Reason In Modern Philosophy (Descartes to Hegel)

 

The epistemological question of what we know, how do we know are inextricably bound to the question of the ‘special status’ of human beings – in what way are human beings rational animals? Is rationality a difference in kind or degree between human beings and animals? To answer the epistemological question we have to reflect upon the rational capacities of human beings and then to articulate this understanding of understanding. The point here is that the question of the validity of knowledge with which science is concerned and the question of the nature of human being and human rationality are intimately related and one is bound to have influence on the other. To use Sellars’ words the manifest image of human being and the scientific image of human being, the question of what we can know and the question what is, cannot be severed apart from one another. If for instance a scientist like Benjamin Libet tells us that human beings have no free will, it will be no consolation to know that our manifest image says otherwise. The question will always be: What is true? We cannot articulate the specialness of human rationality without also answering the question what is true and how do we know the truth, because in order to proceed with this articulation we have to consider these very questions, otherwise our thinking will be merely formal but not real and concrete. It was one of the primary purposes of philosophers of the period under study to articulate how thinking can be about the concrete reality and not simply abstractions of understanding. Descartes’s very revolt against medieval philosophy was because of his impatience with the multiplication of abstract entities, primarily the Substantial Forms. His efforts lie in the direction of making philosophy more concrete, to bring it in touch with reality. This is the reason this period demands close study because the question of how philosophy is able to access reality is treated in far more detail and with greater rigor than in any other period in the entire history of philosophy including today. 

The period begins with Descartes who subscribes to the Platonic model of rationality in taking pure thought to be a distinct source of knowledge different from sense-perception. Plato had observed that sensory perception is unreliable and truth is accessible to pure thought or thinking that abstracts from sensory experience. Descartes like Plato believed that if human beings can revert to a disembodied existence, then they would be able to know the truth better than in their embodied conditions. To regard thought as innate is not to think that there is a storehouse of information that is drilled in the soul but to regard the capacity to know the truth as innate or natural to rational souls but which is hampered due to the violence done to the soul due to its association with the body, but most importantly that the content of knowledge is intellectual and the nature of the content distinguishes thought from sensibility as a source of knowledge. Further to retrieve this knowledge of truth requires in Platonic terms an ascent and for Descartes a meditation, a turn within to find out solely with the assistance of our consciousness and so without any presuppositions, whether or not we can know the truth. The difference between Plato and Descartes is for the latter the ascent means not just discovery of truth but a proof of objective validity. The meditator deploys the sceptical method to question every piece of knowledge he considers himself to have and to believe only when he has eliminated the possibility of deception and all grounds for doubt. This is possible only by setting up a reliable method that allows us to discriminate between truth and falsehood. The meditator discovers this criterion in the fact of self-consciousness, the indubitability of self-consciousness reveals that anything clearly and distinctly perceived to be true cannot be false. This still is insufficient to prove objective validity because it does not assure us that our thinking corresponds to something real outside us. What is being demanded is to prove the rationality of the content of thought, that what exists, is real is amenable to being understood by thought or of being an object of knowledge. Only this could assure us about thought that it can be a valid source of knowledge. The radicalness of Descartes’s project can be gleaned from the fact that this rationality of the content of thought or the identity of thought and existence was never questioned by philosophers before him because this identity was the basis of all proof and to try to prove it cannot but be a project that is inevitably vitiated by circularity which is destructive of the possibility of demonstration. Since the laws of logic are prior to all demonstrations, they themselves cannot be made the object of demonstration but since this is essentially what scepticism demanded either the demand needs to be fulfilled or else the demand is irrational or meaningless. The latter option was the norm in Descartes’s time who broke with it by adopting the former course of action. By choosing this option Descartes opened the Pandora’s Box without being able to close it. First, by distinguishing between subjective validity and objective validity or that thought can be valid without being true Descartes paved the way for a psychologism which gives a foundational role to subjectivity. To see this note again that rationality of the content of knowledge is a view that implies a deeper unity between the thinking subject and the external real object which is the content of knowledge. This deeper unity can be characterized as a structural unity and Reason is this structure that holds subjective thinking and objective content together thereby making it possible for the former to know the latter. Reason is something over and above the psychological thinking process found in the subject and the reality outside the subject. When the meditator grasps God as Reason, he acquires a second-order knowledge of the reliability or the justification of first-order knowledge and the indubitability of the former carries over to the latter so that the meditator can finally trust his faculties to be a valid source of knowledge about external reality. This validity is not a subjective validity – an account of how a subject comes to think or consider something as valid, rather it is objective validity which implies that the connection between the subject and the world is mediated by certain rational norms which account for the rationality of the human faculties of knowledge. However, when the subject is given a foundational role, a psychological account of considering something to be true or justified knowledge is an account of the validity of the thought. The object in order to be an object of knowledge must fulfil the psychological conditions under which the subject can know, subjectivity determines the conditions of the possibility of knowledge and so there is no mind-independent normative space of reasons (to use Sellars’s phrase). There is no objective validity because truth is inaccessible, what is accessible is validity explained in terms of psychological laws that invariably compels thought to think in a certain way. Objective validity can be explained away on the presumption of a psychological deception that compels one to consider as objectively valid what can be taken to have only subjective validity. A psychological account that can explain this illicit transition from subjective to objective validity would undermine the presumption of the objective validity of the laws of logic and so also the rationality of the content of knowledge. Descartes never entertained the possibility of this kind of sceptical response and hence his project failed. Second, in order to prove the rationality of the content of knowledge which through the evil demon scenario he had subjected to doubt, he had to prove the existence of God which meant there was one special Idea found within the human soul that can be accorded objective validity in accordance with the criterion of truth he discovered in the cogito argument. But the criterion of truth he found - clarity and distinctness is ambiguous in so far it can be predicated of the manner of knowing or the perception of the subject and in so far as it pertained to the object of knowledge. In the former sense Descartes could never prove the existence of God because nothing but subjective validity can be accorded to these perceptions. Evidently Descartes employs the second sense of clarity and distinctness thereby presupposing what is the subject to proof – the rationality of the content of thought. This can be seen in the illicit equation of clarity and distinctness with perfection and the assumption that what has maximum perfection must be real. Here the unity of perfection and reality is assumed which however is the very thing to be proved. Third, the manner in which God has been grasped as Reason (nous) undermines the validity of the system of knowledge. When Descartes says that mathematical knowledge of say 2+2=4 is subjectively valid and that there might be possible worlds where this knowledge is false, he has compromised the rationality of the content of knowledge. There is no intrinsic or structural connection between the truths of understanding and understanding. The connection is an external one mandated by God and he could have constituted human understanding in a different way because of which we would not have attached the kind of self-evidence to arithmetical knowledge we are used to doing but would on the contrary have seen it as false. The entire structure of human understanding becomes arbitrary and truths of understanding become species relative truths. This again is a point where Descartes deviates from and so undermines the Platonic model of rationality. To see God as Nous or Reason in Descartes implies seeing God as transcending the system or structure of knowledge where rationality was supposed to be what holds the system together. God like a king mandate what the system will look like and the rationality of the system is not a logic internal to the system but instead subject to the arbitrary will of God. Leibniz took great issue with this aspect of Descartes’s thought and charged him with confounding truths of fact with truths of reason. The difference between God’s understanding and human understanding is a difference of degree rather than of kind and so there is a greater continuity between the two. If we find certain mathematical truths to be valid, God must find them to be valid too and so there is an internal structural connection between human and divine understanding, in Leibniz’s philosophy. God does not mandate truths of understanding but discovers them and human beings despite their inherent limitations are God-like in this manner. Descartes’s views had great potential for undermining the rationality of content of knowledge, it meant that arithmetical truths need not be seen as analytic and so 2+2=4 is a piece of knowledge on par with the inference from smoke to fire because there is no logical (internal/structural) connection between 2 and 2 other than what God had mandated and so it may as well have been connected with 5, if God had willed so. Did Descartes really hold such a view? It seems not, he merely entertained the possibility but was led to it by a logic internal to the system. We can notice the ambiguity in the epistemic status of Divine Guarantee. On the one hand it means that God would not mislead us about the truth because truthfulness is a perfection and God being the most perfect being cannot lack this quality. But while this proves that God will not mislead us, it does not prove that God cannot be deceived about the truths of understanding. So divine guarantee can be an assurance only if there is a necessary connection between divinity and truths of understanding. But what is this connection? As we have seen the answer to this question cannot lie in Divine Mandate because that would inevitably compromise the rationality of the content of knowledge. But if we see this necessary connection in terms of all truths of understanding being necessarily the object of God’s knowledge as Leibniz believes then there is a necessary connection between truths of understanding and human understanding and the possibility of the severance between the two cannot be a genuine possibility and the thought can be entertained only as a heuristic exercise to reassure the meditator of the reliability of his faculties. But then such an exercise will not have the potential to answer the sceptical demand to justify the laws of logic and Descartes’s epistemological project would not be so radical after all.     

