Chapter 5
Copernican constructivism is the central thread of Kant’s position as well as of the post-Kantian German reaction to the critical philosophy. The Copernican turn, which features the identity of identity and difference, runs throughout the Hegelian position. This point determines Hegel’s relation to the ongoing debate—more precisely, his link to Kant, Fichte, and Schelling.
Observers often think Schelling influences Hegel more than Fichte does, but the opposite seems closer to the mark. This point has often been argued. A number of observers—including Bourgeois, Horstmann, and Gérard—think Hegel, in distancing himself from Schelling, also distanced himself from the identity thesis.1 Though Hegel distanced himself from Schelling’s Spinozistic form of the identity thesis, he did not distance himself from either the identity thesis or constructivism, from which it stems. On the contrary, Hegel, in relying on Fichte’s version of constructivism, sought to deepen it. It follows that through his constructivist commitment, Hegel is more strongly influenced by Fichte than by Schelling.
There are two main differences between Fichte’s and Hegel’s approaches to constructivism. On the one hand, Hegel reformulates the Fichtean effort to explain experience and knowledge from the perspective of the subject as an interaction between individuals and the world, leading to what he calls the experience of consciousness. On the other hand, Hegel is a historical thinker—one of the most historical thinkers in the tradition. Hegelian constructivism differs from Fichte’s through its deeply historical character.
Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel were contemporaries who interacted both personally as well as philosophically. Schelling, Hegel, and the German poet Hölderlin were roommates in the Protestant seminary. Fichte preceded both Schelling and Hegel in Jena, where Schelling arrived before Fichte left in the wake of the atheism dispute. Schelling came to Jena, where he became a professor, then arranged for Hegel to come there as an unpaid assistant (then as now the practice in Germany). Hegel’s philosophical position begins to take shape in the Differenzschrift, his initial philosophical publication, where he appraises the theories of Fichte and Schelling (according to Hegel, the only philosophical contemporaries worthy of the name) and of Reinhold (in Hegel’s opinion, at the time the leading nonphilosopher). This text provides Hegel’s account of the transition between Kant, Fichte, and Schelling. It builds on his understanding of these thinkers in beginning to formulate his own emerging view. According to Kant, the critical philosophy was true and there could never be more than one true theory. This Kantian view forms the background of Hegel’s text, which focuses on a series of related themes.
On Hegel’s DIFFERENZSCHRIFT
The Differenzschrift can be read from different perspectives: as an account of the ancient Greek problem of the relation of identity and difference2—for instance, the relation of one over many, to which Plato refers in his account of the forms in his middle period,3 or again, as an assessment of the state of philosophy at the turning of the nineteenth century through the views of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Reinhold. Since we are concerned with the reaction to Kantian constructivism, it will be useful to follow the latter approach here.
According to Hegel, the term “difference” in the title of the Differenzschrift indicates the need for philosophy. The view of the identity of identity and difference, which later becomes central to Hegel’s approach to cognition, is already at work in Hegel’s interpretation of the differences between Fichte and Schelling.
The title of Hegel’s text is misunderstood as suggesting that the young Hegel intended to endorse the Kantian view of earlier philosophy as dogmatic, hence uncritical. For Kant, the spirit and the letter of philosophy coincide in the critical philosophy. Hegel, who denies this claim, is concerned with separating the spirit from the letter of the critical philosophy in carrying forward the former while discarding the latter.
At the time he wrote this text, the young Hegel regarded the views of Fichte and Schelling as successive versions of the critical philosophy. Hegel’s interpretation of his idealist colleagues Kant, Fichte, and Schelling is subtle and complex, both deeply Kantian but also profoundly anti-Kantian, based on a detailed grasp of their respective theories as well as the entire contemporary debate. Hegel’s Kantianism is above all visible in his effort to work out an acceptable version of cognitive constructivism. His many-sided anti-Kantianism takes many forms centering on his turn away from an a priori (hence ahistorical) to an a posteriori (hence historical) approach to philosophy.
Kant is an ahistorical thinker who suggests the problems of philosophy can be dealt with decisively in a theory that will never later need to be revised, and that is independent of the history of philosophy. Hegel thinks he as well as Kant, Fichte, and Schelling all belong to a single ongoing tradition in which later thinkers build on their predecessors in striving to realize the spirit of the critical philosophy. He relies on this criterion in criticizing Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Reinhold. Many observers—including Kant—consider the transcendental deduction as the centerpiece of the critical philosophy, its single most important component. Kant thinks the deduction of the categories is an effective bulwark against dogmatism. Hegel holds that Kant failed at this task, which is only finally carried out by Fichte. Hegel believes the critical philosophy has not left dogmatism behind, and that it fails to go beyond precritical philosophy. He thinks Kant’s view is not itself critical, but merely another form of dogmatism.
It has been noted more than once that Schelling initially posed as Fichte’s devoted disciple, but broke with him in publishing the System of Transcendental Idealism. In the Differenzschrift (1801), which appeared only a year later, Hegel formulates detailed criticism of Fichte, in part from Schelling’s vantage point. Fichte advances a dualism between “is” and “ought,” between what is (or theoretical knowledge) and what ought to be (or practical knowledge). Hegel criticizes Fichte, whose dualism he rejects for failing to bring together what is and what ought to be.
Hegel distantly—but resolutely and with great insight—follows Kant down the constructivist path. Kant’s Copernican turn points to the constructivist concept of identity in difference Hegel adopts as his criterion to evaluate the views of Fichte and Schelling. His exposition of Fichte’s system centers on the Jena Wissenschaftslehre. Hegel treats this text as profound speculation by virtue of its supposed reawakening of reason after Kant. According to Hegel, Kant incorrectly prides himself on his supposedly misunderstood Critique of Pure Reason.The supposed misunderstanding of the critical philosophy—for instance, in the notorious Garve-Feder review—was an important factor in Kant’s composition of the Prolegomena. Hegel thinks Kant—and following him, Fichte—correctly invoke speculation, though both fall below this criterion. Kant invokes but does not exhibit genuine speculation, since he does not deduce the categories. Fichte points toward but fails to establish cognitive identity. He fails Kant’s constructivist epistemic test, hence fails to explain cognition based on experience. Since Fichte advances but fails to complete the critical philosophy, this task remains as the central item on the philosophical agenda.
Hegel on the Difference between Fichte and Schelling
Hegel’s account of Fichte focuses on the three fundamental principles identified in the Jena Wissenschaftslehre. For Hegel and perhaps for Fichte as well, the cognitive die is already cast at the very beginning of the latter’s exposition of his system. Fichte explains his position as the result of thinking through the systematic development of the critical philosophy: “Now, the essence of the critical philosophy consists in this, that an absolute self is postulated as wholly unconditioned and incapable of determination by any higher thing; and if this philosophy is derived in due order from the above principle, it becomes a Science of Knowledge” (SK, 119; p. 117). Fichte’s inversion of the Kantian subject transforms it from the crowning element in the system to the initial concept from which the entire position must be deduced. Yet according to Hegel, even if we grant Fichte’s initial proposition (or his absolute primary principle), his position fails.
Hegel’s analysis of Fichte’s position is every bit as complex as the position. Even at this early stage, he criticizes other positions immanently, in this case, in following the complicated meanders of Fichte’s thought. Hegel reads Fichte as carrying Kant’s constructivist approach to cognition beyond the critical philosophy. According to Hegel, Fichte’s position is based on the following factors: intellectual intuition; and ego = ego, where the ego is the identity of subject and object, and where the absolute is subject/object. Hegel praises Fichte’s approach to experience in pointing out that in ordinary consciousness, the ego occurs in the form of an opposition (Entgegensetzung), which must be explained. According to Hegel, to explain opposition means to show that empirical consciousness is grounded in pure consciousness, in which case, the opposition is sublated through the identity of pure and empirical consciousness. In the latter instance, nothing empirical is undetermined. In other words, pure consciousness is not determined empirically. Hence an absolute identity sublating the apparent dichotomy between pure and empirical consciousness would be impossible.
According to Hegel, philosophy—which posits the objective totality of empirical knowledge as identical with pure self-consciousness (D, p. 121)—needs to demonstrate an identity between empirical consciousness and pure consciousness. The identity in question is not an abstraction from an original opposition; rather, “their opposition is an abstraction from their original identity” (D, p. 212). Hence, objectivity must emerge as it were from the subject, or ego. Yet since the subject, or ego, is both subject and object, empirical consciousness cannot arise from pure consciousness. Hegel summarizes his reading of Fichte in calling attention to a necessary identity (to which, Hegel claims, Kant, Fichte, and Hegel are committed, but which the Fichtean system does not demonstrate): “In other words, Ego = Ego is the absolute principle of speculation, but the system does not display this identity” (D, p. 122). The difficulty consists in the fact that subject and object—subjective ego and objective ego—are not identical but in fact different. Since subject and object (or what posits and what is posited) fail to coincide, it follows that, as Hegel writes: “Ego does not become objective to itself” (D, p. 123).
Hegel transposes this argument to Fichte’s three absolutely basic principles. The first absolutely basic principle is “absolute positing of the ego.” Since there are three such principles, none is absolute and each is relative. Ego = ego, or the first principle, is an absolute identity. Since it is merely one of three principles, its meaning is that pure consciousness is opposed to empirical consciousness—or again, philosophical reflection as opposed to ordinary reflection (D, p. 123). In other words, the subjective ego is ego, but the objective ego is ego + non-ego. It follows that objective ego and subjective ego are not identical, but different (D, p. 124).
At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the suspicion of dogmatism was regarded as exceedingly serious. We recall that Kant suggests he could have accepted Wolff’s position if it had avoided dogmatism in examining the right to rely on principles before employing them (CPR, B xxxi, p. 117). Hegel is at pains to note Fichte is not a dogmatic idealist. In the contemporary debate, this point is raised in different ways by Kant as well as Reinhold. According to Hegel, dogmatic idealism by definition posits the subjective as the ground of the objective, and dogmatic realism posits the objective as the ground of the subjective. Fichte’s effort to ingratiate himself with Kant was steadily resisted by the latter. In rejecting his cumbersome admirer, Kant suggested Fichte was not a critical but a dogmatic thinker; hence from the perspective of the critical philosophy, he was not a philosopher at all. According to Hegel, Reinhold fails to grasp that Fichte must “posit the difference of subject and object in Ego = Ego at the same time as their identity” (D, p. 127). In other words, Reinhold overlooks the speculative dimension of Fichte’s idealism. (I come back to this theme below.)
In criticizing Fichte, Hegel claims the ego fails to make itself objective to itself through theoretical activity, and hence fails to bring about the identity ego = ego. In other words, the object is in Hegel’s words “Ego plus non-Ego” (D, p. 129). It follows that the suggested Fichtean transcendental deduction of an objective world fails to sublate the opposition between subjective philosophical reflection and empirical consciousness. The failure lies in the inability to demonstrate the identity that is the criterion of knowledge in all constructivist theories. According to Hegel, the identity in question in Fichte’s third principle is merely superficial, hence inadequate for his purposes.
Hegel takes the principle of idealism to be “that the world is a product of the freedom of intelligence” (D, p. 130) and further claims that “philosophical reflection is an act of absolute freedom” (D, p. 130). This means that the subject is unlimited, or again limited only by itself. In order to satisfy this criterion, the objective world must be deduced in a so-called “act of freedom” (D, p. 131). Since Fichte is unable to demonstrate this result, identity, or ego = ego, is postulated only practically. That is, the ego ought to objectify itself through a causal relation to the new ego through what Fichte calls striving (Streben). Yet ego = ego in fact occurs only in the form of ego ought to equal ego (D, p. 132). According to Hegel, for Fichte, freedom is a negative lifting of restrictions whose clear manifestation is striving; that is, a principle of non-identity, but not a sublation of opposites (D, p. 133). And since striving can never realize its aim, progress—though infinite—never reaches its goal. Since it is not possible to surpass merely striving for a goal that is never reached, Hegel says, “Absolute identity is present only in the form of an opposite, namely as Idea” (D, p. 135). Or again: the result, which should be identity, or ego = ego, is rather non-identity, or that ego = non-ego (D, p. 138).
According to Hegel, Fichte fails to reach identity since he never overcomes a basic dualism between theory and practice, subjectivity and objectivity. This dualism results in a treatment of the objective from the perspective of the subjective, which is central to what Hegel calls subjective idealism.
Hegel’s evaluation of Fichte’s transcendental philosophy is nuanced, but his verdict about Fichte clear. The latter begins with an initial identity that is immediately lost and cannot be reestablished since Fichte transforms it into a causal relation. In other words, Fichte abandons the principle of philosophical speculation—hence genuine identity—in favor of scientific causality, which is supposedly incapable of yielding the desired result. Hegel credits Fichte with adopting a purer form of Kant’s authentic idealism as concerns the principle of the deduction of the categories. He accepts Fichte’s charge that Kant does not deduce either the categories, or space and time (SK, p. 51). He specifically praises Fichte here and later as the first to deduce the categories (see EL, §42). Yet according to Hegel, Fichte also betrays that principle in adopting a causal explanation of identity (or materialism) in place of genuine idealism. Hence Fichte, from Hegel’s perspective, is inconsistent. In short, according to Hegel, Fichte is both an authentic speculative thinker—and in that sense a true Kantian—but also not speculative at all.
In the section ostensibly comparing Fichte and Schelling, there is little direct attention to Schelling, whose position is at this point presupposed. Everything happens as if Hegel’s main concern were to work out the consequences of Schelling’s effort to build on Fichte by carrying Schelling’s version of German idealism beyond Schelling, hence in completing the line of thought running from Kant through Fichte to Schelling.
Hegel’s comparative discussion of Fichte and Schelling is mainly an attack on the former from the perspective of the latter. The version of Schelling’s position he has in mind is that expounded, for instance, in his controversy with Eschenmayer, in which Schelling clearly relates philosophy of nature to idealism as follows in a passage Hegel cites: “The philosophy of nature is a physical explanation of idealism” (D, p. 176). Hegel starkly contrasts Fichte’s position with Schelling’s, which exhibits the principle of identity throughout since “philosophy and system coincide” (D, p. 155). On this interpretation, Schelling’s conception of identity realizes a version of the Spinozistic claim that thought and being are parallel to each other. According to Hegel, who faithfully expounds Schelling’s position as the latter describes it, absolute identity requires that subject and object be posited as identical. “For absolute identity to be the principle of an entire system, it is necessary that both subject and object be posited as Subject-Object” (D, p. 155). Fichte’s position demonstrates no more than a subjective subject-object, which further requires an objective subject-object. Both are further contained within the absolute, or the indifference point: “As their point of absolute indifference, the Absolute encloses both, gives birth to both, and is born of both” (D, p. 155). Hegel, who privileges identity over difference, insists that subject and object must both be sublated. But this is possible only if subject and object are posited as identical. This in turn requires the identity of subject and object as well as their difference. Hence, Hegel infers that “the Absolute itself is the identity of identity and non-identity” for the reason that, as he writes, “being opposed and being one are both together in it” (D, p. 156).
This statement identifies the full development of constructivism with Schelling’s vision. It incorrectly suggests that in taking transcendental philosophy and philosophy of nature as equal, Schelling reaches the identity Kant identifies and Fichte still only vainly strives for. This is incorrect in that Hegel, who praises Schelling (who has just consummated his break with Fichte), also simultaneously foreshadows his own later break with his sometime patron.
Hegel immediately turns to the point that will later separate him from Schelling in underlining a crucial difference in the understanding of the “absolute.” Hegel takes this difficult term to refer inter alia to a structured whole. In the Phenomenology, he emphasizes this point in rejecting so-called empty formalism, such as the statement A = A, which occurs often in Fichte but perhaps refers to Schelling as well. In a famous passage—which Schelling took, probably correctly, as referring to his position, and which immediately led to a definitive break between them—Hegel rejects efforts “to pass off . . . [the] absolute as the night in which, as one says, all cows are black [which] is an utterly vacuous naiveté in cognition.” 4 In the Differenzschrift, in a period in which he is still close to Schelling, he makes the same point in a less abrasive way in saying that “the claims of separation must be admitted just as much as those of identity” (D, p. 156).
Hegel devotes more space to Schelling’s philosophy of nature. In generally following Schelling, whom he does not name, Hegel claims that real opposition leads to two different but noncontradictory sciences. Their opposition is sublated in a higher standpoint that acknowledges the same absolute in each of them, in other words in transcendental philosophy and the philosophy of nature (D, p. 161). In the section on Fichte, the latter’s transcendental deduction of nature is said to consist of being posited by the subject as a condition of its self-limitation (D, p. 136). According to Hegel—who clearly has Schelling in mind—in Fichte’s superficial view, which explains nothing, nature is no more than an “ideal result” (D, p. 139). Yet Fichte is an easy target, since alone among the great German idealists he was not versed in contemporary science.
In this context, Hegel turns rapidly to Kant’s view of nature to which he gives only short shrift. The main point seems to be that the scientific construction of nature demands that it be not only matter, but also subject-object (D, p. 164). These cursory references—which in Kant’s case simply fail to take the position seriously—have the effect of supporting the Schellingian claim, as well as denying the Fichtean counterclaim, that neither science can sublate the other.
Hegel enlarges on this insight by suggesting that the principle of transcendental philosophy is the subjective subject-object and the principle of philosophy of nature is the objective subject-object (D, p. 166). According to Hegel, each system contains both freedom and necessity (D, p. 167). This reasoning leads to the obscure suggestion that the “science of nature is the theoretical part of philosophy and the science of intelligence its practical part” (D, p. 168).
Hegel takes stock of his claim by stating that in transcendental philosophy the absolute assumes subjective form as cognition, and in the philosophy of nature it is objective as being (D, p. 169). He contrasts these two sciences as in fact opposed, but also as forming a single whole. Hegel, who darkly says that the whole can be regarded as “a self-construction [Selbstkonstruktion] of the absolute” (D, p. 170), appeals here to a series of obscure metaphors to communicate this obscure view. They include Schelling’s “lightning stroke of the ideal upon the real” (D, p. 170), the “intuition of God’s eternal human Incarnation” (D, p. 171), and so on. Hegel appears to be obscurely restating the importance of speculation. This is a view, according to Hegel, that is central to Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, specifically including Schelling’s effort to supplement Fichte’s transcendental philosophy. The central insight is that knowledge requires a speculative approach; this approach reaches its highest level in the unity of transcendental philosophy and philosophy of nature. “Speculation . . . and its knowledge are at the point of indifference” (D, p. 172).
Hegel has so far criticized Fichte from Schelling’s perspective. One might infer that, at this early moment in his career, before he became prominent, Hegel—who was known as the time as Schelling’s older and perhaps intellectually less competent assistant—would be content to stay in Schelling’s shadow. In fact, Hegel, who only appears to follow Schelling closely, is even at the beginning of his career never more than distantly impressed by Schelling’s view. He later rejects the Schellingian philosophy of nature as mere ignorant speculation. (I come back to this below.) In the Differenzschrift, he criticizes both Fichte and Schelling in terms of the criterion of an articulated whole that is neither subjective nor objective, but further preserves opposition (or difference within unity). This criticism emerges in remarks on intellectual intuition in the final paragraph of this section.
According to Hegel, intellectual intuition is the absolute principle of philosophy for both Fichte and Schelling (D, p. 173). This claim justifies Hegel’s view that Fichte and Schelling supposedly differ about a shared Kantian view—in short, within a single shared commitment that each interprets differently. Fichte’s subjective idealism is unacceptable since intellectual intuition, which is neither subjective nor objective, but rather, absolute—must abstract from the subjective aspect. Yet it is also not sufficient to supplement transcendental philosophy through philosophy of nature, or ego through nature. An acceptable view—the one to which Hegel in his initial philosophical text is already committed, but which he has not yet worked out—rejects both Fichte’s and Schelling’s views in favor of a structure preserving difference within identity, or the identity of identity and difference, or again the basic insight of the Copernican revolution. “Philosophical reflection posits these products of pure reflection in the Absolute in their abiding opposition” (D, p. 174). In short, in his initial philosophical text, Hegel is already concerned with realizing Kant’s Copernican turn as the central theme in German idealism, or the single ongoing philosophical tradition englobing Kant, Fichte, Schelling, and himself, all of whom are concerned with this same basic task.
Hegel on Reinhold’s Founding-and-Grounding Tendency
Hegel’s remarks on Reinhold here are harsh but important for understanding his own emerging position. They echo recent remarks about Reinhold by Schelling, who was still Hegel’s patron at the time he wrote the Differenzschrift, expressing extreme distrust of the former.5 It is only later when he comes back to Reinhold early in the Science of Logic that Hegel is able to take a more measured approach. I come back to this point below.
