1.1 The Artifactual Paradigm

For many philosophers, the touchstone of objective reality is mind-independence. For something to be real is for it to exist without the contribution of any human mind, and for something to be objectively known, it must be known as it is apart from such a contribution. The initial appeal of such a conception comes perhaps from certain clear cases where mind-dependence seems to involve a lack of reality in some relevant sense. One thinks of a hallucination as unreal because dependent on the mind in a special way; fictional characters are thought to be unreal because merely imaginary; colors, tastes, and other “secondary qualities” might be demoted in their reality as well, if they depend for their existence on a relation to the mind. But this initial pairing of the real with the mind-independent and the unreal with the mind-dependent is, perhaps notoriously, hard to maintain with complete generality.Footnote ¹ If we look around us, almost anywhere we may be, we see a world that is, apart from any sophisticated philosophical thesis, dependent to a great extent on the past and present workings of human minds. The computer in front of me now, the streets outside my window, and the faint music playing from passing cars: these items would not exist apart from the activity of human minds. Nor would the language I am writing in, the legal rights I acknowledge and respect, and the cultural practices I partake in. They would not exist, at least not in their present form, without the contribution of human thought.

While these claims would be, I expect, widely accepted, their overall significance for the shape of philosophical inquiry is, by and large, treated as marginal. One feels perhaps that thought touches reality only on its surface and in spots; that what really matters for philosophy, and especially metaphysics, is wholly unlike and alien to thought, or at least to ours.Footnote ² The humanly thought and made occupies only a cul-de-sac on the metaphysical landscape. What really is, and so what must be (if it can be) objectively known, is nature and the natural. Implicit in the notion of reality as mind-independent, and objective knowledge as knowledge of what is mind-independent, is the metaphysical priority of nature and the natural.

An illuminating way of viewing Hegel’s philosophical work, I believe, is as a sustained attempt to challenge this philosophical priority of nature and the natural over the realm of the humanly made and mind-dependent. One of Hegel’s most famous contributions to philosophy is of course to introduce Geist (“spirit” or “mind”) as a central theme. Whatever Hegel means by this term, the result of its high position in his system is that topics like law, art, religion, and history find a nearly unprecedented prominence in Hegelian philosophy compared with the tradition that preceded him. This new prominence to the humanly made is the result of what I call Hegel’s inversion of philosophy: a transition from a conception of philosophy in which nature sets the standard for truth and knowledge to a conception in which the paradigm case of knowledge is thought’s own knowledge of thought’s own products. In contrast to nature, in the domain of spirit – the subject matter of what, not coincidentally, would be called the GeisteswissenschaftenFootnote ³ in Hegel’s century – the human mind contemplates itself, not, of course, projected on the screen of an inner theater but as expressed in an outer world. Although the products and processes of Geist, which make up this outer world, are dependent on nature for their existence, they are no longer simply nature. In their relation to conceptuality, they are sui generis. They thus offer a different kind of object for philosophical knowledge.

That Hegel carries out something like this inversion is evident in a number of places. His concern with revaluing the domain of the “ethical” (which involves spirit in the objective domain) vis-à-vis the natural is especially clear in his Philosophy of Right. He writes there,

While Hegel does not here deny that nature is rational, and that philosophy can grasp its rationality, he also alludes to the fact that the rationality of nature is typically understood as something hidden or opaque. The rationality of the state, however, and the humanly made in general is – or can be – out in the open. It is even a “force and power.” This comes out clearly in student notes that were attached to this paragraph of the preface.Footnote ⁴ Hegel is reported to have said:

Hegel here is describing the difference in our attitude to the laws of nature and laws of our societies. Even though both laws are in some way given (at some moment in time), so that we can have factual knowledge of both kinds of laws, Hegel claims that when we look at what is given in nature, we assume that the standard for its laws lies within nature itself, while the standard for the correctness of human laws lies within reason itself, and therefore within us. It is for this reason that Hegel, in the notes that follow, repudiates the idea that there should be a “theory” of the laws of the state, which would suggest that the laws are something “set over against” the thing they are a theory of. Instead, he writes, we must grasp the very “thought” of right itself, which is “not an opinion about the thing but the concept of the thing itself” (16/7). This means that Hegel rejects what he calls a “half-philosophy that locates knowledge in an approximation to truth” (27/16). Apparently, this is because we do not need merely to approximate the truth of something of which we are the measure. We need rather to realize that this measure is somehow already effective. Thus: “It is a warmer peace with the world which knowledge supplies” (27/16).

That Hegel accepts an inversion of the priority of spirit to nature is also one of the most distinctive claims of his Aesthetics. Hegel famously claims there that the beauty of nature is inferior to the beauty of art, so much so that the beauty of art (as a product of Geist) sets the standard for the beauty of nature. He writes: “On the contrary, spirit [or mind] is alone the true comprehending of everything in itself, so that everything beautiful is truly beautiful only as sharing in this higher sphere and generated by it. In this sense the beauty of nature appears only as a reflection of the beauty that belongs to spirit” (VÄ I 15/2). As in the case of the state, Hegel explains the existence of art in terms of its conceptual origin:

Evidently, Hegel does not think that the mind-dependence of art makes it any less worthy of philosophical consideration than natural beauty. Quite to the contrary, for Hegel, this mind-dependence (specifically its “spirit”- and “concept”-dependence) makes art eminently worthy of philosophical reflection.

