G. W. F. Hegel

Key Concepts

Michael Baur

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9781844657940
• eBook ISBN: 9781317591689
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

The thought of G. W. F. Hegel (1770 -1831) has had a deep and lasting influence on a wide range of philosophical, political, religious, aesthetic, cultural and scientific movements. But, despite the far-reaching importance of Hegel's thought, there is often a great deal of confusion about what he actually said or believed.

G. W. F. Hegel: Key Concepts provides an accessible introduction to both Hegel's thought and Hegel-inspired philosophy in general, demonstrating how his concepts were understood, adopted and critically transformed by later thinkers. The first section of the book covers the principal philosophical themes in Hegel's system: epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind, ethical theory, political philosophy, philosophy of nature, philosophy of art, philosophy of religion, philosophy of history and theory of the history of philosophy. The second section covers the main post-Hegelian movements in philosophy: Marxism, existentialism, pragmatism, analytic philosophy, hermeneutics and French poststructuralism.

The breadth and depth of G. W. F. Hegel: Key Concepts makes it an invaluable introduction for philosophical beginners and a useful reference source for more advanced scholars and researchers.

Part I
Hegel's thought

1 Epistemology

Jeffery Kinlaw

Hegel undoubtedly defends a substantive theory of knowledge in his Phenomenology of Spirit. Identifying the integrity and precise contours of that theory, however, can be frustrating even for the most assiduous philosopher. A major source of difficulty is that Hegel appropriates elements from conflicting theories. For instance, his epistemology is internalist and yet it has a significant reliabilist component. He defends a form of idealism – experience is conceptualized “all the way out”–but in important respects Hegel is an epistemological realist, a view defended thoroughly by Kenneth R. Westphal (1988, 1989, 2003). And whereas the nature of truth is correspondence, Hegel defends a coherentist criterion for truth.

I argue that Hegel’s epistemology is read most profitably when interpreted as a normative theory. I use the term “normative” in order to convey the sense that the criterion for knowledge and the means for testing that criterion are internal to the shared practices of what Hegel calls a geistlich community (roughly understood as a community animated by a set of shared intellectual and ethical commitments). Hegel investigates the possibility of knowledge by analysing the actual practice of acquiring knowledge.¹ The test for knowledge is the functional coherence of the specific type of epistemic practice. Justification of knowledge-claims is a social practice² whose basis lies within the mutually shared and recognized epistemic norms by which reasons for beliefs and actions are critically evaluated. Normative authority emerges from individuals’ participation in a community defined as a shared network of recognitive relations which govern everyday practices and which individuals can identify with, but also critically challenge. Epistemic norms that modern subjects take as rationally authoritative or the basis for justification are norms they understand themselves “to have come to take” (to borrow Pinkard’s phrase) as justificatory – or, more precisely, norms they understand themselves as having come to establish as rationally authoritative. In sum, I claim that Hegel’s theory is non-metaphysical and normative “all the wayout”. Justification is not secured by having one’s knowledge-claims conform to the world, but rather results from confirmation of claims by others in terms of mutually acknowledged norms for justification – thus the salient question is: what are the necessary requirements for an efficient and scepticism-resistant account of the practice of justification?

Among those requirements is a certain shared self-conception among epistemic agents. Hegel contends that any way of knowing presupposes a certain self-conception by the knowing subject with which that form of knowing is correlated. Accordingly, absolute knowing is the epistemic standpoint of modern subjects who understand themselves as autonomous agents whose agency is nonetheless mediated by the recognitive relations they share with others. A comprehensive, normative epistemology must offer an account of the community which is engaged in epistemic practices.

Hegel’s normative epistemology is developed to a significant extent as a response to the problem of the criterion. His strategy is to diagnose and resolve inconsistencieswithin alternative accounts of knowing and to show how resolution culminates in the self-critical practice of absolute knowing. Thus, a significant portion of my chapter is devoted to Hegel’s confrontation with scepticism and the incorporation of scepticism into his method. I argue that absolute knowing should be interpreted non-metaphysically as a proto-pragmatist response to scepticism.

My discussion will proceed as follows. First, I discuss briefly Hegel’s assault on immediacy. Since this topic has received extensive treatment in the literature, my concern is to show how the critique of immediacy advances his normative epistemology. I then explicate the structure of knowing embedded in forms of consciousness and indicate the way in which Hegel’s analysis of knowing is informed by his confrontation with scepticism. Next I offer an overview of the “sociality” of knowledge, specifically the relation between justification and one’s self-conception. I conclude with a brief discussion of absolute knowing and indicate some of its fallibilist elements.

