‘Philosophy will never seek to deny its “presuppositions,” but neither may it merely admit them. It conceives them and develops with more and more penetration both the presuppositions themselves and that for which they are presuppositions.’
[1]Martin Heidegger,
Sein und Zeit‘With the name “logic,” Hegel reclaims what has continuously constituted the logos of philosophy – and thus reclaims what has engendered every logic: logos signifies that no identity is given, that no identity is simply available, and that identity and unity are always, in their very simplicity and absoluteness, the movement of self-identification and self-unification. Logos designates the “making” of every “given” – that is to say, its “giving” and, more precisely, its “giving of itself”: thus, logos designates the identical not as substance but as act.’
[2]Jean-Luc Nancy,
Hegel: The Restlessness of the NegativeIntroduction In this paper we have set ourselves the unenviable task of elucidating the phenomenological methods of G.W.F. Hegel and Martin Heidegger. The paper is divided into two parts. Part I provides a detailed exposition and critical engagement with Hegel’s phenomenological method as presented in his great work,
Phänomenologie des Geistes (1807).
[3] In this part of the paper we will address four theses which we take to characterize Hegelian phenomenology. Firstly, Hegel’s phenomenology is a Science (Wissenschaft) of the experience of consciousness, shot through with a normative logic that guides its development. Secondly, Hegel’s method emerges out of a decisive confrontation with scepticism. Thirdly, Hegel’s phenomenology is essentially a pedagogical exercise which finds its denouement in Absolute Knowing, the point from which philosophy proper can begin. Finally, the coordination of the two points of view at work in PhG, namely, consciousness and the phenomenologist, is what facilitates the text’s internal movement without compromising the immanent development of Geist.
Part II expounds the basic tenets of Heidegger’s phenomenological ontology as presented in his magnum opus
Sein und Zeit (1927).
[4] We initially explore the prejudices that have led to our ensnarement within a state of forgetfulness vis-à-vis the question of being and consider Heidegger’s exhortations to raise this question anew. Heidegger tells us that ‘fundamental ontology…must be sought in the existential analysis of Dasein.’
[5] But rather than dwell upon the minutiae of the existential analytic, we will examine Heidegger’s interpretation of the originary and constitutive elements of phenomenology, that is to say, the Greek words, phainomenon and logos, as he interprets them. We hope to show as a result that his reconfiguration of logos as hermēneuein was indispensable to his understanding of the phenomenology of human existence in terms of a phenomenological hermeneutics.
Although we compare and contrast the respective phenomenological methods of Hegel and Heidegger throughout the paper, it is only in Part III that we overtly proceed along comparative lines. There we scrutinize not only Heidegger’s criticisms of dialectical philosophy but also the neo-Kantian philosopher, Paul Natorp’s objections to phenomenological method which he regards as ultimately self-defeating. It is in this way that we hope to elicit an encounter of sorts between Hegelian and Heideggerian phenomenology.
Part I
Phenomenology and the Logic of PhenomenaHeidegger, in 1930-1931, delivered a series of lectures in which he analysed several sections of Hegel’s PhG. In the opening pages of these lectures Heidegger cites the complete title of PhG. This is by no means insignificant. Why? Despite his, at times excessive haste to assimilate Hegel into the history of Western metaphysics, he has espied something which many of Hegel’s admirers have since passed over without even a passing consideration. The full title of Hegel’s text reads:
System of Science: Part One, Science of the Experience of Consciousness.
[6] The subtitle of the text,
Science of the Experience of Consciousness, makes especially clear the theme we wish to belabour in our treatment of Hegel throughout this paper. Thus contrary to naturalism and more specifically psychologism, Hegel takes our epistemic relation to an object to have a complex logical structure, which although made explicit only within the course of experience, is nevertheless both rational and necessary.
[7] The PhG is ‘the Science of the experience which consciousness goes through’.
[8] The overarching thrust of Hegelian phenomenology is thus to demonstrate that all of our experience from the most rudimentary to the most sophisticated is conceptually mediated and comprised of a multiplicity of moments integrated within a complex and differentiated totality.
[9] The ‘moments of the whole are patterns of consciousness.’
[10] Hegel does not apply a dialectical method but engages in phenomenological description teasing out the conceptual and logical commitments, within which consciousness finds itself entangled in its experience of its object.
[11] We wish to emphasize this point because we believe it strikes at the very heart of Hegel’s phenomenological endeavour. Hegel states the purpose of PhG with an unusual degree of lucidity in the Introduction to his
Wissenshaft der Logik,
[12]‘In the Phenomenology of Spirit I have exhibited consciousness in its movement onwards from the first immediate opposition of itself and the object to absolute knowing. The path of this movement goes through every form of the relation of consciousness to the object and has the Concept
[13] of science for its result. This Concept therefore (apart from the fact that it emerges within logic itself) needs no justification here because it has received it in that work; and it cannot be justified in any other way than by this emergence in consciousness, all the forms of which are resolved into this Concept as into their truth.’
[14]In PhG we do not encounter Hegel’s philosophy proper, a ‘presupposition’ of which is the identity of thought and being.
[15] PhG, according to Hegel acts as a ‘deduction’ of the ‘Concept of pure science’.
[16] ‘Absolute Knowing,’ the point d’appui of Hegel’s ontological logic, is the result and culmination of the transformation and supersession of a multitude of disparate shapes of consciousness (
Gestalten des Bewuβtseins), which dissolve immanently in and through the experience of their respective objects. ‘Of the Absolute it must be said that it is essentially a result, that only in the end is it what it truly is’.
[17] The relation of consciousness to its object, at least in principle, elicits from within experience itself, its self-determination and metamorphosis. The clichés regularly bandied about which accuse Hegel of positing a predetermined telos, presupposing the Absolute from the start, or finally reverting back to a dogmatic pre-Critical metaphysics are erroneous insofar as we take the textual evidence seriously. On the contrary, and to the chagrin of Hegel’s detractors, it is only at the end of the process of phenomenological dialectic that he feels himself able to unabashedly state,
‘Absolute knowing is the truth of every mode of consciousness because, as the course of the Phenomenology showed, it is only in absolute knowing that the separation of the object from the certainty of itself is completely eliminated: truth is now equated with certainty and this certainty with truth.’
[18]We will make the case for such a reading of PhG in some detail below. Phenomenology provides a series of stepping stones by which ‘natural consciousness’ can attain the vantage point of Science or speculative philosophy.
[19] The transitions from one shape of consciousness to another best illustrate the normative dimension of Hegelian phenomenology. The logical character of consciousness’s experience becomes palpable in the irremissible tension between consciousness’s claim to adequately know its object, and the veritable poverty of this knowledge, which comes to light in the course of experience itself. This process in turn generates increasingly mediated and intricate varieties of experience and knowledge. According to Hegel, this transformation is logically necessitated and irreducible to the caprice of experience.
At a glance we might think that it is on this point Husserlian phenomenology and its diverse progeny depart most patently from the legacy of Hegel. Moreover, as we shall see, Heidegger in his magnum opus, Sein und Zeit (1927), as well as in numerous lecture courses prior to its publication, openly declared his hostility towards dialectic.
[20] Not to mention, his lecture actual course on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit in which he unequivocally repudiates the efforts of the philosopher Nicolai Hartmann to demonstrate the affinity of Hegelian and Husserlian phenomenology.
[21] There are no doubt significant differences, some of which may be irreconcilable, but nonetheless we will argue throughout this paper that the issue is not as black and white as Heidegger is wont to argue. Not only are the disparities between Hegelian phenomenology and contemporary phenomenology far more nuanced than Heidegger presents them, but there also exists the very real prospect for their mutual illumination.
Hegel and the Problem of Scepticism
The Introduction is of first-rate importance for anyone wishing to properly understand PhG. It is here that Hegel stipulates the minimal conditions necessary for phenomenology to begin. He starts by criticizing a roughly ‘Kantian’ position; some commentators have claimed he means Reinhold in particular, but we shall leave that debate to one side for the moment. It’s clear, however, that Hegel’s criticisms could also be efficaciously applied to Hobbesian, Cartesian and Lockean epistemologies. Any epistemology which treats cognition as an instrument or intermediary lying between the subject and objective reality runs the risk of falling into the despair of an irreparable scepticism.
[22]In the aftermath of Immanuel Kant’s Copernican Revolution there was an intense period of debate within German intellectual life. Key members of the intelligentsia such as F.H. Jacobi and J.H. Obereit saw nihilism as an inevitable consequence of Kant’s critical philosophy because, in their opinion, it reduced objective reality to merely the subjective conditions of human understanding, relegating the realities of God, Freedom, and the Immortality of the Soul to things-in-themselves which could never become objects of human cognition. Kant famously wrote in his
Kritik der Reinen Vernunft (KRV) that he had embarked upon the critique of pure reason in order to make room for faith. He had, however, in many of his contemporaries’ eyes left only an unbearable and gaping chasm.
[23] This is the context in which we would like to situate Hegel’s opening remarks of the Introduction. He perspicaciously recognizes the ease with which one can slide from the so-called organon theory of knowledge
[24] to despair and the belief that any such attempt to know reality independently of our representations is doomed to failure. The similarities between Hegel’s presentation of this eventuality in the Introduction and the concluding remarks of the first book of David Hume’s A Treatise of Human Nature are uncanny:
‘The wretched condition, weakness, and disorder of the faculties, I must employ in my enquiries, encrease my apprehensions. And the impossibility of amending or correcting these faculties, reduces me almost to despair, and makes me resolve to perish on the barren rock, on which I am at present, rather than venture myself upon that boundless ocean, which runs out into immensity.’
[25]Hegel echoes this Humean sentiment when he writes in the Introduction:
‘A certain uneasiness seems justified, partly because there are different types of cognition, and one of them might be more appropriate than another for the attainment of this goal, so that we could make a bad choice of means; and partly because cognition is a faculty of a definite kind and scope, and thus, without a more precise definition of its nature and limits, we might grasp clouds of error instead of the heaven of truth. This feeling of uneasiness is surely bound to be transformed into the conviction that the whole project of securing for consciousness through cognition what exists in itself is absurd, and that there is a boundary between cognition and the Absolute that completely separates them.’
[26]When cognition is thought of as a medium for grasping objective reality, the subject’s apprehension of the object is invariably distorted, since it bears the indelible mark of the cognitive act through which it initially came to be known. It begins with a model of knowledge that emphasizes either the activity of the knowing subject or the receptivity of the cognitive process.
[27] Even if ‘cognition is not an instrument of our activity but a more or less passive medium through which the light of truth reaches us, then again we do not receive the truth as it is in itself, but only as it exists through and in this medium.’
[28] Try as we might to refine and examine the instrument of cognition there remains, for Hegel, an intractable problem.
Any effort to eliminate the impact of cognition upon the apprehension of the object is a fruitless exercise which results only in an infinite regress because one is inescapably reliant on the medium of cognition and can never be sure that one has fully determined its fundamental character and the definitive limits of its operation. He writes, ‘if by testing cognition, which we conceive of as a medium, we get to know the law of its refraction, it is again useless to subtract this from the end result.’ He continues, ‘For it is not the refraction of the ray, but the ray itself whereby truth reaches us, that is cognition; and if this were removed, all that would be indicated would be a pure direction or a blank space.’
