INTRODUCTION

One of the most striking features of “continental” philosophy, and especially of the theories arising from German-speaking philosophy in the late eighteenth and most of the nineteenth century, consists in the fact that the concept of a ‘system’ plays a prominent role as a criterion for evaluating them. In almost no other age or context have the ideas of systematicity, systematic wholeness, and the form of a system been so bound up with the concept of philosophy itself. And this is true not only regarding positive evaluations but also negative ones. For some philosophers in this time the fulfillment of the criterion of systematicity was a direct and necessary condition for redeeming the claim to have provided a philosophical theory about something. Others, however, have seen the form of a system as an obstacle to any philosophical theory’s offering us any illuminating results whatever regarding any object at all.

That such controversial assessments could have arisen at all shows clearly all by itself that in this period there was a determinate spectrum of expectations regarding resorting to the concept of a system. This spectrum cannot be adequately accounted for if one is content to assume that the concept of a system, as in the eighteenth century Wolffian tradition, stands only for the idea of a certain methodical ordering of sentences (judgments, propositions) – thus for something like “being a science” (Wissenschaftlichkeit). In the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the idea of a science was, to be sure, bound up with that of a system but did not exhaust it. We can see this if we attend to the fact that on the basis of a description of the interest in systematicity that relies on the concept of being scientific we cannot make sense of the fact that a conception of philosophy that does without the claim to systematicity does not automatically give up the claim to being scientific; nor on this basis can we understand how in this period the suspicion of systematicity could have arisen at all. In other words, we cannot in this way understand how a philosophy that is “only” scientific can be presented as a serious philosophical undertaking without making any claim to be systematic.

The reception of Kant's first Critique, the Critique of Pure Reason, by the main members of the German idealistic movement - that is, by Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762-1814), Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling (1775-1854), and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) - is a complex and complicated story that is intimately connected with the history of the controversies to which the first Critique gave rise. Kant's Critique of Pure Reason was not an immediate philosophical success. On the contrary, in the first couple of years after its appearance in 1781, there was, much to Kant's disappointment, little public reaction, and most of it was rather hostile, like the notorious review by Garve and Feder. This led Kant then to publish, in 1783, the Prolegomena, most of which he had already written down before the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason (cf. 23:362ff.) with the explicit hope of making his teachings more accessible (4:261, 263f.). Then, four years later (1787), and again reacting to what he thought to be misunderstandings about the foundations of his theoretical philosophy (cf. footnote to the Preface of the Metaphysical Foundations, 4:447ff.), he published a second edition of the Critique in which considerable parts of the original work were rewritten.

It is well known that at one point in his life Hegel was of the opinion that the Phenomenology could be seen as an introduction to his System of philosophy. Yet even today no one knows what exactly might have led Hegel to this opinion. Since Hegel developed the Phenomenology as a “Science of the Experience of Consciousness” that runs through the various ways that subjects relate to objects, the idea does not seem prima facie misguided that Hegel wanted to justify his fundamental metaphysical assumption, his monism of reason, through a theory of types of objects and their epistemic conditions. I believe that this idea can take us a long way towards understanding the function that Hegel himself ascribed to his phenomenological introductory project. For Hegel appears to have provided both a theory of the conditions of object constitution as well as a procedure for making the conditions plausible. Even if one does not find his theory and his procedure convincing, one can still see clearly in his presentation why the question of understanding objects is philosophically meaningful. This is in my eyes a sufficient reason to investigate this question in the context of Hegel's phenomenological analysis.

I will divide the argument into four sections. The first (1) will sketch the epistemological situation to which Hegel reacted in his Phenomenology.

