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Language, Thought and Writing: Hegel after Deconstruction and the Linguistic Turn

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  23 June 2015

Jens Brockmeier
Jens Brockmeier*
Affiliation:
Universität Innsbruck
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Abstract

“One of the most dangerous of ideas for a philosopher is, oddly enough, that we think with our heads, or in our heads.” Wittgenstein

… aber wir sprechen das Allgemeine aus;” Hegel

“Hegel is the last philosopher of the book and the first thinker of writing.” Derrida

“Linguistic turn”, “pragmatic paradigm”, “Destruktion”, “deconstruction”, “condition postmoderne”, “pensiero debole” are not only philosophical labels. They are not only indices of intellectual positions which have inscribed themselves, as consequences as well as preconditions, in the end of traditional metaphysics. “Nothing is true, everything is permitted”, Nietzsche's Genealogy of Morals announces, describing the empty space which the metaphysical concepts have left; and in doing so opening up a seemingly boundless dimension for new developments of thoughts. The dilemma of these developments of modernity is that the vacuum they left, caused by their ruthless critique, cannot be refilled. So the outlook of modernity remains necessarily heterogeneous and unstable, meandering towards the colourful and fashionable-macabre extremes of postmodemity which gain from the tragic certainty of rien ne va plus the happy imperative of anything goes. But these are also ciphers of a particular philosophical-historical constellation, a work situation, in which the potencies of reason, being verhimmelt for a long time, now are going to be situated into their real contexts. Only, as Habermas puts it, “under the premises of an unexcited postmetaphysical thinking”, the once heroic concept of theory, which was meant to explain the world of human beings and their history as well as Nature out of onto-theleological principles of rationality, falls to pieces.

Type
The Presence of Hegel in Contemporary Thought
Information
Bulletin of the Hegel Society of Great Britain , Volume 11 , Issue 1-2: number 21/22 , 1990 , pp. 30 - 54
Copyright
Copyright © The Hegel Society of Great Britain 1990

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References

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14. For an analysis of the linguistic and philosophical background which Wittgenstein and Saussure have in common (despite emanating from very different intellectual traditions) and against which I have emphasized here the outlined anti-representational and anti-object-orientated view of language, cf. Harris, R., Language, Saussure and Wittgenstein, London, 1988 Google Scholar.

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24. Cf. Brockmeier, J., ‘Möglichkeit und Wirklichkeit in Hegel's Entwicklungtheorie des “reinen Denkens”’ in: Dialektik heute, ed. by Kimmerle, H., Bochum, 1983, pp. 1–42 Google Scholar.

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33. Hegel, G. W. F., Phenomenology cf Spirit, transl. by Miller, A. V.. Oxford, 1977, p. 60 Google Scholar.

34. Ibid., p. 58. — From a point of view of history of philosophy and epistemology this form of consciousness is usually identified with the position of ‘naive realism’ or the ‘common sense’ tradition of empirism. But as all Getallen of the Phenomenology also sense-cenainty refers to several levels of meaning in the individual and historical development of consciousness and their philosophical as well as non-philosophical reflection. So it is not only possible to read the text as analysing a “non-conceptual stale of mind”, as Edward Craig puts it ( The Mind of God and the Works of Man, Oxford, 1987, p. 207 Google Scholar), but “as referring to a number of different subjects, rather than different states of the one subject” (ibid., p. 214).

35. Theunissen, M., ‘Begriff und Realiät. Hegel's Aufhebung des melaphysischen Wahrheilsbegriffs’. In seminar: Dialektik in der Philosophie Hegels. ed. by -P.|Horstmann, R., Frankfurt a. M., 1978, p. 327 Google Scholar.

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37. Ibid.

38. Cf. Brockmeier, J., ‘Die Entäuaerung und die Erinnerung der Objektivität. Zum Subjektivitäts — und Entwicklungsbegriff bei Hegel’, in Hegel-Jahrbuch, 1986, pp. 260–270 Google Scholar.

39. Cf. Riedel, M. “Principium und Pronunciatum”. Kantstudien, 79, Jg., H., 1988, p. 12 Google Scholar.

40. Cf. Brockmeier, J., ‘Am philosophischen Rand der Sprache. Die Natur der sinnlichen Gewiaheit in Hegels Phänomenologie des Geisles’, in Hegel-Jahrbuch, , 1990, pp. 157–170 Google Scholar. — It is for this reason that I would like lo formulate more carefully Charles Taylor's assessment ( Hegel, Cambridge, 1973, p. 141 Google Scholar) on this point language is for Hegel not “one of the criterial properties of knowledge” at all, but of philosophical knowledge. And this is that knowledge which the Phenomenology ‘produces’ transforming the totality of the human mind in the diamanlenes Netz of those logical categories which the Logic presents.

Therefore, also Ivan Soll's criticism of Taylor's view must be critically read in the light of the same objection. When Soil slates (‘Charles Taylor's Hegel’, The Journal of Philosophy, 73, (1976), pp. 679–710 Google Scholar; reprinted in Hegel, ed. by Inwood, M. J., Oxford, 1985, pp. 54–66, p. 59)Google Scholar that Hegel bases his attack on sense-certainty “on the principle that what we can say reveals what can and cannot be the object of our consciousness”, he leaves unanswered what the ‘objects of our consciousness’ are. This, of course, implies the more fundamental question of the ontological status of the objects of consciousness in Hegel's thought. Evidently, every linguistic as well as epistemological argument in Hegel's identity philosophy moves within an ontological horizon which in this case appears beyond the dialectical opposition of das Allgemeine and das Einzelne. As Soil points out, Hegel's “arguments concerning the difficulty of referring linguistically to particulars try to show, not that success is achieved only by introducing descriptive terms that are universals, but that both the ostensive terms and what is actually referred to by them, by the objects of our consciousness, are universals” (ibid., p. 64).

