Wesley Phillips

Critical Reading of Hegels Force and the Understanding

[Unrevised text]

Hegel does not name Kant in Force and the Understanding. But it is clear (as all of
the commentaries agree) that the section includes a fundamental critique of the thingin-itself. It is but one of a series in this fundamental critique, or sublation. Something
of Kant is preserved in this cancelling process. Reference to the problem of the thingin-itself in Force and the Understanding is made clear from (1) its treatment of the
longer-standing problem of substance, and (2) the two-worlds dualism of sensuous
and supersensuous. Hegel uses terminology that traverses both (1) and (2): for
instance, the bottom of things, the in-itself, and the so-called curtain which is
supposed to conceal the inner world. Having said this, the problem with treating
Force and the Understanding as the confrontation of the thing-in-itself in the
Phenomenology is that we are still looking upon Consciousness and not yet SelfConsciousness not yet, therefore, spirit. And since the phenomenology of spirit has
not properly commenced, Hegel confronts Kant on the terrain of this novel
philosophy of nature. This gives rise to some serious problems that surpass the
specific relationship between Kant and Hegel. We should say at the outset that Hegel
is not treating the whole of Kants system here. Hegel is quite Kantian in separating
out Kants theoretical and practical projects it being the former alone that is treated
in Force and the Understanding. This partial treatment of the thing-in-itself will
itself prove problematic.
Kants critical metaphysics in the second half of the Critique of Pure Reason is
a critique of dogmatic metaphysics; of substance-ism. Hegel is more sympathetic than
Kant to Leibniz but above all to Spinoza, whose name cannot be separated from that
of Naturphilosophie as a whole. Hence, the Kantian reproach that, in seeking to
surpass Kant, Hegel mere lapses back into a precritical dogmatism. For now, we can
say that Hegel is Spinozist only to the extent that, in opposition to Kantian idealism
and in opposition to Cartesian dualism, Spinozas substance attempts to incorporate

the sensuous and supersensuous; the finite and infinite. That Spinoza does not succeed
is not important. Better an unsuccessful monist than a successful dualist.
Force and the Understanding presents the supersensuous as philosophy has
never seen it before. By bersinnlich, Hegel does not mean the perpetual beyond of
the

sensuous.

Hyppolite

thus

writes

extrasensuous

or

suprasensuous.

Consciousness would not be consciousness were there not something intelligible for
it. Nature can be understood because the understanding stands under nature, as its
inner law. The inner law is something, not nothing, and to that extent is already outer.
Hegel alludes to the Platonic intelligible world, which equally interested Kant.
Intelligibility is both subjective and objective, stated Kant. But Kant (in the first
Critique at least) conceived of its objectivity in terms of formal universality, and not
physical nature.1 In Faith and Knowledge (1802), Hegel situated Friedrich Jacobi
alongside Kant and Fichte, as the school of subjective Idealism. Hegel nevertheless
subsequently takes over Jacobis claim of nihilism against Kant, Reinhold and Fichte.
Intelligibility and the understanding are supersensuous in the wrong way, in this
Kantian Idealism. Kant was right to deduce the categories, in accordance with the
standpoint of experience, but wrong to leave them as pure concepts of the
understanding, cut-off from the sensuous-finite world of intuition. Kant does not
follow through his insight to its proper conclusion, however, leaving a two-world
dualism. Hyppolite writes that, for Hegel, the Kantian Understanding,
hypostatizes its own reflection, it does not reflect back on itself, and it fails to see in nature the selfknowledge that is implicit in it. Knowledge of the phenomenon is a self-knowledge and, as such, it has
a truth that is no longer located in the beyond. But in order to reach such an idealism, reflection, which
Kant uses in his critical philosophy, must reflect itself. 2

The understanding must be reflected back into nature, just as nature was reflected
back into the understanding without resulting in a one-world syncretism (that of
Spinozism). The problem is the way in which Hegel goes about this double reflection.
Hegel made the transition from Perception to Force and the Understanding
by stating that the perception of this thing must become (1) the negation of all other
1

