Unity of Thought and Empirical Knowledge

Dirk Fonfara (Hg.) Metaphysik als Wissenschaft Festschrift für Klaus Düsing zum 65. Geburtstag Cinzia Ferrini, “Unity of Thought and Empirical K nowledge: AntiKantian Views in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.” In: Dirk Fonfara, ed., Metaphysik als Wissenschaft. Festschrift für Klaus Düsing zum 65. Geburtstag (Freiburg/ München: Alber, 2006), 327–345. Verlag Karl Alber Freiburg / München [2006] Unity of Thought and Empirical Knowledge: Anti-Kantian views in Hegel’s Phenomenology * Cinzia Ferrini (Trieste) I. Anti-Kantian views in the »Preface« to the Phenomenology 1. Substance and Subject One of the main issues certainly at stake in the »Preface« to the Phenomenology is Hegel’s claim that philosophy can reach actual knowing once raised to the form of »science«. Hegel’s explicit and proper aim in the »Preface« is to turn its traditional meaning of philia tes sophias, love of wisdom, into possession of scientific knowledge.1 In Hegel’s view, the status of science requires that philosophy becomes a system of true (i.e. objective, universal, necessary, determined) cognition about the nature and the constitution of the objects of knowing. In order to achieve such purpose, »everything turns on« recognizing that »Substance is essentially Subject«.2 This famous cornerstone conjoins two sides of a reinterpreted philosophical tradition. The first aspect is the actuality of substance (an echo of Spinoza’s Dei actuosa essentia in: Ethics. Book 2. Prop. 3. Schol.; but see also Book 1. Prop. 34–35), understood by Hegel as active (free) self-realization (associated with the Aristotelian energeia) of things themselves as they are in-themselves. Note that things are considered in their objectivity, not merely as they appear to us, or according to the external (alien) thereness they possess for our intuition or representation. The second aspect is thinking, represented as an existing subject that thinks, the Ego, and conceived of as an activity that is inwardly determined and determining, universally * Thanks are due to K. R. W estphal for the stylistic revision of this paper. G. W . F. Hegel: The Phenomenology of Spirit (hereafter Phen.). Transl. by A. V. Miller. Oxford 1977, § 5, 3; Phänomenologie des Geistes (hereafter Phän.). In: Werke in zwanzig Bänden (hereafter W.). Ed. by E. Moldenhauer and K. M. Michel, Vol. 3, Frankfurt/M. 1970, 14. 2 Phen., § 25; Phän., 28. 1 327 Cinzia Ferrini self-actuating. In order to grasp and express the True, Subject is said to be equivalent to Substance.3 Therefore, Hegel’s formulation: »everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as substance, but equally as subject«4 is the speculative center of convergence of his scientific epistemology. In fact, at the outset of the »Preface« to the Phenomenology, Hegel defines the »true shape in which truth exists« as the scientific character of the rational knowledge proper to philosophy, which comprehends the concept of the True, that is the universal Idea in the proper form of thought: »the true shape of truth is scientific […] truth has only the concept as the element of its existence«.5 A few pages later, Hegel develops these opening statements by writing that »the actual is the same as its concept only because the immediate, as purpose, contains the self or pure actuality within itself«.6 With the help of the 1830 Encyclopaedia (§§ 159ss.) one may cast light on the meaning of the rather cryptic 1807 reference to the substantial/subjective structure of the Concept. In the Encyclopaedia, the Concept is defined as »the truth of being and essence«, as »the substantial might which is for itself«, that is, »what is free«:7 a universality that remains within itself – and it is not dependent on or determined by something alien to itself – in its selfdifferentiation. Moreover, Hegel stresses that conceptual freedom is to be (syllogistically) understood as totality insofar as any singular moment is the totality (the universality) that the concept is, and any moment is posited as an undivided unity with the concept itself.8 3 Phen., § 17, 10: »equal«; Phän., 23: ebensosehr. See Phen., § 17, 10: Phän., 22s. 5 See Phen., § 6, 4; Phän., 15. 6 See Phen., § 22, 12; Phän., 26. 7 G. W . F. Hegel: The Encyclopaedia Logic (hereafter EL). Part I of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences with the Zusätze. Transl. by T. F. Geraets, W . A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris. Indianapolis/Cambridge 1991, § 160, 236; Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse (1830). I: Die Wissenschaft der Logik. Mit den mündlichen Zusätzen (hereafter Enz. I), W. 8/1, Frankfurt/M. 1970, 307. See also EL, § 23, 55; Enz. I, 80. 8 The point of difficulty here is that in no way could Hegel start his 1807 work with the Concept, for »when what is in question is cognition in the mode of thinking, we cannot begin with the truth, because truth, when it forms the beginning, rests on bald assurance, whereas the truth that is thought has to prove itself to be truth at the bar of thinking« (EL, § 159, Addition, 234s.; Enz. I, 306). Indeed, Hegel underscores in the Phenomenology that his articulated processual, comprehending cognition of the Absolute as Subject »can be justified only by the exposition of the system itself« (Phen., § 17, 9s.; Phän., 23). On Hegel’s self-construing method to give philosophy the status of a demonstrated science, see K. R. W estphal: Hegel’s Epistemological Realism: A Study of the Aim and Method of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Dordrecht/Boston 4 328 Unity of Thought and Empirical Knowledge On the ground of the apparent – phenomenal – opposition of consciousness and object, philosophical thought considers the determinations of cognition in their totality. That is, it takes them both as determinations of things and specific determinations of the mutual relation between subject and object. Otherwise stated, comprehending cognition takes the determinations of knowing not just as subjective determinations of a given that stands before us, but considers the determinations of our knowing about objects together with the knowing subject to which things are referred. This kind of approach marks the first difference between scientific and unscientific (ordinary, natural) habit of thought in our ways of knowing. The unconceptual mode of thinking of the unphilosophical consciousness apprehends its objects through a sheer act of subsumption, as if it were disentangled from the totality that is given in any cognitive act, which for Hegel actually involves not only the object under consideration to which our ordinary knowing confines its selfrepresentation, but also the knowing Ego and the mutual relation between the object and the mine that is consciousness.9 This means that for Hegel the peculiar philosophical mode of conceptually comprehensive cognition takes the externality of the sensible manifold (with which our knowledge begins) insofar as it is also a fact of consciousness. That is to say, the sensible manifold has been already situated in thinking and discourse, it has already been transformed into something that belongs to us (see infra).10 In § 20 of the Encyclopaedia Logic, Hegel writes: »[… ] the sensible is a [realm of] mutual externality whose proximate abstract forms are juxtaposition and succession. – Representation has sensible material of this kind as its content; but it is posited in the determination of its being mine – that the represented content is in m e – and of its universality, of its self-relation, or of its sim plicity«. 