Hegel's Realm of Shadows: Logic as Metaphysics in the Science of Logic by Robert B. Pippin

Author:Robert B. Pippin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Philosophy, General
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2018-10-22T00:48:29.207000+00:00

Schein

The basic, initial idea in this Logic, the idea of an “essence,” the knowability of which requires an act of “reflection,” is a familiar and a wide-ranging one. An analogy (a rough one!) would be an approach to a literary text. Someone who had understood everything said onstage, the plot of Shakespeare’s King Lear, and the basic motivations of the characters, as those characters and others voice them, and had understood only that, would not, we feel entitled to say, have understood “the play.”10 Put in the simplest possible way, to understand the play, one has to do more than listen to it; one must think about it, or we can say, using the word most important for Hegel, “reflect” on it, understand what lies “beneath,” we are also wont to say, these facts about plot and characters.11 In the EL §112Z, he introduces reflection as simply “thinking something over” (nachdenken) and he connects the reflective search for essences as broadly the task of philosophy itself, a way of looking behind what he calls a mere “rind” or a “curtain,” so as to see essence (or, as above, what is truly actual), where it lies “hidden” (verborgen).12 (These are only initial, orienting metaphors of course. There is no such thing as a hidden meaning in King Lear; there are just the words spoken or found on the page. How we get from this clumsy metaphor to the “concept” of King Lear in itself is the underlying story of the logic of essence.)

An even more intuitive example is another used to illustrate the same point in the EL §112Z, the relation between a person’s character, “essence” in that sense, and her deeds. It would be a mistake to sum a person up, attempt to “understand” her in the distinct way persons should be understood, simply by adding up or listing everything she did, from what she had for breakfast to her volunteering for a dangerous mission. A person would not be properly understood by attention to such “immediacy” alone (or her qualitative/quantitative/measured appearances, as in the logic of being). We need to understand her deeds as “mediated” by what Hegel calls her “inwardness” (sein Inneres), something (and now in the most important difference with the logic of being) that we cannot see, that does not simply present itself.

For example, we can’t really understand what she did except by some attention to her own formulation of the act description and to her avowed motive (her “intention”). Sometimes what happens should not count as a deed because there is not the proper connection between inner and outer. An accident happens. Something prevents her from realizing the intention; that is, something happens to her. She does not do something.13 What happens is not an expression of her character. On the other hand, as Hegel states the central claim of the entire logic of essence in a phrase, we must concede that any such inner self-construal can “prove itself” (sich bewähren) only in what manifests that inner outwardly, in the deeds.

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