Hegel Notes: Force and the Understanding

August 15, 2024

After two months of grappling with this beast it’s finally time to be rid of Force and the Understanding, by which I mean to exorcise it in the transcendental act of blogging. This third and final chapter of the Consciousness section is an incredibly obscure expanse of text, even by the standards of the Phenomenology, and while I’d love to be able to offer some kind of coherent reading of all of its weird twists and turns, sadly I’ll have to rest content with this bag of highly opinionated notes which I hope may brush up against some of the larger landmarks.

I tend to favour a reading strategy that aims to produce a rational reconstruction that can stand up by itself, even where it may depart from the text, over one that attempts to tie up every last knot in the name of textual completeness, even where that comes at the price of making the intepretation complex and implausible. In this spirit, I’m going to offer a reading that aims foremost to make sense of an overarching logical progression, even where some pieces of the puzzle may lack solid grounding in the text. This is going to be particularly true when we come to the inverted world, but in my defense I’m yet to find anyone who has given a convincing account of that section without playing somewhat loose with Hegel’s actual words.

The new shape of consciousness that emerged at the end of the previous chapter is defined by the fact that unlike Perception, which grasps its object only in terms of sensuous universals, it is capable of wielding the ‘unconditioned’ universal. The problem for Perception is that armed only with sense-universals it cannot bring together its claim to possess determinate knowledge of its object with its further claim to possess knowledge of its essence: the object as it is in itself. These two criteria of legitimate knowledge are brought together in the unconditioned universal only by jettisoning the immediacy that comes with the restriction to sensuous experience, with whose authority Perception aimed to foreclose the possibility of error. By bringing together both what determines or differentiates the object with what can do so essentially, the unconditioned universal characterises “difference-in-itself”—a phrase that will become the watchword of this chapter.

It’s worth pausing to consider this question of error, as in my view it is one of the key guiding threads in this first act of the Phenomenology. What Hegel has drilled into us in both Sense-Certainty and Perception is that if cognition is to have any determinate content at all then it must at the same time be fallible: contain a possibility of error. The reason for this is that cognition is a kind of action—to determine an object in such a way is to apply a concept to it (to bring it under a universal), and any such application faces the possibility of being a misapplication. An infallible cognition, on this view, must also for this reason be contentless. In this regard Hegel is a kind of hardcore fallibilist, eschewing any philosophy which tries to secure the legitimacy of knowledge by founding it in some intrinsically infallible subset of cognitions. (This sentiment may also help to explain why Hegel can sometimes seem so unimpressed by mathematics.)

Yet at the same time Hegel is clearly sensitive to the sceptical worry that leads these philosophies to seek secure foundations in the first place, namely that if there are no cognitions that are true simply in virtue of being had, how can any chain of justification ever be brought to an end? What reasons can there be to believe anything at all? As outlined in the Introduction, it is clear that Hegel considers scepticism to be something that must avoided at all costs—not just in the narrow Cartesian sense, but also in the expanded Kantian sense which defends the claim that knowledge can have objective content only by denying that this knowledge is about things as they are in themselves. The implicit task Hegel is setting himself is to articulate why fallibilism does not imply scepticism, as has been the guiding ethos of the foundationalist (and particularly empiricist) philosophies in the crosshairs so far.

He does this by identifying and ultimately rejecting a second assumption that lies behind the inference from fallibilism to scepticism. And this, it seems to me, is what Force and the Understanding is all about. This second is the assumption that the object—now characterised in terms of the unconditioned universal, or difference-in-itself—is external to the subject, something wholly other than it. Indeed this is how Hegel sets up the dialectic at the very beginning of the chapter, informing us in advance that the problem within this new shape of consciousness will be that the unconditioned universal “is still an object of consciousness” and that “consciousness has not yet grasped its concept as concept.” (Hegel, 2018, p. 79) Hegel’s overall aim in the chapter is to show that it is this committment, rather than the fallibilism that results from giving up the authority of immediacy, that leads inevitably to sceptical conclusions.

