(4,644 words)
Robert M. Wallace
Abstract: Karen Ng’s book is an ambitious and systematic interpretation of large portions of Hegel’s philosophy, from his Difference essay (1801) through his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) to his Science of Logic (1812/1816). Ng shows how Hegel’s preoccupation with self-consciousness or the self is closely associated, throughout his major works, with his treatment of “life,” which derives (as did Schelling’s treatment of the same topic) from a critical appropriation of Kant’s attempts to understand life, in his Critique of Judgment. Ng particularly examines the notoriously obscure passage about “life” at the beginning of chapter 4 of the Phenomenology, as well as Hegel’s full-dress treatment of life in the context of “Objectivity” in the Science of Logic. No future attempt to interpret Hegel’s philosophical achievement should ignore the connections that Ng has unearthed, or her efforts to clarify them. However, I think that Ng misses an important opportunity to understand Hegel better. Ng gives no detailed account either of freedom (though it’s in her title) or of infinity, which Hegel associates closely with freedom (see Science of Logic, GW 21:125). I spell out an alternative interpretation of the end of chapter 3 and the beginning of chapter 4 of the Phenomenology, in terms of Hegel's concern with infinity, which explains the link between self-consciousness and life more clearly and perspicuously than I believe Professor Ng explains it.
Karen Ng’s new book is an ambitious and systematic interpretation of large portions of Hegel’s philosophy, from his Difference essay (1801) through his Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) to his Science of Logic (1812/1816). I will outline some of the book’s major contributions, and, drawing on key passages in the Phenomenology and the Logic, register some reservations about Professor Ng’s interpretation of Hegel.
Ng shows how Hegel’s preoccupation with self-consciousness or the self is closely associated, throughout his major works, with his treatment of “life,” which derives (as did Schelling’s treatment of the same topic) from a critical appropriation of Kant’s attempts to understand life, in his Critique of Judgment. Ng particularly examines the notoriously obscure passage about “life” at the beginning of chapter 4 of the Phenomenology, as well as Hegel’s full-dress treatment of life in the context of “Objectivity” in the Science of Logic. No future attempt to interpret Hegel’s philosophical achievement should ignore the connections that Ng has unearthed, or her efforts to clarify them.
The main thing that I look for in books about Hegel is that they connect his actual texts with major problems that are addressed by other leading western philosophers. So I’m not a fan of books that don’t deal in any detail with Hegel’s actual texts or don’t analyze them in a way that makes evident their relevance to broader discussions. Ng does deal with Hegel’s texts in considerable detail and does state some of his arguments quite clearly and in a way that makes evident their relevance to broader discussions. So her book is one of a fairly small list of recent books that I would recommend to readers who really want to get Hegel’s relevance into focus.
As I’ll explain in some detail, though, I think that Ng misses an important opportunity to understand Hegel better. Ng gives no detailed account either of freedom (though it’s in her title) or of infinity, which Hegel associates closely with freedom (see Science of Logic, GW 21:125).
First, a bit of background. Kant intended his Critique of Judgment (1790) to bring together the two previous parts of his critical system, his account of our knowledge of the world (that is, natural science), in his Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787) and his account of practical reason (that is, ethics) in his Critique of Practical Reason (1788). One of the main ways in which it was to do this was by examining the role of teleology, or purposiveness, in living things.
Teleology had not been a feature of science as Kant understood science in the Critique of Pure Reason, because the world of basically Newtonian cause and effect that Kant studied in that Critique contained no teleology, no purposes, as such. Practical reason, on the other hand, as Kant understood it, required us to go beyond Newtonian cause and effect, including our “inclinations,” as Kant called them, and treat rational agents as “ends in themselves.” This raised the difficult question of how the two views of the world, the Newtonian view and the practical and ethical view, could be connected with each other or reconciled. It’s the perennial problem in western philosophy, first discussed by Plato (Phaedo 97-99), of how freedom or rational self-determination fits into a world that in many respects seems to be non-rational or “mechanical.” Kant evidently hoped that his account of biological teleology, in the Critique of Judgment, would (to some degree) bridge his two previous accounts, by dealing with “ends” or purposes, as practical reason did, while at the same time dealing with the observable external world, as the natural sciences do.
