Poetic Thinking

In a sort of postscript, Pippin makes a few comments on Heidegger’s valorization of poetry.

“The later Heidegger’s work is dominated by reflections on thinking, poetry, and language. That is, his focus remains on the meaningfulness of Being, now as embodied in language and material works of art, not in Dasein’s comportment and actions…. Moreover, he constantly stresses the great difficulty of the uncovering or disclosing striven for in any understanding of the meaning of Being, going so far as to note frequently that this requires a kind of ‘violence’ on our part to ‘achieve’ such openness” (The Culmination, p. 205).

I am troubled by this invocation of necessary violence. On the one hand it could serve as a metaphor for the difficulty of dislodging prejudices, but in recent years I have come to worry more, hearing talk about violence from a philosopher who is generally weak on ethics, and who evidently believed in 1933 that Hitler’s rise could somehow lead to a better, more spiritual Germany, saving the world from capitalism and communism.

“We have noted several times that Heidegger’s charge of forgetfulness and the consequences of this forgetfulness in a technological, spiritless, even nihilistic world would be empty were there not some contrast with this rejection of the prioritization of discursive intelligibility as the thinking proper to sources of meaning in an epoch” (p. 206).

“The most familiar term for this new sort of thinking is ‘poetic’, by which Heidegger means in very general terms the authentic sort of contemplative activity, expressed in a suitable language, rightly attuned to the disclosure of meaningfulness” (p. 207).

“Poetry is now treated in the terms used for what is demanded of ‘thinking’, the uncovering of meaningful existence as being-in-the-world…. In what we would call modernist poetry, Rilke’s especially, this is an attunement to what is missing, to evoking our sense of dependence on a primordial site of possible meaningfulness that seems available only by its continuing elusiveness or decay…. At this point, however, turning to Heidegger’s voluminous work on Hölderlin and poetry would amount to beginning another book” (p. 208).

Pippin doesn’t really seem very sanguine about this.

“There is only so far one can go in what amounts to promises about the resources of nineteenth and twentieth century German poetry. The general remarks soon become repetitious, and at that level of generality the promises about the potential weightiness and depth of thought in poetic thinking, especially as some sort of new alternative to Plato, Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel, cannot be persuasive” (ibid).

“Paradoxically, Heidegger makes clear… that he does not mean that the task of poetry is to render the unsaid sayable; it is precisely to disclose such meaning in its unsayability, obviously a difficult and paradoxical notion…. A good deal of Heidegger’s commentary is like this, an explication of something evoked that cannot be named; something disclosed but with no determinate content, a revelation with nothing revealed (no determinate content but not mere absence); rather an evocation of absence with [such] density of possible inflections and implications that it defies critical paraphrase” (p. 210).

In my youth, I wrote reams of linguistically thick deconstructionist prose poetry myself, imagining that I was disclosing great unsayable secrets of the universe through Finnegan’s Wake-like word salads, and that this was superior to any theoretical construction. Today, though I no longer actively dwell on it, I still in principle recognize a kind of poetic truth that seems to at least partly escape ordinary discursive articulation, but would not claim it to be superior, only a kind of supplement whose role is hard to specify.

Heidegger vs Hegel

Returning to Pippin’s book, we finally arrive at the main act, a philosophical clash of titans. But the conflict takes place under very uneven conditions, because Hegel was not around to defend himself, and until recently, virtually no one else stood up for him either. The Frankfurt School critical theorist Theodor Adorno bucked the trend of Continental enthusiasm for Heidegger in The Jargon of Authenticity (1964), but Adorno had no interest in defending Hegel.

“Heidegger’s interest in Hegel is prepared for and accompanied by his growing attention to Kant and the entire German Idealist tradition. He lectured on German Idealism in 1929, the same year as his remarkable book on Kant, Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, appeared. He lectured on Hegel’s Phenomenology in 1930/31, on Kant’s transcendental principles (this would become the basis of the book The Question Concerning the Thing) in 1935/36, on Schelling’s On the Essence of Human Freedom in 1936, and on The Metaphysics of German Idealism in 1941. He continued to publish on the Idealists in the later phases of his career as well, as in his acute formulations of his differences with Hegel in Identity and Difference in 1957 and his evaluation of the importance of ‘overcoming Hegel’, and Hegel’s idealism, became more and more prominent” (The Culmination, p. 139).

In my youth, Identity and Difference was a significant text for me. Heidegger’s positive thesis, which I rightly or wrongly understood to be that difference is in every way that matters prior to identity, was just what I wanted to hear at the time, so I did not look too critically into Heidegger’s negative claim that Hegel privileges identity, especially since it seemed consistent with general scholarly consensus about Hegel.

However, the “speculative identity” by which Hegel overcomes various oppositions, like that between subject and object, is clearly very different from the formal identity whose very definition is the absence of difference — a distinction Heidegger seems to refuse to recognize. As we have seen across many posts, Hegel constantly criticizes formalism and objectification. Hegelian speculative identity should be understood rather as comparable to Aristotelian hylomorphism — a kind of practical inseparability that is compatible with irreducible difference.

Pippin summarizes Heidegger’s basic stance toward Hegel. “Hegel must be overcome by radicalizing the way in which the problem [of the meaning of Being] is put; and at the same time, he must be ‘appropriated'” (ibid).

This will be a complex maneuver. Heidegger will aggressively read into Hegel a stance on Heidegger’s own trademark question of the meaning of Being, and he will attribute an epoch-making significance to Hegel’s expression of this stance. He will aim not simply to refute Hegel, but rather to show that various things Hegel says are right, then ultimately to turn the tables and claim that Hegel convicts himself of Heidegger’s charges.

The charges meanwhile seem to involve something much more insidious and far-reachingly horrible than just being wrong. Heidegger wants to make philosophy somehow globally responsible for the ills of the modern age. It all gets started from his imposition of an interpretation that redefines the aims of all philosophy since Plato. For someone like myself who cares a great deal about philosophy from Plato to Hegel and identifies with it, this frankly feels comparable to gaslighting and emotional blackmail. Our best impulses are turned against us, and twisted into evidence of something bad.

“Fulfillment …could mean that the basic problems posed by Greek philosophy were ‘solved’ by Hegel, such that there is no longer philosophical work to do. But it could also mean that the distortions and obscurities inherent in the metaphysical tradition were taken on and thought through by Hegel to the point where it became clear (not to him, but retrospectively) that the whole tradition had ‘culminated’ in a dead end…. Heidegger means that Hegel has made the clearest of anyone the inevitable commitment by Western philosophy (Platonism) to the metaphysics of presence” (p. 140).

I agree that the metaphysics of presence is horrible, but I don’t think it is fairly attributed to Plato, Aristotle, Kant, or Hegel, but rather to those who privilege consciousness or immediacy. Far from being oriented toward pure presence, the way of philosophy from Plato to Hegel is rather to be identified with the long detour. Philosophy is what teaches us to look beyond mere presence. If the metaphysics of presence nonetheless does have a deadening hold on human culture, that is due not to philosophy but to a lack of philosophy.

“[I]dealism in this sense invokes the deepest principle of Western rationalism, the principle Heidegger is so interested in illuminating: ‘to be is to be rationally intelligible’…. The most famous way of putting it looms large in Heidegger’s account: there is an identity of thinking and being…. Given that, the world as it matters to us is available because of our conceptual and explanatory capacities'” (p. 141).

Heidegger claims that the pre-Socratics did better than all later philosophers. Identity of thinking and being specifically recalls one of the surviving fragments from Parmenides. Based on the radical conclusions that Parmenides and his follower Zeno drew from this assertion, this really does seem to be a claim of formal identity. This is all very ironic in context, because Hegel is the original great critic of formal identity. Hegelian “speculative” identity is patterned on Aristotelian hylomorphism, and also anticipates Paul Ricoeur’s notion of “narrative identity”.

“We should recall that idealism in this tradition… should not be understood as a claim about the mind-dependence of the world or about mind-imposed structure in experience or as a so-called objective idealism (a claim about the nonmaterial nature of the real, in favor of its ideal or immaterial nature), but first and foremost as an objection to empiricism, the claim that all knowledge is or must be based on empirical experience. By contrast, idealism in Kant, Fichte, and Hegel is a claim about the capacity of pure (empirically unaided) reason to determine that all that is knowable is knowable, and how it is knowable. Since this amounts to a claim about the normative authority of knowledge claims, and since it is pure reason alone that demonstrates such normative authority, this means that human reason is to be understood to be self-authorizing, a tribunal unto itself” (p. 140).

Heidegger explicitly puts the Kantian/Hegelian autonomy of reason in a negative light. Derrida’s Heidegger-inspired term “logocentrism” concisely captures Heidegger’s negative view of the autonomy of reason as making unsupportable knowledge claims, and as promoting bad, presumptuous epistemology and ontology. Heidegger really does not at all address Kant and Hegel’s own primarily ethical motivations for defending the autonomy of reason.

Heidegger is not dealing in any of the common clichés about idealism. But to my surprise, Pippin goes further, and says he thinks Heidegger understands key aspects of German idealism — and especially the significance of Hegel’s Logic and the relation of logic to metaphysics — better than anyone else.

Pippin thinks that Heidegger is the only one who anticipated Pippin’s own thesis that for Hegel, “logic” (i.e., Kantian transcendental logic and Hegel’s own development of it) really is “metaphysics” in the sense of an account of being qua being. Indeed, Heidegger does also seem to recognize that “logic” for Hegel has a very different meaning from that commonly ascribed to it. From my point of view, this all poses quite a challenge, because up to now I have been very impressed with Pippin’s reading of Hegel, even though I put much less weight on the “logic is metaphysics” claim than he does, and reject the being-qua-being interpretation of Aristotle.

“The idealist claim is that pure thinking can specify the possibility of the determinability of anything at all. In so doing, idealism is a metaphysics. For Heidegger, this all indicates an errancy, a distortion from the start, since, for one thing, thought’s focus is on ‘the beings’, or what is required for a being to be the being it is. It leaves unanswered, ‘unthought’, the meaningfulness of Being itself” (p. 143).

Heidegger does not like questions about what things are or why they are the way they are. Instead, he refers us to the mystifying notion of a Being that is not a being, not an abstraction, not the Christian God, and not a Spinozist whole, but is the ground of all beings. Contrary to this, I want to advocate the position that emphasis should be on seeking the richest possible understanding of “the beings”. For one thing, I believe that all beings should be treated with fundamental respect (see also Regard for Objects). Emphasis on the alleged ontic-ontological difference puts all real beings (whatever they may be) in an unfairly negative light. I do not claim to be presuppositionless in this, only to be open to any sincere attempt at dialogue.

Knowledge of the mere “possibility of the determinability” of anything at all does not presuppose actual knowledge of any particular determination, or any knowledge of existence. Hegel’s most far-reaching claim is that reason as higher-order reflection can evaluate “possibilities of determinability”, independent of the evaluation of concrete cases. This is related to the way that Kant investigates the conditions of the possibility of this or that. As Hegel himself also says, this “transcendental logic” that he practices in common with Kant is a “realm of shadows”. I would say that truth or falsity in the mundane sense only comes into the picture when we come back to interpreting concrete cases, in ways that take the long detour into account.

Pippin explains that Hegel’s motivation is to show that there cannot be any self-sufficient epistemology or, as Pippin puts it, that epistemology cannot be separated from metaphysics.

“[Hegel’s approach] amounts to an attempt to show that any isolation of the question of whether the subject’s putative cognitive powers are actually adequate for the task of cognition, knowledge of reality as it is in itself, ignores the fact that any such conception of the powers of knowing presupposes a conception of the proper knowables. If we ignore that connection and take ourselves to be focusing on our cognitive powers alone, we inevitably end up with skepticism, since there is no way from ‘outside’ the attempt at knowing to measure the exercise of these powers against what really is. (The ‘view from nowhere’ is nowhere, nowhere any finite being could ascend to.)” (p. 144).

