Learning From Hegel What Philosophy is All About:
for the Metaphysics of Reason; against the Priority of Meaning1
Jim Kreines
jkreines@cmc.edu
DRAFT, PLEASE DO NOT CITE, comments welcome
Disagreement about Hegel’s philosophy extends even to the simplest or most basic
questions. Recent debates have focused specifically on so-called “non-metaphysical”
interpretations of Hegel, which raise the simplest question of all: what is Hegel’s philosophy
about? Or: what sort of philosophical issues does it most fundamentally address?
I am a participant in these debates, having long argued for a metaphysical
interpretation. I mean mine to be a new kind of metaphysical interpretation, designed to do
justice to the continuity between Kant and Hegel. So my reading is sometimes grouped in a
new third category: neither a “traditional metaphysical,” nor a “non-metaphysical” reading,
but rather a “revised metaphysical reading.”2 I have no problem with this label, but I have
begun to worry about the debate itself. My worry is that all parties to this debate seem so
certain that they are being misunderstood; and if no one agrees about what is being debated,
then it is worth worrying whether we might be failing to debate any determinate
philosophical issues at all. As Redding says, in distinguishing the three approaches above,
“it is still not clear which issues dividing them are substantive and which are ultimately
verbal.”3
1
I want to thank, for helpful comments on earlier versions of this material, Michela Bordignon, Paul Hurley,
Luca Illetterati, Dean Moyar, Jamila Mascat, Federico Orsini, Peter Thielke and Paolo Vinci.
2
Redding, Paul. “Hegel” The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Section 2.4. 2010.
3
Ibid.
1
True, there has been a kind of progress in the debate: Prominent “non-metaphysical”
interpreters, such as Pinkard and Redding, have recently advocated dropping that label in
favor of the label “post-Kantian.”4 But they do not mean to concede a philosophical point.
Rather, they are trying to correct what they see as a misunderstanding of the interpretation
they have advocated all along. Further, I am compelled by my position to worry that their
new label involves a misunderstanding: the label “post Kantian” suggests that the approach
formerly called “non-metaphysical” is the best way to do justice to the continuity between
Kant and Hegel; I think that my reading, although more of a metaphysical approach, is a
better way to do justice to this same continuity. And so the debate seems sucked ever farther
into empty terminological squabbles, and away from anything of philosophical significance.
But I have come to think that the debate is not merely verbal. It is philosophically
significant insofar as it exposes a crucial philosophical question whose import is easy to
miss: the question of metaphilosophy. The question is, what is philosophy itself most
fundamentally about? Or, what issues are most fundamental in philosophy?
Non-metaphysical and similar interpretations tell a story about Hegel and Kant that
depends on a strong metaphilosophical commitment: a commitment to taking certain
specific philosophical problems as absolutely fundamental, prior, or inescapable throughout
philosophy. More specifically, the story takes as fundamental broadly epistemological
problems about the possibility of knowledge of, and meaningful thought about, an
independent world. Given the essential role of problems about meaning, anyone who no
longer wants to call this “non-metaphysical” could well call it a “priority of meaning” or
“meaning-first” interpretation of Hegel.
4
Pinkard, for example, refers to “what is called the ‘post-Kantian’ interpretation (or sometimes, somewhat
misleadingly, the ‘non-metaphysical’ interpretation) of Hegel” (2004). And see Redding (2009, 7).
2
My goal here is to articulate an alternative. I do not think that those issues about
knowledge, meaning and independence are fundamental or inescapable throughout
philosophy. Nor do I think that Hegel sees such issues as fundamental. I think that Hegel
rather takes as fundamental questions about what is a reason for what, or questions within
what I call “the metaphysics of reason.” And I will draw on this alternative metaphilosophy
to sketch an alternative approach to interpreting Hegel—just enough of a sketch to argue
that this makes possible a very different way of understanding Hegel’s philosophy as
continuous with Kant’s.
So I will argue that the Hegel debate is not merely terminological. For we can
distinguish substantially different interpretive approaches in terms of which issues they take
to be fundamental to philosophy, or which metaphilosophical commitments they attribute
to Hegel. And that there are some important interpretive disadvantages of nonmetaphysical or meaning-first readings of Hegel. Further, a meaning-first reading isn’t the
best choice even for the restricted goal of establishing connections between Hegel and
contemporary analytic philosophy. Finally, this look at Hegel can help us to better
understand the philosophical issues themselves. Of course, there is no space here to
definitively defend a comprehensive interpretation of Hegel, let alone a comprehensive
metaphilosophy. But appreciating the availability of a sharply different reading of Hegel can
help us to appreciate the availability of a sharply different contending metaphilosophy—and
so to better appreciate the underlying terrain on which such wars in philosophy are still
fought today. In that sense, we can learn something important from Hegel with respect to
the question of what philosophy itself is all about.
3
1. Metaphilosophical Diagnosis of the Hegel Debate
Non-metaphysical or “meaning-first” interpretations advocate one specific way of
reading Hegel’s philosophy as continuous with Kant’s. I agree about the continuity, but I
will offer an alternative interpretation of it below. Still, I think it is important to first tell the
non-metaphysical or meaning-first story, in order to appreciate its dependence on a
metaphilosophy. So although I do not agree with it, here is the basic story:
Pre-Kantian philosophers have discussed things they thought we could know about.
It doesn’t matter what things—call them “X”. But none of them adequately provided a
necessary first step: reflecting on our own cognition in order to explain the possibility of
knowledge of whatever X they wrote about. To proceed without this is to implicitly assume
that X can itself explain the possibility of knowledge of it. And for X to explain the
possibility of our knowledge, X would have to be independent of our knowledge or our
form of cognition. So pre-critical philosophers implicitly take our knowledge to be
explained by, and responsible to the standard set by, some X that is absolutely
independent of our cognition. Or, they take the standard to be a way of grasping of X in its
absolute independence—something like a God’s eye view. This package of views is called—
(at least by those who tell this kind of story)—“realism.”5
Kant (the story continues) rejects “realism” in this sense, taking it to guarantee
skepticism, because we could never know utterly independent of the forms of our
cognition. Kant’s alternative is reflection on our own cognition, aiming to demonstrate
through attention to the spontaneity of our understanding that we fix from within a
distinction between the subjective and the objective—now in a sense of “objective” that is
5
I do not myself advocate using the term “realism” in this way. I would reserve that term for views about what
there is, not views about the explanation of knowledge. But the more epistemic usage is important to this story,
and so this is what I will mean when I use the term within quotation marks.
4
internal, as it were, as opposed to the pre-critical sense of absolute independence. So
Kant’s philosophy parallels 20th century rejections of “metaphysical realism” in favor of a
kind of “internal realism.” And we can understand as similar Kant’s claim that
“transcendental realism” leads to the skeptical position of “empirical idealism,” while only
“transcendental idealism” can save “empirical realism” (A371).
Finally, (the story concludes) Hegel carries this line of thought yet further, turning it
against Kant. For Kant claims that we cannot have knowledge of things as they are in
themselves. But we cannot explain the possibility of meaningful thought about such things
supposed to be absolutely independent of our cognition, any more than we can explain the
possibility of knowledge of them. To assume that we could would be again another form of
“realism,” and it too should be rejected. To complete the parallel with the above, the
conclusion is that we can meaningfully refer to an objective world only insofar as we fix
from within our cognition a distinction between the subjective and the objective—again in
a sense of “objective” that is internal rather than the pre-critical sense of absolute
independence. So we must give up as meaningless claims about absolutely independent
things in themselves, including claims to be ignorant of them.
That is the basic “non-metaphysical” story. Redding, for example, sees Hegel as
arguing that:
Kant’s combination of conceivability but unknowability seems to take away
with the one hand a quasi-divine epistemic take on the world – the so-called
‘God’s-eye view’ – only to return something like a semantic version of it with
the other… (2007, 222)
In terms from Pippin (1989), which first made possible such currently popular approaches,
Hegel focuses on the conditions of possibility of any meaningful or “any intelligible
experience of an object,” seeking to extend Kant’s claim about “the spontaneity and
reflexivity of any intelligible experience of an object” (1989, 12). Hegel takes this as a revolt
5
against “realism,” and so also against forms of skepticism that depend on realist
assumptions (“realist skeptical doubts”6), including Kant’s own “‘thing in itself’ skepticism.”7
And Hegel seeks to establish that rejecting realist skepticism supports the conclusion that
our own knowledge is second to no other intelligible standard, or is absolute.8 McDowell
follows: Hegel’s idealism is a “radicalization” of Kant’s “account of the objective purport of
experience”; Hegel is supposed to argue that Kant’s claims about “things themselves”
undermine attempts to defend the objectivity of our knowledge—the point of Hegel’s
radicalization is supposed to be a more completely or successful defense of objectivity.9
It is easy to see why some proponents who once used the “non-metaphysical” label for
this story are rethinking the label, and also why all this brings us to disputes that can seem
merely verbal or terminological. For the point of this story is not that Hegel limits himself to
only modest knowledge about our own cognition as opposed to knowledge of reality. The
point of these readings is that Hegel takes a route though Kantian reflection on our
cognition, to the conclusion that worries about ignorance of things in themselves are
unintelligible, and so to the further conclusion that Kantian reflection on the necessary
conditions of thought yields knowledge of reality—knowledge that is not in any intelligible
respect limited or less than absolute.10 So the idea is to attribute to Hegel a specific brand of
anti-realism—a radically anti-skeptical form of anti-realism. And if “metaphysics” just
means any investigation of reality, then this reading is not non-metaphysical in that sense.
6
E.g. p. 107 and similar formulations throughout.
7
1989, 6.
8
E.g. 1989, 94.
9
McDowell 2009, 69 and 79.
10
Redding 2009, 7.
6
But by the same token it now it also becomes difficult to say more precisely even just
what is at stake in such debates about such anti-realism in a manner that all sides will
accept. Realists will charge that anti-realism is skeptical about independent or objective
reality. Anti-realists will answer that this is to misunderstand the debate, for only their view
can account for a reality that is independent or objective in all intelligible senses, and for
our knowledge of it. They will charge realists with holding an unintelligible conception of
objectivity. And realists will reply that this is to misunderstand the debate, for their view has
nothing to do with whatever unintelligible conception is being foisted on them. Etc.
