Hegel (Shao Kai Tseng)

Tseng, Shao Kai.  Hegel. 

Alex Tseng has an impossible task.  How does one summarize Hegel’s thought in under 200 pages?  (How does one summarize Hegel’s thought at all?) Given his impossible task, he succeeds quite admirably.  I highly recommend this text for beginners in Hegel’s thought.  Tseng has a second, albeit subordinate concern: vindicate Cornelius Van Til’s usage of Idealist thought (more on that below).

To understand Hegel, one must begin with Kant, and Tseng’s treatment of Kant follows standard lines.  Not content with the appearance of the real world, Kant developed the idea of representation:  “the process by which a thing appears to us, rather than what a thing is in itself” (Tseng 19). In other words, there is a gap between content and method, just as there is a gap in knowledge itself.

It is this problem to which Hegel turned.  If Kant’s project was transcendental idealism, Hegel’s was Absolute idealism, the view that the mind is everything; Hegel identifies human consciousness with its object, which is Absolute Spirit. Accordingly, Hegel overcame this gap by simply erasing it. Human consciousness and the world’s rationality are one.

To explain Hegel’s view, we have to look into the German more carefully.  There is a difference between representational (Vorstellung) thinking: our thinking tries to grasp the essence of the thing and conceptual (Begriff) thinking: the knowability of the pure essences of the world.  A concept’s rationality carries its own teleology (38).  So far, so good.  Unfortunately, perhaps for Christianity, this is only manifest through historical representations.

For Plato and Aristotle, essences were static things.  It is Hegel’s unique contribution that essences are also “becoming.” The essence of a thing is that which determines “how the thing has become what it is at present, which is the same as what it will ultimately become” (40).  For Aristotle, as Tseng notes, nature is the potentiality of a thing.  “The actuality is determined by its potentiality” (52). For Hegel, being is determined by becoming.

Dialectic and Truth

Hegel never said what you think he said.  That was Fichte. Rather, it is a negation of a negation.  Truth is developmental, not static (but not relative, either). To understand this, we need a logic of mediation.

In substance metaphysics, as noted above, substances are static, abstract universals.  This is true, but it does not describe the whole of reality. For example, you do not experience reality as a set of abstract forms.  Truth is also a living subject.

To get at this one needs to understand Immediacy: “the stage in which truth is expressed merely as abstract universals” (49).  It is Spirit an sich.  For it to be Spirit fur sich, it needs a moment of self-objectivization (think eternal generation).  At this moment, however, it also becomes alien to itself, which now contradicts the original moment. What is needed is a third moment, a moment of mediation that will allow it to be in itself and for itself–as Absolute.

In a relentless manner, Hegel draws the next conclusion: Organicism: truthful predications about reality within the context of a living subject (50). Tseng gives the example of the body of Christ, the church. This type of thinking was also latent in substantialist philosophers like Aristotle, who posited a telos to truth.

The Three Moments of Logic: The Dialectic of Sublation (Aufhebung)

Moment 1: the human mind conceives the world abstract terms.

Moment 2: the human mind understands the contradictions and limitations in seeing the world in such a way.

Moment 3: seeing the world as a reconciliation of the previous two.

Concrete Universal

The apologist Cornelius Van Til often used the term “concrete universal.”  I have often asked presuppositionalists a) what Van Til meant by that and b) where he got it. I always knew Van Til got it from idealism.  Even so, what he (or Hegel) meant by it is not always clear. Tseng’s comments are helpful.

Substance metaphysics says that universals are defined (or determined) by their abstract forms.  Not only is such a process mechanical, it is empty.  The abstract form of cat does not exist the way this cat does (87).  When Hegel says abstractions do not exist, he is not a nominalist.  Take the sentence

“This cat is small and that cat is big.” Each cat is an abstract particular.  Having gotten our unity by generalizing, “by abstracting from particulars in order to include them into larger unities,” we have emptied these universal forms of any real definable content (Van Til). What Hegel (and Van Til) suggest is a concrete universal. 

A concrete universal, then, “is conceptually comprehended as absolute spirit as a concrete living substance” (Tseng 89).  It is “the organic unity of every particular thing, and it makes every particular meaningfully related to all others.”

That helps, but it is not the clearest.  Here is my tentative effort. Instead of seeing “this cat” as an exemplar of the form “Cat-ness,” “this cat” is now a focal point to the universal reality of cat.  Quite so, but what is the payoff for Van Til?  Van Til wants to see the Trinity as a concrete universal. This might work, but Van Til’s often sloppy language prevents it from fully working.

As such, a divine person would be the particular that “fully exhausts” the divine essence. Perhaps, but one has to be careful in seeing a divine person as a “particular.”

Problems with Hegel:

“His god is not the unmoved mover, but movement itself.”

Hegel reduced the ontological trinity to the logical trinity.

Hegel’s philosophy is a shipwreck, and I do not mean that in a negative sense. It is literally a journey, for Geist had to find itself, and it found itself by successive historical manifestations. And the ship foundered on Christian theism (and Judaism and Islam). Can we salvage Hegel?  I do not think we can on basic metaphysics.  One could make an argument for his comments on aesthetics and politics, though, as his Philosophy of Right is a tortuous rewording of some concepts in Edmund Burke.