In the Differenzschrift, Hegel reacts to Reinhold on two levels: as concerns the relation of philosophy to the history of philosophy, and as concerns the kind of philosophical theory possible in building on the history of philosophy. He rejects Reinhold’s interest in so-called “personal idiosyncrasy”—or again, “personal views” (D, p. 87)—as incompatible with philosophy. According to Hegel, Reinhold, who misunderstands his contemporaries, also misunderstands how to build on their positions.
Hegel, following Kant, Fichte and Schelling, is a cognitive anti-foundationalist. He is especially critical of Reinhold’s cognitive foundationalism, which functions as the central thrust of the latter’s effort to reformulate the critical philosophy. Reinhold, following Bardili, transforms philosophy into logic through the so-called “founding and grounding tendency” (D, p. 179). The suggestion that claims to know must be based on logic anticipates the later logicist concern to base mathematics on logic. This approach later reemerges in different but related form as the view that philosophy must be based on the analysis of language.
Hegel’s discussion of Reinhold features a strong rejection of the latter’s Cartesian form of cognitive foundationalism as self-stultifying as well as an endorsement of the post-Kantian constructivist cognitive approach in all its forms as self-justifying. This theme has often been raised—for instance, by Plato, who thinks philosophy justifies itself and all other claims to know; Descartes, who holds all claims to know must be grounded in an unshakeable initial principle; and Reinhold, who distantly follows the latter’s lead. Hegel’s attack on Reinhold, which distantly allies him with Plato, suggests that pace Reinhold philosophy has no need to be justified by anything other than itself. Hegel addresses this problem in an important passage, which deserves to be cited at length.
Science claims to found itself upon itself by positing each one of its parts absolutely, and thereby constituting identity and knowledge at the beginning and at every single point. As objective totality knowledge founds itself more effectively the more it grows, and its parts are only founded simultaneously with this whole of cognitions. Center and circle are so connected with each other that the first beginning of the circle is already a connection with the center, and the center is not completely a center unless the whole circle, with all of its connections, is completed: a whole that is as little in need of a particular handle to attach the founding to as the earth is in need of a particular handle to attach the force to that guides it around the sun and at the same time sustains it in the whole living manifold of its shapes (D, p. 180; cf. D, p. 111).
It will be useful—since Hegel later comes back to Reinhold in the Science of Logic three decades at the end of his career—to paraphrase this seminal passage very closely. Hegel here touches successively on cognitive identity, the relation of part and whole, the problem of the beginning point of a philosophical theory, and the analogy between cognition and the Newtonian explanation of Copernican astronomy. According to Hegel, a scientific (or speculative) approach to knowledge consists in what he here, following Fichte, calls positing by formulating a cognitive alternative to cognitive foundationalism. Modern cognitive foundationalism is often identified with Descartes. The French thinker, who relies on a geometrical model, bases cognitive claims on an initial principle known to be true and from which the remainder of the theory can be rigorously deduced. The Kantian approach to the deduction of the categories, which is intended as an a priori deduction of cognition, also functions as a form of foundationalism.6
In a foundationalist approach, for which any cognitive claim always comes too soon, it is impossible to begin. Hegel, who rejects the very idea of an (external) foundation, is not usually thought of as an epistemic foundationalist. Yet he does not reject epistemic justification. He specifically suggests science, or the scientific approach to cognition, founds or grounds itself. This suggestion removes any vestige of the seminal Kantian distinction between science and an analysis of its conditions in general. It is then no longer possible to distinguish, as Kant distinguishes, between the road to cognition itself and an analysis of the general conditions of cognition prior to embarking on the road to cognition. Hegel believes any attempt to raise the question of the conditions of cognition must concede that we are always already on that road, hence unable to carry out this task. Hegel later develops these points in the introduction to the Phenomenology. (I come back to this theme below.)
The correspondence theory of truth is the natural consequence of the Parmenidean suggestion that cognition must demonstrate the identity of thought and being. Kant’s Copernican insight restates the Parmenidean identity as the identity of identity and non-identity. Hegel takes this Kantian insight further in claiming that a scientific approach to cognition necessarily posits an identity, hence knowledge in the beginning and at every point of the cognitive process. As a so-called objective totality, the development of theory increasingly grounds or justifies its cognitive claims. This point appears to be straightforward, even noncontroversial. Copernican astronomy is, for instance, substantiated by later developments—above all, as Kant observes, through Newtonian mechanics that would not otherwise have been possible (CPR, B xxi, p. 113). The individual parts of the theory are justified, or grounded, through the formulation, development, and completion of the entire theory. Each of its parts refers at least implicitly to the entire, fully articulated theory. From Hegel’s perspective, the initial stages of the Copernican shift from geocentricism to heliocentrism already point toward Newtonian mechanics.
In this passage, Hegel exploits an analogy between a theory and the solar system. A theory has a central point around which it revolves, and which is progressively justified in further working out the theory. The central point is justified fully only when the entire theory turning on it—and in which it is embedded, as it were—is fully worked out. To continue the analogy, the basic hypothesis underlying Copernican astronomy—i.e., that the sun is situated at the center of the solar system—is more fully constituted, so to speak, after Galileo and still more after Newton. Finally, as Hegel notes, philosophy, like natural science, needs no handle as it were, or no Archimedean lever. A cognitive foundation would function as a kind of handle or external support. Yet, to complete the analogy, Hegel observes cognition no more needs a handle than the earth requires one for the gravitational force that leads it around the sun. In other words, the cognitive process, which is self-justifying, does not require further justification or any form of cognitive foundation other than itself to justify its cognitive claims.
Hegel’s conviction that philosophy is intrinsically circular is one of his earliest and deepest insights, preceding even his characteristic reliance on a categorial (or more precisely, conceptual) approach to experience. This normative view is restated in different ways in later writings, including in the Encyclopedia, which is as close as he ever comes to presenting the “official” version of his position. Here he discusses his conception of philosophical science as by definition without presuppositions (EL, §1), hence circular, as well as his view of philosophy as a self-enclosing circle that closes in on itself, so to speak (EL, §15); or again, as a circle with no beginning that returns into itself (EL, §17).
Hegel rejects cognitive foundationalism as ordinarily understood by virtue of his conviction that philosophy is justifying or self-grounding. From Hegel’s perspective, Reinhold’s founding-and-grounding project is unnecessary as well as impossible. A project of founding philosophy in something external to it, such as logic, is in effect an infinite task that never arrives at either knowledge or philosophy. In that case, as Hegel says, “making the run up” would become its principal task (see D, p. 180). It is, in this sense, like Lessing’s famous ditch: leading from historical facts to religious truths over which it is finally never possible to pass.7 According to Hegel, who presupposes his prior accounts of the views of Kant, Fichte, and Schelling, the alternative is “to connect cognition with the Absolute, so that it becomes an identity of subject and object” (D, p. 181).
Hegel thinks Reinhold’s suggestion that we must antecedently presuppose the so-called arch-true (Urwahre) amounts to the view that the absolute is the arch-true. This is a conception of the absolute that is “not the work of Reason, because it is already in and for itself something true and certain, that is something cognized and known” (D, p. 184). Reinhold’s difficulty lies in explaining how, if the absolute is independent—hence if it is not in some way constructed by reason—it can be reached through reason. Since Reinhold’s absolute is not constructed in this way, and since reason does not have an active relation to it, the absolute lies outside of, or again beyond, reason. Hence it would be absurd to claim knowledge of it. In refuting Reinhold, Hegel—early in his philosophical career—refutes any form of the ongoing Parmenidean effort since early Greek philosophy to know an already constituted, but mind-independent reality.
Fichte and Hegel’s Turn to Phenomenology
Hegel, who was very critical of Reinhold, thought better of Fichte, who turned to phenomenology in the course of working through Kant’s cognitive approach. It is plausible to infer that Fichte’s turn to phenomenology influenced Hegel’s own phenomenological turn.
The term “phenomenology,” which became very popular in the twentieth century through the writings of Husserl and his students, is so widely and imprecisely used that it is difficult to define. Contemporary phenomenologists seem to understand the core concept in different ways. It is unclear there is any central insight linking together, say, Husserl, Heidegger (who substitutes phenomenological ontology for the latter’s phenomenological epistemology), Merleau-Ponty (who is influenced by them both), Scheler, Sartre, Ricoeur, Henry, Levinas, and so on.
In German idealism, “phenomenology” is related to Kant’s influential distinction between noumena and phenomena. This term does not appear in either Fichte’s initial version of the Wissenschaftslehre or, to the best of my knowledge, in his other Jena writings. Yet this concept, though not under that name, is arguably important in this text. Fichte’s turn toward phenomenology derives from his turn away from the thing in itself, hence away from Kantian representationalism, toward his own post-Kantian form of constructivism. Fichte’s turn toward constructivism is a turn toward phenomenology, even before he uses the term. He is throughout committed to explanation of cognition through the activity of the subject—hence from the subject pole—and not from the object pole through the causal activity of the object on the subject.8 Yet his so-called deduction is misnamed, since Kantian representation presupposes a mind-independent object, which Fichte, in giving up the thing in itself, abandons as an explanatory concept.
In writings after the Jena period, Fichte continues to move in a phenomenological direction in developing his version of the constructivist approach to cognition. Certain features of the new method Fichte experiments with in 1800–1801 (and which were incorporated in the 1801–1802 Darstellung, such as the terms “Konstruktion” and “Nachkonstruktion”) become distinctive features of later attempts to characterize the activity of the transcendental philosopher.9
In the 1804 Wissenschaftslehre—which was not published during Hegel’s lifetime, and hence probably did not influence his position—Fichte reworks the Kantian distinction between false appearance and true appearance. According to his son and editor, Fichte entitled the second part of his 1804 Wissenschaftslehre “Erscheinungs- und Scheinlehre.”10 At the beginning of the second set of lectures, Fichte announces his intention to argue for the intrinsic unity of being and thinking. Yet he continues to subordinate this view to faith while explicitly adding a phenomenological dimension. The tenth lecture provides a short overview of Fichte’s view of the science of knowing (Wissenschaftslehre) at this point. This science, which turns on consciousness, is both “a doctrine of truth and reason” as well as “a phenomenology, a doctrine of appearance [Erscheinungslehre] and illusion [Schein].”11 According to Fichte, phenomenology is a theory of true appearance and false appearance, which he understands as a “theory of reason and of truth” (WL, pp. 150–151). Unlike Lambert and the early Kant, for whom phenomenology concerns false appearance, Fichte uses the term here in a positive sense.12 In obviously anticipating Hegel, he defines phenomenology as the science of true appearing (Erscheinungslehre). For Fichte, true appearing (Erscheinen) is never mere illusion (Schein). Truth is phenomenal, though phenomena neither are false, nor are false appearances, but are true. Fichte, who depicts phenomenology as a description of true appearing, here anticipates later efforts by Hegel and Husserl to understand philosophy as science of the phenomenological approach to truth.13
The phenomenological dimension of Hegel’s Phenomenology derives from contemporary influences, from his overall approach to cognition, and (like Fichte) from his rejection of representationalism. Representations are appearances (of an object or objects). Hegel follows Kant as well as Fichte in turning away from a representational, causal approach to cognition and toward an approach based on the activity of the subject. By rejecting a causal theory of knowledge, Hegel gives up the familiar causal model of perception. In its place, he substitutes the construction of epistemic (or cognitive) identity subtended by ontological difference. In the Phenomenology, Hegel works out this view already adumbrated in brief remarks on a circular approach to cognition in the Differenzschrift. Beginning in the latter work, Hegel steadfastly holds to the criterion of knowledge as the identity in consciousness of subject and object, knower and known, emerging from a circular approach to cognition.
Hegel rejects the Kantian view of phenomenology as false appearance in favor of a revised Fichtean view of phenomena as true appearance. In this way he rehabilitates phenomenology—which Kant confines to false appearance, hence to mere appearance, as distinguished from truth. As a result, he transforms phenomenology—which in the Critique of Pure Reason Kant intends as a mere prolegomenous stage—into the main cognitive source. In the first Critique, the Prolegomena, and other writings, Kant distinguishes sharply between noumena and phenomena, between what is true but cannot appear, and what appears and is not true. In his reaction to Kant, Hegel “relativizes” the threefold distinction between what is false, what is mere appearance, and what is truth by calling attention to what appears on the way to truth. Mere falsity, which is not truth, is replaced with a conception of false appearance (Schein) that, under the right circumstances, becomes true appearance (Erscheinung) or knowledge and, at the limit, truth.
Hegel on Phenomenological Cognition
Hegel, who identifies representationalism with the critical philosophy, apparently does not perceive that Kant also features a noncausal, constructivist approach to cognition. In the introduction to the Phenomenology, he criticizes Kant while sketching a phenomenological alternative to a representational (or causal) theory of perception. He follows Fichte in abandoning any form of the effort—as old as the Western tradition—to grasp mind-independent reality in favor of grasping the phenomenal contents of consciousness.
Hegel rejects any form of the familiar view of a transcendent in favor of an immanent subject. In its place, he favors an experimental conception of cognition as arising within and indexed to a social and historical space. He limits cognitive claims to the experience of consciousness (or phenomena) roughly, as Fichte clearly says, to what is directly given to us when we open our eyes. Philosophy must explain the grounds of experience, which he describes as the system of representations (Vorstellungen) accompanied by a feeling of necessity. We do not and cannot know mind-independent objects as they are, since we know and can only know mind-dependent objects. In other words, Hegel—who does not reject realism—like Kant, espouses empirical realism in place of metaphysical realism.
The Phenomenology describes cognition as an intrinsically historical process with no preconditions, but unlike the Cartesian position, without an external foundation—without an Archimedean point. In the Introduction, Hegel argues for the construction of a subject/object identity within an ongoing historical process. Truth is a limited term, or mere idea, regulative but not constitutive. It is, as Putnam says, a mere “Grenzbegriff,”14 which would be reached if and only if subject and object, knower and known, freedom and necessity coincided. Yet since Hegel does not think we have already reached or must ever reach the end of history, or a point where this occurs, there is no reason to think that he treats so-called epistemic closure (or successful fulfillment of the cognitive process) as constitutive, or more than regulative.
Hegel’s theory of knowledge presupposes a double distinction between subject and object. In the process of knowledge, the subject distinguishes itself from something within consciousness, to which it relates itself, and which it strives to cognize. The subject further distinguishes between what is for it—hence given in consciousness—and what (as independent of the subject) would (if it were grasped) constitute truth.15
We do not evaluate claims to know absolutely, abstractly, theoretically, or a priori. We rather evaluate claims to know practically by comparing them to what is not potentially but in fact given in (ordinary) conscious experience. Hegel is often supposed to ignore “experience”; for instance, according to Marxism, in beginning in pure thought in order to descend to being.16 The opposite is closer to the truth. Like Kant and Fichte, he rather takes experience seriously as the only possible source of cognition—in his case, since he believes knowledge emerges only in the form of a trial-and-error process within consciousness.
Following Kant’s Copernican turn, the Hegelian criterion of knowledge is identity in difference. Like Kant, Hegel rejects intellectual intuition in relying on cognition mediated by categories, or in Hegel’s case, concepts (Begriffe). Concepts are in effect theories formulated to grasp what is given in conscious experience. The relation between concepts (or theories about the contents of experience) and experience is intentionally circular. Concepts formulated on the basis of experience, on which they depend, and which they are intended to explain, influence the perception of the object, which in turn depends on the theory about it. It follows that the cognitive object is not independent of, but rather dependent on, the conceptual framework. According to Hegel, when we alter a theory in order to improve it, then the object of the theory, or what one seeks to know, also changes.17 Hegel differs on this very important point from those who think the world is fixed and does not change, since only our theories about it change.18 Such thinkers are often committed to some form of representationalism, or even direct realism.19 We do not and cannot know the mind-independent world as it is. We know only that a theory is better or worse than alternative theories in grasping a cognitive object that changes as the theory about it changes. The cognitive object is literally “constructed” by us in the process of knowing. An elementary instance might be the difference between water and H2O, which as cognitive objects are both constructed by—hence depend on—the conceptual framework. More generally, what we know is never independent of, but rather always depends on, the frame of reference (or conceptual framework).
Cognitive theories arise out of and in response to experience, and are in turn tested through further experience. There are only two possible outcomes in such a test. Any theory formulated on the basis of experience either agrees with or fails the test of further experience, hence needs to be reformulated. If the theory agrees with experience, then subject and object correspond. If the theory fails the test of experience, then subject and object fail to correspond, pointing to the need to formulate another theory to explain experience. Hegel describes knowledge as emerging within a historical process in which theories based on prior experience are tried out and, if they later fail the test of experience, reformulated. A series of experiences generates successive theories, as well as successive experiences on the epistemic road whose terminus ad quem is truth identified by the criterion of identity in difference. In holding that theories which in practice fail the test of experience must be modified, Hegel follows and is followed by anyone who takes an a posteriori approach to knowledge.
Hegel rehabilitates human reason by freeing it from the limits that Kant, who relies on the understanding, imposes in the critical philosophy. Hegel’s claim that, at least abstractly, “reason” is certain “that it is itself all reality”20 derives from the Kantian view of the constructivist unity of thought and being lying at the heart of German idealism. Hegel links constructivism and idealism in claiming that what we mean by idealism is that reason is all reality.21
Hegel describes his phenomenological approach to cognition in the introduction to the Phenomenology. He presupposes this approach in his description of successive levels of knowledge leading to fully philosophical cognition, or absolute knowing (absolutes Wissen). He restricts cognitive claims to the contents of consciousness understood as mere phenomena, which do not refer beyond themselves to noumena. Hegel, who eschews dualism, grasps cognitive objects not outside of, but rather within, consciousness. At the dawn of the modern era, Montaigne and Descartes draw attention to subjectivity as the sole possible path to objectivity. Hegel follows Fichte in grasping objectivity from the perspective of the subject—in Hegel’s case, through a distinction between subject and object, which are both situated within consciousness.22 The cognitive process never knowingly compares a theory to a mind-independent object but rather compares a theory to what occurs on the level of conscious mind.
The Hegelian approach replaces (simple) “constatation” (from the French constater) by a cognitive process in which theories formulated on the basis of experience are tested, and hence validated or confirmed, or on the contrary, undermined or disconfirmed in a confrontation with further experience. Unlike Kant, Hegel is unconcerned to formulate an a priori theory of what must be the case. In place of an a priori approach to cognition, he rather describes everyday cognitive practice. Cognition arises within a conceptual process of conscious experience in which we do not and cannot cognize the mind-independent world.
In constructing phenomena, we literally “construct” our world. This point is not well understood. Sellars includes Hegel among those supposedly committed to what he calls “givenness.”23 Since for Hegel cognitive objects depend on theories, arguably nothing in Hegel corresponds to givenness as understood in Sellars’s position. What we call the cognitive object—or again, the world—is never a mere given, but rather always depends on theories about the world in which the “world” is, so to speak, embedded. Claims to know are adjudicated through simple comparison between the concept of the object and the object of the concept within consciousness.24 From the Hegelian perspective, talk about truth does not concern a mind-independent external object. Rather, it concerns phenomena in consciousness, which in turn function as the standard in terms of which to construct theories about truth.25
Hegel’s conception of phenomena is paradoxical. Phenomena have a dual status both within and outside consciousness. They are within consciousness, where they depend on the construction of conceptual schemes (or theories) to cognize conscious experience. But they are outside consciousness in that theories are tested in confronting them to conscious experience, which either agrees or corresponds with, or fails to correspond with our theories about it. McDowell is correct to claim that Hegel always retains an external constraint.26 Everyone is familiar with theories that, when confronted with experience, fail the test and must be reformulated. In the latter sense, what we seek to know acts as an external, empirical standard for theories about it.
Kant believes knowledge is independent of time and place. Yet it is rare, if ever, that we arrive at a result that we can reliably claim will never need to be modified. In most cases, the theory, or working concept of the cognitive object, can at least conceivably be refuted by further experience, which reveals a distinction between what, on the basis of our theory, we expect and what in practice we find. This is the case for kinds of epistemic investigation from astronomy to zoology, in which our conjectures can always fail the test of experience.
