a priori, because Hegel’s work involves too many quite specific concepts and principles, many of which obviously derive from historical science (e.g., ‘chemism’). Accordingly, much less can Hegel in his Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences attempt purely a priori to show that and how these concepts and principles are specified and exhibited—i.e.: realised (per Tetens and Kant)—in nature and in human life.11 Indeed, such mis-interpretations are ruled out ab initio by Hegel’s defense and use of Kant’s Thesis of Singular Cognitive Reference (above, §3.1). Yet the fact that Hegel expressly avows the empirical and scientific sources of many of the key concepts and principles analysed in his Logic and especially in his Philosophy of Nature does not make his philosophical project merely empirical nor merely explicative. In the Remark just quoted Hegel distinguishes sharply between the basis and development of his philosophy out of reconsideration of the natural sciences and his philosophical science proper, for which the natural sciences are not foundational. Instead, the foundation or basis of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature he calls ‘the necessity of the concept’ (Enc. GW 20 §246+R), which philosophy elucidates in part with some of its own conceptual resources (Enc. GW 20 §9). In what can this conceptual necessity consist, if it cannot be pure a priori and if many of the concepts and principles it involves derive from natural science? Calling the relevant necessity ‘metaphysical’ tells us nothing, until we recall Hegel’s observation that metaphysics is nothing other than ‘the full range (Umfang) of universal determinations of thought (Denkbestimmungen); as it were, the diamond net in which we bring everything and thus first make it intelligible’ (Enc. GW 20 §246Z). Hegel’s concern is that basic concepts and principles used in

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natural science are either assumed to be familiar—as Newton assumed our familiarity with space and time—or they are introduced independently of one another in ways which obscure their conceptual significance, which in part is a function of how each concept is both distinguished from and also integrated with other concepts in its domain and their proper ontological interpretation (Enc. GW 20 §246Z). Hegel advocated moderate holism about conceptual content or meaning: concepts can only be properly defined and understood by integrating them with their proper counterparts within any specific domain, and likewise integrating specific domains under higher-order concepts or principles, while also integrating specific concepts with their instances. Hegel’s moderate semantic holism rests on what may be called his ‘co-determination thesis’. 6.2 Hegel’s Co-determination Thesis. Hegel’s co-determination thesis is an important semantic and cognitive insight, which Hegel gained by reconsidering Kant’s theory of cognitive judgment and what it reveals about the interdependence of categorical, hypothetical and disjunctive judgments. Hegel regarded Kant’s account of the Table of Judgments as inadequate, though extremely instructive (Enc. GW 20 §171Z). Kant noted that a proper disjunctive judgment divides up the whole of a specific range (‘sphere’) of predicates relevant to a particular possible cognition (CPR A73–4/B98–9; Wolff 2017). Denying one predicate of the relevant kind of subject entails that another predicate within that range must be true of that subject. Conversely, affirming a predicate of a relevant subject is tantamount to denying of that subject the other predicates within that range. Hegel recognized that singular categorical judgments and hypothetical judgments both presuppose disjunctive judgments. Hypothetical judgments require disjunctive judgments because establishing any judgment of the form, ‘If A then B’, requires judging that no relevant alternative to B either follows or results from A. Such conjoined hypothetical and disjunctive judgments are central to Kant’s Analogies of Experience, because causal judgments are discriminatory: Identifying any one causal relation requires distinguishing it from its causally possible alternatives (Westphal 2004, §36). Hence the categorical judgments required to identify objects or events in synthetic judgments a priori about them—judgments required for us to be at all self-conscious—also require disjunctive judgments whereby we discriminate any one object from other objects and other kinds of objects. Because such disjunctive judgments require a grasp of the whole of the relevant range of alternatives within a class or ‘sphere’, singular cognitive judgments about objects are possible only on the basis of (locally, moderately) holistic judgments about the relevant class of objects and predicates, that is, about the causally relevant natural alternatives. This requires (within any ‘sphere’) a complete set of mutually exclusive categories, at least some of which are in fact instantiated. Such a set of categories differs significantly from a complete set of logically possible categories, such as the traditional ‘sum of all possibility’, or taken as instantiated, the traditional ens realisimum— the topics of Kant’s Ideal of Pure Reason (CPR A571/B599f.). (Is it logically possible that we could perceive more colours than are found in the standard spectrum of visible light? Who would “we” be if we could? What genuine sense could an answer to either question have?) The point of Hegel’s “Co-Determination Thesis”

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is threefold: Hypothetical and categorical judgments are co-determined, they can be co-determined only within a complete set or ‘sphere’ of contrasting predicates (requiring disjunctive judgments) and they can be co-determined only in connection with extant things and events. This Co-Determination is the joint consequence of Kant’s analysis of our fundamental forms of judgment (in his Table of Judgments) and his demonstration of the discriminatory character of the causal judgments by which alone we can identify and individuate spatio-temporal particulars (in the Analogies of Experience). These grounds for the Co-Determination Thesis, for which Hegel argues in “Sense Certainty” and “Perception” (in the Phenomenology of Spirit) and in his account of perceptual judgments in his Logics, are altogether independent of intellectual intuition, and indicate how Hegel can and did retain this view in his mature philosophy without relying on any kind of intuitionism (Westphal 2018, §§37–46, 92–99). 6.3 Conceptual Explication. If ‘semantics’ is philosophical theory of conceptual content and cognitive or linguistic reference, then ‘metaphysics’, as the study of our ‘diamond [conceptual] net’ with which Hegel identifies his Logic, is fundamentally semantic. Hegel’s philosophical analyses of issues in philosophy of nature exhibit great sensitivity to the ontological implications of conceptual content and to the importance of the ontological interpretation of metaphysical and scientific principles. This may sound anachronistic, but is not: Kant’s semantics are far richer and more sophisticated than has generally been recognised (Melnick 1989; Hanna 2001; Westphal 2004); wisely, Hegel adopted and independently justified the core points of Kant’s semantics. Thus I agree with Pirmin Stekeler that Hegel’s Logic is fundamentally a critical theory of meaning.12 If this is surprising, this is only due to the pre-Kantian, Cartesian character of so much recent philosophy—and the neglect of semantics, epistemology and natural science by most of Hegel’s expositors.13 Kant was the first great anti-Cartesian in philosophy (Westphal 2007); Hegel learned Kant’s lessons well. The Denkbestimmungen analysed in Hegel’s Logic and Philosophy of Nature are, Hegel argues, fundamental structures of the extant world itself (Denkbestimmungen des Seins).14 One of the most important Denkbestimmungen, Hegel argues, is ‘force’, especially as introduced, measured and justified by Newton. Hegel already understood the central role of natural scientific investigation, on the one hand, and conceptual and semantic analysis on the other, for determining whether and to what extent alleged Denkbestimmungen are indeed genuine structures of nature. Hegel’s cognitive semantics is equally fundamental both to his Logic and to his Philosophy of Nature. Only by pursuing both of these investigations together can we identify Denkbestimmungen that are indeed basic structures of what is (des Seins) and in particular those of nature.15 One key feature of conceptual explication is that it requires semantic externalism—the thesis that some aspects of semantic content or meaning are a function of the extra-linguistic context of use. Conceptual explications lack necessary and sufficient conditions, and always admit of alternatives. The character and adequacy of any conceptual explication can only be assessed within actual contexts of its

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possible use, not in merely possible contexts of its imaginary use. For these reasons, Hegel is decidedly a post-Kantian yet altogether Critical philosopher, not a mad a priori rationalist.16

7 One Central Aim of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature One central aim of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature is to systematically order our most basic ontological and natural-scientific concepts and principles (Enc. GW 20 §§246Z, 247Z, 249+Z), beginning with the most abstract, undifferentiated and universal (space and time, Enc. GW 20 §§254–257), and working through a finely-grained series of steps (Enc. GW 20 §249) towards the most complex, the organic life of animal species (Enc. GW 20 §§367–376). The third part of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia then continues this series of levels, no longer merely in nature, but in the human or moral sciences (“spirit” (Geist); Enc. GW 20 §§377–387), from anthropology (§388) through cognition, action and freedom at the individual level (Enc. GW 20 §§445–482) and then through social, moral, political and legal philosophy (Enc. GW 20 §§483–552)—treated with much greater detail and sophistication in Hegel’s Philosophical Outlines of Justice (1821, RPh)—up to a brief sketch of ‘absolute spirit’ in its three forms, art, manifest religion and philosophy (Enc. GW 20 §§553–577), topics treated in extenso in Hegel’s Berlin lectures. Why does Hegel undertake this ambitious project? Hegel’s question can be put in a Kantian formula: All of these natural and social phenomena are actual. How are they possible and how is our knowledge of them possible? Hegel’s philosophical contribution to answering this broad question is to identify, clarify, specify, differentiate and integrate, as accurately and thoroughly as possible, the specific concepts and principles required at each level and at each relevant sub-level, in order to understand each kind of phenomenon and its proper species. This involves identifying both the preconditions of each kind of phenomenon and identifying what is unique and new to it vis à vis preceding, subordinate levels. For each basis level, Hegel seeks to determine why it alone affords the necessary basis for its emergent successor level. For each emergent level, Hegel seeks to determine what is unique in it, and through a similar analysis of a series of sub-levels within that new level, how it provides the necessary basis for enabling in turn the emergence of its successor (Enc. GW 20 §252Z). Hegel insists that this conceptual sequence of stages and sub-stages does not concern the natural development (historical genesis) of ever more sophisticated organizational complexity (Enc. GW 20 §249). What kind of ‘necessity of the concept’ (Enc. GW 20 §246+R, cf. §249) guides this development? Hegel’s phrase may appear to mean either of two things, both misleading. It may seem that the relevant necessity lies in a preordained rationalist telos of a completely self-developing and self-explicating system. Hegel does have some such telos in view, but the notion that it is in anyway preordained relies on transferring conscious purposes from their proper domain (human behaviour) to a transcendent, theistic domain which in principle can be no more than cognitively

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transcendent idle speculation.17 If there is a first rule of Hegel’s metaphysics, it is: Posit no transcendent entities! The other notion stems from purely a priori interpretations of Hegel’s Logic and Encyclopaedia, which require that Hegel’s logic uses some special successor notion to formal-logical deduction.18 It must be a successor notion, because formal-logical deduction does not permit inferring the more specific from the more general. Despite long favour amongst Hegel’s expositors, I confess that I do not yet understand what any such successor notion could be, despite many attempts in the literature. Fortunately, there is another alternative.19 Kant understood the ‘deduction’ of a concept or principle in a legal sense, of showing that we are entitled to use it in genuine, justifiable, accurate judgments, whether cognitive or practical (CPR B117). Though Hegel’s strategy for justifying concepts and principles in his Philosophy of Nature is not transcendental, it does share this general Kantian sense of ‘deduction’ (Enc. GW 20 §88). Hegel seeks to determine the extent to which, and the ways in which, we are justified in using various concepts and principles in genuine cognition of natural phenomena. This is built into his emergentist agenda of showing why nothing less than a specific set of concepts and principles suffices to comprehend natural phenomena of a specific level of systematic complexity, together with how these concepts and principles provide the necessary basis for understanding the successor level. The upper end-point or telos of this series of levels is provided, not by antecedent divine preordination, but by the facts of human cognition and action, on the one hand, and their—that is, our—remarkable productions in the natural and social sciences and more generally in society, history, art, religion and philosophy on the other. Carefully demarcating in the Philosophy of Nature the natural preconditions of these human phenomena shows in broad outline how nature makes our human forms of mindedness possible, both by providing for (potentially) humanly-minded individuals—i.e.: infants—and by providing for humanly comprehensible objects of knowledge (taken as a whole, nature) and a humanly manipulable context of action (nature). This is Hegel’s emergentist strategy for avoiding both (Cartesian) substance dualism and eliminative materialism. Obviously, there is a rich historical and metaphysical background to Hegel’s emergentist and (moderately) holistic worldview. It is important both to recognize and yet not to over-estimate the significance of that background. Hegel certainly does seek to identify and defend a richly systematic orderliness in nature, and indeed in all phenomena. In this context, it is important to recall Hegel’s standard approach to the grand aspirations of theology. Hegel consistently argues that the theistic and metaphysical ascription of such aspirations to a transcendent creator who tends to them (God) is in every case a human projection of human needs onto the fabric of the universe. Yet unlike Feuerbach, Marx or Freud, Hegel interprets such projections as reflecting, if figuratively, genuine and legitimate human aspirations.20 Hegel seeks to show the ways in which and the extent to which the actual world (natural, social and historical) in fact satisfies these aspirations, to a much greater extent than is typically appreciated (Westphal 1991, §4; 2019). This is part of Hegel’s on-going effort to overcome our modern alienation from the world, including our epistemological alienation wrought

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by Descartes’ mechanical and eliminativist account of the body (cf. Enc. GW 20 §246Z). In the present case, Hegel thinks that the pre-Modern ‘great chain of being’ expressed, however metaphorically and inadequately, a legitimate aspiration and anticipated, however obliquely, a correct idea: Nature does form a systematically ordered hierarchy (Enc. GW 20 §246Z) within which human beings have a particular and quite special place: Through our knowledge of the world-whole, the world-whole gains knowledge of itself. In performing this role within the worldwhole, we determine (i.e., specify) through a properly conceived and executed philosophy of nature—despite modern forms of alienation, including the cognitive alienation wrought by Gallileo’s distinction between primary and secondary qualities and by Descartes’ dualism—that nature is our proper environment, both as cognitive and as active agents.21

Notes 1. My suggestions that Hegel espouses emergentism, in ways relevant to biology, are not novel (Wolff 1989; Ziemke 1992), but I believe the facets highlighted here augment their findings. 2. If this may sound anachronistic, it is not; the issue of singular demonstrative reference is explicit in Tetens, whom Kant expressly and consistently follows in this terminological and also substantive regard (Westphal 2004; cf. Melnick 1989). Moreover, what philosophers of language call ‘demonstrative’ reference to particular individuals is known in other fields as ‘deixis’ (Bohnemeyer 2015), the transliteration of the Attic Greek term, deixiς, central to Stoic accounts of indexical or demonstrative reference (Mates 1961, 30, 96; Barnes 1997, 98, 101–102, 137–138). Like later scholars, Hegel knew these Stoic views from Sextus Empiricus. (I am most grateful to Mauro Nasti de Vincentis [2018] for directing my attention to Stoic deixis, and for sharing his research with me prior to publication.) 3. In his introduction to von Pfleiderer (1804), Ziche (1994, 12) notes that Pfleiderer translated and summarized passages from Kant’s Metaphysical Foundations for the physicist GeorgeLouis LeSage; these convinced LeSage that Kant’s dynamic account of matter was scientifically worthless. 4. In his lectures on history of philosophy (Werke 19:561n.), Hegel refers to Tempier’s previous condemnation in 1270, citing Tennemann (1811, 8, 2:460–461), who quotes from that edict and some related papal bulls. Tennemann cites Tempier’s second censure of heretical theses (1277) on pp. 459n., 462n. (I have not located any reference by Hegel to the Paris condemnation of 1277 in the recently published manuscripts.) 5. Quine preached ‘naturalized epistemology’, but never practiced it (Westphal 2015b), cf. Westphal (2016). 6. However coincidental and fortuitous may have been their naming, according to his own methods, Aristotle’s books on physics properly precede those which became known as ‘metaphysics’. 7. Cf. Westphal (2020), with a concluding chart of Kant’s cognitive architecture. 8. E.g., Lodish et al. (2013), Figure 12-10; (6th ed., Figure 12-8, online: http://www.allometric. com/tom/courses/protected/MCB6/ch12/12-08.jpg). 9. E.g., Lodish et al. (2013), Figure 4-3 (an alternate figure online: http://www.bioinfo.org.cn/ book/biochemistry/chapt12/bio3.htm). 10. This section of the chapter draws upon my (2015a). 11. Regarding Hegel’s treatment of chemistry, see von Engelhardt (1976, 1984), Burbidge (1996) and especially Renault (2002).

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12. Stekeler-Weithofer’s (1992) semantic interpretation of Hegel’s Logic dove-tails perfectly with Hegel’s transcendental-pragmatic epistemology (Westphal 2018). This is a strong consideration in favour of Stekeler-Weithofer’s interpretation. The excellent conspectus of Hegel’s Logic by Burbidge (2004) also corroborates these points. 13. The misfortune here lies in failing to appreciate that semantic and epistemological considerations can be put to sound hermeneutical use in understanding Hegel’s philosophy, especially in view of his explicit epistemological and also semantic concerns. 14. Enc. GW 20 §24Z; Phil. Prop. §164/158. 15. WL GW 21:11–12, SL 153.584–593, 155.644–659. 16. Not Hegel, but rather his critics and rather too many of his expositors have limited themselves to a pre-Critical philosophical taxonomy consisting of empiricism, rationalism, relativism, scepticism or transcendental idealism—lumping historicism and pragmatism in with relativism. Hegel instead is the fountainhead of robustly realist pragmatism (Westphal 2018). Unlike Hegel, too many of his expositors labour under the division noted by C.P. Snow (1964) between two cultures: one literary, the other scientific. 17. Note that I say any telos would be, in such a context, idle speculation. On Hegel’s integrating philosophy of nature with philosophy of religion, see Westphal (2019a). 18. An excellent, highly informative presentation of this kind of interpretation is Houlgate (2005), 106–180. I am indebted to Stephen for many years of discussion of these and related issues, despite our divergence on this central point (cf. Ferrini 2020). 19. Another problem with the “top down” approach, beginning with Hegel’s Logic and examining its instantiation in nature (in Enc. II), is that this approach cannot avoid the charge Hegel hurled at Schelling of “schematizing formalism.” Hegel avoids the methodological sin of schematizing formalism by showing, on the basis of an internal, critical examination of natural phenomena for their own sake, that those phenomena exhibit the kinds of conceptual structures and principles articulated in Hegel’s Logic. 20. Westphal (1989, 163–164; 2019a), Harris (1997, 1:64 112, 192–193, 409–410, 417–418; 2:125–130, 252–253, 344–346, 367, 448, 533–534, 537–540, 678, 681–682, 691, 738, 746), Chiereghin (2009), di Giovanni (2009). 21. Research on this paper was supported in part by the Boğaziçi Üniversitesi Research Fund (BAP), grant codes: 9761, 18B02P3.

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Chapter 13

Hegel’s Philosophy of Natural and Human Spaces Cinzia Ferrini

1 Introduction Recent scholarship on nature and spirit shows renewed interest in the ­systematic form of Hegel’s philosophy, both within each sphere of the whole of the Science of the Idea and among these spheres. Hegel’s speculative aim is to grasp the unfolding and necessary concrete actuality of the universality of thought as a syllogistic movement of division and reintegration into unity, expressing the constitutive integration of the particular, individual instance with its universal characteristics. The first logical or ideal stage, achieved by modernity (VGPh 9:188/LHPBrown 3:271–272), is to comprehend the concrete, absolute idea as spirit, knowing itself in its objective and subjective conceptual forms, by recognizing that the particulars of sensory intuition are thought-determined, and thus individualized, through their constitutive conceptual constitution. Appreciating this ontological as well as epistemological principle of the integral conceptual unity within every real determination, both natural and spiritual, aids our comprehending the place and role of Hegel’s philosophy of external nature in respect to its relatively “other” sphere of spirit, along a path that goes from the sheer externality of space to subjective inwardness, and back from subjectivity to objectification. The two main sections of this chapter retrace and highlight the basic “transitional” features of Hegel’s philosophy of natural and spiritual spaces against the background of their systematic unity. Part I elucidates the significance of the immediate determination of space as the indifferent extension that characterizes the systematic definition of nature’s self-external being (§1), and examines the transition from space as simple juxtaposition (§2), to space in individualized matter (§3). Part II follows the progressive subordination and declining significance of mechanical relations within space

C. Ferrini (*)  Department of Humanities, University of Trieste, Trieste, Italy e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 M. F. Bykova and K. R. Westphal (eds.), The Palgrave Hegel Handbook, Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26597-7_13

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and time for philosophical comprehension of natural life’s externality and finitude, focusing first on space as spontaneous determination of an animal’s own place (§4), and then on the immediate relation between terrestrial geology and biological individuals (§5): the determinate place inhabited by organisms is no longer an ‘external’ place, for distinctive of living individuality is to adapt and appropriate its habitat, to make its own space and its own time. By highlighting the identity and the differences between physical geography and the geographical basis of world history, I claim that Hegel is able to show that for self-conscious concrete spirit there is neither spiritual significance nor power in the abstract determinations of space and time constitutive of the mechanism of nature, and that Hegel paves the way for a philosophy of environmental spaces informed by the influences of basic natural configurations of space upon our soul and activities. Finally, Part III focuses on space in the phenomenality of spirit, against the background of the transition from the natural life of the human soul described in the Anthropology to the “I” that opens the encyclopaedic Phenomenology, examining the analogy Hegel draws between the abstract universality of the “I” and the spatial unity of light (§6).

2 Space from Mechanics to Physics 2.1 Nature as the Idea in the Form of Being-Other The opening §254 of the first part of the Philosophy of Nature in the 1830 Encyclopaedia, Mechanics, introduces space as follows: “The initial or immediate determination of nature is the abstract universality of its being self-external — its unmediated indifference, i.e. space” (Enc. §254).1 Hegel states that what appears in space as externality is in general the externality of nature; consider in this connection Hegel’s famous definitions of Enc. §§18 and 247, according to which nature is the absolute idea in the shape of otherness, or the form of being-other (Anderssein). Hegel introduces nature as the idea-foritself2 that “is” (Enc. §244Z). To present nature as the being of the idea that is manifest to itself, that knows itself, sounds awkward. Yet Hegel claims that at the end of the Logic, the idea’s self-knowledge in the essential objectivity of the world now collects itself in the immediacy of being, intuiting its own differentiations (the objective categories of the Logic of Being and Essence, the subjective forms of reflection of the Logic of Concept) in the real sphere of external existence. Indeed, in the Science of Logic, Hegel introduces the section on the absolute idea by stating that now the concept is “for itself universality and knowledge” (für sich Allgemenheit und Erkennen), which, “in its other has its own objectivity as object” (WL GW 12:236.16–17). Systematically speaking, nature is nothing but the idea, positing itself as the absolute unity of the pure concept and its reality, as totality in the form of simple being (WL GW 12:253.11–13). The starting point of this philosophical and speculative conception of nature was, at the beginning

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of the Logic, the abstract, immediate universal form of Being and the externality of the category of Quantity: space as the immediate existence of Quantity (Enc. §257Z). These summary statements require and deserve elucidation in four steps. First, by “form of Anderssein”, as explained in his 1825/26 Lectures on the Philosophy of Nature, Hegel means the basic form of natural, individually qualified existences according to which they appear as immediate, without relation among themselves, as mutually external and extrinsic, facing each other indifferently, in mere juxtaposition.3 The key word here is immediacy (Unmittelbarkeit), because this is both the simple mode or manner in which initially4 natural things appear and the way in which we “found” or “posit” them5; this is also the source of our practical and theoretical attitude to nature. This is in contraposition6 to spirit’s self-reflection in itself,7 that is, this immediacy contrasts to what we are: human self-mediated thinking subjects,8 or “self-interpreting animals.”9 Second, by universality (Allgemenheit), Hegel apparently means something fully traditional: the unity of different determinations. In the Logic, these thought-determinations have no empirical origin; they belong to the thinking subject, but are interwoven with sensory objects. In his 1830 Lectures on the Science of Logic, Hegel uses the example of a very simple sensory judgment (“the rose is red”) remarking that: (i) what appears to be totally sensory contains the copula, which is non-sensory; (ii) the division between subject and predicate contrasts the undifferentiated sensory apprehension of a red-rose; and (iii) what is more, when I say “red” for the singular red that I have before me, the predicate linguistically expresses a universal characteristic that at once belongs both to blood, wine etc. and to me. Otherwise stated, this determinate objective quality that I immediately perceive is an intuited singularity that has the form of a generality which also belongs to the universality of my thought, which also belongs to me.10 The concrete universal is the same as the rightly conceived individual, insofar as individuals are the self-expression of the universal (Haldar 1932, 521–522). As Haldar remarks, Hegel holds that “thought must have its counterpart in perception, and perception its sustaining principle in thought.”11 This universality can be thought at first “verständig,” as a categorial generalization from isolated particulars (the theoretical attitude of the understanding at work in the natural sciences),12 or “vernünftig” (the speculative-rational approach of philosophical thought). The former is an abstraction resulting from disregarding specific qualities of particulars while retaining only those common to them and the bestowing of the form of universality on this fixed content, which counts for the understanding as one that subsists on its own account and is held onto in firm opposition to the particulars (Enc. §80 and §80Z). Note that this common reflective knowledge of the sciences already grasps the singular within the universal, by changing “this red of this rose” into a general property and turning a pure sensory singularity into a predicate (see UVNat, 2). Accordingly, this unitary relation is grasped as a compound of self-standing, independent, mutually external parts. By contrast, the latter consider things as they are in and for themselves, highlighting from within the finitude and one-sidedness of the determinations of the understanding. This is the speculative “living” activity (Enc. §251/GW 20:241.14) of the

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universal concretely determining or particularizing itself, and differentiating itself so that differences produced by the universal hang immediately together and are comprehended—by spirit13—in their original unity (systematically and syllogistically) (see VNat2, 7.146–152).14 In Enc. §81Z1, Hegel praises Plato’s Parmenides for deducing the Many from its opposite in terms of thought as understanding, i.e. the One, showing however how the nature of the Many is simply to determine itself as its contrary, the One. This latter self-determining, concrete, infinite thinking unity, which negates the former abstract universality, Hegel calls the philosophical “concept” (Begriff).15 In this regard, the well-known Hegelian formula that the concept is the unity of universal and particular acquires the significance of the eternal restitution of identity from difference, and bears on the intrinsic contradiction within the logical determination of finitude, which we see in nature as the contradiction within appearance (see UVNat, 17). According to Hegel, Plato in the Sophist highlighted how any finite individual is equally something and its other: each involves the other; and in the Timaeus he wrote that God made the world from the nature of the One and the Other (Enc. §92Z). Put otherwise, Plato has already exhibited the interweaving network of forms which defines the sameness and difference constituting any determinate individual. Moreover, that something becomes an other, but the other, as itself a something, likewise becomes an other, thus constitutes the model of the bad or negative infinite progression (Enc. §94/GW 20:130.22–23) that keeps continually going beyond any fixed limit, as is ordinarily the case with both space in astronomy and time (Enc. §94Z). Hegel writes that this kind of “bad” (schlechte) infinite progress expresses nothing but the contradiction (Widerspruch) that the finite (das Endliche) contains: it is just as much something as its other (daß es sowohl Etwas ist als sein Anderes).16 Note that Hegel’s use of the term “contradiction” (Widerspruch) is not to be charged with “logical illiteracy” (Wolff 1999, 1), violating the Aristotelian law of thought according to which it is impossible for the same predicate both to belong and not to belong to something at the same time and in the same regard. Rather, in Hegel’s view only finite or reflective notions imply contradiction, insofar as they are taken in abstract isolation by our thinking as understanding. As remarked above, Hegel generally characterizes this logical activity as imposing the form of universality on its content, which is held in firm and fixed opposition to the particular. Hence the understanding behaves towards its objects stopping short at their substantive distinctions contra other determinacies (Enc. §80Z). By contrast, rational thought has no contraposition but embraces within itself both the finite terms of which one is the opposite of the other (Skept. GW 4:220), for human reason has an impulse or instinct (Trieb) to overcome the unsatisfactory contradictions of the finite, being restlessly impelled by its own speculative nature to raise its alleged meant, perceived and understood certainties to the true knowing of things themselves.17 Third, the philosophy of nature has therefore the speculative task to know that the being-other of nature is not an absolute, independent negation, but a relative negation: its Anderssein is a sein for and in respect to spirit.18 Otherwise stated, philosophy of nature will know in nature nothing but the concept (UVNat, 10). It aims to grasp the truth of apparently separated universal representations

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(forces, laws, genera) and determined content (electric force, law of falling bodies etc.), which we perceive in nature according to these abstract forms of the understanding, by reworking them conceptually from within (Enc. §246/GW 20:236.8–11). This “path of return” from nature to spirit (Enc. §247Z) determines the increasing degrees of self-determination (subjectivity) and the decreasing degrees of contingency (separation, isolation, mutual externality) from Mechanics to Physics and Organics; in Organics, material parts exist only as members whose own independence has been negated and brought under control of the organism’s centre of unity. Fourth, in his 1825/26 Lectures Hegel clarifies the relationship between abstract and concrete universality in respect to our philosophical knowledge of natural beings by saying that the abstract universality of the reflective understanding is empty: it does not find the particular within itself, and must turn to experience to fill itself with an external content: how any force of nature is qualified is not “given through” a self-determining and self-differentiating universality (VNat2, 18.501–505). Thus, to determine what nature is, is a problem to solve. Hegel says that the concept is the substance, the essence of nature, and that “I am the concept” (VNat2, 14.555–558). My task as free spiritual subject, the task of speculative thought, is to negate the initial appearance that the truth of the natural being is to be per se a self-standing independent objectivity, irrespective of thought’s activity, by showing that this Auseinander of nature is merely a semblance (Schein; see Enc. §248/GW 20:237.9–10). For example, from the philosophical standpoint of the activity of concrete universality (the idea), the fundamental determination of matter as “otherness,” as externality, is a one-sided form, a semblance. By contrast, its alleged immediacy and self-subsistence is only as relation to another; matter is an sich also the concept, but lacks the concept posited in itself, therefore it only “searches” for unity (gravity: see VNat2, 19.810–815). The (philosophical) truth of matter is to be known as a difference of the idea itself, its self-expression, manifesting its inner concept. Indeed, in each material part there is not only its own being but equally the being of the other to which any part relates immediately19: this is the movement of nature itself towards the sublation of its own extrinsicality.20 Thus, a philosophical approach to natural forms and content must begin with the presence of the idea in the immediate element of nature as an aconceptual, purely subjective presence, where the concept’s activity can only count as a virtual inwardness without existence.21 Now the idea as identity of its reality and its concept is manifest only in freedom (UVNat, 16); hence the immanent movement of nature towards the concept as its central point or Zentrum, the knot of a web of differences, will also signify the appropriation of externality, a self-liberation from alien conditioning. The need to overcome this contradiction prompts the necessity of showing that the concept (Begriff) is in fact the master that keeps together particulars which prima facie appear simply separated, dispersed, and unrelated (Enc. §250/GW 20:239.19–240.1).22 This immanently dialectical path begins with the mechanical conception of composite material bodies as mere quantities of matter, consisting of discrete parts which all tend towards a central point—initially,

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their center of gravity: philosophy must recognize that nature strives after unity and deduce its progressive achieving of degrees of unity as a “system” of stages (Mechanics, Physics, Organic Physics: Enc. §249/GW 20:238.29–239.1), identifying the pure, abstract determinations of thought, which were its object in the Logic, within the conformations of mind-independent natural beings (Enc. §24Z2).

2.2 The Quantitative Beginning of the Philosophy of Nature: Indifferent Spatial Externality in Mechanics Bearing these elucidations in mind, if we reconsider our opening quotation, we can see how Hegel’s stress on the first (erste) or immediate (unmittelbar) determination of nature disputes the apparent truth of sense perception and of those intellectual categories which determine nature as outwardness as such. Indeed, by contrast, Hegel states that nature “is” as the other of the idea, and so related to the idea.23 The key point here, as emphasized in the Encyclopaedia (Enc. §247/GW 20:237.3–7), is Hegel characterizing nature as external to itself: for instance matter does not appear as a relation; its alleged self-subsistence and exclusive resistance apparently negates relatedness (VNat2, 13). According to Hegel, the mere “self-externality” (Außersichsein) that defines space, as the first and immediate determination of nature—the “heres” which are side by side and mutually indifferent, not yet regarded as (determinate and relative) “places” (Enc. §254Z)—contains this contradiction: Space is defined as a quiescent absence of specific, determined difference. As Anderssein as such, space is totally abstract and formal. Space does not “become another”; it is absolute, uninterrupted, indeterminate continuity (Enc. §254/GW 20:243.15–19). Nevertheless, space requires tri-dimensionality: the spatial indifference of continuous externality differentiates itself through the generation of forms and relations constituted by point(s), line(s), surface(s), volume(s) (Enc. §§255–256/GW 20:244–7)—the “given” presuppositions of geometry (see VNat2 35; see also Enc. §258/GW 20:247–8).24 In regard to the conceptual genesis of space, however, the dimensional self-negation of space’s immediacy is a movement contradicting our first understanding of space as the initial or immediate determination of nature: the abstract universality of its self-external being, the continuity of its simple extension. The negativity of this self-differentiation of space is only logical, because point, line, surface, volume and body are mere “moments”: their spatial difference is only a mere possibility, differentiability.25 For instance the spatial point has not the independent existence of the real dividing punctual one of the “now” (das Jetzt) which bridges past and future, assuring the continuous passing of time. As Hegel put it already in his 1801 Dissertatio philosophica de orbitis planetarum, reflective understanding, that in mathematics abstracts from things themselves claiming to compare only their numbers, measurements, through calculus and geometry, cannot conceive of a reciprocal transition between two incommensurables such as space and time

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(Diss. 27–28). Hegel however claims that transition to time is within space, pertaining to the self-sublation of its finite, reflective notion, because the determination of the mutually external being (Aussereinandersein) contains both the self-subsistence of mutually external differences and their contrary, i.e. their lack of differentiation, insofar as they are posited in absolute continuity. Hegel shows that when the continuity of simple extension which immediately defines space is negated through moments such as point, line, surface etc., which in turn are posited not as qualitative and real differences but within the continuity of extension, space in fact becomes a sort of “being together with not being”, because space is space only in this contraposition between the simple extension that passes into differentiability and the momentary discreteness that passes into quantitative continuity. The result of Hegel’s rational examination is that space is an sich time: “what it is, it is not, what it is not, it is” (VNat2, 40). Through positing a self-negation of externality, which is nothing but the “inwardness” of space itself, the principle of self-differentiation thus becomes time, i.e. a qualitative difference. As mentioned above, the singular present “now” is a universal, dividing one, which conjoins past and future, exclusive of other moments and yet in continuity with them (Enc. §259/GW 20:249.5–8). Time exhibits tri-dimensionality in the independent, differentiated aspects of present, future and past existence. These aspects are the becoming of externality as such, its resolution into the differences of being as transitioning into nothing, and nothing as transitioning into being (Enc. §259/GW 20:249.8–9). By entering this outward domain of the self-negation and self-contradiction of indifferent externality, we enter (ideally) the domain of the processes of real things. This initial point, however, is still abstract.26 The unity of space with time is only as a movement, the transition of the one into the other. We have the first concrete, posited identity of space and time in “place” (Ort), as a “now” located as a “here”, which is also a point of duration (Enc. §§260–261/GW 20:251–3). Place is a “spatial now” (Enc. §261/GW 20:252.5), though only as a moment within a process, which comes to be and passes away: “this” place becomes “another place”. Hence place is also the posited contradiction which space and time implicitly are27: place is also a multiplicity of mutually indifferent singular places. In contrast to any merely spatial “here”, however, the localized spatiality of any “place” is immediately posited as temporal: this becoming is nothing but motion (Bewegung). In this way, the ideality implicit within the representations of space and time becomes manifest to itself, it is now explicitly for itself. Motion (recall Zeno’s paradox) makes explicit the contradiction between continuity and difference within the abstract negative (space) and positive (time) characterizations of externality and within the process of localization. There is an interesting passage in Hegel’s 1801 Dissertatio regarding the necessity of motion and our true comprehension of it in respect to the reflective representation of matter as filling space: this apparently dynamical notion (implying resistance to the intrusion of other matter and repulsive force, as in Kant’s Monadologia physica) is in fact a purely negative and empty notion. Matter is conceived of as dense and quiescent once space is filled, and thus requires an extraneous principle of change

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(Diss. 26.27–27.2). The same charge against the non-dialectical, abstract reason of subjective, transcendental idealism returns in the 1807 phenomenological Chapter on Reason, where Hegel writes that such empty idealism is bound to be at the same time “absolute empiricism” in order to get hold of difference (PhG GW 9:136.15–23). Space and time pertain to things themselves and their objectivity; it is not confined to the human phenomenal reality: in 1801 Hegel writes that to conceive of matter as being filled space means to have an abstract notion of what is objective contra what is subjective, which lacks form and deletes, once space is filled, any inner principle of change and resistance, which is to be sought elsewhere (a conception that falls into an “absolute empiricism” for its emptiness). In order to comprehend (intelligere) matter as it really and physically is, one must add to the abstract concept of space the contrary form of subjectivity: which Hegel calls “mind” referring to Latin (mens), and “point” in respect of space. Hegel writes that it is in this way that the point, which under the form proper to self-differentiation is time, and space, constitute the elements of matter, which is their principle, and that the necessity of motion becomes intelligible through this internality, for mutability is nothing other than the eternal restitution of identity from difference, the new production of difference, contraction and expansion (Diss. 27.2–15).28 In Finite Mechanics, the reality of space-filling matter is deduced philosophically in contrast to this empty abstraction, in terms of the product of the process of any motion: the immediately identical and concretely existing unity of space and time (Enc. §261/GW 20:252.10–12). Both in the 1817 Encyclopaedia and in the 1827/1830 editions the transition between space and time seems to be always a matter of Vertauschbarkeit (interchangeability): one element passes into the other and then the second passes back into the first, so that only at the end of these two distinct moments the result is the inner identity of these two terms. However, I have shown elsewhere that terminological changes between the 1812 and 1832 Doctrine of Being in the Science of Logic, as well as between the 1817 and 1827– 1830 editions of the Encyclopaedia, point to an important, yet neglected conceptual revision depending upon Hegel’s revised dialectical model for transition (übergehen) in the Logic of Being.29 In 1817 the twofold transition between space and time that gives rise to motion and to matter is defined in accord with the immediate or external form of transition (Übergehen), as the “passing away” (Vergehen) and the “re-production” (Wiedererzeugen) of space in time and of time in space. In 1827 and 1830 the first division of the sphere of the Philosophy of Nature is no longer Mathematics but Mechanics, that is, matter and motion. This means that space and time are from the outset treated in terms of their inter-relation, and their dialectic is placed within a different context than abstract mathematics, i.e. within the frame and under the conceptual umbrella of the existing immediate unity of the objectivity of space and the pure subjectivity of time. Although both the 1817 and the 1827/1830 editions begin with pure space and the text of Enz. 1817 §197 nearly coincides with Enz. 1830 §254, the significance of the two versions appears distinctive in so far as pure space is no longer viewed against the background of space and

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time considered as such, in their abstract difference as the principles of the two branches of geometry and arithmetic. Note that in the chapter concerning the inner division of the first part of the Philosophy of Nature in the lectures of 1819/1820, we read: “Mechanik, nicht bloss Mathematik.”30 The short 1817 text presented the following movement: “This passing away and reproduction of space in time and time in space is motion; a becoming which, however, is itself equally well immediately the identical existing unity of both of them, matter” (my trans.). By contrast, the 1827 and 1830 parallel text reads (with changes emphasized): “This passing away and self-reproduction of space in time and time in space, that time is spatially self-posited as place, while this indifferent spatiality is likewise immediately temporally posited, is motion.”31 Thereafter, the 1827 text follows word by word the 1817 edition. As I have shown elsewhere, this revision appears to point to the immanent (self-)reflection of the logical forms of Being for themselves: it is time itself and its opposite, space itself, each of which mutually sich gesetzt wird as their other, respectively in place and motion, and matter is their extant unity. The notion of Übergang involved here is no longer a simple passing away and then a reproduction of space within time and vice versa, because the one is mediated by the other.32 In Enc. 1830 §261, a new clause implying immanence (absent in 1827) is added to qualify exactly this revised form of becoming, that is now said to be: “in itself the falling together of its contradictions.” This integrated anticipation of modes of essential reflection within the immediacy of Being points to a form of relation in which determining remains inherent in the unity of the terms; regarding space and time, this logical innovation also opens a new perspective into the philosophy of spirit. In Enc. 1817 §448 (Philosophy of Spirit), Hegel writes that the spiritual particularity of a certain Volksgeist cannot be conceived only in terms of its freedom as nature, because spirit is “also” in time. This presents the dimension of time as a conceptually necessary addition to the reality and specific individuality of the soul of any (limited) regional spirit. This is consistent with the 1820 Outlines of Philosophy of Right §346, where Hegel writes that history (Geschichte) is the shaping of spirit in the form of immediate natural actuality; therefore the stages of development are as immediate natural principles. Since these principles are natural, they are as a mutually external plurality (sind als eine Vielheit außer einander, somit ferner so: GPR, GW 14, 1:275.28–33), each belonging to one people; this is the meaning of the “geographical and anthropological existence” of each Volk. By contrast, in Enc. 1830 §548, Hegel writes that the moment (Moment) of the geographic and climatic determinateness (Bestimmtheit) is the natural aspect of the spirit of a people, which is in time and has within itself a history (eine Geschichte innerhalb seiner: Enc. §548/GW 20:523.23–24, my emphasis), that is, a development of the consciousness of itself in time according to its particular principle. Treating spatial existence as the moment of an environmental determination and using the phrase ‘within itself’ appear to indicate, once again, a movement of self-reflection within the relation (Beziehung) of space and time, which maintains them both as re-differentiated and mutually self-mediating within their unity; it implies that the form of relation is both inherent and immanent in space and time together,

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thus opening into considering the geographical (spatial) basis of the history (in time) of spirit, which was largely absent from Hegel’s considerations both in the 1817 Encyclopaedia and the 1820 Outlines of Philosophy of Right. From 1822/23 to 1830/31, Hegel lectured five times on the philosophy of history stressing this doubled dimension, both geographical and historical, of the development of the world spirit. However, this essential form of relation between spatial and temporal aspects becomes fully explicit only in §548 of the 1827 and 1830 Philosophy of Spirit in the Encyclopaedia, in accord with the parallel changes introduced into the Logic of Being and Hegel’s reconfiguration of the first division of the Philosophy of Nature.33 I take §261 and §548 of the 1827 and 1830 Encyclopaedia as indicating a movement that occurs within the interrelationship of space and time and on the basis of their unity, which no longer results from the addition of two distinct mutual passings away; rather, in my view it implies that the moment of relation is both inherent and immanent in space and time taken together.34 In the section on Mechanics Hegel discusses three kinds of movement: uniform motion resulting from external thrust (impact), which is expressed by the simple relation of space to time; relatively free motion, in which motion accelerates uniformly due to gravity; and absolutely free motion, the movement of planets orbiting in the solar system—a stable mechanical occilator. These three stages of Mechanics show how a relatively homogeneous matter passes from passivity to activity, from being set in motion by external thrust to having the principle of motion within itself. The speculative debt to the sublated inherence of relations between the abstract self-indifference of continuity (space) and the dividing punctuality of discreteness (points or moments: time), is made apparent when Hegel defines matter as essentially composite, consisting entirely of discrete parts all of which tend toward a center. He says that matter is always divisible though not divided (immer teilbar aber nicht geteilt), that matter allows self-differentiation only as a possibility, because division (Trennung) by empty space is impossible: what is concrete is the different masses within the universality of gravity: their mutual gravitational attraction (VNat2, 59). Matter is still characterized above all by “essential externality,” governed by gravity: it has thus not yet become properly self-determining (Enc. §272Z). Note that gravity is a qualitative determination in which quantitative difference as such is now insignificant, because what becomes manifest is comparative: the relative masses of various, distinct bodies.35 Examining the law of falling bodies, determined according to the moments contained in nature, the formula of accelerated motion (T2:S=t2:s) is deduced only in so far as it is a determination, a relation between time and space, by which this relationship has to be determined through itself (Dies Verhältnis soll durch sich selbst bestimmt sein: VNat2, 63). This stress on deduction is not to be taken as charging Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature with an apriorism replacing empirical inquiry or a rationalism irrespective of the findings of natural sciences. Simply put, what is at stake is the philosophical foundation of the content that the theoretical activity of the understanding at work in the empirical sciences have provided without demonstrating its truth. In Enc. §246R (GW 20:236) Hegel makes clear that according to this foundational

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role it has to be demonstrated that the empirical appearance actually accords with the conceptual determination (and not vice versa); this task falls neither to experience, with its endless variation, nor to immediate intuition, but to the rational diamond or conceptual net of laws. This is why, at the end of the first chapter of Measure (Specific Quantity) in the Science of Logic, in a Remark commenting on Galileo’s law of falling bodies and Kepler’s laws of the planetary motion, Hegel praises their measuring the qualities of space and time as ratios, discovering a universal form for numbers of nature. However, he adds that: “these men have proven the laws they have discovered by showing that the full compass of the singular things of perception conform to them. But a still higher proof of these laws must be demanded — nothing less, namely, than of knowing their quantitative determinations from the qualities or determinate concepts connected in them (such as space and time)” (SL, 297–8/WL GW 21:340). Otherwise stated, philosophy of nature has the task to unfold logical determinations, not as a series of categories and concepts in pure thought as the Science of Logic, but as universals immanently related within the self-externality of nature, and then to show how the phenomenal laws in accord with observation and perception in turn can be derived from these determinate concepts: an indirect way to prove the necessity of scientific empirical knowledge.

2.3 The Significance of Space in the Physics of Individualized Matter In the section on Mechanics Hegel made clear that matter has no unity for itself insofar as purely mechanical bodies are understood as consisting entirely of discrete, separate, independent parts (quantities of matter) which stay together merely by contact. However, all mechanical bodies have not only mass but also weight, because all heavy bodies tend towards a central point. In the 1827/28 Lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit Hegel clarifies that the “philosophy” of nature presents the concept as a centre rising to the surface, sublating the mutual externality of its components (Aussereinandersein), or conversely Nature (the Idea in the form of its being other) as returning into itself in order to achieve unity with itself, by overcoming its mutual spatial externality. This is why, from a speculative rational standpoint, gravity constitutes the fundamental determination of matter, in which all mutual externality of material particulars is sublated. Hegel contends that if matter, which strives towards a centre of unity, were to succeed, it would cease to exist as matter, because it is defined as ideal insofar as it constitutively (in its substance or concept) relates to what is external to itself. Compared to Mechanics, nature attains a higher form of unity with physical and qualitative particularization: matter “develops,” as its “self-form” determines it to an increasing degree and becomes more explicitly the point unifying all the material components of a body. The highest point achieved in this process is the fully individual matter, that is, the individual material totality of the single, independent body.

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This is why in Physics Hegel reappraises the solar system, which in Mechanics is treated according to its free movement and material self-determination, but not yet as manifesting the unity of substance. Although in the sphere of Mechanics the organism “does not allow itself to occur,” the structural form of the organism already begins to appear in the “ideal” point of unity that governs the movement of free independent material parts within the solar system: the sun in relation to orbiting planets which carry the principle of motion within themselves. However, because it is limited to governing only the motion of parts (the planets) which remain external to their center (the sun), the solar system is merely the “first organism,” that is, merely “the organism of mechanism” (Enc. §337Z). By contrast, in organic nature, an individual is determined as “this particular” in relation to a centre of unity; this point of natural unity functionally unites its parts with the form of the self, of the subject (Enc. §337/GW 20:344.4–9). In the Lectures on the Philosophy of Nature of 1825/26 this feature is highlighted because it marks the difference between physical and organic individualization (VNat2, 169.11–14). What is organic is no longer merely an Individuum, composed by differentiated parts in which the form exhibits itself, but which can fall apart indifferently because they are mutually external, according to the determination of space: they are contiguous but not conjoined. In the organic realm we conceive the body as determining itself essentially on its own and no longer in relation to another, as we still do even in the chemical process, the last stage of “Physics” which deals with real, determined, formed, qualified and therefore “individualized” matter. In his 1821/22 Lectures on the Philosophy of Nature Hegel makes explicit that life is to be individuality as “the process of leading the members back to identity” (VNat1, 168). Through this syllogistic process of reintegration, the individual living organism acquires and preserves the form of a self. In Enc. §350Z Hegel says the mutual relation of the heavenly bodies in the solar system does not accord with their physical nature, but only accords with the nature of space and time. By contrast, the “sun” or the truly ideal subsistent centre of the animal organism is the concept as “living universality” (lebendige Allgemeinheit), which passes syllogistically through its three determinations of shape as self-relation (Gestalt): assimilation as opposition and relation to otherness, and finally genus as self-relation within the other (Enc. §352/GW 20:353). The reference to sun and sunlight in dealing with living organisms is not surprising, since light is implicitly “self-determining”, thus anticipating an aspect characteristic of the concept of “life”. In the Philosophy of Nature of 1805/06 (GW 8 108.5–8) we find a clear assessment of how and why with the physical dimension of light we reach the universal form of “life”: the key notion is the thorough co-penetration of all the parts of a transparent body (i.e. a glass, a crystal) by a unity of presence and actuality. The unity of light, however, is devoid of the form of the self; this marks the difference between merely physical and organic relations to space. On the one side, Hegel underscores (Enc. §320/GW 20:316.8–19) that light as “elementary matter” is an original unity capable of division into luminosity and darkness. On the other side, light is still a unity of space, externality and generality, which thoroughly co-penetrates all parts

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of a transparent body (i.e. a prism) in an external, simple way. In the Science of Logic, Hegel’s originally colorless light is a determinate example of pure indifferent (abstract) sameness in spatial extension, that is, of pure quantity (WL GW 21:178.23–24). Hence, its condition of unity is not yet that of “the singular [einzelne] self,” as is the case with organic nature or the self-conscious “I” at the higher level of the philosophy of spirit.36 Between the two extremes of mechanical matter and spirit, the organism is a subject with a self-developed form, since the material “parts” (Teile) exist only as members (Glieder) whose own independence has been negated and brought under the control of the living being’s identity or centre of unity. Externally, the organism merely aims to maintain its self-unity, alive within the multiplicity of the material mutual externality of nature. This prepares the conceptual basis required to explicate the living subject’s action of governing and assimilating externality, mastering the abstraction of relations of space and time.

3 Space in the Experience of Inhabiting the Earth 3.1 Animal Life and Its Space In the 1825/26 Lectures Hegel stresses that self-motion (Selbstbewegung) is the key to reassessing the significance of indifferent spatial externality within animal life, for self-motion is a singular Mittelpunkt, free from gravity. This feature belongs to the “in sich” of the animal, for the animal spontaneously determines its place (Ort). In Enc. §351 Hegel highlights that the significance of moving at “will” is to have a time freed from real externality; animals move at their own initiative, not merely in reaction to external impact.37 Together with possessing voice, which allows expressing oneself as the self-motion of vocal cords which freely vibrate from within, the animal can exhibit mastery (Hegel uses the noun Herrschaft) over the abstract ideality of space and time. In this way, systematic Nature reaches its highest point, as well as the boundary of its proper sphere. At the same time, however, in so far as Life exists only as natural Idea, throughout its existence, the individual vitality is entangled (befangen) with what is external to it as an alien singularity, and “consigned” (hingeben) to “the unreason of externality” (Enc. §248R/GW 20:238.4–6). The living being confronts an inorganic nature to which it relates as the power (Macht) over it, which it assimilates, though it may disrupt the life of the organism. Hegel conceives the process of nutrition (assimilation) to be a continuing struggle of a subjective individual to preserve itself by first mechanically taking away elements of its environment which it subjectively needs; and second, by chemically digesting and assimilating its external objectivity, positing its immediate self-identity and reproducing itself in this self-preservation (Enc. §363/GW 20:362–3). In this way, the animal is a living point of unity that, in positing itself in determinate opposition to a material nature which externally conditions its life, acquires feeling and

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sentience of itself: the sense of being an exclusive singularity in tension with an inorganic nature which stands over against it (Enc. §357/GW 20:357.4–6). Significantly, at the level of the real life of corporeal individuality in the Philosophy of Nature, the “irresistible” power of the living body’s übergreifen über sein Anderes in respect to its own inorganic nature, stated at a logical level (Enc. §219Z), does not mark the internal liberation of the organic from the inorganic, as if the power over the latter could produce a negation which fully eliminates its presence. In my view, within the real context of the philosophy of nature and spirit, the concrete significance of the Aufhebung (sublation) of the abstract negative and positive externality of space and time and of mechanical relations of juxtaposition and succession is their subordinated co-presence within determinations of higher conceptual order which can endure bearing an other within itself. The Addition to §337 shows how the inorganic and mechanical remain within the organic as its own contradiction and constitutive basis, which the living body bears within itself. This contradiction is represented by the centre of unity and its material constituents, which as such tend to revert to mechanical-chemical processes (Enc. §337Z). Note, however, that the animal organism is the “truth” of organic nature because it satisfies all the logical determinations of the Idea of Life. In §§359 and 365 of the Philosophy of Nature Hegel explains why he characterizes the animal organism in terms of “ideality” and why the enduring action of life is “absolute idealism”: in the nutritive process the organism overcomes its state of tension with its opposed external nature (appetite), negating externality and making it identical with itself. Hegel thus rejects the conception of an organism’s boundary as a closed envelope, showing it to be an open system which exchanges substances with its surroundings. From the standpoint of spatial externality, the animal stage of life presupposes, includes and integrates into a unity both the existence of an external world, the relation to another (the moment of life as external to itself, as “geological nature”), and a developed internal self-unity (an organism’s self-relation, the moment of life as internal to itself). Therefore this self-unity can be conceived as capable of preserving and maintaining itself in what it makes to be its own externality. In this way externality and self-externality are transformed into something “merely transparent, ideal and non-objective” (schlechthin durchsichtig, ideell und ungegenständlich) for the corporeality belonging to the subject (Enc. §365Z). In §368 Hegel explicitly endorses Cuvier’s view (in 1812) that not only the class finds expression in the form of each corporeal part (i.e. intestines, jaws, claws, teeth, predatory instincts for carnivorous), but also the order, the genus, the species and even the habitat (séjour) (Cuvier 1997, 217–218). Hegel comments that in this way one cognizes the significance of the intermixture (Vermischung) of organs and functions and of the singular forms of habit (Gebilden der Habitus) as the construction (Construction) of the determinate coherence (Zusammenhang) of every part of the animal type, so that the animal has been raised above and out of its particularity into its universality (in seine Allgemenheit; see Enc. §368R/GW 20:368.19–21).

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3.2 Geognosy, Physical Geography and World History: Hegel’s Speculative Deduction of Natural Spaces As remarked above, with the progessive determination of self-sufficient “parts” (Teilen) to members of an organism (Glieder), in Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature the first immediate determination of Life is the determination of its own relative and specific otherness. Otherness ceases to have the significance of an alien conditioning externality, for externality is now specified as that means through which life determines and sustains itself. Externality falls under the power of life, as the inorganic, geological nature necessary to its organic processes. Indeed, life is essentially purposive, self-mediating, self-grounding activity as subject and process that establishes its own presupposition in order to be what it is. This is why geology and physical geography, rock formations, seas and landmasses, are not considered under the heading of Physics but rather as the first moment of the Organics. Hegel thus rejects attempts to explain what he regards as a “geological organism” on the basis of mechanical relations, for these have been proven conceptually to be abstract, ideal, quantitative differences of time and space properly explicated only within finite mechanics. In the additions to §§339 and 340, Hegel praises Werner’s physical and chemical theory of the deposition of strata, according to which their origin and sequence are determined by the law of internal differentiation of essential determinations of those rock strata. Hegel dismisses as “external” any geological explanation which aims only to determine the temporal succession of the order of stratification, with primitive granite rock as the deepest strata, followed by sandstone and limestone. The order of stratification certainly allows a purely temporal, mechanical explanation, starting as it does with the conception of a series of parts existing outside and independent of one another, merey regarding their aspect as “product”. If this were the whole truth, however, the external system of the Earth in the first part of “Organics” would not be a “terrestrial organism”, but a mere aggregate of parts. On Hegel’s view, any such approach would neglect the deep meaning and spirit of the sequence (its Sinn und Geist) as an internal “organic”, conceptual bond, the inner coherence or necessary relation between these inorganic formations (Enc. §339Z). This internal connection must depend upon the Beschaffenheit, the constitutive qualitative character of these formations themselves, which governs their occurrence in time. An explanation based merely on a chronology of their production merely transforms their spatial juxtaposition into temporal succession, of no philosophical significance or interest. The particular shape and formations of the self-subsisting parts of the Earth, separated in sea and land, continents and islands, valleys and mountains, according to Hegel, belong to the Earth’s purely mechanical formation, which at first appears merely contingent and accidental and thus seems to baffle any attempt to exhibit its conceptual necessity. According to Hegel, however, there is room for a rational comprehension of the Earth’s configuration as a whole insofar as one can retrace the origin of the formations of solid landmasses and their west-to-east

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orientation from the continuous rotatory movement of ocean currents, insofar as this would afford cognizance of the division of the world into continents as the essential differentiation of a totality expressing the free rotatory movement of the Earth an ihr selbst, i.e. around its axes (Enc. §339Z). Hegel says that in general the land divides into two parts, the Old and the New Worlds. In the former, mountains are ranged west-east or south-west to north-east; by contrast, in America they run south-north, presenting an undeveloped duality38 which can be traced back to the essential feature of the poles of the magnet. This is Hegel’s philosophical background against which to deduce, according to the moments of the concept’s self-determination—simple unity, outward determination as relation to otherness, and self-reaction within the other—the immanent and necessary connection among the three great continental masses of the Old World,39 which exhibit the following full-developed diremption: 1. the undifferentiated rigidly uniform unity of the solid mass of the African uplands; 2. the breaking of that universal compact mass into the opposite Asiatic unbalanced, formless generative profusion of great valleys crossed by ample rivers, and 3. the sublation of this form of juxtaposition, into the balanced compenetration of mountains, rivers, valleys, and plains in Europe (Enc. §339Z).40 This threefold spatial division is accompanied by a corresponding local typology of human beings: Africans are torpid, their spirit is not yet awakened to consciousness; Europeans inhabit the rational or conscious region of the Earth and Asiatics are unable to master their center, living in the wild middle. What Hegel says about physical geography in the sphere of the philosophy of nature constitutes material for his inquiry into the geographical basis of world history, where he represents the idea of spirit at the stage of self-consciousness (the existing spirit of a people) as it exhibits itself in actuality (Wirlichkeit), as a series of external shapes (äusserliche Gestaltungen), generally falling in time and space into modes of natural existence: indeed, when spirit enters Dasein, it acquires the mode of finitude and hence of naturality (VPhWIntro 187). In Enc. §386, speaking of the finite subjective and objective forms of the development of Spirit (relation to itself and reality), Hegel writes that finitude means to spirit, which is the infinite idea, the “disproportion” between concept and reality, with the determination that this Unangemessenheit is its semblance within itself (das Scheinen innerhalb seiner ist). Spirit posits this inwardly, as a limit (Schranke) to itself (Enc. §386/GW 20:383.23–27). To sublate this limit is to make the concept of spirit conform to reality in the knowledge and possession of freedom. The determination of finite spirit is to linger over the various stages of this activity as semblance and to traverse them: to “found” (Vorfinden) a world as a presupposed given, and to “produce” (Erzeugen) it as one posited by spirit; this is tantamount to liberation from and within this world (Enz. §386/GW 20:383.24–384.6). Accordingly, in the spiritual sphere of world history Hegel inquires into the significance that the persistence of abstract, indifferent self-externality of space can assume within the qualitative,

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structured context of the finitude and naturality of spirit. The particular shapes of national spirits fallen auseinander, fall outside one another, since the form of naturality is the abstract determination of the Aussereinander, that is, a purely external relation that should be out of place against the background of the spiritual sphere: the universality of the ethical whole and its own individual agents. Hegel’s justification for this is that the natural context is the ground (als der Boden) on which the spirit moves (bewegt). This is why the geography of natural spaces is an essential and necessary basis (Grundlage) for the spirit of a people (VPhWIntro 187). From 1822/23 to 1830/31, Hegel lectured five times on the philosophy of history; it is worth noting the double dimension, both geographical and historical, of the development of the world spirit. As remarked earlier, the climatic and geographical aspects become fully explicit only in §548 the 1827 and 1830 Encyclopaedia, and this change has been referred to Hegel’s reading (likely in 1819) of Karl Ritter’s Die Erdkunde im Verhältnis zur Natur und zur Geschichte des Menschen, oder allgemeine, vergleichende Geographie (1817).41 This new context introduces differences in the deduction of spatial natural differences in respect to the differentiation of the continental masses of the Old World in physical geography. What appears (erscheint) in spirit as a particular stage dispalys itself also as a natural particular shape (Gestalt) that exists for itself, as a separate unit excluding others. The natural characteristics of every people which, as a nation, represents a particular stage in the development of spirit then corresponds (entspricht) to the spiritual principle in the series of spiritual shapes (VPhWIntro 188). This correspondence enriches the determinate reality of a national spirit with a double component: its subjective way of being or natural will on the one hand, and the specific external nature of its locality on the other. Philosophical cognition, however, is not concerned with the contingent and unessential features of territories, but only with the Naturtypus der Lokalität. Following the moments of the concept’s activity, in respect to land, Hegel recognizes three fundamental conceptual distinctions in the real configurations of any natural inhabited space (wherein spirit dwells) which, insofar as they are traversed by human activities, do not coincide with the speculative deduction of the continents in physical geography. They are: 1. the undifferentiated element of the uplands which are primarily the abode of nomads (great steppes and plains: Central Asia, deserts of Arabia, Paraguay, examined from the standpoint of the mechanical, restless impulses they furnish to a people’s activity); 2. the differentiated element of valley formations watered by rivers where water shapes the soil and makes it fertile, where establishing agriculture gives rise to the first centres of civilisation and internal independence (Hegel refers here to Eastern countries such as China, India and to Egypt); 3. the coastal countries, which exhibit the universal relation of land and sea within the sphere of natural determinate space and where people have developed this relation, stimulating investments, assuming risks in their ways of earning their living etc. (references are to European countries characterized by the link between river and sea: Holland, Poland, Spain, and the Rhine valley in Germany).42

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For our purpose, note that in the inhabited Earth, the natural determination of space, no longer has the significance of an extrinsic juxtaposition of parts, but it now means an environment that has an essential influence on the life of nations, giving rise to particular ways of life, of needs, of cultivation and possession of goods, stimulating courage or inducing mental narrowness, enhancing or dissolving ties with the localities where people’s lives, producing impressions on people’s temperament and natural soul. For instance, in the second moment of the transitional regions, the fertility of the soil brings the development of agriculture and thus the assessment of a cycle of satisfaction of primary needs according to the timing of the seasonal cycles; settlements and prolonged cultivation and possession give rise to social rights (property, justice, classes): these are collective relations which unify forms of human existence, replacing previous nomadic or individual forms of living. In the third division, the indeterminate element of the sea produces on us a spatial impression of limitlessness and infinity, lifting our soul beyond the narrow horizon and the settled routine induced by activity in broad river valleys, shaking any stability and exposing us to the risk of loss in earning life by maritime trades; in contrast, land binds man to the soil. The sheer quantitative alien externality of space has thus became subordinated to more complex vital relations integrated with a territory, in a philosophy of human spaces that recognizes the economic, social and political conditioning of nature upon the historical life of an organized community.

4 Space in Spirit 4.1 Space from the Natural Soul to the Phenomenality of Spirit As remarked above, when dealing with both physical geography and world history, Hegel stresses the influence of natural context on human temperaments and attitudes, pointing to relations within ourselves between the natural and the spiritual, as our immediate and mediated internal features. In the Anthropology (Enc. §406Z) the soul is defined as the wholly universal that includes differences and yet is this individual, specifically determined soul bearing within itself various determinations (which for themselves are merely general). On this account, Hegel claims that my actuality consists in all the universal determinations of the soul live and individualized within me. The Logic offers resources to fill the apparent gap between the immediate and mediated determinations of individuals. At the core of the dialectic of qualitative determinateness lies the difference between something’s own character and whatever proper “other” to which it always relates, which allows for contingency affecting any individual’s determinate being. Hegel writes: “constituted in this or that way, the something is caught up in external influences and external relationships. This external connection on which the constitution depends, and the being determined through an

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other, appear as something accidental. But it is the quality of the something to be given over to this externality and to have a constitution (Beschaffenheit).”43 In §145 of the Logic of Essence in the 1830 Encyclopaedia, dealing with “Actuality” (Wirklichkeit), Hegel considers how the exterior way in which something that has an essential, actual being first appears to consciousness is mediated through the moments of an outward contingency and an inward possibility, for: “Actuality is not just an immediate being (ein unmittelbar Seiendes); but, as the essential being (das wesentliche Sein), it is the sublation of its own immediacy, and in this way it mediates itself with itself” (Enc. §146Z). Therefore, contingent features are not nullified by an alleged reduction of the otherness involved in natural and spiritual processes to a reflex of logical necessity. Rather, Hegel claims that the contingent aspects of my being must be considered as expressions of a specific individuality (Besonderheit). Indeed, for Hegel, what truly I am comes through my inner universality or concept (essence or prius: my human rational thought), that specifies itself and immanently reveals itself in the element of my singularity (Einzelnheit). Incidentally, this same point Hegel defends in the 1807 Chapter on Reason in the Phenomenology, when examining Lavater’s physiognomy, stressing that the genuine being and essence of human inner spiritual individuality rests on his actual voluntary intentions and conduct, that is, in the nature of his free activity and not in his bodily shape. In the Anthropology this is exactly the aim of Hegel’s reappraisal of the prima facie natural characteristics differentiating human beings among themselves: difference of temperament, character, inclination, gender, race, habits are conceived in terms of different degrees and ways to signify spirit, as qualities exhibiting spirituality within the individual subject, not as features of an abstract inwardness (the “soul”), but as affecting external existence as a “second nature,” being part of the actual individual active being (Enc. §410R/GW 20:416.21–26). Similarly, Hegel introduces the Logic of Essence by noting that we often say that the main thing about people is their essence, and not what they do or how they behave or act. According to Hegel, what is right in this view is that what someone does has to be considered not in its immediacy but only as mediated “through and as manifestation of its inwardness” (durch sein Inneres und als Manifestation seines Innern: Enc. §112Z). In the section on Anthropology Hegel treats the unity of material and immaterial within the natural soul in terms of qualitative characteristics (sensation, feelings and self-feelings) which for us are bodily (natural) phenomena signifying a spiritual reality, with “habit” as a turning point enabling the individual self to forego merely immediate reactions and responses to the surrounding world. A case in point are differences among human races, which Hegel regards not as differences in our human rational essence, nor in the possibility of equal rights for all types of humans. A racial difference for him is still a “natural” difference, that is, a difference that primarily relates to the natural soul, that as such is linked to geographical differences between inhabited landmasses (Enc. §393Z). In the shape of the natural soul, spirit is still unaware of itself and unknown to itself, being immersed in natural physicality. Hegel claims that the

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physical-geographical character of the African natural space as a compact undifferentiated mass of uplands which closes its inhabitants off from the coasts returns at the anthropological level with the significance of countering the awakening of its inhabitants’ spirituality, hindering historical progress, movement or development. All the usual charges against Hegel’s racism and Eurocentrism, however, neglect how an unhistorical, undeveloped spirit, still involved in the condition of “mere nature”, highlights a contradiction within itself, according to Hegel’s philosophy, insofar as it indicates a state in which the human being’s existence does not conform its concept, as expressly stated at the outset of §57 of the Philosophy of Right (RPh GW 14.1:64.17–21). Moreover, the African peasant’s “natural” dullness of spirit is neither a biological nor a heritable feature: it leaves intact the essential possibility of foregoing merely immediate reaction and response to the surrounding world. Hegel also maintains that no one can deny to African people the aptitude to cultural emancipation: in this anthropological context he praises Haiti’s revolution (1791–1804) lead by the former Niger slave Toussaint L’Ouverture for having established a constitutional state based on Christian principles, that is, for conquering freedom after having being exposed (out of Africa) to the feeling of human’s personality and spiritual equality. At the end of the Anthropology, the self-development of the natural soul has indeed entered and passed through many different qualities: bodily, sensory, habitual, linguistic, which had demonstrably not exhausted this shape of the self, whereas the soul is in all of them. From the soul determined wholly qualitatively, in the first part of the Anthropology (where the spirit is still unfree, the soul being bound to its determinations in nature, as for racial differences), to the sentient soul which returns to itself and becomes for itself in positing ideally its determinateness of the second part of the Anthropology (through the soul’s conflict with corporeality and its victory over it, by reducing this corporeity to a sign for its expression and representation), the soul does not cease to be a human soul, present everywhere, exerting a formative action (Hineinbildung) within its corporeality (Leiblichkeit: Enc. §412Z), which is unable completely to sublate the difference between soul and body, res cogitans and res extensa. There is an irreducible, purely organic side of the body which resists the moulding power of the soul and constitutes the limit to the soul’s Hineinbildung. Hegel cautions that the soul does not “assume”, nor does it “have”, simple natural differences: rather the soul differentiates itself within itself (Enc. §402Z); it proves itself to remain the same within its qualitative alterations, not consisting in any of them: hence, they signify nothing but predicates of a subject within its judgment. The organic aspect of corporeality is expelled as something external and alien by the soul which feels this limitation to its formative power and reflects itself into itself. Through this self-differentiation, the soul separates its substantial totality and individual world from itself. The soul starts freely to exist-for-itself; it is for itself in the two sides (repulsion and attraction) of this process. As mediated by the totality of these two moments, the soul posits itself as the subjective over against its individual world (Enc. §402Z). This being-for-self of free universality is the “higher awakening” of the soul as “I” or abstract universality

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(Enc. §412/GW 20:421.5–7). As Hegel puts it: “through this reflection-in-itself (in-sich) spirit completes its liberation (Befreiung) from the form of being, gives itself that of essence, and becomes “I”” (Enc. §412Z). Through sentience, feeling, self-feeling, and habits, the natural soul takes hold and becomes aware of its own spatial extension or corporeality; it is able to distinguish, separate and distance what is bodily from itself, making it an object for a subject, a conscious “I,” thus determining itself through an activity of self-differentiation. This activity of repulsion within attraction manifests the natural soul to itself as a negative unity: both subject and object have only the appearance of being mutually independent as external beings, whereas, in ideality, each cannot be thought without the other. Therefore, in the Philosophy of Spirit’s passage from Anthropology to Phenomenology, the “I” has proven to be the primary and simplest determination of spirit which begins to be aware of itself. In the Encyclopaedia Logic Hegel presents the “I” as “the most familiar example of being-for-itself, a determinate being who exists as distinct from other determinate beings and yet related to them” (Enc. §96Z). When we say “I”, this expresses the infinite self-relation which is also negative and exclusive. Therefore, the logical or formal structure of the “I” is not the distinctive identity which merely individuates any unique thing from all others, unto itself, regardless of any relations to others. The “I” is the most familiar example of that immediate (qualitative) relation to itself merely by excluding the other from itself. In the 1831 Science of Logic, Hegel also presents the “I” as an example of Quantity: “for the ‘I’ is an absolute becoming-other, an infinite distancing or all-round repulsion that makes for the negative freedom of the being-for-itself which, however, remains absolutely simple continuity—the continuity of universality, of self-abiding-being interrupted by infinitely manifold limits, by the content of sensations, of intuition, and so forth” (SL 156–157/WL GW 21:179). To clarify the significance of space against the background of this formal qualitative (discrete, repulsive)–quantitative (continuous, attractive) structure of the “I” and within the context of the development of the natural soul to the “I”, consider the transition from the qualitative dialectic of what exists as individually determined in relation of otherness (Fürsichsein versus Sein-für-Anderes, attraction versus repulsion) to the quantitative dialectic of what exists as indifferent to determinacy. Above (§1.3) we considered the unity of presence and actuality of light as reaching the universal form of “life”, though devoid of the form of the self. A comparison with light can clarify why the “I” appears as the subjective consciousness of an independent object which stands over against it, thus constituting the phenomenon of spirit in the opening paragraph of Phenomenology in the Philosophy of Spirit (Enc. §413/GW 20:421.21–422.4). Hegel compares the “I” to light because, in order that something may become visible and appear, light manifests another (the opacity of corporeal individualization) as well as itself, and can only reveal itself by revealing that other, since nothing would be seen in total brightness (Enc. §§276–278/GW 20:277–282). However, in the addition to §381, Hegel claims that spirit does not resemble “light.” Indeed, light, as well as the “I” at the beginning of the encyclopedic

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Phenomenology, is simple, mere relationless self-identity. The “I” appears as an abstract “I”, whereas the “I”, according to its concept or in itself, is at once simple self-relation as well as unconditional relation to another (schlechtin Beziehung auf Anderes; Enc. §143Z). Both light and “I”, however, exhibit distinction or other-relatedness within themselves as sublated: in the 1823/24 philosophy of nature, Hegel remarks that “blue and green,” because they are diverse, seem to exist independently of one another, yet they cannot be divided, like acid and base: each of them does not possess merely its own being, but, at the same time, also the being of the other (GVNat, 90). To sum up: at the outset of the Encyclopaedia Phenomenology, the “I” is posited contrary to its concept, that of being the unity of the continuum and the discrete, which in turn integrates, respectively, the attraction and repulsion of Quality and the negation and reality of the Determinate Being (contained in the beginning of thought with Pure Being as equally and at the same time Nothing). Therefore it is logically necessary that the human “I” does not remain within the immediacy of what is natural, and attains its proper being-for-self in relation to what constitutes its inward and outward limits; for it is constitutively always beyond its finitude, unlike inorganic natural things which reveal themselves only to another, and attain nothing but a being-for-other, demonstrating no independence in respect to space. The crucial phenomenological passage from “meinen”, opinion, about what is in “my” inward being in Sense Certainty and the appropriation of my inward and outer being (Sein) in the sphere of Reason, through the essential mediation of the free self-consciousness, is a passage where the “I” subjectively “infects” (vergiftet) and “transforms” (verklärt) reality in thinking. However, it does not identify immediately with all reality: this would mean to annihilate the limit to its spiritual determined identity constituted by otherness and externality. To “pass through”, hindurchziehen, is different from occupying the space of immediate externality in order to refer to oneself the phenomenal manifestations of other determinate beings. Rather, the subject acquires objectivity by freely making itself into what it is according to its logical concept, while the object in space acquires subjectivity insofar as its own intrinsic universality is recognized and posited by the intellective and rational consciousness in our scientific approach to nature. Objectivity is spiritualized when the external objects have their externality posited ideally in human knowing, so that we can be freely at home in their own determinate existence (as their Bestehen: subsistence or persistence, what is thought as permanent in their transitoriness). We can be really with ourselves in another when we establish in thought a relation between the concrete subsistence of natural things (the positive side stated in “Consciousness”) and the negation of it (stated in “Self-Consciousness”). As Hegel says in Enc. §408Z: When I have raised myself to rational thinking, I am not only a subjective identity of the subjective and the objective in that I am to myself as my confronting object (mir gegenstandlich), but I have also disengaged from this identity by setting it over against myself as an actual objectivity.

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Notes 1. “Die erste oder unmittelbare Bestimmung der Natur ist die abstracte Allgemenheit ihres Aussersichseyns, ––dessen vermittungslose Gleichgültigkeit, der Raum” (Enc. GW 20:243.15–17). All English translations are mine, unless otherwise stated. 2. By the expression, “the idea-for-itself,” Hegel means that at the end of the Science of Logic the idea is manifest to itself, knows itself, as the form-unity of the objective and subjective thought-determinations. 3. “Die Natur Existenzen oder individuelle Existenzen als Qualität haben die Grundform der Selbstständigkeit, der Ausserlichkeit, des Auseinanderseins, der Gleichgültigkeit gegen einander. Pflanze, Blaum, Planet und Sonne bestehen nebeneinander” (GVNat, 90). 4. “Die Natur hat zunächst das Aussehen, gegenüber zu sein dem Geist” (VNat 2, 22). 5. “Das Sein der Natur ist nur abstrakt … es ist nur ein Gesetztes, diess ist die Unmittelbarkeit …. Das Unmittelbare hat nicht das Konkrete in sich, es is nur die abstrakte Beziehung auf sich und diess ist das Sein” (GVNat 88). 6. In 1823/24 Hegel characterizes this initial determination we have of nature as an objective world firmly standing in perennial contrast to us, against which we fight; see GVNat 69: “Die erste Bestimmung die wir hatten war die, die Natur sei ein Anderes gegen uns, ein Jenseits, ein Festes, Absolutes perennirend gegen uns, wir seien im Kampf mit der objektiven Welt”. 7. In Enc. §381Z Hegel defines the basic element of spirit’s conscious activity as “pure self-knowledge (Selbsterkennen) in absolute being-other (Anderssein)”, or as the movement of leading back or negating that which is (merely) external into a simple self-relation. Spirit truly actualizes itself by constituting the essence or substantial basis of my existing singularity as universal individuality. In the spiritual element, contrary to the natural element, the concept has a free existence. 8. Ibidem: “Zur Vermittelung gehört ein Verdoppeltes, Zweiheit und Rückkehr daraus in sich … Man muss aber nicht glauben dass der Begriff nur Vermittelung sei, er ist ebenso auch Aufhebung der Vermittelung”. 9. See Pinkard (2012, 23). 10. “[W]as ich vor mir habe, ist nur das einzelne Rot, dieses Bestimmte, das aber auch [die] Form der Allgemenheit hat, diese gehört auch mir an” (VL 4.54–56). 11. Haldar argues that Hegel’s approach is based on Kant’s following insight: “If, then, the representation of objects in time and space, as Kant shows, is possible only through the synthetic act of putting them and their parts together, perception and conception, time and space and the categories must be viewed as the correlatives of and inseparable from each other” (Haldar 1932, 522). Dahlstrom stresses Hegel’s ontological and critical reassessment of Kant’s distinction in the third Critique between the “analytic-universal” of the finite discursive human intellect and the “spontaneous intuition” of the divine intellect, grasping the whole in which all the parts are contained. For Hegel, the reality of reason is the identity of the universal of the intellect and the particular of intuition in terms of an “unfolding, necessary concretization,” as instantiated by organic entities in themselves (Dahlstrom 1998, 172–177). 12. See VNat2 12–13, where Hegel mentions force, light and matter as categories or thought determinations of the understanding (Verstand) which represent their objects as compounds of self-standing parts, subject to analytical division. 13. “[N]ur der Geist denkt den Begriff” (UVNat 19). 14. For a clear assessment of what does it mean to claim that spirit thinks life rationally, that rational thinking is a living activity, and that life is immediate reason, see VNat1 7–8. See also: “Das sich in sich Zusammenfassende, sich in sich Schliessende ist die Vernunft und das Leben” (ibid., 7). 15. “Begriff is also diese reine unendliche Tätigkeit, das Pulsieren des Allgemeinen, welches diese abstrakte Allgemeinheit negiert und sich-bestimmt” (UVNat 10).

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16. See the extensive account of Hegel’s logical constitution of the category of “something” and the derivation of “otherness” in Houlgate (2006, 312–330). 17. See the phenomenological characterization of the certainty and truth of reason observing nature in PhG GW 9:136.30–137.17. According to Wolff (1999, 19), for Hegel “all individual things, due to their determinateness against each other, relate negatively to themselves. Negativity as self-relation both constitutes and dissolves contradiction”. 18. “Die Natur ist das Anderssein. Anderes ist eine Negation, die relativ ist, das Andere des Geistes. Diese Relativität selbst macht aber die Bestimmtheit aus, die ihr zukommt; was sie für den Geist ist, das ist sie” (VNat2 25). See also a parallel text in UVNat 16. 19. See VNat2 18.493–494: “Das spekulative Denken erkennt in einem sein Anderes”. 20. Note that Hegel presents the “I” as the most familiar example of being manifest to oneself (Enc. §96Z), by saying that “we know ourselves as determinate beings who are there (daseiend), both distinct from other determinate beings and yet related (bezogen) to them”. See also UVNat 14. 21. This feature explains some theological expressions such as the definition of nature as the Abfall of the idea, with references to Jacob Böhme and Luciferus; see GVNat 85 and 87. 22. On the concept as master (Meister) see GVNat 90. 23. “Die Natur ist das Andere der Idee, nicht das relativ Andere, sondern an sich selbst das Andere, Aeusserliche. Die Idee ist in der Natur als begrifflose, als subjektlose, als Sein überhaupt” (GVNat 87). 24. De Vries notes that “Hegel seems to take the truths of geometry to be conceptual truths that unpack assumptions made at the beginning of the inquiry, so he does not explain the apriority of mathematical knowledge by reference to the special role of intuition in the constitution of mathematics. It is the unfolding of a specific form of self-externality that applies universally to finite things” (de Vries 2016, 217–218). 25. “Der Unterschied ist nur als Unterscheidbarkeit” (VNat2 36). 26. “Die Zeit ist die Negativität des Aussersichseins; die Negation dieser Negation ist aber noch ganz das Abstrakte, dies Ideelle, Abstraktion des Sinnlichen, wie es in der Form des Seins der Raum, in der Form des Nichtseins die Zeit [ist]” (VNat2 42). 27. According to Michael Wolff, the “scandal” of Hegel’s philosophy is the view that genuine contradictory judgments need not to be false (Wolff 1999, 19), for they designate something objective, as in the example of motion as “extant contradiction” (ibid., 6). 28. It is worth recalling that in §135 of his 1754 De continuitatis lege, Roger Joseph Boscovich names the fundamental constituents of matter with six interchangeable terms: punctum, punctum materiae, particula, particula materiae, prima particulum materiae, elementum simplex (Ullmaier 2005, 49).  In section 9 of the second edition (1763) of his Theoria philosophiae naturalis redacta ad unicam legem virium in natura existentium, he states that any two points of matter are determined (bina quaecunque materiae puncta determinari) to approach one another at some distance (attractive force) and in an equal degree recede from one another at other distances (repulsive force). Boscovich explains that he uses the term “force” to express ipsam determinationem and not the mode of action of the points (Jammer 1957, 177). 29. See Ferrini (1998). 30. Gies (1982, 11–12). 31. Enz. 1827 and Enz. 1830 §261: “Dies Vergehen und Sich-Wiedererzeugen des Raums in Zeit und der Zeit in Raum, dass die Zeit sich Räumlich als Ort, aber diese gleichgültige räumlichkeit ebenso unmittelbar zeitlich gesetzt wird – ist die Bewegung.” 32. See Ferrini (2020, forthcoming). 33. See Rossi (1992, 178–186). According to Rossi, only in the Berlin period does Hegel fully acknowledge the internal link between historical events and their geographical setting, recognizing that the external character of the historical process must be defined not only temporally but also spatially. Rossi contends that this acknowledgment is prompted by Hegel’s reading (likely in 1819) of Karl Ritter’s Die Erdkunde im Verhältnis zur Natur und zur Geschichte des Menschen, oder allgemeine, vergleichende Geographie (1817).

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34. See Ferrini (1998, 286–294). 35. VNat2 61: “Die Schwere ist eine qualitative Bestimmung, wo dieser quantitative Unterschied keinen Sinn mehr hat, der nur eintritt bei der Vergleichung verschiedener Körper”. 36. However, since the spectrum of colors that light displays results from its inner principle of differentiating itself when it thoroughly permeates the material structure of the body it illuminates (i.e. the prism; see Gies 1982, 11–12), light, though simple, is no longer the kind of unity that governs the motion of parts that remain external to their center, as in Mechanics of parts which remain to their center, as in Mechanics. 37. See de Vries (2016, 223–224): “Animals orient themselves in a spatio-temporal environment; they find food, shelter and mates, often evade predators, and they have some sense of the boundaries between themselves and the world around them […]. In intuitions humans confront the world via a determinate, even if abstract, form of sensibility, one that enables them to measure space and time and recognize in them the highly determinate forms of geometry and chronometry. The forms in which space and time are available to animals, we have to think, are less determinate: near and far, big and small, just happened and something back, mere directionality. These are the kinds of relations available to an animal. They are tied closely to the practical process of irritability”. 38. Note that in Hegel’s view, this speculative characteristic makes America a land to be developed, the land of becoming and future: “So ist dieses Land jetzt ein Land des Werdens, der Zukunft; das uns daher noch nicht angeht” (VPhW 96.552–553). 39. “Diese Unterschiede sind notwendig, da sie dem Begriff des Gedanken entsprechen. Diese drei Teile sind also in wesentlichem Verhältnis und machen eine verständige Totalität aus” (VPhW 96.557–560). 40. See also the account of this further threefold differentiation in VPhW 97.587–609. 41. See Rossi (1992, 186–194), and above, note 33. 42. See VPhWIntro 192–197; LPWHIntro 156–161. 43. SL, 6. See the entry “Beschaffenheit” in Hegel’s Encyclopedia Logic, “Notes to the Glossary,” 348: “Beshaffenheit means the state or condition of a thing, its disposition or nature, but also the constitution—of a body, for example. It expresses the fact of being determined, not just in-itself, but also outwardly. Nevertheless, this outward determination is itself a part of a thing’s own, immanent determination. The word ‘constitution’ best expresses this complex notion.”

Bibliography Cuvier, George. 1997. “Preliminary Discourse.” In Fossil, Bones and Geological Catastrophes. New Translations & Interpretations of the Primary Texts by Martin J. S. Rudwick. Chicago and London: The University of Chicago Press. Dahlstrom, Daniel O. 1998. “Hegel’s Appropriation of Kant’s Account of Teleology in Nature.” In Hegel and the Philosophy of Nature, edited by S. Houlgate, 167–188. Albany: State University of New York Press. de Vries, Willem A. 2016. “Hegel’s Account of Space and Time.” In Hegel’s Philosophical Psychology, edited by S. Herrmann-Sinai and L. Ziglioli, 214–227. New York and London: Routledge. Ferrini, Cinzia. 1998. “Framing Hypotheses: Numbers in nature and the Logic of Measure in the Development of Hegel’s System.” In Hegel and the Philosophy of Nature, edited by S. Houlgate, 283–310. Albany: State University of New York Press. Ferrini, Cinzia. 2020. “Hegel’s Revisions of the Logic of Being: A Controversial Issue.” Rivista di Storia della Filosofia 1.2.

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Gies, Manfred. 1982. G.W.F. Hegel, Naturphilosophie. Die Vorlesung von 1819/20 [Manuscript Berhardy], edited by M. Gies. Napoli: Bibliopolis. Haldar, Hiralal. 1932. “Space and Time in Hegel’s Philosophy.” The Monist XLII: 520–532. Houlgate, Stephen. 2006. The Opening of Hegel’s Logic: From Being to Infinity. West Lafayette, IN: Purdue University Press. Jammer, Max. 1957. Concepts of Force: A Study in the Foundations of Dynamics. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pinkard, Terry. 2012. Hegel’s Naturalism: Mind, Nature, and the Final Ends of Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Rossi, Pietro. 1992. “La storia universale e il suo quadro geografico.” In Hegel. Guida storica e critica, edited by P. Rossi, 169–206. Roma-Bari: Laterza. Ullmaier, Hans. 2005. Puncta, particulae et phaenomena. Roger Joseph Boscovich und seine Naturphilosophie. Hannover-Laatzen: Wehrhahn Verlag. Wolff, Michael. 1999. “On Hegel’s Doctrine of Contradiction.” The Owl of Minerva 31 (1): 1–22.

Part V

Philosophy of Spirit

Chapter 14

Embodied Cognition, Habit, and Natural Agency in Hegel’s Anthropology Italo Testa

This chapter discusses the central role of the notion of “habit” (Gewohnheit) in Hegel’s theory of “embodiment” (Verleiblichung). The aim is to show that the philosophical outcome of the Anthropology is that habit, understood as a sensorimotor life form, is not only an enabling condition for there to be mindedness, but is more strongly an ontological constitutive condition of all its levels of manifestation. Moreover, I will argue that Hegel’s approach somehow makes a model of embodied cognition available, which offers a unified account of the three main senses of embodiment understood as both a physiological, a functional, and a phenomenological process. In this sense, Hegel’s approach to habit can make a useful contribution to the contemporary debate on embodiment in philosophy of mind, the cognitive sciences, and action theory. In fact, for a long time “habit” in twentieth century philosophy and science has been mostly read in a negative way and identified with mechanical and repetitive routine (see Camic 1986). With the advent of informational and computational theory, which emerged as a reaction to behaviorism, the notion of “mental representation” became the fundamental theoretical concept in the approach to mindedness and informed the model of classical cognitive science. The criticism of the internalist, mentalist and representationalist presuppositions of classical cognitive science by the 4E (embodied, embedded, extended, and enactive) cognition paradigm (Menary 2010), has given rise to a reappraisal of the notion of habit as an alternative, fundamental theoretical concept in the approach to mindedness (Barandiaran and Di Paolo 2014). The reconstruction of Hegel’s approach is particularly relevant here and can fruitfully contribute to this discussion. It offers a model that not only assigns to habit a positive constitutive role in the formation of embodied human mindedness but which also overcomes the dualism between habitual motor routine and intentional activities—the dualism that is currently prevalent in cognitive sciences and in action theory—and allows for some sense of natural agency as belonging to

I. Testa (*)  University of Parma, Parma, Italy e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 M. F. Bykova and K. R. Westphal (eds.), The Palgrave Hegel Handbook, Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26597-7_14

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animal life. Furthermore, Hegel’s approach cuts across the great divide between associationist and holistic approaches to habit that has for a long time dominated the philosophical debate on habit and still shapes the current opposition between classical cognitive science and embodied cognitive science.

1 Ontology of Living Activity The key question of Hegel’s Anthropology, which since the 1817 edition of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences constitutes the first subsection of his Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, is the relation between mindedness and embodiment.1 In his approach to embodied mind Hegel develops a style of interdisciplinary research, at the crossroads between animal and human physiology, empirical psychology, psychopathology, ethnography, neurosciences, and philosophy of mind. “Spirit” (Geist), the encompassing notion that Hegel in his system uses to indicate mindedness and its manifestation in natural and cultural phenomena at the individual, collective, and institutional level, is analyzed here as “soul or natural mind” (Enc. §387/GW 20), that is, as it emerges from and is manifested in the natural life of organic living beings. More specifically, Hegel’s Anthropology expounds the ontological structure of those beings that can manifest some form of natural mindedness, and analyzes the embodied cognitive processes that occur within it. Notwithstanding its title, Hegel’s Anthropology does not only concern human life, but encompasses forms of embodied activity shared with non-human animal life, and presupposed by minded activities of human infants, impaired adults, as well as mature and fully competent rational beings. In his Anthropology, Hegel frames minded activity within an ontological account of animal life as an individuated phenomenon that manifests an (a) embodied, (b) self-organized, and (c) interactive activity. Let us consider each of these three separately

1.1 Embodiment Organic bodiliness (Leiblichkeit) is connected with the idea that the body “constitutes my individual life” (Enc. §410Z/GW 20/Enc. 3, 135), that is, it is connected to the individuated character of natural living beings. Bodiliness is not only a necessary condition for the individuation of animal living beings to occur but, as Hegel makes it clear in the 1822 Summer Semester’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit recorded by Heinrich Gustav Hotho, is a part of what individuated minded activity is (“Spirit as individual is bodily [leiblich],” VPhSG GW 25.1:86). Bodiliness is a “necessary condition” that is constitutive of Spirit as such (including, then, its supra individual manifestations).2 The corporeal constitution of living beings is deployed in the Anthropology as a dynamic process: a “system of embodiment” (Enc. §401/GW 20/Enc. 3, 73) that

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encompasses both localized anatomical parts and physiological processes of the body, and the body as an integrated whole. The organic individual body in this sense is presupposed by embodiment (Enc. § 401Z/GW 20/Enc. 3, 78) but not identical with it, since the embodiment process, as we shall see, is a dynamic coupling between organisms and their environment. It can result in forms of incorporation that objectify themselves beyond the limits of the individual corporeal body (for instance, in features of the natural and social environment, in other physical and individual bodies).

1.2 Self-Organization Life’s activity is modeled by Hegel as a self-organizing process, a dialectical relation of identity and difference to their environment. Natural living beings maintain themselves through an inner-outer distinction (Pinkard 2012, 26–28): they relate themselves to an external world they stand in opposition to, but which, through their own activity, can come to be part of their autotelic process of maintenance, reproduction, and growth. Such a homeostatic dynamic coupling between organisms and their environment is analyzed by Hegel as a dialectical relation between the intertwined processes of inwardization and externalization, which are in their turn analyzed as two correlated aspects of the process of embodiment (Enc. §401/GW 20). External “sensation [Empfindung]” is meant here to express the inward direction of the process of embodiment where aspects of the physical world, and of their contact with the sensory organs, modify the individual’s organic body’s internal physiological processes and come to be incorporated in its material and formal constitution. Whereas internal sensation (which Hegel will also call “feeling [Gefühl]”) describes the outward process of embodiment in so far as it results from the individual body’s spontaneous activity and is incorporated in its external manifestation as well as in modifications of the physical and organic environment it interacts with. What we may label as “inwardizing” and “externalizing embodiment” are dialectically intertwined: they do not stand in a zero sum relation but rather are mutually constitutive in the self-organizing process of living beings. As such corporeal living beings instantiate a natural form of the ontological structure of subjectivity (“through this immediate reflectedness into itself and out of its externality, the animal is subjectivity that is for itself and has sensations,” Enc. §381Z/Enc. 3, 11), understood as a self-regulatory process which maintains itself through an ­inner-outer distinction. It is worth noticing that embodying inwardization corresponds to that appropriative moment of “assimilation” or integration of the external that Hegel also calls “idealization” or “ideality of mind,” and which is said to be a property of natural beings (Enc. §381Z/Enc. 3, 12). Idealization, then, when read in the course of embodiment, and in its dialectical relation with externalization, rather than expressing spirit’s departure from nature, as some interpreters have argued (see McCumber 1990; Ferrarin 2001, 237–238), manifests rather the plasticity of embodied living beings, that is their malleability by and adaptability to the environment which surrounds them. And if, on the other hand, we understand externalizing embodiment in its dialectical relation with the moment of

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inwardization, we can realize that here we find the first natural root and manifestation of that process of objectification which plays a constitutive role for Hegel’s understanding of the social and historical world. In this sense Hegel, as we shall see, interprets habit as a homeostatic appropriative moment: habit is a detached form of embodiment, which consists of a re-externalization of embodiment and thus manifests an objectifying character.3 This makes it clear why habit is a turning point of the Anthropology: the ontological process of embodying objectification is exactly that which connects subjective and objective spirit and allows for habit to play a crucial role in both domains.4

1.3 Interaction Life’s activity is a relational process not only because it involves a dynamic coupling with its environment, but more specifically because it is always the manifestation of a natural genus or species (Gattung), which we could here translate with the term “life form.” Individual life activities are in this sense always actualizations of a natural life form and of its potentialities and can be understood in their determinacy and meaning only in this wider context. For instance, the way an individual living being breathes, moves, and mates cannot be understood apart from the way such activities are typically realized in its life form (see Thompson 2008). The ontological relational character of life’s activity is more extended than that in the Anthropology and is specifically connected with the role that embodied reciprocal interaction between members of the same life form plays for their individuation. Hegel first underlines that individual activities always instantiate a life form in an embodied individual manner. The way they realize the universal life form is somehow mediated by their individual self-organizing process, i.e. by their subjectivity and the forms of self-relation it implements (ranging from a lower degree of individuated realization to be found in pre-reflectively self-aware non-human life forms to a higher degree in human life forms mediated by reflective consciousness, language and cultural institutions). Secondly, in the Anthropology Hegel devotes specific attention to forms of embodied interaction that in the course of the ages of life (Enc. §§396–397/GW 20) play a decisive role in the process of organic growth, maintenance, and reproduction of living organisms. Instances of these processes of embodied interaction are the mother-child primary interaction in the mother’s womb and in the early years (see also §405); the imitative character of the learning process of Bildung that leads to habit formation understood as a process that already happens at the animal level (see Enc. §396R/Enc. 3, 53–54); immediate communicative interaction between animals and humans and their pathological forms (what Hegel calls “magical relationship” and “animal magnetism,” cf. Enc. §§405–406). A further instance of these processes of embodied interaction is sexual reproduction understood as the “highest point of living nature” (Enc. §381Z/Enc. 3, 11; see also §397). For living animals, even though they are not yet aware of it in a conscious manner, already have a pre-reflective sentient (self-)relation to the interactive recognitive structure of their form of life.

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2 Embodied Cognition While analyzing the ontological structure of animal living beings, Hegel’s Anthropology develops an account of those forms of natural mindedness that can be exhibited by it. The first section of the Anthropology, “The Natural Soul” (§§391–402), treats the notion of soul, understood in Aristotelian terms as formed life’s activity, and is subdivided into the analysis of “Natural qualities” (§§392–395), “Natural alterations” (§§396–398), and “Sensation” (§§399–402). Natural qualities are those determinations of life’s activity that are related to aspects of planetary life such as climates, seasons, geographies, races and how they are embodied in the corporeal structure and modes of life of different people, and individuated in the determinacy of different individual subjects that manifest varying physiognomy, temperament, dispositions and idiosyncrasies. Natural alternations are those ­psycho-physical changes (such as birth, growth, sexual reproduction, and death) that occur within the individual cycle of life in the course of ages, and those alternating states (such as awakening and sleep) that occur in the course of the day. Finally, in the analysis of “sensation [Empfindung]” individual living beings are considered as sentient self-organizing beings, that is, as self-organizing individual beings, the inner-outer distinction through which they maintain themselves is mediated by their sensory organs and embodied in their psycho-physical states. As one can see, while considering minded activity as an actualization of a life form, Hegel first adopts in the “Natural Soul” section a broad notion of minded or ensouled activity, which encompasses a vast horizon of not specifically cognitive psychophysical natural activities of living beings. Still, the dialectical exposition, culminating in the analysis of sensation, and leading to the next section (§§403–410), whose subject is “Feeling [Gefühl],” understood as the integrated character of sensations in an individual living whole, progressively focuses on those aspects of mindedness that have to do with what we might call the lower threshold of cognition. The latter concerns bodily processes that—such as sensation and feeling—have a cognitive aspect, which manifests itself in an unconscious or preconscious manner, not yet involving explicit consciousness and will. In this sense one can say that since the analysis of sensation and of feeling plays such a central role in the conceptual structure of the Anthropology, the latter can be understood as being fundamentally concerned with what is called today “embodied cognition” (Shapiro 2014). Contrary to classical cognitive sciences and its internalist, representational, and mental approach to cognition, the embodied cognition paradigm assumes that “cognition depends upon the kinds of experience that come from having a body with various sensorimotor capacities, and … that these individual sensorimotor capacities are themselves embedded in a more encompassing biological, psychological, and cultural context” (Varela et al. 1992, 173). And in fact Hegel first develops an embodied approach to cognition in the Anthropology while analyzing ensouled bodily activity as sensation and feeling,

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and later thematizes (in the Phenomenology and in the Psychology) its embeddedness in psychological and cultural contexts. Let us now have a closer look at the thesis that Hegel’s Anthropology is connected with cognition. It is true that at first sight sensations, if taken alone, are presented as physiological states of the body that are connected with the apprehension of singular elements and that as such seem rather like precognitive states, not being characterized as having a determinate cognitive content (Enc. §400/GW 20). Still, Hegel’s approach here is a dynamic one, and is focused not on representational contentful states (and the justificatory role they may play) but rather on processes, and namely on the way sensations are a part of a dynamic system of inward-outward embodiment (§401). One can say that Hegel is primarily concerned here with cognitive activities as episodes of embodied processes rather than with cognitive states as episodes that play a justificatory role. Besides, feeling or emotional feeling, the next determination in Hegel’s dialectical analysis, is first introduced as expressing the functional integration of single sensations in a “totality of sensations” (Enc. §402/GW 20, see on this de Vries 1988, 72–73). Feelings are thus sensations considered for the role they play in the architecture of a living cognitive system. Once we understand that Hegel’s Anthropology is connected with the analysis of cognitive processes, then which are the structural features of the latter to be explained? Here the ontological account of individuated animal life can offer us a guiding thread, since minded activity as cognition is an instantiation of life’s activity. Hence, cognition will have to be treated as being (a) embodied, (b) ­self-organizing, and (c) interactive.5 More generally, in the analysis of cognition, we will have to consider it as an activity (Tätikgkeit), understood as a developing process of organism/environment interaction within a life form. This should not be misinterpreted as meaning that cognition is always active: life’s dynamic activity cuts across the opposition between passive and active, and for instance “feeling,” when first introduced, is initially characterized as an episode of “passive” organization, of passive synthesis of the manifold of sensations (Enc. §405/GW 20). We have already seen how sensation is deployed by Hegel as a bodily determination that results from the intertwinement of inwardizing and externalizing embodiment. Embodied sensory cognition is then understood as an enactive process that arises out of a dynamic interaction between the acting organism and its environment. Rather than consisting in a merely passive representational process whereby information is received and a pre-given world is represented by a pregiven mind—the prevalent model in the representationalist tradition and in classical cognitive sciences—cognition would be a process of enactment of a world and a mind together on the basis of the history of their interdependence.6 This would be a transformational process, where mind and world are modified (enacted) by their dynamic interaction—by the inwardizing and externalizing process—rather than a mere informational process where a given world is represented by an already constituted mind. The enactive process of sensation expresses the structure of animal subjectivity as a cognitive system (“sensation is just the omnipresence

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of the unity of the animal in all its members,” Enc. §381Z/GW 20/Enc. 3, 11), an autopoietic process that is “its cause and effect.” It is important here to realize that the deployment of the integration of the different senses in the living whole of the individual body is analyzed by Hegel as a process of sensorimotor coordination. The integration of sensations into feeling results in the formation of bodily schemas of motor action, understood as consolidated patterned structures of sensations. This is exactly the role that habit as an embodied sensorimotor life form plays within the “Feeling Soul” section of the Anthropology. Before coming to the crucial point of habit formation, let us concentrate on some other important features of the analysis of embodied cognitive processes that Hegel offers us. First, Hegel’s Anthropology, and in particular his analysis of feeling as an integrated system of sensations, deals with minded phenomena that can be labeled as unconscious or subconscious—dream and magnetic somnambulism (Enc. §406)—and as pathological disintegration of conscious activity— derangement (Enc. §408). When it analyzes healthy, non-pathological processes, it also addresses cognitive activities that may happen (even if not necessarily, because in some cases they can be consciously recovered) below the level of reflective conscious activity and voluntary control (“Sensation is the form in which the mind weaves its somber web in its unconscious and unintellectual activity” Enc. §400/Enc. 3, 69). Those are the kind of activities that nowadays could be called the “cognitive unconscious” (see Lakoff and Johnson 1999, 9). Secondly, the embodied cognitive processes analyzed in the Anthropology are fundamentally pre-representational (and pre-linguistic) ones (see de Vries 1988, 81; Ikäheimo 2000, 29), since here (Enc. §404/GW 20) the inner-outer distinction is not yet demarcated as the differentiation of a subject from an object within consciousness that will first be introduced in the Phenomenology subsection of Subjective Spirit. Hence, representations, which will be analyzed as contentful states in the Psychology subsection of Subjective Spirit that follow the Phenomenology, do not play a cognitive role in mediating the enactive interaction between living individuals and their environment. And thirdly, the sort of preconscious cognitive minded activity analyzed in feeling as a system of sensation realizes a form of organized structure, some sort of sensory synthesis of the manifold, which is not yet or not essentially mediated by upper level conceptual categories.

3 Habit as Sensorimotor Life Form The second section of the Anthropology, “The feeling soul,” is articulated in the 1830 edition of the Encyclopaedia in three parts, “The Feeling Soul in its Immediacy” (§§403–406), “Self-Feeling” (§§407–408), and “Habit” (§§409–410), and followed by the section on the “Actual Soul” (§§411–412), where the structures analyzed in the Anthropology are deployed in their more accomplished concrete actualization. Once functionally integrated in a living unity, sensations don’t just affect the physical body in its single parts, but are rather sensed as affecting

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the totality of the living individual. This “appropriation” or “idealization” manifests the subjectivity of sensation and corresponds to the notion of “feeling” (§403), which expresses the way in which sensations are not just registered in discrete bodily states, but are felt as affecting the whole individual. Feeling is then analyzed as a qualitative emotional or proto-emotional state (Howard 2013) of the embodied living being rather than as a form of intentional conscious awareness of something (Enc. §404/GW 20). This does not mean that feelings are not capable of eventually bearing explicit cognitive content. But rather than their aboutness, what is relevant here is that sensations as feelings realize some form of bodily ­self-relation (“what is differentiated from it is not yet an external object, as in consciousness, but only the determinations of its sentient totality,” Enc. §404/Enc. 3, 88) that in animal life is first instantiated in a passive way (Enc.§405). That is why the subsequent moment in its conceptual development is “self-feeling [Selbstgefühl].” The system of sensations is an expression of animal subjectivity that actualizes some form of sensory mediated self-relation. The self-­regulatory ontological structure of subjectivity is then manifested here as an embodied cognitive process that results in some form of proprioception, of non-objective awareness. It is worth noticing that, as is nowadays very often the case in cognitive sciences and philosophy of mind, the modeling of proprioceptive self-awareness is backed by an analysis of its pathological manifestations (such as somnambulism, and forms of derangement). Besides, the notion of embodied self-feeling further contributes to the analysis of the ontological individuation of living beings, since it accounts not only for the fact that the Gattung is necessarily actualized by a multiplicity of individuals (the individual bearers of that form of life), but also for the fact that these individuals actualize their Gattung in an individualized manner. Such an individualized manner of the actualization of Gattung in a multiplicity of individuals is expressed by the fact that the dynamic self-organization of living individuals inevitably involves implicit self-awareness of their individuality. In this sense, Hegel in the 1827–1828 winter semester’s lectures on the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit recorded by Johann Eduard Erdmann, said that “feeling is the most particularized uniqueness of the subject” (VGeist 69–70/LPS 112). Here it must be added that the individuating role of feeling self-relation is not disjointed from its interactive character. Hegel first introduces self-feeling (Enc. §405R/GW 20) as passively instantiated within the context of the child-mother interaction in the womb and in the early years, and within the context of other forms of normal and abnormal communicative interaction between non human and human animals. Moreover, self-feeling is considered as something that can be trained and thus modified through our formative interaction with other living beings. Selffeeling must then be understood as taking place within a process of habit formation. It is in this sense that Hegel frames habit as a “mechanism of self-feeling” (Enc. §410R). According to Hegel, habit formation reshapes the self-referential structure already implicit in particular feelings and gives to it a higher degree of universality, where such a self-relation is exhibited as a “simple relation of ideality to

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itself” or “a universality that is for itself” (Enc. §409). Compared with the singular character of simple sensation, and the particular character of feelings in which the living being is immersed, habit exhibits an organization which has a form of generality, since habits are not single acts but rather dispositions to act in certain ways given certain conditions.7 This is the expression of the process of s­ elf-organization of subjective living beings, and in this sense habits are self-referential general structures insofar as they are organized, standing dispositions for the ­self-development of living beings. The self-referential structure of habits is itself a form of bodily self-relation, the “abstract being-for-self of the soul in its bodiliness” (Enc. §409/GW 20). Yet what is relevant here is that with habit, embodiment takes a universal form. Habit can be qualified as a form of detached embodiment, insofar as on the one hand in habitual behavior we keep a distance from the immediacy of singular sensations and particular feelings and the forms of embodiment connected with them. As Hegel writes, “this particular being of the soul is the moment of its bodiliness: here it breaks with this bodiliness, distinguishing it from itself as its simple being and becomes the ideal, subjective substantiality of its bodiliness” (§409). Habit then “breaks with this bodiliness” insofar as it overcomes the particularity of the embodiment of sensitive feeling. But on the other hand, habit is itself a form of embodiment (“the subjective substantiality of its bodiliness”) which now expresses itself in a bodily capacity of detachment,8 of keeping a distance, which has a general form, since through habitual dispositions we can react in similar ways to different singular sensory inputs. In this sense habit “liberates us from sensations” (Enc. §410R/Enc. 3, 131) and feelings not because by becoming habituated we cease to be sentient beings, but rather because the form of habit expresses the integration of particular clusters of sensations into self-organized general patterns. The kind of self-relation manifested in habits is moreover understood as some form of pre-reflective bodily awareness, which is “unconscious but the foundation [Grundlage] of consciousness” (Enc. §409R/Enc. 3, 130–131). Here Hegel restates again the idea that there is a form of proprioception that precedes the intentional structure of objective consciousness and is the basis on which the latter can be posited. But what does this mean? In which sense does Hegel’s analysis of habit give us a clue on how to interpret this? Once intentional consciousness and reflective awareness are achieved, this does not mean that forms of pre-reflective awareness cease to be there. This is the case not only because we continue to be embodied sentient beings, but also because even reflective consciousness can take a habitual form. Hegel frequently refers to intellectual habits, for instance to the habit of “thinking” (Enc. §410R), and in this sense, it can be legitimate to use here Dewey’s notion of “reflective habits” (Dewey 1983, 145; also see Testa 2017). Moreover, reflective habits, in order to be put in place and to function, must recruit pre-reflective bodily mechanisms and become somehow automatic. In this sense, even higher forms of intelligent behavior do not simply overcome, but rather reshape into new forms pre-reflective sensorimotor patterns: one could speak of “post-reflective” habits.

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Besides, in the Anthropology, Hegel considers a basic level of habit formation where habitual patterns are not structured by conceptual categories, but rather by embodied schemes of sensorimotor action. The generality of habits is, in this sense, qualified by Hegel in the 1827–1828 Lectures on the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit recorded by Stolzenberg, as a “universal mode of acting [allgemeine Weise meines Thuns]” (VPhG GW 25:2, 727; Enc. §410Z/GW 20/Enc. 3, 134). This is a mode of doing whose generality does not depend on the determinate content it takes but rather on its motor form. The universality or generality of habit, as Hegel explains, for instance on the habit of walking—consists in the possibility of accomplishing a multiplicity of particular acts of walking, that is, in its capacity of being instantiated in a variety of particular acts, independently from the particular form and content of those acts (see also VGeist 124/LPS 153). This does not exclude that at higher levels the form of habit can take as its content beliefs, desires and more generally intentional states that are conceptually structured. Hegel’s idea is that more complex forms of habits, such as for instance writing, in order to be put in motion, have to recruit and reshape lower forms of sensorimotor coordination. “Habit,” as he writes in the remark to §410 of the Encyclopaedia, “is a form that embraces all kinds and stages of mind’s activity,” since no matter what their form and content is, minded activities have to take the form of habit in order to be enacted in living individuals (Enc. §410R/GW 20/ Enc. 3, 132).

