The book I'm writing a book about is one of
the two most worked over and actually supervised
for publication books Hegel wrote in his lifetime.
He didn't write very many. We have a lot of
lectures & we have some components of lectures
that he supervised for publication, but only
somewhat informally, like the Philosophy of Right,
just part of his philosophy of objective spirit.
The book I'm writing about he wrote between
1812 and 1816 when he was teaching high school
students in Nuremberg, it's called
"The Science of Logic".
Sometimes, unfortunately for the students,
he actually taught it to them, as teachers and
professors want to do, he wanted to maximize his
research time, so he just babbles away in front of them.
It is not, I would say, the book that Hegel's
ultimate legacy in philosophy will depend on.
There has been virtually no reception of it
in the philosophical literature, even in the
philosophical literature that descends
from Hegel, whether in terms of so-called
Left Hegelianism or so-called
Right or Theological Hegelianism.
There's no standard commentary on the work,
much less a dispute among commentaries
about the basic idea of the work.
It's simply written in a language that we
have lost the capacity to translate very easily
and so reading it requires a serious preparation
in Hegel's earlier work and it doesn't lend itself to,
without simplification or anachronism, without
doing some violence to it an easy summary.
So I'm going to concentrate on one theme I
think is the most essential and make use of a
philosopher's characterization of some general
aspects of German Idealism that I think help
make sense of the book.
Sebastian Rödl, the Leipzig philosopher,
current contemporary Leipzig philosopher,
has rightly identified as the heart of
German Idealism, the principle that
self-consciousness, freedom & reason are one.
The fact that this formulation requires abstractions
of this magnitude, and that the formulation
is an identification of concepts that seem quite
different, not identical, is not accidental in this tradition.
Arguably, the most ambitious and most
difficult single book in that post-Kantian
Idealist tradition is Hegel’s three-part,
two-volume Science of Logic.
Arguably, because there are many other worthy
contenders for the"most difficult" title.
I propose to bring to bear Rödl’s theory
of self-consciousness on that book in a way
that will demonstrate that what he identifies as
the heart of German Idealism is certainly right.
I'm quite sure that the uses to which I'll
put his theory in discussing the Logic are
at the end of the day not recognizably his,
but his account opens up a way of discussing
the importance of the topic of self-consciousness
for what both Kant & the post-Kantians called 'logic'.
This is of course not a sane proposal.
"Difficult" does not begin to
describe The Science of Logic.
But I'll use Rödl’s thesis as a focus for a
reasonably manageable topic: the significance
of self-consciousness for the general
enterprise of the book, as it understands a ‘logic’.
Hegel’s book can be said to stand in a tradition
of ‘philosophical logic’ that includes
Kant’s Transcendental Logic, Fichte’s
Wissenschaftslehre, Frege’s Begriffsschrift,
Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, and
Husserl’s Logical Investigations.
Actually, that tradition could simply be called
‘philosophy’, given the importance of the
logos to Parmenides & works like Plato’s
Sophist and Aristotle’s De Interpretatione.
But the key to understanding his approach
concerns 2 key innovations in Kant’s theory of logic
and I should mention them at the outset.
The first is that Kant does not understand
logic as rules for well-formed formulae and
rules for truth-preserving inferences.
His theory of logic is, like all theories
basically before Frege, a theory of thinking.
His logic is a judgmental & not a propositional logic.
But it is not, as in the 17th century Port
Royale logic, a theory of the rules for thinking,
either descriptively or prescriptively; neither
rules for how we think and make inferences
nor rules for how we should.
For Kant, logic sets out the rules that constitute
thinking as such, and so its scope is far
wider than, say, Frege’s, since it
covers more than truth-bearers.
It covers imperatives & aesthetic judgments
which have only subjective universal validity.
That's why, as many of you know, in the 3
Critiques, Kant tries very hard to keep the
architectonic structure of each of the Critiques
coherent, consistent with the Table of Categories
in the first Critique. They're
all covered by the same logic.
So contrary to Port Royale, not following
those rules is not thinking poorly or thinking
irrationally, it's not thinking at all.
And Kant relies on a key thesis from his critical
philosophy in defining the scope of such
a logic: it is absolutely unrestricted.
Logic has no content, and so is not simply
transparent to the ontological structure of reality
at its highest level of universality, as in the post-
Aristotelian & Leibnizian-Wolffian accounts of logic.
That thesis is that thinking is exclusively
discursive, can provide itself with no content,
and can have content only by
means of sensible experience.
Hegel will accept Kant’s view about the
constitutive status of logic and that it is
a theory of thinking, but will reject this
premise from Kant’s transcendental philosophy
and we'll return to this point in what follows.
But Kant’s other innovation was to insist
that the ‘I think’ must be able to accompany
all my representations, all my judgments.
Judging, believing, acting are
inherently & necessarily self-conscious.
That's the notion I want to explore.
There's no question that that notion is extremely
important to Hegel's Logic, which could fairly be
said to be about everywhere, in one way or another,
the problem Hegel calls "the unity of a concept".
This is clear from a single famous
passage in which that phrase occurs.
Here it is: "It is one of the profoundest
and truest insights to be found in the Critique
of Reason that the unity which constitutes
the essence of the concept is recognized as
the original synthetic unity of apperception,
the unity of the ‘I think’ or of self-consciousness.
This proposition is all that there is to the so-
called transcendental deduction of the categories
which, from the beginning, has however been regarded
as the most difficult piece of Kantian philosophy."
