Reason

Introduction

‘The world is my representation’: – this holds true for every living, cognitive being, although only a human being can bring it to abstract, reflective consciousness: and if he actually does so he has become philosophically sound.

There is a dramatic change between the eclipse of unhappy consciousness and the dawn of reason. The unhappy subject, who goes again and again on a pilgrimage to the church in order to witness God through a medium, is still ultimately unhappy: for God’s salvation comes only in the heavenly kingdom, when all that is singular and contingent is finally shrugged off. For the unhappy subject, there is no community until we die.

Now, however, unhappy consciousness is no longer at the forefront of things. In Hegel’s enormous chapter on Reason (consisting of over two-hundred paragraphs), the foundations for positivity and a real community in this life, prior to heaven, are established. The key to the success of reason is mediation, which emerged in self-consciousness in the figure of the ‘mediating counsel’ or priest. Now, we (the phenomenological observers) must recognise that what appeared in self-consciousness as three distinct entities – the unhappy subject, the unchangeable God, and the mediating priest – are finally understood as three moments of one unified position: namely, the syllogism of reason. What first appeared as the priest’s mediation between God and the unhappy worshipper is now recognised as reason’s mediation between the unchangeable universal and the singular individual. Reason’s power to mediate is the first appearance of philosophical thought proper, ‘the unity that immediately knows both of the other terms, relates both of them to each other, and is the consciousness of their unity’.¹

Being the site of mediation between the universal and particular, reason begins with the pompous certainty of ‘being all truth’. The mediating ego or I is thus at the centre of the whole world: we are now in the era of idealism. For as long as the self has been conscious of itself – from its earliest desire to the apex of unhappy consciousness – it has had a negative relationship towards the world. ‘Formerly’, Hegel says of the subject, ‘it did not understand the world; it desired it and worked on it, withdrew itself from it, took an inward turn back into itself away from it, and erased the world for itself and itself as consciousness’.² It is only now, with reason’s power of mediation, that self and world – thinking and being – are united, one and the same. It is at this point that we can declare Parmenides’ saying: τὸ γὰρ αὐτὸ νοεῖν ἐστίν τε καὶ εἶναι [being and thinking are one and the same].³ Note, however, the centrality of thought – that is, of theory. As Robert Solomon notices, the chapter on Reason – at least in its first section, on ‘observing reason’ – sees a repetition of some of the themes from the earlier chapter on Consciousness. Solomon suggests that the book can therefore be divided between a ‘Phenomenology of Theory’ (consisting of the Preface, Introduction, and the chapters on Consciousness and Observing Reason, and a ‘Phenomenology of Practice’ (consisting of the remainder of the book); the final chapter, on ‘Absolute Knowing’, is a ‘hinge holding the two books together’; the moment when theory and practice are recognised as inseparable.⁴

First Criticism of Idealism: the Journey of the World-Spirit

In his commentary on the Phenomenology, J. N. Findlay gives a clear summary of the starting position of reason:

Consciousness in the experience of absolution has risen to the realization that the individual consciousness is implicitly one with the Absolute Essence which is, however, still placed essentially beyond itself. In this realization self-consciousness has been projected into the world of objects, into the realm of being, and it has also identified itself with the universal. It has become the middle term in a syllogism which reconciles the individual with the unchangeable universal, and which thereby sees itself as all truth.⁵

In what particular way does reason ‘see itself as all truth’? Recall that every shape of knowing in the Phenomenology so far begins with certainty: an immediate and often naïve claim to truth. The chapter on reason begins in just the same way: Hegel makes a distinction between an idealism that recognises the journey (from sensuous certainty to self-consciousness) that is necessary for ‘proving’ that the I is all truth and all reality, and the idealism for whom this journey is forgotten. In its present moment of certainty, reason fits the latter description. ‘It only gives the assurance of being all reality, but does not itself comprehend this, for the comprehension of this immediately expressed assertion is that forgotten path itself’.⁶ This kind of naïve, asserted idealism is thus only ‘an immediate certainty against which other immediate certainties stand in contrast’: since the naïve idealist has forgotten the dialectical overcoming of the certainties in consciousness and self-consciousness (sensuous certainty and the desiring I, respectively), it is unable to overcome these certainties, or prove itself against them.⁷ This point may be specifically directed at J. G. Fichte’s idealism. In the introduction to his idealist system, Fichte claims that ‘to begin with, idealism is unable to refute dogmatism’, and that ‘the dogmatist is equally incapable of refuting the idealist’.⁸ For Hegel, Fichte is forced to see idealism and dogmatism as incapable of refuting one another because he has ignored the dialectical path that makes idealism possible.

