Hegel's Theory of Intelligibility

Rocío Zambrana

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780226280257
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Hegel's Theory of Intelligibility  picks up on recent revisionist readings of Hegel to offer a productive new interpretation of his notoriously difficult work, the Science of Logic. Rocío Zambrana transforms the revisionist tradition by distilling the theory of normativity that Hegel elaborates in the  Science of Logic  within the context of his signature treatment of negativity, unveiling how both features of his system of thought operate on his theory of intelligibility. 
           
Zambrana clarifies crucial features of Hegel's theory of normativity previously thought to be absent from the argument of the  Science of Logic —what she calls normative precariousness and normative ambivalence. She shows that Hegel's theory of determinacy views intelligibility as both precarious, the result of practices and institutions that gain and lose authority throughout history, and ambivalent, accommodating opposite meanings and valences even when enjoying normative authority. In this way, Zambrana shows that the Science of Logic provides the philosophical justification for the necessary historicity of intelligibility. Intervening in several recent developments in the study of Kant, Hegel, and German Idealism more broadly, this book provides a productive new understanding of the value of Hegel's systematic ambitions.

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Hegel’s Logic of Actualization

Hegel is commonly known as a thinker of becoming. Against the Parmenedean One, Hegel defends the Heraclitean concept of absolute becoming—“all flows, that is, all is becoming.”1 His famous emphasis on contradiction has accordingly been understood as the basis for his insistence on dynamic movement, on the dialectical character of all that is. Revisionary readings of Hegel have thus attempted to curb the metaphysical, ontotheological, and Eurocentric conclusions of Hegel’s notorious notion of the idea by emphasizing his treatment of contradiction. Hegel’s dialectics challenges the classical notion of identity based on the principle of noncontradiction. The principle of identity, for Hegel, underlies all foundationalist metaphysics, epistemology, and socio-political theory.2 Oppositional thinking and a two-world metaphysics generated by a thinking of identity, Hegel time and again shows, are self-undermining positions. While the letter of Hegel’s corpus suggests that contradiction sustains a teleology of reason developing in being, nature, and history, the spirit of Hegelian contradiction, revisionists have argued, suggests that Hegel’s philosophy of becoming does not secure the eternal self-relating movement of the idea.3

Rather than his investment in becoming, I will argue that the key to a revisionist reading of Hegel is his treatment of the problem of synthesis.4 In section 10 of the B edition of the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant defines synthesis as “the act of putting different representations together with each other and comprehending their manifoldness in one cognition.”5 Synthesis, for Kant, is a matter of gathering what is manifold into a unity (“one cognition”) through which what is manifold gains determinacy and hence intelligibility.6 Hegel inherits the Kantian problem of synthesis, yet argues that Kant’s narrow emphasis on epistemic objectivity misconstrues the status of determinacy.7 Like Kant, Hegel understands synthesis as a matter of unifying what is manifold. Like Kant, Hegel maintains that the work of synthesis is what makes possible determinacy in the first place. Unlike Kant, however, Hegel conceives of determinacy as a problem of actual rather than possible determination within what he calls Geist. Geist, an elusive notion that I will discuss in chapter 3, rivals Kant’s focus on the single epistemic subject, and suggests that synthesis is the work of practices of rendering intelligible that comprise a shape (Gestalt) of a world.

To be sure, from his earliest theological writings to his mature system, Hegel argued against fixity. He consistently pointed out the falsity and perils of reified categories, laws, identities, and institutions. Hegel’s early socio-political and religious writings examine the problem of “positivity”—of a reified law that commands without sensitivity to feeling, context, community. Hegel thus argued against religion and morality based on external authority.8 From his Frankfurt and Jena writings up to his Berlin lectures, Hegel’s metaphysics sought to transform the Platonic and Kantian notions of dialectics from a method of detecting falsity to a method of truth.9 Against Plato and Kant, Hegel argued that, rather than prompting cancellation, dialectics returns fixed determinations to their fluid, altering character.10 In the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, for example, Hegel writes that the task of philosophy is to “set fixed thoughts into fluid motion.”11 In the Science of Logic, he argues that the task of a logic of the concept is to make thinking “fluid again,” “to revive the concept” from the “ossified, material” of a logic of being and essence.12

