The Difference Between the Pippinian and Houlgatian Interpretations of Hegel

A Hegelian Note

Often it is said that Robert Pippin’s Hegel is too Kantian or too Fichtean. By this is meant, not so much that it is wrong per se that Pippin emphasises the Kantian and Fichtean elements, but rather that something crucial is left out by his reading of Hegel. His is, supposedly, a deflationary reading of Hegel, a kind of bowdlerised version of Hegel the thoroughbred metaphysician in the Spinozan sense, say. Too much emphasis is put, by Pippin, on the fact that we can’t know Being without a dependence on the categories in virtue of which Being can first be determined in and through self-determining thought.¹ Despite the fact that Pippin, certainly more recently, insists on a metaphysical reading, and points to the fact that it is Being’s own intelligibility that is at issue, not just our subjective perspective on it,² his Hegelian detractors have often taken and still take Pippin’s Hegel to be unappealingly unhegelian in some important sense. So in what sense is Pippin’s Hegel then not sufficiently ‘metaphysical’ or ‘ontological’, not enough of a Hegel, as Pippin’s critics believe?

Much can be said about this and I certainly don’t intend to be exhaustive here. But one passage that I reread last weekend in an interview with Stephen Houlgate from a few years ago in which he chooses as one of the important books in the secondary literature on Hegel Pippin’s much-lauded and widely cited monograph Hegel’s Idealism from 1989, is striking in that it illuminates, in a perfectly succinct manner, the difference between Pippin’s interpretation of Hegel (esp. in the Logic) and Houlgate’s own, which can be considered the most important position that is, in many ways, the contrary of the Pippinian approach.

Houlgate has published several pieces in which he criticises Pippin in some detail, and I believe he does so too in his latest tome on the Being Logic (which I haven’t read). Without delving into the specifics of his critique of Pippin elsewhere, which merits closer attention—something I cannot pay here—I want to look at this particular passage from the interview. It is of course merely a text fragment from an interview, not by any means a scholarly paper, but I think, having read Houlgate’s interpretations of Pippin over the years and having discussed this extensively in personal meetings in the past, the fragment is a good reflection of his current position on this matter. I think it makes it clear in what sense Pippin and Houlgate differ and why, I think, Houlgate’s position is ultimately untenable, not in the light of what Pippin believes, but more in general, as a reading of Hegel as a post-Kantian philosopher, which Houlgate himself acknowledges.

Houlgate captures one important element of Pippin’s reading of Hegel accurately:

What people don’t always recognise is that Kant is not simply saying that we need certain categories in order to make sense of the world; he is saying that intuitions themselves have to be understood in terms of certain categories in order to be objects for cognition. This is in the B deduction of the Critique of Pure Reason. So the categories are conditions not just of our experience of objects but of objects themselves as objects of cognition. That’s really important to Pippin’s Kant.

Indeed, this is the identity claim that lies at the heart of the B-Deduction, which Pippin takes to be the nub of the Hegelian point about the Absolute, or what in his early work, Hegel still called ‘absolute identity’. It is the original synthetic unity of apperception that constitutes the identity between Being and thought, between object and subject. This absolute identity should not be read as some kind of presupposed, original absolute substance which has particular attributes, one of which is thought or thought determinations that mirror or map onto its ontological attributes. Rather, absolute identity is a logical condition of cognition in virtue of which it can be seen, in thought, that and how the notions of ‘being’ and ‘thought’ itself basically derive from the function of unity that first establishes the identity between Being and thought, between the understanding and its object. It shows that in fact Being and thought are not absolute opposites sundered from each other in an absolute manner, as Houlgate himself points out in the interview in his answer to the question what absolute knowledge is.

This function of unity is Reason itself. It is not some substance, it is not Being as such, it is nothing pre- or non-rational or prior to thought. Reason itself is the Absolute. It is Reason that constitutes the identity of Being and thought, in that Being is as much subject to the conditions of thought as is thought itself. To put the point in Kant’s terms: the categories, which determine how objects for thought are constituted, are identical to the functions of thought, which dictate how thought works. Objects just are what the categories determine them to be.

