Philosophy and Locality, Pt. 1 – Hegelian Optimism

Hegel opens the Encyclopedia Logic by highlighting what he sees as the disadvantage of philosophy compared to other disciplines (“sciences”):

“Philosophy lacks the advantage from which alone the other sciences benefit, namely the ability to presuppose both its objects as immediately endorsed by representation of them and an acknowledged method of knowing, which would determine its starting point and progression.” (Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, §1 – Brinknann and Dahlsrom translation).

Representations, for Hegel, are how things appear to us, i.e., the way we happen to represent things to ourselves unreflectively. Thus, he is claiming that all disciplines, save philosophy, begin by uncritically taking certain things (though not necessarily everything) as they seem, and then apply a standardly accepted method to investigate them. That is, non-philosophical disciplines assume their starting point and go from there, without putting that starting point under scrutiny. It is not the job, for example, of chemistry to question whether there is matter in the first place (the chemist takes those representations as given), nor does a chemist need to justify the scientific method to get on with the experiments; the chemist qua chemist does not question whether science as it has been handed down to her is a valid mode of inquiry. The chemist simply takes the beginnings of chemistry as they are given immediately and gets on with the business of finding novel chemical truths. (At least that’s how it goes on ordinary days in the laboratory.) We might say that the chemist has the luxury of taking chemistry as ready-made right out of the package. In short, the chemist, when doing chemistry (as opposed to the philosophy of chemistry), is not burdened with putting chemistry as she just so happens to find it into question.

Following the remarks I quote above, Hegel goes on to compare philosophy with religion, and in his view these sciences have their objects in common, i.e., they both consider the ultimate truth, God, nature, the human spirit, etc. Moreover, like religion, philosophy must “definitely presuppose a familiarity with its objects,” because “consciousness produces for itself representations of objects prior to generating concepts of them” (The Encyclopedia Logic, §1). That is, philosophy and religion (along with all sciences) get their start by first taking our representations as given, for no better reason than that we are familiar with them, i.e., these representations are what have been passed down to us or simply how we find ourselves thinking. Inquiry must get off the ground, and we can only begin from where we are in the first place. Thus, using Hegel’s example, religion and philosophy both begin by presupposing certain traditions or so-called common-sense understandings of God, nature, the soul, etc. I will call these immediate representations localities because they constitute where we begin pre-critically.

Notice, however, Hegel contrasts representations with concepts. The former are local and contingent; representations are just how we happen to frame things given our particular history. Representations are subjective in the sense that they are perspective relative, i.e., they do not necessarily hold for someone who is not similarly situated as the subject of the assertion. Think of subjective in this context as conditioned by a subjective pronoun, e.g., “I think that . . .,” “We believe that . . .,” “They presume that . . .” etc. Representations are conditioned by what I call an “as a . . .” qualification, e.g., “As a chemist, I assume . . . “ or “As Catholics, we deny . . . .” For example, when I say “As an American, I am committed to . . .” I am implicitly conceding that other perspectives not qualified by my particular “as a . . .” allegiance would represent things differently. The commitment is only presumed to extend over the domain of Americans, which tells us nothing about how, say, the Belgians would represent things. The logic of “as a . . .” entails that what follows is based on a local presumption, i.e., it is how things appear when viewed from here, and there are different localities that might provide a different take on things -- I so happen to start from this one, but that could be optional. Locality carries with it a hint of contingency; though I am from this place, other people come from different points origin.

Concepts, by contrast, are not local and contingent, but universal and necessary. That is, the conceptual framing of things is unqualified, it is not dependent on “as a . . .” clauses. Whereas the representational framing has the hypothetical form of “As a F, all S are P” (“If you are like me, then you’ll agree that all . . .), the conceptual framing has the categorical form of “All S are p” (the subjective qualifications drop out, no “ifs, ands, or buts”). When one operates by concepts, in Hegel’s view, she is not limited to how things so happen to be represented in some locality (a tradition, history, etc.), but makes an objective claim to universal validity. Whoever or wherever you are, the concept applies. Thus, the distinctive mark of philosophy among all other sciences is not that it begins independently of local presuppositions (for Hegel that is impossible!), but that it insists on moving from subjective assumptions to objective comprehension. Philosophy is the transformation of our local representations into universally valid concepts. The philosopher is someone dissatisfied with residing in our local prejudices, and instead insists on proceeding as everyone (in the broadest sense – sans all “as a . . .” qualifications) ought to frame things. To return to our earlier example, unlike the chemist, the philosopher of chemistry puts the status of chemistry into question by asking whether chemistry as she has encountered it at a certain time and place is in fact how chemistry is best done.