[29] Furthermore, any attempt to subtract the impact of cognition upon our apprehension of the object, by means of a supervening and introspective operation of the mind, falls short of a pure and unadulterated cognizance. This is because it is only by means of the instrument of cognition that an object can be known by a subject at all. As a consequence, this model of cognition finds itself caught up in a circular begging of the question because without the instrument of cognition the object simply evaporates for the knower.
Hegel’s polemic against a very general vision of epistemology prepares the way for his questioning its aforementioned pre-eminent assumption. This conception of the relation between knower and known ‘takes for granted certain ideas about cognition as an instrument and as a medium, and assumes that there is a difference between ourselves and this cognition. Above all, it presupposes that the Absolute stands on one side and cognition on the other, independent and separated from it, and yet is something real’.
[30] What is Hegel’s alternative to a road that can only lead to an all-encompassing scepticism? Hegel’s reply may well be an unexpected one for some. It seems that an image of Hegel and his philosophy has been erected since the polemics of F.W.J. Schelling and Ludwig Feuerbach, which has unfortunately become indissociable from and even a substitute for reading his actual texts.
This is true of both the analytic and Continental reception of Hegel. For example, Jürgen Habermas in his Knowledge and Human Interests writes that Hegel’s objection to the organon theory of knowledge ‘is obviously only valid presupposing that there can be something like knowledge in itself or absolute knowledge independent of the subjective conditions of possible knowledge.’
[31] But Habermas ignores a fairly straightforward point. First, as far as Hegel is concerned we are still a long way off breaching the environs of philosophical reflection, and thus, by Hegel’s lights, can’t begin a phenomenological inquiry by first trying to determine the transcendental conditions under which experience and knowledge are possible. Second, Hegel wishes to begin, as we will argue in greater detail below, his phenomenological investigation with the assumptions of natural consciousness in tact i.e. that the object is distinct from me and has an existence independent of the conditions under which I cognize it.
[32] So when Habermas alleges that ‘Hegel’s critique does not proceed immanently’
[33] it is in fact he that falls short of following the immanent development of consciousness in PhG. It is in large part due to a pervasive and influential simulacrum of Hegel’s thought that many are taken aback when they learn that scepticism is in fact integral to his thinking in both its phenomenological and philosophical manifestations. So contrary to Feuerbach’s claims,
[34] Hegel believes that the conclusions of scepticism must be pursued, albeit not in the manner we have outlined hitherto, which in his opinion, only lead to dogmatism or solipsism.
It is Hegel’s conviction that Science can only liberate itself from the shackles of equipollence by turning on itself. Hegel greatly admired ancient scepticism and the doctrine of equipollence which it formulated. While he only had contempt for its modern descendent, advocated by figures in Germany, such as G.E. Schulze, whose scepticism cum dogmatism only served to sully the noble lineage of its ancient predecessor.
[35] He regarded it dogmatic because it based itself uncritically upon the immediate certainty of matters of fact and sense data. But as Hegel says, ‘One bare assurance is worth just as much as another.’
[36] This is Hegel’s invocation of the two sets of tropes articulated by classical scepticism. The term ‘trope’ expresses a fundamental premise of sceptical argumentation, which holds that for every thesis or argument an equally probable thesis or argument can be found.
[37] This leaves the possibility of certitude and self-satisfied dogmatism on shaky terrain and crystallizes the issue of equipollence, to wit, the problem of deciding between two opposing albeit equally probable theses.
[38]It is this seemingly insoluble issue that leads Hegel to exclaim that Science cannot rest assured in its self-professed indubitability and by virtue of that fact feel itself worthy of our esteem and praise. As Robert R. Williams has perceptively discerned, Hegel strongly believes that scepticism if wielded efficaciously can play an indispensable role in the process of speculative philosophizing.
[39] It purveys the negative and critical dynamism which is a precondition of speculative philosophy.
[40] Williams characterizes Hegel’s phenomenology as a self-accomplishing scepticism because the immanent dissolution and movement of consciousness emanates from consciousness’s own self-subversion.
[41] In this respect, modern scepticism is impoverished by comparison. It is insufficiently critical, and thus in the final analysis incoherent, because it fails to unleash the same degree of critical and destructive vehemence with which it savages metaphysics, towards its own preconceptions and dogmas.
[42] The issue of equipollence as a consequence never becomes a problem for it.
[43]This is the compelling reason for Hegel’s attempt at an ‘exposition of how knowledge makes its appearance’.
[44] Hegel is above all concerned with how knowledge appears to consciousness. He is not preoccupied with a metaphysical inquiry in any conventional sense. As Stephen Houlgate has astutely observed, Hegel doesn’t straightforwardly seek to furnish an explanation of the quidditas or whatness of things i.e. that which makes a thing what it is.
[45] Since Hegel’s so-called Objective Idealism, as developed in WL, doesn’t subtend the preliminary stages of PhG, we have at least ex hypothesi, no intimation of Hegel’s own metaphysical convictions. Too many philosophers and commentators to count have claimed that he sneaks his own metaphysical prejudices surreptitiously through the back door, but we’ll leave that issue aside for the moment.
Pedagogy and Preliminary StipulationsWhat is interesting though, especially with respect to PhG, is the emphasis placed by Hegel the ‘absolute systematiser,’ and ‘totalizing metaphysician’ on pedagogy as the abiding rationale for phenomenology. ‘The series of configurations which consciousness goes through along this road is, in reality, the detailed history of the education of consciousness itself to the standpoint of Science.’
[46] So unlike Wittgenstein’s ladder which must be thrown away after one has climbed it,
[47] Hegel’s ladder arises out of a demand placed on philosophy by natural consciousness to justify its standpoint as Science. The ‘individual has the right to demand that Science should at least provide him with the ladder to this standpoint, should show him this standpoint within himself.’
[48]However, if natural consciousness is prematurely introduced to the standpoint of Science, in the words of Hegel, ‘it makes an attempt, induced by it knows not what, to walk on its head too, just this once; the compulsion to assume this unwonted posture and to go about in it is a violence it is expected to do to itself, all unprepared and seemingly without necessity.’
[49] On the one hand, natural consciousness mustn’t peremptorily defer to the standpoint of philosophy. While on the other, it is compelled if it is ever to surpass its own point of view which it accepts simpliciter, in spite of itself, to tread ‘the pathway of doubt,’ and ultimately ‘the way of despair’.
[50] As PhG unfolds it’s clear that each shape of consciousness takes itself to have grasped reality in itself. It is in this sense that we can say that each shape of consciousness takes itself to be absolute.
A simple objection to Hegel’s method can be presented here: if each shape of consciousness takes itself to be absolute through its conviction that it knows its object most adequately, couldn’t consciousness remain satisfied with its knowledge of the object and thereby eschew following the path of despair and ‘violence at its own hands’ which thence ‘spoils its own limited satisfaction’?
[51] Isn’t Hegel simply perpetuating an Aristotelian prejudice that all human beings intrinsically desire knowledge and strive ceaselessly to know?
[52] On this reading then, PhG can never possibly get off the ground without the philosopher, who behind the scenes engenders putatively ‘immanent’ tensions and thereby instigates the dialectical transitions from one shape of consciousness to another. It is only by means of Hegel’s ventriloquist act that consciousness can lose its object i.e. it can recognize that its criterion of knowledge fails to sufficiently grasp the object, and then find it once again i.e. through an adjustment of its criterion of knowledge, it takes itself to have once more understood the object adequately. We shall argue, however, that Hegel can dispatch this objection, even though its very structure (as an argument) makes it hard to unequivocally refute. We shall address how he manages to circumvent this criticism in the following paragraphs. But before we do this, our exegesis of the Introduction needs to be further extended, because it is there that Hegel makes some important stipulations which delineate the minimal conception of consciousness necessary for phenomenology to begin.
Hegel was a post-Kantian and child of the Aufklärung so we can be confident that the he was in deep agreement with Kant’s remarks in the Preface to the first edition of KRV, ‘Our age is the genuine age of criticism, to which everything must submit.’
[53] Hegel undoubtedly took seriously Kant’s exhortation to be self-critical but felt he had eschewed the sceptical outcome of the latter’s Critical philosophy.
[54] As Charles Taylor points out, the nature of Hegel’s system is to demonstrate all partial reality as dependent upon an Absolute which in turn generates this partial reality.
[55] The plethora of dualisms proliferated by Kantian philosophy, between appearances and thing-in-themselves, freedom and necessity, concept and intuition, subject and object etc…, are to put it somewhat crudely, for Hegel, the consequence of the unwarranted exaltation of such a partial reality.
This reading, however, is potentially misleading because it gives the impression that there exists a nascent drive towards totalization which implicitly governs the development of consciousness from the outset. Jean Hyppolite is surely correct to surmise Hegel’s incompatibility with the Cartesian gesture of guarantying epistemological certitude by means of the process of universal doubt.
[56] We have already seen how Hegel repudiates the desiccated method adopted by much of modern philosophy which tries to vouchsafe the adequacy of our knowledge by honing the instrument of cognition. The reason why Hegel precludes the employment of the strategy of universal doubt is that it would fall within the province of philosophical reflection. Something at this stage to which, as we have seen, he can have no recourse if he is to satisfy the demands of natural consciousness. He begins with natural consciousness in order to convey the ultimate necessity and self-legitimating character of Science for natural consciousness. It is in this sense we can say Hegel is not preaching to the converted.
What constitutes natural consciousness? Hegel stipulates in the Introduction a minimal conception of consciousness pared down to what he takes to be the bare essentials. While remaining consonant with the assumptions of natural consciousness, he provides us with the most basic and abstract criteria necessary for consciousness to be related to an object.
[57] The problem of equipollence casts a shadow over Hegel’s minimal description of consciousness. The purpose of his rudimentary description of consciousness is that it is prima facie uncontroversial. This is important because otherwise it would render Hegel’s initial stipulation of the fundamental constituents of consciousness’s relation to an object vulnerable to sceptical attack. For example, if Hegel had furnished his conception of consciousness’s relation to an object with a highly sophisticated and nuanced array of properties and determinations, not only would it be incessantly subject to criticism in its particulars, it would also lack the force that his later descriptions of perception and the understanding accrue from their phenomeno-logically immanent derivation. The aim at this stage is not to overcome the problem of equipollence, but to foist upon his possible critics, contrary to their own predilection, an awkward dilemma. It allows Hegel to reply to his critics, ‘what then is your proposal for consciousness’s minimal relation to an object?’ For lack of an alternative Hegel deems his starting point although not in itself necessary, the only feasible alternative for an immanent phenomenology. It is in this respect that one may assert natural consciousness to be predicated upon doxa.
[58] His description of consciousness goes thus,
‘Consciousness simultaneously distinguishes itself from something, and at the same time relates itself to it, or, as it is said, this something exists for consciousness; and the determinate aspect of this relating, or of the being of something for a consciousness, is knowing. But we distinguish this being-for-another from being-in-itself; whatever is related to knowledge or knowing is also distinguished from it, and posited as existing outside of this relationship; this being-in-itself is called truth.’
[59]Furthermore,
‘Consciousness provides its own criterion from within itself, so that the investigation becomes a comparison of consciousness with itself…In consciousness one thing exists for another, i.e. consciousness regularly contains the determinateness of the moment of knowledge; at the same time, this other is to consciousness not merely for it, but is also outside of this relationship, or exists in itself: the moment of truth. Thus in what consciousness affirms from within itself as being-in-itself or the True we have the standard which consciousness itself sets up by which to measure what it knows.’