However, Kant’s strong attachment to the Newtonian view of nature led him to explicitly refrain, in the Critique of Judgment, from treating ends, purposes, or teleology as a part of the external world on a par with causes, effects, and substances, the topics of the natural sciences. Instead, he presented teleology as “not a constitutive conception either of understanding or of reason, but … a regulative conception for guiding our investigation of objects of this kind by a remote analogy with our own causality according to ends generally…” (§4). That is, neither understanding nor reason could assert that nature as such contained purposes; rather, the notion of purpose could somehow “regulate” our investigations of nature, without identifying a feature of nature as such. Kant left this distinction between “constitutive” and “regulative” conceptions obscure (as Ng brings out [p. 59]). And to the extent that the distinction remained obscure, Kant’s hope of integrating the two wings of his critical philosophy through the notion of biological teleology was apparently not fulfilled.
Seeing that Kant had not been able to integrate his system fully, Kant’s successors proposed various remedies. F. W. J. Schelling and Hegel both found a promising avenue of revision in Kant’s own conception of biological teleology, which they separated from his (in their view) indefensible distinction between constitutive and regulative conceptions. This is where Professor Ng picks up the story.
Kant had proposed in §3 of the “Critique of Teleological Judgement” in his Critique of Judgement that “a thing exists as a natural end if it is … both cause and effect of itself.” In his example, a tree is the cause of itself inasmuch as it grows, and it governs the interaction and mutual support of its parts, and it produces offspring. And it is also the effect of these processes. Hence, it is “cause and effect of itself.” Kant refers to this feature of organisms as their “self-organization” (§4) and “intrinsic purposiveness” (§5). (It was rediscovered by the biologists H. Maturana and F. Varela in their book, Autopoiesis [1973].) Ng suggests in her Chapter 3 that this self-organization and inner purposiveness gave Schelling his notion of the “objective subject-object,” and Hegel his notion of “the Concept” that is likewise self-organizing and internally purposive, while being only in one respect (that is, not in all respects) self-conscious.
That is, I would add, Kant’s notion of the self-organizing organism presented, for Schelling and Hegel, a way in which nature as such, in the form of life, exhibits something like freedom or self-determination without (as yet) having the explicit self-consciousness that we see in practical reason and ethics. And thus the self-organizing organism shows us how the dichotomy of nature versus freedom, with which Kant’s first two Critiques appeared to leave us, is excessively abstract, obscuring transitional phases that are in some respects “natural” or mechanical and in some respects “free” or self-determining. So that one might anticipate that working out this thought, as Hegel does in his Logic and Encyclopedia, could ultimately integrate the contrasting domains that Kant, due to his inveterate Newtonianism, had failed to integrate. (And, I would also add, Plato and Aristotle may have integrated the same domains in ways that modern thinkers including Kant and many twentieth-century writers on “mind” and “matter” and freedom and determinism have failed to fully appreciate. Which would go a long way toward explaining the great respect that Hegel has for Aristotle [see Encyclopedia §§378 and 577].)
Ng doesn’t spend much time on the sort of “big picture” that I just sketched.[1]Proceeding quickly to the texts, her Chapter 2 examines purposiveness in Kant’s first and third Critiques, and her Chapter 3 gives a rich account of details of (in particular) Schelling’s 1799 “Philosophy of Nature” and his 1800 System of Transcendental Idealism, Hegel’s Difference essay (The Difference Between Fichte’s and Schelling’s System of Philosophy [1801]) with its appropriation and critique of Fichte’s account of the “I,” and Chapters 3 and 4 of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit.
The theme that Ng follows through these texts is what she calls “Hegel’s speculative identity thesis” of “the identity and non-identity between life and self-consciousness” (p. 81). Life and self-consciousness are not identical inasmuch as life is the “object” while self-consciousness is the subject that knows the object. But they are identical insofar as “life is what immediately opens up the possibility of being as intelligible, of being as a realm of objectivity knowable by a subject … [And] self-consciousness … is … fundamentally constituted by its awareness of life” (p. 78).
