Hegel's Transcendental Ontology

HEGEL’S TRANSCENDENTAL ONTOLOGY by Giorgi Lebanidze A dissertation submitted to Johns Hopkins University in conformity with the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Baltimore, MD February, 2016 © 2016 Giorgi Lebanidze All Rights Reserved Abstract This dissertation presents an account of the basic schema of Hegel’s ontological theory based on a close reading of the key part of his Logic: the Doctrine of the Concept. The careful examination of the internal architectonic of the Hegelian Concept, which includes its three moments: the activity of generation of empirical concepts that is guided by the determinations of reflection, the systematically related constellation of empirical concepts, and the objects that are individuated through them as well as the specific type of relation between these moments, demonstrates that the key characteristics of the basic ontological structure stem from Kant. Hence, I conclude that Hegel is presenting a new type of ontology that becomes possible after Kant’s Copernican revolution, which rendered the formal structure of the empirical objects of experience grounded on the faculty of understanding. The dissertation suggests that Hegel’s Logic can be read as an extended commentary on (or spelling out of the ontological implications from) the famous Kantian claim from the transcendental deduction: the object is in the concept of which manifold is united. Advisors: Dean Moyar. Readers: Yitzhak Melamed, Hent de Vries Katrin Pahl, Jennifer Culbert ii Acknowledgements First and foremost, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to my advisor Dean Moyar for the continuous guidance and support of my research, for his patience, encouragement, and immense knowledge. It was his constant insistence on clarity and intellectual rigor that made it possible for me to navigate through the complex twists and turns of Hegel’s logic. I could not have imagined having a better advisor. I thank Yitzhak Melamed for his invaluable insights and continuous support throughout the writing process. Similarly I am grateful to Hent de Vries both for his helpful comments on this work and the inspiring seminars on contemporary European Philosophy that nurtured and reinforced my interest in Hegel. I also would like to thank Katrin Pahl and Jennifer Culbert for their insightful feedback and suggestions on future prospects of my research. My sincere thanks also goes to Michael Williams, Richard Bett, Eckart Förster, Paola Marrati, Meredith Williams, Peter Achinstein, Steven Gross, and Hilary Bok for the many wonderful classes that shaped my outlook. I’m grateful to Hopkins’ Philosophy Department for its intellectual rigor and open spirit that offered an ideal environment for development as a scholar. I thank my fellow graduate students for iii their friendship and many inspiring discussions that inform my research through and through. Last but not the least, I would like to thank my family, my wife Hulya, my mother Nelly, and my sister Khatya for their love and constant supporting throughout the whole process of writing this thesis. Finally, the unique place in my life belongs to my son, Noe Lebanidze, to whom I dedicate this work. iv Table of Contents Chapter 1: Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………………………… 1 Chapter 2: Hegel’s Critique of Alternative Positions ………………………………………………………......33 Chapter 3: Determinations of Reflection and Generation of Conceptual Content …..…………....82 Chapter 4: The Logical Structure of the Concept …………………………………………………………….…122 Chapter 5: Syllogism as the Basic Ontological Schema of Hegel’s Transcendental Ontology...201 Bibliography: …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………...273 v CHAPTER 1: Introduction The recent debate over Hegel’s philosophy is carried out along the lines of the Kantian-epistemological vs. metaphysical interpretations of his position. Those belonging to the first camp understand Hegel as the figure who brought the Kantian epistemological turn in philosophy to its completion, leaving behind the questions of traditional metaphysics regarding the ultimate structure of reality that underlies the mere appearance and true nature of God, soul, and the world. The general line taken by these commentators is that although Hegel does not stop short of using the terminology of traditional metaphysics (such as God, infinite, absolute etc.), the philosophically significant core of his position is independent of these archaic elements, which therefore can be lifted out of his overall corpus without sustaining any philosophically significant loss. Though not always explicitly acknowledged, these Hegelian scholars stand in the long tradition of rescuing what is alive in Hegel from what is dead and ought to be left behind. The essential kernel of Hegel’s system worth rescuing, according to these commentators, is the Kantian transcendental project brought to its completion. 