Hegel's Concept of Mind - Self-Consciousness and Satisfaction - Western Tradition Classics and Interpretations

Author: Robert Pippin (USA)
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2006-03-01
Features: In the history of interpretations of Hegel, this book is highly influential. It will forever end the myth that Hegel's speculative philosophy is a direct return to the extreme rationalism tradition, which Kant deemed "dogmatism" and severely condemned. This achievement makes Pippin's work a major event in our understanding of Hegel. The book is divided into three parts: the background of idealism, the phenomenology of idealism, and the logic of idealism. It also discusses the ideas and achievements of famous Western philosophers such as Kant, Jena, Schelling, and Fichte. Some may have already criticized that following Hegel and emphasizing the thesis of apperception while starting from it, clearly misses the more complex and broader arguments of the critique of idealism. This focus on Kant's theme of self-consciousness while almost completely excluding others seems to openly ignore the foundation of Kant's idealism, which is his concept of the forms of sensible intuition. For Kant, the overall difference between formal or general logic and transcendental logic depends on whether pure intuition is used to distinguish "real possibility" from mere logical possibility, i.e., the conditions necessary for a representation of an object versus the conditions necessary for a thought or representation to be a possible one. Kant indeed argues that we can prove that pure concepts are necessary for the existence of representations or judgments, but he also clearly believes that success in this argument depends on mentioning the unique forms of intuition we happen to possess (especially by mentioning the sequential nature of our grasping activity in time). The core of Kant's answer to his own transcendental synthetic problem—how thought can successfully a priori determine what differs from thought—is his claim that we can a priori, in some sense, represent all possible objects of intuition that differ from thought or what is given to thought; he also claims that pure intuition exists. This idea is not particularly clear, or, as I have argued elsewhere, not a successful one, but it should not obscure its importance in Kant's understanding of his own idealism. However, as we will see, except for in certain brief passages from his Jena period writings, Hegel never addressed this topic with the thoroughness it deserves, a fact that seems to severely undermine any claim that he had philosophical insight or significance in his grasp of Kant.
However, on this point, before we can make any such judgment, we should note that the controversy between Hegel and Kant over the topic of intuition should be divided into two aspects. One question is, why did Hegel believe that Kant could not successfully defend his non-conceptual form of sensible intuition, using it as a distinct element in his idealist argument? The second question is, apart from relying on the conceptual status of the intuited object, whether Kant's argument about the forms of thought as "forms of apperception" itself could lead to idealist conclusions. As we will see in the next chapter, a simple but initially unhelpful answer to the first question is: Fichte. Fichte and his analysis and critique of Kant's apperception and spontaneity greatly influenced Hegel's views on this point to the extent that he rarely acknowledged [as the original text states – translator's note] this topic or its influence, although the traces of Fichte's arguments are evident throughout Hegel's mature reflections on Kant. Therefore, part of the answer to the first question depends on how Hegel interprets Fichte's idealism—particularly Fichte's prioritization of spontaneity over Kant—and why this understanding makes it impossible to make a strict distinction between concepts and intuition. However, this partial answer also depends on the details of the argumentative strategy of the deduction, which I believe is particularly evident in the second edition of the deduction. There are some indications that Hegel believed this strategy collapses internally when using pure intuition to establish the objective reality of the categories.
From a philosophical perspective, reconstructing Hegel's position requires, to some extent, explaining why Kant's reliance on pure intuition, in Hegel's view, is unsatisfactory. Accordingly, I provide a brief overview here, summarizing Hegel's view of the "problem" in the deduction, particularly the role of pure intuition in Kant's claims about a priori synthetic knowledge. Then I discuss the general idealist implications of the thesis of apperception.
Of course, there are many interpretations of the deduction. However, the topic relevant to Hegel can be taken from a few passages, most of which are in the second edition of the deduction, particularly those directly discussing pure intuition and imagination, where Hegel explicitly mentions that his restatement of Kant's strategy is crucial. But the issues raised in these passages belong to the most controversial topics in the interpretation of Kant.
However, I will now provide the broader context in which these issues arise. (I will strive to avoid the complex topic of the relationship between the two versions of the transcendental deduction and many contentious interpretive issues, aiming only to provide an argumentative outline that is relevant to Hegel and, given the limited space, fair to Kant.) Kant often asserts that the core concept in the argument of the deduction is "the possibility of experience." By "experience," he means empirical knowledge, and he intends to examine the conditions necessary for our ability to form claims about the world that are either true or false ("objective" claims). The key point of this possibility lies in our "ability to represent objects" (more commonly stated in the second edition as our "ability to judge"). For Kant, any kind of experience involves a cognitive ability—even if the experience is of the "inner flow" of a subject's mental states. Even such a subject judges that such states are "flowing" in that order. He also claims that any such representational ability must involve the ability to unify a manifold, and that the unity that counts as a sufficient condition for a representation to be a representation of an object is a "synthetic" unity. This claim is then linked to Kant's historically decisive argument that the perception of an object, even a mental state, cannot be understood merely from the perspective of having or directly introspecting a mental state.
Kant identifies the inner complexity of mental states as the ability to recognize them as belonging to the same state, the ability to distinguish which elements in a manifold of intuitions belong together, and the ability to, when many objects are present in the manifold of the intuited, justly represent these elements as the components of a representation of that object—all of which, for Kant, indicate this necessary synthetic ability.