Even before Hegel finished the Phenomenology of Spirit, he had already realized that it was only an initial step in systematic philosophy, and within a decade he would not concede that it was even a necessary first step. From this fact, some commentators have rightly concluded that it is disingenuous to forego a lengthy treatment of Hegel’s entire system and rest content with a jaunt through the action-packed Phenomenology. While I agree that the system contains some of Hegel’s most innovative and important thought and have based my reading on the methodological presupposition that there is no final Hegel, I still want to defend my emphasis on Hegel’s Jena writings before briefly considering the place of reason in the mature system.
Most generally, it should be noted that although the word Vernunft appears throughout Hegel’s writings, it is only natural that Hegel’s most significant discussions of it should appear in phenomenological contexts. Reason is, in its strictest sense, a phenomenological category. In Hegel’s mature system, being, infinity, the concept, space, time, race, habit, and so on each occupy a particular place, and reason is a form of consciousness, taken in the general sense of spirit’s self-presence. Specifically, reason is the third and culminating stage of phenomenology, that is, subjective spirit’s conscious self-knowledge. This means that unlike the concept, organic life, habit, and most structures in the Hegelian system, reason is a way of thinking about oneself. Whereas, for instance, being and nothingness prove to be unstable and self-limiting prior to any cognition of them,1 reason’s instability lies in how it thinks about itself and its world. Thus while there may be formal parallels between the dialectic of reason and other moments of Hegel’s system, the movement of reason is not identical with the movement of the whole, but is only a part of it. There are, however, three notable ways that Hegel uses the term ‘reason’ in nonphenomenological contexts, each of which I will need to address to keep the results of my investigation appropriately modest.
First, Hegel often accuses others of misconceiving his system by approaching it through the understanding rather than reason.2 In these contexts, Hegel is relying more or less on the Kantian definitions of reason as presuppositionless thought and understanding as the application of pregiven categories. In these contexts, Hegel continuously reminds his readers (or his audience) that it is a prejudice of the understanding to assume that moments of spirit are static categories that cannot transform into their opposites.3 By grasping that the categories of the understanding are its own creation, reason is more attentive to their fluid and contingent nature and thus offers a more appropriate standpoint for retracing the dissolution of the pure concepts of logic. By itself, however, this does not prove that the movement of the system is itself determined by reason, but merely that we must already have suspended the fastidious self-seriousness of the understanding to follow the movement of the Logic. To drive this point home, Hegel takes pains to note in the Encyclopedia Logic that though it is indeed an essential building block of rational thought, ‘formal syllogising is “rational” in a way that is so devoid of reason that it has nothing to do with a rational content’ (H 20: 292, §181). While reason depends on the ability to think syllogistically, understanding syllogisms tells us nothing about the concrete truths and perversities to which reason can lead. Following the Logic and its real counterparts requires reason not because reason is the substance or content of the system, but because reason is capable of the gentle touch that lets its object be.
A second clue that reason might pervade the system as a whole is reason’s connection with what Hegel calls the ‘idea.’ In the 1830 Encyclopedia Logic, Hegel writes, ‘The idea can be grasped as reason (and this is the genuine philosophical meaning of reason), further as subject-object, as the unity of the ideal and the real, of the finite and the infinite …’ (H 20: 216, §214). Here we should first note that Hegel is not saying that the idea is reason or that reason in its entirety is a part of the idea, but that the idea can be grasped as reason or that it is useful for his students to conceive it this way, just as it would be to conceive it as a Schellingian subject-object, and so on.4 But this does not negate the fact that if we conceive this ‘is’ properly, we can also say that the idea is reason.
