Introduction
In contemporary philosophy, idealism still suffers from a bad reputation.Footnote 1 It is commonly associated with a subjectivist, solipsistic ‘mentalistic reduction of all objects to thoughts’ (Pippin Reference Pippin1989: 152) or at best with some kind of phenomenalism.Footnote 2 Views of this form seem to be expressions of ill-conceived responses to perceived sceptical threats. Typically the question arises of how to avoid the various traps that might lead to idealism and its varieties, rather than trying to make sense of idealism as an independent option.
In what follows, I will try to make sense of some basic features of Hegel’s idealism. What makes this task particularly difficult is, of course, that Hegel’s thought, since the second half of the nineteenth century, has been regarded as the epitome of the worst kind of idealism. In this context, idealism has been understood to involve the denial of the existence of a thoroughly mind- and attitude-independent natural external world and the assertion that everything there is is fundamentally mental. On this model, idealism would be both a crazy epistemological and an incredible metaphysical view, something that stands in need of diagnostic treatment or refutation at most.
In my view, however, what is really going on in Hegel’s discussion of various forms of idealism is precisely a repudiation of the premises leading to views of this type. Hegel’s critique of these initial premises is quite clear in his critique of subjective idealism in Berkeley and Fichte as well as from his critique of Kant’s transcendental idealism, which he sees as at least implicitly committed to the coherence of subjective idealism. Hegel himself is busy diagnosing the shortcomings that might lead to idealism in the suspicious form, which he treats as resulting from an insufficient reaction to sceptical threats.
That Hegel is not an idealist in the straightforwardly objectionable sense has not gone unnoticed. For instance, some interpreters of his philosophy of mind (what Hegel calls the philosophy of ‘subjective spirit’), such as Willem de Vries (1988) and Christoph Halbig (Reference Halbig2002, Reference Halbig2005), have urged that Hegel is actually in the line of business of defending a form of realism on the basis of an account of perception designed precisely to avoid what is commonly called ‘idealism’. This account of Hegel’s philosophy of mind is paralleled by a recent debate about how to read Hegel’s relation to metaphysics. In particular, Robert Stern (Reference Stern2009), Paul Redding (Reference Redding2007), James Kreines (Reference Kreines2006, Reference Kreines2008, Reference Kreines2015), Guido Kreis (Reference Kreis2015) and Anton Friedrich Koch (Reference Koch2014) have provided reconstructions of Hegel’s views about the nature of metaphysics.Footnote 3 Some of these readings agree on the basic idea that Hegel is not generally a kind of metaphysical idealist, but rather a realist concerning natural kinds.Footnote 4 In any event, many interpreters since the late 1970s and 1980s argue that Hegel is not defending a kind of substance monism according to which there is just one all-encompassing reality governed by a ‘spiritual’ principle.Footnote 5
Despite its specific methodological and metaphysical assumptions—which Hegel, in any case, does not share—the by now classic realism/anti-realism debate has generally provided us with a better way of thinking about idealism. It is not necessary to associate idealism with an outrageously substantial metaphysical view according to which reality as a whole is somehow mental or spiritual.Footnote 6 I therefore agree with Crispin Wright when he associates idealism with this debate. As he puts it at the outset of Truth and Objectivity,
For all the vilification and caricature which its critics have meted out over the years, the idealist tradition in philosophy has proved sufficiently durable to encourage the belief that, at least, locally, there are insights for which it is striving, but for which—its persistently controversial character suggests—we have yet to find definitive means of expression. (Wright Reference Wright1992: 3)
In recent years, a lot of work has been done in this respect with Kant and Hegel. Contemporary interest in Hegel throughout the Anglophone world as well as in Germany stems largely from two groups. One group is busy making sense of Hegel’s concept of recognition and the associated practical philosophy, his philosophy of action, right and so forth. The other group is interested in Hegel’s potential contribution to epistemology, metaphysics, philosophy of mind and other areas of theoretical philosophy. The question of idealism is central to both groups.
Kant-inspired forms of constructivism or anti-realism concerning practical reasons are certainly more widespread among contemporary philosophers than their counterparts in theoretical philosophy. However, in this paper I will exclusively focus on the theoretical issue of idealism. As Robert Brandom, a well-known champion of a rational reconstruction and defender of a Hegel-inspired form of ‘objective idealism’, puts it, ‘The thought that that world is always already there anyway, regardless of the activities, if any, of knowing and acting subjects, has always stood as the most fundamental objection to any sort of idealism’ (Brandom Reference Brandom2002: 208). If one takes a closer look at the contemporary renewal of Hegelianism by Brandom, McDowell and Pippin, in whose works the notion of ‘idealism’ plays a crucial role, one will soon notice that the term ‘idealism’ is not used univocally. Brandom, for instance, uses idealism in two contrasting senses. When he speaks of ‘objective idealism’, on the one hand, he uses it as a term of appraisal. When he mentions ‘idealism’ as a set of ideas relating to the potential rejection of the existence of an external world full stop, on the other hand, it features as an object of criticism. McDowell, on the contrary, interprets Hegel’s idealism in one of his widely discussed papers ‘as a radicalization of Kant’, by which he means an anticipation of his view that the deliverances of sensibility are already within ‘the bounds of the conceptual’, however exactly one then chooses to flesh this out. Pippin, since his seminal Hegel’s Idealism, has also offered a variety of views on the nature of idealism. His interpretation mostly prepares the ground for and then works out in various respects the idea central in McDowell, according to which absolute idealism is not a view about the (spiritual) furniture of the universe but rather a view about the nature of thought and its content.Footnote 7
As we will see in due course, it is actually quite difficult to figure out what kind of an idealist, if any, Hegel is. One might wonder whether it is just an established historical fact that Hegel belongs to a group of thinkers rightly subsumed under the label of ‘German or post-Kantian Idealism’. Historical classification of this form, however, is not exactly helpful as long as we are not told what the ‘idealism’ part in ‘German Idealism’ might mean. ‘German Idealism’ is best not understood as a term referring to a natural kind instantiated by, say, the philosophies of Kant, Fichte, Schelling and Hegel. The same goes for the study of Kant. Everybody—including Kant himself—certainly agrees that Kant was a transcendental idealist, but it is notoriously hard to work out what ‘transcendental idealism’ really amounts to in Kant. Going through the literature, it still seems that what most philosophers with a few notable exceptions would agree on when it comes to this position is that whatever it actually consists in, one should not hold it.Footnote 8