11 1989. 9 As it is stated in the Nürnberg Doctrine of Consciousness (1809ss.). See G. W . F. Hegel: Texte zur Philosophischen Propädeutik. Nürnberger Schriften. In: W. 4, Frankfurt/M. 1996 (9–302); § 1, 111. 10 On the post-Kantian debate that precedes Hegel’s account of consciousness’s knowing, see G. di Giovanni: The Facts of Consciousness. In: Between Kant and Hegel. Texts in the Developments of post-Kantian Idealism. Translated with introduction by G. di Giovanni and H. S. Harris, Indianapolis/Cambridge 2000, 3–50. 11 EL, § 20; Enz. I, 72. 329 Cinzia Ferrini The thinking that is performed by every human being usually works by abstractions. In respect to the task of understanding what objects rightly and properly are, that is, how the nature of a thing (what a thing is »in itself«, its essence or substantial form) develops, lives, becomes for itself, this first natural habit understands the guiding tendency and realization of a thing as »a lifeless universal«, a »mere drive« lacking actual existence, and »a corpse that has left the guiding tendency behind«. The most famous examples are the bud-blossom-fruit sequence for the manifestation of a plant,12 and the embryo that is in itself a human being, but not so for itself.13 In sharp contrast to this, the second, conceptual mode of thought, conceives of and expresses die Sache selbst as the purposive activity of selforiginating, self-differentiating universality, which is able to conceive of the process through which the aims of things come about, their realization together with their becoming, that is, their »actual whole« as immediate substance and as self-movement of the form. In the case of the plant, the former habit confines itself to stating the substantiality of the things under consideration »as an aim«, and sees in the forms of life only conflicts between one-sided incompatibilities;14 while the latter is able to recognize the opposites as »reciprocally necessary moments of a concrete becoming«, for die Sache selbst »is not exhausted by stating it as an aim, but by carrying it out«.15 Thus, in the case of the embryo, the human being is for itself only as a »cultivated Reason«, which »has made itself into what it is in itself«.16 It is worth noting that in § 251 of the Encyclopaedia Hegel writes that nature is an sich a living totality, and in the »Preface« to the Phenomenology he states that the natural forms that appear to be mutually in conflict are in truth »moments of an organic unity in which […] each is as necessary as the other; and this mutual necessity alone constitutes the life of the whole«.17 To posit that »the living Substance is being which is in truth Subject«18 also means that our universal determinations of thought 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 Phen., Phen., Phen., Phen., Phen., Phen., Phen., 330 § § § § § § § 3, 2s.; Phän., 13. 21, 12; Phän., 25. 2, 2; Phän., 12. 3, 2; Phän., 13. 21, 12; Phän., 25. 2, 2; Phän., 12. 18, 10; Phän., 23. Unity of Thought and Empirical Knowledge are not to be taken only subjectively, merely »because we make it so«, on behalf of the convenience of our theoretical approach to nature. Rather, the particularity is the immanent negativity of the universal.19 As determination of the concept that thinks itself, and not an unmoved, undifferentiated substantiality, the universal is the principle of its own differences.20 It is the particular as immanent negativity of the universal that allows Hegel to account for the free, self-subsistent being of particularities.21 2. The mine and the language: Hegel’s quest for the intelligibility and determination of science Hegel describes the relationship between the conceptual form of knowing and the ordinary cognitive strategies of the unscientific consciousness. He does so against the background of his quest for the universal intelligibility of science, which implies its accessibility from the standpoint of our ordinary way of knowing. Note that the requirement of accessibility enables the phenomenological path to exhibit consciousness’s movement onwards from the opposition between itself and the object to the concept of science as a self-movement. In sharp contrast to the view of science as an esoteric possession of a few individuals on the basis of some special kind of intuition or feeling of the True, and in sharp contrast to the vacuity of indefinite formulas for which no justification is provided, put forth as mere declarations or assertions, Hegel articulates a double strategy: to show what natural and philosophical consciousness have in common, 19 See K. Düsing: Das Problem der Subjektivität in Hegels Logik (Hegel-Studien Beiheft 15). Bonn 1995, 228–252, here: 244ss. for a precise and convincing analysis of this point at the logical level. 20 See Phen., § 18, 10; Phän., 23. 21 On the one hand, the external existence of natural things is a feature that is objective to the concept: the Natursein is thought according to the determinate essential diversity that constitutes any individual existence. Hegel says that the totality of the disjunction of the concept exists in nature as a tetrad because the first is the unity of the universality as such, but the second, or the difference, appears in nature as a dyad, so that the subjective unity of the universal and particular is the fourth term which then has a separate existence in the face of the other three terms: for further elucidation see my Being and Truth in Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature. In: Hegel-Studien 37 (2002), 69–90. 331 Cinzia Ferrini and to point to the complete determination of the content. As to the first move, Hegel emphasizes what allows the equal access of everyone to science: »the understanding is thought, the pure »I« as such (überhaupt: in general); and what is intelligible is what is already familiar and common to Science and the unscientific consciousness alike, the latter through its having afforded direct access to the former«. 