As the final stage of Hegel’s logic, the idea is a form of thought that unites the dialectical fluidity of the concept with its object. As such, the idea is not simply the series of concepts that has been presented, but their flowing into one another. The structure of this flowing-into-one-another mirrors spirit’s path from the immediate activity of self-consciousness through the self-possessed freedom of cognition to the actualization of willing, and thus it is tempting to say that the idea succumbs to the dialectic of reason in becoming the absolute idea. But since Hegel repeatedly insists that the moments of the Phenomenology of Spirit play out the pure movements of thought (H 20: 68, §25), it would be better to say that the phenomenological dialectic of reason plays out the movement of the idea (along with other logical movements) in the conscious sphere. Thus when we Hegel’s readers follow his advice and grasp the idea as reason, we do so not by following the pure movement of the idea, but by using a recollection of how it plays out in consciousness to improve our abstract understanding of it.
Finally—and most troubling for my attempt to find consistency in Hegel’s use of the term ‘reason’—Hegel sometimes appears to use ‘reason’ to refer to the motive force behind movement through the dialectic. Especially salient are his references to the ‘cunning [List] of reason’5 and his famous identification of the actual and the rational.6 While his reported appeal to the cunning of reason in his lectures on the Philosophy of History to account for the emergence of new social relations is not especially problematic since a suspended version of reason is still operative in objective spirit, the account of reason I have presented so far is incompatible with his claim in both the larger Logic and the Encyclopedia Logic that the logical structure of teleology manifests the cunning of reason (H 12: 165-6; H 20: 213, §209).
Hegel’s logical claim for the existence of teleological beings rests on his claim that there is an instability in objects that are defined either solely in their relation to external objects (mechanical objects) or by their ability to enter into and dissolve relations to other objects (chemical objects). In both cases, the independence of the object is compatible with its relation to the external object only through the mediation of some third thing, but (as experienced readers of Hegel will be able to predict) this merely raises the question of the relation of the object to the mediator. There must thus be a kind of object that relates to something already within it, an end (Zweck), which simultaneously separates itself from the immediate being of the object and is the means by which the object returns to itself. This subordination of the object to an end, Hegel writes in the Science of Logic, ‘may be regarded as violence insofar as the end appears to be of a completely different nature than the object, and the two objects similarly are mutually independent totalities. But that the end posits itself in a mediated relation with the object and interposes another object between itself and it, may be regarded as the cunning of reason’ (H 12: 165-6). Hegel’s immediate intention in the passage is to explain that an end does not have to be seen as something alien, but can draw the object to its own fulfillment. The end does not rule the object like a tyrannical lord, but is unified with it through the realization of the end.
But while Hegel hedges himself by claiming only that this movement of the end may be regarded as the cunning of reason, this still follows Schelling’s Nature Philosophy in assuming that reason is already present in the very concept of purpose. Whereas the claim that the idea may be regarded as reason (or as subject-object, etc.) can be read as a pedagogical suggestion to help Hegel’s students follow a technical aspect of the idea, his claim that the apparent violence of teleology actually is a kind of rational cunning extends the reach of reason to a place in the system where it has no right to be. If the operation of reason can be seen in purposiveness as such, then reason must be much more pervasive than its presence in the Encyclopedia Phenomenology of Spirit would suggest. If reason underlay the very concept of teleology, then it would not simply be a shape of spirit, but would have to constitute part of the very substance of pure thought. This does not contradict anything I have said so far about reason’s perverseness and need to be suspended, but unless we want to chalk these passages up to Hegel’s desire to make himself understood by analogy, it does suggest that Hegel’s use of the term ‘reason’ may not have been entirely consistent even in the completed system.
In its more familiar use, however, ‘the cunning of reason’ need not presuppose any grand design or demand any allegiance to an infallible providence. If the compilation of student notes that has been passed down as Hegel’s Philosophy of History is to be trusted as presenting his views more or less accurately, then Hegel’s claim is actually quite modest. Contrary to those who would like to see history unfolding according to some logical necessity, Hegel asserts that ‘it is not the universal idea that [places] itself in opposition and struggle and exposes itself to danger. This may be called the cunning of reason—that it sets the passions to work for itself, while that by which it posits its existence pays the penalty and suffers loss’ (Hegel 1970 12: 49). What ‘may be called’ the cunning of reason—again, Hegel distances himself from such terminology—is simply reason’s refusal to get involved in historical struggles. Historical changes occur as contingent human passions come up against each other and wear each other down (sich abreiben).7 The point of this vaguely comical image is to emphasize that the structure of reason has little to do with the frenzy of historical movement; reason’s role is simply to comprehend the development once it has occurred.8 While we will see later that the broader project of finding reason in history does at times risk forgetting the lesson of Hegel’s Phenomenology by placing uncritical faith in reason, this conception of reason’s cunning does just the opposite, releasing history from the determination of reason.
