Hegel and the Future of Systematic Philosophy

R. Winfield

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137442383
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Geschichte & Theorie der Philosophie

Hegel and the Future of Systematic Philosophy critically rethinks and extends Hegel's project for systematic philosophy without foundations, engaging the most important contemporary debates concerning logic, epistemology, metaphysics, nature, mind, economic justice, political freedom, globalization, and literary theory.

Part I

Phenomenology and Logic

1

Is Phenomenology Necessary as Introduction to Philosophy?

The path to phenomenology

In modern times, it has become virtually a natural assumption that before one can truly think what is, one first must investigate knowing to certify its objectivity.

This assumption issues from understandable skepticism about directly setting out to know what is. Any immediate claims about objects can always be doubted by questioning the validity of the knowing employed. Accordingly, it seems evident that before knowing being, one should examine knowing and supplant ontology with epistemology as first philosophy.

The knowing in question may be variously characterized, be it in terms of consciousness, linguistic practice, or some other cultural convention. Nonetheless, the turn to investigate knowing before investigating objects of knowing fatefully determines how knowing gets construed, no matter what attire is attributed to it.

This is so because the “natural” assumption that puts epistemology first rests on a fundamental presupposition of its own: namely, that knowing and its object are different from one another and independently determined. The presumption that knowing always addresses something it confronts, an independent givenness that is the foundation for any truth for knowledge, is built into the very possibility of doing foundational epistemology, of turning to investigate knowing as what comes first in philosophical inquiry. Knowing cannot be investigated without making claims about objects of knowledge unless knowing is separate and distinct from objects of knowledge. Otherwise, knowing cognition involves knowing objects, which is precisely what is suspect.

Consequently, the whole move of first turning to investigate knowing presupposes that knowing is characterized by an opposition between knowing and its object. Yet if one considers that opposition, it seems to leave knowing incapable of validating its certainties. Confronting an independently determined object, knowing may take an active or passive stance, but both options prove equally futile.

On the one hand, knowing can get at what opposes it by taking some initiative and acting upon what it is trying to know. In this way, foundational epistemology takes cognition as an instrument that comes to its object and works upon it so as to bring it into view and grasp what it is. Yet if knowing is an instrument that acts upon its given object, what gets delivered is not the object as it is in its own right but the object as it has been acted upon by knowing, as altered by the activity of knowing.

Alternately, knowing that confronts its object can try to evade this dilemma by refraining from acting upon that object and instead passively receiving knowledge of it. By so comprising not an instrument but a medium through which the object comes to be known, knowing once more fails to capture its prey. What knowing obtains is not the object as it is apart from its transmission through cognition’s passive receptivity, but the object as it is refracted through that medium.

No remedy to these difficulties is provided by subtracting the effect of the activity of knowing as instrument or of the receptivity of knowing as medium. This simply puts cognition back in the opposition from which it starts, for if one subtracts the active or receptive process of knowing, one returns to confronting an object that is yet to be known.

Consequently, because foundational epistemology must assume knowing to be distinct from its object, leaving cognition an instrument or medium, it renders knowing unworkable, whether it be active or passive.

Compounding this outcome is a further problem endemic to beginning philosophical inquiry with epistemology. Taking knowing as the first object of investigation automatically renders the knowing under investigation distinct from the knowing performing the investigation. To investigate knowing as something to be known prior to knowing anything else, the knowing under scrutiny must be distinct from its object insofar as only then can that knowing be known without making knowledge claims about an object. By contrast, the knowing employed to certify knowing of objects is a knowing of knowing. Accordingly, foundational epistemology is not making use of the knowing it examines to investigate knowing. Since foundational epistemology is thereby employing a cognition it does not scrutinize, it is just as dogmatic as those who begin philosophical inquiry by addressing what is.

Moreover, since the knowing employed to investigate knowing is necessarily different from what it investigates, it falls prey to the same dilemma afflicting the knowing it scrutinizes; namely, the debilitating predicament of accessing its distinct object by operating as an active instrument or a passive medium. How can the knowing of the foundational epistemologist possibly know the cognition it confronts as something given, when neither acting upon it nor passively receiving it can secure knowledge of what knowing is in itself?