The contrast between Hegel’s view on this point and the mainstream philosophical attitude today, which gravitates toward naturalisms of various stripes, is a striking one. Many contemporary philosophical naturalists quite clearly endorse the view that philosophy should produce theories about its objects, which do not differ essentially from scientific theories in their attitude of deference to objects of study (this motivates a secondary deference to the authoritative research of empirical scientists). That is, a philosophical naturalist takes the mind-independent object of philosophical study to set the standard for the philosophical account. In so doing, let us say that the philosophical naturalist accepts a natural paradigm for philosophical knowledge.Footnote ⁵ To accept such a paradigm is not to reject the possibility of nonnatural or humanistic knowledge, but it is to see this as derivative and thus non-exemplary. For example, knowledge in the practical domain will either need to pose as a kind of theory about entities (i.e., “moral realism”) or admit defeat (i.e., a form of noncognitivism). Philosophical thinking will, in any case, have to answer to its relation to scientific, theoretical knowledge about the mind-independent and natural. By contrast, I will argue that Hegel endorses an artifactual paradigm of philosophical knowledge.Footnote ⁶ An artifactual paradigm implies that the best case of objective philosophical knowledge is closer to the knowledge we have of a mind-dependent artifact than to the knowledge we have of a mind-independent thing of nature. An artifactual paradigm thus allows philosophical knowledge to be unlike a “theory” in which we grasp an object that is independent from our participation in its existence. Consider, for example, the cases of the state or works of art. What states or works of art are is not a mind-independent matter, even if it is independent of any particular mind. To treat these kinds of objects as paradigmatic is clearly not to endorse a generally constructivist or fictionalist view of the world – especially not the natural world. On the contrary, to accept the artifactual paradigm is to freely concede an important independence of nature from thought and the products of thought, for a paradigm sets a standard but does not define every case. Nor does this inversion exclude a mind-independent nature as an instance of philosophical knowledge. But it suggests that we see our knowledge of nature as a deviation from an ideal that is fully instantiated in other cases.

I think of Hegel’s commitment to an artifactual paradigm in philosophy as a form of philosophical humanism, for we are the relevant artificers. An artifactual paradigm is also present in theologically influenced authors, where creation is the production of God’s artifact.Footnote ⁷ Precisely for this reason, the theological use of an artifactual paradigm does not end up grounding any privilege to the humanly made. In that case, the objects of human craft are not themselves paradigmatic for knowledge; they only offer an appropriate class of examples or analogies. Perhaps the clearest precedent for a humanistic use of the artifactual paradigm in the history of philosophy is Giambattista Vico. It is Vico who most famously attempts to leverage the notion of “maker’s knowledge” to alter the focus of science.Footnote ⁸ In short, if the maker’s knowledge of his own artifact is the exemplary case of knowledge, then human knowledge of the humanly made should better exemplify knowledge than our knowledge of the unmade. Hence, Vico’s “new science” is no longer the new science of seventeenth-century mechanism; he invites us instead to think of human culture and history as artifacts on a grand scale, and thus as more suitable objects of science than the natural world, which is only God’s craftwork. Vico famously announces that “the criterion of the true should be to have made the thing itself” (Vico Reference Vico1988: ch. 1, iv). This is his so-called verum-factum principle.Footnote ⁹ Vico accepts that the principle does apply abstractly to nature, since nature is God’s “factum.” But his use of the principle is primarily in service of the human sciences: the knowledge of the civil, cultural, and historical world. For Vico, we have the criterion for truth in these sciences as fellow makers of this world. This idea persuades Vico to make a number of bold, speculative historical claims about the origin, elements, and basic principles of past and present civilizations. He justifies this ambition in his New Science by appealing to an apparent variant of his verum-factum principle:

Vico used the verum-factum principle to challenge the paradigmatic status of knowledge about nature, and instead to crown the cultural world, and our knowledge of it, as the standard against which knowledge is to be measured, as its best instance.Footnote ¹¹ Vico gives us a clear example of adopting an artifactual paradigm for philosophical knowledge and thus a humanistic metaphysics.

Vico’s precedent is especially important because it shows how the maker’s knowledge principle might be taken not in a ‘constructivist’ kind of idealism, according to which the world as we represent it is a construction of our own minds (an interpretation to which Kant and the German Idealists have often been subjected, however unfortunately),Footnote ¹² but in a quite realistic and almost literal sense. In Vico’s view, the human world is constructed (perhaps not completely, and certainly unevenly) according to the concepts and designs of human minds, and so is in principle intelligible to us, especially as compared to nature. This ‘construction’ of the human world is not a merely cognitive one but a practical and historical achievement, which then has cognitive consequences. Nothing in this position need involve idealism in any subjectivistic sense, or in the sense of a speculative metaphysical theory.Footnote ¹³ If this is an idealism, it is close to an idealism of reflective common sense.Footnote ¹⁴

1.2 The “Logical” Basis of Humanistic Metaphysics

Prime facie, it seems clear that Hegel is a humanist in some sense. Though his affinity with Vico has not received a great deal of attention,Footnote ¹⁵ it is hard to deny. Moreover, it is simply a datum that Hegel gives a more prominent place to Geist than nature in his philosophy, and this position could be supported in a direct way by considering numerous remarks to this effect. My aim in this book is not to show that Hegel is a humanist in this way but to explain this humanism on its more general and substantial basis. However, while Vico’s version of humanism arguably concerns the priority first-order historical knowledge about the civil world, Hegel’s concerns the priority of humanistic philosophical knowledge. Here I aim to demonstrate the “logical” or metaphysical basis of Hegel’s humanistic inversion of philosophy. Hegel’s mature masterpiece, The Science of Logic (WL),Footnote ¹⁶ contains, in its third book, The Doctrine of the Concept, an account of concepts that, I believe, amounts to a criticism of the natural paradigm in philosophy. It aims to demonstrate the possibility of a special domain of knowledge and truth to which our conceptuality has special access, since our conceptuality is its source. In short, Hegel justifies the philosophical priority of Geist to nature on the basis of his account of concepts.