Heidegger “disagrees with the dogmatic assumption that the meaningfulness of Being in its availability is originally its knowability…. ‘[F]initist’ critiques often draw large implications from what I believe to be a distorted interpretation of Hegel. However, … Heidegger has, with some glaring exceptions, a sophisticated, deep, highly accurate, and insightful reading of what Hegel was trying to do in his main text, The Science of Logic” (p. 145).

It seems to me that in claiming that Kant and Hegel put “knowability” first, Heidegger is assimilating them both to a neo-Kantian reading of Kant. Part of the basis of this is that Hegel wants to call self-consciousness a kind of knowledge, although self-consciousness does not seem to meet the conditions Aristotle lays out for knowledge (episteme) in general. I think Hegelian self-consciousness mainly has to do with apprehension of meaning and values, rather than knowledge in a strict sense, which is a relatively rare thing.

Pippin goes on to briefly discuss “idealism” in Kant, Fichte, and Hegel.

“Eventually, I want to say that Hegel’s most important potential contributions have been both misunderstood and undervalued, even by Heidegger, for all the power and depth of his interpretation…. Let me proceed to a ridiculously brief summation of the idealist ambition” (p. 146).

While I admire Pippin’s attempt to be even-handed, I must take exception to the claim of “power and depth” here. It may be true that there is a narrow slice of the argument of Hegel’s Logic that Heidegger has read better than others, but in view of how appallingly misconceived common views of Hegel are, this is not necessarily much of a compliment. Pippin is clearly impressed that Heidegger anticipates Pippin’s own view that what Hegel is doing in the Logic really is a kind of what Aristotle would call first philosophy.

“The central idealist claim began with Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason and his assumption that reason was capable of determining what it was entitled to claim and capable also of restricting itself if it could not provide such authority. This almost immediately generated the concern that such an enterprise would not only end in a destructive skepticism but in an all-destructive ‘nihilism’ (F.H. Jacobi’s original coinage), leaving nothing of moral substance or objective status standing” (ibid).

Here the two claims are that reason can determine for itself what it is entitled to claim, and that it is capable of limiting itself to what it is entitled to. These two abilities are both clearly different from any putative first-order “knowledge” about how things are.

“[A] priori knowledge, while in some sense to be specified ultimately about the world, consists in thinking’s or reason’s knowledge of itself“…. This is what distinguishes classical rationalism from idealism, as Hegel (and Kant) understood it. The former holds that reason has access to its proper objects outside itself; the latter that the object of pure thinking is itself…. One long-dominant interpretation of Hegel on this point … holds that these two claims can be both assertible only if what there ‘really’ is, ‘the really real world’, what is accessible only to pure reason alone, is itself thought … something like the Absolute’s or God’s thinking itself…. Pure thought thinking itself is the manifestation of the noesis noeseos, God thinking himself, or it is the divine-like apprehension of the noetic reality that underlies experienced appearances. I cannot do so here, but I have argued for some time that this interpretation does not fit the text (p. 147).

For Aristotle too, the object of “pure” thinking is itself. That is to say that what is called “pure” thinking is distinguishable specifically as a higher-order thinking, or thinking about thinking that inquires by sincerely questioning itself. Contrary to what one might think based on common connotations of “purity”, this typically occurs in a mixed context that also involves thinking about some concrete beings. I call this mixture interpretation. It occurs in the course of thinking other things, and always has an implicit or explicit ethical dimension, or rather it is the ethical dimension. Kant and Hegel call this “reflection” in a specialized sense that I also relate to Aristotelian contemplation (see multiple articles under Subjectivity and Hegel). This more developed Aristotelian-Kantian-Hegelian notion is what I want to say that “thinking” is. Hegelian mutual recognition and Platonic dialogue are based on socially shared versions of this kind of reflection.

“Pure thinking’s object is itself but not as an object or event; rather, its object is the thinking also interrogating thinking — a circle, not a dyadic relation. Hence the provocative notion of ‘infinity’, without beginning or end” (ibid).

(For Aristotle, the circle is a symbol for entelechy rather than infinity, but in spite of his general finitism, Aristotle does hold that time has no beginning or end.)

“In the most decisive case in the tradition for Heidegger, the dependence in question is what Kant emphasized, the dependence of thinking on sensible intuition, of pure thinking on pure intuition…. Hegel’s prioritization of the Concept — in his terms, the identification of the Absolute as concept — is said to be a prioritization of absolute subjectivity and so to require a relation to what is other than thought, nature, as pure domination…. It would be hard to overstate the influence of such an argument form … from Schelling to Heidegger and Adorno” (p. 148).

“Absolute subjectivity as pure domination” is completely abhorrent, and completely un-Hegelian. Hegel never endorsed one-sided “domination” in any context. Ethical reciprocity is one of his fundamental concerns (see New Biography of Hegel). What is true is that questions of meaning and interpretation in a certain way encompass all other questions.

“In Hegel’s treatment, the topic of pure thinking is presented as having nothing to do with the existing human thinker, the subject, consciousness, the mind. Rather, the topic raises as a problem the possibility of the intelligibility of even whatever is being touted as pre-conscious source or hidden origin, the intelligibility of what is assumed in any such determinate identification as a knowledge claim, even of the ‘neither subject nor object’. That is either something available for some kind of apprehension or it is not. If it is, it must be subject to some regime of intelligibility for this determinacy to be accounted for. This is what Heidegger denies when he insists that the meaning of Being, Being as such, is not ‘a’ being and not subject to the requirements of determinacy. Insisting it begs the question” (pp. 148-149).

Intelligibles act “in” us, rather than “on” us. The common prejudice that we talking animals should understand ourselves as subjects in a syntactic sense is not shared by Aristotle or Hegel.

“In face of this, if someone simply persists in asking ‘but where is all this thinking and explaining happening?’ all one can reply is ‘wherever there is thinking’. This is not to say that there is not always a thinker or subject of thought; it is to say that thought that can be truth-bearing is constituted by what is necessary for truth-bearing, by any being of whatever sort capable of objective (possibly true or false) judgment…. Any such criticism, insofar as it is a thinking, a judging, a claim to know, is always already a manifestation of dependence on pure thinking and its conditions, and such ‘moments’ of pure thinking are to delimit (but not to limit) the normative domain of intelligibility (what can rightly be distinguished from what, or rightly posited as ‘ground’, for example) and not any process or series of events that goes on in supposed independence of the empirical world. Pure thinking, as Hegel understands it, is neither dependent on nor independent from the empirical, or from materiality or the brain or the ‘indifference point’ or whatever new ‘absolute’ comes into fashion” (p. 149).

Intelligibility is not thing-like, and intelligent beings are better understood as not thing-like either. I think that intelligence and intelligibility are inherently not self-contained. Self-containedness would correlate to a kind of stupor. Like Meister Eckhart, I might say that my awareness is over there in the wood I am looking at. To participate in intelligence is to transcend narrow boundaries of self.

“[This] is, rather, to argue for the autonomy of the question of ‘any thinking at all’, whatever the existential status of the thinker” (p. 150).

Shareable thought doesn’t really have an owner, even though it does have a history.

“In knowing itself, what pure thought knows is the possible intelligibility, the knowability, of anything that is. But the intelligibility of anything is just what it is to be that thing, to be determinately ‘this-such’ (tode ti), the answer to the ‘what is it’ (ti esti) question definitive of metaphysics since Aristotle” (p. 151).

The “self” in self-knowledge is not a substantial thing, but a reflective relatedness.

“Kant and Heidegger agree that at the most basic level, thought is finite because thought, understanding, knowledge, cannot create its own objects; it depends on a comportment toward what is other than the subject. With things set up that way, it looks like Hegel’s claim for the infinity of thought is a claim that thought does create its own objects. That is not at all his position, but it remains a common interpretation” (ibid).

Thought does not “create” what goes by the name of external reality.

“The other Kantian claim of massive importance to [Heidegger’s] critique of idealism is his argument… that pure thinking can arrive nowhere, certainly not at the determination of the ‘horizon’ of all possible objectivity, without being everywhere not only intertwined with but dependent on sensibility, especially with the ‘sensible’ faculty of the imagination” (ibid).

Thought has a dependence on imagination and sensation. Even “pure” thinking may be said to have such dependencies.

“We should note the change in emphasis insisted on by Hegel. The new metaphysics, logic, concerns things as grasped, gefaßt, in thought, whereas the old metaphysics was a thing-metaphysics” (p. 153).

Philosophy should address meanings rather than “things”.

“Kant and Hegel certainly share the so-called discursivity thesis (which Heidegger does not). Thinking for both is exclusively a spontaneous or productive power, in no sense a perceptual or passive, receptive capacity. It would be hard to exaggerate the magnitude of this common assumption. More than anything else, it sounds the death knell of traditional rationalism, and it plays a crucial role at the decisive beginning of the Logic, where Hegel demonstrates that the thought of mere ‘being’ can be no actual thought at all, its indeterminacy renders it a mere ‘nothing’ without some predicative determination other than the mere thought, being” (p. 155).

Here I have to pause, because the idea that thought is not just significantly or mainly but exclusively active seems me to be an overstatement of an otherwise good point. At the very least, hylomorphism and the inter-embeddedness of thought with sensation ensure that “we” are not exclusively active.

“Kant had also already realized that the pure forms of thought were not features of the human thinker, were not in that sense psychologically subjective, but necessary for any discursive thinker, which means any non-divine thinker. But since these forms of judgment are the forms of any possible truth-bearer, and since truth is either truth or not, it makes no sense to say that these forms delimit something like ‘what is merely true for discursive thinkers’. There is no such thing as ‘truth for X’, even if there is ‘what seems true to X’. The ‘subjectivizing’ elements in Kant are, though species-specific, the pure forms of intuition. And if we reject that doctrine, as Hegel does, we can return to a position like Aristotle’s, where we can study being by studying the forms of predication” (p. 156).

As he says, contrary to some well-meaning attempts to be generous that fall into subjectivism, there is no such thing as a separate “truth for me”, only what seems true to me. It is only appearance that can be immediate and private.

The way Pippin expresses the point about the non-psychological character of thought here nicely minimizes the difference between Kant and Hegel. But Aristotle’s concern with statement-making is normative and not grammatical. The association of Aristotelian statement-making with mere predication is a common error that loses the essential normative dimension of criteria that make something properly said. To put it another way, Aristotle’s concern is not with any random saying, but with how things are properly said to be.

“At some point, and it doesn’t matter (for philosophy) at what point or how, natural organisms reach a level of complexity and organization such that they begin to become occupied with themselves and eventually to engage each other and to understand themselves in ways no longer appropriately explicable within the boundaries of explanations proper to nature considered apart from such capacities. Hegel’s language about this is everywhere practical, not substantive. It is not that Hegel is denying that self-consciousness and intentional agency are facts. He is claiming that no fact about the organic properties of such beings accounts for what it is to be self-conscious or agents, and there is no need for the positing of nonmaterial entities or capacities” (p. 158).

The “practical” aspect is essential here. Ethics, broadly construed, is for Kant and Hegel prior to epistemology and ontology.

“Of course, spirit remains embodied and so subject to mixed explanations, in which its natural properties bear on its activities as spirit…. Consider this passage from the Lectures on Fine Art. ‘Art by means of its representations, while remaining within the sensuous sphere, liberates man at the same time from the power of sensuousness. Of course we may often hear favorite phraseology about man’s duty to remain in immediate unity with nature; but such unity, in its abstraction, is purely and simply rudeness and ferocity, and by dissolving this unity for man, art lifts him with gentle hands out of and above imprisonment in nature'” (p. 159).

Art lifts us with gentle hands. This is important to mention, because Hegel is being accused of logocentrism.

“It doesn’t matter that there are also natural-scientific explanations for what happens in the body and brain when all this occurs, or when we make or enjoy art. The question that has emerged — the only emergence that is relevant — is whether the norm, art, has been rightly and fully realized, or whether the justifications agents offer each other and themselves can in fact be defended, whether the structure of ethical life is consistent with the potential of such a self-liberating being. There is no need to appeal to a vitalist, self-dirempting nature to account for any of this…. This is so for Hegel because the dynamic in question is historical, not biological, even though it clearly has numerous specific natural-organic conditions and involves no commitment to anything non-natural. Correspondingly, the question of the possibility of freedom is not for Hegel a question about the possibility of how a spontaneous causal agency exists in a material world. His theory is a self-realization theory, and that asks for the right achievement in our understanding of ourselves and in our relations to others, again a historical and social question, not one that descends from any account of substance” (ibid).

