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Философский журнал 2023. Т. 16. № 2. С. 165-175 УДК 130.32
The Philosophy Journal 2023, Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 165-175 DOI 10.21146/2072-0726-2023-16-2-165-175
ИСТОРИЯ ФИЛОСОФИИ
Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer
NATURE, SPIRIT, AND THEIR LOGIC.
HEGEL'S ENCYCLOPAEDIA OF THE THEORETICAL SCIENCES AS UNIVERSAL SEMANTICS
Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer, Professor emeritus. University of Leipzig. 15 Beethovenstr., Leipzig, 04107, Germany; e-mail: stekeler@uni-leipzig.de
Hegel's so-called system of philosophy is a speculative, i.e. meta-level or topical reflection on the logical roles of concepts in world-related empirical knowledge. Its main insight is that the so-called explanations in the science are a result of a world-wide work on 'the concept', the translatable semantics of our languages, which form a relatively a priori and generic precondition for concrete assertions and their understanding.
Keywords: Metascience, dialectics, episteme, doxa, generic, empirical For citation: Stekeler-Weithofer, P. "Nature, spirit, and their logic. Hegel's Encyclopaedia of the theoretical sciences as universal semantics", Filosofskii zhurnal / Philosophy Journal, 2023, Vol. 16, No. 2, pp. 165-175.
Logic consists in a total abstraction of all material subject matter and philosophy is in its inner spirit only logic. J.G. Fichte, Darstellung der Wissenschaftslehre (1801/1802)1
0. Some theses for a start
The following statements are 'claims' only in the sense of a condensation of my proposals to read Hegel's text in a new way. Details are presented in my dialogical commentaries of Hegel's main published texts. Most of them articulate just truisms, but if we think about them, we have to put some received wisdom into brackets.2
1 "In der totalen Abstraktion von durchaus allen materialen Objekten des Wissens... besteht die Logik, und alles, was sich Philosophie nennt, [ist] seinem innern Geist nach nur Logik" (Fichte, J.G. Darstellung der Wissenschaftslehre (1801/1802). Hamburg, 1997, S. 224).
2 The ominous 'absolute' turns out as referring to being (and life) in present performance, not to ideal 'truths' or objects in an imagined perfect knowledge of a God who is supposed to 'look' on the whole world 'sideways-on', as McDowell says. Cf. Stekeler, P. Hegels Wissenschaft der Logik. Ein dialogischer Kommentar, Bd. 3. Hamburg, 2022, S. 39 ff.
© Pirmin Stekeler-Weithofer, 2023
1. We need to re-read Hegel's philosophy. To see the possible reasons for this, we just have to reflect on his titles. At his time, "philosophical" still meant "theoretical". Hegel's Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences is, therefore, not 'his system of philosophy', as many readers claim, for example Vittorio Hosle.3 Its topic is rather the system of all the sciences - commented upon in a new form philosophy, which I would label as 'logical geography', borrowing an idea of Gilbert Ryle.
2. The need for a systematic ordering of the sciences results from a too narrow understanding of the natural and social 'sciences' as more or less technical, mathematical, statistical, and behavioural knowledge. Long before Wilhelm Dilthey, Hegel speaks of a second group of sciences, the science(s) of spirit, "Wissenschaft(en) der Geistes". This second group of sciences, if understood properly and put into a system of sub-disciplines and sub-topics, surpasses the themes and methods of the merely philological and historical humanities. It includes all the social and political sciences, evolutionary or phylogenetic anthropology and ontogenetic or educational psychology.
3. A third group of sciences, the formal sciences, Rudolf Carnap's Formalwissenschaften, are the topic of Hegel's Science of Logic. We should read this work, indeed, as a first book on general semantics in history - which goes far beyond formal or mathematical logic (as Frege will develop it) and mathematics (which is Hegel's topic under the label of 'pure quantities'). Today, we would add to linguistics the formal languages of modern computer sciences.
