hegel_dialectic_ch02_part5.mp3

55. “Thought out of its own abstract nature gives birth to the reality of things” says Professor Seth in his criticism, and, if this is Hegel’s meaning, we must certainly admit that he has gone too far. Thought is, in its essential nature, mediate. As Trendelenburg remarks the immediacy of certain ideas in the dialectic is only comparative and equivalent to self-mediation. Real immediacy belongs to nothing but the data of intuition. And therefore thought cannot exist unless it has something immediately given which it may mediate. It is, of course, perfectly true that the immediate cannot remain unmediated. The only merely immediate thing is the pure sensation, and the pure sensation taken by itself cannot become part of experience, and therefore, since it has certainly no existence out of experience, does not exist at all. But although immediacy, as such, is a mere abstraction, so is mediation, and, therefore, thought. Green’s extraordinary suggestion that “the notion that an event in the way of sensation is something over and above its conditions may be a mistake of ours,” and again that “for the only kind of consciousness for which there is reality, the conceived conditions are the reality,” ignores the fact that the ideal of knowledge would in this case be a mass of conditions which conditioned nothing, and of relations with nothing to relate. Such an elevation of an abstraction into an independent reality is not excelled in audacity by any of the parallel fallacies of materialism, against which Green was never weary of protesting. But if thought is a mere element in the whole of reality, having no more independent existence than mere sense has, it is certainly impossible that thought should produce reality - that the substantial and individual should depend on an abstraction formed from itself. And this is what Hegel believed, if we are to accept Professor Seth’s statement.

56. This theory is rendered the more remarkable by the admission that, within the Logic, the deduction has that analytic aspect which is required to make it valid. “The forward movement is in reality a movement backward: it is a retracing of our steps to the world as we know it in the fulness of its real determinations.” Can we believe that Hegel, after using one method of dialectic process to display the nature of pure thought, employs the same dialectic in an absolutely different sense when he wishes to pass from logic to nature? Logic, Nature, and Spirit are declared to be thesis, antithesis, and synthesis; so are Being, Not-Being, and Becoming. In the case of the latter it is admitted that the true reality lies only in the synthesis, and that no attempt is made to construct it out of the thesis. What reason is there for supposing such an attempt in the case of the more comprehensive deduction which we are now discussing? Professor Seth attempts to answer the question by drawing a distinction between epistemology and ontology in this respect. As to the former, he says, it may be true that Hegel held that we only arrive at a knowledge of pure thought by abstraction from experience, while yet it may be true that he considered that the other element in experience was originally produced by, and is in the objective world dependent on, pure thought. It is perhaps worth remarking that this derives no countenance from Sections 238 and 239 of the Encyclopaedia quoted above, where the union of analysis and synthesis is spoken of as “the philosophic method” and as belonging to “philosophic thought” without any suggestion that it only applies to one department of philosophy. But the distinction is one which would only be tenable if the elements of which experience is composed were selfsubsistent entities, capable of existing apart as well as together. Thus it might be said that, although in a certain experiment oxygen and hydrogen were produced out of water, yet from a scientific point of view we should rather consider them as the elements of which water was made up, they, and not the water, being the ultimate reality. But this analogy will not hold here. For the element of immediacy - the datum given through sense - is as necessary and essential to the existence of the idea, as the sides of a triangle are to its angles. The existence of the immediate element is essential to anything really concrete, and the idea is only an element in, and an abstraction from, the concrete. Now the existence of an abstraction apart from the concrete, or the dependence of the concrete on an abstraction from itself, is a contradiction. And that the idea is a mere abstraction from experience is not merely an accident of a particular way of discovering it, but its very essence. Its existence lies solely in mediation, and it cannot therefore, ever be self-sufficient. It is rather an aspect which we can perceive in experience, than an element which can be separated from it, even ideally, without leading us into error. Its independent existence would thus be a very glaring contradiction. And for Hegel, as for other people, contradictions could not really exist. Each stage in the Logic is a contradiction, it is true, but then those stages have no independent existence. The self-consistent reality is always behind it. “The consummation of the infinite aim . . . consists merely in removing the illusion which makes it seem as yet unaccomplished.”

