The Philosophy of Hegel

hi today i want to talk about the philosophy of hegel one of the last great system builders i am going to ignore the warning of some analytic philosophers that one must never finagle with hegel there can be no apology for his phenomenology and instead talk about some of the ideas in his work the phenomenology of spirit and a number of other works especially we're going to focus on hegel's dialectic his way of thinking about the way in which thought is transformed the dynamics of thought if you will the way it changes over time logicians tend to think about the logical relations among propositions what's a premise what's a conclusion and so forth it's a very static picture occasionally they talk about how language changes a logic might try to take into account the fact that sentences are said in sequences building on one another not merely as sets that all somehow get presented at the same time but most logical systems abstract away from all of that hegel thinks that the most fundamental ideas of logic however should have to do with the dynamics of thought the way in which thought progresses thought changes and that's a very different conception so logicians who pick up hegel's logic are going to be surprised they're going to be finding very little that's familiar and a great deal that seems to them very very strange it's because hegel is interested in those dynamic questions not in the static question of how this proposition relates to that proposition but instead how people thinking about a problem in a certain way or having a certain kind of view are going to find themselves confronted with things that will then lead them to think about things in a different way so he's interested in something like the dynamics of thinking whereas you might say that most logicians are focused on the statics or the kinematics at most of thinking so hegel is giving us a very different conception not just of logic but of the philosophy of mind of the nature of the world than we find in earlier philosophers and his impact over the last two centuries has been immense let's begin by recalling some key facts about kant kant's rationalism held that there were innate ideas pure concepts of the understanding in his way of presenting it the categories that were based on the logical functions of judgment and then there were synthetic operary truths or laws of the understanding things that we used as part of our conceptualization of the world to actually construct the objects of experience so kant was a kind of idealist the objects of experience are things we construct through our own mental activity we receive information from sensibility but then that gets processed in a multi-stage process into objects that we synthesize and so we can know things about them a priori independent leave experience by understanding that process of synthesis but all of this applies only within the realm of experience it applies to things that are being projected not to the world itself hegel has a very different idea so to think about what he is doing to change the picture let me draw you a little sketch of what cot had in mind kant's picture as we've laid it out is something like this caught let's say depicts a thought as occurring within a mind a mind that is receiving information in some fashion from sensibility so here we have sensibility our faculties of sense perception and here out there is something that is generating that the thing in itself numenor is his technical term for that we relate in a multi-stage process the information coming from sensibility let's say through this perception to some concepts here maybe some empirical concepts we've derived from experience maybe from well from our a priori concepts of the understanding and then the mind projects on the basis of this an object of experience the thing that we experience as a triangle and we take our thought to be about that triangle but really it's not a direct line of that triangle affecting us as in plato or aristotle or many earlier philosophers instead this thing is an appearance it is something that is being constructed it's an appearance he also refers to that as an object of experience he uses the greek term this is a phenomenon this is a pneumonian that is to say the thing in itself so in general the phenomena of experience the objects of experience are things that are the product of mental activity i compare this in my talk about kant to a projector the mind is something like a projector and some information comes into the projector a digital file a film strip something that gives it information about what it is to project but then it projects something on the screen of experience and we can know something a priori about the things that will be projected on that screen by knowing something about the projector but given that we have knowledge of things on the screen and we are able to have some reflective knowledge of the nature of the projector what then do we infer about the thing in itself well we have no guarantee that these things will obey the laws of the understanding they're the inputs so for example it might be that everything that can appear on that screen because we're using a black and white projector is black and white that doesn't mean that reality is just black and white that what goes into it is black and white that what goes into it has any color at all for that matter it could just be a digital file it might be zeros and ones um or really just electrical impulses that are meant to represent zeros and ones and so what's getting projected here is no similarity to this at all so in short we can infer nothing about the nature of the thing in itself he refers to this as the unconditioned equal to x that is to say it is unknown we don't know something he thinks must be affecting sensibility it's not just doing this of its own accord it's not just kind of off on a wild flight of fancy and after all different people seem to perceive the same thing at the same time if you were to walk into this room you would see chairs you would see the lights you would see me and so that i mean that needs to be explained we'll talk about that problem much later but khan says all this is reason to think there is a thing in itself first thing hegel does is say wait a minute i don't think that's doing anything for you look you're saying sensibility is receiving information from the thing in itself the new in a world and then this is all taking place