On
many occasions, I have been frustrated with a common view amongst
academics that before the 1700s, there is little of consequence for
modern history, science and philosophy. Zizek, who recently wrote a
massive work on Hegel entitled Less Than Nothing, says that all of
philosophy before the Critique of Pure Reason was a mere precursor to
Kant, and that the fifty years between the publication of the Critique
of Pure Reason in 1781 and the death of Hegel in 1831 was the critical
time of philosophy, the time that the “gang of four”, Kant, Fichte,
Schelling and Hegel, changed philosophy permanently. Fichte and
Schelling are often characterized as a bridge between the thinking of
Kant and Hegel. This week, we will briefly examine the central ideas of
Fichte and Schelling that influenced Hegel, then look at the central
ideas of Hegel’s history of thought and logic, and finally end with the
work of Merleau-Ponty, a Phenomenologist like Hegel and Heidegger. Last
time I mentioned that, following Kant, Phenomenologists are concerned
with the systematic ways we experience things, the way that they appear
for us as phenomena.
As
mentioned the first week, Analytic philosophy broke from the continent
after Kant, charging Hegel and others with obscurity and needless
complexity. The Continental tradition certainly follows Kant in being
difficult to understand and long-winded, though deep and meaningful for
those who take the time to understand. Kant wrote long, difficult (one
might even say, convoluted) books. Martin Jay, a renowned expert on the
Frankfurt School with whom I took classes on Hegel and post-Hegelian
thought in graduate school, once said in class that reading Hegel is
like wading through a swamp. Heidegger and other Continental thinkers,
who were each vying to be the next Kant or Hegel, follow in this
tradition. Thus, before cracking the works for oneself, it is often
very helpful to have a guide give an overview of German Idealism and its
central concepts, such that one does not have to be overwhelmed by the
primary sources, or learn about it on the street.
Johann Gottlieb Fichte
(1762 - 1814 CE), like many of his day, was inspired by the French
Revolution and became entranced by Kant’s Critiques, so much so that he
went to Konigsberg to meet Kant. After a disappointing meeting, as Kant
was not very impressed with the young follower, Fichte threw himself
into work that would prove himself worthy. At first, Fichte’s anonymous
writings were considered the work of Kant himself, and then when his
name became known he began to acquire fame. Becoming a professor, he,
like Schelling and Hegel, taught many students who would go on to become
central Continental philosophers, such as Schopenhauer who we will
study next week. After Fichte wrote a work arguing that there
effectively was no god other than rational morality, he was dismissed
from his professorship for atheism. Recall that Kant had no love for
religious ceremony, but believed in the purity and objectivity of reason
and morality.
Fichte
argued against Kant’s unknowable thing-in-itself. Like the Realists
mentioned last time, Fichte claimed that a gap between our experience
and the objective thing left open the possibility of insurmountable
skepticism. Like Hegel, Fichte argued that all is representation,
phenomena, and therefore any ‘noumena’ was itself phenomena,
representation. The incompleteness of our representations is a part of
the representations themselves, not a categorically removed unknowable
thing beyond reach. Self-consciousness is itself a phenomena, an
appearance, the most fundamental in and through which other phenomena
appear. Rather than say, like Kant, that there was a thing apart from
its appearance, Fichte argued that the thing is its appearance, insofar
as it exists for us.
Like
Hegel, Fichte argued that self-consciousness is a social, not merely
individual, phenomena. This would be critical for future Continental
philosophy. As mentioned, the Analytic tradition avoids history and the
social, focusing on the immediate and individual. The thinkers we have
covered so far, from Descartes through Kant, considered
self-consciousness as fundamental, but personal and singular, not
historical and cultural. While Berkeley said we recognize ideas in
others, it was God, not relations between human individuals, that
constituted reality. For post-Hegelian Continental thought, reality is a
social construct, a synthesis of individuals and social movements.
Reality is intersubjectivity. Objectivity is collective subjectivity.
It is just this sort of relativism and perspectivism that angered the
Realists and Analytic tradition.
