Stern R. Hegelian Metaphysics

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210 Hegel and Pragmatism

interest in this connection,⁴ and I think it i s f air to say that this approach has had

nothing like the impact of readings of Hegel adopted by (for example) Marxists,

existentialists, phenomenologists, deconstructionists, and others.

While there is a fascinating historical story to be told here,⁵ in this paper I

want to concentrate more on conceptual issues, and consider if there is some

shared philosophical outlook between Hegel and the pragmatists, or whether

at some crucial point, these positions are always destined to come apart.

This question could be prosecuted at several levels—metaphysical, ethical, and

political, for example—but my main focus will be epistemological, because

it is here (I will argue) that the heart of the pragmatist outlook lies, and

also where it may appear that the greatest disagreement with H egel is to be

found.

Like any complex school of thought that has evolved over time and been

taken up by a number of different thinkers, it is impossible to reduce the

outlook of pragmatism to any simple formula—even a formula proposed by the

pragmatists themselves.⁶ Nonetheless, if one tries to trace the web of pragmatist

belief back to anything like a centre, then it is arguable that there one ﬁnds

a distinctively anti-Cartesian epistemology, out of which all of the rest of

⁴ One honourable exception among Hegel commentators is Kenneth R. Westphal, who in some

respects adopts a pragmatist reading of Hegel. Cf. Hegel’s Epistemology (Indianapolis: Hackett,

2003), 49: ‘Hegel was the original pragmatist, and the lessons reviewed here were learned well by

Peirce, Dewey, and James’. See also his ‘Hegel and Realism’, in John Shook and Joseph Margolis

(eds.), A Companion to Pragmatism (Oxford: Blackwell, 2006), 177–83, and ‘Can Pragmatic Realists

argue Transcendentally?’ in John Shook (ed.), Pragmatic Naturalism and Realism (Amherst, NY:

Prometheus, 2003), 151–75. The issue is also discussed in Terry Pinkard. ‘Was Pragmatism the

Successor to Idealism?’, in Cheryl Misak (ed.), New Pragmatists (Oxford: Oxford University Press,

2007), 142–68.

⁵ For some discussion of the historical issues surrounding the reception of Hegel’s thought by

the classical pragmatists, see Max H. Fisch, ‘Hegel and Peirce’, in J. T. O’Malley, K. W. Algozin,

andF.G.Weiss(eds.),Hegel and the History of Philosophy (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1974),

172–93; repr. in his Peirce, Semeiotic and Pragmatism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press,

1986), 261–82; Daniel J. Cook, ‘James’s ‘‘Ether Mysticism’’ and Hegel’, Journal for the History of

Philosophy, 15 (1977), 309–20; James A. Good, ‘John Dewey’s ‘‘Permanent Hegelian Deposit’’ and

the Exigencies of War’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 44 (2006), 293–313, and ASearchfor

Unity in Diversity: The Permanent Hegelian Deposit in the Philosophy of Dewey (Lanham: Lexington

Books, 2005).

⁶ Cf. Peirce, CP 5.412, EP II, 332, where Peirce tells us the doctrine for which he ‘invented the

name pragmatism’holdsthat‘aconception, that is, the rational purport of a word or other conception,

lies exclusively in its conceivable bearing upon the conduct of life; so that, since obviously nothing

that might not result from experiment can have any direct bearing upon conduct, if one can deﬁne

accurately all the conceivable experimental phenomena which the afﬁrmation or denial of a concept

could imply, one will have therein a complete deﬁnition of the concept, and there is nothing more to

it’. And cf. James, Pragmatism, 28: ‘The pragmatic method ...is to try to interpret each notion by

tracing its respective practical consequences’.

Hegel and Pragmatism 211

the pragmatic outlook can be seen to develop. Although this epistemology has

its antecedents—most particularly, perhaps, in the ‘constructive scepticism’ of

Pierre Gassendi and Marin Mersenne, and in the ‘commonsensism’ of Thomas

Reid—the pragmatists were to develop its implications to the widest and furthest

degree, while it is in following out those implications in different ways that the

divergence between the pragmatist thinkers themselves can best be understood.