Roughly the thought behind such remarks is this.
What Kant called 'the original synthetic
unity of apperception' is what Hegel calls
'the essence of the unity of the concept’.
This could be understood initially in a formal sense. 
Both unities are classic cases of "one over many".
Even an empirical concept like "red"
remains identifiable as the same concept red,
the same color, in all the many and various
instances and shades in which it appears.
Analogously, the manifold of experience counts
as a unity among such a manifold in all being
ascribable to one I, that identical, self-
same I who has all such experiences.
But both Hegel and Kant do not want
to merely point out a structural analogy.
The unity of apperception
is the unity of a concept.
That is, as Kant makes clear, to say that
experience is always subject to the original
synthetic unity of apperception is to say
that it's always subject to the understanding,
the power of conceiving, which is such a
power only insofar as I know I'm exercising it.
So this is the power to hold things together
as one, necessary for experience to have a
unity ascribable to an identical "I". Discriminating
what belongs together with what, what is connected
to what in a temporal order, knowing that
the successive perceptions of a house do not
count as the perception of a succession in
the world, requires an apperceptive unification;
it does not just happen to consciousness.
What happens is mere succession.
Such a unity is possible only self-consciously and
it is the actualization of the power of conceiving.
But the unity effected by the power of conceiving
-- where ‘conceiving’ means conceiving,
not merely thinking together--is the representational
unity that makes reference to an object possible.
Unifying by ‘red’ achieves the
unity that says how things are.
It, the rose, belongs with the red things;
not with what has seemed red-like to me before.
Without this ability to distinguish how things
are from how they seem to me, there would be
as many 'I's as arbitrarily associated
seemings; & no unity of self-consciousness.
Or achieving the unity of self-consciousness
is differentiating seeming from being, and so
the rules for that distinction, categories,
are constitutive of such unity.
In the way Kant puts it, the "conditions of the
possibility of experience are at the same time
the conditions of the possibility
of objects of experience".
Kant proposed an argument to show that
any unity that could be said to be the product of
affection alone, like an associative unity, must
presuppose what he called ‘a transcendental affinity'.
That is, a power to distinguish a
mere succession of representations
from a representation of objective succession.
Without that power, there could be no "one over many",
no manifold belonging to one I, one experiencer.
Hegel does not rely on the subjective form
of inner sense like this, and argued, as above,
that if we understand correctly that the unity
of any concept is the unity of apperception,
and that such a unity is what establishes
a possible relation to an object, then the
categories, as the moments of any such possible
unifying power, will thereby be shown to be actual,
to make possible representation of objects.
Or a rigorous, what Kant called Metaphysical
Deduction, properly conceived, is the only
deduction we need.
With this brief background, the first task
is to give some general overview of what
the Science of Logic is about, more or less.
This will lead naturally into Rödl’s account
of self-consciousness, and then I'll try to
draw out some implications of this sort of
focus for the structure & movement of the book.
Although Hegel devotes surprisingly little
space to any discussion of what he is doing
in the book -- in effect, he just does it --
the ambition of the treatise as a logic appears
to concern the very possibility of rendering
anything intelligible, sense-making, where that
could mean a number of things: offering a
satisfying explanation, giving an account
as in the Ancient sense, "ton
logon didonai", or justifying a deed.
What is in question at such a level of attempted
comprehensiveness in The Science of Logic
appears to be something like an account of
all possible account-givings, a scope that would
include everything from ethical justifications
to empirical judgements to the concept of
explanation presupposed by the
Second Law of Thermodynamics.
This signals his acceptance of Kant’s first
innovation that logic concerns the very possibility
of thinking, broadly construed.
The most ambitious goal of Hegel’s Logic
is to show that the variety of accounts is
finite, and that not only are there these forms
of account-giving which aren't incommensurable
with each other, but in some way they're interdependent.
Thinking, of course, on this account, following
Kant, is not a perceiving or a grasping, although
a perceiving or grasping can be the ground
of having understood something or the ground
of claiming something to be the case.
The thinking that Kant and Hegel are most
interested in is aimed at getting something
in some sense right; 
paradigmatically in a knowing.
Of course, what it is to get something right,
holding to be appropriately so, rendering
successfully intelligible, is also one
of the contents we want to get right.
This creates a self-reflective paradox of
what Hegel in the last book calls the Logic
of the Concept, or the concept of the concept.
This will clearly require, at some level,
a theory of conceptuality, the heart of the
determinate generality presumed in account-giving
formulated in whatever way one likes: judging,
explaining, understanding.
In an assumption Hegel shares with Kant, any
such account-giving or rendering intelligible
is always necessarily discursive.
Any determinate concept is itself some sort of
result of a determination involving other concepts.
So in the Logic, a bewildering array of concepts
or concept kinds — being, nothing, becoming,
something, other, finitude, infinitude, the
one, the many, continuity, discrete magnitude,
number, measure, essence, appearance, identity,
difference, contradiction, ground, relation,
concept, judgement, syllogism, life; even
the idea of the true and the idea of the good,
and many others — make appearances like
characters in some fast-paced drama, struggle to make
a case for themselves, as if trying to say
what they are, only to fail in some unusual way,
and to give way to putatively more successful
successors, which themselves give way in turn.
It's clear enough that the central problem
seems to be how to account for the determinacy
of these basic rules for possible sense-making
or the right account of their conceptual content.
