Abstract
After a brief account of the main arguments of Fichte’s Science of Knowledge, I turn to Hegel as the figure who occupies the pinnacle of German Idealism and the theoretical conclusion of its development from Kant onwards. In preparation for some later discussion, when I turn to Barth, I focus especially on the third part of Hegel’s Science of Logic and his discussion of the so-called ontological proof of the existence of God in the section on the Syllogism.
It is one of the profoundest and truest insights to be found in the Critique of Pure Reason that the unity which constitutes the nature of the Notion is recognized as the original synthetic unity of apperception , as unity of the I think , or of self-consciousness.
G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic, “The Notion in general”
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Notes
- 1.
“His thought, which may be difficult enough to follow on the clearest exposition, is obscured by the vagueness and the ambiguities of his writing. Bad punctuation, idiosyncratic sentence structure, and a dismaying overabundance of non-functional expletives interfere with the task of understanding, and it is ironic that a thinker in whose philosophy the requirement of unity plays such an exalted role, could have endowed this work with no more readily discernible structure than it displays.” Peter Heath and John Lachs, from the Preface to J. G. Fichte, The Science of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), vii.
- 2.
Fichte, Science of Knowledge, 44.
- 3.
“This notion of the self-positing activity of the I is Fichte’s interpretation of the Kantian notion of autonomy.” Marina Bykova, “The Self as the World Into Itself: Towards Fichte’s Conception of Subjectivity ,” in Fichte, German Idealism, and Early Romanticism, eds. Daniel Breazeale and Tom Rockmore (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), 137.
- 4.
Fichte, Science of Knowledge, 4.
- 5.
Daniel Breazeale, “Fichte vs. Kant on Transcendental Method,” in Fichte, German Idealism, and Early Romanticism, eds. Daniel Breazeale and Tom Rockmore (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), 46.
- 6.
“To think and to determine objects … are exactly the same thing; the two concepts are identical. Logic provides the rules for this determination; and hence, I should have thought, it presupposes determination in general as a fact of consciousness . That all thinking has an object can be shown only in intuition. Think, and attend in this thinking to the way you do it; you will undoubtedly find that you counterposit to your thinking an object thereof.” Fichte, Science of Knowledge, 68.
- 7.
Nectarios Limnatis, “Fichte and the Problem of Logic: Positioning the Wissenschaftslehre in the Development of German Idealism,” from Fichte, German Idealism, and Early Romanticism, eds. Daniel Breazeale and Tom Rockmore (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), 26.
- 8.
J. G. Fichte, The Science of Knowledge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), 95.
- 9.
Nectarios Limnatis, “Fichte and the Problem of Logic: Positioning the Wissenschaftslehre in the Development of German Idealism,” from Fichte, German Idealism, and Early Romanticism, ed. Daniel Breazeale and Tom Rockmore (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2010), 32.
- 10.
Limnatis, “Fichte,” 33.
- 11.
“The distinct characteristic of the selfhood is the ability to reflect upon itself; yet, the reflection is conceivable only as the reflection upon a limited and determinate object.” Bykova, “The Self,” 140.
- 12.
“The self posits absolutely an object (a contrasted, counter-posited not-self). In the mere positing of this it is therefore dependent on itself alone, and on nothing else …. The self is now absolutely bounded: but where does its boundary lie?… It depends entirely on the spontaneity of the self, posited by the word ‘absolutely’. The boundary lies wherever the infinite self posits it to be. The self is finite, because it is to be subjected to limits; but it is infinite within this finitude because the boundary can be posited ever farther out, to infinity.” Fichte, Science of Knowledge, 228.
- 13.
Ibid., 117.
- 14.
Ibid., 10.
- 15.
Ibid., 13.
- 16.
Hoeltzel, “Critical Epistemology,” 92.
- 17.
“Only to the extent that anything is related to the practical faculty of the self, does it have independent reality; so far as it is related to the theoretical faculty, it is incorporated in the self, contained within its sphere, subjected to its laws of presentation.” Fichte, Science of Knowledge, 248.
- 18.
“The subjective is transformed into something objective; and conversely, everything objective is originally something subjective.” Ibid., 274.
- 19.
Ibid., 278.
- 20.
Ibid., 250.
- 21.
“The thing-in-itself is something for the self, and consequently in the self, though it ought not be in the self: it is thus a contradiction , though as the object of a necessary idea it must be set at the foundation of all our philosophizing, and has always lain at the root of all philosophy and all acts of the finite mind …” Ibid., 249.
- 22.
Ibid., 250.
- 23.
Ibid., 207.
- 24.
“The Ego does not find itself in its appearance, or in its positing; it must annul its appearance in order to find itself as Ego. The essence of the Ego and its positing do not coincide: Ego does not become objective to itself.” G. W. F. Hegel, The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy (Albany: SUNY Press, 1977), 123. I should note that Hegel’s critique of Fichte varies from mine in certain respects, although there are also significant overlaps and the conclusion is much the same.