Before considering how Hegel’s account of concepts could have this implication, I should outline the understanding of The Science of Logic that will guide this work. Hegel famously says of his Logic that it is a “replacement” of metaphysics (see Section 4.1). In my view, Hegel would not need to say that his Logic was a replacement of metaphysics if it simply offered a new metaphysical theory. It must be doing something else. This does not mean that Hegel’s Logic bears no relation to metaphysics. Indeed, the Objective Logic, in particular, comprising the Doctrine of Being and the Doctrine of Essence, begins with a consideration of the concept of mere <being> and develops a series of concepts central to traditional ontology: <quality>, <quantity>, <essence>, <cause>, and so on.Footnote ¹⁷ There is clearly an overlap in topic between Hegel’s Logic and texts such as Spinoza’s Ethics, Leibniz’s Principles of Philosophy, and Wolff’s Ontologia. However, the resemblance is in some way superficial. Texts like those just mentioned assert claims and defend principles about their subject matter, whether that has been picked out as substance or beings in general. These claims and principles (and the arguments for them) are what is of central interest. But it is a curious feature of Hegel’s Logic that it is not at all straightforward to see when or even if he is making any claims in the main body of the text. This is not simply because Hegel is an unclear writer (though he often is). The feature of Hegel’s Logic I am pointing to is, I think, intentional on his part and suggests a deeper separation between his approach and that of other authors of the metaphysical tradition. Hegel is approaching questions of metaphysics not by examining claims and making assertions of his own but simply by an immanent investigation (“dialectic”) of the concepts necessary to make any such claims in the first place.Footnote ¹⁸ Hegel’s Logic is thus in some way, like Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, an attempt to examine the possibility of metaphysics. However, unlike Kant, who thought that the critical project should be pursued by first investigating the cognitive capacities of the knowing subject, Hegel pursues this question in perhaps a still more radical way: by focusing on the very meaning of the concepts that are used to make metaphysical claims. From the beginning, Hegel shows that concepts that are the basis of some metaphysical theory or other, starting with <being>, in fact cannot play the central role they are assigned. They prove to be “untrue” on their own and so “pass over” into other concepts. In general, Hegel is “criticizing” concepts – though this means not rejecting these concepts altogether or putting them out of use but showing the internal boundaries and limits of each ontological concept.Footnote ¹⁹ In my view, the Objective Logic overlaps topically with ontology but is no ontology: for each concept that could form the basis of an ontological system proves unable to do so. To achieve this project, Hegel does not need to make positive claims about the world but only develop and investigate the concepts of any would-be ontology.

In my view, the primarily critical goal of the Objective Logic turns to a constructive task in the Subjective Logic, or the Doctrine of the Concept. As I will argue in Chapter 3, what Hegel calls “the Concept” (der Begriff) is something like the power of conceptuality in general. In particular, it is his thematization not of the kind of thought that characterizes empirical categorization and judgment but precisely the thinking involved in the development of philosophical concepts themselves. What Hegel calls the Concept is thus the form of philosophical thinking in general.Footnote ²⁰ As he writes in the Encyclopedia: “Philosophical thinking has its own peculiar forms, apart from the forms that they [sc. philosophy and the empirical sciences] have in common. The universal form of it is the concept” (EL § 9, 52/33). After showing that the ontological concepts of the Objective Logic are “untrue,” Hegel sets himself the task in the Concept Logic of showing how the Concept – philosophical conceptuality – is “true.” As he explains it, he aims to show what it means for Concept and object to agree; such agreement (which is for Hegel a matter of degree) he calls “the Idea.” It is sometimes thought that Hegel’s concept of the Concept signals the moment in the Logic where it becomes self-reflective about its own activity.Footnote ²¹ This would make the topic of the Concept Logic primarily retrospective in the context of the whole work. I will try to show that the goal is rather prospective: the account of the Concept is not primarily an explanation for the thinking within the Logic but a grounding of Hegel’s “Realphilosophie” – his concrete accounts of the philosophical topics of nature and spirit. That is, Hegel is interested in a kind of conceptual truth, but not the conceptual truth of the very general determinations of thought found in traditional logic and metaphysics. Instead, he wants to explain the kind of concrete truth one seeks in philosophy as a whole.

Hence, what Hegel calls “the Concept” is deeply connected to philosophical thought, and what he calls “truth” is primarily philosophical truth. The positive aim of the Concept Logic is to explain what makes concrete philosophical truth possible in its best instance; though in doing so, it also deals with forms of thought that do not achieve this kind of truth. This does not mean that Hegel deals concretely with nature or Geist in the Logic. As I will often emphasize, the accounts of concepts in Hegel’s Logic are all “topic-neutral.”Footnote ²² The Logic is an account of certain thought-determinations “in and for themselves,” without determining or delimiting any specific domain of application in advance. But I will argue that this does not prevent the Logic from developing concepts that are in fact exemplified to different degrees or in different domains. In particular, Hegel’s explanation of the paradigm case of philosophical truth could not apply to everything equally, even if it is defended in a topic-neutral manner: it is compatible with Hegel’s logical and topic-neutral approach that the concepts he deals with will be differently realized in the domains of Geist and nature. In effect, my claim is that, despite the topic-neutrality of the Logic, its solution to the problem of how concepts can be “true” always tends in the direction of Geist; and hence, certain instances from the artifactual domain provides the best – paradigmatic – exemplification of Hegel’s account of philosophical truth.Footnote ²³

This prospective reading of Hegel’s concept of the Concept is nicely illustrated by the use to which Hegel puts concept-talk in the introduction to his Philosophy of Right:

On my reading of this passage, Hegel here assumes that his theory of “the Concept” from the Doctrine of the Concept is decisive for his account of <right> in the Philosophy of Right. Why so? It is because the subject matter of right is a concept that has “truth” and “actuality” and indeed “gives itself actuality to itself.” Not everything that occurs in the political realm – much of which is “ephemeral existence, external contingency, opinion, unsubstantial appearance, untruth, illusion, and so forth” – counts as the actualization of the Concept. Hegel suggests here that a faulty understanding of what a concept is stands in the way of distinguishing all this from the truth. Accordingly, some account of what it means for a concept to be “true” or indeed to give itself actuality is required to understand what Hegel could mean in this specific application. On my view, then, even if there is an initially topic-neutral discussion of the Concept giving itself actuality in the Logic itself, we should expect such an account to be exemplified to varying degrees in the various regions of philosophy.

