Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit is NOT a "Theory of Everything" (TOE)
The Vanishing Mediator of Absolute Knowing
I will be leading a course on Hegel’s first major work, the Phenomenology of Spirit, starting January 15th 2022.
In this article my aim is not to explore why Hegel’s Phenomenology is worth knowing in order to bring one to the perspective that either positively or negatively, accurately or inaccurately, informed much of post-Hegelian philosophy (from Marx to Nietzsche to Deleuze to Žižek).
I attempted to explain that in my first Substack article.
Here I would like to explain something of relevance to contemporary academic literatures or paradigms that aim for “unified integration of knowledge” or completion of knowing in a “theory of everything”.
This attempt to differentiate Hegel from such thinking is not necessarily to negate these forms of theorizing, or attempts at paradigmatics. However, I do have a deep knowledge of both attempts at theories of everything, and Hegel’s Phenomenology. From this vantage point, there are quite specific reasons why one could say a proper understanding of Hegelian phenomenology, would make one extremely skeptical of such totalizing theoretics and paradigmatics as unreflective of knowing in regards to the historical position and action of the actual theorist.
In any case, this article is an attempt to clearly demonstrate that having an awareness or understanding of one of these modes of “theories of everything” thinking, certainly does not replace an awareness or understanding of what Hegel was attempting to achieve in the Phenomenology as the:
“coming-to-be” of knowing itself, and
the proper “standpoint” of philosophical thinking
In other words, or said differently, from a Hegelian perspective, one could think of “theories of everything” as a particular result of knowing’s “coming-to-be” and the determination of a “particular standpoint of knowing”, certainly. But one could not consider such theories an explication of the coming-to-be of knowing or the standpoint of philosophical thinking, in an absolute sense, and this was Hegel’s aim and result.
Consequently, the specific difference is here one of aims and results. Consider the aims and results of a conventional “Theory of Everything” (TOE). Overall, a TOE aims for the result of a “final”, “ultimate”, “unified” or “master” theory, that is a singular, all-encompassing, completely coherent theory. Such theories are often proposed in physics, which by definition would situate the entire impulse in a reductionist direction, and require formulation in mathematical propositions or proofs.
There are many examples of such theories. In physics we can think of mega frameworks like String Theory, M-Theory, Loop Quantum Gravity Theory, and others, all of which are aiming for a TOE in the understanding of quantum gravity. A theory of quantum gravity would bring together the two dominant paradigms of contemporary physics: general relativity or the theory of the macro-scale, and quantum mechanics or the theory of the micro-scale. As is well-known, such a theory is thought to be necessary because there are phenomena which cannot be explained without formulating a theory of gravity that can take into consideration quantum effects.
These theories have been proposed with variations from many different well-respected scientists like Stephen Hawking in The Theory of Everything: The Origin and Fate of the Universe, John D. Barrow in New Theories of Everything, and Stephen Wolfram in A Project to Find the Fundamental Theory of Physics. There have also been lesser known attempts by scientists like Garrett Lisi, who proposed a theory of everything called E8, to popular but relative newcomers to the contest for a theory of everything, like Eric Weinstein, who first shared his TOE ideas on a Joe Rogan podcast.
Stephen Hawking is a particularly good example to explore to further understand what is at stake in all this theorizing. Hawking is without question one of the major pillars and brightest theorists in all of modern physics. For Hawking, his entire career was structured by a search for a TOE. In fact, he ended his brilliant and world-famous book A Brief History of Time with the idea that a “complete theory” would be the “ultimate triumph of human reason” and knowledge of the “mind of God”.
From this perspective, it is clear to see that, in the reductionist point of view, the ultimate triumph of reason and the mind of God are found in the regions of the universe where gravity meets quantum mechanics, where the universe was born and where the universe reaches its limits in the formation of black holes. The question remains for the physics TOE, what is thought’s relation to these realities? Such questions are always left out of the discussion, and yet, at least the early Hawking, did not think this was a trivial question. He in fact also mentioned in the very same conclusion to A Brief History of Time, that a “complete theory” would be “understandable in broad principle by everyone, not just a few scientists” and then “we shall all […] be able to take part in the discussion of the question of why it is that we and the universe exist.”
