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Force and the Understanding
In the 'Perception' section, consciousness has failed to find rational satisfaction in the ordinary world of common-sense, with its ontology of things and properties, as this has led it into a dialectic of one individual and many properties which it did not have the resources to resolve. In 'Force and the Understanding', consciousness tries to get round this difficulty by setting aside common-sense ontology, and
moving to a metaphysical picture that replaces the objects of ordinary sense experience with the very different conception of the world presented to us by the natural sciences, where the 'manifest image' of things and properties is set aside in favour of the 'scientific image' of the world favoured by physics, in which this common-sense ontology is rejected . Where today we might think of this scientific image in terms of the radically revisionary metaphysics of quantum theory, in Hegel's time this scientific conception was centred on the notion of force, which appeared to open up a picture of the world very different from that presented to us by sense experience. The concept of force came to dominate eighteenth-century physics through the work of Newton, while playing a prominent role in the thought of Descartes, Leibniz, and Kant. In particular, Kant's dynamical view of matter was take up by Fichte and Schelling and so became incorporated into the development of the Naturphilosophie (philosophy of nature) of the German idealists . In view of the centrality of this concept in making possible a new picture of reality that departed from the traditional ontology of material substances, it has been observed that '[i]f one wanted to characterize the general scientific approach of the eighteenth-century by means of a single concept, there would be much to be said for selecting the notion of force . . . [T]he diversity of contexts within which it was being applied [included] . . . classical mechanics . . ., fluid mechanics, magnetism and electricity, chemistry, biology and medicine, as well as psychology, ethics, aesthetics and physio-theology' . Now, in his discussion of force, Hegel's attitude is characteristically nuanced: for, while he sees how in one sense the notion of force is attractive, in that it appears to get over the aporia faced by the common-sense conception of things and properties, he also tries to show how this 'scientific image' is itself problematic, in so far as it takes us too far away from the common-sense conception, and so once again leads to a puzzle concerning individuality and universality. He thus distances himself from the contemporary philosophical enthusiasm for the notion of force, trying to show that it is not possible to solve our philosophical difficulties simply by moving from the manifest to the scientific image. Hegel begins by bringing out how turning to the scientific image might appear to represent an advance for consciousness; we no longer have to face the dialectic of one and many that applied to things, as reality is now conceived of as an interconnected whole of internally related forces: 'In other words, the "matters" posited as independent directly pass over into their unity, and their unity directly unfolds its diversity, and this once again reduces itself to unity. But this movement is what is called Force' . This interconnectedness is not visible to us directly in the world given to sense experience, where it appears that reality consists of distinct entities; but this pattern is now taken by consciousness to be merely the appearance of a more holistic structure of internally connected forces:
From this we see that the Notion of Force becomes actual through its duplication into two Forces, and how it comes to be so. These two Forces exist as independent essences; but their existence is a movement of each towards the other, such that their being is rather a pure positedness or a being that is posited by an other; i.e. their being has really the significance of a sheer vanishing . . . Consequently, these moments are not divided into two independent extremes offering each other only an opposite extreme: their essence rather consists simply and solely in this, that each is solely through the other, and what each thus is it immediately no longer is, since it is the other. They have thus, in fact, no substances of their own which might support and maintain them . . . Thus the truth of Force remains only the thought of it; the moments of its actuality, their substances and their movement, collapse unresistingly into an undifferentiated unity . . . This true essence of Things has now the character of not being immediately for consciousness; on the contrary, consciousness has a mediated relation to the inner being and, as the Understanding, looks through this mediating play of Forces into the true background of Things. Thus, according to the scientific theorist, consciousness cannot find rational satisfaction if it deals with the world as presented to us by sense experience; if, however, it treats that world as a mere appearance, and instead thinks in terms of the more holistic notion of force as underlying that appearance, then (the theorist claims) a way can be found to overcome the one/many problem that faced perception: 'Within this inner truth . . . the absolute universal . . . has been purged of the antithesis between the universal and the individual and has become the object of the Understanding' . However, consciousness then discovers that a price must be paid if it attempts to escape the puzzles that arise out of our ordinary conception of the world by moving to the 'two-tier' view adopted by the scientific theorist: 'The inner world is, for consciousness, still a pure beyond, because consciousness does not yet find itself in it. It is empty, for it is merely the nothingness of appearance, and positively the simple or unitary universal' . The difficulty Hegel presses is a familiar one: although moving from the manifest to the scientific image may help us escape the aporia of perception, the bifurcation in our world-view this entails creates as many problems as it solves, as once we go below the level of empirical phenomena, it becomes harder to defend the claim that we have cognitive access to this underlying reality, or to know what we can say about it: it thus becomes a 'supersensible beyond', outside the reach of our intellectual powers. Thus, it seems that the scientific theorist cannot give us grounds for taking his picture of the world seriously from an ontological point of view, unless he can give grounds for taking this picture to be true; but how can such grounds be given, when we have gone beyond the direct evidence of the senses?
