Rather than approaching the question of the constructive or therapeutic character of Hegel’s Logic through a global consideration of its argument and its relation to the rest of Hegel’s system, I want to come at the question by considering a specific thread that runs through the argument of the Logic, namely the question of the proper understanding of power or control. What I want to try to show is that there is a close connection between therapeutic and constructive elements in Hegel’s treatment of power. To do so I will make use of two deep criticisms of Hegel’s treatment from Michael Theunissen. First comes Theunissen’s claim that in Hegel’s logical scheme, reality is necessarily dominated by the concept rather than truly reciprocally related to it. Then I will consider Theunissen’s structurally analogous claim that for Hegel, the power of the concept is the management of the suppression of the other. Both of these claims are essentially claims about the way in which elements of the logic of reflection are modified and yet continue to play a role in the logic of the concept.
The Hegelian response to these criticisms must draw on two quite clearly constructive elements in Hegel’s Logic — i.e., elements in which Hegel argues for specific conceptions of traditional philosophical concepts. The first is Hegel’s claim in his discussion of teleology that the immanence of the end in the means entails the reciprocal transformation of ends and means, and thus a mutability of the end as well as the means and the realization it produces. The second is his claim that the structure of the concept provides a more significant role for contingent particularity than does the model of necessary activity in the Doctrine of Essence.
But the point here is not primarily to keep score; rather I want to show how this constructive response has a therapeutic function in revealing the significance of certain expectations about power within Theunissen’s criticisms, assumptions which are widely shared and whose initial plausibility accounts for the force of those criticisms. Specifically, Theunissen’s argument for his first claim — that reality is dominated by the concept — turns out to depend on the assumption that the concept must serve as a fixed goal in order for its interaction with reality to be productive. Theunissen’s argument for his second claim — that the power of the concept is the management of the suppression of the other — turns out to depend on the idea that power requires the overcoming of alterity and thus a repression of difference. Though these are related points, they address two importantly different aspects of the notion of power as control: the first concerns the aspect of guidance that distinguishes power in this sense from blind force (e.g., EL§§147Z, 136R); and the second concerns the aspect of effectiveness that distinguishes power from mere activity. The two aspects are internally related, of course: guidance aims at being effective and effectiveness is a success term measured by a goal. But as Theunissen’s different arguments show, these aspects raise different concerns for the notion of power that are best dealt with separately.
Thus I hope that tracing a dialogue between Theunissen and Hegel on these points can serve a double purpose: to reveal subtleties in Hegel’s understanding of power; and to show how the constructive and the therapeutic are joined in Hegel’s Logic insofar as his argument attempts to reveal these common expectations about power as misunderstandings precisely by offering an alternative reconstruction of that notion.
I
In ‘Begriff und Realität’, Theunissen focuses on Hegel’s understanding of the truth of finite objects.Footnote 1 After noting that Hegel’s phenomenological conception of truth requires that the truth of the object come to light only with the revelation of the untruth of our initial take on the object, Theunissen notes that this tension within consciousness is grounded in a tension within the object itself. Finite things both do and do not correspond to their concepts, and a fortiori to the concept itself.Footnote 2 But Theunissen holds that Hegel never clearly distinguished two senses of correspondence: as process and as result. As an uncompleted process the dialogue between concept and reality can be truly reciprocal, but the goal of the completion of the dialectical disclosure of the truth of reality requires the concept to remain immune from the influence of reality.Footnote 3 And this is true, on Theunissen’s view, because only under the condition that the concept is a fixed goal can reality move towards it and become adequate to it. Thus, despite the fact that Hegel’s notion of truth puts the concept and the reality of the object into an apparent dialogue, in fact reality can only comply with the concept, rather than the two cooperating with each other. As a result, though Hegel initially uses the symmetrical notion of a correspondence (Entsprechung) between concept and reality to articulate the notion of truth, he ends up with an asymmetrical notion of the overlapping (Übergreiffen) of reality by the concept. In this relation, whatever motility there is in the concept itself is not a matter of it, too, standing under the claim of reality and opening itself up to it, but rather a result of the resistance reality provides to the concept’s attempt to manipulate it under the claim of its own authority. As a result, the finite thing (and thus the finite subject as well) can only be subsumed under the concept rather than transforming itself to become the proper reality of the concept. So though Hegel does not share Plato’s complete denigration of the finite as untrue, his contrary attribution of a correspondence between the concept and reality of the finite is insufficient to do justice to the finitude of either subjects or objects.
There is much to be said for Theunissen’s line of argument here. If the conclusion were true that the finite thing can only be subsumed under the concept rather than being its expression, this would undermine many of Hegel’s most cherished positions, including essential elements of his practical philosophy and his self-understanding of his difference from Kant.