For Hegel, the movement from local sciences to philosophy is not optional, because “familiarity with this content thus turns out to be insufficient, and to make or accept presuppositions or assurances regarding it appears illegitimate” (The Encyclopedia Logic, §1). In other words, the fact we (in this time, in this place, “as a . . .”) happen to represent something in a certain way is no justification for our stance. The homey familiarity of a certain way of thinking is insufficient to recommend it as normative. Since the Copernican Revolution, we are wary of the fact that “This is how it appears to us” is not the same as “This is how it really is.” Thus, Hegel clams that

“only by passing through the process of representing and by turning towards it, does thinking spirit progress to knowing by way of thinking and to comprehending. While engaged in thoughtful contemplation, however, it soon becomes apparent that such activity includes the requirement to demonstrate the necessity of its contents, and to prove not only its being but, even more so, the determinations of its objects.” (The Encyclopedia Logic, §1)

In other words, the fullest comprehension of things (knowledge as opposed to complacent confidence in our local prejudices) requires this movement from contingency and subjectivity to necessity and objectivity. Otherwise, we are merely passive conformists to whatever contingencies we have inherited, not bona fide rational agents – thinkers! I like how Wilfrid Sellars puts this: “there is no thinking apart from common standards of correctness and relevance, which relate what I do think to what anyone ought to think. The contrast between 'I' and 'anyone' is essential to rational thought” (Sellars, “Philosophy and the Scientific Image of Man,” 16–17). Short of moving from I to anyone (from the local and contingent to the universal and the necessary), we are subject to all the foibles and accidents that our idiosyncratic histories of representation foist upon us. For all we know, we might be on the move and the Sun is static, but we won’t get to the bottom of that until we question how things look from where we are standing here on Earth.

Note well that Hegel is not an insidious genealogist eager to use the universal acid of philosophical reason to dissolve all forgoing commitments and traditions. He believes an initial despair or anxiety is naturally requisite to the initial questioning of our locality, but he is not out to leave us with skepticism. Hegel clearly loathed the sort of undercutting skepticism abroad in his day, and he foresaw much of the same that was coming later in the nineteenth century. (See Hegel’s claim that skepticism is a cowardly evasion of our responsibility to the truth, in the Phenomenology of Spirit, §74.) In fact, Hegel is out to preserve locality against a vulgar and self-defeating rationalism that would have us abandon subjectivity entirely. Thinking does not happen in a vacuum: “human content of consciousness which is grounded in thought does not first appear in the form of thought, but rather feeling, intuition, representation” (The Encyclopedia Logic, §1). Hegel rightly understands that there is nothing under the sun without a “beginning.” As humans (and that’s the “as a . . .” we cannot ignore), we ineludibly start somewhere (that’s the lot of finitude), and this grounding in our local representations provides the content of our thinking. Like Kant, Hegel understands that pure conceptuality uncoupled from representations loses its grip on the world – representation and conceptuality form an internally related package deal. Thinking must be thinking about something, and we can only get our cognitive hooks into things in our vicinity.

This, however, poses a sticky problem, because philosophy now seems to be no less hampered by beginnings than any other science: “The difficulty of making a beginning, however, arises at once, since a beginning is something immediate and as such makes a presupposition or rather it is itself just that” (The Encyclopedia Logic, §1). In other words, thinking is only as good as the pre-reflective presuppositions of its origin (we must get off on the right track), but such representations are not necessarily any good, since they are recommended only by their familiarity. Our representations are just the starting point we have been thrown into, but nothing up-front guarantees that our locality is privileged. What assures us that we luckily began in the right place? The history of philosophy does not give us grounds for optimism in this regard, as it can easily be seen as a “the way of despair” – a succession of local beginnings that couldn’t stand the test of universal conceptuality (Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, §78, trans. Miller). Thus, it appears that we are always limited to representations; concepts are a vain hope, which abandons us to skepticism or subjectivism – we can only say how things are under an “as a . . .” qualification.

