That ambitious project is apt to look eccentric in the light of the development of modern logic. This logic has removed from its subject matter not only the metaphysics of Hegel, but also the particular brand of formalism advanced by Aristotle. It is therefore now necessary to read Hegel with more attention to detail, and less respect for system, than he himself would have countenanced. The surprising thing, however, is that his ‘dialectical’ philosophy still seems both important and often acceptable.
The term ‘dialectic’ was used by Plato to describe the method of Socrates, who sought philosophical truth through disputation. Kant had given a far more precise meaning to the term, and it was this meaning which Hegel adopted, to make use of it in a manner wholly antipathetic to the Critical philosophy. The second—negative—part of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason had been devoted to exploring the fallacies which attend the attempt to pass from the circumscribed realm of the ‘understanding’ into the limitless space of ‘pure reason’. In its desire for absolute truth, human reason commits itself only to the absolute falsehood of selfcontradiction. Kant’s diagnosis of the fallacies of pure reason contained a section called the ‘Antinomy of Pure Reason’ (see p. 150). Here Kant had tried to describe certain contradictions into which reason strays in its ambition to pass from the circumscribed viewpoint of empirical knowledge to the realm of absolute cosmology, in which the ‘whole’ of things is grasped as it is in itself, independently of the limitations imposed by our perceptual capacities. I have already referred to an ambiguity in Kant’s conclusions: it is not entirely clear whether he is saying that the limits of human understanding and the limits of truth are one and the same, or whether, on the contrary, he is gesturing towards a world of ‘things-in-themselves’ about which we can at least know that we do not know them. Because of this ambiguity it was possible for Hegel to interpret Kant’s ‘critique’ of pure reason as heralding its eventual celebration. The Kantian contradictions, Hegel thought, were only contradictions from the limited point of view of the understanding. They therefore provided a kind of logical impetus to transcend that point of view into the world of pure reason itself, from the perspective of which these and many other contradictions could be resolved. (To take an analogy: sitting in a railway carriage moving away from a station I suffer the illusion that the station is slipping backwards. I also believe that the station is motionless and that I am going forward. These two judgements form a contradiction which is ‘resolved’ when, in ascending to the impartial standpoint of scientific discourse, I recognise that they both presuppose a fallacious, egocentric view of motion. The truth of the matter consists in a relative movement whose nature can be fully grasped only by a scientific theory that assigns no importance to my limited personal perspective.)
Thus while Kant had used the word ‘dialectic’ to refer to the propensity to fall into contradictions, Hegel used it to mean the propensity to transcend them. This process of transcendence is the true course of logic, and ‘dialectic’ is the name for the intellectual pursuit whose endpoint is not limited or partial, but on the contrary, absolute truth itself. ‘A deeper insight into the antinomies or, rather, into the dialectic nature of Reason shows us... that every concept is a unity of opposite moments, which could therefore be asserted in the shape of an antinomy.’
What then is the structure of reason’s dialectic? It should be recognised that the terms of Hegel’s logic are not propositions or judgements, but rather concepts: and it is concepts, in his view, that are true or false. Falsehood is a form of limitation or incompleteness, whereas truth is a form of wholeness, a transcendence of all limitation. (Here and elsewhere we see the influence of Spinoza.) Dialectic is the method of progression among concepts, whereby a ‘more true’ (or, as Spinoza might say, ‘more adequate’) concept is generated from inadequate beginnings, through overcoming the oppositions intrinsic to them.
The dialectical process is, then, 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’ (Aufhebung), 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 metaphor is attractive, but how do we interpret it? Hegel’s logic is in stark contrast with traditional theories, which see logical relations as timeless, determined not by content but by structure. A thought does not need time, one feels, in which to generate its consequences: indeed it is the essence of a logical consequence that it is inseparable from the thought itself: a logical consequence can be neither lost nor acquired. Yet Hegel thinks of concepts as moving towards a greater grasp of reality, and he speaks of the ‘working through’ of the dialectic as being necessary both to the truth and to the meaning of the result. He refers to the successive stages as ‘moments’, which have to be ‘overcome’, in the act of ‘diremption’ whereby a new concept is born.
These temporal similes would be less puzzling if it were not also the case that Hegel thought of historical processes in dialectical terms—as the successive generation and overcoming of contradictions. And it is this aspect of Hegel, put forward overtly in the lectures on the philosophy of history, but covertly elsewhere, that has been the most influential, perhaps because the most intelligible, of his theories. It often seems that the whole of Hegelian metaphysics points towards a logical and historical interpretation at once. To some extent this reflects a confusion on Hegel’s part, between logic conceived as a science of the relations among ideas, and logic conceived as the intellectual operation whereby those relations are discovered. Clearly, if it is true that we must undergo some dialectical process in order to know logical relations, this is a fact about us, and not about logic. But even this confusion can be glimpsed only obscurely, since Hegel writes at a level of abstraction so great as to attribute the process of thinking not to any particular subject, but rather to a general subject of thought. Logic becomes, in the end, the history, or perhaps the anatomy, of an eternal, impersonal ‘concept’.