Of related concern is Hegel’s famous statement in the Philosophy of Right that ‘The rational is the actual and the actual is the rational.’9 It has been widely noted that this statement is grounded in Hegel’s long-established distinction of actuality from existence and thus that he is not making the conservative claim that things are as they are because this is the most rational way for them to be.10 Rather, since actuality by definition involves self-fulfillment, only those institutions that achieve their self-constituting ends (like a loving marriage, a state that protects individual liberties, etc.) are actual. But this still raises the question whether anything that achieves its end is ipso facto pervaded by reason. Hegel seems to imply precisely this when he states, ‘To recognize reason as the rose in the cross of the present and thereby to enjoy the present, this is the rational insight which reconciles us to the actual’ (Hegel 1970 7: 26-7), but this identification of the actual and the rational is tempered by his insistence that in the objective world of law and politics we can never know in advance what is rational—that philosophy ‘appears only when the actuality of its process of formation is complete and done’ (Hegel 1970: 7: 28). Philosophy ought not to despair at the world’s failure to live up to its ideals, but neither should it assume that reason can prescribe how the world ought to develop. Thus the rationality that we find in well-functioning institutions is distinct from the reason in the Phenomenology that takes itself to be the arbiter of what is to be. There is no promise that reason will find itself completely at home in any institution, but only the assurance that some institutions do live up to their ends. Thus the study of the world’s rationality is not, in Alain Badiou’s words, ‘searching for dialectical corpuscles,’11 but paying careful attention to how given institutions succeed and fail in handling the problems they were created to address.
With these terminological clarifications out of the way, I would now like to turn to Hegel’s systematic working out of the claim at the end of the Phenomenology that nature and history must be released from the concept and allowed to develop freely. First, in the realm of nature, it is not immediately obvious how philosophy can say anything at all about nature if it does not rely on the necessary unfolding of the concept. As several commentators have observed,12 it seems that Hegel is trapped between either assuming that nature develops rationally, and thus that at least the broad elements of its structure can be known independently of empirical investigation, or admitting that empirical investigation can make new discoveries about the world and thus abandoning the assumption that reason truly finds itself in nature. This dichotomy breaks down, however, when we understand the way that nature is released from logic. While I am not in a position to say what value (if any) Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature has for contemporary scientific research, I do want to argue that his conception of the role of reason in investigations of nature is not flawed prima facie, as Schelling and other readers claim.
