Stern R. Hegelian Metaphysics

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220 Hegel and Pragmatism

does grind to a halt in this way, as in reality we just get on with trying to ﬁnd

out about the world without being much moved by this fear that perhaps we are

going astray, which suggests that perhaps it is a worry that we can legitimately

ignore:

Meanwhile, if the fear of falling into error sets up a mistrust of Science, which in the

absence of such scruples gets on with the work itself, and actually cognizes something, it

is hard to see why we should not turn round and mistrust this very mistrust. Should we

not be concerned as to whether this fear of error is not just the error itself?³⁰

The point here does appear to be a Peircean one: The Cartesian philosopher

insists on placing a burden on the inquirer to reﬂect on his capacities prior to

inquiry (what Hume identiﬁed as Descartes’s ‘antecedent’ scepticism),³¹ while in

fact it is pointless to feel any such burden: we would do better to just get on with

inquiring, and if this goes well we will know our cognitive capacities are in order

anyway, and if it goes badly, there is no reason to think this prior investigation

would have helped. As the Cartesian cannot really tell us in advance either way,

or do anything to improve our prospects of success, it seems fruitless to be moved

by his concerns, and better to just ‘get on with the work itself’.

However, it might perhaps be argued by the Cartesian philosopher, that we

should conduct this scrutiny of our cognitive capacities not in order to prevent us

wasting our time or going wrong in our investigations, but in order to avoid the

epistemic sin of making unwarranted presuppositions, namely the presupposition

that our cognitive capacities are all in order and capable of getting us to the

truth—for surely it would be highly presumptuous of us simply to assume this?

Hegel argues, however, that to motivate his investigations into our capacities, to

make this a rational thing for us to undertake, the Cartesian philosopher also

makes an assumption about how our capacities stand between usandtheworldin

some way, raising the spectre that they could easily cut us off from the way things

are, while also assuming that we could have knowledge merely of ‘appearances’;

so this position also involves some prior commitments, which, until we go ahead

and begin our inquiries and see how far they get, cannot be substantiated:

³⁰ Hegel, PS,47[Werke III: 69].

³¹ Cf. Hume, Enquiry, sect. XII, 149–50:

‘There is a species of scepticism, antecedent to all study and philosophy, which is much inculcated

by Des Cartes and others, as a sovereign preservative against error and precipitate judgement. It

recommends a universal doubt, not only of all our former opinions and principles, but also of

our very faculties; of whose veracity, say they, we must assure ourselves by a chain of reasoning,

deduced from some original principle, which cannot possibly be fallacious or deceitful. But neither

is there any such original principle, which has a prerogative above others, that are self-evident and

convincing: or if there were, could we advance a step beyond it, but by the use of those very

faculties, of which we are supposed to be already difﬁdent. The Cartesian doubt, therefore, were it

ever possible to be attained by any human creature (as it plainly is not) would be entirely incurable;

and no reasoning could ever bring it to a state of assurance and conviction upon any subject’.

Again, I am assuming for the sake of this discussion that this sort of reading of Descartes is correct;

but for doubts on this score, see Owens, ‘Scepticisms: Descartes and Hume’, 124–7.

Hegel and Pragmatism 221

Indeed, this fear [of error] takes something—a great deal in fact—for granted as truth,

supporting its scruples and inferences on what is itself in need of prior scrutiny to see if it

is true. To be speciﬁc, it takes for granted certain ideas about cognition as an instrument

and as a medium, and assumes that there is a difference between ourselves and this cognition.

Above all, it presupposes that the Absolute stands on one side and cognition on the

other, independent and separated from it, and yet is something real; or in other words, it

presupposes that cognition which, since it is excluded from the Absolute, is surely outside

of the truth as well, is nevertheless true, an assumption whereby what calls itself fear of

error reveals itself rather as fear of truth.³²

Thus, while it may claim to be the most rational procedure because it is without

presuppositions, Hegel argues that the critical approach is not, and makes no

fewer presuppositions than the sort of position that just ‘gets on with the work

itself’, rather than tarrying on the brink.³³

³² Hegel, PS,47[Werke III: 69–70].