Hegel's critique of immediacy

Hegel’s assault on immediacy embraces epistemic justification of theoretical and practical claims,³ and involves empirical knowledge and self-knowledge. Immediacy is to be construed as direct, non-inferential, receptive awareness of what presents itself directly and ready-made to consciousness, whether a sensed particular or an agent’s expressed intention. As initially presented in Sense-certainty, immediate awareness is knowledge by acquaintance. One simply apprehends the object without assuming anything about it. With Force and Understanding, although the understanding uses its inferential abilities to get at the metaphysical core of the object behind the veil of perception, one still understands herself as apprehending that inner essence as something intrinsic to the object itself. The familiar lesson from these chapters in the Phenomenology is that knowledge is conceptually mediated: how one knows the object is mediated by what one takes the object to be. Furthermore, what one takes the object to be exercises putative authority in the way one ostensibly knows the object.

The decisive move in Hegel’s argument occurs in the “Self-consciousness” chapter with the introduction of what I call the reflection requirement (RR): S is epistemically related to an object only if S takes herself to be so related. This is Kant’s transcendental apperception thesis, which entails, Hegel argues, that concepts inform the entire content of experience and which introduces an internalist component into Hegel’s epistemology. When applied to norms, RR reads: a norm N is rationally authoritative for S only if S takes N to be rationally authoritative. One’s taking N to be rationally authoritative, however, is not sufficient for normative authority, just as an object is not simply what one takes it to be – after all, one can deploy concepts incorrectly. Correct deployment entails one’s being able to recognize that her deployment is correct and that in turn entails that she must be capable of being proven wrong. She is proven wrong, not in her failure to map concepts onto the world, but rather by another self-conscious person. RRand proper deployment of concepts are mediated by the current consensus of the epistemic community, although this is a conclusion that emerges fully only in absolute knowing.⁴

Hegel’s critique of immediacy extends throughout the Phenomenology. Each transition to a new form of consciousness contains residual elements of immediacy inherited from previous ways of knowing. A point often overlooked is that immediacy also concerns self-knowledge and justification of actions. Again, immediacy concerns anything, including norms, assumed as both directly accessible and ready-made apart from its mediation by communal practices. Consider the discussion of Rousseau’s Confessions in the “Reason” chapter of the Phenomenology. The “law of the heart” is each individual’s core selfhoodwhich opposes oppressive social institutions and which is taken, from this standpoint, as the justificatory authority for actions. Vicky, for instance, has a justifying reason for acting if her action sincerely expresses her essential self as she directly grasps it. A problem arises once her action enters the public domain and becomes susceptible to alternative construal by others. Vicky’s inner self is expressed in her action, whereas another’s interpretation of her action will express his essential selfhood. Here Hegel presents a more sophisticated version of the adjudication problem that emerged initially in the master–slave dialectic: what is taken as rationally authoritative is a norm lying outside the shared recognitive relations underwriting communal practices. Sincere expression of one’s core selfhood is justificatory for acting, since it is a universally acknowledged justifying principle. But one’s own assertion of anallegedly universal norm cannot be recognized by others in the essentially subjective form in which it is expressed and thus cannot be validated by them.⁵

The same problem arises for the “beautiful soul” in the concluding section of the “Spirit” chapter of the Phenomenology, yet in this case within the context of an attenuated form of mutual recognition. The “beautiful soul” replays the normative confusion of the Unhappy Consciousness (in the “Self-consciousness” chapter of the Phenomenology), but this time the oscillating standpoints lie within her perspective. She is to act dutifully from the conviction of conscience, yet in its abstract form the universal standard of conscience is whatever she says it is. Thus we have the corrupt standpoint of the romantic ironist who attempts to justify his acts by appeal to the faux sincerity of his conviction. The problem, again, is that immediacy blocks adjudication. One acts from the immediate self-certainty of conscience and one’s acting from conviction is recognized by others as justificatory. Jones claims to act dutifully from sincere conviction, whereas Smith takes Jones’s act as self-serving. Both perspectives claim to fulfil a universal norm in the context of mutual respect for conviction. Unresolved conflict ensues because recognition is incomplete; this type of community lacks a critical normative underwriter for its practices. Thefirst step towards resolution is forgiveness and reconciliation. Once rational agents can see that the perspective of conviction is contingent and that mutual recognition requires an independent, communally vetted standard of normativity which mediates the claims of all individual perspectives, then we have the transition to theform of communitywhichunderwritesabsolute knowing. The critique of immediacy is integral to Hegel’s case for absolute knowing. Immediacy is a reliable symptom of failed epistemic practices.

