![Sample our Humanities journals, sign in here to start your FREE access for 14 days]({"type":"image" , "src" : "/sda/5939/TOC-Subject-Sample-2021-Humanities.jpg"})
Abstract
In this paper, I want to focus on the question whether Hegel's philosophy shares its main characteristics with pragmatism. I will answer this question affirmatively. In the first part, I sketch the understanding of pragmatism that allows me to call Hegel a pragmatist. In the second part, I turn to the specific project of Hegel's Phenomenology and try to substantiate the claim that Hegel is a pragmatist in this sense. I end with a discussion about the limits of my thesis in the third part of my paper.
Notes
1I profited a lot from the discussion of my paper at the workshop ‘Idealism & Pragmatism’ and I would like to thank Christopher Hookway and Robert Stern as well as all participants. Special thanks are due to Kenneth Westphal. I also would like to thank Rolf-Peter Horstmann for his comments and Amber Griffioen for her careful reading and her comments.
2In an earlier paper, I have tried to show that these influences exist with respect to Peirce. See Emundts, ‘Idealism and Pragmatism’.
3Brandom, ‘Some Pragmatist Themes in Hegel's Idealism: Negotiation and Administration’; ‘Contexts’; ‘Holism and Idealism in Hegel's Phenomenology’; ‘Some Pragmatist Themes in Hegel's Idealism’.
4Brandom's thesis has been discussed in various papers. See, for example, McDowell, ‘Comment on Robert Brandom's ‘Some Pragmatist Themes in Hegel's Idealism’’; O'Connor, ‘Hegel's Phenomenology and the Question of Semantic Pragmatism’; Auinger, ‘Hegel ein Pragmatist?’. The discussion about Brandom's thesis has many goals – the relation between classical and semantic pragmatism, the understanding of pragmatism (often James’s pragmatism) and the interpretation of Hegel's philosophy, especially regarding the question of the sense in which it is metaphysical. I will only say things about the second and third points here.
5Hegel's relation to pragmatism in ways distinct from Brandom's approach has been discussed in other papers as well. Stern, ‘Hegel and Pragmatism’ concentrates on anti-Cartesianism; Maker, ‘Hegel and Rorty, or How Hegel Saves Pragmatism from itself’ identifies the idea of anti-foundationalism as a common idea between Rorty and Hegel; Redding focuses on the role of ‘linguistic interactions’ in Redding, ‘Hegel and Pragmatism’.
6This understanding of ‘pragmatism’ is in line with, for example, Hookway and Stern's understanding. Although they tend to emphasize other aspects of the view, the general tendency seems to be similar. Hookway's ‘Pragmatism’ takes the pragmatist maxim to be the core of pragmatism (in a narrow sense). He adds that the pragmatists ‘tended to share a distinctive epistemological outlook, a fallibilist anti-Cartesian approach to the norms that govern inquiry’. In ‘Hegel and Pragmatism', Stern develops the thesis that anti-Cartesianism is a main characteristic of pragmatism. He shows that Hegel is not a Cartesian (as some philosophers think) and that Hegel's view of Descartes or ‘Cartesianism’ does not contradict the thesis that Hegel is a pragmatist. The notion of anti-Cartesianism will be relevant for a few of the ideas that I will develop in what follows.
7Peirce famously formulated this maxim in his 1878 ‘How to Make Our Ideas Clear’, but it also appears in later writings like his 1905 ‘Issues of Pragmatism’. For a few formulations, see EP 1:132 and EP 2:346. For James’s understanding of the pragmatist maxim as a method of solving problems, see James, Pragmatism, 27–8.
8That these things are important for pragmatism seems to be clear. See, for example, Peirce in ‘Some Consequences of Four Incapacities’, EP 1:29. It is also Brandom's thesis in Tales of the Mighty Dead, 214.
9See James, Pragmatism, 27. Compare also Dewey, ‘Logic’, ED 2:171ff.
10See Emundts, ‘Idealism and Pragmatism’, 348–50.
11I think that, with respect to concepts, the difference between Hegel and Kant is different from the one claimed by Brandom (see e.g. Brandom, ‘Some Pragmatist Themes in Hegel's Idealism’, 165). It is not the case that for Kant the meaning of empirical concepts is given by his two-phase structure according to which the content of concepts has to be fixed before their application (which has been criticized by McDowell, ‘Comment on Robert Brandom's ‘Some Pragmatist Themes in Hegel's Idealism’’, 191). The difference has more to do with the understanding of the logical principles and their being a priori or ‘fixed’.
12With respect to the empiricists, it is doubtful that all of them affirm the idea of testing and doing. Thus, I would not say that on my view all empiricists are pragmatists. However, it is clear that pragmatism and empiricism have a lot in common. James claims that the pragmatists have an empiricist attitude which they present ‘in a more radical and less objectionable form’, in James, Pragmatism, 31.
13Hegel's criticism of Kant's method in the Introduction of the Phenomenology does not mean that we need no method at all. Rather his point is that we do not need to reflect on the method before ‘really beginning with philosophy’.
14Section 10 of the Introduction of the Phenomenology, GW 9:10.
15I have argued for it in more detail in Emundts, Erfahren und Erkennen, 105–26.
16Translation by Terry Pinkard of the passage, ‘Das Itzt und Aufzeigen des Itzt ist also so beschaffen, daß weder das Itzt, noch das Aufzeigen des Itzt ein unmittelbares Einfaches ist, sondern eine Bewegung, welche verschiedene Momente an ihr hat’, GW 9:68.
17Translation by Terry Pinkard of the passage from Hegel's Phenomenology, ‘Das Aufzeigen ist also selbst die Bewegung, welche es ausspricht, was das Itzt in Wahrheit ist; nämlich ein Resultat, oder eine Vielheit von Itzt zusammengefasst; und das Aufzeigen ist das Erfahren, daß Itzt Allgemeines ist’, GW 9:68.
