Essays on Hegel's Philosophy of Subjective Spirit

Hegel’s Linguistic Thought in the Philosopy of Subjective Spirit

Hegel’s Linguistic Thought in the Philosopy of Subjective Spirit Between Kant and the “Metacritics” Jere O’Neill Surber The power of Spirit is only as great as its expression, its depth only as deep as it dares to spread out and lose itself in its exposition. —Hegel, preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit Introduction Hegel’s only systematic treatment of linguistic issues occurs within the division of the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit entitled “Representation,” itself a subdivivion of “Psychology.” In the course of this discussion, Hegel specifically refers to Herder’s Metacritique and its linguistic attack on Kantian philosophy. This passage is worth quoting in full: However, knowledge means that I have the word before me and proceed mindfully in words. Herder has many declamations to the effect that philosophizing is a making and combining of words. By doing this one thinks that one has the thing itself while one proceeds through words, and that this movement through words is only an illusion in which we believe we have the thing itself before us. Cf. Herder’s Ideen zur Geschichte der Menschheit, 181 182 / Jere O’Neill Surber and his Metacritique, where he attacks the Kantian philosophy in this way. Names are conditions of thought itself: thinking is consciousness, and so must have an objective [reality] in itself. The content that we possess with the name is what we call the sense (we do not need the image) of which we are conscious, and which we have entirely before us.1 This is a curious text. On the one hand, it seems as if Hegel is siding with Herder and the Metacritics against Kant in maintaining that “names are conditions of thought itself,” something that Kant seemed explicitly to deny and certainly never mentioned in his own treatments of representation and thought. On the other hand, it is clear from Hegel’s preceding discussion of intuition and subsequent treatment of thought (and perhaps also from the somewhat polemical tone of his reference to Herder here) that Hegel could never subscribe to the wholesale “linguistic deconstruction” of Kantian (or, more generally, speculative) philosophy practiced by Herder and his circle. One reading that suggests itself here is that Hegel views signification and language as playing a far more important, even essential, role in human cognition and philosophical reflection than Kant recognized, but that he regarded the metacritical attack on Kantian philosophy as overinflating this role in support of a universal skepticism about all philosophical discourse. Put more simply, Hegel’s view might be fairly read as holding that while Kant gave too little credit to language in the general texture of human cognition and thought, Herder and the Metacritics accorded it far too great a scope. In this chapter, I wish to expand this insight into a more detailed consideration of how Hegel’s systematic treatment of language in the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit both fills a conspicuous void in Kant’s transcendental approach and delimits and counters the universal metacritical skepticism about the possibility of systematic philosophy. Viewed from this perspective, I will suggest that Hegel’s linguistic reflections in this text offer an original and positive account of certain features of language needed by Kant and his successors (including Hegel himself) in order to counter the metacritical and other later linguistic assaults on systematic philosophy. I will conclude by considering to what degree Hegel’s linguistic views in the present text succeed in this task and what issues remain open. Kant and the Metacritics Kant was acquainted, both personally and professionally, with Herder and Hamann (that other “sage of Koenigsberg”), was familiar with the lengthy Hegel’s Linguistic Thought in the Philosophy of Subjective Spirit / 183 debate concerning the so-called ‘Ursprungsfrage” initiated by Herder’s “Prize Essay” of 1772, and had at least some passing knowledge of British and French empirical and philosophical investigations concerning language.2 He was therefore well aware that language was emerging as a significant area of empirical and philosophical inquiry when he began the composition of the works that make up his Critical Philosophy. However, in a telling passage in the Prolegomena, he declared very firmly that the study of language offered nothing of interest to the transcendental philosopher, since, on his view, all linguistic questions were “merely empirical” matters distinct from the necessary and universal principles explored in the Critical Philosophy.3 True to this principle of exclusion, linguistic issues...