I start from the assumption that any attempt to locate Hegel’s philosophy within the area of philosophy of mind must address two fundamental desiderata. Most obviously, it must be able to give an account of the types of individual cognitive capacities and activities, such as judging and inferring, as well as features of subjective experience, such as the ‘phenomenality’ or ‘what it is like’ of conscious experience, that are conventionally thought of as providing the subject matter for a philosophy of mind. But, in particular, it must also be able to do this while conceiving of any finite individuals so-minded as being essentially related to others in conformity with Hegel’s account of spirit. Since conventional philosophies of mind are typically approached in individualist ways, it can seem difficult to know how to engage with Hegel’s approach from such a perspective. On first thought, an obvious place to start within Hegel’s corpus might seem to be the section ‘Psychology’ of ‘The Philosophy of Subjective Spirit’, within volume 2 of the Encyclopaedia of Philosophical Sciences. But it can be difficult to work out exactly what Hegel is trying to do there. For example, it is difficult to get a picture of any distinctly Hegelian conception of mindedness without having taken into consideration issues such as the possession of language that would properly find a place only in subsequent sections of the Encyclopaedia in the context of objective spirit.Footnote 1
Here I want to suggest a way forward—one that starts by looking to the section ‘Subjectivity’ in the ‘Subjective Logic’ making up Book 3 of Hegel’s Science of Logic, interpreting it as a basically intensionalist, rather than extensionalist, logic. Broadly, I mean this as an approach that focuses primarily on relations between contents that are conceived as essentially mind-related—conceptual contents—rather than on the relations between the extensions of those concepts—that is, the entities of which those concepts are deemed true or false. Indeed, I will be arguing that Hegel’s subjective logic is a particular kind of intensional logic, an irreducibly modal one.
Qua mind-related, intensionalist logic might be thought to be an appropriate way to address issues of the logic of psychological contents—a feature that is made explicit in the oft-commented-upon relation between the, apparently etymologically unrelated, notions of ‘intention’ (with a ‘t’) and ‘intension’ (with an ‘s’). While the former derives from medieval approaches to Aristotle’s philosophy of mind, and was revived by Brentano in the nineteenth century, the latter was the English translation used by Sir William Hamilton for what the Port Royal logicians had called the ‘compréhension’ of a term (Arnauld and Nicole 1996), and which they opposed to its ‘étendu’, translated by Hamilton as its ‘extension’—the range of objects to which the term applies (Kneale Reference Kneale1968: 84).Footnote 2 Thus we might, like the modal logician Arthur Prior, regard the psychological notion of intentionality as a species of the wider logical notion of intensionality (Prior Reference Prior1968: 91), thereby providing a route from intensional logic to intentional psychology—in this case, a route from Hegel’s Logic to his Philosophy of Spirit. To this end I’ll be exploiting some striking parallels between Hegel’s subjective logic and modern modal logics, especially that of Prior, in terms of their respective approaches to mental or ‘intentional’ contents.
The broad outlines of this approach will be sketched below in a number of stages. First, I will briefly consider recent approaches to modal logic and the central idea of translations between the sentences of intensional, modal and extensional, non-modal, so-called ‘classical’, logical languages. In the second section, I will relate this distinction to a similar one that Hegel draws between two different kinds of judgment—those treating predication in terms of the notion of ‘inherence’ and those treating it in terms of the notion of ‘subsumption’—in his Subjective Logic. In the final section I’ll turn to the topic of how we might start to think of Hegel’s subjective logic, now explicitly thought of as a variety of modal logic, as providing a framework for a philosophy of mind, in which the individual mind is to be understood as embedded in a larger context of spirit, qua network of interrelated individual minds. Prior to all this, however, and to ward off the charge that this approach involves the retrospective and anachronistic projection onto Hegel of concepts from contemporary logic, a few words on the history of modal logic will be appropriate.
First, the idea of modal logic goes back to Aristotle, but the distinction between intensional and extensional approaches to logic seems to have first appeared in the seventeenth century with the Port Royal logicians’ distinction between a term’s compréhension and its etendu. Leibniz had exploited the distinction, affirming his own logic to be basically intensional, but also thinking that there were translational equivalences between intensionally and extensionally interpreted sentences within that fundamentally intensional logic (Lenzen Reference Lenzen2004: 11–12). The distinction is present in Kant (see here, especially, Anderson Reference Anderson2015), and from his comments on Leibniz in the Subjective Logic, it is clear that Hegel was familiar with these features of Leibniz’s logic, most probably through the influence of the authority on logic at Tübingen in Hegel’s student years, Gottfried Ploucquet, a follower of Leibniz. Hegel too, as we will see, exploits the idea of translation between intensionally and extensionally interpreted forms.
In the mid-nineteenth century, the modern explicitly extensionalist approach to logic began in earnest with the work of George Boole, and this approach become standard within the analytic tradition with works such as the Principia Mathematica (1910–13) of Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell and the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) of Ludwig Wittgenstein. For its part, the modern approach to modal logic, while first mooted by C. S. Peirce, grew out of C. I. Lewis’s criticisms of the extensionalist approach to logical implication found in Whitehead and Russell’s Principia.
Lewis had been critical of what Whitehead and Russell called ‘material implication’, an approach to implication that analysed the statement ‘p implies q’ in terms of the truth-values of those propositions: ‘p implies q’ is treated as equivalent to the negation of the conjunction of p and not q. For Lewis, this is simply not what we mean by the notion ‘implies’, and he opposed to material implication his idea of strict implication in which it has to be impossible (and not simply false) for p to be true and q false (Lewis Reference Lewis1918: ch. 5). To capture the sense of impossibility involved in inference he thus invented a system of logic with the propositional operators of ‘necessary’ and ‘possible’ that could be applied to a proposition p to get ‘It is necessary that p’ or ‘It is possible that p’. But the non-truth-functionality of these operators made Lewis’s modal systems awkward, as the assessment of logical laws relied upon intuitions that were often unclear.Footnote 3 Nevertheless, Lewis’s work in logic addressed a lacuna in the new logic deriving from Russell: its perceived inability to address issues concerning necessary and possible truths.