3.1 Bodily Memory and Imagination Habitual patterns are connected in Hegel’s analysis with some form of bodily memory. “Habit is recollection [Erinnerung],” as Hegel says in his 1822 lessons (VPhSG GW 25.1:89). The instance of memory connected with habit formation and analyzed in the Anthropology is to be distinguished from the form of representational memory that Hegel analyzes in the Psychology (on the latter see Magrì 2016). Whereas the latter is qualified as a “mechanism of intelligence,” the sort of memory that is instantiated by habit is rather to do with the “mechanism of self-feeling” (Enc. §410R/GW 20/Enc. 3, 131). This form of non representational bodily memory is understood by Hegel as recollected feeling or repeated recollection. “The individual activities of man,” as Hegel writes, “acquire by repeated practice the character of habit, the form of something received into recollection, into the universality of the mental interior” (Enc. §410Z/GW 20/Enc. 3, 136). What is here referred to with the term “recollection” (see also Enc. §412 & Z) is then some form of memory incorporated in bodily schemes of self-feeling that are formed through repetition of doings. The idea is that through the practice of repetition some bodily patterns are formed which incorporate past occurrences of singular sensed doings and feelings—recollect them—in the universality of our motor schemes, that is in habitual patterns that put at our disposal a

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general mode of doings that can occur in a variety of individual occasions. What we have here is not a representational content actualized in the absence of past intuitions—as would happen in representational memory—but rather an embodied disposition, which takes the generalized form of the anticipatory schemes of habitual patterns. It is not fortuitous that Hegel often connects in the Encyclopaedia and in the Lessons “repetition” and “recollection” with “production” and “reproduction [Reproduktion]” (VGeist 156/LPS 129; VPhG GW 25.2:734). The term “production” alludes to the role that productive or transcendental imagination plays in the schematization of experience in Kant’s Transcendental Deduction and Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre. By Hegel this is connected with a non representational instance of imagination, since its productive activity is not connected with the formation of mental representations of what is not present, but rather with the structure of habits as “possibility [Möglichkeit]” “capacity or resource [Vermögen]” (VGeist 156/LPS 128; VPhG GW 25.2:734) of doing and acting. Habitual dispositions are then to be understood as bodily schemes which anticipate possibilities of action in a variety of individual situations. In this sense habitual motor patterns, by implicitly recollecting our reactions to past occurrences of sensation and feelings, allow us to take a step back from what is currently present in our sensory experience, and as such anticipate possible courses of action (see Enc. §410Z/GW 20/Enc. 3, 134). This is an embodied form of minded anticipation of experience. The connection between habit and imagination through embodiment is also stated in the 1827 Encyclopaedia, where Hegel concisely defines habit as “Einund Durchbildung der Leiblichkeit” (Enc. §410, 313/GW 20). It is worth noticing that Hegel employs here the term “Einbildung,” which means literally “imagining,” and in its root is directly related to “Einbildungskraft,” that is, the term used in Kant’s Critique of Judgement to refer to the capacity of imagination. The formative activity of habit (“Durchbildung” means “education,” “formation”), in this sense, shapes the body according to imaginative anticipatory motor schemes (“Einbildung”). For the same reasons, in §410R of the 1830 edition of the Encyclopaedia, while analyzing “dexterity” as a form of habit formation where subjective purposes are embodied in the immediate bodiliness as a “particular possibility,” this form of “embodiment [Verleiblichung]” is also described as a process of “Einbilden” of such a purpose in the body (see also Forman 2010, 343–344). Here the verb “Einbilden” again expresses the idea that inhabited formation of the body is shaped by patterns that play a productive imaginative role in that they anticipate particular instances of action (Enc. §410R, 417–418 GW 20). In this sense, the notion of habit can be also read as an ontological answer to the Kantian epistemological question of the unification of the sensible manifold, since here the unifying activity of synthesis is instantiated as the mode of being which results from the embodied process of habit formation rather than as the result of a presupposed transcendental activity.

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3.2 The Integration of Holism and Associationism in Habit Formation Even though the notion of “repetition [Wiederholung]” plays an important role in Hegel’s explanation of habit, this should not lead us to think that he identifies the essence of habit with repetition. In Hegel’s analysis repetition plays a crucial role as for the acquisition of habits: it is connected with the “production [Erzeugung]” of habits through exercise or “practice [Übung]” (Enc. §410/GW 20): a practice that Hegel again qualifies as a process of “sich-einbilden,” of imaginative formation. Still, the fact that habits are so acquired—and here Hegel may be wrong, since as Aristotle already noted, there can be theoretical habits, such as some mathematical skills, that just need comprehension and do not necessarily require repetition in order to be acquired—does not mean that repetition and habit are identical. As we have seen, habits are rather understood by Hegel as ­self-organizing, self-referred universal modes of doing. It is then this kind of “universality [Allgemeinheit]” or “generality [Allheit]” (VGeist 124–125/LPS 153) which seems to characterize habits. Now this mode of universality expresses the repeatability of habits—their being “possibilities”—not their being de facto repeated. A habitual disposition could rarely or never be instanced but remain such. Hegel’s analysis of the relation between habit and repetition makes us appreciate the peculiar way in which Hegel overcomes the opposition between organicist and associationist accounts of habit that according to Barandiaran and Di Paolo’s account (2014) could be detected in our philosophical tradition. Hegel is somehow implicitly confronting himself with associationism and in particular with Hume, which is indirectly confirmed also by the fact that already in the 1817 Encyclopaedia he connects the notion of repetition with that of “induction” (GW 19 §324, 192). While characterizing the form of habit as a “universality arising out of many individual cases that are repeated” (VGeist 125/LPS 154), Hegel accords some role to the association of individual sensations as for the formation of this disposition. And it is because of the way such a universality is formed through associative repetition of mutually external individualities, that Hegel qualifies the universality of habit as being a “formal,” “abstract universality,” still having some sort of mechanical character. The relation of the universal to the many results here from its application to a multiplicity of individual instances external to one another rather than being actualized in its simple relation to itself, as happens in what he understands as concrete universality. In the Humean model association is merely a psychological matter of atomic sensory inputs being associated with each other according to resemblance, contiguity in time and space and cause/effect relations. Whereas according to Hegel sensory inputs are connected with each other by way of their integration in the holistic self-referred structure of motor action. It is exactly in this sense, while analyzing repetition, that Hegel underlines that it consists of an “activity [Tätigkeit],” a kind of doing, because “to repeat means doing something again”

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(VPhG GW 25.2:73; see also GW 19 §324). Association is not then simply rejected, but rather is integrated as a partial description into the more encompassing explanatory scheme of holistic sensorimotor coordination. Hegel criticizes the atomistic models of psychological association and reconceives the latter in a holistic framework. This is an integration where the (increasingly overarching) organicist dynamic moment and the mechanic associationist moment somehow coexist, due not only to the way habits are formed but also to the way they are instanced, since in habit the self-referential moment of its universality necessarily manifests itself by applying successively to a manifold of particular situations in which it can be actualized. We can better appreciate the central role that the tension between these two moments plays for the dynamics of habit formation if we have a closer look at Hegel’s cycles of lessons on the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit. The closing section of the Anthropology, “The Actual Soul” (Enc. §§411–412/GW 20), posits as terminus ad quem of this dynamic process of integration the human “figure [Gestalt],” where the structure of habit is actualized in its most concrete form as an embodied expressive whole. As Hegel says in his 1827/8 lessons, “man is the totality of his habits” (VPhG GW 25.2:735). But it is in particular in the 1822 and 1825 lessons that we can better appreciate the intimate dynamic which leads to the formation of this totality. Here Hegel describes a process of progressive conflictive unification where, starting from animal behavior dominated by a multiplicity of scarcely integrated instinctual habits, the latter are progressively, even if never completely, integrated with each other insofar as they are reshaped as acquired habits. The moment of animality is here understood as not being able to fully integrate in a higher order of unification the conflict between instinctual and acquired habits. But the line between mere animal life and human life is not drawn sharply as a clear cut distinction, but rather understood as a matter of degrees of integration, in a scale where the animal moment is never fully overcome and strikes back in the conflictive dynamics of human life and in its pathological moments of disintegration. More precisely, already in 1822 the process being described here is one where “instinct [Trieb] becomes habit” (GW 21:86). This is a molding process where the “first natural” satisfaction of instincts and “physical needs [Bedürfnisse]” is posited into an “other nature,” a second nature. In the 1825 Lessons recorded by Karl Gustav Julius von Griesheim, Hegel makes it clear that the overcoming of instincts does not mean that they cease to be there, but rather concerns the way in which they are satisfied. Habit’s universality is then understood as a “general way” (VPhSG GW 25.1:362) to satisfy instincts: for instance, the habit of eating at regular times is not the singular satisfaction of a particular urge at a given moment, but rather a general way to satisfy my hunger which distances me somehow from the pressure of that urge. In this sense Hegel says in 1825 that “habit is satisfaction [Befriedigung]” (VPhSG GW 25.1:188): the habitual satisfaction of instincts can be understood as the satisfaction of being satisfied, which somehow frees us from the casual and momentary aspect of the pressure of particular instances of instincts.

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Anthropogenesis is here reconstructed then as an emerging holistic structure of habits. This whole is described in the 1822 and 1825 Lessons as an emerging web of interrelated instincts and habits. First, instincts are not fully overcome, but only as for the general way of their satisfaction: “what man is habituated to, constitutes its nature; but the other side is that man through habit is liberated from instincts, but only in general, not absolutely” (VPhSG GW 25.1:87). This does not mean that habits, at upper levels of integration, cannot transform the content of instincts and physical needs, and introduce new self-generated needs. In this sense Hegel describes the “negative” relation that subsists not only between the satisfaction of different instincts that may conflict with each other, but also between instincts and habits, and between different habits (see also VPhSG GW 25.1:367). Hegel highlights then the constitutive plurality of the dynamic formation of an interrelated web of habit and its conflictive potential. The generality of habit as organized stability of self-satisfaction is in this sense some way of “enduring the negative,” where animal life “reconciles itself with it” (VPhSG GW 25.1:92), but this is only a relative stability, since it is subjected to the dynamics generated by the intrinsic plurality of habit integration. Habits are never instantiated alone. If I have one, I have many: I have, or rather I am a bunch of interrelated habits and individual life is a struggle to integrate them in a living whole. This integration results from an ecology of clusters of interrelated modes of behavior and is a dynamic, dialectic process. As Hegel often remarks in his writings, total habituation is death (RPh §152/GW 14; Enc. §§396, 410R/GW 20). In this sense he describes ageing as a process which leads to stagnant habit integration, with “less opposition and conflict” (VGeist 130/LPS 157), and affirms that a state where habits were fully and statically integrated with each other, would be no life anymore. Accordingly, individual life subsists only insofar as the living unity of the individual is something still to be integrated and some tension between habits and instincts subsists (“the vitality of life consists precisely in this conflict,” VGeist 130/LPS 157). One could say that individual life is a molecular structure of habits that strives towards holistic integration rather than an accomplished whole.

3.3 Lower and Higher Level Habits, and Animal Life As we have seen so far, Hegel defines human beings as creatures of habit and assigns to habit formation a crucial role as for anthropogenesis. In this sense habit connects animal life and human life, which are not distinguished by the occurrence of habitual structures in the latter and not in the former, but rather in terms of forms of differentiated and more or less accomplished integration. This is a point on which Hegel somehow oscillates. As we have seen, he specifically connects animal life with instinctual, fixed habits. He, however, also admits that there is some sort of animal Bildung (Enc. §396Z/GW 20; LPS 53) through which the behavior of non-human living beings is reshaped by interaction: in

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this sense the process through which instincts are formed into acquired habits described in the lessons also concerns animal life. This is connected with the fact that humans “have in common” with animals what he calls “involuntary embodiment” which does not require intentional consciousness and will (§411Z; see VGeist 137/LPS 163). Animal life is a sensitive self-organizing subjectivity, and as such in its interaction with its environment, it is bodily plastically adaptive and can be trained. In this sense, the two main forms of habit that Hegel distinguishes—hardening or inurnment and skill or adroitness—can somehow be attributed even to non-human animal life. For animal organisms in their coupling with their environment can not only harden their body against external sensations such as cold, and heat, but can also be trained to develop some abilities (see also VGeist 130/LPS 157). Hence animals do not differ from human beings in that the latter have habits and the former do not, but rather because the skills they develop remain somehow more externally induced, less inwardized than in human behavior, and more strongly based on instincts (see Enc. §412/GW 20; VPhSG GW 25.1:423). On the other hand, Hegel in some passages affirms that there are some bodily habits which are distinctive of human beings, such as the upright posture and the skilled used of the hand, defined in Aristotelian terms as the “tool of tools” (Enc. §§396, 410R, 411 & Z). However, in some other places he also traces a distinction between “Angewohnheit,” of which learned animals were capable through “dressing [Abrichtung],” and “Gewohnheit” properly said as a feature of human behavior developed through “practice or exercise [Übung]” (VPhSG GW 25.1:363, 367, 423; VPhG GW 25.2:736). Still, this distinction should not be overestimated, since both terms refer to “habit” and indicate rather different degrees of the same phenomenon rather than essentially different things. Habits not only exist as a plurality, but also at different levels of organization, which actualize the structure of habit in a more or less accomplished way. Hence I think a distinction should be introduced here between lower order habits—more strictly related to instincts, less inwardized or appropriated and less subjected to higher organizing principles—and higher order habits, some of which at least are distinctively human. This accounts for the fact that we share with animals some rudimentary habits, and that up to a certain point even animals can acquire higher forms of organized behavior. The distinction between higher order and lower order habits cuts across that between animals and humans also because it applies to the distinction between the two main forms of habit, that is hardening (less complex) and skill (which in the 1830 Encyclopaedia become three, including as an intermediate form “indifference” towards practical urges such as thirst, and hunger). The latter distinction can somehow be actualized in animal life (hardening and skills can somehow be attributed to them), and hence can itself be articulated into lower and higher levels. Moreover, in this scheme higher order habits are not necessarily actualized as intellectual, theoretical ones, since for instance upright posture and the use of the hand are primarily instances of bodily motor action.

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4 Embodiment Revisited. Physiological, Functional, and Phenomenological Aspects With the idea of a living individual as a totality of habits, in the final paragraphs of his Anthropology Hegel develops his most comprehensive account of embodiment and its relevance for the constitution of mindedness. The entire architecture of Hegel’s Anthropology gives us first a systematic unified survey of the three main senses in which the notion of embodiment can be used in philosophy and cognitive sciences, that is 1. the physiological or material level of bodily physical correlates and structures, 2. the functional level of unconscious cognitive mechanisms, and 3. the phenomenological sense of embodiment as conscious or accessible to conscious experience (on this distinction see for instance Lakoff and Johnson 1999, 102). The analysis of sensation, in fact, in subsection one of the Anthropology, is focused mainly on embodiment of mindedness in physiological states registered in (and described at the level of) the material body. The analysis of feeling and self-feeling in subsection two is focused mainly on the functional integration of physiological sensation in the cognitive system of feelings. Whereas the analysis of habit in the final part of this subsection and in the following “The actual soul” is focused mainly on the phenomenal aspect of embodiment as the pre-reflective— considered mainly in the “self-feeling” final part—and reflective self-aware experience of a living individual—focused mainly in the “Actual Soul.”9 Anyway, these three levels are not finally collapsed into a single one, since the kind of integration actualized by habit resurrects them in its internal articulation. Habits, in fact, as structured patterns of sensation, are supported by and embodied in the anatomical configuration and physiological processes of the body and as such are inscribed in the causal chains of bodily processes. But this structure is a functional one, since single habits are considered as for the function they play by their dynamic integration into the whole of the process of self-organization of the living individual. Moreover, habit is described by Hegel as expressing the phenomenal experience of selfhood (“what I am, is the totality of my habits”) as a dialectical process of conflictive integration. Hegel’s theory of embodiment is meant to be an identity theory of mind and body and as such an alternative to any form of dualism as for their relation (see Wolff 1992). But this identity theory can only be achieved if the embodiment is considered in its full extension. Hence, embodiment must not be considered as the same as body under a description of it as a mere material organic body or of anatomical parts of it, nor simply as expressing the material correlates as causal enabling conditions of minded processes. In both cases the body would be taken to be as some kind of “materiality” or “externality” on which mindedness depends and the old dualism would be reproduced in a form of inverted Cartesian materialism. A genuine and stronger form of identity theory of mind and body would,

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according to Hegel, be one based on an account of the living body as subjectivity, as a dynamic self-organizing process which “must make its identity with its body into an identity posited or mediated by the mind” (Enc. §410Z/GW 20/Enc. 3, 135). To be sure, Hegel does not at all deny that physiological processes of the body play a causal role as for the execution of cognitive minded tasks and describe some levels of their embodiment. He endorses the project of a “psychical physiology” (Enc. §401R) which would explain the system of embodiment of internal sensation, and also thinks that some minded processes such as emotional feelings could be localized in distinct anatomical areas. Even habits, insofar as they necessarily take a mechanical form, can be described, according to Hegel, in terms of cause/effect relations between external elements. First, habits are patterns of behavior, which have material correlates in the causal chain of the physiological body. Second, habits have causal effects on themselves—they modify themselves—on other aspects of our bodiliness, and on their environment. Habits are in this sense cause and effect of their own enactment, and as such are self-organizing structures, which are constitutive of subjectivity. Hence, habits do not only endow us with some sort of causal power over ourselves and over the world, but are also ontologically constitutive of our doings.10 In one of Hegel’s preferred examples, that of the upright posture, one can see that here the bodily motor behavior is not only an enabling condition of walking—a causal mechanism necessary for walking to occur—but constitutes what walking is. Hence, embodiment means here the enactment of our action in bodily behavior. Here we are dealing with an activity, and namely an action— walking—that is performed through the body. The bodily movement here is neither a mere concomitant causal condition nor a mere enabling condition necessary for us to walk, but is part of what walking is—it is constitutive of what this action is. If we now come to the phenomenal aspect of embodiment, we can see that this embraces both subpersonal and personal aspects. At the first level, feelings such as sensations felt by the individual are still described by Hegel at a subpersonal level. And even when they are more integrated with bodily self-feeling, the latter is understood as a form of proprioception that already occurs at an animal level where it is not connected with an integrated personal experience. The kind of pre-reflective bodily self-feeling that is actualized in habit— and its pathological fixations and disintegrations, such as somnambulism, mania, and derangement—are already described by Hegel at a personal phenomenal level, which is first given in an unconscious and involuntary way. An important aspect of the phenomenological analysis of embodiment that is manifest in habit concerns, as we have seen, the sort of detached embodiment that habit realizes. Habit is an embodied activity which can be connected with a first personal experience of disembodiment, of a felt “break with bodiliness,” where the self, for instance through hardening of the body against sensation, comes to feel detached from its own body. In this sense, in §412 the structure of habit is said to be the “soul’s higher awakening to the I,” the natural root of

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that experience of a negative relation to our natural condition that at a higher level of description in the Phenomenology and in the Psychology will take the form of the “thinking I.” In this sense the Anthropology describes the natural preconditions of the thinking I, understood as an ensemble of sensorimotor habitual dispositions that are necessary conditions for the logical structure of the thinking I to emerge. Hegel writes here that “the natural soul too is initially only the real possibility of this being-for-itself. Only in the I this possibility becomes actuality” (Enc. §412Z/Enc. 3, 141). This, however, should not be understood as involving a dualism between habit and thinking. If we remind ourselves that habit is itself articulated in lower and higher order habits, and furthermore that Hegel in §410R describes free thinking as something bodily enacted in habit, then what Hegel is saying is that the thinking I is a higher level habit formation which integrates and recruits lower lever motor habits described in the Anthropology. In this sense the thinking I, which relates to its body and the world as to something external to it, from which it can abstract itself, must rather be reconceived as an embodied practice of detachment which plays the role of the disembodied agent. Even for the thinking I it is then true that habit’s embodiment is not just an enabling condition but is much more a constitutive condition of it. The phenomenology of habits described by Hegel also embraces conscious, reflective and voluntary experiences such as writing, playing an instrument, and intellectual theoretical habits such as reflective thinking. Still, even habits, which have arisen out of conscious and voluntary reflection, continue to be accompanied by some form of post-reflective immediate awareness. For in order for them to be implemented as habits, not only must they recruit lower motor habits, but they also have to take for themselves a quasi automatic form—“only through this habit I exist for myself as thinking” writes Hegel (Enc. §410R/Enc. 3, 132). For instance, when we learn to write, at the very beginning we consciously monitor every step and single phase of what we are doing (see Enc. §410Z). Once we are acquainted with the process we proceed automatically, and no longer need to willingly control every single step: still, while doing that we somehow have an immediate ­self-feeling, we are pre- and post-reflectively present to ourselves as a whole, and can in principle recover conscious monitoring if needed. Here the phenomenal experience embraces contrasting aspects. On the one hand, this presence of myself in habit can be connected with an experience of being at home with oneself, a sensation of ease, which is also described as the experience of acting immediately, spontaneously. Yet, on the other hand, one can have the experience of being driven by one’s own habits, and experiencing this as some sort of dependency if not of constriction. A sense of constriction which can border on psychical pathologies such as mania, whose phenomenology is described by Hegel as a case of habit over-fixation, where habit integration fails and one is “captivated” by a particular sensation and “evicted from it from the center of its concrete individuality” (Enc. §410Z/Enc. 3, 134).

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5 Habits and the Conditions of Agency Hegel’s Anthropology deals in general with minded activities understood as life processes and as actualizations in individuals of a life form. And a central role in Hegel’s analysis of sensation and feeling is played by sensorimotor coordination. But the Anthropology very often deals with activities in the more specific sense of “doings, activities [thun],” which involves sensorimotor schemes, and are described in action theoretical terms. If one equates action with intentional action, then one could be tempted to say that since intentional consciousness is not yet thematic in the Anthropology, then when Hegel speaks here of doings he does not mean action in the proper sense; but this would be a mistake. To my mind, Hegel’s Anthropology is extremely relevant for his action theory, since it allows us to appreciate that according to him individual action first has to be framed as a process rather than as a singular event. Secondly, this process has to be understood as a manifestation of vital activity which actualizes a life form. Thirdly, if this holds, then intentional action is a subspecies and not the general model under which action falls. Hegel’s Anthropology would then allow for some sense of natural agency as belonging to animal life. This natural sense of agency is firstly connected with the crucial role that motor action plays as sensorimotor coordination of the system of the senses. And the notion of habit introduces here a sense of patterned, organized behavior which is not only an enabling precondition of action but is constitutive of it. Even if some conditions of action are already introduced in the previous paragraphs, such as corporeal individuation and separateness of living beings, and proprioception as a sense of selfhood, it is with the analysis of habit that action becomes the focus of Hegel’s analysis.11 First, Hegel underlines many times the ontological role that habit plays for the constitution of the individual. It is in particular in the analysis of “hardening” as the first form of habit that Hegel affirms habits constitute the mode of being of living individuals. In the lessons Hegel says that “I am this habit. It is my universal mode of being. What I am is the totality of this habit. I can do nothing else. I am this” (VGeist 124/LPS 153; cf. VPhG GW 25.2:726). Secondly, the notion of habit is connected with a sense of agential individuality. The “mode of being” of habit is described as something that endows me with a mode of doing. “The second point,” says Hegel, “is that habit is a universal mode of my doing, the particular is subsumed under it” (VGeist 124/LPS 153; cf. VPhG GW 25.2:727). We have already seen that this universal mode of my doing regards the generality of habitual dispositions, the fact that they can generate a multiplicity of particular actions. If we now have a look at the passage where Hegel describes habit in §410 we can appreciate further aspects of the relevance of habit for the analysis of action. That the soul thus makes itself into abstract universal being, and reduces the particularity of feelings (of consciousness too) to a determination in it that just is, is habit. In this way the soul has the content in possession, and contains it in such a way that in such

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determinations it is not actually sentient, it does not stand in relationship to them by distinguishing itself from them, nor is it absorbed in them, but it has them in itself and moves in them, without sensation or consciousness. The soul is free of them, in so far as it is not interested in or occupied with them; while it exists in these forms as its possessions, it is at the same time open to other activity and occupations, in the sphere of sensation and the mind’s consciousness in general. (Enc. §410/GW 20/Enc. 3, 131)

The universal mode of action in which habit consists, is here connected with a sense of taking possession of one’s own deeds, and hence to my mind satisfies that ownership condition that according to interpreters belongs to the Hegelian theory of free action (see Pippin 2008, 37–38). Moreover, and most importantly, the notion of habit is explained in terms of that notion of “being-together with one’s own-self [bei sich selber-sein]” that is crucial for the Hegelian theory of action and freedom. “This being-together with-one’s-own-self we call habit” (Enc. §410 Z/GW 20/Enc. 3, 134). As we have seen in the passage above, habit does not distinguish itself from its content, nor is it absorbed in it, but possesses it as a mode of its being. In this sense, habit is free of its content: it can actualize, even if this does not necessarily happen, that structure of being at home with one self in the other that for Hegel is constitutive of freedom. That is why the final stage of the development of habit in the “Actual soul” is described as an actualization of its structure where “the self or the I intuits its own self in its Other and is this ­self-intuiting” (Enc. §412Z/Enc. 3, 141). It is important to note that the sense of ownership we are endowed with by habit, and that is a condition of agency, is for Hegel connected with the idea that structure of habit allows for self-distancing. Habit frees us from its content insofar as it consists of a form of detached embodiment which enables us to keep our distance from aspects of our sensory life. The break felt between mindedness and bodiliness is enacted by habit in a bodily format. It is in this sense that Hegel writes that “spirit is essentially for itself in its body, but also against its body” (VGeist 135/LPS 162). Habit then implements that structure of negativity at the level of bodily action that in Hegel’s model is one of the crucial conditions of free agency.12 Moreover, when analyzing habit as skill or dexterity, which is a higher form of habitual organization than hardening against external sensations and indifference towards satisfactions, Hegel strongly underlines that some habits are stage setting, that is, they empower us insofar as they constitute novel modes of doing, that were not previously available. Skill “belongs to me and thus becomes a possibility to me, and the activity [Tätigkeit] becomes a capacity or resource [Vermögen]” (VGeist 129/LPS 156; VPhG GW 25.2:734). Habits in this sense play a constitutive role in the socio-ontological sense of the terms (see Searle 2010, 9–10). Habit is then constitutive of action, and not just an enabling necessary condition of it, as for instance, the upright posture is not just a causal anatomical, mechanism necessary for us to walk, but it is our walking, it constitutes what walking is. A further important point is that for Hegel the form of habitual formation, which leads to the acquisition of skills, constitutes some kind of purposive activity.

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Habituation as a process of training of the body makes it possible to express aims and purposes. In this sense, some forms of habituation are enactments of action in bodily behavior also insofar as they embody subjective purposes in bodily motor schemes. In this sense habit can account for the purposive structure of action, even if this does not mean that habits are in themselves purposive (see Enc. §410Z/GW 20/Enc. 3, 135). As we have seen, skills are already complex forms of habituations, whereas hardening is for instance a less complex form of habit, which does not exhibit purposive structure. Subjective purposiveness is then the result of some habit formations. Habits in this sense do not presuppose subjective purposes, but are rather understood as structures through which those subjective purposes are constituted. With the constitution of action purposes, habit can account for goal directed action. Hence, the notion of habit Hegel uses does not refer only to automatic stimulus triggered routines, but also embraces goal directed behavior. It is anyway important to note that Hegel’s reconstruction of skilled action is not intrinsically an analysis of action as having representational intentional content, nor of action as intentionally willed. Skilled action, as we have seen, applies not only to reflective conscious and voluntary actions (which Hegel focuses on in the last two paragraphs of the Anthropology), but also embraces animal dexterity and involuntary embodiments. Two final points are worth making concerning the relation between habit and action. First, Hegel’s account of the generality of habitual action is connected with its relational structure. This is not only because, as we have seen, individual life is taken to be an actualization of a life form and as such inserted in the context of (at least in principle) possible reciprocal interaction with other members of it. For instance, when describing the universal mode of acting that the habit of writing endows us with, Hegel defines it as “a universal mode of acting to be handed on to others too” (Enc. §410Z/GW 20/Enc. 3, 136). Here we have then a form of habitual action whose universality is understood as involving a nexus of interaction with other agents. This is related to the idea that habits are developed through repeated exercise, which in Bildung involves a practice of imitation of others. The relational character of habitual patterns is also more deeply rooted in the interactive structure of embodiment. In paragraph 401Z and in the “Actual Soul” subsection (Enc. §411Z), in fact Hegel analyzes embodiment not only as an internal process of a single body, but also as “embodiment for others,” that is, as a process that happens for other living beings which the individual interacts with. This has to do with the fact that the body is not only an organic material process, but also an integrated expressive holistic whole, a “figure [Gestalt],” and as such is “something that has existence for another” (VGeist 136/LPS 162). The external manifestations of this process are “signs” for other living individuals. This communicative performance of the living individual is again a matter of habitual embodiment. A second important aspect to be noted as for the relation between habit and action, is that the process of habit formation can also account for a sense of rule-governed action. For instance, in the acquisition and the mastery of a skill

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such as handwriting, the generality of habit as an interactive mode of action is described by Hegel as being rule-like: “a universal mode of acting to be handed on to others too, a rule.” Again, this should not be overgeneralized, as if all habits were rule-like or normatively structured, which is not at all the case a­ ccording to Hegel. Moreover, rule-like normativity is clearly a case of formal, reflexive, mechanical universality, where the universal understood as a rule applies as something external on singular occurrences and between mutually external living individuals. As such formal universality should not, according to Hegel, be the general model of social action, which is at its core more a matter of concrete freedom than of normative intersubjective relations. Hegel’s account of the relation between some skills and the apprehension of rules in imitative training, accounts for at least what could be called a lower threshold of normativity. This can let us appreciate the fact that, if rules are inwardized through some habits, then normativity and causal power are not mutually exclusive, as some interpreters have assumed (see for instance Pippin 2008, 38). After having considered all these aspects, we can see that the notion of habit as a self-organizing whole unifies both the emergence and constitution of a subject, the emergence and constitution of an agentive identity understood as the locus of the action of this subject, and the putting in place by this very subject of its operative rule or norms. In this sense the notion of habit satisfies the three conditions of agency at the scale of sensorimotor dynamics that have been identified by enactivist theorists: 1. individuality condition: the system is a distinguishable entity distinct from its environment; 2. interactional asymmetry: the system is doing something by itself in its environment; and 3. normativity condition: it does so according to some rule or norms and allows for some sort of naturalization of them (Barandiaran et al. 2009, 369). But even if one has a more demanding notion of action than that involved in dynamic systems theory, and conceives of action as having in a stronger sense a relational and intersubjective structure, then the notions of habit and embodiment, as we have seen, seem equally fitted for accounting for these aspects. Finally, even the ownership condition, the negativity condition, and the being-with-one-self in otherness structure, which seems to be three requisites of the Hegelian theory of free action, seem to be at least partially satisfied by the habit structure. In this sense, the notion of habit seems to be a fruitful one in order to reconcile dynamic system approaches and action theoretical approaches. Habit allows, on the one hand, for the idea that self-organizing biological systems are not action (and norm) free, making it possible to develop a notion of action as emerging from biological processes. On the other hand, the notion of habitual action makes it intelligible that action is not necessarily intentional and can be originated and regulated in a non-intentional manner.

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5.1 Hegel’s Continuity Thesis This Hegelian theory of habit has other advantages that can also be appreciated in the contemporary debate in the theory of action as well as in cognitive sciences. It overcomes the dualism between habits as merely stimulus triggered motor routines and goal directed intentional action. Habits can also be goal directed, and goal directed action is not always in itself intentional, whereas even intentional action can be understood as an instance of habitual dispositions. Habits are then to be conceptualized as traversing a continuum from motor routines to goal directed action. Moreover, the Hegelian approach to habit is also useful to overcome the dualism between involuntary and voluntary action as well as between conscious and unconscious action. Habit is here a sliding door between “voluntary” and “involuntary embodiment.” As for the first aspect, Hegel notes (Enc. §411Z/GW 20/Enc. 3, 139) that “voluntary embodiment” can become the object of conscious will-dependent control both in an ontogenetic and a phylogenetic sense, as when the animal voice becomes speech, or else when laughing as an involuntary reaction can be reproduced intentionally as laughing at something. But on the other hand, even symbolic expressive embodiment voluntarily produced can later happen without any effort of will. For instance, acquisition of the upright posture has been obtained for manhood and for single individuals through will, but once acquired, it is no longer needed to will standing as such and to think about that. Standing remains somehow a manifestation of the will, and remains in the background as something that can be recovered if needed, but is not the intentional content of a conscious act of will (VGeist 129/LPS 157).13 Analogously to what has also been noted in recent studies on dual tasking (Poldrack et al. 2005), Hegel observes in his analysis of cases, such as walking, writing and piano playing, that habit unburden us. For once these tasks have become a part of our being, we no longer need to concentrate our attentive consciousness and will on single details of the basic components of these actions, and can open these faculties to other activities. Habit thus has an exonerating function, insofar as it allows a post-reflective release of consciousness from its focus on immediate goals and to readdress it in the direction of different, higher ones. But this is again a matter of degrees and not an all or nothing matter: our consciousness is somehow both absent as for the single details, but present as some sort of post-reflective global awareness of the matter in hand. If something goes wrong, it can be retrieved in its reflexive form and put back to monitor the single details of the task that needs to be readjusted. In this picture, the relation between ­pre-reflexive and reflexive, involuntary and voluntary, unconscious and conscious aspects of mindedness is both a bottom-up and a top-down process, where habits traverse this continuum in both directions. Unlike transformative theories of rationality, such as McDowell’s, which admit only a downward transformation, where rationality reshapes our nature (on this notion of transformative rationality see Boyle 2016), in Hegel’s holistic picture of habit, there is both a top-down dynamic—once we

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achieve reflexive rationality this also informs our sensorimotor schemes and gives rise to a new kind of reflexive habits—and an upward transformation, where our bodily nature also reshapes rationality and gives it the form of post-reflexive patterns. Hegel’s analysis of habit is then informed by a “continuity thesis” (for other aspects of continuity between internal and external phenomena by Hegel, see Boldyrev and Herrmann-Pillath 2014, 47–49); the form of habit is not opposed to higher capacities but is both a precondition, a continuous support, and a constitutive feature of them. It is in this sense that we have to interpret Hegel’s statements that “habit is the most essential feature of the existence of all mental life in the individual subject,” and that “habit is a form that embraces all kinds and stages of mind’s activity [Tätigkeit]” (Enc. §410R/GW 20/Enc. 3, 133 and 132).

Notes 1. For other aspects of the systematic relevance of the notion of embodiment in Hegel, see also Wolff (1992, 118–155), Russon (1997), Testa (2012), Nuzzo (2012), Westphal (2014). 2. See GW 1:86: “Bodiliness is consequently an absolutely necessary moment for Spirit, without which it cannot become Spirit.” 3. For the notion of “re-externalization,” see Peters (2016, 126). On the relevance of the notion of extended cognition for Hegel’s understanding of institutions as objectification of mindedness, see Crisafi and Gallagher (2010), Boldyrev and Herrmann-Pillath (2013). 4. On habit in objective spirit as inwardizing objectification see in particular RPh §151/GW 14; Enc. §483/GW 20. 5. In her reading of the Logic of the Concept, Karen Ng (2018) interprets these traits of cognition as a priori, epistemological constraints, which would express some form of “formal naturalism.” This, however, neglects the fact that these traits of cognition are actualizations of a life form, that is, they express the forms that the ontological structure of life takes in its developing process. Consequently, Hegel’s naturalist approach to cognition cuts across the alleged distinction between formal and substantive naturalism. 6. On enactive cognition, see Varela et al. (1992, 9), Thompson (2007). 7. On the kind of practical generality expressed by habitual disposition, see Thompson (2008, 149ff.). 8. On the notion of detachment see Winfield (2011, 126), Moss (2014). 9. I use here the term “phenomenal” to indicate Hegel’s analysis of the experience of the self connected with habit, in order to avoid confusion with the Phenomenology subsection, which is more focused on the reflective conscious awareness structured by the subject/ object distinction. 10. The causal understanding of habitual explanations of action may pose some theoretical problems—causal explanations are usually assumed to be asymmetrical, which does not seem to be satisfied by the idea that habits are cause and effect of their own enactment. According to Pollard (2006) this can be solved only if we rephrase habitual explanations as constitutive explanations which have to do with relations of metaphysical dependency rather than with causal relations. But I think that the problem can be solved by realizing that it is under different aspects that habits are cause and effect of themselves, which allows us to understand habit explanations as both constitutive and causal ones. 11. For an analysis of how natural conditions of agency are already developed in Hegel’s Jena lessons on the philosophy of nature and of spirit, see Testa (2012).

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12. According to Pippin, the kind of self-relation, which is a condition for freedom requires “a negative relation to, rather the immediate embodiment of, the natural conditions and states of a being” (Pippin 2008, 52). Besides, Pippin understands this negative relation as a form of keeping a distance from nature which is inherently normative—a form of taking up attitudes rather than of being in something—and opposes such normative relations to causal relations, affirming that freedom does not depend on any individual causal power. Now Pippin somehow admits that it is natural beings, on the basis of their “natural capacities” (Pippin 2008, 53), that develop such negative attitudes, but does not give any account of what this exactly means. If we now consider that the “keeping a distance” attitude is constituted by habit as detached disposition, then we can realize that first there is no reason to oppose “embodiment” and “negative relation to nature,” since this negative relation is in Hegelian terms a form of detaching embodiment. And secondly, the opposition between normativity and causal powers as for Hegel’s conception of freedom does not hold, since that capacity of detachment which is a condition of freedom, does of course depend from habit and its causal structure. Moreover, habit’s actualization of that negative relation does not in itself require normativity to take place. On the relation between habit and the negative moment of freedom, see also the interesting analysis offered by Ranchio (2016, 220–224). For other aspects of the relevance of Hegel’s constitutive account of habit for the critique of Pippin’s and Pinkard’s interpretation of his theory of free action in terms of normative autonomy, see also Lumsden (2013), Menke (2013), Ranchio (2016, 248–257), Wittmann (2017). 13. In this sense, I do not agree with Winfield’s revisionist interpretation, according to which the Anthropology should be concerned only with involuntary embodiments, since voluntary embodiment properly said, implying consciousness and intentionality, should be rather analyzed in the Phenomenology subsection (Winfield 2011, 133–134). Yet it is a fact that Hegel considers cases of voluntary embodiment in the Anthropology, and this is not a mistake, but is due to the reason that habit traverses a continuum between involuntary and voluntary, unconscious and preconscious, pre-reflective and reflective, which can all be re-described as different forms of instantiations and different orders of organization of habitual patterns. For the same reason I do not endorse those interpretations that, on different grounds, finally put habit on one side, and reflective consciousness and intentional action on the other side (see for instance Forman (2010, 335), Magrì (2016, 74–76) understanding the first as just an enabling causal condition for higher, more complex forms of mindedness.

Bibliography Barandiaran, Xavier E., and Ezequiel A. Di Paolo. 2014. “A Genealogical Map of the Concept of Habit.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8 (522): 22–28. Barandiaran, Xavier E., Ezequiel A. Di Paolo, and Marieke Rohde. 2009. “Defining Agency: Individuality, Normativity, Asymmetry, and Spatio-Temporality in Action.” Adaptive Behavior 17 (5): 367–386. Barrett, Nathaniel. 2014. “A Dynamic System View of Habits.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8 (682): 55–57. Boldyrev, Ivan A., and Carsten Herrmann-Pillath. 2013. “Hegel’s ‘Objective Spirit,’ Extended Mind, and the Institutional Nature of Economic Action.” Mind & Society 12 (2): 177–202. Boldyrev, Ivan A., and Carsten Herrmann-Pillath. 2014. Hegel, Institutions and Economics: Performing the Social. London and New York: Routledge. Boyle, Matthew. 2016. “Additive Theories of Rationality: A Critique.” European Journal of Philosophy 23 (4): 527–555. Camic, Charles. 1986. “The Matter of Habit.” American Journal of Sociology 9: 1039–1087. Crisafi, Anthony, and Shaun Gallagher. 2010. “Hegel and the Extended Mind.” S. AI & Soc 25: 123–129.

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de Vries, Willem A. 1988. Hegel Theory of Mental Activity. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Dewey, John. 1983. Human Nature and Conduct. In The Middle Works of John Dewey, 1899–1924, Volume 14: 1922, Human Nature and Conduct, edited by Jo Ann Boydston. Carbondale: SIU Press. Egbert, Matthew D., and Xabier E. Barandiaran. 2014. “Modelling Habits as Self-Sustaining Patterns of Sensorimotor Behavior.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience 8 (590): 58–72. Ferrarin, Alfredo. 2001. Hegel and Aristotle. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Forman, David. 2010. “Second Nature and Spirit: Hegel on the Role of Habit in the Appearance of Perceptual Consciousness.” The Southern Journal of Philosophy 48 (4): 325–352. Howard, Jason J. 2013. “Hegel on the Emotions: Coordinating Form and Content.” In Essays on Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, edited by David S. Stern, 71–86. Albany: State University of New York. Ikäheimo, Heikki. 2000. Self-Consciousness and Intersubjectivity: A Study on Hegel’s Encyclopedia Philosophy of Subjective Spirit (1830). Jyväskylä: University of Jyväskylä (Publications in Philosophy 67). Lakoff, John, and Mark Johnson. 1999. Philosophy in the Flesh: The Embodied Mind and Its Challenge to Western Thought. New York: Basic Books. Lumsden, Simon. 2013. “Between Nature and Spirit: Hegel’s Account of Habit.” In Essays on Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, edited by David S. Stern, 121–138. Albany: State University of New York. Magrì, Elisa. 2016. “The Place of Habit in Hegel’s Psychology.” In Hegel’s Philosophical Psychology, edited by Susanne Herrmann-Sinai and Lucia Ziglioli, 74–90. London and New York: Routledge. McCumber, John. 1990. “Hegel on Habit.” The Owl of Minerva 21 (2): 155–165. Menary, Richard A. 2010. “Introduction to the Special Issue on 4E Cognition.” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences 9 (4): 459–463. Menke, Christoph. 2013. “Hegel’s Theory of Second Nature: The ‘Lapse’ of Spirit.” Symposium: Canadian Journal of Continental Philosophy 17 (1): 31–49. Moss, Lenny. 2014. “Detachment and Compensation: Groundwork for a Metaphysics of ‘Biosocial Becoming’.” Philosophy & Social Criticism 40 (1): 1–105. Ng, Karen. 2018. “Life and Mind in Hegel’s Logic and Subjective Spirit.” Hegel Bulletin 39 (1): 23–44. Nuzzo, Angelica. 2012. “Anthropology, Geist, and the Soul-Body Relation: The Systematic Beginning of Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit.” In Essays on Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, edited by David Stern, 1–17. Albany and New York: State University of New York Press. Peters, Julia. 2016. “On Naturalism in Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit.” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 24 (1): 111–131. Pinkard, Terry. 2012. Hegel’s Naturalism: Mind, Nature, and the Final Ends of Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pippin, Robert. 2008. Hegel’s Practical Philosophy: Rational Agency as Ethical Life. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pollard, Bill. 2006. “Explaining Actions with Habits.” American Philosophical Quarterly 43: 57–68. Poldrack, R. A., F. W. Sabb, K. Foerde, S. M. Tom, R. F. Asarnow, S. Y. Bookheimer, and B. J. Knowlton. 2005. “The Neural Correlates of Motor Skill Automaticity.” Journal of Neuroscience 25 (22): 5356–5364. Ranchio, Filippo. 2016. Dimensionen der zweiten Natur: Hegels praktische Philosophie ­(Hegel-Studien, Beihefte). Hamburg: Meiner. Russon, John. 1997. The Self and Its Body in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Toronto, Buffalo and New York: University of Toronto Press. Searle, John. 2010. Making the Social World: The Structure of Human Civilization. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Shapiro, Lawrence. 2014. The Routledge Handbook of Embodied Cognition. London: Routledge. Testa, Italo. 2009. “Second Nature and Recognition: Hegel and the Social Space.” Critical Horizons 10 (3): 341–370. Testa, Italo. 2012. “Hegel’s Naturalism, or Soul and Body in the Encyclopedia.” In Essays on Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, edited by David Stern, 19–35. Albany and New York: State University of New York Press. Testa, Italo. 2017. “Dewey’s Social Ontology: A Pragmatist Alternative to Searle’s Approach to Social Reality.” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 25 (1): 40–62. Thompson, Evan. 2007. Mind in Life: Biology, Phenomenology, and the Sciences of Mind. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Thompson, Michael. 2008. Life and Action: Elementary Structures of Practice and Practical Thought. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Varela, Francisco J., Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. 1992. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Boston: MIT Press. Westphal, Kenneth R. 2014. “Autonomy, Freedom & Embodiment: Hegel’s Critique of Contemporary Biologism.” Hegel Bulletin 35 (1): 56–83. Winfield, Richard D. 2011. The Living Mind: From Psyche to Consciousness. Plymouth: Rowman & Littlefield. Wittmann, David. 2017. “L’homme entier chez Hegel ou la dialectique de la provenance et de la destination.” In L’homme entier: Conceptions anthropologiques classiques et contemporaines, edited by Faustino Fabbianelli and Jean-François Goubet, 143–166. Paris: Classiques Garnier. Wolff, Michael. 1992. Das Körper-Seele-Problem: Kommentar zu Hegel, Enzyklopädie (1830). Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann.

Chapter 15

Sentience and Feeling in the Anthropology Allegra de Laurentiis

1 Introduction The following interpretation of the “sentient” and then “feeling” soul, psyche, or “natural spirit” acknowledges and presupposes Hegel’s thesis that soul (Seele), the first mode of existence of spirit (Geist), is the inherent immateriality of the living body. The mere matter of a living body exists; only as organically organized material components—integrated organs or organelles—can the material body actively, purposively live. Formulating this point as a metaphysical principle, Hegel states: “Spirit is the existing truth of matter, that matter itself has no truth” (Enc. 3P §389 R).1 For Hegel to say that something “has no truth” does not mean that it does not exist, but that this existent harbors potentialities not yet actualized. The Anthropology exhibits, for example, the soul’s emergence from nature as nature’s inherent truth. It then proceeds to treating fundamental (necessary) stages of the soul’s existence,2 stages which Hegel considers to be increasingly spiritual and decreasingly natural forms of spirit. Those he considers as belonging to “spirit proper” are treated subsequently in the Phenomenology and Psychology, the two subsections of the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit that follow upon the Anthropology. A corollary of the principle given above is the hybrid ontological status of the soul. Since she3 both results from nature’s self-sublation (discussed below) and distinguishes herself progressively from her source, the soul must be understood as sharing in both nature and spirit. She does not belong to a third realm, but participates in both. Among other things, this hybridity of the soul helps clarify Hegel’s treatment (in the Remarks and Additions) of empirical psychosomatic subject matter like human insanity, fetal life, or hypnotic states. More generally, “the animal” (das Beseelte; Aristotle’s empsuchon)4 is the natural individual in which

A. de Laurentiis (*)  State University of New York at Stony Brook, Stony Brook, NY, USA e-mail: [email protected]

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materiality and ideality are one (Einheit; sunolon). If the soul’s affections and emotions are best explained as physical phenomena which are significant to the affected individual, then the whole soul is best conceived as physical and spiritual at once. Accordingly, a full account will include both her somatic manifestations and her intrinsic logic: the structured organic activities of the soul. To locate sentience (Empfindung)5 either in body or in mind is therefore, for Hegel, a false alternative. Sensations affect a natural individual for which there is no inner-outer distinction. In this primitive phase of natural-spiritual development, sentience is the whole of what there is for the affected individual. An initial, indeterminate differentiation of inner and outer emerges in feeling (Gefühl); it culminates only in consciousness, where the soul reaches “the abstract thought of her “I,” of her unending being-for-self” (Enc. 3P §400 Z).6 Unsurprisingly then, the story of life, sentience and feeling begins in Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature: Nature is in itself a living whole; the movement of nature through its series of stages further consists in this, that the Idea posits itself as what it is in itself; or, in other words, that the Idea turns into itself out of its immediacy and externality, which is death, so as to be, first, living being; but further, [the Idea] sublates even this determinacy, in which it is only life, and generates itself as the existence of spirit, which is the truth and end of nature and the true actuality of the Idea. (Enc. 2P §251)

In this passage, two grammatical subjects (Nature and the Idea) are used almost interchangeably to denote the subject of a movement from lifelessness to life to spirit. The second clause clarifies that the movement of nature is part of the Idea’s dynamics: the succession of nature’s developmental phases is equivalent to the Idea’s progressive exposure of what it implicitly holds. The end result of this movement is therefore common to both subjects. The truth and telos of nature is also the final actualization of the Idea. In the last section of the Science of Logic Hegel has defined “the Idea” as the absolute (i.e., unconditioned) union of “object” and “concept,” or “the true as such” (WL GW 12:173–174). Since neither an un-conceptualized thing nor a concept of no-thing can be true in any reasonable sense, “the true” cannot just mean a logically opaque correspondence or mysterious contact boundary between object and concept. The meaning of “the true” must refer to object and concept at once. With this in mind, the above passage from the Philosophy of Nature may be read as follows: (i) although life is implicit in nature (by being part of the latter’s “in-itself” or concept), nature’s existence is at first an abstractly universal, “dead” exteriority; (ii) natural exteriority being only a one-sided mode of existence of the Idea or of “the true as such,” nature must proceed to sublating, i.e., overcoming while preserving, this lopsided existence; (iii) for nature to sublate her own exteriority can only mean for it to inwardize itself; (iv) in this sublation new realities emerge: life forms, and forms of spirit; and (v) spirit is therefore the implicit end of nature as much as the Idea’s own actualization—the coming together of conceptuality and objectivity in the actual (Wirklichkeit). This may be clarified as follows. First, the attribution of “externality” to nature is neither a tautological claim that spatial objects are reciprocally external, nor an equally trivial statement about

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objects’ subsisting outside a nonobjective domain. Rather, nature’s externality denotes here what Hegel elsewhere calls “self-externality,” i.e., the logic of inorganic bodies that lack a center actively binding their components into a whole (this is why they can disintegrate but cannot die). Self-externality is here the antonym of interiority. Hegel often refers to nature’s interiority as “natural subjectivity” or as incipient “conceptuality” of nature: The infinite divisibility of matter means nothing but that matter is an externality to itself… Since every material point appears to be…independent of all others, absence of conceptuality [Begrifflosigkeit] predominates in nature…It is only in life that subjectivity, the opposite of exteriority, comes to be; heart, liver, eye are…no independent individuals, and the hand severed from the body rots.7 (Enc. 2P §248 Z)

Secondly, the sublation of self-external nature into life and spirit does not imply that nature becomes sublated—let alone left behind—by an other of itself. It means that nature overcomes its own exteriority by self-sublation. The opening section of the Anthropology spells this out: Spirit has become as the truth of nature…[T]he…transitioning into the concept has… the…meaning of a free original diremption. Hence, spirit that has become [der gewordene Geist] means that nature self-sublates against itself as the untrue [dass die Natur an ihr selbst als das Unwahre sich aufhebt] and that spirit presupposes itself no longer as the self-external universality of corporeal singularity, but as universality that is simple in its concreteness8 and totality, one in which spirit is soul, not yet spirit. (Enc. 3P §388)

If §251 explained nature’s becoming life and spirit as a gradual shedding of self-exteriority, this section specifies now how this process takes place: it is a self-sublation of nature over and against itself.9 Hence spirit is neither given nor found ready-made. It is not the Word that was in the beginning. Spirit is nature’s offspring, so that its more advanced forms always ground in a natural spirit that is “not yet spirit” proper. This is the ontological status of the soul: a kind of existence that is no longer pure self-externality nor yet full inwardness. The phases of her movement exhibited and explicated in the Anthropology—the sentient, feeling, self-feeling, habit-forming, anthropological soul—are all modes of existence in which spirit is, in brazen self-contradiction, still nature.

2 On Waking up to Sentience The first part of the Anthropology (“The Natural Soul”) scrutinizes the fundamental qualities (α) and changes (β) of natural individuals, as well as the key capacity (γ) that enables individuals to suffer, endure, and even flourish throughout this diversity of qualities and flow of changes. This third moment, entitled “Sentience,” consists of the capacity to detect an indeterminate multiplicity of affections as belonging to an equally indeterminate unit. The merely sentient animal neither selects nor posits its sensations. It merely detects them in a place (that from our conscious perspective we may call inward) of which it knows nothing. For Hegel, this “finding” of sensations defines sentience: Emp-findung is an “inner finding.”

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Hegel’s account is not free of obscurities.10 While his descriptive analysis of this “passive activity” (a finding of what is already present) is compelling, he makes an argument for the emergence of sentience from the sleep-waking cycle of living nature that at the very least requires supplementation by a premise (the intrinsic imbalance between sleep and waking) that is only implicitly contained in the text. In what follows, I attempt to make explicit this necessary addition. Hegel’s sentience is not reducible to a passive reception of external stimuli— though it is dependent upon this kind of pure receptivity that Hegel has discussed in the Philosophy of Nature as simple sensibility (Sensibilität). Sentience is rather a process in which the individual begins to distinguish (unterscheiden) itself as one (i.e., as a whole of affections) from itself as many (the diversity among the affections found in this whole: Verschiedenheit). In this sense, and only in this sense, the sentient soul is the birthplace of all forms of self-relation. Already at this stage of individual development, identity outweighs and sublates difference because the endurance of life, no matter how primitive, requires the dominance of self-sameness over change. The animal’s inner tension between self-differentiation and self-sameness is analogous to the relation between its waking and sleeping conditions, that is, between its differentiated “for-itself” and its undifferentiated “in-itself” states. Yet for Hegel these two conditions provide more than an analogy for the inward opposition that characterizes live individuals. Hegel thinks that the alternation of sleep and wakefulness actually provides the physiological condition for sentience to emerge in nature. To fully understand this, we must therefore examine his discussion of the sleep-waking rhythm in the final section on natural changes (β: Enc. 3P §398R&Z) and the opening section on sentience (γ: Enc. 3P §399). Already this systematic position strongly suggests that the sleep-waking fluctuation is, for Hegel, key to unlocking the enigma of sentience. Hegel emphasizes (following Aristotle)11 that the fundamental difference between sleeping and waking is not one of content but of the individual’s relation to itself. In sleep, the individual relates exclusively to its inner affections or “determinacies.” This is a psychic condition (or relation: Verhältnis) that dispenses with memory, attention, or imagination. It is indeterminate because for the sleeping soul no distinction exists between herself and her affections. Sunk in her contents, she is an “as yet undifferentiated universality” (Enc. 3P §398), i.e., natural spirit in-itself. The waking soul, by contrast, relates to her various contents as differing from herself as a whole. She is natural spirit become for-itself. The latter point must be emphasized: waking (wachen) and becoming awake (erwachen) do not coincide for Hegel with psychological awareness (Gewahrwerden) nor with epistemic consciousness (Bewusstsein), because waking and sleeping do not differ primarily in relation to externality. “Sleep” in this text is better understood as dormancy or latency, and “becoming awake” is closest to the event of being born as contrasted to the life of the fetus.12 The aspect of the sleep-waking relation that is most relevant to the genesis of sentience pertains to its asymmetry. The rhythmic oscillation between the

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two states is only prima facie an example of repetitive infinite motion. In reality, becoming awake is the intrinsic end of sleeping, but not vice versa.13 Sleeping and waking are…not mere alterations but alternating conditions. In this their formal, negative relation there is however also contained an affirmative one. In…being for self…the waking soul finds within herself, and that is, for herself, …the inward determinacies of her sleeping nature…Insofar as spirit remains captured in the bonds of naturalness, the return [of the soul from one to the other state] represents nothing but the empty repetition of the beginning—a tedious cycle. However, that return… according to its concept [dem Begriffe nach], contains at the same time an advance. (Enc. 3P §399&Z)

Despite the “tedious” appearance of the oscillation, in truth (“according to its concept”) the waking soul reaches beyond her sleeping self. The waking individual finds its dormant contents in itself, but not vice versa. While sleep is the soul’s potential for waking, waking is the potential for higher activities. For example, the psychic life of the fetus (about which more below) is a ceaseless flow of sensations shared with the mother’s psyche. The “tremendous leap” (Enc. 3P §396Z) of birth is an irreversible awakening from this dormancy. After this, there is no going back to the original sleep: the daily restoration we seek from our waking hours is but a pale imitation of unborn life’s quiescence. This rhythmic (ex)change of the animal psyche is related but not reducible to plants’ respiratory patterns—an exchange between equivalent opposites. The animal’s (hence also the human’s) daily rhythm expresses instead a striving toward a different condition: [T]he transition [from one to the other] has for us…the result that the undifferentiated substantial being of the soul in sleep, as well as her…still empty being-for-self in waking, prove…to be…one-sided and untrue determinations, thus enabling their concrete unity to emerge as their truth. …This unity…attains actuality…in the sentient soul. (Enc. 3P §399Z)

No longer simply sunk in each affection, the waking soul leads these affections all back to a center point. This marks the inchoate emergence of a doubling (or self-diremption) of the soul into being-in-herself and being-for-herself. In this doubling, one may say, the soul becomes more than she is in herself. It is this excess that opens in the soul as living monad14 a window onto her inner world. This referring of sensations back to a One is of course a far cry from the kind of reflection on one’s inner states that conscious subjects are familiar with. At the sentient stage, this activity is only a self-less experiencing (Erleben rather than Erfahren) of infinitely differing affections as subsisting together—a tentative discerning without awareness, a passive noticing without grasp. Sentience is, then, the minimal threshold of being-for-self. Arachne-like, the sentient soul is a skillful and untiring weaver of tapestries hidden from view, whose patterns she finds in a place she cannot know—what we call, but only in hindsight, her selfness.

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3 On Quivering, Sensibility, and Sentience If sentience is a finding of inner contents, the question arises as to the ­pre-sentient processes responsible in the first place for these contents’ presence in the soul. The Philosophy of Nature (Physics and Organics) offers clues to this missing link. It is in this framework, in which neither the inwardization nor the immateriality of material nature have yet been addressed, that Hegel makes repeated use of “Sensibilität” to denote a preponderantly passive feature of organic matter, while mentioning “Empfindung” as a particular outgrowth of the related but different capacity of irritability (Irritabilität) in advanced organisms. In these same sections, Hegel also discusses the universal role played in nature (whether inorganic or organic) by motional patterns like “quivering,” “pulsating” or “inner shaking” (Erzittern). He discusses these same patterns in the Science of Logic’s section on Life. Here, Sensibilität is explicitly defined as the “living objectivity of the individual,” whose primitive characteristic is “the pure quivering of aliveness in itself alone” (WL GW 12.185). In explaining the logic of material cohesion in the Physics, Hegel calls the self-contained movement of singular bodies an “internal quivering” (Enc. 2P §299). The interplay of cohesive and disintegrative forces in physical bodies manifests itself in their vibrations, sounds, and so on. In logical terms, such interplay is “a momentary negation of parts as well as the negation of this negation” (ibid.). After calling this quivering a physical “ideality” (a prelude to the Anthropology’s immateriality of matter), Hegel defines it as the “appearance of mechanical soulfulness [mechanische Seelenhaftigkeit]” in nature. A fundamental asymmetry already presents itself here, one that anticipates the characteristic imbalance of living systems (discussed above in Sect. 2): for the body’s continued existence, the negation of cohesion must be momentary, while the negation of this negation must predominate. In the Organics Hegel refers again to quivering as a fundamental, self-induced motion of organisms (Enc. 2P §351). Its first effect, heat, guarantees the preservation of the living being’s essential frame (Gestalt) against its surroundings, thus enabling the organism to sense those surroundings by active self-distinction. Inward quivering, it turns out, is living nature’s primary means of survival. In this same part of the Philosophy of Nature Hegel also discusses the three basic conceptual connotations of what counts as organism in connection with their somatic counterparts, i.e., the actual organs and capacities of animals. The first feature of the “animal subject” (Enc. 2P §353) is sensibility. In this purely somatic receptivity, the organism is “simple, generic inwardness in its externality.” This is a body incessantly affected by its surroundings. Sensibility is the physical affectedness of what is in “undivided identity with itself” (ibid.), i.e., of an existent for which its own identity is unmediated by otherness. The merely sensible organism is not a yet fully dirempted one. Indeed in this passive sense even plants have sensibility. This most plant-like feature even presides over all vegetative functions of the animal body. The second and third features of live organisms are the

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capacities for reactivity and replication: the living individual must be capable of irritability (Irritabilität) and self-reproduction or replication (Reproduktion). The former is the organic equivalent of inorganic elasticity (cf. Enc. 2P §297&Z). The latter is the relatively more active, incessant Gestalt-preserving replication of bodily parts (in contradistinction to the periodicity of species reproduction: Geschlechtsverhältnis). Thus unified in one individual, the three moments of being-animal (sensibility, irritability, and replication) ensure the continuous formation (Gestaltung) of the organism, “the crystal of live being” (Enc. 2P §355 Z). The pure physicality of sensibility (as opposed to the ontological hybridity of sentience) is made especially explicit in Hegel’s elucidations in Enc. 2P §353 Z: sensibility, irritability and replication are distinguished from one another only in the ‘higher ranks of life,’ where organ specialization is more advanced. At lower levels, all three functions dwindle to one. Primitive life only enacts its own replication: “[H]ence there are animals that are nothing but replication,—a frameless jelly, an active slime reflected in itself, where sensibility and irritability are not yet separate” (Enc. 2P §353R).15 In the Organics, Empfindung is mentioned for the first time as a derivative of irritability. It is the internal counterpart of outward self-motion: Hence, the system of sensibility specifies itself (αα) into the extreme…of inorganic being and lack of sentience—the skeletal system…; (ββ) into the moment of irritability, the system of the brain and… nerves, which are in turn, in their inward orientation, the nerves of sentience [Empfindung], [and] in their outward directedness, the nerves of motion; (γγ) into the system…[of] replication, the sympathetic nerve with the ganglia, in which dwells a…dull, indeterminate, will-less feeling of self. (Enc. 2P §354)

In sum: at the beginning of soul’s process from natural substance to natural subject, sensations are immediate, transient, indistinct, preceding the soul’s capacity to distinguish between herself as sensing and the contents of this sensing. As the process continues, affections become the soul’s ideal posits—just like the process of awakening can be said to posit the contents of sleep. (This is where the selfcorroboration—Bewährung—and self-certainty—Vergewisserung—of our waking life lie: when sleeping, we know not that we are, in this condition but when awake, we do.) Pure oscillations between activity and inactivity exist of course even in the simplest animals and plants. But when waking becomes sentient waking, the cycle is broken and the process spirals onto a new level. No longer merely alternating between two equivalent poles, the sentient soul sublates both. Hegel likes to phrase this process by using logical jargon: if awakening from dormancy represents a first division or “judgement” (Urteil) internal to the soul (Enc. 3P §398), we may consider the dormant and waking states as premises of a syllogism whose conclusion (Schluss) ties them together (Enc. 3P §400Z). As in every valid syllogism, the premises share the middle term. In the individual, this is the whole of found sensations (Empfindungen). This signals the live organism’s transition from mere physicality to natural subjectivity. The living thing is no longer just affectable, but now also sentient16:

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What the sentient soul finds in herself is, on the one hand, natural immediacy, rendered ideal in her and made into her own. On the other hand, and vice versa, what originally belongs to the for-itself, namely, what is, once deepened in itself, the ‘I’ of consciousness and free spirit, becomes determined as natural corporeity and is sensed as such. (Enc. 3P §401)

The double nature of sentience concisely described in this passage is the clue to the remaining account. Sentience both idealizes physical impressions (a body is seen, a sound is heard, without their physical existence entering the sentient subject)17 and somaticizes spiritual affections (rage quickens the heart, shame dilates the vessels). Natural occurrences become spiritual, emotions become corporeal. Body and spirit join in “healthy symbiosis” (ibid. R) within the animal. It is this symbiosis that further enables the meta-sensations of pleasure and displeasure. A “psychic physiology” treating “the system of internal sensing in its self-embodying particularization” ought to study this sympathy of body and spirit (ibid.). The philosopher’s task, however, is concluded by having answered the question of the place and origin of the affects: it is spirit in corporeal form, or the soul become capable of sentience. As the Ancients located anger or courage in the breast, so we also recognize as a matter of course that the sources of tears and laughter are spiritual (Enc. 3P §401 R). Like Aristotelean passions, Hegel’s Empfindungen are always already logoi enuloi, enmattered thoughts.

4 Transition from Sentience to Feeling18 The first of three parts of the treatise on the soul draws now to a close. Hegel sums up the features of the sentient soul (her passive self-relation; her finding of what is already in her; her radical indistinctness) and provides anticipatory glimpses into the successor, the feeling soul (fühlende Seele) or soul endowed with ­self-feeling (Selbstgefühl). The question arises as to why this transition is necessary in the first place. After all, many life forms never rise to feeling and self-feeling, thriving instead on their symbiotic exchange with the environment. Hegel’s answer to this question is best understood in the framework of his teleological (or, more precisely, entelechistic) conception of reality. The necessity of the transition from sentience to feeling is logical, i.e., it lies in the concept or logos of life. It is not a mechanical necessity, though it is expressed in the mechanisms (and then ‘chemisms’) that advance its goal, i.e., the realization of that concept. Since the being of soul is actually a becoming, and every natural becoming aims at the actualization of the concept of what is in process, then all stages of being soul are directed at its concept: the actualization of conscious being—Bewuβtsein. Life, from its crudest forms to forms of mindfulness, participates in the cosmic necessity to “realize the Concept” (Enc. 1 §242) or, as Hegel also says, in the Idea’s necessary “release [of] itself as nature freely out of itself” (ibid. §244). This (controversial) cosmic entelechism is the explanatory framework for Hegel’s understanding of the soul’s humble contributions to the actualization of spirit proper.

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This telos, however, is an integral connotation of the universal concept of life, not a necessary ingredient of every one particular live specimen. A comment from Hegel’s treatment of mental insanity must suffice here as illustration of the fact that not every instantiation of a concept (here, e.g., life specimens) must reflect the perfections (here, e.g., consciousness, intelligence, or will) implied by the concept. Hegel defines insanity (Enc. 3P §408Z) as applying only to human individuals who have attained rational consciousness, because becoming insane amounts to reverting to a state in which subjective self-feeling predominates in judgement and action and obscures the shared objectivity of conscious experience. This predominance, however, is also part of any healthy condition of childhood. It becomes an illness only when it bursts through the individual’s life at an untimely stage of development. Only then does it become derangement (Verrücktheit), i.e., a dislocation (Verrückung)19 of our subjective capacities visà-vis our previously attained awareness of natural and social objectivity. The fact that a contradiction between subjective feeling and objectivity marks a necessary and physiologically healthy childhood condition does not imply that children are deranged.20 In the same way, with regard to the soul’s necessary transitions, particular life forms can be perfectly successful on Earth without rising to intelligence and reason, though these be intrinsic to life’s universal concept. Methodologically, Hegel’s reconstruction of the transition from sentience to feeling unfolds along a pattern familiar to Hegel readers. Universal motion is a permanent overcoming of oppositions intrinsic to physical systems. Living systems are no exception. The intrinsically paradoxical, hybrid nature of the sentient soul seeks resolution. The feeling capacity emerges as such a resolution, namely, as a sublation of the tension essential to sentience. Hence, this tension is carried over, albeit transfigured, into self-feeling. We must of course bear in mind that despite the radical novelty of self-feeling vis-à-vis more primal activities, feeling still belongs to life’s pre-conscious states. What is being described in the following is therefore the soul’s emancipation, not from nature as such, but from natural immediacy. This “equally difficult and interesting part of the Anthropology” (Enc. 3P §402 Z) reconstructs the transition from sentience to feeling as one in which the opposition intrinsic to sentience is radicalized to the point of becoming unbearable for the living organism. The soul’s sunkenness in each affection happening to her must give way, lest she drown or lose herself in them, to the feeling that these affections are all connected—not as causes to effects, of course, but as occurrences in one totality. This oneness is not known discursively, but felt. It is on account of the lack of causal, temporal or other mediation that the relations among the diverse determinacies of the feeling soul may be called “magic.” In the transition, the soul’s self-doubling is reflected in the fact that in each sensation she also begins to sense herself as receiver of that sensation. Yet this selfness cannot be sensed in the way in which her impressions are. Selfness is not a sensation at all but rather the place where sensations arise and fade away (Enc. 3P §402 Z). The technical term for this unifying of sensations is “feeling.” This is, then, what “feeling soul” refers to in Hegel: life

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forms (including human individuals) in which multiple and diverse sensations converge into the feeling of having them. In feeling, sensations are experienced as a cohesive totality which Hegel calls a “selfness [Selbstischkeit]” (Enc. 3P §402 R). In this activity, the soul no longer collapses with each of her sensations. She is now for-herself, albeit only in an in-itself mode, i.e., in a kind of mediation that involves herself alone—akin to the way in which intuition, though blind, plays a pivotal role in the cognitive process. With the rise of feeling, a subjectively meaningful world is born, suspended in a shadowy realm between primitive sentience and representational mindfulness. Hegel also calls this world of feeling “the presaging soul [die ahnende Seele]:” Between representing consciousness…and immediate sentience…there is…the self-feeling or presaging soul in her totality and universality…What I sense [empfinde] at this stage, that I am, and what I am, that I sense. I am here immediately present in the content which only later, once I have become objective consciousness, appears to me as an independent world opposite me. (Enc. 3P §402 Z)

The momentous novelty represented by feeling is that sensations in it are sublated, not as sensations, but in “idealized” or “negative” form (ibid.). Sensations have become meaningful ciphers. They are not just in but for the individual who is developing toward full-fledged being-for-self. This stage is, however, still only an abstract being-for-self: “As feeling, the soul is no longer only natural, but inward individuality; this…initially formal being for self shall be made independent and free” (Enc. 3P §403). It is precisely in this twilight that precedes the formation of a conscious “I” that Hegel identifies the most fertile terrain for the psychic schisms which, when lacking resolution, manifest themselves as maladies of the human soul (Seelenkrankheiten). In the Addition to §402 Hegel helpfully explains why the logic of human psychic disease may best be explained in the theoretical context of the feeling soul: “this is the standpoint of her diremption [Entzweiung] within herself.” On the one hand, the individual soul is still overwhelmingly the natural organism she has been since her inception (literally, ab ovo). She is still a blind receiver of impressions, one whose self-identity is reduced to each of these as they occur. At her merely sensible and then sentient stage, the soul’s Dasein has merged with each of her affections, making her a prisoner of her determinations. In the feeling stage, however, the soul becomes the crucible of those determinations. She extricates herself from each while retaining them all, albeit “virtualiter” (see Enc. 3P §403R, quoted below). She now occupies “a middle stage between immediate natural life and objective, free consciousness” (Enc. 3P §402Z). Unwittingly, she has become the unfree archetype of the free “I.” At this stage, the soul is “on the one hand self-possessed, on the other, not self-possessed but still trapped in one singular particularity” (ibid.). This is the internal rift (the schizoid self-cleavage)21 in which most forms of mental disease find, according to Hegel, a nurturing soil, and upon which hypnotizers, mesmerizers and other seducers exercise their power.

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The text of this second part of the Anthropology walks us through the main phases of the feeling soul: (α) her immediate feeling of herself as living body; (ß) her feeling of herself as of two entities—the body and its immateriality; finally, (γ) her “break” with corporeity (Enc. 3P §409)22 through control and habituation of the body—the work by which her concept can be realized in embodied subjectivity.

5 On Self-Feeling As feeling, the soul is no longer either an indifferent part of self-external nature or a merely physiological, reactive receiver of sensations. She is also no longer at the mercy of each determinacy found in her. She distances herself from her own determinacies by actively connecting them to a center that is not itself something found but foreshadowed through the psychosomatic equivalent of epistemic intuition. As we have seen, Hegel calls this activity a “presaging” of the “I” by natural spirit. For the logician, feeling is the soul’s first “formal being-for-self” (Enc. 3P §403). For the philosopher of spirit, the chief significance of the converging of sensible determinations into felt inwardness is that it marks the psychic birth of the individual. In the feeling condition, the soul conserves all her sentient determinations not despite but because she negates their one-sidedly somatic character. In other words, sensations are still her main contents but in virtualized form. By negating the nature of her sensations as mere stimulations of the nervous system, the feeling soul transforms them into an “idealized” totality: Nowhere as much as with soul, and even more with spirit, it is essential for the understanding to grasp the determination of ideality, namely that ideality is negation of the real, while at the same time this reality is also preserved, contained virtualiter despite its nonexistence. (Enc. 3P §403 R)

This transformation does not directly affect the individual’s relation to externality because in this preconscious condition there is still no full-fledged externality to grapple with. In every individual there is an infinite world of sensations that (under normal conditions) will never be actualized, i.e., known or acted upon, in the individual’s life. Leibniz called this infinite and unknown world les petites perceptions.23 Though feeling is not identical with self-feeling, the latter is implicit in the former. The feeling soul is always already a self-feeling one (cf. Enc. 3P §410Z). Just like the self-diremption of the soul in her transition from sentient to feeling, even the distinction and overlapping of feeling and self-feeling has far reaching consequences for the explanation of normal and diseased forms of the mental life of humans.

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Theoretically, the feeling soul is difficult to grasp because she is simultaneously concrete and abstract—one may be tempted to say, she is the richest of the poorest forms of psychic life: Every individual is an infinite wealth of sense-determinations, representations, cognitions, thoughts and so forth; but through it all I am still an utterly simple—an indeterminate shaft [ein bestimmungsloser Schacht], in which all this is preserved without existing. (Enc. 3P §403R)

Hegel’s analysis of the feeling soul is a model of linguistic virtuosity aimed at articulating, without undue use of metaphors, the inarticulable perspective of a point in nature that is “utterly simple” and yet stores “infinite” content. Language is only of limited help in the analysis of motions rooted in immediacy—here, in the somatic-spiritual process by which sentience is transformed into the feeling of sentience. Poetic language is more apt to articulate this virtual preservation of what is no longer existent, as poetry’s power consists precisely of putting into words the intimate link of the corporeal and spiritual dimensions of unconscious impressions or pre-cognitive presaging. Though Hegel is no poet, the one metaphor he uses for felt selfhood, namely, the “indeterminate shaft in which all…is preserved without existing” (and whose moral counterpart in the Philosophy of Right is the “bottomless pit” of feeling-based conscience) (RPh §137&R), clarifies better than a thousand words a crucial fact about the feeling soul. Though being part of the world, she also—not unlike Leibniz’s monad of monads—“contains” the whole world in herself. This double relation of containment has for Hegel real phenomenal counterparts. For example, at the onset of human ontogenesis, externality comprises for the individual only its body and is thus not felt (let alone known) as a limit, but simply experienced as the whole of what there is. Despite the strictures imposed by language, there are no two substances here vying for primacy (neither body and soul nor matter and form), and neither do space and time play a role at this stage (cf. Enc. 3P §406R). Before reaching the phase of its diremption into body and spirit proper, natural spirit knows nothing of their distinction. Feeling can then be described as the process by which the soul first unifies bodily sensations into one “virtual” or ideal unit or individuality: “For the feeling soul, the real outwardness of corporeity has no truth” (Enc. 3P §403R). This is therefore only individualization in the form of a foreboding or pre-sentiment of selfhood. From the fact that at this stage the body “does not count as something real” (ibid.) follows that corporeity can neither oppose resistance to, nor be perceived as limitation by, the feeling soul. Extraordinary cultural feats, commonly interpreted as exotic cases of the triumph of spirit over body, show how conscious individuals can train their feeling soul (or feeling body) to sovereign indifference vis-à-vis externality. And the peculiar, immediate relation of the feeling soul to her body is also the deeper truth of those representations that picture her as “omnipresent” in the body (till death them part). Being “a whole (ein Ganzes)” (Enc. 3P §404), the feeling soul is an individual; being individual, she excludes and differentiates. Yet this differentiation can only

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be internal to herself because no true externality is yet discernible (this will only emerge in the process of self-habituation): the spiritual and bodily self are still wholly one. More complex forms of spirit are defined by the capacity to differentiate between the two dimensions—for example, between things and perceptions of things. But the feeling soul can only distinguish among sensations, and between these and her selfness—just like a self-differentiating substance, Hegel adds, can distinguish nothing but its own accidents. Compared to the concreteness and luminosity of consciousness, the feeling soul may be considered an abstract ‘stage of darkness [Stufe der Dunkelheit]’ (ibid.). Yet the darkness of feeling is a necessary moment in natural spirit’s development. It is only when an advanced, wholly conscious individual falls back onto the stage of mere feeling, thus becoming prey again to an exclusive self-relation, that the soul must be considered diseased. In general, an individual is gripped by mental disease when its judgements and actions are predominantly (or even exclusively) ruled by the all-encompassing feeling of self that used to be subordinate to consciousness of objectivity. Hegel’s detailed illustrations of the work of feeling individuality in the human condition cannot be done full justice here, but a few of his examples may illuminate the meaning of ‘feeling’ in his acceptation. As already mentioned, the driving force behind the capacity for feeling is the formation of a pre-conscious “selfness” or “selflike individuality” (see following quote). Because of the gradual extrication of feeling from the physicality of sentience, its active and passive sides (feeling and being felt) may even belong to different bodies. Indeed experience shows that human individuals may temporarily place their selfness in, or lose it to, others. One example is the hypnotic condition, in which one’s dominant selfness or Genius becomes the core of the other’s personality: The feeling individuality is indeed at first a monadic individual but…not yet…an inwardly reflected subject and thus it is passive. Hence, its selflike individuality is a subject different from it, one that may also be another individual, whose selfness [Selbstischkeit]… traverses and determines it pervasively…without encountering resistance; this [other] subject can therefore be called its Genius.24 (Enc. 3P §405)

The same phenomenon can be observed in the mother’s relation to her fetus. These two individuals, the same neither in body nor in consciousness (as one of them lacks consciousness altogether) share the mother’s feeling-psyche: “The mother is the Genius of the child” (Enc. 3P §405R). She is the self-like totality, not just of herself but also of one other “only exogenously posited as individual” (ibid.), who cannot but share its host’s self-feeling—the only individuality it has access to. Further manifestations of these so-called magical (i.e., non-causally mediated) occurrences (cf. Enc. 3P §405Z) of the feeling soul are sleep and other dormant states; hypnotic or cataleptic trance; somnambulism; dreams and presages (cf. Enc. 3P §402Z); so-called psychosomatic25 diseases (Enc. 3P §405Z); clairvoyance or second sight (Enc. 3P §406Z); and even the quotidian, immediate connection of objective self-consciousness and preconscious feeling of self in every human individual.

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The attempt at conceptualizing subject-matters characterized by immediacy is not unproblematic, Hegel admits (Enc. 3P §406Z). It is akin to attempting a ­conceptual or discursive account of intuition. To understand means to cognize the ways in which beings relate to one another through “causality, ground and so on” (ibid.). For the feeling soul these distinctions count for nothing, hence any discursive explanation will be fraught with paradoxes. On the other hand, it is precisely the walled-in character of the feeling soul that allows us to understand the peculiarities affecting those among us who are unable to distinguish and to connect the world they know with the world they feel. For example, the destruction by war or revolution of real world structures that make up an individual’s Genius (the childhood places, languages, customs, beliefs, familiar connections, or political and religious contexts that form the core of one’s personality) often leads to mental illnesses (whereby “religious and political exaltation” figure prominently in Hegel, following the insights of Philippe Pinel).26 Hegel’s examples of this closure and immediacy span the gamut from the depressive disorder of the Stoic philosopher choosing to kill himself rather than living in Caesar’s world, to the malaise of the hopelessly homesick emigré and of the exiled artist, whose muse withers away, to pathological forms of longing for the past or grieving for the dead. The understanding detects in the immediacy of feeling a condition akin to the intuition (Anschauung) of fully developed intelligence. And indeed the kind of knowledge at issue in the feeling soul can be described as a monadic seeing (Anschauen) or a “self-gazing of the Genius” (ibid.). For Hegel, however, the Romantic elevation of this “seeing” to a privileged kind of knowing, whose popular counterpart is charlatanry (ibid.), amounts to intellectual crudeness: Characteristic of this knowing is…that the same content that is…objective for healthy consciousness and…requires…intellectual mediation…can [instead] be immediately known, [i.e.] beheld [geschaut]. This beholding is clairvoyance [Hellsehen] in so far as it is knowledge in the undifferentiated substantiality of the Genius…Yet this clairvoyance…is prey to all sort of contingency of feeling, imagining a.s.o., not to mention the intrusion of alien representations in it…It is crude…to consider the seeing of this condition as an elevation of spirit and…a condition better suited…to universal cognitions. (Enc. 3P §406 R)

Once more, according to Hegel it is the ancients who have the advantage over the moderns in the sober assessment of the anything-but-sober pre-rational conditions of the human mind. Plato’s Timaeus for example, Hegel remarks,27 affirms the intelligibility of madness in the context of a discussion of physiology and psychology. Instead of looking for truth in the insights of shamans, prophets or somnambulists—insights that for Hegel border on rant: Schwärmerei—Plato provides a superior treatment of the condition he calls enthousiasmos that enables divination by certain individuals. Their “dark sayings and visions” must then be subjected to thoughtful interpretation, either by the prophet after “recovery of his wits” or by appointed interpreters. Contrary to some modern philosophizing, Plato is also mindful of the somatic components of “phantoms and visions” (Plato 1961, 71a): god created the liver, for example, as the “seat of divination”—the physical carrier of prophetic capacities (Plato 1961, 71b–e). More importantly, while he

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acknowledges a kernel of truth in this condition, Plato does not hesitate to declare it subordinate to knowledge proceeding from reason: God has given the art of divination not to the wisdom, but to the foolishness of man … [W]hen one receives the inspired word, either his intelligence is enthralled in sleep, or he is demented by some distemper or possession. (Plato 1961, 71e)

6 Conclusion Not surprisingly in view of the systematic character of Hegel’s philosophy, even the detailed, quasi-empirical treatment of sentience and feeling in the Anthropology can be best appreciated and defended only in the wider context of this treatise’s conception of soul-being. In two passages (from Enc. 3P §392 R and §402 Z) Hegel recapitulates the initially abstract and then increasingly concrete connotations of the concept of Seele at work in the Anthropology. The Remark to §392 explains the “qualities” (α) of soul as those aspects of live nature that can be abstractly described without recourse to the “changes” (β) of soul, that is, without including the processes by which alone life can be fully accounted for—principally, the peculiar process of inner-directedness (Erinnerung) that distinguishes animals from the rest of living nature. In the preliminary context of a merely qualitative analysis of the subject matter (α), beingsoul belongs to the continuum of physico-mechanical, chemical, and organic (today’s biochemical) forces at work in the universe and hence on Earth. Souls are segments of nature’s continuum and thus necessarily in sympathy with, or non-mediately connected to, cosmic, sidereal and telluric forces and motions. Hegel also observes here that such cosmic forces have greater impact on plants and animals than on humans, though for obvious reasons even the latter can never be entirely free of them. Cosmic influences become largely irrelevant to individuals endowed with consciousness but can never be absent from the psychosomatic whole of which their consciousness is part. Hegel puts this concisely: the sympathy of human beings with their cosmic or Earthly environment weakens with the increase in human Bildung, that is, with an increase in the practical and theoretical self-formation of the species. Furthermore, individual susceptibility to cosmic sympathy also depends upon the scale of the factors that trigger responses in organisms and their species. Geographical and climatic differences and variations, for example, determine the qualities of soul more than seasonal differences or daynight alternations. And yet seasonal changes and circadian rhythms, so influential on simple organisms, do imperceptibly affect more complex individuals, a fact that comes into full view mostly when the latter become diseased. In this early Remark, Hegel elaborates no further as to why this is so: the reason for observable phenomena of this kind can only become clear at a more advanced stage of analysis of the individual soul in the moment of her “diremption [Entzweiung] within herself” (Enc. 3P §402Z).

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The six-page Addition to §402 focuses on various modes of this diremption as represented by the sentient and then self-feeling soul (see above, Sect. 4). Hegel gives here also a detailed summary of the main phases of the rising of psyche from the stupor of mere sentience to the realization of conscious life. What he provides here is, in other words, a sketch of the logic of human psychic development. As for the specific transition from sentience to self-feeling, he explains that the soul at first “dreams through [durchträumt] and presages her concrete natural life” (ibid.). This is a phenomenon, he comments, that has “recently” caught the attention of the public. The reference is to the famous and equally notorious theory and practices of Mesmerism, based on the presupposition of the existence of “animal magnetism,” a nineteenth-century conception deriving from ancient sources that implies the fundamental bi-polarity of individuals and their ultimately symbiotic relation with the cosmos.28 For Hegel, to assume our “magnetic” nature is simply to acknowledge (and sometimes exploit) the primal layers of the animal soul subsisting alongside our conscious selfhood. As mentioned above, it is possible for individuals to relapse into their former feeling selfness: this is both the target and the tool of therapeutic interventions like hypnotism, mesmerism and, we may add, other future seductions of the psyche still unknown to Hegel. The summation given in this Addition to §408 concludes with a sketch of the soul’s approaching the stage of the “abstract freedom of the I,” or self-consciousness, through self-habituation. In this process the soul will be shown capable to mastering for the first time her corporeal life by demoting the body to the role of handy (and indeed handed) instrument, and by expelling into an external world those of her contents that she no longer recognizes as belonging to spirit proper, the conscious ‘I’.

Notes 1. All references to the Philosophy of Nature and the Philosophy of Spirit, including the Anthropology, are to the bilingual critical edition by M. J. Petry (Enc. 2P and Enc. 3P, respectively). The translations, however, are mine. 2. As the examples from the Encyclopedia Remarks and Additions show, phylogenesis (species development) and ontogenesis (individual development) are distinct but inseparable in Hegel’s conception of the necessary phases (“moments”) of natural spirit. 3. I use feminine pronouns to refer to “soul,” not out of pedantic faithfulness to German grammar but because the ubiquitous “it” and “its” in the translations sometimes obfuscate important claims. See e.g. Enc. 3P, 13, which translates §389Z as saying that the soul is omnipresent in all points of “its” (the animal’s) corporeity, while Hegel states that the soul is omnipresent in all points of “her” (the soul’s own) corporeity. 4. The extent to which Hegel’s Anthropology is—by his explicit acknowledgment, e.g., in Enc. 3P §378—a modern development of Aristotle’s De anima cannot be discussed here but will be briefly indicated in text and endnotes. The same applies to Hegel’s only occasionally acknowledged debt to Leibniz’s monadological theory. 5. In the following, Empfindung is translated as “sentience” in order to emphasize its distinction from Sensibilität (“sensibility,” discussed in Sect. 2) and, of course, “perception” (Wahrnehmung).

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6. Hegel’s division of soul’s “moments” is an elaboration of Leibniz’ distinction among perceiving, sensing, and thinking monads. 7. “Self-externality” is Hegel’s rendition of Aristotle’s “infinite divisibility of matter.” See Aristotle’s discussion of Zeno’s paradoxes in Aristotle (1984a, VII 8). Hegel’s anatomical references are inspired by Aristotle (1907, II 1, 412b18; 1984b, Z 11, 1036b 30–32). 8. Hegel’s konkret is a literal rendition of the Latin concretum (from concrescere, grow together). It always indicates the coalescence of multiple elements into a totality, as opposed to abstrakt, the result of removing multiplicity from a totality. 9. Wallace’s translation: “Nature in its own self realizes its untruth and sets itself aside” (Enc 3, 29) misreads “an ihr selbst” as “in ihr selbst.” It also suggests the existence of a natural “self.” Petry’s subtler rendition: “Nature of its own accord sublates itself as being inadequate to truth” (Enc. 3P, II, 3), freely paraphrases an ihr selbst as “of its own accord,” weakening the oppositional quality of this self-sublation of nature, a sublation that must be understood as occurring not only to but against its externality. 10. On Empfindung and Gefühl in Hegel the following contributions stand out: Hösle (1987), Wandschneider (1999, 2010), Frigo (2002), de Vries (1988, Chapters 4 and 5; 2013), Winfield (2007; 2011, Chapters 5 and 6), Grier (2013), Reid (2013). 11. Cf. Aristotle, Da II.1, 412a22–26: “Both sleep and waking imply the presence of soul; and while waking corresponds to the exercise of knowledge, sleep is analogous to its possession without its exercise.” 12. On Leibniz’s related conception of weakly active and active monads, see Fouke (1991, de Fountenay (1998), Pasini (1994), Fichant (2005). 13. Again, Aristotle’s living “substance” is in the background: psuchē is the formal or eidetic substance of bodies capable of life (Aristotle 1907, II.1, 412a19–21). Its intrinsic alterations are not instances of kinesis (motion) as much as of metabolē (change). The transition from potency to actuality exemplified by sleeping and waking is paradigmatic of the latter. 14. On the soul as “monadic individual” see Enc. 3P §405, quoted in Sect. 4. 15. Hegel’s references are to contemporaneous studies of contractile “mucous membranes” (e.g., J. F. Blumenbach’s solidum vivum) that were widely discussed as scientific explanations for “vital matter.” 16. This means also that the syllogism of sentience marks the boundary between inorganic bodies (e.g., crystals) and organisms, no matter their strong affinity otherwise. Hegel exemplifies this with the fact that water, though capable of being affected by color, is unable to dirempt itself and thus to sense her being colored (GW 15:234; Enc. 3P I:123). See de Vries (2013, 140). 17. See Aristotle (1907, III.8): “The faculties [intellect and sensing] must be identical, not with the things…but with their [intelligible and sensible] forms. The things themselves they are not, for it is not the stone which is in the soul, but the form of the stone” (ibid., 432b28-a). 18. On the significance of Hegel’s changes to this part between the 1827 and 1830 editions see Reid (2013). 19. Kant’s general definition of “madness,” widely accepted during and after Hegel’s time, is the following: the soul “becomes displaced…and finds herself outside the sensorium commune in a place far away from it: thus the word Verrückung” (AA 7, 216). 20. In the same passage, Hegel reminds us of another parallel: the proof that the potential for wrongdoing is a necessary connotation of the concept of freedom does not imply that every free person must commit crimes. 21. Schyzophrenie (separation of the mind) was introduced in the twentieth century (1911) by Swiss psychiatrist Eugen Bleuler (1857–1939). In Hegel’s time, the German descriptive term for this generic condition was Katatonie. Catatonia is now used for one of many symptoms of schizophrenia, but contemporary psychiatry still debates whether “schizophrenia” should be used as umbrella term (as Katatonie in Hegel) or as denoting one specific disease.

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22. “This particular being of the soul is the moment of her corporeity, with which at this point she breaks, differentiating herself from it as its simple being, and becomes the ideal, subjective substantiality of this corporeity” (Enc. 3P §409). 23. Leibniz’s petites perceptions (from the Preface to the Nouveaux Essays, written 1704) greatly inspired Ernst Platner (1744–1818), with whose work Hegel was well acquainted and who may be considered the modern originator of theories of the “unconscious” as well as of “psychosomatic” medical anthropology. 24. This meaning is retained in the English “congeniality,” indicating a somewhat inscrutable affinity. In Hegel’s time, Genius (borrowed from Renaissance Latin) was often synonymous with individual Geist. For Genius in Hamann and Herder see the entry Genie in Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm (DWB). The Grimm brothers speculate that behind this modern conception lies Socrates’ daimonion, first cleansed of its Christian transfigurations as divine anointment or guardian angel and then resurrected as the Romantics’ “voice of the heart.” 25. To be true to Hegel’s understanding of “psyche,” the expression ought to be “spiritual-somatic,” as the psyche is already a unit of body and spirit. Hence my qualifier “so-called.” 26. Philippe Pinel (1745–1826), a life-long sympathizer of French revolutionary circles, served as head physician at the lunatic asylum La Salpêtrière in Paris. He is known for coining the expression “aliénation mentale” and for proposing and implementing therapies compatible with the human rights of the patients. Hegel greatly admired him and relied upon his works (cf. Enc. 3P §408 Z). Pinel’s painstaking reports about his patients reveal the large extent to which in times of war and civil war individuals’ mental world may break down as a consequence of the disappearance of social structures. 27. This digression is found in a footnote to §406 R. See Plato (1961). 28. On this and other consequences of the “immediacy” of the human soul see e.g. de Laurentiis (2019).

Bibliography Aristotle. 1984a. “Physics.” In The Complete Works of Aristotle. Vol. I, edited by Jonathan Barnes, 315–446. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Aristotle. 1984b. “Metaphysics.” In The Complete Works of Aristotle. Vol. II, edited by Jonathan Barnes, 1552–1728. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Aristotle. 1907. De anima. Translation, introduction and notes by R. D. Hicks. de Fountenay, Élisabeth. 1998. Le silence des bêtes. La philosophie à l’épreuve de l’animalité. Paris: Fayard. Part IX, Chapter 5. de Laurentiis, Allegra. 2019. “Derangements of the Soul.” In Cambridge Critical Guide on Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit, edited by Marina F. Bykova, 83–103. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. de Vries, Willem. 1988. Hegel’s Theory of Mental Activity, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. de Vries, Willem. 2013. “Subjective Spirit: Soul, Consciousness, Intelligence and Will.” In The Bloomsbury Companion to Hegel, edited by Allegra de Laurentiis and Jeffrey Edwards, 133– 156. London and New York: Bloomsbury. Fichant, Michel. 2005. “La constitution du concept de monade.” In La monadologie de Leibniz. Genèse et context, edited by Enrico Pasini, 31–54. Paris: Mimesis. Fouke, Daniel. 1991. “Spontaneity and the Generation of Rational Beings in Leibniz’s Theory of Biological Reproduction.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 29 (1): 33–45. Frigo, Gianfranco. 2002. “Die Welt der Lebenden Natur bei Hegel.” In Hegel und die Lebenswissenschaften, edited by Olaf Breidbach and Dietrich von Engelhardt, 107–120. Berlin: Verlag für Wissenschaft und Bildung.

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Grier, Philip T. 2013. “The Relation of Mind to Nature: Two Paradigms.” In Essays on Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, edited by David S. Stern, 223–246. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Grimm, Jacob, and Wilhelm Grimm. 1854–. Deutsches Wörterbuch von Jacob Grimm und Wilhelm Grimm (DWB). 16 vols., Leipzig 1854–1961. Berlin-Brandenburgische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Online: Der digitale Grimm. Hösle, Vittorio. 1987. ‘“Pflanze und Tier.” In Hegel und die Naturwissenschaften, edited by Michael J. Petry, 377–422. Stuttgart: Frommann-Holzboog. Leibniz, Johann G. 1982. New Essays on Human Understanding. Edited and translated by P. Remnant and J. Benet. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pasini, Enrico. 1994. “Perception, Imagination and Leibniz’s Theory of the Will.” In Leibniz und Europa. VI. Internationaler Leibniz-Kongress. Vorträge, 581–588. Hannover: GottfriedWilhelm-Leibniz-Gesellschaft e.V. Plato. 1961. Timaeus, translated by Benjamin Jowett. In Plato. Collected Dialogues, edited by Edith Hamilton and Huntigton Cairns, 1151–1211. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Reid, Jeffrey. 2013. “How the Dreaming Soul Became the Feeling Soul, Between the 1827 and 1830 Editions of Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit: Empirical Psychology and the Late Enlightenment.” In Essays on Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, edited by D. S. Stern, 37–54. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Wandschneider, Dieter. 1999. “Das Problem der Emergenz von Psychischem—im Anschluss an Hegels Theorie der Empfindung.” In Jahrbuch für Philosophie des Forschungsinstituts für Philosophie Hannover. Vol. 10, edited by Vittorio Hösle, Peter Koslowski, and Richard Schenk, 69–95. Wandschneider, Dieter. 2010. “Elementare Formen des Psychischen. Eine Systemtheoretische Skizze im Anschluss an Hegels Deutung des Organismus.” In Bewusstsein zwischen Natur und Geist? Edited by Wolfgang Neuser and Wolfgang Lenski, 1–27. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Winfield, Richard D. 2007. “Identity, Difference, and the Unity of Mind: Reflections on Hegel’s Determination of Psyche, Consciousness, and Intelligence.” In Identity and Difference: Studies in Hegel’s Logic, Philosophy of Spirit, and Politic, edited by P. T. Grier, 103–127. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Winfield, Richard D. 2010. Hegel and Mind: Rethinking Philosophical Psychology. New York: Palgrave. Winfield, Richard D. 2011. The Living Mind: From Psyche to Consciousness. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield.

Chapter 16

Intuition, Representation, and Thinking: Hegel’s Psychology and the Placement Problem Markus Gabriel

Arguably, the very idea of a philosophy of mind in its modern guises draws on a twofold puzzlement. On the one hand, one can point out various reasons that make it look mysterious how some essential aspect of the mind, some subset of the referents of our best established mental vocabulary, could actually fit in the natural order. On the other hand, the assumption that we should at least strive to make the mystery go away—to lift the veil of Isis—introduces a related mystery. The related mystery consists in the impression that despite our constant, apparently intimate, acquaintance with the conscious mind there is room for the view that we have no idea what the nature of this mysterious object is. Thus, there seems to be something, the mind, whose nature needs to be clarified in light of the independent requirement that we have to fit it into the natural order. Otherwise, it seems hard to regard the mind as a legitimate candidate for existence at all. Following Huw Price (2011, 2013), let us call this the “placement problem.” In what follows, I want to explore some aspects of Hegel’s way of addressing this puzzlement and of resolving the aura of mystery. On my reading, Hegel’s overall strategy in this context is to relocate the placement issue that puzzles the committed standard naturalist who believes that the all-encompassing arena of existence is nature, where “nature,” roughly, is the domain of objects under investigation from the most objective scientific standpoint available. Hegel argues that the real placement problem is how to fit all phenomena about which we can have truth-apt thoughts into a single logical space of which nature is only one part, and in which natural science is not the only way of understanding nature itself; natural science, as we know it, does not deal with the concept of “nature” as a realm of specific facts. More precisely, I will look into the psychology section of Hegel’s philosophy of subjective spirit in the Encyclopedia. If anywhere, this is where we need to

M. Gabriel (*)  University of Bonn, Bonn, Germany e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 M. F. Bykova and K. R. Westphal (eds.), The Palgrave Hegel Handbook, Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26597-7_16

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look for Hegel’s contribution to the philosophy of mind in the standard sense of the project dealing with human mindedness, its epistemic relation to the natural, external world, and its embeddedness into a larger whole.1 Hegel’s philosophy of mind belongs to the Post-Kantian project of addressing the metaphysical issue of the unity of the subject head-on. The major PostKantian philosophers, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, all believe that Kant’s strategy ever since the Dreams of a Spirit Seer (AA II, 315–373) was two-pronged. On the one hand, he argues that we really cannot know how the mind fits into the natural order, as the mind is just not an object suitable for the relevant kind of knowledge-acquisition. This, of course, culminates in the Paralogism chapter of the First Critique. On the other hand, Kant splits the subject up by presenting us not only with a bunch of faculties, a “soul sack” (Cf. VGPh 3:444, MM 20:351), as Hegel polemically puts it. Rather, he can be seen as undermining the naturalist’s worries about how to place mind in nature by showing that there is no unified thing, no mind, such that a placement problem for this thing could ever get off the ground. What is particularly interesting about the ambitious projects of the PostKantian Idealists in light of the contemporary debate is that they all offer reasons to avoid the following dilemma which haunts the philosophy of mind. Let us call this the metaphysical dilemma of mind: It seems that we have either to find a way to fit the mind into the natural order or to accept some version of an irreducibility claim concerning a subset (of the referents) of our mental vocabulary. Yet, if this exhausts our options, we are in trouble. For option one, i.e. fitting the mind into the natural order, ultimately amounts to denying that there are any genuine referents of our mental vocabulary, where a “genuine referent” bears an essential relation to the descriptive, intentional features of that very vocabulary (expressivism/non-factualism). And option two, accepting some version of irreducibility, typically leads to a kind of functionalist dualism (or functional pluralism), which again avoids metaphysical commitments. There is, of course, also room for a combination of both, a combination which I would like to call “speculative (meta-)physics,” represented by philosophers such as David Chalmers and Thomas Nagel (Nagel 2012). This corresponds to the idea that there simply must be additional laws or forces operating in nature, whose eventual discovery will show us how the dualistically conceived conscious mind fits into a natural order after all; either because the natural order contains proto-phenomenal or proto-intentional elements hitherto hidden from natural science (Chalmers) or because we will undergo a scientific revolution whose precise shape cannot be anticipated (Nagel). Daniel Dennett rightly warns us against this move of postulating “wonder tissue” (Dennett 1991, 40), which, of course, makes the problem go away at the cost of making metaphysics both an ad hoc and mystery-mongering enterprise. In my view, Hegel’s philosophy of mind avoids all three options. In order to get a grip on the overall outlook of Hegel’s philosophy of mind and to approach some of its details from the right angle, I will first (I.) lay out some of the crucial methodological building blocks of his project. I will then (II.) deal with

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the three major sections of his psychology in which Hegel discusses the concepts of intuition, representation, and thinking respectively and argues that they all fall short of a full articulation of the structure of the mind.2

1 The Method In the introductory paragraphs of the Encyclopedia philosophy of spirit (Enc. §377–386), Hegel contends that the philosophy of spirit differs both from the philosophy of pure thought, logic, and from the philosophy of nature by virtue of its specific methodological set-up. The object of the philosophy of spirit coincides with the subject who claims self-knowledge (Selbsterkenntnis). Hegel, however, warns us straight away that self-knowledge does not consist in an exploration of the individual mental life or soul. To know myself does not mean to delve into my motivations and figure out my unconscious or conscious desires so as to lead a better life. Rather, self-knowledge in the context of an epistemological theory is about the concepts that enable us to think of ourselves under descriptions of a specific kind.3 These descriptions characteristically serve the function of giving an account of how finite, embodied thinkers are capable of guaranteeing the overall intelligibility of what there is. In his Science of Logic, Hegel argues for the standpoint of absolute idealism, which, in my view, is basically a defense of the following principle of intelligibility: (Principle of intelligibility = Absolute Idealism) “A coherent conception of the world has to be compatible with the fact that we often get it right, which is not to say that there is nothing we somehow cannot know. Yet the principle denies that there is anything inherent in the concept of the world, which would make it reasonable to believe on a priori grounds that there are objects and facts beyond human ken.”4

In the Philosophy of Nature, Hegel then deals with the concepts of natural objects, where natural objects are precisely objects which lack self-knowledge in the sense to be discussed in the philosophy of spirit. Roughly, Hegel individuates concepts of natural objects by their pure extensionalist semantics.5 Nature, as he famously puts it, is “extrinsicality (Außereinander),” “infinite individuation (unendliche … Vereinzelung)” (Enc. §252).6 Natural objects do not hang together in the self-conception of natural objects. To put it bluntly, nature’s intelligibility is not more nature, which is why we can legitimately think of nature as merely spread out in space and time regardless of the self-conception, if any, of the elements of the natural order. Yet, the human mind cannot conceive of itself, cannot know itself, by applying merely extensionalist concepts to itself. In particular, if we think of the human mind as a “soul sack” we will not be able to understand how the various aspects of the human mind which happen to be found in the sack hang together by falling under the overall concept of a human mind.

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Whatever is distinguishable in the activity of spirit is defined as an independent determinateness, a procedure which results in spirit’s being treated as an ossified and mechanical agglomeration. And it makes no difference whatever if activities are spoken of instead of faculties and powers, for the isolating of activities also involves treating spirit as nothing but an aggregation, and considering their relationship as an external and contingent relation. (Enc. §445R)

In Enc. §442, Hegel characterizes the method of his philosophy of mind as “development (Entwicklung)” (Enc. §442).7 In this context, he identifies a “goal of spirit,” namely, “to bring forth the objective fulfillment and at the same time the freedom of its knowledge” (ibid.).8 I take it that the underlying idea can be reconstructed as suggesting that our mental vocabulary serves a variety of explanatory functions. In the philosophy of subjective spirit as a whole, Hegel is interested in the use of mental vocabulary in epistemology. His focus there is on the question how we can conceive of the human mind in such a way that we understand how we can know the things we indeed know. Mental concepts, among other things, play the role of making it intelligible to knowers how they can be in epistemic touch with the natural, external world. This is the function under investigation in the philosophy of mind in the narrow sense of the term.9 Hegel claims a “final purpose (Endzweck)” (Enc. §442R) of the philosophy of mind. The final purpose of the philosophy of mind is to make sense of the fact that we can know something about natural objects by being epistemically in touch with them. In Hegel’s eyes, this requires a unified account of the mental activities working together in any truth-apt thought episode directed at the natural order. Yet, this account will ultimately turn out to have a top-down structure in that we are in a position to assume that there is truth-apt thought about the natural, external world which often gets it right. Adding terms to our mentalistic vocabulary serves the function of giving an account of how this actual achievement can best be made sense of in light of the principle of intelligibility provided by the justification of the stance of absolute idealism in the Science of Logic. In particular, this means that our theory of such truth-apt thought episodes has to account for both sides of the relation between the mind and the natural order. On the one hand, we need to make sense of the mental side of the relation and, on the other, of the worldly or natural side, as it were. If we neglect one of these, we either fall into the trap of subjective idealism, solipsism or phenomenalism in the one case, or into the trap of a naturalistic conception of human mindedness incapable of making sense of the unity of the human mind in the other. The various, more specific concepts falling under the more general concept of the human mind are ordered by being different “way[s] of considering spirit and its various activities” (Enc. §442R). The structure of our mentalistic vocabulary is not guided by the idea of an aggregate of faculties or an open-ended list of terms, but by an epistemologically descending order introduced from the topdown standpoint of an account of our achievement qua knowers of facts about the external world. This means that the explanatory context in which we invoke

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mental vocabulary is structured in light of the theoretical goal of making sense of our knowledge of the natural order from within that natural order. This raises the question: how can finite embodied thinkers know of the natural order? The immediate reaction to this question is to resort to sensation as an element in the causal web of nature, which Hegel discusses in the anthropology section. Dennett gives voice to this traditional sentiment: “The world provides an inexhaustible deluge of information bombarding our senses” (Dennett 1991, 16). Yet, this immediately creates the problem that the subject needs to select information in order to reduce the infinite complexity of the world’s assault on her sensibility. This reduction cannot be performed by the theoretical role assigned to the world in this inchoate causal theory of perception. Thus, even if we grant that we are bombarded with an overflow of information to be reduced and processed, this precisely gives us reasons to look for the unity of the experiencing subject elsewhere, that is, not in sensation. The paragraphs dealing with theoretical spirit are crucial steps towards an account of the experiencing subject that does not look for the subject in the meshwork of sensations. Hegel’s moves from one mental concept to the next are investigations into the explanatory structures underpinning our fully justified certainty that we are in epistemic touch with the natural world. The starting point of the actual investigation is that the finite knower, “intelligence,” finds herself as determined by the natural order. This means that finite knowers are related to given objects that are not produced by their spontaneous mental activity, but are rather found. Intelligence finds itself determined; this is its appearance, its point of departure in its immediacy; as knowledge, however, it consists of positing that which is found as its own. (Enc. §445, translation altered)10

Notice the Hegelian wordplay in the first line, which can be translated in two ways into English: a. Intelligence finds determinations within itself.11 b. Intelligence will certainly find itself (“bestimmt” can be used as an adverbial epistemic modal). The second reading is related to the very form of account-giving specific to what Hegel calls “Geist” in general. In Enc. §442 he writes: The progress of spirit is development in so far as its existence, which is knowledge, has within itself as its content and purpose the rational, the being which is determined in and for itself. It is, therefore, the activity of translation, being purely the formal transition into manifestation, within which it is return into itself.