A more philosophical way of giving voice to the notion that there really was such a thing as ‘German’ or ‘post-Kantian Idealism’, such that Hegel would certainly be a good enough candidate to hold membership in that party, goes something like this. Right after the publication of Kant’s first Critique, critics started worrying about the relation between things in themselves and appearances. In particular, most epistemologists of the time argued that the strict unknowability and uncognizability of things in themselves, to which Kant explicitly commits himself in many passages, makes the entire concept of things in themselves incoherent. At the very least, it seemed to many critics at the time that things in themselves are an idle wheel in the context of any explanation in which one might want to invoke them. For instance, if we want to give an account of the potential metaphysical difference between how things appear to us as specifically human perceivers due to our overall epistemic and natural outlook and how they actually are, regardless of appearances in that sense, the distinction had better not be drawn between causally active appearances and causally inert things in themselves. If Kant indeed held that no category whatsoever can justifiably be applied to things in themselves, then we could neither claim to know that there is more than one thing in itself, nor that they ever instantiate causal patterns and so forth. Actually, we could not even claim to know that a single thing in itself exists given that existence (Dasein) for Kant is another category.Footnote 9 And I have not even mentioned traditional worries associated with the view that things in themselves are neither spatial nor temporal.
Against this background, it seems perfectly reasonable to understand Fichte’s, Schelling’s and also Hegel’s official denials of the existence and theoretical usefulness of things in themselves as a brute commitment to a Kantianism without things in themselves. On this construal, the post-Kantian idealists gave up on the idea of things in themselves, but retained the appearances and took it from there.Footnote 10
While readings of this kind have been prominent for decades and were held by philosophers as distinct as Russell and Heidegger, almost no neo-Hegelian of the most recent stripe accepts even the broad strokes of this reconstruction. For one thing, it is clear from many passages, in particular from Hegel’s Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, that Hegel does not at all reject the mind-independent existence of the external world.Footnote 11 He does not doubt that nature is a domain unified, among other things, by being what it is regardless of how we think about it. There is no textual evidence that Hegel thought that nature’s existence was somehow mind-dependent. At the most, he can be read as claiming that nature is ‘idea-dependent’, where this means that nature is intelligible in that it exhibits structures that we can make sense of by building adequate theories. The philosophy of nature is one part of Hegel’s system, where this minimally just means that it is an independent topic of conceptual clarification, a topic with which one has to deal with independently of the concepts employed when it comes to understanding logic or spirit, the other two larger meta-sections of Hegel’s enterprise.
In what follows, I will focus on the theoretical issues associated with the concept of idealism as a discussion of Hegel’s view regarding the epistemology and ontology of practical norms would go way beyond the scope of a single paper. My paper consists of three parts. In the first part I will take a closer look at Hegel’s treatment of ‘subjective idealism’. In the second part I will reconstruct the outlines of his critique of ‘transcendental idealism’. In the final part I will argue that ‘absolute idealism’, Hegel’s preferred version of idealism, consists of a set of methodological assumptions designed to guarantee the overall intelligibility of what there is. In particular, Hegel understands ‘absolute idealism’ as a commitment to what he calls ‘the absolute idea’.Footnote 12 He claims that ‘the absolute idea’ has two manifestations, nature and spirit, which for him means precisely that it is not exclusively ‘spiritual’ (geistig), let alone ‘mental’ in a more narrow sense (EPS: §577).
Anticipating the conclusion, my position is that Hegel’s absolute idealism is not a first-order metaphysical view about the composition of ultimate reality in the sense of the furniture of mind-independent fundamental reality. Rather, it is a defence of the meta-metaphysical idea that there are different kinds of facts, such as natural, mental and social facts, which share a logical structure that guarantees their overall intelligibility. This idea is meta-metaphysical in that it is justified against the backdrop of Hegel’s engagement with the Pyrrhonian sceptical worry that disagreement in philosophy and, in particular, in metaphysics might in principle be irresolvable.Footnote 13 Having the right kind of first-order metaphysics for Hegel presupposes the right kind of meta-metaphysics. The topic of absolute idealism belongs to meta-metaphysics and not to first-order metaphysics, as absolute idealism is a view about the right kind of methodological setting within which first-order metaphysics is feasible.Footnote 14
When I say that absolute idealism is a meta-metaphysical view, I intend to convey the notion that it is precisely not, to borrow a formulation of Crispin Wright’s again, ‘a thesis about the bounds of reality—the thought that, as it were, the totality of facts is conveniently (but mysteriously) trimmed to ensure that there is nothing that outreaches human inquisitiveness’ (Wright Reference Wright1992: 159). Such a thesis would be an example of a first-order metaphysical idealist view. Contrary to that, absolute idealism amounts to a defence of the view that it cannot be a priori that the verification-transcendence of some contingent facts of the matter speaks against the idea that a generally reliable epistemic match between our beliefs and the world has to be ‘in principle detectable’ (Wright Reference Wright1992: 159).Footnote 15 Underestimation of such a distinction between a first-order metaphysical and a meta-metaphysical reading of the (idealistic) idea that reality is in principle intelligible might account for the potential confusion in McDowell’s way of putting this in Mind and World and subsequently in his Hegel papers. For the metaphor of the ‘unboundedness of the conceptual’ or the ‘logical space of reasons’ that somehow covers everything, might be read either as a claim about the structure of the world or as a claim to the effect that there is no barrier internal to the conditions of objective purport separating thought from what there is. In my interpretation of his absolute idealism, Hegel holds the latter, while he wants to distinguish it from the former, which he rejects.
