From Hegel’s Phenomenology: The Sociality of Reason by Terry Pinkard. This is chapter 1.
2. Hegelian Preliminaries
In the introduction, Hegel says the book is a theory of knowledge, in particular how knowledge claims can match up with the objects they are about. So it is odd, then, that most of the book is about issues which do not appear to be epistemological at all. We need to understand how Hegel thought many other issues, from Kantian ethics to the philosophy of religion, are related to knowledge.
If we say that a theory of knowledge has to explain how our knowledge-claims match their objects, Hegel says this puts the problem of skepticism at centre-stage in two ways. First, the basic issue of such theory is whether our claims can or do match their objects, and so a generalized skepticism, in which claims never match their objects, is a major concern.
Second, skepticism is a result of this view. When we understand knowledge to be the act of linking an idea with an object, then these ideas become intermediaries between the thinking subject and the world, and we can wonder if these ideas are illusions or distortions of objects.
State in these terms, it seems that knowledge is only possible if a self-certifying idea, an idea that carries its own justification, and a self-certifying procedure can be found to develop non-self-certifying ideas.
There are many possible candidates for this self-certifying idea, such as indefeasibility, and the issue becomes which one is the proper idea, the “ground” of all other knowledge. The theory of a ground would be a “science” in the sense of Wissenschaft, “a kind of structured theoretical knowledge of some circumscribed domain” (Pinkard 1994, 4).
Further, many different communities make different sorts of knowledge claims. Some religious types claim to know God through the certainty of their hearts, while others insist on sense-experience. Neither side can produce arguments to convince the other, since each side’s claims fail to live up the standards of evidence the other demands.
Since each side in these arguments make a variety of assumptions, Hegel says they are only appearances (Ercheinung), historical phenomena alongside other phenomena with no greater or lesser claim to being true than the others. If we take the problem of skepticism seriously, then all accounts, include our account of these accounts, have to be taken as appearances. Hence, an authentic skepticism has to be skeptical about itself: skepticism is itself only an appearance.
Only a theory which is acceptable to all sides could be an authentic ground of knowledge. Pinkard explains:
“The task of a theory of knowledge must be to produce some way of evaluating what kinds of reasons for belief (or for action) can count as authoritative reasons, and it must be able to show that the reasons it gives for counting those reasons as authoritative reasons are themselves authoritative reasons, and it must do this while at the same time regarding all claims, including the ones it itself makes, as being only ‘appearances.’” (Pinkard 1994, 5)
To take accounts as appearances is to take them as “formations (Gestaltungen) of consciousness,” or as forms of life that have taken certain types of reasons to be authoritative for themselves. Reasons are authoritative when they appear as mandatory or necessary for an agent.
A formation of consciousness is composed of two elements: the types of reasons a form of life takes to be authoritative, and the ways that life articulates to itself why those reasons are authoritative. Forms of life tend to their their reasons as given. To take an account as an appearance is to take it at its word and understand it on its own terms.
This can appear to be a sort of nihilistic relativism, what Hegel calls “the path of despair.” If reasons have to be underwritten by other reasons, then we seem to fall into an infinite regress. Even to begin, a theory of knowledge has to take certain things as evidence, but this procedure does not seem to be able to do that.
But we must start somewhere, and that means taking whatever standards of evaluation we already have and subject them to an internal test. This is Hegel’s solution. The standards of evaluation are internal to consciousness itself; we have to see if our authoritative reasons are actually authoritative on their own terms. This is how corrosive skepticism can become a “self-consummating skepticism.”
There are two initial ways to doubt the authority of a reason. The first is to ask whether it is actually authoritative, and the second is to ask whether our account of why it is authoritative is a good one. Skepticism appears with either of these two doubts—this is the negativity of self-consciousness: “The ‘negativity’ of an account is its capacity to generate a self-undermining skepticism about itself when it is reflected upon within the terms it has set for itself” (Pinkard 1994, 7). Negativity is characteristic of accounts which are objects of reflection, or of self-consciousness. A theory of knowledge needs to understand the relation between reasons and self-conscious reflection.
The Hegelian model of self-consciousness is not the awareness of internal objects like sensations. Initially or basically, it is “the assumption of a position in ‘social space.’” We take up a position in social space when we assume roles or demand treatment based on who we are, or when we see certain behaviours as appropriate or inappropriate, and so on. Within a social space, people assert things to each other and impute reasons based on the shared norms of that social space.
Reason-giving is itself a social practice which goes on within a determinate form of social space that “licences” some inferences and refuses licenses to others.