For Hegel, to give an account of the role of a concept expressing an aspect of mind means to develop the concept in light of a particular end. The end is to make sense of the concept’s contribution to an enhanced understanding of ourselves as knowers. The particular methodological twist to that requirement characteristic of the philosophy of spirit as a whole consists in an additional layer of self-reference: the end of the philosophy of spirit is to know ourselves as knowers, to be in explicit possession of a mentalistic vocabulary sufficient for us to make sense of

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the fact that we can have knowledge both of how things are in the “external world (Außenwelt)”12 and of ourselves as knowing said facts. Against this background, the psychology in its first section, theoretical spirit, first unfolds or develops the vocabulary required for us to express a full-fledged mentalistic vocabulary (which is both phenomenally anchored and available from the intentional stance). The product of subjective spirit in its theoretical respects is “the word (das Wort)” (Enc. §444). Otherwise put, the vocabulary under investigation in theoretical spirit provides us with a basic theory of meaning in light of the specific methodological requirements of absolute idealism on the one hand and the local intelligibility of mind to itself on the other hand. This corresponds to a sensible set of restrictions on what should count as a successful theory of meaning. Anticipating some moves within the overall course of the psychology: let “intuition” be our name for an inchoate account of an epistemically and semantically relevant relation between mind and the external world. Any such relation is posited in order to account for the fact that something not produced by anything mental happens to be available to the mental realm. If this were not the case, our project of a theory of meaning would be doomed at the very outset. Somehow, things not produced by words or full thoughts have to be available to a mental realm. This is just a realist platitude. Yet, we must also be wary not to overstretch the realist platitude and turn it into metaphysical extravagance. The realist platitude would be metaphysically extravagant if we could not at the same time make sense of how we can become aware of the epistemic and semantically relevant relation to which we are referring here. If we only had intuitions, but no concept of intuitions, we could trivially not theorize about intuitions. Hence, philosophy needs a concept of intuitions (an account of the conceptual role of the term “intuition” in our mentalistic vocabulary) adequate to the task at hand of making sense of our knowledge of the natural, external world. Hegel believes that the empiricist tradition, in which he locates Kant’s epistemology and semantics as presented in the First Critique, at this juncture confuses the correct point that we need a concept of intuitions in order to make sense of the posit of intuitions in our theory-constructions with the incorrect point that we need to make sense of how concepts can be attached to potentially non-conceptual intuitions. This does not mean that Hegel prefers a more committed conceptualism to a Kantian half-baked story or that Hegel is groping for a more thorough way of overcoming the “myth of the given,” whatever that might mean. Rather, Hegel is offering us a way out of that discussion definitive of what he calls “philosophy of experience (Erfahrungsphilosophie)” (for example: MM 20:276). Having said that, how is it possible that the concept of an intuition becomes available to philosophical theorizing? It cannot be a mere posit introduced to bridge a gap between a mental realm and the distinctly non-mental realm many of our thoughts are about. There is a similar situation in the case of those who posit qualia in their account of phenomenal consciousness and its specific semantic conditions. They will insist that phenomenal concepts pick out their referents in a peculiar way precisely because there are phenomenally thick presentations to be picked out by a subset of our mentalistic vocabulary. Like qualia on that conception, intuitions, even though posited by the theorist, are not thereby

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produced. This is why the theorist will insist that intuitions, or qualia for that matter, are found. Yet, if they are found, how come we are in a position to state what is thus found, as the stating is not found on the same level? Hegel’s answer here consists in laying out a manner to avoid the usual maneuvers of either thinking of intuitions as always already within the unbounded domain of reason or of finding a way of bridging a gap between non-conceptual content and our conceptualizations of it.13 Rather, he points out that intuitions, insofar as we want to think of their contributions to representations, must have some kind of structure which makes the non-mental available. The non-mental cannot just make itself available to intuitions, as this would amount to the idea of a total vision of absolutely everything in one glance. On the most basic level of theorizing, intuitions must play the role of selection: out of the potentially infinite worldly material, intuitions select a finite amount. This selection cannot be predetermined by the potentially infinite material itself. If there is a realm of the non-mental (an external world) to be made available to mental acts, a subset of the potentially infinite vastness of the external world or nature has to be selected. A first shot at how the selection works is to claim that there are intuitions. But if these intuitions did not have any more structure than that already present in the notion of a potentially infinite non-mental realm, they could not serve the function of selecting bits from their environment for further information-processing. Hence the need for further theorizing in terms of representation, that is, representational content. For the concept of intuition corresponds merely to the notion that an individual is picked out for further processing. It does not inform us about how this works. What is more problematic is that we need to answer the question how the ontic determinacy of the individual picked out by intuition hangs together with the epistemic determinacy of the individual, where no object can be epistemically individuated without being related to a larger whole of which it is a part (such as a visual scene). Nothing could be found by the intelligence if everything were found at the same time, for this would undermine the notion of a selection function. Hegel’s novel methodological contribution to the decomposition of full-fledged singular thought episodes about the non-mental into their elements consists in the assumption that we want to give an account of our mentalistic vocabulary designed to meet a certain explanatory end. In his view, the empiricist tradition, including Kant, is not able to respect this methodology to the extent to which it psychologizes the mind. It thinks of the mind as a set of faculties or activities that we find in the way in which intuition finds its objects, namely, as merely preselected by a selection function.14

2 Intuition Let’s put some more meat on the bones! We have seen how the concept of intuition arises in the context of a particular explanatory project. The project aims at accounting for our overall successful epistemic standing, “knowing (Wissen)” or “cognizing (Erkennen),” as Hegel calls this in Enc. §445. In order for us to stand

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in any epistemically relevant relation to what there is, we need determinate content. “Intuition” is the idea that determinate content is selected in the “form of feeling” (Enc. §447). Hegel’s name for the idea of a content of feeling is “Stoff,” which we might translate as stuff or matter. The setup of the inchoate account of an intuition as a selection function raises the question how the stuff of feeling can be thought of as having any bearing whatsoever on the subject’s position within the “community of rationality (Gemeinschaft der Vernünftigkeit)” (Enc. §447R, translation altered). If it could not, there would be no point in evoking it in the present explanatory context. Thus, the concept of intuition has to be developed in such a way that we understand first how it could account for the subject’s relation to a given content (Enc. §447R) and second, how the content can be communicable. At the very least, the subject has to be in a position to communicate that there is a content with a subjective form in order to make claims to the effect that there is something incommunicable about that very content. For this reason, Enc. §448 introduces the concept of “attention (Aufmerksamkeit).” “Attention” designates the idea that feelings are for a subject. But, if feelings are for a subject, there must be some categorical distinction or other between the subject and her feelings. If every feeling had a different subject, the subject would not be in a position to claim that her feelings share the feature of accounting for some given content expressible to the community of rationality. If every quale was constitutively tied to a token of awareness without phenomenal unity across tokens, we would lose the notion of a quale, as we would not know how to individuate one quale as opposed to another. Qualia cannot hang together in a feeling subject if the unity of this subject is another quale, as this still raises the question how the first-order qualia and the unifying quale hang together and are individuated in such a way that the relevant relations are epistemically available to a knower. The explanatory context in which we invoke intuitions is precisely not one in which we just feel and go with the flow. Hence, there has to be some distinction between the feelings and an epistemic subject referring to those feelings in an explanatory context. We certainly could not know anything about the external world if we were trapped in a schizophrenic phenomenal bubble. Against this background, the second mark of Hegel’s concept of an intuition is that the “content of sensation” (Enc. §448) is categorially distinct from the epistemic subject. The categorial distinction runs between space and time and a subject picking out spatio-temporal episodes by becoming aware of them in the mode of a “determinate affection” (Enc. §447). In a controversial passage Hegel writes: It is thus that intelligence determines the content of sensation as being self-external, projecting it into the forms of space and time, which are the forms within which intelligence is intuitive. To consciousness, the material is simply the general object, the relative other, but spirit endows it with the rational determination of being the other of itself. (Enc. §448)

On one reading, which I reject, Hegel offers a projectivist account of spatio-temporal objects. By this I mean the notion that we really do not perceive

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spatio-temporal objects on the basis of intuitions precisely because the intuitions themselves give us something less than anything which counts as an object so that we somehow need to make sense of a supplement to intuitions in order to achieve a perceptual relation to the object.15 However, Hegel does not commit to this in the paragraphs on intuition. As I read the dialectic, what Hegel is proposing is rather an analysis of the concept of an intuition that contributes to our understanding of how an intuition might play an epistemic role at all. And his answer is that intuitions are not of looks, shapes or textures of things, but of spatio-temporal objects.16 Yet, this raises the question how objects can figure in thought-content which warrants the introduction of a concept of representational content, or representation for short. Hegel’s argument supporting his version of a rich content view draws on a categorical distinction between the subject’s awareness in an intuition and the very idea of a given content that is not identical with the subject which is thus aware of it.17 At this point Hegel refers to the idea of a determinate affection of the subject by objects that are non-conceptual in that their order is merely spatio-temporal. There is, then, a categorical, not metaphysical distinction between the rules which govern awareness and the structural features of spatio-temporal objects—a distinction familiar from Kant’s discussion of the relation between the psychological and the causal order in the CPR.18

3 Representation On the categorical reading, Hegel is not describing subliminal mental events by which we somehow non-consciously structure the mental space of sensory experience by locating some bits of it in an external world, which would, therefore, not be really external in the relevant sense after all. The next step in the development of the categorical apparatus of our epistemic standing with respect to the external world does not consist in adding another, more conceptual layer to a non-conceptual layer of intuition so as to add layer upon layer in a bottom-up synthesis of the human mind. On the contrary, Hegel argues that we cannot understand how the concept of an intuition makes any contribution to our knowledge about knowledge about the external world unless we add the idea of representational content to our mentalistic vocabulary. A closer analysis of the concept of intuition reveals that the very function of the concept in any account of our (perceptual) knowledge of the external world draws on an internal component of information selection. Intuition could not serve any epistemic function if there never were any awareness which delivers glimpses of the world to a subject rather than the entire world. Hegel’s name for the internal component in Enc. §450 is “recollection into itself (Erinnerung in sich),”19 that is, an internalization. The internalization here consists in the fact that intuitions have to be someone’s intuitions. Mental ownership is built into the very notion of an intuition qua information selection.

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On this basis, Hegel makes his first major dialectical transition in the psychology section, from intuition to representation, which is a representative sample case of this type of move. Hegel introduces the concept of a representation thus: As recollected intuition, representation is the middle between the immediacy of intelligence finding itself determined, and the free intelligence of thought. Representation still pertains to intelligence with one-sided subjectivity, for what pertains here is still conditioned by immediacy and does not in itself constitute being. (Enc. §451, translation slightly altered)

For Hegel, representations have a specific kind of content with a mind-to-world direction of fit. Representations would not have the content they have if they were not grounded in intuitions in the sense that the concept of a representation is grounded in the concept of an intuition. The concept of a representation is the concept of an “internalized intuition (erinnerte Anschauung)” (Enc. §451). This means that intuitions could not play the theoretical role we assigned to them in the first place, if they were not internal components of our epistemically relevant standing with respect to the world. But they could not be the kinds of components we need to posit, if they were not essentially integrated into content, that is, if we could not even make sense of a potential epistemic distance between the intuition and the intuited. My own term for the potential epistemic distance built into any state capable of expressing a truth-apt thought is “the contrast of objectivity” (Gabriel 2014, 45). The contrast of objectivity is operative wherever we have reasons to believe that the categorical distinction between taking-to-be-true and truth is applicable to a state-type. The problem with intuitions is that the concept of an intuition is underdeveloped with respect to the applicability of the contrast of objectivity.20 The theoretical role of an intuition is to make sense of the fact that we do not take in the whole world in perceptual experience, but centered bits. However, this presupposes that there is an internal component. If the internal component merely took in bits from the external world, we would be left without any account of the potential divergence between how things are and how we take them be. We would wind up infallible with respect to the external world. This warrants the introduction of a truth-apt state that can fulfill the function of an intuition without falling short of the contrast of objectivity. At this point of the dialectic, representation, that is, representational content, is supposed to play just that role. Yet, Hegel immediately points out that representations are “syntheses” (Enc. §451), which draw on “found stuff/material (gefundenem Stoff)” (ibid.). I take it that he has a version of the following point in mind, which is quite familiar to contemporary philosophy of perception: Representational content accounts for intentional states that are about something as something. Representations are representings-as such that what they are about, the object, is in some yet to be specified sense independent of the representation. As Siegel puts it in her discussion of the motivations for an overall content view of perceptual experience: “It should be taken as analytic that if an experience presents a property as being instantiated, then it presents the property as being instantiated

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by something other than the experience itself” (Siegel 2011, 48). The problem here is this: the presentation of the object to be represented-as this-such still has the logical form of an intuition we wanted to explain away by moving forward to a content view. If we are not in touch with an object in a perceptually based singular thought in the first place, how could we ever represent it as something or other? In Enc. §452–464, Hegel discusses various theories of representational content designed to overcome this difficulty. He distinguishes three broad kinds of theories of representational content which he calls: (1) recollection (Erinnerung); (2) imagination (Einbildungskraft); and (3) memory (Gedächtnis).

3.1 Recollection (Erinnerung) An intuition can only be actualized in the immediate presence of the individual which it represents, which corresponds to a major thread in Kant’s discussion of an intuition.21 Yet, this does not explain how we can represent an individual as being a certain way. Paying attention to the immediate presence of an individual is not yet a form of representing-as. In order to bridge the categorical gap between intuition and representation, Hegel brings in the notion that a representation is some kind of a “picture (Bild)” (Enc. §452). A picture is, as it were, halfway between intuition and representation. He characterizes it as “abstract singularity opposing something other” (Enc. §452, translation altered). A picture is more general than the occasion which triggered its production in that it has a logical form that differs from the logical form of what is depicted. For instance, a picture leaves out certain aspects of the depicted—in the case where the picture is a glimpse of the natural world, the picture leaves out the causal integration of the depicted into nature as a whole. If I represent my left hand as looking a certain way from this angle, I do not thereby intuit the exact position of my left hand, say, in the Milky Way. Against this background, Hegel claims that there is an internal s­ patio-temporal system, an internal cartography, whose structure is independent of the actual inhabitants of space-time positions we encounter in intuition.22 That is, we can become aware of the fact that the sparrow who was just sitting here, flew away, as we are able to single out the position the sparrow occupied and then left. Singling out that position is not itself an intuition, as what we intuit will always only be an object in a place, but never a place such that at t1, such and so is the case at that spot, and at t2 something else. A recollection of a scene is “a relation of a picture to an intuition” (Enc. §454, translation altered). The relation is one of “subsumtion (Subsumtion)” in that an intuited scene is a scene where such and such takes place, for example that a sparrow is present here. “That a sparrow is present here” is content that can be detached from the scene as the sparrow (the object) present here is not the content

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that a sparrow is present here. The content deals with the scene by representing the object(s) present as being such and so. What is mine in the representation is the general form of the picture: things being such and so. That is, even though it is quite sensible to respect the alethic platitude that the sparrow present here is a truth- or accuracy-condition for the representation of that object as a sparrow present here, neither any object present in the scene nor all the objects together can play that role independently of the way in which the representation individuates its truth-conditions. What I mean is this: when we single out a given scene and represent its objects as such and so, the singling out itself is not part of the scene. The sparrow scene does not cry out to be represented as such by anyone. A realist platitude about truths about the natural world precisely points out that the sparrow would have been such and so had no one ever noticed. Yet, the sparrow’s independent involvements in the world are also such that the sparrow is independently related to the Milky Way or to fermions in a certain way regardless of whether I represent any of this. Hence, there is some sense in which cutting off bits from the external world in order to represent something as something belongs to an order which differs from the order of the individuals represented as being that way. The logical and modal relations which hold across represented space and time differ from the natural relations which hold across space-time. This is why we can imagine that an eagle instead of a sparrow could have been here despite the fact that the actual scene available to intuition for further processing contains a sparrow and not an eagle.

3.2 Imagination (Einbildungskraft) The transition from recollection to imagination draws on a distinction Hegel borrows from Plato’s Theatetus, the distinction between property (Eigentum/ἕξις) and possession (Besitz/κτῆσις) (Enc. §454).23 The epistemic subject, intelligence, in intuition owns something without being aware of its possession conditions. They become explicit in the idea that the content can be reproduced (Enc. §455). Here, Hegel discusses the empiricist conception of abstraction, which is clear from Enc. §455R. He rejects the view that the generality of a representation consists in a “superposing of many similar images” (Enc. §455R). His argument is that we could never abstract a general thought from the similarity of pictures without assuming that there are actual laws (Gesetze), knowledge of which would put one in a position to transition from one picture to another without making use of yet another picture. The generality constituting transition conditions (“the glue of generality,” as it were) just cannot consist in there being a series of pictorial representations whose hanging together is produced by adding always another pictorial representation to the series.

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3.3 Memory (Gedächtnis) Pictures are one step in the direction of non-perceptual generality. We cannot treat the elements on the level of generality as more individuals (objects of intuition). There has to be a categorical distinction between intuitions and pictures. At this stage, Hegel introduces the concept of “sign-making phantasy” (Enc. §457). The decisive move amounts to a transition from pictorial representations to meaning, to “Bedeutung” (Enc. §457). The generality constraint for pictorial representations is now interpreted as proto-semantic. Meanings are introduced as general representations which inform intuitions in such a way that they can be about something, whereas the pictures were still too close to intuitions. It turned out to be impossible to achieve generality on the basis of a mere sequence of pictures. In order to pictures to have the aboutness required for representations, that is, in order to go beyond the level of intuitions, a new conceptual element is needed: In this identity however, intuition is not effective positively as representing itself, but as representing something else. It is an image, which has received into itself as its soul or meaning an independent representation of intelligence. This intuition is the sign. (Enc. §458, translation altered)

Hegel’s famous discussion of language in Enc. §458–464 sets out from the thought that our capacity to recognize an object as such of course depends on the presence of representings-as. Without representational content we could not recognize the repeated presence of the same kind of object. The context of the discussion of language is “psychology.” In the discussions of the function of mentalistic vocabulary in the philosophy of nature and the anthropology, Hegel deals with mental functions independently of the further fact that our use of mental functions makes us knowers of a certain kind, in particular, semantically gifted knowers. We are in a position to know that there is meaning by representing something as something and wondering how this is possible. This is what Hegel wants to account for. He is, thus, not in the business of setting our intuitions or representations apart from those of the rest of the animal kingdom. His point is not that other animals or infants share a level of intuitions with us, which becomes upgraded to representings-as as soon as we acquire linguistic skills. Rather, he insists that the concept of an intuition alone cannot explain how we come to think of objects being a certain way. In order to explain this, he claims, we need to have a theory of designation or reference that allows us to understand that the function of singular terms in our language (of names, as he himself says) derives from the generality of representations. What is distinctive of mature human thought is not that our intuitions differ from that of other animals or infants, but rather that we master a public language in which we precisely replace intuitions by singular terms so as to be able to think truly about the natural world without thereby intuiting objects or representing scenes.

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In a passage celebrated by Bruno Liebrucks and Josef Simon, Hegel writes: The name lion enables us to dispense with both the intuition of such an animal and even with the image of it, for in that we understand it, the name is the imageless and simple representation. We think in names. (Enc. §462)24

A singular term, such as “lion,” neither is an intuition nor does it refer to an intuition. If it were an intuition, it would not be communicable and general, as it would be inextricably attached to a given occasion. The misguided idea that names are inseparable from intuitions corresponds to what Quine has nicely labeled “the myth of the museum” (Quine 1969, 27). It might come as a surprise that I believe that Hegel’s point in Enc. §462–464 is echoed in Quine’s comment on his rejection of the museum myth: Uncritical semantics is the myth of a museum in which the exhibits are meanings and the words are labels. To switch languages is to change the labels. Now the naturalist’s primary objection to this view is not an objection to meanings on account of their being mental entities, though that could be objection enough. The primary objection persists even if we take the labeled exhibits not as mental ideas but as Platonic ideas or even as the denoted concrete objects. Semantics is vitiated by a pernicious mentalism as long as we regard a man’s semantics as somehow determinate in his mind beyond what might be implicit in his dispositions to overt behavior. It is the very facts about meaning, not the entities meant, that must be construed in terms of behavior. (Quine 1969, 27)

Hegel’s term for what Quine calls “behavior” in this context is “mechanical memory” (cf. Enc. §463). For Hegel, the meaning of singular terms is not a function of the intuitions which they designate or the objects for which they stand, as they do not stand for any particular object or series of objects. However, Hegel is not a full-blown logical behaviorist, as he does not reduce meaning (Bedeutung) to a disposition to behave in a certain way. He is aware that repetitive behavior is not tantamount to the generality of meaning we have been looking for ever since we realized that intuitions are singular representations. Nevertheless, he can be seen as pointing out that logical behaviorism is a necessary stepping-stone towards the right theory of meaning.

4 Thinking (Denken) Again, this becomes clearer in the context of the next concept in the series of explicating the conditions for truth-apt, communicable thought. In Enc. §463–464 Hegel maintains that memory “constitutes the transition to the activity of thought, which does not have a meaning any longer, i.e. whose objectivity is not any longer something different from the subjective” (Enc. §464, translation altered). Thoughts, according to Hegel, are not individuated by the objects they happen to be about. They lay down objectivity conditions which are not met because they are wrung off from the subject by a given sensory episode. Subjects are not forced to think certain thoughts with a given truth-value, as this would undermine the notion that thoughts are truth-apt, communicable propositional structures.

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In Enc. §465, the first paragraph of the surprisingly short series of paragraphs on thinking (Enc. §465–468), Hegel introduces the concept of a thought (Gedanke), as something a thinking subject, an intelligence, is aware of in such a way that the subject “knows that what is thought is, and that what is only is in that it is thought (weiß, daß, was gedacht ist, ist; und daß, was ist, nur ist, insofern es Gedanke ist)” (Enc. §465). Thinking (Denken) means to have thoughts (Gedanken haben) and a thought is something which presents things as being a certain way. The way things are presented as being is constitutive of the things in a true thought, which Hegel also flags with his own reference to Enc. §21 where he associates the “thinking about something (Nachdenken über Etwas)” with “the true (das Wahre).” What we grasp when we grasp a thought is that things are supposed to be the way the thought presents them as being. This alone does not entail that all thoughts are true, but amounts to the more modest claim that nothing stands in the way of regarding thinking as a generally reliable guide to reality. Having said that, I take Hegel to rely on an argument quite sympathetic to a disjunctivist reading in a McDowellian spirit (McDowell 2008b).25 The argument has the following shape. In order for us to make sense of having thoughts at all, we must not understand conceptual content as either consisting merely of a concatenation of intuitions or of a synthesis of representations which have to be anchored in intuitions. In both cases, the occasion which triggers the postulation of content will be too subjective in order to meet the publicity or universality criterion of meaning. “Lion” can neither originally or even ultimately refer to a more or less random concatenation of lion-adumbrations nor to a synthesis of lion-style sensory episodes. In neither case are we in a position to understand how indefinitely many objects can actually be lions and of how we can communicate the thought that this is a lion or that lions typically do certain things. Lionhood does not come into view on the basis of a repeated confirmation of lion intuitions. In order to counter the overall motivations for empiricist atomistic semantics, Hegel argues that at least some thoughts cannot acquire their meaning on the basis of sensory episodes plus an in-built acquaintance relation. For, thoughts about truth-conditions—such as philosophical thoughts themselves—are precisely not grounded in intuitions of any kind. We are not acquainted with anything insofar as we are constructing a theory of meaning and thought. We are perfectly justified in believing that we are in a position to get things objectively right regardless of our contingent position in a sensory manifold. The thinking subject is not in the business of finding order among an apparently chaotic sensory manifold. Rather, its job is to make sense of the fact that we know many things about the external world as well as about the semantic conditions for said knowledge, which takes place on a different level. This is why Hegel simply shakes off the skeptical worry that we might not be in a position to know anything whatsoever. In the remark to Enc. §445, the paragraph immediately preceding intuition, Hegel clearly locates the development of his mentalistic vocabulary in the epistemological context I am invoking. He claims that “the great question of modern time” is, “whether or not true cognition, that is, the cognition of truth, is possible” (Enc. §445R; see also Enc. §440Z). His aim in

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the psychology section is to give an account of mind that is in line with the very concept of a knowledgeable grasp of truth, i.e. Erkennen: The notion of cognition has yielded itself as intelligence itself, as the certainty of reason; the actuality of intelligence is now cognition itself. It follows from this that it is absurd to speak of intelligence and at the same time of the possibility or arbitrariness of cognition. (Enc. §445R)

The view that thinking consists in having thoughts where a thought is a propositional communicable structure (embedded in more holistic inferential structures) is part and parcel of the very concept of Erkennen. The concept of Erkennen here slightly differs from the concept of knowledge, as it is often articulated in contemporary epistemology.26 One way of looking at the concept of knowledge is precisely to dissociate it from our mentalistic vocabulary in a problematic way. It is correct that to know that p does not presuppose to experience that p. Otherwise, knowledge by testimony or a priori knowledge of any kind would come under unnecessary pressure. However, this broadly correct diagnosis should not mislead us into believing that the concept of knowledge floats free from the concept of experience, let alone from empirical or statistical evidence. To know that p involves being in an overall mental state such that we are justified in believing that p on the basis of having thoughts to the effect that p. In any event, knowledge is some kind of a factive mental state, whatever exactly the order of priority among our factive mental states might be.27 According to my reading of the connection among the concepts of intuition, representation and thinking, Hegel’s view is that intuitions and representations ground some of our knowledgeable factive mental states, but not all of them. The discussion of intuition, representation and thinking culminates in Enc. §467 where Hegel introduces his logical vocabulary. Logical knowledge is not grounded in intuitions and representations. Rather, on the logical level, the concepts of intuition and representation are subordinate to logical concepts. Hegel here holds a version of a context principle (after all, “the true is the whole” (PhG GW 9:13)): in semantic explanations, whole sentential structures embedded in inferential contexts are explanatorily prior to our grasp of intuitions and representations.28 However, this does not mean that intuitions or representations themselves are somehow mysteriously infused by conceptual structures. Intuitions and representations for Hegel are non-conceptual. Yet, this does not rule out that there is both a concept of an intuition and a concept of a representation which make them available to philosophical thinking.

5 Conclusion: Overcoming the Dilemma In the introduction I claimed that contemporary philosophy of mind faces a metaphysical dilemma. The two horns of the metaphysical dilemma of mind, recall, are unwelcome materialistic naturalism on the one hand and unsatisfying functional

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dualism on the other hand. I briefly mentioned speculative (meta-)physics as a bad way out, as it merely combines both horns by introducing hitherto undiscovered “wonder tissue” (Dennett 1991, 40) in order to force a dualistically conceived mind into the natural order. As I read Hegel, he offers a better way out. For him, the unity of the subject in the sense of a mind is the unity of thinking. The thinking subject does not have to fit into the natural order in any metaphysically spectacular sense at all. The unity of the thinking subject is not even a candidate for anything natural, as the concept of something natural is the concept of a realm of pure extensions. Nature is the realm of maximally modally robust facts where a fact is maximally modally robust if a thought articulating such a fact is true only if things would also have been the way the thought presents them as being had no one ever been around to notice them. In his philosophy of nature, Hegel argues that we are conceptually equipped to make sense of there being natural facts of this kind. In his philosophy of mind, Hegel adds that nothing stands in our way of actually knowing something about natural facts on the basis of experiencing an external, natural world. Yet, this does not mean that the knowing subject, what he calls “the intelligence” throughout the psychology section, has to be part of the natural order. It also does not mean that the intelligence is a function which happens to be realized in human beings in the actual world as it is currently arranged, but which might be realized in other tissue structures elsewhere or in a Terminator-style futuristic state of the art of Artificial Intelligence. Intelligence is simply governed by different parameters, such as logical laws discovered by the intelligence engaging in logical thinking. Nevertheless, Hegel at this point does not sacrifice the idea of a whole to which both nature and mind belong, which will be the subject of another workshop in this series. But this precisely means that the right question to ask is not how mind fits into the natural order (it doesn’t!), but rather how nature and mind can both fit into the logical order which we have to assume is unified given that we can have true thoughts about nature, mind and our true thoughts about nature and mind.29

Notes 1. As Stephen Houlgate has rightly pointed out to me, other parts of Hegel’s philosophy are, of course, relevant too, in particular, when addressing the issue of the relation between (animal) sensory registration or sensation and perception. 2. Hegel’s philosophy of subjective spirit consists of three sections: anthropology (Enc. §388–412), phenomenology of spirit (Enc. §413–439) and psychology (Enc. §440–482). Arguably, the anthropology is an account of phenomenal consciousness, the phenomenology of spirit an account of intentional consciousness and the psychology an account of the human mind precisely insofar as it is essentially both phenomenal and intentional. 3. Hegel is clearly echoing Kant’s notion of “Selbsterkenntnis” as a relation of reason to itself, which is how it is presented in the Preface to the first edition of CPR (A xi–xii). Hegel corrects the notion in light of his claim to have actually achieved the kind of system required for this, which Kant, in his eyes, promised, but could not deliver.

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4. See Gabriel (2016, 187–188). 5. In written communication, Houlgate asked me how “this differs from saying that they are individuated by their distinctive onto-logical structure.” The difference I have in mind is the difference between a first-order account of what there is (a first-order metaphysics) and an account of what there is in light of its intelligibility (an account compatible with the verdicts of absolute idealism). For further discussion of the contrast see Gabriel (2013). 6. See also Enc. §381Z (my translation): “We know that the natural is spatial and temporal, that in nature this exists next to that, this follows that,—in short that everything natural is externalized; moreover, that matter, the universal foundation of all existing configurations of nature not only resists us, exists outside of spirit, but differentiates itself from itself into concrete points, divides itself into material atoms, from which it is composed.” 7. Hegel distinguishes three modes in which conceptual structures are laid out: “transition (Übergehen),” “shining into another (Scheinen in Anderes),” and “development (Entwicklung)” (Enc. §161). These modes correspond to being, essence, and concept respectively. On these different forms of dialectic see Schäfer (2001). 8. Cf. also PhG GW 9:19: “the aim is spirit’s insight into what knowing is.” 9. By contrast, the philosophy of objective spirit provides an account of action explanation. In action explanation, we do not study the word-to-world-relation of fit, but rather the language exit rules as they behave in communal, social contexts. The vocabulary under investigation therefore differs, as it deals with a different direction of fit. 10. In German: “Die Intelligenz findet sich bestimmt; dies ist ihr Schein, von dem sie in ihrer Unmittelbarkeit ausgeht, als Wissen aber ist sie dies, das Gefundene als ihr eigenes zu setzen.” 11. This corresponds to the age-old platitude of any philosophy of perception, which Bill Brewer calls “the passivity of perception in comparison with thought. Whereas one has a certain choice of freedom with respect to which contents occur in thought, one is in perception simply ‘saddled’ with determinate content” (Brewer 2011, 58). 12. Hegel frequently uses this term. See, for instance, Enc. §348Z; §355Z; §356Z; §357Z; §365Z. In these passages, Hegel discusses animal sensation and its relation to the external world. In §396Z he claims that the transition from sensation to intuition consists in regarding the external world as real (“ein Wirkliches”) (MM 10:80). In Enc. §410Z he tells us that our body mediates between us and the external world (MM 10:190). He also maintains that matter “exists outside of our mind (außer unserem Geiste besteht)” (Enc. §381Z MM 10:19). 13. In my view, the debate between Houlgate and McDowell is precisely trapped in these alternatives Hegel tries to avoid. See (Houlgate 2006, 2016; McDowell 2008a). 14. Needless to say: there are sophisticated ways of reading the empiricist tradition including Kant on which they might not fall into the trap diagnosed by Hegel. My aim in this paper is not to defend Hegel’s reading of the tradition preceding him, but rather to make sense of his claims that his special methodology might distinguish his approach from that of his predecessors, as he sees them. For more on Hegel’s critique of Kant’s alleged psychologism see (Gabriel 2016, 194). 15. Such a reading is encapsulated in the following passage from Houlgate (2006, 248f.): “In sensation we take up directly the look, shape and texture of things, but nothing else that belongs to concrete experience is taken up in this way. The spatio-temporal continuum in which we experience things is projected by intuition; the general representations which underlie our empirical concepts are the product of our imagination; and the object-character or ‘thinginess’ of things and the causal relation between them are posited by thought in its different forms. When we see a car going by, therefore, we do not actually see a car: we see colors that we understand and judge to be a car.” For philosophical criticism of this passage see McDowell (2008a, 231f.). 16. See, for instance, quite clearly Enc. §402Z and §448Z, where Hegel explicitly fends off the objection that he defends some kind of subjective idealism. However, he would defend

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some kind of subjective idealism about full-blown objects if he claimed that we could never perceive objects, but have to compensate for the shortcomings of intuitions by adding a conceptual layer which synthesizes our fragmented glimpses of (parts of) objects. 17. Siegel defines the concept of a “Rich Content View” thus: “the contents of visual experience are richly complex, and so are not limited to color, shape, and other properties standardly taken to be represented in visual experience” (Siegel 2011, 4). 18. On this, see the influential reconstruction of the transcendental argument in Strawson (2006). 19. Petry translates this as “intro-collectedness” (Enc., 143). 20. There is a distinction between two kinds of claim one could ascribe to Hegel here. The first kind has it that intuitions themselves fall short of an epistemically relevant relation to objects. For instance, this could be fleshed out in Houlgate’s way. The other kind (which I endorse) consists in the claim that the concept of an intuition is not sufficient to give us a full understanding of how intuitions relate to objects in full perceptual episodes. 21. “Representation, which can be produced by a single object only, is called an intuition” (CPR A32/B47). 22. On this see Willem de Vries’ Sellarsian reconstruction in de Vries (1988, 119–134). 23. See the discussion in Plato’s Theatetus 197a–201c. 24. Liebrucks (1964/1979), Simon (1966). 25. See McDowell (2008b). On this in relation to Hegel, cf. Gabriel (2014, §11). 26. Hegel discusses the distinction between Erkennen and “mere knowing (bloßes Wissen)” in Enc. §445Z. 27. See, of course, the influential treatment of the relation between knowledge, factive mental states, and evidence in Williamson (2000, 21–48). 28. For a contemporary discussion of semantic holism in Hegel see Brandom (2002). 29. An earlier version of this paper was presented at a Cambridge workshop on the unity of the subject, and I would like to thank the audience for discussion. Many thanks also to the participants of the Fourth International Summer School in German Philosophy in 2014, in particular to Willem de Vries, Michael Forster, Paul Redding and Robert Stern. I also owe a lot to discussions with Andrew Cooper, Alex Englander and Stephen Houlgate who kindly gave me written comments on the penultimate draft of the paper.

Bibliography Brandom, Robert B. 2002. “Holism and Idealism in Hegel’s Phenomenology.” In Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 178–209. Brewer, Bill. 2011. Perception and Its Objects. New York: Oxford University Press. Chalmers, David. 1996. The Conscious Mind. New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press. Dennett, Daniel. 1991. Consciousness Explained. New York, Boston, and London: Black Bay Books. de Vries, Willem A. 1988. Hegel’s Theory of Mental Activity: An Introduction to Theoretical Spirit. Ithaca and New York: Cornell University Press. de Vries, Willem A. 2016. “Hegel’s Account of the Presence of Space and Time in Sensation, Intuition, and the World: A Sellarsian View.” In Hegel’s Philosophical Psychology, edited by Susanne Herrmann-Sinai and Lucia Ziglioli. New York: Routledge, 214–227. Gabriel, Markus. 2013. Transcendental Ontology: Essays in German Idealism. New York and London: Bloomsbury. Gabriel, Markus. 2014. An den Grenzen der Erkenntnistheorie. Die notwendige Endlichkeit des objektiven Wissens als Lektion des Skeptizismus. 2nd ed. Freiburg i. Br. and München: Karl Alber.

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Gabriel, Markus. 2016. “What Kind of Idealist (If Any) Is Hegel?” Hegel-Bulletin 37 (2): 181–208. Houlgate, Stephen. 2006. “Thought and Experience in Hegel and McDowell.” European Journal of Philosophy 14 (2): 242–261. Houlgate, Stephen. 2016. “Hegel, McDowell, and Perceptual Experience: A Response to McDowell.” In Hegel’s Philosophical Psychology, edited by Susanne Herrmann-Sinai and Lucia Ziglioli. New York: Routledge. Liebrucks, Bruno. 1964/1979. Sprache und Bewußtsein. Vol. 1–5. Frankfurt am Main: Akademische Verlagsgesellschaft and Vol. 6–7. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang Verlag. McDowell, John. 1982. “Criteria, Defeasibility and Knowledge.” Proceedings of the British Academy 68: 455–479. McDowell, John. 2008a. “Responses. Stephen Houlgate.” In Experience, Norm, and Nature, edited by Jakob Lindgaard, 225–234. Oxford: Blackwell. McDowell, John. 2008b. “The Disjunctive Conception of Experience as Material for a Transcendental Argument.” In Disjunctivism: Perception, Action, Knowledge, edited by Adrian Haddock and Fiona Macpherson, 376–389. New York: Oxford University Press. Nagel, Thomas. 2012. Mind and Cosmos. New York: Oxford University Press. Plato. 1977. Theaetetus. Translated by John McDowell. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Price, Huw. 2011. Naturalism Without Mirrors. New York: Oxford University Press. Price, Huw. 2013. Expressivism, Pragmatism and Representationalism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Quine, W. V. O. 1969. Ontological Relativity and Other Essays. New York: Columbia University Press. Schäfer, Rainer. 2001. Die Dialektik und ihre besonderen Formen in Hegels Logik: Entwicklungsgeschichtliche und systematische Untersuchungen. Hamburg: Meiner. Siegel, Susanne. 2011. The Contents of Visual Experience. New York: Oxford University Press. Simon, Josef. 1966. Das Problem der Sprache bei Hegel. Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. Strawson, Peter F. 2006. Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. New York: Routledge. Williamson, Timothy. 2000. Knowledge and Its Limits. New York: Oxford University Press.

Chapter 17

Hegel on Poetry, Prose and the Origin of the Arts Allen Speight

This chapter concerns a question that may initially seem to be quite narrow—the distinction between poetry and prose—but is unusually relevant for understanding Hegel’s philosophy of art. The primary context in which I want to examine it is that of the question of the origin of art—what Hegel says about the emergence of art as an interpretive human activity, and more specifically what role the literary arts play within this larger narrative of Hegel’s. The distinction between poetry and prose may indeed seem to be a rather straightforward (and possibly quite unphilosophical) issue. It is not, properly speaking, even a question about the construction of genre (i.e., about the status of literary genres such as lyric or drama) and it would seem to be a question within the philosophy of literature that can be answered without apparent need for larger conceptual tools: for example, that poetry is distinguished by having intentional line-breaks, whereas in prose line-breaks are arbitrary, set often by the automatic processes of printers and typographers. But Hegel’s development of this question is the background to a number of important considerations within the Lectures. Hegel correlates the poetry/prose distinction not only with the contrast he and others have drawn between (fine or high) art and the bourgeois production of ordinary objects around it (MM 13:214; VKunst 1:163), but in broader philosophical terms he graphs it on to several key philosophical distinctions that matter for him: the distinction between understanding and speculative reason (MM 15:279; VKunst 2.1005); the distinction between bad and good infinity (MM 15.269; VKunst 2.996); the distinction between nature and spirit (MM 15:238; VKunst 2:972); the distinction within nature between organic and inorganic (MM 9:333; Enc. §336); the distinction between arbitrary Willkür and the rational Wille (MM 15:420; VKunst 2.1115); and the distinction between the primitive worlds in which individual heroes are dominant and the law-governed, institutionally organized realm of mature social life (MM 13:254; VKunst 1:194); and of course,

A. Speight (*)  Boston University, Boston, MA, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 M. F. Bykova and K. R. Westphal (eds.), The Palgrave Hegel Handbook, Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26597-7_17

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of ultimate importance in the context of Hegel’s aesthetics, the distinction between what is art and what is not (MM 13:212; VKunst 1:161). As scholars of Hegel well know, not all of these analogical points of contrast do the same philosophical work (and, I should add, not all of them work as perfectly as Hegel might wish), but it seems clear, just from a casual survey, that Hegel places a fair amount of aesthetic weight on the distinction. In this chapter I thus want to look at what lies behind the poetry/prose distinction and Hegel’s applications of it. I will explore in the first section Hegel’s peculiar but hardly idiosyncratic claim that poetry is the most original or even primitive form of writing prior to the existence of any developed form of prose, and his further claim that the origin of poetry may give us a particular window on to the question of the origin of art more broadly. In the second section, I will show how this account and the poetry/prose distinction on which it rests must rely on a fusion or perhaps confusion on Hegel’s part of two distinctive meanings of the notion of prose. A consequence of this fusion of elements in Hegel’s notion of prose is, as I claim in sections three and four, the need for some new lines of reflection about the status of prose in the post-romantic aesthetic landscape that goes beyond Hegel’s own official reflections but may be said to have a broadly Hegelian character. The chapter as a whole offers in several ways an introduction to the larger philosophical questions raised by Hegel’s aesthetics and the tasks he assigns aesthetics within his systematic project: the first section focuses on the question of the origin of art and how it is created or discerned within the seemingly natural or prosaic world; the second section addresses the question of art and consciousness (a question where Hegel’s own suggestive comments perhaps do not reach philosophically far enough); and the third and fourth sections discuss Hegel’s familiar historical account of the development of the specific art-forms— the symbolic, classical and romantic—the context of his famous claims about the supposed “end” of art. In considering these claims, I will look briefly at contemporary stances toward the historicity of Hegel’s philosophy of art. Although this question of art’s end and the post-romantic is most often considered from the perspective of the visual arts—particularly Danto’s well-known claims about abstract painting in the post-Warhol era—it is important to compare in this context Hegel’s views about literature and prose narrative.

1 Hegel on the Origins of Poetry and Art In a rich and well-known passage from the 1823 version of Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Art, we find the following claim: [T]he universality of the need for art involves none other than the fact that human beings are thinking, are conscious. In being consciousness, one must place before oneself what one is and what, on the whole, exists… Natural things just are; they are just onefold, just simply exist (sind nur einfach, nur einmal). Yet as consciousness, human beings double themselves; they simply are, and then are for themselves. They bring before themselves

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what they are, intuiting themselves, standing before themselves, and are consciousness of themselves…. So the universal need for the work of art is to be sought in a human being’s thought, since for a human being the work of art is a way of bringing before oneself what one is…. When, in the second place, we find human beings also as consciousness in relation to an external world, they also have this more specific need to alter the externality found there and to alter themselves as something natural, to place their own stamp upon themselves. One does this in order to recognize oneself from the shape of things. This is already a factor in a child’s first impulse—it wants to see something that it has brought about. (VKunst 2:12–13)

Hegel’s explication of the origin of art here in terms of the analogy to the “child’s first impulse” is one that has drawn the attention of many readers of Hegel’s aesthetics, including Michael Fried and Benjamin Rutter. As Fried has nicely put it in his discussion of this passage, “artistic production is at bottom a form of selfrepresentation… but self-representation here involves something other than a simple mirroring of the self” (Fried 1990, 276).1 If we turn from this general statement about the beginning of art to what Hegel says in the standard edition of the Lectures about the beginning of poetry more specifically, we find a similar claim about the thought and expressive actions of the individual artist: Poetry began when the human being undertook to express herself; for poetry, what is spoken, is there only to be an expression. When once, in the midst of his practical activity and need, the human being proceeds to collect her thoughts and communicate herself to others, then she immediately produces a coined expression [ein gebildeter Ausdruck], a touch [Anklang] of poetry. (MM 15:240; VKunst 2.974; Knox translation emended)

We might expect that Hegel would draw a tight connection between the beginning of art as such and the beginning of poetry, since poetry is in Hegel’s view the “art of arts,” art kat’ exochēn, “the universal art… because its proper material is the imagination itself” and “that universal foundation of all the particular art-forms and the individual arts” (MM 15:232; VKunst 2:967). Poetry in some sense provides for Hegel a key to understanding what art more broadly is about. In this context of poetry’s foundational status within the system of the arts the poetry/prose distinction begins to matter. For, significantly, Hegel’s interest in the “art of arts” is not an interest framed in terms of the status of literature as we might expect it to be framed in contemporary discussion.2 Hegel’s focus (for a number of reasons) is rather about poetry’s status among the arts, and—as we will see—this status is something that is defined in the Lectures particularly in contrast with prose and the prosaic. Hegel’s striking claim about the origin of poetry—one that he shares apparently with Hamann and Herder, who may be Hegel’s source on this—is that poetry emerges first in human history as a mode of communication, prior to the existence of prose (MM 15:239; VKunst 2.973).3 The distinctively Hegelian twist on this claim we can hear in his remark is that poetry is “the original presentation of the truth.” As Rutter has suggested, Hegel’s interest here should not be read as an anthropological or empirical one about the origin of language, but rather about the specific reflective task associated with the beginning of literary art.

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In the passage just cited, Hegel immediately gives us an interesting point of illustration—a distich we find preserved by Herodotus to commemorate the ­ death of the Greeks who fell at Thermopylae. [“Here four thousand from the Peloponnese fought against three myriads”]. Hegel says about this distich: The report is left entirely simple: the dry information that four thousand Peloponnesians fought a battle here against three myriads. But the interest lies in the preparation of an inscription to relate this event for contemporaries and posterity, purely for the sake of relating it, and so the expression becomes poetic, i.e., it is meant to be a poiein [a ‘making’] which leaves the story [literally “content,” Inhalt] in its simplicity but intentionally gives special form to its description. The Word enshrining the ideas is in itself of such a high dignity that it tries to distinguish itself from any other mode of speech, and makes itself into a distich. (MM 15:240; VKunst 2:974; Knox translation emended)

This is an interesting passage in several ways. Notice, for example, what it is not claiming about the “poetry” of the inscription. First, although Hegel notices that the inscription is in the form of a distich, he does not say anything more (as we might expect him to) about distinctively stylistic considerations such as meter, euphony, rhyme or diction that would make it poetry. It is also not a contrast that insists on poetry as a distinctively figurative form of writing, even though this distinction ultimately will play an important role in marking off poetry for Hegel. Although Hegel describes the inscription as gebildet, he does not otherwise appeal here, for example, as he does in some other contexts within the Lectures, to poetry’s use of metaphor. Further, it is not especially a contrast between literary and non-literary modes of speech: Hegel in fact seems partly drawn to the inscription because of its pre-literary nature (it is a form of written speech but not one to be found in any form of conventionally existing book within a “realm of letters”). Finally, although it is presumably an example meant to make clear how poetry begins from the poet herself, it is a text which has no known individual author (and as a memorial inscription for war dead, also honors specifically no individual agent but rather a collective deed). So what does make this inscription a piece of poetry, in Hegel’s eyes? The first thing we notice is that Hegel says that the inscription is something written “purely for the sake of relating it”—that is to say, not for instrumental or pragmatic reasons (the inscription is different from, say, a signpost showing one the road to Thermopylae). Hegel says further that the inscription “leaves the content [der Inhalt] in its simplicity but intentionally gives special form to its description”; he stresses that it has a dignity and a sphere of its own. These are claims that are difficult to know how to take philosophically, but Hegel appears to be linking his account of the inscription to his broader narrative about classical art: what is characteristic of the classical in Hegel’s view, especially in Greek sculpture, is (in contrast to the inwardness of the romantic arts) its plasticity—that it has a shape that is present or objectively part of its world, yet a shape which has nonetheless (plastically) taken on a meaning because it has been made to do so by the agency of an artist. This plasticity seems to be what Hegel is pointing to in underscoring the etymological root of poetry in the Greek verb poiein, “to make.”

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We get something of a further confirmation of this view in the link that Hegel also seems to draw, although not unproblematically, between this basic kind of inscription and his treatment of the epigram as a form of art. In this context, he etymologically stresses that such inscriptions are precisely the origin of a later epigrammatic tradition where a witty turn of phrase (or defeat of expectations) becomes the norm—a development Hegel presents, at least at this point, as something of a declension from its origin4: The original essence of the epigram is expressed at once by its name: it is an inscription [Aufschrift]. Of course here too there stands a topic [Gegenstand] on one side and, on the other, something said about it; but in the oldest epigrams, of which Herodotus has preserved a few, we do not get the sketch of an object [Objekt] in association with some sentiment or other; we have the thing itself [Sache] in a double way: (a) the external existent and (b) then its meaning [Bedeutung] and explanation [Erklärung]; these are pressed together as an epigram with the most apposite touches. Yet even among the Greeks the later epigram has lost this original character and has proceeded more and more to take account of and to describe sketchy, ingenious, witty, agreeable, and touching notions about individual occurrences, works of art, persons, etc. These set forth not so much the topic [Gegenstand] itself as the author’s clever relations to it. (MM 13:544; VKunst 1.425–426)

Hegel provides a gloss in the context of his own aesthetic vocabulary: examples of poetry such as the inscription, he says, present us with a “totality complete in itself and therefore independent”; the “whole” that they articulate, as is the case with the battle of Thermopylae, “may be rich and may have a vast range of relations, individuals, actions, events, feelings, sorts of ideas, but poetry must display this vast complex as perfect in itself, as produced and animated by the single principle which is manifested externally in this or that individual detail.” This single principle must appear, he says in a passage rich with Goethean overtones, “as animated, ensouled, determining the whole, and yet at the same time expressed in such a way that the all-comprising unity, the real animating soul, is made to work only in secret from within outwards” (MM 15:240; VKunst 2:973). There is a good deal more to say about these claims of independence, totality and organic unity, but for the moment I want to keep our reflection on what this distich says about the contrast between poetry and prose. So let me turn directly to Hegel’s development of this contrast and his analysis of prose and the prosaic.

2 The Development of Prose It is worth noting that the nature of prose and the poetry/prose distinction were not the particular concern in Hegel’s earliest aesthetics that they become in the later lecture series (these issues do not explicitly emerge as a part of the Phenomenology of Spirit’s account of the “art religion,” for example). In the aesthetics lectures, the prose/poetry distinction emerges early in the Introduction’s polemical framing of art historical questions in light of the contemporaneous debate between aestheticians drawn to Winckelmann’s notion of the “Ideal”

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and the attack made against such representations of the ideal task of the art by the more naturalistic followers of von Rumohr. But this polemical framework is only the beginning of the more wide-ranging and systematic use to which the poetry/ prose distinction is put over the long course of the lectures. Hegel claims that the “law [Gesetz] of prose” is Richtigkeit, deutliche Bestimmtheit and klare Verständlichkeit (“literal accuracy, unmistakable definiteness, and clear intelligibility” [MM 15:279; VKunst 2:1005])—but then develops this point into a larger philosophical consideration. The “law of poetry,” by contrast, does not involve the literalness of prose but must rather “conduct us into a different element, i.e., into the appearance of the subject-matter itself or into other analogous appearances. For it is precisely this real appearance which must come on the scene on its own account and, while portraying the subject-matter, is yet to be free from it as mere subject-matter, since attention is drawn precisely to the existent appearance; and the living shape is made the essential object of the contemplative interest” (MM 15:280; VKunst 2:1005).5 As I mentioned, Hegel links the poetry/prose distinction to a wide range of other distinctions crucial to the ethical and social dimensions of his aesthetic and philosophical project—what Hegel brought together (perhaps too sweepingly) in his famous phrase “the prose of the world.” For these larger contours of the importance of the distinction, it is important to notice Hegel’s claim that “the prosaic” is not simply a stylistic literary mode but more pervasively a form of consciousness (Bewusstsein): “the prosaic Bewusstsein, which poetry must shun, requires a totally different kind of conception and speech” (MM 15:241; VKunst 2.974). As a mode of consciousness or form of life, the prosaic is defined primarily in terms of external relations: in the case of drama, for example, it is a prosaic touch when the denouement arrives in the form of a deus ex machina rather than as a more organically-experienced turn in the plot (MM 13:293; VKunst 1:226). The social relations that broadly constitute the “prosaic consciousness” are ones that Hegel links especially to the Roman world, where, as Hegel puts it, the individual is intelligible not from himself but only from someone else; he is both shut-in on himself and dependent on others (MM 13:197; VKunst 1:149). It is in this context that Hegel makes the famous comment that prose “begins in the slave” (MM 13:496; VKunst 1:387), Paul de Man’s favorite Hegelian quotation. The concrete meaning of this remark is that it was the slave Aesop whose fables started to develop a distinctive prose style that reflects, indeed, a prosaic way of seeing things (an external relation between the animals that offer the figurative shape of the fables and the independent “meaning” of these tales, usually a quite determinative and moralistic human one). But the larger story about the origin of prose in the slave is one that turns on a set of external and alienated relationships characteristic of the Roman world and, by extension, of the social world of modernity. As we start to consider in the next section the role Hegel sees for art and poetry in turning against this alienated world of prose—in acting as some possible form of liberation from it—it is worth noticing that Hegel’s account rests on a confused or at least a double sense of the term: “the prosaic” is not merely the ordinary

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world of objects and interactions that literary artists can take up; it is also already the articulation of that world by ordinary members of it. This raises a host of questions that can’t be addressed here—the differences between literary and visual media on this issue, the question of the aestheticization of bourgeois experience— but certainly we can say that Hegel (at best) elides or (at worst) confuses the notions of what can be represented as items within a way of life and language that can be used in expressing what that way of life involves.

3 Poetry in the Developed World of Prose: The Literary and Post-romantic Art To turn now to the question about modern poetry’s contrast with prose in its more developed form, Hegel is vague about what the poetry of the Thermopylae inscription emerges against: he says only that it must “separate itself from ordinary speech (von dem gewöhnlichen Sprechen”; MM 15:241, VKunst 2.974). The initial “eruption” of the sort of primitive poetry found in that inscription is something which Hegel says happens “unintentionally” (absichtslos), while later works of poetry must explicitly define themselves against prose as it has emerged with the conscious (bewusst) distinction between poetry and prose in mind. The task facing poetry in the age of developed prose—in broadest terms, the age of modernity— is one which involves a challenge that has met several potential lines of response among those arguing for a Hegelian-inflected account of the post-romantic philosophy of art. The question of the status of art in modernity has been much debated by Hegel scholars and hangs together with his view of art’s historicity.6 In his lectures on the philosophy of art, Hegel famously traced a development among three historical modes: the symbolic, which he took to be characteristic of pre-classical modes of art such as Egyptian architecture (whose meaning and significance must be explained by reference to an idea that is not yet fully embodied in the works themselves); the classical, which Hegel insists represents the most complete expression of beauty in sensual form (most fully embodied in the anthropomorphic statues of Greek divinities); and finally the romantic which corresponded both to a shift in Western religious temperament, away from externally embodied anthropomorphic shapes of the deities, as well as to a new awareness of the importance of individuality and self-consciousness on the part of the artist. Given this narrative arc of art’s historical development, the task of art in the modern age must be different than it was among the ancient Greeks. As Hegel puts it in the Introduction to the standard edition of the Lectures: “neither in content nor in form is art the highest and absolute mode of bringing to our minds the true interests of the spirit…. The peculiar nature of artistic production and works of art no longer fills our highest need. We have got beyond venerating works of art as divine and worshipping them. The impression they make is of a more reflective kind, and what they arouse in us needs a higher touchstone and

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a different test” (VKunst 1:9–10). The point is sometimes mistaken by some who discuss Hegel’s notion of the “end” of art as a claim that art in the modern world will no longer be produced (something he very clearly denies in the Lectures) or that art is merely a thing of the past (as though Hegel offered nothing that would give us an account of post-romantic art). Hegel’s claim instead is that art “only fulfils its supreme task when it has placed itself in the same sphere as religion and philosophy, and when it is simply one way of bringing to our minds and expressing the Divine, the deepest interests of mankind, and the most comprehensive truths of the spirit” (VKunst 1:7); as Danto and others have emphasized, this opens the possibility for understanding Hegel’s notion of art in the post-romantic age as inherently a more reflective and conceptual endeavor. Of the many attempts made by Hegelian scholars to sketch a viable notion of post-romantic art in Hegel’s sense, one line of possibility has been w ­ ell-developed by Benjamin Rutter, who argues that the explicitly conscious task of poetry within the context of the prosaic world of modernity must be either to raise the understanding’s view to speculation or to give speculation an imaginative body of some sort. Rutter looks to Hegel’s late-developing interest in the poetry of Hafiz and Goethe’s West-east Divan as examples of literary art which does not succumb to what Hegel thought of as the degenerate subjective irony of the post-romantic world, but offers rather the possibility of an “objective” reconciliation. In this context, Rutter has characterized Hegel’s use of the poetry/prose distinction in terms that link it to the strategy that Viktor Shklovsky and the Russian Formalists called “defamiliarization” or ostranenie, literally “making strange”: the deliberate attempt to coin a new expression (Hegel’s exact phrase for the Herodotean inscription) that makes a contrast with conventional, ordinary modes of expression. Poetry’s task, from this perspective, is one of estrangement—not an estrangement that has merely the (subjective) purpose of the enjoyment of a poet’s virtuosity but one that allows us to see and feel an object “anew, in its liveliness” (Rutter 2010, 144). There is a second line of possibility, though, one perhaps that has less of a connection with the Russian Formalists than (if we want to find a Russian analogy) with their great critic (and the defender of the prosaic) Mikhail Bakhtin. On Bakhtin’s view, formalists such as Shklovsky had misconstrued both literary and non-literary discourse because of their reliance on essentially poetic categories that missed what Morson and Emerson have called the “prosaic of prose” (Morson and Emerson 1990, 19). Such a second approach could be sketched by looking for some elements of a prosaic counter-narrative within the official confines of Hegel’s project in the aesthetics lectures. If we ask in the broadest terms where Hegel’s account of the “beginning of poetry” should be systematically located in the Lectures on Aesthetics—recall, in Hegel’s terms, this must mean in some relevant sense the “beginning of art as such”—the official answer lies of course in Hegel’s account of the development of the specific artistic genres. This account forms the third main section of the lectures, following Hegel’s initial explications of the “The Idea of Artistic Beauty, or the Ideal” and the “Particular Forms of Art” that we have seen (the symbolic, classical and romantic). This third section is devoted to a Hegelian explication of

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the five so-called “canonical” arts—architecture, sculpture, painting, music and poetry—that emerged in the eighteenth century after Batteux and (like the previous two) is both historically situated and systematically organized.7 In this account of the five arts and their relation, poetry has a familiar place at the crown. This indeed is where we find the account of the Thermopylae inscription with which we began. Hegel, however, has placed a longer discussion of inscriptions and epigrams in the lectures in a somewhat different systematic position: in the series of mostly prose forms which mark the dissolution of the symbolic form of art in the second of the lectures’ three great narratives detailing the successive development of the symbolic, classical and romantic forms of art.8 Hegel’s readers have frequently been vexed by difficulties that arise in the systematic relation of these two large narratives, but notice what is important in this second context for the poetry/prose distinction. All of the other figures of speech in those dissolutionary moments are clearly prosaic (fable, parable, proverb, riddle, allegory, metaphor, image and simile as well as descriptive and didactic poetry on the level of the symbolic, satire on the classical, and many of the various forms of humor on the romantic). Hegel makes clear that he places the symbolic forms of comparison where he does because “their specific character can be elucidated only from this relation, and not from the essential nature of the proper species of poetic art, namely epic, lyric and dramatic” (MM 13:491; VKunst 1:382). Inscriptions and epigrams come at the very end of this list of prosaic forms, at the moment of transition to the “genuine art” of the classic. Within this context, we can read Hegel’s use of the Herodotean inscription as a form which serves at least one important prosaic function—i.e., the destruction of a dominant world view within which it has emerged—and thus as a challenge to his official “poetry first” view: the inscription that heralds the arrival of the serious poetry of the classic has clear links with the tasks Hegel associates primarily with prose forms of literature. If we stress this second location of the inscription’s importance for poetry and prose, there are some good reasons to at least give this counter-narrative some credence. For one thing, although Hegel’s attention is drawn to the distinctiveness and independence of the inscriptional distich, it cannot have escaped his notice that it appears as a distinctive and independent item not merely on the hills outside Thermopylae, but as an item within the prose inquiry structured by the father of Greek history. Herodotus’ role in this regard is not at all that of a mere preserver of inscriptions or reports but in a more developed sense as an interpreter, but we must ask what sort of interpretation is at issue here. The task of the Herodotean prosaic narrative form of inquiry is presumably one of construing the importance of crucial cultural moments (the victory at Marathon, the role of key oracular sayings, interactions with other civilizations) within the ancient world.9 In the context of the Aesthetics, Herodotus’ role as cultural interpreter is above all that of one who understands the essentially artistic connection to the divine that characterized the Greeks in his remark that “Homer and Hesiod gave the Greeks their gods” (a point that Hegel repeats no fewer than five times in the Hotho edition of the lectures). But Hegel claims elsewhere within the Aesthetics that “the first interpreter of religious ideas is art alone” (die erste näher

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gestaltende Dolmetscherin aber der religiösen Vorstellungen ist allein die Kunst; MM 13:409; VKunst 1:316). Presumably the interpretive work that Herodotus does is at another level beyond the “work” done by Homer, Hesiod and Phidias: not simply the poet’s (or the sculptor’s) discerning of the shape appropriate to the larger meaning of collective spirit, but presumably a retrospective and second-­ order interpretive recognition of the importance of that artistic work itself.10 If we take these as hints that there might be some prosaic counter-narrative at work within the Aesthetics lectures, we would gain two things. The first is that there would be a larger account that could do for the modern novel what, say, Robert Pippin has done in his account of construing Manet’s importance in terms that go beyond the official Hegelian account but show why Hegel is crucial to the story (Pippin 2015). Such an account would have real resonance with Bakhtin’s linkage of the emergence of ancient prosaic narrative and the broader prosaic freedom inherited by modern post-Hegelian narrativists like Fyodor Dostoevsky. And such an account would in many ways not be especially new, since there have been a number of attempts from Georg Lukacs’ Theory of the Novel to Pippin’s own work on Henry James to give a Hegelian reading of modes of prosaic literature— particularly the great nineteenth century Russian novel and the great modernist experiments of James Joyce and Marcel Proust—that had not yet been invented when Hegel himself hedged the Bildungsroman and the novelistic romance into such an uninteresting space within the broader project of his lectures on aesthetics. This seems to me very much a classificatory problem that remains from the work of the Phenomenology of Spirit, where Hegel clearly used novelistic forms in the Spirit chapter but gave them no official space within the account of art in the Religion chapter. Not only the reclamation of the great 19th and 20th novels is of interest here, as important as that is for any contemporary Hegelian work in aesthetics and literary theory. What also makes Hegel’s explorations about the importance of prose relevant here is that it may offer some clues as to how Hegel views his own narrative practice as a philosopher writing about art. I made an argument to that effect some years ago (Speight 2001) concerning the Phenomenology of Spirit, insisting that there is a good deal more to be said about the literary and stylistic side of Hegel’s project than the usual appeal to Royce’s comment about its similarity to Bildungsroman indicates (Royce 1919). I would hold the same for the narrative with several historical tasks that Hegel appears to be sorting out (not always neatly) in the Aesthetics lectures. Hegel himself does not work this out explicitly, and, in general, philosophers themselves rarely do: for example, an analysis of the Platonic dialogue as a literary genre was something only given suggestive treatment later by Aristotle with his comparison between Platonic dialogues and the otherwise neglected “mimes” of Sophron. For the moment I merely draw attention to a couple of parallels with the prose forms to which Hegel draws our attention in the lectures. Like Herodotean inquiry, Hegel’s narrative project also is concerned with how great works of the past are taken up within their cultural milieu and aware that the interpretive practice involved is part of a larger exchange asking about the relation between artworks

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and what we take them to be doing (i.e., that understanding artistic monuments and events must take into consideration how they are modes of performance). Also, like Herodotean inquiry, Hegel’s narrative is concerned with the meaning of key cultural performances in a way that is necessarily retrospective—one bound up with the exploration of whether those works have succeeded or failed at the social intelligibility to which they have aspired.

4 Conclusions and Questions It might be asked how the two Hegelian approaches to the poetry/prose distinction and the broader question of significant literary form in the post-romantic age that I have sketched go together: on the one hand, Rutter’s concern with the maintenance of a distinctively poetic form in objective humor with its Shklovskyan need for lyric that can attract our attention from the prosaic; and, on the other hand, what I have called here the prosaic counter-narrative with its Bakhtinian emphasis on continuity.11 It would of course be a false dialectical tension if we saw these as merely opposed alternatives. In his early essay “Art and Responsibility,” Bakhtin had argued—counter Shklovsky and the Formalists—that the separation between art and the “prose of life” (a phrase that he may have deliberately taken from Hegel) is in fact all too easy to achieve: both life and art, he claims, want to ease their burden with a separation, but the result is all too often brazen or overly-emotional art or disengaged life (Morson and Emerson 1990, 72). One can imagine Hegel making a similar point, and perhaps on similar grounds: that there is not only a separation but a continuity involved in the relation between poetry and prose. What makes the Herodotean distich poetic, in Hegel’s view, is not some form of Shklovskyan defamiliarization but rather an independence that we notice for its having a kind of totality complete within itself. It is not that poetry removes or distorts prosaic life, but that it actually draws a kind of intense life into itself. This connects with the familiar and rather deep strain in the Lectures on art’s connection to liveliness (Lebendigkeit): art’s overall purpose, as Hegel says, is to “awaken and vivify [beleben] our slumbering feelings, inclinations and passions” (MM 13:70, VKunst 1:46). Presumably the claim about an independent and lively intensity in poetic writing would be as true, despite all the relevant differences, of post-romantic poetry as of ancient Greek inscriptions. Here we find an interesting connection between Hegel’s approach to literature and the distinctly post-Fregean conversation that has gone in the philosophy of literature more recently over the status of fiction.12 As I have argued elsewhere, Hegel gives us in this description of the emergence of distinctly poetic speech a way of preserving both what John Gibson has called the “humanist intuition”—that literature can present the reader with an “intimate and intellectually significant engagement with social and cultural reality”—while at the same time not losing a second intuition—that literature can present other worlds of aesthetic creation rather than this-worldly representation (Gibson 2007).

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Since Hegel does make clear that, given his stance on form/content issues, there is necessarily a genre fluidity, perhaps this applies as well to the poetry/prose distinction.13 From that perspective, a Hegelian philosophy of literature would need to be open to all the ways in which the poetry/prose distinction has developed differently under different historical conditions and the competing needs for social intelligibility that have impelled that development. And one of its tasks would certainly be to take a closer look at modes of prose-based inquiry stretching from Herodotus to contemporary narratives in the philosophy of visual and literary art.

Notes 1. Fried’s point about the non-narcissistic self-production involved in art is even clearer in T. M. Knox’s English translation of the “standard edition” of Hegel’s lectures on art, which were edited and published by his student Hotho after Hegel’s death. Scholars who work on Hegel’s philosophy of art have been at pains in the last generation or two to make clear what Hotho may have added when he collated notes taken by students across several iterations of Hegel’s Berlin lectures on this topic. In this case, as can be seen from comparing Knox’s translation, the key points are in many ways quite similar: “The universal and absolute need from which art (on its formal side) springs has its origin in the fact that the human being is a thinking consciousness, i.e., that the human being draws out of herself and puts before herself what she is and whatever else is. Things in nature are only immediate and single, while the human being as spirit duplicates herself, in that (i) she is as things in nature are, but (ii) she is just as much for herself; she sees herself, represents herself to herself, thinks, and only on the strength of this active placing herself before herself is she spirit” (MM 13:49–50; VKunst 1.30–31). Hotho’s edition then follows with a famous extension of the image that is not in the 1823 transcript: “a boy throws stones into the river and now marvels at the circles drawn in the water as an effect in which he gains an intuition of something that is his own doing” (see LFAHotho 193). 2. For a longer discussion of the relation between “poetry” and “literature” for Hegel and his contemporaries, see Speight (2016). 3. Cf. Herder’s (nonetheless quite different) claim that “it is, perhaps, from the ode that the entire great original array of poetic forms… will grow” (Herder 1992, 36) and Hamann’s that poetry is “the native language of mankind” (Hammermeister 2002, 225, quoted in Rutter 2010, 141, who suggests that Vico may have been the original source of this view). 4. The Herodotean epigram seems to serve in fact two purposes within Hegel’s aesthetics: within the discussion of the nature of poetry within the artistic genres, it is the opening to the poetic equivalent of the plasticity of Greek sculpture; within the account of the particular art-forms of symbolic, classical and romantic, it is the final form of the dissolution of the symbolic (so, again, a distinct herald of the arrival of art in its classical sense), but one of several that are together treated as prose forms and so not belonging to the account of the genres proper. (In terms of the lecture series, the Herodotean material and the epigram seem to emerge in the decisive years between 1823 and 1826.) 5. “so muß die Poesie in ein anderes Element, in die Erscheinung des Gehalts selbst oder in andere verwandte Erscheinungen hineinleiten. Denn ebendiese Realität ist es, welche für sich auftreten und den Inhalt einerseits zwar darstellen, andererseits aber auch von dem bloßen Inhalte befreien soll, indem die Aufmerksamkeit gerade auf das erscheinende Dasein geführt und die lebendige Gestalt dem theoretischen Interesse zum wesentlichen Zwecke gemacht wird…” 6. See, among (many) others, Henrich (1979) and more recently Houlgate (2013) and Pippin (2005, 2015).

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7. Hegel more or less adopts directly this list of five, leaving aside other eighteenth century candidates such as landscaping and dance. For the aesthetic background of this list of arts—and whether it represents a development beyond earlier accounts—see Kristeller (1951–1952) as well as the more recent debate about Kristeller’s stance by (among others) Porter (2010) and Kivy (2012). 8. On the differences in the historical narratives involved in the three main parts of the Lectures, see Speight (2011). 9. In the introduction to the Lectures on the Philosophy of World History, Hegel even links Herodotus in this sense to the artistic work of the poet in similar terms to those we saw earlier: the historian compiles deeds and events in a way that “what was originally mere existence thereby takes on an intellectual aspect… In the same way, the poet works on the material supplied by his emotions, creating from it an object which can be represented to the senses” (LPWHIntro 12). 10. In this sense, we might think that there is a potentially interesting similarity between Herodotus’ role as the herald and interpreter of classical poetry in the context of the Lectures and the role played by other key interpretive figures important to Hegel’s narrative in the philosophy of art. One might think, for example, not only of that charming young maiden in the Phenomenology of Spirit, who is essential precisely because she hands on the “fruit” of classical art to another cultural (and religious) perspective, standing thus as the hermeneutic mediator between us and the world of Greek art. Or, perhaps more directly, the fictional but key interpretive figure for the emergence of art in both the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Aesthetics narratives: Oedipus, of all people, who is cast in both cases in a somewhat odd Hegelian drama as the interpreter of ancient riddles who can nonetheless make substantial and reconciling art out of them. See Speight (2013). 11. Although I have called this an “unofficial” narrative, because it gives a new prominence to prose narrative beyond that which Hegel’s account of artistic form gives it, there is an argument, of course, for calling it the more official Hegelian narrative, since it is that narrative which is most connected to Hegel’s larger project of tracing the move away from art to (religion and) philosophy—the only narrative, after all, that structures the tight series of paragraphs in the Encyclopedia account of art, when all of Hegel’s (and Hotho’s) discussion of specific artistic genres appear to have faded into the background. 12. In analytic philosophy of literature, the landscape of the last generation or so has been well described in terms largely of reactions to Frege’s insistence that in listening to poetry we are “interested only in the sense of the sentences and the images and feelings thereby aroused,” not the question of truth. For many contemporary philosophers of literature—including Lamarque and Olsen, Walton and Moran—accepting Frege’s claim means that we may of course be concerned with compelling aesthetic and imaginative issues in our engagement with literature—may even, as Lamarque and Olsen put it, look to literature for some kind of insight or understanding—but cannot hope to find in it knowledge of what our world is actually like. 13. Compare Hegel’s Bakhtinian-sounding remarks about the relation between artistic conception and expression in the Greek genres: “[I]t was not as if these ideas and doctrines [i.e., the Greeks’ religious conceptions] were already there, in advance of poetry, in an abstract mode of consciousness as general religious propositions and categories of thought, and then later were only clothed in imagery by artists and given an external adornment in poetry; on the contrary, the mode of artistic production was such that what fermented in these poets they could work out only in this form of art and poetry” (MM 13:140; VKunst 1:102).

Bibliography Fried, Michael. 1990. Courbet’s Realism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Gibson, John. 2007. Fiction and the Weave of Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

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Hammermeister, Kai. 2002. The German Aesthetic Tradition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Henrich, Dieter. 1979. “Art and Philosophy of Art Today: Reflections with Reference to Hegel.” Translated by David Henry Wilson et. al. In New Perspectives in German Literary Criticism: A Collection of Essays, edited by Richard E. Amacher and Victor Lange, 107– 133. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Herder, Johann Gottfried. 1992. “Fragments of a Treatise on the Ode.” In Johann Gottlieb Herder: Selected Early Works 1764–1767. Translated by Ernest A. Menze and Michael Palma. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State University Press. Houlgate, Stephen. 2013. “Hegel, Danto and the ‘End of Art.’” In The Impact of Idealism: The Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought, edited by Nicholas Boyle et. al., 264–292. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Kivy, Peter. 2012. “What Really Happened in the Eighteenth Century: The ‘Modern System’ Re-examined (Again).” British Journal of Aesthetics 52 (1): 61–74. Kristeller, Paul Oskar. 1951–1952. “The Modern System of the Arts: A Study in the History of Aesthetics.” Journal of the History of Ideas 12 (4) (October 1951): 496–527, and 13 (1) (January 1952): 17–46. Morson, Gary Saul and Caryl Emerson. 1990. Mikhail Bakhtin: Creation of a Prosaics. Stanford: Stanford University Press. Pippin, Robert. 2005. The Persistence of Subjectivity: On the Kantian Aftermath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pippin, Robert. 2015. After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Porter, James I. 2010. The Origins of Aesthetic Thought in Ancient Greece: Matter, Sensation and Experience. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Royce, Josiah. 1919. Lectures on Modern Idealism. New Haven: Yale University Press. Rutter, Benjamin. 2010. Hegel on the Modern Arts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Speight, Allen. 2001. Hegel, Literature and the Problem of Agency. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Speight, Allen. 2011. “Hegel and the ‘Historical Deduction’ of the Concept of Art.” In Blackwell Companion to Hegel, edited by Stephen Houlgate and Michael Baur, 353–368. Oxford: Blackwell. Speight, Allen. 2013. “Artisans, Artists and Hegel’s History of the Philosophy of Art.” Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 34 (2): 203–222. Speight, Allen. 2016. “Philosophy and Literature in the Nineteenth Century.” In The Routledge Companion to the Philosophy of Literature, edited by Noel Carroll and John Gibson, 30–39. New York: Routledge.

Chapter 18

Hegel’s Recasting of the Theological Proofs Robert Williams

1 Introduction Hegel observes that in the popular mind, Kant’s discrediting of the theological proofs is so complete that it is not merely this or that proof, but rather the attempt at theological proof as such that is now regarded as impossible.1 It is widely held that Hegel accepted Kant’s refutation of the proofs when he recast them as the elevation of spirit to God. This suggests that Hegel accepted their discrediting as a given which he incorporated into his recasting of the proofs. So understood, Hegel’s recasting of the proofs is likewise supposed to possess only subjective validity devoid of objective significance. In Hegel’s recasting, the proofs cease to be proofs. No one asks, if the proofs are merely subjective debris left over from the collapse of metaphysics, why Hegel went to the trouble of recasting them? Besides, what good would it do to recast a discredited proof as something merely subjective? Isn’t this a distinction without a difference? This interpretation fails to appreciate Hegel’s position, which is that the proofs fail, not because they are devoid of rational content, but because of defects in their form: “we are mistaken when we suppose that, because their form is attacked, the proofs of God’s existence have become antiquated with respect to their content. But the content is, of course, not presented in its purity” (LPR 1 420n.122; VRel 1 313–314). Hegel’s recasting of the proofs begins by uncovering and identifying their true content. For it is this true content that not only evoked and guided the construction of the proofs in the first place, but also that illumines defects and distortions introduced by their traditional forms. Hegel’s concern is to strip away the formal defects and distortions introduced by classical metaphysics, by the understanding separated from and turned against reason, and to restore the proofs to their proper theological significance. Hegel claims that what the traditional proofs

R. Williams (*)  University of Illinois, Chicago, IL, USA

© The Author(s) 2020 M. F. Bykova and K. R. Westphal (eds.), The Palgrave Hegel Handbook, Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26597-7_18

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assume but fail to express adequately, is the elevation of subjective spirit to absolute spirit: “What this nexus contains when we strip away the form of demonstration is the elevation to God, and the proofs are nothing more than a description of the self-elevation to God” (LPR 1 419; VRel 1 312). According to Hegel, It is this elevation of the thinking spirit to that which is itself the highest thought, to God, that we … wish to consider. This elevation is, moreover, essentially rooted in the nature of our spirit. It is necessary to it, and it is this necessity that we have before us in this elevation. The portrayal of this necessity is nothing other than what we call proof. Therefore, we do not have to prove the elevation from an outside perspective; it proves itself in itself, and this means…that it is by its very nature necessary. We only have to describe and follow its own process, and, since it is a necessary process, we have therein the necessity itself, insight into the nature of which has to be furnished and secured by proof. (LProofs 44, trans. modified)

Hegel’s claim is that by its own immanent necessity and logic, the elevation of spirit to God is a philosophical theology. Hegel’s project is influenced by Kant, whose attitude towards the proofs is ambiguous. Despite his attack on the proofs, Kant asserts that the cosmological proof is the most plausible. He observes that the cosmological proof, which begins with the common experience of existence as contingent, judges contingent being to be non-self-sufficient, and spontaneously infers that there must be some necessary being that is its cause. In reasoning thus, the cosmological argument simply follows and codifies what Kant calls “the natural course of human reason” (CPR A586/B614) whereby humans are “led, not by reflection and deep speculation, but only in accordance with the natural course of common understanding” (CPR A590/B618) to the “absolutely necessary.” Kant writes: The cosmological proof…. [is] setting everything on the track of a species of inference that, whether reasonable or sophistical, is at least natural, and has been the most persuasive one not only for the common but also for the speculative understanding; it is also the one that visibly draws the outlines for all the proofs of natural theology, outlines which have always been followed and will be followed further. (CPR, A604/B632; my italics)

Nevertheless, Kant dismisses such instinctive natural logic as metaphysical illusion. More precisely, Kant’s critical doctrine is that reason both demands the unconditioned and yet cannot think it (Kemp Smith 1918, 534ff.). Kant treats religion as a postulate of practical reason, with a God-postulate valid for practical purposes. But the God-postulate remains only subjectively necessary; it is not a theology; rather it expresses a moral faith, namely, that the human being can do what he ought to do. What Kant gets right, in Hegel’s view, is that the proofs express a spontaneous, pre-theoretical natural reasoning that links theology immanently to the consciousness of freedom. Hegel agrees with Kant that the traditional proofs follow a pre-theoretical, instinctual reason, a natural logic that operates according to its own immanent necessity. Hegel accepts this elevation as the starting point of a philosophical theology, but only the starting point (Enc. 3 §552). However, Hegel thinks that Kant undermined this starting point with his Hume-inspired metaphysical skepticism and his doctrine of the postulates of practical reason. Kant claims

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that the theological postulate, though valid for practical purposes, possesses only subjective necessity. Kant’s critical philosophy put an end to metaphysics as an objective dogmatism; nevertheless, by its retention of the traditional logical categories and the anti-metaphysical prejudices of empiricism, it transformed the objective dogmatism of metaphysics into a subjective dogmatism of moral faith. In Hegel’s view, Kant’s “criticism of the proofs is … inadequate on its own account, and in addition Kant failed to recognize their deeper foundation [in religious elevation] and so was unable to do justice to their true content” (LProofs 163).

2 Hegel’s Critique of Kant’s Understanding of Religion In Hegel’s view, Kant fails to understand religion, both in his treatment of it as a postulate of morality, and in his dismissal of the natural bent and disposition of the mind that spontaneously rises from the contingency of the world to the absolutely necessary. On the one hand, Kant regards this instinctual rise as a natural tendency, the most convincing for both common sense and speculative understanding. On the other hand, Kant critically dismisses this disposition of the mind as a merely subjective mixture of psychology and an illusory transcendence devoid of content. Kant’s dismissal of the natural logic at work in religion as sophistry means that he regards religion only from an external point of view. Kant treats religion as a support for the claim of morality that the human being can do what s/he morally ought to do. For Kant the God-postulate does not involve any cognition of God; it expresses not a theology, but only a moral faith that “ought implies can.” Kant’s view of theology as a postulate of morality is further evidence for Hegel’s claim that he misunderstands religion and theology. Hegel adds that Kant’s God-postulate is incoherent. The form of the postulate, as subjective, stands in contradiction to its postulated content and vice versa.2 Hegel observes that if God were merely a postulate, God would have no being independent of the postulating consciousness (LProofs 65–66. See also F&K 95, 67–68). This view of the relation of human beings to God is one-sided; the religious relation is constructed and viewed from one side only. However, “A onesided relationship is no relation at all. If in fact we are to understand by religion nothing more than a relationship on our part to God, then God is left without any independent existence. God would exist only in religion as something posited and produced by us” (LProofs 66). In contrast to Kant’s theological agnosticism, Hegel observes that the expression that God exists only in religion…does have the true and important meaning that it belongs to the nature of God, in God’s complete and self-sustaining independence, to be for the human spirit, to communicate godself to humanity. This meaning is totally different from that previously referred to, in which God is only a postulate, a belief. God is, and gives godself in relationship to humans. (LProofs 66; my italics)

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He adds that “Proving God turns out to be the summons to the philosophy of religion” (LPR 1 137; VRel 1 51).

3 Philosophy of Religion Displaces Traditional Natural Theology Natural theology considered God as the highest being in abstraction from the world and from religion itself. In contrast, Hegel claims that the doctrine of God has its proper context in religion. The doctrine of God is no longer a doctrine of the highest being, the abstract universal, separated from the world, but rather the object and correlate of religion (LPR 1 116; VRel 1 33). To the extent that God is grasped as an essence of the understanding, God is not grasped as spirit. To the extent that God is grasped as spirit, however, this concept includes the subjective side within it… Our concern here … is not with God as such or as object, but with God as he is present in his community…God can only be genuinely understood in the mode of his being as spirit, by means of which he makes himself the counterpart of a community. (LPR 1 116; my italics. VRel 1 33)

Hegel claims that the relation of finite spirit to divine spirit is the substantial foundation of religion. We have to acknowledge the truth implicit in the modern practice of not considering God in isolation from subjective spirit. But we do not do so for the reason that God is… unknown, but only because God is essentially spirit… Thus there is a relation of spirit to spirit. This relationship of spirit to spirit lies at the basis of religion. (LPR 1 383n; my italics. VRel 1 280)

As a relation of spirit to spirit, religion proceeds from both sides of the relation: Religion, as this supreme sphere may be generally designated, has to be considered as proceeding from the subject and having its home in the subject, but equally as issuing objectively from the absolute spirit which is spirit in its community. (Enc. 3 §554)

Questions concerning divine immanence or divine transcendence are questions that explore aspects of the relation of spirit to spirit constitutive of the community in which God is present as spirit. Hegel’s Philosophy of Religion embodies his criticism of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason for separating the forms and categories of knowledge from actual cognition. His correction of Kant demands that the inquiry into the forms and conditions of cognition not be separated from cognition itself: Reason is to be investigated—but how? It must be investigated rationally; it must be cognized. That is possible only through rational thinking, rational cognition….To learn to swim one must go into the water. One cannot make cognition into one’s object without thereby behaving cognitively at the same time. Here in the philosophy of religion it is more precisely God, or reason in principle, that is the object. God is essentially rational, a rationality that is alive and, as spirit, is in and for itself. When we philosophize about religion, we are in fact investigating reason…only we do so without the supposition that we will get this over first, apart from our real object. Instead the cognition of reason is

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exactly the object, is what it is all about. Spirit is just this: to be for itself, to be for spirit. This is what finite spirit is; and the relationship of finite spirit or finite reason to infinite spirit or reason is engendered within religion itself and must be dealt with there. (LPR 1 138–139; VRel 1 53)3

Hegel implements his own critical demand that the forms of thinking, and the critique of them, must be united within the process of cognition. Kant’s philosophy of religion, which treats God only as a subjective postulate of morality, lacks engagement with both religion and cognition of God, and thus fails this important requirement. Hegel’s philosophy of religion satisfies the critical requirement by focusing on the relation of finite spirit to infinite spirit as it is present within religion itself.

4 Kant’s Fact of Reason: From Immanence to Transcendence Hegel acknowledges Kant’s point that the god-question arises originally in and through freedom and practical reason, not in speculative reason or physics (CPrR Ak 5:145). Hegel describes Kant’s point this way: “The idea of God is known as free spirit only from and through ethical life. True religion and piety are sought in vain outside of ethical life and ethical spirit” (Enc. 3 §552).4 Similarly Hegel claims that his concern is not with God as an abstract object of natural theology, but with God as spirit present in his community, and that “the doctrine of God is be grasped and taught only as the doctrine of religion” (LPR 1 116; VRel 1 33). The parallel between Hegel and Kant extends to the elevation of spirit to God. Hegel credits Kant with getting right the starting point of that elevation in the consciousness of freedom and practical reason. For Kant freedom and the unconditional moral law reciprocally imply each other (CPrR Ak 5:6, 29). The moral law is the ratio cognoscendi of freedom and freedom is the ratio essendi of the moral law, for only a free being can apprehend something that ought to be, wherein a human being judges that he can do something simply because he knows that he ought—a fact which without the moral law would have remained unknown to him (CPrR Ak 5:30). “Consciousness of this fundamental law may be called a fact of reason because one cannot reason it out from antecedent data of reason, for example, from consciousness of freedom (since this is not antecedently given to us) and because it instead forces itself upon us of itself as a synthetic a priori proposition that is not based on any intuition, either pure or empirical” (CPrR Ak 5:31). Further Kant asserts that the moral law is given, as it were, as a fact of pure reason of which we are a priori conscious and which is apodictically certain, though it be granted that no example of exact observance of it can be found in experience. Hence the objective reality of the moral law cannot be proved by any deduction, … it is nevertheless firmly established of itself. …. [T]he moral principle, conversely itself serves as the principle of the deduction of… freedom, of which the moral law, which itself has no need of justifying grounds, proves

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not only the possible but the reality in beings who cognize this law as binding upon them. (CPrR Ak 5:47)

For Kant, the fact of reason is immediately grasped, but this immediacy means that the content of the fact of reason possesses only a subjective necessity. Kant’s fact of reason, as immediate, is for Hegel the “point where philosophy terminates in faith” (F&K 67). Kant’s fact of reason opens the door to Jacobi’s immediate knowing.

5 Hegel’s Fact of Religion as Elevation of Spirit to God Hegel does not analyze Kant’s fact of reason. But he does acknowledge Kant’s primacy of the practical as the starting point of the ascent of spirit to God: “…we have the standpoint of absoluteness revealed, since there is an infinite disclosed within the human breast. The satisfying part in Kant’s philosophy is that the truth is at least set within the human heart” (LHPHald 3:458; my italics). Hegel credits Kant with an important move, namely, an approach to transcendence within immanence that Hegel calls the elevation of spirit to God. However Kant’s doctrine of the postulates compromises and undermines his own discovery and approach. But Kant’s account of this elevation reduces it again to a mere postulate, a mere Sollen or “ought”. This is the previously explained distortion, namely the postulate retains the antithesis of finitude. But that very elevation of spirit to God suspends the [contradictory] form of the postulate and transforms it into truth. This elevation of subjective spirit to God must be recovered and restored to its truth and validity. (Enc. 3 §552; my italics)5

Hegel’s agenda is the restoration of the elevation of subjective spirit to God from its distortions in the traditional proofs, in Kant’s practical philosophy, and Jacobi’s immediate knowing. Hegel’s agenda involves a correction of what Kant started, but failed to complete. Kant’s version of the elevation never arrives at its destination, but only ought to arrive—a spurious infinity. Hegel uses the term Faktum in his account of religion. Kant and Hegel are talking about different non-sensible “facts”, to wit, morality, and religion. Both “facts” have to do with freedom but in different senses and domains. For Kant, the fact of reason implies that the moral subject is essential and that the object of religion is relative to the ends of the moral subject, i.e., God supposedly guarantees that the end commanded by moral law can be realized by moral action. For Hegel, the fact of religion implies that the theological object—the absolutely necessary—is essential, and the religious subject, as contingent finitude, is relative to and dependent on its object. This means that religion is a praxis of self-sublating finitude that achieves its stability, freedom, and independence—in and through utter dependence on God. The cognition of God is not optional, but essential. Hegel also observes that Jacobi follows Kant in interpreting the fact of reason as excluding all discursive activity and mediation (LProofs 51; Enc. 1 §§50–1, 62, 63). On the contrary, for Hegel “The one essential fact in the fact of elevation is that it is a mediation” (LProofs 95).

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This elevation has the thoughtful consideration of the world as its only foundation, not the merely sensory one that we have in common with animals. It is for thinking… alone that the essence, the substance, the universal might and purposive determination of the world are present….in fact, animals do not make this transition; they stay with sense experience and intuition; for that reason they do not have any religion either. (Enc. 1 §50R)

Further, the faktum of religion from which the elevation proceeds is not a sensible one, nor an empirically concrete content of sensation or intuition, nor a…fanciful imagination. Rather the elevation proceeds from the abstract thought-determinations or categories implicit in the finitude and contingency of the world. The goal at which the elevation arrives is of a similar kind, the infinitude and absolute necessity of God, though not in a more developed articulation, but solely in these general categories. (LProofs 94–5)

For Hegel, the fact of religion is an act of mediation, i.e., the institution of a relation and a transition. This very fact, the elevation itself, is as such rather something that is immediately an act of mediation; it has its beginning, its starting point in finite, contingent existence, in worldly things, but then is an advance to something altogether other. It is consequently mediated by that beginning, and it is an elevation to what is infinite and in itself necessary only because it does not remain standing with that beginning, which is here alone the immediate (an immediate that later exhibits a merely relative character), but abandons and surrenders such a standpoint mediatedly. This elevation, which is consciousness, is thus itself mediated knowledge. (LProofs 94)

The Faktum of religion has a starting point with contingent finitude and an endpoint in foundational absolute necessity. Spirit is propelled in its elevation by an immanent necessity and presence which invites discursive mediation and the endeavor of proof: It is this circumstance—that the elevation of spirit to God has mediation within itself— which invites to proof, that is, the setting forth of the individual elements of the process of spirit, and indeed in the form of thought. It is spirit, in its innermost aspect, namely in its thought, that produces this elevation—an elevation that is the process of its categories. What should happen by means of proof is that such an activity of thinking is brought to consciousness, that consciousness recognizes this activity to be a nexus of cognitional moments. Against an exposition such as this, which unfolds itself in the field of mediating thought, faith, which wishes to continue to be immediate certainty, protests. So too does the criticism of the understanding, which is at home in the intricacies of that mediation, but for purposes of confusing the elevation itself. (LProofs 95–96; my italics)

Hegel’s account of the elevation is a third alternative to Jacobi and Kant. Jacobi regards mediation as illicit, a self-subversion of reason, a conditioning of the unconditioned, as sacrilege, and so rules out mediation in favor of a leap of faith. The elevation of spirit becomes a blind leap, a sacrificium intellectus that by excluding cognition and mediation, demands immediate certainty. Kant, on the other hand, is at home in the intricacies of mediation, but critically confines cognitive mediation to finitude (concepts without intuitions are empty), while at the same time regarding the object of elevation—the absolutely necessary—as unknowable or a subjective postulate:

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But Kant’s account of this elevation reduces it again to a mere postulate, a mere Sollen or “ought.” This is the previously explained distortion, namely, the postulate retains the antithesis of finitude. But that very elevation of spirit to God suspends the [contradictory] form of the postulate and transforms it into truth. (Enc. 3 §552; my italics)

Common to both Jacobi and Kant is the suppression of the factum itself. Hegel emphasizes that the factum is the unity of distinct determinations, e.g., finite and infinite, which the understanding takes to be absolutely different and thus incapable of either mediation or union. Hegel’s point is that the factum is the unity of both finite and infinite, the unity of immediacy and mediation: It is mindless not to see that the unity of distinct determinations is not just a purely immediate, i.e., totally indeterminate and empty unity, but that what is posited in it is precisely that one of the determinations has truth only through its mediation by the other…It is thereby shown to be a factum, that the determination of mediation is contained in that very immediacy, against which the understanding, in accordance with its own fundamental principle of immediate knowing, is not allowed to have any objections. It is only the ordinary abstract understanding that takes the determinations of immediacy and mediation to be absolute each on its own account, and thinks that it has a firm distinction in them; in this way it engenders for itself the insurmountable difficulty of uniting them—a difficulty which, as we have shown, is not present in the factum, while within the speculative concept it vanishes too. (Enc. 1 §70R)6

For Hegel, the “fact of religion” involves both immediacy and mediation that in its actual, concrete unity constitute an immanent necessity. This immanent necessity is what makes all the difference between a “true fact of spirit” and ephemeral chaff and chatter: As far as faith is concerned, we may say that, however many faults the understanding may find with these proofs, and whatever defective points there may be in their explication of the elevation of the spirit from the contingent and temporal to the infinite and eternal, the human heart will not allow itself to be deprived of this elevation….Faith will not allow itself to be robbed of its elevation to God, i.e., of its witness to the truth, because this elevation is intrinsically necessary, is more than some sort of accidental fact relating to spirit…. In order that this fact may be rightly comprehended as a fact of spirit, and not of the ephemeral and contingent spirits, it is requisite to grasp it in its necessity. Only this necessity vouches for its rightness in this contingent and arbitrary sphere. (LProofs, 96)

Hegel claims “spirit elevates itself above the mass of contingencies, above the merely external and relative necessity involved in them, above the infinite that is merely a negative [the spurious infinite], and obtains a necessity that no longer goes beyond itself but is in and for itself…while all other determinations are posited by it and are dependent on it” (LProofs 103). This elevation intends the true infinite, not the spurious infinite.

6 The Cosmological Proof Kant attacks the proofs by claiming that the unconditional necessity which we require as the indispensable bearer of all things is a veritable abyss for human reason. He takes the unconditioned as a purely negative concept that “does away

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with every condition – without which … there can be no concept of any necessity” (CPR, A610/B638). To illustrate the abyss, Kant refers to von Haller’s image of quantitative infinity, which Kant portrays as a necessary being asking itself “Whence then am I?” Hegel cites and replies to Kant: Kant says that we cannot avoid having the thought and yet we cannot entertain it, that a being whom we represent as the highest should, as it were say to itself, “I am from eternity to eternity; outside of me there is nothing save what is through my will, but whence then am I?” Here everything sinks under us and floats unsteadily before speculative reason alone, and it costs the latter nothing to let the greatest as well as the least perfection vanish. But what speculative reason above all must let vanish is the putting of such a question as “whence then am I?” into the mouth of the absolutely necessary and unconditioned—as if that which is utterly infinite, outside of which nothing exists other than through its will, could look beyond itself for an other than itself, and ask about something beyond itself. (LProofs 156/VBew 326)7

Inherent in Kant’s rhetorical question is an assumption that the absolutely necessary has conditions. If so, then it must be finite and contingent. If this is what Kant means, then Hegel would agree with him that such a finite-infinite is a spurious infinite. Inherent in Hegel’s sharp rhetorical reply is a concept of necessary being that is self-grounding and as such is capable of transforming any relation to any putative other into a relation to itself (LProofs 106–8).8 We shall examine this concept shortly. Despite their disagreement, Hegel credits Kant with formulating an important issue in the form of a dilemma: Regress to the conditions of existence is impossible without assuming a necessary being, but it is equally impossible to begin with such a necessary being: As to what concerns dialectical illusion itself…it consists in the fact that, while I must indeed allow that what exists, in general, has a necessary element, no single thing can be thought of as necessary in itself; and that, while I can never complete the process of going back to the conditions of existence without assuming a necessary being, I can never start from the latter. (LProofs, 157, citing CPR A615/B643–A616/B644)

Hegel comments: It must in justice be allowed that this remark contains the essential element on which everything turns. What is necessary in itself must show that it has its beginning within itself, and it must be comprehended in such a way that its beginning can be demonstrated to be within itself….The sole question is how to begin to show that something starts from itself, or rather, how to combine the two considerations, namely, that the infinite starts precisely from an other and yet in so doing starts only from itself. (LProofs, 157; my italics)

Hegel undertakes to dissolve the dilemma by showing that the elevation starts from a finite other, and yet in so doing starts only from the infinite itself. This will require finding a way to combine the contingent finitude with absolute necessity. If the infinite starts from another—contingent being—then the infinite is mediated. But then it is not infinite. How to show that despite its mediation by finitude, the infinite starts only from itself? Hegel claims that the finite, with which the proof begins, does not persist unchanged, but rather sublates itself. Thus in starting

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from the finite as its self-sublating other, the true infinite manifests its power in sustaining contingent finitude above and despite its possible non-being. The finite is not independent, but the manifestation of the power of the infinite. Starting with the self-sublating finite, the infinite starts only from itself. Although the infinite appears mediated by the finite, it is not dependent on the finite. That is, the existence of contingent finitude is a manifestation of the power of the infinite. Hegel expresses the affirmative self-sublation of the finite thus: Finite things…are…contradictory and disrupted within themselves and… return into their ground.…The true inference from a finite and contingent being to an absolutely necessary being does not consist in inferring the latter from the former as from a being that is and remains the ground. On the contrary, the inference is from a being that, as is also directly implied in contingency, is only in a state of collapse and is inherently self-contradictory; or rather, the true inference consists in showing that contingent being in its own self withdraws into its ground in which it is sublated, and further, that by this withdrawal it posits the ground only in such a manner that it rather makes itself into a positedness. In ordinary inference, the being of the finite appears as the ground of the absolute; because the finite is, therefore the absolute is. But the truth is that the absolute is because the finite… is not. In the former meaning… the being of the finite is the being of the absolute, but in the latter … the non-being of the finite is the being of the absolute. (WL MM 6:79–80/SL 443, trans. revised; my italics)

7 The Defect in the Traditional Cosmological Proof Hegel focuses on contingency and claims that the traditional categories of the argument conceal and suppress the possible non-being inherent in contingency. This suppression results in distortions that undermine the argument, e.g., metaphysical positivism and dualism. In his Logic, Hegel shows that the category of being is the unity of being and nothing.9 Determinate being includes both reality and negation, “but in reality with the accent on being, the fact is concealed that it contains determinateness and therefore also negation” (WL MM 5:118–119/SL 111; my italics). Traditional logic and metaphysics pass over this negation, and dwell in finite thought-determinations that take their terms as given and ready-made (Enc. 1 §§28–31). Hegel notes that this suppression of the negativity of finitude is a metaphysical prejudice inherited from empiricism (Enc. 1 §§47, 39–40). Traditional thought suppresses the negativity inherent in contingency and possibility. So, the terms are taken as stable and fixed, i.e., not subject to negation. “Reality” becomes wholly affirmative, and is assumed to survive when all negation has been excluded. This assumption is metaphysical positivism. Contingent finitude is taken as “having being,” but its equally possible non-being is suppressed and forgotten. When this immanent negation is concealed, the finite appears to rank equally with the infinite as an affirmative being standing on its own, and each appears complete without the other—metaphysical dualism (WL MM 5:131/SL 122). For Hegel, the suppression of the possible non-being inherent in contingency is the fundamental defect of the traditional proof. The proof suffers from

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a permanent immediacy that flattens and distorts crucial differences between the terms in its premises (LProofs 113). To suppress the possible non-being of contingency distorts the meaning of contingency and the meaning of the argument from contingency to necessity: The essential and formal defect of the cosmological proof lies in the fact that finite being not only is taken as the mere beginning and starting point, but also is maintained and allowed to subsist as something true and affirmative. All the forms of reflection…—presupposition, conditionedness, causality—have in common the fact that the presupposed, the condition, the effect, are taken only as affirmative. (LProofs 162; my italics)

These metaphysical prejudices deriving from Hume’s empiricism (Enc. 1 §§47, 39) led Jacobi astray in his misguided critique of the rational cognition as a seeking of conditions for the unconditioned, and led him erroneously to believe that the cosmological proof demonstrates that God actually depends on the prior existence of the world. Jacobi was misled because “the metaphysical proofs…are deficient explanations and descriptions of the elevation of spirit from the world to God, because they do not…bring out the moment of negation that is contained in this elevation” (Enc. 1 §§50R, 192, 204R). Consequently, Jacobi grasped the terms of the argument only as affirmative, a relation between two beings. “However the way the elevation takes place in spirit corrects this semblance; indeed its whole import is the correction of this semblance. But Jacobi did not recognize this [correction] as the genuine nature of essential thinking: that, in its mediation, it sublates mediation itself” (ibid.). Hegel corrects Jacobi’s misreading and clarifies the traditional cosmological argument: If therefore we begin with the contingent, we must not set out from it as something that remains fixed in such a way that in the progression it continues to have being. This is only one side of its determinateness. Rather [contingency] is to be posited in its full determinate character, which means that non-being may just as well be attributed to it and that consequently it enters into the result as a passing away. Not because the contingent is, but rather because it is non-being, only appearance, because its being is not genuine actuality—it is because of this that absolute necessity is. The latter is its being and truth. (LProofs 114)

8 Differentiating Elevation of Spirit from the Traditional Cosmological Proof Hegel appeals to the natural, instinctive logic of the elevation of spirit to God— which preserves the full determinate character of contingency as both possible existence and possible non-existence—in his critique of the distortions introduced by metaphysical positivism: “This moment of the negative is not found in the form taken by the syllogism of the understanding, and therefore the latter is defective in the region of the living reason of spirit—in the region wherein absolute necessity itself is considered as the true result” (LProofs 114). The absolute cannot be a result derivative from a prior finite. Rather, the absolute is self-determining and

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self-grounding. Consequently “the elevation of spirit to God has not been correctly explained in the proof of the existence of God that it constitutes” (ibid.). The traditional proof, in suppressing the possible non-being of contingency, attributes an unqualified affirmative being to the finite and makes elevation unnecessary or impossible. The traditional account construes the relation of finite to infinite as a dualism; this demonstrates the “incapacity, not of faith, not of spirit, not of reason, but rather of the understanding to grasp the finite as a nullity, to grasp its being as something that has equally the…signification of non-being” (LProofs 125). On the contrary, “the finite cannot be thought and represented without the quality of non-being that resides in passing away” (ibid.). Hegel makes this point with a set of variations on the original proposition: “Because contingent being exists, so also does absolutely necessary being” (LProofs 112). If we take this connection without defining it more precisely by the category of ground or reason, its meaning is merely this: Contingent being is at the same time the being of an other, that of absolutely necessary being.

This proposition seems to be a contradiction, which can be analyzed into antithetical sub-propositions. The first proposition is: The being of the contingent is not its own being, but only the being of an other, and indeed it is defined as the being of its other, the absolutely necessary.

This proposition appears to resemble Spinoza’s monism—which Hegel criticizes for defrauding difference (or finitude) of its due (Enc. 1 §151Z). Nevertheless, this proposition, when appropriately qualified by the doctrine of the ideality of the finite, is closer to the elevation of spirit to God, which is Hegel’s position. However, the second, opposite proposition is clearly dualistic and atomistic: The being of the contingent is only its own being, and not the being of an other, the absolutely necessary. (LProofs 117; my italics)

Hegel claims that the second proposition—that the being of the contingent is only its own being and not the being of an other, the absolutely necessary— is that of the understanding, to which modern times has so attached itself. What can be more reasonable than to hold that any sort of thing or existence, and so too the contingent, because it is, is its own being, is in fact just the determinate being that it is, and not an other. The contingent is in this way retained on its own account, separated from the absolutely necessary….Therefore it is said that there is no bridge, no passage from finite being to infinite; the finite is simply related to itself, not to its other….A gulf is simply fixed between them. (LProofs 117)10

Hegel observes that classical Christian doctrine has indirectly influenced this atomistic view of finitude: There can be no doubt that the essential and Christian definition of freedom and of individuality, which as free is infinite within itself and is personality, has misled the understanding into conceiving the individualization of finitude in terms of the category of a subsisting unchangeable atom, and of overlooking the element of the negative that resides in power. (LProofs 137)

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In contrast, the elevation of spirit to God exhibits a dialectic that breaks down the fixity of terms and categories as abstract, separate and external atomic units, into reciprocally mediating processes and transitions (LProofs 163). Since spirit undergoes self-transformation in the elevation to God, this self-sublation of contingent finite spirit poses problems for the traditional syllogism: For this dialectical nature of the finite and its expression, the form of the syllogism of the understanding has no place. It is not in a position to express its rational content; and since religious elevation is the rational content itself, it cannot find satisfaction in the form of the understanding, for there is more in religious elevation than this form can grasp. (LProofs 163)

Religious elevation requires expression in a dialectical syllogism that sublates its terms and expresses the speculative teleology and immanent activity of the final cause or purpose. Moreover, “as is the case with all speculative process—this development of one thing out of another means that what appears to be a derivative result, is rather the absolute prius [or end] of that through which it appears to be mediated, and it is known in spirit as its truth” (Enc. 3 §552; my trans.). Both the self-subsisting atom of finitude and finite personality and the apparently inexorable absolute necessity of the infinite abstract substance (Spinoza) undergo modification in their reciprocal relation and mutual mediation: When… it is said that the being of the finite is only its own being and not at all the being of an other, it is declared that there is no possible passage from finite to infinite and thus no mediation between them…The result is that, although the finite may perchance be mediated through the infinite, the reverse is not true, which is just the point of interest. (LProofs 119; my italics)

Both classical theology and metaphysics assert a one-sided, asymmetrical relation between the finite and infinite. But Hegel criticizes this view of relation and mediation: “A one-sided relationship, however, is not a relationship at all” (LProofs 66). Genuine relation is reciprocal. Is such a reciprocal relation possible between finite and infinite? Not on the assumptions of classical substance metaphysics. Hegel asserts that absolute necessity which is self-sufficient and independent of any other is nevertheless mediated by an other, i.e., the finite. Instead of construing the terms finite and infinite as metaphysical dualism, the elevation can be expressed thus: “The being of the finite is not only its own being, but also the being of the infinite” (LProofs 162; my italics). The problem is to understand this ‘also’. The traditional metaphysical argument takes finitude as something true and affirmative, resulting in dualism. The fixity and rigidity of its terms prevent grasping the connection between the terms as a transition (LProofs 162–163). In contrast, the speculative interpretation of the finite grasps it as a transition, process. Thus the major premise of the cosmological argument should read: “the being of the finite is not its own being, but rather the being of its other, the infinite” (LProofs 163). Accordingly the minor premise “the finite is”—taken in the wholly affirmative sense that constitutes ontological dualism and fixes an unbridgeable gulf—falls away.

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The true infinite is not one of two but rather includes its other—the finite— within itself. This inclusion of the finite in the true infinite means that dualism is avoided. However, the distinction between finite and infinite is preserved in the true infinite as a distinction between an articulated whole and its moments or members. The true infinite corrects the abstract categories of the understanding by sublating their mutual externality. Here there is no relationship or mediation between two elements each of which abides; rather the point of departure sublates itself.…The infinite does not constitute merely one aspect. For the understanding there are…two actual beings: on this side there is a world and over yonder there is God, and the knowledge of the world is the foundation of the being of God. But through our treatment the world is relinquished as genuine being; it is not regarded as something permanent. … The sole import of this procedure is that the infinite alone is; the finite has no genuine being, whereas God alone has genuine being. (LPR 1 424; VRel 1 316–317)

Hegel observes that “the speculative consideration of the nature of the finite, from which the infinite comes forth, is the axis around which the whole—the knowledge of God and God’s cognition—turns. The essential point in this mediation, however, is that the being of the finite is not the affirmative, but rather that it is the self-sublation of the being of the finite by which the infinite is posited and mediated” (LProofs 156). Hegel’s claim does not involve any Spinozistic acosmism. What Hegel denies is that finitude is wholly affirmative and excludes possible non-being. “[A]lthough being certainly does pertain to the world, it is only semblance, not genuine being, not absolute…” (Enc. 1 §50R). The immanent nullity and self-sublation of finitude imply that “It is not the finite that is the real, but the infinite” (WL MM 5:164/SL 149). But the finite does not disappear. The truth of the finite is its ideality. As Stephen Houlgate has pointed out, the ideality of the finite is an ontological ­doctrine about the status of the finite within the true infinite (Houlgate 2006, 428–432; cf. Williams 2010–2011a, 2012, Chapter 6). The ideality of the finite means that finitude does not simply disappear in the infinite—as Hegel believes is the case in Spinoza’s substance.11 With the doctrine of the ideality of the finite, Hegel seeks to thread the needle between Spinoza’s acosmic monism of substance that defrauds the difference of its due, and the dualism of classical theism and deism. The ideality of the finite means that finitude is a moment of the true infinite as an organic whole: Ideal being [das Ideelle] is the finite as it is in the true infinite—as a determination, a content, which is distinct but is not an independent, self-subsistent being, but only a moment. Ideality has this more concrete signification which is not fully expressed by the negation of finite determinate being. (WL MM 5:165/SL 149–150)

Hegel claims that the ideality of the finite is systematically related to the concept of the true infinite: The truth of the finite is…its ideality….This ideality of the finite is the most important proposition of philosophy….[because] the basic concept of philosophy, the true infinite, depends on it. (Enc. 1 §95R; my italics)

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In the Philosophy of Religion Hegel elaborates the ideality of the finite within the true infinite as a social-communal concept: The presupposition is that God alone is true actuality, that insofar as I have actuality, I have it only in God; since God alone is actuality, I should have my truth and actuality in God. That is the foundation of the cultus. (LPR 1444; VRel 1 332)

9 The True Infinite: The Ontological Proof and the Unity of the Proofs Hegel concludes his discussion of the mutual immanence of the finite and infinite with the following remarks concerning absolute necessity: The contingent by its very nature is that which resolves and dissolves itself; it is transition in itself. But…this resolution is not the abstraction of nothingness; rather it is affirmation within the resolution—the affirmation that we call absolute necessity. It is in this way that the transition is conceived. The result is shown to be immanent in the contingent, i.e., it is the very nature of the contingent to revert back to its truth. The elevation of our spirit to God—insofar as we have provisionally no further definition of God than that of absolutely necessary being, or because for the moment we are satisfied with it—is the course of development followed by this movement of the thing-religion-is-about [die Sache]; it is this thing in and for itself, which passes through us and is that which arouses this movement [of elevation] within us. (LProofs 131)

For Hegel absolute necessity is not sheer power or force, but rather the persuasive power of final causality.12 Absolute necessity is immanent in contingent being as that which elicits and awakens the elevation. This immanence of the infinite in the finite is the reason the contingent sublates itself, reverts to its truth, and withdraws into its ground—the true infinite. This is the religious elevation of subjective spirit to God.13 Moreover, since the true infinite is not the abstract universal, but rather the concrete, determinate universal, it “validates the moment of finitude within itself as ideal” (LPR 2 258; VRel 2 162). The ideality of the finite is expressed in its unity in difference with the infinite. “The truth [of the finite-infinite relation] is the unity of the infinite in which the finite is contained” (LPR 1 309; VRel 1 213; my italics). Hegel’s doctrines of the true infinite and ideality of the finite underlie his claim that the theological proofs, recast as the elevation of spirit to God, constitute not three separate proofs, but rather a single proof, a single whole or totality. For Hegel, both the cosmological and the teleological proofs are finite and onesided, because they start with empirical premisses. Such proofs achieve only relative necessity, but fall short of the absolutely necessary, which from the empirical perspective remains an ought to be. Moreover, their empirical starting point is one reason why they create or at least support the illusion that the finite is foundational for the infinite. Jacobi’s interpretation is absurd; however, it is corrected by a reversal, namely the recognition that the true infinite is self-grounding and not relative to or

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reducible to the finite, but rather its foundation. Therefore the crux of the elevation of spirit to God is neither the cosmological nor the teleological proof but the ontological proof, which asserts the necessary inseparability of concept and being (LPR 1 436–440; VRel 1 325–330). It is this inseparability of concept and being— uniquely furnished by the ontological proof—that logically constitutes the concept of God (Enc. 1 §51. LPR 1 440; VRel 1 329) and the reversal in which the finite sublates itself and makes itself ideal, i.e., a dependent moment that manifests the true infinite.14 According to Hegel, the self-sublation of the finite manifests the power of the infinite. The assertion that the finite is, falls away in any independent affirmative sense. If we can say that it exists, “this only means that its existence is merely an appearance. Precisely this—that the finite world is only an appearance—is the absolute power of the infinite” (LProofs 163). The cosmological proof establishes God as power. The teleological proof comes in two versions: (1) external teleology in which means and end are external and separate, and (2) immanent or internal teleology in which everything is both means and end, i.e., organism. The former external teleology stands discredited. Kant rediscovered Aristotle’s entelechy, that every living thing is an end which has its means in itself, in its members, its organization. The vital process of the members constitutes the end, the movement of life. Organic life is self-producing: the end brings forth the means and the means bring forth the end (LPR 1 429; VRel 1 320). To be sure, the conformity to end which is found in human beings is finite; that is, finitude is inherently subject to disintegration. The advance beyond finitude and finite conformity to end is to the idea that the world is a cosmos. A cosmos is a system in which everything has an essential relation to everything else and nothing is isolated….everything has its place, is closely connected with the whole, subsists through the whole and takes an active part in the production and life of the whole. At this cosmic level, there is a transition from finite life to one universal life, and the latter is universal conformity to end, e.g., the Nous, the world-soul. The concept of God as universal organic life, is both higher and deeper than power. At this level it can be affirmed that God is wise. However, these concepts of power and wisdom do not exhaust the concept of God. These concepts, while true, are theologically insufficient, because God is essentially spirit (LPR 3 351 (1895)). The progression from cosmological to teleological proof leads to the threshold of spirit, but falls short of absolute spirit. Absolute spirit correlates with the ontological proof that overcomes in itself the possibility of disintegration (between concept and being) constitutive of finitude. The ancient cosmological doctrines of God as universal life-force establish some concept of divine immanence. However, the ancients grasped human beings principally as part of nature, but not yet as subjective spirit. They did not have the ontological proof. Modern Christian-influenced cultures are both deeper and higher: To entertain a higher thought of God (Vorstellung), it is necessary for spirit to descend into itself as deeply as possible, where the solid distinction between being and nothing disappears, for both are the same empty featureless indeterminacy (Enc. 1 §§86–87). Spirit, when it has arrived at the highest form of freedom,

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namely subjectivity, at first conceives all thought, including the thought of God, as subjective. Thus spirit arrives at the antithesis of subjectivity and objectivity. This antithesis is grasped, deepened and mediated by Anselm as the starting point of the ontological proof. The transition from nature to spirit is the categorical background for the ontological proof: human spirit plumbs the depths of spirit and in so doing conceives God as subjective in contrast to what is objective. The question then becomes, whether the Vorstellung of God discovered in the depths of spirit can be plausibly conceived as simply subjective, finite and contingent. For Anselm, God cannot be a mere subjective Vorstellung, because then one could think of something greater— which is impossible. This impossibility is what Hegel identifies as Anselm’s discovery—the non-existence of God, i.e., any separation between God’s concept and being is impossible. Nevertheless, Hegel identifies a defect in Anselm’s proof: For Anselm, the unity of concept and reality constitutes both the definition of perfection that his proof presupposes and the content of his concept of God. Since the conclusion of Anselm’s proof is identical with the presupposition from which it is inferred, the proof begs the question (LPR 3 182; VRel 1 116–117). Hegel agrees with Kant that being is not a real predicate or a reality that a supremely perfect being cannot lack without self-contradiction. For Hegel, the sum of all realities (Inbegriff aller Realitäten) is an empty abstraction (WL MM 5:119–120/SL 113–114). Further, Hegel agrees with Gaunilo and Kant that being and concept are different. However, this difference is not the same as the difference between 100 real dollars and 100 imaginary dollars. For both are clearly finite. The non-existence of 100 dollars does not entail a contradiction. The main point, however, is that the ‘concept’ of 100 dollars—or any determinateness of the understanding—ought not be called a concept at all (LPR 1 436; VRel 1 325). Hegel defends Anselm’s presupposition by showing that the concept is self-determining; as such it sublates its one-sidedness, i.e., objectifies itself, and realizes itself (Ibid). The absolute concept—the concept in and for itself, the concept of God—is self-specifying, and being is one of its specifications (LPR 1 437; VRel 1 326). It is the active universal that differentiates and particularizes itself, positing a finitude and negating/preserving it, and through this negation of negation is identical with itself (LPR 1 436–437; VRel 1 325–326; LPR 3 355 (1895)). A second further point: being is different from the concept; it is not the entire concept, but only one of its characteristics; the concept is a whole of which being is only one determination (LPR 1 437; VRel 1 326; LPR 3 356 (1895)). A third point: the concept, as active and self-determining, itself does away with the defect of being merely subjective. It is the activity of reproducing itself as something objective that has being (LPR 3 356 (1895)). Further, Hegel observes that no one would be content with a merely subjective freedom or a merely subjective self-hood. These are inherently deficient. The activity of the concept is a drive (Trieb) that demands satisfaction. This demand for satisfaction and self-realization coincides with Hegel’s concept of action. “All the action in the world is a sublating of the subjective (qua need and deficiency) and a positing of the objective and so is the production of the unity of both”

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(LPR 1 439; VRel 1 328). The satisfaction of the drive does away with the deficiencies of mere subjectivity. Drive is an inner purpose whose satisfaction overcomes the dichotomy of a merely subjective need and its objective fulfillment. God is God’s own ontological proof. Having defended Anselm’s theory of perfection in his logic of the self-realizing concept, Hegel asserts that the inseparability of concept and being is absolute only in the case of God. For Hegel, the ontological proof does not turn on the issue of whether existence is a predicate. That issue is a side-show of the first form of Anselm’s proof. Hegel’s defense of the proof recalls the second form of Anselm’s proof, and anticipates Charles Hartshorne’s view that the proof is irreducibly modal, turning on the categorical distinction between necessity and contingency.15 Hegel writes “But God has to be expressly that which can only be ‘thought as existing’…It is this unity of concept and being that constitutes the concept of God” (Enc. 1 §51R; see also LPR 1 440; VRel 1 329; LPR 3 358 (1895)). The mode of being of the infinite as necessary is categorically distinct from the mode of being of contingent finitude as the merely possible. The task of the Logic is to make and defend this categorical distinction in order to prevent the application of finite categories such as contingency (and the corresponding separation of existence from concept) to the infinite: Now though it is of course true that the concept is different from being, there is still a greater difference between God and the hundred dollars and other finite things. It is the definition of finite things that in them the concept is different from being, that concept and reality, soul and body, are separable and hence that they are perishable and mortal. On the other hand, the abstract definition of God is precisely that his concept and his being are unseparated and inseparable. The genuine criticism of the categories and of reason is just this, to make the intellect aware of this difference and to prevent it from applying to God the determinations and relationships of the finite. (WL MM 5:91–92/SL 89–90; trans. revised, my emphasis)

Since God’s being is inseparable from God’s concept, we must think the Sache selbst as well as the concept, or else we fail to think either of these at all. Hegel agrees with Anselm that this modal-categorical distinction is an achievement of spirit, i.e., thought alone and that it possesses religious significance. Grasping the distinction is the awakening and foundation of the ascent of spirit to God. God is not barren, abstract being, but the negation of negation i.e., necessary being (LPR 3 347 (1895); LPR 1: 426; VRel 1 318). The elevation is grounded in the inseparability of concept and being in God, that dissolves and overcomes the opposition between finite and infinite constitutive of the spurious infinite. Thus the ontological proof supplements and grounds the one-sided cosmological and teleological proofs by raising them above their spurious infinite that ought to be, to the true infinite. The true infinite is the necessary unity of infinite and finite that awakens and grounds the elevation of subjective spirit to God. For “without the moment of finitude [and contradiction] there is no life, no subjectivity, no living God” (LPR 1 308; VRel 1 213). The positing and resolution of contradiction propels the elevation beyond the limit and antithesis of one-sided subjectivity:

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The objective significance of what is initially a merely subjective conclusion will…make it self-evident that the inadequate, finite form of this proof is sublated. Its finitude consists above all in the one-sidedness of its…separation from the content. With the sublation of its one-sidedness it comes also to have the content within itself as its truth. The elevation to God is on its own account the sublation of the one-sidedness of subjectivity in general and of knowledge above all. (LProofs 91–92; my emphasis)

The true infinite is the cognitive emancipation from the ‘bogey’ of an absolute gulf between finite and infinite, which is unleashed against any claim, whether philosophical or religious, that presumes to describe the nature of God (LPR 1 309; VRel 1 213–214). Hegel asserts: “That respect for the infinite that keeps the understanding from finding the infinite in every universal ought to be called a foolish respect” (LProofs 125). It is undoubtedly correct that we are limited…However it is equally correct that the finite element [separated from the whole] has no truth, and reason is precisely the insight that the finite is only a limit. But inasmuch as we know something as a limit, we are already beyond it. We must not have such absurd respect in the presence of the infinite. The infinite is…the universal within which every boundary is ideal, is sublated. Therefore…there is… also no longer a gulf between finite and infinite, they are no longer two….The starting point is certainly the finite, but spirit does not leave it subsisting [independently]. This is the more precise development of what is called knowledge of God. Knowledge of God is this very elevation. (LPR 1 425; VRel 1 317–318)

Notes 1. “The impossibility of such proof is a generally accepted opinion” (LProofs 38). 2. Hegel asks, “Is it the identity of thought and being, of reason and its reality that is subjective? Or is it only the postulating of them? …It cannot be the content of the postulates that is subjective, for the negative content of the postulates suspends everything subjective” (F&K 95). Note that for Hegel what is at stake is not only the content of religious belief, but also the foundational principle of all philosophy, to wit, the identity of thought and being, as specified by the ontological argument. Cf. F&K 68, 94. 3. For Hegel’s critique of Kant’s method of critique, cf. Enc. 1 §41Z1. 4. Although Kant correctly grasped the self-consciousness of freedom as the origin of the God-question, he undermined this discovery with his postulate doctrine. 5. Hans Friedrich Fulda emphasizes the importance of Enc. 3 §§552–555 for a proper understanding of Hegel’s concept of absolute spirit that counters contemporary deflationary interpretations that collapse absolute spirit into objective spirit. Such readings treat Hegel as an uncritical Kantian. Cf. Fulda (2001). 6. Later Hegel adds: “But for the factum that there is a cognition of this kind, which proceeds neither in one-sided immediacy nor in one-sided mediation, the Logic itself and the whole of philosophy is the example” (Enc. 1 §75R). Hegel’s Logic is itself an elevation; the Logic is a “metaphysical theology which treats the idea of God in the aether of pure thought” (LProofs 99, 104; cf. Enc. 1 §§213–215). 7. Elsewhere Hegel credits von Haller with distinguishing between the spurious infinite which never gets beyond the ought, and the genuine infinite. Von Haller sees, as Kant and Fichte do not, that renunciation of the progressus ad infinitum is necessary to grasp the genuine infinite. If Hegel is correct, then Kant misunderstands von Haller as well as the theological issues. Cf. Enc. 1 §104Z2.