 

So, we see why Spinoza and Leibniz and scholastics of Descartes’s time were unimpressed by his epistemological innovation. It meant that we accede to the legitimacy of the sceptical demand that the laws of logic must be justified but we cannot justify what itself is the very basis of justification. So, these philosophers thought that instead of refuting scepticism Descartes had instead acceded too much to them and made them still more powerful. Their fears were not unwarranted for this sceptical demand would become the basis of critical philosophy and undermine metaphysics which can be a study of being qua being only if there is a unity of thought and being. But for Spinoza and Leibniz the sceptical demand was unfounded – one cannot make a rational demand while at the same time failing to be rational i.e., one cannot demand a proof while refusing to adhere to the rational norms governing proof. But once we separate subjective validity from objective validity, we also give a certain independence to the subject to determine the truth independently of the norms which are considered to be rationally binding on the subject, depending on the clarity and distinctness of the perception found within the subject. In critical philosophy we find subjective consciousness has a priority in determining the meaning of a concept, a concept cannot have a meaning (sense) which does not mean something to the subject and so the rationality of the concept is determined by what it meaning it has for a particular kind of subject. We find this also in Bayle’s scepticism when he denies the inference from self-evidence to truth. A subject may find self-evidently true that 2+2=4 but nevertheless it may still be false. So, the sceptic may agree that he finds the laws of logic to be true and cannot think otherwise nevertheless he need not grant that they are objectively true for reality may turn out to be radically different from what we hold to be true. Why hold reality hostage to our ways of thinking? So, the sceptical demand is justified, while the laws of logic may govern my thinking what proof of their objective validity can be given? Why believe that the laws of logic can be anything more than psychological? With this way of framing the question there seems to be no contradiction in the sceptical demand to justify logic or the norms governing justification. But with the subjective resources at hand, it seems impossible to prove objective validity. Empiricists like Hume would embark on a reductive project to give a psychological account of why subjective validity is mistaken for objective validity. Kant on the other hand would attempt a proof of objective validity by elucidating the epistemic role of apperception and how subjectivity implies rather than excludes objectivity. The likes of Jacobi would appeal to non-sensible intuition or irrational means to justify reason. To understand these trends of philosophy it is necessary to understand how subjectivity became a special problem in philosophy.   

 

Subjectivity becomes a special problem when subjective and objective validity are separated. In the course of the cogito argument Descartes extracts his criterion of truth, clarity and distinctness which becomes the basis for justifying a rational psychology but insufficient to meet the demand to prove objective validity of thought. The point has also been made above that this separation compromises the Platonic Model of Rationality which saw Reason as the internal structural connection between the subject and the object of knowledge and so saw Reason as independent of the individual psychological thoughts of the human subject implying that logic cannot be reduced to anthropology because no descriptive psychology can deliver the normative science of logic. This means that individual psychological thoughts can be valid only due to considerations outside the human psyche and because of being in accord with the laws of logic. But when we separate subjective from objective validity, we countenance the possibility that thinking may be valid without being true – despite being in accord with the laws of logic it cannot make a legitimate demand on reality as such, atleast not without further proof. We can now give a psychological explanation of the validity of logic because this validity itself is something peculiar to the nature of subjectivity rather than something that conforms to a reality outside the subject. The content or object of knowledge should in order to be an object of knowledge must conform to the demands of subjectivity rather than vice-versa. This paves the way to a subjective or psychological conception of thought because the objective conception of thought implies that a valid thought cannot fail to be true or in accord with reality and so validity of knowledge is governed by norms not reducible to the psychology of the subject. So, laws of logic cannot be species relative, they cannot fail to hold for different kind of rational being because they define rationality itself. Different rational beings cannot have different logical laws and still be counted as rational. This objective conception of thought the author has explicated through a structural unity of thought and being, underlying both the subjective thinking process and the subject-independent reality as such, it makes the connection between the two an internal mode of justification such that valid thought necessarily conforms to reality but the psychological conception of thought makes the relation a contingent and external one or in other words it implies that merely because something is thinkable it cannot be real because thinkability is something purely internal to the subject. The severance of thought and reality is the essence of the psychological conception of thought and the objective conception of thought can be regarded as its exact opposite. Descartes’s epistemological project was undermined due to this emergence of subjectivity as a special problem because as we saw, a) it leads to a psychological conception of thought, b) makes it impossible to give a non-circular justification of rational norms, c) makes God external to the system of knowledge and undermines the epistemic status of Divine Guarantee.

