Heidegger, Hegel, & the Completion of Western Metaphysics
Part 8

3,748 words

All previous parts here.

Heidegger’s Critique of Hegel

We now turn, finally, to Heidegger’s critique of Hegel. As we noted at the beginning of this series, Heidegger saw Hegel’s philosophy as the completion of Western metaphysics. He thus agrees with Hegel in one very important respect, for Hegel held exactly this view of his own philosophy. So, we can begin this installment with a significant observation: Heidegger takes very seriously Hegel’s most infamous claim about his philosophy.

Hegel believed that all previous philosophy was an anticipation of his system. This implies the claim that there is one and only one philosophy, which is being incompletely and imperfectly glimpsed at any given point in philosophy’s history – until we reach that history’s end. Further, Hegel’s standpoint also implies that all previous philosophies are “contained” within his own. Each is, effectively, a “limit case” – whereas Hegel presents the systematic totality of which each prior philosophy is only a partial expression.

Hegel announces all these points very clearly. For example, near the end of his Lectures on the History of Philosophy:

The general result of the history of philosophy is this: in the first place, that throughout all time there has been only one philosophy, the contemporary differences of which constitute the necessary aspects of the one principle; in the second place, that the succession of philosophic systems is not due to chance, but represents the necessary succession of stages in the development of this science; in the third place, that the final philosophy of a period is the result of this development, and is truth in the highest form which the self-consciousness of spirit affords of itself. The latest philosophy contains therefore those which went before; it embraces in itself all the different stages thereof; it is the product and result of those that preceded it.[1]

We must take care not to read this as an expression of historicism. When Hegel refers to “the final philosophy of a period” one could understand him as seeing his own philosophy as the final and thus highest in its own period, but only in its own period. However, one must bear in mind that, as discussed in part five of this series, Hegel believes that he is living at “the end of history,” when an absolute – and thus final – standpoint in philosophy is possible.

Unlike many other philosophers, Heidegger does not dismiss Hegel’s claims out of hand as gross arrogance. Indeed, in large measure, he agrees with Hegel’s self-assessment. However, this is not the same thing as saying that Heidegger believes Hegel’s philosophy to be true. Heidegger does believe that Hegel completes Western metaphysics – but not exactly for the same reasons that Hegel believes this. As I have discussed in other essays, Heidegger is profoundly critical of the Western metaphysical tradition. Thus, to “complete” that tradition is not to bring forth the final or ultimate truth. Instead, for Heidegger, it is to end an intellectual and cultural project that is fundamentally wrongheaded.

For Heidegger, Hegel is largely correct when he claims that his philosophy identifies that at which every previous philosophy was aiming, even if only unconsciously. According to Hegel, the entire history of philosophy is about “the Idea” (which I discussed at length in part five). Even where this was not explicitly stated, philosophy has been about the Idea. But it is only in Hegel’s own era that the truth about Idea is revealed: that Idea is spirit, “the Idea that knows itself.”[2] Thus, what is revealed in Hegel’s time is what we could call, with some major qualifications, the “subjectivity” of idea. Minimally, we can refer to Idea’s essence as bound up with subjectivity.

Heidegger recognizes this as well, though within the context of mounting a critique of Western metaphysics and its focus upon “idea.” He points out that the platonic “form” or eidos (εἶδος), originally referred to the “look” of something, and idea (ἰδέα) has a similar history. Heidegger comments:

An ἰδέα is what-is-sighted. What-is-sighted is sighted only in and for an act of seeing. An “unsighted sighted” is like a round square or a piece of iron made out of wood. We finally have to get serious about the fact that Plato gave the name “ideas” to being [das Sein]. . . . They are called “ideas” precisely and primarily because they are understood to be that: to be what-is-sighted. Strictly speaking, the “sighted” is only where there is a seeing and a looking.^[3]

In short, idea involves presence to human subjectivity. From this, Heidegger draws some tremendously important implications for understanding the history of philosophy. To be sure, Plato never remarks on how eidos or idea involve presence to human subjectivity, yet Heidegger argues that the Platonic form, which Plato presents as ultimate being and truth, is an object tailored to human desires and expectations. The Platonic idea presents itself to the intellect of man and is fully intelligible by intellect. It has no side that conceals itself from us, no mystery. It is fully intelligible because it is fully present, hiding nothing. Moreover, it remains always available to intellect, given that it is eternal and unchanging.