- 25.
G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 20.
- 26.
Novalis , Philosophical Writings, trans. and ed. Margaret Mahony Stoljar (Albany: SUNY Press, 1997), 154.
- 27.
Ibid., 25.
- 28.
Hegel, Difference, 132.
- 29.
G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 1988), 58, and Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 47.
- 30.
In Hegel’s Critique of Metaphysics Beatrice Longuenesse puts this point very well: “The critique I am attributing to Hegel is not the determination of the powers and limits of reason, supposed to be the indispensable preliminary to assessing any claim to metaphysical knowledge. Rather, it is the exposition of the very concepts of metaphysics , not in order to relegate them to the prop room of a dismissed dogmatism, but rather in order to call upon them to account for their own place and role in the activity of thinking.” Hegel’s Critique of Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 4.
- 31.
Hegel, Phänomenologie, 63. My reading of the Einleitung to the Phenomenology of Spirit takes its general direction from John McDowell’s philosophical readings on Hegel.
- 32.
For example, if I know that I intend to bake a cake, I cannot be mistaken about who is intending to bake a cake, nor about what it is that I am intending to do; if I know that I am in pain, I cannot be mistaken about who is in pain, nor about whether or not I am in pain.
- 33.
Sebastian Rödl , Self-consciousness (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007), 9.
- 34.
For example, in my knowledge of myself, or of my actions, achieved by observation. This can happen when I explicitly refer to myself as the particular spatiotemporally located body that I am: when I say that I weigh 79 kilos and it turns out upon further inspection that, sadly, I weigh 80 kilos—although here, again, I cannot be mistaken about whether it is my body (the body that I am) to which the concepts are mistakenly being applied.
- 35.
Gareth Evans, Varieties of Reference (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), 256, 261.
- 36.
This is not to say that it is possible to conceive of the world free from any point of view at all. The idea of a world without any position from which it is known—a view from nowhere—is itself incoherent. I will discuss this in greater detail later.
- 37.
Hegel, Phänomenologie, 63.
- 38.
As John McDowell writes in his essay, “Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective”: “For there to be mental states with objective content, their possessor must have the idea of objectivity , which is the idea of that potential gap between how things are and how one takes them to be. That puts in place a dependence of objective knowledge on at least a potential awareness of the state of one’s own mind, how one takes things to be.” The Engaged Intellect (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009), 153.
- 39.
Hegel, Phänomenologie, 64, and Phenomenology, 52.
- 40.
There is more to Hegel’s use of “contradiction ”; it also turns on the relationship between unity and multiplicity, or universality and particularity, in conceptual mediation. I will examine these aspects in greater detail when I turn to the Science of Logic.
- 41.
Hegel’s account of the journey of consciousness to reach the desired state of knowledge in and for itself is philosophical, epistemological. The transitions between the various “shapes of Spirit” that make up the Phenomenology pertain to the relationship between self-consciousness and its world. Still, we can draw analogies and use examples from the philosophical borderlands that bring out the structure of the transitions in knowledge—as Hegel himself does throughout the work. To stay within the realm of perception (broadly speaking), as an example of the first kind mentioned above consider the various accounts of the planetary movements prior to the revolution brought about by the New Sciences. As an example of the second kind consider the various failed attempts at producing a neurophysiological account of self-consciousness that label it an epiphenomenon.
- 42.
Phenomenology, 53.
- 43.
Ibid., 56.
- 44.
I will return to this below when I take up Hegel’s account of the emergence of self-consciousness in the fourth chapter of the Phenomenology. We will see that we need to tell a story about how self-consciousness can be in and for itself to consciousness . It requires work.
- 45.
“Inasmuch as the new true object issues from it, this dialectical movement which consciousness exercises on itself and which affects both its knowledge and its object, is precisely what is called experience [Erfahrung].” Ibid., 55 (emphasis in the original).
- 46.
Ibid., 56.
- 47.
“[N]ot only is a contribution from us superfluous, since Notion and object, the criterion and what is to be tested, are present in consciousness itself, but we are also spared the trouble of comparing the two and really testing them, so that, since what consciousness examines is its own self, all that is left for us to do is simply to look on.” Ibid., 54.
- 48.
Ibid., 56.
- 49.
Ibid., 104.
- 50.
As Hegel programmatically states at the beginning the section: “Self-consciousness exists in and for itself when, and by the fact that, it so exists for another; that is, it exists only in being acknowledged.” Ibid., 111.
- 51.
Ibid., 113.
- 52.
Ibid., 115.
- 53.