³³ Houlgate, I think, would want to put the Hegelian position even more strongly than this. On

my reading, Hegel’s point is that at the outset of any inquiry, in some ways both he and the critical

philosopher are taking something for granted (the Hegelian, that our cognitive capacities are capable

of taking us to the truth, so that these inquiries are worth s tarting; the critical philosopher that our

faculties stand between us and the world, so require investigation before we can trust them); but

the Hegelian approach is to be preferred because that way we at least stand some chance of actually

getting at the truth because we will begin inquiring, whereas on the critical approach we will just

get stuck in a paralysing self-doubt. The point about presuppositions, then, is the relatively weak

one, that if we thought that the critical approach is nonetheless the one to be preferred because it

involves no assumptions, this would be a spurious preference because (Hegel claims) in fact both

sides are on a par on this issue. Houlgate, however, thinks that Hegel is not just arguing that

neither side can use the point about presuppositions in its support; rather he thinks Hegel is arguing

that his position is presuppositionless in a way that the critical position is not, so that this tells

in its favour. Houlgate’s grounds for this seem to be that if we attempt to think in an altogether

presuppositionless way, we will not only abandon the belief that thought and being are distinct

because we will see that this rests on certain assumptions; having let go of any assumptions, we

will come to see that if we really want to think presuppositionlessly, we must think that they are

one. But, my worry here is that from the fact that accepting one position involves making some

assumptions, it does not follow that accepting its opposite involves making none. Cf. Houlgate,

Introduction to Hegel, 44–5: ‘Hegel’s claim is not that being is a mere postulate of thought [i.e. that

we may legitimately assume that thought and being coincide]. On the contrary, he argues that, for

the fully self-critical philosopher who suspends all his determinate preconceptions about thought

and being, our thought of being cannot be anything less than the thought of being itself. Thought

cannot be assumed necessarily to fall short of what there is—to be conﬁned, for example, to the

realm of conceivable possibility—but must be understood to be the awareness and disclosure of

being as such. This may seem to some to be presumptuous. How can thought be certain that it is

able to bridge the gap between itself and being and disclose the true nature of what there is? From

the point of view of the self-critical philosopher, however, this question is illegitimate, for we are not

entitled to presuppose that there is such a gap in the ﬁrst place. The fully self-critical philosopher

may not assume that being is anything beyond what thought itself is aware of. Consequently, he or

she may not assume that thought is aware of anything less than being itself’. (Cf. also Houlgate,

Hegel’s ‘Logic’, 130.) Houlgate might be right that the philosopher who is ‘fully self-critical’, and

who thus wants to think making no assumptions whatsoever, will not feel entitled to believe that

there is a gap between thought and being, because he will see that this requires us to make certain

presuppositions about the nature of thought and being; but even if this is so, from this it doesn’t

follow that the fully self-critical philosopher who is attempting to think presuppositionlessly will

therefore see that he can start without any assumptions if he believes there is no such gap; rather,

222 Hegel and Pragmatism

Moreover, elsewhere he argues that this Cartesian approach is of dubious

coherence. For, on the one hand, it motivates its reﬂective investigation of our

capacities with the concern that perhaps they might lead us astray; but on the

other hand it, in order to investigate those capacities, it must use these or other

cognitive methods,³⁴ which either have their efﬁcacy taken for granted at this

second level (in which case why not take their efﬁcacy for granted at the ﬁrst

level?), or themselves require another level of reﬂective scrutiny (in which case,

how will the regress of reﬂection ever be brought to an end?). So, this approach

is either redundant or impossible, and as absurd as someone who tries to learn to

swim without getting into the water for fear of drowning, much as the critical

philosopher tries to learn how best to acquire knowledge without actually using

any of his cognitive capacities, for fear of making mistakes.³⁵

Hegel makes plain in the Phenomenology that he sees a kind of bad faith in

the Cartesian position, which instead of getting on with actually trying to ﬁnd

things out about the world, and thus accomplish ‘the hard work of Science’