In the Encyclopedia of Logic, knowing in the
general sense of intending intelligible content
is said to be "determining & determinate thinking".
Well, this is just a first pass at
familiarizing ourselves with the topic.
It will recur in different
forms constantly throughout.
Summarized way too crudely, these kinds of
determinacy are expressed in three different
logics in basic assertion types, misleading
'cause there are many other kinds of judgments...
But said in terms of predicative form, Hegel
wants to argue for the indispensability, irreducibility
and the interrelatedness in the 3
books of the Logic of the forms:
"A is F", "A is necessarily or
essentially F", & "A is a good F".
Various higher-order concepts are said to be
presupposed in such possible determinations,
ranging from ‘finitude’ to ‘essence’ and 'law'
to ‘universality’, ‘life’ and 'the idea of the good'.
None of these [concepts] can be
understood to be derived empirically.
The idea is clearly that they can be shown to
be presupposed in any empirical determination
in different ways in the different logical
contexts, and their content is a matter of
both ‘internal’, self-related ‘moments’
and ‘external’ dependence on relations
to contrary or otherwise negative moments.
For Hegel as for many others, the content
of a true assertion is what is the case, and so
these constitutive moments of any possible
intelligible assertion are the ‘forms of reality'.
This marks his break with Kant.
Any assertable claim of various sorts must
be an expression of such conceptual specifications
of possible intelligibility, and these intelligibility
conditions constitute the possibility of intelligible
bearers of truth (judgement).
The forms of intelligibility are the forms of
what could be true, and so of what possibly is,
although they do not settle the
question of what, in particular, is true.
What we want to know is both something about
the material relations of exclusion necessary
to differentiate and render contentful these
higher-order concepts -- this is the famous
topic of dialectical negation -- and why there
should be some inherent problem, some unavoidable
inconsistency or antinomy, under the specific
assumptions of each logic, in specifying those
internal and external relations.
I should say here that something immediately follows
by taking seriously that Hegel's major text is a 'logic'.
He says that his logic is going to take the place of
and coincidence with metaphysics, but he doesn't say
that the subject matter of metaphysics is of
a special sort that requires a distinct logic.
He says that logic is metaphysics,
or is now, after Kant, metaphysics.
He's often taken to mean that his systematic
account or totality of everything, to be committed
to a kind of absolutization of the principle of
sufficient reason, everything happens for its reason.
And that's often taken to commit him-- almost
universally by traditional Hegel commentators--
taken him to mean that, for example, the
principle of the sufficient reason of this table
must be the sufficient reason it exists,
why it's here, why it's not not-here.
But Hegel's metaphysics is Logic.
The principle of sufficient reason for him doesn't
refer to a principle of its necessary existence.
The principle of sufficient reason is a sufficient
reason for it being the determinate thing it is,
its principle of intelligibility; why it
is a table and nothing else, what it is
for it to be a table and nothing else.
So the totality of the principle of sufficient
is true, but the question he's interested in
is the principle of its intelligibility,
why it is determinately this one thing
is what the principle of unity is.
This has to do with his deep connection
with Aristotle, which I'll say
something about in a moment.
Here is a summary claim by Hegel that begins to
make clear the bearing of Rödl’s issue on this topic:
"As science, truth is pure self-consciousness
as it develops itself and has the shape of
a self, so that that which exists in and for
itself is the known concept and the concept
as such is that which exists in and for itself".
Well this is a strange and complicated identity:
first, science, developing self-consciousness,
in the shape of a self, and truth all form
one identity; all of which is supposed to
allow us to conclude a second identity:
being in and for itself & the known concept.
In the first edition of the Logic, he simply
says that "truth of being, the determination
of what things truly are is self-consciousness
or the forms of self-conscious judgement".
Now, this claim on what there is, being
their concept, again has to be read
through the lens of a Logic.
What things are is their concept.
It doesn't mean Hegel thinks all that exists
are really concepts, as if he's some kind of
medieval concept Realist.
Again his model is Aristotle for whom the center of
metaphysics was the principle of substantial form.
The sufficient reason for saying that the thing
is what it is, is reference to its substantial form,
the thing is its form.
What it really is, is its form.
The form isn't responsible for it popping
into existence, it's the principle by which
it's delineated as exactly the kind of thing it is.
And that's the kind of interest Hegel
has, and given the critique of Plato,
that doesn't mean that the form
of thing is a separate eidetic thing.
It's not a thing at all, but it's the
distinct way of being that the thing is.
The best example that Hegel gives that Aristotle
gives is from the third book of the De Anima,
of how we are supposed to think of this
and Aristotle presents us with an analogy.
He says, if 'body', that is to say 'matter',
were to be considered the eye, then its soul,
that is to say its form, would be seeing,
the distinct being at work of the eye, the
what it was to be, the essence, would be seeing.
That notion of the principle of its intelligibility
being the principle of its modality of being,
how it is the thing it is, is what Hegel means
by saying being in and for itself is the concept.
The vast disagreements between Kant & Hegel
are well known, especially about such issues
as idealism and the thing-in-itself.
But there is a deeper agreement than disagreement
between Kant and Hegel on the logic of possible
thinking when one notes how much of what Kant
wants to distinguish as general logic already relies,
in his own words, on his transcendental
theory (his epistemology) and that has
to mean: on the transcendental
determination of possible content.