Although it is clear that Hegel’s main critical target is fixity, Hegel’s own position is not a defense of mere fluidity and change. Synthesis is the central problem of Hegel’s idealism, given the status of division within his theoretical and practical philosophy. Hegel’s metaphysics (what he calls “logic”), epistemology, and social-political philosophy can be understood as responses to the problem of division. As a social-political category, division is a matter of diremption (Entzweiung), which Hegel glosses as the specifically modern experience of alienation. As an epistemological category, division is a matter of mediation (Vermittlung), which Hegel develops in order to manage the skepticism raised by Kant’s Copernican Turn.13 As a logical category, division is a matter of determinate negation (bestimmte Negation), which Hegel elaborates as the successor concept to Kantian judgment and Fichtean positing.

Negation is at work in all senses of division, however. Hegel’s central contribution to the legacy of critical philosophy develops, as he puts it, “the logical principle that negation is equally positive.”14 Negation is always negation of something—a concrete determination, whether a logical category, a philosophical position, a historically specific identity or institution.15 Negation, however, yields an alternative determination. It is never mere negativity, sheer destruction (which Hegel calls “abstract negativity”). It is an exclusion that sets or posits alternative boundaries and hence a relation of something and its now established other. Logically, then, negation requires content in order to be negation. Now negation, Hegel time and again stresses, is not a function imposed externally by an epistemic subject. It is the work of articulation within and by a practice that sets boundaries thereby instituting unity. Concrete determinations are for this reason in a process of self-negation. Any thing or identity is such because it has boundaries, and maintains itself (determines itself) by asserting its boundaries. A boundary, however, is something that marks a limit. Marking a limit, Hegel emphasizes, is coextensively transgressing it. A boundary marks what some thing is on the basis of what it is not, and hence establishes its opposite as intrinsic to it. Because any identity is both itself and its other, any concrete identity—any individual—is subject to a logic of ambivalence. If understood as exempt from ambivalence, any given identity is but reified—an abstract, one-sided determination.

It is thus a mistake to conflate Hegelian negativity with ontological change.16 Determinate negation does not sustain a view of mere difference. Neither does it allow Hegel to theorize sheer dynamism. Change and dynamic movement are perfectly compatible with the Parmenedean One and any philosophy of pure immanence, which would establish that all is conserved in a movement that serves the completion of the One. It is also a mistake to understand negativity as synonymous with contradiction and, furthermore, contradiction as the motor of speculative-dialectical thinking.17 Hegelian negativity so understood would privilege the very notion of opposition that Hegel is arguing against, since it would be a notion of opposition between two self-standing yet contradictory determinations. Hegel’s attack on oppositional thinking and the logic of identity underlying it is precisely an attack on self-subsistent identities that could be opposed to an other given their integrity.18 An understanding of Hegel’s idealism as a post-critical ontology exacerbates these interpretive options. The textbook interpretation of Hegel as a thinker of cosmic spirit, of the teleology of reason developing in being, nature, and history, is supported rather than challenged by understanding contradiction and change ontologically.