But for his part Hegel rejects the assumption that an end must be fixed in order to provide a controlling orientation. In fact, the need to overcome an intentional conception of teleology according to which a fixed, subjective purpose is merely translated into objectivity is a central theme in Hegel’s discussion of teleology, and in that overcoming both the subjectivity and the fixity of the purpose must be given up. Thus Hegel holds that what initially appears as a relation in which only the object is transformed is soon bent back on the subject:
Purpose is in [objective being] the impulse to its realization; the determinateness of the moments of the concept is externality; the simplicity of these moments within the unity of the concept is however incommensurable with what this unity is, and the concept therefore repels itself from itself. This repulsion [Abstoßen] is in general the resolution (Entschluß – perhaps ‘unclosing’ (cf. PR§12R)) of the self-reference of the negative unity by virtue of which the latter is exclusive (ausschliessende) individuality; but by this excluding (Ausschliessen) the unity resolves itself, that is to say, it discloses [or unlocks] itself (entschließt sie sich oder schließt sich auf). (WL 12, 162)
In this self-repulsion, the concept gains its particular content and thus changes its nature as it discloses itself objectively. This is why Hegel immediately goes on to claim that the means is superior to the finite (subjective) end as an understanding of purposiveness, and serves as the mediating middle term between that end and external reality (WL 12, 166).
We can understand this constructive suggestion in two ways, one more intuitive than the other. To begin with, consider the example of practical reasoning. One of the difficulties of views such as Hegel’s that invoke social roles or collective identities as essential determinants of practical reasoning is that it appears not to leave any stable critical standpoint from which such roles or identities can be assessed. But as Anthony Laden nicely puts it, ‘The requirement of stability [of an evaluative standpoint] does not require absolute fixity, but rather something more akin to inertia.’Footnote 4 So more generally, we might think of the orienting function of the concept qua end as requiring only such relative resistance to change; or to use another metaphor, we might think of the concept as the wheel that moves more slowly in the mechanism as compared with the quickly turning wheels of the particular circumstances of its realization. This is not yet Hegel’s constructive solution in its full glory, but it begins to reveal its therapeutic effects: to show that fixity as such is not required to play the role of orientation to which appeal is made in justifying that fixity.
We can go deeper into the constructive suggestion by noting that the inertia metaphor might lead one to think this is just a matter of the push-back or Gegenstoß of reality against the concept that Theunissen rightly rejects as inadequate, but Hegel’s notion of self-repulsion hints at a more striking conception. First, note that the inertia here is on the side of the concept, so if anything it represents the concept pushing back against the influence of reality, which influence is therefore acknowledged as a form of power in its own right. Second, recall Hegel’s view that the greatest realization of the end is the means rather than the state of affairs produced by its use. In one of his more revealing analogies, Hegel holds that the concept or end is related to objective reality as a purpose is related to the techniques for its realization (WL12, 160). This conception, still from the discussion of subjective (or intentional) purpose, provides some insight into the way that the asymmetry Hegel sees between concepts and reality is nonetheless compatible with the kind of dialogical reciprocity Theunessen thinks Hegel’s conception excludes. Interestingly, the asymmetry is not fundamentally one of constancy or stability. Just as many techniques may be used to fulfill the same purpose, many purposes may be served by the same technique. And one can make a change or development of technique one’s purpose as opposed to taking techniques to be given resources. The completed result of an identification of purpose and technique — for example, in the career of an athlete — is just the full development of the sensitivity of each to the other in their ongoing transformation. But this sensitivity is globally a result or achievement as much as it is locally a process. When interpreted along these lines, Hegel’s conception is not so much subject to Theunissen’s charge of ambiguity in the face of the process/result distinction as it is a use of the internal connection between process and result to bring out the deeper structure of the telic relation between concept and object.
