Habermas on Heidegger

I don’t usually like to dwell on the negative, but Heidegger has aggressively demeaned Plato, Aristotle, Hegel, and Western philosophy as a whole, and I just stumbled on this. In the 2023 English translation of the first part of his Also a History of Philosophy (German ed. 2019), leading German philosopher and social theorist Jürgen Habermas has some very sharp remarks.

Habermas was only four years old when Hitler took power in 1933. Like many children, he was enrolled in the Hitler Youth. According to the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, he “was shaken to his core by what he learnt of the Nazi atrocities from the Nuremberg Trials, and news coverage of the Holocaust. Thus, although still in his teens, he experienced 1945 as a turning point that would shape his political and cultural outlook”. In 1953, Habermas was again extremely disturbed when Heidegger published his 1934 Introduction to Metaphysics lectures, without removing a reference to “the inner greatness” of national socialism.

Speaking about Heidegger’s student the philosopher Karl Löwith, who was Jewish and was forced to emigrate, Habermas says “Löwith wants to strip away everything forced and solemnly exalted from the necessary return to the ancient understanding of nature, that gesture of elitist self-dramatization he had come to detest above all in the teaching and comportment, in the character and attitude, of his teacher Martin Heidegger” (p. 26). Elsewhere I read that Löwith himself recounts that when he met Heidegger in Switzerland during the war, Heidegger was wearing his swastika pin. This colors Heidegger’s claim that he had no more identification with the Nazis after 1934.

“[W]ith his concept of the ‘history of being’, Heidegger radicalized [philosophy of history] into a dubious second-level historicism…. Underlying this problematic figure of thought is the infallible claim to truth that Heidegger himself raises for the assertion of a metahistorical ‘occurrence of truth’, which in turn outstrips the already excessively strong claims to truth of the major systems of Western metaphysics” (p. 28).

“Being and Time could still have been situated in the context of those major nineteenth- and early twentieth-century intellectual movements, which, since the Young Hegelians, contributed to a detranscendentalization of the world-projecting spontaneity of Kantian subjectivity” (ibid). “But in fact Heidegger’s pretension overshoots all attempts to merely desublimate the transcendental world-projecting subjectivity of the human mind into a spontaneous mode of life in the world” (pp. 28-29).

“Heidegger is indeed a master when it comes to explicating the habitual performative knowledge that enables us to engage in the everyday practices of dealing with whatever we encounter in the world. These convincing analyses of a broad spectrum of lifeworld references of human ‘Dasein’ are, however, deflected onto a different path when Heidegger short-circuits the examination of human beings’ mode of existence with the ontological intention of grasping the being of beings as such…. But since the question of being is internally connected with the question of truth, the ontological redirection of the analytic of Dasein to the question of the being of beings leads to a far-reaching prejudicing of the understanding of truth — namely, the confusion of truth with world disclosure” (p. 29).

This “world disclosure” is a comprehensive name for all immediate experience of appearance, or immediate consciousness. While at some level appearance does deserve a kind of embrace as a necessary condition of life, a resolve to treat immediate appearance as having the final character of an unquestionable revelation makes dialogue impossible.

“By transforming the performatively known ‘how’ of standing in the horizon of our lifeworld into an explicit ‘knowledge’ of ‘what’, Heidegger brings a network of categories and attitudes (the so-called existentials) to consciousness that enables us to see the world and occurrences in it from a certain perspective, to experience it in certain emotional states and to address it under certain aspects. It is the ontological radicalization of this topic of linguistic world disclosure (as he would put it following Humboldt) into the metaphysical question of being and truth that misleads Heidegger into assimilating ‘truth’ to ‘world disclosure’. Heidegger de-differentiates the clearly defined concept of propositional truth by assimilating it to the concept of ‘revealing’ world disclosure” (pp. 29-30).

As a young person, I was seduced by 1960s talk about immediacy and spontaneity, and for a while even took up the idea that what the world needed was a kind of renunciation of the non-immediate.

“The mistake, already implicit in Being and Time, of confusing the truth of propositions with a world disclosure that is ontologized and therefore immune to objections, is what lends the concept of the history of being its force” (p. 30). “In this way, the a priori of ‘world disclosure’ swallows up the critical potential of the ‘claim to truth’, because the power of the capacity to say ‘no’ can no longer extend to the basic conceptual structure in which being interprets itself. The crisis-proneness of the history of being is explained by the dialectical character of this self-interpretation of being: it simultaneously reveals and conceals itself in its epochal destinies. By withholding itself from apprehension, it makes itself felt by human beings as the calamity of God’s ‘absence’ or — in the Hölderlinesque neo-pagan jargon of the zeitgeist — of the gods” (ibid).

It is this immunity to objections that I object to as extremely dangerous.

“With the concept of the history of being, Heidegger interprets Nietzsche’s notion of genealogy in a way that retains from the concept of ideology the moment of historically imposed illusion, but at the same time excludes the possibility of illumination through reflection” (ibid).

The exclusion of reflection and questioning that follows from a fixation on immediacy is the real disaster. All the higher achievements of spirit depend on reflection and mediation. Heidegger claims to expose the dogmatism of all other philosophy, and makes a lot of noise about it. This deflects our attention from the fact that giving strong normative status to immediacy effectively rules out any alternative to dogmatism. There is bad faith in these accusations, and if we try to resist, bad faith will be unfairly projected onto to us, which is the most insidious aspect of all this.

“Heidegger blames science and technology for the crisis from which supposedly only a return to the origins of Greek mythology — reaching back behind even the axial threshold of the Platonic logos and the God of the Old Testament — can rescue us. His fixation on the question of being leads him to focus on the deficiencies of theoretical and not — as in Schmitt and Strauss — of practical reason. Ultimately, the fateful alienation from the origin is implicit in reason itself” (pp. 30-31).

This discussion of Heidegger is part of a larger critique by Habermas of 20th-century claims by conservative authors like Schmitt and Strauss that central Enlightenment values like reason, freedom, and equal rights inevitably lead modernity into moral crisis.

“Even simple predicative statements, with which the discursive unfolding of possible cognitions as such begins, already involve an objectivistic ‘distortion’ of the pre-predicative, purely performative ‘know-how’. This deficiency inherent in the operations of reason is supposed to be the result of an act of objectivization that suppresses all connections and holistic references with which we are acquainted only in performance — and fatefully ‘forgets’ them” (p. 31).

There is a huge difference between recognizing that simple predications can be taken in a dogmatic way, and claiming that they inevitably, intrinsically lead to crisis and disaster.

As Habermas writes with obvious irony, “Against this background of a devaluation of the ‘normal’ concept of reason, philosophers are promoted into thinkers and, together with the poets, are sworn to a nondiscursive ‘apprehension of being'” (ibid).

Henceforth, according to Heidegger, philosophy should concern itself exclusively with putative poetic revelation, and reject everything that is not such a revelation. Opposite to this, I think both poetry and religion fare better when what is called revelation is understood as a kind of poetic expression that may be intensely meaningful for us, but does not serve to exclude anything.

What gives standard assertion its weight or “bite” is the fact that it has meaning by virtue of distinguishing from what would contradict it. But one poetic expression does not contradict another. Treating poetic expression as a “revelation” of truth rather than as figurative undoes its character as poetic expression. Claims of revelation introduce a literalism or incipient fundamentalism that is the opposite of a poetic spirit.

Brandom on Reason and Authority

Brandom respectfully takes issue with his teacher Richard Rorty’s claim that all talk about an ultimate objective reality — or objective truth — should be rejected as authoritarian. He uses Hegel to answer Rorty.

“Authoritarianism is an attitude toward the relation between normative statuses and critical practices of giving and asking for reasons. It consists in practically or theoretically taking it that there can be genuine authority without a corresponding critical responsibility to give reasons entitling one to that authority” (Robert Brandom, Pragmatism and Idealism: Rorty and Hegel on Reason and Representation, p. 63, emphasis in original).