Fichte
argued that it is through others that we find ourselves called to
obedience as well as freedom. Being, as self-consciousness, is a
calling or summons (Aufforderung in the German). The individual, as the
“I” (Das Ich), asserts itself, and this assertion is the existence of
the “I” as well as its basic activity. It is in accord and against this
assertion of self that additional activity, additional phenomena, take
place for the self. This became a central idea important not only for
Hegel but later for Freud and Psychoanalysis. While the ‘I’ starts out
unlimited, it comes to discover its limits through its interactions with
others. The self learns what it is through resistance (Anstoss) of
others. Just as Berkeley argued that we recognize others by their
ideas, which resemble our own, for Fichte we set up the presence of the
other, as ourselves but removed from ourselves, to explain the
resistance we find in others. Hegel’s view of history, particularly his
master/slave dialectic which we will soon consider, is founded on this
idea of recognition evolving through a process of resistance.
Unfortunately,
Fichte became a bit too social in hearing the calling of German
Nationalism, as well as antisemitism and misogyny, arguing that the
Germans must assert their Germanness, and that Jews and women should not
be included in the state or given rights. Unsurprisingly, many Nazis
were far more into Fichte than Hegel, who they identified with the rise
of Marx and Communism, an internationalist enemy of nationalist fascism.
Fichte, like the Nazis who would rise over a hundred years after his
death, believed in the original German folk people, the Volk, while
Hegel considered the Germans to be slaves of the Greeks and Romans who
had just come into their day after a historical succession of many
cultures. Later, Nietzsche rejected German Nationalism and
antisemitism, seeing it as a weakness, while Heidegger embraced the idea
of the German Volk through the lens of Fichte and Hegel, seeing it as a
strength. Like Fichte, Heidegger embraced Nazi fascism for several
years, arguing that it was an authentic and admirable calling for the
union of the German people.
Friedrich Schelling
(1775 - 1854 CE) was a student of Fichte’s, as well as Hegel’s roommate
at the University of Jena. A prodigy, he attended the university and
roomed with Hegel at 16, where he studied Neoplatonism and the work of
Kant and Fichte, becoming a professor at Jena at 23 and writing his
major philosophical work at 25. At first, he was befriended by and
mentored by Fichte, but the two soon diverged in their thinking and
their relationship soured. Amongst many things, Fichte hated Spinoza,
while Schelling loved him. It was with Schelling’s help that Hegel
joined him and Fichte as a lecturer at Jena. Originally Hegel sent
Schelling the manuscript of his first major work, the Phenomenology of
Spirit, and asked him to write an introduction, but Schelling, after
reading the work, found that it dismissed Schelling’s own philosophy as
inferior, as a footnote to history, which had progressed beyond the
views of Kant, Fichte and Schelling to Hegel’s own philosophy.
Schelling declined to write the introduction.
After
that, the two attacked each other’s work continuously, and after
Hegel’s death Schelling took Hegel’s central position at Jena, trying to
fight the “dragon’s teeth of Hegelianism”, the rising tide of followers
Hegel’s work had acquired. Unfortunately, by this time Schelling had
grown rather conservative and traditionally religious, and his later
thinking was rejected by many who heard Hegel and his lectures and saw
them as a call to radical revolution and change, particularly the Young
Hegelians such as Marx and Engels, the authors of the Communist
Manifesto, and the anarchist theorist Bakunin. There is good reason to
believe that the Analytic tradition broke from the continent in part due
to Hegel’s association with Marx. Kierkegaard attended the lectures of
Hegel and Schelling, influenced by while despising both. Later,
Schelling’s work had an impact on both Nietzsche and Heidegger, and
Zizek has written two works on Schelling’s philosophy.
Influenced
by Neoplatonism, like Hegel, Schelling argued that duality, polar
opposition, is the expression of nature, essential to our reality. He
saw nature consisting of expansive and contractive forces, light
expanding into darkness, life expanding into space and time. Recall
that Fichte argued that existence is resistance. Nature is a
progressive revealing of the absolute, the evolution and unfolding of
the mind of God as life and the spirit of each successive culture.
Human thought, for Schelling ‘Natural Philosophy’, is the height of the
expression of nature.
Consciousness
is a rupture of original unity, a splitting of the whole into self and
otherness. As with Fichte, the ‘I’ is the source of the universe, all
of which is defined in relationship to the self, and there is no
‘thing-in-itself’ other than that which the self finds in opposition to
itself. As we think, the “I think” of Descartes, this already posits
the “I am”. The self is a synthetic act, a creation of both self and
others, of the world outside of the self as well as the others one
encounters as similar yet different selves. Expansion and restriction
are the two fundamental activities of the self as well as the universe,
an endless struggle that changes along with the landscape. Identities
are unstable, and battles lead continuously to further battles.