Of course, Theunissen is right to note the asymmetry between concept and reality in Hegel’s understanding of their relation. There is no escaping Hegel’s priority of the concept in that relation, but no general problem for the valorization of finitude is entailed by this priority when it is properly understood. To stick with the current analogy, it is not the case that the technique is subject to the standard of the purpose, but not vice versa. For certain techniques (e.g., of musical performance) demand certain ends of their practitioners (e.g., of the development of specific physical abilities), and we may criticize an unrealizable end as incompatible with prevailing technique. Rather, the asymmetry is higher-order and more theoretical: the concept provides the resources — through the terms of universality, particularity, and individuality — of articulating the reciprocal relation in which it stands to reality, whereas objectivist theories of that reality cannot. This is, of course, precisely the point of criticizing the Myth of Given, and Hegel’s response is certainly to advocate ‘the unboundedness of the conceptual’, in John McDowell’s phrase.Footnote 5 But it must be noted specifically that particularity is the conceptual description for the way that the concept stands under the claim of reality and opens itself up to it, and thus the way that it is unbounded without being ‘frictionless spinning in the void’. This is why, in the idea, universality is associated with the concept, particularity with actuality or reality, and individuality with the idea itself. This is a way of talking about the unboundedness of the conceptual in a way that is independent of talk of cognitive capacities, i.e., that clearly separates the distinction between activity and passivity from that between spontaneity and receptivity, to use a distinction Robert Pippin has made in responding to McDowell.Footnote 6 To come back to Theunissen’s way of framing things, in this case the asymmetry involved is compatible with dialogue or communicative freedom, and is somewhat like the dialogue between teachers and students. Though teachers do learn from students and need to be responsive to their pedagogical needs, the teachers are more responsible than students for setting the terms of the relation in which such reciprocal dialogue is made possible. But if the point about particularity holds, then the conceptual-subjective vocabulary itself can explain this point, and intersubjective dialogue then just becomes an important example of Hegel’s point rather than the necessary vocabulary for articulating its significance — more on this in section II.
This view of the asymmetry explains how Hegel’s models of Entsprechen (correspondence) and Übergreifen (overlapping) are compatible. The concept’s simple relation to itself in its Übergreifen of reality is to be found precisely in the way that, of itself, it opens itself up (selectively) to the influence of reality and therefore stands under the requirement of corresponding to reality. Since even the way that reality is open to the influence of the concept is to be understood in conceptual terms, there is an asymmetry between the two terms. As we will see in the next section, for Hegel this follows from the way that the basic conceptual terms — universal, individual, particular — are each capable of mediating each other in a way that objective conceptions of relation (particularly force and causation) are incapable.
If the interpretation offered here is correct, then it is a misunderstanding of Hegel’s conception of the relation between concept and reality to assume a fixed goal, as Theunissen does. Furthermore, since for Hegel, the necessity of the change of the end derives precisely from the immanence of the goal in the means (i.e., from their equality or non-dialectical correspondence), there is no reason to think that such a change ceases to be important in the transition, through internal teleology, to the idea. Quite the contrary, the more thoroughly the end becomes immanent in the means, the more necessary its transformation becomes. This is what is going on in Hegel’s discussion of theoretical cognition and practical willing as shapes of the idea, where the former takes reality as what is genuine and fills abstract subjectivity with it (and thus allows reality to determine its content), and the latter takes subjectivity as what is genuine and modifies objectivity in accordance with it (EL§225). Furthermore true necessity is the threshold of willing, since such necessity (the goal even of theoretical cognition) can be grounded only in the valorization of subjectivity as constitutive of its relation to objectivity, and yet even in willing that necessity presents itself as only partial with respect to the claims of objectivity, i.e., as a mere ought whose resolution requires a return to the presupposition of theoretical cognition that objectivity is truth (EL§234 & Z).
Hegel’s construction of goal-directedness thus has a therapeutic function, which is that it shows the fixed-end conception of purposiveness to be a mistaken overgeneralization from what is in fact a limit case: very simple instances of intentional purposiveness in which technique (means) and goal are given as the result of past development and simply applied in combination. This is to charge Theunissen with the familiar Hegelian misdemeanor of artificially separating the result from the process of its achievement, only here that separation is made more tempting by the fact that the result itself is a process — only a more local one — so the abstraction more easily goes unnoticed.Footnote 7 But note that the kind of therapy here is more Aristotelian than Wittgensteinian, in that it addresses not a confusion brought on by misunderstanding of how words are used but rather an overgeneralization of a partial truth. In this respect, it is rather like Aristotle’s attempt to prevent us from overgeneralizing the partial truth that pleasure is a good into the false view that pleasure is the good, where an integral part of that attempt is a constructive account of pleasure as itself a byproduct (or ‘consequent end’) of successful action.Footnote 8
But teleology is just one articulation of the power of the concept, and perhaps a somewhat derivative articulation at that given its specific placement as a model of objectivity within the subjective logic. Thus one might think that this first Hegelian response misses Theunissen’s point, which is really about the power of the concept as such. Theunissen is well aware of Hegel’s claimed superiority of the conceptual terms as compared to the objective forms of relation, but in ‘Krise der Macht’ he has argued with great care that on Hegelian terms power can only be understood as the domination of the whole over the other.
II
There, Theunissen argues that Übergreifen develops already in the logic of reflection as the appropriation of the one of the other as its other. Hegel’s specifically dialectical thinking of this power requires the overcoming of alterity and thus a repression of difference that thus constitutes identity as the whole which dominates the other.Footnote 9 When this power is then thematized by the doctrine of the concept, it can be nothing but the management of the suppression of the other, since self and other are related as two totalities, each of which must appropriate the other in order to maintain its own existence.Footnote 10 As Theunissen’s charge of domination makes clear, here we are focusing on the dangers of the effectiveness of control that is the second aspect of power discussed above. A reply to Theunissen must take up the distinctive way that the elements of the concept are related to each other as opposed to their proximate analogues in the logic of essence, and most importantly the way that the effectiveness of conceptual individuality is taken to be different from the activity of essential necessity.
