On Hegel's 'Philosophy of Nature' : A Free Reflex of Spirit - part thirty seven.(2)

Hegel does not believe thinking is in need of correction and consequently he does not look upon the history of philosophy sceptically, indeed philosophy has no need to reinvent itself in the least but rather to recover itself, philosophy must become completely the activity that it has been all along in a partial way and the road to philosophical science has to pass through whatever was genuinely philosophical in the works of all philosophers worthy of the name, be they Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, and in addition Anaxagoras, Epicurus, and Leibniz.

For Hegel, and this is important my thesis focusses on this, philosophy has to become a recollective science for how odd it would be if the activity of philosophy had until Kant entered centre stage merely failed to be genuinely philosophical because it was turned in the wrong direction. Hegel is concerned that in the Kantian quest to set philosophy upon properly scientific footing philosophers have been emulating the methods of recognized sciences like anatomy or geometry and the problem here is that both historically and conceptually all of the recognized sciences developed out of the activity we designate philosophy and are thus subordinate to it in the sense that they depend upon it for their very birth.

The word science and the activity that it names can and should be traced to the inquiries ancient Greek philosophers made about episteme and seen in this light Kant’s question is not so much about discovering a new method which is the focus of so much early modern philosophy but more about recovering the bigger picture of from whence science came and whither it goeth. And for Hegel science has to be reconceived broadly to incorporate the whole history of philosophy rather than limited to the narrow range of experimental methods associated with the new science. The meteoric rise of mathematical physics and the mechanical sciences in the seventeenth century obscured the long and patient gestation of ideas that led to it and Hegel saw philosophers busily imitating these new sciences without an appreciation for how their adopted methods sometimes limited and distorted the broader nature of philosophical inquiry, modern philosophers with their novel methods were forbidding concrete discussion of traditional philosophical subjects such as final purposes or teleology.

Where there is the perception of a purposiveness an intelligence is assumed as its author, required for purpose is hence the concept’s own free concrete existence and teleology is above all contrasted with mechanism in which the determinateness posited in the object being external is one that gives no sign of self-determination. The opposition between causæ efficientes and causæ finales, between merely efficient and final causes, refers to this distinction, just as at a more concrete level the enquiry whether the absolute essence of the world is to be conceived as blind mechanism or as an intelligence that determines itself in accordance with purposes also comes down to it. The antinomy of fatalism along with determinism and freedom is equally concerned with the opposition of mechanism and teleology; for the free is the concept in its concrete existence.

'Earlier metaphysics has dealt with these concepts as it dealt with others. It presupposed a certain picture of the world and strived to show that one or the other concept of causality was adequate to it, and the opposite defective because not explainable from the presupposed picture, all the while not examining the concept of mechanical cause and that of purpose to see which possesses truth in and for itself. If this is established independently, it may turn out that the objective world exhibits mechanical and final causes; its actual existence is not the norm of what is true, but what is true is rather the criterion for deciding which of these concrete existences is its true one. Just as the subjective understanding exhibits also errors in it, so the objective world exhibits also aspects and stages of truth that by themselves are still one-sided, incomplete, and only relations of appearances. If mechanism and purposiveness stand opposed to each other, then by that very fact they cannot be taken as indifferent concepts, as if each were by itself a correct concept and had as much validity as the other, the only question being where the one or the other may apply. This equal validity of the two rests only on the fact that they are, that is to say, that we have them both. But since they do stand opposed, the necessary first question is, which of the two concepts is the true one; and the higher and truly telling question is, whether there is a third which is their truth, or whether one of them is the truth of the other. – But purposive connection has proved to be the truth of mechanism. –'

- 'Science of Logic'

Modern philosophers were shrinking the expansive human endeavour to know into the narrow shape of the latest fruit it had created while at the same time alongside this concerning scientization of philosophy Hegel observed a backlash against scientized philosophy from primarily religious factions, and here immediate knowledge and faith and conscience and genius were to lead to new philosophical presentations that hoped to avoid the deadlock in the history of philosophy by consulting our deepest intuitions which sat below the problem ridden questions and distinctions and these two tendencies for scientization and against it therefore came to take up the entire discursive space of philosophy at the opening of the nineteenth century.

The Kantian quest to turn philosophy into a science had descended into a dogfight between those who borrowed their method from the natural sciences and those who without much thought borrowed their method from religious discourse and this dogfight obscured what was philosophical and what was not... enter Hegel’s 1807 preface hoping to give us a sense of how to tell faux philosophy and real philosophy apart, like distinguishing real and counterfeit money, and Hegel was aware that Kant’s question misled people in virtue of the narrow way that they interpreted the word science [Wissenschaft] and he aspired to give the word a more expansive register by recollecting the historical usage whereby science was synonymous with philosophy that was synonymous with accounting for knowledge or knowing knowing.