This passage implies that whatever Hegel’s account of the Concept is, it is not such that it applies to everything equally. For surely “concepts” in a loose sense apply even to the “ephemeral existence” of the modern state: we have “concepts” of corruption, mismanagement, inequality, and more. Hegel must be supposing that a certain kind of concept is at issue here. Though in some sense the whole sphere of conceptuality is at issue in Hegel’s account of the Concept, only a narrower kind of concept seems to fulfill Hegel’s project of explaining what is true.

To see this, it should prove useful to consider it on a more intuitive philosophical basis. We can begin from a distinction between concepts – using that term in a non-technical sense for nowFootnote ²⁴ – that only represent their objects and concepts that in some way constitute their objects.Footnote ²⁵ For a concept to merely represent its object is for the concept to be used as a device for reference, where the representing device is essentially different than the thing it represents. This sense of “representation” is akin to Hegel’s own use of the term Vorstellung. Hegel says that “representing begins from intuition and the ready-found material [gefundenem Stoffe] of intuition” (EPG § 451). I take this to mean that representation is a relation of deference to the object as given (initially in intuition). This is true even if activity on the part of the subject is necessary to generate the representation: its function is still to bound to what has been given. Arguably a concept like <water> has the task only of representing its object in this sense: what water really is, as given. Accordingly, a given concept of water can fail in this task miserably. A user of the concept might be completely in the dark about what water really is. This possibility is central to recent arguments to the effect that terms like “water” are natural-kind terms, whose reference functions independently of their sense.Footnote ²⁶

We might say that the dominant conception of concepts treats representation or reference as their primary or even only function.Footnote ²⁷ By contrast, for a concept to constitute its object requires that there is a relation of dependence not simply of the concept on the object (as in the case of representation) but also of the object on the concept. The idea of a concept constituting its object can be nicely illustrated by a remark of Hegel’s from an 1810 lecture. He uses “intention” (Vorsatz), rather than “concept” (Begriff), but that difference can be ignored for present purposes:

To build a house involves a conception of, or intention for, the house as built, so that the built house (the object) is the conception or intention that was to be realized. We cannot think of the intention or concept as merely representing a house that would exist apart from the concept. Rather, the object is a realization of the concept or intention. The notion of “constitution” suggests itself as an appropriate description of this relation. The example of a house shows that conceptual constitution can be understood on an artifactual model.

Even before a more detailed account is given of the notion of a concept constituting its object, we can notice several unique characteristics of this relation of concept and object. First, the priority of singular reality and universal concept is reversed in the case of conceptual constitution. That is, where a concept has the task of representing its object, we often begin with some singular reality, and our task is to consider which concept or determination should be applied to it. But in the case of conceptual constitution, we have the universal or concept ‘first,’ which determines how the singular reality should be shaped. Second, since the object’s character is determined by the concept, the object has a feature we can label conceptual transparency.Footnote ²⁸ That is, the nature of the object is given by its concept: there can be no final gap between the nature and the concept. In our simple example, this is because what a house is is sensitive to the concept <house> in a way that the nature of water is (presumably) not sensitive to the concept <water>. It is easy to understand a claim like, “This is what we think water is, but we may be completely wrong!” but hard, to my ears, to understand a claim like, “This is what we think a house is, but we may be completely wrong!”

I have started with the simple concept <house> to make the point of conceptual constitution relatively clear. I hasten to add that my final account will not credit <house> as a concept in the fully Hegelian sense; nor will I suggest that material artifacts like houses are bona fide instances of Hegelian conceptual constitution. My claim will be that artifacts like this provide a model of Hegel’s theory of conceptual constitution. However, certain artifacts (especially social artifacts) are genuine instances. Accordingly, the notion of conceptual constitution should apply in a similar way in the case of concepts of traditional philosophical significance, like, for example, <law> (meaning the use of “law” in legal systems rather than “laws of nature”). I think we can we say something similar about law to what we can say about houses: that what law is is sensitive to the concept <law>, that law in some sense involves a universal preceding and determining its own singular reality (the case where a genuine law exists).Footnote ²⁹ We cannot say these things if <law> simply has the aim of representing something, of deferring to an object already given, such as the natural kind, or at least empirical kind, law.Footnote ³⁰ But we may be able to say these things if law depends on a different relation to its concept than mere representation. And so on, mutatis mutandis, for anything that exhibits the relation of conceptual constitution that we have sketched. Insofar as there are objects whose concepts are constitutive concepts, there are objects to which we, if we are thinkers of those concepts, have a special, transparent relation.

Now, this brief treatment may suggest that the notion of conceptual constitution is intelligible independently of any of Hegel’s grand ambitions in the Logic, and this might be taken as a mark against it as an account of Hegel’s position. However, my claim is not simply that Hegel recognizes the existence of conceptual constitution, which could be taken as obvious (though I would argue underappreciated). What is significant about conceptual constitution is precisely its systematic significance: it answers the question of the “true” relation of concept and object in a way that the representationalist approach of the natural paradigm does not. Only thus does it have the potential to “invert” a traditional understanding of philosophy. For Hegel’s project to succeed, it is not enough that he shows that conceptual constitution is possible or even actual; he must show that it stands at the center of philosophical interest, that it answers our philosophical needs.

