Last time we ended with Hume and
his very skeptical philosophy. Hume argues that we have impressions and
ideas, and because all of our ideas come from our impressions, our ideas are
assumptions rather than deductive certainties as Descartes and the rationalists
were after. The famous example Hume uses is the billiard table, arguing
that we have an idea or assumption of a cause when ball A hits ball B.
This total skepticism is quite
welcome to some, but dogmatic and positivist leaning thinkers are not happy
with cause being an assumption in the head and not a fact in the world.
Another problem is that Hume does not tell us where our idea of cause
comes from or how it is related to our other ideas. How is it that human
beings in ancient and modern times understand things in terms of cause and
effect, or bad and good? Hume does not give us any way to understand the
types of our ideas other than that they are all assumptions that spring from
impressions.
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) read
Hume and famously wrote that Hume awakened him from his “dogmatic slumbers”.
Kant is one of the biggest philosophers in the modern European cannon,
loved by dogmatic positivists and hated by skeptical relativists. He was
a big influence on Schopenhauer (who was a big influence on Nietzsche, the
focus of next week), and a big influence on the early thought of Wittgenstein
(who we focus on the week after next).
Kant as a rationalist believes
very much in the aim of Descartes, arguing that the world does contain
certainties and facts such as 2 + 3 = 5, but Descartes as we saw did not spend
much time proving this. Kant’s major work, A Critique of Pure Reason,
tries to bridge this gap with an air tight argument for true positive knowledge
in the face of Hume’s skeptical challenge that all we know is merely
assumption.
Kant argues that Hume is correct
that we learn the world through the senses and this is how we acquire our
ideas. However, even though we do not experience the world directly but
rather through our experience and ideas, we can construct true positive
knowledge of the world and our ideas through reason which can reveal new
certain truths by reasoning from our initial ideas, just as mathematics can
derive additional propositions from beginning propositions. Remember that in
the 1700s algebraic science had come to question many traditional truths and
give new positive answers. Kant studied and wrote in the time when
Newton’s laws of physics had risen to fame. Remember also that Descartes
started with the certainty of awareness and thought and hoped to derive further
certainties from this starting certainty.
Kant argues that the world, the
‘thing-in-itself’ (or in German, the ‘Ding-an-sich’) as he calls it, we cannot
know, but our ideas about it have a structure and order to them. Kant
believed that there are twelve categories of ideas and cause is one of these
categories. If we start from these basic categories, we can learn
additional certain truths about science and the world in the same way that if
we start with 2 + 3 = 5 we can come to additional certain propositions of
mathematics. Kant calls this the synthetic a priori, a fancy term for
what we can discover we know deductively and categorically prior to or
regardless of our experience in the world. The metaphor often used is our
ideas are the eyeglasses through which we see the world. Schopenhauer and
Wittgenstein in his early period both agreed with this conception. We can
know the categorical frame of our lens through which we view the world, even if
the world remains always unknown and chaotic beyond the frame of our
understanding. We can know how grammar, logic and mathematics must work
even if we can not guarantee that anything said or calculated is certain next Tuesday.
Georg Hegel (1770-1831) was as
upset with Kant as Kant was upset with Hume. Like Kant thought of Hume,
and Hume thought of Descartes, Hegel did not think that Kant gave much of an
explanation or exploration of our ideas. It is one thing to say we have an
idea of cause as a category for our experiences, but it is another to explain
how cause functions, both in itself and together with the other ideas that we
have. Hegel thought that Kant declares that we have twelve categories,
including causation, but Kant did not show why we have this category or how it
fits together with the other eleven categories.
Also, just as Kant was critical
of Hume for putting the facts of the world out of reach by declaring everything
to be an assumption, Hegel was critical of Kant for putting the world beyond
our ideas as the “thing-in-itself”. Do we experience our ideas as
separate from the world in this way, like a pair of eyeglasses, or are our
ideas experienced in and as the world itself? If cause is a lens through
which we view the world, then the world itself remains something unknown and my
certain knowledge of causation is still quite useless for practical knowledge
of the world. Why should we know nothing of our experience of the world,
but be certain of our experience of the mind?
