Abstract
In this paper I will analyse the relation between subjectivity and objectivity in McDowell’s and Hegel’s philosophical approaches. I will focus on McDowell’s critical investigation of the Myth of the Given and of Davidson’s coherentism and on Hegel’s critical analysis of the second position of thought towards objectivity. I will show that Hegel and McDowell share the same strategy for solving the problems of two opposite philosophical positions, but I will also underline that they develop this strategy in two different directions. I will proceed as follows: (i) I will trace back McDowell’s criticism of the Myth of the Given to Hegel’s critical analysis of empiricism; (ii) I will trace back McDowell’s criticism of coherentism to Hegel’s critical analysis of Kantian criticism; (iii) I will show that Hegel and McDowell agree on the diagnosis of the anxieties affecting modern thought, that are rooted in a subjective, formal and thus finite conception of thought determinations. I will show that both Hegel’s and McDowell’s cure for the modern philosophical anxieties consists in the revision of the presupposition of the dualism affecting modern thought. In this part of the article I will investigate some correspondences between Hegel’s and McDowell’s theories, but I will also show that McDowell’s idea of the unboundedness of the conceptual cannot be fully assimilated to Hegel’s idea of objective thought.
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Notes
- 1.
Hegel points out that this kind of thinking “is unconscious of its antithesis [Gegensazt].” (EL, § 27, 65).
- 2.
See EL, § 64R, 113: “Objectivity inseparably goes with [verknüpft ist] the subjectivity that thought initially has.”
- 3.
EL, § 26, 65.
- 4.
EL, § 28, 66.
- 5.
EL, § 63R, 112.
- 6.
EL, § 63R, 112. I will analyze in detail the relation between McDowell’s position and the third position of thought towards objectivity in the first part of the article.
- 7.
MAW, XI.
- 8.
MAW, XII.
- 9.
MAW, 3.
- 10.
MAW, 5.
- 11.
MAW, 6. See also ibid.: “The idea is that when we have exhausted all the available moves within the space of concepts, all the available moves from one conceptually organized item to another, there is still one more step we can take: namely, pointing to something that is simply received in experience. It can only be pointing, because ex hypothesis this last move in a justification comes after we have exhausted the possibilities of tracing grounds from one conceptually organized, and so articulable, item to another.”
- 12.
MAW, 7. See also ibid.: “Relation such as implication or probabilification, which hold between potential exercises of conceptual capacities. The attempt to extend the scope of justificatory relations outside the conceptual sphere cannot do what it is supposed to do.”
- 13.
MAW, XI. See also MAW, 4: “What stands over against the conceptual, in the dualism Davidson considers, is often described as the Given. In fact ‘dualism of scheme and Given’ is better label than ‘dualism of scheme and content’.”
- 14.
EL, § 38R, 79.
- 15.
EL, § 37, 76.
- 16.
EL, § 39, 80.
- 17.
EL, § 37, 76.
- 18.
EL, § 37, 76.
- 19.
MAW, xv. See also MAW, xvi: “The idea of a tribunal belongs, together with the idea of what the tribunal passes its verdict on, in what Sellars calls ‘the logical space of reasons’—a logical space whose structure consists in some of its occupant being, for instance, warranted or correct in the light of others. But the idea of experience, at least construed in terms of impressions, evidently belongs in a logical space of natural connections. That can easily make it seem that if we try to conceive experience as a tribunal, we must be falling into the naturalistic fallacy that Sellars depicts as a pitfall for would-be epistemologies.”
- 20.
EL, § 38, 77.
- 21.
MAW, xiv.
- 22.
EL, § 39, 80. According to Asmuth, the problem in this passage depends on the process of induction. See Asmuth (2010, 147): “Hegel macht auf das Induktionsproblem aufmerksam, das eine zentrale Rolle für jede empiristische Position spielen muss. Es besteht darin, dass aus einzelnen sinnlichen Eindrücken letztlich auf eine allgemeine Regel geschlossen werden soll. In Hegels Darstellung gewinnt das Induktionsproblem eine allgemeine Stellung: Welche Bedeutung kann das Allgemeine überhaupt gewinnen, wenn ausschließlich konkrete einzelne Sinneseindrücke, Wahrnehmungen und Empfindungen Geltung beanspruchen können?”
