HEGEL GEORG FRIEDRICH WILHELM
One must no longer separate truth from being (Kant), subjectivity from objectivity (Fichte’s I and Non-Io), nature from consciousness (Schelling), but the Absolute is their higher identity insofar as it is their thought: one must therefore hold firmly that “thought is the sole truth and supreme reality” (Philos. d. Gesch., ed. cit., I, p. 6). Thus the categories, the content, and the forms of thought resolve themselves into thought itself, into its activity, and this is what thought accomplishes as it returns to itself according to the necessity of its nature as “concept” (Begriff): “No object,” writes Hegel, “would in itself and by itself be capable of being expounded with such rigor of immanent plasticity as the development of thought in its necessity, even more than mathematical deduction” (Wissenschaft d. Logik, ed. cit., I, p. 19). He arrives at this through the conception of consciousness as the absolute principle, which he systematically expounds in the Introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit (cf. ed. by J. Hoffmeister, Leipzig 1937, pp. 69–73). Here are its essential stages.
a) Consciousness is in itself its own concept. Not only therefore does the object of thought not refer to a reality outside thought itself, but the concept which is identical with being is in turn identical with consciousness. By finding itself again in every object and act, consciousness is the act of transcending the finite, and since this finite belongs to it, it is the act of transcending itself (p. 69), and it is precisely this continual “overcoming of the finite” that constitutes “reason,” which, however it moves, always remains within itself so that “the concept corresponds to the object and the object to the concept.” Every beyond (Jenseits) of consciousness ultimately falls back into consciousness itself.
b) Consciousness gives to itself its own measure. As long as truth is conceived as an application of a form to a matter or of a universal to a particular, one must despair of truth itself insofar as one term is never the other. When, however, the relation of objects and the forms of consciousness is conceived as intrinsic to consciousness itself, then inquiry will be a comparison of consciousness with itself, and Hegel can then say: “What consciousness designates within itself as the in-itself or the true (nothing other than) the measure it itself establishes to measure its knowing.” It follows that being-for-another, which is the law of consciousness, is realized in consciousness itself, and, once the journey is completed, resolves into a “being-for-self” (p. 71).
c) Consciousness proves (verifies) itself. This is the conclusion of the two preceding principles. Granted that consciousness, in its advance and in the determination of objects, does not leave itself and is to itself its own “measure” (Maßstab), one must admit that the proof of the truth of consciousness is its very movement and actualization. Hegel therefore says that “consciousness of the object and consciousness of the subject or of consciousness itself, consciousness of what is in it and of its knowing, both are the same thing (beide für dasselbe sind) and it itself is their comparison” (p. 72). Only in this way can truth be secured: otherwise—on the hypothesis of a diversity of being and consciousness—one must admit either that reality (in being known) alters consciousness or that consciousness (in knowing) alters reality. The conclusion to which the principle of consciousness leads is therefore that what presented itself to consciousness as the in-itself (of things) is nothing other than the in-and-for-itself (Ansichundfürsich) of consciousness itself.
d) The moments of dialectic. — The imposing bulk of Hegel’s work constitutes an attempt to describe this itinerary of consciousness’ return to itself, according to the various points of view that may be assumed in philosophical reflection. It remains established that the “reason” of which we have spoken is the human spirit itself understood in the fullness of its spiritual activities and in the totality of its “moments” both cultural and historical: the being that is the content of truth is precisely the “becoming” of such spirit, and philosophy is the consideration of this becoming. In the Phenomenology of Spirit one proceeds from “appearance of knowing” (sensible certainty, perception, understanding) to self-consciousness and thence to reason and its actualization in the life of spirit up to “absolute knowing.” The Logic studies the formal side of this path: in the Preface to the 2nd ed. of the Logic (1831), at the end of his career, Hegel warns that one must carry the principle of the autonomy of thought to its conclusion so that the philosopher’s “beginning” is “without presuppositions, simplest, simplicity itself” (Wissenschaft d. Logik, ed. cit., I, p. 20 ff.). Thus the Phenomenology, which was originally to constitute the “first part of the system,” seems absent from the edifice of Hegel’s Logic, perhaps the most dissonant structure the human spirit has raised to pure thought. Here dialectic is presented systematically: it is the sole method of philosophy.
e) The first moment is pure being (das reine Sein), absolutely indeterminate and empty. This is the only valid logical beginning because it is absolutely without presuppositions: it is made “in the element of thought which is freely for itself, i.e., in pure knowing” (Wissenschaft d. Logik, ed. cit., I, p. 53): this pure knowing—Hegel specifies—is being in general, being and nothing more, without any other determination or filling” (ibid., p. 54). Is it immediate or mediated? From the logical point of view pure being is immediate itself, because only pure being can be the beginning. On the other hand—Hegel acknowledges—this pure being is “on the way through mediation, and precisely through a mediation that is at the same time its own self-removal” (loc. cit.). Hegel does not seem to contradict himself, because the beginning of the Logic is the immediate of reflection, and thus a looking back—through reflection—at the path or process that the real traverses forward in its becoming. Pure being at the beginning is therefore already the result of mediation insofar as the removal of every accidental and particular feature is required through the moment of negativity. Hegel can therefore say that “in philosophy going forward is rather a going back and a founding” (Wissenschaft d. Logik, ed. cit., I, p. 55). To this pure empty being corresponds the sphere of Dasein treated in the 1st book of the Logic.
