Relationship of Skepticism to Philosophy

Hegel sets a modern skeptic beside Sextus Empiricus and Plato's *Parmenides*, and argues that the ancients doubted far more deeply.

by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel112 passages held

German, the original language

Original title: Verhältnis des Skeptizismus zur Philosophie
First published: 1802(aged 32)
Original language: German

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Overview

What began as a book review became Hegel's first history of doubt. Gottlob Ernst Schulze, a professor at Helmstedt, had made his name in 1792 with Aenesidemus, an anonymous attack on Kant's followers that borrowed the name of an ancient Greek skeptic. In 1801 he widened the assault to all of theoretical philosophy, in two volumes of more than seven hundred pages each; Hegel called them a sandbag dragged up against the fortress of philosophy. His reply, printed in the Critical Journal in 1802, turns Schulze's chosen ancestry against him. The ancient skeptics, whose arguments Sextus Empiricus preserved, attacked the certainties of everyday life and of the sciences. Schulze doubts every philosophy yet treats as beyond question the one thing they would have challenged first: whatever simply shows up in consciousness. A skepticism like that, Hegel argued, has sunk to the level of the dogmatism it claims to fight. Real skepticism is no rival to philosophy but its negative side, the part that dissolves every fixed and limited claim, and its most complete document is a dialogue by Plato, the Parmenides. Working a position through from inside until it gives way became, five years later, the method of the Phenomenology of Spirit, and the ancient skeptics fill long pages of Hegel's lectures on the history of philosophy. Schulze moved on to Göttingen, where a young student named Arthur Schopenhauer took his advice to read Plato and Kant before anything else. Since Michael Forster's Hegel and Skepticism of 1989, scholars writing in English have read this essay as a key to the whole of Hegel's project.

Key concepts

What does Hegel mean by true skepticism?

True skepticism is the negative side of every real philosophy: the work of dissolving each fixed, limited claim until it gives way. It does not stand outside philosophy attacking it. Hegel's model is Plato's Parmenides, which takes the ordinary concepts of the understanding, such as one and many, and shows each collapsing into its opposite. Behind that negative work, reason stands as the positive side it presupposes.

What are Schulze's 'facts of consciousness'?

They are whatever is given in and with consciousness: perceptions, acts of will, feelings of pleasure and pain. Schulze held them undeniable, since doubting consciousness would need consciousness, and made them the ground every philosophy must answer to. Hegel's objection is that this bedrock is exactly what the ancient skeptics doubted first, so a skepticism resting on it has quietly become dogmatic.

What were the skeptics' tropes?

Tropes were stock patterns of argument that led a skeptic to suspend judgment. Hegel separates two sets. The ten older ones, going back to Pyrrho, turned against the certainties of everyday perception. Five later ones, which Diogenes Laertius credits to Agrippa, turned against philosophers; one of them is the circle, where what should prove a claim itself needs that claim for its own proof.

What was the calm, or ataraxia, the ancient skeptics sought?

Ataraxia is an untroubled state of mind: a calm in which, as Sextus Empiricus put it, no disturbance could frighten the skeptic. It followed doubt, Hegel notes, as a shadow follows a body. Once everything the senses and the understanding offer has been made to waver, nothing is left to cling to or to fear, and life goes on by ordinary custom without asserting any belief.

Why does every truth of reason seem to contradict itself?

Because reason joins what the understanding keeps apart. Hegel's example is Spinoza's claim that God is the immanent cause of the world: a cause that is one with its effect. Split into the understanding's terms, that single truth becomes two opposed sentences, God is a cause and God is not a cause. So, Hegel says, a proposition that asserts only one side, without its opposite, is for that very reason false.

Themes of the book

What this book returns to, gathered into themes and ordered by how much of the text each one occupies.

Doubt as philosophy's own negative side

Is radical doubt the enemy of philosophy, or a part of it? If every true philosophy already contains its own skepticism, the doubter's victory over the philosophers is an illusion.

Real skepticism, Hegel argues, is not a rival school but the negative side of every true philosophy: the power that dissolves each fixed, limited claim the understanding makes. Its most complete document is not a skeptic's handbook but Plato's Parmenides, which takes up the whole range of such claims and destroys them. Hegel even holds that every proposition of reason, split into the understanding's terms, contradicts itself. A philosophy that grasps this is neither skepticism nor dogmatism but both at once, and the endless histories of doubt miss that point.

skepticism
reason
philosophy
speculative philosophy
identity
understanding
plato
self-reference
philosophical method
metaphysics
knowledge
concept and reality

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Ancient doubt against modern doubt

Who doubts more deeply, the ancient skeptic or the modern one? Everything turns on what each leaves standing once the doubting is done.

