Received: 3 June 2024 Accepted: 1 August 2024

DOI: 10.1111/ejop.13000

SYMPOSIUM

The Exteriority of Thinking: Hegel and Heidegger

Thomas Khurana

Philosophy, University of Potsdam, Potsdam,

Germany Abstract
In The Culmination, Robert Pippin offers a stunning
Correspondence
reassessment of the achievements of absolute idealism.
Email: [email protected] Having developed some of the most persuasive defenses of
Hegel's absolute idealism to date, Pippin now argues that
Heidegger's trenchant critique of Hegel has revealed a dog-
matism at the very heart of absolute idealism: an
unwarranted identification of what is with what is discur-
sively knowable. This dogmatic identification leads to a dis-
torted understanding of the meaning of Being, a reifying
account of beings, and a neglect of our own finitude. In this
article, I defend Hegel against these charges. The upshot of
this discussion is twofold. Rather than evading the question
of the exteriority of being, I argue, Hegel in fact aims to
reveal that this exteriority is internal to thinking itself. And
rather than identifying the meaning of being with discursive
knowability, Hegel shows that the meaning of being resides
in a form of freedom that goes beyond the self-
transparency of knowing.

In The Culmination, Robert Pippin offers a stunning reassessment of the achievements of absolute idealism. Having
developed some of the most persuasive defenses of Hegel's absolute idealism to date, Pippin's re-engagement with
Heidegger has brought him to a surprising conclusion: What absolute idealism takes as the very ground and end of
philosophy, the absolute identity of thinking and being, can neither be presupposed nor achieved. “There is no such
absolute congruence of thinking and being,” as Pippin tells us in the Preface (Pippin 2024: x). And after having pro-
vided a detailed reconstruction of Heidegger's critique of Kant and Hegel that tries to reveal why the truth of being
cannot just be equated with “what is known of things and in things” (Hegel 2010: 21.29), Pippin reaffirms his verdict:

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs License, which
permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no
modifications or adaptations are made.
© 2024 The Author(s). European Journal of Philosophy published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.

Eur J Philos. 2024;1–10. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/ejop 1

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2 KHURANA

“There is no Absolute. There cannot be an Absolute.” (Pippin 2024: 184)1 If that is right, it seems that absolute ideal-
ism is fundamentally misguided, oriented by a “chimerical goal” (Pippin 2024: x). This does not have to mean that
“what Hegel has accomplished in the Logic or the Philosophy of Right has turned out to be worthless”
(Pippin 2024: 215), but it would certainly suggest that Hegel did not truly understand what he had actually accom-
plished. Redeeming his insights would therefore require a fundamental reframing of his whole endeavor.2
If Heidegger is right, this reframing has to start by asking a question that almost all philosophy has been oblivious
to: The question of the meaning of being, die Frage nach dem Sinn von Sein. Only by raising this question, Heidegger
contends, can we gain access to issues that are of the deepest significance for human existence in general and that
are vital for grasping the ills of our time in particular.3 Asking the question of being properly would mean to challenge
a presumption that rules Western metaphysics and that idealism has upheld with unparalleled radicality: the pre-
sumption that “to be is to be rationally intelligible” (Pippin 2024: 142), “discursively intelligible” (Pippin 2024: 142),
“in principle knowable” (Pippin 2024: 166). On this reading, it is still true that German Idealism is the culmination of
the Western philosophical tradition. But this is not so because it would bring to completion and fruition its ultimate
truth, but because it finally reveals its insurmountable limit, its fatal flaw.
In what follows, I want to ask if we have no choice but to understand absolute idealism in a manner that makes
it guilty as charged. I will first summarize the critique that Pippin's Heidegger has launched against Hegel and con-
sider some immediate Hegelian responses to these charges. Second, I will consider two of the charges more closely.
This will lead us to two Hegelian counter-questions addressed to Heidegger. Third, I will try to resituate where the
true challenge lies.

