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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 June 2015
1 Was Hegel a metaphysician? Beiser argues (in his robust Introduction) that he was, if we “define metaphysics as knowledge of the absolute” (p 4), but that Hegel's (and Schelling's) metaphysics is “profoundly naturalistic”: “They banish all occult forces and the supernatural from the universe, explaining everything in terms of natural laws” (p 5. The attribution of this view to Hegel is not adequately supported by the accompanying note on p 23, which refers only to Hegel's claim that “reason explains things according to their immanent necessity”) This was a “strictly immanent metaphysics based upon experience alone” (p 20). It was not atheistic, but it “conceived of God as the whole of nature” (p 9). In ‘Hegel's Historicism’, Beiser argues in a similar vein: Hegel “accepts Kant's critical teaching that metaphysics is not possible as speculation about a realm of transcendent entities… [but] only if it does not transcend the limits of possible experience” (p 271). Hegel respects his own “strictures about the limits of knowledge” (p 288): God, providence, spirit, etc remain within the confines of immanent (and experiential?) Aristotelian teleology (p 289). Much of this seems to me doubtful. Hegel nowhere affirms that there are limits to knowledge: he argues that to attempt to assign limits to knowledge, reason or thought is self-refuting, since to assign a limit invokes seeing beyond it. If he does not deal in transcendent entities, this has more to do with his doctrines about opposition, dualism and infinity than with his conception of “experience”, which is not restricted to the “empirical”. Other contributors implicitly disagree with Beiser. Guyer (in ‘Thought and Being: Hegel's Critique of Kant's Theoretical Philosophy’) speaks of “Hegel's failure to address explicitly Kant's basic thesis that claims to knowledge of necessary truth can be justified only at the cost of a severe restriction of their scope to the human representation of reality rather than reality considered without any such restriction” (p 173). Dickey (in ‘Hegel on Religion and Philosophy’) rejects the view that for Hegel “God is not God without the world”, since “Hegel's concept of God… exists independent of the world” (p 339). Dickey's argument is not transparent (eg. does it mean that the concept of God exists without, ie presumably before, the world?), but it is plainly at odds with the identification of God with nature and would associate Beiser with Haym's “ruthless historicization” of Hegel (p 340).
2 Did Hegel conflate logic with psychology? Burbidge (in ‘Hegel's Conception of Logic’) argues that his logic cannot be justly charged with an objectionable “psychologism”. Frege, he claims, ignored the dependence of our concepts on differences, between eg cats and dogs, or “some” and “other”. Such differences can only be discerned by thought. They “enable thought to move from concept to concept in a way that does not depend on contingent psychological processes. This movement is the result of distinctions that have been discovered and developed” over history. Hegel's “thinking” takes “account of differences inherent in the meaning of terms, and draws out from them what inevitably follows”. Frege “misses a distinctive feature of logical thought: the act of differentiating” (p 89). There seem to be four distinct types of “act of differentiating” in play: i) discovering a difference in the nature of things, eg between (if we suppose them to be natural kinds) cats and dogs; ii) inventing a difference that is only loosely based on natural differences, between eg. weeds and flowers; iii) inventing a difference between the words we apply to the things distinguished under i) and ii), eg between “dog” and “cat”; iv) discerning, or thinking about, a difference between things or between words that has already been discovered or invented by others Burbidge takes Hegel's thinking to be of type iv), and can thus distinguish between Hegel's act of thinking and the concepts that it is about. Hegel's thinking is non-contingent in that it follows the tracks laid down by acts of types i), ii) and especially iii). Is it non-contingent only in this sense or also in a stronger sense? On Hegel's view, to think necessarily involves differentiating, whether this means discovering, inventing or recording differences, and that cannot depend on our inherited concept of thinking or even of the difference between identity and difference. To think necessarily involves thinking about (or in terms of) the concept of being, and this in turn involves differentiating it from the concept of nothing. (Cats and dogs, by contrast, need not be thought about or even have existed, and either might have existed, or be thought about, without the other.) The necessity in play here is problematic, but perhaps no more so than that involved in “draw[ing] out… what inevitably follows” At any rate none of this entails that we cannot distinguish Hegel's thinking from what he thinks about or even that the differences he records were invented (rather than discovered) by prior acts of thinking. Beiser also addresses this topic: “Since [an] idea acquires its determinate meaning only through our activity of thinking about it, we cannot make a sharp distinction between the object and the activity of thought. The object is not given to, but created by our thinking about it. It is posited by the very act of discovering its meaning” (p 276). Beiser too can perhaps distinguish between Hegel's object and Hegel's thinking, since the activity of thought required for the determination of an idea is “the work of… a whole generation” (p 277f). Cannot a Platonist resist this attack? Discovery (eg of the nature of animal species) may be as arduous, time consuming and collective as creation (eg of a language). Other contributors are less accommodating to psychologism. Wartenberg (in his excellent ‘Hegel's Idealism: The Logic of Conceptually’) argues that the “central difference between Hegelian and Kantian idealism is Hegel's rejection of the psychological understanding of idealism according to which objectivity is the creation of a mind” in favour of a “conceptual idealism according to which conceptuality itself determines the nature of objectivity” (p 117). Wicks (in his admirably rich ‘Hegel's Aesthetics: An Overview’) suggests that Hegel rejects Plato's “abstract universals” in favour of the Aristotelian view that “the actual thinking of pure concepts… constitutes these pure concepts in their highest, concrete, spiritual realization… as they are “in and for themselves” (p 374). (This does not entail that such concepts are created, in Beiser's sense, by one or more acts of thinking; they may be “in themselves”, independently of actual thinking.) Hylton (in ‘Hegel and Analytic Philosophy’) says that a “Hegelian would agree that most of the objects of our knowledge are independent of us – in an ordinary sense of ‘independent of us’. The real issue must be about the existence of a non-ordinary, or transcendental, sense of ‘independent of us’” (p 480). (This has only an indirect bearing on whether concepts are independent of me or of us.)