“I have been suggesting that far and away the deepest, most thoughtful engagement with Idealist and especially Hegelian thought in post-Hegelian philosophy is Heidegger’s. In fact, a good case can be made that Heidegger’s distinction among all such anti-Idealism positions is that his is the first genuine confrontation with Hegel in all the post-Hegelian European tradition” (p. 161).

Heidegger might have been the big-name 20th-century philosopher whose treatment of Hegel was the least worst, but that is really not saying much. However, first in Germany after World War II and now for several decades in the English-speaking world, Hegel scholarship has improved tremendously, and Pippin himself has played a significant part in this.

“[E]specially important is what was published as the second part of Identity and Difference…. Heidegger goes immediately and directly to the heart of Hegel’s enterprise and states it accurately as just what it is. Heidegger tells us that the subject matter, the Sache, of thinking for Hegel is ‘thinking as such’ (Denken als solches). And he immediately adds exactly the right qualification. ‘In order not to misinterpret this definition of the matter — thinking as such — in psychological or epistemological terms, we must add by way of explanation: thinking as such — in the developed fullness in which what has been thought…, has been and now is thought” (ibid).

As I mentioned, this work was significant to me in my youth. But at that time I had no glimmer that I would come to appreciate Hegel as much as I do now, and to take issue with any reading that makes Hegel out as a partisan of strong Identity. That many people can’t be wrong, can they? But they were. Hegel’s “speculative” identity is clearly not a formal or strong identity. It is more like Aristotelian hylomorphism, to the point where I wonder why he calls it identity at all, instead of nonseparation or something like that.

“That is, Hegel thinks of thinking as Being, and not as a subjective epistemological condition; or, said conversely, Being is only available in any sense in its thinkability. Heidegger realizes that pure thinking’s taking itself as object does not result in a mere theory of thinking, or the rules of thinking, or a ‘philosophy of pure cognition’. As Heidegger says directly, for Hegel, ‘being is the absolute self-thinking of thinking’. The last thing that Heidegger means by this is that Being is mental activity, whether human or divine” (ibid).

So far so good.

“Because of his own approach, Heidegger is in a unique position to realize that the subject matter of the Logic is not in any sense whatever a being, not ‘the’ Absolute’s self-positing, not the noetic structure of the world, not abstract objects, not the mind of the Christian God, not a substance, but, in his language, the meaning of Being, the Sinn des Seins. As he puts it in his distinctive language, ‘The Being of beings reveals itself as the ground that gives itself ground and accounts for itself. The ground, the ratio by their essential origin are the logos, in the sense of the gathering of beings and letting them be. They are the hen panta [One-All]. And he tells us what he thinks Hegel means by logic. ‘We now understand the name “logic”… as the name for that kind of thinking which everywhere provides and accounts for the ground of beings as such within the whole in terms of being as ground (logos). The fundamental character is onto-theo-logic'” (p. 162).

Here I come to a big doubt. The negative setup is nice. But then we are told that Being, which is not any of those things, is the ground of beings. Heidegger has no compliments for the Thomistic notion of God that was traditionally supposed to represent pure Being in a “full” sense. He insists that Being is not a being and certainly not the Creator, but his notion seems to be even much further removed from that thinnest of abstractions that is sometimes suggested. But Heidegger’s Being has in common with Aquinas’s idea of God that it is supposed to be the ground of beings. Late in life Heidegger made cryptic statements like “only a god can save us”, but he made it clear that the Christian God could not meet his qualifications.

“The ‘divine’ at stake in what Heidegger means by theo-logic is, he constantly explains, not a being, not anyone to whom we can pray or play music to or dance to, he notes with a hint of contempt….. [B]ecause … thinking is self-grounding and thereby serves as ground (for any being being intelligibly what it is), this thinking is also ‘theology’ because it concerns the causa sui. Pure thinking is productive and self-generating” (ibid).

Causa sui is “cause of itself”, which implicitly brings in all the questions about the nature of causality. Traditionally, some writers have applied this term to God. (On the other hand, Aristotle says there is no such thing as self-motion — that a thing that appears to be self-moving is better understood by distinguishing a mover part from a moved part. His first cause is not a “self”-mover, but a first unmoved mover, and he sees motion as belonging on the side of the moved thing. But a mover for Aristotle is a more specific notion than a cause. See Moved, Unmoved.)

The Kantian/Hegelian autonomy of reason is neither a self-motion nor a self-moving thing. Can it be assimilated to the notion of something being the cause of itself? I don’t think it is intended to work in the register of causality in the modern sense. And what Aristotle proposes instead of self-motion is the notion of entelechy.

“From his interpretation of Hegel in [Being and Time] on, Heidegger has emphasized … that this ground-giving is what Hegel means by the Concept ‘giving itself its own content’, and this by means of the beating heart of the dialectical process. That is, in Hegel’s language, the Concept is ‘self-negating negativity’. Thinking is discriminating, differentiating, and thus determining, and this is possible by any ‘moment of pure thinking’s differentiation of itself from its other, its self-negating. That self-negating means its lack of self-sufficient determinacy, and this by means of its essential relation to and differentiation from its ‘other’. It thereby returns to a moment of stability and putative sufficiency. It negates its own negation of that original self-sufficiency and ‘momentarily’ reestablishes it, only to require again a self-negating of this putative independence and internal self-definition” (pp. 162-163).

Heidegger also apparently preceded Pippin in explicitly recognizing the importance of Kantian unity of apperception in Hegel.

“Heidegger is right that this is one way of formulating Hegel’s attempt to establish an internal derivation of the moments of pure thinking required for the determinacy necessary for anything to be what it is. And here Heidegger is again correct when he claims that behind this in Hegel, what can account for the source of this development, is the apperceptive character of any thinking, that any moment of thinking is a self-conscious moment and so aware of the commitment it undertakes to establish the determinacy of a conceptual moment” (p. 163).

“But Heidegger continually interprets this ‘presence of the I to itself’ in a Cartesian way, as if it is the I’s demand for such a ‘presence’ (that meaning of Being that is the original sin of Western metaphysics) to itself as the telos implicit in any moment of thinking, an interpretation that construes what Hegel is doing in a formal way and that neglects the way Hegel wants to make his case on the basis of the internal self-negation of the conceptual moment. To use the formulation of the [Phenomenology], ‘thought disturbs thoughtlessness’ because of the incompatible commitment created by such incomplete thinking, not because of a subjective dissatisfaction and demand (ibid).

It is quite a mystery to me why Hegel is so complimentary to Descartes in his history of philosophy lectures, when Hegel’s own philosophy is so anti-Cartesian. Clearly he feels antipathy toward scholasticism, although like many modern writers, he knows it mainly from a few sketchy stereotypes. Perhaps that explains the great relief he expresses on getting to Descartes.

The language emphasizing conflicting commitments versus subjective demand makes an important point. This is another way in which we can have major concern for subjectivity, without centrally referencing an ego-like substantial subject.

“For Hegel, again as Heidegger understands him, to be is necessarily to be determinate (a this-such, discriminable from any other ‘such’) and the requirements of determinacy were also the requirements for anything to count as a being…. The beginning of wisdom for the early Heidegger is that, on the contrary, there was clearly a being not at all comprehensible as, not at all being, ‘determinate’: the being Heidegger called ‘Dasein’ precisely to indicate that it was not a determinate this-such” (p. 164).

Here we get to a major point of dispute. Classic early Heidegger’s Dasein seems to inherit some of the paradoxical characteristics of the Aristotelian intellect that is “nothing at all” until it begins to think, but unlike Aristotelian intellect it seemingly is supposed to refer to a whole human being. Ironically, this combination puts it in territory close to that of the scholastic “intellectual soul”, which I’m sure Heidegger had no patience for.

Heidegger wants to call Dasein an openness rather than an essence. The notion seems to be that essence applies only to caged or fossilized things. This led to Sartre’s claim that “existence precedes essence”, where existence becomes another name for Dasein. For practical purposes Dasein seems to be largely equivalent to a human “consciousness”, albeit one outfitted with existentialist characteristics. I on the other hand take a rather dim view of the promotion of mere being and mere consciousness, and aim to recover a more interesting, specific, and useful notion of essence (importance; the making of distinctions) that has nothing to do with fossils or cages.

“Dasein is openness to the meaning of Being itself, ‘being there’ at the site of any manifestation of such meaning. There could be no logos in the Hegelian sense to a being, Dasein, that was what it took itself to be, a being whose mode of being is to-be, existence, a self-interpreting being…. Such a being could never be simply ‘what it is'” (ibid).

I see, more simply: openness to meaning. With a revitalized notion of essence, we have all that we need. It is Being with a capital “B” that is a reification.

“[Heidegger] notes approvingly that Hegel’s approach is developmental, not deductive, and that this developing thought-thinking-thinking is intertwined with the history of thought, with the history of philosophy…. ‘The only Western thinker who has thoughtfully experienced the history of thought is Hegel” (p. 165).

Heidegger does get points for recognizing the extreme importance of the history of philosophy. He is right that Hegel more or less invented the philosophical history of philosophy. (Besides Hegel, several contemporary French writers, including Alain de Libera, Olivier Boulnois, and Gwenaëlle Aubry, have made significant contributions to what they call philosophical archaeology, which is another kind of philosophical history of philosophy. This is an outgrowth of Michel Foucault’s “archaeology of knowledge”, which ironically was originally conceived by Foucault as radically anti-Hegelian. Much less satisfactory to my mind, but also related, is the “storytelling” motif promoted by Richard Rorty.)

“While Hegel thinks the ultimate identity of thinking and being, Heidegger’s basic thought is about difference” (ibid).

That is how Heidegger presents the matter. I think he actually has a less interesting, less supple account of difference than Hegel does, and I don’t believe the myth of Hegel as an identitarian. Blind pursuit of identity is about the furthest thing from Hegel that I could imagine.

Hegel was supposed to be the sneaky one, making us think we were escaping the bad stuff, while actually pulling us in deeper. Heidegger largely invented this now pervasive trope, which is more sophisticated than the head-on confrontations with Hegel that we see in Schelling and Kierkegaard.

“If we take our bearings only from [Being and Time], then we can put the point in Schelling’s way: we would say that the mark of thinking’s finitude is the ‘unreachability’ of human existence itself…. It remains ineffable, not available…. [Existence] finds itself uncanny, not at home anywhere, the anxious, null basis of a nullity, something it cannot help but flee in a tranquilizing (‘falling’) everydayness. But once Heidegger has fully shifted attention to the problem of metaphysics, another issue looms much larger: the absolute difference between Being and beings, our inevitable confusing of the question ‘what is it to be?’ with ‘what is it to be this or that being?'” (p. 166).

For Heidegger, the most important feature of difference is what he calls the ontic-ontological difference, Being versus beings. He doesn’t really care about all the richness and diversity of particular beings, only for the one thing, Being, which he insists is not an abstraction and is not God. For me the richness and diversity of particular beings is everything, and is endlessly liberating.

“Hegel does insist that the question of Being necessarily always amounts to a question about what it is to be this or that being. That is the result of the first moment of the Being Logic, and it is that moment where the deepest ‘confrontation’ (Auseinandersetzung) with Heidegger must take place. In this, as in so much else, Hegel follows Aristotle. Being is said in many ways, but there is a primacy to being as tode ti, a this-such, determinate being” (ibid).

“Kant, Hegel, and Fichte wanted to say that the only assumption necessary for an account of pure thinking is only the ‘I or he or it’ that thinks, but Heidegger insists that this leaves out the question of the mode of being of the subject, and he is certainly right. The notion of a transcendental-logical’ subject is merely a way to avoid the question” (p. 168).

