German Idealism Today

Markus Gabriel, Anders Moe Rasmussen, Markus Gabriel, Anders Moe Rasmussen

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9783110497519
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Idealismus in der Philosophie

This collection of essays provides an exemplary overview of the diversity and relevance of current scholarship on German Idealism. The importance of German Idealism for contemporary philosophy has received growing attention and acknowledgment throughout competing fields of contemporary philosophy. Part of the growing interest rests on the claim that the works of Kant, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel remain of considerable interest for cultural studies, sociology, theology, aesthetics and other areas of interest.

In the domain of philosophy, the renaissance of innovative readings of German Idealism has taken scholarly debates beyond merely antiquarian perspectives. This renaissance has been a major factor of current efforts to bridge the gap between so-called "analytic" and so-called "continental" philosophy.

The volume provides a selection of well-chosen examples of readings that contribute to systematic treatments of philosophical problems. It contains (among others) contributions by Markus Gabriel, Robert Pippin, Anders Moe Rasmussen, Sebastian Rödl.

IIThemes from Hegel

Markus Gabriel

A Very Heterodox Reading of the Lord-Servant-Allegory in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit

Given the complexity of the argument to follow, which should stand or fall in its own right, I will refrain from extended commentary on other possible or actual overall readings of the influential chapter of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit that I will focus on in this paper. My paper is neither a survey of the recent literature on the topic, nor do I intend to place it in the context of recent trends in Hegel scholarship. However, before we get started with the actual work, let me just briefly note that the recent engagement with Hegel by John McDowell, Robert Brandom, and Robert Pippin in America and Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer and Anton Friedrich Koch in Germany has led to very significant breakthroughs in our understanding of the philosophical stakes of Hegel’s arguments.137 Some of their pioneering work pertains to the arguments presented in my paper. The common denominator of this breakthrough is that this recent work is able to reconstruct Hegel’s arguments in a manner which departs from Hegel’s own form of presentation, as this is often almost indecipherable by our contemporary standards. Yet, there are at least two presuppositions widespread in these readings as far as the Phenomenology of Spirit is concerned I do not share, one methodological and the other more substantial.

The methodological assumption I reject is that Hegel presents his views in the Phenomenology, such as his views about sense-certainty, perception, and self-consciousness. In this book we do not find any of Hegel’s views on these topics. Rather, he is discussing various attempts to give an account of truth-apt reference to objective states of affairs which all fail for interesting and systematically connected reasons. In presenting and discussing the structure of these failures Hegel at most presents his view about the nature of failures in philosophy. Specifically, in the Phenomenology he argues that there is rational theory change in philosophy and not just an arbitrary or contingent exchange of opinions.138 He supports this view about the nature of philosophy by showing how one failure needs to another failure which resolves some shortcomings of an earlier failure while at the same time generating new problems. The Phenomenology is, thus, a systematically constructed series of failed conceptions of truth-apt reference to objective states of fairs. No position within the Phenomenology, none of the famous shapes of consciousness, represents Hegel’s theory of said reference. This is one of the sense in which the Phenomenology is an introduction to the standpoint of philosophy as science, that is, as a positive development of philosophical concepts. In my reading, I emphasize the feature of the project according to which we are dealing with a “presentation of appearing knowledge (Darstellung des erscheinenden Wissens)” rather than with Hegel’s own philosophical knowledge-claims about the nature of conscious intentionality.

The substantial assumption of recent reconstructions that I do not share is that Hegel’s project is the continuation of Kantian transcendental semantics and not (primarily) an engagement with metaphysics and ontology.139 Hegel frequently expresses a variety of criticisms of Kant, particularly against his distinction between appearances and things in themselves, and he himself insists that there is no coherent way of thinking about conscious intentionality without admitting that we can unproblematically grasp things in themselves.140 But I will set these historical details aside in order to present a somewhat detailed and very heterodox reading of a highly influential chapter of the Phenomenology, “Lordship and Servitude (Herrschaft und Knechtschaft)”.141

The degree of heterodoxy of my paper can be determined by measuring the extent both to which the reading it suggests radically departs from the tradition and to which it manages to deflate Hegel’s metaphors. By a “deflation” of metaphors, I mean the clear identification of the concepts Hegel refers to with the help of his metaphors. His metaphors are part of larger allegories he sets up in order to illustrate how “natural consciousness”, that is, everybody who is aware of their awareness of something, is blinded by its homegrown picture-like representations, what Hegel calls “Vorstellung”.142 Deflationary readings of Hegel thus generally tend to be heterodox in the sense that they identify the non-metaphorical concept behind apparently metaphorical terms, such as “life,” “desire,” “master,” “death,” “satisfaction,” “recognition,” etc. A very heterodox reading such as the one sketched in this paper is, accordingly, very heterodox in the sense that it is maximally deflationary. In short, I believe that every single one of the expressions most cherished by the most influential traditions of commentary on the often so-called “master-slave-dialectic” is a metaphor for a concept, and that consequently certainly all orthodox readings are misled by metaphors.143 To put it as bluntly as I can: all theories of life, desire, or social recognition that take themselves to be grounded in Hegel’s views are only grounded in Hegel’s metaphors. Interestingly, Hegel does not even use the word “Anerkennung” “recognition” a single time in the self-consciousness chapter of the Phenomenology, but there only speaks of recognizing, Anerkennen, which is an essential ingredient in his diagnosis of the failure of self-consciousness.

Before the games begin, I will first (1.) explain what I take to be the actual stakes of the argument of the Phenomenology. Hegel explicitly determines a goal and sets up rules that determine achievement conditions. If he either does not act according to the rules or does not reach the goal by legitimate steps, the argument fails. In other words, I will first broadly sketch what the “method” is. I will then (2.) reconstruct the introduction to Chapter IV of the book, which bears the title “the truth of self-certainty.” In part 3. I will then reconstruct the argument of IV.A., the famous chapter on “Dependence and Independence of Self-Consciousness; Lordship and Servitude.”

