March 2021 – Philosophy Scare

28. The Young Hegelians

It was only to be expected that the radicality of Hegel’s philosophy would be missed. Not missed entirely, for the Phenomenology’s central concern with temporality cannot be denied. But it was relegated to the first seven chapters of that work, with the final chapter viewed as climbing up and out of time itself, from history into traditional philosophy, with its claims to truth above time. I have argued elsewhere (Time and Philosophy pp. 39-42) that this is an utter misunderstanding of that chapter: when Hegel moves on to his System, he does not write a statement of anything permanent, let alone eternal, but constructs a wildly revisable fugue of definitions (see Understanding Hegel’s Mature Critique of Kant, Chapter One).

But this went unrecognized at the time, and Hegel was divided into a youthful, radical Hegel, who wrote the Phenomenology (except the embarrassing Chapter Eight), and a traditional late Hegel (that chapter and the later “systematic” writings). Each Hegel attracted its own group of Hegelians. The older of these took the late Hegel as their master and expounded his philosophy as a giant proof that everything that existed was somehow a part of God, which made them very conservative. The Young Hegelians took the Phenomenology as their incitement, and operated as if everything they could talk about had beginnings and endings in time. Since the Old Hegelians had made Hegel’s supposedly divine Absolute the lynchpin of their conservatism, the Young Hegelians waged their war against them as a critique of religion.

The Young Hegelians won that war, but lost it as well. They won it by becoming much more influential than their older counterparts. Many people know of Ludwig Feuerbach, the early Zionist Moses Hess, Karl Marx, and Max Stirner (the more brilliant avatar of Ayn Rand); who today but a specialist has heard of Leopold von Henning, Philip Marheineke or J. K. W. Vatke? But what they won philosophically, the Young Hegelians lost personally: their political and religious radicalism denied them university careers. Some of them lived off small inheritances (Hess, Stirner); others became journalists (Arnold Ruge, Marx) or were supported by wealthy friends (Marx again). Feuerbach apparently became a grifter, moving to a town, running up debts, and then moving again. It is one of the saddest stories in the history of philosophy. (For more on the Young Hegelians, see the “Introduction” to Lawrence S. Stepelevich (ed.), The Young Hegelians Cambridge, 1983).

Their sad fates turned out to constitute an early phase of an enduring problem: philosophy, it seems, fits ill within the modern university. For the university is an institution, and institutions need financial support. This can only come from the upper reaches of society, from political and economic leaders, and upper reaches are never happy with radical critique—or even with radical questioning; Socrates was hardly the last to find this out (even teachings of Aquinas, later a saint, were condemned by the Catholic church in 1277). We will hear more of this; for the moment, it meant the exclusion of the best and brightest of a generation from German universities altogether.

But universities still had philosophy departments—needed to have them, for excluding such an ancient and prestigious domain would impugn their very reason for being, which was the impartial search for truth. And those departments needed, as the 19^th Century wore on, to make hires. Whom did they hire? Those who were not the best and brightest: those who were not quite as sharp, those who were a little bit lazier, those who from an abundance of personal caution abjured the dangerous work of thinking for themselves. In short, German philosophy abandoned Hegel altogether, returned to a (bowdlerized) Kant,[1] and sank into an intellectual morass. Lewis White Beck describes it as follows:

….men entered and left the [Neo-Kantian] movement as if it were a church or political party; members of one school blocked the appointments and promotions of members of the others; eminent Kant scholars and philosophers who did not found their own schools or accommodate themselves to one of the established schools tended to be neglected as outsiders and contemned as amateurs.
White Beck, “Neo-Kantianism” in Edwards, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy V. 428.

This situation continued for almost the entire 19^th Century; it is no accident that Frege was in a mathematics department, or that Nietzsche was a classicist; neither could stand the theistic prattle of the philosophers. Not until the 1890’s did respectable philosophy re-emerge in German philosophy departments, and then it was in politically safe forms of Kantianism—the phenomenologists at Göttingen and later Freiburg, the Logical Positivists in Vienna and Berlin, and the neo-Kantians at Marburg—all avoiding the new, temporalized approach pioneered by Hegel, who, as today, was never read and little remembered.

[1] The bowdlerizing consisted mainly in systematic underplaying of the Third Critique, for which see ## 24 and25

27. What we Think About When we Think About Hegel

Hegel’s philosophical embrace of temporality took him to some fascinating places. Here is one.

On a Hegelian (and, later, a ”continental”) approach, nothing whatsoever can be understood without knowing something about where it came from; for if everything we deal with is in time, it is there replacing something else that didn’t work out. So to understand a current situation requires understanding the problems with the previous situation which it remedies.

