We can come to grips with Hegel easily by examining his philosophy from one central concern. To try to approach him in more ways than one is unnecessary as well as costly, the cost being that of confusion rather than clarification. The orientation, or central concern, most appropriate for studying Hegel in order to examine his importance for contemporary philosophy and religion is what for him was unproblematic.[1] What was unproblematic for Hegel was what he and the German Idealists (Fichte and Schelling) had in common. What they had in common was the uncritical acceptance of the world as collectively human and intelligible. This can be examined by considering them from the viewpoint of the Mind-Body problem. The German Idealists are characteristically lacking in just this respect; they do not consider any of the usual Mind-Body problems but instead sublimate the problem within the individual-collective distinction.
The beginnings of the individual-collective distinction lie in Kant’s answer to both the skepticism of Hume’s empiricism and the dogmatism of the rationalists. Kant argues that there are two aspects of knowledge, that of sensation and that of thought. When we sense, we receive impulses from an outside source, but thought is a process that takes place within our own minds. Though knowledge begins with our sensations and so needs an outside object as cause, our knowledge is not possible only because of those objects. Rather, our knowledge depends on the forms of our perception and the categories of the understanding.[2] We cannot conceive of an object unless we conceive of it as existing in space and time.[3] However, objects are not in space, neither are they in time; space and time are forms of our perception.
Kant’s categories of the understanding are derived from the twelve forms of judgment. Only by a union of these two logical tables is knowledge or judgment possible. The unity of perception (self-consciousness) is the final thing to which Kant credits all our knowledge.[4] For Kant, we cannot know the “thing-in-itself,” that object which causes our sensations, since the categories are not applicable to the object as it is but only as it appears to us. Now, the “thing-in-itself,” essentially unknowable, is reality. We can study our own minds and we can study appearances but still, for Kant, we cannot know reality.
Kant’s insistence that we cannot know reality did not stop further speculation. To quote W.T.Stace’s vivid words:
No sooner had Kant thus cried, “Halt!” to philosophy than philosophy, forming its adherents into a sort of triumphal procession, proceeding, so to speak, with bands playing and flags waving, marched victoriously onward to the final assault, confident of its power to attain omniscience at a stroke, to occupy the very citadel of reality itself.[5]
Jacobi, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and others rejected the “thing-in-itself” and thus set the stage for Post-Kantian philosophy.[6] The theory of the “thing-in-itself” is a flat contradiction. It is beyond the limit of knowledge yet Kant applies the category of cause to it conclude that there is such a “thing-in-itself” in the first place. Fichte described this as “…the absolute projection of an object concerning the origin of which no account can be given.”[7]
However, Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel adopted uncritically Kant’s substitution of “Phenomenology” for the Mind-Body problem. Kant does not get embroiled in the traditional Mind-Body problem as Descartes, Spinoza, etc. did. Descartes postulates the pineal gland as an interaction site for Mind and Body. Kant dismissed the usual interaction problem and replaced it with ego and the “thing-in-itself;” with the categories of the understanding and the forms of perception as the interaction site. This takes the interaction issue from concern with the individual Mind-Body relationship to the collectively human, intelligible world of the categories, since the categories of the understanding and the forms of perception are, for Kant, shared by all men. The categories of the understanding and the forms of perception unite the individual with the collectively human experience (or Phenomena).
Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel primarily wanted to construct a universal system based on the critical foundation laid by Kant. The collectively human, intelligible world was the starting point of their speculations. They differed in their methods of reaching knowledge of it. Fichte adopted Kant’s categories and attempted to demonstrate that they were necessary laws of intelligence by deriving them from a common root or a first principle. This first principle, he postulated, was the Absolute Self, a free, self-determining activity and creator of all reality.[8] But for Fichte, one must believe in order that one may understand. He says:
I know that every pretended truth produced by mere speculative thought and not founded upon faith, is assuredly false and surreptitious; for mere knowledge, thus produced, leads only to the conviction that we can know nothing.[9]
It is Faith, that voluntary acquiescence in the view that is naturally presented to us, because only through this view can we fulfill our vocation; this it is that first lends a sanction to knowledge, and raises to certainty and conviction what without it might be mere delusion. It is not knowledge, but a resolution of the will to admit the validity of knowledge.[10]
Fichte put his system forward as the only solution to the contradiction involved with the “thin-in-itself” theory. In his system the categories and the forms are “organically united” with our intuition. And through our intuition we know that “The categories are not empty forms into which matter is thrown from without, but arise with the objects themselves.”[11]
Schelling differed from Fichte in feeling that reality was not a product of the Absolute Self. He felt that reality, as a living, self-determining process is a stage in the evolution of Absolute Mind. To him, reality is similar to the human spirit, having life and purpose. So, while Fichte maintains the Kantian collectively human, intelligible world, Schelling proposes the world to be intelligible in itself apart from the collectively human. Both Fichte and Schelling moved the collectively human categories of Kant further and further toward the “thing-in-itself.” With Hegel the “thing-in-itself” actually become the collectively human, intelligible world. Hegel equated the Kantian “thing-in-itself” with Geist.
Hegel’s solution to the problem with the theory of the “thing-in-itself” was to reject the categories as Kant described them. Hegel argued simply, if the categories are inapplicable to the “thing-in-itself” then the categories “…themselves are something untrue…if they are inadequate for the thing-in-itself, then the understanding, whose forms they are supposed to be, ought to tolerate them even less.”[12] The “thing-in-itself” as the collectively human intelligible world is not something beyond human experience. As it is self-contradictory to claim the “thing-in-itself” is the cause of sensations and, at the same time, to claim that the categories cannot be applied to it, so if the categories can only be applied to appearances:
…we have no grounds whatsoever for assuming anything beyond experience. But in that case we also have no grounds for considering the categories merely subjective. So far from merely telling us something about the structure of the human mind, they are part of the structure of all knowledge and of discourse on any subject whatsoever – whether that subject be knowledge and discourse, nature, ethics, art, religion, or philosophy.[13]
The forms of thinking are first of all articulated and laid down in the language of man…. In everything that becomes for him something inward, any kind of notion, anything he makes his own, language has intruded; and what man makes into language and expresses in language, contains, shrouded, mixed in, or elaborated, a category….[14]
And in language Hegel can show how subject and object, thought and being form a conceived unity in the history of the collectively human, intelligible world, which is for Hegel, Geist.[15]
It is in this way that the traditional Mind-Body problem enters into the context of Hegel’s thought. The “we, the collectively human, that is Geist, incorporates both the individual and the collective. Through this distinction in Geist the perspective of philosophy and religion changes from one of mind and matter to one of individual Geist and collective Geist. It is this change in perspective that is the key to understanding the influence of Hegelianism on philosophy and religion. Through an examination of this relationship in Hegel’s thought between collective and individual Geist his philosophy can best be clarified and his influence clearly seen.
[1] The advantages of studying a broad philosophical movement by keying on the unproblematic can be seen in Charles Morris, The Pragmatic Movement in American Philosophy (New York, 1970)
[2] W.T. Stace, The Philosophy of Hegel, A Systematic Exposition (Dover Publications, Inc. 1955) pp. 422-423
[3] Ibid. p. 38
[4] Frank Thilly, A History of Philosophy (New York, 1966) pp. 422-423
[5] Stace, op. cit. p. 43
[6] Lewis White Beck, Early German Philosophy, Kant and His Predecessors (Cambridge, Mass. 1969) p. 369
[7] Josef Maier, On Hegel’s Critique of Kant (New York, 1966) – quotes Fichte p.67
[8] Thilly, op. cit. p. 453
[9] Johann Gottlieb Fichte, “The Vocation of Man” in The European Philosophers, From Descartes to Nietzsche trans. By William Smith, revised and edited by Monroe C. Beardsley (New York, 1960 originally 1800) pp. 490-531, p. 495
[10] Ibid. p. 495
[11] Robert Adamson, Fichte (New York, 1903 reprinted 1969) p. 167
[12] Kaufmann, op. cit. p. 182 quote is from Hegel. Logic ed. 1812 p. vii f. or 1841 ed. P. 29 unchanged by Kaufmann.
[13] Ibid. p. 185
[14] Ibid. quote from Hegel, Logic from the preface of the 2nd ed.
[15] Maier, op. cit. p. 72