In a bit more detail: the lord gains independence from the conditions of a natural life by having the bondsman produce the good that sustains him under the threat of death. This provides the bondsman with the opportunity to realize that his entire being is contingent by continuously facing the possibility of his own demise at the hands of the lord, and, simultaneously, having an image of an existence for itself beyond a natural life available for reflection at the same time. Both of these distinctive forms of negativity are concretely present to be contemplated by the bondsman. Ibid., 115ff.
- 54.
Ibid., 117.
- 55.
“Work, on the other hand, is desire held in check, fleetingness staved off; in other words, work forms and shapes the thing. The negative relation to the object becomes its form and something permanent, because it is precisely for the worker that the object has independence. This negative middle term or formative activity is at the same time the individuality or pure being-for-self of consciousness which now, in the work outside of it, acquires an element of permanence. It is in this way, therefore, that consciousness , qua worker, comes to see in the independent being of the object its own independence.” Ibid., 118.
- 56.
G. W. F. Hegel, Science of Logic (London: Routledge, 1969), 29.
- 57.
Ibid., 60.
- 58.
Ibid., 39.
- 59.
“What we are dealing with in logic is not a thinking about something which exists independently as a base for our thinking and apart from it, nor forms which are supposed to provide mere signs or distinguishing marks of truth ; on the contrary, the necessary forms and self-determinations of thought are the content and the ultimate truth itself.” Ibid., 50.
- 60.
If I can use a metaphor: if the Phenomenology is a labyrinth that ultimately leads the reader to absolute knowing, the Science of Logic is the labyrinth’s architectural blueprint abstracted from all material particularity.
- 61.
Hegel, Logic, 63.
- 62.
Ibid., 63.
- 63.
Ibid., 64. Here I must once again mention Longuenesse’s insightful account of Hegel’s critique of metaphysics in Hegel’s Critique, 4.
- 64.
As Longuenesse puts it: “[T]he transition from ‘Being’ to ‘Essence’ is the transition from determinations which seem to exist by themselves and to be immediately present in ‘things’, to the revelation that the apparently most ‘immediate’ determinations are always constituted and organized in the context of a unified process of thinking.” Hegel’s Critique, 7.
- 65.
“One and the same unity of thought organizes the immediate presentation of things and the understanding of their relations: both being and essence are products of the concept.” Ibid.
- 66.
Hegel, Logic, 571.
- 67.
Here “plasticity” entails that thought is open to being reshaped and molded by changing conditions and contingencies. It can develop and gain determinations, and yet remain identical with itself as it takes on a new shape.
- 68.
Hegel, Logic, 571.
- 69.
Ibid., 591.
- 70.
Ibid., 591f.
- 71.
“It is one of the profoundest and truest insights to be found in the Critique of Pure Reason that the unity which constitutes the nature of the Notion is recognized as the original synthetic unity of apperception, as unity of the I think, or of self-consciousness.” Ibid., 584.
- 72.
“[F]or the logic of the Notion, a completely ready-made and solidified, one may say, ossified material is already to hand, and the problem is to render this material fluid and to rekindle the spontaneity of the Notion in such dead matter.” Ibid., 575.
- 73.
Ibid., 623.
- 74.
“The judgment is the self-diremption of the Notion; this unity [of the Notion] is, therefore, the ground from which the consideration of the judgment in accordance with true objectivity begins. It is thus the original division [Teilung] of what is originally one; thus the word Urteil refers to what judgment is in and for itself.” Ibid., 625.
- 75.
Ibid., 642.
- 76.
Ibid., 643.
- 77.
“It is in the judgment of reflection that we first have, strictly speaking, a determinate content, that is, a content as such; for the content is the form determination which is reflected into identity as distinct from the form in so far as this is a distinct determinateness—as it still is in the judgment.” Ibid., 643.
- 78.
Ibid., 630–57.
- 79.
Hegel uses the term “Begriff” to cover both the “Notion” as the power of thought and a particular concept. I have chosen to make a distinction: “Notion” stands for the power of thought, while “concept” simply stands for the class of what we usually understand as concepts of particular things (house, dog, boat, soup, etc.).
- 80.
“In this judgment the Notion is laid down as the basis, and since it is in relation to the object, it is an ought-to-be to which reality may or may not be adequate.” Hegel, Logic, 657.
- 81.
Ibid., 660ff.
- 82.
Ibid., 663.
- 83.
“This judgment, then, is truly objective; or it is the truth of the judgment in general.” Ibid., 662.
- 84.
Ibid., 663.
- 85.
“The Notion as such holds its moments sublated in unity; in the judgment this unity is internal or, what is the same thing, external; and the moments, although related, are posited as self-subsistent extremes. In the syllogism the Notion’s determinations are like the extremes of the judgment, and at the same time their determinate unity is posited.” Ibid., 664.
- 86.
Ibid., 664. Emphasis added.
- 87.
