Yeomans, Christopher

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6/19/2019 Reason in the World: Hegel's Metaphysics and Its Philosophical Appeal, // Reviews // Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews // University of …https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/reason-in-the-world-hegels-metaphysics-and-its-philosophical-appeal/ 1/3College of Arts and LettersNotre Dame Philosophical Reviews2016.01.26EverythingJames KreinesReason in the World: Hegel's Metaphysics and Its Philosophical Appeal,Published: January 26, 2016James Kreines, Reason in the World: Hegel's Metaphysics and Its Philosophical Appeal, Oxford University Press, 2015, 290pp., $74.00(hbk), ISBN 9780190204303.Reviewed by Christopher Yeomans, Purdue UniversityBooks on Hegel's Science of Logic either tend to get in and out of the text relatively quickly, mining a few conceptual moves to be refinedand then alloyed for use in other philosophical industries; or they take the form of commentaries that march the reader through thetwists and turns of the argument at speeds and levels of detail that vary widely according to the individual drill sergeant-interpreter'staste for cruelty. James Kreines, however, is neither in the resource extraction business nor does he fancy a turn on the parade ground.Instead, he offers a book that will surprise both seasoned Hegel hands with the order and connection of its arguments andcontemporary metaphysicians with the cogency of those arguments on their own playing field. For Kreines argues that Hegel's Logic ismetaphysically pluralistic first and epistemologically monistic second -- and he does so by a form of interpretation that attempts toreconstruct Hegel's arguments less in the light of their internal architectonic context than of the current array of live options inmetaphysics. The result is a book whose innovations sometimes left me perplexed at the order of topics considered but more oftenilluminated well-worn territory with newfound clarity.Again to simplify a (good) bit, approaches to Hegel tend to define him by reference either to Spinoza or to Kant. If the former referenceis taken to be dominant, then the resultant Hegel is a metaphysician of the monistic variety. Surely, it is acknowledged, Spinoza comesin for a good bit of criticism at Hegel's hands, and so Hegel's monism must diverge in some way from Spinoza's. But whether organic orteleological or spiritual, the monism tends to go hand in hand with the metaphysical reading. On the other hand, the interpreters whosee Kant as the leading light in Hegel's firmament tend to see Hegel oriented either by epistemology or by concerns about norms.Guidance is then provided either by the Transcendental Analytic's deduction of the categories or by the Groundwork's deduction of themoral law. On both readings, Hegel is seen as offering a re-tooled transcendental argument, regressing on the conditions of thepossibility of self-consciousness.Kreines, however, offers us a Hegel who looks to Kant for metaphysics and whose monism is epistemological rather than metaphysical.The key, he argues, is to see Hegel as continuing not the Transcendental Analytic but the Dialectic, and in particular the Antinomies. Onthis account, the problem with metaphysics is not that it is superseded, but that it is naïve and unable to come to grips with its owncontradictory tendencies. These contradictory tendencies were diagnosed by Kant himself, of course, in the Antinomies. Unlike manycontemporary interpreters who see the Antinomies as a jointly absurd compilation of severally unconvincing arguments, Kreines (andKreines' Hegel) takes them quite seriously. Kreines plausibly motivates the tension in the argument (particularly the Second Antinomy)by appeal to the pressures of complete explanation and then reconstructs Hegel's position against the matrix of possible responses. AsKreines puts it, Hegel is optimistic about knowledge of the unconditioned as opposed to Kant's pessimistic solution to the conflict bylimiting our knowledge to spatio-temporal objects. But Hegel is partially deflationary with respect to the conception of theunconditioned (divorcing it from its image in rationalist substance metaphysics) and partially inflationary (by seeing both teleologicaland spiritual phenomena as more completely explicable than rule-governed phenomena) (150).One of the best things about the book is the patient care with which Kreines disentangles different senses of metaphysics. He argues thatthe sense of metaphysics essential to Hegel is that of seeking answers to why-questions -- discovering the reasons, or grounds, orresponsible factors: "Metaphysics (of reason) = Philosophical inquiry into explanatory reasons, or