 

But there is a further aspect of the problem that led to undermining of the rational psychology itself. Descartes’s criterion of truth – clarity and distinctness is the epistemological basis of the science of rational psychology, pertains to perceptions rather than objects of knowledge pending the proof of objective validity. In the Meditations they suffice for a provisional proof of real distinction between mind and body. In the Second Meditation Descartes sought to prove that it is not only the case that the mind thinks but rather it is a thinking thing i.e., thought pertains to the very essence of the soul which together with the consideration of the difference between thought and extension leads to the inference of the real distinction between mind and body. The very possibility of a rational psychology as a science depends on the essence of the soul which is the object of the study and the essence of the thinking subject can be fathomed only if in this instance atleast there is coincidence of thought and being – which we find to be the case in the case of cogit0 argument and also which in turn is the basis of the extraction of the criterion of truth. It is only in self-consciousness that thought and being coincide and on the basis of this fact Descartes deploys the method of exclusion to argue that thinking is the being of the soul. This method of exclusion however is based on the assumption of the transparency of the soul or the assumption that there is nothing in the soul which in principle cannot be made an object of thought, but this is the very thing to be proved – that the soul in essence is a thinking thing which cannot have more than what thought can inform us about because thinking and being coincide in this case. But even in this limited sphere objective validity cannot be proved because Descartes cannot exclude the possibility that the mind can be both a thinking and extended being. Mind can legitimately think its separation from body without its actually being so. This undermines the prospects of the science of rational psychology because a science is the study of an essence and if the essence is unknowable then mind cannot be made the object of study of a rational psychology. Further the Rationalist paradigm of knowledge depends on Real Definitions, according to which to know something is to conceive it as following as a consequence from its cause (=substance/essence), the ontological relation of essence-mode is conceived in epistemological terms of analytic containment. If I cannot conceive an X without also conceiving Y but the conception of Y does not involve X, then X can be said to be analytically contained in Y. But if the essence is unknowable then the epistemological relation of analytic containment is seriously undermined because even if the concept X involves the concept Y that does not imply that the former is analytically contained in the latter. This calls for a new way to think the topic of individuation of the content of Ideas and their relation with one another. Broadly there are two prospects, one we could give up on analytic containment and regard two Ideas any contingently related and second, to conceive a synthetic but necessary relation between Ideas. The former option was adopted by Malebranche and the latter by Kant and Leibniz’s position comes midway between the two. Malebranche acknowledged the impossibility of a rational psychology because the soul’s essence is indeed hidden to the soul itself, however he still believed we can know the essence of matter is extension. In the case of matter, he could retain the notion of analytic containment and salvage the rationalist paradigm of knowledge but where he couldn’t, he appealed to God as a Deus ex machina. In the case of knowledge of the external world he regarded this knowledge had in its favour only probabilistic evidence because he could not find any logical connection between sensation and the existence of the external world. For Descartes this was not a problem because the inference was made on the basis of perfection of Ideas and the minimal representational content that sensations have intrinsically guarantees the existence of the external world even though this proof lacks objective validity without Divine Guarantee. This is an internal mode of justification because there is a reason (degree of perfection) why sensation is linked to the existence of the external world and the two are not arbitrarily combined by God. However, we see in Descartes at play on the one hand a Platonic framework which saw perfection as the connecting link between thought and reality which leads to internal justification and on the other hand, we can also find in his philosophy an undermining of this basis and an external mode of justification. In Malebranche it is the latter tendency that is predominant. He finds no logical connection between thought and reality, between the existence of effect and the cause, sensation and the external world and so has to appeal to God to save the situation which is an external mode of justification. Not a logical but only a moral certainty belongs to the knowledge of the existence of the external world. We are only a step away from the empirical theory of Ideas which gives an appearance=reality principle for individuation of content according to which if we can form two ideas and if the content of the idea is what we conceive within it and nothing more then the very distinctness of the conception proves that one cannot be said to contain the other.

 

Leibniz made an attempt to salvage the situation by distinguishing between truths of facts and truths of reason. The internalist mode of justification is saved in the case of truths of reason but in the case of truths of facts one could not apply the epistemological notion of analytic containment. But the tendency of Leibniz’s thought is to retain an internalist mode of justification even in the case of truths of facts. He accomplishes this by regarding these synthetic truths as reducible to analytic truths but only in principle. All synthetic truths are based on the principle of harmony or God’s tendency to maximize Good which depends on God’s Will and since there is a necessary connection between will and the object of will (God cannot fail to know what he Wills) the synthetic truths are reducible to analytic truths but only for God. To reduce synthetic truths to analytic truths is the regulative ideal of Reason. Leibniz distinguishes his pre-established harmony from occasionalism on grounds that the principle of harmony depends on the individual nature of monads which he conceives in terms of their compossibility with other monads and so God considers their individual natures to bring them together in harmony. But this is where Leibniz’s problems begin. Considered as a simple essence, the soul of Alexander the great for instance does not contain truths of facts like his victory over the Persians, considered as simple essence no soul has any connection to such contingent truths. So, these predicates must have been instituted by God’s Will in the Soul without considering their simple essence because these contain no predilection towards one contingent truth as opposed to another. So, when Leibniz regards synthetic truths to be reducible to analytic truths, he could only mean analytic-in-will because God’s Will and the object of his Will have a necessary connection but the Will is arbitrary and contains no consideration of simple essences which makes his philosophy indistinguishable from occasionalism. To overcome this predicament Leibniz has to give a unified theory of knowledge but no logical connection is found between truths of facts and truths of reason and there is no way to unify these two kinds of knowledge.  The drive of reason lies in converting all contingent knowledge to analytic knowledge supports an internal mode of justification of thought as an ideal of reason, not realizable in actuality but a regulative ideal nevertheless that Reason sets before itself – to reach greater clarity and distinctness or greater completion as far as it can. The principle of harmony provided an aid to this process but was a source of moral certainty of truths, not logical certainty. But the principles of harmony and PNC are two distinct principles of thought that are illegitimately combined to set up a single regulative ideal for thought as such. The two principles are set up side by side and are never reconciled within Leibniz’s philosophy.

 

So we review here the primary characteristics of Platonic model of thought that Descartes inherited: a) pure thought is objectively valid and requires no proof of objective validity, being and thought are identical and truth is valid thought, b) this validity is internal to the nature of thought, c) pure thought is normative, it sets the standards for judging the truth i.e. it decides which norms allow us to determine the truth, d) the content of pure thought is not a psychological entity tied to the existence of the thinker, e) the source of validity of pure thought is rooted in metaphysics of God, truth and validity of pure thought are values that have their source in God but in an internal structural manner, these epistemological notions are inextricably and due to an internal necessity are linked with metaphysical notion of God, f) truth and being are co-extensive terms which is seen in the notion of perfection which implies that the nature of reality itself involves thought and hence pure thought simply through reflection can acquire objectively valid knowledge and the concept of perfection marks the connecting link between thinking and being, g) pure thought is a distinct source of knowledge than sense perception and the difference is in terms of content of knowledge, h) pure thought is innate or characterizes the nature of the soul i.e. the soul due to its very nature has the capacity to acquire knowledge and in disembodied condition it shall be able to acquire clear and distinct metaphysical knowledge, it may be reiterated that Descartes identified thought with consciousness and regarded it as the essence of the soul, i) pure thought is both discursive and intuitive i.e. it can be regarded as a clear and distinct perception or a conceptual intuition. This Platonic Model of Rationality was compromised by Descartes’s separating subjective and objective validity and eventually led to the psychological conception of thought which we consider next and the difference was not obliterated once the gap opened despite the efforts of Malebranche and Leibniz.  

