Introduction

The following essay has two aims. First, to elucidate Irad Kimhi's concept of the "dual counterpart" that he presents in Thinking and Being. Second, to employ Kimhi's notion of the "dual counterpart" in an elucidation of Hegel's notion of the inverted world (verkehrte Welt) from his Phenomenology of Spirit. Before I do this, I am going to begin by describing a well-known children's game known as "Opposite Day" in English, and "Verkehrte Welt" in German. My description of this game will help build the general intuition that I then attempt to work out more rigorously in the discussions of Kimhi and Hegel.

Opposite Day

My children sometimes play a game that I and my wife also played when we were little that is called "Opposite Day" in English and "Verkehrte Welt" in German. The people playing agree that from now on, anything they say will mean the opposite. For example, my son says to my daughter "You are poop", and everyone knows that by that he means that she is wonderful. "I want to stay inside" means "I want to go outside." "I hate playing being a doggie" means that I love that game, etc. Part of the delight of this game is that the expressive options are limited. The game works on the basis of logical contraries, so that part of the challenge is to think of things that narrow one down to a specific contrary. For example, it is clear in this game that "hate" implies "love". But it is not clear what contrary one intends when one says "the sky is red". Perhaps one means that the sky is blue, or black, but rather than implying a single contrary attribute, "the sky is red" only seems to mean "the sky is not red."

There is a way to change this game that makes it significantly less fun, but infinitely expands its expressive options. Namely, one could agree that one means not the contrary of what one says, but rather the contradictory. So, for example, "The sky is red" means "The sky is not red", and "The sky is not red" means "The sky is red". The implication is that in this inverted world of contradictories one can say absolutely everything one could otherwise say in the normal world, without any loss of information. It is simply a matter of applying or removing the negation from any thing one says. Nevertheless, such an inverted world seems pointless. For it only works because we have secretly agreed that the positive predication means the negative predication and vice versa. In public we are employing the inverted formulations. But privately, everyone is "undoing" them to get at the sense of the utterance. Thus, this inverted world turns on the notion of a transparent masquerade - we cloak our utterances in negation, but understand our utterances by removing that cloak. This suggests that, in fact, the public form of the utterances aside, we have not left the normal world at all, but merely added a superfluous layer of encoding on top of our otherwise transparent utterances.

Consider, by way of contrast, what it would mean, if we applied the inversion not to our public utterances but to the very form of our understanding. In this scenario we would set up the following rules:

• When I say "p", I actually mean to say "¬p"
• When I say "¬p", I actually mean to say "p"

This brings us into an infinite loop of saying "p" and saying "¬p". I say "p", but realize, by the first rule, that what I actually mean to say by that is "¬p". But then, the second rule comes to bear: having now said "¬p", I realize that I actually mean to say "p". And so on and so forth. In this inverted world, the inversion is not a transparent layer of convention in how we choose to communicate. Rather, the inversion goes right to the heart of what I mean. In such an inverted world, the result is that I mean nothing at all. I cannot settle on whether I mean "p" or "¬p". Having said one thing, I immediately contradict myself, and contradict myself again and again. In this inverted world we therefore don't mean anything at all.

The contrast between these two inverted worlds, inverted via contradiction, presents a puzzle. In the one, I can communicate what I mean, but only because I, in truth, have not inverted anything aside from some arbitrary signs by which I communicate. The first inverted world is not an inverted world at all. However, in the second, when I try to invert what it is I mean, I find that I mean nothing at all. Another way of saying this is that there is no coherent inverted world. A truly inverted world is not a world at all, it consists of no claims at all. We can say nothing of it.

Our inability to truly leave the normal world and inhabit the inverted world of contradictories points to a puzzling asymmetry between positive and negative utterances. On the one hand, it seems we can reverse the role of positive and negative utterances with zero loss of information, i.e. without any functional impediment to our ability to effectively make the meaning of our utterances known. On the other hand, when we consider that this reversal only works because we can, in secret, understand the apparently negative utterances for the positive utterances that they truly are, then we understand the stubborn persistence of the respective roles of positive and negative utterances. Meaning what we say prevents us from reversing the polarity of meaning p to meaning ¬p. It is as if propositions, a matter of meaning things, has something akin to the right-hand rule in physics and mathematics. Based on the zero loss of information between the world and the inverted contradictory world, we might think that the two utterances "The sky is red" and "The sky is not red" are entirely symmetrical. But similar to our befuddlement that it is a physical law of the universe (the right hand rule) that a magnetic field has a direction, we discover that meaning p and meaning ¬p seems to be asymmetrical. The analysis that follows of Kimhi's concept of the "dual counterpart" and Hegel's "inverted world" is the attempt to draw out the significance of this asymmetry.

