Hegel

A Re-Examination

J N Findlay

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317852551
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

First published in 2002. Written in 1958, this book offers a re-examination of Hegel's work, and is the volume I of a series of seven volumes on his work. Starting with a biography and the key ideas, the author offers his own explanations of ideas that are central in Hegel: being the notion of spirit, the dialectical method, the phenomenology of spirit, the doctrines of being, essence and notion; the philosophy of nature, absolute knowledge and subjective/objective spirit.

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTORY AND BIOGRAPHICAL

I HEGEL AND MODERN PRECONCEPTIONS

The aim of this book is to give a brief but rounded account of Hegel’s philosophical doctrines, and to relate them to the ideas and language of our own time. Its aim is also to provide a guiding-thread through the tortuous intricacies of Hegel’s principal writings, which exceed in difficulty those of any other philosopher. It will seek to capture something of the actual attitude and atmosphere of these writings, which will demand a more abundant and systematic use of quotation than is usual in expounding the views of a philosopher. Hegel’s writings are at once so unique in their language, and so singular in their mode of argument, that it is not possible to represent them at all accurately in terms differing too widely from Hegel’s own. Our concern will not be with those who have commented on Hegel—detailed commentaries on his writings are in fact somewhat few—nor with those who have been much influenced or greatly revulsed by his teaching—many of these have read him only superficially—but with the actual writings themselves, and with the doctrine that they embody. We shall seek to sketch and assess the contents of The Phenomenology of Spirit and of the three parts of the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences.

There are several reasons why such a general restatement and reassessment of Hegel should be attempted. It would be worth doing even if only on account of the vastness of Hegel’s influence, both in the past century and the present one. It is worth while sketching and sizing up a system which has provoked so huge a literature, which has excited such extremes of admiration and denigration, which has been so variously interpreted and criticized, and which has given birth to so many movements and counter-movements ever since it was promulgated. During that period Hegel’s native Germany has at no time been free from his influence: if it deified him during his lifetime, developed his views in conflicting ‘rightward’ and ‘leftward’ directions after his death in 1831, and allowed the dust to gather on his works during the long ascendancy of positivism in the Bismarckian age, it has at length fitted him into an uncontested, ‘classical’ place in the façade of its historic culture, high in the centre with Kant and above all faction and party; it has also very largely gone back, to philosophizing in a manner reminiscent of Hegel’s own Phenomenology of Spirit. Our own Anglo-Saxon world fell likewise under the spell of Hegel during the last half of the previous century, and the first quarter of the present one. We produced several highly original thinkers, e.g. Royce in America and Bradley in England, in a tradition which owed much of its inspiration to Hegel, and we spent much of the opening years of this century in elaborately abandoning and disowning Hegelian positions we had previously held. Now at length it is feasible for us to dissect and value Hegel with the detached appreciation possible in the case of other great philosophers. Italy, too, has produced several great original Hegelians (e.g. Croce and Gentile), and France, after producing much inspired Hegelian scholarship, has in our own age excelled all previous Hegelian studies in the objectivity, the scholarship and the illumination of M. Jean Hyppolite’s excellent translation and commentary (on The Phenomenology of Spirit). Hegel has also had an immense, left-handed influence on thought through the reaction he inspired in the wilfully narrow, passionately perverse, religious soul of the mid-century Dane Kierkegaard, whose views, despite their condemnation of Hegel, might have come straight from one of Hegel’s own phenomenological studies, and whose works, like the works of those he has influenced, are soaked in an Hegelian method and spirit. Hegel has further had an unassessable influence on the thought of India and the Far East. And he has been responsible (though not through his fault or merit) for the extraordinary transformation of parts of his method and doctrine which we owe to Karl Marx, a transformation involving both social penetration and much philosophical confusion. This has created a comprehensive background and mould of thought for millions of our contemporaries; in it, in fact, a whole new world of historic culture is growing up. No other philosopher can claim to have achieved anything so considerable.

It is not, however, on account of his mere influence that Hegel deserves a restatement and reassessment. He deserves it on account of the originality and permanent interest of his ideas, and on account of the extent to which these ideas have been overlaid by prejudiced misconceptions, due largely to the extreme difficulty and wanton obscurity of the language in which they were stated. Hegel only acquired a tolerably lucid style after he had been lecturing for some years at Heidelberg and Berlin, and by then his two greatest philosophical works—The Phenomenology of Spirit and the Science of Logic—had been written. In this chapter we shall merely prepare the way for an understanding of Hegel by mentioning a few of the deep-rooted prevailing misconceptions which obstruct the comprehension and remove the interest of his writings, and by trying, in dogmatic, preliminary fashion, to replace them by truer views. That they are misconceptions, largely underived from anything that Hegel says, and sometimes flatly opposed to his statements, can be shown only as we go systematically through his writings.