This is not obvious. For example, Spinoza is convinced that artifactual concepts lead to a corruption of philosophy. Not only does Spinoza take the object of genuine knowledge (and, ultimately, the only thing that exists) to be “God, or nature,” he diagnoses some of the central failures of other philosophers as owing to their implicit reliance on an artifactual model of nature and our knowledge of it. Spinoza’s God is not a designer or artificer. Hence, according to Spinoza, our knowledge of nature should no longer bear the trace of illicit analogies to the artifactual realm. For Spinoza, our attachment to normative language in describing even nature relies on precisely this analogy. He writes:

Here, Spinoza has an interesting explanation of our evaluation of artifacts – one with illuminating connections to what we find in Hegel. For Spinoza, we begin with “universal ideas” or “models” of artifacts, which become standards of evaluation of artifacts, against which we measure their goodness or perfection. This is the origin of our normative concepts, not only in their use for the evaluation of artifacts but also when they are extended to everything:

For Spinoza, the use of an artifactual model to understand nature is a sign of the misapplication of concepts in the natural realm. We think we can apply terms like “good” or “perfect” to the natural world, forgetting that the home use of these concepts comes from the evaluation of artifacts.Footnote ³² Spinoza’s solution is not to accept a dualism of nature and artifact but to overturn this dualism in favor of monism of nature. Thus, Hegel’s metaphysical humanism cannot just show that there is such a thing as conceptual constitution (though even this, I think, would be denied by Spinoza); he must also show that it is not reducible to some other form of naturalistic explanation. For this, an inversion of the natural paradigm in metaphysics is required.

1.3 Interpreting Hegel’s Idealism and Metaphysics of the Concept

There has often been a prominent place in the study of Hegel for those who emphasize his significance for “humanistic” disciplines, especially in terms of his providing a precedent for hermeneutics.Footnote ³³ This tradition is a significant inspiration for the present one. However, I do not know of a humanistic reading of Hegel that shows how his humanism is rooted in his theory of concepts. Some, like Taylor’s (Reference Taylor1975) influential work, treat Hegel’s use of “the Concept” to mean something akin to God or a cosmic spirit.Footnote ³⁴ Presumably such an entity will not well explain how we have special conceptual knowledge of the human world. (I sketch an argument for this claim later in this section.) In recent years, however, it has become more popular to explain even the humanistic or social side of Hegel’s thought in terms of the natural or even (supposedly) naturalistic side of his thought, including his sizeable debt to Aristotle. Books by Pinkard (Reference Pinkard2012), Sell (Reference Sell2013), Kreines (Reference Kreines2015), Khurana (Reference Khurana2017), and Ng (Reference Karen2020) emphasize Hegel as a thinker of nature and organic life.Footnote ³⁵ Some have looked to Hegel (though even more to Schelling) as a source of inspiration for environmental thought.Footnote ³⁶ And though the domain of Geist has by no means been ignored in this recent trend, Hegel’s use of the Aristotelian metaphor of Geist as “second nature” has gained a special prominence. This gives the impression that nature is playing a key role even in the concept of Geist.

It is true that nature plays an important role in Hegel’s thought and also that organic metaphors are almost ubiquitous in his work. It will be an important desideratum for my interpretation to show how placing the realm of spirit (read in artifactual terms) as a paradigm of philosophical knowledge does not exclude nature as a genuine instance of such knowledge, and not a mere anomaly (see Section 7.4.2). Even so, an implication of my interpretation will be that the emphasis on Hegel’s naturalism should give way to a “humanist” or indeed “artifactualist” interpretation that I do not believe has received its full due.

What distinguishes my approach is its use of the artifactual paradigm as a new way to challenge traditional interpretations of Hegel’s metaphysics. Despite a spate of deflationary or non-metaphysical readings of Hegel in the past few decades,Footnote ³⁷ several dominant interpretations of Hegel continue to affirm that he offers a full-blooded theory about the nature of reality as such, a metaphysics in its most ambitious sense. On this kind of view, Hegel’s metaphysics, especially as presented in his Logic, involves the claim that there is some important and general convergence or identity between “thought” and “being,” or “subjectivity” and “substance.” A common way to put the basic view is as a variation on Spinoza: Hegel offers an important modification of the Spinozist conception of substance by introducing an element of dynamic subjectivity into the picture.Footnote ³⁸ In Hegel’s famous words, “everything depends on conceiving and expressing the true not as substance, but just as much as subject” (PhG 22–3/¶ 17). Rather than substance being what it is eternally, substance proves to be a dynamic subject that makes itself what it is over time. Eventually, in the course of human history the substance realizes itself most completely in becoming aware of itself in human (Protestant Christian) thought, which indeed contributes to its full realization. On this metaphysical reading of Hegel, Geist is one designation for this dynamic substance-subject, while “the Concept” is a designation for its logical structure, becoming the “Idea” or “Absolute Idea” when it is fully developed. On such a view, Hegel’s absolute idealism is the claim that thought and being, Concept and reality, are one and the same, though this merely implicit identity becomes increasingly explicit over the course of history. Importantly, since all of reality is the product of the Concept, on this monist view there would be no use looking for a fundamental logical distinction between nature and spirit.Footnote ³⁹

This reading of Hegel requires a very different understanding of Hegel’s Concept than the one I have just sketched in the previous sections. While I have said that Hegel’s use of the term “Concept” refers to some aspect of human thought, on the standard metaphysical readings it is something like a logical description of the subject-substance just described. Without doubt, there are passages in Hegel that suggest such an account. For example, consider a passage from the 1831 preface to the Science of Logic:

Introducing the Concept in the Encyclopedia Logic, he writes, “As the substantial might which is for itself the concept is what is free, and since each of its moments is the whole that it is, and is posited as inseparable unity with it, the concept is totality” (EL § 160, 307/236). And in a ZusatzFootnote ⁴⁰ a few paragraphs later, Hegel explains:

These passages, taken by themselves, are not clear in their details. But one can perhaps already see in them what a number of commentators have drawn from them. It is frequently claimed that the way to understand Hegel’s metaphysical idealism is in terms of a conceptual realism.Footnote ⁴¹ On this view, “the Concept” does not refer (primarily) to human acts or contents or thought but to something present in the objective world, perhaps its most fundamental structure.

