Epistemological Diremption in Hegel

For Hegel, the concept of diremption lies at the kernel of the origin of philosophy itself. When, in any culture, there emerge polarised dualisms whose relatedness is unintegrated, the need arises for philosophy, whose purpose, then, becomes the attempt to reconcile them. Modern philosophy, which Hegel largely associates with Kant, is a fundamentally dirempt, or torn system. Rather than reconcile the dualisms it chooses as its subject matter, it instead elevates diremption to the level of philosophy itself. Different kinds of diremption – metaphysical, cultural and political – are of concern to Hegel, but in this commentary I will chose to focus on epistemological diremption, particularly as discusses in the introduction of the Phenomenology of Spirit.

Here, Hegel criticises the Kantian division between cognition and the thing-in-itself. He does this, initially, by discussing two ways his predecessors have traditionally viewed cognition: as an ‘instrument’ and a passive medium or filter. Each is faulty in its own way. The view of cognition as a tool is problematic because, in acting on truth in the manner of an externally intervening apparatus, it modifies it necessarily, leaving the truth it naively sets out to unintrusively examine fundamentally changed in the process. By the time it reaches our faculties of perception, it no longer resembles what it originally was:

If we suppose cognition to be the instrument by means of which we take hold of  the  absolute  essence, then it is obvious that if we apply an instrument to something, the application does not in fact  leave  it  be as  it  is  on  its  own; rather, it sets out to reshape it and change it.[1]

Equally troublesome, for Hegel, is the view of cognition as a passive medium. In this conception, cognition is a filter through which truth passes on its way to our consciousness. It acts as an inert means by which the essence of an object is transmitted to us ‘cleanly’, that is in such a way that it is kept it unaffected by any essential distortion. Hegel takes issue with this view by calling into question the very possibility of an inert filter. There can be no such thing as a passive medium, he argues, for any cognitive filter will, by the simple act of imposing itself between the knower and the beknown, inevitably colour and distort the truth it attempts to capture, so that, by the time it falls on our consciousness, it too is bent into something other than what it originally was:

Here too we do not receive the truth as it is in itself but only as it comes to us through this medium and in the medium. In both cases, we employ a means which immediately engenders the very opposite of its intended purpose.[2]

In both the view of cognition as tool and that of cognition as a passive medium, then, Hegel feels certain critical diremptions are at play, including the division between cognition and the Absolute and the division between cognition and ourselves[3]. Here, reality lies on the far side of a hypothetical cognitive barrier, and the objects populating it are not directly accessible to our understanding. The Kantian thing-in-itself inhabits the noumenal world. This is the external reality to our conceptual categories of understanding, which we can never have direct and full cognitive access to, and is therefore, ultimately, unknowable. For Hegel, this is the fundamental presupposition of modern, dirempt philosophy, its original sin, as it were.

Hegel’s rebuttal of this epistemological diremption consists in stressing the importance of reconciling concept and object. If the goal of knowledge is to ascertain the nature of truth, then we must eliminate the distinction between cognition and the object it seeks to cognise. When we set out to investigate the essence of knowledge, we generally make the following error: we identify knowledge erroneously as an object external to our cognition. We designate knowledge as the concept “but designate the essence, that is, the truth, as what exists,  that is, the object. Here, any conclusions about the an object’s essence, or in-itselfness “would not be its truth but rather merely our knowledge of it.” Since there is a division between the essence of the knowable object, which resides within us, and the object itself, which we intend to compare to that standard, the object is in no way obliged to conform to the standard that seeks to capture it:

The essence, that is, the standard would lie within us, and that which was  supposed to be compared with the standard, that  about which a decision was supposed to be made on the basis of this comparison, would not necessarily have to recognize the validity of that standard itself.[4]

True knowledge, or knowledge liberated from the deleterious effects of diremption, arises, for Hegel, at the point at which knowledge “no longer needs to go beyond itself.”[5] True knowledge, in other words, involves no division between reality and the internal standard we use to cognise it, between object and the concept;

If we take the essence…and designate it as the concept, and then in contrast understand by object the concept as object…then examination consists in our seeing whether the object corresponds to its concept.[6]

Having undertaken the investigation in this manner, we understand that there is no diremptive division between concept and object. Subject and object, knower and beknown are the same. Kant’s cognitive barrier is torn down. In examining the truth of reality, consciousness is examining itself[7]

[1] ¶73

[2] ¶ 73

[3] ¶ 74

[4] ¶ 83

[5] ¶ 80

[6] ¶ 84

[7] ¶ 85