4. We must dismiss the hearsay of Hegel's philosophy as sweeping or "transcendent" speculation. Speculation in Hegel's sense is nothing but logical geography. Habermas still shares the error of Karl Marx that we have to overcome Hegel's allegedly mystical idealism and metaphysical philosophy of spirit and concept.4
1. Transforming Kant's a priori into presupposed conceptual rules
1. The basic problems of reading Hegel with sufficient understanding concern,
a) his terminology, which mainly results from his translations of Greek and Latin terms into German,
b) the difference between what I call rural, i.e. merely narrative, language and urban, scientific, and philosophical language that allows for all kinds of generic abstractions. Using the definite article extensively as an abstractor is possible in Ancient Greek (as in "to einai") and even understood in modern German ("das Sein", "das Nichts"). In English, the standard reading of expressions using definite articles seems to be designating already presupposed objects, not constituting topics for abstract reflection.
2. Hegel's Concept as such (Begriff an sich) is Plato's Eidos. The word refers (generically) to whole structures, like those of arithmetic, geometry, Cartesian
I agree with V. Hösle (Hösle, V. Hegels System, Bd. 1. Hamburg, 1988, p. 5 and 74 ff.) that Hegel analyses the basic concepts of the sciences and their transcendental presuppositions, but disagree with any 'Kantian' understanding of what this means.
Cf. e.g. Habermas, J. Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie, Bd. 2. Berlin, 2019, S. 481 ff. and 497-500.
3
kinematics, Newton's mechanics, or the forms and institutions we talk about in the political and social sciences, psychology, and so on. Hegel, who listens to established language, is right to say that normal predicates like being a prime number or being a dog are no 'concepts', pace Kant, Frege, Russell, and their followers. As the titles "The Concept of Law" (Hart) or "The Concept of Prayer" (Phillips) show, a concept is, rather, a structured genus like the numbers. We arrive at the relevant concept from a mere predicate P like 'being a prime number' by the union with its finite or determinate negation PC, which is, in our example, 'x is not a prime number'. Sentences like 'Caesar is not a prime number' (Car-nap) and 'spirit is not yellow' (Hegel) are 'infinite', 'indeterminate', 'category mistakes' just because they surpass the relevant genus.
3. We do not understand words without reference to the relevant genus or concept. If we do not know the topic, we will not understand what is at issue or what is said.
4. Hegel's well-known criticism of Newtonianism mainly attacks the wrong assumption that we could embed or explain concepts or theories of electrodynamics or electrochemistry just by developing the old framework of mass-point-mechanics. Hegel thus shows long before Marx and Engels how naive 'mechanical materialism' is.
5. Hegel's most difficult concept is 'the idea' ('die Idee'). It translates Plato's idea (not eidos) in the sense of a sufficiently good instantiation or paradigmatic example of an ideal form, genus or species. Plato's idea tou agathou, the idea of the good, is thus the same as his methexis, Hegel's mediation (Vermittlung) of a concept 'an sich' with a real, empirical, gestalt (schesis, schema, eidolon). Obviously, the colloquial use of the word 'idea' in the sense of 'imagination' stands in the way of such an understanding.
6. Hegel does not presuppose any World-Spirit, God or Reason in History with capital letters. He rather reflects critically on sentences 'about' these matters.
7. Kant still contrasts the fallible and finite knowledge of us poor mortals to some divine absolute and infinite truth - to which only a God could have access. Hegel argues that Kant misunderstands the phrases an sich, per se, kath'auto or as such. They do not refer to unknowable things behind the veil of the Maya, the appearances, but to our generic pre-knowledge of conceptual forms, norms, rules, and default expectations.
8. Hegel understands science as an institution of concept-development with philosophy as speculative reflection on the domains of the different sciences.
1.1. From transcendental claims to a phenomenology of understanding
1. At first it may sound as if Hegel praises Kant's deep remarks on synthetic axioms ("Grundsätze") a priori. However, Hegel replaces the schemes of Kant's analytics and the tradition idea of logic by a system of new distinctions. On one side, we have time-general, 'standing', generic sentences like 'water is H2O'. They articulate default inferences. We find them in all kinds of scientific or popular encyclopaedias. We presuppose these sentences in empirical statements: If this is water, you can split it up in H and O.
2. The colloquial use of the word 'logic' is nearer to the truth than modern understandings of formal logic that hold only for mathematical, hence purely ideal and abstract domains of entities and 'eternal' sentences. We say that it is 'logical' that a continuous path out of a country must cross its borders.
