The Philosophy of German Idealism - Kant and Hegel
Introduction (2) Hegel
V. 1.1
(This version containes the remainder of paragraph 1)
WIZIQ, Monday January 27th 2010, 7 PM GMT
1.
In this lecture I will deal with two topics very quickly. The first is the question how does Hegel understand his own era? That will help put Hegel into the perspective we sketched out with the aid of Voltaire and Kant. The second topic is about the nature of Hegel's system as a whole. Like we did with Kant, when we discussed the three Critiques as Kant's working out his basic question What is Enlightenment? So we can understand Hegel's system as a whole.
So we have made a beginning and talked about Immanuel Kant and the autonomous use of reason and the project of the self-limitation of Reason in Kantianism. How do we get from here to Hegel? As a historical point, I want you to understand that there's a lot going on from the time of Kant's first Critique in 1784 to the time of Hegel's first and most powerful work, his Phenomenology of Spirit, that was published in 1807. To understand it historically would mean to dive into European politics, especially the impact of the French Revolution on German culture, and it would certainly also mean an assessment of the spirit of Spinoza alive during those days, though under fierce attack by people like Jacobi and others. More to the point we would have to deal with the general mood of something that we might call a writers' collective, comprising people like the brothers Schlegel, Schleiermacher, von Humboldt, Fichte, Schelling and Hölderlin. Well, maybe we wouldn't say writers' collective, but we can call it a coherent "generation" of writers and thinkers. In stead of this, we will focus directly on the philosophical undertakings of Friedrich Hegel, but I want you to understand that there is far more to it than just this leap we will take from Kant to Hegel.
Let me just make this one point with regard to the historical transition so to speak from Kantianism to early Hegelianism. We can say that the generation of thinkers and writers in which Hegel grew up combined the Enlightenment position of Kantianism with the new issues and ideas that flowed from the French Revolution. What John Edward Toews called the first phase of the formative experience of Hegel's generation, lasting until 1796, was, in his words:
"…dominated by the experience of inner liberation from, and critical opposition to, the political and religious forms of the old regime."
Kant left the antithesis between rational autonomy and the necessities of social and political life as he found it; this generation was trying to solve it. They tried to formulate a vision of reality in which the ultimate opposition between subject and object was reconciled in the dynamic totality of the Absolute. In literature this would be called Romanticism, and Hölderlins attempt to express a vision of Hellenistic Wholeness was one of its most beautiful expressions. In philosophy we would call it speculative or absolute idealism, as opposed to the subjective or transcendental idealism of Kant and up to a point Fichte.
Now let's ask the question how Hegel viewed the philosophical situation of his era. This Monday we will try to summarize this position and on Friday we will develop the philosophical argument into greater detail. In other words, we will look at it today more from an extrinsic viewpoint and on Friday from an intrinsic viewpoint. The fact that we can do that says something important in itself. The distinction between exoteric and esoteric which is approximately identical to the terminology we used here, comes from Hegel himself. The exoteric approach is the more or less descriptive and in that sense abstract and the esoteric meaning is the concrete and proper conceptual development aimed at a full understanding. To Hegel it is obvious that an era can be understood, it can be expressed as a "Zeitgeist", a particular stage in the dynamic development of the Spirit within history. History is not accidental or extrinsic to what happens within it. Philosophy ultimately is defined as "the Spirit of the Age expressed in concepts." For Hegel obviously the Enlightenment, if it is anything, must be expressed within the construct of a systematic analysis of history from the perspective of this dynamic notion of Spirit. Enlightenment is a coming to age of that Spirit, a coming to maturity not so much of individuals but of a collective, expressed in a principle or metaphysically expressed as Spirit.
This of course means that by looking at the specifics of Hegel's understanding of his era from a historical perspective, we are doing something that to Hegel himself is ultimately worthless! That is why I decided not to do it from such a perspective at all. If we want to make any distinction here, it must be this. We can use Hegel's programmatic statements to get a feel of the whole enterprise so to speak and we can look at the passages in which the concept of the era is developed. That is a distinction that to Hegel would still be tantamount to treating it either extrinsically or intrinsically, but at least now we apply the distinction from within his work and not also from an outside, historical interest. So in fact we have three perspectives: the extrinsic historical description from the viewpoint of a contemporary historian such as John Edward Toews for example, or the extrinsic in the sense of the abstract announcement or presentation of the program - abstract maybe in the sense of summary in advance - and the intrinsic, i.e. the proper philosophical development of the concept.
