REDDING, P. Hegels Hermeneutics. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996.

INTRODUCTION: Hegel, Hermeneutics, and the Copernical Revolution in Philosophy

1 Kant [...] encountered a major obstacle because he lacked a way of thinking of
intentional human subjects objectively. Hegel overcame this obstacle and advanced this project
of transformation because he was able to borrow from an emerging style of thinking about such
subjects -- hermeneutics.
3 my simple thesis -- that of Hegels successful continuation of the Copernican turn
initiated by Kants critical philosophy and the role of hermeneutic thought in this continuation.
Kant and the Beginnings of Philosophical Copernicanism
Scientific Copernicanism: The Problematization of Viewpoint and the Redescription of Experience
Copernical Philosophy and the Post-Kantian Trajectory
Copernican Philosophy and Hermeneutics
16 Focusing on the relations between the post-Kantian and hermeneutic dimensions of
Hegels logic and system allows one to raise the question of the epistemological consequences
of his philosophical position and his relation to contemporary hermeneuticism. The double action
of recognition is in essence Hegels answer to the puzzle set by Fichte concerning the nature of
self-constituting subjectivity. Recognition is not an act that is simply the act of a pre-existing
subject. In being an act that constitutes the other in a determinate way, and in being by necessity
reciprocal, it is an act that simultaneously constitutes the agent as such.
17 The role of recognition in its various forms in the constitution of knowing and acting
subjects is seen most cleatly in the Realphilosophie of Hegels encyclopaedic system, in
particular in the philosophy of objective spirit developed most fully in the Philosophy of Right.
But it is precisely the systematic links between this work and the Logic that allow Hegel to
negotiate many of the traps that lie in wait for the more historicist approaches to philosophy that
have come into existence since the nineteenth century. It is the hermeneutic reading of the Logic
which allows us to understand the systematic connections between it and the Philosophy of Right
and to appreciate Hegels profound relevance for many of the most recent debated found in
social and moral philosophy.
CHAPTER 1: Science, Theology, and the Subject in Modern Philosophy
Descartess Response to Perspectivity: Divine and Scientific Knowledge
The Ambiguity of Kants Response to Perspectivity: Non theocentric Epistemology and Theocentric
Ontology
24 And it is significant here that both hermeneutic thought and Hegels philosophy
emerged against a background of a type of heterodox religious thought that challenged the very
idea of God implicit in the theocentric picture -- the culture of pantheism.
The Immanentist Tradition 1: Nicholas of Cusa
The Immanentist Tradition 2: Spinoza
Hegel, Leibniz, and the Limits of Spinozistic Pantheism
32 As I will argue, [Hegel] was to break with sucha monistic metaphysics by transforming
it from within with an innovative hermeneutic reading of Schellings own identity philosophy.
33 For Hegel, the individual substance or monad is one, a negative reflected into itself;
the totality of the content of the world but also something particular and determinate such that
the determinatedness falls in the particular content and the way and manner of its manifestation
(SL, 539; W, 6:198).
The monads will have to be conceived in such a way that rather than being simply
externally determined as harmonizing, they somehow collectively achieve a harmony among
themself. Such a way beyond both Spinoza and Libniz Hegel saw as the task of his own
philosophy.
CHAPTER 2: The Pathways of Hermeneutic Philosophy
Pantheism and Hermeneutics