“Rorty takes it that Kant was right to draw from his distillation of the insights of the Enlightenment the lesson that genuine norms essentially involve liability to rational criticism, to demands for reasons justifying and legitimating claims to authority…. Seeing norms as instituted (solely) by power relations… (‘might makes right’) is authoritarianism” (p. 64).

As I have pointed out, Plato and Leibniz anticipated Kant and Hegel in explicitly rejecting this kind of authoritarianism. Gwenaëlle Aubry has extensively documented the lengths to which Aristotle went to avoid grounding normativity in power.

Brandom notes that Rorty goes on to argue that “The idea that inanimate objects and objective states of affairs can exercise representational authority over the beliefs of those who can engage in critical rational challenges and defenses is a remnant of fetishistic authoritarianism” (p. 65).

Brandom rejects this last claim, as do I (see Things in Themselves; Essence and Explanation).

He says, “I argue for two claims. The first is that the considerations and commitments that shape the final, anti-authoritarian argument of Rorty’s… are among the central concerns Hegel addresses in his Phenomenology. The second is that Hegel there assembles and deploys conceptual resources that suffice to disarm Rorty’s anti-authoritarian arguments against the legitimacy and ultimate intelligibility of the concept of representation” (pp. 65-66).

“I think Rorty accepts the first point, and that is largely why he saw Hegel (at least, in a Deweyan, suitably naturalized form) as representing a way forward for philosophy…. But I do not think he was ever in a position to appreciate the second point (p. 66).

“Hegel takes over from Kant the insight that what distinguishes us sapient, discursive beings from the merely natural ones is the normative character of the space in which we live, and move, and have our being. Geist [spirit or ethical culture], Hegel’s focal concept — what the [Phenomenology] is a phenomenology of — is the whole comprising all of our implicitly norm-governed performances, practices, and institutions, the explicit theoretical expressions of them that constitute our normative self-consciousness, and everything that those normative practices and institutions make possible” (pp. 67-68).

“We are what things can be something for, which is to say that we are conscious beings. Hegel understands the origins of this capacity to lie in our nature as organic, desiring beings…. For something is food for the hungry animal who eats it, but is actually food… only if it in fact satisfies hunger. Hegel takes this possibility of practically experiencing error… to be the organic origin of consciousness” (p. 68-69; see also For Itself).

“We are, further, essentially self-conscious beings. That is, what we are for ourselves is an essential component of what we are in ourselves” (p. 69; see also Consciousness and Identity).

The qualifier “essential component of” is extremely important. To simply equate what we are in ourselves with what we are for ourselves would be subjectivism.

“As I am characterizing Hegel’s thought, his idea is that social pragmatism about norms is the master idea of modernity, and the Enlightenment is the explicit theoretical consciousness of this change of practical attitude. Rorty, Dewey, and Hegel are at one on this point, different as their expressions of it might seem” (pp. 72-73).

Brandom connects Hegel’s ethical ideas about mutual recognition with John Dewey’s characteristic concern for democratic values, as discussed by Rorty. The mere phrase “social pragmatism” sounds a bit shallow, but at this point Brandom has already given his own capsule history of pragmatism and described Dewey’s social and political concerns, so he is using it as a sort of extreme shorthand.

“My overall contention here is that because Rorty’s grasp of the social and historical articulation of normativity that Hegel discovers remains at a highly abstract and programmatic level, he does not understand how the more detailed structure Hegel discerns provides the resources to respond to Rorty’s anti-authoritarian critique of the ultimate intelligibility of representational norms. The rational criticizability of normative statuses can be seen to be built into them when we appreciate the social and historical fine structure of the process by which they are instituted by normative attitudes” (p. 73, emphasis added).

Brandom in effect argues that mutual recognition in Hegel is not only ethical, but that it also conditions knowledge and first philosophy.

The Scope of Reflection in Hegel

It now seems to me that reflection turns out to be the driving concept in Hegel’s Logic, and indeed perhaps in Hegel overall. This is fairly amazing, given the prevalence of accounts that do not even mention reflection, or do so only incidentally. True, the ambivalence with which Hegel treats most of his key terms is strongly in evidence here, insofar as he also makes many remarks about the limits of merely “external” reflection. But reflection seems to be a central orienting concept that says many of the same things as Hegelian “mediation” or “dialectic”, says them a bit more clearly, and thus expresses more.

What has particularly captured my interest is the reflection Hegel specifies as “general” or “absolute”. Merely external reflection correlates with the way that he characterizes mere “Consciousness” in the Phenomenology, in which subject and object are mutually exclusive terms, each defined in opposition to the other. But what he calls “general” reflection seems to precisely name a perspective that is at home in what the Phenomenology‘s Preface calls “otherness”, and in which the polarity of subject and object things is replaced by a continuum of relational distinctions. And indirectly, reflection names that otherness itself.

As the last couple of posts have begun to evidence, reflection plays an explicitly central role in the “logic of essence” that Hegel develops in book II of his Logic, which in contrast to the results of the logic of being in book I is said to represent a permanent acquisition. And although the term “reflection” is no longer literally at center stage in book III’s “logic of the concept”, the work done with it in book II is incorporated into the very “concept of the concept” at the beginning of book III.

“[T]he concept is at first to be regarded simply as the third to being and essence, to the immediate and to reflection” (Logic, di Giovanni trans., opening of book III, p. 508, emphasis in original).

He had begun book II by saying essence is the “truth” of being. In just the same way, then, Hegel is saying here that reflection is the “truth” of the immediate.

“Hence the objective logic, which treats of being and essence, constitutes in truth the genetic exposition of the concept…. The dialectical movement of substance through causality and reciprocal affection is thus the immediate genesis of the concept by virtue of which its becoming is displayed. But the meaning of its becoming, like that of all becoming, is that it is the reflection of something which passes over into its ground, and that the at first apparent other into which this something has passed over constitutes the truth of the latter” (p. 509, emphasis in original).

For immediacy, then, reflection is this other that Hegel calls its truth. Immediacy itself is untrue, but it “has” a truth in reflection. Mere being or immediacy by itself is sterile, but reflection makes it fruitful.

I haven’t yet treated Hegel’s discussion of substance and causality within the logic of essence. For now, what I want to draw attention to is his more general point that the logic of essence — which could equally be termed the logic of reflection — already shows, and indeed primarily deals with, the genesis and becoming of the concept. By contrast, what he calls the logic of the concept treats the concept of the concept as already achieved, and focuses on a suitably expansive treatment of its use in judgment and inference.

“The concept is now this absolute unity of being and reflection whereby being-in-and-for-itself only is by being equally reflection or positedness, and positedness only is by being equally in-and-for-itself” (ibid).

Previously, we left simple being, subjects and objects, and existence claims behind, but now being returns, as relatedness and in the content of what we affirm.

For Kant and Fichte, any unqualified reference to being or to what “is” can only be dogmatic. All that we can undogmatically talk about are judgments about what is, and all judgments are subject to questioning about their reasons. (Fichte characteristically speaks of judgments that we affirm as “posited”.)

Hegel regards Kant and Fichte’s effective ban on direct talk about what is as making an extremely important point, but also as overly fastidious. In effect, he wants to suggest that the deeper meaning of “is” coincides with what can reasonably be judged to be the case, and I think Plato and Aristotle would agree.

At the level of what Hegel calls the concept, we have achieved a kind of indifference with respect to talk about being or the immediate. What this means is that what a truly universal community of rational beings would reflectively judge to be the case is constitutive of what we should say “is”.

Perhaps surprisingly, Hegel defers all consideration of normativity and teleology to the logic of the concept in book III, whereas the more explicit discussion of reflection is in the logic of essence in book II. But Hegel’s Logic is ordered as a successive uncovering of presuppositions: in order to successfully claim this apparently simple and straightforward thing, we discover that we must also presuppose that more subtle thing. So the true order of dependency he means to affirm is the opposite of his order of presentation. He also saves his discussion of the “tedious” traditional-logical topics of forms of judgment and syllogisms for book III, but this is with the intent of radically transforming them.