or rational inquiry, just goes about ‘giving the impression of working seriously

and zealously’, while really giving us ‘excuses which create the incapacity of

Science’. Hegel therefore insists that ‘[w]e could, with better justiﬁcation, simply

spare ourselves the trouble of paying any attention whatever to such ideas and

locutions; for they are intended to ward off Science itself, and constitute merely

an empty appearance of knowing, which vanishes immediately as soon as Science

comes on the scene’.³⁶ Hegel thus seems to think that the doubts raised by the

Cartesian sceptic, which motivate his investigation of our cognitive capacities,

are fraudulent and empty, and can be brushed aside in favour of actually getting

on with the business of inquiry.

However, Hegel makes clear that this does not mean that even ‘Science’ can

assume it will simply be able to assert that its view of the world is the right one

with no further ado; for, any such position will have real competitors to deal

with, which see the world differently, and with which it must engage if it is not

to be merely dogmatic and just insist on the correctness of its position without

any satisfactory argument:

might he not plausibly think that if one is committed to starting without any presuppositions, given

that this is a substantive issue, one should suspend judgement on it altogether?

³⁴ Cf. Hegel, EL, §41Z, 82 [Werke, VIII: 114]: ‘this process of investigation is itself a process

of cognition’; cf. also ibid., §10, 34 [Werke, VIII: 54]: ‘the investigation of cognition cannot take

place in any other way than cognitively’.

³⁵ Cf. ibid., §10, 34 [Werke, VIII: 54]; and also Lectures on the History of Philosophy III: 263

(Vorlesungen, 182): ‘...in the Kantian and the other subsequent philosophies, the concern most

particularly expressed was that knowledge, cognitio n, or subjective cognition should be investigated.

It appeared plausible that we should ﬁrst investigate cognitive knowing, the instrument, although

there is an old story told of the σχολαστιχός [Scholastic] who would not enter the water until he

had learned to swim. To investigate cognitive knowing means to know it cognitively: but how one

is to know without knowing is not stated’.

³⁶ Hegel, PS,48[Werke, III: 71].

Hegel and Pragmatism 223

For, when confronted with a knowledge that is without truth, Science can neither merely

reject it as an ordinary way of looking at things, while assuring us that its Science is

a quite different sort of cognition for which that ordinary knowledge is of no account

whatever ....By [this] assurance, Science would be declaring its power to lie simply in

its being; but the untrue knowledge likewise appeals to the fact that it is;andassures

us that for it Science is of no account. One bare assurance is worth just as much as

another.³⁷

Similarly, as Hegel makes clear elsewhere, we may ﬁnd that our investigations

actually do get into difﬁculties, in which case i t will not be the empty Cartesian

‘fear of error’ that motivates us to look at the way in which we think about

the world, but what seem to be genuine problems (such as Kant’s antinomies,

for example, where these apparently intractable metaphysical questions make

it reasonable to examine our ability to conduct inquiries of this sort). In such

circumstances, Hegel allows, the critical project makes good sense, by recognizing

that traditional forms of philosophizing were unable to make any headway,

which is what made ‘subjecting the determinations of the older metaphysics to

investigation’ in the Kantian manner ‘a very important step’.³⁸

Hegel fully understands, therefore, that reﬂection on the way we think and

the categories we use can be shown to be necessary in a legitimate way, as we

are faced with others who think about the world differently, or as we come up

against apparent obstacles to our inquiries, where Hegel’s method of ‘immanent

critique’ is offered as a way of handling these challenges: rather than dogmatically

asserting that a given view is correct, it must be shown that its competitors have

their own internal difﬁculties that this view can resolve, which is then established

in a non-question-begging way.³⁹ For Hegel, therefore, once such an incoherence

or aporia shows itself within a position, reﬂection on its categories must follow,

where this process is aimed at arriving at a world view that is fully stable, and is

thus to be preferred to any of the alternatives, against which it can lay claim to

truth in a non-dogmatic manner.