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 in which they become what they
are (very like the Buddhist concept of co-dependent arising). After
Hegel, Marx, Darwin, Freud, Weber and Feuerbach 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 scientists today that there
was a process by which our planet, the solar system and the galaxy formed.
Consider the controversy about evolution and Darwin.
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. Plato believed dialectic was the superior method
of acquiring knowledge, and his dialogue plays show 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
not only similar to Laozi’s wheel (made of both solid and empty together), but
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. Hegel often
presents our ideas (which live in the world as politics and our shared
expectations) as starting out positive, flipping and becoming negative, and
then reaching a resolution of positive and negative as a joined whole.
Remember Laozi’s wheel leads us through this three stage process (solid
at first, then empty, then both), as does the famous Zen quote that first a
rock is a rock, then a rock isn’t a rock (it is in the mind, as a concept) and
then a rock is a rock (real rock and concept together as the rock).
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 how they are in the world.
In his first major work, The
Phenomenology of Mind/Spirit (1806), Hegel gives us his social history of
society and philosophy evolving by stages to the present day. In his
second major work, The Science of Logic (1816), Hegel gives us his psychology.
We will look at the overall structure and some key ideas of each,
spending more time on the Logic which has become one of my favorites.
Americans have only begun studying Hegel, because Hegel had a student
named Marx who took Hegel’s concept of dialectic and used it to father
communism. Communists like Hegel’s Logic very much, and so American and
British universities did not teach much Hegel and when they do they often teach
the Phenomenology but not the Logic. This is unfortunate, because while
Hegel’s ideas about history in the Phenomenology are quite antiquated today I
have great hope that there is more to be discovered by looking at the Logic in
the light of the discoveries of modern psychology, especially the work of
Piaget the child psychologist.
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, but 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. 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 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 (again, this is overly simplistic and quite
racist and eurocentric, but funny enough this is still largely the view
preached on campuses today).
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. 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 Non-Being, 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.
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 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, but 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
negative and positive before his own system of unification. Also, as a
teenager Hegel heard about the French Revolution and was, like many youth, an
enthusiastic supporter of the left-wing progressive removal of the aristocrats
and traditional ways. We get our terms left-wing and right-wing from the
French Revolution, as liberals and conservatives sat on opposite sides of the
congress hall. Unfortunately for the French, and for young Hegel, the
revolution collapsed and Napoleon, a dictator, took over. Hegel developed
his ideas about ideas working in the real world as oppositions watching the
French Revolution.
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. 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.
The Master/Slave dialectic is the
continuous process of overturning that occurs at every transformation and
revolution from one stage to the next. It works 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 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, and thus 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. While Hegel
is quite eurocentric, he is right to this extent.
The Master/Slave dialectic had a
great influence on many thinkers, especially progressive left-leaning political
thinkers such as Hegel’s student 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 going to jail
for providing two shotguns to Black Panther party members in Oakland during the
60s).
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.
Like Neo-Platonism, thought has
to gather everything up such that all categories become modes or branches of
the same thing. It does this with Understanding which holds things fast
in sameness and Reason which divides things against each other and against
themselves, opposing the Understanding. Understanding wants to keep ideas
as they are and separate from each other, while Reason wants to change ideas
and unite them all together as a whole. The mind craves unity,
objectivity as the all-view, which pulls it in two directions. First, it
wants to hold on to the unities of the understanding and keep them away from
reason tearing them apart. However, reason wants to dissolve everything
and return it all to the Absolute, or the undivided One. Thus, the
motions rock back and forth in stages. It would thus be correct to say
that, the way Hegel describes it, conservatives would rather understand than
reason and liberals would rather reason than understand.
At each stage, the Understanding
comes to change its shape and provide the ground for the back and forth
positions of reason which share the same understanding(s). Philosophies,
political positions and scientific theories reason against each other even as they
share the common understandings of the time and place. Thus, Hegel says
there really is only one philosophy which is ‘thought’ itself, and the
philosophies are views, perspectives within the one dialectical course of
things which is thought.