Roughly, Hegel aims to show that the externalisation of difference-in-itself necessitates a certain hypostasisation of the division between reality and appearance (being-in-itself and being-for-another) as “self-sufficient substantialities”. This in turn underlies the medium or instrument model of cognition, in which subject and object make contact only via the veil of appearance as mediating middle, which Hegel already identified in the Introduction as the origin of the sceptical worry. According to this reading, the passage on the inverted world that culminates this line of argument is intended to make explicit exactly how this model entails scepticism. If this is right then the inverted world is functioning as something like a reductio ad absurdum, an intolerable possibility following from the externalisation of difference-in-itself. Later I’ll make a comparison with an argument from contemporary philosophy of mind—sometimes called the Dark Phenomenology Argument—which I believe can be presented as analogous. But first I’ll try to say something about how we get there.

The details of this argument are murky as hell, and the comments I can offer will be sketchy and somewhat brief. But some general themes can be picked out. Hegel begins with some considerations on form and content. Strictly speaking form and content are identified in the unconditioned universal—this is what is meant by difference-in-itself—but, Hegel claims, because it is held as “an object for consciousness [i.e. it is externalised], the difference of form and content emerges in it, and, in the shape of content, the moments still have the look in which they first presented themselves: On the one hand, to be a universal medium of many stably existing matters, and, on the other hand, to be a One reflected into itself[.]” (Hegel, 2018, p. 81)

So the distinction between the object and its manifest properties is still present. But where Perception was unable to forge any link between these two poles, leaving disunified determinacies on one side and bare essence on the other, the unconditioned universality that is the hallmark of the Understanding allows this new shape of consciousness to posit them as a single essence which presents dual aspects. This raises the question of how this single essence mediates the relationship (or the “exchange of determinacies”) between its two aspects. This relationship, as I understand it, is what is meant by force in the first instance, and Hegel’s argument tracks its evolution.

The tension that drives this evolution is in some respects the same that is in play throughout Consciousness—the tension between determinateness (which involves differential, or negative universality) and positive particularity. Yet this tension manifests quite differently here. Hegel’s initial thought is that the externalisation of difference-in-itself entails that it is posited as self-sufficient, i.e. as subsisting entirely independent of thought. Yet if its two aspects—which Hegel refers to as the expression of force (corresponding to the “stably existing matters” of Perception) and the genuine force (the excluding One)—are to belong to this single essence, and not merely to be contingently attached to it, then this self-sufficiency must also be inherited by each of them (it is in this way, perhaps, that eliminative forms of both materialism and idealism become thinkable). But of course this is a problem—the two aspects are supposed to be related in the same essence, as having their being in and through one another, yet the duplication of self-sufficiency seems to render their ontological connection contingent.

This form of reasoning is repeated several times: the externalisation criterion imparts a feature to the unified essence which must then be duplicated across its two aspects, which in turn problematises the necessity that is supposed to link them as aspects of the same essence. One important iteration of this logic concerns the law-like nature of scientific knowledge. The laws of motion, for instance, are universal—they describe not just how things have behaved or might behave, but how they must behave. For this reason diverse laws tend towards unification—Hegel’s example is that the law that governs a stone falling to the ground must ultimately be unified with the law that draws celestial bodies towards one another, and extrapolating we might think of the imperative towards a unified fundamental theory in physics, and the anxieties caused by the difficulty of getting quantum mechanics to play nice with relativity. Yet at the same time, this drive towards universality increases the distance between the laws themselves and the particularities they are supposed to determine. From our lofty vantage as readers of the Phenomenology, we can see that this abstract universality has the hallmarks of specifically conceptual structure, something located in the Understanding itself. But the externality criterion ensures this thought remains unavailable to empirical consciousness in its current form. Instead it must project it as a supersensible world, a “motionless realm of laws” lying on the other side of appearance.