Resistance, which Schelling identifies with negation, is followed by
mediation and synthesis, a rebalancing and redrawing of the lines that
constitutes the positive progress of history.
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
(1770 - 1831 CE), who was much in debt to Kant, Fichte and Schelling,
took their ideas and created an elaborate system that described the
evolution of all human thought, including philosophy, politics, religion
and art. Most of the Continental thinkers we will be studying for the
rest of the course, including Schopenhauer, Kierkegaard, Marx,
Nietzsche, Heidegger, Bataille, Sartre, Foucault, Deleuze and Derrida,
were influenced by Hegel’s dialectical system even as most reacted
against it. The Analytic tradition, as mentioned, breaks from the
Continental tradition after Kant, so they, like the Continental
thinkers, are part of the reaction to Hegel as well.
Like
Kant, Hegel was fascinated as a youth by the French Revolution, a
revolt of reason against traditional authority, dogmas and
understandings, in an age when science was overturning many old
assumptions. The Phenomenology of Spirit (1807 CE), Hegel’s history of
thought and first major work, was written as Napoleon was approaching
Jena with his troops, after which he would go on to conquer much of
Germany. When he was young, Hegel enthusiastically supported the
radical revolutionaries, only to find that the political infighting lead
to chaos, which was resolved by Napoleon. Hegel interpreted the
passage from King Louis the 16th to the French Revolution to Napoleon as
a concrete instance of dialectic, the progression of history that works
as a symbiosis of opposition. Like Fichte and Schelling, Hegel saw
individuals, ideas, and cultures as positive assertions that spawn
resistance, and that in each stage of history culture is resisted by
counterculture, which then merge to become a greater culture, a greater
synthesis, which then repeats the cycle. Hegel saw himself as happening
upon the final stage of history and philosophy, the age where Napoleon
balanced order and freedom, authority and rights, in the modern European
nation state.
After
writing his Phenomenology, Hegel wrote the Science of Logic (1816 CE),
which further details the operation of understanding and reason that
underlies the historical and cultural evolution of philosophy, politics,
science and religion. From here out, I will refer to the first text as
Hegel’s Phenomenology, and the second as Hegel’s Logic, the common
abbreviated names that are often used in scholarship. To understand
Hegel’s system, we must examine dialectic, the roles of understanding
and reason, and also the roles of dogmatism and skepticism in human
thought.
Dialectic
is often explained as a progression from positive to negative to
synthesis, much like the passage from Louis to Napoleon in France. Some
critics have pointed out that Hegel does not use these terms himself,
and is critical of Schelling for oversimplifying the process of
assertion and resistance, but it is not an oversimplification to see
these as central to Hegel’s system. In the ancient world, philosophers
understood the world in terms of opposites that work together. In
ancient India with the Jains and Buddhists, in Greece with Heraclitus,
skeptics and Neoplatonists, and China with Daoism, we find the idea of
the union of being and nonbeing together as becoming. Thought is
exercised by considering thesis and antithesis together as a unified
whole that can be viewed from opposite sides.
Like
the Greek Pyrrhonian skeptics, Hegel considered each point of view to
be an appearance or semblance (Schein). His system is an attempt to
fuse all the previous positions of philosophy together as contradicting
opposites, the sum of which give the whole. Just as for Newton, who
argued that in every instance of force there is an action together with
an equal and opposite reaction, in human thought for every assertion
there is an opposite assertion. Just as Napoleon took the authority of
Louis the 16th and balanced it with the rationalism and freedom of the
French Revolution to become the next, greater authority, a great thinker
is one who sees beyond the contradiction of thesis and antithesis to
create a greater synthesis, which Hegel also calls sublation
(Aufhebung), a preserving and transforming.
Just
as Napoleon came on horseback at the right time in history to balance
order and freedom in its latest form, Hegel saw himself as arriving just
after the dogmatism of the Rationalists and skepticism of the
Empiricists to synthesize the whole out of opposing parts. Based on the
simpler opposition between belief and doubt, Hegel viewed the history
of human thought as a struggle between conservative dogmatism and
progressive skepticism. Hegel considers this dialectic as
“self-completing skepticism” (PS 79), and his entire project is designed
to show that synthesizing both sides of a contradiction of views,
bringing position and counterposition together, is the completion and
concrete synthesis of the whole of what is. Similarly, if one looks at
the front and the back of a thing, one has seen the entirety of a thing.