What he really wants to advocate in this last context is a view of judgment and inference — simultaneously very Aristotelian and very nontraditional — as fundamentally reflective and normative, rather than fundamentally formal and quasi-mechanical in nature. The apparent textual separation of reflection from normativity is thus only an appearance. (See also Apperceptive Judgment; Hegel on Reflection; Reflection and Dialectic.)

Intangible Truth

Hegel wants to teach us to put aside the prejudice that a truth must be something “tangible” or discrete in itself, and thus capable of being viewed in isolation, in the way that a Platonic form is commonly supposed to be. He says that ordinary logic already gives us a clue to an alternate view of truth. Indeed, Plato’s own literary depictions of Socratic inquiry and dialogue already suggest a deeper notion of essence and truth than is promoted by standard accounts of Platonic forms.

“The Platonic idea is nothing else than the universal, or, more precisely, it is the concept of the subject matter; it is only in the concept that something has actuality, and to the extent that it is different from its concept, it ceases to be actual and is a nullity; the side of tangibility and of sensuous self-externality belongs to this null side. — But on the other side one can appeal to the representations typical of ordinary logic; for it is assumed that in definitions, for example, the determinations are not just of the knowing subject but are rather determinations of the subject matter, such that constitute its innermost essential nature. Or in an inference drawn from given determinations to others, the assumption is that the inferred is not something external to the subject matter and alien to it, but that it belongs to it instead, that to the thought there corresponds being” (Science of Logic, di Giovanni trans., introduction, p. 30).

There is a glimmer of a deeper truth even in the naive belief that ordinary logic can tell us about how the world really is (not of course how the world is, full stop, just some important things “about” how it is). What we infer by a good inference is at least as real as whatever is intuitively present to us. Neither of these is an infallible source of knowledge. Hegel’s main point, though, is that being immediately present to us is not a criterion of deeper truth.

He continues, “Everywhere presupposed by the use of the forms of the concept, of judgment, inference, definition, division, etc., is that they are not mere forms of self-conscious thinking but also of objective understanding” (ibid).

This leads to a criticism of Kant, which implies that Kant’s famous critique of dogmatism remains incomplete.

“Critical philosophy… gave to the logical determinations an essentially subjective significance out of fear of the object…. But the liberation from the opposition of consciousness that science must be able to presuppose elevates the determination of thought above this anxious, incomplete standpoint” (ibid).

The “opposition of consciousness” Hegel speaks of is its division into subject and object. For Kant, this distinction is interwoven with what Kant takes to be an uncrossable gap between knowledge on the side of the subject, and being on the side of the object. Hegel argues that we can avoid the dogmatism Kant means to criticize, without positing an uncrossable gap between knowledge and being. For him, the works of Aristotle are decisive proof of this.

Kant seeks to ensure the avoidance of dogmatism by treating logical determinations exclusively as attitudes actively taken up by a thinking being. Hegel points out that this leads inevitably to the unknowability of the Kantian thing-in-itself. In Kant, these are two sides of one coin. Thus cut off from logical determination, the thing-in-itself can only be unknowable, just as Kant says it is. According to Hegel’s analysis yet to come, meaning is grounded in judgments of determination, and so to be cut off from determination is to be devoid of meaning.

In criticizing Kant on this score, Hegel speaks of a Kantian “fear of the object”. Elsewhere he specifies that what is wrong with the Kantian thing-in-itself has nothing to do with its resemblance to a kind of essence, but rather with the putative self-containedness of that essence, and with the fact that for Kant the true essence is unknowable as a matter of principle.

Leibniz had earlier concluded that in order for the world to be intelligible in terms of self-contained essences or monads, each monad had to include within itself a microcosmic mirror of the entire universe and all the other monads, each of which also includes all the others, and so on to infinity. For Leibniz, things in the world are really only related to one another indirectly, via their individual immediate relations to God. God is ultimately the entire source of the world’s coherence.

At the very beginning of his career, Kant had argued against Leibniz that interactions and inter-relations between things are real and not just an appearance. The world therefore has a kind of objective coherence in its own right. This is a stance that Aristotle clearly would endorse.

Hegel strongly agrees with Kant on this, but thinks that Kant did not take his critique of Leibniz far enough. (I don’t mean to identify Kant’s critique of dogmatism with his earlier critique of Leibniz, only to suggest that there is a connection between the two.) Hegel in effect argues that no essence is ever really self-contained, and that once we also drop the Leibnizian notion that essences are each supposed to be self-contained in splendid Hermetic isolation, there is nothing left in Kant’s philosophy that would require them to be unknowable as a matter of principle.

Dogmatism for Hegel refers — as it also implicitly would for Plato and Aristotle — to any claim that we somehow know the things we believe to be true, when in reality the basis of our belief is potentially refutable. Dogmatism is claiming the necessity characteristic of knowledge for conclusions that Aristotle would at best call merely probable.

(For Aristotle, “necessary” is just a name for whatever always follows from certain premises; “probable” is the corresponding name for what follows most of the time. Whether or not something always follows is a disputable question. New information might require that we re-classify what previously seemed to be a necessary conclusion as a merely probable one. I would add that what therefore seemed to be knowledge — because it seemed to follow necessarily — may turn out to be only a relatively well-founded belief. Individual humans do have genuine knowledge, but no individual knower can legitimately certify herself as a knower in any specific case.)

(Beyond this, even the historic mutual recognition of any individual concrete community can also turn out to be seriously wrong on particular matters. Widespread and longstanding social acceptance does not guarantee that certain things that are believed to be known are not just shared prejudice. Just consider the history of inferences from race, sex, religion, etc., to characteristics claimed to hold for all or most individuals subject to those classifications.)

(This does not mean we should indiscriminately throw out all claims that are based on social acceptance. That would result in paralyzing skepticism. To avoid dogmatism, we just have to be open in a Socratic way to honestly, fairly examining the basis of our beliefs about what meaning follows from what other meaning, in light of new perspectives. For what it’s worth, I say that once exposed to the light, prejudice against people based on shallow classification of their “kinds” can only be perpetuated through — among other things — an implicit repudiation of fairness and intellectual honesty in these cases.)

(Hegel the man was not immune to the various social prejudices of his time and place. According to his own philosophy, we would not expect him to have been. Outside the context of his main philosophical works, he is recorded to have made a few utterly terrible prejudiced remarks, and a number of other bad ones. In cases like this, we should give heed to the philosopher’s carefully developed philosophical views, and blame the time and place for the philosopher’s spontaneous expression of other particular views that seem out of synch with these. Every empirical community’s views are subject to adjudication in light of the ethical ideal of the truly universal community of all talking animals. The core of Hegel’s philosophy provides unprecedented resources for this.)

Kant’s own response to the issue of dogmatism is to maintain that strictly speaking, certainty and necessity apply only to appearances, which he does understand in a relational manner, but not to the things-in-themselves, which — following Leibniz — he still regards as self-contained and therefore non-relational.

Kant and Hegel seem to share the view that the very nature of necessity is such that it applies to things only insofar as they are involved in relations, and is only expressible in terms of relations. Where they differ is that Hegel sees not only appearances but also reality itself fundamentally in terms of relations.

For Hegel, there is no self-contained “thing in itself”, because the world is made up of what things are “in and for themselves”. Hegel introduces the notion of what something (relationally) is “for itself”, in the context of a reflective concept, and precisely as an alternative to the still-Leibnizian self-containedness of the Kantian “in itself”. What things really are “for themselves” turns out to undo the assumption of their essences’ self-containedness.

Essence and Explanation

Hegel’s Logic comprises what Robert Pippin calls three separate “logics” — a logic of being, a logic of essence, and a logic of the concept. The first of these, the logic of being, was characterized by Pippin as an out-and-out failure that Hegel deliberately embarks on in order to make an indirect point. Broadly speaking, that failure consists in attempting to explain things or make them intelligible solely by means of simple assertions. The logic of being also shows the impossibility of grounding philosophical explanation in a simple immediacy of sense-certainty or intuition, or in any notion of pure Being or being qua being. It seems to me that what these results have in common is the impossibility of explaining any definiteness or determinacy in terms of what is indeterminate.