With this philosophy, a shift takes place in the Western philosophical understanding of being, one that will reverberate through the entire tradition. Prior to Platonism, early Greek thinking affirmed that there is an ineluctable element of absence or concealment in being. Not all is revealed to us and what does get revealed always emerges out of hiddenness, and then returns into hiddenness again. Early Greek thinking, in other words, affirms mystery.

With Plato, however, thinkers begin to demand, implicitly (it is not made explicit until the modern period), that being be constantly present, in the sense of fully available and intelligible. This means that absence or concealment, as inherent in the nature of being, comes to be denied, discounted, or, as Heidegger puts it, “forgotten.” The tradition begins to exhibit what we have called in earlier essays, the “metaphysics of presence.”

We have also called it “will,” for this metaphysics always involves a concealed will to power. For it is an attempt to accommodate being to one aspect of human nature. There is a part of us that is deeply uncomfortable with mystery. Just as we prefer light to darkness, we prefer knowing to not knowing. There is a certain sort of person who despises the darkness, as if it were a reproach to the power of his intelligence. The history of philosophy is filled with examples of men like this – who are not to be despised for this characteristic. Indeed, their insistence on banishing the darkness can be seen as heroic, even if misguided.

For example, Heidegger quotes Hegel saying the following in his 1818 address on assuming his Berlin professorship: “The essence of the universe that is at first concealed and closed contains no power that could withstand the courage of cognition; it must open up before it and lay its riches at its depth before its eyes and offer them for its enjoyment.”[4] We will turn to Heidegger’s analysis of this statement in the next installment. But it is representative of the ethos of the Western metaphysical tradition, which is fundamentally anthropocentric.

In my series of essays on Heidegger’s history of metaphysics, we have seen that the anthropocentrism of the metaphysics of presence becomes more evident in the modern period, in thinkers like Descartes, Leibniz, Kant, Fichte, and Schelling. It reaches a climax with Hegel, whose philosophy is an extreme expression of it. Nevertheless, this anthropocentrism is present in concealed form much earlier.

For example, Aristotle claims in the Metaphysics that beings derive their being from the imitation of a divine self-knowing subject, the “Unmoved Mover.” This god is a pure act of self-consciousness. In Book X of the Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle argues that the way of the philosopher, the path of Socratic self-understanding, is the terrestrial life that comes closest to that of the divine. What has essentially occurred in the Aristotelian metaphysics is that philosophy has literally become divinized: Aristotle’s god is the perfect self-knower; i.e. the perfect philosopher.

Once we have beheld ourselves in the Unmoved Mover there is no going back, and modern idealism is born. In truth, it is but a short step from Aristotle’s theology to Hegel’s “substance become subject.” In Hegel’s philosophy, the anthropocentrism of the tradition becomes fully explicit: humanity, or self-knowing spirit, becomes the be all and end all of existence itself, that for the sake of which the universe exists at all. Consider four quotes from Hegel, two of which we have quoted in an earlier installment:

Freedom is only present where there is no other for me that is not myself.[5]

If God, by knowing man, is himself man, so also is man, by knowing God, God himself; that, it is said, is the unavoidable consequence of absolute knowledge which it may not conceal from itself.[6]

The purpose of all true science is just this, that Spirit shall recognize itself in everything in heaven and on earth.[7]

The aim of these lectures has been to give a picture of nature in order to subdue this

proteus: to find in this externality only the mirror of ourselves, to see in nature a free reflex of spirit.[8]

In the philosophy of Hegel, being has now been fully accommodated to the human will to full knowledge and mastery. What is, fundamentally, is humanity itself. The world is no longer a mysterious “other” before which we are struck with awe. It is now, as Hegel says above, only a mirror of ourselves. For Heidegger, the history of metaphysics is the history of the metaphysics of presence. Hegel completes this metaphysics, drawing out the presupposition and implications that were present from the beginning. Only Nietzsche, as we shall see in a future essay, goes further than Hegel, but he does so through an attempt to overturn metaphysics itself.

