rights, Hegel restores the Fichtean subordination of nature to spirit,
without, however, sharing Fichte's contempt for nature.
Nature is neither
co-ordinate with spirit nor a mere instrument for spirit, but a transition
stage in the development of the absolute, viz., the Idea in its other-being
_(Anderssein)_. It is spirit itself that becomes nature in order to become
actual, conscious spirit; before the absolute became nature it was already
spirit, not, indeed, "for itself" _(für sich)_, yet "in itself" _(an
sich)_, it was Idea or reason. The ideal is not merely the morning which
follows the night of reality, but also the evening which precedes it.
The absolute (the concept) develops from in-itself _(Ansich)_ through
out-of-self _(Aussersich)_ or other-being to for-itself _(Fürsich)_; it
exists first as reason (system of logical concepts), then as nature,
finally as living spirit. Thus Hegel's philosophy of identity is
distinguished from Schelling's by two factors: it subordinates nature to
spirit, and conceives the absolute of the beginning not as the indifference
of the real and ideal, but as ideal, as a realm of eternal thoughts.
The assertion that Hegel represents a synthesis of Fichte and Schelling is
therefore justified. This is true, further, for the character of Hegel's
thought as a whole, in so far as it follows a middle course between the
world-estranged, rigid abstractness of Fichte's thinking and Schelling's
artistico-fanciful intuition, sharing with the former its logical
stringency as well as its dominant interest in the philosophy of spirit,
and with the latter its wide outlook and its sense for the worth and the
richness of that which is individual.
We have characterized Hegel's system, thirdly, as a philosophy of
development. The point of distinction here is that Hegel carries out with
logical consecutiveness and up to the point of obstinacy the principle
of development which Fichte had discovered, and which Schelling also
had occasionally employed,--the threefold rhythm _thesis, antithesis,
synthesis_. Here we come to Hegel's _dialectic method_.
He reached this as
the true method of speculation through a comparison of the two forms of
philosophy which he found dominant at the beginning of his career--the
Illumination culminating in Kant, on the one hand, and, on the other, the
doctrine of identity defended by Schelling and his circle--neither of which
entirely satisfied him.
In regard to the main question he feels himself one with Schelling:
philosophy is to be metaphysics, the science of the absolute and its
immanence in the world, the doctrine of the identity of opposites, of the,
_per se_ of things, not merely of their phenomenon. But the form which
Schelling had given it seems to him unscientific, unsystematic, for
Schelling had based philosophical knowledge on the intuition of genius--and
science from intuition is impossible. The philosophy of the Illumination
impresses him, on the other hand, by the formal strictness of its inquiry;
he agrees with it that philosophy must be science from concepts. Only not
from abstract concepts. Kant and the Illumination stand on the platform
of reflection, for which the antithesis of thought and being, finite and
infinite remains insoluble, and, consequently, the absolute transcendent,
and the true essence of things unknowable. Hegel wishes to combine the
advantages of both sides, the depth of content of the one, and the
scientific form of the other.
The intuition with which Schelling works is immediate cognition, directed
to the concrete and particular. The concept of the philosophy of reflection
is mediate cognition, moving in the sphere of the abstract and universal.
Is it not feasible to do away with the (unscientific) immediateness of the
one, and the (non-intuitive, content-lacking) abstractness of the other,
to combine the concrete with the mediate or conceptual, and in this way
to realize the Kantian ideal of an intuitive understanding? _A concrete
concept_ would be one which sought the universal not without the
particular, but in it; which should not find the infinite beyond the
finite, nor the absolute at an unattainable distance above the world, nor
the essence hidden behind the phenomenon, but manifesting itself therein.
If the philosophy of reflection, in the abstract lifelessness of its
concepts, looked on opposites as incapable of sublation, and Schelling
regarded them as immediately identical, if the former denied the identity
of opposites, and the latter maintained it primordially given (in the
absolute indifference which is to be grasped by intuition), the concrete
concept secures the identity of _opposites through self-mediation_, their
passing over into it; it teaches us to know the identity as the result of a
process. First immediate unity, then divergence of opposites, and, finally,
reconciliation of opposites--this is the universal law of all development.
The conflict between the philosophy of reflection and the philosophy of
intuition, which Hegel endeavors to terminate by a speculation at once
conceptual and concrete, concerns (1) the organ of thought, (2) the object
of thought, (3) the nature and logical dignity of the contradiction.
The organ of the true philosophy is neither the abstract reflective
understanding, which finds itself shut up within the limits of the
phenomenal, nor mystical intuition, which expects by a quick leap to gain
the summit of knowledge concerning the absolute, but reason as the faculty
of concrete concepts. That concept is concrete which does not assume an
attitude of cold repulsion toward its contrary, but seeks self-mediation
with the latter, and moves from thesis through antithesis, and with it, to
synthesis. Reason neither fixes the opposites nor denies them, but has them
become identical. The unity of opposites is neither impossible nor present
from the first, but the result of a development.