Lewis was well aware of the idealist heritage of his explicitly intensional modal logic, having himself been strongly influenced by the American ‘absolute idealist’, Josiah Royce, his teacher at Harvard.Footnote 4 Indeed, Lewis characterized ‘continental’ philosophy in general as having worked with intensional approaches to logic while ‘the British’ had, especially from the period of Boole, conceived of logic in ‘extensional’ ways (Lewis Reference Lewis1930: 31). The idealist heritage of this early phase of modern modal logic is clear enough, but an Hegelian heritage can also be discerned in its next phase—that of the development of quantified predicate modal logics in the 1950s and 1960s. Here Hegel’s influence, I suggest, can be seen via the role played by the New Zealand logician-philosopher Arthur Prior.
From the 1950s, Prior worked on a logic for tensed sentences—a tense or ‘temporal’ logic (Prior Reference Prior1957 and Reference Prior1967)—and his early efforts had provided a model for Saul Kripke’s development of a quantified modal predicate logic in the 1960s (Kripke Reference Kripke1963; Copeland Reference Copeland2002). Prior had been first drawn to the topic by a paper published by his former teacher in New Zealand, the South African-born philosopher John Niemeyer Findlay (Findlay Reference Findlay1941). Read superficially, Findlay’s paper reads as a type of exercise in ‘therapeutic’ ordinary-language philosophy, Findlay having been influenced by Wittgenstein in the 1930s, as acknowledged in the paper. More importantly, however, Findlay had, from his earliest days, harboured deeply Hegelian leanings (Findlay Reference Findlay1985: 4). But he expressed these only explicitly later in the 1950s (Findlay 1955–Reference Findlay6; Reference Findlay1958), when he challenged the anti-Hegelian sentiment of contemporary analytic philosophy, and did so from a perspective that drew upon post-Russellian logic, especially the later work of Wittgenstein.Footnote 5 To add to this, in the 1941 paper Findlay adapts a distinction between different conceptions of time put forward earlier by the British Hegelian John McTaggart (McTaggart Reference McTaggart1908).
Prior had called Findlay the ‘founding father of modern tense logic’ (Prior Reference Prior1967: 1), and given the relations between tense and modal logic, it may not be an exaggeration to think of Hegel as the unacknowledged grandfather of tense logic and modern modal logic in general. Given this background, we should not be surprised to find similarities between the way that modal logic is discussed today, and Hegel’s treatment of formal logic in Volume 2 of the Science of Logic, parallels I will sketch in the next two sections.
I. Contemporary modal logics
A recent textbook on modal logic by Blackburn, di Rijke and Venema commences with three ‘slogans’ concerning the nature of ‘modal languages’: 1. Modal languages are simple yet expressive languages for talking about relational structures; 2. Modal languages provide an internal logical perspective on relational structures; and 3. Modal languages are not isolated formal systems but are related to other branches of symbolic logic, among which is the ‘classical’ language of the type of first-order quantified predicate logic of Frege and Russell (Blackburn et al. Reference Blackburn, di Rijke and Venema2001: xi–xiii).
It might be thought surprising that this general account does not explicitly mention modal logic qua the logic of necessary and possible propositions, but this is because the term ‘modal logic’ has now come to be thought more generally to incorporate various logics other than the logic of necessity and possibility. Besides tense logic as mentioned, modal logic as broadly conceived now includes the logics of belief and knowledge (doxastic and epistemic logics), the logic of obligation (deontic logic), ‘dynamic logic’ and various others. Blackburn et al. attempt to capture this generality with the idea that what all these modal languages have in common is that they ‘provide an internal logical perspective’, that is, a perspective from particular points within various logical structures, for talking about those structures. The tense logic as anticipated in Findlay’s Reference Findlay1941 article provides a useful model.
In the context of examining various ‘puzzles’ about the passing of time, Findlay notes that it is built into the semantic rules of our language that we talk of events that will happen, that are happening, that have happened, and so on, and that regular patterns exist among such locutions. Here, our conventions ‘are so well worked out that we have practically the materials in them for a formal calculus’, and, he adds, this ‘calculus of tenses should have been included in the modern development of modal logics’ (Findlay Reference Findlay1941: 233 and 233 note 17). This is the starting point of Prior’s ‘presentist’ development of tense logic, in which all tenses are treated as implicitly containing a reference to the present. For example, referring to an event as in the future is to imply that in the future it will be present. Similarly, a past event is understood as having been in the present. One might say that from Prior’s perspective, references to past and future times are centred in the present. And as what is ‘present’ must always be in relation to some subject whose ‘present’ it is, such references must be thought of as ‘indexically’ centred in some subject located at some point of time.
That the truth values of statements so centred are dependent on the time at which they are uttered is a point with which any Hegelian will be familiar from Hegel’s discussion, in Phenomenology of Spirit, of the sentence ‘now is night [das Jetzt ist die Nacht]’ (PhG: §95). As Hegel points out, were such a sentence true when said, if written down it would at some later point become false.Footnote 6 To counter this phenomenon, as Findlay notes, we desire ‘to have in our language only those kinds of statement that are not dependent, as regards their truth or falsity, on any circumstance in which the statement happens to be made’. The allusion here is to sentences in which the time is stated explicitly with, say, a date. This seems to free some time referred to (say, ‘yesterday’ or ‘three hours ago’) from its relatedness to a (changing) ‘today’ or ‘now’, and from some specific subject for whom it is today or now. But, Findlay adds, this ‘aspiration which all our language to some extent fulfils’ we are ‘at times inclined to follow to unreasonable lengths’ (Findlay Reference Findlay1941: 233).