f) The second moment is nothingness, but not the nothingness of nothing, rather the nothingness that is bound to being. If pure being at the beginning is “the immediate indeterminate,” in fact it is nothing, Hegel concludes, insofar as it is precisely the absence of every determination of that pure being, the impossibility of any intuition: nothingness is therefore inherent in being, and the beginning contains both, is their unity (ibid., pp. 67 and 58). As a good disciple of Spinoza and Böhme, Hegel affirms that this unity of being with non-being can well be taken “as the first and purest definition of the Absolute”: but what matters to note is that nothingness becomes the motive principle of dialectic. If every particular entity, precisely insofar as it is determined, is a synthesis of being and non-being, then it is through the negation of determination that the authentic position of the real is obtained: “This nothing,” says Hegel, “is not that of abstract understanding, but is the nothing from which it results (vorausgesetzt) and therefore in reality... the veritable result” (Phänomen. d. Geistes, ed. cit., p. 68) and in this sense he speaks of the “enormous power of the negative as the energy of thought, of pure I” (ibid., p. 29). Nothingness is the evil that is necessary to being so that the good may show itself and affirm itself.
g) The third moment is becoming as the (dynamic) unity of being and non-being. Becoming precisely shows that reality never rests upon the finite, upon the particular as such, because every finite entity passes over into something else; what was, now is no longer, and what was not, now is. The opposition, therefore, of being and non-being are inseparable pure unities such that “immediately each of them vanishes into its opposite” (Wissenschaft der Logik, ed. cit., I, p. 67). This mutual belonging of being and nothingness is the reality of becoming, the reality (Wirklichkeit) par excellence, but not as the mere passing of the finite into the finite ad infinitum (bad infinity), rather in such a way that the being of the finite presents itself as that negativity which passes over into the positive as such, which is the infinite. It may therefore be said that dialectic as such is the tension of binary polarity (appearance and reality, essence and existence, parts and Whole, finite and Infinite…), because the three moments belong to logical reflection and, moreover, being and nothingness are inseparable in becoming. Real dialectic consists in the continual “annihilation” that one of the members (the finite) undergoes in becoming, whereby the absolute reality, the Infinite, is revealed. Is the Infinite itself also dialectical? H. would have to deny it if he does not wish to reopen an endless process and remain in turn a prisoner of bad infinity: yet the formula of the Hegelian Infinite is that it is the unity of finite and Infinite, and of God H. says that God cannot be God without the world (Ohne Welt Gott ist nicht Gott: Philos. der Religion, ed. cit., I, p. 148).
IV. PROBLEMS OF HEGELIANISM
It is not difficult to show how, from whatever angle one considers it, Hegelian dialectic presents a fundamental ambiguity. It is affirmed that truth is “result,” that it is in the Whole (das Wahre ist das Ganze), and yet it must be affirmed that the Absolute is present from the very beginning and works “behind the backs” (hinter den Rücken: Enzykl., § 25) of things, that the Absolute is the unity of positive and negative, of finite and Infinite. Not to mention the methodological ambiguity of wishing to eliminate every content of immediate experience, and then relying upon concepts such as “movement,” “force,” “passing over,” etc., which derive their meaning solely from that experience (the objection raised by Trendelenburg, which has troubled all Hegelians from Michelet to Spaventa and Gentile). Hegel therefore did not resolve the fundamental problem of philosophy, namely, the relationship between sense and reason, between the particular and the universal: Italian neo-Hegelianism, seeking to give Hegelianism greater internal coherence, attempted with Croce to valorize the particular (historicism), while Gentile sought to overcome every dualism, even methodological, through the doctrine of the pure act, but in both cases the metaphysical foundation of dialectic was repudiated.For H.—who learned it from Böhme—the authentic schema of dialectic is the Christian dogma of the Trinity: in which the Father, Power, an abstract universal, splits into the Son, and the latter, contemplating himself, is the Holy Spirit—three moments that form a single reality (Philos. der Gesch., ed. cit., I, p. 35, ff.). But H. places religion midway between art and philosophy, since it is still bound to image and therefore inferior to philosophy. Similarly, the dogma of the Incarnation, stripped of its representative content, is reduced to the awareness that self-consciousness has taken of itself in Christ: for this reason one may commend the enormous influence of H. upon dogmatic and biblical liberalism (Wellhausen) and upon secularism in general, as he may even have been accused of atheism.
In the Hegelian conception of the life of the spirit, the highest form or life of consciousness is not religion, but politics as it is realized in the history of peoples and in various civilizations: the Absolute Spirit is the Spirit of the World (Weltgeist), the unique individual of history, to which the spirit of each people (Volksgeist) is subordinate, and to this in turn the individual persons. Thus God, the Spirit of the World, is the absolute-human that dominates nature: “If the divine essence were not the essence of man and of nature, it would be an essence that would be nothing” (Philos. der Gesch., ed. cit., I, p. 38). H. therefore defends the subordination of religion to politics and of the Church to the State: the very concept of individual immortality has no theoretical content but derives solely from the extrapolation of a fanciful desire.
The most vigorous reaction to Hegelian idealism, outside of Catholic thought, has come from existentialism and Marxism: the former, with Kierkegaard, sought to vindicate the transcendence of Christianity and the freedom of the individual; the latter, with Marx, claimed to transform the “dialectic of spirit” into a “dialectic of sensible matter.” For this reason, Hegelian studies in Italy, Germany, and France have regained notable vigor, especially research into the genesis of Hegelian dialectic.
The specific problem of the relationship between H. and Marx forms a separate topic. Cf. from a Catholic perspective: K. Belkner, Marx’ philosophische Entwicklung, sein Verhältnis zu H., Basel 1940; R. Heiss, H. und Marx, in Symposion, I, Freiburg im Br. (1949), pp. 169-206; K. Löwith, Von H. bis Nietzsche, 2nd ed., Stuttgart 1950.