The Pub

Suspicion and Recognition

Christopher Manzer

“The wounds of Spirit heal, and leave no scars behind.”

What are we doing when we invoke reason in a discussion?  More often than not we use reason like a cudgel—gathering the various things we believe into the Lord’s iron rod to beat down those we disagree with.  With this basic impulse, I embarked on the seas of philosophical thought.  I imagine the expectation of many students who first come to Wheaton is something like this, though without the war-like ornamentation.  We expect that, by educating ourselves at an institution committed to both the evangelical tradition and rigorous scholarship, we should leave with beliefs well defined and well defended.  It is not wrong to have this expectation.  If we did not leave with something like a coherent, workable set of reasons for believing and doing certain things, it would be difficult to see why we take the trouble to become educated at all.  Nevertheless, I think that we can become so preoccupied with defending a certain set of beliefs that we ultimately become unreasonable.  Through an examination of the work of G. W. F. Hegel, I want to suggest that reason and knowledge have more to do with seeing the limitations of our own viewpoint and the legitimacy of another’s, than with the conviction of certainty regarding our own particular set of beliefs.

Hegel is not a name frequently used by evangelical Christians when we want to talk about our faith.  This is not surprising; Hegel’s language in most of his texts is notoriously difficult and an easy pantheistic caricature can be made of his philosophy.  Many find it easier to understand Hegel’s erstwhile student, Søren Kierkegaard, whose dramatic account of individuality and faith flies in the face of Hegel’s apparently life-crushing logical system.  While defending Hegel against Kierkegaard is beyond the scope of this essay, I want to discuss a part of Hegel’s famous, if often mystifying, text, the Phenomenology of Spirit.  Among many intricate corridors of thought, Hegel provides an insightful account of confession and forgiveness, for him the characteristic features of modern Christian life.  For all of the accusations made against Hegel, that he is an atheist, or a pantheist, anti-Christian, etc., I find his exploration of the practical life of Christians to be valuable for the seriousness with which Hegel explicates the demands of reconciliation.  What is valuable in Hegel’s discussion of reconciliation is the precise way in which he diagnoses epistemic rigidity and provides a way to overcome the kind of understanding that fails to recognize reasonable disagreement.

The problem he addresses, which I am calling epistemic rigidity, is clinging toa conviction with regard to knowledge that one is not entitled to hold, vis-à-vis other positions.  Moral psychologist Robert Roberts and philosopher Jay Wood describe it at its worst in Intellectual Virtues: “…it is the inability to grasp theoretical alternatives to one’s own; it is the tendency for the views from other vantage points to look stupid or infantile or uninteresting or just opaque.”  It usually works like this, à la Francis Schaeffer: in the wake of the modern crisis, certain questions are raised against reason, religion, objectivity and certainty, and Christianity must reassert  itslegitimacy against the questions of modernity. Philosophers like Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, as well as 20^th-century artists and literary figures are some of those who have posed these questions.  While Schaeffer is quick to commend charitable dialogical exchange, he is certain that the conversation will end where he wants it to, like when he writes, “as Christians, we do have the answers to the questions posed by reality.”  Without pursuing Schaeffer’s thought in great detail, I want to point out the main characteristic of his mode of intellectual engagement that appears in the intellectual culture of Wheaton College.  This characteristic is the conviction of a conclusion.  That is, a systematic, cohering set of propositions (or presuppositions) that are non-negotiable and universally true.  Let me be clear: Schaeffer, and those who follow him, are not the only ones dealing with epistemic rigidity.  This difficulty is not limited by religious or political affiliation.  In addition to this, Schaeffer is quite a complex figure.  Without his conviction that Christianity can speak (even if it is something quite specific) to this post-Christian age, and his practical charity in reading and conversing with those students and citizens laboring under the “death of God”, evangelical intellectual culture would be stunted.  So, despite Schaeffer’s insistence on his systematic set of “answers,” he is not an unambiguous example of the rigidity of understanding discussed above.

