The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (46 page)

To return to the twelve fundamental
a priori
concepts that Kant recognized: for Kant these were tools that we use, from our vantage point within reality, to make our own distinctive sense of reality. To revert to the familiar metaphor, they were part of our spectacles. For Hegel fundamental concepts of this sort are at work in reality itself (
Encyclopedia
I, §42
Z
, p. 70). True, they can be used to make sense of reality. But this is because they are used by reality to make sense (of itself). They are constitutive of reality. Nor should we treat them as simply given. For Kant it was a brute fact that we use these twelve concepts. Hegel, as we saw in §4, seeks to
work out
what the concepts are – what they must be. He seeks to make sense
of
them, not just with them. (Cf.
Encyclopedia
I, §41.) Relatedly, although Kant divided his twelve concepts into four groups of three, in each of which the third ‘arises from the combination of the first two’ (Kant (
1998
), B110), and although he subsequently made much of that structure in the architectonic that he imposed on his system,
⁷⁹
Hegel sees an arbitrariness and an incompleteness in Kant’s taxonomy which is for him (Hegel) indicative of the fact that the full infinite system of concepts, while not infinite in the spurious sense of containing infinitely many, nevertheless contains many more than those twelve.
⁸⁰

Another objection that Hegel has to Kant’s enterprise is that it is impossible to provide a critique of our various epistemic faculties without presupposing them. He writes:

A main line of argument in the Critical Philosophy bids us pause before proceeding to inquire into God or into the true being of things, and tells us first of all to examine the faculty of cognition and see whether it is equal to such an effort. We ought, says Kant, to become acquainted with the instrument, before we undertake the work for which it is to be employed; for if the instrument be insufficient, all our trouble will be spent in vain…. [Now in] the case of other instruments, we can try to criticize them in other ways than by setting about the special work for which they are destined. But the examination of knowledge 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. (
Encyclopedia
I, §10, p. 14, translation very slightly adapted; cf.
Phenomenology
, Introduction, ¶73, and
Science of Logic
, I.i, ‘With What Must the Science Begin?’, p. 68)

Kant might reply that this objection misfires when the enterprise takes the form of using one faculty to provide a critique of another, say reason to provide a critique of understanding – which accords with the two-level view of these two faculties sketched above. But

• Kant did also use reason to provide a critique of reason

• Hegel would in any case reject such a two-level view, not because he would deny that understanding is in some sense inferior to reason, but because he would see its inferiority as the inferiority of that which is preserved in its superior, through
Aufhebung

and anyway,

• not even Kant held understanding and reason to work independently of each other, or at least not independently enough to address Hegel’s objection (see e.g. Kant (
1998
), A298–302/B355–359 and A657–659/B685–687).

It is important, however, to realize that Hegel’s objection is not to the very project of using our epistemic faculties to provide their own critique, only to any pretensions of non-circularity in doing so.
⁸¹
He later voices the same objection and adds:

True, … the forms of thought should be subjected to a scrutiny before they are used: yet what is this scrutiny but
ipso facto
a cognition? So that what we want is to combine in our process of inquiry the actions of the forms of thought with a criticism of them. The forms of thought … are at once the object of research and the action of that object. (
Encyclopedia
I, §41
Z
, p. 66)

Here we see another instance of a pattern which I have already noted in both Descartes (
Ch. 1
, §4) and Hume (
Ch. 4
, §4), and which I have further identified as a feature of Quine’s naturalized epistemology, namely the pattern in which the faculties that we use to make sense of our own sense-making are precisely what we are thereby making sense of.
⁸²

This is significant for two related reasons. The first has to do with the relative assessment of Kant and Hegel. It is easy to see Kant as the more
level-headed of the two, and Hegel as the wild if systematic visionary. Yet when Hegel insists that we cannot make sense of our own most basic sense-making save from a point of immersion in it, we are reminded that it was Kant who tried to take a critical step back from that sense-making; who accorded it a transcendental structure which he took to be at the same time the structure of what we make sense of; who was then forced to draw a radical distinction between appearance and reality; who was obliged to count even space and time as features (merely) of appearance; who by contrast counted our freedom, which he could not bring himself to disavow, as a feature of reality; who accordingly held the originary exercise of our freedom to be an unlocated, timeless exercise of purely rational self-legislation; who grounded the demands of morality in this self-legislation; and who thus severed those demands, at least to that extent, from the concrete practicalities of our shared life together. At times he makes Hegel look like a model of sobriety.
⁸³

The second reason why it is significant that Hegel does not raise any objection to our using faculties of sense-making in order to make sense of those same faculties has to do with the Fichtean choice paraded in the previous chapter. This was between, in my terminology, transcendentalism and naturalism. There is a sense in which Hegel adopts naturalism. For he holds that we make sense of things by being in the midst of them: we are ourselves among the things we make sense of. Nevertheless, the sense in which Hegel adopts naturalism is tenuous. There is also a sense, certainly no more tenuous, in which he adopts transcendentalism. For he also holds, as we saw in §3, that the things we make sense of are transcendentally conditioned by concepts that we use in making sense of them. What Hegel really does, of course, is to challenge the dichotomy. It is another instance of ‘the abstract “either-or”’ of understanding. We could say that he adopts ‘transcendentalism-cum-naturalism’.
⁸⁴

Hegel’s own term for his position is ‘absolute idealism’ (
Encyclopedia
I, §45
Z
, p. 73, and §160
Z
, p. 223). He chooses this term to distinguish his position from Kant’s, which he calls ‘subjective idealism’ (ibid., §45
Z
, p. 73).
⁸⁵
His position is in many respects more radical than Kant’s, inasmuch as it draws no ultimate distinction between sense-making and reality. Things are as they are because of the sense-making at work in them, a sense-making whose object is ultimately itself, making sense. This is ‘absolute’ sense-making. But, for reasons that I have just tried to indicate, Hegel’s position is also in many respects more restrained than Kant’s. Though it has
commerce with the absolute, it has no commerce with the transcendent. ‘The absolute is … directly before us, so present that so long as we think, we must … always carry it with us and always use it’ (
Encyclopedia
I, §24
Z
, p. 40). ‘Absolute idealism’ is an entirely appropriate label.
⁸⁶

9. The Implications for Metaphysics

What, finally, are the implications of all of this for metaphysics?

