Hegel Notes: Kant and Hegel, the Phenomenology and the Logic, Brandom and Houlgate
January 4, 2025
In this note I’ll gather a few big picture thoughts on the scope of Hegel’s project in the Phenomenology, how it relates to the Science of Logic and also to Kant. This was stimulated by a few criticisms Stephen Houlgate aims at Brandom in his review of A Spirit of Trust.
One of Kant’s central ideas is that the categories of traditional metaphysics should be understood as universal forms of thought. The implications of this are twofold. First, it steers a priori inquiry clear of (characteristically modern) epistemological worries by restricting its subject matter to the transcendental structure of rational subjectivity. Second, and as a consequence, it limits the metaphysical ambition of philosophy by denying that a priori inquiry can yield insight into being as such. On this understanding the transcendental turn closes the door on pure ontology.
Houlgate offers a story about how Hegel reopens this door. It begins from the observation that the negative implications of Kant’s claim presuppose a division of thought and being—it is on this basis that the transcendental turn is also an anti-ontological turn. According to Houlgate the standpoint of natural consciousness picked up in the Phenomenology is the perspective embodying this presupposition. The Phenomenology then tracks its development through a process of ‘immanent scepticism’ in which the object of its cognition is repeatedly undermined in its experience. Ultimately this process undermines its original presupposition, and natural consciousness is left in the standpoint of Absolute Knowing, in which thought and being are no longer held apart and are seen to be identical. The Kantian disjunction is thereby undercut, and pure ontology is opened up once again as a field of a priori inquiry. And this is where the Logic picks up.
This story presents a division of labour between the Phenomenology and the Logic: the Logic contains Hegel’s actual philosophy (or at least the beginning of it), while the Phenomenology does not—the Phenomenology is merely a dialectical tool which can be used as a way into the Logic. Houlgate has many gripes with Brandom, but his central one revolves around this point, because Brandom’s goal in A Spirit of Trust is to expound what he takes to be the theory expressed by Hegel in the Phenomenology. But according to Houlgate, the Phenomenology contains no such thing—the only theories we encounter there are the erroneous ones adopted and then discarded by natural consciousness on its way to Absolute Knowing, only at which point can theorising begin for real.
But it seems to me that Houlgate’s story, while no doubt right in certain regards, also misses something critical about what’s going on in the Phenomenology. And that is that the movement of immanent scepticism is not a purely negative movement—when a model of cognition adopted by natural consciousness is seen to undermine its object it is not simply discarded, it is sublated. So when Hegel tells us that implicit in individual self-consciousness is the mutual recognition of multiple self-consciousnesses, do we really want to say that this is just one more mirage to be discarded on the path to Absolute Knowing? I do not think so—Hegel here is clearly giving us an insight, one that has been hard won and will be retained even as it may be reinterpreted in the course of the dialectic. Indeed these are precisely the kind of insights distinctive of transcendental psychology. With each turn of the dialectical wheel, the negative dissolution of the object of cognition is at the same time a revelation of the positive conditions of possibility of cognition of such an object. When it has attained Absolute Knowing at the end of the Phenomenology, natural consciousness will not be some kind of perfectly still Buddha-mind emptied of all presuppositions. Rather it will be equipped with a fully developed framework of transcendental psychology. Indeed, it is precisely in virtue of such a framework that it is able to grasp the identity of thought and being as a determinately contentful identity. And this is the framework Brandom takes himself to be giving an exposition of.
Furthermore, if we are to take the identity of thought and being seriously, then we should understand Hegel not as rejecting Kant’s thesis but as reinterpreting it. If thought and being are identical, then the foundational categories of being just are the universal forms of thought: pure ontology and transcendental psychology have the same object.
But if we take this together with the claim that the Phenomenology does indeed contain a substantial transcendental psychology, then Houlgate’s division of labour begins to look problematic. One question we might raise is if the Phenomenology really is dispensible and Hegel’s philosophy begins with the pure ontology in the Logic, then how does Hegel establish the epistemic warrant for this method? If he doesn’t, then how is this not scholasticism? But if we do see the Phenomenology as indispensible then we have an answer to this question: it is precisely because Absolute Knowing consists in a worked-out transendental psychology that it has epistemic warrant, for all the old Kantian reasons. And for all the new Hegelian reasons, this warrant is also the warrant for a pure ontology.
Seen this way, the Phenomenology and the Logic are two indispensible perspectives on the same thing. Together they paint in the determinate content needed if the identity of thought and being is not merely to relate two empty abstractions. One takes the form of transcendental psychology, the other pure ontology. This kind of picture seems to me to offer a more plausible account of what’s going on in the Phenomenology, which is not just a series of rejections of erroneous models of cognition but also an accumulation of the positive discoveries of what went wrong in them.