At one point in the history of linguistic-turn analytic philosophy, it was popular to hold that metaphysics is meaningless; Hegel was sometimes taken as a paradigm case.Footnote 1 Today issues about ‘metaphysical grounding’ have come to the centre of discussion in analytic philosophy. And Schaffer’s influential defence of the metaphysics of grounding plays a part in his defence of a form of metaphysical monism (Reference Schaffer2010), where he cites as predecessors Spinoza and … Hegel.Footnote 2 Times change.
And, I think, for the better. For one thing, I see contemporary philosophy as best when it engages seriously with philosophy that is culturally and/or historically distant from the here and now. So I welcome the receding of the refusal to engage philosophically, on grounds of the supposed meaninglessness of everything else.
Further, I will argue that there is no way to understand Hegel’s Science of Logic,Footnote 3 the core of his mature philosophical system, without taking seriously issues like those concerning grounding, which have come to be so important in analytic philosophy.Footnote 4 So, in a sense, I take the connection between Hegel and this form of analytic metaphysics to be real and substantial.
But all this so far seems to carry what I will call the ‘obvious suggestion’, namely, that Hegel’s reasons for the claims of his philosophical system appeal to metaphysical grounding, in something like the contemporary manner, making that system a form of the metaphysics of grounding. I argue that it is more philosophically perspicacious to see this suggestion as getting Hegel and his intellectual context backwards.
Hegel’s Logic gives reasons why issues like those concerning grounding must be faced; but it also gives reasons for thinking a metaphysics of grounding must undercut itself, and why philosophy must move on to something else—something meant to not be graspable until after thinking through this kind of productive undercutting, or, roughly, Hegel’s dialectical-speculative thinking. The obvious-seeming suggestion would then be wrong, but still helpful: It helps us to navigate, providing a relatively clear point on the compass, from which we can turn in the opposite direction to better seek Hegel. My aim in this essay, then, is first to understand Hegel’s critique, in its proper intellectual context, and then to follow its implications far enough to get an initial sense of Hegel’s different direction.
To state my proposal in more detail, I note Schaffer’s claim that issues about metaphysical grounding are ‘so tightly interwoven into the fabric of philosophy that’ they ‘cannot be torn out without the whole tapestry unravelling’.Footnote 5 ‘Interwoven’ is a metaphor. What Schaffer argues is that commitments concerning issues about grounding are ‘unavoidable’ in philosophy (Reference Schaffer, Chalmers, Manley and Wasserman2009: 356, 268, 373), so that even philosophers thinking themselves indifferent to such issues depend on commitments about them.Footnote 6 I will call this the ‘interwoven’ claim, or:
IW:Issues concerning grounding are ‘so tightly interwoven into the fabric of philosophy that’ they are ‘unavoidable’.
Schaffer also argues from concern with the metaphysics of grounding, in part, to the view he calls ‘priority-monism’: the whole of everything metaphysically grounds everything else, its parts. Judged in terms of more recent philosophy, it seems obvious that IW helps: some philosophers might have wanted to oppose the case for priority-monism by arguing that questions about metaphysical grounding are not really philosophical, or even meaningful; IW would remove the space for such critiques, holding that philosophers generally are not in a position to so escape. Schaffer argues that ‘[s]ubstantial metaphysics is unavoidable. One might at least try to do it well’ (Reference Schaffer, Chalmers, Manley and Wasserman2009: 373). And that puts him in a position to argue that, if the challenge is squarely faced, this will reveal reasons for monism.
For purposes of comparison to the historical figures of interest here, it is helpful to abstract from Schaffer’s monism a bit, noting that this is one specific form of a general kind of claim, for there being a locus of a complete explicability or intelligibility of everything. Schaffer’s monism is a form of this: Schaffer’s grounding is an explanatory dependence relation (Reference Schaffer, Chalmers, Manley and Wasserman2009: 265). So Schaffer takes the whole of everything to explain everything else, at least with respect to grounding-explanation. Further, his whole has no further ground: it does not further depend, in this sense, and is fundamental in that respect.Footnote 7 So: everything else has a grounding-explanation, in the whole, which itself neither has nor requires any further grounding-explanation. The whole is a locus of a completeness of explanation, at least with respect to grounding explanation.
Spinoza’s monism also endorses a kind of completeness, with respect to forms of explanatory dependence relations: Everything is in, caused by, and conceived through the one substance, which is caused by, conceived through, and in itself.Footnote 8
So, there is a general kind of claim, and different specific versions. One way they can vary is in so far as they might draw on different dependence-relations or associated forms of explanation or intelligibility.
Now whether or not Hegel’s system should be called ‘monism’ or not, and in what senses would require a separate study. Just to make some notes in setting that topic aside: Schaffer distinguishes ‘existence monism’ from ‘priority monism’. ‘Existence monism’ holds that ‘there is one and only one actual concrete object’ (Reference Schaffer2010: 66), where a concrete object would be spatiotemporal. I would doubt Hegel’s system expresses this monism: whatever Hegel’s Logic is about, most would deny it is about spatiotemporal objects, which appear later in the system, and not as just one.Footnote 9 ‘Priority monism’ holds that this one concrete whole is prior to its parts, in grounding them. For similar reasons, many would doubt that anything spatio-temporal is specifically prior in Hegel’s system. Whether Hegel would accept some other form of monism expressed in terms of grounding would depend on whether Hegel is ultimately more of a critic of grounding; that is the topic at issue in this essay, not something to be assumed at the start. As to whether we should apply the term ‘monism’ to Hegel in some entirely other sense: Hegel does not himself really use the term, and there is no need to make anything here contingent on assumptions about how we should use it; this would require separate consideration.
We can instead ascend to a level of abstraction that would allow beginning with the following less controversial points: The end of the Logic says, about something called ‘the concept’, that ‘the concept is all’.Footnote 10 I think it not too controversial to say that this is at least some kind of claim that, given ‘the concept’, there is some locus of a comprehensive intelligibility or explicability of all, in at least some senses—even if those senses of intelligibility might turn out to be unusual or surprising. And in this we can compare views like Hegel’s and Schaffer’s.
Whatever else we say, Hegel’s claim is sweepingly ambitious, including in this sense: it is not a claim limited to one domain of philosophy, like epistemology, leaving others open; it is not simply about all epistemological justification, or all linguistic meaning, for example, in any senses that would be supposed to leave open questions in ontology or metaphysics.Footnote 11 While this is not needed as a premise here, I think in Hegel’s context, this general kind of claim about a locus of complete explicability or intelligibility is taken as affirmation of a ‘system’.Footnote 12
I focus here on seeking Hegel’s reasons for this kind of claim. Interpreters might disagree about what they see as the further content of the claim: What is ‘the concept’? What sense(s) of intelligibility are in play? And so on. But whatever the answers, I think it will be extremely hard to understand and explain how the famously difficult text of the Logic provides reason for the claim.Footnote 13
It is here that a potential connection to the recent metaphysics of grounding can seem irresistible. Or a form of it might be guiding one’s thinking, even for those who would question it, if made explicit. For, first, in Hegel’s context it is common to find views like Schaffer’s IW, claiming that issues about forms of explanatory dependence like grounding are interwoven broadly with philosophical practice. And it seems obvious from a contemporary perspective, noted above, that forms of IW will look incredibly helpful for philosophers trying to give reason for sweeping, ambitious claims for a locus of complete intelligibility or explicability.
It is as if we are looking at the philosophical terrain, and we can see that Hegel is familiar with a clearing on the landscape, with a sign labelled ‘unavoidability of grounding’ or ‘of explanatory dependence’. And we and he can see a well-worn path of reasons from here, in the direction of something that at least sounds like his descriptions of where he is going. And we can see no other widely recognized path of reasons in anything like that direction. It can seem overwhelmingly likely that Hegel takes up camp in that clearing, and sets off on that path, even if he might have extremely unusual ways of describing this terrain.