 

Empiricism beginning with Locke who was the first philosopher to separate epistemological concerns from metaphysical even though he might not have understood his philosophy in this way, he does give priority to the question of what can we know over what is thereby inaugurating the era of critical philosophy. But this tendency of his thought becomes manifest more completely in Berkeley and Hume’s psychologism. Psychologism is a view that reduces epistemological notions of truth, validity or proof to psychological laws governing thought. This reduction seems unstable because psychological laws are empirical laws and are known empirically and hence our manner of reduction will change as the discovery of empirical laws of the mind force the change.  But the mainstay of psychologism is that the content or the meaning of the concept is essentially tied to the consciousness of the individual thinker. Psychologism in the empirical school of thought has four features, first sensibilism (the author has here adopted Waxman’s terminology) according to which Ideas are objects immediately present to consciousness and do not exist independently of being perceived, second the individuation of the content of ideas is based on an appearance=reality principle according to which the Idea contains nothing more than what I think within it. In the Rationalist fold a distinction was made between the content of thought and thought, the latter was a psychological entity peculiar to the thinking subject but in psychologism the existence of the content of thought is not anything over and above the existence of thinking. Thought is similar to sensation wherein for example pain is both the content and mode of apprehension, the act-object model of consciousness is inapplicable thought as it is in the case of sensation, third, Ideas bear resemblance (or represent) only to Ideas and so extra-mental reality cannot be inferred from Ideas. The scope of reference of Ideas is restricted to the consciousness of the subject and so the subject is treated as foundational. The subject cannot refer to any reality beyond himself because anything he thinks must meet the conditions of apprehension which is restricted to consciousness itself and so the subject is entrapped within its own world. The distinction between thing-in-itself or reality and subjectivity is essential to this view. Fourth every Idea is different from another and it is the function of imagination to connect Ideas and bind them together. Only the first is found in Locke, the author differs from Waxman who regards the first and second points both can be found within Locke. The author argues that Locke is a sensibilist without committing to psychologism. This is reflected in the way he conceives the debate between Rationalism and empiricism in terms of concept acquisition instead of the way Hume conceives it in terms of whether the content of thought is intellectual or sensible. The latter debate demands a psychologistic reduction of intellectual content (categories of thought) to sensible content which contains sensible ideas together with laws of association – in effect a reduction of understanding to imagination. Locke’s project is undermined because his historical method to explain concept acquisition allows rationalists like Leibniz to answer Locke by acknowledging the role of experience as a stimulus in the process of concept acquisition while at the same time contending that the content of thought to be regarded as independent of sensory content. Sensory experience is foundational then only in the sense that it is a necessary trigger for the mind to retrieve innate concepts to be found within itself. However, for his empiricism to undermine rationalism Locke needed to prove that the content of understanding is not independent of sensory content. Also, Locke regarded Ideas as having a representational content that resembles extra-mental objects which cause certain Ideas and sensations within the human subject. That the content of Ideas requires an explanation in terms of intellectual cause-effect relations shows that Locke did not subscribe to psychologism which depends on an essential connection between thought and the content of thought precluding extra-mental explanation of the latter.

 

Psychologism demands the reduction of epistemological or logical concepts to psychological concepts so the logical laws of justification are reduced to psychological laws and hence possess only subjective and no objective validity. We saw that in the Platonist model of rationality the metaphysical concept attributed to being was identical and internally or structurally related to pure thought. So, there is a harmony between thought and being, the latter is intelligible to the former. But when subjective and objective validity are separated, thinking and being are separated, the objective or metaphysical conception of pure thought now becomes subjective or psychological. Pure thought provides no insight into the nature of reality. Truth and validity have been separated because truth is no longer valid thought, truth is outside the sphere of subjective consciousness and valid thought is inextricably linked to the thinking consciousness. This conclusion is evident from Hume’s critique of the law of causality. What Hume questions is the nature of the transition from ‘everything that begins’ to ‘must have a cause’. Is this principle due to any insight into the nature of reality or is the transition purely psychological or due to the psychological laws of association? What is the import of the ‘must’ in this case? Is it a logical necessity or a non-logical one? It cannot be a logical necessity because the principle is not analytic, we can think the one without thinking the other and so the concept of the effect does not logically contain the concept of the cause. What warrants this conclusion is that he can think of the existence of one thing without thinking about the existence of the other. To think about the existence of something is to conceive its idea and the idea is copied from the impression. In Berkeley we saw that the immediacy which is the actual presence of a content to consciousness is what determines the content of the concept of existence, in Hume in contrast the actual presence is not required, what is required instead is the feeling of vivacity which determines the content of the concept of existence and due to this feeling impressions are distinguished from ideas. If the law of causality is regarded as the content of immediate consciousness, then even a child would be able to glean causal associations and would not have required experience to learn about which objects are associated in accordance with the laws of causality. So, what is present in the idea of the object is what is copied from its impression and the impression-original contains no information about causality but only about the singular existence of an object. This gets carried over into its concept which contains an accretion of semantic content but no addition of ontological import and when we concentrate on the latter, we find that the idea of one object contains no logical connection to the existence of any other object. The law of causality is only subjectively valid but not objectively valid but human beings in ignorance of the psychological genesis of the law mistakenly attribute objective validity to the concept, regarding the concept as applicable to a reality outside their consciousness and the object is given a priority over the subjective consciousness. All laws of understanding are reduced to psychological laws of association in a non-circular manner to non-cognitive features of the mind and so as a consequence whatever is thought is severed from what exists but is nevertheless taken to be real due to a psychological deception born out of the feeling of vivacity. The necessity of the transition from one individual existent to another is due to a psychological and not a logical necessity. To put Hume’s critique of causality in historical perspective we find nothing new in the criticism that the existence of one does not have a logical relation to the existence of another. Not just Malebranche and Leibniz but even the Medieval Theologians were aware of this mode of criticism. What however is different in Hume is the manner in which he can block the inference to a God as a Deus ex machina to save the causal relation. This is possible because critical philosophy gives a priority to consciousness to determine the meaning or content of consciousness. To transfer this meaning from the subjective consciousness to the existence of the object outside the subject renders the ascription nonsensical. The object of consciousness has to conform to consciousness rather than visa-versa. For instance, attributing pain to a stone is meaningless because consciousness is an essential constituent of the sensible content of pain and so pain cannot be attributed to anything that lacks consciousness. The psychological conditions that determine the possibility of the object of consciousness determine also the boundaries of sense and so are the criterion that distinguish sense from nonsense. This criterion is one that determines the ontological meaning of the concept not its semantic reference, we can continue to speak as if the object is independent of the subject but from an ontological point of view this is not a genuine possibility.

