The Philosophy Book

by DK Publishing

  This resolution of a thesis (being) with its antithesis (not-being) in a synthesis (becoming) is just the beginning of the dialectical process, which goes on to repeat itself at a higher level. That is, any new synthesis turns out, on further analysis, to involve its own contradiction, and this in turn is overcome by a still richer or “higher” notion. All ideas, according to Hegel, are interconnected in this way, and the process of revealing those connections is what Hegel calls his “dialectical method.”

  In saying that the structures of thought are dialectical, therefore, Hegel means that they are not distinct and irreducible, as Kant maintained, but that they emerge from the broadest, emptiest notions by means of this movement of self-contradiction and resolution.

  "Each of the parts of philosophy is a philosophical whole, a circle rounded and complete in itself."

  Georg Hegel

  In Hegel’s view, a synthesis emerging from an antagonism of thesis and antithesis itself becomes a new thesis, which generates its own antithesis—which finally gives birth to another synthesis. This dialectical process is one in which Spirit comes to ever more accurate understandings of itself—culminating in the philosophy of Hegel, in which it achieves complete understanding.

  Dialectic and the world

  The discussion of Hegel’s dialectic above uses terms such as “emerge”, “development”, and “movement.” On the one hand, these terms reflect something important about this method of philosophy—that it starts without assumptions and from the least controversial point, and allows ever richer and truer concepts to reveal themselves through the process of dialectical unfolding. On the other hand, however, Hegel clearly argues that these developments are not simply interesting facts of logic, but are real developments that can be seen at work in history. For example, a man from ancient Greece and a man living in the modern world will obviously think about different things, but Hegel claims that their very ways of thinking are different, and represent different kinds of consciousness—or different stages in the historical development of thought and consciousness.

  Hegel’s first major work, Phenomenology of Spirit, gives an account of the dialectical development of these forms of consciousness. He starts with the types of consciousness that an individual human being might possess, and works up to collective forms of consciousness. He does so in such a way as to show that these types of consciousness are to be found externalized in particular historical periods or events—most famously, for example, in the American and French revolutions.

  Indeed, Hegel even argues that at certain times in history, Spirit’s next revolutionary change may manifest itself as an individual (such as Napoleon Bonaparte) who, as an individual consciousness, is completely unaware of his or her role in the history of Spirit. And the progress that these individuals make is always characterized by the freeing of aspects of Spirit (in human form) from recurring states of oppression—of overcoming tyrannies that may themselves be the result of the overcoming of previous tyrannies.

  This extraordinary idea—that the nature of consciousness has changed through time, and changed in accordance with a pattern that is visible in history—means that there is nothing about human beings that is not historical in character. Moreover, this historical development of consciousness cannot simply have happened at random. Since it is a dialectical process, it must in some sense contain both a particular sense of direction and an end point. Hegel calls this end point “Absolute Spirit”—and by this he means a future stage of consciousness which no longer even belongs to individuals, but which instead belongs to reality as a whole.

  At this point in its development, knowledge is complete—as it must be, according to Hegel, since Spirit encompasses, through dialectical synthesis, both the knower and what is known. Furthermore, Spirit grasps this knowledge as nothing other than its own completed essence—the full assimilation of all forms of “otherness” that were always parts of itself, however unknowingly. In other words, Spirit does not simply come to encompass reality—it comes to be aware of itself as having always been nothing other than the movement toward this encompassing of reality. As Hegel writes in The Phenomenology of Spirit, “History is a conscious, self-mediating process—[it is] Spirit emptied out into time.”

  Napoleon Bonaparte, according to Hegel, perfectly embodied the zeitgeist (spirit of the age) and was able, through his actions, to move history into the next stage of its development.

  "Each stage of world-history is a necessary moment in the Idea of the World Spirit."

  Georg Hegel

  Spirit and nature

  But what about the world in which we live, and which seems to go its way quite separately from human history? What does it mean to say that reality itself is historical? According to Hegel, what we ordinarily call “nature” or “the world” is also Spirit. “Nature is to be regarded as a system of stages,” he writes, “one arising necessarily from the other and being the proximate truth of the stage from which it results.” He goes on to claim that one of the stages of nature is the progression from that which is “only Life” (nature as a living whole) to that which has “existence as Spirit” (the whole of nature now revealed as always having been, when properly understood, Spirit).