and we can know about this part we can know about this part we can deduce something about all of this even a priori good with you with all that but now what role exactly is this playing you can't officially even say this exists or that it's causing us to perceive things in any way because causation and existence are some of the categories you know they apply the things out here you have no reason for thinking they apply here maybe they do i mean you can't rule it out on the basis of what you said but in short the thing in itself is playing no role in the theory it is doing nothing for you okay it's sitting around like an independent wheel or like an appendix you might say in a human body where maybe it's good for something but it doesn't seem like it's good for anything so hegel says first of all get rid of that it accomplishes nothing in this theory we end up having some weird thing there and we said but we can't say anything about it we don't know what's going on in short it's just like substance in luck from barclay's point of view for example or from hume's point of view you end up saying well there must be something i know not what and which these qualities in here that makes this all hang together as an object well what is it says barkley something you know what that's no theory of anything just get rid of it you don't need it there's just a bunch of qualities here right you're saying no they're in something they're in something what i don't know i mean barclays in effect saying that's no theory get rid of it it's doing no theoretical work for you at all and hegel says the same thing to kant here he says okay so all of this process rests ultimately on a thing in itself but it's doing something i know not what and has something i know not what character that enables it to do whatever i don't know what it's doing and in short he says that that that just explains nothing get rid of it it's not doing any work it explains nothing whatever but the second thing he does is to say okay you're getting something a priori here and you've got these laws of the understanding the a priori concepts well all right there are empirical things like triangle but then there's all this stuff here that you claim is a priori and you say from that you can get universal knowledge you can get necessary knowledge well hegel says that's going to be true only if we all have exactly the same a priori concepts of the understanding only if the same laws of the of the understanding operate for everybody every human being in every culture every time every place why should we think any of that is true why should we believe that all of us share the same opioid concepts that all of us share the same laws of the understanding all of us approach experience in the same way and have our minds function in the same way hegel says i don't see why that should be true at all so hegel thinks about these categories these concepts of the understanding and the laws of the understanding and says why should they be constant and invariable why do they have to be universal all human beings all times all places that doesn't seem right we're going to get universal and necessary knowledge of the world only if all of that is constant the same for all people all times all places all circumstances all societies all cultures all historical periods etc but there's no reason to expect that why should we expect human beings to construct the world in the same way at all times and places all circumstances all cultures think about somebody seeing the world as a resident of ancient egypt apparently they saw the world as two-dimensional that's a joke or someone who is a resident of a medieval village or someone living in the midst of the kalahari desert or modern-day manhattan why should all of these people construct the world in the same way why should they all approach it with the same set of concepts now of course they're going to have different concepts coming in from experience but angle doesn't just mean that why should we assume they have all the same starting points at the outset so hegel says i'm a historicist what does that mean the way we construct the world develops over time philosophy and these opioid concepts these laws of the understanding they vary with historical circumstances the famous quotation here is philosophy is its own time raised to the level of thought hegel says tell me what an ancient egyptian said in philosophy or what an ancient greek said or a medieval villager said or a resident of the modern day united states says i'll tell you those are the cultural assumptions those are the assumptions the concepts they're bringing to understanding the world are they all identical no there are some overlap i mean it would be surprising given that they're all human beings who face basic human problems if there were no overlap at all of course there's overlap and you might try to find that overlap as aha that's the true universal necessary a priori thing which i think is kant's attitude but hegel says i'm not so sure about that it might be that just that set of people in that set of circumstances historically developing have that set of concepts now go study the people in the kalahari desert go study those who are indigenous peoples above the ark circle go find some people living on remote pacific islands or remote areas of the amazon are they going to conceptualize things the same way i mean maybe they they too get hungry they too get thirsty there may be some things that they all have in common as human beings but we shouldn't assume that at the outset that's a question for anthropologists and so hegel says really when i think about how people organize experience i don't find them all saying oh yes every of it must have a cause in fact in the contemporary world now that we've been exposed to quantum mechanics and the real possibility that some things just happen without cause that it best their statistical regularities at some level of reality not clear by the way that's in the end how to interpret those theories but it's a very plausible way to interpret them and by now we're used to that thought so we look at kant or earlier philosophers saying every event must have a cause this is built into the structure of the mind and we're inclined to say well no it's not i can entertain the possibility that's not true that some things are truly random what about other ideas like gosh the idea that the amount of matter in the world cannot be