At this point, the understanding attempts to render this supersensible realm less mysterious by identifying it with the laws that govern the natural phenomena, which both stand above the phenomena and are instantiated in them: 'Consequently, the supersensible world is an inert realm of laws which, though beyond the perceived world - for this exhibits law only through incessant change - is equally present in it and is its direct tranquil image. This realm of laws is indeed the truth for the Understanding, and that truth has its content in the law'.
Hegel sees difficulties here, however. First, he argues that on this conception of law, it is natural for the understanding to look for some way of unifying its laws into a unified theory; but, 'when the laws thus coincide, they lose their specific character. The law becomes more and more superficial, and as a result what is found is, in fact, not the unity of these specific laws, but a law which leaves out their specific character' . In other words, in becoming unified the laws become more general, and in becoming more general they lose their applicability to the concrete world. Second, he argues that an understanding of the world in terms of laws is incomplete, because it provides no answer to the question of why these laws obtain, when it appears that the universe could have obeyed other laws: 'But in all these forms [of law], necessity has shown itself to be only an empty word' . Third, he claims that while laws may help us to think about phenomena in general terms, they describe rather than properly explain: 'The single occurrence of lightning, e.g., is apprehended as a universal, and this universal is enunciated as the law of electricity; the "explanation" then condenses the law into Force as the essence of the law . . . In this tautological movement, the Understanding, as we have seen, sticks to the inert unity of the object, and the movement falls only within the Understanding itself, not within the object. It is an explanation that not only explains nothing, but is so obvious [klar] that, while it pretends to say something different from what has already been said, really says nothing at all but only repeats the same thing' . Here, again, it seems that the laws of the Understanding do not take us much beyond the realm of 'appearance' and so we are left with the world of forces as a mysterious 'beyond'. Thus, whereas the understanding began with a conception of forces and laws as universals underlying the particular objects as they appear to us, it now sees that without the particularity of empirical phenomena, there would be no content to our talk of general laws; its claim to have established the priority of universality over particularity in this respect has therefore proved unstable.
