Introduction to Philosophy: Descartes vs Hume

RENE DESCARTES (1596-1650) is called the ‘first modern philosopher’ in the tradition of European ‘Western’ scholarship.  He is known both for the first canonical modern European philosophy texts, his Discourse on Method and Meditations, and also in mathematics for the Cartesian coordinate system (X and Y as two dimensions), a device useful for algebra and critical for the later European development of calculus by Newton and another early modern European philosopher acquainted with Descartes’ thought, Leibniz.  While Newton is far more famous as a scientist, we use Leibniz’s mathematical notation system in calculus because Newton named everything after himself, creating a system that was not only vain but needlessly confusing.

Descartes’ philosophical writings, particularly the Meditations, drew the reactions of several philosophers who themselves went on to become famous, particularly Spinoza, Hobbes, Hume, Leibniz, and Locke.  In the Meditations, of which I gave you central selections, Descartes asks: What we can know for certain if it is possible that everything is an illusion of the mind?  Like Avicenna, Descartes concludes that we can be certain that we are aware and conscious.  From this, he proceeds to conclude that we can be certain that our thoughts are our own, that the world is real, that there are regularities in the world that we can know for certain, and that there is a good and loving monotheistic god who would not deceive us about these things.  

Some philosophers agreed with this very much, but did not find Descartes’ argument convincing and tried to come up with more satisfying proofs. Other philosophers who were more skeptical, such as Hume, did not buy it and argued that human truth and certainty is always, in some way, an assumption.  The two sides of the debate were known as Rationalism and Empiricism.  Rationalists, like Descartes, believe that facts and certainties can be acquired by deduction from other facts and certainties, much like Descartes proceeds from awareness to a world with consistent, knowable and deducible facts.  Empiricists, like Hume, believe that all human conceptions are acquired by induction, gathered perceptions of regularities and patterns, and that while deduction and certainty are useful it is always possible for them to be wrong.  Both sides agree that the world is quite regular in many ways, and that science should continue to examine and learn from the world, however the two see the success of science in opposite ways.  Rationalists see science as proof that humans can acquire certain and true knowledge, while Empiricists see science as proof that humans can never be absolutely certain of their theories, conceptions, and understandings.

Descartes was born in Touraine, France, a town which has since been renamed ‘Descartes’ after its most famous citizen.  Descartes’ father was a member of parliament, though his mother died when he was very young.  He went to law school to follow his father and become a merchant, but decided to become a mercenary instead travel and fight in the 30 years war, ‘to seek truth’.  It seems he did not find truth in law school.  As a soldier, he had much time waiting for battle, and studied mathematics and science in his spare time.  On the night of November 10th, 1619, Descartes had a series of visions that convinced him that the world is a rational and mechanical system profoundly in tune with the rationality of the human mind.

At first, he intended on writing books on physics, but in 1633 Galileo was condemned by the Church for his solar-centric theory, the idea that the earth moves around the sun, which India and Islam had for more than 700 years.  Interestingly, many put the sun at the center of the universe, replacing the earth as center.  Because of Galileo’s troubles, Descartes decided not to publish his views on physics, his Treatise on the World, but his ‘Discourse on Method’, his philosophy text, instead, and it is today considered the first work of modern European philosophy.  This caution did not spare Descartes however, as the work was condemned by the Pope in 1663, thirty years after Galileo’s work was condemned and after Descartes’ death, put on the prohibited index of books alongside other authors who are foundational for European scholarship.  Like Aquinas, even though Descartes argued that reason teaches us that the Catholic Church is the one true religion and there is a monotheistic god, his heresy was teaching that it is reason that shows us this, not faith or the will of the heavens.  Descartes remained a practicing Catholic until his death.

Descartes’ death is famous and unfortunately funny.  For the majority of his life, he worked in bed until noon each day, an aristocrat who had the time and leisure to do this.  After he became famous and his works were prohibited by the Catholic Church, the Protestant Queen Christina of Sweden invited him to Stockholm to be her private tutor.  Unfortunately for Descartes, she wanted morning lessons, every morning, at 5 am.  Between the snow and the early mornings, Descartes was soon sick with pneumonia, and died.  Maybe we should all work on our problems every day until noon, safe in bed.  This is similar to Francis Bacon’s famous death, catching pneumonia after repeatedly stuffing snow into chickens to try to preserve the meat and keep it from rotting.  Some have argued that Descartes was killed with a poisoned communion wafer given by a priest who feared Descartes’ rationalism, but this is questionable.

We saw last time that Islamic algebra and mechanics show us the development toward modern society and thought.  Descartes, in a world of increasing algebra and mechanics, turns from an understanding of causes up in the heavens to cause as the mechanics of this world.  Just like many Islamic and medieval European thinkers, Descartes identifies the mind and heavens with freedom and consciousness while putting the mathematical order of things down in the world.  The heavens remain the good and pure, but the order and mathematics becomes a thing of this world and not the other world.  This change, which is very much modernity, comes with a world increasingly full of algebra and mechanics.  The world we see begins to be the known, and the spiritual begins to be the unknown.  This goes in hand with the soul/mind ceasing to be round and made of fire and the heavens and afterlife ceasing to be physically above our heads even for the committed religious.  While Descartes argued that a monotheistic god clearly created the world, as reason tells us all things have causes, he was condemned like Hobbes, Newton and others for arguing that nature works like a machine, and once caused proceeds largely on its own.