In recent years a number of American interpreters, and certain continental readers strongly influenced by them, have defended an emphatically neopragmatic appropriation of Hegel's philosophy. For these interpreters the principal contribution of Hegelian thought is to be found in a fundamental thesis advanced in Hegel's Phenomenology. This thesis implies that our knowledge of ourselves and of the world is socially mediated, that our knowledge of ourselves and of reality in general is dependent on, and constituted by, intrinsically social parameters. Now this is not simply to ascribe to Hegel the manifestly trivial insight that our knowledge is somehow connected with particular contexts, situations and claims, and thereby inevitably requires a certain “social space” in order to present itself as a specific cognitive attitude to states of affairs in the world. For the interpretation in question would rather seek and find in Hegel a rather more extravagant, and perhaps “deeper”, insight; namely, that the concepts by means of which we speak of ourselves and the rest of reality, which we regard as the fundamental categories for describing the world and on which our understanding of reality itself is based, are already socially constituted. These concepts are socially constituted in the sense that they must be understood as the products of social practices, more precisely, of practices that reflect or express a particular way of giving and accepting reasons that is characteristic for a specific historical epoch or a specific cultural domain.

The seemingly endless debate over the proper interpretation of Hegel's political philosophy with respect to its supposedly progressive or reactionary implications and to its supposedly liberal or conservative presuppositions naturally regards Hegel's theory of civil society as a decisive issue in this respect. For, on the one hand, Hegel's development of the concept of civil society, more than any other theoretical element offered in his richly elaborated system of objective spirit, would seem capable of providing the principal burden of proof that all talk of Hegel as the philosopher of the Prussian state, as the dutiful apostle of authority, as the very metaphysician of the state, should simply be consigned to the realm of tendentious legend. And his concept of civil society would seem to suggest that Hegel, on the contrary, should be regarded and interpreted as a theorist of a typically modern form of society, one who can apparently propose the principle of the freedom of the individual as the legitimating foundation of its constitutional structure and social mechanisms. But on the other hand, the “progressive” character of Hegel's theory of civil society, especially when considered in relation to his theory of the state, also would seem to provide grounds for the strong suspicion, voiced repeatedly since the time of Rudolf Haym, that Hegel's “apparent recognition” of the progressive characteristics of modern political reality merely provided him with the best means of “blunting or defusing” the “free attitude and outlook that belongs to those characteristics.”

Our virtues? – We probably still have our virtues too, although of course they will not be those trusting and muscular virtues for which we hold our grandfathers in honor – but also slightly at arm's length. We Europeans from the day after tomorrow, we firstborn of the twentieth century, – with all of our dangerous curiosity, our diversity and art of disguises, our worn-out and, as it were, saccharine cruelty in sense and in spirit, – if we happen to have virtues, they will presumably only be the ones that have learned best how to get along with our most secret and heartfelt propensities, with our most fervent desires. So let us look for them in our labyrinths! where, as we know, so many things lose their way, so many things get entirely lost. And is there anything more beautiful than looking for your own virtues? Doesn't this almost mean: believing in your own virtue? But this “believing in your own virtue” – isn't this basically what people used to call their “good conscience,” that venerable, long-haired pigtail of a concept that hung on the back of our grandfathers' heads, and often enough behind their intellects too? And so it seems that however up-to-date and unworthy of grandfatherly honor we might otherwise appear, there is nevertheless one respect in which we are the worthy grandchildren of these grandfathers, we last Europeans with a good conscience: we still wear their pigtail.

Suppose that truth is a woman – and why not? Aren't there reasons for suspecting that all philosophers, to the extent that they have been dogmatists, have not really understood women? That the grotesque seriousness of their approach towards the truth and the clumsy advances they have made so far are unsuitable ways of pressing their suit with a woman? What is certain is that she has spurned them – leaving dogmatism of all types standing sad and discouraged. If it is even left standing! Because there are those who make fun of dogmatism, claiming that it has fallen over, that it is lying flat on its face, or more, that dogmatism is in its last gasps. But seriously, there are good reasons for hoping that all dogmatizing in philosophy was just noble (though childish) ambling and preambling, however solemn, settled and decisive it might have seemed. And perhaps the time is very near when we will realize again and again just what actually served as the cornerstone of those sublime and unconditional philosophical edifices that the dogmatists used to build – some piece of folk superstition from time immemorial (like the soul-superstition that still causes trouble as the superstition of the subject or I), some word-play perhaps, a seduction of grammar or an over-eager generalization from facts that are really very local, very personal, very human-all-too-human.

