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Hegel's system
'In everything that is supposed to be scientific, reason must be awake and reflection applied. To him who looks at the world rationally the world looks rationally back; the two exist in a reciprocal relationship' . These comments, made in the course of his discussion of the philosophy of history, may stand as an epigraph for Hegel's philosophy as a whole, in telling us much about the aspirations of that philosophy, and how he hoped those aspirations would be achieved.
Hegel's aim, as this comment makes clear, is to help us see that the world is rational, by getting us to look at it in the right way; for, Hegel holds, the world is rational, and the goal of human enquiry is to 'bring this rationality to consciousness', that is, to become aware of this rationality, and hence achieve a fully adequate comprehension of reality. ( where Hegel speaks of philosophy as 'opening up the fast-locked nature of substance, and raising this to self- consciousness . . . by bringing consciousness out of its chaos back to an order based on thought [and] the simplicity of the Notion'. Cf. also PR: Preface, p. 12, 'nature is rational within itself, and . . . it is this actual reason present within it which knowledge must investigate and grasp conceptually - not the shapes and contingencies which are visible on the surface, but nature's eternal harmony, conceived, however, as the law of essence immanent within it'.) In claiming that the world is rational in this respect, Hegel means many things, but mainly he means that it is such that we can find deep intellectual and practical satisfaction in it: there is nothing in reality as such that is aporetic to reason, which is truly incomprehensible, contradictory or inexplicable, and there is nothing in reality which makes it inherently at odds with our purposes and interests. As the world itself is rational in this way, once we can see that this is so, the world will thereby have shown itself to us in the right way, and we will have achieved absolute knowledge, which represents the highest form of satisfaction; until that point is reached, Hegel calls our knowledge 'finite' or 'conditioned', in so far as this rational insight has not yet been attained.
Now, as Hegel also makes clear in this comment, whether we attain this state of absolute knowledge does not just depend on the world and the fact that it is rational: it also depends on us, on how we look at the world. If we are unable to view the world correctly, therefore, it will not appear satisfactory to reason: that is, the world will appear to contain elements that are incomprehensible, contradictory, and alien, in a way that may lead us into despair. However, Hegel's project is not the purely conservative or quietistic one, of reconciling us to the world no matter what difficulties we see in it; rather, Hegel aims to give us a way of resolving those difficulties by finding a new way of looking at things, to show us the world as it intrinsically is when these difficulties are removed . Thus, Hegel believes that the greatest contribution philosophy can make is to help us overcome our despair, by providing us with fresh ways of thinking about reality, thereby bringing us back to our sense that the world is a rational place, one in which we can truly feel 'at home'; for, as he puts it in the Philosophy of Right, '"I" is at home in the world when it knows it, and even more so when it has comprehended it' The aim of knowledge is to divest the objective world that stands opposed to us of its strangeness, and, as the phrase is, to find ourselves at home in it: which means no more than to trace the objective world back to the notion - to our innermost self.') In order to achieve this goal, as Hegel says, 'reason must be awake and reflection applied': that is, philosophy must take a reflective stance, by identifying and guarding against those forms of thought that lead us to adopt an intellectual or practical conception of the world that prevents it appearing rational to us in the way it should, when we are looking at it properly. Philosophy must therefore set out to correct those outlooks which create the puzzles that stop us from seeing reason in the world, by showing how these outlooks arise as a result of some sort of distortion which can be overcome, thereby enabling the puzzles to be resolved and the world to look back to us in a rational way once again. If philosophy does not fulfil this role, then we may become convinced either that the world is not rational as such, or that even if it is, it can never look that way to us, and so can never be a 'home' to creatures like ourselves. Hegel sees both these options as (literally) counsels of despair: but both will remain options until philosophy has shown that we can achieve a perspective from which the world is made fully satisfactory to reason. Only then, Hegel argues, will we have overcome our estrangement from the world and thus have achieved freedom:
The ignorant man is not free, because what confronts him is an alien world, something outside him and in the of?ng, on which he depends, without his having made this foreign world for himself and therefore without being at home in it by himself as in something his own. The impulse of curiosity, the pressure for knowledge, from the lowest level up to the highest rung of philosophical insight arises only from the struggle to cancel this situation of unfreedom and to make the world one's own in one's ideas and thought.
