Hegel workshop: Horstmann

Rolf-Peter Horstmann gave a paper entitled 'The Metaphysics of the Self: Hegel's Metaphysics of Self-Consciousness' at the Hegel workshop. In the paper he argued that Hegel and other post-Kantian German idealists shared Kant's view that self-consciousness is fundamental to explaining the possibility of empirical knowledge. Rolf made it clear that what Kant et al are interested in is 'philosophical self-consciousness' not empirical awareness of one's states as one's own. The former understanding of self-consciousness is formal rather than empirical; it articulates the ability of a subject to relate together representations as the constituents of thoughts about the world and herself. Presumably then, this form of self-consciousness is 'philosophical' because it is the transcendental condition of thought and thus empirical knowledge in general.

Rolf pointed out that the post-Kantian German idealists were dissatisfied with Kant's grounding of empirical knowledge in our subjective constitution. They saw this move as leading to Kant's restriction thesis on knowledge: that we can only have knowledge of appearances rather than things in themselves. By virtue of a further identification of things in themselves with reality 'as it truly is', Rolf argued that Kant's philosophical successors saw his subjective understanding of self-consciousness as leading not to a restriction on our knowledge, but to the conclusion that we have no knowledge at all.

Rolf then went on to argue that Hegel's 'metaphysics of self-consciousness' must be understood as a remedy to Kant's restriction thesis, whilst holding to the primacy of self-consciousness as a philosophical concept which makes possible (is a transcendental condition of) empirical knowledge. According to Rolf, Hegel's position cannot be understood unless we understand that: 1) Hegel conceived of the sum total of reality as a rational whole, 2) This whole is realised in the self-realisation of the concept of the whole, 3) This self-realisation is of reality as reason. All this apparently makes Hegel a 'conceptual realist', which presumably means that the representational concpetual structures which we construct in order to represent reality are (at least for some object domains) isomorphic to the actual structure of reality itself, and that the construction of such representational structures is itself a realisation of the rational nature of reality.

This monistic metaphysics connects with self-consciousness in the following way: in order to conceive of reality as an internally differentiated whole of qualitatively different objects, we must attribute to reality the complex relational structure of self-consciousness. This 'complex relational structure' can be expressed telegraphically in the idea that the 'I' of self-consciousness is an internally differentiated unity which 'contains its other'. This somewhat dark idea refers to a feature of knowledge which all the post-Kantian German Idealists seem to hold as primitive; namely, that the empirical objects we know are 'other' to us by virtue of being posited by us (are known as objects only via the concepts we deploy which together constitute the representational structure that make possible a repertoire of thoughts unified in a single subject). So to think of reality as an 'internally differentiated whole of qualitatively different objects' is to think of it as a complex relational whole that is somehow 'identical' to the holistic representational structure that makes possible self-consciousness.

Rolf argued that for Hegel, once we see that it is a transcendental condition of empirical knowledge that reality be conceived of as 'identical' to self-consciousness in being structurally isomorphic to it, we can both maintain that self-consciousness is the fundamental philosophical concept for understanding the possibility of empirical knowledge, whilst also avoiding Kant's restriction thesis. For since the holistic representational structure of concepts that makes possible the unity of consciousness (which in turn makes possible empirical knowledge) is now viewed as necessarily articulating reality, there is no reason to see the strictures of our self-conscious view of the world as distorting.

Whilst I think that this is a true rendition of what Hegel thought, it was not clear to me how transcendental this metaphysics of self-consciousness is. For, granting that we can make sense of the dark idea that reality instantiates a relational whole somehow 'identical' to self-consciousness, it would satisfy Hegel's transcendental condition if reality only necessarily appeared to us to instantiate such a whole. Rolf argued in the question period that he saw no problem with a transcendental condition being used to ground a metaphysics that was not restricted to appearances. But it seems to me that for Hegel, reality can only necessarily instantiate a relational structure 'identical' to self-consciousness for two reasons; 1) We could not conceive of empirical knowledge otherwise, in which case it is only necessary that reality appear to us to instantiate such a structure, or, 2) If it did not instantiate such a structure, it would not be the 'self realisation of reality as reason'. The former does not disallow Kant's restriction thesis and the latter vitiates the need to uncover 'transcendental conditions' via transcendental proofs because the conclusion is already assumed in the metaphysical assumptions that drive the proofs.