Karen Ng's first book, Hegel's Concept of Life: Self-Consciousness, Freedom, Logic takes up the elusive Hegelian claim that there is a non-empirically derived notion of life which has a role to play in the field of logic. The book is emblematic of the recent vitalist turn in the study of German Idealism. Ng joins ranks alongside figures as diverse as Catherine Malabou and Michael Thompson in the quest to recuperate Hegel's account of organic form for a present-day philosophical audience.
A particular virtue of Ng's contribution to this conversation is her dedication to reconstructing Hegel's arguments with careful attention to the original texts, an approach that will be gratifying to readers with a historical interest. The framing of the argument is also of note. In a welcome departure from a somewhat tired trend in the literature, Ng declines to take the debate about Hegel's metaphysics as her starting point. Instead, the book is posed as an investigation into the way in which Hegel's early interest in Kant's theory of teleological judgement can be tracked forward into Hegel's later works (23).
In the most general terms, Ng's central claim is that, on Hegel's mature view, end-directed organic form is a condition of possibility on self-conscious thought (109). Pursuing this line of argument, Ng ultimately arrives in the company of the more epistemically-inclined readers of Hegel: lines of argument drawn from John McDowell and Paul Redding tellingly make frequent appearances in the book's later chapters, though Robert Pippin, the usual standard-bearer of this interpretive direction, is less in evidence. However, the route she takes to this destination is largely novel.
The book is divided into two parts. Part One, entitled ‘Thinking Purposiveness from Kant to Hegel’, describes Hegel's reception of Kant's Critique of Teleological Judgement and offers an account of how this inheritance is manifest in the development of Hegel's views on the topic of life. Ng's analysis begins with the 1802 Differenzschrift and carries through to the Phenomenology of Spirit (1807). Part Two—‘The Purposiveness of Thinking in Hegel's Logic’—then demonstrates how a proper understanding of Hegel's interest in the problematic of the concept of life outlined in Part I can be brought to bear on the Science of Logic.
The importance of Kant's Critique of Teleological Judgement to Hegel's mature thought is widely recognized. Ng's aim in beginning with this well-known material is not to offer a novel view about Hegel's inheritance of Kant, but, rather, to remind the reader that the relationship between judgement and purposiveness is a philosophical question originally asked and answered by Kant (64). On Ng's reading, Hegel's early dissatisfaction with the Kantian answer to this question—that is, with Kant's suggestion that teleological causation is a ‘regulative idea’ belonging to the mind of the judging subject instead of to nature itself—remains a motivating force throughout his philosophical career.
Ng argues further that Hegel's interest in what she calls Kant's ‘purposiveness theme’ (23) is primarily in the Kantian notion of inner purposiveness (55), which she equates with life (63). Thus, Hegel's mature concern with the relationship between life and self-consciousness is best understood as a direct inheritance of Kant's discussion of teleological judgement in the third Critique.
In chapter 3, Ng goes on to claim that life and self-consciousness are the two terms identified in Hegel's notion of ‘speculative identity’ (68). This proposal is developed by negative appeal to Johann Gottlieb Fichte and positive appeal to Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling. Though it is no longer scandalous to propose that Schelling exerted a coherent philosophical influence on Hegel, the details of this influence remain disputed. A highlight of this chapter is Ng's proposal that Hegel draws on Schelling's Identitätsphilosophie-era notion of life in order to mount a refutation of logical solipsism (78–79).
While these early chapters are highly suggestive, at times the arguments raise more questions than the text offers answers. For example, the exact contours of the relationship between self-consciousness and life that Ng's Hegel advocates for remain quite ambiguous at this stage. In chapter 3, life is variously described as being a ‘condition’ on self-consciousness (109), ‘constitutive’ of self-consciousness (111), an ‘analogy’ for self-consciousness (111) and a ‘mirror of the central features of self-consciousness’ (104). A picture on which all of these descriptors hold true can certainly be imagined, but Ng's own view about how they do so is not always apparent. In a related vein, the reader of Part One is largely left to infer for herself how Ng defines the ‘self-consciousness’ that stands in contrast to life. These questions remain open until Part Two.
In the book's second half, Ng turns to the Science of Logic. Her treatment focuses on three specific stretches of text: the section entitled ‘Actuality’ that marks the transition from Essence to Concept, the account of judgement in ‘Subjectivity’, and, finally, on the section at the outset of the ‘Absolute Idea’ that explicitly addresses life. I will focus primarily on the last of these, which I take to be representative of Ng's most original and well-developed line of argument about the Logic.