In order to get a sense of what Hegel is getting at, I know of no better text than the Phenomenology, published in 1807. In a note written in 1831 some time before his death, he wrote that the Phenomenology ought not be revised since it was written in direct response to a particular time, at which "an abstract Absolute dominated philosophy." The entire Phenomenology was seen by Hegel as the expression of the path that the Spirit had taken in history, from sensuous knowledge to absolute knowledge, which gave rise to the concept of philosophical science as Hegel had formulated it already in 1805. Every philosopher, Hegel wrote in the Philosophy of Right, is "necessarily a son of his own time." And the philosophy he develops is "time comprehended in thought." So what is this "time of Hegel" then?
Some of Hegel's intuitions may be gleaned from the Preface to the Phenomenology where the new era is characterized at different places. "It is not difficult to see," Hegel writes, "that ours is a birth-time and a period of transition to a new era." There is a new world arising, in the same way that during the growth of a child suddenly there seems to be a young man. Or with another imagery, the new era is like a new birth, suddenly it becomes visible what was only hinted at before. The Concept or Notion that is the atmosphere of this new era is simply there, immediate and still undeveloped, but it is there. The great transformation that it required is coming from all over the place, there is a "widespread upheaval in various forms of culture." In this particular era the whole of the history of the Spirit, after having been brought to its ultimate destiny, reflects on itself and expresses itself as a whole. This reflection on the whole is not the new beginning - it is not, Kant would say, the Enlightened Age - but it is the beginning of it.
It is also apparent from the Preface that the old world contains a specific opposition between two modes of thought: there is the dominating atmosphere of Spinozism, fading away maybe a bit, but still present and influential and as its real successor there is a philosophy of the absolute in the fashion of Schelling, in opposition to what Hegel calls the "philosophy of reflection" which seems to refer more directly to Immanuel Kant. Reflection and substance, form and contents, philosophy and life, God and the world: those are the seemingly self-evident oppositions that express a dualism, a dichotomy in culture and the world.
But this new beginning, different from Kant, is not the Enlightenment! The Enlightenment itself is to Hegel already a previous stage, a part of that history. In the Phenomenology, two stages of the Enlightenment are treated separately from each other and both are distinguished from the era of the French Revolution.
We have the era of the opposition between pure insight and faith and we have the Enlightenment as such in its culmination. The first is the critical and formal attack on the old world, as we found it in Voltaire's text, the second is the positive construction of a new philosophy, as we found it in Kantianism.
To that Hegel and his contemporaries in Tübingen and Stuttgart added the revolutionary zeal that spread over Prussia from France. The old order is not just to be critiqued but needs to be overthrown. If that doesn't happen from the outside as in the French Revolution - which replaced one tyranny with another - it must be done from the inside. The real revolution is the outcome of a process of growth. The continuity with the past and the difference of the new age can then be expressed simultaneously. Hegel believed that by understanding the ideal of the Greek polis and reintroduce that vision into German political life, such a new society of freedom - Kant's Enlightened Age, the Kingdom of God - could be established. More and more Hegel became convinced that if it would happen, it would mean an inner rational transformation of the State and not simply an overthrow of the government which would in fact leave the structures of power and society in tact.
The short formula for what makes Hegel different from Kant is therefore:
(1) Hegel includes the ideals and the simple fact of the French Revolution
(2) He operates with a vision of unity: he tried to express a vision of the Greek polis that he encountered in early Romanticism into his philosophy.
(3) Hegel does so by making - for the very first time - the notion of historical development to be part of the life of the concept.
From: To Read Hegel part 1, R.A. Veen, LULU:2009
2. Hegel's System
In the current stage of reflection on the meaning of Hegel's philosophy, it is no longer necessary to focus on the understanding of the process and method of speculative dialectics as such. In the work of Kroner, Lasson and Hyppolite and many others we can safely say that the general laws of Hegel's dialectics and system are fairly well known.