Now, it is at this point in the Introduction that Hegel contrasts the doubt

we feel in these circumstances with the Cartesian doubt dismissed earlier: for

the doubt that motivates us to reﬂect on our cognitive capacities in a critical

manner is now motivated by our experience of a genuine conﬂict between world

views, and genuine breakdowns in our investigations, as opposed to the abstract

‘fear of error’ that he associates with Descartes, which because of its abstractness

³⁷ Hegel, PS, 48–9 [Werke, III: 71]. ³⁸ Hegel, EL, §41Z, 81 [Werke, VIII: 114].

³⁹ This is a central part of Hegel’s response to the challenge of ancient scepticism, which Hegel

always took much more seriously than modern or Cartesian scepticism, because it was based around

the equal force or equipollence of genuinely competing views. Cf. Hegel ‘Relationship of Skepticism

to Philosophy: Exposition of its Different Modiﬁcations and Comparison to the Latest Form with

theAncientOne’,trans.H.S.Harris,inGeorgediGiovanniandH.S.Harris(eds.),Between Kant

and Hegel (Albany: SUNY Press, 1985), 311–62. For further helpful discussion of this contrast

in Hegel’s attitudes see Michael N. Forster, Hegel and Skepticism (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard

University Press, 1989) and Westphal, Hegel’s Epistemological Realism.

224 Hegel and Pragmatism

has little actual effect on our thinking. Thus, Hegel tells us that the kind of

self-questioning our ordinary forms of thinking (or ‘natural consciousness’) will

be forced to go in for in the Phenomenology is grounded in the real difﬁculties it is

forced to face, in the way that the kind of questioning Descartes goes in for is not:

Natural consciousness will show itself to be only the Notion of knowledge, or in other

words, not to be real knowledge. But since it directly takes itself to be real knowledge,

this path has a negative signiﬁcance for it, and what is in fact the realization of the Notion

[i.e. the view of the world adopted by philosophy], counts for it as the loss of its own self;

for it does lose its truth on this path. The road can be regarded as the pathway of doubt,

or more precisely as the way of despair. For what happens on it is not what is ordinarily

understood when the word ‘doubt’ is used: shilly-shallying about this or that presumed

truth, followed by a return to that truth again, after the doubt has been appropriately

dispelled—so that at the end of the process the matter is taken to be what it was in

the ﬁrst place. On the contrary, this path is the conscious insight into the untruth of

phenomenal knowledge [i.e. the knowledge claimed by our ordinary ways of thinking],

for which the supreme reality is what is in truth only the unrealized Notion [i.e. for which

what appears to be true is not the ﬁnal story].⁴⁰

The doubt that Hegel expects to motivate our inquiries, therefore, and to cause

consciousness to question its previous certainties, is the doubt that comes about

when we are confronted by the fact that what we thought about the world

cannot be made to work coherently, thereby forcing us to change our minds; and

because the problems we face are determinate, consciousness can also see how

they might be resolved, in contrast to Cartesian doubt, which provides no way

forward because the doubt it raises is too abstract to be amenable to resolution:

This [Cartesian] scepticism is just the scepticism which only ever sees pure nothingness in

its result and abstracts from the fact that this nothingness is speciﬁcally the nothingness of

that from which it results. For it is only when it is taken as the result of that from which it

emerges, that it is, in fact, the true result; in that case it is itself a determinate nothingness,

one which has a content. The scepticism that ends up with the bare abstraction of

nothingness or emptiness cannot get any further from there, but must wait to see whether

something new comes along and what it is, in order to throw it too into the same empty

abyss. But when, on the other hand, the result is conceived as it is in truth, namely, as

a determinate negation, a new form has thereby immediately arisen, and in the negation

the transition is made through which the progress through the complete series of forms

comes about of itself.⁴¹

Unlike Cartesian doubt, which Hegel believes is inevitably paralysing in its own

terms so that the only response is to carry on much as before, the doubt he is

interested in is thrown up by seeing that something has gone wrong in what you

previously thought, where trying to right this wrong helps determine a direction

in which we might move forward, in a way that offers a positive resolution to the

⁴⁰ Hegel, PS, 49–50 [Werke, III: 72].