This brings us to the form of TOE that has an entirely different impulse in what we may call an emergentist direction. These frameworks, like the TOE of the physicist, basically propose a TOE in a human or spirit science direction, but like the TOE of the physicist, usually become connected to an individual thinker who brands his framework as the “final” or “ultimate” unification. We can find examples of these TOEs, from the system science perspective, as introduced by Ervin Laszlo in Science and the Akashic Field: An Integral Theory of Everything, which tries to unify science with perennial philosophy, to the philosophical perspective, as introduced by Graham Harman’s Object Oriented Ontology: A New Theory of Everything, which attempts to think absolute reality beyond our thinking.
However, perhaps the most ambitious and socially recognized form of a TOE has been the long-time project of integral theorist Ken Wilber, who published, among many other works, a book titled A Theory of Everything: An Integral Vision for Business, Politics, Science and Spirituality. The aims and result of this TOE is to “draw together an already existing number of separate paradigms into an interrelated network of approaches that are mutually enriching”. Such an aim and result is basically an attempt at “integration of forms of knowledge” as logical propositions so that disparate, fragmented or separated disciplines can operate under one conceptual roof, so to speak.
To give a concrete example of how this works, Wilber developed an integral framework called “AQAL” where he put together dimensions labelled “interior individual”, “exterior individual”, “interior collective”, and “exterior collective” perspectives. Here from an integral view we can have thinkers like:
Sigmund Freud (interior individual),
B.F. Skinner (exterior individual),
Hans Gadamer (interior collective), and
Karl Marx (exterior collective)
All “integrated” into a dynamic conversation with each other, instead of conceptualizing them as irreconcilably antagonistic, or thinking about them only within conceptual silos. One could imagine that such schemas could also be developed which included within them the strivings of the TOEs in physics, although conversation between the creators of “physics TOEs” and the creators of the “emergentist TOEs” (strangely enough) do not collaborate or interact (to my knowledge).
Moreover, it is well-known, as physicist Lee Smolin pointed out in his book The Trouble with Physics, that many different camps in the attempts at a physics TOE do not see each other as mutually compatible and synergistic attempts at the same goal, but rather as incompatible and antagonistic rivals (similar to the frictional dynamics between different religious universalities). The same basic recognition has been pointed out, not only between different “emergentist TOEs”. For example, it is not clear that a Ervin Laszlo and a Graham Harman would find dialogue between their different TOEs enriching or rivalrous; but also within Wilber’s “integral TOE”, where there are already many different frictions and rebellions, and attempts to “go beyond” Wilber, and so forth.
This bring us to Hegel, the Phenomenology, and what makes this work as an aim and a result, of a totally different kind or style in relation to TOEs.
Hegel’s aim and result in the Phenomenology is to explicate for the reader a “coming-to-be” of knowing itself, and also to explicate for the reader what the “standpoint” of knowing means for philosophy. This dramatically changes the status that many theorists would give to either “mathematical propositions” or “logical propositions” about being (i.e. like the idea that we could have a complete theory articulated in equations or formulas or theorems or principles etc.). Instead Hegel privileges the location and the becoming of the knowing subject as it is both for-itself and in-itself. In other words, Hegel’s aim is not to develop an equation to know the mind of God, nor is it to bring together all knowledge into one framework, but rather to inquire as to the very nature of the knower who would attempt to do such things.
For Hegel, the very desire to complete a theory of everything obfuscates, eradicates or annihilates the very capacity to inquire about the knowing subject itself, which would presumably, at least according to Hawking’s reflection on the physics TOE, be relegated to situating its future reflection within such a TOE. Consequently, for Hegel, there can be no framework of mathematical or logical propositions, in whatever form or using whatever method, that could be “integrated” to “complete knowledge or brought into an “ultimate unification” to explain everything. In some sense, this is a mark of a knower who doesn’t understand the truth of knowing.
Nevertheless, in Hegel’s “system” there is a logical order in the “coming-to-be” of knowledge, and this order brings one to an “absolute standpoint”. Moreover, this logical order in-itself has unfolded itself naturally as the idea towards the same end since the birth to the present moment of knowing subjectivity in-and-for-itself. To be specific, this absolute standpoint for knowing is where the truth of the in-itself (being), becomes for-itself (knowing). In other words, from the absolute standpoint of knowing, the truth of the in-itself of being is not somewhere outside of knowing subjectivity (like a black hole, or the Big Bang), and it is not somewhere in the integration of knowing systems (like combining all the epistemological approaches into one framework), but rather where the truth of the in-itself is self-similar with knowing for-itself, extremely simple and empty.
