Forgetting the Forgetting
Is philosophy arrogant? For Hegel, philosophy becomes arrogant when it insists on a peculiarity regarding its content, that is to say, on the maintenance of some idiosyncratic point of view (Hegel, 2008, p.14, §23). Yet, when we look around and compare it to other subjects, is not philosophy precisely, characteristically, peculiar – idiosyncratic, even? For one, it seems to be able to hover above, attack, and digest every other possible field of inquiry, while remaining virtually unscathed by the different terrains (even radically more so than mathematics, its close companion). For another, in their historical trajectories, different or adversarial philosophies seem to live and thrive within their own peculiar metaphysics; they are able to simply and indifferently disagree with one another. It is easy to see, for example, how a philosophy can be picked up to fit one situation only to be discarded for another, or that a person may have different and contradictory frameworks at once without even noticing, or caring.
At the very least, of course one system of philosophy can be said to supersede or resolve another; but even an unfashionable or problematic standpoint is not ”incorrect” in the same way that the theory of, say, phlogiston or young earth is incorrect. The peculiarity of philosophy seems to be such that, especially unlike the empirical sciences, its paradigms don’t die out very easily, if at all.
To complexify the matter further, this question of arrogance – this question of character – is, of course, another way of asking about not only what grounds philosophy, but also what it ought to be grounded in. This question demands that philosophy presupposes its own definite end. But if the fulfillment of philosophy must be or can be “decidable” in this way, that it chooses to presuppose in this or that fashion – how does this choice escape being arrogant? And what of the choice to go against this choice – is this not itself an arrogant presupposition? In any event, in walking this misty path we find ourselves circling back to the peculiar character of philosophy, which, at this stage we can refuse to decide whether it is arrogant or not. So, why bother even asking?
To my mind, Hegel strategically brings up the matter of arrogance, especially at the start of the Science of Logic, to highlight the problem of entrance into philosophy. For Hegel, the entangled, circular nature of questions about the end of philosophy reflects the nature of its beginning, its very condition of possibility. The question of peculiarity, arrogance, dogmatism, etc., constitutes merely half of the problem philosophy has when it seeks out its own foundation – its explicit or “front-end” problem, so to speak. The implicit, fundamental “back-end” problem is that this very seeking enters into discourse already as an expression or function of a certain kind of guiding tendency. In other words, the inauguration of philosophy is not in declaring certain aims, foundations, or results because in stating these, cognition has already begun the process of inquiry. If this true beginning is left out of examination, then the end of philosophy in actuality betrays its stated aim of getting to its foundation; quite the opposite, it becomes beholden to its framework and in this way it remains a peculiarity. As Hegel puts it in the Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, “The aim by itself is a lifeless universal, just as the guiding tendency is a mere drive that as yet lacks an actual existence; and the bare result is the corpse which has left the guiding tendency behind it” (Hegel, 1977, §3). – Thus in speculating the beginning of philosophy, the question of arrogance becomes relevant. My claim is that philosophical peculiarity is the result of a systematic exclusion inherent in the process of its inquiry. This exclusion therefore constitutes a repression of philosophy’s own presupposition. It is the nature of this exclusion, this repression, this philosophical forgetting, that I seek to explore in this work.
The topic of forgetting is usually connected to the risk our imperfect way of being poses to the course of discovering the truth. Forgetting has an accidental character. We have a tendency to miss and overlook, in this case, something within the philosophical analysis. It is accidental, and for that reason it is beyond our help that we forget. This tension between cognition and accidentality constitutes the limit and finitude of our philosophical enterprise. Like the frame of a painting, limit cuts off the subject matter from what is external to it, and what lies beyond this boundary gets canceled out, forgotten. For the beholder’s inquiry, this subject matter is determinate, therefore, insofar as it is a limited thing, and in this sense it has the nature of a finite thing; to put it another way, the analysis does not extend to infinity, in congruence with its object. Given that we are also finite beings and, therefore, the attainment of true knowledge must be reconciled with our necessarily partial view, seems to be the most general and widely espoused form of “wisdom.” This general stance, which I will here arbitrarily call epistemic humility, should be easily recognized and understood by common sense. Its position is that at the outset of learning we are ignorant, and must therefore suspend our judgments, assertions, assumptions, and so on, and do our best to remain receptive to new knowledge. Being aware of this risk, not only that philosophy cannot afford to simply treat finitude as an object for philosophy, it must also embed the finitude that characterizes the mind that thinks philosophy, our mind, into the very enterprise. To put it differently, epistemic humility is a prescription for a philosophy that keeps in mind that it is as limited as the finite thing that does it. We can see how this demand is consistent with a philosophy taken in its definition as a love of wisdom.
In the history of Western philosophy, broadly speaking there are two dominant and epoch-defining stances regarding this risk vis-à-vis epistemic humility. The first, and perhaps most famous, is Platonic humility, as expressed by Socrates' ironic claim that since he readily admits that he neither knows, nor thinks that he knows, he is therefore the wisest man in Athens (Plato, 1995, Apology 21d). The second is Kantian humility, which insists that knowing must be within “the bounds of reason” – that proper cognition cannot comprehend, let alone speculate, on the truth of what something is beyond experience, outside of an adherence to a priori forms of intuition which structure our phenomena. Both humilities share the character of an encirclement of the finite subject, separating it from the entirety of truth. For Plato, what lies beyond the horizon of this circle is the world of the Forms, which exists untouched by our imperfect, fleeting world of appearance. For Kant, it is the Noumenal world, indifferent to and also beyond our experience and description. They are similar in that they both hold fast the existence of our imperfect world.