We have seen, therefore, that Hegel takes it that we are responsible for creating the kind of intellectual and social environments that lead us to find the world intellectually and socially alien, as the world itself is and should be a 'home' to us. But given this, how does Hegel think these alienating conceptions come about? Hegel claims that such mistaken conceptions arise because we are inclined to think in a 'one- sided' or oppositional way: we believe that something is either finite or infinite, one or many, free or necessitated, human or divine, autonomous or part of a community, and so on. The difficulty is, Hegel argues, that if we take things in this way, then reason will find it hard to make sense of things, as it will then look at reality in a way that abstracts from the complex interrelation of these 'moments', when in fact to see itself in the world, reason must grasp that there is no genuine dichotomy here. Thus, to take one example, by assuming that to act freely is to act in a way that is not constrained or fixed in any way, we are faced with the apparent absurdity of taking only arbitrary choices as autonomous actions, as it is only then that we could be said to be acting without anything specifically determining our behaviour; but if we then take autonomous actions to be of this kind, it is then hard to see freedom as being particularly desirable or significant . At this point, we may well feel baulked by a puzzle so deep that we no longer know where to turn to find the satisfaction reason craves: but for Hegel, it is just here that 'reason must be awake and reflection applied'. That is, we must ask whether there is something intrinsically problematic about our starting point, and whether this has created our subsequent difficulties, namely, our assumption that freedom involves lack of constraint; for if the constraining factor is something we can 'internalize', then it appears that constraint and freedom can be made compatible and should not be opposed. Hegel argues that our initial dichotomy must therefore be broken down if the puzzle is to be resolved, '[f]rom which we may learn what a mistake it is to regard freedom and necessity as mutually exclusive' : only then, Hegel suggests, will we come back to seeing the world as rational once again.4
In his desire to find some sense of intellectual and social harmony by overcoming the divisions and dichotomies that seemed to make this impossible, Hegel was clearly responding to the sense of dislocation shared by many of his contemporaries, both within his immediate circle (such as Schelling and Holderlin) and beyond. This dislocation was felt at many levels, as it appeared that the Enlightenment had shaken old certainties but had put nothing substantial in their place. Thus, reason was seen as leading to scepticism, science to mechanistic materialism, social reform to bloody revolution, humanism to empty amoralism and crude hedonism, and individualism to social fragmentation. There was therefore a felt need on all sides to find a way forward, to 'begin again' in a manner that did not lead to these unhappy consequences. But for Hegel, as we shall see, it was crucial that this new direction should not involve the simple repudiation of reason, science, social reform, and so on. Instead, Hegel argues that the conceptual assumptions underlying the way these ideas had been developed required investigation, to show how they could be taken forward in a less limited and one-sided way; only once this had been achieved, he believed, could the ideas of the Enlightenment help us find satisfaction in the world, rather than cutting us off from it, for only then could we find a way of reconciling the demands of reason and religion, freedom and social order, scientific naturalism and human values, and so on. Unlike the irrationalists and conservatives of the counter-Enlightenment, who questioned the critical power of reason, and unlike the Romantics, who turned to art and aesthetic experience as a cure for the ills of modernity, Hegel's position is therefore distinctive in continuing to give philosophy the exalted role of restoring our sense of intellectual and spiritual well-being, albeit a philosophy that thinks in a new, non-dualistic, way. As Hegel puts it in the 'Difference' essay of 1801: 'When the might of union vanishes from the life of men and the antitheses lose their living connection and reciprocity and gain independence, the need of philosophy arises' . It is because of his insistence that we must learn how to break down the opposition between certain fundamental concepts (such as freedom and necessity, one and many, and so on), that Hegel's thought is characterized as dialectical. Hegel himself uses this term quite rarely, and his only prolonged discussion of what he means by it is in Chapter VI of his Encyclopedia Logic, entitled 'Logic Further Defined and Divided'. In this short chapter, Hegel distinguishes three stages in the development of thought, which he identifies as '(a) the Abstract side, or that of understanding; (b) the Dialectical, or that of negative reason; (c) the Speculative, or that of positive reason' . The first stage, of understanding, is characterized as that faculty of thought which treats its concepts as apparently discrete and (in Hegel's terms)
'finite'; it therefore 'sticks to fixed determinations and the distinctness of one determination from another: every such limited abstract it treats as having a substance and being of its own'. Hegel acknowledges that we will always find it tempting to think of things in this way, as we seek to order the world into distinct and self-identical aspects, and up to a point this can bring great intellectual and practical benefits: the mistake the understanding makes, however, is to forget that these aspects are abstractions made against the background of a more complex interdependence. This mistake is brought home to the understanding in the second or dialectical stage of thought, which is 'the inherent self-sublation of these finite determinations and their transition into their opposites' : 'its purpose is to study things in their own being and movement and thus to demonstrate the finitude of the partial categories of understanding' . Hegel argues that it is here that scepticism finds its natural place, for when the understanding is forced to see that its conceptual divisions lead it into incomprehension, it may come to doubt that we can ever arrive at a satisfactory grasp of how things are . However, he insists that the results of the dialectical stage are not merely 'negative' in this way: rather, they lead on to the third and final stage of reason, which 'apprehends the unity of the determinations in their opposition - the affirmation, which is embodied in their dissolution and their transition' . Thus, after we have been forced to rethink our concepts in such a way as to break down the 'abstract "either-or"' of the understanding , we will then arrive at a new conceptual standpoint, from which it can be seen that these concepts can be brought together, thereby overcoming the sceptical aporia of the dialectical stage. According to Hegel, without this conceptual transformation, it will be impossible for us to see the world without apparent incoherence; only once we have identified and surpassed the rigid conceptual dichotomies of the understanding will we be able to conceive of reality in a way that is satisfactory to reason. Thus, as Hegel puts it, '[t]he battle of reason is the struggle to break up the rigidity to which the understanding has reduced everything', while 'the metaphysic of understanding is dogmatic, because it maintains half-truths in their isolation': the 'idealism of speculative philosophy carries out the principle of totality and shows that it can reach beyond the inadequate formularies of abstract thought' .