22 The bridge between unscientific consciousness and science, therefore, is constituted by the philosophical approach to the very nature of human cognition. In § 2 of the Encyclopaedia, Hegel underscores the difference between philosophical thinking and »the thinking that is active in everything human and brings about the very humanity of what is human«, by stressing, at the same time, that »in-itself there is only One thinking«.23 In § 20 of the Encyclopaedia, Hegel states that the I (das Ich) is the thought (das Denken) as the subject, and since »I am at the same time in all my sensations, notions, states, etc., thought is present everywhere and pervades all these determinations as [their] category«.24 In the »Preface« to the second edition of the Science of Logic Hegel makes clear that the forms of thought are, in the first instance, displayed and stored in human language: 22 Phen., § 13, 8; Phän., 20. In the Addition to § 246 of the Philosophy of Nature in the Encyclopaedia it is made clear that in simply thinking things, in simply giving a name to them, we transform them into something universal, we give them our own (human) form and turn them into something that belongs to us, with which we all are acquainted. In bringing everything into the net of the universal determinations of thought we have first made the content intelligible, something we share and can communicate. And what is intelligible, that is, all the things whose unique sensuous singularity can be said (for it has been transformed into the universality of a name), is the content of our natural unscientific consciousness which is, indeed, »immediate spirit.« Likewise, when Hegel comes to speak of the kind of consciousness that finds in external objects only universality, he equates die Allgemeinheit with das abstrakte Mein. See Phen., § 245, 147; Phän, 188. 23 EL, § 2, 25; Enz. I, 42. In other words, in spite of the difference between forms of thought that appear as feelings, beliefs, intuitions, representations and thinking itself as form, Hegel will always maintain that thought (»the pure I as such«) determines and permeates all the human content of consciousness (and, as it is well-known, one of the tasks of Hegel’ s Logic is exactly to bring all our unaware formal activity to consciousness). 24 EL, 51; Enz. I, 75. 332 Unity of Thought and Empirical Knowledge »Into all that becomes something inward for men [… ] into all that he makes his own, language has penetrated, and everything that he has transformed into language and expresses in it contains a category«. 25 From the section on intelligence in the Philosophy of Spirit of 1805/1806, to § 2 of the 1830 Encyclopaedia, up to the »Preface« to the second edition (1832) of the Science of Logic, Hegel will always maintain that, through das Ich (which is form, not only as simple self, but also as movement) the forms of thought in general permeate, instinctively and unconsciously, all human activities – even the most sensuous ones – in their original difference from animality. 26 The essence, the distinctive nature of man itself that is logical, and expresses itself, awakening the spirit, is the force of giving names to things, as language, the first creative force exerted by spirit. As he makes apparent in the dialectic of sense certainty, because language is the work of thought, nothing can be actually expressed in language (versus what is merely meant) that is not universal, because language »belongs to consciousness, i.e. to that which is inherently universal«.27 Therefore »what is originally identical and at one with itself« (the abstract self-relation expressed when one says »I«) has an ›infective‹, transfiguring power28 in respect to »what is posited in this unity«.29 The result is the »intelligibility« (to use Hegel’s 1807 terminology) of the content matter, which fills the gap between ordinary and philosophical consciousness and allows to place a ladder from the former to the latter. As to the second move, Hegel famously criticizes the habit of thought that grasps the True as »the night in which all cows are black« to underscore that »only what is completely determined is at once exoteric, comprehensible, and capable of being learned and ap- 25 Hegel’s Science of Logic (hereafter SL). Transl. by A. V. Miller, London/New York 1968, 31; Wissenschaft der Logik I (hereafter WL I), W. 5, Frankfurt/M. 1986, 20. 26 It has been observed that for Hegel »pre-conceptual thinking activity is a necessary condition of conceptualization«, see A. de Laurentiis: On Hegel’s Concept of Thinking. In: Societas rationis. Festschrift für Burkhard Tuschling zum 65. Geburtstag. Ed. by D. Hüning, G. Stiening and U. Vogel, Berlin 2002, 263–285, here 269. 27 Phen., § 110, 66; Phän., 91s. See also G. W . F. Hegel: Jenaer Systementwürfe III (1805/1806). In: Gesammelte Werke. Vol. 8. Ed. by R. P. Horstmann, Hamburg 1976, 190: »der Mensch spricht zu dem Dinge als dem seinigen und diß ist das Seyn des Gegenstandes«. 28 See EL, § 22, 54 and Addition; Enz. I, 78s. 29 See EL, § 42, Addition 1, 84s; Enz. I, Zusatz 1, 118. 333 Cinzia Ferrini propriated by all«.30 The charge of emptiness, formalism, superficiality and mere repetition of identities leveled against the abstract universality that is at work in the ordinary mode of thought sharply returns when Hegel accounts for alternative philosophical approaches to absolute knowing. They are taken to be views which surrender understanding and suppress the differentiation of the concept, confining themselves either to a sheer ecstatic intuition, to an act of faith or to an immediate, a-processual, undifferentiated knowledge of the Absolute. One of the most famous sentences of the »Preface« runs: »The True is the whole […] Of the Absolute it must be said that it is essentially a result, that only in the end is it what it truly is; and that precisely in this consists its nature, viz. to be actual, subject, the spontaneous becoming of itself«;31 which Hegel expresses also in this way: »Reason is purpose activity [… ] in the sense of which Aristotle, too, defines Nature as purposive activity, purpose is what is immediate and at rest, the unmoved which is also self-moving and as such is Subject [… ] The result is the same as the beginning, only because the beginning is the purpose«. 