In the Introduction to the section on the Idea Hegel asserts that it possesses the most stubborn opposition.¹ This stubbornness is grounded in the oppositions encountered in both the idea of the true and that of the good, that is, in theoretical and practical philosophy. These oppositions are being eternally created and eternally overcome. Human knowledge is eternally producing and overcoming an opposition between subject and object, concept and content, mind and world. The goal of philosophers from Descartes to McDowell has been to overcome this opposition once and for all. Different strategies have included God, forms of intuition and categories of the understanding, intellectual intuition, knowledge by acquaintance, second nature, coherentism, and so on. These strategies instead of overcoming the opposition have ended up producing either a loss of the world (frictionless spinning in a web of beliefs), a loss of our knowledge of the world (causal interaction without justification), or some type of dogmatism (appeal to God or to intellectual intuition). In the Introduction to the Phenomenology Hegel lays out the problematic of the idea of the true using as guiding thread the opposition between the object in itself and the object for consciousness. The “in-itself” is the content thought, what is real, undisturbed by its being thought, whereas the “for-consciousness” is what is thought about the content, the identification of it as something, determined by a particular scheme. Any identification of the content as object of thought would already imply a particular conceptual scheme without which that content could not be thought. The strategy he proposes in confronting the stubborn opposition is to transfer the two poles of content and scheme, in-itself and for-consciousness, into thought itself as the “object in itself for consciousness,” though without collapsing them. This will not overcome the opposition, but rather reveal the structure due to which it is constantly created and overcome. That it is not completely overcome amounts to saying that it is intrinsic to human beings to always find themselves at theoretical odds with the world, to never be able to decipher it in a permanent manner, and thus to always be prone to having the world reveal itself as different than expected. This is what Hegel understands by experience. In this manner, he avoids losing the world without either falling into dogmatism or renouncing knowledge of it. We shall follow this strategy as it is laid out in the second half of the Introduction by means of the issue of the measure and its continuous alteration in experience. We give ourselves the measure against which we compare our beliefs about the world, while simultaneously altering this measure when we alter our beliefs in the face of our negative experience with the world. The Introduction emphasizes the dynamic at work between these two poles of consciousness and reveals the structural necessity of this opposition for the problem of knowledge and the constitution of human beings insofar as they are characterized by making truth claims. The source of objectivity, the hardness of the world, lies in our getting it wrong. The world only reveals itself in our false knowledge as being that about which our knowledge was wrong. Friction with the world is experienced only insofar as we err about it.

In Donald Davidson’s 1974 article “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme”² we find a variation of this stubborn opposition of the idea of the true. He calls it the third dogma of empiricism: the distinction between content and conceptual scheme. A conceptual scheme can be understood as a set of rules of construction by which content is unified or synthesized into the kinds of objects common sense takes as making up the world. If the content lies beyond the conceptual scheme representing it and is only accessible through this scheme, then it will forever lie beyond our reach in its independence since we will only relate to it as determined or formed (and therefore altered) by the scheme we approach it with. There will be no criterion or measure (Maßstab) from which to determine anything common to schemes since the content they are attempting to represent or depict lies outside their scope. If one grants the world independence yet does not believe in the myth of the given, in the possibility of an unmediated connection between the world and us that goes beyond the merely causal stimulation of nervous endings and impresses upon us facts that serve as justifications for beliefs about the world, then the independence of the world becomes an unbridgeable barrier and we are led to either skepticism or relativism. We are led to skepticism if we emphasize the fact that there is no measure or criterion accessible to us against which to compare our beliefs about the world. Thus we can never know if they are true, if they correspond to the way the world really is. We are led to relativism if we emphasize the fact that since there is no one measure or criterion accessible to us, we end up having an indefinite number of conceptual schemes, determined by the particular historical, cultural, or linguistic standpoint of the observer, making the truth of our beliefs relative to the particular scheme in which they are formed. Some of these beliefs may be incommensurable with others, that is, they might not share anything in common and thus be incomparable/untranslatable. This belief in the dualism of content/conceptual scheme is the third dogma of empiricism. Davidson’s attack on it would, according to him, leave nothing distinctive to call empiricism.