The next stage of reflection was opened up by Nicolai Hartmann's question in 1935, concerning the inner structure of the whole of Hegel's systematic works. Hartmann contended that although each of the various disciplines of philosophy was clearly understood by Hegel himself - their methods and objects being sharply defined and distinguished from each other - the whole system of Hegel's thought was still "in-it-self" and not "for-it-self". From the external shape of Hegel's dialectics, we needed to turn to the inner dialectics at work between the various "sciences" that make up Hegel's philosophy as a whole.
This inner dialectic structure of Hegel's philosophy became the theme of the 1962 thesis of a Dutch (then) assistant professor of philosophy called Jan Hollak (1915-2003), who taught History of Modern Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam and the Catholic University of Nijmegen. In his thesis entitled The Structure of Hegel's Philosophy (De Structuur van Hegels Wijsbegeerte) Hollak for the first time went beyond what he called the one-sided responses to Hegel's philosophy, present in the works of Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Kierkegaard and Marx. They approached Hegel's system not from within, but from without by assessing it with an external yardstick - a procedure that according to Hegel was the handiwork of mere finite or subjective reason. Even though Hegel's system was admired greatly in the 1960s - especially his Phenomenology was present in most philosophical debates in Europe from 1920 up to the 1970s - without an adequate understanding of the structure of Hegel's dialectics, it would be impossible to make any significant connection between Hegel's thought and the problems of our contemporary world.
What came out of the Hegel-renaissance in France and Germany were for the most part straightforward denials of single propositions that were represented as Hegel's views on particular issues, without examining the structure and method of the system they were derived from. The stifling result was that Hegel became a philosophical milestone of the past. But that of course made Hegel at the same time irrelevant and contradicted one of his major theses, that in contemporary philosophy as well as in the history of philosophy we do not deal with the past as such, but with the present. Our historicizing reflection on Hegel would then be telling us more about ourselves than about Hegel. Adorno's counterargument, that we need to understand how our time holds up over against Hegel instead of the other way around can be referred to here.
Now, coming back to Hollak, we cannot say that his thesis effectively changed the paradigm of contemporary understanding of Hegel. The work done by Hollak on Hegel remained mostly unknown even in the Netherlands, where only a handful of his students examined and applied his findings. One-sided responses to Hegel remained with us, from the interpretation of dialectics by neo-Marxist humanism in the 50s, through attempts to reinterpret Hegel's dialectics as a theory of intersubjectivity and communication under the influence of Habermas (also Theunissen and others), to Slavoj Žižek's reinterpretation of Hegel with a theory of concrete subjectivity as found in Lacan. In between there were many attempts to use Hegel in contemporary reflection: either dealing with the actuality of Hegel's philosophy of nature (Vitorio Hössle) or to turn Hegel into the institutionalized foe: the need for a straw man produced the well-known image of Hegel as the champion of abstract identity and systematic totalitarianism.
Is it possible now to enter a third stage? Or rather, do we see the dawn of a new stage in the interpretation of Hegel? In this stage we would no longer look for a critical response to Hegel from a fixed standpoint or principle, nor would we need again to deal with questions concerning the inner dialectic structure of Hegel's work. It would require us to accept at least these two principles as adequately established foundations for any reflection on Hegel:
1. The whole of Hegel's philosophy consists of the dialectic unity of three basic shapes of the idea. The first of them, and not to be considered just the extrinsic introduction to the system, would be the Phenomenology of Spirit that deals with the appearing concept, the experience of the Spirit coming to itself, arriving at an understanding of it self. Secondly, the Encyclopedia contains the pure logic as it realizes itself in nature and spirit, and finally, the synthesis of these both, we have the philosophy of history in which logic and consciousness come together as the understanding of the history of the world.
2. Hegel's philosophy, though a closed system like any other consistent effort at understanding the world, is in principle not only open to the appearance off a new stage in the history or humanity, about as such its announcement. Precisely the finality with which Hegel managed to philosophically understand the history and principle of the Germanic-Christian world (i.e. Europe), announces a new principle without either prophesying it nor demanding it to be realized in practice (as in Marxism), signifies the emergence of a new era. To us, for whom this era has already appeared in political history, art, science and technology, the understanding of this new principle allows for something other than abandoning Hegel as being outdated.