The front and back views do not cancel each other out, but complement
each other as a concrete whole.
While
Hegel argued against pessimistic skepticism, what many would call
nihilism, the assertion that nothing can be asserted truthfully at all,
an “excuse for nonphilosophy”, he saw his own system as the union of
dogmatism and skepticism, as an optimistic system-building skepticism
that can fuse various sides into a full completion of possible
perspectives. The problem with skepticism is that it can show both
sides oppose each other, but it cannot build systems. The problem with
dogmatism is that it affirms systems, but myopically, without critical
doubt. For Hegel, belief must progress forward and persevere, but also
contradict and criticise itself to progress. This tension requires
great geniuses to leap over the hurdle of each contradiction, of each
stage in history.
Hegel
calls Plato’s Parmenides the most “perfect and self-contained document
and system of genuine skepticism”, the greatest masterpiece of ancient
dialectic. In the dialogue Parmenides proceeds to show Socrates, by
debating dialectically, that our understandings of reality form sets of
contradictions, and implies that if Socrates practices these exercises,
he will continue to become wise and arrive at greater understandings of
reality. Parmenides argues that being is both one and many, does and
does not exist, is known and unknown, changes and does not change, and
in all of this has and does not have contrary properties, does and does
not contradict itself.
Like
Fichte and Schelling, Hegel argues that things are opposed to each
other as well as the whole, and so it is opposition that defines a
thing, making it into what it is. Hegel calls this determinate
negation, and details how every way of being is a particular way of not
being. While many would consider nonbeing to be simply empty and
nonexistent, we can understand particular determinate negation in terms
of distinction. What a thing or phenomena is is always intimately and
essentially bound up with what it is not, to the thing or things it is
opposed to, just as conservative and progressive, dogmatism and
skepticism, define each other.
All
is change, continuous becoming which Hegel says early in the
Phenomenology is at first disorienting, just as the Sun is disorienting
and blinding to the one who manages to find their way out of Plato’s
cave. Common sense, with its simple dogmatic assumptions, is bewildered
by the “bacchantic frenzy, in which every limb is intoxicated”, which
questions all of its understandings just as Kant was awoken by Hume.
Like an extreme skeptic, Hume did not create a system, leaving truth as
a various unexplained set of assumptions. Kant built a system, crowned
by reason, but did not, for Hegel, bring it to completion, failing to
explain how the categories arise in time or how they are opposed to each
other. For Hegel, in the final synthesized system and completed
understanding, subjectivity and objectivity are two sides of the same
coin, a Phenomenological synthesis beyond Kant’s exclusive and elusive
‘thing-in-itself’. The abstract is the concrete, the subjective
appearance is objective reality. Kant was wrong to attempt to separate
the objective and subjective. History creates complexity in an orderly
way, each step in relation to the previous sum of steps.
Kant
and Fichte argued that reason is always beyond the understanding,
speculating as to what should be beyond what is. Like Kant, Hegel says
that our reasoning is free and speculative in relation to the
understanding, but for Hegel reason can contradict the understanding.
It is contradiction that is the pattern reason conforms to if it is
successful. For Kant, reason extends the understanding through
noncontradictory continuity. For Hegel, Kant stalled out,
misunderstanding reason as merely a higher understanding of
understanding. For Hegel, reason does not merely operate like
understanding, nor does it simply conform to it. Rather, reason is
revolutionary, and part of its job, unlike understanding, is to
contradict understanding. While understanding works by
noncontradiction, the principle of Aristotle and Leibniz that Kant
wanted to salvage as central to metaphysics, reason must be free to
oppose understandings in order to bring them to greater completion. If
understandings were perfect, there would be no need for reason, just as
if knowledge was complete and absolute, there would be no need for
wisdom, and if authority and culture was simply good and just, there
would be no need for revolution and counterculture.
Understanding’s
job, as Kant recognized, is to create categories for experience, but
reason has a different job, to create ideas that synthesize the
understandings. While understanding synthesizes things but keeps these
syntheses categorically separate from each other, for Hegel reason seeks
to unify understandings, and the great leaps in human thought are
unifications of contradictory understandings. If reason merely operated
like understanding, as Kant believed, it would be incapable of
revolutionary insight. For Hegel, Kant’s synthesis of reason fails and
falls short because Kant, afraid of skepticism and contradiction, failed
to understand the cooperation of noncontradiction and contradiction,
the cooperation of dogmatism and skepticism.
