Friday, January 4, 2019

How G.W.F. Hegel's Broadly Platonic Idealism Explains Knowledge, Value, and Freedom


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.

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