The matter of forgetting and the finite nature of inquiry is actually addressed by Plato. For him, philosophical inquiry is in truth a process of recollection or Anamnesis, “the loss of amnesia.” The reason why it must be a process of recollection is because we as finite subjects run into a paradoxical relationship with True knowing. This problem is usually referred to as the paradox of inquiry, which goes as follows (Samet, 2023): Knowledge of something’s nature, if a result of inquiry, is knowledge of something previously unknown. The mediation of inquiry not only reveals to us the truth of its object, but also carries with it a validation – whether or not the truth is correct. Now, if nothing was known about this something prior to the inquiry, then its validation could not have been grounded on anything in its beginning. But if the inquiry started out as groundless, how could it possibly have developed any way to generate the correct results? This paradox is put more beautifully in Plato’s Meno:
Meno: “In what way, Socrates, will you look for that about which you don’t at all know what it is? For having put before yourself which of the things you don’t know will you look for it? Otherwise, even if you run straight into it, how will you know that this is what you didn’t know?” (Plato, Meno, Section 80d)
Plato’s solution is that we can access the fundamental nature of the world because we have always known the correct truth before the inquiry, we just forgot. But through exposure to the process of learning, we can be reminded of the eternal, unchanging Forms. A classic example is the uneducated slave who, after being asked by Socrates the right questions, can access and “discover for himself” eternal mathematical truths, extrapolatable to the entirety of “the truth of the things that are” (Dancy, 2004, p. 224). Innate to our being, it is just a matter of being reminded of these truths by the process of learning that discourse can take place and develop upwards into their intelligibility. The Socratic Method of rooting out contradictions has for its material the logical progression of this discourse, starting off from an obscured and “unexamined” presupposition, to a more lasting and universal knowledge. To put it simply, the validity of truth claims can be made explicit through a kind of interrogation. If a truth claim is incapable of remaining consistent in the course of the dialectic, then it is shown to contain contradiction, which is to say that it is incapable of rising into an essential truth.
Universal knowledge made explicit through Anamnesis – this is how Plato resolves the paradox of knowing the unknown, that the nature of knowledge is fundamentally a memory. As memory, intelligibility is metaphysically prior to what is tangible. Memory as such is not to be found in what is tangible. The primacy of memory, coupled with the loss of amnesia, means that the process of True knowing is a deeper, more inward form of recollection. Perhaps we can view the Socratic Method as a metamnemonic device insofar that it helps us recollect not the series of mere mechanical happenstance, but its conceptual machination instead (in this sense, while learning is actually remembering, philosophical knowledge is never learnt through rote memorization). This is to say that this memory is precisely not a memory of sense experience, but that which existed prior to that perception, that which is timelessly true, ungoverned by change. Thus, insofar as the memory is ours, we must consider the difference between our temporal becoming and the pre-existence of our soul:
Socrates: “If those realities we are always talking about exist, the Beautiful and the Good and all that kind of reality, and we refer all the things we perceive to that reality, discovering that it existed before and is ours, and we compare these things with it, then, just as they exist, so our soul must exist before we are born” (Plato, Phaedo, 76d–e).
For Plato, true knowing consists therefore of learning the distinction of what is distinct from intelligibility, a return, as it were, to the World of Forms, beyond the senses. This means that this World is the true site of actuality, and as such what is distinct from it does not belong in this realm. What is distinguished, what does not rise into an essential truth, and what contradicts the intelligibility of Mind, are therefore a nullity. Seen under this light, the actuality of Platonic humility, of knowing that one does not know, can be read as rising beyond epistemic irony: wisdom is the knowledge of the difference between actuality and nullity, between the pre-existing soul and the becoming-borne body, between the knowing I and the perceiving I.
Intelligibility, as the most actual, must then be pure possibility, because Truth can’t not be. The non-being of contradiction is in this way able to be uprooted, because it is a void and in its impossibility it melts away from the positive field of being. Philosophy, from the standpoint of Anamnesis and the Socratic Method, is consequently only possible, or valid, as an affirmation of being against the void. This attitude can be traced back to the Eleatics, as noted by the Slovenian psychoanalytic philosopher Mladen Dolar when he puts forward that “philosophy started as an exorcism of the void” (Dolar, 2013). According to Dolar, philosophy as this discourse of being arises as a defense mechanism against the void. Indeed, Parminedes’ path of the One Being, “the way that it is and it cannot not be,'' comes simultaneously with a warning against the negation of being, “the way that it is not and that it must not be.”
The risk of forgetting is this threat of the void, the negation of the full actuality of the discourse of being. The fundamental presupposition of Anamnesis is that the amnesia, this negation, is a function of tangible sense experience. But if for Plato philosophical knowledge begins with the exorcism of one’s amnesia, and that this malady is a void, a privation without metaphysical weight, the fact of this darkness of sense experience cannot be explained beyond simply reiterating it as a contingency. In other words, why Anamnesis is necessary in the first place cannot be explained further than that the amnesia simply happened. Yet, learning is still a process that happens as a contingent fact – just as it is not necessary that we should recall what has been forgotten. It is just so: our being is such that we necessarily lose the memory of the Forms upon entering life. Likewise, our entrance into philosophy must be in this state of loss. A bludgeon to the head – and we find ourselves thrown in a strange wilderness, desperately looking for clues in our wallets and pockets to figure out who we are and how to return home. But what to do about the head trauma?
