How do you know what you think you know?
On the Kant-Hegel debate and its rippling effects
The Problem of Grounding in Ancient Philosophy
“How do you know what you think you know?”
We could say that this is a pretty fundamental question when it comes to the history of Western philosophy.
It is, for example, the question that guides most of Socrates’ questioning in texts like Plato’s Meno and Euthyphro. In Euthyphro, Socrates is in conversation with the titular Euthyphro in a dispute about values, just as Euthyphro is busy prosecuting his father in court (surely, Plato knew how to write comedy) — Euthyphro, a pius bud, is pretty confident that the gods ground his values, but as these quarrels with Socrates goes, he is ultimately left in a dilemma: either these things are valuable or holy because the gods / the given ground appraises these things, or what is valuable or holy was not decided upon by any gods or given ground. If we pursue the first part of the dilemma, we must suppose that to be truly grounded, the gods must have a reason to discern these things to be valuable or holy. But if that’s the case, then the holy and valuable are such independently from the gods who appraise them. So, the two issues amount to the dilemma that if the gods have no reason to discern something is holy, then it is arbitrarily valued; whereas if what is holy and valuable is so independently of the gods, then the gods are overcome by something higher than them.
Pretty rough problem for ethics, how do you know or ground what you value? But, in the Meno, the core problem of “how do you know what you think you know?” is posed pretty differently as the Meno paradox. The Meno paradox comes as a result of navigating faulty definitions and cruising through problems over how we go about asking questions. In short when we ask a question, we presume, at least in some minimal sense, that we are acquainted with what is inquired — but if we know what we are looking for, then the inquiry is unnecessary or caught up in its presumptions. On the other hand, if we are clueless about what we are looking for, then inquiry is impossible. The problem, like the one that came up in Euthyphro, is one of grounding and what constitutes an adequate ground. And this problem can lead us to break out from some intuitions we are used to; as in the case of the Meno, Plato introduces what is called the “theory of recollection”, where learning something new is recollecting something one already knew.
Early Modernity: Trying to Establish Foundations
These issues in Ancient Philosophy are representative of a problem that only grew in intensity in Modernity — for instance, if we ask the core question “How do you know what you think you know?”, we note that two major camps tried to answer this question: empiricism and rationalism. At their most abstract, empiricism claims that knowledge is grounded through experience, whereas rationalism claims that knowledge is derived from ideas with necessary relations — or to give an example, this is the difference between trying to learn or gain knowledge of something through experiments like in chemistry as opposed to trying to do the same things with pure mathematics like algebra.
Different exponents of these positions tried to go about this differently.
For example, Rene Descartes took a rationalist approach that offered a ground to stop the free-fall of the skepticism he took on in the Meditations. Descartes discarded everything he took for granted and given, from ostensive objects, to God’s good faith, until Descartes started to be skeptical of his own thinking succumbing to a systematic madness. But what gives the Cartesian grounding of “I think, therefore I am” was the coincidence between the act of doubting and the act of thinking, where if I am doubting my thinking, I am thinking my doubts. Descartes gains at best a subjective certainty. There onwards, Descartes tries to gain certainty of objectivity and the world, and he does so by trying to rehabilitate God as the Absolute ground and guarantee of the certainty of everything. Other people, like Spinoza, took a different approach. In Spinoza’s Ethics, Spinoza starts from the decisive certainty that there is an Absolute substance that grounds itself as the very cause of itself — we don’t need to arrive to the Absolute as an aftermath of subjective certainty like Descartes did, because he unnecessarily split the world into a dualism of two substances: intellectual substance like mind and extended substance like body. Spinoza is more reductive by taking on a neutral monism, where there can only be One Absolute substance that gains expressions of its attributes as different modes in which this One substance is.
