The Poison Chalice of Metaphysical Grounding: Jacobi and Hegel as Reversing Contemporary Expectations

Abstract Today issues about ‘metaphysical grounding’ have come to the centre of philosophical discussion. In the case of Schaffer’s widely influential work, this comes with a defence of monism, according to which everything is grounded in one comprehensive whole. He cites as predecessors Hegel and Spinoza. Part of Schaffer’s case runs through a claim that issues about grounding are unavoidable in philosophy. It is natural to expect that an unavoidability of grounding should help the case of such a monism. But can we read Hegel’s claims for his comprehensive system as similarly supported by a claim for the interwovenness of grounding with philosophy? No. I argue that, in the unusual philosophy of Hegel’s historical context, our expectations are reversed: Hegel and contemporaries who influence him, like Jacobi, see reasons for thinking that claims for the unavoidability of grounding would support rather critique of the prospects for defence of any unity or organization in terms of which everything would be comprehensively explicable or intelligible. Hegel’s challenge in defending a comprehensive system, then, is to resist such unavoidability claims. Seeing this opens an approach to reading Hegel’s Science of Logic in terms of the unusual reasons that animate it.