32 Prima facie, Hegel’s double concern (quest for determinatedness and exoteric intelligibility of the True) marks his distance from Schelling in particular, and the post-Kantians in general (Fichte, Jacobi). It may be worth noting, however, that such kind of concern was already crossing the Differenzschrift, the Dissertation on the orbits of the planets; and it was implied in the unity of the logical and ethical roots of Hegel’s early philosophy of nature.33 Last but not least, it is also directed against the formalism of Kantian morality as well as against Kant’s way to confine objective, universal and necessary truth both to our empirical knowing of phenomena and to the natura formaliter spectata of the first Critique. Moreover, the characterization sketched above between lifeless and living universal involves a criticism of any 30 Phen., § 13, 7; Phän., 20. Phen., § 20, 11; Phän., 24. 32 Phen., § 22, 12; Phän., 26. See K. Düsing: Ontologie bei Aristoteles und Hegel. In: HegelStudien 32 (1997), 61–92. 33 Here I can only hint at an aspect I developed in Tra etica e filosofia della natura: il significato della Metafisica aristotelica per il problema delle grandezze del sistema solare nel primo Hegel. In: Hegel e Aristotele. Proceedings of the Cagliari Congress (April 11–15, 1994). Ed. by G. Movia, Cagliari 1997, 135–201. 31 334 Unity of Thought and Empirical Knowledge empirical analysis that remains at the standpoint of division34 and of Kant’s theory of matter and theory of the Self as well. II. Phenomenology, Logic and Philosophy of Nature Right at the outset of his 1801 Differenzschrift Hegel criticises Kant’s nomothetic laws of understanding for containing only the condition of the possibility of experience in general, for being objective only in relation to the objects of experience and not for the thing-in-itself. Consequently, Hegel denies that particular experience, in its multiplicity, variety, heterogeneity, can be thoroughly interconnected only transcendentally. In Hegel’s view, Kant is a critical target here because the a priori presuppositions (which serve as a guideline for our rational investigation of real nature), are only reflective maxims of the heuristic and subjective judgments of the third Critique. Therefore, they appear inadequate for constituting the rationale of the systematic unity of particular and determinate experience, that is, for grounding the oneness of its empirical objectivity. With regards to the rationale of systematic unity in empirical knowledge, it is worth noting that in the Appendix to the Transcendental Dialectic Kant had made clear two related aspects of his first Critique. The first is that, although the understanding connects, through the schemata of sensibility, the manifold of appearances through concepts and brings it under empirical laws, nevertheless, apart from these schemata, its actions are undetermined;35 the second is that, likewise, »the unity of reason is also in itself undetermined with regards to the conditions under which, and the degree to which, the understanding should combine its concepts systematically«.36 Kant’s solution is to propose an analogue of a schema of sensibility (which as such cannot be found in this case), that is, a schema of reason for the thoroughgoing systematic unity of all concepts of the understanding. Through the application (Anwendung) of the categories to (auf) their sensible schemata we reach a cognition of the 34 See EL, §38, Addition, 79; Enz. I, Zusatz, 111; EL, §227, Addition, 296–297; Enz. I, 380. I. Kant: Kritik der reinen Vernunft (1787: hereafter B). In: Kant’s gesammelte Schriften. AA III, Berlin 1911, 692; Critique of Pure Reason. Ed. and translated by P. Guyer and A. W . W ood (hereafter CPR). Cambridge etc. 1998, 602. 36 B 693; CPR, 602. 35 335 Cinzia Ferrini phenomenon itself, we determine something in its constitution. Through the application of the concepts of the understanding to (auf) the »idea of the maximum of division [interest in manifoldness and according to the principle of specification] and unification [interest in unity and according to the principle of aggregation] of the understanding’s cognition in one principle«, we have »only a rule«, a »maxim«, a »merely regulative« or »subjective« kind of judgment grounded only on the interest of reason without any possible insight into the nature of the object. In this way Kant voids the objectivity of any conflicting claims advanced by alternative scientific theories: by reducing their principles to maxims that express the twofold interest of speculative reason (in manifoldness and in unity), Kant may show that what naturalists assume to come from their proper insight into the object is ‘only’ grounded in their own mode of thought. The scientific battle among different systems of classification of inorganic and organic realms (Kant mentions the model of the ladder of continuity among creatures by Leibniz and Bonnet, challenged at the time also by Linnaeus)37 is not just deprived of any possible objective outcome. Rather, it appears also to be an objectively unjustified contrast, because in any event the constitution of the object »lies too deeply hidden« for empirical scientists38 unaware of the results of the first Critique. On this basis, in the Difference essay Hegel writes that Kant left »an enormous (ungeheures) empirical realm of sensuousness and perception« out of the objective determination through categories, »as if it were an absolute a posteriori«.39 In the Phenomenology’s chapter on Observing Reason, speaking about the various modes of 37 On Leibniz’s law of continuity in the Nouveaux essais sur l’entendement (1756) that leads to the modern revival of the image of the chain of natural bodies together with Bonnet’s progressive scala naturae in the Contemplation de la nature (1764), see G. Barsanti: La scala, la mappa, l’albero. Immagini e classificazioni della natura fra Sei e Ottocento. Firenze 1992, Cap. I, 11–22. On the alternative model of the geographical map (aimed at stressing multifarious, differentiated and crossing affinities among living bodies set forth also by Linnaeus’s Philsophia botanica 1751) see 47ss. 38 B 695; CPR, 603s. 39 G. W . F. Hegel: Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie (1801, hereafter Differenz). In: Jenaer Schriften 1801–1807. W. 2, 10. On this point see K. R. W estphal: Kant, Hegel, and the Transcendental Material Conditions of Possible Experience. In: Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain 33 (1996), 23–41, which brings out some complementary constitutive issues. On the universal teleology of the Critique of Judgment as a mere representation-model for our theoretical and practical world-orientation see K. Düsing: Die Teleologie in Kants Weltbegriff. In: Kant-Studien, Ergänzungsheft 96, Bonn² 1986. 