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8. Hegel’s position is not monism, but rather trinitarian articulated holism. 9. “Determinateness isolated by itself in the form of being is quality…. Quality, taken in the distinct character of being, is reality; as burdened with a negative it is negation in general, which is further determined as limit and limitation” (WL MM 5:118/SL 111). 10. In this proposition, the categories of the understanding to wit, abstract identity and abstract difference, along with the law of contradiction—that keeps identity and difference separate and constitutes metaphysical positivism—are evident. Cf. WL MM 5:140/SL 129–130 “finitude is the most stubborn category of the understanding … finitude is the negation as fixed in itself.” 11. “If the finite were to disappear in God, God would be merely the absolute substance, from which nothing proceeds and into which nothing returns—and even to represent or think of the absolute substance would already be too much, something that itself would have to disappear” (LProofs 90). 12. This presupposes Hegel’s doctrines that the truth of necessity is freedom, and that the truth of substance is subject. Cf. Enc.1 §§158–159. 13. Errol Harris interprets the immanence of the infinite in the finite as a variation on the infinite striving of morality. Harris concedes that it has the effect of displacing morality and the moral vision of the world. The moral point of view is the illusion that God is not present. See Harris (1983, 271, 286). 14. “[A]bsolute truth cannot be a result; it is what is purely and simply first, unique….It should be noted that, even though the process appears initially as a mediating process, nevertheless it is in this result itself that one-sidedness is abolished: the result casts off its position as result and develops a counterthrust against this movement….so that absolute spirit is what is true, rather than that first moment” (LPR 1 322; VRel 1 225). 15. For the distinction between the first and second form of Anselm’s Proof, cf. Hick and McGill (1967, 33–46) and the essays by Norman Malcolm and Charles Hartshorne included in this volume. For the claim that the proof is irreducibly modal, cf. Hartshorne (1962, 49–50). While Hegel does not distinguish sharply between the first and second forms of the proof, his defense of the proof in the Logic treats it as a modal proof—like Hartshorne does. Cf. WL MM 5:91–92/SL 89–90.

Bibliography Fulda, Hans-Friedrich. 2001. “Hegel’s Begriff des absoluten Geistes.” In Hegel Studien, edited by Walter Jaeschke and Ludwig Siep, 167–198. Hamburg: Meiner Verlag. Harris, Errol, E. 1983. An Interpretation of the Logic of Hegel. Lanham, MD: University Press of America. Hartshorne, Charles. 1962. The Logic of Perfection. LaSalle, IL: Open Court. Hick, John, and Arthur C. McGill, eds. 1967. The Many-Faced Argument. New York: The Macmillan Company. Houlgate, Stephen. 2006. The Opening of Hegel’s Logic. West Lafayette: Purdue University Press. Kemp Smith, Norman. 1918. A Commentary to Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. London: Macmillan. Taylor, Mark C. 1977. “Itinerarium Mentis in Deum: Hegel’s Proofs for God’s Existence.” Journal of Religion 57: 211–231. Williams, Robert, 2010–2011a. “Hegel’s Concept of the True Infinite.” The Owl of Minerva 42(1–2): 89–122. Williams, Robert. 2010–2011b. “Hegel’s True Infinity as Panentheism: A Reply to Robert Wallace.” The Owl of Minerva 42(1–2): 137–152. Williams, Robert. 2012. Tragedy, Recognition and the Death of God: Studies in Hegel and Nietzsche. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Williams, Robert. 2017. Hegel on the Proofs and the Personhood of God: Studies in Hegel’s Logic and Philosophy of Religion. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Part VI

Practical and Political Philosophy

Chapter 19

Logic and Social Theory: Hegel on the Conceptual Significance of Political Change Christopher L. Yeomans

As contemporary events in the United States have made clear, it is really quite difficult to know how to think about politics. How can the concepts and reasoning structures that give thought to its articulation make contact with popular movements and the combined yet individual decisions of millions of people, much less have some effect on those movements and decisions? Conventional wisdom is so often wrong, experts are so often surprised, and we oscillate between wondering at unexpected events and the feeling that there is no alternative to our current practices of capitalism and democracy. As a result, it is easy to think that the political sphere is a realm of illusion, power, or historical forces that we can recognize in the past but barely register in the present, to say nothing of evaluating or changing them according to rational standards. The topic of this essay is this problem of thinking about politics as it arises in Hegel; specifically, the problem of the relation between Hegel’s logic—his theory of what thought itself is—on the one hand, and his political philosophy, on the other hand. With respect to this relation many scholars have taken the view that there is no important relation between Hegel’s logic and political philosophy (Wood 1990; Neuhouser 2000). And yet concepts explained in Hegel’s logical writings clearly play crucial roles in his arguments regarding political issues. Alternatively, scholars have argued that if there is to be such a connection, thought must be in the driver’s seat, and so Hegel’s political philosophy must be a logical derivation of his position (Ruda 2013). This seems to show either that Hegel’s political philosophy fails spectacularly, or that politics, as we know it, is impossible. How, then, can we find a middle way that will preserve the subject at hand—politics—while simultaneously doing justice to the determinate structure of thought itself? To specify this problem of thinking about politics as it relates to Hegel, it will help to ask what is at stake in Hegel’s logic, what is at stake in his

C. L. Yeomans (*)  Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA e-mail: [email protected]

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political philosophy, and thus what might be at stake in their connection precisely as the connection between thought and politics. What is at stake in Hegel’s logic? It is the attempt to comprehend the terms in which anything at all could have the significance of truth or goodness. To take two very recent formulations, it is a theory of intelligibility as such (Zambrana 2015), or a theory of the general forms of reason in the world (Kreines 2015). On any of these descriptions it is thus a rather broad undertaking, but its very breadth makes it difficult to see why it is important. Why think that such an undertaking is necessary independent of specific ways of thinking, e.g., in natural science or history? Or, put another way: what value does a separate discussion of these general terms have for us? Two things are relevant here: First, a separate discussion enables clarity about the basic internal and external structure of concepts such as being, cause, or necessity. Second, a separate discussion allows us to see a peculiar feature of such concepts, namely their constitutive instability (what Hegel calls their dialectical character). Both structure and instability are obscured by discussions of such concepts in the context of their more specific use, since the concrete details tend to obscure the structure and to give the misleading impression that the instability is due to those details rather than to the structure itself. Here is how Hegel puts the issue: when the content that motivates a subject to action is drawn out of its immediate unity with the subject and is made to stand before it as an object, then it is that the freedom of spirit begins, the same spirit who, when thought is an instinctive activity, is caught up in the web of its categories and is splintered into a material of infinite variety. Here and there on this web there are knots, more firmly tied than others, which give stability and direction to the life and consciousness of spirit; they owe their firmness and power simply to the fact that, having been brought before consciousness, they stand as independent concepts of its essential nature. (WL GW 21:15)

The logician is like a fisherman repairing his nets, distinguishing the knots that hold the net together properly from the tangles that abridge and distort its structure. In removing those tangles the fisherman allows the net to move in the way required for its proper functioning; allows the net to do its job of separating the target fish from everything else floating about in the water. What is at stake in Hegel’s political philosophy? It is quite specifically and perhaps infamously the attempt to comprehend its own time in thoughts, and so it is essentially historical. But it is important to understand this historicity in both of its dimensions: it means not only that Hegel’s own time is to be understood with respect to what came before it, but also with respect to the plans being made in its present for what was to come after it. Hegel’s time is the early nineteenth century, in the transition between the Holy Roman Empire and the German Confederation, a time of new legal codes and modes of governing, of new territories with new kinds of sovereign statuses, and of new forms of family and economic life no longer tied to one another.1 It is a historical time that understood itself to be a historical time, i.e., to be a time of transition from one form of society and politics to some other form yet to be fully determined. Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is largely an inert text until it is catalyzed by contrasts between the institutions

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it reconstructs and those recently replaced, and between the institutions it reconstructs and those that would replace them already by the mid-nineteenth century. What it provides is not a rationalization of its contemporary institutions, but rather a normative reconstruction of the process of political change itself in terms of the institutions that are both the products and the process of that change. What is at stake in the relation between logic and political philosophy? One thing that emphatically cannot be at stake is the possibility of a derivation, out of logical principles, of an eternally necessary form of just government. Such a derivation would essentially fail to make contact with the historically specific nature of the time it was attempting to comprehend. Given Hegel’s posing of the problem of political philosophy, this cannot be the form of a candidate solution (Westphal 2010). What, then, could be at stake in the relation between logic and political ­philosophy, as Hegel understood them? Hegel says that we need to find the rose in the cross of the present, but this has largely been misunderstood as theodicy (RPh GW14 Preface/MM 7:26; PR 22). Rather, finding the rose is very similar to disentangling the fisherman’s net to reveal the knots that give the net its functional structure. Specifically, the logical question of Hegel’s politics is: how can a society continually being remade by us under given historical conditions have the same significance or import for us as an unchanging order of being?2 In the Logic, Hegel highlights this problem in the continuation of the passage quoted at length above: The most important point for the nature of spirit is the relation, not only of what it implicitly is in itself to what it actually is, but of what it knows itself to be to what it actually is; because spirit is essentially consciousness, this self-knowledge is a fundamental determination of its actuality. (WL GW 21:15–16)

Particularly in the social and political realm, that self-knowledge is essentially communal and the instruments of such communal reflection are the laws, events and reactions that make up a people’s history. In the Philosophy of Right, Hegel highlights this problem when he claims that the actuality of the state (which is itself the actuality of the ethical idea) is in the knowledge and action of individuals (RPh GW14 §257). It might help to further clarify the question if we compare it with Marx’s famous formulation—that “Men make their own history, but…under circumstances directly encountered, given, and transmitted from the past.” Hegel’s question is how we could recognize the truth of this formulation and nonetheless care about making that history as we used to care about taking our place in an unchanging order or place. Marx doesn’t dwell on the extent to which the first half is problematic—in the Eighteenth Brumaire and elsewhere he is primarily interested in the way the second half allows the relics of the past to be briefly resuscitated as “a nightmare on the brain of the living” (Marx 2000, 329–330). Many have thought that Marx implicitly solves Hegel’s problem by appeal to a teleological confidence in the end of history; many have also wanted to read such a teleology into Hegel. In both cases, the impetus behind such interpretations derives from the sense that once the social sands begin shifting under the political thinker, something must

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come into orient the thinker and to give meaning to that shifting. The teleology of final realization (whether as the inevitability of communism or of Germanic freedom in the administrative state) provides a future-secured significance for that shifting. But Hegel, at least, offers us a goal-directed rather than future-secured account of teleology. In fact, the problem of the relation between Hegel’s logic and the Philosophy of Right is how to come to this significance of political activity without that confidence in its success, and what form this significance could possibly take. To continue thinking in Marxist terms, Hegel’s way of framing the problem of thinking about politics is more akin to Marx’s diagnosis that “all that is solid melts into air” than to political liberalism’s diagnosis of incompatible contemporary conceptions of the good. For Hegel, diachronic diversity (i.e., change over time) is more troublesome than synchronic diversity (i.e., disagreement at a particular time). In fact, synchronic diversity comes into Hegel’s view as a long-standing and positive resource for managing diachronic diversity, rather than as a peculiarly modern problem for the possibility of political association; Hegel is Montesquieuian rather than liberal on this point. It should be clear from what has been said so far that Hegel’s Logic is in a unique position to be of use in answering this question. As a form of fundamental or categorical thinking that meditates on the stability conferred by nodes of instability, it suggests that the initially plausible distinction between philosophical thought and historical politics is more apparent than real. But the devil is in the details; the next task is to show how such freedom and significance are made possible by the specific logical categories Hegel uses in his political thinking. At this point, unfortunately, architectonic problems can no longer be avoided, but must be faced squarely. In his mature, tripartite discussion of ‘spirit [Geist]’, Hegel places the social and political philosophy of the Philosophy of Right in the discussion of objective spirit. Our first question must be: what is logically significant about the fact that the Philosophy of Right presents objective, rather than subjective or absolute spirit? Hegel’s discussions of subjective spirit contain reflections on individual psychology, and his discussion of absolute spirit contains reflections on art, religion, and philosophy proper. In the following section we ask: What could it mean to think of politics as a qualitatively different kind of subject matter than psychology, on the one hand, and art, religion and philosophy on the other?3

1 The Logical Significance of the Objectivity of Political Spirit We can take our initial orientation here from the work of Manfred Riedel. Riedel attributes a tripartite significance to the objectivity of spirit: objective spirit can be (a) objective or real, (b) objectivizing or realizing, and (c) objectivized or realized

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(Riedel 1984, 3).4 Riedel sees this as an equivocation, but in fact it tracks the structure of expression mapped out in Hegel’s logic of reflection. Specifically, the reality of spirit is precisely due to the fact that it expresses itself and then stands as expressed through that process; its reality is to stand as an expression of itself. In the logic of reflection, Hegel tries to understand precisely how we can move in thought between the flux of appearances and relatively stable meanings that we take to be expressed by features of that flux.5 This movement Hegel calls reflection, and it obviously has a deep connection with the Logic’s relevance to politics. Hegel’s key conceptual innovation is to distinguish clearly between two different ways that the flux and the stability are dynamically related, or two different forms of reflection. To oversimplify a bit, when we move from the stable meanings to the flux we are engaged in positing reflection; when we move in the reverse direction we are engaged in reflection-into-self. Because the flux is naturally more diverse and holds more content than the relative simplicity of the stable meanings, positing is a kind of creation of something distinctive and full of character from something relatively indeterminate; think, for example, of the way a symphony might originate in a few basic themes. Reflection-into-self works the other way: it begins from this flux and constructs simpler meanings to which that flux is traced back. This is the listener’s activity of identifying and recollecting the basic themes. Positing is creation, and reflection-into-self is interpretation. As Riedel is so good at tracing, the political cycle of positing and reflection-into-self is decisively disrupted by modern economic relations. In Hegel’s social theory this disruption takes the form of the interpolation of a civil society between the domestic and political unities (i.e., family and state). For this reason, the interpretation or reflection-into-self of Hegel’s contemporary political reality required philosophy, which is at least nominally an activity of absolute rather than objective spirit. Philosophy’s role in politics is secured, paradoxically, by the fact that this economic disruption undermines the ability of more traditionally social and political forms of interpretation to serve this function (e.g., laws, ceremonies, roles, and titles). To use some of the technical jargon just introduced, objective spirit is expression with an emphasis on its externality—on positing or creation rather than reflection-into-self. It thus emphasizes (b) and (c) above—the process of realization and its result. But note that this is already a historical-logical claim, rather than a strict application or instantiation of a more abstract category. The historical event of the interpolation of civil society between family and state disrupts the previously existing structures of interpretation while it energizes and accelerates the existing structures of creation. There is not any Hegelian reason to hold that objective spirit necessarily or inevitably emphasizes externality, unless one holds that objective spirit is a distinctively modern European phenomenon (and that would merely make the same point in different words). Philosophy intervenes in the gap in political reality opened up by the continual revolution of civil society. It does so in order to interpret that reality, or, in our technical sense, to trace the flux of newly created appearances back to the stable content of freedom being expressed. But note here that this whole process is

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recursive, and what is reconstructed through interpretation is only relatively stable, as in our image of the knots on the fisherman’s net. Hegel reconstructs a conception of property, for example, that was at his time still as much an aspirational goal of the bureaucracy as a settled pattern of expectations for economic interaction. But he reconstructs that conception of property as what is being expressed in the manifold and changing economic activities and the regulation of those activities. The important point here is that creation is always paradoxically partial: while on the one hand it seems to add something—some content—to the idea that is expressed, it does so under certain conditions that are only more-or-less related to the idea being expressed and thus any expression suggests the possibility of other expressions. Sometimes Hegel puts this in terms of the intervention of nature, whether as the object and medium of work for individuals or as the geography and climate that shape a nation. But there is nothing essentially dualist about the point being made here; rather, the point is historicist: objective spirit is historically local, the way in which the freedom of spirit manifests itself under given, rather specific conditions of the kind Montesquieu cataloged at such length in The Spirit of the Laws. If it is true that objective spirit emphasizes creative rather than i­nterpretive expression, then we would expect the categories of the Doctrine of Essence that articulate the finitude of expression, or the inevitable limitations of positing alone, to be playing a dominant role in the structure of the Philosophy of Right. This is just what we find. Thus existence, for example, is crucial, and the form of knowledge and action described in the Philosophy of Right is to be understood as a manifestation of that form (Riedel 1984, 103–104). Similarly, what Hegel calls relative rather than absolute modality gives the primary senses to actuality, possibility and necessity as they are used in the text. This is a form of modality in which possibility is contingency and necessity is grounded in external influences rather than in the expressed content itself. In social and political philosophy, this means that the basic concept of the free will is being expressed in social and political institutions in a way that is explained at least as much by factors external to that concept as by the concept itself. At the same time, these categories in the Logic are dialectical; thus precisely because those categories are involved we should see them pushing beyond themselves to rudimentary forms of reflection-into-self.6 Though Riedel doesn’t have an adequate logical vocabulary to articulate this particular movement in detail, it is precisely what is going on in a phenomenon he sees quite clearly, namely the fact that the inevitable political role of the corporations and estates of civil society has as “its function…to negate the division between civil and political life which began during the French Revolution, while at the same time it incorporates the economic revolution arising in England” (Riedel 1984, 182–183).7 For Hegel, these socio-economic organizations play that role both because they are freely chosen and open to talent, and because they are many rather than one. The former feature is the subject of §II, and the latter of §III.

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2 The Logical Significance of Free Choice of Profession Open to Talent There were certainly many ways that the new economic relations stretched the connections between the domestic and political unities. When Hegel then sets about to intervene in the opened political space, he does so by focusing on two of them: the new concentrations of resources generated by proto-industrial forms of production (what Hegel calls Vermögen) and the fact that people now left their families and chose to participate in some of those resources rather than others. He then interprets the ethical and political significance of new development by seeing it as an expression of freedom; that much Hegel shares with a broad swath of modern political philosophers, of course. What distinguishes Hegel is that the new opening, the new freedom of choice, serves only as a first step or presupposition of a fuller form of freedom that must be expressed in the continuing development of the chosen profession. In the technical terms of German Idealist theories of agency, this is to say that the choice of career is an instance of Willkür or arbitrary choice that must, over time, be turned into an instance of Wille or rational will. That Hegel should insist that the initial choice of career is a matter of Willkür is somewhat surprising. Despite the fact that Hegel holds that the alternate possibilities embedded in that notion are central to any viable conception of free will, he also almost always accompanies his expression of that that position with the caveat that apparently arbitrary choice always has some external explanation in the neighborhood, and that the externality of explanation undermines the significance of the freedom of that choice (e.g., Enc. §145Z). As contemporary empirical moral psychology repeatedly points out, our choices are influenced in surprising ways by innumerable background conditions outside of our conscious awareness, much less our conscious control. But here Hegel is just being clear-eyed in slightly deflating the Enlightenment and cameralist claims to the value of such choice of profession. How many of us fully understand the shape of the professions we chose to enter, or the potential ramifications of such a choice over a lifetime? In societies that are essentially characterized by economic change, such an understanding is not even possible in principle, and this is acknowledged in Hegel’s account by making that choice a matter of Willkür rather than Wille. The kind of freedom we have in such a choice is largely formal, to use another technical Hegelian expression—but not for that reason expendable or otherwise unimportant. The formal freedom creates the opening of possibilities. It cannot resolve them, nor even adequately formulate them, but it creates the space in which such possibilities can be formulated and resolved. It is a subtle shift to move from thinking that there is something that must be done to thinking that one must choose what to do, but it is a shift that brings in different meanings and, most importantly, the consideration of reasons for action. And this is true even if the initial shift can generate no substantial orientation towards or by specific meanings and reasons.

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In fact, the formal freedom at issue here is even thinner, since Hegel seems to hold that it may be merely formal and not necessarily real. He sees clearly, for example, that the vast majority of his contemporaries—the rural population—had very little opportunity to be anything but farmers. To use a Hegelian example, they have the same chance of becoming successful merchants as the Turkish Emperor has of becoming Pope (Enc. §143Z). Nonetheless the fact that serfdom has ended and formal freedom is in the air, combined with the fact that there is real freedom for some parts of the population, colors the significance of the agricultural way of life and gives it a meaning that it could not have had before. Now the very lack of real choice becomes a kind of sacrifice that ennobles the agricultural way of life and gives it the political meaning that only the militarized nobility had previously had (see Yeomans 2017). As I have intimated, however, this change in significance requires coloration of the agricultural experience by other ways of life in which more substantial forms of freedom are available. At first “available” means only “really available”—i.e., more than merely formal or logically possible, but still in a way that is largely determined by factors outside of agents’ control. But that wouldn’t be enough—that would just generate the kinds of lucky rags-to-riches stories that Adorno and Horkheimer describe as central to the culture industry in Dialectic of Enlightenment (Horkheimer and Adorno 2002, 116–117). The apparently chaotic, creatively destructive economic forces that divided the domestic from the political unities have created new forms of their own—new systems of resources and ways of working—that have a relative stability grounded in their own functional imperatives. These systems of resources become self-conscious, as it were, in the estates and corporations of civil society. They do so when groups combine the creative power of economic production with the interpretive power of correlated expectations, virtues, and forms of recognition. I don’t want to go into the details of Hegel’s social taxonomy here.8 Instead, I just want to make the logical point that this combination starts to re-establish the connections that the interpolation of economic forces destroyed. To use some Deleuzian terms, there has been a re-coding following the de-coding. In Hegel’s modal terms, this is to push beyond real or relative modality to absolute modality (and thus from objective to absolute spirit). That is, it is to generate forms of action that do not just operate against the background of choices shaped by external factors but rather constitute those factors as resources for both initial decisions and ongoing modifications of decisions. Take, for example, Hegel’s analysis of the decision to go into public service. This is a decision made possible by public education and initially without any ability to predict what the shape of the life chosen will be in substantial respects. Initially, then, this is a matter of Willkür. To the extent that the estate of public servants both moves to care for and shape the educational system, and to shape its own garden of forking career paths by published expectations and benchmarks, the estate as a whole takes responsibility for those initial factors and turns them into cultivated resources and at the same time provides guidance, relative stability, and visibility to the shape of future lives. This real phenomenon is also an image writ large of a similar process writ small

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in the ongoing decision of the individual public servant. By attending to educational reform, for example, an individual characterizes her own education as either having some value that needs to be magnified or as having lacked some feature that needs to be added, and so takes responsibility for the meaning of that initial factor in her own career choice through her own career development. Similarly, by choosing specific ways in which to advance her career, the individual makes determinate the motivation and interest with which she started. In some contemporary cases, this means deciding whether the agent’s profession belongs in one Hegelian estate rather than another: am I a doctor to serve the public or to make money? There is more logical machinery here than we can take up, but we have enough already to see the logical significance of this historical shift. Reversing things, we can also see the historical significance of this logical structure: Absolute modality is a way that people make their own history as individuals, because it is a way of turning the external factors into resources rather than causes. For the same reason it is a way that agents interpret their own lives, or bring the creation of those lives closer to an interpretive stance. Hegel’s interpretive intervention into the creative fissure opened by civil society has the force of highlighting precisely the way in which his contemporaries were already actually making such interpretive interventions in their own life. It serves to clarify and magnify the significance of those interventions, to enable his contemporaries to be, in Charles Taylor’s language, self-interpreting animals. In the same way that Marx took his task to be to clarify for the working class the meaning of their already existing struggles, Hegel takes his task to be to clarify for his contemporaries how their own relation to their choices established the meaning of those choices. In Marx’s terms, we really do make our own history and not just our own future. We can get at more of the historical significance of this logical structure by noting how different it is from the kind of reconciliation proposed by Michael Hardimon. Hardimon sees Hegel trying to reconcile us to the specific form of modern European life—its family, economic, and political structures (Hardimon 1994). But if what Hegel is trying to do is something deeper and more logical, then he is trying to reconcile his contemporaries to those forms only insofar as they are the current manifestation of a system of resources that precisely allows for the ongoing transformation of those manifestations as free individual and collective acts and he is trying to use the structure of those current manifestations to show the significance of the possibility of their transformation. If the existence of freedom is right, then these forms of transformation are forms of right that are just as much individual as collective. This is an aspect of Hegel’s social theory of agency that has only grown in relevance since he wrote it, since apart from scattered periods in which most workers could count on long-term, stable employment, the norm has been increasing change and increasing responsibility of individual workers for the shape of their working lives against the background of powerful forces over which they have no control. In the following section, we turn our attention to Hegel’s understanding of the significance of the fact that these systems of resources are many rather than one.

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3 The Logical Significance of Social Pluralism Willkür becomes Wille through the increasing grip that it finds on the meaning of its presupposed conditions, and it does so through ongoing action and reflection with others involved in the same activity. This is an instance of a pattern that I have elsewhere described as internalizing externality—that is, making a phenomenon more self-determining by re-categorizing external influences on the expression of that content as internal features of that content (Yeomans 2011, Sec. 4, 5). This, then, is the answer to the question of the logical significance of freely chosen professions open to talent. But the concept of free will is itself modified and enlarged by this social-logical process of interpretation, so by the time we get to the end of the Philosophy of Right we find not a single conception of free agency but rather a set of conceptions that are related to the concept of autonomy as different solutions to the same set of problems. Let me say first what Hegel takes that set of problems to be, and then the range of extant solutions, and that will point us in the direction of the logical significance of the fact that these professions are many rather than one. In agency we are trying simultaneously to take possession of ourselves, to distinguish between what is central and what is peripheral in the events of our lives, and to make happen what we want to happen in those events. In the terms that I have come to use, self-determination is simultaneously composed of attempts at appropriating oneself, specifying the content of our will, and being effective (RPh GW14 §§25–7). When we act, we try to do all three of these things at once, but this is naturally quite complicated. In most areas of human life in which we try to do multiple things at once we have developed explicit training processes that first separate the requisite skills and activities and train them individually before combining them. Ballet training is a paradigmatic case: students first learn a set of basic positions and movements in slippers before combining these into variations and then performing them on pointe. But no one has ever been taught first to take possession of themselves, then to distinguish the central from the peripheral, then to translate those central ideas into the world, and finally to put it all together as a complete performance of agency. And furthermore, it turns out to be the case that the physical talents that make one ballet movement easier and more expressive make other movements harder and less expressive. In the same way, Hegel thinks that the very things about a person that would make them good at self-appropriation, for example, tend to make them ineffective and bad at determining what they truly desire. Getting good at ballet and agency involves simultaneously making use of those skills and movements that come naturally, while mitigating the damage done by those that do not. As the cycling coaches say: train your weaknesses, race your strengths. However, we lack a similar set of maxims and rules of thumb for training agency. Perhaps we do have such maxims and rules of thumb, but we just do not recognize them as such. By the time he gets to the 1820s, Hegel thinks he has discovered in the world of lived experience three general training and performance

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strategies for the three projects of action. He calls these three forms of accountability (Zurechnungsfähigkeit), and his description of each form represents a conceptual distillation of common ways of life that are attempts to manage this complexity on the ground, as it were. Each of the three subsections in the part on Morality in the Philosophy of Right—i.e., Purpose and Responsibility, Intention and Welfare, and the Good and Conscience—describes a different, relatively independent form of agency that wrestles with the problem of combining these three projects in a distinctive way. But even this is of relatively little help if you are an individual agent trying to get a grip on what you are doing when you are acting, since the descriptions of these forms of agency are too abstract and complicated to condense insight in the requisite way. After all, it took Hegel his whole career just to identify them, and even then he was unable to clearly articulate what he had identified. What one needs are concrete forms of life. We find this in Hegel’s phenomenology of the estates, in which he tried to identify both the distinctive ways in which members of different estates hold themselves and each other accountable for their actions, and the distinctive values implicit in each way of life. In these more localized forms of life—farmers and soldiers, workers and managers, public servants and merchants—Hegel sees the possibility of training or formation (Bildung) that allows individuals to get a handle on becoming a determinate kind of person with a kind of integrity that comes from pursuing a common solution to the three-fold problem of agency. Human free agency is an enormous and slippery problem that continually threatens to become intractable; so many things must go right or at least not terribly wrong for free agency to be successfully exercised. Pursuing a particular kind of solution to that three-fold problem gives a community a body of practical knowledge embodied in tips, virtues, training programs, work-arounds, habits, compensations, etc. The estates (and, within them, the corporations) represent the circles of practical engagement in which this knowledge can be developed, honed, diversified and transmitted. The exemplars of these estates—whether patron saints, stock characters in artistic representations, or just locally recognized successes— provide visible schemas for this practical knowledge that enable both emulation and debate. This aspect of his social theory is paradigmatic of Hegelian historicity. It presents a set of live options with different genealogies, rather than a chronologically successive series of events. To use a term sometimes used in contemporary historiography, it is a pluralistic history—more the story of a set of ongoing disagreements than the recording of a common memory secured by a common identity (Adam and Adam 2001, 37). The differing perspectives within a synchronically differentiated society are each ways of taking up the economic, geographical, religious and other conditions of individual agency in such a way as to make such agency possible. Again it should be noted that Hegel does not see this pluralism as a distinctively modern phenomenon. There is a modern aspect to this—the pace of change varies in the different ways of life laid out in the social taxonomy— but here Hegel thinks he can draw on the resources developed by our long history

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of grappling with synchronic diversity to address this problem of diachronic diversity. Briefly, he does this by requiring cooperation in a bicameral assembly composed of temporally conservative farmers, on the one hand, and temporally progressive workers and entrepreneurs, on the other. The two groups are forced to work together in this assembly to vet and publicize the policy being made by the executive. What is Hegel trying to accomplish with such an institutional design? Two aspects of his Logic are relevant. The first is his development of an extensive mapping schema for coordinating different perspectives on the same public objects or histories. The second is his uniquely non-temporal conception of change. I will briefly take up the second before coming back to the first. Understanding the nature of the palpable changes described by Hegel in his Logic is a perennial interpretive concern. On the one hand the text appears almost unique in the history of philosophy for its insistent and almost musical rhythm of transitioning from one category to another. On the other hand, Hegel denies that the categories or the Logic are temporal in any way, and so even metaphors such as ‘movement’ or ‘transition’ seem misplaced. In my view, the best way to understand how there could be conceptual change without time is to see Hegel as conceptualizing such changes as running in both directions at once. Because time essentially runs in one direction, any change that goes in opposite directions “at the same time” is non-temporal. One can, of course, pull one half of the change apart from the other half, one direction from the other, and then one can perceive such changes temporally. But Hegel characterizes this procedure as the abstraction of the sensible, and as such an abstraction is necessarily a limited form of comprehension. On Hegel’s view, taking such changes in their multi-directional concreteness frees them from both the contingent flux of appearances and the temporal directedness of causal necessity, and thus allows the mind to free itself by thinking the structures of such change. To see society both moving towards modernity (in the person, as it were, of the estate of trade and industry) and away from modernity (in the person of the agricultural estate) is a way of conceptualizing social history in the Hegelian sense of that term.9 If we can conceptualize history, Hegel thinks, we can see why it has such great significance even as so much of it passes away so quickly. A bicameral assembly established along these lines would institutionalize a conversation that was itself such a conceptualizing interpretation of its contemporary history. This brings us back to the first aspect I mentioned, namely, the schema Hegel develops for coordinating different perspectives. This development primarily comes late in the Logic, in what Hegel calls the subjective logic or the logic of the concept. The goal of that part of the Logic is the development of a threefold conception of conceptuality, according to which it is a field mapped out in the three dimensions of universality, particularity, and individuality (see Yeomans 2015a, 2019). But then it turns out that even that field must be grasped by prioritizing one of the three dimensions, and so can only be fully grasped by successive prioritization of each of the three. First we see the field from the perspective of universality, which distorts particularity and individuality; and then from particularity,

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which distorts individuality and universality; and then from individuality, which distorts particularity and universality. Hegel then has an elaborate discussion of different forms of judgements and syllogisms that explains how one can and must move from one of these conceptual perspectives to the other. To try to understand how this is supposed to work, it might be best to use a metaphor from mathematics, namely that of manifolds and maps. When a three-dimensional sphere (such as, roughly, the Earth) is projected onto two-dimensional maps (or charts), a non-Euclidean space is represented by a Euclidean space. This allows better comprehension of the topological characteristics of the space but at the cost of some distortion. What topologists call the maximal atlas is the collection of such map projections (charts) and the additional transition map that allows points on one map to be transformed into points on the other map, and this atlas defines a non-Euclidean manifold in Euclidean terms. In Hegel, the perspectives of universality, particularity and individuality on any object (Sache) are like the different map projections of the atlas: moderately distorted yet truth-revealing.10 This is precisely what is going on in the plurality of forms of agency as Hegel understands them. The first form of agency (which Hegel calls “the right of knowledge”) emphasizes the particular task of agency: specifying the content of will and action. The second form of agency (“the right of intention”) emphasizes the universal task of agency: self-appropriation. Finally, the third form of agency (“the right of insight into the good”) emphasizes the individual task of agency: effectiveness. In each form of agency the other tasks are accomplished, but with less success. What Hegel tries to work out in the institutional structure of his social theory is a political atlas that requires the consciousness of the nation to travel the routes of the transition map from one perspective to the other. Representatives of the first two forms of agency each get a chamber in the estates assembly, and representatives of the last form get the executive. Hegel’s suggestion is to have any policy proposal or goal batted around between these three perspectives for both understanding and modification. This is how we make our history, Hegel thinks, and it has the significance of being our history only if each way of life can both comprehend and contribute. Each way of life, each perspective on agency, must comprehend and contribute in a specific way, and this will tie together the two main logical points that we have made. Hegel hopes to produce an institutional structure that will promote the following kind of comprehension and contribution: each perspective is tied to the others as containing the leading theme of each other perspective, but in a distorted or rather minimized way. If this can be done, then those other perspectives are internalized in a positive, non-coopting way.11 This logical goal has a political value, of course, but it also guides the analytical task of social description and taxonomy. From the beginning, Hegel is looking for groups with a specific kind of unity of action. Nothing in the logical structure that guides such social analysis requires or even suggests that, e.g., the peasantry or the clergy or any other specific group must play this role. When one looks at the development of Hegel’s theory of the estates from 1802 on, one of the striking things is his willingness to

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redraw the boundaries of the estates, lumping and splitting in different ways and pursuing different forms of functional unity (see Waszek 1988, 171–179). This is neither a deliberative democracy of shared premises nor an agonistic democracy of simply competing interests (cf. Westphal 2017). The interests, views of the good life, and interpretations of rights that are advanced by other groups take the form less of an external condition that must be confronted and more of an internal content manifested in a way that looks distorted from the perspective of the others. In the same way that Hegel thinks that his own European contemporaries should see Chinese history as their history too because China had simply magnified the agricultural perspective that was present as well in Europe, Hegel thinks that European farmers should be able to see European public servants as fellow citizens because they too are trying to solve the same barely tractable problem of free agency; they have just pursued a solution with a different starting point. In the following conclusion, we briefly take stock of the more general relation between Hegel’s logic and political philosophy.

4 Conclusion As I suggested at the beginning, the fundamental question here is how deep the import or significance of making our own history goes. Hegel’s answer is that it goes as deep as anything, since if properly done it is the working-out of the concept—the concept of freedom. Yet, one must see the complexity of the concept of freedom before one can see how it would require such time, energy and conflict to express itself. If there is no single, non-distorted perspective but only transition maps between the distorted perspectives, then those transitions must continually be made in order for the perspectives to hang together. They, however, must be made in all directions, and continually rather than in any particular temporal order. This is another way in which Hegel thinks of synchronic diversity as a long-running and positive resource for managing diachronic diversity, rather than a new phenomenon of distinctively modern societies. It turns out that the medieval peripatetic monarchies are not a bad model for modern policy-making! If the same basic conceptual structures secure diachronic understanding as synchronic understanding, then all that is solid does not melt into air, and the specifically temporal dimension to politics constitutes a less fundamental barrier to philosophical thinking than appeared at first.

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Notes 1. For a discussion of Hegel’s development against the background of such changes, see Pinkard (2000). 2. As I have argued elsewhere, it would be a mistake to think that Hegel is very far from Heidegger’s concerns about values as a way to paper over this potential loss of significance. See Yeomans (2015b, 107). 3. On this question see also Alznauer (2015). 4. Chapter 1 of Riedel’s collection gives the story of Hegel’s development of the concept of objective spirit in 1817 after many earlier attempts. Even the state is just a form of objective spirit, as is shown by its getting tossed around by history, one the one hand, and civil society, on the other (Riedel 1984, 49, 188). 5. Actually, Hegel’s topic there is more general than this; but for the moment this explicitly temporal formulation will do. 6. More specifically, they should be moving towards an interdependence of the two kinds of reflection—this is what makes it absolute rather than either subjective or objective spirit— but I leave out that complication here. The important thing is what is added (reflection-into-self). I also leave out the complication that it must be added in a slightly different sense than it appeared in subjective spirit in order to make this interdependence visible. 7. See also ibid., 50: “Just as the family stands between the individual who belongs to it as a member and civil society, so likewise the state moves between civil society and history. It is this gap in the structure of the traditional political institutions which results in the weaving dialectical development of the concept of right in Hegel and the ingenious structure of his system.” 8. I have done so at length in Yeomans (2015b, 97–222). 9. For more on this theme in Hegel’s historicity, see Comay (2010). 10. What is different, of course, is that there is no analogue in Hegel for the sphere itself as an object distinct from its presentations. Hegel’s doctrine of judgement is supposed to show that one does not need the thing itself so long as one has a grip on the transitions between perspectives. 11. The system of interlocking perspectives is part of Hegel’s logical response to the felt need for Ephors (FNR 151–161) or a Tribunate (Rousseau 1997, Bk. IV, Chapter 5). These are groups outside of the political society whose non-discursive goodness is trusted to establish the terms of the conversation. But Hegel wants to design a state that could establish its own terms in part by trying to describe a state that was already doing so. For Hegel, meta-level considerations are always under discussion in object-level debates. On this last point with respect to Kant, see Deligiorgi (2005, 89–90).

Bibliography Adam, Heribert, and Kanya Adam. 2001. “The Politics of Memory in Divided Societies.” In After the TRC: Reflections on Truth and Reconciliation in South Africa, edited by Wilmot James and Linda van de Vijver, 32–47. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press. Alznauer, Mark. 2015. Hegel’s Theory of Responsibility. New York: Cambridge University Press. Comay, Rebecca. 2010. Mourning Sickness: Hegel and the French Revolution. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Deligiorgi, Katerina. 2005. Kant and the Culture of Enlightenment. Albany: State University of New York Press. Hardimon, Michael. 1994. Hegel’s Social Philosophy. New York: Cambridge University Press.

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Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. 2002. Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Kreines, James. 2015. Reason in the World: Hegel’s Metaphysics and Its Philosophical Appeal. New York: Oxford University Press. Marx, Karl. 2000. Karl Marx: Selected Writings, edited by David McLellan. 2nd ed. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press. Neuhouser, Frederick. 2000. Foundations of Hegel’s Social Theory Actualizing Freedom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pinkard, Terry P. 2000. Hegel: A Biography. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Riedel, Manfred. 1984. Between Tradition and Revolution: The Hegelian Transformation of Political Philosophy. Translated by Walter Wright. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Rousseau, Jean-Jacques. 1997. “The Social Contract” and Other Later Political Writings, edited by Victor Gourevitch. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Ruda, Frank. 2013. Hegel’s Rabble: An Investigation into Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. London: Bloomsbury Academic. Waszek, Norbert. 1988. The Scottish Enlightenment and Hegel’s Account of “Civil Society.” International Archives of the History of Ideas. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Westphal, Kenneth R. 2010. “Analytic Philosophy and the Long Tail of Scientia: Hegel and the Historicity of Philosophy.” The Owl of Minerva 42 (1–2): 1–18. Westphal, Kenneth R. 2017. “The Centrality of Public Reason in Hegel’s Theory of Justice.” In Public Reason in the History of Political Philosophy: Classical Sources & Contemporary Commentaries, edited by P.N. Turner and G.F. Gaus, 330–353. New York: Routledge. Wood, Allen. 1990. Hegel’s Ethical Thought. Cambridge [England]  and New York: Cambridge University Press. Yeomans, Christopher. 2011. Freedom and Reflection: Hegel and the Logic of Agency. New York: Oxford University Press. Yeomans, Christopher. 2015a. “Power as Control and the Therapeutic Effects of Hegel’s Logic.” Hegel Bulletin 36 (1): 33–52. Yeomans, Christopher. 2015b. The Expansion of Autonomy: Hegel’s Pluralistic Philosophy of Action. New York: Oxford University Press. Yeomans, Christopher. 2017. “Perspectives Without Privileges: The Estates in Hegel’s Political Philosophy.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 55 (3): 469–490. Yeomans, Christopher. 2019. Perspective and Logical Pluralism in Hegel. Hegel Bulletin 40 (1): 29–50. Zambrana, Rocío. 2015. Hegel’s Theory of Intelligibility. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Chapter 20

Sittlichkeit and the Actuality of Freedom: On Kant and Hegel Christian Krijnen

In this chapter, I shall argue that Kant fails to conceive of the actuality (Wirklichkeit) of freedom adequately due to the formalism of his conception of the moral law (Sittengegesetz).1 In Kant, freedom of action can only be understood regarding its form and not regarding its content too. As a consequence, the determination of an action is, nolens volens, heteronomous in nature. Hegel, by contrast, rationalizes the content while at the same time modifying the whole relationship between form and content. This results in a conception of free action as being (and remaining) with oneself in one’s other. Kant’s conception of “morals” (Sittlichkeit), therefore, presupposes Hegel’s concept of Sittlichkeit, certainly not for external reasons but for reasons stemming from Kant’s conception of practical knowledge itself.

1 Criticism of Kant’s Formalism as Criticism of the Program of Transcendental Philosophy Despite the fact that the issue of Sittlichkeit in Kant and Hegel has been often addressed by philosophers, it remains contested until today and the discussion, unfortunately, is pressed forward not at last by the many misunderstandings that accompany it. The discussion is a paradigmatic one concerning the persisting question ‘Kant or Hegel?’ A broadly held consensus between Kantians and Hegelians is not in sight; on the contrary, the state of affairs is muddled. Nevertheless, both “heroes of reason” are concerned with the same subject matter: philosophy. Fortunately, developments in recent scholarship on Hegel enable a

C. Krijnen (*)  Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, Amsterdam, The Netherlands e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 M. F. Bykova and K. R. Westphal (eds.), The Palgrave Hegel Handbook, Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26597-7_20

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better understanding of Sittlichkeit in Kant and Hegel, and hence lift the discussion to a new level of appropriation. Hegel’s criticism of Kant’s formalism is commonly read as follows: Kant’s moral philosophy is doomed to be an empty formalism as the principle of morals, the categorical imperative (hereinafter CI), neither allows for deducing or justifying specific, content-determined duties nor to distinguish sufficiently between morally valid and morally invalid maxims (between moral validity and invalidity). Hence, CI does not supply determinations that are capable of guiding actions. At first sight, this criticism appears to be highly implausible because the function of Kant’s CI is exactly to determine the content of the moral will. A survey into the dominant line of defending Kant against Hegel’s criticism of formalism does indeed lead to a plain result: Hegel’s criticism is rejected completely. Hegel appears here as somebody who has misunderstood Kant’s moral philosophy fundamentally.2 Therefore, the strategy of Kant’s defenders is as simple as it is illuminating. They attempt to show both that and how CI determines the moral will, and hence that CI is certainly not merely formal or even tautological. CI essentially relates to content. However, this defense strategy misfires: it is itself based upon a fundamental misunderstanding of Hegel’s criticism. Hegel does not all deny that according to Kant CI relates to content: he denies the legitimacy of this relatedness itself. Whereas, to give two polemic statements by way of illustration, a protagonist of a Kantian type of transcendental philosophy like Hans Wagner is of the opinion that Kant might have some competitors concerning theoretical philosophy but in his practical philosophy he surpassed them all (Wagner 1980a, 302), for Hegel, Kant’s principle of morality is the principle of “immorality” (Unsittlichkeit) (NR GW 4:434), dealing out moral “destruction” and “disaster” (NR GW 4:468)3; the principles of a Kantian type practical reason render the perspective of morality “impossible” (RPh §33R/GW 14). Apparently, the sense of Sittlichkeit itself is at issue. Kant’s relating of CI to content turns out not to be the solution, as it is according to the strategy of the Kant defenders, but the problem, as it reveals from an in-depth analysis of Hegel’s arguments. Regarding Hegel’s dispute with Kant, it is of extreme significance to keep the general tendency in view that characterizes the way in which German idealists deal with Kant. On the one hand, philosophers like Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel hailed Kant’s transcendental revolution of philosophy and his conception of reason as the validity source of human thought and action. As they put it, subjectivity is the grounds for objectivity. On the other hand, the German idealists were also convinced that Kant’s transcendental philosophy lacks the proper methodical and systemic form to do justice to the claim of Kant’s critical project itself. Accordingly, Hegel’s criticism of Kant’s conception of morality is primarily of a programmatic nature, that is to say, it aims at transforming Kant’s transcendental project of laying foundations into a speculative-idealist conception of philosophy.4 Formalism—that is, generally speaking, an external relationship between form and content—functions as the formula for perfecting Kant’s transcendental philosophy.

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Hence, Hegel’s criticism of the formalism of Kant’s practical philosophy is the instance of a more general, in particular of a logical constellation. The criticism of formalism pertains to the profile of Kant’s transcendental philosophy as such. Contemporary Hegel scholarship emphasizes this in one way or another and tries to get a conceptual grip on it.5 Apart from taking the logical context of Hegel’s criticism of Kant’s formalism into account, it also transfers the focus from the much-discussed and disputed Kantian ‘examples’ testing maxims by applying CI,6 which Hegel uses to exemplify his general criticism.7 Without taking the more general constellation of Hegel’s argument into consideration, the examples of applications of Kant’s CI Hegel discusses might easily mislead the reader. And even if Hegel should not in all details do justice to Kant’s thoughts and formulations, the general point of his criticism remains intact: Kant’s conception of morality hinders it nolens volens from comprehending the existence (Dasein) of freedom. As Hegel articulates it, due to its abstractness or formalism Kant’s conception of the good misses a “principle of determination” (Enc. GW 20 §508). That is to say, Kant’s transcendental philosophy misses exactly the methodical moment—decisive for Hegel’s speculative idealism—that sublates any externality between oppositions: the “realization of the concept” (by moments intrinsically belonging to the concept itself: universality, particularity, and singularity). For this reason, ‘form’ and ‘content’ (‘matter’), or to put it more concretely and with a view to practical reason, ‘nature’ (‘drives and inclinations’) and ‘freedom’ (CI) remain opposed to each other externally. In comprehending freedom, Kant stops part way. Although the incriminated formalism of morality concerns a modern conception of freedom and the good and surely is not restricted to Kant, Kant’s critical philosophy does indeed represent it strikingly. The inclusion of content is the essential point. In contrast to the protagonists of Hegel’s concept of Sittlichkeit against Kant’s formalism, I turn the idea of the system of philosophy and with that the methodic structure of the realization of the concept as that “what is free” (WL GW 12:16; Enc. GW 20 §160) and manifests itself in the realm of spirit qua realm of the existence of freedom into the guideline of the discussion.8 The perspective of the existence of freedom is very fruitful for confronting Kant’s and Hegel’s concepts of morality and Sittlichkeit with each other. That and why Kant’s concept of freedom is insufficient, and hence that Kant’s conception of freedom is inadequate, already results from Hegel’s Science of Logic. Hence, for revealing that the determinacy of Kant’s concept of freedom is inadequate in principle, the elaborations in the Philosophy of Spirit are not required at all. Correspondingly, Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit does not primarily deal with the dimension of the determinacy of the concept of freedom; it primarily deals with the dimension of the existence of the concept, the latter related to the former. Hegel conceives of the existence of freedom as a “manifestation” of the concept and in this way comprehends what Kant calls the “realization of freedom.” As Hegel holds in his philosophy of spirit, Kant, in contrast to his own intentions, is not able to comprehend the realization or reality of freedom. The reason for this is an inadequate concept of freedom and, more in general, of concept, and even more

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in general, of idea. In Hegel’s view, Kant’s conception of freedom is developed from the start within the context of an understanding of freedom that is too limited to conceive of the actuality of freedom philosophically (notwithstanding the fact that that limited context has its own merits). This overly restricted context is the context of the freedom of the will of a finite subject, and thus the context of a metaphysics of the practical reason of finite subjects. Hegel in no way rejects our freedom of the will, but he shows that freedom of the will is based upon more general and hence fundamental constellations of freedom: on more general and fundamental principles. Constitutive conditions of the possibility of the freedom of the will remain untold in Kant’s story.

2 The Perspective of Actualizing Freedom The starting point of an analysis of the problem of formalism in Kant’s practical philosophy is not plainly the determinacy of freedom but the issue of actualizing freedom. Kant fails to comprehend it. Due to its formalism, Kant’s conception of morality or practical rationality hinders altogether the actualization of freedom. It becomes clear that the perspective of actualizing freedom is the perspective that guides Hegel’s discussion in the philosophy of spirit with Kant if one glances from the viewpoint of the system of philosophy at Hegel’s philosophy of objective spirit. With regard to Kant too, a systemic consideration reveals that the issue of actualizing freedom is an essential part of his conception of morality. It makes up the appropriate perspective for discussing Kant’s formalism of morality—in contrast to Kant’s moral philosophical modelling of the problem of formalism, as common in Kant scholarship. As we shall see, Kant’s conception of morality primarily qualifies the facticity of actions. That is to say, their actuality is drawn on not as a merely natural process, as mere naturality, but as something that is also characterized by a practical determinacy of reason, and hence, as something that is a result of humans giving shape to their freedom. Only because it is such a result can it then be evaluated concerning its moral validity difference; otherwise, morality could not even be a possible perspective of qualification. The moral as the principle of moral validity qualifies a reality that results from human actions. It concerns a reality shaped by the will and thus a reality shaped by reason. It qualifies reality as the existence of freedom, i.e. facticity. In Kant, this qualification of the dimension of actualizing freedom comes to the fore throughout, from his architectonic of reason up to his philosophy of culture and history. Already Kant’s architectonic of reason is much-telling, and I shall restrict myself to this aspect. In line with the tradition, Kant divides philosophy into a theoretical and a practical branch as well as the corresponding objects into nature and freedom. Accordingly, he differentiates between theoretical knowledge and determination of the will as well as between philosophy of nature and philosophy of morals (as

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the “practical legislation of reason according to the concept of freedom”) (cf. CPR B868f., B830; CPrR Ak 5:15; CJ Ak 5:167f., 171, 174, 178f., 416, etc.).9 The philosophy of nature deals with “all that is, the philosophy of morals with that which ought to be” (CPR B868, cf. B830). Whereas here we see that freedom is something that ought to be, and hence is to actualize, this pointed emphasis continues in Kant’s elaboration. He distinguishes both directions of reason as follows. Whereas theoretical reason aims at objects that are given from elsewhere—by sensory intuition—practical reason is related to objects that it creates itself, for practical reason concerns the determination of the will. Corresponding to this view, theoretical reason’s relation to an object consists in, as Kant says, the “mere determination” of the object, that is “theoretical knowledge” of reason. Practical reason, by contrast, is concerned with “realizing” its object (in accordance with the knowledge of it), that is “practical knowledge” of reason (Cf. CPrR Ak 5:89 with CPR BIXf. and Gr Ak 4:426).10 Kant straightforwardly defines the faculty of desire as a being’s power “to become by means of its representations the cause of the actual existence of the objects of these representations” (CPrR Ak 5:9R, cf. MM Ak 6:211). Yet Kant and Hegel go their separate ways here.

3 On the Exposition of the Concept of Freedom in Kant and Hegel and its Ramifications By taking into closer consideration the exposition of the concept of freedom— that is the way in which the concept of freedom is introduced systematically in philosophy—it becomes clear that Kant and Hegel conceptualize freedom and its actuality in a radically different fashion. Without doubt, both thinkers aim to do justice to the modern standpoint of reason as subjectivity. The concept of freedom, therefore, results in the course of the development of the system of philosophy; it emerges from, to use Kant’s words, “self-knowledge” of reason (CPR AXI). As a consequence, the concept of freedom turns out to be a necessary concept. It originates from a validity reflective process of determination of the “concept” itself; hence, it is grounded neither in a transcendent world nor in an immanent world (as in metaphysics and empiricism respectively). In Kant’s philosophy, the concept of freedom arises within the context of the Transcendental Dialectic of the Critique of Pure Reason, or to be more precise, within the Third Antinomy. This antinomy leads Kant to the logical possibility of a negative and transcendental (also called cosmological) concept of freedom. Already in Kant’s proof of the possibility of the conceivability of such a cosmological causality of freedom, it becomes apparent that Kant is bothered primarily with the possibility of moral freedom for our actions (the cosmological or transcendental freedom forgoes moral freedom logically: CPR B561f., cf. B831). In the Critique of Pure Reason, “freedom in the practical sense” is defined, in accord with Kant’s writings on morality, as “the will’s independence of coercion through

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sensuous drives” (CPR B561f.) and as human power of “self-determination” in such independence (CPR B562). Kant here calls practical “everything that is possible through freedom” (CPR B828). On the foundation of the justified assumption of cosmological freedom of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant’s further elaborations concern the freedom of the will. In his practical philosophy, in particular in Kant’s foundational work, in which the objective reality of freedom takes center stage and the concept of freedom receives its full determinacy, Kant thematizes freedom from the outset in the perspective of the “moral law,” and hence within the context of moral considerations. The problem of willing and its validity determinacy are the pivotal point. A free will and a will under moral laws are for Kant identical (Gr Ak 4:447), and the will and practical reason finally coincide (MM Ak 6:213, CPrR Ak 5:15, 55, 160; Gr Ak 4:412, 441, 448; MM Ak 6:213). In accordance with his moral focus, Kant already conceives of freedom in the Third Antinomy of the Critique of Pure Reason, initially cosmological freedom and subsequently based on it practical freedom, as a “power” to be the cause of effects or, more precisely, a power to begin a series of effects “spontaneously.” This power-theoretical modelling enables Kant, who already within the cosmological context focuses on freedom “in the practical sense,” to understand humans as agents of their actions: not merely as an effect of a natural cause, not as a mere object but as a subject. Things in themselves (in the sense of Kant’s idealism) are independent from “natural laws” (that is negative transcendental or cosmological freedom), capable of “beginning a state spontaneously” (that is positive transcendental or cosmological freedom) (CPR B561). Self-determination as the power to initiate a state spontaneously takes the place of being determined by something else (nature, heteronomy). In sum, Kant conceives of freedom as a “power of causality,” capable of beginning a series of events spontaneously, from its own law (the cosmological law of freedom: spontaneous causality). As previously said, the post-Kantian idealists attempted to perfect Kant’s transcendental philosophy. One important issue here concerns Kant’s architectonic of reason. Kant’s divides philosophy into theoretical and practical philosophy as well as into nature and freedom (which are the objects of theoretical and practical philosophy respectively), or theoretical knowledge and determination of the will, philosophy of nature and moral philosophy. Against the background of this dualistic conception, it turned out to be significant for the German idealists to bring about a general concept of freedom: a concept of freedom that establishes a pervasive relationship and, hence, is able to function as the grounds for the unity of any specification of freedom. Freedom already plays an essential role within theoretical philosophy for freedom as self-determination turns out to be a necessary condition for possible knowledge of objects. To put it more generally, freedom belongs to the determinacy of any activity of reason. Therefore, Kant’s architectonic was doomed to appear as insufficient. Whereas for Kant, practical is “everything possible through freedom,” for the German idealists, rational (vernünftig) is everything possible through freedom. Whereas for Kant, the concept of freedom is the “capstone” (CPrR Ak 5:3) of the whole system of pure reason, for the German

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idealists, freedom transforms into the origin of all philosophy and being. Whereas Kant’s conception of freedom offers a subsequent, not an original unity of the system,11 of theoretical and practical reason, nature and freedom, the post-Kantian idealists transform Kant’s dualistic conception of transcendental philosophy into a monism of reason as a monism of freedom. Knowledge, of whatever issues, is itself an eminent act of freedom. This leads in Hegel’s philosophy to a conception of reason and freedom as a unity from which everything else emerges and becomes comprehensible. For Hegel, freedom makes up the beginning, the way, and the end of philosophy. Hegel can come to such an all-embracing position because in his philosophy freedom is a qualification already of the concept: “the concept is that which is free” (Enc. §160/GW 20; cf.; WL GW 12:16). Freedom, therefore, has a logical foundation.12 And the Science of Logic is certainly the first and the last philosophical science in Hegel’s system of philosophy. It comes as no surprise, then, that Hegel does not conceive of that which is originally free as Kant, Fichte, Schelling, or later transcendental philosophers do—not as a practical subject, an “I,” (self)consciousness, or a value-related activity of a subject that forms itself. By contrast, the concept is the eminent and fundamental form of being with itself in its other, which is Hegel’s determination of freedom. Just as little as Hegel conceives of freedom primarily as volitional selfdetermination (freedom of the will, freedom of choice), likewise freedom is not characterized by another feature that belongs to the original determinacy of freedom conceived of in a Kantian fashion: freedom as an autonomous causal power of the active subject. Hegel reaches a fundamentally different and more genuine conception of freedom than “causality from freedom.” Hegel’s alternative is freedom as being with itself in its other, nota bene, being with itself in its other of the concept. Hegel, thus, does not comprehend human action in conformity with the model of causality and by no means primarily within the perspective of the moral quality of a finite practical subject. For him, human action should be primarily conceived of as the existence of the concept, put more generally, as the existence of reason as the grounds for everything. As a consequence, a model of manifestation of freedom takes the place of the causal model of freedom. The concept, as that which is free, shows to be a self-relationship that manifests itself—freedom. Therefore, the problem of formalism in Kant’s transcendental philosophy could be qualified as the missing dimension of what Hegel calls the “manifestation” of the concept, or to articulate it in the already applied philosophy-methodical language, as the missing dimension of the “realization of the concept.” If freedom is conceived of primarily as a manifestation of the concept, then, what is significant with regard to Kant, freedom is not primarily determined as freedom of the power or capacity to choose: as freedom of choice (Willkürfreiheit).13 Freedom is neither originally a “power” (freedom as a possibility) nor freedom of choice. Freedom as a power or capability that is “applied” to given material is, for Hegel, a conception of mere “understanding” (Verstandesauffassung) freedom instead of comprehending it. In such a conception, the relationship between the power and the given material it is applied to

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remains external. This concerns, as Hegel also says, the conception of freedom typical of “reflective philosophy” (Kant), freedom as a “formal self-activity” (RPh §15R/GW 14). Hegel, by contrast, wants to comprehend the reality of freedom as a manifestation of the concept in the realm of the spirit: as a manifestation of the concept in the element of its spiritual existence. By conceiving of freedom primarily as freedom of the concept, freedom remains, as for Kant, spontaneous activity. Yet, this spontaneity is no longer originally characterized by notions like necessity, contingency, law, cause, effect. By contrast, it is the structure of the speculative concept that makes up its basic characteristics: universality, particularity, and singularity. That what is free remains in its activity continuously with itself and is at the same time a unity that is differentiated within itself in its other. Such being with oneself and hence to determine oneself spontaneously towards oneself, is true self-determination. This selfdetermination is a mediation of the moments of what is free with each other and with itself; it therefore is also a mediation according to one’s own (conceptual) law, “autonomy,” thus true self-mediation. However, Hegel does no longer conceive of freedom as a “law” that is “applied” to “cases.” This entails, among other things, that Hegel, in contrast to Kant, does not try to understand the actuality of freedom in terms of a “doctrine of duties”—moral duties, duties of virtue, and duties of right—for finite subjects. Rather, such a “practical philosophy” is based upon or presupposes a dimension of the actuality of freedom that Hegel aims to render explicit as the realm of right qua realm of the existence of freedom. This realm of freedom is the realm of the facticity of freedom, the realm of actualizing validity, norms, or values as such—the realm of the actuality of freedom.14

4 Hegel’s Criticism of Practical Formalism The sketched transformations in comprehending freedom are relevant for understanding better Hegel’s criticism of the formalism of Kant’s moral law or CI. For Hegel, not only does Kant’s conception of cosmological freedom fall short. Also, and essential for the criticism of “practical” formalism, Kant’s practical concept of freedom, which is based upon the cosmological concept of freedom, is unable to express what it means to “realize the object,” that is to actualize freedom. At first sight, CI appears to be a powerful criterion that in no way allows the justification of any maxim. On the contrary, its formalism sorts maxims out with respect to their moral character. And without doubt, Kant’s moral philosophy offers in terms of content a very rich whole of normative principles regarding anything that claims to be moral, virtuous, or right. Kant’s conception of practical reason and the formalism that is typical of it does indeed integrate content. The single and overarching moral law differentiates itself into a plurality of categorical imperatives and is on top of that and via these imperatives related to the reality of humans and the human world.

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At second sight however, the sketched relationship to content of the formal CI does not suffice. Hegel holds, from a Kantian perspective highly surprisingly, that Kant’s CI fails to comprehend the reality or actuality of freedom sufficiently. The reason for this far-reaching esteem of Kant goes deeper than mere practical or spiritual relationships; yet, the perspective from which Hegel addresses the “standpoint of morality” in his mature philosophy of spirit is the perspective of the actuality of freedom. If we look from the perspective of the actuality of freedom at Hegel’s criticism of formalism, then we can detect a general pattern to his criticism. Although Kant’s formalism integrates content, the actuality of freedom remains underdetermined as the rationality of actions is solely based upon their form. In order to grant the form a function that orients our actions, Kant de facto must make additional assumptions concerning the content. Within his model of grounding knowledge and norms critically, these assumptions cannot be accounted for in a methodically justified way. As a consequence, Kant does not make good his own intentions, namely offering a critical foundation of human praxis. What seems to be Kant’s glance on the one hand—formalism—turns out to be its misery on the other: it hinders the performance of one’s duty. For this reason, the strategy of contemporary Kantians of pointing to the relevance of empirical content for Kant’s practical philosophy does not provide a remedy for Hegel’s criticism.15 In Hegel’s view, the basic structure of Kant’s philosophy of practical reason is inadequate. Kant conceives of nature and freedom in a dualistic fashion. Hegel criticizes the emptiness of CI not because CI is not related to content but because he rejects Kant’s presupposition that it is possible to deduce a completely formal law from a completely pure practical reason that nonetheless possesses sufficient determinacy to guide our actions. Kant has to make use of additional content, in particular concerning our rationality and its ends. These assumptions, however, are as such contingent, and hence, by no means valid universally and necessarily. On closer consideration, CI turns out not to be the formalism it should be according to Kant. In this context, Hegel offers the criticism, among others, that Kant determines the good merely as a “task,” or an “ought.” In contrast, Hegel conceives of the basis for practical duties not only as the pure will but grounds them in the empirical too or, to be more precise, in the togetherness of both components. Overall, Hegel rejects Kant’s “dualistic” conception. Against this, he aims to conceive of nature and freedom, the empirical and the rational, form and content, etcetera from the start in their togetherness. And this constellation is anything but decisive only for Hegel’s criticism of practical formalism; according to Hegel, Kant’s theoretical philosophy is characterized by formalism too. Kant always presupposes content, his critical philosophy is never critical enough.16

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4.1 Formalism as Frustration of Actualizing Freedom Thus the question is: How does freedom (normativity, validity, etc.) give itself existence? This is not to say that Hegel, in opposition to Kant, intends to relativize or historicize the claims of reason. After all, Hegel’s philosophy of objective spirit is a doctrine of the existence not of any spirit but of the free, and hence, the rational spirit. Nevertheless, freedom conceived of as freedom of choice does for Hegel not suffice to comprehend the “will” as an “actual will” (RPh §12/GW 14), that is as a will that actualizes itself. A conception of actualizing freedom in terms of freedom of choice by a will that determines itself, conceives freedom of the will, at best, in regard to the form of the will. By contrast, the content of the will, which in first instance seems to consist merely of drives and inclinations and, hence of something given, nature, should be understood too as a “product of its freedom” (RPh §13/GW 14; cf. §§10R, 15 incl. R). Actual freedom, the existence of freedom is only present if the content of the will can also be conceived of as a content of freedom: only when it expresses what the “free spirit” that gives itself existence wants. Hegel is certainly far from making natural drives and inclinations, which hinder our actualization of freedom, into rational givens. By contrast, he intends to achieve a concept of content that is able to conceive of the content of the will as a rational, and hence as a free content. Thus we are dealing with a problem that is, in first instance, logical in nature. The logical form of the content as something immediate, given, contingent, etcetera is inadequate. The content must be conceived of differently in order to be conceived of as free, to articulate it with another focus, if the existence of freedom of a free spirit should be conceivable. Hegel captures this rationality of the content—within the setting of the philosophy of spirit—by elaborating a process in which the determination of the will is purified and hence freed. This purification of the determinacy of the will reaches from its extreme heteronomous, external, natural determination by drives to a form of self-determination that is “self-determining universality, the will, or freedom” (RPh §§19–21/GW 14; §21). In the course of this process, self-determination proves to be the content and purpose of a free spirit. That a free spirit comes into existence does not only require a formal type of self-determination of the spirit; it requires free content too. If, however, the content of our will is rational, then it has stripped off its immediacy, contingency, and particularity. By contrast, the content is characterized by rational determinacy. As a result, it has become the content of a truly free spirit, a spirit that truly determines itself; the content is no longer merely an impulse, inclination and so forth, in short, not merely nature. Heteronomy, determination by externalities of the spirit is typical of freedom in the sense of freedom of choice, not autonomy, self-determination, being with itself in the content. One consequence of the conception of freedom as freedom of choice is formalism. Instead of making the actualization of freedom possible, formalism hinders it. The reason for this is that the transition from the mere formal determinacy of

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normativity—from norms abstractly conceived of (like Kant’s CI and the subsequent categorical imperatives of virtue and right)—to concrete actions of the free spirit, that is to say, to the actuality of freedom, does not take place in a rational and therefore necessary way but is contingent and arbitrary.17 Abstract norms are actualized contingently or arbitrarily because they can only be actualized on the basis of concrete, content-determined norms, and hence, norms that are situated or contextualized norms. Due to the externality of the content, no action is brought about as the number of morally acceptable reasons for actions (maxims) is just infinite—rather, we still do not know “what to do” concretely. The good conceptualized as an abstract norm (CI in the singular and plural) that is a duty for the subject and thus functions as a determinant of orientation for our action and should be actualized accordingly, misses, as Hegel puts its concisely, a “principle of determination” (Enc. §508/GW 20). By implication, determination occurs “outside” the universality that is CI as the form of abstract norms, with the consequence that actualizing the good becomes “contingent”— which should not be the case (Enc. §509 ff./GW 20). Our concrete actions would not be actions out of freedom but actions determined by external givens (drives, inclinations, wishes, and so forth). Human action, however, is free, self-determined action. Due to Kant’s focus on the moral quality of our willing, the problem of the actuality of freedom (reason) moves out of sight. The existence of “freedom” as the existence of the “free spirit,” and hence of the “idea” in the element of reality, has to be conceived of in a different way if it should be possible at all to achieve a Kantian moral world: a world shaped in conformity with the moral law. Kant’s morality presupposes Hegel’s Sittlichkeit as a sphere within which a Kantian type of moral law can be actualized.

4.2 Hegel’s Logic of Freedom This constellation is, as said above, an instance of more general logical relationships. Kant lacks what Hegel calls the realization of the concept. For this reason, Kant, in Hegel’s view, offers a mere “philosophy of reflection”; Kant’s philosophy remains a dualistic system. The One idea as the grounds for unity which determines itself and that functions as the grounds for this dualistic system is unaddressed, that is to say that it remains merely presupposed. Without integrating Hegel’s logic, a discussion of the problem of formalism in the realm of spirit, more precisely, moral formalism, walks away from its core.18 Because Kant conceives of reason or subjectivity as an abstract relation to itself, no transition from this universality to the particularity of specific contents is achieved. These contents, therefore, are always in one way or another presupposed as a given. Thus they are contingent, arbitrary, in short, unfree. In contrast, the transition from the abstract, universal, undetermined to the concrete, particular, determined should happen in a rational and hence self-determined (free) way. This process, that is the realization of the concept, is the “speculative”

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development of the concept: the concept develops itself from the universal to the particular and singular, and with this development it overcomes any formalism in a fundamental and also for the philosophy of reality decisive way. Hegel takes the problem of the “original synthetic unity” (Kant) very seriously and tries to solve it in a radical and pervasive manner. As a consequence, any externality of conceptual contents, including the contingency and arbitrariness this entails, is liquidated. Kant’s conception of rationality as such falls victim to the criticism of formalism. More precisely, it concerns logical constellations that enable it to understand the speculative concept as that which is eminently free and, hence, makes up the foundation of spiritual freedom too. The first thing that should be noticed in this respect is that Hegel rejects the foundation of Kant’s practical concept of freedom: the transcendental or cosmological concept of freedom as introduced in the Third Antinomy of the Critique of Pure Reason. For Hegel, this concept of freedom is not universal enough to function as an opposite concept to the concept of nature; nature and freedom do not establish a complete opposition. Rather, Kant, in accord with the rationalist metaphysics of his age upon which he draws uncritically here, anticipates already the practical concept of freedom of finite subjects. Against this, Hegel takes a more fundamental route. In his philosophy as a philosophy of the absolute idea, the concept in the speculative sense and in its specific logical function (that is its place in Hegel’s system of logic) turns out to be that which is free: “the concept is that what is free” (Enc. §160/GW 20), freedom the “absolute negativity of the concept as identity with itself” (Enc. §382/GW 20). Only on the basis of this fundamental concept of freedom, can the existence of freedom be comprehended.

4.3 Externality as the Unfreedom of Action If, with regard to Kant’s practical formalism, practical reason is unfree concerning its content, then mere arbitrariness or contingency determines the content. Hence, the respective action becomes unfree. The universal ought to determine the content, but it determines it only with respect to its possibility not with respect to its actuality. Therefore, no actualization of the good is brought about. This constellation could be made plausible by analyzing Hegel’s criticism of “morality” in detail (cf. NR GW 4:432ff.; PhG GW 9:323ff.; RPh §§105ff./GW 14). Hegel shows here that Kant conceives of moral autonomy or the good as following a universality that is my own law as an intelligible entity (spirit). In Kant, however, the universal and self-determination do not coincide nolens volens due to the formality of the universal. As a consequence, determination takes place outside the universal (CI, freedom) and the subject is revealed to be unable to grant the good the determinacy it needs in order to accomplish an action. The moral law is only applicable by presupposing certain pre-given content-related determinations—determinations the moral law at the same time excludes, or at least does not express in its form, because it is supposed to be the formal principle of morality. The formality of CI

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disables actions in their actuality. Taken by itself, the moral law in the Kantian sense is only an abstract moment of human self-determination, not the principle of human self-determination. In the latter case, the moral law should also contain the conditions of its own realization in the objective realm of spirit instead of excluding them, rendering itself impossible.

4.4 Hegel’s Sittlichkeit as Rationalization of the Content How, then, does Hegel’s conception, which comprehends Sittlichkeit as a manifestation of the concept as that which is free, provide a solution for the problem of irrationality or contingency of the content of the moral law diagnosed in Kant’s approach? Are drives, inclinations, or the social embeddedness of the subject, for instance, simply exterminated by Hegel? Of course not. The point of Hegel’s deliberations is not to exterminate the natural determinacy of the subject. Hegel’s point is to carve out the rational character of this natural determinacy. Such a comprehension of our natural determinacy starts in Hegel’s philosophy of subjective spirit (Enc. §387ff./GW 20). However, as far as the existence of freedom is concerned, hence realizing purposes in the world (and not, as in the philosophy of subjective spirit, the constitution of a subject, that is a free spirit), the content must be maximally rationalized in order to turn freedom into the principle of both form and content. To be more precise, as drives, inclinations, etcetera, they are already, in the philosophy of spirit, functionalized as determinations of freedom; objective spirit, then, concerns content-related constellations on the level of the objective existence, thus the rationality of a free existence. Contents of a truly free spirit that brings itself into existence must be contents that are not merely given to that spirit but are its own contents, contents with which spirit identifies itself, contents in which spirit is with itself. Moreover, they must result in a concrete action for otherwise no existence of freedom would be brought about. This self-determination of spirit has to be rational: not contingent or arbitrary. Put more technically, its content is transformed. It is no longer content in the form of immediacy but content in the form of the concept, hence, necessary content. The will that actualizes freedom, then, is no longer merely “formal,” “abstract resolution” (RPh §13/GW 14): its content is not merely “immediately present” (RPh §11/GW 14) but the “content and product of its freedom.” (RPh §13/GW 14) The will does not just choose from given possibilities; by contrast, it gives itself its content—it is with itself in its other: persistently free. In short, the logical form of the content has changed. Instead of being in the form of “natur” it has transformed into a moment of the form of the concept (“freedom”). Hegel certainly does not conceive of the will as something that is separated from thought. Rather, the will is a type of thought—thought that “translates itself into existence, impulse to give itself existence” (RPh §4Z/GW 14; cf. Enc. §233/GW 20), thought as a “thinking will” (Enc. §469/GW 20). Only as a thinking will, is the will a “veracious, free will” (RPh §21R/GW 14). As such a

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will, it is a “manifestation” of the idea. For Hegel, manifestation is an activity of something absolute. Something truly absolute only expresses itself (WL GW 11:375f., 397f.; Enc. §§139, 142R, 151/GW 20).19 Hegel’s Logic of Essence shows in this respect that the absolute conceived of as a “substance” sublates itself into the “concept” (WL GW 11:393ff.; Enc. §150ff./GW 20); consequently, Hegel conceptualizes the further development of the Science of Logic and the Philosophy of Reality as manifestations of the concept. Nature and spirit are particular manifestations of the concept, and hence of that which is free. And just as the concept is a relationship between universality, particularity, and singularity, the same applies to the form of any manifestation, regardless of whether it concerns, for instance, the will, objective spirit, or Sittllichkeit. That Hegel via abstract right (universality) and morality (particularity) finally reaches Sittlichkeit (singularity) is due to his conception of speculative comprehension and the conception of concept and the realization that belongs to it. It is Hegel’s way of capturing the existence of freedom, realization of validity or normativity. Just like for Kant, for Hegel too the free will wants itself.20 However, in contrast to Kant, Hegel determines the contents of the will in conformity with the logical structure or the form of the concept in a manner that the contents reveal to be necessary elements of actualizing the will; the “drives,” which are initially the results of being immediately determined by nature, transpire to be the “rational system of the will’s determination” (RPh §19/GW 14). The opposition between the moral law, on the one hand, and drives and inclinations that have to be shaped by it, on the other, is a mere abstraction of truly free actions, that is to say, of freedom in its actuality. This abstraction hinders it from comprehending actions as free actions. The constellation of an abstract system of rules (abstract right) and a subject that determines itself formally (morality) is insufficient for comprehending the actuality of freedom. The normative content of the situatedness or embeddedness of the subject has to be taken into account. Such normative content is present in (any) Sittlichkeit. The existence of freedom or the free activity of the subject requires, thus, to incorporate concrete intersubjective (social) determinations of freedom, social presuppositions of individual freedom, and to thematize them philosophically from the perspective of modernity, that is the perspective of free spirit. The shape of concrete sociality, the shape of Sittlichkeit is as such constitutive of our respective wishes, intentions, actions, and so forth. Only where there is Sittlichkeit, can actions take place. Hegel’s philosophy of Sittlichkeit is a philosophy of the facticity of freedom. Truly free actions take place in a Sittlichkeit that itself is the “product of freedom,” hence in a free Sittlichkeit. The shapes of Sittlichkeit therefore have to be free shapes. In this fashion, Hegel determines them in his Philosophy of Objective Spirit as shapes of the existence of the free spirit.21

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Notes 1. All translations from German texts into English are mine, although I have benefited from consulting current translations. 2. For Kant’s understanding of formalism and its relation to content see, for instance: Geismann (2009), Grünewald (2004), Höffe (2012, 172ff.), Höffe (1995, Chapters 4 and 5), Oberer (1997), O’Neill (1989, 1991), and Wagner (1980c). See also the older studies of Ebbinghaus (1986) and Schmucker (1997). 3. In the chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit on ‘morality’ and in the context of his criticism of Kant, Hegel connotes the moral perspective occasionally as the perspective of “non-morality” (PhG GW 9:336) or “immorality” (PhG GW 9:337). 4. Horstmann (1999) correctly emphasizes the radical impulse of Hegel’s program of philosophy, without, however, turning Kant’s formalism itself into an issue and, hence, discussing the immanent right (or wrong) of Hegel. 5. Sedgwick (2012) intends a study into Hegel’s criticism of Kant’s theoretical philosophy, which she opens with an ‘introduction’ that addresses Hegel’s criticism of Kant’s practical philosophy. For Sedgwick too, Hegel’s criticism is an “expression or particular application of Hegel’s larger critique,” as becomes clear from Hegel’s “theoretical philosophy” (Sedgwick 2012, 2, 7). Also Knappik (2013) construes the problem of Kant’s formalism as an instance of more general constellations. Although Knappik starts his book with the problem of freedom of choice and discusses Kant’s formalism in this context (Knappik 2013, Chapter 2, in particular 2.6.2), he points out that his criticism requires a foundation in the sense of Hegel’s Science of Logic (ibid., Chapter 3, in particular 3.2ff.). 6. The most famous one is probably that of the “deposit” in the Critique of Practical Reason (CPrR Ak 5:27). 7. In his discussion of idealist models of autonomy, Henrich (1982) clearly sees that Kant’s CI cannot be the sole or highest principle of moral determination of the will. Yet, Henrich does not elaborate the structure of Hegel’s model of rationality. By contrast, he focusses on Kant’s examples or on matters of detail. See for a discussion of the various points of criticism that Hegel puts forward against Kant’s moral philosophy, for instance, Sedgwick (2012, 1ff.), Allison (1990, Chapter 10), Wood (1990, Chapter 9). 8. Compare, for instance, Vieweg (2012, Chapter 4, esp. 208ff.) and Heyde (1987, 136ff.). Knappik (2013, Chapter 8.1) conceives of Hegel’s criticism of formalism and conception of Sittlichkeit primarily as the problem of the “constitution of a concrete practical self.” Hegel renewers like Honneth (2001, 2011) encounter Hegel’s idea of system very skeptically anyway. 9. For Kant’s architectonic also see Krijnen (2011) and Krijnen (2016a). 10. In addition, see, for instance, CPrR Ak 5:15, where Kant defines practical reason as a power to produce or cause objects corresponding to our representations, or CPrR Ak 5:57, where practical reason is conceived of as the representation of an object as a possible effect of freedom. For Kant, being an object of practical reason signifies the relation of the will to the action by which the object would be realized. Put in terms of Kant’s two-world theory: The moral law gives to the sensible world (sensible nature) the form of an intelligible world (supersensible nature) (CPrR Ak 5:43). 11. Kant’s Critique of Judgement fits well in this picture. It aims to bridge the “immense gap” (CJ Ak 6:75) between the realm of the legislation of the concept of nature and that of freedom. This exposition of the problem to be solved apparently presupposes Kant’s division of reason into the respective powers and their critically traced transcendental laws. Hence, at issue is a subsequent, not an original unity or nomothetics that grounds and enables the nomothetics of nature and of freedom. See for the specific problem of unity addressed in the Critique of Judgement, for instance, Düsing (1968), Krämling (1985), Krijnen (2016a), Wagner (2008).

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12. For recent investigations into Hegel’s concept of freedom in particular see Fulda (2014), Knappik (2013), and Krijnen (2016b). 13. I insinuate here Kant’s distinction between freedom of the will in the strict sense (Wille) and freedom of choice (Willkür). Although this distinction is operative in Kant’s work throughout, it is not before his Metaphysics of Morals that Kant strictly and consistently distinguishes both dimensions of practical reason terminologically (MM Ak 6:213). The will in the strict sense concerns the will as a legislative power; the capacity for choice concerns the will in its dimension of determining actions and the realization of ends. The will in the strict sense is the power to desire not, as the capacity for choice, related to the action but rather in relation to the “grounds determining choice to action”; for Kant, the will in so far as it can determine the capacity for choice is “practical reason itself” (MM Ak 6:226). 14. Therefore, the proper translation of Hegel’s Sittlichkeit is not ‘ethical life’, as is dominant in Anglo-Saxon texts. The issue is the actuality of freedom and, hence, the facticity of freedom. Though from the perspective of the matter at issue the term facticity is most appropriate, from a pragmatic point of view, however, it will probably be without much chance of success (‘brute facts’). ‘Facticity’ productively integrates Kant. Kant distinguishes agere from facere, and in accord with the logic of his time he speaks of ‘actions of understanding’ (Handlungen des Verstandes: CPR B94, 105, etc.). Apparently, this concerns a very wide concept of action, not restricted to the practical realm. Action in this wide sense merely means “bringing about an effect,” “causation” (cf. CPR B249f., 570ff.). However, this wide concept of action is to be distinguished from a narrower, particular concept: causation from freedom. See also the chapter “What does Action Mean?” (Was heißt Handeln?) in the Pölitz version of Kant’s lectures on metaphysics (Ak 28). Here, Kant determines agere as action in the wide sense and facere as action from freedom. See on agere and facere also the Critique of Judgement (CJ Ak 5:303). In his Metaphysics of Morals, Kant describes “deed” (Tat) as an action subjected to the “laws of obligation,” hence, addressing the “subject” regarding his or her “freedom of choice,” as “originator of an effect” (MM Ak 6:223). Because of such an action, reason is a fact, a factum; here, nature and freedom coincide, freedom is brought into existence. This also fits with Kant’s parlance of the fact (factum, facere) of reason in the Critique of Practical Reason (cf. CPrR Ak 5:3, 5, §§7ff.). Generally speaking, the realm of facticity of reason is the realm of Sittlichkeit: the actual normative realm, the realm of the actuality of freedom. 15. Wagner (1980b, c), for instance, profoundly shows that the formality of CI makes the content of morality determinable. His defense of formalism, however, does not do justice to Hegel’s argument against Kant’s formalism. Hegel reveals that actions in the Kantian sense are, notwithstanding the rational component of self-determination, determined by non-rational factors too, that is to say, actions in their actuality are underdetermined by the formality of CI. Wagner rightly points out that the maxims each of us has are given material for an evaluation in terms of CI, just as our actions are always also materially determined by objects, hence by a natural determinacy or non-rationality. But exactly this reference to given maxims and nature confirms instead of refuting Hegel’s criticism. The same line of Kant defense, though with its own accentuations but nonetheless confirming instead of falsifying Hegel’s criticism, is offered by Grünewald (2004) or Geismann (2009). Mere Kant interpretation of how CI relates to content does not suffice. Hegel understands the relatedness of Kant’s CI to content well enough. 16. Hegel’s criticism of practical formalism is addressed in his essay on ‘Natural Law’ (NR GW 4:432ff.), the chapter on morality of the Phenomenology of Spirit (PhG GW 9:323ff.), the deliberations on critical philosophy in the chapter on the attitudes of thought towards objectivity of the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences (Enc. §§40ff./GW 20) as well as in the introduction (RPh §§1ff./GW 14) into and the chapter on morality of his Elements of the Philosophy of Right (RPh §§105ff./GW 14). 17. Knappik (2013, Chapters 3, 6, and 8), influenced by Hegel’s Phänomenologie des Geistes and debates within Analytical Philosophy, interprets this as a problem of the ‘constitution of

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the self’. However, Hegel’s philosophy of spirit is as such not a philosophy of the self but of the principles of the actuality of freedom: of the spirit that knows and wants itself as free and aims to actualize its “inner” purpose, freedom, within an “externally found objectivity” (Enc. §§483ff./GW 20). Conditions of actualizing freedom are not identical with principles of the constitution of the self. Therefore, the problem of practical formalism is not primarily a problem of a rational transition from an abstract norm (CI) to a concrete self but to the actuality of freedom. Kant’s practical philosophy (like his theoretical philosophy) is not a theory of the self either. It is a philosophy of the validity of practical objectivity (like his theoretical philosophy is a philosophy of theoretical objectivity); Kant’s transcendental reflection leads to a whole of validity principles, not to a self. 18. The Hegel interpretation and actualization of Honneth (2001) suffers, despite numerous pointed insights, continuously from detaching the relationship between Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and Hegel’s system of philosophy including its logical foundation, meaning Hegel’s conception of the speculative concept or absolute idea as developed in the Science of Logic, instead of incorporating it fruitfully. See for this Krijnen (2015, Chapter 2). 19. Bubner (1984), for instance, tries to reconcile Kant’s ethics of maxims and Hegel’s doctrine of Sittlichkeit within the perspective of hermeneutics. His attempt, however, is not very plausible. In particular concerning Hegel, Bubner does not take the conceptual grounding of Sittlichkeit into account. As a consequence, freedom does not appear as the overarching factor of determination of ‘ethical life’ (to express it with the standard translation for constellations of Sittlichkeit). 20. For Hegel it is “essential” that the “pure and unconditional self-determination of the will” is the “root” of duty; he holds that Kant’s conception of autonomy of the will makes up the “firm foundation and point of departure” (RPh §135R/GW 14). Nevertheless, Kant depraves the standpoint of Sittlichkeit as he sticks to the perspective of morality instead of surpassing it towards Sittlichkeit; rather, Kant comes up with an “empty formalism” and a moral philosophy that merely offers a “rhetoric of duty for duty’s sake.” (RPh §135R/GW 14) See also RPh §10/GW 14, in which Hegel criticizes the perspective of ‘understanding’ and its conception of freedom as a ‘power’ and, hence, as a “possibility” that has to be applied to given material, an “application” that is not part of the essence of freedom; the perspective of understanding, therefore, only deals with the ‘abstract alone’ and not with the “idea and truth” of freedom (RPh §10R/GW 14). Cf. also RPh §15R/GW 14). 21. Note that for Hegel any existence of freedom is only possible within Sittlichkeit (this applies also to Robinson Crusoe, hermits, and the like, frequently discussed in the contemporary debate on ‘collective intentionality’). In the realm of objective spirit, the “relation to itself” of subjective spirit has been left and a “world” is brought about in which “freedom” exists (Enc. §385/GW 20). Also the products of practical spirit as subjective spirit, for Hegel, are “not yet deed and action” (Enc. §444/GW 20). On the level of subjective spirit, the free spirit or will has freedom as its “inner” determination and purpose; this purpose, then, on the level of objective spirit, is realized in an “eternally” found objectivity (Enc. §483/GW 20).

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Vieweg, Klaus. 2012. Das Denken der Freiheit: Hegels Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts. München: Fink. Wagner, Hans. 1980a. “Die vier großen Probleme Immanuel Kants: Wissen – Sittlichkeit – Recht – Religion.” (1978) In Kritische Philosophie: Systematische und historische Abhandlungen, edited by Karl Bärthlein and Werner Flach, 290–302. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Wagner, Hans. 1980b. “Kants kulturkritische Bedeutung heute.” (1975) In Kritische Philosophie: Systematische und historische Abhandlungen, edited by Karl Bärthlein and Werner Flach, 329–338. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Wagner, Hans. 1980c. “Moralität und Religion bei Kant.” (1975) In Kritische Philosophie: Systematische und historische Abhandlungen, edited by Karl Bärthlein and Werner Flach, 339–348. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Wagner, Hans. 2008. “Wie weit reicht die klassische Transzendentalphilosophie?” In Zu Kants Kritischer Philosophie, edited by Bernward Grünewald and Hariolf Oberer, 128–154. Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann. Wood, Allen W. 1990. Hegel’s Ethical Thought. Cambridge [England] and New York: Cambridge University Press.

Chapter 21

Speculative Institutionalism: Hegel’s Legacy for Any Political Economy that  Will Be Able to Present Itself as a Science Ivan Boldyrev

Hegel’s interest in political economy as a new science of “disembedded” society was certainly determined by his engagement with strengths and weaknesses of contemporaneous capitalism. In the classical political economy advanced primarily by Adam Smith, he saw the significant contribution to understanding the structural properties of this new world. His interest, however, was not only historical. At stake is not merely Hegel as a politically engaged and pre-occupied observer of current events, but also Hegel as a social philosopher, as someone who sought to understand how the forms of common material life exist, evolve, and are stabilized, and how his own vision of ideal society might be reconciled with the realities of capitalist economies. In this chapter, I do not intend to cover in full detail Hegel’s engagement with political economy of his time, although this topic is crucial and deserves attention.1 Rather, I wish to demonstrate how, through this engagement, Hegel developed his own social theory and what kind of relevance for today’s (political) economy this theory can possibly have. While the previous work on Hegel as an economic thinker mainly focused on the implications of Hegel’s thinking for today’s practical philosophy, and its concern was thus primarily normative, I will extend this discussion and touch upon the economic analysis proper. That is, I will demonstrate how Hegel’s normative engagement with economic and social issues is at the same time a methodological guide so that one can actually do economic research by drawing on Hegel’s ideas or at least subscribing to the general framework offered in his social philosophy.2

I. Boldyrev (*)  Radboud University Nijmegen, Nijmegen, The Netherlands

© The Author(s) 2020 M. F. Bykova and K. R. Westphal (eds.), The Palgrave Hegel Handbook, Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26597-7_21

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1 Speculative Political Economy: What Were the Questions? Hegel encountered political economy as a social science as early as 1799 when he wrote a (now lost) commentary to Sir James Steuart’s 1767 Inquiry into the Principles of Political Economy.3 Adam Smith’s Wealth of Nations (1776) became the second most important source of his knowledge. These background ideas were synthesized in Hegel’s Jena systems and later became part of his account of objective spirit in the Philosophy of Right. Hegel’s contact with political economy certainly explains much of his appreciation of modern individualism—of “the right of subjective freedom [that] has become the universal and actual principle of a new form of the world” (RPh §124/PR151),—and his turn towards more material and down-to-earth aspects of social life.4 Why was Smith’s political economy so interesting to Hegel? Smith showed how a “commercial society,” permeated by interpersonal and mutually beneficial transactions, that is, by the “invisible hand”, could demonstrate a fantastic dynamics and growth of wealth. It described a “system of political economy” and “a system of needs” that were necessary for Hegel’s account of modern freedom precisely because they provided the best way to capture this individualistic capitalist modernity—both as a new epoch and a new forms of culture and society it gave birth to,—with which one had to reckon. In the first Jena system (1803/4) Hegel explicitly takes up several of Smith’s arguments. In particular, he adopts the logic underlying the profit rate equalization in the classical political economy. Smith and Ricardo posited that the market mechanism would, ceteris paribus, equalize the rates of profit across industries because, roughly speaking, the market forces will draw capital from less profitable branches to the more profitable ones thus increasing competitive pressure in the latter and making profit rates uniform across the whole economy. Hegel uses the same type of argument while demonstrating that a laborer, in particularizing herself and increasing her individual skill, discovers “more useful tools” (a direct reminiscence of Smith). This discovery is unique, but it can become unique only by becoming universal while the others learn those tools: “they cancel its particularity, and it becomes directly a universal good” (SS 246). Another argument pertains to the use of machines. When a man allows nature to be worked over by a variety of machines, he does not cancel the necessity for his own laboring but only postpones it, and makes it more distant from the nature; and his living labor is not directed on nature as alive, but this negative vitality evaporates from it, and the laboring that remains to man becomes itself more machinelike; man diminishes labor only for the whole, not for the single [laborer]; for him it is increased rather; for the more machinelike labor becomes, the less it is worth, and the more one must work in that mode. (SS 247)

Here, two arguments originating mostly from the Scottish Enlightenment are taken together: the idea of cultural degradation due to the division of labor and the basic tenet of the labor theory of value positing the direct relation between the value of a good and the amount of living labor embodied in it.

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Bourgeois economy acquires its own universality: Between the range of needs of the single [agent], and his activity on their account, there enters the labor of the whole people, and the labor of any one is in respect of its contents, a universal labor for the needs of all, so as to be appropriate for the satisfaction of all of his needs … the satisfaction of needs is a universal dependence of everyone upon one another; for everyone all security and certainty that his labor as a single [agent] is directly adequate to his needs disappears; as a singular complex of needs he becomes universal. (SS 247)

Thus, already in Jena years Hegel develops a notion of abstract labor (see also JS III/GW 8:224–226; LPSJ 120f.) and invents the economic realm as an autonomous one—situated between the Aristotelian oikonomia of the family and the eighteenth century’s cameralist economy of the state. In exploring the logic of this autonomous realm of “civil society”—as an inexorably given historical datum— Hegel suggests both a descriptive account bearing many traits of Prussian capitalism (and somewhat adopting its social stratification) and a normative vision of objective spirit. In the Philosophy of Right, the main concepts used in economic matters are, again, needs and labor. Indeed, Hegel defines political economy (Staatsökonomie) as “the science which begins with the above viewpoints [needs and labor as means to satisfy them] but must go on to explain mass relationships and mass movements” (RPh §189R/PR227). Hegel is interested precisely in this social bond created by mutual economic dependencies of the civil society consisting of independent agents pursuing their autonomous ends. This society stirs both individual initiative and conformism. The fact that I have to fit in with other people brings the form of universality into play at this point. I acquire my means of satisfaction from others and must accordingly accept their opinions. But at the same time, I am compelled to produce means whereby others can be satisfied. Thus, the one plays into the hands of the other and is connected with it. To this extent, everything particular … takes on a social character; in the manner of dress and times of meals, there are certain conventions which one must accept, for in such matters, it is not worth the trouble to seek to display one’s own insight, and it is wisest to act as others do. (RPh §192R/PR230)

Hegel makes it sufficiently clear that this economic universality is the work of the invisible hand: In this dependence and reciprocity of work and the satisfaction of needs, subjective selfishness turns into a contribution towards the satisfaction of the needs of everyone else. By a dialectical movement, the particular is mediated by the universal so that each individual, in earning, producing, and enjoying on his own account … thereby earns and produces for the enjoyment of others. (RPh §199/PR, 233)

But the tropology of the economic in Hegel is more complicated and reflects his ambivalence towards the model of civil society.5 In Jena he refers to the universal system of need and labor as a monstrous system of community and mutual interdependence in a great people; life of the dead body, that moves itself within itself, one which ebbs and flows in its motion blindly, like the elements, and which requires continual strict dominance and taming like a wild beast. (SS 249)

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In the 1820s, Hegel reminds us of the particular interest which is active in civil society and invokes the freedom of trade and commerce against regulation from above; but the more blindly it immerses itself in its selfish ends, the more it requires such regulation to bring it back to the universal, and to moderate and shorten the duration of those dangerous convulsions to which its collisions give rise, and which should return to equilibrium by a process of unconscious necessity. (RPh §236R/PR262)

Thus, the market is not merely the agent of the universal, but also a Hobbesian battlefield on which everyone seeks one’s own profit (see Herzog 2013). Civilization produces its own monsters. The inherent instability of the market, the contingency and mutability of needs and tastes—something that makes the modern economy both flexible and increasingly universal, is at the same time conceived, in a proto-Keynesian fashion, as the root of its fragility (LPSJ 139f.). The division of labor and the growing specialization make the needs ever more refined and specific, thus reinforcing the (over)production and fostering the global expansion of the market. The economic dialectic here means that no genuine independence is possible without ever more dependencies, notably on the people we never met, on those whose only presence in our lives is secured by the invisible hand. The expansion of market freedom, “alternance incessante de singularisation et de socialization” (Chamley 1965, 251), associated with the new opportunities and capabilities, always has the other, darker side. The intensity of desires, the urgency of self-seeking, the ugliness of “utilitarian individualism”6 are the genuine drives behind a powerful economic machine of the invisible hand. But it is this machine that is ultimately responsible for global economic crises that were perceived as dangerous already in Hegel’s times. One of the major shortcomings of civil society—and thus of the universal capitalist regime of free economic exchange, at least in Hegel’s view of it—was the problem of poverty. Hegel’s main concern was, that on the free market, given the dynamics of modern capitalist system, people could not always secure their jobs. New abundance delivered by economic development within an ever more intricate and complex system of mutual dependence accounts for the shocks on the labor market, produces new scarcities and new misery. By depriving the individuals of their property, the capitalist system deprives them of their status as people, for property is a necessary human extension to be recognized as a legitimate part of the society (see Pereira Di Salvo 2015). The key way of securing one’s identity in this system was for Hegel to be a part of the profession, to be able to perform work and thus to have a legitimate place in the institutional structure. Once the instability of this very structure, the increasing mechanization making some professions redundant and some people easily replaceable, deprives them of their jobs and, generally, of the ability to work—since the labor is getting more specialized as the invisible hand contributes to the dispersion of qualifications—the rabble is formed, an indeterminate group of those who lost their identity and thus endanger the whole system.7 Hegel’s own solutions to the problem of poverty (such as colonization or corporations) do not seem to be viable on their own terms. “If, as

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it seems fair to infer when reading Hegel as a political economist, there is a ‘cunning of reason’ issuing commands to Smith’s ‘hidden hand,’ it is now clear that this cunning shows no great wisdom in dealing with poverty” (Teichgraeber 1977, 63).8 That is why many interpreters see in this failure the origins for the transition from Hegel to Marx (Wartenberg 1981; Ruda 2011).9 Whatever reading of Hegel’s position we may advance it is clear that the production of misery immanent to the civil society was for him an argument for the containment of the market. The economy had to be integrated into some higher entity, in both descriptive and normative ways.

2 Hegel’s Institutional Theory: A Tentative Reconstruction To tame the beast of the unrestrained market Hegel needed certain institutions—estates (Stände) and “corporations”. Hegel’s own theory of capitalist economy—and his social and political philosophy in general—was, in fact, an account of institutions, and it is here that most of his original insights are to be located.10 There are two important speculative ideas that we owe to Hegel and that are essential for his political economy. One is that the speculative whole, or social totality, is only present and alive when it is reaffirmed in the individual action, growing out of it, as it were. Another, which on reflection, seems to restate the first one, involves the retroactive characterization of the individual action: there is no individuality, intentions, self-interested agency and the like that would not be always already mediated by the (social) whole. In following my personal idiosyncratic goals, I pursue social ends, both through my motivations and through the results of my actions, the former being essentially linked to the latter. The best way to think of these ideas would be to formulate them in a dynamic, Aristotelian way: the whole is in becoming; it reaffirms itself in and through the everyday actions of the individuals; and the individuals (re)gain themselves and their interests and identities by engaging with each other, by recreating the institutional scaffolds and thus by actualizing their freedom (see RPh §153/PR 197f.). Institutions are both the infrastructure and the agents of universality. Hegel argued in favor of such an individual agency already in 1802. In the rational social order, “freedom exists … in the fact that the single part, being a subordinate system in the whole organism, is independently self-active in its own specific character” (SS 157). Since “the reality of the universal consists of its being a mass of individuals” what we need to explore is the movement of the individuals in which, after the separation of universal and particular, the latter becomes equal to the former (SS 157). For Hegel, individualism remained an inescapable starting point of modernity. Yet, what he wanted to overcome was the formalistic individualism of natural right theorists and Kant.11 He realized that individualism itself emerged out of (and

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was thus dependent upon) particular institutional and cultural milieu of objective spirit, and it were these forms of common life that were to be considered in order to understand and perhaps to reform modernity. Institutions as a concept and a phenomenon are central both for Hegel’s political philosophy and for the contemporary economic theory. Today’s institutions, although they differ in many respects from those Hegel had in mind, still form the core of human sociality. Explaining the nature, structure, and dynamics of economic institutions amounts to building a comprehensive theory of economy that would answer the fundamental questions (such as where do institutions come from and how do they change) but also address some more specific issues of interest for economists (pertaining to economic development, inequality, etc.). What can be inherited from Hegel in exploring institutions? I will provide a very general and schematic account by highlighting three principles that are characteristic for Hegel’s approach and can serve both as ontological presuppositions and methodological heuristics for institutional theory.12 The first principle implies continuity between the “subjective” and “objective” (or intersubjective) dimensions of human life. For Hegel, both of them are moments in the movement of spirit. This explains two tendencies in Hegel’s political philosophy: his staunch defense of modern individualism (see, in particular, Schmitz 1957) as a foundation of any conceivable and historically relevant political philosophy and his emphasis on the social entanglement of any self-interested agency. Continuity principle means the compatibility and dialectical unity of these tendencies. Yet, once we attempt to operationalize it further, it also implies that the totality of social life is an externalization of the human mind, or subjective spirit. Both “nature” and “spirit” play their role in the social totality and physicality of human life, and they have to be taken seriously, if we are to understand how ethical communities are formed and how they should be organized. Thus, a Hegelian picture of institutional reality involves the interaction within the overwhelming totality of spirit, the movement of the subjective becoming objective or, to put it in the language of social theory, of agency and structure permeating each other. Implications for economic analysis are very powerful. In grasping what really matters—the totality of spirit, the institutional wholeness of modern life—neither individuals (hence the relevance of “methodological individualism”), nor the physical, external dimensions of social action (hence the growing importance of cognitive science and neuroeconomics in current accounts of institutions), nor its intersubjective embeddedness constitutive of modern individualism (hence the much needed emphasis on culture, values and other phenomena, such as “social capital”) can be forgotten. Another principle is the idea of performativity. To come into being, institutions should be enacted, the continuum between the first and the second nature should be the process of its own becoming. Only by being expressed and by existing as this very expression can institutional structures be actualized. They exist as dynamic teleological entities, maintained and reproduced performatively through individual actions and practices. “The determinateness of spirit is … manifestation. Spirit is not a certain determinateness or content, the expression or exteriority

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of which is merely a distinct form of it. Rather than revealing something therefore, its determinateness and content is itself this revelation” (Enc. §383; Enc. 3P, 53). The final element completing the picture is the idea of recognition. True universality—which the institutional reality purports to be—affirms itself only by engaging with the other (see RPh §192). This engagement often achieves the form of struggle when individuals strive for personal recognition in order to elevate themselves to the level of social universality. Importantly, recognition is also present in the relations between individuals and institutions. These ideas—that the terrain behind the existing structures is in fact contested and that what matters for the institutions to be durable and non-alienating is intrinsic acceptance—are the elements of Hegel’s legacy that should become—or have already become—part of institutional analysis. Recognition is also the major force behind the institutions Hegel described: thus, to be a member of a corporation one has to be recognized as such. In fact, recognition underlies most of the concepts Hegel employs, such as rights, person, obligation, contract or property (something today’s institutional economists often discuss when they talk of “enforcement” or even “culture”).13 “Needs and means, as existing in reality [als reelles Dasein], become a being [Sein] for others by whose needs and work their satisfaction is mutually conditioned. That abstraction which becomes a quality of both needs and means … also becomes a determination of the mutual relations … between individuals. This universality, as the quality of being recognized, is the moment which makes isolated and abstract needs, means, and modes of satisfaction into concrete, i.e. social ones” (RPh §192/PR 229). However, the radicalness of this move—putting the conflict, tension, struggle behind any seemingly stable economic institutional scaffold—is still not enough integrated into current economic discourses, recognition is not recognized enough. A good economic example from Hegel’s own writings is a concept of property. Property—as a general concept including all kinds of economic goods—is characteristic for the modern age. Commenting upon the Christian command that condemns the externality of the riches, Hegel in his early theological writings states that “[t]he fate of property has become too powerful for us to tolerate reflections on it, to find its abolition thinkable” (MM 1:333; ETW 221). Property as a sign of historical age symbolizes for early Hegel the separation, disruptive alienation and at the same time the ineluctability of modernity. In the Philosophy of Right, the notions of property and contract are used to explore the relation of the individual person to the external world and to other persons in the rational realm of objective spirit: “Not until he has property does the person exist as reason” (RPh §41A/PR 73). Property is constitutive for the rational free will realizing itself in the world, and contract designates the transition from the physical to the social, intersubjective determination of owning. Willingness to acquire property—and not this or that particular piece of it—thus becomes a universalizing feature that links persons to each other. There are similar concepts of this kind—such as labor or a related idea of Bildung14—describing the dynamic extension of the subjective interiority and particularity and its adaptation to the social totality. Only this continuous movement,

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involving also performativity and recognition, can transform an individual into what she essentially is, a universality. Individuals, as citizens of this state, are private persons who have their own interest as their end. Since this end is mediated through the universal, which thus appears to the individuals as a means, they can attain their end only in so far as they themselves determine their knowledge, volition, and action in a universal way and make themselves links in the chain of this continuum [Zusammenhang]. (RPh §187//PR224)

The continuum involves externality, a materiality of things in which a person finds itself, and gets recognized. Continuity immunizes this performative movement from becoming empty and groundless constructivism (without, however, making Hegel a vulgar materialist), performation adds certain teleological directionality and dynamics into the whole picture of interconnected institutional reality, and recognition defines its genuinely social nature. The latter is the fact that this economic universality is a collective undertaking, a claim, to be shared, accepted or rejected in the space of common life. These methodological principles underlying Hegel’s theory of institutions are at work in many important contexts, I will just pick up two of them related to Hegel’s most pressing problem: to establish a mediation between the reality of capitalism and the normative vision of ethical life. The concepts Hegel uses, are self-unsealing: they both name a phenomenon and provide a solution, describe and prescribe. On the individual scale this role is played by habit, on the social level a prominent example is a corporation.