To return to the topic at hand, epistemic rigidity is a kind of intellectual attitude that leads to a conviction that one’s own knowledge is absoluteand causes one to reject other reasonable viewpoints without real consideration.  Schaeffer does this when he rejects as irrational or nihilistic the various contemporary philosophers, artists, and theologians he interacts with, due to his conviction that the answers he has, systematized in certain propositions, overcome all of his interlocutor’s beliefs.  We do this at Wheaton in our rejection of positions outside the scope of our own set of beliefs, and one does not even need to be a reader of Schaeffer or an evangelical for this to be the case.  It is a matter of suspicion.  Suspicion that theologians are subverting the word of God.  Suspicion that campus organizations like Solidarity are just trying to make us feel guilty.  Suspicion that all conservatives want to do is protect their interests in a net of security rather than exercise faithfulness to the word of God.  In each situation the exchange of reasons stops because trust is lost.  Epistemic rigidity is a form of intellectual isolation because one is primarily concerned with preserving their own beliefs.  This undermines a concern for the truth of a matter.  If another person disagrees with me, it is easy for me to believe that they have an ulterior, non-rational motivation for doing so; particularly, when I am convinced my position is already the most sensible, rational position to be had.  Hegel can correct for this tendency, and he is able to do so while showing the necessity of Christian religious life to that end.

Hegel addresses this problem in the book I mentioned above.  Hegel’s goal in the text is to describe the ascent of an individual to what he calls “absolute knowing.”  This is knowledge that is not relative to or conditioned by any other beliefs: it is complete, though it may not be a complete set of propositions (as will be argued later, absolute knowing is similar to practical wisdom). The concept is ambiguous, but the basic idea is this: absolute knowing is a comprehensive perspective on one’s beliefs, their origins, their hold on a subject, and their legitimacy and span.  In this way, absolute knowledge concerns a certain position of the subject with regard to their beliefs—the way they see these beliefs and the way they see themselves—that can be called a viewpoint.

Although Hegel will be discussing the complexities and contradictions of the morality, his claims about the moral life can be extended to the specific issues of intellectual culture under discussion in this essay.  First,  Hegel  discusses the conflict between moral theories that reveal themselves in certain modes of moral action.  Second, intellectual culture is a matter of action; since knowers do things, like read texts, converse with other people, criticize, and debate, there can be an ethic  concerning what we do with our minds.  Third, and most importantly, Hegel himself describes the continuity between “observing reason” and “active reason.”  Observing reason is the activity of knowing about things—investigation, analysis, critique—while acting reason is the knowledge involved in practice—most obvious in moral knowledge, but involved in any judgments we make about how to act in a given situation. Additionally, knowing involves a variety of activities.  Immanuel Kant, along with Hegel, notes that things do not passively implant themselves in our minds.  For something to be intelligible, it must be understood in certain kinds of categories, ranging from the highly abstract ( such as the theoretical apparatus of the natural sciences) to the exceedingly common (concepts like causality, unity, or categories of sense, like red, orange, loud, quiet).  By understanding and categorizing the world we experience, our minds exercise a kind of activity over phenomena.  Of course, there are much more obvious kinds of activities, the ones associated with scientific investigation and experimentation, the intellectual practices mentioned above, like reading, discussion, and critique.  Reason is exercised in this domain as much as in more theoretical work, so much that the distinction between “observing reason” and “active reason” seems more and more difficult to maintain.  The difference is relative.  In any event, active reason itself is a kind of knowledge.  It is the knowledge philosophers like to call “practical wisdom.”  Quentin Lauer offers this helpful comment on the transition from “observing reason” to “active reason”: “ ‘reason’ remains an empty abstraction if the only means of giving it a content is ‘observing’ nature in the all the ways it is observable . . . mental activity, however, first reveals itself not in the theoretical investigation of what is the case but in the practical work of guiding action.”  This means that even when we simply “observe” what is the case, we are involved in a variety of practical activities, and such activities can and should be understood to have moral dimensions.

Since there are activities involved in human understanding and knowledge and such activities can have a moral dimension, Hegel proposes that confession and forgiveness shape our moral and intellectual lives.  Hegel’s discussion of confession and forgiveness is poised between the secular moral life and the confessional life of Christian religion, and involves the self-contradiction of two moral viewpoints.  Hegel is trying to synthesize the standards and norms of social life with the confessional reality of Christian religion.  Hegel articulates the point of connection between the two, so his account is not quite theological, nor is it entirely ethical.  What emerges as contradictions in the secular moral life point beyond secularity to the religious life.