I have already pointed out (§4) that Hegel’s logic is a paradigm of metaphysics on my definition. I also subsequently alluded to the closely related fact (§7) that the resolution of contradiction in the infinite whole is itself a metaphysical exercise of sorts. This is because it is a way of making sense of contradiction – something that reason does but understanding cannot do – at what must be, in the nature of the case, the highest level of generality.

On my conception of metaphysics, then, Hegel is as great a champion of metaphysics as there could be. Metaphysics is at the heart of his system. Reason, the ground of maximally general sense-making,
is
reality. To paraphrase a quotation from §4: to him who makes maximally general sense of things, things make maximally general sense.

But even on Hegel’s own conception (which is in any case not so very different from mine) there is a glorious ineluctability about metaphysics. ‘Metaphysics,’ he tells us, ‘[is] the science of things set and held in thoughts – thoughts accredited able to express the essential reality of things’ (
Encyclopedia
I, §24, p. 36, emphasis removed). He later adds that ‘metaphysics is nothing but the range of universal thought-determinations, and as it were the diamond-net into which we bring everything in order to make it intelligible’ (
Encyclopedia
II, §246, Addition, p. 62). And he says:

Newton gave physics an express warning to beware of metaphysics …; but, to his honour be it said, he did not by any means obey his own warning. The only mere physicists are the animals: they alone do not think: while man is a thinking being and a born metaphysician. The real question is not whether we shall apply metaphysics, but whether our metaphysics [is] of the right kind: in other words, whether we are not … adopting one-sided forms of thought, rigidly fixed by understanding, and making these the basis of our theoretical as well as our practical work. (
Encyclopedia
I, §98
Z
, p. 144)
⁸⁷

With metaphysics conceived in this way, and standing in this relation to his system as a whole, Hegel is inevitably concerned as much with the
nature of metaphysics as with any question that arises within metaphysics. Not that that is an especially Hegelian way of putting the matter. For this very distinction is yet another that he would renounce. It is here, more than anywhere else in the historical story that I am telling, that any attempt to disentangle the metaphysical from the meta-metaphysical is futile. To make sense of reality, at the highest level of generality, is on Hegel’s conception to make sense of how reality makes sense of reality at the highest level of generality (
Phenomenology
, Introduction, ¶88, and
Encyclopedia
I, §17).

Hegel’s impatience with such distinctions is further evidenced in his relation to the three questions that I posed in §6 of the Introduction, about the scope and limits of metaphysics. In all three cases Hegel would challenge the contrast presupposed in the question. This is so even in the case of the Novelty Question, where there is greatest temptation to accredit him with a simple and unequivocal answer. In his own sacrifice of the commonplaces of understanding, to make way for the extravagances of reason, he may appear to be a paradigmatically ‘revisionary’ metaphysician, with a corresponding commitment to the possibility of radically new forms of sense-making. In a way he is. But his commitment is not to radically new forms of sense-making
as opposed to
standard forms: the former must evolve out of the latter, which must in turn be preserved in the former, in the way that is characteristic of
Aufhebung
. As Hegel himself puts it:

Philosophic thought … possesses, in addition to the common forms, some forms of its own … [but] speculative logic [i.e. the logic of these philosophic forms of thought] contains all previous logic and metaphysics: it preserves the same forms of thought, the same laws and objects – while at the same time remodelling and expanding them with wider categories. (
Encyclopedia
I, §9, p. 13, capitalization altered to suit the new division into sentences)

The early modern period draws to a close, then, with a profoundly self-conscious assault on a number of popular conceptions about the scope and limits of metaphysics and about how these are affected by the geometry of sense-making. This is a continuation of the process that we saw initiated in Hume and Kant, of reflecting on what sense can be made of things, at the highest level of generality, by reflecting on what sense can be made of things at all. It heralds a period in the history of (meta-)metaphysics of unprecedented preoccupation, and, it must be said, uneasy preoccupation, with sense itself.

1
Throughout this chapter I use the following abbreviations for Hegel’s works:
Encyclopedia
I for Hegel (
1975a
);
Encyclopedia
II for Hegel (
1970
);
Encyclopedia
III for Hegel (
1971
);
Faith and Knowledge
for Hegel (
1977b
);
Fichte and Schelling
for Hegel (
1977a
);
Medieval and Modern Philosophy
for Hegel (
1995
);
Phenomenology
for Hegel (
1979
);
Philosophy of Right
for Hegel (
1942
);
Reason in History
for Hegel (
1975b
);
Science of Logic
for Hegel (
1969
);
The Concept of Religion
for Hegel (
1984
); and
The Consummate Religion
for Hegel (
1988
). The use of a ‘
Z
’ in references to
Encyclopedia
I and II stands for ‘
Zusatz
’ and indicates one of the supplementary passages based on students’ notes: I shall quote from these passages as though from Hegel himself, though attributions based on these quotations must be treated with due circumspection. In giving non-page references to the
Science of Logic
I adopt the convention whereby ‘I.i.ii.2C(a)’ names Vol. One, Bk One, §Two,
Ch. 2
C(
a
) and so forth. Note: in my quotations from these works I remove the capitalization in accord with G.A. Cohen’s policy, as cited in
Ch. 6
, n. 2.