Knowledge and Human Interests E-Book

Jürgen Habermas

• Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Seitenzahl: 661

Beschreibung

Habermas describes Knowledge and Human Interests as an attempt to reconstruct the prehistory of modern positivism with the intention of analysing the connections between knowledge and human interests. Convinced of the increasing historical and social importance of the natural and behavioural sciences, Habermas makes clear how crucial it is to understand the central meanings and justifications of these sciences. He argues that for too long the relationship between philosophy and science has been distorted. In this extraordinarily wide-ranging book, Habermas examines the principal positions of modern philosophy - Kantianism, Marxism, positivism, pragmatism, hermeneutics, the philosophy of science, linguistic philosophy and phenomenology - to lay bare the structure of the processes of enquiry that determine the meaning and the validity of all our statements which claim objectivity. This edition contains a postscript written by Habermas for the second German edition of Knowledge and Human Interests.

Leseprobe

Contents

Preface

Translator’s Note

PART ONE The Crisis of the Critique of Knowledge

CHAPTER ONE Hegel’s Critique of Kant: Radicalization or Abolition of the Theory of Knowledge

CHAPTER TWO Marx’s Metacritique of Hegel: Synthesis Through Social Labor

CHAPTER THREE The Idea of the Theory of Knowledge as Social Theory

PART TWO Positivism, Pragmatism, Historicism

CHAPTER FOUR Comte and Mach: The intention of Early Positivism

CHAPTER FIVE Peirce’s Logic of Inquiry: The Dilemma of a Scholastic Realism Restored by the Logic of Language

CHAPTER SIX The Self-Reflection of the Natural Sciences: The Pragmatist Critique of Meaning

CHAPTER SEVEN Dilthey’s Theory of Understanding Expression: Ego Identity and Linguistic Communication

CHAPTER EIGHT The Self-Reflection of the Cultural Sciences: The Historicist Critique of Meaning

PART THREE Critique as the Unity of Knowledge and Interest

CHAPTER NINE Reason and Interest: Retrospect on Kant and Fichte

CHAPTER TEN Self-Reflection as Science: Freud’s Psychoanalytic Critique of Meaning

CHAPTER ELEVEN The Scientistic Self-misunderstanding of Metapsychology: On the Logic of General Interpretation

CHAPTER TWELVE Psychoanalysis and Social Theory: Nietzsche’s Reduction of Cognitive Interests

APPENDIX Knowledge and Human Interests: A General Perspective

Notes

A Postscript to Knowledge and Human Interests

Index

German text copyright © 1968 Suhrkamp VerlagEnglish translation copyright © 1987 Polity Press

The book was first published under the title Erkenntnis und Interesse in 1968 by Suhrkamp Verlag, except for the appendix. The appendix was first published in Merkur in 1965 and reprinted in Technik und Wissenschaft als ‘Ideologie’ by Suhrkamp Verlag in 1968.

This English translation was first published in 1972 by Heinemann Educational Books. The second edition and appendix were published in 1978 and reprinted in 1981. This Polity Press edition was first published in 1987 in association with Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

Reprinted 1994, 1998, 2004, 2007

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Preface

I am undertaking a historically oriented attempt to reconstruct the prehistory of modern positivism with the systematic intention of analyzing the connections between knowledge and human interests. In following the process of the dissolution of epistemology, which has left the philosophy of science in its place, one makes one’s way over abandoned stages of reflection. Retreading this path from a perspective that looks back toward the point of departure may help to recover the forgotten experience of reflection. That we disavow reflection is positivism.

The analysis of the connection of knowledge and interest should support the assertion that a radical critique of knowledge is possible only as social theory. This idea is implicit in Marx’s theory of society, even though it cannot be gathered from the self-understanding of Marx or of Marxism. Nevertheless I have not gone into the objective context in which the development of philosophy from Hegel to Nietzsche took place. Instead I have limited myself to following immanently the movement of thought. This has its logic, for only at the price of dilettantism could I anticipate a social theory at which I should first like to arrive through the self-reflection of science.1 Now the first step in that direction has been taken. Thus this investigation cannot claim more than the role of a prolegomenon.

I first expounded the systematic perspectives guiding this investigation in my Frankfurt inaugural address of June, 1965, published as an appendix to the present volume.2 The section on positivism, pragmatism, and historicism goes back to lectures in Heidelberg in the winter semester of 1963-64. Without my discussions with Karl-Otto Apel, which extend back to the time of my university studies, without his suggestions and disagreements, this theoretical framework would never have found its present form.3

In this framework psychoanalysis occupies an important place as an example. It seems to me necessary to state that my acquaintance with it is limited to the study of Freud’s writings; I cannot draw upon the practical experiences of an analysis. Nevertheless I have learned much from the Wednesday discussions of the associates of the Sigmund-Freud-Institut that took place under the direction of Alexander Mitscherlich. I owe thanks to Alfred Lorenzer, who gave me access to the manuscript of his study of the methodological role of understanding in psychoanalysis. This manuscript has now been published in two parts by Suhrkamp Verlag as Kritik des psychoanalytischen Symbol-begrifìs and Sprachzerstörung und-Rekonstrulcrion. I am indebted to him for more suggestions than I could indicate through specific references.