This impasse might lead one to think that knowing, be it a cognition of objects or of knowing, can know nothing absolute but only phenomena or appearances. Yet claiming that knowing cannot get at any genuine knowledge is a knowledge claim of its own, one any consequent skeptic must refrain from asserting.

Instead, might the real lesson be that foundational epistemology’s fear of falling into error about what is is precisely the error to be avoided? Can’t we now just set out to know and not worry about any prior investigation of knowing? Admittedly, the parallel dogmatisms of ontology and foundational epistemology suggest that knowing must begin without any determinate claims about being or knowing, since in either case any such claims are just as arbitrary as any competing claims. Why not then begin with nothing determinate at all and so not have to worry about falling into error?

Resolving to know without appeal to givens or prior investigations of knowing is, however, just as much an assurance as any other resolve that puts itself immediately forward. Whatever ensues seems no more legitimate than any competing candidate for “presuppositionless knowledge.”

The project of phenomenology as introduction to philosophy

The above considerations are those Hegel lays out just before presenting the project of his Phenomenology of Spirit. At this precise juncture, in paragraph 76 of the Introduction to that work, he declares something that might seem completely unexpected. He tells us that the preceding reflections leave only one thing to be done: to take up knowing as it appears, address cognition as a phenomenon, and in that regard, undertake a phenomenology.¹

What does it mean to take up knowing as a phenomenon, and how would doing so be different from following the “natural” assumption, which presumes that inquiry must begin by investigating knowing? In turning to investigate knowing as first philosophy, as foundational epistemology, one seeks to uncover the truth of knowing by making valid claims about what knowing is in itself. By contrast, in addressing knowing as a phenomenon, one refrains from making any claims about knowing as it is in itself. Instead, one simply takes knowing up as something given, maintaining nothing more about it than that one observe it as a stipulated content. Yet if one is not going to be making any claims about what knowing is in itself, why bother with this whole enterprise?

By addressing knowing as a phenomenon, one indeed escapes the pitfalls of foundational epistemology. By refraining from making any assertions about knowing as it is in itself, one avoids the dogmatic characterization of cognition afflicting the turn to investigate knowing as first philosophy. In so doing, one equally avoids affirming the debilitating presupposition underlying foundational epistemology: that knowing always confronts an object different from itself. Hence, one escapes construing knowing in such a way as to make cognition futile. Moreover, in so departing from foundational epistemology, one equally does not revert to the precritical dogmatism that makes ontology first philosophy by immediately characterizing what is.

Still, these avoidances comprise only the negative significance of the phenomenology Hegel proposes. To appreciate the positive option it provides and how that option might be our only option, one must recognize that phenomenology does not take just any knowing as an appearance. The knowing taken up as a phenomenon is precisely what the natural assumption of foundational epistemology takes knowing to be. Namely, the knowing to be observed as a phenomenon is stipulated to confront a given, to oppose an object independent of and distinct from itself. This construal of knowing is that which modern philosophy tends to absolutize. It is the conception of knowing that regards cognition as always having assumptions, always addressing something given, always opposing an object distinct from itself.

Although phenomenology thereby converges with foundational epistemology in addressing the same construal of knowing, it diverges by taking this construal only as an appearance, not as the absolute, inescapable structure of cognition. What phenomenology undertakes is to observe how knowing so construed attempts to legitimate itself as valid knowing and, in this respect, attempts to vindicate the whole project of foundational epistemology that presumes knowing to have this character. By observing this stipulated construal of knowing engaged in a critique of itself, phenomenology will follow out the effort at self-legitimation of the epistemological project that assumes that knowing always has assumptions, always confronts some given that serves as its standard of truth, always has a foundation grounding the validity of its claims in some factor independent of itself.

Phenomenology will thus enable us to deal with the knowing that presumes that knowing has assumptions without ourselves making any unqualified assumptions about it or without bringing any standards of our own into play. Whereas foundational epistemology examines a cognition that does not examine itself, phenomenology observes a knowing that does critique itself, eliminating at one level at least the distinction between knowing and its object that rendered the cognition of the foundational epistemologist an unexamined instrument.

