Robert M.
Wallace
To
appear in The Routledge Handbook of Idealism and
Immaterialism (Routledge), edited by Benedikt Göcke and Joshua Ryan Farris. (6,000 words)
1.
In this essay I will show how Hegel belongs in the broadly Platonic tradition
(which includes Aristotle),[1] and how this tradition explains knowledge,
value, and freedom or rational functioning better than common-sense “realism” or
Berkeleyan or Kantian versions of “idealism” can explain them.
Common-sense realism has trouble
explaining how (if at all) we are free and rational, and thus how we can know
what’s real, rather than merely believing whatever our environment causes us to
believe. Not to mention how we could know how it would be best to live. These
problems have led many modern thinkers to explore views resembling Berkeley’s or
Kant’s idealisms as possible solutions. Maybe, we suppose, our mind already
contains, or it “constructs,” the crucial things that we need in order to know
reality and know how it would be best to live. But in exploring this avenue we often
find it difficult to give up entirely the realist principle, that what is true
is true independently of anything that we may think. And thus we wind up on the
see-saw of so-called “idealism” versus so-called “realism,” which makes much
modern philosophy seem rather futile.[2]
Plato and Aristotle appear to advocate
views that might get us off of this modern see-saw. For neither of them appears
to be located on either side of it. But when it turns out that they both
connect reality with value, as the Good or as final causes, we hesitate to
follow them because we are so impressed by the modern natural sciences, which
appear to explain reality purely in terms of efficient causes and without
reference to value. Hegel can help us to understand the limits of the natural
sciences, and how an approach that follows Plato and Aristotle in treating
value as an essential aspect of the ultimate reality can solve the problems of
freedom, knowledge, and value in a way that neither common-sense realism nor
Berkeleyan or Kantian idealism can.
Despite his intention of getting off of
the “idealist”/”realist” see-saw, Hegel does call his own doctrine an
“idealism.” He does this because he associates that term not with Berkeley or
Kant, but with Plato and Aristotle and their doctrines of the eidos/idea (“form” or “idea”), which he
is restating. Because Hegel’s version
of “idealism” agrees with neither of idealism’s modern paradigms, Berkeley or
Kant, it has created ongoing uncertainty and vagueness both in encyclopedia
articles and in the specialist literature.[3] To explain Hegel’s “idealism” and its
accomplishments in regard to freedom, knowledge, and value, I will draw on key
passages in his Science of Logic and
his Encyclopedia of the Philosophical
Sciences, and I will outline how his terminology and his thinking restate
Plato’s and Aristotle’s similarly powerful and also not sufficiently well understood
conceptions.
2.
Hegel’s most explicit and illuminating systematic comments on the notion of
“idealism” itself occur in a Remark in the Quality section of the Doctrine of
Being in the 1832 edition of his Science
of Logic. Here Hegel tells us that “The idealism of philosophy consists in
nothing else than in recognizing that the finite has no veritable being....
Consequently the opposition of idealistic and realistic philosophy has no
significance” (HSL 154-155; GW 21:142; SuW 5:172).[4] That is, we are going to get off the “idealist”/”realist”
see-saw.
To see how we will get off it, we first need to
understand Hegel’s claim that “the finite has no veritable being.” A few pages
earlier he had announced that “It is not the finite which is the real [das Reale], but the infinite” (HSL 149;
GW 21:136; SuW 5:164). Why should we agree with this? Common sense supposes the
exact opposite: that what has “true being,” what is “real,” is precisely finite
things like planets, trees, or (perhaps) subatomic particles.
In the two chapters leading up to these theses in
the Logic, Hegel has in fact given an
extensive argument for his doctrine that the infinite, rather than the finite,
is what is real. The argument runs roughly as follows. Being, or what is, when
it’s taken merely as such, has no feature that distinguishes it from nothing,
or what is not. (For, as Kant taught us, “being” is not a predicate!) And the
reverse is also true: Nothing, or what is not, when it’s taken merely as such,
has no feature that distinguishes it from being or what is. (“Not being” is not
a predicate either.) So we should consider whether “becoming” (that is, coming
into being or ceasing to be) might be more definable than being or nothing, as
such. And indeed it seems that what comes into being or ceases to be must be
something definite or determinate.