1 |

In The Culmination, Pippin gives an account of Heidegger's work that is unusual and impressive in many respects.
What is remarkable throughout is the unity of Heidegger's project that Pippin manages to uncover and the contem-
porary relevance he can thereby reveal. Pippin shows how the concrete analysis of Dasein which has inspired so
many contemporary readers is of a piece with Heidegger's at first much more opaque concern with the question of
being. As Pippin argues, we can only truly understand Heidegger's contribution to the analysis of the human life-form
and its normativity if we grasp it as part of his ontological questioning. This “resolute reading” (Pippin 2024: 25)
allows Pippin to find much greater unity in Heidegger's work before and after the Kehre than is usually the case. The
question of being is already driving the analytic of Dasein, and the interrogation of the meaning of being as such that
informs the later works, works which apparently leave the issue of Dasein behind, is much more continuous with the
concerns of the earlier works than one might think. As Pippin reveals, Heidegger's question of being is neither
the question why there is something rather than nothing nor what must be true of everything there is, but rather the
question of the meaning of being: a consideration of the way in which things come to matter in their very being. Ask-
ing the question of being is therefore not aiming to get at the “really real” (Pippin 2024: 43, 103), the things in them-
selves lying behind whatever we may grasp of them, but rather asking how things originally come to manifest and
matter such that we may engage with them.4 If that is right the Kehre does not sever the connection between being
and Dasein to finally leave Dasein behind and turn to the pure exteriority of being itself; rather, it just interrogates
the relation of the two from the other side, from the side of being and not, as before, from the side of Dasein. When
understood in this more unified way, Heidegger's whole oeuvre constitutes, as Pippin shows, a more radical alterna-
tive to the tradition of German Idealism than we may have assumed. It is a familiar thought that the kind of analysis
that Heidegger gives of Dasein in Being and Time gives an alternative account of the sources of normativity, akin to
and yet different from the various Kantian, Hegelian, Wittgensteinian, or pragmatist accounts. But against the back-
ground of Pippin's reading it transpires that the difference of the account is more radical than it may have seemed.
Heidegger is not just offering us a broadly pragmatist account of what it means to be a rational animal, questioning
the intellectualism of other pictures, he is giving us a fundamentally different account of ourselves that is no longer
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THE EXTERIORITY OF THINKING: HEGEL AND HEIDEGGER 3

centered around the idea of rationality (cf. Kern 2024). What we are – what it means to be a person – is not a ratio-
nal animal, regardless of whether this is understood in an intellectualist or a more pragmatic manner. What we are is
Dasein, that is, a being that is open to the very meaning of being, a being for which the being of things and its own
being comes to matter in a peculiar way.5 Rationality, in so far it has a role to play here, is just one of the modalities
through which the meaning of being is articulated. The primary mode in which being shows up in its significance for
us is not knowledge but care (Sorge). Understood in this way, we realize that Heidegger is fundamentally challenging
the self-understanding at the heart of German Idealism and many contemporary accounts of the human life-form
influenced by it.
Now, what is at the center of Heidegger's critique of idealism in general and Hegel in particular? The critique
develops in four stages: (1) First, Heidegger argues that, like the philosophical tradition that has culminated in Ger-
man Idealism, Hegel has failed to raise the question of the meaning of being explicitly and with a sufficient under-
standing of the actual depth of this question. (2) Secondly, we might say, Hegel has implicitly given a wrong,
restrictive answer to that question. Instead of properly asking what the meaning of being qua being is, Hegel has pre-
emptively identified being with discursive knowability. This is, according to Pippin's Heidegger, a “dogmatic” assump-
tion (e.g. Pippin 2024: 145), which not only lacks proper justification, but actually gets the meaning of being wrong.
This wrong answer, identifying being with discursive knowability, involves (3) a metaphysics of presence, according
to which beings are generally treated in terms of “standing presences” (Pippin 2024: 11, 32, 68, 99, 106) and con-
ceived of as “determinacies” (Pippin 2024: 83, 155, 164). This means that the ontology that results does not only get
the fundamental understanding of being wrong but also distorts the form of the various types of beings it distin-
guishes. Most importantly, it distorts the kinds of beings we are ourselves, and that is: those beings for whom the
question of being could at all become an issue. Dasein is, according to Heidegger, fundamentally “not a determinate
this-such” (Pippin 2024: 164) and not something present at hand, but Hegel's ontology unavoidably imposes this
false form on Dasein. (4) The avoidance of the ontological question, the wrong account of the meaning of being and
the distortion of beings, is finally connected to a denial of our finitude, or, to be more precise, the “finitude of pure
thinking” (Pippin 2024: 173). Let me briefly discuss these charges in turn.
(1) Does Hegel ask the question of being and of the meaning of being as such? Well, certainly not in the form in
which Heidegger has introduced us to it. Hegel shows no awareness that the first and most fundamental question
we have to ask is the question of what the meaning of being qua being is. However, the fact that he hasn't raised it
as such does not, in and of itself, prove that he does so by way of a dogmatic denial and that he finds no indirect
way of addressing it.
The first thing to note is that Hegel does not avoid the topic of being altogether. In fact, he starts his very Logic
with pure being as such. As Pippin presents it, the upshot of this discussion is merely negative. Rather than articulat-
ing the meaning of being, the beginning of the Logic aims to show that “the mere thinking of ‘being’ is not a thought
at all.” (Pippin 2024: 164)6 Rather than truly raising the question of being, pure being in its indeterminacy is, as it
were, removed from the picture, gotten out of the way. But isn't there a much more positive reading we could give
of the first steps of the Logic? It is in thinking being, pure being in its indeterminacy, that we are first introduced to
the very movement of the concept that will structure the rest of the book. In that way, it would seem that it is not
demonstrated that being as such cannot be a topic of the Logic. Rather, Hegel's own suggestion seems to be that
without presupposing anything other than being (pure being in its indeterminacy), the movement of the concept
already arises, unfolding this very being. Presumably, Hegel thinks of this as playing an important role in the practical
demonstration of the congruence of thinking and being.
But even if Pippin were right that the first steps of the Logic teach us a merely negative lesson regarding the
thinkability of pure being, this would still leave open the possibility that the question of being and of the meaning of
being could be present in Hegel's Logic in a different manner: not as an explicit question and circumscribed topic, but
as an overall issue that manifests itself indirectly through the whole exposition. Pippin himself points in this direction
when he suggests that Hegel might respond to Heidegger's complaints by arguing “that thinkability as the meaning
of being can only be shown, not said.” (Pippin 2024: 171) The question therefore is whether Hegel truly avoids the
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4 KHURANA