 

For the psychologistic program to succeed it needs to reduce the categories of thought to psychological laws in a non-circular manner. Only Hume could meet this challenge because his laws of association based on felicity of transition and vivacity did not appeal to any intellectual category and are purely based on non-rational imagination. But this reductive program is not successful. Consider first the consideration made earlier that reduction is unstable because its fortune is dependent on advances in empirical psychology. This objection could be alleviated on the basis that psychologism is based on the priority of subjective consciousness – the question what does it mean to the individual is prior to the question - what is and so any future discovery in the field of psychology would improve our prospects of reduction of human experience to underlying psychological laws like the discovery of neurological correlates in the field of neuroscience today. This however does not answer the objection because the reductive project depends on delineating the essential or necessary structure of consciousness. If we found a subject with radically different psychological faculties then the reductive project would fail in this case or else one could salvage the situation by asserting that we should not consider this new species to be a subject at all. But this response is possible only if we have found the essential conditions for being a subject, so the reductive project cannot be left to the fortunes of future discoveries and has an a-priori aspect to repudiate which is the motivation of psychologism. Similarly, the psychological reduction of intellectual concepts like cause-effect will not be successful if there is a contingent relation between the psychological base and the intellectual concepts. Psychologism takes the conditions under which we consider knowledge to be valid, to be an explanation of validity itself. The latter question however is best left to logic to answer.

 

 

So the main features of the psychologistic conception of thought can be summed up as follows: a) psychologism reduces the epistemological or logical concepts of justification to psychological laws, the subjective account of what is regarded as true becomes an account of the truth, b) the operations of the mind on the sensory data make an essential contribution to the content of thought thereby delimiting the scope of application of these concepts because of which they cannot be applied to mind-independent reality, c) there is no mind-language-world isomorphism, d) ideas contain nothing more than what the perceiving consciousness apprehends within them, e) the source or origin of ideas lies within the mind, hence their content is necessarily constituted by mental activity rather than to mind-independent reality, this implies that simply in virtue of being thought the object of thought has no existence outside the field of the thinking consciousness, f) empirical rationality is a form of probabilistic reasoning, the inference from smoke to fire for instance is based on repeated experience and absence of counter-examples and it is not based on any a-priori insight into the constitution of smoke, it is simply a habit of the human mind to associate the two together giving way to a custom where the thought of one invariably triggers the thought of another, g) understanding does not have a distinct content over and above the sensory content and in that sense is not a distinct source of knowledge, h) psychologism takes experience to have a non-cognitive origin and attribution of objective validity to concepts of understanding is due to a psychological deception. There is truth in the traditional view that Locke’s empiricism leads to Humean scepticism. This scepticism is nothing but finding the absence of categories of pure thought within experience. Experience determines what should or should not be considered as rational and is not answerable to logic because the two have different structures and the demands that logic or pure thought makes on experience, the demand to find the ‘why’ or the reason two things are linked in nature are unfounded demands that experience cannot and need not satisfy because experience does not possess a logical structure, i) thinking or understanding is purely discursive and involves an abstraction that indifferently considers multitude of perceptions together ignoring their individual differences in order to form a single concept, j) critical philosophy demands a justification of metaphysical principles and even the principle of identity of thought and reality on which all justification is based, to be validated within experience or within the subject’s consciousness and this demand implies the priority of consciousness over considerations of mind-independent reality. The subject must accept only what he finds validated within his consciousness, so Descartes for instance cannot assume the correlation between degrees of perfection and levels of reality uncritically if this principle has no basis in human consciousness. The epistemic norms that are not validated within subjective consciousness cannot have any binding force on the subject and to meet the demands of the subject they have to be measured in accordance with measuring rod of subjectivity.

 

Kant appreciates Hume’s problem but not his solution. The empirical elimination of a-priori categories of thought would have the consequence of reducing human experience to a dream like fiction and there would be no possibility of finding any truth within human experience because based on the laws of association which have an empirical but no a-priori basis anything could be combined with any other without any justification, to eliminate this possibility of limitless combinations, there must be an a-priori basis of synthetic truths that nevertheless does not regress to metaphysical dogmatism but retains the appeal to subjectivity respecting the critical turn. It is in the conception of subjectivity that Kant differs from Hume, that leads him to rethink the concept of a-priori knowledge and show that it plays a role in explaining the possibility of experience rather than vice-versa thereby salvaging the possibility of proving the objective validity of pure concepts of understanding and preventing the demise of experience into fiction. Hume’s account of synthetic truths based on empirical imagination presupposes unity of consciousness because synthetic truths must be capable of being combined within a single consciousness or their very combination would be impossible. Hume admitted this problem in the Appendix to his Treatise and while he was confident that a solution could be found was nevertheless unable to find one. Kant makes the unity of consciousness into a synthetic principle of thought - the highest principle of synthetic truths he argued was the Transcendental Unity of Apperception.  The reasoning here is that every synthesis since it brings about order within the manifold of representations is based on a unity. The first act of synthesis is based on the pre-categorial unity of transcendental unity of apperception which then can be identified as the highest principle of synthetic thought. The standard approach within Kant scholarship has been that Kant’s reasoning is based on a biconditional, which in one direction depends on deducing the categories from self-consciousness and in another direction self-consciousness from the categories. This biconditional holds for analytic unity of consciousness but the transcendental unity of consciousness is prior to the categories.

 

Kant’s hylomorphism demands that there should be a synthesis of material and formal elements of cognition in order to explain the possibility of experience. The ontological content of thought then depends on pure and sensible intuition and the connecting link is the possibility of experience, which possibility becomes actual through a synthesis. The objective validity of both the categories and the intuition depends on their role in explaining the possibility of experience and they play this role in virtue of possessing universality and necessity. Kant in opposition to Hume reconceptualises experience, he finds necessary features within it that resist reduction. Every object of experience is found within space and time and has to be thought in accordance with the categories. The problem with empiricism is that these necessary features found within experience cannot be explained by its principles. On the other hand, the problem with rationalism is that it takes the formal features of thought to be applicable to material reality without the intervention of sensibility which is the matter of thought. These pure concepts of understanding and intuition do no delineate the structure of rationality but are indexed to rational beings like us. This implies that there can be rational beings which have different kind of concepts and sensibilities. The difference between Divine cognition and human cognition is no longer as it was in Rationalism a difference in degree, but in kind. Thinking is a-priori, has its source in unity of apperception but is purely formal and hence it cannot provide any cognition of reality. Since thought is dependent on the senses it can provide cognition only of appearances not the thing-in-itself. Here we see Kant subscribes to the subjective idealism of empiricists like Hume, the distinction between phenomena and noumena is a necessary consequence of this philosophy, but he did not notice that there is a strand of his thought that is opposed to subjective idealism and his uncritical commitment to ontological entities like the thing-in-itself. This strand is encapsulated in the philosophy that subjectivity is a necessary and sufficient condition for objectivity. In the Prolegomena Kant’s arguments against Berkeley and Eleatic Monism reveal that his approach is distinctive in so far as it tries to overcome the subjective-objective dichotomy (and the rift between subjective and objective validity) by showing that even within the subjective realm of appearances we can find truth, as a matter of fact he seems to make a stronger claim that only within the world of appearances could we find the truth. The latter insight however needs a Fichte style critical philosophy. We see here the distinctive feature of Kant’s philosophy, the categories which are the source of objectivity of experience have their source within apperception because of which the highest subjective principle ‘I’ is regarded as the highest principle of synthetic thought. Not only is the ‘I’ the source of pure concepts of understanding but also Ideas whose content cannot be found within experience at all but which are yet indispensable as a regulative ideal. As a matter of fact, Kant revives the old view that it is because the subject can think of metaphysical entities like God, that we regard the human subject as a rational being. He differs from the old school in so far as the Ideas lack objective validity because they cannot be satisfied within experience at all unlike the pure concepts of understanding. Kant finds pure concepts of understanding to be commensurable to experience by relating them to pure intuition whose structural features are not antithetical to the former. In the case of Ideas however there is no way to connect them to objects of experience even via the pure intuition.

