Against Pure Thought

In 1784, Hamann wrote a brief text called Metacritique on the Purism of Reason in reaction to Kant’s first Critique. The title gives to the word ‘metacritique’ the ironical meaning of being a critique (in a non-Kantian way) of a critique (in a Kantian way). In that text, the so-called ‘magician from the north’ tried to show that the starting point for Kant’s critique was incorrect: there is no such a thing as pure reason, for reason operates only by virtue of language. For Hamann, this is tantamount to saying that reason is ‘impure.’ Following Hamann, it is not reason but its alleged purismus that should be the target of critiques, for it forgets “what nature keeps together: sensibility and understanding.”^{Footnote 3} This unity is contained in our language.

A few years later, in 1799, Herder took his friend and mentor’s idea and wrote a massive text called: A Metacritique to the Critique of Pure Reason. Once again, the target was Kant and his refusal to depart from the ‘impurity of reason’ as the first condition of possibility of any category of understanding. The Herderian metacritique states that, in order to criticize reason, it is necessary to be aware of its misleading uses of language. It is a ‘metacritique’ in the sense that is not just reason but its language that must be criticized. Thus, as he famously states: ontology should actually be philosophy of language.^{Footnote 4}

According to Hegel himself, neither text has anything in common but the title.^{Footnote 5} However, for both Hamann and Herder, Kant’s main problem in the first Critique lies in the fact that the master of Königsberg did not take into account language and its relation to reason and to knowledge. Language, furthermore, does not have to be seen as a tool but as a ‘product’ [Werk] of the activity of thought. This last point is not clearly stated in Hamann’s text but it is a strong statement running throughout Herder’s work.

Although there are differences in the use of the concept, we can define ‘metacritique’ in a general way as a kind of awareness of the fact that any attempt to think about reason’s limits and knowledge’s conditions of possibilities, must take into account both the limits and the possibilities of language, as well as their relation to thought. I believe Hegel shares this philosophical awareness.

Several authors who have studied Hegel’s idea of language, such as Theodor Bodammer, Günter Wohlfart, John McCumber, Jere O’Neill Surber, Charles Taylor, or more recently, Michael Forster, have found similarities—or at least the possibility of establishing them—between Herder’s thesis and some Hegelian statements on language and reason. Some of them have addressed the particular question of whether Hegel has a metacritical standpoint. Most of them have answered that he does not, in particular Surber and McCumber.^{Footnote 6}

I will not argue against their conclusion, which seems correct to a certain extent (given that Hegel’s metacritical standpoint is not Herderian, through and through). However, these authors have nonetheless reached this conclusion by following the wrong assumptions.^{Footnote 7} They have argued that ‘metacritique,’ as Herder puts it, signify that reason and language are identical, and that language is the product of a given society.

For Surber, this comes to mean that language is historical and thus contingent. Accordingly, reason is also historical and contingent. Contrary to this position, Surber adds, Hegel’s reason must be considered pure.^{Footnote 8} In other words, thinking is post-linguistic^{Footnote 9} and it cannot have a contingent content.

For his part, McCumber stresses that if thought is limited by its form of expression (i.e., language), then thought is not self-constitutive (because it needs language) and is, on the contrary, finite. No finite linguistic thought could account for the absolute, since in order to do so an infinite thought is needed. Here, McCumber identifies the term ‘absolute’ with the term ‘infinite’ and thus concludes that thought, in Hegel’s philosophy, should be seen as infinite, which means that it is not limited by its form of expression.^{Footnote 10}

In my view, Hegel shares with Hamann and Herder a project that strives to find the conditions for the possibility of philosophical knowledge by means of language. There is nevertheless a very important difference: whilst, for Herder, reason is impure, not only because it needs language but also because the concepts that we use to think come from our natural language,^{Footnote 11} Hegel distinguishes between two ways of thinking. He assumes that reason is impure because it needs language but he also proposes going beyond natural language and natural ways of ‘representation.’ In this sense, philosophical language does not appear in Herder’s deflationary mode. On the contrary, philosophical thought and its language acquire, in Hegel’s view, features that make this particular language different from natural language and ‘natural’ thought.