Standing sentences express time-general, hence 'logical', rules, even when they contain quite some content as the 'equation' of water and H2O does. Any rule in the narrow sense of the word is explicit, i. e. expressed by a sentence. By far not all the norms of using such rules can be made explicit by sentences or rules, even though we can name them by labels like 'modus ponens'. It refers to the practical form of using rules of the form 'if p then q'.
3. We have to distinguish between human apperception, in German: Wahrnehmung, from animal perception. Kant's theses about transcendental apperception thus means, according to Hegel, that there is no reference to any determined matter or thing in the world without some mediation by conceptually informed apperception - together with the corresponding default inferences or normal expectations. John McDowell develops similar insights. In the preface to his masterpiece Mind and World, McDowell even declares 'that I would like to conceive this work is as a prolegomenon to a reading of the Phenomenology' in a way similar to Brandom's Making it Explicit, which 'is, among others things, a prolegomenon to his reading of that difficult text.'5 There are no sense data, pace Russell, Carnap and Ayer. There are no atomic sentences pace the early Wittgenstein of the Tractatus. Logical atomism and logical positivism are dead-born children, as Wilfrid Sellars, W.V.O. Quine, J. McDowell and Robert Bran-dom have learnt from the first chapters of the Phenomenology if Spirit.6 Kant's unity of apperception simply is coherence in using concepts and language.
4. Empiricism and Kantianism still share the idée fixe of a foundational philosophical reflection on the concept of (reliable) knowledge with Descartes. There is no immediate access to any content or referent at all. Thoughts and contents are mediated by language or other forms of representation.
1.2. On the need of speculative analysis
1. In all cases, in which we need a sketch of a whole it is obviously wrong to ask for a detailed map of local places. Pictures or photographs do not help to get an overview. This holds for any attempt to comprehend the systems of mathematics, physics, chemistry and their applications to the world, but also to religious texts and rites, just to name two major fields.
2. Understanding ("Verstand") is the faculty to re-enact schemes of speech and action. Like self-reflective comprehension ("Selbstbewusstsein"), it is already mediated by concepts. We thus depend on a tradition of language use and generic knowledge that can be ('verbally') learned ('by heart'). However, for full comprehension, we also need a mastery of implicit (Karl Buhler: empractical) forms of cooperation with our partners in applying the schemes freely.
3. What Hegel calls "the concept" (an sich) is, in effect, the semantic structure and system of language (in the sense of French langage). It is a kind of universal semantics on the ground of translatability of all relevant concepts and their sub-structures.
4. A merely so-called philosophy of language in the tradition of Herder and Humboldt does not belong to modern philosophy but to modern linguistics. It consists of hypothetical theories about the developments of different languages, langues - and their different grammar, i. e. phonology, morphology, syntax and linguistic semantics.
McDowell, J. Mind and World. Cambridge, Mass., 1996, p. ix.
Cf. Bar, R. Metascience as Self-Knowledge: Hegel's Philosophy of Science in Light of the Question of Naturalism, Diss. Leipzig, 2017, p. 11.
2. Dialectics in using language and knowledge 2.1. Concepts in apperception and judgement
1. The classical case for applying ideal concepts as such in the real world is geometry. This is already so for Plato. We need a 'measure' for deciding about good enough projections of the forms onto gestalt. Dialectics is the 'method' of such projections.
Any theory and any learned sentence or rule expressing generic knowledge and, hence, semantical rules, has exceptions. The laws of physics lie, says Nancy Cartwright. All laws hold only ceteris paribus, in principle, in general.
2. Understanding of general meaning (i.e. a concept as such) consists in dealing schematically with rules of differentially conditioned conceptual or default inferences. Grasping a concrete content of an empirical assertion or speech act fully means more, namely to apply the corresponding norms with good judgement and free reason to the utterance in question.