Hegel's outlook here may therefore be likened to those who claim that when we are faced with apparently intractable intellectual problems, we should not try to answer them 'head on', by taking up one side or the other, but should rather step back and apply ourselves
'reflectively' (as Hegel puts it), and ask how it is the problem has arisen in the first place; once we see that the problem has its source in a set of one-sided assumptions, if we can overcome that one- sidedness, then the problem will simply dissolve and we can escape the 'oscillation' between one unsatisfactory stance and its equally unsatisfactory opposite. , 'The questions which philosophy fails to answer, are answered by seeing that they should not be so posed in the first place.') However, where Hegel differs from many more recent philosophers who otherwise share this 'therapeutic' approach with him is that he does not take this approach in order to champion the superiority of 'ordinary language' or our 'pre-philosophical outlook' against the snares and delusions of philosophy and its 'forgetting' of our common-sense conception of things. Rather, for Hegel, it is the other way round, as the outlook of the understanding forms the natural starting point of our thoughts, so that it is only with the intervention of further philosophical reflection that we can see our way through the problems that this generates. Far from thinking that common-sense or our ordinary pre-philosophical scientific, political, or religious beliefs should just be 'left alone', Hegel claims that they must be reflected on philosophically if we are to make the 'discovery . . . that gives philosophy peace' ; for, Hegel maintains, these beliefs are in fact saturated with philosophical assumptions, and are unstable on their own. Thus, though in a sense Hegel takes some of the central problems of philosophy to be pseudo-problems (in that they are generated by our way of looking at the world, rather than inherent in the world itself, and so should be resolved 'reflectively' rather than via further inquiry), he nonetheless holds that they can only be dealt with by turning to philosophy, and not away from it, as only philosophy and not 'natural consciousness' is capable of the kind of dialectical thinking that is required to overcome the puzzles that 'natural consciousness' itself generates:
What man seeks in this situation, ensnared here as he is in finitude on every side, is the region of a higher, more substantial, truth, in which all oppositions and contradictions in the finite can find their final resolution, and freedom its full satisfaction. This is the region of absolute, not finite, truth. The highest truth, truth as such, is the resolution of the highest opposition and contradiction. In it validity and power are swept away from the opposition between freedom and necessity, between spirit and nature, between knowledge and its object, between law and impulse, from opposition and contradiction as such, whatever forms they may take. Their validity and power as opposition and contradiction is gone. Absolute truth proves that neither freedom by itself, as subjective, sundered from necessity, is absolutely a true thing nor, by parity of reasoning, is truthfulness to be ascribed to necessity isolated and taken by itself. The ordinary consciousness, on the other hand, cannot extricate itself from this opposition and either remains despairingly in contradiction or else casts it aside and helps itself in some other way. But philosophy enters into the heart of the self-contradictory characteristics, knows them in their essential nature, i.e. as in their one-sidedness not absolute but self-dissolving, and it sets them in the harmony and unity which is truth. To grasp this Concept of truth is the task of philosophy.