This latter topic is important because though Theunissen focuses his criticism on identity, difference, and contradiction, the theory of productivity that begins in the discussion of the determinations of reflection is continually developed in the course of the Doctrine of Essence, and the proximate source of the power of the concept is to be found later on, in the interpretation of necessity as activity. In the Encyclopedia Logic this interpretation is summarized in clear but condensed form in §148 as the connection between three elements: fact (Sache), condition (Bedingung), and activity (Tätigkeit). Very briefly, the activity expresses the fact in a determinate fashion under certain conditions. More technically (and using the vocabulary of modality in which it is embedded), the fact is posited as something inner and possible by reference to the external, existing condition, and in this positing it is presupposed that it has its own proper content that is expressed in existence through the utilization of the resources presented by the conditions. The conditions are those actual features that are posited by the fact in such a way that their independence is presupposed. And activity both posits and presupposes its own conditions (the condition and the fact); it is the necessity of separating the two that is presupposed by the fact.Footnote 11
The schema developed in §148 has extensive consequences for the Doctrine of the Concept.Footnote 12 This is made clear by the way that in the closing of the Doctrine of Essence in the greater Logic, Hegel introduces the elements of the concept as better understood forms of the elements of active necessity. As always in Hegel, proper conceptualization is a transformation of what is conceptualized, and Hegel marks the change by emphasizing the way in which each of the three elements shows itself to be the whole only by ‘negative self-reference’ to the other two (WL 11, 409) and thus that freedom is the ‘mode of relation of the concept (Verhältnisweise des Begriffs)’ (WL 12, 12). To paraphrase this negative self-reference we might talk of the way in which each opens itself to the others or determines itself to accept the influence of the others; or in Hegelian terms to be a semblance (Schein) of the other; or we might say using Theunissen’s language, to stand under the claim of the other; or with McDowell, to be ‘rationally vulnerable’ to the other.Footnote 13
To come to the specific introduction of the conceptual elements (WL 11, 409), the fact (Sache) becomes the universal: ‘the totality (hitherto passive substance) which is originative as reflection out of the internal determinateness, as a simple whole, which contains within itself its positedness and is posited as self-identical therein.’Footnote 14 Here the emphasis is clearly on containment (‘das sein Gesetztsein in sich enthält’), which also comes out in Hegel’s characterizations of universality in terms of the simplicity and purity of its self-reference (e.g., WL 12,33). This looks to be grist for Theunissen’s mill, since such purity is easily understood in terms of the overcoming of alterity. And, in fact, universality marks that openness to influence that is secured by the capacity to undermine the significance of that influence by exceeding its limited context.Footnote 15 For example, this is the openness of an algebraic expression to the influence of different values of its variables, or the openness of property rights claims to different events affecting the underlying possession. Here there is a vulnerability of indifference, but only when that German term — Gleichgültigkeit — is understood also positively as ‘equal validity’. It is from this perspective that Hegel characterizes the universal as a free and non-violent power (WL 12, 35), and with respect to this specific conceptual function in isolation it seems right for Theunissen to understand it on analogy with a defective model of the love of God according to which God merely condescends to take up our facticity rather than engaging in a truly mutual or intersubjective love.Footnote 16 But Hegel tries to show that the function cannot be taken in isolation, or rather, that precisely by taking the function in isolation we see it as one particular function among others. Thus Hegel argues that in virtue of having the internal norm (Maßstab) by which it is able to take up that particularity, the universal is itself a particular (WL 12, 32). This is Hegel’s way of indicating that even the indifference of the universal is a kind of vulnerability, as comes out in his claim that the universal and the particular are mutually produced out of a double seeming (Doppelschein), outwards into the particular and inwards into the universal at the same time (WL 12, 35).
