On Hegel: The Dialectic as the Engine of History
An essay on Hegel’s philosophy, antecedents, and aims.
Hegel’s project is not easy to describe, and is even more difficult to understand: The gap between the two is where most superficial references to him fall. Very much playing within the rules of German Idealism but opposed to Kant’s Critical Philosophy, Hegel saw himself as part of a philosophical tradition going back to the Greeks. Indeed, his ‘dialectical theory’ (if such a thing exists, he does not use this form of argument universally or consistently) is a response to Socratic dialectics but just as much deals with the thought of his contemporaries. I also view Hegel through his metaphysical undertones, where he is as much a intellectual descendant of the great mystics of Western tradition as much as he is an early-modern philosopher.
Indeed, the very problem that he and he predecessors grappled with is the contingency of Being: the finitude of things whose existence is not part of the essence. That being(s) exist is not because they are self-sufficient, but because they are dependent on something for their existence. I find that the best way to illustrate this is not through the Greek tradition itself, but through Ibn Sina (Avicenna):
Every being, if considered from the point of view of its essence and without consideration of other things, is found to be such that either existence necessarily belongs to it in itself or it does not. If existence belongs to it necessarily, then it is the truth in itself and that whose existence is necessary from itself. This is the Independent Reality. If, on the other hand, existence does not belong to it necessarily, it is not permissible to say that it is impossible in itself after it was supposed existing. But if, in relation to its essence, a condition is linked to it, such as the condition of the nonexistence of its cause, it becomes impossible or, such as the condition of the existence of its cause, it becomes necessary. If no condition is linked to its essence, neither existence nor nonexistence of a cause, then there remains for it in itself the third option, that is, possibility. Thus, with respect to its essence, it would be a thing that is neither necessary nor impossible. Therefore every existent either has necessary existence in essence or has possible existence in essence. [1]
Existence itself must be a things essence, for an essence is precedent to any attributes, but an essence that exists prior to Existence is an absurdity.
However, it is not permissible that existence, which is an attribute of a thing, be verily caused by that thing’s quiddity, which is not existence, or by another attribute. This is because the cause is prior in existence, and nothing is prior in existence to existence. [1]
Whatever is, by its essence, Existence, cannot be divisible, for then it is dependent on the things it is divisible into constituting it. Therefore, whatever exists by essence is one.
This kind of argumentation, inherited by the Aristotelian Scholastics from Islamic Philosophy (itself dependent on Neoplatonism, among other Greek resources), was attacked by the empiricists of the early modern period. David Hume asserted that physical order and moral order in the Aristotelian/Neoplatonic sense is a fiction, and cannot be conveyed to us by experience or induction: There is no ‘reason’, and indeed we can never discover this.
Immanuel Kant’s work was to try to defeat this understanding and restore a unified understanding of Being and human standards, in the exorable march to humanity’s (re)unification with harmony and happiness through the intellect/reason. Kant sought to understand the limits of Reason itself, and defined the bounds of rational knowledge as possible only through the unification of concepts (categorie), which are a priori constructs that form the predicate of propositions, and intuition (anschauung), which are a posteriori sensory cognitions that form the subject of a simple proposition. In other words, one must make use of something extra-empirical, a concept, in order to make a synthetic proposition relating to an object of empirical experience. The only other option is to make tautologous propositions, where the predicate does not introduce any new qualia. Kant thereby excludes any concept of a rational metaphysics, which cannot make use of synthetic a priori judgements. The contingency of the world is preserved through the essential intuitive component of knowledge, and with it, the impossibility of achieving a finality to Being.
Nevertheless, for Kant, the delusion of metaphysics is beyond reason but still useful: God or immortality guide the exertion of human spirit though these cannot be rationally spoken of. They are more like signboards pointing us in a direction than an knowable reality (phenomenon). The actuality of reality and unified being, the Absolute, is unknowable as it exists beyond intuition (noumenon).
A similar duality exists at the very root of freedom, or will: The fact that we have a duty imposed on us and that we ought to act in certain ways to accord to it is proof of the actual freedom in action. Kant assumed that virtue, the worthiness to be happy, is the supreme condition of of the pursuit of happiness, and is therefore the ultimate good. Happiness itself is the natural end for humanity, and happiness distributed in exact proportion to morality is the highest good. This leads to Kant postulating that there must be the possibility of harmony, and that such a harmony is itself the same as the will of God, who is postulated to exist.
[…] in a mere course of nature in the world an accurate correspondence between happiness and moral worth is not to be expected and must be regarded as impossible, and that therefore the possibility of the summum bonum cannot be admitted from this side except on the supposition of a moral Author of the world. [2]
Moral law is what allows freedom to be recognised, for in the requirement that one must perform a duty one also realises that one may not do so as well. As the will is subject to the pursuit of the ultimate good, and this ultimate good is a necessary object for the same, the ultimate good is possible. However, since such a good is perfect, and perfection is only possible as the result of endless progress, the validity of moral law presupposes immortality of the agent. The path of this progress is, in essence, the duality of humanity and human nature (or Humean desire), and humanity’s freedom from the contingency of nature in general.