In
his Logic, Hegel writes, “Contradiction is the root of all movement and
life...All things are contradictory in themselves”, and that the being
of a particular concrete thing, which is also a dynamic activity, is the
“force which can both comprehend and endure contradiction”. When the
contradictions of a thing are resolved, the thing ends, transformed into
a new thing, a new situation of contradiction.
“Kant,
as we must add, never got beyond the negative result that the
thing-in-itself is unknowable, and never penetrated to the discovery of
what the antinomies really and positively mean. That true and positive
meaning of the antinomies is this: that every actual thing involves a
coexistence of opposed elements. Consequently to know, or, in other
words, to comprehend an object is equivalent to being conscious of it as
a concrete unity of opposed determinations. The old metaphysic, as we
have already seen, when it studied the objects of which it sought a
metaphysical knowledge, went to work by applying categories abstractly
and to the exclusion of their opposites.”
“However
reluctant Understanding may be to admit the action of Dialectic, we
must not suppose that the recognition of its existence is peculiarly
confined to the philosopher. It would be truer to say that Dialectic
gives expression to a law which is felt in all other grades of
consciousness, and in general experience. Everything that surrounds us
may be viewed as an instance of Dialectic.” (118)
Thomas
Kuhn’s idea of paradigm shift, which we will consider in a few weeks
with philosophy of science, is useful for understanding Hegel. A model
always has problems, and so there are counter examples that arise as any
model is used. This creates culture and counterculture, dogmatists who
support the model and skeptics who attack its weaknesses. For a time,
culture supports the continued use of the model and the skeptics and
problems can be ignored, but then when the problems become too great,
the paradigm is changed, shifted, to resolve the problems. This
resolution brings an end to the old paradigm, and now the new paradigm,
with new problems, begins to generate a new contradictory situation.
The
overall story of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, which can also be
translated into English as Phenomenology of Mind (as the German ‘Geist’,
related to the English word ghost, can mean either mind or spirit, the
conscious part of the human being), is a dialectical rise from the
ancient world to Greece and then to Germany. For Hegel, the first stage
of history is the Orientals. Hegel uses this term as it was used until
recently, before the 1960s, to refer to everyone who is not European.
In the 60s, 70s and 80s this term was still used by many to refer to
East Asian people such as the Chinese. As archeology in Hegel’s time
had revealed the ancient glory of Mesopotamia, Egypt and India, Hegel
puts this as the first and basic starting stage in human development.
It is good that it is a non-European start, but unfortunate that all
further development is European (first Greek, then German) and the
development is a course of Europe becoming different from others. This
is overly simplistic and somewhat racist and eurocentric, but this is
still largely the view preached on campuses today.
The
Orientals understood objectivity and the state, two powerful positives.
The Orientals are the start of society and science, but they do not
question their society or science. They see the real as real, but do
not understand that the real is also mental and can be questioned. In
some cases, such as Buddhism in India, Hegel believes that they realized
skepticism but did not develop it further, turning the world into a
simple void or nothing. Thus the Orientals get simple one-sided Being
or Nonbeing, but do not put these two together to see the unity of the
opposition. It is the Greeks, and specifically Heraclitus, who Hegel
argues make this next leap and become the second stage of history.
The
Greeks now rise above the Orientals and grasp the opposite of Being as
Non-Being, the opposite of the state in the individual, the opposite of
objectivity as subjectivity. This centrally involves Heraclitus and
Plato. While Hegel believes that the Greeks are the ones who are this
step forward, it is more correct to understand the relationship with the
earlier empires as complex and also that the Greeks were only one
civilization of many that made leaps forward like this. Jaspers calls
the age of the Greeks, the Indians and the Chinese the axial age. While
I enjoy using this term, particularly as it equates non-European
cultures with the Greeks, recent critics have opposed this term, arguing
that human thinking did not change significantly in this period.
Rather, we find human thought before, during, and after the axial age,
and so Hegel and Jaspers are wrong to characterize the axial age as the
time when humanity came to understand subjectivity and individuality for
the first time. I continue to use the term, while agreeing with these
recent criticisms.
For
Hegel, just as the Orientals understood the positive, the Greeks
understood the negative, the subjective, temporary and perspectival.
