9 - Results

Summary

If the reading given in the previous four chapters is right, we can say that Hegel takes himself to have established two main claims. First, he takes himself to have shown, negatively, that no general account of theoretical or practical reason is possible. Such an account would begin, in the theoretical case, with the bare idea of an objective account of the world, freed of any contribution by us as inquiring agents or, in the practical case, from the bare idea of an agent pursuing something that the agent claims to be of value, freed of any constraint imposed by the world. In similar fashion, Hegel argues that these bare conceptions will fall short of anything we would recognize as a determinate claim of knowledge or of value. Anything we would recognize as a justified theoretical or practical claim, Hegel takes himself to have shown, must take place within an existing context of norms of belief and of action. Reasoning, then, is culturally and historically constrained.

Second, Hegel takes himself to have shown that the fact of cultural constraint implies a philosophical problem about how anything can be justified at all. Here Hegel argues that the problem can neither be solved directly nor simply dismissed, because it arises from the collision of two irreducible features of our lives: first, our nature as free and rational beings who have the power and right to question any norm; and second, our nature as cultural and historical beings who think and act within a context of norms that have been imposed upon us.