The Telos of Absolute Idealism
“…in the Absolute, all is one,”—Friedrich Schelling
“…in the Absolute, all cows are black…”—Hegel’s critique of Schelling
The Greek concept of Telos
(τέλος) is introduced in episode 2 of Dr. Vervaeke’s
lecture series on cognition along with the concept of “patterns” in meaning,
meaning making, and cognition. His lectures have greatly enhanced my
understanding of the theologian Wilhelm Hegel’s absolute idealism and
appreciation of this discipline known as cognitive science. In a way, this
topic leads back to theologian Friedrich
Schleiermacher (1768-1834) a contemporary of Hegel
(1770-1831) who was also a theologian. Telos means “fulfillment,”
“end,” “result” or even can mean a charged “tax,” or “toll.”
A person on a journey, or climbing to a mountaintop has a telos, goal,
or purpose. Historical time can be viewed as cyclical, or linear. Time thought
to be circular is a closed system. The Ancient Greeks viewed historical time as
circular with persons having predetermined fates. A linear upward climb of time
to a goal or completion is teleological and open ended to multiple
possibilities. For the Ancient Greeks the ancient past is perfect and as time
moves into the future the cosmos becomes imperfect. On the other hand, a
progressive telos of history is thought to be moving upward and onward
to reach a higher level of actualized being (Aristotle). But exactly what is
history moving toward?
“For
Hegel, the inner movement of reality is the process of God thinking as
manifested in the evolution of the universe of nature and thought; that is,
Hegel argued that, when fully and properly understood, reality is being thought
by God as manifested in man's comprehension of this process in and through
philosophy”(Wiki: Hegel).
You should not
have skipped that philosophy course in college! The theological view of
Hegelian absolute idealism is a little more intelligible only because we are
familiar with Christian theism so this interpretation is actually very helpful
in understanding what Hegel means by reality, mind, phenomenon, historical
process, and knowledge. The German word
for mind, “Geist” is also the same word as for “spirit.” Mind in this
context has the meaning of “distinct from the body.” Spirit can mean “spirit of
the times,” as in Zeitgeist, or spirit can mean “The Holy Spirit” as in
“der Heilige Geist.” Absolute knowledge is a
key concept for Hegel. Absolute knowledge does not mean knowing everything
which is clearly humanly impossible, but rather knowledge of reality, as what
is, and not as the world appears. Hegel shows in his work “Phenomenology
of Spirit” (1807) (referred to as PS) how this knowledge is
possible and it is not merely a matter of collecting more empirical data, which
is the job of science. Hegel’s scientific philosophy is a history of cognition
on the path of experience.
Hegel viewed
his task as documenting the historical journey of human thought--of mind, of
consciousness in the highest abstract sense--educating itself as it struggles
with material existence and itself. Consciousness changes into different shapes
or forms, “as series of configurations,” as it reaches a higher understanding
of itself on the torturous historical road of experience—to Calvary. Adorno
referred to this historical process as the “suffering of the concept.” Hegel’s
abstract idealism is integrated with world history for this is how mind becomes
appearance, a phenomenon. Thought comes to know itself as self-consciousness
and understands that reality is ultimately mind creating a purposive collective
social community with coercive force that can build or destroy. Absolute
knowledge is reached when thought realizes through this experience of
consciousness that it seeks to know itself. Self-consciousness is consciousness
reflecting on itself. History is the teleological manifestation of a pattern,
the incarnation, and appearance (phenomenon) of mind in human historical
experience.
“But the goal is as necessarily fixed for knowledge as the serial progression; it is the point where knowledge no longer needs to go beyond itself, where knowledge finds itself, where Notion corresponds to object and object to Notion. Hence the progress towards this goal is unhalting….” (Phenomenology of Spirit, Intro., para. 80).
Hegel is an
absolute idealist, not a relative idealist that believes there are many
interpretations of many different realities and like a solipsist thinks only
their own experiences and thoughts are real with no objective reality by which
to judge any one worldview over another. Absolute idealists believe in one
reality because there is only one mind. The Absolute is an indefinite One: not
a definite substance, or a cow--only immaterial mind.
“Dealing
with something from the perspective of the Absolute consist merely in declaring
that …as something definite, yet in the Absolute, A=A, there is nothing of the
kind, for all is one…[In this incorrect view of the Absolute]… all cows are
black.” —Hegel’s critique of Schelling’s concept of the Absolute, “The
Phenomenology of Spirit (1807)” English trans. by J. Baillie, London,1909,
Preface, paragraph 16.
Reducing the Absolute
(Reality) to a substance, or thing is a common tendency in Western thought.
Ambiguously, Hegel has an Eastern concept of the Absolute. However, we find
that for Hegel human “history is nothing but the progress of consciousness
of freedom”(Hegel: A Very Short Introduction, Peter Singer, 1983, Oxford Univ.
