Subjectivity in the natural world

One of the tipoffs that Hegel’s own conception of idealism differs from more ordinary conceptions of idealism lies in one of his favourite metaphors which has to do with how animals are idealists.Footnote ¹ They do not take food to be untrue things or to be mere appearances of any underlying reality. They take it to be nutrition, and they are right. Animals are idealists not because they actively constitute the objects of their world. Rather, to use a different metaphor, things ‘show up’ in an animal’s sensory field as food because of the purposes the animal brings to bear on itself and its environment. Lettuce is not food for rabbits because rabbits create lettuce. Rather, lettuce shows up for rabbits as food because of the kind of creatures rabbits are, just as rabbits show up as food for foxes because of the kinds of creatures foxes are.Footnote ²

On the Hegelian picture, things in the world show up in our experience depending on the spontaneity at work in that experience. Food can show up to an animal but not to an iron spike. Likewise, to use Hegel’s example, animals can experience illness, a way in which their proper functioning is thwarted, whereas non-purposive entities, like a rock, cannot.Footnote ³ It is only for creatures with the proper organic functioning (and eventually nervous systems) that things can ‘show up’ as food, and only for self-conscious creatures can other things ‘show up’ in experience as states, constitutions, divinities, artworks, and ethical requirements.Footnote ⁴ Crucially for Hegel, this is not because the individual subject ‘constructs’ these kinds of things or imposes conceptual meaning on distinct and neutral sensible information. It is because of the kind of odd creature that self-conscious, concept-mongering organisms that humans are.

The world ‘shows up’ for creatures with a capacity for self-consciousness in a way that it cannot for non-self-conscious creatures. Since receptivity to the world is ‘within’ spontaneity (the conceptual) such that the world can show up in determinate ways to self-conscious creatures, there is nothing ‘outside’ spontaneity, and this means that spontaneity is boundless, unendlich (or ‘infinite’ as it is usually translated). Put in this way, Hegel’s idealism is not the idea the world is inherently spiritual but that there is nothing in principle in the world that is in principle unavailable for conceptual thought. Even things that cannot be directly experienced, such as the infinitely small and the infinitely large can show up for conceptual thought when and only when the appropriate conceptual apparatus has been constructed (for example, the differential and integral calculus). It is also an idealism in the further sense that the ‘totality’ of such things is only available to thought and not to intuition.

Even if Hegel’s idealism is not a monistic metaphysics of spirit (i.e., is not Schelling’s idealism), it is nonetheless metaphysics. Nor is Hegel’s project an investigation of something like ‘how we must think’ coupled with some view to the effect ‘and who cares what the world is really like.’ It is a direct descendent of Kant’s Critiques and Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre: In his Logic, it is the ‘science of science’, an account of explanatory adequacy, an account of accounts. It is more like what A. W. Moore and Robert Pippin have recently called ‘making sense of things’ and ‘making sense of making sense’ (although their conceptions of what it is to ‘make sense of making sense’ differ rather markedly).Footnote ⁵

If the Kantian and Fichtean project of idealism were to succeed, so Hegel concluded, we are required to fashion a more comprehensive conception of nature that had a place for rational agency within itself.Footnote ⁶ Hegel transformed that part of the project into what we can call his own kind of disenchanted Aristotelian naturalism. Indeed, this conception of disenchanted nature as explained through the natural sciences constitutes one of the greatest turning points in history:

The task of philosophy, on the other hand, is to ask about the conception of nature that is revealed in such empirically oriented research and to bring it into what Hegel calls the ‘diamond net’ of metaphysics — that is, to inquire into the ultimate intelligibility of this conception of nature, into what makes sense of things and makes sense of making sense necessarily. Nature means nothing, aims at nothing, and cannot organize itself into better or worse. This is ‘disenchanted’ nature. It is also nature as it must be.