O sancta simplicitas! What a strange simplification and falsification people live in! The wonders never cease, for those who devote their eyes to such wondering. How we have made everything around us so bright and easy and free and simple! How we have given our senses a carte blanche for everything superficial, given our thoughts a divine craving for high-spirited leaps and false inferences! – How we have known from the start to hold on to our ignorance in order to enjoy a barely comprehensible freedom, thoughtlessness, recklessness, bravery, and joy in life; to delight in life itself! And, until now, science could arise only on this solidified, granite foundation of ignorance, the will to know rising up on the foundation of a much more powerful will, the will to not know, to uncertainty, to untruth! Not as its opposite, but rather – as its refinement! Even when language, here as elsewhere, cannot get over its crassness and keeps talking about opposites where there are only degrees and multiple, subtle shades of gradation; even when the ingrained tartuffery of morals (which is now part of our “flesh and blood,” and cannot be overcome) twists the words in our mouths (we who should know better); now and then we still realize what is happening, and laugh about how it is precisely the best science that will best know how to keep us in this simplified, utterly artificial, well-invented, well-falsified world, how unwillingly willing science loves error because, being alive, – it loves life!

In Europe these days, moral sentiment is just as refined, late, multiple, sensitive, and subtle as the “science of morals” (which belongs with it) is young, neophyte, clumsy, and crude: – an attractive contrast, and one that occasionally becomes visible, embodied in the person of the moralist himself. Considering what it signifies, the very phrase “science of morals” is much too arrogant and offends good taste, which always tends to prefer more modest terms. We should admit to ourselves with all due severity exactly what will be necessary for a long time to come and what is provisionally correct, namely: collecting material, formulating concepts, and putting into order the tremendous realm of tender value feelings and value distinctions that live, grow, reproduce, and are destroyed, – and, perhaps, attempting to illustrate the recurring and more frequent shapes of this living crystallization, – all of which would be a preparation for a typology of morals. Of course, people have not generally been this modest. Philosophers have all demanded (with ridiculously stubborn seriousness) something much more exalted, ambitious, and solemn as soon as they took up morality as a science: they wanted morality to be grounded, – and every philosopher so far has thought that he has provided a ground for morality. Morality itself, however, was thought to be “given.” What a distance between this sort of crass pride and that supposedly modest little descriptive project, left in rot and ruin, even though the subtlest hands and senses could hardly be subtle enough for it.

The human soul and its limits, the scope of human inner experience to date, the heights, depths, and range of these experiences, the entire history of the soul so far and its still unexhausted possibilities: these are the predestined hunting grounds for a born psychologist and lover of the “great hunt.” But how often does he have to turn to himself in despair and say: “Only one! only a single one! and this huge forest, this primeval forest!” And then he wishes he had a few hundred hunting aides and well-trained bloodhounds he could drive into the history of the human soul to round up his game. To no avail: time and again he gets an ample and bitter reminder of how hard it is to find hounds and helpers for the very things that prick his curiosity. The problem with sending scholars into new and dangerous hunting grounds, where courage, intelligence, and subtlety in every sense are needed, is that they stop being useful the very moment the “great hunt” (but also the great danger) begins: – this is just when they lose their sharp eye and keen nose. For instance, it might take somebody who is himself as deep, as wounded, and as monstrous as Pascal's intellectual conscience to figure out the sort of history that the problem of science and conscience has had in the soul of homines religiosi so far.

Genuine teachers only take things seriously where their students are concerned – even themselves.

“Knowledge for its own sake” – this is the final snare morality has laid; with it, we become completely entangled in morals once again.

Knowledge would have little charm if there were not so much shame to be overcome in order to reach it.

People are at their least honest when it comes to their God: he is not allowed to sin!

The tendency to let oneself be debased, robbed, lied to, and exploited could be the shame of a god among men.

It is barbaric to love one thing alone, since this one love will be pursued at the expense of all others. This includes love of God.

“I did that” says my memory. I couldn't have done that – says my pride, and stands its ground. Finally, memory gives in.

You have been a poor observer of life if you have not also seen the hand that, ever so gently – kills.

If you have character, you also have a typical experience that always comes back.

The sage as astronomer. – If you still experience the stars as something “over you,” you still don't have the eyes of a knower.

It is not the strength but the duration of high feelings that makes for high men.

Precisely by attaining an ideal, we surpass it.

Many peacocks hide their peacock tails – and call that their pride.