So far, there is no indication that the logic of essence will ever be regarded by Hegel or Pippin as a failure like the logic of being. It will be further enriched by the logic of the concept, and we have yet to see the detail of this. But now we have at least reached the beginning of a true beginning, after having completed extensive due diligence toward claims of an easier, more direct kind of beginning that did not pan out. At the same time, the subject matter has changed from mere isolated assertions to what Kant in the Critique of Judgment called reflective judgments.

I have characterized the indirect positive outcome of the logic of being in terms of the primacy of relation and relatedness over discrete “things”. Pippin says that the logic of being also showed the impossibility of a completely presuppositionless beginning. Hegel’s reworking of Kantian reflective judgment now takes the primacy of relatedness as a starting point.

The logic of essence will thus effectively take the constitutive priority of intelligible relations over their respective “things” as its starting point. Relations will constitute things, at least to a greater degree than vice versa. This is what the Preface to the Phenomenology calls the perspective of “otherness”, and what Hegel also, in a special polymorphic sense that has been very badly misunderstood, calls “negativity”.

Rather than futilely trying to explain something determinate from something completely indeterminate, we have now turned to examining the conditions of the constitution of any possible determinacy. Additional normative considerations will be made explicit in the logic of the concept.

Essence is a Latin term that is read backwards into Greek philosophy, due mainly to its use as a translation of Aristotle’s “what it was to be” a thing. As treated by mainstream scholasticism, however, it had a meaning closer to that of Platonic form (see Platonic Truth). Platonic form is eternal, whereas form for Aristotle and Hegel has an irreducible dependency on manifestation and development in time. But Plato in his dialogues treats “essence” or what a thing eternally is as a matter of dialectical discovery subject to a kind of perpetual renewal, whereas the scholastics generally (and Leibniz) held it to be already finally established by God in the act of creation.

I think of human character as a sort of privileged example of Aristotle’s “what it was to be” some particular one. Pippin has given this an excellent development (see Toward Essence; Hegel on Willing). What makes human character a “privileged” example for me is that it makes many nuances visible that are not so applicable to “what it was to be” that chair, for instance. The nuances of interest here concern relations between essence and appearance, which form the main subject matter of the logic of essence.

Here we also have an instance of the Aristotelian and Hegelian point that we gain the most insight from considering the richest examples of anything, rather than the simplest ones.

The moderns learned from Descartes to privilege simple cases, and to aim to systematically reduce complex cases to simple cases. That is an admirable procedure in mathematics, with many applications. But in life more generally, there is no good reason for assuming that richer cases can be explained with no more resources than it takes to explain simpler ones. In mathematics, if we have a proof that some specific class of rich cases can be reduced to some set of simple cases without remainder, then we can make that sort of “reductionist” claim for that particular class of cases. Outside of mathematics, it seems to me that reductionist claims usually turn out to be mere assertions.

What Hegel calls the “problem of indifference” — how are we to judge which particular appearances show aspects of the “essence” or deeper truth of people or things and which do not — is brought to the fore here.

“We can be said to know the ‘what it was to be’ of a thing, neither by direct intellectual intuition (its being-at-work is a process, a way of being, not graspable punctually as itself some object) nor by just observing, say, the life of a living thing or the uses of an artifact” (Pippin, Hegel’s Realm of Shadows, p. 227).

As Pippin puts it, “if essence is to explain anything, it must be the ground of what immediately ‘shines’ or appears. Those seemings must be its own, and they are made sense of by reference to their essence” (ibid).

“In some sense, and it is the task of the logic of essence to explain in what sense, the thing’s actuality is both not its mere seemings, and yet nothing other than those seemings, rightly understood” (p. 228).

This is another very Aristotelian point.

“Determinate specification of something essential in an appearance requires essential predication or specification of some sort — some predicates, not others. But we know which predicates are essential only by already knowing what essence is. This is a problem that assumes different forms but is basically the same, whether posed in the language of classical essentialism and manifestations, or selecting from a large set of ‘grounding’ causal factors the genuinely explanatory one or ones” (Hegel’s Realm of Shadows, pp. 226-227).

Hegel develops the terms “ground” and “grounding” for discussing the generalization from essence to any sort of explanation.

Pippin notes that “Plato, Kant, Locke, Spinoza, and others can all be cited in various ways as expressive of the reflective logic of the appearances of essence, the manifestation of something substantial that is nevertheless not manifest as it is in itself” (p. 231).

He quotes Hegel: “On the one hand, the ground is ground as the immediately reflected content determination of the determinate being [Dasein] which it grounds; on the other, it is that which is posited. It is that on the basis of which that determinate being [Dasein] is supposed to be understood; but, conversely, it is inferred from the latter and is understood from it. The main business of this reflection thus consists in gleaning the ground from a determinate being [Dasein], that is, in converting the immediate determinate being [Dasein] into the form of reflected being; consequently the ground, instead of being self-subsisting in and for itself, is rather that which is positive and derived” (pp. 227-228, Pippin’s emphasis).

Once again, I would note a convergence with Aristotle. Aristotle says that in order to possibly know how things are in and for themselves, we should and do start with how things are “for us”, not with how they supposedly are, full stop. Hegel will eventually amplify this into what he calls the “subjective” (though anything but merely subjective) logic of the concept.

Aristotle and Hegel both want to say that the basis of knowledge and explanation is a partial overlap between how things are initially for us and how they really are. This notion of a partial overlap between essence and appearance is a sort of Aristotelian mean that eliminates the roots of the twin evils of “all is illusion” skepticism, and of foundationalism, or the claim of a certain starting point for knowledge.

“[Hegel] is in effect saying that a putative logic of being is, has shown itself to be, mere seeming, Schein [literally, “shine”]. As [Michael] Theunissen points out, this means that Hegel is actually invoking the notion of Schein in three different senses. There is the unacknowledged Schein that a logic of being has turned out to be. There is the Schein of the mere appearance that the skeptic and idealists claim are all we are able to know. And there is the result of the analysis, that this purported limitation of knowledge to mere Schein is itself Schein, unable to account for itself; what seemed to be mere Schein turns out to be the Schein of essence or Erscheinung [Hegel’s technical term for appearance that is more than just mere appearance]” (p. 229, emphasis in original).

That all appearance is only mere appearance must be itself only a mere appearance, if there is to be any knowledge or meaningful explanation at all.

“In other words, the illusion of any possible absolute presuppositionlessness is what has been demonstrated by showing that Sein [being] must be understood as Wesen [essence], just in order to be understood as Sein. ([Hegel says] ‘Being is as such only the becoming of essence’…)…. Wesen will show itself (and itself as the truth of Sein) as always already conceptually mediated determinacy” (p. 230, emphasis in original).

The brute “things” of mere assertion depend on the richer, subtler “things” considered by reflective judgment for any truth they may have. This is an archetypal Hegelian move.

Pippin points out that the logic of essence gives a new sense to Hegel’s very nonstandard notion of negation. Whereas before, “negation” served to express the dependency of meaningful relational distinction on what else something rules out in order to express what it is, now “Essence’s seemings are its own…, even though no seeming or set of appearances express in their immediacy what that essence really is” (ibid).

He quotes Hegel, “In the becoming of being, it is being which lies at the foundation of determinateness, and determinateness is reference to an other. Reflective movement is by contrast the other as negation in itself, a negation which has being only as self-referring” (p. 231, Pippin’s emphasis).

Rather than addressing an external other, in reflective judgment Hegelian “negation” is now turned on itself — seeking further clarification first and foremost through questioning itself and its own formulations.

Next in this series: Hegel on Reflection

Hegel’s Union of Kant and Aristotle

Aristotle gets more pages in Hegel’s History of Philosophy than anyone else, and Kant gets the second most. This post will show that that is no accident.

