Tag: Self-Consciousness

Spirit of Trust

“At the very center of Hegel’s thought … is a radically new conception of the conceptual…. This way of understanding conceptual contentfulness is nonpsychological” (Brandom, A Spirit of Trust, p. 2).

“[W]hat confers conceptual content on acts, attitudes, and linguistic expressions is the role they play in the practices their subjects engage in…. [M]eaning is to be understood in terms of use” (p. 3).

“Hegel thinks that we cannot understand [the] conceptual structure of the objective world … except as part of a story that includes what we are doing when we practically take or treat the world [in a certain way]” (pp. 3-4). “[I]n knowing how (being able) to use ordinary concepts, one already knows how to do everything one needs to know how to do in order to grasp and apply the metaconcepts…. The categorial metaconcepts are the expressive organs of self-consciousness” (p. 5).

“In reading [Kant and Hegel] it is easy to lose sight entirely of ordinary empirical and practical concepts…. Yet I believe that the best way to understand what they are saying about their preferred topic of concepts operating in a pure, still stratosphere above the busy jostling and haggling of street-level judging and doing is precisely to focus on what these metaconcepts let us say about what is going on below…. If the point of the higher-level concepts is to articulate the use and content of lower-level ones, then the cash value of an account of categorial metaconcepts is what it has to teach us about ordinary ground-level empirical and practical concepts” (pp. 5-6).

“The process of experience is accordingly understood as being both the process of applying determinate conceptually contentful norms in judgment and intentional action and the process of instituting those determinate conceptually contentful norms. It is the gradual, progressive finding of what the content has been all along” (p. 6).

“So [Hegel] takes it that the only way to understand or convey the content of the metaconcepts that articulate various forms of self-consciousness … is by recollectively rehearsing a possible course of expressively progressive development that culminates in the content in question. And that is exactly what he does” (p. 7). “We can understand [the metaconcepts] in terms of what they make it possible for us to say and understand about the use and content of those ground-level determinate concepts” (p. 8).

“The second master idea of Kant’s that inspires Hegel’s story is his revolutionary appreciation of the essentially normative character of discursive intentionality. Kant understands judgments and intentional doings as differing from the responses of nondiscursive creatures in being performances that their subjects are in a distinctive sense responsible for. He sees them as exercising a special sort of authority: the authority that discursive subjects have to undertake commitments as to how things are or shall be. Sapient awareness, apperception, is seen as a normative phenomenon, the discursive realm as a normative realm” (p. 9).

“But concepts are now understood as ‘functions of judgments’. That is, they are understood in terms of their functional role in determining what one makes oneself responsible for or commits oneself to in judging. At the center of what one is responsible for is having reasons for judging or acting as one does. Concepts are rules that determine what counts as a reason for (or against) applying them, and what applying them counts as a reason for (or against)…. Discursive beings live and move and have their being in a normative space of reasons…. Where the Early Modern philosophical tradition had focused on our grip on concepts, Kant shifts attention to their grip on us” (ibid).

“That is to say that he understands representational purport, the way in which its acts show up to the subject as representings, as intentionally pointing beyond themselves to something represented by them, in thoroughly normative terms. Something is a representing insofar as it is responsible for its correctness to what thereby counts as represented by it” (p. 10).

“What one makes oneself responsible for doing in judging is rationally integrating the new commitment one undertakes with one’s prior commitments so as to yield a constellation of doxastic commitments that exhibits the sort of rational (‘synthetic’) unity distinctive of apperception. For concepts to play their functional role as rules for doing that, their contents must determine what would be reasons for or against each particular application of those concepts in judgment, and what those applications would be reasons for or against” (ibid).

“I have already gestured at Hegel’s nonpsychological conception of the conceptual as what is articulated by relations of material incompatibility and consequence…. Descartes understood the distinction between minded creatures and everything else in terms of a distinction of two kinds of stuff: mental and physical. Kant’s normative reconceiving of sapience replaces Descartes’s ontological distinction with a deontological one. Discursive creatures are distinguished by having rational obligations. They are subject to normative assessment of the extent to which what they think and do accords with their commitments or responsibilities” (p. 11).

“Kant’s insight into the normative character of judging and acting intentionally renders philosophically urgent the understanding of discursive normativity” (ibid).

“[Hegel’s] generic term for social-practical attitudes of taking or treating someone as the subject of normative statuses is ‘recognition’ [Anerkennung]. He takes it that normative statuses such as authority and responsibility are instituted when recognitive attitudes have a distinctive social structure: when they take the form of mutual or reciprocal [gegenseitig] recognition” (p. 12).

“[N]orms or statuses must be intelligible as having a certain kind of independence from practitioners’ attitudes toward them if they are to be intelligible as serving as authoritative standards for normative assessment of the propriety or correctness of those attitudes” (p. 13).

“But however it is with Wittgenstein, Hegel’s invocation of the social character of discursive normativity, in the form of the claim that normative statuses are instituted only by reciprocal recognitive attitudes, works quite differently” (ibid). “In Hegel’s terms, what a self-consciousness is in itself (its normative statuses) depends on both what it is for itself and what it is for others” (p. 14).

“Which others matter for the institution of a subject’s normative statuses is determined by the subject’s own recognitive attitudes: who it recognizes, in the sense of granting (attributing to) them the authority to hold it responsible. But it is not determined by those attitudes alone. Communities do come into the picture. What Hegel calls social ‘substance’ is synthesized by mutual recognition…. But Hegelian communities are constellations of reciprocal-recognitive dyads. The recognitive attitudes of others, who hold one responsible, are equally as important as the normative attitude of one who acknowledges a commitment. Hegel’s version is second-personal, perspectival ‘I’-‘thou’ sociality, not first-personal, ‘I’-‘we’ sociality” (pp. 13-14).

” ‘Dependence’ and ‘independence’, when applied to knowing and acting subjects, are Hegel’s way of talking about normative statuses of responsibility and authority, respectively” (p. 14).

“But corresponding to the reciprocal dependence of normative statuses and attitudes on the side of pragmatics, Hegel envisages a reciprocal dependence of meaning and use, of the contents of concepts and the practices of applying them…. Hegel balances Kant’s insight that judging and acting presuppose the availability of determinately contentful norms to bind oneself by and hold others to, with the insight that our practical recognitive attitudes of acknowledging and attributing commitments are all there is to establish the association of determinate conceptual contents with those attitudes — and so all there is to fix determinate norms or normative statuses they are attitudes toward. The issue of how to make sense of normative attitudes as genuinely norm-governed once we understand the norms as instituted by such attitudes, and the issue of how to understand normative attitudes as instituting norms with determinate conceptual contents are two sides of one coin” (pp. 15-16).

“As the most common misunderstanding of the social dimension sees individuals as bound to accord with communal regularities, the most common misunderstanding of the historical dimension sees the present as answerable to an eventual ideal Piercean consensus. Both are caricatures of Hegel’s much more sophisticated account” (p. 16).

“Viewed prospectively, the process of experience is one of progressively determining conceptual contents in the sense of making those contents more determinate, by applying them or withholding their application in novel circumstances…. Viewed retrospectively, the process of experience is one of finding out more about the boundaries of concepts that show up as having implicitly all along already been fully determinate…. It is of the essence of construing things according to the metacategories of Vernunft that neither of these perspectives is intelligible apart from its relation to the other, and that the correctness of each does not exclude but rather entails the correctness of the other” (p. 17).

“Hegel explains what is implicit in terms of the process of expressing it: the process of making it explicit…. This account of expression in terms of recollection grounds an account of representation in terms of expression” (p. 18).

“Finally, the new kind of theoretical self-consciousness we gain from Hegel’s phenomenological recollection is envisaged as making possible a new form of practical normativity. The door is opened to the achievement of a new form of Geist when norm-instituting recognitive practices and practical attitudes take the form of norm-acknowledging recollective practices and practical attitudes. When recognition takes the magnanimous form of recollection, it is forgiveness, the attitude that institutes normativity as fully self-conscious trust” (p. 19).

“Along the way we can see Hegel using the discussion of the experience of error to introduce the basic outlines of the positive account of representation that he will recommend to replace the defective traditional ways of thinking about representation that lead to the knowledge-as-instrument and knowledge-as-medium models” (p. 21).

“It is widely appreciated that the origins of Wilfrid Sellars’s critique of what he calls the ‘Myth of the Given’ are to be found in Hegel’s Sense Certainty chapter. Sellars himself points to this by opening his essay with an explicit acknowledgement of the kinship between the line of argument he will pursue and that of ‘Hegel, that great foe of immediacy’. By this he means that Hegel, like Sellars, denies the intelligibility of any concept of knowledge that is purely immediate, that involves no appeal to inferential abilities or the consequential relations they acknowledge (Hegel’s ‘mediation’)” (pp. 21-22).

“One conclusion that emerges is that the incompatibility-and-consequence relations that articulate the contents of both theoretical and observational concepts must be understood to be subjunctively robust. By engaging in inferences tracking those relations, experiencing subjects practically confront not only facts, but the lawful relations of consequence and incompatibility that make those facts both determinate and cognitively accessible” (p. 23).

“What self-conscious individual normative subjects are ‘for themselves’ and ‘for others’ are understood as normative attitudes: attitudes of acknowledging responsibility or claiming authority oneself, and attitudes of attributing responsibility or authority to others, respectively…. According to the reciprocal recognition model, one subject’s attitude of acknowledging responsibility makes that subject responsible only if it is suitably socially complemented by the attributing of responsibility by another, to whom the first attributes the authority to do so. The attitudes of acknowledging and attributing are accordingly interdependent. Each is responsible to and authoritative over the other, because only when suitably complementing each other do those attitudes institute statuses” (p. 24).

“One of the principal lessons of the discussion of pure independence, in the allegory of Mastery, is that the normative statuses of responsibility and authority are two sides of one coin. The point is not the trivial one that if X has authority over Y then Y is responsible to X, and vice versa. It is that X’s authority always involves a correlative responsibility by X. Independence always involves a correlative moment of dependence, and dependence always involves a correlative moment of independence” (pp. 24-25).

“The argument for the metaphysical defectiveness of the idea of pure independence (that is, authority without responsibility) in the allegory of the Master and the Servant is, inter alia, Hegel’s argument against the traditional subordination-obedience model of normativity. The crucial move in that argument is the claim that such a conception denies essential necessary conditions of the determinate contentfulness of the authority the Master claims” (p. 25).

“The recognitive community of all those who recognize and are recognized by each other in turn is a kind of universal order under which its members fall…. Self-consciousness in Hegel’s sense is practical awareness of oneself as such a recognitively constituted subject of normative statuses. It is accordingly a social achievement and a social status. Not only is it not the turning on of a Cartesian inner light; it is not even something that principally happens between the ears of the individual so constituted…. As such, it is an important point of reference wherever Hegel invokes the holistic structure of identities constituted by differences” (p. 26).

“The tradition Hegel inherited (endorsed by many philosophers since) understands agency in terms of a mental event of intending or willing causing a separate bodily movement, which in turn has various distinct causal consequences in the wider world. Hegel … thinks rather of doings as unitary things (processes …), which can be variously specified” (p. 27).

“Hegel understands those different kinds of description in normative terms of authority and responsibility…. Intentional specifications are those under which the agent in a distinctive sense acknowledges responsibility, while consequential specifications are those under which others, in a complementary sense, attribute responsibility and hold the agent responsible…. What the doing is in itself is the product of what it is for the agent and what it is for the others….Judging shows up as a limiting special case of practical doings understood in this way” (ibid).

