Certainty

Part 2 of a discussion of certainty and its importance.

Last week, I tried to show three things:

1. The certainty of our knowledge is something we rarely consider, despite the fact that,

2. It actually turns out to be difficult to find any kind of certainty that isn’t unfounded, illusory, or entirely subjective. Far from being a merely academic concern, however,

3. The lack of any foundational certainty threatens the entire project of ethics, because we cannot be certain of what is valuable.

I ended by introducing Hegel’s Science of Logic as a possible way to achieve that certainty and thereby ground not only our knowledge of the world, but also our knowledge of ethical value. I also claimed that I would be writing two posts on this topic, but it’s clear to me now that I’ll need at least one more after this to both articulate Hegel’s argument as well as draw out its ethical implications. These posts are also likely to be more technical than usual, but I’ll do my best to make the core argument of The Science of Logic as legible as possible because, despite it being a punishingly difficult book, it is also the most profound work I’ve ever encountered.

But first: what does logic have to do with any of this? It has everything to do with Kant and how much Hegel thinks Kant got right about our relationship with the world we encounter. In staking out his claim to a kind of subjective certainty about the nature of our experience, that we can be certain of how the universe looks to us but not as it is “in itself,” Kant critiques the empiricism of Hume, who claimed any such certainty to be an illusion. But on the other hand, he also critiques the rationalism of thinkers such as Leibniz, who claimed that it is possible to have certain knowledge of things like God and the soul just through the immediate use of reason. In short, these rationalists claimed that, just by thinking, they could know something about the world “out there.” But we’ve already seen how Kant responds to such claims with his famous Critique of Pure Reason: the things we encounter in our experience are only ever our mediated representations of an unknowable reality, and any attempt to derive the existence of something we can’t possibly encounter in our experience, e.g. God, will say nothing at all about reality, but merely about our own rational apparatus. God, or the ultimate cause, is simply something reason has to believe in so it can make sense of the rest of its experience.

Hegel sides with Kant against these “dogmatic” rationalists: when you think of objects, you are not somehow magically crossing over to them as they actually are with only the power of thought, but rather encountering a mediated manifestation of an object in thought. In short, when one thinks of objects, one is, in part, thinking about thought. This is the definition of logic: the thought, or study, of thought. Most of what goes by that name today is formal logic, the study of the empty forms of thought like “if P then Q; there is P, so there must be Q.” But from this, Kant distinguishes another kind of logic—transcendental logic—which is the study of how objects appear in thought. For example, Kant thinks he can talk about the thought of objects “in general” because there are certain logical rules for how objects must appear to us, e.g. as having certain qualities or relationships, like causality.

So this is why Hegel’s science will be a science of logic, that is, a scientific study of the nature of thought: like Kant, he believes that thinking about objects is actually thinking about thought. But how will this leave us any more able to say anything about the world as it really is and not just about how we think it is? Because Hegel believes Kant has made an unjustified and fatal presupposition, that thing which any good science must exclude to the greatest possible extent. Kant’s presupposition? That thought and being are two different things.

Hegel takes the opposite position—that thought is identical to being—but he does not simply assume this and assert it. Rather, he says there are two ways to arrive at this conclusion. The first is laid out in his most famous work which preceded the Science of Logic, the Phenomenology of Spirit. This is another “scientific” work in that it allows the subject to explicate itself for an ideally passive observer, but instead of a science of logic, the Phenomenology is meant to be a science of consciousness. It begins with consciousness confronting its most immediate, most certain object: “this,” whatever “this” happens to be. This starting point is, in effect, Kant’s presupposition that thought and being are somehow different and divided: consciousness (thought) confronts its other (being). But over the course of the Phenomenology, Hegel allows this confrontation between thought and being to play out of its own accord for the passive observer (with occasional commentary and his famous “previews” of what’s to come), and we see a recurring movement take place. Thought, in trying to apprehend its object, realizes that the latter is somehow contradictory to thought’s initial understanding of it. For example, “this” was supposed to be the most specific, most certain object that could possibly exist for it, except that, on the contrary, everything is a “this.” In order to more firmly grasp its object, consciousness must revise its concept of it until, eventually, it realizes its own involvement with its object. The object of consciousness appears as it does for consciousness. Here again we see Kant’s argument about the entanglement of subject and object, and from this point on in the Phenomenology, every time consciousness is forced to revise its concept of its object, it must also revise its concept of itself, perhaps most dramatically when consciousness encounters another consciousness.

Perhaps by now it’s clear where Hegel is going with this. By the end of the Phenomenology, after consciousness has struggled to find itself in the world that, all along, it had assumed was something other than itself, it realizes that the world is its own self. Hegel calls this final stage of conscious development “absolute knowledge,” not because it “knows” everything, but because the very division inherent in knowledge between knower and known has collapsed into a singularity of thought and being.

So this is Hegel’s first argument for the identity of thought and being. It employs a technique or structure that is common in his work: it takes a presupposition, namely Kant’s assumption that thought and being are different, and allows it to dissolve itself. This result of the Phenomenology, the science of consciousness, is therefore the beginning of the Science of Logic, which will allow thought to examine itself in its pure form as absolute knowledge (this is why it will be a science of logic, thought’s study of itself). Perhaps even more importantly, though, it will allow the Science of Logic to exceed the limitation imposed by Kant and examine the nature of pure being as such, which has been revealed to be none other than pure thought.

But one need not read the Phenomenology or take Hegel’s word (or mine) to grasp the oneness of thought and being. He offers a second argument, one that emphasizes less the experimental/observational element of science, on which we might say the Phenomenology relied, but rather science’s exclusion of presuppositions. If we wish to make a science of thought, i.e. a science of logic, then we ought to abandon the distinction between formal and transcendental logic, which amounts to the abandonment of our presuppositions about the form and content (respectively) of logic, because those are things we must let the science reveal to us. We cannot presuppose a method either, since the movement of thought, if it has one, will also be part of the subject matter we wish to observe. If we then abstract from our reality all form, all content, and all method, what are we left with? Either: pure, undifferentiated, indeterminate, unmediated being or, what Hegel will provocatively claim is the same thing: nothing.

But this being (or nothing) is, again, not something other than our thought of it, for that presupposition of difference must also be suspended. What we hold in our minds, then, the beginning of our science of logic, is a being (or nothing) that is no different from our awareness of it, an immediacy that is simple (i.e. that has no parts). Hegel calls this “the simplest of all simples, the logical beginning,” and the science of logic, as with the science of consciousness, will be nothing more than the observation of this subject matter in its own development. Out of this singularity will emerge everything that it means to be and be known, but this first certainty, the oneness of thought and being, is its foundation. Descartes came close when he claimed, “I think, therefore I am,” but the only real certainty is this: thought is.

Next week, we’ll talk about what the subject of the Science of Logic, this unity of thought and being, actually is and how it can ground our knowledge of the world and our ethical practice. Thanks for reading.