⁴¹ Hegel, PS,51[Werke, III: 74]. Cf. also EL, §81Z, 131 (Werke, VIII: 176).

Hegel and Pragmatism 225

doubt in question, and a change in outlook rather than just a return to what you

thought already.

Now, from what we said previously about Peirce, it should be clear that much

of what Hegel says here should be viewed sympathetically by the Peircean. For, as

we have seen, Hegel is as keen as Peirce to distinguish between different kinds of

doubt, and to reject the sort of apparently groundless questioning of our beliefs

that the Cartesian goes in for, which is claimed to be a necessary preliminary

to any responsible form of inquiry. Rather, like Peirce, Hegel holds that such

questioning can be carried out intelligibly only if we are offered real grounds for

doing so, which requires the doubter to provide some evidence of error, which

will then leave us able to try to correct it, as normally happens when we are

made to realize we have made a mistake. It turns out, therefore, that contrary to

the way things seemed to be going in section II, there is considerable common

ground between Hegel and pragmatism on these issues after all.

So, while Cartesian doubt can provide a motivation for the rejection of all

assumptions, so that it may appear natural to assume that a concern with

presuppositionlessness of the sort Houlgate identiﬁes in Hegel then indicates

a commitment to Cartesianism in some form, it nonetheless seems wrong to

take Hegel’s demand for a presuppositionless philosophy to stem from any such

Cartesian sympathies in epistemology, and thus to see this demand as driving a

wedge between Hegel and pragmatism. For, as we have seen, Hegel like Peirce

sees little force in Cartesian ‘antecedent’ scepticism, so it would be a mistake to

think that this was the basis for Hegel’s desire to construct a presuppositionless

philosophy, as it arguably was in Descartes himself.

However, even if Hegel’s focus on presuppositionlessness was not grounded

in a distinctively Cartesian concern with sceptical doubt, it could still be argued

that this focus sets him at odds with the pragmatist tradition, because it was based

instead on a conception of what it is for thought to be free, a conception that

derives not from sceptical worries but from the way in which Kant developed

Descartes’s demand that we take nothing for granted, because otherwise we

would be following tradition, or authority, or natural habit in a heteronomous

manner. This, indeed, is how Houlgate sees Hegel’s central concern, rather than

identifying it with any more narrowly Cartesian preoccupation with ‘antecedent’

scepticism.⁴² It is prima facie plausible to think that, on the one hand, this

too is an anti-pragmatist perspective, but also, on the other, that this must be

the motivation behind Hegel’s concern with presuppositionlessness, given the

apparently obvious link between the two.

⁴² Cf. Houlgate, An Introduction to Hegel, 27–8.

226 Hegel and Pragmatism

In a recent discussion of the idea of ‘free thought’, both these points have been

emphasized by John Skorupski; and in general, his discussion is very illuminating

in relation to our concerns here. Skorupski argues that it is characteristic of

everyone who adopts this idea to hold that ‘[f]ree thought is thought ruled

by its own principles and by nothing else; in other words, by principles of

thinking that it discovers by reﬂecting on its own activity’;⁴³ but there is an

important further division along this path: ‘Down one route lies the idea of free

thought as thought that is unconstrained by any authoritative source external to

it. Down the other lies the idea of it as radically presuppositionless’.⁴⁴ Skorupski

identiﬁes the latter idea with Descartes, and argues that it runs through to

German Idealism, in a way that resembles the sort of account also given by

Houlgate:

the idea that free thought must be presuppositionless is highly plausible. If it rests on

some presupposition or assumption, how can it be free? Must it not freely question that

assumption? That has been an enormously inﬂuential modern conception of what it

is to think really freely. Call it the Cartesian idea, after the French philosopher, Ren