The ﬁrst step in this direction is taken by Peirce, who challenged the Cartesian

starting point of modern philosophy, encapsulated in Descartes’s famous ‘method

of doubt’. At the heart of this method, as standardly conceived,⁷ is the thought

that if philosophy is to reach anything like knowledge, then it must begin by

suspending belief in anything that is not certain, where it turns out (Descartes

thinks) that this encompasses most but not quite everything we believe: from

out of the rubble some beliefs are said to survive (the belief in my own existence

and the existence of God), out of which the ediﬁce of knowledge can be rebuilt,

this time on secure foundations. Descartes thus makes central a number of the

ruling intuitions of epistemology, namely that knowledge requires foundations

that are certain; that all our ordinary beliefs can be rendered doubtful by the

sceptic; that each individual is required to look for secure foundations working

on his own; that before it can be used, any faculty of knowledge must be shown

to be reliable; and that the burden of proof on these matters lies with us and not

the sceptic.

In a crucial early paper, ‘Some Consequences of Four Incapacities’ of 1868,

Peirce contrasts the Cartesian approach with that of the Scholastics, and declares:

‘Now without wishing to return to scholasticism, it seems to me that modern

science and modern logic require us to stand upon a very different platform from

this’.⁸ Firstly, in contrast to Descartes’s view that ‘philosophy must begin with

universal doubt’, Peirce declares:

We cannot begin with complete doubt. We must begin with all the prejudices which we

actually have when we enter upon the study of philosophy. These prejudices are not to

be dispelled by a maxim, for they are the things which it does not occur to us can be

questioned. Hence this initial scepticism will be a mere self-deception, and not real doubt;

and no one who follows the Cartesian method will ever be satisﬁed until he has formally

recovered all those beliefs which in form he has given up. It is, therefore, as useless a

preliminary as going to the North Pole would be in order to get to Constantinople by

coming down regularly upon a meridian. A person may, it is true, in the course of his

studies, ﬁnd reason to doubt what he began by believing; but in that case he doubts

⁷ For the sake of the discussion in this paper, I will take this standard reading for granted, and not

try to defend it, as I am more interested in how opposition to this view led to the development of

pragmatism, than in whether that opposition succeeded in hitting its historical target; but for a very

interesting recent reading of Descartes that puts that standard reading in question, see David Owens,

‘Scepticisms: Descartes and Hume’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 74 (2000), 119–42, and

‘Descartes’s Use of Doubt’, in Janet Broughton and John Carriero (eds.), The Blackwell Companion

to Descartes (Oxford: Blackwell, 2008), 164–78.

⁸ Peirce, CP 5.265, EP I, 28.

212 Hegel and Pragmatism

because he has a positive reason for it, and not on account of the Cartesian maxim. Let

us not pretend to doubt in philosophy what we do not doubt in our hearts.⁹

Secondly, Peirce objects to Descartes’s claim that the property of being clearly

and distinctly conceived can be used as a criterion of truth, because this leads

to a kind of rationalistic intuitionism which is perniciously individualistic and

immediate: if I claim to see clearly and distinctly that p is true, who are you to

challenge me, and why should I provide any reasons for believing p beyond this

experience of its clearness and d istinctness as an idea? In fact, Peirce thinks, the

test of truth that science actually uses is agreement between inquirers, so that

we need to see ourselves as part of a community of investigators, within which

doubts arise and need to be answered through the challenges of people who see

the world in a different way, rather than the abstract ‘sceptic’, who does not exist

in real life at all.

Thirdly, Descartes is also mistaken that a successful inquiry can be conducted

in a foundationalist manner, by attempting to start from some unshakeable

premiss and arguing from there to further conclusions. In fact, Peirce claims, the

sciences do not proceed in this way at all, but reach their conclusions by adopting

a more holistic and coherentist approach: ‘Its reasoning should not form a chain

which is no stronger than its weakest link, but a cable whose ﬁbres may be ever

so slender, provided they are sufﬁciently numerous and intimately connected’.¹⁰

Finally, Peirce argues that the Cartesian principle is inimical to science because

certain facts remain unexplained, by being traced back to the inscrutable will

of God.