An excellent illustration of the world becoming mechanical and life as the unknown ‘ghost in the shell’ is the City of Brass story from the 1001 Nights, also called the Arabian nights.  In the story, an exploration party of the Sultan sets off to discover King Solomon’s lost City of Brass, a place where he kept demons in brass bottles, forced them to forge many wonderful pieces of metalwork in furnaces and used mysterious forces from below to produce technological wonders in this world, a thing that he can do only because he is very holy and wise.  In the story, there are many evil robots that still kill long after Solomon is dead and gone.  This comes from the Islamic tales of Solomon, that say when he died he stayed upright for a century and the demons continued to work on their tasks not knowing that their master was dead.  Then a worm ate through Solomon’s staff and he fell over, and the demons realized that they had been working for no purpose and fled.  In the City of Brass, a beautiful extension of the story, there are beautiful marionettes that move and beckon in the wind, luring some of the exploration party to their deaths in gorges below.  There are other sorts of dangerous automata that are empty bodies still moving from natural forces.  Finally, Solomon’s Queen (not Sheba who went to Ethiopia, but another) is stuffed and preserved, sitting on her thrown, with her eyes mechanically blinking every so often.  One of the party falls in love, approaches, and only realizes when touching her hand that she is dead, and he reels back in horror.  Think of this as a medieval Islamic science fiction story, similar to killer robots and zombie flash mobs of today.

Descartes now proceeds to make the natural world, including animals, nothing but mechanics and causation, completely devoid of intention or feelings.  Dualism is a position that sees two separate levels in a thing.  Descartes argues for a radical dualism between the mechanics of the world below (body) and the consciousness and intention of the world above (mind).  Consciousness or mind or spirit is in the upper world, while all in the given world is mindless mechanics.  The worst of this is that Descartes practiced vivisection, cutting animals apart while alive to learn about anatomy, and helped popularize the practice in Europe, arguing that animals do not have minds and thus do not feel a thing, their behavior being mere automatic reflexes of causal forces. 

This same cultural current is what led Protestantism to lose saints and angels with functional roles and simply pray directly to Jesus for everything, different from all previous world religious systems (including Catholicism).  In early Europe, Jesus was busy battling the dragon Satan.  If your cow got sick, there was a specific saint or angel to petition.  Asking Jesus for small favors is like calling the president about a stop sign in your neighborhood.  With increasingly sophisticated practices of medicine and then veterinarian practice, you no longer take your sick cow to a particular temple and pray to a particular saint as a particular priest uses medicine as well as prayer and ritual to heal your cow.  The causal solution is now one of this world, but the ‘evil’ of sickness remains distantly rumbling in the world beyond, not gone but no longer the primary force of the institutional practice.  Temples become increasingly research facilities, science and religion specialize and part ways.

Those who are bent toward dogmatism celebrate Descartes as discovering the simple positives of mechanical causes and the existence of self-consciousness or the soul, arguing that there are certain mechanical facts and that each person has a certain personal identity.  Skeptics see Descartes as being fooled by his own judgments, and argue that we can never be absolutely certain of mechanical facts nor of the personal or shared identities.  Thus, Descartes is very much part of the frame of European Philosophy to follow.  Not only is he the first to flourish in Europe in an algebraically structured wealthy culture, but his position is the starting dogmatism which is foundational for dogmatic rationalists and the departure point for skeptical empiricists.

Let us remember Avicenna’s floating man thought experiment.  In what some call the first ‘thought experiment’ (the central device of the American tradition of philosophy), he suggests that the reader imagine floating in a void and having all sensation, including of the body or senses, slowly taken away.  What are you left with as the essential factor once the accidental sensual factors are removed?  Self consciousness, with the awareness of consciousness and mind itself.  For Avicenna, as for Descartes, this awareness and self-circling is the small piece of God, the big all awareness, that is one’s soul, humanity and life.

Descartes proposes a very similar thought experiment.  He asks the reader to imagine that there is a deceiving demon that is creating an illusion of the world, casting doubt on everything except the essence of the human being and soul, the self-awareness which Descartes believes proves that you must exist.  Thus, his famous line:  “I think, therefore I am”, a conclusion that has been violently debated back and forth ever since.  One’s position is defined, in a sense, by what one thinks of Descartes’ simple experiment.

Where does the deceiving demon in Descartes come from?  Why the radical psychological skepticism, and then the simple positive (skeptics would say ‘naive’) affirmation of existence?  To see this, we must speak of the Cathars, a Gnostic Christian and Manichean hybrid Heresy that was being persecuted in France in the 1400s.  Descartes is writing in France in the late 1600s, two hundred years later.  Gnosticism spoke of a deceiving demon false god, the devil, that controls the appearance of this false world below, similar to the Indian doctrine of the world below as not only evil but illusion and false.

Manichaeism was a religion started by a Syrian named Mani (200-276 CE), who claimed to be the final coming of Jesus, the Jewish messiah, the third saoshyant, the Persian Zoroastrian messiah, and the Buddha Amitaba, Buddha of Infinite light who will ferry people to the pure land.  This is because Buddhism and Christianity flourished in Syria and Afghanistan as a middle ground of cultures.  Then the religion was fused with much Zoroastrian terminology to become what Christians in Europe considered a Christian Heresy.  The religion spread up through Europe in 300-500, and the Cathars were an offshoot that survived in France up until the persecutions of 1400s.