336 Unity of Thought and Empirical Knowledge classification of the empirical realm of nature based on specific characteristics (claws, teeth etc.), Hegel deals with the current rival classifications of the distinguishing marks of animals and with the natural scientists’s antiLockean conflicting claims about the essential characteristics on which to ground their own systems.40 Hegel acknowledges that the quest for the »artificial system« (das künstliche System) to be in accord with Nature’s own system is justified on a rational basis: »This follows necessarily from the Notion of R eason; and the instinct of Reason – for, in this observational activity, Reason operates only instinctively – has also in its systems achieved this unity, viz. its objects are themselves so constituted that they contain in themselves an essentiality or a being-for-self, and are not merely the accident of a particular m oment or a particular place. The distinguishing marks of animals, e.g., are taken from their claws and teeth; for in point of fact it is not only cognition that thereby distinguishes one animal from another, but each animal itself separates itself (scheidet sich) from others thereby«. 41 An important issue at stake as early as in 1801 is therefore the merely subjective form of what in Kant’s sense constitutes the objectivity of thinking and the barely phenomenal significance ascribed to the empirical reality of such objectivity. This feature of critical thinking is highlighted in the second Remark to § 13 of the 1783 Prolegomena, where Kant argues that not only the secondary but also the so-called primary qualities of the body, traditionally (Galileo, Locke) regarded as not depending on the subjectobject-dichotomy, but necessarily grounded in the object itself (impenetrability, materiality, shape etc.) belong merely to its appearance. At the same time Kant maintains the existence in itself of the thing that appears, but as an sich devoid of any sensible quality, thinkable but not experienceable. In contrast to this, according to the view stated right at the outset of the »Preface« to the Phenomenology, things are in the first instance an sich, that is, unexperienced in their own substantial con- 40 On the influence of Locke’s criticism of essentialist classification in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (1690) on botanical theory which gave rise to an upsurge of artificial system of classifications see A. G. M orton: History of Botanical science. London et al. 1981, 235ss. 41 Phen., § 246, 149; Phän., 190. 337 Cinzia Ferrini stitution, but only because their sensible nature has not yet been brought out by their development. As it has been already noted: »Hegel does not really reject the Kantian concept of the in-itself«, rather »he rethinks its relation to experience«, giving to the notion of noumena an empirical embodiment.42 No wonder, then, that in speaking of critical philosophy as a »position of thought« in §§ 37–60 of the Encyclopaedia, Hegel will charge Kant with an »impassable gulf« between our thoughts and the Ding an sich.43 The same kind of charge, however, was leveled against Kant in the 1805/06 Lectures in the History of Philosophy.44 In this work Hegel accuses Kant of having conceived of the unity of self-consciousness, the I, as »totally abstract and completely undetermined«;45 and therefore, with taking it as a subjective activity of self-consciousness that is unable to introduce absolute unity into the sensory manifold.46 When, in the Differenzschrift, Hegel writes that Entgegenset- 42 J. McCumber: Schiller, Hegel and the Aesthetics of German Idealism. In: The Emergence of German Idealism. Ed. by M . Baur and D. O. Dahlstrom, W ashington 1999, 133–146. McCumber continues: »Just as Aristotle argues the Forms exist, but here in the empirical world (as species), so Hegel argues concerning things-in-themselves. The Hegelian in-itself is not an indeterminable something beyond experience, and which is called so because it goes on to determine, or actualize, itself in further experiences […] Reality just is what we experience: locating it beyond our experience, so that metaphysics is a nonempirical discipline, is a defect in Kant’s empiricism« (144). The claim of the »Preface«, as well as of the concluding paragraph of the Encyclopaedia’s Phenomenology, is that the universal and necessary (in sharp contrast to the contingent, particular, of sensation) determinations of thoughts are not just our products, cut off from what the things are in-themselves, but they are what also pertain to objects themselves as they are in-themselves. 43 EL, § 41, Addition 2, 83; »eine unübersteigbare Kluft«: Enz. I, 116. The reference seems to be to I. Kant, Kritik der Urteilskraft (1790), AA V, Einleitung, § 9, 195; Critique of the Power of Judgment. Ed. P. Guyer, translated by P. Guyer and E. Matthews, Cambridge etc. 2000, 80–81. 44 Kant’s »external, superficial way« to join understanding and sensibility is compared to the way to connect a piece of wood to a human leg by means of a stick in G. W . F. Hegel: Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie. In: Sämtliche Werke. Jubiläumsausgabe in zwanzig Bänden. Ed. by H. Glockner. Stuttgart 1959, Vol. III/3, 570. 45 EL, § 42, 84; Enz. I, 117. 46 EL, § 42, Addition 1, 85; Enz. I, 118. Recently, this aspect has been highlighted by K. Düsing: Spontane, diskursive Synthesis. Kants neue Theorie des Denkens in der kritischen Philosophie. In: Metaphysik und Kritik. Festschrift für Manfred Baum zum 65. Geburtstag. Ed. by S. Doyé, M . Heinz etc. Berlin/New York 2004, 83–107, see especially 98–101. 338 Unity of Thought and Empirical Knowledge zen and Einssein are both posited at the same time as true in the Absolute by philosophical knowing47 he speaks of an identity that, contrary not only to Schelling’s model exposed in the Darstellung meines Systems (1801), 48 but also to Kant’s, introduces absolute unity in the multiplicity, for by allowing singular beings to subsist on their own account (the side of the non-identity) – as it appears in sense-perception – it at the same time posits them in the Ego, in the unity of the abstract self-relation, consuming their external independence and indifference, appropriating the reality of the world, conquering it through cognition, making it ideal. It is worth noting that the same apprehension of the Absolute as identity of identity and non-identity also permeates Hegel’s approach to matter. In the 1801 De orbitis planetarum Hegel conceived the self-determination of matter in absolute mechanics (the free motion of the heavenly bodies) as an internal and immanent principle of opposed forces. According to a specific feature of the »Preface« recalled above, Hegel centrally linked his speculative or »true« assessment of gravity as principium identitatis quod in se ipso differentiam ponat49 with a living consideration of nature versus the dead mechanism of the principle of inertia and of external combination of selfsufficient abstract forces which were philosophically grounded on the Kantian Leblosigkeit of matter.50 Thus, Hegel constantly rewrites Kant’s pure apperception as 47 Differenz, W. 2, 96. Here I can only mention the point in passing. For an examination see my La Differenzschrift: modelli di identità e filosofie della natura in Hegel e Schelling. In: L’esordio pubblico di Hegel. Per il bicentenario della Differenzschrift. Ed. by M. Cingoli, Milano 2004, 127–147. 