 38 Significantly, as has been noted by Frederick Beiser, Herders notion of empathy was
first developed in a discussion of the nature of literary criticism and only then generalized to
historical understanding: Just as the critic must judge a work according to the purpose of the
author, so the historian must understand an action according to the intention of the agent. He
must know not only the causes of the action (the conditions that make it necessary according to
natural laws), byt also the reasons for it (the values and beliefs that justify it in the eyes of the
agent himself).
Romanticism, Language, and Subjectivity
Later Hermeneutics and Its View of Hegel
44 And, Heidegger suggests, the same must also apply to historical knowledge:
Historians must understand the past on the basis of their understanding of the present. [ITALO:
ESTAMOS SEMPRE NO FIM DA HISTRIA]
46 Complete difference and complete identity of horizons must represent the limits where
dialogue must cease. At one end of this continuum stretching between the absolutes of identity
and difference, there would be loss of communicative contact as no topic of common concern
could be found. At the other, dialogue becomes collective monologue with the I and the thou
collapsing into a we.
49 The dialectical progress of the Phenomenology of Mind is perhaps determined by
nothing so much as by the problem of the recognition of the Thou (TM, 343).
CHAPTER 3: Hegels Early Schellingnianism
From Fichte to Schellings Identity Philosophy
51 With this notion [the transcendental subject of apperception] Kant had claimed that the
knowing subjects relation to known objects was dependent on a certain relation of that subject to
itself -- that consciousness was dependent on self-consciousness. But the nature of this selfrelation was far from clear.
52 Like Cusanuss Neoplatonic One, the I must be regarded as in some sense
coextensive with the world rather than a part of it: its unity is a precondition of that coherent
diversity of singular things found within the objective world.
Hegels Schellingian Critique of Fichte
53 Hegels criticism of Fichte centers on the idea that while the transcendental identity of
subject and object is the principle of Fichtes philosophy, this identity is not displayed (aufgezeigt)
or constructed (konstruiert) in his system (D, 122, 126; W, 1:56, 61). Rather, the unity of subject
and object is only postulated (postuliert).
54 Fir Dieter Henrich, Fichtes original insight concerns the critique traditional ways of
conceiving of self-consciousness in which the selfs knowledge of itself is conceived on the model
of its knowledge of any other thing. Fichtes point, however, is that the I should not be considered
a thing at all. It rather is and act, in Fichtes neologism, a Tathandlung.1
ITALO: Fichtes basic principles: Identity of the I with itself, opposing of the I to the posited
object of consciousness (the non-I), and the synthesis of these acts of identity and opposing.
55 Hegel criticizes Fichtes deduction by appealing to a criterion of completeness that
Fichte had himself specified in Concerning the Concept of the Wissenschaftslehre -- the circular
principle that the very principle from which we began is at the same time our final result.
According to Hegel, The result of the system does not return to its beginning (D, 132; W, 2:68).
57 This was a major shortcoming of both the theoretical and practical sides of Fichtes
system. One could only conceive of another in an objective presentation, as a mere object, not
as a Subject-Object.
The Coincidence, or Indifference, of Opposites in Schellings Constructed Line
The Perspectival Character of Potences
61 Schelling stresses that we should not think of the absolute as actually passing over
into other beings by means of dividion or separation. Rather, since the one being is indivisible,
1 The analogy here is with the word for fact -- Tatsache. The thing-like connotations of Sache being eliminated
with the use of the word for act, Handlung.

