Life and Death in Hegelian Judgements

I am very grateful to Karen Koch and Sebastian Rand for their generous and thoughtful engagement with some of the core arguments of my book. Whereas Koch raises a number of questions concerning the purposiveness theme and Hegel's relation to Kant, Rand's questions revolve around the interpretation of Hegel's Science of Logic, asking after the status of the a priori, singularity, and death in relation to the logical concept of life. Their critical questions provide an opportunity for me to both clarify and defend one of the central claims of my book, namely, that there is a distinctly logical concept of life at work in Hegel's philosophy that is key for understanding his philosophical method. In the book, I argue that this concept, operative in Hegel's writings from the Differenzschrift through the Phenomenology to his Science of Logic, is primarily inherited from Kant, specifically from problems surrounding the concept of inner purposiveness developed in the Critique of Judgement. I will begin by replying to Koch, followed by a response to Rand. I. Inheriting the Purposiveness Theme: Reply to Koch Although I draw on the work of a number of Hegel's contemporaries-including Fichte, Schelling and Hölderlin-in order to understand how a logical concept of life functions in his philosophical system, my point of departure is the concept and problem of purposiveness in Kant's philosophy, and I argue that the core tenets of Hegel's philosophy can be understood through the purposiveness theme. I set up this theme in a number of different ways. First, I show that the problem posed by purposiveness for judgement can already be discerned in the first Critique, suggesting that this concept plays a larger role in Kant's own philosophy than is generally acknowledged. Second, I argue that Hegel's early account of method and the subject-object relation can be understood as inheriting Kant's problem of the relationship between purposiveness and judgement, recast in part as the relationship between life and self-consciousness. Third, I argue that Hegel's Subjective Logic is best understood as putting forward his version of a critique of judgement, in so far as the form and activity of judgement is ultimately shown to be grounded

This paper defends Hegel's positive contribution in the Subjective Logic and argues that it can be understood as presenting a compelling account of the space of reasons as a form of second nature. Taking Hegel's praise of Kant's conception of internal purposiveness and its connection to what he calls the Idea as a point of departure, I argue that Hegel's theory of the Idea that concludes the Logic must be understood in direct reference to Kant's argument in the third Critique that purposiveness defines the space of judgement's power. I take up two arguments that help to understand Hegel's appropriation and transformation of Kant's purposiveness thesis: first, Hegel's contention that internal purposiveness must have primacy over external purposiveness when considered in relation to judgement; and second, Hegel's presentation of a logical concept of life as the immediate form of the Idea.

In this paper, I reply to the critics of my book, Hegel's Concept of Life, by taking up the question of how a science of pure thought thinking itself arrives at the conclusion that it must determine itself as life. In particular, I consider how the logical concept of life informs Hegel's understanding of subjects, objects, and ground, and I also take up the relationship between logic and Realphilosophie in Hegel's system. Throughout, I aim to clarify and elaborate on one of the central arguments from my book, namely, that for Hegel, life is the primitive or original form of judgment. In a book rife with obscure philosophical puzzles, one of the most difficult puzzles to emerge in reading the Science of Logic is the following: why does the science of pure thinking, a science of thought thinking itself, arrive at the conclusion that it must determine itself as life? Why must the self-comprehension of pure thought ultimately comprehend its own essential activity as the activity of life? Immediately, one is struck by the sheer difficulty of bringing together two intuitively distinct modes of engagement: the austerity, formality, and abstraction required by the pursuit of pure thinking and logic on the one hand, and the vitality, dynamism, and concreteness of the phenomenon of life on the other. Although readers of Hegel are no strangers to the bringing together of opposites, this particular case poses special problems, not least because the Logic provides the method and central categories (the "thought-determinations") that are operative throughout the remainder of Hegel's philosophical system. In what follows, I will try to respond to this puzzle by clarifying one of the central lines of argument from my book, namely, that for Hegel, life is the primitive or original form of judgment. I am immensely grateful to my critics for providing an occasion for me to do so, and for the generous, thoughtful engagement that one always hopes for in philosophical debate. Responding to their critical questions concerning how life figures in Hegel's understanding of subjectivity, objectivity, and ground, as well as how we can best understand the relation between logic and Realphilosophie, will hopefully help to resolve the problem of how pure thinking and life are connected in Hegel's system.

In the Science of Logic, Hegel draws a distinction between 'judgements' (Urteile) and 'posits' (Sätze). Judgements serve to explicate a unified subject matter, while posits don't. Since different forms of judgement are marked by specific combinations of logical constants with certain types of predicates, statements which combine logical constants and predicates not 'suited' for each other, cannot express judgements, but posits only. Current accounts of Hegel's concept of judgement tend to either ignore or reject his conception of posits. The purpose of this paper is to show that Hegel's exclusion of a vast variety of well-formed statements from the realm of judgements contains a valuable insight rather than a flaw. It demonstrates that certain statements, even if correct, cannot contribute to the explication of a non-arbitrarily unified subject matter. Paying justice to Hegel's notion of posit thus serves to motivate his general conception of judgement as well as his classification of particular types of judgement.

