"Pointing at the moon is not the moon". This wise statement from Laṅkāvatāra Sūtra, an ancient Buddhist text, points out that language is not a substitute for direct experience (stated in language, ironically enough). We can refer to the truth of reality all we want, but ultimately it is right there in front of us, waiting to be experienced. This is an appealing metaphysics, as it grounds reality and our knowledge of it down here in the immediacy around me, not getting lost up there in abstractions. However, it is still natural to wonder: Is there something beyond what I directly sense, a mind-independent reality? Or is this all in my head? If it's all in my head, what is my head in? This candle, with its whiteness, softness and many other features, are those all just my representations of it, or is that what the candle really looks like? Why is science so successful? Is it because reality is composed of atoms and void, or are those just ideas by scientists that might be totally wrong? Those who wonder things like this may benefit from Hegel's dialectic on perception.
Background
Around Hegel's time, there were a few dominant views with respect to truth and perception in Western thought:
1) Empiricism (Hume), which argued that what is true is what we directly sense from the world, all universal/formal concepts are derivative and after the fact. Similar to how pointing at the moon is not the moon.
2) Transcendental Idealism (Kant), which sort of culminated (and defeated) empiricism by arguing that our direct experience is already full of universal concepts (like space and time) that aren't explicitly in the sense data. Our brains must therefore condition data from incoming senses with these universals before they are even experienced. So we don't directly experience the world as it is. Rather, there is the world in-itself, free of our experience of it, and this passes through the senses and the brain, where we condition it with universals like space, time, and causation, leading to the appearances in our experience. If this is true, it would mean we can't possibly understand the world in-itself: metaphysics is impossible. In science, we use space, time, and causation to understand the world. But if the categories of space, time, causation, etc only apply to experience, then we cannot use them to understand what is beyond the experiences--which may not be spatial, temporal, or even causal. In this sense, even physics, which yields real knowledge, is not unveiling the world in-itself, it is rather finding the causal regularities and structures in experience (which, importantly, still counts as real knowledge that allows us to make valid predictions). This is known as the veil of Kant--we are trapped in the world of appearances, forever cut off from the world in-itself.
3) Correspondence theory, roughly employed by most views on truth up to this point, which is that truth involves confirming that a theory or statement directly corresponds to reality. In fact, Hume attempts to break the rational foundation of scientific truth by showing that it violates correspondence. Using his stance of empirical sense-certainty, he argues that both causation and induction are not logically necessary. Therefore, we have no logical certainty that the predictions of science "correspond" to reality prior to those events occurring. This is why Kant after him is trying to find a stronger foundation to stand on to save scientific knowledge (he ultimately succeeds--by showing that space, time, causation, etc. are already baked into our "direct sensation of the world", we can say with certainty that the structures we find do correspond to fundamental structures composing that experienced world).
Impressively, Hegel shows that all three of these views fail, and one can show this with a single framework, which will also offer a way out. Part of his motivation here involves revising the grounds of western epistemology to account for the "unreasonable effectiveness of mathematical physics," which was starting to become clear around this time. In this light, Hume's skeptical empiricism will fail because science posits all kinds of invisible things beyond sensory perception in order to explain the world. He questions whether Kant's move of the "inaccessible in-itself vs appearance," while certainly grounding scientific knowledge more fundamentally, was correct in veiling the in-itself from human understanding.
We can understand Hegel's move at the most general level by looking at his clever reformulation of truth. Truth is not simply evaluating whether a given statement "corresponds to" reality. It is not accessed by standing on skeptical foundations that will allow one to grasp it with certainty (Descartes). In fact, we should be skeptical of this type of skepticism. A true skeptic doesn't doubt everything they possibly can until they find the un-doubtable source of knowledge. A true skeptic accepts that there is no absolute foundation to knowledge. Rather, truth is evolved over time, starting with a goal and growing into its objective, like how an acorn grows into a tree. It is not something you can apprehend directly through perception or reason, or any particular theory, but something you can see converge by watching the growth of theory over time. In this sense we don't say that earlier theories are wrong because they didn't "access the truth." This would be like saying the earlier stages of the acorn tree are wrong. Rather, we say that they are all necessary stepping stones that grow into each other, not forgotten but rather elaborated on, refined, getting less wrong with time, through a sort of trial and error. The same way Newtonian Mechanics is not wrong or forgotten, but absorbed/evolved/refined into relativity. This shift to a more "process philosophy" that studies movement and growth instead of static essences and direct correspondence is both intensely radical and consequential. Darwinian evolution is predicated on it--literally, animals are not static essences, they are a process over time. It is also the workhorse of Marx's dialectical materialism and the critique of capital. And so to with critical rationalism and Popperian epistemology--which claims that in science we do not access the truth with logical certainty in a given theory or experiment. Our theories are conjectures which can get falsified/refuted and error corrected, slowly growing over time to be less wrong.