“As the doing reverberates through the objective world, as its consequences roll on to the horizon, new specifications of it become available. Each of them provides a new perspective on the content of the doing, on what doing it is turning out to be. That the shooting was a killing, that the insulting was a decisive breaking off of relations, that the vote was a political turning point for the party are expressions of what was done that only become available retrospectively” (p. 28).

“A phenomenology is a recollected, retrospectively rationally reconstructed history that displays the emergence of what becomes visible as having been all along implicit in an expressively progressive sequence of its ever more adequate appearances (pp. 28-29).

“Hegel thinks that the most fundamental normative structure of our discursiveness underwent a revolutionary change, from its traditional form to a distinctively modern one. This vast sea change did not take place all at once, but over an extended period of time. The transition began with the ancient Greeks and proceeded at an accelerating pace. It was still incomplete in his time (and in ours), but with the main lineament of its full flowering just becoming visible. It is, he thought, the single biggest event in human history. ‘Geist’ is his term for the subject of that titanic transmogrification” (p. 29).

“The essence of the traditional form of normativity is practically treating norms as an objective feature of the world: as just there, as are stars, oceans, and rocks. [Normativity] is construed as having the asymmetric structure of relations of command and obedience that Hegel criticizes in his allegory of Mastery…. In any case, there are taken to be facts about how it is fitting to behave” (ibid).

“What is required to overcome alienation is practically and theoretically to balance the modern insight into the attitude-dependence of normative statuses with a reappropriation of the traditional insight into the status-dependence of normative attitudes. At the end of his Spirit chapters, Hegel tells us how he thinks that can and should be done. His account takes the form of a description of the final, fully adequate form of reciprocal recognition: the recollective recognitive structure of confession and forgiveness for which I appropriate his term ‘trust’ [Vertrauen]” (p. 30).

“It is, remarkably, a semantics with an edifying intent. The effect of theoretically understanding the nature of the conceptual contents we normatively bind ourselves by in our discursive activity is to be to educate and motivate us to be better people, who live and move and have our being in the normative space of Geist in the postmodern form of trust. For Hegel’s pragmatist, social-historical semantics makes explicit to us what becomes visible as our standing commitment to engage in the ideal recollective norm-instituting recognitive practices that are structured by trust — a commitment to practical magnanimity that is revealed to be implicit in talking and acting at all” (p. 32).

Adeptio

This will conclude my treatment of Jean-Baptiste Brenet’s account of the unexpected thought of the 14th-century “Averroist” John of Jandun, which confounds and unsettles quite a number of stereotypes. One of the surprises is that this seemingly obscure chapter in the history of medieval philosophy turns out to be a significant episode in the formation of what in recent times have been regarded as modern concerns pertaining to the so-called Subject.

(Let me just briefly suggest that to be humane — to seriously care about people — and to develop concrete accounts of human subjectivity need not be tied to the frequent modern assumption that whatever is ethically important about human beings must be expressed in terms an account of the human as Subject.)

Here it is a matter of what in the Aristotelian commentary tradition came to be called “acquired” intellect (adeptio for the Latins). The point is that what is called intellect in the Aristotelian sense is not reducible to something we are born with. What we have from nature and for the most part live by is a kind of imagination. Within John of Jandun’s elaborate account of the nature and progress of so-called acquired intellect, we encounter both a “metaphysical” or “cosmic” dimension and an elevated concern with the status of human individuals.

Brenet writes, “What the ‘state of acquisition’ signifies [for John] is only a momentary union, a transitory contact and not a stable terminal state. The human sleeps, drinks, and eats, and is not a philosopher when she does so” (Transferts du sujet, p. 379, my translation throughout).

“The image not being an obstacle, it is a matter of seeing what happens with adeptio” (p. 380). “It is important not to confound the order of being and the order of knowledge. The agent intellect is in effect an invariable forma informans [informing form] of the possible intellect. That is to say that in its substance, it is always united to it in the same manner. The only relation between the two that can be modified is that of knowledge: it falls to the possible intellect to know the agent intellect better and better. What is adeptio, as a result? Not only the formal conjunction of the agent intellect with the possible intellect, but the perfect knowledge of one by the other. The agent intellect is acquired when the intellect in potentiality comes to think substance: it knows it in what it is, and not only in the punctual acts that it causes. In short, adeptio is produced when the human intellect knows itself” (p. 381).

Brenet points out that John’s distinction between substance and knowledge in this context is not to be found in Averroes. It seems to me also that this identifies knowledge of substance with a very immodest claim of immediately reflexive human self-knowledge that has no place in Aristotle.

We note that at the end of the above he says “the human intellect”. Up to that point, we might have been reading an account of al-Farabi, who substantially elaborated the elaboration of Aristotle on this point by Alexander of Aphrodisias. The way John and other medieval writers speak about intellects can sound rather “metaphysical”. But after the initial controversies over the translations of Averroes, it became obligatory among the Latins to stress the human element.

John of Jandun in his day was famous and notorious for his defense of Averroes against theological objections. But Brenet documents how deeply John is affected by what might be called the theologically motivated “humanism” of the Latins, summarized in the slogan “this human thinks”. This does not eclipse the “metaphysical” dimension of the discourse about intellect, but rather is layered on top of it.

For John, “This knowledge of self on the part of the intellect, independent of phantasms, subtracted from all intermittences of cogitation, is always there, since always, in the same manner. It is radically different from that which can fall to this or that human, even if in a sense it serves as a model of cosmic success toward which tend those who work to actualize philosophy” (p. 383).

Brenet observes that “this idea is faulty from the start, since for the Cordovan [Averroes] there is no sense in conceiving a cosmic bond between the two [intellects] that operates without the intermediary of individuals and their images” (p. 385). Averroes stands out among the medievals for his rejection of neoplatonic emanationism. John back-pedals on this.

“Each time an abstraction is produced, as a consequence, the possible intellect thinks itself, and thinks the agent of that abstraction. It knows itself as that which informs the intellectual act, then it knows the operator of that act. It knows the subject of thought, it knows the (efficient) cause of it. As imperfect grasp of its substance, the intelligere seipsum [self-understanding] of the intellect accompanies the thought of the world; as achieved thought of itself, it conditions the contemplation of God. In sum, the knowledge of self intervenes at two points in the process that leads to happiness” (p. 391).

Here we have self-knowledge of intellect identified with an imperfect knowledge of substance that seems more achievable. But he speaks of an efficient cause of the intellectual act, which is again problematic.

“The insertion of the problem of knowledge of self into a theory of intellect was inevitable for John of Jandun. It suffices to cross the Nicomachean Ethics and the Metaphysics: from the first, he takes it that happiness resides in contemplation, that God is nothing but this contemplation, and that the human, to be happy, should strive to do like God, in contemplating the divine realities; from the second, he takes it that for God, contemplation comes down to thinking oneself. The First principle subsists as Thought that thinks itself, and the happy human comes to see with this self-knowledge” (p. 393).

Here we seem to be back on more or less Aristotelian ground again. At this point he is neither claiming super-powers for the human, nor reducing intellect to something explainable by efficient causes.

“[John] divides the knowledge of self in two: in imagining an eternal rapport of thought between the agent intellect and the possible intellect, outside of all relation with humans, he misunderstands the essence of intellectus, and loses what is really posed in the text of Averroes: the existence of the philosopher” (pp. 393-394).

“The acquired intellect [adeptio] is the intellect that thinks itself” (p. 394).

“John speaks for Averroes, but like Alfarabi…. In disputing on junction with the separate substances, John [recovers] the program of the Parisian scholastics of the 1240s, where it was a matter of completing Aristotle with the Book of Causes, Avicenna, and Alfarabi…. John holds that the acquisition of the agent intellect does not take place on the level of the intellection of the pure intelligible. For John that is only a stage that rehearses (and does not crown) an ascent to the supreme intelligible. As a consequence, what Averroes poses — i.e., that once joined to the agent intellect, which has become for us our form in act, we ‘effectuate by it the action that is proper to it’, John interprets according to a model that is not Averroes’ own, a cosmological and emanationist model of thought in which it is via the agent intelligence, the lowest of the separate Intelligences, that the human soul accedes to the superior forms and to God. Adeptio is the necessary condition of a re-ascent into being, which according to him is involved in the cosmic gradation of forms between the first Cause and the world of bodies. At the end of her first journey, that of theoretical apprenticeship that ends in the abstraction of the intelligible of the world, the human thinks the agent intellect, then the nearest immaterial substance of a superior degree, and so on. In this way, knowledges that mimic in their order the causal articulation of these substances that pilot the world are assembled in a chain. As a consequence, adeptio is not the last word of noetics. It inaugurates metaphysics, passing the preliminary that is abstractive knowledge. For John, the ‘acquired intellect’ represents a kind of extreme point of two worlds” (pp. 395-396, emphasis in original).

“Averroes nonetheless does not mean this. The formal junction with the agent intellect for him equates to an immediate and total access to the pure intelligible. Under these conditions, how are we to understand the fact that John insists on a progressive ascent, when the text he is reading seems to be satisfied with a direct union with the principle of thought. And what sense should we give to this difference?” (p. 396).

Here for once John’s view sounds more plausible than the one attributed to Averroes. Nothing in Aristotle is “immediate and total”. Plato too is more careful. Immediacy and totality are inventions of later monotheistic theology, belonging to the same order as miracles and omnipotence.

“The term ‘adeptio‘ (Arabic istifada…) is Farabian [from al-Farabi] in origin, and for the Second Master designates the state of ‘acquired’ intellect (‘adeptus‘ or ‘acquisitus‘ in other translations), that has arrived at the ultimate degree of its achievement, where the agent intellect becomes form for the intellect said to be in act, itself a form of the potential intellect. This ‘acquired’ intellect is at the same time identical to the agent intellect, and different from it in that it is the realization of it in the human. At the same time that it is the highest form of the human, it is also contiguous, in the emanationist hierarchy of beings, to the last in the order of separate forms, the agent intellect that is the tenth and last of the celestial Intelligences emanated from the One. This characteristic allowed thought that ascends to the intelligible not to have the stage of ‘acquisition’ as its ultimate term. Rather it was possible, using it as a springboard, to ascend beyond the most eminent of the forms related to matter, to ascend, stage by stage, the whole hierarchy of the separate Intelligences, even to the contemplation of the One, even if this idea is only suggested by Alfarabi, for reasons no doubt related to religious censure. On the other hand, for Averroes, who repudiated the emanationist system of the oriental philosophers, the notion of ‘acquired intellect’ could no longer have this significance. In fact the Cordovan sometimes uses the notion of adeptio for his own proper account, as a synonym pure and simple of the continuatio-copulatio [two key terms for the relation between intellect and the soul in the Latin translation of Averroes], and sometimes in a polemical context he refers to the Farabian sense of the term, in order to reject its pertinence and to deny that ‘acquisition’ is a stage of the actuality of intellect distinct from ‘junction with the agent intellect’, the ultimate end of human knowledge. But precisely, it seems that John of Jandun could not measure the consequences of Averroes’ break with the emanationist model of Farabian origin” (pp. 397-398).

”John’s misunderstanding is explained if we refer back to the idea of an intellect ‘coming from outside’ or ‘acquired from outside’, of which Aristotle speaks in [The Generation of Animals] II 3, as well as the Arabic tradition that was the outcome of the Greek reading posed by Alexander of Aphrodisias in his [On the Intellect]. For the latter, the extrinsic intellect is the agent intellect of Aristotle. Otherwise said, it is strictly the same intellect, but under another name. An error was introduced in the Arabic text of Alexander, which gives aql mustafad (literally ‘acquired intellect’) for nous o thurathen [intellect from outside]” (p. 398).

“Alfarabi gave this notion a sense that it did not have, that of the final perfection of the human, delivered by the agent intellect but distinct from it…. We progress from the acquired intellect to the agent intellect, from the agent intellect to the immediately superior celestial intelligence, etc., up to the First. But for Ibn Rushd [Averroes] it doesn’t go the same” (p. 399).

