Domesticating absolute idealism

The article offers a general overview of how John McDowell tries to “domesticate” Hegelian philosophy by fitting it into the context of contemporary Anglo-American philosophy. One of the ways of such “domestication” (or even appropriation) of Hegel’s philosophy is to bring the “identity thesis” (identity of the of the subject and object of thought) into line with the philosophical quietism of Ludwig Wittgenstein. According to McDowell, absolute idealism is quite compatible with the realism of common sense, which Wittgenstein proposed to focus on in our reflections on philosophical problems. Moreover, in McDowell’s eyes, Hegel’s philosophy has the same “therapeutic” potential as “reminders” from the Philosophical Investigations. In other words, the goal of Hegelian philosophy may also not be to find a solution to philosophical problems (primarily in the field of ontology and epistemology), but to get rid of them, provided that their conceptual source is discovered. Therefore, the “identity thesis” in Hegel’s philosophy does not mean that the world is a projection of the subjective abilities of the mind (whether individual or collective). On the contrary, it means the denial of the ontological gap between the mind and objective reality. One of the main sources of the idea of this gap, as well as many other problems of modern philosophy, McDowell considers the reduction of nature to the sphere of causal laws. In the light of this approach, it remains unexplained how external reality not only causally, but also rationally affects us. Inspired by the philosophy of Hegel, McDowell shows how the recognition of primarily a conceptual structure of external reality guarantees us not only its knowability (subjective idealism would also guarantee this), but also the objectivity of this cognition.