The two moral figures Hegel discusses will be called the “beautiful soul” and the “worldly actor.”  Each represents an extreme point on the spectrum of moral theory.  The beautiful soul is the rigorous moral judge and the worldly actor is the result-oriented pragmatist.  Hegel notices that there are internal contradictions in each of these viewpoints,  then showing how these contradictions point beyond to a higher, more comprehensive viewpoint.  From the viewpoint of absolute knowledge there is no contradiction that is not accounted for, and  no further viewpoint to which one could ascend.  What I will argue later is that absolute knowledge does not involve some particular content, but a particular kind of activity.

Both the beautiful soul and the worldly actor recognize that the way of the world stands against the virtuous person.  As the author of Ecclesiastes writes, “…there are righteous people who are treated according to conduct of the wicked, and there are wicked people who are treated according to the conduct of the righteous (Eccl. 8:14).”  Furthermore, both the beautiful soul and the worldly actor recognize that any action they perform can be reinterpreted as selfishness and vice, despite their intentions.  Because any moral action must be enacted by a particular individual decision, the actor can be accused of acting not out of moral duty, but out of selfish motives.  All it takes is a little change in perspective for an action that was considered virtuous to become selfish.  After all, “no man is a hero to his valet.”

The worldly actor accepts the risk of selfishness, abandoning the obligation she has to explain her actions in terms of moral duty.  On the other hand, the beautiful soul chooses not to act, in fear of contaminating his connection to absolute moral duty and righteousness.  Where the beautiful soul can rightly accuse the worldly actor of abandoning morality altogether, the worldly actor can rightly accuse the beautiful soul of hypocrisy since the beautiful soul has abandoned the actual world for an illusion of righteousness that has no substance.  Take the young, enterprising Wheaton student that chooses, upon his or her return home, to criticize his or her parents, church, pastor, or congregation.  While certain criticisms of their parents’ theological, ecclesiological, or political views may be valid, it is easy to see why such activity is frustrating for parents, church, pastor, and congregation.  This student has not lived yet, he or she has not yet take up the work of ministering to a community.  The criticisms offered by this imaginary student are illegimate, not because they are theoretically incorrect per se, but because the student is still developing and has yet to be an active, concrete participant in the world they are criticizing, and the moral complexities therein.  For most students this is a phase, as we begin to act in concrete ways in our churches, outside of the  often-lofty world of ideas at a university.  It is possible for both positions to be critiqued. It seems that in the failure of both, Hegel has left us without a basis for moral action, and quickly ended his ascent to absolute knowledge by falling down a deep crevasse.

The impasse cause by this deadlock is bridged by mutual reconciliation.  The discourse of reconciliation is confession and forgiveness.  By confessing, Hegel claims, “[one] does not merely find himself apprehended by the other as something alien and disparate from it, but rather finds that other, according to its own nature and disposition, identical with himself.”  What Hegel is describing here is the way that, in confession, one is able to get outside of oneself, and see one’s own actions from the viewpoint of another, such that this viewpoint is not different, strange, or other than one’s own.  Confession is, then, recognition on the part of the confessor that what may seem right from her viewpoint is wrong from another person’s viewpoint; that this other viewpoint is legitimate.  Of course, this confession must be met by the forgiveness of the one confessed to, such that the judge himself sees his own finite position as critic.  Forgiveness is recognition, on the part of the forgiver, that the confessor’s own viewpoint is legitimate, despite the criticisms a forgiver can make.  This may sound different than what we normally think of as confession and forgiveness because in this account the actor does not already think what they are doing is wrong.  Both confessor and forgiver were convinced of the righteousness of their viewpoint, until they judged each other.  This is a much more serious case of confession and forgiveness, and demands more of both confessor and forgiver, than in an ordinary situation in which one does what one already knows is wrong.  By enacting confession and forgiveness, through language, moral life becomes religious.  Language is important here because Hegel is able to get at the active character of absolute knowledge—one must speak and say; externalize oneself in dialogical exchange, to achieve this kind of knowledge.  Inevitably, this language is religious.  For Hegel, the religious practice of Christianity is an essential contribution to the final viewpoint.  By enabling this view of the self that recognizes its limitations this exchange provides a way beyond them through the practice of holiness.