The Dialectic
One might ask: what does this look like in practice? What does it mean to examine the growth of theory over time instead of the validity of a given single theory? Hegel's dialectic, as hinted above, goes something like this: I have a default intuitive stance toward the truth. Then I find some kind of problem in that stance--an internal tension, an error, a contradiction--that forces me to subsume it into an evolved form which resolves the instability. As such, his dialectic on perception will attempt to show that the history of how we view perception--how we think about our experience in relation to reality--is not an accidental or contingent history, but rather a logically necessary path that consciousness must take on its journey toward the truth. This journey involves the transition from perception as the source of truth, to force as the hidden structure of reality. That transition is another massive critical strike in the history of human thinking. We've never been the same since. Below we will walk through the dialectic, first concisely and then in detail.
- Sense certainty: Truth lies in the immediate particular. Concepts are inventions after the fact.
- Issue: Concepts are already present in the immediate particular
- Perception: Truth lies in the conditioned universal. My experience is conditioned with concepts, I experience particular objects with universal properties.
- Issue: I experience objects as a plurality of independent universals, yet I also know that they have particular, determinate identities that persist through time. How can the object be both one and many?
- Force: Truth lies in the unconditioned universal. There is an "entity of interaction" beyond experience, not conditioned by us, that allows for determinate and distinct objects in my experience. This entity is formal and universal and thus can be conceptualized by the mind.
- Issue: We cannot pin down what the force is, as it dances infinitely between latent and manifest, solicitor and solicited.
- Law: Truth lies in the relational universal. We fix the dance of forces as an image that unites both latent and manifest on the same terms, as a relation. Appearances become an inference to the real, a window to the beyond. The distinction between appearances and mind-independent reality begins to dissolve.
- Issue: Laws show the connection between conceptual hidden and appearances, but doesn't explain how this connection is possible, leaving them as a passive description.
- Explanation: Truth lies in the reflexive universal. With the dissolution of the distinction between the appearances and the beyond, we understand that truth discovery is an activity purely within consciousness. The idea of trying to "leap outside of the mind" to get at the truth is revealed to be an illusion. Our minds already grow out of the universe, using its own formal structure to understand it from the inside.
1. Sense-certainty, default stance
We start by assuming as little as possible. No conceptual constructs exist beyond our direct experience. We directly perceive the world as it is through our senses. The world is sense data. Universals like self, space, time, causation, scientific concepts, are all constructed by the mind after the fact. Truth, in this view, is accessed directly, as the immediate particular: this tree I see here right now, etc.
• Contradiction: when pointing out a particular moment or object in the world, we already employ universals. Even something as simple as pointing out a tree, involves "I, here, this, now" which are all universal indexical concepts. The attempt to ground knowledge in the immediate particular collapses into universality.
2. Perception, synthesis
Universals are already baked into experience. We are no longer directly apprehending the world as sense data (immediate particular), but perceiving the world as particular objects with properties (conditioned universals). I have an object in front of me, a piece of chalk, and it appears as a bundle of universal properties including whiteness, hardness, cylindrical shape, etc. In Kant's formulation (described in Background), he epitomizes this position, arguing that our mind (or brain) uses universals like space, time, and even causation, to structure raw sense input into coherent objects that we can understand.
But this coincidence of a particular object, with a bundle of universal properties, runs me into a different issue. These “conditioned universals” do not simply appear on their own. They seem to coalesce into independent, particular, unified single objects, the identities of which are at the same time dissolved into a plurality of universal properties. Is the object one or many? How can unified identity through time be coincident with such a plurality of variable, independent properties? What is tying them together for each object? One might think there could be one property that "determines" the object, and all the other properties are secondary. But this doesn't work, because the properties present themselves as universal and independent...there is nothing about "whiteness" that uniquely determines chalk, for whiteness appears in all kinds of things. So then if all the properties are secondary, what determines the unique identity of the object?
• Contradiction: The opposition here is that perception is now oscillating between the unity of the thing and the plurality of its properties without resolving how both can coexist. Perception has collapsed. How can this be resolved?