Dialectics is the logical form of determining the content of speech acts with all their implicit deixis, contextual anaphora, implicatures, metaphors, analogies, catachrestic ironies etc. It is the practical form of using language in concrete dialogues. Semantics in the narrow sense is the system of differentially conditioned default inferences for sentences as expressions, not yet for utterances or inner di -alogues called 'thinking'. As practical competence of free comprehension, dialectic is thus the logic of dialogues that we can never fully express by sentences or rules.
3. Hegel's ominous dialectical contradictions belong to this level of dialogi-cal 'pragmatics', as modern philosophy has it. It is his way of expressing the fact that the form of using default norms and rules of inference is non-montonic and fallible. There can be always accidental privations.
If his parent promise him a dog as a pet for Christmas, my little grandson would, for example, conclude that he gets a healthy dog with four legs etc. If the dog would be sick or if it were only a toy dog, he would be annoyed: the parents should have said so.
Dialectical or pragmatic inference is non-monotonic in the sense that in cases of privation we infer from p & q less than from p: Fido is a dog but he had a serious car-accident. Therefore, we might be not entitled to 'expect' that he still has four legs, eyesight etc. If I say that there is milk in the fridge, but it is there since weeks, you may not 'assume' that it is still tasty milk.
The schemes of a logic for sentences are hopefully, formally consistent, as far as this is possible. They are monotonic as the following example shows: We can infer from the knowledge that a number is prime much less than from the fact that it is even and prime, namely equal to 2.
Hegel's dialectical contradiction are, therefore, of an almost trivial form: If Emily is a three-legged cat she only seems to contradict the norm or rule that cats have four legs. Emily remains a cat after her accident.
4. There is a diachronic dimension of developing normal forms as semantic norms of differentially conditioned entitlements for inferential default conclusions. It is a feature of conceptual change.
Conceptual change is not only a change in the relation between words and eternal concepts as such. The belief in such a realm of eternal meanings is the very problem we have to dissolve.
2.2. Frames and conceptual change
1. Concepts are the content of whole clusters of standing sentences that express norms and rules of conceptual distinctions and relations.
Implicit (empractical) norms govern how to use rules resp. sentences properly. Formal logics and formal semantics are rule-theoretic systems of schemes (norms) and rules only for mathematical sentences.
2. Formally, conceptual rules as well as empractical forms and norms are time-general; but in reality, they all have a history. This is the deepest of all 'dialectical' contradictions in our logic of language-understanding and conceptual development.
Conceptual necessity is not expressed by really 'eternally' true sentences. One reason for this lies in the fact that there is no guarantee at all that a linguistic expression like a word or a whole sentence keeps its meaning as time goes by. The deeper reason consists in the fact that the conceptual system(s) can shift in a way such that many (inferential) relations of words and concepts change.
3. We develop concepts explicitly in the sciences, implicitly in linguistic practice. We do so by developing conceptual systems of distinctions, identifications, and conceptual inferences. We do this by developing at the same time a system of scientific knowledge and its articulation in a system of verbal expressions and conceptual inferences. Hegel's insight is that we cannot separate conceptual truth from situation invariant knowledge or scientific truth, since mere verbal definitions only lead to formal analyticity - which is not sufficient at all to define any material content of words and sentences.
4. There is no distinction between the development of concepts and the de -velopment of generic knowledge as a conceptual foundation for language. Some writers who know about this speak about 'relative' a priori truths, but few see as clear as Hegel that aprioricity is a semantical status of standing ('gesetzt') sentences, i.e. of generic truths expressing differentially conditioned default inferences.
2.3. Empirical knowledge, historia, and scientia
1. Merely empirical knowledge (the doxa of Parmenides) is subjective 'knowledge' or better: mere certainty about one or many singular cases here or there. Empirical 'knowledge' is narrative, rural, and takes the form of mere historia, not of scientia (Plato's episteme, which allows only time general standing sentences, just as the unmoved truth (aletheia) of Parmenides.
Only general knowledge belongs to science. If it does, it already becomes part of a conceptual framework. It develops the concept in the sense of a whole system of concepts, which is the same as the system of doctrines that can be learned as systems of sentences.
Merely empirical investigation is concerned with historical facts that can be contingent and situation-bound.
2. The real problem with empiricist metaphysics is that it produces an animal picture of human experience and knowledge. The enactive perceptions of animals are structurally much simpler than human apperception. They are not mediated by explicit rules and implicit forms developed in a joint history - defining material necessities and possibilities.