Broadly speaking, there are two main variations of this kind of view that have been presented in recent interpretations. On the one hand, monistic interpretations see Hegel as holding that the Concept is a single quasi-logical structure constituting reality as a whole. This view is classically articulated by Charles Taylor:

Brady Bowman’s (Reference Bowman2013) more recent, well-developed version of this view holds that Hegel’s idea of the Concept is a competitor to Spinozian “substance”; in contrast to substance, the Concept is a purely and absolutely negative structure (“absolute negativity”). There is no positive substance but a dynamic structure of negative relations. The whole structure of mutual negative relations amounts to reality as a whole, including the finite minds (our own) that grasp this structure.Footnote ⁴²

Another strand of conceptual realism we may call the essentialist view. It holds that Hegelian “concepts” are akin to real essences or natural kinds, inhering in the world, perhaps especially the organic and animal world.Footnote ⁴³ Everything, in some way, is what it is because of its inhering concept. Frequently cited in this regard is a different passage from the Science of Logic’s 1831 preface: “The nature, the specific essence, that which is truly permanent and substantial in the manifold and accidentality of appearance and fleeting externalization, is the concept of the thing [Sache], that which is universal in it” (WL I 26/16, modified). Essentialist readings differ on the status of “the Concept” when used in its conspicuous grammatically singular form.Footnote ⁴⁴ But in general they emphasize the role of Hegelian “concepts” as the essences of existing individuals.Footnote ⁴⁵ Hegel’s idealism is an “objective” idealism, on this view, precisely because of his commitment to the existence of mind-independent “concepts.”

One can see quite clearly that if we accept a conceptual realist reading of Hegel, he will be found not to support an artifactual paradigm in philosophy but rather a natural one. For if our goal in philosophy is to express the content of “concepts” that are (human-)mind-independently in the world (whether in the monist or essentialist manner), then philosophical inquiry will be wholly deferential to those “concepts.” Indeed, it will even be “theoretical”: philosophy will be an attempt to approximate in thought the true “concepts” that are the hidden essences or kinds of things.

There is no doubt that some of Hegel’s texts can be read in support of conceptual realist readings. But I find that these accounts face a common difficulty, which I do not think can be met. To put it simply, these accounts do not explain how Hegelian metaphysics can amount to someone’s knowledge, and especially in the strong (even “absolute”) sense that Hegel wishes to credit this metaphysics as knowledge. As I will argue in the next chapter, Hegel’s use of the term “Concept” is involved in crediting human beings, in some instances, with absolute knowledge. For this to work, I believe, concepts themselves must be what subjects think;Footnote ⁴⁶ concepts themselves, whatever their content may be, must be directly present in thought. Call this the immediacy-of-thought condition.Footnote ⁴⁷ By contrast, an account of Hegel’s metaphysics that states that even concepts are on the ‘other side’ of thought – they are ‘in’ the object, they are present in things or as the structure of reality – must take away the directness of our access to the concepts themselves, since we are not ourselves thinking these concepts in their objective form, for example, as governing something about animal life. Suppose we then say that there is a relation between our human concepts and these concepts* (the objective things posited by conceptual realism), what will explain our knowledge of this relation? It cannot be concepts* themselves, if we concede that concepts* are mind-independent (at least for minds like ours). For those are now the objects we are trying to know, and not the concepts we know them with. We have a few options. We may, firstly, assert an identity or isomorphism between concepts and concepts*. But this assertion must be merely dogmatic, since we must rely on our concepts to gain knowledge of this isomorphism, which assumes the very same isomorphism.Footnote ⁴⁸ For example, it would be dogmatic to assume that our concept <dog> is the same as, or identical to, what we posit as the objective concept* dog, since we need <dog> to think dog. Yet the same problem seems to hold no matter what objective concept is posited.

Or, secondly, we might deny that concepts are immediately thought at all and make our knowledge of real concepts an ‘inference to the best explanation.’Footnote ⁴⁹ That is, we might say that the world is better explained by assuming that there are real concepts* in things than not. Yet, even if true, that would not make it the case that those concepts* are immediate to thought. It will be hard to see how our knowledge of those concepts* will be our knowledge rather than, say, reasonable belief. Neither of these solutions will succeed in showing how metaphysical knowledge is possible in the “absolute” but non-dogmatic sense Hegel requires.

However, even if my criticism here is apt, one might think that it presents Hegel’s view of concepts as a nonstarter in another way. For suppose we stipulate that when Hegel speaks of “the Concept,” he is referring to some kind of activity that is possible for human thought, exemplified in philosophical thought. That certainly makes it clear how it could be known by us: simply by thinking. But it would then become questionable how Hegel could want to say what he says about the Concept in the passages that seem to neatly support the conceptual realist position. Evidently, or at least apparently, my own thought is not “the infinite form or the free, creative activity that does not need a material at hand outside it in order to realize itself.” Nor does it seem that one’s own thought could be confused for a quasi-Spinozian “substance.” Satisfying the immediacy-of-thought condition seems to require that we radically deflate the content of Hegelian knowledge.

Existing accounts that attempt, as I do, to meet the immediacy-of-thought condition commonly address this problem by appealing to something like a universal conceptualism about knowledge and experience. This is especially characteristic of Robert Pippin’s still-influential Reference Pippin1989 work, Hegel’s Idealism.Footnote ⁵⁰ He writes there, “For it is with a denial that a firm distinction can ever usefully be drawn between intuitional and conceptual elements in knowledge that distinctly Hegelian idealism begins” (9). Pippin understands the Concept to be Hegel’s answer to the Kantian notion of the transcendental unity of apperception (6). The Concept is something like self-consciousness in its freedom from the givens of experience, which also has the power of unifying our experience. On this account, Hegel’s neo-Platonic-sounding statements about the “concept giving itself its own reality” should be interpreted in terms of Hegel’s challenge to Kant’s distinction between concepts and intuitions.Footnote ⁵¹ To put it simply, the conceptual structure of experience is grounded in conceptual activity or spontaneity. There can be no final, nonconceptual ‘check’ from outside.