57. And Hegel himself distinctly denies the asserted purely synthetical character of the transition. “It is clear,” he says, “that the emergence of Spirit from Nature ought not to be expressed as if nature was the Absolute Immediate, the First, that which originally statutes, and Spirit on the other hand was only statuted (gesetzt) by it; rather is Nature statuted by Spirit, and the latter is the absolute First. Spirit, in and for itself, is not the simple result of Nature, but in truth its own result; it evolves itself out of the assumptions which it itself makes, out of the logical idea and external nature, and is the truth of the former as well as of the latter - that is to say the true form of the Spirit which is merely in itself, and of the Spirit which is merely outside itself. The appearance of the mediation of Spirit by another is transcended by Spirit itself, since this, so to say, has the consummate ingratitude to transcend that through which it seeks to be mediated, to mediatise it, to reduce it to something which only exists through spirit, and in this way to make itself completely independent.” Spirit, the final result of the process, is thus declared to be also its logical ground, and the process of the Idea to Nature and from Nature to Spirit has therefore an analytic, as well as a synthetic aspect, since the end of the process is only to come to explicit knowledge of its ground, which, as its ground, must have been present to it all along, though not yet in full and explicit consciousness. It may be remarked that Hegel uses exactly the same metaphor of ingratitude to describe the relation of Spirit to the apparent commencement of the process, as he used long before to express the connection between pure thought and the empirical details, from the consideration of which pure thought started. This may serve as a slight additional reason for our belief in the theory that the force of the transition to Spirit lies in the implicit presence of Spirit all along, and not in a merely synthetic advance from pure thought through Nature. For in the logic, as Professor Seth admits, the logical prius of the advance is to be found at the end, and not at the beginning of the process. We may also compare Section 239 of the Encyclopaedia, lecture note - "the truth is that Nature is due to the statuting of Spirit, and it is Spirit itself which gives itself a presupposition in Nature.” This view is incompatible with any attempt to represent Nature as statuted by Logic alone.

58. To deny the purely synthetic deduction of Nature from Logic, which we have just been considering, is not equivalent to denying that there is any deduction at all intended, which would be obviously incorrect. It is implied that these are the only two alternatives, when Professor Seth tells us that the “soberminded Hegelian,” who denies the purely synthetic deduction, “will lay as little stress as possible upon the so-called deduction. Further reflection has convinced me, however,” he continues, “that Hegel’s contention here is of more fundamental importance to his system than such a representation allows. Perhaps it may even be said that, when we surrender this deduction, though we may retain much that is valuable in Hegel’s thought, we surrender the system as a whole.” No doubt it is essential to the theory that there shall be a deduction, so that the whole system, from the category of Being to Absolute Spirit, shall be bound closely together. But this is not incompatible with the soberminded view of the dialectic, for, as we have seen, the deduction may be one which is analytic as well as synthetic, and may derive its cogency from the implicit presence, at its starting point, of its result.

59. The treatment of the problem of contingency in the dialectic presents a curious alternation between two incompatible points of view, by the first of which contingency is treated as a category, while by the second it is attributed to the incapacity of Nature to realise the Idea. It is not necessary to consider here the criticisms which might be made on either of these explanations. It is sufficient to point out that, while the former does not imply the theory which Professor Seth adopts as to the general purpose of the Logic, the latter is quite incompatible with it. As to the first, it is to be noticed that the attempt to convert contingency into a logical category is not necessarily identical with an attempt to ignore reality. “The contingent,” says Hegel, “roughly speaking, is what has the ground of its being, not in itself, but in somewhat else. . . . The contingent is only one side of the actual, the side namely of reflection into somewhat else.” It is thus by no means the same thing as the real, which includes, even if it does not consist exclusively of, the self-subsistent entity or entities which have their ground in themselves, or, if that expression be objected to, are primary and without any ground at all. The elimination of the contingent is thus quite compatible with the existence of factual reality. This is confirmed by Hegel’s remark in the same section that “to overcome this contingency is, roughly speaking, the problem of science.” For the object of ordinary science is certainly not to eliminate factual reality. The same expression suggests that the elimination of contingency does not, for Hegel, involve the elimination of immediacy. For the object of ordinary science is not to eliminate the data of sense, but to arrange and classify them. And this is confirmed by the definition quoted above. Contingency consists in explanation from the outside. That which can be explained entirely from itself would not, it appears, be contingent to Hegel, even if part of the explanation was given in the form of a mere datum. No doubt at present all immediacy, involving as it does presentation in sense, outer or inner, requires explanation from outside, and is therefore contingent. But, as was pointed out above in a different connection, there is nothing in the nature of immediacy which prevents us from supposing a state of knowledge in which the immediate data, being traced back to some selfcentred reality, should require no explanation from without, and consequently should lose their contingency, while they preserved their immediacy. The introduction, therefore, of contingency as a category which, like other categories, is transcended, does not fairly lead to the conclusion that Hegel believed in the possibility of mediating thought ever becoming self- sufficient. On the other hand, the theory that contingency is caused by the inability of Nature to realise the idea, is clearly incompatible with an attempt to produce Nature out of pure thought. For, if the world of Nature, as such an attempt would require, is deduced by pure synthesis from the world of reason, and by the free passage of the latter, how can the impotence arise? The only possible explanation of such impotence must be in some independent element, which the idea cannot perfectly subdue and this is inconsistent with the theory of pure synthesis. It may be doubted whether this view is compatible with the general theory of the dialectic at all. But it is certainly, as Professor Seth admits, quite incompatible with “an absolute philosophy” in his use of the phrase. If this was Hegel’s view of contingency, it must be taken as a proof of the presence of an analytic element in the process. For then the failure of thought to embody itself completely in nature, whether consistent or not, would not be so glaringly inconsistent as in the other case. It might then possibly be a casual error. But it is difficult to suppose that Hegel could have slipped by mistake into the assertion that thought, while producing the whole universe, was met in it by an alien element.