Thus, Descartes (the first modern philosopher) is arguing for Christianity and its simple positive faith in the world vs. the Cathar-Manichean-Gnostic deceiving demon.  Descartes thought experiment is very much Avicenna’s floating man thought experiment, but notice that it also attacks the idea of the Cathar Satan or King Demon.  Notice that Descartes’ thought experiment suggests that a Demon could not keep us in the dark the way the Cathars believe.  Instead, because of our self-consciousness/mind/soul that we get from God, and then using this as an anchor of certainty, Descartes argues that God thus does not completely deceive us in this world but shows us many other certainties that we can know with the power and sight of our mind.

I gave you selections of Descartes’ two great works,  Discourse on Method and his six Philosophical Meditations.  Let us work through the texts.  In his Discourse on Method, he lays out the famous “I think therefore I am” thought experiment, remarkably similar to Avicenna’s Floating Man thought experiment.  He says he won’t tell us about his first meditations in hardcore skeptical ‘all is a dream’ mode, “for they are so abstract and unusual that they will probably not be to the taste of everyone”.  Wow, keep that to yourself, Descartes.  He starts with the meditations he will tell us about with a thought experiment: assume that all the senses are being tricked, as if by a dream.  (This is similar to Zhuangzi’s Butterfly, and now he doesn’t know what it is- but Descartes ends like Avicenna’s floating man).

Everything can be doubted but the self-awareness.  He writes that ‘I think therefore I am’ is the first principle of his new philosophy, brought up from the ground of this principle out of total skepticism of certainties.  A skeptic here would wonder if this is so skeptical.  First, Descartes assumes from self-awareness that he is a mind, a ‘substance of thought’, which is completely distinct from the body, which can be doubted.  Already there are grey areas here.  Can’t thought be doubted as much as a body part?  Aren’t both ‘sensed’?

Now, we move to the Meditations, to the argument laid out step by step.  Descartes argues that we all accept things that we believe to be certain, but then turn out to be wrong.  Therefore, we cannot use certainty as the sole criterion for truth.  We have to separate out the categorically certain from the seemingly certain.  The skeptic here questions whether there are categorical certainties that are distinct from our illusions.  This remains a central question.  Dogmatists believe in the categorically true, also called ‘fact’, while skeptics tend to disbelieve in this sort of categorical certainty and opt for relative or perspective/subjective certainty.

Descartes says that it seems certain that he is sitting by the fire writing, but we can doubt this and believe that Descartes is simply dreaming that he is Descartes, by the fire.  He uses the example of madmen who think that they are kings or that their bodies are made out of glass.  Obviously, Descartes had some familiarity with at least literature about types of madness and delusions (also very Avicenna-like, who understood imagination and mental conditions such as hysteria and halucinations).

There seem to be certain truths that cannot be untrue, like 2 + 3 is equal to 5, a central example he uses, or a square always has 4 sides.  Notice that both of these are mathematical examples.  However, we can even imagine that this itself is all delusion.  Hence, we assume for skepticism’s sake that there could be a deceiving demon (much like in the movie The Matrix).  He also says it could be someone extremely powerful who could use ‘industry’ to deceive me:  this is the ‘brain in a vat’ mad scientist thought experiment used today rather than a demon in philosophy classrooms.  The demon cannot convince me that I do not exist, and so I am an existent thing that thinks.  The one point of certainty is self-awareness or consciousness, the one thing that we cannot be fooled about because it is self-evident.Descartes argues that the mind has no quality and no quantity, no space or time to it at all.

Hence, it is the human immortal soul/mind/awareness.  Because we are sure of this, and because we get our truth from something that we are within we are not in the power of something that completely lies to us.  Descartes then quickly declares that we can trust that God is good, the world is not an illusion and 2 + 3 is equal to 5.  When we aspire to God and truth, using reason correctly, we discover certain truths, such as the truths of mathematics, the existence of the soul, and of God, the certainty that the body is not our true self, and that animals do not have souls or awareness.  Note that everyone after Descartes found this reasoning a bit too quick and slim, both those who agreed with him and those who did not.

DAVID HUME (1711-1776) did not agree with Descartes on much.  Hume’s position is that all of our thinking, our identity and truth is induction and assumption.  This is like the Indian theory of skandas, ‘piles’ of sand, speaking of the mind and how all perceptions in it are just bundles of stuff that accumulate and then dissipate.  Interestingly also like Indian thought, particularly Buddism, Hume argued that human thought, identity and behavior are ruled by the passions, not reason which serves as a tool for desires.  With Locke and Berkeley, the Berkeley for which the town and university get their name, Hume is one of the three British Empiricists.

Hume was born in Edinburgh, Scotland.  His name was originally ‘Home’, but Hume changed it because the British and others kept mispronouncing it.  Like Descartes, he originally planned to study law but came to a fascination with philosophy and devoted himself to it instead.  During his lifetime his works on philosophy were condemned both by professors as unintelligible and priests as atheist, but his six volume History of England gained fame and was printed numerous times.  While Hume was called an atheist by friends and foes, he was critical of religion but silent about his own beliefs.  It is likely he was an agnostic, as he argued in various places that reason could neither prove nor disprove the religious beliefs of the world’s cultures.  Like Nietzsche, whom Hume influenced in matters of desire as user of reason, Hume saw religion not as objectively true or false but as useful to a culture in a time and place, and in his History of England he argues that humans are creatures of habit who are often only moved to political revolution over matters of religion.