Thus, Hegel sees that the role of philosophy is to lead ordinary consciousness away from the oppositional thinking of the understanding, in order to overcome the kind of conceptual tensions that make the world appear less than fully intelligible to us; once this is achieved, we will overcome the intellectual and practical difficulties that have arisen because we do not look at the world rationally, at which point the world will look back at us in a rational manner. Now, obviously, showing that reason can enable us to feel 'at home in the world' by freeing us from the apparent opposition between concepts like freedom and necessity, one and many, finite and infinite, and so on is an enormous and ambitious undertaking, which aims at nothing less than the dissolution of all the traditional 'problems of philosophy' and the aporias that these oppositions generate. It is this undertaking which forms the basis of Hegel's Encyclopedia system, beginning with the Logic.5 In the Logic, Hegel sets out to show how the various categories of thought are dialectically interrelated, in such a way that the conceptual oppositions responsible for our perplexities can be resolved, once we rethink these fundamental notions. Hegel suggests that of great importance in this respect is how we conceive of the categories of universal, particular and individual (which he calls the categories of the 'notion' or 'concept'),6 for (he holds) it is only when the opposition between these categories is overcome that the tension in our conceptual scheme can be resolved, to be superseded by a more unified and rational world-picture. Hegel focuses on these categories, and especially on the relation between universal and individual, because he holds that they are central to our way of thinking, and are thus very pervasive. , 'Considered in the abstract, rationality consists in general in the unity and interpenetration of universality and individuality.') At the metaphysical level, we oppose the universality of the ideal to the individuality of the real, and so generate the debate between Platonists on the one hand and nominalists on the other; we oppose the universality of essence to the individuality of existents, and so generate the debate between essentialists and existentialists; we oppose universal properties to individual entities, and so generate the debate between predicate realists and predicate nominalists; we oppose the universality of form to the individuality of matter, and so generate the debate between conceptual realists and conceptual idealists; and we oppose the universality of God to the individuality of man, and so generate the debate between theists and humanists. At the epistemological level, we contrast the universality of thought with the individuality of intuition, and so generate the debate between rationalists and empiricists. And at the moral and political level, we distinguish the community as universal from the citizen as individual, and so generate the debate between communitarianism and liberalism; we distinguish the universal interest from the individual interest, and so generate the debate between the egoist and the altruist; we distinguish the universality of the general good from the particularity of the individual agent, and so generate the debate between the utilitarian and the Kantian; we distinguish the universality of law from the freedom of the individual, and so generate the debate between the defender of the state and the anarchist; and we distinguish the universality of rights and natural law from the particularity of local traditions and customs, and so generate the debate between the cosmopolitan who thinks that all societies should be ruled in the same way, and the communitarian who thinks divergent cultural histories should be respected.7 Hegel therefore claims that crucial issues of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and political and religious thought are all associated with the ways in which the categories of universal, particular, and individual are conceived, such that apparently insuperable philosophical difficulties will be generated unless these categories are brought together or 'mediated' in the right way. Thus, when Hegel talks of the failure of 'the understanding' to overcome the opposition between these categories, he can point to a whole series of divisions in our view of the world, between abstract and concrete, ideal and real, one and many, necessity and freedom, state and citizen, moral law and self-interest, general will and particular will, reason and tradition, God and man. Hegel believed that the division between universal and individual lies behind all these dichotomies; but at the same time, he believed that we do not have to set these categories apart, but can see things as combining individuality with universality, the one aspect depending on the other .8 Because Hegel thought that these are the categories that can be best integrated in this way, in his Logic Hegel works through other sets of categories (such as being and nothingness, quantity and quality, identity and difference, whole and part, one and many, essence and appearance, substance and attribute, freedom and necessity), to show that with these categories certain residual dichotomies remain. It is therefore only once we arrive at the categories of universal, particular, and individual that truly dialectical thinking becomes possible for us; the aim of philosophical reflection is thereby achieved. Having reached the categories of thought in the Logic which Hegel thinks will enable us to 'look at the world rationally', in the next two books of the Encyclopedia Hegel moves on to show that this then enables the world to look rationally back at us, in such a way that reason can find satisfaction in it. In the Philosophy of Nature, Hegel considers the natural world in this regard, trying to show that where we find conceptual difficulties in our understanding of nature (for example, in the notion of 'action at a distance') this can be resolved through a more dialectical approach. As Hegel puts it in his discussion of heat, '[t]he task here is the same as that throughout the whole of the philosophy of nature; it is merely to replace the categories of the understanding by the thought-relationships of the speculative Notion, and to grasp and determine the phenomenon in accordance with the latter'. Likewise, in the Philosophy of Spirit, Hegel considers the human world at the levels of anthropology, phenomenology of mind, psychology, ethics, politics, art, religion, and philosophy, where again his aim is to demonstrate the value of his dialectical method rests on the categorical investigations of the Logic. Hegel does not doubt the far-reaching significance of that investigation for all these fields of inquiry, in so far as all involve conceptual assumptions that must be made dialectical if the damaging one-sidedness in our thinking is to be avoided:
metaphysics is nothing but the range of universal thought- determinations, and is as it were the diamond-net into which we bring everything in order to make it intelligible. Every cultured consciousness has its metaphysics, its instinctive way of thinking. This is the absolute power within us, and we shall only master it if we make it the object of our knowledge. Philosophy in general, as philosophy, has different categories from those of ordinary consciousness. All cultural change reduces itself to a difference of categories. All revolutions, whether in the sciences or world history, occur merely because spirit has changed its categories in order to understand and examine what belongs to it, in order to possess and grasp itself in a truer, deeper, more intimate and unified manner.
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