“For John of Jandun, the Rushdian theory of formal junction to the agent intellect is overcome by another doctrine, of Farabian inspiration, of the ascension of the ladder of the separate beings” (p. 400). “According to John of Jandun, Aristotle defines human happiness as an actus sapientiae, as the act of theoretical wisdom that consists in contemplating the divine realities, God and the separate beings” (p. 401).

“John deduces that Aristotle and Averroes do not strictly speak of the same thing, and proposes to articulate their two positions. He does this by distinguishing two modes of knowledge, two ways the human can have the knowledge of the supreme substance that is God. The first is an intuitive and simple knowledge of the divine quiddity. The second, more rich, more extended, is discursive…. Adeptio is an example of the first, and the actus sapientiae the second…. Relative to the other intuitive knowledges, it certainly constitutes the final degree, but it is only a preparatory stage for the ultimate knowledge that the metaphysician obtains when he demonstratively unfolds the folded ensemble of the essential characters of God” (p. 402).

It is noteworthy that John treats discursive knowledge as higher than intuitive knowledge. I hold this to be true for both Plato and Aristotle, as well as for Kant and Hegel.

“Each in their order, these two stages constitute maximal goods. But they remain ordered toward the accomplishment of a discursive knowledge of the divine essence, the only absolute felicity” (p. 404).

For John, “The achieved state is not the work of anyone in particular. The perfection of knowledge is not the lot benefiting an elite. It is not a privilege. It is not simply incarnated: the totality of philosophical knowledge only results from the integration of partial knowledges. One could thus compare knowledge to the silver in circulation on the earth: this silver is indeed a sum, a capital in which humanity partakes, but never the wealth of one alone. Indeed philosophy is not reserved for the fine flower of humanity, it is not this activity that divides the humans and separates their species in two (the brutes and the simple thinkers on one side, the philosophers on the other); on the contrary, it is the fruit that engenders the combination of their efforts” (p. 424, emphasis in original).

This anti-elitist conception is another aspect of John that I find admirable.

“Almost at the same time, this idea of a collective actualization of intellect is found in the Monarchia of Dante. The latter posed that there is an end common to every human society, the universal end of the human species to which God has destined it by nature. It is a matter of a ‘proper operation’, an operation, ‘which lends itself neither to the individual alone nor to the family alone, nor to the town, nor the city, nor the realm taken apart from others’. What is it? Constantly reducing to act all the power of the possible intellect. Knowledge by this intellect is in effect the specific activity of the human species: outside of the human there are only being, life, and sensation that serve minerals, plants, and animals just as well; and above them the intellectual nature of God and the separate substances has something particular so that it is never potential but always in act; there is only a self-knowledge that is never eclipsed. As a consequence, only the human is in potentiality to knowing; and only the ensemble of human beings accomplishes it” (p. 425).

“In reality two things are posed, and this is the central thesis of the Monarchia that profoundly distinguishes Dante from John of Jandun: the participation of all the humans is necessary to actualize the possible intellect’s power of thinking, and to allow humanity to attain its end; but this ‘multitude’ is only possible in ‘peace’. No peace, no universal human society; and only the ‘temporal monarchy’ is capable of eliminating wars. As R. Imbach notes, this means that the actualization of the possible intellect in Dante not only has a social dimension, it has a ‘political dimension’. It is by the just political organization of the world that the human comes to attain her proper end at every instant: the perfection of knowledge, because it is from the monarchy that humankind acquires the power to think in common” (pp. 425-426).

This political dimension was somewhat similarly developed by John’s friend Marsilius of Padua.

“Dante takes from Aristotle’s Politics how to conceive this last point, but it is to the Long Commentary of Averroes on the treatise On the Soul that he makes reference, when he maintains that the (possible) intellect cannot remain in potentiality…. The philosophy of Averroes in effect marks a rupture with the fundamentally neoplatonic attitude that sustained the conception of intellectual perfection among his Arabo-Moslem predecessors. For Averroes, the existence of the community is a necessary condition for the existence and maintenance of philosophy” (p. 426).

It is this dimension of Averroes that inspires Marsilius and Dante.

“What Averroes confronted was an Islamo-Andalusian tradition of praise of philosophical ‘solitude’, illustrated in his time by Avempace [Ibn Bajjah] (d. 1139), then in an undoubtedly more radical way by Averroes’ elder the doctor Ibn Tufayl, in the novel Hayy ibn Yaqzan…. It is with this conception, and those who maintain it, that Averroes resolutely breaks….The community participates in the achievement of philosophy” (p. 427-428).

This too I find quite admirable. It is not individual genius but dialogue and discourse that grounds philosophy.

“On the question of thought, [in John] the doctrine of Averroes certainly meets its demise almost in its totality. John retains almost nothing: neither his conception of the accomplishment of intelligere, nor that of its attribution, nor that of its final perfection. But two new ideas, at least, proceeded from this decomposition. The first is the more powerful, without doubt, and it determined John’s philosophical production: it is that of the individual who experiences herself as the author of a thought produced in herself. But second is beautiful, asssuredly, and it concludes this part: if it is no longer a question of the subordination of society to a group of people in whom total knowledge is incarnated, it is that of an immanence to the human species of its proper destiny” (p. 432).

“According to [John], subiectum in the case of the image does not mean ‘support’ for Averroes but ‘object’; the image is the mover of the species and not vice versa. He judges incomplete the first opinion: that the human individual does not think only because her image is the cause of thought, or of the intelligible species; but he rejects the other absolutely: the image is not the place of thought, one of its two places, and it is not such a localization that gives reason, according to the Commentator, either for individuation or for the attribution of intelligere. This second critique revolves around a fundamental passage of the Long Commentary. We have read it closely to bring out three things. First, there are reasons that justify the Rushdian formula of the duo subiecta [two subjects] of thought. Here we can see the lexical trace of a youthful theory, since the Cordovan took from Avempace the idea that images are spiritual forms serving as a substrate for the intelligibles in each individual. But we must recognize above all that the idea of the ‘two subjects’ or, more precisely, the designation of the image as subiectum, was grounded in the very letter of the De Anima of Aristotle. Certainly Averroes elaborates in his manner the Aristotelian analogy between intellection and sensation, combining in a single paragraph elements that the De Anima treats separately, but it remains that it is in the Stagirite that we find the term hupokeimenon used for the sensed ‘object’, and that he indeed would agree that the subiectum of the Long Commentary should not be weighed down with a local determination it absolutely does not have. If Averroes maintains that conceiving by the intellect is accomplished by the intermediary of the ‘two subjects’, it is above all because, like Aristotle, he compares the intellective process to sensation, and because he reads in the De Anima that the sensible is subiectum. The latter designates the object of sensation; in the same way that the image is the mover of thought, and not its receptor. Besides, in the Long Commentary, the rupture with Avempace is explicit: the image is the subject-mover of the universal in act, and only the material intellect receives it. It is absolutely not a question of a bilocation of the intelligible. If we speak of a substrate, the intentio intellecta has but one, the (material) intellect; and the fact that the intelligible is in potentiality in the image in the Long Commentary has nothing to do with the determination of that image as subiectum. Also, Averroes never claimed that the intelligible species was in the image, its subject of inherence, and that the human by this comes to thinking in person. In making the image one of the subjects of thought, he did not designate a sub-jection of the intelligible in it, any more than he intended to conceive of a transitive subjection of that intelligible in the human as support of images. The model of the duo subiecta has no worth from the Rushdian point of view if we do not systematically assimilate subject and substrate. His ‘theory’ of the two subjects is not a topic. His idea of individual intellection is not governed, on the basis of a conception of the image-substrate, by a theory of the human as hupokeimenon of thought.”

“As a result, it appeared clearly how the Latin misinterpretation by other important authors such as Herve de Nedellec and Durand de Saint-Pourcain was situated…. And paradoxically, the solution they opposed to the doctrine of Averroes appears intimately related to the principle their erroneous critique had extracted from him, that is, the idea that the human only thinks by being in a certain manner the subject of thought. This is the second thing we have raised. Where Averroes problematizes the question of the noetic subject of thoughts (the ‘problem of Theophrastus’, which bears on the being of the material intellect, related elsewhere to that of the intellective process within which the image-subject is the mover of the concept, his Latin critics believed they read a theory of the bilocation of the intelligible that made the human who imagines a second ‘substrate’ of thought, having from this position the possibility of thinking in her own right. In fact this was inexact, and in any case the Latins contested that that would be possible in the system of the Commentator; but the problem of the human subject of thought had emerged” (pp. 440-441, emphasis in original).

“This suspended the question of the attribution of intellection in favor of the human as substrate of that act: this the Latins will hold onto, in order to maintain that the human only thinks if she herself is the subject of thought, or if some part of her can be (which from their point of view implied that intellect could not be separate and unique, as in the Rushdian system). Thus authors like Herve or Durand denied that the system of Averroes could satisfy the principle of [what Heidegger callled] subjectity, insofar as intellect was cut off from the humans and the image could not serve as the place of the universal, but they were re-launching for themselves the principle that their misinterpretation had quite simply invented” (p. 441, emphasis in original).

“[John’s] displacement appeared remarkable to us: while he with good reason notes a misinterpretation of the word ‘subject’, applied to the image, he seems nonetheless to subscribe to their principle, produced in this faulty reading, requiring of the human that she be the subject of thought in order to think in her own right. And this is the sense of his inclusion of intellect in the thinking human, of his partition of the human being that repatriated the receptor of thoughts for each, insofar as she thinks. This ‘recentering’ as well is only the first face of a new idea cut in reality from two sides. Averroes’ theory of continuatio is in effect reinscribed in another disposition; it is rethought as a theory of productio. Averroes writes that the human thinks in the measure that she joins herself to the intelligible in act by her images (which constitute potentially the formal part), but John translates that the human thinks insofar as she produces the act of thinking, and that intellect is thus aggregated to her; she produces it in herself: my thought is through and through made in me” (pp. 442-443).

As I have noted before, this kind of creative misinterpretation anticipates (what I would call the error of) Descartes with his cogito.

“Although he aims to save the Long Commentary from the Latin attacks that castigate the inability of the Cordovan to rationally ground the psychological fact, the Parisian master, inheritor of the quarrel between Thomas Aquinas and Siger of Brabant, constituted a theory that finally differed in nearly all respects from that of Averroes, and which left behind the two ‘canonical’ models of ecstasy or of ‘prolongation’. It was a complex theory, as witnessed by his use of denomination (‘thinking’ denominates the individual at the same time as subject, by ‘her’ intellect, and as cause, by her image). It is also a theory that we willingly call Latin, where in the field of psychology there is imposed a certain articulation between ‘human’ and ‘subject’ that other thinkers (William of Auvergne, Peter Olivi) had already in their manner put in place. In defending the idea of the human aggregate, in integrating intellect into the human, in posing that the thinking human is active and that it is within herself that she produces her thought, John of Jandun, the prince of the Averroists, is effectively in solidarity with the sliding, on Latin ground, that transformed the question of the noetic subject of thought into that of its personal or human subject. How did ‘subject’ become so to speak the privilege, indeed exclusive, of the human? To this question that Heidegger posed, the study of the Averroist crisis from now on provides an entirely new response” (p. 443).

“Finally, after the study of the theory of intelligere and that of continuatio, we passed to the transfer affecting the theory of adeptio, the ultimate junction with the separate beings and with God. In John’s re-reading it is in the responses to a series of objections that the transformation it is subjected to becomes manifest. On four major points, the Rushdian doctrine of perfection is undone and re-done otherwise: the necessity of the image, once the stage of theoretical accomplishement has been attained; the rapport of the two intellects with one another, when one is acquired by the other; the after-junction, i.e. the passage of the intellect adeptus to the thought of the pure intelligibles; and finally, the harmony of the adeptio of Averroes with the actus sapientiae of Aristotle” (ibid).

