The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century

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The Oxford Handbook of German Philosophy in the Nineteenth Century Page 122

by Michael N Forster


  Werner Hartkopf has made a distinction between an ‘extensive’ and ‘intensive’ type of dialectic in Fichte, that is, the dialectical triad of the first three principles is extensive and encompasses the whole, whereas the triads which follow differentiate this area and go ever more subtly inwards.39 Since Fichte proceeds only externally and the speculative unity remains a mere ‘ought’ at the Foundations’s conclusion (whereas Hegel’s dialectic proceeds immanently and completes its circular movement by returning to the beginning), his dialectic seems predominantly analytic or antithetic-synthetic, something imposed from outside. An external-opposition dialectic (Fichte) can thereby be distinguished from an internal-contradiction dialectic (Hegel), as Karen Gloy has pointed out. Fichte’s further analysis of dialectic appears in the Foundations’s theoretical and practical part, which, however, cannot be pursued here.

  Gloy furthermore shows that in contrast to the external antithetic-synthetic dialectic of the early Fichte, the late Fichte of 1800 (in particular the Science of Knowledge of 1804) develops a dialectic of contradiction, which he now conceives from an internal point of view of self-consciousness. Nevertheless, Fichte’s dialectic of contradiction differentiates itself from Hegel’s dialectic of contradiction by the fact that the result of negation’s negation is not a position but rather the paradox of position and negation. In contrast to the positive dialectic of the early Fichte, Gloy maintains, a negative or ambivalent type of dialectic becomes apparent in Fichte’s later work, one which leaves the contradiction between an idealist and a realist outlook unsublated. On the one hand, a ground needs to be presupposed for the existence of self-consciousness; on the other, this ground remains inaccessible. Exactly this openness and indeterminacy could be seen as an advantage, compared to the completed and perhaps overly processual Hegelian logic.40

  33.2.3 Schleiermacher: Hermeneutic Dialectic

  Schleiermacher understands the basic concept of his extensive Dialectic (1822) in close connection with the Platonic rhetorical tradition (διαλέγɛσθαι) as an ‘art of discourse’.41 In so doing, he also distinguishes an external and an internal purpose of dialectic. The external purpose of dialectic consists solely in rhetorical persuasion (persuasio), that is, dialectic here becomes the potentially deceptive ‘art of illusion’ (and differs thereby only in its form from rhetoric: whereas rhetoric is monological, dialectic is dialogical). However, more essential is dialectic’s internal purpose as a technique for generating truth by comparing ideas.

  Thus we are left with the internal purpose of dialectic: the art of arousing ideas (Vorstellungen) by pursuing conversation, which is grounded only on truth and through truth alone may achieve success. The starting point of a conversation is always a diversity of ideas. If one conducts such a conversation, however, two endpoints always appear. Either both speakers agree on the disputed point of their opinion, or they convince themselves that they can never have the same idea in this regard.42

  The logic and technique of interaction in the contradictoriness of ideas is therefore the object of dialectic. ‘Thus dialectic is the art of taking, with every idea, the shortest and safest route from a given starting point to one of these endpoints [agreement or disagreement]’.43 The presupposition of dialectical argumentation is the (social as well as universal human) interest in other people’s divergent ideas and in comparing these divergent ideas with the aim of clarifying their correctness. Dialectic is therefore established as a social hermeneutics which sets itself the task of relating and mediating different horizons of understanding and interpretation around a common validity claim. A remarkable change is thereby made to the concept of truth: truth’s criterion is no longer the (transcendental) conditions of the object, but the intersubjective community of ideas. Speech is the means to weigh up differences of ideas, so that a common meaning can be found. Schleiermacher admits that certain forces might militate against the dialectical interest in agreement, whether moral indifference (e.g. disinterest) or technical (e.g. ignorance of certain conceptual foundations necessary for argumentation). Noteworthy in Schleiermacher’s dialectic is its attempt at a theory of social spheres, for example, different linguistic levels, sociolects, and so on, which are seen to make a common dialectical discussion impossible, so that mutual misunderstanding becomes a fundamental social problem.44