 

Maimon’s argues that Kant has not answered Hume. His argument is that Kant’s proof of the objective validity of pure concepts of understanding depends on their applicability to objects of experience through their application to pure intuition, but even if the latter is granted to Kant a Humean sceptic can still resist the application of these pure concepts to the objects of experience themselves. The objects of experience do not exhibit a logical structure, for instance we see fire and smoke spatially and temporally connected but we do not see why the existence of one demands the existence of another because no logical connection exists between fire and smoke, so it may be that their connection can still be alternatively explained through non-cognitive factors. Kant seeks to prove the applicability of pure concepts of understanding to concrete objects of experience through the application to pure intuition i.e., in so for are as these objects are in space and time but the application to these objects themselves that touches the very constitution of these objects is unproven and why these specific objects are connected in a particular way and no other is unproven. Kant has proved only the possibility of application of pure concepts of understanding to experience but he has not proved they are actually applied to them and so his philosophy is purely formal and lacks material reality. The objects of pure intuition – space and time possess the distinguishing marks of reason like a-priority but the objects of experience do not possess any such marks. Moreover, pure concepts of understanding do not contain any spatial and temporal characteristic, for instance the validity of the if-then conditional or the ground-consequence relation does not depend on the temporal and spatial priority of the former over the latter. In order to think them we need to proceed in time but this is a psychological constraint external to the logical content of the thought. Maimon’s solution is to give up on the distinction between sensibility and understanding. This can be done through positing an infinite intellect for which synthetic a-priori propositions become analytic. In the final analysis the spatial-temporal features of objects of experience would be reduced to categories of pure intellectual thought. This however is only a regulative ideal which fulfils the interests of reason and so in a way Maimon’s response to Humean scepticism is practical. The resemblance to Leibniz’s rationalism cannot be resisted, we have again two epistemic principles standing side by side to each other and their overcoming through a regulative ideal intrinsic to reason.  

 

We may note here the important features of Kant’s critical conception of thought: a) thinking is purely formal and does not involve any existence claims and so is incapable of providing knowledge of existence, b) logic in order to be applied to objects of experience requires an external mode source of justification which is the connection with intuition, c) thinking and sensing are two irreducible features of cognition and cognition depends on their synthesis, d) all synthesis is based on a prior unity of a concept and this method of analysis leads us to the highest principle of synthetic thought in the transcendental unity of apperception, e) the proof of objective validity is based on the necessity and universality of concepts and intuitions relative to their role in determining the possibility of experience. To determine universality and necessity Kant deploys a conceivability test, for example no experience is possible if the object of experience is not seen to be within space and time. This test however is indexed to the thinking subject but does not prove that it can be validly applied to all rational beings across the board, f) transcendental unity of apperception is Reason because it is the highest principle of synthetic thought and the source of Ideas whose content cannot be satisfied within experience. The highest task of Reason is to be self-aware of its limitations, hence the need for critical philosophy, g) the problem of quid juris is not a psychological but an epistemological problem, Reason has to prove its right or entitlement to govern experience and this entitlement is proven on the basis of indispensability of Reason in the explanation of possibility of experience. This implies that the normative force of Reason requires substantiation or a deduction which is an internal mode of justification. Also in so far as pure concepts are applicable to pure intuition (space-time) we have an internal mode of justification but as Maimon has argued in relation to sensible objects of experience the mode of justification is external. Reason makes itself the object of its own cognition and becomes self-aware of its role in determining the possibility of experience while at the same time it becomes critically aware of its limits, the attempt to transcend which leads to dialectical illusions, h) the objectivity of thought has its source within subjectivity and Kant’s philosophy attempts to overcome the dichotomy of subjectivity-objectivity but at the same time Kant retains his commitment to thing-in-itself under the influence of subjective idealism of Hume. This dualism of Kant’s thought can be overcome only by a Fichte style critical philosophy which seeks to find the necessary and sufficient conditions for being a rational subject thereby completing the task of critical philosophy to provide a foundational role to subjectivity. 

 

Maimon is a critical philosopher and not a reviver of metaphysics in the traditional sense. One of Maimon’s major insights is that critical philosophy cannot be completed till we retain ontological commitments to thing-in-itself. Maimon’s way is to regard the sum total of all appearances as exhausting the entire content of reality, there is no reality outside this totality. This is possible by using the notion of an infinite intellect to refer to complete reality and regarding the thing-in-itself as an unfinished epistemological commitment, a mark of ignorance which would be completely eliminated when we have the complete rational explanation of the world by reducing all synthetic propositions to analytic propositions. This however for Maimon is only a regulative ideal but even then, involves a reference to an infinite intellect. Maimon in effect is uniting the realm of phenomena and noumena, the thing-in-itself, soul and God, Ideas and pure concepts of understanding, thereby bringing about a great economy within the critical philosophy of Kant. The noumenal world then is not something set over and above the phenomenal, but a pointer that further epistemic advance is possible and the distinction between phenomena and noumena will be overcome within a completed science. What was an ontological distinction in Kant becomes an epistemological distinction in Maimon.

 

Jacobi does not find such an option feasible, the ontological distinction between appearance and reality was for him one of the most salient points of Kant’s philosophy. He believes that it is one of the most important discoveries of recent times that thought has no relation to truth or reality and is restricted to the realm of appearance, a discovery due to Kant. The mainstay of this discovery is the commensurability and dependence of thought to intuition, thinking cannot provide knowledge of something that cannot be found within intuition and since sensible intuition provides access to the realm of appearances, thought cannot rise above this level and provide knowledge of something that possesses greater reality like God. Knowledge of existence is possible through intuition and not through concepts. The metaphysical knowledge of God and Soul is based on a mystical intuition which cannot be made the object of thought, thinking is receptive to this intuition but cannot explain its possession. The proof of objective validity is to reinforce the conviction that we already do possess this intuition, denying which leads to nihilism or the denial of the values of truth, goodness and beauty in the world of human experience. The criterion of the truth of an intuition whether it be sensible or mystical is immediacy which is a feature peculiar to intuition because concepts are always sources of mediate cognition. To try to explain immediate intuition is to destroy its truth because explanation depends on mediation. The problem of objective validity is not solved because the content of intuition is in a purely negative relation to thought and does not conform to concepts at all. This means that the content of intuition is completely ineffable and no justification can be proved of a source of knowledge whose content cannot be specified.