For Hegel, however, the claim that we are somehow trapped in the local is incoherent, since we can only raise the very question of our beginnings from the philosophical standpoint. The claim that “We are only able to argue from an ‘as a . . .’ qualification” does not chain itself to such a subjective limitation. In other words, “What makes our beginnings the right place to start?” is a question that does not make sense from just any particular somewhere, but only from an absolutely universal perspective, the proverbial “God’s eye view.” By raising the question of beginnings, I am somehow standing over all beginnings. Thus, the fact that we are having this conversation about the universal normative status of our beginnings entails that they do indeed have that status. Moreover, if I can see the prior history of thinking as a “way of despair,” I must do so from a perspective permitting the application of universal norms of thinking (concepts, not mere representations) across all those failed attempts; I must be thinking universally and not merely representing locally. What seems like a way of despair, must turn out to be progressive. Here’s how Hegel puts it: “Because of this necessity, the way to Science is itself already Science, and hence, in virtue of its content, is the Science of the experience of consciousness” (Phenomenology of Spirit, §78). Even to look for the way in which our beginnings might be justified entails that they are ultimately so justified. Our task is merely to reconstruct (or recollect) the pathway we already have travelled unawares. Though we necessarily began in finitude, we somehow ended up in the infinite, and the philosopher is out to demonstrate the concepts that structure that transformation and to speculate as to how it happens.

Notice the first sentence in the quotation from Hegel I introduced above: “only by passing through the process of representing and by turning towards it, does thinking spirit progress to knowing . . . .” Thus, philosophy cannot transcend representation let alone debunk it, but passes through it and turns toward it. In other words, the point is not to subvert our local presumptions, but to take them as an inevitable starting point on our way to a conceptual standing that returns to its beginning. This homecoming is supposed to show that the universal and necessary were implicitly there all along within the local and the seemingly contingent. For Hegel, like Heraclitus, the road up really is the same as the road down. Thus, philosophy forms a circle: it begins with the I perspective, achieves the anyone perspective, and then finally returns to show the opposition between the I and anyone was never exclusionary. As Hegel puts it, “the truth of philosophy” or the “highest goal of philosophical science” is “to bring about the reconciliation of the reason that is conscious of itself with the reason that exists, or with actuality, through the knowledge of this agreement” (The Encyclopedia Logic, §6). The job of philosophy is then to show how we happen to think about things (“reason that exists”) is in fact how one anyone ought to think about things. For Hegel, philosophy both presupposes and demonstrates that the way things actually are with respect to our thinking is how things ought to be. Thus, Hegel’s abiding motto from the Philosophy of Right: “What is rational is actual and what is actual is rational” (Hegel, The Philosophy of Right, 10 – trans. Knox).

Hegel plays on his word for determinate being, “Dasein,” which literally means “being there”: “It is not mere being, but determinate being [Dasein], etymologically taken, being in a certain place; but the idea of space is irrelevant here” (Hegel, The Science of Logic, 110 – trans. Miller). For Hegel, all being is concrete – nothing is merely abstract. Thus, being is Dasein, existing-somewhere. There is no indeterminate being in actual existence (as Aristotle says, everything must be a this in addition to being a what), so being must always exist someplace. That’s not to say everything is literally spatial; Dasein could be existing-somewhen or existing-with-somebody as well as existing-somewhere. The point is that, since there can be no utterly unspecified actuality, the ground floor of things must be beings that are tied to each other in concrete relations. The world, for Hegel, is local. The philosopher is no exception to this metaphysical law, so he too is Dasein. However, the philosopher is that local being who can also take his Dasein up into the universal (he can demonstrate his this is also a what). Rather than denying determinate being, this is to vindicate it as not only something that is, but also something that ought to be. Ultimately, for Hegel, philosophy is a kind of theodicy – a justification of all existence as what ought to exist.

Think of Hegel’s notion of philosophy in terms of Plato’s famous Allegory of the Cave. The story begins with prisoners who can see only images on the wall of the cave in which they have been perennially held captive. In Hegel’s terms, the prisoners are limited to the local and particular representations of their historical and cultural inheritance, i.e, their Dasein. One of the prisoners escapes and undergoes a process revealing the locality and particularity of these images. The newly liberated prisoner is troubled by the apparent contingency of his Dasein, and thus begins an arduous process of finding his way out of the cave (Hegel’s way of despair). Now on the outside, the former prisoner, the newly minted philosopher, encounters the universal forms that transcend the local limitations of the cave. To this point Plato and Hegel tell the same story, but now they diverge (we’ll take up Plato in the second part of this series). For Hegel’s part, the philosopher must return to the cave! The representations on the wall of the cave are the beginnings of his philosophy, so they need to be vindicated by the concepts he has found outside the cave. The philosopher does not overcome or transcend his Dasein. That is an impossibility; no actuality is non-local, existence is existing-somewhere. The philosopher must return by demonstrating that his Dasein is the local manifestation of the universal; his being in the cave and subsequent journey beyond are essential to the vision of the universal forms. Hegel’s philosopher descends back into the cave like an NFL all-pro returning to his old high school to tell the kids how the local virtues have resonance in the big leagues.