This is subtle and tricky. Leaving out the question of the mode of being of “the subject” is hardly as terrible as Heidegger makes it out to be. Meanwhile with this talk of the mode of being, he distracts attention from what seems to be a rather conventional modern notion that what we are asking about when we consider human “being” is after all most appropriately addressed as a unitary “subject”. I see human (and nonhuman) being as infinitely richer, more multiplex, and more refined than that. This is rooted in the major Hegelian ethical point that we find ourselves in the other, and that human maturity and true spirituality begin from learning to be at home in otherness. Moreover, I think the distinction between empirical and transcendental subjectivity is not at all a mistake but the beginning of wisdom — a recognition that subjectivity is multi-dimensional, and not reducible to one thing.

“Thinking thinking thinking is the enacting of thinking, and the reflective self-consciousness at the end of the Logic, the Concept of the concept, of intelligibility itself, is a form of self-consciousness about the intelligibility of any being, not something like ‘Being as intelligibility itself’…. It does not and cannot include what Heidegger seems to be after: ‘what it means for Being to be thinking’s self-determination of thinking'” (p. 169).

Very true.

“This is not at all to deny that there is something also quite limited and often tendentious about Heidegger’s assessment of Hegel. There are other passages where he does not charge that the question of the mode of being of the thinker has been left unthought by Hegel, but that Hegel did ‘think’ it, and as a Cartesian, that the subject is understood as nothing more than an individual center of consciousness…. While it is true that Hegel does in the Encyclopedia (albeit in the special context of Philosophy of Nature…) say such things as that spirit is ‘the eternal’ and that the eternal is ‘absolute presence’, it is clear from a more charitable reading that Hegel doesn’t mean present-at-hand, or standing presence, as Heidegger claims…. [Heidegger’s claim] assumes that the dialectical self-negation of concepts and eventual sublation results in some sort of abidingness or stability, and, as so much Hegel scholarship after the war has demonstrated, that is the last thing Hegel wants to say” (pp. 169-170).

“This all also raises the question of whether Heidegger is right to draw the rather apocalyptic consequences he does from this ‘forgetting’ or not asking this question; in a word (his word) ‘technology'” (p. 170).

“Heidegger does not here discuss any of the modal questions involved in philosophical conceptuality…. We want necessary conditions. We want: without these elements in place, this availability would not be possible…. In Kant, necessity is tied to necessary conditions of experience. That means, necessary for a unity of consciousness, the Transcendental Unity of Apperception to be possible. In Hegel, necessity is internal to the development of the Concept…. Whether this is defensible or not, we can at least see the basis of necessity in this internal self-negation and developmental necessity. And in Heidegger? Without what would there be no availability, no manifestness, no clearing?” (p. 171).

“But Heidegger and many Hegel scholars pay no attention to the strange limitation Hegel suggests, that Hegel calls these essentialities ‘shadows'” (p. 178). This constitutes “a concession to finitude that Heidegger does not see” (p. 179).

This is extremely important. Hegel may rhetorically rhapsodize about the infinity of reflection, but really he is not at all hostile to the concerns of advocates of the finitude of human powers. Pippin’s Hegel’s Practical Philosophy develops this in great detail.

“Hegel’s speculative identity claim… is wrongly characterized by the traditional notion of individual determinacy. The relation of dependence goes the other way too. Such determinacy must be rethought in the light of the theory of interanimated pure concepts. (This is roughly the same logical point we saw in the implications of the inseparability of thought and intuition in our discussion of Kant.)…. Hegel has many of the same objections to the understanding — ‘forgetting’ its provisional and merely useful status — as Heidegger does” (p. 180).

Pippin is absolutely right here.

“The metaphors can threaten to pile on each other clumsily here, but it is essential to see that by ‘shadows’, Hegel means to point to the insufficiency of the Logic — even as a metaphysics — if considered as a stand-alone part…. It is an abstraction, a necessary one, but its isolation from the system it animates, while necessary, can produce only shadows of the Absolute. We must see it ‘alive’ in the development of the sciences of nature and in the historical development of human Geist before it can be fully understood. It is the same with Aristotle, Hegel’s guide in so much. ‘What really is’ is the being-at-work (energeia) of the individuated species form in a particular, a tode ti. The universal species form is indispensible in knowing, but isolated it is a ‘shadow’ in the same sense” (ibid).

Well said.

“Since Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature clearly incorporates unanticipatable historical developments in the natural sciences, and since the Philosophy of Spirit refers to many distinctly modern elements of civil society and the state, then the reciprocal relation between the Logic and the Encyclopedia cannot be ‘closed’. Further developments in either normative domain must affect what could count as the logical moment they depend on. To be sure, this point does not mean that logical or conceptual reflections are ‘driven’ by empirical discovery and historical novelty. Every such change must be understood as an amplification and further substantialization of what in the Logic are mere shadows. Any such amplification and deepening must always occur ‘shadowed’ by the necessities of the Logic’s requirements for intelligibility. This does, however, mean … that the Hegelian a priori … must be a historical a priori … at a moment of development in the investigations of nature and the developments of civil society” (pp. 180-181).

“Does any of this mean that Heidegger’s critique misses the mark? Not decisively, I would suggest…. There is no way into or out of Hegel without the Absolute, the Concept, the Science of Logic. And Heidegger is right. There is no Absolute. There cannot be an Absolute” (p. 181).

That is disappointing. The Absolute that cannot exist, I want to suggest, is not Hegel’s. I’m walking the edge here, but in spite of numerous passages that do have inflationary rhetoric, the Hegelian absolute is actually a relatively simple and modest notion.

“The Logic, we recall, begins with the ‘resolve’ to think being, and it is fair enough for Heidegger to interpret this as a question about the meaning of Being. And, since all thinking is inherently apperceptive, upon reflection the result of attempting to think Being itself is shown to be an unsustainable thought because indeterminate and so unthinkable, not a thought” (p. 186).

“In other words, Hegel draws exactly the wrong lesson from the unthinkability of Being as such, a generality that is so general that it dissolves into something unavailable” (p. 187).

I would argue with that.

“However, [Heidegger’s] main question and the critique it is based on are only weighty, fundamental in his sense, if it does not remain a kind of black box of chaotic indeterminate, unsayable revelations across historical time. What is this new sort of thinking?… Without some answer to this question, it is Heidegger who looks like our shopper searching in vain for ‘fruit'” (p. 188).

Pippin recounts Heidegger’s discussion of an anecdote by Hegel of an apparently very Socratic shopper who went to the store to buy Fruit with a capital “F”, but found only apples, bananas, pears, and the like, and considered the venture a failure. Heidegger tries to turn the tables on Hegel in this example and claim that Hegel himself is really like that shopper, but Pippin is saying this is not a legitimate reading.

Pippin quotes Heidegger, “One must think in both a literal and a substantive sense, namely, that the unique unleashing of the demand to render reasons threatens everything of humans’ being-at-home and robs them of the roots of their subsistence” (p. 189).

This is a horrible mischaracterization of what is wrong with the world. People looking for reasons are hardly the cause of the apocalypse. Reasons are ethical before they are epistemological. We need them and like them. They are our friends, and help us make things better. To claim that reason is inevitably alienating is simplistic, utterly wrong, and a terrible piece of bad faith.

“The gods have fled, though, and some new ‘thinking’ (thinking that is not what he had called ‘logic’) is necessary if Heidegger is posing a real alternative to the twenty-five hundred years of metaphysics begun by Greek ‘aesthetic objectivism'” (p. 191).

OK, now we’re calling it in. Aesthetic objectivism, really? I guess that for Heidegger the birth of ethical reason with Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle was a non-event.

“Hegel does not mean that Spirit will no longer exist in time but that its self-comprehending over time assumes a teleological structure, a goal that, when reached, transcends its necessary appearance in time, or its finitude…. As we have been seeing, Heidegger denies that Dasein has any such structure or goal…. (The temporal form of the fundamental meaning of Spirit’s being is for Hegel provisional; not final.) Such a denial is unwarranted and dogmatic, according to Heidegger” (p. 192).

“It is this notion of a genuinely progressive inner self-correction that Heidegger challenges as merely staged” (p. 195).

The thing in Hegel that Brandom seems to love most — a confident, proto-Deweyan vision of progress — is false, according to Heidegger. This is a delicate point. Hegel has been called both an optimist and a pessimist in different settings. Once again, I think that a charitable interpretation is a modest interpretation. Even Brandom also refers to the “path of despair”, a phrase of Hegel’s that is farther than I would go in the other direction.

“A key issue in what bothers Heidegger about this procedure and indeed the key to understanding what Hegel is trying to do is the concept of negation involved in Spirit’s periodic self-negation, that ‘self-consummating skepticism’. This sort of phenomenological negation is said by Hegel not to be indeterminate” (p. 196).

“The journey is governed by the assumption that any moment must be a ‘self-knowing knowing’, that any being must be discursively articulable…. But there is a prior question about the meaning for Spirit of what it experiences, a meaning Hegel simply assumes” (p. 197).

“Our natural consciousness would stubbornly insist it knows what it sees, even if it cannot say so precisely. Hegel’s contrary claim is that the inherent and unavoidable commitment to full logical intelligibility (‘science’) is both partially and ever more self-consciously revealed as an inherent, unacknowledged commitment in any claim to know or (ultimately in the journey) to act justifiably and that we are led to a full acknowledged commitment in full self-consciousness about what we had been doing. There is nothing illicit in the presence of the assumption; that is what is being demonstrated. It is simply un-self-conscious and coming to self-consciousness” (p. 198).

“Heidegger has, in other words, confused the fact that an implication may be implicit in a position and coming to see that and why a claim that an implication is implicit in a position is justified. We may know at the end of Hegel’s journey that ‘the Absolute’ was ‘already assumed, already present’, but we are not entitled to any such position at the outset” (p. 199).

“A second criticism is also a familiar and predictable one. Who is the ‘subject’ of this putative experience?” (ibid). “[Heidegger’s] clear assumption is that any such subject will still be ‘thing’ or ‘substance’ like and will not diverge from the basic presuppositions Heidegger notices in the consciousness section” (p. 200). “Likewise with the emergence of the logical prejudice in his explanation of the transition from consciousness to self-consciousness, that ‘being is determined logically, such that logic manifests as egology'” (p. 201).

“It would take an interpretation of all the first four chapters of the [Phenomenology] to challenge Heidegger’s reading, but we should at least note in passing that, at least as Hegel understands his book, it cannot be considered an ‘egology’ like Fichte’s, say…. Rather, individual egos should not be considered as, ex ante, atomistic, self-sufficient egological origins of such commitments to a collective subject, as if Geist comes into being only as a result of constituting acts by ex-ante spiritless (geistlose) atomic individuals. They are the individuals they are only as already ‘formed’ (gebildet) within and as inheriting such collectivities” (ibid).

“The difference between Hegel’s ‘shapes of spirit’ and Heidegger’s ‘world’ comes down to whether such shapes of spirit can become self-conscious to themselves in ways reflected in art, religion, and philosophy, and in coming to do so, reflect on and move on from deficiencies in such self-understanding…. This co-constituting mutual dependence is why Hegel can frequently say something that would otherwise be mysterious, that spirit, this social subjectivity, is ‘a product of itself’. (Geist is this co-constituting relation — the product of individuals who are themselves the products of their participation in Geist. Geist has no substantial existence apart from this mutual reflection.)” (ibid).

Next in this series: Poetic Thinking

New Biography of Hegel

Hegel: The Philosopher of Freedom by Klaus Vieweg (German ed. 2019; English tr. 2023) is a highly acclaimed new biography of Hegel. Even more so than the also good one by Terry Pinkard, it provides evidence refuting longstanding misinformation about Hegel, and especially his political views. It gives more of a sense of what kind of person Hegel was and what his core values were than anything I’ve seen before. This background will be good to bear in mind for the upcoming treatment of Heidegger’s claims about Hegel.

Hegel comes across as warm, sociable, witty, deeply concerned with equality, and personally courageous. Vieweg says that his extensive engagement with the arts has been underappreciated, and that Hegel’s lectures on art basically gave birth to art history as a discipline. He also says the place of both ancient and modern skepticism in Hegel’s formation has been underestimated, and in particular that Hegel’s distinctive notion of negation reflects a skeptical heritage.

