Thought as Afterthought
On Being and Thought Once Again
In his last work Hegel on Being (Houlgate 2024), the picture of Houlgateโs reading which we considered before is confirmed. He writes:
The development Hegel traces ... is not a product of our thinking; rather, it is made necessary, logically, by being and nothing themselves and is simply made explicit and articulated by thought. In speculative thought our thought does not determine the development that the categories of being and thought undergo, but it is itself determined by the immanent logical development of those categories. (2024:143)
Here, too, it appears that Houlgate believes that thinking is some mental process that merely registers the logical process that separately happens between the categories of Being, on the ontological level, that is, within Being, without thought having some a priori determinative influence upon this development. Elsewhere, Houlgate objects to Pippinโs portrayal that the Logic โsets out โpure thoughtโs experience of itselfโ as it tries to discover โthe conceptual conditions required for there to be possibly determinate objects of cognitionโโ (2024:397n.16).[1] Pippinโs wording might be taken to mean that what is at issue is a subjectโs experience of an object and its conditions. And I think that Houlgate takes it in this sense. Houlgate makes it clear, and he seems to be suggesting that Pippin mistakenly reads the Logic in this way, that the Logic is not to be interpreted as if it still concerned a phenomenology of the experience of objects and amounts to an analysis of this. He is of course right about the latter, but it would be wrong to accuse Pippin of such a reading.
What Pippin means is that in the Being Logic an analysis of the conceptual determinations of Being is carried out on the basis of the idea that that analysis is nothing less nor more than an analysis of the selfโs thinking own constitutive elements that make up thoughtโs own content, developed out of itself, a priori, without relying on external factors, but also without relying on some kind of substantive metaphysics. This has nothing to do with how a subject experiences an object that stands over against it. After the Phenomenology, the starting point of the Logic is the thinking subject which has fully internalised all of the relations to external object and world alike, and is wholly thrown upon itself. From this vantage point the Concept and its determinations, starting with โbeingโ, is completely specified, as it is developed out of the determinations of the thinking subject thinking all of the constituent elements of thought itself, โthinking thinking thinkingโ, as Pippin aptly put it. This does not in the least suggest that a distinction between subject and object, between thought and Being, is reintroduced here at the start or anywhere else in the course of the Logic.
It is not just that Houlgate believes that Pippin remains indebted to a dualist scheme of subjectivist thought and Being in that the latter purportedly continues to think of the Being Logic as having to do with the conditions of the experience of objects, as if it concerned a mere epistemology, and not a metaphysics, an ontology. Houlgate himself appears to hold fast to a dualist schema between epistemology and ontology in that he rejects the revolutionary Kantian conception, which Hegel adopts, of the object-constitutive role of thought that Pippin highlights in his reading of Hegel. What Hegel does in the Logic, and what Houlgate entirely misses, is in fact a critical re-evaluation and expansion of Kantโs Metaphysical Deduction in which the functions of thought are shown to be the necessary and sufficient conditions for determining the categories of Being. Access to Being is through the functions of thought.
In some important sense, Being is thus a product of our thinking, contrary to what Houlgate believes, but in the sense Kant meant, that is, insofar as the necessary conditions for the identity of self-consciousness are the necessary conditions for the identity of the object of thought (cf. A158/B197), with the Hegelian proviso that Kantโs restriction thesis does not apply: these conditions concern Being itself and arenโt restricted to appearances of things only, that is, to our experience of objects only, as Kant still believed. There is nothing ontologically reductive about this view, as Houlgate fears, provided one heeds the proviso that Pippin again and again stresses. It is not as if on this view Being were literally produced out of minds, recalling the old โworld-emanating-out-of-cosmic-mindโ reading or any crude phenomenalist-idealist takes that take objects to be constructed out of sensations. Nor does such a view imply a subjectivist โBeing-just-for-usโ reading. Nothing in Pippinโs reading shows that the categorial determinations of Being as they are developed in the Logic are concerned only with the mere question of how we experience or think about Being. In fact, Pippin is quite insistent in his repudiation of such Kantian ontological reticence. Houlgateโs uneasiness with Pippinโs alleged reductionism about Being is based on a straw man.
Furthermore, Houlgateโs ambiguity about the identity of thought and Being makes his own view vulnerable to the charge that he cannot explain the a priori nature of the relation between Being and thought if, as he appears to believe, thought is merely registering what in the first instance is developed within the realm of Being. Quite clearly, Houlgate believes that the categories of Being are not dependent on thought, but this makes it difficult, on his account, to establish in virtue of what the categories of thought are mapped onto the categories of Being. The fundamental question arises as to the way in which โthought ... itself [is] determined by the immanent logical development of those categoriesโ. In some way, this relation must be a priori and must arise logically out of the immanent logical development of the categories of Being. This canโt be just a later stage in the dialectic when self-consciousness appears at the scene, in fact even only after the Logic, namely in the Phenomenology of Spirit (Houlgate 2024:129), for as Houlgate himself claims, the identity of thought and Being is there already from the beginning of the Logic, namely as the Being of thought itself, which sets everything in motion. The very function of movement between concepts must explain how the categories of Being are also categories in thought, right from the start.
References:
Houlgate, S. (2024), Hegel on Being (London: Bloomsbury).
Pippin, R. (1989), Hegelโs Idealism. The Satisfactions of Self-Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).
[1] Houlgate quotes Pippin (1989).