There remains always a gap between the contingency of recollection and the intelligibility of the eternal Forms that must, in turn, govern everything else. Here, we see how the systematic repression of the void simply serves to heighten its terror. Even if we do attain knowledge, after the long labor of rigorous recollection, as long as the discourse of being is a process that has to begin in the sensible world, it must remain in the shape of an imperfection. As Hegel puts it, the ancient philosopher “not only comes to doubt the being of sensuous things, but to despair of it”(Hegel, 1977, §109). Thus, the impossibility of a full recovery of knowledge always lurks behind the horizon of Plato’s inquiry. We become doubly thrown: as born amnesiacs in the first place, and as incurable, despairing, amnesiacs secondly. The accident of forgetting leaves a disturbing scar upon being. The problem is that not only have we forgotten the content of knowledge, we have also forgotten this forgetting as the condition of possibility for Anamnesis. By beginning with being, Platonic philosophy “[disavowed the] primacy of the void as the lure, the temptation and the threat, lurking behind any talk about being, part and parcel with its logos” (Dolar, 2013). The affirmation of positive being through the way that “cannot not be,” leads one straight to its negative direction, in disavowal. The abstract fear of the threat of non-being in fact concretizes it into despair. By clinging so dearly onto being, Anamnesis also reveals this discourse’s impossible wish to forget the amnesia.
In my view, Hegel echoes Kant in using the term despair. For Kant, also, the dissatisfaction of beginning with Being is inevitable, because by doing so “reason moves against itself with such violence that it never could have arisen except in complete despair…” (Kant, 2004, p.25). The problem is that this beginning is made pre-critically; that is to say, it is a metaphysics that begins without considering the possibility of metaphysics. If in its procedure Anamnesis leaves a gap between recollection and forgetting, it is only because this forgetting is never addressed as constituting the limits of reason. In other words, if the nature of learning is remembering, then before learning can begin we must establish how remembering is possible at all – otherwise, we lack its distinguishing features. The gap is therefore precisely this lack of critique. Forgetting this, Anamnesis immediately arrives at the answer to whether something is or is not, without ever questioning whether its own enterprise is possible to begin with – now, is this not the height of arrogance?
Kant legitimizes this demand by considering the ocean of “illicit and precarious” metaphysics throughout the history of philosophy, which are invariably in theoretical contradiction with one another (Kant, 2004, p. 24). For Kant it is consequentially clear from this that metaphysics is due for a critique. The long and convoluted history of philosophy simply proves this: “one can point to no single book,” he observes; one cannot say, “here is metaphysics” (ibid). Lacking this “here,” reason moves against itself because what is demanded of it is beyond its limits. But valid knowledge is only of the conditioned thing, precisely because there is no condition under which the thing-in-itself is intelligible to cognition beyond spurious speculations. Thus, a new era of philosophy begins with this Copernican Revolution: that knowledge is not to be found “out there,” in the world or beyond it, but in the subject’s own structuring of the experience of such an object, in its appearance:
“... that appearance, as long as it is used in experience, brings forth truth, but as soon as it passes beyond the boundaries of experience and becomes transcendent, brings forth nothing but sheer illusion.” (Kant, 2004, p. 44)
It is by looking at the conditions of possibility of appearance that reason can begin to test and learn from its own “acuteness,” and here, metaphysics can finally expand into a science.
What pre-critical philosophy confuses is the difference between appearance and illusion. Traditional metaphysics presupposes that the philosopher reaches unconditioned being upon distinguishing what is from what is not. The proposition that being is absolute reality (and consequently that non-being is an illusion) is perhaps apodictically certain; yet for Kant this does not provide us with knowledge because being, as opposed to being-here, is not an object for experience, that is to say not an object for memory. Hence, Anamensis begins and ends with illusion, because it is “sheer illusion.” The disavowal that comes with Platonic recollection is, for Kant, symptomatic of a faulty mode of thinking which seeks to unite finite consciousness with something noumenal, or unconditioned. What can be learned, instead, must begin from the principles of pure reason, which is to say from how the world must be conditioned in appearance. Platonic humility tells us that what is forgotten is the distinction between knowledge and the illusion masquerading as knowledge, but it forgets that this distinction itself wears a mask.
For Kant, to get to the truth of this mask is to understand the relationship between its phenomenal appearance and what it is as a thing-in-itself. In this way, Kant shows in a single gesture that what metaphysics has been failingly trying to do is domesticating the outside. Rather than transcending this world, Kant’s philosophy is instead transcendental because it does not claim to access an eternal memory, wherever it may be, but simply allows us, here, to not be recaptured in the forgetting.
The classic I that remembers is now the modern I that thinks the content of sense-intuition: “... the business of the senses is to intuit; that of the understanding, to think” (Kant, 2004, p.56). But this separation between subject and object does not suffer from the ancient despair of the separation of knower from known. Instead of deriving all reality from a noumenal One, transcendental philosophy gets to the standpoint of objective reality by applying reason to objects of experience in order to get to its principles of understanding. Failing to do this, reason falls into what Kant calls sophistical doctrines. Sophistical doctrines “may neither hope to be confirmed nor fear to be refuted in experience” (Kant, 2007, p. 388) If we recall the indifferent disagreements within the field of philosophy delineated in the opening, we can see how the history of philosophy is symptomatic of this, as Kant puts it: “Every one of them is not only in itself free from contradiction, but can even point to conditions of its necessity on the nature of reason itself – although, unfortunately, the assertion opposing it can produce equally valid and necessary grounds in its support” (ibid).
Kant observes that there are two levels of delusions involved in a sophistical doctrine, which is naturally subject to an antinomy, its contradictory opposite. Both doctrine and its antinomy “carries with itself not merely an artificial illusion which disappears once we have insight into it, but a natural and inevitable illusion which, even when it deceives us no longer, still continues to delude us, and which hence can be rendered harmless, but can never be annihilated” (ibid). This deeper illusion is due to the fact that there is a natural incongruence between the extremes of reason and understanding. The demand to meet the adequacy of reason in mere ideas is “too great” for the understanding that thinks the content of intuition; on the other hand, when the condition of knowledge is adequate to the understanding, it is “too small,” too empirical a matter for reason to work out.