[60]For Hegel, consciousness’s relation to an object is comprised of several elements: (1) Consciousness distinguishes itself from the object. (2) Simultaneously consciousness relates itself to the object. (3) Through this relation the object exists for consciousness. This relation is an epistemic one, in that by relating to an object consciousness takes itself to know the object.
[61] (4) Consciousness supplies itself with a criterion of what it takes the object to be in itself or an sich. Consciousness articulates contradictions from within itself, as a consequence of the disparity between what consciousness takes the object to be in itself and its concurrent experience of the object which reveals the former to be merely for it.
[62] The upshot of this contradictory moment is that consciousness recognizes the inadequacy of its criterion i.e. its knowledge of the object or what it had taken the object to be in itself. ‘Hence it comes to pass for consciousness that what it previously took to be the in-itself, is not an in-itself, or that it was only an in-itself for consciousness.’
[63] Consciousness makes the necessary adjustments to its knowledge so that it is once more appropriate to the object of experience. ‘Since consciousness thus finds that its knowledge does not correspond to its object, the object itself does not stand the test; in other words, the criterion for testing is altered when that for which it was to have been the criterion fails to pass the test; and the testing is not only a testing of what we know, but also a testing of the criterion of what knowing is.’
[64] This brings consciousness’s criterion of knowledge into line with its concurrent experience of the object i.e. what consciousness presently takes the object to be in itself. ‘Inasmuch as the new true object issues from it, this dialectical movement which consciousness exercises on itself and which affects both its knowledge and its object, is precisely what is called experience [Erfahrung].’
[65]This development is completely internal to consciousness and thus remains faithful to the strictures of immanence which Hegel takes himself to have substantiated.
[66] He contends that, ‘the essential point to bear in mind throughout the whole investigation is that these two moments, ‘Concept’ and ‘object’, ‘being-for-another’ and ‘being-in-itself’, both fall within that knowledge which we are investigating.’
[67] Consciousness’s dissolution and reconstitution occurs through a multiplicity of moments. This process is not formulaic but rather a function of consciousness’s experience of the object; the infamous triadic structure of thesis-antithesis-synthesis, commonly taken to express the movement of Hegelian dialectic, is an aberration culled from an unmitigated oversimplification.
[68] Hegel would surely think it an overwrought and reified schema imposed externally upon a dialectical movement always already at work and inherent to consciousness’s relation to its object.
However, a more formidable quandary presents itself. The Introduction sets the stage for and opens onto a section entitled A. Consciousness which is comprised of three chapters, Sense-Certainty: Or the ‘This’ and ‘Meaning’, Perception: Or the Thing and Deception, and Force and the Understanding: Appearance and the Supersensible World. A problem arises for the interpreter because Hegel’s definition of the most primitive form consciousness can take arguably entails aspects which implicitly amount to a description of self-consciousness. This is of course untenable if Hegel doesn’t wish to compromise the integrity of his commitment to immanence. Even though Hegel may have been quick to dismiss this allegation, claiming that self-consciousness requires additional relations and determinations, for example, in the section named B. Self-Consciousness, IV. The Truth of Self-Certainty he states that ‘self-consciousness is Desire in general.’
[69] It’s nevertheless interesting to examine this at times perplexing issue, especially when read alongside Robert B. Pippin’s seminal reading of Hegel in Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness. Although others, such as the philosopher Hans-Georg Gadamer,
[70] had previously stressed the impossibility of fully understanding the transition from consciousness to self-consciousness in PhG, if Hegel’s indebtedness to Kant and his formulation of the transcendental unity of apperception were not taken into account, Pippin was the first to dedicate an entire book to this pressing issue.
The problem we have brought to the forefront revolves around the Introduction’s positing of natural consciousness’s intrinsic capacity to simultaneously differentiate itself from its object and yet relate to it. The question is whether consciousness is conscious of this. It would appear so given that Hegel’s description emphasizes both reflexive and transitive elements i.e. ‘Consciousness simultaneously distinguishes itself from something, and at the same time relates itself to it…and the determinate aspect of this relating, or the being of something for a consciousness, is knowing.’
[71] This passage evinces the I’s spontaneous ability to differentiate itself from and relate itself to something. It knows and is thus aware that it is not the object and that the object is not it. This awareness is tantamount to self-awareness because the I explicitly thematizes itself as not being the object. In this regard we can agree with Pippin that Hegel adheres to the apperceptive thesis because the preponderance of the distinction made by the subject between itself and the object entails that the ‘I think must be able to accompany all my representations’.
[72] But while Kant is unapologetically advancing at this stage in the B-Deduction a conception of self-consciousness, Hegel’s narrative still has some way to go until it reaches this stage. With a measure of poetic licence we can say that Hegel’s adaptation of Kant’s theory of apperception would sound something like the ‘I am not the object and the object is not me must be able to accompany all my representations.’ Although it is a rather clumsy formulation on our part we take it to convey well the point we are struggling to articulate.
[73] The somewhat thorny question of whether the description of consciousness offered in the Introduction, insofar as it possesses self-awareness is not already a precipitate conception of self-consciousness. Pippin’s reading would seem to assent to such a characterization
[74] since he emphasizes above all Hegel’s identification of the Concept with self-determining subjectivity.
[75]There is further evidence of Hegel’s covert reliance upon a model of self-consciousness in the Introduction. As we have seen, consciousness has the ability to reflect upon its knowledge and compare it with its experience of the object. Consciousness thereby assesses the adequacy of its knowledge with respect to its actual experience and as a result is able to surmise shortcomings in its knowledge, which it proceeds to rectify. Consciousness is therefore able to explicitly thematize both its knowledge i.e. what it takes the object to be merely for it, and its experience i.e. what it takes the object to be in itself, so as to effect a transformation of both.
[76]‘For consciousness is, on the one hand, consciousness of the object, and on the other, consciousness of itself; consciousness of what for it is the True, and consciousness of its knowledge of the truth. Since both are for the same consciousness, this consciousness is itself their comparison; it is for this same consciousness to know whether its knowledge of the object corresponds to the object or not.’
[77]And,
‘Consciousness knows something; this object is the essence or the in-itself; but it is also for consciousness the in-itself. This is where the ambiguity of this truth enters. We see that consciousness now has two objects: one is the first in-itself, the second is the being-for-consciousness of this in-itself…the first object, in being known, is altered for consciousness; it ceases to be the in-itself, and becomes something that is the in-itself only for consciousness…this then is the True: the being-for-consciousness of this in-itself.’
[78]The features of thematization, comparison and reflection attributed to consciousness by Hegel surely suffice as evidence of self-conscious activity. As we can see, he unambiguously states that consciousness separates and objectifies its knowledge which it distinguishes from the object qua in itself. The crux of the matter is that only now do we confront the ‘mechanism’ which tears consciousness out of its calm repose and stasis and propels it to ceaselessly move beyond its self-proclaimed limits.
[79] Only a self-conscious being endowed with the ability to thematize, discriminate, compare and reflect could feel the pangs of dissatisfaction with its knowledge of the object of experience. The description of consciousness posited by Hegel is in part an acknowledgement of this. He knows very well that it’s the coordination and interplay of these various capacities which provoke thought’s restlessness and propensity to advance beyond its dogmatism and one-sidedness. We have not deviated from our previous characterization of Hegel’s method as strictly descriptive out of choice, it seems in part necessary if we are to explain and understand the dynamic of PhG itself. It is interesting to note that Hegel himself invokes a transcendental argument in order to vindicate the distinction he makes between the I’s knowledge and what it takes the object to be in itself: ‘the distinction between the in-itself and knowledge is already present in the very fact that consciousness knows an object at all.’
[80]This issue however is by no means settled once and for all. One could argue to the contrary, that consciousness is able partake in psychic operations such as comparison and reflection without being explicitly aware that it was engaged in such activities, somewhat similar to the notion of pre-reflective consciousness found in the work of twentieth century phenomenologists like Husserl and Jean-Paul Sartre. But such an argument remains, in the final analysis, unconvincing because first it occludes the Kantian legacy which so profoundly shapes and underpins Hegel’s problematic.
[81] Second, and more importantly, it negates the active and reflexive nature of consciousness as depicted in the passages adduced above.
Determinate Negation and the Philosophical ‘We’Against, the leitmotiv of Kantian humility, Hegel proposes the principle of ‘determinate negation,’ which beyond the merely negative effects of critique has positive and constructive consequences for consciousness’s knowledge of its object. PhG is therefore not to be read simply as via negativa. Determinate negation isn’t a principle which is applied externally to the matter under consideration, for that would be a gross violation of Hegel’s own claims to immanence, not to mention countermand the possibility of an authentic description of consciousness’s experience of the object.
[82] Hegel even goes so far as to say that the phenomenologist
[83] simply plays the role of a passive observer while consciousness undergoes its self-examination.
[84] The labour of determinate negation is only visible to the eye of the philosopher who examines the development of consciousness from his or her own standpoint. Consciousness is oblivious to the presence of determinate negation because it is unaware of the fact that its own experience of the object conforms to or is imbued with this philosophical principle. Hegel can’t simply presume Spinoza’s principle of omnis affirmatio est negatio as averred in the latter’s Ethics.
[85] The idea that every determinate position is at once a negation and that every determinate negation is at once a particular position must show itself to be true of the subject’s experience of the object and hence cannot be taken as the materia prima and well-spring of the transformations of consciousness’s way of relating to the object. In other words, determinate negation should not be seen as effectuating the transformations of consciousness, but as in lieu gleaned by the philosopher who simply observes consciousness’s oscillation between its loss of the object and later rediscovery in a novel presentation.
The philosopher does not then simply describe consciousness’s experience of the object. Consciousness’s experience and its development possess philosophical import. With the arrival of a ‘new true object’ on the scene, the phenomenologist elicits the logical necessity of its emergence from that which preceded it. On the one hand, this is just another level of description albeit tempered by philosophical nomenclature. While on the other, the phenomenologist’s spelling out of the necessity of the transition from one shape of consciousness to another is itself equally necessary because it is the means by ‘which the succession of experiences through which consciousness passes is raised into a scientific progression’.
[86] Consciousness neither uncovers nor understands the provenance of the new object to which it relates. The progressive thrust of PhG is disclosed ‘behind the back of consciousness.’
[87] Since consciousness is not privy to the necessity of this transformation, the preceding shape of consciousness need not accede to its own self-sublation. The philosopher does not jettison consciousness’s experience and by means of a contrived logical connection proceed to artificially stitch together the various shapes of consciousness. The philosopher rather draws out the phenomeno-logical consequences of consciousness’s own experience. To wit, the philosopher shows how the new shape of consciousness explicitly advances what the antecedent shape had embodied implicitly within itself. For us, the philosophers, therefore, the emergence of the new object ‘appears at the same time as movement and a process of becoming.’
[88] We have largely focused our attention upon the first level of appearance i.e. that which appears directly to consciousness. This second level of appearance, which appears to the philosopher, is the appearance of the Absolute’s own self-externalization and is articulated as such.
Hegel is able to circumvent the accusation that the philosopher who already possesses absolute knowledge expedites consciousness’s development by furnishing transcendent sign posts which guide PhG’s machinic generation of new shapes of consciousness on the road to Absolute Knowing. This criticism is in one sense true. The philosopher does facilitate consciousness’s progression, but only insofar as he formalizes consciousness’s experience. This act of formalization is a precondition of progress, but not its source. The reason why we can think of it as a precondition, is that if it were not to occur, consciousness, as we noted above, may never surpass its own self-assurance in the veracity of its knowledge. There is a slight tension here though, because, at least on our reading, the givenness of the object i.e. what consciousness takes the object to be in-itself, should in and of itself be able to erode consciousness’s confidence in its knowledge of the former. The exploration of this tension will sadly have to been left for another time.
