Günther's Critique: What the Machine Lacks
This text is a preview of History of the Reception of Hegel, volume II, to be published in 2026 by Reflexivity Press.
The Structural Machine
Gotthard Günther, whom we have encountered as the formalizer of dialectic, thought more deeply about the relation of machine and consciousness than most AI researchers.
His thesis: machines can perform all the structural operations of thought. Calculating, drawing inferences, recognizing patterns — all of this is formalizable and hence machine-realizable. A sufficiently complex machine can carry out any formal operation a human being can carry out.
But this is not all that thinking is. The structural operations are the content of thinking. Thinking also has an existential dimension — the that of thinking, not only the what.
The Existential Dimension
What does the machine lack? Günther calls it “genuine subjectivity” — the capacity for self-positing and free reflection.
A machine can be programmed to analyze itself. It can monitor its own states, detect errors, correct itself. This is reflection on the structural level.
But can it want to analyze itself? Can it decide to change its own programming because it considers that programming wrong? Can it relate to its own being — not merely operationally, but existentially?
Günther’s answer: this requires a form of self-reference that cannot be fully captured formally. The machine operates according to rules — it cannot transcend the rules. The human being can question their own rules, set new rules, relate to their own rules. That is freedom — and freedom is not computable.
Intelligence versus Consciousness
The distinction is fundamental: intelligence is the ability to solve problems, recognize patterns, achieve goals. Consciousness is experience, being-for-itself, knowing that one knows.
A chess computer is intelligent — it solves the problem of winning. But it does not know that it is playing chess. It experiences nothing. For it, the game is not an event.
Günther’s prediction: machines will become ever more “intelligent” — they will be able to solve ever more problems that were once reserved for humans. But they will not become “conscious” — they will not experience what they do.
This is not a demotion of the machine. It is a clarification of what it is. The machine is structural intelligence without existential subjectivity. That is not worth less than human intelligence — it is something different.