But the question naturally arises, is it determinate
through itself (an sich) or only in
its relations to others (Seinfüranderes)?
If the latter were the case, the something would apparently not qualify as
truly being, since its determinateness would belong to it only through (its
relations to) others. And yet, insofar as there are “others,” it seems to be
inevitable that some of the determinateness of each something will accrue to it
through its relations to these others, and thus it won’t be fully determinate
in itself, an sich.
So in pursuit of determinateness in itself, Hegel
introduces another wrinkle: the finite. It seems that something that has a
boundary, as a finite thing does, would to that extent be more self-contained
and thus more “in itself.” However, as we might have foreseen, inasmuch as a
limit or a boundary bounds X off from Y, it also relates X to something that’s
other than itself, whether that is Y or the boundary between X and Y.
Hence the need for the infinite, which promises to
be determinate entirely within itself, since there is nothing that is “other”
than it. (Note that what we’re talking about here is a qualitative infinity,
rather than the more familiar quantitative infinity.) The infinite will be
determinate within itself, as long as it isn’t defined as what is not finite—since such a definition would
again make it dependent on something that’s other than itself (this is the “spurious
infinity,” schlechte Unendlichkeit,
which aims to be infinite but fails). This is why Hegel moves to the “true” (as
opposed to spurious) infinity, which he says “is only as the self-transcending,” the Hinausgehen über sich, of the finite (HSL 145; GW 21:133; SuW
5:160). As the finite’s self-transcending, the true infinity isn’t opposed to
anything that’s other than itself.
But now we can see what Hegel means by saying that
the infinite is the “real,” and the finite has no “veritable being.” The
infinite is the real because only it is fully determinate in itself. What is
(fully) real, Hegel supposes, should be what it is by virtue of itself, rather
than by virtue of any relationships it may have to other things. The finite has
no veritable being because it depends in part on its relationships to others to
make it what it is. The infinite has no such dependence, so it is (fully) real.
Hegel at one point calls true infinity “the
fundamental concept of philosophy” (Encyclopedia
Logic, §95R), because it’s the first adequate formulation of being, and the
rest of his system is largely an elaboration on this formulation. I show in
some detail in my Hegel’s Philosophy of
Reality, Freedom, and God (2005) how throughout Hegel’s system true
infinity is the nisus or the goal, because it is true being, or reality.
3.
Can we take true infinity seriously as a description of our own world? I find
it especially helpful, for this purpose, to trace out the connections between
Hegel’s account and our experience of inner freedom and self-government. And for
that purpose it’s helpful to look first at how a mixture of metaphysics and moral
psychology that’s similar to Hegel’s can be seen much earlier in Plato’s Phaedo and Republic books iv-vii. (And likewise in his Symposium, Timaeus, and other dialogues.)
Plato asks, what kind of reality can a soul or a
thinking being have, and how does that reality relate to the reality of things
that are less self-governed than souls or thinking beings are? In the Phaedo, Plato writes that “the truly
good and ‘binding’ binds and holds [the person] together” (99c), and in the Republic he explains how this is the
case. Republic book iv lays out the
“parts of the soul,” the appetites, self-importance (thumos), and the rational part. These can be unified (443d) under
the guidance of the rational part. In books v-vii we learn that the rational
part is able to carry out this unification because it finds a higher source of
guidance in the “Good” (509b). As Socrates plausibly asserts in book vi,
“Nobody is satisfied to acquire things that are merely believed to be good …
but everyone wants the things that really are
good, and disdains mere belief here” (505d). The Sun, Line, and Cave
similes in books vi and vii are meant to show how we might attain knowledge, as
opposed to mere belief, regarding what’s really good. This is important because
this kind of functioning would make a person self-governed, insofar as
appetites and self-importance, the lower parts of the soul, are inherited or
are reactions to one’s environment, whereas the pursuit of the Good is or could
be something that a person chooses.
