Systematicity and the Defense of Reason in the World

Jim Kreines – Claremont McKenna

 

1.

I am extremely grateful to Brady Bowman, Terry Pinkard, and Clinton Tolley for their thoughtful comments and generous attention to my book. I have learned much from each of them, in this exchange and others, and I am happy to have this opportunity to thank them. What I would like to do in this paper is to advance the conversation further, in defense of my position in Reason in the World. Regrettably, space constraints prevent me from adequately addressing all of their comments and questions; but all of them have been a helpful spur for future work, for which I am thankful as well.

 I begin with challenges pressed by Clinton Tolley concerning my account of Hegel’s interpretation and criticism of Kant. My core argument is that Hegel fundamentally aims to turn Kant’s Antinomy against Kant and Kant’s claim about our having an epistemic limit to the bounds of sensibility. Kant thinks that antinomy conflict arise because of the application of a conception of the unconditioned—adequate, in itself—to a domain that it cannot fit, namely, the spatio-temporal. Hegel, as Tolley cites me, responds that ‘the problem is rather entirely internal to the conception of the unconditioned that is so applied’ (168). More specifically, I point to an internal tension in the conception, arising from taking “the perspective of the understanding”—a kind of substratum thinking—“on the objects of reason” (EL §27).

Tolley questions many claims I make and need to this end, but also questions some claims that I do not make, and I think we differ over whether my argument requires these further claims. The best way to respond is to take up the challenge to clarify the argument in a manner making clear what is and is not required.

First, begin with what I call the “paradigm case”—not of Kant’s own views, but of what he calls “the metaphysics of the understanding”, This is the case of the bare substratum. The bare substratum is supposed to “support”, as it is often said, for properties an object has. Arguing for existence would require something like this paradigm argument: If property P is had, then there must be something that has it. If the answer characterizes that something only in terms of a further property, Q, then the argument must bundle all of the properties of an object into a conjunctive property, and insist that there must be something independent to correspond to the subject-pace in a judgment attributing that conjunctive property. This would have to be something independent of all the object’s properties: the bare substrate. 

Second, we then get a paradigm problem: the bare substrate thus demonstrated would be too bare to really support anything. It is not itself a supporting thing, because it would also have to be independent of the property of being a support. It would be, as Hegel says, “indifferent.”[42] In the paradigm case, we get a contradiction if we assert that something serves the role of finally corresponding to the subject of judgment and the role of an explanatory support or ground. Now that is just a paradigm case chosen to heighten and reveal the tension; Hegel thinks that versions of this problem arise in subtler cases throughout pre-Kantian metaphysics.

But the key in the book is the case of Kant and specifically the Antinomy. I do not claim that Kant asserts that there exist any bare substrata (161). For one thing, the issue here is not about Kant’s existence claim, but rather his claims about the guiding ideas of reason and the unconditioned. For another, the ideas are cleverly not ideas of absolutely bare substrata. The issue is whether subtler forms of substratum thinking shape the arguments of the Antinomy and the conception of the unconditioned at work there.

We can pursue this by asking, first, do we find something of the form of the paradigm argument? And the answer is that we do. Take the thesis of the second antinomy: A whole cannot consist of composition all the way down. For we can bundle composition relations—all of them—and demand something further and independent to be the something that stands in those relations, or does the composing. Thus there must be simple parts. I think it is nice, but not necessary, that Kant brings out the parallel by saying that the thesis demands “subjects”, in the sense of “subjects of all composition” (A436/B464), as if the proof might be expressed also by demanding some parts to correspond to the subject-place in a judgment about the bundled totality of composition. (I deny and have no need of a view Tolley criticizes here, namely, that all ideas of reason are supposed to be “absolutely unconditioned, i.e., unconditioned in every respect” (xx). What I say is that for a “given explanatory regress” what is required is “relative to that regress”[43]—an unconditioned “explainer for that regress” (186); e.g. for the regress of composition, simplicity.)