Here, Hegel has a hint from Spinoza: determinate negation. To be a unique, determinate perceptual object, you must be distinguishable from other objects. Something is what it is by not being something else. The chalk is white as opposed to brown, or green. If white were the only color that existed, it wouldn't be an identifying property of the chalk in the first place. The identifying properties are those that can be opposed to each other in reality. And thus a thing is only defined by its opposition to other things. The thing-in-itself becomes the thing-for-another. The essence of the thing is not substance, but negation, interaction, opposition. Something which allows objects to interact with each other, so that they can oppose and distinguish themselves from each other. If true, the contradiction between unity and multiplicity would dissolve, because the unitary essence of an object does not "inhere within the object," it is determined through its relations with opposing objects. We will call this interactive entity at the core of reality "force."
3. Force, synthesis
Up until this stage, we have tried to avoid moving beyond experience. Our immediate particular collapsed and we moved to perception, or conditioned universals, in order to recognize the primacy of universals, while still preserving truth as given in experience. But if the universal properties that are characteristic of an object are all independent of one another, and that's all we see in experience, we need some unifying principle that is not an appearance, that can bring unity into this apparent plurality. The understanding must now move beyond appearances to explain reality . Force is thus is an unconditioned universal, a mind independent entity which acts whether or not it is being perceived. And as mentioned before with determinate negation, this invisible unity must allow objects to interact with each other, to determine themselves as they appear to us, unifying their diversity of appearances. With gravity for example, all the diverse appearances of objects falling and behaving a certain way on earth, are unified by this invisible, unified entity, which is fundamentally relational.
Force does not need to be conditioned by the mind like perception, but it is a universal in that it is ultimately a concept. The properties we sense are all secondary...after the fact. The perceptual given (whether immediate particular or conditioned universal) is no longer the source of knowledge and reality. Rather, the core of reality is now conceptual—the unconditioned universal. What we posited as fixed objects with properties in experience turns out to be a play of forces within a reality beyond our experience. To gain knowledge of reality we need to understand this play, and how it manifests into the appearances that we experience--determinate objects with properties, doing stuff.
This is a huge move in multiple ways. We have moved from the core of reality being visible, to being invisible. From being a direct appearance, to being a concept beyond experience, accessible to thought through conceptual structure. If, with Kant's veil, we were stuck with the world of appearances we could know, and the unknowable world in-itself, we are now liberated by Force, which acts as a bridge between appearance and the in-itself. The inner structure of reality suddenly becomes conceptual and intelligible. And based on the successes of Newtonian physics by this point in explaining the structure of our appearances, we find that our conceptual apparatus may indeed be capable of coinciding with the inner workings of the world. The veil, which was once opaque, is starting to look translucent...
The understanding now looks back on its appearances, through the concept of force. It begins to wonder how this notion of force could structure its appearances...what form must force take if it is to give rise to the patterns in my experience? How is it embedded in objects, and transferred between them? Where does it live? How does it move between the invisible and the visible, the latent and the manifest? On the most basic assumption, we can suppose that force is the One invisible behind the plurality of our appearances, generating them. However, when examining our appearances to pin down this One, we soon run into something unstable:
When moving billiard ball A hits stationary billiard ball B, we assume there is an invisible force transferred from A to B. This is then manifested in appearance as the motion of B. So we have the latent (invisible) force, and the manifest, or kinetic appearance of the force. We want to say intuitively that A is the actor here, imparting the latent force into B, the acted upon, which then manifests it kinetically. However, we find (through Newton's third law) that A is also acted upon, and B is also an actor. For the latent force in A to have any effect on B, there must also be an equal and opposite latent force in B to resist the force of A, otherwise it could have no influence. So there is no clear actor and acted upon. No solicitor and solicited. Both objects seem to have latent and manifest force, both are solicitor and solicited. The force doesn't exist in one object and get transferred to the other. Rather it exists between the objects. Forces require each other to manifest in appearance, dissolving into each other and escaping our attempt to individuate them. Force is now caught in this oscillation between solicitor and solicited, between its true latent aspect beyond experience, and its expression in appearance...both sides referring to each other, caught in a constant loop. This is the play of forces, and it appears highly unstable...we cannot pin it down. Alarmingly: if the distinction between latent and manifest is destabilized, so is the distinction between form (substantial unity of an object, organizing principle) and content (appearances, generated properties that we experience), between reality in-itself and appearance. Kant is indeed under fire.
It is worth noting another significant move here. In addition to finding that the core of reality is conceptual, we also find that it is not a static structure. This does away with the sort of substance ontology that we assumed back in the stages of perception, which was extremely dominant at the time and went back to Aristotle and even earlier. The view in which the world is constituted by individual, independent entities that persist through change and bear properties. Instead, this previously supposed core of reality merely becomes another appearance. And at the core, we now find a play. A flux, a process, an activity is what leads to the unified and determine objects in our perception. While this is only a stage in the unfolding of the understanding, it is also a significant turning point in history from substance to process ontology.