We shall say at this point that Hegel is misconceived, first of all, as being a transcendent metaphysician, one who deals with objects or matters lying beyond our empirical ken, or who fits together or transforms what we know or experience into some total view going beyond any individual person’s knowledge or experience. We shall likewise hold him to be misconceived as some sort of subjectivist, one who thinks the realm of nature or history exists only in or for someone’s consciousness, whether this be the consciousness of a mind like ours, or of some cosmic or supercosmic mind. We shall likewise rebut the stronger charge that Hegel thought that our mind (or the mind of God) made up the world in some witting or unwitting fashion. We shall hold, thirdly, that Hegel is misconceived as being some sort of manic rationalist, one who seeks to deduce or to foresee the detail of nature and experience from the abstract demands of certain notions, who tries to do a priori what we now hold can only be done a posteriori. We shall contend further that the extraordinary language in which he expresses his thought is not wholly devoid of illumination and justification, and that the chain of thought by which he advances from one thought-phase to the next is not rendered unworthy of study because it violates essential logical principles. We shall deny, further, the extraneous but highly prejudicial charge that Hegel was a thoroughgoing political reactionary, responsible ancestrally for the atrocities of Hitlerism: we shall deny the absurdly stronger charge that his whole system is merely a mask for such reaction. And we shall suggest, finally, that there is nothing irrelevant nor uncontemporary in Hegel’s ideas, and that he has as much to say to us as to previous generations of thinkers.

As regards the view of Hegel as a transcendent metaphysician—one who speaks of matters lying beyond the bounds of possible experience, or who welds the data of our experience into a whole going far beyond what any mind can embrace—a good refutation is perhaps to be had simply by glancing at the contents of Hegel’s two systematic works, The Phenomenology of Spirit and the Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences. Both works start with what is ‘immediate’, and as far as possible removed from what is ultimate and ‘absolute’—the former starts with the direct certainties of sense-experience, the latter with the abstract notion of ‘being’—both works likewise end up with what is ‘absolute’, the former with the ‘Absolute Knowing’ of philosophy, the latter with the three forms of ‘Absolute Spirit’, Art, Religion and Philosophy. Considering these works, there can be no doubt at all that Hegel sees what is ‘absolute’ in nothing which lies beyond the experiences and activities of men: the Absolute, he says is ‘what is entirely present’ (das durchaus Gegenwärtige), what is ‘on hand and actual’, not ‘something over above things or behind them’ (etwas drüben und hinten). The Hegelian Absolute is not realized in a supramundane consciousness, nor in a timeless comprehensive vision, but in the creative activities and products of the artist, the faith and worship of the religious person, and the systematic insights of the philosopher. One might say, in fact, that there never has been a philosopher by whom the Jenseitige, the merely transcendent, has been more thoroughly ‘done away with’, more thoroughly shown to exist only as revealed in human experience. Hegel does indeed sometimes make use of the transcendent language of religion, speaking of ‘the Idea’, the abstract principle of self-consciousness, as existing like God before the creation of nature and finite spirit: he also speaks of the highest stage of philosophical vision as achieving the ‘abolition’ of time. He makes plain, however, that the religious language thus occasionally made use of merely says by way of imaginative representation what can be more clearly said in the notional diction of philosophy, for which the ‘Idea’ only exists before the concrete world of nature and mind in the sense of being the conceptual ‘blue-print’, or notional possibility of the latter. And he makes plain that the only sense in which time (and for that matter space) is ever ‘overcome’, is that we reach levels of thought at which it simply ceases to count at all.