To move on with the introduction of the conceptual elements, the condition becomes the particular (WL 11, 409): ‘because the universal is self-identical only in that it contains the determinateness within itself as superseded, and is thus the negative as negative, it is immediately the same identity which individuality is. And the individuality, because it equally is the determinately determined, the negative as negative, immediately is the same identity that universality is. This their simple identity is particularity.’ But we must be careful about the simplicity here. Paradoxically, particularity is the simple identity of universality and particularity (i.e., the negative as negative), but is not, as it were, the simple identity of itself (precisely because it is the identity of negativity). What we have then in the particular as the outward half of this double seeming is non-simple but also not a whole: ‘The particularity is not therefore as totality’ (WL 12, 40). For this reason particularity is both that which binds together the universal and the individual but also a limit notion of reason. It is the cement of Hegel’s conceptual universe but precisely by having the double openness to its significance being exceeded by the universal and modified by individual contrasts with other particulars. But Hegel’s view appears to be that there is a kind of power precisely in this double vulnerability. Precisely because of its vulnerability to individual contrast it has the ability of modify the significance of the larger context in the process of being exceeded by it. And precisely because of its vulnerability to being exceeded by the larger context it brings its own distinctive content to its contrasts with other particulars, unlike, for example, structure of Dasein. Of the former ability examples are the changes in the slope of a graph of a function on the basis of new values, or changes in bodily capacities as a result of specific challenges in athletic training. Examples of the latter would be the way, on Hegel’s view, the upbringing within the family prepares men for the competition of civil society.
In the greater Logic, after introduction of the particular, Hegel circles back around to the universal to re-characterize its exceeding function now that this function is no longer to be taken in isolation, and he does so by way of a form/content contrast between the universal and particular.Footnote 17 He tells the following story: at first it looks as if the universal is entirely unaltered by its uptake of the particular — this is what he calls ‘pure universality.’ But this very indeterminacy makes the universal a kind of particular — it makes it a genus, and this determinate character is what allows it to vacuum up the particulars indifferently, but really only to vacuum up a certain range of particulars. To put it in the terms I have used, the exceeding function of universality turns out to be grounded in its identity with the particular (WL 12, 38). But, therapeutically, this reveals that what looked like pure universality is in fact just abstract universality, where the adjective ‘abstract’ denotes precisely the way in which the universal stands under the claim of particular content on pain of being defective qua universal (WL 12, 41). This is what explains Hegel’s claims that the particular has turned the tables here, and is itself ‘indifferent’ with respect to the universal (i.e., different universals are with equal validity ascribed to it) (WL 12, 40), and thus that the constitution of the universal as the inner half of the double seeming necessarily goes beyond indifference to the outer particular (WL 12, 36).
A great example of this movement of recognition that the pure universal is in fact an abstract universal comes from French revolutionary debates about the scope of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and Citizen. An initial, apparently purely universal ascription of rights to all men is then revealed to be implicitly qualified by particular features, and then the question is which particular features matter qua universal, i.e., as the norm for inclusion of the particulars by exceeding their limited context. Was the pure universal ‘man’ qua rights-bearer to be construed as fundamentally a property holder, i.e., ‘property-holder’ is the particular that matters qua universal, which specifies the rule by which the particulars are measured and which thus turns ‘man’ into an abstract universal or genus (in which case perhaps free mixed-race residents of the French colonies were to be made full citizens and to have their own property rights to their slaves confirmed). Or, on the other hand, should the universal ‘man’ be construed in terms of the norm of conscience and its internal connection to liberty (as in arguments for the abolition of slavery). But this example also shows that we should resist the temptation to think of the pure universal simply as a mistake, a false mental product. The pure universal form of ‘man’ obviously had extraordinary real effects in the revolutionary period, and the significance of specifying its more determinate (paradoxically — ‘abstract’) form depend precisely on the power that it had qua pure (i.e., it would not have had that power had it been antecedently specified). Similar points could be made about the revolutionary debates about the rights of women and Jews. In fact, the internal connection between the pure and the abstract universal is exemplified perspicuously in the curious rhetoric of the 1791 proclamations of the French National Assembly confirming rights of the Jews:
The National Assembly, considering that the conditions necessary to be a French citizen and to become an active citizen are fixed by the Constitution, and that every man meeting the said conditions, who swears the civic oath, and engages himself to fulfill all the duties that the Constitution imposes, has the right to all of the advantages that the Constitution insures;
Revokes all adjournments, reservations, and exceptions inserted into the preceding decrees relative to Jewish individuals who will swear the civic oath which will be regarded as a renunciation of all the privileges and exceptions introduced previously in their favor.Footnote 18
The proclamation has the form of merely clarifying what the Constitution itself already meant, removing exceptions to its universality that has the double effect of making the universal itself more abstract while making its scope more concrete.
