A Short History of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein, Second Edition (25 page)

Underlying knowledge is the free and self-producing subject. The destiny of the subject is to know itself by ‘determining’ itself, and thereby to realise its freedom in an objective world. This great adventure is possible only through the
object,
which the subject posits, but to which it stands opposed as its negation. The relation between subject and object is dialectical— thesis meets antithesis, whence a synthesis (knowledge) emerges. Every venture outwards is also an alienation of the self, which achieves freedom and self-knowledge only after a long toil of self-sundering. The self emerges at last in possession of a ‘realised’ self-consciousness, which is also consciousness of an objective order. The ‘process’ of self-determination does not occur in time, since time is one of its products: indeed the order of events in time is the reverse of their order in ‘logic’.

That drama, give or take a few details, remains unchanged in Schelling and Hegel, and remnants of it survive through Schopenhauer, Feuerbach and Marx right down to Heidegger. What it lacks in cogency it amply supplies in charm, and even today its mesmerising imagery infects the language and the agenda of Continental philosophy.

But there was another input, besides Fichte’s drama, into the post-Kantian agenda. This was the aesthetic theory of Kant’s third
Critique,
as refined and polished by the poet Friedrich von Schiller (1759-1805). In a series of
Letters on Aesthetic Education
(1794-1795) Schiller gave special content to the Kantian view of the aesthetic sense as ‘disinterested’. While Kant had paid little attention to art, Schiller attempted to describe it as the highest of man’s activities. Art is the activity in which, being ‘disinterested’, man is at once wholly free and wholly at rest. Art is a form of ‘play’. It therefore has a privileged place, not only in human self-knowledge (of which it forms the highest example) but in the life of the state. It is through ‘aesthetic education’ that the moral and cognitive faculties of man achieve their free expression, and so develop in accordance with their innate principles of harmony. The good state must therefore both encourage and embody that aesthetic understanding which brings the greatest intuition of unity between man and man and between man and nature.

Schiller was followed by Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling (1775-1854), in the attempt to incorporate into the critical philosophy a comprehensive account of the nature and value of art. Schelling began as a disciple of Fichte, arguing, in his
System of Transcendental Idealism
(1800) for the same view of the world as self-creative ego, and the same view of knowledge, as a progression from subject to object, in which the subject plays the active and determining role. But like Schiller he was deeply influenced by the prevailing romantic attitude to art and to the creative imagination. He therefore sought to describe the aesthetic mode of understanding as an indispensable part of human consciousness. In the course of doing so, he invented the subject of art history as we know it and placed aesthetic experience at the pinnacle of human knowledge.

From the point of view of aesthetics Schiller is both more original than Schelling and of greater contemporary interest. And from the point of view of the history of philosophy Schelling is now entirely eclipsed by his colleague and rival Hegel, who nevertheless would not have thought as he did had Schelling, Fichte and Schiller not prepared the ground for him. All three of these last-named philosophers remain honourably situated in the history of ideas, being part of that great burgeoning of literary activity known as the
Goethezeit.
Had Hegel not existed, Fichte and Schelling would be studied as avidly now as they were by their contemporaries. But Hegel, the most powerful of the German idealists, towered above these lesser figures, presenting a philosophy which has been not only one of the most influential that the modern world has known, but also the greatest in range and imaginative grasp, the clearest in its understanding of the consequences that ensue when philosophy takes practical and not theoretical knowledge as its central interest, and the boldest in its contempt for any mode of thought that is not both
a priori
in method and infinite in ambition.

G.W.F.Hegel (1770-1831) was influenced by three separate intellectual movements: first, and most importantly, by post-Kantian idealism and by Kant himself. Secondly, by Christianity, and in particular by New Testament theology, to the subject of which much of Hegel’s early writing was devoted. (Hegel sought to give the complete exposition of the thought that ‘in the beginning was the Word’.) Finally, in his outlook and manner, by the literature of late German romanticism, for which he provided an elaborate philosophical justification. Hegel was a highly cultivated man of letters, and a friend of many of the artistic figures of his day, notably of the poet Hölderlin. Despite his bohemian entourage, however, he did not allow the fashion for romantic despair to overcome his will for success and establishment, and ended his life as the revered and comfortable official philosopher in the Prussian state which, by a happy but characteristic turn of thought, he had foretold as the highest expression of the political life of man.