It is in the section called ‘Psychology’ from the Philosophy of Spirit from the Encyclopaedia where Hegel admits the impurity of reason. Here, Hegel shows the organic movement of intelligence [organische Entwicklung der Intelligenz]^{Footnote 12} and the very strongly associated emergence of linguistic thought.^{Footnote 13} In this ‘organic’ movement, the linguistic sign appears as one of the most important stages, the stage of imagination [Einbildungskraft].

It is true that, for Hegel, signs refer to something. It must be said, however, that this thing has a sui generis otherness. The ‘otherness’ of the thing does not lie in the fact that the thing is given or that the thing is placed at an ontological realm of reality, different from the realm of the mind; rather, intelligence is actually self-posited in the thing. The thing is now located on the side of an exteriority within intelligence itself.^{Footnote 14}

But what does Hegel understand by ‘thing’? There are two German terms that Hegel uses to talk about things: ‘Ding’ and ‘Sache.’ While, on the one hand, ‘Ding’ is an object considered from the point of view of the intelligence that is not yet in its interiority, ‘Sache,’ on the other, is the term Hegel uses to indicate that intelligence itself has become the object of what it is considering, as its ‘other.’ In other words, this thing is the embodiment of the intelligence and is the real meaning of a linguistic sign.

Surber focuses on the difference between signs and names. Names are the product of another stage of intelligence, namely, memory. He explains their difference by opposing an alleged sensibility of signs and an alleged purity of names. According to Surber, Hegel’s claim that we think in names [es ist in Namen, daβ wir denken]^{Footnote 15} means that thought is not sensible, contingent, social, and impure but rather free of contingent content. For him, signs refer to an external (i.e., ontologically differentiated realm, independent and outside the subject) reality that gives them meaning, while names are pure in the sense that they do not mean or refer to any given object in the cultural (external, contingent) world. He thus concludes that if though thinks in names, thought is post-linguistical.^{Footnote 16}

But Surber misses out on some very important remarks that Hegel makes on sensibility, for example, the one stating that it is a mistake [Irrtum] to assume that sensibility gets its input from outside.^{Footnote 17}

To signify, to mean [bedeuten], is not equivalent to referring to something outside the subject’s mind. Meaning is what the sign refers to as already being in the pure frame of the intelligence. Meaning has nothing to do with any alleged ontological difference between the realm of things and the realm of words, such as what naïve realism or logical atomism could state. Signs do not refer to some external reality. Rather, meaning goes from the subjective to the objective in the one realm of intelligence.^{Footnote 18}

In other words, the meaning and the sign are both simultaneously outside, that is, they are the external thing [Sache]. But the representation the sign builds is external insofar as it is posited intuition or an intuition inside the intelligence.^{Footnote 19}

What Surber fails to see is that, for Hegel, signs are not contingent externalities, but rather the matter of the internal realm of intelligence, which is still placed beside the thing [Sache]. He fails to see that the process of intelligence towards itself is always a successive or progressive movement of interiorizations and that signs and their meanings are already an element of such interiority.

As José Manuel Sánchez de León rightly sees, a sign, for Hegel, is the connection of thought to the sensible or intuitive side of cognition.^{Footnote 20} Yet, at the same time, the sign is something produced spontaneously by the intelligence^{Footnote 21} at the level of imagination. Thus, it is not that linguistic signs are ‘sensible’ and, therefore, external (in a naïve, realistic manner) and contingent. This means rather that sensible signs, as signs of intelligence, are already produced as such by the intelligence itself.^{Footnote 22} Hegel states:

This creation of an ‘internal exteriority,’ that is, an exteriority within the intelligence,^{Footnote 24} can lead us to the comprehension of an extremely important concept within the economy of intelligence’s development: theoretical freedom,^{Footnote 25} which I’ll refer to later. First, let us also see how Hegel concludes from this inwardness on the importance of language for thought. He writes:

Here Hegel states that it is absurd to imagine that thought can exist without words. But the absurdity of this affirmation is not that we cannot separate thought and words. It is indeed possible to think without language. An important conclusion comes from this, namely: thought and language are not identical. However, even if thought and language are not identical, they cannot actually [wirklich] be without each other. Thus, it is absurd to believe that, without words, thought can have, as Hegel puts it, a genuine reality. Hence, the aphasic thought, far from being the candidate to represent the alleged pure thought of philosophy Surber wants to characterize (that is, the alleged post-linguistical thought needed to think philosophically), is, on the contrary, a confusing, imprecise, and defective one.