Why is it opposed to itself?
Where did this come from? Interestingly, Hegel writes that we need
to start with ‘legend’ of the fall of man, of Adam falling out of the Garden of
Eden. Hegel says the inner meaning is what is important (a similar
reading to Deists of his time in Europe, who see the bible as true
psychologically but not literal). When Adam, or consciousness, falls into
the world out of unity with all, it falls into oppositions and tensions,
polarities that present one side and hide the other. Today, we can
describe the fall from unity either in physics as the Big Bang or in psychology
as the infant mind learning to discern itself and others in the world (Piaget).
Hegel calls judgment ‘the
one-sided acid’. Categories are thus gathered, assumed, by the Understanding.
(God)(IS), (You)(Are), (this)(is), the anchor points of Descartes.
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 or All. Second, they are almost
entirely empty of content, making them almost no different from empty.
This is exactly how Hegel is critical of Kant’s categories and the gap he
leaves between mind and world.
(68) “Kant, it is well known, did
not put himself to much trouble in discovering the categories.”
“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.”
(118) “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 nonbeing as one like Heraclitus.
It is merely recognizing it 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.
In fact, often it takes decades after the thinker’s death for their ideas
to become accepted, further proof that the great thinker must unite the old
with the opposite direction of the new and this is the barrier between the new
idea and the common understanding of the people.
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
interrelated. This is exactly how Kant was frustrated with Hume, because
everything being an assumption does not tell us what things are specifically.
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.
Thought now tries to understand
things in terms of essences, and these essences in terms of their qualities and
quantities. Remember that Hegel in his Phenomenology saw Plato as the
union of Heraclitus and Parmenides, that Plato thought things have ideal
essences in the stars that cause them to be what they are, and that Platonism
was the major school of thought in middle-age Europe to which Hegel
acknowledges he owes many insights.
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 puts these as essences outside the world
as Plato put them up in the stars, in another more modern way “in” things and
their groups as their “nature”. The problem with this stage is that this
still puts things as isolated and does not understand them in a situation as
mutually interdependent. It seeks the meaning of the thing in the group
where it could not find it in the individual, but this still isolates things
even as it puts them in groups. 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 do not
understand how things cannot be separate from each other if we want our
knowledge to be like the world, in which everything fits together.
Just as qualities are non-beings
within beings, essences are also non-beings within beings, but a core is sought
beyond and opposed to outer qualities or bunches of quantities. Thought
has turned on itself yet preserved itself, trying to understand the real as
merely the idea. It would be like saying that the hand is really the
ideal hand, rather than a hand in the real world which we idealize.
Thought is struggling to grasp the unity of the mind and the world, of
our ideas of things and the real things themselves. Remember Kant left a
complete gap between the fully certain categories of the mind and the unknown
world-in-itself. Just as beings were opposed to themselves and others,
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.
What, then, moves us beyond
Kant’s categories and isolated essences? The process of dialectic, which
grasps the unity of sameness and difference, of one and many, and of necessity
and freedom, as it did with Being and Non-Being before at the first stage.
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 for Hegel Actuality, the final stage. It
is grasped by the mind, but in extension is the view of the real world and all
that it is or could be.
Interesting for Chaos Theory,
Quantum Theory and more modern developments of mathematics and science, Hegel
writes that seeing the unity of necessity and freedom is the final hurdle.
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. This
would be the final and total grasp of the wheel as solid and empty, or the rock
as thing and perception/assumption.
Now, Hegel believes, reason goes
forth as true science and simply Nature itself, 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, that is
one with the world.
Unlike Hegel and Right wing
Hegelians, who believed that the system had been achieved, Left Hegelians (most
famously Marx) believe that evolution is constant and unending for the system,
not just the knowledge it acquires and that we are constantly taking positions
that are one-sided that need to be complemented by the opposite perspective.
Many of the latest European thinkers have been powerfully affected by
this leftist Hegelian view.