Part of the background of Findlay’s discussion here is McTaggart’s distinction between the tensed and the tenseless ways of referring to temporal relations—his well-known ‘A’ and ‘B’ series of temporal relations (Prior Reference Prior1967: 1–8). Thus Findlay interprets the internal relations of McTaggart’s A series in the way that Blackburn et al. talk about modal languages. When using a tensed sentence, I am speaking about a world structured temporally from some point within it, a point we designate as ‘now’, and from which I refer to events located at other times—as having occurred ‘yesterday’, as will occur ‘tomorrow’, and so on. Thus we utilize various devices such as names, and so on, to overcome the ways in which the truth of such tensed statements are so conditioned, and transpose our statements into the different logic—that of McTaggart’s ‘B series’. When sentences are taken to refer to events against the background of the objective temporal points of the B series, the sentences are being understood extensionally. But Findlay is pointing to the limits of this process with the idea that we might endeavour to follow it to ‘unreasonable lengths’.
In Prior’s development of Findlay’s point he notes the tendency for logicians to assume that a tensed sentence, say, ‘it is raining’ is incomplete in such a way that it could be made complete by adding an explicit reference to the time at which it is raining—‘it rains at a’. Here ‘a’ names some specific point in time, with the resulting sentence becoming tenseless. In Prior’s analysis, this amounts to the interpreting of the original sentence as a predicate, and predicating it of that point in time named with the ‘a’ (Prior and Fine Reference Prior and Fine1977: ch. 1). This is a type of translation. A whole sentence ‘p’ is now translated as a predicate of a further sentence: ‘p’ is translated as ‘pa’.Footnote 7
This translation is an example of what Blackburn et al. talk of as the translation of a simple intensional modal sentence into a sentence of the extensionally understood ‘classical’ quantified predicate logic. But we are now faced with the question of how to understand this translation. Which ‘language’, the (intensional) modal or the (extensional, truth-functional) classical, is the more basic? In the Russell-influenced analytic tradition it has been assumed that the extensional is basic, with the modal language understood as translatable into it so as to render it ‘complete’. (In the jargon, the extensional language is the ‘meta-language’ into which the ‘object language’ is translated.) However, Prior followed Findlay’s suggestion that this assumption reflects an ‘aspiration’ taken to ‘unreasonable lengths’. Thus Prior opposed the conventional view, and treated ‘first-order predicate calculus [as] … an artificially expanded modal logic or tense logic’ (Prior and Fine Reference Prior and Fine1977: 54). Prior gave as his reasons for this the ‘Platonism’ inherent in the conventional answer:
I find myself quite unable to take ‘instants’ seriously as individual entities; I cannot understand ‘instants’, and the earlier-later relation that is supposed to hold between them, except as logical constructions out of tensed facts. Tense logic is for me, if I may use the phrase, metaphysically fundamental, and not just an artificially torn-off fragment of the first-order theory of the earlier-later relation. (Prior and Fine Reference Prior and Fine1977: 37)
Nevertheless, to Prior it was clear that tenseless logic still had capabilities that had yet to be accounted for in tense logic, and so he sought to expand the resources of tense logic to match it.
With names for times, as with ‘10.32 am, September 14, 1933’, the tenseless system can specify when some event took place, but the basic modal tense system seems to lack this. To this end Prior saw the need to extend the resources of tense logic to include an analogue to the ‘naming’ of singular points. Such naming could not be conceived as primitive, as this cedes the extensionalists’ point, so Prior attempted to refer to specific points in time from the resources of the relational tense system itself, the result being what now is known as hybrid logic.Footnote 8 Basically, this meant treating sets of propositions that are uniquely true of some ‘point’ in time as equivalent to ‘names’ for those points.Footnote 9 With these moves, Prior thus challenged the ‘British’ tendency to deal with conceptual relations extensionally by way of a ‘continental’ tendency to treat them, primarily, as intensional, that is, in a mind-dependent way, but to supplement simple intensional logics with these ‘extensional’ translations understood in a new way.
We need not go further into the subsequent developments of modal logic and modal metaphysics from the 1960s onward. As mentioned, on the model of Prior’s tense logic, Saul Kripke took this form of analysis as a way of treating the traditional alethic modalities of possibility and necessity: rather than thinking of sentences as true at different points of time, sentences were thought of as true ‘at’ different possible worlds. With this, C. I. Lewis’s non-truth-functional treatment of ‘necessarily p’ could be replaced with a properly truth-functional one. On the model of a sentence (an ‘eternal sentence’) said to be true at all times, a sentence said to be necessarily true could now, following Leibniz, be said to be one that was true at all possible worlds. The resulting ‘possible-world semantics’ precipitated a huge debate over the existence of possible worlds, but for our purposes, the important points concern the ways in which these temporal and alethic modalities exhibit similar types of context-sensitivity by being ‘centred’ on, or having their sentences true or false ‘at’, some ‘location’ in a logically articulated structure (a particular point of time, a particular possible world, and so on), but as ‘translatable’ into extensional equivalents. It is with this that the intensional can be applied to the realm of the intentional, as found in the doxastic logic of belief, for example (Hintikka Reference Hintikka1962). There, a sentence p will be treated as not true or false per se but true or false in the context of the beliefs of a particular subject. A certain belief content will be treated as true or false, ‘at’ Jane, for example, simply if it is one of Jane’s beliefs. But then the more general question arises: in which direction are we to think of the translation involved? For the extensionalist, the purported translatability of such modal judgments will invite the idea of the complete elimination of the ‘subjectivity’ of such belief contexts, but the ‘Findlay-Prior’ attitude will oppose this as taking the goal of extensionality to ‘unreasonable lengths’.