Second, do we find something of the form of the paradigm problem? Yes. Just consider the supposedly simple parts. If they are spatially extended, as would be required in a mathematical antinomy considering a regress entirely within space and time, then we have the antithesis to the second antinomy: those parts would have to be composite as well as simple (A435/B463). So the only room for simple parts would be something more like the objects considered in the third and fourth, or dynamical, antinomies: something “different in kind … outside the series” (A530/B558). But this opens an explanatory gap. With the necessary being of the fourth Antinomy, for example, if really necessary, then this would have to be outside of the series of contingent causes in time. Note: this does not require an absolutely bare substratum; as Tolley cites me, it “need not be absolutely bare but would have to be at least bare relative to that regress” (156). In this case, then, it would be bare of temporal features, and so unable to explain the temporal features of a cause in time (119; A455/B483). Returning to the issues about a regress of composition in space, a ground from outside this regress would not have to be absolutely bare, but bare relative to that regress, or non-extended—like a monad. Then the explanatory gap emerges because compounding non-extended monads cannot itself explain spatial extension. This is familiar from puzzles about some of Leibniz’s formulations. Monads seem indifferent, as Hegel puts it, to something they would be supposed to ground.[44] 

And so Hegel holds, contra Kant, that the conflict in an antinomy can be caused by a way in which a demand for something like a substratum (the perspective of the understanding, in the sense fixed by that bundling form of argument for something underlying) conflicts with a demand for explanation or opposition to explanatory gaps (the objects of reason). Further, I think this tension has nothing specifically to do with spatio-temporality. So if Hegel is right, then the root of the conflict can rather be the way in which Kant’s conception of the unconditioned, powering both thesis and antithesis arguments, contains the above tension between reason and the understanding. If so, then antinomy conflicts can arise—as Hegel claims—in other cases apart from just a specifically cosmological regress from the spatio-temporal (EL §48R); I come to an example from Hegel below. And, if so, then this is reason to take seriously Hegel’s proposal that antinomy conflicts cannot be resolved by, and so do not require conclusions about, spatio-temporality, including Kant’s epistemic limitation of our cognition within the bounds of sensibility.

Tolley notes Kant’s own discussions of the generation of the ideas; but Hegel’s case does not require an unlikely admission by Kant there that he means to mix in some substratum-thinking so as to make the ideas internally conflicted. What is important is how Kant actually argues in cases like those noted above. Tolley also asks about the Paralogisms on the soul[45] and the Transcendental Ideal on God. But I argue that it is the Antinomy that defends Kant’s epistemic limit,[46] so I set these other sections aside because they are not required for the core topic.

Finally, Tolley makes a wonderful connection, providing what seems to me a great way to adjudicate matters between us: he says that my “treatment comes close to assuming that Kant could (or should) have embraced what Karl Ameriks has characterized as a ‘short argument’ for epistemic humility” (xx). I can see why one might expect Hegel to have a problem here, given common expectations. But this is part of why I mean to depart radically from expected interpretations, and where I see my departure paying large dividends. If we read Hegel’s project as fundamentally an attempt to extract and radicalize Kant’s deductions from the Transcendental Analytic, then we seem doomed to portray Hegel as uncharitably misunderstanding Kant, as if Kant meant transcendental idealism in general or epistemic humility in particular to rest on a “short argument”—one that bypasses the details concerning the forms of our sensible intuition, space and time, specifically found in the Aesthetic and the Dialectic. In the book I agree with Ameriks here and at many points: there is no sense engaging with Kant’s epistemic limit in a way that fails to recognize that “it is the Dialectic which nails down the strong claim that our (objective theoretical) knowledge is absolutely limited”.[47] This is part of the reason why, against interpretations of Hegel on the table, I side with Ameriks’ defense of Kant.[48] But this is also why I advocate rethinking Hegel anew, resting everything now on this priority of the Dialectic. We can then see how Hegel recognizes that Kant is aiming for something far better than a short argument, specifically given the key role of the Dialectic. But we can also see how precisely the strengths of Kant’s case also open it to Hegel’s unusual response. In particular, a short argument is hopeless: from the fact that our knowledge is mediated, I argue that it does not follow that our knowledge is limited or restricted (section 2.2). But for precisely this reason, if Hegel has a case that the Antinomy argument for epistemic limits fails to connect to spatio-temporality in the manner Kant wants and needs, then Hegel has a case that the attempt to use the Antinomy to support epistemic limits is weak—a case that the Antinomy arguments can actually be used against Kant himself in this respect.

I will return below to briefly respond to Tolley concerning the absolute idea.