Where I left off in Pippin’s account of Hegel’s Logic, he was still discussing the meaning of Hegel’s claim that now “logic” could take the place of metaphysics.

The idea of a “gap” between thinking and being, with the consequent need for an extensive inference to show that the rational categories of thought are after all applicable to being, had been a major theme of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Hegel ambitiously wants to eliminate that gap, while at the same time preserving and extending Kant’s critique of dogmatism. At first glance this might seem impossible, but as I see it, Hegel’s strategy consists of two moves.

First, Pippin has been arguing that a major theme of Hegel’s Logic is an alternative showing of the applicability of something analogous to the Kantian categories. Hegel’s alternative is inspired by Aristotle’s non-psychological view of the content of thought as shareable rational meaning. From this point of view, there is a no discernible difference (and therefore a strict and literal identity) between a thought and that of which it is the thought. Thought in Aristotle is unaffected by the modern distinction of subject and object in consciousness. This is intimately related to Aristotle’s ambivalence on whether or not thought belongs to a part of the soul.

“As with Aristotle, [the] link between the order of thinking (knowing, judging to be the case) and the order of being is not an inference, does not face a gap that must be closed by an inference. Properly understood, the relation is one of identity” (Hegel’s Realm of Shadows, p. 60).

The other, complementary part of Hegel’s strategy uses his critique of representation to express the Kantian problem of dogmatism in a different way. For Kant, dogmatism consists in ignoring or leaping over the gap between thinking and being. For Hegel, there is no such gap. Dogmatism consists in adhering to fixed representations and disregarding the real fluidity and liveliness of both thought and being.

Alongside this strategy for dealing with Kantian issues, Hegel revives Aristotle’s ideal of normative, teleological explanation of overall processes of actualization, and of the subordination of explanation by the efficient causes that serve as particular means of actualization (see Aristotle on Explanation). For Hegel as for Aristotle, intelligibility and explanation first and foremost involve a rational “ought”, and other forms of explanation are subordinate to that.

Pippin quotes John McDowell’s contemporary distinction between explanation by rational “ought” and by empirical regularity. McDowell refers to “explanations in which things are made intelligible by being revealed to be, or to approximate to being, as they rationally ought to be. This is to be contrasted with a style of explanation in which one makes things intelligible by representing their coming into being as a particular instance of how things generally tend to happen” (p. 61).

Pippin says that for both Kant and Hegel, logic “states the conditions of possible sense, the distinctions and relations without which sense would not be possible” (ibid). Here he is implicitly recalling Frege’s distinction between sense and reference, and making the point that Kant, Hegel, and Aristotle all see meaning mainly in terms of sense rather than reference. “The Logic is never said to seek a determination of what is ‘really’ real, and in a way like Kant, it also concerns the determination of the possibility, the real possibility, of anything being what it is. Hegel calls this Wirklichkeit, actuality, and distinguishes it often from questions about existence” (p. 62).

Possible sense construes real possibility in terms of explanation by a rational “ought”. Logical concepts for Hegel always embody a context-sensitive rational “ought”, rather than a direct simple determination of what exists. For example, “for Hegel to claim that ‘Life’ is a logical concept is to say not that there could not be a world that did not have living beings in it, but that if there is a world at all, the denial that there is any distinction between mechanically explicable and organically unified beings is self-contradictory” (ibid).

Such a contradiction is something we ought to avoid. The overcoming of contradictions in Hegel is a matter of teleological actualization that may or may not occur. Contrary to old stereotypes, no formal or causal determinism is involved. The overcoming of contradictions is in fact intimately connected with the motif of freedom. Kant and Fichte struggled to articulate a very strong notion of practical freedom that did not depend on a one-sided notion of free will. Hegel makes the explanation of freedom much easier by explicitly adopting the Aristotelian priority of explanation by ends and oughts. For him as for Aristotle, the realization of ends and oughts at the level of factual existence is contingent, and involves multiple possibilities. For him as for Aristotle, being has to do primarily with sense and intelligibility rather than brute factual existence.

“So what Hegel means by saying logic is metaphysics, or that being in and for itself is the concept, can be put this way. Once we understand the role of, say, essence and appearance as necessary for judging objectively, we have thereby made sense of essences and appearances, and therewith, the world in which they are indispensable…. In making sense of this way of sense-making, its presuppositions and implications, we are making sense of what there is, the only sense anything could make” (pp. 63-64).

“The actual Kantian statement of this identity is the highest principle of synthetic judgments, and it invokes the same thought: that the conditions for the possibility of experience are at the same time the conditions for the possibility of objects of experience” (p. 64).

Pippin quotes from Adrian Moore: “To make sense of things at the highest level of generality… is to make sense of things in terms of what it is to make sense of things” (p. 65).

He notes similarities and differences between his and Robert Brandom’s approach to Hegel.

On the one hand, Brandom agrees that the job of distinctively logical concepts is “not to make explicit how the world is (to subserve a function of consciousness) but rather to make explicit the process of making explicit how the world is (to enable and embody a kind of self-consciousness)” (quoted, p. 66).

On the other, Brandom sees the making explicit of the process of making explicit entirely in retrospective terms, whereas Pippin argues that Hegel in the Logic takes a more Kantian, prospective approach. Pippin calls Brandom’s retrospective approach “empirical” because it relies on retrospective insight into concrete occasions of making things explicit.

Elsewhere, Pippin had previously criticized Brandom’s emphasis on “semantic descent” in interpreting Hegel’s Phenomenology. Brandom himself introduces semantic descent in the following terms: “I believe the best way to understand what [Kant and Hegel] are saying about their preferred topic of concepts operating in a pure, still stratosphere above the busy jostling and haggling of street-level judging and doing is precisely to focus on what those metaconcepts let us say about what is going on below…. If the point of the higher-level concepts is to articulate the use and content of lower-level ones, then the cash value of an account of categorical metaconcepts is what it has to teach us about ordinary ground-level empirical and practical concepts” (A Spirit of Trust, pp. 5-6).

While I don’t care for the rhetoric of “cash value”, which to my ear sounds too reductive in the context of normative sense-making, the idea that meta-level considerations get their relevance from what they teach us about ordinary life seems fundamentally right to me, and of great importance. Moreover, this is clearly presented by Brandom as his interpretive strategy, which he points out is quite different from the way Kant and Hegel usually talk. Brandom’s reading of Hegel is also mainly focused on the Phenomenology; he doesn’t have much to say specifically about the Logic.

The idea of a retrospective reading of the Phenomenology is encouraged by Hegel himself, and there I think it is fair to say that Hegel’s own method is retrospective. On the other hand, I think the text of the Logic clearly supports Pippin’s claim that it takes a more prospective approach, closer to that of a Kantian a priori investigation. This still does not conflict with the suggestion that its ultimate value lies in what its high concepts have to teach us about living our own lives.

“[W]hatever the connections are in the [Science of Logic], they are clearly not truth-functional or deductive. As suggested, they have something to do with the demonstration of dependence relations necessary for conceptual determinacy” (Hegel’s Realm of Shadows, p. 70).

For Hegel, “concepts can be determinately specified only by their role in judgments, the determinacy of which depends on their roles as premises and conclusions…. And he never tires of noting that the standard subject-predicate logical form is finally inadequate for the expression of ‘speculative truth’…. The basic possibility of sense depends on an act, an act of rendering intelligible or judging” (pp. 71-72).

“In the traditional reading of Kant, it would appear that Kant wants to introduce a step here, as if skeptical about why ‘our’ ways of sorting things should have anything to do with ‘sortal realism’ in the world…. In this picture, there must ‘first’ be sensible receptivity (according to ‘our’ distinct, nonconceptual pure forms of intuition), and ‘then’ there is conceptual articulation/synthesis, which is possible because of the imposition of categorical form” (pp. 73-74).