The object of philosophy is not the phenomenal world or the relative, but
the absolute, and this not as passive substance, but as living subject,
which divides into distinctions, and returns from them to identity, which
develops through the opposites. The absolute is a process, and all that
is real the manifestation of this process. If science is to correspond
to reality, it also must be a process. Philosophy is thought-movement
(dialectic); it is a system of concepts, each of which passes over into
its successor, puts its successor forth from itself, just as it has been
generated by its predecessor.
All reality is development, and the motive force in this development (of
the world as well as of science) is opposition, _contradiction_. Without
this there would be no movement and no life. Thus all reality is full of
contradiction, and yet rational. The contradiction is not that which is
entirely alogical, but it is a spur to further thinking.
It must not
be annulled, but "sublated" _(aufgehoben), _i.e._, at once negated and
conserved. This is effected by thinking the contradictory concepts together
in a third higher, more comprehensive, and richer concept, whose moments
they then form. As sublated moments they contradict each other no longer;
the opposition or contradiction is overcome. But the synthesis is still
not a final one; the play begins anew; again an opposition makes its
appearance, which in turn seeks to be overcome, etc.
Each separate concept
is one-sided, defective, represents only a part of the truth, needs to be
supplemented by its contrary, and, by its union with this, its complement,
yields a higher concept, which comes nearer to the whole truth, but still
does not quite reach it. Even the last and richest concept--the absolute
Idea--is by itself alone not the full truth; the result implies the whole
development through which it has been attained. It is only at the end
of such a dialectic of concepts that philosophy reaches complete
correspondence with the living reality, which it has to comprehend; and the
speculative progress of thought is no capricious sporting with concepts
on the part of the thinking subject, but the adequate expression of
the movement of the matter itself. Since the world and its ground is
development, it can only be known through a development of concepts. The
law which this follows, in little as in great, is the advance from position
to opposition, and thence to combination. The most comprehensive example
of this triad--Idea, Nature, Spirit--gives the division of the system; the
second--Subjective, Objective, Absolute Spirit--
determines the articulation
of the third part.
%2. The System.%
Hegel began with a _Phenomenology_ by way of introduction, in which (not
to start, like the school of Schelling, with absolute knowledge "as though
shot from a pistol") he describes the genesis of philosophical cognition
with an attractive mingling of psychological and philosophico-historical
points of view. He makes spirit--the universal world-spirit as well as
the individual consciousness, which repeats in brief the stages in the
development of humanity--pass through six stadia, of which the first three
(consciousness, self-consciousness, reason) correspond to the progress
of the intermediate part of the Doctrine of Subjective Spirit, which is
entitled _Phänomenologie_, and the others (ethical spirit, religion, and
absolute knowledge) give an abbreviated presentation of that which the
Doctrine of Objective and Absolute Spirit develops in richer articulation.
%(a) Logic% considers the Idea in the abstract element of thought, only as
it is thought, and not yet as it is intuited, nor as it thinks itself; its
content is the truth as it is without a veil in and for itself, or God in
his eternal essence before the creation of the world.
Unlike common logic,
which is merely formal, separating form and content, speculative logic,
which is at the same time ontology or metaphysics, treats the categories as
real relations, the forms of thought as forms of reality: as thought and
thing are the same, so logic is the theory of thought and of being in one.
Its three principal divisions are entitled _Being, Essence, the Concept_.
The first of these discusses quality, quantity, and measure or qualitative
quantum. The second considers essence as such, appearance, and (essence
appearing or) actuality, and this last, in turn, in the moments,
substantiality, causality, and reciprocity. The third part is divided into
the sections, subjectivity (concept, judgment, syllogism), objectivity
(mechanism, chemism, teleology), and the Idea (life, cognition, the
absolute Idea).
As a specimen of the way in which Hegel makes the concept pass over into
its opposite and unite with this in a synthesis, it will be sufficient to
cite the famous beginning of the _Logic_. How must the absolute first be
thought, how first defined? Evidently as that which is absolutely without
presupposition. The most general concept which remains after abstracting
from every determinate content of thought, and from which no further
abstraction is possible, the most indeterminate and immediate concept, is
pure _being_. As without quality and content it is equivalent to _nothing_.
In thinking pure being we have rather cogitated nothing; but this in turn
cannot be retained as final, but passes back into being, for in being
thought it exists as a something thought. Pure being and pure nothing are
the same, although we mean different things by them; both are absolute
indeterminateness. The transition from being to nothing and from nothing to
being is _becoming_. Becoming is the unity, and hence the truth of both.