The fact that all the major philosophical movements that follow Hegel are either in some way developing his ideas or reacting against him could be offered as evidence that both Hegel and Heidegger are right about the place of Hegel’s philosophy in the history of ideas. Hegelians, needless to say, will insist that Hegel offered us the final philosophical truth. There is thus nothing left for others to do except to run with his ideas, or run away from them. Heideggerians will argue, by contrast, that this situation results from the fact that Hegel’s philosophy is the dead end of Western metaphysics.

It is now time to consider Heidegger’s criticisms of Hegel in more detail.

Hegelianism as “Ontotheology”

Heidegger’s most famous criticism of Hegel is that his philosophy constitutes “ontotheology” (Ontotheologie). This term was coined by Heidegger, and it combines the Greek word ontos (ὄντος), meaning “being,” with theology, meaning the study or science of God. Ontotheology is an attempt at an ontology, an account of being, that winds up being theology, an account of God or the highest of the beings. Heidegger discusses ontotheology in numerous writings, but one classic source is his 1957 essay “The Onto-theo-logical Constitution of Metaphysics.” He regards ontotheology as a fundamental error present, in one form or another, throughout the history of metaphysics.

This error results from confusing or forgetting what Heidegger calls “the ontological difference” (ontologische Differenz), the difference between being and beings, a concept crucial for understanding Heidegger’s thought. For Heidegger, the central question of metaphysics is “what is being?” Things, like the keyboard in front of me, are beings: things that have being, things that are. Ontology is concerned not with beings, but with the being that beings have. What do we mean when we say that this keyboard is? We say that it “has being.” But what does this mean? It is a perennial question, and difficult to speak about, especially in English. In English things get confusing because we are forced to use the same word in two different senses. We say that the book is a being, because it has being.

Matters are a little less confusing in German, where the being that a being has (being-as-such) is das Sein, a noun constructed from the infinitive of the verb “to be” (sein). Beings, the things that have being, Heidegger calls das Seiende. This is actually a singular noun, and is probably best translated “what is” or “that which is,” but it is understood to refer to beings, the things that have being. In order to avoid confusion, many anglophone Heidegger commentators have adopted the convention of capitalizing the initial letter of Being, to indicate that what is referred to is Being-as-such, the Being that beings (small b) have. However, this practice is falling into disuse, for reasons we need not go into here.

What is this mysterious being that beings all have? One thing is clear: it cannot be a being. If being were a being (i.e., one of the beings) it wouldn’t be being: it would simply be yet another thing that has being. To draw an analogy, you could say that what my dogs have in common is that they both possess the characteristic of dogness. I’m not sure how to define dogness, but I do know that dogness can’t be a dog. If it were, it would be something that has dogness, not the quality of dogness as such. The distinction between being and beings is “the ontological difference.”

Heidegger claims that all previous philosophers have failed in the task of thinking being, because in one way or another they sidestepped the question “what is being?” and talked instead about some being or other that has being – usually a very special or exalted being, but a being nonetheless. Heidegger expresses this in one of his writings on Hegel:

By thinking beings as beings (ὂν ᾗ ὂν [being qua being]), metaphysics is ontological. By thinking beings as beings from the highest being, metaphysics is theological. Metaphysics is in its essence ontotheological. This holds true not only for Plato’s metaphysics and the metaphysics of Aristotle, let alone only for Christian metaphysics. Modern metaphysics is from Descartes to Nietzsche also ontotheology.[9]

For a paradigm case of ontotheology, let us once more consider Aristotle. Near the beginning of the Metaphysics, he announces that his subject matter is “being qua being” (being-as-such). He says that the science that studies this is not the same as any of the special sciences for they each “cut off” some part of being and study that, rather than studying being qua being.[10] In other words, Aristotle is saying that each of the special sciences studies some being or other: astronomy studies the stars, biology studies living beings, geology studies the earth, etc. They study beings and not being; they study things that have being, things that are, not being as such. It will be the task of what Aristotle calls “first philosophy” to study being qua being.