To mention the point on which the heart of the
theoretical issue between Kant and Hegel turns,
in the Critique Kant writes: "And thus
the synthetic unity of apperception is the
highest point to which one must affix all
uses of the understanding, even the whole of
logic and, after it, transcendental philosophy;
indeed this faculty is the understanding itself".
And this is tied to an even more general point:
I find that a judgement is nothing other than
the way of bringing given cognitions
to the objective unity of apperception.
That is, the aim of the copula is in them:
to distinguish the objective unity of
representations from the subjective.
For this word designates the relation of the
representations to the original apperception and
its necessary unity, even if the judgment
itself is empirical, hence contingent,
for example, "Bodies are heavy".
By that, to be sure, I do not mean to say
that these representations necessarily belong
to one another in the empirical intuition, but
rather they belong to one another in virtue of
the necessary unity of the apperception
in the synthesis of intuitions, that is, in
accordance with the principles of the objective
determination of all representations insofar as
cognition can come from them, which
principles are all derived from the principle of
the transcendental unity of apperception.
This is a new theory of judgment-- actually
Kant knew in 1762 already that he had a new
theory of judgment by insisting on this
self-conscious dimension of judgment.
He repeats it again, noticing its originality
in section 19 in the Critique.
And accordingly grounds a new understanding of
logic, especially the logic of concepts & judgment.
Such an interpretative claim makes clear that,
somewhat contrary to Kant’s own presentation,
general logic is an abstraction from a more
original and basic theory, in Kant’s language
a transcendental theory of the possible conceptual
determinations of an object (the logic that
coincides with metaphysics in Hegel’s account), and
not some basic empty form to which content is added.
It also entails that what we have to call
Kant's theory of thinking (or account-giving
or judging) has a component that's not
something supplemental to the basic features
of his general or contentless logic as
rules for valid judgings and inferrings.
It is, rather, the basic feature:
judging is apperceptive.
This is a logical truth, a truth in and of
general logic, as the b134 passage insisted.
It has to be to be a judgment, and that has
to mean in a very peculiar sense important
to Hegel, but that will take some time to
unpack, that such judgings are necessarily
and inherently reflexive, and so at the very
least are self-referential, even if such a
reflected content is not substantive, does
not refer to a subject’s focusing on her
judging activity, as if a second
consciousness of the event of thinking.
That is, to judge is not only to be aware of
what one is judging, but that one is judging,
or linguistically asserting or claiming something.
If it were not apperceptive like this, it
would be indistinguishable from the differential
responsiveness of a thermometer, and
thermometers cannot defend their claims,
their readings aren't committed to anything.
But one is not or cannot be, simultaneously
judging that one is judging,
on pain of the obvious regress.
Rather, judgment somehow is
the consciousness of judging.
These are not two acts, but one.
As Rödl puts it, "The spontaneity of thought
is of a very special kind: it is a spontaneity
whose acts are knowledge of these very acts".
Again, we should note that in this tradition,
propositional structure, considered on its own,
represents nothing,
because it claims nothing.
Kant was well aware that with this notion
of apperceptive judging he was breaking with
the rationalist & Lockean notion of reflection
as inner perception, and as we shall see,
Hegel’s language is everywhere
carefully Kantian in this respect.
Since self-consciousness is the form of all
possible knowledge and action, a great deal will
hang on what we should call the appropriate
‘logic’ of this self-relation, where we mean
not what we intend when we turn our attention
to ourselves, but in what relation to ourselves
we are whenever we claim
something or whatever we act.
It is, however, extremely difficult
to formulate this point properly.
Rödl says: they're not two acts but one.
I know what I believe and I know of my
beliefs, by being the believer, by being identical
with one who believes.
But when I say "I know of my believing, by
being the believer", that doesn't mean I have
a method for finding out whether I'm
believing, it means I don't need a method.
In believing, I'm aware of being the believer.
If it weren't that, I wouldn't be believing, I
would be vocalizing in response to some stimuli.
But the grammar of the formulation that I quoted
has to say something like, acts of theoretical
knowledge are also, besides being knowledge
of some state of affairs, "knowledge of these
very acts", that's a quote from Rödl.
Even his formulation: "judgment is, is
identical with, is the same thing as, the
consciousness of judgment" introduces
the language of consciousness and object
into the apperceptive dimension
in a way that can be confusing.
In knowing that the book is red, if I say that
I know something about the book & something
about my acts of knowledge, that I know it,
why are there not two acts?
There certainly can be contexts in which
my assertion itself could be the object of an
intentional attitude, in response, say, to someone
asking, "Just think about what you're claiming!".
But that is a special circumstance
and a special sort of attentiveness.
I cannot be a believer unless I know that I am
believing, and I know that by being the believer.
But besides what I believe, what exactly do
I know by being the believer? I don’t know
that the proposition "I am the believer" is
true, and I'm not somehow acquainted with
a special object, myself,
in coming to believe something.
Again, that formulation, ‘knowledge of my
acts of belief', would seem to mean I also
know that I have knowledge of my acts;
but then we would be off to the regresses.
These same potential misapprehensions pertain
to the formulations Rödl uses everywhere to
analyze a genuine unity of
disparate elements in consciousness.
That unity is nothing but the consciousness
of that unity; and the consciousness of that
unity is nothing other than
the unity of which it is conscious.
There must be some way of saying that the
self-conscious dimension of thought and action
is a matter of the way a claim is made or
a belief avowed or an action undertaken.