• Contradiction: In summary, force does not seem to belong to objects, but exists between them, caught in an endless dance between manifest and latent, kinetic and potential, active and passive, solicitor and solicited. And with this collapse we also lose the distinction between form and content core to substance philosophy. The world is no longer composed of stable substances which give rise to the properties we perceive. It is as if the ground beneath us has been lifted away.
How are we to resolve this instability at the core of reality? While force is always caught in this play between appearances and the hidden, it ultimately manifests itself in appearance as stable objects with properties that exhibit patterns over time. And, as shown before, it must be relational in nature. How can we stabilize relation as the core of existence? There must be a way to manifest relationality itself as a stable image of the play of forces, one that shows how they structure stable patterns when expressed in appearance. The understanding must move beyond the unconditioned universal to the next stage: the law.
4. Laws, synthesis
If forces structure appearance, there must be consistent patterns in our experience that can be discovered as governing laws. Thus instead of chasing the hidden forces moving in and out of appearances, we can try to pin down the regular structure in the organized appearances that come out of this play, as universal formal relations. For example, in the case of the billiard balls imparting force on each other and manifesting those forces in appearance as movement, we can specify the laws governing those appearances as:
1. Force = mass x acceleration, Newton's second law, which describes how the force on an object relates to its movement (acceleration) in appearance
2. F1=F2, Newton's third law, asserting that the force exerted by the moving ball on the stationary ball is equal and opposite to the force exerted on the moving ball by the stationary ball.
All of a sudden, the unstable dance of forces between invisible and visible, between solicitor and solicited, gets stabilized as a set of fixed images expressing the equivalent two-way relation...by equations. The equation is our way to make a stable image out of flux. The understanding stabilizes the dance by finding stability within instability, by finding sameness in difference. It now expresses both the latent force and manifest behavior on the same terms. In this sense we don't consider reality as an unconditioned universal, solely hiding behind appearances. With law, we unite appearance and reality as a stable relation. We have now moved to the relational universal. Reality is revealed as formal structure.
With the movement toward law, the understanding sees how force has transformed perception. Perception is not merely passive appearance, it is an inference to the real, a window to the in-itself. And we have formally captured the collapse of the distinction between the in-itself and appearances by expressing them in the same conceptual framework, on the same terms. F=ma not only stabilizes the play of forces, it represents the dissolution of the Kantian distinction between appearances and the in-itself, as well as the substance ontology that preceded it. The in-itself is no longer a hidden entity behind appearances, it becomes a formal structure expressed in appearances themselves. The distinction between in-itself and appearances has collapsed; the law becomes the new stable structure of reality.
It's worth briefly noting the magnitude of this step as well. In force, when the distinction between active and passive failed, so did the distinction between form and content, driving the need for law. What we used to call the thing, is actually emergent from the play of forces, which we can understand with static, unitary, underlying principles called laws. This gives us a static, formal way to describe becoming itself. Plato never thought this could have been possible, that we could capture the fuzzy flux and becoming of appearance with static laws. This is why he believed math lived solely in the realm of the forms, he thought such clean formal relations could never possibly capture our messy, qualitative experience.
Which leads us to our next question: why does F=ma work so unreasonably well? Why should the conceptual structure of laws coincide with the structure of appearances in the first place? We can, and should, discover the laws, but if we don't explain how our conceptual apparatus happens to perfectly coincide with the inner structure of reality, allowing us to predict our appearances, it becomes unclear whether we are really explaining reality or merely re-describing it. It seems as though the fate of consciousness is not merely to observe the laws passively through experience, that it may have a more active role in creating them. Perhaps the distinction between law and appearance is itself part of the issue.
• Contradiction: Laws passively describe relations between inner reality and appearances without explaining why they coincide. While laws stabilize the flux, we need to introduce flux into laws.
5. Explanations, synthesis
In order to resolve this tension between law and appearances, let's first look back at the movement from perception-->force-->law. The understanding doesn't assume realism as a given from the beginning, realism emerges from the attempt to grasp reality through sense certainty--consciousness must posit something beyond itself. And after doing so, it finds that this realist distinction itself--between appearances and reality in-itself--gets dissolved into a flux of forces, which gets stabilized by law. This points to two critical realizations: 1) Law reveals reality as formal structure. 2) Realism was never given or inevitable, it was itself produced by consciousness as an explanation for that stage of understanding, before being subsumed by the next. These distinctions and their resolutions all exist within consciousness, as part of the understanding's process of explaining reality to itself, of growing toward the truth. The theories we get, and the corresponding reality implied by them, are simply the best explanations up to that point. These realizations will together resolve the tension between law and appearance.
