Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) is, as far as I know, the first book in western philosophy to abjure appeals to the atemporality of anything—for Hegel’s immediate predecessor in this regard was Heracleitus, who didn’t write books; he didn’t even know what they are.
This is hardly the standard account of Hegel, which is still a quasi-theological one. Nor is it the usual revisionary one, which is quasi-Kantian. But it is the only view of Hegel I know of that actually makes his philosophy work, for the others require gigantic and indefensible presuppositions (e.g. “not only does God exist, but here is what He thinks;” or “these, not Kant’s, are the necessary categories of human thought”). And, as I have argued in two books, it has textual support: look Hegel’s his use of “truth,” in the Phenomenology, to designate the outcome of a certain sort of process rather than the traditional notion that truth consists in the “correspondence” of something verbal or mental (a sentence, belief, etc.) to some fact or state of affairs.
Hegel’s usage here reminds us that truth as correspondence is an atemporal notion. For the two poles of a correspondence-relation, a sentence or belief on one side and a fact or state of affairs on the other, must exist simultaneously for the relation between them to hold: if I say the cat is on the mat,” then the cat either is, or is not, on the mat when I say it. If I say “the cat was on the mat last Tuesday,” then I am inferring to something I cannot now experience; what exists right now is whatever evidence I have that the cat was on the mat last Tuesday. Is it that of which the sentence is true?
Saying that a sentence “corresponds” to the evidence for it would evacuate correspondence of all meaning, so philosophers invented something called “facts,” to which sentences (etc.) correspond but which are atemporal: it is a fact right now that the cat was on the mat last Tuesday. Such a fact can serve as the complement for true statements about the past and future. But why postulate wholly atemporal beings for this job, when you can follow Aristotle and say that our minds form images, φαντάσματα, of things, and locate some of those things in a similarly imagined past? “The cat was on the mat last Tuesday” is then true of my image of the cat on the mat, together with the temporal index “last Tuesday.” Philosophers don’t like mental images as a rule, and I sympathize—but how imaginary are facts? Have you ever seen one?
If I am right about Hegel, he thinks something like the Aristotelian account is the way our minds ordinarily work (he usually opts for Aristotle in such cases); but there is also the alternative of saying that “the cat is on the mat is true” has nothing to do with any state of affairs referred to, but simply conveys that a certain process has resulted in the localization of the cat on the mat. That is, roughly, what he does in the Phenomenology.
If to be true is to be the result of a certain kind of process, then everything true is path-dependent. What kind of path ends in truth? For the Phenomenology, it is one that resembles what is often called today the “hypothetico-deductive” model of scientific inquiry. It has four stages (forget the three-stage “thesis-antithesis-synthesis” stuff):
- an hypothesis is formed (Hegel calls it a “certainty”);
- it is tested against reality (“experience”);
- it fails, i.e. encounters significant anomalies (“contradictions”)
- the hypothesis is revised (“sublated”) to accommodate them.
The distinctive features of the Phenomenology, as opposed to scientific inquiry, are two: first, the hypothesis always fails and requires revision; and second, the testing carried out can be ethical in nature: an hypothesis promises the success of certain courses of action, and it is when these fail that the certainty needs revision. Since the revised hypothesis is the “truth” of the process, I will call the whole development a “truth-process
This characterization of the truth-process is formalistic, for in the Phenomenology it applies to a huge gamut of contents. The relation between the formalistic process and its content is therefore contingent; and, moreover, the relation between a particular case of the process and anything that ever actually happened is also contingent. History does not in fact exhibit truth-processes of this kind, except very rarely; the facts of history, Hegel tells us in the Preface to his Lectures on the Philosophy of History, present us with a “slaughter bench,” a panoply of meaningless suffering. The question is not whether the available facts constitute a truth-process, but whether they can be reconstructed—or, better, reconstrued— or, better still, construed—as one.
Such construal requires, at minimum, omitting all kinds of random events and circumstances which, in reality, accompany the stages of the truth-process. These often include the intentions of the people engaged in a truth-process. Hegel justifies such omission of intentions as the “cunning of reason” (though it often amount to the “cunning of Hegel”). Though truth processes almost never actually happen, they are “rational” for Hegel when they are construable as testing just one part of a certainty at a time, via a series of minimal changes (“determinate negations”).