That any other impression of Hegel’s doctrine should be current, is due, in part, to Hegel’s studied conciliation of religion, whose basic principles he regarded (without absurdity) as one with those of his own philosophy. It is due also, particularly in our Anglo-Saxon world, to a confusion between the doctrines of those who learnt much from Hegel, and who were often called ‘Hegelians’, and the doctrines of Hegel himself. It was Bradley, not Hegel, who believed in some Absolute Experience within which the objects of our ordinary human experience would be unbelievably fused and transformed, in which ordinary categories would be done away with without being replaced by anything that we can hope to understand, and concerning which we certainly do not have the ‘Absolute Knowing’ which Hegel thinks that we have of the Absolute, and which is, in fact, for him, identical with the Absolute’s own knowledge of itself. And it was McTaggart, not Hegel, who made the Absolute into a timeless fellowship of spirits, curiously but not incorrigibly deceived into seeing themselves and their own activities as in time. The un-Hegelian character of these systems is shown too, by their imperfect use of Hegel’s dialectical methods: they make use of contradictions to abolish the world of appearance and the notions of ordinary life, and then pass to a realm of truth and reality in which ‘all this is altered’: in Hegel, however, the apparent and false are retained in his final result, whose content is, in fact, no more than the clear understanding of the process which has led up to that result itself. These systems are likewise differentiated from Hegel’s by their doctrine of an unlimited ‘coherence’, of ‘internal relations’ between everything and everything else: as opposed to this Hegel accords a dishonourable place to unresolved contingency ‘on the surface of nature’, and to indeterminacy in the caprices of the will. References to the ‘Universe’, the ‘Whole’, are likewise as rare in Hegel as they are frequent in the philosophers just mentioned. What we have said must not be construed as casting scorn on the metaphysicians in question or on transcendent metaphysicians in general. Hegel, however, is not to be numbered among them, and must be praised or condemned for his own doctrines, and not for those of others.

Having thus dealt with what we may call the ‘metaphysical charge’ against Hegel, we may pass on to consider the ‘subjectivist charge’. Hegel, we may maintain, is no idealist in the sense of holding that to be is to be perceived, or that to be is to be conceived, or that objects exist only if there are conscious minds to consider them or to refer to them. Even less is he an idealist in the sense of thinking that the mind imposes its forms on the material of sense, or that it ‘constructs’ the world in its activities of imagination or thought. That such subjectivism should be attributed to Hegel is due to an excessive stress on his relation to Kant, of whose thought he is regarded as the ‘fulfiller’ (Kant in his turn being regarded as the ‘fulfiller’ of previous post-Renaissance thought, in which the subjectivist strain is strongly stressed). From this point of view the main merit of Hegel lay in thoroughly liquidating the ‘transcendental object’ or ‘thing-in-itself’ of Kant, the thing as it exists apart from thought or consciousness. For the dualistic Kantian idealism, which opposes things as they exist for consciousness to things as they exist in themselves, Hegel is thought to have substituted an ‘objective idealism’, for which things have no real being except such as they have in relation to the thinking mind. This ‘objective idealism’ is, however, more the position of Hegel’s predecessors than of Hegel himself: to attribute it to him is to ignore the extent to which his philosophy is Hellenic rather than Kantian, the extent to which for him ‘the Idea’ is objective after the manner of Plato and Aristotle and not after the manner of Kant. The Philosophy of Nature makes it plain, further, that Hegel believed in the existence of natural objects long before the advent of life and consciousness in the world, and in the Philosophy of Spirit he makes it plain that time and space are the forms of external things, and not merely the forms in which the mind envisages them. And if Hegel held that the whole natural world was an ‘externalization’ of the ‘eternal Idea’, this Idea is not to be interpreted as an actual self-conscious being, but rather as the mere notion of that spiritual self-consciousness which it is the task of the world-process to develop. It is clear that Hegel thought that conscious spiritual beings were the last beings to arrive on the scene of the world, and that ‘Absolute Spirit’, as manifest in the highest forms of art, religion and philosophy, was the last stage to be reached in their experience.

Hegel, in fact, must be recognized to be an ‘idealist’ in a thoroughly new sense of the word: he employs throughout the Aristotelian notion of teleology or final causation, and he holds Mind or Spirit to be the final form, the goal or ‘truth’ of all our notions and the world. It is implicit, an sich, ‘in itself’, at the start of an ideal or a real process, and the whole process of notional or real development merely serves to make it explicit, für sich, ‘for itself’. Hegel’s thoroughgoing teleology means, further, that nothing whatever in the world or our thought can have any meaning or function but to serve as a condition for the activities of self-conscious Spirit. In distinguishing Hegel’s teleological idealism from other forms of subjective or objective idealism, we are not here attempting to criticize the latter. But the elaborate fallacies which realist criticism has found in such forms of idealism must not be attributed to Hegel, who was not an idealist in this manner. Karl Marx found it necessary to stand Hegel on his head, in order to transform his ‘idealism’ into Marxist ‘materialism’. There is, however, as much materialism in Hegel as in Marx, since matter is for him certainly a stage in the ‘Idea’. (Just as there is certainly also a strong strain of teleological idealism in the supposedly scientific materialism of Marx.)