I will not try to clarify these debates further, because I will later argue against the
meaning-first story about Hegel. But for now I just want to point out the dependence of this
story on a metaphilosophy. The dependence is clear if we note the need for an argument
against pre-critical metaphysics. Consider a pre-critical metaphysician—call him by his
initials, PCM—who says this: Look, no philosophy can explain everything. Everyone must
take something for granted. I begin with our knowledge of ordinary things, like rocks and
trees and their parts, and then I use this to address the metaphysical issues of interest to
me—for example, the question of whether they have indivisible atomic parts. The nonmetaphysical folks apparently think that I am thereby leaving unanswered some other
question about the possibility of knowledge of such things; but, if so, then this is not a
question that I have any interest in answering, nor for my purposes any need of
answering.
The “non-metaphysical” story above contains an argument against PCM, but the
argument depends entirely on metaphilosophy: PCM is supposed to be mistaken because
claims about any rocks or trees or any X, without a critical or idealist explanation of the
possibility of knowledge of X, simply must involve at least implicit reliance on the “precritical” or “realist” view that X itself explains the possibility of our knowledge of it—even if
7
PCM is naïve or unknowing about this dependence. So issues concerning independence and
the possibility of knowledge are supposed to be fundamental in the sense that it is naïve to
think that they can be ignored; they are inescapable, or what philosophy is inescapably
about. So the argument in this story depends entirely on the metaphilosophy.
A similar argument would be required against Kant’s claim that we can meaningfully
conceive of some things of which we cannot have knowledge. Imagine Kant responding like
this: Look, no philosophy can explain everything. I note one meaningful conception that
we do in fact have—our idea of “the unconditioned.” I argue that this idea is spontaneously
generated by our faculty of reason.11 And I argue that we cannot have knowledge of
anything unconditioned.12 Redding apparently thinks that I am leaving unanswered some
further question about the possibility of meaning here. But, if so, then this is not a question
that I have any further interest in answering, nor any need of answering. I take the
meaning of the idea, and I use it to solve other problems concerning knowledge: I use it to
render my defense of objective scientific knowledge compatible with the need to also “deny
knowledge to make room for belief” (Glaube) with respect to ultimate questions relevant to
freedom and morality (Bxxx).
The meaning-first story provides an argument, but it again depends on
metaphilosophy. The reply is that problems concerning meaning are fundamental to
philosophy, in the sense that they are inescapable, so that it is naïve to think they can be
ignored or set aside as irrelevant to the task at hand. So those who tell this kind of story
about Hegel cannot rest content with the claim that Hegel’s philosophy includes
11
For example, “reason does not give in to those grounds which are empirically given, and it does not follow the
order of things as they are presented in intuition, but with complete spontaneity it makes its own order
according to ideas” (A548/B576).
12
See the passage from (Bxx) discussed below.
8
consideration of problems about meaning, or semantics. The argument attributed to Hegel
requires the stronger claim that problems about meaning or semantics are fundamentally or
inescapably what philosophy is about. The idea here is a “priority of epistemology” or
“epistemology-first” reading of Kant and Hegel; and, more specifically, a “priority of
meaning” or “meaning-first” interpretation of Hegel.
2. Distinguishing the Metaphysics of Reason
The philosophical issues taken as fundamental in non-metaphysical or meaning-first
interpretations of Hegel have tended to color what it will seem to mean to dissent: to give a
contrasting “metaphysical” reading will seem to mean portraying Hegel as arguing that the
possibility of our knowledge and meaningful thought is explained by a world that is
absolutely independent of our cognition. In other words, those who read Hegel as arguing
for something like 20th Century anti-realism or internal realism will naturally take
dissenters to hold that Hegel takes the opposite stand on the very same philosophical
issues. It should be clear now why a sense of misunderstanding on all sides of this debate is
natural, given differing metaphilosophical commitments. For I have in mind something very
different by way of a “metaphysical” interpretation of Hegel. I do not see Hegel as taking a
different stand on the same issues concerning the explanation of knowledge and meaning;
my point is rather that Hegel takes entirely distinct philosophical issues to be fundamental.
But if Hegel takes philosophy to be fundamentally about something else, then what? If his
philosophy is “metaphysical” in some sense that is not fundamentally about meaning and
knowledge of independence, then what is that sense?
To understand the alternative, consider first a debate engaged by Rorty concerning the
idea of “truth as a goal of inquiry,” or truth as a “norm” governing “our statement-making
practices” (1998, 27). What Rorty objects to is the idea that we might think of “truth” as a
9
goal or norm over and above justification or warranted assertibility. But if truth is
understood in terms of justification, then Rorty allows that truth is a norm or goal of
inquiry: “what pragmatists want you to think” is that “you have done enough if you have
done all the justifying you can” (ibid).
My interest here is a worry about the idea of truth as the goal of inquiry which will
apply equally well regardless of whether “truth” is understood in the way that Rorty prefers
or the way he rejects. My worry is that there are innumerably many questions for which we
could try to find the true answers, and the vast majority seem of little or no interest—so
there is no goal here that is always worth having, or no legitimate norm for all theoretical
inquiry.
Imagine, for example, that I am walking through my pantry. It occurs to me, on seeing
the cracker box next to the cookie box, that I cannot tell at a glance the answer to the
question: which is larger? Must I seek to ascertain the truth of the matter? I could do so, by
measuring. If truth is a basic goal of inquiry, then it seems that I should. For this would be a
situation that calls out for inquiry, as much as any situation does: there is after all a question
here, and I could discover which answer is best justified. But, on the face of it, there is no
point. The question is silly.
Or consider some other silly questions: What is the distance between the Golden Gate
Bridge and the closest of the stars said to make up the constellation Sagittarius (at their
closest points, and at some particular instant, etc.)? Or: if you took all of the bridges in
Australia, and tried all possible ways of slicing them into cubes whose sides have the same
length as the largest beetle to live during the 20th Century, what is the maximum number of
solid cubes of metal that you could end up with? On the face of it, there are true answers,
but the questions are silly, uninteresting, or not such as that we particularly should seek
10
answers to them. So matters cannot be as simple as truth always being a norm or goal of all
inquiry. I call this the problem of the profligacy of truth.
Now there is one obvious reason why the above questions are silly: their answers are
extremely unlikely to provide any practical payoff. Answering them is unlikely to help us to
achieve some good, like curing a deadly disease. This is surely true. But my concern here is
rather in an additional sense in which those questions are silly, a sense that is purely
theoretical in that it has nothing to do with practical payoff. To see the point, consider this
non-silly question: What are the laws of nature governing the motion of all matter?
Compare the silly questions above, like: How many cubes of steel make up the bridges of
Australia? If we did not know the answer to either, then it would be the former that calls out
for inquiry. The former question has a point. And it would still have a point even if we set
out of consideration all possible practical payoffs. In short, nothing seems to depend on the
answers to the silly questions. Or, learning these answers seems unlikely to answer any
theoretical why-questions about anything else. Or, it seems unlikely to explain anything. Or,
it seems unlikely to provide insight into the reasons for anything else. By contrast, learning
about the laws of motion would be of more help in answering a great many other theoretical
why-questions: Why do the planets rotate the sun? Why does the baseball fall to the
ground? Etc. For the laws of motion are the reason why the planets rotate, and why the
baseball falls. Of course, such insights are of practical use too: knowledge of those laws is a
means to building better forms of transport to get wherever we want to go, for example,
from planes to rockets, etc. But even if we set all such practical interests aside, still it is clear
that the question about laws is of greater interest than the silly questions about cookie
boxes, Sagittarius, etc. The laws are of greater theoretical interest, because they are the
reasons why things do what they do, or are as they are. The idea is that we take an interest in
the knowing the why of things, even over and above, or independent of, any reason to
11
foresee that such knowledge might have a practical payoff. In sum: There are innumerably
true answers to different questions. But only some of them seem of any theoretical interest,
insofar as only some of them seem to have nothing to do with the why of anything, or the
reasons for anything. We might say that truth is profligate, but reasons are sparse.
Now return to the question of what “metaphysics” is. If we think from the perspective
of 20th century debates about “metaphysical realism,” then it is easy to assume that
“metaphysics” refers to the pursuit of something privileged insofar as it is supposed to be
independent from our cognition, or our perspective; thus anti-realism would be the
rejection of metaphysics or “metaphysical realism.” But there is an alternative sense, in
which “metaphysics” would be concerned with something privileged insofar as it is a more
basic reason for other things. So I will distinguish here the “metaphysics of reason” from the
“metaphysics of independence.”
Consider an example of a recognizably metaphysical debate: Some monists will argue
that the one whole of all reality is the reason why there are many parts and/or why the parts
are as they are or do what they do. Some atomists will take the opposite view: atomic parts
are the reason why there is a whole of everything, and why that the whole is as it is and does
what it does.13 This is not a debate about knowledge, meaning, or independence. The
question is not whether the whole or the parts are more independent of us. It is certainly not
the broadly epistemological question about how to explain our knowledge or meaningful
concepts of the whole and parts. The dispute is about whether the parts or the whole are
prior in the sense of being the reason for the other. This is a dispute within the metaphysics
of reason.
13
Shaffer (2010) calls the former “priority monism.”
12
Further, this sort of debate can be of interest to almost anyone. Granted, there are
some views that will be incompatible with trying to resolve this debate—but no views, I
think, which anyone would take to be relevant to understanding Hegel. For example,
perhaps there are some varieties of anti-realist which would hold that different cultures
cannot know anything but the reality somehow constructed from their different conceptual
schemes, while none can know reality in itself. And perhaps such anti-realists would have
reason to respond to my monism debate by saying that we cannot know whether reality in
itself is prior to its parts. But no one would think that such a view could be relevant to Hegel.
Those who think that a kind of anti-realism is relevant are thinking of a radically antiskeptical form of anti-realism, on which there is an objective reality and that we can in fact
have knowledge of it in every intelligible and relevant sense. So the question, if we must
parse it specially for such anti-realists, is just this: is the whole of that objective reality prior
to its parts, or vice-versa. And so on for anyone who thinks that there can be in some sense
be a right answer to such questions about priority and reasons. For instance, imagine I ask
whether the whole is the reason for the parts, or vice-versa, and my friend NM answers that
he rejects metaphysical realism and accounts for truth in terms of warranted assertibility.
