Presuppositionless Thinking

Why be presuppositionless?

Presuppositionless thinking is a form of thinking that thinks without presupposing the outcome. Simply put, it is a commitment to a philosophical inquiry that does not proceed according to preconceived notions of how things are but is instead open to the possibility that things may be otherwise. At its most honest, the tenet of presuppositionlessness is the acceptance that our knowledge of things may be flawed or incomplete because the approach that philosophy has taken to comprehend a concepts may have itself been flawed. Thus, it is a voyage of exploration into the regions of reason that may or may not disclose something new. It is entirely possible that a presuppositionless approach may yield nothing at all, or nothing at all new. It is equally possible, however, that presuppositionlessness may show us something new about thought. We simply cannot presuppose prior to the ordeal.

One may baulk at the idea that our knowledge of things may be flawed. What exactly is it that we're claiming to be flawed? Doesn't there need to be an argument for why we should take our knowledge to be flawed? Absolutely. One argument is this. Hegel takes seriously Kant's discoveries in the transcendental dialectic - the self-movement of Reason is not merely an illusion but is in fact something fundamental about what it is to be rational. Yet, if we reflect on our typical understanding of concepts we will immediately notice that they bear no resemblance whatsoever to how reason appears to be. In this regard reason is dialectical, namely, it transforms into its opposite, and this movement of concepts appears to be essential to what reason is. For Kant, this is just an illusion precisely because this is not how the world appears to be. For Hegel, on the other hand, this should prompt us to wonder whether we have properly understood the nature of Reason and, thereby, the nature of thought itself.

Presuppositionless thinking has a long lineage in the history of philosophy and is not Hegel's invention. And while Kant may not be the most obvious source of inspiration, we find that Descartes, too, was struck by the notion that our received notions might be flawed and that we should try to inquire into the nature of things by setting aside all received assumptions. Descartes' argument is that we have experience of our senses failing us. We have experience of seeing an object as being so-and-so only to discover that it is, in fact, otherwise. So if our senses fail us occasionally, why not also our concepts about the world? And so the sceptical scenario is set. Thus, Descartes sets aside all of his assumptions about the world and reaches the most certain, if not simplest, point that he can conceive, from which the rest of his philosophy grows.

A further, and perhaps no less important, reason for presuppositionless thinking is the demand for freedom. This is something that is greatly emphasised by Houlgate (2022). If we want to be genuinely free we cannot be content to simply accept the received notions of the world or ideas, by others or ourselves, but, rather, open ourselves to investigating whether they are true (or false) as the present themselves. The demand for freedom, when taken absolutely seriously, means that we must be open to inquire into not only the basis for this or that apparent truth (as perceived, experienced, thought or otherwise) but also inquire into the very nature of thought itself. This opening is the basis of presuppositionlessness. We must be open, if we want to be free, to both prove or disprove ourselves since, if the former, we have greater reason to be confident in our thoughts and, if the latter, we have corrected ourselves and are now in a better position than where we started out from. A win-win situation if there ever was one. This is the simplest position that one can take and a fair starting point for taking on the methodological tenet of presuppositionless thinking. There is no argument about the nature of reason or the reliability of senses. There is only an assertion that to be free is to have a true understanding of the world and that, if we are committed to freedom, we should be open to inquiring into what we know, and proving whether it is true or false.

Presuppositionless thinking, then, is underpinned by a philosophical stance that leaves open the possibility that we may be misled about some aspects of reality and that we should inquire into the nature of things as well as into the nature of thought that inquires.

What is it to be presuppositionless?

We have looked at the reasons for why one might take presuppositionless thinking as a methodological tenet. We will now look at what it means to be presuppositionless. Simply put, to be presuppositionless is to not be guided by preconceived notions. But how is this actually possible? If I am absolutely presuppositionless, then, taken to its logical extreme (or absurdity) I cannot refer to language, experience, or history for my philosophy. These are all established ideas and how can one utter even a word without presupposing its meaning! But this is manifestly not Hegel's approach. Not only is The Science of Logic (SL) written in German, but it makes use of the widest possible range of concepts from science and the history of philosophy - from the concept of the infinite to the dual concepts of action and reaction. Presuppositionless thinking, then, cannot mean an abstraction from reality. So what exactly are we being presuppositionless about? Notably, Richard Dien Winfield, in his book Reason and Justice (1988), wrote that there are some presuppositions that are necessary for the simple doing of philosophy and that we should think of them as “enabling conditions”. There are some things, like language and experience, without which it would be impossible to even conceive of a presuppositionless project, let alone carry one out. Such things as language and experience, then, are so fundamental that one could not reasonably be sceptical about them since the very thought of scepticism about them is itself founded on the very things about which you are expressing scepticism.