Sometimes a theory is provisionally adopted before more stringent tests are devised. This suggests that knowledge and truth correspond, or coincide, since our view of what is the case in fact correctly identifies the character of future experience. Though this need not ever occur, if it happened, the cognitive process would reach its end, or epistemic closure.27
A theory needs to be reformulated if there is a difference between what the theory suggests and what we find. Many observers, including empiricists of all kinds, insist on respecting the verdict of experience. Kant—who thinks it is possible to work out a theory of knowledge that is a priori, hence immune to experience—is an exception. The novel aspect in Hegel’s approach is his conviction that when we alter a theory on the basis of experience, then the cognitive object—which depends on the theoretical framework—is also altered. In effect, Hegel denies there is a single determinate way the mind-independent world is. Like Fichte, he rather believes that what we mean by “world” depends on the theory about it. If cognitive objects depend on theories about them, then a change in the theory results in a change in the cognitive object. In other words, a new cognitive object, or new phenomenon, is literally “constructed” as a result of the change in the theory.28
Hegelian Constructivism and the PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT
Perhaps no one denies that aspects of the PHENOMENOLOGY, above all the early chapters, concern cognition. Kant uses the Latin “cognition” and the German “Erkenntnis” to designate knowledge. Hegel’s “Erkennen,” which means “perception, seeing, differentiating, or noticing how something or someone is,” is a general term that embraces specific types of knowledge. It is based on “kennen,” roughly “knowledge by acquaintance,” and is closely related to “anerkennen,” roughly “recognition.” This terminological link is developed in Hegel’s account of self-consciousness through the struggle for recognition between master and slave (Herrschaft und Knechtschaft).
Hegel, for whom the truth is the whole, proceeds holistically. The Phenomenology advances a single, complex theory of knowledge running through different phases, from the most elementary form or forms of cognition (Erkennen) up to and including absolute knowing (absolutes Wissen). Hegel’s main interlocutor in the Differenzschrift and in later writings is always Kant. Yet the main influence in interpreting, criticizing, and simultaneously reformulating Kantian insights while formulating his own position is always Fichte. Fichte, who is always an original thinker and never merely a disciple, typically lets no opportunity pass to emphasize his fidelity to Kant. Hegel, who builds on Fichte, turns Fichte against Kant, and hence denies Fichte’s claim for the identity between his position and the critical philosophy.
It will suffice here to mention only three among the main ways in which Hegelian constructivism, under Fichte’s influence, differs from its Kantian predecessor. The differences include: a retreat from an apodictic a priori to an experimental a posteriori approach; the substitution of a mind-internal relation between concepts and cognitive objects for the familiar mind-external relation between subjects and objects; and the appeal to concepts, not categories.
Kant is an a priori and Hegel is an a posteriori thinker. Kant proposes a supposedly apodictic, hence incorrigible a priori cognitive theory. His approach could only possibly succeed if there were no more than a single set of identifiable cognitive conditions. In following Fichte, Hegel studies the real conditions of a systematic grasp of conscious experience. His approach succeeds if he is able to identify the real conditions in which we cognize our surroundings and ourselves. With respect to Kant, Hegel can be said to replace the possibility of a “final,” hence inalterable, claim for cognition through an intrinsically experimental conceptual process in which any given cognitive claim is always at risk, as it were, always subject to being refuted and subsequently replaced through a better claim.
Second, Hegel gives up Kantian cognitive dualism in favor of cognitive monism. The familiar, dualistic, modern causal theory of perception approaches the cognitive problem through the relation between a cognitive subject and a mind-external cognitive object. The task of justifying cognitive claims about a mind-independent external object is restated but not basically altered in Kant’s cognitive approach. Following Fichte, Hegel transforms this theme by internalizing the relation between subject and object, knower and known, within consciousness. In the Hegelian model, the cognitive problem does not consist of supposedly knowing a mind-independent external object as it is independently of the subject, but rather consists of comparing and contrasting a concept or theory of the object with the object as it is given in consciousness.
A third difference concerns the nature of categories, which in the Kantian position are fixed, inalterable, through concepts, which are not fixed but alterable or variable. Though Kant and Fichte apparently use both “category” and “concept” indiscriminately, there is an important conceptual distinction at work. Hegel employs the latter term in a technical sense to refer to a cognitive approach that goes beyond mere representation by directly capturing the appearing object. Discussions of Hegel either tend to avoid mentioning his view of concepts or point to the difficulty of specifying the precise range of meaning. According to The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, “concept” is a modern replacement for the older term “idea.”29 Categories presuppose a dualism—more precisely, a difference between the cognitive subject and the mind-independent cognitive object—and hence are compatible with any form of the familiar representational approach to cognition. Concepts, which arise in a monistic perspective, point to the rejection of any dualism between subject and object, or mind and world, in favor of a distinction within consciousness between the concept (or theory of the object within consciousness) and the object within consciousness. (I come back to this point below.)
Hegel on Philosophy of Nature and Cognition
It will be useful to test Hegel’s constructivist approach to cognition against his views of nature and logic. Hegel’s philosophy of nature requires discussion in any study of German idealist cognition. Philosophy of nature was important around the turning of the nineteenth century. With the obvious exception of Fichte—who was not grounded in natural science—in different ways, the other German idealists are all interested in this theme.
Hegel’s views of nature have been controversial since their inception. His Philosophy of Nature immediately attracted controversy on publication. It was widely rejected in its own time as based on mere ignorance—for instance, by the biologist Schleiden in 184430—and it was later lampooned. More recently, Hegel’s account of nature has been criticized by Popper (a dogged but uninformed and, as concerns Hegel, uninsightful critic), in the context of a wide-ranging attack on supposed enemies of freedom;31 and by Russell32 on the basis of insufficient information about Hegel’s scientific views.
Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature stood out in the general rejection of idealism and romanticism after Hegel’s death. It later attained the unfortunate status of a negative paradigm during the second half of the nineteenth century.33 Special ridicule was evoked by Hegel’s supposed a priori proof in the Dissertation that there was not and in fact simply could not be an eighth planet. Yet this is a mere straw man, since Hegel does not offer such a proof, either a priori or otherwise, in the Dissertation or elsewhere. Rather, he correctly claims there is no reason to believe there is a planet waiting to be discovered between Mars and Jupiter.34 Later, in the Philosophy of Nature, he returns to this problem, which, as he notes, astronomers disdain but that he thinks is important. Here he indicates that although there is, as yet, no law concerning the series formed by the distances between the planets, he is optimistic that in the future this law will be discovered (see PN, p. 82).
Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature is doubly significant: from a purely historical perspective, by virtue of those influenced by it; in itself as a theory of the natural sciences; and as an illustration of his constructivist approach to cognition. It is clearly important in filling out the historical record. Hegel, who was unusually well informed, draws widely on a vast number of views of what was thought about natural science at the time. Petry lists some thirteen pages of references from Hegel’s text—surely an impressive list. This is especially impressive for someone who is widely still thought by those often not well versed on his position to be uninformed about contemporary science.35 It is important in the present context as a test of the claim that his position is constructivist.
Hegel’s view of Naturphilosophie is significant in different ways; for instance, because of the important thinkers known influenced by his conception of nature. According to Buchdahl, who is well acquainted with Hegel’s views of nature, a short list includes Gadamer, Findlay, Heidegger, Bosanquet, McTaggart, Croce, and Royce.36 Hegel is often derided as a main example of someone who does not know enough about science to deserve to be taken seriously. Others, who know more about Hegel, are more tolerant and likely to be impressed by the unusual breadth of his erudition.37 According to Petry, who has studied Hegel’s views of science with care, Hegel’s account of natural science is one of the most sophisticated and informed analyses we possess of the whole range of nineteenth-century science.38
Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature is, like all his writings, difficult to interpret. Among the many difficulties is the sometimes nearly impenetrable quality of Hegel’s language in this and other texts, the frequent inability to decide what Hegel has in mind, false legends about it that obstruct an accurate reading of the text, and so on. Despite recent attention to Hegel’s conception of nature,39 it is unclear that the debate is making progress. According to Stone, Hegel offers an a priori account of nature.40 Yet this point, which cannot be demonstrated on textual grounds, would be clearly inconsistent with Hegel’s consistently a posteriori approach to cognition throughout his writings.
Any approach to Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature needs to observe a basic distinction between his account of the details of modern science (which obviously now needs to be brought up to date) and the overall intent of Hegel’s theory (which, depending on the interpretation, is arguably as valid now as when it was initially formulated).41 It is sometimes suggested that Hegel intends to present not a work based on observation or experience, but rather a work of philosophy in the tradition of Aristotle’s Physics, Kant’s Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, or perhaps even Plato’s Timaeus—in short, an account of the ultimate conceptual structure of nature.
Though Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature is eminently worth studying in itself, we will discuss it in the context of his constructivist approach to cognition. (Hence it will not be possible to mention recent efforts to argue for or against Hegel’s treatment of specific examples, such as mechanics, chemistry, and so on.) Buchdahl, for instance, laments a curious paucity of attention Hegel directs to epistemic themes.42 On the contrary, the epistemic theme is a central concern in this work, which illustrates Hegel’s constructivist approach within the restricted sphere of the natural sciences in the early nineteenth century. In the Phenomenology, Hegel strikingly claims that substance becomes subject. He illustrates that perspective here specifically through an account of the natural sciences as they were known in his day.
If we judge by the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, then—along with phenomenology and logic—philosophy of nature is one of Hegel’s central themes. In the Differenzschrift, Hegel generally supports Schelling’s concern with philosophy of nature in brief but friendly remarks. After he published the Phenomenology and broke with Schelling, Hegel remained interested in philosophy of nature. That work contains a long passage on observing nature. In the Encyclopedia, Hegel devotes an entire volume to this theme. Hegel’s intention is not to build on Schelling’s approach to nature, which he here sharply rejects. In the Phenomenology, Hegel sharply criticizes Schelling’s abstract conception of the absolute. In the Philosophy of Nature, he objects to Schelling’s uninformed, superficial, formalistic approach to the philosophy of nature, to his mystical reliance on intuition, as well as to his “charlatanism,” which, Hegel suggests, discredits the entire field of inquiry (see PN, p. 1). Hinman—who has devoted special attention to Schelling’s philosophy of nature, but who never mentions Hegel—offers a similar view.43
Kant, Schelling and Hegel present rival conceptions of philosophy of nature. Kant argues for objective cognition in natural science through an a priori approach. Kant’s philosophy of nature features a priori necessity, which Hegel reinterprets as necessity intrinsic to the concept. In the Phenomenology Hegel considers and rejects the Kantian a priori approach to knowledge in favor of an a posteriori approach based on the interaction between the knower and the known.
Kant elucidates the conditions of natural science in general; Hegel seeks to determine the real conditions of natural science as it exists. According to Hegel, we must grasp the idea as concrete, or in other words, as immanent (see PN, p. 4). His point seems to be that since reason is immanent, we do not import the idea into the phenomena; rather, we find it there. Hegel brings out this point by noting that physics starts from determinations internal to nature, which it considers in terms of its immanent necessity (see PN, p. 6). In other words, philosophy of nature consists in so-called “thinking consideration of nature,” or consideration of general principles in terms of what Hegel calls the “immanent necessity” of the concept (PN, p, 7), which is possible since the idea is present “in the form of otherness” (PN, §247, p. 13).
This obscure formulation suggests not only that thought can know being—which is routinely presupposed in all forms of natural science—but also that philosophy of nature does so on a deeper level than is possible in the natural sciences. At stake is the form of constructivism Hegel formulates in the Phenomenology and applies here in his account of nature. The problem is posed in the following terms: “Nature has presented itself as the Idea in the form of otherness. Since therefore the Idea is the negative of itself, or is external to itself, Nature is not merely external in relation to this Idea (and to its subjective existence Spirit); the truth is rather that externality constitutes the specific character in which Nature, as Nature, exists” (PN, §247, 13–14).
In a remark appended to the former paragraph, Hegel clearly says that philosophy—including philosophy of nature—is justified through conceptual necessity but must agree with empirical knowledge, which it presupposes. Hegel obviously thinks physics is abstract, but philosophy, which is concrete, restates abstract universals in conceptual form lying beyond physics. Metaphysics concerns universal or general “thought determinations.” Both physics and philosophy of nature are metaphysical. The former is abstract and formal; but the latter, which is concrete, features an identity in difference, or the identity of itself and what is finite. In other words, philosophy of nature brings together the theoretical and the practical, or the abstract universal and sheer individuality.
It is helpful to consider his Philosophy of Nature in the context of the history of philosophy as well as contemporary philosophy of nature. In the present age of specialization, philosophical debate tends to be increasingly narrow. The very idea that a single individual can effectively embrace more than one highly focused theme is often taken as an indication that such a person has nothing to say.
Cosmological speculation about the universe is older than Western philosophy. Accounts of the emergence of Western philosophy in ancient Greece out of cosmological speculation typically treat natural science as an important theme within a wider perspective, which, as in our time, it has not yet usurped. This holistic perspective returns in Hegel’s broad, very well-informed treatment of natural science in the context of his Encyclopedia. There it is one of three main themes that, with logic and spirit, constitute the main axes of Hegel’s encyclopedic treatment of the topic, as the title of the work suggests. When Hegel was active, his main rival among recent thinkers as an encyclopedic thinker was, of course, the dogmatist Wolff, and further afield it was certainly Aristotle. The difference—which is important—is that the latter, like Kant, made basic contributions to the science of his day (in Aristotle’s case, biology; in Kant’s case, astrophysics). Though Hegel studied natural science as it was known when he was active, he was never active in natural science. His contribution to this domain lies in thinking about its fundamental problems on the philosophical plane.
The general theme of philosophy of nature is certainly not new. In different ways, it is part of the ancient Greek holistic approach of including natural science within philosophy. In ancient philosophy, Plato, Aristotle, and others discuss the foundations of philosophy as science as well as natural science. Aristotle’s empirical studies of biological phenomena decisively influence his general philosophical standpoint. After Greek philosophy, the link between philosophy and science was often maintained, but philosophers were rarely directly active in the natural sciences. Increasing specialization, which arose after Kant, has—since the decline of German idealism, the rise of neo-Kantianism, and the emergence of analytic philosophy—become increasingly important. Generalists like Plato or Aristotle, Descartes and Leibniz, Kant and Hegel, and more recently Cassirer are now clearly frowned upon and increasingly rare.
The familiar distinction between philosophy, science, and philosophy of science as separate subdisciplines is relatively recent. At the time Hegel was writing, science and philosophy had not yet been clearly separated. They were clearly intertwined in Newton’s Principia. They were still intertwined in the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence (1715–1716), which makes no distinction between technical problems of physics and the other sciences, or more general questions of metaphysics and theology. They are further intertwined in Kant’s writings. And the term is still in use late in the nineteenth century.44
The contemporary distinction between natural science and philosophy of nature later became established for two reasons. First, there was the increasing disinterest of physicists in philosophy. Second, there was increasing philosophical interest in the distinction between philosophy and science; for instance, in modern philosophy of science. In German idealism, this difference is presupposed in philosophical accounts of modern science, which in Hegel becomes explicit.
Not only the views, but also the general orientations of Kant, Schelling, and Hegel toward nature are very dissimilar. Hegel’s approach develops in relation to then-contemporary philosophy of nature, including among philosophers the great German idealists, and among scientists, above all, Newton. Other than the fact that Hegel constantly measures his position against Kant’s, it is difficult to say how his approach to natural science relates to Kant’s. Perhaps the safest thing to say is that the Kantian and Hegelian conceptions of nature are basically different.
In his mature period, Kant is consistently focused on formulating a general theory of the possibility of knowledge, including in modern natural science as it arose in the seventeenth century. He is not concerned, as Aristotle earlier was and Hegel later is with a biological model, which only reemerges in the second global scientific revolution. He is also uninterested in non-classical science, which begins to emerge only at the end of the nineteenth century.45
Natural science for Kant, who was active before the emergence of modern biology or chemistry, mainly means physics. His model is Newtonian mechanics. Kant’s focus on justifying, or grounding, natural science through philosophy is a later version of the Platonic view that philosophy, which is self-grounding, grounds both mathematics and natural science. When Hegel was writing, modern biology was in the process of emerging, but modern psychology had not become a separate discipline. For Kant, natural science and cognition itself come to a peak and to an end in the critical philosophy. Hegel, on the contrary, provides a speculative account of what would now be called the fundamental principles or the basis of natural science. Since natural science is independent of philosophy, he thinks it can be understood but cannot be justified, grounded, or legitimated through philosophy—which, hence, cannot bring it to an end.
Kant came from astrophysics to philosophy, and he remained interested in physics, to which he contributed, throughout his career. Kant often appears to run natural philosophy and the philosophy of nature together. In the Critique of the Power of Judgment, he invokes teleology in discussing subjective purpose in aesthetic phenomena and objective purpose in respect to nature. In the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science—Kant’s most important discussion of physics in the so-called critical period—it remains unclear if he is focusing on science, on philosophy of science, on both, or even on something else. Kant, who is a Newtonian, thinks natural science provides cognition of nature. He is centrally concerned with justifying the possibility of Newtonian science. He clearly thinks that in the work of Galileo and other seventeenth-century physicists, science has entered on a so-called secure path. He further believes that Newtonian mechanics has provided a definitive solution of the main problems of physics.
Kant and Hegel both employ a metaphysical approach to natural science, which they understand in basically different ways. In the Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, Kant is less concerned with speculating about the foundations of natural science than developing Newtonian mechanics beyond Newton. Kant’s project in this book can be understood in different ways. According to Friedman, Kant is concerned here with integrating the extension of Newton’s gravitational astronomy to cosmology and his own dynamic theory of matter46 in a constructivist theory of nature. In Friedman’s account, Kantian constructivism is unrelated to idealist metaphysics, but rather is central to Kant’s effort to ground Newtonian mechanics.47
Kant’s metaphysical approach to philosophy of nature is intended to present rational cognition from concepts. As applied to natural science, Kant insists, metaphysics “contains the pure actions of thought, and thus a priori concepts and principles, which first bring the manifold of empirical representations [sic] into the law-governed connection through which it can become empirical cognition, [sic] that is, experience.”48 According to Kant, unlike the other sciences, metaphysics does not depend on the data of intuition.49 Hegel, on the contrary, is concerned not with extending modern natural science; rather, he seeks to comprehend its basic concepts. He is especially concerned to distinguish between philosophy of nature and physics.
Since Fichte is neither knowledgeable about nor even interested in natural science, it is not surprising that his name does not appear in Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature. Hegel’s view of Schelling’s conception of natural science evolves from a minimally favorable (or at least neutral) attitude in the Differenzschrift to a highly unfavorable view in the Philosophy of Nature. Schelling is not mentioned in the Dissertation, where Hegel focuses on a critique of Newton’s theory of gravitation. In the Differenzschrift, Hegel takes Schelling’s side of the dispute with Fichte about the need to supplement transcendental philosophy with philosophy of nature. In short, he supports the view—implicit in the distinction between subjective idealism and objective idealism—that one needs to go beyond the subject to reach the objective world. Yet he does not support, but also does not criticize, Schelling’s philosophy of nature. By the time Hegel wrote the Philosophy of Nature, he had already distanced himself from Schelling. Here he takes the opportunity to denounce the latter’s conception of science, as mentioned, in unusually harsh terms.
Hegel notes early in the introduction that the view of philosophy as the basis of all further education is no longer held, and that because of recent very crude efforts—especially by Schelling—philosophy of nature is especially discredited. Hegel thinks we should reject all forms of charlatanism about philosophy of nature, but denies we should reject philosophy of nature.
According to Hegel, the philosophy of nature is rational physics, which is older than physics, and which was separated from physics in only modern times; for instance, in Wolff’s distinction between cosmology and physics. Hegel, who contests this distinction, thinks Wolff provides a world metaphysics that is no more than a series of abstract categories in the understanding. Hegel holds that rational physics and physics are more closely related than usually thought. In the Phenomenology, he suggests art, philosophy, and religion overlap; art and religion represent what only philosophy knows. Hegel here makes a similar claim about physics and rational physics, which employ different perspectives. Physics regards itself as an empirical science, hence as intrinsically different from and opposed to philosophy of nature. Hegel believes this opposition disappears from the perspective of philosophy of nature, since he thinks physics and rational physics differ only through “the kind and manner of their thought.”50 This suggests rational physics, or philosophy of nature understands physics, which misunderstands itself.
According to Hegel, to understand the concept of the philosophy of nature, we must first understand nature and only then work out the difference between physics and rational physics. His approach is intended to unite both theoretical and practical aspects. He draws attention to the distinction between nature (which is immediate and external) and human being (which correctly understands itself as an end) in pointing to finite teleology. Hegel, who notes that Aristotle was already interested in a teleological approach to the nature of things, extends this approach in remarking that the “true teleological method” consists in “regarding Nature as free in his own peculiar vital activity” (PN, §245, p. 6.).