How does life “immediately open up the possibility of being as intelligible,” in a way that mere being does not? I will summarize what I take to be Ng’s answer, which begins to emerge in her description of Hegel’s critique of Fichte, in the Difference essay. Fichte presents self-consciousness or the “I” not as an existing thing but as an act, a Tathandlung (p. 83), which aims to be self-determining or free. Being guided by a reason of some kind, an act is intelligible in a way that a mere being might not be. But against Fichte’s development of this notion, Hegel objects that Fichte presents natureas a mere “check” or “impetus” (Anstoss) to rational activity, and to that extent he leaves nature as “dead opposition” to reason (see p. 88 for Hegel’s liberal uses of the word, “death,” in connection with Fichte’s conception of nature)—in which case “self-consciousness in turn cannot determine itself as self-determining” (p. 90), because it is determined (in part, at least) by its opposition to this dead, merely external being, rather than by itself. Its options are either to be determined by nature or to “dominate” nature, neither of which Hegel regards as free because neither is fully self-determining. Whereas Hegel by contrast conceives of freedom as “being at home with oneself in one’s other” (same page, emphasis added), where one’s “other” includes nature. And he does this in large part by understanding nature as life. Where nature “opens up the possibility of being as intelligible” insofar as life is understood as self-governing, in the way that Kant sketched out in his Critique of Judgment, and as “intelligible” in terms of the principles by which it governs itself.
In the previous paragraph I have summarized Ng’s story of these issues more explicitly than she does in her rather complex discussion of the Difference essay and Hegel’s critique of Fichte, and I hope I’ve caught her drift. I don’t think she ever fully explains what it would be like to be “at home with oneself in one’s other.” In particular, she doesn’t draw on Hegel’s account of “something,” the “other,” finitude, and freedom in the “Quality” chapter of the Science of Logic, which (as I argued in my Hegel’s Philosophy of Reality, Freedom, and God [2005]) provides the most important systematic clue to his formulation about being “at home with oneself in one’s other.” For it’s here that Hegel shows how the finite cannot be “with itself,” inasmuch as it’s determined by its limitation vis-à-vis others, so that it’s only the infinite, which has no “other,” that can embody full self-determination and freedom. And thus it’s only as infinite, that we can be fully free.[2]If one worked backward from this argument in the Science of Logic to the earlier works, one might well find that as anticipations of what is spelled out more clearly in the Logic, they are less confusing.
Chronologically, the next major stage in Hegel’s development of his “speculative identity thesis” after the Difference essay is, of course, the Phenomenology of Spirit. Here, Ng does give a conspectus of the whole argument. It is composed of an “analogy,” a “transcendental argument,” and a “refutation of idealism” (p. 103). The analogy is between life and self-consciousness; the transcendental argument is from consciousness via life to self-consciousness; and the refutation of idealism is a “phenomenological” argument which strengthens the force of the transcendental argument by “bringing together theoretical and practical considerations that emerge in considering the actual experiential development of self-consciousness and spirit” (p. 115).
The analogy between life and self-consciousness is that both are active and self-relating. But the exact relation between the two is spelled out in the transcendental argument. The conclusion of the transcendental argument is that “The ambiguity, disparity, and negativity between life and non-life, and between life and self-consciousness, is the motor and structure—the method—of the experience of consciousness through which self-consciousness is continually actualized as a process of development” (p. 111). “In grasping the unity of this disparity, or the identity of this non-identity, consciousness attains self-consciousness”; but “the only object that displays the unity of this disparity, the object of experience as something that is in-and-for-itself (self-dividing yet self-relating, displaying a unity and distinction of inner and outer), is infinity, or life” (p. 110, first emphasis added). In this way, “infinity, or life” is the essential intermediary between consciousness and self-consciousness.
In regard to this argument, one has to ask two questions. First, why does the “unity of this disparity” have to be displayed by an object? And second, why is the object that displays it described not only as “life,” but as “infinity”? In regard to the second question, Professor Ng is, of course, following Hegel’s description of the object in Phenomenology of Spirit §169 (Suhrkamp Werke, 3:140). But she needs to explain why he describes it in that way. She never presents an account of infinity as such, and consequently she doesn’t clarify its relation to “life.”