Where We Are Now: The State of Britain Today

Scruton, Roger.  Where We Are: The State of Britain Now.

Brexit was more than a rejection of Eurocratic globalism.  It was a coming home and a defense of home.  Sir Roger Scruton’s goal is not some crude caricature of nationalism. Rather, he demonstrates the organic way in which the nation arises from the longing for home. As noted in the opening sentence, the book is a minor defense of Brexit and an elegant rebuke to a myopic globalism.

Scruton, as was common with all thinkers before the rise of fascism, actually undertakes to discuss what a nation is.  A nation is allegiance to a homeland. That is a good definition, but it is still abstract.  A nation arises when men live as neighbors with each other.  Because of this proximity, territorial, even only at the local level, courts arise to adjudicate matters. That is a nation.  

Missing from Scruton’s definition is any discussion of race.  Scruton mentions racial and ethnic issues, to be sure, but they are not constitutive of nationhood.  Home is. This allows Scruton to contrast home with other identities.  The nation, despite its bad press in the 20th century, is superior to other pre-political identities, such as tribe and creed. Postmodern elites, of course, deny any of the above options, leaving us only with life dictated by international treaties. 

When men live as neighbors, they need a structure to adjudicate.  This is where law is attached to land.  This is the nation.

Internationalism, Immigration, and Human Rights

Is globalism inevitable? Tony Blair said so, implying that you, a free patriot, are foolish to resist it. Scruton, however, made an interesting comparison with the industrial revolution.  Assuming that something like the industrial revolution was inevitable, should society have sat back and let it run its course?  In other words, given that it was inevitable, should politicians have allowed employers to force children to work 16 hour days? Why not? Progress is inevitable.  Of course, that is absurd.  Why then do we ignore the same thing with globalism? Maybe the rural village will disappear in a cloud of digits and files, but maybe we should find some way to channel these energies and preserve the bonds of society.

In a similar vein, Scruton’s comments on immigration might mislead some.  When the European Union began, it did so to organize and streamline manufacturing and energy production between the various countries.  Whether that was good or not, it did make some sense. That is no longer the case.  Europe cannot compete with Asia in industrial potential.  Europe, rather, should focus on the capital it does have: intellectual, technological, and legal.

Internationalism has also called into question the practicality of human rights.  Human rights are real. They are real only because they are not international.  Someone’s “right” means I have a duty to that person, and that duty is usually seen in day to day interactions.  People do not have their freedom in the abstract.  Rather, it is embodied “in the act of moving outwards in shared relations.” It receives a real and objective form in community–this or that community.  In less technical language we can illustrate the problem this way:  I believe that Tibetans have the right to x.  It is not clear, though, what I can do about it. I have no–indeed, I cannot have–embodied social relations with them.

These embodied relations partly explain the Meltdown crisis. In chapters 1 and 2 of Das Kapital, Karl Marx complained that capital has an illusive character.  Indeed, it disappears in a quasi-alchemical process through various exchanges.  Since capital in Marx’s time was largely manufactured goods, his claim was pure nonsense.  On the other hand, when applied to modern digital currency, there might be something to it. Scruton frames the problem thus: from where do the digits that determine our currency come? True, there is a man at a desk entering the numbers, but the digits themselves come from Nowhere. This is also where your Facebook friends reside.

The answer to all of this is a reinvigorating of “home.”  Scruton writes with a poignant style.  Indeed, we meet nostalgia in its original sense, a journey to home.

Kant: Science of Right

Kant, Immanuel. The Science of Right.

Even though Kant wrote many bad things in his life, this is not one of them.  It is surprisingly well-written and relevant.  Kant, like most theorists in his generation, sought to justify, or at least explain, the move from a state of nature to having rights and property.  Similar discussions, with varying degrees of success, are found in Locke and Rousseau.

Kant notes a right action must have freedom of will and the ability to be willed into a universal law. Such a definition, whatever else its problems may be, allows Kant to connect rights with duties.  This implies, among other things, that we treat others as ends, not means.  Moreover, we should be “an end for others.”

What is freedom then?  “Freedom is independence of the compulsory will of another.”  Freedom, for Kant, is freedom from, not freedom to.  Not entirely, though.  His earlier comments about our being an end to others suggest some form of duty towards them.  That is not important for his definition, though.

From here Kant answers the next logical question: what makes something “mine?”  Locke had earlier said when I mix my labor with the land, it becomes mine. Kant does not reject this, but he does add several conditions: my use of something is the subjective condition. This cannot mean anything that I use becomes mine, but it does give Kant a starting place.

There is both a rational and empirical conception of Right. Since rights are first contained in reason, “they cannot be immediately tied to experience.”  There must be some mediating term.  That mediating term, then, is possession.  He does not mean physical possession, but rational.  As a justification, this appears useless.  As it stands, it is useless.  But Kant has more in play.  By linking justification of a right with conceptual possession, he opens the door for a “juridical connection.”  We have moved, if not always clearly, into a communal relation.