NM has missed the point of the question. I was not asking in what sense of “true” he thinks
one or another answer might be “true.” I was asking whether he thinks that the whole is the
reason for the parts, or vice-versa. I think all sides should agree that the way to approach
this question would be to consider which answer is best justified or warranted. But NM may
employ whatever account of truth he thinks best, if he must raise that issue at all, if only he
will then answer the question posed: are the parts the reason for the whole? Or vice-versa?
Or would he develop and justify an alternative competing answer to that question?
13
Surely NM will think that his favored issues about metaphysical realism are more
important. But my point is that there is an alternative: some philosophers might take more
interest in issues within the metaphysics of reason.
Further, note that the metaphysics of reason is not only concerned with what is, or
what exists—it is not concerned only with “ontology” in this sense. It makes sense to call this
a form of “metaphysics,” in part, because it is concerned with determining, among what is,
what is more specifically prior or fundamental. But the key here is the specific sense of
priority or fundamentality. The metaphysics of reason is not more interested in X and Y
because X is somehow more independent of us, our point of view, our conceptual scheme,
etc. The metaphysics of reason is more interested in X than Y insofar X is a reason for Y,
rather than vice versa. It is concerned with what is prior or more fundamental insofar as it is
a reason.
Perhaps some will think that any view that fits the label “metaphysics” must always
posit a higher, prior or more fundamental world or realm beyond the human, the finite, etc.
I would call this, more specifically, the “metaphysics of the beyond.” But clearly there can be
views holding that there is nothing beyond the human or the finite, and that the human or
finite is in fact fundamental in that it is the reason for everything else. And there is a
question, which I would call “metaphysical”: is the human or the finite fundamental in this
sense? So we should not make the mistake of thinking that all metaphysics must be a form
of the “metaphysics of the beyond.”
Returning to Hegel, then, when I say that I prefer a metaphysical interpretation, I do
not mean to say that Hegel takes as fundamental issues about explaining the possibility of
meaningful thought about and knowledge of an independent world, and then takes the
position on these issues sometimes called “metaphysical realism.” What I mean is that the
issues which Hegel takes as fundamental are not those issues, but rather issues within the
14
metaphysics of reason. Hegel seeks, on my view, to rethink issues throughout philosophy
from the perspective of reason, or from the perspective of the concern with what is a reason
for what.
Admittedly, there are a lot of questions that one or another philosopher might take to
be in the neighborhood of the question of anti-realism, where Hegel needs and provides
answers to those questions. But it is notoriously difficult to say precisely which questions
are at stake there in any manner that will satisfy all participants in anti-realism debates—
thus the impression that it is unclear which of the issues at stake in anti-realism debates are
merely verbal. For example, some think that anti-realism debates have to do with the
question of whether speakers of different languages construct and so inhabit different
realities, with different entities like rocks and trees. But some think that this question is not
what is at stake in debates about anti-realism. In any case, I take Hegel to answer in the
negative. But this seems uncontroversial to me, and far away from Hegel’s fundamental
concerns. Others might think that this other question is at stake in anti-realism debates:
Does everything real have an intrinsic nature that is entirely non-relational, or independent
in this sense, like a monad in that respect? I am sure that others will not think that this
question is relevant to anti-realism debates. In any case, I think that Hegel answers in the
negative. Perhaps meaning-first or anti-realist readers of Hegel would attribute the same
answer in this case. But note the different in the philosophical content of the reading: on my
view, Hegel does not argue by taking the problem of meaning as basic, and arguing that we
could not even intelligibly conceive of such non-relational inner natures. Rather, Hegel’s
fundamental concern will be that such non-relational natures would be entirely indifferent
to how anything interacts with anything else, leaving them with nothing to contribute to a
philosophy built entirely around consideration of what is a reason for what, or the
perspective of reason.
15
I will return to this point about non-relational natures below. For now, here is a quick
example of Hegel taking a stand on an issue within the metaphysics of reason. Think of
familiar debates about what it is to be a law of nature. On a “humean” approach, a law will
just be a regularity or a generalization stating a regularity. (It is a matter of debate whether
Hume himself is a “humean,” in this sense.14) Anti-humeans hold that a law is something
else, something which governs events, and so something responsible for which regularities
hold. Recent humeans have emphasized that theirs is a “non-governing” conception of laws
(Beebee 2000). For if laws are just regularities, then they more summarize than govern
events.
Hegel clearly holds that the laws of nature are the reason for the events that fall under
them, or that laws govern. Consider the Lectures on the History of Philosophy, for example:
The movement of the solar system is governed by unalterable laws; these laws
are its reason. But neither the sun nor the planets which revolve around it are
conscious of them. It is man who abstracts the laws from empirical reality and
acquires knowledge of them. Any idea of this kind, that there is reason in
nature or that it is governed by unalterable universal laws, does not strike us as
in any way strange… (LPH 12:23/34)
The laws are the “reason” for the rotation of the planets; and this is just to say that their
movements are “governed” by laws. The point is not epistemic—Hegel is not trying to claim
that our reason for coming to the conclusion that the planets rotate is our knowledge of the
laws. Rather, the laws are a form of “governing” or “reason in nature.” Furthermore, in his
criticisms of empiricism at the beginning of the Encyclopedia, Hegel formulates and rejects
the alternative that I have called the “humean” approach, according to which “universal
notions, principles, and laws” (§38) would reduce to “alterations that follow one after the
other, and … objects that lie side by side” (§39).
14
For this debate about Hume see Winkler (1991).
16
Those who favor humeanism might try to argue that the very idea of a law of nature
being a “reason,” or “governing,” is so unclear as to be meaningless. But thinking in terms of
the metaphysics of reason shows the weakness in the objection. For both sides in this debate
are equally addressing an issue within the metaphysics of reason: both sides have a position
on what is a reason for what. The humeans, then, accept one form of reason—they hold that,
given an array of disconnected events in space and time, the features and placement of each
event are together the reason why there are laws (if there are, because laws are just patterns
or regularities). Recent humeans sometimes write about this form of reason by saying that it
is “in virtue of” the arrangement of events that there are laws;15 or, there is a form of
“ontological” “grounding” of laws by the arrangement of events, or “reduction” of laws to
history.16 A humean holds, then, that events are the reason for the laws. An anti-humean
simply holds the reverse: laws are the reason why certain events occur at all. Anti-humeans
can defend the meaningfulness of their view in this way: humeans accept one specific form
of reason, or one specific way in which one thing can be a reason for another (“ontological
grounding,” an “in virtue of” relation, or “reduction”); anti-humeans simply think that there
is also another specific form of the same general idea: the “governing” of events by laws.
Since both sides are talking about different forms of reason in the world, or about different
forms of the same thing, neither can claim to find the other’s view without meaning.
Some might wish to reject the whole debate, finding talk of “reason,” whether in the
form of “governing” or “ontological grounding,” all meaningless, insofar as none of these
can be analyzed away in terms of efficient causality. But this objection too is weak, because
it assumes that causality itself is unproblematic, or something not in need of philosophical
15
Loewer 1996, 102.
16
Schaffer 2008, 83.
17
comprehension. But, obviously, there is philosophical debate about what causality is. There
is, for example, a humean conception of causality: for some x to cause some y is just for X’s
and Y’s to be constantly conjoined throughout space and time. And there are anti-humean
conceptions of causality, on which it causality is rather the reason why an effect occurs, in
the specific sense that an effect is necessitated by a cause. Of course, here too the issue is
really what is a reason for what: humeans about causality hold that the course of events is
the reason why there are causes, and the reason for what causes what; anti-humeans about
causality holds that, where there are causes, these are the reasons why events unfold as they
do.
What we are discovering, as we step through these debates, is the fundamentality of
the question of what is a reason for what. We need the basic and general notion of one thing
being a reason for another in order to engage any of these debates. And so we should accept
that notion, and proceed to investigate what specific forms of reason there really are, which
directions they run in different cases, and how they relate to one another.
Those who prefer a “meaning-first” reading of Hegel might see all of these issues about
laws, monism, causes, etc. as a series of technical issues in isolated, minor, or peripheral
areas of philosophy—as “merely” issues in the philosophy of science, for example. But my
point here is that there is an alternative way to look at it. When we think in terms of the
metaphysics of reason, we see rather a surprising thread linking issues throughout
metaphysics. Take the example of the humean views above: they all stem from a wonderfully
clear and incredibly comprehensive humean metaphysics: all there is to reality, says the
humean, is a series of disconnected events arranged in space and time; this arrangement is
the reason for everything there is—for laws, causality, necessity, etc.—it can all be explained
in these same terms. As David Lewis formulates the form of humeanism so important in
18
recent analytic metaphysics, it is “the doctrine that all there is to the world is a vast mosaic
of local matters of particular fact, just one little thing and then another” (1986, ix ).
I think that Hegel’s basic aim is to formulate a comparably comprehensive position
within the metaphysics of reason—albeit one that is about as far as you can get in content as
compared to humeanism. And one that is less simple, and so more difficult to understand.
Hopefully, it also has some virtues that will compensate for its relative lack of simplicity. But
it is important to emphasize that I have chosen the example of Hegel’s anti-humean position
on the laws of nature only as an introductory example of an issue within the metaphysics of
reason, not as something supposed to be the key to an overall simple view. Hegel’s view is
not that the unalterable laws of nature are absolutely fundamental to everything. The
rotation of the solar system as an example of something governed by laws of nature. But this
does not mean that Hegel sees everything as so governed. Hegel will argue, for example,
that the behavior of living beings is teleological, and not governed by exceptionless laws.17
Further, we must not view Hegel here through the lens of an assumption that the most basic
issues are those concerning independence from us. For then we will easily mistake the claim
that there are “unalterable” governing laws of nature for the claim that the laws of nature
are fundamental, or something of unsurpassed importance for philosophy. After all, if there
are unalterable laws of nature, then they would seem to be as independent of us as anything.
But matters look different if we take Hegel as basically concerned not with independence
from us, but rather with reasons. The more important question will then be what sort of
reason are the laws of nature? And Hegel will argue that they are only a very limited,
incomplete, or minimal form of reason for the events they govern; teleological reasons for
the behavior of living beings, for example, will turn out to be a more complete form of
17
I argue that he has a compelling case in Kreines (2009).