destroyed or expanded maybe but maybe that's exactly what happens when we have an atomic explosion we convert matter into energy maybe the amount of energy in the world remains constant our physical theory tells us that it is on the other hand i can imagine that it's not so in short we're now thinking there are a lot of things that these philosophers thought it was impossible for us to entertain that we think we can entertain those things seem to change over time well they do change but hegel says that doesn't mean that i want to end up as an absolute relativist who says well you know if just the truth varies with time and place or to become a skeptic who says who knows who's right we all approach the world differently blah instead he says no there are ways in which thought progresses there are ways in which cultures progress there are ways in which thinking progresses and he calls that in well in german the term is geist in fact his great work is the phenomenology of geist that is to say of spirit or of mind that progresses through stages toward absolute knowledge here in talking about geist he doesn't mean just specifically your mind but or my mind he really means thinking itself the ways in which human beings approach the world the way they think about the world progress as human beings live in this world over time it progresses toward absolute knowledge he has hopes that we will finally reach it maybe it will be a limit we will we'll never really achieve but in any case that's what's happening so it's not a random process we aren't sitting there thinking well who knows who's right he says no we're thinking is getting better and better we're approaching the ultimate truth but we could still be far away from it so what takes place as we progress through these stages what really matters here is not how this set of people happens to see the world at this time instead it's the dynamic principles that govern the development of thinking over time if we have reason to think that we're going to eventually attain absolute knowledge of the world well it must be because we understand what's going on with these dynamic principles so what can we say about that hegel says philosophy can express universal and necessary truths but not of the kind that kant thought not necessary and universal truths about the world as he or earlier avicenna or descartes or leibniz or other rationalists tried to sketch out he says not that kind of thing you're looking for things that are constant across all times places cultures historical periods and so on no that's not it i'm talking about the laws that govern the development of thought itself so what we're going to be able to find as universal and necessary isn't anything about the world it's about the development of thinking okay the dynamic principles that govern thought there will not be a priori propositions about the world there will not be innate concepts about the world there will be these innate higher order abilities and tendencies of thinking that are going to allow us to articulate universal and necessary dynamic principles so these are high-level dynamic principles not about the world but about our thinking about the world they govern the development of thought hegel is thinking about thinking he is thinking about our processes of cognition over time and the way we develop our theories the way we approach the world the concepts we use and the ways in which they change in response to experience he has a number of these dynamic principles by far the most famous is what's become known as the thesis antithesis synthesis pattern and it is a common pattern he thinks he outlines this and the details of its development in a number of different ways so he sees this happening again and again now what is it well let me use an analogy physics tries to give us some constant universal necessary scientific laws it looks at a world with things changing but says nevertheless there's something that isn't changing the laws according to which things are changing they don't change so the scientific laws are constant the things in the world are changing but we can say how and that's what physics tries to do in laws of gravitation laws of motion laws governing electromagnetism and in a variety of other ways the theory of relativity does something similar it looks at the qualities of things in the world things like velocity or motion or even well gosh mass of a variety of things that would have been taken to be primary qualities in the things themselves by descartes lock and it says well actually those things change they change across various reference frames they're really relative to our reference frame but the scientific laws things like this is the speed of light or like well momentum is inertial mass times velocity those are things that are invariant across reference frames and so some scientific laws are invariant no matter how we look at things no matter whether we're moving or stationary and so on but the qualities of things including the primary qualities as traditionally understood they do change across frames hegel's historicism is doing something similar it says our theories about the world our basic concepts that we use about the world change but there are dynamic principles about those concepts and theories that are constant so he is looking at a changing set of things in this case not a changing world or a changing set of reference frames but instead a changing set of theories about the world and he's saying i can formulate laws for how those theories change and so if you look at a changing world here and then think of our theories as being one level up trying to be constant hegel's looking and saying yeah but they're not very constant are they look one level higher that's where you get the constant theories about the way in which our thinking about the world changes so if you might say an ordinary science of the world and traditional philosophies are looking at the world saying we got a changing world but maybe we can find some unchanging truths about it hegel says i see a bunch of changing theories about those unchanging truths but i can tell you how those theories are changing and i'll come up with the only truly unchanging things one level higher at the level of thinking not about the world but thinking about thinking so here's his idea behind thesis antithesis synthesis we start with a thesis it transforms itself into an antithesis or you might say it comes into