“John is hesitant at first where it concerns knowing whether it is still necessary to imagine once we have come to think perfectly. He responds in the affirmative, no doubt because he does not conceive the ultimate junction as a stable state but as a transitory contact that it is necessary to regain each time. He makes a great effort to clearly conceptualize intellectual access to adeptio, and notably to reconcile the abstractive process expounded in the Long Commentary (which leads to perfect junction by abstraction from all the mundane intelligible) with that presented in the commentaries on the Physics, where we pass from caused movement to the moving intelligences, i.e. to the pure forms. On the question of the relation between the two intellects, agent and possible, he develops a theory of the self-knowledge of intellect: it is in the order of knowledge and not that of being that the information of one by the other progresses, such that there is ‘acquisition’ when the intellect knows itself perfectly” (p. 443-444).

“John is led in his exposition to alter the text of Averroes: on the one hand, and it is the effect of the disputes to which he was contemporary. He introduces distinctions that are not found there: the ontological and gnoseological relations between the two intellectus, the intellect taken insofar as it is separate and insofar as it is united to us, the different phases of auto-reflection (the reception of the species, then the consideration of the species, then that of its receptive power, then that of the substantial subject of that power, etc.); on the other hand there slips away from him in his interpretation of a capital text on the continuity of knowledge a fundament of the Rushdian noetics: the position of the existence of the philosopher. He thus develops a different theory of ‘acquisition’ from that of Averroes. Besides, the term adeptio was not completely suitable to the doctrine of the Commentator, and this lexical floating equates in reality to a sliding of the foundation. On the question of the after-junction, in fact John is more Farabian. He opts for an ascent of the ladder of separate beings, on the basis of the acquired intellect conceived as a springboard for ascending by stages up to God. Indeed he aggregates to the Rushdian model of theoretical accomplishment another model, in solidarity with an emanationist conception of the universe that relegates to second-class status the formal junction to the agent intellect, the latter perceived as nothing more than a means, a preparation for the enjoyment of a yet greater intellectual perfection. This evidently has effects on his conception of happiness: on its nature, its sharing, its possibility, as well as on the harmonization one could make of the Long Commentary of Averroes with the Nicomachean Ethics or the Metaphysics of Aristotle. John posits that adeptio is not the ultimate degree of beatitude, but solely that it conditions the discursive practice of metaphysics, which concerns the essential predicates of God. The completely happy human is the metaphysician of Aristotle, who must, in order to be such, have known the acquisition of which Averroes speaks. As a result, John develops a typology of happiness that distinguishres between the successes that the individual knows according to the stages of her ascent. In this process, the direct junction to the agent intellect and the fiducia philosphantium [philosophical faith] have only a relative value for the human” (p. 444).

“The end of the analysis again changes what is given. When John disputes on the sharing of ‘felicity’, he says it is difficult to earn, notably by reason of the moral exigence that places the intelligent life above the right life and its severe discipline; but it is nonetheless possible, and it is necessary to see what is proper to the philosopher, to whom falls the premier place among the humans of the city. Nonetheless, when John passes to the explication of a strong proposition of the Commentator, who maintains, he writes, that ‘philosophy is always perfect in the major part of its subject’, he concludes that the ‘subject’ of accomplished philosophy designates the humans, and that there is not — or so rarely that one returns like the mythical phoenix — an individually perfect philosopher. Only philosophy is complete at every moment, if we add together all the particular knowledges of individuals on the earth. Against the eventuality of personal successes, John indeed opts for the idea of an ahistorical totality, without progress, complete in permanence, which confers to science a conservative or patrimonial dimension: philosophy is actualized collectively, from all eternity, if we integrate the sum of partial knowledges. Whatever we may fear, the spirits never desert to the point that the number of brutes surpasses the number of thinkers. After having constructed a theory of individual intellection in solidarity with the Latin problematization of that intellect that makes the human the ‘subject’ of thought, and having at the same time completely decomposed the theory of the continuatio that Averroes develops, John makes humans the ‘subject’ of philosophy, and undermines one of the basic principles of [Averroes’] doctrine of the ultimate perfection: the necessary and permanent existence of the philosopher. Surrounded by professionals like himself, John of Jandun is probably beholden to the theoretical model of the universitas, and to the distinction dear to the artists [secular professors] of the end of the 13th century, between the unity of truth and the fragmentation of knowledges. No doubt he did not have the idea of a philosopher-king like Averroes with his imam-philosopher. If specialization is the grand word of the thought of the university (and there was no Almohad university), John finishes here with the thesis of the integration of partial knowledges, which acquires a striking anti-elitist bearing and excludes making the ‘artist’ the metonymy of the philosopher, on a ‘globalized’ vision of philosophical actualization, inspired not only by this or that scholastic debate but, more profoundly again, by the institutional framework that was his own” (pp. 444-445).

So he adds both an unfortunate conservative dimension and a laudable anti-elitism.

“In displacing the question of the noetic subject, to the point of losing it in that other problem of the intellect forma corporis [form of the body], in ruining, without having been able to demonstrate the intellectual illumination of the phantasm, that of his imaginary subject, and finally in articulating as he does ‘human’ and ‘subject’, sometimes for producing a theory of individual intellection that slides from the concept of junction to that of internal production, sometimes for saving the idea of a total accomplishment of knowledge that integrates the fragmentary participations of each, John of Jandun properly annihilated the Long Commentary of the Cordovan. The epigones, we know, are not always the most faithful to the masters they claim to serve. We have said also, from the beginning, that John is not Rushdian. But here the division is abyssal” (pp. 445-446).

“Contrary to what [the great 20th-century Thomist] Gilson could allow to be understood, the emancipation of philosophy in the 14th century is not entirely made in the form of a condemnation (or abandonment) of Aristotelianism. Gilson saw in the current incarnated by John of Jandun a frankly ‘conservative’ movement, or ‘an obstinate and limited Aristotelianism’. The description of the ‘transferences of the subject’ has seemed to show us the contrary” (p. 448).

Typical modernist historiography fails to recognize things like the existence of an “emancipation of philosophy in the 14th century”. On this point, I have to sympathize with the Thomists. However, Brenet also points out a notably anti-Aristotelian element in 20th-century neo-Thomist historiography that is in accordance with both traditional theological and modernist anti-Aristotelian prejudice. In the modern period, there has often been a sort of unprincipled bloc of theologians and modernists, who in this regard are united only by their quite differently motivated hostilities to Aristotle. Brenet finishes by remarking that his investigations have also shown “how philosophy continued to advance within Aristotelianism, and not (or not only) against it” (p. 449, emphasis in original).

“The question of the subject does not exist, any more in the modern epoch than in this period of the Middle Age. We have been able to see, on the other hand, what problem of the subiectum applied to the human (what determination or assumption of the individual as subject) is posed in [John’s] rearticulation of the Rushdian noetic. A question of the human subject of thoughts arises, which requires that [what Heidegger called] subjectity place itself in the human (and for some, already, in ‘the’ me), if we want to accurately reflect intellectual personality” (p. 448, emphasis in original).

Heidegger vs Hegel

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Philosophy should address meanings rather than “things”.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So far so good.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Very true.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pippin is absolutely right here.

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

Well said.

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

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

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

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

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

I would argue with that.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Next in this series: Poetic Thinking

Consciousness and Identity

Previously, I raised a doubt about Robert Pippin’s statement to the effect that “I know I am the one acting because I am the one acting”. For this line of argument, he cites Sebastian Rödl’s work. Pippin also says, drawing on Rödl, that “judgment is the consciousness of judging” (Hegel’s Realm of Shadows, p. 105).

In the first case, my doubt had to do with what counts as knowledge. I tend to adhere to Plato’s sharp distinction between knowledge on the one hand, and belief or opinion on the other. In the second case, I draw a sharp line between Hegelian consciousness and self-consciousness, or between Kantian empirical and transcendental subjectivity (see numerous posts under Subjectivity). It is my contention that when they are being more careful, both Kant and Hegel too emphasize such a distinction. But they both also make more casual remarks that blur the distinction.

Judgment in the Kantian and Hegelian sense, I want to say, belongs to reflection and to what Hegel calls self-consciousness, which is not a kind of plain simple “consciousness” that just happens to take for its object a substantial “self”, but something else altogether. The plain simple consciousness that we share at least with all animals has an organic basis related to perception and emotion, but no one is born with self-consciousness. Self-consciousness belongs to what the scholastics used to call second nature. In modern terms, it is in part a cultural acquisition, and in part something that we give birth to ourselves, or, as Hegel might prefer to say, that is able to give birth to itself in us, once we have the necessary acculturation.

Ordinary consciousness includes what has traditionally been called inner sense. This involves immediately having images of one’s (empirical) self, or of aspects of it, analogous to the way that we experience external sensation. This is a kind of imagination, not a kind of reflexivity.

Thought and judgment on the other hand are inherently reflexive, and self-conscious in the sense of reflexivity, but — I want to say, and I think this is implicit in Aristotle and Hegel — the reflexivity of thought and judgment belongs directly to each specific thought and judgment itself, rather than to a separate substantial “self” that “has” them. In the main example that Pippin gives, the reflexivity of a judgment consists in all the reasons for it, which refer to it.

At one point in this discussion, Pippin says that “Finally, there is little doubt that Hegel realized that apperception was not a kind of consciousness” (p. 107). He quotes Hegel saying that the “original deed” corresponding to a Kantian unity of apperception is “liberated from the opposition of consciousness, is closer to what may be taken simply as thinking as such. But this deed should no longer be called consciousness; for consciousness holds within itself the opposition of the ‘I’ and its intended object which is not to be found in that original deed. The name ‘consciousness’ gives it more of a semblance of subjectivity than does the term ‘thought’, which here, however, is to be taken in the absolute sense of infinite thought, not encumbered by the finitude of consciousness” (pp. 107-108).

This is what I have been saying, and I do not see how it can be reconciled with the claim that judgment is identical to a consciousness of judgment, if judgment is inherently apperceptive. Apperception is something higher than mere consciousness. Apperception and judgment are inherently discursive; mere consciousness is not.

Which comes first, reasons we live by and things we care about, or a substantial self? I say it is what we live by and care about. Put another way, it is discursivity and not consciousness that involves reflexivity. (And even our basic sentience need not be attributed to a substantial self. See Droplets of Sentience?.)

What is true is that judgment does presuppose that misleadingly designated “self-consciousness” which is not a kind of consciousness and does not involve a substantial self. Consciousness of judgment would be judgment’s presentation in imagination. It may well be true that there is no judgment without its also being presented in imagination, but a reflexive, apperceptive, discursive judgment and its immediate presentation as an image in animal imagination are by no means the same thing.

Reflection and Apperception

According to Robert Pippin, the most important feature of Kant’s theory of thinking, account-giving, and judging is that “judging is apperceptive” (Hegel’s Realm of Shadows, p. 103). “Apperception” is a term coined by Leibniz. The “ap-” prefix etymologically suggests a redoubling of perception, or a “perception of perception”. Leibniz broadens its meaning to cover all forms of self-awareness. Aristotle’s surviving texts include only a few lines about the “common sense”, which both synthesizes inputs from different senses into perceptions of objects, and is the root of self-awareness. Kant’s first and third Critiques greatly expand on this.

Pippin quotes Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, “I find that a judgment is nothing other than the way to bring given cognitions to the objective unity of apperception” (p. 102), commenting, “This is a new theory of judgment and accordingly grounds a new logic” (ibid). That judging is apperceptive is for Hegel a logical truth.