Hume’s ‘An Abstract of A Treatise of Human Nature’ is the condensed form of Hume’s first and foremost work which he wrote after critics claimed his original Treatise of Human Nature was convoluted and difficult to understand.  Hume starts saying that philosophy has flowered all over Europe in “these last four score years” (80 years, no connection to Lincoln or Gettysburg), and that it has occurred in England just as greatly as any other.  Notice that philosophy is a recent development for Europe, as well as England.  Hume says that philosophers of ancient times have handled their truths delicately, showing more restraint than full depth of reflection.  Remember with Descartes, skepticism and critical reflection can quickly turn to orthodoxy.  Hume is ultimately going to say that all truth is assumption, habit, and prejudice, which opens the gates on any accepted truth as needing to be continuously justified rather than simply proved, as well as opens up potential attacks on all established forms of truth.

Hume says that all mental activity are perceptions.  Perceptions are divided into two kinds: impressions and ideas.  Impressions are perceptions of objects that are present, and ideas are perceptions of objects that are not present or not directly perceived.  For example, one has the perception of a red billiard ball on the table.  If one turns around and doesn’t look at the ball, one has an idea of the ball and its appearance in one’s head.  Likewise, if one looks at the still red ball and imagines it is moving, one has an impression of the ball and has an idea of the ball rolling down the table.  Likewise, if one looks at a moving red ball and imagines it is going to continue moving or hit another ball, one has many impressions of the ball as it moves that one gathers together with an idea of its continued future movement.  Impressions are strong, while ideas are weaker.  Hume argues that we derive all of our ideas from our impressions.  Hume acknowledges that this is in line with Locke’s Tabula Rasa (Blank Slate in Latin).  It goes directly against Descartes and Kant, who believe we can with the operation of reason, independent of experience, determine several truths that are correctly understood to be certain regardless of experience.

Hume presents us with his famous and central billiard ball analogy.  Imagine two billiard balls, one red and one blue.  There are three events.  First, the red ball moves up to the blue ball.  Second, there is the sound of a ‘clack’.  Third, the blue ball moves away from the red ball.  Naturally, and this is the key word here as we are talking about the habit, we all understand that the red ball struck the blue ball.  Notice that we did not see or perceive the conjunction of the two events.  We did not perceive the causation.  The causation is itself invisible.  Then how did we all understand it?  The answer is:  we have all shared common experience, and so we share ideas and prejudices.  We all had an idea or prejudice when we watched the red ball moving toward the blue ball.  Our impressions of things knocking into each other, and in particular our impressions of billiard balls and their motions, naturally caused us all to get into the habit of having a preconception, a preconceived idea, that the red ball was going to hit the blue ball and then the blue ball was going to move afterward.  Then, when things happened as they usually seem to, we all come to the conclusion, individually and as a group together, that we were right in our preconceptions.  

Hume believes that this is all one can strictly say about the events, and that saying anything else, like suspecting that a particular ‘causation’ was there as an invisible presence, may be common perception but it is not in fact directly perceived or known.  Most often, our conclusions are correct, but whenever they are wrong, it shows us that we can have certainty and preconceived ideas, but these do not guarantee that we will be correct.  For example, if I made a movie of the two billiard balls, it is an illusion that one image is striking the other.  Obviously, I want the audience of the film to have this idea, but this does not make it any less of an illusion, whether the balls are filmed or animated.  In a sense, when we watch animation we know and don’t know that what is going on is ‘real’.  We can ‘suspend’ our disbelief, and allow our minds to watch and believe in the animated events, even though any animated even must by its nature be fake caricatures of events.  Likewise, we can construct an animatronic billiard table, like at a ride in Disneyland, that looks like objects are hitting each other over and over again even if the sound is artificial and the objects never touch.  Roland Barthes, the French philosopher and literary critic, said that now that we have built Disneyland, maybe we will be more critical of the nonsense of politics.

Hume argues that all of our beliefs and truths are inferences that we draw, not certainties that we can know without qualification.  This is true of life, history, and all of philosophy.  If this seems hopeless in its skepticism, it is not entirely bad.  Remember that most of our preconceptions are quite in accord with how things go, otherwise we would have no reason for forming them in the first place.  While nothing can be known for certain, it is giving a different view of meaning.  Things accumulate and build up in our ideas, and thus they are real to us.  They are not so real that they ensure that nothing could ever contradict them, but they are real to us and we use them in the world.  Hume uses the example of Adam in the garden of Eden as a human who learns the motions of things by experience, starting with a blank slate.  Hume says that even Adam, “with all his science, would never have been able to demonstrate that the course of nature must continue uniformly the same, and that the future must be conformable to the past.”

“We are determined by custom alone to suppose the future conformable to the past.  When I see a billiard ball moving towards another, my mind is immediately carried by habit to the usual effect, and anticipates my sight by conceiving the second ball in motion…It is not, therefore, reason which is the guide of life, but custom  That alone determines the mind, in all instances, to suppose the future conformable to the past.  However easy this step may seem, reason would never, to all eternity, be able to make it.”

“With regard to any matter of fact, however strong the proof may be from experience, I can always conceive the contrary, though I cannot always believe it…Philosophy would render us entirely skeptical (Pyrrhoian) were not nature too strong for it”.