So this is how reason could give the soul a unity, and thus a kind of reality,
that the rest of nature lacks, or that it achieves only through beings like
ourselves. It’s how “the truly good and ‘binding’” can “bind and hold [the
person] together,” as a person and not just a collection of influences.
4.
Now, Hegel invites us to consider his train of thought from being to infinity as
having to do, like Plato’s thought, with unity and self-government. Hegel underlines
this connection when he describes the “something” as “the beginning of the subject, being-within-self [das Insichsein] only as yet quite
indeterminate” (HSL 115, emphasis added; GW 21:103; SuW 5:123). And then when
he cites the ”ought,” the Sollen, as
part of the transition from the finite to the infinite (HSL 132-136; GW
21:118-123; SuW 5:142-148); and above all when he exclaims that
At the
name of the infinite, the heart and Spirit light up, for in the infinite,
Spirit is not merely abstractly present to itself, but rises to its own self,
to the light of its thinking, of its universality, of its freedom. (HSL 137-138;
GW 21:125; SuW 5:150)
All of Hegel’s apparently dry metaphysical
topics—determinateness, something, finite, infinite—are in fact closely tied
up, in his mind, with the theme of the emergence of freedom: of the ability of
certain “somethings” to engage in free, thoughtful self-determination. The
framework of concepts that Hegel is constructing will ultimately serve, in his Encyclopedia’s account of “Nature” and “Spirit,”
precisely to make sense of the presence of such somethings in what we call the
“physical world.” Which is the same presence that Plato sought to make sense of
in his Phaedo and his Republic books iv-vii. This presence was just as
controversial in Plato’s day, with the advent of philosophical materialism and
atomism, as it was in Hegel’s day with the rise of the modern natural sciences
and the materialism of Hobbes, La Mettrie, and Holbach. And of course it is still
controversial in our day with our neurosciences and projects of “artificial
intelligence.” If the “infinite” is
the prototype of free, thoughtful self-determination, then proposals to reduce
our apparent freedom to finite mechanisms such as bones and sinews (Phaedo 99a) or neurons and circuitry (21st
century) miss the boat because they don’t address veritable being and what’s
truly “real.”
Here we can also see how Hegel
begins to capture the intimate connection between reality and value that we see
in Plato, for whom the highest principle of reality is the Good, and in Aristotle,
for whom everything seeks, in one way or another, to emulate God.[5] In both Plato and Aristotle, it’s the pursuit of
value (as the Good, final cause, “form,” or God) that gives living things and
humans a degree of unity and thus a kind of reality, designated as “soul,” that
lower things such as rocks can’t possess. The
same thing then occurs in Hegel, when the “Ought” or Sollen figures as a crucial step in the passage from the finite to
the infinite and thus to what is truly real. Hegel criticizes Kant’s and
Fichte’s conceptions of the Sollen
for failing to be infinite, but some conception of what the Sollen aims at is indispensable here,
precisely because it gives being a
vocation that goes beyond such finite characteristics as appetites and self-importance.
Hegel shares with Kant and Fichte the conviction that such a higher vocation,
properly understood, is indispensable to freedom, and he goes on to add that it
gives humans (and anything else that’s capable of freedom) a distinctive kind
of reality, which we might call reality “as themselves” and which Hegel calls Fürsichsein or “being-for-self.” As “infinite,” not constrained by
finite appetites or self-importance, Fürsichsein
is “real” in the sense that it’s self-determining or an sich, in itself. Which is what Hegel has in mind when he lays it
down that only the infinite is truly “real.”
Now, the higher vocation that’s inherent in the Sollen is clearly a kind of value. So we
now see that for Hegel as well as for Plato and Aristotle, value is an
indispensable aspect of the fullest kind of “reality”: of reality, as we might
say, “as oneself.” And thus the doctrine that only the infinite is real, which
Hegel says is going to get us off of the “idealism”/”realism” see-saw, depends
upon understanding the fullest “reality” as dependent on value, just as it was
for Plato and for Aristotle. And indeed we find at the end of the Science of Logic that the fullest
reality in the book, which Hegel calls the “Idea,” is achieved first through
teleology and life (as in Aristotle), and then through a combination of the
“Idea of the True” with (as in Plato) the “Idea of the Good.”