Philosophy of nature and physics are two forms of the thinking consideration of nature. The difference between philosophy of nature and physics lies in the way they go to nature. Physics goes directly to nature to obtain universal knowledge, but philosophy of nature starts with “determinations external to nature” (PN, §246, p. 6), such as “mass,” “force,” and so on, which it scrutinizes and presupposes, and which must agree with empirical physics. The difference lies in the treatment of the phenomena. Physics is concerned with natural laws, but philosophy of nature is concerned with “immanent necessity in accordance with the self-determination of the concept” (PN, §246, p. 6, translation modified). The foundation or basis of science, hence physics, is conceptual necessity. He explains this point by suggesting that nature presents itself in the form of externality. Nature does not exhibit freedom, but rather shows only necessity or contingency. Hegel here is making two points: first, there is an idea in nature; second, since this idea is rational, it can be cognized.
Hegel’s assumption that all phenomena are intrinsically rational, hence can be grasped by reason, is one of his oldest conceptions. For instance, at the beginning of the third part of his Dissertation, which centers on planetary orbits, Hegel insists—in terminology he employs at the beginning of his career before he discovered the concept of spirit—that human reason can and in fact does grasp nature.51 In the Philosophy of Nature he suggests nature forms a system or series of stages arising through the development of the immanent idea. Hegel, who considers various conceptual models, suggests that the concept develops through contradictions.
Hegel acknowledges two different kinds of cognition: empirical cognition derived from experience—which is central to natural science, above all physics; and a speculative conceptual framework exemplified throughout philosophy, including philosophy of nature. The empirical and the speculative frameworks have different functions. The empirical framework emerges from and depends on experience. The speculative conceptual framework, which is Hegel’s version of the Kantian transcendental deduction, subtends cognition of any and all experience—in this case, scientific cognition of nature.
Hegel’s view of nature seems different from the theory he advances in the Phenomenology. The latter work features an experimental approach to cognition, understood as identity in difference, which in turn is based on the interaction between experience and an experientially derived, conceptual framework. In comparison to the critical philosophy—which advances indefeasible, a priori claims to know—Hegel proposes a more modest empirical approach.
This side of Hegel’s position has often been overlooked in favor of Hegel’s other, less restrained speculative approach to cognition. With reason, Hegel has often been understood as making stronger, less modest claims. This point is made in different ways. Those who know—or at least, should know—how difficult it is to say with certainty what Hegel intends in his texts are sometimes least hesitant in making definitive pronouncements. According to Findlay, Hegelianism in general—especially including the Philosophy of Nature—is “an essay in Absolute-theory, an attempt to frame the notion or to work out the logic of an Absolute, by which is to be understood something whose existence is both self-explanatory and all-explanatory, an inheritor, in short, of the religious conception of a God, as of the various materialisms, idealisms, spiritualisms, etc., whose objects have been given some of the notional ultimacy and uniqueness of a God.”52
Distantly following Kant, Hegel approaches nature in terms of a conception of necessity. Kant’s philosophy of nature features a priori necessity, which Hegel reinterprets as necessity intrinsic to the concept. It will be convenient, in characterizing Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, to follow his accounts of the so-called notion or concept of knowledge of nature, and then on this basis the distinction between physics and philosophy of nature. Hegel begins in noting—perhaps with Newton in mind—that what is now called physics was earlier called philosophy of nature (PN, §246, p. 6). This approach has conceptual consideration of the universal or general (Allgemeine) as its object, which it studies through its own immanent conceptual necessity (PN, §246, 6). This obscure claim can be read as indicating that Hegel’s treatment of nature focuses on the underlying conceptual framework. This in turn presupposes empirical knowledge of nature, and hence that theoretical knowledge is based on and “adjusts” to natural objects as given in experience. In broader terms, Hegel apparently believes philosophy—which begins but does not end in experience—transforms empirical, abstract results into a so-called “intrinsically necessary whole”—that is, a unity based on concepts and subtending the merely apparent “separability” of different things (PN, p. 10). In other words, philosophy differs from physics in that its concepts are not abstract or formal, but concrete, and hence grasp particularity.
Nature, for Hegel, is what he darkly calls “the Idea in the form of otherness,” (PN, §247, p. 14), which is the ideal, or concrete, realization of the idea. The difference at this level between philosophy of nature and physics is that the former contains a series of conceptual links, whereas the latter relies on physical laws. Hence, as he says, its conceptual treatment posits particularity (PN, §249, remark, p. 20). Hegel discerns a contradiction in nature in that the idea (or concept) is, as he puts it, external to it, and hence takes form in different ways according to conceptual necessity, and that there is sheer contingency in nature. It should not be lost in this purple prose that Hegel is not proposing to construe or to deduce nature from philosophy (see PN, §250, remark, p. 23).
Hegel now goes beyond the inorganic to consider organic nature, or nature itself, which “is, in itself, a living Whole” (PN, §251, p. 24). He seems to mean that the conceptual framework is a unified, self-developing entity that reaches its highest level in spirit. It is difficult to overlook the parallel between Kant’s view that human being is the highest point of nature and Hegel’s conviction that in spirit, nature reaches its truth, its final goal, and its so-called genuine actuality. In other words, Hegel understands conceptual development as teleological.
Hegel’s Critique of Newton
In view of the present focus on constructivism, it will not be possible to treat either Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature or the surrounding debate in detail. It will be useful to attend to a notorious example—namely, Hegel’s critique of Newtonian mechanics from the perspective of his constructivist approach. This critique runs throughout his writings as a consistent theme both early and late in signaling Hegel’s effort to formulate his view of nature. It will be useful to examine this point briefly in the Dissertation where it is already visible, then later in more detail in the Philosophy of Nature, and finally (and more briefly) in the History of Philosophy.
Hegel’s critique of Newton was unusual for the beginning of the nineteenth century. Newton’s preeminent role in natural philosophy—his term for what is now called natural science—extends at least from the late-seventeenth to the early-twentieth century. For Kant, writing in the second half of the eighteenth century, Newtonian mechanics is the peak of modern science. He strongly supports the Newtonian approach in various ways. As part of his a priori approach to cognition, Kant holds an anti-fallibilist conception of natural science. His remark that Newton has proven the Copernican hypothesis (noted above) suggests that modern natural science, which was earlier merely hypothetical, has in fact been demonstrated. This in turn suggests a view of natural science as unrevisable—a standard that has, in practice, never been reached. Kant’s formulation of his version of the nebular hypothesis is further conducted along Newtonian lines. Though he rejects the Newtonian view of absolute space, and he acknowledges Newton’s inability to explain attraction at a distance, he explicitly affirms the latter’s universal theory of gravitation.
Hegel’s critical reception of Newtonian mechanics is motivated by a number of issues. To begin with, there is the proper understanding of the relation of philosophy and science, which Newton regards as continuous but which Hegel distinguishes. When Hegel was active, this distinction was still emerging. A second point is the proper understanding of natural science. Hegel holds a fallibilist conception, which is incompatible both with Kant’s apodictic, hence non-fallibilist or “infallibilist” conception as well as with Newton’s suggestion that the laws of nature can be deduced from the phenomena. Hegel is further concerned with rethinking the role of philosophy with respect to natural science. He holds a version of the view familiar as early as Plato that science raises questions about itself it cannot answer but that call for philosophical elucidation. For instance, Hegel is concerned with the proper way to grasp the relation of natural science to logic and spirit, the two other main themes in the Encyclopedia. Finally, Hegel, who has strong historical interests, is also concerned with correcting the evaluation of the roles of Kepler and Newton in modern planetary astronomy.
Hegel’s polemical attack on Newton merely continues the polemics surrounding Newtonian mechanics. Newton was, of course, no stranger to controversy. Everyone knows that Newton and Leibniz disputed the discovery of calculus. It is also well known that when the first book of Newton’s Principia was presented at a meeting of the Royal Society in 1686, Robert Hooke accused him of plagiarism concerning the inverse square law. Hegel’s critique of Newtonian mechanics—still the central scientific theory at the time he was writing—begins in the Dissertation, is developed in detail in the Philosophy of Nature, and is restated more briefly and in different form in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy.
Hegel’s approach to natural science in general and Newton in particular is based on a critical attitude towards empiricism. Hegel criticizes an empiricist approach to cognition in different ways. In the Phenomenology, in the account of sense certainty, he rejects the effort to go directly to experience, which is not the richest but rather the poorest form of knowledge. In the Encyclopedia Logic, in his account of three “Positions of Thought to Objectivity” (EL, §§37–60), he discusses empiricism (EL, §§37–39) before turning to the critical philosophy, which he examines as a form of empiricism. According to Hegel, empiricism, which arises to counter abstract metaphysics, intends to remain on the finite plane but unwittingly falls into metaphysics. This illusion is especially patent in so-called scientific empiricism: “The fundamental delusion in scientific empiricism is always that it uses the metaphysical categories of matter, force (not to mention those of the one, the many, universality, and infinity, etc.). . . . [It is] ignorant that in so doing it itself contains and pursues metaphysics and that it uses those categories and their relationships in a completely uncritical and unconscious fashion.” (EL, §38, p. 79).
There is a clear link in Hegel’s mind between philosophical and scientific empiricism. He points out that Hume—whom he takes as the high point of modern empiricism—bases his skepticism on taking the truth of the empirical as basic and distinguishing it from universal claims (see EL, §38, remark, p. 79; see also §47, pp. 50, 53). This same approach is patent in science as well. As concerns scientific metaphysics, Hegel’s most prominent target is obviously Newton, whom he regards as inconsistent. Like Kant, Hegel defends metaphysics. He notes that Newton, who enjoys a reputation in England as the greatest philosopher (EL, §7, p. 35), calls for banishing metaphysics but fails to heed his own advice (see EL, §98, addition, p. 155).
In the preface to the first edition of Philosophiae Naturalis Principia Mathematica, Newton proclaims his empiricism when he writes, “For the whole difficulty of philosophy appears to be to discover the forces of nature from the phenomena and then to demonstrate the other phenomena from these forces.”53 Observers agree that in book 3 of the Principia, Newton claims to establish gravitation from planetary and lunar motion—in short, from Kepler’s work—and then from gravitation to explain the tides, the shape of the earth, the precessions of the equinoxes, and so on. It is plausible Newton conflates philosophy and physics in claiming to be doing philosophy when he is doing physics, in claiming to deduce the laws of nature from the phenomena when he in fact relies on mathematics,54 and so on.
From Hegel’s perspective, Newton, who erroneously claims to be an empiricist, is doubly mistaken. First, he is not an empiricist since he does not rely on experience but in fact relies on mathematics. Second, empiricism is sufficient for physics, but insufficient for the thinking consideration of nature—the aim of philosophy of nature. In short, Hegel proposes that modern natural science—which reaches a high point in Newtonian mechanics—arose by replacing a phenomenological approach worked out by Kepler through a causal approach based on the substitution of forces for Kepler’s laws. This account is in all points similar to Kant’s later claim that Newton proved the Copernican hypothesis.
Hegel’s Dissertation, which is entitled De orbitis planetarum, or more formally Dissertatio Philosophica de Orbitis Planetarum (Philosophische Erörterung über die Planetenbahnen), was written in Latin, as was the custom, and defended by Hegel in August 1801. It begins by calling attention to two basic questions: the conception of nature, and the distinction between physics (or natural philosophy) and philosophy of nature. Hegel is well aware that philosophy of nature goes back into the early tradition and continues up to the present. He remarks that (1) it is not a new science, since Aristotelian physics is far more philosophy than physics, and (2) it is only recently that Wolff—for Kant as well as Hegel, a dogmatic, precritical thinker—has separated philosophy from physics through an abstract metaphysics. According to Hegel, physics and philosophy of nature, which are closer than often realized, differ mainly in their particular kinds of the thinking apprehension of nature.
In general, Hegel raises two related complaints against Newton’s approach to mechanics. First, he complains about the widespread misunderstanding of what Newton did and did not do, leading to an unjust preference for the latter’s view over Kepler’s. In short, Newton incorrectly claims to deduce the laws of planetary motion from experience, which Kepler in fact did. Second, Hegel thinks Newton conflates the a priori and the a posteriori, and depends more on a mathematical approach than on the empirical data by slighting the phenomena. Both complaints point to what Hegel thinks is a false comprehension of the proper approach to cognition based on a misunderstanding of the specific contribution of Newtonian mechanics. The first point concerns a mistaken estimate of Newton’s accomplishment, which pretends to be a posteriori, since Newton famously claims he does not make hypotheses but is rather an a priori (or at least relatively a priori) thinker. In Hegel’s eyes, Kepler’s approach is a posteriori; but by virtue of the amount of mathematical results, what Kepler accomplished is not correctly appreciated.
As concerns experience, there is an analogy between Kant and Newton. Both claim to go beyond mere hypothesis—the former in pretending to deduce his principles from experience, and the latter in basing the claim for a priori cognition on experience. Kant, who insists that all knowledge begins in experience, claims to cognize from an a priori perspective. Yet he inconsistently takes experience into account. For instance, he consistently judges a given science by its success—which he regards as the criterion of cognitive success—by adopting what appears to some observers as a confused form of pragmatism.55 It is because logic and mathematics have not needed to take a step backward that he thinks these sciences are on a secure course. And it is because it has never been possible to find out something a priori about objects if cognition must conform to them, he thinks that we should try as an experiment the assumption that objects must conform to our cognition. Newton, on the contrary, claims to rely on experience but in fact relies on mathematics. Thus he denies that hypothesis has any place in what he calls experimental philosophy; he suggests that principles should be deduced from the phenomena, though he concedes that he is unable to do this for gravitation.56
Hegel—who defends an experimental approach to philosophy—is, like Kant, not an empiricist but also opposed to claims to go beyond the limits of the empirical. Hegel thinks a scientific theory can be constructed on the basis of experience, but not deduced from it. His objection—that Newton claims to deduce from experience what he rather deduces from mathematics—is unclear. Hegel might be objecting to the use of mathematics before clarifying the relation between mathematics and natural science. He might also be objecting to the application of mathematics, as the language of science, to nature. In the latter case, his objection would go to the heart of the rise of the new science through the successful mathematical representation of nature by Galileo and others.
Hegel points out it is no accident that Newton calls his famous work “Principles of Natural Philosophy.” A theory constructed on the basis of experience can later be tested by confronting it with further experience. A theory that, like the critical philosophy, is deduced is not fallible but infallible, and cannot be justified through experience. Hegel, who thinks theories are not and cannot be deduced from experience, has two points in mind. First, Newton incorrectly describes his own procedure, which is only supposedly empirical. Second, the procedure he describes cannot in fact be applied to knowledge of experience.
Hegel’s attack on Newton presupposes the rehabilitation of Kepler. The latter formulated his laws of planetary motion not—as Newton suggests—by deducing them, but rather by looking for ways to understand the available astronomical data. Kepler was apparently widely ignored by the founders of the new science, including Descartes and Galileo. Hegel thinks the celebration of Newton for proving the laws of planetary motion is a mistake. Since it is not possible to prove through experience what is in fact derived from mathematics, Newton did not prove the laws of nature. If the laws of nature are based on experience, they cannot be proven but only refuted in experience. Hegel is especially concerned with the problematic relation between mathematics and physics, for what is the case in mathematics is not necessarily the case in physics. Since Kepler’s approach, unlike Newton’s, accords with correct procedure, Hegel thinks his accomplishment should be recognized.
In the opening lines of the first part of the Dissertation, in an important passage that deserves to be cited at length, Hegel writes:
Whoever approaches this part of physics soon realizes that it is rather a mechanics than a physics of the heavens and that astronomy’s laws derive their origin from another science, from mathematics, rather than actually having been teased from nature or constructed by reason. Our great countryman Kepler, blessed with the gift of genius as he was, discovered the laws according to which the planets circulate in their orbits. Later, Newton was celebrated for proving these laws not from physical, but from geometrical grounds, and also, despite that, for integrating astronomy into physics. . . .
What Newton did was to compare the magnitude of gravity shown by experience for bodies forming part of our earth with the magnitude of celestial motions; he then proceeded to deal with everything else using mathematical reasoning from geometry and calculus. We must be especially wary of this binding of physics with mathematics; we must beware of confusing pure mathematical grounds with physical ones; namely, of blindly taking lines deployed by geometry as helps to construction [sic] in proving its theorems for forces or force directions. . . . For when, in mathematics, geometry abstracts from time and is constituted solely on the principle of space, while arithmetic abstracts from space relying solely on the principle of time, then knowledge connections in the formal whole are clearly quite distinct from the actual relationships of nature, in which space and time are inseparably united. . . . For these reasons we may not mix that knowledge typical of the secure and formal manner of mathematics with physical relationships by attributing physical existence to what only has reality in mathematics.
Not only was Newton careful to call his famous text, in which he describes the laws of motion and gives examples of them from the world system, “mathematical principles of natural philosophy;” he also reminds us repeatedly that he uses the expressions “attraction,” “impulse” and “propensity towards a centre” indiscriminately and interchangeably taking these forces not in the physical but only in the mathematical sense. The reader must not expect, then, on the basis of such terminology, to find definitions of the types and modes of action, causes, or physical grounds anywhere in Newton’s work. Neither may he attribute true and physical forces to the centres, which are only mathematical points, even when Newton speaks of forces strongly attracting to the centre or of these as central forces. Just what concept Newton had of physics is clear alone from his assertion that perhaps in purely physical terms instead of “attraction” it would have been more correct to say “impulse.” We, however, maintain that “impulse” belongs in mechanics and not in the true physics. . . . It must be said, however, that if Newton really wants to work with mathematical relations then it is astonishing that he resorts to the term “force” at all, for the study of the magnitudes of phenomena belongs in mathematics, while that of force belongs in physics. Newton believed he had explained the relations of force everywhere, but all he in fact did was erect an edifice from a mixture of physics and mathematics making it hard to determine what belonged to physics and really moved it forward.57
In the Philosophy of Nature, Hegel again attacks Newton’s conception of gravitation. In the meantime, he has become acquainted with Goethe, who criticized Newton’s theory of colors in defending a rival view (which Hegel here also favors). In the Philosophy of Nature, Hegel considers and criticizes Newton’s views of gravitation and color separately. In remarks on absolute mechanics, he discusses universal gravitation by building on his earlier remarks in the Dissertation. In comparison, the later treatment of Newton is less detailed but more critical.
Though Hegel indicates that he has been studying Newtonian mechanics for some twenty-five years, his specific treatment of Newtonian mechanics in the Philosophy of Nature is brief (some two and a half pages)—and hence lacks the wealth of detail of the earlier analysis of Newtonianism. Then as now, mathematics—which has long enjoyed the reputation of the queen of the sciences—attracted attention through its supposed rigor, or as Hegel notes because of its quantitative aspect. Universal gravitation, which is mathematical, includes centripetal and centrifugal forces as well as gravitation and the body on which they act. Hegel stresses that gravity rests on the idea of the unity of these apparently different forces.
This brief remark is followed by an addition (Zusatz). Hegel here notes the solar system is composed of independent bodies, or planets, linked together through gravity in reference to a center. Hegel now points out that the difference between the planets is posited relative to the central body—in this case, the sun. The planets could be equidistant from the same center, in which case they would lack difference, but in fact they follow elliptical orbits in retaining their independence, which is Hegel’s way of saying the planets do not fall into the sun. One senses Hegel lacks an adequate language to describe the solar system simply and accurately. He does better in quickly suggesting there are three motions: (1) mechanical motion communicated from the outside, or impetus; (2) the free motion of falling under the impulsion of gravity, or centripetal force; and (3) the unconditionally free motion of what Hegel calls the “great mechanics of the heavens” (his term for centrifugal force), which takes the form of a curve—more precisely, an ellipse.
This much is clear, though not necessarily cogent. Other comments are more problematic; for instance, the statement that “falling is an imperfect manifestation of gravity, and is therefore not real” (PN, pp. 64–65). Hegel goes on to deny that there are individual forces on the grounds that there is only one force. Though he states that the moments of force do not pull in different directions, this seems doubtful, and he provides no proof for his assertion.
In comparison with the focused, detailed treatment of gravitation in the Dissertation, this later treatment is neither focused nor specific. The central earlier complaint—that is, that Newton does not prove his theory of gravitation by deducing it from the phenomena, as he claims in the Scholium—is now wholly absent.
Hegel quickly turns to Kepler’s laws, which he mentions rapidly, and to which he appends a remark of seventeen pages. He claims that Kepler, who relies on research conducted by Brahe, discovered empirically by induction the so-called laws of absolutely free motion, for which Newton is known—by inference, unjustly so—as the first to prove them. Hegel thinks Newton’s main addition to Kepler’s achievement is the so-called principle of perturbation, or deviation of planets from exact elliptical orbits because of the mutual attraction of bodies.
