The only resemblance that remains to be noted between the scholastics and Hegel is this: they both treat of subtle distinctions in thought, while our modern “common sense” system goes only so far as to distinguish very general and obvious differences. This is a questionable merit, and the less ado made about it by such as take pride in it, the better for them.
Our author continues: “The principal difficulty of the system of Kant is our ignorance of the ancient systems of logic. The Critique of Pure Reason is modelled on the scholastic system.” Could we have a more conclusive refutation of this than the fact that the great professors of the ancient systems grossly misunderstand Kant, and even our essayist himself mistakes the whole purport of the same! Hear him contrast Kant with Hegel: “Kant sees in Being only the form of Thought, while Hegel sees in Thought only the form of Being.” This he says is the great difference between the Germans and French, interpreting it to mean: “that the former pursues the route of deduction, and the latter that of experience”!
He wishes to consider Hegel under three heads: 1st, The Beginning; 2d, the dialectical deduction of the Becoming, and 3d, the term Dialectic.
II. The Beginning.—According to M. Janet, Hegel must have used this syllogism in order to find the proper category with which to commence the Logic.
(a) The Beginning should presuppose nothing;
(b) Pure Being presupposes nothing;
(c) Hence Pure Being is the Beginning.
This syllogism he shows to be inconclusive: for there are two beginnings, (a) in the order of knowledge, (b) in the order of existence. Are they the same? He answers: “No, the thinking being—because it thinks—knows itself before it knows the being which it thinks.” Subject and object being identical in that act, M. Janet in effect says, “it thinks itself before it thinks itself”—an argument that the scholastics would hardly have been guilty of! The beginning is really made, he says, with internal or external experience. He quotes (page 316) from Hegel a passage asserting that mediation is essential to knowing. This he construes to mean that “the determined or concrete (the world of experience) is the essential condition of knowing!” Through his misapprehension of the term “mediation,” we are prepared for all the errors that follow, for “mediation in knowing” means with Hegel that it involves a process, and hence can be true only in the form of a system. The “internal and external experience” appertains to what Hegel calls immediate knowing. It is therefore not to be wondered at that M. Janet thinks Hegel contradicts himself by holding Pure Being to be the Beginning, and afterwards affirming mediation to be necessary. He says (page 317), “In the order of knowing it is the mediate which is necessarily first, while in the order of existence the immediate is the commencement.” Such a remark shows him to be still laboring on the first problem of Philosophy, and without any light, for no Speculative Philosopher (like Plato, Aristotle, Leibnitz, or Hegel) ever held that Pure Being—or the immediate—is the first in the order of existence, but rather that God or Spirit (self-thinking, “pure act,” Νοῦς, “Logos,” &c.) is the first in the order of existence. In fact, M. Janet praises Plato and Aristotle for this very thing at the end of his volume, and thereby exhibits the unconsciousness of his procedure. Again, “The pure thought is the end of philosophy, and not its beginning.” If he means by this that the culture of consciousness ends in arriving at pure thought or philosophy, we have no objection to offer, except to the limiting of the application of the term Philosophy to its preliminary stage, which is called the Phenomenology of Spirit. The arrival at pure thought marks the beginning of the use of terms in a universal sense, and hence is the beginning of philosophy proper. But M. Janet criticises the distinction made by Hegel between Phenomenology and Psychology, and instances Maine de Biran as one who writes Psychology in the sense Hegel would write Phenomenology. But M. Biran merely manipulates certain unexplained phenomena,—like the Will, for example—in order to derive categories like force, cause, &c. But Hegel shows in his Phenomenology the dialectical unfolding of consciousness through all its phases, starting from the immediate certitude of the senses. He shows how certitude becomes knowledge of truth, and wherein it differs from it. But M. Janet (p. 324) thinks that Hegel’s system, beginning in empirical Psychology, climbs to pure thought, “and then draws up the ladder after it.”
III. The Becoming.—We are told by the author that consciousness determining itself as Being, determines itself as a being, and not as the being. If this be so we cannot think pure being at all. Such an assertion amounts to denying the universal character of the Ego. If the position stated were true, we could think neither being nor any other object.
On page 332, he says, “This contradiction (of Being and non-being) which in the ordinary logic would be the negative of the posited notion, is, in the logic of Hegel, only an excitant or stimulus, which somehow determines spirit to find a third somewhat in which it finds the other conciliated.” He is not able to see any procedure at all. He sees the two opposites, and thinks that Hegel empirically hunts out a concept which implies both, and substitutes it for them. M. Janet thinks (pp. 336-7) that Hegel has exaggerated the difficulties of conceiving the identity of Being and nought. (p. 338) “If the difference of Being and nought can be neither expressed nor defined, if they are as identical as different—if, in short, the idea of Being is only the idea of the pure void, I will say, not merely that Being transforms itself into Nothing, or passes into its contrary; I will say that there are not two contraries, but only one term which I have falsely called Being in the thesis, but which is in reality only Non-being without restriction—the pure zero.” He quotes from Kuno Fischer (p. 340) the following remarks applicable here: