Heidegger, Hegel, & the Completion of Western Metaphysics
Part 3

4,362 words

Parts 1 and 2 here.

Toward the Sunlight

In our last installment, we learned that The Phenomenology of Spirit is an account of how spirit, or humanity, traverses a highway of despair – a path along which it becomes disillusioned with various of its forms, all of which in one way or another implicitly aim at self-knowledge. In the end, it arrives at what it had sought all along, true self-knowledge or “absolute knowledge.” Spirit becomes thereby “absolute spirit.” The Phenomenology of Spirit is not a book “about” absolute spirit, it is itself absolute spirit. Spirit in its highest form is the writing of the Phenomenology by Hegel, and our reading of it.

We now need to consider the argument of the Phenomenology in more detail. Just exactly what is this “highway of despair”? How does spirit traverse this path? How do the forms of spirit prefigure absolute knowledge? What exactly is absolute knowledge? We have said that it is “true self-knowledge,” but what does that mean? And how does the Phenomenology prepare us for the “system” of Logic-Philosophy of Nature-Philosophy of Spirit?

The standpoint from which Hegel writes the Phenomenology is philosophical in the classical sense. In other words, it is an attempt to escape from the cave and into the sunlight. Hegel refers to the form of consciousness of our perennial cave dwellers as “natural consciousness” (natürliches Bewusstsein), which is roughly the standpoint from whence issues what Plato calls “opinion” (doxa). Natural consciousness takes itself, its forms, and its ways of life for granted and does not call them into question.

Heidegger writes, “Natural consciousness rests in its own nature. It exists in accordance with one of the modes of its nature. However, it is not itself its own nature. Rather, what it finds natural is never to arrive at its own nature on its own, never, therefore, to arrive at what is constantly going on behind its back.”[1] Philosophical consciousness, by contrast, calls natural consciousness and all its forms into question. It is thus, in a qualified sense, a form of skepticism.

In “Hegel’s Concept of Experience,” Heidegger writes, “But what is the phenomenology of spirit, if it is the experience of consciousness? It is thoroughgoing skepticism.”[2] We associate skepticism with the claim that knowledge is impossible, and with “problems” such as “How do you know you’re not asleep and dreaming right now?” or “How do you know you’re not a brain in a vat?” This sort of skepticism is characteristic of the modern period and has nothing to do with the “skepticism” Heidegger is attributing to Hegel.

What Heidegger means is that in the Phenomenology, Hegel puts all of our knowledge into question – and shows all of it to be inadequate. But this is where the similarity with the familiar forms of skepticism ends. Skeptics usually attempt to demonstrate that all of our knowledge is inadequate as an end in itself, and the outcome of this demonstration is purely negative. By contrast, Hegel calls our knowledge into question as a means to achieving a higher sort of knowledge – absolute knowledge. In this sense, Hegel’s approach is similar to that of Descartes, who deploys skepticism in the first of his Meditations in order to arrive at knowledge that is absolutely certain.

I should also remind the reader at this point of something I mentioned in the last installment, namely that Hegel’s discussion of the forms of spirit in the Phenomenology is not restricted to “knowledge” in the familiar sense, but includes ways of living, theories, ideologies, art forms, religions, forms of social relation, etc. All of these are shown to be somehow or other “inadequate” to achieve the goal of perfect self-knowledge. All are, deep down, attempts of various kinds to achieve self-knowledge, but all fail. This is precisely what natural consciousness does not discern is going on “behind its back,” as Heidegger puts it. Philosophical consciousness, or the science of phenomenology, can discern this.

Dialectic

It is appropriate that we alluded to Plato in the last section, as the famous Hegelian dialectic has its roots in Plato and his predecessors. “Dialectic” (Dialektik) comes from the Greek dialektikē, from dialegesthai, “to converse.” Originally, dialektikē referred to the art of conversing, but it came to mean a special sort of conversing – indeed, one in which there need not be anyone speaking at all. It came to mean, in fact, something like a conversation of ideas with themselves.

Zeno of Elea is credited as the founder of this sort of dialectic. A follower of Parmenides, he argued that motion and change (both expressed by the Greek kinēsis) are impossible or illusory. He did this by showing how belief in motion or change results in contradiction. Thus, in “Zeno’s paradoxes,” the idea of motion is made to, in a sense, “contend with itself” and is shown to issue in absurdity.