At this point one move might be to place all being—along with determinacy—on the side of the supersensible world, i.e. to ascribe reality to the supersensible world only and to disregard appearance as inessential to the object. But Hegel points out that this is not possible. When supersensible laws are expressed in appearance (as they must be)—when the laws of electricity are expressed as a lightning strike, say—because they belong to the same essence these laws have to be posited as doubled in the particular lightning strike itself, the thing we can see and point to. The realm of appearance must therefore contain a duplicated order of differences. But the self-subsistency of these two orders now raises the spectre of scepticism, because who is to say that the differences received in appearance don’t deviate systematically from those in the supersensible world? And so it goes—in this manner the two facets of difference-in-itself—difference or determinacy and being-in-itself—are chased back and forth across the divide, gradually painting in the details of the medium/instrument model: a substantial veil of appearance possessing its own structure with an equally structured and equally self-subsisting supersensible world behind it. Yet the actual content of difference-in-itself is never quite located.

This is all a little more impressionistic than I’d like it to be, but it shall have to do for now. According to my reading, the inverted world appears as the final step in this runabout. In this last gasp difference-in-itself is posited as a kind of difference which is completely internal (or intrinsic) to any particular object. This contrasts with the earlier attempt to locate it in the extrinsic differences that relate objects to one another, specifically the law-like differences of natural science that bear the necessity that makes them candidate determinates of essences. This notion of ‘inversion’ can be thought of as a way of honing in on this kind of purely internal difference, as inversion is difference with respect to oneself.

The problem with pinning one’s hopes on this kind of intrinsic content can be illustrated with the Dark Phenomenology argument. This argument originally emerged as a way of turning arguments in favour of what would now be called strong phenomenal realism—the view that qualia are real and irreducible to physical or functional qualities—against themselves. One of the simplest of these is the inverted spectrum argument, which imagines a scenario in which someone’s brain has been rewired such that the spectrum in their colour vision has been completely flipped, but without interfering with the functional aspects of the visual field. Or in other words, all the differences—the things that might make a functional difference, like being able to distinguish stop lights from go lights—have been preserved, while at the same time everything looks the opposite of how it had¹. The argument thus aims to show that there is some content of phenomenal experience that is irreducible to the kind of extrinsic differences that could have functional or cognitive significance. These days we’d call that aspect that can be reduced to differences available to functional or cognitive processes ‘access consciousness’. What the phenomenal realist claims, then, and what arguments like the inverted spectrum are supposed to show, is that phenomenal consciousness always overflows access consciousness.

The Dark Phenomenology argument draws out a counter-intuitive implication of this position. If phenomenal consciousness overflows access consciousness, then in particular it is not determined by it. But if this is the case, then it’s logically possible that someone could be in a cognitive state that is wildly out of line with their true phenomenal state—for instance, they could believe that they’re feeling relaxed and wonderful while they are in fact suffering enormous agony. More generally, the separation of phenomenal consciousness from access consciousness seems to render our phenomenology unknowable (or ‘dark’) even to ourselves. Not only is this extremely counter-intuitive, it undermines the idea that our phenomenal consciousness is what we each know most intimately. It is unclear how a theory of consciousness entailing this possibility could ever be considered successful.

Hegel’s inverted world scenario could be seen as analogous. If difference-in-itself is posited as pure internal difference, then any concept applied to an object as it appears is consistent with it being the opposite way in itself. Some of Hegel’s own examples are a bit funny, like the example of the action which appears to be wrong (i.e. it has morally impermissible consequences) but is in fact good (i.e. it’s based on good intentions). What Hegel might be pointing to here is that certain familiar antimonies arise only when the essence of things is conceived in this way as intrinsic internal difference (in this case, the irreconcilability of consequential and categorical approaches in normative ethics). In this way, the inverted world shows how the original sin of this chapter—the externalisation of difference-in-itself—leads to this rather dramatic form of scepticism.

The final task, then, is to say how we get from here to self-consciousness. We already know this is where we’re going—since early in the chapter Hegel has been telling us that object of the Understanding (the unconditioned universal) is not something external to it, but is rather its own concept, and that the next shape of consciousness will open up only once this concept is recognised as concept. One thing we could say immediately is that self-consciousness does seem to realise an internalisation of this structure of difference-in-itself: self-consciousness is that mode of consciousness in which consciousness is internally divided as both subject and object. However this alone is a little unsatisfying, and doesn’t give much indication of how the medium/instrument model of cognition has been finally overcome. Some insight can be gleaned here, I think, by returning to the contemporary problem of phenomenal consciousness.