Hegel appears not to grasp the basic difference between Kepler and Newton. Kepler provides a phenomenological description of the phenomena, which Newton, who recasts Kepler’s laws in mathematical form, quantifies within a causal framework. In substituting a causal analysis for a phenomenological description, Newton transforms astronomy along the lines of modern natural science. In that respect, Kepler—whom Hegel is concerned to defend—remains, like Brahe and Copernicus before him, a premodern figure, since his theory is inconsistent with the famous Galilean idea that the book of nature is written in mathematics. Many observers (for instance, Husserl) think this idea is normative for modern science, as it emerged in the seventeenth century. Hegel, who does not seem to grasp this point, describes the difference between the approaches of Kepler and Newton as “a mere difference of the mathematical formula” (PN, p. 67). He indicates as an argument for the priority of Kepler that Newton’s formulae can be deduced from Kepler’s laws.
Hegel thinks Newton’s dependence on a mathematical formulation is not innocent but leads directly to what he calls an “unspeakable metaphysics” (PN, p. 67). In disagreeing with Newton, Kant, of course, holds that natural science depends on metaphysics. Hegel, who rejects this view, believes natural science employs unclarified metaphysical categories based on mathematics, rather than thinking about the conception of the object. According to Kepler, the cubes of the mean distances of the planets are proportional to the squares of their periods of revolution (A3/T2). Hegel, who describes this as one of the most beautiful of scientific laws, says that in formulating the universal law of gravitation, Newton simultaneously obscured Kepler’s accomplishment when recasting it in mathematical form. Yet he concedes that Newton contributes by extending gravity to all celestial motion.
Hegel is very tough on Newton, whom he attacks for unfairly receiving credit for linking the planets to the sun—in short, for discovering universal gravitation. According to Hegel, not only Kepler but Copernicus already had this insight. He further objects that Newton proposes a mistaken proof based on infinitesimal calculus. Newton was, with Leibniz, one of the two main inventors of the calculus. At the time Hegel was writing, the calculus was still very new and there were still unresolved problems with understanding infinitesimals. Hegel’s objection to this conception is rooted in discussion due to Berkeley and others.58
In the Philosophy of Nature, Hegel discusses Newton twice: once in the context of absolute mechanics, which is prior to physics; then once more in the context of the physics of the total individuality. Hegel’s comments on Newton’s theory of color reflect similar comments by his friend Goethe. In this context, Hegel—in abandoning all self-restraint—makes a series of unfortunate remarks about someone widely regarded as a scientific genius, but whom Hegel treats as if were feebleminded. According to Hegel, with respect to color, Newton is inept and incorrect, guilty of bad character in reasoning, suffers from blind prejudice, manifests conceptual barbarism, and so on.
Interest in the nature and properties of light goes back to the ancient Greek and Indian traditions. We can summarize the situation prior to Goethe’s intervention in the debate as follows. Descartes, who was one of the first to hold that light is a mechanical property of a luminous body, is a proponent of the wave theory of light. At the time, the wave theory was supported by Hooke, Euler, and many others. Before Newton, many partisans of the wave theory believed light was white but refracted into different colors of the spectrum by imperfections in the prism. In a famous experiment, Newton passed light through two prisms; as a result, it was decomposed and then recomposed. He contended that since light was composed either of waves or corpuscles, and as a result of the experiment it could not be composed of waves, it must therefore be composed of corpuscles. According to Newton, each color has a specific angle of refraction. He maintained that light is composed of colored particles that, when combined, appear as white.
Newton and Goethe approach light very differently. Newton, who took a causal approach, was concerned with the theory of the visible spectrum. Goethe, who was widely known for his interest in plants and colors, published a book entitled Theory of Colors (Zur Farbenlehre) in 1810. Unlike Newton, Goethe was rather concerned with the phenomenon of color perception (or what might now be called, more generally, phenomenological description). He explicitly says the “[the] intention [of his research] is to portray rather than to understand.”59 Goethe, who studied the perception of light under different conditions, considered Newton’s theory a special case. He criticized Newton’s theory of colors in strong terms, since he thinks it was so important that it impeded free inquiry.60 He further thinks it is not possible to write a history of color while Newton’s theory still exists.61 In refuting Newton, Goethe specifically denies any link between the phenomenon of color and mathematics62 He modestly suggests that his observations concerning the “primordial phenomenon” will provide raw material for philosophical discussion.63
Hegel—who knew Goethe personally—strongly defends Goethe’s view against Newton’s in the Philosophy of Nature. Goethe’s view may have appealed to Hegel in that Goethe was more concerned to collect empirical data than to formulate an explicit theory, in leaving the latter task to the philosopher. It would be natural for Hegel to contact Goethe, since the theory of light plays an important role in Hegel’s account of philosophy of nature. Hegel wrote to Goethe on February 24, 1821 to express his interest in the latter’s conception of the Urphänomenon.64 Goethe answered him on April 13 of the same year.
Goethe’s view attracted interest at the time; someone else influenced by Goethe is Schopenhauer. The young Schopenhauer discussed with Goethe the latter’s views of light. Schopenhauer published a volume entitled On Vision and Colors (Über das Sehn und die Farben) in 1816. The book, which he later reedited, was based on Goethe’s substitution of three pairs of colors (red/green, orange/blue, yellow/violet) in place of the seven colors of Newton’s spectrum. Following Aristotle, Schopenhauer believes colors arise out of a mixture of light and dark.
Goethe’s Theory of Colors contains a violent polemic against Newton. Hegel must have read the book, from which he cites specific passages; he develops a similarly violent polemic against Newton in defense of Goethe in the Philosophy of Nature. The comments about Newton’s and Goethe’s views of light occur in the context of a nearly six-page remark appended to an obscure account of the immaterial being-for-self of form developing into interior existence (PN, §320). In the remark, manifestly following Goethe, Hegel notes that abstract darkness is the opposite of light. Like Goethe, Hegel differentiates the process of darkening, its abstract moments, and their empirical manifestations. He concedes there are difficulties while claiming that physics creates greater difficulties—and hence is less appropriate as an approach to color—by mixing together properties from different spheres. In following Goethe, he calls attention to the difference between specialized conditions and simple, general conditions revealing the archetypal phenomena (Urphänomena, from Urphänomenon) “in which the nature of color reveals itself to an unprejudiced intelligence.” (PN, p. 196). Hegel here takes Goethe’s side in rejecting Newton’s approach to color: “The confusion attaching to a procedure, which makes such a show of precise and well-grounded experiment, while it is in fact crude and superficial, can only be countered by taking account of differences in the modes of origin of the phenomena: one must know what these differences are and one must keep them apart in their distinctive characters” (PN, p. 196).
Hegel, who explicitly follows Goethe’s view of color, states a number of objections to Newton’s theory. According to Hegel, Newton’s theory of white light suggests it is composed of an indeterminate number of colors. We are meant to infer Newton’s visible spectrum cannot adequately represent visual experience. Further according to Hegel, Goethe has shown the “incompetence” of Newton’s observations in his famous two-prism experiment. To support his accusation, Hegel specifically notes that Newton overlooks the role of darkness as a so-called “active factor in producing dimness” (PN, p. 199). He also taxes Newton with blind prejudice in treating his theory of color as if it had a mathematical basis, since its measurements are false and measurement is irrelevant to color. In support of this claim, Hegel further cites the results of a series of contemporaneous application of differential calculus to the phenomena of light.
In a lengthy addition (almost seventeen pages), Hegel directly contrasts Newton’s and Goethe’s views of color in a series of detailed remarks, which depend on a precise grasp of Newton’s and Goethe’s published views. Nothing is to be gained here in following that discussion in detail. The main thrust is clearly to deny Newton’s theory in violent terms perhaps meant to “destroy” it in substituting for it Goethe’s view.
Hegel’s critical remarks in the Dissertation and in the Philosophy of Nature are very different. The comments in the Dissertation indicate that Newton has not in fact carried out his claim to derive his gravitational theory from experience by implicitly suggesting that theories, which cannot be derived from experience, must rather emerge from it. This focus is replaced by a more diffuse attack on Newton’s theories of gravitation and color in the Philosophy of Nature. In the former case, the main point seems to be to call attention to Kepler’s accomplishment in deriving (but not deducing) his laws from experimental data. In the latter case, Hegel follows Goethe’s attack on Newton in suggesting the inadequacy of a mathematical treatment of color phenomena. This critique restates in specific form Hegel’s objection in the Dissertation that the relation between mathematics and phenomena needed to be clarified.
Hegel mentions Newton again, but more briefly, in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, after his account of Puffendorf and before his account of Leibniz. Here he combines and condenses his remarks on Newton’s view of physics and color by now focusing more clearly on his central complaint: Newton, who famously claims to take an empiricist approach to natural science, mistakenly believes that he neither deals with nor require concepts. This approach would (if it were successful) simply obviate Hegel’s effort to revive philosophy of nature from a constructivist perspective. Hegel, who cites Newton’s anti-Kantian maxim—“Physics, beware of metaphysics”65—thinks physics cannot avoid metaphysics, which is the condition of progress (PN, §98, addition, p. 156). In this regard, Hegel formulates two more specific complaints. First, Newton restated physics in substituting the so-called laws of force (or gravitation) for the laws of phenomena, which Hegel earlier credits to Kepler. Second, Newton is bad at experimentation. Hegel’s basic point is that Newton mistakenly thinks that natural science is conducted empirically. Yet by repositioning natural science on a gravitational basis, he is dealing not with the conclusions of empirical research but with concepts. Hence the complaint that Hegel directs against Newton is directed against his supposed empiricism. Though Newtonian empiricism was further extended by Locke, according to Hegel it supposedly misrepresents both the nature of Newton’s contribution as well as of the conduct of physical science.
Hegel on Dialectical Logic and Cognitive Constructivism
Hegel does not reject Newton’s theory of gravitation. He rejects only the underlying theoretical paradigm on which it is based. Hegel’s approach to natural science emerges not from the first volume of the Encyclopedia, but rather through a conception already adumbrated in the Dissertation and then later worked out in the Phenomenology, the Philosophy of Nature and elsewhere. It follows that the Hegelian logical theory is at most consistent with—but not the basis of—views of natural science and cognition in general.
As in the preceding discussion, the remarks on Hegel’s view of logic will be limited to selected aspects of the role of logic within his overall theory of cognition. The frequent identification of Hegel’s logical theories with a single work is obviously unjustified since he formulates his logical views in two works that, though they overlap, depict logic slightly differently. The aim of the theories expounded in the two versions of the Logic can be described as an all-embracing categorical framework starting from an initial concept. This concept—which is not, as for Descartes, known to be true—constitutes the beginning point from which the remainder of the system can be derived: “For it is only the whole of philosophy which is knowledge of the universe as in itself that one organic totality which develops itself out of its own Concept and which, in its self-relating necessity, withdrawing into itself to form a whole, closes with itself to form one world of truth.”66
The Science of Logic, also known as the greater Logic, is an independent work, which was published in two volumes (1812, 1813, 1816). It precedes the so-called lesser Logic, which appeared as the first part of the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in three editions (1817, 1827, 1830). The first volume of the greater Logic comprises “The Objective Logic,” whose two parts appeared in 1812 and 1813. The second volume, which contains “The Subjective Logic,” appeared in 1816. Hegel finished a revision of the first volume of the greater Logic only a week before his untimely death (1831), which hence provides his latest logical views.
The two Logics are often studied separately, and then mainly with precedence given to the greater Logic. Though such an approach has its uses, it will not be followed here, where the focus is on the overall position. For our purposes, it will be useful, as much as possible, to read the two Logics together as separate statements—albeit from slightly different perspectives—of a single conception of logic, which Hegel expounds twice in separate works. In the present context, it will be useful to give preference to the so-called lesser Logic for two reasons: it was composed after the greater Logic, and in this later work, Hegel takes care to situate his view of logic with respect to the historical tradition.
The two works overlap but also differ in a number of ways. The greater Logic is comparatively more detailed, hence easier to grasp than the lesser Logic. The greater Logic also contains the very important chapter entitled “With What Must the Science Begin?” that is closely related to Hegel’s anti-foundationalism, hence to his overall understanding of cognition. The lesser Logic differs from the greater Logic through its concision as well as its important account (in the description of the preliminary concept [Vorbegriff]) of the different positions of thought to objectivity, in which Hegel describes the main contemporary epistemic models as well as his reasons for rejecting them.
Hegel adumbrates his mature conception of logic as early as the Differenzschrift in remarks on speculative philosophy, categories, and identity. The conceptual die is already cast at the beginning of this text. We recall that Hegel here makes four related claims about the critical philosophy: though Kant’s attempt fails, his deduction of the categories is genuine idealism; its principle can be separated from the letter of Kantian theory; the Kantian categories are effectively lifeless; and “the principle of speculation is the identity of subject and object” (D, p. 80). Hegel follows Kant in evoking a philosophical system that (unlike his predecessor) he presumably bases on concepts, not on categories.
As an aid in reconstructing the link of logic to cognitive constructivism, it will be useful to focus on three main points: “The Attitudes of Thought to Objectivity”; dialectic; and cognitive foundationalism and circularity. In the Encyclopedia Logic (§25), Hegel links objectivity to objective thought and truth. Claims to know obviously require an account of the relation of the subject (or thinker) to what is variously described as the real, the cognitive object, objectivity, what is to be known, and so on. Hegel begins with a rapid account of the so-called preliminary concept before turning to analysis of only three positions or attitudes of thought to objectivity (Stellungen des Denkens zur Objektivität) taken from philosophical tradition. Since Hegel’s account is brief, many obvious questions go unanswered. It is, for instance, unclear if he thinks it isexhaustive, or representative of the most important cognitive approaches, or even representative of the most important current approaches. His rapid survey of other views suggests that—even on the traditionally arid level of logic—thought is not independent of, but rather dependent on, its historical moment.
Kant suggests that philosophy worthy of the name begins and ends with the critical philosophy. Hegel, who denies that claim, considers his own position to belong to an ongoing debate. He applies the same approach to the critical philosophy, to which, despite his sharply critical evaluation, he accords a crucial status. Hegel’s account of the three attitudes of thought to objectivity—roughly cognitive strategies—turns on the critical philosophy, which he treats as more important than either its predecessors or successors. Hegel identifies the three attitudes of thought to objectivity he discusses as pre-Kantian, Kantian, and post-Kantian philosophy. He further formulates the logical theory that implicitly counts as a fourth and (in Hegel’s position) finally acceptable alternative. Hence, unlike Kantian transcendental logic—which is allegedly a priori, hence implicitly independent of all prior philosophy—Hegelian logic is explicitly dependent on the prior philosophical tradition.
Attitudes of Thought to Objectivity
The first attitude is illustrated by prior, or dogmatic, metaphysics that Kant thinks prevailed before the critical philosophy and when he was active, and that arguably today is still widespread. It consists in the naïve belief—which asserts but does not know—that through sense perception the so-called abstract understanding can go directly to objects “as they really are.” Kant’s apparently neutral term “prior metaphysics” (neutral since it seemingly includes no value judgment) is intended to distinguish between earlier, arguably mistaken forms of metaphysics, which qualify as dogmatic since they do not feature the Kantian standard of failing to examine the conditions of their possibility, and his conception of the future science of metaphysics. Kant—who does not explicitly consider the views of, say, Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, or other scholastic metaphysicians—mainly has in mind the so-called Leibniz-Wolffian philosophy, which supposedly reached a highpoint in Wolff.
Observers often think Kant was educated in the Leibniz-Wolffian philosophy, but later became its staunch enemy. He seems to reject the Leibniz-Wolffian perspective as essentially useless (see CPR, B 61, B 865). Kant thinks someone who merely learns a philosophical system, such as the Leibniz-Wolffian philosophy, has acquired historical cognition (cognitio ex datis) but not yet acquired rational cognition (cognitio ex principiis). He pointedly remarks that such a person is merely “a plaster cast of a living human being” (CPR, B 864, p. 693). Other observers believe Kant rejects Wolff but—despite critical remarks, for instance, about preestablished harmony—aligns himself with Leibniz.67
The many points of overlap between Kant and Wolff include: an interest in Leibniz, emphasis on the practical importance of philosophy, application of the mathematical method to philosophy, a strongly systematic approach, interest in the principle of sufficient reason, and so on. Kant rejects Wolff’s approach dogmatic approach, since he fails to criticize pure reason. Yet he admires his predecessor as the greatest of the dogmatic philosophers in virtue of his clear, well-grounded exposition “of the way in which the secure course of a science is to be taken” (CPR, B xxxvi, p. 120). This mild praise does not detract from Kant’s sharp rejection of Wolff’s approach. Kant, who believes metaphysics must be a science in his rigorous sense of the term or nothing at all (see P 122), applies this same inflexible standard mercilessly to any and all forms of pre-critical philosophy, including the views of Wolff, scholastic metaphysics, and so on. “Critique stands to the ordinary school metaphysics precisely as chemistry stands to alchemy, or astronomy to the fortune-teller’s astrology” (P 117). Kant thinks a dogmatic metaphysical approach is incapable of providing apodictic proof, which alone meets the scientific criterion of critical philosophy.
Hegel’s evaluation of Kant resembles the latter’s judgment on Wolff. Hegel thinks Kant vastly overstates the difference between himself and his predecessors. He mistakenly believes the critical philosophy will soon be forgotten. This striking lack of generosity on the part of a thinker who consistently strives to find something of value in all his predecessors is inconsistent with his own attitude towards the history of philosophy. It contradicts his view, surely correct, that the critical philosophy is central to the further development of modern theory of cognition. Kant bases his case for the difference not in degree but in kind between the critical philosophy and its predecessors on its critical status, which supposedly breaks with all prior approaches to cognition. Hegel, on the contrary, consistently denies Kant’s claim to break with his predecessors in treating the critical philosophy as merely another form of dogmatism.
Here and elsewhere, Hegel specifically denies Kant’s crucial claim to criticize reason before employing it. This amounts to denying that the critical philosophy is critical. In short, Hegel rejects Kantian claim for a difference in kind between the critical philosophy and pre-critical metaphysics. In the Encyclopedia, he compares the Kantian criterion of philosophical science to trying to learn to swim without going in the water (see EL, §10, Remark p. 38). Hegel believes dogmatic metaphysics, which uncritically considers thought determinations as the basic limitations of things (Grundbestimmungen der Dinge), or the predicates of truth (Prädikate des Wahren), neither begins nor ends with Kant. It is especially pervasive in pre-Kantian philosophy and in all forms of natural science. In our time, this attitude is widespread in the uncritical commitment to metaphysical realism. Despite Kant’s intervention, the metaphysics of the past continues unaltered not only in Hegel’s day but also in ours.
Pre-Kantian metaphysics uncritically assumes a basic isomorphism between thought and being in taking “the thought-determinations as the fundamental determinations of things” (EL, §28, p. 68). This amounts to uncritically assigning predicates to the absolute, Hegel’s term for mind-independent reality. Hegel thinks the dogmatic metaphysical claim to grasp mind-independent reality, which has been on the agenda at least since Parmenides, runs directly contrary to the critical philosophy, for which the real lies beyond cognition. Dogmatic metaphysics assumes without inquiry there is a fixed and unalterable categorial set adequate for any and all items of experience. Though he claims to be a critical thinker, Kant makes a similar assumption.
In reference to dogmatic metaphysics, Hegel seems to have in mind the Leibniz-Wolffian philosophy, especially Wolff, as well as the critical philosophy. This form of naïve realism applies equally well to Plato, Aristotle, and aboveall Descartes. In criticizing prior metaphysics Hegel does not distance himself from but rather aligns himself with Kant. Hegel, like Kant, adopts as his standard the Copernican revolution. Like the author of the critical philosophy, Hegel rejects all pre-Kantian theories of knowledge in which the relation of thought to objectivity is understood along traditional lines as a cognitive grasp of an already constituted mind-independent external object. The important difference is that for Hegel Kant also belongs to the amorphous category of uncritical metaphysics.
If a priori critique of the cognitive instrument is not possible, though Kant’s intention is clear the significance of his opposition to prior metaphysics is unclear. This suggests two further points. First, it is probable that what Kant and following him most observers call his critical period is not discontinuous but rather continuous with his pre-critical period. In other words, it is difficult, perhaps not possible to sort out what is critical, or not yet fully critical, from what is dogmatic or still tainted with dogmatism in Kant. Second, despite Kant’s testimony, the critical philosophy does not, in fact could not, break sharply with preceding forms of metaphysical thought.