Jürgen Habermas

Frankfurt, 1971

Translator’s Note

I should like to thank the following persons for their contribution, through discussion, reading, and encouragement, to the preparation of this translation: my colleagues Shierry Weber and Donna Huse of the Center for the Study of Technological Experience; Paul Breines; and Charlotte Riley. My original interest in the subject of this work arose under the teaching of Herbert Marcuse, Barrington Moore, Jr., Robert Paul Wolff, and Paul Tillich; to all of them I am much indebted.

Jeremy J. Shapiro

PART ONE

The Crisis of the Critique of Knowledge

If we imagine the philosophical discussion of the modern period reconstructed as a judicial hearing, it would be deciding a single question: how is reliable knowledge (Erkenntnis)1 possible. The term “theory of knowledge,” or “epistemology,” was coined only in the 19th century; but the subject that it retrospectively denotes is the subject of modern philosophy in general, at least until the threshold of the 19th century. The characteristic endeavor of both rationalist and empiricist thought was directed likewise at the metaphysical demarcation of the realm of objects and the logical and psychological justification of the validity of a natural science characterized by formalized language and experiment. Yet no matter how much modern physics, which combined so effectively the rigor of mathematical form with the amplitude of controlled experience, was the model for clear and distinct knowledge, modern science did not coincide with knowledge as such. In this period what characterized philosophy’s position with regard to science was precisely that science was accorded its legitimate place only by unequivocally philosophical knowledge. Theories of knowledge did not limit themselves to the explication of scientific method—they did not merge with the philosophy of science.

This was still the case when modern metaphysics, which was already organized around the problem of possible knowledge, was itself subjected to doubt. Even Kant, through whose transcendental-logical (transzendentallogisch)2 perspective epistemology first became conscious of itself and thereby entered its own singular dimension, attributes to philosophy a sovereign role in relation to science. The critique of knowledge was still conceived in reference to a system of cognitive faculties that included practical reason and reflective judgment as naturally as critique itself, that is a theoretical reason that can dialectically ascertain not only its limits but also its own Idea. The comprehensive rationality of reason that becomes transparent to itself has not yet shrunk to a set of methodological principles.

It was with the elaboration of a metacritique that subjects the critique of knowledge to unyielding self-reflection, with Hegel’s critique of Kant’s transcendental-logical inquiry, that philosophy was finally brought to the paradoxical point of not altering its position with regard to science but abandoning it completely. Hence I should like to put forth the thesis that since Kant science has no longer been seriously comprehended by philosophy. Science can only be comprehended epistemologically, which means as one category of possible knowledge, as long as knowledge is not equated either effusively with the absolute knowledge of a great philosophy or blindly with the scientistic self-understanding of the actual business of research (Forschung).3 Both equations close off the dimension in which an epistemological concept of science can be formed—in which, therefore, science can be made comprehensible within the horizon of possible knowledge and legitimated. Compared with “absolute knowledge” scientific knowledge necessarily appears narrow-minded, and the only task remaining is then the critical dissolution of the boundaries of positive knowledge. On the other hand, where a concept of knowing that transcends the prevailing sciences is totally lacking, the critique of knowledge resigns itself to the function of a philosophy of science, which restricts itself to the pseudo-normative regulation of established research.

Philosophy’s position with regard to science, which at one time could be designated with the name “theory of knowledge,” has been undermined by the movement of philosophical thought itself. Philosophy was dislodged from this position by philosophy. From then on, the theory of knowledge had to be replaced by a methodology emptied of philosophical thought. For the philosophy of science that has emerged since the mid-nineteenth century as the heir of the theory of knowledge is methodology pursued with a scientistic self-understanding of the sciences. “Scientism” means science’s belief in itself: that is, the conviction that we can no longer understand science as one form of possible knowledge, but rather must identify knowledge with science. The positivism that enters on the scene with Comte makes use of elements of both the empiricist and rationalist traditions in order to strengthen science’s belief in its exclusive validity after the fact, instead of to reflect (reflektieren)4 on it, and to account for the structure of the sciences on the basis of this belief. Modern positivism has solved this task with remarkable subtlety and indisputable success.

Every discussion of the conditions of possible knowledge today, therefore, must begin from the position worked out by analytic philosophy of science. We cannot return immediately to the dimension of epistemological investigation. Positivism has unreflectively leaped over this dimension, which is why it generally has regressed behind the level of reflection represented by Kant’s philosophy. To me it seems necessary to analyze the context in which positivist doctrines originated before we can take up the current discussion. For a future systematic investigation of the basis in human interests of scientific knowledge cannot abstractly restore epistemology. Instead it can only return to a dimension that was first opened up by Hegel through the radical self-critique of epistemology and then once again obstructed.

In opposition to Kant, Hegel was able to demonstrate the phenomenological self-reflection of knowledge as the necessary radicalization of the critique of reason. But he did not develop it logically, owing, I believe, to his preoccupation with the postulates of the philosophy of identity (Identitätsphilosophie).5 Marx, whose historical materialism really required the movement of Hegel’s self-reflection, misunderstood his own conception and hence completed the disintegration of the theory of knowledge. Thus positivism could forget that the methodology of the sciences was intertwined with the objective self-formative process (Bildungsprozess)6 of the human species and erect the absolutism of pure methodology on the basis of the forgotten and repressed.