3 Habit: A Redemptive Repetition How do institutions emerge and how are they sustained? No economic theory of institutions can skip these questions. Hegel singled out one important mechanism of institutionalization that is in many ways compatible to the contemporary theoretical efforts. This is a habit—as a “second nature.” It is through the mechanical reproduction in a habitual action that a true institutional universality—and thus freedom—can emerge. Habit, as a repeated immediacy, links the somatic to the psychic, the particular to the universal, the contingent to the essential (Malabou 2005, 26, 37f., 74): a repetitive action engages with the external while not identifying itself fully with the transient externality. The individual adapts to the universal by getting accustomed to it and, at the same time, by recognizing in it his or her own consummation. Crucially, the habit creates a reflective distance of oneself from oneself (Lumsden 2013, 126), thus making the intentional self-posited structure objective (a habit can be described as a stable and regular), without losing its ideality (it is up to me whether to follow the habit or not). In enabling the transition from nature into spirit (see Malabou 2005, 55), habit makes the continuity dimension of institutional reality more palpable. The first nature becomes the second one, and continuity extends to the legislation of both.

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Being simply identical with the actuality of individuals, the ethical [das Sittliche], as their general mode of behavior, appears as custom [Sitte]; and the habit of the ethical appears as a second nature which takes the place of the original and purely natural will and is the all-pervading soul, significance, and actuality of individual existence [Dasein]. It is spirit living and present as a world, and only thus does the substance of spirit begin to exist as spirit. … Just as nature has its laws, and as animals, trees, and the sun obey their law, so is custom the law appropriate to the spirit of freedom. (RPh §151, 151A/PR195)

No genuine freedom would be possible without radical naturalization of institutional rationality as a habit and the habit’s elevation to form the identity of individuals (Lumsden 2013, 127). Habit is declared to be “what is most essential to the existence of all spirituality within the individual subject” (Enc. §410; Enc. 3P, 397). It turns out that the notion of habit, prominent in American pragmatism and “old” institutionalism, has become significant in pragmatist sociology and institutional economics (Camic 1986; Hodgson 2004, 2006).15 For this kind of thinking habits “are the constitutive material of institutions, providing them with enhanced durability, power, and normative authority. In turn, by reproducing shared habits of thought, institutions create strong mechanisms of conformism and normative agreement” (Hodgson 2006, 7). This view implies that habit does not oppose the intentionality of individual economic action, but it rather conditions and even directs it. Through habit, individuals become Hegelian “moments” of institutions, their preferences and needs change and incessantly re-create the institutional totality—both the framework and the content of the social whole. Here too, habit mediates between agency and structure and ensures institutional stability. With the notion of habit we thus see how institutional reality can be embodied in the individual agency and how this agency is shaped by the social. And it also becomes apparent how the present concerns of institutional economics are prefigured in important ways in Hegel’s social ontology.

4 Corporations: Devices of Conformity An institutional solution to the problem of mediating individuals through the ethical community, of actualizing “the unity of the universal … with subjective particularity” (RPh §229/PR259), and of fighting poverty are corporations, that are professional groups or associations with voluntary membership based on skills. Just as habit is a second nature, a corporation is a second family for its members. “Within the corporation, the help which poverty receives, loses its contingent and unjustly [mit Unrecht] humiliating character, and wealth, in fulfilling the duty it owes to its association, loses the ability to provoke arrogance in its possessor and envy in others” (RPh §253/PR272). What makes the case of corporations similar to the discussion of habit is the focus on the individual economic agent and its preferences. These (mostly selfish)

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preferences are radically transformed within the corporation. For it is recognized that its member “belongs to a whole which is itself a member of society in general [and] has an interest in, and endeavors to promote, the less selfish end of this whole” (RPh §253/PR271).16 A profession is a medium of economic universalization in the civil society that, at the same time, puts the limits to the potentially limitless self-seeking.17 In so far as the rooting of the particular in the universal is contained immediately in the spirit of the corporation, “it is in this spirit that such depth and strength of disposition as the state possesses are to be found” (RPh §289/PR 330). The specific features of corporations, the details on what kinds of entities they really are and whether they are compatible with the workings of the free market— all these issues remain vague in Hegel (Herzog 2013, 2015). But his intention to solve the problem of individualistic atomization remains, and at the interface of the particular and the universal Hegel puts corporations as a specific embodiment of universality, an apparatus of labor and Bildung producing new kind of people— the citizens of freedom.

5 Hegel and Current Economics: Accepting the Prophet? Nothing seems to be more alien to Hegel’s thought than contemporary economic theory. Indeed, how can abstract mathematized models of rational economic action, a perfect specimen of what Hegel called abstract understanding, be compatible with historical dialectic of economy and society? Most of Hegel commentators criticize the narrow idea of economic rationality and draw on Hegel for an alternative.18 In many ways they are right, for economics today remains indeed mostly a positivistic “mathematical politics” with very rudimentary philosophical self-consciousness. However, a more informed analysis undermines the first impression and invites us to differentiate. The historical starting point for Hegel and for contemporary economists is very similar: both assume that an individual agent with its rights and responsibilities forms the basis of modernity—the one still not replaced by anything else. At the same time, no matter how close Hegel would be to modern economics in a normative way, economic science as an explanatory endeavor is less and less seen as merely a study of individual choice and increasingly as a science of institutions or other structures of interaction, such as networks. This is certainly true about the upsurge of institutional economics, but it is also true even about economic theory in its most abstract game-theoretic ramifications (Ross 2012). Hegel was interested in how individual preferences emerge and can be normatively channeled, and the economists and economic psychologists are now turning to the same problem. It should be sufficient only to name theories of “endogenous preferences” (Bowles 1998) and the “fast and frugal heuristics” program (Gigerenzer 2008). While the former seek to understand how the preferences

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are formed, and not merely pre-given,19 the latter develops the idea of new Enlightenment—promoting more rational and, presumably, more responsible behavior emerging out of the interactions between the decision-making individual and its environment. Through the advent of “behavioral” approaches—and the concomitant openness towards psychology and experimental methods—economics is getting increasingly naturalized. The human body with its emotional and cognitive frameworks, the details and contexts of particular economic actions—including, crucially, habitual dispositions, and the resulting patterns of interaction—are gaining eminence and becoming an integral part of economic analysis. Following the principle of continuity this tendency gains new legitimacy in the study of institutions. Other Hegelian principles—performativity and recognition—are less pronounced, but no less present in institutional theories. Economic thinking pervades decision-making and policy discussions, informs the new nudging solutions and financial products, fuels public discourse in many fields and thus becomes an essential moment of the social totality, an intellectual foundation of today’s objective spirit, albeit, admittedly, with mixed consequences.20 Recognition—among the individuals and between the individuals and institutions—is also both an important assumption and a problem in contemporary economic accounts. One particular research perspective could be helpful as an example, and this is the theory of social preferences (see Bowles and Polanía-Reyes 2012 for an overview). Based on the experimental evidence, it demonstrates how the other-regarding, altruistic, or else intersubjectively oriented motivations emerge, what hinders and what promotes them, and why they are more fruitful in terms of economic performance. It draws on a vast tradition of research in economics arguing that selfishness and greed, isolated—or, in Hegel’s parlance, “abstracted”—from the cooperative totality produce suboptimal outcomes. The most elementary account of this tradition is a famous “prisoners dilemma” game, in which purely self-interested strategies fail, while the ability to cooperate and to sustain the cooperation yields long-term benefits.21 The idea of social—or, better to say, other-regarding—preferences can be interpreted as a particular realization of Hegel’s vision. We see how individuals acting in an intersubjective way look like, what the members of the true ethical community actually do, and how in the society populated by self-interested agents, the civil society, the values and norms of common life can be interiorized and preserved. There are further important analogies between Hegel’s speculative perspective and contemporary approaches in behavioral economic analysis. Perhaps the most conspicuous one concerns current accounts of economic preferences and actions. Standard economic theory, at least as we know it since the postwar stabilization of “mainstream,” considered economic action as a result of instrumentally rational deliberation—something vaguely referred to as rational choice theory. According to this theory, an agent has certain given interests (embodied in his preferences over certain goods, services or modes of acting) and constraints, and the action is a result of reasoning based on these primordial elements.

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Hegel, however, developed a different account of action (Taylor 1983a, b), in which no strict separation between an actor and her actions, between the intention and the very process of acting is made. In this pragmatist mode, “[w]hat the subject is, is the series of its actions” (RPh §124/PR151). The subject, the actor, realizes herself in the ongoing performative process of learning in which intentions and actions shape each other. Of course the inherent sociality of action, its embodiment in shared practices, in a particular form of life, is also at play here. As behavioral research in economics and economic psychology demonstrates, this is a viable account of economic action (Ariely and Norton 2007) and, indeed, one of the most promising venues of research. Economic actors are not abstract, pregiven units of a mechanical universe, they are “moments” of historically evolving institutional framework, subjective spirits inhabiting and molding the objective one.

6 Conclusion: Political Economy of the Future We are now in a position to ask: how could a Hegelian economic science look like? As I tried to demonstrate, Hegel’s attempts to keep free markets at bay and, generally, to re-integrate the modern individualism into the overwhelming structures of ethical life are to be directly associated with his theory of institutions. For objective spirit is essentially a set of institutions that we need to explore in order to rationally comprehend—and thus master—the modern social life. Hence, an economic science of tomorrow that Hegel takes seriously has to be an account of institutions. At the same time, it has to emphasize the continuity between the laws of nature and the laws of the second nature, the body and the social world. Put it differently, it has to include insights from behavioral and cognitive sciences—something behavioral economists have been doing during the last decades. The future political economy also has to enlarge the traditional concept of rationality and to complement it with the institutional one, referring to the stability and reproducibility of the whole economic system rather than merely to the instrumental accounts of standard methodological individualism. This discipline has to be culturally and historically embedded, since the economy itself, for Hegel, is a moment of the overarching socio-cultural and institutional organism in which laws and norms matter only when recognized by the individuals. Hegel (especially in his essay on Natural Law, see NL) criticized empty formalism, but he would also be opposing the purely descriptive, atheoretical approach of the Historical school. Normative criteria evaluating today’s institutions have to emerge within concrete communities sharing them, this is the only way the particular and the universal could extend themselves to each other in a pulsating movement of interiorization and exteriorization. No pure particularity will work: new economic science needs new concrete universality—both as an intersubjective dimension of any of its concepts (for, as we remember, the social is

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synonymous with the universal), and as a normative frame in, e.g., addressing such pressing issues as inequality. It is in this context that Hegel’s key “policy advice”—to provide the opportunity to earn one’s living for everyone—gets its full meaning. The political economy in Hegelian mode would involve the analysis of cultural communities, groups, in which the self-seeking, still pervasive in modern economies, would outgrow itself and be transformed in another, more cooperative ethos. This transformation—initiated by modernity itself, as a natural unfolding of its own potentialities (see Buchwalter 2015)—is the most compelling way to concrete freedom, a concept virtually absent in modern economics, but worth being reclaimed, with Hegel at the back of our heads.

Notes





1. This has been done previously, see, in particular: Chamley (1963, 1965), Waszek (1988), Priddat (1990), and Herzog (2013). 2. By assuming that this enterprise is possible and even worthwhile, I do not delve into the complex issues of the internal coherence of Hegel’s oeuvre and of the very possibility of picking up certain ideas while leaving others (say, the speculative deductions of the Logic) unemployed. Whether it would make sense to embrace Hegel’s system in its entirety and whether any kind of piecemeal adoption compels us to accept the rest, are interesting questions, but they are beyond the scope of this chapter. I would only note that the strategy of getting ‘inspired’ by Hegel without becoming an orthodox Hegelian—something defended explicitly by, e.g., Herzog (2013)—hardly diverges from most of the approaches to reading Hegel today. 3. On Steuart see Chamley (1963), Neocleous (1998), and Caboret (1999). 4. One of the first to claim this was Georg Lukács (1975). See also: Waszek (1988). 5. See more on these tropes and on the less explicit and more important danger of the economic for Hegel’s speculation—lying in the necessity of economic externalization and abstraction for the speculative itself—in Boldyrev (2016). 6. See Walton (1984) attributing it to classical political economy. 7. Ruda (2011) provides an interesting account of rabble and emphasizes its universality: in the market society, everyone is in precarious position and potentially a part of rabble. The inherent instability of capitalism always makes the pauperization a possibility. 8. Cf. Avineri’s (1972, 154) claim that no real solution is provided by Hegel. A huge critical literature on Hegel’s views on poverty cannot be examined here, but it is worth mentioning at least a few items. See e.g., Fatton (1986), Fraser (1999). On the contexts and contradictions of Hegel’s analysis of colonization see a helpful essay by Paquette (2003). 9. On the inherent tension between civil society and the state see also Schmidt am Busch (2002). 10. This also explains why Hegel’s economic ideas are not to be separated from his legal perspective on modernity and why his economic philosophy belongs to the philosophy of right (Priddat 1990). 11. No fully exhaustive account of literature on that topic may be given, see a useful introductory presentation e.g., in Schnädelbach (2000). 12. This account is essentially based on my joint work with Carsten Herrmann-Pillath. See the first formulation in Boldyrev and Herrmann-Pillath (2013) and a more extensive analysis in Herrmann-Pillath and Boldyrev (2014, Chapter 2). 13. On the latter, see the recent extensive survey in: Alesina and Giuliano (2015).

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14. Bildung is “the absolute transition to the infinitely subjective substantiality of ethical life, which is no longer immediate and natural, but spiritual and at the same time raised to the shape of universality” (RPh §187/PR225). 15. Thorstein Veblen defined institutions as “settled habits of thought common to the generality of men” (Veblen 1909, 626). 16. On the formation of identities and preferences in Hegel see Herzog (2013, 2015) and for a broader Hegelian perspective Herrmann-Pillath and Boldyrev (2014). 17. There are many ways to describe this emerging loyalty to institutional universality, for example by invoking the individual responsibility of consumers (Anderson 2001). 18. Such examples abound, the most recent are commentaries on Hegel’s Phenomenology by Pirmin Stekeler (2014) and Ardis Collins (2015). 19. This is an important complement to Herzog (2015) who rightly sees the idea of taking the (self-interested) preferences as given (common for current economics) in Hegel’s account of police in the Philosophy of Right. However, in endogenizing preferences (that is, in making them emerge out of the logic of their models and not assuming them as given) economists go further and are increasingly becoming unacknowledged Hegelians. See, however, Jones (2001) for a more cautious treatment of Hegel’s political economy, emphasizing its historical situatedness and limitations. 20. For a more elaborate perspective on this, drawing on the notions of extended mind and distributed cognition, see again Herrmann-Pillath and Boldyrev (2014, Chapter 2). 21. Hegel’s view of the corrupting influence of unrestricted markets upon individual moral integrity—rooted itself in the long-standing tradition of thought—has an immediate counterpart in the today’s accounts of how ‘intrinsic motivation’, an unconditional mode of doing things for their own sake, is ‘crowded out’ by monetary incentives and economization.

Bibliography Alesina, Alberto, and Paola Giuliano. 2015. “Culture and Institutions,” Journal of Economic Literature 53 (4): 898–944. Anderson, Joel. 2001. “Hegel’s Implicit View on How to Solve the Problem of Poverty.” In Beyond Liberalism and Communitarianism, edited by Robert Williams, 185–205. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Ariely, Dan, and Michael I. Norton. 2007. “How Actions Create—Not Just Reveal— Preferences.” Trends in Cognitive Science 12 (1): 13–16. Avineri, Shlomo. 1972. Hegel’s Theory of the Modern State. Cambridge and New York: Cambridge University Press. Boldyrev, Ivan. 2016. “The Beast and the Universal: Hegel’s Critique of Political Economy.” Crisis and Critique 3 (3): 84–91. Boldyrev, Ivan, and Carsten Herrmann-Pillath. 2013. “Hegel’s ‘Objective Spirit’, Extended Mind, and the Institutional Nature of Economic Action.” Mind & Society 12 (2): 177–202. Bowles, Samuel. 1998. “Endogenous Preferences: The Cultural Consequences of Markets and other Economic Institutions.” Journal of Economic Literature 36 (1): 75–111. Bowles, Samuel, and Sandra Polanía-Reyes. 2012. “Economic Incentives and Social Preferences: Substitutes or Complements?” Journal of Economic Literature 50 (2): 368–425. Buchwalter, Andrew. 2015. “Introduction. Hegel and Capitalism.” In Hegel and Capitalism, edited by Andrew Buchwalter, 1–17. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Caboret, Dominique. 1999. “The Market Economy and Social Classes in James Steuart and G. W. F. Hegel.” In The Economics of James Steuart, edited by Ramón Tortajada, 57–75. London and New York: Routledge. Camic, Charles. 1986. “The Matter of Habit.” American Journal of Sociology 91 (5): 1039–1087.

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Chamley, Paul. 1963. Économie Politique et Philosophie chez Steuart et Hegel. Paris: Dalloz. Chamley, Paul. 1965. “Les Origines de la Pensée Économique de Hegel.” Hegel-Studien 3: 225–261. Collins, Ardis B. 2015. “Anonymity, Responsibility, and the Many Faces of Capitalism: Hegel and the Crisis of the Modern Self.” In Hegel and Capitalism, edited by Andrew Buchwalter, 53–69. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Fatton, Robert, Jr. 1986. “Hegel and the Riddle of Poverty: The Limits of Bourgeois Political Economy.” History of Political Economy 18 (4): 579–600. Fraser, Ian. 1999. “Speculations on Poverty in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right.” The European Legacy 1 (7): 2055–2068. Gigerenzer, Gerd. 2008. “Moral Intuition = Fast and Frugal Heuristics?” In Moral Psychology, Vol. 2: The Cognitive Science of Morality: Intuition and Diversity, edited by Walter SinnottArmstrong, 1–26. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Herrmann-Pillath, Carsten, and Ivan Boldyrev. 2014. Hegel, Institutions, and Economics: Performing the Social. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Herzog, Lisa. 2013. Inventing the Market: Smith, Hegel, and Political Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Herzog, Lisa. 2015. “Two Ways of ‘Taming’ the Market: Why Hegel Needs the Police and the Corporations.” In Hegel and Capitalism, edited by Andrew Buchwalter, 147–162. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Hodgson, Geoffrey. 2004. “Reclaiming Habit for Institutional Economics.” Journal of Economic Psychology 25 (4): 651–660. Hodgson, Geoffrey. 2006. “What Are Institutions?” Journal of Economic Issues 40 (1): 1–25. Lukács, Georg. 1975. The Young Hegel. London: Merlin Press. Lumsden, Simon. 2013. “Between Nature and Spirit: Hegel’s Account of Habit.” In Essays on Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, edited by David S. Stern, 121–138. Albany, NY: SUNY Press. Malabou, Catherine. 2005. The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, and Dialectic. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Neocleous, Mark. 1998. “Policing the System of Needs: Hegel, Political Economy, and the Police of the Market.” History of European Ideas 24 (1): 43–58. Paquette, Gabriel. 2003. “Hegel’s Analysis of Colonialism and Its Roots in Scottish Political Economy.” Clio 32 (4): 415–433. Pereira Di Salvo, Carlos. 2015. “Hegel’s Torment: Poverty and the Rationality of the Modern State.” In Hegel and Capitalism, edited by Andrew Buchwalter, 101–116. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Priddat, Birger. 1990. Hegel als Ökonom. Berlin: Duncker und Humblot. Ross, Don. 2012. “The Economic Agent: Not Human, but Important.” In Handbook of the Philosophy of Science. Volume 13: Philosophy of Economics, edited by Uskali Mäki, 691– 735. Amsterdam: Elsevier. Ruda, Frank. 2011. Hegel’s Rabble. An Investigation into Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. London and New York: Continuum. Schmidt am Busch, Hans-Christoph. 2002. Hegels Begriff der Arbeit. Berlin: Akademie Verlag. Schmitz, Hermann. 1957. Hegel als Denker der Individualität. Meisenheim/Glan: Hain. Schnädelbach, Herbert. 2000. Hegels praktische Philosophie. Ein Kommentar der Texte in der Reihenfolge ihrer Entstehung. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp. Stedman Jones, Gareth. 2001. “Hegel and the Economics of Civil Society.” In Civil Society: History and Possibilities, edited by Sudipta Kaviraj and Sunil Khilnani, 105–130. Cambridge, etc.: Cambridge University Press. Stekeler, Pirmin. 2014. Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes. Ein dialogischer Kommentar. Bd. 1: Gewissheit und Vernunft. Bd. 2: Geist und Religion. Hamburg: Felix Meiner. Taylor, Charles. 1983a. “Hegel and the Philosophy of Action.” In Hegel’s Philosophy of Action, edited by Lawrence Stepelevich and David Lamb, 1–18. Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press.

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Taylor, Charles. 1983b. “Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind.” In Contemporary Philosophy: A New Survey. Vol. 4, edited by Guttorm Fløristad, 135–155. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Teichgraeber, Richard. 1977. “Hegel on Property and Poverty.” Journal of the History of Ideas 38 (1): 47–64. Veblen, Thorstein. 1909. “The Limitations of Marginal Utility.” Journal of Political Economy 17 (9): 620–636. Walton, A. S. 1984. “Economy, Utility and Community in Hegel’s Theory of Civil Society.” In The State and Civil Society: Studies in Hegel’s Political Philosophy, edited by Zbigniew A. Pelczynski, 244–261. Cambridge, etc.: Cambridge University Press. Wartenberg, Thomas E. 1981. “Poverty and Class Structure in Hegel’s Theory of Civil Society.” Philosophy and Social Criticism 8 (2): 169–182. Waszek, Norbert. 1988. The Scottish Enlightenment and Hegel’s Account of ‘Civil Society.’ Dordrecht, Boston, and London: Nijhoff-Kluwer.

Chapter 22

Hegel’s Philosophy of Bildung Marina F. Bykova

1 Introduction Bildung is one of the key concepts of Hegel’s philosophy that, in contrast to Kant’s, attempts to completely grasp reality in all its complexity and dynamic development. This philosophy deals with the world of human experience, the world, not as a collection of contingent facts and successive events, but the rational, mediated form of historical actuality, brought into existence through human activity (see LPWH 50f./VPhWIntro 58f.). In this sense, Bildung, traditionally understood as a formative development of the self, becomes an essential feature of the historical and systematic dynamics of Hegel’s account of the world itself. The German word Bildung has no direct equivalent in English. In literature, it is usually translated as education or maturation. I argue that neither of these variations fully captures specific meanings given to the term in Hegel’s philosophical discourse. Perhaps more appropriate in many contexts would be to render Bildung as enculturation. While not ideal, this rendering seems to be conceptually closer to Hegel’s own use of the term. In this chapter, I use “enculturation” to render Bildung, though occasionally I use some other terms to emphasize specific connotations of Hegel’s usage. The idea that Bildung is central to Hegel’s account of the unending, historical development of individual human subjects and of humanity at large is widely recognized. However, there is no agreement about the exact meaning in which Hegel uses the term, nor about its systematic significance within his philosophy. In scholarly literature, Hegel’s notion of Bildung is often explained in terms of education, conceived either as a pedagogical theory or as a process of developing individual human’s potentials and capacities (see Wood 1998; Uljens 2002;

M. F. Bykova (*)  North Carolina State University, Raleigh, NC, USA e-mail: [email protected]

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Munzel 2003). Another popular interpretation of Bildung treats it as synonymous with culture, understood as resulting from human activity (see, for example, Levi 1984; Markus 2011). In this reading, Bildung acquires some social-historical characteristics, but is predominantly understood in its universalistic worldly aspect alone without the important connection to the individual subject. While both of these connotations are important to understanding Hegel’s use of the term, in Hegel’s usage, Bildung is still more significant. It is worth mentioning that Hegel, who is well known for being meticulous about the terminology he employs, in addition to Bildung, also uses the terms “Ausbildung” (the German word for “education”) and “Kultur” (the German word for “culture”) in his writings. He utilizes both terms rather consistently, and neither of them “in a quite sporadic and accidental manner” (Markus 2011, 400), as some believe. A quick search shows that Hegel uses the terms “Kultur” and “Ausbildung” in the Philosophy of Right only eleven times each.1 To be sure, in the same work, he employs the term Bildung more than a hundred times. This fact itself should already give one a good idea of what kind of importance Hegel attaches to the notion of Bildung. There are certainly many other, rather conceptual and more serious, reasons to support this claim, to which I will turn later. For now it should suffice to say that merely equating Hegel’s concept of Bildung with either education or culture, in my view, largely misrepresents the meaning that the thinker assigns to this notion. Both interpretations are limited and, as such, neither of them is able to capture the whole complexity of the term how Hegel actually uses it in his systematic writings. For Hegel, the term refers to the formative self-development of individual and universal spiritual entities: human individuals and the human race construed as world spirit. This self-development occurs through the own self-directed activity of a spiritual being, which is simultaneously the activity of self-discovery and of self-realization. Hegel portrays Bildung as an on-going dialectical (contradiction-ridden) process, a series of achievements that contribute to the individual’s self-making. Yet this process of self-formation is not a purely individual undertaking; it is a social enterprise that takes place in the historical and social world (the world of spirit) through various interactions with other individuals. Only through this dialectical dynamic does the spiritual being come to self-realization, which is manifest in freedom from dependence upon nature and eventually from everything that is given as pre-determined. It is this complex process of the formation of the universal subjects of thought, will, and action historically and socially developed within the cultural forms of the manifest (world) spirit that Hegel describes as the “path of Bildung.”2 In this chapter, I outline the basic connotations of Bildung, how Hegel conceptualizes it, and discuss the role this concept plays in his philosophical systematic. I argue that there are at least three key meanings, in which Hegel uses the term: (1) Bildung as formal education or schooling; (2) Bildung as social enculturation understood as the “cultivation of the self” through one’s participation in social life with other individuals; and (3) Bildung as “acculturation” conceived as the process of recapturing and appropriating the “cultural formation of the world” (PhG

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GW 9:25.7) while striving to actualize oneself as a historical self. For brevity, I will refer to these three meanings as (1) educational, (2) social, and (3) historicalcultural aspects of Bildung. Despite some important distinctions between these three aspects of Bildung, they all are closely connected; only taken together do they explicate Hegel’s concept of Bildung in all its dialectical rigor and complexity. In this chapter, I will mainly focus on the social and historical-cultural meanings of Bildung, while just briefly mentioning the educational one. In what follows, I show that in Hegel’s philosophical systematic, Bildung is conceptualized as a fundamental, social-historical project of the spirit’s self-cultivation, a path toward rational autonomy and actively attained freedom from natural immediacy of life; a path which unfolds through contradiction, difference, the dialectic of alienation, intersubjective interactions within the social realm, and participation in cultural history. In terms of Bildung, Hegel discusses such issues as otherness, negations, alienation, recognition, and freedom that are vital to understanding the human reality and all human social and historical enterprises. Such a fundamental conceptualization of Bildung substantiates the paramount role the idea plays in Hegel’s philosophy, whose task he famously defined as the rational comprehension of the world of spirit (MM 7:26–28). I argue that although Hegel does not offer a systematic account of Bildung, he introduces it as a central idea that illuminates a complex relationship between the human individual and the historical-cultural world, shedding light on how these two are connected. Presenting a great panorama of Bildung in its manifold connotations, Hegel thus elaborates it, I would suggest, as a philosophy of Bildung. This philosophy captures the intricate process of attaining both human (spiritual) self-realization and self-awareness of this realization in reality. In this sense, Bildung, which is prominent throughout all of Hegel’s work—from the Phenomenology to Philosophy of Right and the Lectures on the World History— provides important insights into his humanistic philosophy3 and is instrumental to understanding his philosophical project. The chapter begins with a brief overview of the history of the German neologism “Bildung” and explains the shift in its meaning that took place in German philosophy in the nineteenth century. Next, it turns to Hegel’s usage of the term and discusses in some detail Bildung in its social and historical-cultural connotations identified above. It concludes with some remarks concerning the role of Bildung in Hegel’s philosophical enterprise.

2 On the Early History of the Term While the term “Bildung” came into fashion in Germany at the end of the eigh­ teenth century, where it gave voice to the intellectual discourse of the late Enlightenment, this neologism has ancient roots. Etymologically, the term combines two different ideas expressed by two pairs of Latin terms: forma—formatio and imago—imitatio. The former pair emphasizes the activity of producing or

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giving shape to a concrete object; the latter points to a relation between the original image (Vorbild or Bild) and its reproduction (Abbild), which imitates or resembles the original. Thus “Bildung” means two things: first, a forming (bilden), in the sense of shaping a certain object according to specific rules or an arrangement that gives rise to a form; and, second, an imprinting (ab-bilden) by an image (Bild), i.e. an imprinting such that the product closely resembles the original model, which may be endowed with an absolute value. This double meaning reveals the complexity of the notion of Bildung. It should be understood not only as the idea of formation or developing the whole into a living whole, but also as to include an idea of forming by a model, which should be imitated in a certain type of form that can closely match the valuable Vorbild. The complex relationship between the original and its reproduction introduces a crucial element into the concept of Bildung. Not only does it add a dynamic character to Bildung, but it also injects an idea of perfection into it. The latter becomes a main criterion for measuring how the resultant image corresponds to the model and also serves as the ultimate goal of the process of “forming,” which is progressing toward perfection. The modern history of the German term Bildung has many stages and turning points, which run through purely theological usage (exemplified by Master Eckhart, Pietism), and applications in natural philosophy (by Jakob Böhme) and pedagogy (by Joachim Heinrich Campe).4 However, the term had only reached its peak by the end of the eighteenth century, when Bildung came to have not only spiritual but also philosophical and political connotations. Increasingly, Bildung was associated with liberation, both intellectual (liberation of the mind from tradition and superstition—this usage of the term is central to Goethe,5 Schiller, and Wilhelm von Humboldt) and political (liberation of the German nation from an archaic political system of small feudal states, and later from the Napoleonic invasion—apparent in writings by Herder and Fichte6). Over time and with contributions from almost all of the era’s important German thinkers, there emerged the movement known as German neo-humanism, whose ideal was the formation of individuals who are governed by their own highly developed inner characters rather than by a desire to imitate how others conduct themselves (Bruford 1975, 55). As this tradition was evolving, it had championed a number of important ideas relevant to our topic, such as highlighting the unique value of each individual, the significance of his self-development toward autonomy, and the merit of broad education as well as the idea of the social harmony of the individual with his society. This shift in discourse not only contributed to a different outlook on the world but also helped reformulate the concept of Bildung in more secular terms with emphasis placed on questions of possibilities and finding an appropriate model for shaping a new individual. The sought model was now presented as a universal perfection, which is subject to precise rules. The great influence that Johann Winckelmann and his concept of perfection had allowed for a movement from a purely religious interpretation of the term centered on unattainable moral perfection, to a secular image of perfection, which, to some extent, could be calculated and defined in human terms and was thus reproducible. At the same time, the very idea

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of perfection implies that such a model can no longer be defined based solely on personal inclinations and aspirations. Rather, this model must be defined in universal (and not individual, singular) terms: a model which has an absolute value and which presents itself as the ultimate achievement of humanity as an objective possibility. This emphasis on universality is what distinguishes the specifically German neo-humanistic tradition of Bildung, exemplified in both German modern literature and philosophy. Those who represent this tradition find this universality in the world, which is not limited to the realm of human existence but encompasses what Hegel would call the “ever-changing realm of historical culture.” One of the first to articulate the (neo-)humanistic ideal of Bildung was Wilhelm von Humboldt. In his writings, the world appears as a living human world, in which everything that exists is not given and fixed, but is in continuous change and a non-stop process of formation. For him, the human world may be adequately illustrated as a never-ending transformation, a continuous replacement of forms, and an unstoppable flow. Bildung comes to be conceptualized as a dynamic path and a living impulse behind all these changes; the universe is viewed as animated by an internal energy, which breathes life into it and gives it rhythm and movement. Yet the one who acts upon the world contributing to the formation of the culture in which he lives is the man, with his irresistible desire to live in a multi-form way. Thus, the whole historical world of human culture, rather than the realm of mere existence, becomes the place for an individual’s self-realization and manifestation of his freedom that allows him to elaborate new values, propose new goals, and fully express himself in this way. In Humboldt’s view, man’s most important objective must be his self-development toward a complete whole (Humboldt 1903b, 106). The process of human self-cultivation he calls Bildung, which is characterized by a never-ending enrichment of the individual through his continuous effort to understand as much of the world as possible (Humboldt 1980, 236).

3 Hegel and the German Tradition of Bildung Post-Kantian German idealists, including Hegel, were profoundly influenced by German neo-humanism, and Hegel’s Bildung-ideal had its roots in conceptions of Bildung developed by Herder, Wilhelm von Humboldt, and other key figures of the humanist tradition (see Forster 2012, esp. 75–82). Following this tradition, Hegel considers Bildung to be an important part of the life journey of any spiritual entity at both the individual and universal levels. For him, this is the process of the formative self-development of spirit (a spiritual being) taking place in the social and historical world. Through the analysis of Hegel’s texts, it is possible to distinguish three key meanings Hegel described with the term Bildung in his philosophical system. The first is Bildung construed as formal education or schooling that, while not identical to “upbringing” (Erziehung), has the same end as the latter. The primary aim

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of both is to overcome natural immediacy and to enrich spirit through universal thought.7 Bildung as formal education (schooling) is not fully self-directed activity yet. Although education is a fundamentally internal process and a child should be internally motivated to learn, this process often involves the child’s parents and pedagogues who frequently act as external stimuli for a child. This is a crucial difference between education in a narrow sense and all other forms of Bildung. I grant that Hegel does use the term with the connotation of education. I would argue, however, that this meaning of Bildung is not central to Hegel’s own conceptualization of the idea. Furthermore, the usage of Bildung as formal education is not uniquely Hegelian and should be rather viewed as a sign of Hegel following the broader intellectual and philosophical tradition. Indeed, in the second half of the nineteenth century, Bildung in Germany received a more restricted meaning of education as schooling and the intellectual development of the individual. Thus, it should not come as a surprise that Hegel, too, employs Bildung in this way. This, however, does not justify the treatment of Hegel’s concept of Bildung in this individualistic pedagogical aspect alone. To be sure, Hegel does deal with the issues of education in a somewhat explicit manner in both his writings (especially his Nuremberg Gymnasium Rede) and his practice of pedagogy. Yet Hegel, in my opinion, does not consider purely pedagogical questions as having fundamental philosophical significance.8 He avoids dealing with the topic systematically, addressing pedagogical issues mostly in his non-systematic writings,9 and does not produce any method or theory of pedagogical practice, while still maintaining Bildung as a fundamental theme of his philosophy. Thus, the simple reduction of Bildung in Hegel to the narrowly understood educational activity of the individual represents a distortion of his view. The modern, Enlightenment-based idea of education defines its main aim as providing support for individual development toward maturity. From this perspective, education is a finite process. Furthermore, education focuses on the individual, considering his growth toward maturity as primarily an individual cognitive process, without taking into account this individual’s social interactions and practical engagement with the historical-cultural world. Yet Bildung for Hegel is the formative self-development of spirit (in both its “forms”—as individual human and world spirit) regarded as a social and historical process. Cognitive advancement is only one of the dimensions of Bildung, but this, too, is treated as a historical-social phenomenon. In this chapter, thus, I will rather focus on the social and historical-cultural meanings of Bildung, which I consider uniquely Hegelian and central to understanding his philosophical enterprise, commenting on the narrowly understood educational aspect of Bildung only occasionally, where it is relevant to the discussion of the other two connotations. Before turning to the close analysis of these two, let me briefly outline them. The second aspect of Hegel’s Bildung-concept that, for brevity, I dub as social, can be described as a process of individual cultural (spiritual) development, the “cultivation of the self” in and through the social realm that all of us share and participate in. Bildung in this meaning is not identical and cannot be reduced to the mere intellectual-educational activity of the individual, however rigorous this

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activity might be. What Hegel has in mind here is not just acquisition and mastery of basic or any other kind of knowledge, nor mere natural organic growth toward maturity. This is rather the formative development of the individual consciousness, the self-generated transformation from the standpoint of its non-reflected, natural purity and immediacy, still lacking any self-awareness and independence, to the “enlightened” (philosophical) standpoint where the individual attains his rational autonomy and becomes fully aware of himself through rational reflection on both his knowledge and his social role. This is the process, by which the abstract “I” develops into a concrete subjectivity. The observed correlation between Bildung and subjectivity already underscores the instrumental significance of the concept of Bildung in Hegel’s system. The centrality of the topic of subject and subjectivity for Hegel is now widely recognized and discussed (Hösle 1998; Taylor 2000; Pippin 2005; De Laurentiis 2005; Seigel 2005). Yet what is often ignored is that it is impossible to understand the thinker’s account of subjectivity (and selfhood in general) without grasping his conceptualization of Bildung which I examined elsewhere.10 The “cultivation of the self” is, in fact, a cultivation into humanity. This is not an automatic transformation, but a process of enculturation (Bildung) that necessarily assumes the active involvement of the individual and his full conscious commitment. This is a completely self-driven and self-directed, internally motivated activity. What is involved here is an individual’s self-development toward his full autonomy and self-awareness; the development, which unfolds within the social realm as mediated through this individual’s relations with other people. In this sense, the process of individual cultivation coincides with the cultivation of humanity that occurs within the social and historical-cultural world. Thus, the essence of the enculturation process is not merely a theoretical process of acquiring knowledge of one’s environment, but to a greater degree is a practical enterprise that involves not just imitating but inventing and producing. The third (historical-cultural) sense in which Hegel uses the term Bildung signifies the process that I would render as acculturation, or individual internalization of cultural history. This is a very important component of the “cultivation of the self,” which occurs when the individual recaptures and appropriates the “stages” of the formative development (Bildungstufen) of “world spirit.” The “traces” of Bildung of spirit are manifest as tradition and culture, which the individual first discovers as something external and alien to him. This tradition becomes his own only after he “appropriates” and “internalizes” it. While this aspect of Bildung has important cultural connotations, it is not identical to culture, and it would be a mistake to interpret it in this way. In Hegel’s view, culture (Kultur) generally points to whatever is in one’s social environment, whereas Bildung as acculturation designates what one masters from and within that environment. Bildung is the self-generated activity of the individual toward his own cultivation through culture and tradition. Hegel does not provide a systematic account of Bildung; instead, it must be obtained from various sources, arguments and thoughts that are abundant in Hegel’s works. This makes the task of “reconstructing” Hegel’s usage of Bildung and outlining ideas he associates with this notion very difficult, yet rewarding.

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4 A Note on Sources Traditionally, Hegel’s concept of Bildung is discussed exclusively in the context of his Phenomenology of Spirit without bringing to attention the conceptualization of the notion in his other writings. It would be hard to question the prominence of the theme of Bildung in the Phenomenology. Many scholars, both classic and contemporary, even suggest reading the Phenomenology of Spirit as a Bildungsroman, a well-narrated story that traces the path of the individual’s, as well as humanity’s, development, which is often understood as the educational process.11 While this reading might be productive and might underscore Hegel’s central concern with Bildung in the Phenomenology, it does not capture the whole complexity of the concept and the variety of meanings of the term that are at display even in this work. For Bildung is employed in the Phenomenology not merely to delineate the process of the individual’s development from the natural, “uneducated” standpoint to the “educated” position of modern science, but also to conceptualize the on-going process of world history. However, the focus here is still on one single historical epoch, the epoch of emerging modernity, which is described as the world of Bildung. This connotation of Bildung often escapes the commentators’ attention because it is discussed by Hegel in terms of universal spirit, specifically as “substance given itself its self-consciousness, or, its coming-to-be and its reflective turn into itself” (PhG GW 9:25.13). I will return to the relation of Bildung and spirit in Hegel’s system later. For now, I just want to stress that the Hegelian Bildung-concept is more complex than it might appear at first, and this is true for the Phenomenology as well. Furthermore, however revealing the Phenomenology might be about Hegel’s concept of Bildung, this is not the only writing where the thinker engages this notion. Bildung has a prominent place throughout all of Hegel’s works. Along with the Phenomenology of 1807, the most substantial sources include his writings from the Nuremburg period (1808–1815), the Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1821), the Lectures in the Philosophy of World History delivered in Berlin five times from the w ­ inter of 1822–1823 to the winter of 1830–1831, as well as the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Science, especially its second (1827) and third (1830) editions. The intricacies of Hegel’s unique usage of Bildung can be revealed only if it is considered in all its complexity in these and other writings. Presenting Hegel’s concept of Bildung in all its complexity is, however, an arduous task that cannot be accomplished within this relatively short chapter. What follows is only an attempt to sketch the basic meanings of the concept of Bildung in Hegel’s philosophical system and identify the key aspects of his unique usage of the term and how they relate to one another.

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5 On the Relation Between Bildung and Spirit The importance of Bildung in Hegel’s system has often been obscured by an exaggerated focus on the teleological and metaphysical aspects of his philosophy of history, in which Hegel seems to explain the historical development of human civilization as an inevitable and intentional development of some transcendent universal “world spirit.” Indeed, in his philosophical system, Hegel presents the workings of history as a historical narrative of world spirit (Weltgeist): “world history is governed by an ultimate design, … it is a rational process whose rationality is not that of a particular subject, but a divine and absolute reason” (LPWHIntro 28/VPhWIntro 29). Commentators often view this claim as strong evidence of Hegel’s providential or (broadly understood) theological conception of history (see Hodgson 2012, 21–30, 89ff.). Coupled with Hegel’s use in this context of the notion of world spirit, which comes to be interpreted as a sort of transcendent entity, it should thus vindicate criticism of the theological, metaphysical, and teleological tendencies of Hegel’s philosophy. According to this interpretation, human individuals and societies are not the agents of world history, but merely the means by which spirit works toward its final goal of self-recognition in time. Thus the cultural development of humanity from its natural existence in prehistoric times to the philosophical and historical self-consciousness of modern times becomes an unproblematic phenomenon, easily “explained” by the intentions of the universal world spirit. Such interpretations, however, are mistaken. Not only do they render Hegel’s thought radically inconsistent, but they also neglect the important humanistic character of Hegel’s concept of history.12 In spite of sometimes-obscure terminology, Hegel views world history as historical narratives of human development, which is not to be mistaken for a history of the growth of a single individual self. What unfolds on the plain of world history is the historical account of the process of enculturation or, self-cultivation (Bildung) of humanity, of the universal (“communal”) self, which Hegel construes as spirit. In Hegel’s use of the word, spirit is not the agent of historical development, but rather a product that results from the interactions of history’s true agents: individual human beings. World history, for Hegel, is not the descent into time of some predetermined spiritual principle (akin to a metaphysical Absolute), but rather the result of the gradual development of human self-understanding and self-realization. Hegel describes the narratives that unfold in world history as the history of universal world spirit, and conceptualizes the activity through which we humans come to a complete understanding of ourselves as human beings, as the activity of spirit coming fully to self-consciousness. Yet human history is more than a merely accidental record of changes; it is not simply a set of random and unrelated events. Instead, it must be viewed as a series of connected narratives that gradually evolve into one another. This transformation reflects the movement of philosophical history, which, according to Hegel, has “rational design” and is manifest as the working of reason. Hegel lays down his philosophy of history as the philosophy of world-historical spirit,

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whose systematic discussion he offers in his Lectures on Philosophy of History. The narrative that unfolds here is the narrative of self-cultivation (Bildung) of spirit toward its self-realization: “World history is the record of the spirit’s efforts to attain knowledge of what it is in itself” (LPWHIntro 54/VPhWIntro 56). It might be a curious strategy to attempt to understand the progress of human history by referencing the history of the self-development of spirit. This, however, would make more sense if we evoke the function and instrumental significance that Hegel assigns to the philosophy of history in his system. In Hegel’s view, world history represents the process in which what spirit was only potentially becomes actual. This process of self-realization is twofold. Spirit realizes itself both in and through the triumphs and tragedies of history—the historical events that are nothing else but self-expressions of spirit itself—and concurrent attainment of consciousness of those events, that is, knowledge of itself. Translated in terms of the history of humankind, world history is a dialectical progression toward a complete fulfillment of the potential of humanity. This involves not simply humans’ intellectual development, but the achievement of a reflective appreciation of the historical-cultural reality which ultimately provides material for new knowledge and cognitive growth. This can only be achieved through Bildung as the self-formation of humanity on a grand historical scale. Yet for Hegel, humanity is not an abstract “universal agent.” While he emphasizes the “communal” nature of this phenomenon and points to “wholeness” as a most important feature, the “whole” under consideration is not something that exists separate from the individual. As in the social sphere, the person’s individuality does not simply dissolve in the communal spirit; on the historical plane, too, the individual human being retains his independence and “essential individuality” within the historical human subject and humanity at large. What makes the historical world real for Hegel is the individual and his action. Thus, the achievements of humanity are the results of the interactive work of the individual human beings. This is the idea Hegel captures by his notion of “spirit” in its universal dimension. As I have shown elsewhere, by referring to universal spirit in the context of explaining the process of the historical unfolding of the social and cultural world, Hegel, in fact, discusses the intersubjective activity of human self-formation (see Bykova 2009). A complex dialectical process of human Bildung comes about as the result of the mutual recognition of individual human subjects. Understanding the mechanism of this recognition is key to comprehension the conceptualization of Bildung in Hegel’s writings.

6  Bildung as the Dialectic of Recognition Being recognized by another conscious individual is necessary in order to obtain a sense of one’s existence as an individual subject—a point that Hegel famously emphasizes in the Phenomenology (PhG GW 9:109ff.) and that has now become commonplace in scholarly literature on Hegel. What, however, is often lost in

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these discussions is that, for Hegel, recognition is an essential mechanism of socialization and enculturation (Bildung) of the individual (the process of the emergence of selfhood). The two important elements of recognition that make it instrumental to Bildung are the sense of otherness and the negation represented by otherness. Let us first briefly consider how Hegel introduces the process of recognition in the Phenomenology. According to Hegel, recognition is first achieved through a dramatic struggle arising from the encounter of two self-consciousnesses. Hegel describes this lifeand-death struggle in terms of the so-called master-slave dialectic. This dialectic is nothing else but an account of Bildung of self-consciousness, which undergoes the formative development toward its “in and for itself” existence. This can be achieved only by way of one self-consciousness “being in and for itself for an other; i.e., … only as a recognized” (PhG GW 9:109.9—my trans.). This dialectic runs through three stages. In the first stage, although “[f]or self-consciousness there is another self-consciousness” (PhG GW 9:109.19), it does not consider the other point of view as such. Instead, it treats it as the same as its own, remaining “simple being-for-self, and it is self-equal through the exclusion from itself of all that is other” (PhG GW 9:110.35–36). The other is perceived as merely “an inessential object, designated by the character of the negative” (PhG GW 9:111.1–2), not as another self, but just as not being oneself. This lack of recognition of the other as an independent self, characteristic of this stage, prevents detachment from one’s own views and beliefs. Yet, those desires and beliefs must be “proven” not only to oneself but also to a being other from itself. This requires an acknowledgement (recognition) of the other as an independent self (as not identical but rather differentiated from oneself). Eventually, through the submission of the slave who has to work on the object in order to carry out the will of the master, the otherness has been established. This otherness gives rise to alienation (negation) from one’s natural state of being oneself (“simple being-for-self”). This is the second stage of the dialectic, which Hegel describes as a “trial by death” between oneself and the other. The result of their “battle” is their being “as two opposed shapes of consciousness” (PhG GW 9:112.30–31). As with the life-and-death struggle, reaching a higher mode of consciousness requires breaking free from the particularity of life. This is possible because the slave who works for the master on objects the lord desires attains this consciousness of himself, “shaking the entire content of his natural consciousness.” Serving the master, he works not in the exclusive interest of his own individuality, … his desire is expanded into being not only the desire of this particular individual but also the desire of another. Accordingly, [he] rises above the selfish individuality of his natural will. (Enc. 3 §435Z)

Such a reconciliation between the self and the other marks the third stage of this dialectic, described by Hegel as the unity of the two different selves, who in this unity of their oppositions achieve complete freedom and self-sufficiency: “The I that is we and the we that is I” (PhG GW 9:108.39). This level of reflective reconciliation results from mutual recognition between two selves—though it is not attained until much later in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, in the concluding

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paragraphs of “Evil and Forgiveness.” (On Part One of “Self-Consciousness,” see Westphal 2018, §§71–91.) At least three moments here are directly relevant to our discussion and thus deserve our attention. The first is Hegel’s insistence that the existence of “in and for itself,” which is for him the existence of the “cultivated self” requires both otherness and the recognition of this otherness. In this way, Hegel stresses the importance of otherness for Bildung. The second essential idea is Hegel’s emphasis on the instrumental role of negation in the process of Bildung. The third is the significance that Hegel attributes to (mutual) recognition for achieving the Bildung-ideal. Let us briefly consider each of these moments.

7 Otherness and Its Importance to Bildung The idea that Bildung is associated with a sense of otherness is a uniquely Hegelian idea. Indeed, awareness of the perspectives of others is essential to both Bildung’s social and historical-cultural connotations. Distinguishing oneself from one’s natural and social environment, becoming aware of and taking into consideration the existence of others are what allows oneself to rise above one’s particularity to universality. Hegel writes: By educated [gebildete] people, we may understand in the first place those who do everything as others do it and do not flaunt their particular characteristics [Partikularität], whereas it is precisely these characteristics which the uneducated display. … Similarly, in his relation with others, the uneducated man can easily cause offence, for he simply lets himself go and does not reflect on the feelings of others. (PR §187Z/GW 14)

Hegel argues that awareness of the perspectives of others is essential to Bildung at the individual and social levels. It is only through encounters with others who inevitably have different beliefs and desires that the individual begins scrutinizing his own beliefs and opens his mind to universal viewpoints. Gadamer, who heavily draws from Hegel in his own elaboration of Bildung in Truth and Method, rightly observes that universal viewpoints are present to the cultivated (gebildete) man “only as the viewpoints of possible others” (see Gadamer 1989, 17). In Hegel’s systematic, exposure to otherness is a necessary element of any Bildung process, be that understood as formal education or a complex process of enculturation in its social and historical-cultural aspects. What makes the other so valuable to Bildung is the emphasis on a difference that contests the sameness. Perceived as alien, the other challenges naturally acquired habits and beliefs, everything that the natural man takes for granted. Thus, in his writings from the Nuremberg period, where Hegel develops his ideas about Bildung as formal education, he describes it as a dialectical process of alienation (Entfremdung) and separation (Trennung) from one’s natural state and acquisition of a “new perspective” which he associates with the beginning of the work of enculturation. This is the process in which the mind of a child should be

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continually stretched beyond its ordinary (simplistic) worldview. Hegel points to the study of ancient civilizations as the most valuable to a child; he argues that the ancient world is sufficiently alien to the child’s own culture to allow him to separate from his habitual beliefs, yet similar enough to a child’s own cultural world to enable him to “return” transformed (GW 10.1: 461–462). Hegel will later elaborate on this idea, further developing it into the conception of Bildung as acculturation, which will be discussed below. As we shall see, although the questioning of habitual beliefs and overcoming of a natural point of view is a vital part of the Bildung process, it is not its ultimate goal. Hegel argues that “cultivated” (gebildete) individuals are capable of not just approaching the world from different singular perspectives, but are capable of “considering [things] in many aspects” (LHPHald 1:359) and developing more reflective views of the world, carefully contemplating their own ways of living. The awareness of other historical and cultural traditions, Hegel suggests, significantly contributes to this process. Hegel writes: The natural man [still lacking Bildung] … lives quite unconsciously in his own practical way, in conformity with the morality of his town, without even having reflected on the fact that he practices this morality. If he then comes into a foreign [other] land, he is much surprised, for through encountering the opposite, he for the first time experiences the fact that he has these customs. (LHPHald 2:355; my italics)

8 Dialectical Negation and Bildung Otherness is thus a constructive element that provides a significant opportunity for the individual to “open” his horizons and receive exposure to other points of view, beliefs, cultures, and traditions. Otherness, however, can also be a source of tension involving opposition (contrariety) and even contradiction. For the views and desires of others may not be only different or even irreconcilable with our own; they can contradict each other. In Hegel’s dialectical system, the other is treated not merely as different but rather as contradictory. The dialectical core of the relation of contradiction is negation (Negativität). Hegel describes the negation, which is introduced by otherness, as a “vehicle,” or driving force of Bildung. The enculturation necessarily involves the transformative process of rising above the particularity of one’s social (and broader historical-cultural) context, which occurs through negation.13 The negation in question is not a complete annihilation, or “nullification,” which Hegel would reject as an abstract negative. This is rather a dialectical (determinate) double negation (the negation of negation),14 which results in a reflective reconciliation: the fact that the other does not share one’s habitual (natural) beliefs and views encourages one’s reflective thinking toward the adoption of a more reflective, universal point of view. Hegel, however, warns that in order for this to occur, one must not just be confronted by the other, but the other must be viewed as such. This is not always the case. As we have seen in the Phenomenology section on the master-slave dialectic, Hegel holds that the other is initially viewed not as another self—i.e. not as B opposed to A, where

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A is oneself—but as just not being oneself, that is, as not A. When the other is viewed in this way, the negation involved does not amount to a reflective activity that enables one to overcome the natural particularity, the process that Hegel associates with Bildung. Hegel sometimes describes Bildung as a form of “pure negativity” in that it negates any particular standpoint not from another standpoint but rather in virtue of its detachment from any particular standpoint at all (PhG GW 9:18; Enc. 3 §378Z). This may be understood in the way that Bildung and its detached point of view require a kind of “self-recognition in otherness,” an important element of reciprocity that grounds our (human) co-existence in the social and cultural world. Hegel points here to a very important feature of the Bildung process: as individual participants in the social realm, we share certain concerns, which becomes possible only within a shared social realm that provides the framework necessary for enculturation. For the shared realm to exist and be productive, the relation of the mutual recognition of individual human subjects must be established, the concept that Hegel sketches in the Phenomenology passage on the master-slave dialectic discussed above. The detailed discussion of the notion of recognition in Hegel15 is beyond the scope of this chapter. Here I will make only a few remarks about the significance of mutual recognition for Bildung.

9 Mutual Recognition, Intersubjectivity and the Social Significance of Bildung As we have seen, for Hegel, recognition is the long and complex process of the individual’s self-development from a natural into a social self (the person acting in the historical-social reality), the process in which the individual encounters the other which he recognizes as such. What is recognized here is one’s dependence upon the other, which is not one-sided but a mutual process. The two necessarily “recognize themselves as mutually recognizing each other” (PhG GW 9:110.29). This mutual interdependence is the reality of the human social world and an essential condition of human development (here in the sense of socialization). One’s self-awareness is possible only through mutual recognition by other individuals; this is required to develop, construct, adopt, adapt, assess and justify our social and communal essence. This is why the intersubjective activity that animates our spiritual life takes place in the broad context of social and historical-cultural reality and is a crucial part of the self-enculturation process. Mutual interdependence not only enables the individual subject to break out of a sort of impulsive (natural) and unreflective selfishness (particularity) and to begin comporting himself to objective social norms and traditions, but it also allows for communication, cooperation, and social organization, which mark the beginning of human historical development. Both individual self-consciousness and human social and cultural development are dependent upon this on-going process of intersubjective recognition. Hegel designates both the individual-subjective

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and the social-objective developments that result from intersubjective recognition as aspects of spirit, which is really nothing more than intersubjective life and activity. The engine of this entire developmental process is the individual subject, which strives for self-awareness through intersubjective activity. Through engagement with a community composed of other subjects, the individual gradually begins to adopt the norms and customs of this community and to make them his own. Now, rather than simply acting from his transient and instinctive impulses, the individual regulates his activity based on the norms and customs adopted by the community and understands himself according to the role he plays within the community. Furthermore, the natural individual becomes a social self only by integrating itself into a social system. This process is essential to both the development of individuals and civilizations. Without a community to integrate into, the individual would never become a self, but would remain merely an incoherent series of (unreflected) habitual impulses and appetites; without the integrating individual, there would be no society. This process of social and cultural integration is captured in Hegel by the social aspect of Bildung. Interpreted as an intra-personal, intersubjective activity which marks a transition to the socio-cultural (universal) dimension of individual life, this Bildung is not imposed externally. It is a self-generated activity of the concrete individual in search of his self-realization as a conscious and free being (see PhG GW 9:194). In this regard, Hegel agrees with, and greatly expands upon Aristotle’s account of why and how we are zoôn politikon—integrating into his account Ferguson’s History of Civil Society (1767) (Ferguson 1995) and Montesquieu’s Spirit of the Laws (1749) (Montesquieu 1989).16 By conceiving Bildung in this way, Hegel accomplishes several things. First, he affirms the realm of intersubjective interaction as an actual medium of the individual’s self-realization. The individual that is “in and for itself” “presents” himself in the social world through intersubjective activity. Second, Hegel highlights the social dimensions of human individuals, emphasizing how social life is crucial to any distinctively human individuality: only within social reality and by participating in social institutions and practices do individuals become who they each are, both intellectually and socially. Hegel writes: [Individuals] are conscious of themselves as being these singular self-sufficient beings as a result of their having sacrificed their singular individuality and as a result of this universal substance being their soul and essence. In the same way this universal is again their doing as singular individuals, or it is the work which is brought forth by themselves. (PhG GW 9:194.26–29)

However, the process of attaining this universal level requires not only “sacrifices” of individual particularity and unreflective “adoption” of the universal substance, e.g. communal and social goals or cultural norms and traditions. To make the universal substance “their soul and essence” the individuals must appropriate, make all social laws and factors, as well as cultural customs and traditions, their own. This is the process of Bildung as acculturation, which takes place in the broadly understood social and historical-cultural world.

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10 The Historical-Cultural Significance of Bildung: Acculturation and Freedom The social-cultural world in which we live and which provides material for our enculturation is distinct from the natural realm. In contrast to the natural world that is not of our making, the social and cultural world is a human creation. This creation, however, is not an individual enterprise; individuals are not mutually independent, self-sufficient makers of their social and cultural world. Although each of us, at any given time, participates in producing this world, it results from our collective activity through history. This is a history of human development, not as an individual but rather as humankind. Generations of people, living in different historical epochs, have contributed to this grand process in unique, individual ways, leaving their traces etched in the form of customs, traditions, and cultural norms. Taken together they constitute what Hegel calls human culture, which “consists in those universal ideas and ends, in the scope of those spiritual powers that rule consciousness and life” (VGPh 1:41). As individual human beings, we are involved in a complex relationship with this realm. As single subjects, we encounter culture with all its norms, customs, traditions, social laws and institutions ready-made. While we take such cultural content or structure as pre-established and “given” to us, we necessarily build relations with what we encounter, becoming practically engaged with certain universal ideas and elements of our social and cultural environment. Hegel writes: Our consciousness has these ideas, maintains their validity as ultimate determinations, follows the interconnections indicated by them in its course but it knows them not: it does not make them the subject-matter and interest of its investigation. (VGPh 1:41)

Indeed, the engagement with what we encounter in our social and cultural milieu has various forms—e.g. social and political volunteering, participation in social institutions, following customs and traditions, etc.—and it occurs at both individual and communal levels. However, at first we take the encountered universal ideas and elements of our culture for granted, that is, unreflectively and uncritically. We do not know them, do not have them in our possession: they appear to us as merely external features, like otherworldly objects we encounter in our everyday life. To truly know universal ideas, customs and traditions that we come across in our culture and that, to some extent, determine our social lives, we need to make them our own; we need to internalize what we find at first as external. The process of internalization is an important component of the practice of Bildung. Taken in this specific connotation, Bildung could be rendered as “acculturation.” The aim of acculturation is not simply to advance one’s cultural awareness but to recapture and “appropriate” what was acquired (produced) through history and now exists in culture as norms, customs, traditions, and other common capabilities and habits. The individual must understand himself not as a property of his culture but must rather view himself as a free participant in the shared cultural context within the broader historical-cultural framework. The essence of this

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transformation, which is possible only through active engagement with tradition, is a transition from the unreflective (habitual) affirmation of one’s culture as simply being one’s particularity to the practical and conscious appropriation of culture and tradition. Hegel discusses this task in full length when he explains the goals of the Bildung of modern time (Odenstedt 2008, 573). In contrast to the ancient Bildung whose achievement consisted of raising the individual from sensuous apprehension to universality of thought, the modern day Bildung must free the individual from the unreflective certainty of the abstract form that he finds “ready-made.” Hegel warns that “abstracting itself from itself… does not consist in only omitting itself, or, setting itself off to one side. Rather, it consists in giving up the fixity of its self-positing as well as the fixity of the purely concrete…” (PhG GW 9:28.25–29). In other words, Bildung consists not in “leaving out,” withdrawing oneself from the alien cultural context (a pure negation), but rather in a reflective use (conscious appropriation) of what was formerly found as ready-made and thus affirmed in an unreflected (habitual) way. The essence and the outcome of this process is liberating, not only because the “fixity” of the uncultivated (ungebildeten) individual is overcome. The most important result is that in the universality of shared culture (tradition), individual is finally reconciled with his own particularity consciously (reflectively) coming to see it not as a mere natural property but rather as his own being as an individual human being. Hegel stresses that Bildung in its absolute determination, is … liberation and work towards a higher liberation; it is the absolute transition to the infinitely subjective substantiality of ethical life, which is no longer immediate and natural, but spiritual and at the same time raised to the shape of universality. In the individual subject, this liberation is hard labor against the pure subjectivity of demeanor, against the immediacy of desire, against the empty subjectivity of feeling and the arbitrariness of inclination. … [I]t is through this educational labor that the subjective will itself attains objectivity within itself, an objectivity in which alone it is for its part capable and worthy of being the actuality of the Idea. (RPh §187R).

A few points crucial to understanding Hegel’s concept of Bildung are present here. First, Hegel clearly associates Bildung with the process of liberation, the goal of which is one’s freedom from dependence on anything that is “fixed,” pre-determined, and given, including the “certainty” and habitual affirmation of one’s own particularity. However—and this is the second point—rising above particularity toward universality (how Hegel conceptualizes the process of Bildung) does not mean undermining particularity and individuality. One’s particularity is not “swallowed up” by universality, as it is often viewed. It is only that through Bildung one’s particularity becomes enriched as a result of the reflective recognition and appropriation of otherness. This “enrichment” is a developed capability to consciously appropriate and critically (reflectively) adopt the universal point of view. In this sense, the particular becomes universal. The transformation to “the universal point of view” is, however, never final, because otherness of the universal (historical-cultural context) is ever-changing. Bildung, hence, is a never-ending ongoing process that takes place in the cultural and social world and that can be conceived as a series of achievements that contribute

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to one’s self-realization. Third, liberation through Bildung is not an automatic, or “mechanical” process. It requires hard labor on the part of the individual striving to actualize himself (his potential) in the world. The reconciliation of the particular with the universal cannot be brought about by what Hegel calls “the pure I.” It is an achievement of the concrete individuals who actively interact with each other within the actual historical-cultural world and who are capable of reflecting upon their own experiences. Bildung as acculturation is a complex process that involves the discovery of what we find as ready-made in our social and cultural reality. This discovery is not only a cognitive undertaking but also includes our practical activity. For only through our deliberate practical engagements with the social and cultural world can we learn to “decode” the meanings of ideas, beliefs, norms, and customs that we encounter, reflecting on their historical contents and consciously employing them in our shared practices. The result of this discovery is twofold. On the one hand, acting individually and collectively, we internalize what is external, making it a part of our individual “organic” nature. Yet striving to internalize and embody communal norms and practices, each member of a community alters them. Thus, on the other hand, the process of appropriating cultural norms and traditions is at the same time the process of producing new ideas, meanings, and practices, which themselves become cultural phenomena. Through our various social enterprises, we discover and take into possession human culture, but we also participate in its development. Culture penetrates all spheres of human reality and practice and is a collective human undertaking. The process of this grand endeavor that takes place through history is what Hegel captures by his concept of Bildung as acculturation. This connotation brings into view the historical and cultural dimensions of Bildung which are so important for Hegel. However, he does not equate Bildung with the historical culture as its results.17 According to Hegel, human culture is never final and static; it is in a perpetual process of change and development. In this sense, Bildung as acculturation is possible only within a historical world, which can be understood as a progression of the world-epoch of cultivation. Bildung functions in Hegel’s system not only as the driving force forming self-conscious individual subjects but also as the engine of the historical development of human societies and of the historical-cultural world itself. The broader context in which Bildung unfolds and which defines its true essence is a historical one. Not only is Bildung merely possible within the historical world of culture, the activity of Bildung is a historical process; people create their social and cultural reality collectively through historical activity. In this sense, the process of Bildung at the individual level inevitably coincides with the Bildung of human culture and its progression through history. Hegel underscores this idea when he associates the cultural development of the world with the development of world spirit. He holds that cultural developments through history represent “stages” of the process of enculturation (Bildungstufen) of the world spirit. The single individual person, in and through his self-enculturation, recapitulates the stages traversed by the world spirit in which it has left its traces. Thus, the

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process of acculturation is nothing else but the process of recapturing the cultural history of the world, the great spiritual “conquest of the past” that the individual undertakes. Appropriating cultural history as the Bildung of spirit and assuming what “has already become an acquired possession of universal spirit,” the individual is able to “nourish” himself “in his living off that inorganic nature and in his taking possession of it for himself” (PhG GW 9:25.7–12). This is the process through which the individual raises his awareness of culture as the domain of the universal, coming to understand the social and cultural norms, values and standards that govern his life as collective achievements of spirit. In this way, the single individual realizes his “belonging” not only to his social community but also to the historical-cultural world that he shares with all other spiritual beings throughout history. Hegel shows that the single individual “depends” upon these cultural universals in at least two senses: first, the individual person derives much of his identity from culturally elaborated standards and norms; second, culture provides the appropriate framework for evaluating individual human achievements. However, the real “agents” of culture are the concrete individuals who through their own activity produce and “enact” cultural norms, standards, and values. Hegel insists that tradition and cultural history receive their import not merely from the Bildung process of spirit itself, but rather from the individual’s making this tradition his own. In this sense, the immanent critique of tradition is for Hegel a crucial source of progress in culture and in human history. He writes: What in relation to the single individual appears as his cultivation [Bildung], is the essential moment of the substance [culture] itself. … What appears here as the authority of the individual under which the substance is subsumed and thereby sublated [aufgehoben] is the same as the actualization [Verwircklichung] of the substance, for the power of the individual consists in making itself conform to the substance. (PhG GW 9:268.18–19, 29–31; trans. revised)

In referring to culture as the “substance,” Hegel points out that for the individual who is necessarily brought up in culture, existing cultural tradition with its values, norms, and standards, appears as the constitutive foundation of his subjectivity and selfhood. But this is only through Bildung, through the critical (reflective) appropriation and internalization of traditional norms and standards, that individuals come to see the culture they inhabit as their own. In Bildung, human individuals not only acquire knowledge of the natural and social world, but also become conscious about themselves and their own place in the world. This is the complex process in and through which individuals reach their spiritual potentials and “become for the first time what they ought to be, rational beings” (LPWH 1:151). Hegel, however, warns that this is a long and laborious process that can be accomplished only by the individual himself and through his own efforts. Hegel is very explicit that a human being can only fulfill himself through Bildung and discipline … [and he] must realize his potential through his own efforts, and must first acquire everything for himself, precisely because he is a spiritual being [Geist]; in short, he must throw off all that is natural in him. Geist, therefore, is the product of itself. (LPWHIntro 50–51/VPhWIntro 58)

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If the demands thus laid upon individuals are enormous, Hegel’s monumental contribution to our enculturation merits far more serious attention than is common; it is detailed brilliantly by Harris (1997). If Hegel’s (and Harris’) achievements may appear too vast for contemporary spirits, such monuments to comprehensive erudition continue into the present age (e.g., Braudel 1972, 1981; Merz 1907–1912; Rudwick 2005; Wood 1995, 2002, 2008, 2012; see also Bykova 2019).

11 Conclusion A specific meaning of Bildung, which marks an important legacy of Hegel’s conceptualization of this notion, is the meaning of Bildung as world-encountering understood as a necessary condition of human self-development. The core dimension of Bildung is neither the world as such nor the individual itself, but the specific interplay between the self and the world. The world in question is a universal and ideal realm that transcends every particular environment and everything that is factually given. Therefore, Bildung does not imply simply getting beyond the present and the particular or just adapting oneself to a specific (“new”) social reality or culture; rather, it involves acquiring historical-cultural views and developing universal norms and principles. This world-relatedness of Bildung is what grounds its difference from the concept of learning as a simple attaining of knowledge and narrowly understood education, both of which focus on the individuals’ interactions with the specific realm of their existence, and not with the world at large. The semantic structure of Bildung, however, points to radically distinct connotations. It does not simply mean a construction and development of the self as an abstract particularity disconnected from the social and historical-cultural world, but it rather displays this process of development and crucial transformation of the individual as inherently interwoven with the opening of a world-horizon by and for the self. This essential link between an individual’s self-development and encounter with the world, viewed as a universal entity transcending particular cultural and contextual divides and combining them into a unified overarching concept of the whole (the historical-cultural world that we all share), is what distinguishes the uniquely Hegelian concept of Bildung. Since the world in question is a living, human world, the interplay between the self and the world inevitably includes complex interactions among the active selves. These intersubjective interactions are governed by universal (cultural and historical) norms and principles, and their development unfolds the dynamics and actual history of the world of spirit. This world is the actual world in which we human beings participate and through which we become aware of our social and cultural environment and of ourselves as universal individuals (as humanity) (PhG GW 9:24). This is why the proper understanding of individual self-cultivation in terms of Bildung is the “self-cultivation of man toward universality.” This is precisely the meaning of Bildung that Hegel actively constructs in his works.

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Presented here in at least three key connotations that I have labeled as educational, social, and historical-cultural, Bildung becomes Hegel’s main philosophical concern. He does not simply make the notion absolutely central to his project; he conceptualizes his philosophy as a philosophy of Bildung.18 This is a theory that provides an account of key principles of the complex enculturation process. Identified with the dynamic that animates the grand philosophical process of spirit’s self-realization and making actual what was present only potentially, Bildung captures more than an activity of individual self-formation, pointing to a larger historical undertaking. For Hegel, Bildung does not only unfold in the historical-cultural world, but the world itself comes to be understood as the world of Bildung. Transcending mere acquisition of knowledge, Bildung points to a way of integrating human experience with universal social and cultural concerns. The Bildung-ideals are those of self-realization and freedom. Conceptualized as practical ideals of spirit’s self-cultivation, they determine the dynamic of Hegel’s philosophical system.

Notes 1. It might seem surprising that Hegel uses the term Kultur so rarely, especially given the significance of the discussion of culture in his writings. It would be, however, unfair to Hegel to accuse him—as some commentators apparently do—of avoiding employing the concept of culture or failing to integrate it systematically in his philosophy (see, for example, Liebruck 1975). I would argue that the concept of culture, which Herder had only recently (as relative to Hegel himself) shaped in the modern sense, is not missing in Hegel’s system; rather it is discussed in terms of the concept of spirit. Indeed, Hegel’s concept of spirit, as it is elaborated in his systematic writings, includes all the characteristics of the modern concept of culture: the transformation of nature, sociality and historicity. For more on this see Arndt (2010). 2. For a more detailed discussion of Hegel’s project of the Phenomenology, see Bykova (2009). 3. I believe that Hegel’s account of Bildung can further reinforce the humanistic reading of his philosophy, which I support. The way that Hegel conceptualizes Bildung clearly points to this interpretative approach, extending its applications from the Phenomenology to his other writings, including the Lectures on the World History. As I will argue in this chapter, I do not believe that a providential or ontological-theological interpretation does justice to Hegel and his treatment of history. For one of the recent attempts to undermine the legitimacy of the humanist interpretation of Hegel while underpinning the theological reading, see Hodgson (2012, especially 28–30, 69–73). 4. I commented on the stages of the early development of the term Bildung in Bykova (2016, 137–138). 5. Goethe is credited with initiating the new literary genre of the Bildungsroman that steadily expanded first in Germany and later into Europe and throughout the world. Novels focusing on a man’s personal journey through life in the search of his individual growth and self-realization have fascinated readers and writers alike. The narratives that paid special attention to individual’s feelings and psychological experiences prevailed especially in Germany, where a mode of sentimentality exerted major influence on all literary creations including periodicals, poetry, and novels. For more on this topic, see Delon (2013, esp. 1215–1217).

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6. On the political connotations of the term in Fichte, see Bykova (2016, esp. 140–152). 7. Interestingly, Hegel’s understanding of the task of education is directly opposite to that of Rousseau, whose Émile or On Education (1762) was a nightstand book of young Hegel when he was a student at the Tübinger Stift (1788–1793), a Protestant Seminary under the jurisdiction of the University of Tűbingen. In Émile, Rousseau argues that education should isolate the child from civilized life, thus helping it to develop its natural abilities and talents. Hegel was reported to have read Émile with a great enthusiasm, discussing Rousseau’s ideas with his close friends, then also students at Tűbingen, Schelling and Hölderlin. For a discussion of Hegel’s time at Tűbingen and his friendship with Schelling and Hölderlin, see Bykova (1990, 140ff.). 8. Some scholars disagree with this position. For example, Allen Wood believes that “education is not only a prominent but also a fundamental theme in Hegel’s philosophy” (Wood 1998, 301). It should be noticed, however, that when Wood employs the term “education” in his discussion of Hegel, in fact, he has in mind a somehow broader connotation of Bildung, which he, in my view, inappropriately equates with education usually understood as a formal schooling. 9. Hegel discusses the question of education of children in only two of his systematic writings, and just in passing. See: Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences (§140A, 396A) and Philosophy of Right (§§173–175). Most of his insights on education (in the sense of schooling) are formulated in his so-called Gymnasium Rede that he gave as the director of the Nuremberg Gymnasium and in his correspondence with Immanuel Niethammer, a famous reformer of the Bavarian education system. (More on this see in Chapter 1 in this volume.) Not only does he famously defend Niethammer’s view that a classical education in Greek and Latin languages and literature should serve as a foundation for the secondary school curriculum (MM 4:305–402), but he also insists on teaching philosophy in secondary school (MM 4:403–425). See also Hegel’s correspondence with Niethammer in: Letters, 171–233. 10. For a discussion of the role of Bildung in Hegel’s account of subjectivity, see Bykova (2009, 286–289). 11. Perhaps the first to hint on this reading of the Phenomenology was Marx, who devoted a good portion of his Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 to Hegel’s writing considering it “the true point of origin and secret of Hegelian philosophy” (Marx 1975, 329; 1981, 571). Later this reading was adopted by Jean Hyppolite (in his Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1947)—see Hyppolite (1979), and further developed by Alexandre Kojève (most profoundly in his 1947 book, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel—Kojève 1980; see also Kojève 2000). In his groundbreaking Young Hegel (1948; completed in 1938), Georg Lukács stresses the same idea, although he prefers calling the narrative of the Phenomenology “an odyssey of spirit” (Lukács 1977, 566). Josiah Royce also argues that the Bildungsroman model certainly influenced Hegel’s procedure in the Phenomenology (Royce 1919). Interestingly, while Royce sees the source of this influence in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre (ibid., 147–149), Hyppolite draws attention to Hegel’s study of Rousseau’s Émile (Hyppolite 1979, 11).  A reading of the Phenomenology as a Bildungsroman has remained dominant throughout the whole twentieth century and beyond. See, for example, the note in Kaufmann (1977, 21), as well as, Gjesdal (2015, 710–711). 12. One of the most vocal supporters of the humanist reading of Hegel is Robert Solomon (see Solomon 1983, 5–7; cf. 198–199). For more recent support of this interpretative approach, see Pinkard (2017, esp. Chapters 2 and 5). 13. In the Philosophy of Right, in passages where Hegel refers to the final stages of the French Revolution, he describes the working of the negative. This description provides a good illustration for the negation in question: “Only in destroying something does this negative will have a feeling of its own existence. It may well believe that it wills some positive condition … but it does not … for this at once gives rise to …. particularization both of institutions and individuals; but it is precisely through the annihilation of

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particularity … that the self-consciousness of this negative freedom arises” (RPh §5 GW 14:29/PR 38). 14. Hegel distinguishes between determinate and abstract negation (Enc. 1, 147; Enc. §91 GW 20:130). An abstract negation is simply a “cancelation” of what is negated, the absence of particularity. A determinate negation preserves (retains) parts of what is negated while rising above it. Thus, only determinate negation is truly productive, and as such can serve as a “vehicle” of Bildung. 15. There is a vast literature on the concept of recognition in Hegel. For the most influential treatments of this topic, see: Siep (1979), Williams (2000), Pippin (2010), McDowell (2006), Brandom (2007), Ikäheimo and Arto (2011). 16. For more details about how the political-philosophical ideas of Ferguson and Montesquieu influenced Hegel’s account of zoôn politikon, see Westphal (2019). 17. This is the position that Gyorgy Markus seems to defend. See Markus (2011, 409). 18. Kristin Gjesdal even claims that “[w]ith Hegel, … Bildung is philosophy (Gjesdal 2015, 709). She argues that Hegel’s philosophical system in its entirety can be viewed as a “grand narrative of spirit’s Bildung in world-history and its culmination in logic” (ibid., 711).

Bibliography Arndt, Andreas. 2010. “Kultur, Geist, Natur.” In Staat und Kultur bei Hegel, edited by Andreas Arndt and Jure Zovko, 93–104. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag. Brandom, Robert. 2007. “The Structure of Desire and Recognition. Self-Consciousness and SelfConstitution.” Philosophy & Social Criticism 33: 127–150. Braudel, Fernand. 1972. The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. 2 vols. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press. Braudel, Fernand. 1981. Civilization and Capitalism, 15th–18th Century. 3 vols. London: W. Collins Sons & Co. Bruford, Walter H. 1975. The German Tradition of Self-Cultivation: Bilding from Humboldt to Thomas Mann. London: Cambridge University Press. Bykova, Marina F. 1990. “War Hegel ein schrecklicher Mensch? Überlegungen über die Persönlichkeit des jungen Hegel.” Wiener Jahrbuch für Philosophie 22: 135–153. Bykova, Marina F. 2009. “Spirit and Concrete Subjectivity in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.” In The Blackwell Guide to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, edited by Kenneth R. Westphal, 265–295. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell. Bykova, Marina F. 2016. “Fichte’s Nationalist Rhetoric and the Humanistic Project of Bildung.” In Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation Reconsidered, edited by Daniel Breazeale and Tom Rockmore, 133–152. Albany, NY: State University of New York. Bykova, Marina F. 2019. “On Hegel’s Account of Selfhood and Human Sociality.” In Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit: A Critical Guide, edited by M. F. Bykova, 164–185. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Coe, Cynthia D. 2014. “Narration, Bildung, and the Work of Mourning in Hegel’s Philosophy of History.” In The Palgrave Handbook of German Idealism, edited by Matthew C. Altman, 626–647. London: Palgrave Macmillan. De Laurentiis, Allegra. 2005. Subjects in the Ancient and Modern World: On Hegel’s Theory of Subjectivity. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan. Delon, Michel, ed. 2013. Encyclopedia of the Enlightenment. Oxon: Routledge (First published in 2002). Ferguson, Adam. 1787. An Essay on the History of Civil Society, 5th ed. London: Cadell; Edinburgh: Creech & Bell (Critical edition by F. Oz-Salzberger, Cambridge University Press, 1995).

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Forster, Michael N. 2012. “Bildung bei Herder und seinen Nachfolgern: Drei Begriffe.” In Bildung und Freiheit: ein vergessener Zusammenhang, edited by Klaus Vieweg, 75–89. Paderborn: Schöningh. Furck, Carl-Ludwig, Georg Geiβler, Wolfgang Klafki, and Elisabeth Siegel, eds. 1965. Beiträge zur Geschichte des Bildungsbegriffs. Weinheim: Verlag Julius Beltz. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1989. Truth and Method, 2nd rev. ed. Edited and translated by J. Wein­ sheimer and D. G. Marschall. London: Sheed & Ward. Gjesdal, Kristin. 2015. “Bildung.” In The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the nineteenth Century, edited by Michael N. Forster and Kristin Gjesdal, 695–719. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Harris, Henry S. 1997. Hegel’s Ladder, 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing Co. Hodgson, Peter C. 2012. Shapes of Freedom: Hegel’s Philosophy of World History in Theological Perspective. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Honneth. Axel. 1995. The Struggle for Recognition: The Moral Grammar of Social Conflicts. Translated by J. Anderson. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Hösle, Vittorio. 1998. Hegels System. Der Idealismus der Subjektivität, 2 vols. 2nd ed. Hamburg: Meiner. Humboldt, Wilhelm von. 1903a [1792]. “Ideen zu einer Versuch die Grenzen der Wirksamkeit des Staates zu bestimmen.” In Gesammelte Schriften, vol. I, 97–254. Berlin: Reimar. Humboldt, Wilhelm von. 1903b [1793]. “Theorie der Bildung des Menschen.” In Gesammelte Schriften, vol. I, 282–287. Berlin: Reimar. Humboldt, Wilhelm von. 1980. “Theorie der Bildung des Menschen.” In Werke in fünf Bänden, vol. 1, edited by Andreas Flitner and Klaus Giel; der 2. Auflage, 234–240. Stuttgart: J.G. Cottasche Buchhandlung. Hyppolite, Jean. 1979. Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Translated by Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. Ikäheimo, Heikki, and Arto Laitinen, eds. 2011. Recognition and Social Ontology. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Kaufmann, Walter, ed. 1977. Hegel: Texts and Commentary. Translated and edited by W. Kaufmann. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. Kojève, Alexandre. 1980. Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on the Phenomenology of Spirit, edited by Allan Bloom. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Kojève, Alexandre. 2000. Outline of a Phenomenology of Right. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. Levi, Albert W. 1984. “Hegel’s Phenomenology as a Philosophy of Culture.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 22 (4), 445–470. Liebruck, Bruno. 1975. “Recht, Moralität und Sittlichkeit bei Hegel.” In Materialien zu Hegels Rechtsphilosophie, vol. 2, edited by Manfred Riedel, 13–51. Frankfurt/M.: Suhrkamp. Lukács, Georg. 1977. The Young Hegel: Studies in the Relations Between Dialectics and Economics, translated by Rodney Livingstone. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1977. Markus, Gyorgy. 2011. Culture, Science, Society: The Cultural Constitution of Modernity. Leiden: Brill. Marx, Karl. 1975. “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844.” In Marx/Engels Collected Works, translated by Jack Cohen et al., vol. 3, 229–348. Marx, Karl. 1981. “Ökonomisch-philosophische Manuskripte aus dem Jahre 1844.” In Werke, Ergänzungsband, 1. Teil, K. Marx u. F. Engels, S. 465–588. Berlin: Dietz Verlag [MarxEngels-Gesamtausgabe, Erste Abteilung, Band 3. Berlin, 1932]. McDowell, John H., 2006. “The Apperceptive I and the Empirical Self: Towards a Heterodox Reading of ‘Lordship and Bondage’ in Hegel’s Phenomenology.” In Hegel: New Directions, edited by Katerina Deligiorgi, 33–48. Chesham: Acumen. Merz, John Theodore. 1907–1912. A History of European Thought in the 19th Century, 3rd ed., 4 vols. Edinburgh and London: William Blackwood & Sons. Montesquieu, Charles Louis de Secondat, de. 1989. The Spirit of the Laws, translated by A. M. Cohler, B. C. Miller, and H. Stone. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

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Munzel, G. Felicitas. 2003. “Kant, Hegel, and the Rise of Pedagogical Science.” In A Companion to the Philosophy of Education, edited by R. Curren, 113–139. Oxford: Blackwell. Odenstedt, Anders. 2008. “Hegel and Gadamer on Bildung.” The Southern Journal of Philosophy XLVI: 559–580. Pinkard, Terry. 2017. Does History Make Sense? Hegel on the Historical Shapes of Justice. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Pippin, Robert R. 2005. The Persistence of Subjectivity. On the Kantian Aftermath. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pippin, Robert R. 2010. Hegel on Self-Consciousness: Desire and Death in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Royce, Josiah. 1919. Lectures on Modern Idealism. New Haven: Yale University Press. Rudwick, Martin J. S. 2005. Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Seigel, Jerrold. 2005. The Idea of the Self: Thought and Experience in Western Europe Since the Seventeenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Siep, Ludwig. 1979. Anerkennung als Prinzip der praktischen Philosophie: Untersuchungen zu Hegels Jenaer Philosophie des Geistes. Freiburg: Karl Alber Verlag. Solomon, Robert C. 1983. In the Spirit of Hegel. New York: Oxford University Press. Taylor, Michael C. 2000. Journeys to Selfhood: Hegel and Kierkegaard. New York: Fordham University Press. Uljens, Michael. 2002. “The Idea of a Universal Theory of Education—An Impossible but Necessary Project?” Journal of Philosophy of Education 36 (3), 353–375. Westphal, Kenneth R. 2018. Grounds of Pragmatic Realism: Hegel’s Internal Critique and Reconstruction of Kant’s Critical Philosophy. Leiden and Boston: Brill. Westphal, Kenneth R. 2019. “Kant, Hegel and our Fate as Zoôn Politikon.” In Hegel and Contemporary Practical Philosophy: Beyond Kantian Constructivism, edited by J. Gledhill and S. Stein. London and New York: Routledge—forthcoming. Williams, Robert R. 2000. Hegel’s Ethics of Recognition. Oakland: University of California Press. Wood, Allen W. 1998. “Hegel on Education.” In Philosophers on Education: New Historical Perspectives, edited by Amélie Oksenberg Rorty, 300–318. London: Routledge. Wood, Ellen Meiksins. 1995. Democracy Against Capitalism: Renewing Historical Materialism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wood, Ellen Meiksins. 2002. The Origin of Capitalism: A Longer View. London and New York: Verso. Wood, Ellen Meiksins. 2008. Citizens to Lords: A Social History of Western Political Thought, from Antiquity to the Middle Ages. London and New York: Verso. Wood, Ellen Meiksins. 2012. Liberty and Property: A Social History of Western Political Thought, from Renaissance to Enlightenment. London and New York: Verso.

Part VII

Philosophy of World History and History of Philosophy

Chapter 23

Hegel’s Philosophy of World History Andreas Arndt

1 On the Tradition of the Lectures Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of world history commence in his late Berlin period; Hegel delivered the first course of lectures in the winter term of 1822/23 and repeated the lectures in the winter terms of 1824/25, 1826/27, 1828/29 and 1830/31. The growth of the material Hegel sought to cover in each new attempt is also indicated by notice for the last course of lectures, announced as only the first part of the Philosophy of World History (i.e. Philosophia historiae universalis in the Latin version) (cf. Virmond 2011, 297, 365, 441, 524, 611).1 This may indicate that Hegel, limiting himself to a first part, was preparing a draft for publication; as the manuscript for the last course of lectures was written and prepared with uncharacteristic thoroughness (GW 18:138–207; Jaeschke 2016, 368). Hegel’s writings include two versions of the “Introduction” to the Philosophy of World History: the first Hegel used from 1822 to 1828; the second served as the basis of his last lecture (LPWH 67–77; 78–126/GW 18:121–207, 208–214).2 Otherwise, only few pages written in Hegel’s hand have been preserved. The reconstruction of the lectures’ procedure therefore relies on notes of attending students, of which only sixteen are known at this point (Jaeschke 2016, 368). The transcripts of the first course of lectures in 1822/23 are now published in the critical-historical edition of Hegel’s collected works (GW 17,1). Four additional volumes of transcripts of the lecture series of 1924/25, 1826/27 and 1830/31 are forthcoming; no transcripts of the lectures of 1828/29 are known (cf. GWKat, 93f). Hegel’s lectures were first published posthumously in volume 9 of Hegel’s collected works (Werke), edited “by an association of the friends of the immortalized” Draft translation by Anna Moentmann and Marina F. Bykova; translation completed, revised and edited by Kenneth R. Westphal. (Passages from Hegel’s German translated by Westphal are marked as krw.) A. Arndt (*)  Humboldt-University, Berlin, Germany

© The Author(s) 2020 M. F. Bykova and K. R. Westphal (eds.), The Palgrave Hegel Handbook, Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26597-7_23

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(“von einem Verein von Freunden des Verewigten”). The first edition (1837) was published by Hegel’s student, the philosopher of law Eduard Gans; the second (1840) by Hegel’s son, the historian Karl Hegel (see WVF).3 A new edition of the lectures in four parts was first published by Georg Lasson between 1917 and 1920, with him repeatedly adding manuscripts—also in the reissues.4 A new attempt was made by Johannes Hoffmeister in 1955 with his edition of the introduction to Hegel’s lectures on the philosophy of world history, aiming to replace Lasson’s edition (see VPhW).5 Individual transcripts, published since, are already partially included in the critical-historical edition of the collected works (VPhW; see also VPhGes). The state of the tradition shows that an interpretation can draw upon verified manuscripts by Hegel himself, though these only encompass the introduction and thus only illustrate the basis of Hegel’s conception, but do not detail his execution, which only becomes apparent from students’ notes. Especially examination of Hegel’s progressive development of these materials lacks sufficient textual basis, as prior editions compiled various transcripts into one composite text.

2 The Systematic Position of World History The systematic position of the philosophy of world history was already s­ pecified by Hegel in the first edition of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences (1817) and then further developed in detail in later editions of the Encyclopaedia.6 According to that structure, the philosophy of world history stands at the end of the philosophy of objective spirit and forms the bridge to the philosophy of absolute spirit, in which spirit recognizes itself as spirit and sublates the limitation it still retains as subjective and objective spirit. Hence, the depiction in §448 in the first edition of 1817 starts with the transition of the limited spirit of a people (Volksgeist) into the universality of world history. That Volksgeist is limited, insofar as it has a specific development in time: “But as a limited spirit it passes into universal world-history, the events of which exhibit the dialectic of the several national spirits, — the judgment of the world” (Enc. 3:302 §548/GW 13:238). Through this process spirit “becomes a universal spirit, a world-spirit,” from which perspective the spirits of peoples are regarded as stages in the development of the world spirit in time (Enc. 3:302 §549/GW 13:238). Through the spirits of peoples becoming the medium and agent of the world spirit, its consciousness represents, according to Hegel, the absolute will of the world spirit: “Against this absolute will the other particular national spirits have no rights” (Enc. 3:307 §550/GW 13:450). The national spirits of peoples is in this regard bearers and agents of the world spirit in the same way as individual human beings are bearers and agents of the spirit of their people. What individuals (or peoples) achieve for the consciousness of the world spirit is “the substantial issue of their labor,” i.e. its proper content; thus they, in this respect, “are instruments, and their subjectivity,

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which is peculiar to them, is the empty form of activity” (Enc. 3 §551/GW 13:239 §451). World history, as outlined here by Hegel, presents itself as labor through which the world spirit becomes conscious of itself as spirit. In other words, the spirit rises in world history from its limitation and particularity to the generality of that spirit, which as spirit becomes aware of itself. The “spiritual substance,” Hegel concludes, has in the course of this development “elevated [self-consciousness] into infinity, and is thereby as universal spirit an object to itself, which self-consciousness knows as its own substance” (Enc. GW 13 §452). Hegel here describes world history as labor, a labor whose actors, i.e. vehicles, are limited “spirits”—spirits of peoples, or single individuals (subjective spirits)— which function in it simultaneously as tools or agents of the world spirit. This does not hold of the peoples or particular individuals in all regards; it pertains, Hegel emphasizes, only to “the substantial issue of their labor” or “the individual share they took in the substantial business” (Enc. 3:307 §551/GW 13 §451). The vehicles of this process, these actors, are therefore limited individualities, yet the substance of their achievements, their works, is general—and from this perspective of generality, or substance, they are agents and tools of the world spirit. Likewise, Hegel describes this relation as the “cunning of reason” (VPhW, 105), through which reason—the universal spirit—realizes its purpose: to recover its own consciousness. This figure, whose “speculative aspect” belongs to the Science of Logic (LPWH 94/GW 18:163; Intro. 1830/31), concerns Hegel’s conception of teleology. Concerning this Hegel says in the Logic of the Encyclopaedia: “The fact that the subjective purpose, as the power over these processes, in which the objective sublates itself, keeps itself outside of them and preserves itself in them is the cunning of reason” (Enc. 1:284, §209/GW 13:97, §159). In terms of Hegel’s Realphilosophie, this is equivalent to the structure of labor in which man, seeking to fulfill his purpose, uses the features and forces of objects and tools. “He uses nature as a means to defeating nature; the nimbleness of his reason enables him to protect and preserve himself by pitting the objects of nature against the natural forces which threaten him and so nullifies them” (Enc. 2p:195f. §245/GW 24, 1:4). The question of how a goal-oriented subject, using individuals and peoples as means of its labor, can be conceived in the context of history as such will be discussed later. By denoting world history as “labor of the world spirit,” by which it arrives at self-consciousness, Hegel establishes a link to the Preface of the Phenomenology of Spirit, where he first developed this figure in detail. There he distinguishes the particular individual, the incomplete spirit, from the universal individual, the world spirit. What the particular individual wills (aims) to know is “an acquired possession of the universal spirit,” which “constitutes the substance of the individual, or, his inorganic nature,” which it must “acquire” and take into “possession” (PhG GW 9:25). From the perspective of the universal spirit, which is the substance of the individual, it follows that this substance thereby provides for its own acquisition of self-consciousness. Individuals’ appropriation of the universal spiritual property and the universal spirit’s self-reflection therefore cannot be

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separated; only through particular human individuals consciously acquiring the results of the unconsciously fulfilled labor of the world spirit does “the universal spirit itself” becomes “substance giving itself its self-consciousness,” as Hegel explicitly argues (PhG GW 9:25). Thus, the universal spirit only acquires self-consciousness through the activity of particular individuals, who are the vehicle of this world-historical processes. The sections on world history in the second and third editions of the Encyclo­ paedia were developed after Hegel had already lectured on this topic several times. They change neither the systematic position nor the outline of world-historical development, “the path of liberation for the spiritual substance, [… by which] the merely implicit spirit achieves consciousness and selfconsciousness [… so that] it becomes to the outward eye a universal spirit — a world-spirit” (Enc. 3:302 §549/GW 19:384f). However, Hegel changes his formulations repeatedly and adds clarifications, mostly in the extensive Remarks appended to each section.7 Hegel discusses in detail two main problems. The first Remark to §549 addresses objections, according to which assuming there is a purpose of world history is a priori and thus empirically superficial, indeed an extraneous method. Hegel replies that considering history entirely impartially, with no point of reference by which singular events, agendas, opinions and deeds can be ordered, must regard all these historical particulars as “equally pointless and utterly indifferent” (Enc. 3:306, §549R/GW 19:387). The extrinsicality, alleged to be concommitant with assuming a purpose, is by this approach, Hegel argues, instead only exacerbated: “In that way historical truth means only correctness — an accurate report of externals, without critical treatment save as regards this correctness — thus admitting only qualitative and quantitative judgements, but neither judgements of necessity nor of the concept” (Enc. 3:306 §549R/GW 19:387f). Philosophy of history instead concerns relating historical phenomena to the “spiritual life of truth and freedom” (GW 19:388). This indicates one of Hegel’s primary systematic aims, further developed in the lecture series: World history is to be understood specifically as history of freedom. The second problem Hegel treats in an extensive Remark concerns inquiry into the knowledge universal spirit acquires of itself, the transition from objective to absolute spirit, achieved in and accomplished as the chief result of world history. Hegel now places this argument, to which he had alluded in 1817, in the context of spirit’s ascension to God, already mentioned in the Introduction to the Logic (Enc. §51R). Following Kant’s moral proof of God, which grounds truth based upon moral premises, Hegel describes religion as “life rising to thinking, thus becoming aware of the free universality of its concrete essence. Only from moral life (Sittlichkeit) and by moral life is the Idea of God seen to be free spirit” (Enc. 3:309 §552R/GW 19:390). Here too, the final goal to which spirit rises through world history is the concept of freedom. The “ascension to God,” that is, the transition into absolute spirit resulting from and in world history, indicates that history has achieved its goal, and has now sufficiently achieved that goal to enable spirit to conceive itself as spirit.

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“The struggle of finite self-consciousness with absolute self-consciousness, which latter appeared extrinsic to the former, ceases. Finite self-consciousness has ceased to be finite; thus conversely the absolute self-consciousness has obtained the actuality it previously lacked. This is the entirety of world history as such and specifically the history of philosophy, which has only presented this struggle and appears there at its goal, where this absolute self-consciousness, the idea of which [philosophy] has, has ceased to be alien, so that spirit is actual as spirit” (tr. krw; LHPHald 3:551f/MM 20:460). This concerns Hegel’s understanding of an end of history, considered below. The third edition of the Encyclopaedia retains the systematic structure of the second edition, but Hegel expands his Remark concerning the a priori idea required to understand history, and adds a detailed Remark to the concluding §552, concerning the relation between state and religion. Hegel notes that of course “religion is the very substance of the moral life itself and of the state,” although “religion must have the genuine content” (Enc. §552R/Enc. 3:310/GW 20:532). This content, as again emphasized here, is the human content of “the free spirit itself”: “Thus ultimately the principles of the religious and of the ethical (sittliche) conscience come to be one and the same in protestant conscience: the free spirit knowing itself in its rationality and truth” (Enc. 3:318/GW 20:541; tr. krw). It remains to be shown that from this perspective, history of religion becomes part of the history of consciousness of freedom, so that Hegel’s lectures on philosophy of religion are integral to his account of world history as history of freedom. An outline of world history also concludes Hegel’s Elements of the Philosophy of Right (1821), which examines philosophy of objective spirit in detail (much greater detail than the three editions of the Encyclopaedia), through which world history is transformed into absolute spirit. Distinctive of this presentation is that here, and at the outset, Hegel calls world history “spiritual actuality in its entire range of inwardness and externality” (RPh §341/PR 372/GW 14,1:274), through which world history is defined as the complete history of spirit in general. This is not unproblematic, as this definition exceeds the scope of objective spirit, in which world history systematically located. A complete history of spirit, world history also includes the history of absolute spirit, thus including art, religion and philosophy, though in Hegel’s summary concluding his Philosophy of Right, history of spirit appears in the context of the development and the relation of nationstates.8 However, Hegel explicitly emphasizes in the Philosophy of Right that history only starts with the state, because only the state is “the formal realization of the idea within it” (RPh §349/PR 375/GW 14,1:277). Without the local universality of the state—however insufficiently this state may be developed—spiritual universality, the central concern of philosophy of history, has no basis (Jaeschke 2016, 370). Regarding the course of world history itself, the description in the Philosophy of Right is more detailed than that of the Encyclopaedia. Hegel defines the concrete ideas, the spirit of a people, in terms of the development of the selfconsciousness of universal spirit, the world spirit. This serves as the basis for

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distinguishing between four “world-historical realms”: the Oriental, the Greek, the Roman and the Germanic (RPh §354/PR 377/GW 14,1:278), adding further characteristics of these empires in subsequent sections. The Christian-Germanic world consolidates the worldly and intellectual realm, because “the spiritual realm brings the existence (Existenz) of its heaven down to earth in this world, to the common worldliness in actuality and in representational thought; and conversely, develops its abstract being-for-itself to attain thought and the principle of rational being and knowing, to the rationality of justice (Recht) and law […], so that genuine reconciliation becomes objective, which reveals the state as the image and actuality of reason” (RPh §360/PR 380/GW 14,1:281; tr. krw). The state as reality of reason in morality is thus world-historical insofar as it brings together the intellectual and the profane, thus constituting the realization of philosophy.

3 Types of Historiography: The “Introduction” 1822–1828 At the outset, Hegel defines his subject as “philosophical history of the world ” (LPWH 67/GW 18:121), which he further specifies by distinguishing it from two other kinds of historiography: “original” and “reflected” history. Hegel’s own manuscript, however, only outlines original and reflected history, so that student transcripts must also be consulted.9 As examples for “original” historiography, Hegel mentions the works of ancient historiographers Herodotus and Thucydides. This type of historiography is original because the authors “have themselves witnessed, experienced and lived through the events, deeds, and circumstances they describe” (LPWH 67/GW 18:122). This direct relation to the events (res gestae) is recounted by “original” historiographers; the “development of the writer” and “the development of the events,” the “spirit of the author and the general spirit of the actions he relates, are one and the same” (LPWH 69/GW 18:125). We here have, according to Hegel, “the history of a people […] recent, alive, and at first hand” (LPWH 70/GW 18:127). Although Hegel does not consider this type of historiography to be reflective, the immediacy of the experiencing is, however, ruptured in the depiction of the experience, which is of course a reworking; the authors compile “events, deeds, and situations that are contemporaneous to them into a work of representation for representation” (LPWH 68/GW 18:124). That which “is scattered about in subjective, fortuitous memory” is “fashion[ed] into a whole” and “set up in the temple of Mnemosyne” (the goddess of memory); Hegel speaks in this context also of “transplanting” (LPWH 68/GW 18:123). Hegel distinguishes original historiography from sagas, folk songs and similar types of poetry, naive story-telling and folk lore “whose consciousness is still obscure” (LPWH 68/GW 18:124). Thus, the field of “German philology,” newly emerging in the beginning of the nineteenth century, seeking to find a national cultural tradition—especially in the poetry of the Song of the Nibelungs—is denied

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legitimacy as an historical science. A second distinction is made to chronicles, which record events in a similarly objective manner (cf. LPWH 70f/GW 18:127f). Hegel requires that historians be “of the same class, circle, attitude, mentality, and culture as those whose actions he describes,” to be considered an original writer (LPWH 71/GW 18:128f). Here a fundamental feature of Hegel’s understanding of history becomes clear: History is apparently not identical with objective events, the res gestae. For the transformation, or transposition (“transplantation”) of the events to the temple of Mnemosyne demands the historiographer to possess a particular mind to arrive at a rich understanding of the events occurred that is not—as in chronicles— disolved into singular events.10 On the other hand, a historiography that only or mostly works subjectively is to be ruled out, just as an “objectivistic” historiography, which is suggested by the distancing from sagas and poetry and epics. Hegel therefore locates the concept of history between the two extremes, the type of interchange between which is yet to be explored. “Reflected” history differs from original history by going “beyond what is present simply to the author” (LPWH 71/GW 18:129), reflecting a temporal distance through which the past is known as passed and is related to the standpoint of the historiographer. The main characteristic is, according to Hegel, “the way in which the historical material is worked up, for the worker comes to it with his own spirit, which is different from the spirit of the content itself,” which is why the standpoint of the reflecting historiographer becomes crucial (LPWH 71f/GW 18:129f). Reflected historiography seeks to give an overview by assembling existing reports and through composing this portrayal can enable “a faithful portrayal of the times” (LPWH 73/GW 18:132). As reflecting, this type of historiography is to be classed with that kind of reasoning that abstracts and singularizes. Those who “endeavor to provide an overview of a lengthy period of the whole of world history” (LPWH 74/GW 18:133) need to abbreviate through abstraction, or resort to recounting a “motley assortment of details” (LPWH 75/GW 18:134) which loses interest in coherence and confuses, a manner that, as Hegel polemically writes, should be “left to Walter Scott’s novels” (LPWH 135/GW 18:135). The manuscript of the “Introduction” explicitly mentions pragmatic historiography as an example, which addresses the past as a (positive or negative) example in view of the present. Closely linked is moral (or rather: moralizing) historiography, which judges the past according to current moral standards (cf. GW 27, 1:11). Hegel mentions as a third form, one that emerged from the hermeneutically inspired ars critica, “critical” history, “which is not history itself, but rather a history of the account of history and an assessment of the same”; he names Niebuhr’s Römische Geschichte as an example (GW 27,1:12). A fourth form of reflected historiography are different types of specialized history—e.g. history of law in Germany or elsewhere—which nonetheless have a general perspective, e.g. the development of law of a specific people as such (cf. GW 27,1:13). This type of historiography forms, because of its generality, the transition into philosophical world history.

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Philosophical historiography does not follow an abstract-general point of view, which guides the reflection of the intellect, but its perspective “is a concrete universal, the spiritual principle of peoples and the history of this principle” (GW 27,1:14). This universal, which Hegel defines more closely as “idea,” i.e. “spirit,” is on the one hand the guiding principle of history, on the other hand “eternally present to itself” (ibid.). Here the systematic relation of this prima facie paradoxical quality requires clarification. A generality concrete unto itself, i.e. one entity which is internally differentiated as totality, is Hegel’s concept of reason for this kind of concrete generality, which he contrasts to the abstract universality of the intellect, which subsumes the particular but does not contain it within itself. Hegel’s concept of concrete universality is developed in the Science of Logic as logical, i.e. absolute idea, which is in nature and spirit, where the spirit works upwards in relation to nature towards its self-consciousness as an idea. Thus although the idea as spirit already always (and therefore eternally) is with itself; at the same time, spirit is always also historical; because it is not always its selfconsciousness, but only becomes so. Spirit and historicity are ultimately synonymous for Hegel. This is why world history has its systematic position at the transition to absolute spirit; this also makes clear why Hegel wants to look at history neither purely objectively nor purely subjectively, but localizes the relation between subjective and objective within the nature of spirit. The spiritual principle that places philosophical historiography into focus as concrete universality is therefore “The totality of all particular perspectives, [and] these principles themselves … stand in a necessary succession of stages. They are the offshots of spirit (Sprossen des Geistes), and in them spirit completes itself to totality within itself” (GW 27,1:14f.). World history is therefore comprehensive history of spirit, including the forms of absolute spirit; although Hegel had not explicitly developed such a broad notion of spirit, “world spirit” had been a cipher at least since the Phenomenology. Philosophical world history is therefore characterized, in every respect, by the standpoint of universality; it is “world history with a universal thought about history; not reflections on individuals and circumstances” (GW 27,1:16). The first universal thought is that of change and evanescence, “the general sadness over the decline of peoples. Each new stage is built on the ruins of the past” (GW 27,1:17). At the same time, the demised is the material of the spirit’s further labor, which always creates something new from it. So here arises the question, whether this labor has an ultimate purpose: “this is the third category, that of reason” (GW 27,1:19). This is the question of rationality of history, or of the reason in history.

4 History and Reason: The Introduction 1830/31 Philosophy, according to Hegel, does not consider history through its external characteristics; the “sole conception that it [philosophy] brings with it is the simple conception of reason – the conception that reason governs the world, and

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that therefore world history is a rational process” (LPWH 79/GW 18:140). This is proven in philosophy itself—ultimately in Science of Logic—and is presupposed on the basis of philosophy, the supposition being that “reason is not so impotent as to yield only an ideal or a moral ought, and only outside the bound of actuality” (LPWH 80/GW 18:140f). This program, exhibiting the reality of reason in history, demands, however, “that we must apprehend the historical accurately” (LPWH 81/GW 18:143) and construct history through external characteristics or even add fictious accounts. Both—having the determination that history is proceeding reasonably and the demand that history be treated “faithfully”—today appear contradictory. The historical events of the twentieth and twenty-first Centuries, which latter has only just begun, appear to concede little or nothing to the conviction that history is reasonable, if “reasonable” is understood to be affirmative, as legitimizing historical events. In this regard, the problem of theodicy arises anew, although Hegel takes up an immanent perspective from the beginning when considering the philosophy of world history and leaves “the relationship to God” undetermined (LPWH 79/GW 18:140). Yet soon after, Hegel acknowledges explicitly that his consideration of world history is a “theodicy, a justification of God,” because “it is in world history that the total mass of concrete evils is set before our eyes” (LPWH 85f/GW 18:150). Hegel’s formulations indicate he does not simply equate the reality of reason with whatever occurs historically. In the Logic, which Hegel here presupposes, he distinguishes between actuality, as something adequately fulfilling its proper essence or constitutive kind, and mere reality, merely what exists, however defective or deficient it may be—a terminological distinction perhaps characteristically German (Baptist 2006). Only the actual counts as reflecting reason; this is not so of the evils Hegel so graphically describes: One can paint “the most terrible picture” of the successes of evil in history, “without rhetorical exaggeration, only with the right compilation of mishap, …. and likewise to heighten the emotion to the deepest and most inconsolable grief that cannot be balanced by any reconciliatory result.” In this regard, history is a “slaughter bench in which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of states, and the virtues of individuals are sacrificed” (LPWH 90/GW 18:156f.). When Hegel nevertheless confesses being “woefully content with the empty and fruitless sublimities of this negative result” (LPWN, 91/GW 18:158), and in those deeply regrettable events to see “only the means” for the ultimate purpose of history (LPWN 90/GW 18:157), it may appear that he excuses these evils by appeal to the final purpose of history, thereby justifying and instrumentalizing historical sacrifices and slaughters. Yet this is not how Hegel seeks to achieve reconciliation.11 Hegel’s approach can be properly understood only by bearing in mind that he seeks to comprehend history neither purely objectively at the level of events, nor purely subjectively. According to Hegel, reconciliation with the evils of world history can be achieved “only through knowledge of the affirmative [element in history] in which the negative passes away into something subordinate and surmounted, in part through awareness that this purpose is actualized in the world and that evil has not been able to maintain an equal standing.” He allows that initially

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this claim of reason is merely an “indefinite word” (LPWH 86/GW 18:150). Thus the affirmative character of reason, through which it can subordinate historical evils within world history, must still be specified, to understand how Hegel’s emphasis on cognition—knowledge, comprehension—implies that the empirical reality of world history (in contrast to its rational actuality) is not thoroughly permeated by reason. In this context, Hegel emphasizes two considerations. First, the “abstract definition” (LPWN 87/GW 18:152) of world history, i.e. its ultimate purpose, is nothing other than spirit working to ascend to self-consciousness of its freedom. Second, Hegel draws a “distinction between the principle as such and its application, that is, its introduction into and its accomplishment within the actuality of spirit and life” (LPWH 88/GW 18:153). Indeed, spirit as spirit is historical precisely because what it actually is can only be achieved as a result; thus it signifies an abstract principle, which in the further reflective philosophical reconsideration of history is able only gradually to permeate the full actuality of spirit and of life. In this context, Hegel defines world history as “progress in the consciousness of freedom” (ibid.). This designates the goal of the process and provides the criterion by which progress in history is assessed. History is not a universal advance in all aspects of social and political life—a conception which of course has never been advocated in this form by historico-philosophical theories of progress of enlightenment (Rohbeck 1987; also Rohbeck 2004, Chapter 1); world history is also not even progress in the realization of freedom, but it is only progress in consciousness of freedom.12 This also cannot be understood as being about a common consciousness of freedom; instead, it concerns the concept of freedom, which is fulfilled when spirit in an absolute consciousness comprehends itself as free. The ultimate consciousness of freedom is therefore the absolute idea, as it is developed in the Science of Logic. It is, in short, the totality as the unity differentiated within itself, the unity, within which the differentiated aspects or moments exist in their particularity as moments of the whole and, in accord with the properly rational concept of universality they are not simply subsumed under an abstract principle or classification. This totality, in which individual freedom and individuals’ common existence is comprehended together as a whole, is the normative model of political and social freedom according to Hegel. In the Elements of the Philosophy of Right this appears as “right of particularity” characteristic of modernity: The right of the subject’s particularity to find satisfaction, or – to put it differently – the right of subjective freedom, is the pivotal and focal point distinguishing between antiquity and the modern age…. Now this principle of particularity is admittedly a moment with an antithesis, and in the first instance at least, it is equally identical to the universal as it is distinct from it. (RPh §124R/PR 152/GW 14,1:110)

The principle of this right is marked world-historically by Hegel as the turning point between antiquity and modernity, which he understands largely to coincide with the emergence of Christianity, which Hegel regards as first proclaiming the

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freedom of each and all. However, this principle was only philosophically epitomised by Hegel’s philosophy in the absolute idea, through which, strictly speaking, world history achieves its end in an absolute and hence complete consciousness of freedom. From this perspective, world history is the development of freedom’s consciousness, i.e. of man as free. This freedom, as free will, is the basic condition of world history, which at first belongs to objective spirit. The basis for objective spirit—according to Hegel’s 1830 Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences— is the free individual mind, the “actual free will” as a “unity of theoretical and practical spirit: a free will, which realizes its own freedom” (Enc. §481/GW 20:476). Hegel bases this claim upon the idea that only the free will breaks out of direct dependence upon nature, so that nature, according to Hegel, is already the “implicit Idea” (Enc. §482/GW 20:476). Accordingly, in history the origin of freedom is also the origin of evil. Because world-historical individuals advance history with their passions, in the course of world history, relapse into subjectively exerted individual freedom with destructive consequences for the community and for other individuals is always possible. According to Hegel, only animals are innocent; the volition of man can either be directed towards good or evil (cf. LPWH 97/GW 18:167). However, “theodicy” as reconciling re-consideration of history does not consist in claiming that good has triumphed despite evil and has even learned how to use evil for good the purposes—this would indeed be cynical, already in Hegel’s time. Instead, reconciliation with history consists in the fact that history at all emerges from the free will, and that the will as Idea is able to attain self-consciousness in its complete concept of freedom. What has been sacrificed on the slaughter bench of world history is not deducted from freedom’s consciousness, what remains to be appreciated and comprehended is that this consciousness of freedom was at all able to arise, despite the sacrifices of history. Hegel offers no more reconciliation than that; consider that the realization of freedom in a world not appropriate to the consciousness of freedom simply does not belong to philosophical world history, which culminates in the consciousness of freedom; according to Hegel, more than this does not lie within the competence of philosophy. The course of world history, as Hegel presents it in the conclusion of the “Introduction” and explicates with abundant empirical material in the lectures, thus constitutes the “stages of the development of the principle whose content is the consciousness of freedom” (LPWH 110/GW 18:185). Here Hegel describes three main stages, which correlate with the three world-historical “worlds,” the Oriental, the Greco-Roman and the Germanic (Christian-modern) world. Initially, spirit is still immersed in naturalness and only “in a condition of unfree singularity (one is free). In the second stage spirit emerges into the consciousness of its freedom (some are free)”; finally in the third stage “spirit is elevated out of this still particular freedom into freedom’s pure universality (the human being as such is free)” (LPWH 110/GW 18:185f).