In the final section of this paper I will examine the significance of this Findlay-Prior attitude to modality in relation to issues in Hegel’s philosophy of subjective spirit. For the moment, however, we have glimpsed enough of the landscape of modern modal logic to allow us to appreciate how similar distinctions emerge in Hegel’s Subjective Logic—distinctions that can then be applied to his philosophy of mind.
II. The mediated logical dualism of Hegel’s Subjective Logic
That Hegel’s ‘subjective’ logic of judgments and syllogisms in the Science of Logic, Book III, is an explicitly modal logic is made clear by the difference between what he calls an Urteil or judgment and a Satz, by which he seems to mean here something like a sentence considered in the context of a simple reporting usage.Footnote 10 Thus, considered as a mere Satz, the sentence ‘Aristotle died at the age of 73 in the fourth year of the 115th Olympiad’ will have a structure in which both subject and predicate are considered as name-like singular terms: ‘what is said of a singular [einzelnen] subject’ says Hegel, ‘is itself only something singular (nur etwas Einzelnes)’ (SL: 553; 12: 55). Considered as something like the juxtaposition of two names, Hegel’s ‘Satz’ looks something like what Wittgenstein in places in Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus also calls a ‘Satz’—that is, a Satz-sign [Satzzeichen] considered ‘in its projective relation to the world’ (Wittgenstein Reference Wittgenstein1922: 3.12). For Wittgenstein’s extensionalist approach, the relata here were, on the one side, the configuration of the simple signs in the Satzzeichen, itself considered as a state of affairs and, on the other, ‘the configuration of the objects in the state of affairs’ pictured by the Satzzeichen (Wittgenstein Reference Wittgenstein1922: 3.21). While Wittgenstein says that one configuration ‘entspricht’, corresponds to, the other, Hegel talks of ‘the agreement [Übereinstimmung] of representation with the subject matter’ (SL: 562; 12: 65).Footnote 11 However, for Hegel the Satz considered in such a projective way is itself neither true nor false, but simply correct (richtig) or incorrect (unrichtig), and as the capacity for being true or false is the mark of a judgment, a Satz, considered in this way, is not a judgment. In short, judgments cannot be fully understood extensionally, in terms of relations among the designata of their referring parts.
For a Satz to count as a proper judgment, an Urteil, it must be used in more than in a simple reporting sense: specifically, it must form part of a larger piece of inferential reasoning: ‘There would be in it an element of judgment’, writes Hegel,
only if one of the circumstances, say, the date of death or the age of the philosopher, came into doubt … In that case, the figures would be taken as something universal, as a time that, even without the determinate content [bestimmten Inhalt] of Aristotle’s death, would still stand on its own filled with some other content or simply empty. (SL: 553; 12: 55–56)
It is in relation to this function that the judgment must contain universals,Footnote 12 the clear suggestion being that we must be able to think of the predicate ‘happening in the fourth year of the 115th Olympiad’ not as simply ‘naming’ a point in time but as an abstract universal capable of being true of (Hegel will say ‘subsuming’) diverse events, allowing it to mediate evidentiary relations among judgments. For Hegel, then, truth and falsity seem to be bound up with inferences, and, as we will see, modal notions, at the most elementary level. But this does not mean that for Hegel there is no place at all for judgments understood extensionally or truth-functionally, as this is what is strongly suggested by the role Hegel gives to judgments that have a ‘reflective’ structure.
The idea that for the Satz to function as a judgment one of its terms must express an inference-articulating universal is further exploited in Hegel’s treatment of the types of judgment. Hegel first distinguishes judgments of determinate being (or ‘thereness [Dasein]’) (SL: 557–68; 12: 59–71) from judgments of reflection (SL: 568–81; 12: 71–84), it being clear that this is a distinction between perceptual and inferentially elicited judgments. The judgment of determinate being in its initial form as a positive judgment with two juxtaposed terms seems to approximate a mere Satz, but with one of its terms now a universal. Hegel’s analysis here, however, is surprising. While we typically think of judgments like ‘Gaius is learned’ or ‘the rose is red’ on the model of the predicate expressing something general, being learned or being red, about some singular existent, such as Gaius or some rose, Hegel adopts the opposite analysis. Here the subject is ‘determined as universal by the predicate’ and so becomes universal, while the predicate is ‘determined in the [singular] subject’ and ‘is therefore a singular’ (SL: 560; 12: 62).
The singular predicate of the positive judgment of determinate being, such as ‘the rose is red’,Footnote 13 acts in a name-like way to pick out the particular redness inhering in some specific rose—we might say, pointing to a rose before us—that rose’s particular way of being or looking red.Footnote 14 With the predicate as a singular, we will be tempted to think of it as expressing something like a Kantian intuition, the referent of which is conceived as an individual, concrete property instance—this instance of redness inhering in this rose. But as predicated of the subject, the predicate ‘red’ cannot be simply thought of as semantically simple in that way; it has an internal structure that emerges on consideration of the judgment’s negative form. The positive judgment ‘is not true but has its truth in the negative judgment’ (SL: 562; 12: 64). When one says, for example, ‘the rose is not red’, negation here will only be taken as applying to the determinateness of the predicate, such that in saying that the rose is not red one does not imply that it is not coloured.Footnote 15 Rather, ‘it is … assumed that it has a color, though another color’ (SL: 565; 12: 68).Footnote 16 If a rose is red then it is not yellow, not pink, not blue and so on, and if it is not red, then it is either yellow or pink or blue, and so on.Footnote 17 This shows that the meaning of the predicate in the simple judgment ‘the rose is red’ cannot be given simply demonstratively, nor independently of an account of the types of inferences of exclusion into which that judgment can enter. Moreover, it has modal properties: if some rose is (uniformly) red, it is not possible for it to be (uniformly) yellow, or pink, etc. The predicate ‘red’ at first seemed to function as a type of name or singular term, but it cannot be analysed in this way—it too must be understood as a universal.