  Schleiermacher further defines dialectic as the art of finding and justifying the principles of all knowledge and their coherence.45 An important element of the Platonic concept of dialectic is thereby taken up again in the context of a hermeneutics of social understanding. It is the way of dialogical thinking to aim at reasons and the coherence or connections of knowledge. Dialogicity as a principle of dialectical argumentation is found not only in conversation but also forms the logical basis of writing and reading, indeed of all textuality.46 Even in thinking it is the basic form of argumentation (thinking is the inner conversation of the soul with itself, as Plato already noted). To speak in the language of contemporary philosophy, one could say that the dialectic in conversation is a form of ‘giving and asking for reasons’ insofar as relationality and the principle of contradiction form the basic structures of all thinking. (a) The path towards clear ideas goes only through conversation. (b) The relationality of thoughts to each other is the necessary condition for this: the correctness of a single thought depends on the correctness of its consistency with other thoughts. Knowledge as an absolute set of connections therefore contains in itself the plurality entailed by thinking the objects of knowledge in a divergent, contradictory manner. Schleiermacher thus develops a coherence theory of knowledge when he postulates that there is no individual knowledge which would not at the same time connect with all other knowledge, and that the quality of these connections is the norm of the concept of knowledge. All knowledge and all our thoughts and ideas are imperfect until the ‘absolute totality’ of their connection (the ‘complete connection’ of true knowledge) is produced.47 Knowledge’s systematic form (the absolute relationality of true knowledge) is emphasized by Schleiermacher again and again. For him the primal human condition of knowledge is marked by a false separation of the elements of knowledge (mere difference without unity) and a false connection (a confused unity without clear differences). Only the progress of thinking enables correct combinations and clear differentiations in knowledge. Dialectic is therefore the art of producing the right form and the right relation of identity and difference between the elements of knowledge. However, whilst absolute knowledge represents the aim of all science (here one recognizes Schleiermacher’s idealism), its achievement would bring every conversation to an end: there would be no more divergent, contradictory ideas and human intellectual activity would cease. Thus Schleiermacher comes to the conclusion that the connection of knowledge and its principles can never be complete at any given time and that only an infinitely continuing conversation remains, one which achieves a provisional narrowing-down and gradual acquisition of knowledge.48 It is the infinite task of dialectic (here Schleiermacher the romantic speaks) to strive to reach an always inaccessible perfection of knowledge. Schleiermacher’s dialectic is thus the technê of the infinite approach (unendliche Annäherung) to absolute knowledge via hermeneutic conversation. In this case, dialectic can no longer be grasped (in a strict sense, at least) as an objective structure or dynamics of being but, first and foremost, as an expression of a subjective attitude which is based in the last instance on ‘feeling’.49 It remains an open question whether Schleiermacher’s dialectic is given over finally to mere subjective randomness.

  Unlike in Hegel, although with a similarly speculative orientation, dialectic is here not the infrastructure or self-movement of absolute knowledge but the art of right thinking under the conditions of a not yet achieved absolute knowledge. This movement is nevertheless ‘speculative’ because limited positions in the dialectical progress overstep their own limits towards the complete connection of knowledge, without being wholly ‘sublated’ in this unity. Dialecti
c, as an art of relating contradictory ideas to a true (though inaccessible) unity of knowledge by correction of the element’s conjunctions (on the horizontal level) as well as to a rational coherence of the genesis and the validity of its grounds and principles (on the vertical level), remains marked by an unavoidable deficit of true knowledge. For Kant, dialectic is the sign of a fundamental lack of knowledge of the whole; for Schleiermacher it is the technique of mastering and infinitely approaching knowledge of the whole; for Hegel it is the form of self-movement of knowledge of the whole.