diversity among things is only possible to the extent that this indivisible whole is posited under
various determinations. I call these determinations potences.
62 When observing nature, history or art, for example, our objects should not be seen as
distincs things or ontologically distincs realms. Rather, in all these contexts we are observing the
same absolute under some particular set of ideal determinations found within it.
Potences are real inasmuch as they imply the existence of structures of ideal
determinations from which they will appear as real to some form of cognizing subjects who
themselves have to be thought of as within this structure.
63 that which is truly thought by philosophy is always the same -- it is the absolute. This
means that genuine philosophical doctrines will always have a single content, but will express
that content in forms that reflect the particular finite conditions under which those doctrines had
been articulated.
64 But more than this would seem to be implied in that the recognition must be reciprocal
-- it would seem that this all could take place only if the other standpoint adopted the same
attitude towards us!
We might crudely list some of the aspects of the philosophical position of the early
Schelling crucial for understanding Hegels development.
First, there were those critical epistemological consequences of pantheist
ontology: the rejection of a dualism and the claim of the essentially embodied and hence
perspectival character of consciousness;
the critique of Kantian Verstand as grounded in such a perspectivally
limited consciousness;
and the critique of any theistic support for the concept of knowledge found
in scientific or transcendental realism with its notion of an extra-worldly Gods-eye view.
Recognition and the Constructed Line: Hegels Early Analysis of Ethical Life
65 Hegels formula is now that of the unity of concept and intuition in the Idea.
66 The organism is itself capable of being understood in terms of the opposed poles of
body and soul with the principle of their indifference, the unity of body and soul. In such a schema
we cannot think of body and soul as different substances joined together in the organism; it is
truine whole, not a composite one. [...] The organism, via the primitive representational capacities
of its soul in sensation, starts to transform the real into the ideal, such a process reaching its
zenith in humans, [...].
ITALO: Razo como ponto de encontro do real e do ideal, filosofia da natureza e
idealismo transcendental.
68 the point of view from which an intelligence is recognized as such is that of another
intelligent being of the same kind, a result anticipating the role accorded to recognition in the
Phenomenology of Spirit.
70 Speech is the middle term of intelligence recognizing intelligence, which is itself
absolute ideality. Thus we must not think of speech here as an accident of an intelligent subject.
As a potence, intelligence only exists inasmuch as it is recognized, and speech is the medium,
the middle term, of this recognition.
CHAPTER 4: The Revolutionary Philosophical Form of Hegels Phenomenology of Spirit
Philosophy and Everyday Consciousness in Hegels Essay on Skepticism (no li)
The Phenomenological Drama and Its Audience
81 In fact, this separation between the objective gaze of the philosophical subject (here
the we) and the contextualized and particular outlooks of those forms of consciousness
observed is central to the whole question of Hegels phenomenological method. Just as the
progress of an observed drama cannot be affected from the position of the audience, so neither
is the progress of natural consciousness in the Phenomenology to be affected by the
contributions of the phenomenological we. We are meant merely to contemplate the action
without the need to import criteria, or to make use of our own bright ideas and thoughts during
the course of the inquiry (PS, 84, W, 3:77). That we do not need to import criteria here is an
aspect of the fact that we understand the actions of the character on stage, for to understand an

action involves recognizing what it aims at, that is, recognizing what would count as success
even if the action fails. [...]
82 As these two aspects of the action, the criterion and what is to be tested, are present
in consciousness itself, that is, manifested in this conscious egos actions, natural consciousness
will itself be able to carry out its own assessment of its progress and so all that is left for us to do
is simply to look on (PS, 85; W, 3:77).
The doubleness of consciousness demanded of the dramatic persona of the
Phenomenology is demanded of the spectator as well.
83 And so what we have at the start of the Phenomenology is a depiction of a living
character, but one pared down to barely recognizable abstracted aspects of a life. It is this that
gives the early drama a somewhat Beckettian flavor: we picture consciousness as alone onstage
(perhaps as simply an almost disembodied pair of speaking lips) thinking aloud, trying to capture
the certainty of the this and the here -- those immediately presented sense contents that this
attitude accepts as reality. Later the drama becomes rather more conventional; the scenery
becomes more and more filled out; our protagonist interacts with others; eventually the stage is
thronged, as whole forms of live and momentous historical events are depicted. But at first there
is just this apparently isolated character, perhaps analogous to Descartes's famous depiction of
himself alone in his room, determined to get where he is going under his own steam, freed from
the interferences of opinions of others and of the world outside the room.
Sense-Certainty: Certainty of the This
83 The overall progression here is from its taking as this truth that which is most
immediately present to sense to that which is initially absent from it but reached by reasoning.
This is the progression from sense-certainty through perception to understanding. At the end of
these three scenes consciousness comes to recognize in a moment of anagnoritic insight
something that we in the audience (with the help of Hegel) had been able to observe all along:
while consciousness, in its various shapes, had taken itself as a passive contemplator of things
given, it had, in fact, been actively involved all along in the constitution of those things. Once this
myth of the given is dispelled, consciousness now becomes self-consciousness, reinterprets
the nature of his quest, and begins again.
86 Sense-certaintys attempts to specify its object turns that object from something
immediately acessible only to a unique consciousness into something conceivable from a wholly
universal point of view. From Hegels choice of words here this is obviously no minor thing:
language has the divine nature of directly reversing [verkehren] the meaning of what is said, of
making it into something else (PS, 110; W, 3:92).
Perception
87 In sense-certainty