One more important thinker who may help provide some grounding to understand Hegel is Gottlieb Fichte. Fichte argued that it is both within humanity’s power and duty to realise and exercise its dominance over the rest of existence, and its independence of any pre-existing order. Fichte branded as dogmatists anybody who explains consciousness by means of objects, that is, something externally existent as a pre-cognised given: Anyone who does so accepts themself to be bound by laws of causality or duty in nature. What humanity must do is to treat consciousness as the primal font from which one begins to engage with reality, and this can only be done through activity: Indeed, consciousness is activity as it is a creative initiative that reifies a world of objects that is devoid of independent existence. One could understand Fichte as transposing the ultimate principle’s (or Plotinus’ the One’s) attributes to the human mind where the non-ego (transposed objectivity) is brought into being by the ego to establish its own creative self-awareness. In Fichte’s sense, the ego is transcendental: Every individual human possesses a subjective consciousness that must be discovered individually.
But in the Ego positing itself is the same as being. In it real and ideal ground are one and the same. Again, not positing itself, and not being, is for the Ego the same. […]
Activity and passivity of the Ego are one and the same. For what the Ego does not posit in itself it posits in the Non-Ego. [3]
Human community is made possible as every individual embarks on a journey to know themself as humanity, through their partaking of the unadulterated transcendental subject. The creation of the world necessitates a continuing reabsorption of objects into consciousness to make the enterprise one of self-knowledge. This is achieved through the overcoming of objects, and transcending the boundaries of objectification, but Fichte, like Kant, makes this an infinite progress. History, nevertheless, can be seen as the mind’s struggle to transcend these boundaries in any period of its time in the process of self-education, and the evils of the past should be seen as a part of progress (like the old Aristotelian position). Ultimately, Fichte maintains his own duality: Between objects and subject, mind and its creations, and defends its eternality.
Hegel’s philosophy was as much to overcome these dualities to deprive Being of its contingent effects while preserving the multifarious. The same conundrum affects all monists: Either one must consign all aspects of contingent existence as an illusion (as held by Sankara) or that the Existent, or the Absolute, is in a constant state of becoming/unfolding (as in Nicholas Cusanus). The maintenance of differentiation made both of these positions undesireable. It is to resolve this issue that Hegel speaks of Aufheben, or ‘sublation’: The preservation of the negation even in the very act of its assimilation. It is to defend the thesis of this occurence that Hegel, in dense and abstract language (at least in translation), wrote of the evolution of Being in his Phenomenology.
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Hegel starts by positing the Mind (Geist) as infinite and ultimate reality: A monist thesis that one can link to Parmenides in the Greek tradition, or any number of Upanishadic shlokas. This would mean that every form of reality is only a phase of the development of the Mind, as a manifestation of how it combats its own imperfection (contra Parmenides or the Upanishads, where this reality is also perfect). The Mind pursues the fullness of possibility to exist for itself, to know itself. Self-knowledge is then the ultimate goal, the telos, and this occurs through its sublation of itself as an object in its complete form.
Our rational activity guides this process as a part of the whole: There is no fundamental diversity in the constant assimilation and negotiation with the outer boundaries of the ‘opposite’. Our cognitive powers of reason must exist, and it cannot draw the bounds of its own validity without knowing what is invalid. For Hegel, the talk of noumenon is incoherent: reason is a process of meditating on the Absolute, and must give itself meaning through its relation to the Absolute. In this way, there is an active movement towards resolution, and the path to the Absolute is through thinking and Reason (Vernunft, the sublating intellect). Since the Absolute is the entirety of Being, so is Truth: Truth must be apprehended in its entirety to be understood, and meaning can be understood only if one already grasps the whole. Self-knowledge, or the realisation of one’s being in its fullness is to understand its nature. The exhaustion of possibilities, and the assimilation of every stage of possibility and negation fuels this fullness and puts one on the path to Truth.
Being itself follows the same evolution as it graps itself, and the Being of Mind is identical with the knowledge of Mind, where Mind’s objectification of itself is returned to its conception of itself. Again, the parallels with Plotinus’ procession and return of the Intellects to the One can be illustrative but also an apt place to differentiate: For Plotinus, to return would involve ‘casting off’ the sensible and the less perfect to achieve a state of eudaimonia, while Hegel would have the Absolute, the Mind, apprehend itself as the product of history. The values of every negation is assimilated and persist through the future evolution of the Mind.
All concepts exist in particularity, but in dependence with something else by the process of negation. Concept are therefore in relation to each other: Every defined concept is ‘stabilised’ by the restriction of determination. However, there will be the existence of the negative, and the ‘one-sidedness’ and limitation of what is predicated in a definition will be percieved as such. The finite is not acted upon or pushed to pass into its own negation, but does so by its very essence. It is this moment of understanding which a concept sublates its negation, and proceeds to maintain itself, even as it passes into its opposite.
