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The Categorial Satisfaction of Self-Reflexive Reason

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 June 2015

Terry Pinkard
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Abstract

Robert Pippin's book, Hegel's Idealism: the Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness, is a deep, probing reconstruction of Hegel's project and the specific ways in which he tried to work out that project. It is rich in both analytical detail and in setting Hegel's thought in the historical complex of ideas that run from Kant to Fichte. It offers us a different view of Hegel than we have been accustomed to getting.

I shall not concentrate too much on the details of Pippin's book, which excels in the depth and fine grained quality of its analyses. Instead, I shall deal with his overall interpretation and how good a case can be made for it. Pippin's goal of locating Hegel in terms of the Kantian project is well founded, and I think that he almost succeeds admirably. But only almost.

The design of this commentary is threefold. First, I will give an overview of the general thrust of Pippin's interpretation. Second, I shall raise some questions about it and propose an alternative to it. Finally, I shall look at part of one particular section of Pippin's work, namely, his interpretation of Hegel's conception of “Essence” in the Science of Logic.

Pippin's main thesis about Hegel's program seems relatively straightforward: Hegel's work should be understood as carrying on and transforming the Kantian idea of deriving all the conditions of knowledge from the transcendental unity of apperception, a special kind of self-conscious awareness of objects. Let us call this the Apperception Thesis.

Type
Symposium on Pippin
Information
Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain , Volume 10 , Issue 1: number 19 , Spring/Summer 1989 , pp. 5 - 17
Copyright
Copyright © The Hegel Society of Great Britain 1989

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References

1 “It is one of the profoundest and truest insights to be found in the Critique of Pure Reason that the unity which constitutes the nature of the Concept is recognized as the original synthetic unity of apperception, as unity of the I Think, or of self-consciousness … Thus we are justified by a cardinal principle of the Kantian philosophy in referring to the nature of the I in order to learn what the Concept is.” [ Hegel's Science of Logic, translated by Miller, A. V., (New York: Humanities Press, 1969), pp 584–585]Google Scholar. (Hereafter cited as “Miller”) The Kantian text to which Hegel; is most likely referring is Kant's footnote to §16 (B134n) of the Transcendental Deduction”: “The synthetic unity of apperception is therefore that highest point, to which we must ascribe all employment of the understanding, even the whole of logic, and conformably therewith, transcendental philosophy.”

2 In Pippin's view, Kant has argued that all experience is necessarily apperceptive in that it involves some kind of self-relation or self-awareness to it (p. 103), and Hegel accepts this view. Pippin takes this apperceptive principle to be that “consciousness can be said to be in a relation to an object only in the sense that it takes itself to be” in such a relation (p. 114). He takes this to mean: “For anything to count as a representation of mine, I must be self-consciously representing such an object, implicitly taking myself to be representing thusly” (p. 132). Pippin tries to show that Hegel's unique twist to the Apperception Thesis lies in Hegel's social construing of rationality. Kantian claims about the apperceptive conditions of self-consciousness become transmuted into the claim that “participating in a practice can count as such only if the practice is undertaken … within … the ‘horizon’ of assumptions taken by the participants to be those assumptions” (p. 152). Thus, the self-relation, or apperception, necessary for a determinate cognitive relation to objects is possible only under certain types of intersubjectivity (p.158).

3 Miller, p. 589.

4 Pippin also notes that Hegel mounts a sustained criticism of Kant's conception of intuition that leads him to reject that part of Kant's doctrine. Pippin's treatment here is both subtle and persuasive.

5 I take this to be part of what Hegel means when he says of the Kantian move to the transcendental ‘I’ as a basis for such a principle, “But in order that this cognition may be reached, that form has still to be relieved of the finite determinateness in which it is ego, or consciousness. The form, when thus thought out into its purity, will have within itself the capacity to determine itself, that is, to give itself a content, and that a necessarily explicated content — in the form of a system of determinations of thought” (from the “Introduction” to the Logic, Miller, p. 63). Right before this sentence, Hegel says, “But if philosophy was to make any real progress, it was necessary that the interest of thought should be drawn to a consideration of the formal side, to a consideration of the ego, of consciousness as such, i.e. of the abstract relation of a subjective knowing to an object, so that in this way the cognition of the infinite form, that is, of the Concept, would be introduced.” Miller, p.63. I take it mat he is here referring to the Phenomenology as the theory of such abstract relations.

6 I would argue that there is ample textual evidence to show that he later changed his mind, but that is irrelevant (after all, maybe he was just wrong), so we need not go into it here.

7 Hegel calls the phrase, “transcendental” a barbarous expression. See Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy, translated by Haldane, E. S. and Simson, Frances H. (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul), Vol. III, p.431 Google Scholar; on p.437 Hegel also describes Kant's use of the term, “begleiten” (“accompany”) to characterize the relation of the unity of self-consciousness to the multiplicity of representations in consciousness as “barbarous”; Hegel, G. W. F., Werke in zwaruig Bänden, ed. by Moldenhauer, Eva and Michel, Karl Markus (Frankfurt a.M.: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1969). Vol. 20 Google Scholar, Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosphie, pp. 337, 343.

8 Hegel's notion of speculation is obviously indebted to Kant's transcendental dialectic. In each case, there is a deficiency in the category or the categorial pair, namely, that the category is entangled in contradictions. The contradictions result from the fact that the reasons for positing one category are equally good reasons for positing another, contradictory category: for example. Being and Nothing; or for positing a substructure that cannot be known (Essence); or for positing a system that pretends to be fully self-positing but is not (Concept).

9 I take this to be more or less what Hegel meant when he obscurely spoke of the owl of Minerva spreading its wings only at dusk. Philosophy takes its material in from the outside, where it both discovers and resolves the problems of categorial possibility in it. Philosophy generally only comes on to the scene after a particular conceptual array has been developed to the point where the philosophers can discover and reconstruct the categorial problems of possibility in it. As an example, consider Hegel's theory in his Philosophy of Right. It may be taken as a theory of how particular problems of categorial possibility in the relations of the modern state, society and the individual are to be conceptually resolved. If it is successful, then Hegel has shown that no more contradictions are present within that particular complex of social categories. Of course, that does not rule out new and unforeseen problems arising as a new array is itself developed. In that way, Hegel's claims for his theory's being ‘absolute’ (as being complete and consistent) can be reconciled with its historically determinate character. It is complete in that it leaves out none of the relevant historically given categories; it is consistent in that no new contradictions appear in it to propel further moves in the dialectic.

10 Hegel's idea here is to call attention to two different conceptions of existence, namely, the older idea of existence as something characterizing individuals as individuals, and the more modern conception of existence as a property of concepts or classes (i.e., to say of anything that it exists is to say that its class has at least one member). Kant, for example, uses the latter conception in his critique of the ontological argument, and modem quantificational logic makes it a part of its very structure. Hegel does not think that the more modem conception of existence is the ‘true’ conception or the correct ‘analysis’ of the concept of existence so much as he thinks that it is a different conception than the more primitive idea of Dasein, having to do with the more developed categories of substructure and superstructure.

11 Stephen Bungay makes this point in his overview and reconstruction of Hegel in terms of the categorial reading. See Bungay, Stephen, “The Hegelian Project” in Pinkard, Terry and Engelhardt, H. T. Jr., (editors), Hegel and Transcendental Philosophy: Essays in Honor of Klaus Hartmann, forthcoming from D. ReidelGoogle Scholar.