Applying this principle to, for example, Kant’s distinctive account of moral agency as the capacity to act from a single universal principle, the “categorical imperative,” requires asking how such moral agency has come to be. This kind of question usually has more than one answer. In the current case, one answer is that Kantian moral agency came to be from Kant: “moral agency” captures his understanding of a similarity holding for certain actions—those which we consider good, which all come into being in accordance with the categorical imperative. Kant has thus seized upon a similarity (or what he thinks is a similarity) among a number of events and has given it a name, making it publicly accessible (#3).

Thus, it is only fitting that Hegel’s account of Kantian moral agency finds a place in his broader discussion of Kant’s philosophy. But then Hegel asks a question which goes beyond Kant: how does one become a moral agent? Kant never answers this question: though his entire philosophy, at least as I understand it, is devoted to strengthening our capacity to act according to a universal principle, he never tells us how we acquire that capacity in the first place. Indeed, he explicitly refuses to do so:

But how this peculiar property of our Sensibility itself is possible, or that of our Understanding and of the apperception which is necessarily its basis and that of all thinking, cannot be further analyzed or answered, because it is of them that we are in need for all our answers and for all our thinking about objects .
Kant, Prolegomena Akademie-Ausagabe IV 318f

As I have argued elsewhere (Time and Philosophy, Chapter One) this conflates an explanation of fact with one of validity. We cannot think without the Understanding, but we cannot think without our brains either: is Kant saying that brain research is impossible?

Hegel, however, does tackle the question, in the course of his Philosophy of Right. He begins with the notion of a human being who is not a moral agent—one who, then, is guided entirely by desires. Such guidance does not work out because desires are inconstant and inconsistent: desires for various things (or people) follow one another at random, all of them are never fulfilled, and someone who has no other spiritual resources is pushed around by the lack of fulfillment.

So much is standard philosophical fare from Plato on; but Hegel goes into much more detail than is usual about how a person moves from that pre-moral state to the universal concern for humanity implied in Kant’s categorical imperative to treat everyone as “ends in themselves.” His treatment has, I think, two distinctive features. One is an insistence that moral agency has an affective dimension—in order to treat all people as ends in themselves, you have to care about them. The other is the claim that we are brought to such universal care by the institutions of modern society.

Thus, marriage—which is grounded mainly in the urgent contingency of sexual desire—shapes that desire into a stable relationship of two hearts. In the family, the purely physical side of this eventually dies away, “extinguished in its own satisfaction.” But this also doesn’t work out, because families require sustenance. To get that, one must enter into civil society, the market-driven realm in which a person succeeds by providing others with goods and services that they require. This means taking into account, not merely the needs of one’s spouse, but those of a wider circle—one’s clients or customers, for one must figure out what they need in order to provide them with it. The market economy, in turn, requires state regulation. Eventually, erotic love turns into patriotism, and one’s physical desires are educated into a panoply of cultural and spiritual concerns. But states, too, are mortal, as we see at the end of the book. To be truly enduring, then, the emotion of patriotism must turn into concern for humanity at large.

Life in the modern state thus constructs the individuals who inhabit it:

The principle of modern states has this monstrous strength and profundity, to allow the principle of subjectivity to perfect itself into the self-sufficient extreme of personal diversity (Besonderheit) and simultaneously to lead it back to the substantial unity [of the state], and so to maintain that unity in the principle of subjectivity itself.
Hegel, Philosophy of Right §260

The modern state thus allows individuals to take shape in the most diverse ways—religiously, ethnically, professionally, and in whatever other “extreme” way is called for, while still providing channels for them to care, and care actively, about their fellows. This is the earliest explicit defense of human diversity I have found in Western philosophy, and still one of the most powerful for it claims that my being who I have to be enriches everyone. It is no accident that American thinkers as profound as W. E. B. Dubois and Martin Luther King were students of Hegel.

But all this, from Kant’s point of view,—and not only Kant’s—is misguided. For moral agency, on Hegel’s account, is historically conditioned, and so not, in Kant’s sense, “universal” at all. Before Kant, one could noconceive of such moral agency; and without the modern state, one cannot live it. On a Kantian approach—indeed, on the approach of all traditional philosophy, from Parmenides on—the capacity to act from a universal principle can only be either a state of affairs which obtains for reasons we cannot and need not fathom—or a mere ideal which cannot actually exist anywhere in our experience.

26 What We Think About Hegel

Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) is, as far as I know, the first book in western philosophy to abjure appeals to the atemporality of anything—for Hegel’s immediate predecessor in this regard was Heracleitus, who didn’t write books; he didn’t even know what they are.

