Hegel, Analytic Philosophy’s Pharmakon

Abstract

In this article I argue that Hegel has become analytic philosophy’s “pharmakon”—both its “poison” and its “cure.” Traditionally, Hegel’s philosophy has been attacked by Anglo-American analytical philosophers for its alleged charlatanism and irrelevance. Yet starting from the 1970s there has been a revival of interest in Hegel’s philosophical work, which, I suggest, may be explained by three developments: (1) the revival of interest in Aristotelianism following Saul Kripke’s and Hilary Putnam’s work on natural kinds, and Elizabeth Anscombe’s, Philippa Foot’s, and Putnam’s opposition to the fact-value distinction; (2) the rehabilitation of Hegel’s theories by various philosophers, including Robert Pippin, Terry Pinkard, Fred Beiser, Robert Stern, and Stephen Houlgate; and (3) the Sellars-inspired philosophy of mind of John McDowell and of Robert Brandom. The first and third of these reasons, I argue, have led several analytic theorists to cast Hegel in a more positive light as the “cure” for analytic philosophy. The combined outcome of these changes, both ironic and fitting, is that the Hegelian principle of internal critique has played a significant role not only in analytic philosophy’s rapprochement with Hegel’s philosophy but also in overcoming the Analytic-Continental philosophical divide.

Keywords:

• Hegel
• analytic philosophy
• continental philosophy

Notes

1. Though one might claim that Russell’s and Moore’s rejection of idealism was directed at British idealists, such as Bradley and Green, it is clear that their critique is principally directed at British Idealism’s pater patria—Hegel. The battle-cry for the founding of analytic philosophy is probably best expressed in the following passage from Russell’s History of Western Philosophy:

Modern analytical empiricism… differs from that of Locke, Berkeley, and Hume by its incorporation of mathematics and its development of a powerful logical technique. It is thus able, in regard to certain problems, to achieve definite answers, which have the quality of science rather than of philosophy. It has the advantage, in comparison with the philosophies of the system-builders, of being able to tackle its problems one at a time, instead of having to invent at one stroke a block theory of the whole universe. Its methods, in this respect, resemble those of science. I have no doubt that, in so far as philosophical knowledge is possible, it is by such methods that it must be sought; I have also no doubt that, by these methods, many ancient problems are completely soluble. (834)

2. Redding, “Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.”

3. Hans Hahn, Moritz Schlick, Rudolf Carnap, and Otto Neurath were leaders of the Vienna Circle, and Kurt Gödel regularly attended its meetings.

4. Nuzzo, Hegel and the Analytic Tradition, 1.

5. Beiser, “Dark Days”: “From the 1920s to the 1950s, except for exercises in excoriation, an interest in Hegel had to be private and secret, something better read in the loo” (80).

6. Beiser, Hegel, 1.

7. Searle, Intentionality, x.

8. See, for example, Burge, “Sinning against Frege” and “Frege on Sense”; Beaney, Frege: Making Sense; Carl, Frege’s Theory of Sense; and Dummett, Frege: Philosophy of Language.

9. How do we account for the difference in cognitive significance between ‘The morning star = The morning star’ (‘a=a’) and ‘The morning star = The evening star’ (‘a=b’) when both propositions are true?

10. I use the term “analytic tradition” in a broad sense, in order to include a wide range of philosophical movements such as logicism, Russell’s atomism, Moore’s common-sense realism, Logical Empiricism, ordinary language philosophy, analytic pragmatism, etc. Like Redding in “Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel,” and Nuzzo in Hegel, I do not take it to refer to a “monolithic bloc” (Nuzzo, Hegel, 11).

11. Of course, this does not apply to the analytic tradition’s general difficulty with interpreting Hegel’s Science of Logic, which seems to be caused by the triadic structure of the work and Hegel’s dense language.

12. This is also known as the “spirit monist” view. See Taylor, Hegel, where he adopts this approach. An even cruder view of idealism can be attributed to Russell and Moore who took Hegel and the British Idealists as claiming that the external world does not exist.

13. See Beiser, Hegel, 154.

14. Schopenhauer writes in The World as Will: “But the height of audacity in serving up pure nonsense, in stringing together senseless and extravagant mazes of words, such as had previously been known only in madhouses, was finally reached in Hegel, and became the instrument of the most barefaced general mystification that has ever taken place, with a result which will appear fabulous to posterity, and will remain as a monument to German stupidity” (2.22).

15. As Popper writes in Conjectures and Refutations: “There is so much philosophical writing (especially in the Hegelian school) which may justly be criticized as meaningless verbiage” (94).

16. Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism, 5.

17. The following passage from William Bristow’s Hegel and the Transformation elegantly expresses this idea:

To someone who appreciates Kant’s critical project—who has felt the excitement of a powerful new beginning in epistemology aroused by appreciation of it—Hegel’s suspicion is bound to seem relatively shallow, even if not totally unmotivated. Hegel himself subscribes to the dictum that criticism of a philosophical system has little weight unless it engages seriously with that in the system that seems compelling to its proponents. It may seem that Hegel’s objection against Kant’s project of critique… does not engage very seriously or directly with what strikes students of Kant’s epistemology as its substantial core. And so Hegel’s apparently dismissive criticism of Kant’s critical project is dismissed in turn by Kantians. Consequently, the Hegel-Kant engagement often strikes us, I think, as philosophically sterile. 64)

18. Beiser, Cambridge Companion to Hegel, 11.

19. See Hylton, “Hegel and Analytic Philosophy”; and Candlish, The Russell/Bradley Dispute.

20. I have in mind Taylor’s Hegelian communitarian magnum opus, Sources of the Self, which argues that we are all intersubjectively vulnerable, and that the process of gaining recognition intersubjectively is identical to the journey of self-realisation as a social and rational agent.