According to Pippin, Hegel denies this two-step picture, though he “fully realizes the extreme difficulties in stating properly the dual claims of distinguishability and inseparability” of concept and intuition” (p. 75).

“Hegel clearly wants a way of understanding the mutual dependence of each on the other that involves an ‘identity’ even ‘within difference’. In other words, he came to see that the concept-intuition relation was at its heart a logical or conceptual problem, what he would variously call the problem of (how there could be such a thing as) ‘mediated immediacy’, or the inescapably reciprocal and correlated functions of identifying and differentiating. For another, in any apperceptive determination of content, a relation to content has to be understood as a modality of a self-relation….This gets quite complicated because such an apperceptive awareness in the case of perceptual experience… must be distinguished from apperceptive judging…. Neither Kant nor Hegel believes that experience itself consists in judgments” (ibid).

What Pippin here calls apperceptive awareness in the case of perception as distinct from judgment belongs in the same general territory as the “passive synthesis” discussed by Husserl.

“Failing to observe the ‘norms of thinking’ is not… making an error in thinking; it is not thinking at all, not making any sense. The prospect of objects ‘outside’ something like the limits of the thinkable is a nonthought…. But just because it is unthinkable, the strict distinction between a prior, content-free general logic and an a priori transcendental logic, the forms of possible thoughts about objects, can hardly be as hard and fast as Kant wants to make it out to be. Or, put another way, it is an artificial distinction…. For one thing, … the distinction depends on a quite contestable strict separation between the spontaneity of thought (as providing formal unity) and the deliverances of sensibility in experience (as the sole ‘provider of content’). If that is not sustainable, and there is reason to think that even Kant did not hold it to be a matter of strict separability, then the distinction between the forms of thought and the forms of the thought of objects cannot also be a matter of strict separability” (p. 76).

“‘To be is to be intelligible: the founding principle of Greek metaphysics and of philosophy itself…. [T]he formula ‘to be is to be intelligible’ is not, as it might sound, some sort of manifesto, as if willfully ‘banning’ the unknowable from ‘the real’…. ‘What there is is what is knowable’ is an implication of what knowing — all and any knowing — is if it is to be knowing. It is not a first-order claim about all being, as if it could prompt the question: How do we know that all of being is knowable? That is not a coherent question. There may be things we will never know, but that is not to say they are in principle unknowable” (p. 77).

“So those ‘two aspect’ interpretations of Kant’s idealism and his doctrine of the unknowability of things in themselves, those claiming that knowing ‘for us’ is restricted to ‘our epistemic conditions’, leaving it open for us to speculate about what might be knowable but transcends our powers of knowing, cannot be right. The position is internally incoherent. There is no ‘our’ that can be put in front of ‘epistemic conditions’. They would not then be epistemic conditions; the account would not be philosophical but psychological” (ibid).

In place of the Kantian unknowability of things in themselves, Hegel puts the “liveliness” of real things that overflows any particular representation. For Hegel, dogmatism is a disregard for the overflowing character of real meaning and being.

“[I]f we… ask how we can know a priori about nature’s suitability for our cognitive ends…, we have again imported a kind of neo-Kantian version of Kant” (p. 78).

“Yet more care must be exercised here, lest readers get the wrong idea. To say that the forms of ‘thought’ are, must be, the form of objects of thought does not mean that any form of ‘mere thinking’ delineates some ontological realm — as if the forms of the thought of astrological influence are the forms of such influence in the world” (ibid).

“Thought” here clearly does not mean any arbitrary belief. It refers to possible knowledge. Hegel and Pippin are saying only that if and wherever true knowledge is indeed possible, corresponding knowledge of objects must be possible. “It would never occur to us, I assume, to entertain the thought that the form of some piece of empirical knowledge is not the form of the object of knowledge” (ibid).

Pippin points out “what amounts to a kind of operator in Hegel’s Logic on which all the crucial transitions depend, something like ‘would not be fully intelligible, would not be coherently thinkable without…’ What follows the ‘without’ is some more comprehensive concept, a different distinction, and so forth” (p. 79).

This means that Hegelian logic is not about the deduction of consequences from assumptions, but rather aims to be an assumption-free regressive movement from anything at all to a fuller view of the conditions for its intelligibility.

In the introduction to the Encyclopedia, Hegel “notes explicitly that what exists certainly exists contingently and ‘can just as well not be‘, and he refers us to the Logic for the right explication of what is ‘actual’ by contrast with what merely exists. He adds, ‘Who is not smart enough to be able to see around him quite a lot that is not, in fact, how it ought to be?’…. Yet despite Hegel’s waving this huge bright flag inscribed, ‘I believe in contingency!’ one still hears often (even from scholars of German philosophy) that his philosophy is an attempt to deduce the necessity of everything from the Prussian state to Herr Krug’s fountain pen” (p. 87).

Pippin thinks that actuality in Hegel is “congruent with what Kant meant by categoriality” (ibid). I don’t fully understand this particular claim about actuality, unless it is intended as a variant of the Philosophy of Right‘s famous formula about the actual and the rational, which itself makes good sense with a normative or teleological as opposed to factual notion of the actual. I would agree there seems to be a strong “Kantian categorical” component to Hegelian “logic” in general. Pippin agrees that actuality has a normative rather than factual character in both Aristotle and Hegel. However, the generally normative emphasis of Kant’s thought notwithstanding, at this point in my effort to understand Kant, his “deduction” of the categories seems to me to make the categories more like a kind of universal “facts”. I also think of the Aristotelian “ought” as primarily concrete, as when Aristotle says that practical judgment applies to particulars. Kantian normativity by contrast aims to be universal in an unqualified way, which is certainly closer to categoriality. So, there is a question whether Hegelian actuality inherits more from Aristotelian actuality or from Hegel’s incorporation of Kantian universalizing normativity.

If we were talking about Hegelian “concrete universals”, this might provide a basis for reconciling Aristotelian and Kantian perspectives on the “ought” involved in actuality. Do the Hegelian incarnations of Kantian categories in the Logic — called by Hegel a “realm of shadows” — qualify as concrete universals? At this point I am in doubt. I suspect Hegel might say that the concrete universal is reached only at the very end of his development. Maybe the ultimate bearer of categoriality and the place where it unites with actuality will be the “absolute” idea.

“What we know is what we know in exercising reason, what we know in judging” (p. 90). In the Encyclopedia Logic, “Hegel remarks that Kant himself, in formulating reason’s critique of itself, treats forms of cognition as objects of cognition…. He calls this feat ‘dialectic’. Mathematical construction in mathematical proof makes essentially the same point…. And most suggestively for the entire enterprise of the Logic, practical reason can determine the form of a rational will that is also itself a substantive content. The self-legislation of the moral law is not volitional anarchy but practical reason’s knowledge of ‘what’ to legislate. It ‘legislates’ in being practical reasoning about what ought to be done. It legislates because in knowing what ought to be done it is not affected by some object, ‘what is to be done’, about which it judges. It determines, produces, what is to be done. Said more simply, when one makes a promise, one legislates into existence a promise. One is bound only by binding oneself…. Being bound is the concept of being bound, applied to oneself” (ibid).

Pippin is suggesting we look for ethical meaning in Hegel’s logic.

“Thought’s self-determination in the course of the book makes no reference to the Absolute’s self-consciousness in order to explain anything…. Any thinking of a content is inherently reflexive in a way that Hegel thinks will allow him to derive from the possible thought of anything at all notions like something and finitude, and ultimately essence, appearance, even the idea of the good…. Hegel thinks that thought is always already giving itself its own content: itself, where that means, roughly, determining that without which it could not be a thought of an object…. But all this can only count as previews of coming attractions” (pp. 91-92).

This is important. The thought that is self-legislating and one with its object, while it doesn’t include mere belief, is being said to include at least some thought that occurs in ordinary life. According to Pippin, thinking far enough through with any content at all has a self-legislating and category-generating character for Hegel.