Descartes, who expounded it in his Meditations ....One way of spelling out its shaping

inﬂuence would be to tell the story of German philosophy from Kant to Nietzsche. This

tradition takes the Cartesian idea with utmost seriousness, and then seriously tries to free

itself from its clutch. Kant responds to Descartes’ failure by a critique of free thought

itself (the ‘Critique of Pure Reason’). Truly free thought, he says, must investigate the

conditions of its own possibility ....The story continues with Hegel. He ﬁnds fault

with Kant’s project because it imposes a basic cleavage of subject and object. So he tries

to show how free thought itself literally generates everything: a kind of apotheosis of

presuppositionless free thought. Nietzsche sees the failure of these high-wire heroics and

diagnoses a crisis of Western values.⁴⁵

In contrast with the Cartesian conception of free thought, Skorupski identiﬁes a

different approach,

⁴³ John Skorupski, Why Read Mill Today? (London and New York: Routledge, 2006), 6. As

Skorupski points out, the contrast here is with ‘apologetic thought, in the traditional and respectable

sense of that word—thought which seeks to make intelligible, so far as possible, the ways of God

to man, without claiming to know those ways by its own principles alone. The apologetic tradition

is ﬁdeistic, in the sense that it holds that free thought alone cannot tell us what to believe. Natural

reason must be a servant of faith, or at best a co-sovereign with it’ (ibid.). Elsewhere, Skorupski cites

Cardinal Newman as representative of this apologetic outlook, when Newman writes: ‘Liberty of

thought is itself a good; but it gives an opening to false liberty. Now by Liberalism I mean false liberty

of thought, or the exercise of thought upon matters, in which, from the constitution of the human

mind, thought cannot be brought to any successful issue, and therefore is out of place. Among

such matters are ﬁrst principles of whatever kind; and of these the most sacred and momentous are

especially to be reckoned the truths of Revelation. Liberalism then is the mistake of subjecting to

human judgement those revealed doctrines which are in their nature beyond and independent of it,

and of claiming to determine on intrinsic grounds the truth and value of propositions which rest

for their reception simply on the external authority of the Divine Word’ (John Henry Newman,

Apologia Pro Vita Sua, ed. A. Dwight Culler (Boston: Houghton Mifﬂin Company, 1956), 261;

cited in John Skorupski, ‘Liberalism as Free Thought’, unpublished paper, 6).

⁴⁴ Skorupski, Why Read Mill Today?,7. ⁴⁵ Ibid.,7–8.

Hegel and Pragmatism 227

according to which free thought does not start by refusing to make any assumptions at

all, but instead maintains a continuing critical open-mindedness about everything we

take ourselves to know, without any exemptions whatever. This ‘constructive empiricism’

also goes back to the seventeenth century. It is naturalistic, in that it takes us to be a part

of the world that we scientiﬁcally study. It is holistic, in that it works from within our

convictions as a whole. It takes the fallibilistic attitude that any of the things we think

we know, however seemingly certain, could turn out to be wrong in the course of our

continuing inquiry. That includes our initial assumptions—but it does not follow that

we cannot start from them.⁴⁶

Skorupski calls this approach ‘thinking from within’,⁴⁷ anditshouldbeclear

from what we have already said, that pragmatism can be seen as a development

of this perspective, rather than the Cartesian one.⁴⁸ Andyet,ifthisisso,and

if by contrast it is the Cartesian conception of free thought that drives Hegel

into radical presuppositionlessness, doesn’t this show once again that Hegel and

pragmatism must be taken to diverge?

However, while at ﬁrst placing Hegel within the Cartesian camp, Skorupski

also notes that ‘Hegel’s method, incidentally, could also be described as thinking

from within’,⁴⁹ thereby putting him in the alternative tradition to which the

pragmatists belong. Skorupski doesn’t elaborate on this remark any further, but I

take it he has in mind the historicist and communitarian side of Hegel’s position,

according to which a particular historical time and social place inevitably forms

the horizon of our thinking. It is this aspect of Hegel’s outlook that is encapsulated

in his well-known comments, that ‘[e]ach individual is the son of his own nation

at a speciﬁc stage in this nation’s development. No one can escape from the spirit

of his nation, any more than he can escape from the earth itself’;⁵⁰ and ‘[a]s far