Consider now the corresponding subject term of the original positive judgment of determinate being, which was treated as a universal:Footnote 18 ‘it is thereby posited as the concrete – according to the category of being, as a something of many qualities; or as the concrete of reflection, a thing of manifold properties, an actual of manifold possibilities, a substance of precisely such accidents’ (SL: 559; 12: 61–62). Again, it is the possibility of the judgment’s negation that establishes its status as a proper Urteil. When, say in a dispute, one denies that the rose is red, and thereby implies that it is another colour, one is tacitly appealing to essential properties of roses. In contrast, to deny that the number two is red is clearly not to imply that it is either yellow, or pink, or blue, and so on. The universal sortal term ‘rose’ appearing as part of the subject term here functions to control the array of possible contraries relevant for the predicate, further demonstrating the type of reciprocal determination of subject and predicate terms once they conjoined in the act of judging. This implicit universality of the subject will become explicit later in the judgment of necessity, which will be thought as being about the kind that had been appealed to in determining the concrete subject term of the judgment of determinate being. To get there, however, we must pass through the opposing form of judgment, the judgment of reflection (SL: 568; 12: 71).
Judgments of reflection are subsumptive judgments, and here the conventional singular-subject, universal-predicate order has been restored, in that the property predicated of the subject is now considered a universal in the standardly abstract sense, that might be truly said of a variety of different things across different genuses. ‘Red’ is truly said of this rose just as it is said of a London bus, and beside abstracting away from the kinds involved, it abstracts away from the particular ways in which the things of which it predicates ‘red’ instantiate redness. The irrelevance of kind terms in subject place here will mean that its subject term will have the characteristics of a ‘bare’ singular, allowing a domain of singular unqualified things to be classified under different abstract universals with the use of explicit quantification (SL: 570–75; 12: 72–77). Via reflective judgments we could thus make judgments such as ‘some red things are plants’, ‘all red things are coloured’ and so on. Here predication is conceived along the line of class membership and so is extensional. All this, as we have seen, is dependent on some kind of naming.
This distinction between judgments characterized by the different inherence and subsumption forms of predication is now repeated at higher and higher levels, generating an array of increasingly complex judgment types, and ultimately types of syllogisms. In the judgment of necessity, the kind term in the subject dropped in the judgment of reflection now returns as the explicit referent of the subject term. Such judgments will be about essences. One might say that ‘the rose as such is a plant’ or ‘the rose is essentially a plant’. This series of increasingly complex judgment forms will eventually lead to a complex judgment form, the apodictic judgment—the final sub-form of the judgment of the concept—which is shown to be an implicit syllogism (SL: 585–87; 12: 87–89; Redding Reference Redding2007: 188–89), and Hegel’s treatment of judgments thereby transits to his treatment of inferences or syllogisms. With this, the inherent ‘inferential’ characteristics of the predicates applied in judgments are made explicit.Footnote 19
What we are witnessing in this passage through judgment forms involves a type of alternation back and forth between what Blackburn et al. would understand as sentences of simple modal languages on the one hand and their extensional ‘classical logic’ translations respectively. Hegel seems to envisage this as achieved by a process of reversing the relations of subject and predicate. This logical manoeuvre is by no means unknown, Ramsey, for example, noted that ‘Socrates is wise’ can also be expressed as ‘Wisdom is a characteristic of Socrates’ (Ramsey Reference Ramsey1925: 404), and this manoeuvre can be used by extensionalists as a way around problems within extensionalism. For example, it can be a puzzle how to think of the meaning of sentences about non-existent objects from an extensionalist point of view, as there are no things the properties of which can determine the truth or falsity of the predicate. But by reversing subject and predicate, for example, as with translating ‘unicorns do not exist’ into, say, ‘existence is unicorn-free’, there is something (‘existence’ or the universe) the properties of which can determine the truth or falsity of the judgment.
As in modern modal logics, Hegel thus allows translations to be made between two types of logical structures, but this seems to be done without the conception of one of those languages as an ultimate meta-language, as in the conventional Russell-derived analytic approach to modality. Translation is always, we might say, a local affair, and as intensionalism is often defined negatively as the denial of extensionalism, we can consider Hegel to be an intensionalist whose intentionalism accommodates a type of extensionalist dimension within it. And this logical intensionality can now provide him with the logical resources for an intentional psychology.
III. Hegel’s intensional logic as the infrastructure of his intentional psychology
The paragraphs on Psychology in the Encyclopaedia ‘Philosophy of Spirit’ form the third part of a series of three approaches to the mind, following Anthropology and Phenomenology of Spirit, and, we might ask, what exactly is psychology meant to study beyond the phenomena treated in the first two sections? The section ‘Anthropology’ (EM: §§388–412) presents a type of ‘externalist’ approach to the embodied and located ‘natural mind’ or ‘soul’ (Seele)—mind ‘in itself or immediate’ (§387). The orientation is broadly Aristotelian rather than centred on subjective facts of consciousness as in early modern approaches. Next, Phenomenology of Spirit treats spirit as ‘for itself’ or ‘mediated’, and formally covers, in an abbreviated way, sections ‘A, Consciousness’, ‘B, Self-Consciousness’, and ‘C (AA), Reason’ from the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit, although ‘Reason’ here is reduced to a mere two short paragraphs. Hegel describes Phenomenology’s subject matter as ‘spirit in relationship, or particularization’ (§387). Finally, Psychology, in contrast, treats ‘spirit as such’ (§387Z).