question, as Heidegger contends, or proposes a different way of developing it. In the next section I will give more
indications that suggest he is doing the latter.
(2) The second charge is that Hegel preemptively identifies the meaning of being with discursive intelligibility.
On Heidegger's account this amounts to a form of dogmatic rationalism, rationalism as dogmatism. It involves what
we could call the “logical prejudice”: the assumption “that only what is fit to be the content of an assertion can count
as a being” (Pippin 2024: 48; cf. McManus 2024). Part of the problem with this prejudice is that the identification is
presupposed, rather than properly defended in the context of possible alternative answers.7 The other part of the
problem, however, is that this identification gets the meaning of being wrong on Heidegger's account. Being is what
is disclosed through attunement and manifest in our practical comportment to the world – it is not exhausted by
what we can discursively assert.
Now, it seems certainly right that, in his Logic, Hegel does not consider and defend the identification of being
and rational intelligibility in the context of possible alternatives. Logic is our engagement with being and beings inso-
far as and to the extent that they lend themselves to an intelligible rendering, so that this identification is, in a sense,
built into the very form of the account. However, the early Hegel wrote a Phenomenology as an introduction to his
system, meant to first bring us to the standpoint from which we can do logic, rather than simply presupposing
it. (Thus, for the young Hegel, just as for Heidegger, there is a sense in which Phenomenology comes first.) And the
mature Hegel has embedded the Logic in an Encyclopedic system in which it is both followed by and preceded by
the Realphilosophie. Pippin himself clearly reveals the ways in which Hegel has thereby indicated the limitedness of
his logical project, indeed the “insufficiency of the Logic – even as metaphysics – if considered as a stand-alone part”
(Pippin 2024: 180). In that sense, we can doubt whether Hegel is suggesting that the significance of being is
exhausted by the Logic and its identification of being and intelligibility. There is a dimension of natural and spiritual
existence that awaits us beyond the Logic and that is revealed as irreducible on Hegel's own account.
What is more, even within the bounds of the Logic, it seems doubtful to me that Hegel is guilty of the “logical
prejudice” narrowly conceived, limiting being not just to what is intelligible but to what is “rationally or discursively
intelligible” (Pippin 2024’: 142). By highlighting the fact that predicative judgment is unsuited for truly expressing
the movement of the concept, Hegel suggests that the intelligibility he aims to make accessible through his Logic is
wider than what our predicative assertions can provide.8 But if that is true the opposition between Heidegger and
Hegel is not as clear cut. Even Heidegger approaches being in terms of its meaning and thus, in some sense, in terms
of its intelligibility. Of course Heidegger aims for a broad form of intelligibility or “understanding”, originally revealed
in our attunement and comportment, rather than in our theoretical or practical knowledge. But given his critique of
judgment, we may ask whether Hegel's notion of intelligibility has a greater kinship with the intelligibility of being
that Heidegger aims to bring into view.
Pippin himself concedes both point: first, that Hegel has himself given limited status to the Logic, highlighting
that it introduces us to a mere “realm of shadows” we have to go beyond; second, the unusual character of Hegel's
characterization of intelligibility within the Logic that seems to point beyond an identification of being with predica-
tive assertibility. However, he suggests that this does not invalidate Heidegger's critique:

Does any of this mean that Heidegger's critique misses the mark? Not decisively, I would suggest. No
matter how unusual Hegel's position on both conceptual and real determinacy turns out to be, the
driving impetus in his account is to account for the knowability of being and to account for being
itself in terms of knowability.
(Pippin 2024: 181)

I take Pippin here to suggest that within the Logic and beyond, Hegel's account remains solely oriented towards
knowability. So even though he may not fall under the rubric of the logical prejudice narrowly conceived, if we mean
by this the identification of what is with what can be known, and the identification of what can be known with what
can be asserted in a predicative judgment, he would still be committed to a restricted view of the meaningfulness of
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THE EXTERIORITY OF THINKING: HEGEL AND HEIDEGGER 5

being: it is always and only what is to be known, and in knowing it we completely exhaust its significance. In the next
section, I want to suggest that, looking at the whole system, we might give a different characterization of Hegel's
overall take on the meaning of being that could suggest that knowability is not all there is to it for Hegel.
(3) The third charge is this: The fact that Hegel is oblivious to the fundamental ontological question of being and
preemptively identifies being with knowability is connected to a misguided ontology: beings in general are treated as
determinacies and in terms of something present at hand. Whereas I think Hegel may not be helpless against charges
1 and 2, but is an appropriate target of those, I have a harder time seeing how he is articulating a metaphysics of
presence in the sense that for him the world would consist of entities that are merely present-at-hand (vorhanden)
and therefore invites a manipulative and instrumental understanding of being.9 As Pippin himself makes clear, Hegel
does not present us with a reified account of beings, but rather presents beings as moments in the articulation of the
self-moving concept. Everything that is is therefore presented in terms of a becoming, a movement that does not
lend itself to the reification of presences at hand. This is connected to the way in which Hegel brings out the limita-
tions of discursive intelligibility to do justice to what is, judgment being a clumsy instrument, one unsuited to grasp
the speculative content of thinking (Hegel 1991: §31A). We grasp the dynamic character of being internally by
experiencing the dissatisfying limitations of predicative judgments and by using judgment in a self-transgressive,
speculative way.
(4) The fourth and final charge is that Hegel's philosophical account does not truly acknowledge our finitude.
Pippin focuses mainly on the finitude of pure thinking in regard to its capacity to determine being. Understood in
these terms, this point is connected to charge 1 and 2. Not properly raising the question of being and precipitously
identifying being with discursive intelligibility implies that pure thinking has full sway over being. However, Pippin
also connects the issue of the finitude of pure thinking to a broader acknowledgment of our own finitude: the signifi-
cance of our own mortality and our dependence on presuppositions that always already precede us and cannot be
mastered. It is not hard to understand how one can get the idea that Hegel's claims to absolute knowing and his
assertions that spirit has a way of surviving its own death amount to a denial of human finitude. However, I think
there is a way of understanding Hegel's response to the issue of finitude more charitably. In his discussion of the
problem of finitude, he is quite clear that as long as we understand infinity in opposition to finitude, the kind of infin-
ity we might want to attain or claim will always remain finite: limited by its opposition to finitude. True infinity is
therefore only available if we fully grasp our finitude, even acknowledge its necessity. Infinity is therefore not the
overcoming of finitude, but is infinite finitude (Hegel 2007, §386Z). Along these lines, we can think of Hegel's
approach not as an attempt to deny, but to deepen our sense of finitude: we are not finite in the merely Kantian
sense that we would be locked into a species-specific form of intuition that qualifies the status of our access to the
world as relative. Hegel rather tries to show that in our very existence as universal beings or Gattungswesen (and this
means precisely: not as species-beings)10 we are exposed to finitude.

2 |

Let me try to give a deeper response to charges 1 and 2, which will then also pave the way for two countercharges
against Heidegger. Regarding the first charge, it seems obvious that Heidegger asks a new and deep question, open-
ing up a new pathway to a fundamental reappropriation of the philosophical tradition. The mere fact that Hegel does
not raise this question in these terms, however, does not mean that he simply neglects it without any reason. The
way I understand Pippin's Heidegger, it is key to ask the question of being sans phrase, to turn to being qua being in
distinction from any question of the being of specific beings. Independently of asking how this or that particular type
of being is present to me, I need to raise the question how being as such manifests, becomes available, comes to
matter. Now, I think that Hegel's elaboration suggests that he sees a possible problem with asking the question of
being in abstraction from the being of beings. Confronting pure being in its very indeterminacy, as Hegel does in the
beginning of the Logic, reveals that we don't get very far with this. We have to proceed to the attempt of thinking
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6 KHURANA