  33.2.4 Hegel: Speculative Dialectic

  Dialectic represents the decisive nexus of Hegel’s entire philosophy and it is with justification that no philosopher is more closely associated with the term. Dialectic can be found in each of the different parts of Hegel’s system, in the details as well as in their connections—it can generally be described as omnipresent in Hegel’s work. It can, for instance, be seen as the all-embracing principle of the system in general, that is to say, a movement between Logic, Philosophy of Nature, and Philosophy of Mind (Realphilosophie); within the Logic it is visible in the movement between Being (abstract immediacy), Essence (mediation), and Concept (reflected immediacy); within the Philosophy of Right it forms a connection between the three elements of Abstract Right, Morality, and Ethical Life as well as internal differentiations such as Family, Civil Society, and State. When one looks at the details it becomes apparent that every local conceptual connection proceeds dialectically, for instance, Hegel’s reflections on the ‘inverted world’ (verkehrte Welt) and on ‘Master and Slave’ in the Phenomenology of Spirit, or the philosophy of Organic and Inorganic World in his Philosophy of Nature. It is thus neither possible nor meaningful within the scope of an overview such as this to address or even specify the concrete forms taken by dialectical connections in Hegel’s system. Instead, the very programmatic core of dialectic thinking should be discussed, that is, what dialectic is, structurally, in its basic form and function. The essential statements about this are to be found in the Science of Logic, above all in the discussion of ‘Identity’ and ‘Difference’, which form the beating heart of the whole system, as well as in the ‘Division of the Logic’ within the Encyclopaedia.50 Important to bear in mind, however, is how disputed is the assertion that Hegel’s dialectic is a method (compare ‘final remark’).

  The Encyclopaedia (‘More Precise Conception and Division of the Logic’): in §§ 79–82 of the ‘Lesser Logic’, Hegel defines the concept and the form of the logical as the connection of three moments which are regarded as different forms of relation or realization of identity and difference. Their development out of each other as movement makes up the structure of dialectic, though terminologically one should note that Hegel ascribes here the expression ‘dialectical’ solely to the second ‘side’ of the whole nexus: ‘With regard to its form, the logical has three sides: (α) the side of abstraction or of the understanding, (β) the dialectical or negatively rational side, (γ) the speculative or positively rational one.’51 Hegel makes clear that both the understanding (Verstand) and reason (Vernunft), being cognitive faculties, belong to the form of the logical, that is, dialectic as movement cannot be an instrument or method of any one of these faculties alone. Rather, dialectic as principle of the living development of the conceptual itself integrates the faculties by allotting them and their functions a place in the nexus of dialectical movement. Moreover, these three sides form no mere parts of the logical, which might be treated in isolation by the understanding, but are moments of every logical-real and must be understood as an integral organic movement and connection. As moments they have a logical temporality, that is, (a) they have a genesis, and (b) they are always oriented to a transition, to their disappearance through negation. The transformation of (antithetical) determinations into moments is in general the essential structural feature of Hegelian sublation (Aufhebung) whereby fixed and mutually exclusive determinations find their contrast (negare) qualified by a simultaneous unity (conservare) as determinations in a higher, richer, and more complex concept (elevare).52

  (§80) The understanding (Verstand) distinguishes, generates, and fixes finite determinations, holding them in their identity against other determinations. It gives them the form of abstract universality (identity) by distinguishing finite determinations from other finite determinations and seeing each as abstractly ‘existing for itself’53 (für sich bestehend). By contrast, reason recognizes that each can only exist for itself in a concrete way by referring to its other, that is, it becomes itself only through something other. Thus the moment of abstract understanding is responsible for fixing determinations exclusively in their contrast and for seeing them as indissoluble and finite. The law of non-contradiction is its fundamental principle. Identity and difference as forms of determination are here related to each other as mere opposites: determinations have their identity with themselves in unmediated distinction to their determinacy, which consists in the difference from other determinations.