“Hence a conflict must arise which cannot be avoided, do what we will.” (Kant, 2007, p.389)
The dialectical character of a sophistical doctrine, that it is unable to be confirmed or refuted in experience, is therefore the result of this natural tension. Plato tasked himself with clearing up the pebbles of contradictions that lie along the path towards the unconditioned One, but he forgot the more profound contradiction between this mortal path and its eternal destination – between finite cognition and a completely transcendent rationality. Pre-critical, dogmatic philosophy doubly forgets because in only solving the explicit illusion it becomes unequipped to tarry with the implicit illusion. Indeed, for Kant sophistical assertions are the foreground to a dialectical battlefield. To win in this battlefield means very simply that you are in the attacking position, and the losing side must always be put in the defense. To ensure a decisive victory, therefore, the defender of the good cause only needs to ensure that he has the last words, so to speak, which can be achieved, as Kant, man of Enlightenment, puts it, by “forbidding his opponent ever to carry arms again” (ibid). In this dialectical battlefield, it is possible for both sides to win, many, many, times throughout its history. Although one side may have won more territories, the other side may have more lasting strongholds or castles. And the situation may reverse in another moment. For Kant, at this level of analysis one should remain an impartial judge because it doesn’t really matter whether it be the good or the bad cause that wins out. In fact, Kant reveals that the nature of the conflict is rather comical: “It is best to let them fight it out between themselves in the hope that, after they have tired out rather than injured each other, they may themselves perceive the uselessness of their quarrel, and part as good friends” (ibid).
What is important here is that by looking at the battlefield one can peer not so much into what lies beyond the illusion, but rather beyond the illusion of the illusion, into the truth of appearance. What is revealed by the state of this war tells us the contour of rational necessity out of historical subjectivity, which yields the objective form of our reason. Here is where something concrete can be learned, and knowledge can expand, and is worthy of the name – not out there in the dialectical battlefield, where reason is incommensurable with experience, and endless delusions within delusions abound. Thus, the Copernican Revolution allows for the study of fossilized, naturally occurring skepticism by using a scientific skeptical method which unearths “the point where the misunderstanding arises.” Before harmonizing reason’s conflicting assertions by watching, letting, even provoking them to develop and resolve themselves, according to their own nature, philosophy cannot scientifically begin (Kant, 2007, p.390).
We see that for Kant, perhaps the deepest delusion of pre-critical metaphysics is that it doesn’t know that it is essentially engaged in mock battle. In other words, pre-scientific reasoning does not have a global-historical perspective over its own understanding, which outlines its objective shape. Not before the philosopher undergoes this critique can he save himself from self-inflicted skepticism, through boundless speculations, and retreat from the dialectical battleground to finally see for himself the objective state of this strive he is so deeply enmeshed in (Kant, 2007, p.420). It is a mock battle because before the critical turn was made, reason was doing unsound philosophy, and consequently the problems it was grappling with were pseudo-problems. The Noumenal One, which is utterly cut from experience, is as such an orphan of war in a virtual Hobbesian landscape, reared by the midwives of permanent conflict, pulled every which way by the utter restlessness of a limitless mind. This imagination is the last sound heard before reason’s voice drowned entirely into the background noise of the manifold. But beyond the dialectical battlefield, “a permanent and tranquil rule of reason over the understanding and the senses would then be inaugurated.”
This isn’t to say that Kant denies that there is such a thing as a “good cause,” or that it does not matter if you support a bad one. Although there is a quality to Kant’s skeptical method that is not too dissimilar to Nietzsche’s “beyond good or evil,” the latter’s re-valuation tended more towards the principles of pure empiricism over the dogma of pure reason. For Kant, the reverse holds true because it is closer to the practical stance emerging out of the conflict. The value of the practical stance simply lies in the congruence between the underlying principles of the understanding, which is grounded in space and time, and its practical use, which puts pure reason and its critique under one sky. Dogmatic reasoning, while pre-critically unsound, shares the same practical interests as common understanding in regards to metaphysical questions about causality, freedom, the self, the truth of religions, etc. These values which raised humanity “above the compulsion of nature” (Kant, 2007 p.422) are therefore indicative of the possibility-space of science. Of course, pure empiricism also plays a crucial role in the debridement of cognition, but since it errs closer to skepticism it is equipped with too sharp an instrument, and therefore tends to commit more malpractice – unless when it doesn’t, and the patient does wake up from his slumber, if only to subsequently attack his physician. In this way, finally, philosophy can build a science out of itself, out its own concrete cause, using concrete materials, and with a concrete relationship with both finite nature and supreme being:
“Thus the metaphysics of nature as well as morals, but above all the preparatory (propaedeutic) critique of reason that dares to fly with its own wings, alone constitute that which we can call philosophy in a genuine sense.” (Kant, 2007, pg 700, emphasis added)
Sophistic assertions commit philosophical arrogance because they boast their complete authority upon one region of inquiry, without at the same time understanding their total silence on another, and remaining vain and indolent in this instead of undergoing a critique. Unsound philosophy does not know when it needs to remain silent, which is to say that sophistical assertions cannot open themselves up to their own conditions of possibility. To put it in the most Kantian way, they refuse to “suspend
knowledge in order to make room for belief” (Kant, 2007, p.25, Bxxix).