Part II
Heidegger and the Question of BeingWe will now provide a cursory outline of the opening statements of Martin Heidegger’s chef d’oeuvre,
Sein und Zeit. This will allow us to determine, in brief, the aims, objectives and ends of Heideggerian phenomenology, in contradistinction to the transcendental phenomenology of Husserl. A thorough discussion of Heidegger’s differences and criticisms of Husserl cannot be given here. We will only try to demarcate those instances in which Heidegger conceived himself as departing from Husserl’s project. Familiarising ourselves with the lineaments of Heidegger’s transfiguration of phenomenology as phenomenological ontology will also permit of comparison with Hegelian phenomenology as exposited above. Although reams of literature have been dedicated to the elucidation of the basic tenets of SZ, a rehearsal of sorts is in order before we can delve into those issues which continue to confound even the most perspicuous and sympathetic of Heidegger’s interpreters.
Heidegger tells us in the Introduction to SZ that the question of the meaning of being has all but been forgotten by philosophy. ‘Being and its structure transcend every being and every possible existent determination of being. Being is the transcendens pure and simple.’
[89] The aim of SZ is to bring this question to the forefront of philosophical debate and reclaim it from a history of occlusion and neglect. The reasons for the question of being’s slide into oblivion are legion. But in the Introduction Heidegger enumerates three prejudices with which we must come to terms prior to the inauguration of fundamental ontology and the Destruktion of the history of metaphysics. The deconstruction of the tradition is an undertaking we mustn’t take lightly if we desire to exhume and unearth those phenomena which have been victim to the obfuscation and perversion of metaphysical discourse. It is in this respect that the phenomenological inflection of Heidegger’s self-assigned task becomes perceptible. In SZ Heidegger alacriously champions the phenomenological war-cry “To the things themselves!”
[90] Thus, in principle, he is quintessentially in agreement with Husserl. What, at least in part, motivates this oedipal drama is Heidegger’s conviction that the master had fallen short of his own rigorous and exacting imperative.
[91] Simply put, transcendental phenomenology for Heidegger, was ultimately incapable of availing itself of the resources necessary for the illumination of the Ur-etwas, the ‘original something’ to which phenomenological intuition strives to access.
[92] This issue is greatly complicated by the hermeneutical twist Heidegger gives to his phenomenology of Dasein or being-there.
[93] It turns out to be, in the final analysis, not only impossible, but even undesirable that we reach some sort of terminus in which the Ur-etwas would be finally laid bare once and for all. We shall now try to explicate in greater detail the three prejudices alluded to above, to which Heidegger draws our attention, and claims have underwritten philosophy’s approach to the question of being hitherto.
First, ‘“Being is the most “universal” concept’.
[94] On this view we regard being as a property like any other. By way of abstraction Seiendheit or ‘beingness’ operates like any other predicate. It is merely distinguished by the fact that qua predicate it functions at the highest level of generality. Heidegger as an avid reader of Aristotle could not take seriously such a brazen answer to the Seinsfrage. Aristotle had deigned long ago that ‘being’ does not straightforwardly behave like a very general predicate.
[95] Heidegger took seriously the Aristotelian dictum that being is said in manifold ways and set himself the task of uncovering a single sense in which all beings could be said to be.
[96] Is there a single unifying sense able to encompass being’s multiple expressions as essence, substance, accident, actuality, potentiality, truth and falsehood? The very posing of this question undercuts the view of being as merely the most universal concept. The incommensurability of its many senses instead leaves us in a veritable quagmire.
Heidegger’s involution within Aristotelian ontology by no means comes to an end here. Crucially, in §6 of the Introduction, he claims that ancient ontology did in fact posit a single sense of being, which formed the substratum of the many other disparate senses. Furthermore, he argues that this sense of being is fundamentally determined by privileging a definite mode of time, namely, the present. For Aristotle, at least on Heidegger’s reading, being is, in the final analysis, understood as parousia or ‘presence’ (Answesenheit).
[97] What is, is therefore at bottom, what is present.
[98] The meaning of being qua presence abrades the more primordial meaning of being, which in Division II of SZ, Heidegger will argue is time. By the end of SZ, time turns out to be not only the transcendental horizon of Dasein’s understanding of its being, but the meaning of being as such.
[99] Metaphysics is defined for Heidegger by its powerless to think its hypostatization of a specific mode of temporality.
[100] We can perhaps only now have an inkling as to the reasons why Heidegger is so fond of telling us that the ‘concept of “being” is…the most obscure of all.’
[101]The second prejudice is that the ‘concept of “being” is indefinable.’
[102] The being of beings has generally been thought of in terms of beings, consigned to what Heidegger calls, the ontic domain i.e. that which concerns itself with the investigation of beings or entities. ‘We can conclude only that “being” is not something like a being.’
[103] This is the reason we shall refrain from capitalizing ‘being’ with a capital B as is the wont of some scholars and translators of Heidegger. The problem with this practice is that it instigates the pernicious tendency which Heidegger unequivocally and on countless occasions states he wishes to avoid, that is to say, an understanding which can only possibly envision ‘being’ in terms of ‘beings’. The upshot of the so-called ontological difference is to bring about the obsolescence of this traditional practice. Irrespective of whether one reads Heidegger’s disciples or his most virulent opponents, the ontological difference, is acknowledged as the sine qua non of this thought. Its perdurance despite the various upheavals, reversals and breaks undergone by his philosophy through to his later period is plain to see, even to the most perfunctory of readers. As we know, Heidegger famously distinguishes the ontical from the ontological. In contrast to the former, ontology preoccupies itself with ways of being and their structural features. The ontico-ontological difference itself entails correlative distinctions such as the existentiell and the existential, the apophantic and the hermeneutic, the factual and the categorial etc…
[104] For the moment we must put these distinctions to one side. They will however receive clarification throughout this part of the paper.
The third and final prejudice is that ‘“Being” is the self-evident concept’
[105] since every proposition can be analysed as including the copula ‘is’.
[106] As a consequence, being is regarded as transparent and diaphanous. Such complacency never even glimpses that which it takes for granted. As Heidegger points out, such a view pays scant attention to the incomprehensibility of our ‘average comprehensibility’ of being. ‘It shows that an enigma lies a priori in every relation and being toward beings as beings.’
[107] The enigma which Heidegger is attempting to unravel here is our own pre-ontological understanding of being,
[108] which he will show through a series a dazzling phenomenological analyses ‘ultimately belongs to the essential constitution of Dasein itself.’
[109] We incessantly speak, act and think via the invocation of the copula by which we link together subject and predicate, and yet are reluctant to probe further to into the murky recesses which allow this manner of speaking, acting and thinking. ‘We do not know what “being” means. But already when we ask, “What is being?” we stand in an understanding of the “is” without being able to determine conceptually what the “is” means.’
[110] For Heidegger, ‘we live already in an understanding of being’ but the elusive and indeterminate nature of its meaning for us demands that we repeat the Seinsfrage. However, before this repetition can impress itself upon us, we must ‘first of all…work out adequately the formulation of the question.’
[111]But who poses this question and how should our inquiry proceed, if we desire not to repeat the same misguided perambulations and confusions that have for the past two millennia surrounded the Seinsfrage? The who in question is of course Dasein, or ‘being-there’ which has been almost universally identified with the being of humanitas.
[112] ‘Regarding, understanding and grasping, choosing, and gaining access to, are constitutive attitudes of inquiry are thus themselves modes of being of a particular being, of the being we inquirers ourselves in each case are.’
[113] Heidegger would firmly rebuke Sartre some two decades later in his letter to Jean Beaufret, which he expanded into his famed
Brief über den Humanismus (1947) for making just this equation. This important issue has befuddled and exasperated both friend and foe. But let it suffice for now to say that like its Hegelian counterpart, Heideggerian phenomenology is not primarily interested in the quidditas of things.
[114] On the contrary, Dasein is defined in terms of Existenz rather than essence.
[115] In SZ Heidegger emphasizes his inversion of the primacy of essentia over existentia a propos Dasein, and his detachment of the latter from its filiation with its Latin cognate, which denotes ‘objective presence’ or Vorhandenheit.
[116] Dasein, however, ‘is a being that does not simply occur among other beings.’ Dasein is, according to Heidegger, ‘ontically distinguished by the fact that in its being this being is concerned about its very being.’
[117] This very sketchy portrayal of Heidegger’s conception of Dasein only paints a rather emaciated picture. But for the moment it is all we require, since the more pressing question of Heidegger’s phenomenological method awaits explication.
Why Phenomenological Ontology?It has already been intimated that before we are able formulate the question of the meaning of being we must first assay the specificity of the being of Dasein, and this is the purported raison d’être of Heidegger’s fundamental ontology.
[118] As we previously mentioned, Heidegger like Hegel, is convinced of the faithfulness of his phenomenological method to the ‘things themselves’. ‘It is opposed to all free-floating constructions and accidental findings; it is also opposed to taking over concepts only seemingly demonstrated; and likewise to pseudo-questions which often are spread abroad as “problems” for generations.’
[119] The task of ontology is the explication of ‘being itself.’
[120] Heidegger, however, postulates an important caveat vis-à-vis the possibility of ontology: ‘Ontology is possible only as phenomenology.’
[121] Depending on how one interprets the aims and objectives of SZ, Heidegger’s phenomenology can be read as having an analogous structure to that of Hegelian phenomenology or as markedly differing from it.
As we have seen, Hegelian phenomenology acts as a propaedeutic to speculative science, a science which begins only once the identity of thought and being has been accepted. PhG can therefore be feasibly extricated from Hegel’s philosophy which takes the form of an ontological logic. On the one hand, Heidegger adopts a comparable strategy to Hegel. For Heidegger a phenomenological analysis of that being, which is ontologically as well as ontically distinctive, namely Dasein, is a precondition of our posing the question of the meaning of being in general.
[122] Hence the priority Heidegger assigns to the ontical without which existential analysis would be impossible: ‘the roots of the existential analysis…are ultimately existentiell – they are ontic.’
[123]For Hegel this simply isn’t an issue if the identity of thought and being is acknowledged in advance of the inauguration of philosophy proper, making phenomenology’s task, in the final analysis, a dispensable one.
[124] On the other hand, for Heidegger the question of the meaning of being is indissociable from the ‘who’ that poses, interprets and understands this question. For Heidegger there is no foreseeable point in the future, when after a protracted and exhaustive period of investigation we could finally declare to be rid of Dasein. Moreover, for Heidegger it is not a matter of observing a Dasein riven from the phenomenologist undertaking the phenomenological investigation of Dasein in its everydayness. Unlike Hegelian phenomenology, Heidegger’s existential analytic has no need of a mediator who articulates the experiential trajectory of consciousness’s development. For Heidegger the interrogator and the interrogated are one and the same, and everything hinges on the ebb and flow of their intrinsic interrelation. Heidegger does not so much collapse the distinction between the interrogator and interrogated but rather stresses their relatedness and inseparability. But the decisive question is whether this is a genuine improvement and circumvention of the refractive mediation concomitant with the philosopher’s descriptive unfolding of consciousness’s experience in PhG. In the final part of this paper we will attempt to broach this question explicitly. But before we do so a fuller elaboration of the specificities of Heidegger’s method is in order.