It is true that, following Platos ideas, Kant draws an analogy between human reason
and natural organisms. Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (Cambridge
University Press, 1999), 397
2
Jean Hyppolite, The Genesis and Structure of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, First
(Northwestern University Press, 1974), 125-6

things, and (2) the apprehension of thingness. But what is thingness? Thingness is
substance. For Spinoza, substance is the causa sui, the unconditioned absolute,
God.3 Kant ultimately takes the unbedingt to imply unthingly; inconceivable as
substance from the standpoint of finite experience, including that of the philosopher.
To claim to know substance is dogmatism. Instead, the question of the unconditioned,
the theoretical sum of conditions, must constitute the antinomy of reason, given to
us as a problem (more will be said on this below). In contrast to Kant, Hegel
proceeds to conceive of thingness as unthingly by way of a paradigm shift within the
philosophy of nature, from thing to force.
Force is something, not nothing, nor some-thing in the beyond without,
however, being thing-like. In Perception, Hegel referred to the free matters in
reference to the flux of the universal medium. Hegel is now taken by the concept of
force in Newton, Leibniz,4 and (indirectly) the contemporary chemistry Dalton.5
According to Hegel,
the matters posited as independent pass over into their unity, and their unity directly unfolds its
diversity, and this once again reduces itself to unity. But this movement is what is called Force.6

The natural scientific concept of force is not enough by itself. This not enough is
however an integral part of the story of Consciousness. By the time of Force and
the Understanding, the standpoint of consciousness is itself that of the natural
scientist, the most sophisticated shape of pre-philosophical consciousness, but not yet
self-consciousness not philosophical Science. The natural scientist seeks to
understand: no more and no less. Of course, Hegel did not face the great divide
between the natural sciences and the humanities that faces us today. Force and the
Understanding is perhaps the last great philosophy of nature (even including the
Encyclopedia). Last, in the sense that Hegel reserves the role of the natural scientist to
the understanding alone. Anything beyond this will require a philosophy of spirit. Of
course, the scientific understanding is conscious activity. The law of nature is
duplicated in the understanding. This duplication of Force (into the solicited and the
3
4

cf. Hyppolite, 121

Henry Silton Harris, Hegel's Ladder vols 1,2: The Pilgrimage of Reason and the
odyssey of spirit: The Pilgrimage of Reason Vol 1 (Hackett Publishing, 1997), 268
6
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, New Ed (Motilal
Banarsidass,, 1998), 81
5

soliciting) indicates Hegels initial means of extending intelligibility to the sensuous

and supersensuous taken as a whole.
Again, it is strange if Hegel is treating Kantian philosophy at the level of a
natural scientific understanding. On the one hand, Hegel is only treating Kants
theoretical philosophy. The first Critique is solely theoretical and the second Critique
is solely practical. Their very division is leads to an unsystematic system. Hegel
reserves his consideration of the metaphysically substantial aspects of Kant to the
practical philosophy. Hegel came to Kant through his practical philosophy, because
Hegel was from the beginning interested in philosophy as the Science of wisdom, not
as a science of knowledge, in the sense of a narrow epistemology. In Hegels critique
of the practical philosophies of Kant and Fichte, On The Scientific Ways of Treating
Natural Law (1802-3), we read that, the critical philosophy has placed the absolute
wholly within practical philosophy.7 Hence the absolute, as Hegel sees it, is not to be
found in Kants theoretical philosophy whereas, in fact, it is. But this allows to
Hegel to artificially isolate the thing-in-itself from the absolute.
For anyone who doubts the pre-Scientific nature of Kantian Verstand for
Hegel (between 1801 and 1807 at least) we should recall Faith and Knowledge once
again (also written for the Critical Journal, co-edited with Schelling). There, Hegel
restricts subjective Idealism to the culture of ordinary human intellect [gemeinen
Menschenverstandes]. The ordinary human intellect understands finitude and
infinitude, intuition and concept dualistically: because it remains ordinary intellect it
takes the infinite concept to be absolute thought and keeps what remains of its
intuition of the eternal strictly isolated from the infinite concept. 8 The ordinary
human understanding appears to be, at one level, the Understanding of ordinary (and
natural) Consciousness in the Phenomenology. However scientifically, it conceives
of a finite world of things in space and time, beyond which we can only wonder what
exists. Subjective Idealism is, in both works, surpassed in the history of philosophical
spirit by Schelling and Hegel. Hegel quite deliberately uses the past-tense when
discussing Kant, Jacobi and Fichte, so as to put them in their valid place (since they
surpassed rationalism and empiricism in crucial regards). Critical Idealism is a
7