To this double contrast of the particular and the universal we can add two further ontological themes with which, as Edward Craig has shown, Hegel deals here: those of active/passive and simple/complex. “The play he makes with the demonstrative ‘this’, the idea that sense-certainty is a purely ostensive form of consciousness, underlines this fact, and the reader who can hear his philosophy polyphonically will find all three themes sounding at once here” ( Craig, E., The Mind of God and the works of Man. pp. 209/210 Google Scholar). There is no doubt that the Hegelian world of consciousness and mental activity always coincides with the world of the real, non-mental objects (cf. Stern, R., Kant, Hegel, and the Structure of the Object, London & New York, 1990 Google Scholar) is a fact which sheds light also on the ontological status of language in Hegel's thought. Here I am going to concentrate only on emphasizing the constitutive function of language for philosophical objects. For these are the objects of the Phenomenology.

41. The attack on the purported richness of sense-certainty is based “not, as Taylor claims, on the rather weak requirement that ‘in order to know something we must be able to say something about it’, but on the more rigorous thesis that our knowledge is limited to what we can express” ( Soll, I., ‘Charles Taylor's Hegel’, p. 57 Google Scholar).

42. Hegel, G. W. F., Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 70 Google Scholar.

43. Ibid., p. 66.

44. Ibid., p. 60.

45. Ibid., p. 55.

46. One could almost attribute to sense-certainty the status of a ‘pre-chapter’ of the Phenomenology, for the actual genesis of consciousness begins only with the second, the perception-chapter. Here the field is already prepared in a way which for Hegel is quite clean the linguistic character of consciousness is out of question. The ‘utterances’ of sense-certainty move already in forms of proposition which belong to the sphere of perception and regard categories of perception like thing and quality (cf. Wiehl, R., ‘Über den Sinn der sinnlichen Gewiaheit in Hegel's Phänomenologie des Geistes’. In Hegel in der Sicht der neueren Forschung. ed. by Fetscher, I., Darmstadt, 1973, p. 56 Google Scholar).

Possibly it was for this reason that Hegel himself later withdrew the examples, which he chose in the Phenomenology (like the spatio-temporal terms of “now” and “here”), since they are “von der Anschauung erfaate Bestimmungen des Objekts” (Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften III. Werke in zwanzig Bänden, vol. 10, l. c., 418, p. 207).

Thus J. Heinrichs ( Die Logik der “Phänomenologie des Geistes, Bonn, 1974, p. 111 Google Scholar) concludes that the concept of consciousness, which is represented by sense-certainty, is at least more specific or narrow than that one which represents the whole Phenomenology, which intends to embrace the history of all experiences of consciousness.

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48. Cf. Wieland, W., “Hegel's Dialektik der sinnlichen Gewiaheit”. In Materialen zu Hegels “Phänomenologie des Geistes”. ed. by Fulda, H. F. & Henrich, D., Frankfurt a. M., 1973, pp. 70, 75a, 78 Google Scholar.

49. Westphal views even in the first three chapters of the Phenomenology, which together have the title Consciousness, a structure of arguments parallel to Plato's Theaetetus (cf. Westphal, M., ‘Hegel's Phänomenologie der Wahrnehmung’. In Materialen zu Hegels “Phänomenologie des Geistes”, pp. 83/84 Google Scholar).

50. Hegel, G. W. F., Phenomenology of Spirit, p. 66 Google Scholar.

51. It seems to me that David Lamb has focused perhaps a bit too exclusively on just these points and stressed in, as I think, a very generous manner what he calls “the considerable convergence of the later Wittgenstein, as commonly understood, and the Hegelian understanding of language” (‘Sense and Meaning in Hegel and Wittgenstein’. In Hegel and Modern Philosophy, ed. by Lamb, D., London, New York & Sydney, 1987, pp. 70–101)Google Scholar. He finds it “striking that the two philosophers argued very similarly against the sensory realist account of the relation between language and reality” and that they both emphasized that the necessity of ‘universal’ linguistic structures and conceptual knowledge precedes every experience of an object (pp. 70 and 97). “But the thesis that there is a close affinity between the later Wittgensteinianism and Hegel on meaning and sense-certainty has received surprisingly little attention. For precisely because Wittgenstein was never a Hegelian, it would be an ironic note indeed if the philosophical revolution, through the later Wittgenstein, were to issue into and newly confirm the old Hegelian or neo-Hegelian tradition against which it originally defined itself.” (ibid., p. 70).

52. One reason why Hegel privileges phone, the oral language, as central means and medium for philosophical thought seems to be precisely its “etherical character” (which he had first developed in his “Theory of the ether” in the Philosophy of nature in its Jenenser Realphilosophie of 1804/5 ). Here he had shown how spoken language can be understood as a paradigm for a movement of Aufhebung without rest. (Cf. Philipsen, U., ‘Sprache bei Hegel und Derrida’. Paper presented to the XVIII. Internationaler Hegel-Kongrea, Wroclaw, August, 1990)Google Scholar.

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