Abstract
In this essay I examine Hegel’s conception of perceptual experience and respond to criticisms by John McDowell of an earlier essay of mine on the same topic. I argue that, for Hegel, sensation takes in the look or shape of things, but that consciousness and intuition actively “posit” what we see and feel as a world of objects. In McDowell’s view, this commits my Hegel to “subjective idealism.” I argue, by contrast, that Hegel avoids such idealism, because in positing what we see to be an object, consciousness thinks it to be the object it is: the activity of consciousness presents us with the object itself. I also argue, pace McDowell, that, for my Hegel, human beings do not first admit sensory content to an antechamber of the mind and then admit it to consciousness at the cost of being conceptualised, but that sensory content is taken into consciousness, and endowed with objectivity, as it is being received. To conclude, I note that, whereas, for Hegel, sensory content is received into consciousness by being actively taken up into it, for McDowell, experience involves no such activity but conceptual capacities are drawn into operation passively in the deliverances of sensibility.
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Notes
- 1.
See Houlgate (2006).
- 2.
See RH1.
- 3.
See VSG I and VSG II.
- 4.
MAW, 24.
- 5.
ES, § 410R.
- 6.
Hegel states that “sensation as such, without a content belonging to spirit, is animal” (VSG I, 51) and that “initially the child has only a sensation of light by which things are manifest to it” (ES, § 396A). See also Houlgate (2006, 248). (Note that all the additions to ES can also be found in VSG II, 919–1117).
- 7.
See VSG I, 52.
- 8.
See ES, § 401 and 401A; VSG I, 52 f., 288; VSG II, 655: “The bodily determinacy is at the same time in feeling a sensation” (die leibliche Bestimmtheit ist zugleich im Gefühl ein Empfinden). (See also SCKS, 117: “Sensibility provides an animal with representations—awarenesses in some sense—of features of its environment.”) Hegel does not, however, deny that what we are aware of, including sensations, can be sub- or unconscious (see ES, § 453R).
- 9.
See ES, § 400R.
- 10.
See ES, § 399A.
- 11.
See VSG I, 289; see also ES, § 401.
- 12.
See VSG I, 250; see also ES, § 401A.
- 13.
See LPS, 117/VPG, 77 and EN §§ 317A, 320A. Translation of ‘Manifestiertsein’ altered. See also VSG I, 289; VSG II, 657.
- 14.
See ES, § 401A and VSG I, 54.
- 15.
See Kant (1998, B34–36).
- 16.
See VSG I, 283, 440.
- 17.
See ES, § 401A; VSG II, 656 f.
- 18.
See ES, § 401A. Touch also feels “resistance” (Widerstand) (or what is often known as “impenetrability”) and so, unlike the other senses, is not just aware of immediately given determinations but registers the presence of something other than the soul and its body (ES, § 401A; VSG I, 55). Yet touch registers the presence of an other only through direct contact with the latter; it does not, therefore, take that other to be an object quite distinct from the subject.
- 19.
- 20.
See VSG I, 250.
- 21.
Hegel says at one point that we learn to see through “inference” (Schließen), but he then immediately associates this with “comparing” (Vergleich) (rather than explicitly rational inference) (VSG I, 54).
- 22.
See LPS, 117/VPG, 77.
- 23.
See ES, § 400R.
- 24.
See ES, § 418R.
- 25.
See LPS, 168/VPG, 141f. Consciousness not only separates what we see from the subject, but it also separates visible objects from one another by bringing “various sensations together into a point” (VSG I, 442). In other words, it performs a function similar to Kantian “synthesis” by uniting the “manifold” of sensation into discrete things.
- 26.
See LPS, 176/VPG, 153. See also ES, § 400A: “the soul, in so far as it only senses, does not yet apprehend itself as a subjective confronting an objective.”
- 27.
See VSG I, 101.
- 28.
See ES, § 413A.
- 29.