Hegel sees this as Heraclitus bringing being and nonbeing together as
becoming, and sees Plato merging Heraclitus with Parmenides as a further
development. However, this is not the last stage because the Greeks
still put being off in another world, either as Heraclitus’ flux of fire
or Plato’s static ideal forms. It is the Germans, and specifically
Hegel himself, who see the true unity of objectivity and subjectivity,
of state and individual, of necessity and freedom, of science and
discovery, to complete the history of thought in three stages. Hegel
leaps entirely over Islam in a page, giving them no credit for the
development of later thought at all, similar to his treatment of the
Indians before the Greeks.
The
Europeans, specifically the Germans, who are in Hegel’s time becoming
the foremost champions of philosophy, history, science, and politics,
are in the position to realize the union of the mind and world. Hegel
sees Hume and Kant as the last dialectical turns before his own system
of syntheses, and believes that history is almost at its completion in
his time with his own philosophy and the politics of the German
parliamentary state which balances collective objectivity with
individual subjectivity. He also believes that religion evolves exactly
as philosophy and politics does, and that German Lutheran Christianity
is the final form of religion that unites the individual directly with
God (living objectivity) because each man is the priest of his
household.
One
influential idea of Hegel’s that appears early in the Phenomenology is
the Master-Slave dialectic, which Hegel uses to describe the earliest
evolution of human culture. At first, the self (which can be an idea,
individual or culture) goes out into the world and discovers that there
are other selves out there with opposing opinions and views. The self,
Fichte’s Ich, thus wants to kill the others, but it finds that if the
others are killed there is no one left to acknowledge the self as
supreme. Changing strategies, the self decides to show restraint and
conquer the others, enslaving them, as it wants to prove its view, its
subjectivity, to be objectivity. The slave, then, comes to do
everything for the master, and develops while the master deteriorates
and grows lazy. The slave comes to realize that he can do things he
never thought of for someone else, so he can do things no one has
thought up yet for himself. After this situation builds until the
breaking point, the slave triumphs over the master and becomes the next
master.
This
is Hegel’s explanation for why the Orientals started out with
objectivity but then failed to do real subjective philosophy, the Greeks
followed but failed to complete subjectivity with objectivity, and the
Germans bridge the gap grasping subjectivity and objectivity as the two
opposed yet united sides of existence. Notice this correctly understands
that the Greeks were slaves of the Orientals, and the Germans were
slaves of the Greeks! This is not often pointed out, but it is implied
by Hegel and confirmed by historians today. While Hegel is quite
eurocentric, he is right to point this out. This is the reason why more
Nazis were into Fichte than Hegel, as the original German Volk were an
inferior slave people until they were forced to evolve.
The
Master/Slave dialectic influenced many thinkers, especially progressive
left-leaning political thinkers such as Hegel’s student Karl Marx.
Feminist Hegelians, like Simone de Beauvoir, uses it for women in ‘The
Second Sex’, Franz Fanon uses it for black people in ‘Black Skin, White
Masks’, as does the Black Panther, activist and professor Angela Davis,
who went to Germany to study Hegel before being arrested by the FBI for
providing two shotguns to Black Panther party members in Oakland during
the 60s. Often called “the big three”, class, gender and race are the
major social divisions, the differences between people that are
problematic, and progressives who try to counter each of these have
found inspiration of the “We shall overcome” message of the
Phenomenology.
Just
as Hegel’s history passes from Oriental empire to Greek city state to
the French Revolution to Napoleon, philosophy similarly evolves from
sense certainty to perception to understanding to reason. Each stage is
a move from conflict to resolution, which then is the site of another
conflict. The development of philosophy starts with sense certainty,
like Samuel Johnson kicking the rock to disprove Berkeley, the position
often called ‘Naive Realism’: things just are as we see them. Consider
the expression, “Right as rain”. Although rain cannot speak, and so
cannot be right about anything, like the ancient Indian logicians of the
Nyaya school we consider rain to be something self evident, a clear
truth about which one cannot be mistaken, just as Samuel Johnson
considers the rock to be clear and distinct. Hegel shows that what we
call common sense is actually empty and abstract, and concrete
understandings are the result of a process of rational reflection.
While, “The table is solid” seems to be nice and objective, we can only
know how solid the table is if we doubt and test its solidity, coming
to a more complex and thus more accurate, defined and concrete
understanding.