Hegel rejects any claim to go directly to objectivity, or roughly what would now be called direct (or naïve) realism. In the chapter on sense certainty in the Phenomenology, he denies general predicates describe the object as experienced. He objects to the assumption that abstract predicates can provide an exhaustive description of an object given in consciousness. His rejection of abstract description counts against propositional or quasi-propositional approaches to knowledge, such as Aristotelian logic, which predicate qualities of a subject. This and similar approaches presuppose the cognitive object is always already fully constituted. Yet from a constructivist perspective the object for us, which is not present at the beginning, is only finally constituted at the end of the cognitive process. Further, this approach dogmatically assumes that in the case of two opposing, mutually exclusive assertions, one is necessarily true and the other false (see EL, §32, p. 71). In this and in similar passages, Hegel presumably expresses his misgivings about what, since Aristotle, has become known as the law of excluded middle.
According to Hegel, dogmatism is the contrary of skepticism. The ancients used the term “dogmatism” to refer to fixed systems. For Hegel, this term applies to the metaphysics of the understanding, which assumes fixed distinctions, as Hegel says a strong either/or as opposed to idealism, which assumes the principle of the whole (Totalität). Dogmatic metaphysics is divided into four parts, including ontology, rational psychology or pneumatology, and cosmology. Ontology refers to the abstract, enumerable characteristics of being. The second part concerns the rational nature of the soul, or spirit treated as if it were a thing (Ding), though, as Hegel notes, the latter concept is ambiguous. Hegel, who is deeply impressed by Aristotelian psychology, further distinguishes between rational and empirical psychology. Cosmology, the third part, includes such themes as the world, contingency, necessity and eternity, which it discusses as a series of binary oppositions. The fourth part, so-called natural or rational theology, relates to the concept or possibility as well as the proofs for and the properties of God.
From his inflexible maximalist perspective, Kant simply rejects prior views as dogmatic. He condemns, for instance, the Leibniz-Wolffian philosophy without reserve. Since he claims to invent philosophy worthy of the name, he further condemns any and all prior forms of metaphysics. Hegel’s historical perspective enables him to acknowledge the initial metaphysical stage as a milestone on the road toward an adequate metaphysics, as a step forward, which in turn makes possible further progress toward grasping objectivity through thought.
Hegel’s brief treatment of pre-Kantian metaphysics is important in itself and for the light it sheds on his understanding of the critical philosophy, which, in view of its importance as well as its importance for Hegel, is treated at greater length. His main point is that the abstract, naïve claim of earlier metaphysics to go directly to objectivity is indemonstrable. This point agrees in all respects with Kant’s view that earlier metaphysics is uncritical, unable to demonstrate its cognitive claims. Yet it rejects the Kantian distinction between a dogmatic and a critical philosophy on the grounds that critique, or an examination of pure reason prior to employing it, is not necessary but rather impossible.
Hegel subdivides the second attitude of thought to objectivity into empiricism and the critical philosophy. These are moments of a higher, still inadequate conceptual moment elicited (as well as made possible) by the earlier dogmatic metaphysics. The characteristic shared by both sub-forms is that the realm in which thought can legitimately pretend to cognize objectivity is no longer unrestricted but rather defined as coextensive with the realm of experience.
Since empiricism has been mentioned above, we can go more quickly here. Hegel understands empiricism roughly as it is now understood, namely as an approach to knowledge that emerges wholly or at least mainly from sensory experience. Thus Locke, a central figure in modern empiricism, famously holds that, since there are no innate ideas, prior to experience the mind is a blank slate or tabula rasa. It follows that all knowledge is a posteriori, or derived from experience.
Empiricism, which goes all the way back to the ancient Greeks—Aristotle is on some accounts an empiricist—and runs throughout the entire Western tradition, exists in many different forms. Moore and Russell, the two central figures in the rise of analytic philosophy in England, were both empiricists, though of very different kinds. Logical empiricism was developed in the 1920s and early 1930s in Vienna in the circle around Schlick and in Berlin in the circle around Reichenbach.68 Analytic philosophy, which arose against the background of classical British empiricism, later, roughly after the later Wittgenstein’s attack on Moore’s empiricism, launched a full-fledged critique of empiricism by Sellars, Quine, Davidson, Rorty, Putnam, McDowell and others. Hegel’s critical account of empiricism, which is continuous with his critique of Newton’s approach to natural science, suggests that in empiricism thought gives up the search for truth in favor of experience as its source (EL, §37). Though the goal of empiricism, as of all forms of philosophy, is objective cognition, Hegel regards it as a form of subjectivism.
Hegel typically stresses concreteness, which requires conceptual mediation, over abstract claims. According to Hegel, empiricism surpasses the prior metaphysics in responding to the need for concrete content, or intrinsic determinateness. In an approach to knowledge based on concrete content we know “the objects of consciousness as intrinsically determinate and as the unity of distinct characteristics” (EL, §37, p. 68). Hence empirical psychology replaces rational psychology, and empirical physics replaces rational physics. Empiricism relies on the principle that “what is true must exist in actuality and be there for perception (EL, §38, p. 79). Yet this principle is also a defect. Sensory perception, which is by definition individual, always falls below the level of experience. The process of knowledge does not end in but rather only begins with impermanent sensation in seeking what Hegel calls the general or universal and permanent in experience.
Hegel situates empiricism with regard to the prior metaphysics and the critical philosophy. Empiricism concerns the sensible, but the prior metaphysics concerns the supersensible. According to empiricism, since knowledge is restricted to sensory perception, the supersensible cannot be known. Empiricism is allied with materialism, or the view that, though a mere abstraction, “matter as such counts as the truly objective” (EL, §38, remark, p. 81). We can note in passing that Berkeley, who is often criticized for his so-called “immaterialism,” never uses this term.
Hegel, like Berkeley, does not deny that matter, which he takes to be a mere abstraction, which cannot be perceived, but which materialists take as the real objective world, in fact exists. According to Hegel, experience has two main elements: matter, or an infinite set of mere particulars, and form containing universality and necessity. One of Hegel’s early publications concerns the difference between ancient and modern forms of skepticism.69 Hegel, who follows Hume’s modern skepticism, remarks that experience cannot lead to either universality or necessity.
Kant’s view of the distinction between theory and practice is complex. Though over many years he worked to subordinate theory to practice, his theory of morality rather subordinates practice to theory. In his moral writings, he claims it is always possible to provide a universal principle governing any and all practical situations. The principle governing a specific action is a priori, but the situation in which one must choose a course of action is a posteriori. Kant simply assumes theory is always adequate to determine how to act in each and every practical case. It is reasonable to think there are always unanticipated new situations that fall outside the current state of theory—which is, hence, constantly confronted with problems it cannot resolve or adequately resolve. Kant implicitly denies this point. From the Kantian perspective, there is not and cannot be a practical situation for which there is no universalizable principle of action. In other words, in Kant’s position the recurrent moral question (what should I do?) always has a single definite response.
Kant’s a priori view of morality presupposes but fails to demonstrate the subordination of practice to theory. He addresses this theme in the two introductions to the Critique of Judgment (1790). Later, in a semipopular text (“On the Common Saying: That May Be Correct in Theory, but It Is of No Use in Practice,” 1793), he seems to reverse course by arguing, as he argues in his moral writings, that theory can be absorbed (or resorbed) into practice.
Kant’s effort to subordinate practice to theory is quickly reversed by Fichte and further developed by Hegel. Hegel appeals to a Fichtean form of Kant’s distinction between theory and practice. According to Hegel, empiricism makes a positive contribution since, unlike the “moral ought” (Sollen), the true must appear in reality and for perception. Yet this approach is doubly limited since thought remains abstract in limiting cognition merely to the finite to account for the existence and possible knowledge of the non-sensory. Hegel here both follows as well as (implicitly) criticizes Kant. He accepts the Kantian view that generality (or universality) and necessity are hallmarks of knowledge in the full sense. Hence, it is correct to distinguish between content and form, to which universality and necessity belong. Yet if knowledge is drawn only from perception, then claims for universality and necessity are unjustified. Hegel, for this reason, criticizes Kant’s refusal of claims for supersensible, non-sensory knowledge.
Except for several incidental references to Hume, Hegel does not illustrate his account of empiricism. The scope of his reference to an empirical approach to cognition is surprisingly limited, and perhaps inadequate for his purposes. In the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel rapidly describes individual empiricist positions with special emphasis on Locke. Surprisingly, neither Locke nor Berkeley—who belong on any short list of classical British empiricists—is mentioned at all in the Encyclopedia. Yet Hegel’s discussion of empiricism helps to understand the empiricist approach of thought to objectivity in several ways.
One point concerns skepticism. Hegel follows Hume, Kant, and others in drawing attention to skepticism as the unavoidable result of empiricism. He at least implicitly follows Maimon in attributing skepticism to Kant. He discusses this point at length in the important article on skepticism from the Jena period. Hegel objects that Kant, who disqualifies reason from any cognitive role in favor of the understanding, draws the limits of knowledge too narrowly in excluding its genuine form.
Still within the compass of “The Second Attitude of Thought to Objectivity,” Hegel turns to the critical philosophy. Hegel devotes only three sections to empiricism, but analyzes the critical philosophy—perhaps because it is crucial for his own position—in more detail in section 21. The degree of attention to Kant can be justified in various ways. The critical philosophy was centrally important; beginning with the Differenzschrift, Hegel constantly measures his position directly in terms of Kant’s and indirectly through the reactions of Fichte and Schelling to Kant. Another reason is Hegel’s obvious concern to build on the critical philosophy in formulating his own view. It is difficult to resist the impression that the rapid remarks on empiricism are intended to prepare his critique of Kant.
His account of the critical philosophy here closely resembles other accounts in the Differenzschrift, in Faith and Knowledge, and in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy. Since this is not a study of Hegel’s view of Kant, it is not necessary to go into detail. Suffice it to say that Hegel’s interpretation of Kant follows the latter’s suggestion in the Prolegomena that the critical philosophy centers on responding to Hume. Hegel as well as many of his contemporaries thought Kant failed to answer Hume and hence does not go beyond Humean skepticism.
Hegel begins in pointing to similarities and differences between empiricism and the critical philosophy. “Critical Philosophy has in common with Empiricism that it accepts experience as the only basis for our cognitions; but it will not let them count as truths, but only as cognitions of appearances” (EL, §40, p. 80). Hegel’s view here resembles the contemporary views of Jacobi, Maimon, and Fichte, each of whom rejects the thing in itself. Hegel, who shares this perspective, thinks that despite enormous effort, Kant finally does not improve on Hume. Kant, who does not go beyond skepticism, only clarifies the contents of experience, or facts (from Faktum) in a different way. In other words, if the intent is to answer Hume by substituting knowledge for skepticism, then the critical philosophy fails.
Kant stresses objective cognition, but Hegel (as already noted) regards the critical philosophy as intrinsically subjective. According to Hegel, the critical philosophy widens the distinction between subjectivity and objectivity so that both fall within subjectivity and only the thing in itself remains within objectivity. Possibly following Hamann—one of the first to object to Kant’s transcendental approach—Hegel notes that for Kant, thought investigates its own capacity for knowledge.
According to Hegel, who vastly underestimates Kant’s philosophical importance, efforts to surpass the critical philosophy often fall short of it. “Nowadays, the Kantian philosophy has been left behind, and everybody wants to be at a point further on. To be further along, however, has a double meaning: both to be further ahead and to be further behind. Looked at in clear light, many of our philosophical endeavors are nothing but the method of the old metaphysics, an uncritical thinking along in a way everyone is capable of” (EL, §41, addition 1, p. 84). In this way, Hegel signals that he intends to surpass the critical philosophy.
The difficulty lies in bringing together the subjective and the objective dimensions, or what is given in experience and what (under the heading of the thing in itself) lies beyond it. In the critical philosophy, this requires constructing a unified cognitive object by bringing sensations under the categories (or concepts of the understanding [Verstandesbegriffe]), as well as space and time.
Kant cannot merely assume but needs to derive the categories. The latter are subjective unities of the understanding whose application transforms sheer perception (Wahrnehmung) into experience (Erfahrung). Kantian categories—which are neither subjective nor objective, but rather conditions of objective cognition—cannot yield knowledge of the absolute (or mind-independent) real world, which lies beyond cognition. He interprets the categories subjectively, hence in a non-Kantian way. Subjective categories are incapable of objective knowledge, since they cannot function as determinations of the absolute, which is not given in perception. Hence, they do not yield knowledge of things in themselves, which Hegel—very much like Fichte, but in different words—describes in passing as a caput mortuum, or as a mere product of thought; in short, as a philosophical fiction (see EL, §44, p. 89). As in the Differenzschrift, he suggests that the critical philosophy is unable to reach knowledge of the absolute, which he takes as the cognitive criterion.
This remark points to a difficulty in the Kantian version of cognitive constructivism. Kant relies on the understanding. Yet according to Hegel, we can become aware of the limited character of experiential knowledge (Erfahrungskenntnisse) only through reason, which is described as a capacity of the unlimited (Vermögen des Unbedingten). According to Hegel, the Kantian conception of objective knowledge requires cognition of an empty thing in itself (leeres Ding-an-sich). Hegel, who understands cognition as specifically grasping an object, interprets Kant as claiming that reason has at its disposal only categories incapable of knowing a transcendent object. An idea of reason, or unlimited cognitive object, is a necessary aim for which an object cannot be given in experience, hence cannot be known.70
In reviewing Kant’s three ideas of reason (e.g., the soul, the world, and God) Hegel comes back to his view that Kant does not surpass but rather remains on the same level as Humean skepticism. According to Hegel, Kant goes no further than Hume’s remark that universality and necessity are not encountered in perception. For Hume (and supposedly for Kant as well), empirical content and thought determinations are basically different. Hegel thinks Kant’s effort to cognize the world leads to a series of antinomies. His solution consists in pointing out that contradictions do not lie in the object but rather in reason, which fails either to cognize objects or to grasp the dialectical moment of logical thought (see EL, §49, p. 96).
According to Hegel, Kant features a contradictory form of metaphysical realism. The contradiction lies in limiting cognition to experience while denying that reality can be either experienced or known. Hegel obscurely claims the contradiction rather lies in the object. This illustrates his rival view that cognitive claims are confined to the dialectical relation between a concept (in effect, a theory) of the object and the object of that theory. The supposed dialectical contradiction in the object is manifest in the cognitive process between the theory about the object and the object, which are both situated within conscious experience.
God, the third object of reason, can be known through so-called rational limitation. For the understanding, limitation is negation but reality is limitless. God is the essence of all reality, but the content of limitation is only an abstract limitation or being. Reason has the task of uniting two opposing moments: abstract identity (or the concept) and being (or, as Hegel says, using the Kantian term “ideal,” the ideal of reason; see EL, §49, p. 96).
According to Hegel, this (re-)unification can occur in two ways only: by proceeding from being (Sein) toward abstract thought (Abstraktum des Denkens) or conversely. Hegel’s comments about this theme are doubly important for his reaction to Kant as well as for his own conception of logic. Hegel understands being as a fully articulated world (erfüllte Welt). One can only think being by stripping away everything contingent to grasp a necessary, self-developing object, or “to divest its form of individual and contingent [features] and to grasp it as a universal being, different from that first [fullness of being], to grasp it as necessary in and for itself, active and determining itself in accordance with universal purposes—in short, to grasp it as God” (EL, §50, p. 96).
Two points are important here. First, as Hegel indicates in the analysis of sense certainty in the Phenomenology, language is intrinsically general or universal. The particular or the contingent, which cannot be grasped through language, can be identified only ostensively. It follows that thought can grasp only generality or universality.
Hegel’s terminology is clearly confusing. Here as elsewhere in his writings, Hegel intermingles religious language and an apparently secular cognitive approach. In the Differenzschrift, he refers to the cognitive object as the Absolute. Here he calls it God, or slightly later, substance. “Absolute,” which is apparently unrelated to Christian religion, points to Hegel’s commitment to cognitive holism, or the category of the whole. In short, Hegel rejects the Kantian theory of cognition based on the understanding in favor of his own rival view grounded in reason.
Second, Hegel points out that Kant attacks the conceptual transition from the empirical world to God. If Hegel is finally a secular thinker, then he does not understand “God” in a religious sense, but rather, say, in the Kantian manner, as a thought of the whole. This approach is opposed to the Humean perspective, which rejects any inference to universality or necessity from the empirical world. For Hegel, the cognitive process must start with being and progressively rise to a concrete grasp of the whole. According to Hegel, Kant (like Hume) mistakenly limits thought about the world to the understanding (Verstandesform). In other words, Kant fails to transform the empirical form of the world into something general or universal (ein Allgemeines). “The sense of the elevation of spirit is that, while being belongs to the world, this being is merely a semblance [Schein], not the true being, not absolute truth, and that this [truth] is instead beyond that appearance in God alone, that God alone truly exists” (EL, §50, p. 98). Similarly, the suggestion that “spiritual nature” is the only acceptable starting point to know the absolute is presumably not intended as a religious claim to knowledge through a return to God. Rather, it is a suggestion that knowledge in the full-sense requires cognitive holism.
The alternative, which runs from abstract thought to limitation, leads to a contradiction between thought and being. Just as one cannot find the general or universal in the empirical, one also cannot find the empirical in the general or universal. It follows, as Hegel points out, that being cannot be derived from concepts. It further follows that the critical philosophy, which fails to reach concreteness, remains abstract.
According to Hegel, the abstract, formal character of Kant’s theoretical reason recurs in his view of practical reason; for instance, in his conception of the thinking will (der denkende Wille). Hegel’s critique of Kantian practical reason briefly restates a point earlier raised in the Phenomenology: it is purely formal, entirely devoid of content.
Hegel gives more space to reflecting judgment, which is central to Kant’s aesthetic theory in the Critique of Judgment. This is the principle of intuitive understanding in which the contingent particular is limited by the universal (or abstract identity) encountered in art objects as well as organic nature. Hegel treats the particular, which Kant understands through the universal, as the concrete universal, or as “the actuality of the ideal.”71 He seizes on Kant’s remarks about artistic objects as appropriate to introduce the concrete idea. According to Hegel, who passes rapidly from the Kantian view of aesthetics to teleology, Kant grasps reflecting judgment as the goal of so-called living products of nature while turning away from its realization in any finite external form. In other words, the goal (Zweck) is a so-called subjectively-existing cause, which manifests itself through representation (Vorstellung) only. Kant continually stresses the limits of knowledge to appearance. In passing, Hegel notes the difference between two subjective types of thought about categories, or again, inner purposiveness. He regards the latter, which Kant does not work out in detail, as more promising. Hegel comments that the realization of this idea would be the realization of God. This point contrasts with Kant’s view of human being as the highest form of nature. Possibly with Aristotle in mind, Hegel remarks that the abstract Kantian conception of the good is only our good, which goes no further than a merely abstract idea of what ought to be but is not actual.
In a final point, Hegel notes it is impossible for a dualistic theory to bring together opposing sides. He is thinking of the inconsistency between the Kantian view “that the understanding acquires knowledge of appearances only, while maintaining, on the other, that this kind of knowledge is something absolute by saying that knowing cannot go further, that this is the natural, absolute barrier [Schranke] for human knowledge [Wissen]” (EL, §6, p. 106). According to Hegel, it is inconsistent to limit cognition to appearances while also insisting it is absolute. He goes on to claim—hugely underestimating Kant’s effect on the later debate—that the main result of the Kantian philosophy consists in reawakening consciousness of absolute inwardness. This suggestion is linked to the principle of the independence of reason (Unabhängigkeit der Vernunft). When Hegel was writing, this was a widely accepted presupposition. It is still widely accepted today.
Hegel devotes roughly equal space (EL, 20 §§) to the third moment of the relation of thought to objectivity: immediate knowledge. Hegel is dealing here with a contemporary theme; Jacobi, for instance—who is a plausible target here for Hegel—relies on intuitive (or nondiscursive) rather than discursive claims for truth.
According to Hegel, the critical philosophy is a dualism composed of a subjective conception of thinking opposed to truth understood as a concrete universal. The opposing standpoint is the conception of thought as an activity intended to grasp the particular, but incapable of grasping truth. The account in the Encyclopedia Logic restates and develops Hegel’s remarks in earlier writings on immediate knowing. In Faith and Knowledge (1802), where he analyzes the relation between religious faith and cognitive beliefs—or between the truths of religion and those of philosophy and science in the views of Kant, Jacobi, and Fichte—Hegel is especially concerned with the opposition between the critical philosophy and immediate knowing.
