Hegel's Realm of Shadows

Logic as Metaphysics in "The Science of Logic"

Robert B. Pippin

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9780226588841
• Topic: Filosofía
• Subtopic: Historia y teoría filosóficas

Hegel frequently claimed that the heart of his entire system was a book widely regarded as among the most difficult in the history of philosophy, The Science of Logic. This is the book that presents his metaphysics, an enterprise that he insists can only be properly understood as a "logic, " or a "science of pure thinking." Since he also wrote that the proper object of any such logic is pure thinking itself, it has always been unclear in just what sense such a science could be a "metaphysics."Robert B. Pippin offers here a bold, original interpretation of Hegel's claim that only now, after Kant's critical breakthrough in philosophy, can we understand how logic can be a metaphysics. Pippin addresses Hegel's deep, constant reliance on Aristotle's conception of metaphysics, the difference between Hegel's project and modern rationalist metaphysics, and the links between the "logic as metaphysics" claim and modern developments in the philosophy of logic. Pippin goes on to explore many other facets of Hegel's thought, including the significance for a philosophical logic of the self-conscious character of thought, the dynamism of reason in Kant and Hegel, life as a logical category, and what Hegel might mean by the unity of the idea of the true and the idea of the good in the "Absolute Idea." The culmination of Pippin's work on Hegel and German idealism, this is a book that no Hegel scholar or historian of philosophy will want to miss.

PART I

1

INTRODUCTION: THE SIGNIFICANCE OF THE SCIENCE OF LOGIC

Reason has insight only into what it itself produces according to its own design. (Critique of Pure Reason Bxiii)

Critical philosophy did indeed already turn metaphysics into logic but, like the subsequent idealism, it gave to the logical determinations an essentially subjective significance out of fear of the object. (SL 21.35)

Logic and Idealism

Hegel repeatedly said that the core of his philosophy, what everything else depends on,1 is to be found in a two-volume, three-part book that he wrote while teaching classical Gymnasium students in Nürnberg between 1812 and 1816, at times teaching versions of the book itself to the no doubt bewildered high-schoolers.2 It was called The Science of Logic. The first volume is called an “objective logic,” and it contains a “logic of being” and a “logic of essence.” The third part, the second volume, is called the “Subjective Logic” and it consists of a “logic of the concept.” To understate the matter in the extreme: this book still awaits its full contemporary reception. Aside from occasional dust-ups about its beginning argument or its “movement,” several invaluable studies of particular topics like negation, reflection, ontology, and the nature of concepts, and occasional attempts at an overview or summary formulations of its purpose, it has not inspired the kind of engagement found in work on Kant’s Critiques or Hegel’s own Phenomenology of Spirit or Philosophy of Right. This is so even though there are a number of other examples of philosophical reflection on logic that form something like a context within which Hegel’s project ought to be comprehensible as an alternative. I mean not just Kant’s transcendental logic, but Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre, Frege’s Begriffsschrift, Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, and Husserl’s Logical Investigations.3

Hegel also says frequently that a science of logic is a “science of pure thinking.” This must be understood in the context of what we designate as “German Idealism.” This idealism, at least the thread that travels from Kant through Fichte to Hegel (Schelling’s “idealism” is another issue), has three components. The first is the claim that a priori knowledge of the world, the ordinary spatio-temporal world, is possible—knowledge about that world, but achieved independently of empirical experience.4 That the Logic is a work of a priori philosophy is hardly controversial, even though Hegel understands the relation between pure thinking and thinking informed by what is other than thinking in a way that is uniquely his, as will be discussed in chapter 9. Idealism in this sense is primarily a critique of empiricism (not of empirical knowledge, although it is sometimes confused with such a critique; empiricism is itself an a priori position, intended to explicate what any possible knowing amounts to). The second component is where all the interpretive controversies begin. It is the claim that this a priori knowledge, while, in some sense to be specified, about the world, consists in thinking’s or reason’s knowledge of itself, thinking’s determination of thinking, or, as Hegel designates, a “science of pure thinking.” (Kant’s allegiance to this principle is manifest in the beginning quotation above.) This is the heart of Hegel’s claim that his speculative logic is a “metaphysics” in a new sense. It is understandable, but also quite false, to think that these two components can be jointly claimed only if objects of knowledge depend for their existence on being thought, or if access to objects requires some sort of mind-imposed unification of sensory elements, resulting in a “subject-mediated” product, not the thing as it is in itself. There are certainly versions of this existential dependence or subject-mediated interpretation of German Idealism, especially Kant, in the extant literature. This view no doubt stems from the understandable but hasty inference that if such a conceptual structure is not derived from experience, it must be contributed by, or “imposed by,” us. This must be so, if objects depend for their experientiability on such “mind-imposed” unity. A variation on this notion of restricted knowledge is the claim that philosophy can determine only the finitely knowable aspects of the in principle knowable, requiring us to admit that we do not know objects as they fully are in themselves. And an even more extreme idealism would hold that the mind (or the divine mind active in us) creates its own objects by thinking them, which certainly explains how pure thinking could on its own determine the nature of the real. But it does so at the price of great implausibility.