Therefore, for Hegel “it is quite misleading for Kant to formulate the point by saying that the ‘I think’ must ‘accompany’ (begleiten) all my representations (B132). Representing objects is not representing objects, a claiming to be so, unless apperceptive (which is in effect what the B132 passage claims). And that has to mean, in a very peculiar sense that is important to Hegel and that will take some time to unpack, that such judgings are necessarily and inherently reflexive, and so at the very least are self-referential, even if such a reflected content is not substantive, does not refer to a subject’s focusing on her judging activity as if it were a second consciousness.”

“Virtually everything in [Hegel’s] Logic of significance descends in one way or another from the proper understanding of this claim” (p. 103).

He quotes Hegel, “The concept, when it has progressed to a concrete existence which is itself free, is none other than the ‘I’ or pure self-consciousness” (p. 104).

I like to turn this last point around, and say that self-consciousness, the pure ‘I’, for Hegel is none other than the concept — not a static self-image, but a pure reference to the active taking of things to be thus-and-such. My individual essence as a “rational” animal is constituted by all that I care about and hold to be true, as confirmed in my actions and follow-through, not by what I happen to believe about myself.

What Pippin calls the “very peculiar” sense in which apperceptive judging inherently involves reflection and self-reference seems completely normal to me. My self-consciousness straightforwardly consists of what I actually care about and hold to be true, not some abstract “consciousness of consciousness”, in which ordinary consciousness would be its own object. It is not mere organic consciousness or “awareness”, but self-consciousness — Kantian discursive “taking as” — that is inherently reflexive.

This is a relational reflexivity that does not presuppose a substantial “self”, only a kind of “adverbial” self-reference. Takings have reasons, which in turn have other reasons. When all goes well, the reasons mutually support one another, and there is no infinite regress. This results in what Kant calls a unity of apperception, which is a truer, deeper self than any self-image we may have, and indeed not an image at all — and not something presupposed or achieved once and for all, but something we must constantly aim for anew, even when we did just achieve it.

We are the sum of our takings. Meanwhile, what we take to be the case — and what we take to be important or good — is not necessarily what we say it is, but what our actions and follow-through imply.

For Itself

Hegel’s distinctive phrase “for itself” (für sich, literally “for self”) always seemed a little mysterious to me. It seems to refer to a self-aware being’s taking itself to be this or that, following a more or less Kantian model of judgment. That part is clear enough. But what in the world is something like “the concept in and for itself”?

Once again, the simple Kantian/Hegelian notion of reflection sheds a great deal of light on this. It applies on two levels.

First, there is a purely relational one that applies to anything that may be conceived as having characteristics that are mutually related to one another. These in turn may be construed in terms of a kind of self-relatedness of the underlying thing. In this sense, “for itself” would apply to things that have self-relatedness. This means practically everything, except perhaps some abstractly simple things like points in geometry.

Second, there is the level of self-relatedness that is internal to a reflective judgment or unity of apperception, and to the value-oriented self-consciousness arising from mutual recognition. Self-consciousness is not a detached spectator beholding multifarious relations, but has its very being within and amidst all those relations. We might say, then, that in this context the relations themselves are “self-conscious”. Similarly, concepts involved in reflective judgment are in a way necessarily “self-conscious” concepts.

In a way, our essence as human beings is the integral whole that results from — or is teleologically aimed at by — the self-consciousness of our concepts. This whole would be the totality of our commitments — everything we hold to be good, true, or beautiful.

For Hegel as for Aristotle, what count as “our” commitments and “our” concepts are not just whatever we assert are ours. The measure of what commitments and concepts are truly ours lies in what we do in life. And what we really did in any particular case is not just what we say we did or meant to do, but also what others can observe and evaluate.

In this way, to be “for oneself” is simultaneously to be for others, because what counts as one’s deed — and ultimately as oneself — is partly up to all those others who experience us. This doesn’t mean we are not entitled to make contrary assertions of our own that may be right; maybe in some particular case, the others affected by our deeds are prejudiced. For Hegel, the bottom line is that everyone affected gets a hearing in such cases, and the outcome — what is ultimately right — is not subject to a predetermined formula, but rather follows from all the fine details of each case. This is characteristic of the openness by which Kant first distinguished reflective judgment. It is also characteristic of Aristotelian practical judgment.

To be “for itself” or “for oneself” is to be a subject of reflective judgment. For humans, it is also to be a subject of mutual recognition.

At least in the first instance, “subject” here need not imply a self-conscious subject, just a thing with properties with which the judgment is concerned. But perhaps the human case suggests something about how a self-conscious subject could be thought of as a special case or elaboration of a simple Aristotelian “subject” or underlying thing.

What distinguishes Aristotle’s view of the higher levels of subjectivity (and, I think, Hegel’s too) from typical modern ones is that self-consciousness inheres not in the subject per se as a special kind of entity, but rather in the activity of reflection (contemplation, thought thinking itself, deliberation) in which the subject is involved.

Pure Reason?

Hegel’s “logic” takes what Kant calls pure reason as its subject matter. Hegel regards Kantian pure reason as a world-changing revolution, because in contrast to early modern views, it seeks not to imitate the formal character of mathematical reasoning, but rather to achieve the discipline of a kind of self-sufficiency that does not appeal to anything external to it. Kant and Hegel differ on the scope of this self-sufficiency, but that is a different matter.

Early modern views of the world generally rely on many substantive assumptions. There is strong motivation for them to do so, because in order to yield any substantive conclusions, reasoning of a broadly formal kind requires substantive assumptions. The assumptions are typically of a sort analogous to those that Aquinas regards as grounded in the natural light of reason, which is not itself reason, but a kind of originating intuition of truth given to us by God. Descartes, for example, explicitly appeals to a variant of the Thomistic doctrine of natural light.

(The strong Thomistic notion of the natural light of reason and of reason’s relative autonomy from the simple dictates of authority is itself a development of almost inestimable importance, compared to completely authority-bound views of religion such as present-day fundamentalism. Indeed, something like the natural light of reason was never completely absent from the earlier medieval tradition either.)

But for Kant, reason is purely discursive, and cannot appeal to any intuitive source of truth like a natural light. Pure reason is nonetheless supposed to be able to stand on its own. In Kant’s language, it is “autonomous” (see also Kant’s Groundwork; Self-Legislation?). Kant’s critique of dogmatism especially targets assumptions that are naively realistic in the sense of claiming direct knowledge of external or inner objects, but it is broader than that.

Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason is most directly responding to empiricist views broadly associated with Locke, which were dominant in England and France, and popular in Germany in his day; but even more so to the rationalist system of Christian Wolff (1679-1754), which then dominated German academic teaching. (Wolff was an accomplished mathematician who had corresponded with Leibniz, and greatly contributed to popularizing the part of Leibniz’s philosophy that Leibniz had published in his own lifetime. Like Leibniz, he is associated with moderate Enlightenment, while at the same time showing a degree of sympathy for scholastic philosophy.)

Kantian pure reason effectively aims to be free of unnecessary assumptions, especially those of the Wolffian system, but also those of the empiricists. Kant also criticizes Wolff’s and Spinoza’s idea that philosophical reasoning should as much as possible resemble mathematical reasoning. What makes it possible for Kant to avoid assumptions beyond the famous “God, freedom, and immortality” (and for Hegel to avoid any assumptions at all) is a move away from the early modern ideal of reason as formal.

Without ever explicitly saying so, Kant in fact takes up and works with a notion of reason that is close to aspects of Plato and Aristotle that were generally neglected in the intervening tradition. Reason in Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Hegel is not limited to formal reasoning. It includes what in more recent times Sellars and Brandom have elaborated under the name of material inference.

Formal reasoning is called formal because it is supposed to apply to all things, independent of any analysis of meaning. But this makes it dependent on assumptions in order to yield conclusions. Material inference — which was also present as a minor theme in scholastic logic — is on the contrary grounded in the interpretation of meaning. It is this reflective grounding that can enable reason to be autonomous and “pure”, with no reliance on anything external to it.

Sellars illustrates material inference with examples like “there are dark rain clouds in the sky, so I should take my umbrella when I go out”. Brandom elaborates with an account of how such judgments may be successively refined based on additional information. In general, if I strike a match correctly, it will light. But under certain conditions, it will not light. But under yet more specific additional conditions, it will in fact still light.

Both Sellars and Brandom — working within the tradition of contemporary analytic philosophy — tend to reach for examples that involve empirical facts, and relations of cause and effect in the broad modern sense. But material inference is more general than that. It is grounded in meaning as we encounter it in real life. Its scope is not limited to any particular kind of meaning, nor does it assume any particular theory of meaning.

Pure reason, then — far from excluding meaning, as formal logic does — is concerned with the progressive self-clarification of meaning — or Kantian “taking as”, or judgment — in a reflective context.

For Hegel, “logic is to be understood as the system of pure reason, as the realm of pure thought” (Science of Logic, di Giovanni trans., introduction, p. 29). This is what he calls the “concept of science”, and also “absolute knowledge” (p. 28). As I’ve pointed out before, in Hegel these terms have specialized meanings that are far from their ordinary connotations in English. Science need not be empirical, and “absolute” in this context just means the same thing as “pure” or “autonomous” — that reflective judgment need presuppose nothing outside itself.

For Hegel, the standpoint of pure reason (or “science”, or “absolute” knowing) is that of reflective judgment. The whole effort of the Phenomenology of Spirit is required to reach this point, which he then uses as a starting point in the Logic.

“Pure science thus presupposes the liberation from the opposition of consciousness [between itself and its object]…. As science, truth is pure self-consciousness as it develops itself and has the shape of a self, so that that which exists in and for itself is the conscious concept and the concept as such is that which exists in and for itself” (p. 29, emphasis in original).

The reflective concept has the shape of a “self” — a reflexivity — that is not to be identified with our empirical self, but rather is related to the reflective character of self-consciousness, which overcomes the simple opposition between consciousness and its object.

“This objective thinking is thus the content of pure science. Consequently, far from being formal, far from lacking the matter for an actual and true cognition, it is the content which alone has absolute truth” (ibid).

He calls reflective judgment objective thinking, precisely because it begins only after the separation of consciousness from its object ends. Reflective judgment and self-consciousness will not be separated from “the concept” in which they are embodied. Rather, we have here a case of the Aristotelian identity of pure thinking with what it thinks.

“Logic has nothing to do with a thought about something which stands outside by itself as the base of thought; nor does it have to do with forms meant to provide mere markings of the truth; rather, the necessary forms of thinking, and its specific determinations, are the content and the ultimate forms of truth itself.”

“To get at least some inkling of this, one must put aside the notion that truth must be something tangible. Such tangibility, for example, is carried over even into the ideas of Plato which are in God’s thought, as if they were, so to speak, things that exist but in another world or region, and a world of actuality were to be found outside them which has a substantiality distinct from those ideas and is real only because of this distinctness” (pp. 29-30).

Truths are not objects, and they are not given to us in the way that ordinary consciousness takes objects to be. For Hegel, moreover, spiritual values do not have to do with turning away from this world in favor of another one. They are intended to guide us in life.

“There will always be the possibility that someone else will adduce a case, an instance, in which something more and different must be understood by some term or other” (p. 28).

Reflection and interpretation are inherently open-ended.

“How could I possibly pretend that the method that I follow in this system of logic, or rather the method that the system itself follows within, would not be capable of greater perfection, of greater elaboration of detail? Yet I know that it is the one true method. This is made obvious by the fact that this method is not something distinct from its subject matter and content — for it is the content in itself, the dialectic which it possesses within itself, which moves the subject matter forward. It is clear that no expositions can be accepted as scientifically valid that do not follow the progression of this method and are not in tune with its simple rhythm, for it is the course of the fact [Sache] itself” (p. 33).