There are, I think, a number of notable and fateful elements to Peirce’s

discussion here, including: his distinction between real and artiﬁcial doubt; his

claim that fallibilism is not the same as scepticism, in the sense that I can hold

abeliefandrecognizethatImightcometohavereasontoquestionitinthe

⁹ Peirce, CP 5.265, EP I, 28–9 . Cf. also ‘Some philosophers have imagined that to start

an inquiry it was only necessary to utter a question or set it down upon paper, and have even

recommended us to begin our studies with questioning everything! But the mere putting of a

proposition into the interrogative form does not stimulate the mind to any struggle after belief.

There must be a real and living doubt, and without this all discussion is idle’ (Peirce CP 5.376, EP

I, 115); and ‘Philosophers of very diverse stripes propose that philosophy shall take its start from

one or another state of mind in which no man, least of all a beginner in philosophy, actually is.

One proposes that you shall begin by doubting everything, and says that there is only one thing

that you cannot doubt, as if doubting were ‘‘as easy as lying.’’ Another proposes that we should

begin by observing ‘‘the ﬁrst impressions of sense,’’ forgetting that our very percepts are the results

of cognitive elaboration. But in truth, there is but one state of mind from which you can ‘‘set out,’’

namely, the very state of mind in which you actually ﬁnd yourself at the time that you do ‘‘set

out,’’—a state in which you are laden with an immense mass of cognition already formed, of which

you cannot divest yourself if you would; and who knows whether, if you could, you would not have

made all knowledge impossible to yourself? Do you call it doubting towritedownonapieceof

paper that you doubt? If so, doubt has nothing to do with any serious business. But do not make

believe; if pedantry has not eaten all reality out of you, recognize, as you must, that there is much

that you do not doubt, in the least’ (Peirce CP 5.416, EP II, 335–6).

¹⁰ Peirce CP 5.265, EP I, 29.

Hegel and Pragmatism 213

future as a result of further inquiries, without on that basis being required to

doubt that belief now; his claim that while Cartesianism may set out to oppose

dogmatism, it in fact invites it, by ending up with an individualistic criterion

of truth that rules out reasonable disagreement between inquirers; and his claim

that while Cartesianism claims to provide a foundation to the sciences and to

therefore legitimate them, it is in fact at odds with the methods of communual

and holistic inquiry that those sciences themselves actually employ.

These elements are fateful, because so much of what has come to be associated

with pragmatism can be traced back to the central shift in perspective that

they embody, where at the centre of this shift lies the distinction between real

and artiﬁcial doubt. Four strands in pragmatist thinking can be seen to start

from here.

Firstly, central to Peirce’s doctrine of real doubt is the idea that this only

occurs in the context of some inquiry that is ongoing: it is real, precisely because

something happens or is said that causes a challenge to what you already believe

or take for granted, in a way that brings about a mental ‘disturbance’. But then,

Peirce holds, it is perfectly legitimate for you to resolve that disturbance by

thinking about it in the light of other things you believe, rather than suspending

your beliefs altogether, the abstract possibility of global error notwithstanding.

This view then leads to a Neurathian picture of inquiry that is at odds with the

Cartesian approach: while any belief may be questioned, we are not required to

question all our beliefs at once, as a way of testing our belief system from the

outside, so we are like the sailor at sea who ﬁnds that some planks of his ship are

rotten, but can rely on others while he repairs them, without needing to go into

port. This idea was developed further by Dewey in his account of inquiry, and

lies at the heart of Rorty’s more radical historicism and perspectivalism, which it