Hegel shows his gratitude to exactly these presuppositions in the preface to second edition of the SL. He writes: “but this traditional material, the familiar forms of thought, must be regarded as an extremely important source, indeed as a necessary condition and as a presupposition to be gratefully acknowledged even though what it offers is only here and there a meagre shred or a disordered heap of dead bones” (31). It is clear that Hegel accepts language, experience, and history as necessary presuppositions for doing philosophy. But if Hegel is not sceptical about the very medium through which we grasp and develop our understanding of the world, then about what is he sceptical? The answer is given in a passage a few pages down in the preface to the second edition of the SL:

“Such presuppositions as that infinity is different from finitude, that content is other than form, that the inner is other than the outer, also that mediation is not immediacy (as if anyone did not know such things), are brought forward by way of information and narrated and asserted rather than proved. But there is something stupid - I can find no other word for it - about this didactic behaviour; technically it is unjustifiable simply to presuppose and straightway assume such propositions” (41).

Hegel's concern has to do with whether our specifically philosophical assumptions are justified or not. Hegel is not out to question whether language is the best medium for us to do philosophy; or to investigate what happens if we abstract from experience. He takes these things as necessary presuppositions for philosophical activity. Instead, Hegel is interested in whether we have actually comprehended the concept of infinity or the concept of mechanism. Obviously we already have these concepts. We already have the concept of infinity and the concept of mechanism - Hegel does not doubt that. But have we properly understood them? What is the infinite? Is it the unbounded? Is it absolutely opposed to the finite? Is it made up of infinite finites? Again, Hegel does not doubt that there is a concept of the infinite. Hegel doubts, rather, that we have an adequate comprehension of the infinite.

This, again, raises interesting questions about the justification for Hegel's scepticism. Why does Hegel just doubt our philosophical assumptions? Why stop there? Why not doubt everything? Because, and unlike Descartes, Hegel is deeply sensitive to the essentiality of some presuppositions. Hegel has often been credited as being a philosopher who is sensitive to history, and nowhere is this more significant than at the beginning of his philosophical project. Hegel has no time for philosophical projects that are complete abstractions because they are merely pretensions to abstract thinking, because such abstraction fails to justify itself and thus actually ends up being incoherent. There is a bedrock of assumptions, without which we cannot do any kind of philosophy. And yet, these assumptions do not impede our inquiry into the nature of things and thought. Put more technically, the "enabling conditions" precisely enable us to engage in philosophical inquiry, but do not determine the outcome of that inquiry. Said differently again, having legs enable walking around, but that doesn't mean the destination is hereby decided.

How does presuppositionlessness work?

Let us briefly outline how exactly presuppositionlessness works in practice. We have already stated that presuppositionlessness does not require us to do away with language or our reservoir of concepts. We are not trying to reinvent the wheel. Rather, we are not taking for granted that our concepts are true. What we are inquire into is whether we have understood the nature of our concepts correctly or not. In this sense, then, we are not calling into question the conditions that enable us to do philosophy in the first place. Our presuppositionlessness is, instead, a methodological presuppositionlessness.

The first tenet of methodological presuppositionlessness is “do not take anything for granted”. As such, whilst doing philosophy we will never be driven by what philosophers have normally taken 'x' to be, or by what we think 'y' is based on experience. We will set aside our assumptions about how philosophical concepts ought to be. In the absence of any assumptions about how philosophical assumptions ought to be, how is our philosophical inquiry to proceed? This brings us to the matter of the beginning of philosophy, which is a whole topic unto itself; for now, we will assume that there is nothing problematic about the beginning. Hegel's strategy for beginning his philosophical inquiry, despite setting aside all assumptions, is to abstract all content from thought and to see where thought takes us. This is the second methodological tenet: “attend to the immanent determination of thought and do not import anything external into it”. Once we have set aside all of our assumptions and abstracted all content from thought, our philosophical inquiry will proceed by attending to the immanent character of our thought. Whatever that may be. As it turns out, when we abstract all content from thought what we are left with is the simple is-ness of thought or “pure being”. If we think about “pure being” and consider its characteristics we will discover that it is, in fact, “pure nothing”. And so on and so forth, the dialectic of thought proceeds.

Authors
Ahilleas Rokni (2024)