Hume argues that effect is often variable and uncertain in life.  As an example, he argues that thirty grains of opium will kill anyone that is not accustomed to it.  Hume goes on to question the Cartesians’ (followers of Descartes) idea of a supreme being which is wholly without deception, the eternal self, and geometric/mathematical truths (2 + 3 = 5).  He argues: how can they know this from experience?  Our idea of God is a composition of our experience (guy with a beard, in the clouds) that we have not experienced directly so much as in other things.  Mathematical and geometric proofs look nice, but sometimes geometry seems like it is proving something that later is disproved.

Hume argued that emotion and reason are always intertwined, just as experience and reason are always intertwined.  He famously said, “Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions”.  Without desire, we do not reason.  Recent literature about antidepressants suggests that when people are significantly devoid of desire, they do not find themselves thinking much, are not motivated to have significant ideas about important things.  When we think much about something, we are passionate.

Hume argues that the great subverter of skepticism is employment, the occupations of common life.  Because we must act and eat, we cannot afford to be entirely skeptical.  While it is easier to be skeptical in a school or in the shade, as soon as we are passionate about things in the world skepticism, even for the hardened and determined skeptic, vanishes like smoke.  The only genuine profession for the skeptic is philosophy.  If the entire world were made of nothing but skeptical philosophers, humanity would die out, but thankfully we are naturally ignorant, passionate, and dogmatic, and so skepticism is continuously useful for showing most people the continuous errors of their ways and that for every position there is a counter position even if it does not seem apparent at first.  Thus, while skepticism, philosophy and doubt would be worthless if they eclipsed all dogmatism, vocation and belief, they are the most useful of positions and vocations, in critical opposition to everything else on Earth.

Social & Political Philosophy: Hegel, Dialectic & Revolution

Hegel (1770-1831) is one of my favorite philosophers.  In order to understand Hegel we study Marcuse’s Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, the book that got me and others such as Angela Davis into Hegel.  In the first part of Marcuse’s book he examines Hegel’s philosophy as it developed through his life (a very Hegelian method), and in the second part he examines Marx’s philosophy and later Marxist theorists building on while transforming Hegel’s philosophy.  There will be more on Marcuse and his impact on the 60s next week with Socialism, as he is again one of the central authors we will read on the subject. 

In college, I took a class on Hegel from a visiting German professor.  I did not understand Hegel reading Hegel, but later in graduate school I read Marcuse’s book and got into a skeptical yet Hegelian view of the mind and reality.  American and British schools neglected the study of Hegel until after the fall of the Soviet Union, while the Soviet Union promoted the study of both Hegel and Marx as the science of history.  Marcuse’s book is in fact a post-Marxist socialist rescuing of Hegel from theorists who argued that Hegel was a fascist and his ideas lead to Stalinist dictatorial communism (such as Popper).

Today we introduce Hegel, his life and important ideas, and finish with Hegel’s Phenomenology (his theory of History) and its master/slave Dialectic.  Next time, we will look at Hegel’s Logic (his theory of psychology, his Philosophy of Right (his political theory) and the following of the Young Hegelians (the most famous being Marx).  This will set us for studying socialism and communism in the coming weeks.

THE LIFE OF HEGEL

As I mentioned already, Hegel was a teenager during the French Revolution, and like his fellow German and European youth he watched with great anticipation hoping for radical change of tradition in the name of reason and rationality.  Recall the Cult of Reason that Robespierre tried to install.  Hegel watched the French Revolution and became more cynical and conservative in time.  Many scholars have argued that this dialectic in Hegel’s own opinions was formative for his understanding of history and philosophy.  By the time Hegel wrote his major work the Phenomenology of Spirit/Mind, he believed that Napoleon was a hero who embodied a new stage of history on horseback, and that Napoleon was a transition to the final form of politics embodied in the German and Prussian state governments that balanced authority with rights and liberties.  As we will see when studying communism, Hegel went from believing in continuous revolution like Trotsky to conserving the established state like Lenin, which is also a great continuous change/Reason to supporter of the state/Understanding.

Hegel began his academic career much as Nietzsche, Heidegger and other German philosophers did: studying to be a theologian and Lutheran minister.  Nietzsche wrote that one only has to mention the College of Tubingen (where Hegel began study) to know what German philosophy is at bottom: a cunning theology.  I myself enjoy pointing out the similarities between Christian Neo-Platonism (the central philosophy of the European middle ages, the material one would study as a German doing theology) and German philosophy and it was the topic of my master’s thesis.  Hegel does believe that the process and evolution of history is that of humanity building stage by stage the full understanding and reason of the human mind, which is the mind of God and the universe (similar to the understanding of Newton who was the rage in Hegel’s time).  Marx took up this idea but famously “stood Hegel on his head” by taking Hegel’s system of dialectics and arguing that this is not the mind of God but the material science of politics being established according to the necessary process of reason, taking Hegel’s idealistic theism and making it materialistic atheism.

As a youth, Hegel thought that reason and freedom were the true forces of good in the universe, sounding much like a Jacobin.  After watching the collapse of the French Revolution, he continued to view reason and freedom as the forerunners of human achievement but came to see understanding and necessity as counterweights that cause history to sway in a back and forth manner that Hegel identified with the Socratic and Platonic method of dialectic, of arguing both sides of an issue back and forth to achieve greater truth.