49 It echoes the Differenzschrift’s formula of the union of identity and non-identity. 50 I. Kant: Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft (1786). AA IV, 544. Let me add that mechanical free self-determination, that is, matter viewed as being endowed with an inner principle of change, however, does not at all imply »individuality« as a dimension of the »self«. Clearly enough, from such a perspective, matter cannot be said to be subjective and selbstisch (i.e. endowed with individuality) within the realm of Mechanics, for the conceptual relation between the parts and the whole that characterises individuality is organic, not mechanical. However, only by stating that the subjective logic is the framework of organics does Hegel characterize nature as essentially selbstisch and subjektiv and retrospectively characterize the emergence of organics in mechanics, leading that first stage back into its conceptual ideality. Precisely because the concept distinguishes according to qualitative determinateness, we have not a progressive realisation of the Absolute as subject, but rather »leaps«, discontinuity, in the process of nature. 48 339 Cinzia Ferrini »the activity of making the object mine«. This very concern belongs to the core of the Hegelian critical reading of Kant throughout the development of Hegel’s thought, for the language of the Addition 1 to § 42 of the Encyclopaedia strikingly recalls the one used in a famous Aphorism on Jakob Böhme (1803–1806),51 which has parallels in the 1805–1806 Lectures on the History of Philosophy and in the Addition to § 248 of the Encyclopaedia: »Thus the Ego is, so to speak, the crucible and the fire through which the indifferent multiplicity is consumed and reduced to unity«.52 In the Encyclopaedia Logic of Essence, speaking of Essence as ground of existence, Hegel further clarifies the anti-Kantian implication of his approach to the truth of things, repeating the plant and a variant of the embryo examples of the Phenomenology. He concludes by pointing to the stage in which a thing is determinate (concrete). A thing is not formaliter spectata when it is conceived of as having existing distinctions in the forms of diversity (reflection-into-another) which are posited in its oneness, as a bond that connects various properties to one another, constituting the full body of a specific identity. III. The Dialectic of Perception and Hegel’s anti-Kantian Theory of Matter This logical moment corresponds to the stage of Perception in the Phenomenology, where the so called common sense or ordinary understanding of natural consciousness (ruled by the principle of non-contradiction) knows its object, the perceived things, according to two 51 G . W . F. Hegel: Aphorismen aus Jenenser und Berliner Periode. In: K. Rosenkranz: Hegels Leben (1844), Repr. Darmstadt 1963, 537–566, here: 547. 52 EL, § 42, Addition 1; Enz. I, 118. Commenting in the Jena period Böhme’s vision of God’s wrath when he becomes aware that his essence is lost, dispersed in the being other of himself of his creation, Hegel relates the intuition of a divine consuming fire that burns nature, transfiguring its immediate life in an eternal spiritual one to the higher scientific work of consciousness which, through conceptual knowing, shows how the natural essence of both the subject and the object is consumed so that the individual emerges aware of his own self and intuition of nature’s spiritual essence, by crushing the alleged external substantiality of the reality of the world standing before its knowing, and by making it ideal. Note that for Hegel the very first spiritual act that consumes the immediate natural determinacy of the sensible world is the word of language, which supersedes concrete images in abstract representations. I refer to an issue deepened in my Dai primi hegeliani a Hegel. Napoli 2003, 103–115. 340 Unity of Thought and Empirical Knowledge apparently contradictory extremes: singularity and universality. Because of these two extremes, common sense despairs of reaching truth every time that it tries to bring together the unitary being of a thing and its many different sensory aspects. In the same vein with the general perspective outlined in the »Preface«, the understanding is the mode by which thinking apprehends given objects in their determinate distinctions, but it bestows the form of abstract universality on these contents, which it fixes in mutual contradistinction. Hegel never changed opinion about this characterization of the understanding, from the Differenzschrift essay (where the sound common sense is taken to be responsible for the dualism of modern culture)53 up to § 80 of the Encyclopaedia. What in Perception properly characterizes the reflective ordinary human understanding from the standpoint of philosophical Science is exactly what Hegel will also restate in the 1812 »Preface« to the first edition of the Science of Logic: that the Verstand »imposes its view that truth rests on sensuous reality, that thoughts are only thoughts, meaning that it is sense perception which first gives them filling and reality«.54 In § 25 of the Encyclopaedia Logic Hegel speaks of the Phenomenology in terms of the concrete part of the system that already falls partly within the introduction to it, for it considers the positions available to thinking in respect to objectivity as permanently in the phenomenological antithesis between subject and object. However, »if the thought-determinations are afflicted with a fixed antithesis, they are »only of finite nature« (of limited content) and this is the kind of thinking that is called »understanding«. The finitude that characterizes understanding is »inadequate to the truth«, its determinations »persist both in antithesis to each other, and (even more) in their antithesis to the Absolute«.55 Since Perception results from Sense Certainty, the object is initially taken as it emerged from the experience of the dialectic of the here and the now, that is, as a simple (universal) complex of many determinations, as language truly expresses. Therefore, on the one hand, the thing is taken as essentially one, as a simple natural unity which as this kind of identity excludes what is other than itself.56 On 53 See M. N. Forster: Hegel’s Idea of a Phenomenology of Spirit. Chicago/London 1998, 583–586. SL 28; WL I, 16. 55 EL, § 25, 64; Enz. I, 91. 