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Hegel’s Idealism

Thursday, November 30, 17

G. W. F. Hegel

• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) was perhaps the last great philosophical system builder.

• His distinctively dynamic form of idealism set the stage for other nineteenth-century Western philosophers.

• Hegel, like Kant, is an idealist: Everything depends on mind.

• The world as we know it is something we construct.

Kant’s Philosophy of Mind

ConceptAppearance

This is a triangle

Understanding

SensibilityThing in itself

Critique of Kant

• Noumena (things-in-themselves) play no role in Kant’s system.

• The pure concepts of the understanding do not apply to them.

• So, they do not fall under the categories.

Critique of Kant

• We cannot say that things-in-themselves, in combination with our cognitive faculties, cause things to appear as they do, for causation is one of the categories.

• We cannot even officially say that things-in-themselves exist!

Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind

ConceptAppearance

This is a triangle

Understanding

SensibilityThing in itself

The Self• The same reasoning applies to the self

• For Kant, my body is part of the world of appearance, governed by physical laws

• But I—the “transcendental unity of apperception,” the noumenal self—am free!

• Hegel: This division makes no sense—get rid of the noumenal self

The Self• The same reasoning applies to the self

• For Kant, my body is part of the world of appearance, governed by physical laws

• But I—the “transcendental unity of apperception,” the noumenal self—am free!

• Hegel: This division makes no sense—get rid of the noumenal self

Kant’s Rationalism

• There are innate ideas: pure concepts of the understanding (the categories)

• There are synthetic a priori truths (laws of the understanding)

• But they apply only within realm of experience

Historicism

• Kant maintained that we could have universal and necessary knowledge of the world by uncovering the laws of the understanding.

• To give us universal and necessary knowledge, those laws must be constant; they must be the same for each person, in all times and circumstances.

• Why, however, should we expect human beings to construct the world in the same way, at all times and places, in all circumstances, in all cultures?

Historicism

• Hegel contends that the way in which we construct the world develops systematically over time.

• Philosophy, like other aspects of human thought, thus varies with historical circumstances.

• “Philosophy is its own time raised to the level of thought.”

Absolute Spirit

• Hegel tells the story of Spirit or Mind (in German, Geist), which progresses through a variety of stages to reach Absolute Knowledge.

Dynamic Principles

• This is not to say that philosophy cannot express any universal or necessary truths.

• But they are not the kinds of truths sought by Kant or other previous rationalists.

• What stays constant across historical circumstances are not a priori propositions or innate concepts but the set of dynamic principles governing the development of our ways of constructing the world.

Dynamic Principles

• Hegel finds some universal and necessary truths.

• But they are high-level, dynamic principles governing the development of thought.

• The best known is the thesis-antithesis-synthesis pattern.

Hegel’s Historicism

Theories about theories (absolute)

Theories about the world (relative)

Hegel’s Logic

Thesis Antithesis

Synthesis

Dynamic Patterns of ThoughtThesis

Antithesis

Synthesis

Thesis

• People adopt a certain way of looking at and thinking about the world (the thesis).

• Because it is only partially correct, over time people encounter contrary evidence, counterexamples, anomalies, and contradictions.

Antithesis

• Inspired by these, they shift to a new and contrary way of looking at and thinking about things (the antithesis).

• That too is only a partial truth, however, so it also gradually confronts contrary evidence, counterexamples, anomalies, and contradictions.

Synthesis

• The conflict between thesis and antithesis is eventually transcended in a synthesis that draws elements from both while transforming the way people see and think.

• That becomes a new thesis, and the process begins again.

Social Character of Thought

• Hegel sees human thought as essentially social.

• The social and historical context of thought is crucial.

• We learn our language, which provides our basic categories of thought, from other people, at a particular time, in the context of a particular society.

• What Kant and other rationalists take as stemming from our nature as knowers Hegel sees as reflecting a specific social background.

Dynamics of the Self

• Hegel, rejecting things-in-themselves, sees the unity of the self not as a given but as an achievement.

• His Phenomenology of Spirit (phenomenology = study of phenomena, that is, appearances) traces the development of the self through a variety of stages, including one he famously terms “unhappy consciousness.”

Unhappy Consciousness

• The self is divided, alienated from itself.

• We overcome that alienation socially.

Unhappy Consciousness

• We achieve self-consciousness by

–recognizing other people as self-conscious agents,

–being recognized as selves by them, and

–recognizing that recognition ourselves.

• We become integrated selves by being seen as such by others we recognize as selves.

Myth of the Given

• Hegel rejects what he refers to as immediacy, the sharp divide in Kant and the empiricists between sensibility and understanding— between perception and conceptual knowledge.

• Hegel denies that we can distinguish any given, preconceptual portion of our experience. The concepts we have shape the way we perceive the world.

• We construct norms

• They are relative to a historical period and social context

• They express the World Spirit in its current state of development

• But they progress toward the Absolute

• “Whatever is, is right!”

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