In other words, what can seem overwhelmingly likely is the:
Obvious Suggestion: Hegel endorses a form of IW, claiming that philosophy is intertwined with issues concerning grounding, and this is part of his reason for a sweeping claim for a locus of a completeness of explanation or intelligibility that is consequently itself a form of the metaphysics of grounding.
That seems overwhelmingly likely, even if Hegel’s unusual terminology and texts make it difficult to see.
But, again, my aim is to show that this obvious suggestion gets Hegel and his philosophical context nearly backwards. On the one hand, if we look in Kant and post-Kantian philosophy, we find forms of IW playing the opposite of the expected role: Forms of IW are generally employed to critique philosophical attempts to demonstrate any kind of complete intelligibility or explicability. On the other hand, the in-context challenge for Hegel is consequently more or less the opposite of the expected: it is not to enlist a form of IW, holding something like grounding to be interwoven with philosophy, in support of some sweeping claim about complete explicability of intelligibility involving something like a form of grounding; it is to resist forms of IW, and to somehow find in this very resistance reason for a sweeping claim about how ‘all’ is intelligible or explicable, but in some sense now very different than senses involving metaphysical grounding—in some sense graspable only in terms of Hegel’s way of showing the metaphysics of grounding undercuts itself, and in this gives reason to somehow go beyond it.
Here I begin (I) with some preliminaries about grounding and a form of argument, introduced via its role in Kant, which I call ‘the poison chalice of grounding’. I then (II) turn to give more attention, and some defence, to F. H. Jacobi’s form of the poison chalice argument, because this also influences Hegel, and has more to do with the idea of a single focus offering complete explicability of everything.
Finally (III), I turn to initiate an approach to Hegel’s Logic, in terms of this context and the way it reverses our natural expectations about the metaphysics of grounding.
I. Preliminaries
I.i. Grounding as an explanatory relation, and Schaffer’s IW
What is most important here about contemporary discussions is to be clear about what ‘grounding’ is —in particular, that it is a form of priority-involving explanatory dependence—and to make sure we have the sense of Schaffer’s IW correct, as a claim that positions on grounding are, as he puts it, ‘unavoidable’, even for philosophers taking themselves to be indifferent.
So: what is grounding? To see the answer, first recall again: it was once popular in twentieth-century linguistic-turn philosophy to hold that metaphysical claims are nonsense, a matter of indifference. Things change, step by step. Quine brings ontology back, in the sense of a focus on the question of what there is, itself understood in terms of the existential quantifier and the domain over which variables range.Footnote 14 As Schaffer emphasizes, this is to defend ontology in part by excluding supposedly debunked older or traditional issues, which Schaffer sees in Aristotle or Spinoza, such as those concerning ontological priority and fundamentality. Whatever grounding is, it is supposed to be something excluded at these earlier stages.
Later developments in modal logic then contribute to bringing back the metaphysics of modality as well—essences, for example, understood strictly in modal terms.Footnote 15 But it is crucial that the return of grounding is a distinct step. So whatever grounding is, it is also something supposed to have been excluded at this stage. The claim that ‘X grounds Y’ is not supposed to be a supervenience claim, or any modal claim, like: there cannot be Y without X. Before the return of grounding, a modal notion of supervenience seemed appealing—in Lewis’s words—as ‘a stripped-down form of reductionism, unencumbered by dubious […] claims of ontological priority’ (Reference Lewis1999: 29). That is to say, any issues that might have travelled under the heading ‘ontological priority’, which philosophers did not wish to dismiss, seemed addressable in these terms.
Grounding theorists’ case for the distinctness of grounding emphasizes its being a form of explanatory dependence, involving priority, and none of this itself as captured by the idea of supervenience:
Supervenience itself is not an explanatory relation. It is not a ‘deep’ metaphysical relation; rather, it is a ‘surface’ relation that reports a pattern of property covariation, suggesting the presence of an interesting dependency relation that might explain it. (Kim 1993: 167; as quoted in Schaffer Reference Schaffer, Chalmers, Manley and Wasserman2009: 364)
For grounding theorists, cases have figured prominently like this: There cannot be Y without X, nor X without Y; and yet behind this bi-directional ‘surface’ relation there is a one-way dependence of Y on X.Footnote 16 Similarly, X is ‘prior’ to Y in this sense, in that Y depends on X.Footnote 17
So, what is ‘grounding’? The key is that it is priority-involving explanatory dependence, not reducible to modality. Of course, one could ask ‘What is dependence?’ or ‘…priority?’. Here Schaffer argues that these notions are primitive, and that we just do understand them. On the latter point, he turns to history:
Plato brings the notion of natural priority to prominence in the Euthyphro dilemma … Many of us teach this dilemma to our first year students. They get it … Aristotle then codifies the notion of priority in nature, characterizes substances as ultimately prior … These notions reverberate through the history of metaphysics (e.g., Descartes … Spinoza). (2009: 305)
On the latter, he deploys tests for primitiveness, and argues that grounding is primitive, unanalysable.
There is debate about how grounding relates to causal dependence, which is also a form of explanatory dependence. It will be more in keeping with our historical texts to default (unless noted) to a broader usage, on which ‘grounding’ includes worldly explanatory and priority-involving dependence generally; when needed I will note a narrower sense that might include at least mereological dependence, but exclude temporal causality.
With this sense of grounding in mind, we can turn to Schaffer’s IW. Schaffer argues in these terms for the return of ‘traditional metaphysics’, concluding that: ‘traditional metaphysics is so tightly interwoven into the fabric of philosophy that it cannot be torn out without the whole tapestry unraveling’ (Schaffer Reference Schaffer, Chalmers, Manley and Wasserman2009: 373). One part of the reason for this is that traditional metaphysics, for example Aristotle’s, was concerned with grounding, and grounding is itself unavoidable. That is to say:
IW: Issues concerning grounding are ‘so tightly interwoven into the fabric of philosophy that’ they ‘are unavoidable’.
Schaffer considers Quinean ontology. Schaffer argues that, with grounding, we can have a sense of the fundamental, as that which is without a ground (Reference Schaffer, Chalmers, Manley and Wasserman2009: 273). Quinean ontology, if really indifferent to grounding and so fundamentality, would be left with questions about existence that would be merely ‘trivial’. The Quinean method does not seem trivial; it is ‘to solve for the domain of quantification required for the truth of an apt regimentation of our best theory’ (2009: 348). But that method ‘is inextricably interwoven with questions of grounding’ (2009: 356). For example, we can ask ‘what makes a theory best?’ And Schaffer argues that the substantive answer is that it is a theory of the fundamental, or that which has no ground (Reference Schaffer, Chalmers, Manley and Wasserman2009: 366–67). So for Quinean ontology to be non-trivial it requires commitments concerning fundamentality, and so grounding—even if Quineans would wish to be indifferent to this.
Schaffer’s argument is meant to show that ‘Grounding questions will emerge as both deep and unavoidable’ (Reference Schaffer, Chalmers, Manley and Wasserman2009: 356).
I.ii. A brief look at the poison chalice of grounding in Kant
I next want to introduce a form of argument I claim is popular at Hegel’s time, which I call the ‘poison chalice of grounding’. The argument can seem unusual, so I begin by noting just its form, in some familiar features of Kant’s critical philosophy, and especially the ‘Antinomy’ of the ‘Dialectic’ of the first Critique. I do not seek to bring out or defend the reasoning here. This is not here the most important case of that argument form, because Kant’s first Critique does not connect it to an idea of a single locus of explanatory completeness of everything; Jacobi’s version does, looking to Spinoza (II, below).
The argument form divides into two legs: First, it advances a form of IW—a claim for a connection between philosophy as generally practised (in senses to follow) to commitments about explanatory dependence or grounding—and it seeks to draw conclusions about some kind of explanatory completeness. In the second leg, it reverses directions, showing that the very tie to grounding poisons the prospects for such conclusions. The point is generally a critique of philosophy as generally practised, or some reform or revolution that would cut ties with commitments that push in a direction that is also by the same token poisoned or rendered unacceptable.