60. We must now proceed to the second charge made against the transition from the Logic - that it involves an argument from essence to existence. Such an argument would doubtless be completely fallacious. Any proposition about existence must either be directly based on immediate experience of reality, or must be connected, by a chain of inferences, with a proposition that is so based. The difference between the real and the ideal worlds is one which mere thought can never bridge over, because, for mere thought, it does not exist. As Kant says, the difference between twenty real thalers and twenty thalers which are only imagined to be real, does not appear in the idea of them, which is the same whether they exist or not. The difference lies in the reference to reality, which makes no part of the idea. If, therefore, we confined ourselves to thought, we should be unable to discover whether our thalers were in truth real, or whether we had only imagined their reality. And even if, starting from the nature of thought taken in abstraction from sense, we could evolve the idea of the entire universe (and we have seen that without sense we could perceive nothing of the nature of thought), it would remain purely ideal, and never be able to explain the fact that the world actually existed. For the difference between the real world, and a world, exactly like it, but only imagined to exist, is a difference which pure thought could not perceive, and therefore could not remove. It is impossible to argue that contradictions would drive it on, for the contradictions of thought, as we have seen, arise from its being abstract, and can do no more than restore the concrete whole from which a start was made. If reality was not given as a characteristic of that concrete whole, no abstraction from it will afford a basis from which the dialectic process can attain to reality.

61. Before, however, we decide that Hegel has been guilty of so great a confusion, we should require convincing evidence that his language must be interpreted to mean that existence in reality can be deduced from the essence of thought. And the evidence offered seems by no means sufficient. In discussing the first charge made by Professor Seth, I have given reasons for supposing that the analytic aspect of the method, which Professor Seth admits to be present within the Logic, is also to be found in the transition from Logic to Nature and Spirit. Now we have seen above that the absence of such an analytic element would not imply of necessity that the argument is from essence to existence. But, on the other hand, the presence of that element would render it certain that no attempt was made to proceed to existence from essence. For the presence of the analytic aspect in the transition means that we are working towards the development, in explicit consciousness, of the full value of the whole which was previously before us in implicit consciousness, and the existence of this whole is the motive force of the transition. If, therefore, the result reached by the dialectic has real existence, so also the datum, of which the dialectic process is an analysis, must have real existence. The argument is thus from existence to existence. That a movement is in any way analytic implies that its result is given, at any rate implicitly, in its data. But an argument from essence to existence would most emphatically go beyond its data, producing something fresh. If, therefore, we have reason to reject the first charge of Professor Seth against the validity of the transition from the Logic to the rest of the system, the second charge falls to the ground with it.

62. In defence of his view Professor Seth, pointing out that Hegel calls his philosophy absolute, says that “it is the characteristic of an absolute philosophy that everything must be deduced or constructed as a necessity of thought.” No quotations, however, are given from Hegel in support of this interpretation. And the one definition which Hegel himself gives of the word in the Encyclopaedia turns on quite a different point. “According to Kant, the things that we know about are to us appearances only, and we can never know their essential nature, which belongs to another world, which we cannot approach. . . . The true statement of the case is rather as follows. The things of which we have direct consciousness are mere phenomena, not for us only, but in their own nature; and the true and proper case of these things, finite as they are, is to have their existence founded not in themselves but in the universal divine Idea. This view of things, it is true, is as idealist as Kant’s, but in contradistinction to the subjective idealism of the Critical Philosophy should be termed absolute idealism.” The meaning of the epithet Absolute is here placed exclusively in the rejection of the Kantian theory that knowledge is only of phenomena. But the assertion that reality may in itself become the object of knowledge is not equivalent to the assertion that conclusions regarding reality can be reached by merely considering the nature of thought. If Absolute had this additional and remarkable meaning Hegel would surely have mentioned it explicitly.

Disclaimer: This article was obtained from Internet and intended for private and personal use only to study Hegel's philosophy. The original auhers and publishers own its copyright, and if this post invokes any copyright infringement, I will take the article off Inernet immediately.