UNDERSTANDING HEGEL 1
OR: NO MORE THESIS — ANTITHESIS — SYNTHESIS

Win Corduan

Part 1 Immanuel Kant

Philosophers can be somewhat disoriented at times. Somewhere I have a xeroxed copy of an article by someone who declared that Meister Eckhart's (1260?-1327?) belief system really was grounded in the thought patterns of the middle ages. Wow! Who would have thought? With Hegel, things tend in the same direction: people attempt to transfer his thought into some alien environment. Any number of scholars try to extricate him from his setting in the early 19th century. For example, there is a persistent strain of people who write books about Hegel depicting him as an Aristotelian philosopher (e.g, Alfredo Ferrarin, Hegel and Aristotle, 2001). That does not work. No wonder people don't comprehend Hegel if they try to read him yanked out of his place and time. But still, it is a rare find, at least for me, when someone actually catches on to the fact that Hegel fit into 19th-century transcendental philosophy.

I'm also surprised at how many people interpret Hegel as a Romantic writer celebrating the burden of individual responsibility and the freedom granted by the modern state or some other such extrapolations. Hegel used examples, sometimes chapters long, to clarify his points, but the illustrations are not the actual points. One example is so obvious, it's amazing how many or his readers miss it. I'm thinking of the segment in the Phenomenology where he discusses the relationship between a master and his slave; eventually the master became enslaved to his slave. This discussion is an illustration in the context of the relationship in our perceptions  of external reality and how it can get bonded to our internal knowledge.

Similarly, his discussion of the French Revolution is all about not allowing our freedom to dissolve into chaos. In neither case is he presenting a socio/political message (though he does so in other places), but in many places he is giving us a parable which is intended to make his frequently somewhat obscure writing a little clearer. One must read Hegel's most obtrusive declarations as constituting the core, not his verbal pictures. 

I understand that a lot of philosophers are under pressure to write "important" works that contribute to the "conversation" (aka "publish or perish"), but I don't think it's an unreasonable stipulation for someone writing on a particular philosopher that he or she should analyze their subject from within the subject's own conceptual life-world, and Hegel is certainly no exception. Sure, you can force all kinds of schemes on him, but in that case you'll never really get what he's saying. In order to understand Hegel, you have to understand Kant, maybe Fichte, and definitely Schelling, and, if you do, Hegel will virtually fall in place for you. However, all-too-few people seem to understand Kant, and, consequently, his philosophical heirs are a total enigma to them.

Kant, we frequently hear in semi-popular presentations, was a skeptic who taught that we could not know reality. He barred us from knowledge of things-in-themselves; he declared that all knowledge is subjective; he cut us off from the external world. Christian apologists frequently put him into the same category as David Hume, the enfant terrible of modern philosophy. Now, Hume may have been that, but he and Kant belong into very different boxes. We all know that Kant said that Hume awakened him from his "dogmatic slumber," but then, surely it did not lead him to imitate Hume, but to solve the problems bequeathed to the world by Hume. He sought to neutralize Hume, as had many others, but his approach was unique: the so-called Kantian Copernican Revolution. If you think about it, Kant's philosophy actually went in the other direction from Copernicus, moving from epistemic world-centeredness to self-centeredness.

Here's the difference: Hume began with a method, a rather simplistic empirical positivism, and on the basis of that method, he delineated what is and what is not knowable, with the category of what is knowable being pretty tiny. On the other hand, Kant began with the assumption that there are all kinds of things that we do know and then developed a theoretical mechanism that would explain how it is possible for us to have that knowledge. Given the world's honeymoon with Isaac Newton at the time, he hoped to bring the same degree of certainty to philosophy as the natural sciences appeared to be enjoying.