Kant’s first leg, then, starts from a form of IW. In particular, Kant holds that the faculty of reason is responsible for guiding theoretical inquiry, and is characterized by an interest in conditions or, as Kant sometimes says, grounds. Kant includes formal and real grounds, where real grounding is worldly relation of priority-involving explanatory dependence.Footnote 18 Two forms of worldly explanatory dependence emphasized by Kant are mereological dependence—clearly a core case of grounding, for Schaffer—and causality; thus I will default to a broad notion, including both. Kant also points out that reason’s interest in conditions or grounds recurs, and argues that this reveals reason itself as ultimately interested in the complete series of explanatory dependence, or in ‘the unconditioned’ (A307/B364).Footnote 19
Kant takes philosophy, as generally practised, to pursue these interests of reason in the context of a natural-seeming commitment to what he calls ‘transcendental realism’. What exactly is included in this realism is controversial; here what is crucial is that rejection of such realism will involve in part acceptance of a strict epistemic limit, noted below.
At the very beginning of the first Critique, Kant considers philosophers who pretend ‘indifference’ to the interests of the faculty of reason. We can compare Schaffer’s consideration of Quineans. Kant refers to
so called indifferentists, to the extent that they think anything at all, always unavoidably fall back into metaphysical assertions, which they yet professed so much to despise. (Ax)Footnote 20
Their own thinking, then, in so far as they think anything at all, would be inconsistent with their pretence of indifference. Since I am not here defending Kant, just sketching a form of argument, I do not consider his meaning more precisely; I take it that the claim is clearly parallel to Schaffer’s. And so we might start to look for a formulation of a Kantian version of IW; for reasons to come, concerning the second leg, I will put this for now in terms of Kant’s language of ‘interest’ in grounding:
IWK: Issues about grounding and its completeness are so tightly interwoven into theoretical inquiry, as guided by the faculty of reason, that interest in grounding and its completeness is unavoidable for such inquiry.
The first leg of the poison chalice form of argument begins with a movement from a form of IW, towards seemingly promised conclusions about forms of explanatory completeness. In Kant’s case, it is the Antinomy of the first Critique that is crucial. What Kant argues is that, given IWK, we are unable to avoid interest in issues about what grounds the objects of our experience—the topic of the Antinomy; and we are unable to avoid engagement with questions about the complete or unconditioned grounds of such objects.Footnote 21
The second Antinomy considers objects grounded by their parts.Footnote 22 Kant argues that, in the context of realism, conclusions about an absolutely complete explanatory regress of grounds of that object do follow, or do answer the questions in which reason inevitably interests us. For example, one conclusion that follows is that the regress must reach completeness in absolutely simple parts, fundamental in not being further so grounded, or grounded by parts.
But this brings us to the second leg of a poison chalice argument: the poison in the chalice of grounding. What is supposed to turn us around is contradiction. For the Antinomy argues that drawing cosmological conclusions about the complete series of explanatory dependence or grounding brings to light equally strong arguments for contradictory conclusions. In particular, not only must there be simple, fundamental parts, but also: there cannot be, and the complete series of explanatory dependence, to grounding parts, must be infinite, without any smallest parts.Footnote 23
Deriving the contradictory conclusions is supposed to put us in a new context, from which we can see the contradiction, itself reason to reverse course, rejecting transcendental realism, accepting ‘transcendental idealism as the key to solving the cosmological dialectic’ (A490/B518). Again, the full extent of this is controversial, but important here is that idealism brings a strict epistemic restriction.Footnote 24 In general, that restriction is supposed to leave us without any possible epistemic justification for conclusions about a complete series of explanatory dependence, or ‘the unconditioned’.Footnote 25 Generally, this is supposed to leave open ‘belief’ in forms of such completeness, grounded in ways appropriate for ‘belief’ but not ‘knowledge’. For example: belief in an unconditioned free will (Third Antinomy); the soul as complete psychological ground (Paralogisms); and God as complete ground.Footnote 26
The poison chalice form of argument is meant to cast a critical eye on philosophy as usual, or as normally practised. In Kant’s case, that is to say: philosophy that pursues the interests of the faculty of reason in context of commitment to transcendental realism. Kant’s point is that we require ‘critique’, idealism and acceptance of the associated epistemic limit, to learn to avoid ‘deception’ by a natural ‘illusion’ (A297/B354). Or, to avoid a kind of philosophical commitment to conclusions about a complete regress that would suggest adequate epistemic justification. So interest in completeness or the unconditioned is supposed to be built into all philosophy and rational inquiry. But it is only philosophy as usually practised—which is to say without acceptance of transcendental idealism and the associated epistemic restriction—that is entangled with dogmatic pretence with respect to conclusions about unconditioned grounds.
Some Kantians may find, for these reasons, the contemporary metaphysics of grounding—in so far as it is presumably without Kant’s epistemic restriction—to be unacceptably dogmatic.Footnote 27 But I will not pursue such criticism. For the most important thing here is the form of the argument: A supposed unavoidability of grounding seems to offer support for conclusions about explanatory completeness, making such forms of IW irresistible for those interested in such conclusions; but the unavoidability of grounding in fact poisons the prospects for such conclusions.
II. Jacobi’s poison chalice argument and Spinoza
I now turn to Jacobi’s employment of a poison chalice argument.Footnote 28 I give this more attention not only because it also greatly influences Hegel, but also because it further links the form of argument to issues about a single locus for some kind of complete explicability or intelligibility of everything—emphasizing the case of Spinoza’s one substance as such a locus. We will see that Jacobi differs from Kant on any number of points, even while pursuing what is—at a high enough level of abstraction—the same form of the poison chalice argument. I aim to give this enough attention to see and engage with Jacobi’s reasons for the claims of this argument.
I think we do best with Jacobi if we distinguish what I would call ‘demonstrative philosophy’, meaning philosophy aiming to demonstrate substantial (not merely formal logical) results from premises, establishing a firm footing in this way, and constructively building on it. And that is to say as well that this is philosophy subject to the norms of such demonstration.Footnote 29
Jacobi expresses what I have called the two legs of the argument in terms of Spinoza. Jacobi’s is a ‘double philosophy’,Footnote 30 defending at once two views on opposing sides of a spectrum, which Jacobi calls his ‘Spinoza’ and ‘Antispinoza’ (JWA 1: 274). The first leg argues that Spinoza’s system is the best of all demonstrative philosophy. The second leg is the reversal: it gives reason why Spinoza’s system is nonetheless not acceptable, motivating a critical look at philosophy as practised—namely, on Jacobi’s account, demonstrative philosophy.
II.i. Introducing Spinoza as best, and Jacobi’s form of IW
In this section I introduce Jacobi’s claim that Spinoza’s is the best of all demonstrative philosophy, and why he needs a form of IW to support it.
Before extending to the general case for Spinoza as best, I start with a paradigm example, important in historical context. Consider then a causal argument for a more traditional God, as compared with Spinoza’s one substance, ‘God, or nature’. Mendelssohn, Jacobi’s target, later explains one version of an argument of his own as
having presented, on the basis of the undeniable existence of contingent, mutable things, their dependence upon a necessary cause and, indeed, on the free choice of this free cause. (2008: 186/Reference Mendelssohn, Dahlstrom and Dyck2011: 71)
The reasoning in Jacobi to be discussed below suggests this response: The argument requires a principle, to infer from contingent, mutable things, to their cause or ground; the passage cited from Mendelssohn appears in a chapter whose title begins ‘Sufficient Reason (Grund) for the Contingent in the Necessary…’ (2008: 183/2001: 67). The principle licensing this step to a ground will be some form of what Leibniz and Mendelssohn after him call ‘the principle of sufficient reason’ (hereafter, PSR), or der Satz des zureichenden Grundes, where the reference to Grund can be translated as reason or ground. One form of the principle would require, for anything that exists, a cause or ground of its existence, providing a reason why it exists, or an explanation of its existence, in this sense. Such a principle would get Mendelssohn’s argument going: We have some contingent things. The PSR licenses the inference to some cause or ground of their existence. If they are contingent, then there is some sense in which they could have been caused to exist—or not. And so we can at least see why Mendelssohn would think that the cause would involve something like a choosing between among many possibilities, and an ultimate cause as a kind of person, at least in the sense of something with ‘free choice’.