In this series I will try to present Hegel's Phenomenology from this perspective. In continuity with Hollak, I will try to raise also some objections to Hegel's position. But to contradict Hegel is no easy undertaking. Most of what is said against Hegel in contemporary literature is simply irrelevant and doesn't get to the core issues. A true contradiction to Hegel is a dialectic achievement of the first order. But to phrase the matter in distinction to Kroner: to understand Hegel is to (truly) contradict him.
That qualifies my position as standing within the large realm of so-called left-Hegelianism. I'm not an orthodox neo-Hegelian, certainly not in the honorable tradition of Dutch Hegelianism that merely tried to paraphrase the Master. In many respects I side with Theodor Adorno and Slavoj Žižek who emphasized the concreteness of Hegel's critical and negative dialectics. It may sound strange, but Spirit is a term for the concreteness of reality. It does not denote any kind of metaphysical "Geist" that will hover beyond the abyss that separates phantasy from our experience. Maybe it is important first and foremost to try and understand Hegel. And to that end I have to make clear how important Hollak's thesis is for this endeavor. How then must the structure of Hegel's philosophy be understood and why does it matter?
How not to construct Hegel's System
The usual structure of Hegel's philosophy as taught all over the world, is based on a (flawed) reading of the last paragraph of the Encyclopedia. There we find the three logical syllogisms of philosophy.
§ 575 The systematic treatment of the nature of the concept ultimately develops into the idea of philosophical sciences and thereby affirms the beginning: the circle is complete. This concept of philosophy is the self-thinking idea, truth aware of itself or logic with the significance that it is generality preserved in concrete content. In this way science returns to its beginning, with logic as the result. The presupposition of its concept, or the immediacy of its beginning and the aspect of its appearance at that moment, are suspended.
Now, does this paragraph deal with the separate Phenomenology? Is it about the specific concept of philosophy in the Encyclopedia? Or is it about philosophy in a general sense? What Hegel seems to be referring to is the circular movement of the encyclopedic system as a whole. The "self-thinking idea" is both the start of science and the end result of science. The concept is the beginning of a syllogism - as is obvious from the basic structure of the System - but also its mean and its result, its other extreme. The three possible movements within the System show that and these are expressed as syllogisms. Each of them expresses the whole with a different emphasis.
These are then the three logical syllogisms of the System (Encyclopedia), and they express philosophy as (1) subjective knowledge, (2) objectivity, and their synthesis as (3) complete self-knowledge (=philosophy).
Most often however the second syllogism is interpreted as the Phenomenology of Spirit, the first is correctly identified with the Encyclopedia as a whole, and the third is thought to be the summary of a philosophy of Absolute Spirit that Hegel never wrote.
Let's take a look at each in turn.
§ 575b This initial appearance is formed by the syllogism, which has logic basically as its starting point, with nature for the middle term and is linked ultimately to spirit. Logic becomes nature, and nature becomes spirit. Nature, which stands between the spirit and its essence, divides itself though not to the extremes of finite abstraction. For the syllogism is in the idea and nature is essentially determined as a transition point and negative moment. But the mediation of the concept has the external form of transition, and science takes the form of being.
So in essence we have here the whole of the movement of the Encyclopedia, starting from the Logic, going through the philosophy of nature and ending with the concept of absolute Spirit as it is being expressed in the concept of philosophy as the self-understanding of the Absolute Spirit.
In the second syllogism this appearance is suspended, for the spirit is the mediating factor. This is a syllogism which is already the standpoint of the spirit itself, presupposes nature and joins it with logic. It is the syllogism of reflection on the idea; science appears as subjective cognition.
§ 576 So now we start with nature (the Spirit presupposes nature), go through Spirit and then end with the Logic. This is the same as the System or Encyclopedia, only now the syllogistic structure of the whole is different: Spirit is the intermediate, and logic the conclusion.
And finally:
§ 577 These appearances are suspended in the idea of philosophy, which has self-knowing reason, the absolutely general (the logic), for its middle term a middle which divides itself into spirit and nature, with the former as its presupposition (spirit), and the latter as its general extreme (nature). Thus immediate nature is only a posited entity, as spirit is in itself not a presupposition, but rather totality returning into itself. In this way the middle term, the self-knowing concept, has as its reality primarily conceptual moments and exists in its determinacy as general knowledge, persisting immediately by itself.