conflict with an antithesis and then out of that arises a synthesis all of this can be presented in a way that makes it sound utterly mysterious and mystical and some philosophers have rejected it that way the african philosopher quasi roredu for example has looked at this saying that these are just seemingly mystical laws and insofar as marx takes them over and builds them into the foundations of marxism there's similarly this mystical thing going on at the basis of marxism well turning here just to the hegel part forget marx for a moment um we can say i think he has in mind something that isn't quite as mystical as all of that here's the underlying idea suppose we are interested in mapping out the course of well in this case the colorado river as it's going through southern utah and headed toward the grand canyon we find formations like this and you can see here the river has been cutting through this rock over eons to make shapes like this dramatic and beautiful scenery but also has a bizarre and complex path as it goes through the rock well suppose i'm trying to do this and let's say there's a border between two counties that is supposed to follow the river and i'm trying to chart where exactly this boundary is well i am doing this using surveying tools that require me to use straight lines in a certain sense intuitively we can say look it's in the center of that river so it does go like this but hey come on i'm supposed to be surveying this right and reporting coordinates and i can't do curves like that i i have these things and i look through them and i do sight lines and i need to reduce this to straight lines somehow so how do i do it well here's the idea it's too complex really to be captured by any finite set of straight lines so what i'm doing is approximating and i approximate it first in this way i try this line this line but then you come back and you look and say well that's not quite right i mean come on look it's going over here it's going over there you're not really capturing the curve correctly so we say there are inadequacies to that thesis let's try solving the problem you've got this mistake here let's fix that in fact if we draw the thing differently in this way start over here instead and try to map this then we get something different so here in a grossly oversimplified form over on the left there i've got the thesis okay we try drawing that line we say well wait a minute that's not capturing this little oxbow thing going on here and this little peninsula there that's being left out and so on and so forth we say this isn't quite right so we draw a different line through this and that i've got marked as the antithesis but then the same thing happens there we look and we say well now yeah you reported this but now we've gone in in our more detailed survey and that's not quite right i mean that's not the center of the river here it's cutting off all sorts of rock formations and so forth so we synthesize them we come up with something else now here i've drawn it as something halfway in between roughly but of course that's not always the case in fact we might reconceptualize and say you know we need a totally different technique this isn't going to do it at all so the synthesis tries to combine the strengths of the thesis and antithesis but sometimes the compromise between them often is a transcendence of them and hegel's term for this they are alpha-hoven they are transformed they are transcended by the synthesis so it's not just a compromise it's not just a blending or a combination we somehow replace them with this new way of thinking about things and ideally it really is a transformation of the way we're thinking not merely some compromise or combination so here's the general pattern people adopt a certain way of looking at and thinking about things that's the thesis but it's only partially correct the world's a complicated place it's not going to be totally right so it faces contrary evidence faces counter examples anomalies contradictions problems emerge and then we say well all right we tried going with that hypothesis and we encountered all sorts of problems for a while people try to solve the problems and then they say you know what maybe we should have a new way of looking at things and indeed in science this often happens people are getting a theory they're trying to develop the theory they say well that's a problem case this is a problem case but we solve it we can solve this we can solve this and the theory becomes more and more complicated until finally somebody says that's the wrong way to approach it why don't we start from this side instead and so they come up with the antithesis they shift to this new and contrary way of looking at things but it's also only a partial truth i mean it's a new way of thinking about things in a sense it denies the starting point of the other one said let's approach it from a different direction but it too ends up facing contrary evidence counter examples anomalies contradictions again the world's a complicated place it doesn't get everything right so eventually we realize we have to in some way combine the strengths of both and avoid the weaknesses of both so we resolve the conflict between the thesis and the antithesis and transcend them in a new synthesis it draws elements from both it transforms how people think how people see things and it becomes a new thesis but then the problem starts again the process starts again we begin thinking oh yes but now it is the new exciting idea we go with it and then it starts encountering anomalies contradictions counter evidence counter examples and now we say well what do we do about it and the same thing happens so thought keeps doing this hegel traces it through a number of things you can see it happening in pre-socratic philosophy where we've got some people saying there is one kind of thing at the foundation of the world adams somebody else or sorry i have one thing water that says thales someone else says no there are different kinds of things air water fire and then somebody else says no there are many many different kinds of things all these atoms okay and someone else you know heraclitus says change is constant everything is just constantly changing apartment foreign ever changes then plato and aristotle say well things change but they remain the same thing across change they change their accidental properties but they retain their essential properties and so forth so these kinds