In chapter 7, Ng links together the view of life as inner teleology sketched in Part I with the Subjective Logic's signature problem: namely, the question as to how it is that transcendental logic gives itself a content. Ng's proposal is elegant. She argues that one of the logical formal functions of life is to provide rational thought with content in the same way that the Kantian faculty of intuition provides content to the understanding. This is the case partially insofar as living beings possess a capacity for sensibility (266), and partially insofar as a host of other features, such as a living being's status as both an individual (261) and a member of a genus (271), inform this capacity for sensibility. In Ng's words, the content-providing function of life is ‘Hegel's attempt to replace Kant's doctrine of the two stems of knowledge where[in] life and cognition take the place of intuitions and concepts’ (249). In this way, Ng's detailed argument about Hegel's inheritance of Kant's theory of teleological judgement culminates in a claim about the way in which Hegel's logical notion of life responds to Kant's theory of intuition.
One of the most pressing questions that emerges in the course of the book, then, is the following. How does the notion of life as a way in which intuitive content is provided by means of corporeal sensory capacities, which Ng hews to in chapter 7, square with the notion of life as an end-directed activity that Ng defends throughout the rest of the book? That is to say, how is it exactly that the sensuous receptivity of life fits together with its definitive purposive activity? These two superficially contrasting aspects of life need not be incompatible, but, as the well-known debate between McDowell and Pippin has shown, the precise details of the way in which activity informs receptivity in the Hegelian context matter. Here, the standing question from Part I about Ng's views on the way in which self-consciousness relates to life recurs more specifically, now as a question about the way in which the activity of cognition relates to life in both its active and receptive aspects.
Ng gestures toward her own responses to these issues in both the chapter 3 discussion of the Phenomenology (100–101) and the later discussions of the Logic. Ultimately, she suggests that life is best understood as a ‘schema’ in the Kantian sense (270) according to which the external world that is available to a living being's senses is somehow made congruent with that living being's purposive activity. Ng writes, ‘the external world is given shape (at least immediately) entirely through the lens of the needs of the subject’ (270). So, just as a honeybee might parse its world in terms of honeybee-apt affordances like pollen and nectar, a human being will parse her world in terms of human being-apt affordances (leaving their exact determination open for now). This is a promising direction, though a worry remains regarding why, in the case of beings whose ‘needs’ are informed by their rationality and vice versa—beings for whom, in Ng's own words, ‘the external world is conformable to the subject only insofar as it is interest-laden’ (270)—it does not amount to a naturalistic version of the same logical solipsism that Ng has claimed Hegel wishes to avoid (78–79).
Some answers can be found in a reconsideration of the material that Ng treats in chapter 5. Here, Ng reads the discussion on subjectivity that opens Hegel's Doctrine of the Concept as a Hegelian ‘critique of judgement’. This leads to some interesting interpretive results, including a compelling discussion of Hegel's own take on teleological judgement (186–200). Even so, Ng's election for a third Critique lens leaves many of the first Critique themes of the section untouched. Yet, the ‘Subjectivity’ section arguably contains one of Hegel's most explicit attempts to grapple with Kantian apperception. As such, what this section offers is not just a critique of judgement; it is also Hegel's introduction of the subject of judgement, of his version of the synthetic unity of apperception. To my mind at least, a satisfying post-Kantian answer to the question of how it is that corporeal sensory capacities serve as an adequate constraint on cognition must eventually run through Hegel's account of apperceptive synthesis.
Ng's reading has been described elsewhere as ‘neo-pragmatist’. Yet, although topics like ‘the space of reasons’ and ‘inferentialism’ are mentioned, these are not ultimately the central targets of Ng's argument as I construe it. By arguing that life provides an a priori notion of corporeality, Ng makes the mature Hegel out to be more of a phenomenologist (in the twentieth-century sense) than any sort of pragmatist. In so doing, she opens up a variety of exciting new interpretive directions for mind-centred readings of Hegel.
As anyone who has spent time with Hegel's humbling theoretical texts is well aware, Ng's book is an achievement. As in any short review, I have managed to touch here on only a few of the many points of interest contained in Ng's text. The reading presented in Hegel's Concept of Life is an ambitious effort that announces an energizing new presence on the scene of Hegel scholarship.