Hegel’s lectures, published after his death, contain influential works on aesthetics and the philosophy of history; while the
Encyclopedia
(1817, enlarged 1827) adumbrates an entire system in which science, logic, mind, art, morality and religion are given their respective situations, and in which the whole of the world, as it appears to reason, is blessed, as it were, by an act of philosophical recognition. There are three specific works which will concern us, all published in Hegel’s lifetime:
The Phenomenology of Spirit
(1807),
The Science of Logic
(1812-1816) and
The Philosophy of Right
(1821), which will be considered in chapter 14. The first two are notorious for their difficulty, in despite of which they have spawned interpretations and rival philosophies by the thousand. To many of Hegel’s contemporaries it did indeed seem true that the key to the mysteries of the universe had been found, and that Hegel’s implicit claim to utter the ultimate truth about everything should be upheld. Since his death the course of philosophy has been, to put it roughly, a process of steady disillusionment with Hegel, culminating in the vigorous rejection of his thought and method by analytical philosophers in the early years of the twentieth century. But even in our century his influence is felt. His philosophy of ‘being’ survives in amended form in the writings of Heidegger, and his theory of self-knowledge is present, in some version or other, in most of the major works of phenomenology, and in most theories of art. In this chapter I shall try to sketch certain central Hegelian themes in order to show why Hegel must still be seen as a towering presence in modern philosophy.

In one sense it was unfortunate that Hegel sought to found his philosophy in a general theory of logic, and particularly unfortunate that he should have advanced the theory of the ‘dialectic’ as containing the whole of metaphysics, thus illustrating, in Bertrand Russell’s words, ‘an important truth, namely, that the worse your logic, the more interesting the consequences to which it gives rise’. Hegel imagined himself to be replacing the empty formalism of the neo-Aristotelian logic with a new science, which has both form and content, and from which the nature of metaphysical truth can be derived. He therefore invented a new starting, point for logic, which was to deal, not with the formal structure of argument, but with the nature of Being itself. Logic deals with truth, not merely in the formal sense of telling us which arguments
preserve
truth, but in the substantive sense of telling us what truth is, and hence what is true (the ‘is’ here being an ‘is’ of identity).

That ambitious project is apt to look eccentric in the light of the development of modern logic. This logic has removed from its subject matter not only the metaphysics of Hegel, but also the particular brand of formalism advanced by Aristotle. It is therefore now necessary to read Hegel with more attention to detail, and less respect for system, than he himself would have countenanced. The surprising thing, however, is that his ‘dialectical’ philosophy still seems both important and often acceptable.

The term ‘dialectic’ was used by Plato to describe the method of Socrates, who sought philosophical truth through disputation. Kant had given a far more precise meaning to the term, and it was this meaning which Hegel adopted, to make use of it in a manner wholly antipathetic to the Critical philosophy. The second—negative—part of Kant’s
Critique of Pure Reason
had been devoted to exploring the fallacies which attend the attempt to pass from the circumscribed realm of the ‘understanding’ into the limitless space of ‘pure reason’. In its desire for absolute truth, human reason commits itself only to the absolute falsehood of selfcontradiction. Kant’s diagnosis of the fallacies of pure reason contained a section called the ‘Antinomy of Pure Reason’ (
see p. 150
). Here Kant had tried to describe certain contradictions into which reason strays in its ambition to pass from the circumscribed viewpoint of empirical knowledge to the realm of absolute cosmology, in which the ‘whole’ of things is grasped as it is in itself, independently of the limitations imposed by our perceptual capacities. I have already referred to an ambiguity in Kant’s conclusions: it is not entirely clear whether he is saying that the limits of human understanding and the limits of truth are one and the same, or whether, on the contrary, he is gesturing towards a world of ‘things-in-themselves’ about which we can at least know that we do not know them. Because of this ambiguity it was possible for Hegel to interpret Kant’s ‘critique’ of pure reason as heralding its eventual celebration. The Kantian contradictions, Hegel thought, were only contradictions from the limited point of view of the understanding. They therefore provided a kind of logical impetus to transcend that point of view into the world of pure reason itself, from the perspective of which these and many other contradictions could be resolved. (To take an analogy: sitting in a railway carriage moving away from a station I suffer the illusion that the station is slipping backwards. I also believe that the station is motionless and that I am going forward. These two judgements form a contradiction which is ‘resolved’ when, in ascending to the impartial standpoint of scientific discourse, I recognise that they both presuppose a fallacious, egocentric view of motion. The truth of the matter consists in a relative movement whose nature can be fully grasped only by a scientific theory that assigns no importance to my limited personal perspective.)