 

We might list here the primary features of Jacobi’s mystical conception of Reason: a) there is a distinction between reason and understanding, the latter is governed by PSR and so is a source of mediate cognition (it seeks the conditions of something conditioned) and is restricted to the realm of appearances, b) reason is the source of knowledge about reality, it is conceived to be a kind of intuition lacking discursivity, c) the content of this intuition cannot be conceptualized, d) this rational intuition is sui generis and completely outside the network of thought, a mystical cum rational intuition is posited in a contradictory relation to thought. PSR can become a basis of a philosophy which might be internally consistent and Jacobi claims no refutation of this kind of philosophy can be given. Such a philosophy inevitably leads to nihilism and so we need to make a choice - to accept a philosophy based on freedom or nihilism, e) the mystical intuition of God is its own justification and we cannot legitimately saddle it with a further demand for subjecting it to a justification by understanding.

 

Fichte sought to develop a critical philosophy that answers both Maimon’s scepticism and Jacobi’s mysticism. He saw that the basis of both lies in a deeper commitment to the thing-in-itself or a conception of reality outside thought. In Maimon this commitment is found in his conception of an infinite intellect, the thing-in-itself is removed from his ontology by referring to this intellect which is the principle that determines the concept of rationality. In contrast Fichte advocates a finitism which sees all truth, reality, moral and aesthetic values to be relative to the subject or the ego and to have no reference outside the finite being. Nihilism is a consequence of an objectivism that emphasizes the existence of the thing-in-itself over the subjective consciousness. In Fichte’s words there is no truth-in-itself except the truth that is relative to or indexed to a rational being. To prove this, he would carry critical philosophy still further by determining the possibility of consciousness itself and so attempts to provide an explanation of the complete structure of rationality. His first principle is the Ego which through its inner drive is led to posit a non-Ego whose existence is relative to the former and from these principles Fichte would give a new deduction of the categories.

 

Subjectivism leads to the problem of justification of logic, the demand to justify the very principles on which justification is based in a non-circular manner which led to the psychologistic project of reduction of logic to psychology. Fichte in contrast is keen to get rid of psychologism and distinguishes transcendental philosophy from anthropology and believes that this was one of Kant’s principal insights of which he himself lost a hold on. The problem with psychologism is that the demand for a non-circular reduction of intellectual categories cannot be met and Fichte says should not be met. Fichte in contrast makes circularity a virtue and a mark of subjectivity. The subject has to validate logic by using logic itself but this circularity is not a vice because the demand for non-circular validation comes from an implicit commitment to the thing-in-itself. This however does not solve the problem of reality of thinking which demands that the truth of the laws of logic have to be shown in their application to the objects of experience and so the laws of logic must give us the concrete reality itself. Fichte sought to resolve this problem by appealing to a practical instinct of freedom, which says that the self is an agent and is in essence free in its actions. There can be no theoretical refutation of scepticism and the appeal to practical reason is inevitable. Fichte believes that the primacy of practical reason is the most important lesson of Kant’s philosophy. This moral instinct is the source of reality of Fichte’s logic. The Ego is not a metaphysical entity but a rational construct based on the instinct of practical reason which validates the foundation or the starting point of Fichte’s system. Also, Fichte attempts a reversal of Jacobi in that his proof of objective validity is nothing but a way to eliminate the doubt vitiating the practical certainty of freedom that validates our belief in Reason. This practical instinct and the active character of the ego is Reason according to Fichte. His philosophy is a radical finitism that makes it impossible to escape the circle of subjectivity to arrive at a completely objective mind-independent reality because there is no such thing. It is the impulse to escape this circle that proves our undoing. Yet at the same time the Ego is given a foundational epistemological role fulfilled by an intellectual intuition of freedom, to paraphrase Descartes, Fichte believes I act, therefore I exist. The intellectual intuition pertains to the practical agency of the finite subject and accounts for the reality of his system of philosophy. The impulse to posit the existence of thing-in-itself is removed only when philosophy provides a complete explanation of the structure of finite rationality or a complete explanation of human experience. Fichte’s rebuttal of both Jacobi and Maimon is not successful because the starting point of his philosophy, the practical certainty of freedom is itself susceptible to doubt and might be a psychological deception and hence is not self-validating and so cannot ground Fichte’s entire system. We should take notice here of the conflicting demands that Fichte’s system is afflicted with, on the one hand he wants to take formal completeness of his system to be proof of the validity of his system and so takes circularity to be the mark of subjectivity and on the other hand he needs to prove the reality of his system by appealing to a foundation outside the system to act as its ground or its first principle.

 

The important features of Fichte’s radical finitism may be noted: a) existence is relative to thought and so not prior to it, b) there is no truth or reality independent of the reference to subjectivity, c) the project of deduction of categories demands finding the condition of the possibility of consciousness and the result will be the complete specification of the conditions of rationality, an explanation of what it is to be a rational being and so the categories will be valid all kinds of rational beings and will prove that subjectivity is necessary and sufficient for objectivity, d) circularity is the mark of subjectivity yet the foundation of the system requires a self-validating starting point, e) formal completeness of the system of philosophy is insufficient to prove its reality, f) the commitment to thing-in-itself saddles us with a conflict between subjective validity and objective validity, reality and formality of thinking, g) thinking is both discursive and intuitive, the foundations of his system are validated through an intellectual intuition, so there is no duality of sensibility and understanding as in Kant’s system, h) practical reason is prior to theoretical reason and the practical certainty of freedom is the source of reality of the system of philosophy, the proof of objective validity depends on removing obstacles to the natural certainty that belongs to this practical instinct but this obstacle can be removed only by constructing a system of philosophy that explains experience.

 

According to Hegel the self-reflexivity of reason produces a peculiar situation, the subject in doubt of the norms of logic seeks to validate logic but the only instrument he has for validation is logic itself. The subject is not a mechanical rule follower submitting to the dictates of Reason, he needs to know that he knows and hence the inquiry into the justification of logic. Here we find both the aspects of subjectivity, the subject’s demand to know and objectivity which lies in the self-validating nature of logic which does not countenance the demand for justification that the subject saddles it with. The usual response has been to see the subject’s demand as unjustifiable and to reiterate the validity of the norms of logic. Descartes however emphasized subjectivity and he put his knowledge to scrutiny by testing it with a universal doubt. By pushing the subject hard enough he wanted the meditator to turn inward and realize where truth and certainty may be found. This he does not do by argumentation and geometrical construction of a system of axioms and theorems but by a heuristic device meant to push the subject to find the source of the validity of his norms through his consciousness. As a result, he ascribes provisional subjective certainty to truths, like truths of mathematics whose validity he regards as uncertain because the source of these truths is unknown. These truths might be objectively valid but the subject does not know them to be so and he must know, the subject must know what it is to know. Hegel believes in the legitimacy of this demand, in his way of stating the problem - the immediate identity of thought and being on which, the validity of logic is based must be mediated, there must be a method through which the subject arrives at this knowledge. This method is essentially the method of universal doubt but carried more thoroughly than Descartes does because the latter leaves the content of logic untouched and concentrates on the inward journey of the soul to discover truth and validity within. Hegel’s Phenomenology is based on an immanent critique of the myriad shapes of consciousness where very shape due to its inner logic leads to contradiction and in order to overcome this contradiction it is negated giving way to another shape of consciousness which is more enriched or concrete because it includes the truth of the previous shape of consciousness. There is first the negation of one shape of consciousness and then the negation of negation or affirmation of the first suspended form of consciousness in a new context that gives us a more enriched or less abstract content. This process culminates in absolute knowing which is the subject’s immediate realization of its own nullity and his realization that within the infinite consciousness one finds the unity of thought and being and it is because the subject is part of an infinite consciousness that there is a possibility of truth for him. Like Descartes this is an ontotheology where the subject realizes his dependence on an infinite reality which opens a new horizon wherein truth is a possibility and scepticism is overcome. The justification of logic is mediated because it depends on the negation of the foundational role of subjectivity and the re-affirmation of subjectivity as dependent on an infinite reality. Thereby the critical demand that logic must be justified within the subjective consciousness is met and the subject is dethroned when he realizes there is no truth possible without his dependence on an infinite reality.