“The two pillars of [Hegel’s] thinking are freedom and reason…. He is the most famous figure in modern philosophy, arguably its greatest master…. Today, Hegel’s portrait deserves to be finally liberated from clichés and grotesque fairy tales” (ibid).

“Reason” in Hegel generally means something holistic, never mere logic chopping. “Freedom” is a key topic throughout German Idealism, and a subject of much ambiguous rhetoric. Its meanings include both civil liberties and something called free will. But Hegel at least — like Paul Ricoeur — has a clearly non-voluntarist notion of free will that is one of his most important ideas (see Actualization of Freedom; Hegel on Willing).

Vieweg emphasizes Hegel’s deep commitment to democratic or “republican” politics. Hegel took personal risks as a firm supporter of the moderate Girondin faction of the French Revolution, as well as defending the legal reforms of the Napoleonic Code, which ended the legal basis for aristocratic privilege. He repeatedly went to great lengths to defend students who had been arrested by the police. He could have been charged with treason for delivering a letter to a revolutionary in Paris.

“In Berlin, Hegel established himself as the premier intellectual opponent of the Restoration…. The secret police were watching him all along…; it was widely known that Hegel supported traitors and revolutionary students” (p. 3).

“Hegel was among ‘the first to really conceptualize people as social beings. He ushered in a normative, free era of thought ” (p. 6).

“According to Hegel, … a person is the ‘sum of their deeds’. It is our actions that show what lies deep within us” (p. 9).

Robert Pippin has very thoroughly developed this point in Hegel’s Practical Philosophy.

“A life should not be seen as ‘internally congruent’ but rather full of ‘strange interwoven branching paths’, which are affected by contingencies…. In Hegel’s own words, the particularity of a person, the unique, the ‘individual character’, is the most important thing” (ibid).

Individual character is emergent, and it is an accomplishment. I think Paul Ricoeur’s work on “narrative identity” is more Hegelian than Ricoeur himself recognized..

“Lawrence Stern’s Tristram Shandy, one of Hegel’s favorite books, posits that a biography should depict a person’s character such that the reader can discern the subject’s ruling passions. Hegel describes these quintessences, these crucial inner attitudes and motivations, by the Greek word pathos, and calls them the ‘self-justifying power of the mind, which holds rationality and free will'” (ibid).

“A life should be reconstructed in all its dimensions and perspectives, its changing circumstances, experiments, continuities, and moments of transition, for it contains all the errors and confusions of a human ‘I’: an ‘independent unity’ of countless deeds and episodes, synthesizing diverse personality traits that were, when they were being lived out, incoherent and full of self-contradictions. The identity, that which stays ‘true to itself’ throughout the changes, should and can only be determined afterwards” (pp. 9-10).

Similarly, unity of apperception is an emergence, and a tendency that reconstitutes itself at every moment. It can be treated as static only in hindsight, and it is never pre-given.

“[B]iography is but a medium for a plea for free thought. To use Lawrence Stern’s words: it must be an attack on stupidity, on any and all superstition, on vanity, on rationalizing dogma and fanaticism, on scholars lolling on the floor with their inkpots, on pompous philosophers. The most important thing to clarify is that Hegel sought to make philosophy the most rigorous form of knowledge, and that reason and freedom remained the common thread and continual credo of his entire life” (p.11).

In this example of unity of apperception and biography, we can see how the theoretical and the practical are being thoroughly intermingled.

“Let us get this straight: at every stage of his work, Hegel stood for free republican ideals, against the Restoration and conservative models of thought” (p. 12).

“To philosophize: to think and live freely” (p.13).

“They were up against a strong and despotic nobility” (p. 18).

“With respect to his budding philosophical interests, we may note his occupation with Epictetus’s understanding of freedom and self-determination, which was inspired by Aristotle’s thoughts on prohairesis” (p. 22).

With this reference to Aristotle and Epictetus, we again have an indication that Hegel’s talk of free will should not be interpreted voluntaristically.

“As early as 1787, in Stuttgart, the seventeen-year-old Hegel distanced himself from the religious vision that ‘all-powerful God rules at will'” (p. 25). “He referred to Rousseau’s view of God in Émile, which turns against the superstition inherent in all religions and against the notion that God brings happiness and unhappiness, and portrays God as connected with all ideas of understanding and good” (p. 26).

For years, I could not understand why Kant and Hegel would esteem Rousseau so highly, when Rousseau is an anti-rationalist voluntarist. The answer is that it was not his rather shallow “philosophy” that attracted them, but his practical and literary views of politics and religion and human goodness. And much of Hegel’s engagement with Rousseau was through the poet Schiller.

“Hegel was also a great admirer of poetry…. Hegel liked Schiller’s tone” (p. 28). “Schiller likened Rousseau’s philosophy to Prometheus’s fire which provided arms against the horrors of poverty and ‘demonic self-interest'” (p. 29).

The French Revolution’s “declaration of inalienable human rights and its first article — ‘Men are born and remain free and equal in rights’ — as well as Rousseau’s and Kant’s philosophy of autonomy — were suggestions and challenges for the young Hegel” (p. 32).”The [French] Revolution was motivated by philosophy; Hegel called it ‘the dawn of freedom’…. [F]reedom means rights for all humanity” (p. 36).

“[R]eports from the French capital proclaimed the the importance of philosophy for revolution — ‘the breath of life which is philosophy has reached every atom of civil society’ — and educated people far and wide on the concept of human rights” (p. 37).

All this is what Hegel means by freedom — human rights and civil liberties, nothing metaphysical.

[The poet] Hölderlin called his friend a genius; Schelling saw Hegel, with his bold and Kant-inspired philosophical revolution, as the one who would most ‘tear apart the web of stupid superstitions'” (ibid). “Rousseau’s and Kant’s ideas would help him construct a more profound subjective religion, a folk religion, which ‘goes hand in hand with freedom’…. Religion is one of the most important subjects, a Hegelian fragment declares. Hegel also loved Schiller’s Sturm und Drang poem ‘The Gods of Greece’…, with its provocative line ‘For gods were more human / and so humans were more divine’, not to mention Goethe’s creed, his invective against childlike faith. Meanwhile, Rousseau saw humankind not as burdened by original sin but as born free and good” (pp. 43-44, emphasis in original.).

“Schelling quoted Lessing almost verbatim in a letter to Hegel: ‘Orthodox concepts of the divine are not for me — hen kai pan! [one and all!] I know no other. Hölderlin also invokes hen kai pan in Hegel’s journal” (p. 44, emphasis in original).

This candid remark by the revered literary figure Lessing, along with Lessing’s enthusiastic endorsement of Spinoza, created a huge stir when publicized by the anti-rationalist literary figure F. H. Jacobi in the 1780s. Jacobi was a proponent of intuition and immediacy as superior to reason. He claimed that reason leads to atheism and anarchy.

“Theologians tore down Rousseau’s arguments, which Hegel proceeded to rebuild in his critique of Tübingen’s Christian teachings: ‘respect for Spinoza, Shaftesbury, Rousseau, and Kant’s virtue and morality'” (p. 45).

“Supernaturalist theology, according to which rights have their origins in heaven and are a revelation, went against the autonomy of reason…. The second theological pillar Hegel attacked is original sin” (p. 46).

Rousseau may have been the first modern European writer to publicly oppose original sin. But such a belief is also utterly alien to Plato and Aristotle.

“At the core of Hegel’s thinking is the famous image of the Reich Gottes: an inner life, not a physical church or a positive religion but an invisible church, a realm of morality. One enters not not through external forces like subordination, cults, or belief in miracles but rather, as Hegel answers Kant, by speaking and conducting one’s life in accordance with moral law” (pp. 46-47).

Invisibility here is not any kind of occult property, but a poetic name for universality. There is a close link between universality and considerations of equality.

“While still in Tübingen, Hegel diagnosed society as being harmfully detached from nature; instead, he advocated, people should recognize the power of nature. Much as we emphasize the legitimacy of spirit and the laws of reason, he wrote, ‘we must do the same when considering humankind in general: the sensuality of their lives, the dependence of the inner and outer natures, the effects of their surroundings, the desires of their senses’. And reason is to life as spices to a dish: it determines the taste of the whole thing. Like a light that shines through all of nature, reason is not a substance of old metaphysics but ‘looks, like light, different for each object'” (p. 47).

“Meanwhile, enlightenment through the cultivation of understanding is indispensable despite deficits. Hegel always based his philosophical understanding of nature on the latest science…. [W]ithout this kind of analytical understanding, there could be no reason” (ibid).

“Spinoza’s deus sive natura argued against the dualistic division between spirit and nature…. Reason and sensuality, moral law and bliss are all equally important to the development of humankind and free will. This comes from the view that humankind ‘is made of sensuality and reason together’ and is also how [Hegel] critiqued Enlightenment conceptions of bliss, ‘those hawkers of empirical cure-alls’, as well as Kant” (p. 48).

And I want to say that this non-division of reason and sensuality is good Aristotelianism, even if many of Aristotle’s later readers downplay it.

“Pyrrhonist skepticism… would be very important to Hegel (p. 42). “Hegel lived at the height of the revival of skepticism and Pyrrhonism (an ancient form of radical skepticism). [Hegel’s first biographer] Rosenkranz insisted that the principle of harsh, unbiased, true skeptical inspection was key to Hegel’s philosophical development. The revival of skepticism in the 1790s, especially Pyrrhonism and skeptical Kantianism, is often unfairly dismissed as a marginal event in Hegel’s life. But we are missing a huge part of Hegel’s thinking if we do not consider them. His conception of negativity was, without a doubt, a turning point in his philosophical growth. [The leading Pyrrhonist] Sextus Empiricus was, starting in Tübingen, a symbol for the exclusivity of Hegel’s absolute ideals of freedom. The young Hegel’s critical and skeptical thinking begins with Fichte’s response to Leonhard Creuzer and Gottlob Ernst (Aenesidemus) Schulze. He went from his philosophical critiques of the Frankfurt parallel reading on Plato and Sextus to his Jena Skeptizismusuafsatz (On Skepticism) to the project of the Phenomenology of Spirit as a self-fulfilling skepticism” (p. 49).

Hume already pointed out that ancient Pyrrhonic skepticism is very different from the kind of skepticism that people began to worry about after Descartes. For one thing, skepticism came to be regarded as a nihilistic position to refute, rather than as the kind of intellectual scruples we see Hegel reaching for here.

Vieweg’s phrase of “self-fulfilling skepticism” in connection with the arc of development across Hegel’s Phenomenology seems to mean the same kind of thing that I mean when I provocatively suggest that Hegelian “absolute” knowledge is principally distinguished by a thoroughgoing recognition of the relativity and conditioned character of knowledge claims.

“The heated controversies on skepticism were a huge motivation for Hegel’s astonishing philosophical development between 1790 and 1810. And [the skeptic] Schulze, an astute man who attacked Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, was an especially important agent provocateur. Schulze pushed Fichte and Hegel to revise their ideas and drafts more carefully. It all started in the Stift [Tübingen]: skeptical thinking instilled in the young revolutionaries both Pyrrhonic and skeptical Kantian methods, ‘a fundamentally unique part of transcendental philosophy’, two forms of anti-dogmatism par excellence” (ibid).

“Hegel was taken by the Pyrrhonists’ understanding of themselves not as lethargic doubters but harsh, unbiased scouts and inspectors who weighed pros and cons. He loved the Greek root word, skepsis, meaning investigation and proof, and Hume’s characterization of skeptics as diligent inspectors and critics. The principle of isothenia — for every opinion there is an opposite, equally valid opinion — is a cry against mere opinionation. Hegel had encountered this isothenic-antinomian motivation in Plato’s Parmenides as well as in Aristotle. The implicit or explicit presence of isothenia and antinomy would assist Hegel’s future conceptions of negativity and contradiction” (p. 50).