Now this is where Houlgate notes a crucial difference. As much as it is true that there’s no gap between how the categories determine our thought or experience of an object and how this object itself is an object for thought, there is something about the object that prevents it from being made identical to its being thought, something that is apparently not captured by the logic of thought if we take the Pippinian/Kantian route. And this has got to do not just with objects per se, but how we approach the Logic of Being as such, starting with the very first pages in the Logic, where any determinate object for thought is not yet an object of study. The categories that are discussed in the beginning of the Logic are more primitive and concern Being in a far more indeterminate sense. Pippin’s ‘apperceptive’ approach that focuses on object determinacy seems to run ahead of the analysis in the Logic. To be ‘something’, let alone to be any object of a possible judgement, is not the most primordial sense of Being. As a category ‘something’ appears only somewhat further on in the Being Logic, and judgement first appears in the last part of the Logic. Houlgate hints at this:

Pippin thinks that the first part of the Logic—the logic of being—considers the problems that arise when one attempts to understand what there is through simple categories, such as ‘something’. For him, Hegel’s exposure of the failure of this attempt then leads to the discovery, later in the Logic, of the further categories that are in fact required for something to be a determinate object of cognition. In my view, by contrast, the logic of being has a more positive role and simply unfolds what it is to be ‘something’, ‘finite’ and so on. (boldface added)

First, Houlgate appears to allude to a sense of Being not captured by the determinacy of thought, as if Being itself determines itself prior to or independently of thought doing so. It seems that, for Houlgate, we must be able to talk about Being itself apart from how Being appears as more determinate forms of Being in judgements. In Houlgate’s view, the ‘apperceptive’ line of interpretation that Pippin espouses is derivative of, or secondary to, a more primordial sense in which Being is to be characterised. Pippin has labelled such a reading of the Logic ‘objectivist’. It is ‘objectivist’ in two senses: this type of reading opposes a ‘subjectivist’ construal such as Pippin’s apperception-centric approach, and it is suggested that an independent mind-independent account can be given of the categories of Being in the Being Logic, as if Being itself suggests the unfolding of these categories out of itself, which we merely need to register in the analysis. The Being Logic is then this chronicle, as it were, of the categories of Being.

It’s just a sentence on which he does not elaborate in the interview, but the phrase with which Houlgate describes the Being Logic is telling, i.e. it ‘simply unfolds what it is to be “something”, “finite” and so on’. Note Houlgate’s emphasis on ‘is’, which suggests that the copula, in e.g. speculative judgements such as “Being is Nothing”, should be read as a real predicate, implying an ontological reading of predication, referring to an existential. By contrast, Pippin doesn’t read concepts such as ‘being’, ‘nothing’, ‘becoming’, ‘something’ as properties of an independently and prior given Being, but as concepts that purport to be determinations of Being that in fact, taken as such, fail to be such things. That doesn’t mean they are meaningless or don’t have a distinct role in the dialectic of the Logic: on the contrary, they lead us, by way of a conceptual analysis which is a close analogue of Kant’s Deduction, to an increasingly determinate, substantial concept of Being. One should not take these concepts as if each of them somehow mirrors or expresses an actual aspect of Being, even right at the start of the analysis. To do so would imply that pure Being is given as such, independently of thought and prior to it, so that we only have to map out what its characteristics are. This would subvert the entire Hegelian premise that we start out from the standpoint of Reason that has superseded any distinction between a determinative understanding and its opposite, the ‘absolutely existing’ world of objects.