“The suggestion is that Hegel thinks of anything’s principle of intelligibility, its conceptual form, as an actualization in the Aristotelian sense, the being-at-work or energeia of the thing’s distinct mode of being, not a separate immaterial metaphysical object. In understanding Hegel on this point, we should take fully on board the form-matter, actuality-potentiality language of Aristotle, and so the most interesting kind of hylomorphism, soul-body hylomorphism, as our way of understanding this nonseparateness claim.” (p. 92).

Here I can only applaud.

“To think that for creatures like us, we must distinguish the sensory manifold from the form that informs it is the great temptation to be avoided for Hegel. The power of the eye to see is not a power ‘added’ to a material eye…. The seeing power is the distinct being-at work of that body. The form-content model central to Hegel’s account of logical formality works the same way” (pp. 92-93).

That seeing is not somehow “added” to the eye is another Aristotelian point. The eye is what it is in virtue of what it is for the sake of. Incidentally, Joe Sachs’ translation of Aristotelian energeia as “being-at-work” appears to have a precedent in Hegel’s German.

Pippin’s identification of a being-at-work or actuality with a power here is novel from an Aristotelian point of view. In the text of the Logic, Hegel himself associates power with a notion of substance that seems more Spinozist than Aristotelian. His earlier example of relational determination uses the mathematical-physical notion of centrifugal and centripetal forces affecting a planet’s orbit.

“Power” commonly appears in translations of (especially Latin scholastic) discourse about potentiality rather than actuality. But on my reading, Hegel does not seem to adopt the distinctively Aristotelian concept of potentiality. He only seems to use more ordinary notions of power and possibility. And he explicitly introduces teleology only near the Logic’s end. This makes sense on Pippin’s reading that the Logic “moves” in a forward direction, progressively uncovering deeper presuppositions.

But power seems to me to belong in the register of efficient causes, whereas potentiality and actuality both belong primarily in the register of final causes. It does make sense that a capability could follow from an actualization or be attributed to it. Paul Ricoeur makes a nice ethical use of capability, but in general I worry that talk about power privileges sheer physical action over the intelligible ought and the “for the sake of”.

Pippin returns again to the unity of thinking and being.

“So it is perfectly appropriate to say such things as that for Hegel reality ‘has a conceptual structure’, or ‘only concepts are truly real’, as long as we realize that we are not talking about entities, but about the ‘actualities’ of beings, their modes or ways of being what determinately and intelligibly they are. To say that ‘any object is the concept of itself’ is to say that what it is in being at work being what it is can be determined, has a logos…. We can say that reality comes to self-consciousness in us, or that the light that illuminates beings in their distinct being-at-work is the same light that illuminates their knowability in us, as long as we do not mean a light emanating from individual minds” (pp. 93-94).

“And here again, Hegel’s model of metaphysics… is Aristotelian. And Aristotle’s metaphysics is not modern dogmatic metaphysics, does not concern a ‘supersensible’ reality knowable only by pure reason. In many respects it is a metaphysics of the ordinary: standard sensible objects, especially organic beings and artifacts. This means that in many respects Kant’s critique of rationalist metaphysics in effect ‘misses’ it” (p. 94).

“By and large Hegel means to ‘denigrate’ the immediately given, how things seem to common sense…. This has nothing to do with doubting the external reality of tables and molecules…. The point of Hegel’s denying to finite, empirical reality the gold standard badge of true actuality is not to say that it ‘possesses’ a lesser degree of reality in the traditional sense (whatever that might mean). It is to say that finite objects viewed in their finitude, or considered as logical atoms, can never reveal the possibility of their own intelligibility” (pp. 96-97).

This provides a clue to the negative connotations of finitude in Hegel. It has far more positive connotations for me, but I consider the primary meaning of “finitude” to be a dependence on other things, which is as different as could be from logical atomicity. This is another different use of words, not a difference on what is or ought to be. If “finite” is taken to mean “to be treated as a logical atom” as Pippin suggests, the negative connotations are appropriate.

Next in this series: Apperceptive Judgment

Form and Things

I use the word “thing” in a very general sense for anything at all — real, ideal, or imaginary; abstract or concrete; including properties, actions, processes, and adverbial characteristics.

Kant controversially wanted to assume that things of all sorts have definite ways that they objectively are “in themselves”, i.e., completely independent of our experience and knowledge of them. But for him, there is inevitably a gap between our knowledge and reality. Every attempt to ignore or overleap that gap he called dogmatism. This was his way of practicing what I have called epistemic modesty, or the ethical virtue of avoiding unfounded knowledge claims. When we don’t know, we go ahead and act based on the best beliefs we have, while in principle remaining open to the possibility that our belief may require revision.

Hegel and others have worried that there is something wrong with Kant’s way of expressing the situation — with this gap between knowledge and reality that is inevitable and even virtuous for Kant. Some of Kant’s remarks make it sound as if reality as it really is and our experience could be two entirely nonoverlapping realms. If this were true, Kant’s position could be seen as leading to skepticism, or the conclusion that genuine knowledge of reality is impossible.

Kant himself would have resisted this conclusion with all his might. He does believe we have genuine knowledge; he just wants us to be very careful about what we claim to know. For Kant, genuine knowledge does not require access to things in themselves; rather, it keeps within the bounds of possible experience. It minimally designates an objectivity toward experience, consisting in the absence of dogmatism and an unceasing effort toward unity of apperception.

Hegel agrees with Kant in opposing dogmatism and emphasizing the effort toward unity of apperception. His strongest opposition to Kant’s talk of things in themselves assumes that “in themselves” means “in isolation”, as it would under the Wolffian view (rejected by both Kant and Hegel) that all knowledge is analytical. Hegel emphasizes that unities of apperception are not just individual but also shared. At the same time, he revives the Aristotelian idea that thoughts should be distinguished as forms or meanings shareable in principle with any rational being, and that as such, they are whatever they are independent of subjective presentation. This makes it quite reasonable for Aristotle and Hegel to claim that the form or meaning that is properly being thought is the very same as the form or meaning that is being thought about.

An analogous identity certainly does not apply to experience or consciousness. To assert that would be dogmatism in Kant’s sense. The thought that Aristotle and Hegel identify with form or meaning is not a kind of consciousness. The most fundamental characteristic of consciousness for Hegel is the separation of subject and object, whereas in thought proper there is no such separation, only a succession of forms. In Hegel, the gap between consciousness and its objects takes the place of the gap between knowledge and reality in Kant, and similarly commends to us a practice of epistemic modesty in life.

Another dimension of epistemic modesty in Aristotle and Hegel has to do with the non-univocal character of form in Aristotle, and with Hegel’s repeated warnings about the “falsity” of all fixed representations. Form is said in several ways in Aristotle, e.g., sensible form, mathematical form, linguistic meaning, and the life or soul of a living being. Of these the first two are univocal, but the last two are not.

From the point of view of form, we take a deflationary view of “things”. Things — like the thing in itself in Kant — are in a strict sense indexes delimiting our ignorance rather than univocal “objects” of knowledge.

The fact that our ignorance is delimited means it is not total. We do have knowledge, but insofar as either proper knowledge or Hegelian spirit has “objects”, those objects lack univocal identity.

Three Kinds of Knowledge

Spinoza identifies three kinds of “knowledge”.

“From what has been said above, it is clear that we perceive many things and form universal notions:”

“I. from singular things which have been represented to us through the senses in a way that is mutilated, confused, and without order for the intellect…; for that reason I have been accustomed to call such perceptions knowledge from random experience;”

“II. from signs, e.g., from the fact that, having heard or read certain words, we recollect things, and form certain ideas of them, which are like them, and through which we imagine the things…. These two ways of regarding things I shall henceforth call knowledge of the first kind, opinion or imagination.”

“III. Finally, from the fact that we have common notions and adequate ideas of the properties of things…. This I shall call reason and the second kind of knowledge.”

“[IV.] In addition to these two kinds of knowledge, there is another, third kind, which we shall call intuitive knowledge. And this kind of knowing proceeds from an adequate idea of the formal essence of certain attributes of God to the adequate knowledge of the… essence of things” (Ethics, book 2, proposition 40, scholium 2, Collected Works vol. 1, Curley trans., pp. 477-478).

