the main business of this chapter has been to argue that empirical science is not (pace mcdowell) a fully adequate medium for reason’s actualization of its freedom, although it is a medium in which that task can begin. for reason cannot discover, in the objective medium of the natural world, adequate reflections or objectifications of a number of essential features of the concept: totality, order (stable internal dif- ferentiation), universality, and necessity. in consequence, the concept cannot here be “at one with itself in the other.”33
32 cf. hegel’s scathing remarks on haller’s poem “on the infinite,” GW 4:92; enc §§140, 246.
33 in order to keep my discussion to a manageable length, i have omitted discussion of hegel’s views on a privileged phenomenon of nature, namely organic life, which hegel repeatedly characterizes as the single most adequate realization of the concept in the self-external sphere of nature (cf. GW 12:182–87; enc §251/251a, and esp. enc §337). also, it should not be overlooked that hegel interprets the human search for laws of nature as a manifestation of the life of the concept itself in a decidedly non-metaphorical sense of life. nevertheless, in regard to the ultimate underdeter- mination and incompleteness of nature as a level of reality, hegel’s views on organic life make no difference.
thus, empirical natural science embodies reason to the extent that it succeeds in uncovering intimations of reason’s native totality, order, universality, and necessity throughout nature. one can go further: empirical science is itself an aspect of the life of the concept. like organic life, empirical science is driven by a rational instinct to assimi- late the superficially non-conceptual stuff of experience to its own rational form, experiencing thereby a kind of growth and maturation. empirical science constitutes, as an instance of orchestrated human, social activity, the life of the concept in its unconscious immediacy. the scientifically engaged mind does not self-consciously conceive its activity as the emergence and partial actualization of the level of real- ity that is reason or the concept. it is therefore limited, like organic life, by the nature of the beings to which it is externally directed and on which it depends for its continuing subsistence. these are essen- tially determinate, finite, self-external, and hence necessarily incom- pletable beings. they share in the structures that reason finds in them, so scientific explanation is no mere imposition of human norms onto an unstructured or differently structured world; but they do not adequately actualize those structures, and so scientific explanation is an infinite task, not a sphere of satisfactory rational self-actualization.
far beyond their present or foreseeable needs for securing and aug- menting their material existence, human beings seek out laws of nature. We do this, according to hegel, out of a rational instinct to actualize unconditioned reason, what mcdowell calls apperceptive spontaneity. therefore, as mcdowell suggests, natural science is indeed a medium for actualizing rational freedom. according to hegel, though, in the end it is not the adequate medium. Scientific endeavor is fraught with uncertainty and incompleteness; our best-founded theories appear to be mere fragments of a more perfect theory we may have no rea- sonable hope of attaining. if max Weber is right, then our very pur- pose in the pursuit of science is to produce knowledge destined to become obsolete in exact proportion to its fruitfulness in suggesting new objects and avenues of research, new science.34 Science is thus an infinite task in which the rational instinct can therefore find no lasting satisfaction.
this idea is familiar to us today, both through Weber and more generally as the idea of infinite progress toward consensus in an ideal
34 cf. max Weber, “Science as a Vocation,” in The Vocation Lectures (indianapolis, in and cambridge: hackett 2004), 1–31.
scientific community. the idea was familiar to hegel, too, not least in the guise of the “infinite progress” toward positing the i in nature for which he repeatedly criticized fichte (cf. GW 4:46–48, 401; 21:226– 27). many of hegel’s contemporaries interpreted kant’s limitations on knowledge and his regulative ideals as meaning that theoretical reason was of its very essence an unceasing striving for scientific com- pletion, and that the achievement of a complete and unified scientific edifice would in fact signal the death of reason. obviously, hegel dis- agreed. this variety of progressivism amounted for him to subjectiv- ist skepticism: if our scientific knowledge of the world is subject to a continual process of growth and perfectibility, then our best current theory of how things are is at best only partially correct; and if pro- gress is truly conceived as infinite, then in relation to the ultimate goal our best current theory is not much better than total ignorance, or at least there would no way for us to measure how far we have advanced in getting it right.
hegel courageously accepted the idea that we will never complete empirical science, but he interpreted this failure as a reflection of the fact that nature itself is incomplete and, within its own sphere, incom- pletable. Which is to say again that he objectified a certain strand of kantian skepticism: as kant argues in regard to the first cosmological antinomy, the contradiction between the thesis of the natural world’s totality and that of its infinity is moot, since what we ultimately mean by “the natural world” is the inclusive concept (Inbegriff) of appear- ances, and the idea of a totality or an infinity of appearances is out of place.35 But if we join hegel in dropping the frame of transcen- dental idealism while radicalizing the idea of the dialectic, the reso- lution of the cosmological antinomy applies to the objects themselves. the impossibility of completing science is the “spiritual” counterpart of nature’s own intrinsic incompleteness, though not as a sign of her inexhaustible wealth, but of her insurmountable limitations.
taken seriously, this implies denial that there can be any ultim- ately justifying foundation for claims to scientific knowledge of nature within finite cognition. hegel, far from seeking any such ultimate grounding for the sciences, seems rather to explain them as condi- tioned by the finite nature of their very objects. this is the upshot of hegel’s reflections on skepticism and of the detailed analysis of his
35 cf. B528–29; cf. also the discussion of kant’s revision of the principle of thoroughgoing determination in chapter 3.
views on the philosophy of science. not only natural science, but the very realm of nature points beyond itself – to the concept. hegelian metaphysics is thus revisionary: the critique of finite cognition (part and parcel with his critique of traditional metaphysics) does not end with the rehabilitation of finite cognition from the point of view of the absolute idea. Both the Phenomenology and the Science of Logic are by intention transformational. the forms and categories of finite cog- nition are changed in their very content so as become recognizable as subordinate forms of the concept, and this requires that we change our view as to what features of reality those forms and categories actu- ally pick out. this movement bears less resemblance to the methodical skepticism of descartes which, in the end, leaves all our beliefs as they were before, than to the platonic ascent out of the cave and into the light. it is supposed to change our mind.
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