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5 The End of History As not at all world-historical events, as quasi-objective occurrences, constitute the philosophical content of world history, which instead is solely progress in the consciousness of freedom, Hegel avoids those arguments against theodicy mounted by Kant, because Hegel’s perspective involves no balancing between casualties and progress. Hegel also avoids overburdening his philosophy with a broad concept of progress. The price for this, which has much irritated Hegel’s scholars, is that the very criterion of progress, and the end of history concluding in self-knowledge of the idea of freedom, are designated together in one stroke. This is troublesome for two reasons: First, because we are accustomed to regarding history as preferably objective, as the entirety of human activity and deeds in time, we thus lack an intuitive sense of the claim that history has arrived at an end; second, because the task of permeating spiritual actuality as a whole with the idea of freedom still requires actualization in the form of actual accomplishment. Hegel’s treatment of the Christian principle of freedom in terms of the history of freedom clearly assumed that this principle must be realized in the rationality of the state and therefore would have to become mundane, whereas previously it had been otherworldly or merely ideal. Philosophy, however, Hegel says in Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, is a sanctuary apart, and those who serve in it constitute an isolated order of priests, who must not mix with the world, and whose work is to protect the possessions of Truth. How the actual present-day world is to find its way out of this state of disruption, and what form it is to take, are questions which must be left to it to settle, and to deal with them is not the immediate practical business and concern of philosophy. (LPRel, 151)

This is certainly connected to Hegel’s rejection of a mere ought and with his belief that philosophy is only able to recognize what has already become actuality: “As the thought of the world, it appears only at a time when actuality has gone through its formative process and attained its completed state” (RPh PR 23/GW 14,1:16). Because the owl of Minerva can only retrospectively perceive what is actual, the struggle to actualize freedom in society and state, subsequent to the philosophical end of history, is not the object of philosophy and is philosophically imponderable. Because this struggle not only touches all human interests, but takes these as its content, it also generates—constantly anew—the need for human self-understanding in art, religion and philosophy. The absolute spirit and with it the consciousness of freedom constantly enters into a tension-filled relation to contemporaneous socio-political actuality and to the conditio humanae, the anthropology as subjective spirit, which it determines in its historical specificity. Hegel had developed a model for this in Jena, to which he however does not return regarding world history: the “true need of philosophy,” according to Hegel in 1801/02, is “learning to live from it and through it” (GW 5:261),13 through “bearing the limitations of actuality without finding it satisfactory” (GW 5:269).14 Dissatisfaction with existing reality, as Hegel had envisioned it theoretically in Jena, would indeed belong to the “highest right of the subject,” as introduced in

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the Elements of the Philosophy of Right, namely “to recognize nothing that I do not perceive as rational.” It is, however, “at the same time formal,” and “the right of the rational—as the objective—over the subject remains firmly established” (RPh §132R/PR 159/GW 14,1:115). If this right realizes itself as critique of what exists, it does not as an ought turn against the existing “world”; instead it practically claims what philosophy completely comprehends in the result of world history: the consciousness of freedom.

Notes 1. The number of attendees varied between 77 in the second and 140 in the fourth course of lectures. 2. In secondary records—here the handwritings are not retained—“Geschichte des Orients” has been preserved; cf. GW 18:221–227. 3. The edition published as part of MM (MM 12) is largely based on the WVF edition. 4. This edition was published as part of the “Philosophische Bibliothek” of the Felix-MeinerVerlag (Leipzig). For a detailed overview, see Bast (1993, no. 36.32); on the edition of Hoffmeister cp. ibid., no. 36.33. 5. Parts 3 and 4 were published in Lasson’s version, supplemented only by additional literature references. Those parts have been published since 1968 as part of Meiner’s “Philo­ sophische Bibliothek” in multiple editions. 6. These are in the first (1817) edition (Enc. GW 13) §§448–452. In the second (1827) and third (1830) editions (GW 19, GW 20) this discussion is in §§548–552, whose content was heavily revised. The third stands out from the second edition mostly through detailed Remarks Hegel added to individual sections. Hegel’s hand written notes in his personal copy, which refer to the revised second edition, are published in Enc. GW 13:485–499. 7. The notes in Hegel’s copy of the Encyclopaedia 1817 prepare for these additions, but in contrast to the Remarks in the second edition, already refer to the progression of world history. 8. Concerning this issue, see Jaeschke (1996, 363–373). 9. See GW 27:1. Here the transcript by Hotho of the first lectures in 1822/23 is combined with versions of other transcripts on the same series of lectures. 10. This is the reason why Hegel rejects historicism. 11. On the problem of theodicy, see Jeaschke (2016, 378–380). 12. On the concept of history as history of freedom, see Arndt (2015). 13. Hegel’s lecture Introductio in Philosophiam from the winter semester of 1801/2. 14. The fragment on logic and metaphysics of 1801/2 entitled Logica et Metaphysica.

Bibliography Arndt, Andreas. 2015. Geschichte und Freiheitsbewusstsein: Zur Dialektik der Freiheit bei Hegel und Marx. Berlin: Eule der Minerva Verlag. Baptist, Gabriella. 2006. “Wirklichkeit.” In Hegel-Lexikon, edited by Paul Cobben, Paul Cruysberghs, Peter Jonkers, and Lu De Vos, 497–499. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Bast, Rainer A. 1993. Die philosophische Bibliothek. Geschichte und Bibliographie einer philosophischen Textreihe seit 1868. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag.

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Jaeschke, Walter. 1996. “Die Geschichtlichkeit der Geschichte.” In Hegel-Jahrbuch 1995, 363– 373. Berlin: Akademie-Verlag. Jaeschke, Walter. 2016. Hegel-Handbuch. Leben – Werk – Schule. Stuttgart und Weimar: J. B. Metzler Verlag. Rohbeck, Johannes. 1987. Die Fortschrittstheorie der Aufklärung. Französische und englische Geschichtsphilosophie in der zweiten Hälfte des 18. Jahrhunderts. Frankfurt/M. und New York: Campus. Rohbeck, Johannes. 2004. Geschichtsphilosophie zur Einführung. Hamburg: Junius Verlag. Virmond, Wolfgang, ed. 2011. Die Vorlesungen der Berliner Universität 1810–1834 nach dem deutschen und lateinischen Lektionskatalog sowie den Ministerialakten, edited by Wolfgang Virmond. Berlin: Akademie Verlag.

Chapter 24

Freedom and the Logic of History Simon Lumsden

Karl Löwith’s classic work from 1949, Meaning in History, presents Hegel’s philosophy of history as a secularized eschatology in which reason “governs the world” and history is the rational execution of God’s purpose (Löwith 1949, 54). This comprehensively teleological account of Hegel’s thought assumes there is a pre-determined end towards which world history is striving. However, the path of historical development in Hegel’s philosophy of history is not directed toward a posited end by a supra-individual entity, nor is there a structure of spirit that compels human beings to realize a plan it has devised for itself. World history is not teleological in this sense. There is a logic to history’s development and its transformations must be conceived as necessary but this does not mean that history’s trajectory is progressing towards an end that reason or a supra-individual cosmic spirit has designed for human existence. The question at the center of Hegel’s philosophy of history is how to understand historical development if reason is not a force independent of human activity that is pulling its levers. This would appear to leave us with two alternatives: that history is meaningless, something Hegel clearly denies, or that history is the product of actions and intentions by individuals and collective agents such as states. The cunning of reason explicitly rules out that the rationality of history, its meaning, could be an achievement that corresponds to the conscious purposes or intentions of individuals, states or institutions (LPWH 1:93/GW 18:161). Certainly, the intentions of states, institutions and individuals have a role to play in historical development but history’s determinacy and the path of its development, even the concepts that make up a culture’s animating principle, are not single or collective intentions. And yet cultures and historical developments are determinations of and by spirit, that is, they are collective human achievements. Even the change affected by world historical figures move history forward by developing principles that are already implicit in their own culture.

S. Lumsden (*)  University of New South Wales, Sydney, NSW, Australia e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 M. F. Bykova and K. R. Westphal (eds.), The Palgrave Hegel Handbook, Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26597-7_24

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The language Hegel employs to describe the architecture of historical development—the concept and the idea—is designed to present self-producing spirit as achievements of collective self-determination but in a manner such that they cannot be straightforwardly equated to the intentions of agents. The cunning of reason is Hegel’s way of describing this process in the philosophy of history. In the Phenomenology the language of a shape of spirit is used to capture this historicalconceptual development. The philosophy of history has to make sense of how it is that things are driven forward and why things are world historical and why things are not. What governs how the movement of history should be understood are the logical features of thought rather than a teleology.1 Being at home with oneself in otherness, being in and for itself, actuality, reason’s satisfaction, the syllogism of reason and so on, all these logical notions demand things be considered in a certain way. The modern state is the expression of human freedom that satisfies these logical requirements, broadly conceived it is the form that is adequate to the concept of freedom. What this adequate form is, is not something that could be known in advance; it has to emerge through the conflict and turmoil of history. If there is a drive at play in all Hegel’s thought, it is the desire for self-knowledge and these logical concepts are the schema by which thought could be adequate to itself, and a self-knowing subject.

1 Providence, Teleology and Freedom In antiquity there could be no philosophy of history as such, since the succession of historical events was under divine control. Nature and human affairs were neither governed by logic nor could either be said to be aiming at some final end. The gods’ orchestration and organization of events was not something that human beings could conceive. Divine control was an order imposed on the world by incomprehensible divine forces. The Christian era, by contrast, presents a clear line of historical development from “the fall” to “the day of judgment.” Augustine’s conception of this interval between the fall and God’s judgment invests this time with meaning, since the divine judgment, towards which human existence is moving, directs this period—secular human history—toward an end that promises the possibility of salvation. Augustine’s City of God intends to establish a coherent explanation and justification of the divine rationale of God. Providence is the expression of God’s care for us; it restores order to the world through divine justice. The punishment of the sinful and the reward for the righteous are all part of a grand reckoning to restore order to the cosmos (see Lloyd 2008, 144–150). Because his providential ordering of the world takes place in the city of God, and not the earthly world, meaning is not in but outside history, since meaning only comes through the end in the promise of divine salvation or damnation in the last judgment. Who does what to whom in the secular period is of no consequence in itself. If the philosophy of history begins with Augustine, it is an inauspicious start, as secular time amounts

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to nothing more than insignificant change; it is not meaningful except in relation to the divine beginning and end that are its boundary. The salvation towards which human beings ought to direct their activity lies only in God’s grace and this is something over which we have no direct control. The world is governed by divine providence and the changes in secular time cannot be self-correcting, since God can and does overrule human purposes. Kant’s account of world history in “Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Aim” is of a very different order: human beings—flawed and passionate creatures though we may be—can discern the plan nature has for humanity. Reason, through its observation and comprehension of history, discerns a pattern of development and infers an end to which nature aims, which is how the world ought to be. Reason can discern what the end is and can thereby promote the conditions by which that end can be achieved. Humanity is able to use their collective will to direct human action towards the rationally discerned end that nature is moving us inexorably toward (Enc. 1 §234Z/GW 19). This is the highpoint of enlightenment disenchantment of the world: the teleology of nature, accelerated by the reflective insight of reason, is able to liberate us from our fallen state in this world. Hegel’s philosophy of history has been regularly presented as an internalization of providence—that the plan guiding the transformations of human existence is transposed from a transcendent being onto an immanent rationality that is governing the world.2 On this view, Hegelian providence shifts the external necessity of God’s providence into an internal teleology—the concept. Hegel’s descriptions of world-historical development as, for example, the progressive realization of freedom, which has its highest expression in the state, would appear to give credence to the idea that the state is the fulfillment of a goal laid out in advance by some kind of rational providential teleology. My concern here is to demonstrate that the core claims that Hegel makes in his philosophy history, such as, the “interest of reason is that the state, this ethical whole, should exist,” do not have to be understood as the secularization of providence (LPWH 1:178/V 12:74). The notion of world historical development clearly entails the idea that there is some kind of progress. What is difficult to determine in Hegel’s philosophy of history is what, if anything, governs that progress. However, we are to understand the logic of historical development in Hegel’s philosophy of history it cannot be that of the model of external teleology. As with providence, any purposiveness that assumes an “extra-mundane intelligence” is misguided (WL GW 12:155/SL 652; also Enc. 2 §245/GW 19). Hegel is more receptive to the idea of an inner purposiveness that would allow us, for example, to conceive of biological life as in a very broad sense organized to satisfy the concept self-preservation (Enc. 1 §204R/GW 19).3 Such a notion allows us to think of biological life in its totality or at the level of the genus as having a structuring goal. Yet, it does not presuppose that there is some kind of master plan for how this end should be satisfied and it certainly does not allow us to understand the actions of individual creatures entirely on the basis of this concept. The idea of internal teleology is, in the

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context of the philosophy of history, useful for helping to understand the way in which the philosophy of history should be conceived as the progressive realization of freedom. Freedom is a structuring principle of the philosophy of history; what serves this end (human freedom) is an object of world philosophical inquiry and what does not is irrelevant. Hegel’s preferred language for describing the way in which freedom actualizes itself in history is not teleology, he usually employs phrases such as the “way in which the idea brings itself forth” (LPWH 1:146/V 18:25). While we can think of history as being teleological in a very weak sense—that there is some kind of potentiality to be realized—there is something misleading in using this language to describe the philosophy of history. Freedom does not have some kind of prescribed plan that it is striving to fulfill. This is not how the progress of freedom should be conceived—world historical developments are understood as such only retrospectively. World history is to be judged as striving to be adequate to the concept of freedom and self-producing spirit but the nature of this path cannot set out in advance what the adequate manifestation of freedom’s realization is. The path of historical development is better conceived as governed by logical processes rather than teleological ones. The struggles of world history develop this, but they are structured by key elements of the logic of spirit that will be discussed below. Hegel describes the self-movement that is characteristic of spirit’s development this way: “the infinite nature of the spirit is its inner process of not resting, of essentially producing, and of existing by means of its production” (LHPIntro 70/EGP 100). This restlessness and inner self-movement has a logic to its development but this logic does not plan the path by which it realizes itself. There are many forms to this logic but the one that Hegel adopts from Christian providence is that development has to be understood as necessary. If spirit is striving towards anything it is self-comprehension, and the self-comprehension, as science, requires—as it does in Kant’s Ideas essay—that its transitions be understood as necessity. Hegel appeals to providence not to claim that things are determined in advance by some entity, but that the progression of states of affairs can be a philosophy of history only if we understand the necessity of this process. The difference between the Christian era and antiquity allow us to make sense of why Hegel thinks we can see world history as rational. While Greek culture was a flourishing expression of human freedom, this was not reflected in its cosmology, which allowed no place for the authority of human judgment. Individuals needed the authority of the gods to make decision. The gods of ancient Greece had purposes for the world of which citizens could have no direct knowledge. Greeks could seek guidance for a course of action only through the irrationality of oracles, rituals and offerings. Greek cosmology permits no genuine conception of freedom since it requires one to accept the circumstances one finds oneself in: “because something is the way it is, it is, and the way it is, is the way it ought to be” (Enc. 1 §147Z/GW 19). This meant there was a profound tension at the heart of Greek civilization: between its knowledge that humans are free and the absence of an authority by which

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individuals could by themselves legitimate their judgements and actions and through which they could know themselves. The Greeks were subject to fate because they had not yet “grasped this power of decision as their own” but were instead subject to the gods and to “superstition” (LPWH 1:397/V 12:352). Their inability to conceive of themselves as ends in themselves who were capable of changing a state of affairs through self-determined agency did not cause them consternation, that is just the way things were—existence was determined by the gods not by them. In such an environment there could be no animating tension or “discord” between what they wanted for themselves and what was the case. Fatalism leaves no role for the negative. The power of the negative needs “discord” between a self-conception and another way in which things could be. Human beings are “dissatisfied when external reality does not correspond to their aims and differ from their desires” (LPWH 1:398/V 12:354). This discord is at the heart of historical development, but it is not one available to the Greek understanding of the order of the world. The critical element in the shift from Greek fatalism to an inchoate modern subjectivity and genuine freedom emerges when Christianity “allowed that God has become a this” (LPWH 1:396/V 12:351). Probably only Hegel could invest the notion of “thisness” with world historical significance.4 By God providing humanity with his son, an “actual human being,” Christians knew that God could experience their particular suffering and concerns. “With this conception, this confidence, individual human beings can decide and resolve things for themselves” (LPWH 1:397/V 12:352). Why exactly Hegel thinks God presenting his son as a particular man would allow early Christians to conceive of themselves as ends in themselves is not immediately obvious. If one is certain God was incarnate, because he gave us his son who lived and acted as one of us, it might lead to the conclusion that earthly matters are directed by this transcendent being and that consequently one’s own agency did not seem all that useful or important. Hegel anticipates such cynicism as “empty and idle talk,” since it fails to appreciate that the incarnate Christian God shifts responsibility from God to humanity. Hegel’s argument follows a central pattern in his thought: that we come to know ourselves as this, as a particular human being, when we find ourselves in otherness. This allows us to recognize that we are all ‘thises’—even God. In Christ we see that God is like us: he has individual needs and desires. In the gift of God’s son “our particularity is by this means also something recognized” (Enc. 1 §147Z/GW 19). The Greeks lacked such a self-conception “because what is particular, the end of individuals, was not taken up into God” (LPWH 1:398/V 12:354). The Christian God is fundamentally concerned with the particularities of human experience: God’s providence is present and guiding the particularities of human existence, shaping the circumstances of the human world to his end. This means that while the Christian may not understand all the details of the succession of particularities in the human world they are all aiming ultimately towards the good (LPWH 1:397/V 12:353). For the Greeks, what one did or why an event took place was at the whim of the Gods; the Greeks therefore had only Willkür not will, and such blind fatalism precluded the rational understanding of history.

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Providence as the Christians saw it was structured towards divine justice rather than contingency, moreover divine providence entailed a conception of necessity, though one issuing from an external source. While the Christian may not comprehend all God’s determinations, the will allows human beings to be judged before God not on the basis that all events and actions are random but because we have purposes and ends that we determine for ourselves, through our own counsel and judgement. Christianity located the basis of our action as something inwardly determined, because this is something that God has both experienced and of which he is concerned. More importantly those particularities have a connection to the universal, even if the early Christian was not in a position to understand it. Providence plays a critical role here, not because Hegel appropriates this as a model by which we think an external being determines a necessity in the earthly world, or because it offers him a way of conceiving of history as structured towards some master plan but in a logical form. Christian providence and the fate of antiquity share the idea that the details of our individual lives are not comprehensible to the individual but the Christian has faith that the journey of historical and individual particulars is ultimately towards the good. There is a necessity to history’s trajectory that is in God. Hegel appropriates the necessity from divine providence for the philosophy of history but it becomes a retrospective necessity that we can discern “the necessity of what has happened” (Enc. 1 §147Z/GW 19). The authority for understanding that necessity is relocated from God to reason. Understanding the necessity of history is why Hegel can claim his philosophy of history is in some sense providential. The transition from Antiquity to the Christian era is a case in point. Understanding the necessity for the historical advance of Christianity over Antiquity is to be found in Christianity’s correction of the diremption of universality and thisness in Antiquity. In it we can comprehend the correct relation of particularity and thisness to universality. The logical form of the syllogism allows us to see the superiority of the Christian over the ancient Greek, but it required this be experienced through the figure of Christ. Luther emerges as a decisive figure here. His theological concerns are primarily with the certainty of divine law—that truth issues from God and an individual can have faith in his eternal laws. Prior to the reformation, divine truth was mediated to the laity through the priesthood. Luther’s innovation was to argue that the individual is able to identify with the truth directly through their inner reflections. The subject is free, because he or she is no longer dependent upon the dictates of the clergy; the agent is able to know the truth through his or her own faith. The subject is free when he or she is at home with herself in otherness, because the truth that was over and against the agent, held from them by the priesthood, is now at one with his or her particularity, which is why he says “the this is now a spiritual matter” (LPWH 1:505/V 12:501). This mirrors the innovation of early Christianity because in the incarnate God, we have a God in whom particularity and universality align. This gives subjective authority to agents because, unlike the Greek gods, the Christian knows that the universals proclaimed by God are developed on the basis of God’s experience of the world, so this God is not set

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over and against them, consequently the truths he claims are in theory able to be experienced as true. This idea becomes secularized in subsequent history as we will see in the final section, because the individual, not through their personal faith, but through their rationality, is able to determine for themselves what should count as true and can recognize the relation of their particularity to the universal. Hegel’s innovation on this enlightenment pillar is the role of the state and Bildung in this process. The state is required to make this model actual (or effective). With Luther the individual can appropriate the objective as their own but only at the level of feeling, this model is made adequate in modern life only with the state, which provides the basis by which an individual can know their relationship to the universal and see it is as their own. This as we will see in the final section is the form that “belongs to culture [Bildung],” which is “the activity of the universal” (LPWH 1:506/V 12:502). Two issues emerge from this: Firstly, the role of discord in historical development. The tensions at play and the logical form of their conceptualization is central to Hegel’s philosophy of history. Secondly, does this shift to humans as ends in themselves replace the power of divine providence with a history that is determined by the explicit intentions of individuals? While it is clear that the shift in the modern world from Greece to the Christian and German world entails the awareness of being ends in themselves rather than being subject to fate, does this not mean the trajectory of history now lies with the self-determined character of human agents? Hegel holds onto the idea of providence because he does not want to align the necessity involved in historical development with the intentions of human beings.

2 Reason, Passion and the Universal Hegel’s notorious phrase “the cunning of reason” is probably more associated with his philosophy of history than any other claim.5 David Carr, in his recent work Experience and History describes the cunning of reason as a counterenlightenment project that returns “humans to their traditional status of passive beings subject to divine control and dependent on an agency outside themselves for their salvation and ultimate well-being” (Carr 2014, 95).6 The argument follows Löwith: reason has taken over from divine providence setting a goal for history that governs the way in which it is realized. It achieves its own ends by using the passions, interests and intentions of individuals, which are blind to its program. The problem with framing the cunning of reason in this way is that it makes the particular purposes of individuals into instruments of reason, as though reason has some kind of supra-individual intentionality. Carr is right that reason achieves its purpose through the “particular passions and interests” and that reason’s aims are not the same as those particular interests. But reason is not an

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organizing principle in any straightforwardly teleological sense guiding human action towards an end of its own design. Before we can understand what is going on with the notion of the cunning of reason we need to backtrack a little. Hegel remarks that the object of his inquiry in world history is the idea as it actualizes itself through human freedom. The idea is certainly not a simple concept to convey, but in the context of his philosophy of history it describes the way in which the concept is realized through human action. It is in a very broad sense the process by which the implicit principles of a form of life become effective in and as a shape of life. One of the central features of the idea is its necessity. The question Hegel asks and perhaps this is the central question of his philosophy of history: “the necessity in question is not an external one like that of fate but that of the divine Idea, so that we must now ask how this exalted Idea can be reconciled [vereinen] with human freedom” (LPWHIntro 71/VPhWIntro 83). The way Hegel conceives this problem is not a straightforward attempt to resolve a dualism. In the context of the philosophy of history, he asks how reason is able to determine anything in history if we assume that individuals are agents in history who are self-determining. Hegel illustrates how we might think of the necessity of history being compatible with self-determined freedom with an example that does not seem at first glance very helpful. He describes someone wanting to build a house. Building a house requires the aims and intentions of the builder, as well as various natural materials, each of which has their own natures and properties. This example sounds as though Hegel is leading us in the direction in which world history functions by virtue of an external purpose, as though its achievements were the representation of a supra-historical cosmic agent guiding world history, like an architect providing a plan that the builder realizes. But he excludes such an interpretation: “world history does not begin with some sort of conscious purpose, as do the particular spheres of human beings” (LPWH 1:93; GW 18:161). Instead, this is how Hegel describes the way in which the building of a house could be analogous to world history. Building the house requires using various materials (iron, wood and stone) each of which has natural properties that are essential to the construction of the house. The intention of the builder must harness conflicting natural properties: the laws of nature are employed against the natural features themselves: “fire to melt the iron, air to fan the flames, water to turn the wheels, to cut the wood” (LPWHIntro 71/VPhWIntro 84). The properties of natural elements are also turned against one another to build the house, which is in turn designed to keep the very same elements it employs to build the house outside or controlled—one has a dwelling to protect oneself from rain, wind and fire. The materials in the design of the house “act together to create a product which restricts their own activity” (LPWHIntro 72/VPhWIntro 84). This gives us the first aspect of the cunning of reason, which is that complex structures of collective existence and universal notions develop out of and in response to human’s pursuing their particularity. Human society, history and justice develop through the driving force of human passions that are the building

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blocks of a social order and yet the order itself was designed in part precisely to keep them at bay. The cunning of reason develops “by letting the objects in accordance with their nature, act on one another and wear themselves out on one another” (Enc. 1 §209Z/GW 19). Individuals pursue their particular passions and this will lead to conflict with the passions and interests of others, but the conflict of particularity does not mean they are in conflict with the universal—passion is not by its nature in conflict with justice. Systems of justice are historically produced universals that develop through all these conflicting tendencies that they aim to control but which is also their product.7 The universal structures of right may be in conflict with the particular pursuits of individuals but this does not negate the universality of its laws. If we cannot understand the idea as being motivated by an internal purposes (the intentions of individual agent) or external purpose, how ought we conceive of its development? The development of the idea is not the unfurling through some mysterious coordination of the purposes of individual agents, but is bound up with the way in which history develops the concept and makes actual universals. “My interest may indeed be a particular one, but it does not follow from this that it is opposed to the universal. For the universal can only be realized by means of the particular” (LPWHIntro 72/VPhWIntro 84). He goes on in this section to describe, in an analogous vein to the way in which he describes the construction of the house, how an individual is developed through his or her passions, and that the particularity of those passions and interests, and the specific ways in which they pursue their ends contribute to the character of the individual. The universal does not exist in itself; the abstract universal has no determinate existence—there is no universal ‘I’ as such, there are only human beings with determinate characters, which they develop through their action. This determinate character is not a “purely private content but are the effective motive force behind actions whose significance is universal” (LPWHIntro 73/VPhWIntro 85). He has no interest in ineffectual [ohnmächtigen] subjective opinions—what he is concerned with are universals. They gain significance by being put into effect by human beings: through their passion, activity and their will, by understanding a potentiality, seeing it as their own and translating this into existence.8 How can world history have no purpose and then appear to have a purpose accomplished through individuals satisfying their particular passions? This brings us to the second aspect of the cunning of reason: the way world historical individuals ‘produce’ new universals. Caesar pursues his own interest in a manner that takes on world historical—universal—significance because his actions correct a deficiency in Roman freedom. Caesar’s self-interested defeat of his rivals furthers the vocation of reason. Caesar maybe be pursuing his own interest but his end is animated by failures of freedom and conflicting conceptions of freedom in the existing state. Whatever the particular ills of Caesar’s actions in themselves, from the perspective of history his changes to the republic were an advance of human freedom. The pursuit of his own ends, which might be problematic, even immoral in his culture, develops history and advances spirit (see Alznauer 2012). Caesar “grasps” “a universal” that was “only implicit” and “turns it to their purpose”

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(LPWH 1:174/V 12:68). Such figures may not explicitly know this universal, nevertheless they will it and they act on it. This is what I take Hegel to mean by the cunning of reason: an individual has an interest in an inchoate principle (an sich) and pursues it with passion and will not stop until they are satisfied that it has been accomplished (für sich) (LPWH 1:91/GW 18:158). The universal does not exist until it is made actual through the agency of the individual. The laws, principles and so on that are an sich do not “gain currency by themselves” they must be put into operation through human action. What makes the heroes of world history great is that they feel this universal to be part of who they are and they “actualize the universal” through their actions. But the central problem here is from where does the principle arise? The Idea is itself the product of factors outside itself, and it is implemented and brought to its realization by the actions of individuals. It is precisely at this point that we encounter those great collisions between established and acknowledged duties, laws, and rights on the one hand, and new possibilities which conflict with the existing system and violate it or even destroy its very foundations and continued existence…. These new possibilities then become part of history. They incorporate a universal of a different order. (LPWHIntro 82/VPhWIntro 97–8)

It is the gap between an extant ethical life and an emergent universal that is the basis for historical change—not a plan of reason or God or something else. Dissatisfactions with or failures of existing norms incrementally undermine the coherence of a form of life. The cunning of reason marks the way in which the deficiencies in a form of life come to be corrected and the retrospective recognition of the necessity for this correction marks those transitions as rational. (This is the providential aspect of world history discussed above.) This process of correction is a complex and messy one. What distinguishes the world historical figure, and what sets them ahead of their society is: “they have recognized what is true in their world and in their age, and have recognized the concept, the next universal to emerge” (LPWHIntro 83/VPhWIntro 98; see also LPWH 1:175/V 12:69). They are able to see the necessity for the change in a social order: that a form of life has fallen out of alignment with what the culture is becoming. This is the role, at an abstract level, the idea serves. The idea is a way Hegel can conceive of how it is that an individual and principles can transcend their age. Generally, the actions of individuals align with the ethics of their age and in so doing individuals are at home with themselves. But the world historical individuals, those “conduits” of spirit, allow the emergence of a new universal that corrects the limits of their age. There may be no means or norm internal to their culture that justifies their action. Caesar’s action was right because it satisfied the idea not the norms of his own culture. Hegel is trying to provide the conceptual frame by which we can understand historical progression such that an individual can be right by overstepping their age: “There is a second universal that comes into prominence and expresses itself in the great figures of history: and therein lies the point of conflict that makes it difficult to conduct oneself in accord with the ethical realm. Within an ethical community of being such a conflict cannot occur” (LPWH 1:174/V 12:68). In

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these individuals the justification of their actions can only be a personal satisfaction, because the concepts they could employ to assert the justice of their claims has not yet emerged—they are the ones who bring it into existence: they “know what the times call for; they seek it and find their satisfaction only in doing so” (LPWH 1:175/V 12:70). The historical development at play here is not a normative correction in the manner of Christine Korsgaard and Robert Brandom. World historical individuals do not take center stage as figures of world history because they are ahead of the pack in recognizing logical or normative inconsistency. Striving to make all our commitments consistent and coherent does not capture the force of the negative and its role in experience. Transformation of the moral world order, as someone such as Korsgaard (2009) conceives it, seems to be effected by ironing out all our contradictory norms. In the case of Brandom, progress seems to be achieved (2007) by making all our commitments tightly organized into clear inferential relations, with all the inconsistent ones resolved or abandoned.9 World history does not progress in this way: things become inadequate and contradictory because they are experienced as such through painful tensions and conflicts of history. The development of the idea in history requires that inadequate expressions of the concept be transformed. Norms that are no longer applicable because they fail are no longer recognized as legitimate or cannot make an intelligible hold on the world show the limits of a shape of life. In these cases there is a “lived discontinuity” where the animating concepts that give a life significance become, in a phrase of Jonathan Lear’s “uninhabitable” (Lear 2006, 56)10; that is the norms through which one makes sense of the world fall increasingly out of alignment with the needs of the present. This is what a Julius Caesar or a Nelson Mandela does—they bring to a head through their actions a form of life that was already flawed; that had run its course because the animating norms were becoming increasingly unintelligible. A shape of life starts to grow old, is inadequate to itself, when its subjects cannot live those norms and principles as unreflective second nature, and they are experienced as out of alignment with what the world is becoming, with a need of the present. The great figures of world history demonstrate that the animating norms of a way of life have become untenable. The citizens in a sense intuit this but through the “heroes of world spirit”—the way in which they employ their self-interest, and their passion to pursue a goal—it is made actual in a concrete figure and then they can know it. They can recognize the way in which this form of life might be corrected because their actions show both the deficiency and the necessary path for its resolution. Resolving this gap is the labor of the negative; a culture that has fallen out of alignment with itself is a pathology that compels historical development. The driving purposiveness of biological nature is self-preservation. These life forces are not entirely transcended in spirit. Hegel’s subjective spirit makes it clear that the natural elements of human existence are a bed upon which individual and collective life is made.11 Drives and passions are central to historical development. In

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the case of world spirit, the driving “purpose [Zweck]” is “simply to find itself, to come to itself, and to contemplate itself in its actuality” (LPWH 1:94; GW 18:162). This aspiration for self-comprehension is purposive, and is governed by a logic—to be at home at with itself in otherness, but it is not teleological in the sense figures like Löwith and Beiser use it: that spirit is orchestrating some end to which it is aiming. What governs the movement of world-history are the features of spirit in all its forms: bei-sich-selbst-sein, the “infinite restlessness” of reason (LPWH 1:172/V 12:65), the analytic rigidity of Verstand, the reconciling role of reason, etc. Spirit is not structured to fulfill a secularized version of a divine order—there are different elements that motivate its development, for example, being at home with oneself in otherness [beisichselbstsein] is not an end in any real sense. Because spirit does not stand still, and it is not something that is ever satisfied, what these logical structures do is govern the form that any satisfaction of spirit might take. The movement of spirit involves drawing out the potentiality of the concept, making the in itself for itself. Spirit seeks satisfaction, it strives to comprehend itself and be at home with itself, but its drive forward is not designed to realize a plan of nature or spirit like a cosmopolitan moral world order. The diversity of elements at play in any world historical culture and the way in which competing norms and alternative conceptions of ourselves are contested are constantly in motion and these become the fog of potentialities or the an sich that come to be developed and known retrospectively as the path of historical development. That process is never ending, since the nature of modern reason is such that it is always dissatisfied with existing norms and ways of being and so the norms by which we interpret ourselves are in a constant state of transformation—so the attempt at self-comprehension is infinite. Historical development takes place through individuals pursuing and satisfying various public and private ends.12 The way Hegel conceives nature is that organisms just bring forth their properties without strife, conflict and struggle.13 Emergence is the process that Hegel appeals to describe this and it has a distinctively non-Darwinian connotation. In the following passage Hegel contrasts the development of spirit with nature: “[Spirit’s development] is not just a harmless and conflict free process of emergence,14 as in organic life, but rather a hard and obstinate labor directed to itself” (LPWH 1:109/GW 18:184). Hegel extrapolates this onto the broader program of history, in which unending internal conflict and resolution is the on-going struggle that is the life of spirit.

3 World History and the State as the Realization of Freedom Hegel argues that there is something distinctive about the way in which the state is organized that makes it the object of world history. Despite the state being at the center of his philosophy of history, it is not presented with any extended

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systematic description. Very little detail is provided about the nature of the modern state in the lectures. The Philosophy of Right is the proper place to examine the detail of the state.15 The world historical importance of the state is not to be found in the precise nature of its internal make-up, but in its more general function: “The essence of the state is ethical life” (LPWHIntro 95/VPhWIntro 112), and more specifically in providing a flourishing Bildung. Its significance is to be found in the way in which it allows freedom to objectify itself. It provides the condition in which freedom can make actual its potential through it mediating between universal and particular or the subjective will. It achieves this in two ways: firstly, by the “raising up of the singular to universal ethical principles” (LPWH 1:173/V 12:66). This aspect allows the individuals to see themselves in the objectivity of the state and to act and think rationally. Secondly, the way in which the state, especially in its highest modern European manifestation as constitutional monarchy “grants freedom to its particular elements, brings them into prominence, and takes them back into unity” (LPWH 1:183/V 12:81). The tensions between the particulars, and between the state and individual interests provide the condition for the on-going self-transformation of modern ethical life. Freedom in the social contract tradition of Hobbes and Locke is something that pertains to all individuals. Its character and form can be deduced in its completeness a priori. This conception of freedom is outside history; it is a freedom that does not require state and ethical life or even a capacity to act on principle. It is, for Hegel, a model of freedom that would treat the uneducated child who is governed by her inclinations and passions as free. After one has entered the commonwealth through the social contract, how one’s freedom can be expressed is circumscribed and limited by the state. In this model the individual is complete, the agent—as with the freedom that pertains to her in the state of nature—is fully developed without ethical life. This is most definitely not the case with Hegel: freedom and human subjectivity are fundamentally historical; they are achievements not a given. The problem with the Lockean and Hobbesian view of political society is that there is nothing mediating between the state and individuals. Without a bridge between these spheres the state remains in perpetuity separated from the individual who will be consigned to their subjective willing. This model ends up with two distinct domains: on the one hand, a state that may or may not allow certain rights and subjective freedoms, and on the other, an individual on whom restrictions to the following of their inclinations may or may not be imposed. For Hegel this forges a false view of the state and of subjects because it isolates the subjective will (the particular) and the universal. In such a state, an individual remains other to it—it cannot align particularity with universality because individual freedom has no necessary relation to justice and the institutions of state and civil society. Justice can only be conceived on this view as simply the enforcement of state of nature rights and is therefore fixed, stagnant and set over and against the individual. Civil society is primarily an economic sphere that facilitates the satisfaction of individual inclinations.

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Hegel adopts a very a different approach to the relation of the state to the individual. Historical change presupposes the transcending of the particular realm in which “ordinary and particular inclinations can be satisfied” (LPWH 1:172/V 12:64–5). World historical individuals, who were discussed above, are agents of historical change because their actions are directed against the particular settled ethical life of their culture. The justification for their actions is not something possible from within their own culture. They embody rationality because the heroic individual operates as a syllogism (“everything rational is a syllogism”): through their actions, they elevate their particular will to a universal. While they make the universal “as it is in and for itself” by making something implicit an object of their own knowing through their actions, on their own, however, they cannot make the new principle into something effective—actual—that is, an ethical whole. The state alone is in the position to embody the syllogism on a communal scale, by mediating the subjective will of all individuals with the universal. The state has the unique ability to embody at large the syllogistic movement of the heroic individual because they connect, freedom, law, and justice with individuals. With regard to the state, as with the heroic individual of world history, there are two universals at play. Firstly, the state is able to cultivate in its citizens the universality of ethical custom and is central to reconceiving freedom as objective, as we will see shortly. Secondly, the heroic individual of world history can damage their particular ethical realm and even be immoral with regard to it, and yet they can advance the cause of justice and world history. What the modern state represents however is a sphere in which this capacity for change can be contained within the state itself without a form of life having to collapse. Because Hegel conceives spirit as infinite restlessness, one can see why the state becomes important for the realization of the idea as it is manifested in world history. “The object of history is … change” (LPWH 1:172/V 12:64–5). The modern state embodies the restlessness of spirit and the change of spirit of history in its ethical life. The role of Bildung is central here, because it provides the basis by which new norms can emerge that allow individuals to adopt in a sense a new form of ethicality. The state is the idea,16 since its fundamental unity of citizen, institutions and state provides an openness to the future and a capacity for conceptual and ethical change that allows for ongoing self-transformation. If we return to the issue with which we began this section, the notion of freedom, and how Hegel’s approach is to be distinguished from social contract theorists, we can see the distinctive role of the state in the development of Hegel’s account of freedom. “A human beings first nature is one’s immediate being, which is animal nature; the second nature is something created by spirit, and this creating takes place in the state.”17 While Hobbes and Locke could not be accused of equating our animal nature to the state of nature, nevertheless in an undeveloped primordial condition—in its natural or state of nature variants—we are not for Hegel properly rational. Only the state can educate the individual such that they develop their spiritual potential.

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By means of discipline, education, and culture18 [human beings] become for the first time what they ought to be, rational beings. (LPWH 1:151/V 12:31)

The pedagogical role of the state is therefore crucial for its status as world historical. The cultivation of Bildung by the state provides the conditions by which the alignment of individuals with their particular wills and desires can be realigned with the universal. Without this realignment, individuals would pursue their subjective will and the state would be “an abstraction that stands over against the citizens” (LPWH 1:179/V 12:74). Right, justice and law would be on one side and subjective freedom on the other. Bildung provides the conditions by which individuals can see the culture they inhabit as their own. Bildung as an expression of the ethical life of the state raises the individual such that they are able to make judgments for themselves about the nature of the norms and principles proclaimed by the state. And moreover they are aware that those norms and the institutions that facilitate their circulation, adoption and that provide them with authority are understood to be collective achievements. Bildung has the central role here in bridging the gap between the subjective and the universal.19 The individual is free only insofar as he or she knows and wills the universal and posits those universals as her purpose. The language of purpose and end is pervasive throughout his various lectures on the philosophy of history: “The definition of reason in itself—insofar as reason is considered in relation to the world—amounts to asking what the final end [Endzweck] of the world is. To discuss the latter implies that it should be realized or actualized” (LPWH 1:86/GW 18:151). We have already seen what such actualization can mean: that it requires the state to educate the individual such that they understand themselves in relation to the institutions of their society and the principles that underpin it. But this does not explain as yet why the state is the fulfillment of some kind of end of history. Spirit’s goal is self-comprehension. There is no plan for the end towards which spirit is moving, the nature of its trajectory is, in some sense, governed by logic; its development comes to be understood as structured by these orders of intelligibility. If world history has a purpose it is that spirit be adequate to itself. “World history begins with its general purpose—that the concept of spirit be satisfied” (LPWH 1:93/GW 18:161). Why the modern state satisfies spirit in world history is because the animating concepts of spirit: self-production, restlessness, being-athome in otherness, self-knowing, the syllogistic relation of particular to universal are objectively present in the structures, institutions and self-understanding of the modern state, but only because spirit, collective human agency, have made these concepts central to how modern life should be considered. We have already gestured at the way in which the state embodies all these core concepts of spirit but the most substantial reason why the modern state is the satisfaction of spirit is its ability to harness the negative. Modern ethical life is not torn apart by conflict. The conflicts that may have caused the collapse of earlier forms of life are in modernity the basis for self-transformation. In earlier forms of life, the emergence of a new animating

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principle for a culture required the collapse of the culture—this is not the case with modern state. As we saw with regard to the cunning of reason, at the heart of this notion is the conflict and collapse that advances world history. Cultures break down when individuals pursue their subjective will and there is nothing to unite them, because the animating principles of the society can no longer be habitually offered as reasons for action. Reasons and norms that were legitimate and authoritative begin to become unintelligible or illegitimate as reasons for action and judgement. The modern state cannot be built on the particularity divorced from the universal, it develops a people’s cognizance of the universal. For the state to achieve a unity of subjective interests with the universal: “numerous institutions must be established and appropriate mechanisms invented. This [unity] involves a lengthy struggle of the understanding to become aware of what is appropriate, as well as a struggle with interests and passions, which must be subjected to protracted and difficult discipline” (LPWH 1:93/GW 18:161). The modern state is incompatible with those who would wish to assert their particularity at the expense of others. Those who would seek to build a nationalism built on race, ethnicity or some other subjective motivation cannot be justified on Hegel’s account, for it cultivates limited interests and asserts the superiority of one limited interest over another. Concretely, the education of individuals develops their ability to overcome their particularity and this requires adopting the viewpoint of objective ethical life. As Gyorgy Markus puts it: “being educated means developing an ability to comprehend the thought and standpoint of others” (Markus 2011, 404). In the modern state Bildung has the critical role of ensuring “that the individual should not remain something subjective but rather become objective” (LPWH 1:178/V 12:73). That is what the institutional mediation of ethical life is designed to do. It is the expression of human freedom for Hegel, because in the dynamism of ethical life we see ourselves and are at home with ourselves in a manner that does not remain fixed, because we see our universality embodied in the practices, concepts and institutions of ethical life and we recognize them as products of our own making. Our inclinations and subjective will can be wrong, contingent and destructive and education is the way in which we learn to accommodate those interests to the complex needs of modern life. We can only do this if we are at home in otherness, that is, if we see modern ethical life as an objective expression of ourselves. Bildung is at the center of human development and the state is the pinnacle of this, because it gives objective structure to thought. It creates a material sphere by which reason is in the world, but this reason is something that spirit has created through the complex processes of history. The self-comprehension of spirit requires Bildung, because it provides the condition by which we can understand ourselves and thereby recognize the rationality of modern life. The development of art, religion, Bildung, the institutions of ethical life, and ultimately philosophical reflection, are the objective manifestations of the raising of the singular to the universal. These are the means by which spirit

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can know itself in a manner that is adequate to itself. It knows these objective structures are its own, and that they make actual and satisfy its own concept. The modern age satisfies spirit because in it, its concept—that it is self-producing—can be shown to be the culmination of world history.20 The state understands itself to be self-producing and through the institutions of ethical life (which embody this self-production) it brings this idea to consciousness in the individual.

Notes 1. See the brief discussion of this issue in Pinkard (2012, 194). 2. Beiser (2005) holds a view like this. See p. 276. 3. For a complex yet compelling discussion of the way Hegel distinguishes internal and external teleology see Kreines (2015, Chapter 3). See also the very clear discussion of this issue and how it bears on the philosophy of history in McCarney (2000, 127). 4. See the extensive discussion of Luther’s consciousness of the this as central to the emergence of modern freedom (LPWH 1:503–506/V 12:499–503). 5. He uses versions of the phrase in the discussion of teleology in both versions of the logic. 6. In many senses this is a very impressive book that is one of the few significant analyses of the philosophy of history in recent years. Surprisingly for a work examining the importance of experience in history, Carr ignores this most central aspect of Hegel’s thought in his analysis of Hegel’s philosophy of history. 7. For a compelling account of world historical development as a striving towards justice see Nuzzo (2012, especially 122–123). See also Pinkard (2017). Pinkard’s important work on the philosophy of history came into print unfortunately too late to be incorporating into this chapter. 8. “That which exists only in itself is a possibility or potentiality which has not yet emerged into existence” (LPWHIntro 69/VPhWIntro 81). 9. For an extended discussion of why Brandom’s approach does not fit with the project of the philosophy of history see Lumsden (2016). 10. The language of uninhabitable norms is also a key theme in Pinkard (2001, 2012). 11. One of the central positive elements of the internal purpose of biological nature is the “felt contradiction that takes place within the living subject” (Enc. 1 §204R/GW 19) which drives it to satisfy its desires. The satisfaction produces peace in the subject. The language he uses is that humans are cleaved (LPWH 1:149/V 12:29). 12. This is the “means and instruments of a higher and wider purpose of which, which they know nothing of but unconsciously carry out” (LPWH 1:94/GW 18:162). 13. “But natural organisms are also capable of development. Their existence is not simply an immediate one that can be altered only by external influences; rather it proceeds from its own inner and changeable principle, from a simple essence its existence as a germ is at first likewise simple but then brings distinctions forth from itself into determinant being” (LPWH 1:183–4/V 12:109). 14. “Emergence refers to the appearance on the scene of organic structures or transphysical phenomena such as consciousness that could not exist without a physical support system but are nonetheless not reducible to or causally deducible from their physical substratum” (Brinkman 1996, 149). 15. The other formal structures of modern ethical life are also not examined in much detail, there is minimal discussion of the family and surprisingly almost no discussion of civil society. 16. “The state is the idea as it is present on earth” (LPWH 1:179/V 12:74).

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17. This passage is from Hegel’s Introduction to the 1830–1831 lectures on the philosophy of history transcribed by Karl Hegel. This critical edition is in preparation for publication by Walter Jaeschke and will appear as a volume of Hegel’s Gesammelte Werke (Hamburg: Meiner). A typescript of the lectures was made available to the author by Walter Jaeschke and a draft of its English translation by Peter Hodgson. 18. “Zucht, Erziehung und Bildung.” 19. “This consists in the unity of the universal and the subjective will” (LPWHIntro 95/VPhWIntro 112). For a detailed analysis of Hegel’s notion of Bildung see Markus (2011). 20. In Lumsden (2018) I tease out some of the implications of conceiving of modernity as the satisfaction of self-producing spirit. There I argue that modernity’s inability to respond to our current ecological crisis is a marker that spirit itself may have become a shape of life that has grown old.

Bibliography Alznauer, Mark. 2012. “Ethics and History in Hegel’s Practical Philosophy.” Review of Metaphysics 65 (3): 581–611. Beiser, Frederick. 2005. Hegel. London: Routledge. Brandom, Robert. 1999. “Some Pragmatist Themes in Hegel’s Idealism.” European Journal of Philosophy 7 (2): 164–189. Brandom, Robert. 2007. “The Structure of Desire and Recognition: Self-Consciousness and SelfConstitution.” Philosophy and Social Criticism 33 (1): 127–150. Brinkman, Klaus. 1996. “Hegel on the Animal Organism.” Laval théologique et philosophique 52 (1): 135–153. Carr, David. 2014. Experience and History: Phenomenological Perspectives on the Historical World. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Korsgaard, Christine M. 2009. Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity and Integrity. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Kreines, James. 2015. Reason in the World: Hegel’s Metaphysics and Its Philosophical Appeal. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lear, Jonathan. 2006. Radical Hope: Ethics in the Face of Cultural Devastation. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lloyd, Genevieve. 2008. Providence Lost. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Löwith, Karl. 1949. Meaning in History. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lumsden, Simon. 2016. “Second Nature and Historical Change in Hegel’s Philosophy of History.” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 24 (1): 74–94. Lumsden, Simon. 2018. “Hegel and Pathologized Modernity or the End of Spirit in the Anthropocene.” History and Theory 57 (3): 371–389. Markus, Gyorgy. 2011. “The Hegelian Concept of Culture.” In Culture, Science, Society: The Cultural Constitution of Modernity, 399–414. Leiden: Brill. McCarney, Joseph. 2000. Hegel on History. London: Routledge. Nuzzo, Angelica. 2012. Memory, History, Justice in Hegel. London: Palgrave. Pinkard, Terry. 2001. “Contingency and Necessity in History: Rethinking Hegel.” In Die Weltgeschichte—das Weltgericht? edited by Rüdiger Bubner and Walter Mesch, 95–117. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Pinkard, Terry. 2012. Hegel’s Naturalism: Mind, Nature, and the Final Ends of Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pinkard, Terry. 2017. Does History Make Sense? Hegel on the Historical Shapes of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Sedgwick, Sally. 2010. “Reason and History: Kant Versus Hegel.” Proceedings of the APA 84 (2): 45–59.

Chapter 25

History of Philosophy in Hegel’s System Nelly V. Motroshilova

1 Evolution and Change in Hegel’s Account of the History of Philosophy 1.1 Establishing History of Philosophy as a Philosophical Discipline Historians of philosophy attribute to Hegel the fact that the history of philosophy became a relatively independent discipline in university education in Germany in the first half of the nineteenth century. Hegel of course had predecessors in this field, for example, the compilers of historical-philosophical compendia. The authors of the best known and most comprehensive compendiums were Johann Jakob Brucker, Historia Critica Philosophiae [“Critical History of Philosophy”] (Brucker 1742–1744), and Wilhelm Gottlieb Tennemann, History of Philosophy in 12 volumes (Tennemann 1798–1819). Hegel cites both, and also Johann Gottlieb Buhle, Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Philosophie und einer kritischen Literatur derselben [Textbook of History of Philosophy and Critical Literature on the Same] (Buhle 1796–1804). Though he recognized their uses, as also their limits (VGPh 1:361–363/LHPBrown 1:63, 99–101), Hegel never intended to develop a descriptive chronicle of historical philosophy. He sought to develop a theoretical, historicalphilosophical concept that would, ideally, fit into his evolving philosophical system and demonstrate what we can learn philosophically from philosophy’s history. What aspects of his philosophical predecessors’ doctrines could Hegel retain? Most major eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century philosophers wrote standalone historical-philosophical works. These are well known and, it would appear, have been thoroughly analyzed. Yet consider more closely the historical-philosophical material bequeathed to Hegel’s generation. Kant’s Critique of Pure

N. V. Motroshilova (*)  Institute of Philosophy, Russian Academy of Sciences, Moscow, Russia

© The Author(s) 2020 M. F. Bykova and K. R. Westphal (eds.), The Palgrave Hegel Handbook, Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26597-7_25

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Reason includes a chapter, “The History of Pure Reason,” which begins with this caveat: “This title stands here only to designate a place that is left open in the system and must be filled in the future” (CPR A852/B800; italics added). The need to develop an historical-philosophical chapter within the system of philosophical knowledge was thus announced well before Hegel. Scholarship on historical philosophy had not yet attained systematic status within philosophy, nor assumed a disciplinary role within the curriculum. Developing theoretical and methodological principles for philosophical history of philosophy required much more than compendious chronicles or selective thematic studies, such as C.F. Stäudlin’s Geschichte und Geist des Skepticismus (Stäudlin 1794–1795). Occasionally, philosophical tracts offered some generalizations or classifications; e.g., the division between “sensual” and “intellectual” (rational) philosophers (CPR A853/B881) had become commonplace and was reiterated in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Yet Kant considered such schemes to be no more than sketches for a future discipline that would historically interpret the development of philosophy on theoretical and methodological grounds expressly developed for the purpose. Significantly, Hegel was among those who initiated the development and inclusion of history of philosophy within the university curriculum. On this he worked slowly but steadily, achieving impressive results before his sudden death. Hegel’s philosophical system provides no major text on history of philosophy, comparable to The Science of Logic, Elements of the Philosophy of Right, or corresponding sections of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences. Hegel developed his philosophical history of philosophy primarily in lectures, which were regular, systematic, extensive, rigorous and ultimately formed a coherent system. One key question about lectures by outstanding historical thinkers concerns the form in which purportedly “authentic” records reached their contemporaries, posterity, and us today. In the best case, primary sources survive as the author’s draft lectures or coherent, detailed notes for them. Unfortunately, such sources were unusual and so are rare. Only within the past century have electronic recording devices been available. However, prior to those innovations, student note taking was often highly skilled; prominent lecturers attracted enthusiastic, perceptive students and other auditors, and often they mastered shorthand techniques, whether standard or of their own devising. In the best cases, two or three (sometimes more) such transcripts were made, allowing their comparison and using them as mutually complementary. This affords a genre of secondary sources, which compare and compile transcripts, often combining these with the lecturer’s own lecture notes. Historians of philosophy are well aware that over time (sometimes decades, even centuries later) a new secondary source may be re-discovered which can substantially revise the generally accepted idea of one or another doctrine. I briefly review Hegel’s lecturing on history of philosophy, including locations and dates. With these details in hand, I then return to issues regarding sources used to study Hegel’s historical-philosophical lectures.

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1.2 Dating Hegel’s Lectures on History of Philosophy Hegel began lecturing on history of philosophy fairly early at Jena University in 1805–1806. For a decade thereafter, Hegel had no opportunity for university teaching, though eventually he resumed university lecturing, including on history of philosophy. Significantly, during this later period Hegel lectured more regularly on history of philosophy than on other topics, excepting only metaphysics and logic. A decade after leaving Jena, Hegel delivered the following systematic lecture courses on history of philosophy at Heidelberg University (Winter Semester, 1816/17 and 1817/18) (Jaeschke 2003, 477), then at Berlin University, in Summer Semester, 1819, and Winter Semesters, 1820/21, 1823/24, 1825/26, 1827/28, 1829/30, and 1830/31. In Winter Semester 1831/32 he began lecturing on history of philosophy, but these were interrupted shortly before his sudden death. The course was completed by Karl Michelet.

2 Problems with Michelet’s Record of Hegel’s Lectures on History of Philosophy The records of Hegel’s lectures on the history of philosophy highlight the difficulties confronting the use of secondary sources of lecture courses. Hegel’s lectures were first and most fully written down and published by Hegel’s pupil and constant auditor at his lectures on history of philosophy, Karl Ludwig Michelet (1801–1893), a law specialist and, significantly, an historian of philosophy. Those notes were published in Hegel’s collected works (1832–1845), sponsored by The Association of the Friends of the Deceased (see WVF). A facsimile is included in the Jubilee Edition of Hegel’s Works (1927ff) by Hermann Glockner, a prominent Hegel scholar. Extensive and intensive research brings us these results regarding Michelet’s editions: 1. Regrettably, no reliable primary sources for Hegel’s Lectures on history of philosophy have survived; likely, there were few originals. 2. As regards Michelet’s notes, no one suggests the published lecture notes were unreliable. If they had failed to do justice to Hegel’s course, their publication in the 1830s (when many of Hegel’s numerous pupils and other auditors were still active and attentive), one expects, would have elicited protest. None were voiced, or at least none has been recovered. On the whole, considering all the difficulties and inconsistencies, one can concur with our contemporary (and critic of Michelet’s records) Walter Jaeschke, who wrote: “Since Hegel’s manuscripts have not been preserved, the volumes edited by the Association of Friends of the Deceased have lasting value as primary sources” (Jaeschke 2003, 478)—with due notice of new corrections and additions.1

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As regards primary sources, that is, Hegel’s own materials for the lectures, the situation remains unsatisfactory. When he began these lectures in Jena, there was, according to Michelet, “only the Jena notebook written and polished by Hegel himself; at the time he did not yet have the confidence to lecture without notes” (SW 13:vi). Michelet mentions “A Short Outline of the History of Philosophy” Hegel drafted in Heidelberg. Yet no one, not even Michelet, had seen that draft, if there were one (Jaeschke 2003, 477). As regards the Jena notebook, Michelet claims to have had it in hand when preparing his notes for printing, yet did not use it. Why? Michelet answers rather convincingly. When deciding whether to use the “Jena Notebook” he bore in mind that Hegel himself never used it after Jena. So the disciple, now editor, chose to follow the example of his teacher, mainly because “the persuasive force of later variants of the Introduction, which were constantly perfected, was to be preferred. Perhaps half of the introductory part was fragments that had been written but never uttered, which holds also of the Introduction to Ancient Philosophy” (SW 13:vii). Therefore as editor, Michelet wrote, “it remained to introduce into the text” [of his notes] “only very minor corrections” (ibid.). Thus the situation is this: Because the existence of Hegel’s Jena Notebook remains unconfirmed, any references to its content would be very problematic. On the tricky issue, thoroughly rehearsed by scholars, of how to regard Michelet’s editorial work in the early nineteenth century, I again turn to Walter Jaeschke. Regarding these sources, Jaeschke discovered similar difficulties with other courses of Hegel’s lectures, e.g., on aesthetics. Though new secondary sources pertaining to Hegel’s aesthetics lectures were discovered early in this century, no such discoveries have (yet) been made regarding Hegel’s lectures on history of philosophy. Yet Jaeschke rightly reminds us of some few possible additions to the course on the history of philosophy. To what does he refer? Some additions noted by Jaeschke and other scholars were made by Michelet himself. Rather than resolving, problems multiplied in cases where Michelet supposedly had in his hands very rare preparatory notes made by Hegel himself. Jaeschke attests that additions in the form of fragments or extracts from notes belonging to other authors were subsequently made to the Introduction to the lectures on the history of philosophy (as edited by Michelet). Jaeschke points out that from these [Berlin] years, there survived only two handwritten fragments to the Introduction (1820/21 and 1823/24) and, in addition, each course is transmitted by at least one, but often by numerous [sets of] lecture notes. (VGPh 1/V 6:xix)

As this is very brief, specialized material, I will not consider it.2 Note, however, that the authenticity of the new corrections has also been challenged. Some scholars recommend or even prefer comparing Hegel’s lectures to Hegel’s contemporaneous books. For example, they suggest that the earliest (Jena) course on history of philosophy should be assessed in view of Hegel’s treatment of the history of philosophy in Phenomenology of Spirit. This approach is credible; comparing later courses with historical-philosophical extracts from other works published by Hegel himself is valuable. Thus, Science of Logic contains

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historical-philosophical material, thoroughly examined, in nearly every section. Nevertheless, the aims and purposes of Hegel’s distinct works must not be neglected, nor should Michelet’s notes and edition be dismissed or treated arbitrarily. Any scholar who has published works and delivered lectures on those topics understands that live lecturing generates fresh ideas, turns of thought, conceptual solutions, new accents in response to the occasion, communicating with a new audience, inspiration, etc.; Michelet testifies that this occurred to Hegel. Michelet, who attended Hegel’s lectures repeatedly in several years, thus provides credible testimony, which should be considered together with genuine, documented corrections or additions.

3 Hegel’s Introduction to His Lectures on History of Philosophy (28 October 1816, Jena) Let us identify Hegel’s main thematic blocks and ideas in the text which (as edited by Michelet) commands a measure of trust among modern Hegel scholars. (This is the text translated by Knox and Miller; see LHPIntro.) When he resumed lecturing in Heidelberg (and, Michelet notes, later basically repeating the Introduction in his Berlin lectures), Hegel assumed that by the mid-1810s more favorable conditions had emerged in Europe, especially in Germany, for appreciating and examining problems of philosophy and its history. He expressed his hope in 1816 that now philosophy, “well-nigh stricken dumb, may lift up its voice again and may hope that a world which has become deaf to it may lend it an ear once more” (MM 18:11/LHPIntro 1). Hegel understood and appreciated the relevance of socio-cultural causes and circumstances of renewed interest in philosophy, in sciences generally and in the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) in particular. Significantly, his Introduction to his lectures on history of philosophy expresses this directly: “The necessities of the times have given the petty interests of daily life such enormous importance” (ibid.). The interests of the spirit, Hegel attested, were per force focused upon daily necessities; “Because the spirit of the world was thus pre-occupied, it could not look within and withdraw into itself.” Germany, for example, had to rescue “its nationality, the basis of all vital life” (ibid.), thus alluding to the Napoleonic wars, and to Germany’s, especially Prussia’s, struggle for independence. People, even educated people, had no time for philosophy, let alone the history of philosophy—though some philosophers analyzed the challenges and tasks of the German struggle for liberation, e.g., Fichte in his Addresses to the German Nation. Regarding the fate of philosophy, Hegel’s Introduction also addressed the recent history of Europe. Due to preoccupation with urgent daily events, in Europe “except only in name, philosophy has sunk even from memory” (GW 18:4, cf. 15/LHPIntro 2). Yet in Germany, he adds, the embers of philosophy were still warm: a distinctive feature of the nation’s spiritual life.

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Hegel eloquently proclaims the preservation of this “holy flame” to be the mission of Germany, the spiritual vocation of Germans, of all peoples. German philosophers, he urges, should now act and interact in their science with German seriousness and eloquence in order to wrest philosophy from its isolation and decline into which it has sunk. “We elders, who have devoted our lives to science”—thus does the 46-year-old Hegel refer to himself and his generation—“can regard you as fortunate, who in your youth can devote yourselves unreservedly to truth and philosophy” (GW 18:6/LHPIntro 3). This is Hegel’s main message in his Introduction (to history of philosophy) delivered at Heidelberg University on 28 October 1816. Hegel’s appeal might equally be addressed to us, philosophers of the epoch two centuries later. In our era of dramatic socio-economic changes which yet again foster narrowly pragmatic strategizing, at the expense of spiritual aspirations of history, and prevalent neglect and underestimation of the historical role of philosophy and other sciences of the spirit, we too should awaken to the trans-historic significance of such visions, appeals and wisdom of humanity’s great thinkers, including Hegel.

4 Hegel: Introduction to the History of Philosophy, and its Concept From the outset Hegel presents his audience (and subsequent readers) with a practical and theoretical challenge. History as a science, Hegel reasons, demands that facts be stated “impartially, without attempting to validate any particular interest or end” (GW 18:95/LHPIntro 6). This would seem all the more important to history of philosophy because it aims to describe what is real, indisputable, has actually occurred, and to reproduce, integrate and assess the real history of the human spirit.—No simple task! Hegel reasons thus: While in other historical sciences—e.g., of a country, a people, the human race as a whole or, say, the history of sciences (mathematics, physics, etc.) or history of the arts—at some historical point their subject matter becomes sufficiently rich and more or less clearly defined, in history of philosophy the situation is quite different (GW 18:96/LHPIntro 6). Hegel notes how controversial, clashing opinions of different philosophers of the past about the very subject matter of their learned discussions and research appear to their posterity, and he wonders how genuinely philosophical were certain historical forms and attempts at reasoning which authors sought to present as philosophy. These challenges must and can be met. Hegel concludes: But in fact, if the true conception of philosophy is to be established in a scientific, and not in an arbitrary, way, then its historical treatment is philosophy itself, since philosophy has the peculiar characteristic that its essential nature and conception constitutes its beginning merely apparently, and it is only its entire treatment which is the proof, and, we may say

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indeed, the discovery, of that conception which is essentially a result of that whole course of treatment. (GW 18:97–8/LHPIntro 7)

This is why Hegel believes that the narrative of the history of philosophy must be preceded by an Introduction into the history of philosophy as a discipline. By delivering all these historical-philosophical lecture courses Hegel had, ultimately, created a specialized propedeutic to this discipline adapted to the problems, methods, and stylistics of the history of philosophy. Its main ideas and accents are these: 1. One of Hegel’s first points in the Introduction is that justice must be done to the “series of noble spirits, the gallery of heroes, reason’s thinking” (GW 18:100/LHPIntro 9) with all their specific and general contributions to penetrating “the essence of things, of nature and the spirit, of God, and acquired for us the supreme treasure, the treasure of rational knowledge” (ibid.). Within philosophy’s history, renowned individuals appear as philosophy’s creators and heroes. Hegel considers these questions, if briefly. The point would appear obvious: Outstanding philosophers, thinkers of various times and peoples, are the leading figures in philosophy’s history; sometimes they are, like Hegel, also significant historians of philosophy. However, Hegel notes, that says rather little about the knowledge, talents and in some regards the personalities of the prominent philosophers who were agents and whose views now are subjects of historical-philosophical studies by the philosophical historian. From various texts, one can discern Hegel’s judgements about the characteristics that contribute directly to producing and accumulating the highest achievements of historical philosophy. What does Hegel consider to be pivotal for the pursuit of the history of philosophy and its results? One must consider, Hegel argues, not the purely individual character and personal history of a philosopher, “the individual, according to the peculiarity of his disposition, talents, affections, the strength or weakness of his character, and in general, according to that through which he is this individual” (GW 18:100/LHPIntro 9); such focus may obscure the main conditions: free thought, which though inherent in man as such, is not always found in its “perfect form,” as the capacity for acts or “deeds of thought” (ibid.)—a decisive quality for the philosophical historian. These prerequisites refer to this or that period of past history only formally; essentially they are humanity’s “common possession.” Anyone who devotes her efforts, reason and talents to “deeds of thought” within philosophy and its history, must have and develop an innate capacity to grasp highly complicated, exemplary philosophical achievements of the past and present, she must learn to understand and interpret them, and hone her skill in understanding exceedingly complex texts, most of which belong to past historical epochs, and she must be able to explain them to interested contemporaries. A specific characteristic shared by all historians of philosophy is this: because they deal with the world history of philosophy, some of them must be able to read and understand complicated texts of past epochs in the original languages, often ancient languages, as well as being able to read and understand

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foreign philosophers. (Before suspecting that ‘world’ history of philosophy is parochial Occidentalism, one should inspect (at least) the Tables of Contents to Buhle’s (1796–1804) monumentally comprehensive, cosmopolitan history of philosophy. Nationalist parochialism developed later in the nineteenth century; cp., e.g., Überweg (1863–1866).)

5 This Entails Further Consequences That Hegel Stresses An historian of philosophy in the proper sense of the term must possess “self-conscious reason,” which Hegel elaborates thus: it does not “arise suddenly, nor does it grow only from the soil of the present. This possession must be regarded as previously present, as an inheritance, and as a result of labor … of all past generations of men” (GW 18:101/LHPIntro 9). This means much more than merely possessing much historical erudition. Erudition regarding historical facts, events and philosophical wisdom is necessary, especially to the historian of philosophy, but not sufficient. Because an historian of philosophy deals with “the intellectual world,” the product of free spiritual creativity, the person who feels most at home and acts within it is the free person able to “work,” and therefore “live” in the spontaneous realm of spirit. To feel at home and to create within this realm requires that one can “perceive” and then extend the frontiers of knowledge and understanding. To make this philosophical realm one’s own spiritual motherland, as it were: one’s spiritual soil, is the supreme aim of those who are indeed philosophical, including philosophical historians. These innovations by Hegel are insightful and sound; they are exhibited by any stage of development in philosophy and its history. 1. The true “heroes” of philosophical history are above all prominent, outstanding philosophers of the past and (perhaps) of any present, as well as their schools, unions and associations which may preserve their continuity over several centuries. The philosophers who lead developments within this domain—their lives, works, doctrines, and their trans-historical achievements—must and shall be recalled, re-assessed and reinterpreted again and again for as long as humanity and its culture exists and the historical dialog of generations, countries and civilizations continues. 2. According to Hegel’s account of the history of philosophy, everything that is great, unique and personal in the history of philosophy, everything that is transient in life and in knowledge, in short, everything concretely historical, must be presented in organic unity with our common, permanent possession. What does this imply for the history of philosophy? 2a. Historians of philosophy must be able to integrate philosophical heritage arising within its present—deciphering what genuinely belongs to any philosophical present—with the results of the work of “all past generations of men,” and with the historian’s (or our own) philosophical present. This complex, yet

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indispensable methodological requirement is easier to formulate than to practice at any time; it requires mastery of contemporaneous philosophical developments within the author’s present context, and also mastery of the equally difficult skills and attitudes required for philosophical study of historical philosophy. For example, those who study ancient philosophy must have a general idea of the further development of at least the main earlier concepts they are studying. Conversely, those who study modern thought should not separate it even from a more relevant historical-philosophical process. (We shall leave aside the question, how necessary is knowledge of historical philosophy to pursuit of other philosophical disciplines or problems.) 2b. The problem of defining such apparent commonplaces as “epoch” or “spirit of the times,” whether in philosophical-historical or historical-philosophical senses, is exceedingly complex—and sadly, little studied at various stages in history. (It is considered below.) 3. “The beginning” of philosophy and its history. Periodization and sources of the history of philosophy. Hegel scholars (Jaeschke 2003, 483), consider understandable and justified the claim of historians of philosophy that philosophy originated later than religion or art. Philosophy first had to “discover,” or “capture” its subject matter. Because the subject of philosophy is “thought” itself, then, according to Hegel, philosophy proper begins when “free thought for itself arises, grasping its object as thought” (VGPh 1, 6:103.606–7/LHPBrown 1:200). Hegel does not deny the philosophical character and content of prior cultures or traditions; his point is that philosophy requires the freedom of thought to scrutinize and assess the accuracy, insight and justification of thoughts for oneself (VGPh 1, 6:133, 172, 243–4, cf. 375–6/LHPBrown 1:49, 71, 132–3, 159–60, cf. 111–2). 4. Among the numerous more concrete, including historical, ideas and arguments it is necessary and possible to single out from much of Hegel’s thinking (and briefly examine) the following prerequisites for the start of bona fide historical philosophical processes. Hegel says (VGPh 1, 6:93f/LHPIntro 165) that turning to philosophy in general and especially (and later) to its history presupposes some prerequsites, some of which take shape outside philosophy and even outside “the spiritual domain” as such. Hegel maintains that people do not turn to philosophical reasoning and analysis until a certain social stratum can afford not to be concerned with its daily needs. Hegel recalls that Aristotle referred to these prerequisites when he said that Egyptian priests could devote themselves almost entirely to mathematics. Hegel stressed the general significance of “liberation from needs” (rather, having others cater to their daily needs as part of the division of labor). Hegel thus formulates the second socio-historical prerequisite, which he considers to be even more important than the first: “Philosophy could emerge only there, where civil liberty has flourished. Civil liberty is based on the infinity of the will to be respected as an absolute” (VGPh 1, 6:93–94.305–308; cf. LHPIntro 165, 167; LHPBrown 1:88–89). Hegel emphasizes the significance of gaining political (and other) freedoms in the Greek polis for the development of philosophy—although, as Jaeschke rightly

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notes, bringing together political freedoms and the formation of truly great thinking, as understood by Hegel, is always a challenge. 5. Brevity precludes considering here Hegel’s periodization of the historical-philosophical process, its stages and what he regarded as its main forms. Intricate problems of dividing key historical phases of philosophy must also be set aside; only Hegel’s main ideas may be noted. Consider this problem. Hegel identified three historical periods in the development of philosophy: the first lasted from Thales of Miletus (approx. from 600 BCE) until neo-Platonic philosophy, a period of 1000 years; the second period was Mediaeval philosophy, including Hebrew and Arab philosophies, though mainly covering Christian philosophy, also a period of a thousand years; and the third period is “modern philosophy,” which in Hegel’s day spanned only a couple centuries; according to Hegel, in his time “philosophy was still something new” (VGPh 1, 6:228; cf. VGPh 1, 6:203, 276, 311, 349–50/LHPIntro 175, 183).

6 Sources of the History of Philosophy The differences between Hegel’s epoch and our own times are particularly apparent when he discusses the concrete and often considerable issues pertaining to these topics. Nevertheless, the typological and not merely chronological distinctions Hegel draws are still relevant; they are addressed in other sections of his lectures on history of philosophy. For example, he rightly distinguishes historical-philosophical sources proper from other, for example, political sources. The latter, according to Hegel, describe historical deeds, for example, speeches of prominent individuals who made a mark in politics. Hegel stresses the fundamental differences of this genre of historical description from the study of historical-philosophical sources: the former deals with historical achievements which have receded into history, yet which remain significant in describing the character who was then active or his (or her) historical period. By contrast, Hegel pointed out in his later lectures, for historical philosophy, “the sources are different in kind from the sources for political history. What lie before us… are the [philosophical] achievements themselves … We possess the works of the important philosophers, and these are the authentic sources. If we want to study the history of philosophy seriously, we must to turn these sources themselves” (VGPh 1, 6:359/LHPBrown 1:97–98; emphasis added). Hegel’s recommendation, however elementary it may seem, can with good reason be considered the golden rule of history of philosophy. Often enough it has been broken, and is broken today, precisely in the history of philosophy, not to mention its other departments. Though it is rather easy to proclaim this as a fixed rule, abiding by it is difficult for several reasons. Hegel was aware of these difficulties, both internal and external, and did not evade them. For example, he spoke of the daunting size of some primary sources, such as the multi-volume works of Scholastic philosophers

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(up to 16 or even 26 folios each), and he noted that philosophical works of all past epochs were not equally accessible. Though the polyglot Hegel does not mention it directly, there are also issues about languages or works which are foreign to some countries (for example, ancient Chinese and Indian philosophical texts for European historians of philosophy). Hegel also touches upon some underlying problems of analysis of the history of philosophy: first, explicating cultural specificities of historical philosophies (VGPh 1, 6:91/LHPBrown 1:104); second, defining more precisely and demonstrating concretely the concept and character of philosophy throughout all the lectures on its history. The history of philosophy, according to Hegel, should consider two theoretical issues, one regarding its relations to affiliated historical areas of religion, art, other sciences and, e.g., political history, and yet also in its uniquely philosophical specificity. For example, Hegel believes that the concrete function of his Introduction to the history of philosophy is to provide such an (admittedly concise) conspectus. I conclude this section by summarizing Hegel’s ideas on the other themes examined in this concluding part of his Introduction to his historical-philosophical lectures. 1. Hegel considers some common ideas about history of philosophy, such as “the insipid and superficial view that the history of philosophy recounts for us a multitude of random philosophical opinions” (VGPh 1:110/LHPBrown 1:138–9). Hegel counters that: There are no philosophical opinions as such. An opinion (Meinung) is a personally satisfying, subjective view that is simply mine (mein), and that is how it gets its name. Philosophy is objective cognition, knowledge of truth, not something subjective; it is directly antithetical to opinion. (VGPh 1:110/LHPBrown 1:139)

Hegel then expounds the difference between truth and opinions. Another common opinion is that, if the history of philosophy proves anything, it proves the futility of philosophical knowledge at every single point of its existence. The diversity of philosophical doctrines is commonly viewed along these lines: if the truth be one, then there should be only one philosophy. Yet the diversity and mutual incompatibility of doctrines in the history of philosophy make one doubt that it is at all possible to form a single and coherent truth in the historical process of the development of philosophy (VGPh 1:110/LHPBrown 1:139). Hegel does not underestimate the influence or tenacity of such ideas; they must be refuted, Hegel writes, persistently, thoroughly, and in detail: The history of philosophy becomes scientific knowledge and not a sheer aggregation of information only when, as indicated, this history is grasped in a concept. In order to comprehend the history of philosophy one must in any event bring in this concept, lest only what is external and contingent be found in it. (VGPh 1, 6:144/LHPBrown 1:140)

Only identifying, assessing and integrating past and present philosophical achievements can show that “… the deeds of thinking reason are not some romantic adventure” (VGPh 1, 6:144/LHPBrown 1:213).

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2. Important general observations in the Introduction are contained in the small section titled “Explanatory Remarks upon the Definition of the History of Philosophy,” which treats some genuinely significant concepts of the history of philosophical thought: (a)  the concept of “development” as applied to the history of thought; (b)  the concept of the “concrete,” presenting the peculiarly Hegelian philosophical view of the concrete not as individual things and states, but as a totality accommodating a plurality of forms and phases of development, a totality that is not linear; rather, it resembles a circle which implies a return within itself, a circle which has around its periphery “a great number of circles.” As applied to the history of philosophy the whole, according to Hegel, “the entirety of this series is a succession of [philosophical] developments retiring into itself; and each particular development is one stage in the whole” (VGPh 1, 6:217/LHPIntro 80). Of signal importance for professional students of the history of philosophy is a small section in the Introduction setting forth several key consequences of the reflections summed up above. Consequence one “the whole history of philosophy as such is an inherently necessary progression; it is implicitly rational, sofar as it is free, as it is determined through the idea” (VGPh 1, 6:153; cf. 6:154, LHPBrown 1:217, LHPHald 1:36). Consequence two flows from the first: any philosophy worth this lofty name is not something transient, but is preserved as a moment in the movement of philosophy (VGPh 1, 6:154/LHPBrown 1:218). Consequence three concerns any philosophical principle: much depends on the time, or rather, the phased development, the progressive elaboration of each principle. When a fundamental philosophical principle is first put forward, it is usually abstract, i.e., one-sided and wanting, not yet expressing the genuine philosophical depth or many-sidedness; only over time is the principle fleshed out philosophically. “Each principle has reigned for a certain time, and when the whole system of the world has been explained from this special form, it is called a philosophical system” (MM 18:57/LHPHald 1:38; cf. VGPh 1, 6:219–20, 237–238/LHPBrown 1:176, 188; LHPIntro 21, 92–93). Consequence four follows from the preceding three: according to Hegel, in the history of philosophy we should not deal with the past as anything vanishing and transient: The scientific products of reason form the content of this history, and these are not past. What is obtained in this field of labor is the true, and as such, the eternal; it is not what exists now, and not then; it is true not only today or tomorrow, but beyond all time, and in so far as it is in time, it is true always and for every time. The bodily forms of those great minds who are the heroes of this history, the temporal existence and outward lives of the philosophers, are, indeed, no more, but their works and thoughts have not followed suit. (VGPh 1, 6:47/LHPIntro 48–49)

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7 Philosophy as “Its Epoch Captured in Thought” I single out this theme from the Introduction to the lectures on the history of philosophy for closer scrutiny because it is of pivotal importance and yet (as I shall show) has been little studied. Hegel’s famous yet ill-understood description of philosophy as “its epoch captured in thought” is associated with various theoretical and methodological explanations scattered across various sections of his history of philosophy and other blocks of the great philosopher’s legacy. Below I shall attempt to put them together and reveal the overall message of this counterpoint of the historical-philosophical Introduction. 1. In his lectures on the history of philosophy Hegel insists that it is necessary to capture the development of philosophical thought of various epochs and periods in history as historical values of special spiritual experience. In this respect it is particularly important, according to Hegel, to learn to identify in both a concrete and a generalized way the lines, styles and directions of the influence of historical time precisely on the emergence and substantive development of philosophy, including its special or “individualized” concrete forms. It is necessary, according to Hegel, to relate to the “epoch” the more significant theories, ideas, slogans and behests of various philosophical doctrines. In doing so one should also grasp the spiritual, intellectual aspirations and achievements of an epoch which are not strictly philosophical. For Hegel philosophy is not a form of thought detached from “the spirit of the epoch.” The particular form (Gestalt)3 of a philosophy is thus contemporaneous with a particular constitution of the people amongst whom it makes its appearance, with their institutions and forms of government, their morality,4 their social life and the capabilities, customs and enjoyments of the same; it is so with their attempts and achievements in art and science, with their religions, warfare and external relationships, likewise with the decadence of the states in which this particular principle and form had maintained its supremacy. (VGPh 1, 6:38/LHPIntro 110–111)

This excellent enumeration of the aspects of social reality “contemporaneous” with philosophy that influence it in one way or another merits a closer look, elaboration and use in work on the history of philosophy. At the same time Hegel sees the main function of historical-philosophical science not so much in stating its “contemporaneity” as in revealing the interaction of philosophy with the main aspects of social experience (both mentioned here and others left unmentioned). Any serious, professional philosopher at any time cannot but admit that the central spheres of activity and pivotal events of an epoch listed by Hegel have a certain impact not only on their fate, but on the content of their activities through the Gestalts of their peoples mentioned by Hegel and through many individual spheres expressly mentioned by Hegel. Of course, it is one thing to recognize such influence and it is another to elaborate it, about which more will be said below.

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2. In line with the inner logic of Hegel’s historical-philosophical concept, many features of an “epoch” (not only those mentioned by Hegel) impact the philosophy of any time in a specific way. The impact of the epoch is reflected through the socio-historical particularities and spheres of “spirit” in general and of philosophy as a specific area of human spiritual activity. Thus, Hegel’s core notion of “the spirit of the people” (der Geist des Volkes), which is also introduced and explained in these lectures, has a fundamental spiritual, theoretical and methodological significance. Somewhat unexpectedly, Hegel illustrates the concept of “the spirit of the people” with architectural similes: a cathedral and its parts—the vaults, rows of columns, the numerous branchings and passages between them—covered by the word “organization” and summed up thus: “all of which have proceeded out of one whole and are directed to one end” (VGPh 1, 6:58–59/LHPIntro 25–26). From this Hegel throws a bridge to philosophy: “Philosophy is one form of these many aspects. And which is it?” (ibid.). And indeed, which specific features of philosophy as a form of spirit in its historical development does Hegel urge us to take into account above all when speaking about its interaction with its epoch? In the Introduction to these lectures, Hegel answers the question of the significance and specificities of the socio-historical and cultural role of philosophy, using lofty, even florid language: Philosophy is the highest flowering, it is the concept of its complete form, the consciousness and the spiritual essence and being of this entire condition, the spirit of the age as present and aware of itself in thinking. (VGPh 1, 6:58–9/LHPIntro, 25–26; trans. rev. by krw)

Interestingly, in describing the specificity of philosophy through the “spirit of the people,” Hegel not only rises to soaring spiritual heights, but is not averse to using homely comparisons to explain, for example, such fundamental notions as “philosophical traditions” and attitudes toward them. Thus he compares the cherishing of traditions in philosophy with the behavior of a model housekeeper, who not only guards faithfully that which she has received, but passes on intact the rules and habits of running the house; in her activities, such tradition is “no motionless statue, but is alive, and swells like a mighty river, which enlarges the further from its source it advances. (VGPh 1, 6:7/LHPIntro 10)

True, some peoples live through periods when their “education, art, science and their spiritual capacities are static.” He cites China which “may have been as far advanced in all regards two thousand years ago as now” (VGPh 1, 6:7–8/LHPIntro 10); but the “spirit of the world does not sink into this indolent indifference; this follows from its very nature, for its activity is its life” (ibid.). Let us not go into all the details of this inspired, almost poetic portrayal of the relentless march, the unfolding ascension of the “world spirit” and the “spirits” of various “peoples.” Important is that its march, according to Hegel, is embodied in and formed within all these cultural forms; in philosophy it is “fathomed,” which holds also of the “spirit of an epoch.”

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It is worth giving some extra thought to Hegel’s challenging, yet succinct and insightful observation, without succumbing to the trite idea that one should isolate from the blend of the features of an epoch some feature that is its key and determinant (the path later followed by vulgar Marxism, which proposed that all the spheres of the spirit are determined by economic relations, and in politics, by class struggle). “Political history,” Hegel reasoned wisely, in forms of government, art and religion are not related to philosophy as its causes, nor, on the other hand, is philosophy the ground of their existence—these “all have the same common root, the spirit of the time” (VGPh 1, 6:59/LHPIntro 26–27; italics added). Hegel explains: the spirit of the time is … one determinate existence, one determinate character which permeates all sides and manifest itself in politics and in all else as in different elements; it is a condition which hangs together in all its parts, and the various parts of which contain nothing which is really inconsistent, however diverse and accidental they may appear to be, and however much they may seem to contradict one another. (VGPh 1, 6:59/LHPIntro 26–27)

This and similar statements by Hegel contain a certain antinomy which corresponds to the contradictory character of real processes (including those on which Hegel here reflects). This antinomy is manifest in how, even within the homogenous single alloy of spheres, events and deeds which constitute and express the “spirit of the time,” philosophy plays, according to Hegel, a special socio-historical role. On the one hand, as is seen from many of Hegel formulations, it is “entirely identical with its time,” with its spirit. Elaborating this thesis and reinforcing it, Hegel repeatedly and in various ways stresses that the philosopher, like any individual, being the son of his times, cannot “jump out of his skin.” “It is just as foolish to imagine that any philosophy can transcend its contemporary world as that an individual could overleap his time or jump over Rhodes” (RPh, 21–22). One implication of this for the history of philosophy is that philosophy and philosophers cannot overcome the many intellectual and ideological weaknesses and prejudices of their epoch even when they set themselves this task. Another aspect which Hegel stresses, perhaps even more forcefully, is that philosophy is able to rise above its times, its epoch and even “run ahead” in forecasting some future features and processes. This happens because, according to Hegel, philosophy has a number of advantages in grasping the spirit of the times, compared to other spheres of spirit and culture.

8 Philosophy, its Distinctive Character, and the Role of the History of Philosophy Hegel’s reflections on the special status of philosophy in science and culture blend the results of profound thought on the true role of philosophy in the historical development of spirit and his aspirations, the requirements philosophers have yet to meet during the future course of history.

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These questions are raised in those sections of the lectures addressing the links and the contrasts between philosophy and kindred spiritual spheres such as science, education, art and religion. For at least two reasons, Hegel attaches great significance to these spiritual spheres which are closely allied to philosophy and its history. First, as Hegel concisely notes, “spirit” inhabits them, too, and—especially important for Hegel’s examination of their links and kinship with philosophy—they too actualize thought, albeit each in their own way. This is the nexus of the progressive and in many ways concurrent philosophical work of all classic German philosophical studies, including the centuries-old spiritual and intellectual activity of the whole of humanity, as will be shown below, when considering Hegel’s Gestalt of the German philosophy of his times. The prime source and prototype of Hegel’s formulas discussed here is an objective process of the creation over centuries by humanity of values, ideas, institutions and achievements, about which there is nothing mystical or mystifying, an—our—“objective” cultural “spirit” which structures our conjoint being, lives and activities, through the spheres of law, morality, customs, norms, etc. Another prototype was humanist culture in the broadest sense, its relentless march through the whole history of humanity, despite all the disruptions and setbacks. The ideas of “subjectivity” (expressed directly by classical German thinkers) and “intersubjectivity” (a new term, though classical German philosophers confidently wrote about universality of spirit) intertwined and nourished German philosophy before and during Hegel’s time. Hegel brilliantly recorded and explained this duality. “Thought” and “thinking” are particularly important designations for Hegel (and not only for him) of the summits of spiritual culture and especially the essence, mission and calling of philosophy that was common to the epoch and transcended its history. As Hegel asserted in his historical-philosophical lectures, the philosophy of one period is developed as the result of the period preceding. The fundamental character of development is that one and the same idea – that there is only one truth – lies at the basis of all philosophy and that every later philosophy contains the specific characteristics of its predecessor and is itself equally well the further developed specification of that predecessor…. What is worked out in this field is the truth, and truth is eternal …. The history of philosophy has to do with what is immutable, present, and living now. (LHPIntro 48–49; cf. VGPh 1:46–8, 326; trans. rev. by krw)

Such great attention is attached to philosophy precisely because, in reflecting on what is “substantial” in its epoch, it gathers and concentrates the prerogative of thinking, picking its important characteristics from other areas in which “thinking” is present in one form or another. Yet philosophy remains for Hegel the primary sphere of thought’s domain. In accord with this line of reasoning, Hegel’s Introduction to the history of philosophy was also to contain a dual problem-theoretical approach whose lines we have already traced. Thus we find in Hegel (in his history of philosophy and in other texts): (1) an explanation of the special character of the history of philosophy; and (2) a more accurate definition of philosophy as a whole (a) through the prism of its link with the epoch; (b) by revealing its links with the “spirit” of the epoch; and (c) by

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identifying its unique function in understanding the “epoch” which it “captures” through a special system of thought that preserves and transforms crystalized philosophical truth. A brief observation would not be amiss, that Hegel’s key ideas about the link between philosophy and its epoch have been poorly pursued in subsequent history of philosophical thought, including today. Ingrained “traditions” impeded implementing Hegel’s task of explaining philosophy as “understanding the epoch in thought.” The literature on this issue displays some types of reasoning which have rightly been declared untenable. One was the attempt, noted above, by vulgarized Marxism to reduce the dependence of philosophy on its epoch to the impact of economic processes and factors allegedly determining the epoch and political class interests (also interpreted crudely). Such patently ideological “products” have existed in history, but as a rule they were born not so much in philosophy as in overtly ideological theories (vulgar Marxism among them). Due to a combination of reasons, the overall result of the history of world thought at this time is lamentable: the analysis of the link between philosophical ideas, teachings and their epoch, begun by Hegel in his historical-philosophical lectures and bequeathed as a task to be tackled by the history of philosophy, has only been pursued half-heartedly in the history of philosophical thought, including modern philosophy. Systematic and extended studies of this theme in philosophy are few and far between5 (to the best of my knowledge); this holds too of classical German philosophy, including Hegel’s own philosophy.6 I believe joint work of interested historians of philosophy from different countries may help to overcome the “stagnation” in this important area of historical-philosophical work thus fulfilling Hegel’s behest.

9 “Gestalt” of Recent German Philosophy in Hegel’s Concept of the History of Philosophy This theme and range of problems within Hegel’s concept of the history of philosophy is both expansive and of central significance; he also developed it in other disciplinary sections of his system. Here I can touch only upon its main ideas that are germane to the historical-philosophical context. Their theoretical weight is determined above all by the enduring philosophical, cultural and general social importance of the object of study, the great and glorious German philosophy of Modern Times. The entire Gestalt7 Hegel refers to as “modern German philosophy” may be likened, metaphorically, to a massive mountain formed by pinnacles of various heights among which Hegel’s philosophy looms large—an all-embracing Gestalt close to historical reality and yet summarizing the philosophy Hegel sought to outline in the section of his historical-philosophical course that is our subject here. In contrast to other phenomena of historical philosophy, this Gestalt has distinctive features which attracted Hegel’s close attention. What were these distinguishing features of his work on the relevant historical-philosophical material?

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1. Hegel gave a sketch of the German philosophical landscape of the late eighteenth and the early decades of the nineteenth centuries, not only on the basis of documents and works, but also through his own “engaged observation” and participation. Hegel’s interpretations and descriptions concerning truly modern philosophy of his time present extra interest as a concentration of testimony, experiences and reflections of someone directly involved in the events, a profound thinker who deemed it his mission to penetrate their very essence (“substantiality”). This specific historical-philosophical phenomenon and Hegel’s portrayal of contemporary German philosophy is the subject of copious and often very thoroughly international literature produced by Hegel scholars and also biographical, historical-philosophical literature (referred to throughout this Handbook). From the outset, an important reservation is in order. The hundreds of pages of Hegel’s historical-philosophical texts devoted to this problem are included not only in the lectures, but in other, indeed, in all the thinker’s works, both large and small. I focus here on the hundreds of pages of Hegel’s corresponding texts on the history of philosophy; Chapters I–III of Book Three of the lectures on the history of philosophy of the Modern Times, and in particular Recent German Philosophy as well as Chapter IV about the philosophical doctrines of Kant, Fichte, Schelling and other contemporaneous authors. They cannot be presented here even briefly. I thus chose a different approach: I shall highlight only the main theoretical lines that Hegel draws through all these summary sections and through the chapters devoted to these individual—great and outstanding—authors. First we must sort out how Hegel scholars who command the greatest authority in the historical-philosophical sphere assessed in the past and are assessing today the reliability and authenticity of this part of Hegel’s lectures in terms of material and depth of analysis of the glorious stage in the development of German philosophy. True, Hegel scholars do not put the history of German philosophy as represented in Hegel’s lectures on the history of philosophy on the same footing with the parts of Hegel’s manuscripts (for example, The Science of Logic or The Philosophy of Right) which often refer to the teachings and ideas of his recent predecessors or contemporaries. In these manuscripts—and this should always be kept in mind—Hegel constantly turns to the ideas of Kant, Fichte, Schelling and, less frequently, of other contemporaneous German philosophers of any note. Nevertheless—after much research on, corrections and critical use of secondary texts—a justifiably positive and respectful attitude has prevailed to those sections of Hegel’s system in which he analyzed, in lecture, the latest philosophical teachings in his country. Walter Jaeschke, our contemporary, writes: The emphasis of [Hegel’s] presentation lies first of all on the detailed information about these essays and their relation [to each other] – their reciprocal criticism and their consistent further development by Fichte and the critique of the latter by Jacobi up to Schelling’s “identity philosophy.” (Jaeschke 2003, 495)

Those who attended Hegel’s lectures on history of philosophy at various times, as well as later readers (of their transcripts) undoubtedly looked with particular

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attention at those parts of Hegel’s historical-philosophical texts that concern his epoch and the philosophical teachings that were closest to him, not only in time but in terms of ideas and methods. Because that epoch was perceived, even by the more influential philosophers of the time, including Schelling and Hegel, as one of profound and rapid change, most apparent in spiritual spheres (spirit, Hegel said, seemed to “have put on seven-league boots”), the ability of thinkers to take up, develop and personally contribute to the realization of dynamic historical changes (the philosophers called them “revolutionary”) was indeed their distinctive feature and advantage. After Hegel’s death his extraordinary capacity to absorb and express the spirit of his epoch, which, as we have seen, Hegel considered to be an essential mission of philosophy, was pithily expressed by Heinrich Heine (who had visited Hegel in the evening and spoke with him): “in this man beats the pulse of the century” (Dilthey 1970, 210).8 Indeed so. As regards specific texts and excerpts Hegel used in his lectures (and other works) from Fichte and Schelling, one must from the outset bear in mind the apparent contradictions in everything Hegel wrote and said about his two outstanding contemporaries. On the one hand, as is well known and thoroughly studied, after their joint studies in Tübingen, Schelling and Hegel first experienced the liberating influence of Kant’s ideas (“the dawn began with Kant,” Schelling wrote); then Schelling fell briefly under the spell of Fichte, “the new hero in a land of thought, a titan fighting for humanity” (Motroshilova 1984, 26, see also 27–39). His enthusiasm infected Hegel who during his sojourn in Jena was initially under the influence of Schelling and his ideas. On the other hand, towards the end of his stay in Jena Hegel gradually started developing his own ideas and conceiving new, independent turns of German thought. This makes the material pertaining to Hegel, Fichte and Schelling extremely challenging, demanding scrupulous professional analysis. The lapidary summary texts, including those in historical-philosophical lectures (in German, 20 pages on Fichte, 27 on Schelling) possess special merits because they contain established general assessments of the results of the work of thinkers whose ideas were born and evolved “in front of Hegel’s eyes,” were perceived by him and not only him as cutting-edge and revolutionary. However, Hegel later subjected these ideas to a drastic revision as contemporaries, including Hegel himself, came up with their own ideas, concepts and built their own philosophical systems. The special value of the historical-philosophical lectures, especially of later periods, lies in the fact that they reflect in historical dynamics the well-considered judgments of the mature Hegel about these great thinkers who were his contemporaries. They also sum up Hegel’s engaged observation, investigation and assessment of directly observed philosophical phenomena of the second (and third, etc.) rank. A few words about the latter. Early in his stay in Jena, when Hegel and Schelling published the short-lived Critical Journal of Philosophy, Hegel printed there devastating reviews of “system-forming” writings of such philosophers as Krug and Bouterwerk. (In our times specialists attempted a more balanced and objective analysis of their works and Hegel’s philosophical lampoons.) What was definitely unacceptable in Hegel’s

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assessments even then was the contemptuous and biased attitude of a historian of philosophy to some professional, fairly independent and interesting philosophers, his contemporaries and compatriots (for example Reinhold) whom he unfairly branded as “puffed-up nonentities” who had served up “a hodge-podge of picked-up thoughts and perceptions—as also Hegel’s charge that they were mere imitators of Kant, Fichte or Schelling. This is one example of how the passage of time is sometimes a more objective judge (of the weight and significance of philosophers’ work) than some prominent contemporaries who for whatever reason take an unkind and biased attitude. However, in his lectures on contemporary German philosophy Hegel seldom discusses the details of the work of individual authors, especially those who are not in the front ranks. He focuses his analysis on the key concepts and problems through whose prism the main teachings and classical German systems are mainly viewed and the significance of this integral historical-philosophical Gestalt are perceived.

10 Hegel’s Analysis of “the Latest German Philosophy” Through Its Central Concepts 10.1 Freedom of the Human Spirit “The principle of the freedom of the human spirit” permeates Hegel’s presentation of the “latest” German philosophy of his time. It is vigorously embodied, Hegel is convinced, in diverse central ideas of the multi-form entity which Hegel and his contemporaries called “the latest German philosophy.” Subsequently it received various appellations. For example, it was called “German classical philosophy” in the twentieth century and is sometimes called that today because compared to subsequent history of philosophical culture, that culture is relatively integral yet consisting of original, sometimes opposing teachings, that add up to a “classical” philosophical heritage that is rich in substance and abiding relevance. Thus, speaking not yet about Kant, but about the philosophy of Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi (1743–1819), not a top-ranking German philosopher (in particular, his proposition that man’s knowledge of God implies recognition of human freedom) Hegel delivers the central general formula: “the greatness of our time rests in the fact that freedom, the proper possession of spirit, by which it is at home with itself within itself, is recognized, and that spirit has this consciousness within itself” (VGPh 4, 9:178/LHPBrown 3:257). Running through the (concise) examination of what Hegel considered the most important specific doctrines of German classics is the idea of an increasingly persistent, clear, concrete and comprehensive grounding of the “principle of freedom.” Thus, writing about Kant’s philosophy, he waxes lyrical: “The establishment of this principle was a great advance; human freedom is the ultimate pivot upon which humanity turns, the ultimate and absolutely firm pinnacle that is not open to influence, such that

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we grant validity to nothing, to no authority of whatever form, if it goes against human freedom” (VGPh 4, 9:168/LHPBrown 3:245). Hegel rightly and unequivocally states that Great popularity has from one point of view been won for Kantian philosophy by the teaching that man finds in himself an absolutely firm, unwavering centre-point. (ibid.)

On the other hand, when it comes to concrete analysis (in various works, including lectures on the history of philosophy), Hegel contends that Kant’s philosophy “cannot advance one step further” (VGPh 4, 9:168–9/LHPBrown 3:245–6). There is still no consensus whether Hegel was right to uphold a more concrete concept of the role and content of the principle of freedom than Kant and other contemporaries. It is impossible here to analyze in detail Hegel’s concept of the key contradiction of Kant’s truly great philosophical achievement, nor to provide a concrete-historical analysis of how Hegel, in various periods of his life, changes and deepens his image of Kant the philosopher. And yet “the image of Kant’s philosophy” that can be gleaned from the lectures on the history of philosophy can help us understand how interesting, substantive, critical and at the same time contradictory were Hegel’s historical-philosophical profiles of his great or outstanding contemporaries.

10.2 Hegel’s Historical-Philosophical Portrait of Kant The question of the ultimate and complete historical-philosophical image of Kant’s thought, his spiritual “critical” exploit in the history of thought up to the present time, is the subject of a vast literature.9 Drawing on this literature, let us recall some other touches to the “image of Kant” Hegel added in these lectures. On the one hand, Hegel highly prized, adopted and elaborated some of principles Kant’s Critical philosophy. On the other hand, Hegel deemed it necessary to apply these very critical principles to Kant’s own philosophical thought. This was manifest in Hegel’s approach to a whole range of theoretical solutions of his great predecessor. Thus, on the central Kantian idea of transcendental aesthetic theory of space and time he says trenchantly, that “it has been taken from experience” and that this is “a totally unphilosophical, illegitimate approach” (MM 20:346/LHPHald 3:439; cf. VGPh 4, 9:157/LHPBrown 3:225, 229). More than once Hegel vehemently opposed other specifically Kantian concepts and categories; he described Kant’s terminology and ideas as “barbarous” (MM 20:337/LHPHald 3:431, 447), and charged that “Kant remains restricted and confined by his psychological point of view and empirical methods” (MM 20:337/LHPHald 3:431), and that in the Critique of Pure Reason “Kant proceeds only psychologically, that is, historically. Sensibility, understanding, and reason are present in human [experience]. Kant tells the story in this way by

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taking it up quite empirically, without developing it from the concept” (VGPh 4, 9:151/LHPBrown 3:222). Hegel’s critique of Kant in his historical-philosophical lectures refutes—or at least repudiates—Kantian “transcendental idealism,” which was of fundamental significance for Kant: Kant, as portrayed by Hegel, proposes to use this very idealism, which Hegel flatly rejects, to resolve the antinomies of pure reason. Yet Hegel rightly considers the antinomies to be the most interesting aspect of Kant’s philosophy, especially compared to “ordinary metaphysics.” Yet in his lectures Hegel cannot forgive Kant for belittling of the power of spirit. First, Hegel argues, Kant unpardonably uses spirit (mistakenly) to drive a wedge between thesis and antithesis; “since spirit takes these [antinomies] upon itself, and contradiction is self-destructive, spirit is in itself all derangement and disorder” (MM 20:359/LHPHald 3:451). It is notable that, within the framework of the history of philosophy, after initially giving due to Kant for proposing, validating and glorifying the principle of freedom, Hegel made these (and other) sharply critical remarks about Kant’s doctrines. It would be utterly wrong to disregard or fail to understand them, as Kant and Hegel scholars have shown. The relevant scholarship points out that Hegel’s critical remarks sometimes pinpoint real weaknesses in Kant’s views. But on the whole it has to be noted that Kant with his “transcendental idealism” and “critique of pure reason” is sometimes more realistic in portraying the contradictions, weaknesses and errors of reason, in short, in many-sided description of spiritual-cognitive activity than is Hegel’s utterly “optimistic,” “objective” and “absolute” idealism which leads him to discuss and condemn Kant’s philosophy “not immanently, but rather from the premises of his own [philosophy]” (Düsing 1983, 231, 232–233).

10.3 Philosophical Idealism as a Distinct Feature of German Classical Philosophical Teachings of Hegel’s Time The idealistic character of these doctrines can be seen as the distinctive feature of the most developed and influential forms of classical German philosophy in the eighteenth–nineteenth centuries. Yet this inherent theoretical-methodological pivot was actively opposed at the end of this period as a fundamental limitation of German philosophers of other theoretical persuasions. They included, for example, thinkers who shared the ideas brilliantly developed and consistently upheld (first) by the disciple of the Hegelian school who ended up as a materialist, Ludwig Feuerbach (1959). Hegel’s idealism, highly valued for its dialectic, was taken up by Karl Marx, who was not immune to the influence of Hegelian schools. Hegel, of course, could not have foreseen such developments, and what is more, on the grounds of initially powerful Hegelian movement that followed the teacher’s death, a meaningful movement eventually was wrecked by the opposition between two schools of Hegelianism which became increasingly politicized. That

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is why various reasons and sentiments (unknown to Hegel) force us to revisit the arguments about German idealism, in particular, to demonstrate how many original theoretical and practical novelties were associated with the idealistic accents and overtones of Hegel’s philosophy and contemporary (then “the latest”) philosophical teachings. What are these innovations? 1. First, Hegel’s philosophy substantially reinterpreted many prerequisites, methods and conclusions of those departments of historical-philosophical classics concerning the spiritual aspects of the development of long-studied capabilities and actions of the human individual as a thinking subject. By Hegel’s time it was not only a clearly identified but fairly well developed area of philosophy which had learned the lessons of earlier clashes between “empiricism” and “rationalism.” But in Hegel’s historical-philosophical interpretation the “metaphysical,” i.e. general philosophical, theoretical study of “subjective spirit” was substantially modified. How exactly? In contrast to studies of these topics by his predecessors and many contemporaries, it swelled into a vast, minutely detailed first section of his doctrine of spirit, the philosophy of subjective spirit. Hegel subdivided this section into “philosophical anthropology” (Hegel already used that term), phenomenology and psychology. These themes cannot be detailed here; note only that according to Hegel “subjective spirit” too was not confined to the research framework of traditional philosophy which concentrated on “the inner world” of the cognizing human being, but included many “anthropological,” i.e. naturally caused and socio-historical characteristics of the spiritual activity of individual members of the human race (see Bykova 2008, 272–289; 2010; 2013, 228–229). Hegel thus places new accents, differing from those of the epoch before Hegel and even from Hegel’s times in describing, for example, Modern French or English philosophy. For example Hegel describes Locke’s philosophy, somewhat unusually, as “reflecting (metaphysizierende) empiricism” (MM 20:223/LHPHald 3:361, 363, 383). Why? Locke’s teaching as portrayed by Hegel is the philosophical locus where, on the one hand, ancient truly metaphysical concepts such as substance, the infinite, modus, or attraction continued to live and develop. (Incidentally, this contradicts later Positivist interpretations of classical philosophical “empiricism” as a kind of anti-metaphysics.) Such an unorthodox approach is similar to the following specific accents: Hegel does accord Locke’s teachings (which were most frequently, in Germany, labeled as “empiricism”) a special place in the analysis of “spirit” (Geist). To wit: Hegel gives credit to Locke on the one hand for describing the “path of the emerging spirit” (des erscheinenden Geistes). Let us not forget that beginning from Phenomenology of Spirit one of the key lines of Hegel’s research was “the appearing spirit” (with a very complicated explanation of the distinctions of “the spirit” as such and in particular “the appearing spirit”), while Locke had claimed to use “the plain historical method” (Essay, 1.1.2). On the other hand, Hegel detects a certain limitation of Locke’s philosophy in that Locke allegedly had in mind only this form of spirit. However important for philosophy was the study and glorification by Locke of such form of spirit as the main and sole form, in Hegel’s opinion, it “deprives” spirit of its main distinctive features—it omnipresence and omnipotence. On the whole Hegel is of the opinion that neither

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Locke, nor the French philosophers of the preceding period, were able to attain the level of analyzing “spirit” (Geist) in its most genuine and intimate forms. What are the main “forms of spirit” dealt with in Hegel’s historical-philosophical concept? 2. Strictly speaking, considering these forms is not the main special subject of the history of philosophy as part of Hegel’s system. Theoretically they are included in his “philosophy of objective spirit” in which “spirit” (Geist) is divided into justice (“right”, Recht), morality (Moralität), “mores” or the ethical order (Sittlichkeit) and is studied from these predominantly socio-historical angles. As for the “continuation” of Hegel’s analysis of “spirit” in the forms of “absolute spirit”—and that is art, religion and philosophy—that department is crowned by philosophy, which is highly uncharacteristic of past epochs in considering what Hegel sees as the highest forms of spirit, i.e., spirit “in itself and for itself.” The challenge (in interpreting these lectures on history of philosophy) is: though the problems discussed had been objectively and ultimately developed in Hegel’s works and lectures beginning from the early period, he did not formulate substantively and completely the very concept of “objective spirit” in its various manifestations until the 1820s, both in major works (Philosophy of Right, Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences) and in corresponding lecture courses. 3. “Objective spirit” and the history of philosophy in Hegel’s system. First, a brief mention should be made of the place the teaching about objective spirit occupies in Hegel’s complete “philosophy of spirit”; then we can address the question of the relation—in Hegel’s final system—between the two disciplinary sections, i.e. his account of objective spirit and his history of philosophy.