To borrow the approach to many similar problems
taken by Ryle, the later Ryle, they are accomplished
self-consciously, rather than accompanied by or
even identical with, another act of consciousness.
There is only one act; action, for example,
is the consciousness of acting.
There is not an acting and also a being
conscious of what one is doing.
Acting is being conscious of what one is doing.
So there is a self-referential component
in any judgement or action (‘I think this,
I act thusly’), but it can be misleading
to think that this is the same problem as,
for example, how does the first-person pronoun
have sense, and thereby pick me uniquely out.
I understand this adverbial qualification
to be suggested by Rödl in his discussions
of what he calls an unmediated way of
knowing from the inside, not of some "other"
or by any inner perception.
Knowing from the inside by being the knower
is, quoting Rödl, "a way of knowing such that
my first-person reference is constituted
by a relation I bear to the object—identity—
by which I know it in this way".
Or by the precision of his saying, "when I
know an object in a first-person way, I know it
by being that object".
The question "What exactly do I know besides
what I believe by being the believer?" is the
same question as "How can the self-relation
inherent in all cognitive relation to the
world announced by Kant, and in all action,
which self-relation certainly has the grammatical
form of a dyadic relation, not be a dyadic
relation, but be the expression of an identity?"
Since self-consciousness is the basic structural
feature of knowledge and action according to
Rödl and to Hegel, the supreme necessary
condition for anything being believing or acting,
everything depends on the right formulation
and drawing the right implications.
I don’t know what I'm doing by identifying myself
with the one acting, but by being the one acting.
So how can such a Two also be One?
We are in the middle of everything of significance
here in Hegel’s Logic, not to mention Fichte’s early
Wissenschaftslehre and Schelling’s early idealism.
We are at the heart of the problem they
called Identitätstheorie, identity theory.
For example, in Fichte’s early versions
of the Wissenschaftslehre, the possibility
of the I’s or ego’s identification of itself
in all its experiences mirrors what he calls
'the division’ at the heart of any statement
of identity, a division that is also somehow
not a division, as in the difference
between "A is A" and simply "A".
In fact, he argues, the very intelligibility of any
statement of the law of identity presupposes
the I’s self-identity and self-differentiation.
A cannot be identified as A unless the ‘I’ of the
first A is the ‘I’ of the second A and knows it is.
And since identity is the first principle
of any possible intelligibility, the issue is
in the systematic sense, primordial.
This too is important to state carefully.
Hegel scholars often assume that Hegel inherits
identity philosophy from Schelling, and that
it means the identity of subject and object.
They then formulate various philosophically
implausible versions of such an identity,
such as that true reality is divine thought
thinking itself, and that objects are moments
of this thought’s intellectual intuition of itself.
But the Logic is not committed
to anything remotely like this.
As we'll see in more detail in a moment,
in thinking of identity, Hegel is first of all
thinking of self-consciousness in any consciousness,
where the subject of knowledge is identical
with itself, where there is no difference
between the subject & object of its knowledge,
'cause it knows itself; all of this as
Rödl formulates it in his own terms.
And Rödl is expressing a Hegelian thought
when he says that this is just not a feature
of an isolated problematic,
a theory of self-consciousness;
it isn't a theory of self-consciousness
in the sense we needed in philosophy.
This unusual identity is constitutive
of theoretical thought as such.
Theoretical thought, he says, "is a reality
that includes its subject’s knowledge of it".
So a subject’s knowledge "that and why she
believes what she does, which she expresses
in giving the explanation, is not a separate
existence from what it represents.
It includes and is included in the
reality of which it has knowledge".
This has an important implication.
The theoretical thought of any content cannot
be understood as the momentary or punctated
grasp of a solitary item.
The thought of the content is also, is identical
with, is already, is implicated in, the thought
of whatever reasons there are to delimit a
concept in such a way and not some other;
for example, the thought of discreteness,
in its contrast with continuity, or the thought
of essence in its contrast with appearances.
We are not thinking of discreteness if we
cannot think of what such a notion excludes
determinately, presupposes, and requires,
if we have no idea how such discrete magnitudes
could form a continuum.
These are, for Hegel, reasons which
differentiate it from its contrary.
Reasons that allow success in distinguishing
the content from its complements or contraries.
That the thought of the content is also the
thought of my thinking, it, has this implication,
is what that apperceptive element amounts to.
So to bring all this together: Judgment
is the consciousness of judgment.
But one is conscious of judging in
an unusual way, by being the judger.
Being the judger, believer or thinker of anything
is as if in answer to the question what ought
to be judged, believed or thought in this way.
This means, that at the highest level of abstraction,
the thought, the belief, the assertion of some content
like finitude or causality is at the same time
the thought of the reasons that are required
for such an answer.
Finally, thought can also investigate what
is generally presupposed, what is required,
in order to judge anything, to think determinately
any content (that's why the Logic begins with
the thought of mere Being).
It does not learn these from experience;
does not apprehend them as ideal objects.
It has to be said to give them to itself.
The record of some such attempts
is The Science of Logic.
Since these meta-concepts are the forms of
whatever could be truly judged, and what is
truly said is what is the case,
they are the forms of reality.
Now, I realize this introduces a lot of issues
that are not directly relevant to the Science
of Logic, but these are claims
that are quite controversial.