Logos as Apophansis and Logos as HermēneueinPhenomenology is the science of phenomena. Like Hegel, Heidegger uses the German word Wissenshaft to describe his method. Even though we know that Heidegger will soon expunge this term from his philosophy, it is nonetheless germane that he employs it in SZ to describe the phenomenological enterprise. The Greek phainomenon means what shows itself and is hence manifest.
[125] Heidegger distinguishes phainomenon from ‘appearance’. By ‘appearance’ Heidegger means something which through its self-showing points to something else that is not manifest, ‘it means that something makes itself known which does not show itself…Appearing is a not showing itself.’
[126] Appearing, however, is only possible on the basis of a self-showing of something.
[127] And because of this Heidegger argues that the notion of appearance presupposes the concept of phenomenon.
[128] ‘Accordingly, phenomena are never appearances, but every appearance is dependent upon phenomena.’
[129] ‘Semblance’ behaves in a similar manner, because it looks like something or ‘seems’, which again is only possible on the basis of the phenomenon qua self-showing in itself.
[130] Phenomenon thus designates a distinctive way something can be encountered.
Hegel also meant his conception of phenomenology in this sense, but, as we have seen, contends that consciousness’s experience of phenomena disrupts and incites the break down of its pre-existing conceptions of the object. Hegelian phenomenology delineates the immanent logos or logic of phenomena and their development into increasingly sophisticated conceptual structures. Does the phenomenology of Hegel with its advocacy of a phenomeno-logical approach to the progressive development of appearances in relation to consciousness, more literally exemplify the Greek terms of phainomenon and logos, than does Heidegger’s? Consciousness, as we know, does not explicitly acknowledge the universal and necessary conditions of the possibility of objective judgements, to which only the philosopher is privy. What are the ramifications of understanding the meaning of ‘logical necessity’ in this transcendental sense? Or in other words, what are the repercussions for our comparison of Hegelian and Heideggerian phenomenological method?
Heidegger’s repartee would probably be that the logos of Hegel’s phenomeno-logical project, is not the same logos with which he is concerned, but an palsied and derivative phenomenon. But we must bear in mind that PhG is comprised of two strata, namely, consciousness, its knowledge of the object and the object of experience itself, and the philosopher who describes the vicissitudes of consciousness, through the stages of brimming confidence, self-abnegation and finally transmutation. The transcendental component of which we have spoken is thematized strictly at the philosophical level, while consciousness remains ignorant and perhaps even obdurate as to the inexorability of its self-overcoming. Attentiveness to the phenomenal is therefore not sacrificed by Hegel in the name of transcendental arguments. We are thus not dealing with a transcendental or dialectical philosophy in any conventional sense. Hegel’s phenomenology is able to pre-empt the standard argument invoked by Heidegger against transcendental philosophy, to wit, that it does violence to the self-showing of phenomena. We shall review Heidegger’s invective against dialectic in the paragraphs that follow, but for now we will try to determine what logos means for him in SZ.
In a lecture course from 1923-1924,
Einführung in die phänomenologische Forschung, Heidegger states that insofar ‘as apophantic λόγος can characterize a human being’s existence, it pervades a human being’s entire dealings with his world, all seeing, interpreting, articulating.’
[131] Any attempt to understand the meaning of phenomenology and its salience for human existence must ponder the meaning of logos. Logos literally translated means ‘speech’ but has been interpreted by the tradition variously as reason, judgement, concept, definition, ground and relation.
[132] These definitions fatally obviate the more primordial meaning to which Heidegger aspires. Heidegger wishes to demonstrate that prior thinking of logos has taken it to mean: ‘to make manifest “what is being talked about” in speech.’
[133] He goes on,
‘Aristotle explicates this function of speech more precisely as apophainesthai. Logos lets something be seen (phainesthai), namely what is being talked about, and indeed for the speaker (who serves as the medium) or for those who speak with each other. Speech “lets us see,” from itself, apo…, what is being talked about. In speech (apophansis), insofar as it is genuine, what is said should be derived from what is being talked about. In this way spoken communication, in what it says, makes manifest what it is talking about and thus makes it accessible to another.
[134] Such is the structure of logos as apophansis.’
[135]Heidegger argues that logos as apophansis has the structure of synthesis, because it lets ‘something be seen in its togetherness with something’.
[136] Subject and predicate are synthesized in order to form a judgement. But apophansis or propositional judging is not for Heidegger the original performance of truth.
[137] The kind of truth that appears in such judgments is only one form of truth and a derivative one at that.
[138] For Heidegger, apophantic statements, in the words of Thomas Sheehan, ‘co-perform,’ the givenness of things.
[139] But neither the performance nor the givenness that it obtains are sufficiently primordial.
[140] Phenomenology, taking its cue from Aristotle, ultimately aspires to the enactments of truth as aletheia or unconcealment, that is to say, the givenness of entities as self-giving or autodisclosive (on alethes).
[141] However, insofar as some modality of the givenness of beings is co-performed in a logos apophantikos, we should be able to uncover within the structure that underpins apophansis traces of a more original human co-performance of disclosure.
[142] ‘The “being true” of logos as alētheuein means: to take beings that are being talked about in legein as apophainesthai out of their concealment; to let them be seen as something unconcealed (alēthes); to discover them.’
[143]For the Heidegger of SZ any explanation of aletheuein and aletheia remains bound to the question of logos.
[144] We still are yet to provide a satisfactory answer to this question. Heidegger in the concluding pages of the Introduction affords us an answer and it is absolutely vital if we wish to understand Heidegger’s phenomenological method:
‘The logos of the phenomenology of Dasein has the character of hermēneuein, through which the proper meaning of being and the basic structures of the very being of Dasein are made known to the understanding of being that belongs to Dasein itself. Phenomenology of Dasein is hermeneutics in the original signification of that word, which designates the work of interpretation.’
[145]Dasein and world form a circle. Heidegger augments the purview of the traditional hermeneutic circle between the text and its reading to the most primordial stratum of Dasein’s existence.
[146]‘The “circle” in understanding belongs to the structure of meaning, and this phenomenon is rooted in the existential constitution of Dasein, in interpretative understanding. Beings, which, as being-in-the-world, are concerned about their being itself have an ontological structure of the circle.’
[147]This is why he regards apophantic assertion to be a deficient mode of hermeneutic assertion.
[148] Apophantic assertions are not false. They are misleading because they suggest that a form of predicate calculus is sufficient for describing our world.
[149] By isolating subject and predicate and then unifying them in a judgement such as ‘the hammer is heavy,’ the hammer and its properties are cut off from their dependence upon our everyday understanding, which is embedded with numerous skills, discriminations and practices.
[150] Critical reflection only comes into play when our ordinary ways of coping break down, and is made possible on the basis of our everyday background practices which it can never fully articulate.
[151] ‘We call primordial the “as” of circumspect interpretation that understands (hermēneia), the existential-hermeneutical “as” in distinction from the apophantical “as” of the statement.’
[152] Dasein’s taking something as something structures its understanding of entities. When Heidegger says that Dasein’s understanding possesses the existential structure of a project (Entwurf), he is not talking about a plan of action but the taking-as, as a mode of disclosure which allows Dasein to make sense of its being-in-the-world.
[153]As Richard Rorty has observed, Heidegger, like the Wittgenstein of Philosophische Untersuchungen, diagnoses the misplaced confidence of traditional philosophy in the belief that there must somehow be entities which are atomic in the sense of being what they are independent of their relation to other entities.
[154] Both Wittgenstein and Heidegger, in different ways, focus their attention upon the idea of relationality rather than subsistent relata. SZ’s argument for the primordiality of Zuhandensein effectively means that everything is related within a nested structure of purposive relations variously name by Heidegger the ‘in-order-to’, ‘where-in’, ‘with-which’, ‘towards-which’, and ‘for-the-sake-of-which’, which guides and runs through all of Dasein’s practical involvement within the world.
[155]Dasein’s being-in-the-world subtends its equipmental, referential, and involvement wholes. The phenomenon of world is the particular way the world manifests itself, and worldliness is the way of being of the world and of all its various subworlds.
[156] ‘Things at hand are encountered within the world. The being of these beings, handiness, is thus ontologically related to the world and to worldliness.’
[157] The world is always already ‘there’ but can never be encountered as such i.e. as an extant thing. Although we are unable to do justice to this notion here since it is not directly relevant to the subject matter of this paper, it should be borne in mind that the world remains unthematized, when we are engaged and unreflectively coping within it.
Wittgenstein famously wrote in the opening lines of his
Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) that the ‘world is the totality of facts.’
[158] Heidegger insists on the contrary that ‘the world is not the sum of all extant beings, not the universe of natural things – that the world is not at all anything extant or handy.’
[159] World is a determination of the being of Dasein. The world is not extant but it certainly exists.
[160] By this he means that it does not have the mode of being of an object, despite being ‘more objective than all objects’.
[161] ‘World exists – that is, it is – only if Dasein exists, only if there is Dasein.’
[162] And this is because the ‘ontological sense’ of world is imbued with or if you prefer structured by ‘significance’ (Bedeutsamkeit): the nested structure of meaningful interconnections within which we all dwell. For Heidegger we are always already thrown into a world of meaning, even if when in our more nihilistic moods it seems devoid of meaning. Dasein is not a human subject standing over against an object (Gegen-stand), but the unity of self and world, ‘self and world are the basic determination of the Dasein itself in the unity of the structure of being-in-the-world.’
[163]Part IIIPhenomenological Description, Dialectic and the Problem of ‘Stilling the Stream’For Heidegger, Hegel never really manages to get at the things themselves, because the intuition (Anschauung) through which the phenomenon is initially given and then described by the philosopher, is always already mediated through its expression (Ausdruck) in concepts.
[164] This is why Heidegger so vigorously objects to dialectical method in SZ, and in a host of lecture courses preceding it. Dialectic confuses Ausdruck with Anschauung, and because of this confusion deludes itself into believing that it determines the phenomenon by means of its conceptual apparatus. It thus finds itself in the manifest contradiction of feigning its complete apprehension of the given, while in fact granting that nothing is in fact given. It is for this reason that Heidegger snidely opines that dialectic, ‘which was a genuine philosophic embarrassment, becomes superfluous.’
[165]But didn’t we argue above that Hegel doesn’t have a dialectical method as such? Yes, and we were right to do so. Just as commentators have challenged Heidegger’s reading of Platonic dialectic, we can demonstrate the tendentiousness of such an indictment of Hegel’s method, and moreover, ask under what pretence can Heidegger lay claim to a pure seeing (Anschauung) of the phenomenon, especially in the aftermath of Hegel?
[166] Ironically, in his lecture course
Ontologie (Hermeneutik der Faktizität)[167] Heidegger levels the accusation that dialectic ‘cannot hold out in such a thing as staying with the object and allowing it to prescribe the right mode of grasping it and the limits to this.’
[168] But this is exactly what Hegel claims his phenomenology is doing. Of course we can dispute whether in fact he abides by this principle, just as we can dispute whether Heidegger really disentangles himself from the cul-de-sacs he associates with transcendental phenomenology. But unfortunately we cannot authoritatively settle these questions here. In the present paper we can only hope to convey the subtlety and persuasive case made by each philosopher for their respective methods. What we can say however, is that Heidegger mistakenly reckons the consciousness of PhG to have a single object i.e. its knowledge.
