UNDERSTANDING HEGEL 12
OR: NO MORE THESIS — ANTITHESIS — SYNTHESIS

Win Corduan

Part 12 An Overview of Hegel's System

So, without an accompanying brain picture, Here is a fairly simplified schematic of Hegel's system:

Before getting into a lot of specifics, note that it is round, and that there are arrows pointing in the clockwise direction. It has three parts, which are of disproportionate size and importance. These three parts are also the three constituents of Hegel's Encyclopedia. In that work we read some of Hegel's idea in abridged form, but also with a lot of supplements in which Hegel tells us what he meant to say.

We entered the system at the top, where the Phenomenology starts, though it is at the very bottom that the most significant transition occurs when the system has attained Absolute Spirit, but then dissolves itself in order to begin once more with the ideas of Logic. There we find God, but in a very abstract sense. He is the "Eternal Idea before Creation."

Now when I say "logic," presumably you may be thinking of syllogisms, modus ponens, and other ways of testing the validity of arguments. Well, that's not what Hegel's Logic is all about. It's really more like a transcendental search for the concepts behind logic. Let's ask what we need in order to have logic. Well, something has to exist (or to be), so that we can say such things as, "x is y" or "x is not-y" or "if x is y, then y is z." At a minimum, such statements presuppose the hypothetical existence or non-existence of x, y, or z. But what does it mean to exist? It means to be. Thus, as Hegel begins his conceptual analysis he starts with Being. And, pure Being is God. So, Logic begins with God alone, which is to say, before he created anything.

Again, we follow the method of looking at something closely enough to realize that it contains its own negation, unless it's supported by something else. In this case, Hegel says (and we saw a very similar argument last time as well), if you look at Being, this concept is so huge, so all-inclusive, that it cannot accommodate any internal distinctions. But in order to have actual entities, you need to be able to distinguish between, say, entity A and entity B. Hegel's view of Being is total unmitigated Being, so devoid of any distinctions that you can't find any particular beings in it. Everything exists, but no entities can possibly be distinguished, so actually nothing exists. So, if you're looking at Being, you might as well be looking at Non-being. Of course, you can't look at Non-being or even analyze it because, by nature and terminology, it does not exist. But that's crazy; "Being as Non-being" makes no sense. For that matter, don't forget that Hegel is doing a transcendental deduction here, not a metaphysical description of reality. So what we're really looking at is that there is Being, which appears to be exchangeable with Non-being, and Non-being, which appears to be conceptually exchangeable with Being. So, as should be flitting easily into our minds by now, we need to look for a concept that keeps Being from morphing into Non-being. He finds the possibility of having both Being and Non-being in a transition which Hegel calls "Becoming." Not that Hegel is promoting Aristotelian philosophy, (as I said a long time ago), but this concept of Becoming functions very much like potential being in Aristotle's metaphysics.

And we're off! The entire Logic consists of this kind of unpacking of concepts, which generate their own negations if left alone, and for which we find further concepts to support them, and so on. But, please, remember that there is no antithesis that's being brought up against a thesis and that the negation generates itself out of the concept, thereby leading us to find the concept underneath it that makes it possible. In fact, there are times when the interplay is between four, not three, concepts, which led the British Idealist J. M. E. MacTaggart (1866-1925) to "correct" Hegel's use of the "dialectic" (Studies in Hegelian Dialectic, 1896), rather than to re-think the usage of the triadic method. The part of the system that is Logic is self-contained insofar as it starts with God as Eternal Idea and ends up with God as Absolute Idea, but throughout the progression, it remains on the level of the purely conceptual without taking material creation into account.

But God did create a material world. So, the second part of Hegel's system is a philosophy of nature. This discussion consists of abstract science, displaying the way in which the world develops and grows according to a philosopher's quest. I'm sure that it's of great interest to historians of science, reflecting a philosopher's view of science when it had not yet become entirely empirical.

Let us not forget that Kant wrote a natural history (which, incidentally, includes a rubric for "four-footed birds," such as bats). Hegel's habilitation lecture at Jena in 1801 was called Dissertatio philosophica de orbitis planetarum, "Philosophical Dissertation on the Planetary Orbits." He tried to show that, by some manipulations of a numerical series in metaphysics, and from a transcendental perspective it only provides a transition to the next stage. This section occupies itself with the material world apart from spirit. It grows and develops, again along the line of finding the conditions that make a previous condition possible. but eventually it exhausts its potential, so to speak. For there to be any further advancement, we need to extend our transcendental inquiry back into the spiritual dimension. So, we need to find exactly where it makes sense to stipulate the transition from the purely material to the combination of spirit and matter.

The point of contact is the human being who is both material and spiritual. However, the spiritual side dominates, because a person's knowledge of the world is ultimately self-consciousness. So, here is where the Phenomenology begins and then takes us down the rest of the circle to Absolute Spirit, in a manner that we have yet to trace. Once we have attained Absolute Spirit, we are back where we started. But that doesn't mean that we can now rest, put our feet up, and call it a day. We can still ask, "What are the conditions that make Absolute Spirit possible?" We conclude that there could not be Absolute Spirit unless, well, first of all there would be the Eternal Idea. The circle never stops. If you are looking for a label for this kind of system, I would suggest that it is a kind of panentheism, though certainly very different from Whiteheadian process philosophy. God and the world are mutually dependent on each other. I also need to keep the method in mind. Thus, I would call it a "transcendental panentheism."

More on the right side of that circle next time we talk about Hegel.