I. Subjective idealism
As is common today, Hegel treats Berkeley as a prime subjective idealist. In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy Hegel characterizes the position of subjective idealism in the following way:
Subjective idealism says: There are no external things, they are a way in which our self is determined. In respect to sensation, this has to be admitted. I am passive in sensing, sensation is subjective; it is being, a state, a determinacy in me, not freedom. (VGP: II, 189/TWA: 19, 207)Footnote 16
Hegel’s basic idea is that subjective idealism consists in the view that our access to what there is is irremediably mediated by the alleged fact that we can only know what there is by sensing it. He then points out that such a form of empiricism, what he calls ‘philosophy of experience’ (Erfahrungsphilosophie), confuses the true claim that we cannot perceive anything without at the same time being in a state of sensing with the false claim that perceiving something to be the case is sensing it.
Hegel’s first argument against Berkeley has it that the latter has at least to admit that it is built into the appearances that they at least appear as if we did not produce the objects of experience by perceiving them. The objects at the very least appear to be given. As Hegel puts it,
Immediately the necessity of the representation contradicts the being in itself of that which represents; because the being in itself is the freedom of that which represents, which, however, does not produce the representations freely, but for it they have the form and determinacy of something other with respect to it. (VGP: III, 367/TWA: 20, 273)
For Hegel, Berkeley recognizes the problem that the content or rather the objects of experience do not appear to be produced in the way in which he claims, which is why he introduces the ad hoc solution that the contents or objects of experience seem to be given, and not produced by mental acts, because God is the hidden causal factor in experience.
However, Hegel points out that this is a bad solution for many reasons. What is particularly bad about the solution is that it needs to invoke an external factor causing us to have an experience to the effect that p after all. Thus, there has to be a sense in which there is an external world, even though the external world on Berkeley’s model, from the theorist’s perspective, consists of other minds (most notably of his and of God’s mind) and their purely experiential contents. Hence subjective idealism does not solve the problem of the external world which it faces, either by giving up on the existence of an external world or even by bracketing it. It just replaces a more commonsensical notion of the external world as containing ‘specimens of middle-sized dry goods’ (Austin Reference Austin1962: 8) with a notion of the external world as containing God’s ideas. ‘The inconsistency in this system God has again to make good, the gutter; we leave it to God’ (VGP: III, 367/TWA: 20, 273).
Hegel’s diagnosis of why subjective idealism appears attractive in the first place is that it promises a whole-hearted solution to external world scepticism by simply denying the existence of matter. It unifies the world in light of its knowability by giving up on the ontological commitment to one kind of substance usually recognized, material substance.
In this context, it is important to point out that Hegel himself believes that the question of how mind and nature fit together in an integrated conception of what there is must give an account of two potentially opposite conceptual pulls. On the one hand, we want to be able to understand that reality is largely the way it is regardless of our epistemic capacities and activities. This modest form of realism Hegel nowhere denies. He refers to it under the heading of ‘the theoretical idea’ or ‘the idea of cognition’. On the other hand, there is a more ‘presumptuous’ direction of thought, as Wright puts it, ‘that, while such fit as there may be between our thought and the world is determined independently of human cognitive activity, we are nevertheless, in favourable circumstances, capable of conceiving the world aright, and often, of knowing the truth about it’ (Reference Wright1992: 2).
Let us speak of the principle of intelligibility here. This principle claims that a coherent conception of the world has to be compatible with the fact that we often get it right, which is not to say that there is nothing we somehow cannot know. Yet the principle denies that there is anything inherent in the concept of the world which would make it reasonable to believe on a priori grounds that there are objects and facts beyond human ken.Footnote 17 Thus Hegel need not, in addition to this principle, also commit to the ambitious notion that we can know a priori that there is nothing that we cannot know. All he needs to argue is that what we cannot know does not lie on the other side of a ‘boundary between cognition and the Absolute […] that completely separates them [schlechthin scheidende Grenze]’ (PhG: 46/TWA: 3, 68), a boundary that one could draw by armchair reasoning about our knowledge of the world.
Nevertheless, Hegel is epistemologically more ambitious than even the presumptuous direction of the realism debate presented by Wright. For Hegel neither believes that the fit between our thought and the world ‘is determined independently of human activity’ nor does he believe that our knowledge of the world in general relies on ‘favourable circumstances’, on any kind of epistemic luck. Rather, he raises the question under what conditions we would be able to articulate the presumptuous direction of realist thought. What is it for us to know that knowledge involves a relation of fit between the world and human experience? How could we claim to know that we are ever in a position to know anything about the external world unless we could somehow guarantee that what there is is intrinsically intelligible, that it is shaped in such a way that our most general concepts, such as our concepts of facts, objects, structures, order, and so forth, do not utterly go astray? If there is no reason to believe that our most general concepts ever hold good for the world, we might wonder how far the potential divergence between our overall theories of reality and reality itself goes.