In 1801, just two years after Napoleon’s coup in France, Hegel began his academic career as a professor of philosophy in Jena.  At the time, Kant was the rage in German philosophy, and Hegel’s philosophy developed in dialogue with Kant and others in vogue at the time.  Hegel particularly took up Kant’s idea that understanding and reason are oppositional forces of the human mind and conceived of all history, including philosophy and politics, to be a dialectical evolution between these two forces.

HEGEL’S CORE IDEAS AND SYSTEM

Hegel has two major ideas that became very influential for later thinkers.  The first is historical explanation or explanation by process.  Hegel argues that things are not simply what they are at once, but evolve through stages to become what they are, and the process by which they evolve show us how the things essentially work.  Also, things are not simply what they are in themselves but are what they are in a situation with other things by which they become what they are.  After Hegel, Marx, Darwin, and Freud were major thinkers who overturned old theories of static order with new theories of process to explain the workings of the mind and society. Consider that Newton thought God made the earth at the very beginning in an instant, while most believe today that there was a process by which our planet, the solar system and the galaxy formed.  Consider the controversy about evolution and Darwin, and how this questions our human-centered understanding of reality.

Hegel’s second major idea, the mechanism or motion of evolution over time, is dialectic.  Dialectic is a Greek term for arguing back and forth, for and against a position, to come to greater understanding.  Socrates and Plato believed dialectic was the superior method of acquiring knowledge, and Plato’s dialogues present Socrates arguing against others and himself in this way.  Hegel argues that all things are made of oppositions or contradictions (contra-diction means “arguing against”, like arguing both sides, the pros and cons, of a particular thing).  This is similar to Newton’s idea that for every force there is an equal but opposite force.

Hegel’s dialectic works in a three stage pattern of positive, negative and synthesis.  Consider the French monarchy and feudalism, the French Revolution, and Napoleon.  Consider the hometown conservative, the college liberal, and someone trying to find the overall truth after taking both sides.  Hegel presents ideas as starting out positive (dogmatism), flipping and becoming negative (skepticism), and then reaching a resolution of positive and negative as a joined whole which then goes on to become the next positive or dogma for another stage of evolution.  Hegel argues that by looking at things as evolving over time in a situation, not immediate and isolated, and looking at things as two sided and in opposition to themselves and others, rather than categorical and without tension, we can come to understand how things actually are, which is a union (while an opposition) of how they are in the mind and world.

In the course of the history and evolution of politics and philosophy, thought has to gather everything into a universal whole while at the same time dividing everything up into their particular parts.  It does this with the two opposite forces or faculties of understanding and reason.  

Understanding, the anchor and stability of the mind, has two jobs: keeping thought the same and keeping conceptions separate.  Reason, the motion and freedom of the mind, also has two jobs, which are naturally opposite those of understanding: continuously changing thought and uniting conceptions together as a whole.  This is the reason that dogmatic and conservative thought wants to keep traditions and ideas as they are and prevent them from getting mixed up, while skeptical and liberal thought want to change traditions and ideas and criticize the separate categorical differences of the understanding with inter-relativity.  While everyone uses both understanding and reason continuously everyday and at every stage, dogmatists and conservatives prefer set understandings to fluid reasoning while skeptics and liberals prefer fluid reasoning to set understandings.

For Hegel, at each stage in any area of thought (religion, politics, philosophy, science etc) understanding  provides the stable ground for the back and forth positions of reason.  Philosophies, political positions and scientific theories reason against each other even as they share the common understandings of the time and place.  Theologians fight theologians in the name of religion, lawyers fight lawyers in the name of law, philosophers fight philosophers in the name of philosophy, and scientists fight scientists in the name of science.  For Hegel there really is only one tree-like being which is mind/spirit, and the philosophies are views, perspectives within the one dialectical course of things which is thought.  Many have written a good deal about Hegel and Marx each coming to set understandings and then being contradicted and developed by later thinkers in the names of Hegel and Marx themselves.

Remember that Radin argued there are philosophers in all cultures, but they are rare.  Hegel argues in his Logic that philosophers are rare because most get stuck in a one-sided understanding either on the side of dogma/understanding or skepticism/reason, and it is only the rare individual who can see the latest stage’s contradiction on both sides and become the understanding of the next stage (just like Napoleon).  My own take on Hegel is much like that of Marcuse: dialectic is not giving us the unopposable truth, but powerful new truths (interpretations for Nietzsche, descriptions for Wittgenstein) that will be opposed but also  supported by others in the continuous evolution/revolutions of truth and history.  Recall Thoreau wondering about American democracy.

THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT/MIND

I disagree with Hegel’s history because it is quite simplistic and eurocentric, but it is an excellent introduction to Hegel’s thought not only because it was his first major work, after which he wrote the Logic to clarify the inner process of the mind at work in this history.  Like the Logic, it shows dialectic working in three stages to complete itself as a union of contradictory sides.

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.  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 this is the 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.  The Orientals understand 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.  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.  While Hegel believes that the Greeks are the ones who did this, it is more correct to understand the relationship with the earlier empires as more 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 three places we studied in the ancient world in depth, the axial age).  Just as the Orientals understood the positive, the Greeks understand the negative, the temporary, subjective and perspective.  Hegel sees this as Heraclitus bringing Being and Non-Being 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.  Notice that Hegel leaps entirely over Islam in a page, with no credit at all.  The Europeans, are in the position to realize the union of the mind and world.  Hegel sees Hume and Kant as the last negative and positive before his own system of unification.  Hegel 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, balancing authority with rights, liberty and property as Locke argued it should.   Rights and property are the unity of objective and subjective, the unity of the state and the individual understandings and perspectives.

