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incomplete, not fully self-conscious account of the “logical” intelligibility of being, a negation that negates itself determinately. The very first moment of the Phenomenology of Spirit manifests this sort of problem. The idealized first subject of the PhG, Consciousness as Sense-Certainty, assumes the world is available to it simply by virtue of its sensible presence. One is immediately onto sensed objects directly just by sensing them. But any distinctly human form of apprehension must, insists Hegel, be able to say what it claims to know, otherwise it is just differentially responsive and not an instance of knowing. The absence of such saying would be untrue to its experienced nature as a human knower and in that sense, not being who one is, would be unfree. It puts itself unavoidably to the test by trying to say what it knows and failing. This is the first manifestation of the conatus of freedom, the realization of self-conscious self-knowledge. But whence comes the weightiness of this self-test mattering as much as Hegel claims, or at all? As we have seen Heidegger argue, Hegel can demonstrate this “because he has already assumed the Absolute”—in phenomenological terms the ultimacy of this conatus, from the beginning, and that means that metaphysics as unconditioned thinking on thinking, conceived dialectically like this, is an illusion, question-begging.17
This is not an issue limited to Hegel or Kant, and it is not at all a matter of whether some case made for some insufficiency and that some correcting move is determinately warranted, a good argument or not. Heidegger has framed all such issues as dependent on, and reflecting some sense of, the historical meaningfulness of Being and that means the context of his question about the reconciling powers of reason is a question about mattering. How could Hegel approach a question like whether a mutual recognitive status in modern ethical life matters, and if so how much, and if a lot, why? It is to Hegel’s enormous credit that he realized that in the emerging modern world of market capitalism and competitive economies a critical source of meaningfulness would have to be one’s ethical standing among others, the sources of self-respect in a world (or mutuality of recognition),
17. I state here the Heideggerian position, not my own view. Heidegger has to claim that what for the Hegelian, or in the Hegelian tradition, must count as the pathologies of modernity— alienation, reification, domination instead of mutuality of recognitive status, the humiliating conditions of the modern organization of labor, anomie, deracination—are all best understood as implications of the still “unthought” question, the meaning of Being, as descendants of the “metaphysical” tradition. As I have suggested, this claim is worth taking more seriously than it has been, but the way Heidegger formulates the issue seems to exclude all other options as derivative from and so complicit with that tradition. Even on strictly hermeneutical grounds, such exclusivity leaves us with an incomplete interpretation of what we need to understand— what has happened to us.