3. There is not only one notion of 'conceptual' necessity or possibility as formal logicians suggest. On the ground of generic knowledge we have access to and must evaluate diverse 'grades' of possibilities. As concept-mongering creatures (Brandom) we live in the horizon (Heidegger's Lichtung and aletheia) of possibilities, not of merely actual presence.
4. Any concept stands in differential and inferential relations to all other concepts in a conceptual frame. It is thus a position in a whole system of concepts. The outer form and the inner content of words resp. forms of utterances are both defined by the contrasts that we can express by its use. Moreover, words and concepts contain in a sense their own history and development, together with the possibility of further development, like any human institution does.
5. A concept in and for itself in Hegel's sense of 'an und für sich' has a di-achronic and a dialectical structure. It contains not only a) the word, b) its actual usage, but also c) a joint practice of control of this usage as a common usage together with d) meta-level judgments about the correctness of mere attempts to use the concept and e) explanations of privative failures. The possibility of such failures shows that the concept in itself (an sich) is a kind of ideal goal that we can more or less sufficiently achieve or miss.
6. As a sufficiently good instantiation, Hegel's Idee is more or less the same as 'the concept in and for itself. It 'includes' dialogical discussions and reflections about an appropriate use of the concept. When Hegel says that the identity of a concept is dialectical he just means this.
3. Antifoundational inferentialism
3.1. Justification by axioms and justification of axioms
1. Theories are frames or systems of generic default inferences. Theoretical explanations are part. As such, they are always linguistic inventions. We can turn only some such theories with good results into mathematical constructions.
Hegel's so-called idealism just highlights the truism that we construct theoretic models in the sciences and establish analogical representations in our languages. When we use them, we focus on invariant content, not on the variations of its outer forms. This means that we implicitly abstract from the many equivalent representations of contents. Therefore, we tend to overlook their linguistic character. - As a result, any talk of a direct 'correspondence' between true sentences and the world is mistaken. In the generic case of ideal semantic inference rules there no correspondence at all.
2. Conceptual theories are justified by abduction, as Charles Sanders Peirce has called the form of justifying a theoretical construction as a decision for best available models of explanation. However, this was just a new label for an insight that Hegel has developed in his Logic of the Concept. - All objectivity is constituted by trans-subjective abstraction. The corresponding equivalence relations rest on concrete methods of changing perspectives first by movements and attitudes, then by representative thinking on the ground of learned theories. We control the reliability of theories in a complex and joint practice.
3. Many principles or axioms are such that we have learnt them 'unconsciously' (Hegel) or 'blindly' (Wittgenstein). We nevertheless master their use in inferences and argumentations quite well. In all such cases, we put quint a lot
of trust into our traditional knowledge and in the cooperative development of scientific knowledge-control.7
3.2. On the order of scientific themes and methods
1. Chemistry and the life-sciences (including physiology and ethology) certainly have developed far beyond the imagination of the days of Kant and Hegel; but it is still true that biology is not in the same way a mathematical science as geometry and physical dynamics is - and it never will be. There is no need for weakening 'perhaps'.
In a certain degree, biology and medicine have still the status of a mixture between technical know-how and empirical historia.8 However, nobody would claim today that the limited range of exact laws makes these sciences less scientific. Nevertheless, there is still the claim that every explanation of natural phenomena could be turned into a physical explanation 'in principle'. Unfortunately, the use of the phrase 'in principle' here has the form of a Radio Erivan Joke: Communism is a good idea only in principle.
The hope to reduce all true science and knowledge to physics is not even clear in its meaning or goal. Noam Chomsky, for example, had also seen that it does not help at all just to call all 'real' science 'physics' or 'natural science'. Hence, we better follow Hegel and stick to the real forms and topics of knowledge by arguing from the perspective of today's system of conceptual inferences.