The impurity of thought that can be derived from here does not mean, however, that thought is inhabited by strange elements when it actually exists i.e., by something that once was outside—as naïve realism would have it. Exteriority, as seen earlier, is only as such within the framework of intelligence, that is, in its interiority. Thus, freedom of thought does not mean that thought is rid of words or of things coming from an external reality. Quite the opposite: our thoughts need words in order to be free since words are the product of the act of self-determination of intelligence and are what makes thought actual. It is why Hegel himself says: “But it is also ridiculous to regard the attachment of thought to words as a defect of thought and a misfortune.”^{Footnote 27}

Furthermore, by the already mentioned ‘organic development of intelligence,’ Hegel meant that thought is present in every step of the formation of words (sensibility, imagination, memory) as the activity that makes them be.^{Footnote 28}

At the beginning of this section, I stated that, although the different usages of this word, ‘metacritique’ is a philosophical position that presupposes the fact that any attempt to think about reason’s limits and knowledge’s conditions of possibilities must take into account both the limits and the possibilities of language, as well as their relation to thought. Thought and language are thus mutually dependant. This constitutes a solid base to affirm that Hegel endorses a metacritical position, as defined above.

Additional specifications are nonetheless needed in order to approach a complete characterization of Hegel’s metacritical view on language and thought. In particular, we must take into account that, rather than just being a kind of container of words, thought has another function: it establishes, as Alfredo Ferrarin puts it, the semiotic relationship^{Footnote 29} between names.

One must also be aware of the fact that, despite Hegel’s assumption about thought’s impurity, he does not identify philosophical thought or concrete language of the absolute, with everyday language. This is an important point that separates him from Herder.

I believe that we must abandon everyday language or the formal, representative way of thought, which Hegel calls ‘abstract,’^{Footnote 30} in order to attain a philosophical one. The usual and formal way of thought is precisely the way understanding imposes ‘mechanical’ relations between names. Let us look at these points more closely.

From Abstract to Concrete Language

As we have just seen, signs do not refer to an objective, external, word—as naïve realism would have it. And consequently names do not constitute the level at which this alleged opposition would be surmounted, as Surber believes. How then are names to be characterized?

For Hegel, names are the product of memory. Unlike signs, they do not have meaning [Bedeutung]. This is not to say that names are absurd. This only points to the fact that the separation between the objective and subjective pole of intelligence is sublated.^{Footnote 31} Hegel says:

Names do not ‘mean.’ They are not signs and therefore they are no longer related to things [Sache]. But that does not mean that things have disappeared. Rather, it is the relatedness existing at the level of imagination (the level of intelligence where signs are created) that is sublated. There is no more need to relate the subjective and the objective poles (signs and things) of intelligence since names now become the things themselves. We are moving away from representation and approaching thinking, the final stage of the organic development of intelligence. Memory [Gedächtnis] constitutes this final stage.

The realm of memory points out to what Hegel understands to be the ‘freedom of thought.’ Thought, for Hegel, is free. Its freedom does not mean that it lacks content [Stoff], but rather means that it can create its own contents and organize them.^{Footnote 33} Memory is the first stage where this autonomy of thought can be clearly perceived. As being contained in memory, names relate only to other names.^{Footnote 34} Hegel thus states:

But even if memory constitutes the step leading from representation to thought, memory will play a fundamental role in the characterization of representational thought, better called ‘understanding’ [Verstand] because memory will give understanding its mechanical semantics. What is meant by ‘mechanical’? This is something we are going to find out.

