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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 May 2010
Books on the major thinkers in the history of philosophy are faced with difficult tasks. Not only do they run the risk of being too scholarly for the nonspecialist or insufficiently detailed for the specialist, but also they must observe the fine line between avoiding anachronism and establishing the current relevance and merits of the past philosopher. These problems are compounded for the English-speaking philosopher by a figure like Hegel who is either identified with a very unhegelian British idealism, or largely ignored. The anglophone interpreter of Hegel must find fresh ways of expressing his ideas and methods for a philosophical audience whose recent resurgence of interest in Hegel emerges from a zero degree, or worse, of understanding or empathy. Charles Taylor's book is brilliantly successful at rehabilitating Hegel and providing a vigorous, stimulating reading of his major works.
1 Charles Taylor, Hegel, p. vii. Subsequent references to this work (and only to it) will appear in the text.
2 Taylor, Charles, “Interpretation and the Sciences of Man,” Review of Metaphysics, 35 (1971), 3–51Google Scholar; see p. 32. See also Hegel, pp. 295–96.
3 See Hartmann, Klaus, “Hegel: A Non-Metaphysical View,” in Hegel: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Maclntyre, Alasdair (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor, 1972), pp. 101–24Google Scholar.
4 Schmitz, Kenneth L. does an excellent job in searching Taylor's publications and revealing such cues in his article “Embodiment and Situation: Charles Taylor's Hegel.” Journal of Philosophy, 73 (1976); pp. 710–23CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
5 Taylor, “Interpretation,” p. 16.
6 Ibid., p. 14; see Hegel, p. 98.
7 Ibid., p. 5.
8 See Hegel, pp. 567ff.
9 Taylor, “Interpretation,” p. 6.
10 Hegel's Philosophy of Right, translated by Knox, T. M. (New York: Oxford University Press, 1967), pp. 12–13Google Scholar.
11 Taylor, “Interpretation,” p. 50.
12 Ibid., p. 47.
13 Published in Hegel: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Alasdair Maclntyre, pp. 151–87.
14 Ibid., p. 152.
15 “The Logic” refers to Taylor's reconstruction, which draws upon various texts including the larger Science of Logic and the smaller Logic of the Encyclopedia (see 225).
16 See Rorty, Richard, “Verificationism and Transcendental Arguments,” Noùs, 5 (1971), 3–14Google Scholar; p. 14. Although Hegel sees reality as necessary interconnection, it must be emphasized that he does not reduce truth to mere coherence. Judgements are still objective because inferential relationships involve not only universals, but also external particulars. The claim is not that there is no external being, but that particulars are not independently given; in Taylor's words, “we are dealing with… a totality of external being which is systematically and externally related” (Hegel, p. 263; see 309, 337).
17 Parkinson, G.H.R., “Charles Taylor's Hegel” Inquiry, 19 (1976), pp. 255–66CrossRefGoogle Scholar; p. 258.
18 Hegel, , Lectures on the History of Philosophy, translated by Haldane, E.S. & Simson, F.H. (London: Kegan Paul, 1895), vol. III, p. 431Google Scholar.
19 Although Kant's transcendental deduction depends on the claim that all consciousness is self-consciousness, Richard Rorty demonstrates that a transcendental argument for objectivity can bypass this premise. See his article, “Strawson's Objectivity Argument,” Review of Metaphysics, 24 (1970–71), pp. 207–44Google Scholar; pp. 219f.
20 One might also think that since dialectical arguments apparently waive the principle of noncontradiction they would be incompatible with transcendental ones, which can be expressed in a variety of elementary logical forms (and which are thus not defined by their logical form alone). This is a misunderstanding, however, for what is incompatible are reductio arguments based on the principle, ˜ (p. ˜ p); for if Hegel could establish p and ˜ p, then anything would follow, and not only that particular transformation that Hegel thinks follows necessarily. Kant himself is clear that a transcendental argument is not apagogical or indirect like a reductio argument (A789/B817), and he also thinks that the principle of contradiction, although fundamental to general logic, is not crucial in transcendental logic (A154–5/B193–4). Taylor correctly insists that Hegel's logic continues the programme of transcendental logic, not that of the pre-critical, general logic. Instead of the principle of ˜ (p. ˜ p) he points out that for Hegel “the minimum cluster which can really do justice to reality is three propositions, that A is A, that A is also ˜ A; and that ˜ A shows itself to be after all A” (80). Parsing the contradiction into separate propositions removes unnecessary paradox, as Taylor shows by the clarity of his explication of the paradigm cases of human subjectivity and self-positing Geist.