Kant, like Hegel, situates arrogance in this insistence on a peculiarity, which for him is philosophical delusion stemming from natural skepticism. It is in the excitement of the dialectical battle that reason harms itself into skeptical despair and forgets its limits, which holds together its body. But by looking at this wound critically, that is to say, scientifically, reason can find a way to heal itself. In order to do this, the full body of reason has to be elaborated in the possibility of its parts (perception, understanding, antinomies, etc.,) relating to itself as a whole – in other words, an anatomy of reason has to be established, as it is also necessitated by the aforementioned practical stance. Kant’s insight is that the full body of reason can be traced by looking at the point at which “the general root of our cognitive power divides and branches out into two stems, one of which is reason” (Kant, 2007 p.693). Reason as the totality of the higher functioning of cognition, The Rational in-itself, has for its digestive systems empirical sense-intuition to process. Like by radiolabeling, through illuminating the movement wherein cognition extracts what is subjectively historical from the objectively philosophical, we can trace the passage that takes these elements to the corresponding higher organs, which are themselves subsystems of the whole organism, which in turn articulates the movements the whole body. Indeed, for Kant reason is a living thing (691), or more precisely, a living architecture, and through this Architectonic of Pure Reason, science can understand the art of systems.
“The whole is therefore articulated (articulatio) and not heaped together (coacervatio); it can, to be sure, grow internally (per intus susceptionem) but not externally (per appositionem), like an animal body, whose growth does not add a limb but rather makes each limb stronger and fitter for its end without any alteration of proportion.” (Kant, 2007, p.691)
The many-limbed aberration that is pre-critical philosophy may be a result of external growth without an internal articulation, but because ‘everything is for the sake of each member, and each individual member is for the sake of all, so that the least frailty, whether it be a mistake (an error) or a lack, must inevitably betray itself in its use,’ philosophical skepticism can be understood in its organic shape. Seeing it as a part of the higher organism of reason, Kant is able to naturalize sophistical skepticism as belonging to a kind of immune system, a defense mechanism against error, an Antithetic. The problem is that this system has gone haywire, and reason is therefore unable to heal its festering wounds properly. But metaphysics, through the path of science, can now cure its head trauma, and finally practice sound philosophy.
As we have seen, for Kant despair is revealed to be the root of arrogance. Inherent in the critical system is a willingness to attend to our self-historically-inflicted wound. Read in this way, Critical Idealism demands a kind of self-compassion from philosophy. The authentic philosophical stance vis-à-vis the wound ought to be in a sense therapeutic. The choice to go against any possible pre-critical speculation does not amount to arrogance if it is at once an antidote for it. Philosophy can escape the circular trap of arrogance if, instead of simply declaring that it has the right to sit atop the tall heap of history, instead of offering yet another unsound thought, it finally opens up a door to articulate it. If Plato fails to close the gap between recollection and forgetting, Kant simply shows the gap to be an unnecessary and tiresome paradox which is kept alive by spurious dialectical argumentations.
Yet, calling it a pseudo-problem does not mean the paradox goes away; its presence is even more pronounced, because, if in lieu of an affirmative existential proof the domestication of the thing-in-itself produces anything resembling foundational knowledge at all, it is only when all gaps are put aside. Thus, in his own way, Kant not only preserves this void, but he also furthers its subjective depth. What started out as a banishment and rooting out of the void has now evolved into a great wall: from a separation of the knower to the known, to a total cutting off of the unknown altogether. As aforementioned at the start of this work, the shared characteristic of humility between Plato and Kant can be said to consist in an encirclement of the subject; if we recall Dolar’s assertion that metaphysics began as an exorcism of the void, this commonality must be understood equally as a continuity. If, in the former, the knower is reminded of the void through scars and blemishes, in the latter the void is present through its suspicious absence – one can almost say, knowledge becomes too clean. The logic here is what Hegel calls “hiding in totality,” which is to say that the way a totalizing system conceals something, reveals more about it than what it actually hides (Hegel, 2008, §139). In terms of Kant’s critique, it reveals a deep reliance on one last dogma: the unknowability of the thing-in-itself. Kant’s totality, therefore, cannot be divorced from the fact that it is a withdrawn totality, a totality except for one other thing. The preservation of this dogma requires philosophy to manifest a new form of forgetting which avoids at all cost a total detachment from the metaphysics of common sense – forgetting as a self-renunciation of reason.
Common sense is of course a function of the understanding, and therefore a practical choice for critical philosophy. Nonetheless, while it has made the Copernican turn which treats knowledge of objects as here, critical philosophy still treats common sense as if it were an indifferent thing out there which exists totally separated from the subject. At the same time – this is a common sense understanding of objects and knowledge. We see that there is something of a retroactive move here: the structure of the understanding is such that it redefines the subject in the present, which unites subject/object relations, back into their separateness. In my view, this is what Hegel means by “But the reflection of the understanding seized hold of philosophy.” Philosophy is seized by the ratcheted structure of the understanding which abstracts and separates objects, but causes it to be stuck in this abstraction and separation. The essence of common sense retains its naive form, as mere thoughts – and objects are something else, standing on their own over there. In this way, Critical Philosophy, contrary to its intention, turns itself against reason, and reverts back to ordinary common sense, behaving as if truth rests on sensuous reality which fills thoughts with “actual” content – because reason on its own can only generate mental figments. It is this turning back that constitutes reason’s self-renunciation. Truth is subjective and this subjectivity is treated like it does not belong to the true fact; hence, knowledge has lapsed into opinion.
The atavistic tendency of subject/object unity to revert back to its formalistic stage stems from the presupposition that knowledge of the appearance of illusion is immediate. This is to say that although Kant sought to “render harmless” the deeper deception that hides beneath pre-critical philosophy, he never took into account its necessarily passive standpoint in regards to the very formalism he critiques. For example, critical philosophy treats the dialectical battlefield as if judgments can be drawn objectively from a neutral, solid ground. Yet, it is also as if this ground suddenly opens up and swallows reason into a hole – at least, from the point of view of a soldier, this must be what Kant’s retreat looks like!