This notion becomes a little clearer if we examine the beginning and the end of the dialectical process, and say something about the course between them. The starting-point of logic is, for Hegel, not arbitrary. Modern conceptions of logic have tended to the view that logic is an instrument whereby the consequences of some premise are derived. Logic is powerless to give knowledge until the premise is determined. This was emphatically not Hegel’s view, who thought that the premise of logic is determined by logic itself. The premise of logic is ‘pure indeterminate being’—being conceived without any of the particular determinations through which it makes itself manifest to the understanding. Being is the single great a priori concept, from reflecting on the nature of which we arrive at an a priori theory of reality. (The modern logician will be reluctant, as we shall see, to admit that there is any such concept as that of pure being: this only shows that Hegel’s metaphysics can no longer be so easily disguised as a logic, with all the incontestability which that label implies.)
Logic begins, then, from ‘being’, and advances towards its conclusion, which is the ‘absolute idea or truth itself’. This absolute idea is thought and reality at once: it is like the God of Spinoza, who comprehends the whole of things and, being identical with that whole, exists thinking Himself. Each concept in the dialectical process that leads to this supreme conception is obtained from that of being by a sequence of dialectical transformations.
Imagine a kind of impersonal dialectical ‘thought’, or thinker, attempting to understand the world. It has nothing available to it but thought and so must put forward, as its sole instr
ument of knowledge, the ‘concepts’ which enlighten it. Of necessity it begins from the single most indeterminate concept—that which is contained in all concepts and yet which is logically precedent to them, the concept of being. But what is being, considered as ‘unmediated’ by reflection, and as free from extraneous determinations? It is, surely, nothing, or (as the English translators of Hegel prefer to write it) Nothing. (Cf. Berkeley’s arguments against the Lockean substratum.) Hence 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. This concept is ‘becoming’, which captures the truth contained in that previous opposition, the truth of the passage of being into nothing and nothing into being. To our impersonal thinker the world now appears as becoming rather than as being, and this perception is ‘truer’ than the preceding one, although as yet far short of that absolute truth in which all such oppositions will be resolved.
Becoming seems to be a specifically ‘temporal’ characteristic, but we cannot assume at this stage that the ‘temporal’ character of Hegel’s logic is anything more than a metaphor. From the point of view of logic ‘becoming’ suffers from the same defects as ‘being’; it generates its own contradiction out of ‘the equipoise of arising and passing away’. So it gives way to a higher truth, which is that of ‘determinate being’, in which being and nothing are finally reconciled. Determinate being is that more familiar, less abstract, form of existence of which our world presents us with examples: being becomes determinate by being limited and so, as it were, incarnate in a certain identity. From this ‘limitation’ further oppositions arise and the process continues, until our ‘thinker’ is brought by a seemingly ineluctable process to the absolute idea itself, so perceiving the whole of reality as ‘coming forth’ from that indispensable concept from which all thinking must begin.
It would not be unfair to say that Hegel’s metaphysics consists of an ontological proof of the existence of everything. The character of this, as of any ontological proof, is that it proceeds from concept to reality, arguing moreover that the discovery of reality and the ‘unfolding’ of a concept are one and the same. In Hegel’s metaphysics this aspect is to some extent concealed by his reluctance to specify the nature of the abstract ‘thinker’ for whom the dialectical succession of concepts unfolds. His genius for abstractions leads us always away from the subject of thought, to thought itself. And the nature of the resulting metaphysics is such as to abolish the distinction between thought and reality altogether, thus displaying the principal characteristic of idealism.
It is not to be expected that such a logic can readily be made intelligible, or that a philosophy which is able cold-bloodedly to announce (for example) that ‘Limit is the mediation through which Something and Other is and also is not’ should be altogether different from arrant nonsense. Nevertheless, a picture of the dialectic is not hard to form, and this picture is important to bear in mind as we turn to that part of Hegel’s philosophy—the philosophy of mind and of politics— which seems now to be most worthy of study and most likely to contribute to the pursuit of knowledge. The picture I have in mind is one that can be seen at its clearest in Leibniz’s theory of time. According to Leibniz, ours could be the best possible world only if it were also the richest—the richest in the number and variety of monads that it contains. For this to be possible some monads must contain predicates which cannot—from our limited point of view—co-exist. For example, a thing cannot be both red and green at once: these two attributes seem to contradict each other. But it can be red and green successively. So that, in the order of phenomena, the dimension of time enables monads (whose reality is timeless), as it were, to display their abundance of predicates in succession. In perceiving the world under the aspect of time we thereby reconcile what might otherwise have seemed to be contradictions pertaining within it. As Leibniz put it (Réponse aux réflections de Bayle): ‘Time is the order of possibilities which are inconsistent, but which nevertheless have some connexion.’ In some such way it is the dialectic of contradiction which squeezes the Hegelian concept out of its logical changelessness into the order of succession, replacing being by becoming, and logical stasis by ontological evolution.