Translator di Giovanni comments in his glossary, “In non-technical contexts, [Sache] can and should be translated in a variety of ways, such as ‘substance’, or even ‘thing’. As category, however, ‘fact’ seems to be the best rendering. Sache, like ‘fact’, denotes a thing or a situation which we understand to implicitly contain all the factors required for an explanation of its existence. Its presence therefore cannot be doubted even when those factors have yet to be made explicit. The related word, Tatsache, was first coined… in order to translate the English term ‘matter of fact'” (pp. lxxi-lxxii).

To me, these sound like reasons for calling Hegel’s Sache something other than “fact”. Especially in a work of “logic” that invokes “science”, the English word “fact” would most commonly be taken taken to mean an unambiguous empirical truth. Both what I think Hegel means and the explanation di Giovanni gives of it seem better suited by the more open connotations of an English phrase like “the concrete case” or “the matter at hand”. The Sache is something objective, but it is objective in the indefinite sense of a Gegenstand [“object” in the sense of something standing over and against us, but whose nature has yet to be determined].

I used to think that reason that would be applicable to life (or to anything like Hegel’s Sache) could not possibly be pure. I now think that with the inclusive character of reflective judgment and material inference, it can be pure.

Reflection, Apperception, Narrative Identity

Robert Pippin recounts how in writing what became the Critique of Judgment, Kant developed a new notion of reflection, which transformed his whole philosophy from the inside:

“In early 1789 Kant began to formulate the new problem of reflective judgment, as well as a new a priori principle for such a faculty, the purposiveness of nature. What is important to notice for our purposes is that with that development, the shape of the entire critical project began to change dramatically” (Hegel’s Realm of Shadows, p. 290).

“Kant had realized that something like the deep structure of judgments like ‘this rose is beautiful’ actually contravened its own surface structure, that the predicate ‘beautiful’ was not really functioning as a standard predicate, as it appeared to. It referred to no objective property or mere secondary quality. Instead, he concluded, it involved a nonconceptually guided reflective activity on the part of the subject of the experience, whose novel logic required notions like a free play of the faculties, purposiveness without a purpose, disinterested pleasure, a commonsense and universal subjective validity” (pp. 290-291).

“The realization of the distinct features of this reflective activity was only the beginning of a series of more strikingly novel claims of interest to us…. [T]he reflective judging that resulted in aesthetic judgments, also constituted the basic structure of teleological judgments, and so could account for the unique intelligibility of organic beings” (p. 291).

“And then a number of other issues seem to be thrown into the same reflective judgment pot. The formulation of scientific theories not fixed or determined by empirical generalizations involved this activity and its logic, as did the systematizing of empirical laws necessary for genuine scientific knowledge. Finally, even the determination of ordinary empirical concepts now seemed to require this newly formulated reflective capacity…. So reflective judging and its a priori principle were now necessary not only for explaining the possibility and validity of aesthetic judgments, but in accounting for the necessary distinction between organic and nonorganic nature, the formation of empirical concepts, the proper integration of genera and species, the general unification of empirical laws into systems of scientific law, theory formation itself, and the right way to understand the attribution of a kind of necessity to all such principles, judgments, concepts, laws, and systems” (ibid).

Much of the discussion of judgment in the Critique of Pure Reason sounds like it is a simple matter of “applying” pre-existing concepts to things. But in reality, applying even pre-existing concepts is not a simple matter at all, if we care about the soundness of the application (as Kant certainly did), or about how anyone preliminarily judges what concepts might be applicable in a given case. This is what Kant began to consider in more detail with his new notions of reflection and reflective judgment.

Reflection is characterized above by Pippin as “nonconceptually guided”. I don’t think this means at all that reflection is nonconceptual, but rather only that it is fundamentally guided by something other than the kind of pre-existing concepts that Hegel would call “fixed”. Reflection involves the formation and interpretation of concepts that are not treated as already fixed. That is why it does not presuppose particular fixed concepts.

I want to relate this back to the Aristotelian deliberation and practical judgment (phronesis) that are concerned with particulars as such. The significance of addressing particulars as such is that we do not assume in advance what universals (i.e., Kantian concepts) apply to them, but rather let the particulars “speak” for themselves, and thoughtfully consider what they might mean or be in their own right. By particulars I mean in an Aristotelian way independent or non-independent “things”, not putative raw phenomena.

Aristotelian deliberation and practical judgment, I want to say, involve a “free play of the faculties” of the sort that Kant associates with reflection. Aristotle’s commonly cited conclusion that practical judgment is inferior to contemplative wisdom is entirely tied to the fact that he considers practical judgment’s outcome to be an action. I think the term practical judgment ought to apply just as much or more to the activity of interpreting particulars, without prejudice as to how the interpretation is used.

Kantian reflection seems to me to have the great virtue of uniting Aristotelian theoria (contemplation) and sophia (contemplative wisdom) with deliberation, thinking things through (dianoia), and practical judgment (phronesis). Kant also explicitly argues for the primacy of practical reason, which ultimately involves the reflective normative evaluation of particulars, even though he foregrounds a separate effort to articulate ethical universals. An Aristotelian sense for the Kantian primacy of practical reason would start from the interpretation of particulars mentioned above.

Kantian reflection also has an important relation to the Critique of Pure Reason‘s key term of apperception. The term “apperception” was coined by Leibniz, originally to imply a kind of “higher order” perception — a perception of perception. Kant gives it a more explicitly discursive character. If we add a Hegelian dimension, the dialectical character of discourse makes discourse inherently reflective in Kant’s sense. By virtue of their common reflective, discursive character, apperception in Kant is closely related to what is called “self-consciousness” in Hegel.

Kant famously speaks of the effort to maintain a unity of apperception. Here is where I think phronesis comes to the aid of theoria and sophia. Contrary to what both Kant and Aristotle sometimes suggest, it seems to me that the interpretation of particulars is actually prior to and more governing than the articulation of universals, although there is much interplay between the two. It is the interpretation of particulars that mainly provides occasions for the articulation of pertinent universals. This comes back to Aristotle’s other point that universals do not have independent reality in their own right, and to Kant’s other point about the primacy of practical reason.

The effort to maintain a unity of apperception is the effort to maintain a unity of self-consciousness. Self-consciousness is not simple “consciousness” of a pre-existing “self”, as if the latter were a discrete, pre-existing object. Rather, self-consciousness is grounded in reflection that has potentially indefinite extent. I think a similar grounding in reflection is what makes intellect “something divine in us” — and more than just a part of the soul — in Aristotle.

Aristotle speaks of thought thinking itself as contemplation. He tends to emphasize that thought thinking itself is an identity. But with any kind of identity, we must consider the way in which it is said.

What then could constitute any persistent identity for a unity of apperception? Here we come to the problems that Paul Ricoeur discussed under the more general rubric of narrative identity. Strictly speaking, any particular unity of apperception is a concrete constellation of what Aristotle would call particular relations that hold at a given moment. It is something like the totality of what we are currently committed to. Insofar as we speak of it as existing in fact, its unity and coherence are relative. Only as a kind of ideal or ethical goal can its unity be considered to be unqualified.

Insofar as we want to speak of the relative persistent identity of a unity of apperception — or anything like the unity of a person — we also need the Aristotelian concept of entelechy. The narrative identity of a unity of apperception is a kind of entelechy in which the thing whose identity is maintained is itself a work in progress, as all living beings are. We only have the final form of a life when it is over (see Happiness).

The narrative identity of a unity of apperception, then, is a kind of entelechy of apperception. More generally, Aristotelian entelechy is the narrative identity of a unity, or just is a kind of narrative identity. An entelechy of apperception is the entelechy of a process of reflection. (See also More on Contemplation; Hegel on Reflection; Apperceptive Judgment.)

Hegel on Reflection

Continuing a walk-through of Robert Pippin’s Hegel’s Realm of Shadows, we are now trying to understand what grounds the possibility of non-misleading appearances of an essence or ground or reality, which is to say those in which aspects of the essence or ground or reality are said to be genuinely made manifest.

It seems to me Hegel is suggesting that what distinguishes actual knowledge is its reflective, “mediated” character. This is what makes knowledge more than just mere appearance or mere assertion. Real knowledge is not just a one-off that “happens” sometimes, by a sort of happy coincidence.

On the side of judgment, reflection corresponds to the self-relation and self-referentiality on the side of content that were mentioned before. In terms of Hegel’s Phenomenology, it corresponds to self-consciousness. There, it involves a very nonstandard kind of “infinity” that Hegel insists is a “result” and not anything pre-existing. In the Logic, Hegel very sharply distinguishes such an infinity of reflection from any one-dimensional infinity of magnitude or quantity, as “good” infinity from “bad” infinity.

Hegel’s “good” infinite is infinite in dimensionality, not in extension or even in intensity. Extension and intensity both apply only to single dimensions. The good infinite is not a kind of pseudo-quantity that is beyond measure, not something that is not a number that we nonetheless use in place of a number. It is intended to be compatible with definiteness in any given dimension.

This, I think, is what earns it Hegel’s characterization as “good”. A “bad” or one-dimensional infinite “swallows up” and makes to be as nothing any definite determination within its scope; Hegel’s “good” infinite multiplies related dimensions but preserves distinctions in each dimension. Indeed, by combining determinations across dimensions, it not only preserves each determination but potentially strengthens their robustness and resilience. (See also Reflective Grounding.)

Pure relation or pure negativity has its correlate in “absolute” reflection, or reflection as a single act of “self-conscious” synthesis spanning potentially infinite dimensions of meaning, any one of which is in principle subject to definite characterization. With the caveat that the dimensional infinity is potential in an Aristotelian sense, this puts partial realizations of “absolute” reflection within the reach of us rational animals. (See also “Absolute” Knowledge?.)

The potentially infinite dimensionality of reflection is thus what grounds the possibility of real knowledge for Hegel. The next level of detail will concern Hegel’s notion of the identity of contents of possible knowledge in this reflective context.

Pippin notes that “Plato, Kant, Locke, Spinoza, and others can all be cited in various ways as expressive of the reflective logic of the appearances of essence, the manifestation of something substantial that is nevertheless not manifest as it is in itself. To understand how this is possible, Hegel argues that it has become necessary to understand the content of and relation among the ‘determinations of reflection’ by means of which essence can be established (qualitative identities fixed and differentiated from others) and a proper relation to appearances established: ‘identity, difference, and contradiction'” (p. 231).

“It would be wrong to say that Hegel will ‘derive difference from identity’…. This is basically a deductive model of systematicity and it is not Hegel’s” (ibid).

“He argues that [the ‘A’ in ‘A = A’] can be understood in its self-identity only determinately, and that means by something not-A, and the context makes clear that he means, not the mere repetition of A itself as that determination, but determinate predicates that, we would say, do not mean the same thing as A. So not ‘human being is human being’, but something like ‘human being is rational animal’, where ‘rational animal’… has a different meaning” (pp. 231-232).

According to Pippin, Hegel very clearly distinguishes the “is” of identity from the “is” of predication.

“We have not derived ‘difference’ in this sense from ‘identity’, but the exposition has shown that identification (identity at work, one should say) requires already, in itself, just by being thought through, an appeal to differentiating factors. Otherwise, nothing is determinately identified” (p. 232).

Pippin’s phrase in the style of Aristotle, “identity at work”, captures the background of a Kantian unity of apperception. We are headed toward Hegel’s notion of apperceptive judgment, which Pippin has already characterized in a preliminary way.