 

2.

Terry Pinkard focuses largely on the crucial issue of the dialectical method in the Logic, and draws out the basics of my approach in this way:

What holds all these arguments together is the dialectic… each such attempt at a complete explanation results in some kind of contradiction that propels us to move on to another type of explanation…

However, I have said that I do not want to compromise on Hegel’s ambitiousness, and Pinkard worries that my approach forces compromise: “We do not have a propulsion”; rather at each dialectical transition can only say “let’s try something else”. I certainly agree that Hegel is more ambitious than that. So what differentiates my approach?

Again, I hold that everything traces back to the issues from Kant’s Dialectic. So the first thing to say is that Hegel draws a claim from Kant: reason is needed to guide all theoretical inquiry, by means of its interest in the unconditioned, or completeness of (in Hegel’s terms) reason in the world. As Kant’s says, one cannot be guided by reason “unless one assumes (annimmt)” (A307/B364) that there is something unconditioned. Hegel applies the point to philosophy.[49] So philosophy too must begin with an assumption that this aim or interest is not pointless, empty, meaningless or confused. Call this claim dialectic-propulsion, as it will provide the force and directionality.  

To see how this works, consider Pinkard’s example: Hegel thinks that lawful reality is so universally dependent that this amounts to a kind of contradiction within it. Pinkard is already worried:

…it sounds as if the contradiction is between metaphysics and science, not in the lawful itself. Physicists, to the extent that they are indifferent to metaphysics, need not see any contradiction…

On my account, there are two sides to this: the sense in which Hegel famously leaves a real contradiction in the world here, and the sense in which contradiction propels the Logic forward.

To see the first sense of contradiction, imagine that our physics recognizes three basic, lawfully interacting kinds, X, Y, Z. But what is X? What fixes its identity?[50] At first, there need be no issue if one says that X is just the kind defined by attraction to Y. But if the fixing of identity is thereby deferred to Y, then an issue arises if the same is true of Y and so on to all physical reality. Some will say that this is logically impossible, sometimes saying that there cannot be relations without relata. Russell finds the impossibility obvious:

There are many possible ways of turning some things hitherto regarded as “real” into mere laws concerning the other things. Obviously there must be a limit to this process, or else all the things in the world will merely be each other’s washing. (1927, 325)

Some philosophers continue to see here reason that there would have to be some more independent character to physical reality, even if natural science could never attain knowledge of it. But the pull in that direction is that of what Hegel calls “the metaphysics of the understanding”: the seeming need for something underlying the relational properties here, so that we could bundle all of the relational properties, and say in independent terms what they are properties of. Hegel thinks that physicists tend to give in to the temptation, resulting in their moving beyond physics and into philosophy and metaphysics—but in unfortunate ways. For example, after the successful discovery of gravitation, a philosophical mistake follows: “a physical meaning of independent forces is given” (EN §270A), as if thinking of forces as physical could satisfy the apparent need for independently fixed identities.Hegel’s position is that physicists should be more indifferent to such considerations; philosophers, meanwhile, should recognize that there is a kind of Antinomy contradiction here (again one without special tie to station-temporality), to which Russell is reacting, but it is one that rather expresses the correct metaphysics of merely lawful reality.

With respect, second, to propulsion, the key is that lawful reality now looks explanatorily incomplete. But, Kant and Hegel agree, theoretical inquiry is always guided by the aim of the unconditioned, or completeness of explanation, and can never be indifferent to this. Thus Kant says, as if he were talking of Pinkard’s imagined physicists:

So-called indifferentists, to the extent that they think anything at all, always unavoidably fall back into metaphysical assertions, which they yet professed so much to despise. (Ax)

In the book, I dwell on the defense of Kant on this crucial point (Ch. 4). If anyone holds that Hegel takes a deflationary or indifferentist tack here, dismissing the centrality of the notion of explanatory completeness drawn from Kant, then this reading would seem to me to inevitably fail capture Hegel’s own conception of dialectic, and specifically its ambitiousness. In any case, to apply the point to examples like that of Pinkard’s physicists, I use the famous joke from Molière:

I am asked by the learned doctor for the cause and reason that opium makes one sleep. To this I reply that there is a dormitive virtue in it, whose nature it is to make the senses drowsy.[51]

The idea is that physicists pursue a kind of inquiry based in part on a commitment to reject such dormitive-virtue explanations, and instead to seek more complete explanations. But then they are contradicting their commitment if they say what Pinkard imagines, namely, that physical reality is exhausted by these three forces that we have found, while professing indifference to explanations beyond the fact that x’s do what they do on account of this being the nature of kind X, and so on for kinds Y and Z.