may or may not entail.¹¹

Secondly, the idea of real doubt generates an impatience with abstract

and empty theorizing, an impatience that is characteristic of the pragmatist

temperament, where this theorizing has no ‘cash value’ in our lives: faced with

Cartesian scepticism, none of us change what we do, carrying on much as we did

before. This phenomenon had been noted by philosophers previously, of course;

but there had still been the suggestion that our inability to be moved by sceptical

doubts betokened a lack of full rationality on our part, a triumph of instinct and

habit over reason and self-control.¹² The pragmatists, however, went further, in

¹¹ Cf. Cheryl Misak, ‘Introduction’, in Cheryl Misal (ed.), New Pragmatists (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 2007), 1–6, at 4: ‘Neurath’s image of having to rebuild our boat of knowledge

plank by plank while at sea might well be thought of as the insight at the heart of Peirce, James,

and Dewey. Peirce’s own metaphor is strikingly similar: science ‘‘is not standing upon the bedrock

of fact. It is walking upon a bog, and can only say, this ground seems to hold for the present. Here

I will stay until it begins to give way’’ (CP 5. 589)’.

¹² This can be seen as the moral drawn by Hume, although the sceptical reasoning, which we

forget as soon as we leave the study, is for him not Cartesian, which he also views as groundless

214 Hegel and Pragmatism

arguing against any such dichotomy, and came to see such capacities as central to

our epistemic success, in furnishing us with the ability to conduct our inquiries. It

is arguable, therefore, that with Peirce’s doctrine of real doubt and thus with the

conviction that (as Dewey put it) ‘uncertainty is primarily a practical matter’,¹³

we ﬁnd the beginning of pragmatism’s characteristic emphasis on the need to

look at the impact of ideas on our actual behaviour and lives.

Thirdly, this focus on real doubt led Peirce and subsequent pragmatists to look

seriously at how inquiry is actually carried out, particularly in the sciences. The

suggestion is that philosophers, by entertaining their peculiar kinds of doubt,

miss how doubt in fact plays the role it does in our investigations, and the

steps that we in fact take to deal with it, which is by cooperating with others,

performing tests on the world around us, reﬂecting on our other beliefs, seeking

convergence over time, and remaining open-minded as regards the beliefs we

have without at the same time succumbing to scepticism.

Fourthly, Peirce’s doctrine of real doubt plays a crucial role in the way in

which metaphysics comes to be conceived, where it can no longer be seen as a

possible ‘ﬁrst philosophy’ that might offer us indubitable truths, known a priori.

To some, like Peirce, this meant a liberation for metaphysics, which could now

be conducted in the same fallibilistic, open-minded, cooperative spirit as the

sciences, and in a way that takes them into account; while for others, like Dewey

in some moods and Rorty in all, it meant a liberation from metaphysics, as a

fruitless and unnecessary search for a transcendent beyond that pragmatism has

shown that we can do without. Associated with these issues is the question of

how far the goal of truth is also part of the metaphysical quest to leave behind the

uncertainties of the ordinary world, so that the kind of truth the sceptic aspires

to is inevitably made unattainable. It then becomes a matter of debate within

pragmatism whether this means realist notions of truth should be abandoned (as

Rorty claims), or whether they can still be retained in a suitably modiﬁed form

(as pragmatists closer to Peirce will usually claim).

As this brief sketch suggests, there is plenty of room for divergence and

disagreement within the pragmatist tradition on issues like the viability of

metaphysics, the ambitions of philosophy, and truth as the goal of inquiry.¹⁴

‘antecedent’ scepticism, but more substantive ‘consequent’ scepticism, based for example on what

philosophy tells us about the indirectness of our sense experience. Cf. David Hume, An Enquiry

Concerning Human Understanding,3rdedn.,ed.L.A.Selby-Bigge,rev.P.H.Nidditch(Oxford:

Oxford University Press, 1975), sect. XII, 149–68, and A Treatise of Human Nature, 2nd edn., ed.

L. A. Selby-Bigge, rev. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1978), Pt. IV, 180–274.

¹³ John Dewey, The Quest for Certainty (New York: Minton, Balch & Co., 1929), 223.