Mechanical Memory

Understanding appears as the representational way of thinking. This, for Hegel, means that the understanding places [stellt] its objects in front of [vor] it. To represent [vorstellen] means, for Hegel, to think abstractly.^{Footnote 36} Why? As Hegel suggests in his brief text, Who thinks abstractly?, to think in an abstract way is to assume that things are only as they appear to us under certain conditions, that they don’t change, and that they are not dependent on historical and social conditions.^{Footnote 37}

In addition, to think abstractly means to perceive qualities as discrete elements of an object. In other words, it means to believe that several qualities of an object define the object, but without being able to see these qualities in their mutual determination. This mutual determination is what Hegel will call ‘inner relation.’ The ‘inner relation’ between names is opposed to their ‘outer relation.’

This ‘outer relation’ can be indicated with a German word Hegel uses playfully: auswendig.^{Footnote 38} This word refers to a memory that learns things by heart. To learn things by heart means, for Hegel, a ‘mechanical’ or ‘automatized’ way of learning relations between names (that is, nets of inferences between names already constructed).

But I contend that he uses the term ‘auswendig’ not only to stress that we learn things by heart but also to stress that the relation between names at this level is external. This externality is the unilateral way of being of understanding. Hegel states:

With memory and its names, we are still in the representational way of thinking because we are still in an external form of relating names. In this case, the word ‘external’ does not mean, as in the previous case, a differentiated realm of reality—as naïve realism would have it—nor the ‘externality’ within interiority, as in the case with signs. ‘Exteriority,’ in this new context, is equivalent to the act of juxtaposing names, a sort of blindness of the immanent relatedness between them.

Just as when I put a book next to another book on a shelf, I put a word next to another word in a sentence. This ‘next to’ is what Hegel calls ‘exteriority.’ Exteriority’ in this sense also implies that names find themselves contingently within a realm that gathers them together (the shelf, the sentence). This new way of conceiving exteriority, different from the word ‘exteriority’ used before, depicts what takes place at the level of ‘mechanical’ memory and abstract understanding.

As Hegel suggests, at this stage, the realization of intelligence has not yet been achieved as true thought. Intelligence falls again in a new opposition between names and grammar or, better expressed, between content and form. Grammar is not directly related to the historical character of language but to a kind of ‘a-historical’ structure which is understanding^{Footnote 40} itself as a dividing and fixing force. Hegel is using a distinction that Humboldt himself makes between the material aspect of languages (words) and the formal aspects of it (grammatical rules).

Hegel knew Humboldt’s work. In the Encyclopaedia, he cites Humboldt’s study Über den Dualis.^{Footnote 41} Humboldt refers to grammar as ‘formal’ but he insists throughout his work, that forms must be taken as regulative ideas, not as existing things.^{Footnote 42} Hegel is aware of Humboldt’s thesis on the historicity of languages and the variety of linguistical families. But he attributed non-historical features to grammar.

Understanding generates representations [Vorstellungen] because it puts the form (grammar) upon the content of memory, that is, names. Names are ordered by understanding. It creates an external relation to each other.

Accordingly, memory is mechanical when it represents, because this is the moment were intelligence juxtaposes its content. Understanding fixes and thus mechanizes the relations of its contents for which the dividing force of the understanding is required. Representations are objects without internal unity.^{Footnote 43}

Mechanical memory contains the ‘stones’ for the building of thought, but it is not the building itself because stones do not have life. Hegel states: “The relationship between the stones and the house is not determined by their nature [because it] is mechanical. If the goal, the soul, does not lie in what is living, then every member stops being what it is only in its relationship to life.”^{Footnote 44}

Hegel is thereby suggesting that, in order to comprehend the real relation between content and form, thought must be conceived of as something gifted with life. To continue with the metaphor, the stones (or names for that matter) must be alive in order to be the building. In other words, names must have ‘spirit’^{Footnote 45}; they must grasp their own content. Hegel states once more: “[…] in intellectual thinking [verständigen Denken], the content is indifferent to its form, while in rational or conceptual cognition [vernünftigen oder begreifenden Erkennen] the content produces its form from its own self.”^{Footnote 46}

This is a very important statement. Hegel makes clear that there are two kinds of thought: representational thought and rational knowledge. The first one is free insofar as the contents it possesses are the result of the intelligence activity. But in this kind of thought content (names of mechanical memory) and form (grammar) are just related. Relations imply a persistent separation between the elements at play. Both extremes are thus indifferent to each other (names regarding grammar or content regarding form). On the contrary, a rational thought does not establish any relation between its contents. Rather, contents are able to produce themselves in virtue of the presence of the form within themselves.