So this is the source of the propulsion: theoretical inquiry cannot rationally be content with this result so far. Physicists will be propelled to doubt that they have found everything, and to seek further, which is as it should be; but Hegel sees also a further underlying philosophical problems. Hegel’s view is that Kant responds to such “contradiction” with a kind of “abstract negation”[52]: explanatory completeness would have to be entirely other or beyond the kind of regress of conditions here, so that it is grasped first in terms of what it is not, as the un-conditioned; he concludes that objects of reason must fall beyond our epistemic limits. Hegel, by contrast, sees no grounds for abandoning the field of the metaphysics of reason’s objects. For he sees rather a determinate negation here: specific failures of completeness demonstrate specific results concerning how better to give a positive understanding of the objects of reason, and so how philosophical inquiry must (given its orientation by reason) proceed. For example, given the contradiction in merely lawfully necessitated reality, the Logic doesn’t just “try something else”—as I put it, it is propelled in that it “must turn instead to teleology” (192).

Of course, this begins another series of disputes with Kant, for which explanations will not fit here: Hegel must defend the reality and knowability of what Kant calls “inner purposiveness”, and Hegel must defend a greater explanatory completeness of such teleology.[53] And Hegel argues that the greater explanatory completeness of teleology requires realization in the lesser explanatory completeness of the lawful—there must be something there to be used on behalf of some purpose or telos.[54] But, coming back to the propulsion issue, a natural outstanding question concerns the status of the starting point that provides the propulsion. This is why Hegel holds that his project will make sense only if determinate negation—all the way to the lawful, to teleology, and on from there—can in the end can circle back and mediate, in the sense of justifying, the initial claim that there is some complete form of reason in the world.[55]

Space allows only brief replies to two further questions. Pinkard notes Quine saying that he privileges physics because he thinks that “nothing happens in the world … without some redistribution of microphysical states” (1981, 98). Pinkard asks whether I see Hegel as agreeing with Quine, or as more of a Platonist. But I think that Quine is operating with such a restricted metaphilosophy that direct comparison to Hegel is unnecessary and unhelpful; substituting a better and more Hegelian metaphilosophy dramatically changes the options. Quine is interested in a privilege of physics (“special deference”). But his merely naturalist conception of philosophy itself restricts what he can say about why. He is so metaphilosophically constricted that what he ends up saying expresses no privilege at all. For it is perfectly possible, given X’s and Y’s, that nothing changes without a change in the X’s and yet precisely the same is true of the Y’s. Privilege would be expressed by views like: everything real is ontologically dependent on the physical. Or: the physical is the reason in the world for everything real. Note the illustration of Kant’s point above: Quine’s “nothing happens” claim tries to be indifferent to such metaphysics, but Quine’s interest in privilege shows him unable to be indifferent. This is part of why I think comparisons to views in a line of thought departing from Quine, Davidson, and so on, bring metaphilosophical baggage that threatens to obscure rather than clarify Hegel. In any case, we could now allow Quine’s claim that every change is accompanied by physical change, while arguing that something else is metaphysically prior in being responsible for those physical changes. Matters are more complex than this in Hegel, but he can for related reasons hold this: like teleology in general, the absolute idea cannot be realized unless there is some non-teleological substrate (unlike a form of Platonism denying this); but the absolute idea, like teleology in general, is metaphysically prior, in that it can be the trumping reason why things happen as they do, and a more complete form of reason in the world (as opposed to Quine’s privileging of the physical). My response to Pinkard’s question about Logic as a “realm of shadows” is similar: yes, the topics of the Logic also require realization in some kind of “sensuous concretion” (WL 5:55/37); but, no, that need not mean that the objects of the Logic lack metaphysical priority, or cannot be “explanatory enough on their own” (xx).

3.