21. McDowell, Having the World, and Mind and World; Brandom, Making It Explicit, Tales of the Mighty Dead, and Reason in Philosophy. McDowell and Brandom, the Pittsburgh “neo-Hegelians,” trace their influence to some extent to Sellars’s rejection of the myth of the given in Empiricism.

22. Nuzzo, Hegel, 2.

23. Kripke, Naming and Necessity; Putnam, Mind, Language and Reality, and Meaning and the Moral Sciences; See Putman, The Collapse.

24. Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” 1–19; Foot, Virtues and Vices, and Natural Goodness.

25. On Hegel’s relation to Aristotle, see Lear, Aristotle; Beiser, Hegel; and Stern, “Hegel’s Idealism.”

26. Findlay, Hegel: A Re-examination; Hartmann, “Hegel: A Non-Metaphysical View”; Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology, and German Philosophy; and Brandom, “Some Pragmatist Themes,” Tales of the Mighty Dead, and Reason in Philosophy. I do not include Pippin in this group though his works have usually been seen as the flagship of the anti-metaphysical/non-metaphysical interpretations of Hegelianism. This is because at the 2013 annual conference of the Hegel Society of Great Britain Pippin stated that he regards Hegel as a metaphysician, which contrasts with his claim in Hegel’s Idealism that he “also propose[s] to defend a nonmetaphysical interpretation of Hegel” (6).

27. The non-metaphysical reading of Hegel differs from what can be loosely called the Strawsonian-inspired view of Hegel, as espoused by Wood. Wood, as Strawson did with Kantianism, sees a repugnant side to Hegelianism but also finds in it something of value to Hegel’s philosophy, particularly the analysis of the state and morality. Consequently, Wood tries to separate Hegel’s ethics and political philosophy from Hegel’s theoretical concerns. See Wood, Hegel’s Ethical Thought. This is very similar to the Strawsonian tendency to separate Kant’s transcendental programme and theory of experience from transcendental idealism.

28. Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism, 7.

29. Redding, “Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.”

30. Beiser, Cambridge Companion to Hegel, and Hegel; Wartenburg, Hegel’s Epistemology; Horstmann, “Substance, Subject and Infinity”; Houlgate, An Introduction to Hegel and Opening of Hegel’s Logic; Stern, Routledge Philosophy Guidebook, “Hegel’s Idealism,” and Hegelian Metaphysics; Westphal, Hegel’s Epistemology; and Kreines, “Hegel’s Metaphysics, and “Hegel: Metaphysics.”

31. It is important to note that Kant did not criticize metaphysics in the way that Hume and the Logical Positivists did: he did not regard the discipline per se as a meaningless philosophical enterprise. Rather, Kant’s concern was to put metaphysics on the “secure course of a science” (Critique of Pure Reason, Bxiv), that is, to purge it of any fallacies and obscurities by prioritising logic and epistemology as the first stages of any philosophical enquiry. See Moore, The Evolution of Modern Philosophy; O’Neill, “Vindicating Reason”; and Grier, Kant’s Doctrine.

32. Beiser, Hegel, 55.

33. The charge of extravagance is levelled by Ameriks in “Hegel and Idealism,” 386–402; for a response, see Stern, “Hegel’s Idealism,” 135–73.

34. Sellars writes in Empiricism:

One of the forms taken by the Myth of the Given is the idea that there is, indeed must be, a structure of particular matter of fact such that (a) each fact can not only be noninferentially known to be the case, but presupposes no other knowledge either of particular matter of fact, or of general truths; and (b) such that the noninferential knowledge of facts belonging to this structure constitutes the ultimate court of appeals for all factual claims—particular and general—about the world. It is important to note that I characterized the knowledge of fact belonging to this stratum as not only noninferential, but as presupposing no knowledge of other matter of fact, whether particular or general. It might be thought that this is a redundancy, that knowledge (not belief or conviction, but knowledge) which logically presupposes knowledge of other facts must be inferential. This, however, as I hope to show, is itself an episode in the Myth. (68–69)

35. McDowell, Mind and World; and Brandom, Making It Explicit, Articulating Reasons, and Tales of the Mighty Dead.

36. On Hegel and McDowell, see Sedgwick, “McDowell’s Hegelianism,” 21–38; and Stern “Beyond the Kantian Philosophy,” 247–69.

37. Brandom, The Mighty Dead, 216.

38. Houlgate, “Hegel and Brandom,” 139.

39. Brandom, Making It Explicit, 647.

40. Ibid., 622.

41. On Hegel’s relation with Brandom, see Houlgate, “Hegel and Brandom”; and Pippin, “Brandom’s Hegel.”

42. For more on Hegel’s transcendental concerns in Sense-Certainty, see Taylor, “The Opening Arguments”; Dulckeit, “Can Hegel Refer to Particulars?”; Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism; and Pinkard, Hegel’s Phenomenology.

43. Pippin, Hegel’s Idealism, 117.

44. Rorty, “Introduction,” 8–9.

45. Smith and McIntyre, Husserl and Intentionality; see also Dreyfus and Hall, eds., Husserl, Intentionality; and Mohanty, Transcendental Phenomenology.

46. Smith and Thomasson, eds., Phenomenology and Philosophy of Mind is another important cross-disciplinary work. Perhaps more importantly, Gallagher and Zahavi’s more direct impact on the analytic phenomenological scene is the cross-disciplinary journal they founded, Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences.

47. Sellars, Empiricism, §63.

48. Rorty, “Introduction,” 11.