In a real sense, Kant was restoring the complexity of the epistemologies of the Middle Ages, which had been lost in modern philosophy, particularly on the side of the British empiricists (Locke, Berekley, Hume). To them perception seemed to be a rather passive process, not all that different from a camera taking a picture. The image captured by the mind could undergo various operations, such as recognition, classification, and drawing inferences, but could not provide anything that would amplify knowledge. Hume argued that the links between the different pictures were not perceivable. His most famous example was the idea that we may observe a constant conjunction of two events, but that causality (or "necessary connexion," as he called and spelled it) could not refer back to any impression received by our minds. Thus, to him, all analysis under the heading of metaphysics was, strictly speaking, meaningless. Lest you think I'm overstating his case, let us recall his "fork," the final declaration of his Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding.

Kant's theory that concepts such as causality are not abstracted from the world but supplied by the mind is reminiscent of the philosophy  of St. Thomas Aquinas who leaned on Aristotle's idea of the "agent" or "active" intellect.

In fact, in the twentieth century there was a movement among Thomistic philosophers who attempted to develop their philosophy from a Kantian perspective, initiated by the Belgian philosopher Joseph Maréchal, and propagated particularly by the theologians Bernard Lonergan and Karl Rahner (dates for both of them: 1904-1984). This "transcendental Thomism" cannot hold up, as shown by Jacques Maritain among others, but there is no question that Aquinas agreed with Kant on the basic idea that we do not have knowledge of any item apart from the active contributions made by the mechanisms of our minds. Where Thomists part company with Kant is that they believe that God created the world according to his patterns ("exemplar causes", which are a part of "efficient causes") and that what exists is being, which is not merely a logical category of understanding. Furthermore, when the mind receives a "phantasm," the agent intellect turns it into knowledge. You can find the story of the debate between Maréchal and Jacques Maritain in detail in the book Out of a Kantian Chrysalis  by Ronald McCamy. 

So, let's start with the simple example of knowledge of an object by acquaintance. I know that here is a flower. I know the flower. I know the flower by means of my mental functions that facilitate my knowing the flower. I do not know the flower apart from the way that I know it. There is a flower. My mind apprehends it, and so I know it, thanks to my mind. Do I know the flower apart from the mechanisms of my mind that make it possible for me to know the flower? Of course not. I can only know the flower by means of my faculties of knowledge.

Do I know the flower-in-itself? Well, I don't think so, but I don't know what that means. Maybe if someone could explain the difference to me between knowing the flower and knowing the flower-in-itself, I could make sense of the question, but it seems to me that the question entails the possibility of knowing-the-flower-apart-from-knowing-it, and that I cannot do.

Kant turned things inside out, or rather outside in, by saying that the knowledge that we have of things is made possible by the forms of space and time and the pure concepts of the understanding, which are contributed by our minds and not contained in the external world. Does the flower know, for example, that it is a single and particular flower, that it was caused by the seed of a previous flower, that its life is contingent on nourishment from the soil, and that its identity is different from another flower? No, those judgments are applied by our minds; they don't come with the flower. So, Kant ascribed to the workings of the mind what previous modern philosophers naively thought was incorporated in the substance of the flower.

Kant did not say that we cannot know reality. He did say, however, that we cannot know reality apart from the mechanism of knowledge, and if that's being skeptical, we have taken the sting out of the term "skepticism." Furthermore, Kant also declared that, if we try to take those mechanisms and turn them into objects of knowledge themselves, we are going to run into contradictions (the so-called antinomies of reason, of which Kant also said that they awakened him from his dogmatic slumber). For example, I can say that the flower is singular and particular, but if I try to establish whether singularity is particular, that doesn't make any sense and is, thus, off-limits. (It is a part of the "noumenal," which makes knowledge of the "phenomenal" possible, but it it cannot be treated as though it were a phenomenal reality itself.)

So, this is how Kant thought knowledge comes about. There is an external world. Just to reassure ourselves, the external world consists of things-in-themselves, but we cannot know those things apart from knowing them. We know them by packaging them with the faculties of our minds. First, we apply the forms of space and time to them, so that they are in their proper geographical and temporal locations, and then subject them to judgment by means of the categories of logic. After all, we need to maintain the differences between one and many, cause and effect, and so forth, and our minds do that for us.