Cognition and Finite Spirit

• Author: John W. Burbidge
• Position: Professor Emeritus, Trent University, Ontario
• Pages: 189-202

Page 189

If, for Hegel, the subjective logic completes the study of pure thought, how can he then include discussions of nature and spirit in his philosophy? Why does thought, which includes mechanism, chemism, and the idea of life, have to extend its range to what we can call the philosophy of the real? To answer this question, I have already compared what he says in the chapters on chemism and life with the chemical and organic sections of his philosophy of nature.¹ But the real world includes the realm of spirit. In the introduction to his chapter on "The Idea of Cognition," Hegel himself mentions his anthropology, phenomenology, and psychology:

[T]he Idea of spirit as the subject matter of logic already stands within the pure science; it has not therefore to watch spirit progressing through its entanglement with nature, with immediate determinate-ness and material things, or with [representation]; this is dealt with in the three sciences mentioned above [anthropology, phenomenology and psychology].²

On the other hand, although his doctrine of spirit in the Realphilosophie should include the "object of normal empirical psychology "³ it does not develop its task empirically, but scientifically. The contingency of contemporary psychology is stressed in paragraph 378 of the Encyclopedia:

Empirical psychology has concrete spirit for its object, and because, with the renaissance of science, observation and experience have become the primary foundation for the cognition of the concrete, it has been practiced in the same way. As a result, on the one hand meta-Page 190physics [rational psychology] was retained outside of this empirical science and came to no concrete determination and content on its own; on the other hand empirical science concentrated its attention on the usual metaphysics of the understanding with its forces, diverse faculties and so on, and ostracized any speculative considerations.⁴

These "speculative considerations," which are to grasp "the unity of the determinations in their opposition," will be the foundation for the scientific handling of the philosophy of spirit.⁵ So we have three disciplines which are to investigate spirit. Empirical psychology is to be distinguished from the philosophy of spirit in that it subordinates its observations and experiences to the abstract categories of force and spiritual capacities in an almost mechanical way, while the latter grasps the unity of the faculties in their diversity. The logic of cognition, like the philosophy of spirit, is scientific and speculative; the former, however, lies within the pure science of self-thinking thought, while the latter is concerned with the way spirit is conditioned by nature (anthropology), with its emergence as consciousness and self-consciousness (phenomenology), and with the developing mastery of its own content in representation and thought (psychology). How are these three different approaches-empirical, pure science, and spirit's entanglement with nature-related to each other?

In this paper, I propose to consider this question by investigating the scientific methods (in Hegel's sense) of the logic on the one hand, and the doctrine of spirit on the other. How does one distinguish the speculative approach of unifying determinations in their diversity as it is practiced in the pure science of logic from the way it is practiced in the philosophy of the real world? A short, textual exposition of the chapter on cognition will provide a framework for understanding the pure logical method. I then decipher the distinctive role of the philosophy of spirit. Finally, a comparison of the speculative character of the doctrine of spirit with contemporary empirical psychology will prepare us for some conclusions concerning the way the conceptual logic is related to the philosophy of the real world.Page 191

The Idea of Cognition

In his lectures on the Philosophy of Spirit, Hegel recalled the logical transition from life to the idea of cognition in the Logic. "The death of the simply immediate, singular life is the proceeding forth of spirit."⁶

This "proceeding forth" is not to be understood corporeally but spiritually-not as a natural progression, but as the development of the concept, which sublates the one-sidedness of the genus, unable [as it is] to come to an adequate actualization but rather through death showing itself as negative power over against that living actuality, as well as the opposing one-sidedness of animal being, constrained in its singularity- sublating both of these into a singularity, universal in and of itself, or (which is the same thing) into that universal, existing on its own in a universal way, which is spirit.⁷

In other words, at the end of the logic of life, genus remains a subjective concept, whose actualization takes place through the death of the living individual and the reproduction of the species. Thus, there develops a discrepancy between the simple universality of the genus, and its actuality in an infinite progression of diverse individuals-the concept and its realization do not match. The idea, which was to be the unity of concept and objectivity, has fallen apart into a disparity which now needs to be overcome. In other words, "concept and object are to correspond to each other"-an expression that regularly serves as the definition of cognition; for cognition names the drive to overcome any discrepancy between concept and reality.

Governed by the idea of the true, conceptual thought distinguishes itself from its object and, at the same time, seeks to find a conceptual form appropriate to this other. This struggle develops through various stages.

At first, thought seeks to grasp the object in itself without introducing any mediating activity. Because we are to initiate no conceptual distinctions, we should simply think not only of the object in general, but also of any concrete properties that distinguish it from others, each on its own identified as an abstract universal. In this way, thought analyses the given into its elements-a collection of diverse universalsPage 192 which, though derived from a single object, possess no conceptual connections with each other. Yet, the object on its own is a whole of parts, a cause with effects. It contains within itself relationships which need to be identified if one is to satisfy the drive to truth. For the object itself is not just a collection of analysed properties, but rather a universal which determines itself in particular ways. As a result, the desired correspondence has not been reached. If we are to achieve the truth, conceiving must somehow mirror this objective synthesis.

The mediating activity of thought is defined by its three conceptual determinations: universality, particularity, and singularity. In the first synthetic move-definition-the object is taken first as a singular, so that it can then be subsumed by thought under a universal genus, and then distinguished from others through its particularities. Although this approach may be productive for the objects of abstract reason (such as those of mathematics), it becomes problematic when thinking attempts to identify the determining features of objects in the real world. For what specifically distinguishes men from other animals could be quite inessential (for example earlobes), and the universal genus could be associated with any common characteristic, whether contingent or necessary. So, the rules for definition could produce something totally misleading, and the desired correspondence not be achieved.

If this approach starting with the object as singular cannot reach its goal, then perhaps we should start with it as a universal, going on to determine its particular components through division. As the second strategy of synthesis, division needs to be exhaustive in grasping all the diverse determinations of the object as a whole. Like definition, this initiative can be productive with regard to the abstract objects of conceptual systems; but it is regretfully ineffective when one turns to the concrete objects of nature and society. After all, while we might realize that something is a dog, that general description tells us nothing about why it has the particular bone formation and teeth structure that it has. The conceived universal can capture what is common in the diverse objects, but it lacks a principle to determine what is essential among the characteristics it has.

This ineffectiveness in both definition and division can be overcome by constructing a theorem that sets out expressly the...