Hegel’s reason for calling this ultimate reality
the “Idea” is not, primarily, because of any affinity it has with Berkeley or
with Kant. It doesn’t refer to an “idea” in any particular mind, nor does it
refer, as in Kant, to something that’s regulative and not constitutive (that
guides our thought but is not an object of knowledge). Rather it refers, as in
both Plato and Aristotle (where we usually translate eidos/idea as “form,” but a more etymologically direct equivalent
would be “idea”), to a fundamental feature of reality as such. In Plato, this “idea”
reality or Form is surpassed only by the Idea or Form of the Good, and in
Aristotle by the energeia or
actualization of nous or intellect. In
Hegel it is surpassed, or completed, only by the unity of life, truth, and goodness
in the Absolute Idea. In each case,
the “idea” brings about a more integrated and self-governing reality than its
ingredients, as a collection, possessed.
It’s because of this continuity with Plato’s and
Aristotle’s eidos/idea that Hegel
calls this ultimate reality the “Idea.” And this “idea”/reality gets us off the
modern see-saw of “idealism” versus “realism” inasmuch as the highest reality
that it constitutes is made of an
“idea.” Not an idea in a mind, but an “idea” as such: a thought. The highest
reality is a thought, not because everything is thought (as in Berkeley), and
not because thought imposes something on the reality that it knows (as in
Kant), but because it’s only through thought that the highest reality exists.
We have to get over the assumption that an idea or
a thought must be “contained in” a mind. Since such containing would render the
idea or thought finite, this is a version of the assumption that finite things
are the real things, which Hegel has shown to be mistaken. “The Idea” is
involved with our finite minds, since the true infinity is the finite’s
transcending itself, but the finite does, precisely, transcend itself. What we need, in order to have knowledge, is “in our
minds” in the sense that we’re capable of it (and in this respect, Berkeley and
Kant are correct), but it is not “in”
our (finite) “minds” inasmuch as it transcends our ordinary, finite functioning
(and in this respect, Berkeley and Kant are mistaken).
5.
At the end of the Science of Logic,
the Absolute Idea “freely releases” itself into space, time, and nature (HSL 843;
GW 12:253; SuW 6:573). This is the equivalent of the act of creation, in
Plato’s Timaeus, in which the “demiurge”
or craftsman, who was good and therefore “without jealousy” or spite,
generously tried to make a world as much like himself, and therefore as good,
as possible (Timaeus 29e). Plato’s
and Hegel’s God is fulfilled, as good, only by sharing his goodness as widely
as possible. (Like Aristotle, Hegel is careful to avoid suggesting that the act
of creation occurred in a past time; since it creates time, it’s eternal.)
But to make the world as much like himself as
possible, God shares his goodness by inspiration, rather than by coercion. And
since even a miniscule amount of good is better than none, the world that is
inspired into being has every kind of imperfection. So the great question then
is, how will this world respond to, relate to, its creator/inspirer? To the
best of its ability, the world will understand, and implement its understanding,
that the creative/inspiring Idea surpasses it but, as a true infinity, isn’t
separate from it. This is the understanding that Hegel unfolds in his Encyclopedia’s sections on Nature and Spirit.
6.
I don’t have space here to explain the full unfolding either of Hegel’s Logic or of his Encyclopedia. But one especially revealing point in the Hegelian “turning
back” or epistrophe (as Plato’s
follower Plotinus called it) of Nature to the creative/inspiring Idea is the
transition from Nature to “Spirit” (Geist).
Hegel says in Encyclopedia §381,
For us
Spirit has for its presupposition Nature, of which it is the truth, and for
that reason its absolute prius [absolut Erstes]. In this its truth Nature
is vanished, and Spirit has emerged
as the Idea that has arrived at its being-for-self. Here the Idea’s subject and
object are one—either is the Concept [Begriff]….