However, to make a very long story short, Aristotle winds up deciding that the best way to understand being will be to investigate that which is the highest or most perfect of the beings, of the things that have being. This is how Aristotle shifts to talking about God, or the Unmoved Mover. He reasons that everything else is said to “be” insofar as it approximates to being like God, which, as the most perfect of the beings, is also the one, true being of which all others are effectively pale imitations.

You can buy Collin Cleary’s Wagner’s Ring & the Germanic Tradition here.

God is a mind that exists in a state of perfect self-sufficiency, contemplating itself, and only itself. In one way or another, all things strive (almost always without awareness) to imitate God’s perfect self-sufficiency. In doing so, they actualize their form (e.g., dogs actualize dogness), which constitutes their individual being. Because things realize their being through their imitation of God, Aristotle holds that God is ultimately what makes beings be. Thus, God is true being.

This is certainly an awe-inspiring conception, yet, as Heidegger points out, it fails in one crucial respect. Aristotle had set out to learn what “being qua being” is. The metaphysics he produces, however, completely fails to do this. Instead of exploring being, Aristotle effectively abandons ontology and turns to theology instead. In other words, rather than give us an account of being-as-such, he changes the subject and instead discusses the highest or most exalted of the things that have being. Aristotle discusses a being, not being qua being. God may be perfect, but he still belongs to the realm of beings, of the things that have being. But what is being? Ultimately, Heidegger contends, Aristotle leaves this question unanswered.

Heidegger levels the exact same objection at Hegel. There are remarkable structural parallels between Hegel’s system and Aristotle’s, and arguably Aristotle was the most important philosopher for Hegel. An important difference between the two thinkers is that while for Aristotle God is a transcendent mind, for Hegel God is the whole. But the telos of the whole, its reason for being, is to give rise to Absolute Spirit, which is a kind of absolute self-consciousness. Thus, it can be argued that Hegel immanentizes Aristotle’s Unmoved Mover, just as was suggested in section one above. God is not a being that transcends nature. Instead, nature itself issues in a “divine,” self-sufficient self-knowing, which is most fully realized in Hegelian philosophy.

We can say that, for Hegel, God is the whole – but we can equally well say that Absolute Spirit occupies the place of the divine in Hegel’s philosophy, since it is that for the sake of which the whole exists. From Heidegger’s perspective, it does not matter which we choose to emphasize. Either way, Hegel’s philosophy fails to address the question “what is being?” and instead, just as in the case of Aristotle, gives an elaborate account of God, or what Hegel calls the Absolute, whether this is construed as the whole, or as Absolute Spirit. In short, Hegel obscures the ontological difference and confuses being with a being, with one of the beings.

This is despite the fact that, for Heidegger, Hegel’s account of being gets off to a promising start. As we have seen, the Logic begins with “pure being.” We suppose, at this point, that Hegel means this in the sense of Aristotle’s “being qua being.” This impression is strengthened when Hegel identifies being with nothing. For Heidegger, being is indeed nothing. The English language allows us to make this point very clearly: being is no thing. This is, in fact, what the ontological difference states: to say that being is not a being is roughly the same thing as saying that being is no thing; it is the being that “things” have. One of Heidegger’s primary criticisms is that Hegel leaves the nothing, and negativity as such, unexplored. Had he focused on the nothing, and its identity with being, Hegel might have succeeded in thinking “being qua being.” Instead, the beginning point of the Logic, so pregnant with possibilities, is simply swept aside by the dialectic.

Being and Beyond

At this point, it is reasonable to ask how Heidegger himself answered the question “what is being?” After all, if he is going to claim that all previous philosophy has dodged the question, then we are entitled to ask whether Heidegger has succeeded where the others have failed. Readers may be surprised to discover, however, that while Heidegger does have an account of what being is, this is not actually the focus of his work. It is a common misconception that Heidegger searched all of his life for the meaning of the word “being.”