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Natural Law: the Scientific Ways of Treating
Natural Law, Its Place in Moral Philosophy, and Its Relation to the Positive Sciences
of Law (University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975), 57. Translation altered.
8

philosophical understanding rooted in the end of a Protestant Enlightenment

culture.9 As was suggested with regard to the categories, Hegel does treat the
Kantian theoretical and practical philosophies together, but only as a twofold failure
to deal with the problem of infinity. Nevertheless, Hegels success in confronting this
bad infinity will depend upon his confrontation of a properly reconstructed Kantian
project, not a straw man. Can this confrontation proceed from a philosophy of nature?
Both Kant and Hegel were inspired by Newton, in different ways. From
Hegels perspective, Kants understanding of Newtonian physics remains too static.
Force is something that happens between things that interact upon each other, rather
than as that which radically undermines thing-ism as such. Overlooking Kants
(inconsistent) distinction between Ding and Object, Hegel appears to connect the
Cartesian res extensa, a deterministic substance, with a mechanistic understanding of
human nature in the Critique, as a result of stressing causation over force. This leads
nature to equal determinism. Nature romanticism must react against this travesty of
the absolute substance. But to conceive of Kants question as to the existence thingsin-themselves as solely a question concerning the physical constitution of things
would be misplaced, as soon, that is, as we of necessity connect the thing-in-itself to
the unconditioned, the Transcendental Analytic to the Transcendental Dialectic. The
question of the respective interpretations of Newtonian physics misses the point, by
restricting the problematic of a materialist system of freedom to the philosophy of
nature.
The Dialectic of the Critique is separated from the Analytic by the question
possible experience. The transcendental deduction of the pure concepts of the
understanding requires an object of experience, given in the synthesis of the manifold
of appearance to sense (intuition) by way of those pure concepts. Kant is thus drawn
into the old question of the existence of things-in-themselves, as opposed to things as
they appear. We must suppose that things-in-themselves exist, as the cause of
appearance (of things), but we can know nothing of their existence. In the Dialectic
(and in the transitional chapter on noumenal and phenomenal objects) by contrast, the
quasi-transcendental deduction of the ideas of pure reason does not rely upon an
empirical object of experience. The Ideas are supersensuous. Hence the question of
the thing-in-itself recedes, on the surface. It is metaphysically displaced, as it were, by
the question of the unconditioned. Displaced, because the unconditioned takes over
9

the character of the thing-in-itself (and, in another way, the transcendental object) in
crucial regards. This is made explicit by Kant in his Preface to the second edition:
For that which necessarily drives us to go beyond the boundaries of experience and all appearances is
the unconditioned, which reason necessarily and with every right demands in things in themselves for
everything that is conditioned, thereby demanding the series of conditions as something completed. 10

Kant also makes an explicit connection between the paradigm of the unity of manifold
appearance in the Analytic to the unity of the manifold series of conditions in the
Dialectic. The question is: how manifold is the series such that we may speak of a
unity of reason? Kant thus refers to the notion of things in general.11
The connection of thing-in-itself and unconditioned is also made explicit in
the reception of Kants work. Again, a distinction is suggested by Kant, on the
grounds that things-in-themselves plural stand behind the phenomenal world of
particular things; that, by contrast, the unconditioned is singular. The unconditioned
cannot be plural. When Kant occasionally writes of the thing-in-itself, it is particular
rather than singular. But since Jacobi, who drastically showed that nothing can be said
of the thing-in-itself, the thing-in-itself cannot be individuated into things-inthemselves, since this would transgress Kants own restriction of the categories to
objects of experience (including, however, noumenal objects). The thing-in-itself is
then either the nothing that necessitates an act of faith in the absolute in order to stave
off nihilism (Jacobi),12 or, the thing-in-itself is the unconditioned Tathandlung, the
self in-itself (Fichte).13
or both (. In both cases, the thing-in-itself is singular and not particular. This
is in keeping with Spinozas idea of substance as self-conditioned: There cannot exist
in the universe two or more substances of the same nature and attribute; and, Except
God no substance can exist or be conceived.14
***
10

Kant, 112
Kant, 392
12
Frederick Beiser, The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte,
New edition (Harvard University Press, 1993), 124
11