Having disposed of the ‘subjectivist charge’ against Hegel, we may likewise dispose of the view of him as a relentless a priorist, one who sought to deduce the detail of nature and history from the relationships of abstract concepts. Hegel certainly believed in a Systematic Science (Wissenschaft) in which all concepts, even those applied in science and in history, could be linked together in a continuous chain, and in which each would find its unique and necessary place. The rules of this ‘Systematic Science’ are, however, far from being deductive in the sense in which the rules of a syllogism or a mathematical calculus are deductive. They are rather precepts which urge us to pass from notions in which some principle is latent, to other notions in which the same principle will become manifest: they do not, like deductive principles, march on a single level of discourse, but proceed rather from one level to the next. Though Hegel frequently speaks of the ‘necessity’ of his moves, he is clear, too, that this is not like the necessity of deductive inferences. And as regards the application of Hegel’s peculiar method to the facts of nature and history, it is plain that the fit is loose, and intended to be loose. Some of the material he ranges over is dismissed as being contingent and superficial, and is even described as ‘untrue’, and there is absolutely no attempt to go beyond the facts and laws offered us in the empirical sciences, nor to make extrapolations or predictions which experience might or might not fulfil. Hegel sometimes ‘sides’ with one scientific theory against another, as he persistently espouses Kepler and Goethe against the empiric Newton: his reasons for such espousals are, however, as much scientific as philosophical. It is plain, in fact, that Hegel’s philosophical aim is not to do the work of history or science, nor to add to their results, but to frame concepts in terms of which these results can be philosophically grasped, can be allotted a place in the teleological frame of notions and phases of being in terms of which Hegel sees the world. That such a re-conceiving of historical and scientific fact can be valuable and illuminating, as that it can also be arbitrary and absurd, will become plain when we consider actual instances. Hegel’s genuine empiricism and freedom from a priori presuppositions is, however, much more definite than that of a philosopher like Herbert Spencer, whose First Principles attempts to prove much more about the physical universe, and to prove it more rigorously, than Hegel would ever have dreamt of doing. Hegel describes the facts of nature in much queer, old-fashioned language: a philosopher like Herbert Spencer makes many queer, old-fashioned misstatements of fact.

If Hegel is not to be regarded as a rationalist gone mad, he is also not to be regarded as a merely bogus reasoner, one whose words depend for an effect of meaning on a mere accumulation of pictures and suggestions, and whose thought-transitions are either non-logical and associative, or involve definite violations of logical rules. That these charges are somewhat hard to rebut can be shown by a single, brief quotation from Hegel, by no means unusual or untypical. Hegel writes: ‘For the reality in itself, the general outcome of the relation of the Understanding to the inner nature of things, is the distinguishing of what cannot be distinguished, or is the unity of what is distinguished. This unity is, however, as we saw, just as much the recoil from itself, and this conception breaks asunder into the opposition of self-consciousness and life: the former is the unity for which the absolute unity of difference exists, the latter, however, is only this unity itself, so that the unity is at the same time for itself.’¹ Passages like the foregoing certainly daunt the Hegelian student and apologist, and require much exegesis before the smallest illumination can be discovered in them.

That Hegel’s use of language is in every way defensible can certainly not be maintained: it is, however, less indefensible than is usually supposed. For the purpose of Hegel is to explore notions from a peculiar angle, to see them as embodying half-formed tendencies, sometimes conflicting, which other notions will bring ou...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• FOREWORD
• CHAPTER ONE: INTRODUCTORY AND BIOGRAPHICAL
• CHAPTER TWO: THE NOTION OF SPIRIT
• CHAPTER THREE: THE DIALECTICAL METHOD
• CHAPTER FOUR: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT—I (Consciousness, Self-consciousness and Reason)
• CHAPTER FIVE: THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT—II (Spirit, Religion and Absolute Knowledge)
• CHAPTER SIX: THE LOGIC—I. The Doctrine of Being
• CHAPTER SEVEN: THE LOGIC—II. The Doctrine of Essence
• CHAPTER EIGHT: THE LOGIC—III. The Doctrine of the Notion
• CHAPTER NINE: THE PHILOSOPHY OF NATURE
• CHAPTER TEN: THE PHILOSOPHY OF SUBJECTIVE SPIRIT (Hegel’s Psychology)
• CHAPTER ELEVEN: THE PHILOSOPHY OF OBJECTIVE SPIRIT (Hegel’s Theory of Law, Morals, the State and History)
• CHAPTER TWELVE: ABSOLUTE SPIRIT AND RETROSPECT (Hegel’s Aesthetics, Philosophy of Religion and History of Philosophy)
• APPENDIX: THE DIALECTICAL STRUCTURE OF HEGEL’S MAIN WORKS
• INDEX