Kimhi's Dual Counterpart

In Thinking and Being, Kimhi argues that thinking is a "two-way capacity", which is to say that a simple positive predication like "The sky is red" forms a unity with its contradiction "The sky is not red", and that within the unity of the simple predication p and ¬p, the positive form has priority over the negative form. There is no shortcut to understanding what Kimhi means by all of this, but I find that Kimhi's notion of the "dual counterpart" offers a reasonable entrypoint into understanding his claims. It is, we shall see, a version of the "opposite day" game.

Kimhi introduces the "dual counterpart" in order to show the deficiency of what he calls "c-factualism". "C-factualism" is a theory about how we make simple predicative claims about what is the case, such as when saying "The cat is on the mat". According to the c-factualist, the claim "The cat is on the mat" can be described in terms of a picture, or diagram, of a cat on top of a mat: C. The problem with such a view is that it is not clear whether the diagram (C) is being used to claim that the cat is on the mat, or to claim that the cat is not on the mat. This is why Kimhi quotes Spinoza:

​So they look on ideas as dumb pictures on a tablet, and misled by this preconception they fail to see that an idea, insofar as it is an idea, involves affirmation or negation.

The diagram C is "dumb" in the sense that it does not contain, it does not "speak" its own affirmation or negation. It is certainly telling us something about the cat and the mat, but it cannot speak as to whether it is bringing to our attention the fact that the cat is on the mat, or that the cat is not on the mat.

We can recognize here that this is a variation on the opposite day game. In this game, I say "The cat is on the mat", and it can mean either the cat is on the mat, or the cat is not on the mat. The game is to figure out which one of those options I mean when I say "The cat is on the mat". Perhaps I mean "The cat is on the mat", or I mean "The cat is not on the mat". In any case, my utterance "The cat is on the mat" is the equivalent of displaying a card on which stands: C, and leaving it up to a guessing game whether I intend, by raising this card, to assert that the cat is on the mat, or that the cat is not on the mat. We could call this game "Guess my Intention". The functional equivalent of this guessing game is the game where I say "The cat is on the mat", and I either mean that or its contradictory. That game we could call "Truth and Lies". Rather than furnishing a card with a diagram on it, I can say either "The cat is on the mat" or "The cat is not on the mat", and the others have to guess if I am intending with my claim to tell the truth or to lie.

Kimhi explains what is happening in this game like this:

Since a proposition can be ­either true or false, being true cannot simply be a ­matter of depicting a state of affairs—of being an isomorphic image of a state of affairs.(Kimhi 102)

The card C which "depicts a state of affairs" is the "isomorphic image" of two states of affairs: 1) The cat being on the mat, and 2) the cat not being on the mat. If I try to communicate that the cat is on the mat by furnishing the card C, there is still the question what I mean by this: "being true cannot simply be a matter of depicting a state of affairs". The card itself is neither true nor false, for it is not a proposition. In other words, "since a proposition can be either true or false" (we can say: since a proposition must be either true or false), the card C cannot be a proposition because it is neither true nor false - by showing the card, it is not clear which of the two claims I am making: 1) affirming that the cat is on the mat or 2) denying that the cat is on the mat.

To describe c-factualism as such a guessing game is to say that c-factualism does not understand what constitutes a proposition. As such, c-factualism believes that it is possible for us to inhabit an inverted world in the resolute sense of meaning the opposite of what we mean. For according to c-factualism, I can furnish "propositions" in the form of "spatial models" or "images" that can both affirm and deny what they say. The crucial point, however, is that these "images", the card C, make no claim at all. As such, these images are not propositions, they are not depictions of the world. Because C-factualism has an incorrect understanding of what constitutes a proposition, C-factualism, in fact, cannot represent any world to begin with, and so there is no possible world for it to invert, and thus the inverted world it claims to lead us into, in which our "proposition", our "spatial model" can deny what it claims to "propose", is an illusion.