So in this case we start with the Spirit, go through the logic of the (self-knowing) concept which is now the middle term and end with nature.
The System is not the Whole
The system of Hegel's philosophy as a whole cannot be identified however with the “system” that is expressed in and as the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences. Hegel's entire philosophy should be seen as the dialectic unity of three major disciplines:
the separate Phenomenology of Spirit,
the System of Philosophy or Encyclopedia,
the Philosophy of History
All three of these disciplines have the notion of the Idea in common. But in each the Idea is treated differently, in such a way that these three again form a single syllogism:
1. In the Phenomenology the idea moves from its immediate shape as substance (immediacy for and of consciousness) to self-reflecting subjectivity and produces the notion of pure science. (The self-thinking idea.)
2. In the System the idea is expressed as science, as systematic knowledge, i.e. as the pure concept, moving from the subjectivity of the concept in logic, through the externalized objectivity of the concept in nature to the complete and absolute self-expression of the Absolute Spirit as (the concept of) Philosophy.
3. In the Philosophy of History however, the Idea is understood as absolute Spirit and shown to be actively realizing itself within and as the history of humanity and the world, in the course of which it also develops its self-understanding as philosophy.
Starting from the appearance of the Spirit as consciousness (Phenomenology of Spirit) we move through the middle term of philosophy as conceptual science (Encyclopedia; the "System") to its other extreme: the absolute Spirit realizing itself as coming to its self-understanding through its own real history (Philosophy of History and the History of Philosophy).
Only in that perspective the whole of reality is expressed without leaving out any essential perspective. That is why Hegels philosophy as a whole should be seen as an attempt to understand the Idea as History (self-realizing Spirit).
That is also why the separate Phenomenology of Spirit is so different from the section on the Phenomenology of Spirit within the Encyclopedia.
In the separate Phenomenology the totality of all reality is consciousness, and the independent shapes of the idea are present as constantly changing objects. In these different objects we find a reflection of a presupposed subjectivity. In a continuous process of the self-correction of consciousness, the dialectic identity of the consciousness and its object appears.
The systematic Phenomenology on the other hand merely discusses the logical categories of the Phenomenology. That is why it only deals with three separate categories: consciousness as such, self-consciousness and reason.
The separate Phenomenology then continues beyond reason with a more "substantial" notion of reason, i.e. immediate Spirit. Only by remembering the shape of consciousness as it existed in Greek civilization - but still only by remembering it as it is present in contemporary culture i.e. as part of contemporary Bildung, as cultural awareness or education - it begins to understand that consciousness is not a property of an individual, but basically a collective awareness mediated within an historical Society.
In the following chapters Roman culture, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment and the French Revolution are used to provide the historical paradigms in which the structures of consciousness can be expressed. Even though these historical stages are also to be understood as stages in which this type of consciousness is produced, they are not dealt with as such. That is left to the Philosophy of History.
It stands to reason that in the so-called syllogisms of the System, at the end of the Encyclopedia, only the concept of philosophy as such is dealt with. Philosophy is the method of understanding that sat the beginning of the Logic in a way is presupposed and has to move on toward understanding itself as such - which is identical to the construction of the whole of philosophy. At least in the sense that the Encyclopedia of philosophical sciences presents the main concepts of philosophy in their immanent order and intrinsic relationships.
One cannot however identify the separate Phenomenology with any one of these. The meaning of the syllogisms is to show, how the System of Speculative philosophy must be Encyclopedic: one can start from the logic going through nature and ending up with Spirit. One can also start with the external concept, nature, then develop a philosophy of Spirit and finally end with the concepts of the subjective science of logic. And equally we can start with the pure concept of the Spirit, then develop the formal concepts of the logic and then finally reach nature as the external realization of those concepts.
The system of Hegel's philosophy however is not complete if we just consider the Phenomenology that produces the notion of consciousness as science, nor if we just take the system of philosophy, i.e. the Encyclopedia, into account which ends with the notion of pure philosophy as such. In both cases the concept of the absolute Spirit is part of the analysis yet as such it is not developed.