The constant slide between logical and temporal relations is of the very essence of Hegel’s philosophy and preceded the official formulation of his doctrine of logic, exemplified in what is probably the greatest, and certainly the most intricately suggestive of his works, The Phenomenology of Spirit. This was written in 1806 and completed in Jena on the eve of the Napoleonic battle outside that town. The complexity and range of the Phenomenology defy description: it covers all subjects from art to theology, from science to history, and contains some of the most suggestive examples and intellectual parables in the whole of literature and philosophy. I shall content myself with a résumé of what I take to be its central argument.
It will be remembered that Kant’s positive philosophy in the Critique of Pure Reason was delivered by the ‘Transcendental Deduction’. According to this, the pure ‘subject’ of Descartes and the empiricists is capable of knowing itself as subject only because it also knows the world as object, disciplining its experience in accordance with the a priori categories of the understanding. From the epistemological point of view Hegel did not so much advance beyond as dance around this master thought of Kant’s, but he danced in a fascinating way. In the Hegelian whirlwind epistemology melts into ethics, metaphysics into the philosophy of mind, and theoretical understanding into practical reason. This amalgamation of practical and theoretical reason partly explains the temporal emphasis of Hegel’s logic. For it is of the essence of practical reason to advance towards decisions, and not to be detachable from the circumstances of the reasoner. Conclusion and argument are here inseparable, yet neither can be represented in the wholly a-temporal manner demanded by traditional theoretical logic.
Let us allow ourselves, then, as Hegel allows himself, full use of the temporal metaphor. We explore the relation between subject and object in the manner laid down in Fichte’s primeval drama (see pp. 156-8). We show how the pure subject advances towards self-consciousness through successive postulations of the objectivity of his world. Now Hegel’s ‘pure subjectivity’ is an abstraction, and he goes on to argue, both in the Phenomenology and elsewhere, against any view of the ‘I’ that does not grant universal status to its subject matter. Nevertheless, we can without distortion regard him as referring also, and primarily, to the individual subject, and laying down, in parabolical, quasi-historical terms, the conditions which must be fulfilled if that subject is to rise to the self-consciousness that fulfils his nature.
Like Kant, Hegel recognised that the existence of the self in any form brings with it a peculiar immediacy—the immediacy of Kant’s Transcendental Unity of Apperception. And Hegel took over from Kant one of the major conclusions of the Critique of Pure Reason (established in that part of the Dialectic called the Paralogisms, where the rationalist theory of the soul is demolished). This is that the ‘immediacy’ with which our mental states are presented to us can provide no clue as to the nature of those states. It is the mere surface glow of knowledge, wholly without depth. The immediacy of the pure subject is, as Hegel would put it, undifferentiated, indeterminate and so devoid of content.
It follows that the pure subject we have imagined can gain no knowledge of what he is, and still less any knowledge of the world which he inhabits. Nevertheless, as Kant saw, his existence presupposes a unity, and that unity requires a principle of unity, something that holds consciousness together as one thing. Spinoza had spoken in this regard of the conatus, or striving, that constitutes the identity of organic beings. Hegel has recourse to a similar notion, the Aristotelian orexis, or appetite. Through this, the subject is launched forth in a manner which is void of knowledge and uninformed by the prospect of success. Consciousness exists only as the primitive ‘I want’ of the infant, the co
ntumacious screeching of the fledgling in the nest.
But desire cannot exist without being desire for something. As Hegel puts it, adopting Fichte’s jargon, desire posits its object as independent of itself: our primitive subject has already made a step towards the conception of another, and hence towards a conception of itself as differentiated from the other. Its ‘absolute simplicity’ is on the point of being sundered. But consciousness is not yet an agent: it has no conception of the nature of itself, or of the value of its primitive desire. It remains the slave of appetite and impulse. This is, roughly, the state of animal consciousness, which explores the world purely as an object of appetite, and which, being nothing for itself, is without genuine will. At this stage the object of desire is conceived only as a lack (Mangel), and desire itself destroys or consumes the thing desired.
There follows a peculiar ‘moment’ in the consciousness of the primitive subjectivity. This is the moment of opposition. The world is not merely passively uncooperative 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 self has now ‘met its match’, and there follows what Hegel poetically calls the ‘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. Full self-consciousness is not the result of this—for the struggle is one that arises from appetite, and brings no conception of the value of what is desired. Hence it does not create the consciousness of the self as standing in definite relation to the world, fulfilled by some things, denied by others. As Hegel would put it, it does not generate the concept of the self in its freedom. On the contrary, the outcome of this struggle is the mastery of one party over the other. Conflict is resolved only in the unstable relation of master and slave.
A Short History of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein, Second Edition Page 20