Nonetheless, there is a place for functional teleology in the structure of organisms that discloses a more limited form of Aristotelian teleology. Living creatures sustain themselves and reproduce themselves, and the ‘inner purpose’ of a living thing is the way explanations of why it does what it does appeal to its nature as the form of life it is. (We nominalize the form of life in statements like, ‘The robin breeds in Spring.’) As noted, for Hegel, the concepts of disease and injury suggest that such explanations have a basis in a real feature of the world. The various organs of a plant or an animal perform various functions that are aspects (or ‘moments’ in Hegel’s terms) of the organism as a whole functioning well. Organisms (the ‘wholes’ of such organs) themselves have two general functions to fulfill: survival and reproduction, even though sometimes the requirements of each may conflict with the other. Because of this, things can be said to go well or badly for the organism (even if the animal does not have the neurological apparatus to note that something is going badly for it). When something external to the normal functioning of the organism interferes with it, and it is prevented (or has difficulty with) achieving the goals appropriate to its form of life, then it can said to be diseased. To say that an animal is in a diseased state is thus not merely a subjective requirement on our part. If the plant or animal is diseased, it really is diseased (and it is diseased not merely ‘for us’). If disease is real, then nature has functions (that is, purposes of a sort) within it, even though nature as a whole is thoroughly non-purposive. However, since what can count as a disease for the animal may be nourishment for the bacteria attacking it, nature has no way of balancing these realities out against each other. What is good for the predator is not good for the prey. Nature has no aim, and it makes no sense to talk of its making itself better. Such is the impotence — die Ohnmacht — of nature.Footnote ⁸

Moreover, although the emergence of life on earth itself fulfills no further purpose, life is nonetheless its own purpose — it is what both Hegel and Kant call a Selbstzweck — even though the purpose of life is distributed among many different creatures who do not share that purpose with each other. As having a purpose of staying alive and reproducing, some animals can also be said to respond to reasons that are more or less in the world. For example, the zebra running from the lion can be said to be responding to a good reason right there before it. More intelligent animals may even maintain a certain flexibility about how they do this and thus display a certain intelligence or at least a high level of cognitive skill. Hegel attributes subjectivity to those animals, so he clearly sees a kind of continuum at work there in the passages from life to animal life to human life. Things show up to such creatures because of the kind of creatures they are.

What then is the difference between animal life and human life? The non-human animal cannot, as both Aristotle and Hegel put it, entertain its purposes as purposes.Footnote ⁹ Humans are self-conscious primates, odd creatures in the natural order, not because they are made of different ‘stuff’ or because their mental events weirdly cause physical events but because they have a distinct kind of self-relation. In a move that Hegel picked up from Hölderlin (and from Fichte), he holds that our conscious life is an apperceptive life in which we are always, already ‘originally’ placed in a world of normative involvements. To have an apperceptive life is to have a way of moving within this world of involvements in which there is a normative awareness of what one is doing without there being any separate act of reflection accompanying one’s awareness. Moreover, this form of self-consciousness is part of the very makeup of conscious acts. To be judging, for example, is also to be aware that one is judging, that is, to know (if for example, one is asked) that one is judging and not, say, swimming, or cooking or gardening.Footnote ¹⁰ To be an apperceptive life — a subject — is to know that one is this form of life exactly by being the life that falls under the concept, and it falls under that concept by bringing itself under that concept.Footnote ¹¹

It is when something goes wrong in those involvements, or when somebody is challenged, that we, as it were, stand back from these involvements to evaluate them. This is standing back ‘as it were’ because in standing back, we are still standing somewhere, even if that somewhere becomes progressively more abstract as we have historically been driven to more abstract self-conceptions. An original division is introduced into self-consciousness because of its capacity to exercise such reflection on itself, and that capacity for reflection means that unlike other animals, human agents can entertain their purposes as purposes.Footnote ¹² It is worth stressing that apperception is not primarily an agent’s reflective relation to the status of her own judgments, although it involves a capacity for such reflection. The absolute identity of the two-in-one of which Hölderlin spoke (at least in the Being and Judgment fragment and which we can assume he conversed about with Hegel and Issac von Sinclair in Frankfurt) just is the apperceptive self. This conception of agency’s apperceptive self-relation comprises more or less the ground floor of Hegel’s metaphysics of subjectivity.