This is hardly the standard account of Hegel, which is still a quasi-theological one. Nor is it the usual revisionary one, which is quasi-Kantian. But it is the only view of Hegel I know of that actually makes his philosophy work, for the others require gigantic and indefensible presuppositions (e.g. “not only does God exist, but here is what He thinks;” or “these, not Kant’s, are the necessary categories of human thought”). And, as I have argued in two books, it has textual support: look Hegel’s his use of “truth,” in the Phenomenology, to designate the outcome of a certain sort of process rather than the traditional notion that truth consists in the “correspondence” of something verbal or mental (a sentence, belief, etc.) to some fact or state of affairs.

Hegel’s usage here reminds us that truth as correspondence is an atemporal notion. For the two poles of a correspondence-relation, a sentence or belief on one side and a fact or state of affairs on the other, must exist simultaneously for the relation between them to hold: if I say the cat is on the mat,” then the cat either is, or is not, on the mat when I say it. If I say “the cat was on the mat last Tuesday,” then I am inferring to something I cannot now experience; what exists right now is whatever evidence I have that the cat was on the mat last Tuesday. Is it that of which the sentence is true?

Saying that a sentence “corresponds” to the evidence for it would evacuate correspondence of all meaning, so philosophers invented something called “facts,” to which sentences (etc.) correspond but which are atemporal: it is a fact right now that the cat was on the mat last Tuesday. Such a fact can serve as the complement for true statements about the past and future. But why postulate wholly atemporal beings for this job, when you can follow Aristotle and say that our minds form images, φαντάσματα, of things, and locate some of those things in a similarly imagined past? “The cat was on the mat last Tuesday” is then true of my image of the cat on the mat, together with the temporal index “last Tuesday.” Philosophers don’t like mental images as a rule, and I sympathize—but how imaginary are facts? Have you ever seen one?

If I am right about Hegel, he thinks something like the Aristotelian account is the way our minds ordinarily work (he usually opts for Aristotle in such cases); but there is also the alternative of saying that “the cat is on the mat is true” has nothing to do with any state of affairs referred to, but simply conveys that a certain process has resulted in the localization of the cat on the mat. That is, roughly, what he does in the Phenomenology.

If to be true is to be the result of a certain kind of process, then everything true is path-dependent. What kind of path ends in truth? For the Phenomenology, it is one that resembles what is often called today the “hypothetico-deductive” model of scientific inquiry. It has four stages (forget the three-stage “thesis-antithesis-synthesis” stuff):

an hypothesis is formed (Hegel calls it a “certainty”);
it is tested against reality (“experience”);
it fails, i.e. encounters significant anomalies (“contradictions”)
the hypothesis is revised (“sublated”) to accommodate them.

The distinctive features of the Phenomenology, as opposed to scientific inquiry, are two: first, the hypothesis always fails and requires revision; and second, the testing carried out can be ethical in nature: an hypothesis promises the success of certain courses of action, and it is when these fail that the certainty needs revision. Since the revised hypothesis is the “truth” of the process, I will call the whole development a “truth-process

This characterization of the truth-process is formalistic, for in the Phenomenology it applies to a huge gamut of contents. The relation between the formalistic process and its content is therefore contingent; and, moreover, the relation between a particular case of the process and anything that ever actually happened is also contingent. History does not in fact exhibit truth-processes of this kind, except very rarely; the facts of history, Hegel tells us in the Preface to his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, present us with a “slaughter bench,” a panoply of meaningless suffering. The question is not whether the available facts constitute a truth-process, but whether they can be reconstructed—or, better, reconstrued— or, better still, construed—as one.

Such construal requires, at minimum, omitting all kinds of random events and circumstances which, in reality, accompany the stages of the truth-process. These often include the intentions of the people engaged in a truth-process. Hegel justifies such omission of intentions as the “cunning of reason” (though it often amount to the “cunning of Hegel”). Though truth processes almost never actually happen, they are “rational” for Hegel when they are construable as testing just one part of a certainty at a time, via a series of minimal changes (“determinate negations”).

25. Kant’s Hidden Solution

But we are not quite finished with Kant—more accurately, he is not quite finished with us. We saw (# 24) that Kant’s problem is Aristotelian (and, in a sense, Platonic); his solution, too, is Aristotelian.

Kant’s formulation of the problem is bought at the price of restricting the entire issue to the human mind: we are not to ask how a divine, unchanging realm produces changes in the world we live in, as Aristotle (and Plato) did, but merely how the principles of different faculties of the mind relate to one another. But the solution to this quintessentially modern formulation must be bought at another price, one Kant is not willing to pay, because he wants us to remain with the timeless principles of transcendental philosophy, to go down with the transcendental ship he has invented. But in the first part of the Critique of Judgment, before entering its final debacle, Kant shows us a possible escape.