¹⁴ For further discussion of these divergences, see for example H. O. Mounce, The Two

Pragmatisms: From Peirce to Rorty (London and New York: Routledge, 1997); Nicholas Rescher,

‘Perspectives on Pragmatism’, in Kenneth R. Westphal (ed.), Pragmatism, Reason, and Norms

(New York: Fordham University Press, 1998), 1–16; Mark Migotti, ‘Recent Work in Pragmatism:

Revolution or Reform in the Theory of Knowledge?’, Philosophical Books, 29 (1988), 65–73; Susan

Haack, ‘ ‘‘We Pragmatists ...’’: Peirce and Rorty in Conversation’, reprinted in her Manifesto of a

Hegel and Pragmatism 215

Nonetheless, I think it should also be clear that these divergences are from a

common starting point, which can be traced back to Peirce’s anti-Cartesian

conception of inquiry; which direction one takes from there is a matter of what

one takes the full implications of that conception to be, and thus whether one

thinks Peirce himself best understood these implications, or whether they were

better grasped by his successors.

If we therefore take Peirce’s anti-Cartesianism to be the starting point of prag-

matism, this gives us a clear way of gauging how far Hegel’s position may be

thought of in pragmatist terms: namely, did Hegel share this starting point? If

he did not, it would seem hard to view the further details of his position in

a pragmatist manner, and any similarities would be at best superﬁcial (such as

the conceptual realism he shares with Peirce, or the anti-dualism he shares with

Dewey, or the focus on historical change he shares with Rorty). At the same time,

as we have noted, pragmatists who have shared this starting point have then gone

in different directions, so the orientation of Hegel’s thought could still be called

pragmatist, even if from here his thought differs from that of some of the prag-

matists, as could also be said of the way in which the pragmatists diverge amongst

themselves. The interpretative issue, then, is not whether Hegel was or was not a

metaphysician, or a realist about truth, or a believer in intellectual progress (for

example), because as we have seen, these are all matters on which the pragmatists

have disagreed; whatever Hegel’s views on these questions, the crucial issue is

whether Hegel’s stance here can be traced back to something resembling Peirce’s

distinctive response to Cartesian epistemology, and thus whether this Peircean

approach is one he can be said to share with the pragmatist tradition as a whole.

It can be argued, however, that if we take Hegel’s systematic claims and

intentions seriously, and if we view him as the genuine heir to Kant, then it must

be accepted that Hegel’s position has a fundamentally Cartesian aspect; and it

would therefore follow that Hegel should be seen not as an ally of pragmatism,

but as one of its enemies, at least as I have presented it. We therefore need to

look carefully at this sort of interpretation of Hegel, in order to see whether a

case can indeed be made for claiming that his approach is fundamentally at odds

with pragmatism’s guiding idea.

A reading of this kind, which sees Hegel’s position in broadly Cartesian

terms, has been presented in recent years by Stephen Houlgate.¹⁵ Central

Passionate Moderate: Unfashionable Essays (Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1998),

31–47.

¹⁵ See in particular An Introduction to Hegel: Freedom, Truth and History, 2nd edn. (Oxford:

Blackwell, 2005), and The Opening of Hegel’s ‘Logic’ (West Lafayette, Indiana: Purdue University

216 Hegel and Pragmatism

to Houlgate’s approach is the importance he attaches to Hegel’s claims to

presuppositionlessness in his philosophical work, where Houlgate understands

these claims in a Cartesian manner. Houlgate thus places emphasis on passages

such as the following:

All ...presuppositions or assumptions [Voraussetzungen oder Vorurteile] must equally be

given up when we enter into the Science, whether they are taken from representation

or from thinking; for it is this Science, in which all determinations of this sort must