Pippin’s comparison of Hegel’s Concept or “Notion” (as it was formerly translated) with a Kantian notion of the unity of apperception thus makes the focus of Hegel’s theory of conceptuality its relation to perceptual experience. In line with the idea that the Hegelian Concept is the unity of apperception, for Pippin, the specific concepts of the Logic are moments of this unity, and thus akin to Kantian categories, conditions for possible judgments and hence any empirical uptake. At least in his early work, Pippin reserves the name “Notion” for the specific concepts discussed in the Logic itself: concepts such as <becoming>, <essence>, and <life>.Footnote ⁵² Hegelian “Notions” differ from Kantian categories in that they are not static, they are defined mutually, and they do not depend on a nonconceptual given.Footnote ⁵³

We can see how closely Pippin conceives the Hegelian to the Kantian project in a passage such as the following: “And, as I have been stressing, Notions have this [sc. empirically unrevisable] status for basically Kantian reasons, because for Hegel, the issue of the ‘determinations of any possible object’ (the classical Aristotelian category issue) has been critically transformed into the issue of the ‘determinations of any object of a possibly self-conscious judgment’” (Pippin Reference Pippin1989: 250). On this view, Hegel’s apparent realism about conceptuality is an occasional misstep. Pippin writes, “On the face of it, there are several places where Hegel … slips frequently from a ‘logical’ to a material mode, going far beyond a claim about thought or thinkability, and making a direct claim about the necessary nature of things” (187). But he thinks this “slip” is not required by Hegel’s considered view.

Though Pippin’s work will receive further attention in what follows, I agree with critics who complain that his account does not satisfactorily explain the grander-sounding claims that Hegel makes about the Concept, those that lead others to accept the conceptual realist reading.Footnote ⁵⁴ Rightly or wrongly, a view in which the Concept is akin to Kantian categories will have the ring of subjectivism (or in Pippin’s terms, “impositionism”Footnote ⁵⁵): for it looks like what makes the world show up with the determinations it has is the fact that these are the forms that judgment brings to it. When, more recently, Pippin’s (Reference Pippin2019) Hegel is more willing to make claims about “being qua being,” this can even have the appearance of a yet more complete subjectivism: a subjectivism so thorough that even the thought of the Concept’s non-objectivity is simply ruled out, as if by fiat. For it is unmistakable that the apparent symmetry between being and thought, for Pippin, stems entirely from the activity of judging. To claim that to be is to be intelligible, and to be intelligible is to be the object of judgment, seems to achieve absolute objectivity by a kind of willful blindness to the possibility of a non-judgmental object. That it does not make sense to me to think of a nonconceptual, non-judgmental object does not seem to rule it out simpliciter. True, I cannot draw the distinction between the thinkable and the unthinkable. But one might easily take that to be further evidence of my own limitation, not a reason to think that there is no such distinction.Footnote ⁵⁶

The systematic interpretive significance of the artifactual model I will propose is its ability to avoid both conceptual realism (as commonly understood) and the arguably subjective idealism of the Kantian accounts like Pippin’s, with which I am otherwise more in sympathy (since these do not abandon the immediacy-of-thought condition). There are two key sources of this advantage. First, as I’ve suggested, Hegel’s interest in concepts or the Concept is not an interest in the relation of the concepts employed in judgments of perception or experience, and thus not akin to Kantian categories. Hegel does not, on my view, envision concepts as something ubiquitous in everyday perception or experience. He even claims that “ordinary life has no concepts, only representations of the imagination [Vorstellungen]” (WL II 406/628). Instead, his interest is in philosophical concepts more generally: concepts as varied as <beauty>, <perception>, <knowledge>, <law>, and <civil society>. He wants to explain how they have a special reality or truth, in contrast both to empirical concepts and the more formal concepts he discusses in the Logic itself.

Second, and relatedly, this model no longer requires the Concept to have some completely general absolute or constitutive relation to the world. Pippin’s earlier use of the Kantian “apperception” motif is precisely meant to attribute this kind of generality to Hegel’s idealism. Categories bound to apperception must apply to all objects of experience. By contrast, while it may be true that for Hegel the Concept is the form of our thought in general, on my reading thought has a constitutive relation to the world only in the special case of the domain of Geist. The artifactual paradigm shows what it means for an object to be completely conceptually transparent, namely when the Concept takes on a constitutive relation to an object through its practical dimension; but this does not hold of thought and its object in general. In no way is this practical-constitutive dimension of the Concept unfamiliar to Pippin (see his Reference Pippin2008a). But it seems to me that it has not been treated as a solution to understanding Hegel’s objective and absolute idealism. Pippin certainly speaks of Geist as a “product of itself,”Footnote ⁵⁷ and so gives a prominent place to an artifactual metaphor. But Pippin seems to use this notion for the special case of our production of ourselves as reason-responsive creatures of a certain sort. This may be a part of Hegel’s view. But it is not the center of my own “Vichian” account. Whether we are products or not,Footnote ⁵⁸ some of the objective, historical world, the domain of Geist in general, is (for Hegel) the product of rational thought, or, rather, it is always being reproduced. We must factor in our special access to those things when we consider the kind of idealism Hegel endorses. Given the existence of objects that are conceptually constituted, our conceptual knowledge of the world is sometimes knowledge of the nature or essence of “things” (Sachen, not Dinge: see Sections 2.4 and 5.1). This much idealism is sufficient to show us that human thought is not alien to the world, and that we should not think of thought as only subjective. These are desiderata of any reading of Hegel. It also explains Hegel’s tendency to speak in seemingly neo-Platonic terms about the Concept realizing itself in the world, as if through a demiurge. For this is (or can be) something like the relation of human action and institutions to conceptual thought. Hegel is thus a conceptual “realist” in the full sense only in the case of the humanly constructed world.Footnote ⁵⁹ And since it is (or can be) our concepts that can be recognized as objective in the artifactual domain, we satisfy the demand for realism and the immediacy-of-thought condition at the same time. I contend that without understanding the special metaphysical significance of the humanly made world in Hegel’s thought, it will be difficult to understand how he holds both of these sides together.