56 It is worth noting that at a logical level, Hegel deals with the figure of the excluding One under the general heading of Quality and under the specific standpoint of atomistic philosophy in the first and second edition of the Science of Logic and in § 98 of the Encyclopaedia Logic, showing how contradiction arises when the One is fixed as One, repulsion is taken to be its fundamental 54 341 Cinzia Ferrini the other hand, however, the thing of Perception also necessary contains diversity, it appears as constituted by a manifold of determinate properties.57 The unsolved sensuous opposition between the abstract extremes of essentiality and determinatedness leads to the transition of consciousness to the superior and deeper unity of understanding, and to force as its object. The transition is carried out when consciousness moves to an unconditioned, supersensible, self-identical universality as the inner, productive ground of the manifold properties of the object (i.e., a self-identical universality that is not an immediate lifeless substance that lacks actual existence, but as form that is purposive activity and makes itself into what the thing is in itself, developing its parts and properties, bringing the inner nature of perceived things to actuality). At a parallel logical level, if the One as fixed One and as many Ones represents the standpoint of atomistic philosophy, through the self-sublation of the One it has been shown the unity of repulsion and attraction, that is that attraction belongs to matter just as essentially as repulsion. It is because of the activity of the essence of things force and the moment of its coming together with others (attraction) is conceived of as something external and by chance. 57 Again, it is worth noting that, logically speaking, Hegel states that in truth repulsion is essentially attraction and the excluding One sublates itself. On the dialectic of repulsion and attraction see F. Schick: Absolutes und gleichgültiges Bestimmtsein – Das Fürsichsein in Hegels Logik. In: Hegels Seinslogik. Ed. by A. Arndt and Ch. Iber, Berlin 2000, 235–251. On Hegel’s polemics against the atomistic theory and Kant’s construction of matter in the Logic, see W . Lefèvre: Repulsion und Attraktion. Der Excursus ›Die Kantische Konstruktion der Materie aus der Attraktiv- und Repulsivkraft‹ in Hegels »Wissenschaft der Logik«, ibid., 252–270. Eventually, the whole movement of Perception is taken to be the one of an essence that in perceiving is linked with a multifarious diversity that is both inessential (i.e. the properties are mutually indifferent, not mutually exclusive) and necessary (to the determinatedness of the thing). W hat necessarily emerges is that in consciousness’ experience the perceived thing as the simple, unseparate complex of many properties, collapses through the determinatedness that allegedly constitutes its essence: indeed, Perception sublates itself when it separates the simple inner self-determination of the thing from its multifarious being, it separates the being of the thing from its immediate presence to a perceiver, and it posits the thing as the whole ground of its determinate parts. This self-sublation of the finite is exactly what Hegel calls dialectical moment of everything logically real in § 79 and § 81 of the Encyclopaedia Logic. 342 Unity of Thought and Empirical Knowledge (without which essence itself does not exist) that Hegel speaks of force. Thus, natural consciousness necessarily moves from a mediated relation to a supersensible, unconditioned inner being of things. Its true essence is called force, and as a universal, a thought determination, it belongs to the domain of the Understanding. Commentators have been puzzled by this transition.58 Already in the 1801 Difference essay, however, Hegel had charged Kant’s metaphysics of nature with being able to construct only a (dead) mechanics, that is, with offering only a purely formal mathematical, not dynamical construction of phenomena.59 As we have recalled above, against Kant’s metaphysical foundation of Newton’s law of inertia, (according to which matter’s vis inertiae is and signifies nothing but its lifelessness als Materie an sich selbst), Hegel held the view (as early as the 1801 De orbitis) that matter must be grasped as constituted by an immanent and internal principle of self-determining identity, a universal force, common to the world, that posits difference within itself. He rejected the view of matter as a dead substratum that receives the impulse to move only from a cause external to it, as if matter could be still said to be something an sich selbst independently from and out of the relation of the opposed forces which were supposed to construct it dynamically.60 In § 98 of his Encyclopaedia Logic Hegel charges Kant’s view of matter as constituted by the mutual relation of the forces of attraction and repulsion with »muddy confusion«, because it is still indebted to the 58 For instance, according to Heidegger, the designation with force of the object of our understanding is »initially strange« and not »readily intelligible« (see M. Heidegger: Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Transl. by P. Emad and K. Maly. Bloomington/Indianapolis 1988, 101s.). Moreover, he includes Hegel’s move within the stream of philosophies of subjectivity. He does so in the light of a resumption of metaphysics after Kant’s transcendentalism. In particular, he confines Hegel’s treatment of the notion of force to the »material completion and unfolding« of Kant’s categories of relation (which are: of Inherence and Subsistence; of Causality and Dependence; of Community: i.e. reciprocity between agent and patient). Heidegger writes: »Hegel already took account of the first relation – substantia and accidens – with the corresponding transformation in the interpretation of the thinghood of the thing as object of perception. And now one could assume that the object of the understanding would be the next dynamic category as the truth of the thing, the category of causality« (103). 59 See Differenz, W. 2, 103s. This aspect has been examined by K. R. W estphal: On Hegel’s Early Critique of Kant’s Metaphysical Foundation of Natural Science. In: Hegel and the Philosophy of Nature. Ed. by S. Houlgate, Albany 1998, 137–166. 60 G. W . F. Hegel: Dissertatio philosophica de orbitis planetarum. Jena 1801, 22,26–23,10. 