Georg
Wilhelm Friedrich HEGEL
1770-1831
Works: Phenomenology
of Spirit 1807; Logic 1812-1816; Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences
1817 and much other material, including lectures on logic, law, history, the
history of philosophy...
Hegel was an
encyclopedic thinker, comparable e.g. to Aristotle in ancient times in respect
of the breadth of his interest.
(I) General: Hegel versus (Hume and) Kant is an out and
out rationalist: The Real is Rational and the Rational is Real. His thinking involves an endeavour
at a radical overcoming of the Kantian dualism of world as we cannot but
perceive and conceive it and world as it is in itself. He tries to make a
System of everything, and moreover thinks he has succeeded, at least in general
line.
(a)
The
key is to treat the development of Nature and of human history as the story of
the self-development of God or Absolute Spirit.
The Spiritual alone is real, what the story is all about, what underlies
and manifests itself in all reality. The Absolute is Subject, the activity with
produces all reality in order that it may come to itself.
(b)
Everything
else is to be explained by its destination-- material objects, the state, art, religion --which destination is to embody and make real
spiritual activity. Everything both is,
and is to be explained as, but moments in the self-development of Absolute
Spirit. This destination is not outside reality however --it has its destiny in
itself, just by being itself.
(c)
On
the other hand, the Infinite/Absolute Spirit/God requires finite spirit and
also a material world in order to come to its own
fulfillment. Like the human spirit, it
has to go out of itself, express itself in the exteriority, do things, in order
to come back to itself, to become conscious of itself as it is.
(d)
It
is all a story, then, of alienation and of transcendence of alienation, like
looking for happiness, or like the incarnation, death and resurrection of the
Christ. God posits the otherness of Godself in order to become Godself
--and the otherness goes is own way. God
returns to Godself, eventually, through the activity
of finite spirits reflecting on Nature and History (which activity, by the way,
reaches its climax in Hegel's philosophy) The return is for the finite to
recognize the infinite in the finite --as
in the early Fichte, the infinite has no
consciousness of itself apart from the consciousness of itself in man... but
this latter is itself the work of the Infinite, the power of the Infinite
active in you. (Cf. the 'anthropic principle'
nowadays: we are Nature's way of knowing itself --and according to Hegel,
produced by Nature for that purpose, even if Nature itself is not conscious of
that purpose except in us.)
(e)
Why
would you want to believe all this: because of the sense it makes of this that
and the other thing, as well as of the whole lot, when you use it as a guiding
concept in your attempt to make rational sense of things.
(f)
All
this is to be appropriated rationally, rather than in moral experience (Fichte) or aesthetic experience(Schelling), though these also will have a role: Hegel on
this point distancing Godself from both Fichte and Schelling, though at
the same time appropriating their insights into his own system. Reason has the primacy --eventually, the real
is rational and the rational is real.
But this Reason is to be understood properly: it is Dialectical, the Hegelian dialectic,
which is both how Reason develops its ideas and how reality as the process of
self-development of Absolute Spirit works.
(II) The Hegelian Dialectical Method:
The
dialectical method works in so far as it reflects the nature of spirit, to go
out of itself and to discover itself in the other, which is why it applies to
the real which is the story of Spirit. The Rational is Real, because the Real
is Rational --it's the story of Spirit.
In accordance
with the method, Reason goes through three stages:
·
A
stage of UNDERSTANDING: clear concepts, one thing distinct from another,
e.g. being versus non-being, inner reality/essence versus outer appearance/
accidents, table versus chair, slave
versus master; this gives way however
to
·
a
stage of DIALECTIC: in which one concept when pushed, passes over
into its opposite: e.g. pure being, being in general, which is
indistinguishable from nothing; what is the good of an inner that doesn't ever
express itself; the sense of table refers to chair and vice versa; slave and
master refer to each other --the master depends on the slave in order to be
master, the slave is thus master of the master. Everything in itself is contradictory: to
abstract from the links is to falsify --to see reality in its oppositions. We don't stay here, however: there is a
reconciliation worked in
·
a
third stage: a stage of SPECULATIVE REASON: to come up with a concept in which the
oppositions are resolved in a higher synthesis, a synthesis which shows the
unity of the oppositions and enables you to see why the links are necessary.