On the other hand, empiricism has similar internal differences. At the beginnings of modern empiricism, someone like Francis Bacon would strongly oppose a theory like Plato’s theory of recollection, where to learn something new is actually remembering something from within us. For instance, Francis Bacon prioritized the work of induction as the grounding of knowledge as opposed to axiomatic touchstones like the logical syllogism, whereas David Hume problematizes induction deeply by questioning whether induction can actually guarantee anything at all. Francis Bacon would claim that by experimental observation mediated through the scientific method, we can elevate to the status of a foundation that, let’s say, the sun will rise tomorrow — but Hume would take on an issue with this. And starking this contrast further, we can compare both Bacon and Hume to someone like George Berkeley who undertakes an Absolute Subjective Idealism out of empiricism, where to be is to be perceived, and God is the Absolute Perceiver of all and upon which everything that is is dependent.
Now if we explore Hume’s skeptical argument a bit, we can then move on to Kant. In Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, some core themes that Kant inherits from Hume are the limits of knowledge and the undermining of the foundations of metaphysics. The text starts as an inquiry of the origin of ideas, which Hume argues they come from external sense impressions (sense-data) and internal sense impressions (emotions, feelings, and affections); ideas, however, are duller reflections on impressions. For example, out of these impressions, we can develop complex ideas out of these bases — like a unicorn .which puts a horn and horse together by a voluntary act of imagination and to be contrasted to the involuntary belief that horses exists. But the part that is most crucial to us is Section IV of the Enquiry. Hume takes on a distinction, which is also crucial for Kant and Leibniz, between two objects of human reason and knowledge: relations of ideas (analytic statements) and matters of fact (synthetic statements). To give some examples, relations of ideas / analytic statements are those we find in math, logic, or instances where the predicate is contained in the subject — i.e., definitionally, a bachelor is an unmarried person, or that 1 + 1 = 2, or that A = A. On the other hand, matters of fact / synthetic judgments concern things like memory, the senses, and the question of cause and effect. In Hume’s argument, causation and induction deeply problematize experience as ground to make any claim to knowledge about causality as an object of induction — rather than saying that something observable necessarily causes something else, Hume restricts himself to the bare observation that we only know constant and regular conjunction probabilistically. So, whereas Bacon claims that the sun rising tomorrow can be elevated with certainty to the status of an axiom, Hume thinks this is just custom and habit. And we could try to ground induction. However, if we try to do so through a deduction, a pure deduction cannot salvage induction, and thus causation, because what follows is not necessarily implied by what preceded it (a priori). And if we try to ground induction through induction, we are just presuming what we have to show.
Kant: The Critique of Dogmatism and Purely Negative Skepticism
So, let’s pose the basic question again: “How do you know what you think you know?” The problem tried to be resolved in modernity through the dominant answers of rationalism and empiricism — however, as Hume pointed out, pure reason led philosophy to metaphysical abstractions that needed to be skeptically examined, as in pure reason, God could be claimed to exist because by notional definition God is necessitated to exist (ontological argument); and pure experience cannot provide sufficient ground to guarantee itself as a foundation of knowledge, we can at best hold the probability that the sun will rise tomorrow but we cannot know this by any absolute certainty. The problem that we end up with here is whether we have any access to the Absolute and to a foundation for philosophy and knowing without ending up in a dogmatic position, or whether we end up in a skeptical standstill that cannot posit anything.
Immanuel Kant’s position in the Critique of Pure Reason is different than the early modern rationalism and empiricism, as he instead proposes a transcendental philosophy that has systematically worked itself out of the tensions that Hume brought to our attention. But this transcendental philosophy is only possible for Kant if we undergo the critical project, one that lays out the conditions for such a philosophy. In short, what Kant is looking to outline is the horizon of conditions that delimit what reason and empiricism can claim — for example, we can never experience an object as such, as pure experience is an abstraction since experience is always given within certain conditions; like an apple’s redness may be more vibrant in being experienced if the room’s light is just right. Similarly, the abstractions of reason can be brought back to conditions under which the workings of reason can be anchored down. In taking on this position, Kant identifies two central “pure intuitions” or conditions of experience and reason — namely, space and time. In addition, our understanding of experience and reason is mediated by a schematic of categories: those of quantity (unity, plurality, totality), those of quality (reality, negation, limitation), those of relation (inherence and subsistence, causality and dependence, and community), those of modality (possibility-impossibility, existence-nonexistence, necessity-contingency).