2. Our scientific knowledge as a system of sentences that can be learned as 'true' even defines our very notion of conceptual and empirical possibilities. For Kant, nature is the epitome (Inbegriff) of (natural) laws, the overall object of lawlike natural science. Schelling, and with him Hegel, protested against this identification of the whole world with the object of the natural sciences.9 On the other hand, Hegel admits that life (an sich) is a chemical process, namely of metabolism.10
3. The difference between a living body („ Leib ") für sich and a corpse („ Leich -nam ") is nevertheless a matter of a continuing process, not just a difference in the overall physical and chemical organization of the mere body („Körper"). Physics and chemistry tell us many things about necessary preconditions of life and about interventions by which we can change the form of life. However, it is far from clear what it could mean to say that in modern genetics the "mystery" of life is "solved".
4. The emergence of living beings and their autopoiesis together with the finitude of the life of individuals remains as a Great Fact, just as the so-called Big Bang or the development of the cosmos. Great Facts are presupposed historically.
The arguments of W. Sellars, R. Brandom, and J. McDowell against logical empiricism are indeed similar to those of Hegel against classical and 'logical' empiricism, as I show in Steke-ler, P. Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes. Ein dialogischer Kommentar, Bd. 1. Hamburg, 2014,
S. 469-478.
In the preface of Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft (A IX) says Kant famously: "Ich behaupte aber, dass in jeder besonderen Naturlehre nur soviel eigentliche Wissenschaft angetroffen werden könne, als darin Mathematik anzutreffen ist" (Kant, I. "Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft", Kants Werke, Akademie-Textausgabe, Bd. IV. Berlin, 1968, S. 470). This is either an all too wide notion of mathematics or an all too narrow concept of the (natural) sciences.
To the debate about Hegel's so-called naturalism see Bar, R. Op. cit., p. 54 ff. 10 Cf. Hegel's Encyclopaedia §334. In §335 we even find the following, exaggeration: "Der chemische Prozess ist... im allgemeinen das Leben".
9
They are no topic of causal explanations in the narrow sense of finding a causa efficiens. To accept them even stops further explanations - just as the former talk about God's creation, as Hegel knows quite well.
5. Kant seems to suggest that the limits of the range of a scientific explanation of nature is due to a lack of our knowledge. Hegel is more radical and more correct in seeing that the problems at issue are logical, not epistemological. Falli-bilism is also a logical feature, just as the modal openness of the future. We can predict or exclude only some matters or events; but no imagined God can do better - without contradicting time, space and, hence, destroying the very notion of the real world.
3.3. Self-conscious philosophy of nature, mind and spirit
1. Hegel's much contested philosophy of nature might suffer from problems of articulation. Its content is, however, much more rational and deep than his critics claim, if we reconstruct it with charity and understanding.
The most extensive use of the words "natura" and "physis" is, as Heidegger had remarked also, co-extensive with "all being", the whole world, which, in turn, coincides with Spinoza's more or less deistic or pantheistic God. Here, natura coincides with substantia, essentia, and deus.
The nature of a thing is also its essence as it stands in contrast to appearance. This second notion of nature is defined via the forms of our theoretical explanations.
The third main usage of "nature" is framed by the contrast of culture and nature.
2. Spirit is the joint development of human culture in the history of mankind. It is crucial to read this ominous word "Spirit" not as a synonym for a metaphysical and transcendent God. It rather stands for the historical Us (in its generic forms). We create institutional practices. Language and science are part. Through them, we form our world.
Hegel's philosophy of Spirit is a reflection on objective Spirit of human culture. In our performative life, we take part in the presently given forms of objective spirit, in culture and civilization, in the economy of a division of labor and goods. Scientific development and political self-rule are mediated by some republican, aristocratic, meritocratic, democratic and monarchical structures of representation. A much smaller number of persons represents larger we-groups. Such representations are necessary sub-forms of institutions.
3. Already in his masterpiece, the Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel understands the rites and celebrations of the religions as the 'phenomenological' outer forms of representing Absolute Spirit.
Objective spirit is the whole of institutions and forms of practices that are 'objectively' given in our enactive behavior and actions. We refer to them as systems of forms (and norms) in our sciences of spirit or culture. Thus, we turn them into objects of reflection and of historical and generic (structural or system-theoretic) knowledge. In the institutional practices of absolute spirit, i. e. in religion, arts and philosophy, we present, represent and develop subjective attitudes to this given culture and the world at large.