In the Encyclopedia Logic, Hegel begins his account in indicating that the opposition between reason and faith has recently been transferred into philosophy. According to Hegel, this emancipation of reason is only a pyrrhic victory, since reason is no longer reason and faith is no longer faith. Hegel is often regarded, especially by the young Hegelians, as either overtly or at least covertly a philosopher of religion. In fact, his cognitive approach is rigorously secular. Not surprisingly, he is extremely critical of any attempt to base reason on faith. According to Hegel, since the absolute lies beyond reason in the writings of Kant, Jacobi, and Fichte, philosophy has once again made itself into the handmaiden of faith (FK, p. 56). The result is a mere subjective longing for “the Absolute and the eternal” (FK, p. 58) situated beyond intuition, which concerns itself with the sensuous and the limited (FK, p. 60). Kant, Jacobi, and Fichte are caught in the finite and the empirical (FK, p. 61), hence enmeshed in the antithesis of finitude and reality (FK, p. 62).
Hegel notes in passing that Jacobi attacks Kant’s proofs of the understanding (see EL, §50, 96). In Faith and Knowledge, he depicts Jacobi as a subjective thinker, and describes his position as a subjective variation on a wider empirical genus, including Locke and such “eudaimonists” as Kant, Jacobi, and Fichte. These three thinkers share a common view of the finite as opposed to the empirical in “an idealism of the finite” (FK, p. 64).
Hegel discusses immediate knowing as a pre-philosophical standpoint under the general heading of sense certainty (der sinnlichen Gewissheit). Immediate knowing (unmittelbares Wissen) is “knowing of the immediate or existent” (Wissen des Unmittelbaren oder Seienden). In Faith and Knowledge, where he devotes more space to Jacobi than to either Kant or Fichte, he presents Jacobi’s philosophy as the opposite of Kant’s. According to Hegel, Jacobi transforms the objective form of Kant’s views of finitude and subjectivity into mere individuality (SK, p. 97). In the same way as his account of Reinhold in the Differenzschrift, his account of Jacobi’s theories here is detailed but also withering. He devotes extensive space to demonstrating that Jacobi misreads Spinoza (FK, p. 106–16; see also EL, §50, p. 98)) and he criticizes Jacobi’s attack on Kant (SK, 120–33).
Jacobi’s supposed weakness lies in emphasizing the finite at the expense of the infinite (FK, 149). This approach yields an unmediated, illicit transition from a merely subjective idea to being—a transition similar to the ontological proof of the existence of God. Hegel hammers away at this point in the detailed account of immediate knowing in the Encyclopedia. Kant’s supposed inability to rise from the (fixed determinations of the) finite to the infinite is compounded in Jacobi’s anthropomorphism and general attack on cognition (see EL, §62, p. 111). The method through which everything is mediated yields the particular, the dependent and finite in transforming “reason” into “immediate knowing, faith” (EL, §63, p. 111). According to Hegel, since these categories are familiar, they are often not examined. Jacobi supposedly conflates ordinary belief about things in the external world, better designated as immediate knowing, with religious belief about God (see EL, §63 R, p. 112). Immediate knowing supposedly grasps that the infinite in our representation is. It opposes philosophy, for instance the Cartesian conception of the cogito. It further asserts knowledge claims as a mere fact (eine Tatsache); in short, as a psychological phenomenon, in eschewing study of the concept, mediation, and their relation to knowledge (Erkenntnis). Hegel analyzes this relation in the account of essence in the second part of his theory of logic. Immediate knowledge of facts differs basically from so-called immediate religious knowledge, which is mediated by religious education. Hegel further calls attention to the relation between innate ideas and immediate ideas.
Hegel depicts immediate knowing as turning on the transition—hence the mediation—from the subjective idea to being. He now turns this insight against immediate knowing. From this standpoint, since “neither the idea as a merely subjective thought nor a being solely for itself is what is true [das Wahre]” (EL, §70, p. 119). Despite what the ordinary, untutored observer thinks, what is immediate is mediated.
Hegel here—as earlier in the Phenomenology—rejects immediate knowing. Subjective claims for knowledge based on the mere fact (Faktum) of consciousness are one-sided. Hegel explores the view that this fact is present in everyone’s consciousness in pointing out that the Ciceronian consensus gentium does not satisfy the criterion of universality. A second difficulty with immediate knowing is that any superstition or idolatry becomes true. Finally, immediate knowledge of God is confined to the fact that God is, and hence does not address the question of what God is, which cannot be immediate but requires mediation. This latter point presupposes it is possible to surpass the impoverished view—or simple acknowledgment that God is the unlimited supersensible—by pointing out “the fact that God exists, not what God is “what God is” (EL, §73, 121). Yet since the content of immediate knowing is finite and not infinite, from this perspective, God becomes an abstract essence.
Hegel brings out this inference in making two points (EL, §75). It is factually false that there is immediate knowing without mediation. It is equally false that thinking is based on finite determinations, which are not self-sublating and which are mediated by something else. His positive example is, as he notes, his theory of logic.
Hegel ends his account of immediate knowing in comparing and contrasting it with the supposedly naïve, modern, implicitly precritical metaphysics exemplified by Descartes. Hegel thinks immediate knowing makes a qualified return to Cartesianism, with which it shares three points: to begin with, there is “the plain inseparability of thinking and the being of the thinker,” since thinking and being are the same; second, there is an inseparability between God’s essence and existence (for instance, as codified in the ontological proof); and finally, consciousness of external things is merely “deception and error . . . contingent . . . or a semblance [Schein]” (EL, §76, pp. 123–24).
The latter point, which is not obvious, requires qualification since Descartes famously distinguishes between true (or clear and distinct) and all other perceptions. Hegel, who does not pause to qualify his claim, calls attention to distinctions between immediate knowing and naïve metaphysics. Cartesian metaphysics, which rests on indemonstrable presuppositions taken to be indemonstrable, leads to further forms of knowledge, including modern science. But immediate knowledge, or the modern standpoint, yields no more than the limited result that cognition based on finite mediation yields no truth. Hegel believes immediate knowing is a form of skepticism. He stresses this conclusion in his second point—that is, that the modern standpoint neither alters the scientific approach to cognition nor leads to knowledge since it is merely arbitrary and anti-philosophical. He concludes his account of immediate knowing in suggesting that we must put aside the opposition between immediacy and mediacy (or mediation), as well as all other arbitrary presuppositions, when we enter into science (see EL, §78).
Hegel does not specify his intentions. Yet it is reasonable to infer that his remarks about “The Positions of Thought with Respect to Objectivity” are intended to identify the main conceptual models in the history of the tradition. These are models he rejects for reasons already given. It remains unclear whether these three conceptual models are intended to be exhaustive or merely a short list of prominent alternatives. Hegel’s featured alternative cognitive model is a dialectical theory he recommends in place of other cognitive approaches, above all the Kantian theory of the understanding.
One point is the view that cognition aims at a form of objectivity that understanding cannot reach. Hegel prefaces his account of the three approaches he considers by indicating his concern with objective thought. This is not only the goal, but also, as he darkly says, the absolute object of philosophy. In focusing on thought, not being, Hegel simply abandons the ancient quest to know reality, which in our time continues under the heading of metaphysical realism. Yet he explicitly maintains the concern with objectivity in his belief that philosophy must grasp the truth, hence be objective, not subjective. If thought determinations (Denkbestimmungen) have fixed oppositions, then, in Hegel’s language, they are finite, not infinite, and thus inadequate to yield truth. According to Hegel (who now uses the Kantian term), thought that yields only finite determinations is called understanding. Each of the cognitive models Hegel reviews in the “Positions of Thought with Respect to Objectivity” belongs to the understanding. The finitude—hence cognitive inadequacy—of so-called simple thought determinations lies in the fact that they are subjective but have an objective antithesis, on the one hand; and on the other hand, that as limited content, they further stand in antithesis against each other as well as against the absolute.
Hegel’s point seems to be that philosophy is not concerned, as Hume and Kant think, with knowing individual things. Rather, it is concerned with what one would now call a holistic approach to the contents of experience. Thus Kant limits knowledge to items of experience and knowledge through the understanding, while ruling out cognitive claims about what lies beyond the limits of experience. As a result, he turns away from reason in favor of the understanding as his main cognitive instrument. Hegel, on the contrary, aims to go beyond mere empirical determinations, hence beyond empiricism in either the usual British or the revised Kantian senses of the term.
We can infer that for Hegel philosophy, which begins with simple thought determinations (einfache Gedankenbestimmungen), yields objective knowledge of the so-called concrete absolute lying beyond subjectivity, hence beyond understanding. The Phenomenology, for instance, runs from “the first, simplest appearance of spirit, namely immediate consciousness, and developed its dialectic up to the standpoint of the philosophical science, the necessity of which is shown by this progression” (EL, §25, p. 66). The process of development leading from immediate consciousness to philosophy is increasingly mediated, hence (in Hegelian terminology) increasingly concrete. According to Hegel, “the standpoint of philosophical knowing [Wissen] is in itself the most basic and concrete” (EL, §25, p. 66). The standpoint of philosophical science reached at the end of the Phenomenology presupposes “concrete shapes of consciousness” such as morality, ethical life, and so on; in other words, the mainly formal “development of the contents” as “the subject matters of special parts of philosophical science.” Hegel now repeats a point as already noted several times in the introduction to the Phenomenology: that “philosophical science develops so to speak to take place behind consciousness’s back insofar as the content (as what is in itself) relates to consciousness” (EL, §25, pp. 66–67). This is a straightforward claim against Kant’s skeptical view that the thing in itself does in fact appear in consciousness, to begin with, in the simple but logical thought determinations.
Hegelian Logic
Hegel’s rejection of prior models of the relation of thought to objectivity points to the alternative model he describes in his theory of logic. He expounds his conception of logic differently in the Encyclopedia and in the Science of Logic. In the Encyclopedia, he introduces his approach in three short numbered paragraphs accompanied by lengthy notes. He begins by remarking that the logical, or logical-real, simultaneously encompasses “the abstract side or that of the understanding . . . the dialectical or negative-rational side . . . the speculative or positive-rational side” (EL, §79, p. 125). According to Hegel, who has Kant in mind, the understanding is limited to fixed determinacy and distinctness. Kant replaces intuition—on which Descartes, for instance, relies—with a faculty that transforms sensory contents into perceptual objects. Yet the abstract result, which for both Kant and Descartes centers on fixity and distinctness, falls short of thinking or grasping (Begreifen). Thinking does not halt, or reach its end, in understanding, and “the concept [Begriff] is not a mere determination of the understanding (EL, §80, p. 126). In short, Hegel thinks that to equate understanding and thinking, as Kant does, is in effect to take the part for the whole in prematurely stopping the conceptual process before reaching cognition.
Hegel explains this point in a detailed addition to the numbered paragraph, to begin with in distinguishing intuition and understanding. The latter provides abstract generality or universality (Allgemeinheit). As the opposite of intuition and feeling, it differs from the particular. The opposition between understanding and feeling turns on the view that thinking is one-sided. Hegel believes such criticisms go no further than the understanding (“das verständige Denken”). He concedes that both theoretically and practically, without understanding there is neither fixity nor determinacy. On the contrary, cognition (Erkennen), which literally begins in grasping (auffassen), presents objects in their specific differences (in ihren bestimmten Unterschieden). In other words, cognition follows upon (hence presupposes) the understanding as a necessary stage, but not as the terminus ad quem. Hegel, who builds on the critical philosophy, accords the understanding, which plays a necessary but limited role in cognition. In understanding, thought distinguishes between things, forces, species, and so on. On this level, its principle is identity. Hegel thinks mathematics is a clear example.
According to Hegel, we should not understand the logical (das Logische) as a subjective activity. We should rather understand it as “Allgemeine” and objective, as an approach which finds application in the understanding, or the first form of the logical. Hegel’s example is God’s goodness (die Güte), which employs finite categories applying equally to animals and plants, hence to all possible objects. Hegel goes on to give a series of other examples; the main point is the distinction between understanding and other forms of thought.
Hegel’s dialectical approach to logic was unusual in Hegel’s time as in our own, in which there is a distinct preference for an approach to cognition that relies on understanding.72 Part of the problem is the obscurity of the Hegelian conception, which he has difficulty in explaining. The so-called “dialectical moment,” which opposes the fixity of the understanding, “is the self-sublation of such finite determinations by themselves and their own sublation [das eigene Sichaufheben] into their opposites” (EL, §81, p. 128; translation modified). Hegel follows this relatively clear statement with two further points presumably intended to meet contemporary objections to dialectic or dialectical thinking. If taken separately, hence in isolation from understanding, dialectic results in in simple negation, hence skepticism. Dialectic is commonly taken to be a mere external procedure (Kunst) arbitrarily yielding confusion in limited concepts and “a mere semblance of contradictions (Schein von Widersprüchen]” (EL, §81, p. 128); in short, as a subjective shuttling between different possibilities lacking any content. In this way, false appearance is mistakenly taken as true.
Hegel, who rejects these rival views of dialectic, responds unclearly that dialectic rather “aims precisely at contemplating things as they are in and for themselves, and from this emerges the finitude of the one-sided determinations” (EL, §81, addition 1, p. 128). It is unclear if “dialectic” refers to the work of the understanding, to things, to the finite in general, to all of the above or to some combination thereof. Is Hegel saying that dialectic arises on and is limited to the cognitive plane, or is he saying that dialectic is in some way in the things as it were? He can be read as claiming that dialectic is not something merely added, but that it is intrinsic to anything finite. According to Hegel, what is finite is one-sided. Dialectic is the self-negation of the one-sided and the finite—in other words, its own sublation (sich selbst aufzuheben). Hegel differentiates the result of the understanding, which on his account is prescientific, and what he calls science (for Hegel, logic is a science) as opposed to natural science. At stake is the difference between the critical philosophy—which for Hegel goes no further than the understanding and hence lacks a genuine conception of reason—and science, which emerges in the wake of understanding, and which depends on dialectical reason.
It is difficult to specify the precise meaning of this claim. To begin with, science differs from understanding, which yields only fixity and determinacy, but which, under scrutiny, changes into other shapes. Unlike the understanding, science results in an immanent linkage in creating a structured whole lying beyond its discrete parts, a whole that surpasses the finite. Hegel writes that the dialectical “is in general the principle of all movement, all life, and all actual activity [and] equally the soul of all truly scientific knowing” (EL, §81, addition 1, p. 129). Hegel adds, when rejecting so-called one-sided approaches, that “the dialectic differs essentially from such behavior, for it aims precisely at contemplating things as they are in and for themselves, and from this emerges the finitude of the one-sided determinations of the understanding” (EL, §81, p. 129).
This short statement about dialectic is accompanied by two detailed remarks. Taken together, these remarks defend his view of dialectic in three related ways: in characterizing it as the intrinsic principle of motion in the cognitive process; in calling attention to the view that dialectic naturally arises after understanding as a further step in the cognitive process, hence once more suggesting that Hegel’s position builds on and carries further Kant’s; and in referring to the place of his account in the history of this concept that goes back to ancient Greece. We recall that Plato, for instance, speaks of “dialectic” as the direct grasp of the initial principles or hypotheses, presumably by suitably talented and trained philosophers.73
Hegel often appears to replace argument by description. At the risk of repeating himself, he writes that dialectic “is in general the principle of all movement, all life, and all actual activity” (EL, §81, addition 1, p. 129). This metaphorical statement is implausibly broad. Hegel restricts his claim in a way that makes evaluation possible in the next sentence: “The dialectical is equally the soul of all truly scientific knowing” (EL, §81, addition 1, p. 129). There is a clear difference between asserting dialectic is immanent in things and in asserting it is immanent in the cognitive process about things. So-called “scientific cognition” is apparently Hegel’s formulation of the view that knowledge claims must be rigorous. He suggests that “the finite,” or result of the understanding, which is not merely externally limited, rather, through its own nature “sublates itself (durch seine eigene Natur sich aufhebt).” In other words, the fixity and determinacy exhibited through the results of the understanding are not permanent, but impermanent, since it changes into its opposite (durch sich selbt in sein Gegenteil übergeht). Hegel, now sounding pre-Socratic, illustrates this point in pointing out that a living person is also mortal, hence bears death within himself.
Hegel does not seem to distinguish between the historical Socrates and his role in Plato’s dialogues; he calls attention to the Platonic roots of dialectic in Socratic practice. According to Hegel, Plato invented a scientific, objective conception of dialectic. In Plato’s dialogues, dialectic is exemplified in the Socratic practice of leading his discussion partners later to say that opposite of what they initially said. In this way, Plato transforms the subjective Socratic conception of dialectic into an objective conception in showing “the finitude of all fixed determinations of the understanding in general” (EL, §81, addition 1, p. 130). Hegel further suggests dialectic is not merely restricted to philosophical discourse, but found literally throughout experience. His point is once again that when we look closely, we see in the so-called “dialectic of the finite” that “the same thing is driven beyond what it immediately is and turns over into its opposite” (EL, §81, addition 1, p. 130). He seems to be saying that on further inspection, specific claims that turn out to be insufficient are replaced by further claims in an ongoing cognitive process.
In the second, shorter addition to this paragraph, Hegel, in drawing on his important article about skepticism, considers skepticism regarding the results of the understanding. Skepticism points out “the nothingness of all things finite” (EL, §81, addition 2, p. 131), which cannot resist it. As in the Phenomenology, so here Hegel includes skepticism within philosophy as “the dialectical moment” in which what is fixed and determinate turns into its opposite. Skepticism is not a fundamental flaw that undermines the cognitive process. It is also not a general claim that “no knowledge is possible,” which requires knowledge about the impossibility of knowledge. It is rather a version of the familiar view that, on occasion, specific cognitive assertions fall short of truth, and hence need to be revised.
Hegel ends the second addition to his account of dialectic in claiming that dialectic is positive or positively rational, or again, speculative. He needs such a claim since he has so far emphasized dialectic as negative, as the self-destructive component lodged within the fixity and determinacy of the understanding. If there were no positive moment, the cognitive process would merely lead to cognitive skepticism. “Speculative” is in this context a synonym for the terms “positive” or “positively rational”—in short, the result of Hegel’s adoption of speculation as central to philosophy as early as the Differenzschrift. According to Hegel, “The speculative or the positively rational grasps the unity of the determinations in their opposition, the affirmative that is contained in their dissolution and their passing over into something else” (EL, §81, p. 32).
In the Encyclopedia, the accompanying remark includes three comments intended to show dialectic yields a positive result within a widened conception of logic as both transcendental and dialectical. The positive result yields determinate content, or something, not nothing. In other words, unlike skepticism, dialectic is not simply negation but, as Hegel elsewhere says, determinate negation with determinate content. This suggests the second point—namely that the result is not simply logical, but “something concrete,” or a “unity of distinct determinations.” The third point situates transcendental logic, which Hegel calls the “mere logic of the understanding,” in which finite determinations are falsely taken as infinite, within speculative logic. The latter contains the former as a special, limited case, which is valuable not as the solution of the problem of knowledge, as Kant mistakenly thinks, but as a stage of the cognitive process.
In the addition, Hegel returns to the earlier point that rationality is not merely confined to philosophy. The familiar claim that a human being is a rational animal points to a view of the rational as “generally to be something unconditioned which for that reason contains its determinateness within itself” (EL, §82 A, p. 132). The rational is by implication a self-contained whole that depends on nothing else. This suggestion reprises the point Hegel already made in the Differenzschrift against Reinhold. The “speculative” means the “rational” or the “positively rational” inasmuch as it is “something thought.” The term “speculative” is usually understood vaguely. Hegel here takes the term to have two specific meanings. It refers to what lies beyond the immediately present result of the understanding, which is “transcended” or gone beyond. It further refers to what, in its speculative stage, has given up the subjective for the objective. In other words, the speculative designates what Hegel now helpfully characterizes as “concrete and a totality.” In short, as a concrete totality, it proves itself (als konkret und als Totalität erweist). Hegel further goes on to discuss the relation between the mystical and the speculative elements, but we need not follow him there.
It will be useful to close this brief account of Hegel’s conception of the logical with some remarks on his general solution to the problem of the categories. This is one of the ways in which he can be seen as extending Kant’s position. According to Hegel, Kant stops short at the deduction of the categories, hence without formulating the categorial framework mandated by the view that science requires a system based on a single idea.
Hegel now considers a series of themes, including the difficulty of the beginning point, which is raised in modern philosophy as part of the justification of cognitive claims. This particular theme is especially important for epistemic foundationalism, which emerges in the modern effort to counter Pyrrhonian skepticism. Early in the modern tradition, Montaigne and Descartes disagree about the possibility as well as the conditions of knowledge. In “The Apology for Raimond Sebond,” Montaigne revives Pyrrhonism in arguing that knowledge based on sense experience does not grasp reality. Descartes closely follows Montaigne’s argument in drawing positive conclusions for cognitive claims supposedly able to defeat even the most radical form of skepticism in adopting an unshakeable Archimedean beginning point (fundamentum inconcussum).