Hegel’s Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit can be divided into two sections. The first section would run from paragraphs 73 to 80, the second from paragraphs 81 to 89. Our main concern lies in the second section, which regards, in Hegel’s own words, “the method of carrying out the inquiry.”⁷ In the next sentence he further clarifies what kind of inquiry this is: “an investigation and examination of the reality of cognition.”⁸ I intend to focus on and analyze the structure appearing in the discussion of the “in-itself” and the “for-consciousness,” understood respectively as content and scheme, and of the problem of the criterion. Before delving into the passages in question, an overview of the first section of the Introduction will help contextualize the discussion of the criterion. For this purpose I shall elucidate three main topics to be found in the first section: (1) certain epistemological paradoxes; (2) the starting point and drive of the Phenomenology; (3) the particularities of natural consciousness and its relation to the question of truth.

Hegel starts off by pointing to the paradoxes faced by an epistemological endeavor that separates cognition (Erkennen) from the true (das Wahre) and decides to focus on an analysis of the functioning of our conceptual schemes before dealing with content or “what truly is.”⁹ This does not mean that Hegel finds no value in epistemological endeavors that attempt to clarify the structure and limits of cognition, and that he merely wants to return to a pre-critical thinking that believes in an immediate access to “what truly is.” As was mentioned above, the Phenomenology is itself an “examination of the reality of cognition.” Hegel is also a major foe of the immediate character of any type of knowledge. Science in its immediacy only “comes on the scene.”¹⁰ It is an appearance that has to exhibit itself as what it is. What Hegel criticizes from epistemological endeavors is the fact that they completely separate knowledge from truth, falling thus into the third dogma. This would lead to a renunciation of knowledge of “what truly is” and to its limitation to appearances, which would be a completely unacceptable compromise for Hegel regarding what knowledge should be about. This path describes in a general sense the move Kant makes in his Critique of Pure Reason: things in themselves are inaccessible to human cognition and to think about them leads to contradiction. Only appearances (phenomena) constituted by a manifold of sense data intuited through the pure forms of space and time and subsumed under categories of the understanding, united by a transcendental synthesis of apperception, make knowledge possible. There can only be cognition of things as they appear to us. It is by renouncing knowledge of the absolute that Kant is able to secure a universal knowledge against empiricism. Thus, he is able to overcome the limitations of both rationalism and empiricism. On the one hand, he renounces knowledge of the objects of reason, such as God, the soul and the world, due to the fact that there is no intuition of them (concepts without intuitions are empty). On the other hand, he nonetheless saves the possibility of universal knowledge due to the a priori character of both the pure forms of intuition and the categories of the understanding (by means of which not just the possibility of experience but also that of the objects of experience themselves is established). He merely limits the field of knowledge to phenomena, to things as they appear to us. Hegel has Kant in mind when he talks about “a type of cognition which, though it does not cognize the Absolute as Science aims to, is still true,” and when he says that “cognition in general, though it be incapable of grasping the Absolute, is still capable of grasping other kinds of truth.”¹¹ This is the “hazy distinction between an absolute truth and some other kind of truth,”¹² which Hegel cannot accept since it is already a compromise regarding his strongly asserted starting point “that the Absolute alone is true, or the truth alone is absolute.”¹³ A philosophy that settles for less than the absolute shall not bear such a name. The presupposition of the separation between scheme and content must be justified: why should one start from such a separation? This presupposition leads to the insoluble problem of separating scheme from content while simultaneously only having access to content through conceptual schemes: how does one have access to this content to verify if knowledge of it is correct, if the only access to it is precisely through our conceptual schemes? And if there were another type of access such as revelation or belief, why bother with epistemological matters at all?¹⁴ Here one already sees emerging the problem of the “criterion.” How does one know that the conceptual scheme being used to...