Kant (1998, B131f.).
- 30.
See VSG I, 435.
- 31.
See VSG I, 430; ES, § 410R.
- 32.
ES, § 418R; VSG I, 428.
- 33.
See VSG I, 102f., 418, 428.
- 34.
See ES, § 414A. See also VSG II, 766: “the activity of the I is not for our consciousness.”
- 35.
See VSG I, 430.
- 36.
See ES, § 418; VSG I, 106, 445.
- 37.
See ES, §§ 419–423.
- 38.
See LPS, 178/VPG, 155f.
- 39.
See VSG I, 106; EN, § 246A.
- 40.
See Kant (1998, A105).
- 41.
See ES, § 420.
- 42.
See VSG I, 436: “the construction [Construktion] of the object by thought.”
- 43.
See VSG I, 431; EL, § 42A3.
- 44.
See VSG I, 431.
- 45.
Kant (1998, B59).
- 46.
See VSG II, 770; LPS, 178/VPG, 155. This is not to deny that children must acquire these categories as they learn to think, or that our way of understanding the categories changed in history before they came to be properly understood. On the development of children, see ES, § 396A, and on categorial change in history, see EN, § 246A: “All revolutions, in the sciences no less than in world history, originate solely from the fact that spirit, in order to understand and comprehend itself with a view to possessing itself, has changed its categories, comprehending itself more truly, more deeply, more intimately, and more in unity with itself.”
- 47.
See Kant, (1998, B138).
- 48.
EL, § 41 A2; translation altered.
- 49.
See EL, § 41 and 41A2.
- 50.
Kant (1998, B306).
- 51.
Kant (1998, B629); see also EL, § 51 and 51R.
- 52.
Kant (1998, B72).
- 53.
Kant (2000, § 76), emphasis added.
- 54.
See Kant (1998, B33, 272 f., 629).
- 55.
See Kant (1998, B34, 42).
- 56.
See ES, §§ 401A, 448A.
- 57.
For this reason, I think, Hegel writes at the start of the Science of Logic that “nothing” is “the same empty intuition or thought [Anschauen oder Denken] as pure being” (SL M, 82/W 5, 83). See also SL M, 77/W 5, 78.
- 58.
See ES, § 465A; VSG II, 877; Houlgate (2006, 249f.).
- 59.
See ES, § 465.
- 60.
See DeVries (1988, 68): “no sensory episode plays a foundational epistemological role.” See also VSG I, 118: “sensation is the imperfect objectless [gegenstandslose] form.”
- 61.
See Houlgate (2006, 249f.).
- 62.
See VSG I, 432.
- 63.
See VSG I, 120–122; VSG II, 806.
- 64.
See ES, § 448: “the abstract identical direction [identische Richtung] of the mind.” See also VSG I, 500; VSG II, 814f.
- 65.
See ES, § 448A; VSG I, 125 f., VSG II, 815.
- 66.
See VSG II, 821.
- 67.
ES, § 448A.
- 68.
ES, §§ 396A, 448A.
- 69.
ES, § 410R.
- 70.
ES, § 396A.
- 71.
ES, § 448.
- 72.
See ES, § 448A; VSG II, 816.
- 73.
See LPS, 209/VPG, 191.
- 74.
See VSG II, 816; LPS, 210/VPG, 192. Williams translates “gegen mich” as “in relation to me.”
- 75.
See VSG II, 818f.
- 76.
LPS 210/VPG 191; see also VSG II, 816. Williams has “active in this felt content” (whereas Hegel has in mind “active in intuition”). If Williams” version were to be correct, however, the German would have to be “ist in ihm Aktion,” rather than “ist in ihr Aktion.”
- 77.
See ES, § 448A.
- 78.
See VSG I, 126f.
- 79.
See Kant (1998, B33–36, 74f.).
- 80.
See Kant (1998, B42–44, 49–53).
- 81.