This is that double seeming, inward into the universal and outward into the particular, which is clearly the analogue of activity as we saw in in EL§148 from the Doctrine of Essence that itself differentiates between the possible fact and the actual conditions, but in the concept, activity becomes the individual: ‘the totality (hitherto causal substance) into the reflection, equally out of internal determinateness into a negative determinateness which, as thus the self-identical determinateness is likewise posited as the whole, but as self-identical negativity.’ What is interesting about the greater Logic’s discussions is the contrast between the treatment at the end of the Doctrine of Essence (in which particularity is introduced last as the identity of universality and individuality) and the treatment in the first chapter of the Doctrine of the Concept, in which Hegel treats individuality as just falling out of the re-contextualization of the exceeding function of the universal by the influence of the particular (WL 12, 49). This is a superficial difference, of course, but a difference that allows Hegel to emphasize different aspects of individuality in the two discussions. In the first its vulnerability is emphasized, and in the second its effectiveness. But since what we are primarily interested in is the connection between the two, we need to do justice to both. The vulnerability introduced in the first discussion is fundamentally the vulnerability of contrasts between different ways of playing a functional role.Footnote 19 So, for example, this is the vulnerability of normal cell DNA to retrovirus DNA, or the vulnerability of a spouse to being replaced by another lover. In the second discussion the emphasis on effectiveness tries to get at the way that this vulnerability is essential to the power of the concept in virtue of that power being exercised as a part of a project that can fail, a project that involves bringing the differences between the particulars back to a unity that is opposed to the abstract universal and is in accord with their own nature (WL 12, 42).Footnote 20 So, to take the cellular example, a unity that was abstract would be precisely indifferent between the normal DNA and retrovirus DNA and thus would undermine the cell’s project of maintaining itself. What the cell needs is a unity that excludes the retrovirus DNA, but this can only come from leveraging the nature of the particular elements of the cell in their interconnection. So one might interpret the advances in HIV treatment due to the use of multiple anti-retroviral drugs that target the substitution of normal for retroviral DNA at multiple points as an example of assistance in the project of bodily individuality in that instance in which the body’s own system for discriminating the universal nature of its particulars (the immune system) has become part of the problem. What is important here from the second discussion in the Doctrine of the Concept is the way that the abstract universal plays a role as a kind of particular with respect to the project of individual effectiveness, as an inherent danger and therefore also as a limit notion of reason (WL 12, 49). Though there is no time to explore the point here, Hegel also suggests that the individual is in some sense a limit notion of reason as well: ‘Individuality is not, however, only the turning back of the concept into itself, but the immediate loss of it’ (WL 12, 51). Thus all three of the conceptual elements are, when taken in isolation, limit notions of reason. That is, they name intra-conceptual deficiencies of comprehensibility such as can only be made good by radical supplementation by the other two deficiencies. To use a visual metaphor, they each name distortions of perspective that can only be corrected by reference to the distortions of the other two perspectives rather than by any undistorted perspective.
This returns us to the question of the relation of the therapeutic and constructive. As a first pass at a therapeutic diagnosis, we can say again that Theunissen has overgeneralized one aspect of the role of one of the three elements (the exceeding function of the universal). More broadly, what this constructive account reveals, in the therapeutic language, is the possibility of three different kinds of pathologies of effectiveness, each a result of overgeneralizing one of the three perspectives into the sole general perspective on their interrelation: when exclusively universal, the kind of existential battle for supremacy Theunissen sees (or, more abstractly and without the communications-theoretical rhetoric, the difficulty of qualitative theories of individuation to account for differences between concrete particulars); when purely particular, the kind of passivity in film noir charactersFootnote 21 and Humean moral psychology (or, more abstractly, the fist-pounding character of bare particular accounts of individuation); and when purely individual, vanity (or, more abstractly, insistence on something like Leibniz’s Principle of the Identity of Indiscernibles).Footnote 22 But perhaps a better Hegelian therapeutic diagnosis of Theunissen’s view is syncretism. His initially quite plausible claim — i.e., that self and other are related as two totalities, each of which must appropriate the other in order to maintain its own existence — illegitimately combines the exceeding operation of the abstract universal with the competitive stakes of the possible substitution of individuals. But this therapeutic point is secured via the constructive account of the triple perspectives, and specifically via an alternate account of the identity of the universal and the individual, which just is his notion of particularity. None of the three conceptual elements is reducible to the other even as a matter of the perspective on the relation between the three; thus Hegel’s idea that each of the three ‘is just as much the whole concept as it is determinate concept and a determination of the concept’ (WL 12, 32).
The key notion here is the way that totality is being reinterpreted. Theunissen’s assumption that such totality requires the overcoming of alterity entails the existential struggle for comprehensive control. But in Hegel, the notion of a totality points not to exhaustiveness of scope but depth of realization. Such realization is fundamentally contrastive, but it is nonetheless compatible with (and in fact parasitic on) the alternate forms of realization with which it contrasts. Further, those alternate forms are always in some sense particular aspects of the realization of the original form. As Hegel puts it in closing his discussion of the conceptual elements at the end of the Doctrine of Essence, ‘These three totalities are therefore one and the same reflection that, as negative self-reference, differentiates itself into the other two totalities’ (WL 11, 409). This radicalizes the point made in §I because it shows subjectivity to be precisely the register in which the reciprocal yet asymmetrical priority of the related terms can be articulated. That is, one can articulate the way that reality (as the particular) and the concept (as the universal) each can serve as the fundamental perspective with respect to which the other is its articulation only by using the subjective-conceptual categorization of universal, particular, individual rather than the objective-causal categorization of action and reaction.