The word is AUFHEBUNG: the oppositions are both cancelled and preserved
–usually translated overcome, means both to preserve and to cancel
·
E.g.
the idea of becoming, which includes both being and non-being; also quality =
to be this, which at the same time is not to be that;
·
e.g.
the inner now conceived as that which is expressible in the outer, the outer
meanwhile as always some kind of expression of the inner --nothing is real
which cannot be expressed, to be real is to beexpressible
in the outer, though not necessarily to be here and now expressed.
·
E.g.
a society of free
people freely depending on each other.
·
E.g. ?? study furniture, eating
furniture, which gives the reason why you have to think them together.
·
The
exact meaning of overcome tends to change with the example, but the pattern is
preserved. This pattern meanwhile, according to Hegel, is both the pattern of
our thinking and the pattern of Reality.
The idea is
that any idea except the Idea of the final system including all knowledge is
still too abstract to express reality in all its interconnections, and so will
tend to provoke another idea: the first idea becomes a new thesis, which both
in thought and reality provokes its antithesis, these two reconciled in a further synthesis, until you come up with a fully concrete idea,
the idea of the final system.
(A corollary
from this: theCoherence Theory of truth, that to understand
anything fully you have tounderstand everything, that
any statement apart from its context in the final system is at best only partly
or roughly or more or less true.)
The work of
philosophical reason meanwhile is to show the Identity of the Identical and the
Non-Identical, as in, more or less, The
Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences ...
(III) The Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences:
a systematic treatment of the whole of reality, a presentation of all
available knowledge in general outline according to the one schema. (The notion of an Encyclopaedia had already
been enunciated by the French Philosophes. Hegel tries to do it in a much more
systematic fashion, according to a consistent pattern). The subject of philosophy = God, i.e. the
Totality of Reality.
(a)
The
Encyclopaedia is divided into three parts, expressing stages in the
self-development of Absolute Spirit in Nature and History:
1/
Logic: treating the Idea
as it is in itself, abstracting from its incarnation in the finite world:
dealing with the categories of thinking = also the objective categories of
reality (versus Kant), not just forms of thinking or forms for the construction
of objects.
2/
Philosophy of Nature:
treating the otherness of the Idea: the Idea passes over into its
otherness, the externality in Nature, loses its self-identity, expresses itself
in the other so that it may eventually come back to itself.
3/
Philosophy of Spirit: the
return of infinite spirit to itself via finite spirit: the infinite has to
become finite to manifest itself, but this manifestation has to be a
manifestation for spirit, and this can only happen through finite spirit.
(b) The Philosophy
of Spirit has three stages:
1/ Subjective Spirit:
studying the movement by which finite spirit, embodied in the body with
its impulses, becomes able to see itself as spirit --through feeling, sensuous
representation, and thinking to a consciousness of being for itself, delimited
from nature.
2/
Objective Spirit: finite
spirit objectifying itself in State and History: freedom has to produce itself
in the exteriority, create a world appropriate to its nature, a free world, by
founding states. The subjective Moralitat of Kant has to embody itself in the Sittlichkeit of a people. Hegel glorifies the State, the
actual God on earth, divine reality, which reaches its ultimate fulfillment, he
thinks, in the
3/
Absolute Spirit: spirit conscious of itself in Nature and
History, the subjective united to the objective, in the objective recognizing
itself. Spirit must
not only shape the world but see the meaning of the world, become
self-conscious, see the State and History as the revelation and expression of
Spirit, in order to return to itself, to fully find itself.
(c) The study
of Absolute Spirit again has three moments:
1/
Aesthetics: spirit conscious of itself via sensuous intuition, in
an individual thing, a piece of art;
2/
Religion:
self-consciousness of spirit via feeling and representation;
3/
Philosophy:
self-consciousness of spirit on the level ofthinking
--no longer using stories about creation and incarnation but grasping the
meaning of it, the inner sense, this being the form of consciousness
appropriate to spirit. l
(e) Concerning
Philosophy: .
·
Philosophy
will have the same content as religion but not the same form --the form of
thinking rather than the form of representation. The form of thinking is more perfect, since
more appropriate to the reality: reality itself is spiritual, i.e. rational,
and the appropriate way of seeing it is the rational way: in this sense
philosophy is higher than religion.
·
However,
we don't see it all without religion, and philosophy is not a replacement for
religion any more than it is a replacement for art. Philosophy gives the true content of the
feeling, shows the inner sense of what in religion we are
believing, but a person doesn't stop feeling and using representations...