This second type of thought, Hegel claims, implies the self-production of contents. This self-production cannot be achieved unilaterally. Contents must, with respect to the form they generate, find themselves in a mutual movement of production. This is the turning point from a mechanical to an organic memory.

Organic Memory

Hegel states: “[…] thinking must not remain abstract, formal thinking, for this dismembers the content of truth; it must develop into concrete thinking, into conceptual cognition.”^{Footnote 47} For Hegel, as I will show in this section, “[p]hilosophical language is concrete.”^{Footnote 48}

While understanding appears as a dividing force, Hegel characterizes concrete thought as the one that can conceptualize [begreifen]. Thought will be depicted as unifying and syllogism-making [schlieβende].^{Footnote 49}

I believe that this opposition between two kinds of thought is the real problem and the real difference between two kinds of language: everyday language and philosophical language. I contend that this is the key to understanding Hegel’s own metacritical position.

Concrete thought is, as I will argue, only possible if names become concepts. Understanding must become reason, concrete thought, by overcoming [aufheben] its dividing force.

Names are, for Hegel, souvenirs of souvenirs,^{Footnote 50} interiorization of former interiorizations, namely, of signs. This double souvenir allows for the completeness of intelligence (the completeness towards which intelligence aims in its organic development) for it shows the progressive sublation of any sort of exteriority and the attainment of a more enclosed domain which is reason. Only when intelligence has reached its final stage does it become reason. As such, reason is able to grasp, to comprehend [begreifen], to really think. Real thinking must sublate the representations of the understanding. Hegel says:

The step leading from names to concepts can be grasped by taking into account what I call the ‘organic memory.’ As said at the beginning of this paper, Hegel does not use this expression. I allow myself to do so assuming, among other things, that the way Hegel understands organic movement is closely related to what he understands as the teleological, self-constituting processes (this is, in the end, true subjectivity). Final causes sublate the ‘mechanism’ of efficient causes, hence, thought sublates (mechanical) memory by becoming organic.^{Footnote 52} I argue that it is possible to see a further movement of sublation of mechanical memory, which he also refers to as ‘organic memory.’^{Footnote 53}

Fulda also sees that there are some non-developed issues concerning memory in Hegel’s Encyclopaedia. He admits that Aristotelian traces in the constitution of Hegel’s section Psychology are unarguable. It could thus be expected that Hegel’s concept of memory is similar to the Aristotelian memory [mneme]. However, he also reveals, quite convincingly, that Hegel does not share the Aristotelian thesis in which memory finds itself in an accidental relation [kata simbebekos] to thought.^{Footnote 54} The Aristotelian mneme is related to fantasy, not to thought (or, if it is, only accidentally so). In contrast, memory, for Hegel, has sublated imagination. Indeed, both imagination and memory have something in common, namely, their capacity of interiorization [Erinnerung]. Memory, however, contains names, not signs, as we have already seen. For this reason, memory is, for Hegel, constitutive of thought and not accidentally related to it. However, there are, as we have seen, two kinds of thought: understanding and reason. Where should organic memory be placed?

Fulda rightly sees that memory, in Hegel’s account, is between two processes. On the one hand, memory can be found working for the unification of intelligence and its signs by transforming signs into names. This is the process we just left behind in mechanical memory. On the other hand, it can be found on the side of achieved intelligence, that is, on the side of reason or of thought, which is the activity of actually having thoughts.^{Footnote 55} In this last sense, Fulda, following Hegel, points out that memory is not just mechanically but also organically related to thought. So, this is where organic memory should be found. But, what is the particularity of this new ‘relatedness’ between memory and thought, most of all taking into account that the development of intelligence is itself an organic development?^{Footnote 56} In other words, to say ‘organism’ is to say a self-generating movement, thus not only memory but also imagination and intuition are organically related to thought. This observation highlights the difficulty stressed by Hegel:

On the one hand, we can ask: if everything in intelligence follows an organic movement, why then is memory called ‘mechanical’? And, on the other, how can we understand an ‘organic memory’? Elisa Magrì has answered that memory is mechanical because memory is the efficient cause of thought.^{Footnote 58} I disagree with this reading: memory is not the efficient cause of thought because it is not external to thought, as efficient causes are.