To use terms that Robert Hanna has employed in the debates about conceptualism, the characterization of the particular as a limit notion of reason affirms the Kantian gap between general concepts and manifold intuitions, though now reinterpreted as an intra-conceptual gap rather than a gap between conceptual and non-conceptual content.Footnote 23 But it is impossible to see this if it is not also recognized that the universal is itself a limit notion of reason (and the individual as well), and this is the point of Hegel’s discussion of the Kantian gap in the introductory material on the concept (WL 12, 17-23). Otherwise the universal looks to be paradigmatically the concept and the particular only derivatively so, and then it looks like Hegel can mind the gap only in a Pickwickian sense or attempts to eliminate it entirely (this is how Hanna reads Hegel). But once we recognize that all three conceptual elements are limit notions of reason, we get a version of conceptualism in Hegel that is both stronger and weaker than McDowell’s — stronger in the sense that there is no form of receptivity, but weaker in the sense that the conceptual sphere itself is opened up, as it were, by essential internal resistance by the manifold of particularity to generalization.Footnote 24
To put the point bluntly, the true depth of the claim of reality on subjectivity can only be given in subjective terms, which is again a way of putting the rejection of the Myth of the Given. And yet Hegel wants to push beyond this bare rejection to try to articulate, within the subjective register, precisely what differentiates the kinds of claims that reality makes on subjectivity from the kinds of claims that subjectivity makes on reality, and both of these from the kinds of claims that individual manifestation makes on both subjectivity and reality. The conceptual may be unbounded, but its internal topography is in fact a geography of diverse and diversely connected regions. Actually, we can push this metaphor a bit further by using the mathematical notion of manifolds and maps. When a three-dimensional space such as a sphere (such as, roughly, the Earth) is projected onto two-dimensional maps (or charts), a non-Euclidean space is represented by a Euclidean space. This allows better comprehension of the topological characteristics of the space but at the cost of some distortion. What topologists call the maximal atlas is the collection of such map projections (charts) and the additional transition map that allows points on one map to be transformed into points on the other map, and this atlas defines a non-Euclidean manifold in Euclidean terms. In Hegel, the universality, particularity and individuality of any object (Sache) are like the different map projections of the atlas: moderately distorted yet truth-revealing. But two natural tendencies must be resisted: on the one hand, the tendency to think that there is some further, single perspective from which every point immediately appears in undistorted relation to every other point; and on the other hand, the tendency to think that the ineliminability of distortion entails that we can have no firm grasp of truth and must therefore lapse into skeptical anti-realism or a Heideggerian mysticism of unconcealment. With regard to the first tendency, the utility of two-dimensional projections nicely makes the point at issue because in a three-dimensional presentation the back side of the figure is always hidden. With regard to the second, the figures of the judgment and syllogism are like the transition maps that allow one to move from one distorted presentation to the other, and thus the modes of inference provide principled routes for supplementing manifestations distorted in one way by manifestations distorted in another. The most important claim here is Hegel’s idea that the modes of distorted presentation are relatively few in number (three), and thus that the complexity of the transition map between them is manageable — and in fact we have a long (though self-misunderstood) tradition of logic devoted precisely to this transition problem. Universality, particularity and individuality are thus modes of veridical manifestation and ipso facto modes of distortion, but the maximal atlas of their presentations and the system of transitions between them (i.e., the idea) defines the manifold in such a way that every truth can manifest itself in some connection or other.
Conclusion
I have said rather too little in this paper about the problem of control in the logic of essence, and rather too much elsewhere, so let me say something of the right length at least about the relation between Hegel’s treatment of the theme in the logics of essence and the concept. On my view, there are two different sets of problems that arise for the notion of control, regardless of whether the locus of responsibility with respect to which control is defined is an agent’s will or some other conceptual structure. The first set concerns the very possibility of that locus of responsibility, and with respect to agents this set is represented in modern, broadly naturalistic skepticism about free will. Hegel attempts to deal with these concerns as issues not of nature but of explicability generally in his treatment of objectivity, both in the logic of essence and in the conception of the object within the logic of the concept. The second set of problems concerns the question of whether multiple loci of responsibility are possible, i.e., whether my being such a locus of responsibility is compatible with your being such a locus (or God, or the state).Footnote 25 This set is represented by a broad sweep of writers that I think of as particularist critics of Hegel.Footnote 26 But as should be clear from the orientation of this paper, I take Theunissen to be the most sophisticated and insightful purveyor of such objections. Hegel takes up these concerns in the Logic’s account of subjectivity and its relation to objectivity.
