Abstract
Abstract I argue that Hegel’s Phenomenology is an attempt to prove that human experience displays a sui generis logical structure. This is because, as rational animals who instinctively create a universe of meaning to navigate our environment, the perceptual content of our conscious experience of objects, the desires that motivate our self-conscious experience of action, and the beliefs and values that make up our sociohistorical experience all testify to the presence of rationality as their condition of possibility. As such, Hegel’s Phenomenology not only requires of us that we transform the mission of logic into a description of the immanent logic at the basis of human experience, thereby making the task of logic “anthropological.” It also presents us with a novel model of human experience—one that: demonstrates the rationality already instinctively at work in our bodily sensations, perceptions, and desires; gives an account of the origins of human society and history; and also makes human experience irreducible to cognitive processes in the brain, psychological mechanisms, and the biological imperatives of survival and reproduction.
Highlights
Rationality as the originating factor of human experienceThe standard picture painted of Hegel’s logic is that it is a formal outline of the logical structure of the universe.[1]
I argue that Hegel’s Phenomenology is an attempt to prove that human experience displays a sui generis logical structure. This is because, as rational animals who instinctively create a universe of meaning to navigate our environment, the perceptual content of our conscious experience of objects, the desires that motivate our self-conscious experience of action, and the beliefs and values that make up our sociohistorical experience all testify to the presence of rationality as their condition of possibility
Hegel’s Phenomenology requires of us that we transform the mission of logic into a description of the immanent logic at the basis of human experience, thereby making the task of logic “anthropological.” It presents us with a novel model of human experience—one that: demonstrates the rationality already instinctively at work in our bodily sensations, perceptions, and desires; gives an account of the origins of human society and history; and makes human experience irreducible to cognitive processes in the brain, psychological mechanisms, and the biological imperatives of survival and reproduction
Summary
The standard picture painted of Hegel’s logic is that it is a formal outline of the logical structure of the universe.[1]. (2) Since claims can only be adjudicated in the practice of giving and asking for reasons, we are social and historical beings: we have an instinctive need to find consensus, driving us to rationally construct communally shared beliefs and values that evolve over time In this manner, the three books of Hegel’s logic—once again, the Doctrines of Being, Essence, and the Concept—deduce the basic categories by which we, as rational animals, instinctively make sense of various qualities, provide substantial and causal explanations of them, producing accounts of the natural and human worlds and our place in them, and how these accounts are taken as true in what Hegel calls the “pure space” of thinking:[4] the conceptual activity of making and backing up claims in discourse as that which produces the existential structure of our experience of things, ourselves, the beliefs and values that constitute our societies, and even the forward march of history. He has to display to us how the objects that we normally take to be just there in our everyday existence and our epistemological practices are always already products of our process of conceptualization
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