Brady Bowman raises some questions, first, about teleology. At issue is my interpretation and defense of Hegel’s rejoinder to Kant concerning the inner purposiveness of life. I argue that the crucial point is Hegel’s taking the concept or Begriff as “the substance of life” (WL 6:472/678). I interpret the point as related to Hegel’s reading of Aristotle on the species as the form of an organism, and a formal cause. I also explain by saying that this involves an intimacy of tokens (organisms) and their type (species, form, Begriff). Bowman is worried:

Tokens are spatio-temporal particulars with causal powers, whereas types are universals, i.e. non-spatio-temporal entities lacking causal powers… to say that the type is causally responsible for (e.g. “brings about”) any feature of the corresponding tokens amounts to a contradiction in terms. (xx)

I think Hegel would grant that, if that ontology is correct, then nothing like a concept, universal or form could be “the substance of life”, and inner purposiveness would be an “incomprehensible mystery” (WL 6:472/678)—which is what Kant wishes to show.[56] But Hegel is in great shape, in this respect: I think he has excellent arguments, including some independent of the case of teleology, for the conclusion that what “brings about” many happenings crucially involves types in the sense of concepts or kinds (Chapters 1-2). An example: what is responsible for the planets rotating as they do is, in part, the nature of the kind or “Begriff” of matter, or “gravitation” being “the true and determinate concept of material corporeality” (EN §269).

Bowman is also worried that my account of teleology as realized in the non-teleological would leave teleology of no explanatory relevance. He cites Hegel rejecting the view on which the “non-organic” is “represented as existing independently and for itself, and the organic is represented as an external addition” (xx). I agree that Hegel rejects that view. But Hegel’s position, as sketched above, is that non-organic lawful reality is characterized precisely by dependence and lack of anything existing “independently and for itself”. To imagine mechanism as capable of trumping teleology in this way is to hold the view I call “fundamentalist mechanism”, with mechanism paying the role of God in a metaphysics; and Hegel has a good argument that mechanism is too weak to play that role (101). 

But this brings us now to Hegel’s absolute idea. Before coming back to Bowman, I want to return briefly to Tolley’s question on this topic. On my view, as he summarizes, “[w]hat is free and thinking, what is the idea, is no one of its instances, but rather the unity of its instances as the realization of its concept” (xx). And he cites me: ‘the absolute idea is no substrate’, ‘nor is it an individual’, since ‘it is a process or movement, and one connecting kind and particular individual’ (232). Tolley presses a dilemma: does the metaphysical weight of distinguishing the absolute rest on human individuals like us, thinking in some distinctive way; or does it rest with the absolute idea in some independent sense, making this itself a self-conscious individual, more comparable to traditional theological conceptions in this respect? He has cited me ruling out the latter in favor of the absolute idea as a self-moving process. But if I say the former, then Tolley sees this as joining interpreters like Pippin and Pinkard in a humanistic rather than theological approach. But, to begin with, I don’t think the issue is one of a humanist or a theological reading. For, on the one hand, I argue that the Logic itself makes no commitment concerning the individuals involved in the absolute idea being either specifically human, or well-described by the details in the Philosophy of Spirit (230ff.). And, on the other hand, I argue different contending interpretations create different tensions when it comes to Hegel’s suggestions about the connection between the absolute idea and theology. The Spinozist approach noted by Tolley, like mine, will have both advantages and disadvantages here (265). So I do not think that the options can be adjudicated just in terms of which best captures the sense of Hegel’s comparisons with God; they should be adjudicated on the basis of the metaphysical arguments, and how these fit into a system. So the issue concerns rather the relations between individuals and their concept or Begriff. And Tolley’s question about this seems to me to insist on a dualism that Hegel would reject. I don’t think that the metaphysical weight in Hegel’s metaphysics is going to be carried by one thing or another thing, but by a distinctive interrelationship, or a system that precisely crosses supposed gulfs. It is not as if we should expect that Hegel would directly answer if pressed with a supposed dilemma concerning whether the concrete universal is supposed to be concrete, or rather universal; clearly the point is that it is both. Hegel’s arguments about teleology, I point out in the book, require a form of this “both” all forms of the idea will involve a system relating individuals to their kind or concept (Begriff).[57] Further, Hegel's transitions focus on the limitations of a prior topic. For example, noting the lack of a “totality of self-determination” (WL 6:429/645) in “Chemism” is not a criticism of the idea of such a self-determining system—it is an indication that this is what is lacking insofar as we still have not yet reached the absolute idea. So the story is similar with the discussion of death to which Tolley points: at the end of “Life”, “living individuality… on account of its initial immediacy” “perishes” in “universality” “as the power” (EL §221). The point is not to argue that individuals cannot carry more metaphysical weight. On the contrary, this is a limitation at this stage, falling short of the absolute idea: in “Life” individuals are too powerless to carry their share of the weight in a truly self-determining system. So the point is that self-consciousness will allow individuals and their kind or concept to share the metaphysical weight in a manner finally allowing a self-determining system. The sense in which the system is self-conscious will not be reducible to any independent facts about its elements. We certainly should not expect the absolute idea to involve the emergence of an independent divine standpoint beyond our own, insofar as this would recreate the dualism between our own and a divine form of knowledge—which Hegel famously, at least by the time of the Logic, seeks to overcome: “[t]he opposition … must be set aside” (EL §78). Finally, there is Tolley’s connection to Pinkard and Pippin on spirit. But here I myself argue that it is an advantage of my reading that I can incorporate some of the benefits of their account of spirit. I borrow some of what they have to say about Hegel on self-consciousness, while giving a new account of the significance of this theme for Hegel’s project—insofar as the key is not anything like the role of this theme in an account of the conditions of the possibility of experience or cognition of objects, but rather in a metaphysics of reason in the world (section 9.1).

