Warwick Hegel Conference 2008
(29-30 May 2008)
Truth and Falsity
Ioannis D. Trisokkas, Postgraduate Research Fellow, University of Warwick
In recognition of the huge importance Hegelian philosophy currently has at Warwick, the
Department of Philosophy organized its first Warwick Hegel Conference. The aim of the
conference was to clarify and evaluate Hegel’s understanding of the notions of truth and
falsity. For this purpose six of the most prominent Hegel scholars in the world were
invited, as well as four graduate speakers, whose papers were selected out of a number of
thirty-seven abstracts that were submitted nine months earlier. The speakers were
Professors Robert Pippin (Chicago), Stephen Houlgate (Warwick), Robert Stern
(Sheffield), Anton Koch (Tübingen), Paul Franks (Toronto), and Angelica Nuzzo
(CUNY); and the graduate students Henry Southgate (Northwestern), Christian Martin
(LMU Munich), Jose Luis Fernandez (Stony Brook), and Arthur Kok (Humboldt Berlin).
There were about sixty-five participants, including both academics and graduate students.
The event was organized by Professor Stephen Houlgate, the doctoral students Ioannis
Trisokkas, Lee Watkins and Sebastian Stein, and the Department’s secretary Mrs. Lynda
Hemsley. It received generous funding from the Humanities Research Centre (HRC), the
Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC), the University of Warwick’s North
American Travel Fund, the European Journal of Philosophy, and the German Academic
Exchange Service (DAAD).
Stephen Houlgate opened the conference by welcoming everyone and introducing the
theme.
The first paper, entitled “An Old Man at the Revels: Hegel, Truth, and History,” was
delivered by Paul Franks. Paul argued for the thesis that Hegel’s epistemology is
essentially ontological. He started by delineating the three components of knowledge: (a)
the subject’s contentful state or act, (b) the truth of this content, and (c) the warranted
status of the subject’s contentful state or act. Unlike rationality, warrant is nonaccidentally related to truth: if a certain state or act is warranted, that state or act is true.
Warrant, therefore, is sufficient for knowledge. Paul then tried to illuminate the relation
between Hegel’s image of the True as a “Bacchanalian revel” in the Preface to the
Phenomenology of Spirit and this notion of warrant and truth. Truth is central to the
Phenomenology, although it hardly receives any real explication there. The text of the
Encyclopedia Logic might then be of assistance here, for there are certain passages
therein in which Hegel provides a clear and accessible discussion of the notion of truth.
In one of those passages Hegel distinguishes between correctness and truth. Correctness
denotes the “correspondence” of a representation with its content and truth the
“correspondence” of an object with its concept. So, for Hegel “correctness” designates
our common, everyday definition of truth and “truth” a special philosophical sense of
truth. We can understand this distinction also as one between an epistemological and an
ontological conception of truth. Paul drew at this point a parallel between Kant and Hegel
on this matter by referring to the former’s distinction between the nominal and the
transcendental definition of truth. However, there are important differences between the
two philosophers concerning the idea of truth. For Kant, it is judgments about empirical
reality, not objects, that are transcendentally true or false, and such truth or falsity is
conditioned upon human sensibility. Transcendental truth consists in conformity to forms
which are merely ours; consequently, there remains another kind of truth, the
transcendent truth, to which we humans have no access. For Hegel, on the contrary,
philosophical truth pertains to objects, not to judgments; and while it involves “forms,”
these are not merely ours. Does this mean that Hegel’s conception of truth is a
“materialistic” conception? No, but in order to understand why not, we should first
explore further how Hegel uses the term “true.” He clearly uses the term by reference to
normative and ethical terms; but he also uses it by reference to terms applicable to nature.
This suggests that Hegel uses the term “true” in a teleological sense, as designating the
telos of the object, but this should be understood in terms of internal, not external
teleology. Paul reminds us that Hegel defines reason as “purposive activity” and that he
explicitly connects “life” to “the concept.” These connections are then used to illuminate
the image we are interested in, to wit, the image of the True as a “Bacchanalian revel.”
This represents the dynamic relation between the members of a moving whole (the
“species”) and that whole itself (the “genus”), considered as the stable pattern that
emerges from the movement. In terms of truth, this pattern that emerges is the logical
form. Indeed, in the Phenomenology what we are seeing emerging from the flux are the
stable logical forms. These are the constituents of the telos that drive the
phenomenological movement to its end, to its truth. Paul finished his paper by explaining
why Hegel developed this specific conception of truth. It did so because he wanted to
give a response to naturalistic scepticism, the refutation of which could not be effected
through the recourses of Kantian philosophy.
