|
|
Hegel, the phenomenology of spirit, a guide in mp3 voice
16TheDialecticOfReason_RationalismAndIdealism.mp3
"click the bottom arrow to listen, or download the mp3 file"
Mp3 PDF file 116TheDialecticOfReason_RationalismAndIdealism.pdf download
http://jumbofiles.com/5pbwq5rnmh3x/116thedialecticofreason_rationalismandidealism.pdf.html
Text online 116TheDialecticOfReason_RationalismAndIdealism.txt
The dialectic of Reason
(Phenomenology, C. (AA.) Reason)
Rationalism and idealism
With the move from Unhappy Consciousness to Reason, the Phenomenology recaptures the spirit of optimism characteristic of rationalism, as consciousness once again comes to look at the world as a place where it can be 'at home': 'Now that self-consciousness is Reason, its hitherto negative relation to otherness turns round into a positive relation'. Reason holds that the world is rational, and so now sets out to find itself in this 'otherness'. But, as we have seen, while Hegel himself was a rationalist in this sense, he was also concerned that such rationalism should take its proper form; otherwise, he believed, it could easily become distorted. In this section, we therefore find Hegel analysing the shortcomings of different kinds of rationalism, all of which turn out to be inadequate and one-sided, as an unresolved tension between the categories of individuality and universality remains. Hegel opens the chapter with a discussion of idealism, which collapses the distinction between the subject and the world, and so takes thoughts and things to coincide immediately:
Up till now [self-consciousness] has been concerned only with its independence and freedom, concerned to save and maintain itself for itself at the expense of the world, or of its own actuality, both of which appeared to it as the negative of its essence. But as Reason, assured of itself, it is at peace with them, and can endure them; for it is certain that it is itself reality, in that everything actual is none other than itself; its thinking is itself directly actuality, and thus its relationship to the latter is that of idealism . . . It discovers the world as its new real world, which in its permanence holds an interest for it which previously lay only in its transiency; for the existence of the world becomes for self-consciousness its one truth and presence; it is certain of experiencing only itself therein. Hegel is clearly sympathetic to the way in which this idealism enables consciousness to escape the urge for the transcendent, and the need to 'negate' the world: 'Apprehending itself in this way, it is as if the world had for it only now come into being; previously it did not understand the world; it desired it and worked on it, withdrew from it into itself and abolished it as an existence on its own account, and its own self qua consciousness – both as consciousness of the world as essence and as consciousness of its nothingness. Idealism therefore represents a kind of advance: in it, we have our rationalistic faith restored, that the subject will find the world accessible to reason, in so far as it is created by the subject, so 'it is certain of experiencing only itself therein'. At this point, however, Hegel exposes the weaknesses of a rationalism that takes this form, where his remarks implicitly refer to Kant, Fichte and Schelling. His first criticism repeats the objection made against Schelling in the Preface: namely, that this idealistic rationalism does not argue for its position or attempt to take on board other points of view, but simply dogmatically asserts that '[Reason] is all reality'. Because Schelling lacked Hegel's philosophical method, whereby other standpoints are gone through first, 'the consciousness which is this truth has this path behind it and has forgotten it, and comes on the scene immediately as Reason; in other words, this Reason which comes immediately on the scene appears only as the certainty of that truth . . . The idealism that does not demonstrate that path but starts off with this assertion is therefore, too, a pure assertion which does not comprehend its own self, nor can it make itself comprehensible to others'. A second criticism is more technical, and is directed primarily at Kant, although it extends to Fichte too. This concerns Kant's metaphysical deduction in the Critique of Pure Reason, where Kant derives his table of categories from a table of logical judgements. Like Fichte and Schelling, Hegel argues here that this procedure is thoroughly unsatisfactory, 'an outrage on Science', because it does not really demonstrate the necessity of the categories as such; but, he claims, the attempt by Fichte to derive them from the 'absolute ego' is no more satisfactory or enlightening. The third criticism Hegel makes is perhaps the most important, and also finds an echo in the Preface, where he claimed that 'everything turns on grasping the True, not only as Substance, but equally as Subject'. Thus, as we saw, while Hegel endorses idealism in some sense, it is also crucial for him to ensure that this unity 'does not again fall back into inert simplicity, and does not depict actuality itself in a non-actual manner'. Hegel claims here that the Kantian idealists have violated this constraint, with the result that the emptiness of the subject requires them to reintroduce another kind of negation, in the form of Fichte's Anstoss ('external impetus') or Kant's unknowable thing-in-itself, so that their rationalism ends up being compromised by an underlying scepticism:
[Consciousness'] first declaration is only this abstract empty phrase that everything is its own. For the certainty of being all reality is at first [only] the pure category. This Reason which first recognizes itself in the object finds expression in the empty idealism which grasps Reason only as it first comes on the scene; and fancies that by pointing out the pure 'mine' of consciousness in all being, and declaring all things to be sensations or ideas, it has demonstrated that 'mine' of consciousness to be complete reality. It is bound, therefore, to be at the same time absolute empiricism, for in order to give filling to the empty 'mine', i.e. to get hold of difference with all its developed formulations, its Reason requires extraneous impulse, in which first is to be found the multiplicity of sensations and ideas . . . The pure Reason of this idealism, in order to reach this 'other' which is essential to it, and thus is the in-itself, but which it does not have within it, is therefore thrown back by its own self on to that knowing which is not a knowing of what is true; in this way, it condemns itself of its own knowledge and volition to being an untrue kind of knowing, and cannot get away from 'meaning' and 'perceiving', which for it have no truth. It is involved in a direct contradiction; it asserts essence to be a duality of opposed factors, the unity of apperception and equally a Thing; whether the Thing is called an extraneous impluse, or an empirical or sensuous entity, or the Thing-in-itself, it still remains in principle the same, i.e. extraneous to that unity. Though extremely compressed, this third criticism of Kant and his successors is highly significant for the light it sheds on how Hegel wanted his own idealistic rationalism to be understood. Although he does not use this terminology here, elsewhere he distinguishes his own idealism from that of Kant by calling the former 'absolute idealism' and the latter 'subjective idealism', and it is clearly subjective idealism that he is criticizing at this point in the Phenomenology. As Hegel sees it, Kant and his successors take the subjectivist turn because they think that reality is intelligible to consciousness only in so far as it has a form imposed upon it by the mind; at the same time, things in themselves, which do not have this form imposed upon them, stand outside the grasp of our intellects. Now, Hegel accepts that reality must have a certain form in order to be intelligible to consciousness; but he denies that it is imposed by the subject on reality, arguing instead that it is inherent in reality itself, so that this form mediates between the subject on the one hand and the world on the other. As Hegel puts it in his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, '[Thought] contains reconciliation in its purest essentiality, because it approaches the external [world] in the expectation that this will embody the same reason as the subject does'. For Hegel, therefore, idealism proper is the doctrine that the world has a rational structure that is accessible to thought and so can be 'brought to consciousness': that is, consciousness can make itself aware of this rational structure as it exists in the world. But Hegel rejects any idealism that treats such rational structures as mind-dependent or mind-imposed. In this respect, Hegel (like Plato and Aristotle) was a realist:
But after all, objectivity of thought, in Kant's sense, is again to a certain extent subjective. Thoughts, according to Kant, although universal and necessary categories, are only our thoughts – separated by an impassable gulf from the thing, as it exists apart from our knowledge. But the true objectivity of thinking means that the thoughts, far from being merely ours, must be at the same time the real essence of things, and of whatever is an object to us. Thus, in calling himself an idealist, Hegel intended to signal his allegiance to a certain conceptual realism, rather than to any Kantian doctrine regarding the dependence of the world on a constructive mind; on this view, human consciousness reflects and makes known the fundamental conceptual order inherent in things as they are in themselves, rather than things as they are constituted by us. As this discussion in the Phenomenology shows, Hegel held that while subjective idealism may appear to be an option for the rationalist because in some sense it breaks down the barrier between mind and world, in fact this option is unstable, as it breaks this barrier down 'immediately', without proper respect for the mind-independence of reality, so that sceptical problems re-emerge. Hegel's argument is that while Kantian idealism may treat the phenomenal world as constituted by the mind and hence as knowable, it is forced to posit a mind-independent noumenal reality beyond it, to provide the mind with some content for its constituting activity; but this reality is then deemed unknowable, as it lies outside the world as the subject determines it: 'This idealism is involved in this contradiction because it asserts the abstract Notion of Reason to be the True; consequently, reality directly comes to be for it a reality that is just as much not that of Reason, while Reason is at the same time supposed to be all reality. This Reason remains a restless searching and in its very searching declares that the satisfaction of finding is a sheer impossibility'. Now, in claiming that 'this idealism therefore becomes the same kind of self-contradictory ambiguity as Scepticism', Hegel has been accused of misrepresenting Kant's position, and of misunderstanding the way in which Kant wished to distinguish between 'things as they appear to us' and 'things as they are in themselves'. For example, it is argued that Hegel mistakenly thinks that Kant is committed to a 'two worlds' account of this distinction, rather than a weaker 'two aspect' account, when it is claimed that the latter does not compromise a realist view of the world, or treat it as somehow 'second rate'. It remains an open question, however, how far Kant's position can be reconstructed in this way, and indeed whether such reconstruction is sufficient to escape Hegel's fundamental misgivings. (For references and further discussion, see Stern)
|
本城市首頁
等級：5
