A Beginner's History of Philosophy, Vol. 2: Modern Philosophy

by Herbert Ernest Cushman

The Fundamental Principles of Hegel’s Idealism. In contrast with Mysticism and Realism, as well as with the doctrine of Fichte and Schelling, Hegel tried to formulate a conception of the universe that would include everything and yet be an organic whole. In what terms can this world of richness and variety, of coördinations and contradictions, be conceived as a single whole? How can it be one and still be many? Hegel saw clearly that this was his problem. The truly absolute must be a unity, and still be absolute.

There are two fundamental principles upon which his doctrine rests: (1) The world must be conceived in terms of consciousness. To any one who has studied the principles of psychology, or who has followed Kant’s epistemological analysis, it is clear that the only real unities are conscious unities. The characteristic of consciousness is synthesis. This is what we mean by consciousness, and consciousness is unique in this. (2) The world as a conscious whole must be essentially a world of contradictions. We must accept contradiction and not consistency as the fundamental and explanatory principle of life. In science and our ordinary humanproblems we try to get results that are logically consistent. This is useful, but in doing so we do not get a full explanation. We omit in such calculations life’s negations and incongruities. But do not inconsistencies and negations and incongruities exist? They certainly do; everything has its opposite; and if we will take the pains to observe the processes of thought, we shall find that thought is fundamentally inconsistent. Why do we usually regard thought as a self-consistent process? Because our methods of formal logic are such. In formal logic we reason smoothly and consistently from the premises to the conclusion. If we look more deeply into thought, we shall find that such consistency is made possible by ignoring the inconsistencies necessary to the very being of thought. The question therefore is not, Can the cosmic whole be conceived as consistent? but What is the law of its inconsistencies?

Let us consider these two principles of the Hegelian philosophy more in detail.

The Cosmic Unity. Hegel insists on the old truth that thought is self-operating within us. Thought belongs to our nature, yet it controls our nature. Thought develops consequences without regard to the will and demands that contradictions shall be solved. It is not correct to say that we think, but rather that thinking goes on within us. Thought is the life of the world. Thought is a process which embraces all things and projects them. Hegel emancipates thought from all the limitations of human minds. He would make thought objective and transform reality into thought.

Thus Hegel conceives that this self-operating thought within us is essentially the reality of the universe. Thought is the great cosmic undercurrent that includesall things in its sweep. Indeed, the universe cannot be conceived as a unity unless the universe is conceived as a cosmic consciousness or reason. The true study of the nature of the world is cosmic logic, and philosophy becomes in Hegel’s hands panlogism,—universal logic. Kant restricted the categories of thought to the human understanding; Hegel universalizes them and they become categories of the cosmos. For if the reality of the world is conscious reason, the categories are not only the forms of thought, but also the modes of being. The categories are, therefore, more comprehensive than Kant supposed. To use a term from the Middle Ages, they are “substantial forms.” They are at one and the same time the forms that mould thought and the stages of eternal creation. The knowing process and the cosmic process are one and the same—one writ small and the other writ large. They are not separate from each other, but are the transformations of one Being. If we would study the cosmic forms, let us study thought-forms. Logic is really ontology; the study of the genealogy of thought is the study of Being. The real is reason, and the reason is real. By reason Hegel does not mean intuition or even immediate perception, which Fichte and Schelling claimed to be the fundamental principle of the mind. The reason which Hegel is talking about is the concept or general notion. All actuality is the development of the general notion in a necessary and self-creative movement. History, matter, and thought are exhibitions of the divine Idea. “All Being is thought realized and all Becoming is a development of thought.”

Hegel’s philosophy is a monism of reason,—a universalized concept, in which everything has its divine place. It is an all-embracing system, moulding every department.Mind and matter are not aspects of a reality which is behind them, but are the modes of that reality. The cosmic reason is successively mind and matter, and not the principle of mind and nature. In Schelling things proceed from the absolute. In Hegel they are the absolute. The absolute does not exceed things, but is wholly in them as their organic unity. Everything is under the conceptual labor of thought. The important thing is to refer all our complex states to the unifying cosmic concept and have one illuminating idea. Absolute reason is absolute movement—the perpetual movement of life. Yet this absolute reason—the reason that refuses to change according to our likes and dislikes—is its own law and goal. The cosmos is the law of reason and has as its end its own unfolding self-consciousness. It is not the purpose of philosophy, according to Hegel, to tell what the world should be, but to recognize its nature as rational.

We must, therefore, be careful to distinguish Hegel’s conception of the unity of God from that other conception of Him as a quantitative, single, and isolated unity. An isolated and single Being would imply the existence of other isolated Beings. Such an individual would be limited by others and dependent upon them. In technical terms sameness with one’s self implies difference from others. A good example of the conception of an isolated God can be found in modern theology; such a God is a unity, but He is only the greatest of the several powers in the universe. Such an One is not an absolute, for the One to be absolute must be all that there is. Limitation implies something else. Das Wahre ist das Ganze.

But Hegel does not mean by the Oneness of God anaggregation of parts, nor does he mean a system or arrangement of parts. An aggregation of parts, however big, is never complete and cannot include all that there is. An aggregation, even if it includes the past and the present, is not Absolute. The temporal series points to something else to give it meaning; and yet Reality must not stand outside any part of the temporal series. The Absolute Reality must include the temporal series, and yet the temporal series is not in itself Reality. Neither does Hegel mean that Reality is a system or society of individuals, whose knowledge and will imply one another; for such an organization of individuals also has its meaning in something below it.

The Absolute Reality is a spiritual individual. It is a unifying consciousness, which is self-moving, subjective, and active. “It is the Idea that thinks itself and is completely self-identical in its otherness.” It cannot be abstract thought like Spinoza’s God, for the Absolute must be actual. Nor does Hegel mean by Reality merely life or vitality, as Haeckel has conceived it in modern times; for these, too, are only abstract terms. “It is pure personality which alone through the absolute dialectic encloses all within itself.” Reality is an Absolute Cosmic Spirit engaged in its self-discovery and self-appropriation by means of its own movement; and this movement is revealed in art, religion, and philosophy. The Absolute is, as Shelley makes the Earth picture man in Prometheus Unbound,

“One harmonious Soul of many a soul,