Hegel’s criticism of Berkeley amounts to the position that Berkeley is precisely not able to respect the principle of intelligibility. For Berkeley accepts that our epistemic activity consists in creating a system of beliefs based on raw input given to us by God. Due to his empiricism, the raw input is not itself intelligible, which is why the alleged fact that it is given to us by an intelligible source (a mind) does not make it per se intelligible to us. In Hegel’s reading, there is nothing intrinsically intelligible about the input itself as conceived by Berkeley, which is why he has to resort to God. Yet this only covers up a conceptual problem and does not even come close to a solution, because God is only introduced as a name for the solution of the problem of objective purport, probably because God is seen as an idealized knower for whom the problem of objective purport is always already solved. If we come to know that God provides us with content which is not yet intrinsically intelligible, we come to know that it is at least intelligible to an idealized knower. Yet this does not help us to come to terms with the problem stemming from the fact that we are precisely not idealized knowers but recipients of information in a sensory, for all we can tell from our standpoint potentially non-intelligible, key.Footnote 18
For Hegel, this is nicely brought out by the fact that Humean scepticism can be read as the outcome of Berkeleyan subjective idealism. Indeed, early modern idealism for Hegel is generally a response to a sceptical threat (namely external world scepticism) that misconstrues its own strategy as a set of substantial metaphysical discoveries, be it in the form of Berkeley’s subjective idealism or Leibnizian monadology. He expresses his contempt for Berkeley and Hume in the very title of the section on the period of the history of philosophy in which they worked, a period he calls ‘period of transition [Übergangsperiode]’. The subtitle, curiously not translated in the English edition of the lectures, says it all: ‘The degeneration of thinking until Kantian philosophy [Das Verkommen des Denkens bis zur Kantischen Philosophie]’. Hegel continues in the following way:
But since in the modern world this absolute substantiality, this unity of what is in itself and self-consciousness is fundamental, this faith in reality in general, scepticism has here the form of idealism, i.e. of expressing self-consciousness or certainty of itself as all reality and truth. The crudest form of this is that self-consciousness, as individual or formal, does not proceed further than to say: All objects are our representations. We find this subjective idealism in Berkeley and another version of it in Hume. (VGP: III, 363–64/TWA: 20, 270)
Hegel typically refers to what he calls ‘subjective idealism’ both as ‘bad idealism’ and as ‘formal idealism’. He links this with his standard attack on traditional forms of empiricism, where these endorse the idea that the contribution of conceptual structures to our knowledge of the world is intelligible precisely because it is our subjective contribution. This makes the content potentially unintelligible, as we cannot guarantee against all sorts of sceptics that the concepts we employ in theory-building processes are ever able to get a hold of what is there, regardless of our theory-building processes. ‘Bad idealism’ is bad in that it merely ties objectivity (das Gegenständliche) to consciousness (Bewußtsein), ‘merely saying of it that it is my feeling, mine [und von ihm nur sagt, es ist meine Empfindung, mein]’ (VGP: I, 310/TWA: 18, 36). Despite apparent metaphysical modesty, this position holds that ‘a sensuously nonconceptual manifold of sensing is established, […] in which there is no reason, and with which this idealism has no further concern’ (VGP: I, 310/TWA: 18, 367). This is the upshot of what Hegel calls ‘the false idealism of modern times [der schlechte Idealismus der modernen Zeit]’ (VGP: I, 351/TWA: 18, 405), even though he already identifies the roots of it in ancient epistemology, most prominently in ancient atomism.Footnote 19
Bad idealism draws on the assumption that our representations of the world have a specific form due to our information filters, an idea heavily exploited by ancient sceptics from the Sophists to later Academic and Pyrrhonian scepticism. On this level of analysis it does not really matter whether we think of those information filters as an overall conceptual scheme, or as a set of epistemic intermediaries that might be reified by employing the metaphor of a veil of perception. The crucial idea of ‘bad idealism’ is the view that we can only have access to a given reality by applying subjective categories, concepts restricted to our minds. Yet, if this were the case, how could we even claim to know that there is a given element in experience regardless of our further conception of the source from which the given element is supposed to be derived? How would we be able to draw a systematic distinction between the given element in experience and the contribution of our information filters?
Subjective idealism owes us an account that individuates the given content regardless of the additional conceptual structuring. It only makes sense to draw the relevant distinction if we are able to predicate something of the given element. Yet this presupposes that at least on this level of epistemological analysis we are after all capable of uncovering fully mind-independent reality. Otherwise it would remain completely mysterious how we could ever be in a position to draw a distinction between the form and content of experience. Certainly, there has to be a given manifold of experience. But the question is how exactly we come to think of it in such a way that we can know anything about the domain of the manifold itself. Given that not even according to the most radical subjective idealists from the history of philosophy are we supposed to have produced the manifold itself, and given that all conceptual structure is meant to consist in the form of our minds, we are not able to provide any criteria of individuation for those given contents. This is the sense in which subjective idealism is merely formal, as it is nothing but a claim about ‘the form of representation according to which a content is mine [die Form der Vorstellung, nach der ein Inhalt der meinige ist]’ (WL: 125/TWA: 5, 173), as Hegel puts it in the discussion of idealism in the Science of Logic.
Crucially, Hegel critically identifies the premises motivating revisionary metaphysical manoeuvres that might come to look like evidential support for subjective idealism. In his critique of the terms of Kant’s refutation of idealism, he writes:
Idealism in the sense of the view that there is nothing outside of my individual self-consciousness as individual, as also the refutation of this, the assertion that there are things outside of my self-consciousness as individual, is one as bad as the other. […] The truth or untruth does not rest in their being things or representations, but in their limitation and contingency, whether conceived of as representations or things. (VGP: III, 442/TWA: 20, 349)
II. Transcendental idealism
This leads me to my second topic, the outlines of Hegel’s worries about transcendental idealism. At this point Kant enters the picture. The majority of contemporary reconstructions of Hegel’s critique of Kant rightly focus on two elements:Footnote 20
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1) His critique of form/content dualism.