To be sure, he fights hard to disguise it.

Reflective judgment for Kant begins with a “summing-up” (Zusammen- fassung: CJ 287). What gets summed up must have been given originally not as a unit but as a series of sensory contents (“intuitions”), deliverances of our sensory organs which our mind has arranged in space and time. Judgment then must scan those sensory contents; when it achieves a ”summing up,” the scanning stops. This may be because of some characteristic of the contents themselves (e.g. a color which reaches an edge), in which case the object is judged to be beautiful; or it may result from some feature of the scanning apparatus itself, in which case the object “exceeds” the scanner in some way and is termed sublime.

In a judgment of beauty, there may be only one stopping-point or summing up, or (expanding on Kant) several. In the former case, the judgment is of one object; in the latter, of a plurality. In either case, that sensory contents can be summed up means that they are held within boundaries, within which all points have equal weight and nothing is more central than anything else. Kant calls this kind of arrangement “aesthetic form.”

Leaving Kant behind, we may suppose that an aesthetically-formed sensory unit, or “aesthetic unit,” is then associated with a sound, so that (as Plato puts it in the Phaedo) the sensation of either calls up the other. When the formed unit is a single object, the sound associated with it is its proper name. When it is a plurality, the sound is associated with a set of properties shared by the objects summed up; it is a common name.

Naming is traditionally viewed as a “baptism,” an association of a sound or mark with a being which pre-exists the act of naming. Viewed as a case of reflective judgment, the object named is not presupposed, but is co-created by the sensory contents, with their shared properties on the one hand and the mind which scans them and sums them up on the other.

Any two sensory contents resemble one another just in that both are sensually given. They may also resemble one another in an indeterminate number of further ways—in shape if they are colors, pitch if they are sounds, and so on. Any two sensory experiences which we would say resemble each other thus do so in more than one way; the resemblances we recognize as such are superadded to their shared, and normally unspoken, quality of being sensed at all. The association of a sound with a plurality of aesthetic units thus normally takes place via a selection among the shared properties of the aesthetic units. Just which resemblances get selected for often requires clarification, through repeated ostension, definitions or longer explanations.

Reflective judgment so understood forms names; and it does so via a process akin to that of Homeric simile: first, some similarity among a set of sensory givens is noticed and seized upon (in Kantian terms, “summed up”). Such similarities, being sensory contents, are private; associating them with a sound makes them public. To form a name is therefore to decide that a certain set of similarities among sensory contents should be a public matter. What are the criteria for such a decision?

Obviously they are many and various, because they concern what is usefully talked about by a group of people at a particular time and in particular circumstances; this is the obvious truth behind Franz Boas’ reputed claim that the Inuit have 50 words for snow. It is perhaps worthy of note, in this connection, that words can be embedded in practices shared across a society, to cue others as to what to do next: names are the pre-eminently human means of action-coordination.

The names we produce articulate only a small subset of the many ways in which things resemble one another. Which of those ways are selected to be named varies with time and place. Thus, when Kant, at the very outset of his philosophical trajectory, characterizes sensation as “receptivity” (Rezeptivität, KRV B33), we must ask where that word comes from. Did he examine a number of cases of affection by objects and see that they all had receptivity in common? Or did he have a “pure” cognition of receptivity apart from the many instances of it in his experience? Kant tacitly opts for the latter—and with this appeal to purity, vaults into timelessness and gives his whole game away: the debacle of the Critique of Judgment already awaits him. If the former, however, he must accept that other people, at other times and places, may not see those cases as coming under the heading of “receptivity” at all. The possibility which, in the Third Critique, haunts him most—the possibility that our very faculties are gifts of history, which history can take back—stands open.

It is not merely a possibility; it is an abyss.

Philosophy trembled on its brink.

24. A Problem With Kant

Kant resolves the contradiction in the Third Antinomy (#23) as he resolves the others, by throwing each side into a different mental box: the thesis, he says, is a principle of the Understanding, and the antithesis is a principle of Reason. But a deeper problem now arises.

Here again we see how tightly history of philosophy’s web is woven, for this new problem had also made trouble for Aristotle. His divine Prime Mover, being without matter, cannot change. But any action of a cause, Aristotle says, changes the cause: saws, for example, become dull. So how can something unchanging be a cause?

This was also a problem for Plato, but one he perhaps didn’t see clearly, for he never really explains how a form causes a thing to participate in it at a particular time: “participation,” Aristotle remarks, is a word and not a theory.