What allows the knowing under consideration to examine itself without need of our juridical involvement is the character it is stipulated to have in being what Hegel calls “consciousness.” In employing this rubric, Hegel is not making any systematic claim about consciousness, for doing that would involve a reversion to foundational epistemology or dogmatic philosophical psychology. Instead, Hegel is utilizing a term that fits the stipulated construal of cognition at issue insofar as consciousness appears to be the type of psychological phenomenon that treats its mental content as the determination of something that it confronts. Consequently, construing knowing in these terms here signifies that cognition is defined by an “opposition of consciousness,” where cognition involves two poles. On the one hand, knowing has for its object something given in its own right apart from knowing. On the other hand, knowing has its knowledge insofar as it enters into a relation with its object. The two sides of the relationship are asymmetrical, for the object does not need knowing to be what it is, whereas the knowing in question does not exist apart from relating to the object it confronts. That latter relation constitutes the knowledge claim or certainty that knowing has in confronting the object, whose independent givenness constitutes the truth of knowledge or the standard to which knowledge must conform to be valid.²

Consequently, the phenomenological observer need neither introduce any standard for evaluating the knowledge of the cognition under view nor undertake to examine whether that knowledge conforms to its standard of truth. Consciousness has its standard within its polar relation insofar as the object to which it relates constitutes the standard for its knowledge, whereas consciousness examines the correspondence of its knowledge with that standard simply by being aware of both its own knowledge claim and the object to which it should conform.³

Hence, phenomenology has hypothesized a construal of knowing that examines its own knowledge claims. Moreover, this examination, which is built into the structure of consciousness as the phenomenon it is taken to be, is such that a specific development will ensue so long as the knowing under observation retains its defining identity by confronting something given. Insofar as there remains a distinction between knowing and its object, when knowing compares its object with its putative knowledge of it, it must discover that the object that it is addressing is not the object as it is apart from knowing. Rather, it is the object as it is given for knowing, since only in relation to knowing can the object be compared to the knowledge cognition has of it. Since the object can be appealed to as a standard only as it is given for knowing, knowing experiences that the object it confronts is not what it appeared to be – namely, something apart from knowing. The object that it confronts is the object as it is for knowing, which is a different content.⁴

Yet as Hegel points out, to the extent that what knowing confronts is altered, knowing’s relation to its object is also altered, for its relation is characterized in respect to what it confronts. Thus, the knowing under observation necessarily undergoes a transformation through the comparing of its terms, becoming what can be considered a new shape of consciousness, retaining in a new guise of transformed relata the defining opposition between knowing’s relating and that to which it relates.⁵

As Hegel points out, this process of transformation, where consciousness comes to experience that its object turns out to be what the object is in its relation to knowing, could be regarded as a path of despair because each successive shape would appear to be subject to the same process of inversion.⁶ For the observer, the succession of shapes provides a necessary development insofar as once knowing construed as consciousness is stipulated, each shape of consciousness generates a specific successor determined by its own particular opposition of knowing and its object.⁷

Although this necessity allows phenomenology to have a nonarbitrary ordering, it is not clear how this “scientific” form⁸ saves the observation of consciousness’s path of despair from the ceaseless undertaking of traditional skepticism. As the ancient skeptics realized, because any global denial of knowing subverts itself, skepticism must be an endless task, ever casting doubt upon whatever knowledge claims it comes upon. Phenomenology would seem similarly caught in endless observation, ever confronting more shapes of consciousness, ceaselessly emerging from further experience. Phenomenology would then be a curse, never leading beyond the futile endeavors of phenomenal knowing, never bringing them to closure, never freeing discourse from the opposition of consciousness.

The underlying problem, however, equally indicates the only possible solution. So long as the observed phenomenon of knowing retains its defining difference between knowing and its object, there will remain a difference between what the object is independently of knowing and the object as it exists in its relation to knowing. This means that when knowing examines its knowledge, it will find itself confronting an object different from what it originally took it to be. If, by contrast, these two terms come to be indistinguishable, no discrepancy will arise, and there will be no further generation of additional shapes of consciousness. The motor of the development will cease to function insofar as the constitutive opposition of knowing and its object has itself collapsed. Consequently, the nature of the development of the subject matter dictates its one and only possible terminus: the accomplished equalization of knowing and its object.

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