What, then, of the state? Kant’s treatment is an improvement over Rousseau.  There must be some will that will bind citizens to respect each other’s rights.  Rousseau’s abstracted “general will” does no such thing.  The state constitutes the nation, but state for Kant, as for many 18th and 19th century Germans, does not mean the bureaucratic apparatus, but “the hereditary unity of a people.”  

Kant does use contract language, if only because such language seems unavoidable.  He notes that “the act by which a people is represented as constituting itself into a state is a contract.” They portion out their freedom only to receive it back again as members of the commonwealth.  I think he means they receive it back metaphysically and practically, not necessarily legally.

Kant does not really decide on whether monarchy or republic is the best government.  Given his Enlightenment convictions, one would expect him to say republic, and that probably is his preference.  But like many Europeans, he probably does not see the two as mutually exclusive.

That is the essence of his argument.  He has an excellent discussion on marriage.  He leans towards outlawing secret societies, though he does not mention the Freemasons or the Bavarian Illuminati in particular.  He also rejects the idea of lotteries, noting, quite correctly, that they are an attack on the poor.

Conclusion

This was a surprisingly excellent book.  Although he does not mention Locke and Rousseau, they are clearly in the background.  His almost “hypostatizing” of Will into a single person anticipates Hegel (and Marx’s inversion of Hegel).

Christianity and Idealism (Van Til)

Van Til, Cornelius. Christianity and Idealism. Phillipsburg, NJ: Presbyterian & Reformed, 1955.

Originally a collection of articles, this is actually a fascinating account of the final days of Anglo-American Hegelianism. When Van Til (and by extension, his interlocutors) say “idealism,” they do not mean it like Berkeley and others did, where the world is a product of the human mind. Not even Hegel meant that. Rather, for this kind of idealism, the Absolute is that which is either beyond all particulars or contains all particulars.

A note on terminology: a key concept for idealism is the concrete universal. If for Plato universals existed in some unattainable heaven, and where for Aristotle universals exist in the particular, for the later Idealists the universal contains the particulars.

For men like FH Bradley, reality is beyond the appearances. Reality is unreal to the degree that it is not comprehensible. This calls to mind the old Hegelian dictum: the real is the rational and the rational is the real.

Bernard Bonsanqet makes a similar argument: pluralism destroys knowledge (Van Til, 19). Unity must be basic to difference. I think this is correct and Van Til himself acknowledges its proximity to theism. Without a unity, everything is in flux. This means that the universe must be timeless. Now we are getting into dangerous waters. We are only a short step away from denying the passage of time altogether, as McTaggart later did.

As good as this sounds, Van Til highlights its weakness. It makes God and man correlative of one another. Being and nothing are correlative. All ends up as becoming. Yes, it’s pantheism. Another consequence is that there is no doctrine of creation, since particularity has always been there.

Van Til says the ontological Trinity is the true concrete universal. I think there is something to that. There is unity and particularity in the Trinity, but it does not function the same way as earlier Idealist models did. The unity for the Idealists served to ground the particulars. The difficulty here is that the particulars in the Trinity (i.e., the persons) are not functioning in the same way as idealist particulars are. Of course, Van Til never makes these claims, but it is an idea I have had for years when I read Van Tillians on the ontological trinity.

The book is worth getting to see how Van Til reacted to the last of the British Hegelians.

Volume 2 of the Syntopicon (Adler)

Mortimer Adler regularly claimed that it was impossible to be educated before the age of 40.  If true, I would also suggest it is difficult to be educated without working through something like his Syntopicon.  The setup is the same as the earlier volume.    There is a ten page essay, topical indexes, and a recommended reading list.  This review will only outline his key topics, the various positions taken, and how the great thinkers interacted with their predecessors, if time permits.

Man

Man is the only subject where the knower and the object known are the same (Adler 1).  Indeed, “the human intellect is able to examine itself.”

The Western tradition is divided on man’s essence.  The standard (and correct) view is that man differs from animals because he is rational.  His use of speech is a consequence of this rationality.  It is not the main difference.  If this is true, then there must be some distinction between reason and sense (5).

Mind

The mind is capable of self-knowledge. This is the difference between sense and intellect.  Senses do not seem to be aware of themselves (172). 

Following Aristotle, we see that if “the soul is the principle of life and all vital activities, so mind is the subordinate principle of knowledge” (173).  And the act of intellect moves as such:

1) conception
2) judgment
3) reasoning.

Monarchy

Adler wisely separates the principle of absolute government from monarchy, since republics and democracies can be as absolutist (205). Monarchy as an idea underwent a transformation in the Middle Ages. It did resemble an absolute system in one sense by giving power to one man, yet it placed supremacy of law in the hands of the people (207).  The only problem with this idea is that given its birth in feudalism, it did not last long in the modern age.

Hegel suggests a robust constitutional monarchy.  In this view the state is more of a corporation. The advantage of this view is that it is quite flexible with modernity and market forces  It doesn’t have any of the disadvantages that plagued medieval models.  On the other hand, it’s not always clear what Hegel is saying.