determinate beings in order to gain more substantive insights into being. The Logic thus suggests that rather than
turning to being qua being, we have to turn to beings (in their very being). Hegel does so, however, without denying
or downplaying what Heidegger has called the ontico-ontological difference. Hegel's account does not confuse being
with beings.11 Quite the contrary, he makes clear that there is a fundamental difference between being and beings.
To get this into view, however, we have to attend to specific beings and see how the being of those beings is not
exhausted by the determinate features of those beings. Those beings are recast as moments of the self-articulation
of the concept and in this way are based on something that exceeds them: they articulate something that points
beyond them. It is in the process of their articulation that being comes to be disclosed (in a way that is not exhausted
by any determinacy that the concrete beings gain in that process). Thus, there is no two-step process – first the dis-
closure of being, then the conceptual articulation of beings – but only one process of manifestation. Beings and their
Being are distinguishable, yet inseparable.
If that is implicitly guiding Hegel – or, if this is at least a way of construing his approach as a response to
Heidegger – it seems that it opens up the route to a possible countercharge. Insisting on a thematization of the ques-
tion of being in abstraction from the being of concrete beings runs the danger of reifying being and distorting the
form of the ontico-ontological difference. Pippin reminds us of a remarkable passage in § 13 of the Encyclopedia that
Heidegger himself cites in Identity and Difference (Pippin 2024: 187ff.)

Taken formally, and put side by side with the particular, the universal itself becomes something partic-
ular too. In dealing with the objects of ordinary life, this juxtaposition would automatically strike us as
inappropriate and awkward; as if someone who wants fruit, for instance, were to reject cherries,
pears, raisins, etc., because they are cherries, pears, raisins, but not fruit.
(Hegel 1991: §13)

The shopper who would reject cherries, pears, and raisins, because she wants to buy fruit as such, is confused
about the status of the universal and the essential difference of the universal and the particular, putting the universal
side by side with the particular and treating it as an item of the same sort. This seems analogous to someone who is
confused about the ontico-ontological difference and treats Being as one of the beings. Heidegger himself quotes
this passage to make a critical remark about Hegel, but we may turn this around and redirect the charge at Heideg-
ger. Isn't Heidegger, in requiring a treatment of Being in abstraction from the Being of beings, in danger of treating
Being like a being? Pippin himself points in this direction:

What would it mean in this post-culmination or post-Idealist context to struggle to understand the
meaning of Being, to resolve obscurity about what meaning is disclosed, to avoid simply leaving us
with this very general notion of dependence? Without some answer to such a question, it is Heideg-
ger who looks like our shopper searching in vain for ‘fruit.’ (Pippin 2024: 188f.)

If that is right, what Heidegger has done in raising the ontological question, in underlining the ontico-ontological
difference, and in highlighting the tendency of Being to obscure itself in the very guise of present beings,12 would
not, of course, be worthless. But the dialectical constellation would be more complicated than he has led us to
believe. It is not the case that the idealist approach is the only one in danger of obscuring the ontico-ontological dif-
ference. Anti-idealism in its insistence on addressing Being as such opens up the danger of a different obfuscation:
reifying Being.
What about charge 2, the identification of being and discursive intelligibility? I have already indicated that even
if we remain strictly within the bounds of the logical project we can see that Hegel questions the extent to which
logical being can be exhausted by discursive intelligibility. According to Heidegger's perspective, Kant is more attuned
to the finitude of human thinking, for he stresses the importance of intuition and reveals a kind of imaginative syn-
thesis that precedes our conceptual synthesis and originally relates us to being. But it would be wrong to think that
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THE EXTERIORITY OF THINKING: HEGEL AND HEIDEGGER 7

