Chapter 6 - “Reason … apprehended irrationally”: Hegel's critique of Observing Reason

Summary

Die Frage könnte eigentlich so gestellt werden: Wie hängt, was uns wichtig ist, von dem ab, was physisch möglich ist?

(Ludwig Wittgenstein)

“Observing Reason” is one of the longest sections of the Phenomenology of Spirit. It is, for instance, twice as long as the much-noted part dedicated to self-consciousness. Yet it is one of the least commented, interpreted, and productively appropriated passages of this seminal work. There are two clusters of reasons that can explain this relative disregard: First, in the section on “Observing Reason” Hegel deals with scientific theories and accounts in the philosophy of nature of his times. These are, at least at first sight, remote from both the actual overarching topic of the Phenomenology and from the model of a socially and historically oriented theory of the mental that is attractive from today's perspective. The problems Hegel deals with here not only lie outside the interests of most interpreters of the Phenomenology. They refer to questions and theories that are unfamiliar to us. It would seem that in this section Hegel's general philosophical program in the Phenomenology can find only sparse anchorage in the subject matter being investigated. Interpreters interested in the systematic sustainability of the entire work tend to look to other parts of the book for arguments in favor of Hegel's attempt to prove the necessity of the sequence of all our epistemic projects on the route to Absolute Knowing.