1.4 Plan of the Work

Though the focus of this book’s argument is on the Science of Logic, in Chapter 2, I first motivate my reading of the Logic by exhibiting the connection between his theory of concepts and his social ontology within Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Though Kant and Fichte recognized that practical knowledge is driven by concepts, they did not recognize practical knowledge as issuing in sui generis conceptually constituted reality. Hegel’s move beyond his predecessors rests on this point. He shows in the Phenomenology that practical knowledge issues in “works” (Werke), which are grounded in the concepts necessary for their constitution. Knowledge of such works, which often stem from institutional histories, is what Hegel calls absolute knowledge. I argue that Hegel’s idea of absolute knowledge is qualitative rather than quantitative: it concerns a specially transparent form of knowing rather than a certain massive extent or even finality of knowing. The constellation between the topics of concepts, artifacts, and social-historical realities present in the Phenomenology becomes a precedent for the more abstract argument for concrete conceptual truth in the Logic.

In Chapter 3, I turn to the Doctrine of the Concept. It is crucial for my whole account that Hegel’s use of the term “Concept” (der Begriff) is closer to its ordinary philosophical meaning than is often claimed. In this chapter, I argue that the singular use of “the Concept” is a synecdoche for the structure of conceptual thought as exemplified in philosophy in general, and that this structure is distinct from (though related to) what Hegel sometimes disparages as “representation” (Vorstellung). Hegel argues that conceptual thought has a formal structure of universality, particularity, and singularity. However, unlike many accounts, I do not see these as properties that all concepts must have to be concepts. Rather, these formal features are exhibited variously in different concepts, judgments, and syllogisms. Hegel’s discussion of the formal dimension of thought sets up his attempt to show that some structures of thought more perfectly exemplify the form of the Concept than others.

Why does a discussion of the formal structure of conceptuality occupy a text that is supposed to be a “replacement” of metaphysics? In Chapter 4, I attempt to answer this question. I first argue that the Objective Logic, the part of the Logic that most overlaps with the concepts of traditional metaphysics, is an examination and development of metaphysical concepts without leading to any metaphysical theory. The reason for this, I argue, lies in Hegel’s use of a device I call suspended reference, which is not unique to Hegel but rather common in philosophy. Suspended reference is a way of using a concept (not only mentioning it), but without being committed to the reality of its referent. Hence, the Objective Logic is not a metaphysical theory, and the transition to the Concept Logic is not a progressive development within a metaphysical theory. Instead, it is Hegel’s attempt to provide a grounding for the metaphysical concepts of the Objective Logic. Hegel’s bold claim, which is enacted in his transition from <substance> to <the Concept>, is that the metaphysical concepts have their grounds within the logical forms he discusses in the Subjective Logic. In effect, metaphysics is a self-exposition of the form of thinking. This transition motivates a turn away from metaphysics as a theoretical discipline, which attempts to grasp the structure of a reality that may be unlike it; in my view, the transition opens the door to a view of philosophy in which the mind-dependent is privileged because it is more transparently dependent on concepts.

The remaining project of the Concept Logic is to articulate on explicitly logical grounds a new standard for the kind of “truth” – agreement of Concept and object – that most characterizes the object of philosophical inquiry. In Chapter 5, I argue that Hegel develops an account both of the least adequate logical relation of Concept to object, which he calls judgment, and the most adequate such form, which is the syllogistic form of teleology. For Hegel, what best corresponds to its concept is what is conceptually constituted. And Hegel’s model for conceptual constitution is a teleological process governed by some universal. I argue that the Teleology chapter of the Logic does not reject the artifactual model for teleology but in fact embraces it, for the teleology of artifacts requires its intention to come “first” in the construction of its object. Hegel’s aim is thus not to defend a claim about natural purposes but to show what it means for an object to become adequate to the Concept. A teleological process solves Hegel’s attempt to find a “true” relation of Concept to object because teleology involves a universal being realized through particular means as a singular object – this is its “syllogism.” Teleology shows in a concrete way how the moments of conceptual form can be unified in the objective domain.

Chapter 6 concerns the contentious issue of the role of the concept of life in the Logic and its consistency with the artifact-centered conception of teleology I defend. Here I oppose a common tendency to think that the Life chapter implicitly imports abstract references to the biological domain in the Logic itself. I argue instead that Hegel’s Life chapter must be read in “topic-neutral” terms: in a way that requires application neither to the natural or “spiritual” domains. Once it is read in this neutral way, we can see that the notion of “logical life” is simply the notion of a self-determining purpose. This concept can apply equally (and, I argue, even more appropriately) in the domain of culture and human institutions as in that of living organisms. Only a “living” purpose could be conceptually constituted because only thus could a universal play a determining role in the purposive object, rather than as a mere plan or design. Yet I argue that the concept of life as developed by Hegel is not at all contrary to the artifactual domain; this is especially because the social and cultural domain give us prime examples of “living artifacts,” which are precisely the kind of artifacts that can be based in a self-referential form of thought. I argue that Hegel provides a logical foundation for the living artifacts of the domain of Geist precisely because these are purposive processes that must also be guided by the universal, or the domain of cognition. Some contemporary work in social ontology provides a useful reference point for understanding the way that (objective) Geist involves both life and cognition. For social ontology is precisely that which exists because of the way it is known.

In the final chapter, I consider how my explanation of the artifactual paradigm at work in Hegel’s thinking affects his overall philosophical position. Speaking loosely, Hegel sometimes suggests that ‘everything’ is conceptual. However, I argue that essential to Hegel’s idealism is an asymmetry in the domains of Geist and nature that is rooted in Hegel’s theory of concepts. Geist is that which is conceptually constituted; nature is that which is not conceptually constituted. This asymmetry between the two domains is the “inversion” of philosophy that Hegel’s concept-centric metaphysics inspires. In this chapter, I assemble evidence from Hegel’s so-called Realphilosophie – specifically his works on political philosophy, natural philosophy, and aesthetics – to show that Hegel’s treatment of these topics indeed demonstrates an inverted conception of philosophy, one that is rightly considered a humanism.