REASON
IN THE WORLD
HEGEL’S
METAPHYSICS AND ITS PHILOSOPHICAL APPEAL
The key to understanding
Hegel, I argue, is a surprising but compelling conception of what philosophy is
most fundamentally about. Recent interpretive debates tend to focus on locating
Hegel relative to issues concerning the possibility of knowledge of, and
meaningful reference to, an independent world—and related issues about the
existence of a world that is independent of us in various senses. But Hegel
takes to be more fundamental philosophical issues concerning (in his terms)
what is a reason for what. The basic
approach allows the possibility of many different forms of reason in the world.
For example, debates about grounding concern one possible form of reason in the
world. Anti-humeans views about causality hold, in Hegel’s terms, that causality
is a different form of reason in the world. Understanding the appeal of this
approach to philosophy itself allows us to understand Hegel’s philosophy in
three steps:
1. We can understand how
Hegel gives compelling philosophical arguments for his nonetheless unusual
metaphysical positions concerning mechanism and teleology: his view that
mechanism is a surprisingly incomplete form of reason in the world, leaving a
sense in which mechanical phenomena are surprisingly insubstantial; and his view
that living beings are teleological phenomena, even if they are also composed of
underlying mechanical phenomena.
2. We can understand how and
why Hegel—despite his own commitment to such metaphysics—takes so seriously
Kant’s critique of metaphysics. Interpretive debate here has gone astray in
focusing on a Kantian argument from epistemological claims—an attack on
metaphysics from the foreign territory, as it were, of epistemology. But what
Hegel finds so compelling in Kant is rather the “Transcendental Dialectic”
argument that metaphysics causes problems for itself, from within—that it
generates conflicts or contradictions concerning the nature of ultimate or
absolute grounds or reasons. What is crucial here is that Kant has a formidable
argument for the inescapability of problems concerning complete grounds or
reasons—concerning what Kant calls “the unconditioned.”
3. We can then understand the
most unusual and ambitious elements of Hegel’s philosophy in terms of his
attempt to build a new and complete metaphysics around the very arguments that
Kant employs in a critique of metaphysics—to turn Kant’s critique to a very
different purpose. We can understand in these terms, for example, the
philosophical appeal of Hegel’s claims that there is a real form of
contradiction, and that there is an “absolute” of which we can have knowledge,
or “absolute knowledge.”
PART ONE: INTO HEGELIAN METAPHYSICS. 4
1.
Reason in the World and the
Laws of Nature. 6
1.1. Hegel’s Anti-Empiricist Approach to the Laws of Nature. 8
1.2. Kinds and their Usefulness. 16
1.3. Response to Worries about the Possibility of Knowledge and Meaning 26
1.4. Conclusions. 36
2.
Beloved Metaphysics: Reason and the Structure of Reality. 41
2.1. Clarifying the Idea of Reason in the World. 43
2.2. Metaphysics and Explanation. 50
2.3. The Structure of Reality and Worries about Knowledge. 58
2.4. Objective Thought and Concepts, and Epistemic Optimism.. 66
2.5. More Ambitions: Hierarchical Structure, Dialectic, Absolute. 74
2.4. Conclusions. 81
3.
Teleology, Life and the Levels of Reality. 88
3.1. Kant’s Analysis of Inner Purposiveness. 92
3.2. Skepticism about Natural Teleology. 98
3.3. Hegel’s Aims and his Analysis of Life. 108
3.4. Comprehending the Origin of a Naturzweck. 113
3.5. Immediacy and the Concept. 118
3.6. Mechanism and Teleology. 124
3.7. A Kantian Rejoinder and a Contemporary Comparison. 127
PART TWO: DIALECTIC AS THE THREAT TO METAPHYSICS 134
4.
Kant’s Dialectic and the
Inescapability of Problems about Complete Reasons 136
4.1. The Faculty of Reason and Kant’s Desired Conclusions. 138
4.2. Against Rationalism: Dialectical Contradiction and Divine Intuition. 145
4.3. Inescapability of Problems about Complete Reasons: An Example. 155
4.4. Inescapability: Argument. 165
4.5. Kant’s Resolution: Regulative Status and the Limitation of Knowledge 172
4.6. Kant’s Limits Are Limiting: The Example of Laws of Nature. 182
4.7. A Brief Look at Unknowable Things in Themselves. 189
5.
Between The Bounds of
Experience and Divine Intuition: Hegel’s Aims 195
5.1. Against Immediate Knowledge of an Ultimate Reason. 200
5.2. The Breadth of Hegel’s Target, Including Schelling. 208
5.3. Aim: Eliminate the Limitation Relative to Divine Immediacy. 213
5.4. Surpassing the Bounds of Sensibility. 218
5.5. The Inescapability of Problems Concerning the Absolute. 223
PART THREE: DIALECTICAL METAPHYSICS. 235
6.
Mechanism and the Defense of
Immanent Concepts. 237
6.1. Mechanism vs. Immanent Concepts?. 238
6.2. Hegel’s Formulation: External and Immanent Concepts. 245
6.3. Matter and the Mechanical Process. 252
6.4. Against External Forces or Laws. 257
6.5. Recipe for Reasonable Mechanism: Add Immanent Concepts. 263
6.6. An Objection, and the Force of the Argument. 269
7.
The Being of One is the Being
of the Other: Holism and the Insubstantiality of Lawful Nature. 276
7.1. The Being of One is the Being of the Other. 278
7.2. Clarification by Comparisons. 286
7.3. The Question of Monism: Jelly, Shot or Cannonball?. 291
7.4. Interpretive Interlude: Striving and the Nature of Matter. 303
7.5. Defending Insubstantial Holism against Worries about Contradiction. 308
7.6. The Thinking of Contradiction is the Essential Moment of the Concept 314
8.
The Idea, and the Priority of
the Teleological from Life to Spirit 328
8.1. The Problem of Fatalism.. 332
8.2. Inner Purposiveness and the Resolution of the Problem of Fatalism.. 337
8.3. The Priority of the Teleological 345
8.4. The Idea: Better than Turtles, and Knowable Too. 352
8.5. Subjective Spirit and Freedom.. 359
8.6. Objective Spirit and Freedom.. 367
8.7. The Absolute Idea. 376
8.8. Lawful Nature is not Alive, and Nature is not Spirit. 385
9.
The Idea as Absolute. 391
9.1. Dialectic and the Idea: The Background and Kant. 391
9.2. Dialectic and Idea: Sketching how Hegel’s Pieces Fit Together. 396
9.3. Driving Force of the Dialectic. 401
9.4. Dialectic as Circular Justification. 408
9.5. Real Contradiction in the World. 413
9.6. The Absolute Idea: Method, Thought Thinking Itself, and the Idea in
the Form of Otherness 424
9.7. Against Rationalism: Necessity, Infinity, and the Absolute. 433
9.8. Truth, Substantiality and the Rational as the Actual 444
9.9. Summarizing by Distinguishing senses of Metaphysical and Epistemic
Priority 453