[169] We know however, that consciousness has two objects, its knowledge of the object and what it takes the object to be in-itself. This distinction of course falls within consciousness. And if anything this is where we must draw a line in the sand between Hegel’s phenomenology and the modern phenomenological movement.
[170]Leaving aside for the moment Heidegger’s crusade against Cartesianism and his casting aside of Husserl’s self-constituting transcendental ego, there remain a number of acute and perhaps unbridgeable differences between the two conceptions of phenomenological method. Husserl wished to describe our experiences from within the first-person perspective while Hegel’s consciousness is at a remove.
[171] The phenomenologist describes the experiences of a third-person perspective which undercuts itself and is successively enveloped by ever more comprehensive ones. Because it operates on the basis of the third-person perspective which is described extraneously by the philosopher, Hegel may never be able to alleviate the suspicions of contemporary phenomenologists. The phenomenologist can invariably claim that consciousness’s experience and its descriptive translation by the philosopher are not equivalent, and that something is inevitably lost in this transition from third-party experience to philosophical expression.
In an early text entitled,
Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie (1919), Heidegger evaluates the redoubtable neo-Kantian Paul Natorp’s critique of phenomenology.
[172] Natorp’s critique, to which we will turn shortly, could not only be applied to the problem of the methodological setup of Hegel’s phenomenology, but actually had a very real impact upon the young Heidegger, inciting his wariness and suspicion of philosophies which fetishized the notion of intuition. Theodore Kisiel, deems Natorp’s objections to be pivotal in mitigating Heidegger’s up to then untrammelled confidence in the power of intuitive fulfilment and preference in SZ to speak in terms of Dasein’s understanding of being, as the interface of thrownness and projection.
[173]Natorp’s criticisms are two-fold: first, Husserl’s method of reflective description brings the stream of experiences to a grinding halt. The experiences cease to be lived and are instead ‘looked at’.
[174] Through plucking experiences from out of the flow of conscious experience we, in Natorp’s words, ‘still the stream’ and so purge the latter of its inimitable movement.
[175] The second objection concentrates upon whether the immediate matter of phenomenology is expressible at all. Phenomenological description, despite its best efforts, is an intrinsically procrustean method in that it continues to circumscribe and subsume concrete immediacy under abstraction categories.
[176] Any attempt at immediate description is effectively futile, since expression and verbalisation, generalise the immediately lived and thereby foment its objectification.
[177]On the one hand, Hegel, arguably escapes this dilemma, because we can make the case that it is his avowed desire to elicit the conceptual commitments of consciousness which spring from its knowledge and experience of the given. Hegel is therefore able to side-step the danger outlined by Natorp, because he never adopts the charade of a pure unmediated intuiting. While on the other hand, if we claim that Hegel’s phenomenological method is essentially the same as that of Husserl à la Kojève,
[178] without an attunement to its specific modus operandi, this predicament is merely exacerbated, because the givenness of the object is even more attenuated by virtue of the fact that the stream of experience is not lived through by the phenomenologist in the first-person, but transposed into the third-person perspective of consciousness as such. Furthermore, this problem is intensified because the Gestalten which form A. Concsiousness, namely, Sense-Certainty, Perception, and Force and Understanding, are more akin to paradigms which are merely constitutive of our comportment to entities in the world, derived through an anterior moment of abstraction. This isn’t a problem as far as Hegel is concerned, and as we have seen, particularly in our examination of his relationship to scepticism, he has good reason for such an approach. Despite this being the case, we can be sure that many contemporary phenomenologists and epistemologists will be left with a bitter aftertaste and remain unpersuaded of the virtues of Hegel’s phenomenological method.
The way Heidegger manages to avoid the seemingly congenital defeasibility of phenomenological description, is first, to argue for a non-reflective understanding, and second, the non-objectifying conceptualization that it itself provides.
[179] Heidegger criticized the privilege that Husserl placed upon the mode of givenness of perception. In Logische Untersuchungen Husserl predominantly distinguishes between the signitive, the imaginative and the perceptual modes of givenness, and ranks them in accordance with their ability to give us the object as directly, originally, and optimally as possible.
[180] Perception is held to be superior because it is the only type of intention that presents the object itself in its bodily presence.
[181] For Heidegger the imperceptible non-objective presence of world around which Dasein circumspectly moves takes precedence over bodily presence correlative to perceivedness.
[182] World can never be apprehended by means of intuition. It is only by way of the understanding and therefore interpretative exposition from out of a prior meaningful whole that we can give expression to world. ‘“Intuition and “thought” are both already remote derivatives of understanding. Even the phenomenological “intuition of essences” is based on existential understanding.’
[183] This is even further complicated by Heidegger’s temporalization of the understanding, the upshot of which is to turn the understanding into an unceasing, futural, finite transcendence. Unfortunately we are unable to explain the significance of this introduction of temporality by Heidegger into the hermeneutical work of the understanding because it would involve a thorough analysis of Division II of SZ, which would be cavalier to attempt at this stage of the paper. It should however be born in mind that there remains a great deal more work to be done if we are to satisfactorily comprehend the at times recondite transformation of phenomenology undertaken by Heidegger in SZ.
Conclusion Perhaps the only virtue of this paper is that it indicates that there remains a massive amount of research that still needs to be done. Clearly the methodological approaches of Hegelian and Heideggerian phenomenology share certain affinities. But are their differences more significant than those points at which their interests seemingly overlap? The divergence of their respective methods becomes most conspicuous on the issue of phenomenology’s relation to ontology. We have recapitulated this argument ad nauseam only because it is so important to understanding each philosopher’s methodology on its own terms. Rather than produce a garbled rigmarole by arbitrarily conflating those ideas and concepts which in fact underscore their philosophical originality, we should emphasize the distinctiveness of each philosopher’s conception of the phenomenological project.
For Hegel the themes of immanence and education play a central part, with ontology proper yet to arrive on the scene. It is the seemingly effortless coordination of two vantage points within the text, namely that of consciousness and the philosopher, which expedites PhG’s development on the route to Absolute Knowing. Both positions operate at distinct levels, and so produce the internal movement of Geist without violating the respective concerns and commitments of the other. The philosopher merely formalizes the experience that consciousness goes through. And consciousness experiences its object without the philosopher forever peering over its shoulder, admonishing it to turn its attention to the necessary conditions of its experience. By means of its own conscious reflexivity it is able to determine for itself the inadequacy or shortcomings of its conception of the object and modify it accordingly so that it falls into line with its concurrent experience of that object. Hegel thus does not in a patriarchal fashion loom over and delineate consciousness’s experience, ignoring the object’s givenness, but allows consciousness to engender and undergo its own self-transformation.
For the Heidegger of SZ on the other hand, ontology is only deemed possible by means of phenomenology. In this respect, ontology for Heidegger has abdicated its traditional role as the science of being qua being. Phenomenology for Heidegger does not pave the way for ontology in the way that it does so for Hegel. These two modes of philosophical inquiry are now explicitly bound to one another. Heidegger in large part owes this insight to Husserl whose phenomenological revolution undoubtedly impresses itself upon many of the methodological guidelines argued for in SZ. The existential analytic’s acknowledgment of the indispensability of the ontical is the upshot of phenomenology and ontology’s indissociable entwinement. The emphasis placed by Heidegger on the interrelatedness of interrogator and interrogated is also a testament to this methodological preference which runs through the entire book. At this point Heidegger is unable to avail himself of any other means for broaching the Seinsfrage. It is only in the 1930s that Heidegger begins to distance himself from the phenomenological hermeneutics of SZ in order to think the truth of beyng from out of the Da of Da-sein. The success or failure of this shift of focus will however have to be left for another occasion.
What are we to make of our staged encounter between two of the most controversial philosophers in the Western philosophical canon? We have thus far eschewed the issue of whether a rapprochement would be possible between Hegelian and Heideggerian phenomenology. Both recognise the importance of mediation, albeit in different ways. Both mount powerful critiques of the primacy of theoretical knowledge and the pre-eminence of objectival being. But when all is said and done we have pointed to what is arguably an irreparable rift between their respective conceptions of the phenomenological project. On the basis of our analyses and conclusions born in the course of this paper we would have to say that a fruitful encounter is certainly possible, but that at the level of method, their elective affinity is dissolved. For Hegel phenomenology can only ever have a pedagogic and propaedeutic function, whereas for Heidegger, at least in SZ, phenomenology ultimately redefines the very ‘how’ of philosophizing.
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[1] Being and Time: A Translation of “Sein und Zeit”, Martin Heidegger, trans. Joan Stambaugh, State University of New York Press, 1996, p286-287, (§62)
[2] Hegel: The Restlessness of the Negative, Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Jason Smith & Steven Miller, University of Minnesota Press, 2002, p21
[3] Henceforth, PhG.
[4] Henceforth, SZ.
[5] Being and Time, Martin Heidegger, p11, (§4)
[6] Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Martin Heidegger, trans. Parvis Emad & Kenneth Maly, Indiana University Press, p2
[7] What Hegel means by ‘necessity’ and its significance as a category which informs PhG’s development is by no means a cut and dried issue. See for example, A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Quentin Lauer, Fordham University Press, 1976, p34-35
[8] Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel, trans. A.V. Miller, with analysis of the text and foreword by J.N. Findlay, Oxford University Press, 1977, p21, (§36)
[9] See Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit: A Commentary Based on the Preface and Introduction, Werner Marx, trans. Peter Heath, University of Chicago Press, 1988, p90
[10] Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel, p56, (§89)
[11] Hegel’s Phenomenological Method, Kenley R. Dove, Review of Metaphysics, 23, 4, (June, 1970), p615
[12] Henceforth, WL.
[13] In this paper we prefer to use ‘Concept’ rather than A.V. Miller’s rendering of Begriff as ‘Notion’.
[14] Science of Logic, G.W.F. Hegel, trans. A.V. Miller, with a foreword by Professor J.N. Findlay, Humanity Books, 1969, p48
[15] The Immanence of Thought: Hegel’s Critique of Foundationalism, David S. Stern, The Owl of Minerva, 22, 2 (Fall, 1990), p29; Philosophy without Foundations: Rethinking Hegel, William Maker, State University of New York Press, 1994, p73
[16] Science of Logic, G.W.F. Hegel, p49
[17] Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel, p11, (§20)
[18] Science of Logic, G.W.F. Hegel, p49
[19] Hegel, Charles Taylor, Cambridge University Press, 1975, p127; Reason and Revolution: Hegel and the Rise of Social Theory, 2nd ed. with Supplementary Chapter, Herbert Marcuse, Routledge, 2000, p93
[20] It should be added that Heidegger’s diatribe against dialectic is not explicitly aimed at Hegel. His critique is best characterized as a dispute with a much broader position, which arguably encompasses both Platonists and Hegelians. We will detail Heidegger’s objections below and examine whether they can be tailored to the specifics of Hegel’s phenomenological dialectic.
[21] Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Martin Heidegger, p21
[22] We are by no means suggesting that Hegel in the Introduction provides an adequate critique of the above named philosophers. At this stage such an undertaking is simply not his main concern. He has outlined a general epistemological position in order to differentiate his own strategy from his predecessors. As we shall see, it is the problem of scepticism which motivates Hegel’s opposition to various transcendental philosophical approaches, both realist and idealist, in favour of an immanent critique initially wedded to the assumptions of natural consciousness.