ﬁrst be investigated, and in which their meaning and validity like that of their antitheses

must be [re]cognised ....Science should be preceded by universal doubt,i.e.bytotal

presuppositionlessness [die g

anzliche Voraussetzungslosigkeit].¹⁶

According to Houlgate, what this shows is that Hegel was committed to

questioning all assumptions, because like Descartes he holds that in a rational

scientiﬁc inquiry (which is what Hegel means by ‘Science’ or Wissenschaft), none

of these assumptions can be taken for granted where, also like Descartes, Hegel

believed that this questioning had a limit; however, this limit is not that of

the cogito, but of thought having being. Thus, Houlgate writes: ‘The path of

‘‘universal doubt’’ that leads into Hegel’s science of logic is clearly very similar to

that taken by Descartes. Hegel’s conclusion, however, is not ‘‘I think, therefore

I am’’ but rather ‘‘thinking, therefore is’’ ’.¹⁷ This Cartesian approach thus takes

us, Houlgate argues, to the category of pure being, from which thought itself then

proceeds to the further categories of nothing, becoming, determinate being, and

all the rest. Such is Hegel’s commitment to presuppositionlessness, on Houlgate’s

account, that Hegel doesn’t even assume any particular method (dialectical or

otherwise) in moving from one category to the next, as to do so would be to

Press, 2006). For related papers, see ‘Response to Professor Horstmann’, in Proceedings of the

Eighth International Kant Congress, ed. H. Robinson, 2 vols (Milwaukee: Marquette University

Press, 1995), 1.3: 1017–23; ‘Schelling’s Critique of Hegel’s Science of Logic’, The Review of

Metaphysics, 53 (1999), 99–128; ‘Substance, Causality, and the Question of Method in Hegel’s

Science of Logic’, in Sally Sedgwick (ed.), The Reception of Kant’s Critical Philosophy: Fichte, Schelling

and Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 232–52. Other writers who also

make the issue of presuppositionlessness central include William Maker (particularly in Philosophy

Without Foundations: Rethinking Hegel (Albany: SUNY Press, 1994)) and Richard Dien Winﬁeld

(particularly in Reason and Justice (Albany: SUNY Press, 1988) and Overcoming Foundations: Studies

in Systematic Philosophy (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989)). There is also an interesting

discussion of some of the issues raised here in William F. Bristow, Hegel and the Transformation of

Philosophical Critique (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007).

¹⁶ Hegel, EL, §78, 124 [Werke, VIII: 167–8]. This passage is discussed by Houlgate in

Introduction to Hegel, 30, and Hegel’s ‘Logic’, 29. In this connection, Houlgate also cites Hegel, SL,

70 (Werke, V: 68–9): ‘the beginning must be an absolute, or what is synonymous here, an abstract

beginning; and so it may not presuppose anything, must not be mediated by anything nor have a

ground; rather it is to be itself the ground of the entire science’; and he refers to G. W. F. Hegel,

Lectures on the History of Philosophy, 3 vols, ed. Robert F. Brown, trans. Robert F. Brown, J. M.

Stewart, and H. S. Harris (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990), III: 137–8 (Vorlesungen

¨uber die Geschichte der Philosophie, Teil 4, Philosophie des Mittelalters und der neueren Zeit, ed. Pierre

Garniron and Walter Jaeschke (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1989), 92).

¹⁷ Houlgate, Hegel’s ‘Logic’, 31–2. See also ibid., 82, 128, and Introduction to Hegel, 31–2.

Hegel and Pragmatism 217

make another unwarranted assumption; rather, his approach is just to ‘look on’

and see what happens.¹⁸

In presenting Hegel as Cartesian in this way, Houlgate also offers an account

of Hegel’s motivations, where he argues that Kantian considerations made this

Cartesian approach seem necessary to any philosophical outlook that considered

itself fully modern: for Houlgate believes that from Hegel’s perspective,¹⁹ it is

Kant who held that it is only by engaging in a critical philosophy aimed at

rooting out all unquestioned assumptions that we can be free as thinkers and

fully self-determining in our view of the world, in a way that is distinctive of a

truly modern outlook that takes no tradition, authority, or givens for granted:

What Hegel learns from Descartes and Kant is that human thought frees us from

arbitrary authority by subjecting everything to the scrutiny of self-determining reason.