In his commentary on Hegel’s Philosophy of Subjective Spirit, Michael Inwood suggests that because the ‘natural conclusion’ of the ‘reason’ section of the Phenomenology will be ‘socio-political’ issues treated in the 1807 Phenomenology’s section ‘BB: Spirit’, Hegel breaks off the Encyclopaedia Phenomenology at this point, enabling him to transition to ‘the investigation of the mind of the individual that occupies the section on Psychology’ (Inwood 2007: note to §438). One might wonder about what exactly is meant to differentiate an approach to Geist in its particularity and a study of ‘the mind of the individual’, and indeed, Inwood notes the ‘uneasy relationship between “phenomenology” and “psychology”’, also commenting on the role played by consciousness in the latter, while supposedly being the domain of the former. I will suggest another way of understanding the study of ‘Psychology’, however, that draws a firmer distinction from the topic of Phenomenology and that underlines the logical character of Psychology.Footnote 20
Rather than looking at psychology as concerned with ‘the individual mind’, we might treat it as focussing on the logical characteristics of the types of ‘intentional’ capacities dealt with in that section. Here, just as with the progression from the 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit to the Science of Logic, the consciousness-centered perspective of the former is meant to be left behind, but the continuity with the Encyclopaedia Phenomenology’s focus on the issues of consciousness and self-consciousness will make subjective rather than objective logic the relevant framework.Footnote 21 As I have suggested, the relations of the subjective logic are specifically intensional ones, and as such ‘mind’ is still immanent within these structures, as providing the relevant centres from which logical relations are to be grasped. Regarded in this way, the relationship of Psychology to the study of natural mind in the Anthropology becomes clearer: where certain features of mindedness appear in the natural world they will obey a logic that is appropriate to nature, and so that is fundamentally extensional, but where the same features appear in psychology, they will obey a logic that is primarily intensional and subject centred. We can see this at work in relation to the topic of sensation, Empfindung, which appears in both sections.
Consider, for example, what seems to be Hegel’s version of Aristotle’s account of the mind’s acquisition of content from the perception-based process of induction (epagoge) as sketched in Posterior Analytics Book 11, ch. 19.Footnote 22 Both Aristotle’s and Hegel’s treatments crucially involve considerations of temporal processes of retention of sensory material originating in nature, but understanding Hegel’s account in terms of his subjective logic allows certain problems in Aristotle to be addressed.
Aristotle states that all animals have perception, but in some animals—clearly humans are meant—percepts are retained in the soul. To capture this he introduces an analogy in which the formation of enduring ideas from transient percepts is modelled on the actions of a group of soldiers who come to ‘take a stand’ in the context of a rout in a battle. The soldiers are fleeing, but a common stand eventually comes about, first by one soldier taking a stand, then another, then the next, and so on, until ‘a position of strength is reached’ (Aristotle 1984: 100a1–14). The retreating individual soldiers represent the flow of individual percepts in time, and when the stream of percepts comes to make its collective stand in this way ‘there is a primitive universal in the mind (for though one perceives the singular [to kath ekaston] perception is of the universal—e.g. of man but not of Callias the man)’ (Aristotle 1984: 100a15–b1).Footnote 23
In Aristotle’s imagery, the fleeing individual soldiers are a disorderly rabble, but they assume a type of collective agency when ‘taking a stand’. The group is thus meant to be understood as some kind of concrete universal, and this allows the story to serve as a model for how a universal can be formed in the mind from the stream of single percepts from which perception starts. The metaphor is far from explanatory, however. There is no real attempt to say why, while it is singular things, like this man Callias, that are perceived, perception is nevertheless seemingly about universals. Hegel’s account of judgments and syllogisms in the Subjective Logic, I suggest, is intended to provide the basic logical materials for such types of explanation, and to this end it will involve positing crucial steps missing but needed in Aristotle: the conversion of the contents of immediate perceptual judgments qua naturalistically conceived singulars into elements of judgments that can thereby be related to other judgments—a process, that, as in the Logic, in turn allows the development of the contents of those judgments into properly Aristotelian universals.Footnote 24 All this will involve the peculiar ‘translations’ of judgments into ones of a different logical form, and to see how this might be possible, let us compare Hegel’s account of the role of ‘recollection’ (Erinnerung) in the Encyclopaedia Philosophy of Spirit, section on Psychology.