In short, what Kant has set up here is a critical filter over what goes in philosophy and over what goes in claims about knowledge, either by the means of experience or by the means of reason. The consequence, insofar as we operate under this Kantian critical filter, is that anything that falls under the filter is actually knowable, whereas everything outside it remains radically inaccessible. This is a gap between the domain of what we can know and what we cannot is Kant’s central preoccupation, as he distinguishes between phenomena (how things are for us) and noumena (how things are as such and in themselves). This gap and torsion in knowledge leaves Kant in a position where a multitude of issues gain expression as antinomies of reason like simultaneously holding that: “the world has a beginning in time, and is also limited in regard to space” as opposed to “the world has no beginning, and no limits in space, but is, in relation both to time and space, infinite”; or “causality according to the laws of nature is not the only causality operating to originate the phenomena of the world. A causality of freedom is also necessary to account fully for these phenomena” as opposed to “There is no such thing as freedom, but everything in the world happens solely according to the laws of nature”. Whereas the critical negative project for Kant aims at setting up these tensions against which dogmatism is overcomed, the positive project for Kant is a transcendental philosophy based on this overcoming via skepticism as in the case of Kant’s Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone.
Hegel: Beyond the Critique and to the Absolute
Now, let’s turn to the same question once more: “How do you know what you think you know?” The problem so far has pertained knowing, the types of things we can know, how we can determine what we can and cannot know. With Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, we end up with a framing filter for the field of the knowable to undermine both abstract dogmatism and a skepticism that is too preoccupied with what we cannot know over what we can. And at the end of going over Kant’s 1st Critique, we note that we are left with an irreducible gap between phenomena and noumena, where we cannot ever arrive at the Absolute as such without risking dogmatism. I may never know what I think I know, because the way I know any one thing will never be the way this thing is for itself and in itself, I know it only for me.
The most curious thing about Hegel’s position is that it assumed everything that Kant has laid out, except rather than situating this gap in knowledge, Hegel places this gap in being itself. In short, what we see in Hegel’s The Phenomenology of Spirit is that in order for there to be this gap in knowledge between how things appear to us and how these things are for themselves, this gap has to be a part of being itself to begin with; and the work of the Phenomenology is an exploration of minding this gap as it oscillates between being subject and being the substance of the notion of the Absolute.
We can break this down a bit more by setting a series of distinctions between different types of philosophical reflection: positing reflection, external reflection, determinate reflection, and reflexive determination. In The Sublime Object of Ideology, Slavoj Žižek lays down these positions as if there were different methodologies through which we are trying to make a claim of knowledge over a text like Antigone. In a positing reflection, we are positing a declaration such as “”Antigone is in fact a drama about…”. Then, external reflection, we are posed by the question “We don’t know what Sophocles really meant, the immediate truth about Antigone is unattainable because of the filter of historical distance, all that is within our grasp is the succession of historical influences of the text…” These first two positions are expressions of the contrasting philosophical projects of Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Kant. In Fichte’s case, the search for ground sets out the first principle of the transcendental I; that is, the I that posits itself as self-positing, or the mere ground for positing altogether as immediately posited to itself — in short, it suffices to say that Antigone is a play about something at the very least. What an external reflection like Kant’s critical philosophy highlights is that though the Fichtean subject has a productive relationship with reality, it remains stuck in its determinate presuppositions (which is exactly what Kant is looking to enumerate in order to move on to his transcendental philosophy). Thus, the core of the external reflection is this attempt to account for the presuppositions that the self-positing I takes for granted — I posit under certain conditional and mediating presuppositions rather than in a self-grounding immediacy.