19
reason. And it is not life but rather Geist that will turn out to manifest the most complete or
absolute form of reason of all. So the laws of nature will turn out to be relatively
unimportant in Hegel’s philosophy.
3. Kant’s “Transcendental Dialectic” Critique of the Metaphysics of Reason
Meaning-first readings of Hegel take his philosophy to be continuous with one specific
kind of Kantian critique of metaphysics, focused on problems concerning knowledge of an
independent world. But I think that there is an alternative approach that can also make
sense of a continuity between Hegel’s philosophy and Kant’s critique of metaphysics. On
my view, Hegel’s philosophy is continuous with a very different Kantian critique of
metaphysics—one that is targeted specifically at the metaphysics of reason. What I am
thinking of here is the critique of metaphysics form the “Transcendental Dialectic” from the
first Critique.
The explicit thread running throughout the Transcendental Dialectic is Kant’s account
of “the faculty of reason.” To see the point of this account, recall the idea noted by Rorty,
about truth being a norm or goal of inquiry, and indeed a norm for “all our statement
making practices.” The way to understand this thread in the Transcendental Dialectic is to
recall the problem that truth is too profligate to be any kind goal that provides real positive
guidance for inquiry. In Kant’s terms: the faculty of the understanding is perfectly capable
of coming to true judgments about what is the case in the empirical world; but the
understanding nonetheless requires guidance from a norm or goal provided by the faculty of
reason: without reason’s guidance we would have “no coherent use of the understanding”
(A651/B679). Because reason’s role is to guide, Kant characterizes reason by an “aim” or
“end” (Zweck), or even an “interest” (Interesse). Specifically: insofar as we are reasonable,
we take an interest in underlying grounds or conditions of all kinds, or in following a
20
“regress from the conditioned to its condition” (A523/B521). For example, the
understanding might achieve knowledge of an event; one thing reason will then direct us to
seek is knowledge of the condition in the sense of the cause of the event—the reason that the
event occurred. Or the understanding might achieve knowledge of an object extended in
space; one thing reason will then direct us to seek is knowledge of the conditions in the
sense of the parts in virtue of which the object fills just that volume of space.
But Kant exposes difficulties by arguing that this is not yet quite an adequate
characterization of reason. Imagine that we know of some X that is conditioned; if so,
reason will leave us unsatisfied and interested in the underlying conditions. But what if we
find an underlying condition, Y, and this too is something merely conditioned? Then the
same dissatisfaction of reason will persist. So we are not at base interested just in
underlying conditions or reasons as such. We are interested in conditions only insofar as we
assume that, in finding conditions, we are making some progress toward a complete series
of conditions or a complete reason—toward what Kant calls “the unconditioned.” If we find
the condition for something, reason requires that “the condition of its condition thereby has
to be sought”; thus:
…we see very well that the proper principle of reason in general (in its logical
use) is to find the unconditioned for conditioned cognitions of the
understanding, with which its unity will be completed. (A307/B364)
Kant is aiming to argue, however, that we cannot ever attain knowledge of anything
unconditioned. Thus Kant begins the A-preface to the Critique with the resulting tension
between reason’s interest and the limits of our knowledge:
Human reason has the peculiar fate in one species of its cognitions that it is
burdened with questions which it cannot dismiss, since they are given to it as
problems by the nature of reason itself, but which it also cannot answer, since
they transcend every capacity of human reason…
21
Our attempts to answer these questions cannot be conclusive, and so we fall into endless
controversies. And this is metaphysics: “[t]he battlefield of these endless controversies is
called metaphysics” (Avii-viii). Note that “metaphysics” in this sense has nothing
fundamentally to do with absolute independence from our point of view, nor with any idea
of a God’s eye view. “Metaphysics,” in this sense is concerned fundamentally with the
complete reasons for things, or the unconditioned. It is only on grounds of the further
Kantian position that our form of cognition cannot achieve knowledge of anything
unconditioned that the derivative result follows: metaphysics amounts to an interest in
something (the unconditioned) that is unknowable from our point of view.
The resulting problem is this: We seek insofar as we are rational or reasonable to
reach conclusions concerning whether or not there is anything unconditioned. But, on the
face of it, this could only be either an affirmation or a denial of whether there is any such
thing. And Kant argues that both the affirmation and the denial are unacceptable.
Consider first the affirmation. Kant argues that we are naturally tempted by it. That is,
we are naturally tempted to mistake the maxims or rules guiding reason for objective
principles: “In our reason … there lie fundamental rules and maxims for its use, which look
entirely like objective principles” (A297/B353). So given reason’s demand that we seek the
unconditioned, we are tempted to affirm this further principle: there must always be
unconditioned grounds for everything conditioned. This is essentially the “principle of
sufficient reason” (PSR) of the early modern rationalists. The idea is that everything not a
sufficient ground or reason of itself—everything conditioned—must have an external
sufficient or complete ground or reason, or an unconditioned ground. Rationalists
paradigmatically use the PSR to argue that there must be one single complete ground or
reason for everything real, or to argue for the existence of “God” in this specific sense. I take
this as definitional of “rationalism,” which is thus not fundamentally a view in epistemology
22
but in metaphysics: “rationalism” includes any view that endorses a PSR that is strong
enough to support such arguments for a single complete ground of everything.18 Spinoza is a
paradigmatic rationalist, in this sense, so clearly rationalists can disagree sharply in their
arguments about what “God” or the ground of everything is like.
Kant’s response is subtle. On the one hand, the interest of our faculty of reason leaves
us naturally tempted by rationalism. For example, consider the rationalist arguments for
God, in the rationalist sense of “that the concept of which contains within itself the ‘Because’
to every ‘Why?’ … that which is in all ways sufficient as a condition.” Kant holds that reason
itself makes the rationalist argument that there must be such a complete condition or
ground tempting to us: this is “the natural course taken by every human reason” (A5845/B612-3). On the other hand, the Transcendental Dialectic argues that we must learn to
avoid asserting theoretical knowledge of such rationalist conclusions.
The problem with rationalism is supposed to be this: it must either contradict itself, or
else come to depend on an untenable combination of epistemological claims. The
threatened self-contradictions are developed in the first two Antinomies. The contradictions
arise from a specifically rationalist line of argument, whose major premise is that there must
be completion or sufficiency in a series of conditions: “The entire antinomy of pure reason
rests on this dialectical argument: If the conditioned is given, then the whole series of all
conditions for it is also given; now objects of the senses are given as conditioned;
consequently, etc.”19 The problem arises specifically with respect to a regress of conditions
18
Compare Curley: “Prospects for identifying a common rationalist programme are better in metaphysics. One
doctrine Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz did agree on was what Leibniz was to call the principle of sufficient
reason” (1995).
19
A497/B525. In emphasizing this passage and my approach to the Transcendental Dialectic here, I am
following Grier (????).
23
in time (the first Antinomy) or space (the second). For purposes of understanding Hegel’s
response, the second Antinomy is most immediately useful.
We can imagine accepting first what I will call Assumption A: there is an infinite
regress to smaller parts. But a rationalist must insist that there is a sufficient reason why
there can be any composition here at all. And the only way to find such a reason within the
regress would be to hold that there are smallest, simplest parts which explain why there is
anything here out of which things could be composed.20 So a rationalist looking for
sufficiency within the regress must reject the Assumption A and instead endorse smallest
spatial parts.
But now try on Assumption not-A: there are such smallest parts in space. If they
occupy some region of space, then the rationalist must insist that there is a sufficient reason
why they occupy that region. Within the regress, the only thing that could provide such a
reason would be smaller parts which, once conjoined, occupy that reason. So for any simple
or indivisible part in space, the rationalist must hold that there are underlying parts—which
is a contradiction.21 And so the rationalist must reject the Assumption not-A, and hold
instead that the regress to smaller parts extends infinitely down.
Clearly the goal here is to pressure the rationalist into contradiction. But it is
important that a rationalist need not be forced to both affirm and deny that there are
smallest parts, and Kant need not insist otherwise. The rationalist has a popular way to
escape. He can say that the point of the PSR is not that everything must have the sort of
reason that we can know or comprehend. Leibniz, for example, insists that there must be “a
sufficient reason why it is thus and not otherwise, although most of the time these reasons
20
By the assumption, there would be “…no simple part, thus nothing at all would be left over; consequently, no
substance would be given” (A434/B462).
21
“…the simple would be a substantial composite, which contradicts itself” (A435/B463)
24
cannot be known to us” (#32). The sufficient reason, then, may be comprehensible only by a
divine intellect. And what God is supposed to be able to understand is how there could be an
infinite regress of conditions, and then also, outside of the infinite regress, a sufficient
condition for all of them. For God need not step through each of the infinite steps of the
regress, but could grasp and know all of them at once. So Leibniz says that “there is always,
underneath, a reason … even if it is perfectly understood only by God, who alone goes
through an infinite series in one act of the mind” (Ariew and Garber, 303). Applying this
strategy to the regress in space, then, there can be an infinite regress of smaller parts in
space, and then also the whole infinite series has a ground or reason from outside itself in
the form of non-extended monads.22
But Kant has another worry about this rationalist escape route. The idea is that there
is a kind of intellect superior to our own in kind—it does not run through a step, condition,
are reason more quickly in degree, but without needing to take a step or any time at all. In
Kant’s terms, such ultimate grounds could be known only by an intellect with intellectual
intuition, which “would grasp and present the object immediately and all at once” (8:389).
And Kant merely responds that, if such a mind superior in kind were required to know what
such reasons are, then we cannot legitimately claim or assert knowledge of even whether or
not there are any such for-us-unknowable sufficient reasons. For example, Kant complains
that those who defend Leibnizian monads “would have us be able to cognize things, thus
intuit them, even without senses, consequently they would have it that we have a faculty of
cognition entirely distinct from the human not merely in degree but even in intuition and
22
Or, similarly, Spinoza can take the analogous escape route, holding that there is an infinite regress within
space and time—and then also add that the whole series is grounded insofar as it is “in” and so dependent on
one substance or God.
25
kind,” possessed by “not by humans but beings that we cannot even say are possible, let
alone how they are constituted” (A277-8/B333-4).
