hegel_dialectic_ch02_part1.mp3

Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic.

John McTaggart & Ellis McTaggart 1896

Chapter II: Different Interpretations of the Dialectic

30. IN the last chapter I have explained the view of Hegel’s philosophy which seems to me the most probable. It is now necessary to examine some objections which have been raised to the possibility of interpreting Hegel in this manner. With regard to three points in particular various commentators have taken a different view of Hegel’s meaning. It has been held that the dialectic process has no reference whatever to experience, but takes place in pure thought considered apart from anything else. It has been held that, whether this be so or not, yet at the end of the dialectic we reach, in the Absolute Idea, a form of thought which exists in and by itself, and does not merely mediate data immediately given to the mind by some other source. And, lastly, it has been held that the deduction of Nature and Spirit from Logic is to be taken as an attempt to degrade them into mere forms of the latter, and to declare that all things are reducible to thought alone.

31. The first of these points has been discussed by Trendelenburg in his Logische Untersuchungen. According to him, Hegel attempted what was impossible, and achieved what was useless. He attempted, by observation of the pure notion in its most abstract stage, and apart from everything but itself, to evoke all the other stages of the pure notion, and so reach a result of general validity à priori. But since we can extract from an idea, taken by itself, nothing more than is already in it, and since an idea, independent of the data which it connects and mediates, is unthinkable, any such dialectical evolution as Hegel desired was impossible. In point of fact, all appearance of advance from one category to another is due, according to Trendelenburg, to surreptitious appeals to experience. In this way the sterility of pure thought was conquered, but with it the cogency of this dialectic process also disappeared, and it became merely empirical and contingent, without a claim to be called philosophy. On the question as to the actual results of the dialectic we shall consider Trendelenburg’s views further on. As to Hegel’s intention, he says “Although the Wissenschaftslehre of Fichte extracted the Non-Ego from the Ego, yet he does not go on to real notions. The dialectic has appropriated his methods; it takes the same course in position, opposition, and reconciliation. It does not make so much difference that it begins with the notion of Being, for it is the empty image of Being. If it nevertheless comes to the notions of reality and to concrete forms, we do not perceive whence it gets to them. For pure thought will not accept them, and then permeate them, but endeavours to make them. Thought, expressed in this way, is born blind and has no eyes towards the outside.”

32. In answer to this we may quote Mr F. H. Bradley. “An idea prevails that the Dialectic Method is a sort of experiment with conceptions in vacuo. We are supposed to have nothing but one single isolated abstract idea, and this solitary monad then proceeds to multiply by gemmation from or by fission of its private substance, or by fetching matter from the impalpable void. But this is a mere caricature, and it comes from confusion between that which the mind has got before it and that which it has within itself. Before the mind there is a single conception, but the mind itself, which does not appear, engages in the process, operates on the datum, and produces the result. The opposition between the real, in the fragmentary character in which the mind possesses it, and the true reality felt within the mind, is the moving cause of that unrest which sets up the dialectical process.” The fact seems to be that Trendelenburg’s interpretation of Hegel’s attempt to construct a dialectic of pure thought, is inadequate in two ways. He supposes, first, that the incomplete thought from which we start is conceived to exist only in its incompleteness, and is intended to have as yet no actual relation to the concrete reality to which it is afterwards to attain. In fact, he says, the process does depend on a reference to concrete reality, but, in so far as this is so, the original attempt, which was to construct an objectively valid dialectic by means of pure thought, has broken down. I shall try, however, to show that such a relation to reality was in Hegel’s mind throughout, and that it leads to conclusions of objective validity. If pure thought meant anything inconsistent with this, it would certainly be sterile. But there is nothing in this which is inconsistent with pure thought, for the notion, as contained implicitly in reality and experience, is precisely of the same nature as the isolated piece which we begin by consciously observing, though it is more complete. And, secondly, Trendelenburg appears to think that thought, to be pure, must be perceived by itself, and not in concrete experience, which always contains, along with pure thought, the complementary moment of sensation. If this was the case, it would most certainly be sterile, or rather impossible. So far from one category being able to transform itself, by the dialectic process, into another, no category could exist at all. For all thought, as we have seen, requires something immediate on which to act. But this need not prevent the dialectic process from being one of pure thought. As was explained above the only part of experience from which the dialectic process derives its cogency, and the only part which changes in it, is the element of pure thought, although the dialectic process, like all other acts of reasoning, can only take place when the thought is joined with sensation. Whether the reference to experience in Hegel’s Logic destroys its claims to absolute and à priori validity will be discussed in the next chapter. At present we have to ask whether the appeal to experience is inconsistent with the original intention of the dialectic, as Trendelenburg asserts, and whether it was only used by Hegel because the absurdity of his original purpose drove him, more or less unconsciously, to make such an appeal, or whether, on the other hand, it was all along an essential part of the system that it should have such a relation to experience.