However, the last two distinctions — determinate reflection and reflexive determination — highlight what is most crucial to Hegel’s approach. Žižek notes that in determinate reflection, the “true”, “original” meaning of Antigone is construed by this passing of influences, “it is constituted afterwards, through a structurally necessary delay”. In short, what Kant and external reflections would see as a constraint or limitation of knowledge; as a question of being, this impasse is our very way to the Absolute. But what we see in moving on from the determinate reflection to the reflexive determination is that it is not enough that reality is internally ruptured to be as an appearance or phenomena; reality must appear for the appearance itself in such a way that, as essence in the form of a phenomenon, reality gives a paradoxical space to the nullity of phenomena as such. As substance and as subject, as determined and determining, what we highlight is the self-fissure of reality where reality can appear to itself phenomenally as subject, but also where reality can be itself to itself as substance. Or to stress the radicality of Hegel’s point further: there is not only a determinate reflection in being itself as substance determining the experience of being itself as subject; but also a reflexive determination, whereby the subject’s positive-empirical activity is possible only if it structures its activity in a way that opens the space for the subject’s intervention of substance in advance. In short, reality itself is this self-differing and makes the space for interventions of how reality is reality.
When we look at the Hegelian gesture that “the yet is contained in the already” in this redoubling from determinate reflection to reflexive determination, we stress that we always already have what we need to be on our way to knowing — everything turns out to be what it already already was and you already have everything that you need with you. The difference of the Hegelian subject from that in Kant’s external reflection and Fichte’s posting reflection is that the Hegelian subject is unbound from finite limits through the symbolic and formal empty act before the act whereby the act chooses what is already given as infinite. By tarrying with the negative in sorting out the notion of the Absolute, philosophy is a self-generative process of its own authority and universality, both determining and determined, to the point that reality realizes itself — or as Hegel puts it in The Philosophy of Right, “the rational is the real and the real is the rational”. Strictly speaking for Hegel, philosophy is a self-generative problem working itself through determinations and limits, where the infinite and unbound, like Spirit, is found among finite and even commonplace of occurrences.
The Kant-Hegel Debate Today
Since Kant and Hegel, philosophy has been deeply affected by splits, such as the infamous analytic-continental split — which in many respects, it is an artificial splitting of philosophy as Simon Critchley elaborates on in his book A Short Introduction to Continental Philosophy. However, we can entertain this split insofar as it has had a real effect on how people digest German philosophy in particular. The tendency goes that Kant is the last German thinker to be taken seriously by the analytic tradition of philosophy, as the Hegelian project is quickly dismissed as another obscurantist dogmatism — Schopenhauer is reduced to mysticism and Nietzsche is rendered into a mere rhetorician and a sophist, not even a philosopher at the worst of times. On the other hand, in the weird conglomeration of approaches deemed to be continental, many of them have taken on Hegel quite closely and with seriousness even if they diverge in methodological and practical approach (structuralism, post-structuralism, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, Marxism, existentialism, speculative realism, etc.) — and the curious thing is that all these approaches are met with the same resistance, that they are obscurantists, they are nonsense, they are mere abstractions, and so on even though they are very different from each other (AND EVEN WHEN THEY ACCUSE EACH OTHER OF THESE THINGS).
One example that happened recently was an article on Slavoj Žižek published October 2019 in Current Affairs, titled “What is Žižek for?” The article makes a number of accusations: Žižek is an incomprehensible clown, charlatan, reactionary racist, inconsistent and with no attention span. There have certainly been a number of responses to the article, like Zero Book’s YouTube video response where Douglas Lain tries to address some of these issues as well as Žižek’s own “Can One Be a Hegelian Today?” published in The Philosophical Salon later that month. In this article, Žižek stresses how his position with an appendix to address the criticisms as uncharitable, but he also regards the criticism as a “if that’s what I have amounted to, so be it”. But for us to continue the exploration of Žižek’s Hegelianism today, trying to elaborate on his position, he notes that:
We remain within the domain of reason, and this domain is deprived of its consistency from within: immanent inconsistencies of reason do not imply that there is some deeper reality which escapes reason. Rather, these inconsistencies are in some sense “the thing itself.” We find this ourselves in a universe where inconsistencies are not a sign of our epistemological confusion, of the fact that we missed “the thing itself” (which by definition cannot be inconsistent), but, on the contrary, a sign that we touched the real…
For Hegel, the One of self-identity is not just always inconsistent, fractured, antagonistic, etc.; identity itself is the assertion of radical (self-)difference. To say that something is identical with itself means that it is distinct from all its particular properties, that it cannot be reduced to them. “A rose is a rose” means that a rose is something more than all its features: there is some je ne sais quoi which makes it a rose, something “more in a rose than the rose itself.” As this last example indicates, we are also dealing here with what Lacan called objet petit a, the mysterious X beneath all its properties that makes an object what it is, that sustains its unique identity. More precisely, this “more” oscillates between the sublime and the ridiculous or vulgar, if not obscene: to say “a law is a law” means that, even if it is unjust and arbitrary, an instrument of corruption even, a law remains a law and has to be respected. The minimal structure of identity (which is always a self-identity since it is, as Hegel knew it, a category of reflection) is thus 1–1-a: a thing is itself in contrast with its determinate properties, and objet a is the unfathomable excess that sustains this identity.