We can illustrate point 2) further by briefly stepping into the scientific process. This process involves taking our observations (appearances) and finding a way to model/explain them through our conceptual apparatus, updating our beliefs and reinventing the apparatus as necessary to match new observations. For example, moving from a Newtonian to a quantum conceptual framework to account for observations such as blackbody radiation. But our perceptual observations, and our conceptual apparatus--these are both completely within the activity of consciousness. There is no moment in which we step outside of the mind. We verify it from within, reflecting on our appearances, using our conceptual apparatus to discover the laws behind it, and improving our theory with time as we find problems, just as we have been throughout this very dialectic.
With law, we see that reality is ultimately formal structure. Formal structure which governs the play of forces, which generate our experience. And crucially, formal structure which the mind grows out of. The mind's conceptual apparatus can understand the formal structure of reality in-itself because it grows out of that very structure. And it does not grasp the full formal structure directly as a given, but through a creation and discovery process. A dialectic where it tries to explain the world to itself, and update those explanations over time as it finds problems within them. In this sense even the laws themselves, which constitute the universe, are not fixed. They reflect a stage in the journey of the understanding. We do not simply find laws in the world, we create them through our conceptual activity over time, in our project to understand the world. Structure is recognized as produced by the understanding as it gets closer to the truth of reality. We are the structure of the universe, and as we look deeper into the world over time, we look deeper into ourselves.
Discovery of the world is thus a process of self-discovery, a movement in which we update our beliefs over time, growing toward the truth. We now understand why F=ma works so unreasonably well. The conceptual order of appearances is grasped through the same logical structure that constitutes reality in-itself. Thus reality moves from the relational universal to the reflexive universal. The positing of reality in-itself leads to a realization that the structure of this reality can be accessed by the concept. The structure of the world is the structure of the understanding. The lifting of Kant's veil is complete.
Synergy with Critical Rationalism and Explanatory Realism
It is worth noting the synergy at this stage with explanatory realism and critical rationalism, the modern Popperian philosophy of science position alluded to above, currently held by lauded physicists and philosophers such as David Deutsch. It is no coincidence that this stage in the dialectic happens to use the same word as that movement. In explanatory realism, reality is composed of the objects in our best current explanations. Here, in step with Hegel, is a recognition of the mind's fallibility, and the impossibility of absolute foundations, moving instead toward a rational theory growth process over time to converge on the truth. They both accept that we initially seem "trapped in the subjective," but find later that we don't need to leap outside of the mind and "grasp" the external world absolutely. In fact, such a notion is almost non-sensical and is itself produced by the mind, dissolving away under further reflection. And what is left is a gradual, self-correcting process which evolves over time toward the truth, from within consciousness. In this process, we accept that the most real things are whatever our best explanations allow them to be, whatever we currently know to be real. Reality, with its truth and its formal relations, ultimately proceeds from our attempt to explain the world to ourselves. Both Hegel and explanatory realism collapse the distinction between epistemology and metaphysics in this way.
As a second synergy, the resolution that the stage of Explanation offers to the understanding is oddly resonant with David Deutsch's own explanation for the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematical physics. Deutsch essentially points out that the laws of physics are computable (formal, logical relations that can be computed, like F=ma above), and the matter in our universe happens to be structured in such a way that it can make universal computing machines (our brains). Therefore, we are able to simulate the laws of reality because our brains grow out of reality (which is governed by laws) into an ordered structure that allows them to think in formal, universal concepts, reflecting the laws back at the universe. Sound familiar? This is precisely the reflexive universal!
Both of these minds are pointing to the same thing: that the reason we can so effectively capture the fundamentals of the universe with our minds, is that our minds are not external to the universe to begin with. They grow out of the structure of the universe, which is logical and formal, and use that structure to examine it from the inside. If the universe is formally structured, and our minds are a piece of this universe trying to know itself, then it is not so surprising that our thought structures can map unreasonably well onto reality, and grasp it at the most universal level. In that sense--and again both Hegel and Deutsch agree here--we can say optimistically that as we move deeper into the understanding, into explanation, into self-consciousness, into our "pointing of the moon," we do not move further from Being, we get closer to it.
The mathematician plays a game in which he himself invents the rules while the physicist plays a game in which the rules are provided by nature, but as time goes on it becomes increasingly evident that the rules which the mathematician finds interesting are the same as those which nature has chosen.
--Paul Dirac
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