In fact, Heidegger’s real concern was with how we ever become aware of being, or take being to be a “question.” Heidegger defined human nature precisely in terms of our relationship to being: we are the beings for whom being is an issue. This is why he refers to human beings as Dasein. In German, this is a common word (normally translated as “existence”) which Heidegger uses in an uncommon way. Literally, it means “there [da] being [sein],” or “being there.” He calls us Dasein because we are the “there” or the location of being. Why? Because we are what being is present to. All manifestation has its dative: the “to whom” it is present. To sound very Husserlian, being presences itself to Dasein. Indeed, for Heidegger, being just is this presentation to a human being. We are, after all, the only beings that are aware of the being of beings.

To understand why being is presentation, let’s resurrect an example I used in an earlier essay. I am walking up to my front door, and I see an unfamiliar object on the steps. “What is that?” I wonder. I am inquiring into the being of the object; what it is. As I approach closer, the mystery is solved: I see that the object is an Amazon box: it presences itself to me as an Amazon box. This way of experiencing something, when it presences itself as a thing of such and such form or nature, is a fundamental structure of human experience (called “presentational as structure” in phenomenological lingo). And this is what Heidegger takes to be being. Why? Quite simply, because the being of something is just the same thing as what it presences itself as.[11] In this presentational event, the being of something is given to me: what it is displays itself.

If we reflect on this carefully, we will realize that talk about “the being of things” is really talk about what they mean to us. And things are only meaningful in relation to an us; an us that derives its way of interpreting meaning from a cultural inheritance. It is only us, after all, that register what things are or what they mean; only us that says “so that’s what it is!”; only us that raises the question “what is being?” Without us, “things” would still be “out there,” they would “exist,” but they would not be. Now, this understanding of being as presentation will probably seem strange, unfamiliar, and very modern to my readers. However, Heidegger argues that it is present in the early Greeks – meaning Greek thinking prior to the metaphysical tradition inaugurated by Plato.

So far so good, but it is at this point that I must throw the reader a curve: Heidegger is not always consistent about how he uses the term “being.” In his later philosophy, by “being” (Sein) he frequently means what he calls elsewhere die Lichtung, which we translate as “the clearing.” When Heidegger accuses Hegel of ontotheology, he means that Hegel confuses being with a being and thus “forgets” being. But, ultimately, what Heidegger really winds up arguing is that, at an even more fundamental level, what Hegel has forgotten is the clearing. If one accepts Heidegger’s premises, this allows him to raise a truly decisive objection against the Hegelian system.

We will explore that objection in the next, and final, installment of this series on Heidegger and Hegel.

Notes

[1] Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 3 vols., trans. E.S. Haldane and Frances H. Simson (London: Kegan Paul, Trench, Trübner, 1892), vol. 3, 552-553.

[2] Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, vol. 3, 549.

[3] Quoted in Thomas Sheehan, Making Sense of Heidegger (Lanham: Rowman and Littlefield, 2015), 84.

[4] Quoted in Martin Heidegger, Hegel, trans. Joseph Arel and Niels Feuerhahn (Bloomington, IN: Indian University Press, 2015), 55-56.

[5] G.W.F. Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, Translated by T.F. Geraets et al. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 58.

[6] G.W.F. Hegel Werke, Ed. E. Moldenhauer & K. M. Michel (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1986), Vol. 11, 369.

[7] G,W.F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 445.

[8] G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970, 445.

[9] Heidegger, Hegel, 63.

[10] Metaphysics Gamma, Chapter One, 1003a2-30.

[11] Thomas Sheehan writes: “The ‘as’ of ‘something-as’ is what human λόγoς brings to the phenomenon in order to let it ‘become’ what it is. This contribution of the as-structure – which is what Heidegger means by ‘world’ – marks the arrival of meaning in the universe of entities, and the ‘that-as-which’ a thing shows up (the shield, the god, the home) embodies the meaning of the thing in question.” Sheehan, Making Sense of Heidegger, 86.