But the first question really goes to the heart of her project in this book. Why does the unity of the disparity of life and non-life, life and self-consciousness, or inner and outer have to be “displayed” by anything (and then specifically, as she and Hegel insist, by “life”)? Ng addresses this question with an argument that she finds in Schelling and which she calls a “refutation of idealism.” Schelling argues that an “intelligence will be able to intuit itself” as “active” in the world “only in an object that has an internal principle of motion within itself,” and that means, in something that’s “alive” (Ng, p. 113). That is, that in order to perceive itself as active, the intelligence must perceive itself externally, as an “object,” and an object that’s alive.
Ng presents this argument of Schelling’s as resembling Kant’s “Refutation of Idealism” in the Critique of Pure Reason (B275-6), which appeals to one’s consciousness of oneself as determined in time, and therefore as relating to objects outside oneself that are not reducible to one’s perceptions. Schelling’s argument is certainly an interesting one. But if Hegel has something like this argument in mind, why, in all the twistings and turnings of Chapters 3 and 4 of the Phenomenology, does he never present it?
It seems to me more plausible to suppose that Hegel is proceeding from the notion of “consciousness” that has been his topic throughout Chapters 1-3 of the Phenomenology, which all assume that in some way or other, one is conscious of a world that is not reducible to one’s perceptions. So subjective “idealism” is already off the table, from the beginning of the book. The theme of Chapters 3 and 4, then, is how the notion of a “self-conscious” mind can emerge from the consciousness that thinks of itself as dealing with an external world. Unlike Schelling in the passage that Ng draws on, Hegel here is not asking why I should suppose that I or “life” or anything else exists as an object that’s independent of my perceptions. Rather, he’s asking where does the notion of “me,” as possessing these perceptions, come from? That he is asking this, explains why the topic of Chapter 4 is “Self-Consciousness.”
If we allow ourselves to be guided, in this way, by the main topics of Chapters 1-4 of the Phenomenology (and Ng has given us no reason not to), then the question, why “life,” in particular? appears in a different light. It would now be the question, why should we understand some of the objects in the world, of which we are conscious, as self-governing in the way that “life” is self-governing, and possibly also as “self-conscious”? Hegel would be presenting “life,” in the sequence that he in fact follows, as an initial form of self-government, which, however, quickly becomes conscious of itself, and thus self-conscious.
Why does life become conscious of itself? Because thinking of itself as self-governing, as “life” is according to the schema that Hegel has taken over from Kant, immediately directs one’s attention to the “self” that is supposed to be governing itself. This is the intimate connection between “life” and “self-consciousness.” The “ambiguity, disparity, and negativity between life and non-life, and between life and self-consciousness,” which Hegel and Ng foreground, is firstly the ambiguity, disparity, and negativity between objects of consciousness, merely as such, which consciousness does indeed tend to treat as “dead” or merely mechanical, and the living thing that consciousness discovers itself to be in the course of Chapters 2 and 3 of the Phenomenology. And secondly it is the ambiguity and disparity between life merely as such, and life that is conscious of itself, which we arrive at in Chapter 4. Schelling and Hegel focus on these ambiguities, and therefore make it a point always to connect self-consciousness with life rather than with mere “objects” which could be “dead,” because they are interested (as I suggested earlier) in exploring an intermediate realm between mere mechanical “Newtonian” objects, which are not self-governing, and the self-consciously self-governing subjects of practical reason and ethics. If we keep this elementary state of affairs before our minds, then Hegel’s twistings and turnings in Chapters 3 and 4 of the Phenomenology may be less obscure than they appear to be in Ng’s reconstruction of them.
