hegel_dialectic_ch01_part4.mp3

22. Even if this were all, the result of the dialectic would be of great importance. It would have refuted all attempts to establish a complete and consistent materialism, and would have demonstrated the claims of the categories of spirit to a place in construing part at least of the universe. But it has done more than this. For it does not content itself with showing that the lower categories lead necessarily to the higher, when the question relates to those portions of experience in which the higher categories are naturally applied by the uncritical consciousness. It also demonstrates that the lower categories, in themselves, and to whatever matter of intuition they may be applied, involve the higher categories also. Not only is Being inadequate to explain, without the aid of Becoming, those phenomena which we all recognise in ordinary life as phenomena of change, but it is also unable to explain those others which are commonly considered as merely cases of unchanging existence. Not only is the idea of Substance inadequate to deal with ordinary cases of scientific causation, but without the idea of Cause it becomes involved in contradictions, even when keeping to the province which the uncritical consciousness assigns to it. Not only is it impossible to explain the phenomena of vegetable and animal life by the idea of mechanism, but that idea is inadequate even to explain the phenomena of physics. Not only can consciousness not be expressed merely in terms of life, but life is an inadequate category even for biological phenomena. With such a system we are able to admit, without any danger either to its consistency or to its practical corollaries, all that science can possibly claim as to the interrelation of all the phenomena of the universe, and as to the constant determination of mind by purely physical causes. For not only have we justified the categories of spirit, but we have subjected the whole world of experience to their rule. We are entitled to assert, not only that spirit cannot be reduced to matter, but also that matter must be reduced to spirit. It is of no philosophical importance, therefore, though all things should, from the scientific standpoint, be determined by material causes. For all material determination is now known to be only spiritual determination in disguise.

23. The conclusion thus reached is one which deals with pure thought, since the argument has rested throughout on the nature of pure thought, and on that only, and the conclusion itself is a statement as to the only form of pure thought which we can use with complete correctness. But we have not found anything which would enable us to discard sensation from its position as an element of experience as necessary and fundamental as pure thought itself, and if Hegel did draw such a consequence from it, we must hold that he has taken an unjustifiable step forwards. All the thought which we know is in its essential nature mediate, and requires something immediate to act on, if it is to act at all. And this immediate element can be found so far as our present knowledge is concerned only in sensation, the necessary background and accompaniment of the dialectic process, which is equally essential at its end as at its beginning. For an attempt to eliminate it would require that Hegel should, in the first place, explain how we could ever conceive unmediated or self-mediated thought, and that he should, in the second place, show that the existence of this self-subsistent thought was implied in the existence of the mediating and independent thought of every-day life. For since it is only the validity of our every-day thought which we find it impossible to deny, it is only that thought which we can take as the basis of the dialectic process. Even if, in the goal of the dialectic, thought became self-subsistent in any intelligible sense, it would be necessary to show that this self-subsistence issued naturally from the finite categories, in which thought is unquestionably recognised as mediate only. I shall endeavour to prove later on that Hegel made no attempt to take up this position. The conclusion of the Logic is simply the assertion that the one category by which experience can be judged with complete correctness is the Absolute Idea. It makes no attempt to transcend the law which we find in all experience by which the categories cannot be used of reality, nor indeed apprehended at all, without the presence of immediate data to serve as materials for them.

24. To sum up, the general outline of the Hegelian Logic, from an epistemological point of view, does not differ greatly, I believe, from that of Kant. Both philosophers justify the application of certain categories to the matter of experience, by proving that the validity of those categories is implied in the validity of other ideas which the sceptical opponent cannot or does not challenge. The systems differ largely in many points, particularly in the extent to which they push their principles. And Hegel has secured a firmer foundation for his theory than Kant did, by pushing back his deduction till it rests on a category the category of Being, the validity of which with regard to experience not only never had been denied, but could not be denied without contradiction. It is true also that Kant's work was clearly analytic, while Hegel's had also a synthetic side, and may even be said to have brought that side into undue, or at any rate misleading, prominence. But the general principle of the two systems was the same, and the critic who finds no fundamental fallacy in Kant's criticism of knowledge, should have no difficulty in admitting that the Hegelian Logic, if it keeps itself free from errors of detail, forms a valid theory of epistemology.