- 23.
See Halbig (2002, 230): “Eine Verbindung der Welt mit dem erkennenden Subjekt entsteht für den Empirismus nur durch die Vermittlung einzelner Wahrnehmungen. Diese Wahrnehmungen jedoch bleiben ein ‘Gegebenes’, dessen Einwirkung sich das Subjekt passiv ausgesetzt findet. Der Verweis auf ein solches Gegebenes, etwa auf die ‘impressions’ Humes , die durch kausale Einwirkung der äußeren Welt auf unseren Geist entstehen, kann indes nicht die Funktion epistemischer Rechtfertigung unserer Urteile über die Welt übernehmen. Damit entsteht nach Hegels Auffassung für den klassischen Empirismus dasselbe Problem, das John McDowell für das empiristische Programm einer ‘naturalisierte Erkenntnistheorie’ W.V.O. Quine aufgewiesen hat.”
- 24.
- 25.
See Halbig (2002, 287): “In seiner Theorie des Verhältnisses von anschaulich Gegebenem zu den Urteilen des Verstandes vertritt Jacobi also eine besonders deutliche Variante jener Form von Epistemologie, die John McDowell als Mythos des Gegebenen charakteriesiert hat: Ein ausdrücklich außerbegrifflich, in der Anschauung Gegebenes rechtfertigt („bewährt“) die Urteile, die der Verstand auf der Grundlage seiner begrifflichen ‘Verarbeitung’ des Anschauungsmaterials fällt.”
- 26.
See Sanguinetti (2015b, 49): “Secondo questa prospettiva, il rapporto tra dimensione epistemica e mondo è riposto nella “rivelazione” immediata degli enti esterni che ha luogo nella sensazione, secondo un accesso immediato e ancora privo di elaborazione concettuale da parte del soggetto.”
- 27.
This interpretation is supported by the reference to passages as the following one: “The antithesis [Gegensatz] between an independent immediacy of the content or of knowing, and, on the other side, an equally independent mediation that is irreconcilable with it, must be put aside, first of all, because it is a mere presupposition and an arbitrary assurance.” (EL, §78, 124) Nevertheless, one must pay attention to the fact that the immediacy attacked by Hegel affects a content that is already a knowing—Jacobi’s philosophical standpoint is immediate knowing—and not simply a perceptual content completely separated from the mediation of the sphere of Denken, as I will try to explain further on.
- 28.
In my analysis, I will consider only Hegel critical investigation of Jacobi’s position, namely the paragraph of the Encyclopedia dedicated to the third position of thought towards objectivity, and the way it can be related to McDowell philosophical proposal. I will leave out the consideration of Jacobi’s own position, which would cast doubt on Hegel’s account of immediate knowing, especially with respect to the relation between thought and being. In fact, Birgit Sandkaulen (2010, 188) points out: “Was Hegel mit dieser Identifizierung von Denken und Anschauen vorhat, ist mit Blick auf die Seinslogische Funktion der abstrakten Unmittelbarkeit inzwischen geklärt (vgl. § 74). Hier ist darauf zu achten, inwiefern er mit der Unterstellung einer solchen Identität die Position Jacobis wirklich verfehlt. Denken und Anschauen als dasselbe zu behaupten (und damit prospektiv die Unterscheidung zwischen Vermittlung und Unmittelbarkeit zu untergraben), heißt nämlich erstens, Jacobis Auffassung der Vernunft zu ignorieren, die in genauer Analogie zur sinnlichen Wahrnehmung als ein Organ der Wahrnehmung sui generis bestimmt wird. Einem solchen Organ der Wahrnehmung Gedanken oder Ideen zuzuschreiben, die den Status von Gedanken haben, ergibt keinen Sinn, da dies einen »Übergang« vom Denken und Sein involviert, den Jacobis direkter Realismus im Modus unmittelbarer Gewissheit gerade ausschließt.”
- 29.
EL, § 64R, 113.