Hegel
says that if we write down obvious truths, such as “It is now night
time”, if we look at our truth come noon the next day, we find that it
is no longer true, as it has, for Hegel, “grown stale”. Our ‘now’,
which was so immediate, changes with time, and so any statement about
‘here’ or ‘now’ is not universal, but rather contingent on time and
place. The mind attempts to understand ‘being’ in terms of space and
time, of here and now, but all that it can determine is that ‘being’ is
not ‘nonbeing’. Here is the first instance of “negation of negation” in
the text. The categorical dualism between being and nonbeing does not
satisfy the mind, as it is entirely empty of content.
While
Hegel mentions India, and Buddhism by name, for Hegel this philosophy
did not grasp anything other than nonbeing. It was in ancient Greece,
for Hegel, that philosophers such as Heraclitus grasped the union of
being and nonbeing together as becoming, even though we can find earlier
expressions of this same unity earlier in Jain and Buddhist thought of
India.
The
mind turns from sense certainty, which is a part of the truth but
incomplete, to the relation of subject and object. To summarize much of
the Phenomenology in a few words, first humanity looks for the answer
in essences within the world. Hegel sees Plato’s ideal forms, the
essences of things in the sensible world, as the grasping of this stage.
Plato tried to put the truth of things above them, and the viewer can
rise above a merely subjective view to see the objective truth of things
by examining the essences. Many failed attempts and philosophers
later, Hegel argues that the Germanics of Europe turned from essences in
the world to essences in the mind, conceptions such as those debated in
the opposition of the Rationalists and Empiricists. While I often
mention that this psychological turn was much influenced by the golden
age of Islamic thought, particularly the work of Avicenna, Hegel gives
Islam no credit, just as he didn’t for India.
Just
as Heraclitus’ grasp of becoming lead to Plato’s forms in ancient
Greece, Hegel sees Hume’s Empiricism leading to Kant’s categories,
essences placed in the mind rather than in the heavens above.
Unfortunately for Kant, the categories are disunified and their origin
is unexplained. Hegel sees his own position as the superior synthesis,
as the gathering up of Kant’s categories into a living, singular Idea.
Subjectivity and objectivity are understood as one continuous thing,
unified while opposed to itself. The self is its world, and the self
understands itself in terms of others as Fichte had argued. Similarly,
necessity and freedom are one and the same. This is the totality of all
previous positions, unified together, which goes forward as philosophy
and science. Some have argued that the final pages of the Phenomenology
are Hegel’s plea for modern university system, such that philosophers
and scientists can continue to speculate and seek greater truth.
While
mathematics is a useful measuring device, just as the knowledge
supplied by science is useful, it must be understood in a philosophical,
free and critical context, with room for both dogmatism and skepticism,
to be genuine and authentic. Hegel writes in the Logic, “It is in vain
that an attempt is made to fix it by means of spatial figures and
algebraic symbols for the purpose of the external eye and of a
notionless mechanical treatment or calculus”. In order for philosophy
and science to be authentic, they must be understood as dynamic, as
evolving and open, not as dead and closed. Hegel considers Kant to have
been a great thinker, but his inability to tolerate contradiction made
his system a dead corpse, not a real living grasp. Living, authentic
thinking must be ready and willing to contradict any part of itself,
breathing the life of opposition into any stale conception.
Alexandre
Kojève, a Russian born philosopher living in Paris, introducing many
French thinkers to to Hegel’s work through his seminars, sometimes
informal meetings at people’s houses between 1933 and 1939, when Paris
was seized by the Nazis. His seminars were attended by the philosophers
Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, the Surreal writers Bataille and Breton, and
the psychoanalyst Lacan. Later, Foucault and Derrida said that Kojève’s
work on Hegel was central to their own philosophical development.
Kojève read Hegel through the lenses of Marx and Heidegger, and he
focused on the Phenomenology, in particular the master slave dialectic,
and Napoleon as the resolver of the French Revolution and the bringer of
the modern European nation state.