There is a sense here in which Fichte is actually less sophisticated than his predecessor, Kant. As Dieter Henrich put it, Kant’s critical project relied on the fact that ‘before there can be an insight that there is some illusion in this metaphysics, there has first to be an original metaphysics. … Because, in his view, one cannot get to the truth all at once at the beginning, there are necessary stages of the development of philosophy’.⁹ This is far closer to Hegel’s realisation of the historicity of philosophy. Nonetheless, Hegel also had criticisms of Kant, of course, and Fichte’s work certainly wasn’t the first great example of ‘forgetting’ in the history of philosophy: as Harris notes, Fichte is really carrying out a ‘repetition of Spinoza and Leibniz’ in his insistence on immediacy.¹⁰

The critical element in the first four paragraphs on ‘the certainty and truth’ of reason are summarised by Hegel quite simply: ‘How consciousness is immediately to be found … depends on what it has already come to be.’¹¹

Second Criticism of Idealism: On the Arbitrariness of the Categories

So far, the idealist whose development we are witnessing is comfortable in the certainty that all reality is conditioned by the I. Expressed more directly: ‘Reason is the certainty of being all reality.’¹² The I thus becomes a category: it is the light that illuminates every thing. This idea appears perhaps most clearly in Kant, when he explains that ‘the I think must be able to accompany all my representations’: the ‘I think’ (which is both a thought and an act of self-awareness), unifying all objects, is the fundamental category which conditions all of reality.¹³ As Hegel puts it, this category is thus ‘the simple unity of self-consciousness and being’.

The idea of ‘categories’ as thought’s classifications of beings appears as early as in Aristotle. Aristotle, however, was no idealist. When Hegel refers in §235 to ‘a one-sided, bad idealism’ in which there is a remainder of what is categorised – namely, the in-itself ‘confronting’ self-consciousness – he has Kant in mind. In Kant’s first Critique, he took Aristotle’s term and revised it to refer to the ‘pure concepts’ which, according to him, necessarily govern the way that objects can be understood:

In such a way there arise exactly as many pure concepts of the understanding, which apply to objects of intuition in general a priori, as there were logical functions of all possible judgments in the previous table: for the understanding is completely exhausted and its capacity entirely measured by these functions. Following Aristotle we will call these concepts categories, for our aim is basically identical with his al­ though very distant from it in execution.¹⁴

The idealist we have seen so far has only one category: namely, the I itself. This is not closely correspondent with any hugely famous moment in the history of philosophy. With Kant, however, we come to a ‘second idealism’, which is nonetheless ‘even more incomprehensible than the first’.¹⁵ Kant’s argument (the conclusion of which is in the quotation above) is that there is a plurality of categories (specifically, twelve), and that this plurality is grounded on the plurality of human thought’s functions of judgment. For instance, affirmative and negative judgments correspond to the categories of reality and negation, and so on.

Hegel seems to accept that, from the single category of the I, a plurality of categories must emerge. His argument for this claim is obscure; he explains that ‘this category [the I], or the simple unity of self-consciousness and being, has the difference in itself, for its essence is just this, that it is immediately self-equal in otherness, or immediately self-equal in the absolute difference’.¹⁶ This seems to be an instance of the argumentative gesture that appears again and again in the Phenomenology: namely, that determinateness (of a category, in this instance) is possible only through its difference with an opposite. Thus, as soon as any category of reality is affirmed, its opposite must also be affirmed as a category; consequently, a plurality of categories arises.

Indeed, Kant’s table of categories is populated by oppositions (unity-plurality, necessity-contingency, and so on); however, he does not arrive at plurality via the argument I have just given. His multiple categories are simply derived from the multiple functions of judgment, as described above. Many people have made the criticism that this makes Kant’s so-called ‘deduction’ of the categories rather arbitrary, if they are grounded ultimately on what is assumed to be an exhaustive catalogue of human thinking. Hegel, however, takes this criticism a little further, in a concluding sentence that sounds almost exasperated or frustrated:

… to take up again the plurality of categories in some way or other as something we simply come upon, for example, in judgments, and then to continue to put up with them in that form, is in fact to be regarded as a disgrace to science. Where is the understanding supposed to be capable of demonstrating necessity if it is incapable of demonstrating the pure necessity it has within itself?¹⁷

Essentially, Kant is satisfied to ‘simply come upon’ the categories via the functions of judgment. Hegel’s criticism does not target the basis Kant opts for (that is, judgment), but instead targets the very gesture of ‘simply coming upon’ the categories. If this criticism is a little opaque in the Phenomenology, it is clearer in Hegel’s Encyclopaedia, where he praises Fichte for having ‘reminded us that the thought-determinations [categories] must be exhibited in their necessity, and that it is essential for them to be deduced.’¹⁸ The Science of Logic, which was published in full in 1816, is Hegel’s attempt to overcome the ‘outrage of science’ in Kant, and outline a system of logic that is fully and legitimately grounded, and takes nothing as given. As for now, we continue with the Phenomenology’s task of overcoming the philosophical standpoint from which a ‘given’ is acceptable.