This paper aims to understand Hegel's claim in the introduction to his Philosophy of Mind that mind is an actualization of the Idea and argues that this claim provides us with a novel and defensible way of understanding Hegel's naturalism. I suggest that Hegel's approach to naturalism should be understood as 'formal', and argue that Hegel's Logic, particularly the section on the 'Idea', provides us with a method for this approach. In the first part of the paper, I present an interpretation of Hegel's method in which life plays a central role. In the second part of the paper, I develop Hegel's method by providing a reading of Hegel's Subjective Spirit, focusing on the sections 'Anthropology' and 'Phenomenology' in particular, arguing that they display the dialectic between life and cognition outlined by Hegel's Idea.

2019

For two hundred years, people have been trying to make sense of Hegel’s socalled “dialectical method”. Helpfully, Hegel frequently compares this method with the idea of life, or the organic (cf., e.g., PhG 2, 34, 56). This comparison has become very popular in the literature (in, e.g., Pippin, Beiser, and Ng). Typically, scholars who invoke the idea of life also note that the comparison has limits and that no organic analogy can completely explain the nature of the dialectical method. To my knowledge, however, no scholar has attempted to explain exactly where or why the organic analogy falls short. In this paper, I propose to remedy this lack by exploring in depth two different organic models. In brief, I argue that both versions of the organic model require an appeal to something external to the organism, and no such appeal can be made sense of within the dialectical method.

The purposive nature of dialectical process, its teleological orientation, is one of the most problematic aspects of Hegelian philosophy. This article begins by analyzing Spinoza's criticism of final causes in general as well as Althusser's specific criticism of epistemological expressionism. The author argues that such criticism of Hegel's concept of purpose is well founded inasmuch as it is linked to the organic metaphor of the germ as plant-in-itself. However, Hegel himself limited the usefulness of the organic metaphor in matters of spirit. In order to separate the teleology of nature and the teleology of spirit, Hegel employed the metaphor of the 'germ of death.' In the second part, the author argues that Hegel completely agrees with Spinoza's rejection of what Kant called the external teleology – e.g. the understanding of lightning as God's punishment. While Hegel does often explain the process of knowledge with reference to the internal teleology of organic nature, the proper Hegelian concept of purpose (telos) rests in understanding the purposive nature of the dialectical process as following the internal logic, but nevertheless producing a result which is external to it. This concept of teleology bears the same fundamental structure that is characteristic of the signature Hegelian claim that the true must be understood both as (determinate) substance, as well as a (free) subjectivity.

Argumenta, 2019

For two hundred years, people have been trying to make sense of Hegel's so-called "dialectical method". Helpfully, Hegel frequently compares this method with the idea of life, or the organic (cf., e.g., PhG 2, 34, 56). This comparison has become very popular in the literature (in, e.g., Pippin, Beiser, and Ng). Typically, scholars who invoke the idea of life also note that the comparison has limits and that no organic analogy can completely explain the nature of the dialectical method. To my knowledge, however, no scholar has attempted to explain exactly where or why the organic analogy falls short. In this paper, I propose to remedy this lack by exploring in depth two different organic models. In brief, I argue that both versions of the organic model require an appeal to something external to the organism, and no such appeal can be made sense of within the dialectical method.

Argumenta, 2019

This paper shows how Hegel transforms Kant's Fact of Reason argument for freedom, and in particular how Hegel takes over the role of experience and death in Kant's "Gallows Man" illustration of the Fact. I reconstruct a central thread of the Phenomenology of Spirit in which Hegel develops his view of freedom and practical rationality through a series of life and death experiences undergone by "shapes of consciousness". While Hegel views his fact of reason as a result of a developmental process rather than as an immediate brute fact, the method of that development is itself deeply informed by Kant's argument that the moral law must be opposed to attachment to life in order to establish the reality of freedom. By contrast with Kant, Hegel begins with an immediate unity of life and selfconsciousness, and only through a painful trial is the subject of the Phenomenology educated to free obedience to reason. Hegel departs fundamentally from Kant both in uniting life and freedom and in simultaneously developing a world of freedom, a socially embodied fact of reason, through which individuals express their freedom in action.

Hegel Bulletin, 2018

For many recent readers of Hegel, Wilfrid Sellars’s 1956 London lectures on the “Myth of the Given” have signaled an important rapprochement between Hegelian and analytic traditions in philosophy. Here I want to explore the ideas of another philosopher, also active in London in the 1950s, who consciously pursued such a goal: John N. Findlay. The ideas that Findlay brought to Hegel—sometimes converging with, sometimes diverging from those of Sellars—had been informed by his earlier study of the Austrian philosopher Alexius Meinong, and transformations of Meinong’s ideas by his student, the logician Ernst Mally. These ideas that Findlay found Hegel-friendly are ones that have had a particular bearing on more recent analytic modal metaphysics, especially via the work of Findlay’s own former student, Arthur Prior. Given this, we might not be surprised at the similarities between the type of actualist interpretation of modal logic that Prior offered in opposition to David Lewis’s variant on Leibnizian possibilism, and Hegel’s approach to the category of “Actuality” [Wirklichkeit] at the end of the Objective Logic of The Science of Logic. But the similarities, I suggest, do not end there, as elements of Hegel treatment of predication in the Subjective Logic parallel similar elements found in the work of Mally and, more recently, “modal actualists” such as Prior and Stalnaker. In this paper I explore some puzzling features of Hegel’s treatment of predication in the Subjective Logic from the point of view of the need for a logic for thought about the modally complex actual world, as Hegel conceived it.