CHAPTER ONE

Hegel’s Critique of Kant: Radicalization or Abolition of the Theory of Knowledge

Hegel replaced the enterprise of epistemology with the phenomenological self-reflection of mind. He introduces the Phenomenology of Mind with an argument that returns in later contexts.1 The critical philosophy (Kritizismus)2 demands that the knowing subject ascertain the conditions of the knowledge of which it is in principle capable before trusting its directly acquired cognitions. Only on the basis of reliable criteria of the validity of our judgments can we determine whether we may also be certain with regard to our knowledge. But if this critique itself must claim to be knowledge, how can we critically investigate the cognitive faculty prior to knowing?

What is demanded is thus the following: we should know the cognitive faculty before we know. It is like wanting to swim before going in the water. The investigation of the faculty of knowledge is itself knowledge, and cannot arrive at its goal because it is this goal already.3

Every consistent epistemology is caught in this circle from the beginning. This cannot be avoided by beginning the critique with presuppositions that remain provisionally unproblematic but that in principle can be taken as potential problems for subsequent investigation. This “problematic method,” originally adopted by Reinhold, is still recommended today by positivists for methodological investigations. It is argued that one cannot at the same time take all principles as problematic. The set of presuppositions that defines the frame of reference of a given investigation should be assumed as unproblematic for the course of the investigation. The manifold repetition of this procedure is supposed to provide an adequate guarantee that in principle all presuppositions can be called into question. However, the choice of the first frame of reference and the sequence of the additional stages of investigation remain arbitrary. Radical doubt is excluded, because the procedure rests on a conventionalism that precludes the logical foundation of its premises. But the theory of knowledge, according to its philosophical claim, is an enterprise directed at the whole. It is concerned with the critical justification of the conditions of possible knowledge in general. It cannot renounce radical, that is unconditional doubt. The methodical (methodisch)4 meaning of its approach would be inverted if it bound critique to conditions (that is if it allowed presuppositions) that are themselves the preconditions of the critique of knowledge without being subject to it. Because epistemology, in virtue of its claim to providing its own and the ultimate foundation, appears as the heir of First Philosophy (Ursprungsphilosophie),5 it cannot dispense with the strategy of beginning without presuppositions.6 This explains how Hegel can praise Reinhold, who clearly perceived the circular character of epistemology, while rejecting the problematic method that was to escape it. His “correct insight does not alter the character of such a method, but immediately expresses its inadequacy.”7

Hegel’s argument is conclusive. It is directed against the intention of First Philosophy. For the circle in which epistemology inevitably ensnares itself is a reminder that the critique of knowledge does not possess the spontaneity of an origin. As reflection it is instead dependent on something prior and given, which it takes as its object while simultaneously originating in it. Thus the critique of knowledge is condemned to being after the fact. It begins with data of consciousness that it first confronts empirically. But the choice of a starting point is not conventional. Sense-certainty is the name of the natural consciousness of a world of everyday life which we always find ourselves already inside, with inevitable contingency. Sense-certainty is objective in the sense that the recollecting power of reflection itself originates in this stratum of experience, whose dogmatic character it unmasks. In reflection consciousness cannot make anything transparent except the context of its own genesis. The circle that Hegel charges to epistemology as a bad contradiction is justified in phenomenological experience as the form of reflection itself. It pertains to the structure of self-knowledge that one must have known in order to know explicitly. Only something already known can be remembered as a result and comprehended in its genesis. This movement is the experience of reflection. Its goal is that knowledge which the critical philosophy asserted as an immediate possession.

If this is so, then the critique of knowledge can no longer claim to fulfill the intention of First Philosophy. But it is not at all clear why abandoning this intention should entail abandoning the critique of knowledge itself. The latter has only to cast off its false consciousness by being turned against itself in metacritique. Hegel, however, believes that his argument affects not only this false consciousness but the epistemological approach as such:

Meanwhile, if concern with falling into error creates mistrust in science, which goes to work without such misgivings and attains real knowledge, then it is not clear why conversely there should not be mistrust of this mistrust and why there should not be concern that this fear of erring is not error itself. In fact this fear presupposes many beliefs as true and bases its misgivings and conclusions on them. It is these presuppositions themselves that first need to be examined as to their truth.8

Hegel rightly criticizes the unacknowledged presuppositions of epistemology. However his demand that these, too, be subjected to critique accords with the strategy of unconditional doubt. Thus his argument cannot limit the mistrust expressed by the critical philosophy, which is the modern form of skepticism. Instead, it can only radicalize it. Phenomenology would have to reconstruct the standpoint of doubt (Zweifel) adopted by epistemology as the beaten path of despair (Verzweiflung). Hegel sees this; yet he asserts in the same breath that the fear of erring is error itself. Hence what starts out as immanent critique covertly turns into abstract negation. It is through the epistemological circle that the theory of knowledge can cure its false consciousness and be brought to consciousness of itself as reflection. Hegel, however, takes this circle as a sign of the untruth of the critical philosophy as such. He sees through the absolutism of an epistemology based on unreflected presuppositions, demonstrates the mediation of reflection by what precedes it, and thus destroys the renewal of First Philosophy on the basis of transcendentalism. Yet in so doing he imagines himself to be overcoming the critique of knowledge as such. This opinion insinuates itself because from the very beginning Hegel presumes as given a knowledge of the Absolute while indeed the possibility of just this knowledge would have to be demonstrated according to the criteria of a radicalized critique of knowledge.