Hegel has simply tried to remove intuition from the picture to instead claim that our thinking is a purely spontaneous
conceptual activity. Quite the contrary, he has shown that intuition is itself a mode of thinking, and that means: that
the passivity and receptivity of intuition is internal to, essential to thinking. He has not removed our finitude but
internalized it such that it is not the other of our unlimited, purely spontaneous, capacity to think but inherent in our
thinking.
That Hegel does not maintain that discursive intelligibility exhausts the meaning of being is also clear from the
explicitly limited character of the kind of being that the Logic claims to address. The being that the Logic engages with
is marked as logical being: being is explicitly introduced here from the very start as the flipside of pure knowing. We
don't start the Logic with being as such, independent of any activity of knowing, but rather with the being of knowing.
It is in thinking through the indeterminacy of the pure knowledge with which the Logic starts that it is revealed that
this pure knowledge is in fact indistinguishable from the pure immediacy of being.13 Another way of bringing out the
same point is by attending to the fact that the Logic is not dealing with any content that would be external to think-
ing in any way, it has only thinking for its content: it is the thinking of thinking. The identity of thinking and being is
thus wholly internal to thinking itself: it is the identity of the act and the content of thinking. Hegel also expresses
this by qualifying the Logic as a “realm of shadows” (and nobody has done more to illuminate this idea than Pippin;
cf. Pippin 2018). As Hegel notes at the very end of the Logic, the results of the Logic therefore remain “shut up in
pure thought” (Hegel 2010, 12.253). Even if the movement of the Logic is a movement of the realization of thought,
it is a realization purely within the sphere of pure thought itself.14 The Logic thus articulates the absolute within a
sphere that is closed off, and in that sense, it is not true to its own aspirations of absoluteness. The Logic is thus
internally dependent upon a Realphilosophie that follows it – and, according to the circular structure of Hegel's
account, that also precedes it. The logical idea needs to transgress itself and release itself out of itself in the form of
exteriority: it needs to release itself out of itself as nature to give room to the moment of its own particularity and
otherness.15 This finitude which the idea here finally realizes is one that is not a mere given, a simple fact, but some-
thing we, or thinking, has to take on (and may shy away from). That is why on Hegel's account, the Logic begins and
ends with a resolve (Entschluss): the resolve to think being; the resolve of the purely logical idea to determine itself as
external idea.
Ultimately, I believe this points us to a different fundamental response to the question of the meaning of being
implicit in Hegel's account: The meaning of being is not simply that it is something to be discursively known; rather,
it is something to which we are to relate freely – something that gains its significance as being to the extent that we
constitute ourselves as free beings in relation to it. The knowledge articulated in the Logic is one mode in which free-
dom is to be realized, freedom qua pure thinking; but it is a mode incomplete without the actualization of freedom
as nature and freedom as spirit.
At the very end of his treatment, Pippin himself brings up the idea that the meaning of being is essentially linked
to freedom in Hegel: For Hegel, freedom is a “matter of fundamental meaningfulness”: what “matters, what must
matter, is the realization of freedom” (Pippin 2024: 218). But Pippin offers a gloss on freedom where this role of
freedom amounts to a confirmation of the idea that the meaning of being is knowability. Freedom consist in “self-
consciously realized self-knowledge” (Pippin 2024: 217) and is therefore nothing other than a form of knowledge.
But the end of the Logic seems to teach us that this kind of self-knowledge cannot be won by shrinking away from
exteriority and retreating into the sphere of pure thought. The realization of freedom requires a mode of existence
not exhausted by what we discursively know about it.
This becomes apparent in the way in which Hegel characterizes freedom in his Realphilosophie in which freedom
emerges out of nature in the Anthropology and gives rise to a second nature in subjective and objective spirit.16 It is
not just that Hegel concedes that in us finite creatures freedom is, alas, tied to a finite bodily existence that we
unfortunately can't shake. Rather, actual freedom is only available thanks to this existence. We need to overcome
the temptation to assume we can gain freedom in some otherworldly realm. Hegel makes clear that a freedom that
does not release itself as nature does not attain its highest point. The freedom of spirit, which is initially described as
a liberation from nature and thus could be understood as striving to leave the being of nature behind, is only
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8 KHURANA