I think it can be easily defended, at least I
think so, with respect to the conditions for the
possibility of judging or acting as such,
of cognitive claims and of intentional action.
It's more controversial with cases of belief,
that in order to be believing I must be conscious
of my believing, that is a component
of what it is to be believing.
And it's even more controversial of other
things we are willing to call 'knowledge',
but which are not judgmental or fully cognitive.
I know in some sense where my left foot right
now is, but that's not apperceptively self-ascribed.
Likewise, we like to think that people have
beliefs that they don't know they have,
sometimes racial prejudice is described in this way.
A person avows a belief in racial equality,
but he really has a belief in racial inequality.
Or we avow beliefs that we think we're committed
to that we're not really committed to.
There's a lot to say about this.
I would not call beliefs that we
do not yet avow "beliefs" as such.
I would call them something like potential
beliefs. We have the potential to avow a variety
of things if we're asked about it.
It's somewhat unreasonable to think of the
infinite things we could believe, we're already
believing them, we just haven't avowed them.
If it's a belief, in some sense,
I know that I'm believing it.
Same thing's true of self-deception.
If I have beliefs I'm self-deceived about,
the whole idea of self-deception is that I
know what I'm hiding from myself, and hence that
even beliefs in that context must be self-ascribable.
I must know that I'm believing it.
Belief is not something that just happens,
judging is not something that just happens.
Judgments are not emitted,
judgments are not merely evoked.
If I'm making a judgment, I'm
standing behind something.
And hence, the thought of the judgment is the
same as the thought of the reasons on which I judge.
These are not occurrent episodes in the mind,
no one's saying that, but the conditions for it
being an act of judging are that I be conscious that
I'm judging, I'm claiming, I'm committing myself.
And I could only be conscious of that if I
were conscious of what reasons lead me
to be so committed.
Herein lies another lesson--let me talk about
that in the discussion, it's a lot of complicated,
controversial claims.
Herein lies another lesson, though, in the
difficulty of finding the right formulation.
Rödl, in discussing the main features of
this order, inferential relations, believing
Q because I believe P and P implies Q, argues
that such inferences themselves reveal that
there must be a reason it is right to believe
something other than because of an inferences
from something else one believes.
This different way, he says, will reveal the
order under which I bring myself in asking
what to believe.
It cannot be the case that this moment that
defines the rightness of the whole order of
inferences is itself the content of
a separate belief or representation.
We would be heading straight for Carroll’s
paradoxes of Achilles and the tortoise.
It must be that what it is to determine what
it is right to believe because of what else
one believes is itself, just thereby, to reveal
the order under which I bring myself in asking
what to believe, not to evoke another belief.
And this in the same difficult-to-state way
that judgment is the consciousness of judgment.
And in just the same way that, being committed
to the truth of a proposition, I am just thereby
committed to the denial of
everything inconsistent with it.
The latter is not a separate inference I draw
on the basis of my first commitment.
It is a dimension of the content
of my first commitment.
This is not to say I must be conscious of
these implications and incompatibilities.
Just that I could not be thinking that content,
were I not able to be responsive to such considerations
appropriately.
This is also just as someone’s believing
anything & her thought that it is something
right to believe are, as Rödl says,
of the same reality.
Reflection on these features of judging or believing
or doing brings us back to our starting point.
Their all being undertaken self-consciously
means no one could be said just to assert,
or just believe or just act.
Any such undertaking, if self-conscious, must
be potentially responsive to the question
of "Why?" that is, to reasons.
An assertion is such a responsiveness; the
latter is not a secondary or even distinct
dimension of the former.
And it is at least plausible to say that the
greater the extent of such potential responsiveness
or said another way, the greater the self-
understanding, the freer the activity, the more I can
be said to redeem the action as genuinely
mine, back it, stand behind it, as mine.
And there we have the heart of German Idealism stated
at the outset, the principle that self-consciousness,
reason and freedom are one.
At this point, we have to note that Hegel adds
his own unusual spin to this trio of abstractions.
A proper understanding of the self’s relation
to itself in thinking, the form of any conceiving,
and thereby of any concept understood as a
moment of conceiving, and thereby any inferential
relation, is also the core meaning
of the what Hegel calls the ‘infinity’
treated by speculative philosophy, all in
contradistinction to traditional metaphysics,
what he calls the domain of Verstand
(the understanding) and finitude.
Later in the Encyclopedia, Hegel states Kant’s
point in his own speculative language: What
is here called object of reason, the unconditioned, is
nothing but the self-equivalent, das Sich-selbst-Gleiche;
in other words, it is the original identity
of the I in thinking, what is here called
the object of reason, is the original identity
of the I in thinking, otherwise bewildering
without the path we have just followed.
I think that Rödl’s formulations have given
us some hope that we might understand why
Hegel equates the ‘object of reason’ with
‘the original identity of the I in thinking'.
Or why he calls ‘truth’ ‘self-consciousness’.
But of course, Hegel’s formulations about
he's calling the infinite character of this
self-relation are quite difficult.
He has invoked a self-relation that is something
like a circular structure, in which the self’s
self-relation never terminates in a distinct
object or determinate posit -- and so despite
appearances, is never dyadic -- but in so
attending, returns to itself as the thinker
of such a thought.
It would have to since the subject
is the object it is aware of.
The relation is to a self that is the original
subject of the relation; a relation, or a
difference, even with such an identity, to 
insert Hegel’s frequent way of framing the issue.