In the separate Phenomenology e.g. a whole chapter is devoted to the demonstration of how all the previous modes of consciousness, i.e. consciousness, self-consciousness, reason and Spirit, should be understood through the medium of the absolute, in this case the absolute as it is in and for consciousness, as religion. Likewise in the System, the notion of the absolute Spirit is present when Hegel discusses objective spirit in its highest shape, i.e. the State and the political history of states. Remembered history as education and the political history of the objective Spirit however do not exhaust the infinity of absolute Spirit.
Only in the Philosophy of History does Hegel deal with the absolute Spirit (the Eternal Spirit developing itself through time to its present and opening up a future) realizing itself as world history. Only in world history we have the reality of the Spirit in its totality, both subjectively and objectively - including the perspective that was worked out separately as the philosophy of (the history of) religion.
The system of Philosophy as a whole is therefore for Hegel a triad of three different disciplines:
The Idea in its appearance as consciousness: Phenomenology
The Idea in its pure conceptual form as philosophy: Encyclopedia (or “System” of Philosophical Sciences.)
The Idea in its historical realization: the philosophy of History.
In these three books, the basic topic is the idea in its development, and all three of them develop the whole of philosophy in a specific aspect. "History" is present in each of them.
1. The separate Phenomenology of Spirit deals with the history of consciousness, but gives a linear development. What the Spirit experienced in separate stages is now remembered as succeeding moments within one movement of thought.
2. The Encyclopaedia treats history as a logical concept of the interaction between states (within the transition of objective to absolute Spirit). The basic viewpoint of the System is static: the concepts are set in their order and remain for-themselves. (The separate Science of Logic shows that there is an inner dialectic to it that can be expressed as such. A separate philosophy of nature or a philosophy of Spirit never reached maturity.)
3. And finally the Philosophy of History deals with the spirit as the whole of the developing reality of humanity and the world, i.e. with history as a whole and as such.
The other works can then be understood from this basic concept as separate or minor philosophical disciplines, focused on a single element of the system as a whole.
* The Science of Logic. The first section of the Encyclopedia gets a separate treatment in the Science of Logic. Now the dialectical deduction is presented that was not worked out in the Encyclopedia.
* The Philosophy of the Fine Arts deals with the notion and reality of Fine Art in various ways. Its starting point and premise is not the notion of Art as it is present in the Encyclopedia! The status of this work is not completely clear.
* The Philosophy of Right develops the idea of “Objective Spirit” already scrutinized in the third section of the Encyclopedia. History is present as the relationship between States and the World-Judgment.
* The Philosophy of Religion does the same with the second stage of Absolute Spirit, Religion, which is mentioned both in the Phenomenology (as the antithesis to Consciousness – Spirit) and in the Encyclopedia. History is present in the sense that there is an order in which various shapes of religion ultimately come to full expression in the revealed Religion of Christianity.
* The History of Philosophy deals with the historical process, part of world history, in which the self-understanding of the Absolute Spirit realizes itself. In a way it is the "subjective" mode of the Philosophy of History.
I think this overall picture of Hegel’s whole philosophical enterprise is crucial in understanding its elements.
R.A. Veen © 2010
The text was prepared in advance of the lecture so it may contain many things that were not expressed during the Monday session at WIZIQ. To download this and any other text go to http://www.robbertveen.com/german-idealism.php
John Edward Toews, Hegelianism, the Path to Dialectical Humanism 1805 - 1841, Cambridge:1980. p. 30. I am drawing on him for the particulars of history for now.
"Historical truths" according to Hegel in PhoS, par. 41, p. 23, "are concerned with a particular existence, with the contingent and arbitrary aspects of a given content, which have no necessity."
Quoted by A.V. Miller in his foreword to the translation, p. v (roman numerals). See A.V. Miller, Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, (Oxford:1977)
PhoS p. 6. All quotations from the Phenomenology (PhoS) in this text are from the translation by A.V. Miller.
PhoS, p. 7.
Derrida or Lévinas can be mentioned here. But note that it is not so much in these responses as such that Hegel has been misunderstood, but by the attempt to deliver a reconstruction of Hegel that grounded the response. Arguing against a possibility of thought that derived from Hegel is not the same as arguing against Hegel.
The Philosophy of German Idealism 2/26 - Robbert A. Veen
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