Scepticism and the structure of justification

Hegel’s mature epistemology emerges in the Phenomenology after a serious engagement with scepticism. His relationship to scepticism is complicated, however, since he sharply criticizes (especially modern) scepticism and yet refers to his method as a “self-consummating scepticism” (sich vollbringender Skeptizismus; PS 50 = W 3:72).⁶ Hegel confronts scepticism with a two-part strategy: first, he shows that some key assumptions of (especially modern) scepticism areflawed – notably, the representational theory of mental activity – and that his own epistemology avoids theseflaws; second and more importantly, he faces the challenge of the problem of the criterion directly and shows how his own method resolves the problem.

Hegel never questions the common sense assumption – what Flay calls the “natural attitude”–that we acquire knowledge. The issue is not whether any form of consciousness knows anything at all, but whether it knows what it claims to know rather than something else. He never questions the general reliability of our cognitive abilities,⁷ but he approaches scepticism seriously. The target of Hegel’s criticism of modern scepticism is a set of assumptions that together constitute the representationalist theory of the mind: (a) subjective and objective standpoints are distinct and separate with no natural bridge from the former to the latter; (b) the subjective standpoint is transparent and immediately accessible. Hegel rejects (a) because it absolutizes the perspective of the understanding (that knowing is separate from what it knows) and leads to the conclusion that knowledge is of something beyond experience. The task of knowledge is not the task of mapping one’s subjective representations onto an objective world. One is already situated in the world as a member of a historical community. It is noteworthy that what partly motivates Hegel’s rejection of Kant’s restriction of knowledge to phenomena is the realist precept that knowledge captures the real nature of what is.⁸ The case against (b) coincides with the attack on immediacy, namely, the attack upon the modern sceptic’s assumption that mental contents are psychological entities to which we have immediate and perhaps incorrigible access. Mental contents are taken as given, which is why the sceptic’s analysis of the mental presumes to add nothing to these contents. The first three chapters of the Phenomenology are a critique of representationalist accounts of mind and knowing, and their assumption that the mind is self-illumined, although the last vestiges of representationalism are not removed until the “Religion” chapter (see Di Giovanni and Harris 1985: 317–18, 339).

A characteristic of immediacy is that it represents a one-sided, abstract perspective. The same holds for scepticism generally, since it simply exposes contradictions within whatever is given to it. Accordingly, scepticism is “contingent” and potentially arbitrary.⁹ Dialectic, by contrast, exposes a determinate negation within a particular form of consciousness and the determinate negation (knowledge defeater) arises from concrete instances of incoherence in the experience of knowing (LHP 2:330–38; PS 50). Dialectic is not a sceptical method imposed upon positive assertions. It exposes inconsistencies arising naturally when away of knowing fails to know what it claims to know. Exposing contradictions between the actual experience of knowing and what a form of knowing purports to know is precisely what scepticism attempts to accomplish – thus Hegel’s claim that dialectic incorporates scepticism.

This brings us to the problem of the criterion and how it motivates Hegel’s critique of ways of knowing. Hegel states the problem in compressed form as follows: a philosophical examination of whether a way of knowing actually yields knowledge presupposes a criterion by which to test the knowledge-claims of that way of knowing. Since no readymade and justified criterion is available and thus no putative criterion can claim to be justified, the examination is impossible (PS 52). The problem is a form of the Agrippan dilemma: (a) any putative criterion requires justification which would presuppose an additional criterion and a regress ensues; (b) a legitimate criterion is arbitrarily assumed; (c) there is no criterion. Since (a), (b) and (c) are unacceptable, inquiry is impossible. But this falsely presupposes, Hegel argues, that the criterion is an external standard applied to a way of knowing to test whether it knows what it claims to know. Every form of consciousness has an internal justificatory authority or criterion – what it takes as rationally authoritative for justifying beliefs and actions – which its knowledge-claims must meet in order to be justified. The criterion is validated or invalidated by whether it can function as a standard for that way of knowing. To test whether what one takes as rationally authoritative really is authoritative does not involve going beyond any putative rational authority to ascertain what is authoritative in general and outside of all contexts (what is authoritative überhaupt). The comparison lies within consciousness between two distinct elements: what one takes as rationally authoritative and what can function as authoritative for that way of knowing. If the experience of knowing reveals that the two do not coincide, then we have a knowledge defeater; it follows that the rational authority and the form of knowing it allegedly underwrites must alter to remove the inconsistency.

The key move in Hegel’s strategy is the contention that knowledge cannot be assessed überhaupt. All knowing either results from or fails because of the epistemic practice of a concrete way of knowing by ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Key Concepts
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Contributors
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part I Hegel’s thought
• Part II Hegel’s legacy
• Chronology of Hegel’s life
• Bibliography
• Index