Thus while Kant had used the word ‘dialectic’ to refer to the propensity to fall into contradictions, Hegel used it to mean the propensity to transcend them. This process of transcendence is the true course of logic, and ‘dialectic’ is the name for the intellectual pursuit whose endpoint is not limited or partial, but on the contrary, absolute truth itself. ‘A deeper insight into the antinomies or, rather, into the dialectic nature of Reason shows us... that
every
concept is a unity of opposite moments, which could therefore be asserted in the shape of an antinomy.’

What then is the structure of reason’s dialectic? It should be recognised that the terms of Hegel’s logic are not propositions or judgements, but rather concepts: and it is
concepts,
in his view, that are true or false. Falsehood is a form of limitation or incompleteness, whereas truth is a form of wholeness, a transcendence of all limitation. (Here and elsewhere we see the influence of Spinoza.) Dialectic is the method of progression among concepts, whereby a ‘more true’ (or, as Spinoza might say, ‘more adequate’) concept is generated from inadequate beginnings, through overcoming the oppositions intrinsic to them.

The dialectical process is, then, as follows: a concept is posited as a starting-point. It is offered as a potential description of reality. It is found at once that, from the standpoint of logic, this concept must bring its own negation with it: to the concept, its negative is added automatically, and a ‘struggle’ ensues between the two. The struggle is resolved by an ascent to the higher plane from which it can be comprehended and reconciled: this ascent is the process of ‘diremption’
(Aufhebung),
which generates a new concept out of the ruins of the last. This new concept generates its own negation, and so the process continues, until, by successive applications of the dialectic, the whole of reality has been laid bare.

The metaphor is attractive, but how do we interpret it? Hegel’s logic is in stark contrast with traditional theories, which see logical relations as timeless, determined not by content but by structure. A thought does not need time, one feels, in which to generate its consequences: indeed it is the essence of a
logical
consequence that it is inseparable from the thought itself: a logical consequence can be neither lost nor acquired. Yet Hegel thinks of concepts as
moving towards
a greater grasp of reality, and he speaks of the ‘working through’ of the dialectic as being necessary both to the truth and to the meaning of the result. He refers to the successive stages as ‘moments’, which have to be ‘overcome’, in the act of ‘diremption’ whereby a new concept is born.

These temporal similes would be less puzzling if it were not also the case that Hegel thought of historical processes in dialectical terms—as the successive generation and overcoming of contradictions. And it is this aspect of Hegel, put forward overtly in the lectures on the philosophy of history, but covertly elsewhere, that has been the most influential, perhaps because the most intelligible, of his theories. It often seems that the whole of Hegelian metaphysics points towards a logical and historical interpretation at once. To some extent this reflects a confusion on Hegel’s part, between logic conceived as a science of the relations among ideas, and logic conceived as the intellectual operation whereby those relations are discovered. Clearly, if it is true that we must undergo some dialectical process in order to know logical relations, this is a fact about
us,
and not about logic. But even this confusion can be glimpsed only obscurely, since Hegel writes at a level of abstraction so great as to attribute the process of thinking not to any particular subject, but rather to a
general
subject of thought. Logic becomes, in the end, the history, or perhaps the anatomy, of an eternal, impersonal ‘concept’.