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2) His repudiation of the distinction between appearances and things in themselves.
However, it is very important to add the third dimension of his engagement with Kant, since this leads to his concept of absolute idealism. Namely:
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3) The problem of the world.
I will deal with this third aspect of Hegel’s critique of transcendental idealism in the final section of my paper. In this section, however, I will give an outline of Hegel’s worries regarding (1) and (2).
Hegel officially engages with Kant’s epistemology and metaphysics in three major works: in the early essay called Faith and Knowledge, in the Science of Logic and in the Lectures on the History of Philosophy. McDowell’s much-discussed paper ‘Hegel’s Idealism as a Radicalization of Kant’ deals exclusively with the early material from Faith and Knowledge (McDowell Reference McDowell2009).Footnote 21 Given the somewhat clearer exposition of the central themes in Hegel’s mature lectures, I will concentrate on these.
Generally, Hegel reads Kant’s enterprise in the First Critique as following an epistemology-first method. In his view, the motivation behind the very idea of a Critique of Pure Reason consists in the familiar motive that the sceptic forces us to present arguments to the effect that truth-apt thoughts—what Kant calls ‘judgments’—are not fundamentally ‘sealed off from the world’.Footnote 22 It is already at this early stage of the enterprise that Hegel formulates a famous objection to the approach, an objection with which he opens the ‘Introduction’ to his Phenomenology of Spirit. The view under attack there is what we can call the unqualified instrument view of cognition. According to the unqualified instrument view, cognition is characterized as an instrument used in order to grasp how things really are, what Hegel simply names ‘the truth’. His question is whether we have any good reasons to question our capacity for acquiring ‘cognition of what truly is [Erkennen dessen, was in Wahrheit ist]’ (TWA: 3, 68).
For Hegel it is misguided to think of our various epistemic capacities to know the truth as the means of grasping the facts in terms of a set of epistemic intermediaries that sometimes happen to get it right and at other times happen to get it wrong.Footnote 23 In contemporary terms, what Hegel ascribes to Kant and what the former rejects would be a ‘highest common factor’-model of cognition, according to which our epistemic standing with respect to the world would essentially seem to be the same to us, or would rather be the same, even if we had never actually grasped a true thought or endorsed a true assertion. Against the background of a set of worries that might lead one to accept such a sceptical challenge, it only seems natural—Hegel even says commonsensicalFootnote 24 —first to guarantee that the epistemic intermediaries are at the very least truth-apt by exhibiting the relevant form of objective purport. In this case: ‘Cognition is represented as an instrument, as a way by which we want to take possession of the truth. Thus, before one can make one’s way to the truth itself, one would have to cognize first the nature, the kind of one’s instrument’ (VGP: III, 428/TWA: 20, 334). Hegel’s favourite objection to this version of epistemology as first philosophy can be found throughout his entire career in various passages, most notably, as I have already emphasized, in his Phenomenology of Spirit. This is probably part of what McDowell had in mind when he described Mind and World ‘as a prolegomenon to the reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit’ (McDowell Reference McDowell1996: ix).
Hegel’s basic objection to the unqualified instrument view is that a successful articulation of the very view achieved would already amount to epistemological knowledge and thereby contradict the intended outcome that we might be completely sealed off from the world. The instrument epistemologists would have to claim to know that there is a set of epistemic intermediaries such that they explain, first, why we might want to think of them as the highest factor common to the good and the bad case, and, second, that they are truth-apt for some theoretically articulated set of reasons. This is exactly what Kant is doing in his first Critique, in Hegel’s reading.Footnote 25 Yet the problem is that this immediately calls the familiar second-order sceptic onto the scene, who will respond that either there are epistemic intermediaries at play in the articulation of the theory itself or that, if there are not, the instrument theorist does not believe that all cognition has the form that his theory claims it has. Knowing that the theory is true would be entirely different from knowing something about the world. Hegel’s preferred way out is simply to accept that cognition is already at work in any attempt to figure out what it is. Or, as he puts it with his famous ‘swimming rejoinder’:Footnote 26
To investigate the faculty of cognition means to cognize it. The requirement is thus: one is supposed to cognize the faculty of cognition, before cognizing anything; it is like wanting to swim before one enters the water. The investigation of the faculty of cognition itself is cognizing, it can never arrive where it wants to arrive, as it is already this itself. (VGP: III, 428f/TWA: 20, 334)
Trying to refute a sceptic who is at the same time and for the same reasons worried about the proper functioning of our sensory faculties and our intellectual capacities is futile, because such a sceptic would not even be able to formulate a justified worry in the first place. The justified formulation of sceptical worries about the proper execution of some epistemic procedure is justified to the extent to which it does not immediately undermine the justificatory procedures employed in the formulation.
Against this background, the majority of Hegel’s objections to Kant’s transcendental idealism boil down to the overarching idea that Kant really holds two incompatible views about cognition and knowledge: one first-order view about truth-apt thought about the natural world and a different, insufficiently articulated higher-order view about our knowledge of the conditions of first-order truth-aptness.