A major feature of social space is the set of “ground-rules” with which agents justify their beliefs and actions. These rules do not appear as the way in which people happen to reason, but the way in which they should reason. When the set of reasons undermines itself, it loses this sense of necessity—so a theory of knowledge has to look for a set of reasons that generates its own necessity in a way that does not undermine itself. This requires a self-conscious account of norms, and being self-conscious about norms means being “aware of the apparent paradoxes, incoherences, and conflicts within them” (Pinkard 1994, 8).
Forms of self-consciousness have a mediated, or inferential, structure. Pinkard uses this to give his definition of spirit:
“Whenever there is mutual recognition among self-conscious subjects that is mediated by such a shared self-conscious understanding of what for them counts in general as an authoritative reason for belief and action—that is, mediated by whom they take themselves to be in light of what they count as being generally authoritative for themselves and why they take themselves to count those things as authoritative—we have a relation of what Hegel calls spirit.” (Pinkard 1994, 8)
Spirit is a form of life which has developed practices for reflecting on what it takes to be authoritative for itself. Or in other words, it is a social space which reflects on itself to see if it is satisfactory on its own terms.
Problems arise when the form of spirit’s own reasoning leads to skepticism about the whole system of authoritative reasons. When this happens, agents seek to stabilize their sense of who they are, and engage in practices of affirmation and reassurance concerning their form of life. These practices take many forms, such as tragic drama, religious practice, or the valorization of certain social roles. People assure themselves that their reasons and grounds are actually in order.
We cannot assume that any particular form of spirit is correct; they must all be treated as appearances. Neither can we assume a vantage point outside any form. A theory of knowledge has to be built from inside a form. Each appearance has to be treated as a historical phenomena alongside other historical phenomena. Further, no historical phenomena can claim to be the “best” one because it can claim to be the best fit for its historical scene or its participants intuitions, because scenes and intuitions are also appearances.
Even this is not skeptical enough, because it begs the question as to why philosophy should be a science at all. Why would is the project of grounding mandatory, and why that type of grounding? Why not humanistic essays, like Montaigne’s, or aphoristic reflections, like Pascals? Hegel says that we need to give a non-question begging account of why philosophy has to be a science.
This amounts to saying that Hegel needs to show that his theory of knowledge is both an appearance and a necessary project, something moderns require.
Hegel cannot merely criticize other accounts: he has to show that these other accounts lead to his account. Other accounts are self-undermining in a way that requires Hegel’s project to make sense of themselves. Hegel’s project has to emerge out of them.
Hegel’s term for this way of looking at reasons is dialectic: “Dialectic looks at accounts that forms of life give of what they take to be authoritative for themselves, and how those accounts are transformed in terms of considerations internal to the accounts themselves” (Pinkard 1994, 10). Forms of life, as spirit, are constituted by self-conscious reflections on what they form of life requires to justify itself.
When a form of life is faced with skepticism, it responds by reassuring itself of its necessity. Either this reassurance is successful, and that form of life is renewed, or it fails, and a new form of life appears.
There is a potential problem with treating the theory of knowledge historically: it could be reduced to simply saying “we do things this way because this is how history has formed us.” We have become what we have become. Doing this, taking a purely historical argument as legitimating a form of life, is an example of what Hegel calls positivity, or what Kant would call dogmatism.
If philosophy is going to deal with history and be something other than an apology for the status quo, then the historical account of the contingencies that have made us who we are need to be supplemented with a dialectical history of self-consciousness.
Such a history would show how succeeding social spaces had resources within themselves that both justified themselves and gave way to new social spaces. This is not to claim that later formations of consciousness were fated to succeed earlier forms, or that the earlier forms were only aiming at later ones. Rather, the claim is that later forms can be seen retrospectively to have been completed by later forms.
Pinkard goes on to explain the dialectical progression in the Phenomenology of Spirit. First, a reflective form of life takes certain reasons to be authoritative, and then these reasons generate their own skepticism about themselves—they generate their own negation. The form of life is unable to reassure itself, and a new form takes its place, and the process begins again.
Broadly, the Phenomenology is a dialectical-historical narrative of how Europe has taken certain kinds of reasons to be authoritative for itself. These kinds of reasons are not purely philosophical, but include all the ways spirit can appear: art, religion, politics, science, and so on. It is the story of how justification from a personal view and justification from an impersonal view conflict and produce change.
The book begins by showing why such an account is necessary. Certain post-Enlightenment attempts to say our awareness of objects is immediate are shown to undermine themselves, and so must reflect on themselves in a historical way. The book’s starting point is epistemological, and through the failure of that epistemological starting point, history is introduced.
The Phenomenology takes its readers through the past formations of consciousness of Europe’s spirit, and demonstrates that they require a dialectical-historical account to make sense of themselves. It shows what is entailed by the European form of life, and what options are available to it.
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