[23] Hegel, Frederick Beiser, Routledge, 2005, p25-29; see also The Fate of Reason, Frederick Beiser, Harvard University Press, 1993
[24] Knowledge and Human Interests, Jürgen Habermas, Polity Press, 1987, p10
[25] A Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume, ed. David Fate Norton & Mary J. Norton, Oxford University Press, 2000, p172
[26] Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel, p46, (§73), (my emphasis)
[27] Knowledge and Human Interests, Jürgen Habermas, p10
[28] Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel, p46, (§73)
[29] Ibid, p47, (§73)
[30] Ibid, p47, (§74)
[31] Knowledge and Human Interests, Jürgen Habermas, p11
[32] It might be objected that this is just the position of transcendental realism attacked so persuasively by Kant in KRV. Against this criticism, we must reiterate that Hegel’s phenomenological investigation starts out from the stance of pre-philosophical common sense in order to demonstrate how this position breaks down by virtue of the disparity between what consciousness takes the object to be and its actual experience of the object. This immanent tension, according to Hegel, is merely described by the philosopher, and therefore must not be confused with the standpoint of philosophy as such. Kant’s transcendental turn that reversed the dogma of both rationalism and empiricism by claiming that objects must be seen as conforming to our mode of cognition rather than vice versa, and by extension the task of the Transcendental Deduction which sought to uncover the categories that provide the rules for all objective judgements are simply not germane to Hegel’s method or aims at this stage.
[33] Ibid, p12
[34] The Young Hegelians: An Anthology, ed. Lawrence S. Stepelevich, Humanities Press, 1983, p112
[35] On the Relation of Skepticism to Philosophy, Exposition of Its Different Modifications, and Comparison of the Latest Form with the Ancient One, G.W.F. Hegel, trans. with notes by H.S. Harris, p311-362, in Between Kant and Hegel: Texts in the Development of Post-Kantian Idealism, trans. with Introductions, by George di Giovanni and H.S. Harris with two essays by the translators, revised ed., George di Giovanni, Hackett, 2000
[36] Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel, p49, (§76)
[37] Recognition: Fichte and Hegel on the Other, Robert R. Williams, State University of New York Press, 1992, p104
[38] Ibid, p104-105
[39] Ibid, p103
[40] Ibid, p103
[41] Ibid, p104
[42] We would have to exempt David Hume here. These criticisms although maybe appropriate to Schulze fail to do justice to a thinker of such profound depth, verve and originality as Hume. He can only under interpretive duress be characterized as merely reworking a possibility already latent within Cartesianism. Unfortunately due to issues of space and relevance I cannot further elaborate here. For a thought-provoking challenge to such a reading see Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, Gilles Deleuze, trans. with an Introduction by C.V. Boundas, Columbia University Press, 1991
[43] Hegel writes in the Preface to PhG, ‘Dogmatism as a way of thinking, whether in ordinary knowing or in the study of philosophy, is nothing else but the opinion that the True consists in a proposition which is a fixed result, or which is immediately known.’ (PhS, G.W.F. Hegel, p23, §40)
[44] Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel, p49, (§76), (my emphasis)
[45] An Introduction to Hegel: Freedom, Truth and History, 2nd ed., Stephen Houlgate, Blackwell, 2005, p63
[46] Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel, p50, (§78)
[47] Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein, trans. D.F. Pears and B.F. McGuinness with an introduction by Bertrand Russell, Routledge, 2002, p82 (6.54)
[48] Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel, p14-15, (§26)
[49] Ibid, p15, (§26)
[50] Ibid, p49, (§78)
[51] Ibid, p51, (§80)
[52] There is some textual evidence for this in PhG. For example, when he writes that ‘the goal is as necessarily fixed for knowledge as the serial progression; it is the point where knowledge no longer needs to go beyond itself, where knowledge finds itself, where Concept corresponds to object and object to Concept.’ (PhS, p51, §80). And where he claims that the very restlessness of thought itself disrupts consciousness’s indolence, ‘If it wishes to remain in a state of inertia, then thought troubles its thoughtlessness, and its own unrest disturbs its inertia.’ (PhS, p51, §80)
[53] Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant, trans. & ed. Paul Guyer & Allen W. Wood, Cambridge University Press, 1998, p100-101 (A xii)
[54] Hegel virtually paraphrases Kant’s famous footnote of the Preface to the first edition of KRV in §78 of the Introduction to PhG. He writes, ‘The scepticism that is directed against the whole range of phenomenal consciousness, on the other hand, renders the Spirit for the first time competent to examine what truth is. For it brings about a state of despair about all the so-called natural ideas, thoughts, and opinions, regardless of whether they are called one’s own or someone else’s, ideas with which the consciousness that sets about the examination [of truth] straight away is still filled and hampered, so that it is, incapable of carrying out what it wants to undertake.’ (PhS, p50, §78)
[55] Hegel, Charles Taylor, p127
[56] Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Jean Hyppolite, trans. Samuel Cherniak & John Heckman, Northwestern University Press, 1974, p12
[57] This act of abstraction could of course be deemed itself quintessentially ‘philosophical’ or only possible on the basis of a discourse which sets up certain issues and problems as meaningful by means of ‘theoretical’ cognition. This, we must admit, is a pertinent criticism, akin to Feuerbach’s remonstrations in his polemic Towards a Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy (1839). One can also imagine the early Heidegger chiding Hegel in a similar manner. Below we will in fact attempt a reconstruction of what such a critique might look like, given that Heidegger never explicitly mounted a critique of Hegel which emphasized this tack; he reserved that honour for his teacher Edmund Husserl. For the moment, we will attempt to show that Hegel has sufficient armoury at his disposal to respond to the above censure. Hopefully in the course of this defence it should become clear why we decided to set our exposition of the Introduction to PhG against the backdrop of Hegel’s relationship to scepticism in both its ancient and modern guises.
[58] Recognition: Fichte and Hegel on the Other, Robert R. Williams, p127
[59] Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel, p52-53, (§82)
[60] Ibid, p53, (§84)
[61] ‘Something is for it the in-itself; and knowledge, or the being of the object for consciousness, is, for it, another moment. Upon this distinction, which is present as a fact, the examination rests.’ (PhS, p54, §85) (my bold)
[62] Hegel, Charles Taylor, p130
[63] Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel, p54, (§85)
[64] Ibid, p54-55, (§85)
[65] Ibid, p55, (§86)
[66] We should, however, remain on our guard with respect to the superiority claimed for the immanent approach, which arguably Hegel takes for granted, falling short of the demands incumbent upon a thoroughly self-critical philosophy.
[67] Ibid, p53, (§84), (translation modified)
[68] For the historical details of how this formula first gained currency see Hegel: A Biography, Terry Pinkard, Cambridge University Press, 2000; and The Hegel Legend of ‘Thesis-Antithesis-Synthesis’, Journal of the History of Ideas, Gustav E. Mueller, Volume XIX, June, 1958, Number 3, p411
[69] Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel, p105, (§167)
[70] Hegel’s Dialectic: Five Hermeneutical Studies, Hans-Georg Gadamer, trans. and with an introduction by P. Christopher Smith, Yale University Press, 1976, p35
[71] ‘Dieses unterscheidet nämlich etwas von sich, worauf es sich zugleich bezieht; oder wie dies ausgedrückt wird: es ist etwas für dasselbe; und die bestimmte Seite dieses Beziehens oder des Seins von etwas für ein Bewuβtsein ist das Wissen.’ (Phänomenologie des Geistes, G.W.F. Hegel, ed. E. Moldenhauer & K.M. Michel, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1970, p76)
[72] Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant, p246 (B131)
[73] Pippin’s makes a relevant point. He argues that both Hegel and Kant would ‘deny “realist” theories of consciousness, particularly rationalist claims about sensation being a direct, immediate, though “unclear” apprehension of objects. They agree, that is, on a basic consequence of the apperception thesis: that all apprehension is mediated by the subject’s taking itself to be apprehending in a specific way, so that a necessary component of any relation to objects is a self-relation.’ (Hegel’s Idealism, Robert B. Pippin, p35)
[74] ‘Whatever else Hegel intends by asserting an “Absolute Idealism,” it is clear by now that such a claim at the very least involves Hegel in a theory about pure concepts, and about the role of such concepts in human experience, particularly in any possible knowledge of objects, but also in various kinds of self-conscious, intentional activities.’ Hegel’s Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness, Robert B. Pippin, Cambridge University Press, 1989, p91
[75] Pippin’s reading can in many respects be read as a comprehensive exegesis of Hegel’s remark that ‘everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance, but equally Subject.’ (PhS, p10, §17)
[76] ‘But, in fact, in the alteration of the knowledge, the object itself alters for it too, for the knowledge that was present was essentially knowledge of the object: as the knowledge changes, so too does the object, for it essentially belonged to this knowledge.’ (PhS, p54, §85)
[77] Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel, p54, (§85)
[78] Ibid, p55, (§86) (my bold)
[79] It is in this respect that PhG differs from Hegel’s earlier Jena period in which, as Hyppolite notes, he endorsed a form of ‘vital immanence’ through which ‘life’ and ‘infinity’ were thought to be identical. Contrariwise, in the PhG Hegel rescinds dependence upon anything which could to approximated to an acosmic substance inured within the very heart of being, instead preferring his text’s progressive trajectory to be carried out in accordance with the experiential content of consciousness itself. Conscious is not stirred from out of its quietude by either ‘life’ or ‘thought’ per se, but results out of the incongruity between consciousness’s knowledge and the givenness of the object. The notion of an acosmic entity furtively impelling the subject towards self-knowledge and self-coincidence with itself, becomes for Hegel a superfluous and regrettable doctrine. (See The Concept of Life and Consciousness of Life in Hegel’s Jena Philosophy, in Studies on Marx and Hegel, Jean Hyppolite, trans. with an Introduction, Notes, and Bibliography, by John O’Neill, Basic Books, 1969, p6). In this regard my reading is at variance with that of John Sallis who contends that ‘the movement is not something which the I accomplishes alone but is rather a movement of the absolute, i.e. belongs to that movement which the absolute is.’ (Hegel’s Concept of Presentation, in Delimitations: Phenomenology and the End of Metaphysics, John Sallis, 2nd Expanded Edition, Indiana University Press, 1995, p54)
[80] Ibid, p54, (§85)
[81] Hegel affirms in a oft cited passage from the Science of Logic just how important he felt Kant’s discovery of the transcendental unity of apperception was: ‘It is one of the profoundest and truest insights to be found in the Critique of Pure Reason that the unity which constitutes the nature of the Concept is recognized as the original synthetic unity of apperception, as unity of the I think, or of self-consciousness.’ (SL, p584)
[82] This is clearly where, for example, the readings of Quentin Lauer, Stephen Houlgate and William Maker diverge from the interpretation of Karin de Boer who regards determinate negation or negativity überhaupt as an external principle applied by Hegel to the particular philosophical problem under scrutiny. She curiously regards this principle as an ‘ontological perspective,’ which despite its richness and profundity, remains merely perspectival. It cannot, for de Boer, in principle be self-legitimating (Lecture given at the University of Warwick for the Colloquium in European Philosophy entitled Hegel and Derrida, 06/09/2007). This more recent interpretation seems to conflict with comments in her book, Thinking in the Light of Time, where she expressly acknowledges, although vis-à-vis WL that Hegel’s method is, at least prima facie, self-grounding. (Thinking in the Light of Time: Heidegger’s Encounter with Hegel, Karin de Boer, State University of New York Press, 2000, p221)
[83] We are using the terms philosopher and phenomenologist interchangeably.