One and the Many

In line with Aristotle, unity is the first property of being.  All contraries are reducible to things like being/nonbeing, one/many, etc.  Moreover, unity belongs to the individual natural substance.  Man is a substance.  He is not made of other substances.  Machines, though, are.

This is somewhat different from Plato.  Plato’s view had problems.  The idea of the one is also one idea among many.  Plotinus corrected some of these problems.  For him, the one transcends being.  It also transcends intelligence, since knowing requires an object, which would introduce duality into the One.

Opposition

Opposites do not simply distinguish, they exclude.

Plato: Everything has one opposite.  This was his idea in Gorgias and Protagoras on the unity of virtue.  This also illustrates the numerous subdivisions in Western taxonomies.

Aristotle: made the distinction between correlative opposites (double, one-half) and contrary opposites (odd/even).

Hegel: Unites opposites by reconciling their differences.  Every finite phase of reality has its own contrary.  For example, being and nonbeing imply and exclude one another.  They are united in becoming.

Reasoning

The words “if” and “then” indicate that reason is a motion of the mind from one alternative to another.

Plotinus: any form of thinking signifies a weakness.  It introduces duality.  Higher intelligences, by contrast, know by intuition.  Later Christian thinkers didn’t accept this extreme a view, but they did borrow his idea on intuition and applied it to angelic intelligences.

All the praise I gave of volume one also applies to this volume.

The Concept of the Political (Carl Schmitt)

Schmitt, Carl. The Concept of the Political. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. [reprint 2007].

In what concrete apparatus does political authority lie? Answers could be God or natural law or the social contract?  That might be true in an ultimate sense, but power is always mediated.  To phrase it another way: who is the actual sovereign? 

Carl Schmitt begins on rather innocuous grounds: the state cannot be simply equated with the political. In other words, society cannot be equated with the political. What, then, is the political? It begins “with the distinction between friend and enemy” (Schmitt 26). To be sure, as Schmitt notes, this is a criterion, not an exhaustive definition.  (Schmitt is using ‘enemy’ in a terminological sense, not in a moral sense of ‘bad guy’.) The enemy is one who intends to negate your way of life. To ward off confusion, Schmitt says it is a public, not a private enemy. Indeed, the enemy in this sense “need not be hated personally” (29).

Jesus’s comments do not contradict this.  He is speaking of private enemies.  As Schmitt notes, “Never in the thousand-year struggle between Christians and Moslems did it occur to surrender rather than defend Europe out of love toward the Saracens or Turks” (29).

The contrast between friend and enemy is most stark in the context of war.  There contrast becomes absolute and internal tensions within the political structure become relativised (e.g., as a patriot I dislike moderates, but in the face of an existential external threat, I put that dislike aside).  Indeed, “War is the existential negation of the enemy” (33). A world without war would be a world without the friend-enemy distinction: it would be a world without politics.

We can now tentatively define the political as an entity which is able to escalate the friend-enemy distinction to war. It is any community “that possesses, even if only negatively, the capacity of promoting that decisive step” (37).

Subordinate societies within the political certainly exist.  These are Burke’s “little platoons” or “free associations.” They are necessary to health of the state.  Schmitt’s reiterates his point, though, with stark clarity: “the political entity is by its very nature the decisive entity, regardless of the sources from which it derives [its power]. It exists or does not exist. If it exists, it is the supreme, that is, in the decisive case, the authoritative entity” (43-44). We might recoil at his conclusion, but it remains true that the political, not the church or the guild, is able to use the sword.

I think at this point Schmitt is still at the level of theory, for there are examples in European history where entities other than the state had the power to wage war.  Theoretically, he is correct.  

Any group that has the power to make this distinction and does not do so ceases to exist.  As Schmitt notes, if a group within the political chooses not to engage in the friend-enemy distinction, it in fact joins the enemy. “Only a weak people will disappear” (53).

Interestingly enough, we can apply Schmitt’s insights against globalism.  If the political presupposes an enemy, it means another political entity, another state, must exist.  “As long as a state exists, there will always ben in the world more than one state. A world state which embraces the entire globe and all of humanity cannot exist” (53). The enemies will not cease to exist.  The world-state will simply transfer the category to a group of whom it deems “deplorables.”

The Contradiction of Liberalism

Liberalism seeks to protect individual rights and liberty.  It does so by hindering the state’s control. While noble, this also means liberalism cannot really accommodate the existential nature of the political as mentioned above.  If war arises, the political can demand that you sacrifice your life.  Classical liberalism says it can’t make that demand.  It is here that Schmitt gives his famous rule of the exception, the rule that fundamentally kills liberalism: “An individualism in which anyone other than the free individual himself were to decide upon the substance and dimension of his freedom would be only an empty phrase” (71).

This doesn’t mean liberal societies cease to exist.  They undergo a transformation. “A politically united people becomes…a culturally interested public.”  “Government and power turn into propaganda and mass manipulation, and at the economic pole, control” (72).

Evaluation

This isn’t as shocking as it appears. Politics is about negating the other.  I want my political candidate to win.  That means I want the other to lose.  Completely.  Democrats want Republicans to lose.  Republicans want patriotic Republicans to lose, and so on. Of course, at this point it hasn’t yet come to war.  Actually, that’s’ not true.  The Democratic Party has numerous paramilitary groups burning cities.

