HEGEL The Arguments of the Philosophers EDITOR: TED HONDERICH Professor of Philosophy, University College, London The group of books of which this is one will include an essentially analytic and critical account of each of the considerable number of the great and the influential philosophers. The group of books taken together will comprise a contemporary assessment and history of the entire course of philosophical thought. Already published in the series Plato J.C.B.Gosling Meinong Reinhardt Grossman Santayana Timothy L.S.Sprigge Wittgenstein Robert J.Fogelin Hume Barry Stroud Descartes Margaret Dauler Wilson Berkeley George Pitcher Kant Ralph C.S.Walker The Presocratic Philosophers (2 vols) Jonathan Barnes Russell R.M.Sainsbury Socrates Gerasimos Xenophon Santas Sartre Peter Caws Karl Popper Anthony O’Hear Gottlob Frege Hans D.Sluga Schopenhauer D.W.Hamlyn Karl Marx Allen Wood Nietzsche Richard Schacht HEGEL M.J.Inwood Fellow of Trinity College, Oxford Routledge & Kegan Paul London, Boston, Melbourne and Henley First published in 1983 by Routledge & Kegan Paul plc 39 Store Street, London WC1E 7DD, 9 Park Street, Boston, Mass. 02108, USA, 464 St Kilda Road, Melbourne, Victoria 3004, Australia, and Broadway House, Newtown Road, Henley-on-Thames, Oxon RG9 1EN This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2003. © M.J.Inwood 1983 No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without permission from the publisher, except for the quotation of brief passages in criticism. Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data Inwood, M .J., 1944– Hegel. (The Arguments of the philosophers) Bibliography: p. Includes index. 1. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770–1831. I. Title. II. Series. B2948.156 1983 193 83–10904 ISBN 0-203-44219-9 Master e-book ISBN ISBN 0-203-75043-8 (A dobe eReader Format) ISBN 0-7100-9509 -0 (Print Edition) For Christiana When you start out on the way to Ithaca, you should wish the journey long, full of adventures and of knowledge. The Laestrygonians, the Cyclopes, angry Poseidon you shouldn’t fear, such things on your way you ‘ll never find if you keep high your thoughts, and if exquisite emotions touch your spirit and your body. The Laestrygonians, the Cyclopes, wild Poseidon you will never meet if you are not carrying them inside, within your soul, and if your soul does not erect them there before you. C.P.Cavafy, ‘Ithaca’ (tr.C.Sourvinou-Inwood) How very strange he is! I don’t know whether he’s brilliant or crazy. He didn’t seem to me to be a very clear thinker (Ottilie von Goethe, on Hegel; from Goethe: Conversations and Encounters, tr.D.Luke and R.Pick, London, 1966, p. 170). Contents Abbreviations pagexi Chronological Table xiii Introduction 1 Part One PRELUDE 7 I Perception, Conception and Thought 9 1 The sensuous 9 2 Concepts and conceptions 10 3 The acquisition of thoughts 16 4 Pure thoughts 17 5 A mathematical analogy 19 6 Non-empirical conceptions 22 7 Grammar and metaphor 24 II Thinking and the Self 26 1 Form, content and object 26 2 The subject as thinker 30 3 The subject as thoughts 34 4 The growth of self-consciousness 42 III Experience, Meta-thinking and Objectivity 46 1 Science and commonsense 46 2 Empirical science 51 3 Science and thought 55 4 Explanation 59 5 The defects of empirical science 64 6 Objectivity and science 73 7 Varieties of objectivity 78 8 Thought and essence 80 9 Self and world 87 vii CONTENTS Part Two PROBLEMS 91 IV Philosophy and the Fall of Man 93 1 Problems and the fall 94 2 Evil 97 3 The fall from innocence 99 4 The restoration of unity 103 5 Philosophy and problems 107 V Knowledge and Assumptions 113 1 The rejection of epistemology 114 2 Knowledge and reality 118 3 Refutation and self-refutation 125 4 Completeness and necessity 128 5 Scepticism and diversity 134 6 Limits and intelligibility 139 7 The problem of the beginning 141 8 Language and meta-language 144 9 Fiction and meta-fiction 148 10 Circles and infinity 149 VI Infinite Objects and Finite Cognition 155 1 Metaphysics and opposition 157 2 Infinity and description 165 3 Concepts and truth 170 4 Wholes, parts and falsity 173 5 From the concept of infinity to the infinite concept 176 6 Truth and predication 180 7 Propositions and assumptions 184 8 The superfluity of the propositional form 186 9 Concepts and logic 188 10 Dogmatism and antinomy 190 VII Faith, Proofs and Infinity 193 1 The defects of cognition 193 2 Faith and its objects 196 3 The variety of faith 199 4 The Unknown God 201 5 Religion and consensus 202 6 The vacuity of immediacy 205 7 The mediated and the immediate 209 8 The conditions of certainty 210 9 Hegel’s debt to Jacobi 213 10 Proofs, grammar and physiology 215 11 The traditional conception of the proofs 216 12 Concept and properties 218 viii CONTENTS 13 Perfection and abstraction 220 14 Theology and geometry 222 15 Hegel’s reply to Kant 224 16 Criticisms of the traditional view 227 17 Finitude and deduction 228 18 Grounds and dependence 229 19 Identity, difference and Spinoza 232 20 The rise to God 234 21 Philosophical arguments 237 22 The traditional ontological proof 239 23 Hegel’s ontological proof 242 24 God as spirit 246 25 Minds, machines and organisms 251 26 Substance and subject 256 Part Three THE SYSTEM 259 VIII Logic: Thinking about Thinking 261 1 The structure of logic 261 2 Form and content 265 3 The point of logic 269 4 Thought and reflexivity 271 5 The advance of thinking 276 6 Meaning and metaphor 279 7 The construction of meaning 282 8 Complexity and transcendence 287 9 Progress and contradictions 292 10 Hegel’s triads 294 11 The ambiguity of the triad 297 12 Contradictions and organisms 299 13 Criticism and self-criticism 302 14 Thoughts, thinking and the ego 308 15 Thought and individuals 311 16 Hegel’s circles 317 17 From logic to logic 321 18 ‘A tale that tells itself’’ 326 19 Maps, infinity and self-reference 331 20 The standpoint of the concept 332 21 Concepts and the concept 336 22 Reciprocity and purpose 338 23 Teleology and concepts 342 24 The concept vindicated 345 IX Thought and Things: the Transition to Nature 348 1 An ambiguous transition 348 2 Nature and contingency 355 ix