Now we are in a position to understand Kimhi's comments on the dual counterpart:

Consider therefore the dual counterpart of a state of affairs, which differs from the original state of affairs only insofar as the obtaining (or non-­ obtaining) of the counterpart is the same as the non-­obtaining (or obtaining) of the original. (Kimhi 103)

Kimhi is inviting us to consider the possibility that we might be living in an inverted world, the dual counterpart. Either everything is as I say it is, or everything is precisely not as I say it is, but we don't know which of these two scenarios we are in fact living in. Now suppose I claim "The sky is red". Considering that I don't know which of the two worlds I am living in, I do not know if what I claim is true or false, and there is nothing in that claim itself that can help me figure it out. Kimhi writes:

There cannot be anything in a ­simple affirmation that determines ­whether the state of affairs it depicts is the original or the counterpart. (Kimhi 103)

There is nothing in the "simple affirmation" The sky is red that determines whether the sky is actually red or not actually red. In other words, the claim The sky is red could "depict" the "state of affairs" of a red sky, or it could "depict" the "state of affairs of a blue sky. In the first case, I am living in the normal world, the "original". In the second case, I am living in the inverted world, the "dual counterpart". However, I have no way to decide, based only on the claim "The sky is red" which of the two worlds I am living in. Hence, both the claim "The sky is red" and the denial "The sky is not red" say nothing at all. Kimhi writes:

There cannot be anything in a ­simple affirmation that determines ­whether the state of affairs it depicts is the original or the counterpart. Hence, it is meaningless to describe affirmation or denial as true or false. (Kimhi 103)

In this state of doubt about which world I am living in, I can say nothing at all. If I consider the possibility that I live in the inverted world, no claim concerning the world, such as "The sky is red" or "The sky is not red", is going to help me determine which world I am living in, and what the actual claim is that is being made. Therefore, unsure of whether I live in the original or the counterpart, "it is meaningless to describe affirmation ["The sky is red"] and denial ["The sky is not red"] as true or false." Saying "The sky is red" is saying something that might be true, and might be false, depending on the world I am living in. As such, it says nothing at all. And this is true of any simple predicative claim I make concerning the world. They are all null and void, they all say nothing at all, all for the same reason. Thus, the possibility of living in an inverted world collapses. Even the mere possibility that I could be living in an inverted world collapses me into a world in which no proposition, no claim is possible, and hence robs me of having any world at all.

To review: contemplating even the mere possibility of an inverted world demonstrates that such a world is impossible. Thus, it is by virtue of the fact that the claim "The sky is red" means anything at all that I know that the inverted world is an incoherent impossibility. I cannot even so much as consider such a world. The uninvertable relationship between affirmation and denial, truth and falsity is a condition for having a world at all.

It might appear that this argument ignores an obvious way out of the uncertainty that leads to world collapse. Why can't I simply look up at the sky and see what color it is? That will tell me if I am living in the inverted world or not. If, having claimed that the sky is red, I look up to the sky and see redness, then I know I am living in the normal world, the "original". And if I look up to the sky and see blue, then I know that I am living in the inverted world, the "counterpart". But this generates a reductio. For, for me to see that the sky is red is for me to make the claim that the sky is red. Everything I could possibly observe about the world, however direct, must, in order to be an observation at all, be expressible in the form of a proposition. And so, when I attempt to look up at the sky to see if it is red, I look up at the sky, and see that it is, indeed, red, and exclaim "The sky is red! I live in the original". Alas, I find myself back where I started: unable to form any coherent claim at all. For perhaps my allegedly "direct" observation that the sky is red is the non-obtaining of the sky being red (it is crucial to this argument that there is no such thing as non-propositional "direct" observation, no "non-conceptual content", as John McDowell would put it). Considering the possibility that I truly live in an inverted world, in which everything that I take to be the case is not the case, I find that considering this possibility forecloses it. Considering the possibility that I live in an inverted world, I conclude that such an open possibility would destroy the very notion of a world (as "all that which is the case" - TLP 1).

By the argument of reductio ad absurdum, I conclude that I live in the only possible world there is, in which claims mean what they do, and the world is as I say it is. I conclude that the polarity of truth and falsity cannot be inverted.

Hegel's Inverted World

Overview

Let us begin with a high-level description of what, I argue, Hegel intends to communicate with his example of the Inverted World.

• Hegel introduces the Inverted World in the third chapter of the Phenomenology, Force and Understanding, after the chapter Perception and before the turn to self-consciousness in the ensuing chapters.

