Hegel 9

UNDERSTANDING HEGEL 9
OR: NO MORE THESIS — ANTITHESIS — SYNTHESIS

Win Corduan

Part 9 Hegel's Transcendental Method

Have you ever tried to touch a rainbow? It's a futile procedure, of course. Rainbows are not the kind of thing that you can touch. As the sunlight hits the gentle rain drops, the water reflects the light in an arc, the width of which covers the entire spectrum of colors visible to the human eye. In fact, if you manage to place yourself right into the area where the rainbow seems to have appeared, you will find it gone. Instead, you'll stand there in the midst of a gray drizzling rain. Now, please don't make the mistake of asserting what the rainbow "really" is, the beautiful spectacle in the sky, the phenomenon, or nothing except the precipitation. They're all real. They all contribute to the divinely originated spectacle; they do not exclude each other, but support each other.

For much of my time at Rice University (Ph.D., 1977), after I had taken up the study of Hegel, I fell into the annoying habit of regularly declaring to my fellow grad students that Hegel's philosophy did not consist of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, and my friends rightfully started to tease me about it. (I realize that I'm reciting the same litany on this site, but that's because it is intentionally focused on Hegel, so I can hardly avoid how he should be read and understood.)They would deliberately bring it up whenever the opportunity lent itself--or, better, when they created an opportunity for it. We would be conversing about some philosophical or theological topic, and someone was sure to turn to me and with faked sincerity inquire, "Hey, Win, isn't that just like Hegel's philosophy of thesis-antithesis-synthesis?" It was always good for a laugh all around. But the best laugh came during a seminar with the eminent theologian and philosopher, Wolfhart Pannenberg .

Pannenberg was visiting Rice, and our department chair, Professor Niels C. Nielsen, Jr, arranged for a two-hour seminar with him to which all departmental faculty and grad students were invited. I had the chance to ask him several questions, including one about the opinion voiced by many scholars that Pannenberg was deeply influenced by Hegel. Professor Pannenberg's immediate answer was, "You in America just think of Hegel as "thesis-antithesis-synthesis"; that's not what it's about. What Hegel is saying is that you look at a thing and see what it is, and when you look again, it's something different."

My colleagues were gleeful to see me get the same lecture to which I had subjected them so many times. At the end of the seminar, I got to have lunch with him. When I told him a little about myself and my current project that involved Hegel, he apologized and told me that philosophically he was not particularly interested in Hegel, but inclined to the study of Duns Scotus, the subject of his doctoral dissertation in philosophy. Still to this day, the Wikipedia article to which I have linked him mentions that he was deeply influenced by Hegel, an idea that he denied half a century ago. I wish I could go back and eliminate his name from my paper on "Hegelian Themes in Contemporary Philosophy " If you look it up, you'll see that I didn't write much about him except a vague declaration, obviously due to the fact that at that early time I had still only been exposed to the myth about him. I didn't find much else to say about him, and then I learned that this was so because there was no actual connection between Pannenberg and Hegel. >

Well, that's a good start, more or less, but left to itself, it's not quite enough. That summary is actually more applicable to Schelling than to Hegel; it really resembles Schellings way of reinventing the Law of Contradiction. What's missing in that description is that the analysis of the first look reveals the thing's own negation, and that's why it looks like something else the next time.

So, isn't this the scheme which I earlier labeled as inappropriate for Hegel, namely a thesis being opposed by an antithesis? No, not at all. There is no opposition, which is then resolved by bringing in a third thing. It is a self-negation that emerges from the thing, which then requires another thing to prop it up. The pattern you have in Fichte, you remember, is that you start with the Absolute I, which is then opposed by the reality of the other Absolute I's, so to speak, which constitute the non- I.

Fichte's Thesis and Antithesis
For Fichte the antithesis comes from something external to the thesis.

In case the jargon is getting to you, let me try to put it in plain language. I am "me." Theoretically I'm not only the center of my universe, I am my own universe. But when I get too impressed with myself, I get reminded that there are millions of other people who have the same grandiose self-perception. Those are all people who are not me. So, I encounter everything that is not me or non-I, and I need to clip the wings of my exaggerated self-consciousness. The limited I is hammered together, chastened and humbled, and now will also become capable to serve those others in the world. So, in Fichte's thought, you start with one idea (Abs. I) which is then opposed from the outside by a contrary idea (non-I).