I’m not sure I would build a political worldview on Schmitt’s thinking.  Questions like pursuing the Good and virtue are not relevant for him.  He doesn’t dismiss them, to be sure, but they have no meaning on the friend-enemy distinction.  Nonetheless, he writes with bracing clarity and forces the reader to grapple with hard issues.

Note on Hegel: all spirit is present spirit.  Hegel is also the first to bring the nature of the bourgeois forward: “The bourgeois is an individual who does not want to leave the apolitical riskless private sphere” (Schmitt 62).  The enemy, for Hegel, is “negated otherness.”

Short History of Modern Philosophy (Scruton)

Scruton, Roger.  A Short History of Modern Philosophy. New York: Routledge, 2002.

This was a joy to read.  Scruton communicates depth with a certain type of elegance rarely matched in academic writers.  Bertrand Russell is probably the closest equivalent.

There are several angles from which we can view Scruton’s work.  An exhaustive review of each figure and movement would be beyond the scope of this review.  Several key themes emerge in Scruton’s narrative.  Substance never disappears as a concept, pace modern nominalists.  On the other hand, it cannot stand simply in its Aristotelian form.  Developments in mathematics, logic, and language require a sharper focus on substance.

First, some comments on Aristotle’s logic. Every proposition contains both subject and predicate, which corresponds to substance and attribute (Scruton 16). Since a substance can have, or perhaps lose, different attributes, a substance is something that survives change.  One problem raised is whether substances can cease to exist and what is meant by the term “exist.”

Distinction between stuff and things.  Stuff can be measured.  Things can be counted.  This made the idea of substance rather fuzzy.

The Port Royal Logic

 The Jansenist critics of Descartes anticipated several key breakthroughs in logical analysis. They noted the distinction between the intension and extension of a term.  The former denotes what a thing is.  The latter applies to the set of things: man vs. the class of men.

Leibniz

Gottfried Leibniz emerges as a true champion in this narrative. Spinoza had previously said there was only one substance and an infinity of modes.  Leibniz, by contrast, saw reality as reducible to individuals known as “monads,” which Scruton highlights as (68):

1 Monads are not extended in space. 

2 Monads are distinguished from one another by their properties (their ‘predicates’). 

3 No monad can come into being or pass away in the natural course of things; a monad is created or annihilated only by a ‘miracle’. 

4 The predicates of a monad are ‘perceptions’—i.e. mental states—and the objects of these mental states are ideas. Inanimate entities are in fact the appearances of animated things: aggregates of monads, each endowed with perceptions.

 5 Not all perceptions are conscious. The conscious perceptions, or apperceptions, are characteristic of rational souls, but not of lesser beings. And even rational souls have perceptions of which they are not conscious. 

6 ‘Monads have no windows’—that is, nothing is passed to them from outside; each of their states is generated from their own inner nature.

To be sure, not every organic thing is an individual monad. Most aren’t. Humans, for example, would be aggregates of monads.

Hegel

Scruton’s analysis of Hegel’s logic put the brakes on any Hegelian speculations I might have had.   The main difficulty with Hegel, apart from his impenetrable prose, is that his use of terms doesn’t mirror the way the world normally uses such terms.  In normal usage, logic is a tool.  For Hegel it is almost an active, living entity.

Scruton summarizes the problem in reading Hegel in one elegant, witty passage:

“It is not to be expected that such a logic can readily be made intelligible, or that a philosophy which is able cold-bloodedly to announce (for example) that ‘Limit is the mediation through which Something and Other is and also is not’ should be altogether different from arrant nonsense” (175).

Scruton interrupts his survey after Nietzsche to make a few comments on political philosophy.

For John Locke, when I mix my labor with an object, I make it my own. It becomes my property (206).   Locke’s arguments on natural rights are interesting and quite important.  Contract theory, however, is built on a much shakier foundation.  Scruton identifies several problems. 1) On what grounds do we infer the existence of such a contract?  It is almost always an implied contract, if it exists at all.  Claims of “tacit consent” are vacuous, as Hume noted.  It’s not clear how anyone born in such a society gave “tacit consent.”

Marx takes Hegel’s concept of alienation and comes up with “false consciousness.”  Scruton notes that Marx didn’t use alienation all that much later on in life.  What is “alienation?” As Scruton observes, 

“Under capitalism it is not only objects, but also men, who are bought and sold. And in this buying and selling, under the regime of which one party has nothing to dispose of but his labour power, we reach the ultimate point in the treatment of men as means. Men have become objects for each other, and whatever remnants of their human (social) life remain will be dissipated” (225).

Although such a view is not entirely coherent (and Marx would trade it in for “false-consciousness” later on), it did have imaginative power.  A false consciousness, on the other hand, is a universal error one makes in examining the social world. This unhappy consciousness emerges from Marx’s analysis of “base” and “superstructure.”

Following this chapter Scruton examines utilitarianism and British idealism.  More pertinent for this review will be Scruton’s analysis of Gottlob Frege’s logical revolution.  