This is ‘infinity’ in the proper sense,
Hegel tells us frequently, and, as he says
in his discussion of ‘Being-for-self’,
"Self-consciousness is thus the nearest example
of the presence of infinity".
A finite understanding of this relation
would be, for example, a naturalistic one.
There has to be something of this
thought in Rödl’s position.
The believer knows of her acts of believing
not by inner perception or inference but
by being the believer.
But this identity is not something like the
identification of one thing with another,
the way a reductionist would identify
mental states with brain states, that is,
claim there are only brain states,
there are no mental states.
So occasionally Rödl must
formulate more metaphorically.
As before, he says: a subject’s knowledge
that and why she believes what she does,
which she expresses in giving the explanation, is
not a separate existence from what it represents.
It includes and is included in the
reality of which it is knowledge.
Well, 'includes’ and especially ‘included
in’ a reality of which she has knowledge
sound metaphorically an idealist note (what
is it for reasons to be included in a reality?),
but also evinces some aspects of the ‘identity and
non-identity’ language the idealists were so fond of.
One can note the problem by comparing this
language of ‘including’ with what he had said before.
"Her believing it and her thought that it is
something right to believe are the same reality."
Hegel had said that the subject matter of
the Logic is thinking (Denken), understood
as an activity which means it, thinking, is
the ‘active universal’ or the ‘self-activating’
(sich betätigende) universal, because the deed
or that brought about, he said, is the universal.
At the beginning of The Logic of the Concept,
Hegel glosses this activity in a way that
also expresses a Kantian thought.
That is, he rejects the idea of the judgement
as the combination of independent concepts,
subjects and predicates, and insists instead
that the relation between the determinacy
of concepts and their roles in judgement
is in effect one of identity; their determinacy
is their role in judging.
Discovery of a different role in judging,
discovery of a different conceptual content.
He has his own way of putting this,
but I think the point is clear.
He's trying to explain here what he means
by saying that the Concept as such does not
abide within itself without development, calling
the concept instead ‘totally active’ in that
it is always ‘distinguishing itself from itself’.
If you like a contemporary analogue, he's
denying, with these formulations, that the
fixing of the concept's meaning -- the Carnpian
view -- is something we can do independently
of what we discovered to be the possible
roles of the concept in judgement.
He has a kind of Quinean view against Carnap,
that the change in the role it could play
in various judgements as we begin to analyze
the concept more fully or look to other dimensions
of its use, changes the meaning of the concept.
No fixity of the meaning of the concept if
the play of judgmental interlocution would say,
is as varied or as widespread as Hegel thinks it is.
So he says, the sundering of the concept into
the distinction of its moments that is posited
by its own activity is the judgment.
I hope it's clear this---anybody reading this for
the first time, it would sound like gobbledygook.
But he's trying to follow the logic of Kant's
definition of judgment as apperceptive and
the link that Kant himself formulated between
the content of concepts and their role as
predicates in possible judgments, as he says,
and he's noting the instability of the notion
of conceptual content we get
once we concede this point.
The concept of Being doesn't mean what it
means on first analysis if the concept of
Being can only be articulated by judgmental
specifications that then mean its use in those
specifications changes so that our first apprehension
of it hadn't particularly well identified
the content of the concept.
In Kant as well as in Hegel, concepts are
predicates of possible judgements, even the
concepts or the categories, dependence on
which is necessary for any conceptual determination
to be possible.
This means that concepts cannot be independently
grasped as determinate entities.
Hegel has the last thing
close to a concept realism.
Thinking that they could be produces what
Hegel is forever calling ‘dead’, lifeless,
static, ‘untrue’ concepts.
This truth is part of what we are learning
in the first Logic, the Being Logic; learning
that it is not possible to understand conceptual
determinacy this way, by assuming it is and
falling into contradiction.
And this means that the logic of Being can
be deeply misleading, as if we are simply
entertaining concepts as such, one by one.
In trying to understand this claim, we can
recall here the passage where Hegel had claimed
that the Gestalt, the form of concepts
was the form of the self, that is, in science,
that the truth is self-consciousness.
Concepts have the form of a self in this sense,
are moments of apperceptive predication, always
of self-conscious judging.
They have this reflective structure—knowledge
of their determinate content is also knowledge
of the considerations for just such a delimitation.
And they are what they are in this reflective
way taken to be, determined to be, necessarily
in the interconnected practices of
all conceptual determination.
This alone will be the source of the claim
for what would otherwise be the mysterious
‘logical movement’ in the greater Logic,
and through such logical movement, a finally
determinate logical order.
Judgement is said to be the "determining of
the Concept through itself" and is said to be
"the realization of the concept, for reality
denotes in general the entry into existence
as determinate being" Or concepts are only
determinate by virtue of their roles in judgement,
the bringing to the objective unity
of apperception, in Kant’s definition.
So concepts like ‘essence’, for example,
can be said to be delimitable as just that
concept by virtue of its possible uses in
various contrasts with ‘appearance’, or
by virtue of its negation of the concept ‘being’ or its role
in distinguishing accidental from essential predicates.
These are all roles in judgements and
thereby tied to judgemental roles in inferences.
Any of these uses though involves any such claim
in a network of justifications, a normative order.
The application of any such concept in judgement,
since apperceptive, self-consciously applied,
must be, just thereby, responsive to its possible
misapplication, and the question of the general
contours of its correct use implicates any one notion
in the normative proprieties governing many others.