We find that the limitations of the finite do not merely come from without; that its own nature is the cause of its abrogation, and that by its own act it passes into its counterpart. We say, for instance, that man is mortal, and seem to think that the ground of his death is in external circumstances only; so that if this way of looking were correct, man would have two special properties, vitality and — also — mortality. But the true view of the matter is that life as life, involves the germ of death, and that the finite, being radically self-contradictory, involves its own self-suppression. [4]
This is followed by the grasping of the unity of the oppositions, or their result: To reject the concept and its negation would lead to skepticism in the absence of premises whatsoever, and Hegel seeks to avoid that. He instead holds that the new stage of Positive Reason has definite content that exists by virtue of the negation of specific propositions that are contained in the result. It is, therefore, a determinate negation.
In doing so, the new concept has surpassed the limits of the earlier concept, thereby progressing on the path to ‘becoming’: It is now possible to speak more clearly of a concept’s being-in-itself as it now exists in relation to other things in a way that has moved past earlier limitations. Definitions are surpassed and boundaries are sublated into concepts as they evolve, inexorably moving towards their negations, and by this process one can speak of a movement from the particular to the general, from the finite to the infinite. The Absolute is approached through these dialectical processes as they move to a higher level of generality and universality by virtue of its overcoming of limitation, conditions, and finitude.
What of when two self-knowledges encounter each other? The fact that they impose limitations on each other leads to the subjugation of one by the other, in a master-slave relationship: The self-knowledge with greater will to die for will succeed and become the master (herr), while the other is vassalised (becomes a knecht). The master is dependent on the slave: Despite making the slave work for them, the master’s own position is contingent on the slave’s action in conformance with their will. The slave, despite the internalisation of the ‘law’ of the master, becomes progressively aware of the lawgiver, and thereby undermines the normative relationship: The master’s imperatives are not contingent on reason but caprice, and self-subjection is crucial to authority itself. In this way, normative authority is based on the will of both self-knowledges, and reason does not make universal demands on us the way Kant imagines. [5]
This process, though briefly described and skipping Hegel’s explanation of religious thought and onward to Reason and the discovery of itself through the decomposition of ‘otherness’, highlights another important aspect of Hegel’s work: That the normative ideals of an age are unextricable from the actuality of history.
Virtue is thus overpowered by the world process, because the abstract unreal essence is in fact virtue’s own purpose, and because its action as regards reality rests on distinctions that are solely a matter of words. Virtue wanted to consist in the fact of bringing about the realization of goodness through sacrificing individilality; but the aspect of reality is itself nothing else than the aspect of individuality. The good was meant to be what is implicit and inherent, and opposed to what is; but the implicit and inherent, taken in its real truth, is simply being itself. […] But the consciousness of virtue rests on this distinction of implicitness and explicit being, a distinction without any true validity.
[…]
The course of the world is, then, victorious over what, in opposition to it, constitutes virtue; it is victorious over that which took an unreal abstraction to be the essential reality. [6]
There is no difference between the course of history and normativity: Philosophy is limited to the awareness of the past alone, and cannot be predictive. History is justified in the route it took to overcome the limitations of the day, but there is no way to speak of what comes in the future. The Mind, struggling to be free, increasingly understands the contingency of what it faces and overcomes its own determinations. This is done through action: Activity brings possibility into existence, and the expansion of possibility into actuality. Reality is meant to fulfil the possibilities of the Mind, and therefore is justified as such, and what the Mind does in any set of circumstances is an exploration of these possibilities. Only in such a situation can there be a collapse of nature and consciousness, of desire and duty: By the recognition of Reason becoming Mind through its assimilation of itself in the world.
Every contemplation by Reason would then be ever-expansive: As each contemplation of the Absolute must include the previous, otherwise comprehensive contemplation. This would lead Hegel to the same infinite regress that Kant or Fichte find themselves in. However, Hegel argues that the finite is not imperishable and itself contingent, limited as it is. Infinity must therefore be a negation of finitude, and itself a negation: Finitude must be shown to be a positive infinite. The real infinity is the Mind back at its beginning, but with the weight of history and its exhaustion of possibility in the unity of the finite and the infinite in an ultimate, final synthesis:
This infinite, as the consummated return into self, the relation of itself to itself, is being-but not indeterminate, abstract being, for it is posited as negating the negation; it is, therefore, also determinate being for it contains negation in general and hence determinateness. It is and is there, present before us.
[…]
The image of the progress to infinity is the straight line, at the two limits of which alone the infinite is, and always only is where the line — which is determinate being — is not, and which goes out beyond to this negation of its determinate being, that is, to the indeterminate; the image of true infinity, bent back into itself, becomes the circle, the line which has reached itself, which is closed and wholly present, without beginning and end. [7]
PS: Little of this carried over into Marxist thought however, and the Marx-ified version of Hegel speaks of dialectics as an inexorable and predictive process. Nevertheless, defences of Stalinism maintain a premise that Truth must be grasped ‘as a whole’, making any arguments contrary to ‘approved’ conclusions bunk since such knowledge only vests selectively (in the Party).
[1] Ibn Sina’s Remarks and Admonitions: Physics and Metaphysics: Fourth Class.
[2] The Critique of Practical Reason, by Immanuel Kant
[3] Science of Knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre)
[4] Logic Further Defined and Divided, Hegel
[5] German Philosophy: The Legacy of Idealism
[6] Pleasure and Necessity
[7] Science of Logic — Being