It is for this reason that ambiguities surround the status of Kant’s transcendental “objects,” such as the categories. If not actual objects themselves, but only the conditions of a priori knowledge, which is the nature of the understanding that judges the nature of things (Beiser, 2008, p.166), then how are we to understand of what standpoint they belong to? In my view, we can understand the transcendental categories as a reflection of exactly what it takes its objects to be from: a mock battlefield. What is ironic is that Kant’s dialectical battlefield is itself “a blind play of representations, i.e. less than a dream,” and as such the critique has only the appearance of activity, when it in fact retains its passive form. The transcendental categories constitute what Hegel in the preface to the first edition of The Science of Logic terms “empty formalism” (Hegel, 2010, p. 9), which is to say that they are a temporary structure, scaffoldings that holds together representations and the judgment they relate to. But as these structures fall away revealing the developed form of judgment, this transcendental apoptosis is not included in the logical moments of the unification of representations in a consciousness, which for Kant defines the activity of thinking proper. The pure concepts of the understanding excludes this regulated death from all the possible ways of representing the synthetic unity of perceptions as necessary and universally valid. Nonetheless this process of loss, negation, remains the enduring preservation of the transcendental.
Reason must always deny its own activity and remains passively articulated; consequently, it always knows before it knows, because the faculty of cognition does not itself constitute an instance of cognition (Smith, 1973), but rather an activation of presupposed lemmas. It is passively articulated because this component of cognition, which is the site of truth, or the matter, must originate from elsewhere outside of its own closed-circuit logic. Because the matter does not depend on logic for its existence, logic can give only the formal conditions of what Kant thinks to be genuine knowledge (Science of logic, introduction), or the “ propaedutic” of thinking: for example, that the mind must be, in the first place, reactive to mind-independent objects – or, in what way must thinking adjust itself, such that it can relate to its content passively in order to receive “true” knowledge, much like adjusting an antenna to receive a better signal. Thus, for Critical Idealism the negative dimensions of the transcendental categories do not contain any real truth. In Hegel’s view, Kant’s reason cannot, in fact, fly with its own wings.
We see that the persistence of the last, excluded dogma is the matured form of the ancient’s “forgetting the Anamnesis.” For Critical Idealism, memory is in the form of a “lasting approbation” (prolegomena), an uncontested approval, in the vein of the hard sciences, but especially mathematics. At the start, forgetting yearned to undo the irreversible; now, forgetting is actively condemned to rewrite the present, in accordance with this approval. Science is not fully articulated, free and self-moving in its own peculiar shape, because it is “appealing to an inferior form of its being” (Hegel, 1977, p.49 .76) “The older metaphysics,” Hegel contends, had a higher concept of thinking than Critical Idealism (Hegel, 2010, p. 25). For Anamnesis presupposed that the essences of objects lie in what is known of them in thought – or, that the truth of things are within their intelligibility, not their immediate appearance. Thinking, and the determinateness of thinking are not considered outside of the subject matter; rather, things and the thinking of them agree in and for themselves. “Thinking in its immanent determinations” and the truth of things are one and the same content (ibid). For Hegel, Plato reached a higher concept because things are not just considered as things of the extended world, but also as things of thought. The intelligibility of something is inseparable from its thinking up.
Yet there is something of value in the foundational underpinnings of this retrograde step, which is key to elevating reason to “the loftier spirit of modern philosophy” (ibid). This universally accepted conception has its basis in the insight that, as displayed in the dialectical battlefield, there is a necessary conflict of the determinations of the understanding with themselves. When the understanding reflects on subject/object relations, it consists in transcending the concrete immediate as it determines and separates the object from the subject. This is to say that consciousness becomes aware of the necessary conflict between the unity of concrete immediacy and the understanding’s reflection of it – thus they are differentiated. In other words, the act of reflection, which constitutes Kant’s “here,” is suspended by the extremes of reason and understanding, and therefore is the very incongruence which sets forth the deeper illusion supposedly missed by Pre-Critical thought. From this illusion, to repeat Kant, “a conflict must arise” because reason and understanding cannot adequately complement each other.
However, this very reflection must mean that the understanding equally transcends above this very determination of separateness – the sheer fact that the understanding is able to recollect its memory, uniting itself back with reason into, as Kant puts it, “the general root of our cognitive power,” in elaborating that it separates its determinations into object and subject, means that the two spheres become one thing within this knowing. The two determinations exist within the higher perspective that the understanding has of itself. Hence, the separate determinations are now connected in reason, which is in and of itself this activity of reflection, of tracing its own steps backwards, of its experience extracting what is subjectively historical from the objectively philosophical, which is a process of negation. So, the conflict of determinations turns out to be a function of the concept of reason itself – reason is the site where this conflict breaks out in the first place.
For Kant, a concept is necessarily a unification of representations in a consciousness because it must be a principle of objectively valid judgments. But, inherent in this unity is also a profound instability. Moreover, as we saw, the validity of such judgments is insofar as it is occluded from its own dissolution, and so the principle misses its own objective form. To my mind, this contradiction is the heart of Hegel’s most devastating critique of the Kantian project: that it cannot even begin. That Kant’s propaedeutic is a “knowing before knowing” implies that the process of cognition has already begun setting up its parameters before any preparation can be made. Critical Idealism, consequently, has already made its entrance into the world of philosophy – but since it must begin by specifying the conditions of knowledge, this step is forgotten.
The consequence of this is that knowing can never make that final step that would take it into a higher perspective of itself. Kantian memory, as this knowledge before knowledge, has for its truth the lasting approbation which retains the inferior form of knowledge as “out there.” This further internalization of object-realism rather than a reevaluation of epistemic relations, despite making the Copernican Turn, makes this type of knowledge unsatisfactory because the determinations of the understanding will forever lack the stability of sensuous experience. But this impossible standard is presupposed by a cognition that is only correct for appearance. To even say that this cognition is only correct for appearance, however, is like “attributing right insight into someone, with the stipulation, however, that he is not fit to see what is true but only what is false” (Hegel, 2010, p. 26). This cognition which is true but does not know its subject matter is absurd.
