Reconciling Social Science and Ethical Recognition: Hegelian Idealism and Brunswikian Psychology

The forming of the five senses is a labor of the entire history of the world down to the present.

--Karl Marx, Economic and
Philosophical Manuscripts of 1844 108

G. W. F. Hegel construed his theory as "Science" as opposed to philosophy, but not because it required or allowed for greater empirical verification. While the manifest fallacy of much of the Philosophy of Nature, Hegel's attempt to systematically apply his science to the empirical world, has made Hegel a favorite whipping-boy of generations of natural scientists, it does nothing to discredit the general project of Hegelian science among those who accept the strictly idealist precepts of that project. If Hegelian science needn't founder for lack of empirical verification, however, neither can it stand in remove from empirical application generally. Indeed, it is precisely such application that distinguishes the Hegelian project from philosophy. In contrast to philosophy, Hegelian science does not pretend to correspond to or explain an independent objective reality; instead, it sets out to determine the conditions of the possibility of objects becoming real, "in their truth," to begin with. In consequence, science does not "fear error" (Hegel 1807, 58; 47); ¹ on the contrary, it progresses precisely in virtue of the "astonishing accident" that compels reevaluation of the conditions' objective possibility (26; 18). Science penetrates objective reality, not by explaining it from without, but by applying itself to the "self-construing path" of the "immanent development of the Notion" (1812, 7; 28). Hegel's own claim to have finally identified the comprehensive historical logic by which this path proceeded did not keep him from insisting that science could reach that end only after "all possible shapes of a given content and of objects came up for consideration" (1816, 486; 826). The predominance of this historical logic in all of Hegel's work from the Jena Phenomenology on, however, can make it difficult to appreciate the significance of specifically empirical experience for the "development of the Notion," and thus for Hegelian science. By contrast, Hegel's early Jena work for the Critical Journal and, in particular, his Natural Law essay, give a nonphenomenological, nonhistorical account of "absolute ethical life," an account that articulates its implications for empirical experience with a clarity that the phenomenological accounts cannot. Exploiting this clarity, I here explore the applicability to psychology of these early formulations of Hegel's critiques of Immanuel Kant and empirical science and attempt to infer some broader conclusions regarding the empirical application of Hegelian science generally.

1. Hegel's Critique of Kant and Empirical Science

Hegel's is neither the only nor the most influential critique of Kant. Kant's critical philosophy had already been deemed untenable by many of his immediate contemporaries, who, Frederick C. Beiser writes, concluded that "[t]he Kritik had transformed the problem of knowledge, but it had not solved it" (1987, 325). Kant had resolved the question concerning the correspondence of mental representations and physical objects only to have it replaced by that concerning the correspondence of distinct types of representations: a priori concepts and a posteriori intuitions of sensibility. "This dualism," Beiser concludes, "though new, was no more bridgeable. Thus the grand postulate of the correspondence between thought and being . . . had been shattered" (325). The reconciliation proposed by Hegel has been undermined, Gillian Rose argues, less by the imputation to it of an untenable metaphysics than by theorists such as Georg Lukács and Theodor Adorno, who respond to that imputation by distinguishing between Hegel's supposedly "radical method" and the "conservative system" in hopes of salvaging the former (1981, 33, 42). Thus, on Rose's account, the terms of our own experience of the dualism of thought and being do not derive directly from either Kant or Hegel; rather, they derive from a distinct and often overlooked intervention: neo-Kantian sociology. "The very idea of a scientific sociology...