343 Cinzia Ferrini standpoint of atomistic philosophy, for it is essentially analytic.61 Prima facie Hegel’s own charge seems untenable, for in the Metaphysische Anfangsgründe Kant criticizes the atomistic and mechanistic view of nature as well as the metaphysical dogmatism endorsed by the working scientists of his time, that is: their unjustified use of absolute impenetrability, absolute homogeneity and absolute indestructibility. In Hegel’s view, however, far from providing a true construction of matter, far from deducing how matter consists in nothing else but the unity of the two forces of attraction and repulsion, Kant’s alleged dynamic »suffers from the defect that repulsion and attraction are postulated as present without further ado«. In the Science of Logic Hegel writes that Kant presupposes the representation of matter and afterwards he asks himself which forces occur to obtain its presupposed determinations. Although Kant recognizes that attraction is as fundamental as repulsion, within matter itself the two forces remain mutually external and self-sufficient. With the concept of force as the unconditioned, self-identical universality that emerges from the self-sublation of perceiving consciousness as the inner, productive ground of the manifold properties of the object, Hegel also shows us that when Kant grounds the objectivity of experience he fails to credit thought-determinations with any active and immanent part in determining the content of experience.62 Therefore, Hegel’s analysis of the deceptive experience of the 61 Hegel’s position may be further elucidated when we recall its philosophical context. Indeed, a similar vein is to be found in Schelling’s Erster Entwurf (1799), where he had stated that no matter was to be conceived of as simple or primitive, but it must be regarded as a product, that is as something originated by the original organizing absolute activity of nature; in this way no place was left for atoms. Instead, Schelling introduced the concept of monades of nature, arguing for a sort of spinozism of physics. In the Allgemeine Deduktion des dynamischen Processes (1800) Schelling had challenged Le Sage’s corpuscular theory, and he had criticized Kant’s construction from forces of the empirical reality of matter as a phenomenon, as a subjective representation of an unknowable to us thing-in-itself (in the section Dynamics of the Metaphysische Anfangsgründe, Theor. 4, Remark 2). According to Schelling, pace Kant, the two forces are not to be thought as united to matter, for matter is not made possible by the concurrence of repulsion and attraction. Rather, matter has not empirical reality an sich and its possibility is given by a determined relation of the two forces, one to the other, in respect of space, so that it comes to be only the sensible, phenomenal symbol of the two opposed forces. 62 W ith reference to the Logic of Essence and Hegel’s attack on the Kantian notion of a thing-initself, P. Keller (Hegel on the Nature of the Perceptual Object. In: Jahrbuch für Hegelforschung 3 (1997), 47–75) remarks that: »mere thinghood fails to distinguish the thing in itself from any other thing in itself [… ] The thing as such is whatever gives unity to a collection of properties« (74). 344 Unity of Thought and Empirical Knowledge »perceiving understanding« in the dialectic of Perception proves in the experience of consciousness that natural things have to be objectively determined according to what is internal and necessary, not external or alien to them: their ground is force that expresses itself.63 T his P D F ‘off-print’ matches the pagination, and as closely as possible also the format, of the original publication. © V erlag K arl Alber G mbH Freiburg / M ünchen 2006. 63 Here I refer to my Zwischen Naturwissenschaft und Philosophie: Hegel’s Phenomenological Transition from Perception to Understanding. In: Homo Sapiens und Homo Faber. Epistemische und technische Rationalität in Antike und Gegenwart. Festschrift für Jürgen Mittelstraß. Ed. by G. W olters and M. Carrier, Berlin/New York 2005, 187–197. 345 Inhaltsverzeichnis Einleitung des Herausgebers I. 11 Die Begründung der Metaphysik in der griechischen Antike Hans-Dieter Klein Anmerkungen zu den Anfängen des philosophischen Gottesbegriffs 37 Karl Bormann Protagoras in der Kritik Platons 56 Jan Opsomer Drittes Bett, Artefakt-Ideen und die Problematik, die Ideenlehre zu veranschaulichen 73 Wolfgang Janke Metakritik und Problemaufriß der Ideenmetaphysik im 1. Teil von Platos Parmenides 89 Dirk Fonfara Zwischen Tradition und Innovation: Aristoteles’ ›doxographische Methode‹ mit einem Ausblick auf Husserl 102 7 Inhaltsverzeichnis II. Der »zweite Anfange« der Metaphysik im Zeitalter der Universitäten Andreas Speer Der Zirkel des Erkennens. Zu den epistemischen Bedingungen der Metaphysik bie Thomas von Aquin 135 Rolf Darge Von Durandus zu Christian Wolff: Eine Entwicklungslinie der Theorie des Guten in der mittelalterliche und neuzeitlichen Universitätsmetaphysik 153 III. Metaphysik als W issenschaft vor dem Hintergrund der Kantischen Erkenntnisrestriktion, im Deutschen Idealismus und bei Nietzsche Claudia Bickman Transzendentale Logik: Worin gründet sie, was macht sie möglich, warum ist sie nötig? 173 Thomas Grundmann Transzendentalphilosophie ohne Idealismus? 190 Mario Caimi Der Teller, die Rundung, das Schema. Kant über den Begriff der Gleichartigkeit 211 Tom Rockmore Some Implications of Kant’s Copernican Revolution 221 Jana Padel Fichtes transzendentaler Idealismus der Freiheit. Reine Subjektivität und moralisches Bewußtsein 235 8 Inhaltsverzeichnis Morteza Ghasempour Wie die Lüge zur Wahrheit wurde. Die Sphärenkonstitution des Ästhetischen 256 Anja Solbach Schellings Wendung zur ästhetischen Bestimmung der intellektuelen Anschauung im Hinblick auf Hölderlins frühe Konzeption der Schönheit 275 Félix Duque Die (verborgene) Vernunft. Schellings Symbolik und Mythologie 294 Otto Pöggeler Metaphysik und Transzendentalphilosophie: Hegels Weg mit Schiller 311 Cinzia Ferrini Unity of Thought and Empirical Knowledge: Anti-Kantian Views in Hegel’s Phenomenology 327 Klaus Erich Kaehler Hegel und das Prinzip der neuzeitlichen Metaphysik 346 Heinz-Gerd Schmitz »Þ ðïéiéëåäÎò Gößãî«. Zu Nietzsches Metaphysikkritik 367 IV. W issenschaft und Metaphysik in der Philosophie des 20. Jahrhunderts Dieter Lohmar Synthesis in Husserls Phänomenologie. Das grundlegende Modell von Auffassung und aufgefaßtem Inhalt in Wahrnehmung, Erkennen und Zeitkonstitution 387 Rudolf Benet Reine Phantasie als freie Selbstentzweiung bei Husserl 408 9 Inhaltsverzeichnis Dimitri Yfantis Faktizität und Dialektik. Heideggers Interpretation des Platonischen Sophistes in der Marburger Vorlesung des Wintersemesters 1924/25 427 Alberto Rosales Bewegung und Stetigkeit der Zeit bei Heidegger 446 Jing-Jong Luh Der neue Weg der »Meta-Physik« als philosophische Wissenschaft: Programm einer dialektisch-systematischen Hermeneutik 466 Albert Zimmermann Nachdenken über Lehren der modernen Kosmologie 481 Tobias Schlicht Der Physikalismus und das Projekt einer Wissenschaft des Bewußtseins 499 Anhang Schriftenverzeichnis Kaus Düsings Autorenverzeichnis 10 523 535