Hegel derives the order of this coming-to-be with dialectical logic (although even dialectical logic is left behind once one reaches the level of absolute knowing). In any case, he takes as his dialectical double starting point that:
Truth only exists from the standpoint of conscious knowledge, and that
Conscious knowledge is concerned with truth.
Thus, logically, there is a dimension of truth that is “for-us” (truth for the knower), and a dimension of truth that is “in-itself” (knower for the truth), and both of these dimensions fall within and on the side of a process of conscious knowing which needs to be historically developed in-and-as the subject’s life process. From this he derives the natural stages that we call “consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, spirit, religion, and absolute knowing”. What is at stake in understanding the dialectical logic of these stages, is the capacity to avoid self-deception, which is a danger at every twist and turn along the path.
Here what is important, for Hegel, is that it makes no sense to inquire about a truth that is independent from or standing separately from the knower. And that if one accepts this starting point, one finds that the truth naturally unfolds itself in and with the activity of knowing itself, and points towards an absolute form of self-knowing. This absolute form of self-knowing is the “standpoint” that Hegel' hopes to describe to “ordinary consciousness” in the Phenomenology. For Hegel, ordinary consciousness is often under the presupposition that the truth in-itself is somewhere “out there” or “separate” from its own knowing process, as if it is waiting to be discovered in an unaltered form by knowers (as in classical notions of the natural or the transcendental alike). Even think for a moment, very practically, that this is the “spontaneous intuition” for how physicists would approach the reality of the Higgs boson, or how religious believers would approach the reality of God.
Consequently, it is difficult or impossible to think of the Phenomenology as something which ultimately has the aim or result of systematizing or unifying everything in either mathematical or logical propositions. It is rather something which aims for the result of aiding or guiding each subjective singularity to recognize that there is a logical process in the relation between knowing and truth, internal to spirit’s very historical processual unfolding, that has built within it a contingent starting point, and a necessary ending point.
What is crucial here is that each subjective singularity is responsible for actualizing or realizing that ending point in a state of absolute knowing, by thoroughly testing itself at every step along its phenomenological journey, otherwise it remains only a non-actual or un-realized potentiality, and something that the knower experiences in the form of an alien haunting outside of itself. Moreover, this state of absolute knowing, paradoxically, does not end or complete knowledge at all, but rather opens up a horizon of knowing in which the subject is thoroughly emptied of the logical propositions that structured its own coming-to-be a subject of absolute knowing.
In this way, what is crucially different, and ultimately what is at stake in engaging the Phenomenology, as something very much distinct from “theories of everything” (where knowledge is ultimately reified in a set of unchanging explanations), is that the subject of absolute knowing is a type of “vanishing mediator” (for other subjects). The subject of absolute knowing has nothing to do with any particular system of logical propositions which one would cling onto as an “integration” or a “unification”… nothing at all. The subject of absolute knowing is a subject that has already won itself in a type of symmetry between its knowing and its truth, as an empty point of self-relation capable of really observing and enduring difference. In this way such a subject can reflect back to other subjects, as if like a mirror that can help position their own truth, without doing much of anything at all but observing, as clearly as possible, the immanence of absolute knowing in the other.
For Hegel, it is only at this location of absolute knowing, where we can start to ask ourselves questions about our relation to any notion of an absolute being. Thus, if Hegel would have an ultimate critique of “theories of everything”, it would be that the very position of the knower that conceptualizes such theories is what should be thrown into question as a (we might say) “premature ejaculation”. The position of the knower, in attempting to integrate or unify a theory of everything in logical propositions, is the type of knower that is by definition not a subject of absolute knowledge (“shooting his shot” before he is really ready). Thus, the type of “being” that is posited by such subjects, cannot be the absolute being, but more a reflection of the truth of that knower, most probably stuck within his or her (but usually his) own reason. This would in any case explain why such TOEs do not discuss with each other, or do not reflect on the fact that a multiplicity of such TOEs, by definition, signals an unreflective problem or a rupture within the very act itself.
Ultimately the Phenomenology does not give us a key or an answer to questions about the absolute being (that must wait for the Science of Logic), but it does give us a key or an answer, explicated in the form of dialectical logic, of the destiny of the position of the knower, and the logical role of the subject in actualizing that knowing in a phenomenological drama. And it is from this position that we may start to reflect with other such subjects, on fundamental questions about the ultimate nature of being.
Will or would such reflection lead to anything like a TOE? I don’t know, but I have my suspicions. What seems immanent is not a TOE, but the idea itself, of which, we individual subjects are (crucial) moments (for it).