- 30.
EL, § 70, 117.
- 31.
EL, § 70, 117.
- 32.
EL, § 70, 118.
- 33.
EL, § 70, 118.
- 34.
EL, § 70, 118.
- 35.
I will analyze the differences between Hegel’s conception of objective thought and McDowell’s thesis of the unboundedness of the conceptual in Sect. 9.5. As far as Jacobi’s position is concerned, my idea is that it is possible to trace a partial correspondence between his position and McDowell’s one, especially if his essay David Hume über den Glauben, oder Idealismus und Realismus (1787). The problem Jacobi addressed in this essay is the same one investigated by McDowell in Mind and World, and by Hegel in the three positions of thought towards objectivity. My impression is that McDowell’s position is much closer to Jacobi’s than to Hegel’s one. In this sense, I agree with Andrew Bowie (1996, 515–554), who points out that “even though their aims are different in quite decisive ways, some of McDowell’s principal concerns do clearly echo those of Jacobi. Jacobi arrives at his position as a way of avoiding the problem in idealism that what is held to be true of the world can only be corrected from within thought, without there being any sense in which the truth might be determined by a reality which transcends the contingency of subjective representations”
- 36.
Halbig (2002, 231).
- 37.
MAW, 14.
- 38.
See MAW, 14: “Davidson recoils from the Myth of the Given all the way to denying experience any justificatory role, and the coherentist upshot is a version of the conception of spontaneity as frictionless.”
- 39.
EL, § 41A, 82–83.
- 40.
EL, § 41, A83.
- 41.
EL, § 40, 81. See also EL, § 41A, 82: “Kant calls the thought-product [Gedachte]—and, to be more precise, the universal and the necessary—‘objective.’”
- 42.
EL, § 41, 81. This problematic point is made explicit by Asmuth (2010, 152): “Die gesamte Materialität der Erkenntnis liegt im Subjekt, dessen Endlichkeit durch die Entgegensetzung von Verstand und Sinnlichkeit erklärt wird. Sogar die Objektivität wird durch eine konstitutive Akt des Subjekts begründet, nämlich durch die spontane Synthesis des Verstandes. Wie dieser Subjektivität noch ein Ding an sich entgegenstehen könne, bleibt, so Hegel, rätselhaft, ja letztlich unerklärlich.”
- 43.
EL, § 41A2, 81.
- 44.
See Halbig (2002, 248): “Subjektiv in einem ontologischen Sinne könnte nur zur Kennzeichnung einer Defizienz, etwa in der Abspaltung eines Moments aus dem Gesamtprozeß der Idee verwendet werden. Und eben in diesem Sinne wendet Hegel die Bedeutung von subjektiv gegen Kant, wenn er ihn vorwirft, durch seine Metaphysik des transzendentalen Idealismus eine „unübersteigbare Kluft“(§ 41 A2) zwischen unserem Begriffsschema und einer äußeren Wirklichkeit, die unerkennbar bleibt, eröffnet zu haben.”
- 45.
See Quante (2002, 84): “In reference to phenomena, however, thought only rediscovers its own constitutive achievements as foundations. This corresponds to the friction-free circling of thought within itself that McDowell has identified in pure coherentism.”
- 46.
EL, § 44R, 87.
- 47.
See Halbig (2002, 254): “Die kritische Philosophie verlegt nun aber „jene beiden Elemente zusammen,” also das „Ganze der Erfahrung“in die „Subjektivität“(§ 41). Außerhalb der Erfahrung bleibt dann aber nur der Bereich der Ding an sich, dessen „Affektionen,” von denen Hegel in der Logik spricht, indes genau das leisten, was McDowell der ‘idea of the Given’ vorwirft: sie geben dort Ausflüchte, wo Rechtfertigungen gefordert sind. Kant verfährt hier freilich insofern konsequent, als er das Ding an sich für unerkennbar erklärt, sich damit aber auf eine kohärentistische Position festlegt, für die die Verbindung von Denken und noumenaler Wirklichkeit abgeschnitten ist.”
- 48.