[84] ‘But not only is a contribution by us superfluous, since Concept and object, the criterion and what is to be tested, are present in consciousness itself, but we are also spared the trouble of comparing the two and really testing them, so that, since what consciousness examines is its own self, all that is left for us to do is simply to look on.’ (PhS, p54, §85) (my bold)
[85] Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Jean Hyppolite, p14
[86] Phenomenology of Spirit, G.W.F. Hegel, p55-56, (§87)
[87] Ibid, p56, (§87)
[88] Ibid, p56, (§87)
[89] Being and Time: A Translation of “Sein und Zeit”, Martin Heidegger, trans. Joan Stambaugh, State University of New York Press, 1996, p33-34, (§7)
[90] Ibid, p30, (§7)
[91] During the course of an analysis of the First Book of Husserl’s Ideen zu einer reinen Phänomenologie und phänomenologischen Philosophie, in his lecture course of 1925, Prolegomena zur Geschichte des Zeitbegriffs, Heidegger writes: ‘This idea, that consciousness is to be the region of an absolute science, is not simply invented; it is the idea which has occupied modern philosophy ever since Descartes. The elaboration of pure consciousness as the thematic field of phenomenology is not derived phenomenologically going back to the matters themselves but by going back to the traditional idea of philosophy.’ (History of the Concept of Time: Prologomena, Martin Heidegger, trans. Theodore Kisiel, Indiana University Press, 1985, p107)
[92] Why Students of Heidegger Will Have to Read Emil Lask, Theodore Kisiel, in Heidegger’s Way of Thought: Critical and Interpretative Signposts, ed. Alfred Denker & Marion Heinz, Continuum, 2002, p132
[93] Although we rely in this paper upon Joan Stambaugh’s translation of Sein und Zeit, unlike Stambaugh we choose not to hyphenate Dasein in keeping with the original.
[94] Being and Time, Martin Heidegger, p2, (§1)
[95] Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger’s “Being and Time,” Division I, Hubert Dreyfus, MIT Press, 1991, p10
[96] The New Heidegger, Miguel de Beistegui, Continuum, 2005, p60
[97] Being and Time, Martin Heidegger, p22, (§6)
[98] The New Heidegger, Miguel de Beistegui, p60
[99] Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy: An Introduction, Daniela Vallega-Neu, Indiana University Press, 2003, p12
[100] Unfortunately it is beyond the remit of this paper to grapple with the various amphibolies and aporias presented in Division II of SZ. This part of the paper is concerned specifically with the phenomenological method employed by Heidegger. This we hope will facilitate an auspicious comparison with the method of Hegelian phenomenology. We would though like to make a single comment with respect to the modus operandi of horizonal temporality qua ‘ground’. If we may call it a ‘ground’, horizonal temporality, functions for Heidegger, in a completely different fashion to the way the conception of ‘ground’ has traditionally done so in the great metaphysical systems. For Heidegger’s ‘ground’ discards both presence and permanence in favour of finitude and temporal occurrence. It is disclosed in and through the unfolding of finite transcendence i.e. Dasein. (Heidegger’s Contributions to Philosophy, Daniela Vallega-Neu, p14)
[101] Being and Time, p2, (§1)
[102] Ibid, p2, (§1)
[103] Ibid, p3, (§1)
[104] The most general characteristics of objectively present objects and Dasein are called categories and existentials respectively. ‘Existentials and categories are the two fundamental possibilities of the characteristics of being. The being which corresponds to them requires different ways of primary interrogation. Beings are a who (existence) or else a what (objective presence in the broadest sense).’ (SZ, p42, §9)
[105] Ibid, p3, (§1)
[106] Being-in-the-World, Hubert Dreyfus, p11
[107] Being and Time, Martin Heidegger, p3, (§1)
[108] ‘To be ontological does not yet mean to develop ontology. Thus if we reserve the term ontology for the explicit, theoretical question of the meaning of beings, the intended ontological character of Dasein is to be designated as pre-ontological. That does not signify being simply ontical, but rather being in the manner of an understanding of being.’ (BT, p10, §4)
[109] Ibid, p6, (§2)
[110] Ibid, p4, (§2)
[111] Ibid, p3, (§1)
[112] Although thanks to the benefit of hindsight we know this a simplification of sorts, especially in light of Heidegger’s later work. This issue, however, is not essential to our preoccupations because firstly, we recognise the speciousness of imposing a makeshift continuity of terminology where this is none. And secondly, because we acknowledge the illegitimacy of importing connotations that harbour resonances in the later texts, into Heidegger’s earlier thought, even though Heidegger himself at times conveyed the movement and reconfiguration of his philosophy as a seamless transition, which it plainly was not.
[113] Ibid, p5-6, (§2)
[114] ‘The expression “phenomenology” signifies primarily a concept of method. It does not characterize the “what” of the objects of philosophical research in terms of their content but the “how” of such research.’ (BT, p24, §7)
[115] ‘We shall call the very being to which Dasein can relate in one way or another, and somehow always does relate, existence [Existenz]. And because the essential definition of this being cannot be accomplished by ascribing to it a “what” that specifies its material content, because its essence lies rather in the fact that it in each instance has to be its being as its own, the term Dasein, as a pure expression of being, has been chosen to designate this being.’ (BT, p10, §4)
[116] Ibid, p39, (§9)
[117] Ibid, p10, (§4)
[118] Ibid, p6, (§2)
[119] Ibid, p24, (§7)
[120] Ibid, p24, (§7)
[121] Ibid, p31, (§7)
[122] Ibid, p33, (§7)
[123] Ibid, p11 (§4)
[124] This is arguably confirmed by Hegel’s relegation of phenomenology to a mere chapter of the third volume of his Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, between anthropology and psychology.
[125] Ibid, p25, (§7)
[126] Ibid, p26, (§7)
[127] Ibid, p26, (§7)
[128] Ibid, p26, (§7)
[129] Ibid, p26, (§7)
[130] Ibid, p25, (§7)
[131] Introduction to Phenomenological Research, Martin Heidegger, trans. Daniel O. Dahlstrom, Indiana University Press, 2005, p28-29
[132] Being and Time, Martin Heidegger, p28, (§7)
[133] Ibid, p28, (§7)
[134] Heidegger importantly qualifies this: ‘Not every “speech” suits this mode of making manifest, in the sense of letting something be seen by indicating it.’ (BT, p29, §7)
[135] Ibid, p28-29, (§7)
[136] Ibid, p29, (§7)
[137] Hermeneia and Apophansis: The Early Heidegger on Aristotle, Thomas Sheehan, in Heidegger et idée de la phenomenology, Franco Volpi et al., Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1988, p68
[138] Ibid, p68
[139] Ibid, p69
[140] Ibid, p69
[141] Ibid, p68-69
[142] Ibid, p69
[143] Being and Time, Martin Heidegger, p29, (§7)
[144] Hermeneia and Apophansis, Thomas Sheehan, p70
[145] Being and Time, Martin Heidegger, p33, (§7) (translation modified)
[146] Heidegger and the Hermeneutic Turn, David Couzens Hoy, in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. Charles B. Guignon, Cambridge University Press, 1993, p172
[147] Being and Time, Martin Heidegger, p143-144, (§32) (translation modified)
[148] Being-in-the-World, Hubert Dreyfus, p212
[149] Ibid, p212
[150] Ibid, p4
[151] Ibid, p4
[152] Being and Time, Martin Heidegger, p148, (§33)
[153] Ibid, p136, (§31)
[154] Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and the Reification of Language, Richard Rorty, in The Cambridge Companion to Heidegger, ed. Charles B. Guignon, Cambridge University Press, 1993, p347
[155] Being-in-the-World, Hubert Dreyfus, p92
[156] Ibid, p97
[157] Being and Time, Martin Heidegger, p77, (§18)
[158] Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, Ludwig Wittgenstein, p5 (1.1)
[159] The Basic Problems of Phenomenology, Martin Heidegger, translation, introduction, and lexicon by Albert Hofstadter, Revised Edition, Indiana University Press, 1982, p296
[160] Ibid, p296
[161] Ibid, p299
[162] Ibid, p297
[163] Ibid, pp297
[164] Dialectic as “Philosophical Embarrassment”: Heidegger’s Critique of Plato’s Method, Francisco Gonzalez, Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 40, no. 3 (2002), p365
[165] Being and Time, Martin Heidegger, p22, (§6)
[166] Heidegger actually abandons the naïve belief in a notion of a pure seeing, by the time of SZ, found in a lecture course several years earlier called Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie (1919-1920). For a more detailed analysis see Dialectic as “Philosophical Embarrassment”: Heidegger’s Critique of Plato’s Method, Francisco Gonzalez, Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 40, no. 3 (2002). In 1925 he wrote ‘phenomenology does not wish to be either a philosophy of intuition or a philosophy of the immediate. It does not want to be a philosophy at all in this sense, but wants the subject matters themselves.’ (History of the Concept of Time: Prologomena, Martin Heidegger, trans. Theodore Kisiel, Indiana University Press, 1985, p88). Of course there remains the problem of determining whether he in fact escapes a form of intuitionism. We will try to show very briefly below how he manages to free himself from intuitionism, particularly by highlighting his emphasis on Dasein’s understanding of being and his rethinking of phenomenology in terms of phenomenological hermeneutics. But since this question, although important, is not central to our discussion of Heidegger’s phenomenological method, we will have to leave a more extensive treatment of this issue for another time.
[167] Henceforth, (OHF).
[168] Ontology: The Hermeneutics of Facticity, Martin Heidegger, trans. John van Buren, Indiana University Press, 1999, p37
[169] Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, Martin Heidegger, p22
[170] We are not suggesting here that the phenomenological movement was a unitary or even coherent one. But we will suppose certain family resemblances so that a comparison with Hegel’s method does not become impossible.
[171] This issue strangely still hasn’t been adequately addressed by the literature. See for example, Phenomenology: Hegel and Husserl, Quentin Lauer, in Beyond Epistemology: NewStudies in the Philosophy of Hegel, ed. Frederick G. Weiss, Martinus Nijhoff: The Hague, 1974, p174-196; Recognition: Fichte and Hegel on the Other, Robert R. Williams, Chapter 5.
[172] Towards a Definition of Philosophy: With a Lecture Course “On the Nature of the University and Academic Study,” Martin Heidegger, trans. Ted Sadler, Athlone Press, 2000
[173] From Intuition to Understanding: On Heidegger’s Transposition of Husserl’s Phenomenology, Theodore Kisiel, in Heidegger’s Way of Thought: Critical and Interpretative Signposts, ed. Alfred Denker & Marion Heinz, Continuum, 2002, p176
[174] Heidegger in GA Bd. 56/57, 100f, cited by Kisiel in ibid, p176
[175] Ibid, p176
[176] Ibid, p176
[177] Ibid, p176
[178] Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, Alexandre Kojève, ed. Allan Bloom, Assembled by Raymond Queneau, trans. James H. Nichols, Jr., Cornell University Press, 1980, p171
[179] From Intuition to Understanding, Theodore Kisiel, p176
[180] Husserl’s Phenomenology, Dan Zahavi, Stanford University Press, 2003, p28
[181] Ibid, p29
[182] From Intuition to Understanding, Theodore Kisiel, p181
[183] Being and Time, Martin Heidegger, p138, (§31) (translation modified)
© Sadegh Kabeer
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