Whereas in Nature the Concept has its perfect, external objectivity, this
externalization has [now] been sublated and the Concept has thus become
identical with itself in this externalization. Thus at the same time the
Concept is this identity only insofar as it is a return out of Nature.
Spirit is “the truth of” Nature, that is, it is
what is true or real in Nature, omitting what is false or unreal. It is
Nature’s “absolute prius,” that is,
it is absolutely (in terms of truth and reality, though not in the order of
exposition) prior to Nature, more fundamental than Nature. It is more true and
more fundamental than Nature because it’s free (as Hegel explains in §382),
self-determining, and thus in Hegel’s sense of the term, “real.” In that sense “Spirit
has emerged as the Idea,” the embodiment and source of reality, which arrives
here at its “Being-for-self” (Fürsichsein)
in that it is free, and thus infinite. And the Idea’s subject and object now are
both “the Concept,” that is, they’re both the free subject that is finite objectivity’s
and finite subjectivity’s going beyond themselves, just as the infinite is the
finite’s going beyond itself.
We could misunderstand Hegel’s statement here that
“Nature is vanished” as a Berkeley-like thesis that we can dismiss the idea of
a Nature that’s independent of minds. But Hegel prevents such a
misunderstanding by telling us that the Concept is identical with its
externalization in Nature “only insofar as it is a return out of Nature.” What occurs here is a “sublation” (Aufhebung), a preservation as well as a
cancellation. Nature’s externality is an essential aspect of Spirit, because the
infinite “is only as the self-transcending of the finite.” So Hegel’s
“idealism” doesn’t reduce reality, in the manner of Berkeley, to the contents
of minds (any more than it reduces minds or Spirit to Nature).
But Hegel’s idealism does assert, as we see here,
that mind or Spirit is the Idea’s being-for-self or Fürsichsein, from which we can infer that it is veritable being and
truly real. And Nature as such, evidently, is not veritable being or truly real. Which is why Hegel can say that Nature
“is vanished,” in Spirit. So it’s a
mistake to describe Hegel as embracing “naturalism.” Some present-day writers
are tempted to associate Hegel with naturalism because Hegel clearly is not a
dualist, and they imagine that super-naturalism must be dualistic. But the
point of Hegel’s “true infinity” is precisely to show that an upward motion or
transcendence doesn’t need to involve dualism.[6]
6.
To understand Hegel’s doctrine of Spirit as surpassing or transcending Nature,
I think we need, again, to have recourse to our experience of our own inner
freedom. When we seek to be guided by what is truly good and true, do we not
achieve a higher degree of reality, as ourselves, than we experience when we
let ourselves be guided merely by our appetites, our opinions, or our
self-importance? In the extreme case, a “wanton” such as Harry Frankfurt
describes, who is driven purely by appetite and has no higher-order thoughts at
all, clearly is less of a person and less “himself” than someone who has such
thoughts and tries to be guided by them.[7] And being less of a person and less himself, he is
less real as himself. Rather than
being “himself,” he is simply the puppet of his biological and social heritage
and environment.
In this thought we can, I think, find the germ of
the truth that Hegel is putting before us, which is that what governs itself
through thought, is more real as itself, and in that sense more “real,” period,
than what is merely the product of its relationships. Spirit is what is real as
itself, and in that sense more “real,” period, than what is merely the product
of its relationships. That is the sense in which Nature, whose contents are
largely determined by their relationships, “vanishes.” As we seek what is most
“itself” and in that sense most “real,” we realize that Nature as such, the
finite mechanisms of subatomic particles, neurons, and electrical circuits, is
not what we are seeking. Rather, we are seeking freedom, or the infinite. These
are not the opposite of Nature, or separate from it. But they are in a clear
sense more real than it. When common sense asserts that what has “true being”
and what is “real” is finite things like planets, trees, or subatomic
particles, it ignores the higher degree of reality, namely, reality “as
ourselves,” which we experience when we engage in free, thoughtful self-determination.
7.