Accordingly there is something half-hearted about the Phenomenology of Mind. The standpoint of absolute knowledge is to proceed with immanent necessity from phenomenological experience. But because it is absolute, it does not really need to be justified by the phenomenological self-reflection of mind; and, strictly speaking, it is not even capable of such justification. This equivocation of the phenomenology of mind deprives Hegel’s critique of Kant of the force that it would have needed in order to put forward a reflected theory of knowledge. The theory of transcendental philosophy itself has not held its ground against its positivist opponents.

Hegel directs himself against the Organon9 theory of knowledge. Those who conceive of the enterprise of the critique of knowledge as an examination of the means of knowledge start with a model of knowledge that emphasizes either the activity of the knowing subject or the receptivity of the cognitive process. Knowledge appears mediated either by an instrument with whose help we form objects or as a medium through which the light of the world enters the subject.10 Both versions accord in viewing knowledge as transcendentally determined by the means of possible knowledge. The model of knowing as a medium through which the state of fact, which is true in itself, manifests itself in refraction makes clear that even the contemplative self-understanding of theory, when examined from the viewpoint of the critique of knowledge, must be re-interpreted along the lines of an organon theory of knowledge. For Hegel the task of the critical philosophy appears as one of ascertaining the functions of the instrument or medium in order to be able to distinguish the inevitable contributions of the subject from the authentic objective content in the judgment that is the result of the cognitive process. The objection to this then lies at hand:

If we remove from a formed thing what the instrument has done to it, then the thing—in this case the Absolute—is once again just what it was before this exertion, which thus was superfluous. . . . Or if the examination of knowing, which we represent to ourselves as a medium [instead of as the functioning of an instrument—Jürgen Habermas], makes us acquainted with the law of its refraction, it is just as useless to us to deduct it from the result. For knowing is not the refraction of the ray, but the ray itself through which truth reaches us.11

This objection is obviously valid only presupposing that there can be something like knowledge in itself or absolute knowledge independent of the subjective conditions of possible knowledge. Hegel imputes to epistemology a privative concept of subjectively tinged knowledge that can in fact only arise in confrontation with Hegel’s own concept of absolute knowledge. However, for a critical philosophy that does not fear its own implications, there can be no concept of knowledge that can be explicated independently of the subjective conditions of the objectivity of possible knowledge: this is shown by Kant’s principle of the synthetic unity of apperception as the highest principle of all employment of the understanding. Of course, we can feign the idea of a mode of knowledge that is not “ours,” but we associate a meaning with this idea only to the extent that we derive it as a limiting concept from a variation of knowledge that is possible “for us.” It remains derivative and cannot itself serve as a standard according to which we could relativize that from which it is derived. Transcendental philosophy’s conception of knowledge mediated by an Organon implies that the frame of reference within which the objects of knowledge are at all possible is first constituted by the functions of the instrument. The idea that Hegel imputes to transcendental philosophy, namely “that the Absolute is located on one side and knowing, located on the other, is still something real by itself and in separation from the Absolute,”—this idea belongs rather to Hegel’s own frame of reference. For Hegel is referring to the absolute relation of subject and object. In this relation a mediating Organon of knowledge can in fact be thought of only as the cause of subjective interference and not as the condition of the possible objectivity of knowledge. For critical philosophy it is otherwise. The Organon produces the world within which reality can appear at all; thus under these conditions of its functioning it can always only disclose reality and not obscure it. Only presupposing that reality as such simply appears can this or that individual real element be obscured—unless we presume an absolute relation between reality and the cognitive process that is independent of that instrument. But from the presuppositions of transcendental philosophy we cannot even meaningfully talk of knowledge without identifying the conditions of possible knowledge. Accordingly Hegel’s critique does not proceed immanently. For his objection to the Organon theory of knowledge presupposes just what this theory calls into question: the possibility of absolute knowledge.