Neither Being nor objects can be taken to be given, independently of and prior to the analysis of concepts that the Logic sets in motion. What we have at the start of the Logic is merely thought thinking its own minimal determinations, or as Pippin aptly puts it: ‘thinking thinking thinking’, i.e. thought thinking itself. To appeal to a notion as ‘sheer being’ at this point, as Houlgate does, is not vindicated by the logical dialectic of Hegel’s text, and it in fact also contradicts his own motto of ‘presuppositionlessness’ as the characteristic of Hegelian logic.

Secondly, for Houlgate, it seems that the categories of thought determining what something is are ipso facto not sufficient for determining what something is. But here too he seems to smuggle in an ontological element that is supposedly not captured by the categorial determination itself. This suggests that he reintroduces a dualist constellation of the relation between thought and Being, whereby Being is absolutely independent of thought even though thought is capable of determining Being. I recall here Houlgate’s own mantra, often half-jokingly invoked during our many fruitful but vigorous debates, ‘thought is Being, and Being is thought’. So he most certainly doesn’t intend to reintroduce a dualism between the two. But he does in fact appear to do so, it seems to me.

This is suggested by his use of the term ‘sheer being’ and the claim that ‘being is not collapsible’ into thought determining Being. This might sound plausible: for isn’t it intuitively right to say that Being has a structure of its own quite independently of how we determine it to be? Isn’t Being something objective that is not reducible to how we subjectively determine it? And mustn’t we distinguish between necessary conditions (the categories) and sufficient conditions of knowledge after all? Isn’t it true to say that something just is even apart from whether or not it is known by us or anyone?

In some sense, Houlgate’s instinctual sense that there is something independent about Being (and I’m not sure Houlgate would be happy about my use of the term ‘independent’ here), and therefore everything that is, might seem right. That I judge some object x to have a certain property or quality and that that object therefore is as such an object for my thought in that I’m capable of making a judgement about it doesn’t in the least mean that the object’s existence is constituted by my thought. My judgement or even multiple judgements don’t exhaust the object’s being what it is. This is quite in line with Kant’s statement that the existence (Dasein) of an object is not constituted by the functions of thought. So the identity of object and thought doesn’t seem to go as far as the Being of the object is concerned. Here’s where Kant’s thing in itself comes into play, which I shall not elaborate on here, as this is another tricky interpretative minefield about which entire monographs have been (and still are) written.

What is important to note here is that for Pippin’s Hegel there’s no longer any Kantian reticence with respect to the ontological implications of the identity claim at the heart of the Deduction, and so the Logic: the absolute identity claim that Kant establishes in the B-Deduction is no longer linked to a restriction thesis, that is, there is no restriction of our possible knowledge to mere appearances. Instead, the identity claim concerns the intelligibility of Being itself. Obviously, this does not mean that we can’t make false judgements or that there isn’t some sort of independence of the object’s existence, namely in an empirical sense (no German idealist in his right mind claims that tables are mere objects of the mind in the empirical sense). The identity claim is rather about the fact that there is no in principle gap between thought and Being. What thought determines there to be is all that there intelligibly can be.

It is precisely here that Pippin and Houlgate seem to diverge, though it strikes me as difficult to comprehend why Houlgate could not agree to this other than because of a tendency to objectify the terms in the analysis, precisely what Pippin considers to be an unwarranted ‘objectivism’. Or, Houlgate’s reserve here might stem from a quite familiar, and thus understandable, lingering reluctance to give up on the idea of Being’s independence of thought, a conservative resistance to consistently subjectify ontology. It would appear that Pippin is more radically Hegelian here than Houlgate.

Paradoxically, Houlgate seems more Kantian in spirit here than Pippin: He doesn’t seem convinced that the identity claim really captures Being itself. ‘Sheer being’ is the term he uses. Kant would agree to an extent, in that the being of a thing in its complete determinacy, its in-itselfness, is not captured by the identity claim of the B-Deduction (though of course, its existence qua existence is determined by the category ‘existence’). This is of course not how Houlgate sees it himself, as he’s, following Hegel, damning about Kant’s notion of the thing in itself.