⁴⁶ Ibid., 8. Cf. also p. 95, where Skorupski is summarizing John Stuart Mill’s place in this

approach: ‘[Mill] is ﬁrmly established in the alternative tradition that takes free thought to be

unconstrained rather than presuppositionless. Instead of grappling heroically with scepticism, he

mildly emphasises fallibilism: taking it for granted that methods of thinking from within—critical

reﬂection on our inherited convictions, free discussion, the appeal to reﬂectively endorsed disposi-

tions—are available and satisfactory. To use a well-established metaphor, he sees free thought as a

ship on an open ocean. Any part can come to need repair, but we always have to rely on other parts

to make the repair. So there is no crisis of scepticism, but there is an important task of improving

and reﬁning our methods in science and ethics’.

⁴⁷ Ibid., 9.

⁴⁸ Skorupski identiﬁes Mill as one of the heroes of this tradition, and in this connection it may

not be coincidental that James prefaces his book Pragmatism with the dedication: ‘To the Memory

of John Stuart Mill[,] from whom I ﬁrst learned the pragmatic openness of mind[,] and whom my

fancy likes to picture as our leader were he alive to-day’.

⁴⁹ Skorupski, Why Read Mill Today?,9.

⁵⁰ G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of World History: Introduction,trans.H.B.

Nisbet (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975), 81 (Vorlesungen ¨uber die Philosophie

der Weltgeschichte, vol 1, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister (Hamburg: Meiner, 1955), 95). Cf. also

G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover Publications, 1956),

52; trans. modiﬁed [Werke, XII: 72]: ‘[e]ach individual is the son of his people, and at the same

time, insofar as his state is in development, the son of his time; no one remains behind it, and no

one can leap ahead of it’.

228 Hegel and Pragmatism

as the individual is concerned, each individual is in any case a child of his time;

thus philosophy, too, is its own time comprehended in thoughts’.⁵¹ On this basis,

then, it can be argued that Hegel, no less than the pragmatists, understood that

inquiry must be conducted ‘from within’.⁵²

We should be careful, therefore, in inferring that just because Hegel says that

‘we must make no presuppositions’ is ‘a very great and important principle’,⁵³

this makes him a Cartesian in a way that would separate him from pragmatism.

For, ﬁrstly, he makes clear that while the reason Descartes gives for this principle

‘in his own fashion’ is that ‘we must make no presuppositions because it is

possible to be mistaken’, this is not the fundamental issue for Hegel, because

‘[i]n the Cartesian form [of this position] the stress is not on the principle of

freedom as such, but instead on reasons more popular in tone’, namely the

possibility of error and the need for certainty.⁵⁴ But secondly, even if we see

‘the principle of freedom’ as what for Hegel really underlies the concern with

presuppositionlessness, this need not mean that this commits him to the idea

that free thought must begin with no assumptions and so be presuppositionless

in this sense; for, thought can still be free as long as it is always able to reﬂect

further on the presuppositions with which it starts, even though it cannot reﬂect

on them all at once from a position that makes no assumptions whatsoever.

And indeed, when Hegel writes about the way presuppositions might pose

a threat to ‘free thought’, he does not seem to be going along with the idea

that for Skorupski drives the Cartesian approach here, namely, ‘that if [thought]

rests on some presupposition or assumption, how can it be free?’. Rather, the

presuppositions Hegel identiﬁes as posing a threat to the ‘principle of freedom’

are those that are posited as prior to thought in a special sense: namely, as

something that thought cannot grasp or understand, and so are presupposed in

the sense of ‘put before’ (voraus-gesetzt) thinking. In the Lectures on the History

of Philosophy, Hegel thus resists presuppositions not because he is concerned by

Cartesian doubt, or even because he is unwilling to ‘think from within’, but

⁵¹ G. W. F. Hegel, EPR,21[Werke, VII: 26]. Cf. Robert B. Pippin, Modernism as a Philosophical

Problem (Oxford: Blackwell, 1991), 72, who summarizes Hegel’s view as follows: ‘Just as when we

attempt to ‘‘judge objectively’’ or ‘‘determine the truth,’’ we inherit an extensive set of rule-governed,

historically concrete practices, so when we attempt to ‘‘act rightly,’’ and attempt to determine our

action spontaneously, we must see ourselves as situated in a complex collective and historical setting,

a dependence very much like that implicitly asserted by the narrative form of the modern novel’.