The first kind is the source of the confusion addressed in the last post. It elaborates on Plato’s account of “mere opinion”. An important detail is Spinoza’s explicit reference to the fact that inadequate “universal” notions are commonly formed based on inadequate ideas from perception and imagination. Formal logic can then be mechanically applied to these inadequate universals, yielding conclusions that are formally logically sound but deeply wrong materially or content-wise when applied to the real world. We’ve all seen this happen.

The second kind, which he calls “reason”, is thus distinguished not by its use of logic but by the kind of contents it addresses: common notions and adequate ideas. For Spinoza, “reasoning” that takes mere images and opinions as unproblematic sources of truth does not deserve the name of Reason.

“Common notions” is Spinoza’s preferred term for principles that are recognized by all humans and are “equally present in the part and the whole”. What exactly these are intended to include is somewhat obscure. His main example of common notions involves simple mathematical properties of bodies, which are “common” due to the presumed objectivity of mathematics, rather than any sort of intersubjectivity or mutual recognition.

“Adequacy” of ideas is an entirely internal criterion — basically a kind of coherence of meaning, rather than a correspondence with something external that is presumed to be independently known. Ideas for Spinoza are things we affirm or deny, so they have internal complexity. Adequacy of ideas seems to be entirely independent of his criteria for common notions, which is good because I worry about the narrowness of the latter.

I read the third kind — “intuition” — as presupposing and building on the discipline of the second. It is not a free-for-all. This is a “cumulative” rather than “originary” intuition. What other authors claim as originary intuition (alleged “self-evident truths” coming from nowhere) would for Spinoza be mere opinion or imagination.

He says that the first kind of knowledge is the only source of falsity, which implies that the results of the second and third kind are always true. While it is clear that the first kind is a source of falsity, to say that reason and “intuition” yield only truth sets a very high standard indeed. He does not seem to acknowledge the difficulty of knowing there is no admixture of the highly fallible first kind in what we may take to be the infallible second or third kind, or in general the difficulty of practically achieving the extremely high standards he sets for the second and third kind.

This whole discussion proceeds very hastily. There is a bit more than I have quoted, but only a bit. His account of the first kind of knowledge and its weaknesses is relatively more extended, and quite vivid and insightful. But the account of the second kind is very sketchy, and the account of the third kind even more so.

Perhaps we are intended to see the whole text of the Ethics as an illustration of how the second and third kind work. But if it purely embodies the infallible second and third kinds of knowledge, then it would seem that all serious philosophers ought to unequivocally endorse all its arguments, or else they won’t qualify as serious. Strictly speaking, does Spinoza’s standpoint even allow him to acknowledge another philosopher as serious who does not endorse all his arguments? Honestly I did not expect to write the previous sentence.

While Spinoza does not seem to me to be what Kant would call a dogmatist in the sense of taking objects for granted, there is a sense in which he does seem to say, “here is my system, take it or leave it”. I’m still not sure what I think of Hegel’s claim that no finite presentation can ever be truly final, but relatively speaking I’m more comfortable with that. I want to say it is actually a principle of charitable reading to at least in some measure tolerate excessive claims a work may make on its own behalf, and focus instead on understanding the content.

Aristotelian Probability

Things Aristotle calls “probable” have nothing to with statistics. The legal notion of “probable” cause is much closer to Aristotle’s concept of probability. It refers to conclusions for which there are good reasons, but which are not expected to be established beyond reasonable doubt.

Mathematics achieves certainty and rigorous necessity through the artifice of abstracting away real-world complication and ambiguity. Whenever we are concerned with the real world as we actually experience it, whatever conclusions we reach at best follow probably rather than necessarily.

Keeping in mind the probable character of judgment in general should not prevent us from acting decisively. This kind of “probability” is all the basis we need to have well-founded practical confidence. We can have strong confidence without false pretenses of certainty.

To claim certain knowledge in these cases amounts to what Kant called dogmatism. The deep roots of American pragmatist philosophy have more to do with something like an Aristotelian emphasis on the practical sufficiency of probable judgments than with later reductive, utilitarian theories of value. (See also Aristotelian Dialectic; Dialectic Bootstraps Itself; The Epistemic Modesty of Plato and Aristotle; Demonstrative “Science”?; Kantian Discipline; Copernican.)

Demonstrative “Science”?

The “historiographical” notes on the history of philosophy I offer here from time to time are a sort of compromise. For much of my life, I’ve been very concerned with the fine grain of such history, and with casting a broad net encompassing many historical figures. Here, I made a strategic decision to focus instead on a mere handful of philosophers I consider most important.

Discussion of actualization in Hegel led to actualization in Aristotle, which led me to indulge my fascination with the Aristotelian commentary tradition. To the extent that it is possible to generalize about the historic readings discussed in the Greek, Arabic, Hebrew, and Latin commentaries, my own view of Aristotle is quite different on a number of key points, having more in common with some modern readings. Nonetheless, I am enormously impressed by the levels of sophistication shown by very many writers in this tradition.

I just mentioned al-Farabi again. As previously noted, al-Farabi (10th century CE) played a great historic role in the formulation of Arabic (and consequently, Hebrew and Latin) views of Aristotle. The Syrian Christians who did the majority of the translating of Aristotle to Arabic from Syriac had access to most of Aristotle’s works, but publicly only taught from the logical treatises. It was al-Farabi who initiated public teaching of the full range of Aristotelian philosophy in the Islamic world. He flourished during the so-called Islamic golden age, a time of tremendous interest in ancient learning not only by aristocrats but by many literate skilled crafts people. The political climate of the Islamic world at the time was much more embracing of secular learning than it came to be between the 13th and 19th centuries CE.

One unfortunate aspect of al-Farabi’s reading was a very strong privileging of a notion of demonstrative “science” over Aristotle’s own predominant use of dialectic in philosophical development. This was based on a reading of Aristotle’s Posterior Analytics as propounding a model of “science” as a deductive enterprise expected to result in certain knowledge, which is still dominant today, but which I (following a number of modern interpreters) think involves a misreading of the basic aims of Aristotelian demonstration.

The idea that Aristotle was fundamentally concerned to develop “sciences” yielding certain knowledge gave a more dogmatic cast to his whole work, which has been a contributing factor in common negative stereotypes of Aristotle. Many modern commentators who still accept this reading of Posterior Analytics have been puzzled by the huge gap between this and Aristotle’s actual practice throughout his works, which in fact is mainly dialectical. I think a careful reading of the Topics (on dialectic) and Posterior Analytics (on demonstration) with consultation of the Greek text on the originals of some key phrases yields a view that is far more consistent with Aristotle’s actual practice.

Demonstration is a pedagogical way of showing very clear reasons for certain kinds of conclusions. It works by assuming some premises are true, whereas dialectic makes no such assumption. Thus the only necessity that results from demonstration is the “hypothetical” one that if the premises are true, then the conclusion is also true. But the more important point in regard to the classic syllogistic form is that the common “middle term” that allows the major and minor premises to be both formally and materially composed together illuminates why we ought to consider it appropriate to assume the conclusion is true if we believe the premises are true.

Dialectic, as I have said, is cumulative, exploratory discursive reasoning about meanings in the absence of initial certainty. This is how Aristotle mainly approaches things. Dialectic implicitly relies on the same logical form of syllogistic argument explicitly used in demonstration, but Aristotle distinguishes dialectic and demonstration by whether premises are treated as hypotheses to be evaluated, or as hypothetically assumed “truths” to be interpreted.

It is also important to note that in the Latin scholastic tradition, the dogmatic trend resulting from wide acceptance of claims about demonstrative science was significantly mitigated by a strong counter-trend of evenhandedly analyzing arguments pro and con, which effectively revived a form of dialectic. (See also Foundations?; Fortunes of Aristotle; Scholastic Dialectic.)