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.

Poetic Thinking

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pippin doesn’t really seem very sanguine about this.

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

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

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

New Biography of Hegel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

That is an interesting different take on “system”.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Free will here basically means unimpaired reason.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Culmination of the Culmination

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next in this series: Heidegger’s Story About Metaphysics

Ricoeur on Imagination

Paul Ricoeur’s essay on imagination in From Text to Action invites us “to see in it an aspect of semantic innovation characteristic of the metaphorical use of language” (p. 171). The term “image”, he says, has acquired a bad reputation from its misuse in the empiricist theory of knowledge. It “corresponds to two extreme theories, illustrated by Hume and Sartre, respectively” (p. 170). Hume sought to derive images entirely from sense perception, while Sartre related them starkly to the absence of a real object. According to Ricoeur, “To say that our images are spoken before they are seen is to give up an initial false self-evidence, which holds the image to be first and foremost a ‘scene’ unfolding in some mental ‘theater’ before the gaze of an internal ‘spectator’. But it also means giving up at the same time a second false self-evidence, holding that this mental entity is the cloth out of which we tailor our abstract idea, our concepts, the basic ingredient of some sort of mental alchemy” (p. 171).

He suggests that we take the poetic image as paradigmatic. The poetic image is unfolded through what Eugène Minkowski and Gaston Bachelard called a kind of “reverberation” of things said. Metaphor for Ricoeur operates not just as substitution for nouns, but rather in a refiguration of whole sentences. Use of what would otherwise be “bizarre predicates” produces a kind of shock that leads us to “produce a new predicative pertinence that is the metaphor…. [A]t the moment when a new meaning emerges out of the ruins of literal predication[,] imagination offers its specific mediation” (p. 172). “[S]emantic shock… ignites the spark of meaning of the metaphor…. Before being a fading perception, the image is an emerging meaning” (p. 173). (See also Beauty, Deautomatization.) He says that in a Kantian sense, imagination schematizes emerging meaning, giving it concreteness.

The reverberation of meaning is not a secondary phenomenon, but rather essential to the constitution of meaning as such. Ricoeur suggests that “the power unfurled by poetic language” (p. 174) affects not only meaning, but reference too. Poetic discourse abolishes “our first-order interest in manipulation and control” (p. 175), but brings to the foreground a second-order reference to “our profound belonging to the life-world” and the “tie of our being to other beings” (ibid). This second-order reference “in reality is the primordial reference” (ibid). (See Rule of Metaphor.) Such a perspective goes along with the idea that reference is constituted by meaning, rather than vice versa. In Fregean terms, sense is prior to reference.

“The paradox of fiction is that setting perception aside is the condition for augmenting our vision of things” (ibid). According to Ricoeur, work in model theory suggests that not only in poetry but also in science, fiction plays a necessary heuristic role in articulating new meanings (see also Searching for a Middle Term). Further, “the first way human beings attempt to understand and to master the ‘manifold’ of the practical field is to give themselves a fictive representation of it” (p. 176).

Referring to Aristotle’s Poetics, he says “poetry goes right to the essence of action precisely because it ties together mythos and mimesis, that is, in our vocabulary, fiction and redescription” (ibid). In a Kantian vein, Ricoeur adds that “Its referential force consists in the fact that the narrative act, winding through the narrative structures, applies the grid of an ordered fiction to the ‘manifold’ of human action” (pp. 176-177; see also Narrated Time.)

Beyond its mimetic function, imagination also has a projective aspect. “Without imagination, there is no action…. And it is indeed through the anticipatory imagination of acting that I ‘try out’ different possible courses of action and that I ‘play’, in the precise sense of the word, with possible practices…. It is imagination that provides the milieu, the luminous clearing, in which we can compare and evaluate motives as diverse as desires and ethical obligations, themselves as disparate as professional rules, social customs, or intensely personal values” (p. 177). “Finally, it is in the realm of the imaginary that I try out my power to act, that I measure the scope of ‘I can'” (p. 178). (See also Free Play; Practical Judgment.)

Imagination is also involved in our recognition of others as like us. “[I]ndividuals as well as collective entities… are always already related to social reality in a mode other than that of immediate participation, following the figures of noncoincidence, which are, precisely, those of the social imaginary” (p. 182).

“[T]he analogical tie that makes every man my brother is accessible to us only through a number of imaginative practices, among them ideology and utopia” (p. 181). Ideology “seems to be tied to the necessity for any group to give itself an image of itself, to ‘play itself’, in the theatrical sense of the word, to put itself at issue and on stage…. [S]ymbolism is not an effect of society, society is an effect of symbolism” (ibid). Ideology covers over the real gaps in all systems of legitimacy. Utopia exposes these gaps, but also tends to subordinate reality to dreams, and to be fixated on perfectionist designs. Ideology and utopia are mutually antagonistic, and both tend toward a kind of pathology that renders their positive function unrecognizable. “[T]he productive imagination… can be restored to itself only through a critique of the antagonistic and semipathological figure of the social imaginary” (p. 181).

Poetry and Mathematics

Philosophy is neither poetry nor mathematics, but a discursive development. Poetry may give us visionary symbolism or language-on-language texturings that deautomate perception. Mathematics offers a paradigm of exactitude, and develops many beautiful structures. But philosophy is the home of ethics, dialogue, and interpretation. It is — dare I say it — the home of the human.

Poetry and mathematics each in their own way show us an other-than-human beauty that we as humans can be inspired by. Ethics on the other hand is the specifically human beauty, the beauty of creatures that can talk and share meaning with one another.

Rule of Metaphor

In The Rule of Metaphor, which contains essays from the early 1970s, Ricoeur aimed among other things to refute Frege’s apparent claim that poetry has no reference or denotation, but only a sense or connotation. According to Ricoeur, poetic language achieves a kind of “second-level reference” by suspending first-level reference. I tend to think all reference presupposes higher-order constructs, so I am sympathetic. This is also an argument for the general importance of metaphor.

In an appendix, he describes how the rise of structuralism in the 1960s — of which he remained critical — led him from a kind of existential phenomenology to a much closer engagement with language. His earlier emphasis on symbols gave way to a more general approach to hermeneutics, and he began to also engage with analytic philosophy.

At the beginning of the book, he notes how the study of rhetoric became much narrower after Aristotle, losing its connection with dialectic and philosophy. Later, he goes on to argue that meanings of sentences take precedence meanings of words, and meanings of whole discourses take precedence over meanings of sentences.

Apparently, some structuralist writers on rhetoric argued for the contrary, bottom-up approach starting with meanings of words. My own past interest in so-called structuralism never led in this direction; I was initially more concerned with the priority of relations over “things”, and later with the explanatory power of Foucaultian “discursive regularities”. I do think a compositional, bottom-up approach has great value in formal contexts, and that formal analysis is not irrelevant to ordinary language, but I think ordinary language meaning is best approached mainly in terms of material inference, which has a holistic character.