• Force and Understanding begins with the achievement from perception, namely the ability to form judgments of the form "S is F", for example: "The sky is blue". These simple predicative judgments are what Hegel refers to, at the start of the chapter as "the unconditioned universal" (das unbedingt Allgemeine) (more on this apparently strange formulation later).

• Force and Understanding is going to address a skeptical challenge, which goes like this: "You claim that S is F, but what if your claim that S is F is, in fact, false. How can you verify the truth of your claim?" Note that we can close off one avenue of verification, namely, the avenue of basing the judgment "S is F" on another judgment "T is G", for this generates the regress mentioned at the conclusion of our discussion of Kimhi's dual counterpart. Having closed off the avenue of verifying the judgment "S is F" on the basis of a different judgment, we come to a question that has the same form posed by Kimhi's scenario of the dual counterpart. How, from the claim that "S is F" alone, can we verify the truth of that claim? How do we know that for any claim of the form "S is F", we are not living in a world in which "S is F" is false, and "S is not F" is true? How do we know we are not living in an Inverted World?

• Hegel's reply to this skeptical challenge is that we cannot, in fact, know, from the claim "S is F" alone, that it is true. This is Kimhi's point: "There cannot be anything in a ­simple affirmation that determines ­whether the state of affairs it depicts is the original or the counterpart." Thus, if the claim "S is F" could be our only justification for guaranteeing truth of our claim "S is F", then it is very possible that we are, indeed, living in an Inverted World, and just don't know it. Because, however, we do in fact know that we are not living in the Inverted World, there is something missing in our account. There must be something else that guarantees our claim to know anything at all. This "something else" cannot be just other predicative judgments (since that leads to the regress), but rather something else entirely. This "something else" that guarantees the truth of our judgment "S is F", (for example: "The sky is blue", etc) will turn out to be self-consciousness.

• In Hegel's Inverted World, the solution to the way out is already suggested. Hegel's way out, I argue, depends on a similar application of the "right hand rule" that foreclosed in our discussion of "opposite day" our entry into the inverted world and that eliminates Kimhi's "dual counterpart", namely the irreversibility of truth and falsity, that which Kimhi calls "the priority of positive predication" within the "unity of the contradictory pair" (Kimhi 151). Hegel's suggestion is that the irreversibility of truth and falsity rests on a deeper principle, namely the irreversibility of good and evil. This is a striking claim. He is arguing that irreversibility in general is most fundamentally the moral irreversibility of good and evil. This means that the logical (or epistemo-logical) expression of this irreversibility as the polarity of truth and falsity rests on our constitution as moral beings, and not the other way around! Consciousness is moral first, and logical second.

The Details

Let us begin now by observing the examples that Hegel gives of inversion. They can be classified into three types: epistemo-logical claims, claims about the natural world, claims of the moral world.

1. (Epistemo-)Logical Claims

what in the law of the first world is sweet, in this inverted in-itself is sour, what in the former is black is, in the other, white. (Hegel 97)

These are claims of the form "S is F", simple positive predicative claims: "The apple is sweet", "The square is black." We need not be worried that Hegel employs here contraries and not contradictories. This is only to entertain the impossible fiction of an Inverted World, to pretend like the Inverted World could be a possible world at all. Strictly speaking, in the Inverted World, all we know is that "The apple is sweet" implies "The apple is not sweet", which implies "The apple is sweet", and so on and so-forth. As we have seen above, this leads to world collapse. Hence Hegel needs to use contraries rather than contradictories to maintain the fiction and thereby hold open the possibility of this Inverted World long enough to discover morality. The irreversibility of truth and falsity in a simple positive predication is what we might call the "theoretical" or "veridical" or "logical" or "epistemological" expression of the right hand rule.

2. The Natural World

Electricity and Magnetism:

What in the law of the first is the north pole of the magnet is, in its other, supersensible in-itself [viz. in the earth], the south pole; but what is there south pole is here north pole. Similarly, what in the first law is the oxygen pole of electricity becomes in its other, supersensible essence, hydrogen pole; and conversely, what is there the hydrogen pole becomes here the oxygen pole. (97)

Electricity and magnetism exhibit the right-hand rule in the strict sense of math and physics.¹