complete on Hegel's own account if it includes a liberation of spirit in nature and a liberation of nature itself – a liber-
ation that does not appropriate nature for our practical or theoretical purposes, but acknowledges it in its other-
ness.17 To attain a liberation from nature that also sets nature free requires that spirit extends its freedom and
knowledge beyond itself. For freedom to redeem itself as not merely an imposition, it has to show how it can release
itself from itself as nature. This is the metaphysical significance of the idea of “second nature.” It does not reside in
the much more familiar Aristotelian point that we only have our rational capacities by acquiring them, something Pip-
pin rightly points out we don't have to make such a great deal about (Pippin 2024: 159). The metaphysical signifi-
cance is that for us to be able to understand the proper unity of thinking and being, we do not have to merely
understand how thinking can incorporate and transform being into intelligibility, like an animal consuming food and
turning what it has consumed into itself. Rather, we need to see how spirit can let go of itself and return to itself as
nature. If we understand that the first and last word in Hegel is not reason per se, but freedom, we can see how his
approach to being is not dogmatically constricting it as something to be discursively known, but liberating us to relate
to the exteriority of being in our very thinking itself. The question therefore is: is idealism just a form of rationalism,
the celebration of the infinite appropriative power of knowledge, or is idealism an ethos of freedom – of a freedom
that needs to become capable of letting go of itself?
In both respects – with regard to the logical account of being itself and with regard to the embeddedness of
logic in a larger account –, we may say that Hegel's ambition is to show that the link to a being that is not exhausted
by discursive intelligibility should not be presupposed from without but demonstrated to be internal to thinking
itself.18 The Logic shows that the content of pure thinking cannot be exhausted by predicative judgment, that the
being internal to the Logic requires the speculative movement of the concept, and that the logical idea requires fur-
ther realization outside of the realm of shadows. If we reformulate this again in terms of a countercharge, we may
say that Hegel could argue that the insistence on some inexhaustible being independent of thinking is in danger of
dogmatically asserting an other, rather than demonstrating its irreducible presence in ourselves.

3 |

None of this is meant to deny that there is a problematic limitation to the idealist endeavor. But maybe it does not
reside simply in a presupposed and dogmatic identification of being and discursive knowledge. As Pippin rightly
notes, the problem of the identity of thinking and being is connected to an almost unshakable temptation to think of
being as “the really real”. This lures us into conceiving of the issue as the problem of mind and world, world (the
really real) here, mind there. If that is the framing, then the claim that they are simply identical cannot be anything
other than a dogmatic gesture that defies plausibility. Having opposed them and placed them here and there, asking
how they could possibly relate, claiming they are identical seems to undermine the very presupposition of the ques-
tion: There are no two sides, no relation, no problem, but also: nothing to understand. The answer does not respond
to but defies the question.
Maybe we can understand Hegel's move as an attempt to leave this framework behind, get over the question of
the really real, and uncover a different question. The true metaphysical problem does not reside in some abstract
relation of being and thinking, world and mind, but rather in the internal economy of meaningfulness that pertains to
both sides, mind just as well as world. One avid reader of both Heidegger and Hegel, Derrida, has suggested that the
real question lies here: in this question of the economy of meaning. Derrida's suggestion is that Hegelian metaphys-
ics is based upon a limited, appropriative economy of meaning, which, however, ultimately rests upon an
unacknowledged general economy that exceeds the bounds of sense.19 On Derrida's account Hegel is right to leave
the question of mind and world behind by arguing for the identity of being and thinking. The true issue is that Hegel
has remained within the bounds of a restricted economy and shied away from a general economy that exceeds the
appropriative configuration of meaning.20 What we thus need to understand more properly is the way in which
thinking deals with the exteriority that is, as Hegel had rightly pointed out, internal to thinking.
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THE EXTERIORITY OF THINKING: HEGEL AND HEIDEGGER 9

I take it that Derrida wants to suggest that we are here ultimately confronted with a dilemma that lets us oscil-
late between idealism and anti-idealism. Idealism wants to acknowledge and recognize exteriority as internal to
thinking, but to do so interiorizes it and turns it into an instrument of spirit's self-appropriation. Anti-idealism insists
on the radical exteriority and inexhaustibility of what is other than thinking, but threatens to simply oppose this
other to the finite expressions of our thinking and thereby reify and mystify this inexhaustible other. Idealism and
anti-idealism both fail to account for the radical exteriority of our own being and therefore each drives us back to
the other. Deconstruction is the expression of this aporia, our being torn between idealism and anti-idealism.

ACKNOWLEDGMENT
Open Access funding enabled and organized by Projekt DEAL.