  (§81) Dialectic can only be effective where the understanding has worked in advance, because there need to be determinations of the understanding within which reason can discover dialectical forms. Hegel recognizes very well that ‘thinking is at first an activity of the understanding’.54 In reason and its negative form (the negative-rational moment), understanding’s finite determinations negate themselves in the self-movement of the concept, that is, pass over in themselves, through their own immanent logic, into their opposites. If one looks at finite, abstract concepts purely according to their own description, it becomes clear that they are themselves precisely their own opposite. (The isolated proposition ‘God is infinite’, for example, shows that God, by being described in just this one determination, is at the same time finite, because his infiniteness is thought here in isolation from finiteness, and is therefore itself finite.) This negative-dialectic shows that the understanding conceives each determination in isolation from every other, as mere oppositions; it is incapable therefore of capturing the truth. For Hegel the thinking of contradictions doesn’t indicate (as in Kant) that such thinking is faulty; rather, the correct thinking of contradictions constitutes the integrative mode of truth. While for Kant, dialectical relations indicate that we have moved beyond the norms of knowledge, Hegel maintains that what is true begins where dialectical relations are at work, where determinations pass over into their opposites, that is, survive the finiteness of their contrast and become infinite by virtue of negating themselves without dissolving themselves. Here Hegel distinguishes dialectic from reflection; though it must be remembered that the pejorative term ‘reflection’ denotes the merely external reflexivity of the understanding and must be distinguished from the more positive term ‘absolute reflexivity’ which Hegel develops within his ‘Logic of Essence’. Dialectic, like reflection, is a form which relates understanding’s isolated determinations to each other and thereby overcomes their exclusivity. While reflection relates the isolated determinations merely externally, so that they remain separate from each other and preserve their validity only through themselves (‘isolated validity’55), in dialectic the understanding’s opposing determinations behave according to an immanent relation to one another, so that they pass over out of themselves into their opposite, negate themselves, in order to be with themselves in the other and to be identical with themselves in their otherness (‘immanent transcending’56). Dialectic thus gives rise to a necessary internal connection between concepts as complexes of internal moments, and with it truth in the Hegelian sense. Dialectic, according to Hegel, is ‘the moving soul of scientific progression, and it is the principle through which alone immanent coherence and necessity enter into the content of science’.57

  (§82) Finally, the positive-rational moment is the ‘affirmative’58 as literal opposite of the critical (krinein: to make a distinction), because in this form, in the progress of the negative-dialectical moment, that is, by the negation of its negativity, a stable unity
of opposing, mutually reverting determinations now arises. The affirmative characterizes the new contents which have now been established, the positive in the sense of the given that arises from determinations’ negative-rational movement. This new content preserves the negativity of dialectical relations from the second moment by bringing them into a new concrete content which emerges as a ‘unity of distinct determinations’.59 In Hegel’s speculative approach identity exists only in and through the differences in whose integration it sustains and produces itself: the ‘transition’ (Übergehen) of opposing determinations into each other does not simply produce ‘empty, abstract nothing’60 as its effacement, but the determinate negation of a new content (arising from the self-negativity of the preceding content) which integrates the contradictions of determinations and comprehends them as meaningful moments of a more truthful unity.

  Science of Logic (Identity and Difference): Identity and Difference are the pure conceptual determinations of reflection, which represent in their respective relations the fundamental forms—in a sense, second-order categories—for all categorial determinations. Understanding them, the task of the Doctrine of Essence, is therefore key to understanding Hegel’s dialectic: not only because identity and difference are the meta-categories of the dialectical relation itself, but also because Hegel shows how, precisely in their own difference, the determinations of identity and difference themselves carry out a dialectical movement of which they are the fundamental elements. In contrast to the situation in pure immediacy, the concept of ‘Identity’ already contains a necessary and essential relation to its negation in difference. In the last analysis, the form of Identity relates distinguished things in order to posit them as identical: Difference is always already and essentially inscribed within it. Identity and Difference are in each case moments in relation to each other; their identity is in each case the unity of themselves and the other. For identity is only such as an identity of things distinguished as different, and what is distinguished as different is only distinguishable from another thing as something identical with itself. In consequence, difference in this form ‘is to be considered as the essential nature of reflection and as the specific, original ground of all activity and self-movement’.61 For this reason, Hegel devotes great care to distinguishing between different levels of difference, using as his fundamental criterion for doing so precisely the principle of the inner connection between Difference and Identity.

 

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