But to achieve this he had to begin with fight his way through the faux philosophical tendencies into which post-Kantian philosophy had devolved and it may appear that Hegel is merely assailing rival views to assert his own here, but he means to do something quite different, he works to disclose something about the essence of philosophy, all genuine philosophy and not just his own project by highlighting the ways that faux philosophy falls short of doing justice to philosophical content. For instance Hegel’s prefaces contain significant claims that should assist us in separating the philosophical spirit of Baruch Spinoza’s work from the formalistic presentation of his 'Ethics'. Hegel’s concern is that without such a separation we will lose the valuable effort of Spinoza’s thought altogether and fail to grasp how philosophical thinking has developed and reached its current state through the work of Spinoza and many others for among his peers Hegel recognised that enthusiasts for Spinoza and detractors of Spinoza-detractors and the two groups completely missed their common ground. The enthusiasts were correct that Spinoza was a genius, the pivot point of modern philosophy, and the detractors were correct, Spinoza’s geometrical method was rigid and taken on its own led to mechanism and atheism that is to say to an overly narrow view of philosophy’s scope and content.

There are tendencies in Spinoza's work fighting it out between themselves whereby it is both a catalyst for and a limitation on thinking and a study of faux philosophy (not his term but I rather like it) of the sort Hegel undertakes in his 1807 preface discloses both why Spinoza’s formalistic presentation appeals to us and why it limits us and how it can be corrected. Sundered form their distracting formalistic structure key concepts in Spinoza’s work disclose their place in a continuous line of developing thought descending from the first Greek philosophers and through grasping this continuous act of thinking we are grasping philosophy not as a mound of isolated viewpoints that cannot be brought to common ground but as a single activity, as the universal science of thinking itself.

At this you, gentle reader, may baulk. Offering the universal science of thinking itself? It is this kind of thing that gives Hegel his reputation for self-aggrandising arrogance but such a reaction is itself founded on a prejudice namely the prejudice that each person has an individual point of view or position and that philosophy is not a single activity at all but a mishmash of individual views. Starting from the assumption that philosophy has no single essence and actually consists of individually distinct philosophies, independent viewpoints that must war against each other, then looking for a single essence of philosophy in all past philosophies will seem as merely another point of view just another viewpoint.

And even worse it will seem like an hegemonic endeavour to silence the diversity of points of view by asserting itself as the supreme one that incorporates all others and this is a common way of dismissing Hegel’s work, but take note that the premise of this interpretation of philosophy’s history is similar to the intuition that grounds empiricism, a plurality of particulars are real and the universals that gather them up into kinds are convenient fictions. And by contrast were we to allow instead that philosophy might name a single activity that is imperfectly expressed by any individual thinker including Hegel then our concern is for what this or that work discloses about the common essence of philosophy. Whatever our inclination might be it will only be by studying the history of philosophy that we actualize and demonstrate its truth and to even test the plausibility of Hegel’s presentation of philosophy as a single enterprise, that is a universal science of thinking, we must to begin with be able to recognize the giveaway indications of faux philosophy so that their failures and limitations do not get imputed to philosophy proper and tarnish the reputation, indeed scurrilously slander our beloved Lady Philosophy.

______________________________________________________

'The Creation of the World and the Expulsion from Paradise', 1445, Giovanni di Paolo

And God set them in the firmament of the heaven to give light upon the earth, And to rule over the day and over the night, and to divide the light from the darkness: and God saw that it was good. And the evening and the morning were the fourth day. And God said, Let the waters bring forth abundantly the moving creature that hath life, and fowl that may fly above the earth in the open firmament of heaven. And God created great whales, and every living creature that moveth, which the waters brought forth abundantly, after their kind, and every winged fowl after his kind: and God saw that it was good.

- Genesis 1.17 - 21.

And the LORD God said, Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever: Therefore the LORD God sent him forth from the garden of Eden, to till the ground from whence he was taken. So he drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubims, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.

- Genesis 3.22 - 24.

The one who sins is the one who will die. The child will not share the guilt of the parent, nor will the parent share the guilt of the child. The righteousness of the righteous will be credited to them, and the wickedness of the wicked will be charged against them.

- Ezekiel 18.20.

______________________________________________________

Dedicated with love to the One from whom I have imbibed much learning of immeasurable value, through whom I have learnt about the beliefs and traditions, values and influences, of a rich and ancient culture, and in the course of which I have learnt a great deal about myself, my presuppositions and the things I have merely taken for granted, and of course I have been blessed with especially precious lessons in love.

'Lover Lover Lover'

I asked my father, I said, 'Father, change my name

The one I'm using now it's covered up with fear and filth and cowardice and shame'