On the other hand, Hegel’s critique also has its justifications. Unfolding the two cognitive models of the instrument and the medium brings to light a series of implicit presuppositions of a critique of knowledge that claims to be free of presuppositions. The latter must always already know more than it can know according to its own stated premises. The critique that knows knowledge to be mediated by an Organon must include specific ideas both about the knowing subject and the category of correct knowledge. For Kant reconstructs the organization of the cognitive faculty, as the essential unity of the transcendental conditions under which knowledge is possible, by starting with a priori valid propositions and with an ego for which the validity of propositions exists. Already in our approach we secretly base the critique of knowledge on a specific concept of science and of the knowing subject. However, the only presupposition that modern skepticism will allow is the project of not accepting the thoughts of others on authority, but instead of examining everything oneself and autonomously following one’s own conviction. The only thing standing at the beginning of critique is the radical project of unconditional doubt. From Descartes to Kant this doubt required no justification because it legitimated itself as an aspect of reason. And correspondingly consciousness that criticizes itself does not need to be trained in methodical doubt, because the latter is the medium in which consciousness constitutes itself as consciousness that is certain of itself. These are assertions claiming self-evidence that are no longer convincing today as basic assumptions of rationalism. Radical doubt that needs to be neither justified nor learned through practice is no longer conceded a transcendental role. At most it has a place in cognitive psychology. In recent philosophy of science, therefore, methodical doubt has been replaced by a critical attitude that is committed to the principles of rationalism but cannot itself be justified.12 Rationalism is supposedly a method of belief, one opinion among others. Unaltered, however, is its function in the presuppositionless beginning of the critique of knowledge and thus for an absolutist self-understanding that transcendental philosophy shares with today’s methodology. To the abstract resolve of unconditional doubt Hegel opposes a self-completing skepticism:

The series of shapes that consciousness passes through on this course is . . . the complete history of the self-formation of consciousness into science. In the simple manner appropriate to it, that resolve presupposes this self-formation as immediately settled and completed. Against this untruth, however, this course of formation is the real accomplishment.13

Epistemology presumes to take nothing for granted except its pure project of radically doubting. In truth it bases itself on a critical consciousness that is the result of an entire process of self-formation. Thus it is the beneficiary of a stage of reflection that it does not admit and therefore also cannot legitimate.

The first presupposition with which epistemology begins is a normative concept of science. It takes a given, specific category of knowledge as prototypical knowledge. Characteristically, in the preface to the Critiqueof Pure Reason Kant resorts to the examples of mathematics and contemporary physics. Both disciplines are distinguished by what appears to be relatively constant cognitive progress. They fulfill a criterion that Kant cloaks in the stereotyped phrase of the “sure march of science.” In contrast, other disciplines, which have falsely claimed the name of science, are characterized by groping around with mere concepts. This includes metaphysics; measured against the pragmatic mark of cognitive progress, its method is without success. That is why Kant would like “us to undertake a complete revolution in it after the example of the geometers and natural scientists.” From the very start the enterprise of a critique of pure speculative reason assumes the normative cogency of a specific category of knowledge. Presupposing that the statements of mathematics and contemporary physics are valid as reliable knowledge, the critique of knowledge can take principles that have proved themselves in these processes of inquiry and use them to draw conclusions about the organization of our cognitive faculty. It is true that Kant feels psychologically encouraged by the example of the natural scientists, who have understood that reason only comprehends what it itself produces according to its own plan, to transform metaphysics according to the same principle. But over and above this he depends systematically on this example, because the critique of knowledge only seems to be free from presuppositions. In fact it must begin with a prior, undemonstrated criterion of the validity of scientific statements, which nevertheless is accepted as cogent.

Modern methodology, too, gains pseudonormative force by first taking a particular category of traditional knowledge as the prototype of science. It then generalizes the procedures that make possible the reconstruction of this knowledge and converts them into a definition of science. Hegel opposes this by insisting that knowledge which first presents itself as science is primarily a manifestation of knowledge (erscheinende Wissen)14 —one barren assurance is just as valid as another. Nor is science as it first manifests itself any more worthy of belief because we place our confidence in the claim that it is authentic or true science and decide against other forms of knowledge that appear with the same claim. The critique of knowledge must begin by abstaining from any prejudgment about what is to count as science. At first it confronts only competing claims of the manifestation of knowledge. That is why it has to abandon itself to the course taken by this knowledge in its manifestations :

Skepticism directed at the entire compass of consciousness in its manifestations first makes . . . the mind skilled at examining what truth is. It does so by creating despair of so-called natural ideas, thoughts and opinions. It is a matter of indifference whether one calls these one’s own or others’. The very consciousness that is to examine truth is still so filled with and caught in these ideas that it is in fact incapable of undertaking what it wants to.15

As the representation of knowledge in its manifestations the critique of knowledge takes up the thread of phenomenological experience in the everyday life-world in the formations that natural consciousness has given itself and in which we find ourselves:

When knowledge in its manifestations becomes our object, its determinations are first taken up as they immediately present themselves; and they surely present themselves as they have just been formulated.16

Epistemological investigation does not thereby regress to the dogmatism of common sense. For now its critique is directed so unsparingly even against itself, that the standards that it uses for examination cannot simply be presupposed. By reconstructing the self-formative process of consciousness, the critique of knowledge observes how at every stage the standards of the preceding one disintegrate and new ones arise.

