Responses to Trisokkas, Torsen and McManus

Trisokkas raises two objections to my defence of Heidegger's claim against Hegel. Heidegger's claim is that Hegel had dogmatically assumed the priority of ‘logic’ in any inquiry into the meaning of being, thus inheriting the metaphysical tradition's dual assumptions that what must be said to matter most of all in our attempt understand our place in the world and a possible reconciliation with the world is the knowability of being. Everything else can only matter if the world is first of all available as knowable. The claim is not that Hegel cannot develop a ‘science of logic’ or, to use Hegelian shorthand, that Being cannot be understood as Concept. The issue is the status of the Logic, what significance it has in our attempt to understand ourselves and the meaning of being in general. Ultimately Hegel counts as the culmination of the metaphysical tradition because he believes, citing Aristotle, that ‘nous rules the world’, that everything is primordially available to us as rationally available, explicable. This means that even the meaning of the being of human history, sociality, religion and art is as expressions of reason, even as modes of rationality. Trisokkas objects that it is question-begging to saddle Hegel with a question that he is not, in the Science of Logic at least, attempting to answer. He puts this by saying that Hegel is simply not addressing the question of the status or significance of the Logic, that he has not ‘chosen’ to raise any question about what matters to human beings or to Hegel himself, but has chosen an inquiry into being. (‘Mattering is irrelevant at the beginning of Hegel's Logic.’ ‘All being is taken to be, is simply being.’) According to Trisokkas the Logic is simply an inquiry into being's possible determinacy. Trisokkas's second objection is a classic Hegelian objection, the one he himself raised against Schelling. He alleges that any philosophical understanding, even of the nondiscursive sources of meaningfulness, must itself be discursive in some way, as in Heidegger's own analysis or as in my book, and he cites this as evidence against the priority, at least for philosophy, of a nondiscursive attunement to significances. Mattering is a concept and our account of its significance must remain conceptual, not itself ‘poetic’.