33. At the beginning of Section 6 of the Encyclopaedia Hegel says that “at first we become aware of these contents” of philosophical knowledge “in what we call experience. . . . As it is only in form that philosophy is distinguished from other modes of obtaining an acquaintance with this same sum of being, it must necessarily be in harmony with actuality and experience.” This passage supports the view that Hegel was conscious of the manner in which his dialectic rested on experience. For, even if it were possible for philosophy to observe pure thought independently of experience, it is certain that “other means of obtaining an acquaintance with this same sum of being" – science, namely, and common sense – have no field for their action except experience. It is no doubt the case that, as Hegel mentions in Section 8, philosophy has “another circle of objects, which” empirical knowledge “does not embrace. These are Freedom, Mind, and God.” But, although philosophy deals with these conceptions, it does so, according to Hegel, only by starting from empirical knowledge. It is, for example, only by the contemplation of the finite objects perceived by the senses that we arrive at the knowledge of God. And, as we are now considering the basis, and not the extent, of philosophy, the fact that we can rise to knowledge of that which is never represented in sensuous intuition is not to the point.

34. Again, in Section 9, he points out that “the method of empirical science exhibits two defects. The first is that the Universal, or general principle contained in it, the genus or kind, &c., is of its own nature indeterminate and vague, and therefore not on its own account connected with the Particular or the details. Either is external and accidental to the other, and it is the same with the particular facts which are brought into union: each is external and accidental to the others. The second defect is that the beginnings are in every case data and postulates, neither accounted for nor deduced. In both these points the form of necessity fails to get its due. Hence reflection, whenever it sets itself to remedy these defects, becomes speculative thinking, the thinking proper to philosophy.” Further on in the same section he says that “the relation of speculative science to the other sciences may be stated in the following terms. It does not in the least neglect the empirical facts contained in the other sciences but recognises and adopts them: it appreciates and applies towards its own structure the universal element in these sciences, their laws and classifications; but besides all this, into the categories of science, it introduces, and gives currency to, other categories. The difference looked at in this way is only a change of categories.” The method of philosophy then is separated by no difference of kind from the method of science, and must therefore also deal with experience. It takes the materials of science, and carries further the process of arrangement and analysis which science began. Whether, in doing so, it actually goes so far as to destroy the basis from which it started, is a question which will be considered later. The changes which it produces are in any case very extensive. Fresh categories are introduced, and not merely as additions, but as altering materially the meaning of the categories of science which now turn out to be abstract and of imperfect validity. The process must not be confounded with one which should simply carry scientific generalisations up to the highest point, using only the categories of science, and making the ordinary scientific presuppositions. The result may in one sense be said to differ from the result of science in kind and not only in degree. But the method only differs in degree. The special categories of philosophy are not introduced “out of a pistol” but are the necessary consequence of reflection on the categories of science and the contradictions they display. And, if there is this continuity between science and philosophy, we are placed in the dilemma of either supposing that Hegel imagined science to be possible without experience, or admitting that for him the dialectic method, the method of philosophy, also required experience as its presupposition.

35. The whole of Section 12 has a very important bearing on this question. The following extracts are especially significant. Philosophy “takes its departure from experience; including under that name both our immediate consciousness and the inductions from it. Awakened, as it were, by this stimulus, thought is vitally characterised by raising itself above the natural state of mind, above the senses and inferences from the senses into its own unadulterated element, and by assuming, accordingly, at first a stand-aloof and negative attitude towards the point from which it draws its origin.” And further on “On the relation between immediacy and mediation in consciousness ... here it may be sufficient to premise that, although the two ‘moments’ or factors present themselves as distinct, still neither of them can be absent, nor can one exist apart from the other. Thus the knowledge of God” (compare Section 1 – "Truth, in that supreme sense in which God and God only is the Truth") “as of every supersensible reality, is in its true character an exaltation above sensations or perceptions: it consequently involves a negative attitude to the initial data of sense, and to that extent implies mediation. For to mediate is to take something as a beginning, and to go onward to a second thing; so that the existence of this second thing depends on our having reached it from something else contradistinguished from it. In spite of this the knowledge of God is independent (selbstständig) and not a mere consequence of the empirical phase of consciousness; in fact, its independence is essentially secured through this negation and exaltation. No doubt, if we attach an unfair prominence to the fact of mediation, and represent it as implying a state of conditionedness (Bedingtheit), it may be said – not that the remark would mean much – that philosophy is the child of experience, and owes its rise to an à posteriori fact. (As a matter of fact, thinking is always the negation of what we have immediately before us.) With as much truth however we may be said to owe eating to the means of nourishment, so long as we can have no eating without them. If we take this view, eating is certainly represented as ungrateful; it devours that to which it owes itself. Thinking, upon this view of its action, is equally ungrateful.” And again, “In relation to the first abstract universality of thought there is a correct and well-grounded sense in which we may say, that we may thank experience for the development of philosophy. For, firstly, the empirical sciences do not stop short at the perception of the individual features of a phenomenon. By the aid of thought, they come forward to meet philosophy with materials for it, in the shape of general uniformities, i.e. laws and classifications of the phenomena. When this is done, the particular facts which they contain are ready to be received into philosophy. This, secondly, implies a certain compulsion on thought itself to proceed to these concrete specific truths. The reception into philosophy of these scientific materials, now that thought has removed its immediacy, and made it cease to be mere data, forms at the same time a development of thought out of itself. Philosophy then owes its development to the empirical sciences. In return it gives their contents what is so vital to them, the freedom of thought – gives them, in short, an à priori character. These contents are now warranted necessary, and no longer depend on the evidence of facts merely, that they were so found and so experienced. The fact of experience thus becomes an illustration and image of the original and completely self-supporting activity of thought.”

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