The second speaker, Henry Southgate, talked about “The Transcendental Background of
Hegel’s Concept of Contradiction.” Hegel criticized Kant’s transcendental idealism as
too “subjective,” as limiting human cognition merely to appearances. Thus he has been
read as rejecting Kant’s project entirely. Henry argued that Hegel in fact attempts to carry
on Kant’s critical philosophy, and that a way to see that is by examining Hegel’s concept
of contradiction. He interprets Hegel’s account of contradiction in the Science of Logic as
a development of Kant’s transcendental logic. Hegel takes Kant to show that formal logic
becomes illusory when it is used without consideration of the nature of objects
represented in the predicates of judgments. From this impossibility of determining the
nature of opposition of predicates through form alone, Hegel draws a conclusion which is
implicit but undeveloped in the Critique: that formal logic (hence its highest principle of
non-contradiction) loses its status as the sine qua non of veridical objective judgment.
Hegel argues that it forfeits this status because the abstract conceptual comparison that
formal logic presupposes is not only empty but also inhibitory to conceptualizing the
world as it is “in truth.” To support this, Hegel provides a sophisticated analysis of
contradiction in the “Doctrine of Essence” which reveals (1) that the validity of the
principle of non-contradiction is restricted to the domain of abstract thinking and (2) that
“objectively valid” contradictions are possible in nature. He thereby argues not only is it
not the case that contradiction cannot exist nor be thought, but that it is rather an essential
feature of the world which veridical objective judgments must express.
The third paper, “The Truth Well Lost: An Outline of Hegel’s Epistemological Realism,”
by Christian Martin, investigated the connection between truth and falsity in Hegel’s
thought, as well as the one between correctness and incorrectness therein. Providing a
condensed account of his system in truth-theoretical perspective, Christian proceeded by
way of deduction from what Hegel conceives as the generating form of his philosophy, to
wit, the Concept. The argument starts with Hegel's equation of the Idea with “pure” or
“absolute truth,” which might seem to constitute a piece of metaphysical dogmatism par
excellence. Contrary to this impression, Christian argued that Hegel does not hypostatize
ontological truth in shape of a transcendent entity subsisting on its own, but that it must
be rather seen as always already lost. On the basis of pure truth's loss an account of
propositional truth (correctness) can be given, according to which the truth of empirical
judgments consists in the conceptual articulation of a reality which is unarticulated in
itself, though conceptually articulable. In this way Christian ascribed to Hegel a kind of
epistemological realism and credited him with an anomalous identity conception of
propositional truth, according to which true judgments, far from mirroring a world
allegedly composed of facts, nevertheless grasp what there is.
The fourth speaker, Robert Stern, talked about “Truth, Fallibilism and
Presuppositionlessness: Can Hegel be Read as a Pragmatist?” This paper considered the
similarities and differences between Hegel's approach to the inquiry into truth, and that of
the pragmatist tradition. Whilst it is argued that pragmatists characteristically brush off
sceptical threats to such inquiries, because they take sceptical doubt to be “unreal” and to
be underpinned by a false epistemic paradigm, it might be felt that Hegel's
position is more Cartesian and thus anti-pragmatist in this respect, in so far
as his philosophy aims at presuppositionlessness, in what may appear to be a
Cartesian manner. The paper argues, however, that Hegel's approach to
scepticism is much closer to the pragmatists than this makes it appear, and
hence that his concern with presuppositionlessness and the related notion of “free
thought” should not be given a Cartesian interpretation.
The fifth paper, entitled “Truth in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: The Case of
Perception,” by Stephen Houlgate, offered us a very detailed and immanent reading of
the second chapter of Hegel’s Phenomenology (“Perception”). Stephen emphasized the
particular conception of truth that is at play in this chapter.
Robert Pippin, our sixth speaker, delivered a paper about “Literary Truth in Hegel’s
Phenomenology.” Professor Pippin drew his inspiration from the poem with which the
Phenomenology concludes and argued that many of the philosophical problems that
surround Hegel’s work could be resolved if we accept that a certain kind of literary truth
is at play therein. He then developed a theory of such kind of truth through a fascinating
overview of post-Kantian German philosophy.