The skeptics’ real point is to advocate suspension of judgment. We could advocate suspension of judgment without making the positive claim that all opinions are equal, and this would allow us to embrace a kind of skepticism without destroying the possibility of discourse. Saying all opinions are equal is like saying everything is an illusion. It obliterates distinction, but without distinction there can be no meaning or understanding. In spite of this, there have been a few people who tried to seriously sustain such a claim. Hegel too sometimes writes as if things were more evenly balanced than I think they could be, but he certainly would not countenance any wholesale obliteration of distinctions.

“The images of the ‘free republican’ and of a rationally formed society of self-possessed, free agents were a big part of this ‘young generation’s ideal’. Such a way of life would require a republican national education. All people, regardless of culture, nationality, ethnicity, gender, religion, and so forth are born free, and all have the right to a free life…. Their ideal of freedom and brotherhood were part of the reason for Hegel’s interest in stoicism, especially Epictetus [who was himself a slave], who doubled as a symbol of overcoming slavery through education. Meanwhile the ideals of the Stoic Marcus Aurelius took equal rights and freedom to a new, universal level: the polis became cosmopolitan. We are all citizens of one state. The world is a public under a great law, the general law of reason” (pp. 51-52).

Here we see a French Revolution style linking of freedom with equal rights. And on this kind of topic, we get to see Stoicism in a sympathetic light.

I should write on Epictetus one of these days. His ethical focus is almost entirely independent of the representationalist-realist dogmatism in Stoicism that I often use as a negative reference in contrast to Plato and Aristotle. (Many other aspects of Stoic ethics, physics and logic are interesting as well. It is what Kant calls dogmatism that I object to. The historic characterization of then-dominant Stoicism as “dogmatism” by other ancient philosophers is the source of Kant’s usage of the term.)

“Hegel was an ardent advocate for separation of church and state: only in the ‘unhappiest countries’ do ‘religious leaders rule’. Hegel was also against the idea that religion and morality are inherently inseparable; he insisted, in fact, that they be divided. National religion (Volksreligion) and freedom of conscience must be able to coexist. Hegel favored free thought as portrayed in Schiller’s Don Carlos, … and he referenced Lessing’s Nathan the Wise as he argued for a diversity of religions and perspectives. Neither church nor state, he also argued, nor ‘fanatic priests nor decadent despots’ could issue ‘any commands or prohibitions’ on morality and religion; otherwise, as he would later add, there arises fanaticism, his word for fundamentalism. Neither church nor state can send out moral overseers, judges who measure morality with ‘a religious ruler'” (p. 52).

Genuine morality cannot be based on obedience to commands. (But fortunately, Plato and Aristotle never proposed such a thing.)

“In 1794, German idealism was born in Jena, with Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s Foundations of the Entire Science of Knowledge, a text that sparked the single most creative decade in the history of philosophy” (pp. 58-59).

“Meanwhile, there were stormy skies ahead for the French Revolution…. As [Hegel] would later say, Robespierre’s answer to everything ‘was la mort!‘ [death!]. Despite these profound conflicts, Hegel remained — unlike many contemporary German intellectuals — loyal to the principles of liberty, equality, and fraternity and would eventually become the philosopher of modern freedom” (p. 59).

“Something is not true just because people posit or assume it, because it is an accepted fact, or because everyone agrees that it is so. As for censorship, Hegel’s thoughts on positive religion, as well as his Rousseau- and Kant-inspired Life of Jesus, would have generated tremendous outcry…. Hegel wisely kept [these] manuscripts to himself” (p. 60).

“The second constant was his employment of poetic devices in philosophical argumentation, his appeal to the senses, his use of his vast literary knowledge. This set him apart from Kant and Fichte, whose literary and artistic knowledge was rather limited” (ibid).

This is a significant point. Hegel employs a great many figures of speech, and has a high linguistic awareness. This is not just idiosyncrasy.

“His Berne writings, for example, combined Lessing’s Nathan and its thoughts on religious tolerance with ancient Greek tragedy, which thematizes human accountability and responsibility (Oedipus Rex) and the collision of different ethical principles (Antigone)” (p. 61).

“He was concentrating on developing a unique, systematic way of philosophizing, in which he does not separate the themes of religion, art, and education” (ibid, emphasis in original).

That is an interesting different take on “system”.

“Ultimately, Hegel’s thoughts culminated in a radical critique of all authoritarian religion. For him, the important thing was to develop a new way of educating people…. Going back to Lessing, Rousseau, and Kant, Hegel believed that only a natural and rational religion could count as a religion, not this positive faith that only served to establish external authority. No one should be blindly obedient to laws they have not themselves made. And religions of obedience are founded not in the freedom of the will or any kind of freedom at all but in subordination….The court of moral law, as he put it, has the question ‘Rational or irrational?’ engraved over its doorway” (pp. 62-63).

“Thinking of Lessing, he wrote that if Jesus teaches a pure moral religion, how could Christianity become positive, that is, authoritarian? ‘The objectivity of divinity goes hand in hand with corruption and the enslavement of humankind’…. This ‘downfall’ replaces reason with miracles. The higher power lies in a totally unknown world, which we do not share…. The most disturbing thing is that, in the name of this ‘objective’ God, one ‘murders, slanders, burns, steals, lies, and betrays’. Such a distorted religion is the ‘tool’, ‘advocate’, and ‘fiery praise of the ungodly crime’ of soul-sucking despotism. With that said, Hegel knew that rights cannot exist without positive rights and that religion cannot exist without positivity” (p. 63).

“Nothing had done more to make religion authoritarian than belief in miracles” (p. 64).

“After the fall of the Jacobins, Hegel distanced himself from the folk religion idea and ended up emphasizing the separation of church and state. All his ponderings about folk education wound up being fundamentally unviable; his search for a close connection between Rousseau and Kant brought no great results. But as he considered original sin, his folk education project came back into the picture. He began attacking both theological and Kantian positions by emphasizing human self-respect: People are not sinners nor carved out of crooked timber, and they must never be treated with disdain” (p. 65).

“While Hegel was in Berne, his theories did not paint a picture of decadence and decay, even though he was influenced by Rousseau…. Hegel foresaw no downfall, nor was he pessimistic. Instead, he describes a human tendency toward authoritarian despotism and argues against subordination and for an ideal of freedom. One can see how he distanced himself from Rousseau. Inalienable human rights, he writes, are the ‘beautiful sparks of reason’; slaves and servants will not behave like sheep forever. The supposedly subordinated ones have no duty toward a higher power, since they have human rights. Yet rights and duty are indivisible…. When people are subjugated, they are wounded in the most profound way. People’s rights are infinite, inalienable, and absolute. In the Berner Briefen, Hegel asks: Why did it take humanity so long to realize that this dignity lies at the center of things?” (ibid).

“[M]easured, carefully articulated withdrawal from Kant, Fichte, and Schelling was accompanied by praise of their work…. [Hegel] called for dignity, human freedom, and a cosmopolitan, anti-despotic way of thinking…. Now he proposed an anti-Kantian ‘amalgam of sensuality and reason’. One must not divide intention from result, reason from sensuality…. So Hegel bid adieu to Kant’s deontology, despite having consulted it for many early fragments about freedom. This was inevitable: Hegel focused on friendship and love, while Kant worked ‘in a world of intangible ideas’, a stranger to the five senses…. He … pits love against asceticism. Ascetics want to tax every thought, control every feeling, crush one’s joy, love, friendship and social life — things that Hegel valued tremendously his whole life long” (pp. 66-67).

The friendship and love and anti-ascetism here all sound like Aristotle.

“Hegel further opposed the dogma of the ‘sin we are naturally born with’, that is, original sin. He believed that people must take responsibility for their actions; only then can free will exist…. One is only responsible for one’s actions if one undertook them knowingly and with an awareness of the law…. People are not deficient because of their sensual desires; they are natural beings, not sinful weeds in God’s garden”(p. 67).

Free will here basically means unimpaired reason.

His first systematic-philosophical manuscript from 1795 “is full of reservations about Fichte’s, Kant’s, and Reinhold’s notions of freedom. In the first place, they all think they need to master nature: they conceptualize the unity of reason and nature, but one is the master while the other is mastered…. Free thought does not come from assuring people that there is support from on high…. And in regard to nature, there can be no relationship of ‘master’ and ‘slave'” (p. 68).

As Brandom has especially emphasized, Hegel is utterly opposed to the idea of “mastery” that is sometimes foisted on him.

“Hegel … identified the fatal flaw in all abstract concepts of unity: How does one derive different concrete things from a vague, even empty unity?” (p. 70). Manuscript 41 from 1795 says “where subject and object, or freedom and nature, are thus unified, so that nature is freedom and subject is not to be divided from object, that is divine” (p. 71). “With unified thought, it cannot be about master and servant; it cannot be that the subject is powerful while the object is submissive, nor vice versa. Right after arriving in Frankfurt, though it created a huge burden of proof, Hegel would say that the true hen kai pan [one and all] is love” (ibid).

“In the fight against ‘living in chains’, against being ‘rowers in a galley’, against political and religious despotism, against all master/slave structures, Hegel employs the principle that people must live exclusively by laws that they have made for themselves” (p. 76).

“[T]he core of modernity is freedom of thought (Meinung, ‘opinion’), knowledge (Wissenschaft), art, and religion. The ‘coincidental differences of opinion and belief’, people who think or believe differently, must be respected. A good citizen should believe whatever they want; yet the Holy Inquisition and colonizers ‘avenged the offended majesty of God through murder’, upon indigenous peoples, pagans, Muslims, and Jews…. These hypocrites profess sympathy or love toward people whom they really see as deeply mistaken just because they have differing beliefs…. [A] clear distinction must be made between legality and morality. A ‘virtuous state’, whether it comes from religious fundamentalism or a Robespierre-like regime, tends to exclude all people who think differently, making them seem like deviants and promoting fanaticism” (pp. 76-77).

“Hegel repeatedly distinguishes between beautiful, free imagination and its ‘adventurous excesses and images of a terrifying world’. The latter is the source of prejudice” (p. 78).

“The ideal of his youth can be summed up in a single word: freedom. Freedom as Rousseau, Schiller, Kant, and Fichte defined it, in the spirit of the French Revolution” (p. 87).

“From the Romans, who owned slaves and indulged in their vices, to the wild ‘barbarians’ and the Italian city-states, to the monarchies that held their people in bondage, it is an ambiguous history, full of great scientific and artistic achievements but also of banning and censorship…. Christianity preached love of one’s fellow humans and equality; yet under the Spanish cross, entire populations of Native Americans were being wiped out. The English sang songs praising the destruction of India” (p. 97).

“Positive faith creates a master/slave structure, through abstract opposition and heteronomy. This is no sign of the ‘Reich Gottes’ (Kingdom of God), for nothing that rules me, within or without, can be godly…. Hegel looked to Aristotle to demonstrate the unity of humanity and God. The actualization of divine reason in an active life, as an individual, containing opposition, must be understood in this way (p. 101).

“Nothing that rules me can be godly” — I like that.

“Humans and God must be imagined as being of the ‘same nature’, which is spirit itself imagined by spirit (human beings)…. In 1799, Hegel described the divine as ‘the highest freedom, whose existence and relationship to the world comes in the form of beauty’…. Miracles illustrate the extreme of positive or objective religion; the ‘most ungodly’ lies in creatio ex nihilo [creation from nothing]. In the context of religion, too, Hegel is concerned with the insufficiency of unity without diversity: disdain for the diversity of life leads only to fanaticism. If the divine is pure, shapeless, and unconnected, then it follows that everything else must be impure and loathsome. It also leads to the idea that people who worship different gods are ‘unbelievers’. Those who hate all gods but their own must ‘carry a hatred of all humankind in their pocket'” (pp. 101-102).

“To Hegel, an avid reader of Shakespeare, love between two people… represents the ‘finding of one in the other’…. ‘The more I give, the more I have. The individual finds within the other a way to be free” (p. 102).