10.4 “Objective Spirit” and the History of Philosophy Within these Lectures on History of Philosophy, Hegel does not expressly investigate the problem of “objective spirit” comprehensively. However, the specificities of the history of philosophy, in particular, the question of the sources of the idealistic character of German classical philosophy, cannot be understood without at least brief explanation of their links. I will trace (concisely) the main problem and substantive lines linking Hegel’s concept of objective spirit to the idealistic overtones of German classical philosophy. In materialist philosophy, especially that anchored in the traditions of dogmatic dialectical materialism, these were myopically dismissed as nothing but abuses and errors of Hegelian (and any other) idealism. However, the philosophy of Hegel and other giants of German classical philosophy of the eighteenth–twentieth centuries exhibit the legitimate pride of these philosophers in the historic accomplishments, “objective”—inter-subjective, transnational and transhistorical—achievements of the human spirit (Geist). This philosophy continued, and in many ways revolutionized the study of the specific forms, opportunities and varieties of human spiritual activities. It distilled profound theoretical results which Hegel and like-minded philosophers accumulated under the auspices of “objective”

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and “absolute spirit.” These were investigations of diverse forms which had to be taken into account, brought together and studied; the objects of study were in many ways justifiably described as both “objective” and “spiritual.” What are these forms? First of all, they are as old as the comparatively civilized human society which has abandoned the state of barbarism. Hegel, however, considers them mainly in their complete, mature forms. Hegel scholars have high regard for Hegel’s concepts, descriptions and characteristics of “objective spirit” which substantially influenced the philosophy of his time and later times. Walter Jaeschke explains: In this concept – which will then have its own history reaching to the twentieth century … – Hegel captures the character of the social life with the ingenious conciseness: “objective Spirit” is the spiritual world, in which “subjective Spirit,” and more precisely, the [individual] will becomes objective, is objectified. This kind of conceptualization emphasizes the derivative character of social life. It is spiritual life, it is not based on mere natural relations but on the subjective spirit, on the spirituality characteristic of human life. Where it is lacking, there are – trivially – no social institutions. Law, morality, and ethical life are not given “by nature.” They come from the spirit, and more precisely, from the will. They are forms produced by free will, [and] spirit is their “substance,” as Hegel says. (Jaeschke 2003, 367–368)

These remarks of the prominent modern student of Hegel pinpoint the fact that in Hegel’s system “objective spirit,” proceeding of course from “subjective spirit”— these being the sum total of the spiritual faculties and actions of individuals that owe their existence to man’s free will, common sense and reason—generates the processes and products inconceivable without human interaction, absent their social relations and the whole course of history. Thus emerge spiritual spheres and results of human activity that are not separated from real individuals, but are generated in and through their activities and invariably return into individuals as historically determined “worlds” of conscious activity of a multitude of subjects and therefore objectively given for a vast number of individuals. They are indeed reified, objectified (sich gegenständlich werden—Hegel’s expression10; MM 18:40, cf. 120, VGPh 1,6:112, 251/LHPIntro 24, LHPBrown 1:140, cf. 244) in universally meaningful spiritual products “given” to individuals (for example, in the concepts of science, law, works of art and literature, moral norms, and creations in other spiritual culture spheres, etc.). They are introduced as something objectively significant and valuable (thus becoming equally objective spiritual values) both into culture, science and communications among individuals and—as an object of study—in the entire body of humanities and other areas of education broadly speaking (Bildung). Hegel and other classical German philosophers did not invent all this: Philosophy has from ancient times been describing and seeking to understand the world of “ideas,” to identify their special character and sometimes—owing to their “universality”—severing them from the human world and positing them in a transcendent world, as Plato did. It is a particular characteristic of Hegel and his fellow German philosophers that they do not simply reveal, but glorify the role of thinking activity of humanity, which at times led them

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to absolutize and ideologically reify it. This was not simply due to emphasis, but also due to the growing role of spiritual, thinking achievements of certain individuals and products of thought within human culture. Recall that Hegel associated “truth” and “truths” only with thought, thus conferring on them universal—i.e. transcendental and transhistorical—significance (to use later terms). Hegel, of course, recognizes that many results obtained outside philosophy are also produced by our active thinking. These “works” (Werke) are accumulated, for example, in religion or political history; they are “reified” in legal and governmental structures and activities; and they are embodied in the results of art and science in a vivid, truly “objective” spiritual form. And of course “objective spirit”—as multi-form forms, types and results of activity—is first, embodied within philosophy and second, assessed and appraised for its meaning by philosophy. Hegel is well aware (this seems elementary) that not any instance of philosophizing and its results (ideas, works, etc.) become part of a total, meaningful historical-philosophical entity (just as not all stand-alone trees make up a forest, Hegel says). But perhaps nowhere in the spiritual sphere does inclusion in the entirety of history, if and when it happens, play such an important role as in science in general and in philosophy in particular. Individual stages in the history of philosophy are only relatively independent, as only together do they constitute its history, a history that does not end as long as humanity exists. In its totality “the history of spirit” is embodied and most profoundly understood, including the history of those pinnacles human thought is able to achieve. Thus, special credit is due to the giants of classical German philosophy, especially Hegel, for examining in depth in concrete detail spiritual phenomena— ideas, principles, values, etc.—within the socio-historical activities of persons and humankind. But that is one side. On the other hand, due to the indelible religious component of their philosophical systems, they could not avoid portraying “objective spirit” and especially “absolute spirit” and even thought itself as ultimately generated by the “divine,” a reified, higher “spirit” said to be “controlling” or at least guiding the world of nature and man’s spiritual world. Thus, profound and meaningful studies of spirituality went hand-in-hand with idealism which is rightly called “objective” and sometimes “absolute idealism” because Hegel more than anyone gave pride of place to varieties of “objective” and still higher “absolute spirit.” Hegel puts the latter at the peak of the creations of “the spirit” because only such spirit, in his considered opinion, cognized “itself in itself” in the forms of art, religion and philosophy. If such a criterion—cognition of the spirit by itself and within itself—is chosen, then of course Hegel places philosophy above not only art, but also above religion. One confirmation of such a hierarchy of forms of culture proposed by Hegel was the unprecedentedly profound philosophical interpretation by him and other classical German thinkers of the specificity of “spirit,” i.e. the summits of humanity’s

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spiritual culture. This helps to clarify why, for all its contradictions, history of philosophy occupies a high position in Hegel’s philosophical system: its place within the wealth of disciplinary rubrics within his philosophical system appears to be rather modest; yet its role as the most essential, “crowning” structure of absolute spirit is beyond question.

11 The Place of History of Philosophy in Hegel’s System Readers are advised first to review the scheme included in Part IX of this volume (Appendix 2) that reflects a number of features which characterize—in historical dynamics—the extraordinary ramifications of the development and implementation of systemic ideas and principles in Hegel’s philosophy. Of particular interest for our purposes is the significant and apparently contradictory role the history of philosophy plays in Hegel’s system, of which it is an inseparable part. I first formulate several basic principles which apply to the whole body of Hegel’s systematic ideas and historical dynamics of their development. 1. Systemic ideas had been developed by Hegel’s predecessors, most clearly and confidently by Kant. In his Critique of Pure Reason Kant wrote that “idea of the whole” (Idee des Ganzen) is not a “wrapping,” or “cover” for a disparate “aggregate” of data and propositions, but instead is the possibility and requirement to present this whole in the shape of connection of the main ideas within a system (Zusammenhang in einem System; KdrV B89). 2. This section cannot examine Hegel’s systematic principle and its implementation in their entirety (Motroschilova 1986, 1988).11 Here it is necessary to recall the history of the issue and highlight the following characteristics of the formation and unfolding of the systematic principle in Hegel’s philosophy (reflected in the above-mentioned schema): • the historical character and continuity in the formation, development and implementation of the systematic principle; Hegel’s persistence in developing the whole system and its parts; • the unprecedented ramified structure of the system, profound and systematic elaboration of all its individual disciplines and their branches which Hegel the “encyclopedist” considered to be one of his prime philosophical goals; • at the same time his readiness, if new knowledge and research required, to change the initially chosen foundations of the system (Phenomenology of Spirit at the start of the journey, followed by The Science of Logic after a fundamental investigation of systematically connected branches of that philosophical science); • another important result of systematic dynamics is gradual enrichment of the entire system with perceptive, specially designed sections dealing with socio-historical and socio-cultural problems, under the aegis of the “philosophy

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of spirit” (subjective, objective, absolute spirit as the key elements of the whole system) and its specific categories. With regard to the history of philosophy as an inseparable part of the system, which Hegel studied from the beginning of his creative philosophical work and pursued throughout his life and brought to those interested through university teaching, it makes sense to note the following contradiction concerning the place and role of the history of philosophy in Hegel’s system as it was finally formed. On the one hand, prima facie the role the history of philosophy plays within this extraordinarily ramified yet cohesive system may appear to be exceedingly modest. As a discipline, the history of philosophy provides (through lectures) a special supplement to one link in the system, the section “philosophy,” which itself is an aspect of “absolute spirit.” This systematic approach faithfully describes the apparently particular, specialized significance of history of philosophy for philosophy as a whole (accordingly, the specialization of historians of philosophy and their relatively small share—in every epoch—of the whole philosophical community). Yet this is only one side of the matter—one which, alas, is stressed by those opposed to studying historical philosophy, who today are rather numerous and very aggressive (cf. Katzav 2018). Consider now the other side of the matter, which is expressly, profoundly examined in Hegel’s philosophy. What he conceived as the vast theoretical, specialized, cultural role of the history of philosophy, which he sought to derive on a strict disciplinary basis from his systematic principles, is due to this decisive thesis: “absolute spirit”, as a section of his philosophical system, and which comprises philosophy with its indispensable subsection, “history of philosophy,” does not merely complete but crowns Hegel’s entire systematic structure. It is significant that in Hegel’s system, philosophy crowns the entire systematic structure as a systematic “organism” of philosophical disciplines. Astonishingly (for his time), Hegel places philosophy—and in its educational function within cultural Bildung, its history—above art and even above religion. This is why Hegel—beginning from the early period, from the start of the nineteenth century (with a ten-year interval due to professional circumstances) and until his last days—regularly lectured on history of philosophy, hoping that this section which he considered to be so very important would provide a fitting crown for the whole body of philosophical sciences. Was this apparently contradictory yet (within Hegel’s frame of reference) important “elevation” of the history of philosophy within the integral system of philosophical disciplines borne out by the subsequent history of philosophical thought, including the modern stage? The answer to this question again looks contradictory. On the one hand, “modernity” (in the twentieth but especially in the twenty-first century) is marked by growing “positivist” trends (in the broad sense) within contemporary philosophy. These trends, according to authors who style themselves as “philosophers,” imply and even demand that the philosophical community should neglect the history of philosophy. Sometimes this polemic develops into truly Herostratus-like attempts to push aside the study and teaching and in extreme cases, figuratively speaking, to “burn” (denigrate) the history of

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philosophy as it is studied today.12 Nevertheless, the history of philosophy in its entire development during Hegel’s era and in our time, even during the hardest times, has never lost its genuinely fundamental significance for the development of philosophical thought in general, the study of early epochs and of our own epoch, by seeking to “capture in thought” both modern and previous historical stages in the development of humanity. One proof of this idea is the continuous and thorough-going way in which Hegel’s own philosophy has been studied in all epochs, including our own, and the fact that these studies have been both fundamental and international, as is evidenced by this Handbook.

12 “Final Result” of the History of Philosophy as Portrayed by Hegel Hegel delivered the concluding lectures of his historical-philosophical course on 2 March 1817, 14 March 1818, 12 March 1819, 23 March 1821, 30 March 1824, 28 March 1828, and 26 March 1831. Each occasion was an inspired, brilliant conclusion to courses replete with comprehensive ideas Hegel delivered to students and the general public at famous Universities in Heidelberg, and (mainly) Berlin. Attendance grew from four in 1806 to 70 in 1817. True, his lectures were always very challenging for students in form and content. Yet among his audience in the Berlin years were some who were not only attentive, but gifted, who used Hegel’s philosophy in their own work. Wilhelm von Humboldt reports in one of his letters that in his lectures Hegel does not intend to confine himself to communicating his ideas, he is purposefully creating his own school. As regards his lectures on the history of philosophy, transcripts of these lectures—especially in the concluding part—were marked not only by broad historical philosophical talent, but also by inspiration. Hegel spoke with emotional fervor about: • the significant intellectual effect achieved by the combination of mutually complementary efforts of great and outstanding philosophers; according to Hegel, “the Idea is known in its necessity; the sides of its diremption, Nature and Spirit, are each of them recognized as representing the totality of the Idea” (MM 20:454/LHPHald 3:545); • “The ultimate aim and interest of philosophy is to reconcile thought or the concept with actuality” (MM 20:455/LHPHald 3:545). This is one of Hegel’s key theoretical theses; it has nothing to do with mere, crude conformism, but had everything to do with the growing ability of “spirit” to master this reality (VGPh 4, 9:188/LHPBrown 3:271–2; MM 20:455/LHPHald 3:545–6); • the high level attained by “the world spirit”—where by “world spirit,” inasmuch as it expressed itself in philosophy, was meant nothing nebulous, mystical or impressionistic. Hegel meant a very real, collective, prolonged, international, i.e. cosmopolitan process of interaction, mutual complementarity, gradual preservation and development and enrichment of principles and central ideas

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without external bounds or local barriers, a striving of the spirit creating “the universe” (MM 20:455/LHPHald 3:546); • about the inevitably prolonged and arduous course of any creative, paradigmatic “philosophy of our day,” about work which appears “slothful and slow,” for only a retrospective review could be quick; here Hegel used the Hamletian simile of a hard-working “old mole” (MM 20:456/LHPHald 3:547); • about the need to “read old stuff” while realizing that only thanks to the tireless work of the spirit, in particular philosophical spirit, is “the present ... the highest stage reached,” though not in the form of “mere fashionable theories of the time,” but in the collective capacity of “one philosophy in its development” to take the form of “reasonable procession,” forward movement, in which connection Hegel then summarized “the main epochs” in the history of philosophy (MM 20:456–61/LHPHald 3:547–52). Hegel declared his lectures on the history of philosophy to have been completed. Once again, in other terms, he recapped his main ideas about the association of genuine, truly philosophical doctrines and therefore one, essentially single “world” philosophy in its “series of successive spiritual forms … in its progress” (MM 20:460–2/LHPHald 3:551–3; cf. VGPh 4, 9:188/LHPBrown 3:171–2). Hegel said It is my desire that this history of philosophy should contain for you a summons to grasp the spirit of the time, which is present in us by nature, and – each in his own place – consciously to bring it from its natural condition, i.e. from its lifeless seclusion, into the light of day. (MM 20:462/LHPHald 3:553; cf. VGPh 4, 9:188/LHPBrown 3:272)

At the very end Hegel thanked his listeners, who became more numerous and attentive, for the opportunity they had given him “to have been associated with you in this spiritual community” (ibid.). It remains only to express the hope that through exposure to Hegel’s profound historical-philosophical ideas and works today’s readers who are not indifferent to the accomplishments of the philosophical “world spirit” will develop “spiritual bonds” with his philosophy. Translated by Kenneth R. Westphal, with Marina F. Bykova

Notes 1. However, the rules concerning secondary sources are often broken. So far as possible, the present discussion cites the recent critical editions and translations of transcripts of Hegel’s lectures (edited by Jaeschke or Brown, resp.); where necessary, Michelet’s edition (MM) and its English translations are cited. Translations revised without notice. (Revisions are by krw.) 2. For the benefit of specialists: the materials mentioned by Jaeschke will be found in VGPh1-4. 3. Conceptual explanations are in order for a modern understanding of Hegel’s formula. The word Gestalt which is frequently used in Hegel’s philosophy (for example, Phenomenology of Spirit), in this case lends special shades to the great philosopher’s reasoning. This, however, is

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often overlooked, partly because of unhappy and misleading translations of Gestalt into other languages. For example, in earlier Russian translations of Hegel the word is conveyed by the composite and somewhat obscure word formoobrazovaniye (form-building). On how French translators go about solving this problem see my study Motroshilova (2008). In my opinion, it is best to preserve the word Gestalt at least in translations into the European languages (including Russian) because the term is generally understood in our times. 4. The concept of Sittlichkeit, which Hegel explains in detail in The Philosophy of Right, is not identical to the moral sphere (denoted by the word morality, Moralität). “Sittlichkeit” is derived from “Sitten” (or mores) and, according to Hegel, includes a wide range of notions: family, civil society (Zivilgesellschaft) with subdivisions of the system of needs, administration of justice, police, corporations and the state. Therefore, English translations are bound to be inaccurate because according to the rules of this language it is impossible to distinguish the German Sittlichkeit whose root “Sitten” connotes mores and does not require a special word clearly distinguished from Moralitat which refers to “morality.” Incidentally, the Russian language has no problem distinguishing these two concepts corresponding to the texts of Hegel and other philosophers. 5. For a major systematic study of the theme see Collins (1998, especially Chapter 12). In recent Russian philosophy, the book by Yakovlev (2013) stands out on account of its originality. The author examines Locke’s socio-political ideas. An example to illustrate the philosopher’s response to a specific social historical context: the link of Locke’s political works with his life in the Netherlands and more specifically, observations of the economic and political life of the Republic of the Netherlands, the topic of tolerance in this historical “context” and in Locke’s Essay on Tolerance. Another example is “the republic of science” as an idea and as a feature of the real socio-historical context. Yakovlev’s work is a good example of how much such philosophical understanding depends on scrupulous historical research. 6. I sought to proceed from Hegel’s ideas analyzed here and other ideas in my book published at the end of the last century (see Motroshilova 1990), where I proposed an integral concept for the analysis of the socio-historical roots of German classical philosophy at three levels, civilization, epoch and situation. 7. When the word Gestalt is used in the historical-philosophical context (Gestalt of the German philosophy of the Modern Times) I should explain that I mean an aggregate, generalized image of such philosophy which sums up and stylizes, as it were, particular individual entities covered by the notion of German philosophy and “visualizes”—in the mind’s eye of course—what they have in common and unites them. “Picture-making” images and comparisons are geared to this specific task. 8. The anecdote is from Ferdinand Lassalle (1862, 77); it is reported from there by Nicolin (1970), Nr. 364 and also by other philosophical histories of the period, e.g., Kuno Fischer, Beno Erdmann, and by Dilthey (1970, 210). 9. In my opinion, one of the best summations of this strand of research in world philosophy by the 1980s is provided in a section of the book by the German philosopher Klaus Düsing, devoted, on the one hand, to Hegel’s portrayal of Kant, and on the other hand, containing a scrupulous analysis of the literature on the issue (see Düsing 1983, 196–242). 10. “Alles Erkennen, Lernen, Wissenschaft, selbst Handeln beabsichtigt weiter nichts, als das, was innerlich, an sich ist, aus sich herauszuziehen und sich gegenständlich zu werden” (MM 18:40). 11. I am glad to note that the second work is part of the cycle of works accomplished in the 1980s and 1990s as part of cooperation between Russian philosophers with leading Hegel scholars and specialists on eighteenth–nineteenth century German philosophy, members of the famous Hegel Association (Hegel-Vereinigung). Some of the books were published in our two languages in Germany and Russia respectively. 12. Herostratus set arson to the Tempel of Artemis in Ephesos.

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Bibliography Brucker, Johann Jakob. 1742–1744. Historia Critica Philosophiae. 5 vols. (1766–1767 ed., 6 vols.). Lipsiae (Leipzig): apud Bernh. Christoph. Breitkopf. Buhle, Johann Gottlieb. 1796–1804. Lehrbuch der Geschichte der Philosophie und einer kritischen Literatur derselben. 9 vols. Göttingen: Vandenhöck und Ruprecht. Bykova, Marina F. 2008. “Spirit and Concrete Subjectivity in Hegel’s Phenomenology.” In Blackwell Guide to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, edited by Kenneth Westphal, 265–295. Oxford: Blackwell. Bykova, Marina F. 2010. “Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit as a Project of Social Ontology.” In Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in Context of the Contemporary Hegel Scholarship, edited by Nelly V. Motroshilova, 291–313. Moscow: Kanon+ (in Russian). Bykova, Marina F. 2013. “Thinking and Knowing.” In Bloomsbury Companion to Hegel, edited by Allegra de Laurentiis and Jeffrey Edwards, 225–230. London, New Delhi, New York, and Sydney: Bloomsbury. Collins, Randall. 1998. The Sociology of Philosophy: A Global Theory of Intellectual Change. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Dilthey, Wilhelm. 1970. Zur Geistesgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts. In Gesammelte Schriften, vol. 15, edited by U. Herrmann. Leipzig: Teubner. Duquette, David A., ed. 2003. Hegel’s History of Philosophy: New Interpretation. Albany, NY: State University of New York Press. Düsing, Klaus. 1983. Hegel und die Geschichte der Philosophie. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft. Feuerbach, Ludwig. 1959. Hegels Geschichte der Philosophie. In Sämtliche Werke, vol. 2. Stuttgart: Bad-Cannstatt. Gadamer, Hans-Georg. 1980. “Hegel und die antike Dialektik.” In Gadamer. Hegels Dialektik: Sechs hermeneutische Studien, 2nd ed., 7–30. Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr. Jaeschke, Walter. 2003. Hegel-Handbuch. Leben-Werk-Wirkung. Stuttgart and Weimar: J.B. Metzler. Katzav, Joel. 2018. “Analytic Philosophy, 1925–1969: Emergence, Management and Nature.” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 26 (6): 1197–1221. Kimmerle, Heinz. 1970. “Zur Verhältnis von Geschichte und Philosophie im Denken Hegels.” In Das Problem der Abgeschlossenheit des Denkens, 301–312. Bonn: Bouvier/Hegel–Studien 8. Kohmer, Petza. 1998. Philosophiegeschichte als philosophisches Problem. Kritische Überlegung namentlich zu Kant und Hegel. Freiburg and München: Karl Alber Verlag. Lassalle, Ferdinand. 1862. “Die hegelsche und rosenkranzische Logik und die Grundlage der hegel’schen Geschichtsphilosophie in hegelschen Systeme.” Der Gedanke 2 (H. 2): 123–150. Michelet, K. L. 1837–1938. Geschichte der letzten Systeme der Philosophie in Deutschland von Kant bis Hegel. 2 vols. Berlin: Duncker und Humblot. Motroshilova, Nelly V. 1984. Put’ Gegelia k “Nauke Logiki” [Hegel’s Path to the Science of Logic]. Moscow: Nauka. Motroschilova, Nelly V. 1986. “Die Dialektik des Systemprinzip und das Systemprinzip der Dialektik.” In Hegels Wissenschaft der Logik, edited by Dieter Henrich, 39–64. Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta. Motroschilova, Nelly V. 1988. “Das Systemprinzip in Hegels Wissenschaft der Logik.” In Studien zur Geschichte der westlichen Philosophie. Elf Arbeiten jungerer sowjetischen Autoren, edited by Nelly V. Motroschilova, 182–205. Frankfurt a.M.: Surkamp Verlag. Motroshilova, Nelly V. 1990. Sotsial’no-istoricheskie Korni Nemetskoj Klassicheskoj Filosofii [Socio-historical Roots of German Classical Philosophy]. Moscow: Nauka. Motroschilova, Nelly V. 2008. “‘Phänomen,’ ‘Erscheinung,’ ‘Gestalt,’ von Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes in ihrem Bezug zur Philosophie Kants.” In Phänomene und Analyse, Grundbegriffe der Philosophie des Geistes (1807), edited by Wolfgang Hogrebe, 107–134. Würzburg: Konigshausen und Neuman.

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Nicolin, Günter. 1970. Hegel in Berichten seiner Zeitgenossen. Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag. O’Malley, J. J., K. W. Algozin, and F. G. Weiss, eds. 1974. Hegel and the History of Philosophy. Proceedings of the 1972 Hegel Society of America Conference. The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff. Stäudlin, Carl [Karl] Friedrich. 1794–1795. Geschichte und Geist des Skepticismus vorzüglich in Rücksicht auf Moral und Religion. 2 vols. Leipzig: Crusius. Tennemann, Wilhelm Gottlieb. 1798–1819. Geschichte der Philosophie. 12 vols. Leipzig: J. A. Barth. (An abridged version in English: 1852. A Manual of the History of Philosophy. Translated by Rev. Arthur Johnson and John R. Morell. London: H. G. Bohn.) Überweg, Friedrich. 1863–1866. Grundriss der Geschiche der Philosophie. 3 vols. Leipzig: Verlag E. S. Mittler und Sohn. Yakovlev, Anatoly A. 2013. Zaveshchanie Dzhona Lokka, Priverzhentsa Mira, Filosofa i Anglichanina [The Testament of John Locke, an Advocate of Peace, Philosopher and Englishman]. Moscow: izd-vo Instituta Gaidara.

Part VIII

Hegelianism and Post-Hegelian Thought

Chapter 26

Hegel and Recent Analytic Metaphysics Paul Redding

After a sustained period in which the enterprise of metaphysics was negatively regarded, metaphysical topics have for some time been back in favour with analytic philosophers. The highpoint of analytic philosophy’s anti-metaphysical period had been in the 1930s and 40s when the logical positivists used a verificationalist criterion for meaningfulness (a claim is meaningful only if it can be either empirically verified or disconfirmed) to dismiss traditional “metaphysical” discourse as meaningless. However, the verificationalist criterion soon came to be regarded as self-defeating: clearly it was not itself capable of empirical verification or disconfirmation. Another turn taken by analytic philosophy around the same time would continue this anti-metaphysical impulse without relying upon the positivists’ self-refuting principle: “ordinary language” philosophers shifting the criteria for meaningfulness more to the “ordinary” uses of language. While in comparison to the 30s and 40s, the very early years of analytic philosophy had seemed comparatively “metaphysical,” the seeds for the ultimate rejection of metaphysics are not difficult to discern there.1 While in no sense opposed to the project of metaphysics per se, the attitudes expressed by Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore at the turn of the twentieth century had been opposed a particular type of metaphysics—broadly the type of “British idealism” influential in the last decades of the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, the more general anti-metaphysical orientation that was to develop later might be seen as deriving from the weapon that had been employed by Russell in his war against the idealists. This was the new quantified predicate logic stemming from work of Gottlob Frege on the logical foundations of mathematics. With the development of this new approach, logic had come to be perceived as “formal” or “mathematical” in ways contrasting with the traditional Aristotelianbased conception of logic that had survived for over two millennia. Frege’s project

P. Redding (*)  University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia e-mail: [email protected]

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of seeking in logic a foundation for mathematics—in particular, a foundation for number theory—did not reduce logic to mathematics: any reduction here was conceived as going in the opposite direction. Nevertheless, this logicist project demanded that logic be conceived of in such a way as to enable the assimilation of mathematical truths to logical ones. Importantly, the truths of mathematics are thought of as eternal truths, unlike everyday truths about a changeable world. While Aristotle had thought of the truth or falsity of particular judgements as changing with time—the statement that someone is sitting is true while he is sitting but becomes false when he stands (Aristotle 1984, Chapter 5, 4a22–5)—in the Russellian approach, the propositions expressed by judgements or statements came to be conceived as true or false simpliciter, or “eternally.” Thus a sentence such as “Socrates is sitting” came to be seen as incomplete—a shortened form of “Socrates is sitting at such and such a time” which remains true or false with the passage of time. Next, the mathematically conceived logical formula meant that logic itself came to be conceived in an essentially “extensionalist” way and so dissociable from relations thought to be essentially mental or psychological. At least since the time of the Port Royal logicians, what was “comprehended” in a concept had been distinguished from the range of objects to which that concept applied—Sir William Hamilton having rendered the French distinction as that between the “intension” and the “extension” of a concept. The notion of the comprehensible content of a concept suggests something psychological, but if the relation between concepts could be understood in terms of the relations among the respective “extensions” of those concepts—an approach encouraged by the emergence of set theory—then the domain of logic could be conceived independently of the domain of the mental. Suggestions of this had already been present in Leibniz’s project of a “calculus” for thought applied to a type of universal language or “characteristic,” but Leibniz had nevertheless conceived such extensionally understood relations as internal to an overall intensional interpretation of the logical domain— logical contents ultimately being understood as related to the mind of God. By the nineteenth century, however, a more uniformly extensionalistic approach to logic was suggested by George Boole (Bar-Am 2008). This development came to fruition in the new logic employed by Russell in his attack on the idealists. All in all, the rapid progress in logic made in first half of the twentieth century seemed to support Russell’s dismissal of the earlier idealism, a metaphysics he thought to be wedded to the categories of traditional logic. By the 1950s, however, this historical movement hit an obstacle, and with this, a serious challenge to the anti-metaphilosophical and anti-idealist flavor of analytic philosophy appeared. This obstacle was provided by the return of an ancient form of logic, alethic modal logic—the logic of necessary and possible truths—that when conceived as intensional seemed in many ways closer to logic as envisaged by Hegel than to logic as envisaged by Russell. The attempt to preserve the extensionalist assumptions about logic favoured by Russell and the positivists within the context of modal logic created problems. The quantification that ranged over domains of objects in non-modal logic was, in modal logic, conceived of as ranging over merely possible (that is, non-existing) objects—objects existing in alternate “possible worlds.”

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David Lewis accepted this consequence by affirming the reality of such possible worlds, but many found this metaphysical position so counter-intuitive that they considered it as a type of reductio of the project to reconcile modal logic with the thesis of extensionality. The ensuing discussion over the possibility of acknowledging the reality of modal notions of possibility and necessity has been an important vehicle for the return of “metaphysics” in analytic philosophy, but while this has seen a resurgence of interest in Aristotelian metaphysics (e.g., Tahko 2012), any consideration of the consequences the new situation holds for Hegel’s philosophy has been largely ignored. In the following sections I want to explore the question of Hegel’s philosophy in relation to the new metaphysical context of analytic philosophy along two related lines. The first explores a hidden role played by lingering commitments to Hegelian forms of thought in the revival of modal logic itself, the second explores the possibilities for new ways of understanding the nature of Hegelian idealism against the background of the array of metaphysical positions that have developed in analytic philosophy in the wake of the challenge to extensionalism posed by modal logic.

1 The Hidden Role of Hegel in the Development of Modal Logic in Twentieth Century 1.1 Hegel, Royce, Russell and C. I. Lewis Russell had believed that the revolution in logic originating from the work of Frege had dispensed not only with traditional Aristotelian logic but also the traditional forms of metaphysics linked to it. Russell was surely right in assuming that Aristotle had thought of his logic as implying a distinct metaphysics. In his classification of judgements, in De Interpretatione Chapter 7, Aristotle starts with the claim that “of actual things some are universal, others particular” (Aristotle 1984, Chapter 5, 17a38). Of the former, statements can be made either universally (Aristotle 1984, Chapter 5, 17b3), in which case there will be a contrary, or non-universally (Aristotle 1984, Chapter 5, 17b6–8), in which case there will be no contrary. The important point for us is that, for Aristotle, both universally and particularly quantified affirmative statements are to be understood as being about universals. Both “all men are mortal” and “some men are mortal” say something about the genus “man.” Building on Frege, however, Russell uncoupled Aristotle’s universally quantified affirmative judgements from the type of metaphysics that followed Aristotle in treating “kinds” or “genera” as primitive and real—the type of metaphysics often thought of as incompatible with the explanations of modern science. For Russell, such judgements were no longer about kinds; they were simply general judgements about the world itself, expressed in conditional form. All As are B effectively says that if one finds an instance of property A, it will be accompanied by an

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instance of property B. In one fell swoop, the elimination of “kind terms”—those terms in the subject position of a sentence specifying the essential nature of that which is designated—eliminated the “kinds” to which those terms had previously been mistakenly thought to refer. The elimination of kinds thus undercut the distinction between necessary and contingent properties, and the new logic had little concern for traditional modal judgements of necessity and possibility. Crucially, Russell in many places portrayed Hegel as naively held hostage to the Aristotelian approach to both logic and metaphysics, criticizing him for having accepted the traditional “subject-predicate” conception of the proposition (e.g., Russell 1914, 48). Limited to a logic of one-placed predicates, Hegel, he claimed, had no way of theorizing relations between individual objects, with the consequence that ultimately all predicates had to be referred back to one big subject, “the Absolute”—a consequence of Hegel’s approach that had been made explicit in the work of Bradley. However, this extensionally conceived account of judgement upon which Russell based this criticism of Hegel was soon itself to be criticized on logical grounds, and this would lead to the revival of a type of modal logic—the propositional modal logic of the American Clarence Irving Lewis. Indeed, in this counter-thrust against Russell’s extensionalism it is not difficult to see the spectre of Hegel. Within a few years of the publication of the first volume of Whitehead’s and Russell’s Principia Mathematica, C. I. Lewis published the first of a string of articles critical of Russell’s conception of “material implication” that was based on his extensionalist reduction of the form of Aristotelian judgements (Lewis 1912, 1914, 1918). Russell’s elimination of Aristotle’s modal distinctions between the properties possessed necessarily by an instance of a kind and those possessed contingently, Lewis complained, left him incapable of conveying the idea of the necessity implicit in the logical conception of valid inference. Lewis then set about developing a formal logic with modal propositional operators (“it is necessary that …” and “it is possible that …”) to capture this necessity, and opposed his “strict implication” to Russell’s “material implication.” Lewis’s logical move in fact had a clear Hegelian genealogy. First, Lewis had been deeply influenced by his teacher, the American “absolute idealist,” Josiah Royce, from whom he had derived much of his logical formalizations used for his systems of modal logic (Lewis 1918, vi). Lewis was to make clear the link to idealism of his own intensional approach to modal logic in an essay of 1930, describing his own logic as a mathematical, or “logistical,” development of the type of intensional logic that had been typical of “continental” thinkers since the time of Leibniz (Lewis 1930, 33). In contrast to Russell’s attempt to reduce the intensional to the extensional, Lewis claimed that “the intensional implication relation (or “strict implication” as I called it)” was the more inclusive: “when the extensional relations are introduced by definition, it includes the calculus of propositions, as previously developed, as a sub-system” (ibid., 36). Further, while Lewis may not have been aware (although his teacher Royce would surely have been), his criticism of Russell effectively repeated the general features of Hegel’s criticism of Leibniz’s logic in Book 3 of his Science of Logic.

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Hegel had been well aware of the nature of Leibniz’s extensionalistically conceived project of a “universal characteristic” and its link to an algebraically based “calculus.” As a student at Tübingen he had been taught the logic of Gottfried Ploucquet, a staunch supporter of Leibniz’s project of a rational calculus (Pozzo 2010), and in his treatment of syllogisms in the “subjective logic” of Book 3, Hegel argues that the form of the “mathematical syllogism” pursued by Leibniz and Ploucquet actually undermines the very inferential relations that this syllogism is meant to formalize (WL GW 12:104–110.602–608, Redding 2014). The logical basis of Hegel’s attack is foreshadowed in his earlier general comments on the logical structure of judgement. Hegel distinguishes an Urteil (judgement), with its clear intensional meaning, from a Satz, by which he clearly means something like an extensionally considered material sentence via which some piece of information about empirically related features of the world can be conveyed. Thus treated as a juxtaposition of two names—“what is said of a singular subject is itself only something singular” (WL GW 12:55.553)—Hegel’s “Satz” looks something like what Wittgenstein in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was later to call a “Satz”—that is, a Satz-sign [Satzzeichen] considered “in its projective relation to the world” (Wittgenstein 1922, 3.12). However, for Hegel the Satz considered in such a simple way is itself neither true nor false, but simply correct (richtig) or incorrect (unrichtig), and as the capacity for being true or false is the mark of a judgement, a Satz, considered in this way, is clearly not a judgement.2 Rather, for a Satz to count as a judgement (Urteil) it must be understood in the context of its use within a larger piece of inferential reasoning: A Satz about Aristotle’s age at the year of his death, for example, would count as a judgement “only if one of the circumstances, say, the date of death or the age of the philosopher, came into doubt” (WL GW 12:55– 56.553). It is in relation to this function that the judgement must contain universals, the clear suggestion being that we must be able to think of a predicate such as “happening in the fourth year of the 115th Olympiad,” as not simply “naming” some particular interval of time but as expressing an abstract universal capable of being true of (Hegel will say, “subsuming”) diverse events, and so allowing it to mediate evidentiary relations among judgements. Such details from Hegel’s subjective logic show him in a different light to that in which he is portrayed in Russell’s account. Rather than a naive advocate of traditional Aristotelian logic, Hegel seems to treat Aristotle’s syllogistic as leading dialectically to its contrary—Leibniz’s self-destructive mathematically tractable universal characteristic (Redding 2014). While any alternative post-Leibnizian logic is no more than gestured at, Hegel’s logic is clearly not envisaged as a return to the Aristotelian position from which formal logic had started. While extensionalism is clearly rejected, something closer to Lewis’s mediated intensionalist position seems implied, the Leibnizian contrary to Aristotelian logic must be preserved and negated (aufgehoben) within the classical syllogistic. From his earliest criticisms of Russell, C. I. Lewis had proceeded to develop his systems of propositional modal logic, the fruits of which were contained in the 1932 work co-authored with C. H. Langford, Symbolic Logic. Constrained within

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the framework of Lewis’s somewhat awkward systems, S1 to S5, modal logic remained something of a logical backwater until the 1950s and 60s when it underwent a revolution with the extension to modal logic of the type of semantics that had developed for non-modal logic after Russell. This led to the creation of quantified modal predicate logic and so-called “possible-world semantics.” Considered as a development internal to the program of formal logic, these developments have been regarded as amounting to an eventual triumph of the extensional approach of Russell over C. I. Lewis’s early intensionalist revolt. From a broader philosophical perspective, however, this evaluation is far from settled. Saul Kripke is usually credited as the first theorist to work out a way of cleanly extending the type of semantic program Alfred Tarski had developed for the earlier non-modal logic to Lewisian systems of propositional modal logic (Kripke 1959, 1963). In using Tarski’s mathematical models in relation to quantified modal logic, Kripke had invoked Leibniz’s idea of “possible worlds” for the purpose of making sense of truth conditions for necessary and possible propositions. One can think of a proposition that is necessarily true as one that is true in all possible worlds, and one that is possibly true as one that is true in some possible worlds (Kripke 1959, 2). But possible worlds can contain things that might have, but do not actually exist. What sense then is one to make of the idea of “quantifying” over domains of non-existent entities? At this point David Lewis famously bit the bullet, defending the extensionalist program by treating thoughts about merely possible objects as being made true or false by objects existing in alternate possible worlds— that is, concrete worlds considered as just as “real” as the actual world (Lewis 1986). Many found the metaphysical costs of this solution simply too high, and one response has been to relocate an extensionalist “possible-worlds” approach within an enframing intensional interpretation of modal logic in the manner originally suggested by C. I. Lewis and, one might add, Hegel. One early advocate of such a position was the New Zealander Arthur Prior, whose own work on tense logic in the 1950s had provided an initial model for Kripke’s development of modal semantics (Copeland 2002, 2008). Here too, I suggest, we can discern the hidden hand of Hegel—not directly, but via the influence of Prior’s teacher, John N. Findlay.

1.2 Hegel, Findlay and Prior While Russell’s original diagnosis of the logic and metaphysics of Hegel may be still widely accepted among analytic philosophers in general, it has for decades been challenged as an accurate portrayal by Hegel scholars. One of the first of these was John N. Findlay (1903–1987) who was later to play an indirect but important role in the developments of modal logic in the 1950s. Findlay had arrived at Oxford in 1924 after completing an undergraduate degree in his native South Africa, and while already committed to Hegel’s philosophy, he found little of interest in “the last breathings of Oxford idealism” (Findlay 1985a, 16).

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A philosopher of diverse interests,3 Findlay was to combine his early interest in Hegel with interests not only in other “continental” philosophers like Brentano, Husserl and Meinong, but also with the new logic emanating from Cambridge. Contrary to both Russell and the Oxford idealists, he saw no incompatibility between the new logic and the underlying spirit of Hegel’s philosophy, criticizing portrayals of him as violating “essential logical principles” (Findlay 1958, 19). In fact, Findlay believed that the developing history of the new logic through the first half of the twentieth century instantiated Hegel’s “dialectic,” Russell’s onesided extensionalist construal of logic having provoked a series of contradictory consequences. Thus early in his career, he published in Mind an article generalizing Gödel’s theorem from mathematics to discursive reasoning more generally (Findlay 1942). Perhaps understandably for a young aspiring philosopher in that analytic context, there is no mention there of Hegel, but later he was to point out that he had regarded Gödel’s theorem as a “beautiful and excellent example” of Hegel’s dialectic (Findlay 1963, 221). Hegel’s logic, he thought corresponded to “the sort of informal, non-formalizable passages of comment and discussion in a book like Principia Mathematica, rather than its systematic text” (ibid., 219). The theme of the problematic relation between a formalized “characteristic” or “concept-script” and the non-formal language used to talk about it is apparent here,4 as is the late Wittgensteinian rejection of the possibility of reducing the latter to the former. It was Hegel’s engagements with this type of relation that made his thinking so relevant to twentieth-century analytic philosophy. After Oxford, Findlay, as a teacher of logic, had immersed himself in Principia Mathematica as well as works by Carnap and others. It was also during this time that he came under the influence of Wittgenstein, later describing himself as having been “pushed by Wittgenstein’s influence in directions that he [Wittgenstein] would not have sanctioned, but which coincided in part with my own original Hegelianism” (Findlay 1985a, 32). As with the Gödel’s piece, little in the way of overt reference to Hegel is to be found in his publications from this period, although in retrospect clear Hegelian themes are apparent in many, especially the article, “Time: A Treatment of Some Puzzles,” originally published in 1941, which would eventually have an influence on developments in modal logic. The vehicle of this influence was a student of Findlay’s from the late 1930s, Arthur Prior. Findlay’s peripatetic early career had led to him spending some time at the University of Graz, where he obtained a Ph.D. supervised by the Meinongian, Ernst Mally, and a decade (1934–1944) at Otago University in Dunedin, New Zealand, where he would stimulate Prior’s interest in logic. It would be Prior’s later work on the logic of tenses that would influence the young Kripke in his efforts to extend modern quantified predicate logic to modal logic (Copeland 2008, Sect. 2.1). The paradigm judgements treated by Principia Mathematica, being mathematical ones, are ones that, if true, are to be regarded as “eternally” or tenselessly true, and Prior had been drawn to the logic of tensed statements, the truth or falsity of which are relative to the time of their utterance, by Prior’s 1941 paper.5 On the basis of a few brief passages from this paper, Prior would nominate his former teacher as the “founding father” (Prior 1967, 1) of tense logic.

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Secondary scholarship has been generally silent on Findlay’s Hegelianism, and some have played down the depth of Findlay’s influence, despite Prior’s claim. For example, Øhrstrøm and Hasle (1995, 171) downplay the role of Findlay’s “not very elaborated” comments, but this ignores any influence Findlay had exerted as Prior’s former undergraduate teacher and master’s supervisor, to which Prior testified in his first book, The Logical Basis of Ethics. There he had acknowledged his debt to Findlay for “almost all that I know of either Logic or Ethics” (Prior 1949, xi). The parallels between the logical treatments of the modalities of time and truth are reasonably straightforward (Copeland 2002, 2008). Kripke was to extend the idea of quantification over a domain of actual objects to a domain of possible worlds in a way that temporal logic talked of quantification over times. As noted, in the modern context, “Socrates sits” came to be treated as shorthand for “Socrates sits at t1,” for the reasons that had been apparent to Hegel who, in his Phenomenology of Spirit, had exemplified with the sentence “Now is night” (PhG GW 9:64/M ¶95). What kind of truth, Hegel asked, becomes stale with time? That there are two different ways of conceiving of temporal relations—tensed and untensed—had been clearly stated in earlier work by John McTaggart (1908), an Hegelian of the British persuasion to which Findlay was opposed and one target of the 1941 article. In talking about an event happening yesterday, I can describe it as happening “yesterday” or I can designate that day with a date. In the former mode (McTaggart’s “A series”) but not the latter (his “B series”), the truth or falsity of the statement will depend on when it is made. In the context of examining various “puzzles” about the passing of time, such as McTaggart’s conclusion that time does not exist, Findlay notes that it is built into the semantic rules of our language that regularities hold within McTaggart’s “A series” to give it its own logic. Here, “we have practically the materials in them for a formal calculus” (Findlay 1941, 233), and, in a note adds that this “calculus of tenses should have been included in the modern development of modal logics” (ibid., 233, Note 17).6 Findlay acknowledges that getting beyond the contextuality of the tense system is clearly important for achieving objectivity in time determinations for particular utterances, however he alludes to “a certain aspiration which all our language to some extent fulfils, and which we are at times inclined to follow to unreasonable lengths [emphasis added]. We desire to have in our language only those kinds of statement that are not dependent, as regards their truth or falsity, on any circumstance in which the statement happens to be made” (Findlay 1941, 233). This aspiration is what leads to attempts to reduce McTaggart’s “A series” to the “eternal” determinations of the “B series.” But, consistent with his “late Wittgensteinian” resistance to treating the encompassing informal language as reducible to the formal concept-script, Findlay resists reducing the tensed system to the untensed one. A response in the spirit of Russell to the relation of the “A series” to the “B series” was implicit in his own original non-modal interpretations of the implicitly modal categorial statements of Aristotle. In the way these issues would come to be discussed post-Principia, Russell’s own tenseless “classical” language

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would be considered a “metalanguage” for the specification of the true meaning of tensed or other modal sentences. Findlay’s opposition to this reduction as a general solution would be followed by Prior who, rather than see the system of tenseless languages as the meta-language declared: “It is not that modal logic or tense logic is an artificially truncated uniform monadic first-order predicate calculus; the latter, rather is an artificially expanded modal logic or tense logic” (Prior 1969, 246). In short, as a philosophical interpreter of the development of modal logics, Prior’s position would be overtly Findlayian and, I suggest, thereby indirectly Hegelian. The intensional cannot be reduced to the extensional—this general principle applying across the different modalities, but neither can the extensional be reduced to the intentional. That there was a distinct “dialectical” relation here was what Findlay had taken from Hegel, and the relevance of this philosophical orientation can, I suggest, be discerned in Prior’s first book, The Logical Basis of Ethics. Besides logic, Prior had claimed to have learned almost all he knew in ethics from Findlay. Findlay’s brief comments about modal logic in the 1941 paper suggest an interest in and familiarity with this developing field. Ernst Mally, Findlay’s earlier supervisor in Graz, had, in the 1920s, published the first work on “deontic” logic, a variety of modal logic (Mally 1926). Findlay also had spent part of a sabbatical of 1938–1939 at University of Chicago where he reports having seen “a great deal of Professor Carnap,” and having attended his “valuable course on the logical syntax of language” (Findlay 1985a, 28). Carnap’s book Logische Syntax der Sprache, appearing in 1934, with an English translation in 1937, had included a brief discussion of modal logic and Carnap had gone on to struggle with a type of Tarskian semantics for modal logic in the 1940s. It would not be surprising then if such issues were aired in his course in 1938. We have noted Findlay’s attraction to these issues as manifesting Hegel’s dialectic. Later, in accounting for his interest in Carnap’s work, he was to describe himself as not having “capitulated to the new way of words” but as committed to the belief that “the best way to counter it was to understand it internally,” noting that “the same issues which troubled traditional ontology and epistemology, and the alternative strategies for dealing with them, would recur in the new medium” (Findlay 1985a, 28). His attitude to the history of the new logic was thereby that of a Hegelian, as he understood the term. Prior apparently first read his former teacher’s 1941 article only in the 1950s, but we might see the ground for any later influence on these lines as having been laid down in the 1930s and 40s in relation to an area of common concern: ethics. This was a topic to which Findlay had devoted much of his free time during his New Zealand stay (Findlay 1985b, 57), an effort that would bear fruit in his 1961 book, Values and Intentions, in relation to which he described his “greatest and most positive debts” as being owed to Kant and Hegel (Findlay 1961, 17). Findlay’s book was motivated by the aspiration to rescue “ethics” from the discipline of “metaethics” that had developed in analytic philosophy, and while broadly written from a “phenomenological” perspective it contains another significant reference to modal logic. After mentioning the temporal determinations discussed in the 1941 paper, he then invokes a wider array of modal concepts, including the

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“rudimentary ‘mays’, ‘musts’, ‘woulds’, ‘coulds’ and ‘likelies’” (Findlay 1961, 65). Although the work of Ernst Mally, his former supervisor is not mentioned, there is a clear connection to the emerging tradition of “deontic logic.” As with the domain of tense, Findlay denies that the “meta” perspective—here metaethics— is sufficient for understanding and evaluating the determinations of the judgements taken to be objects of the metaperspective—here first-order ethical judgements. Drawing on phenomenological senses of “intention,” Finday’s approach suggests an assimilation of the “intentional” (with a “t”) of psychology to the “intensional” (with an “s”) of logic.7 Read in the light of Prior’s later more explicit interest in modal logic, it is easy to see in his first book, Logic and the Basis of Ethics, an interest in just these sorts of modal, mind-related themes Findlay investigates at length in Values and Intentions. There, Prior is largely concerned with the eighteenth and nineteenth century history of the type of critique of naturalism in ethics that is summed up in Moore’s “naturalistic fallacy,” the impossibility of deriving ethical consequences from non-ethical premises. But he is also critical of the limits of this antinaturalistic turn, and finds in Sidgwick’s critical appropriation of Kant’s distinction between “hypothetical” and “categorical” imperatives important principles concerning the way that practical action must nevertheless rely on knowledge of the situation in which action is to occur.8 Prior’s small book does not link these to issues in modal logic. Apart from Mally’s little-known work, such a link would be made by G. H. von Wright (1951) only after the publication of Logic and the Basis of Ethics. Prior was to die in 1969, before the bulk of the debate sparked by David Lewis’s thesis of the reality of non-actual possible worlds. However, the general features of Prior’s philosophical thought about modal issues were clear. He was clearly opposed to the interpretation by David Lewis, which prioritises “althetic modality,” and at the time of his death was working on a book with obvious Findlayian themes to be entitled Worlds, Times and Selves.9 Prior had an answer to one of the defences David Lewis was to offer to his critics, an answer in the spirit of Findlay. Lewis would argue that it was just as irrational to deny the reality of non-actual possible worlds as it was to deny the reality of times other than the present (Lewis 1973, 86). We don’t think of the world of ancient Rome, for example, as unreal simply because it doesn’t exist now, and we shouldn’t think of the worlds of un-actualized possibilities as unreal, simply because they are not actual. But Prior had already rejected Lewis’s way of thinking in reference to the temporal vehicle of the analogy. Like Findlay, Prior was suspicious of the desire to try to speak in ways that purported to involve complete independence from temporal context and other “ego-reflexive” factors, and did this because of metaphysical consequences involving what he thought to be an illegitimate appeal to “Platonic” entities such as instants of time. Thus, Prior can be regarded as an early exemplar of the actualist standpoints critical of David Lewis’s pluralist realism about possible worlds. The modal actualist denies the reality of possible worlds beyond the actual one, but nevertheless wants to treat the modalities of possibility and necessity as meaningful. Possibility

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must therefore be thought of as somehow internal to the actual world,10 a position argued for more recently by Robert Stalnaker, for whom “merely” possible worlds are abstracta, not alternate concrete worlds—they are non-realized states or properties of the actual world. Thus, after the fashion of C. I. Lewis, they can be identified with maximal consistent sets of propositions (Stalnaker 2012). This is a way of thinking of modality that accords with what I have called “mediated intensionalism,” an early paradigm of which, I suggest, can be found in Hegel. While Prior himself seems to have had no interest in Hegel or familiarity with German idealism, his views on time and modality nevertheless show many features analogous to those features of Hegel’s philosophy reflected in Findlay’s approach. In the final section, I return to Hegel to suggest that his commitment to “absolute idealism” may be understood as just the type of commitment to a conception of actuality mediated by possibility forged by Findlay and Prior.

2 Hegel’s Idealism as Mediated Actualism Modern modal actualists such as Prior or Stalnaker insist that possibility must be considered as somehow internal to the actual world—in Stalnaker’s work, for example, as abstracta or unrealized properties of the actual world (Stalnaker 2012). Hegel’s account of the category “actuality [Wirklichkeit],” found in his two logical works, The Science of Logic and the Encyclopedia Logic, suggests an analogous attitude. For example, in the Encyclopedia Logic he describes possibility as “the reflection-into-itself which, as in contrast with the concrete unity of the actual, is taken and made an abstract and unessential essentiality.” “Possibility” he goes on “is what is essential to reality, but in such a way that it is at the same time only a possibility” (Enc. 1 §143).11 Hegel’s version of actuality, I suggest, may be understood as an actualist one in contrast to the opposing “possibilist” version found in Leibniz. For Hegel, actuality just is reality; it is not one possible world within a plurality of alternate possible worlds, but it is also to be understood as affirming the reality of possibility, in contrast to Spinoza’s necessitarian form of actualism. His absolute idealism, I suggest, attempts to avoid both Spinozist and Leibnizian alternatives. Hegel’s outlook can be conveniently approached in the theological register. In his theory of Spirit (Geist), the divine mind is effectively distributed over a historically developing dynamic entanglement of human minds. In Leibniz’s scheme, any finite individual monad (mind) occupies a perspectival outlook onto the world and is capable of moving closer to an aperspectival one (the God’s-eye view) by a type of Platonic movement that takes it, in a stepwise manner, from more to less perspectival forms of knowing.12 Leibniz describes these transitions as going from relatively clear but confused ideas to clear and more distinct ones (Leibniz 1998, §24). Leibniz had conceived such steps on the model of translations taking one from Aristotelian categorical judgements understood from an intentional point of view to judgements given the form of conditionals and understood extensionally,

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and this “ascent” thus depends on the possibility of the iteration of the reflective move from an intensional content to an extensional one. But what of Hegel? I have appealed to those passages in Book 3 of Hegel’s Science of Logic where he contests the reducibility of the syllogistic as intensionally conceived to extensionalist universal characteristic of Leibniz (WLGW12: 104–110.602–607). Hegel, had been critical of this project understood as some global attempt to render judgements into an entirely extensional form (WLGW12: 53–58.550–555), and in this his attitude was similar to that taken later by C. I. Lewis, Findlay and Prior. But like Leibniz, he treats this type of translation from the intensional to the extensional (that Hegel calls “reflection”) as playing a crucial role in the progress of thought. Nevertheless, this movement cannot be considered, as it had been by Leibniz as constituting a series of iterated reflections that take us further and further from our location in the actual and closer and closer to that of a transcendentally located (that is, an actually non-located) mind—God’s “view from nowhere.” Later, Findlay, too, would be critical of the idea of the iterability of such reflective steps (Findlay 1961, 68), and similarly for Hegel, reflection does not take thought further from the actual, but deeper into it, its cycles revealing connections that had not been apparent to superficial experience. In this sense Hegel is a “realist” about essences, and yet the individual knower never ceases to belong to the actual, nor ceases to view the world from a perspective within it. That is, the individual knower never achieves a “view from nowhere.” One way of thinking of the cognitive finitude involved in this is like that of Kant, but this is not Hegel’s way. The “view from nowhere” is an inappropriate metaphor, not because we, qua finite beings are unable to access it, but because to think of the divine mind in such a way is categorically ill-conceived (Redding 2012). A single example from Hegel’s account of judgement will hopefully suffice to demonstrate the non-linear “circular” progress involved. Hegel’s first judgement form, the broadly Aristotelian “judgement of determinate existence [Urteil des Daseins]” (also called a “qualitative” judgement or a judgement of “inherence”) evolves through a string of subforms, starting with the “positive judgement.” Hegel repeats the idea that the subject and predicate of the Satz are at first names, and notes that they “receive their actual determination only as the judgement runs its course” (WL GW 12:60.557). The positive judgement provides the first step on this course. It shows the surprising logical structure of having a universal subject term and a singular predicate term (WL GW 12:62.560), a structure that will distinguish it from the opposed judgements of reflection (also called quantitative judgements and judgements of subsumption) that will show the more conventional singular subject/general predicate form. The Urteil des Daseins is clearly relevant to the idea of the judg­ement expressing some phenomenally rich perceptual content, as with the idea of the singularity of the predicate, such as “red” in “the rose is red,”13 Hegel clearly intends that the singular predicate acts in a name-like manner, and so akin to a Kantian “intuition,” so as to pick out the specific redness “inhering” in some specific rose—the specific rose’s specific way of being red.14

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This positive judgement is, Hegel says, “not true” and “has its truth in the negative judgement” (WL GW 12:64.562), and it is this use of negation that introduces a new degree of logical complexity. When such a judgement is contested, for example, with the counter-claim “the rose is not red,” negation will only be taken as applying to the determinateness of the predicate, because one does not thereby imply that the rose is not colored.15 Rather, “it is … assumed that it has a color, though another color” (WL GW 12:68.565). If a rose is red then it is not yellow, pink, blue …, and if it is not red, it is either yellow or pink or blue …, manifesting amongst these predicates the structure of what Hegel calls “determinate negation.” Thus the predicate “red” has gone from functioning in a quasi-name-like way of picking out some individual instance of redness to designating something like an area within a larger partitioned space of possible colors, an area defined by its borders, and that will, subsequently, potentially accommodate within it, a multiplicity of shades of, or ways of being red. With this it has become the appropriate type of predicate for a reflective judgement. These resulting judgements of reflection are, in turn, not fully fledged judgements, but rather are “more in the nature of Sätze” (WL GW 12:84.581). The “subsumptive” and quantitative aspects of reflective judgement anticipate another, more developed version of the original qualitative judgement of inherence, such that we might come to think of properties of the rose more as dispositional properties belonging to the genus rather than simply qualitative properties that “inhere” in particular instances. We thus go from conceiving of the subject of the j­udgement as a singular isolated thing to the context of its connectedness to other things in the world. “If we say, ‘This rose is red’, for example, we are considering the subject in its immediate singularity, without relation to anything else; while, on the other hand, in the more complex judgement, ‘This plant is curative’, we are considering the subject (the plant) as standing in a relation to something else (the illness to be cured by the plant) in virtue of its predicate, curativeness” (Enc. 1 §174Z). Such connections can be established only on the emergence of distinct patterns of association found in experience that allow us to make quantified claims such as “some plants are curative” or “all plants are edible,” the latter form constituting an “empirical universality” in which one can glimpse, as Hegel writes with an allusion to the Aristotelian doctrine, “an obscure intimation of the universality of the concept as it exists in and for itself” (WL GW 12:75.573). Thus, the appearance of quantitative distinctions such as “some As are B” and “all As are C” will point to the idea of A’s essential properties, expressed in the form “The A (as such) is C”: “Instead of ‘all humans’,” Hegel notes, “we now have to say ‘the human being’” (WL GW 12:76.574). Thus the judgement of reflection transitions into the “judgement of necessity” in which “the universality is determined as genus and species … Now the categorical judgment has for predicate such a universality as in it the subject possesses its immanent nature” (WL GW 12:78.575). In the following “judgment of the concept,” the “inferentialist” dimension of Hegel’s conception of judgment (Brandom 1994) becomes explicit, as a judgement such as “the house is good” is shown to contain an implicit inference or syllogism, “the house, as so and so constituted, is good” (WL GW 12:87.585).

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In place then of Leibniz’s Platonic ascent to judgements conceived as made from a transcendent God’s-eye point of view, Hegel’s presentation suggests a circular cognitive movement that goes from single qualitative judgements (this A is B) to reflective quantitative ones (some or all As are B) and from there returns to another type of individual judgement/syllogism (this A, as so and so c­ onstituted, is B), in which the subject is no longer conceived as a singular instance of perception, but as a type of “secondary substance” or concrete universal that is, nevertheless, still available to a type of evaluating form of perception. For this, the evaluative nature of the categorial judgement requires that the universal value be once again instantiated in an individual item—some particular house (Redding 2007, Chapter 6). Concomitantly, we are to understand the intensionality of this final form of judgement (and the intentionality of this type of experience) as somehow mediated by the possibility of the quantitative judgements of reflection that precede it. When one moves to this subsequent higher level, and makes a perceptually based evaluative judgement about this house, one makes explicit the qualities that separate it from houses constituted in some different manner, qualities to which one had reacted initially the type of feeling relevant to evaluative judgements like aesthetic and moral ones. Clearly these are logical considerations that go well beyond any crude adherence to the subject–predicate paradigm of traditional logic as found in Russell’s picture of Hegel. Moreover, Hegel’s account does not absorb the individual into a conception of the world understood as a single substance. Hegel may regard the “quantitative” judgements of reflection as “obscure intimations” of judgements about kinds, but they are more than this, as this mediating step of the dialectic corresponds to an ontological point about the relation of a kind to its individual members—Hegel’s “Leibnizian” point that he insists upon in opposition to Spinoza’s ontological holism. As Hegel puts it, “‘All humans’ expresses, first, the species ‘human’; second, this species in its singularization, but in such a way that the singulars are at the same time expanded to the universality of the species” (WL GW 12:573.75–76). The parallel between Hegel’s way of conceiving of judgement structure and that of the stance of mediated intensionalism within recent possible-world semantics is, I suggest, quite systematic. Hegel thinks of a judgement, an Urteil, as involving a type of primordial division, a Teilung, and a similar role for “division” is found in the perspective of possible world semantics when interpreted intension­ ally. Thus a proposition, qua intentional content of a linguistic assertion, is itself conceived by Robert Stalnaker to “divide” the “space of possibility,” demarcating a subspace representing those worlds in which the proposition is true from the space representing those in which it is false (Stalnaker 2012, Chapter 5). Such a primordial division allows the assertion to be understood as conveying information that allows a hearer to eliminate from their beliefs an array of possibilities incompatible with the content of what was communicated. As in Findlay’s neo-Hegelian account, sometimes the subject, as an essentially contextualized “intentional” agent, needs to put her beliefs in a form that can be conveyed to others who inhabit different contexts, and so she needs to abstract from her

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linguistic representations those features that tie them exclusively to some aspect of her context not shared by the interlocutor. But the totality of a subject’s belief states cannot, as Stalnaker argues, be entirely divested of modal or contextualized judgements, or, using another terminology, indexical or self-locating ones (Stalnaker 2008, Chapter 3). I have tried to convey some of the evidence that I see as pointing towards Hegel’s logic as a form of mediated intensionalism and his metaphysics as a form of modal actualism. As Hegel makes clear, his idea of the actual includes possibility as a type of reflection existing within it: “Possibility is what is essential to reality, but in such a way that it is at the same time only a possibility” (Enc. 1 §143). But many modern philosophers refuse to admit abstracta such as propositions into their ontology, equating them in a Platonistic fashion with other-worldly entities. Regarded as such they would be incompatible with Hegel’s this-worldly actualism, but there is the suggestion of a non-Platonistic interpretation of abstracta in the pragmatist dimension to Stalnaker’s account, that would seem to suit Hegel. On Stalnaker’s account, possible worlds are treated as sets of propositions—that is, abstract entities (sets), the members of which (propositions) are also abstract. As this second kind of abstracta, propositions are to be understood as abstract entities capable of truth and falsity, of standing in relations of compatibility or incompatibility, and of being objects of intentional attitudes. Accepted in abstraction from this latter role, propositions would be Platonic entities, but as I understand him, Stalnaker’s account of propositions is tied to the role they play in the activity of attributing intentional contents to others in the effort of giving meaning to the sentences they utter and the actions they undertake. They are the means by which we go about conceiving how the world is for other subjects (Stalnaker 2008), and without the existence of such talking and acting subjects in the world, there would be no place for talk of either possibilities or propositions. Hegel had conceived of spirit, Geist, as made up of the myriad ways in which individual subjects are caught up in acts of mutual recognition (Anerkennung)— acts in which subjects recognize and acknowledge other subjects as subjects and that are necessary for the constituting of self-conscious subjects as such. Selfconsciousness, we are told, “exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only as something recognized or acknowledged [anerkannt]” (M §178). For an actualist, such “spirit” must always be embodied in the natural world (the actual world being largely natural), but it nevertheless is conceptually irreducible to the natural world. In something of the same way, we might say that for Stalnaker, the recognition of others as thinkers to whom we attribute propositional contents is presupposed by any cognition we have of them as intentional beings.16 To sum up, on this version of actualism, inspired by the indirectly Hegelian approach of Arthur Prior, we are to think of minds and the propositions they entertain and act upon as mutually presupposing entities within the actual world, and so as existing on the same ontological level.17 Abstracta like propositions, when understood non-Platonistically, presuppose the existence of subjects who, speaking and acting in meaningful ways, express abstract mental contents,

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and presuppose other subjects who can understand such utterances and actions. Neither propositions nor minds can, in positivist fashion, be eliminated from or reduced within the actual world. Thus this type of mediated actualism entails a certain type of idealism—the idea of the necessity of the existence of the mind in the world—but this idealism is, I suggest, of a metaphysically benign form.

3 Conclusion On the reading suggested here, Hegel’s absolute idealism asserts nothing more than the presence of the mind in the actual world, when the actual world is conceived as containing possibility—a position I have labelled “mediated actualism.” But this position must be conceived in contrast to the thesis of the necessary existence of the mind per se, understood as the presence of mind in all possible worlds, clearly expressed in Leibniz. Understood in the latter way, Hegel’s metaphysics would indeed be a “luxuriant” one, although surely no more so than various versions of modal metaphysics on the contemporary market, such as those of David Lewis or Alvin Plantinga. But understood in the former way, the claim that mind is necessarily in the actual world is able to be interpreted as a relatively metaphysically modest thesis. It is essentially what David Lewis had tried to capture with the thesis of the “indexicality” of the actual world—the idea that the actual world contains us—but without Lewis’s commitment to the reality of other concrete worlds with other subjects (our “counterparts”) for whom their worlds are understood as actual. The dialectic contained within the development of the logical doctrines that Russell had used to eliminate Hegel, a dialectic discerned by the work of the young Findlay, would seem to have brought the present debate in analytic metaphysics to a point at which the persisting exclusion of Hegel seems no more than an unjustified prejudice. After the widespread return to Aristotle, we might ask, why not a return to “the modern Aristotle”—Hegel?

Notes 1. This is treated in more detail in Redding (2007). 2. “It can also be mentioned in this context that a sentence [Satz] can indeed have a subject and predicate in a grammatical sense without however being a judgement [Urteil] for that. The latter requires that the predicate behave with respect to the subject in a relation of conceptual determination, hence as a universal with respect to a particular or singular” (WL GW 12:552–553.55). Second references here and elsewhere for this work are to the corresponding German pagination in Hegel’s Gesammelte Werke. 3. Besides his 1958 book on Hegel, Findlay wrote books on Meinong, Plato, Kant and Wittgenstein, and translated Husserl. In his later career to seemed to identify himself more as a type of Platonist or neo-Platonist.

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4. I will avoid the “language”/“metalanguage” nomenclature as typically intensionalists do not consider symbolic systems such as Leibniz’s characteristica universalis or Frege’s Begriffsschrift as proper languages. Rather than a formal language I’ll refer to a “concept-script” but as not limited to Frege’s conception. 5. Although the paper first appeared in 1941, Prior seems not to have read it until the 1950s after its republication in a volume of work on advances in analytic philosophy in 1951. 6. Of particular relevance of tense logic for Kripke was that it provided a clear sense of the differential “accessibility” of certain times (or “worlds”) from others. What was the case from the point of view of the present, was presently the case some time in the past. It was this issue of the differential accessibility between worlds that allowed Kripke to get beyond certain technical problems besetting the earlier attempts of Carnap to employ something like a “possible worlds” approach with the notion of “state descriptions.” 7. That the psychological intentional is a subspecies of the logical intensional was also advocated by Prior (1968). 8. The limits of Moore’s thesis of the naturalistic fallacy is also a central concern of Findlay (1961, 22). This is a theme that is prominent in Hegel’s critique of Kant, of which Findlay was clearly aware. 9. The volume of this name (Prior and Fine 1977) was essentially compiled after Prior’s death by Kit Fine, Prior’s former student, from Prior’s Findlay’s notes and published essays. 10. Alternatively, one could be, like the positivists and Quine, an amodal actualist by being skeptical of the meaningfulness of modal talk. 11. An excellent account of this chapter is to be found in Ng (2009). 12. Of course this is only how it looks. In truth, the contents across such “windowless” monads are coordinated by God at creation. 13. Hegel switches between the examples “the rose is red” and “the rose is fragrant.” For simplicity sake, I will keep to the former. No logical point hangs on the difference between examples. 14. Cf., “‘The rose is fragrant.’ This fragrance is not some indeterminate fragrance or other, but the fragrance of the rose. The predicate is therefore a singular [ein einzelnes]” (WL GW 12:62.560). In this context, the concept qua singular gives it properties of a Kantian intuition. 15. “From the side of this universal sphere, the judgement is still positive” (WL GW 12:68.565). 16. They don’t form part of the fabric of the universe conceived naturalistically, as we don’t typically attribute thoughts to beings qua natural beings. As abstracta, then, propositions or possibilities should be thought of as essentially mind-related notions. In Hegel’s terms, they are posits that have a place in the world in the context of our practice of reflecting on and explaining or making explicit the contents of the thoughts of other subjects, or of ourselves. 17. For Hegel, the “act upon” here is, of course, crucial. Actuality is for him a dynamic concept. Human agents in acting transform the world ways that are tied to the possibilities they act upon. But possibilities here being irreducible to what is grasped by any particular agent, the evolution of actuality with the realization of these possibilities obeys its own “objective” logic that is only retrospectively reconstructable.

Bibliography Aristotle. 1984. The Complete Works of Aristotle: The Revised Oxford Translation, vol. 1. Edited by Jonathan Barnes. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Bar-Am, Nimrod. 2008. Extensionalism: The Revolution in Logic. Dordrecht: Springer. Brandom, Robert B. 1994. Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing and Discursive Commitment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

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Copeland, B. Jack. 2002. “The Genesis of Possible Worlds Semantics.” Journal of Philosophical Logic 3: 99–137. Copeland, B. Jack. 2008. “Arthur Prior.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by E. N. Zalta. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2008/entries/prior/. Findlay, John N. 1941. “Time: A Treatment of Some Puzzles.” Australasian Journal of Philosophy. Reprinted in Antony Flew, ed. 1951. Logic and Language. Oxford: Blackwell. Findlay, John N. 1942. “Goedelian Sentences: A Non-numerical Approach.” Mind 51: 259–265. Findlay, John N. 1958. Hegel: A Re-examination. London: Allen and Unwin. Findlay, John N. 1961. Values and Intentions: A Study in Value Theory and Philosophy of Mind. London: Allen and Unwin. Findlay, John N. 1963. “The Contemporary Relevance of Hegel.” In Language, Mind and Value: Philosophical Essays, 217–231. London: Allen and Unwin. Findlay, John N. 1985a. “My Life: 1903–1973.” In Studies in the Philosophy of J. N. Findlay, edited by Robert S. Cohen, Richard M. Martin, and Merold Westphal, 1–51. Albany: State University of New York Press. Findlay, John N. 1985b. “My Encounters with Wittgenstein.” In Studies in the Philosophy of J. N. Findlay, edited by Robert S. Cohen, Richard M. Martin, and Merold Westphal, 52–69. Albany: State University of New York Press. Kripke, Saul A. 1959. “A Completeness Theory in Modal Logic.” Journal of Symbolic Logic 24: 1–14. Kripke, Saul A. 1963. “Semantical Considerations on Modal Logic.” Acta Philosophica Fennica 16: 83–94. Leibniz, G. W. 1998. “Discourse on Metaphysics (1686).” In Philosophical Texts, Translated and edited by R. S. Woolhouse and Richard Francks, 53–93. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Lewis, Clarence Irving. 1912. “Implication and the Algebra of Logic.” Mind 21: 522–531. Lewis, Clarence Irving. 1914. “Review of A. N. Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, Principia Mathematica.” Journal of Philosophy 11: 497–502. Lewis, Clarence Irving. 1918. A Survey of Symbolic Logic. Berkeley: University of California Press. Lewis, Clarence Irving. 1930. “Logic and Pragmatism.” In Contemporary American Philosophy: Personal Statements, vol. II, edited by G. P. Adams and W. M. Pepperell Montague, 31–54. Woking: Unwin Brothers. Lewis Clarence Irving, and Cooper H. Langford. 1932. Symbolic Logic. New York: Century. Lewis, David K. 1973. Counterfactuals. Oxford: Blackwell. Lewis, David K. 1986. On the Plurality of Worlds. Oxford: Blackwell. Mally, Ernst. 1926/1971. Grundgesetze des Sollens. Elemente Der Logik des Willens. Graz: Leuschner & Lubensky. Reprinted in Ernst Mally, Logische Schriften. Großes Logikfragment—Grundgesetze des Sollens, edited by K. Wolf and P. Weingartner, 227–324. Dordrecht: Reidel. McTaggart, John M. E. 1908. “The Unreality of Time.” Mind 17: 457–474. Ng, Karen. 2009. “Hegel’s Logic of Actuality.” The Review of Metaphysics 63: 139–172. Øhrstrøm, Peter, and Per F. V. Hasle. 1995. Temporal Logic: From Ancient Ideas to Artificial Intelligence. Dordrecht: Kluwer. Pozzo, Roberto. 2010. “Gottfried Ploucquet.” In The Dictionary of Eighteenth-Century German Philosophy. 3 vols., vol. 2, edited by Heiner F. Klemme and Manfred Kuehn, 899–903. New York: Continuum Press. Prior, Arthur N. 1949. Logic and the Basis of Ethics. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Prior, Arthur N. 1957. Time and Modality. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Prior, Arthur N. 1967. Past, Present and Future. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Prior, Arthur N. 1968. “Intentionality and Intensionality.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Supplementary Volumes 42: 91–106. Prior, Arthur N. 1969. Papers on Time and Tense. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Prior, Arthur N., and Kit Fine. 1977. Worlds, Times and Selves. London: Duckworth.

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Redding, Paul. 2007. Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Redding, Paul. 2012. “Some Metaphysical Implications of Hegel’s Theology.” European Journal for Philosophy of Religion 4: 139–150. Redding, Paul. 2014. “The Role of Logic ‘Commonly So Called’ in Hegel’s Science of Logic.” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 22: 281–301. Russell, Bertrand 1914. Our Knowledge of the External World. London: Allen and Unwin. Stalnaker, Robert C. 2008. Our Knowledge of the Internal World. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Stalnaker, Robert. 2012. Mere Possibilities: Metaphysical Foundations of Modal Semantics. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Tahko, Tuomas E., ed. 2012. Contemporary Aristotelian Metaphysics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. von Wright, Georg H. 1951. An Essay in Modal Logic. Amsterdam: North Holland Publishing. Whitehead, Alfred North, and Bertrand Russell. 1910–1913. Principia Mathematica. 3 vols. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Wittgenstein, Ludwig 1922. Tractatus Logico-philosophicus. Translated by C. K. Ogden. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

Chapter 27

Hegel’s Pragmatism Willem de Vries

It would not be terribly difficult to construct a case that Hegel and pragmatism have very little in common, especially if one employs some of the more cartoonish characterizations of the protagonists. “Hegel was a metaphysician on a grand scale who claimed to be able to think God’s thoughts as they were before creation and thereby have a priori insight into the design of the world, which he then recorded in a fair amount of obscure detail in his system.” “The pragmatists were naturalistic anti-metaphysicians who worshiped the empirical sciences, which they took as the model for all rational activity, and whose highest goals aimed at finding workable solutions to particular real-life problems.” What could be more different? Those cartoons are absurdly inaccurate, although there is some truth to recognizing the sometimes stark differences between Hegel and the pragmatists. Much greater illumination, however, is cast by looking at the similarities among them and tracing out the common threads that unite them. It is this author’s personal conviction that the line of great Western philosophers runs from Kant through Hegel to Peirce (though I am not so sure where it goes after that). This is a line rather than a mere list, because each of these thinkers was writing in response to difficulties felt to beset his predecessors.1 Each broke with while also extending elements of his forebears’ philosophies in markedly novel and creative ways. The line does not constitute a steadily increasing, cumulative record of philosophical achievement, but it does constitute a conversation that creatively broadened our horizons and deepened our appreciation of the world around us and our place in it. Hegel’s philosophy is profound and insightful in numerous ways, particularly in its comprehension of the internal relations among philosophical concepts and the structure of philosophical disagreement, but it shows its age in a way pragmatism does not: it is pre-Darwinian and bears the marks of Hegel’s early training in a seminary. High rhetoric and claims about the Absolute and the necessity of his results abound in Hegel’s philosophy. Stylistically, it seems deeply metaphysical

W. de Vries (*)  University of New Hampshire, Durham, NH, USA e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 M. F. Bykova and K. R. Westphal (eds.), The Palgrave Hegel Handbook, Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26597-7_27

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and dogmatic, although I think that is not its substance. Pragmatism tends to sound like a much more modest, down-to-earth philosophy, although Peirce, for one, did not lack philosophical ambition. Ours has become a scientific age in a way that Hegel’s was not: well-defined, mature scientific disciplines have proliferated well beyond their number in the early nineteenth century, and our lives are much more deeply structured by the growth and development of the sciences, together with the technologies spawned thereby. Hegel was well-informed about the empirical sciences of his day, but the pragmatists were themselves practicing scientists. Peirce earned his living for years as a scientist for the Coast and Geodetic Survey; James was one of the inventors of psychology as a science in its own right; Dewey published in experimental and social science, as did George Herbert Mead. This level of involvement in empirical science left an indelible mark on pragmatism. Because of it, pragmatism was in many regards ahead of its time and well suited to a modern, secular, industrial and even post-industrial age. Rorty has arguably washed away some of the pragmatist orientation towards the sciences, but certainly not across the board. Despite these differences, there is much common ground shared between Hegel and the pragmatists. This essay will focus on several of these points of agreement, but it cannot, in the space allotted, pretend to be exhaustive. After a mid-twentieth century lull, interest in pragmatism has increased recently, thanks in part to the work of Richard Rorty, but also of others, such as Richard J. Bernstein, Hilary Putnam, Joseph Margolis, John McDermott, Larry Hickman, and others. There has been a corresponding increase of interest in the connections between the pragmatists and their greatest immediate predecessor, Hegel. There is, therefore, a good and growing literature in which the interested reader can pursue the subject further. A number of excellent publications deserve some mention in which one can further explore the issues. Robert Stern and Christopher Hookway headed up a project titled “Idealism & Pragmatism: Convergence or Contestation?” It did not focus solely on Hegel, but among the useful resources developed is a bibliography.2 The British Journal of the History of Philosophy (vol. 23, № 4) contains papers from the project, notably Steven Levine (2015), “Hegel, Dewey, and Habits” and especially Dina Emundts (2015), “Hegel as a Pragmatist.” Emundts emphasizes two characteristics of pragmatism shared by Hegel: (1) a rejection of the apriori, and (2) the claim that knowledge has a lot to do with testing and that concepts are given in our practice. In a separate paper, Emundts (2013) argues that the notion of experience both conjoins and separates Hegel and Pragmatism. This is a theme I will touch on, but from a different angle. Stern (2004, 2007a, b) has written several notable articles on the relation between Idealism, Hegel in particular, and Pragmatism, especially Peirce; these are collected in his book Hegelian Metaphysics (Stern 2009). One set of those essays works out in scholarly detail the relation between Peirce and Hegel, particularly with respect to their treatment of categories. His later essay “Hegel and Pragmatism” (2011) is a masterful argument that Hegel shared with the pragmatists a thorough rejection of several central epistemological principles of Cartesianism: The abstract, methodological

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doubt of Cartesian philosophy is empty; inquiry is indeed motivated by doubts, but they must be real doubts that arise from experience. Even the supposed presuppositionlessness of Hegel’s logic can be given an interpretation compatible with pragmatic thought. Paul Redding (2015) also has a piece titled “Hegel and Pragmatism.” His emphasis is on the social theory of mind and normativity that the pragmatists shared with Hegel, although he notes, with Pinkard, that it has Fichtean roots. Terry Pinkard’s (2007) article, “Was Pragmatism the Successor to Idealism?” is concerned explicitly with Robert Brandom’s neo-pragmatism, which he argues is actually more Fichtean in structure than Hegelian. Pinkard’s (2006) essay is a fascinating study of how much post-Kantianism shows up in the philosophy of the twentieth century American Wilfrid Sellars. Kenneth Westphal (2004, 2015a, b, c) has also written extensively about the threads that tie Hegel and Pragmatism together, arguing that Hegel espouses a form of realism that is also found in the pragmatists. Rorty wrote little directly on Hegel, but his student and fellow neo-Pragmatist Robert Brandom (1999, 2001, 2002, 2019) has, emphasizing Hegel’s coherence (or “inferentialist”) theory of concepts and content as well as the social nature of norms.

1 Mind and Knowledge in the Cartesian Tradition The take on the relation between Hegel and pragmatism explained and defended here will reiterate some of the themes to be found in the articles cited. I hope to put them into different combinations and look at them from a different angle or two in order to reveal other aspects of a fascinating relationship. My central theme, like one of Stern’s essays, will be the shared rejection of the Cartesian heritage so dominant in Western philosophy. Whereas Stern emphasizes the difference between the Cartesians and their critics concerning the methodological role of doubt, I will, instead, focus on the differences in their conceptions of mind, consciousness, and the structure of knowledge. In the Cartesian tradition, minds are conceived of as self-contained entities, indeed, substances—independent existences—in their own right, that are (1) transparent to themselves, (2) thus, known directly or immediately to themselves, and (3) prior to and independently of any knowledge of the external world, that is, any knowledge of any other created substance. Because of this, the Cartesian thinks that our knowledge always proceeds from the inside out. We know our own mental states “first and best,”3 and any knowledge we may have of things different from us must be built on and justified by reference to the knowledge we have of our own mental states. Thought of this way, the Cartesian tradition covers both classical rationalism and classical empiricism, which otherwise seem to be odds with each other. Berkeley and Hume are as much Cartesians in this sense as Descartes. While Descartes thought he could show that, and the extent to which, we are justified in believing in an external material world, Berkeley, for example, thinks we

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cannot make good sense of the concept of a material object, so we are left with a world in which all that can be known, all that exists, are minds and their modifications. Kant begins to break out of this Cartesian ideology, particularly with his “Refutation of Idealism,” but arguably never shakes it entirely, hanging on to the thing-in-itself as a last outpost of Cartesianism. Hegel and, subsequently, the pragmatists discard this Cartesian picture of mind and its epistemic relation to the world. There is, of course, both a negative and a positive aspect to this change. They have to show what is wrong with the Cartesian picture, and then they have to provide a viable alternative. In neither case do Hegel and the pragmatists make identical moves, but the moves they make are often similar and made with similar motivations. Let us look more closely.4

2 Problems with Cartesianism, 1: The Case of “Experience” Emundts points out that the pragmatists criticized Hegel for not paying enough attention to experience. The main idea in this regard is that Hegel seems to think too much can be done in one’s armchair and does not accord sufficient stature to the empirical sciences. But she also recognizes that pragmatism “seems to be heavily influenced by Hegel’s specific conception of experience” (Emundts 2013, 350). Spelling this out helps reveal the deep relations between Hegel and the pragmatists. “Experience” is an accordion word: its meaning expands and contracts, depending on the context, and it is always difficult to pin down with any precision.5 But “experience” usually connotes the presence of a sensory element. One way to distinguish the Rationalists from the Empiricists is in terms of the role they give the sensory element in experience. The Rationalists tend to think of the sensory as confused conception. Consequently, they give it little role in our knowledge; it can motivate action, but is too confused to justify significant knowledge. For the Empiricists, however, sensation is crucial: it is the fons et origo of all conception and knowledge. This is crystalized, for instance, in Hume’s principle that understanding any idea means tracing it back to the impression(s) (either of sense or of reflection) from which derives. The Rationalists see no point in carefully articulating the structure of experience: it is inevitably confused, in any case. But for the Empiricists a proper analysis of the structure of sensory (and also reflective) experience is imperative; it delimits the bounds of sense. The hard-nosed empiricist takes it for granted that there is some minimal set of basic sense-impressions, more or less equivalent to the set of Aristotelian proper and common sensibles, that provide the material out of which all our ideas can be constructed. Causation is a problematic notion for Hume, because there is no clear sensory basis for our common sense conception of causation as a form of necessary connection between objects.

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For both Rationalists and Empiricists, then, experience becomes a “veil of ideas” that stands between and cuts us off from any external reality. For the Rationalist, sensory experience is confusion, a fog through which external reality cannot be well or properly perceived. For the Empiricist, experience is equated to having non- or pre-conceptual sensory episodes that stand between the mind proper (that is, our cognitive faculties) and its world, and effectively determine the content available for thought. (Jumping ahead a few hundred years, we can see a similar conception operating in the phenomenalism of the logical empiricists, who attempt to solve the problem of the external world by insisting that everything is logically constructed from elementary sense data.) Such a conception of experience is, ultimately, disastrous. Rationalism is simply dogmatic, and bald empiricism escapes skepticism only by discovering a mythical given. Kant began the critique of such a view of experience, arguing that perception or, as he called it, intuition, must always be a conceptual as well as a sensory response to the objects of experience.6 A line of philosophers from Hegel through the pragmatists and on to Sellars and McDowell defend such a richer conception of experience. On their conception, experience is richer in several dimensions: (1) It is never merely sensory, but always possesses conceptual content. (2) The conceptual content of experience is not limited to a minimal and impoverished set, say, just the proper and common sensibles. (3) It does not stand as a third thing between the mind and the world. It is no “veil of ideas”; it is the way minds connect to the world; it reveals the world to us. In experience, mind and world cooperate (though not always successfully) to constitute each other. Even though William James called himself a “radical empiricist,” he had no difficulty titling one of his books The Varieties of Religious Experience. For an empiricist of Humean stripe, it is not clear what such an “experience” could be: it is hard to imagine an arrangement of bare sensory states, of proper and common sensibles that would qualify as a religious experience. But Hegel, along with James, is willing to recognize the possibility of religious experience, aesthetic experience, moral experience, precisely because experience is never merely sensual, it always has a conceptual dimension, and that conceptual dimension need not be limited to some minimal, Procrustean set of observation concepts. [P]hilosophy should be quite clear about the fact that its content is nothing other than the basic import that is originally produced and produces itself in the domain of the living spirit, the content that is made into the world, the outer and inner world of consciousness, in other words, the content of philosophy is actuality. The first consciousness of this content is called experience. (Enc. 1 §6)

Such a conception is not only the common possession of Hegel and the pragmatists; the pragmatists knew that Hegel shared this with them. Consider the following passage from a lecture John Dewey gave in 1897 on Hegel’s philosophy. Dewey speaks of “the main point in [Hegel’s] philosophic methods,” namely that, all thought is objective, that relations of thought are forms of the objective world; that the process of thinking is simply following the movement of the subject matter itself. This is often interpreted as exactly the reverse of what Hegel meant. It is often considered to mean that thought as a special faculty of the mind has the power of evolving truth out of

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itself; that subjective ideas, by some magic, transform themselves into objective facts. But his real meaning is that there is no such thing as a faculty of thought separate from things: that thinking is simply the translation of fact into its real meaning; it is subjection of reality subjecting. (Dewey 2010, 96)

Dewey clearly rejects the idea that the absolute idealism Hegel espouses is at all a subjective idealism or involves a magical ability to create or constitute objective reality from the subjective ideas individuals possess. Hegel’s idealism is rather a thesis about how the world is structured and what kinds of concepts are required to be able to understand such a world. The world is such that concepts regularly applied to our thought processes in fact can also be applied to processes in the world: e.g., contradiction, consequence, and purpose (inter alia) are relations of thought that are also forms of the objective world. Of course, such concepts cannot be applied in a slapdash or arbitrary way; one of the jobs of good philosophy is to reveal where and how such concepts properly capture aspects of the objective world. There is, thus, a perfectly good sense in which Hegel is a realist. He neither denies nor reduces away the existence of the material world, nor does he deny us knowledge of it. He does insist that the material world needs to be understood in a still broader context, namely, that of the self-realization of the Absolute. But that no more denies reality to the material world than insisting that an organ like the heart needs to be understood in the context of the organism denies the reality of hearts. Pragmatism has been criticized for entailing a form of idealism because of its so-called “epistemological” conception of truth. If truth is tied to knowability and there is no particular mention of correspondence in one’s characterization of truth, then, some think, the independence of reality has been besmirched and realism abandoned. Yet, the pragmatists look at the way the concept of truth actually functions in our practices of inquiry. The proper description of that function makes no reference to correspondence, since there is no way to step outside our practices to check independently on any claimed correspondence. But the presence of a concept with the function of our truth concept makes sense only in the context of a thinking organism that is trying to make sense of and “get the world right,” so that it can continue to act effectively in the world. An epistemological conception of truth makes sense only in the context of a deep commitment to realism, a commitment to seeing truth and knowledge as normative ideals used to assess the activity of real agents in a real world. Thus, in my view, trying to describe either Hegel or pragmatism in terms of the classical distinction between realism and idealism is bound to distort their views. For both of them, the idealism/realism distinction is just too simple to capture the complex relations between the ideal and the real. For both Hegel and the pragmatists, thinking of experience as something static, congealed into a particular mental state at a particular time, drastically falsifies the notion. Experience must be conceived of as a process that plays out over time in which the mind and the world are adjusted to each in cognition and action. Because of this, it is also misleading to characterize experience as the revealing of the world, insofar as revelation is often thought of as a one-way relationship in

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which the one to whom the world is revealed plays only a passive, receptive role. Experience is a give-and-take affair, regardless of whether it is a cognitive experience or an experience of one’s agency.

3 Problems with Cartesianism, 2: Agency and Externality I now want to bring out a different dimension of the rejection of Cartesianism shared by Hegel with the pragmatists. Pragmatism is so-called because one of its main principles is the primacy of practice. This is variously interpreted among the pragmatists. Peirce’s pragmatic maxim directs us to look at the consequences of our concepts that have practical bearing, if we want to clarify those concepts.7 Dewey often called his doctrine “instrumentalism,” because he thought of concepts, indeed, thoughts in general, as tools that we utilize to formulate and achieve our goals.8 The overall message is clear, however: conception and thought are to be understood in terms of their contribution to agency: The point of conception and belief is the better modulation of behavior. In fact, conception and thought are themselves forms that our agency can take, even though in their normal, first-order occurrence, thinking and conception are acts, but not actions. Emphasizing the primacy of practice is another way pragmatism is anti-Cartesian. The Cartesian conception of mind is a peculiar thing: it is defined by its activity, namely as a thinking thing, but this activity is entirely self-contained. It need never affect the rest of the world—there need not even be a “rest of the world.” The Cartesian mind must be able not only to have ideas, it must be able to reason, that is, to judge and to infer. But it does not need to (or even be able to) act outside its own confines. The Cartesian mind is a purely inner reality.9 For the pragmatist, this simply makes no sense. Post-Darwinians that they all are, the pragmatists understand that the complex set of capacities in virtue of which we can describe ourselves as having minds are products of evolution and have come to exist and sustain themselves within our species precisely because they contribute to a better and more flexible capacity to survive and reproduce. Minds cannot in principle be shut off from the real, material world in which they exercise agency.10 Indeed, any mind divorced from external, material reality as Cartesianism envisions would be empty of determinate content. In its self-enclosed reality, there would be no real practical consequences to the ideas in such a mind; they would be tools without a task. More deeply, both Hegel and the pragmatists have thought more thoroughly than their early modern predecessors about the structure and presuppositions of representation or intentionality. Intentionality, directedness at an object, is not a simple property that mental states by their very nature just have. It requires a complex structure of rule-governed interactions among many mental states and (importantly) the world in which the organism lives.11 The Cartesian may balk, arguing that all kinds of questions are begged here by assuming that organisms exist within and have knowledge of a material world

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without first justifying that claim. We might anticipate a substantial game of burden tennis between the Cartesian and the pragmatist, but I think the pragmatist stands on firmer ground with his critique of Cartesian doubt (a point shared with Hegel) and insistence that we must begin philosophy in medias res. This latter point, that philosophy must begin from where we in fact are, is also common ground with Hegel, though one might be misled to think otherwise by the opening section of his Science of Logic, “With What must the Science Begin?” There Hegel argues that science, that is, philosophy, must begin with the thought of pure being and without any presuppositions. Since Robert Stern works this out in detail in his article “Hegel and Pragmatism” (Stern 2011), I will not dwell on it here. We have seen the Cartesian idea that minds are self-contained worlds unto themselves, entirely inner, at best only contingently related to anything outer, anything material. The Cartesian’s view is that it is precisely this inner being or inwardness that is the essential element in a person. Now I want to argue that the pragmatist’s utter rejection of such a view is shared by Hegel. Indeed, I think there are several different paths one can take through Hegel’s thought that lead one to see that the Cartesian conception of the mind is radically mistaken, and to agree with the pragmatists that human being is unintelligible unless one effectively recognizes the primacy of practice and agency in an external world. One such path is through Hegel’s dialectic of the inner and outer. [W]hat is inner and what is outer are also opposed to each other as determinations of the form; and as abstractions of identity with self and of mere manifoldness or reality they are radically opposed. … The usual error of reflection is to take essence as what is merely inner. If it is taken only in this way, then this view of it is also a quite external one and that “essence” is the empty external abstraction. (Enc. 1 §140 & R)

Hegel’s thought is almost always worried about distinctions. He recognizes the absolute need for distinctions—without them, there is no thought—but he is also conscious of the fact that people too often freeze distinctions and do not recognize their limitations or conditions. This is a major characteristic of the attitude of understanding: some (set of) distinction(s) is taken as simply given, as a fixed feature of the universe, and no thought is given to the larger context in which the items so distinguished are, in fact, unified. True, rational thought seeks to overcome such distinctions, to see the larger unifying context in which the distinctions, now properly limited, make sense. Inner/outer is just such a distinction that needs to be overcome. It is overcome by recognizing the mutual interdependence of the inner and outer. The way a man is externally, i.e., in his actions (not of course just in his merely corporeal externality), that is how he is internally: and if he is only internally virtuous or moral, etc., i.e., only in his intentions, and dispositions, and his outward [behavior] is not identical with those, then the former is as hollow and empty as the latter. (Enc. 1 §140R) [F]or as long as understanding holds inward and outward fast in their separation from one another, they are a pair of empty forms, and the one is as null as the other. Both in the study of nature and in that of the spiritual world, it is of great importance to keep the special character of the relationship between inward and outward properly in

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view, and to guard against the error of thinking that only what is inward is essential, that it is the heart of the matter, whilst the outward side, on the contrary, is what is inessential and indifferent. We first meet this error when, as often happens, the distinction between nature and spirit is traced back to the abstract distinction between outward and inward. (Enc. 1 §140Z)

The Cartesian picture of an inner, fully determinate soul thinking fully determinate thoughts that are, in principle, entirely independent of the outer world (which, note, includes other souls as well) can, in Hegel’s view, be only an abstraction from a fuller picture of humans engaged in rational activities in a material world they did not make. The dialectic of inner and outer does not itself bring us explicitly to see the primacy of practice—it is still too abstract a distinction to reveal that point. But when Hegel tries to illustrate his point with real world examples, he cannot avoid illustrations in which the primacy of practice shines forth. For example, he emphasizes, again and again, that “We are … justified in saying that a man is what he does” (Enc. 1 §140Z), where it is clear that what someone does concerns activity in a shared, public, material world. Thus a child, for instance, [considered] as human in a general sense, is of course a rational essence; but the child’s reason as such is present at first only as something inward, i.e., as a disposition or vocation, and this, which is merely internal, has for it equally the form of what is merely external, namely the will of its parents, the learning of its teachers, and in general the rational world that surrounds it. The education and formation of the child consists therefore in the process by which it becomes for-itself also what it is initially only in-itself and hence for others (the adults). Reason, which is at first present in the child only as an inner possibility, is made actual by education, and conversely, the child becomes in like manner conscious that the ethics, religion, and science which it regarded initially as external authority are things that belong to its own and inner nature. (Enc. 1 §140Z)

Such passages from the lesser logic point beyond the idea that spirit or mind is a self-contained, independent inwardness that stands in contrast to and is only contingently related to an external, material world. Inevitably, they point also to the significance of human agency and sociality. In the Zusatz just quoted, Hegel is trying to make his conceptual point about the relation of inner and outer palpable for his audience, and it is no accident that the illustration he gives concerns the need for children to connect to their external social world in order to become the rational agents they ought to be. The human spirit or mind is a social achievement that is not possible absent a community that can create, impart, and sustain the norms constitutive of proper thought and proper conduct.

4 Problems with Cartesianism, 3: Rational Being as Social Achievement The recognition of the essential sociality of mind is one of the greatest achievements of Post-Kantian German Idealism. Arguably, Fichte, or maybe even Kant, was the source of the original insight, but it was Hegel who made it a permanent

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possession of the tradition. In the context of this essay, think of it this way. We have already discussed the idea that the subjective mind can be made sense of only by locating it within a larger context, by seeing it as something inner essentially connected to an outer reality, a material world in which it makes its way and in response to which it first gains its content. This is the fundamental structure of conscious being. But human being is not merely conscious being, it is self-conscious being. Making one’s way in an external, material world is not yet enough to ground such a higher, reflective form of consciousness. Such a self-consciousness requires a confrontation with other self-consciousnesses. Hegel embodies this recognition in his account of the master-slave dialectic, which has inspired so many thinkers. This dialectic reveals two more ways in which the Cartesian conception of mind is faulty: (1) The master-slave dialectic portrays minds (or selves) as products of development. A mind is not something that simply comes into being fully formed; it must be developed. (2) It also portrays minds as essentially social, dependent for their development and sustenance on interaction with other such selves or minds. I will assume general familiarity with Hegel’s description of the master-slave dialectic. Two consciousnesses, each self-contained and convinced of its independence, meet. Each wants recognition from the other, but is unwilling to give it. They battle until one gives in and accepts the dominance of the other. The apparent “winner” is, however, recognized by someone whose opinion does not count, since the bondsman has not been recognized. The “master” is a dead end. The bondsman, in contrast, begins to regain his self-assurance by transforming the world around him, overcoming his own submissiveness by learning to make the world his own. The dialectic leads towards the development of a conception of mutual recognition in which interacting consciousnesses no longer seek one-sided dominance; they become at home with granting each other equal stature. That Hegel portrays the initial encounter of two (mere) consciousnesses as a battle is not supposed to imply that consciousnesses are necessarily and permanently at odds with each other. Quite the contrary, for, even as portrayed by Hegel, progress is made, truth is achieved, only as the consciousnesses come to recognize each other. “Recognition” here is a loaded term, for it does not, in this context, reduce to simple object recognition, say, the ability to tell a hawk from a handsaw. Recognizing another consciousness, another person, includes taking an evaluative or normative stance towards that person, acknowledging that person’s autonomy and value. Such an acknowledgment itself has practical consequences: One thereby also recognizes the other as able to make claims upon one, as subject to certain entitlements over against one’s own claims and entitlements. In becoming self-conscious, humans thereby also begin to make explicit to themselves the normative nature of human being. The idea that the master-slave dialectic reveals essential dimensions of human self-consciousness is distinctly un-Cartesian, for the selves involved need to develop, and they need to develop by interaction both with a material world and with other consciousnesses. They are able to achieve themselves fully only in a context in which other, separate, and independent selves also achieve themselves.

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Perhaps even more important, the development a self undergoes is not a straight line incremental growth; it is fundamentally transformational. The social interactions by which a consciousness learns how to engage in relations of mutual recognition transform it from something merely living and organic into a rational being. This is a radical break with the Cartesian conception of a self-enclosed, thinking (and rational) substance with a fixed and immutable nature. The self one achieves in this process is not simply the de facto assemblage of what happens to one, but, as we have seen, a matter of what one does. Thus, we see the primacy of practice re-asserted in this context as well. But we need to be clear about the nature of what one does. What one does is not a mere de facto assemblage of movements, but the set of one’s actions, undertaken usually with intention and expressive of one’s values. Actions have meaning; they can be right or wrong, appropriate or inappropriate, rational or irrational. Understanding human being, thus, is not simply a matter of understanding what there is; it essentially involves understanding the relation between what we are and what we ought to be, what we value and how those values are expressed (or not) in our actions. Thus, since actions are essentially susceptible to normative assessment, understanding normativity becomes essential to understanding ourselves. In all of these matters, Hegel and the pragmatists agree. They also agree on the general strategy to be employed in understanding normativity. The “old school” answers, which either took norms and values to be simply built into the world (à la Plato’s forms) or dictated by some external and ultimate authority (God), no longer satisfied enlightened Westerners after the development of the new sciences, which gave us a disenchanted clock-work world, and the reformation, which made it impossible to assume universal agreement concerning God’s plans for the world. The new approach to normativity that arose in the Enlightenment treated it as an upshot of the structure of human practices. Robert Brandom, a contemporary pragmatist who claims strong ties to Hegel, states the idea well: Enlightenment conceptions of the normative are distinguished by the essential role they take to be played by normative attitudes in instituting normative statuses. Commitment and responsibilities are seen as coming into a disenchanted natural world hitherto void of them, as products of human attitudes of acknowledging, endorsing, undertaking, or attributing them. (Brandom 2002, 218)

In particular, there is a line of thought, developed by Rousseau and Kant, according to which the difference between a merely coercive and alien force that would dictate one’s behavior and a legitimate authority that imposes a normative constraint on one is precisely one’s endorsement or acknowledgment of the authority as binding on one. No one has authority by nature, except over herself—power is natural, but the question of its legitimacy is always germane. The only thing that can bind one normatively is oneself via one’s acknowledgment, endorsement, or acceptance of some rule or standard. It is, ultimately, the recognition of an external authority as authoritative that constitutes its authority. Sociality becomes crucial in such a view; otherwise, the structures of normativity shatter into individualistic centers of authority, each infallible to itself, but

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irrelevant to others. In the end, the normativity itself evaporates. If only I can bind myself to norms, then, it seems, the norms can be whatever I want them to be. But if I can decree my thoughts and actions to be correct simply by deciding that they are, the notion of correctness has lost its meaning. Normativity evaporates if there is no standard beyond one’s mere wish.12 Again, Brandom: “If whatever I acknowledge as correct—as fulfilling the obligations I have undertaken—is correct, then in what sense is what I did in the first place intelligible as binding myself?” (Brandom 2002, 219). Authority is, in fact, objectively present only to the extent that it can be made determinate and non-arbitrary. But one cannot make one’s authority determinate and non-arbitrary all by oneself. That is why the recognition that is constitutive of the self must be reciprocal. It is up to the individual whom to recognize. But it is not up to the individual whether those individuals then in turn recognize the original recognizer. Only when this “movement” is completed is a self constituted. (Brandom 2002, 217)

The idea is that my commitments are real and not mere subjective fantasy only to the extent that there are others independent of me who will hold me to those commitments; my entitlements are real only to the extent that others recognize them and act accordingly. Acknowledging each person’s autonomy while tempering it with a simultaneous acknowledgment that the autonomy of others imposes responsibilities on all is essential to constructing an environment in which truly mutual recognition is possible. Thus, Hegel’s notion of mutual recognition gives us a very different notion of selves from the Cartesian, for a self—something with a distinctive normative status—exists only insofar as it is one self among many selves, each recognizing the others has having authority in two dimensions: the authority to make its own commitments, and the authority to hold others to theirs. Furthermore, the determinacy of one’s commitments can be made sense of only within this structure. This general structure shows up in pragmatism in different ways in different authors. I have already noted that all the pragmatists are consciously post-Darwinian. They have drawn the conclusion that minds develop and that persons must become themselves. The developmental nature of mind is recognized to be both a phylogenetic and an ontogenetic feature. The human species is a product of evolution; individual minds are products of growth and learning. Peirce heavily emphasized the fact that inquiry—all inquiry, not just what we now think of as science—can occur only in a community of inquirers, each simultaneously amanuensis to and critic of the others. At a still deeper level, Peirce proposes a semeiotic conception of the self; that is, selves are essentially interpreters, but precisely to that extent also need to be interpreted. Peirce’s semeiotics or theory of signs is too complex to review here, but it entails that minds must be elements of complex interpretive interrelations. This is clearly incompatible with the Cartesian conception of the atomistic soul sufficient unto itself in glorious isolation. Dewey equally recognized the essential sociality of human being.13 The great emphasis he laid on the significance of education is as much grounded in his

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understanding of the metaphysics of personhood as it is in the belief that fostering education is simply efficient, sound social policy. Dewey was throughout his life also a strong partisan for democracy, and, again, the value he placed on it is deeply grounded in his metaphysics of personhood: only democracy adequately expresses and accounts for the sociality constitutive of human being.

5 Yet Hegel Was Not a Pragmatist Hegel and the pragmatists share a deeper and richer conception of experience than the Cartesians. They all insist that minds cannot be made sense of independently of their situation in an external, material world, in which they have developed, grown into themselves, through interactions with both material and social reality. We can add further shared characteristics examined in some of the other articles mentioned above: a shared belief that philosophy must begin in medias res, and cannot pretend to doubt everything from the very beginning; a shared rejection of straightforwardly aprioristic conceptions of knowledge; a strong belief that testing—holding our beliefs accountable to experience—is the key to epistemological method; a shared belief in the reality of the material and the social worlds we inhabit; a coherence theory of concepts; and a belief that norms must grounded in practice. These are deep commonalities between Hegel’s Absolute Idealism and Pragmatism. It is clear that both are resolutely anti-Cartesian, rejecting virtually everything in the Cartesian conception of humanity’s place in the world. Arguably, Kant began the movement away from Cartesian conceptions of mind and knowledge, but the truly radical nature of the break with Cartesian tradition becomes fully clear only with Hegel and, perhaps even more so, with the pragmatists. Does this wealth of shared positions entail that Hegel was a pragmatist? No, things are never so simple. There are countervailing aspects of Hegel’s philosophy that push him away from the pragmatist movement despite their many commonalities. One is that Hegel thinks that human beings have a natural tendency to rely heavily on sensory experience, and to achieve philosophical insight they need to free themselves from sensory experience at least in the sense of rising above that form of experience. In this regard, Hegel is perfectly at home with the rationalist strand of Cartesian thinking. But that is not the attitude of a pragmatist; they believe that good philosophy does not require freeing us from sensory experience, but a better use and orchestration of such experience. The pragmatist would agree that there is a sense in which we rise above sensory experience in theory construction, but this is no denigration of sensory experience. Another way in which Hegel does not fit well within pragmatism concerns his understanding of regulative ideals. Regulative ideals are important to the pragmatists. They are especially significant in Peirce; in his view the related concepts of truth and reality are both regulative. He famously characterized truth as “the opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we

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mean by the truth” (Peirce 1931, 5:407). It is also clear, however, that he does not think that this agreement must actually be reached: “Inquiry properly carried on will reach some definite and fixed result or approximate indefinitely toward that limit” (Peirce 1931, 1:485). Furthermore, “The opinion which is fated to be ultimately agreed to by all who investigate, is what we mean by the truth, and the object represented in this opinion is the real” (Peirce 1931, 5:407). The concepts of truth and reality are for Peirce regulative ideals: they direct action—in this case, epistemic action and investigation—rather than describe something given. Our notions of truth and reality drive us ever onwards towards further discovery and still more investigation. That we, finite and limited beings, may never (will never) reach a final and conclusive science that leaves nothing more to investigate is not something that troubles Peirce or the pragmatists. This, however, does bother Hegel. Regulative principles are maxims for action; they are prescriptions, oughts. They are not constitutive, and they represent ideals that can never be fulfilled, maxims that prescribe an impossible task. Yet, as Kant pointed out, ought implies can. Why should we strive for an unattainable ideal, then? Hegel thought Kant is stuck with a dilemma, an internal inconsistency, one that he escapes by saying that what is commanded is striving for the ideal, not achieving it. This seems hollow to Hegel, like telling a midget to strive for a professional basketball career. According to Hegel such infinite striving is simply empty; an end without end is no end at all. Hegel’s proposed solution is clear: ought does imply can, and the Ideas of reason (which Hegel unifies in his own one Idea) as the in-principle achievable task or object of rational thought are not merely regulative, they are what is in and for itself, what is real. I complained earlier that the idealism/realism contrast is simply too inarticulate to be useful in describing Hegel and the pragmatists, and we see here yet another respect in which this is the case. For Hegel, the ideal is the real; for the pragmatists, the real is an ideal. For Hegel, who thought of his project as, in one sense, the reconciliation of humanity with the world, it was vital that the reconciliation striven for not be a mere pipe dream. It must be possible for us to be reconciled in the here-and-now. The pragmatists did not share that conviction, or, rather, they had a different view of how humanity is to be reconciled to the world. It is the striving itself, the on-going project of transforming ourselves via knowledge and the world through our actions in which we reconcile ourselves with the world by participating in it fully. That Hegel, despite his deep similarities to the pragmatists, and despite the great influence he exercised on several of the classic pragmatists, is not properly called a pragmatist himself can also be seen (perhaps more quickly) by pointing out that Josiah Royce, another great American philosopher, and one of Hegel’s strongest American adherents, is not grouped with the pragmatists. Royce was deeply influenced by Peirce and took up the study of logic because of Peirce’s inspiration. It was Royce who procured Peirce’s papers for Harvard. Royce was hired by William James and spent years as his colleague. Some of Royce’s students, for instance, W. E. B. Dubois and C. I. Lewis, were counted major

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pragmatists. Yet, though one will occasionally see Royce called a pragmatist, he is much more often called an Idealist, and he did not consider himself a pragmatist. If Royce, with deep ties of mutual influence with pragmatism, does not qualify, it seems unlikely one could, in good faith, simply call Hegel a pragmatist. Without Hegel’s transformation of Kant’s project, however, it is certain that pragmatism would have looked very different, if it came into existence at all. Peirce claimed that “My philosophy resuscitates Hegel, though in a strange costume” (Peirce 1931, 1:42), and we have seen no reason to think that he was far off the mark.14

Notes 1. Of course, they were not responding solely to the linear ancestor, but to complex historical and social circumstances as well. 2. This bibliography is accessible at: http://idealismandpragmatism.org/bibliography. 3. This is one conclusion of Descartes’s wax example at the end of the Second Meditation. 4. A highly readable account of the relation between early modern philosophy and pragmatism that is consistent with the story I tell here can be found in Bruce Aune (1970). 5. Indeed, there are two different words in German for the one English word. “Erlebnis” is used to refer to something one lives through: “That roller coaster ride was quite an experience.” “Erfahrung” (the word Kant uses) has a more cognitive connotation; it implies something is learned or grasped: “I want a highly experienced surgeon.” 6. This is the point of his Transcendental Deduction of the Categories. 7. “Consider what effects, that might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conception of the object” (Peirce 1931, 5:402). 8. One might wonder how one could make Dewey’s characterization of thought as a tool compatible with Hegel’s stinging critique of that very metaphor in the “Introduction” to the Phenomenology of Spirit. Notice that there is a difference between thinking of cognition as “the instrument with which one takes possession of the absolute” and thinking of it as a tool that enables us better to achieve our worldly goals. I leave spelling this difference out as an exercise for the reader. 9. Leibniz hits this nail on the head with his conception of a monad. 10. Of course, pragmatists have to recognize that there are pathological cases in which someone’s ability to act has been stolen away by some disease or severe brain damage, but these are (1) precisely pathologies where things have gone terribly wrong, and (2) presuppose a prior high level of engagement with the material world in which the subject’s mental powers were cultivated, just like the rest of us. 11. That Hegel recognizes all this is argued in detail in de Vries (1988). 12. As Ken Westphal has pointed out (in personal correspondence), this is exactly Hegel’s point, in a deliberate literary parallel to Hobbes’ state of nature, in “Der geistige Tierreich” (the spiritual animalistic realm). 13. Dewey “knows that an individual is nothing fixed, given ready-made. It is something achieved, and achieved not in isolation, but the aid and support of conditions, cultural and physical, including in “cultural” economic, legal, and political institutions as well as science and art” (Dewey 1935, 227). 14. Thanks to Paul Giladi for tracking down some useful references. Thanks also to Ken Westphal for useful comments and suggestions.