13
14

Benedictus De Spinoza, Spinoza : Ethics, New edition (Phoenix, 1993), 9-13

On the one hand then, Hegel restricts Kants theoretical philosophy to the
common scientific understanding of things, only to say, on the other hand, that this
paradigm has been superseded by a more sophisticated Newtonian science; one that
has implications for Science. For Hyppolite, the movement [from the thingism of
perception to the relativity of understanding] is a familiar one in the history of science
and of philosophy.15 This paradigm shift allows Hegel to (1) obscure the problem of
thing-in-itself qua unconditioned, and (2) surpass Kant on his own terrain by
suggesting that his (Hegels) philosophy of nature is more in tune with the true natural
science, leading to (3) the true Wissenschaft. Insofar as Force and the Understanding
is a critique of the thing-in-itself, we face this complex problem of interpretation. It is
crucial in asking whether Hegel succeeds in constructing his ladder to absolute
knowing, and in grounding a progressive-historical dialectic.
We may well concur with Hyppolite that science (as physics) has progressed
from thingism to relation, from Newton to Einstein. The Kantian categories are
then outdated, and his account of causation too mechanistic. But to what extent does
the paradigm shift within science bear upon the problem of the thing-in-itself qua
unconditioned? Kants appropriation of the principle of sufficient reason (that every
thing can be explained by the thing that causes it) is mechanistic, and ultimately
dualistic with regards to freedom. Moreover, Kant introduces the problem of the
unconditioned as the meaning of the sum of conditions, leading to the various
antinomies of finite/infinite conditions (especially those of space and time). The
question of the unconditioned appears as a deterministic cosmology. But at the same
time, Kants idealism leads him to conceive of reason as a human task, of
(self-)knowledge as the pursuit of conditions, rather than as a reflection of the nature
of matter as knowledge. Hence, the third antinomy of human freedom. Already we
can see two competing forms of materialism; forms that Hegel is seeking to
aufgehoben into one.
The question of whether Hegel addresses the problem of the thing-in-itself in
Force and the Understanding thus depends upon whether his sublation is successful.
This rests upon the mediation introduced above, between force as unconditioned
universal substance, and force as lawful nature of the understanding. The dialectic of
particularity and universality, introduced in Sense-Certainty (this and thisness) and
15

Hyppolite, 116

in Perception (thing and thingness), is described by the law of forces of

intelligibility. There are two stumbling blocks here, however. The first involves the
contemporary status of natural science in Force and the Understanding. We could
offer a sympathetic reading, a la Hyppolite: Hegel anticipates Einstein (or rather,
Dalton is already Einstein!). But even if this were the case, a second problem
emerges, that Hegel has not (yet) addressed the problem of the thing-in-itself qua
unconditioned, because the Kantian task of reason is applies to self-consciousness, not
consciousness. Hence the strategic advantage for Hegel of restricting Kantianism to
Consciousness (even though its variants will, tellingly, return later on in the
Phenomenology). Reason is more than the understanding, in Kant as in Hegel. It is not
clear how the paradigm shift within the natural scientific worldview will determine
the question of the possibility of a human task of reason; not so long as the question
of the totality or infinity of conditions (or relations) is understood in a naturalistic
regard, as what there is and not what is to be done. In order to read Kant in a solely
naturalistic manner we would have to be very selective in reading him. Of course, it
was the third Critique that was to be so crucial to Schellings philosophy of nature,
and hence to Hegel. Hegels claim is that the paradigm shift from thing to force is
within philosophy and not science in the narrower sense (or, it is without science in
the narrower sense). The question is, again, whether the scientific findings can
impinge upon the question of self-conditioned substance. On a metaphysical reading
of Kant, no natural science can get behind the curtain of the thing-in-itself, because,
as Novalis famously remarked, We look everywhere for the Unconditional Absolute,
and all we find are the conditions.16 The remark can be read either as a Romantic
postulation of infinite freedom, as against the determinism of conditioned things, or as
the postulation of the infinity of the task of reason (a progressive infinity). It can
thus be read as both Romantic and as Kantian. In mechanistic terms, finite human
activity adds conditions to the sum of conditions, meaning that the unconditioned sum
of conditions cannot be found. For Hegel, and eventually Schelling, this infinite task
remains a regressive infinity. But if we replace condition for relation here, the
Hegel of Force and the Understanding can be said to succumb to the same
epistemological problems. Again, this is because Hegel as hastily polarised Kantian
philosophy into the ordinary intellect on the one side and contemporary metaphysics
16

Novalis, Miscellaneous Remarks (1797), in Classic and Romantic German

Aesthetics, trans. Karl Ameriks, Cambridge University Press (2003), 1, p.203.