But there is clearly a question to be answered, and such an answer would be the third component of idealism: how could the first two components possibly be true, if the standard versions of the third component are not true too. One interpretation of Hegel on this point is that these two claims can be jointly assertable only if what there “really” is, the “really real world,” what is accessible only to pure reason alone, is itself thought, “thinking moments”—something like the Absolute’s or God’s thinking itself, an inherent, evolving noetic structure. This is sometimes what scholars are insisting on when they insist, against what they perceive as “nonmetaphysical” readings, that Hegel was certainly (and for many quite obviously) a “metaphysician” in just this sense. The nature of the real is an intellectual entity.5 The thesis of this book is that these do not exhaust the relevant alternatives, that Hegel most certainly was a “metaphysician,” but that he did not live in this Neoplatonic neighborhood or in the mind-imposed-unity or mind-making-reality camps. That is, the following will attempt an answer to the third dimension of idealism, how the first two elements could jointly be true. The most important watchword for Hegel’s Logic, once we realize that no form of “object dependence on subject” is at stake in that project (an extremely widespread view of what idealism must be to count as idealism),6 is that we are talking not about any dependence but about an “identity” (a “speculative identity” to be sure) between the forms of pure thinking and the forms of being. It will take a while to exfoliate the terms of such an identity claim.

I note immediately that there is a widespread view that this Hegelian project (in any possible interpretation of it) is doomed from the start, that there is not and cannot be such a topic as “pure thinking.” Since the Jena romantics and Hegel’s contemporary, Schelling, began this line of attack, it keeps reappearing in the European tradition down to the present, with the popularity of “new realisms” and speculative materialisms and the influence of cognitive and neuroscience. The criticism is that thinking must always be understood as grounded on, or dependent on, or an epiphenomenon of, materiality or contingency or the unconscious source or instinct of the thinker. But from Hegel’s point of view, this criticism is question-begging from the start. In his treatment, the topic of pure thinking has nothing to do with the thinker, the subject, consciousness, the mind. The topic rather raises as a problem the possibility of the intelligibility of (also) whatever is being touted as source or hidden origin, the conditions assumed in any such determinate identification.7 Any such criticism, in so far as it is a thinking, a judging, a claim to know, is always already a manifestation of a dependence on pure thinking and its conditions, and such “moments” of pure thinking are to delimit the normative domain of intelligibility (what can rightly be distinguished from what, or posited as “ground,” for example) and not any process or series of events that goes on in supposed independence of the empirical world. Pure thinking is neither dependent on nor independent of the empirical or materiality or the brain or whatever new absolute comes into fashion. That question already manifests a misunderstanding of the question of pure thinking itself.8 This is not to deny that any reference to thinking presumes a thinker, indeed a living, purposive rational thinker. That issue, which is important to Hegel, will be the subject of chapter 7. It is, rather, to argue for the autonomy of the question of “any thinking at all.” That is, it is to insist on the priority and autonomy of “logic,” and that means for him its complete self-determination of its own “moments.” (As just noted, one could put this another way: it is to insist that there is such an enterprise as philosophy. That is, all philosophy, from Plato’s Republic to Descartes’s Meditations to Wittgenstein’s Tractatus to Quine’s Word and Object, is an enterprise of pure thinking, “confirmed” not by empirical evidence but through the self-examination by pure thinking of itself.) Hegel’s enterprise in the SL takes as its topic the categories or “thought-determinations” (Denkbestimmungen) necessary for thought to have determinate objective content, an enterprise that at the same time specifies the determinations inherent in the possible determinacy of being itself.9