Note that this criticism need not rely on the details of Kant’s positive account of our
own understanding as limited, restricted, merely discursive, etc. There is here an
independent line of argument, which will ultimately support Kant’s specific claims about
our epistemic limitations. The point about rationalists, then, is that they box themselves into
an untenable epistemic position here: they escape from the Antinomy by claiming that
reality is such as could be grasped only from this divine point of view; but to really do the
trick, they must refer here to a form of intellect distinct from ours in kind, not just in degree,
and they undercut their own assertion of knowledge that reality really is such. So the point
is not to attack rationalist metaphysics from the foreign territory of positive claims about
epistemology. The point is that rationalist metaphysics contradicts itself from within, and
for rationalists to seek to escape by moving to claims about divine knowledge is to
contradict oneself again by implicitly claim possession of some of that knowledge.
In sum, rationalism is unacceptable because the threat of contradictions concerning
any regress in space or time will force it into this last, dogmatic, position. Of course, it can
seem easy for us to sidestep Kant’s worry here: for it seems that we can still deny
rationalism, or deny that there is anything unconditioned. But this only brings us to the
other side of Kant’s worry: we need the faculty of reason, and its guidance, if we are to
pursue any theoretical inquiry at all, and even if there is to be any “coherent use of the
understanding” (A651/B679). And Kant has argued that the faculty of reason guides us by
requiring us to seek for unconditioned grounds. We cannot rationally hold that there are no
unconditioned grounds while also trying to discover some. So this denial leads to the
skeptical renunciation of the project of reason or theoretical inquiry, “the euthanasia of
pure reason,” or “skeptical hopelessness” (A407/B433-4).
26
A quick way to appreciate the power of this point is to consider a famous scene in
Molière: the character Argan is asked why opium interacts with us by putting us to sleep.
And Argan responds, famously, that opium has a dormitive virtue or power. Of course, we
now know better. We know what opium is made of, and why it does what it does. But
consider the farthest point to which we have advanced in the regress of powers or
dispositions. Say we find, at the limit of our current knowledge, particles X and Y, where X’s
attract Y’s. We might still ask why do X’s attract Y’s? A contemporary Argan would say: on
account of their attractive power. But is it rational to take this answer for any sort of
conclusion? Kant would deny it. And he would explain his answer in this way: reason
demands that we assume, at least for the sake of inquiry, that there is something more
satisfying to be said in answer to the why-question. And reason demands that we inquire
into what that more satisfying explanation might be. True, one can deny that there is
anything more satisfying. But then one has no grounds left for saying that reason favors
further inquiry over Argan’s self-satisfaction or utter lack of intellectual curiosity. And that
is skeptical hopelessness.
While I think that there is more to say in defense of this last point about the threat of
skeptical hopelessness, this will have to wait for another occasion. For our purposes, the
important point is the broad sense in which Kant’s “Dialectic” seems to present an insoluble
problem. We can affirm or deny rationalism, but an “antithetic” here
leads reason into the temptation either to surrender itself to a skeptical
hopelessness or else to assume the attitude of a dogmatic stubbornness…
Either alternative is the death of a healthy philosophy though the former might
also be called the euthanasia of pure reason. (A407/B433-4)
Now Kant raises this far-reaching problem in order to argue that there is one
acceptable alternative, and only one—something new and radical. We must conclude that
our own knowledge is fundamentally limited or restricted. More specifically, we much
27
conclude that our understanding is merely “discursive”, or dependent for intuitive content
on a faculty of sensibility, and so by the a priori forms of our sensibility: space and time.
And “in sensibility, i.e. in space and time, every condition to which we can attain in the
exposition of given appearances is in turn conditioned” (A508/B536). We cannot have
knowledge, then, of anything unconditioned—not even knowledge of whether there is
anything unconditioned.
Precisely this ignorance is what will allow Kant to hold that we can and must always
assume, for the sake of inquiry, that there are unconditioned grounds—and then seek them
in inquiry.23 For Kant has argued that we can have neither knowledge of any unconditioned
(which would have terminated the need for any further theoretical inquiry), nor knowledge
that there is nothing unconditioned (which would have contradicted the guiding
assumption). So reason demands that we pursue the unconditioned as an end, a goal; and
reason provides perfectly legitimate “regulative” or guiding principles; but we must learn
not to mistake this for knowledge of anything unconditioned. We can thereby at least make
progress “asymptotically” (A663/B691) as Kant says at one point, toward the goal of reason
that guides scientific inquiry. And thus Kant avoids the “skeptical hopelessness,” or the
“euthanasia of pure reason,” but without slipping back into the “dogmatism” of rationalist
assertions.
This line of argument for the limitation of our knowledge is clear to see in Kant’s own
gloss of the argument of the Dialectic. Kant says:
23
On the need to assume, for the sake of inquiry, even though we cannot have knowledge, that there is an
unconditioned: The logical maxim of reason demands only that we seek the unconditioned; but Kant adds:
“This logical maxim cannot become a principle of pure reason unless one assumes (man annimmt) that when
the conditioned in given, then so is the whole series of conditions subordinated one to the other, which is
unconditioned, also given (i.e. contained in the object and its connection)” (A307-8/B364).
28
That which necessarily drives us to go beyond the boundaries of experience and
all appearances is the unconditioned, which reason necessarily and with every
right demands… (Bxx)
True, we cannot know that there really is anything unconditioned. But precisely because we
still must conceive the unknowable unconditioned as a goal, we must conceive of it as
“present in things … as things in themselves.” Otherwise, “the unconditioned cannot be
thought at all without contradiction” (Bxx). So the threat of contradiction concerning the
unconditioned forces us to distinguish the objects of our knowledge from things as they are
in themselves, and conclude that our knowledge is merely limited or restricted.
It follows that there is a sense in which metaphysics is impossible for us. Recall that
reason gives rise to “endless controversies” on “the battlefield … called metaphysics” (Aviii).
If reason is responsible, then these are controversies about the unconditioned. Such
metaphysics is impossible for us because our form of cognition can never legitimately assert
any conclusion about this topic—such metaphysics is impossible for us. But this is not to say
we can or should forget these controversies: reason “cannot dismiss” (Avii) the metaphysical
questions. As Kant later says, “we will always return to metaphysics as to a beloved from
whom we have been estranged” (A850/B878). True, some philosophers think that they have
become indifferent to metaphysics, but Kant sees them as unknowingly entangled in
metaphysics: they “always unavoidably fall back into metaphysical assertions, which they
yet professed so much to despise” (Ax). This last point is important. Kant is not saying the
following: metaphysics is born of a desire to know a reality absolutely independent of us and
our perspective; but we cannot know or even intelligibly conceive of such an absolutely
independent reality; so we should forget about the whole thing. Kant is rather saying:
metaphysics is born of a desire to know the complete or sufficient reason for things; this
metaphysics of reason is fundamental or inescapable, at least in the sense that philosophy
cannot and we cannot become indifferent to it; we must rather keep in mind our inescapable
29
interest in metaphysics, precisely in order to guard against thinking that we can attain
theoretical knowledge that would satisfy that interest.
4. Hegel’s Non-Rationalist, Post-Kantian Metaphysics of Reason
When we turn back to Hegel, we now have a choice. We could interpret Hegel as
interested fundamentally in the broadly epistemological problems about meaning and
knowledge of an independent world. If we go this way, then our basic orienting question will
concern how to relate Hegel to the sides in prominent 20th Century debates about “realism”:
Is Hegel a “metaphysical realist”? Or is he more like an “anti-realist” or “internal realist”? Or
does he develop some other response to those issues? Of course, one danger in this
approach is that competing sides in such debates do not agree about how to understand
what issues are at stake, and insofar both sides tend to agree that there is an objective
reality, in every intelligible sense, and that we can know it—the debate can often come to
seem merely verbal or terminological.
But there is an alternative. We can instead read Hegel as interested fundamentally in
the issues raised by Kant’s critique of the metaphysics of reason. So the basic orienting
question would be rather how Hegel’s view relates to the options Kant distinguishes there:
the rationalist affirmation of the existence of unconditioned grounds, the denial of the same
which Kant labels skeptical hopelessness, and Kant’s limitation of our knowledge. Or does
Hegel rather develop some other response to this set of issues?
This orienting question makes it easy to see that traditional metaphysical readings,
although sometimes not explicit about it, are essentially portraying Hegel as holding a
version of precisely the rationalism targeted by Kant. For they portray Hegel as arguing on
the basis of an insistence that everything must be completely explicable, so that there must
be some complete reason for everything; such readings often take Hegel as accepting
30
Spinoza’s claim that the whole of everything is a ground of everything, and then modifying
Spinoza’s account of that whole.24 On these readings, Hegel’s “absolute knowledge” would
have to be knowledge of everything and the complete reason for everything. Nonmetaphysical interpreters complain that such readings cannot make sense of Hegel’s aim to
build on Kant’s critique of metaphysics:
…much of the standard view of how Hegel passes beyond Kant into speculative
philosophy makes very puzzling, to the point of unintelligibility, how Hegel
could have been the post-Kantian philosopher he understood himself to be…
(Pippin 1989, 7).
I agree with this criticism of readings on which Hegel is a metaphysical rationalist. But note:
such readings no not necessarily involve the attribution to Hegel any particular
epistemological account of the possibility of knowledge and meaning. So what is
unintelligible here is not how Hegel passes from one such account to another. The
unintelligibility stems from the attribution to Hegel of a specific position within the
metaphysics of reason that is specifically singled out and attacked by Kant, without a
rebuttal for Kant’s attack: the position that everything must have a complete or sufficient
reason.
Fortunately, it is possible to read Hegel as engaging with the metaphysics of reason
but in a manner that is continuous with Kant’s critique of metaphysics. It is this possibility
that I want to sketch in more detail. The idea would be that Hegel agrees with the individual
claims behind Kant’s critique: Hegel agrees that problems concerning complete or absolute
reasons are inescapable; and that is what Hegel means in holding that issues concerning
“the absolute” are inescapable (e.g. Phän §75). But Hegel also agrees in rejecting
rationalism, and in rejecting denials of the existence of the unconditioned as “skeptical
24
Some say the whole is a mind freely self-creating mind or spirit (e.g. Taylor 1975, 87ff.). Others that it is a
basic “structure” that is not itself a mind but is most completely realized in mental phenomena. See Horstmann
(1991, 177-82) and (1998/2004; Part 4). And see Beiser on Hegel’s modification of Spinoza (2005).