“Hegel did not see humans as Fremdlinge (aliens) in nature or Pfichtlinge (dutiful beings) in the moral world. Regardless of categorical imperatives, they have a right to happiness and well-being, to act on their desires; duty and desire cannot be pitted against each other. In religion, God must be imagined as a ‘friendly being’, and humans must be not only beings of duty but beings of joy, love, and laughter…. In Frankfurt, Hegel changed his terminology, ‘unifying’ morality and legality into a higher term. As Rosenkranz puts it, ‘first came simply life, later came ethical life” (p. 103).

“Aristotle’s Metaphysics, book 12, was particularly important for his understanding life as identity” (p. 106).

“Truth is freedom from ruling / being ruled” (ibid).

“Beginning in the autumn of 1801, he was close to Goethe, and they often went together to the theater” (p. 113).

“Dogmas generally come in the form of presuppositions without evidence: assumptions, revelations, empty assurances…. Each of these approaches assumes that there is something before reflection, beyond reflection — spontaneous, given facts, the unchangeable. All are variations of the myth of the given. An unexamined assumption, a pure reassurance, cannot found or ground a philosophy, because critical examination remains suspended. Immediacy, if merely assumed, is fraudulently acquired: a fatal leap into belief or faith, akin to an appeal to oracles” (p. 120).

“Instead of ‘I = I’, the postulate is ‘I should be I’, only a demand for unification, a unification that will never happen” (ibid).

“No logical path leads from pure unity to duality or diversity, and vice versa. In Plotinus’s Neoplatonism, the One is supposed to metaphorically radiate outward. Fichte also made an illegitimate leap in logic, from the ‘I’ to the ‘not-I’…. Finding evidence (Beweis) for the beginning forced Hegel to drastically change his strategy of thinking while still in Jena” (p. 128).

“Reading Aristotle and Fichte, Hegel understood thought and will as different but not as confronting each other; in each, the theoretical and the practical are connected…. Reason must stand against both dogmatism and skepticism — against Plotinus’s example of empty unity, empty monism, and against Sextus’s example of mere division, empty dualism…. Philosophical thinking cannot accept pure immediacy, or anything prereflective…. [T]he key concept of ‘ethical life’ (Sittlichkeit) aims at a philosophy of concrete self-determination” (p. 130).

“True ethical life must overcome extremes, both for private subjects that are only for themselves and for empty and abstract generalities” (p. 133). “True ethical life claims the identity of the universal and the particular in form and content: concrete freedom” (p. 134).

Vieweg quotes from an 1803 fragment, “Geist is not being, but becoming; it comes from negation and, having prepared for itself the ideal element of nothingness, can move freely. Geist is but the elevation of its other; this other self is nature; Geist makes this other and itself the same…. Geist recognizes that this nature, or otherness, is not actually other. This knowledge makes Geist free, for the first time truly Geist…. Only by leaving itself and returning to find itself can Geist prove itself Geist” (p. 139, ellipses in original).

“With a precise categorical definition of development, he countered the relativist mantra of procedure as an endless cycle of self-creation and self-destruction up until the bad infinity of St. Neverland Day. There is no lottery without a payout; the purpose of being-in-oneself becomes real when it becomes for-oneself…. Second, he defined the relationship with oneself as knowing” (p. 140).

“Hegel fought against the fiction of pure, unconditional immediacy, and abhorrent dogmatic assurances of a pure immediate, setting against these assertions the skeptical climbing of the ‘rope ladder of logic”. Skepticism was his weapon against what is supposedly sacrosanct, primordial, prereflective doubt, or skepsis, is the opposite of the pure immediate” (p. 142).

“[H]e continued his debate with skepticism and sharpened his concept of negativity, a point whose importance is still underrated” (p. 143).

“The monadic-solipsistic ego is only able to achieve self-consciousness in a thinking self-relation through the sublation of its imaging and yearning self-relation, only through knowledge of the will, which is thus conceived as a universal will and is essentially being-recognized” (p. 144, emphasis in original).

“He was working to overcome the paradigm of consciousness” (p. 148, emphasis in original).

“Hegel wrote a popular, accessible essay called ‘Who Thinks Abstractly?’ This little gem is an excellent place to start on Hegel’s philosophy; it addresses the main barrier to philosophy — namely, that it is too abstract: ‘Metaphysics, thought, and abstraction are words that make everyone run away more or less as if from the plague’. Hegel’s answer to the titulary question is perhaps surprising: it is the uneducated who think abstractly, not the educated. Abstract thinking means, for example, seeing in a murderer nothing but the abstract fact of being a murderer, thereby denying them everything else — their concreteness, the fact that they may also be a strong, attractive person on whom the sun likewise shines; an uneducated person thinks abstractly, reducing a person to a single predicate” (p. 185).

“‘The answer that Robespierre gave to everything: whatever anyone said, thought, did, or wanted, he cried, La mort! It became repetitive’. Schelling’s absolute knowing is the same: ‘great broom, sweeping everything away'” (p. 186).

“Hegel wrote the Philosophy of Right inspired by the spirit of 1789. The Restoration proved a danger to his publishing it. (It is a double irony that Hegel-haters today call him a Restoration ideologue.)” (p.269).

“Hegel was a danger to the Restoration. In his lectures and books, he insisted fearlessly on free thought. He supported students who stood accused of treason” (p. 270). “Hegel spoke with hotheaded youths, sympathizing with their yearning for freedom and discouraging nationalism and anti-Semitism, evidently with some success…. [H]is Philosophy of Right proved that theories of nationalism, especially those that excluded Jewish and French people, were absurd” (p. 271). “The secret police, inevitably, kept an eye on him, for he was supporting ‘traitors’…. And yet, despite all this, there are still those who call Hegel a Restoration apologist. They should read the Philosophy of Right, which is arguably history’s greatest book against Restoration ideology, against nationalism, colonialism, and racism, and for a modern society of freedom and justice” (p. 272).

“The preface to the Philosophy of Right is one of the most misunderstood texts in philosophical history….. [Hegel] would be vilified for his universalism and his rejection of German chauvinism, nationalism, and racism at key moments in later history — 1870, 1914, and 1933″ (p. 274).

“Not everything that exists is ‘actual’ (wirklich); only rational forms have that attribute. Positive rights cannot be equated with the right of reason (Vernunftrecht)…. What exists is not the standard, as the Prussian state would have it, but rather reason: the standard and the court where ‘rights’ must justify themselves. In a lecture Hegel said, ‘What is actual (wirklich), is rational. But not all is actual, that exists” (p. 275).

“In colloquial speech, actuality encompassed every ‘stunted, transitory existence’. Vieweg quotes Hegel, “But when I speak of actualization (Wirklichkeit), one should instantly wonder in what sense I use this expression, for I also discussed actuality in the Logic and I do not just mean contingencies, which do exist. I have precisely distinguished actuality from Dasein, existence, and other categories'” (ibid).

“The prologue also includes one of the most beautiful metaphors in philosophy: ”The owl of Minerva begins her flight when dawn breaks’, The cliched, pessimistic interpretation is that philosophy comes too late. But Hegel described the French revolution as a glorious sunrise: for the first time, there was a constitution based on rights” (ibid). The modern world represents the ‘dawn’ of history, the highest stage of freedom. First, it suggests that a free society can realize the singular freedom of all subjects. Dawn and sunrise stand for the French Revolution” (p. 276).

“Relationships such as master/slave and despotism are not forms of freedom: both ‘master’ and ‘slave’ are unfree, as is the despot; they are ‘in the same relationship’ of unfreedom. People’s reciprocal recognition is intrinsic to Hegel’s free will. The idea of interpersonality appeared in the Encyclopedia back in 1817: a person is ‘realized only in the being of other people’; only then am I ‘a real person for me‘. The principle of recognition is fundamental in the Philosophy of Right. It is the substance of true community, of friendship, love, family, state. Abstract right demands that I ‘be a person’, and with regard to intersubjectivity, ‘respect every other “I” as a person, a subject with rights’…. All actions that do not respect a person as a subject with free will or interfere with their freedom are unfree. Third, Hegel has a concept that goes back to Kant and Fichte: every being with free will is — unlike a thing — its own end” (p. 281).

“The three dimensions — recognition, inviolability, and the end in itself — all concern people’s equality in their ‘humanity’, with their right to personality/personhood and are the foundation of human rights…. Every being with free will has the absolute right to recognition of their person” (ibid).

But at the same time, “Equating arbitrariness with freedom is a theoretical fallacy” (p. 296).

“Having finished the Philosophy of Right, Hegel became one of the main inspirations for the explosion of poetry in the 1820s…. Hegel’s Lectures on Fine Art, which were about modern and Romantic literature and art in general, were especially important to them” (p. 318). “Hegel was a big part of the Berlin musical scene….’Hegel was especially at home in the company of Berlin women, and quickly they, too, came to care for and look after him, the good and humorous professor'” (p. 320).

“Hegel’s success and polemical statements also inspired jealousy, hatred, and rejection….Hegel had friendly, collegial relationships with many fellow intellectuals…. But he also had influential enemies” (p. 327). “The nobility, correctly, did not find Hegel to be a Prussian political philosopher, a royalist; in fact, he was one of the most philosophically dangerous enemies of the Restoration” (pp. 327-328).

Culmination of the Culmination

Right before his final conclusion, Pippin recalls a wonderful quote from Nietzsche’s Twilight of the Idols:

“Learning to see — habituating the eye to repose, to patience, to letting things come to it; learning to defer judgment, to investigate and comprehend the individual in all its aspects. This is the first schooling in spirituality: not to react immediately to a stimulus, but to have the restraining, stock-taking instincts in control. Learning to see, as I understand it, is almost what is called in unphilosophical language strong will-power: the essence of it is precisely not to ‘will’, the ability to defer decision. All unspirituality, all vulgarity, is due to the incapacity to resist a stimulus — one has to react, one obeys a stimulus” (The Culmination, p. 216).

Heidegger argues that art — and poetry in particular — represents a disclosure of meaningfulness that must be understood as prior to philosophy and to all the works of reason. Pippin explains Heidegger’s talk about attunement to the question of Being as a way of putting meaning before knowledge. I too think meaning comes before knowledge; I believe in a kind of Platonic reticence about knowledge claims.

But Heidegger effectively attributes to Aristotle and Hegel, among others, what Derrida would call a logocentrism — a bad-smelling thing redolent of ethnocentrism, but having to do with the role of reason. I sharply disagree with this characterization of Aristotle and Hegel, as well as with the characterization of the role of reason that Heidegger assumes.

I think that across a great many posts here, we have clearly seen that interpretation of meaning comes before knowledge in Aristotle and Hegel. Reason itself, for the two greatest “rationalist” philosophers, has a fundamentally hermeneutic or interpretive character, which takes precedence over logic in the sense of formal calculation. Hegel can be forgiven for using the term “logic” in a very nonstandard way, and even for calling it a science. Heidegger was an important promoter of a kind of hermeneutics in the 20th century, but he seems to think of a hermeneutic approach as standing in opposition to the “rationalism” of Aristotle and Hegel.

Pippin says that for Hegel, “The role of art is to make available the speculative truth of philosophy in a sensible and affective register, and that means in an incomplete and finally unsatisfactory, because not fully self-conscious, way, and that way must be and can only fully be articulated in the Logic. Obviously, this touches on the basic issue that has arisen scores of times in the preceding: is there or is there not a form of nondiscursively available meaningfulness in human experience, and one that bears directly on philosophy in a fundamental way, given that such original familiar meaningfulness must count as bearing on the ‘first’ question all philosophy must be oriented from — the possible availability of anything at all, the availability of being qua being?” (p. 217).

That some more fundamental interpretation of meaning must precede calculable, univocal forms of reasoning is, I think, abundantly clear. Even from the side of formal systems, it is always necessary to begin with axioms, postulates, or hypotheses that are presumed to have a status independent of the development of the system. No formal system is truly self-contained. But philosophers like Aristotle and Hegel are not developing formal systems.

And what does this all have to do with talk about “being qua being”? This connection, so important to Heidegger, seems like sheer presumption. I’m objecting to the identification from the hermeneutic side, but I could imagine that some Thomists might also be unhappy with it, because they would identify being qua being with God, and therefore not with human hermeneutic activity.