Frege

What did Frege do?  He overthrew Aristotelian logic.  He began by examining J. S. Mill’s claim that arithmetic was abstracted from experience, as in 2+3 = 5. Numbers are empirical aggregates from experience.  Frege responded that Mill could give no account of the number zero.  Moreover, while I cannot with my senses apprehend a 1,000 sided figure, I am easily prepared to acknowledge such a figure exists.  And in the final coup de grace on Mill, Frege notes that induction assumes probability, but probability presupposes arithmetical laws (250).

Frege then asks, “What is a number?” They can’t be a property, since if I say “Socrates is one,” I do not attribute the property of one-ness to Socrates. Nor are they abstractions. If numbers are objects, then we need to be able to locate them, and that entails a host of philosophical headaches. 

A more immediate problem, and one for which Frege is ultimately famous, concerns existential quantification.  If I say “Unicorns are horned animals,” am I saying that unicorns exist?  Frege made it clear that identity and prediction are different.

I don’t feel smart enough to explain what Frege meant by sense and reference, so we will go on to Heidegger, particularly, Scruton’s wonderful rhetorical comments on Heidegger.  

“It is impossible to summarise Heidegger’s work, which no one has claimed to understand completely. In the next chapter I shall give reasons for thinking that it may be unintelligible” (268).

“the reader has the impression that never before have so many words been invented and tormented in the attempt to express the inexpressible” (268).

“All these are more or less pompous ways of distinguishing things from persons” (269).

“Heidegger notices and applauds the result, but does not, as he perhaps should, feel threatened by it” (269).

“One thing is clear, which is that Heidegger’s conclusions, where intelligible, are clearly intended as universal truths, not merely about the human condition, but about the world as such” (272).

“Heidegger does not give any arguments for the truth of what he says. Most of Being and Time consists of compounded assertions, with hardly a ‘thus’, ‘therefore’, ‘possibly’, or ‘it might follow that’, to indicate the relations which are supposed to hold between them” (272).

This book was a sheer pleasure to read and absorb.  It is easily my favorite text and first recommendation on the history of modern philosophy.

History & Truth in Hegel’s Phenomenology

Westphal, Merold. History & Truth in Hegel’s Phenomenology.  Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1998.

Hegel remains important today for the children who claim him as their father.  To be fair, you cannot draw a straight line from Hegel to Marx (or Cultural Marxism).  Hegel was a conservative monarchist.  Nonetheless, Hegel’s method was hijacked and in combating the evils of Cultural Marxism, it helps to know what Hegel said.  And what he said is different from what you were told he said.

As far as analyses of Hegel goes, this is hit-and-miss.  I don’t see it as an advance upon Charles Taylor.  On the other hand, Merold Westphal does a good job explicating what Hegel meant by “Spirit.”

Thesis: transcendental subjectivity has a social history and absolute knowledge is historically conditioned (Westphal xvii).

Hegel’s initial target is the view that takes knowledge to be merely an instrument. This is the view that knowledge is neutral and that the knower remains unattached to the process.

The Task of The Phenomenology

I’m not sure what Westphal was saying in this chapter. He makes a number of helpful remarks on Hegel’s system, though.

The best way to see Hegel’s project is that of Spirit progressively abandoning its external husks (26).  Hegel is interested in the historical and social dimension of Spirit. Geist overcomes oppositions.  If we take our standard oppositions of subject-object, mind-body, and spirit-matter, Hegel sees them as “congealed oppositions,” to which Reason’s goal is to transform them.

Reason, then, for Hegel is human life in its totality.   Obviously, this is not how we normally use the term.

The Knowledge of Nature: Sense Certainty

Sense certainty is the weakest of all theories of knowledge.  Hegel adequately rebuts it, but he goes the long way around to do it. If all we can know are our sense perceptions, then we must rule out things like cause, effect, consciousness, etc. (which, of course, is what Hume did).

As it stands, Hegel’s criticism of sense certaintyis convoluted, but what it does is allow him to develop terms such as mediation and immediacy.  He wants to make the move from “pure thought” to “pure Spirit.”

Mediation implies a negative relation to something else.  When I see a tree, I am not simply seeing sensations of brown and green.  I see the tree within a larger matrix (which rules out its being things it isn’t). All this may be true, but I don’t see exactly how it attacks sense-certainty.

Hegel says that when sense perceptions are present to my consciousness, they are always so in a contingent relationship (here, now).  They are never present as pure being.  Again, quite true but I am not sure this gets us anywhere. I think his point is that every moment of sense-certainty is always in a determinate (i.e., limited) context and never present as pure-ness.

If something is present to me in a pure, immediate sense, then it is so as an empty concept. For example, close your eyes and think about “being.”  Now think about “nothing.”  You probably thought about the same thing. I think the payoff is that sense certainty is trading on a number of concepts that it rules out. Hegel goes on to say that this mediation is language.

Constructing the knowledge-act: Every act of knowing has a subject and an object. Spirit mediates between subject and object, yet there is also a mediating act within Spirit itself. The object I know is part of a universal consciousness (is it?), of which I am also a part.