See Redding (2011, 578): “This was because he regarded empirical intuitions as issuing from the impact of a supersensuous reality beyond the mind—a reality to which concepts could not stretch. Hegel, however, following the critique of Kant by Fichte and Schelling, had rejected the dualism of intuition and concept, and along with this had ‘urged that we must discard the supersensible in order to achieve a consistent idealism’.”
- 49.
EL, § 25, 64.
- 50.
Hegel (EL, § 38A, 79) explicitly ascribes this kind of finitude to empiricism when he writes that “the presupposed content of Empiricism […] is the sensible content of Nature and the content of finite spirit. Here we have before us a material that is finite, while in the older metaphysics we had one that was infinite (and that then was made finite through the finite form of the understanding). In Empiricism we have the same finitude of form; in addiction, the content is now finite too. Beside, the method is the same in both ways of philosophizing, inasmuch as both begin from presuppositions that are taken to be something fixed.”
- 51.
MAW, 25. See also MAW, 9–10: “The relevant conceptual capacities are drawn on in receptivity […]. It is not that they are exercised on an extra-conceptual deliverance of receptivity. We should understand that what Kant calls “intuition”—experiential intake—not as a bare getting of a extra-conceptual Given, but as a kind of occurrence or state that already has conceptual content. In experience one takes in, for instance sees, that things are thus and so. That is the sort of thing one can also, for instance, judge. […] In the view I am urging, the conceptual contents that sit closest to the impact of external reality on one’s sensibility are not already, qua conceptual, some distance away from that impact. They are not the results of a first step within the space of reasons, a step that would be retraced by the last step in laying out justifications, as that activity is conceived within the dualism of scheme and Given. This supposed first step would be a move from an impression, conceived as the bare reception of a bit of the Given, to a judgement justified by the impression. But it is not like that: the conceptual contents that are most basic in this sense are already possessed by impressions themselves, impingements by the world on our sensibility. […] Experiences already have conceptual content, so this last step does not take us outside the space of concepts. But it takes us to something in which sensibility—receptivity—is operative, so we need no longer be unnerved by the freedom implicit in the idea that our conceptual capacities belong to a faculty of spontaneity.”
- 52.
MAW, 26.
- 53.
MAW, 5.
- 54.
MAW, 26. See also MAW, 25–6: “This joint involvement of receptivity and spontaneity allows us to say that in experience one can take in how things are. How things are is independent of one’s thinking. […] By being taken in in experience, how things are anyway becomes available to exert the required rational control, originating outside one’s thinking, on one’s exercises of spontaneity. […] Thus the idea of conceptually structured operations of receptivity puts us in a position to speak of experience as openness to the layout of reality. Experience enables the layout of reality itself to exert a rational influence on what a subject thinks.” See also MAW, 27: “When one thinks truly what one thinks is what is the case. So since the world is everything that is the case […], there is no gap between thought, as such, and the world.” In this sense, Rockmore (2005, 151) points out that “in his account of the so-called unboundedness of the conceptual, McDowell follows a line of argument he identifies in Wittgenstein , according to which there is no gap between thought about the world and the world.”
- 55.
SL DG, 15.
- 56.
See Quante (2002, 79): “Hegel objects that the realm of objects itself has the same categorical structure as thought. The concepts of thought are at once subjective and objective, and for that reason a dualism of conceptual scheme and content is impossible.” See also Halbig (2002, 266): “Da die Idee das Absolute ist, kann ihr nichts äußerlich bleiben […]. Die Opposition von subjektivem Begriffsschema und objektiver Realität ist also in der Idee aufgehoben. Gerade weil die Idee „die begriffliche Struktur der Welt als solche“ist, kann auch das Erkennen dieser Struktur nicht mehr durch einen Dualismus von äußerlich Gegebenem und einem auf dieses Gegebene applizierten Begriffsschema expliziert werden. Es muß vielmehr selbst die ontologisch fundamentale Ideenstruktur in sich instantiieren.”
- 57.
MAW, 24.
- 58.
SL DG, 522.
- 59.
SL DG, 523.
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Bordignon, M. (2018). Objectivity and Subjectivity in Hegel and 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_9
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