However, Jacobi worries that such principles of explanatory dependence are generally handled in demonstration in an ad hoc manner, or in this sense inconsistently. About the example argument, the point would be this: It adjudicates the existence and nature of God on the basis of the PSR. But, if consistent, proponents should be willing to similarly adjudicate the existence of contingency. And then Jacobi argues that the PSR, holding that everything has a cause or ground, should rather support Spinoza’s well-known necessitarianism, his claim that everything is necessary.Footnote 31 That would mean a denial of free will, in any sense requiring open possibilities—even to God. To shield contingency by choosing to begin with it, prior to the operation of the PSR—holding it just obviously beyond adjudication by argument, ‘undeniable’—is an ad hoc solution to the problem of how to preserve a more traditional non-Spinozist God. In Jacobi’s terms, a ‘determinist’ holds a PSR, or that everything is determined by some cause or ground; a ‘fatalist’ is a necessitarian, denying free will; and Jacobi says: ‘the determinist, if he wants to be consistent, must become a fatalist’ (JWA 1: 154/187).
In this example, we see why going in for a certain demonstration is supposed to push us farther, to at least one characteristic position of Spinoza’s metaphysics (necessitarianism). And while this does not get us to a case for Spinoza’s monism, or God as the one substance, we can at least see the strategy for knocking out a prominent defence of a rival view, with a transcendent God, separate from nature, enjoying free will, and so on.
Of course, one might cede that this causal demonstration of God has a problem, without seeing reason for any more general concern about any wider swathe of philosophy. And that is precisely why Jacobi’s case for Spinoza as the best of demonstrative philosophy must depart from a form of IW, to tie demonstrative philosophy generally to principles of explanatory dependence or ground. This will not get him all the way there, but it is needed as a point of departure.
So: why think that commitments concerning explanatory dependence are entangled with demonstrative philosophy generally? I think the idea is that demonstrations that purport to expand our knowledge, beyond results in merely formal logic, move step by step along chains of explanatory dependence, for example, from grounded to ground. This in itself seems not unusual. We could compare, for example, the Port Royal Logic on finding truth ‘either by proving effects by their causes […] or […] causes by their effects’ (Arnauld and Nicole Reference Arnauld, Nicole and Buroker1996: 233).
Jacobi then naturally thinks that movement through the steps of demonstrations requires license by some kind of principle of explanatory dependence, or—to use terminology that will greatly influence Hegel—‘mediation’. Jacobi thinks of these as at least some form of principle of reason or ground (Grund). And so he says that ‘all philosophical cognition […] is effected in accordance with the principle of reason [Satz des Grundes] that is, by mediation’.Footnote 32
If we thought this could by itself have any chance of bringing us all the way back to Spinoza’s necessitarianism, let alone his monism, then this would be extremely unconvincing. For we only have reason to think that demonstration requires some principle of explanatory dependence, which might then be extremely limited. Consider a principle requiring only that events of a certain kind have causes. Demonstration could infer by means of this from an event of that kind to its cause. And yet no thoroughgoing determinism would follow just from this, and so no chance of necessitarianism or fatalism.
Still, we can analyse Jacobi’s reasons by separating results so far as a kind of first step. We can formulate it as a Jacobi-inflected version of IW:
IWJ: Principles of explanatory dependence or grounding are so tightly interwoven into the fabric of demonstrative philosophy that at least some such principle(s) are unavoidable in that context.
We could again put the point by saying that ‘philosophy as usual’ is interwoven with dependence or grounding; here ‘as usual’ would single out demonstrative philosophy.
II.ii. From IWJ to Spinoza as the best of demonstrative philosophy
What we need, then, is a second step. That role is played by Jacobi’s idea that, in the context of demonstration, there is a kind of norm of consistency and generality—of ‘non-ad-hoc-ery’. Imagine trying to save the causal argument for God, above, by removing the general PSR and saying instead something like this: everything has a cause, except where something’s having a cause would conflict with a transcendent God having free will. This seems ad hoc: it is hard to see how there could be a reason for the restriction. Or: this makes it look like a prior commitment to the desired conclusion is just being dressed up in a costume of pretend demonstration. The idea here is that restriction of principles used in demonstration requires some general reason, or argument—or that there is a norm against restricting principles in demonstrations, defeasible by some reason or argument for the restriction.
Since Jacobi holds that demonstration requires specifically a principle of explanatory dependence, he holds that there is a defeasible norm in demonstration in support of the most general explanatory principle, and then that this will be a PSR supporting necessitarianism, fatalism—for reasons discussed above—and ultimately other aspects of Spinozism as well.
Now this point obviously still allows that opponents of generalization might argue for the restriction of explanatory principles, and so a rejection of the general form of PSR that would support all that. Here I will limit myself to pointing out, however, the interaction with IWJ: if all demonstration is based on explanatory principles, then a demonstration purporting to limit explanatory principles would have to proceed on the basis of … explanatory principles. If so, then perhaps demonstration cannot limit concerns about explanatory dependence, including grounding; it can only teach us how best to extend and systematize them.
So a form of IWJ connects demonstration and explanatory principles. And a norm of consistency pushes this towards the PSR or determinism. We can see the role of this appeal to consistency in claims like this in Jacobi: ‘the determinist, if he wants to be consistent, must become a fatalist’ (JWA 1: 18/187). Fatalism and necessitarianism are part of the view Jacobi calls ‘Spinozism’, and his aim here is to conclude that this package is the best of demonstrative philosophy: the least ad hoc about the principles of grounding interwoven with such philosophy. Here Jacobi emphasizes consistency about the PSR (using a nothing-from-nothing form of the principle): ‘Spinoza’s philosophy […] maintains and applies with the strictest rigour the well known principle, from nothing, nothing is generated’ (JWA 1: 57/205).
Now this famous conclusion of Spinoza’s does not yet get us to the whole of Spinoza’s claim that everything is completely explicable through its place in one substance, his substance monism. And yet Jacobi does think we are headed for the rest once we are entangled with the general PSR. Much recent work on Spinoza argues that this is key to Spinoza’s reasoning.Footnote 33 Here I will just sketch Jacobi’s idea: He argues that, for a substance to begin to exist, it would have to come out of nothing, or without adequate cause or reason.Footnote 34 What connects up everything for Jacobi is that a substance would have to be infinite: ‘if a series is not to arise from nothing, it must be infinite absolutely’ (JWA 1: 18/187–88). In Spinoza, we could compare first 1P8: a substance must be infinite within any attribute that it has. And second, 1P28, arguing that modes must form an infinite causal series. Jacobi sees Spinoza as concluding that the only way to have supplied this series with adequate reason or cause was to have ‘only posited an immanent one, an indwelling cause of the universe eternally unalterable within itself, One and the same with all its consequences’ (JWA 1: 18/187–88).Footnote 35
And so we can at least begin to track Jacobi’s reasons for his form of IW, linking demonstrative philosophy generally to principles of explanatory dependence; and for his move from there to an ambitious claim about a single focus of the complete explicability of everything.