In this enterprise the second presupposition with which the critique of knowledge begins also becomes problematic: namely the assumption of a complete, fixed knowing subject or, in other words a normative concept of the ego. In order that judgment be passed on the errors through which reason had become at odds with itself in its trans-empirical employment, Kant wanted to institute a tribunal. He had no second thoughts about the genesis of the court. For nothing seemed more certain to him than the self-consciousness in which I am given to myself as the “I think” that accompanies all of my representations. Even if the transcendental unity of self-consciousness can only be comprehended in the actual course of the investigation as arising from the activities of original apperception, the identity of the ego must already be taken account of at its beginning on the basis of the undoubted transcendental experience of self-reflection. In contrast, Hegel perceives that Kant’s critique of consciousness commences with a consciousness that is not transparent to itself. The observing consciousness of phenomenology knows that it itself is incorporated in the experience of reflection as one of its elements. Beginning with natural consciousness, its genesis must be reconstructed up to the point of view provisionally taken by the phenomenological observer. Then the position of the critique of knowledge can coincide with the constituted self-consciousness of a consciousness that has become aware of its own self-formative process; only in this way can it be purified of all that is contingent. For the consciousness that is about to begin the task of examination, the subject of epistemological investigation is not yet at hand. It is first given to itself only with the result of its self-ascertainment.

A critique of knowledge that has dissolved the normative conception of both science and the ego in radical doubt is relegated exclusively to what Hegel calls phenomenological experience. The latter moves in the medium of a consciousness that reflexively distinguishes between itself, for which an object is given, and the being-in-itself of the object. The transition from the naive intuition of the object-in-itself (ansichseiend)17 to the reflexive knowledge that this being-in-itself exists for it (consciousness) enables consciousness to have a specific experience of itself via its object. This experience first exists only for us, the phenomenological observers:

It is the genesis of the new object, which presents itself to consciousness without the latter knowing how this occurs, that for us appears to take place, so to speak, behind its back. In this way a moment of being-in-itself or being-for-us enters into its movement; yet this moment does not present itself to the consciousness that is itself engaged in the experience. But the content of what originates for us exists for it, and we comprehend only its formal element or its pure genesis. This result of genesis exists for it only as object, whereas for us it is at the same time movement and becoming.18

The dimensions of in itself, for it, and for us designate the coordinate system in which the experience of reflection moves. But during the experiential process the values change in all dimensions, including the third. The phenomenologist’s perspective, from which the path of knowledge in its manifestations presents itself “for us,” can only be adopted in anticipation until this perspective itself is produced in phenomenological experience. “We,” too, are drawn into the process of reflection, which at each of its levels is characterized anew by a “reversal of consciousness.”

The last implicit presupposition with which an abstract critique of knowledge begins, however, thereby shows itself to be untenable: the distinction between theoretical and practical reason. The critique of pure reason assumes a different concept of the ego than does that of practical reason: the ego as the unity of self-consciousness versus the ego as free will. The separation of the critique of knowledge from a critique of rational action is considered self-evident. Yet this distinction becomes problematical if critical consciousness itself emerges only from the history of the development of consciousness. Then it is an element, even if the last one, in a self-formative process in which at every stage a new insight is confirmed in a new attitude. For reflection destroys, along with a false view of things, the dogmatic attitudes of a habitual form of life: this holds even for the first stage, the world of sense-certainty. In false consciousness, knowing and willing are still joined. The residues of the destructions of false consciousness serve as rungs on the ladder of the experience of reflection. As shown by the prototypical area of experience in life history, the experiences from which one learns are negative. The reversal of consciousness means the dissolution of identifications, the breaking of fixations, and the destruction of projections. The failure of the state of consciousness that has been overcome turns at the same time into a new reflected attitude in which the situation comes to consciousness in an undistorted manner, just as it is. This is the path of determinate negation that guards against empty skepticism, “which always sees only pure nothingness in the result and abstracts from the circumstance that this nothingness is determined as the nothingness of that from which it results.”19 In clarifying what the reversal of consciousness means, Hegel repeats

. . . that the result obtained from a non-veridical instance of knowledge cannot shrink to an empty nothingness but must be apprehended necessarily as the nothingness of that of which it is the result: a result that contains that which was true in the preceding instance of knowledge.20

This figure of determinate negation applies not to an immanent logical connection but to the mechanism of the progress of a mode of reflection in which theoretical and practical reason are one. The affirmative moment that is contained in the very negation of an existing organization of consciousness becomes plausible when we consider that in this consciousness categories of apprehending the world and norms of action are connected. A form of life that has become an abstraction cannot be negated without leaving a trace, or overthrown without practical consequences. The revolutionized situation contains the one that has been surpassed, because the insight of the new consists precisely in the experience of revolutionary release from the old consciousness. Because the relation between successive states of a system is brought about by what is in this sense determinate negation and not by either a logical or a causal relation, we speak of a self-formative process. A state defined by both cognitive performances and fixed attitudes can be overcome only if its genesis is analytically remembered. A past state, if cut off and merely repressed, would retain its power over the present. The relation described, however, secures continuity to a moral life context that is destroyed again at each new level of reflection. It makes possible a sustaining identity of the “mind” (“Geist”) in the succession of abandoned identifications. This identity of the mind becomes conscious as a dialectical one. It contains within itself the distinction confidently presupposed by epistemology and cannot be defined in relation to this distinction between theoretical and practical reason.