For Hegel, the inside-outside distinction of the Allegory of the Cave necessarily resolves into a unity. The real is the rational and the rational is the real, and thereby one abandons the real as though it were a vail of tears only by emptying the rational of its meaningful content. Thus, Hegel’s philosopher does not overcome the world of representations, but returns to these concrete realities to show that they implicitly contained the keys to what we ought to have thought all along. Rather, we should say that those representations were what we ought to have thought at that stage in our journey to the universal forms. Our representations are vindicated as necessary to the process. Hegel does not seek to overcome or leave behind the local and contingent, but to redeem it by showing that it has always had the implicit form of the universal and necessary, and moving through the former is the only way to achieve the latter. That’s a tall order, but Hegel would say it must be the case on pain of incoherence – our raising of the question assumes both the beginnings and the triumph of philosophy.

Of course problems abound. Namely, there are a lot of localities on offer, and they seem to be incompatible. There is every appearance of a “way of despair.” This is why Hegel emphasizes that the process of coming to knowledge is essential to the state of knowing. That is, knowing is the overcoming of the apparent conflicts of local beginnings, but we cannot grasp that explicitly until we have gone through that process of reconciliation. The trip in and out of the cave is not accidental to philosophical wisdom – the philosopher’s escape and return are essential parts of the knowing. Thus, Hegel claims that the history of philosophy has always been heading to fulfillment (otherwise our very question fails to make sense), even though it looks like a cacophony of incommensurable localities built on flimsy assumptions. History does not seem to make any sense (both the history of ideas and the history of the people who hold them), but that is an appearance limited by a local perspective. Hegel argues that the philosopher, who has moved beyond the cave to the End of History, can see how the seemingly ridiculous play of events is finally an unfolding toward a pre-ordained end that makes sense of the whole travail. The matter is complicated because we can only see the rationality of the concrete process retrospectively; as Hegel waxes “the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the failing of dusk” (Philosophy of Right, 13). But again, Hegel believes that any intelligibility presupposes that this grand synthesis is on the horizon; all the local appearances and contingent assumptions foisted on us by nature, culture, history, fickle preference, etc., will finally be shown as necessary to the inevitable achievement of Absolute Knowing. Here is Hegel’s own expression of his optimism:

“Thus the moments of the whole are patterns of consciousness. In pressing forward to its true existence, consciousness will arrive at the point at which it gets rid of its semblance of being burdened with something alien, with what is only for it, and some sort of ‘other’, at a point where appearance becomes identical with essence, so that its exposition will coincide at just this point with the authentic Science of Spirt. And finally, when consciousness itself grasps this its own essence, it will signify the nature of absolute knowledge itself.” (Phenomenology of Spirit, §89).

The job of the philosopher is then to demonstrate the path of thinking, the way to Absolute Knowledge. Really, the philosopher (and once again this is a commonality with Plato) is engaged in reconstruction or recollection. On the one hand, the philosopher abstracts the categories and concepts suited to the process of moving from the beginning, to the end, and back again. This is the task of Hegel’s logical writings, wherein he attempts to deduce the rational from the facts of the real. On the other hand, the philosopher thinks historically by giving concrete examples of how those concepts give shape to the actual process of human development. This is what Hegel is up to in his writings on history, politics, nature, art, religion, and of course the Phenomenology of Spirit, wherein he vindicates the real by the norms of the rational. (In typical Hegelian fashion, these projects presuppose each other.) In any event, the philosopher speculates as to how the human mind and society (these come to the same thing for Hegel) must have or inevitably will develop (these come to the same things for Hegel) to achieve this Absolute that mends all gaps between the local and the universal.

Though Leibniz, thanks to Voltaire’s superficial reading, gets the dubious honor of philosophy’s most blurry-eyed optimist, we can see now that Hegel might better deserve the title. For Hegel, we philosophers are already at the End of History. The game is happily rigged, and we just need to remind ourselves how we got here. Of course, Hegel’s optimism is not frivolous (and neither is Leibniz’s!). He has good reasons for thinking the Absolute must already be running things from behind the scenes of our minds and institutions. We, at this late date in history, find it hard to share Hegel’s confidence that it is the Absolute casting the images on the wall of Cave. Though we think of that sort of suspicion as a late arrival (the irony and cynicism of our postmodern situation), we will see in the next part of this series that it is the original philosophical stance. Of course, Hegel would diagnose this pessimism as captivity by our historical locality.

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