THE MASTER SLAVE DIALECTIC

One of the main ideas that structures Hegel’s Phenomenology is the Master/Slave dialectic, the continuous process of overturning that occurs at every transformation and revolution from one stage to the next in history.  It works equally on the level of idea, individual and social movement.  At first, the individual goes out into the world and discovers that there are other beings out there with other opinions and views.  The individual thus wants to at first kill, later conquer these others, as it wants to prove its view, its subjectivity, to be objectivity.  The slave, then, comes to do everything for the master, and develops understanding with reason while the master deteriorates and grows lazy in a stagnant understanding/political arrangement.  The slave comes to realize that one can do things for someone else (doing things for self and other at the same time), overcoming his own desires, and thus develops and triumphs over the master and becomes the next master.

This is Hegel’s explanation for why the Orientals started but then failed to do real subjective philosophy, the Greeks followed but failed to complete subjectivity with objectivity, and the Germans bridge the gap seeing subjectivity and objectivity as two sides of the same thing. Notice that this tells us 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.

The Master/Slave dialectic had a great influence on many thinkers, especially progressive left-leaning political thinkers such as Hegel’s student Marx.  Marx argued that just as the French Revolution threw off the old masters, the clergy and nobility, the coming communist revolutions would throw off the new masters, the industrial capitalists.  Feminist Hegelians use the master/slave dialectic for women, like Simone de Beauvoir did in ‘The Second Sex’.  Post-Colonialists use the master/slave dialectic for oppressed minorities, such as Franz Fanon did in ‘Black Skin, White Masks’, as did the Black Panther, activist and professor Angela Davis (who went to Germany to study Hegel before going to jail for providing two shotguns to Black Panther party members in Oakland during the 60s).  Considering that class, race and gender are the ‘big 3’ issues in academia since the 60s, Hegel is quite influential.

HEGEL’S LOGIC

After writing the Phenomenology, Hegel came to realize that he had not described the inner workings of the dialectical process of history to his liking.  Hegel believed the world consisted of ideas, so he leaves history behind and turns to the workings of ideas in the mind.  To show the inner psychology at work in every stage of historical development, he wrote his Logic which like the Phenomenology unfolds in three stages as positive, negative and synthesis, but instead of Orientals, Greeks and Germans, the three stages of the Logic are Being, Essence, and Concept.

Remember the dialectical process of the opposite yet complementary forces/faculties of understanding and reason.  Why is thought opposed to itself?  Where did this come from?  Hegel writes that we need to start with the “legend” of the fall of man, of Adam and Eve being cast out of the Garden of Eden.  Hegel says the inner meaning is what is important.  This is entirely in the vein of Enlightenment Deists reading the Bible as a work of philosophy and psychology rather than literal history or religious authority.  When Adam/consciousness, falls into the divided world and out of the unity of paradise, he/it falls into oppositions and tensions, polarities that present one side and hide the other.  Today, we can see a similar in physics as the Big Bang and in psychology as the infant mind learning to discern itself and others in the world (Piaget & Vygotsky).  Just as Adam and Eve have to toil for food and survival once out of Eden, knowledge and wisdom must be gained by effort and the process of history.  Hegel  argued that work and labor are a contradiction of subject and object, of ideal and actuality, of the mental and the physical.  Marx entirely follows Hegel on this point, and both see the work (modes of production) of each age as a revealing of another level of truth through history.

Hegel calls judgment ‘the one-sided acid’.  Categories are thus gathered, assumed, by the Understanding.  However, these are inadequate.  First, they are one sided, and so dogmatic, stuck.  They are divided from each other and the All, so reason is not satisfied and tries to figure out how all of these separate categories are one in reality, or the big One/All.  Second, they are almost entirely empty of content.  A cow is a cow, and not a horse, but without contradicting the separation of the categories and comparing a cow to a horse such that we can gather the similarities and divide the differences we can’t develop a greater understanding.  In the Logic Hegel writes:

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.

Hegel writes that the feeling of being alive is to feel contradiction within oneself, at rest in itself but at the same time moving itself beyond itself.  It both wants to stay and go at once, and does.  Similarly, the Soviet literary critic and thinker Bakhtin said that when we think we are in dialogue with ourselves, are opposed to ourselves on opposite sides.

In the Phenomenology, Hegel argues that Heraclitus realized the unity of Being and Non-Being as ceaseless Becoming, as the flux of the cosmic fire.  Hegel says that some say no one is capable of understanding contradiction, but Hegel points to Heraclitus and argues that to come to the next level in your understanding your reason has to see both sides and unite them in the cement of the understanding, which is what Heraclitus did for the Greeks such that they could rise beyond the Orientals to the next level.  Hegel says that if we imagine any transformation or change or motion, we are seeing being and non-being as one like Heraclitus.  It is recognizing this with the categories of our understanding (one-sided logic and grammar) that is the hard part.  Hegel says that this is the hurdle that prevents the common person from being a philosopher, and the reason that the great thinkers and revolutions in thought are rare.