On the other hand, I do greatly appreciate Pippin’s gloss that Heidegger’s question of the meaning of Being can alternately be expressed more simply as questioning about meaning. That takes the mystifying element out of it. But it still raises the question why it is necessary to raise the topic of questioning about meaning in such a roundabout and mystifying way, if that is really the aim.

Pippin equates the possible availability of being qua being to the “possible availability of anything at all” (ibid). I doubt this. Being qua being is a very specific historically developed theory or theories, mainly due to Avicenna, Aquinas, and Scotus. Anything at all is anything at all.

“[W]e can say that there is in [Hegel’s] Encyclopedia system a non-theoretical, nondiscursive, and philosophically significant role for art…. Heidegger’s affirmative answer… ranges from his early emphasis on the disclosive role of ‘attunements’ to his later emphasis on historical ‘uncoverings and self-concealings’ in the arts…. [I]n Hegel, … fine art should count as a ‘sensible and affective’ register of what could be called the way in which the meaning of Geist’s being is available to it at a historical period in a historical community” (ibid).

The medieval Albertist Dietrich of Freiberg would frankly tell us that the meaning of Geist‘s being should be understood to be the same as the meaning of Geist said simply (he says that a human being is in no way different from a human, and similarly for all such cases).

For Hegel “Consciousness as Sense-Certainty… assumes the world is available to it simply by virtue of its sensible presence. One is immediately onto sensed objects directly just by sensing them. But any distinctly human form of apprehension must, insists Hegel, be able to say what it claims to know, otherwise it is just differentially responsive and not an instance of knowing. The absence of such saying would be untrue to its experienced nature as a human knower and in that sense, not being who one is, would be unfree. It puts itself unavoidably to the test by trying to say what it knows and failing. This is the first manifestation of the conatus of freedom, the realization of self-conscious self-knowledge…. As we have seen Heidegger argue, … in phenomenological terms the ultimacy of this conatus, from the beginning… means that metaphysics as unconditioned thinking on thinking… is an illusion, question-begging (p. 219, emphasis in original).

Conatus is a term from early modern theories of motion that was used by Spinoza for the ongoing effort of a living being to be the being that it is. It seems to me to describe more or less the same phenomena as Aristotelian entelechy or Kantian internal teleology, in a vocabulary that is compatible with mechanism and avoids reference to teleology.

Pippin adds in a footenote to “question-begging” : “I state here the Heideggerian position, not my own. Heidegger has to claim that what for the Hegelian, or in the Hegelian tradition, must count as the pathologies of modernity — alienation, reification, domination instead of mutuality of recognitive status, the humiliating conditions of the modern organization of labor, anomie, deracination — are all best understood as implications of the still ‘unthought’ question, the meaning of Being, as descendants of the ‘metaphysical’ tradition…. [T]his claim is worth taking more seriously than it has been, but the way Heidegger formulates the issue seems to exclude all other options as derivative from and so complicit with that tradition. Even on strictly hermeneutical grounds, such exclusivity leaves us with an incomplete interpretation of what we need to understand” (p. 219n).

The theory of how the unconditioned can emerge from the conditioned, and the eternal from what is in time, is very delicate and easily misunderstood, but it is central to what Hegel is about. I don’t claim to know that that is how things are, but it is my fervent conviction. Hegel uses very idiosyncratic talk about “negation” and “negativity” to explain it.

“Heidegger has framed all such issues as dependent on, and reflecting some sense of, the historical meaningfulness of Being and that means the context of his question about the reconciling powers of reason is a question about mattering” (ibid).

I’m all for attention to meaning and mattering, but for me that means attention to interpretation and ethics, not ontology. Heidegger distinguishes an inferior, everyday “ontic” character of things from the superior, extraordinary, ineffable character of Being, and castigates others for ignoring this distinction. I think this distinction is false and should be ignored. Rather than a binary division between the ineffable and the boring world of ordinary things and ordinary life, it is better to learn to see the nonordinary in the ordinary.

Next in this series: Heidegger’s Story About Metaphysics

Plotinus on Intellectual Beauty

“Art… must itself be beautiful in a far higher and purer degree [than the beautiful object]” (Plotinus, Enneads V.8, MacKenna trans., p. 422)

“The Nature, then, which creates things so lovely must be itself of a far earlier beauty; we, undisciplined in discernment of the inward, knowing nothing of it, run after the outer, never understanding that it is the inner that stirs us; we are in the case of one who sees his own reflection but not realizing whence it comes goes in pursuit of it” (p. 423).

“By what image, thus, can we represent it? We have nowhere to go but to what is less” (p. 424).

“For all There is heaven; earth is heaven, and sea heaven; and animal and plant and man; all is the heavenly content of that heaven…. And each of them contains all within itself, and at the same time sees all in every other, so that everywhere there is all, and all is all and each all, and infinite the glory. Each of them is great; the small is great; the sun, There, is all the stars; and every star, again, is all the stars and sun. While some one manner of being is dominant in each, all are mirrored in every other” (p. 425).

“Each There walks upon no alien soil; its place is its essential self; and, as each moves, so to speak, towards what is Above, it is attended by the very ground from which it starts: there is no distinguishing between the Being and the Place; all is Intellect, the Principle and the ground on which it stands, alike” (ibid).

“The myth of Lynceus seeing into the very deeps of the earth tells us of those eyes in the divine. No weariness overtakes the vision which yet brings no satiety as would call for its ending; for there never was a void to be filled…. [T]o see is to look the more, since for them to continue in the contemplation of an infinite self and of infinite objects is but to acquiesce in the bidding of their nature” (ibid).

“Life, pure, is never a burden…. The greatness and power of the wisdom There we may know from this, that it embraces all the real Beings, and has made all and all follow it, and yet that it is itself those beings” (p. 426).

“If we have failed to understand, it is that we have thought of knowledge as a mass of theorems and an accumulation of propositions, though that is false even for our sciences of the sense-realm…. [T]his is not a wisdom built up of theorems but one totality, not a wisdom consisting of manifold detail co-ordinated into a unity but rather a unity working out in detail” (ibid).

“Later from this wisdom in unity there appears, in another form of being, an image, already less compact, which announces the original in terms of discourse and seeks the causes by which things are such that the wonder arises how a generated world can be so excellent…. This excellence, whose necessity is scarcely or not at all manifest to search, exists, if we could but find it out, before all searching and reasoning” (p. 427).

“One way, only, remains: all things must exist in something else… thus the entire aggregate of existence springs from the divine world…. [T]he creation is not hindered, even now; it stands firm in virtue of being All. To me, moreover, it seems that if we ourselves were archetypes, Ideas, veritable Being, and the Idea with which we construct here were our veritable Essence, then our creative power, too, would toillessly effect its purpose” (p. 428).

“Certainly no reproach can rightly be brought against this world save only that it is not That” (p. 429).

“Being is desirable because it is identical with Beauty; and Beauty is loved because it is Being. How then can we debate which is the cause of the other, where the nature is one?” (p. 430).

“To those that do not see entire, the immediate impression is alone taken into account; but those drunken with this wine, filled with the nectar, all their soul penetrated by this beauty, cannot remain mere gazers: no longer is there a spectator outside gazing on an outside spectacle; the clear-eyed hold the vision within themselves, though, for the most part, they have no idea that it is within but look towards it as to something beyond them and see it as an object of wisdom caught by a direction of the will” (p. 431).

“The very contrary: to see the divine as something external is to be outside of it” (p. 432).

“We ourselves possess beauty when we are true to our own being” (p. 433).

Efficient vs Proximate Causes

Joe Sachs links the notion of proximate cause to what I have called the modern sense of “efficient cause”.

The brief passage in Aristotle’s Metaphysics that seems to have primarily driven scholastic discussions of efficient causes reads “In yet another [way], [cause] is that from which the first beginning of change or rest is, as the legislator is a cause, or the father of a child, or generally the maker of what is made, or whatever makes a changing thing change” (Book V chapter 2, 1013a30-33, Sachs translation, p. 78).

Sachs’ footnote to this passage says “This is sometimes mistakenly called the efficient cause. Aristotle never describes it in such a way, and we generally intend by the phrase [efficient cause] the proximate cause, the last event that issues in the effect. Aristotle always means instead the origin of the motion, when it happens to be outside the moving thing. It is only in a derivative sense that he will speak of a push or a bump as being a cause at all, since, as he says at 1013a16 above, all causes are sources” (p. 78n).

When he says “Aristotle never describes it this way”, I think he means that “efficient cause” is yet another Latin-derived standard translation that has quite different connotations from the original Greek.

The excellent Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy article “Aristotle on Causality” reconciles the brief reference in the Metaphysics with Aristotle’s much more detailed discussion in the Physics. This is worthy of an unusually long quotation:

“[A]n adequate explanation of the production of a [bronze] statue requires also a reference to the efficient cause or the principle that produces the statue. For Aristotle, this is the art of bronze-casting the statue….”

“This result is mildly surprising and requires a few words of elaboration. There is no doubt that the art of bronze-casting resides in an individual artisan who is responsible for the production of the statue. According to Aristotle, however, all the artisan does in the production of the statue is the manifestation of specific knowledge. This knowledge, not the artisan who has mastered it, is the salient explanatory factor that one should pick as the most accurate specification of the efficient cause (Phys. 195b21-25). By picking the art, not the artisan, Aristotle is not just trying to provide an explanation of the production of the statue that is not dependent upon the desires, beliefs and intentions of the individual artisan; he is trying to offer an entirely different type of explanation – namely, an explanation that does not make a reference (implicit or explicit) to these desires, beliefs and intentions. More directly, the art of bronze-casting the statue enters in the explanation as the efficient cause because it helps us to understand what it takes to produce the statue; that is to say, what steps are required to produce the statue. But can an explanation of this type be given without a reference to the final outcome of the production, the statue? The answer is emphatically “no”. A model is made for producing the statue. A mold is prepared for producing the statue. The bronze is melted and poured for producing the statue. Both the prior and the subsequent stage are for the sake of a certain end, the production of the statue. Clearly, the statue enters in the explanation of each step of the artistic production as the final cause or that for the sake of which everything in the production process is done.”

“In thinking about the four causes, we have come to understand that Aristotle offers a teleological explanation of the production of a bronze statue; that is to say, an explanation that makes a reference to the telos or end of the process. Moreover, a teleological explanation of the type sketched above does not crucially depend upon the application of psychological concepts such as desires, beliefs and intentions. This is important because artistic production provides Aristotle with a teleological model for the study of natural processes, whose explanation does not involve beliefs, desires, intentions or anything of this sort. Some have objected that Aristotle explains natural process on the basis of an inappropriately psychological teleological model; that is to say, a teleological model that involves a purposive agent who is somehow sensitive to the end. This objection can be met if the artistic model is understood in non-psychological terms. In other words, Aristotle does not psychologize nature because his study of the natural world is based on a teleological model that is consciously free from psychological factors….”

“One final clarification is in order. By insisting on the art of bronze-casting as the most accurate efficient cause of the production of the statue, Aristotle does not mean to preclude an appeal to the beliefs and desires of the individual artisan. On the contrary, there are cases where the individual realization of the art obviously enters in the explanation of the bronze statue. For example, one may be interested in a particular bronze statue because that statue is the great achievement of an artisan who has not only mastered the art but has also applied it with a distinctive style. In this case it is perfectly appropriate to make reference to the beliefs and desires of the artisan. Aristotle seems to make room for this case when he says that we should look “for general causes of general things and for particular causes of particular things” (Phys. 195b25-26). Note, however, that the idiosyncrasies that may be important in studying a particular bronze statue as the great achievement of an individual artisan may be extraneous to a more central (and more interesting) case. To understand why let us focus on the study of nature. When the student of nature is concerned with the explanation of a natural phenomenon like the formation of sharp teeth in the front and broad molars in the back of the mouth, the student of nature is concerned with what is typical about that phenomenon. In other words, the student of nature is expected to provide an explanation of why certain animals typically have a certain dental arrangement.”