Hegel radicalizes the approach of the critique of knowledge by subjecting its presuppositions to self-criticism. In so doing he destroys the secure foundation of transcendental consciousness, from which the a priori demarcation between transcendental and empirical determinations, between genesis and validity, seemed certain. Phenomenological experience moves in a dimension within which transcendental determinations themselves take form. It contains no absolutely fixed point. Only the experience of reflection as such can be elucidated under the name of self-formative process. Critical consciousness, after initially hastening forward, must work itself up to its present position through stages of reflection that can be reconstructed through a systematic repetition of the experiences that constituted the history of mankind. The Phenomenology of Mind attempts this reconstruction in three progressions: through the socialization process of the individual, through the universal history of mankind, and through this history as it reflects upon itself in the forms of absolute mind, that is religion, art, and scientific knowledge (Wissenschaft).21

The critical consciousness with which the theory of knowledge begins its examination is obtained as the result of phenomenological observation as soon as the latter becomes transparently aware of the genesis of its own standpoint by appropriating the self-formative process of the human species. Now Hegel asserts at the end of the Phenomenology of Mind that this critical consciousness is absolute knowledge. Hegel did not make good this assertion; indeed, he could not even carry out such a demonstration because he did not satisfy the formal conditions of a phenomenological passage through the history of nature. For in accordance with the approach of phenomenological investigation, absolute knowledge would be conceivable only as the result of a systematic repetition of the formative processes of the human species and nature at once.

Now it is not really probable that such a simple “mistake” could have crept into Hegel’s thought. If, disregarding the preceding argument, he never entertained a doubt that the phenomenology of mind led, and had to lead, to the standpoint of absolute knowledge and thence to the concept of speculative scientific knowledge, it is rather an indication of a self-understanding of phenomenology that deviates from our interpretation. Through phenomenological investigation Hegel believes himself not to be radicalizing the epistemological approach but to be making it superfluous. He presumes that phenomenological experience always keeps and has kept within the medium of an absolute movement of the mind and therefore must terminate necessarily in absolute knowledge.22 In contrast, we have followed his argument from the point of view of an immanent critique of Kant. If we are not guided by the presupposition of the philosophy of identity, the fateful union dissolves. True, Hegel’s construction of consciousness in its manifestations, by radicalizing the epistemological approach, dispels transcendental philosophy’s limitation of what merely seems to be unconditional doubt. But in no way does it guarantee us access to any sort of absolute knowledge. Unlike empirical experience, phenomenological experience does not keep within the bounds of transcendentally grounded schemata. Rather, the construction of consciousness in its manifestations incorporates the fundamental experiences in which transformations of such schemata of apprehending the world and of action themselves have been deposited. The experience of reflection preserves those outstanding moments in which the subject looks back over its own shoulder, so to speak, and perceives how the transcendental relation between subject and object alters itself behind its back. It recollects the emancipation thresholds of the history of mankind. However, this does not exclude contingent impacts upon the transcendental history of consciousness. Under contingent circumstances, the conditions under which any new transcendental framework for the appearance of possible objects is formed could be produced by the subject itself: for example, through progress in the forces of production, as Marx assumes. This would not bring about an absolute unity of subject and object. Only such a unity, however, would confer upon critical consciousness, in which phenomenological recollection culminates, the status of absolute knowledge.

Notwithstanding, Hegel advocated this view in 1807.

By urging itself on to its true existence [in the course of phenomenological experience], it [consciousness] will attain a point at which it casts off its appearance of being affected with what is different from it, with what is only for it and as something other than itself, or where appearance becomes identical with essence, so that the description of consciousness coincides with this very point of the authentic scientific knowledge of mind; and finally, by apprehending this its own essence, it will express absolute knowledge itself.23

But already here a contradiction appears that is masked only rhetorically. If it is phenomenology that first produces the standpoint of absolute knowledge, and this standpoint coincides with the position of authentic scientific knowledge, then the construction of knowledge in its manifestations cannot itself claim the status of scientific knowledge. The apparent dilemma (Aporie) of knowing before knowledge, with which Hegel reproached epistemology, now returns in Hegel’s thought as an actual dilemma: namely, that phenomenology must in fact be valid prior to every possible mode of scientific knowledge. Hegel first published the Phenomenology as the first part of a system of scientific knowledge. At that time he was convinced that the forms in which consciousness appeared followed one another with necessity, and “through this necessity this road to scientific knowledge is itself already scientific knowledge.”24 Yet Hegel could claim necessity for the progression of phenomenological experience only retrospectively from the standpoint of absolute knowledge. Seen from this perspective the relation of the phenomenology of mind to logic takes the following form:

Consciousness is mind as concrete knowledge, which is, moreover, knowledge affected with externality. But, like the development of all natural and mental life, the forward movement of this object is based exclusively on the nature of the pure essences that make up the content of logic. As mind in its manifestations, which frees itself in this way from its immediacy and external concretion, consciousness becomes pure knowledge, which gives itself as an object these pure essences themselves, as they are in and for themselves.25

From this point of view, however, phenomenological investigation would lose its specific character and be reduced to the level of a metaphysical philosophy of mind and nature (Realphilosophie desGeistes ).26 If the progressive phenomenological movement of consciousness, like “all natural and mental life,” were based on the logical structure of essences existing in and for themselves, then precisely the special relation that enables phenomenology to be an introduction to philosophy would be neglected: namely that the phenomenological observer, who cannot yet have attained the standpoint of logic, is himself incorporated in the self-formative process of consciousness. His dependent position is shown in that he must begin with sense certainty, which is something immediate.

