Beyond Epistemology: New Studies in the Philosophy of Hegel

254 Pages·1974·7.86 MB·English

by  G. R. G. Mure (auth.)

Beyond Epistemology
Beyond Epistemology
NEW STUDIES
IN THE PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL
Edited by
FREDERICK G. WEISS
MARTINUS NIJHOFF I THE HAGUE I 1974
© I974 by Martinus Nijhotl, The Hague, Netherlands
All rights reserved, including the right to translate or to
reproduce this book or parts thereof in any form
ISBN-13: 978-90-247-1584-8 e-ISBN-13: 978-94-010-2016-9
DOl: 10.1007/978-94-010-2016-9
TO
ALL TRUE LOVERS OF HEGEL, QUICK AND DEAD,
AND IN PARTICULAR TO
GEOFFREY MURE
10 veggio ben, che giammai non si sazia
Nostro intelletto, se'l Ver no 10 illustra
Di fuor dal qual nessun vero si spazia.
Dante, Paradiso IV, 124-6
FOREWORD
This book approaches Hegel from the standpoint of what we might
call the question of knowledge. Hegel, of course, had no "theory of
knowledge" in the narrow and abstract sense in which it has come to be
understood since Locke and Kant. "The examination of knowledge," he
holds, "can only be carried out by an act of knowledge," and "to seek to
know before we know is as absurd as the wise resolution of Scholasticus,
*
not to venture into the water until he had learned to swim." While
Hegel wrote no treatise exclusively devoted to epistemology, his
entire philosophy is nonetheless a many-faceted theory of truth, and
thus our title - Beyond Epistemology - is meant to suggest a return
to the classical meaning and relation of the terms episteme and logos.
I had originally planned to include a lengthy introduction for these
essays, setting out Hegel's general view of philosophic truth. But as
the papers came in, it became clear that I had chosen my contributors
too well; indeed, they have all but put me out of business. In any case,
it gives me great pleasure to have been able to gather this symposium
of outstanding Hegel scholars, to provide for them a forum on a
common theme of great importance, and especially, thanks to Arnold
Miller, to have Hegel himself among them.
Frederick G. Weiss
Charlottesville, Va.
• The Logic of Hegel, trans. from the Etu;yclopaedta by William Wallace. 2nd ed. (London:
Oxford University Press, 1892), p. 17.
TABLE OF CONTENTS
I. "Hegel: How, and How Far, is Philosophy Possible?"
G. R. G. MURE, Oxford University I
II. "Hegel's Theory of Religious Knowledge"
MEROLD WESTPHAL, Yale University 30
III. "On Artistic Knowledge: A Study in Hegel's Philosophy
of Art"
ALBERT HOFSTADTER, University of California 58
IV. "Hegel: Truth in the Philosophical Sciences of Society,
Politics, and History"
HENRY PAOLUCCI, St. John's University 98
V. "Hegel and the Natural Sciences"
ERROL E. HARRIS, Northwestern University 129
VI. "Reflexive Asymmetry: Hegel's Most Fundamental
Methodological Ruse"
J. N. FINDLAY, Boston University 154
VII. "Phenomenology: Hegel and HusserI"
QUENTIN LAUER, Fordham University 174
VIII. "Hegel and Hermeneutics"
THEODORE KISIEL, Northern Illinois University 197
IX. Appendix. "Reason and Religious Truth": Hegel's
Foreword to H. FR. W. HINRICHS' Die Religion im inneren
Verhliltnissezur Wissenschaft (1822), translated by A. V.
Miller, with Introduction by Merold Westphal 221
Contributors 245
HEGEL:
HOW, AND HOW FAR, IS PHILOSOPHY POSSIBLE?