See Kant (1998, B42).
- 82.
See Kant (1997, § 9): “If our intuition had to be of the kind that represented things as they are in themselves, then absolutely no intuition a priori would take place, but it would always be empirical. For I can only know what may be contained in the object in itself if the object is present and given to me.”
- 83.
VSG 1, 250.
- 84.
See (VSG I, 125, 501). Hegel’s claim that the uneducated or “wild” person is “attentive to nothing” (auf nichts aufmerksam) suggests that the “educated” include not simply those who have enjoyed a formal education, but those who have learned, or been trained, to pay close attention to things (VSG I, 125).
- 85.
As we have noted above, consciousness and intuition are themselves also activities of judgement, but they do not yet involve the linguistic judgement that is at issue here.
- 86.
See LPS, 238/VPG, 226; my emphasis.
- 87.
See Kant (1998, B104f.).
- 88.
See Kant (1998, B143).
- 89.
RH1, 228.
- 90.
See Kant (1998, B94).
- 91.
The subtle difference between the two philosophers, however, is that, for Hegel though not for Kant, the activity of uniting what we see into an “object”—the activity that Hegel assigns to consciousness—is itself that of (prelinguistic) judgement.
- 92.
See Kant (1998, B682).
- 93.
Kant distinguishes sharply between the “receptivity” of sensibility and the “spontaneity” of understanding (Kant, 1998, B75, 129f.), and Hegel states that “only soul is passive, the free mind is essentially active, productive” (ES, § 444A) (though he also thinks that the child, who is initially little more than soul, has to “learn to see” depth and distance [VSG I, 250]). Unlike Hegel, however, Kant does not think that sensation takes in the look of things themselves, but rather that it is simply the way we are affected by things (see Kant, 1998, B34).
- 94.
See VSG I, 430 on “the unconscious side” to consciousness, and VSG II, 806 on the self-conscious activity of intelligence: “Theoretical spirit certainly seems to be passive, but it is not; it is immediately active …; it is itself the drive—and is this for itself—to make the other into its own.” See also Kant (1998, B130): “all combination, whether we are conscious of it or not.”
- 95.
Houlgate (2006, 252).
- 96.
Houlgate (2006, 252f., emphasis added).
- 97.
For Hegel on unconscious representations, see ES, § 453R, and for Kant on the same topic, see Kant (2007, § 5). For both philosophers, unconscious representations remain representations, and thus forms of (albeit obscure or dim) awareness, rather than mere bodily states.
- 98.
RH1, 225.
- 99.
RH1, 226.
- 100.
RH1, 227f.
- 101.
RH1, 226f.
- 102.
MAW, 39.
- 103.
See RH1, 230.
- 104.
See VPS I, 429f.; LPS, 210/VPG, 191.
- 105.
See RH1, 228f.
- 106.
See RH1, 230.
- 107.
See Houlgate (2006, 244).
- 108.
See McDowell’s phrase “a successor to that separable contribution” (RH1, 228; my emphasis).
- 109.
See MAW, 30.
- 110.
RH1, 227.
- 111.
RH1, 227.
- 112.
RH1, 225f.
- 113.
MAW, 26.
- 114.
RH1, 228f.
- 115.
ES, § 453R.
- 116.
See Kant (2007, § 5).
- 117.
See Kant, (1998, A116).
- 118.
RH1, 234.
- 119.
See RH1, 231; see also VSG I, 436.
- 120.
RH1, 231, 234.
- 121.
RH1, 234.
- 122.
See ES, § 465; VSG I, 432.
- 123.
RH1, 232.
- 124.
MAW, 24f., 39.
- 125.
See ES, § 410R.
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Houlgate, S. (2018). Hegel, McDowell, and Perceptual Experience: A Response to John McDowell. In: Sanguinetti, F., Abath, A. (eds) McDowell and Hegel. Studies in German Idealism, vol 20. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-98896-2_5
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