ORCID
Thomas Khurana https://orcid.org/0000-0003-3149-3787

ENDNOTES
1
I refrain from the temptation of asking whether this proposition amounts to a negative absolute.
2
On this account, we would have to recast Hegel's system as a merely regional ontology (covering only the “region of the
knowables” (Pippin 2024: 215)), dependent upon a fundamental ontology that would require a different approach, articu-
lated by the late Heidegger in terms of “poetic thinking.”
3
One gets a good sense of how immediately Heidegger connects the ontological question to a diagnosis of social patholo-
gies in his lecture course Introduction to Metaphysics (Heidegger 2000). One also gets an idea how sweeping and problem-
atic many of his social diagnosis are. Pippin doesn't discuss these social diagnoses in their own right and I will not go into
them either.
4
Anyone who may have hoped for a renunciation of the Copernican turn here will thus be disappointed. Heidegger is pres-
ented as the most radical critic of the idealist tradition, but a critic from within that tradition. This includes the claim that
Heidegger is even said to be committed to the “‘logic as metaphysics’ thesis … if we expand the notion of logic to include
apperceptive comportment” (Pippin 2024: 97; cf. McManus 2024).
5
“Dasein is openness to the meaning of Being itself, ‘being there’ at the site of any manifestation of such meaning.”
(Pippin 2024: 164)
6
And Pippin continues: “The indeterminacy of mere being, its indistinguishability from what is not being, makes it indistin-
guishable from ‘nothing.’ Therewith follows the spontaneous self-constitution by pure thinking of what would satisfy the
determinacy conditions without which nothing could be a determinate anything.” (Pippin 2024: 164)
7
Pippin (2024: 150): “Pinning down the meaning of any being as the knowable is not and cannot be a topic in Logic. The
basic question is begged.”
8
The form of judgment is “inapt [ungeschickt] for expressing what is concrete (and what is true is concrete) and specula-
tive; because of its form, the judgment is one-sided and to that extent false” (Hegel 1991: §31A)
9
There are other ways in which his discourse may be organized around the central value of presence as Derrida has
famously argued, but I don't think it happens by way of reducing what is to what is simply present at hand.
10
On the contrast between what it means to be a “species-being” (Artwesen) and what it is to be a “genus-being”
(Gattungswesen) cf. Khurana 2022.
11
Even Heidegger does not seem to think that Hegel does so: “Metaphysics responds to Being as logic, and is accordingly
in its basic characteristics everywhere logic, but a logic that thinks the Being of beings, and thus logic which is determined
by what differs in the difference: onto-theo-logic (ID, 70)” (quoted according to Pippin 2024: 163, emphasis added).
12
“The oblivion of being belongs to that essence of being which this oblivion itself conceals. It belongs so essentially to the
destiny of being that the dawn of destiny begins as the unveiling of the present in its presence. This means: the history
of being begins with oblivion of being; it begins with being keeping to itself with its essence, its difference from beings.”
(Heidegger 2002: 275, transl. modified)
13
“Pure knowledge, thus withdrawn into this unity, has sublated every reference to an other and to mediation; it is without
distinctions and as thus distinctionless it ceases to be knowledge; what we have before us is only simple immediacy. …
The true expression of this simple immediacy is therefore pure being.” (Hegel 2010: 21.55)
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10 KHURANA

14
In a surprising turn at the very end of the book, it becomes clear that the idea which was characterized as the very unity
of concept and reality, subject and object, remains enclosed in thought: “the simple being to which the idea determines
itself remains perfectly transparent to it: it is the idea that in its determination remains with itself” (Hegel 2010: 12.253).
15
“The absolute freedom of the Idea, however, is that it does not merely pass over into life, nor that it lets life shine within
itself as finite cognition, but that, in the absolute truth of itself, it resolves to freely release out of itself the moment of its
particularity or of the initial determining and otherness, [i. e.,] the immediate Idea as its reflexion, or itself as
Nature”(Hegel 1991: §244)
16
For a much more detailed account of the way in which the form and actuality of freedom can only be understood on the
basis of life, see Khurana (2025).
17
Understood in this way, there opens up the possibility of a Hegelianism that would not “require a relation to what is
other than thought, nature as pure domination,” thereby responding to a deep criticism elaborated “from Schelling to
Heidegger and Adorno” (Pippin 2024: 148).
18
To make the same point in a different way: When Pippin writes that “there is no such absolute congruence of thinking
and being”, what is the status of this proposition? I take it this is something we know. But if it is, how does knowledge
know of the absence of such absolute congruence? It can only do so if the difference between being and thinking is inter-
nal to knowing itself.
19
Cf. Derrida (1978: 328): “In naming the without-reserve of absolute expenditure ‘abstract negativity’, Hegel, through
precipitation, blinded himself to that which he had laid bare under the rubric of negativity. And did so through precipita-
tion toward the seriousness of meaning and the security of knowledge.” See also Derrida's program of a “reduction of
meaning” in Derrida (1982: 134) which aims to go beyond the “reduction to meaning”, shared by idealism and phenome-
nology alike.
20
Cf. Pippin's own characterization of this restricted economy with regard of the release of nature: “Hegelian releasement
is a stage in the final self-comprehension of the Absolute, its return to itself after its externalization” (Pippin 2024: 193).

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How to cite this article: Khurana, T. (2024). The Exteriority of Thinking: Hegel and Heidegger. European
Journal of Philosophy, 1–10. https://doi.org/10.1111/ejop.13000