Third Criticism of Idealism: The Abstract Individual

To this point, idealism has not been depicted in a favourable light. Hegel does have praise for it, however, insofar as it is the first appearance of reason. As we saw above, ‘reason’ is the name for all thinking that bases itself off of mediation. Kant’s idealism, in this regard, is successful: it mediates between subject and object (self-consciousness and reality) precisely by making the latter conditioned by the former. For this reason, Hegel remarks that if we are to be Kantian idealists, ‘we can no longer really talk of things at all, which is to say, we can no longer speak of what for consciousness would only be the negative of itself’.¹⁹ In a simpler form of his accusation of subjectivism in Kant, Hegel is here arguing that insofar as all things, for the Kantian idealist, are conditioned by the categories, and these categories are themselves mere ‘species of the pure category’ – namely, the I – then all our talk about ‘things’ amounts to little more than reflection on the fundamental category of things: the I itself. Are we therefore left with nothing but pure thinking, with no otherness or externality? Not quite: in the labyrinthine remainder of §236, Hegel shows how externality and the Other come back to idealist consciousness. Because this passage is so difficult, I have quoted it at length, and split it into subsections which I will then explain one by one.

1. ‘However, the many categories are already equivocation itself, since at the same time they have in themselves otherness in its plurality as opposed to the pure category.
2. They in fact contradict the pure category through this plurality, and the pure unity must sublate them in themselves, and thereby constitute itself as the negative unity of the differences.
3. However, as negative unity, it excludes from itself both the differences as such and that first immediate pure unity as such, and it is singular individuality.
4. This is a new category, which is an excluding consciousness, which is to say, it has an other for it.’²⁰

These four moments follow the aforementioned scenario, in which there is no real Other when all that consciousness can refer to is conditioned by the categories which, ultimately, are various ‘species’ of consciousness itself. In the first moment, Hegel points out that some kind of otherness is present, after all, since there is a difference between the unity of the ‘pure category’ (that is, the I), and the plurality of the ‘many categories’ – and since, whenever there is difference, there is otherness. Hegel realises, in the second moment, that this difference is a contradiction, between the unity of the I and the plurality of the categories. (This is, in some sense, a reappearance of the contradiction of the One and the Many in the earlier chapter on perception). The ‘pure unity’ – by which Hegel means the I as a mere ‘genus’ of the categories – sublates or overcomes this contradiction when it is re-understood as the ‘negative unity’ of the categories: that is, a unity of mutually excluding parts. The third moment explains that, through becoming a negative unity, the I is thus separate to both the original sense of the I, as a pure unity, and to the original plurality of the categories, which are not a unity at all. In this separation, as Hegel remarks in the fourth moment, the I as negative unity is thus exclusive: it excludes, and has an Other. Hegel calls this new, excluding shape of the I a ‘singular individual’.

The singular individual is the I or ‘ego’ that Descartes could not conceive of: it is a ‘thinking thing’ which nonetheless is an individual thing among other things of the world. As Harris writes,

The thinker cannot identify herself with the pure thinking (any more than with the “thoughts”) because she is the being that is appeared to. This step undercuts the Cartesian dualism. The “certainty” of Reason is simply a singular agent in a world of external sensible appearances.²¹

This ‘singular agent’ is not as stable as it might first appear, however. Though it has achieved the awareness of otherness, in a sense, this awareness has only come about through the interplay of consciousness and its manifold facets. ‘Each of these different moments’ – that is, the pure category, the negative unity, and so on – ‘points to another moment, but at the same time, within each of them, there is never any otherness at all’.²² The singular individual is the negative unity of the manifold categories, which themselves are immediately unified by the I as ‘pure category’ which, in its contradiction with the plurality of the manifold categories, is sublated in the I as singular individual … and so on.

For this reason, Hegel explains, consciousness is at this point ‘posited in a twofold manner’: it is both the constant movement between various moments, desperate (but always failing) to grasp real otherness, and the ‘motionless unity’, the ‘I am I’, proud of its immediate certainty. At this stage of idealism, consciousness is this movement within itself. (Compare this to the similarly navel-gazing condition of the stoic and skeptic, in the chapter on self-consciousness). Whenever rational consciousness (by which I mean, consciousness in the stage of Reason) thinks it has grasped an Other, the Other slips through its fingers like sand, turning out merely to be another moment of consciousness itself. There is always a thing in itself, supposedly to be found on the ‘other side’ of consciousness. At this moment, rational consciousness is at the impasse that Hegel described in the introduction:

Consciousness seems, as it were, to be incapable of getting behind the object to the object as it is in itself and not as the object is for consciousness.²³

In the last two paragraphs of his introduction to Reason, Hegel makes his conclusive critical statements on the idealism that represents the certainty (rather than the truth) of reason. As he puts it, this idealism – which, though it is best represented by Kant and Fichte, can be concisely summarised by Schopenhauer’s declaration that ‘the world is my representation’ – fails because it is abstract.²⁴ All reality, for this idealism, is ‘the pure mine of consciousness’; as we have seen, a notion this pure and simple cannot find a stable other to which it can relate itself. Consequently, it finds itself always turning to some ‘alien impact’ [fremden Anstoßes] in order to find something meaningful or contentful. Of course, since it regards truth as inhering in the I (the ‘unity of apperception’ in Kant), it is forced to denigrate any such alien externality as a mere phenomenon, a categorised appearance that is distinct from a thing in itself. ‘Reason condemns itself’, Harris writes, ‘to be a search in which it is known a priori that there can be no success, no finding’.²⁵