As will be obvious in the next two chapters, I think we start heading in the right direction if we consider the Logic’s project under the rubric John McDowell introduced in the second lecture in Mind and World,10 the “unboundedness of the conceptual.” The formulation is inspired by Wittgenstein’s remark that “When we say, and mean, that such-and-such is the case, we—and our meaning—do not stop anywhere short of the fact; but we mean: this-is—so.”11 McDowell’s different formulation of the same point is that “there is no ontological gap between the sort of thing one can mean, or generally the sort of thing one can think, and the sort of thing that can be the case.”12 Or, even more to the point of the present study, “The constraint comes from outside thinking, but not from outside what is thinkable.”13

The context of McDowell’s discussion is perception and perceptual knowledge claims, so it is of limited use for the details of The Science of Logic, which is some sort of claim to a priori knowledge. Moreover, the relation of thinking and the thinkable in the Logic faces a problem not germane to McDowell’s concerns in his book. The problem is: how to account for the determinate moments of “any thinking of the knowable,” such that they count as the determinate moments of the knowable itself?14 In the expansive sense of the German Wissenschaft, Hegel’s formulation (“a science of pure thinking”) means first of all that it is an account of, a theory of, pure thinking (what pure thinking is), and he means a pure thinking that is a knowing, one that is onto objects as they are. In the logic of the day, that means he is talking primarily, but not exclusively, about judgments. (Not exclusively because he thinks the nature of judgments cannot be isolated from an account of concepts and inferences.) Pure thinking is thinking without dependence on the deliverances of sensibility, without reliance on experience. Traditionally the question inspired by the very formulation of such a project arises naturally: What, if anything, objective can be known just “by thinking,” without reliance on empirical experience? In the long tradition of pre-Kantian Western rationalism, that question was often understood to be asking: Are there entities, or aspects of reality, knowable only by pure thinking, thinking unaided by sensibility? Inspired by the pure thinking of mathematics as well as other considerations, the rationalist answer was that there were such entities, not available to empirical experience, but knowable by the light of reason, by pure thinking. There have been many candidates for such a status: souls, minds, God, universals, monads, substance, the Good.

Kant gave another sort of answer. There is something accessible only to pure thinking, but it is not some object or entity. The proper object of pure thinking is thinking itself: either the possibility of any thinking at all, which Kant called general logic; or, in a topic that Kant invented, the possibility of thought’s having objects at all, or knowledge, which he called transcendental logic. Thinking’s reflection on any thinking claiming to be knowledge, or a critique by reason of itself, could determine the form of any possible object of knowledge, and could specify as well what objects could never be objects of either empirical or pure knowledge. Thinking about thinking could determine what there is, and is not, to be known. The core of such a claim, for both Kant and Hegel, had especially to do with the implications of a relationship that they both insisted on between thought’s determination of what it is to be thinking (in the sense of knowing) and the conceptual content required for thinking to be thinking (in the sense of knowing)—that such content must be understood as what it was only by being known a priori to be such content. Distinctly philosophical knowledge, for that is what we are discussing, is and must determine for itself its own objectivity. More prosaically put, if there is to be such knowledge, it can’t be made true by something “outside” of judgment, to which it can be compared. Any such appeal to objectivity is “inside” judgment’s self-determination, a point made the most of among the idealists by Fichte. (To say that the Ich posits itself and in so doing posits the nicht-Ich is his way of making this point. It has nothing to do with creating an external world by thinking it.)15 Thought was in this sense “self-determining”; concepts could be said to “produce their own content.” This involves revolutionary claims made first by Kant about the exclusively productive or spontaneous nature of thinking, and the inherently self-conscious nature of all thinking. Both claims were enthusiastically embraced by Hegel, and it will be the task of the next two chapters to explain the nature of these claims, and their implications as Hegel saw them, implications for philosophical truth quite different from those Kant drew.

This was not traditional rationalism because Kant denied any receptive relation between a domain of objects and pure thinking. Hegel agreed. Pure thinking had only itself as its proper object. It is an endlessly interesting aspect of this claim (and almost impossible to hold in mind properly) that thinking so conceived is not conceived as an entity or event, whether psychological or immaterial. Thinking is its own “object” only in the sense of what pure thinking is about—the activity of thinking necessary for it to be thinking, and necessary for it to be a thinking of (in the sense of knowing) objects. But, when the claim is formulated this way, Kant also seemed to say that philosophy could determine something about the objects o...