Another example Hegel offers, that of gravity, is curious. He suggests in the lead-up to the Inverted World that the "moments" of gravity, which he identifies as "space and time, or distance and velocity", are analogous to the positive and negative poles of electricity. However, gravity does not feature in his examples from the Inverted World. He doesn't actually suggest any "inversion" of "space and time, or distance and velocity". Nevertheless, his mention of gravity in the lead-up to the Inverted World suggests to me that he is, here too, interested in a kind of right hand rule, namely the unidirectionality of time. Newton's equations, namely, allow us to describe not only how a body of mass will move as time progresses, but also where, given a mass's position and velocity at the current time, it was at a past time. In other words, based on Newton's equations, we can make a model of the world in which masses move around in time and space, and we can move back and forth along the axis of time as we please. However, in the real world, we can only move forward in time. The apparent symmetry of past and future in the Newtonian model stands in contrast to the asymmetry of past and future in the real world.

3. The Moral World

Hegel's example in the moral realm is the law of revenge. In the normal world, the law of revenge says that "revenge on an enemy is...the supreme satisfaction of the injured individuality." We could express this as a moral imperative: it is essential that I avenge any wrongfulness committed against my person. In the Inverted World, such a law of vengeance leads only to destruction:

the reinstatement of myself as a person through the destruction of the alien individuality is turned into self-destruction (97)

In the Inverted World, the law of revenge on my enemy, the "alien individuality" is not my path to reclaiming my personhood, as it is in the normal world, but rather it is my path to self-destruction, to the destruction of my personhood. We could express this as the following moral imperative: Do not avenge your enemy.

Hegel's example might at first seem curious. For I am arguing that Hegel is arguing for the irreversibility of good and evil. Surely Hegel doesn't think that the law of revenge is a good law. Surely the law he wants to argue for as good is in fact the moral law of the Inverted World: "Do not avenge your enemy." Positively formulated, this law is the Golden Rule: "Do unto others (including your enemy who wronged you) as you would have them do unto you". Surely Hegel has things backwards! It is not the Golden Rule that is perverse, but rather the Rule of Vengeance. At this stage in the Phenomenology, however, we have only advanced so far that we can make predicative positive claims of the form "S is F". In other words, we have neither "Self-consciousness" of the form "I think S is F", nor consciousness of other human beings, of the form "She (or he) thinks S is F". Thus the law of revenge seems to us to be a good law: there are no other (conscious) human beings in the world. There are for this young Spirit, just S's that are F. And in that world, it makes sense that I eliminate any threats to myself.

Hegel's example from the moral realm beckons toward what is to come: the master slave dialectic, and all the rest. The only reason I can inhabit this Inverted World at all, the only reason that the Inverted World is a possible world at all is that I have not yet grasped that truth and falsity are irreversible. And the reason I have not yet grasped that truth and falsity is irreversible, is that I do not yet have an adequate notion of good and evil. The reader of the Phenomenology can see that when our young Spirit enters the Inverted World, it discovers not an inverted notion of good and evil, but rather the Golden Rule itself, the correct version of good and evil. This suggests that, so long as we have no intersubjective awareness of other human beings, we might as well be living in the Inverted World, because it is a better world than the normal world in which revenge is king. However, we know that we are not living in the Inverted World. We know, from a consideration of the incoherence that results when we reverse truth and falsity, that the Inverted World is less than a fiction. In a truly inverted world, in which my truth claims are my false claims, I would not so much as even have a world. Therefore, knowing that I live in the only possible world, I must conclude that, in order to have this world I do have, in order to know anything at all, in order to have any world at all, I must have an intersubjective, moral consciousness.

Another way to look at Hegel's mode of argument is to say that it is inconceivable to us that The Good could be Evil, and the Evil could be Good. The person who thinks that has not grasped the concepts of Good and Evil. One can debate whether this or that act is good or evil, but one cannot debate whether The Good is Good or whether it is Evil. The person who thinks it debatable that The Good is good and not evil, has thereby demonstrated that he or she has no concept of The Good to begin with. Hegel is pointing out that the irreversibility of Good and Evil is readily accessible to each and every one of us, in a way that the irreversibility of Truth and Falsity isn't. In order to see the irreversibility of Truth and Falsity, we have to engage in the mode of argument done here, and that, Dear Reader, is exhausting.

The Footnotes

At this point, everything that needs to be said about Hegel's Inverted World has been said. But we can, as an academic exercise, lay out how, based on this reading, we should understand Hegel's mysterious terminology like that of "Force" (Kraft), "Sollicitation" (Sollizitieren) and "the supersensible world" (die übersinnliche Welt).