  At this stage of nature, a different dialectic begins, namely that of consciousness itself—of the forms that Absolute Spirit takes in its dialectical progression toward self-realization. Hegel’s account of this progression begins with consciousness first thinking of itself as an individual thing among other individuals, and occupying a separate space to that of matter or the natural world. Later stages of consciousness, however, are no longer those of individuals, but are those of social or political groups—and so the dialectic continues, refining itself until it reaches the stage of Absolute Spirit.

  Spirit and mind

  At the time Hegel was writing, there was a dominant philosophical view that there are two kinds of entities in the world—things that exist in the physical world and thoughts about those things—these latter being something like pictures or images of the things. Hegel argues that all versions of this distinction are mistakes, and involve committing ourselves to the ridiculous scenario in which two things are both absolutely different (things and thoughts), but also somehow similar (because the thoughts are images of things).

  Hegel argues that it only seems as though the objects of thought are different from thought itself. For Hegel, the illusion of difference and separation between these two apparent “worlds” is shown as such when both thought and nature are revealed as aspects of Spirit. This illusion is overcome in Absolute Spirit, when we see that there is only one reality—that of Spirit, which knows and reflects on itself, and is both thought and what is thought about.

  The “Whole of Spirit”, or “Absolute Spirit”, is the end point of Hegel’s dialectic. However, the preceding stages are not left behind, as it were, but are revealed as insufficiently analyzed aspects of Spirit as a whole. Indeed, what we think of as an individual person is not a separate constituent of reality, but is an aspect of how Spirit develops—or how it “empties itself out into time.” Thus, Hegel writes, “The True is the Whole. But the Whole is nothing other than the essence consummating itself through its development.” Reality is Spirit—both thought and what is known by thought—and undergoes a process of historical development.

  "Of the Absolute it must be said that it is essentially a result, that only in the end is it what it truly is."

  Georg Hegel

  German history had reached its end point in th
e Prussian state, according to Hegel. However, there was a strong feeling in favor of a united Germany, as personified by the figure of Germania.

  GEORG HEGEL

  Georg Hegel was born in 1770 in Stuttgart, Germany, and studied theology at Tübingen where he met and became friends with the poet Friedrich Hölderlin and the philosopher Friedrich Schelling. He spent several years working as a tutor before an inheritance allowed him to join Schelling at the University of Jena. Hegel was forced to leave Jena when Napoleon’s troops occupied the town, and just managed to rescue his major work, Phenomenology of Spirit, which catapulted him to a dominant position in German philosophy. In need of funds, he became a newspaper editor and then a school headmaster before being appointed to the chair of philosophy first in Heidelberg and then at the prestigious University of Berlin. At the age of 41 he married Marie von Tucher, with whom he had three children. Hegel died in 1831 during a cholera epidemic.

  Key works

  1807 Phenomenology of Spirit

  1812–16 Science of Logic

  1817 Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences

  See also: Heraclitus • Johann Gottlieb Fichte • Friedrich Schelling • Arthur Schopenhauer • Karl Marx • Jean-Paul Sartre

  IN CONTEXT

  BRANCH

  Metaphysics

  APPROACH

  Idealism

  BEFORE

  1690 John Locke publishes An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, explaining how all our knowledge comes from experience.

  1781 Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason introduces the concept of a “thing in itself”, which Schopenhauer used as a starting point for his ideas.

  AFTER

  Late 19th century Friedrich Nietzsche puts forward the notion of a “Will to power” to explain human motivations.

  Early 20th century Austrian psychoanalyst Sigmund Freud explores what lies behind our basic human urges.

  Arthur Schopenhauer was not part of the mainstream of early 19th-century German philosophy. He acknowledged Immanuel Kant, whom he idolized, as a major influence, but dismissed the idealists of his own generation, who held that reality ultimately consists of something nonmaterial. Most of all he detested the idealist Georg Hegel for his dry writing style and optimistic philosophy.

  Using Kant’s metaphysics as his starting point, Schopenhauer developed his own view of the world, which he expressed in clear, literary language. He took Kant’s view that the world is divided into what we perceive through our senses (phenomena), and “things in themselves” (noumena), but he wanted to explain the nature of the phenomenal and noumenal worlds.