31
hopelessness.” Still, Hegel does not for these reasons accept Kant’s limitation of our
knowledge and denial of the possibility of our reaching conclusions in metaphysics. Rather,
Hegel argues that Kant sees only these options because he views the matter from the
perspective of the understanding, and is thus too quick to be suspicious of the faculty of
reason. So Hegel will argue that, if we begin and with Kant’s own account of reason, and rework philosophy entirely from this perspective, we can build a new kind of metaphysics of
reason—one that finds a new way to avoid both rationalism and yet also skeptical
hopelessness.
This alternative will involve reading Hegel as denying rationalism. For example, Hegel
will argue that there is no complete or sufficient reason for why law-governed natural
phenomena do what they do. Consider for example the Logic discussion of “Chemism.” But
Hegel emphasizes that he not talking specifically about chemistry, but about any kinds of
things that are such as to be linked by laws with others.25 Here Hegel argues that the nature
of such a lawfully interacting thing is such that it cannot be comprehended except in
relation to others. As Hegel says, “a chemical object is not comprehensible from itself alone,
and the being of one is the being of the other” (WL 6:430/728). What is it to be some lawgoverned X? It is to react in a specific manners with Y’s, etc. And, further, to be Y will be to
interact in characteristic ways with Z’s and X’s. Etc. So the “being” of things of such kinds
will depend on a whole interconnected network of kinds and laws within which that are a
part, or the network within which they are nodes. For law-governed stuff, the
“determinateness” of anything in particular is just one “moment” of a larger “whole” or
“Begriff” of the whole: it “is the concrete moment of the individual concept (Begriff) of the
25
WL 6:429/727.
32
whole, which concept is the universal essence, the real kind (Gattung) of the particular
object” (WL 6:430/728).
The philosophical pressure towards this kind of metaphysical holism has often been
noted in more recent metaphysics, even while that holism is often resisted. For example,
take Russell:
There are many possible ways of turning some things hitherto regarded as
“real” into mere laws concerning the other things. Obviously there must be a
limit to this process, or else all the things in the world will merely be each
other's washing… (1927, 325)
Armstrong too finds the pressure to holism distressing: “physical objects …show a
distressing tendency to dissolve into relations that one object has to another” (1993, 282).
And Chalmers aims to resist the same holism: “…this would lead,” he says, “to a strangely
insubstantial view of the physical world” (1996, 153).
Those who reject this particular pressure towards holism tend to be pushed at least in
the general direction of a panpsychism, according to which basic physical entities have a
hidden inner side that is mental (or at least akin to the mental). For it is difficult to imagine
what the non-relational inner features of things could be unless they are like the features of
a mind experiencing things. Chalmers reads Russell as attracted to the view that “the
intrinsic properties of the physical are themselves a variety of phenomenal property.” And
Chalmers at least considers something analogous to the mental: “protophenomenal
properties” (1996, 154). The rationalists, of course, had already charted this course—Kant
reads Leibnizians as arguing in just this manner for monads: “what can I think of as inner
accidents except for those which my inner sense offers me? - namely that which is either
itself thinking or which is analogous to one” (A265-6/B321-2).
Hegel will not go in the direction of such a rationalism. Rather, he embraces the idea
of a “strangely insubstantial view of the physical world,” to use Chalmers’ terms—he finds
33
the law-governed physical world to be surprisingly insubstantial. When we seek to
understand such a lawful physical thing, Hegel says, it “gets lost” in relations, lost in a
regress of dependence; it “becomes something else than it is empirically, confuses
cognition” (Phän 3:190/149). Hegel’s view is that lawfully governed things really do (now in
Armstrong’s words) “show a distressing tendency to dissolve into relations” (1993, 282).
Another way to put the point is to say that, when we look to lawful things, we find only
the slightest of reasons for what they do at all. True, the laws are the reason why things do
what they do. But the laws are as they are on account of the relational natures of such
things. Which is to say that the natures of things are as they are on account of the laws, and
the laws on account of the natures, and so on. The insubstantiality of such things leaves us
without anything like a stopping point for explanations—resulting in surprisingly
insubstantial explanations.
Hegel will later argue that, when we look to living beings, we begin to find what had
been missing in lawful nature. Take a tiger, for example. Why does the tiger have these
sharp claws and the corresponding capacities to catch and kill rabbits? Here we do not “get
lost” in a regress of dependence. The answer is not that rabbits have a disposition to be
caught, and so on. For the tiger has these parts and capacities on account of something
about the tiger itself: an account of the intrinsic end or goal of self-preservation. As Hegel
says, “the living thing is articulated purposefully; all its members serve only as means to the
one end of self-preservation.”26 This intrinsic end or Zweck is supposed to allow the nature
of an organism to be manifest in the determinate way that it relates to the environment, yet
without its nature merely dissolving into relations with others. An organism is “the real end
or Zweck itself … it preserves itself in the relation to an other” (Phän 156). This is supposed
26
(VPA 13:193/1:145)
34
to make life a more complete form of reason, specifically as compared to lawfully governed
lower-level things. Or, alternatively, a living being is more substantial—precisely in the
sense that lawfully interacting things are strangely insubstantial.
What is really surprising here is that a living being will be more substantial, in the
above sense, than even the lower-level law-governed stuff of which it is composed. This can
be hard to even understand. But judged purely from the perspective of an interest in the
reasons why things do what they do, or purely from the perspective of reason, the point is
not hard to understand. A tiger, for example, could not exist without the existence of the
underlying stuff of which it is composed. But there is also a sense in which the natures of the
underlying stuff are a matter of indifference when it comes to what the living being does.
The tiger’s claw, for example, could have had the same capacities and yet be realized in
different underlying stuff—in steel, for example.
Note, then, how Hegel’s conception of a complete or absolute reason comes apart from
Kant’s conception of the unconditioned: an organism is, in a sense, conditioned by or
dependent on the stuff of which it is composed. But insofar as this is a conditioning by
something indifferent, this is irrelevant when it comes to reason. Being conditioned or
dependent, in this sense, makes no difference to the question of whether something
manifests a complete or absolute form of reason—or the question of whether something is
such as to completely satisfy the faculty of reason, in Kant’s terms. We can mark this
distinction with terms drawn from Hegel: dependence on an “indifferent base”27 makes no
difference to the completeness of a form of reason. And, since a complete form of reason
could depend in this way on something else, it also need not be something on which
everything else depends. So to manifest a complete or absolute form of reason need not
27
For Hegel’s use of the term “indifferent base,” see for example the above discussion, from “Chemism,” of WL
6:430/728. I am coining the term “principle of activity” to contrast with this.
35
mean depending on nothing, nor being something on which everything depends—it is rather
to be something that does what it does on the basis of what we might call a complete and
internal “principle of activity.”28
Hegel will go on to argue that even organic life is limited relative to this standard of a
complete reason. He sometimes makes the point in terms drawn from Kant: “idea,” in Kant,
refers to a conception of something of interest to the faculty of reason; so Kant’s view is that
the “idea” is always a conception of something unconditioned. Hegel’s view is that life (even
if not unconditioned) is a form of “the idea,” is more satisfying to reason, although only a
partial or incomplete form: “the idea is firstly life” (WL 6:468/760). But life “as only a
natural mode of the idea, is at the mercy of the unreason of externality” (§248An). Hegel
will argue that an absolutely complete intrinsic principle of activity is realized only in the
case of our own kind, or what Hegel calls Geist or spirit. This is why Hegel will call Geist
“the absolute”: “the absolute is spirit—this is the supreme definition of the absolute” (PG
§384). We can know the absolute, in this sense—we can have absolute knowledge—in that
we can know something with an absolutely intrinsic principle of activity, something that
realizes a complete form of reason. This need not mean that there is a complete reason for
everything, nor that we can know any such thing. Nor need it mean that we can know
everything—for there are many things without a sufficient reason, which are not absolute.
For example, if basic physical particles lack any complete or absolute reason for what they
do, then knowledge of the absolute need not be any kind of complete knowledge explaining
the location and movement of every physical particle.
But consideration of the arguments, especially for Hegel’s claims about Geist, will have
to wait for a separate occasion. Here it will have to be enough to note that the resulting
28
See for example Hegel’s use of the term “principle of activity” in discussing Aristotle’s view of life (e.g. VGP
19:174).
36
metaphysics asserts that reality has a hierarchical organization of levels.29 Everything is
composed of lower-level stuff, which also most lacks complete reasons. Some of that stuff
makes up living beings, whose behavior has more complete reason, or is more completely
explicable. And some living beings have the capacity of self-consciousness, and behave in
correspondingly distinct ways, because they are of the kind Geist, and it is here that we are
supposed to find a complete form of reason.
Again, the resulting view is not rationalist. Lowest-level law-governed things lack a
complete or sufficient reason for why they do what they do. They falsify the PSR that is
definitive of rationalism. Hegel sometimes makes this general point about the limitations of
nature by referring to a “powerlessness” or “weakness” or “impotence (Ohnmacht) of
nature.” Hegel’s point is not that there is some hidden side to nature itself. Lawful nature is
this weakness of impotence. And Hegel specifically contrasts the sense in which Geist does
have an intrinsic principle of activity of its own, or a complete reason:
In nature, not only is the play of forms a prey to boundless and unchecked
contingency, but each separate entity is without the concept of itself. The
highest level to which nature attains is life; but this, as only a natural mode of
the idea, is at the mercy of the unreason of externality … whereas in every
expression of Geist there is contained the moment of free, universal selfrelation. (PN §248An)
Kant might worry that Hegel’s view, insofar as it denies rationalism, would lead to
“skeptical hopelessness.” To see why it does not, note that, on Hegel’s view, there are also
higher levels of reality. And when we view lawful nature in context of those higher levels, we
can see that theoretical inquiry has a point. For on the higher levels, such inquiry can be
satisfied. And even within lawful nature inquiry can make a sort of progress insofar as we
discover at least a distant, imperfect echo of the sort of independent principle of activity
29
For example, in introducing the PN, Hegel says that there are different orders of kinds, a hierarchical
structure of reality: “the orders not only serve to give us a general view, but form a hierarchy (Stufenleiter) of
nature itself” (PN §246Zu 9:20/10).