Descartes’s suggestion that knowledge claims are justified through an initial point known to be true is widely influential. It is, as has been noted several times, the basis of Cartesian foundationalism. Reinhold and Fichte disagree about whether a Cartesian beginning point is possible. In the Encyclopedia, Hegel responds to this problem in suggesting as early as the first sentence of the first paragraph that, since philosophy can presuppose nothing—nothing at all—it must by implication justify any and all its cognitive claims. “Philosophy lacks the advantage, which the other sciences enjoy, of being able to presuppose its ob-jects [sic] as given immediately by representation” (EL, §1, p. 28).
If philosophy can presuppose nothing, then it also cannot merely assume but must justify its beginning point. Hegel undertakes to do so from an anti- or at least non-foundationalist perspective. He begins by stating that “Being is the Concept only in-itself” by pointing to the identity between concept and object. Hegel, who understands being as becoming, follows Heraclitus (whom he reads as a dialectical thinker) rather than Parmenides. He famously remarks there is no proposition in Heraclitus he does not take up in his logical theory.74 According to Hegel, being and becoming are interrelated, since the former unfolds the concept in itself, whose explication finally turns into the “totality of being in the course of which the immediacy of being is sublated.” Three points are important here. To begin with, there is the identity of thought (or concept) and being, which does not need to be constructed. In a sense it is always already there, since thought is being and being is thought. Second, the identity develops since being develops. Finally, cognitive claims cannot rest with particular objects (seiende) since conceptual explication encompasses all of being. In other words, cognitive claims—which are holistic—cannot stop either with particulars or with the results of the understanding, but must go beyond it in aiming at the whole, or the whole of being.
Hegel’s rapid remarks about the identity of being and concepts focus his approach to the cognitive problem. As he has in writings since the Differenzschrift, so here Hegel brings together—or, depending on the perspective, perhaps even conflates—cognitive and religious claims in drawing attention to the relation of thought and being. According to Hegel, being as well as its limitations (Bestimmungen), including logical limitations in general, “can be regarded as the definitions of the absolute, as metaphysical definitions of God” (EL, §85, p. 135). This possible religious reference can perhaps more plausibly be read as a quasi-Spinozistic, pantheistic claim for the identity of God and nature. Hegel seems to be claiming that a metaphysical definition of God entails specifying God’s nature in thought—or, since logic encompasses all thought, in logic.
Though the exposition is obscure, the basic idea is clear enough. Hegel is suggesting that by virtue of the identity of thought and being, through concepts leading to a grasp of the whole, we know the absolute (or God) in the form of thought. In other words, he thinks of logic as the satisfactory replacement theory for any and all prior or possible attitudes of thought to objectivity.
In his account of quality, Hegel further devotes three paragraphs to being as the logical beginning point and as self-developing, hence as generating what from Hegel’s perspective are increasingly concrete concepts of the logical framework. In the lesser Logic, Hegel lays claim to pure being as the beginning by pointing out that it is pure thought, undetermined, simply immediate. His account builds on Fichte’s view that an initial principle can be neither proven nor defined (SK, 93). Hegel similarly claims a so-called first beginning is not and cannot be determined by anything else, since there is nothing prior to it. He does this by noting two points: anything else is already mediated (bereits Vermittlung ist), hence not first; and being is always contained in it. Clearly Hegel is taking as his model the most general, hence least specific and least concrete possible concept. Since development is teleological, the relevant conceptual framework must develop from least specific through ever more specific stages in aiming toward the supposedly most specific, fully mediated concept. Hegel seems to presuppose an “identity” between being and existence. In the Critique of Pure Reason, in refuting the ontological proof, Kant rejects a supposed identity of thought and being since he thinks existence is not a predicate. Hegel, in implicitly refuting Kant, suggests that being is the first, most general, and most abstract definition of the absolute—or God, or again, the most real, the world, and so on.
The account of being as the beginning point is followed by a further claim that it is nothing. This claim is plausible since pure being is a pure abstraction, or as Hegel says, the absolutely negative (das Absolute-Negative), which, hence, is nothing (das Nichts). Hegel applies this point as the second definition of the absolute and with respect to the thing in itself, which has no content at all and hence refers to nothing. In a remark, he points to the difficulty of distinguishing—since being, as he says, lacks determination—between being and nothing. Heidegger ought to have taken this point seriously.
In characterizing nothing, Hegel calls attention to its relation to becoming in making two points. Being and nothing are the same since, as just noted, pure being—which has no characteristics—is literally nothing. Further, the unity of being and nothing is becoming. According to Hegel, “Conversely, nothing, as this immediate, self-same [category], is likewise the same as being. The truth of being as well as of nothing is therefore the unity of both; this unity is becoming” (EL, §88, p. 140).
Hegel’s point that being leads through nothing to becoming again indicates that he follows Heraclitus in taking being as a kind of flux. This point is reinforced by an appended remark in which he presents an anti-Parmenidean, anti-Kantian, Heraclitean solution to the problem of how to generate concepts. The author of the critical philosophy claims to deduce a finite, invariable series of categories (arguably) appropriate for any and all content. Hegel never varies from his claim in the Differenzschrift that Kant fails to deduce the categories. In substituting “concept” for “category,” Hegel suggests that through mediation, concepts form an ever more concrete framework terminating in full mediation of being, the initial concept in the conceptual framework.
Hegel, who is aware of the paradox in identifying being and nothing, qualifies this claim in a number of ways. This is, to begin with, only an analysis of what is already contained in the concept. Being and nothing are the same and also diverse, or different. Hegel thinks this claim cannot be rejected without illicitly smuggling in other, more restricted perspectives. One cannot deny that everyone understands being and nothing, since they are contained in becoming, which everyone grasps. Yet what has to be grasped is not the unity, but rather “the unity in the diversity” or again “the unity of being and nothing . . . the [Heraclitean] unrest [Unruhe] in itself” (EL, §88, p. 143). In the appended addition, Hegel points out that becoming is a concrete thought with respect to the mere abstractions of being and nothing. He sums up his basic claim in writing, “In being, then, we have nothing and in it being [i.e., something]” (EL, §89, addition, p. 143).
With What Must Science Begin?
The lesser Logic provides an extremely compressed account of why logical analysis must begin with being, which necessarily develops through nothing to becoming, then on to Dasein, and so on. The account of the beginning of science or logical science in the greater Logic is less compressed and slightly easier to grasp, but also unusually complex, even by elastic Hegelian standards. The main difference is that in the greater Logic, Hegel treats the problem of the beginning of logical science in a separate chapter that in English translation is awkwardly entitled as “With What Must the Beginning of Science Be Made?” Hegel here takes up again, at the end of his career, the problem that concerned him at the beginning: the justification of claims to know, which Descartes bases on foundationalism, Locke on empiricism, Kant on a priorism, and Hegel (following Fichte) on circularity. This chapter differs from the more compressed treatment of this theme in the Encyclopedia Logic in several ways. They include extensive, often confusing detail, as well as references to Reinhold, Fichte, and others. In the Differenzschrift, before he worked out his position, Hegel argues that cognitive theory justifies itself. In the greater Logic, when he has already worked out the phenomenological and logical phases of his position, he restates a claim about philosophy made earlier in the Differenzschrift before he had a theory of logic. According to Hegel, the system of logic—the deepest part of the position, hence the deepest part of his post-Kantian theory of cognition—justifies itself.
Hegel starts by pointing to an obvious enigma: the beginning must be either mediated or immediate (unmediated)—in short, based in faith—but can be neither. According to Hegel, who here refers to a passage in the Encyclopedia (see EL, §§61 ff.), mediation and immediacy are inseparable. In a nicely worded passage, he claims there is nothing—nothing at all—that is not immediate but also “mediate,” or mediated. It follows that there is no alternative to starting with one or the other. In pointing out that the general problem of cognition, which belongs to logical science, cannot be clarified prior to science, he again denies the Kantian view that the philosophical instrument must be examined before employing it. His suggestion that science and science alone can answer the question of where to begin contradicts Fichte’s claim that science begins in a prescientific decision. In short, philosophy is adequate to the task of providing cognition.
The title of the chapter incorrectly suggests that, like Descartes and Kant, Hegel will consider science in general. Hegel immediately narrows the theme merely to the logical beginning (logische Anfang).75 This move has the double advantage of restricting the scope of the discussion as well as linking his logical theory to his phenomenological theory in a circular relationship. Hegel has consistently claimed, since the Differenzschrift, that the epistemic process is circular. Here he again points out that logic presupposes phenomenology (or the science of spirit) in demonstrating the standpoint of pure cognition, from which it begins, which it carries further, and which it completes in simple thought determinations. The science of spirit begins from immediate consciousness, which is a presupposition yielding as its result pure knowledge—that is, “Logic,” which is “the pure science” or again “pure knowledge in the full compass of its development” (WL, p. 47).
After these preliminary considerations, he immediately considers “what is there before us” or “simple immediacy” (einfache Unmittelbarkeit, WL, p. 47). According to Hegel, “simply immediacy” is an expression of reflection (ein Reflexionsausdruck), which is nothing more nor less than “pure being” (das reine Sein). At this point in his text, Hegel returns to Reinhold in altering the peremptory judgment rendered at the beginning of his career. In the Differenzschrift, as repeatedly noted, Hegel considered Reinhold to be the leading non-philosopher of his time, and rejected Reinhold’s supposed conflation of the views of Fichte and Schelling. Though he did not object to the “revolution of bringing philosophy back to logic”—which Reinhold thinks was already accomplished through Bardili—it is only at the end of his career that Hegel provides the logical theory implicit in his initial philosophical text so to speak.
In the greater Logic, Hegel has so far argued that being and being alone is the logical beginning. He now restates the argument in the Differenzschrift about science as intrinsically circular with explicit reference to Reinhold. Hegel, who is usually careful before he reacts, rarely changes his mind. The evolution of his view of Reinhold is a rare counterexample. In the period separating the Differenzschrift from the Science of Logic, and after working out his mature position, his evaluation of Reinhold has basically changed. Yet Hegel’s conception of the self-justification of philosophical cognition has not changed. In the Differenzschrift, Hegel refutes Reinhold in expounding a rival account of philosophical theory as self-justifying. In the greater Logic, Hegel expounds basically the same conception of self-justification by now signaling his agreement with Reinhold.
Hegel situates his approach to logic with respect to Reinhold’s approach to cognition. In the Differenzschrift, Hegel discusses Fichte, then Schelling before turning to Reinhold as if he did not belong to the post-Kantian debate. In addressing the theme of the beginning point of science, Hegel now turns away from Schelling—whose position is not relevant to his immediate concerns—to consider Reinhold and Fichte in chronological order. This theme, while a secondary concern in the Differenzschrift, is central to his theory of logic. This change in emphasis leads to a revised reaction to Reinhold, as well as a fuller but basically unaltered claim about the self-justification of philosophical cognition.
We recall that in the Differenzschrift, Hegel answers Reinhold’s call to found cognition in contending that a theory or conceptual framework progressively justifies itself as it develops. In his logical writings, Hegel points to the relation between the contents of consciousness—which unfold behind the back, as it were—and culminate in philosophical science and the logical development of simple thought determinations. According to Hegel, questions about cognitive justification necessarily begin in immediate experience and end in the simple thought determinations of logical theory. Hegel is making the point that phenomenology and logic exhibit a circular connection since phenomenology leads to logic, which depends on phenomenology. In other words, the Phenomenology leads up to and justifies the logical theory worked out in slightly different versions in the two Logics, and conversely, the logical theory underlies and justifies the phenomenological approach to cognition. If phenomenology leads to logic, and if logic leads to phenomenology, then their relation is not linear but circular. This must be regarded as Hegel’s final answer to the deep modern question of how to justify claims to know.
In the Differenzschrift, at a time when Hegel could discern no redeeming feature in Reinhold’s approach, he answered the latter by ridiculing Reinhold’s so-called founding-and-grounding tendency. In the meantime, Hegel has changed his mind. Now, rather than simply rejecting Reinhold’s approach, he appropriates it for his own purposes in a wave of the dialectical wand. At the end of his career, Hegel thinks Reinhold’s suggestion, namely, that absolute truth is a result leads to the view that philosophy is “a retrogression and a grounding” that is not a merely arbitrary assumption, but rather “partly the truth [das Wahre] . . . partly the first truth [das erste Wahre]” (WL, p. 48). Reinhold’s approach constitutes “an essential consideration” (eine wesentliche Betrachtung). The “progression” (or unfolding of logic) is “a retrogression and a grounding, only by virtue of which it then follows as a result that that with which the beginning was made was not just an arbitrary assumption but was in fact the truth and the first truth at that” (WL, p. 48). Cognitive claims are progressively demonstrated through the development of the theory whose justification is circular, since “that progression is a retreat to the ground, to the origin and the truth on which that with which the beginning was made, and from which it is first produced, depends” (WL, p. 49). In abandoning any form of the claim that science must begin in “pure immediacy,” Hegel rejects linearity in returning to his early claim for the circularity of the cognitive process. At this point, he thinks, “the whole of science is in itself a circle in which the first becomes also the last, and the last also the first” (WL, p. 49).
In a circular cognitive process, the result—which Reinhold takes to be absolutely true (das Absolut-Wahre)—is the progression into its ground as well as the ground. Since the beginning of philosophy is contained as the ground (Grundlage) in everything that follows from it, it is always preserved, so to speak, and never simply left behind. Hegel infers from this point that the development (or progression) of the beginning transforms it from what is limited, immediate and abstract to what is mediated. In other words, “the line of scientific forward movement consequently turns into a circle” (WL, p. 49).
Hegel now points out that the beginning point of science cannot be known at the outset, for it is not yet developed, but still abstract. Further, cognition is the result of the full developmental process. Hence, it is only through “its entire development . . . [that science is] complete, full of content [inhaltvolle] and first truly grounded knowledge” (WL, p. 49; translation modified). Hegel is once again opposing cognitive foundationalists such as Descartes, Reinhold, and others. Cognitive foundationalists think that claims to know must be deduced from a ground known to be true; Hegel rejects this approach on the grounds that we reach truth only as the result of the fully developed cognitive process.
Hegel further rejects the idea that the beginning point of the theory is merely arbitrary or provisional. Rather, it is determined by the “matter at issue [die Sache selbst]” since “in pure science the beginning is made with pure being” (WL, p. 50). In other words, science—which includes everything, since nothing falls outside it—further includes the justification of its beginning point. Now making a weaker claim, Hegel states, “It lies in the nature of a beginning itself that it should be being and nothing else” (WL, p. 50). He infers from this point that nothing is necessary to begin other than to begin. In again responding to Reinhold, Hegel denies that the beginning of philosophy can be either a “more specific determination” or again, possess “a more positive content” than pure being (EL, §1).
Hegel further entertains the possibility science merely makes a so-called pure beginning in considering the view that “there is nothing, and something is supposed to become” (WL, p. 51). If it is to become, the beginning—which cannot be pure nothing—must rather be what Hegel designates as “a nothing.” It follows that being, which must be present at the beginning, necessarily contains both “being and nothing,” or is “the unity of being and nothing,” or in still another formulation, is “non-being that at the same time is being, and being that at the same time is non-being” (WL, p. 51).
In the Differenzschrift, Hegel already depicted philosophy as the speculative effort to bring about identity in difference. He now comes back to this early description in an important passage that maintains his initial conception of identity. This form of identity restates Kant’s Copernican insight. It maintains the general constructivist approach to cognition by indicating the continuity in Hegel’s position with its Kantian roots. Hegel writes: “An analysis of the beginning would thus yield the concept of the unity of being and non-being—or, in a more reflected form, the concept of the unity of differentiated and undifferentiated being—or of the identity of identity and non-identity” (WL, p. 51). He goes on to claim that the logical beginning cannot be concrete, since in that case it would contain (or rather, presuppose) a process of which the concrete would be the result. Yet if, on the contrary, we begin with the fact itself (die Sache selbst), then, as he points out, we begin with empty being.
Reinhold, who in his foundationalist phase is a Cartesian foundationalist, believes philosophy requires a cognitive foundation. As an anti-Cartesian anti-foundationalist, Fichte thinks philosophy must begin with the subject (Ich). According to Hegel, Fichte’s approach can be depicted in relation to three further factors. These include reflection; then the fact that everything follows from the initial truth (aus dem ersten Wahren)—a concept close to Hegel’s view; and finally the need that the first truth be known (ein Bekanntes) and not merely immediately certain, which goes beyond the Cartesian approach. The interest of Fichte’s view lies in the fact that the subject (or self)—in short, “this immediate self-consciousness”—appears to be partly immediate, partly familiar, and in any case more familiar than anything else. In pointing to Fichte’s belief that we are immediately self-conscious, Hegel stresses the difference between Kant’s view, which denies self-consciousness, and Fichte’s theory, which depends on it. Hegel, who prefers Fichte to Kant in this respect, immediately drives a wedge between Fichte’s conceptions of finite human being and the philosophical subject by moving in the direction of the critical philosophy. The philosophical subject, or the beginning and ground of philosophy, which must be sundered from the finite subject, attains consciousness only in abstract form. Since the ordinary subject necessarily gives way to the philosophical subject of pure knowledge, in which the distinction between the subjective and the objective has vanished, the advantage of beginning with a familiar subject to which we can link through further reflection also vanishes. According to Hegel, an approach of this kind results not in clarity but in the worst kind of confusion and misunderstanding.
At stake is the problem—a central modern theme—of how to understand the philosophical subject. It has been noted more than once that Kant separates the finite human subject and the philosophical subject to avoid what Husserl later calls psychologism. The difficulty lies in finding a way to avoid reducing the logical to the psychological while also maintaining a link between finite human being and objective cognitive claims. Fichte objects to Kant’s supposed inability to grasp the subject as a unified being. Though Hegel criticizes Fichte’s approach, it is unclear if he can bring together human being and the general conditions of knowledge.
Hegel believes that neither Fichte nor Kant transcends mere subjectivity. He criticizes the former, whose conception of the subject remains subjective. The Fichtean subjective approach is incompatible with real scientific development. Scientific development emerges from the subject but maintains “an other with respect to the I” since it is still “entangled in appearance” (WL, p. 54). Hegel thinks Fichte fails to rise above mere appearance, or to maintain objectivity that is the condition of knowledge.
Hegel clarifies this point in expanding on the relation of subject and object, subjectivity and objectivity. Science is not concerned with the subject asserted to be pure knowledge or intellectual intuition. It is rather concerned with what is present or internal (innerlich) to thinking. It is further concerned with the specific character it has in this particular object (die ein solches in diesem Dasein hat). At the beginning of science, there can be nothing other than “a first, immediate, simplest determination” (WL, p. 55). The problem is how “such an absolute enters into thinking or how it can be known and expressed (Aussprechen). Any beginning must lie in simple immediacy where the process begins. If the beginning lies in simple immediacy, the only way to go further toward the concrete is through “a mediated process [vermittelnde Bewegung] emerging from this process” (ibid.). Lacking in this approach is the proof (Beweis) required by the concrete determinations.
Hegel illustrates this point by remarking that if the cognitive object contains more than merely pure being, then cognition must emerge not in representational but in conceptual form (ins Wissen als denkendes, nicht vorstellendes, erst hervortreten) situated beyond the pure beginning. Simple immediate being is prior to the progression from one thing to another. Hegel concludes, “This empty something [das Einfache], that otherwise has no further significance, that is empty, is therefore immediately the beginning of philosophy” (WL, p. 55; translation modified). In the final sentence, he adds that his analysis aims only to point out that the beginning requires no special preparation. In this way he returns the point made earlier in the Phenomenology: the proper way to begin is to begin.
The analysis of being is intended inter alia to justify claims to know and to formulate a conceptual framework that cannot be deduced, but that emerges out of the analysis of concepts in an ongoing progression from the abstract to the increasingly concrete. This is Hegel’s response to Kant’s conception of philosophy as a categorial framework deducible apart from and prior to experience. For Hegel, a conceptual framework cannot be deduced; it can only be formulated as a result of the confrontation of concepts with experience. Method cannot be isolated from science, nor theory from practice, since they are two inseparable dimensions of a single unified cognitive process. In other words, Hegel’s response to the important question (where does science begin?) is that philosophical science must begin without any presuppositions. For, by virtue of its intrinsic circularity, it is self-justifying. The proper response to Kant’s failure to deduce the categories is not, like Fichte’s aim, to improve on the Kantian approach. It is to give up the endeavor in turning from categories to concepts, which cannot be deduced but rather emerge in the effort to cognize conscious experience.