  Interpreting Kant

  According to Kant, we each construct a version of the world from our perceptions—the phenomenal world—but we can never experience the noumenal world as it is “in itself.” So we each have a limited vision of the world, as our perceptions are built from information acquired through a limited set of senses. Schopenhauer adds to this that “every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.”

  The idea of knowledge being limited to our experience was not an entirely new one; the ancient philosopher Empedocles had said that “each man believes only his experience”, and in the 17th century John Locke had asserted that “no man’s knowledge here can go beyond his experience.” But the reason Schopenhauer gives for this limitation is quite new, and it comes from his interpretation of Kant’s phenomenal and noumenal worlds. The important difference between Kant and Schopenhauer is that for Schopenhauer, the phenomenal and noumenal are not two different realities or worlds, but the same world, experienced differently. It is one world, with two aspects: Will and Representation. This is most easily evidenced by our bodies, which we experience in two ways: we perceive them as objects (Representations), and experience them from within (as Will).

  Schopenhauer says that an act of will, such as wishing to raise my arm, and the resulting movement, are not in two different worlds—the noumenal and phenomenal—but the same event experienced in two different ways. One is experienced from inside, the other observed from outside. When we look at things outside ourselves, although we see only their objective Representation, not their inner reality or Will, the world as a whole still has the same simultaneous outer and inner existences.

  A universal Will

  Schopenhauer uses the word “will” to express a pure energy that has no driving direction, and yet is responsible for everything that manifests itself in the phenomenal world. He believes, like Kant, that space and time belong in the phenomenal world—they are concepts within our minds, not things outside of them—so the Will of the world does not mark time, or follow causal or spatial laws. This means it must be timeless and indivisible, and so must our individual wills. It follows, then, that the Will of the universe and individual will are one and the same thing, and the phenomenal world is controlled by this vast, timeless, motiveless Will.

  Schopenhauer studied the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, in which Krishna the charioteer tells Arjuna that a man is a slave to his desires unless he can free himself from his cravings.

  Eastern influence

  At this point in his argument, Schopenhauer’s pessimism shows through. Where contemporaries such as Hegel saw will as a positive force, Schopenhauer sees humanity at the mercy of a mindless, aimless universal Will. It lies behind our most basic urges, he insists, and is what causes us to live lives of constant disappointment and frustration as we attempt to relieve our cravings. For Schopenhauer, the world is neither good nor bad, but meaningless, and humans who struggle to find happiness achieve at best gratification and at worst pain and suffering.

  The only escape from this miserable condition, according to Schopenhauer, is nonexistence or at least a loss of will for gratification. He proposes that relief can be found through aesthetic contemplation, especially in music, which is the one art that does not attempt to represent the phenomenal world. Schopenhauer’s philosophy here echoes the Buddhist concept of nirvana (a transcendent state free from desire or suffering). He had studied Eastern thinkers and religions in great detail.

  From his idea of one universal Will, Schopenhauer develops a moral philosophy that may be somewhat surprising, considering his otherwise misanthropic and pessimistic character. He realizes that if we can recognize that our separateness from the universe is essentially an illusion—because all our individual wills and the Will of the universe are one and the same thing—we can learn empathy with everyone and everything else, and moral goodness can arise from a universal compassion. Here, again, Schopenhauer’s thinking reflects the ideals of Eastern philosophy.

  "The fundament upon which all our knowledge and learning rests is the inexplicable."

  Arthur Schopenhauer

  Lasting legacy

  Schopenhauer was largely ignored by other German philosophers in his lifetime, and his ideas were overshadowed by those of Hegel, though he did have an influence on writers and musicians. Toward the end of the 19th century, the primacy he gave to Will became a theme in philosophy once more. Friedrich Nietzsche in particular acknowledged his influence, and Henri Bergson and the American pragmatists also owe something to his analysis of the world as Will. Perhaps Schopenhauer’s greatest influence, however, was in the field of psychology, where his ideas about our basic urges and their frustration influenced the psychoanalytic theories of both Sigmund Freud and Carl Jung.

  ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

  Born into a wealthy and cosmopolitan family in Danzig (now Gdansk), Schopenhauer was expected to become a merchant like his father. He tra
velled through France and England before his family settled in Hamburg in 1793. In 1805, after his father’s death—possibly by suicide—he felt able to stop working and go to university, where he studied philosophy and psychology. He maintained an uneasy relationship with his mother, who constantly criticized his achievements.