Hegel’s modest metaphysician
Finally, one might instead have a kind of sceptical worry here: how can the mind, which is one thing, be so well equipped at discovering fundamental features of the world, which is something else — how can we assume that using the one we are able to find out about the other? Isn’t this rather miraculous, and so requires an explanation in transcendental idealist terms, if we are to avoid postulating some sort of ‘pre-established’ harmony between the two, underwritten by God? Now, in response to this worry, I think Hegel would again question the starting point, and hold that there is no reason to think the mind and world are so very different from one another in the first place, not because they are put into conformity by God, or because the mind somehow makes the world, but because while the mind is capable of grasping general laws, principles, kinds, universals and so on, the world itself also embodies such things, so it is again no great mystery that we find reality to be intelligible and accessible to our inquiries.
Continuing the End Times series, Richard Marshall interviews Robert Stern.