Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness

"Pippin has made a huge impact, there’s no denying it. Like Burbidge, Pippin tried to introduce clarity into what Hegel is doing, against the background of what he takes to be an untenable metaphysical reading of Hegel. By such a reading, he means one that takes Hegel’s Logic to be concerned with dubious entities, such as the ‘Absolute’. Pippin rejects such a reading and so is usually understood to put forward a ‘non-metaphysical’ interpretation of Hegel. In fact, however, the matter is a bit more complicated. To explain Pippin’s interpretation of Hegel, let’s start with Kant. Pippin takes up Kant’s basic thought that cognition has two roots –intuition and understanding – which work together to yield objects of experience. More specifically, intuitions give us the immediacy of things – their being here and now – and the understanding then gives us the various forms of objectivity. What people don’t always recognise is that Kant is not simply saying that we need certain categories in order to make sense of the world; he is saying that intuitions themselves have to be understood in terms of certain categories in order to be objects for cognition. This is in the B deduction of the Critique of Pure Reason . So the categories are conditions not just of our experience of objects but of objects themselves as objects of cognition. That’s really important to Pippin’s Kant. “ Pippin’s work has made Hegel respectable among Kant scholars and other people who wouldn’t otherwise read Hegel. ” Now we move to Hegel. Hegel takes over the broad idea that the categories, as unfolded in the Logic , are the conditions of anything being a determinate object of cognition. Hegel, however, drops Kant’s idea that cognition is also mediated by forms of intuition – space and time – that are subjective. Kant’s forms of intuition are universal – all finite beings like us share the same forms – but they’re subjective in the sense that they have their source within the mind. By the way, Kant is, in my view, quite dogmatic about this: because the forms of intuition are a priori and so subjective, we know that they can’t belong to things in themselves, but only to things as they appear to us. Yet Kant does not, as it were, peer over the wall bounding our experience and see directly that things in themselves are not spatio-temporal. This is impossible, not just because we are restricted to what is on this side of the wall, that is, to the objects of possible experience, but also because things in themselves should not be thought as actually there beyond the limits of experience. They are, rather, something that thought posits from within experience itself. More precisely, they are what we must think there to be when, within experience, we abstract from the conditions under which alone we know and experience objects. So Kant can’t say there are such things, he just says we must think there to be such things. But because we know that the forms of space and time are subjective, we must think things in themselves not to be spatiotemporal. Not all readers of Kant understand ‘things in themselves’ in this way, but this is how I understand them. Be that as it may, Hegel drops the whole idea that things in themselves must be thought to be (or that they are) beyond the reach of cognition, and maintains that what there is, is knowable. However, he retains the idea that the categories are the conditions under which things can be known, can be objects of cognition. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Pippin understands Hegel in the way I have just described, too, though there are subtle differences between our interpretations. For example, Pippin thinks that the first part of the Logic – the logic of being – considers the problems that arise when one attempts to understand what there is through simple categories, such as ‘something’. For him, Hegel’s exposure of the failure of this attempt then leads to the discovery, later in the Logic , of the further categories that are in fact required for something to be a determinate object of cognition. In my view, by contrast, the logic of being has a more positive role and simply unfolds what it is to be ‘something’, ‘finite’ and so on. Pippin’s work has made Hegel respectable among Kant scholars and other people who wouldn’t otherwise read Hegel. They now read Hegel because of what Pippin has done. But, interestingly, Pippin’s book has been influential by being slightly misunderstood – a misunderstanding that I was guilty of myself for a while. Pippin is usually taken to regard Hegel as a non-metaphysical thinker, as a thinker who tells us about the categories required for cognition of objects but nothing more. In fact, however, Pippin accepts that Hegel is a metaphysical thinker of a certain kind, because he thinks that, for Hegel, how something is understood to be is what it is . Pippin’s Hegel gives us an account of what it is to be an object for a possibly self-conscious judger, for thought and understanding. But at the same time, he claims that, for thought, this is all that an object can be . There is nothing more to things that we could know beyond what it is for them to be objects of cognition, so understanding the conditions of such objects just is knowing what they are. This is a subtle position, and I think that Pippin is right to complain that his Hegel is not simply non-metaphysical. Pippin’s Hegel just looks non-metaphysical when compared to the image of the ‘metaphysical’ Hegel that he rejects – the image of Hegel as a philosopher of the ‘Absolute’. Nonetheless, it seems to me that there is still something missing from the position adopted by Pippin’s own ‘metaphysical’ Hegel: for, in my view, there is an element of sheer being that is not collapsible into being for a knower or being an object of cognition . When we think about this table, we think that that table is there . Yes, it is known by us, but it also has a being and an identity of its own. My Hegel is thus trying to work out the categories that structure not only (a) how we must think of things; not only (b) what something must be to be an object of cognition; but also (c) what is to be at all. I think this third element is missing from Pippin’s account. For me, the long and the short of it is that Pippin’s Hegel ends up being a little too close to Fichte, for whom also ‘to be’ is ‘ to be for a subject ’. But Pippin’s interpretation of Hegel is very sophisticated, very interesting, and has been hugely provocative. It has helped give rise to the whole debate about whether Hegel is metaphysical or not. Since Pippin has been associated with the non-metaphysical interpretation, this has allowed others to advocate a metaphysical interpretation again. So, one consequence of Pippin’s book has been a huge revival of interest in the metaphysical Hegel (albeit understood in a variety of different ways)."