II.iii. Jacobi: the poison in the chalice
Jacobi nonetheless also offers reasons for finding Spinoza’s metaphysics unacceptable. That is the reversal, the second leg of the poison chalice argument, showing that entanglement with explanatory dependence turns out to poison the prospects for conclusions about all-encompassing explicability. Where these two legs lead Jacobi is someplace very radical—a kind of leap away from demonstrative philosophy. There is not enough space here to grasp the whole of that leap, and so to consider whether there could be adequate reason for it; this is in any case not what is most influential. What is needed here is to show that Jacobi does provide a kind of reason against Spinoza, and that this is compatible with the first leg of the argument, above. I separate Jacobi’s influential reasons against Spinoza into the ‘official story’, as I put it, and some further suggestions that are influential later and associated with Jacobi.
The heart of the official story is the following: Demonstrative philosophy (for reasons specified above) can only be consistent as ruling out free agency. But in living as a practical agent, one has immediate access to one’s own free agency. What is important here is that one is in an epistemically superior situation, with respect to one’s own freedom, than one could be in relation to indirect inferences, licensed by a principle like the PSR, that might tell against this. And so Jacobi says: ‘The whole thing comes down to this: from fatalism I immediately conclude against fatalism and everything connected with it’ (JWA 1: 18/189). This is meant to mean direct access to an inexplicability, and so to the falsity of a claim for complete explicability. For those taking up Jacobi’s anti-systematic position, their focus is ‘what cannot be explained’ (JWA 1: 42/194). And immediate access to this, here in the form of one’s free agency, poisons the prospects for philosophical conclusions about a locus of complete explicability.
Can we reconcile this sort of reason against Spinoza with the claim that norms of demonstration tend towards Spinozism? I think so: the point is that this reason is direct, rather than inferential or demonstrative; it is ‘immediate’, in this sense.
Nor is this idea so historically distant that we cannot have access to it as a form of reason, or cut off in some way from contemporary philosophy. The basic move in itself is still familiar. Just compare van Inwagen: the PSR ‘would entail that no one had free will […]. We must therefore reject PSR’ (Reference van Inwagen1983: 204).
Agency is not the only case in which we are supposed to enjoy such direct epistemic access, even if it sometimes seems privileged, or the heart of the matter. Another case, also still familiar, is Jacobi’s response to external world scepticism: He claims that one has epistemically direct access to the existence of objects outside one’s mind, without need of, and epistemically superior to, any inference; indeed, Jacobi holds that one has all at once access to one’s agency, and external objects as resistance to it (JWA 2: 37/277).Footnote 36
Granted, it must be admitted that adding this form of direct reason to Jacobi’s case above about demonstration—this does push in a very radical and unfamiliar direction. The reason is that it will now follow that Jacobi’s immediate form of reason tells against the norms of demonstration themselves. And so Jacobi’s position must in some sense exit the context of demonstrative philosophy, in favour of some anti-systematic position, or Jacobi’s ‘Antispinoza’. In any sense that demonstration remains, its norms would have to be so completely subordinated to the above form of immediate access, that demonstration would be transformed. Jacobi refers to ‘a knowledge without proofs that necessarily precedes all knowledge from proofs as its ground, and governs [beherrsche] it always and in every respect’ (JWA 2: 375/538). Similarly, Jacobi’s position cannot be that there is any path of demonstration that reaches his destination. For, again, ‘all demonstration ends in fatalism’ (JWA 1: 156). So we can at least understand why Jacobi thinks that arriving at his destination requires rather more of a ‘leap’ (JWA 1: 348), or a death-defying summersault (‘salto mortale’; JWA 1: 20ff.).
The point of the poison chalice argument generally is to make some reform to philosophy as usually practised. In Kant, the point is the reform offered by ‘transcendental idealism’ and its epistemic limit; in Jacobi, it would be the reform offered by this total subordination of the norms of demonstration.
There is not enough space to grasp the whole of the landscape at which one would arrive, to evaluate the overall position. But here it is enough that we have found a kind of reason against Spinoza, a second leg for a poison chalice argument, which is at least consistent with the first.
One way in which Jacobi’s official story differs is that Kant’s antinomy focuses on an internal failure within attempts to establish conclusions about explanatory completeness; Jacobi’s story is rather that such attempts end up highlighting, revealing or bringing into view a kind of reason, external to them, which is supposed to overcome them. But there are also some suggestions in Jacobi of worries that look more like internal failures. These are later influential, and widely associated with Jacobi—including by Hegel. Their consistency with Jacobi’s anti-systematic position raises difficult questions beyond my scope here.Footnote 37 But it is important, for the below, to mention them.
The main point here is Jacobi’s reasons for thinking it impossible to demonstrate the existence of God or anything absolute, or any final focal point for complete explicability, because demonstration (given IW-J) can only establish the merely dependent.Footnote 38 Jacobi’s thought seems to be this: Demonstration would be driven by a principle of explanatory dependence or grounding, like a PSR. We could start with something temporal, arguing that this must be dependent. But then is the ground we demonstrate itself temporal? If yes, then our own argument—turning on the need of the temporal for further grounds—forces regress, and our ground is not absolute. If no, then we have an atemporal ground, and here Jacobi sees a violation of the required PSR. For there could be no explanation of why something eternal should ground something temporal: ‘if that which subsists in itself […] had ever been by itself, without the impermanent, it would never have produced a becoming’; that would ‘presuppose a coming-to-be from nothingness’ (JWA 1: 94/217).Footnote 39 Any ground reached would be forced back into the regress. To try to demonstrate the existence of God would be, Jacobi says, ‘[t]o discover the conditions of the unconditional’ (JWA 1: 287/348).
It is interesting to compare Schaffer here. His one whole is the whole is ‘the entire cosmos (the ultimate concrete whole)’ (Reference Schaffer2010: 31). His monism claims that this is not grounded by its parts, but is the ground for everything else, itself without further ground. Between the whole and its parts, there seems to be nothing like the discontinuity there would be between an eternal God and finite spatiotemporal events or objects. The challenge from above would then be how to block further regress requiring further grounds for any whole, presumably in a yet greater whole. Here we find what is perhaps the most contested premise in Schaffer’s metaphysical case for monism, a claim for a kind of asymmetry: ‘there must be an ultimate whole, but there need not be ultimate parts’ (Reference Schaffer2010: 64). That is, it is possible that every proper part has proper parts ad infinitum (that the world is ‘gunky’) but not that every whole is a proper part of a larger whole ad infinitum (that the world is ‘junky’). Jacobi would simply argue that there is no principled distinction between the cases.Footnote 40
Jacobi’s suggestion, then, is that no final focal point for complete explicability can be demonstrated. For the entanglement of demonstration with explanatory dependence, and its norm of generality and consistency, would leave it only with conclusions about the merely dependent.
Now perhaps neither any argument like this, nor Kant’s antinomy, need bother those who would defend an absolute focal point of complete explicability. Take Spinoza, for example. He agrees that the ‘proper order of philosophical inquiry’ cannot begin with something temporal and regress; it properly begins with the ‘divine nature’, which is ‘prior both in cognition and in Nature’ (E: 2P10S). Perhaps he still has reason for his God in this sense: The Ethics begins with a definition of a causa sui (E: 1D1). If we understand this (a cause-of-its-own-existence) then we see that it must be. So no inferential demonstration of God would be needed from anything else.Footnote 41 We might demonstrate other things from God; both the order of demonstration and the order of real grounding would align, anchored everywhere by God or the one substance.Footnote 42
But now we find another worry in Jacobi and Kant, challenging the coherence of any substantial sense of a causa sui. Anything logically follows from itself, and in this thin sense is ‘grounded’ by itself; this is what Jacobi will call a ‘formalism’. To break beyond that, Jacobi holds that we need causality, with a sense in which a cause is prior to effect. But such priority renders a self-cause incoherent: the cause would be prior and yet also not prior. Because Jacobi thinks one has immediate access to one’s one temporal agency, he sees our access to such priority as rooted in temporal causal priority. So he notes: if there were a self-cause, then ‘things […] can precede or follow one another without being before or after one another’ (JWA 1: 256–57/372). Kant gives both a specifically temporal version of this worry, and one in terms of priority generally.Footnote 43
But to come back to the big picture: In Hegel’s intellectual context, it is natural to expect familiarity with forms of IW, claiming that philosophical practice makes commitments about explanatory dependence unavoidable. And it is just as natural then, as it is now in looking at Schaffer’s monism, to take forms of IW as seeming to promise support for conclusions about complete explicability. But in Hegel’s context, it is prominent—as in both Kant and Jacobi—for forms of IW to be advanced in support of critique of such claims for completeness of explanation, and to take this to reflect critical light back on philosophical practice. Kant’s and Jacobi’s critical positions differ in any number of other respects. Perhaps most prominently, Jacobi thinks that the path from IW ends up bringing us face to face with real and persistent inexplicability, for example in the case of one’s own free agency. Kant argues for a restriction leaving us short of epistemic justification for claims about explanatory completeness. But, at the right level of abstraction, both advance forms of a poison chalice argument.