This lack of identity of a thing with itself (otherwise known as a coincidence of opposites) is one of the main things that Žižek’s critic takes issue with — so much so that the author of “What is Žižek for?” gets actively frustrated at the fact he can pin down Žižek himself as if he were a consistent and fully-integrated person, always in identity with himself. Meanwhile, this is easy to express for someone with the most minimal Hegelianism; for instance, how Jean-Paul Sartre is able to express that we are a living contradiction — we would suppose that the poetic force of this expression would also get lost for the author of “What is Žižek for?” because it is not literal enough to carry truth. From a Lacanian psychoanalytic point of view, we are immediately concerned with the critic presuming that Žižek is the subject-supposed-to-know; that is, in the situation of analysis, a patient works out themselves through someone else, the psychoanalyst, which is in a structural sense the place where knowledge is anticipated. But perhaps what is most real about Žižek is what we find at the cracks of consistency and when we realize that we also supposed to get over Žižek — in short, where our anticipations and expectations fall short. Admittedly by Žižek himself, he does not hold any answers for us — at best, he is just a support for us to work that out just the same way we turned to our parents or previous teachers whom we eventually (hopefully) outgrow. The frustration in Žižek’s critic is simply reminiscent of a child underwhelmingly realizing that their parents and adulthood in general amount to a pretext, and then trying to make them pay for it for making up this pretext; I truly hold some sympathy for the critic insofar as I have had similar frustrations with Žižek, however, my takeaway is different insofar as this brought up something in myself to unpack rather than making Žižek the only person responsible for my frustrations. I am suspect that Žižek would agree with his critic that we can do better than Žižek — though maybe Žižek would not admit this openly. But besides these sympathies, I find that more than anything that the critic’s issues with Žižek are more concerned with not doing this and that rather than at least trying to make honest mistakes or doing something at all. The perspective remains purely negative and restrictive, so what is this critic for?
But perhaps the more long-lasting and constant reiterations of the Kant-Hegel debate today is found in the disputes between Žižek and Noam Chomsky. Chomsky has also regarded Žižek as a charlatan for about 30 years, and Chomsky has had broader issues with much of what gets tied together as continental philosophy — Jacques Lacan himself has also been called a charlatan by Chomsky, as have Foucault, Derrida, Kristeva, and Lyotard.
Chomsky himself comes from an analytic philosophical background. In short, and for the sake of a brief discussion, analytic philosophy is broadly speaking a methodological approach that delimits what philosophy can figure into its discourse through linguistic and logical analysis via definitional work, syntax, the usage of formal logic, the study of ordinary language, logical positivism, etc. This has been crucial in Chomsky’s early work as a linguist rather than his later political work. His admitted Kantianism is apparent if we look at Chomsky’s linguistics where he is known for proposing a universal grammar as an inherent human capacity for language acquisition. In Kantian terms, we can see this as a universal condition of subjectivity, or being subject to language, which determines and mediates our capacity to understand language — we cannot think outside this universal condition without it amounting to obscurantism; or in other words, to comprehend this alleged condition would be to transgress the Kantian limits that Chomsky adheres to. This is an impossibility to Chomsky’s framework, and yet we constantly continue to ask, as Žižek noted in a recent interview with Douglas Lain, impossible questions that we are unable to properly understand. Not only are we obsessively concerned with impossible questions like “how do you know what you think you know?”, but we also realize that the obscurantist mystery and the unexpected are only possible because there was an anticipatory expectation to begin with — philosophy is stung by mysteries of different kinds (love, consciousness, being, knowing), none of which it can fully wrap our head around, and this very impossibility is something we can nevertheless assume positively at the core of philosophy.
