A quote from Terry Pinkard’s ‘Does History Make Sense?: Hegel on the historical shapes of justice?’ pp.7-8

Substance and Subject Link to heading

Here is one way of starting. We are natural animals, but there is a way in which we are different from other animals. One way of thinking about that is to claim or try to demonstrate that there is something very “un-animal” about the stuff out of which we are constituted. That is not Hegel’s way. For him, there is a line that runs from nature to fully minded agents, but it is not a line that runs from the animal to the nonanimal but rather from animals with a certain type of self-relation to animals with a very different self-relation. Something like that thought is behind his summary statement in the Phenomenology that “everything hangs on apprehending and expressing the true not just as substance but also equally as subject.”¹ Or, as we might alternately put it, if Hegel is right about the importance of that statement, then everything about what we say about Hegel hangs on what we take Hegel to mean by that assertion. Let us start with the view that Hegel’s statement about substance and subject is the key to his idealism. At first, let us simply lay out some of the basic commitments and come back to their interpretation and defense later.

One of the oldest interpretations of Hegel’s thought takes his idealism to consist rather straightforwardly in the claim that only spiritual (or perhaps mental) things are real, and that the supposedly nonspiritual world of interstellar gases, stars, and the more mundane supposedly nonspiritual world of rocks, plants, and animals is an unreal or untrue manifestation of that deeper spiritual reality—or, on another version of the same view, it holds that there must be some singular big Mind that constructs objects out of its own experiences but that those objects remain only spiritual constructions, even if they appear (untruly) as physical. This is the most common view of Hegel’s idealism: It is supposed to be a monistic metaphysics of Geist, i.e., of “spirit” or “mind.”² Mind is not a feature of nature so much as nature is supposed to be a manifestation of a more basic spiritual order of the world.

Although it is always tempting to assimilate Hegel’s idealism to one of these other, more familiar forms of idealism, it is also misleading. One of Hegel’s favorite analogies—which pops up in all the various places where he remarks that animals are true idealists—is in an indication that his is not an idealism that declares everything to be ultimately mental. Animals do not, he notes, take food to be untrue or merely one-sided phenomenal appearances of an underlying mental reality. Rather, as he puts it, they confront the things that show up to them as food and “without any further ado, they simply help themselves to them and devour them.”³ Animals do not, that is, construct the objects of their world out of their mental experiences. To animals with the requisite sensory apparatus, things “show up” as food because of the purposes the animal brings to bear on its environment by virtue of being the kind of animal it is. Lettuce shows up for rabbits as food because of the kind of creatures rabbits are, just as rabbits show up as food for foxes because of the kinds of creatures foxes are.⁴ What “shows up” to an animal as salient in its world depends on the species interests it brings to bear on that world. Food can “show up” only to creatures with the proper organic makeup and the appropriate nervous systems, but nothing shows up to an iron spike. However—and it is here that Hegel’s genuine idealism starts to come into view—for self-conscious creatures, very different things can “show up” in experience, for example, states, constitutions, divinities, artworks, and ethical requirements.⁵

We can put the first provisional formulation of Hegel’s idealism in this way: It is a view that the way the world shows up for living creatures depends on the nature of the creature and that the world “shows up” for creatures with a capacity for self-consciousness in a way that it cannot for non-self-conscious creatures. Put in this way, it is not the thesis that the mind creates the world or that what is really fundamental or more basically real are mental things, nor is it the idea the world is inherently spiritual and not material, nor is it the idea that subjects “construct” (either socially or individually) these kinds of things, nor finally that subjects impose conceptual meaning on some kind of distinct and neutral sensible information. The world is not dependent on us for its existence or its structure, but what “shows up” as salient in our world is a function of our species interests as the beings we are.

There is a second way of stating Hegel’s idealism that augments the first one, which has to do with the way things show up to thinking creatures. It holds that not only are there items which can only be entertained in thought—although the infinitely large and the infinitely small are not perceptible they are thinkable—there is also nothing in the world that is in principle unavailable for conceptual thought. There is no reason to think, for example, that there are items which can be felt or grasped in some deep emotional state but not thought. A corollary to this is that for Hegel’s idealism, the world taken as a whole—the “totality” of such things—is only available to thought and not to intuition. We can think of the infinite, we can imagine it, but we cannot see it. Because of this capacity for comprehending the world that goes beyond the more direct deliverances of experience, things can show up for humans in a way that they cannot for non-self-conscious creatures. As such self-conscious creatures, we become capable of wondering whether the way things show up for us is the way things really are. This capacity for self-conscious thought—and, in Hegel’s language, for entertaining the “universal”—is the determining feature of our species life. That also means that our species life is also characterized by a profound unease with itself, another corollary of Hegel’s idealism but which requires a different argument. This is a feature of our type of self-relation, not an indication that we are made of different stuff than other natural things.

Nonetheless, even if Hegel’s idealism is not, after all, a monistic metaphysics of spirituality, it is still metaphysics.⁶ What kind?