III. Hegel in the context of the poison chalice critique
I turn now to look at Hegel in the context of the poison chalice critique. True, there is not enough space to completely interpret Hegel’s philosophical system, or even just the Logic at its core. Nor enough to survey a full range of interpretive approaches. Instead, I just want to note a satisfying fit between the material above from Hegel’s intellectual context and the broadest tripartite structure of the Logic; and then I want to argue that we can begin to get a sense, in these terms, of how a form of reason animates that broadest structure, and even a hint of the conclusion of a kind of complete intelligibility asserted in the claim that ‘the concept is all’.
III.i. The problem of reasons; proposal: with or without grounding
The Logic is large and complex and neither in the whole nor in the parts is it easy to see how it could be animated by any form of reasons, or anything that would contrast with merely unpacking an assumption. Consider for example the famous beginning of the main text:
Being, pure being—without further determination. In its indeterminate immediacy it is equal only to itself and also not unequal with respect to another; it has no difference within it, nor any outwardly. (SL 21: 68–69)
There seems to be nothing like a ‘therefore’ to connect anything like a premise or, at the start anything like axioms, to a conclusion. Indeed, the first period concludes a snippet that is not a complete sentence, without the structure that seems needed to enter into any such relation of justification. While the texts to follow in the Logic, labelled ‘remark’, may be easier to view in this light, they are separated from a main text, which continues without any sustained version of that familiar kind of reasoning structure (P therefore Q) becoming easy to see. But Hegel clearly does not think he is merely assuming, and clearly warns against merely begging the question against others.Footnote 44 So I take as a central interpretive problem discerning how the Logic is animated by reasons, in some sense that—unusual though it may be—contrasts with mere assumption.
Why should this be so difficult? After all, it would seem that Hegel could proceed in a very simple manner, in line with the ‘obvious suggestion’ above. Imagine something like this: 1. Call to our minds familiar and easy to grasp cases of dependence, say about mereological relations of parts and wholes. 2. Exploit our sense of the dependence involved to try to argue that, ultimately, all such dependence must rest on something fundamental. 3. Argue that only something called ‘the concept’ could provide that locus of dependence and in a related sense of intelligibility. Philosophers generally could understand how one might at least try to provide reasons in this way, even if not necessarily expecting to be convinced. Given that approachable path, what possible reason could there be to favour something so obscure and difficult that it would be familiar for even specialists to see him as merely assuming and begging the question against others?Footnote 45
But now that we have looked at Hegel’s intellectual context, we can propose an easy-to-understand reason for not taking that path, namely: Hegel sees reasons, like those we have noted in Kant and Jacobi, for concluding that building such forms of grounding or dependence into our reasoning would, while putting us on a path like the simple path sketched above, in fact poison the prospects for reaching a satisfying destination or conclusion along that path.
Would that be an understandable reason why Hegel would choose a path so obscure and difficult? Yes, in a way, if we think of this as conditional on his reaching a conclusion about a supposed locus of a supposed complete intelligibility. My proposal is this: Hegel sees reasons—not unlike Jacobi’s, Kant’s or even (now out of historical context) Schaffer’s—for something like IW, or some claim that at least philosophy practised in any familiar way is entangled with commitments concerning grounding; if so, he would need, to avoid the poison, something new, unusual, remote relative to familiar forms of philosophy, including any Kant, Jacobi, or Schaffer can or do use to testify to the plausibility of forms of IW.
Even if this might explain why it should be hard to understand Hegel’s reasons, it would not yet itself put us on the track of those reasons. However, if we compare our look at Hegel’s context, above, with the tripartite structure of the Logic, then I can make a proposal that remains fairly simple for at least two-thirds of the way through. The Logic divides into ‘The Doctrine of Being’, ‘The Doctrine of Essence’, and ‘The Doctrine of the Concept’. What stands out in light of the above is the second part: ‘Essence’ focuses specifically on forms of dependence, grounding (broadly), priority-involving relations—or forms of ‘mediation’ (Vermittlung), as Hegel puts it, broadly following Jacobi (e.g., JWA 1: 156). For example, it emphasizes relations of ground-grounded; cause-effect, part-whole; etc.Footnote 46 In so far as it makes these central, at a first approximation it is pursuing philosophy in accord with something like IW.
We could then first ask, in light of many finding forms of IW plausible: how and why is there a first part of the Logic entirely prior to anything like grounding playing any role? I have a simple proposal: we can understand that prior part as an argument for a form of IW (although, an argument later to be called into question). As a kind of tagline, the point is that philosophy cannot live without grounding. It is a dialectical argument, at least in the sense for now of turning on a contradiction: it claims to show that pursuit of philosophy innocent of all commitment and interest in grounding or dependence results in contradictions, preventing any satisfactory philosophical conclusion.Footnote 47 While that might seem extremely ambitious, in one sense we can see why it might be attractive: The easier ways to defend forms of IW seem to involve examples of philosophers trying to do without grounding, and finding hidden commitments to grounding—as Schaffer argues about Quine, and Kant about the ‘indifferentists’, etc. Hegel’s way (if possible) would provide some reason for the general conclusion that philosophy (not just, e.g., Quine’s) is and need be entangled with commitments about grounding (even if, again, this will come in for questioning later).
And then I have a simple proposal concerning reasons in the second part, ‘Essence’. Just as the point of the first part would be that philosophy cannot live without grounding, the point of the second part would be that philosophy cannot live with grounding either. More specifically: We have in hand at this point a reason, from ‘Being’, for thinking philosophy is entangled with forms of priority-involving explanatory dependence. But then we are supposed to find that this reason puts so much pressure on forms of dependence or grounding that they cannot bear the weight: any way we turn we are supposed to still meet contradictions that prevent satisfactory conclusion.
We can only hold off the hardest problems so long, however—only until the third part, ‘The Doctrine of the Concept’. At least we can see in simple terms what is so unusual here: For the two lines of argument above seem to force some kind of very sceptical conclusion. For at the start it is hard—perhaps impossible—to see any alternative to ‘mediation’ (in the second part, ‘Essence’) and its lack, or ‘immediacy’ (in the first part, ‘Being’). But I will propose that having already traversed the dialectical arguments in those parts, a solution is supposed to only then come into view, or even be graspable at all, leading to the above-mentioned ‘the concept is all’ (SL 12: 238).
Naturally, this is still Hegel’s Logic, and grasping even the simpler steps in enough detail to attempt anything like a defence would require much more space. And at the end we would get at most only a sense of what the final view would be. Still, my hope is to start to understand the broadest structure, in terms of how it is meant to be animated by reasons, in a sense contrasting with mere assumption, and perhaps to get an initial hint about how to try to understand the conclusion in terms of those reasons.
III.ii. ‘Being’: philosophy cannot live without grounding
In this section, then, I try to bring across an initial sense of how the first part of the Logic, ‘The Doctrine of Being’, gives reason for the centrality of grounding (broad sense) or mediation.