When I confess and when I forgive, I recognize the partiality of my own viewpoint.  The beliefs I have cannot be considered absolute, in virtue of the reasonable disagreement of others.  This is a kind of knowledge: I know something about my own position that I previously did not know.  In this section on the beautiful soul and the worldly actor, Hegel is trying to presenta situation where neither individual can resolve their disagreement with the other through the addition or maintenance of some of their beliefs.  Both the beautiful soul and the worldly actor have valid, reasonable criticisms of each other.  The only further viewpoint each can have is that the other is equally entitled to their beliefs.  In this kind of absolute difference and disagreement, each knows that their viewpoint is limited.  Hegel writes, “just as the former has to surrender its one-sided, unacknowledged existence of its particular being-for-self, so too must this other set aside its one-sided, unacknowledged judgment.”  Reconciliation demands that both the confessor and the forgiver recognize that their individual viewpoint is not absolute and that another viewpoint should be recognized.

Each confronts the finitude and limitation of their viewpoint;neither can have an absolute set of beliefs, but they can have absolute knowledge in their acknowledgement of this limitation, which they transcend in recognizing this limitation and the legitimacy of the viewpoint of the other in the practice of forgiveness.  Hegel writes, “It is the actual I, the universal knowledge of itself in its absolute opposite, in the knowledge which remains internal, and which, on account of the purity of its separated being-within-self, is itself completely universal.”  Hegel is struggling here to express the way in which, through a certain kind of activity (confession and forgiveness), one can have a kind of knowledge that unifies “absolute opposites.”  As this quotation indicates, the two viewpoints that are reconciled remain separate; they are not synthesized into a new set of beliefs.  What is universal about this knowledge is maintenance of absolutely different viewpoints, in the unity of one’s own mind.  This cannot happen through an increasingly comprehensive set of beliefs, but only through a practical wisdom, that allows for the acknowledgement of different viewpoints in actual situations of disagreement.

In this way, absolute knowing looks similar to the old Socratic truth – to really know is to acknowledge that I do not know.  To be more exact, Hegel argues that “knowing” does not terminate in a set of propositions, however well defended they may be, but does terminate in my understanding that my own beliefs are not the only reasonable ones that can be held.  While this may seem like garden-variety liberal tolerance (which may not be such a bad thing), I think Hegel’s conceptual analysis of reconciliation is about more than the vague feelings of “respect” that characterize the politics of tolerance.  Confession on Hegel’s account is not simply a matter of morality—the active, moral life of individuals is intertwined with their self-consciousness and self-knowledge.  Therefore, it is a matter of knowledge to recognize the limitations of one’s own viewpoint.

I would like to sketch out some consequences of what has been argued by returning to the discussion of Francis Schaeffer.  Let me reiterate my appreciation of Schaeffer: in a manner characterized by integrity and charity, Schaeffer attempted to understand and respond to society in a comprehensive way. Yet, it seems that his insistence on a certain set of Christian answers to modern questions undercuts the admirable conversation Schaeffer wants to initiate.  What Schaeffer does not do is examine his own positions, his form of evangelical Christianity and his related philosophical commitments, in light of the philosophers, authors, and artists he interacts with..  Figures like Kant, Hegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche have particular things to say to the Schaeffer’s foundational commitments, and these foundational commitments (to the simple objectivity of truth, rather than a more complex, perspective driven and phenomenological account of truth) go unquestioned in Schaeffer’s dialogue with Western culture.

This is not to suggest that our reasons for holding beliefs are unimportant.  Yes, our reasons for holding to certain positions are rendered relative in the face of another’s disagreement, and in the face of the finitude and partiality of our viewpoints.  But this does not mean we stop asking for reasons or are  less rigorous in our intellectual practices.  What this does mean is that, for intellectual matters with regard to our beliefs, our reason, and our justifications, we must trust the practice itself.  This is not finally a trust in any particular reasons, rather in the process of dialogical exchange, in the demands of rational discussion.  This is a trust in reason—the practice of intellect—rather than any reasons themselves.

Christopher Manzer is a senior philosophy major from Petoskey, MI. Chris once owned a dog that had a drug addiction.