His life contained few events of importance. In youth he was much attracted to mysticism, and his later views may be regarded, to some extent, as an intellectualizing of what had first appeared to him as mystic insight. He taught philosophy, first as Privatdozent at Jena-he mentions that he finished his Phenomenology of Mind there the day before the battle of Jena–then at Nuremberg, then as professor at Heidelberg ( 1816-1818), and finally at Berlin from 1818 to his death. He was in later life a patriotic Prussian, a loyal servant of the State, who comfortably enjoyed his recognized philosophical preeminence; but in his youth he despised Prussia and admired Napoleon, to the extent of rejoicing in the French victory at Jena.
Hegel’s philosophy is very difficult–he is, I should say, the hardest to understand of all the great philosophers. Before entering on any detail, a general characterization may prove helpful.
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From his early interest in mysticism he retained a belief in the unreality of separateness; the world, in his view, was not a collection of hard units, whether atoms or souls, each completely self-subsistent. The apparent self-subsistence of finite things appeared to him to be an illusion; nothing, he held, is ultimately and completely real except the whole. But he differed from Parmenides and Spinoza in conceiving the whole, not as a simple substance, but as a complex system, of the sort that we should call an organism. The apparently separate things of which the world seems to be composed are not simply an illusion; each has a greater or lesser degree of reality, and its reality consists in an aspect of the whole, which is what it is seen to be when viewed truly. With this view goes naturally a disbelief in the reality of time and space as such, for these, if taken as completely real, involve separateness and multiplicity. All this must have come to him first as mystic “insight”; its intellectual elaboration, which is given in his books, must have come later.
Hegel asserts that the real is rational, and the rational is real. But when he says this he does not mean by “the real” what an empiricist would mean. He admits, and even urges, that what to the empiricist appear to be facts are, and must be, irrational; it is only after their apparent character has been transformed by viewing them as aspects of the whole that they are seen to be rational. Nevertheless, the identification of the real and the rational leads unavoidably to some of the complacency inseparable from the belief that “whatever is, is right.”
The whole, in all its complexity, is called by Hegel”the Absolute.” The Absolute is spiritual; Spinoza’s view, that it has the attribute of extension as well as that of thought, is rejected.
Two things distinguish Hegel from other men who have had a more or less similar metaphysical outlook. One of these is emphasis on logic: it is thought by Hegel that the nature of Reality can be deduced from the sole consideration that it must be not self-contradictory. The other distinguishing feature (which is closely connected with the first) is the triadic movement called the “dialectic.” His most important books are his two Logics, and these must be understood if the reasons for his views on other subjects are to be rightly apprehended.
Logic, as Hegel understands the word, is declared by him to be
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the same thing as metaphysics; it is something quite different from what is commonly called logic. His view is that any ordinary predicate, if taken as qualifying the whole of Reality, turns out to be selfcontradictory. One might take as a crude example the theory of Parmenides, that the One, which alone is real, is spherical. Nothing can be spherical unless it has a boundary, and it cannot have a boundary unless there is something (at least empty space) outside of it. Therefore to suppose the Universe as a whole to be spherical is self-contradictory. (This argument might be questioned by bringing in nonEuclidean geometry, but as an illustration it will serve.) Or let us take another illustration, still more crude–far too much so to be used by Hegel. You may say, without apparent contradiction, that Mr. A is an uncle; but if you were to say that the Universe is an uncle, you would land yourself in difficulties. An uncle is a man who has a nephew, and the nephew is a separate person from the uncle; therefore an uncle cannot be the whole of Reality.
This illustration might also be used to illustrate the dialectic, which consists of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. First we say: “Reality is an uncle.” This is the Thesis. But the existence of an uncle implies that of a nephew. Since nothing really exists except the Absolute, and we are now committed to the existence of a nephew, we must conclude: “The Absolute is a nephew.” This is the Antithesis. But there is the same objection to this as to the view that the Absolute is an uncle; therefore we are driven to the view that the Absolute is the whole composed of uncle and nephew. This is the Synthesis. But this synthesis is still unsatisfactory, because a man can be an uncle only if he has a brother or sister who is a parent of the nephew. Hence we are driven to enlarge our universe to include the brother or sister, with his wife or her husband. In this sort of way, so it is contended, we can be driven on, by the mere force of logic, from any suggested predicate of the Absolute to the final conclusion of the dialectic, which is called the “Absolute Idea.” Throughout the whole process, there is an underlying assumption that nothing can be really true unless it is about Reality as a whole.
For this underlying assumption there is a basis in traditional logic, which assumes that every proposition has a subject and a predicate. According to this view, every fact consists in something having some
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property. It follows that relations cannot be real, since they involve two things, not one. “Uncle” is a relation, and a man may become an uncle without knowing it. In that case, from an empirical point of view, the man is unaffected by becoming an uncle; he has no quality which he did not have before, if by “quality” we understand something necessary to describing him as he is in himself, apart from his relations to other people and things. The only way in which the subject-predicate logic can avoid this difficulty is to say that the truth is not a property of the uncle alone, or of the nephew alone, but of the whole composed of uncle-and-nephew. Since everything, except the Whole, has relations to outside things, it follows that nothing quite true can be said about separate things, and that in fact only the Whole is real. This follows more directly from the fact that “A and B are two” is not a subject-predicate proposition, and therefore, on the basis of the traditional logic, there can be no such proposition. Therefore there are not as many as two things in the world; therefore the Whole, considered as a unity, is alone real.
The above argument is not explicit in Hegel, but is implicit in his system, as in that of many other metaphysicians.
A few examples of Hegel’s dialectic method may serve to make it more intelligible. He begins the argument of his logic by the assumption that “the Absolute is Pure Being”; we assume that it just is, without assigning any qualities to it. But pure being without any qualities is nothing; therefore we are led to the antithesis: “The Absolute is Nothing.” From this thesis and antithesis we pass on to the synthesis: The union of Being and Not-Being is Becoming, and so we say: “The Absolute is Becoming.” This also, of course, won’t do, because there has to be something that becomes. In this way our views of Reality develop by the continual correction of previous errors, all of which arose from undue abstraction, by taking something finite or limited as if it could be the whole. “The limitations of the finite do not come merely from without; its own nature is the cause of its abrogation, and by its own act it passes into its counterpart.”
The process, according to Hegel, is essential to the understanding of the result. Each later stage of the dialectic contains all the earlier stages, as it were in solution; none of them is wholly superseded, but is given its proper place as a moment in the Whole. It is therefore
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impossible to reach the truth except by going through all the steps of the dialectic.
Knowledge as a whole has its triadic movement. It begins with senseperception, in which there is only awareness of the object. Then, through sceptical criticism of the senses, it becomes purely subjective. At last, it reaches the stage of self-knowledge, in which subject and object are no longer distinct. Thus self-consciousness is the highest form of knowledge. This, of course, must be the case in Hegel’s system, for the highest kind of knowledge must be that possessed by the Absolute, and as