reason in the world, and ultimatelyinto their completeness" (9). Within that metaphysics as Hegel has it, there turn out to be three different orders of explanation, and thisbit of metaphysical pluralism will bring us to Hegel's epistemological monism. There are law-governed phenomena that are explainedby the powers and natures of the things related by the laws; there are living phenomena that are explained by immanent ends of self-6/19/2019 Reason in the World: Hegel's Metaphysics and Its Philosophical Appeal, // Reviews // Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews // University of …https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/reason-in-the-world-hegels-metaphysics-and-its-philosophical-appeal/ 2/3preservation; and th re are spiritual phenom na such s reasoning th t are explained by the immanent c ncept of freedom (23). Eachof these types of phenomena and the entities involved are equally real and existent, but they are explicable to different degrees -- listedhere in ascending order. Because only spiritual phenomena are fully explicable (by the concept of freedom embodied in the absoluteidea), our knowledge of lawful and living phenomena is secured by comparison or approximation. This theme of approximation to theparadigmatic and fullest case is, of course, a classic bit of rationalism. But here it is put to epistemological rather than metaphysical use.Or rather, its epistemological form is driven by the pluralistic metaphysics, as a way to demonstrate the validity of optimism about thepossibility of knowledge about all the orders and sorts of things in the world.This concern to get metaphysics right is Kreines' driving force as much as Hegel's. In fact, I cannot think of any recent work on Hegelthat is so deeply engaged with contemporary analytic metaphysics -- its field of possibilities and its modes of arguments. Kreinesdevotes equal energy to arguing that neither Humeanism, nor neo-Aristotelianism, nor substance metaphysics is immune to the criticalimperatives to which Hegel responds. Against the Humeans, Kreines argues that their reduction of laws to patterns introduces preciselythe kind of objective explanatory relations -- or reason in the world -- that the reduction was supposed to avoid (69). The disagreementbetween Hegel and the Humeans turns out to be not whether there is such reason in the world, but in what direction it operates.Against the neo-Aristotelians, Kreines argues that life and species-kinds, though clearly superior in explanatory import to lawfulregularities, still fall short of our expectations of complete explanation (which can be found only in free, spiritual phenomena). Andagainst substance metaphysics, Kreines argues that it conflates dependence and explanation (159, 207-8). In fact, it turns out to beHegel's view that spiritual phenomena embody the absolute idea, but only by dependence on living and lawful phenomena that are notthemselves directly explained by the absolute idea. This is a paradoxical notion to be sure -- that completeness of explanation and extentof dependence could not only be separable but also in fact run in opposite directions -- but it is to Kreines' credit that when the outlinesof that position become clear in the last quarter of the book, its plausibility both in itself and as a solution to the antinomial problem ofmetaphysics is readily apparent.Let me then close with a critical note on the shape of that antinomial problem. It is right to read Kant that way, but Kreines' ambitionsextend further than that -- he is at pains to argue that this is the right way to orient metaphysics. Two features of this orientation seemquestionable.The first and perhaps most pressing is what he calls the Irreplaceable Guidance Claim. Kreines argues that all theoretical inquiry isnecessarily interested not only in explanatory reasons as such but also in complete reasons. Metaphysics in particular is so committedand thus is subject to the criticisms of Kant's dialectic. Discussing David Armstrong and Jonathan Schaffer in particular, he argues thatany metaphysical view that proposes more fundamental explanations than those provided in the natural sciences either slides toward adogmatic foundationalism or offers weak-kneed appeals to balance in order to resist such a slide:Armstrong needs to rest on a philosophical case that explanatory appeals to laws implicitly require commitment to hisuniversals; but then he remains open to the charge that this case itself requires commitment as well to "the Absolute" he soresists. His resistance, then, will have to stand on his counsel of balance. But this is no principle, and judgments will obviouslydiffer: the humean, for example, will think that the humean