Thus Hegel does not consider formal (mathematical) calculation a form of reasoning, and he describes “mathematical equality” as a “relation which converts the syllogizing process into a completely meaningless and tautological formulation of propositions.” Ibid., 686.
- 88.
“The essential feature of the syllogism is the unity of the extremes, the middle term which unites them, and the ground which supports them.” Ibid., 665.
- 89.
John McDowell , “Singular Thought and the Extent of Inner Space,” in Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 232.
- 90.
“The syllogism is mediation, the complete Notion in its positedness. Its movement is the sublating of this mediation, in which nothing is in and for itself, but each term is only by means of an other. The result is therefore an immediacy which has issued from the sublating of mediation, a being which is no less identical with the mediation, and which is the Notion that has restored itself out of, and in, its otherness.” Hegel, Logic, 704.
- 91.
Ibid., 682.
- 92.
In this chapter, I have not written explicitly about practical reason in Hegel. Hegel does not make a sharp distinction between practical and theoretical reasoning, because he views practical reason as the application of a form that explains the actions and intentions of self-conscious beings. While our actions certainly can be the result of a conscious reasoning about what to do, it is not always so. We often act directly, without deeper reflection. This does not make our actions unreasonable—we can show that they have a rational form and we can account for them qua giving grounds for acting. It simply means that, generally, our actions are unlikely to be the direct result of formal syllogizing. In this sense, I (by and large) take Hegel to be an Aristotelian with regards to practical reason—at least in the way G. E. M. Anscombe reads Aristotle in Intention (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000).
- 93.
Hegel, Phenomenology, 12.
- 94.
Hegel, Logic, 705.
- 95.
“Now though it might seem that the transition from the Notion into objectivity is not the same thing as the transition from the Notion of God to his existence, it should be borne in mind … that the determinate content, God, makes no difference in the logical process, and the ontological proof is merely an application of this logical process to the said content.” Hegel, Logic, 706.
- 96.
Ibid., 707.
- 97.
Ibid.
- 98.
Hilary Putnam , “The Meaning of ‘Meaning,’” in Mind, Language, and Reality, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 227.
- 99.
John McDowell , “Putnam on Mind and Meaning,” in Meaning, Knowledge, and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998), 276.
- 100.
“Of course there is an organ, the brain, whose proper functioning is necessary for mental life. But that is not to say that the proper functioning of that organ is what mental life, in itself, is. And if we deny that, we need not be suggesting instead that mental life is, in itself, the functioning of some mysterious immaterial para-organ (an organ ‘so to speak’). Mental life is an aspect of our lives, and the idea that it takes place in the mind can, and should, be detached from the idea that there is a part of us, whether material or (supposing this made sense) immaterial, in which it takes place. Where mental life takes place need not be pinpointed any more precisely than by saying that it takes place where our lives take place.” Ibid., 281.
- 101.
“My aim is not to postulate mysterious powers of mind; rather, my aim is to restore us to a conception of thinking as the exercise of powers possessed, not mysteriously by some part of a thinking being, a part of whose internal arrangements are characterizable independently of how the thinking being is placed in its environment, but unmysteriously by a thinking being being itself, an animal that lives its life in cognitive and practical relations to the world.” Ibid., 289.
- 102.
Hegel, Phenomenology, 263.
- 103.
“God is attainable in pure speculative knowledge alone and is only in that knowledge itself, for He is Spirit; and this speculative knowledge is the knowledge of the revealed religion. Speculative knowledge knows God as Thought or pure Essence, and knows this Thought as simply Being and as Existence, and Existence as the negativity of itself, hence as Self, as the Self that is at the same time this individual, and also the universal, Self. It is precisely this that the revealed religion knows.” Ibid., 461.
- 104.
“The joy of beholding itself in absolute Being enters self-consciousness and seizes the whole world; for it is Spirit, it is the simple movement of those pure moments, which expresses just this: that only when absolute Being is beheld as an immediate self-consciousness is it known as Spirit.” Ibid., 461.
- 105.
“For Hegel, as for Luther, it is Spirit that ‘calls, gathers, enlightens, and sanctifies,’ Spirit alone that overcomes the absolute paradox of the two worlds of universal and particular, whether in their formal or their material aspect. While the Incarnation is the concrete, representational symbol of this overcoming, it is Spirit that makes it actual and Spirit alone that makes it intelligible in the spiritual community.” Alan M. Olson, Hegel and the Spirit (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1992), 127.
- 106.
Of course, this is an overstatement, since we know that form is not independent of content. Perhaps we should rather say that, even if Christianity as we know it had not appeared on stage, something very like it would have appeared to provide a representation of the inner dialectic of Spirit to be known by itself.
- 107.
Hegel, Phenomenology, 479.
- 108.
Hegel, Logic, 581.
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Baark, S. (2018). Fichte and Hegel on Knowledge and Self-Consciousness. In: The Affirmations of Reason. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-70793-8_4
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