How does Hegel justify insisting that one’s world must contain not merely dead “objects,” but living ones (whether the living object is oneself or another self)? Why, as I asked earlier, does the unity of the disparity of life and non-life, life and self-consciousness, or inner and outer have to be “displayed” by anything (and then specifically, as Ng and Hegel insist, by “life”)? I will give my own answer to this question, which is an answer that Ng doesn’t give. Hegel justifies this with his appeal to “infinity” or freedom:
Infinity, or this absolute unrest of pure self-movement … this no doubt has been from the start the soul of all that has gone before … but it is as ‘explanation’ that it first freely stands forth [als Erklären tritt sie zunächst frei hervor]; and when infinity is finally an object, as that which it is, for consciousness, consciousness is thus self-consciousness. (PhG §163; Suhrkamp Werke 3:133; my translation)
When infinity becomes an “object” for consciousness, consciousness becomes self-consciousness. And it’s only when infinity does this that infinity “freely stands forth,” that is, that it emerges as free. Why is it not “free” before this, when it is only “inner” and not yet an object for consciousness? It isn’t free, in such a case, because it’s defined as not outer, and to that extent it’s determined by what it’s not, and thus it’s not self-determined or free. So what’s inner must also be outer, if it’s to be free. This is why the unity of the disparate (life and non-life, life and self-consciousness, inner and outer) has to be “displayed”—that is, it’s why that unity has to be an object for consciousness.
And this unity is first displayed by life, when life is understood in the way that Kant proposed, as governing itself. For we can watch life, living things, governing themselves. I can watch myself, a living thing, alongside other living things, engaging in the kind of self-government that’s common to all living things. In this activity of self-government, life is “an object for consciousness,” and thus approaches the infinity that unites the inner and the outer, self-consciousness and consciousness, and that is thus truly infinite and truly free. All that life lacks, in this self-observing self-government, is the realization that what it is observing is infinite and fully free, which is the crowning accomplishment that is self-consciousness.
In this way, Hegel’s conception of freedom and self-consciousness as infinity connects life to freedom and self-consciousness, without making them identical. This is the primary issue that Ng addresses, without, as far as I can see, clarifying it as well as Hegel does in these passages of his Phenomenology.
I should add that Hegel’s notion of freedom as infinity also resolves another issue that hovers, unstated, beneath the surface of Professor Ng’s book, which is: Why should we take seriously the claims of rational self-government, in Kant’s ethics and in Hegel’s account of life and self-consciousness, to be real? Why shouldn’t we be satisfied, as many people claim to be, with Newtonian mechanism (or something like it) as an account of reality as a whole? Hegel addresses the claims of Newtonian mechanism and similar doctrines to be adequate accounts of reality as a whole with the first five chapters of the Phenomenology. Ng summarizes a good part of Hegel’s argument on pp. 105-107, but she presents it not as an argument that Newtonian mechanism isn’t the whole of reality, but as an argument that “The living object is … the object that provides consciousness with the resources to adequately grasp itself as self-consciousness” (p. 107). That is, Ng doesn’t directly address the challenge of mechanism as such.
Hegel’s account of infinity addresses the challenge of mechanism by focusing on something that can’t be reduced to it. In Chapters 1-3,
What is true for consciousness is something other than itself. But the Concept of this truth vanishes in the experience of it. What the object immediately was in itself—mere being in sense-certainty, the concrete thing of perception, and for the Understanding, a Force—proves to be in truth, not this at all; instead, this in-itself turns out to be a mode in which the object is only for an other…. But now there has arisen what did not emerge in these previous relationships, namely, a certainty which is identical with its truth; for the certainty is to itself its own object, and consciousness is to itself the truth. (PhG §166; Suhrkamp Werke 3:137)
The “certainty which is identical with its truth” and “is to itself its own object” is, of course, self-consciousness, or freedom, or infinity. I am my own object, and therefore I can’t help being certain of this object. (We hear echoes of Descartes’s Cogito and of Fichte’s Tathandlung.) To deny this object would be to deny what I am doing in denying it; so I can’t, effectively, deny it. Thus in self-consciousness we have arrived at a certainty that is identical with its own truth—a reality that can’t be denied. So we can confidently rely on the reality of self-government, in ethics and in self-consciousness in general, and conclude that nothing like Newtonian mechanics is the whole of reality.
The remainder of Ng’s book surveys Hegel’s treatment of life in the final section of his Science of Logic, in which Teleology and Life form the intermediate step between Mechanism, on the one hand, and (theoretical and practical) Cognition, on the other. So Hegel is explicitly laying out the ascending ladder of what we might call mechanical, biological, and human functioning. Prior to this final section, Ng also provides a detailed and illuminating account of the transition from substance to subject or “the Concept,” of which the Objective Concept (including Mechanism and Teleology) and the Idea (including Life and theoretical and practical Cognition) are aspects.