Hegel’s fundamentally Platonic/Aristotelian conception of a true reality that
incorporates Nature but goes beyond it through ideas or thought opens
perspectives on freedom and rational functioning, on knowledge, on value, and
on the natural sciences, that are available neither to conventional realism nor
to Berkeleyan or Kantian idealisms.
First, freedom and rational functioning (or “Spirit”)
are real but they don’t require a separate domain, carrying with it the
insoluble problem of how that domain relates to nature. Instead, freedom and
rational functioning are achieved by nature’s transcending its merely “natural”
modes of functioning, in pursuit of full reality or reality as oneself. They
are a “return out of nature.”[8]
Second, since full reality according to Hegel’s
account is achieved by thought, there is no problem as to how the thinker can
know this reality. The thinker knows “from inside” what her thought achieves. As
for the less-than-full realities that are not achieved by our thought, we know
them insofar as they contribute to the full reality. In this way, our minds do indeed bring
with them the crucial things that we need in order to know reality, but not
because everything is contained in minds (Berkeley) and not because anything is
externally imposed on reality (Kant). Minds bring this with them through their
ability to contribute, through
thought, to the full (and not to the less-than-full) reality, and thus to know
it.
Third, theory and practice, and fact and value, are
united insofar as the fullest reality or “fact” is achieved only by the pursuit
of a certain kind of practice or value. And practice and value are informed, in
turn, by the knowledge of this reality or fact that’s achieved through them. Thus
we overcome the modern (and, in particular, Kantian) division of theory from
practice and fact from value.
And finally, the natural sciences on the whole investigate
finite objects as such, without reference to their self-transcendence as infinite
self-governing thought. But like any search for truth, as opposed to mere
appetite-satisfaction or self-importance, this investigation is itself a form
of self-transcendence and infinity. So when scientists become aware of the
implications of their own activity as scientists, they will arrive at what
amounts to the Hegelian view of the reality that includes this activity.
These solutions are made possible by
the way Hegel goes beyond the modern subject/object way of thinking. The real
subject, he suggests, is the object’s transcending itself. We have seen this in
the form of the transitions from being to infinity and from Nature to Spirit,
both of which feature the emergence (or re-emergence) of subjectivity, in a
process that was anticipated by Hegel’s famous dictum in the Preface to his Phenomenology of Spirit that “Substance
is essentially Subject” (Miller trans., §25; SuW 3:28). Infinity knows the Finite, Spirit knows Nature, and the
Subject knows the Object (or Substance) because Infinity, Spirit, and the
Subject are the self-transcendence (or in the Phenomenology, the “essence”) of the Finite, Nature, and the Object.
And by knowing themselves they know that of which they are (essentially) the
self-transcendence or the essence.
8.
Most of what I’ve just said about Hegel’s thinking applies to Plato and to
Aristotle as well. Neither Plato nor Aristotle puts subject and object
side-by-side, as many modern thinkers do. Plato clearly thinks of the soul as going beyond but still incorporating natural
mechanisms when it integrates appetites and self-importance into something
that’s more unified. His contrast of what “is and is not” with what “completely
is” (to pantelos on, Republic 477a), with their respectively lower and higher
(as commentators put it) “degrees of reality,” parallels Hegel’s contrast between
Nature and Spirit or the finite and the infinite, where only the latter, in
each case, is fully real.[9] Similarly, Aristotle’s “four causes” go beyond
efficient causation, while still incorporating it; and he tells us that “We
must consider also in which way the nature of the universe possesses the good
and the best” (Metaphysics 1075a11).
Something like the Good, the supreme goal, is at
work, under various names, in all three of these accounts. Because this reality
is understood in terms of integration, or the emergence of a higher-level
whole, rather than in terms of mechanical push and shove, it’s something to
which humans can and do make a distinctive contribution. And thus in all three writers
we can know this more self-determining and in that sense more “real” reality
“from inside,” rather than having to approach it “from outside,” as in the modern
subject/object model.[10]
9.
Against the idea that “we have in Hegel a recognizable ‘degrees of reality’
Platonism,” Robert Pippin objects that such a view “would leave unaccounted for
all [Hegel’s] references to subjectivity, the active universal, deeds, and that
brought about (hervorgebrachte)….
