Hegel Workshop: Houlgate

Stephen Houlgate's paper "Is Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit an Essay in Transcendental Argument?" argues that Hegel is no transcendental philosopher. Kantian transcendental philosophy, as exemplified in the transcendental deduction, involves identifying the necessary conditions of experience, which themselves are not experienced. Houlgate argued that in his 1802 essay "Glauben und Wissen", Hegel criticised Kant in a way that is at best only 'quasi-transcendental'. However, in the Phenomenology Hegel moves to an entirely non-transcendental position which aims to avoid making any assumptions not shared with either philosophical opponents or 'ordinary consciousness'. Rather, the idea is to trace the development of what (necessarily) occurs within that common consciousness beginning from the characterisation that common consciousness would give of itself. Only in this way can philosophy avoid dogmatism and become truly self-critical. This 'radically non-transcendental' procedure can be seen in the transition from sense-certainty to perception.

Discussion focused on a number of issues, of which I shall just mention a couple. To begin, although Kant is of course the paradigmatic transcendental philosopher, we must not identify transcendental philosophy with Kantian philosophy, let alone the transcendental deduction. The fact that (arguably) the transcendental deduction contains dogmatic elements does not mean that all transcendental philosophy must.

Second, presumably not everybody would accept the conception that ordinary consciousness supposedly gives of itself. Nor the transitions that purportedly occur within ordinary consciousness. Rather, these are transitions that ordinary consciousness would make when thinking aright. In that case, philosophy might well become just an extension of the kind of rational reflection that ordinary consciousness already engages in.