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Abstract
Although, as many scholars have noted, Hegel appears to dismiss common sense, I argue that his claim that speculative philosophy can provide the rational ground for what is implicit in ordinary consciousness amounts to a critical vindication of common sense. Hegel’s attitude to common sense/ordinary consciousness is thus more complex and intriguing than either the longstanding consensus on his dismissal of and disdain for common sense, or the McDowellian attempt to ally Hegel’s position with later-Wittgensteinian philosophical therapy. Hegel’s critique of ordinary consciousness, I conclude, should be read as a nuanced philosophical vindication of common sense.
Keywords:
Notes
1. This view is shared by both Anglophone and continental receptions of Hegelianism.
2. McDowell, Mind and World, 112.
3. While both passages from the Science of Logic indicate some of Hegel’s most hostile arguments against common sense, it is very important not to lose sight of how that particular engagement with ordinary consciousness is contextualised against the background of Hegel’s critique of Kant.
4. Cf. Bowman, Metaphysics of Absolute Negativity, 115. I position myself in the “conceptual realist/revised metaphysical” interpretations of Hegel.
5. Stern, “Going Beyond the Kantian Philosophy,” 260.
6. I have discussed this issue in greater detail elsewhere. For more on Hegel’s Aristotelian-inspired conception of metaphysics, see Lear, Aristotle; Beiser, Hegel; and Stern, “Hegel’s Idealism”; and Stern, Hegelian Metaphysics.
7. It is important to note that Hegel regards ancient scepticism to be philosophically essential to deal with, and that he regards Cartesian and modern species of scepticism to ultimately be worthless. See, for example, the following passage from the Phenomenology of Spirit:
This path can accordingly be regarded as the path of doubt, or, more properly, as the path of despair, for what transpires on that path is not what is usually understood as doubt, namely, as an undermining of this or that alleged truth which is then followed by the disappearance of the doubt, and which in turn then returns to the former truth in such a way that what is at stake is taken to be exactly what it was in the first place. … For that reason, this self-consummating scepticism is also not the kind of scepticism with which a fervent zeal for truth and science imagines it has equipped itself so that it might be over and done with the matter. (§78)
8. McDowell, Mind and World, 113.
9. Michael Quante provides a helpful framework for discussing Hegel and the therapeutic model of enquiry. He distinguishes between therapeutic and “constructive” philosophy of differing kinds. In its narrowest sense, the therapeutic approach claims that the function of philosophy solely consists in curing misunderstandings engendered by philosophical errors. In a wider sense, it claims that the function of philosophy consists in curing misunderstandings engendered by both the mistakes of philosophers and the mistakes of non-philosophers. In defining “constructive” philosophy, which Quante equates with the view of philosophy as a problem-solving discipline, Quante draws four further distinctions. In the pejorative sense, this model creates the problems that necessarily require therapeutic treatment by mistaking philosophical problematics for real/genuine problems; in its narrow sense, it provides solutions for real problems within common sense that pose genuine threats to the good life; in its wider sense, it goes further by seeking to provide a philosophical framework to support the assumptions of common sense, even when those assumptions are not the cause of various aporias; and in its revisionary sense, it aims to replace common sense, which it regards as entirely bankrupt.
10. Beiser, Hegel, 164, 165.
11. Friedman, “Exorcising the Philosophical Tradition,” 439–40.
12. The German Romantics, as Beiser and as Stone correctly note, regarded the modern era to have alienated man from the natural world and disenchanted nature by applying a very narrow and analytic form of enquiry. The Romantics believed that the Enlightenment had ultimately stripped nature and humanity of any beauty or real intrigue. As Beiser writes in “German Romanticism,” “[Romanticism] hoped to restore the beauty, magic and mystery of nature in the aftermath of the ravages of science and technology” (349). Furthermore, as Stone writes in “The Re-enchantment of Nature” “[f]or Schlegel… humans ‘disenchant’ (entzaubern) nature if they perceive it as not at all mysterious but completely intelligible by reason. Conversely, humans would ‘enchant’ (bezaubern) nature by perceiving it as partly mysterious, not fully rationally comprehensible” (4). For Hegel, though, the Romantic appeal to mystery and rejection of reason is just as pernicious as narrow analysis. Therefore, Hegel’s ‘Romanticism’ only consists in sharing the broad Romantic concern to account for nature in rich and enchanting ways. Contra the Romantics, Hegel believed that only a rich conceptualisation of nature will enable humanity to be re-enchanted with the natural world. Furthermore, Hegel should be seen as taking some distance from Romanticism, given his criticisms of certain ways of conceiving force, and also in how force is not as crucial for Hegel’s philosophy of nature as it is for Schelling’s philosophy of nature.