on the other. The point is not that Kant is right and Hegel is wrong. The problems of
scepticism and nihilism in Kant remain. Rather, the question is whether a philosophy
of nature and not spirit can offset the nihilsim. This is precisely what Hegel is aiming
at, or over-reaching at, in Force and the Understanding even though the
Phenomenology will thereafter progress to a philosophy of spirit.
Is not the thesis on force, the name for the dialectical movement of
conditioned particularity and unconditioned universality, ultimately a macrocosmic
formalism? Hegel wants to overcome formalism by introducing content into the
supersensuous. The content is movement as dialectic, as the Notion. But force as
movement remains an external description of dialectic; tonally moving form.17
Movement, of course, is an Aristotelian response to the form-content problem. In fact,
Hegel acknowledges that the understanding does, by itself, result in formalism. In,
that is, a tautology of the (force of the) understanding and (the force of) what is
understood. In the scientific understanding, we simply see what happens. But this
tautological formalism, or rather the consciousness of it, gives rise to infinity, which
is the Notion. This is not the regressive infinity of Kant, however, because Hegels
infinity is the formal infinity of content, not an infinity of form. Again, this is because
force as force is a kind of content. But it is a pre-spiritual content, contradicting
Hegels claim that the Kantian understanding is a true moment in the history of
modern spirit.

natural law / laws of nature / ethical life

first (Greek) philosophies of nature/cosmos NOT modern! (workings of the divinities
in nature taken as given i.e., an ethical natural law). c.f. Hegels example of
punishment. Attempt to derive ethical value from scientific validation. But nature is
not the measure of man.
Harris:
265
The result of Perception was the world as a system of relations. The Understanding
comprehends that as an intelligible system, i.e. a reality that cannot be perceived, but
only conceived.
17

Hanslick

266
We must abstract from this mistaken opposition, and recognize that what the thing is
for itself is identical with what it is for us. Every thing is the sum total of its
possible relations with everything else; and our own sense organs are the central focus
of this universal community of relations.
In virtue of the positing of the absolute antithesis as one and the same essence this
reciprocal movement in the consciousness (or thinking) is identical with the
movement in the world (or being).
every phenomenon refers us necessarily to the infinite web of phenomena. The Dingan-sich at which we have arrived is the whole order of Nature; the result is radically
universal (schlechthin allgemein).
267
there is nevertheless a balance of forces.
268
Force proper is precisely what is not manifest, not perceptually objective, but inward,
or intelligible.
270
For us, Self-Consciousness as the inwardness of things will be the result of
Consciousness.
275
The Understanding begins with the concept of Force as Substance. Aristotle employed
the concept of Substance for things. Hegels concept of Substance in both preSocratic and modern, but not Aristotelian. In the result of Perception the
unconditioned universal emerges as the absolute community of interaction.
276

In virtue of the necessary identity of Force and Understanding, or of what is for

another with what is in itself, the inwardness of things is identical with the
conceptual inwardness of scientific theory. When a scientific observer speaks of the
order of Nature in terms of Law and so on, she is not just weaving a verbal fantasy,
but talking about what is there in nature, although it is not apparent as such.
276
There are not two worlds, there is only one; but when we understand it, it acquires a
new dimension through our interpretative activity.

Natural Law
the earth as the organic and individual element extends through the system of that elements shapes,
from primal rigidity and individuality into the qualitative sphere and difference. And only in the
absolute indifference of ethical nature does it resume the complete equality of all its parts and the
absolute oneness of the individual and the absolute in the first aether which, from its self-identical
fluid and soft form, scatters its pure quantity through individual formations into individuality and
number, and completely controls this absolutely brittle and rebellious system by the fact that number is
purified to become pure unity and infinity, and becomes intelligence [Intelligenz]. Thus, by becoming
absolutely negative, the negative can become perfectly one with the positive absolute, for the absolute
Concept is its own immediate opposite and, as one of the ancients says, is nothing no less than it is
something.18

The in-itself is transferred from thing to self. Like the thing-in-itself, the self-in-itself
is the non-representable cause of all representation. We no longer think of this cause
in the thing but rather in the self; in the unconditioned Tathandlung. Like Hegel,
Fichte rejects thing-ism in order to reject the thing-in-itself. Fichte is interested in
knowledge as such, not the knowledge of things. But unlike in Hegel, this leads to a
rejection of the finite and a valorization of infinite self-reflection: protestantism gone
wild; for Jacobi, philosophical egoism (check)
.
18

Hegel, 110