At the end of the Science of Logic, Hegel describes nature’s release from science in terms similar to those at the end of the Phenomenology of Spirit. After reaching the absolute idea, in which thought thinks itself in all its internal differentiation, philosophy finds that as an idea it is still plagued by limitation:
Secondly, this idea is still logical; it is enclosed within pure thought and is the science only of the divine concept. The systematic exposition is indeed itself a realization of the idea but confined within the same sphere. Because the pure idea of cognition is so far confined within subjectivity, it is the drive [Trieb] to suspend this, and pure truth as the last result becomes also the beginning of another sphere and science. (H 12: 253)
Rather than a simple repose in its own internal completeness, logic is driven and then decides13 to suspend its unity and release itself into an external realm. Schelling would later quip that this transition is so unmotivated that logic could only decide to release itself into nature through boredom. He is, in a sense, correct. Though Schelling expresses preference for Jacob Böhme’s more evocative tale of freedom vomiting itself into nature14 and advances his own elaborate narrative of this transition in the Ages of the World (especially the 1813 version), all such attempts to motivate the transition into nature are, for Hegel’s project, extraneous to the release of the absolute idea. For if this transition were a logically necessary one, then it would not be a release at all, but just another internal logical transition. If, on the other hand, it were the actualization of an idea that already existed objectively, then it would come on the scene too late and already be plagued with the contingency to which all nature is condemned. It is not even the actualization or life of the idea, for these are still logical determinations (H 12: 253). The move from logic to nature, Hegel writes, cannot be conceived as a transition or a becoming; rather, all that can be said is ‘that the idea freely releases [entläßt] itself in its absolute self-assurance and inner poise’ (H 12: 253). Though to this point Hegel has repeatedly reminded his readers to allow their readings of previous sections to be structured by reason rather than the understanding, he here reaches the point where even reason is of no help. Because the idea’s self-release is the logical analogue of reason’s self-sacrifice in the phenomenological realm, it is the one movement of pure thought to which reason lacks even analogical access. Its structure can be abstractly understood, but it cannot be rationally motivated. As we will see in the next chapter, Schelling regards this as a nonanswer to the question of why nature comes to be in the first place, and thus he will devote the rest of his life (beginning with the 1815 Ages of the World) to showing why what he calls the ‘negative philosophy’ must be supplemented with a ‘positive philosophy’ tracing out how and why there is anything at all. In contrast to this conflicted allegiance to reason, Hegel calmly and neutrally marks out the place where there is nothing else for reason to do.
This place beyond reason is, however, merely a systematic one, for the contingency of nature and freedom of spirit assure that reason will never be in want of work. Indeed, as we saw in Chapter 7, time itself is bound up with the self-overcoming striving of reason. In the Philosophy of Nature, this means that nature does not strictly follow logical determinations. As Hegel showed in the Phenomenology’s discussion of Observing Nature, nature has a playful side that resists conceptual deduction. Though it is often possible to find analogues of natural categories in the natural world, Burbidge has shown that Hegel’s discussion of chemistry, for instance, does not precisely follow the logical determination of chemism, nor does his discussion of organic life perfectly mirror the logical category of life.15 Instead, even once we philosophers have found a genuine parallel between logic and nature, there is always slippage.
Thus the relation of reason to nature is just as problematic in the Philosophy of Nature as it is in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Nature’s contingency and irreducibility to the concept is not merely something that we can observe in, say, the unexpected morphology of the platypus, but is shown to be necessary in the very relation of logic to nature.16 No matter how painstaking scientists are in attempting to find the logical structures underlying contingent natural phenomena, their conclusions will always be provisional and fallible. Thus Hegel insists early in the Encyclopedia Philosophy of Nature that ‘in addition to explaining [angeben] an object according to its conceptual determination, the philosophical path also calls for naming the empirical appearance that corresponds to it and showing that there is in fact a correspondence’ (H 20: 236, §246). In a Zusatz to this section, Hegel is reported to have complained that modern physics impedes careful observation of natural diversity by seeking to reduce all natural phenomena to universal laws and forces immanent in nature. Only philosophy is suitably attuned to the difference that exceeds suppositions of identity. While Hegel sometimes describes this incomprehensible excess as resulting from nature’s powerlessness,17 it also exposes the weakness and pretentions of a reason that claims dominion over nature.
None of this, of course, explains the concrete development of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature. This development has already received at least two recent book-length treatments in English,18 and due to its complexity it could easily support several more. But this is precisely the point at issue. Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature is by necessity in conversation with the contingent empirical discoveries of his historical time and thus must contain more than the excrescences of reason. Because it aims to retrace nature’s development as a systematic unity, it is not a mere condensation of empirical observations, but it is open enough to contingency that it is capable of being surprised.19 This is not to say that the Naturphilosophie of any time will always fail to describe the structure of nature. After all, as scientists and philosophers engage thoughtfully with nature, obvious inconsistencies are continually being corrected and rough edges smoothed. It does imply, however, that reason has no right to assume that its theories are correct just because they are its products or that its ultimate union with nature is in any way guaranteed.
