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06TheIntroduction.mp3
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The Introduction
Like the Preface, the Introduction has a clear polemical intention, in setting out to show how a new approach is needed after the false starts in philosophy prior to Hegel. Also like the Preface, the Introduction makes plain what Hegel takes to be the consequences of failure: unless philosophy can make good on its promise to find reason in the world, then the forces of anti-philosophy will triumph, heralding a return to sceptical irrationalism, to '[t]his conceit which understands how to belittle every truth, in order to turn back into itself and gloat over its own understanding, which knows how to dissolve every thought and always find the same barren Ego instead of any content' . However, whereas in the Preface Hegel's polemic is rather narrow in seeing this irrationalism as arising out of the 'immaturity' and 'empty formalism' of the kind of philosophical position occupied by the post-Kantians, in the Introduction Hegel tries to deal with a more fundamental challenge, one that sees such irrationalism as stemming from nothing more than a 'natural assumption' concerning the method of philosophical inquiry. Hegel accepts that once this 'natural assumption' is made, then sceptical irrationalism follows; he therefore sets out to show that it is in fact not 'natural' at all, and that instead it should be treated as an unwarranted imposition. Hegel sets out the problematic assumption at the start of the Introduction: namely, that before we set out to find 'reason in the world', we must first step back and examine whether our intellects have the capacity for this sort of understanding, where the fear is that otherwise we may find ourselves embarking on a hopeless project with no prospect of success. In a passage that Hegel cites elsewhere , John Locke famously recommended this procedure, which requires that we 'take a Survey of our own Understandings, examine our own Powers, and see to what Things they [are] adapted' ; and although Hegel cites Locke here, he could equally well have quoted the following passage from Descartes: 'Now, to prevent our being in a state of permanent uncertainty about the powers of the mind, and to prevent our mental labours being misguided and haphazard, we ought once in our life carefully to inquire as to what sort of knowledge human reason is capable of attaining, before we set about acquiring knowledge of things in particular' . Now, Hegel sees Kant's critical project as sharing essentially the same outlook, according to which we must begin in philosophy by first investigating the scope of our intellectual capacities ; and although Locke may not have been a sceptic or idealist, Hegel holds that Kant in the end was both, and in a way that was inevitable given his Lockean starting point. For, once we adopt this approach, we inevitably treat our thought as an 'instrument' or 'medium' with in-built limitations, and the idea naturally arises that our cognitive capacities stand between us and reality; it then comes to seem that the world as it is 'in itself' is inaccessible from our perspective, an 'evil' that we find we cannot remedy no matter how hard we reflect on the nature of this 'instrument' or 'medium' . The Kantian may seek to console us here by adopting a more relativistic conception of truth, and claim that this provides us with an adequate goal of inquiry; but Hegel is airily dismissive of such intellectual bad faith, claiming that 'we gradually come to see that this kind of talk which goes back and forth only leads to a hazy distinction between an absolute truth and some other kind of truth, and that words like "absolute", "cognition", etc. presuppose a meaning which has yet to be ascertained'. Now, in order to rebut this apparently inevitable slide into sceptical irrationalism, Hegel's aim here is to suggest that there is in fact nothing that obliges us to adopt the 'natural assumption' that we must begin by 'first of all [coming] to an understanding about cognition' (what could be called 'the critical epistemic method'). One argument for it might be that it is properly presuppositionless, as it does not assume anything about our capacity to investigate the world; but, Hegel claims, the adoption of this approach does not in fact make the critical epistemic method presuppositionless, as it still assumes something, namely that we have the ability to successfully 'step back' and investigate our cognitive capacities. So, as Hegel puts the point in the Logic, if it is claimed that the limitations of our intellect must be assessed before we can begin inquiring into the 'true being of things', then presumably before we can begin inquiring into the limitations of our intellects we must assess our capacity for such inquiry; and thus our capacity to achieve that must be assessed, and so on ad infinitum, for 'the examination of knowledge can only be carried out by an act of knowledge'. Thus, the aim of the critical epistemic theorist to investigate our cognitive capacities without also using them and so 'to seek to know before we can know' is nonsensical and absurd, 'as absurd as the wise resolution of Scholasticus, not to venture into the water until he had learned to swim' . Faced with this difficulty, defenders of the 'natural assumption' may instead claim that their procedure is warranted, because otherwise we cannot be sure that our cognitive faculties are up to the job of arriving at knowledge; in the Logic, Hegel suggests that this was Kant's view: 'We ought, says Kant, to become acquainted with the instrument, before we undertake the work for which it is to be employed; for if the instrument be insufficient, all our trouble will be spent in vain' (ibid.). Hegel's argument against this view in the Phenomenology is straightforward: why should we need any assurance of this sort before beginning our inquiries? Why shouldn't we just start and see how far we get? Hegel thus recommends that rather than going in for any sort of preliminary investigation of our faculties, 'Science . . . gets on with the work itself . . . and mistrusts this very mistrust' .