25. But the Logic claims to be more than this, and we must now proceed to examine what has been generally held to be at once the most characteristic and the weakest part of Hegel's philosophy. How far does he apply the results of his analysis of knowledge to actual reality, and how far is he justified in doing so? It is beyond doubt that Hegel regarded his Logic as possessing, in some manner, ontological significance. But this may mean one of two very different things. It may mean only that the system rejects the Kantian thing-in-itself, and denies the existence of any reality except that which enters into experience, so that the results of a criticism of knowledge are valid of reality also. But it may mean that it endeavours to dispense with or transcend all data except the nature of thought itself, and to deduce from that nature the whole existing universe. The difference between these two positions is considerable. The first maintains that nothing is real but the reasonable, the second that reality is nothing but rationality. The first maintains that we can explain the world of sense, the second that we can explain it away. The first merely confirms and carries further the process of rationalisation, of which all science and all finite knowledge consist; the second differs entirely from science and finite knowledge, substituting a self- sufficient and absolute thought for thought which is relative and complementary to the data of sense. It is, I maintain, in the first of these senses, and the first only, that Hegel claims ontological validity for the results of the Logic, and that he should do as much as this is inevitable. For to distinguish between conclusions epistemologically valid and those which extend to ontology implies a belief in the existence of something which does not enter into the field of actual or possible knowledge. Such a belief is totally unwarranted. The thing-in-itself as conceived by Kant, behind and apart from the phenomena which alone enter into experience, is a contradiction. We cannot, we are told, know what it is, but only that it is. But this is itself an important piece of knowledge relating to the thing. It involves a judgment, and a judgment involves categories, and we are thus forced to surrender the idea that we can be aware of the existence of anything which is not subject to the laws governing experience. Moreover, the only reason which can be given for our belief in things-in-themselves is that they are the ground or substratum of our sensuous intuitions. But this is a relation, and a relation involves a category. Indeed every statement which can be made about the thing-in-itself contradicts its alleged isolation.

26. It cannot be denied, however, that Hegel does more than is involved in the rejection of a thing-in-itself outside the laws of experience. Not only are his epistemological conclusions declared to have also ontological validity, but he certainly goes further and holds that, from the consideration of the existence of pure thought, we are able to deduce the existence of the worlds of Nature and Spirit. Is this equivalent to an admission that the worlds of Nature and Spirit can be reduced to, or explained away by, pure thought? We shall see that this is not the case when we reflect that the dialectic process is no less analytic of a given material than it is synthetic from a given premise, and owes its impulse as much to the perfect and concrete idea which is implicit in experience, as to the imperfect and abstract idea which is explicitly before the student. For if the idea is, when met with in reality, always perfect and concrete, it is no less true that it is, when met with in reality, invariably, and of necessity, found in connection with sensuous intuition, without which even the relatively concrete idea which ends the Logic is itself an illegitimate abstraction. This being the case it follows that, as each stage of the Logic insists on going forward to the next stage, so the completed logical idea insists on going forward and asserting the coexistence with itself of sensuous perception. It does not postulate any particular sensuous perception, for the idea is equally implicit in all experience, and one fragment is as good as another in which to perceive it. We are thus unable to deduce any of the particulars of the world of sense from the Logic. But we are able to deduce that there must be such a world, for without it the idea would be still an abstraction and therefore still contradictory. We are able to predicate of that world whatever is necessary to make it the complement of the world of pure thought. It must be immediate, that thought may have something to mediate, individual and isolated piece from piece that thought may have something to relate. It must be, in short, the abstract individual, which, together with the abstract universal of thought, forms the concrete reality, alike individual and universal, which alone is consistent and self-sustained.

27. If this is so, it follows that there is nothing mysterious or intricate about the deduction of the world of Nature from the Logic, and of the world of Spirit from the world of Nature. It is simply the final step in the self- recovery of the spirit from the illegitimate abstractions of the understanding the recovery which we have seen to be the source of all movement in the dialectic. Once granted a single category of the Logic, and all the others follow, since in the world of reality each lower category only exists as a moment of the Absolute Idea, and can therefore never by itself satisfy the demands of the mind. And, in like manner, the world of pure thought only exists as an abstraction from concrete reality, so that, granted pure thought, we are compelled by the necessity of the dialectic to grant the existence of some sensuous intuition also. It is perhaps conceivable that, in some future state of knowledge, the completion of the dialectic process might be seen to involve, not only the mere existence of Nature and Spirit, but their existence with particular characteristics, and that this might be carried so far that it amounted to a complete determination, in one way or another, of every question which could be asked concerning them. If this should be the case, we should be able to deduce à priori from the character of pure thought the whole contents of science and history. Even then, however, we should not have taken up the position that the immediate element in Nature and Spirit could be reduced to pure thought. For we should not be endeavouring to deduce the immediate merely from the mediate, but from the mediate compared with the concrete reality of which they are both moments. The true force of the proof would lie in the existence of this synthesis. At present, however, the world of sense appears to us to contain a large number of particulars which are quite indifferent to pure thought, so that it might be as well embodied in one arrangement of them as in another. This may possibly be an inevitable law of knowledge. It certainly expresses the state of our knowledge at present. It follows that the Philosophy of Nature and Spirit will consist only in observing the progress of the pure idea as it appears in the midst of phenomena to a large extent contingent to it, and cannot hope to account for all the particulars of experience. But this is all that Hegel attempts to do. He endeavours to find the idea in everything, but not to reduce everything to a manifestation of the idea. Thus he remarks in the Philosophy of Spirit, This development of reality or objectivity brings forward a row of forms which must certainly be given empirically, but from an empirical point of view should not be placed side by side and outside each other, but must be known as the expression which corresponds to a necessary series of definite notions, and only in so far as they express such a series of notions have interest for philosophic thought.