A
friend of mine posted a Huffington Post comedy piece, roasting the
Republicans blocking the nomination of Chuck Hagel to defense secretary
(Hagel’s family likely changed the spelling of the name, like Hume, so
that it would be pronounced correctly). Ted Cruz is a Tea Party
supported senator who has been compared to McCarthy for making unfounded
accusations that Harvard Law had at least twelve communists and only
one conservative among his professors. The satirical piece is titled,
Cruz Claims Hagel Inspired Marx, and the opening reads:
“Senator
Ted Cruz (R/TP-TX) launched a blistering attack on Defense Secretary
nominee Hagel, asserting a direct link to Karl Marx: ‘History shows that
Marx not only read Hagel, but took his inspiration from him," said the
Princeton-educated Harvard Law School graduate. "I should know. I was
taught by at least 12 communist professors at Harvard.’ Broadening his
attack on Hagel, and citing French(!) socialist professor Alexandre
Kojéve's interpretation of Hagel's thesis, Cruz warned of the ‘danger to
America having a secretary of defense who believes that history ended
with the Battle of Jena.’ Senator Lindsey Graham (R-SC) called for a
delay in the vote on Hagel's nomination until the Committee had a chance
‘to read the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Philosophy of Right,
two of his key writings, to understand what this nominee really
believes, and why he encouraged Karl Marx. These are critical questions
for any Defense Secretary nominee.’ Former Governor Sarah Palin
(R/TP-AL) revealed that, after she took a speed-reading course, she had
read Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit in 20 minutes and concluded: ‘It's all in German.’”
Maurice Merleau-Ponty (1908
- 1961 CE) is a Phenomenologist influenced by Hegel, Marx, Husserl and
Heidegger, and was a member of Sartre’s inner circle along with Simone
De Beauvoir and Fanon, both progressive thinkers who use Hegel’s
Master/Slave dialectic. Merleau-Ponty’s central work, The Phenomenology
of Perception (1945), is an attempt to bring attention to the body as
the site of experience, the body-subject, against Descartes’ mind-body
dualism. Just as Locke said that it is hard to see the eye as well as
understand our capacity to understand, Merleau-Ponty argued that the
body is often ignored, even as all phenomena are known to us through our
bodily senses, particularly vision, sound and touch. We commune with
our senses, and through our senses with others. Our subjectivity is
corporeal, as our world is framed by our body. We view things partially
through our perspective.
Consider
that we do and do not see the things around us. We only see what is in
front of us, not what is behind us, and of what is in front of us, we
only see the side facing us, not the side facing away from us. This is
often ignored, even if it is obvious once it is pointed out. Similar to
Hegel’s idea of determinate negation, what is behind us or behind
things exists as an unperceived, as a not appearing. While unicorns are
also unperceived and not appearing to us, we expect things to exist
behind us just as we expect the concealed side of objects to exist
behind them while we do not expect to encounter unicorns. That which
falls outside our perspective exists as the yet-to-appear, not as the
nonexistent.
I
mentioned with Kant that Heidegger famously said, “Every revealing is a
concealing”. Merleau-Ponty, who was influenced by both Hegel and
Heidegger, found a similar revealing/concealing in our immediate
experience, in the world of sensation long before we gain the capacity
to create complex conceptual ideas. Just as Locke, Hume and other
Empiricists argued that we get our abstract ideas from our experiences
in the sensual world, Merleau-Ponty argued that we get our understanding
of perspective, central to Hegel, from our early sensual experience.
Just as Berkeley argued against Locke’s primary qualities, arguing that
there is no objective property which is not subjective, and Fichte and
Hegel argued against Kant’s thing-in-itself, as things exist insofar as
they appear, Merleau-Ponty argued that perspective is our reality, and
any projection of reality outside our perspective is itself viewed
perspectivally. When we imagine objectivity, we imagine a human-like
view that exceeds our own. When we imagine things, we imagine a thing
that is viewed from a particular angle, and which has alternate sides
that are potentially viewable from additional angles. Our world, and
the things that inhabit it, are open ended. The world does not have
definite boundaries, nor is there a closed set of things. This does not
make the world or the things in it meaningless, but it does leave their
meanings open.
Merleau-Ponty’s
idea of embodied consciousness influenced two famous Berkeley scholars,
the feminist Judith Butler and the Cognitive Linguist George Lakoff.
Lakoff’s work shows that accross cultures we are “hardwired” to frame
experience in terms of metaphors involving basic physical experience.
Affection and excitement are warm, indifference and calm are cool.
Good is up, while bad is down. Important is big, and insignificant is
small. Similarity and intimacy is close, and difference and the
unfamiliar are far. Good is fragrant and sweet, and bad is stinky,
bitter and sour. Order is clean, and disorder is messy. Easy is light,
and difficult is heavy. Concepts and understandings are containers,
help is support, time and change are motions, purpose is a destination,
knowing is seeing, and understanding is grasping.