That Houlgate diverges from the identity reading that Pippin espouses is made explicit by this passage:

[I]t seems to me that there is still something missing from the position adopted by Pippin’s own ‘metaphysical’ Hegel: for, in my view, there is an element of sheer being that is not collapsible into being for a knower or being an object of cognition. When we think about this table, we think that that table is there. Yes, it is known by us, but it also has a being and an identity of its own. My Hegel is thus trying to work out the categories that structure not only (a) how we must think of things; not only (b) what something must be to be an object of cognition; but also (c) what is to be at all. I think this third element is missing from Pippin’s account. For me, the long and the short of it is that Pippin’s Hegel ends up being a little too close to Fichte, for whom also ‘to be’ is ‘to be for a subject’. (boldface added)

The phrasing of ‘an element of sheer being that is not collapsible into being for a knower’ is significant. It strikes me as however undermining the notion of absolute identity that is central to Hegel’s thought. Either there is an identity between thought and Being, or there isn’t. Of course, in any particular judgement about an object, I could be mistaken as to whether I do indeed see an object, or whether I correctly or not attribute this or that property to the object. But there is an in principle identity between my ability to cognise the object and the object’s being. This is the Kantian element that Hegel, according to Pippin, takes over and modifies by taking out the stuff about pure intuition. And you can’t fall back behind it without jeopardising Hegel’s Kantian legacy: for it’s the central part of it. Houlgate does seem to fall back behind it: Being is not collapsible into being for thought, meaning that there is an unbridgeable gap between Being as such, sheer Being (whatever that may mean), and our grasp of it. Or so it seems.

For Hegel, properly speaking, and this is what Pippin emphasises, there could not be an intelligible distinction between (b) and (c). What could it be for something to be like that is not graspable in cognition in virtue of the categories? Or more charitably—for Houlgate might be taken to argue that everything about Being should in principle be graspable by thought, without however Being collapsing into its being grasped by thought—what exactly makes the difference for something to be in distinction from it being grasped by thought? This seems to point to a different set of determinations that express that difference. But how is that difference accounted for in view of the unity of thought and Being? In other words, how can what seems to have a being on its own, having ‘an identity of its own’, still be grasped by thought? Hegel is not a Kantian idealist, who can perfectly consistently juggle two different irreducible sets of rules governing separate realms; so for Hegel, any claim about different ostensibly irreducible ways of being, being for cognition and being on its own, must be accounted for in terms of a single, unitary set of categorial rules. If Being is in principle graspable by thought—and I think Houlgate would not dare deny this—then there must, in some specifiable manner, be an identity between Being for cognition and Being on its own.

So the question is, if there were a distinction between the categories structuring (b) and (c), are we talking about the same set of categories structuring both (b) and (c), or are there two different sets of categories that structure how objects are for us and their sheer being ‘at all’ respectively? And if there are two such different sets of categories, in what way are they both related to thought and its function of unity? In other words, how can thought grasp the transition between (c) and (b), or put differently, how and in virtue of what does thought combine the putative two sets of categories that govern (b) and (c) so that what we determinately grasp in thought is in fact how Being itself determinately is, that is, such that it is sheer Being in fact what we determine? It seems to me that Houlgate’s non-collapsibility thesis is in at least potential conflict with his commitment to the absolute identity thesis about thought and Being.

These logical conundrums can be avoided by adopting the identity reading that Pippin proposes. There simply is no intelligent way in which Being can be determined other than through the categories that constitute the ways in which Being is for thought. There just is no sheer Being that is not collapsible into Being for thought. It must be so collapsible if we are committed to Hegelian absolute idealism.

See also follow-up article ‘Sheer Being and Thought’.

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© Dennis Schulting, 2022.

1. Ugly as it is, I capitalise Being so as to differentiate it from the participle form of the verb.

2. See my review of Pippin’s Hegel’s Realm of Shadows.