There something akin to Aristotle’s fleeing percepts coming to take a ‘collective stand’ is recognizable in Hegel’s treatment of the formation of intuitions from sensations considered in terms of their temporal relations of ‘successiveness, of arising and vanishing’ (EM: §448Z). At this sensory starting point in the formation of intuition we are, Hegel says, first ‘outside ourselves, in spatiality and temporality’, ‘immersed in the external material’. This alludes to that naturalistic dimension of sensation that had been treated earlier in the Anthropology. Conceived as occurrences in a body conceived merely as a piece of nature, such sensations simply arise and vanish, but in the context of spirit, they must be somehow retained. Here, spirit ‘posits the intuition as its own. It pervades it, makes it into something internal, recollects itself in it’ and ‘by this withdrawal into itself, intelligence raises itself to the state of representation’ (EM: §450Z).Footnote 25
A number of things are clear from Hegel’s account. First, Aristotle’s fleeing percepts—sensations naturalistically conceived—are not to be thought of as, somehow, arresting this flight, regrouping and taking a stand simply by themselves, as they are, for example, in the modern idea of the ‘association of ideas’. To think of a mental ‘representation’ as formed in this way would be to think of it as explainable on the basis of the natural features of its parts, and this prioritizes the logic of extensionality over that of intensionality. Rather, the contents must be posited by spirit ‘as its own’—that is, must belong to an internally related intensional set of relations centered on a subject. ‘Intuition is sublated in mind, not vanished, not merely passed away’ (EM: §450Z). But, next, it becomes apparent in the succeeding paragraphs in the section ‘Representation’ that central to any individual mind’s capacity to retain and, especially, achieve voluntary control over past contents in the form of retained images, is the capacity to retain a very specific type of intuition, the intuition of names, which suggests that any individual subject possessing such a capacity already belongs to a linguistic community. ‘Sound articulating itself further for determinate representations, speech, and its system, language, give to sensations, intuitions, representations a second, higher reality than their immediate one, in general an existence that carries weight in the realm of representation’ (EM: §459). Thus when Hegel says that ‘Intelligence … in filling itself with the word, receives into itself the nature of the thing’, he has made the linguistic capacity to use names a condition of the Aristotelian process of the incorporation into nous of a thing’s essence or nature in perception—a process that Aristotle seems to treat as a type of natural and immediate taking in.
Given the structure of Hegel’s Encyclopedia it is difficult to integrate issues that properly belong to objective spirit, such as language as a social phenomenon, into the discussion of subjective spirit, and this is where it can be advantageous to focus on the specifically logical level—to approach the intentional from the point of view of the intensional. With this we are able to play on the modal commonalities between the temporal dimension of Aristotle’s army-in-rout model, the metaphorical explanans, and the specifically mental context of the explanandum. Thus we might think that linguistically articulated ‘reflective judgments’ provide the appropriate means to link contents across different subjectively construed centres of experience and belief, as found in modern doxastic logic, in much the same way that they can be used to link contents across different temporal contexts, as in tense logic, or properties across different kinds in reflective judgments. It is at this point that we can see the problems being borne by Inwood’s assumption that what is being discussed in ‘Psychology’ is ‘the mind of the individual’. Adopting a more explicitly logical focus, we are able think of ‘individual minds’ as positions or centres within a logically structured set of contents, such that some kind of regular account of the relations between these contents can be thought of in ways analogous to those which we use to think the relations among various times when conceived in the ‘intensionalist’ way.
Of course there are features of Hegel’s Psychology that predispose it to the type of individualistic orientation that Inwood suggests. As we have seen, Hegel transposes material from Anthropology—sensation, for example—to Psychology, resulting in a seemingly ‘mentalistic’ language suggesting a typically ‘Cartesian’ or early modern ‘subjective’ approach of a mind’s cognition of its own mental contents. However, the account of the role of ‘recognition’ in spirit in the preceding ‘Phenomenology’ has, just as in the 1807 version, radically undermined the idea of any single subjective consciousness understandable in abstraction from its relation to other such consciousnesses. Any ‘Cartesian’ interpretation of ‘subjectivity’ here would presuppose a type of extensional logical interpretation of the elements of mental processes as fundamental: as in Descartes or Locke, the mind would be thought of as in immediate epistemic contact with a quasi-spatial realm of its own thing-like ‘ideas’.
In contrast, we may now approach such intentional notions as ‘intuition’ from the point of view of logic. From the perspective of one particular centre that a subject occupies at any one time, sensory content will come in the form of ‘intuitions’—when observing this rose, its distinctive way of being red will be presented to me in an apparently immediate, and seemingly ‘nameable’ way. But for a subject with the appropriate cognitive capacities, this experience will be able to be ‘translated’ into reflective form—a form in which it might be communicated to, or simply attributed to, other subjects, who are not ‘here’. But the same translation might make the content available ‘later’ to myself when I’m no longer able to consult the immediate experience of this rose. That is, the ‘intuition’ of the rose corresponds to that initially name-like ‘singular’ predicate that can nevertheless become a universal via Hegel’s peculiarly iterated reversals of subjects and predicates. In short, it is not the contents of an individual mind that are being examined in ‘Psychology’ but a dynamic field of mind-related phenomena that already include other ‘centres’ of consciousness.
Here we must be careful, however, as it can appear that with this model we are aspiring to a type of universal God’s-eye view of this ‘field’ with its various subjective centres—a view from nowhere in particular within the field. Once more this would seem to revert to a type of extensionalist understanding of the logical relations involved.Footnote 26 A better way to understand such an analysis of these logical structures, I suggest, is from within the perspective of what Prior called an ‘egocentric logic’. That is, we are to understand the relations within this structure as becoming explicit from a point of view which is that of one of the centers or nodes within it.