Something similar is at work in “Socratic dialectic,” where Socrates leads an interlocutor to see the contradictions or difficulties in his ideas. Since Socrates always has an agenda in these situations, pressing his interlocutor to assent to one suggestion after another and leading him to the desired conclusions, these arguments could be expressed without the participation of the interlocutor at all. They are thus fundamentally similar to Zeno’s style of argument. In the later Platonic dialogues, dialectic becomes a method aimed at generating knowledge of the forms. Here, it begins to resemble the dialectic of Hegel’s Logic – something which Hegel himself recognized.

Due to the use of dialectic by the Sophists, and to the tendency of ordinary people to see all philosophy as hair-splitting sophistry, “dialectic” came to have negative connotations. Kant has this negative sense in mind when, in The Critique of Pure Reason, he uses “dialectic” to refer to the human mind’s tendency to try to know that which transcends sensory experience using pure deduction from concepts alone (what is referred to today as “rationalism”). Kant’s famous “antinomies” purport to demonstrate the folly of this, by showing that for every philosophical issue regarding transcendent “objects” (for example, the question of the existence of God) there are two equally defensible but completely contradictory positions. This is intended to establish that, in fact, no real knowledge is possible of those objects.

Kant thus follows in the Zenonian tradition by, in effect, putting ideas into conversation; causing ideas to contend with themselves. For Kant, as for Zeno, the result is purely negative: an impasse and a demonstration of what we do not know. Hegel’s dialectic preserves this moment of impasse – but only as one moment in a larger whole. As is well-known, the Hegelian dialectic is typically a three-stage process that is often depicted as “thesis-antithesis-synthesis.” It is important to note that Hegel himself never used this formula to describe his own dialectic (the formula is used, however, by Fichte, whose version of dialectic influenced Hegel).

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Nevertheless, the pattern “thesis-antithesis-synthesis” can be helpful, up to a point, in understanding Hegelian dialectic. Basically, it works as follows. A claim, idea, or position is considered (the “thesis”). In Hegel, this will often be some sort of idea or category that is considered obviously true or beyond challenge by natural consciousness. Thorough consideration of this idea leads us then to consider a further idea standing opposed to or even contradicting the first (the “antithesis”). This will often be what natural consciousness uncritically takes to be the diametrical opposite of the thesis. Hegel uses the term “understanding” (Verstand) to refer to the tendency of natural consciousness to think in terms of fixed oppositions or “either-ors.”

It is this moment of bringing two terms or ideas into opposition with each other that is where the older dialectic stops. Hegel calls this “negative reason.” His own dialectic moves beyond these oppositions. Usually, he does this by showing that the two terms are not nearly so opposed as understanding assumes. For example, he will sometimes demonstrate that there is an underlying identity uniting the two terms. This enables us to pass beyond them to the “synthesis,” which is “positive reason” or the “speculative” moment in dialectic.

The real problem with the formula “thesis-antithesis-synthesis” is with the term “synthesis.” The third term to the thesis and antithesis is seldom a straightforward “synthesis” or wedding of the other two ideas. It is usually correct, however, to say that in one fashion or other the third term “reconciles” the others. It is necessary to say “in one fashion or other” because how the opposition between terms is reconciled differs from case to case throughout Hegel’s writings. This means that although we can speak of “dialectical logic,” the dialectic cannot be formalized or rendered as an abstract rule of inference. There have been many attempts to do this with dialectical logic over the years and all have failed.

To think of dialectic as involving a formalizable logical pattern of thought is to conceive it abstractly, as a method or device distinctly different from a subject matter, to which the method then gets “applied.” Hegel is insistent, however, that this is not correct. He maintains that in his philosophy there is no division between form, or method, and content. His philosophy takes a dialectical shape because the subject matter is inherently dialectical. Hegel argues that thorough philosophical consideration of any subject matter of necessity issues in a dialectic. In other words, thought that thoroughly thinks any one “thesis” will eventually, and of necessity, give rise to thought of an opposing term, and then to a reconciling moment.

An implication of this supposed lack of distinction between form and content is that reality itself is dialectical. In other words, dialectic is not just a type of thought. Hegel takes a dialectical approach not just in the Phenomenology but in all three parts of his philosophical system: Logic, Philosophy of Nature, and Philosophy of Spirit. No matter the subject under consideration, his account of it takes a dialectical form because the matter at hand is inherently, one could say metaphysically, dialectical. This is true of the forms of spirit, of the movement of the history of philosophy, of the movement of history itself, of ideas in their interconnection (as depicted in the Logic) – even of nature. The natural world, Hegel claims (with rather convincing reasons, one might add) exhibits a dialectical structure.