Mechanical memory is a movement within thought that characterizes it as auswendig. I contend that organic memory must be understood as its sublation.^{Footnote 59} To sublate the representational character of intelligence means that thought must integrate that which understanding exteriorizes—its Auswendigkeit or externality, so to speak. Only by bringing to its interiority [Inwendigkeit]^{Footnote 60} what is separated by understanding, thought is able to be with itself [bei sich]. This means that organic memory brings in fluidity into names. Thus, the specificity of organic memory lies in the fact that it does not relate two differentiated names, as mechanical memory did, but is ‘self-relatedness.’ Memory, as organic, is implicated in the self-generating process of thought.^{Footnote 61}

Only by sublating this external relation will memory be able to organize its content with an immanent form. Without this immanent form, contents of mechanical memory will have no sense [Sinn]. That is to say that they will lack an internal force capable of relating them. Without thought, names find themselves in a simple succession and external (juxtaposed only) to each other. Only by virtue of organic memory “sense, Hegel says, interrupts the simple mechanism of memory.”^{Footnote 62}

Organic memory is the memory whose contents are no longer names without sense but contents creating their own form.^{Footnote 63} Contents that create their own form are concepts [Begriffe]. When memory changes from mechanical to organic, it identifies completely with thought whose activity is to apprehend [begreifen]. When organic memory becomes thought, thought then becomes conceptual and is, therefore, capable of judging and creating syllogisms.^{Footnote 64} This last logical product can be defined as teleological movements.^{Footnote 65} The ‘sense’ that the content of organic memory has must be understood as a direction. When a name acquires its sense, the name has become a concept because within this name there is a direction, a direction towards its completion.

Now, it is possible to say that to think in names, as Hegel puts it, means two things: if thought results from understanding, it means to remain in representations, which are fixed. But to think in names through organic memory is to think names as teleological movements. This transforms names into concepts. Bearing this in mind, we understand why intelligence must, as Hegel says, determine the simplicity of names with their inner difference. As he states in the Science of Logic, the capacity of the educated [gebildet] thought is to see, even in the smaller natures, an internal unity and a necessity in the union of what constitutes them.^{Footnote 66}

For Hegel, a concept is necessary to the extent that it possesses a movement that has led it to itself, that is, to the extent that its determinations have been appearing one by one. These ‘apparitions’ or moments [Momente] are possible by virtue of the concept’s own poietical power and not due to external causes. To comprehend or grasp [begreifen] is to notice that objects of knowledge are bound together, not only by an inferential network but also by a necessary sequence of progressive determinations.

Organic memory is organically bound to thought; it makes the historicity (or developmental character) of the objects of thought possible. Everything that is philosophically grasped is an immanent teleological activity. We can think about Hegelian concepts such as ‘history,’‘ freedom,’ ‘consciousness,’ or even ‘Concept.’ [Begriff]. They are concepts in the Hegelian way only if they show how they form their own sense as self-development. In the Phenomenology of Spirit, for instance, Hegel has shown how ‘consciousness’ achieved its truer being. This achievement would not be possible if consciousness did not experience itself.

The Science of Logic is also a good example of what organic development means.^{Footnote 67} The ‘Concept’ moves generating itself, towards itself.^{Footnote 68} This relatedness is possible only by what Gwendolyn Jarczyk has shown to be, de tout temps, moving this development forward.^{Footnote 69} The driving force at work in every step of the journey is the Concept itself as its form, or as universal.

Mechanical memory has helped us to understand what abstract thought is by revealing the externality [Auswendigkeit] or persistent ‘indifferent’ [gleichgültig] relation between names and grammar. Organic memory has allowed us a better comprehension of what is concrete, philosophical language, by revealing that the sense of a name is not given externally, by a definition in a sentence, but by a construction taking place in its immanent self-developing movement. It thus becomes a concept.