In my view, both sets of concerns are legitimate, neither confusions nor pseudo-problems. And both of Hegel’s sets of responses add to the complete understanding of control, i.e., in a technical sense, the idea of control. So though Hegel’s constructive accounts do have the therapeutic function of showing certain expectations to be mistaken, they also show that there is some truth to those expectations, and thus that they are not pure Schein in Theunissen’s sense of a phenomenon that does not participate in truth at all.
Let me conclude on this note by taking up Michael Quante’s framing of the issue of Hegelian therapy by way of distinctions between therapeutic and constructive philosophy of a variety of different forms.Footnote 27 In its narrowest sense, the conception of philosophy as therapeutic holds that the only task of philosophy consists in curing misunderstandings that are engendered by philosophical mistakes. In a wider sense, one might think of philosophy as therapeutic if its task extends to the convictions of non-philosophical domains when those convictions cause suffering in those who hold them. So this sense differs from the narrow sense in holding both that there are problems that are not ultimately rooted in philosophical misunderstanding but that these problems are nonetheless treatable by philosophical means. On either interpretation, therapeutic self-understanding orients philosophy practically by understanding its function as one of enabling the good life. In contrast, constructive philosophy aims to solve problems. In the pejorative sense, such a procedure actually creates the problems that necessitate therapy by mistaking philosophical problems for real problems. But Quante thinks that there is also a sense of constructive philosophy — which he calls its narrow sense — in which it attempts to construct solutions for real problems within common sense (whether explicit or implicit) that endanger the good life, and so may be correspond to or at least be an element of therapeutic philosophy in the wider sense. Then there is a related but wider sense of constructive philosophy that goes further in wanting to provide a philosophical framework to support the assumptions of common sense, even when those assumptions are not causing any proximate trouble. Finally, there is a revisionary sense of constructive philosophy that attempts to replace common sense, which it takes to be fundamentally mistaken.
With respect to Hegel’s systematic philosophy as a whole, Quante thinks that one might be able to defend Hegel from the charge that his thinking is constructive in the objectionable, revisionary sense if one could show both that he actually preserves rather than re-interprets the central assumptions of common sense and that his own systematic philosophical assumptions are necessary for that preservation.Footnote 28 If he could do so, Quante thinks, he could supersede the distinction between the narrow sense of constructive philosophy (according to which philosophy limits itself to constructing solutions for real problems within common sense) and its wider sense (according to which it builds a philosophical framework for those solutions) and in so doing show that the therapeutic project required constructive philosophy. Quante thinks there are three reasons why Hegel cannot successfully make this double move in the case of his philosophy as a whole; let me conclude by saying at least why these three reasons are not true of his treatment of control.
First, Quante argues that Hegel’s taking skepticism seriously (with its requirement for a firm foundation) involves responding to an assumption that is decidedly not a part of common sense. But I think that the basic conception that drives Theunissen’s criticisms — that power requires a fixed goal to which all other conditions are subjected as powerless — is widely shared and initially quite plausible, and in fact serves as the common-sense element that motivates particularist critical interpretations of Hegel.
Second, Quante argues that Hegel has produced an implausibly internalist conception of self-consciousness. But if the interpretation of the elements of the concept offered in §II is correct, then this is simply not the case. And since the Doctrine of the Concept is, officially at least, the theory of subjectivity of such, the role of particularity there shows the externalist component even in the categorical scheme as it is neutral between theoretical and practical ideas. This is, of course, an internal externalism, as it were — i.e., the externality is between the universal and the particular — but Hegel nonetheless thinks this incorporates the contingency that an implausibly internalist conception does not.
Third, Quante argues that Hegel also does not succeed in showing that qua finite subjects we implicitly make these commitments, and thus showing that his philosophy is a reconstruction rather than a replacement of common sense commitments. But here I think the ease with which we can understand examples of power that include Hegel’s commitments shows their presence within the common stock of possible thoughts that goes by the name ‘common sense.’ Common sense is not so common not because people are dumb, but because it is a shifting and only moderately consistent set of commitments, so this case in which both the commitment that produces skepticism and the commitment that answers it are present in common sense is by no means exceptional; in a Gadamerian register we might rather speak of this aspect of Hegel’s therapeutic effect as the revealing and investigating of prejudices.
Now, I don’t deny that there may be Hegelian arguments that have a more narrowly therapeutic form — for example, the striking unimportance of the notion of virtue in his moral philosophy is to be explained at least in part by his diagnosis of a confusion between the Greek arête, the Latin virtus, and the German Tugend — but whatever therapeutic effects his discussion of control produces are intertwined with a more fundamentally constructive response to the problem.