view is the perfect balance between denying the existence of laws andmore metaphysically inflationary views like Armstrong's. (146)In the light of this problem, Kant's pessimism about metaphysics -- his restriction of all knowledge to spatio-temporal objects -- lookslike a better, because more principled, response to the underlying problem. Hegel takes up the challenge to provide an alternative butno less principled response that maintains optimism about metaphysical knowledge. Here the cost is a paradoxical or counter-intuitivemetaphysics in which dependence and explanation go in opposite directions. But absent excessive confidence in our own supposedmetaphysical intuitions, this might be a price we should be willing to pay.Kreines' claim, however, is broader and stronger: not just metaphysics, but theoretical inquiry as such is taken to have this interest ofreason. Put another way, metaphysics is committed to some version of the unconditioned, and we are all committed to metaphysicsonce we try to explain anything at all. Here, however, the argument seems to me much weaker, depending on a strained analogybetween iterated prisoner's dilemma games and vicious circles of explanation (129). Now, one might think that just showing that anymetaphysics is committed to the unconditioned is sufficient, but it is worth noting that the stronger claim is required to fully motivateeither Kantian or Hegelian idealism.The second problem concerns the distinction between explanation and dependence that is so crucial to Kreines' view. Making thisdistinction results in Hegel's "combination of extreme metaphysical ambition about reasons with such a dismissal of any metaphysics ofsubstrata" (173). So rather than making the tension between dependence and sufficiency internal to explanation itself, he separates the6/19/2019 Reason in the World: Hegel's Metaphysics and Its Philosophical Appeal, // Reviews // Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews // University of …https://ndpr.nd.edu/news/reason-in-the-world-hegels-metaphysics-and-its-philosophical-appeal/ 3/3two and rejects depende ce arguments as a way of doing metaphysics. The problem is that this view makes it look as if the antinomy canbe done away with because one half of its force can be dismissed as a misguided inference from language to metaphysics (e,g., 187). Putanother way, the interpretation makes the contradiction of the Antinomies more apparent than real (see the discussion of Leibniz on175, also of contemporary metaphysics on 187).Kreines is certainly live to the problem here:One reason why it can be difficult to make sense of Hegel's claim for the reality of contradiction, in this case and others, is thatthis seems to present a dilemma: On the one hand, if we really explain the view, or render it thinkable, then we seem to undercutthe sense in which reality would contain contradiction within it; we make reality seem to make more sense than it would if reallycontradictory. On the other hand, if we insist on the reality of a kind of contradiction that could never make sense or beexplained, beyond the grasp of thought, then we seem to suggest one or another view that, although possibly of philosophicalappeal in some respects, cannot cohere with Hegel's other commitments (196).Kreines embraces the first horn of the dilemma, and I think that his solution involves teasing apart the kinds of dependence argumentsthat generate substrata from the kind of dependence arguments that generate Hegel's own view that the completely explicable (theabsolute idea) depends on the incompletely explicable (the lawful and the living); but I am unable to report the precise form of thissolution. The two problems are related, of course, since traditional arguments for the kind of unconditioned, complete explainer Kreinestakes to remain necessary guidance for us rely at least partially upon the very considerations of dependence from which Kant tried tofree us.In any event, Kreines' book marks an important step forward for understanding Hegel's theoretical philosophy. In clearly framing theimport of Hegel's conceptual innovations by placing them against the background of options in modern metaphysics, Kreines continueshis contributions towards the cultivation of a productive space for debate about the metaphysical significance of Hegel's thought.Copyright © 2019  ISSN: 1538 - 1617 College of Arts and Letters  Accessibility InformationNotre Dame, IN 46556

James Kreines: Reason in the World: Hegel’s Metaphysics and its Philosophical Appeal

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James Kreines: Reason in the World: Hegel’s Metaphysics and its Philosophical Appeal

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