The seventh paper, “The Eschatological Design of Truth in Hegel’s Philosophy of Art,”
by Jose Luis Fernandez, argued that Hegel’s theory of aesthetics cannot be divorced from
its metaphysical underpinnings, which are broadly eschatological. In Adorno’s Aesthetic
Theory, the author writes that Hegel pronounced the “death of art” and heralded what
amounts to “a premature eschatology of art”. Pace Adorno, Joe argued that Hegel’s
aesthetic eschatology should not be viewed as an “end time” after which aesthetic truth is
stopped dead its tracks. Rather, far from having entered the age of its ultimate “demise,”
aesthetic truth remains open to future epochal revelation. Joe’s paper was organized into
three sections. In the first section, he outlined Hegel’s aesthetic theory in order to show
that artworks possess truth insofar as their “end” reveals the immanent structure of the
concept embodied in objects, and falsity if they provide no more than a trifling diversion
by expressing an external chaos of contingency through mere sensuous feeling. In the
second section, he examined Adorno’s use of the eschatology trope and demonstrated
that Hegel’s aesthetic theory does not hold with the Christian eschatological notion of a
final end and of everything unfolding in accordance to a transcendental power. Finally, in
the third section Joe suggested that Hegel’s “end of art” thesis is neither prophetic nor
suggestive of an aesthetic apocalypse, thus leaving open the possibility for art to continue
revealing truth.
Our eighth speaker, Arthur Kok, discussed “The Role of Social Interaction in TruthFinding: The Relation between Objective Nature and Recognition in the Master-Slave
Dialectic in the Phenomenology of Spirit.” According to Hegel’s Phenomenology of
Spirit, the consolidation of any truth content is impossible without “social interaction.”
Hegel conceptualises the recognition of the Spirit, which is a manifold of selfconsciousnesses that reciprocally recognise one another. This is not only a condition for
human interaction but also one for knowledge of objective nature. The first part of
Arthur’s paper consisted of a systematic introduction to the structure of the Hegel’s
Phenomenology. In the second part he reconstructed the role the pure Self plays in this
work. In the third part, he examined more closely the stage of the lordship/bondsmanrelation, which is the first stage in the Phenomenology in which recognition is realised.
Arthur proposed a systematic interpretation of the fear of death, the labour of the
bondsman and the savoury of the lord. He wanted to show that recognition is not just a
formal condition but is also realised as a societal body, and that the lordship/bondsmanrelation anticipates the complete relation between objective and absolute spirit.
Recognition is both reflective and immediate practice. This exposes Hegel’s
phenomenological science as a philosophy that explicitly connects the particular acts of
knowing with the concrete practice of human life.
Anton Koch, gave the ninth paper of the conference, entitled “Truth and Metaphysics in
Hegel’s philosophy.” In the Science of Logic Hegel sets out to develop a theory which is
individuated methodologically as pure thinking, to wit, as the (one and only) theory
without presuppositions. As to its subject matter, pure thinking turns out to be a theory of
the (pre-temporal) evolution of logical space. The idea that logical space is not a static
manifold of possible worlds, but a (pre-temporal) process in which reality successively
takes on different categorial shapes proves fruitful for a diagnosis of what metaphysics
has been after. Metaphysicians of different colours have tried to fix logical space at
different stages of its evolution and offer their respective results as the truth about
ultimate reality. A metaphysical theory may indeed be true as a representation of a given
stage of logical space in its evolution, but it is wrong as a theory of ultimate reality tout
court. In the Phenomenology of Spirit and again in the Science of Logic Hegel portrays
reality as itself playing the game of successive, competing categorial forms and, at the
same time, successive, competing metaphysical theories. We as philosophers have our
various parts in that game, and Hegel sees his own part as seeing through the game and
bringing it to its final halt (or fixed point) at which reality, namely, the process of logical
space, reveals itself as nothing but the game of categorial forms. In his talk Professor
Koch developed these themes with an eye on the respective programs and methods of the
Phenomenology and the Logic.
Angelica Nuzzo closed the conference with a paper called “‘…As if Truth were a Coin!’
Hegel’s Developmental Theory of Truth.” Angelica investigated, in an indirect way, the
relation between truth and falsity in the Logic of the Concept of Hegel’s Science of Logic.
Her paper was dedicated to laying out the framework in which Hegel presents the
structure of Begriff through a “refutation of Spinozism.” In order to clarify how the
procedure of “refutation” (Widerlegung) sets up the relationship between truth and falsity
in the Logic of the Concept, she went back to the passage of the preface to the
Phenomenology in which Hegel embraces Lessing’s “refutation” of the numismatic
theory of truth, which corresponds to the view of truth proper to the “logic of the
understanding.” Pilatus’ question: “What is truth?” which Hegel raises at the beginning
of the Logic of the Concept can be adequately answered only once the premises of the
numismatics of truth have been refuted.
Each presentation was followed by a forty-minute “question-and-answer session.” These
sessions were, with no exception, extremely lively and informative. The conference
dinner at the Radcliffe was a great success, something that can also be said about the
conference as a whole.