Philosophical Language at a Practical Level

Surber’s mistaken interpretation about the purity of thought has to do with his artificial separation between the theoretical and the practical realms. By doing so, he fails to see that thought is part of a broader sphere, that is to say, the social world it belongs to and that it contributes to create.^{Footnote 70} Freedom (theoretical, as well as practical) does not mean, for Hegel, the absence of determinations. On the contrary, as we have seen in relation to theoretical freedom, thought is free insofar as it creates its own contents. In a similar way, practical freedom is also the assumption of social determinations as my own determinations.

Hegel agrees with Herder that language is a spiritual being. For Hegel, language is indeed spirit’s existence,^{Footnote 71} and he stresses that actual freedom means to produce Substance through the ethical person’s activity [Tätigkeit].^{Footnote 72} This substance is the spirit of the people [Geist eines Volkes]^{Footnote 73} within which we are no longer individual persons, within which we abandon ourselves to a duty.

But, if freedom is already exercised in the communitarian use of language, why, then, does Hegel state that thinking must become true thought? Why not just understanding? Why should we give up the freedom (theoretical, as well as practical) we already have in the formal, everyday language? Why should we reject common language in order to know, to grasp [begreifen] philosophically, as Hegel demands? These questions point at the difference between Herderian metacritique and Hegel’s own metacritical standpoint.

Hegel agrees with Herder on the normative power of spirit. Although he states that freedom means obedience to this universality, he would also agree with Humboldt’s thesis on the [Sprachkraft], the force of language, shared between speakers and language itself.^{Footnote 74}

Humboldt criticized the draconian perspective, assignable to Herder, according to which all individual thought is determined by the normative power of the linguistic community. Humboldt assumed that language could be modified^{Footnote 75} through the force of language every speaker has. In this sense, it is one thing to say that in language we are in a determined spiritual realm and another to say that this spiritual realm, being determined, is closed down. Precisely, the spiritual realm is not closed down. I believe this is an idea that Hegel shares with Humboldt.

In my view, Hegel would admit a reciprocal relation between what Humboldt calls the ‘freedom’ of the force of language and the ‘normative force’ exercised by a language, since he also considers it possible to overtake the limits of communitarian or spiritual language.

The assumption of a reciprocal relation between the universality of language and the use a speaker makes does not mean that Hegel assumes the possibility of private languages. Rather, it indicates the possibility of the extension or plasticity of the social realm to which we belong, and of language.

This can explain why Hegel states that philosophy has the right to exert violence upon language. Hegel affirms:

Hegel seems to be far more radical than Humboldt in his conception of linguistic freedom insofar as he not only admits the possibility for modification of the inferential network of a language; he also urges for a critique against the underlying logic in grammar. This is neither an exhortation for linguistic anarchy nor the sublimation of the romantic genius. The self-knowledge of thinking (self-knowledge means the identity of thought with its objects^{Footnote 77}) is related to the effort of the concept itself. Philosophical language must criticize representational, abstract language.

That is also why, as Rosenkranz testifies, Hegel notices that: “We are not used to exert violence upon language and to form new words from old ones.”^{Footnote 78} These statements make clear that philosophy cannot be without language, but this language must be modified. Philosophy has the right.

Philosophical thought will have to exert violence upon everyday language in order to stir up the passion for the concept.^{Footnote 79} The exercise of this right cannot be interpreted as ambiguity, vagueness, or a blunt lack of style. It is not what Kierkegaard called the Hegelian ’perverse’ use of language.^{Footnote 80} Rather, it is freedom.

I have argued that Hegel does have a metacritique. However, my point was not to say that Hegel’s metacritical position is identical to Hamann’s or Herder’s metacritiques. The difference lies in Hegel’s understanding of theoretical and practical freedom. On the one hand, the sublation of mechanical memory shows us that another language, different from the representational, is possible. Organic memory takes us to the realm of philosophical language.

It has also become clear that, in a way, Hegel would assume the Humboldtian point of view on the force of language as the possibility of transforming everyday language. To grasp [begreifen] or to think philosophically is only possible if we stop thinking with juxtaposed names. Language can and must be transformed in order to make us think beyond abstract, senseless words. Philosophy means to grasp organic, teleological movements or concepts fleshed out with sense.