Prior exemplifies the primitive judgments of such an egocentric logic with the judgment that is an extreme version of a contextualized modal judgment such as ‘It is raining’—his example is ‘It is paining’. Just as the tensed expression contains an implicit reference to the ‘now’ of speaking, the egocentric one contains an implicit reference to the sensory state of the speaker. And just as ‘It is raining’ can be translated into a tenseless form in a series of steps that goes, say, from ‘It is raining’ to ‘It is raining now’ to ‘It is raining at time t 1 ’, so too an analogous egocentric judgment might be translated into a non-egocentric one. ‘It is paining’, might be thought as going to ‘It is paining at me’—that is, ‘I am in pain’, which in turn could be translated to ‘It is paining at a’—that is, ‘Paul is in pain’. And just as the meaning of ‘now’ in the tensed sentence could only be understood (as in Hegel’s ‘determinate negation’) in opposition to both past and future ‘thens’, ‘I’ might be thought as able to be understood only in relation to an analogous set of oppositions: ‘you’, ‘her’, ‘we’, ‘they’ and so on. That is, with this system of distinctions between first, second and third ‘persons’, we might say with Findlay that ‘we have practically the materials in them for a formal calculus’, allowing a similarly orderly set of transpositions. Thus just as an ‘is’ becomes a ‘was’, an ‘I’ becomes a ‘you’ when the original ‘you’ (the spoken to) becomes an ‘I’ (the speaker), and so on. Moreover, ‘I’ can become a ‘he’ or ‘she’, or the referent of a proper name, when spoken about from within some other I–you dialogue to which the original ‘ego’ does not belong.
With this we might now appreciate what is involved in the transition from understanding predicates that inhere in grammatical subjects (of judgments of determinate existence) to ones that subsume their subjects (of judgments of reflection). In short, one must be able to grasp the equivalence of the egocentric sentence ‘I am in pain’ said by me, and the assertion ‘you are in pain’ said of me by you or ‘Paul is in pain’ by someone else. But it cannot be simply that when I come to grasp the determinacy of ‘I am in pain’, I am merely coming to learn something that is true of me prior to and independently of my coming to grasp it.Footnote 27 To think that the allocentric third-person ‘Paul is in pain’ captures the proper meaning of the original egocentric assertion, that is, captures it in a non-egocentric metalanguage, is akin to thinking that the non-tensed ‘Socrates is sitting at noon’ captures the complete meaning of the simple tensed sentence ‘Socrates is sitting’. Prior had refused the metaphysical idea of time as a sequence of self-subsistent temporal entities that can come to be named and subsumed under abstract universals, and similarly we might think of Hegel as having rejected the analogous assumption of a pre-existing self-sufficient cognitive subject (an ‘ego’) with determinate contents waiting, as it were, to be similarly named and described.Footnote 28
Nevertheless, as Prior had realized, there is a need in egocentric logic to achieve an analogue to the ‘naming’ of temporal points in tense logic. Just as some way of referring to individual points of time had prompted the creation of hybrid logic, similarly, he had hinted at the possibility of egocentric logic being analogously extended to incorporate the means for individuating and ‘naming’ subjects considered as reflected out of the relational system to which they otherwise belonged, including their relations to specific others. Of course, spatio-temporal bodies can be named, but we need a way that links this naming to a conception of such bodies as ‘centres’ of subjective points of view.
Prior had explicitly linked this latter idea to Leibniz’s notion of the complete concept of an individual—an idea he interpreted as the totality of beliefs true only for that person: ‘Each person is identified by a set of propositions which describe the world as it is from his point of view, i.e., by the set of propositions which are true when said by him; by any single proposition which is true only when said by him’ (Prior and Fine Reference Prior and Fine1977: 59). If a person could in principle be so identified, this of course allows that person herself to conceive of herself ‘objectively’ as the singular being she takes herself to be, in abstraction from the relations in which she stands to others, on the one hand, and her merely bodily spatio-temporal particularity, on the other.
All this, I suggest, is something like what we might expect from the perspective of Hegel’s account of the recognitive conditions of self-consciousness found in the Philosophy of Right (PR)—an expanded version of the treatment of ‘objective spirit’ in the Encyclopaedia. Here the ‘inherence’ and ‘subsumption’ modes of predication would correspond to the different ways in which an ‘I”s could belong to a ‘we’.Footnote 29 Such relationality, in which the I first achieves a perspective from ‘within the relational structure’, might be thought of as that of the family—the context within which humans first acquire cognitive contents (PR: §§158–81). There, any role-switching personal pronouns would work within a network of holistically defined relationships such as ‘father of’, ‘sister of’, ‘son of’ and so on. In immediate forms of objective spirit like the family, an individual’s beliefs will always presuppose a common background of shared beliefs. But there is another force working towards the dissolution of such fixed relationships (the dissolution of ‘immediate Sittlichkeit’) and towards their replacement by a different system centred on the subject conceived abstractly in terms of being bearers of their own individual theoretical and practical beliefs. This is the system typified for Hegel by the form of recognition found in modern civil society (PR: §§182–88).
In the sphere of civil society, the person appears abstracted from their relations to others in their family. Here the metaphysical idea of a person is more likely to appear as something like an individual bearer of particular epistemic and practical ‘commitments’, the contents of which that person can be judged to be rationally entitled or unentitled.Footnote 30 So identified a subject here appears as an individuated analogue of Kant’s ‘transcendental unity of apperception’. But in Hegel’s logical approach, interpreted on the model of Prior’s ‘hybrid’ extension of egocentric logic, this way of conceiving of an individual self will be an outgrowth of some earlier, relationally constituted self, rather than that self’s ahistorical essential nature. And the individual self’s reflective commitments will always be understood against a background of those immediate forms of pre-reflexively shared contents that have their home in the family-like networks to which they must also belong.
I started with the idea that any attempt to reconstruct Hegel’s philosophy of mind must face two desiderata: that of giving an account of the types of cognitive capacities and experiences that Hegel thinks are achievable by the mind, and that of conceiving any individual mind as in some way determined by the position within which it exists within the larger context of spirit. Using some of the tools of modal logic might allow us to think of minds in terms of their intentional contents, contents that can be linked to the world only via the means that allow them to be linked to other minds that can share them. But this should not be surprising, given the fact that Hegel himself seems to use just such tools in his own subjective logic.Footnote 31