What Wittgenstein said in the Investigations — ‘Commanding, questioning, recounting, chatting, are as much a part of our natural history as walking, eating, drinking, playing’ — could easily have been endorsed by Hegel.Footnote ¹³ However, Hegel would add: That we naturally do these things makes all the difference in the world, since in doing so, we thereby make ourselves immediately into subjects, apperceptive selves. We do not cease to be natural creatures, but we do become natural creatures with a different form of self-relation. Here both Hegel and Hölderlin were following in the footsteps of Kant: What distinguishes us is not the stuff out of which we are made but the kinds of activities (like judging) which characterize us. Spirit is its own product, as Hegel provocatively states it, and as we — or, in the nominative form, spirit — develop ourselves in history, we acquire new capacities to respond to our ends as ends and not merely as drives, impulses, and natural needs.

This is so, Hegel thought, because there is a kind of logic to this that makes such a conception of subjectivity necessary. A subject is a substance that knows it is that kind of substance by bringing itself under the category, ‘subject.’Footnote ¹⁴ This ‘logic’ of sorts is a logic of intelligibility, both of what makes sense and a logic of when sense has been made. Although the story of the in’s and out’s of Hegel’s Logic is obviously too long to tell here, there are nonetheless some general things that can be said of it. What characterizes a large range of philosophical puzzles has to do with the kinds of infinite regresses that seem to follow on a certain type of reflection on them. Problems about the ‘given’ in knowledge are one (and relatively familiar) set: If to know one thing requires knowing another thing, the thought rapidly comes on the scene that there might well therefore be one thing one knows without having to know anything else (on pain of infinite regress or some bad form of circularity). What is bad about such infinite regresses is, as Wittgenstein at least claimed, ‘The reasoning that leads to an infinite regress is to be given up not “because in this way we can never reach the goal,” but because here there is no goal; so it makes no sense to say “we can never reach it.”’Footnote ¹⁵ One understands the infinite regress and resolves the problem in it by grasping the principle of the series that underlies it. (In the mathematics of Hegel’s day, that would be by virtue of the calculus.)

Reflection on these kinds of regress problems led Hegel to something like the following result, which we can summarize without having to give much of Hegel’s argument for it. We can distinguish two different types of assertions we make in trying to make sense of things. First, we can make assertions about individuals by pointing them out (‘That thing over there.’), classifying them (‘This is red’,), making generalizations about them (‘American Robins live on average 1.7 years’), or counting them. Second, we can distinguish those kinds of judgments from judgments like ‘The tie only looks green in the store but is blue in normal sunlight’ and ‘Deficiency in vitamin D may cause cognitive impairment in older adults’, in which we explain things by appeal to some underlying condition that is not immediately apparent in the mere observation of them. That is how we make sense of things in the most general way, but we also need a third way of making sense, namely, to make sense of when we make sense. We typically do that in judgments such as ‘What you just said does not follow from your premises,’ or ‘This makes no sense within the current standards of physics.’ These represent, very roughly, the ‘logics’ of Being, Essence, and Concept. ‘What is this and how many of them are there?’ is typically answered in one way that makes sense of things, whereas ‘Why does it look that way?’ or ‘Why did that happen?’ are typically answered in another way. ‘How does that follow?’ is typically answered in neither of those two ways.

Likewise, each of these two ways exhibits its own types of typical infinite regresses when subjected to philosophical interrogation. The first way (‘Being’) typically involves the kind of regress involved by characterizing one thing in terms of its difference from the other (but how do we know what the other is unless we contrast it with the first or with another thing, ad infinitum). The second way typically involves the problem of sorting out explanatory priorities, as we claim that what is doing the explaining is independent enough from what is being explained, yet is identifiable as what is doing the explaining only in its dependence on the explained. Such regresses are more typically oscillations between claiming independence and dependence. The third way – which involves making sense of making sense – logically culminates in the concept of thought’s capacity to make these judgments by being the kind of activity that exercises those powers, that is, the activity which brings itself under the concept of itself. Hegel called that the ‘absolute Idea’, which expresses the ‘true infinity’ of concepts inasmuch as it expresses the self-bounding nature of the normative.Footnote ¹⁶