But this returns us to Bowman, who thinks—and he has great company in this—that Hegel is a metaphysical monist; I, again, do not. Bowman notes some passages that seem to suggest oneness. I argue that there are passages that seem to suggest a metaphysical monism on which the One explains or grounds everything real—as well as passages that seem incompatible with this view (261-2). So those on both sides need to explain the seeming discrepancy. The monists I was concerned about in the book are those who have what I call the “partial perspective” for reading Hegel: from a partial perspective, things seem to be many; from a complete perspective the whole is seen as only the One that explains or grounds everything real. I give many reasons for denying that this can be Hegel’s position. For example, it looks to rest on the kind of dualism between a mediate, limited, finite intellect and an infinite mind grasping reality immediately; that is again a dualism Hegel rejects (EL §78). Further, the “partial perspective” strategy conflicts with with Hegel’s argument that greater explanatory completeness (as in teleology) requires realization in something that is itself truly of lesser explanatory completeness (mechanism). For this means that it cannot be the case, for Hegel, that everything is completely explicable—he must and does reject the principle of sufficient reason (PSR). It is not just that some things must appear to be incompletely explicable; they must really be, and so cannot be, when seen from a complete perspective, completely in and grounded by any One. 

But I suspect that Bowman and I are not as far apart here as first meets the eye. Bowman cuts to the crux with a beautiful passage:

Monism is the view that only one object truly is or exists, and Hegel clearly seems to be saying that nothing other than the Absolute Idea is a fully determinate unity and that therefore nothing other than the Absolute Idea fully is, i.e. fully possesses being. That’s monism. (xx)

I am intrigued by Bowman’s introduction of this “fully”: here we seem to get a metaphysics of these non-full entities, or partials—as opposed to the what seems to me to be an epistemological dodge in the partial-perspective strategy. This gloss is surprisingly close to the view I attribute to Hegel, namely: only the absolute idea is fully rational, substantial, actual, and true. There is a slight difference here, insofar as I think that this requires saying rather that there are or exist (fully) some things that are not fully actual, substantial, etc. And it seems to me clear that this is more precisely what Hegel does say. For example, Hegel famously equates the rational and the actual. But he is at pains here to emphasize that there is or exists much that is not fully actual: “[a]ny sensible consideration of the world discriminates … what truly merits the name ‘actuality’” (EL §6). Lecture notes deny that we should “call every brain wave, error, evil, and suchlike ‘actual’, as well as every existence” (EL §6Zu).