That negation—and hence division—is irreducible in Hegel’s thought suggests that the work of synthesis is key. It suggests the necessity of synthesis, which Hegel understands as a matter of what he calls recollection (Erinerrung, Er-innerung). Synthesis is thus crucial to specifying the status of Hegel’s idealism. The chapters that follow argue that the problem of synthesis is central to Hegel’s transformation of the critical project into a post-critical philosophy of Geist. My aim in these chapters, then, is to situate Hegel’s theory of determinacy within Kant’s critical epistemology and sketch the ways in which Hegel’s idealism inherits the specifically Kantian problem of synthesis. Chapter 1 delineates the problem of synthesis in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, specifically in the Aesthetic and the Analytic. My discussion of Kant in chapter 1 is not exhaustive, to be sure. Chapters 2 and 3 continue to discuss aspects of Kant’s Aesthetic and Analytic. Chapter 2 discusses Fichte’s solution to the Kantian problem of synthesis by developing a logic of positing. Chapter 3 examines Hegel’s transformation of the problem of synthesis into a logic of actualization, which should ultimately be understood as a matter of Geist.

CHAPTER 1

Synthesis: Kant

Hegel inherits the Kantian problem of synthesis, as noted in the introduction to part 1, yet he argues that Kant’s emphasis on epistemic objectivity misconstrues the status of determinacy. Hegel transforms Kant’s focus on a single epistemic or moral subject by arguing that synthesis, determinacy, and ultimately intelligibility are a matter of Geist. In order to accomplish this transformation, Hegel calls into question two crucial aspects of Kant’s transcendental idealism. Although Hegel agrees that determinacy and intelligibility are a matter of unity, first, he inverts the logical priority of division and unity within Kant’s critical epistemology. This inversion, second, allows Hegel to call into question the assumption that unity requires a condition or principle that is not itself a synthesis, thereby developing a more consistent account of mediation than Kant’s Copernican Turn elaborates. In order to reconstruct and assess Hegel’s transformation, we must first sketch the problem of synthesis in Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason.

Kant’s critical epistemology is grounded on the claim that knowledge is a matter of experience, which involves the receptivity of impressions and the spontaneity of concepts.1 Cognition accordingly involves sensibility, the capacity to be “affected in some way,” and the understanding, the capacity to “bring[] forth representations itself.”2 Through sensibility an object is given (gegeben); through the understanding the object is “thought in relation to that representation (as a mere determination of the mind).”3 Experience accordingly involves two heterogeneous elements: the sensible given and nonempirical constraints (rules for determinacy: concepts, principles, postulates). Sensibility and understanding are heterogeneous, thus irreducible to each other. Although they “cannot exchange their function,” they refer us to elements whose joint contribution makes experience possible. Kant’s strategy for establishing the objectivity of cognition in the first Critique is hence to account for the activity of receptivity and spontaneity, rather than the structure of the sensible and the intelligible. Accounting for the capacity to be affected and to cognize an object by way of judgment establishes that what is given in sensation is subject to nonempirical constraints on experience and, vice versa, that nonempirical constraints yield objective determinations of what is given in sensation.4

Division is thus the starting point in Kant’s critical epistemology. It follows from the claim that cognition involves two heterogeneous capacities that provide unity to an undetermined manifold given in sensation in distinctive ways. Division, therefore, follows from the duality of the sources of cognition and from the indeterminacy of the given matter of cognition. Heterogeneity and indeterminacy suggest that unity is a matter of combination (“conjunctio”), and that synthesis is the key to the unity of any object of experience and any experience in general. Determinacy thus depends on the relation between receptivity and spontaneity of the mind, which will in turn account for the relation between intuition and concept (a singular representation of sensation and a rule for universal determination of manifold representations into an objective representation). Kant is thus immediately confronted with accounting for unity on two registers.5 First, he must establish the work of gathering distinctive of sensibility and of unifying distinctive of the understanding, since it is what makes possible taking what is given in sensation as something given and what is determined by concepts as an object of experience (or an event). Second, Kant must establish unity as a matter of the relation between concept and intuition, and must therefore show that the categories apply to appearances and that appearances are subject to the categories. While the transcendental deduction addresses the second problem, the distinction b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction: Hegel’s Modernism
• PART 1 Hegel’s Logic Of Actualization
• PART 2 Hegel’s Critique of Reflection
• PART 3 Hegel’s Idealism
• Conclusion: Philosophy’s Work
• Notes
• Index