To see this, one must transcend the level of the natural consciousness, and its understanding, which uncritically accepts conceptual oppositions. One must, in other words, achieve the “speculative moment,” in which oppositions are transcended. To think in this way is, for Hegel, just the same thing as thinking philosophically. Indeed, he uses the terms “speculation” (Spekulation) and “speculative philosophy” to refer to his own position. Hegel’s use of “speculation” has little to do with the usual sense of the word, and nothing at all to do with making risky investments. There is a long history of using “speculation” to refer to attempts to know the divine. Kant uses the term to refer to knowledge claims that transcend experience, which, as we have seen, he rejects. Hegel’s speculation is “transcendent” only in the sense that it transcends the understanding (in the sense of that term just discussed).

Because dialectic is inseparable from its subject matter, it is actually misleading to speak, as many do, of something called “the dialectic” in Hegel. Instead, there is the dialectic of the Phenomenology, of the Logic, of the Philosophy of Nature, of the Philosophy of Spirit, of the Lectures on Aesthetics, etc. And it is seldom the case in Hegel that any two dialectical transitions are alike (though parallels are frequently possible). Heidegger understands this quite well. He writes,

Certainly, “dialectic” is a magnificent thing. But one never finds the dialectic, as if it were a mill which exists somewhere and into which one empties whatever one chooses, or whose mechanism one could modify according to taste and need. Dialectic stands and falls with the matter itself, just as Hegel took it up as the matter of philosophy.[3]

It is also important to note that Hegel regards the transitions in his dialectic as necessary. In this sense, the dialectic is deductive (though it is not the sort of deduction familiar to us from Aristotle). Such claims on behalf of the Hegelian dialectic are rather dubious. Many of the dialectical transitions are obscure at best and many have a distinct whiff of the arbitrary. In moving from point A to point B, Hegel often seems to be relying more on a very fertile imagination rather than on any sort of eidetic necessity. For this reason, commentaries on Hegel are often amusing, as scholars are sometimes at pains to justify Hegel’s dialectical inferences, and sometimes admit that they cannot do so.

These problems inevitably show up when one moves from a kind of introductory “bird’s eye view” of the Hegelian system, to the nitty-gritty process of working through the texts themselves. The bird’s eye view of the system is so inspiring and, indeed, plausible, one is tempted to re-present Hegel’s ideas in some new form, without the credulity-straining dialectic. A major reason Hegelians would be appalled by such a suggestion is precisely the thesis, discussed a moment ago, that it is reality itself, not just Hegelian philosophy, that is dialectical. For example, Hegel once stated that dialectic is “the principle of all motion, of all life, and of all activation in the actual world.”[4] It is important to thoroughly understand this claim, so let us consider it again.

The claim that reality is dialectical amounts to an exposition of the principle of “holism” referred to in the last installment. One of the most influential aspects of Hegel’s philosophy is his contention that the universe itself is a whole (one sees its influence, for example, in the “deep ecology movement”). Specifically, the universe is a one of many. The relation of the many to the one is not, however, like the relation of the items in my wastebasket to the wastebasket. The many is not, as Aristotle would put it, a “heap.” The parts of the whole are not separable pieces that make no difference to each other, such that the removal of any one (or more than one) would leave the rest unaffected.

Instead, the whole exhibits a systematic order not unlike that of a living organism: each part (or, to speak the language of this kind of philosophy, each “moment”) is what it is in relation to all the others and thus the being of each is “founded” on all the others. A careful consideration of any one part will reveal that it is only intelligible in terms of parts that are “other” to it. Each is thus an identity constituted through difference. The articulation of the whole is therefore “dialectical” in that it is intelligible only by perceiving the higher or reconciling unity that brings together all that which is “opposed” (in being differing or “other”).

This “organicism” makes a great deal of sense, especially when one realizes that so much mischief in the modern world, especially in our relationship to nature, has been the direct result precisely of thinking that the beings of our universe are separable pieces that make no difference to each other. As a result, we moderns believe that we can change or destroy whatever we like without consequence to the whole. This is because, at root, we do not even believe that the universe is a whole; we think that it is merely a heap. This is the metaphysics underlying modernity, and here Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature dovetails with Heidegger’s analysis of modernity as das Gestell (the tendency to see all that exists as material to be exploited in the satisfaction of human desires).