13. See Westphal, Hegel’s Epistemological Realism; and Westphal, Hegel's Epistemology.
14. Cf. Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 1.310; 1.351; 3.363–64; 3.367.
15. Cf. Hegel, The Encyclopaedia Logic, §42z: 85–86; Philosophy of Nature, §246z, 9–10; and Philosophy of Mind, §448.
16. Bubbio, “The Reality of Religion,” 238–39.
17. Cf. Hegel, “In our ordinary way of thinking, the world is only an aggregate of finite existences” (Philosophy of Nature, §247, 16).
18. Pippin, “Hegel’s Original Insight,” 288.
19. Pippin, “Hegel and Category Theory,” 839.
20. Longuenesse, Hegel’s Critique of Metaphysics, xvii.
21. Gabriel, “What Kind of an Idealist,” 188.
22. What, we may ask, is the relationship between the two: is Sense-Certainty a manifestation of common sense, or are they different epistemological positions whose relation is one of analogy? I would argue that they are two different epistemological positions but are analogous in some way: what distinguishes them is Sense-Certainty’s pre-linguistic “vocabulary” for grasping individual objects; what makes them analogous in some way is that both fail in their own way to be sufficiently attuned to the necessary conditions that make certain kinds of cognitive experience possible.
23. For more on Hegel’s transcendental concerns in Sense-Certainty, see Taylor, “The Opening Arguments of the Phenomenology”; Dulckeit, “Can Hegel Refer to Particulars?”; Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism; and Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology.
24. Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism, 117.
25. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit:
[In] this simplicity [Now] is indifferent to what happens in it; just as little as Night and Day are its being, just as much also is it Day and Night; it is not in the least affected by this its other-being. A simple thing of this kind which is through negation, which is neither This nor That, a not-This, and is with equal indifference This as well as That—such a thing we call a universal. So it is in fact the universal that is the true [content] of sense-certainty. ... The same will be the case with the other form of “This”, with “Here”. “Here” is e.g., the tree. If I turn round, this truth has vanished and is converted into its opposite: “No tree is here, but a house instead”. “Here” itself does not vanish; on the contrary, it abides constant in the vanishing of the house, the tree, etc., and is indifferently house or tree. Again, therefore, the “This” shows itself to be a mediated simplicity, or a universality. (§§96–98; original emphasis)
26. Hegel makes this clear in the passage on “Perception” in Phenomenology of Spirit: “if the many determinate properties were strictly indifferent to one another, if they were simply and solely self-related, they would not be determinate; for they are only determinate insofar as they differentiate themselves from one another, and relate themselves to others as to their opposites” (§114; original emphasis).
27. Cf. Hegel, Science of Logic, 12.33–34; 531.
28. See Bristow, Transformation of Philosophical Critique, 142, 150.
29. Hegel, “Who Thinks Abstractly?” in Kaufmann, Hegel: Texts and Commentary, 115–16.
30. Hegel offers similar claims in the Phenomenology of Spirit. See, for example, the passage from “Observing Reason”:
Observation, which kept [its biological categories] properly apart and believed that in them it had something firm and settled, sees principles overlapping one another, transitions and confusions developing; what it at first took to be absolutely separate, it sees combined with something else, and what it reckoned to be in combination, it sees apart and separate. So it is that observation which clings to passive, unbroken selfsameness of being, inevitably sees itself tormented just in its most general determinations—e.g. of what are the differentiae of an animal or a plant—by instances which rob it of every determination, invalidate the universality to which it has risen, and reduce it to an observation and description which is devoid of thought. (§247)
31. Hegel, Science of Logic, 21.101; 87, 11.37; 472; and Hegel, Encyclopaedia Logic, §87Z, §91Z.
32. As Pringle-Pattison writes in Man’s Place in the Cosmos, Hegel is staunchly opposed to a view of Being in which all determinations are “devoured, like clouds before the sun, in the white light of the unica substantia” (173).
33. Cf. Hegel, Science of Logic, 21.68–69; 59.
34. As Houlgate writes in The Opening of Hegel’s Logic:
For Parmenides… [t]rue being is thus purely affirmative with no trace of negation or indeed change in it; it is thus “uncreated and imperishable”. This conception of being as purely affirmative continues to cast its shadow over subsequent philosophy right up to the modern period. It is to be seen, for example, in Spinoza’s assertion that “the definition of any thing affirms, and does not deny, the thing’s essence”. … [But] [a]ccording to Hegel’s account, the category of being proves to harbor within itself the moment of negation in several forms: the concept of reality entails negation in the form of determinacy and difference; being something entails negation in the form of otherness and finitude; and infinite being also contains negation insofar as it lives in and through self-negating, finite beings. (43–44)
35. See Hegel, Philosophy of Right, §§157–58, 181.