For Hegel, the recollection of experience is also the path that consciousness takes in order to reach the goal of Absolute Knowing – the full self-comprehension of Spirit, which in turn emerges from the full self-comprehension of the sapient experience. Rather than starting with a consciousness that is presupposed to be the “general root of cognitive power,” a supposedly stable unity of reason and understanding, Hegel looks at the unstable becoming of consciousness grown into Spirit.
“This Becoming presents a slow-moving succession of Spirits, a gallery of images, each of which, endowed with all the riches of Spirit, moves thus slowly Just because the Self has to penetrate and digest this entire wealth of its substance. As its fulfillment consists in perfectly knowing what it is, in knowing its substance, this knowing is its withdrawal into itself in which it abandons its outer existence and gives its existential shape over to recollection” (Hegel, 1977 .808).
As opposed to Kant’s mock battle, the cultivation of consciousness into Absolute Knowing is a slow-moving process that includes the “digestion” of the immediate substantial knowing – the presupposition that essence lies in an external relation to the subject. As Hegel puts it: “everything turns on grasping and expressing the True, not only as Substance but equally as Subject” (Hegel, 1977, .17). As we saw previously, this substantial knowledge is the form of the “here” that was shown to harbor a profound instability. For Hegel, the vanishing of Kant’s “here” into its opposite is not a defect of cognition, but simply the nature of the former’s abstract universality, which is the true essence of sense-certainty. “‘Here’ itself does not vanish; on the contrary, it abides constant in the vanishing…” (Hegel, 1977, .98). Substantial knowing is this simple negativity of the subject. Taken in this way, the knowledge that subject has of its substance is fundamentally in the form of a loss, and as such Spirit must maintain itself by also being negated – this negation of the negation “transforms spirit’s outer existence into a higher form of existence posited by and within spirit itself. The negation of spirit’s outer existence is not the annulment of this existence” (Bordignon, ed. Ricci & Sanguinetti, 2014 p.37).
Indeed, Hegel takes it that the journey of consciousness towards Absolute Knowing goes through a path of despair (Hegel, 1977, .78). Consciousness cannot simply retreat to a higher place and observe the battlefield from afar, but must always learn for itself the shapeshifting untruth of phenomenal knowledge. “The series of configurations which consciousness goes through along this road is, in reality, the detailed history of the education of consciousness itself to the standpoint of Science” (ibid). But Critical Philosophy reduces this education into simply the resolve to fly with its own wings. Now, we return once again to the problem of arrogance. There is certainly something arrogant about Kant’s presupposition that thought can simply fly over conflict, seemingly without even having touched the ground to make the leap. It is also at least condescending to claim that the battle of ideas does not affect reality – if the 20th century taught the human spirit anything, the opposite is very much the case (perhaps we can even say it was one station in the path of our collective negation of negation). The same can be said for the resolve that philosophy must maintain only the familiar form of being correct, which boils down to a type of arbitrary definition.
For Hegel, Kant’s epistemic humility, in truth, hides a vanity. By maintaining a truth that is always beyond it, always elusive to its grasp, always making room for faith, consciousness implicitly sees itself as also beyond truth.On the one hand, its own logic does not allow consciousness to fully penetrate into itself – into the “I” in-itself. On the other hand this inaugurates a protective barrier around consciousness’ last dogma, the denial of negation as the fundamental process of reason. This barrier is the vanity that thinking is beyond negation, and as such, beyond truth. Kant’s finitude is one that presupposes an “I” that is an elusive abstraction. The primordial amnesia carried over from the Eleatics survives in Kant as a transcendental amnesia, in the form of the empty “here,” that is at once an emptying out, an abstraction of the “I.”
“Argumentation is reflection into the empty 'I', the vanity of its own knowing.This vanity, however, expresses not only the vanity of this content, but also the futility of this insight itself; for this insight is the negative that fails to be the positive within itself. Because this reflection does not get its very negativity as its content, it is never at the heart of the matter, but always beyond it.” (Hegel, 1977 p.59)
If we recall the claim above, that Socrates’ ironic wisdom has an accent towards being, and yields positive knowing from distinguishing the I that knows from the I that perceives, Kant’s position can be seen as having an accent towards non-being. We observe a rather interesting homology: like its ancient predecessor’s doubling of illusions, there is a doubling of the futility of the insight of the Transcendental Subject, as this empty “I.” Firstly, it is futile in ways delineated above: that it cannot begin, that it cannot engage with truth in-itself but only with an agreement. But because the Transcendental Subject also cannot engage with logic’s own content, which is thinking and its negative determinations, its dissatisfaction with despair, skeptical or otherwise, “is admitted but at the same time presupposed” (Hegel, 2015, p.26). This deeper futility can perhaps be termed dialectical futility, in that the Kantian project only manages to arrive at the dialectically opposite position to pre-critical thought, rather than actually elevating it into a comprehensive science. But the nature of its “unsatisfaction” remains projected against the opposite direction, and it relies on this projection to arrive at and maintain its supposed “stability and accord” (ibid). The privileging of being is homologous to transcendental non-being because they are, in a sense, modifications of a shared ancestral trait: the exorcism of the void. The heart of Kant’s finite peculiarity is this presupposed dissatisfaction. Kant’s supposed humility in remaining in the finite, simultaneously makes the infinite judgment that its abstract dissatisfaction warrants a detachment from despair. Hegel calls this false modesty feeble minded:
“Feeble-minded modesty holds itself clear of the matter itself, and such modesty directly passes into arrogance again. Conscious of its own merit, modesty then forgets to forget itself, while when we hold ourselves within the matter itself we forget our peculiarity. In knowing we are free, we remain firmly lodged in thinking. In philosophy we have to do with the matter itself, and with the surrender of self-conceit.” (Hegel, 2008 p.15)
False modesty forgets to forget itself – as mentioned before, the impossible wish of ancient philosophy is to forget the scars of Anamnesis, and for Kant this is developed into the wish for a transcendental amnesia, that it can ignore the despair that comes with thinking. We can see that both are united in the attempt at forgetting the forgetting, although they remain dialectically futile, passing back and forth into philosophical arrogance. Hegel offers a perspective shift on the matter, taking forgetting itself to be fundamental to holding the resolve to, as Kant himself would put it, fly with one’s own wings. “To hold ourselves within the matter itself” is for Hegel simultaneously a forgetting of peculiarity, which is to say peculiarity as the pattern of forgetting itself. It is an affirmation of subjectivity in its self-referential negativity rather than merely in its determinate and axiomatic subjectivist shape. The latter is conceptually inferior because it exists in a cognition without truth, and as such is condemned to a closure in a rumination of the shadowy outlines of its past.