 

The end point of Phenomenology is the starting point of the Science of Logic which proceeds with the identity of thought and being. The positive dialectic in this case proceeds to what was negated earlier, the subject as its end result, all that was negated earlier is reaffirmed but in a new light as grounded in the infinite. The system moves in a circle by an internal necessity. The ground cannot be seen as the ground till the grounded has been derived from it as a consequence. But the relation of ground and consequence is not a mathematical deductive one but a dialectical model which specifies the concrete content of reality or truth.

 

The logic has three parts, first comes the abstract understanding which is based upon identity. This is the method of definition; we identify different objects based on a common characteristic and combine them under a universal which is indifferent to the individual differences of the defined object. All definitions also aim to exclude, the definition mark excludes objects that do not possess that mark and affirmation would have no significance if nothing was excluded. Hegel regards these abstract universals as valid in a restricted sphere that however cannot be applied to Reason where the content contains infinity and the nature of reality itself. When understanding attempts to provide a complete account of reality then its pretensions may be undermined by the sceptical method employing the equipollence strategy which affirms that the contradictory of a proposition may be affirmed with equal justification. That a contradictory might equally be true negates the abstract identity on which understanding is based. This leads us to the second part, dialectics. This logic affirms that one thing may pass on to its opposite and hence necessarily involves a reference to its opposite and cannot exist except in relation to something else hence they are finite conditioned existents, difference is an intrinsic part of an object’s identity. Some of Hegel’s metaphors might be put to use here. He points out that we see life and death as external to each other, that destruction is in some way external to life and destroys it from outside. But death is necessary to life itself and at a point it passes on to its opposite. The movement to death is the inner dialectic of life. Another example he gives is of anarchy and despotism and excessive virtue becoming a vice. Dialectic is the inner nature of each thing and in this way, it is this unity in difference of two opposite entities that ensures the concreteness of content of logic. Logic’s very content involves contradiction and its movements are dictated by these contradictions, they do no lie simply in our manner of knowing but also in the object of knowledge. Identity and Difference are two moments of logic that cannot be separated from each other. This brings us to the third stage, the speculative concept. This new concept is a concrete universal which unites two opposites in an identity, freedom and necessity Hegel says are not opposed to each other but if they are seen as abstract universals, we would naturally treat them as opposed to each other. But in a speculative concept we notice the difference of one thing to another but at the same time we see them as two moments of identity that despite opposition contain a unity such that a dialectical movement is possible, one thing can move on or pass into its opposite. In the dialectic of being and nothing we find that their opposition is negated and reaffirmed in the more concrete content of becoming which contains both being and nothing. Pure Being is an abstract concept and is one-sided and hence in order to make this concept more concrete or determinate its one-sidedness has to be negated and in a new concept it has to be reunited with its opposite in order to give us a more concrete content in the concept of becoming which in turn will make way for a new more concrete content.  

 

Truth is the complete whole; Hegel conceives it as a circle with two dialectical movements – a negative one and a positive one. Truth is valid thought and thought is the complete organization or system or in a word an Idea. Logic makes this system clear, concrete because all thinking is the demand for determinateness and hence, we cannot rest with abstractions like pure being and thought is compelled to negate these and comes up with a more concrete speculative concept of becoming which involves in a unity both the concepts of being and non-being. The negative route is necessary as a preparation for the study of the science of logic and it demands the sublation of the separation of truth from valid thought. Absolute knowing arrives at the point where pure being and pure thought are identical and from this point Logic shows how thinking is made concrete. But this logic does not have a propositional form since it goes beyond abstract understanding which distorts the cognition of reality. In this way the justification of logic is internal or immediate and is mediated by the sublation of subjectivity. It has a beginning that is mediated and the form and content of this system are united in a concrete whole. Hegel comes up with a new metaphysics but this metaphysics is transformed into a logic. 

 

The important points of the dialectical model of thought may be noted: a) thought is not a psychological entity but an objective thought, Reason or nous, b) logic is the normative science of justification and proves its own validity internally but still is mediated by a phenomenology of consciousness, c) consciousness is the primary source of the knowledge of truth and is intrinsically related to being, consciousness is a form of knowing, d) dialectics is a logic based on the actual structure of concrete reality, dialectics is that structure, e) Hegel does not believe in a-priori intuitions providing us knowledge of eternal truths, knowledge is historical and the eternal Idea is understood in and through its movements that reveal its internal organization, f) in negative dialectics pure thought has a negative relation to experience and the latter is negated by the sceptical method because it rests on differentiating between subjective and objective validity, truth and certainty, but in positive dialectics pure logic and its categories are seen as the truth of experience. This is captured in Hegel’s infamous dictum, the rational is the actual. Hegel points out that there is a usage in colloquial language that the inessential or accidental is not regarded as actual. The contingent is not reduced but seen as an accessory that may thwart the development of the rational or aid its realization, g) sensory content lacks existential content which comes from thought, h) the identity of thought and being is mediated by the negation of subjectivity but the difference between truth and certainty is endemic to subjective point of view, it is overcome by understanding that this difference is not absolute and there is a unity in difference in the relation between thought and being. The science of logic can however proceed only when in absolute knowing we find the identity of thought and being, i) the entire content of the system of logic is the definition of the Absolute.

 

In this manner we began with the demands of subjectivity in Descartes that initiated a grand new dialectic to resolve the tension between subjective and objective validity of thought and we arrive full circle at Hegel who reaffirms the identity of thought and being while still respecting the demands of subjectivity and we find logic or metaphysics reclaiming its lost innocence but in a way much different from the Platonic model of rationality that Descartes inherited and unwittingly helped destroy and is replaced with a new dialectical model of rationality. In between we find two models, premised on the formality of thinking which in consist of the divorce of thinking and being and the attempt to arrive at knowledge of being or reality through means other than thinking. In no other age have the material validity of logic and the claims to knowledge of reality put to a sterner test and become such keen objects of discussion. This makes the period from Descartes to Hegel an invaluable one for philosophy. In our current age the voice of Reason has been trumped by the belief that reality does not measure upto ‘our’ standards and so is in a sense a-logical which is the key belief behind mysticism, deconstructionism, reductive naturalism, psychologism etc. We need to revisit this belief and as a start we need to look back again to our past and see how claims to knowledge of reality were justified and why they were subjected to doubt.