The connection between thought—speciﬁcally philosophical thought—and freedom

was of course made by both Plato and Aristotle, too; but it is in the post-Reformation

period that free, self-grounding thought comes to be recognised as the highest principle

for humanity. It is in the modern period, therefore, when human consciousness at last

recognises that it is the essential nature of all humanity to be free, that the demand that

thought should make itself as explicitly autonomous and self-grounding as it can becomes

most urgent.²⁰

For Houlgate therefore, after Kant, the Cartesian project is seen to be more than

just the rather narrow attempt to ‘provide solid foundations for the sciences’;

it now becomes part of a much more ambitious agenda, which is to ‘liberate

human consciousness’, by developing ‘Descartes’s idea that philosophy may take

nothing for granted in its search for truth and that thought is the principle of

doubt or criticism that frees us from the authority of habitual but unwarranted

belief’.²¹

Seen from this perspective, Houlgate argues, Hegel may be viewed as attempt-

ing to complete this Kantian project of radical self-criticism, which Kant himself

failed to achieve in so far as he took too much for granted concerning the nature

of thought and its categories, with the result that he failed to provide a proper

deduction of them (as Fichte and others had also argued):

Kant simply bases his understanding of the categories on the functions of judgment

traditionally assumed in formal logic ....Kant thus does not subject the categories

themselves to critical examination but retains—without proving that it is necessary to

do so—what Hegel regards as a quite traditional (Aristotelian) understanding of them.

¹⁸ See Houlgate, Hegel’s ‘Logic’, 32–5, 51–3, 60–2.

¹⁹ Houlgate allows that this view of Kant may not quite ﬁt Kant’s own conception of critical

philosophy: ‘Critique [for Kant] thus shows how metaphysics is possible; it does not call for anything

like a thoroughgoing self-criticism, either explicitly or implicitly’. Nonetheless, Houlgate argues that

this approach is still ‘implicit in Kant’s philosophy after all’: ‘It is implicit, however, not in Kant’s

own conception of critique as such but in the demand for a rigorous derivation of the categories that

is itself implicit in Kant’s recognition that they have their source in the intellect’ (Hegel’s ‘Logic’, 27).

²⁰ Houlgate, An Introduction to Hegel, 27–8. ²¹ Ibid., 27.

218 Hegel and Pragmatism

In this respect, Kant’s critique of pure reason remains, for Hegel—like the thought of

the ‘older metaphysicians,’ Leibniz and Wolff—‘an uncritical thinking’ ....A properly

critical thinking, by contrast, would suspend the traditional conception of the categories

and determine anew how the categories are to be understood.²²

Houlgate argues, therefore, that just as much as Kant, and indeed Descartes,

Hegel deserves to be seen as a thoroughly modern philosopher, for whom

self-critical thinking is a fundamental requirement not only for certainty and

the kind of foundations needed by the sciences, but also for human free-

dom and dignity; and in so far as he took this project further and more

deeply than even his predecessors managed to do, Houlgate believes that

Hegel should be thought of as providing ‘the quintessentially modern philos-

ophy’.²³

III

We have therefore explored Houlgate’s claim, that ‘[t]he best way to understand

Hegel is to see him as exemplifying a Cartesian willingness to suspend his

cherished beliefs and habits of thought, and to accept as true only what reason

itself determines to be true’;²⁴ and we have also seen in the ﬁrst section how

pragmatism might be deﬁned in terms of its suspicions concerning the need for

any such ‘Cartesian willingness’. Houlgate’s reading of Hegel would therefore

seem to render any pragmatist appropriation of Hegelian thought thoroughly

misconceived, notwithstanding any superﬁcial similarities that may be found

between them.