1 1) Pippin The central figure among the commentators who consider the completion of Kantian transcendental epistemology central to Hegel's legacy is Robert Pippin, whose groundbreaking Hegel’s Idealism, published in 1989, set a new stage in Hegel scholarship. In the book, Pippin aims to demonstrate that the issues most important to Hegel’s project can be traced back to Kantian critical epistemology. Uncovering the Kantian origins of Hegel’s philosophy, according to Pippin and his followers, allows us to read Hegel as a post-Kantian epistemologist whose doctrine can be set free of any substantial ontological commitments. This approach allows us to read Hegel's two central works, Logic and Phenomenology, as investigations within the normative authority of the pure concepts of understanding as the means by which reality can be cognized, and to do so without ascribing to Hegel any substantial commitments regarding the nature of this reality. The image of Hegel that emerges as a result of this account is that of a transcendental epistemologist who replaces the Kantian formal account of the pure concepts of the understanding with a more robust exposition of the conceptual schemata as the medium of making sense of the world while putting aside questions of metaphysical nature. Pippin’s work brought about two invaluable contributions to Hegel scholarship. First, he left behind the hitherto dominant onto-theological readings of Hegel that saw him as a philosopher of the world-soul who had reconstructed the problems and issues of traditional metaphysical systems on historicist grounds, but 2 essentially addressed the very same questions as his rationalist predecessors and offered answers to them from the point of view of God. Second, Pippin made it possible for Hegel to speak to contemporary philosophers by translating his complicated technical vocabulary—such as “in itself vs. for itself,” “infinite being immanent to the finite,” “freedom as being with itself in its other,” etcetera—into a language much more accessible to those schooled in the analytic tradition. From an obscure thinker of only historical value, Hegel was transformed into a figure who has much to offer to those engaged in contemporary debates in epistemology and semantics. 2) New traditionalist alternative The alternative approach that emerged in the years following the publication of Pippin’s work has reinstated the image of Hegel as a metaphysical thinker. But this is not simply an attempt to go back to any version of the traditional reading that dominated Hegel scholarship prior to the publication of Pippin’s work. What sets these commentators apart from the traditional readings of Hegel, which also ascribed to him a metaphysical position, is that they are elaborated on the background and in contradistinction to Pippin’s Hegel. The most vivid evidence of this is that these commentators take distancing Hegel from Kant as the touchstone for ascribing to him any form of metaphysical view. It is because Pippin and his 3 followers take the Kantian dimension of Hegel’s project as the grounds for advancing a non-metaphysical reading that the new metaphysical interpretations see distancing Hegel from Kant as a necessary condition for a successful execution of their project. Hence, while Rolf-Peter Horstmann in his work that preceded and considered with the publication of Pippin’s book could comfortably present Hegel as upholding certain ontological theory, while at the same time standing within the tradition of the Kantian critical philosophy, the new interpreters like Robert Stern and Brady Bowman clearly feel the need for decoupling Hegel’s project from Kant's in order to ascribe to him any substantial ontological commitments. Bowman, for example, writes, “to be a philosopher self-consciously working in the wake of Kant’s ‘fortunate revolution’ is [not] necessarily to be engaged in a project that is continuous with transcendental idealism or one that needs to recognize the peculiar limitations Kant sought to impose on thought. Post Kant is not necessarily propter Kant” (Bowman 2013, 3). For Bowman, the path to demonstrating that Hegel is upholding a metaphysical theory lies in showing that his project diverges radically from Kant’s. In the same vein, Stern writes, Kant may be seen as proposing a dilemma to the traditional ontologist: Either he can proceed by abstracting from the spatio-temporal appearances of things in an attempt to speculate about things as they are in themselves,… ,and get him nowhere with things in themselves; or he can attempt to work with less formal principles, that take into account the spatio- temporal features

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