When the boy is "becoming" a youth he is, and at the same time is not, a
youth. Being and not-being are so mediated and sublated in becoming that
they are no longer contradictory. In a similar way it is further shown
that quality and quantity are reciprocally dependent and united in measure
(which may be popularly illustrated thus: progressively diminishing heat
becomes cold, distances cannot be measured in bushels); that essence and
phenomenon are mutually inseparable, inasmuch as the latter is always the
appearance of an essence, and the former is essence only as it manifests
itself in the phenomenon, etc.
The significance of the Hegelian logic depends less on its ingenious and
valuable explanations of particulars than on the fundamental idea, that the
categories do not form an unordered heap, but a great organically connected
whole, in which each member occupies its determinate position, and is
related to every other by gradations of kinship and subordination. This
purpose to construct a _globus_ of the pure concepts was itself a
mighty feat, which is assured of the continued admiration of posterity
notwithstanding the failure in execution. He who shall one day take it up
again will draw many a lesson from Hegel's unsuccessful attempt. Before
all, the connections between the concepts are too manifold and complex
for the monotonous transitions of this dialectic method (which Chalybaeus
wittily called articular disease) to be capable of doing them justice.
Again, the productive force of thought must not be neglected, and to it,
rather than to the mobility of the categories themselves, the matter of the
transition from one to the other must be transferred.
%(b) The Philosophy of Nature% shows the Idea in its other-being. Out of
the realm of logical shades, wherein the souls of all reality dwell,
we move into the sphere of external, sensuous existence, in which the
concepts take on material form. Why does the Idea externalize itself? In
order to become actual. But the actuality of nature is imperfect, unsuited
to the Idea, and only the precondition of a better actuality, the actuality
of spirit, which has been the aim from the beginning: reason becomes
nature in order to become spirit; the Idea goes forth from itself in
order--enriched--to return to itself again. Only the man who once has been
in a foreign land knows his home aright.
The relation of natural objects to one another and their action upon one
another is an external one: they are governed by mechanical necessity,
and the contingency of influences from without arrests and disturbs their
development, so that while reason is everywhere discernible in nature,
it is not reason alone; and much that is illogical, contrary to purpose,
lawless, painful, and unhealthy, points to the fact that the essence of
nature consists in externality. This inadequacy in the realization of the
Idea, however, is gradually removed by development, until, in "life," the
way is prepared for the birth of spirit.
As Hegel in his philosophy of nature--which falls into three parts,
mechanics, physics, and organics--follows Schelling pretty closely, and,
moreover, does not show his power, it does not seem necessary to dwell
longer upon it. In the next section, also, in view of the fact that its
models, the constructive psychologies of Fichte and Schelling, have already
been discussed in detail, a statement of the divisions and connections must
suffice.
%(c) The Doctrine of Subjective Spirit% makes freedom (being with or in
self) the essence and destination of spirit, and shows how spirit realizes
this predisposition in increasing independence of nature. The subject of
anthropology is spirit as the (natural, sensitive, and actual) "soul" of
a body; here are discussed the distinctions of race, nation, sex, age,
sleeping and waking, disposition and temperament, together with talents and
mental diseases, in short, whatever belongs to spirit in its union with a
body. Phenomenology is the science of the "ego," i.e., of spirit, in so
far as it opposes itself to nature as the non-ego, and passes through the
stages of (mere) consciousness, self-consciousness, and (the synthesis of
the two) reason. Psychology (better pneumatology) considers "spirit" in its
reconciliation with objectivity under the following divisions: Theoretical
Intelligence as intuition (sensation, attention, intuition), as
representation (passive memory, phantasy, memory), and (as conceiving,
judging, reasoning) thought; Practical Intelligence as feeling, impulse
(passion and caprice), and happiness; finally, the unity of the knowing and
willing spirit, free spirit or rational will, which in turn realizes itself
in right, ethics, and history.
%(d) The Doctrine of Objective Spirit%, comprehending ethics, the
philosophy of right, of the state, and of history, is Hegel's most
brilliant achievement. It divides as follows: (1) Right (property,
contract, punishment); (2) Morality (purpose, intention and welfare, good
and evil); (3) Social Morality: (a) the family; (b) civil society; (c) the
state (internal and external polity, and the history of the world). In
right the will or freedom attains to outer actuality, in morality it
attains to inner actuality, in social morality to objective and subjective
actuality at once, hence to complete actuality.
Right, as it were a second, higher nature, because a necessity posited and
acknowledged by spirit, is originally a sum of prohibitions; wherever it
seems to command the negative has only received a positive expression.
Private right contains two things--the warrant to be a person, and the
injunction to respect other persons as such. Property is the external
sphere which the will gives to itself; without property no personality.