The unconditioned universal (das unbedingt Allgemeine)

The unconditioned universal is the achievement of Perception and therefore the starting point for Force and Understanding. It is a simple predicative judgment of the form "S is F", for example "The sky is blue". "Universal" means here that something is expressible in language. The first "universal" that Hegel identifies is the "sensuous universal". The "sensuous universal" is a name (a universal) that picks out something in experience (sensuous). For example "tree!", "house!", or "night!":

To the question: 'What is Now?', let us answer, e.g. 'Now is Night.' In order to test the truth of this sense-certainty a simple experiment will suffice. We write down this truth; a truth cannot lose anything by being written down, any more than it can lose anything through our preserving it. (Hegel 60)

We pick out things in experience by attaching a name to them, by calling them what they are. As Hegel describes, it is like writing the name, e.g. "night" on a post-it note and attaching that post-it note to panorama of our experience, so that we know that there in our panorama of experience is the thing called "night".

The problem with the notion of naming is that the name itself is not a truth claim. By merely exclaiming "night!" I have not said anything that is true or false. I only make a truth claim when I affix the post-it note to my panorama of experience and say "This here is night!"². Let us say that I affix my post-it note "night" to the black sky in my panorama. If that panorama changes, as it always does when night turns to day, then that post-it note is now incorrectly marking the bright blue sky as "night". Hegel calls this employment of names "a universal that is affected with an opposite". The word "Night" only makes sense, only says anything at all, when it signifies something, and it does this by being placed in the dark sky on my panorama of experience. The post-it note is "affected" with an opposite in the sense that the truth or falsity of "night" being correctly applied, depends on the sensuous presence of darkness in the sky: "a universal" i.e. a name "night", that is "affected", this is, whose truth, correct usage, etc. is determined by "an opposite", that is, the sensuous presence of darkness in the sky. We can see here that "affected" refers not to a process of causal impact (as in: particles of light hitting my retina, causing my brain to utter 'night'), but rather to logical directionality: the correct application of the word "night" depends on (is "affected by", "managed", "handled" by) the presence of darkness in the sky.

To review: to name something correctly is to point to that thing and say the name. This is only possible in the presence of that thing. The "universality" of the name is "conditioned" by the presence of the thing it names. In contrast, there is another use of names that is not dependent on presence. As such, it is not a "conditioned universal", but rather an "unconditioned universal". This is the employment of a proposition of the form "S is F", e.g. "The sky is blue." Previously, in naming, I employed the word "blue" correctly by pointing to the sky and naming the color I see up there "blue". Now, I replace the "this" that I employed when pointing with a name for the "this", the "sky". This yields the proposition "The sky is blue." In contrast to the proposition "This is blue", I can now claim that the sky is blue without having to actually point up at the sky and say blue. I am employing language, i.e. I am employing a universal, and I am employing the universal in such a way that it is "unconditioned" by sensuous presence. By wresting the proposition "This is blue" away from sensuous presence with the new proposition "The sky is blue", I have achieved, in language, an independence, a decoupling of language from reality. Language, the claim, must refer to reality, if its truth is to be evaluated, but it doesn't need for the reality to be present at that moment of the utterance. I can be in a windowless room and say "The sky is blue", and that claim can be true. If I am, however, stuck in a windowless room painted green all over, my proposition "This is blue" will never be true.

Force (Kraft)

Hegel's term "force" has confused commentators to no end. The confusion lies in thinking that Hegel is talking about physical force, such as "mass times acceleration". On such a reading, Hegel's discussion of force can only be "allegorical"³. Hegel is using "force", however, in the sense that Kant used it when he referred to the "power of judgment", or in the sense that Sebastian Rödl uses it when he talks of "The Power"⁴. It is the power to know tout court. It is the power to know anything at all. It is the "vis" that manifest in the "vir", the strength (vis) that makes (hu)mans, men and women (vir), the powerful beings that they are.