G. R. G. MURE
Oxford University
I) David Hume, the gifted amateur, woke Kant from his dogmatic
slumber, and Kant, being a professional physicist as well as a pro
fessional philosopher, proceeded to ask himself how pure physics and
pure mathematics are possible. With his a priori categories and forms
of sensuous intuition (Anschauung) he provided an answer. Whether
he provided any positive answer to the question how the critical
philosophy is itself possible is more doubtful. He confined human
knowledge to the deliverance of the understanding (Verstand) in
cooperation with sense; to phenomenal objects, that is, which we
know to be the appearances only of things forever unknown to us as
they are in themselves. We know that these objects are only phenome
nal, because they present themselves everywhere and always as
conditioned ab extra and not as self-subsistent, as terms in, e.g., an
endless causal series in which every term is an effect and, in its turn, a
cause. It is true that human reason (Vernunft) has Ideas (Ideen) of the
unconditioned, but these are mere thoughts which do not yield us
knowledge of any object. Their function is at once to stimulate Verstand
and to restrict it to its proper cognitive function in cooperation with
sensuous intuition. They merely regulate: they cannot, since we have
no!faculty of intellectual intuition, constitute any object of knowledge.
This is the human condition.
2) Despite this cautious attitude, the critical philosophy, once
stated, is a claim to knowledge which is not mere knowledge of phe
nomenal objects but knowledge of what phenomena are, of what
Verstand and Vernunft are, and ultimately of what the allegedly
unknowable things in themselves are. To show that knowledge is con
fined to phenomena Kant has tacitly to contradict himself and assume
knowledge where he cannot admit it. So in general Hegel criticizes the
critical philosophy, on which, none the less, his own speculation was
2 G. R. G. Mure
so largely based that he is constantly adapting and reinterpreting
Kant's terminology.
3) If we ask how, on Hegel's showing, his own absolute objective
idealism is possible, we get a fairly straight short answer in the opening
sections 1-18, of the Encyclopaedia, Part I. The gist of it is this:1
Philosophy is "a thinking study of things," and the novice cannot
learn to swim before he enters the water. He may be presumed to have
some acquintance with the objects which philosophy studies, and some
interest in them; for they are in general the same as the objects of
religion, namely the finite worlds of Nature and the human spirit
(Geist), and the relation of these to each other and to God, who is their
truth (Wahrheit). He will know something of mathematics and the
empirical sciences, of history and of art, and he is already a moral agent
and a citizen. Now, desiring to philosophize, he must reflect thought
fully (thought is his innermost self, that which distinguishes man from
brute) upon his cognitive empirical experience (Erfahrung) as a finite
thinker who lives ordinarily at the level of common sense.
4) In Erfahrung thought is only Verstand, not yet Vernunft. 2 It is
an activity which develops out of a relatively passive sentience, but
is forced to accept the cooperation of a partner which it tries to super
sede, and this is a contradiction. In Erfahrung the immediate object
on which thought works is sensuous, a percept, a cognitive image, or
an imagined end of volition. The subject in Verstand assumes that his
thinking, like his sensing, is merely adjectival to himself as one singular
experient subject among others, and that the deliverance of his senses,
even if it is, as Kant said, blind without thought, is nevertheless a
communication from without, a "given" content of at least potential
knowledge from a separate source. His unreflective assumption is not
simply false, but it is an inadequate insight which involves contra
diction. The function of Verstand is to elicit from sensuous contents
which come to the experient as contingently given, as indubitably
"there" but not understood, a universal and necessary essence which
shall be what they really and necessarily are. That is what the empirical
scientist 3 is trying to do when he first observes and classifies his
1 In what follows I have both omitted and expanded.
B These are not separate faculties, as Kant tended to view them, but phases through
which thought logically develops. We shall see later that Hegel extends thought further
downwards, too, labelling it InteUigenll, to cover all that is articulate in sense experience;
see §§ 8 and 13 below.
8 See Ene. §§ 9 and 16. All references to Hegel's works are to the Jubilee Edition (JE)
of Glockner (Stuttgart 1928) unless otherwise stated.
Hegel: How, and How Far, is PhilosoPhy Possible? 3
subject matter, and then attempts to establish necessary laws -
ultimately a unitary system of laws - governing its behaviour. His
procedure thus debases his initial sensuous data to the status of
appearances. They become endlessly multiple phenomena which in
comparison and contrast to the inward essence fail to present the truth.