Press, p. 33). Once again, mind has stepped into the Agora, ἀγορά
(or “marketplace,” related to the word “agriculture”) just as
Socrates asked in the agora, “What is virtue?” The cynical and Cynic
philosopher Diogenes
searched for an honest man in the marketplace-it’s funny when you really think
about it. And again the Christian monk Martin Luther “protested” (being
a “protest-tant)” in the agora against the lifeless corpse of an
authoritarian Christianity by declaring that human beings have their own
spiritual nature and do not need permission to interpret the Scriptures from
any external authority!
In Hegel’s philosophical
work “Philosophy
of History” (1837) freedom does not mean to do as one wishes (Ethical
Wantism), but having a free mind since we are not free if others coerce us
by physical force or lies. We are not free when controlled by personal desire
instead of Reason (Vernunft). Freedom only comes from free rational choice.
Reason is universal and reality is the self-manifestation of the Logos. Hegel
rejects the Kantian block and believes the noumenal world, or the
thing-in-itself, is not beyond thought but can be known. Hegel said of this
empirical manifestation “the rational is real, and the real is rational.”
Logos is a characteristic of mind so that it is also universal. All human
beings are linked by universal Reason. The greatest obstacle to a free society
is that individual persons do not know they are a part of this universal mind.
Consciousness through experience begins to slowly understand itself as both
universal and rational. In the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel travels
down the road to Absolute knowledge describing how consciousness finally
comprehends the close connection between freedom and knowledge. “Spirit is
indeed never at rest but always engaged in moving forward” (PS, para. 11).
Mind is necessarily communal in which persons can purposively participate in a
rationally organized way:
"...the true is the whole."-Hegel
In “Phenomenology of
Spirit” the Preface is titled, “On Scientific Cognition” so
Hegel understood his historical review of Western philosophy as showing the
different shapes of mind: “The series of configurations which consciousness
goes through along this road is, in reality the detailed history of the education
of consciousness itself to the standpoint of Science” (PS, para. 78).
Science during Hegel’s time meant “systematic inquiry.” Hegel examines each stage of mind in detail like
a jeweler studying every light-reflecting facet of a finely cut diamond in an
attempt to say the unsayable. It is this topic that Hegel mostly earns the reputation of an obscure
writer; however, his train of thought can still be followed. Much of what Hegel’s
critics call incomprehensible is Christian theology. This phenomenological
history is structured to show the triadic stages of consciousness:
Consciousness (Bewusstsein), Self-Consciousness (Selbstbewusstsein),
and Reason (Vernunft).
Sense-certainty
The first undeveloped form
of consciousness appears as the problem of knowledge and certainty. Hegel described this consciousness in the
first part of Phenomenology of Spirit as Sense-certainty that only
relies on sense perception of a particular object of knowledge. Sense certainty
is the uncritical natural naïve attitude toward objects, but views itself as
having genuine practical knowledge of the world. Sense-certainty only receives sense data at the here and now
of this or that.” This type of knowledge really isn’t knowledge
at all for it does not categorize the particular, but only records sense
perception in the now. This is the most primitive empiricism that cannot
coherently state any truth about experience since it lacks universal concepts
to classify objects in some order. Knowledge cannot only be of the
particular sense experience for they need concepts. However, the very general
terms of language “here,” “now,” “that” themselves are
universal concepts that point the way to the next higher stage of
consciousness.
Perception and Understanding
Perception and Understanding
Perception and Understanding
(Verstand) are the next forms of consciousness to go beyond the
particulars to the universals of language so that unity and coherence is given
to the stream of raw sense data received in sense experience. A model of
perceptual experience must be created to organize sense perception. And yet
perception still lacks the power to understand reality so consciousness
constructs its own laws of physics (Gravity, Electromagnetism, Force) to
achieve order and unity of experience. Consciousness as understanding, or
intelligibility mistakes these paradigmatic constructs as real objects
(reification) so that consciousness is now really trying to understand itself.
Consciousness in trying to understand itself is now latent self-consciousness.
Self-Consciousness:
Stoicism, Skepticism, and Unhappy Consciousness
In discussing how latent
self-consciousness becomes self-consciousness, Hegel switches away from
epistemology to Life as conflict. Living self-consciousness desires (Begierde)
to establish its own identity as a person, so self-consciousness must have
an opposing object to differentiate itself, or a non-self. Consciousness’ sense
of selfhood needs another self to create its identity-in-difference.
Self-consciousness needs an external object to define itself, yet it views all
externality as a threat. To achieve recognition self-consciousness needs
another object to possess, but when the object is made its own the object’s
externality is negated so self-consciousness is alone once again.