Phenomenology does not depict the developmental process of mind, but rather the appropriation of this process by a consciousness that must first free itself from external concretion and attain pure knowledge through the experience of reflection. Thus it cannot itself already be scientific knowledge and yet must be able to claim scientific validity.

This ambiguity remains. We need to ground the concept of science phenomenologically only as long as we are not certain of the conditions of possible knowledge—or, possibly, of absolute knowledge. To this extent the method of phenomenological experience only radicalizes what was always the intention of the critique of knowledge. On the other hand, when phenomenology truly attains its declared goal, absolute knowledge, it makes itself superfluous. Indeed, it refutes the perspective of inquiry held by the critique of knowledge as such, although this perspective is its only legitimation. At best, then, we may regard phenomenology as a ladder which we must throw away after climbing it to the standpoint of the Logic. In a certain sense Hegel himself later also treated the Phenomenology in this way. He did not incorporate it into his system of the sciences. In its place in the Encyclopedia appears a so-called preliminary notion (Vorbegriff) of the science of logic.27 Yet in the fall of 1831 Hegel began preparations for a second edition of the Phenomenology and made a note for himself reading, “Unusual early work, not to be revised.” He obviously wanted to retain the phenomenology in its old form but for the same function as the new preliminary notion of the Logic and place it alongside the system as a whole. In this way scientific knowledge, which is expounded as a system, could explain its standpoint in relation to a consciousness that is still outside the system and that must still be motivated to decide to want to think purely.28 As this sort of self-interpretation of science, which comprehends the necessity of a consciousness caught in appearance, phenomenology would have to evolve its thought process from the standpoint of speculative scientific knowledge. But it could do this only didactically and not scientifically. This later self-understanding of phenomenology rests on a re-interpretation of its original intention. Nevertheless Hegel could carry it out without violence, owing to the ambiguity that was always attached to phenomenology. It had to assume as uncertain the standpoint of absolute knowledge to which it was supposed to give rise and to which it could give rise only by radicalizing the critique of knowledge. Yet in fact it presupposed absolute knowledge with such certainty that it believed itself exempted from the labor of this critique from its first step.

Kant’s critique of knowledge accepts an empirical concept of science in the form of contemporary physics and derives from it the criteria of possible science in general. Hegel shows that the critique of knowledge, if it unconditionally follows its own intention, must abandon such presuppositions; instead it must let the standard of critique emerge from the experience of reflection. Because he does not proceed logically but relativizes the critique of knowledge as such according to the presuppositions of the philosophy of identity, Hegel arrives at the concept of speculative scientific knowledge. In relation to this norm, sciences that proceed methodically, whether of nature or mind, can only prove themselves to be limitations of absolute knowledge and discredit themselves. Thus the paradoxical result of an ambiguousradicalization of the critique of knowledge is not an enlightened position of philosophy with regard to science. When philosophy asserts itself as authentic science, the relation of philosophy and science completely disappears from discussion. It is with Hegel that a fatal misunderstanding arises : the idea that the claim asserted by philosophical reason against the abstract thought of mere understanding is equivalent to the usurpation of the legitimacy of independent sciences by a philosophy claiming to retain its position as universal scientific knowledge. But the actual fact of scientific progress independent of philosophy had to unmask this claim, however misunderstood, as bare fiction. It was this that served as the foundation-stone of positivism. Only Marx could have contested its victory. For he pursued Hegel’s critique of Kant without sharing the basic assumption of the philosophy of identity that hindered Hegel from unambiguously radicalizing the critique of knowledge.

CHAPTER TWO

Marx’s Metacritique of Hegel: Synthesis Through Social Labor

In the last of the economic-philosophical manuscripts from his Paris period (1844) Marx comes to grips with the Phenomenology of Mind.* He focuses especially on the last chapter, on absolute knowledge. Marx follows the strategy of detaching the exposition of consciousness in its manifestations from the framework of the philosophy of identity. He does this in order to bring to light the elements of a critique that often “far surpasses Hegel’s standpoint,” elements that are already contained, although concealed, in the Phenomenology. In so doing he refers to paragraphs 381 and 384 of Hegel’s Encyclopedia, in which the transition from the philosophy of nature to the philosophy of mind is delineated, making explicit the basic assumption that tacitly underlies the Phenomenology: “For us the mind has nature as its presupposition; it is the truth and thus the absolute ground () of nature. In this truth nature has disappeared, and mind has emerged as the Idea existing for itself: both the object and the subject of the Idea is (concept, Begriff).” For Marx, on the contrary, it is nature that is the absolute ground of mind. Nature cannot be conceived of as the other of a mind that is at the same time in its own element (bei sich) in its other. For if nature were mind in the state of complete externalization, then as congealed mind it would have its essence and life not in itself but outside itself. There would be an advance guarantee that in truth nature could exist only as mind reflexively remembers it while returning to itself from nature. As Marx comments on the Encyclopedia,