In this light Hegel approaches Kant’s form/content dualism. Unlike some recent commentators who try to make sense of Kant’s distinction between the conceptual and the non-conceptual contribution to a given empirical thought-episode or cognition, Hegel splits Kant’s famous principle that ‘thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind’ (CPR: A51/B76) into two potentially separate claims: the claim that there are empty thoughts without intuitions on the one hand and the claim that there are blind intuitions without concepts on the other. Yet, if this were the case, we could have a conception of ‘thoughts without content [Gedanken ohne Inhalt]’ (TWA: 20, 343). As a matter of fact, Kant actually needs to be able to isolate thoughts from intuitions at least in the context of his critique of the ideas of God, the world as a whole and the immortal soul as potential objects of serious epistemic or theoretical inquiry.Footnote 27 Beliefs to the effect that if there are seven souls, then there are more than five, or that if God does not have a body, then he can move from one place to the other in no time—or what have you—according to Kant really are thoughts without content. It is not the case that they merely happen to have transcendent truth-conditions, positive or negative assessment of which is barred from us due to the limits of our knowledge. Claims about transcendent matters, for Kant, are therefore not even guesswork—that is, as long as they are presented as theoretical claims concerning the structure and content of what there really is. In his Transcendental Dialectic Kant develops an error-theory for the discourse about God, the Soul and the world as a whole which presupposes the intelligibility of empty thought severed from receptivity, which is the object of the investigation that he famously calls a ‘logic of illusion [Logik des Scheins]’ (CPR: A61/B85).
Hegel now raises the following question: if there is empty thought and non-empty thought, what distinguishes the two of them? One answer to be expected from Kant is, of course, that non-empty thought either is straightforwardly empirical (synthetic a posteriori) or is about the properties of the conditions of the possibility of the former (synthetic a priori). In any event, all content of thought derives from ‘possible experience’ and our relation to it, which is why Kant can refer to ‘the world’ as the ‘field of possible experience [Feld möglicher Erfahrung]’.Footnote 28 In accordance with this model, the activity of thinking will consist in exercises of our epistemic capacities to put various elements belonging to the field of experience together in such a way as to accumulate ‘glimpses of the world’ while having a larger world in view, to borrow from McDowell again (Reference McDowell2009). Yet, if all content is derived from the field of possible experience, it is all too tempting to see the activity of thinking, putting non-empty thoughts together, as ‘something subjective [etwas Subjektives]’, as Hegel puts it (TWA: 20, 331).
In this context, Hegel is one of the first to charge Kant with an untenable form of psychologism on two levels. On one level, he polemically points out that Kant seems to merely dig out epistemic capacities from ‘a soul sack’. In a passage later echoed by Nietzsche, Hegel writes that ‘he hunts through the soul sack to see what faculties are to be found there; and by merest chance one happens to find reason there too’ (VGP: III, 443/TWA: 20, 351). The charge here seems to be that Kant introduces the idea of a given plurality of epistemic capacities that we just happen to find in our overall epistemic equipment, without ever being able to unify them under our concept of reason by seeing them as integral to reason as such. Kant wants to avoid this option, as this would threaten to undermine the contrast between our specific set of capacities and those of potentially different forms of thinking, such as divine thinking. ‘Not to mention the barbarous terminology, Kant remains restricted and confined by the psychological point of view and empirical manner’ (VGP: III, 430f/TWA: 20, 337).
On another level, Hegel anticipates some of G. E. Moore’s and Wittgenstein’s later worries about the unity of the proposition. In a similar vein, Hegel believes that the unity of an endorsed proposition, a judgment, cannot entirely consist in the fact that there is a subjective synthesis. For we need to make sense of the idea that things hang together in just the way in which we take them to hang together when we assert that they are thus and so.Footnote 29 Otherwise it would easily look to us as if—to pick one of Hegel’s own examples—a sugar cube would really be nothing but a bundle of simple ideas or impressions, such as: seems sweet at t1, looks like this from here at t2 and like that from here at t3 and so forth. If the assertion that there is a sugar cube had to be reconstructed as a subjective synthesis of atomic impressions, we would run into familiar conundrums like the question of how there could objectively rather than psychologically be a thing with actual properties. Against this background, it is possible to read the entire Phenomenology of Spirit as an argument against the view that mind imposes order on a world that might be metaphysically shaped by structures entirely different from the categories employed in our mentally constructed understanding of the world. Hegel generally calls the view that mind and world might be distinguished in such a way ‘philosophy of consciousness’. He thinks that philosophy of consciousness underpins the kinds of idealism—subjective and transcendental—which he wants to reject, and he associates both with the notion that there might be a ‘boundary […] that completely separates them [schlechthin scheidende Grenze]’ erected between mind and world (PhG: 46/TWA: 3, 68).
Let me be very brief regarding Hegel’s critique of the thing-in-itself/appearance distinction. Roughly speaking, the assumption that there is an unknowable and uncognizable thing in itself in Hegel’s eyes is just an expression of a certain theory failure. This failure consists in believing that the content of experience is derived from a source potentially structurally different from the structures with which we are acquainted by giving an account of our own rationality. For Hegel, this is a misguided portrayal of both the objectivity and fallibility of our knowledge of what there is. His point is that the usual trial-and-error process involved in figuring out how things are certainly does not presuppose the possibility of a maximal structural divergence between our conceptual scheme and what we are trying to make sense of by building theories. Giving up on the very idea of a thing in itself, as an idle wheel in our epistemology with an inclination towards sceptical premises, then, precisely does not mean starting to reduce everything to something mental. It means giving up on the idea that the mental is entirely subjective, a phenomenological layer of epistemic intermediaries.
It would lead too far to go into more details of Hegel’s critique of Kant, since he also believes that Kant’s practical philosophy is largely driven by problematic epistemological and metaphysical assumptions. What is important for the focus of this paper is that ‘absolute idealism’, the only idealism to which Hegel officially commits himself, should neither be interpreted as having the shape of subjective idealism gone wild or inflated into a metaphysics, nor as having the shape of a refined version of transcendental idealism, as some contemporary interpreters have claimed. This leads me to my final topic.
III. Absolute idealism
The third point of Hegel’s engagement with Kant is a good way of approaching ‘absolute idealism’, as I understand it. As I said, Hegel’s engagement with Kant’s theoretical philosophy covers three central features of transcendental idealism:
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1) form/content dualism;
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2) the distinction between things in themselves and appearances;
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3) the problem of the world.