As a result, there is no contradiction between the insight that absolute being (which is not relative to the truth of linguistic representation) consists in performing forms in time by individual beings, and the insight that absolute truth is an ideal.
Hegel sees that we comprehend scientific truth only if we see them as a human enterprise to develop conceptual pre-knowledge.
4. My last remarks concern Hegel's reconstruction of conscience (con-scien-tia, Gewissen) and freedom (liberty, Freiheit) as the two essential forms of leading a life as a full person. Like Plato and Leibniz, Hegel sees that the soul, the person, mirrors in herself all her personal relations to all other persons. Hence, I am a full human person only insofar as I take active and proper part in the universe of all free persons - who say the truth, keep promises and treatises, hence cooperate freely - despite of all the risks that free riders and criminal minds can abuse their trust.
However, the strife for security can undermine free cooperation, as Plato, Kant and Hegel know quite well. They address the problem directly in their ethics. The famous prisoner's dilemma in modern decisions and game theory is only a new way to represent the age-old problem.
Hegel even writes - sarcastically - in the Phenomenology that a risk-avoiding homo oeconomicus without a Spirit of Trust (as the title of Robert Brandom's marvellous book on the Phenomenology says) belongs only to a spirited kingdom of animals (geistiges Tierreich). And he includes the homo nationalis into this reign of a mere animal rationale.
According to Hegel, it was Christianity, which developed the idea of a free, conscientious, person who takes up the insights of Socrates and Jesus that a full person has to take risks and at least in principle prefers to be treated unjustly, rather than treating others in an unjust way. Even though the corresponding real forms of practice slowly are becoming standards for the whole world, there are setbacks. In Hegel's structural analysis of world history, one such setback was already the return of Byzantine state and religion to the forms of an oriental reign. The caesar became a rex, basileus, again. Families, tribes, and all forms of an economic 'cosa nostra' became the central sub-statal forms of society. At least parts of the still intact republican traditions of Rome and Western Christianity were given up.
References
Bar, R. Metascience as Self-Knowledge: Hegel's Philosophy of Science in Light of the Question
of Naturalism, Diss. Leipzig, 2017. 285 pp. Fichte, J.G. Darstellung der Wissenschaftslehre (1801/1802). Hamburg: Meiner, 1997. 256 S. Habermas, J. Auch eine Geschichte der Philosophie, 2 Bde. Berlin: Suhrkamp, 2019. Hösle, V. Hegels System, 2 Bde. Hamburg: Meiner, 1988.
Kant, I. "Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft", Kants Werke, Akademie-Textausgabe, Bd. IV. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1968, S. 465-566. McDowell, J. Mind and World. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996. 191 pp. Stekeler, P. Hegels Phänomenologie des Geistes. Ein dialogischer Kommentar, 2 Bde. Hamburg: Meiner, 2014.
Stekeler, P. Hegels Wissenschaft der Logik. Ein dialogischer Kommentar, 3 Bde. Hamburg: Meiner, 2020-2022.
Природа, дух и их логика.
Гегелевская Энциклопедия теоретических наук как универсальная семантика
Пирмин Штекелер-Вайтхофер
Почетный профессор Лейпцигского университета, Германия. University of Leipzig. 15D Beethovenstr., Leipzig, 04107, Germany; e-mail: stekeler@uni-leipzig.de
Так называемая система философии Гегеля является спекулятивной, т.е. мета-уров-невой или предметной рефлексией относительно логической роли концептов в эмпирическом и миро-соотнесенном знании. Основное содержание этой системы в том, что так называемые объяснения в науке являются результатом проводимой по всему миру работы над «концептом», переводимой семантикой наших языков, формирующей относительно априорную и универсальную (generic) предпосылку для конкретных утверждений и их понимания.
Ключевые слова: метанаука, диалектика, эпистема, докса, универсальность, эмпирическое
Для цитирования: Stekeler-Weithofer P. Nature, spirit, and their logic. Hegel's Encyclopaedia of the theoretical sciences as universal semantics // Философский журнал / Philosophy Journal. 2023. Т. 16. № 2. С. 165-175.