Now, it is important to remember that Hegel's target here is a view of the critical epistemic method that sees it as a 'natural assumption', one that claims that this inquiry into the nature of our cognitive capacities is an obvious and commonsensical starting point of any responsible philosophical endeavour, either because of a conviction that this way can we guard against grasping 'clouds of error instead of the heaven of truth' , or because of a 'fear' of taking anything for granted . It is harder to see how Hegel's arguments here would tell against other ways of motivating the critical epistemic method, particularly those built around the claim that there is positive evidence that our cognitive capacities are limited, based on the apparent failure of our inquiries in certain areas (theology or metaphysics, for example). Given this evidence of our cognitive limitations, it might then be seen as sensible to see what it is about our cognitive capacities which produces those limitations, so that we do not try to overstep them in a way that would prove fruitless or misleading. Thus, it would seem, the critical epistemic method could be motivated not by an epistemic overscrupulousness that gets things in the wrong order by questioning our capacities before it has sought to exercise them; rather, it could be motivated by a desire to make a reasonable inventory of our abilities faced with real evidence of their limitedness. (In terms of Hegel's analogy, therefore, this sort of critical theorist is not like someone who wants to learn to swim without getting wet, but instead like someone who having nearly drowned, has got out of the water to reflect on how far his swimming abilities can be expected to take him.) It may seem that Hegel's arguments here do not really deal with this way of taking the critical epistemic method (although it could be said he tackles it elsewhere, for example in his attack on Kant's claim that the problems of metaphysical thinking show reason to be limited: ). At this stage, however, it is not clear how much of a worry this should be to the Hegelian. For here Hegel is focusing on how a 'natural assumption' about philosophical inquiry as such can lead to sceptical irrationalism, and the claim that proper methodology requires that we should start with the critical epistemic method; he is not concerned at this point to rule out the possibility that once we get on with the business of trying to understand the world, we may find that we encounter certain intractable difficulties which make it apparent that there are particular cognitive limitations we must accept. If this happens (and as we have already seen, for Hegel it is a very big 'if'), then proceeding as the critical epistemic theorist suggests may be sensible. Thus, while this point may undermine the force of his polemic here as a critique of Kant and perhaps others (if it can be shown that they adopted the critical epistemic method for the reasons just given, and not for the reasons Hegel criticizes), this still does not undermine his central philosophical point, that there is little reason to adopt the critical theorist's approach as a 'natural assumption' at the outset, prior to philosophical inquiry; and it is only if it is a 'natural assumption' that it is valuable to the sceptic's case, as only then would it seem to show that doubts about our capacity for knowledge arise as soon as we even begin to seek such knowledge, so that it is somehow self-defeating to seek to know reality. What is significant, therefore, is that Hegel undermines the status of the critical epistemic method as a 'natural assumption', even if some of its proponents (such as Kant) could have had other, philosophically more substantive, reasons for adopting it.