Hence the course of the ‘movement’ in the Logic.
But with this topic of ‘infinity’, though,
we are at the very limits now of being able
to follow Hegel, at least at my limits.
We still need some non-metaphorical sense
of how, in non-empirical cases-- I mean, it's
important that they be non-empirical.
If the engine driving the re-formulation of
the conceptual content is just more information
coming from the empirical world over historical
time, it would be easy enough to understand
how the varieties of what keeps escaping conceptual
determination keep forcing transformations and
even the very content or meaning of a concept.
But the Science of Logic & Phenomenology
are not about empirical self-correction.
There's another kind of movement at stake
in the postulation of these different judgmental
roles that can't rely on the same thing,
which is what's wrong, by the way, with
Brandom's interpretation of Hegel.
He takes as his model empirical correction as
responsive to, as responsible for, the variations
in conceptual meaning.
We still need some non-metaphorical sense
of how in non-empirical cases, settling on
some determination of conceptual content,
because necessarily self-conscious, is a settling on
at the same time, much more than an
isolated or punctated grasp of anything.
That the self-relation involved in such a
full determination, in effect, thought’s
determination of its own possibility, the possibility
of rendering determinately intelligible at all,
should be understood as ‘infinity’,
does not seem very helpful.
It might help us understand why Hegel sometimes
seems to say that knowing or determining one
content would be to know or determine
everything, but that's not very helpful either.
It would be reasonable to say that, formulated
this way, the prospect of understanding the
structure of this self-relation in some systematic way
-- and by hypothesis that would mean understanding
the possibility of intelligible knowing and
acting -- is impossible, and this impossibility
represents the failure of German Idealism.
This is the thesis of by far the greatest
Dean of German philosophy scholarship in the
post-war period, Dieter Henrich, this is his
claim, that Henrich is essentially a Kantian.
So, he has some stake in the
project of German Idealism failing.
We could conclude from this either that we
have made a wrong turn somewhere and must
begin anew or that the issue itself—or the
complex of issues, self-relation in relation
to the world, practical self-knowledge in
action that involves no strange inner eye—
does not allow a systematic, only an approximate
or indirect, articulation of value as a weapon
against naturalism.
This is Henrich’s position; and
merely ‘approximate’ is his term.
Or we could hope that the problem in formulating
this structure stems from the limitations
inherent in a kind of formulation, what Hegel
calls the formulations of Verstand, the understanding,
and that a different conception of the logic
of thought, of intelligibility, might be possible,
and adequate to this infinite self-relation.
This is of course Hegel’s position
in The Science of Logic.
Said more simply, understanding this self-relation
in thinking and acting is the most important
element to understand in understanding ourselves
as thinkers and agents, and Hegel, in effect claims
we are captured by a largely empiricist
picture of how to achieve this understanding,
a picture of consciousness and objects.
The Phenomenology was supposed to have helped
us, therapeutically, break the hold of this picture.
In the Logic the one thing required is that
we understand, by contrast with this empiricist
picture, that thought, the concept, does not
acquire content, but gives itself its own content.
This is very similar to Rödl’s formulation, and
is the final element we need in understanding
the so called "heart of German Idealism".
That is, we need to begin by realizing that
the determination of the conceptual content
involved in the thinking of anything at all consists of
determinate attempts at predicative specification.
At the level of abstraction of the Logic,
the level of meta-conceptual functions that
have empirical, scientific and ethical concepts
as their arguments, the role of self-consciousness
in the possibility and shape of such
an enterprise has a distinct feature.
Any such determining is at the same time conscious
of such determining in the way specified:
just by being the act of determination.
But then the determination is implicated in
a normative order, the reasons which require
or prohibit some such determination, but ultimately
the full exposition of which would be needed
for a successful determination.
In that sense we have to say that the I’s
being itself in its thinking and acting is
at the same time it’s not
being fully or wholly itself.
Its reasons, under some finite set of assumptions
about qualitative predication or essential
predication, run out.
Being itself and not being itself, that is,
not being able to fulfill the intention resolved
to adequately determine content, places me
in a state of opposition with myself that
Hegel calls a contradiction, not at all in
the formal logical sense, that is, something
logically false, but in the ordinary sense
when we say to someone "I discovered you're
contradicting yourself".
It is clear enough what is at stake for Hegel
in such a self-determination, and it is clear
in another register in Rödl’s book.
The culmination of the course of the demonstration
in the Logic is the Logic of the Concept -- or
the concept of the concept, thought’s determination
of its own possibility at the highest level
of abstraction -- about which Hegel says that
having reached this realm we have reached
the realm of subjectivity and freedom.
Later in the account of the Logic of the Concept
itself, he says that "In the concept, therefore,
the kingdom of freedom is disclosed".
And in the Addition to §31 of the Encyclopedia
of Logic, he waxes poetic over such ‘logical’
freedom, using a dramatic image to
characterize the achievement of such a logic.
Using his technical term for freedom, Beisichsein,
being oneself, or being able to identify myself
wholly with what I claim or do, he says,
this being with self, Beisichsein, belongs
to free thinking, a free voyaging, where,
with nothing under us and nothing over us,
in solitude, alone by ourselves, we
are purely at home with ourselves.
This sets the bar pretty high for a poor commentator,
but if these considerations are right, then
at least we can have some sense of what
stakes we are playing for & what the game is.
Thanks for your patience.