Concepts are supposed to be moments in the process of thought’s attempt to
determine its own possibility…, not apprehended realities, eidetic things.”[11]
What I’m suggesting, however, is that what’s most
important about Plato’s Forms is not their apparent “thing”-hood, but the role
that they play in the soul’s achievement of unity, which is the primary locus
of the Platonic “ascent.” The Forms make the soul’s ascent to unity possible by
giving it a source of guidance that has more authority than the pushes and
pulls of appetites and self-importance. By uniting the soul in this way, the
Forms make subjectivity or a real “self” possible, against materialism,
mechanism, relativism, and skepticism. Which is precisely what Hegel, too, is
seeking to do with his notions of subjectivity, the active universal, and so
forth. In this way, Plato is more “modern” than we generally recognize, and we
can see how the modern and Hegelian focus on the “subject” or the “self”
continues Plato’s line of inquiry rather than starting a new one. And how when
Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel show the way in which the subject’s functioning can
bring about a higher degree of reality, they completely transform the usual
picture that places subject and object side by side, rather than one above the
other.
10.
In the twentieth and twenty-first centuries a number of philosophers have
sought to lay out positions that are similar to Plato’s, Aristotle’s, or
Hegel’s. Some prominent figures in this effort have been Alfred North
Whitehead, Michael Polanyi, Wilfrid Sellars, John Niemeyer Findlay, and John
McDowell. One might also mention Ludwig Wittgenstein, who entertained ideas in
his early work that are in line with the aspects of Plato that I have
emphasized here.[12]
The complexity of the issues that such
efforts must address makes progress painfully slow. The current group that’s
composed of John McDowell, Sebastian Rödl, Irad Kimhi and their associates draws
on Aristotle, Kant, Hegel, and Wittgenstein and may be able to pull a lot of
this together.[13] I have the impression, however, that so
far none of these writers subsequent to Hegel have appreciated the relationship
in Plato, Aristotle, and Hegel between value and full reality or reality as
“oneself,” and the way this relationship ensures our freedom and knowledge, as
I have tried to bring out in this essay. I hope that when these features of Plato’s,
Aristotle’s, and Hegel’s approaches are better appreciated, we will see work on
these issues which will integrate the best features of the work of all of these
writers, from Plato to the present.[14]
[1] For a detailed account of the sense in which and
the ways in which Aristotle is a “Platonist,” see Lloyd Gerson, Aristotle and Other Platonists (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 2005).
[2] Thus on the “realist” side of the see-saw we get
E.B. Holt and others, The New Realism
(New York: Macmillan, 1912) and again, a century later, Maurizio Ferraris, Introduction to the New Realism (London:
Bloomsbury, 2015).
[3] Berkeley’s and Kant’s versions of “idealism” are
the paradigms in, for example, the online Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
article, “Idealism” (accessed in November, 2018), and the comparable article in
the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (London:
Routledge, 1998). Thomas Wartenberg’s “Hegel’s Idealism: The Logic of
Conceptuality,” in Frederick C. Beiser, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, 1993), pp. 102-129, surveys major recent accounts of Hegel’s idealism
and gives Wartenberg's own non-Kantian and non-Berkeleyan account, but Wartenberg
doesn’t explain how Hegel could be justified in maintaining “that reality is a
self-actualizing whole” (p. 110). I will show how Hegel’s argument for the
thesis that the true reality is infinity fills that gap.
[4] HSL=Hegel’s Science of Logic,
translated by A. V. Miller (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities, 1989); GW=G. W.
F. Hegel, Gesammelte Werke (Hamburg:
Meiner, 1968-); SuW=G. W. F. Hegel, Werke.
Theorie Werkausgabe, ed. K. M. Michel and E. Moldenhauer (Frankfurt am
Main: Suhrkamp, 1970-). HSL cited by page number; GW and SuW cited by volume
and page number. Translations are my own.
[5] “The most natural act is the production of another
like itself … in order that, as far as its nature allows, it may partake in the
eternal and divine” (Aristotle, De Anima 415a26).