18I cannot discuss the role of the observing consciousness in the Phenomenology here. However, I would say that this understanding of consciousness has these cases of testing behind it. See Emundts, Erfahren und Erkennen, 56–8.
19For this thesis, see Emundts, ‘Idealism and Pragmatism’.
20See, for example, the Introduction into the Phenomenology, GW 9:56;61.
21Paul Redding (in ‘Hegel and Pragmatism’) has shown that it is fruitful to read Hegel's chapter on master and slave from the pragmatistic perspective of how to recognize other human beings.
22Concerning the relation between pragmatism and common sense, see, for example, James, Pragmatism, 34f. For Peirce, one of Descartes’s main problems is that his philosophy abstracts too much from questions that arise in everyday experience. See Peirce in ‘Some Consequences of Four Incapacities', EP 1:28–30. Much could be said about common sense and its role for philosophy for Hegel and for the pragmatists. If everyday experience is so important, it seems natural to conclude that common sense has to be important, too. I think this is indeed true for Hegel and for the pragmatist. However, Hegel also is probably more suspicious of whether common sense is always a statement of genuine experience and not sometimes rather an adoption of bad reasoning. This is made clear by the fact that he starts the Phenomenology with a position of a natural consciousness that turns out to have very abstract and crude ideas.
23See note 9 above.
24Hegel criticizes the idea of thinking as a tool in the Introduction of the Phenomenology, GW 9:53f. However, one might think that the pragmatists endorse this idea because it fits their understanding of solving problems. See James, Pragmatism. It seems as if the pragmatist method (27) and also scientific theories (30) are for James here tools for solving problems. For Dewey the logical forms are tools to solve problems, cf. ‘Logic’, ED 2:169–79.
25See Emundts, ‘Idealism and Pragmatism’.
26I agree here with Robert Brandom's thesis about Hegel and pragmatism. However, according to Brandom, we are talking about empirical concepts and their meanings whereas I think we should (also) be talking about basic concepts (like ‘law’, ‘causality’, ‘substance’, etc.) that is, concepts that we think to be basic because they somehow structure the world. This also leads, as we will see, to other questions linked to the topic of meaning.
27Hegel (1832), Wissenschaft der Logik (1832), GW 21:42.
28It is here, where Brandom's relation to Hegel becomes really complicated because he shares Hegel's ‘holism’ and the idea of progress in explication. Thus, I would say that here he is closer to Hegel than classical pragmatism.
29See, for example, Willaschek, ‘Bedingtes Vertrauen’.
30I suppose that this is the reason for another difference that might come to mind: Hegel understands a philosophical project as looking for all relevant presuppositions and explicating them. In this sense, his philosophy seems to make ‘no presuppositions’. (For a more careful reading of this claim, see Stern, Hegelian Metaphysics). The pragmatists, on the contrary, seem to reject such an idea. They doubt the possibility of a philosophy without presuppositions. Hegel's idea of explication also has to do with an ambitious understanding of philosophical critique – namely that it can operate only with claims the criticized position itself has to make. William Maker (in ‘Hegel and Rorty’) develops this difference in a way that is meant to show that Hegel's criticism of foundationalism is more convincing than Rorty's.
31See Stern on Peirce in Hegelian Metaphysics (especially Chap. 8).
32As we will see later on, Hegel wants to abandon these questions in some sense, but in a more complicated or reflexive way. Another example that fits this procedure (of showing that answers to this issue are false because the questions were raised in the wrong way) is the question concerning the soul. See Wolff, Das Körper–Seele-Problem, 14.
33It seems that Peirce was very much interested in these questions. This can be seen, for example, in his 1903 ‘Harvard Lectures on Pragmatism’ (though he, of course, thinks that we have to look for a new method in order to answer these questions), EP 2:133–241. However, James seems indeed to be of the opinion that it is a merit of pragmatism to simply get rid of these metaphysical questions. See James, Pragmatism, 28.
34Both considerations can be found in the Introduction into the Phenomenology in the passage where Hegel talks about the relation between Phenomenology and Science (GW 9:55). There Hegel says that without the Phenomenology the philosophy presented herewith would be a ‘simple claim’ (Versicherung) – meaning not justified – and it would be a mere appearance among other appearances – that is, it would always be possible to simply switch to the impression that there is an opposition.
35Hegel (1812/1813), Wissenschaft der Logik (1812/1813), GW 11:21;30.
36And maybe we can read this criticism of metaphysics in a very radical way. This is what Theunissen has done in his Sein und Schein and what Horstmann and Fulda have criticized; Fulda, Horstmann, and Theunissen, Kritische Darstellung der Metaphysik, 15ff.
37I have also tried to elaborate on some ideas of what follows in: Emundts, ‘Hegel on Consciousness’ (forthcoming).
38In what follows, I refer to Hegel's Phenomenology. The criticism of Kant and the clarification of the relation between the concept of force and the concept of life can be found in the chapter on force and understanding. The considerations concerning actions can be found in the chapter on Spirit. The conceptual relations are meant to become clear also in Hegel's Logic.
39This idea leads to an understanding of the world according to which physical explanations hang together essentially with deliberations on actions and freedom. With respect to the relation between nature and the role of physical principles, there are indeed some important differences between Peirce (and James) and Hegel. For some of these points, see Emundts, ‘Idealism and Pragmatism’.
40I think this is where Brandom's reading of Hegel takes the metaphysical dimension of his philosophy too little into account. See, for example, Brandom's explication of the role of the self within Hegel's philosophy; Brandom, ‘Some Pragmatist Themes in Hegel's Idealism’, 169ff.