Like Kant, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) was a catalyst, a take-off point for many divergent thinkers. Left-Hegelians diverged one way, Right-Hegelians another. There is no one reading of Hegel. Nor can his considerable body of work be captured in a mere blog. I will do the best I can.
Hegel charged himself with replacing formal neo-Aristotelian logic with a ‘new science’ from which the nature of metaphysical truth might be derived (‘logic coincides with metaphysics’). Logic was no longer to be focused on the formal structure of argument, but with the nature of Being. Logic is to tell us ‘what truth is’.
The term ‘dialectic’ was used by Plato to describe the Socratic method, namely, the pursuit of philosophical truth through disputation. Kant deployed it to mean the propensity to fall into contradiction. Hegel’s use is altogether more positive: for him, it referred to the propensity to ‘transcend contradictions’. Scruton: ‘the process of transcendence is the true course of logic, and ‘dialectic’ is the name for that intellectual pursuit whose endpoint is not limited or partial, but on the contrary, absolute truth itself.’ Hegel developed a philosophical system to account for reality as a unified whole. His philosophy is often termed ‘absolute idealism’.
For Hegel it is ‘concepts’ rather than propositions which are true or false. Falsehood is a form of limitation or incompleteness, while truth is a form of wholeness or completeness (a transcendence of all limitations). In Scruton’s words, the dialectical process can be described as follows:
‘ … a concept is posited as a starting point. It is offered as a potential description of reality. It is found at once that, from the standpoint of logic, this concept must bring its own negation with it: to the concept, its negative is added automatically, and a ‘struggle’ ensues between the two. The struggle is resolved by an ascent to the higher plane from which it can be comprehended and reconciled: this ascent is the process of ‘diremption’, which generates a new concept out of the ruins of the last. This new concept generates its own negation, and so the process continues, until, by successive applications of the dialectic, the whole of reality has been laid bare.’
The process of diremption requires us to work through the dialectic in successive stages, or ‘moments’, until a new concept is born. To complicate matters further, Hegel thought of historical processes in dialectical terms, namely, as the successive generation and overcoming of contradictions.
‘Being’ is the sole great a priori concept; and reflecting on its nature we arrive at an a priori doctrine of reality. So logic begins from Being and takes us to its conclusion – the ‘absolute idea or truth itself’. Consider the following. The concept of Being contains within itself its own negation – Nothing – and the dialectical opposition between these two concepts is resolved only in the passage to a new concept (see above). This new concept is ‘Becoming’, which captures the truth contained in the previous opposition, the truth of the ‘passage’ of Being into Nothing and Nothing into Being. Where does this leave us? Well, the world now appears as Becoming rather than Being; and while this is ‘truer’ than the preceding one it falls short of that absolute truth in which all such oppositions will be resolved.
‘It would not be unfair’, Scruton comments, ‘to say that Hegel’s metaphysics consists of an ontological proof of the existence of everything.’
What of the relation between subject and object? For Hegel, ‘pure subjectivity’ is an abstraction. He opposes any view of the ‘I’ that does not grant universal status to its subject-matter. So how does he deal with self-consciousness’? Clearly the ‘pure subject’ cannot gain any knowledge of what any given person is or of the world they inhabit.
Babies and the very young, as ‘primitive subjects’, have appetites and desires, and this involves positing objects independent of themselves. But consciousness does not yet possess agency. Scruton again: There follows:
‘ … a peculiar ‘moment’ in the consciousness of the primitive subjectivity. This is the moment of opposition. The world is not merely passively unco-operative with the demands of appetite: it also actively resists them. The otherness of my world forms itself into opposition. It seems to remove the object of my desire, to compete for it, to seek my abolition as a rival.’
The result is what Hegel refers to as ‘a life and death struggle with the other’ in which the self begins to know itself as will, as power, confronted with other wills and other powers. The resultant conflict is resolved only in the unstable relation of ‘master and slave’. This does not, however, result in consciousness of self, which requires another ‘moment’.
This ‘moment’ comes when one party has ‘enslaved’ the other: that is, when they have achieved the power to extort the other’s labour. In such circumstances the will atrophies (leisure collapses into lassitude). This newfound ‘freedom’ subsides. ‘True freedom’, Hegel, argued, requires self-consciousness. But the freedom of the master is impaired. What of the freedom of the slave? His will is chained but not removed. The will of the slave – and his identity – is articulated through labour. His will and ‘inner freedom’ increase to the extent of his master’s lassitude. The ‘dialectic’ of their relation awaits its resolution, and this occurs only when each treats the other as ends not as means. This is Kant’s law of freedom. But for Hegel all is not done.
For him the individual ‘I’ is only a metaphor. No philosophical argument can take off from the cognisance of the individual ‘for in that very act of cognisance the individual becomes universal’. The true subject-matter of philosophy is the concept itself. The ‘I’ is universal. Scruton:
‘The real subject-matter of the ‘Phenomenology’ is not the concrete, sceptical, solipsistic self, but the universal, affirmative spirit (Geist), whose progress towards realisation in an objective world is something in which you or I might participate, but which we do niot otherwise affect.’
Spirit (Geist) has been described as the shared total system of human thought, history and social institutions that expands and gains in self-awareness over time. It ‘lives in’ human culture, language, customs etc rather than inside one human’s head. It grows historically through the dialectical overcoming of contradictions. The principal goal of Spirit might be defined as self-discovery, to fully understand itself: it sees the world, changes it, and comes to the realisation that the world is a product of human reason.
Spirit can be said to have three stages:
- Subjective Spirit – the individual mind and personal consciousness.
- Objective Spirit – Spirit expressed in the external world through families, customs, economies, polities and so on.
- Absolute Spirit – the highest stage where Spirit achieves total self-awareness through art, religion and philosophy.
Nothing exists in actuality that is not some determinant of pure Being, and whose existence is not derived from the dialectical working out of that concept. Reason generates everything, comprehends everything – hence: ‘the real is rational and the rational is real’. The world, being the product of reason, shows the ‘cunning of reason’; it reveals itself to reason, ‘so that the apparently contingent can be seen to be really necessary, and the arbitrary and diffuse as directed and whole.
Scruton summarises Hegel’s theory of the concrete universal at this point:
‘ … according to which the world as given is both known (because it is universal) and also sensuously known (because it is concrete). Hence, in moments of pure observation we see it as it eternally is, while seeing it transfixed in time, beleaguered by all its determinations, clothed in attributes, specified to a comprehensible point of Being. Philosophy shows the world thus, but philosophy is a lingering occupation: art shows it more immediately, since art is the sensuous embodiment of the idea.’
Hegelianism dominated much of the thinking in early nineteenth-century Germany. There is enough even in this brief snapshot to indicate that it was the take-off point for the likes of phenomenology, existentialism, Marxism and so on, as well as assorted other forms of philosophical idealism.
The intention behind this series of blogs is to provide tasters, to invite any readers to go back to original texts and make up their own minds as to their pertinence and utility. Hegel’s oeuvre is especially complex and I am very conscious of the extent to which this precis is brevity personified!