of synthesis between opposing ideas keep happening well hegel says that's the general pattern of human thought that just keeps happening but notice that as it happens you are trying to eliminate contrary evidence counter examples you're getting your straight lines to approximate that curve more and more closely so there's a sense in which you hope you're getting closer to the absolute truth and he's confident that in the long run we keep getting better and better at thinking about things as we do this we do confront the counter examples the contrary evidence the anomalies the contradictions and we do try to improve our ways of thinking that retains the explanatory power and the strength of our earlier theories so in that way our theories keep getting better and better who understood the physical world better aristotle in his physics or a contemporary physicist surely we hope the contemporary physicists because all sorts of anomalies over centuries have been taken care of and are incorporated into the strength and power of that modern theory well as we do this we have to recognize that we're not doing this in a vacuum and we're not driven just by the world we do this in a social and historical context we frame our thinking and our theories in terms of language those linguistic units that we use the words the phrases the ways in which we describe the world are shaped by basic categories of thought and they reveal the basic categories of our thinking but other people at our time or slightly earlier other people in our context in our circumstances in our society are teaching us language so i think about the world in a certain way because i speak a certain language i've learned that language from other people in a certain historical context i think about the world well i know other languages but i am a native speaker of english that shapes how i see the world and i learned that english within a particular social setting given a certain interpretation of it so what hume attributed to custom or habit or feeling what caught another rationalist attribute to our priori concepts and laws of reason hegel says i see that as coming out of the social context out of a particular place and time our thinking is shaped socially it is really in society that we live and move and have our being to steal a phrase from an ancient philosopher quoted famously by paul in acts 17 and so hegel says really it is society playing that role we learn our language and our ways of thinking in a given social and historical context that shapes how we think everything in particular hegel attacks the idea of a given he attacks klut's distinction between understanding and sensibility he attacks the empiricist understanding of thinking as depending on sensation impressions and then ideas and so on he says actually no our perceptions of the world are shaped by our concepts from the very start he is against what he calls immediacy this idea that there is anything we contact in the world immediately he says even in a basic perception i might think that this looking at my hands is just a basic perception he says but i'm already thinking of this hands i'm already conceptualizing them how i perceive the world and the concepts i use to frame that perception are all part of one big process it is not that sensibility does its thing then the understanding does it as kant thinks it's not the case that i have these impressions and then i form ideas the ideas the impressions the sensations the understanding the conceptual resources all of that is going on at the same time there is no way to divide concepts from percepts sensation from thinking about sensation the concepts we use to understand sensations our concepts shape the way we perceive the world and our perceptions are already thoroughly conceptual if you don't give me the concepts then i'm not going to perceive the world in the same way i won't see things that really you might say oh look the information is there why aren't you seeing it because i don't have the concepts to process it and so he says there just is no given preconceptual portion of experience that we could isolate and call sensibility or sensation or impressions or anything else like that the whole division on which rationalism and empiricism rest that whole thing has to be rejected well whatever i've said about concepts and perception in the world in general thinking in general also applies to norms norms of ethics but norms govern our behavior in all sorts of ways we construct them we construct them relative to a certain historical period and social context now they do express the world spirit geist in its current state of development and so they are to be sneezed at but on the other hand they are relative to our time and place in formulating principles of ethics we are not formulating universal and unnecessary laws that stem from the laws of nature as in natural law theory or that stem from human nature and our responses to pleasure and pain or happiness or flourishing or thriving nor is there anything like a categorical imperative that applies to all rational beings these are things that we formulate as useful guides for human life at a given time and place nevertheless he says we're not doing that arbitrarily we are doing it because of the successes and failures of earlier systems of norms and so these two are going to progress toward the absolute and in fact what we think about these things now he says is the best we can do now at understanding what that absolute is so as a rather shocking conclusion he says whatever is is right whatever is is rational this is as far as rationality has taken us at this point and the best we can do is adopt the norms that are the most rational given our circumstances so there's a sense in which whatever the ethical norms of our time and place are they're the right norms for us to have at that time and place that's not to say it's all purely relative tomorrow we may look at ourselves today and think we were barbarians nevertheless he says look it was the best we could do at the time and so in general we think that norms too are relative to a time relative to a place but nevertheless have a kind of standing because they are putting us on the path and in fact are expressions of how far along we are on the path toward absolute knowledge of how to live

Channel: Daniel Bonevac

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Length: 34min 46sec (2086 seconds)

Published: Thu Mar 11 2021