Gottlob Ernst Schulze claimed to stand on the shoulders of the ancient skeptics and doubt more reasonably than they did. Hegel turns the comparison against him. The ancients, whose arguments Sextus Empiricus preserved, shook the certainties of everyday perception and of the sciences, and sought an unshakeable calm. Schulze doubts every philosophy yet treats as beyond question whatever simply shows up in consciousness, the very thing the ancients would have challenged first. Such skepticism, Hegel concludes, has made peace with the crudest dogmatism of the sciences and become a bastard of doubt.

skepticism
ancient philosophy
dogmatism
epistemology
consciousness
subjectivity
certainty
objectivity
appearance
causality
infinite regress
first principles
history of philosophy
philosophical disagreement
kantian philosophy
innate ideas

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Within this work

passages held: 112
distinct concepts: 150
by passages held, corpus-wide: #480

What this book thinks together

The wheel takes this book’s leading concepts and shows how often they come up together. The wider the band between two, the more of its passages speak of both. Among them, most often together: “reason” and “skepticism”.

Concept co-occurrence, strongest first 8 concepts, joined by 20 pairings. 83 pairings reach beyond these concepts and are not drawn.
Concept	Paired concept	Shared passages
reason	skepticism	25
epistemology	skepticism	20
ancient philosophy	skepticism	13
dogmatism	skepticism	12
epistemology	metaphysics	7
metaphysics	skepticism	7
philosophy	skepticism	7
ancient philosophy	epistemology	6
dogmatism	reason	6
knowledge	skepticism	6
philosophy	reason	6
epistemology	reason	5
metaphysics	reason	5
dogmatism	philosophy	3
ancient philosophy	dogmatism	2
ancient philosophy	reason	2
dogmatism	epistemology	2
knowledge	reason	2
epistemology	philosophy	1
knowledge	philosophy	1

Works held

The author's work in order, this book marked in place. Your-language title first, the original beneath it where the two differ; side chips show which full texts are held.

1801 The Difference Between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy (Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems der Philosophie)
The book that opened Hegel's Jena years and first put his name before the public — as Schelling's ally, a role his essays for their Critical Journal continued.
DE
1802 Faith and Knowledge (Glauben und Wissen)
Written at the height of the alliance with Schelling: the longest of Hegel's pieces for their journal, and his fullest early reckoning with Kant.
DE
1802 How the Ordinary Human Understanding Takes Philosophy (Wie der gemeine Menschenverstand die Philosophie nehme)
Of Hegel's reviews for the Critical Journal, the most openly mocking: the journal's programme of severity turned on a single named Kantian.
DE
1802 On the Essence of Philosophical Criticism (Über das Wesen der philosophischen Kritik überhaupt)
Unsigned, and claimed for both editors ever since: the programme at the head of the journal Hegel and Schelling ran in 1802–03, which Hegel's reviews in its later issues put into practice.
DE
1802 On the Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law (Über die wissenschaftlichen Behandlungsarten des Naturrechts)
Spread across the Critical Journal's last two issues: Hegel's longest published early writing on law and the state, composed while he was still an unsalaried lecturer at Jena.
DE
1802 Relationship of Skepticism to Philosophy (Verhältnis des Skeptizismus zur Philosophie) you are here DE
1807 Phenomenology of Spirit (Die Phänomenologie des Geistes)
Written as Napoleon's army entered Jena and published in 1807, the book Hegel meant as the doorway into his system — and the one many readers still enter him through.
DE
1812 Science of Logic (Wissenschaft der Logik)
The larger of Hegel's two versions of the Logic, written away from any university while he ran a Nuremberg school; the metaphysical core the rest of the system rests on.
DE
1817 Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in Basic Outline (Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse)
The frame for Hegel's other books: its first part condenses the Science of Logic, and the Philosophy of Right expands one section of its third part. Hegel taught from it and rewrote it twice.
DEEN
1821 Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts)
The last book Hegel published in his lifetime apart from new editions of the Encyclopaedia: the textbook of his Berlin law lectures, and the one of his books most argued over by political readers.
DE
1831 On the English Reform Bill (Über die englische Reformbill)
Some three decades after his first, unpublished pamphlets on Württemberg and on the German constitution, Hegel's last venture into the politics of the day.
DE
1833 Lectures on the History of Philosophy (Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie)
Among the posthumous lecture books, the course Hegel carried through nearly his whole teaching life, and the one that closes on his thanks to the students who had followed it.
DE
1835 The Philosophy of Fine Art (Vorlesungen über die Ästhetik)
Not a book Hegel wrote but Berlin lectures assembled by a student after his death — the most influential philosophy of art of the nineteenth century, and a contested reconstruction of it.
EN
1835 Who Thinks Abstractly? (Wer denkt abstrakt?)
Hegel in the manner of a magazine essayist: short, comic and aimed at the general reader, though he never published it himself.
DE
1837 Lectures on the Philosophy of History (Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte)
For decades the most widely read of Hegel's works, and now the most contested — lectures on world history, published after his death, reading it as the growth of human freedom.
DE

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