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