To anticipate the strategy, compare Schaffer again. His grounding-theorist sees a ‘hierarchy of being’ (Reference Schaffer, Chalmers, Manley and Wasserman2009: 354); determinately distinct levels of being are determinately distinct in so far as one is prior to the next, or the next depends on or is grounded by the prior. He argues that to really carefully stick to a grounding-free alternative would leave one with empty triviality. Hegel will say that the alternative is seeing ‘being’ as entirely indeterminate, and see a contradiction here.
The most helpful stretch of text in this respect is the beginning of the Logic. We can start with a sense in which the Logic here finds reason, first, that philosophy must proceed carefully at the start, and not build into its inquiry something like grounding. And, second reason that such a careful beginning would require beginning with consideration of ‘Being’—without consideration of this as a ground of anything, or as grounded by anything.
Why would such carefulness have to mean beginning with ‘Being’? An initial sense of the idea is this: Imagine we rather wanted to begin with grounding. Presumably this would mean holding that there is grounding. But Hegel would see this as complex, taking grounding in relation to that ‘is’, and involving a relation between ground and grounded. Hegel will say to complex proposals that, ‘insofar as mediation is already present within each of these forms, they are not truly the first’ (EL: §86A). Alternatives would involve at least something else in relation to that ‘is’, or in relation to the ‘simplest of all simples, the logical beginning’ (SL 21: 56). That would be ‘being, pure being’ (SL 21: 68). There is here supposed to be a form of reason precisely in the lack of any prior assumed premise or axiom, to begin with ‘Being’.
It is natural to demand to know whether Hegel means to begin with a concept of being, or somehow being itself. But we are meant to begin far simpler than this: To grasp a concept would be to grasp it in terms of a distinction between concept and objects—and a relation between them, by which objects might satisfy concepts.
An obvious objection would insist that there is in fact nothing thinkable prior to such complexity. But care is needed, since the supposed objection is quite close to Hegel’s point: he will famously find reason in the Logic to conclude that this pure being, innocent of all relations including dependence relations, is so entirely indeterminate as to be nothing. In more detail: Hegel finds reason to take such being as ‘pure indeterminateness’ (SL 21: 68–69). After all, what is simplest would not be a relation between being and some determination of being. But Hegel is more ambitious here, seeing reason to hold that ‘[b]eing, the indeterminate immediate is in fact nothing’ (SL 21: 69).
To get an initial sense of this, consider an objection: Hegel soon mentions in this connection Parmenides (SL 21: 70), who would perhaps prefer a form of Schaffer’s ‘existence monism’, innocent of the grounding involved in ‘priority monism’. And perhaps Parmenideans would defend indeterminate being by saying this: it is only from our limited perspective, grasping things in terms of determinations, that we find nothing to being at all; but (says the Parmenidean) being in itself is rather somehow too full, or too large to be grasped from such a limited or limiting perspective. However, what I think Hegel argues here is that there is no room here at the beginning for any distinctions at all: not between concept and object, nor any this and that. If so, then there is no room for a distinction between our perspective and an in-itself. And so in this context, there is nothing to say but that being itself turned out to be nothing at all.
Hegel further finds that the equation of being and nothing is a contradiction (SL 21: 77). My sense of the idea is this: if being itself is nothing, then there is nothing; but, for that to be true, there would have to be a fact, namely, that there is nothing.Footnote 48
Hegel thinks then that resistance to these points would require facing ‘the challenge to state what, then, is being, and what is nothing’ (SL 21: 79–80). The first part of the Logic goes on to consider other forms of priority-free ‘flat ontology’ (to use Schaffer’s term). But it purports to find reason that, without priority-involving dependence, the challenge cannot be met.
III.iii. ‘Essence’: philosophy cannot live with grounding
In this section, I want to give an initial sense of the second part of the Logic, or the ‘Doctrine of Essence’, as uncovering problems with philosophy oriented around grounding.
A very rough way to start looking for this kind of problem would be to look for problems about infinite regresses. One trouble with this would be that it would not initially be clear why infinite regress should necessarily be problematic, or vicious.
But one way to think, relative to Schaffer, is this: He takes the fundamental to be the ungrounded (Reference Schaffer, Chalmers, Manley and Wasserman2009: 373). He accepts ‘foundationalism’, holding that ‘all priority chains terminate’ (Reference Schaffer2010: 37). If they terminate, then the chains bring us to the fundamental. Sometimes he treats foundationalism as an ‘assumption’ (Reference Schaffer2010: 37). But sometimes it gets what seems to be a reason: if ‘nothing is basic’, then ‘[t]here would be no ultimate ground. Being would be infinitely deferred, never achieved’ (Reference Schaffer2010: 62). We can take that thought on board and see what happens if we also accept the well-known objection to his monism, noted above, arguing that just as gunky worlds are possible, without smallest parts, so too are junky worlds, without largest parts, regressing infinitely upwards. With that addition, Schaffer’s views seem to suggest not just the possibility of regress-all-around but a contradiction: Given something about ‘being’ and grounding, it would be metaphysically necessary that there be a foundation; but grounding would also open the possibility of no foundations.Footnote 49
Hegel’s way also turns on a concern about being. In particular, the Logic began with a problem about being; we come to a contradiction in being itself, not avoidable without being able ‘to state what, then, is being’ (SL 21: 79–80), so long as we lack grounding (broadly) or some form of priority-involving dependence. But this now places a great deal of weight on dependence, and what Hegel argues is that this weight will force contradiction.
Here I will look away from a great deal of diverse forms of dependence considered, and diverse worries about them, and start specifically with what Hegel calls ‘grounding’. To see this as a solution to the problem about being is to think we can account for what it is to be in terms of grounding. Hegel sees this view as what is really expressed by a principle of ground (Grund), or sufficient reason:
‘Everything has a sufficient ground or reason’.—In general, this means nothing but this: Anything which is, is to be considered to exist not as an immediate, but as a posited… (SL 11: 293)Footnote 50
The second part of the Logic, more generally, takes ‘being’ itself, in so far as it is not just ‘infinitely deferred’ (as Schaffer puts it), to be ‘achieved’ in being grounded, or in so far as it depends. And this is what Hegel means by a focus on ‘essence’: The second part considers the view that ‘The truth of being is essence’, and this means orientation around ‘what being is in and for itself’ or a ‘background’ that ‘constitutes the truth of being’ (SL 11: 241).
There are many kinds of problems that follow, but here is one important form: Perhaps we might otherwise have been satisfied with Schaffer taking grounding as primitive. But if so, then the same could have been said about ‘Being’, and then there would be—at least as Hegel sees it—no principled, general reason to conclude philosophy cannot make do without grounding. The first part of the Logic finds it impossible to reach a stable conclusion there, and so demands something more with respect to an account of what it is to be. For appeals to grounds to help with that would require an account of what it is to ground. But if ground is fundamental, then there is nothing for such an account to reach for beneath—there is only, at its own level, the grounded. So the threat is that what it is to ground would be to have a grounded. Hegel says: ‘The ground is only ground insofar as it grounds’ (EL: §121A). If grounding is the source of determinate distinctions—such as those between levels in Schaffer’s ‘hierarchy of being’—then ground and grounded must be distinct, as prior and posterior. But, if what it is to ground is to have a grounded, then the grounded is ground, and there is no distinction of priority. Lecture notes on the Logic comment on this as contradiction in a parallel relation of cause and effect: ‘the inseparability is one determination, the diversity the other, that is contradiction’ (VL: 168/23, 2: 770).
There is much else considered in ‘Essence’, sometimes including forms of Spinozism, here considered in terms of forms of priority-involving dependence, and so as forms of Schaffer’s ‘priority monism’. But my focus here has not specifically been monism, but just to get just a sense of a reason for thinking that if philosophy cannot live without grounding, then it cannot live with it either. Or, better: given the reason why philosophy cannot reach an acceptable conclusion without grounding would also prevent an acceptable conclusion with grounding.