For an overview of Aristotle’s theological cosmos, see David Sedley, Creationism and Its Critics in Antiquity (Berkeley:
University of California Press, 2007), pp. 170-171.
[6] Terry Pinkard describes Hegel as embracing
“naturalism” (Terry Pinkard, Hegel’s
Naturalism: Mind, Nature, and the Final Ends of Life [Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2012]). Like many recent commentators on Hegel, Pinkard
overlooks the finite’s “self-transcendence” (Hinausgehen über sich), Nature’s “vanishing” in Spirit, and the
human “elevation to God” (Erhebung zu
Gott: Lectures on the Philosophy of
Religion, vol. 1, ed. Peter C. Hodgson [Berkeley, CA: University of
California Press, 1984], pp. 414-425; Vorlesungen
über die Philosophie der Religion, ed. W. Jaeschke [Hamburg: Meiner, 1983],
vol. 1, pp. 308-318; and elsewhere). I elaborate on Hegel’s notions of
transcendence and the super-natural in “Infinity and Spirit—How Hegel
Integrates Science and Religion, and the ‘Natural’ and the ‘Supernatural,’” in
B. Göcke and C. Tapp, eds., The Infinity
of God (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2018).
[7] Harry G. Frankfurt, “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a
Person,” Journal of Philosophy lxvii
no. 1 (Jan. 1971), pp. 5-20.
[8] Reality is a “self-actualizing whole” (see note 3,
above) because infinity (which is the real) is unified or whole in a way that
the finite, with its dependence on others, can’t be; and it’s self-actualizing
for the same reason: having nothing
outside it, its actualization can only be self-actualization.
[9] Unfortunately neither Plato’s notion of a higher
degree of reality (to pantelos on)
nor Hegel’s notion of true reality as infinity has been studied with much
sympathy in recent decades. I defended Hegel’s notion of a higher degree of
“reality” in my Hegel’s Philosophy of
Reality, Freedom, and God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005),
especially pp. 61-62. Walter Bröcker challenged both Plato and Hegel on this
issue in his “Platons Ontologischer Komparativ,” Hermes 87:4 (Dec. 1959), pp. 415-425. Gregory Vlastos discussed
Plato’s “degrees of reality” view in two papers, “Metaphysical Paradox” and
“Degrees of Reality” (in his Platonic
Studies [Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973 and 1981]). My view is
that rather than being merely “personal” (as Vlastos suggests on p. 56),
Plato’s “degrees of reality” are an essential part of his systematic thought. I
elaborate on Plato’s systematic thought in Chapter 5 of my Philosophical Mysticism in Plato, Hegel, and the Present, to
appear in 2019.
[10] Kant seems to be reaching for a solution like this
one in his consideration of teleology in his third Critique, but he can’t grasp
it because of his commitment to a Newtonian efficient-causal concept of
reality, which makes him classify teleology and Ideas in general as merely
“regulative,” rather than “constitutive.”
[11] Robert B. Pippin, Hegel’s Realm of Shadows. Logic as Metaphysics in The Science of Logic
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2018), pp. 96-97.
[12] Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality (New York: Macmillan, 1929), Michael Polanyi, Personal Knowledge (Chicago: University
of Chicago, 1958), Wilfrid Sellars, Science,
Perception, and Reality (New York: Humanities Press, 1963), J. N. Findlay, The Discipline of the Cave and The Transcendence of the Cave (London:
George Allen and Unwin, 1966 and 1967), John McDowell, Mind and World and Having the
World in View (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994 and 2009). I
discuss Wittgenstein, Whitehead, Findlay, Sellars, and McDowell in my Philosophical Mysticism, forthcoming.
[13] Sebastian Rödl’s Self-Consciousness and Categories
of the Temporal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007 and 2012,
respectively) draw especially on Aristotle and Kant, and Irad Kimhi’s Thinking and Being (Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press, 2018) elucidates especially Plato and Aristotle.
[14] I am grateful to Benedikt Göcke for helpful
comments on a draft of this paper.