So far I have sketched some of Hegel’s worries and objections regarding transcendental idealism with respect to (1) and (2). However, it sometimes goes unnoticed that the problem of the world is quite central for Kant. In a letter to Christian Garve from September 21, 1798, Kant interestingly writes:
It was not the investigation of the existence of God, immortality, and so on, but rather the antinomy of pure reason—‘The World has a beginning; it has no beginning, and so on, right up to the 4th [sic]: There is freedom in man, vs. there is no freedom, only the necessity of nature’—that is what first roused me from my dogmatic slumber and drove me to the critique of reason itself, in order to resolve the scandal of ostensible contradiction of reason with itself. (C: 552/254)
Let us generally call the problem of the world the set of problems associated with the question of how absolutely everything hangs together. Kant here more specifically mentions two worries: the question of whether the world is finite or infinite in its spatial and temporal extension, and the question of whether the structure of the world is deterministic in such a way that there can be no ‘freedom in man’, as he puts it. Famously, in the Prolegomena Kant tells us that engagement with Hume has awoken him from ‘dogmatic slumber’, which typically has been interpreted as relating to the theory of causation. Yet, in the letter to Garve, Kant emphasizes that the main thrust of his arguments in favour of transcendental idealism is metaphysical, where ‘metaphysics’ is the investigation of unrestricted totality or, as I also like to phrase it, the theory of the world as world. Kant’s own solution to the apparent contradiction of reason within itself is a form of metaphysical agnosticism. Precisely because the world is not a thing in itself, but a regulative idea driving the unification of our knowledge in the form of the ideal of ‘systematic unity’, there is no point in asking how absolutely everything hangs together. Systematic unity is restricted to appearances which might be a proper subset of a larger domain of entities, even though we have no theoretically justified grounds to believe that this is indeed the case. We simply have no warranted beliefs regarding absolutely everything, for indefinitely vast regions of what there is—things in themselves—are simply not possible objects of empirically grounded inquiry. Claims to the effect that the world is such and so will therefore always remain undecidable.
For Hegel, this is the quintessential claim of transcendental idealism. In order to understand his objections to claims of this form, it is important to look at a remarkable passage from the Science of Logic. In this passage, he writes:
The claim that the finite is an idealization defines idealism. The idealism of philosophy consists in nothing else than in the recognition that the finite is not truly an existent. Every philosophy is essentially idealism or at least has idealism for its principle, and the question then is only how far this principle is carried out. (WL: 124/TWA: 5, 172)
Hegel then gives two quite surprising examples of idealism in that sense: Thales’ dictum that everything is water, and Greek atomism. As I understand him, he praises these rough positions for a simple reason: they try to make sense of essentially absolutely everything there is by coming up with a unified account of overall reality. Of course, Hegel neither believes that everything is water nor that the world entirely consists of atoms and the void. What he points out in this passage is merely that idealism is a thoroughgoing commitment to the principle of intelligibility. His name for this idea at the very end of the Science of Logic is ‘the absolute idea’. The view according to which the more specific methodological assumptions articulated in the Science of Logic chapter on the ‘absolute idea’ amount to a sufficient account of the principle of intelligibility simply is his ‘absolute idealism’.
The first important aspect of this which I would like to highlight is that Hegel’s absolute idealism is not a view about the composition of the world, or the structure of the fundamental nature of reality. On the level of first-order metaphysics, in the Science of Logic Hegel does not provide us with substantial information about the denizens of the universe, nature or reality. Accordingly, my claim is that Hegel’s absolute idealism is not intended as a direct contribution to the discipline of first-order metaphysics.
We can contrast first-order metaphysics with meta-metaphysics and view Hegel’s absolute idealism as being engaged in the activity, first and foremost, of giving an account of the overall intelligibility of what there is. This account is largely neutral when it comes to engagement with more specific ontological commitments. However, without further ado it does spell out conditions that have to be met by any more specific first-order metaphysical account. There is at least one potential negative methodological verdict entailed by absolute idealism, namely that nothing can count as a successful first-order metaphysical account that does not meet the requirements of the principle of intelligibility. In this light, Thomas Nagel rightly associates his recent reliance on the principle of the ‘intelligibility of the world’, as he calls it, with absolute idealism (Nagel Reference Nagel2012: 17).
To begin to understand what Hegel means by ‘the absolute idea’, a concept with which he deals in the concluding chapter of his Science of Logic, it might be useful to keep in mind that he is dealing with the problem of the world as formulated by Kant. As a matter of fact, Hegel describes the ‘absolute idea’ as a combination of two subordinate ideas: the idea of theoretical cognition (die Idee des Erkennens), on the one hand, and the practical idea, the idea of the good (die Idee des Guten), on the other. He regards this as a unification of two strands in Kant’s thinking, one grounding his theoretical philosophy and the other grounding his practical philosophy. More specifically, Hegel explicitly describes how things look from the perspective of the absolute idea:
Accordingly, in this result cognition is restored and united with the practical idea; the previously discovered reality is at the same time determined as the realized absolute purpose, no longer an object of investigation, a merely objective world without the subjectivity of the concept, but rather as an objective world whose inner ground and actual subsistence is the concept. This is the absolute idea. (WL: 734/TWA: 6, 548)
I take it that the intended meaning of this is roughly the following. The theoretical idea, for Hegel, is just the assumption that there is an objective world whose fundamental structures and make-up just are the way they are regardless of how we take them be. On some level or other we will have to be metaphysical realists. Absolute idealism is a meta-metaphysical position, which need not (and arguably does not) discount metaphysical realism as a first-order metaphysical stance to be respected from the standpoint of statements about nature. Nature is what it is regardless of how we take it to be, which does not mean that nature might be entirely different from what we find out about it by employing the appropriate means.Footnote 30 Hegel does not deny that there is a contrast of objectivity that distinguishes belief from knowledge, and that we can make sense of this contrast in terms of there being an objective world of facts which settles which of our theoretical beliefs are indeed true and which are not. On the other hand, there is the practical idea, the idea of the good, by which Hegel refers to the idea of a word-to-world direction of fit encapsulated in the concept of intentional action. If we are committed to there being facts of both kinds, facts to be studied from the theoretical stance and facts to be studied from the practical stance, we need a unified account of the categorical structure of reality that allows us to integrate both conceptions without running into the contradictions that Kant describes in the antinomies chapter of the first Critique. Achievement of such a stance is just what Hegel calls ‘the absolute idea’.