When Desire Doubles

We move from Consciousness to Spirit, and Spirit requires a social dimension.  Here’s how. Spirit or practical consciousness begins with desire (122). Whenever we are conscious of something, we are conscious of an object.  To desire an object is to experience its otherness. I am now conscious of my consciousness of the other.  This is Self-Consciousness.  Unfortunately, this objectifies the Other, which does not survive the negation.  What Hegel means is not that the object is obliterated, but that I only experience it as an object of my desire, never as itself.

We need another category that doubles my self-consciousness yet doesn’t negate the other.  This is Spirit. The Spirit is the third term that mediates between the two self-consciousnesses without negating the two.

Spirit is the unity of self-conscious individuals.  It is the I that is a We and the We that is an I (129).  Westphal lists several characteristics: spirit is a social reality, not an ontological predicate; it is an interrelated unity of selves; it is a substance which will become subject.

This points to an obvious conclusion: Spirit is fully recognized in the life of a people (Volk; 139). This is Hegel’s famous term, Sittlichkeit, ethical life. “It is the substantial life of a people expressed in its customs and laws.”  This sounds very similar to Augustine’s famous “common objects of love” (City of God Book 19).  Of course, all hinges on what we mean by Spirit.  Hegel might have meant something like “God,” in which case his thought is to be rejected.  But if we mean something like the real bonds which hold a society together, then it is fine.

The Career of Spirit

Spirit manifests itself in concrete forms in history.  It moves from the Greek Polis to the Roman Legal Self to Revolutionary Terror to the climax of human perfection, 19th century Germany.  That much is easy enough to understand.  It gets convoluted at the end.

The Greek life was one of social wholeness.  However, it lacked self-reflection.  As it began to reflect on itself (with the help of several wars), it lost its cohesion and Spirit moved to the Roman Empire.

The Roman self was a legal self.  The individual is his property and nothing beyond.  Unfortunately, this means I can only relate to the Other through externals (usually wealth), which will later introduce alienation.

The main problem with all of this is the evidence, as noted in the apocryphal quip, “Herr Hegel, the facts do not support your theory.”  Hegel: “Too bad for the facts.”

Conclusion

This isn’t my favorite Hegel text, and I mean no disrespect to Westphal.  He is an accomplished philosopher and a good writer.  I think he tried to say too much in too little space.  Charles Taylor’s book on Hegel is much longer and much clearer, clearer probably because it is longer.

Sergius Bulgakov: The Lamb of God

This is the hallmark of Bulgakov’s “Sophiology” project. Since it is prone to misunderstanding, and those councils which condemned it lacked the philosophical tools to evaluate it, it would be wise to state what Bulgakov means by “Sophia.” The short answer: Imagine what would happen if Platonism and Hegelianism had a child. Longer answer: Sophia is the divine prototype. To speak even more loosely, it is the receptacle and vehicle of God’s divine nature (Bulgakov, 98ff). It is the divine glory. Bulgakov even says it is “the divine world.” He then moves to identify Sophia as the “pre-eternal humanity in God” (113).

Whether we agree with him or not, Bulgakov’s comments gain new relevance after we explore what he calls “The Patristic Dialectic.” The heretic Apollinaris was the first to identify the problematic: What is divine humanity and how is the Incarnation possible (4ff)? He, in good Alexandrian fashion, denies a duality of personal principles. He argues, rather, that two perfect principles cannot become one. Thus, how can one understand the union without transforming it into a duality?

We reject Apollinaris’s heretical teaching, but we must admit he formulated it on very good grounds: the union cannot be of two whole integral persons, which is why Apollinaris dropped the human nous from the humanity. Aside from the comments on the nous, this isn’t that different from Chalcedon (11)!

Cyril responds to this by giving his famous answer: there is one nature of the enfleshed Logos. Cyril now has several difficulties: in order for this statement to be Orthodox, we have to reinterpret what we mean by “phusis.” It is also worth pointing out that Cyril is ideologically dependent on his opponents, which likely prevented him from developing a full, positive alternative to Nestorius.

Bulgakov’s genius (if he proves successful) is to solve the dialectic in this manner: man contains within himself the receptacle of divinity. This is so because he is created on the divine proto-image. In other words, there is a mediating principle between divinity and humanity. It will be Bulgakov’s argument that this is what preserves Chalcedon: the third-term mediation allows a true union and avoids duality.

An Analysis and Critique

Strictly judged on Platonic grounds, it’s hard to argue with him. Without agreeing with him on all specifics, I have to admit his project seems to ‘work.’ He gives a very beautiful and engaging discussion on creation, time, and eternity.

His heavy Platonizing could be forgiven if it weren’t for the occasional foray into Gnosticism. He identifies the Logos with the “Demiurgos” (111). This isn’t that different from the god of Freemasonry. It is an “architect” that merely re-shapes dead matter. He runs into other dangers with loose terminology: he speaks of a tri-hypostasis, a feminine hypostasis of Sophia, but at other times he denies that Sophia is en-hypostasized. He rightly argues that the Ascended Christ is bodily in heaven, notwithstanding any difficulties that entails. The problem for his Eucharistology is that how can the bodily Christ stay in heaven and be physically present in the elements? Bulgakov responds by saying…I kid you not…”He comes down without leaving heaven.” Understandably, some won’t be convinced.