Phenomenal antirealists claim that phenomenal consciousness is reducible to access consciousness. This position implies that our conscious experiences have no intrinsic content—not that they have no content at all, but that any such content is exhaustively realised in differential relations that can make functional differences. This is a counter-intuitive claim—we are accustomed to thinking that there is something specific it is like to see a certain shade of blue, for instance—but there are some precedents in our own phenomenology which offer some intuitive leverage. When learning music theory it can be disconcerting to discover just how relative the way a particular note or chord sounds is to harmonic context, while certain optical illusions can problematise our ability to say which shade of a grey a square on checkerboard is. That it is even possible to be surprised by these examples suggests that we are perfectly capable of harbouring false intuitions about the way our own phenomenology works. A committed phenomenal realist can work around these cases by, say, admitting that there may be nothing it is like to hear an e minor chord, but there is always something it is like to hear a particular e minor chord played in context. But this kind of move depends on locating an intrinsic content relative to a fixed background, and this won’t work against the phenomenal antirealist’s claim, which is that these kind of phenomena generalise across the entirety of our phenomenal field—it’s differences all the way down.

Intrinsic phenomenal content is akin to the colours of the pixels on the screen of the inner cinema. By chipping away at this metaphor of the inner eye, the phenomenal antirealist challenges the intuition that there are facts of the matter about the way things seem to us, in excess of what we can cognitively do with those seemings. I’d be the first to admit that I’ve been somewhat overcooked in this philosophy of mind stuff, but this does seem to me to be very similar to what Hegel means when he talks about lifting the veil of appearance. In the medium/instrument model of cognition, the objects we perceive are first presented in appearance before being represented in our cognition. On this model our relationship to appearance is understood to be immediate, but the presumed gulf between reality and appearance raises the possibility of a systematic discrepancy between them. By doing away with this model Hegel achieves two things. First, by sweeping away the domain of immediately graspable cognitions he commits to a thorough-going fallibilism. Second, he ensures that the contact between thought and being is direct, if mediated—rather than having an immediate relation to an appearance of a tree, which may or may not accurately present the real tree, I am simply in a (conceptually) mediated relationship with the tree. We grasp the world with our concepts the same way the elephant grasps it with its trunk: directly. Because this contact is mediated, it contains a possibility of error, but because it is direct the concern about a systematic misaligment of representing and represented is no longer relevant. Even when cognition is in error, this error can now be made intelligble as possessing a certain content, as bearing information about the world it misrepresents. In this way the possibility of error is no longer seen as a doorway to scepticism which must be sealed at all costs, but as an essential aspect of the process through which consciousness bootstraps itself into truth. In this way Hegel shows how a fallibilist framework can not only avoid scepticism, but in fact guard against it.

As a final comment, I just want to mention something Hegel says at the very end of chapter, which addresses the worry that by taking the Understanding to be its own object, we have opened the door to a different kind of scepticism. This is a kind of postmodern scepticism which says that if the Understanding is totally inward looking then there will be nothing to constrain it, being presenting no friction to thought which could prevent it becoming lost in arbitrary free play. In what is barely more than a passing comment in the final sentences of the chapter, Hegel swats away this criticism by noting that it continues to depend on the now discredited model of immediacy. It is true that if the Understanding were perfectly transparent to itself—if its concept were simply whatever it took them to be—then it would indeed be completely unconstrained. But this is precisely the assumption we cannot make. The concepts of the Understanding cannot be understood to be immediately transparent to it, they are, as Hegel says, “only the result of a complex movement” and for this reasons “the cognition of what consciousness knows while knowing itself requires still further elaboration.” (Hegel, 2018, p. 101) And that is why we have the rest of the book to look forward to.

References

1. Hegel, G. W. F. H. (2018). The Phenomenology of Spirit (T. Pinkard, Tran.). Cambridge.

Notes

1. Anyone concerned that colours don’t have true opposites will be pleased to know there’s plenty out there who have sweated the details to come up with a version of this argument that actually makes sense—see Inverted Qualia for more. ↩

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