And yet, on the other hand, there is a crucial place in Hegel’s work where he

appears to draw something very like the Peircean distinction between real and

artiﬁcial doubt, which I have claimed is so central to pragmatism. This occurs in

the Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit, and in a way that I believe makes

clear his fundamental opposition to Cartesianism in any narrow epistemological

sense, and to that extent at least shows him to be anti-Cartesian. We therefore

need to consider this text in some detail.

The Introduction begins by discussing what Hegel says may seem a ‘natural

assumption’, that before we begin our inquiries, we ﬁrst investigate our cognitive

methods and capacities, ﬁrstly because some capacities may be better for knowing

about some things than others, and secondly because otherwise we may ﬁnd

ourselves being led astray, so that unless we proceed in this manner, ‘we might

grasp clouds of error instead of the heaven of truth’.²⁵ It is clear, I believe, that

here Hegel has the outlook of thinkers like Descartes, Locke and of course Kant

²² Houlgate, Hegel’s ‘Logic’, 26. Cf. also An Introduction to Hegel, 31.

²³ Houlgate, Hegel’s ‘Logic’, 39. ²⁴ Houlgate, An Introduction to Hegel, 39.

²⁵ Hegel, PS,46[Werke, III: 68].

Hegel and Pragmatism 219

in mind. In a passage that Hegel cites elsewhere,²⁶ Locke famously recommends

this procedure, which requires that we ‘take a Survey of our own Understandings,

examine our own Powers, and see to what Things they [are] adapted’;²⁷ and

although Locke is cited here, Descartes expresses a similar view when he writes:

‘Now, to prevent our being in a state of permanent uncertainty about the powers

of the mind, and to prevent our mental labours being misguided and haphazard,

we ought once in our life carefully to inquire as to what sort of knowledge

human reason is capable of attaining, before we set about acquiring knowledge

of things in particular’. ²⁸ Hegel equally sees Kant’s critical project as sharing

essentially the same outlook, according to which we must start in philosophy by

ﬁrst examining the scope of our intellectual capacities, so that ‘[t]he very ﬁrst

[task] in the Kantian philosophy, therefore, is for thinking to investigate how far

it is capable of cognition’, which meant that for Kant, ‘the faculty of cognition

was to be investigated before cognition began’.²⁹

While allowing that there is something intuitive and appealing about this

approach, Hegel nonetheless makes clear that he thinks it is potentially disastrous,

because in fact it leads inevitably to a focus not on the object of our inquiries, but

on our cognitive capacities as a kind of instrument or medium by which we are

put in touch with those objects; but once we think of our cognitive capacities in

this way, the suspicion then emerges that our cognitive capacities stand between

us and reality, as an instrument or medium that distorts how things are. Thus,

starting from the ‘feeling of uneasiness’ that perhaps we should put our cognitive

capacities to the test before we begin our investigations, we end up believing that

we can never really be conﬁdent that those capacities are not leading us astray.

Hegel argues that it then becomes impossible to remedy this ‘evil’, for example

by trying to dispel the effects of any distortion by trying to adjust for it, as unless

we already knew what reality is like, how could any such adjustment be made?

On the one hand, the critical philosopher cannot just allow that our cognitive

capacities are accurate, as this would render his investigation of these capacities

superﬂuous; on the other hand, if he does not allow this, then there seems to

be no prospect of determining what we should do to ensure that our inquiries

succeed using those capacities, leading inexorably to a sceptical conclusion.

Hegel claims, therefore, that the worry with which we began—that without

this investigation of our cognitive capacities ‘we might grasp clouds of error

instead of the heaven of truth’—has in fact ended up seeming to put rational

inquiry or ‘science’ out of our reach. But, he argues, in fact rational inquiry never

²⁶ Hegel, FK, 68–9 [Werke III: 303–4].

²⁷ John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, ed. P. H. Nidditch (Oxford: Oxford

University Press, 1975), ch. I, §6, 47.

²⁸ Ren

e Descartes, ‘Rules for the Direction of the Mind’, in The Philosophical Writings of

Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch, 2 vols (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 1985), I: 30.

²⁹ Hegel, EL, §41Z,p.82[Werke, VIII: 114].