Then, in a final flourish, Hegel puts forward the idea of the
'inverted world', as a kind of reductio ad absurdum of understanding's
'two-tier' conception of reality. Hegel had first used the term in his Introduction to the Critical Journal of Philosophy in 1801, where he comments that in its esoteric form, 'in its relationship to commonsense the world of philosophy is in and for itself an inverted world' . His discussion of the inverted world in the Phenomenology is linked into his previous accounts of force and law in a way that is extremely hard to follow; but the general point seems to be that once the understanding posits a supersensible world over and above the one apparent to ordinary experience, it then becomes very hard for consciousness to say what the world is really like 'in itself':
Looked at superficially, this inverted world is the opposite of the first in the sense that it has the latter outside of it and repels that world from itself as an inverted actual world: that the one is appearance, but the other the in-itself; that the one is the world as it is for an other, whereas the other is the world as it is for itself. So that to use the previous examples, what tastes sweet is really, or inwardly in the thing, sour; or what is north pole in the actual magnet in the world of appearance, would be south pole in the inner or essential being; what presents itself as oxygen pole in the phenomenon of electricity would be hydrogen pole in unmanifested electricity. In turning from the manifest to the scientific image, consciousness as understanding has therefore failed to attain rational satisfaction: by conceiving of the scientific image as a simple negation of the manifest image, all that can be ascribed to the 'inner' (and 'true') world is the opposite of whatever we perceive, none of which helps us to understand or explain what we perceive. Hegel ends this section by adopting the standpoint of the 'we' (as phenomenological observers), telling us that from this standpoint, the dualism of the Understanding can be overcome dialectically in the concept of the infinite: 'From the idea, then, of inversion, which constitutes the essential nature of one aspect of the supersensible world, we must eliminate the sensuous idea of fixing the differences in a different sustaining element . . . Thus the supersensible world, which is the inverted world, has at the same time overarched the other world and has it within it; it is for itself the inverted world, i.e. the inversion of itself; it is itself and the opposite in one unity. Only thus is it difference as inner difference, or difference in its own self, or difference as an infinity' . Hegel explains that from this perspective, the problems that arise for the Understanding are really pseudo-problems, as they do not apply to the infinite so conceived: 'Accordingly, we do not need to ask the question, still less to think that fretting over such a question is philosophy, or even that it is a question philosophy cannot answer, the question, viz. "How, from this pure essence, how does difference or otherness issue forth from it?" For the division into two moments has already taken place, difference is excluded from the self-identical and set apart from it. What was supposed to be the self- identical is thus already one of these two moments instead of being the absolute essence' . Here, then, we have a dialectical structure of identity-in-difference, where the infinite is not distinct from the finite, but rather contains the finite within it . As Hegel makes clear, however, consciousness as Understanding is not yet ready to grasp the concept of the infinite in this way, and so is cut off from this resolution of its difficulties: 'In the contrary law, as the inversion of the first law, or in the inner difference, it is true that infinity itself becomes the object of the Understanding; but once again the Understanding falls short of infinity as such, since it again apportions to two worlds, or to two substantial elements, that which is a difference in itself - the self-repulsion of the self same and the self-attraction of the unlike' . Unable to grasp for itself this solution to its difficulties, consciousness must look for satisfaction in another way, as it no longer appears it can find intellectual harmony with the world, and so achieve what it seeks, which is 'consciousness of itself in its otherness' . We know this is possible, once consciousness overcomes its one- sidedness; but 'it is only for us that this truth exists, not yet for consciousness'.
Thus, in the opening chapter of the Phenomenology, Hegel has shown how fundamental metaphysical and epistemological problems arise for consciousness because of the ways in which it has so far conceived of the relation between universals and individuals. Hegel has tried to demonstrate that none of these ways is adequate, as each leads consciousness into certain fundamental aporias, so that some new conception of these categories must be found if consciousness is to reach a rationally satisfactory metaphysical picture of the world. Consciousness does not grasp that new conception in the Phenomenology, however, as this is the job of the Logic for which this critical discussion is supposed to prepare it: all the Phenomenology is meant to show is that the options exemplified by sense-certainty, perception, and the understanding have failed, so that consciousness must come to a new way of thinking if these problematic standpoints are to be avoided. Put very briefly: Hegel argues in the Logic that what is required is a substance-kind conception of the universal, such as 'man' or 'horse', which escapes the one/many problem by being a single essential property of the individual taken as a unified entity, so that the individual is neither a mere bundle of diverse property-universals, nor a bare quality-less substratum; this conception is then sufficient to secure the common-sense ontology of objects without recourse to the two-tier picture of the Understanding. ('The universal is not meant to have merely the significance of a predicate, as if the proposition asserted only that the actual is universal; on the contrary, the universal is meant to express the essence of the actual.' [E]ach human being though infinitely unique is so primarily because he is a man, and each individual animal is such an individual primarily because it is an animal: if this is true, then it would be impossible to say what such an individual could still be if this foundation were removed, no matter how richly endowed the individual might be with other predicates, if, that is, this foundation can equally be called a predicate like the others.' For further discussion of Hegel's positive position, )
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