Facts to be studied from the theoretical stance, for Hegel, are unified by belonging to ‘nature’ whereas facts to be studied from the practical stance, in his division of labour, belong to ‘Geist’ or ‘spirit’. This is why he can claim that ‘nature and spirit are in general different modes of exhibiting its existence [sc. that of the absolute idea] [die Natur und der Geist sind überhaupt verschiedene Weisen, ihr Dasein darzustellen]’ (WL: 735/TWA: 6, 549). All this means is that we require a conception of facts that is sufficiently topic-neutral to cover both nature and spirit in this sense. Otherwise put, our overall commitment to the principle of intelligibility should not be interpreted in such a way that we mistake it for a principle that we can simply read off the universe or nature. Nature’s intelligibility does not reveal itself in the fact that we know certain things about nature, as our local achievements in the uncovering of natural facts do not necessarily tell us anything about nature’s intelligibility as a whole or in principle.Footnote 31 What Hegel is looking for is precisely a topic-neutral, universal concept of facts or truths that allows us to develop a ‘system of totality’ (TWA: 6, 569), where this would consist in an overall coherent conception of the broadest accessible way in which things hang together.Footnote 32
It would be misguided to ground this conception in given natural facts. The intelligibility of nature is not itself a natural fact, as the principle of intelligibility also holds for spiritual, that is to say mental and social, facts. That a person runs a certain business and has certain beliefs can be as much a fact as that there are up-quarks. Even if we have all sorts of reasons to ground some, if not all, mental facts in natural facts, this cannot tell us that nature’s intelligibility is just more nature. The very idea of a unified domain that we call ‘nature’ is not derived from nature by our usual methods of investigating it. This also does not mean that nature should now be grounded top-down in mind, which would be even more of a confusion. Hegel’s point is that the intelligibility of what there is derives as little from nature as it derives from the fact that there are mental facts. It is essentially topic-neutral or universal.
Against this background, McDowell’s metaphor of ‘the unboundedness of the conceptual’ is indeed quite adequate to capture the intention behind Hegel’s absolute idealism. In his discussion of Wittgenstein, McDowell offers a formulation of the essence of absolute idealism. I leave it open to what extent this actually captures what Wittgenstein had in mind, but the following passage can nicely be brought to bear on the notion of idealism in Hegel: ‘there is no ontological gap between the sort of thing one can mean, or generally the sort of thing one can think, and the sort of thing that can be the case. When one thinks truly, what one thinks is what is the case’ (McDowell Reference McDowell1996: 27). Hegel’s own name for this assumption is ‘the pure correspondence of the concept and its reality [das reine Entsprechen des Begriffs und seiner Realität]’ (WL: 737/TWA: 6, 551).
Of course, figuring out in detail what Hegel believes to be required to make a convincing case for absolute idealism is a different story. One would have to go through the details of his Science of Logic, because this is an overall defence of absolute idealism. The aim of my paper has been more modest. All I wanted to show is that Hegel has reasons to reject subjective and transcendental idealism, and that many of these reasons deserve fuller articulation in light of the question of what kind of an idealism (if any) Hegel himself defended. In addition, my aim has been to argue that Hegel’s absolute idealism should be interpreted as a contribution to meta-metaphysics rather than a view about the fundamental nature of reality. Such an interpretation also makes sense of his constant engagement with the threat raised by ancient Pyrrhonian and modern scepticism that metaphysics might in principle be an ill-conceived form of discourse. The experience of massive disagreement on the ‘battleground of metaphysics [Kampfplatz der Metaphysik]’ (CPR: A viii) had already led Kant to the idea of needing a radically new framework to finally turn metaphysics into a science, that is, a methodologically controlled investigation. In this context, Hegel ascribes to Kant a provisional move from metaphysics to meta-metaphysics—a move Hegel supports—but then sees Kant as entangled in a highly specific form of metaphysics, a combination of an entirely Newtonian conception of nature plus a transcendental idealist epistemology. Hegel rejects these tenets, for he believes that neither is ultimately compatible with the principle of intelligibility.Footnote 33
This aspect of his philosophy has hardly been explored as yet, despite the potential relevance of Hegel’s philosophy for contemporary metaphysics, which again finds itself confronted with forms of irresolvable disagreement which might be seen as evidence that something is wrong with the discipline. The resurgence of interest in Hegel’s take on the nature of metaphysics is also reflected in a certain change of interest in recent debates from the Phenomenology of Spirit to the Science of Logic and even to the Encyclopaedia, which is actually the only place where we find a sketch of Hegel’s philosophy of mind in its relation to nature in our contemporary sense. My framework for a reconstruction of Hegel’s arguments relies on the assumption sketched in this paper, namely that he is largely dealing with meta-metaphysical problems, a dimension almost entirely missed by classical critics from Marx and Heidegger via Russell to Popper.Footnote 34