To say identity at work “requires… an appeal to differentiating factors” is not only not to derive difference from identity. It is to explicitly say that identity depends on difference, just as much as vice versa. Pippin says that for Hegel, identity and difference are equally primordial. I think it is impossible to have one without the other.

“‘The pure movement of reflection which identity is‘ (identity understood actively as the power to successfully identify) is to be understood by reference to ‘the simple negativity which is contained in a more developed form by the just stated second formulation of the principle‘ (A’s being A by already not being ~A, such that the determinate predicates by which A is specified actually do specify it)” (p. 233, Pippin’s emphasis).

Identity itself for Hegel is a “movement of reflection”. Unities at the level of thought arise out of apperceptive judgment, rather than coming to us ready-made.

As to A being A only by also not being anything materially incompatible with A, Pippin says this is one version of the most important thought in Hegel’s Logic. The logic of being’s lesson of the inseparability of affirmation and negation is one version of it. In the part of the logic of being Pippin skipped over, he notes there is a related development of the “co-definability of qualitative independence and dependence (substance independence and relational dependence” (p. 234). Also related are “the identity within difference of essence and appearance, and so ultimately of ground and what is grounded in the logic of essence; and the way in which Hegel understands the concrete universal, that is, the inseparability of particular and universal in the logic of the Concept” (ibid).

“Hegel’s suggestion that Kant’s concept-intuition distinction should be understood as primarily a logical or conceptual problem, that we do not yet know how to think together their inseparability with their distinctness, reaches its most crucial turning point in the logic of essence in his account of reflection. The ‘immediacy’ of Schein as nevertheless also mediated, determinate even when the skeptic insists on the absence of a determining essence, is a pivot of the book” (ibid; see Toward Essence).

“If we think of the account in terms of our example of the relation between a person’s character/essence and her particular deeds, the character or essence must be in some way ‘posited’ (rather than apprehended or seen). But the positing cannot be arbitrary; what guides our positing is what we think the deeds must ‘presuppose’ to be the deeds they are” (p. 235).

“Hegel implies that the way Kant has described the situation — given a particular, find the universal — is misleadingly ‘external’. For what we are supposed to ‘ascend to’ and discover is not really external to the instance being reflected on…. There is no credible way to understand the particular as ‘external’ to the power of reflection like this. As… ‘waiting’ for its universal, it isn’t anything determinate at all; as provoking a universal-search, on the assumption that it has not been classified as a kind, it has nothing determinate to guide us or direct such a search. It could be said to have scores of properties. Which are relevant?” (p. 236).

He continues, “What Hegel calls ‘reflection in general’ must rather be characterized as ‘determining reflection’, a term he wants to cover both determining and reflective judgment. This is to be understood, in his terms, as the unity of positing and external reflection. What is external, say, the deeds in our example, are not just uniform repetitions of the self-same essence; they are all other than essence” (ibid).

“Yet again we encounter a mutually presupposing relation, here in ‘determinate reflection'” (p. 237). “If we don’t know how to connect in any determinate way the deed with the inward character being manifested (or not), then our positing/presupposing is just a form of ‘external’ reflection” (ibid).

In summary then, non-misleading appearances will be those that are understood reflectively in this mutually determining way. The inter-relations of many appearances taken together — e.g., in a unity of apperception — are what ground the robustness and resiliency of any given appearance.

He quotes Hegel, “Essence as such is one with its reflection, inseparable from its movement. It is not essence, therefore, through which this movement runs its reflective course; nor is essence that from which the movement begins, as from a starting point. It is this circumstance that above all makes the exposition of reflection especially difficult, for strictly speaking one cannot say that essence returns into itself, that essence shines in itself, for essence is neither before its movement nor in the movement: this movement has no substrate on which it runs its course” (p. 238).

This “movement that has no substrate”, I would say, is also the movement of the Aristotelian potential intellect that “is nothing at all before it begins to think”.

Next in this series: Reflection and Dialectic

Apperceptive Judgment

What Hegel calls “the concept” is not a simple content to be grasped, as if it were already completely formed as what it will turn out to be, and all of that in advance of and independent of the activity of judgment. Rather, it emerges out of the activity of judgment in the space of reasons. It also turns out to have an inherently normative character.

Pippin quotes Kant: “I find that a judgment is nothing other than the way to bring given cognitions to the objective unity of apperception…. I do not mean to say that these representations necessarily belong to one another in the empirical intuition, but rather that they belong to one another in virtue of the necessary unity of the apperception in the synthesis of intuitions” (Hegel’s Realm of Shadows, p. 102).

As a first approximation, “apperception” here means something like apprehension of intelligible meaning. For Kant, “the basic feature” of the “general or content-less logic as rules for valid judgings and inferrings” is that “judging is apperceptive” (p. 103).

The significance of this will become a bit clearer further below. Hegel will go further than Kant in construing apperception in a purely “logical” (as opposed to psychological) way.

“Kant was well aware that with this notion of apperceptive judging he was breaking with the rationalist (and Lockean) notion of reflection as inner perception, and as we shall see, Hegel’s language is everywhere carefully Kantian in this respect” (p. 112).

(Aristotle too carefully distinguishes thought from inner sense, rather than identifying them as Descartes and Locke do.)

Pippin quotes Hegel: “It is one of the profoundest and truest insights to be found in the Critique of Pure Reason that the unity which constitutes the essence of the concept is recognized as the original synthetic unity of apperception, the unity of the ‘I think’, or of self-consciousness” (ibid).

This suggests a three-way mutual explication of the essence of the concept, unity of apperception, and self-consciousness. Self-consciousness for Hegel turns out to be not a separate substantive “subject” distinct from its “object”, but rather an essential adverbial property of self-reference that is intrinsic to the thinking of every concept (see The Ambiguity of “Self”).

From Hegel’s perspective “it is quite misleading for Kant to formulate the point by saying that the ‘I think’ must ‘accompany’ (begleiten) all my representations…. Representing objects is not representing objects, a claiming to be so, unless apperceptive…. And that has to mean, in a very peculiar sense that is important to Hegel and that will take some time to unpack, that such judgings are necessarily and inherently reflexive, and so at the very least are self-referential, even if such a reflected content is not substantive, does not refer to a subject’s focusing on her judging activity as if it were a second consciousness…. Virtually everything in the Logic of significance descends in one way or another from the proper understanding of this claim” (ibid).

Judgings as activities are “necessarily and inherently… self-referential”. The suggestion seems to be that apperception and self-consciousness consist in complex self-referential judgings, rather than anything resembling perceptive receptivity or simple consciousness. “Reflexivity” for Hegel is an elemental property of judgments as judgments, not a global property of consciousness. To assert the inherent self-referentiality of judging activity is quite different from asserting the sort of inherent reflexivity of consciousness that Descartes and Locke presuppose.

“[W]e have to be clear that this has nothing to do with inner perception or the mind observing itself” (p. 105).

“There must be some way of saying that the self-conscious dimension of thought and action is a matter of the way a claim is made or an action undertaken. To adopt the formulations used by Ryle in accounting for many similar phenomena, they are accomplished ‘self-consciously’, rather than accompanied by or even identical with another act of consciousness” (p. 106).

“There is a self-referential component in any judgment or action too (‘I think this, I act thus’), but it can be misleading to think that this is the same problem as ‘how does the first-person pronoun have sense, and thereby pick me uniquely out’. As we shall see, it is misleading because it suggests a punctuated moment of awareness” (p. 107).

“Finally, there is little doubt that Hegel realized that apperception was not a kind of consciousness” (ibid).

In support of this he quotes Hegel: “[I]n this original deed there is not yet the representation of the ‘I’…. [T]his objectifying deed, liberated from the opposition of consciousness [between subject and object], is closer to what may be taken simply as thinking as such. But this deed should no longer be called consciousness; for consciousness holds within itself the opposition of the ‘I’ and its intended object which is not to be found in that original deed” (ibid).

It seems to me that apperception thus implicitly becomes the middle term of a syllogism: self-consciousness is apperception; apperception is not a kind of consciousness; therefore (contrary to what the formation of the word suggests) self-consciousness is not a kind of consciousness, but something “else”.

I take consciousness to be a form of presentation in what Aristotle calls imagination, and self-consciousness to be the form of the self-referential character of judgment or apperception. Outside the context of the Logic (e.g., in the Phenomenology), self-consciousness has an inherently social or intersubjective dimension; in both the Phenomenology and the Logic it has a normative dimension. Human as opposed to purely animal experience is always a mixture of “consciousness” and “self-consciousness”.

“I know what I am doing not by identifying myself with the one acting, but by being the one acting. So how can such a Two also be One? We are in the middle of everything of significance in Hegel’s Logic, not to mention Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre and Schelling’s early idealism…. This unusual identity is constitutive of ‘theoretical thought’ as such” (pp. 108-109).

“This too is important to state carefully. Hegel scholars often assume that Hegel inherits ‘identity philosophy’ from Schelling, and that it means ‘the identity of subject and object’. They then formulate various implausible versions of such an identity, such as that true reality is divine thought thinking itself, that objects are moments of this thought’s ‘intellectual intuition of itself’. But the Logic is not committed to anything remotely like this” (p. 109).

Rather, the identity Hegel is principally interested in is that “the thought (belief, assertion) of some content… is at the same time the thought of the reasons that are required for such an ‘answer'” (p. 110, emphasis added). This what it means to say that thought is inherently self-referential.

This helps to explain why it is true that “It is a condition of use of a concept that the use is subject to a norm of correct and incorrect use, and that norm is internal to the concept…. Such capacities as judgment and self-consciousness are called into play in a way that can be redeemed if challenged, for example” (p. 106).

Pippin elaborates, “being committed to the truth of a proposition, I am just thereby committed to the denial of everything inconsistent with it. The latter is not a separate inference I draw, on the basis of my first commitment. It is a dimension of the content of my first commitment. This is not to say I must be conscious of these implications and incompatibilities, but just that I could not be thinking of that content were I not able to be responsive to such considerations. This is all so just as someone’s believing something and her thought that it is something right to believe ‘are the same reality‘” (p. 112).

The idea that a proposition should be identified with the distinctions and entailments that it presupposes and that follow from it — rather than with a simple Boolean value of true or false, as in mainstream 20th century logic — has been developed with extraordinary thoroughness by Robert Brandom in Making It Explicit, which Richard Rorty credited with ushering in a new “Hegelian” stage of analytic philosophy.

“[N]o one could be said to ‘just’ assert, or just believe, or just act. Any such undertaking, if self-conscious, must be potentially responsive to the question of ‘Why?’; that is, to reasons. (An assertion is such a responsiveness; the latter is not a secondary or even distinct dimension of the former.)” (ibid).

This formulation that an assertion is such a responsiveness — which relies on the essential self-referentiality of judgment that Pippin is arguing for here — seems in a way more radical than the way Brandom puts it. For Brandom and Brandom’s Hegel, the concomittant commitments are material inferences, and there is a sort of Kantian imperative that we ought to show such responsiveness to everything with a material-inferential connection to our assertions. According to Pippin’s Hegel, the concommitant commitments are not inferences at all but integral to the true identity of the assertion, and we would not really have made an assertion at all if we did not show responsiveness to them. But they ultimately agree that we ought to show such responsiveness — that addressing the concomittant commitments of our assertions is not something we could legitimately choose to ignore — and that this has something to do with the very nature of assertion-making.

“And it is at least plausible to say that the greater the extent of such potential responsiveness (or said another way, the greater the self-understanding), the ‘freer’ the activity, the more I can be said to redeem the action as genuinely mine, back it, stand behind it. We thus have formulated what [Sebastian] Rödl rightly identifies as the heart of German Idealism, the principle ‘that self-consciousness, freedom and reason are one'” (pp. 113-114).