But here the contradiction emerges. Because his thought is only
Verstand, only aware of itself as adjectival to a singular finite subject,
his elicited universal essences and laws cannot fully transform and/or
supersede the sensuous content. As they first emerge from sense they are
"essences" only as purely general concepts, mere identities abstracted
from indefinitely multiple particulars, bare common characters which
ignore difference and patently demand to be completed and "verified"
in sensuous instantiation.4 Indeed, it is largely the seeming authority
of the senses as importers of knowledge from without which convinces
(if they reflect at all) most ordinary men and most special scientists
that the object-world they experience, whatever subjective mistakes
they may make about it, is real independently and apart from their
experiencing. This sub-philosophical realism is the distinctive attitude
of Verstand. Doubtless the special scientist comes to see these merely
general concepts as not only self-specifying up to a point but also as
developing necessary universal connections, but the necessity is always
compulsive ab extra necessitation, causal series in particular, which
he can on reflection only think as endless regress, as series which must
have, and yet cannot have, a first term, so that the necessity in his
thinking remains always hypothetical.
5) Out of these contradictions have sprung, both before and after
Hegel, endless controversies about the status of universals, the fierce
battles of variously assorted rationalists, empiricists, positivists and
phenomenalists, and in our own day the attempt to distinguish from
logic and psychology a questionable science called epistemology. In
Hegel's view, all such disputants, even Kant, have been endeavouring
to philosophize without transcending the level of Verstand.
The contradictions in his thinking which arise from its ambiguous
relation to sense do not seriously trouble the progress of the empirical
scientist. He has perhaps a vague ideal of an all-embracing kingdom
of scientific laws, but he has his own garden to cultivate. His primary
4 Between Verstand and immediate sensuous intuition imagery (V01'stellung) is a mediating
phase. So close is the tie at this level between thought and the sensuous content which it is
struggling to supersede but must still rely on for support, that Hegel frequently uses the
term V01'stellung to cover together both Verstand and its habitual accompaniment of images.
It may then be conveniently rendered as "pictorial thinking." See § I~ below.
4 G. R. G. Mure
aim is a limited truth which is not philosophical. The novice, whom
Hegel in the early sections of the Encyclopaedia is introducing to
philosophy through logic, must, on the other hand, reflect self
consciously on the contradictions which Verstand generates and on
nothing else. By virtue of a craving, a nisus in thought's own nature
(and therefore in himself),5 he may find himself able to solve these
contradictions, not by rejecting one side or the other but by a conti
nuous dialectical ascent. Kant had taken a negative and depreciatory
view of dialectic. He had seen it as no more than the helpless and
illusive oscillation of human reason when confronted by humanly
insoluble dilemmas such as (a) the necessity and (b) the impossibility
of thinking a primary cause into causal series. Under Hegel's guidance
the novice will recognize that Vernunlt has categories in which the
stark oppositions of Verstand emerge as half-truths reconciled through
their very opposition at levels above the world of phenomena to which
Kant had restricted human knowledge. He will see that dialectic is not
illusory but is everywhere the genuine and concrete self-development
of thought.
6) Philosophy, then, is possible by virtue of an inherent dialectical
nisus of thought. But that is a very short answer. We must try to
expand it, though at first in terms which may seem obscure. This nisus
in the individual thinker is itself possible because, in Hegel's view, the
universe is the single dialectical activity of Absolute Spirit, and the
individual thinker is an integral element, a constituent phase, of its
self-developing activity. It constitutes him, and he goes to constitute
it. From this reciprocity Hegel concludes that a man's philosophizing
will be a coming to comprehend the universe through and as a growing
comprehension of his own real nature, so that his philosophizing will
not be a comment ab extra on the universe but a pulse of its activity.
Thus in the whole of Hegel's tripartite system, but more and more
conspicuously in the Philosophy 01 Spirit in Part III of the Encyclo
paedia, which offers a dialectical ascent through all the levels of human
experience up to philosophy, the subject of Hegel's discourse will
at least seem to be ambivalent as between man and Absolute Spirit.
On how far Hegel succeeds in making intelligible this ambivalence,
this dual-centred nature of spirit, depends the answer to the second
part of our question. Before we can try to formulate it, something
must be said later of Hegel's Absolute eo nomine,6 but it may be useful
i Cf. Ene. §§ II-I2.
• See §§ 21-29 below.