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intelligible to itself. Ultimately, the structure of the Concept and the dynamic of absolute negation
serve to integrate the two great models from which post-Kantian philosophers drew their
inspiration: Spinoza's monism and Kant's idealism. They do so by supporting a unified account of
the source of determinacy in nature and intentionality, that is, by identifying a single structure that
is at once the structure of being and the structure of thought. (23-24)
While structural readings of Hegel have become almost the norm (for metaphysical and nonmetaphysical readings), Bowman goes further in arguing for an original activity that accounts for the
structure of both nature and our thought. This argument leads to the conclusion that "knowledge of the
truth is necessitated by the truth" (240), an idea that he likens to David Armstrong's recent theory of
truth (240n2).
One of the great virtues of Bowman's book is that his interpretive agenda does not blind him to the
nuances and complications of Hegel's position. Even in his opposition to the "non-metaphysical" Hegel,
Bowman does not neglect those aspects of Hegel's view that clearly are directed against the
metaphysical tradition. Just when I would find myself thinking the interpretation was one-sided, he would
introduce complexities that demonstrate his grasp of the alternatives. Bowman is also keenly aware of
the communicative perils of Hegel interpretation ("Some reader are sure to find observations like this
akin to numerology and about as meaningful" (173); "One has to be very careful in expressing this
relation since at this level of abstraction it is easy to stray into nonsense." (209)), but he does not shy
away from difficulty. He builds on the work of previous commentators, but always discharges the burden
of making the points intelligible in his own voice.
There is no way I can do justice even in summary to Bowman's many complex arguments. In what follows
I will outline the main theses of four (out of seven) of Bowman's chapters, and then follow with some
lines of resistance to those theses.
In his opening chapter Bowman draws on the work of two preeminent German commentators on Hegel's
theoretical philosophy, Dieter Henrich and Rolf-Peter Horstmann, in order to establish the basic
parameters of Hegel's relational metaphysics. From Horstmann he adopts an understanding of the
Concept as a basic relational structure: "The unique character of the Concept lies in its being constituted
wholly by relationswhich themselves are metaphysically prior to any relata that might appear to realize
those relations" (37). While this suggests an inactive, perhaps overly formal structure, Bowman ties it
together with Henrich's analysis of negation in order to explain the active process that gives rise to that
structure. He writes that "the logic of absolute negativity" is "the generative dynamic that gives rise to
the structure of the Concept" (48). This is "autonomous negation" because Hegel "ceases to view it as
fundamentally standing in complementary correlation to affirmation" (50). According to this idea,
negation can be (indeed must be) applied to itself, and in the process it generates an internal structure
of identity and difference. In the following, Bowman describes a potential problem with this idea, and its
solution:
Qua self-relating negation, autonomous negation immediately gives rise to a positive term
(affirmation, being) to which it stands in an external relation, that is, a relation-to-other. . . . The
decisive move, therefore, in reconstructing Hegel's Grundoperation is to posit relation-to-other as a
moment wholly internal to the relation-to-self: the relation-to-other that emerges as an analytic
implication of autonomous negation has to be interpreted as, in truth, the relation of autonomous
negation to itself. (52)
Bowman is aware that many readers of Hegel will be much more familiar with "determinate negation"
than with this conception of "absolute negativity," and he therefore emphasizes that determinate
negation presupposes absolute negativity (55). Rather than determinate negation being the fundamental
tool, it is "the moment of relation-to-other when conceived as the result of self-referential negation" (55).
Absolute negativity takes a back seat for much of the next four chapters, as Bowman delves into the
specific criticisms of pre-Kantian metaphysics and the domains of "finite cognition." I pass over the
masterful Chapter Two account of Hegel's critique of the metaphysics of both the classical rationalists
and Kant himself. In Chapter Three Bowman examines Pippin's idealist reading and McDowell's more
realist interpretation, and offers a characterization of Hegel's metaphysical position as one that is
fundamentally skeptical about finite objects. Drawing on Robert Stern's work, Bowman notes that Pippin's
claim that Hegel denies "any sense to a mind-world dichotomy" (109) renders untenable Pippin's view
that self-consciousness is central to Hegel's project. The problem is that Pippin sometimes characterizes
his Kantian view as anti-realist, and thus he seems to view Hegel's philosophy to be "an exploration
of how we as self-conscious cognizers must take the world to be, not how the world really is" (109). While
Bowman admits that many of Hegel's criticisms of Kant are compatible with the idea that Hegel is
completing Kant's project, he ultimately thinks that the distance between Kant's fundamentally
epistemological critical project and Hegel's metaphysical project is too great for Pippin's view to be
correct. Bowman partially endorses McDowell's more realist appraisal of Hegel, but claims that McDowell
only appreciates half of Hegel's position on finite objects, namely the epistemological side. What
McDowell doesn't appreciate is:
Hegel's metaphysical idealism: the position that the whole sphere of categorically constituted,
finite objectivity is both independent of finite cognizers and radically dependent on
an infinite ground that does not itself in turn fall under the categories, but is the activity of which
they are manifestations. (115)
Thus McDowell and Pippin are both guilty of focusing on the reality of "determinate objects," a focus that
"makes thought beholden to a class of objects that are finite, merely phenomenal, and hence ultimately
unreal" (124). Bowman takes this to imply that Hegel is "a radical skeptic" (126) about what we ordinarily
call knowledge. In Chapter Four Bowman applies this skeptical interpretation to Hegel's understanding of
nature, and argues "that even items such as Galileo's law of free fall do not fully count as knowledge in
the sense relevant for Hegel" (136). He emphasizes the transformational and revisionary aspects of
Hegel's approach, whereby we come to see the objects of natural science, and natural science itself, as
incapable of full justification on their own terms.
The interpretation really comes to a head in Chapter 5, where Bowman argues that Jacobi's criticism of
Spinoza could be seen as a serious criticism of Hegel's relational metaphysics as well (I am leaving out
here Bowman's strikingly original use of Hegel's views on geometry to stage the argument). He does an
excellent job of showing that Hegel's own sympathy with Jacobi's critique (that Spinozism leads to a
formalism of relations that implies fatalism and nihilism) risks making his own position internally
contradictory. While repeating much of Jacobi's critique, Hegel "himself espouses a metaphysics that is
explicitly committed to theabsolutely relational view of finite things" (159). Here is Bowman on Jacobi's
criticism and the Hegelian position that seems to be guilty of the very same sins as Spinozism:
Jacobi alleges that (1) the essential role of tautologies ("identical propositions") in demonstrative
reasoning, (2) the primacy of relations over intrinsic properties or qualities, and (3) the closely
related primacy of the whole over the parts (semantic and especially metaphysical holism) are
what entail fatalism and nihilism. And excepting (1), these are among the most striking features of
Hegel's own system, which I think is best understood as a version of metaphysical structural
realism. The very concept of the Concept is that of a complex of nested relations that are
absolutely prior to any (by definition finite) relata. The concept of absolute negativity is that of a
self-referring procedure or process that originates the elements through whose relations it
manifests itself, thereby also individuating itself as the singulare tantum it is. And the Hegelian
absolute . . . is by definition the whole, while the various individualities populating Hegelian
science are moments that can claim neither determinateness nor existence outside that whole.
(166-67)
To show how Hegel escapes Jacobi's critique, Bowman analyzes a long passage in which Hegel accuses
Jacobi of viewing mediation and holism only from the perspective of finitude, and thus of opposing
immediacy to mediation in a dogmatic way. The question then is how to save the finite things on the
absolute relationally view, for Hegel clearly sympathizes with Jacobi's complaint against Spinoza that
finite individuals fall out of a systematic rationalist view. Bowman thus insists that Hegel does find a
place for the finite:
Finite cognition is a constitutive moment of the (infinite) cognition of the Idea, and reference to
finite, self-external, non-absolute objects of knowledge is thus an ineliminable, albeit subordinate
and by nature evanescent moment of the Idea's self-cognition. . . . Its constitutive character is to
be vanishing, not to be nothing. (189)
It is this moment of finitude that enables Hegel to answer Jacobi's formalism charge and thus to escape
the charge of "acosmism" that he levels against Spinoza.
The penultimate chapter argues for an interpretation of Hegel's conception of logical content, which
Bowman views as the answer to the fundamental problems that Hegel diagnosed in Spinoza and Kant.
Bowman views as "strictly analogous" (201) the problems of how to account for the relation between
Kant's transcendental I and the sensible manifold, on the one hand, and for Spinoza's relation between
substance and the finite modes of cognition, on the other. To sort out these problems and Hegel's unitary
solution, Bowman has recourse to a scholastic and Cartesian distinction, namely the distinction between
formal and objective reality. With the help of this distinction he attempts to make intelligible Hegel's goal
of uniting substance and subject. In Bowman's reconstruction substance stands for the formal reality of a
mind-independent world and objective reality stands for the intentional content of a subject's
representation of objects. The discussion here is difficult but illuminating, as Bowman guides us through
the dialectic of these two kinds of reality in their relation to each other. Pausing to take stock and reorient
the reader, Bowman describes Hegel's "metaphysics of knowing" as follows:
One helpful way of looking at Hegelian speculative science is to see it as starting with a certain
analysis of the "logic" of knowing (i.e. the "dialectical" identity of formal and objective reality
presented above), and then positing it as a structure/dynamic absolutely prior to the subjective
acts of knowing that make up finite cognition. (214)
Bowman thus aims to account for the reflexive dimension of Hegelian metaphysics, the way in which it
has to account for its own possibility as a form of knowing. The language of positing is also central in the
following conclusion: "all reality ("the true," "the absolute") depends on the emergence of a difference
between formal and objective reality such that formal reality exists just to the extent that it is posited in
and through its objective reality, in other words as an object of knowing" (218-19). The Hegel that
emerges on this reading thus clearly subscribes to idealism, though a "non-psychological" idealism that is
compatible with metaphysical structural realism.
I turn now to raise some questions about the argument. Bowman is surely right to identify negativity as
the central figure in Hegel's thought, but there is reason to doubt that absolute negativity is an
autonomous negation that constitutes an ultimate active ground. This is a complex issue, yet the
potential problem is clear enough from Hegel's statement about first principles in the famous Preface to
the Phenomenology of Spirit. As autonomous, it seems that absolute negativity is supposed to be a first
principle, a ground from which everything else flows. Yet Hegel's holism means that he is opposed to all
first principles:
It is only as a system that knowledge is actual and can be presented as science; and that any
further so-called fundamental proposition or first principle of philosophy, if it is true, is for this
reason alone also false just because it is a fundamental proposition or a principle. [3]
The absolute negativity of reflection may well be Hegel's primary methodological tool, but as such a tool
it does not seem to be autonomous in the sense of floating free from affirmation. As a principle of
mediation, absolute negativity's main function is to turn immediate affirmations into more
determinate affirmations.
Part of the point of Hegelian negation is the duality of the finite and infinite, the way in which they are
two sides of a single coin. Bowman thus seems to go too far in demoting the status of finite objects and
finite cognition when he writes that Hegel's position is "maximally strong version of skepticism" (102)
about knowledge of finite objects and that this is an "unmitigated skepticism" (128). It seems essential to
Hegel's view that his skepticism is moderate and indeed highly mitigated. The bulk of his writings
concern finite objects and finite cognition, and the arrival at the "Absolute Idea," when according to
Bowman we finally get beyond finite cognition, consists mainly of a discussion of the method by which
the forms of finite cognition have been interpreted to form a systematic whole.
Bowman's more detailed descriptions of his position on the finite show a more balanced view, for he
argues that the finite is transformed in our speculative knowledge of it (42). So the finite can be known
and does find a place within Hegel's ultimate account of reality, but the finite loses the immediacy and
independence that we naively attribute to it. The most direct admission of the positive role of the finite
comes in his answer to Jacobi's charge that relational metaphysics loses all grasp of the finite. In that
context, Bowman writes, "the perennial recurrence of a self-external, finite content . . . cannot vanish lest
the foundation crumble on which the higher-level self-relation of philosophical cognition is built" (189).
This seems basically right to me, except that it is rather confusing to call the finite the foundation of
cognition, especially after calling Hegel a radical skeptic of the finite. The view of the finite as the
"vanishing" also doesn't seem to capture the sense in which finite individuals can themselves be selfrelating and therefore simultaneously infinite in Hegel's sense.
A further concern, closely related to the previous two, is that Bowman's account is oriented too much by
Hegel's "Doctrine of Essence," and not enough by his "Doctrine of the Concept." There is reason to think
that the discussion of negativity at the beginning of "Doctrine of Essence," the torturous section that is
the basis of Henrich's view, is itself an abstraction from the genuinely reality-defining treatment of
cognition and objectivity in the "Doctrine of the Concept." In the latter Hegel gives an account of forms of
judgment followed by an account of forms of inference. The judgment-inference relation is perhaps the
key to making sense of how the infinite (the inference as the form of reason) is built on the "foundation"
of the finite (the judgment as the form of the understanding). [4] I also worry that by introducing formal
and objective reality, and putting so much weight on metaphysical necessitation, Bowman has confined
himself too much to concepts from the final section of the "Doctrine of Essence," at the expense of
dealing more fully not only with the inference, but with mechanism, teleology and life. The latter two
topics in particular would have helped show (along with the critical discussion of the geometric method)
how much Hegel departs in the end from Spinoza's rationalism.
Bowman certainly does make a good case for Hegel's difference from Spinoza, but it is one that raises a
number of further questions about the nature of Hegel's view. Answering the question of how Hegel
reconceived the problematic relation in Spinoza of substance and its attributes, Bowman writes,
On the Hegelian conception, by contrast, the original determinateness of substance just is the
existence of the intellect that finds itself outside (infinite) substance and therefore finite: in Hegel's
technical terms, the determinateness of substance is identical to the existence of
the understanding or finite cognition. (221)
The claim that the being (i.e., the "determinateness") of substance is finite cognition itself could be read
as overcoming the very project of metaphysics rather than as an argument for metaphysics. It could be
reformulated as the claim that the real is just what it can be known to be through finite cognition.
Perhaps one could make the case that only a metaphysical argument could get us to this claim about the
original determinacy of substance, but then I start wondering whether the self-negating character of such
an argument (practice metaphysics in order to undermine the metaphysical separation of being and
finite thought) is compatible with the kind of robust metaphysics that Bowman aims to establish. There is
a different sense of metaphysics that would align it closely with semantics, a sense in which metaphysics
is about ultimate intelligibility or sense-making. There are many points in Bowman's book where he does
seem to align Hegel with this rather moderate understanding of metaphysics, which would be fine,
except that such an understanding of Hegel is extremely close to Pippin's supposedly contrary Kantian
view that conditions of intelligibility are the conditions of objectivity.
The proximity of the Hegelian metaphysics that Bowman defends to the Kantian view can also be made
out through comparing the position to that of Fichte's Jena Wissenschaftslehre. There are several points
where Bowman acknowledges the tight relation of Fichte's and Hegel's projects (3, 46, 189, 226), though
he also notes several key differences. The project of a "metaphysics of knowing," in which one gives a
logic of knowing and then posits that logic as the basis of the real (see Bowman's description quoted
above from p. 214), seems quiteFichtean to me. Of course Hegel aimed to remove the
lingering psychologistic element from Fichte's view, thus giving the dialectic of thinking a more purely
conceptual expression, one that didn't have to insist on the priority of the subject against the real. Hegel
stressed that his negation is immanent rather than external, and he aimed to integrate thought within
nature by demonstrating nature's intelligibility, but Hegel's project still seems to be a closer cousin to
Fichte's than to anyone else's. This affinity would be even more pronounced if Bowman had tried to
account for the role of the practical at the end of Hegel's Science of Logic. Fichte ultimately relied on
practical grounds for overcoming Spinoza's metaphysics, and though Hegel thought that a more
immanent critique was possible, he too had recourse to the practical as essential to his very method.
But any well-focused book on Hegel has to leave many topics out of consideration. It is a mark of
Bowman's achievement that one finishes his dense, challenging book wanting to read more. [5]
[1] G.W.F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, translated by Terry Pinkard, 20. Gesammelte Werke(GW),
edited by the Academy of Sciences of Nordrhein-Westfalia (Hamburg: Meiner 1968- ), Vol. 9, p. 19.
[2] Robert Pippin, Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-consciousness. Cambridge: Cambridge
question of what makes non-finite objects rational: "the infinite in them is not the empty abstraction from
the finite, is not a universality which is void of content and determination, but is the fulfilled universality .
. . Only in this way does reason rise above the finite, the conditioned, the sensuous, or however one
might define it, and is in this negativity essentially replete with content, for as unity it is the unity of
determinate extremes. And so the rational is nothing but the inference [Schlu]." G.W.F. Hegel, The
Science of Logic, translated by George di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, p.
589. GW 12, p. 91 (translation altered). Bowman comes close to thematizing Hegel's version of the
judgment-inference difference in a discussion of the "speculative sentence" (251-54).
[5] I would like to thank Yitzhak Melamed for helpful comments on a draft of this review.
Los lectores de Hegel, especialmente los que no se contenta con permanecer dentro de
su propio vocabulario, han luchado durante mucho tiempo con la forma de dar sentido a
la actividad que l atribuye a trminos tales como "esencia", "espritu", y el "Concepto".
He aqu un ejemplo prominente de uso de Hegel de un trmino tan activa: "La verdad es
el todo Sin embargo, el conjunto es slo la esencia completarse a travs de su propio
desarrollo.". [1] Hegel no exactamente tmido lejos de usar trminos teolgicos , por lo
que es una forma natural de leer las actividades como el funcionamiento de una mente
divina neoplatnica (la propia necesidad de capitalizar Concepto para marcar su
singularidad sugiere un sper agente en el trabajo detrs de nuestros conceptos
ordinarios). Un punto de inflexin en contra de tales interpretaciones vino con el
idealismo de Robert Pippin Hegel, [2], que puso a la vanguardia de la dimensin
kantiana de la filosofa terica de Hegel y abri un camino a la lectura de los verbos
activos de Hegel como parte de una lgica en la que el carcter incompleto de un cierto
trascendental de Kant y el colector sensible, por una parte, y por la relacin de Spinoza
entre sustancia y los modos finitos de la cognicin, por el otro. Para resolver estos
problemas y una solucin unitaria de Hegel, Bowman recurre a una distincin
escolstica y cartesiana, a saber, la distincin entre la realidad formal y objetiva. Con la
ayuda de esta distincin que intenta hacer inteligible objetivo de Hegel de unir a la
sustancia y el sujeto. En sustancia reconstruccin de Bowman representa la realidad
formal de un mundo independiente de la mente y la realidad objetiva representa el
contenido intencional de la representacin de un tema de los objetos. La discusin aqu
es difcil, pero esclarecedor, ya que nos gua Bowman a travs de la dialctica de estas
dos clases de realidad en su relacin con los dems. Haciendo una pausa para hacer un
balance y reorientar el lector, Bowman describe Hegel "metafsica del conocimiento" de
la siguiente manera:
Una forma til de ver la ciencia especulativa hegeliana es ver como a partir de un
cierto anlisis de la "lgica" de saber (es decir, la identidad "dialctica" de la
realidad formal y objetiva presentada anteriormente), y luego postular como una
estructura / dinmica absolutamente antes de los actos subjetivos de conocimiento
que conforman la cognicin finito. (214)
Por lo tanto Bowman pretende dar cuenta de la dimensin reflexiva de la metafsica
hegeliana, la forma en la que se tiene que dar cuenta de su propia posibilidad como una
forma de saberlo. El lenguaje de la postulacin es tambin central en la siguiente
conclusin: "toda la realidad (" la verdadera "," lo absoluto ") depende de la aparicin
de una diferencia entre la realidad formal y objetiva de tal manera que existe realidad
formal solo en la medida en que es postulada en ya travs de su realidad objetiva, es
decir, como objeto de conocimiento "(218-19). El Hegel que emerge en esta lectura as
claramente se suscribe al idealismo, aunque un idealismo "no-psicolgica" que es
compatible con el realismo metafsico estructural.
Paso ahora a plantear algunas preguntas sobre el argumento. Bowman es seguramente la
derecha para identificar la negatividad como la figura central en el pensamiento de
Hegel, pero no hay razn para dudar de que la negatividad absoluta es una negacin
autnoma que constituye un suelo activo final. Este es un tema complejo, sin embargo,
el problema potencial es lo suficientemente claro en la declaracin de Hegel sobre los
primeros principios en el famoso prefacio a la Fenomenologa del Espritu. Como
autnoma, parece que la negatividad absoluta se supone que es un primer principio, la
tierra de la cual fluye todo lo dems. Sin embargo, el holismo hegeliano significa que l
se opone a todos los primeros principios:
Es slo como un sistema que el conocimiento es real y puede ser presentado
como la ciencia; y que cualquier llamada proposicin fundamental o primer
principio de la filosofa an ms por lo que, si es cierto, es por esta razn
tambin es falso slo porque se trata de una proposicin fundamental o un
principio. [3]
La negatividad absoluta de reflexin tambin puede ser instrumento metodolgico
principal de Hegel, sino como una herramienta de este tipo no parece ser autnomo en
el sentido de la libre flotacin de la afirmacin. Como principio de la mediacin, la
funcin principal de la negatividad absoluta es convertir afirmaciones inmediatas en
ms afirmaciones determinadas.
edited by the Academy of Sciences of Nordrhein-Westfalia (Hamburg: Meiner 1968- ), Vol. 9, p. 19.
[2] Robert Pippin, Hegel's Idealism: The Satisfactions of Self-consciousness. Cambridge: Cambridge
question of what makes non-finite objects rational: "the infinite in them is not the empty abstraction from
the finite, is not a universality which is void of content and determination, but is the fulfilled universality .
. . Only in this way does reason rise above the finite, the conditioned, the sensuous, or however one
might define it, and is in this negativity essentially replete with content, for as unity it is the unity of
determinate extremes. And so the rational is nothing but the inference [Schlu]." G.W.F. Hegel, The
Science of Logic, translated by George di Giovanni. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2010, p.
589. GW 12, p. 91 (translation altered). Bowman comes close to thematizing Hegel's version of the
judgment-inference difference in a discussion of the "speculative sentence" (251-54).
[5] I would like to thank Yitzhak Melamed for helpful comments on a draft of this review.