As we saw in Chapter 7, absolute knowing’s release from science yields its externalization not merely into the contingency of nature, but equally into the free activity of history. Given its similarity to the structure of the Encyclopedia, some commentators have concluded that this is an early version of the logic/nature/spirit division of Hegel’s mature system.20 But since spirit comes in so many shapes for Hegel, some of which are prerational and some of which incorporate the suspension of reason, I will keep my analysis focused on the ways that history exceeds reason. A great deal of excellent recent scholarship has shown that Hegel believed history was full of contingency,21 that he never believed that his contemporaries had reached the ‘end of history’ in any but the most trivial sense that historians could only recount and explain what had already happened,22 that he assumed the structure of society would continue to change in seismic ways,23 and that he rejected the assumption that the idea is the guiding force of history.24 But we are still left with some famous passages from his Philosophy of History that seem to imply strongly that the only correct philosophical approach to history must assume that reason is not only operative in it, but governs it. While the obscurity of the composition of this book from a jumble of student notes makes it tempting simply to ignore some of the more troublesome passages, the account of reason given in the lectures is consistent enough to deserve some explanation.
Hegel begins his discussion of philosophical history (as opposed to original or reflective history) by declaring, ‘The only thought which philosophy brings with it [to the contemplation of history] is the simple thought of reason, that reason governs the world, and that the history of the world is accessible through reason’ (Hegel 1970 12: 20). Thus while he cannot fairly assume his audience to be in full possession of an understanding of the role of reason in history, he can presume that they ‘at least have the firm, unconquerable faith that reason does exist there’ (Hegel 1970 12: 20). It seems, then, that philosophical history cannot proceed without the philosophical knowledge, or at least the faith, that history develops in accordance with what is reasonable. Such a view is roughly that expressed in Part Four of the System of Transcendental Idealism, that the unity of the spiritual world can only be conceived on the basis of an underlying drive to reconcile all opposition. But as Schelling’s very working out of this idea showed, there is no internal reason to believe that there must be such a drive, even if we presuppose a preexisting harmony among all individuals and their expressions (S 3: 592).
Thus Hegel is emphatic that though it may be commonplace in his students, no such faith in reason is required to study history (Hegel 1970 12: 21). Such a general belief in history’s rationality is just as unsatisfying as Anaxagoras’s assertion that the world is ruled by nous is for Socrates in the Phaedo)25 Just as Socrates’s second sailing requires engaging nature concretely through the formulation and testing of hypotheses, Hegel argues that historical explanation requires studying the particular passions of the agents involved (Hegel 1970 12: 25). If reason shows itself to underlie history’s movement, then this must be the result, not the presupposition of the study of history.
But even as a result, the conclusion that the movement of history is rational is a highly contingent one. For unless we make the effort to understand the particular form of reason to which history has given rise, Hegel writes, the term ‘reason’ is just as abstract as ‘providence,’ and a study of reason in history would at best be a Leibnizian theodicy that merely asserts abstractly that the present state of the world must be the best possible one (Hegel 1970 12: 28-9). Hegel is confident enough from his partial study of world history to conclude that history develops so as to maximize human freedom, but he begs off complete knowledge of what constitutes this freedom and admits that the ‘still incomplete process of the world’s history itself’ can only be analyzed from our historically conditioned and thus necessarily limited perspective (Hegel 1970 12: 40). As Hegel puts it in the Philosophy of Right, philosophy cannot tell us how the world ought to be, for it ‘always comes on the scene too late. As the thought of the world, it appears only at a time when actuality has already completed its process of formation and made itself ready…. The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of dusk’ (Hegel 1970 7: 28). Thus Hegel’s assertion that philosophical study of history shows it to be guided by reason ultimately says no more than that we can comprehend the achievements of history only from a particular historical perspective by grasping how our particular assumptions about the world are indebted to our particular histories. This position does require adherence to the claim that history is a self-determining whole, but historical study must grant its fallibility in attributing any particular structure or end to this self-determination. While reason plays a key role in becoming aware of the historical conditions of its own freedom, it never delivers on its promise to present a history that it controls.