Being the creatures we are, we are not just reliably differentially responding to the world. Our receptivity is already within our own spontaneity. We know what we know by receptive knowledge, but we know that we know by our spontaneity. In knowing about the world, we know (mostly non-reflectively) that we know (just as we apperceptively know what it is we are doing). We are also justifying our claims about the world, about ourselves, and holding ourselves accountable to ourselves and others — in short, making sense of things and making sense of ourselves. Our various acts of thinking are, as we might put it, manifestations, not instantiations, of the power of thought.Footnote ¹⁷ Now, what I take Hegel to claiming when he says things like, ‘Only the Idea is actual,’ is that a unified account of mind and world cannot do without an account of the specifically apperceptive engagement which primates such as ourselves orient ourselves, such even in full absorption in our current involvements, we nonetheless possess a self-consciousness of what we are doing — that one is reading a book, not hiking in the mountains or taking a bath.

Because we are such natural creatures, as Hegel stresses, ‘laws and principles have no immediate life or validity in themselves. The activity which puts them into operation and endows them with real existence has its source in the needs, impulses, inclinations, and passions of man.’Footnote ¹⁸ What is at work, wirklich, actual in the human world is that combination of ‘needs, passions, inclinations’ and our sense of what it is we are trying to do, have become, and what we can ultimately account for — only some of which may at any time be clear to us.

Hegel defines the Idea consistently across his mature works as the unity of concept and objectivity and, sometimes, as the unity of concept and reality. What Hegel calls the ‘Idea’ is his one-word shorthand for the ultimate expression of making sense of making sense. In the ‘Idea’, we aim at comprehending both how our norms (the various ‘concepts’) fit together with the world and therefore how, metaphorically, the world does or does not cooperate with us in our endeavours.

What counts as the ‘Idea’ has to do therefore with what we take to be really going on in our individual and collective lives, and here Hegel’s naturalism and his idealism have a substantive and controversial point to make.

In the Investigations, Wittgenstein remarks about a way of doing philosophy such that ‘one thinks that one is tracing the outline of the thing’s nature over and over again, and one is merely tracing round the frame through which we look at it.’ Wittgenstein hypothesized that philosophical problems are really manifestations of the way that ‘a picture held us captive. And we could not get outside it, for it lay in our language and language seemed to repeat it to us inexorably.’Footnote ¹⁹ Hegel would substitute: it was an Idea that held us captive, and we could not get outside of it. Such an ‘Idea’, as a comprehensive conception of what constitutes authority in a form of life, breaks down when it imposes unlivable tensions on those living in its terms.

The ‘Idea’ of what it was to be a thinking being was itself historical, sustained by the kinds of authority in making epistemic, ethical, religious, aesthetic and even philosophical claims across time. Such authority never has real existence except as recognized authority. What gets us ‘out’ of an Idea as a form of socially sustained authority is not so much a new and superior Idea but the breakdown of that Idea itself and where we end up landing as it falls apart around us. These breakdowns are dissolutions of meaning, when the general sense of things starts seeming senseless, and we cannot find a way to make sense of making sense. We carry on, but we do not understand what exactly it is we are doing.

This is part of Hegel’s naturalism, which dovetails with his idealism. We are self-conscious primates whose apperceptive orientations are rarely fully clear to ourselves, and as we work them out, we have historically found key elements of them to be unlivable. Hegel does not adhere to the more common reflective picture that we must ‘stand back’ or ‘stand above’ our various commitments and evaluate them or that we are to reflectively take on a practical identity from which to make such evaluations (a view which often claims to be ‘Kantian’ in spirit). In saying that, though, he is also not denying that, say, Greeks could ever ‘step back’ from their determinate commitments and, working within their Idea, make all kinds of adjustments to their practices, nor that they could even take note of great conflicts within their social order. That kind of making good on things is the work of what Hegel calls ‘the understanding,’ in which we often find ourselves with incompatible commitments and strive to bring everything into order. Nothing wrong with that — it is one way we speak of exercising rationality. More interesting to Hegel is how we deal with the consequences of such breakdown when we find ourselves committed but no longer really understanding what we are committed to. In those cases, we have to worry about whether our ‘Idea’ is itself not fundamentally at odds with itself.