I am not going to examine Professor Ng’s treatment of the Science of Logic in the detail that I gave to her treatments of the Difference essay and the Phenomenology, because no new issue of comparable importance arises in the later sections. Mostly, the same issue arises once again, that Ng again does not focus on or examine the relevance of Hegel’s distinctive notions of infinity and freedom to the aspects of the text on which she focuses. Ng quotes Hegel’s statement that the Doctrine of the Concept is “the realm of freedom,” but (as one might expect from her earlier discussions) neither freedom as such nor infinity is the theme of her treatment of this Doctrine. In particular, the way in which Life and Cognition introduce increasing degrees of freedom as self-government is not her theme, despite the way in which these sections expand upon and systematize the discussion of life and freedom that Hegel gave in Chapters 3 and 4 of the Phenomenology.
Summing up his entire treatment of the “Idea” as the final stage of the “Concept,” Hegel writes that
the absolute Idea … is … on the one hand the return to life, but … the Concept is not merely soul [and thus life], but free subjective Concept that is for itself and therefore possesses personality. (GW 12:236)
The subjective Concept’s “freedom” is of course most evident in the theoretical and practical Cognition that immediately precede the absolute Idea. But in her treatment of the passage that I’ve quoted (Ng p. 288), Professor Ng focuses on the “return to life,” and doesn’t quote or elaborate on the part about “free subjective Concept.” Instead she emphasizes, quite appropriately, the way in which Cognition’s “return to life” in the absolute Idea excludes any one-sided emphasis merely on Cognition, by itself. “Cognition without life would be an empty affair devoid of determination” (same page). But with this emphasis, she overlooks the way in which Hegel’s formulations here explicitly give an enriched and more systematic version of the transition from life to self-consciousness (here called the “free subjective Concept”) that was the theme of the end of Chapter 3 of the Phenomenology.
Finally, Ng points out that in his culminating discussion of “method,” ”Hegel does not hesitate in making far-reaching claims concerning the scope of absolute method, calling it … ‘the universal absolute activity in which … the Concept is everything,’… and method ‘is reason’s highest and sole drive, to find and cognize itself by means of itself in everything’” (Ng p. 288, quoting GW 12:238). She comments that “the sheer outrageousness of these claims tries the patience of even the most generous reader” (p. 289). (To which I, at least, must object that rather than experiencing them as trying my patience, I find them exhilarating!) She seeks to explain Hegel’s “outrageous” claim as boiling down to this:
“Having eliminated the thought that truth and goodness are beyond the grasp of reason in principle, the unity of theoretical and practical cognition is what allows Hegel to determine the scope of method as truly absolute, as having no meaningful ‘outside’… Hegel has finally produced the positive result of his long-stated position that method is not external to its content, but instead represents the essential form of its content…. Even the intelligibility of what falls below the processes of life and cognition—mechanism, chemism, and external purposiveness—are only intelligible asthe things that they are from within the bounds of method itself” (p. 289-290).
To this explanation I would add two further points of clarification. (1) The reason why what falls below the processes of life and cognition is only intelligible from within the bounds of method itself is that what is fully “real,” as itself, is infinite, not bounded below or anywhere else. So what falls below the processes of life and cognition must be understood through its contribution to those processes, and not merely through itself. For without its contribution to those processes it is unreal, or nothing. (“It is not the finite which is the real, but rather the infinite” [Science of Logic GW 21:136].) And thus (2), when we understand self-consciousness and thus the Concept and Cognition as infinite, it is clearly necessary that they will have no “outside,” but instead they will be “the essential form of [all] content,” and reason as infinite will necessarily be “in everything.”
[1]Thomas Khurana, Das Leben der Freiheit: Form und Wirklichkeit der Autonomie (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 2017) gives a more detailed account of Kant’s critical system and his treatment of teleology than Professor Ng gives. Khurana also gives a very illuminating analysis of Hegel’s account of life and freedom.
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