Nonetheless, Hegel argues that it would be a mistake to take the failure of the critical theorist's 'natural assumption' to show that we can just be sure that our view of the world is the correct one, or that we can proceed with whatever presuppositions we like. The difficulty is that different conceptions of the world may strike different inquirers as valid, so that unless we can show why one conception is to be preferred to the others, we could not claim that that conception has a right to be regarded as true. However, it would be wrong to expect these other conceptions to concede defeat without any argument (as this would be dogmatic); and it would be wrong to attempt to overcome such other conceptions by assuming things about the world that they do not accept (as this would be question-begging); we must therefore attempt to show that these other conceptions are inadequate on their own terms, and are thus self-undermining, so that in the end if and when we arrive at a conception that is not inadequate in this way, we will have reached a conception that has established its legitimacy in a non-dogmatic and non-question-begging way. This is what is known as Hegel's method of immanent critique: to establish that his conception is the one that is best able to make us feel 'at home in the world', Hegel first sets out to show that these other conceptions cannot overcome the problems and puzzles that arise for them, so that they cannot claim to give us the kind of rational satisfaction that is required.
Thus, as a preliminary to Hegel's systematic position, the Phenomenology has the task of bringing out how each non-dialectical viewpoint involves some sort of self-contradiction; it is thus a 'way of despair' for ordinary consciousness , as it comes to see that its conceptions are inadequate: 'this path is the conscious insight into the untruth of phenomenal knowledge, for which the supreme reality is what is in truth only the unrealized Notion . . . The series of configurations which consciousness goes through along this road is, in reality, the detailed history of the education of consciousness itself to the standpoint of Science' . Hegel claims that because each inadequate stage of consciousness 'suffers this violence at its own hands', he can persuade consciousness to accept his position in a non-dogmatic and non-question-begging way, by showing that consciousness moves towards it of its own accord, as it seeks to make good on its own internal problems. We therefore do not need to assume anything about the world at the outset, or to use such assumptions to criticize consciousness: rather, '[c]onsciousness provides its own criterion from within itself' by which its adequacy can be judged, 'so that the investigation becomes a comparison of consciousness with itself'. Thus, Hegel famously declares, 'since what consciousness examines is its own self, all that is left for us to do is simply to look on' . Consciousness will find itself in the position of seeing that how it took things to be is somehow incoherent, and so will be forced to revise its outlook accordingly, until ultimately a conception is reached where it is able to see how to free itself from these problems, at which point 'knowledge no longer needs to go beyond itself, where knowledge finds itself, where Notion corresponds to object and object to Notion'. However, while consciousness will move forward immanently in this way, without our having to motivate or impel it from the outside, what will not be apparent to consciousness is how exactly its new way of looking at things is related to its previous conception, and how this new conception has come about. As we have discussed, for Hegel this sort of shift involves a revision in how consciousness thinks about the world: but, in the Phenomenology, although consciousness undergoes these shifts, it is not aware that this is the driving mechanism behind them, so that here 'the origination of the new object . . . presents itself to consciousness without its understanding how this happens, which proceeds for us, as it were, behind the back of consciousness'. To consciousness, it appears that its understanding of the world develops because the world has revealed itself to it in a new way; but to us, as phenomenological observers, it is clear that this has only happened because consciousness has changed its way of thinking about the world, so that these cognitive shifts do not come about 'by chance and externally', but 'through a reversal of consciousness itself', as it moves from one conception to another by questioning some assumptions and taking on others. Only at the end of its journey is consciousness ready to understand what has happened to it and why; it is then able to think reflectively and self- consciously about the categorical shifts that have led it forward from one problematic position to the next, to the point at which 'it gets rid of the semblance of being burdened with something alien' , and can at last feel at home in the world. Before such homecoming is possible, however, we must follow Hegel as (like Dante's Virgil) he guides us through the journey of the Soul, 'so that it may purify itself for the life of the Spirit, and achieve finally, through a completed experience of itself, the awareness of what it really is in itself'.
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