It is a central part of the logic of Hegel’s Logic that since fundamentally subjectivity is to be understood in terms of matters like ‘following from premises’, ‘fitting into a larger view’, and the like, this means that, unlike a question such as ‘Why did the pipes burst yesterday?’, a question such as ‘Why do you think that?’ ultimately requires an answer in terms of a justifying reason, not an explanation by efficient causation.Footnote ²⁰ Now, Hegel’s Logic forces the conclusion that justifying reasons must take priority over explanatory reasons and not just from the subject’s own first-person point of view. From a third-person point of view, of course, we may say that the agent’s reason was false or misguided, etc., and that his real reason for action was not the promotion of rational nature as an end in itself (as he perhaps claimed) but simple jealousy. If we see reasons as mental events (instead of seeing them as the shape of agency itself), then we have to see them as causal elements in a series of events that may or may not lead to the actions with which they are related (as if often said to be required by such third person accounts). The alternative Hegelian view is that we have to see agency itself as a kind of status that has its own basic way of developing itself, such that failure to act on a reason has to be explained in a way similar to the way we explain disease — as something lying in the nature of things that prevents (or places barriers to) achieving the goals appropriate to its form of life, which in this case is that of rational agency. If so, then the problem with agency is not that external factors (as in disease) can thwart the appropriate functioning of our powers of knowledge and action. Our powers can be thwarted in themselves, when they impose impossible conditions on themselves or make the lives lived in terms of those reasons unlivable.

This is a much larger story and is part of Hegel’s theory of the breakdown of forms of life, a theme to which he devoted a good part of the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit and many of the lectures of his time in Berlin. Metaphorically speaking: If we were holy wills, then when we believe falsely or act wrongly, something must have gone wrong in our spontaneous capacities. Sometimes, since we are not holy wills, things do indeed go wrongly for us because of conditions external to ourselves, but sometimes, or so goes Hegel’s extended case, something does go wrong with our spontaneity. In those cases, as we noted, we go on as we do, but we no longer know exactly what we are doing. Such is alienation, and in those conditions we are not free. We are never holy wills.Footnote ²¹ Breakdowns occur both by virtue of external forces and of our own making.

This is Hegel’s version of what he took to be Spinoza’s fundamental insight: There is one world that appears to us in two ways, first as nature, then as a realm of normative statuses that are at odds with nature, and finally as one world, grasped in thought, or in Hegel’s terms, the Idea. This leads him, oddly enough, back to an idealist conception of a realism about reasons. Reasons are the significance that things have for us, given the possibilities we have as the creatures we are.Footnote ²² Reasons thus have to do with matters about which ‘success’ and ‘failure’ are appropriate assessments, and reasons are thus part of life, not for any particularly metaphysically abstruse grounds, but because significance (and the possibility of failure) only arises against the background of the evolution of life itself.

Forms of life can themselves fall into dissolution when they begin to cease making sense to those people, and they cease to make sense when some of their absolute commitments begin to manifest contradictions that were not immediately evident before that time and when they begin to be putting demands on people that cannot be things that they can live with over the long run. When that happens, the immediate self-conscious unity of the shape of life inevitably becomes more reflective, and as it becomes more clear that there may not be any to make sense of the crumbling state of affairs, it falls into dissolution. The people living in the ruins of that dissolution have to pick up the pieces, keep what still works, discard the rest, and create something new out of it. The German term for that process is Aufhebung (as both cancelling and preserving). Out of it come new reasons that have ‘immediate life and binding force’ for them. As Hegel puts it: