Hegel’s Views on Language (2006)

Section 2 of Chapter 4 (“Language, Reflection, and the Beginning of the Logic”) of Stephen Houlgate’s The Opening of Hegel’s Logic (2006).

Gadamer accepts that Hegel acknowledges a connection between thought and language. But he believes that for Hegel language is nothing more than “a self-effacing and temporary medium of thought or merely its casing.” For Gadamer himself, by contrast, language is the permanent “abode” of thought and infuses thought through and through. ^[1] [2]

The first thing to be said in response to these charges is that Hegel is fully aware that all thought is indeed linguistic. Thought is not reducible to language: thought is understanding and reasoning — consciousness of the nature or form of what there is and of what follows therefrom — whereas language is the system of signs in which such understanding is articulated. But Hegel insists that we can think and understand only in language. Language is no more a merely temporary “casing” for thought in Hegel’s view than it is in Gadamer’s, but it is the very abode of thought. We can form mental images of visible things without explicitly employing words, but we can frame thoughts — and so become conscious of what is not evident to our senses (such as the form or causes of things) — only through the explicit use of words. “It is in names that we think,” Hegel says. ^[3] This is because it is only through words that our thoughts come to be something objective and determinate for us. Thoughts cannot be pictured or felt but need to be named and explained if they are to become something definite.

We only know our thoughts, only have definite, actual thoughts, when we give them the form of objectivity, of a being distinct from our inwardness, and therefore the shape of externality, and of an externality, too, that at the same time bears the stamp of the highest inwardness. The articulated sound, the word, is alone such an inward externality. ^[4]

This is not to deny that thoughts can also be given inadequate articulation in language. “Language,” Hegel maintains, “is exposed to the fate of serving just as much to conceal as to reveal human thoughts.” ^[5] We do not, however, judge that a thought has been inadequately articulated by comparing what we say with some putative perfectly formed thought residing “behind” language in the inner depths of our mind (as we might compare our verbal description of someone with our mental image of him). We can justify such a judgment only by giving more adequate articulation to the thought concerned in words.

This is how we are to understand the relation between Hegel’s account of the categories in his Logic and our ordinary understanding of those categories as it finds expression in everyday language. Hegel maintains that “the forms of thought [or categories] are, in the first instance, displayed and stored in human language”; ^[6] they are given expression in the things we say, such as “this leaf is green.” ^[7] In ordinary discourse, however, categories such as “being,” “quantity,” and “cause” are often employed without a full understanding of all they imply. The role of the Logic, as we have seen, is to bring us to a full understanding of such categories by drawing out their immanent implications. This immanent exposition of the true structure of our categories cannot, however, bypass language. Rather, it will use language to give us a more precise and more developed grasp of the categories than we ordinarily employ in our discourse.

Indeed, Hegel’s exposition will use the resources of ordinary language itself to take us beyond our ordinary understanding of the categories. For Hegel, of course, this means that it will use the resources of everyday German. Not only is German Hegel’s native tongue, but it is also particularly suited, in his view, to articulating the true, speculative character of the categories. This is because (so Hegel believes) more categories find explicit expression in German as ordinary nouns and verbs (such as Maß or sein) than in many other languages and also because German is endowed with a distinctive “speculative spirit.” “Some of its words,” Hegel writes, “possess the … peculiarity of having not only different but opposite meanings,” ^[8] [9] and as we saw in chapter 3, speculative reason is reason that comprehends “the unity of the determinations [such as being and nothing] in their opposition.” ^[10] Speculative philosophy thus does not need to adopt a specialized, technical vocabulary (though it can, and does, employ non-German words, such as Reflexion), but can exploit the resonances of everyday German words. ^[11]

In fact, Hegel thinks that only in this way can philosophy avoid alienating its students and be understood as clarifying and extending their own understanding: “when they are expressed in one’s own language (for example, Bestimmtheit instead of Determination, Wesen instead of Essenz, etc.), it is immediately apparent to consciousness that these concepts are its ownmost — that with which it is always concerned and not something alien.” ^[12] A philosophy written in the vernacular can thereby become the property of a people as a whole and be seen as the public enterprise of self-clarification in which the participants find freedom in being released to the true implications of their own thoughts, rather than being subordinated to the dictates of an alien intellectual authority. In choosing to use German vocabulary wherever possible, like Fichte before him and Heidegger after him, and to avoid the Latin terminology favored by Kant (and often Adorno), Hegel thus continues in the area of philosophy the work begun by Martin Luther, who enabled people to find truths about their own lives more easily in Christianity through his translation of the Bible into German. ^[13]

At this point, those who know Hegel’s work only through English translations may be forgiven a distinctly skeptical smile. Hegel uses ordinary vocabulary? Can that be true? Do Germans really go around talking about “determinateness” (Bestimmtheit) and “being in and for itself” (Anundfürsichsein)? Well, perhaps not precisely in the way Hegel does, but they do use related expressions in everyday speech. Ask a German if he or she thinks national reunification was a good thing, and you may hear in response “bestimmt” (“definitely”) or “an und für sich, schon” (“in principle, sure”). These are quite straightforward German expressions and do not simply indicate that the speakers spent too many illjudged hours in their youth wading through Hegel’s Logic. One should remember, therefore, that although Hegel’s vocabulary may seem strange to our ears when translated into English, he is deliberately using familiar German words and turns of phrase to articulate his speculative comprehension of the categories. He clarifies his aim in a famous letter to J. H. Voss written in 1805: “I may say of my endeavor that I wish to try to teach philosophy to speak German” — just as Luther had made the Bible speak German and Voss had done the same for Homer. ^[14]

There is no doubt that Hegel’s syntax is strange to ordinary speakers of German, but to the extent that Hegel employs a predominantly German vocabulary, Gadamer is right to claim that the German language “breathes life into Hegel’s philosophy.” ^[15] Where I disagree with Gadamer, however, is in his claim that Hegel — despite his intention to produce a purely logical account of the categories — in fact “conjures up” speculative truths out of German words and idioms and that the ordinary meanings of words thus play a significant role in determining how Hegel understands the categories and their development. ^[16] In my view, Hegel certainly exploits the resources of German in order to render his dialectical account of the categories as intelligible and as engaging to his audience as he can, but as I will try to show later in this study, his understanding of the categories themselves is determined solely by the way they are derived logically from the initial category of pure being, not by the ordinary meanings and associations of the words he uses. As Wolfgang Wieland puts it, “although the logic must always manifest itself in a given language, it is not therefore a mere function of this language.” ^[17] Hegel’s philosophy is clearer and more accessible in German than in English, but his arguments do not depend on peculiarities of the German language. It can consequently be translated into, or rewritten in, other languages than German.

Hegel’s claim is that the categories he sets out are derived from the sheer being of thought as such, not from the contingent qualities of any particular way of thinking or any specific language. This does not mean that people in all civilizations of the past or present necessarily employ all these categories or that every language has an appropriate expression for each category. Many categories may be latent in the understanding of certain cultures and not yet have become explicit categories of thought. If Hegel is right, however, all the categories set out in the Logic must at least be implicit in the understanding of everyone, and where a civilization does not employ a category that Hegel has derived, its members must, like Meno’s slave, be able to be brought to an explicit understanding of it. In such cases, new expressions may have to be coined in the relevant languages, and as a result, the speakers of those languages may find themselves less able to feel at home in Hegel’s Logic than speakers of German. But there is nothing in principle to prevent Hegel’s Logic from being translated into those other languages and to preclude the speakers of those languages following his arguments. In that sense, although the German language does “breathe through it,” Hegel’s philosophy is in principle universally intelligible.

The German language constitutes a historical presupposition of Hegel’s speculative philosophy since it forms part of the historical and cultural context that gave birth to that philosophy. It does not, however, constitute an ineliminable hermeneutic precondition of speculative philosophy since one does not have to speak German in order to understand that philosophy or to philosophize speculatively oneself (though Hegel’s Logic is certainly easier to read and understand, and — as it were — more homey, if one does speak German). Language as such, by contrast, is a necessary hermeneutic precondition of speculative philosophy insofar as all thought must occur in words. Moreover, since we do not just speak “language as such,” but rather one or more specific languages, the speculative philosopher must presuppose the vocabulary and idioms of at least one of those languages. Such a philosopher must also presuppose whatever “concepts of reflection,” such as identity (or sameness) and difference, may be operative in all languages. To this extent, then, Pfaff, Schelling, Feuerbach, and Gadamer are right: Hegel cannot begin his Logic without taking for granted and employing concepts that are only derived and justified later in the Logic.

Yet neither language as such nor any specific language constitutes the founding presupposition of speculative philosophy in the sense in which I have been using the term. This is because the ordinary meanings of the words and concepts that Hegel must presuppose and employ do not themselves determine the course of his derivation of categories from the thought of pure being. That is determined by the thought of pure being alone. Hegel’s Logic does not, therefore, fall into vicious circularity: he certainly uses words and concepts at the start of his account that are justified only later, but that process of justification is not determined in advance by those words and concepts. As Richard Winfield aptly puts it, language (and the concepts of reflection it entails) constitutes nothing more than the “enabling condition” of speculative philosophy: it makes it possible for us to do philosophy but does not predetermine, or set prior limits to, what we can think and understand. ^[18] For Gadamer’s Hegel (though not for Gadamer himself), pure thought develops autonomously apart from language and is then merely encased in words. For the Hegel I am presenting in this study, by contrast, pure thought develops autonomously in language and thanks to language. ^[19]