37
found on the higher levels. For example, the whole network of kinds and laws within lawful
nature is a distant but imperfect echo of the sorts of biological wholes we find on higher
levels. It is comparable to, but “not yet for itself that totality of self-determination” (WL
6:434/731-2). So we can have some success in explaining nature insofar as we can find more
distant approximations of the idea throughout nature, even if these approximations are in
truth other than the idea. In Hegel’s terms, nature is “the idea in the form of otherness”
(§247).
We can put the final combination of claims in this way: (i) Only Geist realizes a
complete independent principle of activity, or a complete manifestation of “freedom” and
“the idea.” (ii) Metaphysically speaking, nature does not depend on Geist, but Geist does
depend on the nature in which it is embodied—it “presupposes” nature. However, this is just
dependence on an indifferent basis, in the sense discussed above, so it is no limitation of the
status of Geist as a complete form of reason, or as a manifestation of “the idea.” And (iii)
speaking now epistemologically, there is a kind of dependence of nature on Geist. In
particular, the explicability of nature depends on Geist: we can explain nature insofar as we
find there a distant trace of the kind of self-determining system or complete reason that is
fully realized only in the case of spirit—to find, in this sense, traces of ourselves in nature, or
to find the world to be our world, in this sense. Hegel wraps all of these points together:
As Geist is free, its manifestation is to set forth Nature as its world; but because
it is reflection, it, in thus setting forth its world, at the same time presupposes
the world as a nature independently existing. In the intellectual sphere to
reveal is thus to create a world as its being – a being in which the mind
procures the affirmation and truth of its freedom. (§384)
In sum, then, Hegel accepts Kant’s argument for the inescapability of problems about
complete reasons. And Hegel agrees with Kant in rejecting the possibility of simply denying
that there are complete reasons. And Hegel agrees with Kant in rejecting the rationalist
assertion that everything must have a complete reason. But this is not to say that Hegel
38
accepts Kant’s limitation of our knowledge, or the impossibility of metaphysics for us.
Rather, Hegel develops out of these Kantian considerations a new form of metaphysics—
neither rationalist nor subject to Kant’s worry about skeptical hopelessness. Hegel argues
that Kant and the rationalists misunderstand what a complete form of reason would be: to
be a complete form of reason need not involve being a ground of everything, nor even being
unconditioned or dependent on nothing; a complete form of reason would be rather
something with an intrinsic principle of activity of its own. Thus Hegel can argue that there
is something absolute in this sense—Geist—without arguing that this is the metaphysical
ground of everything envisaged by the rationalists. And Hegel can argue that we can know
this absolute, without having to know everything and a complete ground of everything—or
without the sort of divine intellect that could grasp all of reality immediately and all at once.
5. For the Metaphysics of Reason and Against Meaning-First Metaphilosophy
I have argued that there is an alternative to “non-metaphysical,” or “meaning-first”
interpretations of Hegel. And that we can distinguish the alternative without getting bogged
down in the terminological disputes over terms like “metaphysics.” The philosophically
important point distinguishing so-called “non-metaphysical” readings is that they take as
fundamental to philosophy problems concerning the possibility of meaningful thought
about and knowledge of an independent world. The best way to develop and distinguish an
alternative reading is to argue that Hegel does not take these issues as fundamental to
philosophy, but rather issues concerning what is a reason for what—in the sense, for
example, that this is the issue at stake in debates about the form of monism holding that the
whole of everything is the reason why there are parts, and why the parts do what they do
and are as they are. The philosophically significant nub of the issue, then, concerns which
issues are most fundamental or basic to philosophy.
39
Now it may have once seemed an unbeatable advantage of epistemology-first and
more specifically meaning-first readings of Hegel that they alone seem to make sense of the
continuity with Kant’s critique of metaphysics. But I have just argued that there is an
alternative, a metaphysics of reason interpretation of Hegel that can make sense of the
continuity specifically with Kant’s Transcendental Dialectic critique of the metaphysics of
reason. Since both make sense of the continuity with Kant, we need to judge between them
on other grounds. And once we come to this task with fresh eyes, it is easy to see some
advantages of the metaphysics of reason approach. To sneak up on the more complex issues
concerning Kant, it is helpful to start instead with empiricist versions of epistemology-first
criticisms of metaphysics. Empiricists will attack by arguing that others illegitimately take
for granted the possibility of knowledge in metaphysics. But Hegel has a powerful response:
empiricists are in no position to complain about knowledge taken as basic, because in such
attacks “the truth of the empirical, the truth of feeling and intuition is taken as basic”
(§39An). In effect, the empiricist argues that metaphysics is suspect because it compares
poorly to a supposedly immediate access to reality in the case of sense perception. Hegel’s
position is that there is no such immediate access to reality—not on the domain of senseperception, nor anywhere else.30
Nor does Hegel think that empiricists provide any alternative to metaphysics. Just as
Kant takes “indifferentists” to “always unavoidably fall back into metaphysical assertions,
which they yet professed so much to despise” (Ax), so too Hegel takes empiricists to covertly
advance their own metaphysics:
[t]he fundamental illusion in scientific empiricism is always that it uses the
metaphysical categories … without knowing that it thereby itself contains a
metaphysics and is engaged in it, and that it is using those categories and their
connections in a totally uncritical and unconscious manner. (§38An)
30
I take it that this a conclusion defended in the “Sense-Certainty” section of the Phenomenology, for example.
40
But there is no hope of the empiricist drawing on the force of skeptical epistemological
worries to advance their metaphysics. For skeptical worries also apply to the very sorts of
knowledge taken for granted or as basic by empiricists. If we are to take such
epistemological worries as fundamental, then the only principled or philosophical position,
Hegel argues, would be the position of the ancient skeptics, who saw that skeptical
arguments undercut empirical claims as well; thus Hegel refers in this same passage to his
earlier case for the superiority of ancient skepticism.
Note that Hegel’s rejoinder to empiricism anticipates Sellars’ “Empiricism and the
Philosophy of Mind” attack on “the myth of the given”—as Sellars himself notes (1956, 253).
Some see this parallel as a strike against my metaphysical reading (Lumsden 2007, 52 and
57). But it is not. The point of Hegel’s criticism of empiricism taking “the empirical … as
basic” (§39An) is to defend an anti-empiricist view in the metaphysics of reason against
empiricist attack: to defend “universal notions, principles, and laws” (§38) which do not,
contra empiricists, reduce to “alterations that follow one after the other, and … objects that
lie side by side” (§39).
Now turn from empiricism to an epistemology-first Kantian criticism of metaphysics.
Hegel considers such a criticism at the beginning of the Encyclopedia:
One of the main points of view in the Critical Philosophy is the following:
before we embark upon the cognition of God, or of the essence of things, etc.,
we should first investigate our faculty of cognition itself, to see whether it is
capable of achieving this. (§10A)
The proposal turns on a metaphilosophical commitment: any other kind of claims about any
X are supposed to raise inescapable problems about the capability of our cognition for
knowledge of X, so that the prior and fundamental task facing any philosophy is critical
reflection on our own cognition. But Hegel will clearly reject this “epistemology-first” or
“priority of epistemology” criticism. Again Hegel has a powerful argument: If our cognition
41
is suspect when advancing a metaphysics, then it would be equally suspect when reflecting
on itself. So this argument produces no support at all for the claim that such epistemological
reflection enjoys any privileged position of fundamentality or inescapability in philosophy.
In effect, the epistemology-first Kantian—just like the empiricist—is assuming that our
cognition can have immediate access to its objects on a special, favored domain: the
empiricists’ favored domain is sense-perception; the epistemology-first Kantian favors
rather reflection on our own form of cognition. Either way, the epistemology-first attack
fails, because it just presumes a form of immediate or basic access on some other domain,
arguing that metaphysics compares poorly. In Hegel’s terms, the epistemology-first Kantian
objection to metaphysics turns on the desire “to have cognition before we have any,” and
this is “as absurd as the wise resolve of Scholasticus to learn to swim before he ventured
into the water” (§10An). The point is clear: philosophy takes an interest in metaphysical
topics, such as “God … the essence of things, etc.”; the epistemology-first Kantian worry
provides no reason to refrain from such metaphysics; the only thing to do is to jump in the
water and try to learn to swim—which is to say, to start doing such metaphysics, or to start
thinking about “God … the essence of things, etc.”, and to try to learn to think about such
things well, rather thinking about them unknowingly or uncritically.
Of course, although Hegel is here advocating engagement with metaphysical questions
about “God … the essence of things, etc.,” it is of course also true that he takes pre-Kantian
views of such topics to be objectionably naïve or uncritical. But clearly he is not objecting to
the lack of prior reflection on the fitness of our cognition! Rather, pre-Kantian metaphysical
claims are naïve because they haven’t sufficiently noted, and responded to, the dialectical
contradictions which Kant’s Transcendental Dialectic shows to arise within metaphysics
itself—contradictions concerning complete reasons or the unconditioned. What Hegel seeks
42
to do, then, is to build a non-naïve metaphysics by beginning with these Kantian
considerations from the “Dialectic.”
Note that Hegel is careful to place similar rejections of Kantian epistemology-first
criticisms of metaphysics both here at the beginning of the Encyclopedia and also at the
beginning of the Phenomenology (§73ff.), in the form of criticism of the recommendation
that philosophy must begin with reflection on cognition as a sort of instrument by which the
truth is to be grasped. It is of course true that the body of the Phenomenology literally
begins with what is in part an epistemological discussion in “Sense-Certainty.” But whatever
the point of this beginning might be, the point is clearly not to claim that such
epistemological issues must be “first” in the sense of having priority or being fundamental,
so that the fitness of our cognition for any X would have to first be established or deduced
before claims about X could be legitimate. For the “Introduction” clearly rejects this claim,
and Hegel will continue to reject it.
Non-metaphysical or meaning-first interpreters of Hegel might respond by retreating
to the moderate position that while Hegel does not take as fundamental problems about
meaning, he does include consideration of these problems. This is true. But this point does
nothing to support the non-metaphysical or meaning-first story about how Hegel accepts
and radicalizes a Kantian critical turn toward reflection on our cognition; we have seen that
this story depends entirely on the metaphilosophical commitment to these broadly
epistemological issues concerning reflection on our cognition being absolutely fundamental
throughout philosophy. This story holds that pre-Kantian metaphysics fails because it fails
to see that it cannot escape engagement with broadly epistemological problems about the
possibility of meaning and knowledge of an independent world, and—without a critical
resolution for them—it always implicitly draws on a “realist” explanation of meaning and
knowledge. And so it is an inescapable drawback of this interpretation that Hegel himself
43
seems to prominently reject the idea that epistemological problems about meaning and
knowledge are absolutely fundamental or inescapable in this sense.