21 Richard Rorty in “Verificationism” suggests that transcendental argumentation actually comes down to a single anti-Cartesian argument in different guises, but with a common target, viz., “the notion that we can start with knowing about nothing save our own experiences and go on from there” (p. 14).
22 If Kant begins the challenge, Hegel completes it: “We live the outer before we live the inner,” says Taylor in explicating the Logic (295–296), and futhermore, “the inner, Geist, can only exist in external reality; hence the reality of the inner depends on the solidity of the outer” (291).
23 Strawson, P.F. in The Bounds of Sense (London: Methuen, 1966Google Scholar) also maintains that “Kant is closer to Berkeley than he acknowledges” (p. 22; p. 35). Kant's resistance to Hegel's move depends on the cogency of the distinction drawn when he says we cannot know, but only think the noumenal (B xxvi). Yet Kant is not merely claiming that it is possible to think the thing-in-itself as he does, but that it is necessary to do so if our experience is not to be contradictory. Taking up Kant's insistence on our inability to know the true nature of our constituting subjectivity, Taylor argues on Hegel's behalf that “we can only consider ourselves barred from knowing it if we take the basically Humean attitude that the subject is what must be known in an inner intuition” (335). But his limitation itself presupposes a view that the subject is polarized, that it is necessarily confronted with an object, so we do have a clue to and a conception of the basic nature of the subject (334; 89) — a conception that is stronger than a mere thought.
24 Hegel's Logic, translated by Wallace, William, 3rd ed. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1975), § 41, p. 67Google Scholar.
25 Ibid., p. 68.
26 Ibid., p. 73.
27 Taylor brings out very clearly the difference between Kant and Hegel on this score, emphasizing that whereas “for Kant categories are finite because they are subjective, for Hegel they are finite because they are partial, they have their place in the whole process, and have to go under each in their turn”; accordingly, ultimate truth is no longer beyond our grasp “because reality is not foreign to thought, rather it develops out of thought itself” (301).
28 Very much in the spirit of Hegel, Richard Rorty shows that Kant himself should have realized in the “Transcendental Analytic” that he undercuts both the intuition-concept distinction of the “Aesthetic” and the noumenal-phenomenal distinction of the “Dialectic.” The transcendental deduction demonstrates in effect that there is no unit of knowledge smaller than the judgement: either the intuition is synthesized in an actual perceptual judgement and is therefore not merely intuitive, or it is ineffable, and therefore of no explanatory value. Furthermore, the very sense of the term “phenomenal” dissolves once it turns out that the idea of an intuitive given — the basis of phenomenal knowledge — is no longer meaningful (“The World Well Lost,” Journal of Philosophy, 69, 1972, 649–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar; p. 650.) This realization can be found in the Phenomenology at the transition from consciousness to self-consciousness, where consciousness becomes aware that the veil of appearances does not really hide anything behind it, and that the Kantian noumenal reality is nothing more than the result of a moment of thought dividing itself against itself.
29 Stroud, Barry, “Transcendental Arguments,” Journal of Philosophy, 65 (1968), pp. 241–56; pp. 253–54CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
30 Hegel's Logic, p. 67.
31 Despite Hegel's claim to strictly immanent progression through internal contradiction within concepts, Taylor believes that there are only a few places where he actually meets the methodological requirements of ontological dialectics, namely, in the accounts of Being, Nothing, and Dasein in the Logic and of consciousness in the Phenomenology (347).
32 See Davidson, Donald, “On the Very Idea of a Conceptual Scheme,” Proceedings and Addresses of the American Philosophical Association, 47 (1973–74). 5–20; p. 20CrossRefGoogle Scholar.