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Hegel's Ladder: The Ethical Presuppositions of Absolute Knowing*
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 13 April 2010
Abstract
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- Type
- Critical Notices/Études critiques
- Information
- Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review / Revue canadienne de philosophie , Volume 39 , Issue 4 , Fall 2000 , pp. 803 - 818
- Copyright
- Copyright © Canadian Philosophical Association 2000
References
Notes
1 Hegel, G. W. F., Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by Miller, A. V. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977)Google Scholar. References to this work (hereafter Ph.S.) are to the numbered paragraphs of this edition, which is the numbering Harris uses in his commentary.
2 References to this work are by volume and page number.
3 Pippin, Robert B., Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1989), p. 158.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
4 “The opposition between phenomena and noumena in Kant is the fundamental Gegensatz that Hegel's Phenomenology has to overcome. His work is crucially (though negatively) determined by Kant …” (Vol. 1, p. 27).
5 Needless to say, the claim that “things” are not ultimate “truth-makers” does not involve any claim that would lead to the reduction of things to our experience of them. Conversely, Hegel's anti-sceptical argument in the Phenomenology does not entail that the effort of human knowing about the natural and historical world will ever be complete or not come across recalcitrant phenomena.
6 To make the connection more vivid, compare the claim in the Introduction to the Phenomenology that “consciousness simultaneously distinguishes itself from something, and at the same time relates itself to it, or as it is said, something exists for consciousness …” (Ph.S., §82), with the following passage from The Berlin Phenomenology, translated by Petry, M. J. (Boston: D. Reidel Publishing, 1981)Google Scholar, §424, where Hegel is denning “Self-consciousness”: “There can be no consciousness without self-consciousness. I know of something, and if I did not have that which I know within the certainty of myself, I should know nothing of it. Since it is an other and at the same time my own, the general object is mine, and in accordance with this aspect I am self-relating. The general object has two aspects: on one side it is the negative of what is mine, while on the other side it is mine, my object, within which I am self-relating. In consciousness I am also self-conscious, simply also however, for the general object has an implicit aspect which is not mine.” Hence, although I think Hegel's methodological extension of the apperception thesis is mediated through Fichte, he emphatically employs the idea in its original Kantian garb.
7 Although Harris does not present the issue this way in Hegel's Ladder, he does do so in his essay “Hegel's Correspondence Theory of Truth,” in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit: A Reappraisal, edited by Browning, G. K. (London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997)CrossRefGoogle Scholar, where he states, in the context of an account of sense-certainty, “But the speculative philosopher—the one who has transcended the naïve realism of “common sense” from the start, and who knows (because of Kant's achievement) that “the world” is a “concept” and “experience” is its motion of development, can “observe” what happens as (s)he comes to be and to know what (s)he is in truth, and can put the movement together in its logical order” (p. 13).
8 This is important, since the “minimal” or inaugural notion of self-consciousness needs to be phenomenologically and historically transformed into the proper notion of self-consciousness, ego = ego, which is Fichte's conception of self-consciousness, and what Hegel identifies as the notion of “Reason” (Vol. 1, p. 452–56).
9 Which is why Harris is right to say that the transition to self-consciousness can only be made by theorists like ourselves: “For the natural consciousness the transition is always already made” (Vol. 1, p. 318).
10 To put the same thought another way, the point of the opening chapters is, finally, to show that human knowledge does not begin with simple, or even complicated, acts of direct object awareness, but with a consideration of ourselves as living, embodied agents in the world. Hence, at a more abstract philosophical level, its aim is to sublate the claims of Kant's transcendental aesthetic and transcendental analytic within a wider practical (Fichtean) and naturalistic (Schellingian) setting—which is why the claims of consciousness must be reworked again at a higher level in “Reason.” From what Harris says at Vol. 1, p. 470, note 10, he should agree with me.
11 To say that the opening chapters are best construed genealogically is to claim that what they really accomplish is a way for “we” philosophers who are willing to accept the reflexivity requirements of the method to order pre-reflexive positions in a manner that enables us, first, to correctly place, and so displace, Kant's epistemology as truly self-reflexive (see the previous note), and, second, to correctly identify what the correct minimal account of self-consciousness must be. It equally follows from this account that, as some of Hegel's critics have complained, the procedures of the opening chapters simply beg the question against the positions being examined. I think this complaint is accurate (most visibly in sense-certainty and understanding) and harmless. If Hegel methodologically begins with Kant, then for a direct refutation of Hume and Locke you must return to Kant.
12 In his reply to the Harris essay cited in note 7 above, Kenneth Westphal plausibly contends that Reid is not a good example here, since his direct realism did employ concepts. Better for these purposes would be Hume, Jacobi, or, anachronistically, the Russell of “knowledge by acquaintance” (“Harris, Hegel, and the Truth about Truth,” in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit: A Reappraisal, p. 26).
13 However, if even Frau Bauer is “actually a self-certain sense-certainty” (Vol. 1, p. 315), then the sense in which we ever could “return” to the sense-certain world, however mediated, should be moot even for Harris. When considerations like this emerge, I am tempted to think that the one thing Hegel cannot cancel and preserve is the paradise lost of sense-certainty; it remains the forever mythic hallucination of immediate human knowing.
14 For an overview of the debates on the proper interpretation of spirit, see Williams, Robert R., “Hegel's Concept of Geist,” reprinted in G. W. F. Hegel: Critical Assessments, Vol. 3, edited by Stern, Robert (New York: Routledge, 1993), pp. 538–54.Google Scholar
15 Hegel's internalization of the problem of comprehending the world as a whole turns on the transformation of God's creating the world into, first, “the progressive appearing of God as the World-Spirit” (Vol. 2, p. 543), and, thence, to the recognition that “it is we who create the scientific interpretation of it [the world]” (Vol. 2, p. 682). Our knowledge of freedom is more complex since it must include “the power of the negative”—that is, our powers of spontaneity and creation—as well as Hegel's official line that identifies the knowledge of freedom with its coming to a recognition of rational necessity.
16 A belief fostered by The Philosophy of Right.
17 I borrow the phrase from the title of Pinkard's, Terry commentary, Hegel's Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1994).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
18 In reconstructing Hegel in this way I am departing slightly from the letter of Hegel's text; but, clearly, both the achievement of the post-Kantian standpoint of Conscience and the phenomenological logic that leads to its final form is one place in the Phenomenology where, whatever the historical sources and texts are, because what is at stake is just the moral logic of the present, then logic is more important than historical sources. For readings of this part of the Phenomenology which, I think, converges with Harris, see my “Conscience and Transgression: The Exemplarity of Tragic Action,” in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit: A Reappraisal, edited by Browning, G. K. (London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997), pp. 79–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar, and “Confession and Forgiveness: Hegel's Poetics of Action,” in Beyond Representation: Philosophy and Poetic Imagination, edited by Eldridge, Richard (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 34–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar. In The Self and Its Body in Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1997), pp. 102–106Google Scholar, John Russon adopts a line of argument that converges with mine in contending that it is not just the singular origin of action which is “evil,” but the fact that significant action is logically always transgressive, always a negation and transformation of existing structures of mutuality. Luther's conscientious stand is, thus, best understood as the fulfilment of the exemplary law-breaking of Hegel's ethical trinity of Antigone, Socrates, and Jesus. In this respect, the Phenomenology's account of conscience and forgiveness is the solution to the problem that haunts Hegel's earlier writings of how he can make “criminality” paradigmatic for consciousness formation, and, thus, for an understanding of action generally.