Recently, however, Chomsky admitted to being unable to do this, unlike Žižek, when Chomsky noted that we have been without a concept of matter for centuries. As Chomsky is quoted to say on a panel:
But see, you can’t ask the question about interaction between the physical and the non-physical until you tell us what physical means. But there hasn’t been any concept of the physical for hundreds of years. The physical these days are things that Newton would have regarded as total absurdities like curved space-time, how can that be physical? Quantum entanglement, I mean, Einstein regarded that as non-physical because it is so absurd. But, you know, now scientists just accept it. Physical is just anything we more or less understand, and if that’s the only notion of physical we have, there cannot be interaction between the physical and the non-physical. Because the non-physical is all the things we don’t understand.
The key of this quote is Chomsky’s emphasis on “understanding” at the end. Indeed, this quote by Chomsky highlights his Kantian restrictions over what he can claim to understand, and yet what is beyond Chomsky’s understanding and knowledge is. But the only way that this can be thought about by Chomsky is as a mystery to the understanding, as an impossible question in a merely negative and restrictive sense, which can only be overcome by either a Hegelian gesture on the limits of knowledge or a speculative realism that bypasses the Kantian problematic altogether. To finish up, in the Žižek-Chomsky debate, the differences amount to this: Chomsky is concerned with the Kantian approach over how we can come to know things as they are in themselves, all appearances aside; whereas for Žižek, the problem is, rather, why do things appear to begin with? Why are things torn apart that are supposed to be otherwise in an organic unity? Can we take an illusion seriously and not just dismiss it?
References and Citations
Plato’s Euthyphro. Retrieved from: http://www.faculty.umb.edu/adam_beresford/courses/phil_100_11/reading_euthyphro.pdf
Plato’s Meno. Retrieved from: https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/experimental-study-group/es-113-ancient-greek-philosophy-and-mathematics-spring-2016/readings/MITES_113S16_Meno.pdf
Rene Descartes’ Meditations on First Philosophy. Retrieved from: http://selfpace.uconn.edu/class/percep/DescartesMeditations.pdf
Spinoza’s Ethics. Retrieved from: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3800/3800-h/3800-h.htm
Francis Bacon. Retrieved from: https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/francis-bacon/
David Hume’s Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. Retrieved from: https://socialsciences.mcmaster.ca/econ/ugcm/3ll3/hume/enquiry.pdf
Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Retrieved from: http://strangebeautiful.com/other-texts/kant-first-critique-cambridge.pdf
Kant’s Religion Within the Limits of Reason Alone. Retrieved from: https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/kant/religion/religion-within-reason.htm
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Retrieved from: http://www.faculty.umb.edu/gary_zabel/Courses/Marxist_Philosophy/Hegel_and_Feuerbach_files/Hegel-Phenomenology-of-Spirit.pdf
Hegel’s Philosophy of Right. Retrieved from: https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/hegel/works/pr/philosophy-of-right.pdf
Simon Critchley’s A Short Introduction to Continental Philosophy. Retrieved from: http://filozofia.uni-miskolc.hu/wp-content/uploads/2017/02/Critchley-Continental-Philosophy-A-Very-Short-Introduction.pdf
Noam Chomsky on “Physical”. Retrieved from: https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x3z8xfm
“What is Žižek for?”. Retrieved from: https://www.currentaffairs.org/2019/10/what-is-zizek-for
“Can One Be a Hegelian Today?” Retrieved from: https://thephilosophicalsalon.com/can-one-be-a-hegelian-today/
“An Interview with Slavoj Žižek”. Retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UiwTFkcFGv0&t=3264s
“What is Žižek For? (A Defense of Slavoj Žižek as a Philosopher)”. Retrieved from: https://youtu.be/XJsLRe7m0ns
Žižek’s The Sublime Object of Ideology. Retrieved from: https://altexploit.files.wordpress.com/2017/09/slavoj-zizek-the-sublime-object-of-ideology-second-edition-the-essential-zizek-2009.pdf