I think Bulgakov successfully defended himself from charges of heresy. Further, if one is committed to substance-ontologies, then it’s hard to avoid Bulgakov’s proposal. If there remains some truth in Hegel, then Bulgakov’s ideas could prove quite valuable. At the end of the day, though, many are nervous about employing a heavily Platonic schemata in our theology.

Overcoming Ontotheology (Westphal)

Westphal, Merold.  Overcoming Ontotheology. New York, Fordham University Press, 2001.

This is a Christian, albeit sympathetic, reading of academic postmodernism as it has come to us via Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Derrida.  It is not a treatment of the emergent church. That is not academic postmodernism.

Ontotheology is when someone treats God as another datum to be analyzed and uses this datum to explain all of reality.  Like all of Westphal’s books, this is very well-written and learned. Parts are even in German. There is a danger to this book:  both sides, modernist and postmodernist, and the Christians within both camps, might say that this book, and by extension Continental Philosophy, is the true philosophy.  Therefore, analytic philosophy is ontotheology. Even worse, they might argue that Continental philosophy = postmodernism. Westphal himself doesn’t do that, as he notes that some postmodernists like Rorty are closer to the analytic tradition in some ways.

For Heidegger, philosophy starts out as Being qua being, but this needs an Unmoved Mover to complete the system. For Heidegger, if we try to introduce God into this system, we can only do so on philosophy’s terms.

We will have to square up to Westphal’s use of the term “postmodern.”  By it he is simply denying that humans can have a “God’s-eye view” of Truth. He finds this in Plato’s claim of “the unaided intellect” which is purified from the senses (Phae 65e ff). Pure thought meets a pure object. 

What critics like Kant and Heidegger suggest is that we can never escape Time.  Our experience is always temporal. With this in mind, Westphal summarizes the leading postmodernists (Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Rorty, Heidegger, Derrida):

1. All our experience is linguistically mediated.
2. Every language is a conceptual scheme that lacks universality.
3. Every language is contingent.
4. Every language is a perspective.

Christian Philosophers and the Copernican Revolution

Westphal’s specific argument is that Kant’s claim to a thing-in-itself is not necessarily an anti-Christian claim.  Indeed, Westphal argues that Kant correlates (somehow) the phenomenal and noumenal worlds. For him, the distance between things-in-themselves and appearances is the way the world is versus the way I experience it.

Positive Postmodernism as Radical Hermeneutics

*Foundationalism is a replacing of mythos with logos.

The Hermeneutical Turn in Modern Continental Philosophy

The trace: something at work in my thinking that is not present now yet never has been fully present.

Laughing at Hegel

Mediation: mediation involves otherness.  Immediacy is its absence. At this level Hegel is a philosopher of difference. Hegel does hold to immediacy at one level, though.  Something is immediate in its being “self-evident,” yet it is not self-evident in itself. It is self-evident to us.

Immediacy is abstract self-relation and hence it is abstract identity (EL 74A). Immediacy is a product of social mediation, of our being in history.  Hegel’s argument is that immediacy can never exist at the level of abstraction, for then it would only give you the altar of the unknown god.

Immediacy tries to undo all of the relations that connect to us.

What does Hegel mean by “dialectics?” First, he doesn’t mean what you’ve been told by bloggers that he means.  He never uses that triad (thesis/antithesis = synthesis) in the way that you think he does. For him, and well for all of the philosophical tradition, dialectics is the negative point of reason (EL 81R).  Everything finite is its own sublation. Westphal suggests that this sublation, this aufhebung, is a recontextualization into the whole.

If you want a triad, it is this: abstract self-relation, mediation through another, and the self-mediation of the totality.

The Otherness of God and Ontological Xenophobia

I see where Horton got the “meeting a stranger” motif.  I agree that the Augustinian/Ps.-Dionysian project is more Neoplatonist than classical theists want to admit.  I just don’t think Derrida is the answer.

For the Neoplatonist et al, the goal of religion is “overcoming estrangement,” by which he means finitude.  For Covenant man, it is meeting a stranger who descends to us. In the former we ascend via negation. In the latter God descends to us.

Conclusion

Heidegger himself might not avoid his own criticism, for in saying we must go beyond the horizon of being to understand being, is he not putting being into intellectualist terms?

Criticisms

*He says Husserl’s process of epoche is an attempt to escape finitude.  I’m fairly certain Husserl is not doing that.  

* Westphal takes issue with Plantinga’s attack on Kant’s “creative anti-realism.” This hinges on whether Westphal’s theistic reading of Kant is tenable.  When read in light of Kant’s philosophy of religion, I don’t think it is.

* Finally, the pious churchgoer might wonder if there is any point in reading Derrida.  I would have to say no. Everything Derrida wants the Reformed already have in the archetypal distinction.  Further, while we agree with Heidegger that we should overcome ontotheology, God has already done so in being the God of the Covenant.