3 Did Hegel believe in eternal truths? Beiser speaks, with regard to art, religion and philosophy, of the “simple lesson of history: that what appears to be given, eternal, or natural is in fact the product of human activity… in a specific cultural context” (p 272) and claims that while “the subject matter of other disciplines is fixed, given, and eternal, that of philosophy undergoes constant development” (p 275). But why this difference? It cannot stem, as Beiser believes, from the historicity of thought: astronomy too has a history and involves thought. Wood (in his fine account of ‘Hegel and Marxism’) takes the contrary view: “history for Hegel is not dictated by a series of changes in people's philosophical or religious conceptions… On the contrary, Hegel thinks that… art, religion, and philosophy… considered in themselves, fall outside history altogether, because their proper object, which is absolute truth or the divine Idea, is timeless and unchangeable. They have a history only because in each age they take a form that corresponds to the level of self-awareness attained by spirit” (p 429). Wood seems to me mistaken about the Idea (as in his suggestion that if it is timeless, this implies that changes in our conceptions of it cannot determine other historical changes), but this does not depend only on philosophy's having a history.
4 Wicks claims that for Hegel “language is merely a vehicle for the externalization of thought, and is not itself a necessary condition for, nor a constitutive aspect of, thought” (p 359). “The idea”, he adds, “that language and thought are inextricably interwoven has steadily gained currency within this century” (p 375). But this idea was advanced in the eighteenth century by Herder and Hamann, and all the signs are that Hegel agreed with them (see Encyclopaedia III, §462A). How could Hegel (or anyone else) infer that language is not necessary for thought, as Wicks suggests he did, from the conventionality of verbal sounds and inscriptions? Wicks implies that Hegel infers that sound does not matter to poetry from the doctrine that language is not necessary for thought: “Since we tend to overlook the particular sounds or shapes of words in ordinary discourse and simply focus on the sets of meanings they invoke, Hegel assumes that much the same happens when we attend to poetry” (p 359). But the doctrine is not directly relevant to poetry. The view that language is necessary for thought is compatible both with the view that sound matters to poetry and with the view that it does not (just as it does not in the case of “ordinary discourse”). Is Hegel so obviously wrong about poetry? The sheer visual appearance of written words does not matter, except in those rare cases where the poet confers a semantic significance on it (as in the “tale” the Mouse told to Alice). Why should the sheer sound of words matter, unless, as is no doubt more often the case, the sound as such has semantic significance? We do not know exactly what Greek poetry sounded like, but we get far more from it than from the sound of a poem in an unknown language. Background music is often enjoyable, but background (viz. uninterpreted) poetry leaves us cold (Translatability is a different question, since this raises problems of meaning and metre as well as sound.)
5 Wicks notes that the “term ‘symbolic’ undergoes a change of meaning (in a negative direction) from its appearance in Schelling's philosophy of art to its presence in Hegel's aesthetics. What Schelling honors as ‘symbolic’ art… more closely corresponds to what Hegel terms ‘classic’ art” (p 374). This perhaps depends in part on two of Hegel's innovations: i) his account of symbolism as a non-conventional but indeterminate relation between signifier and signified: eg a lion signifies strength non-conventionally, since a lion is (commonly held to be) strong, but has many other qualities besides strength, which in turn has dimensions not found in lions (Enc III §458; Aesthetics, trans Knox, T M, pp 303ff)Google Scholar; ii) his rejection of Creuzer's view that the gods portrayed in Greek art were symbols in this sense rather than self-sufficient, rounded personalities (Aesthetics, pp 471ff, 481ff).
6 Wood (‘Hegel's Ethics’) and Kenneth Westphal (The Basic Structure and Context of Hegel's Philosophy of Right’) give fine accounts of the Philosophy of Right. But why do neither of them mention Hegel's view of war? Is it because they regard it as peripheral or as unpalatable?