Because the moments of the whole are mutually founding, and the being of one entails those that are “other” to it, the articulation of the whole into its necessary moments seems to require a dialectical logic that moves from one moment to other, opposed (or at least differing) moments, and then to the reconciliation of those moments in larger wholes – and, ultimately, reconciliation or unification in the whole itself. This is a plausible metaphysics. Nevertheless, there is a disconnect between the idea of dialectical logic, as I have just sketched it, and the actual dialectic in Hegel’s writings, in which, as I have noted, the movement of the dialectic often exhibits an arbitrariness that we do not normally associate with logical necessity.

Dialectic and Idealism in the Phenomenology

We must now set aside our reservations about Hegel’s dialectic and see how it operates in the Phenomenology. The text has an odd structure. After the Preface and Introduction, the book is divided, unsurprisingly, into three major sections. Hegel is notorious for the triadic structure of his texts and, as we have seen, the dialectic is frequently understood as having a triadic structure (though some Hegel scholars dispute this). The three major sections are:

1. Consciousness
2. Self-Consciousness
3. Reason

However, the third of these sections is actually designated in Hegel’s text as “C. (AA.) Reason.” This is then followed by:

(BB.) Spirit

(CC.) Religion

(DD.) Absolute Knowing

One can interpret “C” in one of two ways. Either “Reason” does double duty as title of the third major division of the work, as well as title of one of four moments making up the third division (AA through DD); or “C” has no specific title and refers to the four moments of AA, BB, CC, and DD taken together. This latter possibility seems less likely, as Hegel gave titles to divisions A and B, so why would he not title C? Most interpreters seem, in fact, to take the text as consisting of three major divisions, designated “Consciousness,” “Self-Consciousness,” and “Reason.”

These form a dialectical triad. “Consciousness” deals with knowledge of objects, where these are uncritically taken by spirit to be fully distinct from the subject. As a result, spirit fails in its attempt to truly know objects (in a sense we will discuss in the next installment). “Self-Consciousness” deals with various ways in which spirit reacts to this situation by turning inward and away from the object. In most of the “self-conscious” forms of spirit, its “turning away” from the object and toward itself consists in somehow negating or denying the object. These two terms are clearly one-sided standpoints, and each is the antithesis of the other.

In “Reason,” the “synthesis” of “Consciousness” and “Self-Consciousness,” spirit comes to realize that the determinations of the subject are simultaneously determinations of the object, and vice versa. In other words, spirit comes to realize an identity between subject and object. This culminates in “(DD.) Absolute Knowing” (or “absolute knowledge”; absolute Wissen can be translated as either). This is the final category of the Phenomenology and the entrée into the system of philosophy that begins with the Logic. In absolute knowing, the distinction between subject and object is literally cancelled or overcome.

But what does this mean? In all forms of knowing or awareness, there is an object that stands opposed to a subject. In absolute knowing, however, our object becomes the subject. Thus, the traditional subject-object distinction is overcome or erased. We might observe, however, that a form of knowing in which our object is the subject just sounds like a description of self-consciousness. This is exactly right. But haven’t we already covered “self-consciousness” in the text, and hasn’t the dialectic left it behind? Not exactly. What was covered earlier in “B. Self-Consciousness” were defective attempts to know ourselves – just as what was covered in “A. Consciousness” were defective attempts to know objects.

Absolute knowing constitutes true self-awareness. In absolute knowing, we realize that the object – indeed, the “objective world” as a totality – is a reflection of ourselves. In knowing the world we are, in a sense, knowing ourselves. In knowing ourselves we are also knowing the world. The microcosm and the macrocosm are identical. Hegel states in The Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences that “the aim of all genuine science is just this, that spirit shall recognize itself in everything in heaven and on earth.”[5]

For Hegel, the achievement of this recognition, absolute knowing, is just the same thing as philosophy or philosophical consciousness (as opposed to natural consciousness). Thus, absolute knowing is another term for philosophy. More precisely, it is the ultimate realization of the philosophical quest. It is the love of wisdom consummated; wisdom achieved. The Phenomenology takes us up to the point where we realize that absolute knowing is what spirit has been aiming at all along. But absolute knowing is merely introduced in the Phenomenology. It unfolds its content – what absolute knowing knows – in the system of Logic-Philosophy of Nature-Philosophy of Spirit.