1The Rules of the Game

First and foremost, we need to settle the meaning of “consciousness.” Given what Hegel says in the Introduction, the meaning of “consciousness” can be pinned down as intentionality in the minimal sense of a state which is about something. “Consciousness” in Hegel simply means aboutness. “Knowledge,” another term Hegel frequently uses in the Introduction, and famously claims to be a result of the Phenomenology (in “Absolute Knowledge”), presupposes intentionality. One cannot know what one cannot refer to at all. Knowledge is knowledge of something; it involves objects or facts that are not necessarily a relatum in the relation of aboutness. Trivially, some things we can know are not identical with being known – the state of knowing is at least not in all instances identical with what it is about, with the possible exception of the state of knowing what knowledge is. Any theory of intentionality has to account for the fact that intentionality can be a part of knowledge. This provides us with two constraints that are very important for the development of the book: objectivity and fallibility.

The objectivity of intentionality consists in the fact that it can be about objects that would have been the way they turn out to be when referred to, had no one ever referred to them. Ways objects would have been had no one referred to them I call “maximally modally robust facts.”144 Maximally modally robust facts are very objective, as it were, but of course objectivity is not defined by the fact that intentionality is about this or that particular kind of object. The objectivity of intentionality is a feature of intentionality and not of its objects. We will see in a moment why this is so.

The second constraint, fallibility, becomes important once we realize that intentionality is entangled with knowledge and that it can go wrong. There can be reference failures, and if there is a reference failure, any knowledge claim built on the instance of intentionality in question will be a false knowledge claim and not amount to knowledge. A knowledge claim can fail by being based on a reference failure. Here is a simple example: A famous clown approaches. We see something red on his face and believe that he is wearing his red clown nose and hence claim to know that a clown nose is approaching our position in space-time right now. However, it turns out that the clown is not wearing his nose today, but rather happens to be carrying a red ball in front of his nose for some reason.

We can think about all sorts of objects, some of which are involved in maximally modally robust facts, such as the formation of our planet.145 Some other objects are not as robust. Some social objects, such as certain social roles are evidently constructed insofar as they would not exist had no one been around to have beliefs about them.146 Trivially, higher-order beliefs involve some facts with a null degree of robustness, such as the fact that I have a belief about a belief. This will be crucial for self-consciousness.

To sum up, the basic entity under scrutiny is consciousness. And consciousness is a relation between something and what it is about, where the aboutness is the relation. Most saliently, intentionality is realized as an aspect of knowledge, that is, when we know something about something. In this scenario, there are two very general constraints on intentionality: It has to be objective and fallible.

The third and last constraint, topic-neutrality, derives from Hegel’s post-Kantian concern to unify reason; it can be boiled down to the following chain of reasoning. It might seem that acts of referring to good food, to the Big Bang, to universities, to cats, and to the moon are structurally different in that referring to these different kinds of objects requires different kinds of activities. In this case, it might seem that there could not be a unified account of intentionality or an overall theory of intentionality. However, all entities in my fairly random list can be referred to and known about, and it is not evident why the difference in content should entail a difference in form. The post-Kantians Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel agree that we need a unified treatment of intentionality in order to avoid splitting reason or rationality itself into an indefinite number of capacities or faculties. A theory of intentionality should consequently be able to account for intentionality’s topic-neutrality, that is, for the fact that we can refer to all sorts of objects and know about them by referring to them in whichever way is useful to accomplish the ends of intentionality, most particularly knowledge.

The Phenomenology is a succession of theories of intentionality. The criterion for accepting or rejecting a theory is defined by the three constraints: Objectivity, fallibility, and topic-neutrality. The starting point of the whole book, Sense-Certainty, for instance, accounts for its topic-neutrality by ontologically committing only to individuals. Everything we can refer to and thereby acquire knowledge about is an individual. Let us call this “rampant nominalism”. These individuals exist anyway, they are maximally modally robust, and this is why we can be right or wrong about them. The theory breaks down for many reasons, the simplest being that it does not withstand self-application: Given that it claims that there is intentionality and given that it claims that everything there is is an individual, there is an individual that consists of an instance of reference, an instance of being referred to, and the instance of these two being relata of the relation of aboutness. Sense-Certainty is not capable of distinguishing these three individuals from any other three individuals: it is forced to think of relations as just more individuals, which triggers famous regresses reminiscent of Aristotle’s third man argument and Bradleyian, British Idealism regresses.147 The claim that everything we can refer to is an individual entails under self-application that any instance of reference is both itself an individual and can only consist of individuals if it has a structure at all. For this and many other pertinent reasons, Sense-Certainty fails. The goal of the Phenomenology is thus well defined: We are looking for a theory of intentionality, which accounts for its objectivity, fallibility, and topic-neutrality.148

2The Truth of Self-Certainty: Introduction

The chapter on self-consciousness deals with self-reference in the form of higher-order intentionality. The first part of Chapter IV. serves as an introduction of the concept of self-consciousness and culminates in a discussion of higher-order intentionality in the last two paragraphs (¶¶11–12). I will not be able to account for the origin of self-consciousness, which is the theme of the preceding chapter. This would take me more than one additional paper. All we need is the thin notion of consciousness according to which some subject S can think about some object or other. Let us take a look at diagram (D1), which is the minimal diagram of consciousness:

(D1) S→O

The relation described by (D1) is asymmetrical in that the topic-neutral, fallible, and objective most universal form of intentionality has to allow for many instances in which what is referred ...