But however that slight difference is resolved, I think we are on the road to allowing that these partial entities are not fully unified with (or in, or similar) the absolute idea. What I argue in the book is that the only grounds for claiming defending such a metaphysical monism would have to be some version of the PSR, used in some manner like Spinoza uses it.[58] But Hegel argues—powerfully, I try to show—that any such use of the PSR will force the monist to an unacceptable elimination of all finitude and all determinacy. So Hegel would say, first, that there can be no good reason for thinking that the partials must be in one absolute idea, or unified with it, etc. And it is hard to see, second, how they could be. For surely the absolute idea is completely explicable in terms of itself, similar at least in some sense to Spinoza’s substance. So I would think that something fully in or unified with the absolute idea would be completely explicable thereby. So once we have a metaphysical claim about these partials (whether partially existing, or partially substantial, etc.), I think the break with Spinoza is sharp and decisive: First, a decisive break with arguments from a PSR, needed, on Hegel’s account, for monism; Hegel’s metaphysics includes things like the lawful, which are not completely explicable—not by the absolute idea nor by anything at all. Second, in Hegel’s metaphysics such things will be partially “at the mercy of the unreason of externality”, and lawful reality will “burdened … with externality” where “forms still remain external to each other”[59]. The metaphysics of non-full entities, then, will have them at least partially external to the absolute idea, or partially non-unified by or with it. So this metaphysics will allow some things that are neither the absolute idea, nor in it, nor unified with it, nor similar. To borrow from Bowman’s great passage, for the purposes of a friendly version of the Hegelian determinate negation that we all seek to understand: that’s not monism.

 

 

Abbreviations

AA      Kant, Gesammelte Schriften Akademie Ausgabe. Berlin: Reimer, later de Gruyter 1900ff.

ENC    Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften (1830), in: GW 20. “R” = Remark, “A” = Addition.

GW     Hegel, Gesammelte Werke, edited by the Acad­emy of Sciences of Nordrhein-Westfalia, in cooperation with the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft. Hamburg 1968ff.

TWA   Hegel, Werke in zwanzig Bänden: Theorie Werkausgabe, edited by E. Moldenhauer, K. M. Michel. Frankfurt am Main: 1969ff.

The rest need to be made uniform between the papers

 

Other Works Cited

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Beierwaltes, Werner 2004. Platonismus und Idealismus. 2. Aufl. Frankfurt am Main.

Bird, A. (2007b). “The Regress of Pure Powers?” Philosophical Quarterly, 57, 513–34

Bowman, Brady 2012. Hegel and the Metaphysics of Absolute Negativity. Cambridge.

Foot, P. (2001). Natural goodness. Oxford, Clarendon.

Garrett, D. (1979). “Spinoza's Ontological Argument.” The Philosophical Review 88/2: 198–223. 

Halfwassen, Jens  2005. Hegel und der späte Neuplatonismus: Untersuchungen zur Metaphysik des Einen und des Nous in Hegels spekulativer und geschichtlicher Deutung. [= HEGEL-STUDIEN Beiheft 40]. 2. Aufl. Hamburg.

Halfwassen, Jens  2004. Plotin und der Neuplatonismus. München.

Horstmann, Rolf-Peter 1984. Ontologie und Relationen. Hegel, Bradley, Russell und die Kontroverse über interne und externe Beziehungen. Königstein.

Hutchison, K. 1991. “Dormitive Virtues, Scholastic Qualities, and the New Philosophies.” History of Science 29: 245–78.


Kreines, J. 2015. Reason in the World: Hegel’s Metaphysics and its Philosophical Appeal. OUP.

Lane, N. 2015. The vital question : energy, evolution, and the origins of complex life.

Moore, A. W. (2012). The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics : Making Sense of Things. New York, Cambridge University Press.

Pippin, R. 1989. Hegel’s Idealism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.


Plotinus 1918. On the One and Good, Being the Treatises of the Sixth Ennead. Translated by Stephen Mackenna, B. S. Page. Boston.

Robinson, Howard 2014. "Substance", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2014 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr2014/entries/substance/>. [Accessed 26.01.2016]).

Russell, B. 1927. The Analysis of Matter. London: Kegan Paul.

Thompson, M. (2008). Life and action : elementary structures of practice and practical thought. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press.

Thompson, M. (2013). Forms of nature: ‘first’, ‘second’, ‘living’, ‘rational’ and ‘phronetic’. Freiheit : Stuttgarter Hegel-Kongress 2011. G. Hindrichs and A. Honneth. Frankfurt am Main, Vittorio Klostermann: 701-735.