For further discussion of this issue, see Frederick C. Beiser, ‘Hegel’s Historicism’, in Frederick

C. Beiser (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Hegel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,

1993), 270–300.

⁵² This, of course, is the aspect of Hegel that Rorty likes the most: cf. ‘Cultural Politics and

the Question of the Existence of God’, repr. in his Philosophy as Cultural Politics (Cambridge:

Cambridge University Press, 2007), 3–26, at 23: ‘Hegel does not think that philosophy can rise

above the social practices of its time and judge their desirability to something that is not itself an

alternative social practice (past or future, real or imagined)’.

⁵³ Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy III: 138 [Vorlesungen, 92].

⁵⁴ Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy III: 139 [Vorlesungen, 93].

Hegel and Pragmatism 229

because he objects to the idea of ‘something found already there [pre-posited] that

thinking has not posited, something other than thinking’, such as (in an example

Hegel gives) F. H. Jacobi’s God, which thought is unable to comprehend, and

which we can be aware of only through the non-intellectual means of ‘immediate

intuition or inward revelation’. In a presupposition of this sort, Hegel argues,

‘thinking is not present to itself’, because it clearly has limits imposed on it by this

prior positing, much in the way in which it does when told to believe things on an

external authority, which it cannot fathom.⁵⁵ Thus, for Hegel, presuppositions

of the kind postulated by Jacobi as ‘pre-positings’ violate the freedom of thought

by setting up something which is alien to it, where by contrast Hegel holds that

freedom for thought requires it to ﬁnd nothing alien and so to be ‘at home

with itself’, a freedom that he believes constitutes the ‘greatness of our time’.⁵⁶

I take it that this is what Hegel is getting at when he writes that ‘[w]hatever is

recognized as true must present itself in such a way that our freedom is preserved

inthefactthatwethink’.⁵⁷ It seems, then, that Hegel can take presuppositions

as his target here in this sense, without this committing him to a tradition of ‘free

thought’ that is at odds with the one followed by the pragmatists, or indeed his

own historicist conception of the context of beliefs and assumptions that forms

the background to any inquiry.

We have seen, then, that while there is indeed a deep concern with the issue

of presuppositions in Hegel, of the sort highlighted by Houlgate and others, it

would be wrong to think that he should therefore be identiﬁed with a Cartesian

approach in epistemology, or with a Cartesian (or Kantian) conception of ‘free

thought’—for, to the extent that he is committed to free thought, we have seen

that Hegel’s idea of ‘free thought’ (like the pragmatist’s) does not take a form

that commits him in itself to a demand to think presuppositionlessly; and neither

does his rejection of the Jacobian idea that there might be anything that thought

cannot grasp. Yet, as Houlgate rightly emphasizes, Hegel nonetheless insists that

the Logic must proceed without presuppositions. This, however, seems to leave

us with a puzzle: for if Hegel is not Cartesian in outlook, what motivation for

⁵⁵ Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy III: 138–9 [Vorlesungen, 93].

⁵⁶ Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy III: 257 [Vorlesungen, 178]. Cf. also Hegel,

EM, §440, 179–80 [Werke, X: 230]: ‘Free mind ...is determined as embracing within itself all

objectivity, so that the object is not anything externally related to mind or anything mind cannot

grasp. Mind or spirit is thus the absolutely universal certainty of itself, free from any opposition

whatever. Therefore, it is conﬁdent that in the world it will ﬁnd its own self, that the world must

be reconciled with it, that, just as Adam said of Eve that she was ﬂesh of his ﬂesh, so mind has to

seek in the world Reason that is its own Reason’.

⁵⁷ Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy III: 139 [Vorlesungen, 93].