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Hegel, the phenomenology of spirit, a guide in mp3 voice
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Scepticism
At first, the Sceptic's anti-rationalism may not be apparent, as he can claim he is merely aiming at the kind of 'freedom of thought' the Stoic was looking for, since he is prepared to question everything, even that there is a world in which rational satisfaction may be found; instead, the Sceptic believes we can achieve a peaceful, healthy, satisfactory life by dropping rationalistic aspirations and dispassionately following appearances: 'In Scepticism, now, the wholly unessential and non-independent character of this "other" becomes explicit for consciousness; the [abstract] thought becomes the concrete thinking which annihilates the being of the world in all its manifold determinateness, and the negativity of free self-consciousness comes to know itself in the many and varied forms of life as a real negativity'. Hegel then attempts to show, however, that this 'freedom of thought' is illusory: for, once the Sceptic has accepted that everything can be doubted and thus that thought cannot take us beyond appearances, he ends up declaring that thought is in fact powerless and turns back to the senses; at the same time, by holding that everything we know is mere appearance, he implicitly retains the idea that if thought could take us beyond the sensible realm, it might achieve a higher kind of knowledge. Hegel therefore argues that the abstract rationalism of the Sceptic in fact leads into a despairing anti-rationalism, as the sceptical consciousness convinces itself that rational satisfaction is impossible for us. In some respects, the tone of Hegel's brief analysis of scepticism here is surprising, as it is apparently more critical and dismissive of scepticism than are his discussions elsewhere, particularly in his early essay for the Critical Journal of Philosophy, 'The Relationship of Scepticism to Philosophy' (1802), and in his later Lectures on the History of Philosophy. In these discussions Hegel draws an important contrast between ancient and modern scepticism, and while he is hostile to the latter, he is much more positive about the former, largely because it was more thorough-going, and not merely in the service of common-sense against philosophy (as he took Humean scepticism to be, particularly as adopted by its German proponents like G. E. Schulze, whose work is reviewed in the early scepticism essay). It is this contrast that explains why even in the Phenomenology, Hegel treats scepticism as a (degenerate) type of rationalism when focusing on its ancient form, while in its modern form he is more inclined to see it as an out-and-out anti-rationalism with no such 'positive' side (an anti-rationalism that therefore results in a kind of dogmatism, by seeing nothing to question in appearances).
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