III.iv. A proposal about the conclusion of the Logic
Again, this only gets us so far, since it seems to force some kind of radically sceptical conclusion: if philosophy, roughly, can live neither without (‘Being’, ‘immediacy’) grounding, nor with it (‘Essence’), then it seems doomed. And this has brought us to the really unusual thing about Hegel’s method: this kind of dialectic, reasoning through contradictions, is supposed to not merely be negative, but to somehow generate positive results not reachable in any other way. Sometimes Hegel calls this a ‘speculative’ moment in something like a speculative-dialectical method (e.g., EL: §80–82).
Just as we made an approximate start above by invoking infinite regress, here we can do so by noting a common and familiar tie, for better or worse, between the idea of an absolute regress-stopper and the idea of something somehow dependent on itself, or self-grounding, self-causing, or similar. Spinoza seems to see this as for the better, endorsing substance as caused by itself (a causa sui). And ‘Essence’ in the Logic, for Hegel’s part, takes this to be something helpful if incomplete: a kind of pointing in the right direction.
And yet the same connection can also seem to exacerbate the sense of a sceptical result. That Descartes’s causal argument in the Meditations can seem to require that God be a self-cause is famously taken as a worry in the objections.Footnote 51 More immediately relevant for Hegel is that both Kant and Jacobi argue that a self-cause is just incoherent, except in a merely formal sense.
We can see both of these points towards the end of the second part of the Logic. In the Encyclopaedia version, the praise for Spinoza comes out like this: ‘cause is […] in and for itself causa sui’. And Hegel acknowledges and Jacobi’s criticism: ‘Jacobi, firmly caught up in the one-sided representation of the mediation, took the causa sui […] this absolute truth of the cause, merely for a formalism’ (EL: §153A).
And Hegel here concedes something important: so long as we think in terms of ‘mediation’—which here I would take to be priority-involving dependence relations, or (broadly) grounding—we cannot follow in the direction Spinoza points. So we cannot take the notion of a causal relation of dependence between distinct relata and turn it back on itself: about that, Jacobi is right to see incoherence. So we have only a pointing in a direction, and not yet any way of proceeding in that direction, or defending the coherence of thinking in that direction.
I propose here that what Hegel does at the end of the Logic is to call our attention to the kind or ‘method’ of thought pursued throughout the book. I think the idea is that, if the path of reasons followed prior holds up, then this itself shows that that very thought is what is pointed to with formulations like self-cause. Say we object: no, thought is merely determined by something outside thought. Then Hegel tries to argue in response: on the contrary, thought found reason at the start, without having to assume axioms or the like, to begin with ‘Being’. Or say we object: no, thought only progresses given some assumed end or goal. Hegel tries to argue in response: on the contrary, we found reason just in ‘Being’ to move on to ‘Nothing’, and so on, up to ‘Ground’, etc.
This is a very obscure idea, to be sure! But hopefully not in the sense that we should disregard it as too unclear to even consider whether there could be reasons for it. On the contrary, if we object, Hegel points to reasons throughout the Logic. Of course, there is no space to really defend them, but the idea is less of something without reason, and more of something that somehow just is all reason.
How could this thought neither be like the mediation or dependence found problematic in ‘Essence’ nor the immediacy or lack of mediation found problematic in ‘Being’? I think the idea is that thought is a form of what Hegel calls, in distinguishing the third part of the Logic, ‘development’ (Entwicklung).Footnote 52 On the one hand, I take it that this thought is supposed to not be composed of prior parts, standing in relations, so it is not composed of the mediation relations considered in ‘Essence’; rather, the parts are at least as much supposed to be what they are in virtue of the progression, growth or movement of thought. On the other hand, this is not the immediate indeterminacy of ‘Being’; this movement or development distinguishes steps within itself: being, nothing, etc.
It is Hegel’s Logic, of course, and so the expressions of this in the text would take a lot of space to unravel. One central passage at the end of the Logic refers to ‘the concept’ in a technical sense. Here I take this to refer to the ‘method’ already pursued throughout the Logic itself. And so the passage begins: ‘what is to be considered as method here is only the movement of the concept itself. We already know the nature of this movement’ (SL 12: 238). It adds that, at the end, we can see two points of ‘added significance’ to this method.
The first is that this movement throughout the Logic is right where formulations like causa sui are trying to point, even if those expressions themselves are still couched in terms of relations that leave them only pointing. And so the passages continues:
We already know the nature of this movement, but it now has […] the added significance that […] its movement is the universal absolute activity, the self-determining and self-realizing movement. (SL 12: 238)
Now that was actually the second of two points of ‘added significance’. The first was an orienting passage from the start here: ‘We already know the nature of this movement, but it now has, first, the added significance that the concept is all’ (SL 12: 238).
That is to say, all is thought, or the movement of thought, in the Logic’s sense of thought. My sense is that the basic idea here is this: We are supposed to be able to grasp what it is to be, only in terms of the movement of thought; all that is, would be in some way forms or stages of this movement of thought. And, in this, all would be in some sense intelligible—namely, in terms of its place in such a movement or development of self-determining thought, rather than in terms of something else prior to it, or on which it depends, or by which it is grounded.
IV. Conclusion
I have now promised, on Hegel’s behalf, that it should be possible to look retrospectively from the end of the Logic back to the beginning, and to give an account of being, or what it is to be, in terms of the thought noted at the end of the ‘Doctrine of the Concept’. I take it the same would apply to what it is to ground, or for the forms of dependence considered in ‘Essence’. Hegel promises to have shown along the way along that there is nothing else for any of this to be; for example, ‘The concept is accordingly the truth of being and essence’ (EL: §159). And I think this would mean a new kind of account or intelligibility or explicability itself—no longer one based on priority-involving dependence.
While there is no room to complete any interpretation of such accounts here, we can look back and see what has been achieved. First, I hope I have located Hegel’s Logic relative to the metaphysics of grounding. It can seem an ‘obvious suggestion’ that he must argue from grounding, if he is to argue. But this is mainly helpful with Hegel in so far as the truth is more the reverse: while Hegel takes such metaphysics seriously, he ultimately sees it as facing internal difficulties. To grasp the challenge Hegel’s Logic claims to face, we should not think of it as extending or completing a metaphysics of grounding; the challenge is more to do justice to a reason for it, to show that this reason in fact turns against it, and to find a positive philosophical result in just this.
But it is ultimately better to think of Hegel less in terms of metaphysics today, and more in terms of what this teaches us about his own historical context. Hegel is engaging with Kant and Jacobi; he is not engaging with Quineans. And I hope here we can begin to see how he meets them with reasons, rather than just question-begging assumptions. In particular, Hegel recognizes and generalizes a kind of Kantian Antinomy problem, arising giving the entanglement of much of philosophy with issues about priority-involving dependence, conditions and the unconditioned: a way in which such philosophy is at odds with or contradicts itself. But he looks in this contradiction for a positive result, even something absolute—rather than an epistemic limit. Or, take Jacobi’s challenge: He argues that the entanglement of philosophy as usual with dependence ultimately forces such philosophy to deny all free agency, and that this is untenable. Hegel answers by arguing that the problems internal to dependence-based philosophy rather open up a new kind of account on which even the complete freedom or self-determination of something like a self-cause is coherent, and central.
Hopefully, then, if we start by asking about contemporary metaphysics, we can end up getting at least an initial sense of how Hegel’s Logic is animated by a kind of reason, contrasting with mere assumption. And we can at least propose a path towards understanding what the conclusions of the Logic mean in terms of the reasons that animate that work. And we can do so having shifted from a concern with contemporary metaphysics itself, and to a more grounded(!) sense of Hegel’s own intellectual context.Footnote 53
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