This construal of force as (the power of) knowledge shows a general principle that we must apply in reading German Idealist texts. It begins with Kant's notion of "affection". As Jacobi famously pointed out, Kant cannot mean by this term physical affection. But then what does Kant mean? Hegel clarified this point, as demonstrated by his notion of affection concerning the phrase "a universal that is affected with an opposite". "Affection", Hegel is saying, does not mean physical affection, but rather logical dependence. Sensuous presence "handles", "influences", "conducts" ("afficere") the employment of the universal. Key terms in the Kantian tradition have two possible meanings: one in "the logical space of reasons", the other in the "logical space of physical objects in Space and Time". The correct meaning is usually the space-of-reason meaning. Fichte is the first person to really employ physical vocabulary in a resolute way, speaking of an "activity" "turning back", encountering "resistance", all as a way of explaning the "mechanism" of the human mind. However, none of these terms in Fichte are employed in the physical sense. We must always look for their meaning in the space of reasons. The same applies to Hegel.⁵

Hegel defines force as a "movement":

the 'matters' posited as independent directly pass over into their unity, and their unity directly unfolds its diversity, and this once again reduces itself to unity. (81)

The "matters" at hand are secondary qualities posited on an object, a this, such as the "red" and "square" of "The cube is red", "The cube is square". My knowledge of this, the cube, is my knowledge of these propositions, it is the "unfolding" of the cube, the thing, the "this", into propositions about the cube: "The cube is red", "The cube is round", all of which can be evaluated as true or false based on that object, the cube, over there, that "this" truly is. The plurality of propositions "reduces itself to unity." Force is the power to know, it is the power to know things in the canonical form of knowledge the form of "S is F". The "S" is the porous medium that can hold many F's, many "determinates" (Bestimmtheiten): "S is F₁", "S is F₂", etc.

Solicit (Sollizitiert)

Hegel first introduces the term "solicit" in the following context. I am standing before an object, a cube, a "this", which has "the express [i.e. posited - ML] character of a One" (das unter der der Bestimmtheit des Eins gesetzte). I now want to know things about this cube, so I "solicit" it. I ask it: "what are you?" and the cube says "I am red" and "I am square". This is the unfolding movement of "force" from "unity" to "diversity".

Again, "sollicit" does not refer to the physical sense of disturbing or moving (sollicitare tellurem = ploughing, the stirring up of the earth). It refers to the legal sense of petitioning: to approach the court and ask for an answer to a question:

- "What is this thing?"
- "This thing is red."
- "What else is this thing?"
- "This thing is square."
- etc.

Here is Hegel's description:

Since it is necessary that Force itself be this subsistence, or that it express itself, its expression presents itself in this wise, that the said other' approaches it and solicits it. (Hegel 83)

The setup is, again, like this: we have a red cube sitting before us. It is red and square independently of our so knowing. The "redness" and the "squareness" already inhere in it, but without our knowledge of them:

The subsistence of the unfolded 'matters' [e.g. "redness", "squareness" - ML] outside of Force [i.e. Knowledge - ML] is thus precluded and is something other than Force [i.e. Knowledge] (83)

We now sollicit the this, this one, to find out something about it. We find out it is red and it is square. But now, we reflect on the fact that the cube before me is not only red and square. It is the physical object, the unity I see before me, a unity that is not exhausted by any proposition of the form "S is F":

But, since Force must of necessity be this oneness which it is not as yet posited as being, this 'other' approaches it, soliciting it to reflect itself into itself (83)

Force, the knowledge of the cube, is also the knowledge that "redness" and "squareness" all refer to the one thing, that cube there. In one moment, force, knowledge was the person exclaiming: "The cube is red!", "The cube is square!". In the next moment, it reflects on the fact that none of those propositions exhaust our knowledge of the cube: "Force...is driven back into itself". It knows that the cube is an object that exists independently of my act of predicating anything of it at all. It doesn't need my predications for it to be. It exists independently of the fluctuations of my mind, my furnishing of this proposition and that proposition.

The Supersensible World (die Übersinnliche Welt)

Once we realize that our propositions are only true because they refer to things in the world that are as they are independently of our propositions, our truth claims concerning them, we come to the "supersensible world". The cube is not red because I say it is, but rather it is red because it is red in itself. This is where the skeptical challenge of the Inverted World enters the picture. How do I know that I am not living in the Inverted World in which nothing is as I say it is?

Bibliography

Brandom, Robert Boyce. 2019. A Spirit of Trust: A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology. The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press.

Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, A. V. Miller, John N. Findlay, and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. 2013. Phenomenology of Spirit. Reprint. Oxford Paperbacks. Oxford Univ. Press.

Kimhi, Irad. 2018. Thinking and Being. Harvard University Press.

Rödl, Sebastian. 2018. Self-Consciousness and Objectivity: An Introduction to Absolute Idealism. Harvard University Press.