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Bibliography Aune, Bruce. 1970. Rationalism, Empiricism, and Pragmatism: An Introduction. New York: Random House. Brandom, Robert B. 1999. “Some Pragmatist Themes in Hegel’s Idealism: Negotiation and Administration in Hegel’s Account of the Structure and Content of Conceptual Norms.” European Journal of Philosophy 7 (2): 164–189. Reprinted in Brandom 2002. Brandom, Robert B. 2001. “Holism and Idealism in Hegel’s Phenomenology.” Hegel Studien 36: 57–92. Reprinted in Brandom 2002. Brandom, Robert B. 2002. Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brandom, Robert B. 2019. A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Descartes, René. 1641/1984. Meditations on First Philosophy in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes: Volume 2. Edited and translated John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, 1–62. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. de Vries, Willem A. 1988. Hegel’s Theory of Mental Activity. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. Dewey, John. 1897/2010. John Dewey’s Philosophy of Spirit, with the 1897 Lecture on Hegel. Edited by John R. Shook and James A. Good. New York: Fordham University Press. Dewey, John. 1935. “The Future of Liberalism.” The Journal of Philosophy 32 (9): 225–230. Emundts, Dina. 2013. “Idealism and Pragmatism: The Inheritance of Hegel’s Concept of Experience.” In The Impact of Idealism: The Legacy of Post-Kantian German Thought. Vol. I: Philosophy and Natural Sciences, edited by Karl Ameriks, 347–372. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Emundts, Dina. 2015. “Hegel as a Pragmatist.” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 23 (4): 611–631. Giladi, P. 2015a. “Hegel’s Therapeutic Conception of Philosophy.” Hegel Bulletin 36 (2): 248–267. Giladi, P. 2015b. “A Critique of Rorty’s Conception of Pragmatism.” European Journal of Pragmatism and American Philosophy 7 (2): 168–185. Giladi, P. 2016. “Thought and Experience: Robust Conceptions of Phenomenology.” Revista Eletronica Estudos Hegelianos 13: 39–54. James, William. 1902. The Varieties of Religious Experience: A Study in Human Nature. New York: Longmans, Green, and Co. Levine, Steven. 2015. “Hegel, Dewey, and Habits.” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 23 (4): 632–656. Peirce, Charles Sanders. 1931. Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, vols. 1–6, edited by Charles Hartshorne and Paul Weiss, 1931–1935, vols. 7–8, edited by A. W. Burks, 1958. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press. References to volume number and paragraph number. Pinkard, Terry. 2006. “Sellars the Post-Kantian?” In The Self-Correcting Enterprise: Essays on Wilfrid Sellars, edited by Michael P. Wolf and Mark N. Lance. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Pinkard, Terry. 2007. “Was Pragmatism the Successor to Idealism?” In The New Pragmatists, edited by Cheryl Misak. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Redding, Paul. 2015. “Hegel and Pragmatism.” In G. W. F. Hegel: Key Concepts, edited by Michael Baur, 182–192. New York: Routledge. Stern, Robert. 2004. “Peirce on Hegel: Nominalist or Realist.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 41: 65–99. Stern, Robert. 2007a. “Peirce, Hegel and the Category of Firstness.” International Yearbook of German Idealism 5: 276–308. Stern, Robert. 2007b. “Peirce, Hegel, and the Category of Secondness.” Inquiry 50: 123–155. Stern, Robert. 2009. Hegelian Metaphysics. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Stern, Robert. 2011. “Hegel and Pragmatism.” In A Companion to Hegel, edited by Michael Baur and Stephen Houlgate, 556–575. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell.

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Stovall, Preston. 2015. “Inference by Analogy and the Progress of Knowledge: From Reflection to Determination in Judgements of Natural Purpose.” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 23 (4): 681–709. Westphal, Kenneth. 2004. “Hegel and Realism.” In A Companion to Pragmatism, edited by John R. Shook and Joseph Margolis, 177–183. Malden, MA: Blackwell. Westphal, Kenneth. 2015a. “Hegel’s Pragmatic Critique & Reconstruction of Kant’s System of Principles in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit.” Hegel Bulletin 36 (2): 159–183. Westphal, Kenneth. 2015b. “Hegel’s Pragmatic Critique & Reconstruction of Kant’s System of Principles in the Logic & Encyclopaedia.” Dialogue: Canadian Journal of Philosophy/Revue canadienne de philosophie 54 (2): 333–369. Westphal, Kenneth. 2015c. “Causal Realism & the Limits of Empiricism: Some Unexpected Insights from Hegel.” HOPOS: The Journal of the International Society for the History of Philosophy of Science 5 (2): 281–317.

Chapter 28

The “Pittsburgh” Neo-Hegelianism of Robert Brandom and John McDowell Paul Redding

1 Introduction The proximity to the ideas of Hegel found within American pragmatist thinkers from pragmatism’s “classical” phase as it developed from the latter decades of the nineteenth century is treated in detail in the essay in this volume by Willem de Vries.1 As is there pointed out, striking similarities to some of Hegel’s ideas are to be found in the works of C. S. Peirce, William James and John Dewey, particularly in relation to their shared critiques of the early modern individualistic or “Cartesian” conception of the mind. More specifically, in Peirce and Dewey this is augmented by their historically inflected accounts of the social conditions under which the human mind had evolved. Nevertheless, as de Vries points out, the outlook of these early pragmatists reflected deep changes that had occurred in social and cultural life since Hegel’s own time, including the many advances in the sciences and the relative retreat of religion. Peirce, for example, had been much more focused on the relevance of mathematical thought for philosophy than had been Hegel, while James was a major innovator in the development of empirical psychology. Perhaps the most Hegelian of the trio, Dewey, influenced by Darwin, had looked to a naturalistic conception of human existence and its origins that would seem to have been anathema to Hegel. Nevertheless, such differences cannot conceal the many points of contact between these thinkers and Hegel. However, one might be less optimistic concerning any reconciliation with Hegel for any pragmatist orientation developing within that major philosophical movement that was to develop in English-speaking philosophy from around the turn of the twentieth century—that of “analytic philosophy”. Analytic philosophy as a distinctive approach had effectively emerged with the work of Bertrand Russell and G. E. Moore at Cambridge, and from the start it had been resolutely

P. Redding (*)  University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia e-mail: [email protected]

© The Author(s) 2020 M. F. Bykova and K. R. Westphal (eds.), The Palgrave Hegel Handbook, Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26597-7_28

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anti-Hegelian in its conception of both philosophical method and content. Russell, especially, envisaged the type of philosophy that he aimed to bring about as a fundamentally “scientific” one, by which he meant something very different to what Hegel had meant with the term “Wissenschaft”. Especially important for Russell, trained as a mathematician, was the programme of “Logizismus”, or “logicism”, developed by Gottlob Frege, the German mathematician and logician, over the last decades of the nineteenth century. Logicism was meant to demonstrate the rational “foundations” of mathematics by grounding all mathematical knowledge in the a priori science of logic, and Frege had developed a new form of logic to meet this need. This radically new form of symbolic logic that Russell was to develop, challenged Aristotelian syllogistic logic that had remained dominant up to that time. Traditional logic was thus now regarded as having been rendered obsolete in the same way that, say, Aristotelian physics had been made obsolete by Galileo and Newton in the early modern period. While Peirce had been similarly responsible for the types of changes within logic that were to define it in the twentieth century, his break with the Aristotelian tradition had not been so stark. Russell, however, regarded Aristotelian logic as having underpinned much of non-scientific, earlier philosophy that needed to be replaced, and often presented Hegel as a figure exemplifying the way a metaphysical house of cards could be constructed on an inadequate logical basis (Redding 2007, Introduction).2 As analytic philosophy developed it was, of course, not restricted to such a tight focus on mathematical knowledge and its justification, but the early logicist form of the movement had established a set of deeply held assumptions informing its later practice. For one, the idea of clarifying the “foundations” of a science was soon extended to the empirical sciences, and next, it made issues of the correct logical analysis of language and thought central to the investigation of all philosophical topics. Deprived of any legitimate logical basis, the Hegelianism that had been popular towards the end of the nineteenth century could easily be construed as a fundamentally non-scientific movement—a form of religion in disguise, especially given the way that Hegel had liberally employed religious language in his own philosophising. While the early work of Russell and Moore was not particularly wedded to empiricism, analytic philosophy soon underwent such a shift towards empiricism, with the result that for the analysts, only early-modern empiricists such as Hume were thought of as having been on the correct scientific path. Thus, the new “logical” forms of empiricism that were developing could be seen as reaching back over nineteenth–century post-Kantian forms of idealism, to connect up with Kantian and earlier empiricist approaches, in an attempt to realign philosophical culture and put it on a more secure footing. A form of pragmatism would eventually develop within this new context— indeed within one of its core areas, philosophy of language—and, somewhat surprisingly, it too, it would be later claimed, would have striking and deep “Hegelian” features. One important precursor would be the “later” work of one of the founders of the analytic tradition, Ludwig Wittgenstein—that is, work from the period of his return to philosophy from the late 1920s until his death in 1951, that exhibited some broadly pragmatist features. An early attempt to blend the thought

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of the later Wittgenstein with that of Hegel was taken by John N. Findlay in an effort to revitalize Hegelianism in an analytic context in the 1950s (e.g., Findlay 1958 and Redding, this volume, Chapter 25). More significant for the attempts to reconcile Hegelianism with analytic philosophy in later decades, however, was the work of the American analytic philosopher Wilfrid Sellars (1912–1989). Sellars, nonetheless, was not a Hegelian, despite the fact that he in places “flirted” with Hegelian ideas, especially in his well-known set of lectures in the 1950s published as Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (Sellars 1997). In fact, Sellars had himself identified his own pragmatist version of analytic philosophy with the philosophical approach of Immanuel Kant, a thinker much closer to the style of analytic thought than Hegel. But Sellars had interpreted Kant in such a way as to make many of his ideas compatible with the type of “scientific realism” that he himself espoused.

2 From Sellars to the Sellarsians: Rorty, Brandom and McDowell After periods at the University of Minnesota and then Yale, Sellars took up a professorship of philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh in 1963, effectively establishing a department that would give expression to his ideas well beyond his death in 1989. Sellars had been an important figure in the establishment of analytic philosophy in the United States after the Second World War. For example, while at the University of Minnesota, a decidedly “analytic” department, he had, together with his departmental colleague, the logical empiricist, Herbert Feigl, edited a volume, Readings in Philosophical Analysis, which would help define analytic philosophy in the US after its publication in 1949.3 From the perspective of the typical analytic style, however, Sellars’s approach was far from conventional. For example, as opposed to the generally ahistorical approach found amongst the analysts, Sellars’s often blended considerations from the history of philosophy with philosophical argument, and he published significant works on historical figures such as Aristotle (Sellars 1959) and, especially, Kant (Sellars 1967). While not devoting the same attention to Hegel, he had clearly not discouraged some students at Pittsburgh, including Willem de Vries, who completed his PhD on Hegel in 1981, the thesis forming the basis for his later book, Hegel’s Theory of Mental Activity (de Vries 1988), the first genuinely Sellarsian work on Hegel. The implicit Hegelian dimensions of Sellars’s thought, however, would be brought to a larger audience in the next decade by a pair of philosophers sometimes referred to as the “Pittsburgh School of Neo-Hegelians,” Robert Brandom and John McDowell.4 Both Brandom and McDowell have spent a substantial part of their careers in the Philosophy Department at Pittsburgh, Brandom having taken up a junior position there in 1976, a year before completing his Ph.D. at Princeton in 1977, and McDowell being drawn there from Oxford ten years later. While Brandom had

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embraced a version of Sellars’s work from early in his career, McDowell had done so from an already well-formed philosophical position, having done important work in philosophical semantics, especially together with Gareth Evans (Evans and McDowell 1976), and being also well-known for his work in moral philosophy. One feature distinguishing them from de Vries in their attempt to bring Sellarsian views closer to the views of Hegel was their attempts to divest Sellars’s approach of its scientific realist frame, and in this both had been importantly influenced by Brandom’s former supervisor at Princeton, and mentor, Richard Rorty (1931–2007). Rorty had neither studied directly with Sellars nor worked at Pittsburgh but might be thought of as the god-father of the Pittsburgh Neo-Hegelians. Attracted to Sellars’s philosophy in the early 1960s (Rorty 2014, Chapters 4 and 5), and away from the earlier influence of Whitehead, Rorty became first known for his radical materialist elimination of the mind (ibid., Chapters 6 and 10) and for his edited compilation charting the history of the analytic “linguistic turn” up to the mid-1960s (Rorty 1967). As a member of the Princeton philosophy department, generally seen as a major centre for analytic philosophy throughout the secondhalf of the twentieth century, Rorty had come to champion Sellars as one of a group of analytic philosophers whom he saw as effectively undermining the very basis upon which professionalized analytic philosophy had become established. Thus, in his widely read Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, published in 1979, he drew on the work of Sellars and other “post-positivist” philosophers such as W. v. O. Quine and Donald Davidson to give a radical critique of the notion of the mind as an entity with a capacity to “represent” the outside world, as if reflected in a mirror, and the “foundationalist” epistemological project associated with it. Thus, he claimed that the work of the leading lights of the analytic movement was taking philosophy in the direction of their traditional rivals from the European “historicist” and “hermeneutic” movements on the one hand, and the classical pragmatists on the other, and envisaged the rejuvenation of “Hegelianism”—although now understood as an explicitly historicist doctrine, shorn of any systematic and absolutist “metaphysical” pretensions. This book had an enormous impact beyond the usual readers of philosophy texts, and in 1981 he was awarded a prestigious Macarthur Fellowship. Throughout the 1980s and 90s, in a variety of wide-ranging essays, Rorty offered his very readable interpretations of philosophical, cultural and political trends to non-specialist readers, and soon became recognized as one of America’s leading public intellectuals. He continued to develop his distinctive version of pragmatism in this way up to his death in 2007. Within the analytic philosophical community itself, Rorty was divisive, and was seen by many as espousing irrationalism. Form his own perspective, however, he saw his way of philosophizing as motivated—in Hegelian fashion—by an interest in the development of human freedom. Thus, in his conception of progress he drew on contemporary historicist trends, such as Thomas Kuhn’s account of progress in science (Kuhn 1962) and Harold Bloom’s account of progress in

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literature (Bloom 1973). In all these areas, he thought, “realism” did not serve progress. The nineteenth-century novel, for example, could be understood as having been progressive, having helped create new moral lives within readers by having fashioned new “vocabularies,” better adapted to modern society than, say, earlier religious ones. And Kuhn’s account of scientific progress suggested in a similar way, the way that progress resulted by the whole-sale replacements by new “paradigms” of “incommensurable” earlier ones. But any pretensions to “realism,” in the sense of insisting that either the nineteenth-century novel or contemporary science got their respective worlds “right” or had managed to create vocabularies that cut their respective worlds “at the joints,” would simply place restrictions on further innovation. Realism thus had to be resisted in order to encourage the continuation of what, in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, he referred to as the “great conversation of mankind.” His claim there that Hegel had “made philosophy too popular, too important, to be properly professional; it challenged philosophy professors to embody the World-Spirit, rather than simply getting on with their Fach” (Rorty 1979, 135) might stand as a description of Rorty’s own ambitions. Antipathetic to the work of Kant, whom he saw as responsible for the established epistemological project of professional philosophy, he described the virtue of Hegelianism as grounded in the fact that Hegel had “grasped the emptiness of Kantian attempts to make ‘Reason’ the name of an ahistorical faculty, and to build historical criteria into the structure of the human mind” (Brandom 2000, 89). While not a serious Hegel scholar, Rorty adopted important aspects of Hegel’s texts to his own purposes. Like many others, he was to find inspiration in Hegel’s famous account of the “struggle for recognition” from the Phenomenology of Spirit—a theme made popular in the 1950s by Sartre’s recycling of an account put forward earlier by Alexandre Kojève. “My starting point” Rorty tells us in an autobiographical essay, “was the discovery of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, a book which I read as saying: granted that philosophy is just a matter of outredescribing the last philosopher, the cunning of reason can make use even of this sort of competition. It can use it to weave the conceptual fabric of a freer, better, more just society” (Rorty 1999, 11). Clearly, Rorty could not claim that his reading of Hegel was, in some deep sense, “right.” From his radically nonrepresentationalist perspective, there could be no psychological or “intentional” reality to which one could appeal in claiming to capture what Hegel had actually meant.5 In this sense, with his own version of “behaviourism,” Rorty remained close to earlier critics of meaning and intentionality such as the logical positivists or Quine. With this, Rorty’s reading seemed to have taken Hegel full circle: from having been interpreted as a “metaphysical idealist” for whom everything is mental, Hegel was now a thinker for whom nothing was mental. While both Brandom and McDowell would recoil from the extremes of Rorty’s own sceptical and historicist tendencies, both would maintain important features of Rorty’s reading of Sellars and Hegel.

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3 The Creation of the Pittsburgh “Neo-Hegelians” In 1994, both Brandom and McDowell published books that would be among the most discussed works of analytic philosophy over the next few decades. Both books developed ideas from Sellars and hinted at the type of revival of Hegelianism that Rorty had seen as on the horizon. In Making It Explicit, Brandom developed ideas started in the Ph.D. at Princeton. What is found in the massive book is a highly technical program of “inferentialist semantics,” the basis of which he had found sketched in Sellars. Although there are only a few scattered and easily missed references to Hegel in this volume, the effects would be profound. As had Rorty in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, Brandom endorses Sellars’s critique of the traditional representationalist account of mental contents. Understanding entities should not be thought of as a simple relation between a representing subject and something represented. “Concepts” are not to be understood as private classifiers of objects. Rather, to understand something, or possess its relevant concept, is to possess the capacity to engage in “a certain type of practical activity.” Brandom’s conception of this practical activity is, however, narrower and more specific than that appealed to by earlier pragmatists, including Rorty. Specifically, it is the capacity to draw inferences. In his account of the Kant–Hegel relation, Brandom does not share Rorty’s antipathy to Kant. Thus, Brandom follows Sellars in stressing that the seeds of the revolution against traditional representationalism are to be found in Kant (Brandom 1994, 91–92): it was just that Kant had not gone far enough, and “it remained for Hegel … to complete the inversion of the traditional order of semantic explanation by beginning with a concept of experience as inferential ­activity and discussing the making of judgements and the development of concepts entirely in terms of the roles they play in that inferential activity” (ibid., 92). Drawing on Sellars’s own description of his project as an attempt “to usher analytic philosophy from its Humean to its Kantian stage” (Rorty 1997, 3), Rorty would go on to describe Brandom’s work as directed to bringing analytic philosophy “from its Kantian to its Hegelian stage” (ibid., 8–9). Sellars had taken up ideas from the later Wittgenstein in which issues of meaning had been primarily addressed in pragmatic terms as language use. Employing Wittgenstein’s idea of “language games,” he focussed in particular on the sorts of rational language games in which assertions are made, contested and defended— games of the “giving and asking for of reasons.” This idea becomes central to Brandom’s inferentialist approach to semantics: rather than an asserted sentence “picturing” some extralinguistic fact—a view found in Wittgenstein’s earliest work, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus—an assertion should be treated as a move in a language game in which interlocutors “keep score” on each other’s “doxastic commitments.”6 The earlier Fregean revolution in logic had treated a proposition not as assembled out of already meaningful parts, but as a basic meaningful unit, the parts of which were to be understood in terms of their

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contributions to the truth-value of the whole. But while Frege had come to be interpreted as thinking of individual propositions as independently meaningful, Brandom finds in Frege’s early work the basis for grounding the meaningfulness of the propositions themselves on the functional role played in longer stretches of argumentative discourse. The holism involved in reading modern logic in this way divides it from the empiricist tradition and brings it into line with Hegel, who had also thought of inferences (“syllogisms”) as somehow prior to the judgements that seemingly make them up. As Hegel had famously declared, the syllogism is the “truth” of the judgement (SL 593). McDowell’s Mind and World published in the same year had similar passing references to Hegel that would be seized upon by many of those hoping to revive the Hegelian tradition in contemporary philosophy. In McDowell’s case this was conceived of in relation to a solution to contemporary problems in philosophy by way of a Hegelian extension of Kantian ways of thinking implicit in current analytic philosophy. Thus, he starts from the Kantian thought of judging as requiring an “interplay between concepts and intuitions” (McDowell 1994, 6), a “cooperation between receptivity and spontaneity” (ibid., 9), relating Kant’s approach to more recent criticisms of empiricism on which Rorty had drawn in Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. These would include Sellars’ criticism of the role played by the “Givens” of experience in the justification of judgement, and Donald Davidson’s critique of the prevailing tendency to conceive of experience in terms of a “duality of form and content.” However, Kant’s way of construing the role of experience in judgement had led to the tendency to think of what he had meant by “intuitions” as contributions of “some bare getting of an extra-conceptual Given” (ibid., 9). This, however, is to both misunderstand Kant’s more profound point and to fall into a serious trap. Rather, we must understand Kantian intuition as “a kind of occurrence or state that already has conceptual content. In experience one takes in, for instance sees, that things are thus and so. That is the sort of thing one can also, for instance, judge” (ibid.). Again, in making this explicit, Hegel had gone beyond Kant, but like Brandom, McDowell does not share Rorty’s antipathy to Kant. The problems surrounding Kantian intuitions vis-à-vis the problems of the “Myth of the Given” are generally seen to stem from mis-understandings of Kant’s point, rather than from Kant himself.7 It is this wrong way of treating the concept–intuition distinction he portrays as having led to the central dilemmas of modern epistemology in which accounts of the justification of judgements “see-saw” between two equally troublesome ways of thinking of the relation between judgement and empirical experience. Treated as atomic non-conceptual “Givens,” Kantian intuitions, as Sellars and Davidson had shown, cannot perform the justificatory role that is demanded of them. The activity of justifying assertions is a conceptual activity, requiring the mind’s “spontaneous” use of its conceptual capacities. However, without intuitive input, “spontaneous” conceptual thinking seems to be left with no rational restraints from experience to be placed upon its conceptualizing. Thus this “recoil” from the Given had produced a worrying form of “coherentism,” that in Mind and World he finds particularly in Davidson, and which he sees as leading to the type of wholesale

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rejection of experience as found in Rorty. In Mind and World McDowell describes Kant had having come “within a whisker of a satisfactory escape from the oscillation” (McDowell 1994, 42), between the idea of thoughts ultimately justified by a non-conceptual Given, and the opposing problems of unconstrained “frictionless spinning” thought. But it was Hegel’s “Absolute Idealism” rather than Kant’s “transcendental” version of the idealist doctrine that provided modern philosophy with a way forward—a way of escaping from this interminable oscillation between foundationalist epistemology and its coherentist rival. The philosophical background against which these two books introduced their ways of reading both Kant and, especially, Hegel was very different from the type of approach to these classic works from the history of philosophy usually found in more textually based scholarship, however the ground to the reception of these innovative interpretations had been laid by recent work. By the time that Brandom and McDowell generally had come to the attention of Hegel scholars, a particularly innovative approach to Hegel’s texts was being put forward by Robert Pippin and Terry Pinkard, portraying Hegel as building on and going beyond Kant in ways broadly like those being underlined by Brandom and McDowell. The meaning of Hegel’s work has, of course, been contested since the time of his death, when the “right”, “left” and “centre” Hegelians split, primarily over the implications of Hegel’s thought for religion. From the point of view of its relation to traditional metaphysics, for which Rorty shared the logical positivists’ dismissive attitude, Rorty’s own view could be seen as a continuation of the “left” Hegelian tradition. This “anti-metaphysical” theme was continued by the post-Kantians, although this terminology easily led to misunderstandings of their views. Earlier, the German philosopher, Klaus Hartmann had argued for a “non-metaphysical” reading of Hegel, denying that Hegel’s categories involved existence claims about any super-entity upon whose existence the existence of other entities depended (Hartmann 1972). In his first book (Pinkard 1988), Pinkard had been more aligned to Hartmann’s views, but came to converge more with Pippin’s after the publication of the latter’s influential Hegel’s Idealism (1989). From this point, Pippin and Pinkard went on to portray Hegel as a critic of the types of traditional metaphysics of which Kant had been critical in his “transcendental idealism.” Hegel’s departures from Kant, manifest in the many criticisms levelled at him, involved, they argued, not some qualified return to metaphysics, but the attempt to extirpate remnants of traditional metaphysics in Kant himself. In this they seemed to converge with the sorts of hints found in Brandom and McDowell. In an article on Kant, Pippin had discussed the relevance of Sellars’s approach to the idealist notion of “spontaneity” (Pippin 1987) and in an article on Hegel’s logic (Pinkard 1979), Pinkard had argued for Sellarsian features of Hegel’s method. During the late 1990s and increasingly into the new century, both Making It Explicit and Mind and World would become recognized as major works in analytic philosophy, albeit as controversial and outside the mainstream. The influence and reputations of Brandom and McDowell, already substantial before the appearance of these volumes, continued to climb over the first two decades of

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the new millennium both within and outside of analytic philosophical circles, in ways that echoed Rorty’s influence in the 1980s and 90s.8 Their respective works came to be the subjects of conferences, special issues of journals, monographs and collections (e.g., on Brandom: Wanderer 2008; Weiss and Wanderer 2010; on McDowell: Smith 2002; MacDonald and MacDonald 2006, and on both; Maher 2012). Both have received honours and awards, such as the prestigious Andrew Mellon Foundation Distinguished Achievement of Award for “exemplary contributions to humanistic scholarship” (Brandom in 2003, and McDowell in 2010), and both books have been translated into a variety of languages. Interest in Sellars, who had died in 1989, itself seemed to receive a boost, with the reissuing of his work and the appearance of new secondary literature.9 Within the community of Hegel scholars, the spread of this influence was similarly controversial and somewhat slower, but nonetheless very real. In the late 1990s, both had started to appear, often together and often with Rorty, at conferences devoted to Hegel scholarship.10 Up to that point, apart from the handful of very general references to Hegel in their major works, neither Brandom nor McDowell had yet published much on Hegel at all. Brandom had for some time been giving a series of graduate seminars at Pittsburgh on Hegel’s Phenomenology, with McDowell occasionally taking this seminar series as well, and there had been rumours of a book based on these lectures circulating since the early 1990s. Two lectures given in various contexts in the late 1990s were published as chapters in Brandom’s Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality (Brandom 2002, Chapters 6 and 7), while in 2003, two papers that McDowell had given on Hegel in similar contexts were published (McDowell 2003a, b). Since this time, more writings specifically on Hegel have appeared (e.g., Brandom 2009, especially pt. 1; McDowell 2009), and secondary literature devoted to their versions of Hegelianism has grown (e.g., Rockmore 2004; Mendieta and Eason 2007 [on Brandom]; Lindgaard 2008, and Sanguinetti and Abath 2018 [on McDowell]; Redding 2007 [on both]). In 2019, Brandom’s long-awaited reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, entitled, A Spirit of Trust, was published.

4 A Future for Pittsburgh Neo-Hegelianism? Thus far, the massive task of attempting to employ some kind of Sellarsian version of analytic philosophy to illuminate the vast and difficult corpus of Hegel’s work is only in its early stages. As with Rorty’s earlier work, it is Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit that seems the most amenable to such reading, and it remains unclear as to how this approach might be extended to other parts of Hegel’s work, especially the parts of his systematic Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences. As with all forms of philosophical appropriation of earlier forms of philosophy, considerable reinterpretation can be expected. There is surely much that would be acceptable in terms of standards employed in the early

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nineteenth century that would not be acceptable today—a lesson that, as Rorty had pointed out, we can learn from Hegel himself. However, what might be counted as collateral evidence for some optimism in this regard is the on-going work by the loosely associated neo-Kantians, Pippin and Pinkard, which has over the last decade extended further into different parts of Hegel’s system, making sense of much of it from a contemporary point of view. These have included sympathetic treatments of Hegel’s practical philosophy (Pippin 2008), his aesthetics (Pippin 2013), his naturalistic attitude to human life (Pinkard 2012), his philosophy of history (Pinkard 2017), and his logic (Pippin 2018). One concern about the reconciliation of the approaches forged so far by Brandom and McDowell with the substance of Hegel’s philosophy might be thought to lie in the strongly “extensionalist” logical assumptions, usually signalling materialist connotations, that seem to link ideas in Brandom and McDowell, via Rorty, Davidson and Quine, back to Russell’s avowed anti-Hegelian approach. Such sorts of concern often seem to motivate the pessimism of critics of the Pittsburghians, who identify the basic orientation of analytic philosophy with what Hegel denounced as the operations of mere “understanding” (der Verstand).11 But Sellarsians see philosophy as a self-correcting process, and it might be said in reply that even were such criticisms to have a point, might not such assumptions be weeded out in the on-going attempt to develop a broadly Sellarsian analytic version of Hegel? One might add to this the fact that Russellian assumptions about logic are no longer universally accepted, and developments within logic since the turn of the second half of the twentieth century have included the revival of “intensionalist” interpretations closer to the earlier approaches of the idealists than to Russell.12 Finally, perhaps we should be mindful that Hegel insisted that the path of “reason” “die Vernunft” must go through, and not simply by-pass, the contradictions into which “der Verstand” must inevitably fall. Thus, as in Wittgenstein’s celebrated image from the Tractatus, it might be that despite Russell, analytic philosophy itself has provided a ladder for philosophers to ascend to the heights of Hegel’s thought—a ladder that is subsequently pushed away.13

Notes 1. Willem de Vries, “Hegel’s Pragmatism,” this volume, Chapter 26. 2. Peirce did not see the new logic that he was helping to create as antithetical to the idealist tradition in the same way as did Russell but was critical of Hegel for what he, wrongly (Wolff 1986), took to be Hegel’s backwardness in mathematics. Nevertheless, he was keenly aware of what seemed similarities between his own work and that of Hegel. 3. Thus, Feigl and Sellars state: “The conception of philosophical analysis underlying our selections springs from two major traditions in recent thought, the Cambridge movement, deriving from Moore and Russell, and the Logical Positivism of the Vienna Circle (Wittgenstein, Schlick, Carnap) together with the Scientific Empiricism of the Berlin group (led by Reichenbach). These, together with related developments in America stemming from Realism and Pragmatism and the relatively independent contributions of the Polish

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logicians, have increasingly merged to create an approach to philosophical problems which we frankly consider a decisive turn in the history of philosophy” (Feigl and Sellars 1949, vi). 4. The name was apparently coined by Brandom but avoided by McDowell. For a view contesting the Hegelianism of the Pittsburgh School, see, for example, essays by Nuzzo, Rockmore, Baynes and de Laurentiis, all in Mendieta and Eason (2007). 5. I have developed these ideas further in Redding (2016). 6. That is, their “beliefs.” Like Rorty, Brandom does not really believe in “beliefs,” a notion considered to be representationalist. 7. After Mind and World, for example, in (2009), McDowell seems to have become more insistent that Kant himself was not guilty of this misunderstanding about the nature of intuition, while in Mind and World, under the influence of Strawson’s earlier analytic interpretation of Kant, he seems to have been more inclined to attribute the erroneous view to Kant himself. 8. McDowell had been a Fellow of the British Academy since 1983 and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences from 1992. McDowell’s Mind and World was, in fact, the published version of lectures given in the prestigious “Locke Lecture” series at Oxford in 1991, while in 1994, Brandom was to give present the “Hemple Lecture” series at Princeton. 9. Two new editions of Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind appeared in the 1990s (Sellars 1997, and the text appended to de Vries and Tripplett 2000, of which only the latter reproduces footnotes Sellars had added to the 1963 version). Comprehensive interpretations of Sellars’s philosophy appeared during this time, e.g., de Vries (2005) and O’Shea (2008). 10. Effectively the first of these was in 1998, at a conference “Hegel and his Legacy” held at Northwestern University, to which Pinkard was in the process of moving. 11. See, for example, Tom Rockmore’s concern with the very notion of “Pittsburgh Hegelianism” (Rockmore 2016). However, other critics, for example, Westphal (2006), do not see the problem as residing in the Pittsburghians analytic orientation per se. 12. The idealist heritage of this logical tradition is relatively clear, given the early influence of Josiah Royce on C. I. Lewis, the instigator of modal logic in the early twentieth century (Lewis and Langford 1932). More recent versions of modal logic might also be regarded as having had a significant contribution from the idealist tradition. See my “Hegel and Recent Analytic Metaphysics” in this volume. 13. I wish to thank Bill de Vries, Terry Pinkard and Ken Westphal for many helpful comments on an earlier draft. Research for this chapter was supported by funding from the Australian Research Council, DP 130102346.

Bibliography Bloom, Harold. 1973. The Anxiety of Influence. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Brandom, Robert B. 1994. Making It Explicit: Reasoning, Representing, and Discursive Commitment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brandom, Robert B. 2000. Rorty and His Critics. Oxford: Blackwell. Brandom, Robert B. 2002. Tales of the Mighty Dead: Historical Essays in the Metaphysics of Intentionality. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brandom, Robert B. 2009. Reason in Philosophy: Animating Ideas. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Brandom. Robert B. 2019. A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Davidson, Donald. 1983. “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge.” In Kant Oder Hegel? edited by Dieter Henrich. Stuttgart: Klett–Cotta.

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de Vries, Willem A. 1988. Hegel’s Theory of Mental Activity. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. de Vries, Willem A. 2005. Wilfrid Sellars. Chesham: Acumen. de Vries, Willem A., and Tom Tripplett. 2000. Knowledge, Mind and the Given: Reading Wilfrid Sellars’s “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind”, Including the Complete Text of Sellars’ Essay. Indianapolis, IN: Hackett. Evans, Gareth, and John McDowell, eds. 1976. Truth and Meaning. Oxford: Clarendon Press. Feigl, Herbert, and Wilfrid Sellars. 1949. Readings in Philosophical Analysis. New York: Appleton-Century-Crofts. Findlay, John N. 1958. Hegel: A Re-examination. London: Allen and Unwin. Hartmann, Klaus. 1972. “Hegel: A Non-Metaphysical View.” In Hegel: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Alasdair Macintyre, 101–124. New York: Anchor Books. Kuhn, Thomas. 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press. Lewis, C. I., and Cooper H. Langford. 1932. Symbolic Logic. Toronto: General Pub. Co. Lindgaard, Jakob, ed. 2008. John McDowell: Experience, Norm and Nature. Oxford: Blackwell. MacDonald, Cynthia, and Graham MacDonald, eds. 2006. McDowell and His Critics. Oxford: Blackwell. Maher, Chauncey. 2012. The Pittsburgh School of Philosophy. London: Routledge. McDowell, John H. 1994. Mind and World. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. McDowell, John H. 2003a. “The Apperceptive I and the Empirical Self: Towards a Heterodox Reading of ‘Lordship and Bondage’ in Hegel’s Phenomenology.” Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 47/48: 1–16. McDowell, John H. 2003b. “Hegel and the Myth of the Given.” In Das Interesse des Denkens: Hegel aus heutiger Sicht, edited by Wolfgang Welsch und Klaus Vieweg, 75–88. München: Wilhelm Fink Verlag. McDowell, John H. 2009. Having the World in View: Essays on Kant, Hegel and Sellars. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Mendieta, E., and R.E. Eason, Guest eds. 2007. Philosophy and Social Criticism 33 (1). O’Shea, James R. 2008. Wilfrid Sellars: Naturalism with a Normative Turn. Cambridge: Polity Press. Pinkard, Terry. 1979. “The Logic of Hegel’s Logic.” Journal of the History of Philosophy 17 (4): 417–435. Pinkard, Terry. 1988. Hegel’s Dialectic: The Exploration of Possibility. Philadelphia: Temple University Press. Pinkard, Terry. 2012. Hegel’s Naturalism: Mind, Nature, and the Final Ends of Life. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pinkard, Terry. 2017. Does History Make Sense? Hegel on the Historical Shapes of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Pippin, Robert B. 1987. “Kant on the Spontaneity of Mind.” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 17 (2): 449–476. Pippin, Robert B. 1989. Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pippin, Robert B. 2008. Hegel’s Practical Philosophy. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Pippin, Robert B. 2013. After the Beautiful: Hegel and the Philosophy of Pictorial Modernism. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Pippin, Robert B. 2018. Hegel’s Realm of Shadows: Logic as Metaphysics in the Science of Logic. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Redding, Paul. 2007. Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Redding, Paul. 2016. “Not Knowing What the Right Hand Is Doing: Rorty’s ‘Ambidextrous’ Analytic Reinterpretation of Nineteenth-Century Hegelianism.” In Debates in

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Nineteenth-Century European Philosophy: Essential Readings and Contemporary Responses, edited by Kristin Gjesdal, 373–383. New York: Routledge. Rockmore, Tom. 2004. Hegel, Idealism, and Analytic Philosophy. New Haven: Yale University Press. Rockmore, Tom. 2016. “On the Pittsburgh School, Kant, Hegel, and Realism.” In Wilfrid Sellars, Idealism, and Realism: Understanding Psychological Nominalism, edited by Patrick J. Reider, 103–120. London: Bloomsbury. Rorty, Richard M., ed. 1967. The Linguistic Turn: Essays in Philosophical Method. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Rorty, Richard. 1979. Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature. Princeton: Princeton University Press. Rorty, Richard. 1997. “‘Introduction’ to Wilfrid Sellars.” In Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. Rorty, Richard. 1999. Philosophy and Social Hope. London: Penguin Books. Rorty, Richard. 2014. Mind, Language, and Metaphilosophy: Early Philosophical Papers, edited by S. Leach and J. Tartaglia. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sanguinetti, Federico, and André Abath, eds. 2018. Hegel and McDowell: Perceptual Experience, Thought and Action. Cham: Springer Nature Switzerland AG. Sellars, Wilfrid. 1956. “Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind.” In Minnesota Studies in Philosophy of Science, vol. 1, edited by H. Feigl and M. Scriven. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press (Republished in Sellars 1963, 127–196 and in de Vries and Tripplett 2000, 205–276). Sellars, Wilfrid. 1959. Philosophical Perspectives: History of Philosophy. Reseda, CA: Ridgeview. Sellars, Wilfrid. 1963. Science, Perception, and Reality. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul. Sellars, Wilfrid. 1967. Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes. Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview. Sellars, Wilfrid. 1997. Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind, with an Introduction by Richard Rorty and Study Guide by Robert Brandom. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Smith, Nicholas H. 2002. Reading McDowell: On Mind and World. London: Routledge. Wanderer, Jeremy. 2008. Robert Brandom. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press. Westphal, Kenneth. 2006. “Contemporary Epistemology: Kant, Hegel, McDowell.” European Journal of Philosophy 14 (2): 274–301. Weiss, Bernhard, and Jeremy Wanderer. 2010. Reading Brandom: On Making It Explicit. London and New York: Routledge. Wolff, Michael. 1986. “Hegel und Cauchy. Eine Untersuchung zur Philosophie und Geschichte der Mathematik.” In Hegel und die Naturwissenschaften, edited by Rolf-Peter Horstmann, 197–263. Stuttgart and Bad-Connstatt: Frommann-Holzboog.

Appendices

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 M. F. Bykova and K. R. Westphal (eds.), The Palgrave Hegel Handbook, Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26597-7

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1770  27 August: Hegel born to George Ludwig Hegel and Maria Magdalena Louisa Hegel in Stuttgart, Württemberg. 1788 Completes Gymnasium in Stuttgart (Abitur). Enters the Tübingen theological Seminary (Tübinger Stift). 1788–1793  Studies theology and philosophy (as well as physics under C.F. Pfleiderer); befriends Hölderlin. 1790  Passes exams required for Magister (earns the Master’s degree); befriends Schelling. 1793 19–20 September: Takes examination in theology from church authorities (Konsistorialexamen); graduates from the Seminary, and leaves Tübingen. 1793–1796 Works as a Private Tutor for the Steiger von Tschugg family in Bern, Switzerland. Has access to excellent libraries. 1797–1800 Works as a Private Tutor for the Gogel family in Frankfurt am Main. 1799 His father dies, and Hegel inherits a modest sum of money. 1801 January: Moves to Jena, where he uses his inheritance to finance his academic career; Schelling helps him to secure a position as Privatdozent (an unsalaried lecturer) at the University of Jena. 27 August: Defends his Habilitation (post-doctoral) dissertation. Publishes The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy—Hegel’s first major work, which signals his break with Schelling. 1802–1803 Co-editor, with Schelling, of The Critical Journal of Philosophy. 1802 Publishes Faith and Knowledge; On the Ways of Treating Natural Right Scientifically. 1804 Appointed Assayer of the Jena Mineralogical Society. Joins Westphalian (Westfalen) Society for Natural Science. 1805–1806 Promoted to Professor Extraordinarius (Auserordentlicher Professor).

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 M. F. Bykova and K. R. Westphal (eds.), The Palgrave Hegel Handbook, Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26597-7

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1806  Fathers an illegitimate child by his married landlady, Dorothea Burkhardt. 14 October: Napoleon invades Jena, which disrupts the university and forces Hegel to leave Jena. 1807 Publication of The Phenomenology of Spirit. 1807–1808 Serves as the Editor-in-Chief of the Bamberger Zeitung. 1807 Joins the Heidelberg Society of Physics. 1808–1816 Rector of a Gymnasium (secondary school) in Nuremberg; undertakes successful reforms of his Gymnasium, influencing general reforms of Prussian educational system. 1811 Marries Marie Helena Susanna von Tücher. 1812 Publishes Science of Logic, Volume I. 1816 Publishes Science of Logic, Volume II. Appointed Professor of Philosophy at the University of Heidelberg. 1817 Co-editor, Heidelbergischen Jahrbücher der Literatur. Publishes Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences, first edition in one volume, to be used as a text in Hegel’s Heidelberg lectures. 1817–1818 Lectures for the first time on the system of ideas that he later presented in the Philosophy of Right. 1818–1831 Appointed Professor, succeeding Fichte (who died in 1814) at the prestigious chair of philosophy, at the University of Berlin. 1820–1821 Appointed Dean of the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Berlin. 1821 January: Publication of the Philosophy of Right, which was completed a year earlier. 1822 Travels to Brussels and Holland. 1824 Travels to Vienna, stopping on the way in Dresden and Prague. 1827 Publishes Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences, the second edition, now revised and expanded to three volumes. Visits Goethe in Weimar and travels to Paris. Founding of Jahrbücher für wissenschaftliche Kritik. 1829–1830 Serves as Rector of the University of Berlin. 1829 Visits Goethe and travels to Prag. Travels to Karlsbad spa, where he unexpectedly meets Schelling. 1830 The third edition of Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences was published. 1831 14 November: dies of cholera in Berlin. Marina F. Bykova

Hegel’s Philosophical System in His Writings and Lecture Series

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 M. F. Bykova and K. R. Westphal (eds.), The Palgrave Hegel Handbook, Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26597-7

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The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)—originally composed as the first part (and initial foundation) of the system Science of Logic (‘Greater Logic’)—a new foundation and the first part of the final system Science of Logic, in 2 Parts, published in Nuremberg by Johan K. Schrag Verlag, The Subjective Logic The Objective Logic 1812–1816; The Doctrine of Essence The Doctrine of the The Doctrine of Being 2nd edition, with extensive revisions to Book Concept 1, written in 1831 (published in Berlin, 1832) 1813—Science of Logic, Part 1 1816—Science of Logic, 1812—Science of Logic, Part 1 (Book 1) (Book 2) Part 2 (Book 3)

578 Hegel’s Philosophical System in His Writings and Lecture Series

Lectures On the Entire System (Heidelberg, 1818). Realphilosophie: on philosophy of nature and philosophy of spirit (Jena, 1805/6, 1806, 1807)

3rd rev. ext. ed.: Berlin, 1830

2nd rev. edition: Berlin, 1827;

1st edition: Heidelberg, 1817;

Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences: presents an abbreviated version of Hegel’s mature philosophical system in its entirety

Lectures Logic and Metaphysics (Jena, 1801/02, 1802, 1802/03, 1803/04). Speculative Philosophy, including Logic, Philosophies of Nature and Spirit (Jena,1803, 1803/04, 1804, 1805). Logic (Berlin, 1818–1831, annually)

Science of Logic (‘Lesser Logic’)

Lectures Naturphilosophy or Rational Physics (Jena,1804; Heidelberg, 1818) Philosophy of Mathematics (Jena, 1805/06, 1806, 1807. Philosophy of Nature (Berlin, 1819/20, 1821/22, 1823/24, 1825/26, 1828, 1830)

Philosophy of Nature

Lectures On Natural Right and Political Science (Jena, 1801/02, 1802/03, 1803/04; Heidelberg, 1818) Philosophy of Law (Berlin, 1818/19, 1819/20, 1821/22, 1822/23, 1824/25, 1831)

Elements of the Philosophy of Right, or Natural Law and Political Science in Outline (Berlin, 1820; the book’s original title page dates it to 1821)

Ethical life (Sittlichkeit)

Objective Spirit Right (Recht)

Morality (Moralität)

Psychology

Phenomenology

Lectures Philosophy of Subjective Spirit (Berlin, 1820, 1822, 1825, 1827/8, 1829/30)

Anthropology

Subjective Spirit

Philosophy of Spirit Art

Lectures Philosophy of Religion (Berlin1821, 1824, 1827, 1831)

Religion

Absolute Spirit

Philosophy of World History (Berlin, 1822/23, 1824/25, 1826/27, 1828/29, 1830/31)

Lectures: On History of Philosophy (Jena, 1805/06; Heidelberg, 1816, 1817; Berlin, 1819, 1820/21, 1823/24, 1825/26, 1827/28, 1829/30, 1831)

Philosophy

Marina F. Bykova and Nelly V. Motroshilova

Lectures On Aesthetics (Heidelberg 1818; Berlin, 1820/21, 1823, 1826, 1828/29)

Hegel’s Realphilosophie—concerns “the philosophy of nature and of the spirit”

Hegel’s Philosophical System in His Writings and Lecture Series 579

Conclusion: An Agenda for Future Research Marina F. Bykova and Kenneth R. Westphal

Given the scope of our volume, it is difficult to summarize in one short section all the results of Hegel studies by various scholars undertaken from so many diverse perspectives. Furthermore, the very nature and spirit of Hegel’s philosophy does not assume any absolute completion. Instead, Hegel’s system points to a continued progress and calls for development of fresh insights that inspire a search for new ideas and further delving into the unknown. Thus, instead of drawing conclusions of our multifaceted study, we conclude the Palgrave Hegel Handbook with a brief agenda for further research, intended to be suggestive, not exhaustive. Most of the agenda drafted below is stated as questions to be addressed in order to fully grasp and accurately assess both Hegel’s own insights and the objections posed by his most sophisticated critics, both in his own time and in present day. 1. What is the full significance of Hegel’s extensive and intensive revisions in the 1832 Doctrine of Being (Book I) for understanding his Science of Logic? How should its Books II and III (1813, 1816) be understood and assessed in view of those revisions and his extensively revised second and third editions of the Encyclopaedia logic (1827, 1830), which appear to involve revisions corresponding to those of the 1832 Doctrine of Being? (cf. Ferrini 2020, with further references.) 2. In particular, the transition to ‘essence’ (Wesen) announced in the first edition Doctrine of Being (1812) indicates that the determinations of being are anihilated in the advent of essence, whereas the second edition Doctrine of Being (1832) involves a ‘double transition’ to essence, in which the determinations of being are indeed sublated, yet also retained, though re-integrated and subordinated within essence. To what extent, or in what regards, does their contrast perhaps indicate that the first edition Doctrine of Being (1812) relies upon, or draws more or less directly from, his earlier Jena manuscripts on logic and metaphysics, which involve a via negativa ascent to absolute

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 M. F. Bykova and K. R. Westphal (eds.), The Palgrave Hegel Handbook, Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26597-7

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intellectual intuition? To that extent (whatever it may prove to be), do the revisions to the second edition Doctrine of Being indicate fuller or better use of insights achieved in the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit, in which Hegel expressly articulates an alternative to his previous via negativa? Hegel adopted from both Tetens (1775, 1777) and from Kant (who followed Tetens in this regard) Tetens’ novel use of the verb ‘realisieren’ (to realize), in connection with concepts or principles, according to which to ‘realize’ a concept or principle is to indicate, point out, at least one actual, relevant example or instance of that concept or principle. How might this usage help us better understand Hegel’s use of that verb, also in its reflexive (often passive) form, sich realisieren? In which contexts, or in regard to what issues, is Tetens’ usage significant to properly understanding Hegel’s own? Whether various of Hegel’s views are ‘metaphysical’ or ‘non-metaphysical’ has long been debated. This simple contrast, however, is not very informative. The more important (and insightful) question is what sort(s) of ‘metaphysics’ does Hegel accept or reject, in what domains or regarding what topics, and why, in which manner and how well does he argue for or against any of these kinds or version of ‘metaphysics’? One very striking, carefully documented and articulated thesis developed by H.S. Harris (1997) regarding Hegel’s 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit, is that it contains Hegel’s genuine and most fully developed philosophy of history, which involves carefully re-examining the historical period from Augustus to Napoleon four times, in distinctive regards, because this period forms a properly logical cycle of experience. How sound or informative is Harris’ interpretation? How can his interpretation aid our understanding and assessment of Hegel’s later Berlin lectures on philosophy of history? Michelet (1861, 77) complained that the elder Hegel’s defence of liberalism was “no longer so vigorous.” That remark was countered by von Henning and by Lassalle, though without citing the single most direct piece of published evidence (1827, 1830): Hegel’s Remark added to Enzyclopaedia §6, in which Hegel himself underscores the normative character of his Doppelsatz, that the actual is rational and the rational is actual. The normative character of Hegel’s thesis lies in his principled distinction between what is actual, in the sense that some extant being or structure sufficiently manifests its proper concept, in contrast to what merely happens to be, and so may only accord very poorly to its proper concept. If Michelet missed the significance of Hegel’s published Remark, directly on this crucial point, what might this indicate about others of Michelet’s claims or interpretations of Hegel’s views or manuscripts? Understanding or interpreting Hegel’s logic in terms of, or in connection with, recent analytical semantics has become more common. Much recent analytical semantics relies on formal model theory (Hodges 2018). To what extent, or in what regard(s) might Hegel’s logic be better understood, or more fruitfully compared to, proof-theoretic semantics (Schroeder-Heister 2018)? This would appear to be a promising strategy, because proof theory offers much more obvious ways to link semantics with issues of judgement and justifiable

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forms of judgement, in ways evident in Hegel’s Doctrine of the Concept (cf. Stoval 2015, 2019/forthcoming). 8. Frege (1893, xv; 1916, 183) made famous the fallacy of “psychologism,” that claims about processes as occurrences in principle do not suffice to justify the validity of (purported) outcomes or results of those processes; that understanding and assessing validity or justification in principle require other, specifically normative considerations, and that if processes contribute to, or result in, justified or justifiable results, they do so only insofar as they satisfy normative criteria or constraints. This contrast was also central to Kant (most plainly stated in CJ Einl., Ak 5:182.26–32), and indeed to Hume’s contrast between ‘is’ and ‘ought.’ This contrast is also central to Hegel’s philosophy, e.g., in his principled contrast between what exists and what is actual (RPh §3+Remark). Although Hegel obviously and extensively attends to issues of process, whether in history, psychology or in the structure and execution of his own philosophical works, we may and should ask: In these various contexts, how and how well does Hegel comprehend de facto processes, and whether, how or the extent to which these processes also satisfy proper normative criteria or conditions? How and how well does Hegel identify and justify relevant normative criteria or constraints? 9. Kant’s cognitive psychology has been recognized to offer rich resources to contemporary cognitive sciences (Brook 2016). To what extent, or in what regards, might Hegel’s likewise contribute to contemporary cognitive sciences? Promising bases for such prospects are developed (e.g.) by de Vries (1988–2013) and the collections edited by Stern (2013), Herrmann-Sinai and Ziglioli (2016) and Bykova (2019). 10. In what way(s) and to what extent(s) can examining Hegel’s texts with regard to how he proposes to justify any of his views, and how well he does justify the view in question, be used hermeneutically, to improve our understanding and assessment of the views Hegel develops, espouses, defends and perhaps also justifies? 11. The disagreement between “right” and “left” wing Hegelians about how to understand Hegel’s philosophy of religion is long-standing. Recently George di Giovanni (2009, 2018) has argued that both wings are mistaken, and that Hegel’s philosophy of religion instead develops a cogent, significant middle ground. What can or ought we learn from re-examining Hegel’s philosophy of religion in light of di Giovanni’s innovative re-interpretation? 12. Hegel held that in our Modern age, the highest aspirations of spirit could no longer be satisfied by the arts, only symbolically by religion, and instead require philosophical comprehension. He also noted that his 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit was written in a time dominated by an “abstract” conception of the absolute. Might today’s circumstances be such that we lack even an abstract conception of the absolute, that philosophical comprehension appears rather to be compromised by philosophical and cultural dissent and disonance, so that, on Hegel’s own grounds, there may be more significant roles for the arts or for religion than those indicated by Hegel late in

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his Berlin period? How might such questions be properly posed, examined, assessed or answered? 13. The Hegel mythology dies hard; the myth that he sought to demonstrate a priori that there are and can only be seven planets is still repeated, e.g., by Hockey (2014), although a sufficient, if brief, rejoinder was published by Beaumont (1954). More serious and extensive criticisms of Hegel’s views on astronomy were made by Whewell (1849), which are only in part countered by Shea (1981). One question for further research is to determine the extent to which Whewell’s criticisms are accurate or erroneous. Answering this question may contribute to assessing what of Hegel’s views on Newtonian mechanics are accurate, and what in those views is inaccurate or (perhaps) irrelevant. Much important groundwork for such examinations is provided by Ferrini (1991–2002), though without considering Whewell (1849), who cites the second (1827) edition of Hegel’s Encyclopaedia, and remarks appended to that by Michelet in Sämtliche Werke 7,1 (1842). The field of Hegel study continues to evolve, and we are confident that these and many other questions will inspire new research on Hegel, producing a body of scholarly work which is both illuminating and thought-provoking. The Palgrave Hegel Handbook greatly contributes to ongoing examination; we hope that readers may find the volume both appealing and stimulating. Marina F. Bykova and Kenneth R. Westphal

Bibliography Beaumont, Bertrand. 1954. “Hegel and the Seven Planets.” Mind ns 63 (250): 246–248. Brook, Andrew. 2016. “Kant’s View of the Mind and Consciousness of Self.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by E. N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/ win2016/entries/kant-mind/. Bykova, Marina, ed. 2019. Hegel’s Philosophy of Spirit: A Critical Guide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. de Vries, Willem. 1988. Hegel’s Theory of Mental Activity. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. de Vries, Willem. 1991. “The Dialectic of Teleology.” Philosophical Topics 19 (2): 51–70. de Vries, Willem. 2013. “Subjective Spirit: Soul, Consciousness, Intelligence and Will.” In The Bloomsbury Companion to Hegel, edited by A. de Laurentiis and J. Edwards, 133–156. London: Bloomsbury. di Giovanni, George. 2009. “Religion, History, and Spirit in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.” In The Blackwell Guide to Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, edited by Kenneth R. Westphal, 226–245. London: Blackwell. di Giovanni, George. 2018. “Review of R. Williams, Hegel on the Proofs and the Personhood of God: Studies in Hegel’s Logic and Philosophy of Religion Oxford University Press, 2017).” SGIR Review 1 (1): 8–19. (New York, Society for German Idealism and Romanticism; print + online open access. https://www.thesgir.org/sgir-review.html§§.). Ferrini, Cinzia. 1991. “Features of Irony and Alleged Errors in Hegel’s De orbitis planetarum.” Hegel-Jahrbuch, 459–477.

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Ferrini, Cinzia. 1994. “On Newton’s Demonstration of Kepler’s Second Law in Hegel’s De orbitis planetarum (1801).” Philosophia naturalis 31 (1): 150–170. Ferrini, Cinzia. 1995. Guida al De orbitis planetarum di Hegel ed alle sue edizioni e traduzioni, La pars destruens, con la collaborazione di M. Nasti De Vincentis. Berner Reihe philosophischer Studien 18. Bern/Stuttgart/Wien: Haupt. Ferrini, Cinzia. 1996. Scienze empiriche e filosofie della natura nel primo idealismo tedesco. Milano: Guerini e ass. Ferrini, Cinzia. 1997. “Il giovane Hegel critico di Newton.” Intersezioni 3: 395–417. Ferrini, Cinzia. 1999. “On the Role of Newtonian Mechanics and Naturphilosophie at the Origin of Hegel’s Dialectic.” In Hegels Denkenentwicklung in der Berner und Frankfurter Zeit, edited by M. Bondeli and H. Linneweber-Lammerskitten, 197–224. München: Fink. Ferrini, Cinzia. 2002 (issued: 2004). “Being and Truth in Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature.” HegelStudien 37: 69–90. Ferrini, Cinzia. 2020. “Hegel’s Revisions of the Logic of Being: A Controversial Issue.” Rivista di Storia della Filosofia 1.2. Frege, Gottlob. 1893. Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, vol. 1. Jena: Pohle. Frege, Gottlob. 1916. “The Fundamental Laws of Arithmetic.” Translated by J. Stachelroth and P.E.B. Jourdain, The Monist 26 (2): 182–199. Harris, Henry Silton (H.S.). 1997. Hegel’s Ladder. 2 vols. Cambridge, MA: Hackett Publishing. Herrmann-Sinai, Susanne, and Lucia Ziglioli, eds. 2016. Hegel’s Philosophical Psychology. New York and London: Routledge. Hockey, Thomas. 2014. “Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich.” In Biographical Encyclopedia of Astronomers, 2nd ed., editor-in-chief T. Hockey, 923–924. New York: Springer. Hodges, Wilfrid. 2018. “Model Theory.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by E. N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2018/entries/model-theory/. Michelet, C. L. 1861. “Sitzungsbericht der Philosophischen Gesellschaft [zu Berlin, des 30.03.1861].” Der Gedanke 2: 75–78. Schroeder-Heister, Peter. 2018. “Proof-Theoretic Semantics.” In The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, edited by E. N. Zalta. https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2018/entries/ proof-theoretic-semantics/. Shea, William. 1981. “The Young Hegel’s Quest for a Philosophy of Science, or Pitting Kepler Against Newton.” In Scientific Philosophy Today: Essays in Honor of Mario Bunge, edited by J. Agassi and R. S. Cohen, 381–397. Dordrecht: Springer. Stern, David, ed. 2013. Essays on Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit. Albany: SUNY Press. Stoval, Preston. 2015. “Inference by Analogy and the Progress of Knowledge: From Reflection to Determination in Judgements of Natural Purpose.” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 23(4): 681–709. Stoval, Preston. 2019, forthcoming. “Syllogistic Reasoning as a Ground for the Content of Judgment: A Line of Thought from Kant Through Hegel to Peirce.” European Journal of Philosophy. Tetens, Johann N. 1775. Über die allgemeine speculativische Philosophie. Bützow and Wismar: Boedner. Tetens, Johann N. 1777. Philosophische Versuche über die menschliche Natur und ihre Entwicklung. 2 vols. Leipzig: M.G. Weidmanns Erben und Reich. Whewell, William. 1849. “On Hegel’s Criticism of Newton’s Principia.” Transactions of the Cambridge Philosophical Society 8: 698; rpt. in: idem, Philosophy of Discovery, 504–521, as Appendix H. London: Parker, 1860.

Name Index

A Aenesidemus, 27, 28, 51, 68 Aristotle, xli, xlvii, 13, 26, 54, 58, 112, 134, 154, 204–5, 213, 222–3, 234, 280, 300, 312, 313, 346, 366, 439, 493, 522–5, 528, 536, 561 Augustine, 40, 43, 468 B Bakhtin, Mikhail, 344, 346–7 Brandom, Robert, 110, 111, 116, 121, 130, 335, 447, 477, 483, 533, 543, 551, 552, 561–9 C Carnap, Rudolf, xlv, 121, 527, 529, 537n6, 568n3 D Descartes, René, 36, 38, 39, 65–7, 111, 118, 120, 125, 126, 129, 130, 219, 222, 223, 234, 543, 555 Dewey, John, 125, 277, 542, 545–7, 552–3, 555n8, 58513, 559 E Eberhard, Johann August, 50, 60 Engels, Friedrich, 60, 204, 212, 214, 215, 217 Euclid, 205

F Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 9–11, 17, 19, 23, 28–36, 38–41, 43, 45, 50, 68, 111, 113, 118, 119, 125, 126, 129, 279, 318, 369, 390, 395, 428, 446, 489, 502–4, 549 Findlay, John, 526–32, 534, 536, 537, 561 Frege, Gottlob, 46, 50, 113, 119, 349, 521, 523, 537, 560, 565, 579, 583 G Galilei, Galileo, 205, 219, 251, 560 Gödel, Kurt, 527 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 20, 112, 344, 428, 445, 446 H Hamann, Johann Georg, xli, 47, 49, 50, 55, 59, 60, 135, 314, 339, 348 Heidegger, Martin, 67, 120, 125, 387n2 Herder, Johann Gottfried, xli, 47, 49, 50, 55, 59, 60, 135, 314, 339, 348, 428, 429, 445 Hobbes, Thomas, xliii, 125, 138, 479, 480, 555 Hölderlin, Friedrich, 3, 6–9, 11, 35, 36, 43, 195, 446 Hume, David, xl, 49–50, 57–8, 65, 79, 114, 115, 118, 120, 121, 125, 215, 223, 280, 361, 543, 544, 560, 579, 583

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 M. F. Bykova and K. R. Westphal (eds.), The Palgrave Hegel Handbook, Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26597-7

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588

Name Index

J Jacobi, Friedrich Heinrich, 11, 29–31, 43, 50, 55, 73, 85, 135, 146, 356–8, 361, 365, 502, 504 James, William, 542, 545, 559

N Newton, Isaac, xl, 20n10, 58, 205, 220, 225, 227, 230, 231, 560 Niethammer, Friedrich Immanuel, 12–5, 17, 446

K Kant, Immanuel, v, xxv–xxxiv, xxxix, 5–8, 15, 18, 23–31, 34, 45–50, 52–3, 55–9, 60n2, 60n8–9, 60n11, 65–9, 73–4, 76, 79n2, 85, 111–3, 116, 118–20, 122–7, 130n7, 134–5, 137–41, 144–45, 146n3, 151, 153–65, 165n16, 167–8, 171–2, 175, 181n6, 203–11, 213, 215–6, 217n2, 219–25, 228–31, 233, 234n2–3, 234n7, 263n11, 279, 313n19, 318, 322–3, 325, 327, 333n3, 334n14, 351–9, 366–7, 369n3–4, 369n7, 387n11, 389–402, 403n2–4, 403n7, 403n9–11, 404n13–15, 404–5n17, 405n19–20, 413, 425, 456, 464, 469–70, 486, 502–6, 511, 515n9, 529–30, 532, 536n3, 537n8, 541, 544–5, 549, 551, 553–5, 555n5, 561, 569n7, 582n3, 583n8–9 Kojève, Alexandre, 107n11

P Parmenides, 54 Peirce, Charles Sanders, 40, 125, 541–2, 547, 552–5, 555n7, 559–60, 568n2 Plato, 13, 26, 54, 58, 71, 114, 120, 127, 244, 310, 311, 314, 328, 335, 509, 536, 551 Prior, Arthur, 526, 527, 535 Protagoras, 58

L Leibniz, Gottfried Wilhelm, 59, 77, 116, 120, 153, 197n18, 307–8, 312n4, 313n6, 313n12, 314n23, 522, 524–6, 531–2, 534, 536, 537n4, 555n9 Lessing, Gotthold Ephraim, 5, 6, 9 Lewis, Clarence Irving (C.I.), 524, 526, 532, 554, 569 Locke, John, 56, 65, 121, 125, 140, 217, 479, 480, 507, 515 Lukács, Georg, 110, 346, 421n4, 446n11 Luther, Martin, 472, 473, 483 M Maimon, Salomon, 45, 50, 60 Marx, Karl, 110, 214, 215, 233, 375, 376, 381, 413, 446, 506 McDowell, John, 110, 111, 116, 121, 291, 331, 334, 335, 447, 545, 561–9

Q Quine, Willard Van Orman, xlii, 59, 112, 121, 234, 330, 537, 562, 563, 568 R Reinhold, Karl, 7, 27, 28, 45, 50, 68, 504 Rorty, Richard, 111, 223, 542, 543, 562–9 Royce, Josiah, 346, 446n11, 524, 554–5, 569n12 Russell, Bertrand, 76, 121, 521–8, 534, 536, 559–60, 568, 568n2, 568n3 S Sartre, Jean-Paul, 110, 563 Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph, xl, xli, 3, 6–12, 12, 13, 13, 14, 20, 23, 35–8, 43, 45, 47, 51, 60, 65, 67–9, 75, 114, 118, 135, 181, 195, 214, 219, 235, 318, 390, 395, 446, 502–4 Schleiermacher, Friedrich, 18 Schulze, Gottlob Ernst, xli, 26–30, 47, 50, 51, 53, 55, 65, 68, 219 Sellars, Wilfrid, xlii, 80, 121, 543, 545, 561–9 Sextus, Empiricus, 47, 51, 52, 55, 65, 69, 234 Socrates, 54, 314 Spinoza, Baruch, 23, 35, 36, 39, 40, 68, 114, 362–4, 531, 534

Name Index T Tetens, Johannes Nikolaus, xxxix, 46, 56, 221, 229, 234, 578, 582 W Wolff, Christian, 49, 212

589 Z Zeno, 26, 54, 247, 313

Subject Index

A Absolute, the, xl, 11, 14, 20n6, 35, 43n4, 47, 51, 54, 65, 67, 69–70, 129, 143, 360–1, 402, 524, 541, 546, 555n8, 583 adverbial use of term, 54, cf. 78 accuracy, xliv, 119, 123, 143, 221, 328, 342, 493 action, theory of, 269–70, 287–8, 291 actual & rational. See rational & actual agency, xlvii, 57, 100, 102, 140, 225, 269, 288, 290, 341, 379, 382–3, 385–6, 413–4, 417, 471, 473, 476, 481, 547–8 anthropology, vii, 139, 144, 232, 242, 286–7, 297, 302, 307, 311, 314, 321, 329 in the physics of individualized matter, 251, 258–9, 261, 269–70, 272–5, 281, 284 in world history, 464 art, vii, xlviii, 37, 75, 103, 113, 117, 126, 128, 232, 337–9, 341–7, 348n1, 348n4, 349n7, 349nn10, 11, 376, 457, 464, 482, 490, 493, 495, 497, 499–500, 508–9, 510–2, 555n13, 583 classical, 340, 343–4, 348, 349n10 romantic, 340–1, 343–4, 348 symbolic, 338, 343–4, 345, 348 ascription, self-, 121, 126 aufheben, Aufhebung. See sublate B beauty, 127, 343–4

becoming, xlix, 114, 169, 171–5, 247, 249, 261, 265n38, 304–5, 413 Being, xlvi, xlviii–xlix, 11, 15, 72, 168–75, 185, 190–2, 204, 211, 216, 224, 228–9, 242–3, 245, 248–50, 262, 280, 287, 293n12, 360, 362, 367, 369n2, 370n9, 417, 472, 578, 581–2 being of nature. See nature Bildung, 120, 276, 282, 290, 311, 383, 425–45, 446n8, 446n10, 447n14, 447n18, 473, 479, 480, 484n18, 484n19, 509 and Spirit, 427, 429–30, 432–4, 482 as acculturation, 415, 418, 426, 427, 431, 437, 439–44, 481, 512 as education, 425, 429–30, 436 as enculturation, 4, 425, 435 as self-cultivation, 272, 425, 427–9, 431, 434, 444 binding, sensory. See sensory integration C capitalism, 373, 409, 411, 416, 421n7. See also civil society Cartesianism, 542, 543–4, 547–53 Categorical Imperative (CI, Kant), 117, 123, 139, 390, 396, 399, 530 causal, causality, cause, cause-effect, 175 causal explanation, xlvi, 58, 219–234 causality & freedom. See freedom civil society, 177, 377–8, 380–1, 387n4, 387n7, 411–3, 418–9, 421n9, 479, 483n15, 515n4

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2020 M. F. Bykova and K. R. Westphal (eds.), The Palgrave Hegel Handbook, Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-26597-7

591

592 co-determination thesis, 230–1. See also reference, singular cognitive; space, individuation; terms cognition, xli–xlv ‘4E’, 269. See also anthropology; epistemology; justification; know; psychology embodied, 269, 273–5 concept, realization of the, 391, 395, 399 concepts a priori, xxxix, xlii, 45–6, 55–7, 221 concepts of reflection (Kant), xliv–xlv, xlvii realize (realisiren, of concepts), xxxix, xliv–xlvi, 45–6, 56, 229, 582 conceptual anlaysis vs. explication, xli–xlii, xlv–xlvi, xlix, 59, cf. 167–81, 201–17, 219, 222–3, 228–32, 344–5, 358 conscience, 100–1, 109, 119, 139–42, 146n5, 177, 308, 383, 457 consciousness, forms of, xli, 65–6, 70–1 phenomenal, 42–3, 52–5, 86–7, 90, 106, 322, 333n2 self-critical character of, 70, 118–9, 121–2 unhappy, 94, 105. See also anthropology; embodiment; Phenomenology of Spirit; psychology constitution (Verfassung). See state(s) contradiction, 123, 169–72 self-, 89, 184, 189, 191–3, 210–1, 244, 246–7, 299, 360, 367. See also dialectic; logic, formal corporations, 177, 378, 380, 383, 412–3, 417–8, 515n4 creation, divine, ex nihilo, 5, 36, 85, cf. 208, 214–5, 233, 541, 543 criterion, Dilemma of. See skepticism, Pyrrhonian D Dasein, xlvi, 120, 10, 172–3, 256, 306, 348n5, 391, 415, 417, 532 death, 42, 92–3, 137, 183–4, 191, 192–3, 273, 282, 298, 308, 340, 435 of God, 104–6 deduction (justification) of concepts (Kant) objective, xlii, 57, 71–2, 207, 216, 233, cf. 250–1 subjective, 57 design, institutional. See institutions dialectic, vii, xlviii–xlix, 48, 52, 55, 58, 72–3, 112, 129, 153, 160–1, 163–5, 165n4, 215, 217n6, 248, 258, 261,

Subject Index 271, 274, 325, 334n7, 363, 412, 414, 418, 426–7, 434–5, 438, 454, 506, 527, 529, 534, 536, 548–9 master-slave, master-servant. See lord & bondsman speculative logic, 151–4, 157, 160, 163 dialectical method. See method, dialectical difference (and identity), xliv, 119, 161, 164, 173, 184–6, 189–90, 192, 244, 246, 248, 300, 378, 427 disposition, 114, 226, 228, 265n43, 273, 330, 353, 418, 491, 549 habitual, 277, 279–80, 286–7, 291, 292n7, 419. See also habit E economy, political, 110, 409–10, 413, 420–1, 422n19 system of needs, 410–2, 415, 417, 515n4. See also institutions egoism, logical, xliii, 135, 144–5 moral, 135, 137–8, 144–5, 551–2 embodiment, 99, 133, 137, 269–72, 274, 277, 279, 283–6, 288–92, 293n12, 418, 420 empiricism, empiricist, xxxix–xlii, xlvi, 45, 49–51, 57, 67–9, 112, 115, 118, 121, 129, 135, 206–7, 209, 215, 223, 235, 248, 322–3, 328, 331, 334n14, 353, 360–1, 393, 507, 543–5, 560–1, 565, 568n3 existence empiricism (Kant), 206–15 enactive, enactivism, 114, 118, 269, 274–5, 292n6 Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences. See Hegel, works: Enc epistemology, vii, xlv, xlix, 46, 51, 55, 58–9, 65–66, 68, 71, 75–9, 140, 142, 151–65, 223, 228, 231, 234n5, 235n12, 320, 322, 332, 529, 565–6 estates, 4, 17, 97, 378, 380–1, 383–6, 413 evolution, 65, 168, 186–7, 203–4, 213–4, 537n17, 547, 552 existence, xlvi, 32, 34, 39, 77, 85, 94, 99–100, 102–3, 105, 118, 129, 145, 172–3, 175, 185–6, 194–6, 204–15, 222, 224–5, 227, 229, 242–3, 245–7, 249, 253–4, 256, 258–60, 262, 263n7, 289, 292, 297–9, 302, 304, 312, 313n9, 317, 321, 338–339, 349n9, 352, 361, 366, 378, 393, 417, 425, 429, 433–6, 438, 444, 446n13, 458, 462, 496, 499, 535, 546 existence empiricism (Kant), 206–15

Subject Index human, 142, 184, 258, 429, 467–9, 471, 474–7, 483n8, 483n13, 559 of freedom. See freedom of God, 351, 353, 357, 359–62, 368 of the mind, 535–6, 543 externalization, 271–2, 292n3, 414, 421n5 F faith, 35, 49, 73, 97–9, 102, 136, 140, 210, 214, 352–3, 356–8, 362, 472–3 fallibilism/infallibilism. See justification family, 106, 120, 177, 374, 377, 381, 387n7, 411, 417, 483n15, 515n4 feeling, 73, 145, 177, 273–92, 297–312 self-, 193, 253–4, 259–61, 275–6, 278, 284–6, 299, 304–7, 312 Fichte, Johann Gottlieb works EPW, xxxiii, 28, 30, 43n1 FNR, xxxiii, 387n11 GA, xxxiii, 32, 33, 35 SK, xxxiii, 33, 35 VM, xxxiii, 32–3 finite, xlii–xliii, xlvii, 26, 28–30, 34, 37, 51, 66, 69, 72, 75–77, 79, 85, 111, 113–4, 116, 125, 135, 139, 143–4, 173–4, 177, 180, 184–5, 208, 244, 247–8, 255–6, 263n11, 264n24, 319, 321, 392, 395–6, 400, 457, 531–2, 554 and infinite, 354–5, 357–69, 369n7, 370n11, 370n13 formalism, 146n3, 154, 235n19, 389–92, 395, 396–400, 403n2, 403n4, 403n5, 403n8, 404n15, 420 practical, 396–7, 400, 404n16, 405n17 freedom, actuality of, 389, 392, 396–7, 399, 402, 404n14, 405n17 actualizing, 392, 398, 405n17 cosmological, 394, 396 of choice, 379, 395, 398, 403n5, 404nn13, 14 existence, of, 381, 391–2, 395–6, 398–402, 405n21 of human behavior, 109–29, 183–96. See also anthropology; embodiment; habit of the will, 392, 394, 395, 398, 404n13

593 G Geist (spirit), 146n9, 202, 255, 263n4, 263n13, 264n18, 270, 297, 299, 314n24, 321, 334n12, 376, 443, 498, 507–8, 531, 535 absolute, xlviii, 75–6, 79, 101–7, 109–29, 143–4, 208, 211, 214, 352, 354, 366, 454, 456–60, 464, 508–12 free, 245, 304, 355, 398–402, 456–7, 492 objective, xlvii, 18, 75, 96, 109–145 passim, 272, 373–445 passim, 454, 457, 463, 508–11 subjective, xlvii–xlviii, 75, 117–8, 229–333 passim, 352, 354, 356, 365–6, 368–9, 376, 401, 414, 420, 455, 464, 476, 507, 509 of a time (epoch), 499 world, 250, 257, 426, 430, 431, 433, 442–3, 453–65, 477–8, 498, 513–4, 563 geognosy, 255 and physical geography, 255 God, 5, 26, 37, 60n9, 85, 86, 98–100, 102–7, 113, 116, 118–9, 125, 128, 144, 233, 244, 311, 351–8, 361–9, 369n6, 370n11, 370n13, 456, 461, 467, 468–9, 471–2, 476, 491, 504, 522, 531–534, 537n12, 541, 551 great chain of being. See scala naturae ground, retreat into, 89–90, 95, 97, 102, 106. See also proof, regressive H habit, 192, 254, 259, 261, 269–70, 272, 275–92, 292n4, 292n9, 292n10, 293n12, 293n13, 299, 416–7, 422n15, 440, 498 habituation, 282, 289, 307, 309, 312 hand, invisible, 410–2 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich biography, 3–20 works Briefe, xxxvii, 8, 12–7, 35–6 Diff., xxxiv, 10–1 EGP, xxxvii, 470 Enc., xxxv, xliv, xlvi–xlviii, 16, 18–9, 46, 54, 58, 59, 66–9, 73–4, 77–8, 130n4, 146n5, 168, 171, 174, 178–9, 186–9, 191–3, 195, 196n1, 196n11, 197n15, 197n20, 204, 208, 213, 225, 228–9, 230–4, 235nn14, 19, 242–62, 263nn1, 7, 264n20,

Subject Index

594 270–2, 274–83, 285–6, 288–92, 292n4, 319, 331–2, 333n2, 334nn6, 7, 12, 16, 335nn19, 26, 337, 379–80, 391, 399–402, 404n16, 405nn17, 21, 415, 417, 432, 446n9, 444–7, 455, 457, 463, 465nn6, 7, 486, 567, 576, 580, 584 Enc. 1, xlv, 85, 87–8, 186, 304, 356–8, 360–2, 364, 366, 368, 369nn3, 6, 7, 370n12, 447n14, 455, 469–71, 475, 483n11, 531, 533, 535, 545, 548–9 Enc. 2, xxxv, 178–9, 298, 302–3, 312n1, 455, 469 Enc. 3, xxxv, 270–2, 275, 277–9, 285–6, 288–92, 297–301, 303–11, 312nn1, 3, 4, 313nn9, 14, 16, 314nn22, 26, 352, 354–6, 358, 363, 369n5, 415, 435, 438, 454–7 ETW, xxxv, 440 F&K, xxxiv, 353, 356, 369n2 G&W, xxxiv, 54 GWKat, xxxiii, 453 HPR, xxxv, 187, 188 HSL, xxxv, 184, 192–3, 196n2 JS, xxxiv, 225, 411 Letters, xxxvii, 5, 7–8, 12–6, 35–6, 446n9 LFA, xxxvi, xxxviii, 348n1 LHP, xxxvii, xliv, xlviii, 54, 241, 356, 437, 457, 470, 485, 489–500, 504–7, 509, 513–4 LPRel, xxxvi, 464 LProofs, xxxvi, 352–3, 356–9, 361–6, 369, 369n1, 369n6, 370n11 LPS, xxxvii, 277–80, 282–3, 287–9, 291 LPSJ, xxxvi, 411–2 LPWH, xxxvii, 265n42, 349n9, 425, 433–4, 443, 453, 455, 458–9, 461– 3, 467, 469–82, 483n4, 483nn8, 11, 13, 16, 484n19 M, xxxv, 90–106, 107n6, 528 MM, 54, 60n14, 152–5, 157–64, 165n1– 3, 9, 13–14, 186, 188–9, 191–3, 195, 196nn7, 10, 11, 197nn15, 16, 18, 20, 21, 318, 322, 334n12, 337–43, 346–7, 348n1, 349nn1, 13, 360, 364, 367, 370nn9, 10, 15, 375, 415, 427, 446n9, 457, 465n3, 489, 496, 505–7, 509, 513–4, 514n1, 515n10 NL, xxxvi, 420 NR, xxxv, 390, 400, 404n16 PEA, xxxv, 17

PhG, xxxiv, xxxv, xlxiii–xliv, xlviii, 13, 47, 52–6, 58–9, 67, 70, 78, 89–106, 107n8, 109, 112, 114, 120, 130nn8, 9, 133–45, 146nn9, 10, 172, 176, 178, 207, 225, 264n17, 332, 334n8, 400, 403n3, 403n16, 426, 432, 434–5, 438–9, 441, 443–4, 528 Phil. Prop., xxxiv, 235n13 RPh, xxxv, 88, 187, 232, 260, 282, 292n4, 308, 375, 382, 390, 396, 398, 400–2, 404n16, 405n20, 410–3, 415–8, 420, 422n14, 441, 447n13, 457–8, 462, 464–5, 499, 585 Skept., xxxiv, 52, 54, 68–9, 244, 360, 364, 367–8, 370nn9, 10, 15, 469, 565 SL, xxxv, 18, 235n15, 251, 261, 265n43 SW, xxxiv, 51, 488 V, xxxvi, 469–73, 476–82, 483n4, 483n11, 483n13, 483n16, 488 VBew, xxxvi, 18 VGeist, xxxvii, 276, 278–80, 282–3, 287–9, 291 VKunst, xxxvi, 337–47, 348n1, 349n13 VLog, xxxvi, 191–2, 195, 263n10 VNat, xxxvi–xxxvii, 244–7, 250, 252, 263nn4, 12, 14, 264nn18, 19, 25, 265n35 VPhG, xxxvii, 278–9, 281, 283, 287–8 VPhGes, xxxviii, 454 VPhW, xxxvii, 256, 257, 265nn38, 39, 40, 42, 425, 433–4, 444, 454–5, 474–6, 479, 483n8, 484n19 VRel, xxxvi, 351–2, 354–5, 364–9, 370n14 WL, xxxv, xliv, xlvi, 18–9, 24, 46, 59, 71–2, 76–7, 85, 87–91, 105, 169–70, 172–5, 181, 184–5, 192–3, 196n2, 217n2, 235n15, 242, 251, 253, 261, 298, 302, 360, 364, 367–8, 370nn9, 10, 15, 374, 375, 391, 395, 402, 469, 525, 532–4, 536n2, 537nn14, 15 WVF, xxxiv, 454, 465n3, 487 heroes, of world spirit, 477 historiography, 203, 205, 383, 458–60 original, 458 philosophical, 460 pragmatic, 459 reflected, 459 history, xl, xlvi, xlix, 11, 49–50, 57–8, 78, 139, 233, 375, 381, 383–5

Subject Index formative, of consciousness. See Phenomenology of Spirit geographical basis of, 242, 249–50, 256–8 of nature, 168, 173, 178, 204, 213 of philosophy, v, xlviii, 38, 40, 66–8, 384, 457, 485–97, 499–502, 505–6, 508–9, 511–4, 561, 566, 569n3 of pure reason, 47–9, 52, 59, 73, 486 of spirit, 101, 103–4, 339, 427, 457, 460, 510, cf. Bildung. See also Philosophy of History holism, xli, 69, 183–6, 190, 230, 280, 335n28, 370n8, 534, 565 hypnotism, 312 I I (1st person, oneself), 68–69, 87, 114, 119–20, 129, 134, 176, 186, 242, 261–62, 264n20, 285–6, 288, 307, 312, 435. See also individual; recognition; self; self-consciousness idea/ideal, 14, 26, 73, 75, 76, 118, 170–1, 175, 208, 210–2, 298, 304, 344, 355, 364, 400, 441, 460, 462–3, 474, 476, 500, 511, 513, cf. 341–2 of the good, 127, 175 regulative, 125–8, 230, 242–6, 445, 456, 461, 553–4 idealism, 194–6 absolute, xli, 51, 66, 76, 110, 215, 254, 319–20, 322, 391–2, 510, 531–6, 546, 566 British, 223, 228, 521–2, 526–7 German, vii, 6, 36, 185, 318, 390, 394–5, 429, 506–8, 531, 549, 560 Refutation of (Kant), xxix, 544 subjective, 123, 125, 136, 320, 546, 563 transcendental, xxxix, xli, xlii, 46–7, 53, 56, 157–60, 221–4, 235n16, 248, 394, 506, 566. See also Name Index for specific authors identity, xliv, 11, 16, 20n6, 43n4, 66, 69, 70, 76, 78, 87, 112, 116, 119, 146n10, 126, 129, 152, 156, 169–70, 184–6, 189–92, 195, 197n22, 227, 242, 244–6, 248, 252–3, 261–2, 264n11, 271, 284–5, 295, 300, 302, 329, 369nn1, 2, 10, 383, 400, 412, 417, 443, 502, 547 independence, 24, 32, 68, 92–4, 96, 99, 104, 135, 140, 188, 245, 253, 257, 262,

595 341, 345, 347, 353, 356, 393–4, 412, 431, 434, 530, 546, 550 individual, the, 18, 67, 74, 87, 97, 99–100, 123, 133, 140, 259, 271, 276, 285, 287, 289, 292, 30, 302–3, 306–8, 323, 327–328, 342, 381, 387n7, 413, 416–7, 419–420, 426, 428–2, 434, 436–3, 455, 472–3, 479–83, 491, 532, 534, 552. See also I, the; self, the individualism, 57, 133–7, 144, 146n8, 177, 410, 412–4, 420. See also ontology, social individuality, 475–6 infinite, true, 358, 360, 364–6, 369 inner/outer, xliv–xlv, 549 insanity, 137, 297, 305 institutions, 110, 117, 120, 124, 137–40, 177, 272, 292n3, 374–5, 378, 387n7, 413–20, 422n15, 439–40, 446, 467, 479–83, 497, 500, 509, 555n13 institutional design, 384, 409–21 intuition, 288, 339, 477 forms of (Kant), 206, 208 humanist (J. Gibson), 347 intellectual, xl–xli, 14, 51–2, 113, 116, 118, 231, 582 original, 28 pure (Kant), 355 sensory, 28–9, 48, 74, 113, 157–60, 166, 171, 216, 241, 243, 261, 306–7, 317–33, 357, 393, 532, 565, cf. 545. See also intuitionism intuitionism, 144 immediate (Jacobi), 85 logical, 147n11 moral, 139, 140–1 irritability, 265n13, 302–3 J judgement, xxxiv, xli–xliv, 27–8, 45–6, 48–50, 53, 55–57, 59, 68, 71, 74, 77–78, 80n4, 97, 115–6, 119–24, 126–9, 130n4, 134–6, 138–43, 303, 305, 309, 385, 387n10, 456, 471, 482, 522–5, 527, 530–35, 536n2, 537n15, 564–5, 582–3 justification, fallibile, xlv, 125, 135, 143–5, 176, 221–3, 551–2 infallible, xlvi, 77, 221–3, 326 rational, xlii–xliii, 143–5. See also deduction

596 K Kant, Immanuel works Anth., xliii, 135, 137, 144 CJ, 60n3, 138, 181n6, 220, 225, 393, 403n11, 404n14, 583 CPR, xxxix, xli, xliii, xliv, xlv, 24–30 passim, 45, 48–50, 53–4, 60n9, 61n16, 73, 138, 154, 156–60 passim, 165, 171, 205–7, 222, 225, 230, 233, 325, 352, 359, 393–4, 404n14, 486 CPrR, 355–6, 393–4, 403n10, 404n14 Gr, 139, 217n2, 393–4 MFNS, 224 MM, 139, 393, 394, 404n13, 404n14 Prol., 5, 50, 125 know, knower, knowing, 65–132 passim, 319–33 passim absolute, xlviii, 54, 71–3, 75, 77–9, 85–6, 102–5, 110 a conceptual, xlii, xlix, 56, 58, 77, cf. knowing, immediate apparent, xli, 47, 51–6 a priori, 24–5, cf. logic, transcendental by acquaintance. See know, aconceptual by description. See reference, singular cognitive commonsense, xlii divine, 28 false, 70–1, 76 finite, 28–34, 37, 40–1 forms of. See consciousness, forms of immediate, 40, 77, 87, 89, 135–6, 144, 356, 358 natural-scientific, xxxix, xl, 110, 114, 201–262 passim philosophical theory of. See epistemology presuppositionless, xliii–xliv, 88 scientific (wissenschaftlich, systematic), 25, 43, 71–7, 85–107 passim, 109, 114, 495 self-knowing, 24, 25, 32–6, 38–40, 42–3, 57–8, 87, 116–20, 129, 319, 434, 440, 443–5, 455–8, 464, 468, 473 synthetic a priori, xxxix, 68, 165n8, 355 transcendental, 24–7, cf. logic, transcendental vs. faith. See faith vs. familiarity, xliv, cf. 230. See also cognition; epistemology; justification knowledge. See epistemology; knowing

Subject Index L language, lingual, linguistic, 99, 112 Hegel’s, 185–6, 468, 470, 481, 498, 560 & generality (concepts, classifications), 329, cf. 395 & social history, xl, 49–50, 59, 77, 97, 124–5, 272, 468, cf. Bildung & logic, 77–8, 522, 528–9, 560 authoritative as language, 98 ordinary (everyday), 117, 521, cf. 564 poetic, 308, cf. 339–40 translation, 112, 495 life, xlvii, 191–4, 273ff., 568 and its space, 242, 253–4 animal, 92–4, 110, 224–6, 232, 252, 255, 366, 469 citric acid (Krebs) cycle, 179–80 concept of, 208, 252, 254 daily, 489 fetal, 297, 300, 301, 309 -form, 272, 273 forms of, 73, cf. biology organic. See life, animal social (human), xlvii, 119–20, 124, 126, 176, 374, 378, 497, 509, 559, cf. Bildung; history; spirit, objective Locke, John, Essay Concerning Human Understanding, 56, 217n5, 507 logic, xlvi, 58, 77, 112–3, 119, 151ff., 233 das Logische, 77, cf. 88, 90, 217, cf. 180–1, 208–9, 231 dialectic-speculative, 66, cf. 73, 77, 170–1 modal, 378, 522ff., cf. 328, 368 non-contradiction, law of, 123, 139, 229, 244 Port Royal, 522 predicate, 521–2, 526–7 subjective, 109, 126, xlvi, 72, 75, cf. 109ff., 126, 384, 525 tense. See time, tense logic transcendental, xliv, 151–61, 164, cf. 207–9, 211 logical egoism (Kant), xliii, 135, 144 –empiricism, xlii, 521, 545, 560, 561, 563, 566 –positivism. See logical empiricism logicism, 47, 522, 560 lord & bondsman (master/slave, master/servant), 57, 72, 93, 107n11, 133–5, 137, 435, 437–8, 550

Subject Index M magic, 167, 168, 272, 305, 309, 546 market(s), 410ff. master & servant. See lord & bondsman mathematics, xl, xliv, xlvii, 26, 110, 113–4, 125, 129, 162, 201, 202, 203, 204– 6, 224, 246, 248–9, 280, 385, 418, 490, 493, 521–2, 524–7, 559–60 mechanics (branch of physics), xl, 203, 205, 212, 220, 225, 247–52, 584 mechanism, xlvi, 114, 128–9, 151, 168, 175, 219–20, 225, 226, 229, 234, 241–2, 252–5, 311, 320 bodily routine, 278–89, 302, 305, 330, 416–7, cf. 442 mechanization, 412 method, l, 15, 88–91, 151–65, 167–81, 319–23, 486, 491, 545–6 conceptual analysis vs. conceptual explication, xli–xlvi, 220, 222, 228 dialectical, 77–9, 151–65 Findlay, 525–6 heuristics, 219, 225 individualism, methodological, 414, 420 institutional–, 414, 418 Kant, 26 phenomenological (Hegel), 42, 48, 55–7, 59, 66–7, 85–107, 113, 125, 133, 135, 136, 155, 161–4 plain, historical (Locke), 217n5, 507 schematizing formalism, 235n19 skeptical, 52–3, 129, 223, 542–3 transcendental doctrine of, xlii–xliii, 47, 48, 135, 138 transcendental reflection, 48, 59, 223, 391, 405n17 methodological individualism, 414, 420 mind. See anthropology, psychology mindedness, human, xlvii, 18, 57, 124–5, 233, cf. 120 social. See spirit, objective. See also Bildung; Cartesianism; pragmatism – & world, 36–7, 326, 565–6 moral, morality, l, 85, 99–106, 119, 123–4, 136, 139–45, 177, 383, 508. See also objective spirit; Philosophy of Right; practical philosophy; Sittlichkeit – egoism (Kant), 135, 137–8, cf. 308 – faith, 352–69, cf. 456–7 – historiography, 459 – perfection, 428

597 – psychology, 379, cf. 534, 545 – sciences, 117, 213, 232 – world order, 477–8 motion, 192, 195, 247–50, 253, 302–3, 411–2, 478, 498. See also mechanics (branch of physics) N nation. See state(s), nation(s) nationalism, 16, 482, 492 nature, history of, 178, 204 human, 26, 120, 145, 352, cf. Anthropology, Psychology self-external being of, 251 stages of, 178–81, cf. Philosophy of Nature state of, xliii, 138, 145, 480 –transcendental author of (Kant), 27–8. See also Philosophy of Nature; Enc. 2; science, natural needs, human (organic), 134, 194–5, 258, 281–2, 411, 471, 493 organismic (biological), 226, 253, 258 spiritual (human drives, aspirations), 338–9, 343–4, 348, 367–8, 375, 381, 412, 440, 464, 471, 477–8, 483, 486, 534–5, 546, 548, 549–51. See also Bildung system of. See economy; institutions negation, xxxix, 533 abstract, 254, 447n14 determinate, 23–4, 39–42, 55, 89, 91, 97, 99, 101, 102, 103, 104, 105, 106, 533, cf. 244, 360–1. See also logic negative, negativity, 40, 42, 68, 71, 94, 98, 104–6, 163–4, 172, 189, 191–3, 245–7, 261, 282, 288, 360, 362–3, 367, 400, 427, 435–8, 471, 477, 481, cf. 533 non-contradiction, logical law of. See logic, non-contradiction normativity, norms, 18, 46, 48, 91, 109–145 passim, 290, 293n12, 341, 375, 381, 396–403, 409–21, 438–45, 462, 476–83, 500, 509, 513, 543, 546, 549–53 nothing (concept, category of), xlix, 169–72, 175, 247, 262, 360, 366 creation ex nihilo, 5, 36, 85, 208, 214–5, 233, 541, cf. 106 privation, 40–2 noumena (Kant), xl, 56, 77

598 O ontology, 66, 67, 76, 151–65, 219–62 passim ontological argument (proof), 365–9 ontological difference, 120 holism, moderate, xli, 224, 227–8 natural (Henrich), 71 social, 134, 414, 417. See also Bildung; relations, concepts of organism, organicism, organicity, 364, 366, 478 aesthetic, 342, 345 biological, xlvii, 104, 178, 192, 193, 213–4, 219–34, 241–58, 270–3, 282–5, 297–8, 302, 546–7 cosmological, 92, 203–4, 311 geological, 255 natural, 180, 208 social, 258–62, cf. 280–1, 413–4, 420–1. See also anthropology originality, 13, 67, 138, 163, 249, 338, 413, 549 other, otherness, 43, 75, 86, 92–7, 103–7, 158, 161, 170–1, 173–4, 212, 258–9, 261–2, 427, 436–8, 472, 479, 482, 493, 545, 550 being at home in (or with), xlii–xliii, 18, 92, 97, 99–103, 105–7, 142–5, 186–96, 252, 262, 288, 290, 389, 395–6, 401, 415, 435, cf. 324, 342, 359, 413, 421, 468, 472, 478, 481–2. See also ontology, social; ­recognition, mutual; spirit, absolute of nature, 212, 241–6, 251, 255 ownership. See property P panlogism, 214 Paralogisms of Pure Reason (Kant), 221, 318 Parmenidean exercises, 54–6, 59, cf. 244 pathology, psycho-, 270, 272, 275, 276, 281, 285, 286, 310, 324, 555n10 social pathology, 477 performative, performativity, 109–29, 415–6, 419–20 perspectival, perspective, 125, 188, 383–6, 390–7, 402, 436–7, 454–64, 475, 229–32 pessimism, 115, 116 Phenomenology of Spirit (1807), xli–xliv, xlviii, 11–5, 18, 19, 42–3, 45–59, 65–73, 85–107, 109–22, 129, 133–45, 152, 155, 159, 160, 168,

Subject Index 172, 173, 176–8, 181, 221, 223, 227–9, 231, 259, 341, 346, 427, 432, 434–9, 455, 460, 468, 488, 507, 511, 528, 563, 567 Enc. (3rd ed., §§413–439), 242, 261–2, 274, 275, 286, 297, 507 phenomena, phenomenon, xlix, 59, 223–4, 232, 382 aggregate, 226 mere appearances, semblances, 70 cognition (knowledge) as, 47, 56, 70–1, 86–90, 106. See also consciousness, form(s) of of embodiment, 284–92 natural, xlviii, 178, 202, 207, 220, 229–30, 233, 251 public, xlii psychological, 85, 270, 275, cf. 283, 322. See also anthropology social & historical, xliii, xliv, xlviii, 57, 133–45, 211, 377, cf. 110, 202, 233, 270, 378, 380–1, 383–6, 414–6, 430, 433–4, 442, 456, 501–2 spiritual, 258–62, 510. See also phenomena, social & historical spatio-temporal, xl, xliv–xlv, 58, 248 vs. noumena (Kant), xl, 56, 77 phenomenalism, phenomenalist, 68, 320, 545, cf. 532 phenomenological, phenomenology (nonHegelian), 66, 125, 161, 163, 520, 530 philosophy, Critical (Kant), xxxix–xli, 11, 45–59, 85, 185, 206, 220–5, 232, 352–3, 357, 390, 391, 397, 400, 505–6, 566, cf. 23 empiricist. See empiricism humanistic, 14, 427, 429, 433, 500, 567, cf. 347 of art. See aesthetics of history. See Philosophy of History of nature, 392–3. See also Philosophy of Nature of religion. See Philosophy of Religion of Right (Recht, justice). See Philosophy of Right of science, xlv, xlvii, 58, 59, 110, 201–6. See also Philosophy of Nature of spirit. See Philosophy of Spirit Philosophy of History, 66, 140, 250, 257, 433–4, 453–65, 467–83, 568, 582 Philosophy of Nature, xlvii, xlviii, 16, 110, 152, 168, 173, 178–80, 193,

Subject Index 201–62, 298, 300, 302, 319, 329, 333, 392, 394 Philosophy of Religion, 78, 85–107, 351–69, 457, 464 Philosophy of Right (Rph), xlvii, 18–9, 75, 88, 117, 168, 173, 177, 187, 188, 249–50, 260, 308, 373–421, 426, 427, 432, 457, 462–3, 465, 479, 486, 502, 508 Philosophy of Spirit, xlvii–xlviii, 16, 75, 176–8, 188, 202, 213, 249–51, 253, 261, 272–514 passim. See also Hegel, works (listed by abbreviations); spirit pluralism, 76, 143, 318, 382–6, 530 political, politics, 7, 14, 16, 19, 110, 124, 138, 232, 258, 310, 373–421 passim, 428, 440, 462, 464, 479, 493–5, 499, 501, 506, 510, 562. See also Philosophy of Right poverty, 412–3, 417 practice, practical, pragma, 7, 11, 15, 51, 68, 73, 75, 78, 96, 101, 110–29, 134–5, 137–9, 144, 176, 233, 243, 278, 280, 283, 286, 289, 311, 339, 340, 346, 352–6, 373–420 passim, 430–1, 437, 439–42, 445, 463–5, 482, 490, 530, 542, 546–53, 564, 568. See also habit practical faith. See faith pragmatic historiography. See historiography, pragmatic pragmatism, pragmatist, 111, 113, 122, 125, 127, 417, 420, 535, 541–55, 559–64 pre-conscious(ness), 305, 309 preferences, 417–9 presage, 309, 312 presupposition, xl, xlii, xlviii, 29, 38, 71–2, 97, 106, 109–12, 117, 120–9, 159, 162, 169, 180, 206, 208, 209, 211, 212, 214, 228, 230, 246, 254, 255, 256, 269, 270–1, 279, 289, 299, 312, 326, 332, 361, 365, 367, 379, 382, 389, 396, 397, 399, 400, 402, 414, 461, 469, 480, 493, 535–6, 547 presuppositionless(ness), xliii–xliv, 76, 78–9, 86–90, 105, 152, 164, 185, 354–5, 543, 548 proof, 76, 85–6, 88–91, 126, 206, 210, 212, 251, 393, 490–1 cosmological, 352, 358–66 indirect, xlvi, xlix, 212 moral (of God), 456 ontological, 365–9

599 regressive, 57 teleological, 365, 366 theological, 351–69, 456 transcendental, 223 property, proprietary, proprietor, 125, 140, 258, 328, 378, 412, 415 providence, 433, 467–73, 476 psychologism, 46, 50, 59, 583, cf. xxix psychosomatic, psychosomatism, 297, 307, 309, 311 Q quality & quantity, 170, 173, 174 R rational & actual, 18–9, 458, 461–2, cf. 464–5 rational, vs. irrational, 95–7, 103–5, 401, 562, cf. 35 rationalism, rationalist, xxxix, xl, 5, 23, 45, 47, 50, 135, 185, 206, 207, 232, 250, 400, 507, 543–5, 553 realism, realist, 75, 322 causal, 58, 228 commonsense, xl, 58 dogmatic, 35 epistemological, 53, 66, 76, 228, cf. 532, 543, 546 naive, xlii, xlix, 55, 56, 58, 59, 136 pluralist, 530 scientific, 561, 562 structural, 76, 77 realize (realisiren), of concepts. See concept; reference, singular cognitive architectonic, of, 392–4 child’s, 549, cf. 339 critique (assessment) of, 47ff., 354–5, 368 cunning of, 413, 455, 467–8, 473–6, 482, 563 fact of (Kant), 355–6 form of consciousness (PhG), 58, 72–3, 95–103, 119, 122–6, 135–9, 177, 228, 248, 259, 262 heroes of, 389, 491, 496 historicity of, 47–9, 57–9, 73, 486 meta-critique of, 47, 49–50, 55, 135 practical, 96, 123, 137, 352, 355, 390–2, 394, 396–7, 400 pure, xl. See also Kant reason, 369 speculative, 5, 37, 337, 359 system of (Kant), 26, 48–9, 162, 393–5

600 theoretical, 7, 35, 37–8, 225, 393 reciprocity, of processes, interactions, 178, 181, 191, 226, 272, 289 of specifications (determinations), xlv, xlvii, 89, 246–7, 363, 548 social, 18, 176, 180, 411, 438 recognition, among animals, 272 defective, 93, 563 mutual, xliii, 72, 134, 137, 143–5, 176, 177, 415–9, 435–9, 535, 549–50, 552 primacy of practical, 126 social (civil), 177, 380, 383, 412, 419, 551 spirit, self-recognition of, 454, 504 reconciliation, inter-personal, 101, 143, 435, 437–8 social (political), 435, 458 with actuality, 513, 554 with history, 474, 478, cf. 381 with loss, tragedy, 188, 193, 461–2 with onself, 441–2 reductionism, anti-reductionism, 109–10, 129, 203, 220, 224–5, 259, 260, 287–8, 300–1, 318, 330, 356, 358, 366, 524–5, 527–9, 532, 535–6, 546 reference, singular cognitive, xliv–xlv, 56–7, 221–2, 229, cf. 230–1. See also concept, realize (realisiren); terms relations, causal. See cause cognitive. See epistemology, knowledge concepts (kinds, species) of, xlv, xlix, 54, 57–9, 134, 173–4, 177, 220, 223–4, 227, 271–2, 280, 328, 522, 524–5, 528–30, 535, cf. 77–8, 241–62, 308–9, 377–8, 383, 415 world-. See epistemology, knowledge relativism, relativity, 51, 69, 79, cf. 54, 78, 111, 121, 125–6, 139, 209–10, 215, 235n16, 377–80, 398, cf. 527 sceptical trope of, 47, 50–1, 71 religion, 113–9, 124, 126, 128–9, 177, 203, 232–3, 310, 343–6, 376, 428, 456, 457, 464, 482, 493, 495, 497, 499, 508, 510, 545, 549, 559, 560, 566 fideism, 60n9 in PhG, 58, 85–107, 140, 144, 341, 346 (mere) faith & feeling, 73 theological proofs, 351–69. See also Philosophy of Religion S Sache, xliv, 54, 61n16, 71, 152, 341, 365, 368, 385 scala naturae, 197n21, 204, 214

Subject Index Schelling, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph works FDSP, xl, xli Heath, 38 HKA, 45 SW, 38, 51 Science of Logic, Logic. See Hegel, works: HSL, SL, WL science(s), xlviii, 25–6, 49, 65, 68, 109, 489 cognitive, 269–92, cf. 126 historical, 110, 459, 490, 495 moral (social), 110, 117, 410–21, 489–90 natural, xxxix, xl, xlv–xlvii, 5, 55, 58–9, 68, 88, 110, 114–5, 125, 179–81, 191, 317, 432, 523, 542, 544, 551, 559–63, cf. Philosophy of Nature philosophical, xliii, 5, 15, 66, 117, 495–6, 511–2, cf. epistemology; know; Hegel, works: Enc.; method; social. See also science(s), moral scientia, 109, 220, 222–5 scientism, 65, 68, 126, 128–9 second nature (human nature, culture), 259, 281, 414, 416–7, 420, 477, 480. See also Bildung; ontology, social; spirit, objective self, the. See I, the; individual self-consciousness, 95–107, 109, 116–7, 176–7, 242ff., 256, 262, 309, 343, 432–3, 455–7, 462, 492, 536, 550 apperception (Kant), xliii, xlix, 70–3, 118, 230, 262 Descartes, 118–9 I=I (Fichte), 69, 119 PhG pt. II, 58, 91–5, 103, 119–20, 122, 129, 133–45 pragmatic history of (Fichte), 75. See also anthropology, Phenomenology of Spirit, psychology speculative, 113, cf. 126 self-organization, 203, 225, 270–3, 277, 280, 283–5, 290 self-understanding. See understanding, selfself-sufficiency, 32–3, 133–45, 176, 188, 435, 439–40. See also independence sensibility, 69, 157–9, 161, 165, 279, 297–333, 505–6 proper & common sensibles (Aristotle), 544–5 sensation, sensory, xlii, xlvii, xlix, li, 24, 29, 32, 48, 49, 50, 56, 58, 65, 91, 95, 112, 136, 168, 171, 176, 206, 207, 216, 243, 246, 259, 260, 261, 269–333, 343, 357, 384, 441, 486,

Subject Index 505, 543–5, 553. See also intuition, sensory (Kant); sensibility sensory integration (binding), 48, 171, cf. 280–1 sentience, 27, 121, 122, 394. See also perception; sensation; sensibility singular cognitive reference. See reference; singular terms. See terms. See also individual Sittlichkeit (ethical life), 119, 124, 139, 389–402, 417, 456–7, 508, 515n4 skepticism, xxxix–xli, 7, 23, 40, 41, 49, 65, 67, 72–9, 94, 115–6, 122, 223, 227, 331, 486, 545, 563 ancient, 55, 58, 65–6, 69 Cartesian, 72, 74, 129, 222–3, 542–3 Dilemma of the Criterion, xli, 47, 51–3, 56, 65, 69–72, 135–6 Hume, 57, 58, 125, 352, cf. 129 Kantian, xl, 23 post-Kantian, 26–33, 47, 50–2, 58–9, 68, 69 Pyrrhonian, 47, 50–2, 69, 71, 72 self-consummating, 48, 52–5, 67–8, 129 skill, 114, 134, 146n7, 213, 280, 283, 288–90, 301, 329, 382, 410, 417, 491, 493. See also habit society, civil. See civil society somnambulism, 275–6, 285, 309, 310 soul, xlvii, 117, 119, 122–4, 161–3, 187, 242, 249, 258–62, 269–92, 297–312, 318, 319, 329, 341, 368, 417, 439, 549, 552 beautiful, 104, 142 Idea of (Kant), 118 world-soul, 366. See also anthropology; psychology; sentience space, spaces, spatial, 241–62, 385 and time, 92, 113, 176, 180, 211, 212, 230, 232, 308 a priori concept, xliv, 46, 55–6, 221 as form of intuition (Kant), 505. See also intuition, forms of externality (partes extra partes), 208, 212, 241–53, 298–9 Fichte, 34 geographical (regions), 255–8 habitat, 253–5, cf. 307–9 human (social), 258–62, 339, 377, 414–6 individuation, xlix, 50, 212, 324–8. See also reference, singular cognitive quality space, 533–4 sensory integration (binding), 48, 171, 274–5, 279, cf. 280–1

601 transition between, 212–3 spirit (Geist). See Geist state(s), nation(s), 106, 110, 117, 124, 125, 177, 214, 373–86, 411, 416, 418, 457–8, 461, 464, 467–9, 473, 475, 478–83 constitution(alism), 16, 260, 479, 497 German, 16, 428 government, 98, 374–5, 497, 499, 510, cf. 337 of nature, xliii, 138, 145 power, 98. See also estates; institutions struggle (interpersonal, social), 7, 98, 138, 381, 415, 499, cf. 185, 489. See also lord & bondsman sublate (aufheben, Aufhebung), xlviii, 66, 72, 78–9, 90, 116–7, 154, 167–81, 189, 211, 213, 245, 247, 251, 254, 256, 260, 262, 298–90, 303, 305–6, 356, 359–61, 443, 455, 581–2 synthesis (integrate, unify), 159, 171, 174 biological, 193, 226 cognitive, 76, 325–7, 331. See also co-determination; sensory integration; sublate systems, complex, 201–17, 219–234, 412 T teleology, xlvi, 127, 151, 167–8, 175, 219, 304, 375–6, 414, 416, 433, 455 autotelic processes, 271 historical, 467–83. See also providence; systems, complex teleological, (design) argument. See proof, theological terms, general & singular, 329–30, 429, cf. 119. See also co-determination; reference, singular cognitive thing-in-itself (Kant), 29–32, 34, 40, 77, 159, 544 time, 94, 113, 143, 171, 175, 179, 205, 376, 433, 521–36, cf. 384 and contingent truth(s), 522, 546 a priori concept of, xliv, 46, 48, 112, 324, 327–8 historical, 101, 104, 374–5, 453–65, 467–83, 497 modern (epoch), 74, 331, 362, 374–5, 378, 409, 412, 415, 441, 489, 494, 500–8 natural, 221, 242, 244, 246–56, 324, 327 tense logic, 526–30. See also space, and time

Subject Index

602 transition, 90, 106–7, 122, 133–45, 164, 241–62, 299–307, 312, 321, 326, 328–31, 357, 363–7, 384–6, 415, 416, 439, 441, 460, 472–6, 533 double, 170–81, 581–2. See also sublate Trinity, 106 truth, xliv–xlvii, 53–4, 68–71, 73–4, 85–6, 105–6, 109, 154, 211, 330–2, 532–5, 546, cf. 157–9, 339, 344, 357–8, 522, 553–4 conditions, 526 correct(ness), 525 criterion of, 51–2, 65–6, 91, 111, 203 ideal, 113, 116–7, 120, 122, 123–4, 127–8, cf. 217, 328 mundane, 128–9 synthetic necessary, xlii. See also realize (realisiren) Tübinger Stift (seminary), 3–8, 10, 12, 35, 195, 503, 525

U understanding (Verstand, vs. reason), 51, 119, 155, 172, 243–4, 337, 351, 363, 505–6, 568, cf. 160, 207–8 partial (Burge), 146n8 self-, 59, 60n9, 144–5, 321–2, 433, 444, 464, 475, 481, cf. 124, 471 W whole, organic, xlviii, xlix, 11, 34, 71–2, 78–9, 86, 92, 96, 114–7, 127, 167–8, 177, 207–8, 230, 233–4, 364–7, 369, cf. 183–96, 326–7, 332–3 world history. See philosophy of history Z zoôn politikon, 133–45, 439