Now, Hegel talks about the "toil of the negative," he's not referring to a thing finding itself "attacked" by its opposite from without. He's saying that any shape of consciousness, if left alone, bears its own negation.

Here's an easy illustration of the method, which, of course, falls far short of any philosophical import. Let 's say that you're outdoors, but it's too cold for you, and so you go back indoors. But it's also cold inside 0f your house, so you need to warm it up, and you decide to bring a little outdoor fun inside of your house.

You go back out for a few moments and collect sticks and branches of wood, pile them together in teepee shape in the middle of your living room carpet, add a few crumpled pages of newspaper, strike a match, and have yourself a great camp fire right there in your home. Maybe you have some marshmallows or, better yet, also some crackers and chocolate to make yourself s'mores. Now you can get nice and warm, if not downright toasty.

Bad idea. The fire you made keeps you warm, but starts to spread, and pretty soon, your entire dwelling is one huge blaze. The idea itself generated its own annihilation. The same fire that may have seemed good for a few moments turned out to be destructive a few minutes later . . . . . . . .
. . . . . . . unless you had availed yourself of one of the many devices available to maintain a contained fire in your house, such as a stove or a fire place.

Well, then, a fireplace is a great idea. You move the wood into one and light the fire. This time your house will not go up in flames. However, the fire is creating a lot of smoke throughout your house, and in a few minutes you find yourself coughing and struggling to breathe as your room is accumulating a layer of soot. You need a chimney. And on we go with conditions for the chimney to work.

So, you have some ideas that looked good at first glance, but then turned out to be bad because intrinsic to them there was a flaw that could only be alleviated by bringing in a further necessary condition to be useful---

The cold weather outsides requires us to go indoors.
The cold temperatures indoors necessitates a fire.
To make a fire you need wood, some paper to start, and a lighted match.
To counter the danger of an open fire inside of the house, we need a fiereplace.
To keep the smoke from the fire from suffocating us, the fireplace needs a chimney .
To make the chimney work, you need a damper.
To get the damper to work, you need to open it.
etc.

---and we can go on until we wind up with the laws of nature being secured by the Absolute (or maybe even in some roundabout way with the existential necessity of Herr Krug's writing pen).

So, how does that differ from "thesis-antithesis-synthesis"? In that scheme the negation is not inherent in the item, but comes from without. Remember that for Fichte the Absolute I resolved into the relative I after encountering the non-I. In this illustration then, you make a nice and safe fire in your house, but a neighbor complains about all of the smoke coming out of your chimney and spreading over the neighborhood. So, you make a compromise with him and limit yourself to use only dry and clean wood so that the amount of smoke is reduced. As you walk through the forest picking up usable pieces of wood, the local ranger stops you because it is illegal to take wood out of the park and you have to pay a heavy fine. And so forth ... The thesis clashes with an antithesis external to it, and the synthesis emerges as a compromise between them.

At this point, I need to remind us that we are looking at transcendental philosophy, which begins with the question, "What are the conditions that make knowledge possible?" Even though the system becomes extremely complicated, that was Hegel's question as much as Kant's. Kant responded by claiming that the necessary conditions include a thing-in-itself, a sensory intuition, the forms of space and time, and the categories of logic. Hegel's answer is: the entire universe as Absolute Spirit manifests itself, but not all at once, as Schelling would have it. We have to work backwards, with one shape of consciousness, but find that it negates itself unless it relies on another one. So, we stipulate (it'ces transcendental philosophy!) the necessary new shape of consciousness. But then we realize that this one also negates itself unless it relies on another one. I like to think of the mechanism of Hegel's system as nesting cups or stacked blocks, as shown in the illustration.

To make the illustration really accurate, rather than having a vertical stack of blocks, ultimately the system moves backwards in a circle, where your starting point also becomes your ending point.

"Where, then, is the starting point?" someone asks.

"Wherever you want it to be," I answer. "It's a circle, remember?"

In fact, in his Encyclopedia (which is nothing like an "encyclopedia" in our current use of the term; it refers to the circular shape of the system), Hegel begins with "The Eternal Idea Before Creation"--God in himself--and ends up there again. In the Phenomenology he starts with our simplest form of knowledge, "sense certainty," and that's where we'll pick up next time.