The foregoing could have the unfortunate consequence of misleading the reader into thinking that Hegel is some sort of subjective idealist. This would be a major misunderstanding. When Hegel claims, as I put it earlier, that the objective world is a reflection of ourselves, he is not saying that the world exists only in our minds or that the world is somehow a creation of the mind (in the sense of a subjective illusion or “veil of maya”). As I stated in the last installment, this is a complete misconstrual of Hegel’s position. There are no Hegel scholars who understand him to be advocating subjective idealism.

Nevertheless, Hegel is correctly described as an “idealist,” and he described himself that way. He is, in fact, what is sometimes called today an “objective idealist” – the diametrical opposite of a subjective idealist. Both Plato and Aristotle could be understood as objective idealists. For Plato, the world around us is fully real in the sense that it is really there, it is no illusion or mental construct (as subjective idealism typically maintains). Our perception that there are bodies existing alongside our own in an environing world is reliable. Nevertheless, Plato contends that the truth of that world is idea.

The impermanent and changing objects in nature are, Plato held, “copies” of eternal ideas or forms. He reasoned that though natural objects really exist, they have a kind of imperfect, derived being. The eternal forms or ideas constitute true being. Subjective idealism, which is found only in modern philosophy, reverses the Platonic relationship between the human subject and the ideas. For Plato’s objective idealism, ideas are, in a word, objective: they are non-spatio-temporal objects existing independently of our minds. In modern representationalist theory, “ideas” are subjectivized as ideas in our minds which mediate between ourselves and an “external world.” Subjective idealism, which depends upon the representationalist paradigm, severs the connection between ideas and world, declaring that only subjective ideas exist.

Hegel’s objective idealism is similar to Plato’s in two fundamental ways. First, he holds that the natural world around us is fully real. Second, he holds that the truth of that world is idea – specifically, the Idea. We will discuss Hegel’s concept of the Idea (die Idee) more fully in a later installment, when we turn to his Logic, in which it is the culminating category. For the moment, suffice it to say that the Idea is the idea of perfect self-relation; it is an idea that is idea of itself. The Idea is empty and abstract, however, when considered apart from its concrete expression in the world. On this point, Hegel’s idealism is similar to the objective idealism of Aristotle, who differed from Plato in holding that while ideas and forms are real, they have no existence apart from the natural objects that exemplify them.

For Hegel, the exemplification of the Idea – its concretization or, we could say, “embodiment” – is just absolute spirit engaged in absolute knowing. In other words, the idea that is idea of itself finds its expression in the world (and thus its real-ization) through an embodied thought that is thought of itself – through self-consciousness, in which object becomes subject and subject becomes object. Hegel understands the expression of Idea in self-thinking thought as the telos (end or goal) of all of nature. In other words, he believes that nature is intelligible as a scale of forms each of which is an approximation to the perfect self-relation exemplified by absolute spirit – i.e., self-aware humanity.

In absolute spirit, nature, in a sense, bends back on itself and comprehends itself. Human beings are creatures of nature but unlike all other natural forms we are capable of self-consciousness. This means that our quest to know ourselves is really nature striving to knowing itself. For Hegel, nature organically issues in its own self-comprehension, and we are the vehicle of that self-comprehension.

Heidegger thought that the most fundamental question of philosophy was “why is there anything at all rather than nothing?” Unlike most philosophers, Hegel actually has an answer to this question: a universe exists so that it can know itself. It reaches a kind of closure or completion in knowing itself, in bringing Idea into concrete being. Thus, if we are looking for the “truth” of the world – something that explains why things are the way they are and, indeed, why any of this is at all – we find it, according to Hegel, in Idea. It is just in this sense that Hegel is an “idealist.”

* * *

In our next installment, we will complete our discussion of the Phenomenology through a consideration of the text’s beginning and end: how absolute knowing develops from the Phenomenology’s starting point, “sense certainty.” We will also consider the tension in Hegel between absolute knowledge and historicism. How can Hegel simultaneously insist, as he does, that all philosophy is only its own time grasped in thought, and that his philosophy provides an ahistorical absolute knowledge? Finally, we will take our first steps into the labyrinth that is Hegel’s Logic.

Notes

[1] Martin Heidegger, “Hegel’s Concept of Experience” in Off the Beaten Track, trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Haynes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 133. (Henceforth, HCE.)

[2] Heidegger, HCE, 151.

[3] Martin Heidegger, Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Parvis Emad and Kenneth Maly (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1988), 112.

[4] Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, Translated by T.F. Geraets et al. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 128-129.

[5] G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, trans. W. Wallace and A.V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 1.