Subjectivism, from the perspective of recollection, is a fixation onto a presupposed time when consciousness had a pure and immediate relationship to being. But this tranquility, an equally presupposed state, is now bothered by thinking’s own unrest because it finds itself mediating this relationship. This fixation ensures that consciousness begins and ends with the empty, abstract “I” that needs to know before knowing. But for Hegel, the lesson is simply that immediacy cannot be disentangled from mediation – what is concrete for consciousness is that their movements into one another constitutes the stages of the development of its own self-consciousness. The full comprehension of consciousness’ development, or Absolute Knowing, therefore, constitutes the logical totality of its concrete experiences. This Speculative standpoint is the logical beginning of philosophy. Speculative thinking lets contradiction between immediacy and mediation to unfold on their own terms, and so avoids beginning with a result:
“Of course, the very act of taking being as pure immediacy “mediates” that immediacy. It does so, however, precisely by abstracting from the fact – or actively forgetting –that being is a mediated result. This is not to deny that, at the start of logic, we retain a reflective awareness that pure being is such a result; but being itself is thought as sheer immediate being.” (Houlgate, 2021)
For the “feeble-minded,” the dissatisfaction of the past haunts their every move. But the logical beginning takes into account that despair is more than a risk, it is “part and parcel with its logos,” to echo Dolar. The evolving patterns of forgetting compose the experiences that spirit must recall to reach its full self-organization. If underdeveloped consciousness gets stuck in the understanding’s presupposed temporality, that in the beginning pure being is immediate, the subject of Absolute Knowing overcomes this by re-internalizing it as a universal experience of negation. It is unbothered, uncaptured by their particularity.
“The individual whose substance is the more advanced Spirit runs through this past just as one who takes up a higher science goes through the preparatory studies he has long since absorbed, in order to bring their content to mind: he recalls them to the inward eye, but has no lasting interest in them” (Hegel, 1977, p.16 .28)
For Hegel, the presupposed temporality stemming from the “here” of empty intuition appears for consciousness that has not grasped its pure concept by annulling time (Hegel, 1977, §801). In my interpretation, this formalism of time, what Hegel calls “time-form,” is a series of finite, individual snapshots of consciousness, strung together by an illusory continuity, which at once is its empty content. Spirit appears in this formal time as a given result, as a standpoint already made adequate by its preceding moments. But because the parts remain in-themselves unarticulated, due to their only virtual continuity, the recollection of them amounts to the activation of an empty intuition – the parts are self-similar, but without the negativity that allows them to be self-referential. The result is that these snapshots cannot be truly continuous, disappearing into one another, but merely accumulate in a quiet juxtaposition, in a heap. But the annulment of this time-form “eliminates the context in which the experience of spirit took place until this present moment, and establishes a new dimension for science,” (Ricci and Sanguinetti, 2014, p. 6). In annulling this time Spirit forgets its own peculiarity, because consciousness for it is now an originary temporalizing activity (ibid). Reason is always in medias res, finding itself in the midst of a concluding moment, and a new beginning. Only at this standpoint does Spirit “[set] aside its time-form, comprehends this intuiting, and is a comprehended and comprehending intuiting” (Hegel, 1977, §801).
The self-conceit of the time-form lies in the fact that for it, recollection must only be of its own finite determination; but as we saw before, this modesty hides a vanity, that it is beyond truth. But in remaining firmly lodged in thinking, in dealing with the matter itself, we can surrender this self conceit. By forgetting itself in transcending the finite, by annulling the time-form rather than repeating it, time appears as the necessity to “realize and reveal what is at first only inward (the in-itself being taken as what is inward) ,i.e. to vindicate it for spirit’s certainty of itself.” Finitude, therefore, is sustained by its own mediation. “The finite is not sublated by the infinite as by a power present outside it; its infinity consists rather in sublating itself” (Hegel, 2015, 116).
For Hegel, the matter of arrogance does not necessarily lie in the philosophical forgetting itself, but the peculiarity that does not allow consciousness to lose itself in its recollection. What is arrogant is the maintenance of a dissatisfaction, over concrete relationship with the negative aspects of existence, that we begin at the split, as the wound itself. It is only by being wounded, scarred, and scuffed up by the dialectical battle that we become worthy of philosophy. “We enjoy dignity by taking up residence in the content of knowledge, in what is substantial, and such dignity is quite the contrary of arrogance” (Hegel, 2008, p.14). Arrogance is not solved by imposing a “proper” beginning to thinking, a formal preparation, but by making oneself worthy of the matter at hand. The dignity of thinking universalizes its pattern of forgetting, transforming its time-form into concrete history of Spirit. This dignity allows consciousness to not only forget but forgive its past forms. Dignified thinking remains graceful in its forgetfulness, in tracing its steps backwards before making the leap over the abyssal ground.
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