Statements like “self-consciousness, freedom and reason are one” used to give me no end of trouble, because I assumed they were meant to assert the sovereignty of a Subject (i.e., in this case that the Subject is self-conscious; the Subject has free will; and the Subject is the seat of reason). What I eventually realized through the closer study of Kant and Hegel is that I was assuming dictionary meanings of self-consciousness and freedom that are not applicable, and that Hegel and even Kant are much less “subject-centered” than common readings make them out to be. A strong concern for subjectivity need not be identified with the assumption of a sovereign Subject.

Because what Hegel means by “concept” is so fundamental to understanding the Logic and so far from the way it is commonly understood, Pippin repeats an earlier message in different words:

“[C]oncepts are determinate only by virtue of their roles in judgment, the ‘bringing to the objective unity of apperception’, in Kant’s definition” (p. 115).

“So a concept like ‘essence’, for example, can be said to be delimitable as just that concept by virtue of its possible uses in various contrasts to ‘appearance’ or by virtue of its negation (in the grand structure of the [Science of Logic]) of the concept ‘being’, or its role in distinguishing accidental from essential predicates. These are all roles in judgments (and are thereby tied to judgmental roles in inferences). Any of these uses, though, involves any such claim in a network of justifications, a normative order. The application of any such concept in judgment, since apperceptive, self-consciously applied, must be, just thereby, responsive to its possible misapplication, and the question of the general contours of its correct use implicates any one notion in the normative proprieties governing many others. Hence, as we shall see, the course of the ‘movement’ of the logic” (ibid).

“A proper understanding of the self’s relation to itself in thinking, the form of any conceiving and thereby any concept, and thereby any inferential relation, is also the core meaning of what Hegel calls the ‘infinity’ treated by speculative philosophy” (p. 118).

“This is yet again not an easy thought: some sort of self-relation that is not a two-place relation, but something like a circular structure, in which the self’s self-relation never terminates in a distinct object or determinate posit, but in so attending, returns to itself as a relating…. This is ‘infinity’ in the proper sense, Hegel tells us frequently, and… ‘Self-consciousness is thus the nearest example of the presence of infinity'” (p. 119).

My current impression is that what Hegel calls the “good” infinite has something to do with what I would tentatively call relational structures with cyclic dependencies, and he thinks we can and do implicitly use something like this in life, without getting stuck in what could be a mathematically infinite cyclic traversal of the structure. (That something like this is at least conceivable is anecdotally supported by the existence of computable and hence in that sense “finite” implementations of infinitely extensible data structures.) The more usual notion of infinity — at root mathematical, a paradoxical “value greater than any definite value” — Hegel derides as “bad” infinity, regardless of whether it is potential or actual (which was a key distinction for Aristotle). (See Hegel on Reflection for a somewhat better account of this issue.)

Hegel in effect seems to ask us to suspend the assumption that standard mathematical infinity is what infinity is, and to step back to the more general idea of the non-definite. Further, he identifies the contrasting term of finitude specifically with a non-relational view of things, as being whatever they are even in complete isolation from one another, so his condemnations of finitude are not at all condemnations of the view of things as finite in the sense of depending on other things. Pippin earlier even suggested that some kind of notion of things depending on other things for their intelligibility is the main source of the famous and difficult-to-understand “motion” in Hegelian logic.

“Discriminating what belongs together with what, what is connected to what in a temporal order, knowing that the successive perceptions of a house do not count as the perception of a succession in the world, requires an apperceptive unity; it does not just happen to consciousness” (p. 121).

“Without this ability to distinguish how things are from how they seem to me, there would be as many ‘I’s’ as associated seemings, and no unity of self-consciousness. Or, achieving the unity of self-consciousness is differentiating seeming from being” (p. 122).

Pippin returns to his larger argument about the Kantian basis of what Hegel is doing.

“The attempt has been to understand the Kantian claim about apperception as a logical, not psychological claim, and this goes some way toward understanding the link between this reflexive character of judging as the essence of intelligibility and ‘the intelligibles’. If it is possible to establish that certain a priori judgments have… objectivity, but without Kant’s limitation thesis, restricting that thesis to possible objects of sense experience (phenomena, not noumena), we will have a way into Hegel’s claim that logic can be understood as metaphysics. Our claim about Kant was that even for him, this relation to objects is not established by the imposition of subjective form onto received sensory material. Kant’s position is not ‘impositionist’ in this sense, and both he and Hegel are following the nonimpositionist, more Aristotelian (hylomorphic) line” (p. 125).

He includes several more quotes from Kant and one from Beatrice Longuenesse that offer hints in this more Aristotelian direction, then says, “We need only remember that for Hegel this is the core of Kant’s own position once we give up any notion of separable contributions from sensibility and understanding, and give up referring to pure forms of intuition as species-specific…. If we do, we get the careful statements about the identity within difference of concept and being in and for itself with which we began” (p. 126).

He returns to the more basic point that “There is no indication that Hegel thinks that being or God has an apperceptive discursive intellect and that we are manifestations of it. We are manifestations of the finitude of Verstand [understanding] and the possibility inherent in Verstand of the transcendence of such self-imposed finitude” (ibid).

In referring to “self-imposed” finitude, I think Pippin means the viewing of concepts as independent, isolated objects or fixed representations, rather than as pure moments in the traversal of the relational network of the space of reasons.

“[W]e need a kind of stereoscopic vision to keep in mind two aspects of this issue that Hegel keeps stressing…. The first is that conceiving is an activity and concepts are ‘moments’ of this activity. This is something stressed in a different way when Hegel tells us that concepts are not things, objects. The second is that… such activities are not actions, doings, and that Kant’s position, when properly understood (and so not as Kant understood it), should not be taken as a part of a two-step or impositionist account of such activity” (p. 127).

That activity is not reducible to punctual actions is a thesis I have been pursuing in an Aristotelian context.

“Hegel says that (Kant’s) objective or transcendental logic ‘replaces’… general metaphysics or ontology. Logic so construed also takes account of and replaces special metaphysics, the a priori doctrines of the soul, the world, and God” (p. 128).

Once again, Hegel’s “logical” alternative to rationalist metaphysics and psychology does not presuppose any fixed concepts. Pippin returns to this to avoid misunderstanding, because he has been emphasizing the non-psychological character of apperceptive judgment for Hegel.

“If we think, as some do, of Hegel’s Denkbestimmungen [thought determinations] as something like Fregean thoughts, objective in a Platonic sense, as abstract entities, then what I am quoting [to the effect that the “objective” part of Hegel’s logic is the true critique of such determinations] is very puzzling. Hegel certainly knows that Kant’s transcendental logic is in some sense or other a logic of subjectivity” (p. 129).

The distinction that is beginning to be made explicit here is between subjectivity in general and specifically psychological subjectivity. This will allow Hegel to develop a “subjective” logic that has nothing to do with psychology.

By analogy, Pippin notes that “Frege interpreters argue that there is no reason to go as far as the historical Frege did (a form of Platonism) to differentiate objective thought from mental episodes, private associations, etc.” (ibid).

“In a claim we shall have to return to and investigate, [Hegel] repeats often that the true critical question is not whether subjective forms of thought have any objective purchase, but whether the concepts of a logic ‘in and for themselves’ provide what they are supposed to provide: what is required for successful conceptual determination…. Kant did not sufficiently investigate what these pure concepts are; he did not pursue the question of their ‘nature’ and their very possibility” (p. 130).

Broadly speaking, the answer will be that concepts are not Platonic forms but get their meaning from their uses, as normatively evaluated in the space of reasons.

“Commentators are sometimes so eager to observe the spirit of this sort of critique of Kantian ‘subjectivism’ that they assume that the Logic is something like the ‘pure’ manifestation of the objective dependence and implication relations among ‘pure essentialities’, thoughts in the objective sense, logical entities that are in those relations in ways that have nothing to do with anyone ‘thinking them'” (p. 131).

The delicate point here is that we can take the activity of thinking into account by treating it as its own “subject”, rather than attributing it to a separate Subject.

“But the apperceptive or inherently reflexive determination of conceptual content… is no more external than the ‘I think’ is external to a content thought. Judgment and the consciousness of judgment are one act. No content represents anything except as thought/judged” (ibid).

Recalling the syllogism I constructed above from Hegel’s statements — which concluded that what he calls self-consciousness is not a kind of consciousness — I think Pippin should have said “self-consciousness” rather than “consciousness” in the above. “Self-consciousness” for Hegel is normative and non-psychological. What he calls “consciousness” (the aspect of immediacy and of presentation in the form of objects) does have a psychological character. In real life, we encounter mixtures of the two.

“The movement of pure thought is like the movement in a proof, on the assumption that the moves are inferences a thinker, on pain of contradiction, must make, and not merely formal-structural functions, as in a symbolic logic” (p. 132).

A proof involves not just a sequence of propositions but a sequence of judgments or assertions. Frege explained this difference in terms of an additional dimension of “assertoric force” alongside his Platonic view of concepts and propositions. For Pippin and Brandom, the consideration of assertoric force is where normativity enters into logic.

“[I]t is also question-begging to assume that anyone who makes the assertoric force inseparable from the logical structure of a unit of meaning (as Hegel unquestionably does) is thereby guilty of psychologism, or of relying on some ‘experiential’ standard of adequacy. Even Frege was willing to make the question of assertoric force a part of ‘logic’ in his own terms” (ibid).

Hegel takes assertoric force into account by treating it normatively rather than psychologically. Meanwhile, the movement of judging activity that is the bearer of Hegel’s notion of truth must also be distinct from the mere inspection of logical structure.

“[O]bjects moving about [in Hegel’s Logic]… is a mystification. At any rate, I have no idea what it would be to ‘observe’ one thought-object developing into another. (We don’t observe what happens when one step in a proof ‘becomes’ another; the inference has to be drawn, and drawn for a reason.) Such an objectivism makes it almost impossible to understand what Hegel calls the Logic‘s inner ‘drive’…, and it especially does not take account of the claim that conceptual form is itself apperceptive, that ‘the truth is self-consciousness’ (pp. 133-134).

“Essentialities do not move or establish relations with other essentialities…. A proposition cannot be the bearer of truth, does not even represent any state of affairs, except as judged, and therewith the identity of the acts of thinking involve[s] a wide variety of other commitments at the same time…. (I mean such things as being committed to the denial of all judgments inconsistent with the one that one asserts as true, and this not as a second act of thought.) By contrast, the basic unit of intelligibility for Hegel is not an internally complex object, even if in relations with other objects, but as he says in many ways and many different times, a result, the accomplishment of the ‘active universal’, which activity is judging…. The mode of logical connection is inseparable from the mode of connecting. They are co-constituting” (pp. 134-135).

Objective “thoughts” in Hegel’s sense are not just pure Platonic essentialities but judgments that have a shareable meaning and that inherently invite normative evaluation.

“Said another way, a strong way of insisting that Hegel’s new ‘metaphysics’ is a logic, none of this has anything to do with what anything is made of, consists in, with the furniture of the universe. What we want to know… about these concepts is their ‘logic’, how they function with account-givings governed by the norms of explanatory satisfactoriness and truth” (p. 137).

“This means that any concept of thinking and of the content of thought involves normative proprieties, exclusions, and implications, without which any thinking a thought could not be the thinking and the thought that it is. These normative commitments are independent of what a thinker might herself be able to acknowledge, but they cannot be denied on being noticed, on pain of incoherence, of not thinking anything at all” (ibid).

Thus apperception — or what we might call “pure” as opposed to empirical subjectivity, which need not be tied to an assumed separate Subject, but only to some judging activity — for Hegel is purely “logical” (having to do with the determination of meaning). It is independent of anything psychological, and at the same time it is inherently normative.

Next in this series: Negation and Negativity