This thesis examines Hegel’s response to representationalism in the Phenomenology of Spirit. It analyses four key chapters and argues that Hegel approaches this issue from two distinct perspectives. From the first perspective, Hegel develops an internal critique of representationalism that shows it to be self-undermining. From the second perspective, Hegel claims that what appears from the first perspective as representational knowledge of a mind-independent object can be understood as a form of self-knowledge, whereby spirit knows itself. In this way, Hegel’s argument reinscribes the appearance of representational knowledge into an anti-representational theory. The thesis begins by demonstrating how Hegel takes up this issue in his discussion of Kant’s philosophy. Hegel finds in Kant’s Critical Philosophy an identity of subject and object that is implicitly anti-representational, but he criticises Kant for articulating this identity in a way that reinstates representationalism at the level of philosophical analysis. Chapter two shows how Hegel begins to develop a response to this issue in the introduction to the Phenomenology. While the representationalist perspective corresponds to the standpoint of ‘consciousness’, Hegel’s anti-representational redescription of that standpoint is articulated from the point of view of Hegel’s ‘phenomenological observers’. Although this interpretation of the role of the phenomenological observers is at odds with much recent scholarship, which tends to assign it a more minimal role, it is argued that there is ample textual and philosophical support for this reading. Chapters three and four analyse Hegel’s deployment of this two-sided approach in ‘Sense-Certainty’, ‘Perception’ and ‘Force and the Understanding’. Chapter five develops an interpretation of the under-explored ‘Observing Reason’ section of the Phenomenology. It argues that Hegel’s anti-representationalism is compatible with his realist attitude to the natural world, for two reasons: firstly, nature and consciousness share an underlying logical structure; and secondly, although nature possesses an existence independent of consciousness, that independence is overcome by consciousness in its engagement with the world. As such, Hegel’s anti-representationalism is as much a practical achievement as a theoretical fact.
German Idealism, Philosophy, Hegel, Epistemology, Ontolology, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Mind
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