Through punishment (retaliation) right is restored against un-right
(_Unrecht_), and the latter shown to be a nullity. The criminal is treated
according to the same maxim as that of his action--that coercion is
allowable.
In the stadium of morality the good exists in the form of a requirement
which can never be perfectly fulfilled, as a mere imperative; there remains
an irrepressible opposition between the moral law and the individual will,
between intention and execution. Here the judge of good and evil is the
conscience, which is not secure against error. That which is objectively
evil may seem good and a duty to subjective conviction.
(According to
Fichte this was impossible).
On account of the conflict between duty and will, which is at this stage
irrepressible, Hegel is unable to consider morality, the sphere of the
subjective disposition, supreme. He thinks he knows a higher sphere,
wherein legality and morality become one: "social morality"
(_Sittlichkeit_). This sphere takes its name from _Sitte_, that custom
ruling in the community which is felt by the individual not as a command
from without, but as his own nature. Here the good appears as the spirit
of the family and of the people, pervading individuals as its substance.
Marriage is neither a merely legal nor a merely sentimental relation, but
an "ethical" (_sittliches_) institution. While love rules in the family, in
civil society each aims at the satisfaction of his private wants, and yet,
in working for himself, subserves the good of the whole.
Class distinctions
are based on the division of labor demanded by the variant needs of men
(the agricultural, industrial, and thinking classes).
Class and party honor
is, in Hegel's view, among the most essential supports of general morality.
Strange to say, he brings the administration of justice and the police into
the same sphere.
The state, the unity of the family and civil society, is the completed
actualization of freedom. Its organs are the political powers (which are
to be divided, but not to be made independent): the legislative power
determines the universal, the executive subsumes the particular thereunder,
the power of the prince combines both into personal unity. In the will of
the prince the state becomes subject. The perfect form of the state is
constitutional monarchy, its establishment the goal of history, which
Hegel, like Kant, considers chiefly from the political standpoint.
History is the development of the rational state; the world-spirit the
guiding force in this development; its instruments the spirits of the
nations and great men. A particular people is the expression of but one
determinate moment of the universal spirit; and when it has fulfilled
its commission it loses its legal warrant, and yields up its dominion to
another, now the only authorized one: the history of the world is the
judgment of the world, which is held over the nations.
The world-historical
characters, also, are only the instruments of a higher power, the purposes
of which they execute while imagining that they are acting in their own
interests--their own deed is hidden from them, and is neither their purpose
nor their object. This should be called the cunning of reason, that it
makes the passions work in its service.
History is progress in the consciousness of freedom. At first one only
knows himself free, then several, finally all. This gives three chief
periods, or rather four world-kingdoms,--Oriental despotism, the Greek
(democratic) and the Roman (aristocratic) republic, and the Germanic
monarchy,--in which humanity passes through its several ages. Like the sun,
history moves from east to west. China and India have not advanced beyond
the preliminary stages of the state; the Chinese kingdom is a family state,
India a society of classes stiffened into castes. The Persian despotism is
the first true state, and this in the form of a conquering military state.
In the youth and manhood of humanity the sovereignty of the people replaces
the sovereignty of one; but not all have yet the consciousness of freedom,
the slaves have no share in the government. The principle of the Greek
world, with its fresh life and delight in beauty, is individuality; hence
the plurality of small states, in which Sparta is an anticipation of
the Roman spirit. The Roman Republic is internally characterized by the
constitutional struggle between the patricians and the plebeians, and
externally by the policy of world conquest. Out of the repellent relations
between the universal and the individual, which oppose one another as
the abstract state and abstract personality, the unhappy imperial period
develops. In the Roman Empire and Judaism the conditions were given for the
appearance of Christianity. This brings with it the idea of humanity: every
man is free as man, as a rational being. In the beginning this emancipation
was religious; through the Germans it became political as well. The
remaining divisions cannot here be detailed. Their captions run: The
Elements of the Germanic Spirit (the Migrations; Mohammedanism; the
Frankish Empire of Charlemagne); the Middle Ages (the Feudal System and the
Hierarchy; the Crusades; the Transition from Feudal Rule to Monarchy,
or the Cities); Modern Times (the Reformation; its Effect on Political
Development; Illumination and Revolution).
The philosophy of history[1] is Hegel's most brilliant and most lasting
achievement. His view of the state as the absolute end, the complete
realization of the good, is dominated, no doubt, by the antique ideal,
which cannot take root again in the humanity of modern times. But his
splendid endeavor to "comprehend" history, to bring to light the laws of
historical development and the interaction between the different spheres of
national life, will remain an example for all time. The leading ideas of
his philosophy of history have so rapidly found their way into the general