28. If this explanation be correct, it will follow that Hegel never endeavoured to claim ontological validity for his Logic in the second sense mentioned above by attempting, that is, to deduce all the contents of experience from the nature of pure thought only. The deduction which does take place is not dependent merely on the premise from which it starts, which is certainly to be found in the nature of pure thought, but also on the whole to which it is working up, and which is implicit in our thought. If we can proceed in this way from Logic to Nature and Spirit, it proves that Logic without the additional elements which occur in Nature and Spirit is a mere abstraction. And an abstraction cannot possibly be the cause of the reality from which it is an abstraction. There can be no place here, therefore, for the attempt to construct the world out of abstract thought, of which Hegel's philosophy is sometimes supposed to have consisted. The importance of the ontological significance of the dialectic, even in this limited extent, is, however, very great. We are now enabled to assert, not only that, within our experience, actual or possible, everything can be explained by the Absolute Idea, but also that all reality, in any sense in which we can attach any intelligible meaning to the word, can also be explained by that idea. I cannot have the least reason to believe in, or even to imagine possible, anything which does not in the long run turn out to contain and be constituted by the highest category. And since that category, as was pointed out above, expresses the deepest nature of the human mind, we are entitled to believe that the universe as a whole is in fundamental agreement with our own nature, and that whatever can rightly be called rational may be safely declared to be also real.

29. From this account of the Hegelian system it will appear that its main result is the completion of the work which had been carried on by German philosophy since the publication of the Critique of Pure Reason the establishment, by means of the transcendental method, of the rationality of the Universe. There was much left for Hegel to do. For the Critique of Pure Reason was a dualism, and had all the qualities of a dualism. Man's aspirations after complete rationality and complete justice in life were checked by the consideration of the phenomenal side of his own nature, which delivered him over to the mercy of a world in one of whose elements the irrational manifold he saw only what was alien to himself. And the defect of the Critique of Pure Reason in this respect was not completely remedied by the Critique of Practical Reason. The reconciliation was only external: the alien element was not to be absorbed or transcended but conquered. It was declared the weaker, but it kept its existence. And the whole of this argument had a slighter basis than the earlier one, since it rested, not on the validity of knowledge, but on the validity of the moral sense the denial of which is not as clearly a contradiction of itself. Moreover, it is not by any means universally admitted that the obligation to seek the good is dependent on the possibility of realising it in full. And if it is not so dependent then the validity of the moral sense does not necessarily imply the validity of the Ideas of Reason. Even in the Critique of Judgment the reconciliation of the two sides was still external and incomplete. Nor had spirit a much stronger position with Kant's immediate successors. Fichte, indeed, reduced the Non-Ego to a shadow, but just for that reason, as Dr Caird remarks, rendered it impossible to completely destroy it. And the Absolute of Schelling, standing as it did midway between matter and spirit, could be but slight comfort to spirit, whose most characteristic features and most important interests had little chance of preservation in a merely neutral basis. Hegel on the other hand asserted the absolute supremacy of reason. For him it is the key to the interpretation of the whole universe; it finds nothing alien to itself wherever it goes. And the reason for which he thus claimed unrestricted power was demonstrated to contain every category up to the Absolute Idea. It is this demonstration quite as much as the rejection of the possibility that anything in the universe should be alien to reason which gives his philosophy its practical interest. For from the practical point of view it is of little consequence that the world should be proved to be the embodiment of reason, if we are to see in reason nothing higher than reciprocity, and are compelled to regard the higher categories as mere subjective delusions. Such a maimed reason as this is one in which we can have scarcely more pleasure or acquiescence than in chaos. If the rational can be identified with the good, it can only be in respect of the later categories, such as End, Life, and Cognition.

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