So Kant’s problem goes back to Plato; but his solution remains with Aristotle, who presents it in Metaph. Λ. There he asserts that there is one kind of cause which does act without changing, and that is the final cause. Love is an example: the person you love changes you, but your love does not necessarily change them; unreciprocated love is quite common. So the order of nature must be caused by the love of the cosmos for the Prime Mover, which acts ὥς ἐροῦμενον—as something loved. And love for Aristotle is a form of final causality: to love someone is to become more you in their proximity.

And Kant? On the one hand, he is going to say that we are not talking about objects, as Aristotle and Plato were; and we are also not talking about our experiences, as Hume thought. Nor, to be sure, are we talking about love. We are talking about fundamental, unalterable activities of the mind which proceed according to rules. The Understanding follows the thesis of the Third Antinomy, taking as its rule of operation that everything has a cause outside itself; the antithesis follows Reason, which takes as its rule the possibility of a free action, i.e. one without such a cause. So the Kantian question is: how can we view Reason as a cause without violating the rules of either faculty?

The First Critique, that of pure Reason, suggests that simply relocating the issue to the faculties solves the problem: our minds are set up to work with two contradictory rules, end of story. The Second Critique, that of practical Reason, maintains that Reason acts as a cause via a feeling, that of respect (Achtung) for the moral law—the only a priori feeling that we have. This solution is more than a bit ad hoc, and because it is restricted to a feeling it does not explain how it is even possible that an individual moral action can make the world a better place. So in the Third Critique, that of Judgment, Kant goes back to Aristotle, and invokes his solution to the problem.

It is not that an old bachelor like Kant makes ἐρῶς into a moral force. But Aristotle, recall, believes that ἐρῶς is a kind of final cause: I love someone because I become more myself in their vicinity. And this suggests a more general answer to the question of how something immutable can be a cause: if something else tends to imitate it. Kant argues that the faculty of Judgment takes it as its rule that the sensory world, structured by the Understanding according to external causes, seeks to become a world of Reason, structured by free actions. Or at least: Judgment has to view it that way.

The stakes here are sky high for Kant. If he is right, but only then, he has answered how the two contradictory rules of the Understanding and Reason can be united into a coherent human mind; and, moreover, he has explained what Plato and Aristotle—and everybody else running around in the ancient Metaphysical Barn—could not: how the immutable realm (Reason for Kant, forms for Plato, essences for Aristotle) relates to the changeable world we live in. The price of this, for Kant, is that we are talking not about objective reality, but about the way the rules of our mind make us see such reality.

Kant is willing to pay this price; but he cannot, for he does not do even the job his critically restricted philosophy requires. His “argument” that Judgment requires us to see nature as having Reason for its final cause (at Critique of Judgment §§ 82-85) is not even an argument, but a series of observations, digressions, stipulations, and the like.

So here is where things stand after the Critique of Judgment: Hume has shown that we can have no knowledge of immutable things outside our mind; Kant agrees with that, but then tries to establish such knowledge within the mind, in the form of the (knowable) rules of the faculties. He then cannot explain how the immutable truths of Reason can serves as causes in the ever-changing world we actually live in. His failure means that immutable truths cannot be known either inside or outside of the mind. Philosophy must dismiss them altogether

Hume’s success led him to billiards, and then to history. What happens after Kant’s failure?

The Critique of Judgment came out in 1790. Philosophy held its breath for 17 years.

Two Dollops of Meta

I hate people who do what I did: start blogs and then don’t finish them. This blog has along way to go–in spite of what they say, the history of philosophy is not finished even today, let alone in Kant’s time. But I plead for forgiveness on the grounds that I was trapped in Chicago by an evil virus. I flew there just before the 2020 elections, fearful of my reactions if the Bad Guy won. My plan was to return sometime after Thanksgiving. But then there arose such a fearful surge of COVID-19 that I stayed on, and on….until my resourceful daughter got my wife and me vaccinated and I could return to my workplace in Los Angeles. resuming these meanderings through the history of Western philosophy.

The word “meanderings” brings up another matter that troubles me. Shouldn’t I be publishing these in reverse order? When you open this blog, the last is the first: what confronts you is the most recent posting, and the ones that follow it down the list get earlier as you go along. So the story is being told backwards.

But then: isn’t that how we discover history? Something confronts us. it seems cloudy in places, confusing in others. So you ask where it came from, and usually some things get cleared up. But that explanatory factor has clouds of its own, so you ask where it came from, and so on down the line. And that’s the way you have to confront this blog, So I’ll leave it like this.

And with my Two Maxims Regarding History: Everything we see ordeal with is there replacing something else that didn’t work out; and, everything in history could have been different; that’s what “history” is.