Self-consciousness must have another object without destroying its otherness so
it seeks to possess another person--another self-consciousness, or
we-consciousness. This struggle with another consciousness forms a Master/Slave
relationship in which one seeks to destroy the other. However, in this power
struggle the Master realizes he still needs the other self-consciousness and
spares the other to spare his own self. This historical situation causes a
variety of internal divisions in consciousness that reappears in other stages
of cognition. The master only perceives himself as a true person. The slave (Servile
Consciousness) projects his selfhood onto the master, but while in this
dialectical relationship the slave transforms material existence by his labor
opening the way to the next emerging stage of higher self-consciousness.
“To be free is not to
be either master or slave, not to discover oneself in this or that situation in
the midst of life: it is to behave as a thinking being in all
circumstances.”-Jean Hyppolite
(“Genesis and Structure of
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,” Northwestern University, 1974, p.180)(pdf.).
Consciousness takes the form
of Stoicism that teaches both master and slave to withdraw from the world into
consciousness where “I = I” in an escape into a
false liberty existing only in abstract thought. Hegel writes of Stoicism, “The
essence of consciousness is to be free, on the throne or in chains….”
Stoicism is not just a single isolated philosophy for the citizens of the Roman
Empire, but a universal philosophy that every self-consciousness goes through
in a teleological development of mind. Since the differences between life and
the self remain unchanged, Stoic withdrawing into subjective interiority
disconnects the person from the external world making it impossible to
actualize itself into a stable human being.
Skepticism is the next stage
of consciousness as a self-contradictory philosophical attitude toward life;
however, this is not the skepticism of Hume. Historian of philosophy Frederick
Copleston said of this transition from Stoicism to Skepticism,“…this
negative attitude towards the concrete and external passes easily into the
Skeptical consciousness for which the self alone abides while all else is
subject to doubt and negation” A History of Philosophy: Modern Philosophy,
Fichte to Hegel, Vol. 7, Part I, Doubleday, 1965, p. 223).
The unhappy consciousness is
the “alienated soul” reflecting the division of existence into materiality and
transcendent spirituality. This internal disunion is reflected in consciousness
as physical desire (flesh) working against spiritual fidelity (faith). Hegel
viewed this form of Christianity as consciousness projecting onto a
transcendental deity all human qualities of personhood missing in the finite
material world of suffering. The unhappy consciousness is aware of this internal
split that appears similar to the master/slave struggle, but now disunity is
between man and G-d. “…the self is conscious of the gulf between a changing,
inconsistent, fickle self and a changeless, ideal self…this ideal self can be
projected into an other-worldly sphere and identified with absolute perfection,
God considered as existing apart from the world and the finite self. 21
The human consciousness is divided, self-alienated, ‘unhappy’.” (Ibid.,
p. 223). Again, this cleft consciousness is not the living spirit of a
unified life. For Hegel, Christianity is just one modality of the unhappy
consciousness inherited from Judaism.
From this point in the Phenomenology
of Spirit, Hegel continues on to the telos of Absolute knowledge,
Reason, and Freedom.
Of course Kierkegaard would
disagree with all of this Hegelian systematization. As much as he railed against
Hegel's dialectical system, Kierkegaard incorporates dialectical
"contradiction" in his description of the stages of human existence,
but going in the opposite direction! In contradiction to Hegel, Kierkegaard
wrote “Concluding Unscientific Postscript”(1846) as an anti-Hegelian dialectic
which moves not toward universal world-history, but the subjective individual
existent; not to Absolute knowledge, but to uncertainty and faith; not
theoretical integration, but fragmentary disintegration of truth. The Real is the absurd. Human
spirituality cannot just be another object of science. Human existence is
"Unscientific," or dynamically ongoing and fragmentary. Human
existence can only be a
"Postscript," or an unsystematic remainder of any comprehensive
philosophical system.
That was grueling. I need Space Lady...
Synthesize Me
Your eyes are set on stun
You are hotter than the sun
I love to see you shine
Because you really blow my mind
Your heart beats like a drum
It hammers when you're gone
The terms with you and me are up, set us free
Synthesize Me
Hypnotize Me
Humanize Me
Energize Me
Your eyes are set on stun
You are hotter than the sun
I love to see you shine
Because you really blow my mind
Your heart beats like a drum
It hammers when you're gone
The terms with you and me are up, set us free
Synthesize Me
Hypnotize Me
Humanize Me
Energize Me
I've seen the rings of Saturn
And the craters on the Moon
Oceans of Venus in the middle of June
Mirrors of Mercury and Mars' electric skies
Pearls of Neptune in Jupiter's eyes
I heard the old man who plays the lake
Amazing things will make you want to shake
A strange planet a zillion lightyears away
Through a black hole across the milky way
Synthesize Me
Hypnotize Me
Humanize Me
Energize Me
Don't patronize me
Don't glamorize me
Don't paralyze me
You can't surprise me
Harmonize me
Mesmerize me
Solarize me
Synchronise me
Synthesize me
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