Abstract
Hegel sees philosophy as the only rigorous science that does not have any presupposition, but he rejects the possibility of an absolute foundation for philosophy, instead maintaining that only the system as a whole can be free from all presuppositions. Hegel’s system lays claim to presuppositionlessness, not on the ground of any presuppositionless beginning, but rather as a holistic system of concepts in which inevitable presuppositions are made transparent and comprehended. This paper examines Hegel’s analysis of the concept of immediacy and his critique of the foundationalist conception of philosophy. Although Hegel’s critique is targeted against his predecessors and contemporaries, it has important implications for Husserl’s phenomenology, which represents one of the most ambitious foundationalist projects in the history of philosophy. The final part discusses the later development of Husserl’s thought and his introduction of the concept of lifeworld in light of Hegel’s critique.
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Notes
- 1.
Hereafter, the page number of the English translation follows the corresponding page number of the German edition.
- 2.
More precisely, “[p]hilosophy lacks the advantage from which the other sciences benefit, namely the ability to presuppose both its objects as immediately endorsed by representation of them and an acknowledged method of knowing, which would determine its starting-point and progression” (Hegel 1830, §1, 41/28).
- 3.
In another passage, Hegel explains that “[i]t is only the ordinary abstract understanding that regards the determinations of immediacy and mediation each for itself as absolute and supposes itself to have a firm distinction in them” (Hegel 1830, § 70, 160/119).
- 4.
A good example is Jacobi’s famous claim that “[t]hrough faith we know that we have a body, and that there are other bodies and other thinking beings outside us. A veritable and wondrous revelation!” (Jacobi 1994, 231). The claim indeed shows the opposite of what it intends to show. There is a complex process of learning through which we acquire the basic criteria for judging validity. On the basis of the adopted criteria, this common-sense belief appears to be immediately evident in normal circumstances. But a simple philosophical reflection already suffices to show that that belief is far from being certain and infallible. Its objective validity is subject to rational evaluation, and it is not immediate in the required sense.
- 5.
Noteworthy is the fact that the first sentence of the main text of the Logic is, in fact, not a complete sentence, but an anacoluthon (Wieland 1978).
- 6.
Another formulation in the Logic of the Encyclopedia is as follows: “When beginning with thinking, we have nothing but thought in the sheer absence of any determination of it, since for a determination one and an other are required. In the beginning, however, we have as yet no other. The indeterminate, as we have it here, is the immediate, not the mediated absence of determination, not the sublation of all determinacy; but the immediacy of the absence of determination, the absence of determination prior to all determinacy, the indeterminate as the very first. But this is what we call ‘being’” (Hegel 1830, §86, 184/137).
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Lau, CF. (2019). Hegel’s Critique of Foundationalism and Its Implications for Husserl’s Dream of Rigorous Science. In: Ferrarin, A., Moran, D., Magrì, E., Manca, D. (eds) Hegel and Phenomenology. Contributions to Phenomenology, vol 102. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17546-7_4
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