Perhaps some will seek to retreat to the view that there is a fault-line in Hegel’s work,
diving a good Hegel who commits to meaning-first philosophy from a bad Hegel who lapses
into claims inconsistent with this commitment. Non-metaphysical interpreters have often
disagreed about where this fault-line is supposed to be: perhaps the Logic is the locus of the
properly non-metaphysical view; or perhaps the Logic must be read as dependent on the
Phenomenology in order to come out properly non-metaphysical, and the Realphilosophie
lapses; etc. But I don’t see the evidence for this fault-line view of Hegel. Note that one could
equally well begin with nearly any view one favors, X, and then look to Hegel’s works to
distinguish those parts that would fit well with X, and those which would not. But that there
is such a distinction is not adequate evidence for there being, for any such X, a fault-line
within Hegel’s philosophy, or some sense in which Hegel is at odds with himself. For it is no
evidence that Hegel is at all concerned with that X, and is trying to fit his views with X or to
not fit his views together with X. In such cases, we should rather conclude that the
appearance of a fault-line is an artifact of our choosing to view Hegel through that particular
lens.
Granted, one might be faced with the question: How does Hegel’s view compare with
anti-realism of this or that sort? And then the right answer might well be that some of his
views fit well with that anti-realism, and some do not. But here I am more interested in this
question: How can we best understand Hegel’s philosophy? If that is the question, then we
should try to avoid viewing him through an interpretive lens that will produce the
appearance that Hegel is at odds with himself, while hiding the question of whether there is
any evidence that this is anything but an artifact of the chosen interpretive lens.
44
True, one might also seek to understand Hegel in a manner that will bring out
connections with contemporary analytic philosophy. And a kind of meaning-first rejection
of metaphysics was very popular at one point in the history of analytic philosophy. Perhaps
at some point in middle to late 20th Century the dominant orthodoxy would have taken
problems about meaning as fundamental throughout philosophy, and argued then rejected
metaphysics on grounds that its claims are meaningless. But the overall trend of analytic
philosophy more recently has been away from that rejection and back towards
metaphysics. As Zimmerman puts it:
There was a period when many analytic philosophers—perhaps even the
majority—believed that the problems of metaphysics were either demonstrably
meaningless… But it was a relatively short phase… (2004, xiv)
So even if one had the specific goal of seeking to find connections between Hegel and
contemporary analytic philosophy, still this is no reason why we must prefer a meaning-first
or non-metaphysical reading of Hegel. And it is important to note something positive about
this same recent trend in analytic philosophy. In short, this movement reopens connections
between analytic philosophy and the history of philosophy. As Zimmerman says, of
contemporary analytic metaphysicians:
the problems they tackle are not significantly different from those that faced
the philosophers of earlier eras; and they defend positions readily identifiable
as variously Platonist, Aristotelian, Thomistic, rationalist, Humean, and so on.
(xxi)
Thus analytic philosophy, as it moves away from a meaning-first anti-metaphysical
orthodoxy, opens up to the possibility of learning something important from positions in the
history of philosophy—not only from Plato, Aristotle, etc., but also from Hegel.
So it is true that a meaning-first reading of Hegel may bring his philosophy into
contact with one strand of analytic philosophy—the strand that continues to take problems
about meaning as fundamental. But the same reading threatens to obscure connections
45
between Hegel and the more metaphysical trends in analytic philosophy which specifically
open it up to connections throughout the history of philosophy. For example, just my sketch
here of a “metaphysics of reason” interpretation of Hegel brings his philosophy into contact
with five currently lively debates in analytic philosophy, about: (i) the metaphysics of the
laws of nature, including contemporary forms of anti-humeanism; (ii) the comprehensive
program of the humean position in analytic metaphysics, as in David Lewis and his
followers; (iii) the proposal that “ontological grounding” is the subject of metaphysics, a
kind of revival of an Aristotelian approach within analytic metaphysics (Schaffer 2009)—I
argued above that Hegel’s approach starts with a comparable but broader or more general
notion of one thing being a reason for another; (iv) the sort of monism which holds that the
whole is the “ground” for the parts, or “priority monism” (Schaffer 2010, esp. the
comparisons to Hegel at pp. 42 and 67); (v) the issues concerning dispositions, their
possible grounds, and the pressure toward a metaphysical holism concerning this, noted
above in Russell (1927), Armstrong (1993) and Chalmers (1996). So we should not prefer
meaning-first readings of Hegel on grounds of a desire to bring Hegel into contact with
contemporary analytic philosophy; we can do at least as well, in these respects, by reading
Hegel in terms of the metaphysics of reason.
Finally, I turn to set the interpretive questions briefly aside, in favor of the
philosophical question of what we ourselves should conclude about metaphilosophy. First of
all, we have seen that Hegel himself offers a powerful rejoinder to arguments for the
fundamentality of broadly epistemological issues concerning knowledge and meaning: the
arguments maintain that claims about any X inescapably raise questions about the fitness of
our cognition for knowledge or even meaningful claims about X; but such arguments cannot
support any priority or fundamentality of these broadly epistemological issues, because
doubts about the fitness of our cognition would apply just as well to its fitness for reflection
46
on itself and its fitness. So I conclude that Hegel is right here: we should indeed jump into
the water in order to try to learn to swim—we should jump right into the metaphysics of
reason, and then try to learn to do it well. Further, thinking in terms of the metaphysics of
reason seems to me, for the reasons just noted, to allow us to better find philosophical
significance throughout the history of philosophy—not only in Hegel, but in Spinoza,
Aristotle, Plato, etc.
By contrast, meaning-first arguments in philosophy seek to make progress by denying
or closing off philosophical significance. For example, meaning-first or non-metaphysical
interpretations of Hegel argue that Kantian worries about our lack of knowledge of things as
they are in themselves—and, more generally, “realist skeptical doubts”—fail to articulate
any intelligible or significant worry the extent of our knowledge. So thinking in terms of
the metaphysics of reason allows us to find lasting philosophical significance throughout the
history of philosophy, even where we might have not expected to find it. Thinking in terms
of meaning-first philosophy allows us to deny that there is lasting philosophical significance
where we might have expected to find some. I take it that it is better for contemporary
philosophy to find more philosophical significance throughout history of philosophy, and so
to be more open to learning more from and being influenced by the history of philosophy.
So I favor the metaphysics of reason metaphilosophy, according to which the basic
questions of philosophy concern what is a reason for what.
Note that a metaphysics of reason metaphilosophy allows us to even find philosophical
significance in questions about the possibility of meaning and knowledge of an independent
world. For the issue here is really whether an objective world is itself the reason why we can
know it, or rather whether something about our capacity for knowledge and epistemic
spontaneity is the reason why there is any distinction to begin with between the objective
and the subjective. I see no good a priori grounds for denying that this is a philosophically
47
significant concern. But we should be clear, on my view, that there is also no reason to think
that this specific concern is fundamental to all philosophy. So if debates about this specific
concern should start to seem merely verbal, then there is no sense in which everything
else—metaphysics, for instance—should be held hostage to such stalled debates.
In sum, recent debates about Hegel tend to take place against the background of the
idea that problems concerning the possibility of meaning and knowledge of an independent
world are fundamental throughout philosophy. But I have argued that there is an important
and promising alternative approach: we might instead take as fundamental problems
concerning what is a reason for what, as for example in several familiar and recognizably
metaphysical debates. This “metaphysics of reason” alternative can do justice both to
Hegel’s interest in such metaphysical topics from history of philosophy, and yet also to the
sense in which Hegel’s thought is continuous with Kant’s critique of metaphysics. Once we
see that there is an alternative, then it is easier to notice that there are some prominent
places in which Hegel seems to reject the idea that problems about knowledge and meaning
are fundamental. Finally, consideration of Hegel can lead us in this way to the real and
lasting philosophical advantages of a “metaphysics of reason” metaphilosophy. True, we can
decisively resolve in this way neither the broadest questions about Hegel nor, certainly,
questions about what all of philosophy is most fundamentally about. But thinking about
Hegel can help us to come to see that there is a neglected and surprising contender when it
comes to metaphilosophy. In this way, we can better appreciate the underlying terrain on
which conflicts within philosophy are still fought today. And so I hope to have shown that
we can learn something important from Hegel when considering the question of what
philosophy is all about.i
48
i Primary Texts
HEGEL: Encyclopedia cited by § number, with ‘An’ indicating Anmerkung and ‘Zu’
indicating the Zusatz. All other references to Hegel’s writings are given by volume and page
number of Werke in zwanzig Bände. Edited by E. Moldenhauer und K. Michel, Frankfurt:
Suhrkamp, 1970-1. I use the following abbreviations and translations:
Phän: Phenomenology of Spirit. Translations from A.V. Miller. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1977.
WL: Hegel’s Science of Logic. Translations from A.V. Miller. London: George Allen &
Unwin, 1969.
EL: Encyclopaedia Logic.
VGP: Lectures on the History of Philosophy.
VPA: Aesthetics: Lectures on Fine Art. Knox, T.M., trans. 3 vols. Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1975.
KANT: Aside from references to the Critique of Pure Reason, all references to Kant’s
writings are given by volume and page number of the Akademie edition of Kant’s
Gesammelte Schriften (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1902-). I use these abbreviations and
translations:
A/B: Critique of Pure Reason. Translations from Paul Guyer and Allen Wood. Cambridge,
1998.
Other Works
Ariew, R. and Garber, D. 1989. Leibniz: Philosophical Essays. Hackett.
Armstrong, D. M. 1993, A Materialist Theory of the Mind. Routledge, London.
Beebee, H. 2000 “The Non-Governing Conception of Laws of Nature.” Philosophy and
Phenomenological Research 81:571-94.
Beiser, F.C. 2005, Hegel. London: Routledge.
Brandom, R. 1999, "Some Pragmatist Themes in Hegel's Idealism”, European Journal of
Philosophy, 7: 164-189.
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