Once thought realizes becoming as the unity of the being of things and their non-being (their temporary being in time and their not being other things), thought still does not have enough to understand each and every thing or how they fit into the All as one.  Thought tries to understand the individual beings of the world and the world itself as constant becoming, like Heraclitus, but this does not show us how things are particularly interrelated.  ‘All is one and in flux’ is an excellent truth (one of my favorites), but it tells us nothing of particular beings or stages of history.  For this, reason must push towards more contradictions.

Thought must explore two opposite directions to try to find the meaning of individual things.  First, it tries to understand things by their qualities (such as green, square, closed), but this moves away from the things themselves towards abstract ideas.  Second, thought tries to understand things by their quantities, with each thing being a one itself and being a quantity of many parts and being in a group of many members.  Unfortunately, this leaves each being as merely a thing, and tells us nothing about the specific differences between types of things.  Notice that quality and quantity are the two opposite sides to our abstractions of things, the two ways we isolate and abstract, through thought, the parts and ways of things.  Consider that your hand is not explainable simply by its shape, or color, or texture, any more than its being one hand with five fingers, though all of this together tells me much about my hand.  To understand your hand, you have to see it in context, in the world used with other things, as well as understand the qualities and quantities of the hand.

Because thought could not understand things in their qualities and quantities, it tries to understand things by putting them in groups and then understanding the qualities and quantities of these groups.  It either puts these essences outside the world (as Plato put them up in the stars), or inside of things as “nature”.  It seeks the meaning of the thing in its group because it could not find it completely in ‘All as One’ or in singular things.  The problem with this stage is that things are still isolated in groups by type and this prevents the understanding from grasping their interdependence and codependent evolution (much like the Buddhist concept of codependent arising).  Hegel is very aware that modern science is often in this mode, isolating things and finding new truths about their exclusive natures.  For Hegel, Plato’s forms, Kant’s categories and scientific theories are good but they are not complete because they are not like the world in which everything fits together as one.  Hegel says that essences, if they remain many and are not gathered into a trunk of the All, still have contradictions in themselves and against each-other and so they are opposed to unity.

Through further dialectic, the idea and the thing are realized as one in the Concept, which includes the thought and thing.  When we see that the world is in our minds and in itself together as one, that things are our ideas about them and themselves for us as one that is also many, this is Actuality, the final stage.  Interesting for Chaos Theory, Quantum Theory and modern developments of mathematics and science, Hegel writes that seeing the unity of necessity and freedom is the final hurdle, the final contradiction that reason must push the understanding beyond itself to grasp.  To see that no part of reality is absolutely necessary, but no part is absolutely free, and the two hang together as opposites always like light and darkness, this is the final stage that lets us see things as they are.  Now, Hegel believes, reason goes forth as true science and speculation, with a ground to continue to investigate and understand things with all the branching of the Idea by which we could ever understand them to be.  All becomes a single Idea, which is in extension with the world.

Marx was deeply influenced by Hegel’s Logic, which gave him a social process of opposites resolving in unity.  Marx wrote that Hegel’s Logic is by nature revolutionary and thus a scandal to the well positioned (the middle and upper classes).  Marx argued that the bourgeoisie were trapped in their middle-class roles just as understandings are trapped in isolation, and that Hegel’s Logic separated his own thinking from that of other academics who were complicit with the status quo.  Just as Hegel said the average person cannot comprehend contradiction and thus remain stuck in their undeveloped understandings, Marx saw the middle and lower classes as stuck because they cannot see the problems and contradictions of their position and labor.  However, through a process identical with the master/slave dialectic, Marx believed this would eventually result in a greater understanding by way of reason and the political arrangement of the communist international state.  Not only would the contradictions between classes be transcended, but also the contradictions between warring nation-states. 

Both Hegel and Marx saw the business class as embodying a new synthesis of laborer and capitalist that creates new contradictions.  Hegel was aware of the misery of the working class in Germany and England under rising industrialism and manufacturing, and spoke of these contradictions in his lectures even though he was not arguing for a communist revolution but rather a resolution in the form of the German state.

In 1914, just as WWI was being declared, Lenin (who was in neutral Switzerland along with other influential figures such as the Dada artists who kicked off much of modern art) studied Hegel’s Logic intensely to comprehend Marx.  Lenin, like Marx, saw Hegel’s Logic as bringing the abstract and ideal down into unity with the material.  For Marx and Lenin, this was a call to materialism and a recognition that ideas exist by way of the historical and material. 

Most importantly for this class, Marx and Lenin followed Hegel in his criticism of Rousseau: it is not simply the arbitrary individual will that binds everyone together in the general will and the social contract, but rather the understanding/reasoning of individuals that determines the community and draws individuals together in groups and classes.  Thus, Marx and Lenin saw communism as political science, as a result of ages of understandings/classes developed through reason/revolution.  Note that this is complimenting Rousseau’s romantic will with rationalistic reason.  Nietzsche, who like Hegel was influenced by Rousseau and a fan while critical, pushed back against reason to center on freedom and the will like Rousseau did originally.  In the mid 1800s, the German people rose up in revolution to gain rights like the British, French and Americans and were crushed by the princes banding together.  Marx wrote his major works in this period for a German revolutionary audience.  The failure of the German revolution was the major cause of  German pessimism, a turn from reason as the force of history to will as the force of history.  We will consider this more we cover Nietzsche, the Nazis and Fascism.

We will cover the Young Hegelians as the first topic of Socialism next week.