Cognitive Psychology, Intelligence and the Realisation of the Concept in Hegel’S Encyclopaedic Epistemology

CHAPTER 19

Cognitive Psychology, Intelligence and the Realisation of the Concept in Hegel’s Encyclopaedic Epistemology

127 INTRODUCTION.

Hegel’s comprehensive, systematic, highly original philosophy remains an enormous expository and critical challenge. One strategy is to compartmen- talise Hegel’s views, treating the main sections of Hegel’s philosophical Ency- clopaedia as a series of mutually separable philosophical tracts, each of which poses considerable challenges. This pronounced tendency obscures both He- gel’s division of philosophical tasks and their equally important interconnec- tions. The scope, character and relations amongst the various aspects of He- gel’s philosophy have been further obscured by tendencies to dismiss the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit as an immature first work, to regard The Science of Logic as the master premiss from which all else is to follow, and either to neglect Hegel’s epistemology or to assume he avowed intellectual intuition- ism. This chapter counters these tendencies and compartmentalisations by examining some crucial, illuminating links between Hegel’s Science of Logic, his philosophical psychology and his Philosophy of Nature. So doing shows how Hegel preserved and augmented Kant’s insightful cognitive psychology whilst dispensing with Transcendental Idealism. So doing provides another vantage point on the central themes of this study, and provides further important corroboration. Hegel’s philosophical psychology, or ‘philosophy of subjective spirit’, is broadly, non-reductively naturalistic. His main source is not Descartes, but Aristotle (deVries 1988; Ferrarin 2001, 234–325). Recognising its difficulties, Hegel expressly aims to use Aristotle’s broadly natural account of the various forms and activities of ‘soul’ (animus) to account for our capacities to instan- tiate and exercise the cognitive functions central to Kant’s Critical theory of rational judgment and action. Four key features of Hegel’s account of Intelligenz are these: 1. Human cognition is active, and forges genuine cognitive relations to objects which exist and have their own characteristics, regardless of what we may think, believe or say about them.

2. The Denkbestimmungen (‘determinations of thought’ or: ‘thought-structures’) which structure and thus characterise worldly objects and events can only be grasped by intelligence (not merely by consciousness). 3. Intelligence obtains genuine objectivity by correctly identifying characteristics of a known object. 4. Central to our intelligent comprehension of Denkbestimmungen is natural science. These four points further underscore the importance of Hegel’s adopting one use of the verb ‘realisieren’ from Tetens via Kant, according to which to ‘real- ise’ a concept is to demonstrate that an extant object corresponding to it can be located and identified by us. These findings show that Hegel’s Logic is mutually interdependent with Naturphilosophie, with natural science and with cognitive psychology, especially with cognitive judgment. Recently pub- lished transcripts of Hegel’s Berlin lectures on Logic and on Philosophy of Spi- rit further illuminate and corroborate Hegel’s realism in epistemology.1

128 IS HEGEL A SUBJECTIVE IDEALIST?

I begin with a passage from Hegel’s Introduction to the Encyclopaedia Logic:

Because it is equally the case that in reflection the truthful nature [of the object] shines forth (zum Vorschein kommt), and because this thinking is my activity, the truthful nature of the object is equally well the product of my spirit, indeed qua thinking subject; it is mine according to my simple univer- sality, as the ‘I’ that simply is at home with itself, – or according to my freedom. (Enz. §23; Geraets, Suchting and Harris, trs.)

Statements like this (and there are many in Hegel’s texts) often lead com- mentators to ascribe some more or less standard form of subjective idealism to Hegel, according to which the world is mind-dependent, both for its existence and its characteristics. If in Hegel’s view the world may not depend for its existence or characteristics on individual human minds, nor even all human minds, this is only because the world depends for its existence and characteristics on Hegel’s candidate for the ultimate mind of all minds, Geist. Subjectivist interpretations of Hegel’s idealism comport with a long line of Hegel commentary which places Hegel’s philosophy in the ranks of historicist relativism (e.g., Haym 1927, 375–6; Meinecke 1959, 451–2), a movement inau-

1 The importance of Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit in these and other regards is highlighted by Stern (2013); see the review by J.B. Hoy (2014). The present analysis supple- ments these salutary findings. Also see Ferrini (2012).