Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel's Philosophy, and Especially of His Logic

by William Wallace

There is thus left unexplained a totality which encompasses all the single members of experience—a unity compared to which the several categories are only a collection of fragments—an infinite which commands and regulates the finite concepts of the experiential intellect. But in the region of rational thought there is no objective and independent standard by which we can verify the conclusions of Reason. There are no definite objects, lying beyond the borders of experience, towards which it might unerringly turn; and its sole authentic use, accordingly, is to see that the understanding is thorough and exact, when it deals in the co-ordination of experiences. In this want of definite objects, Reason, whenever it acts for itself, can only fall into perpetual contradictions and sophistries. Pure Reason, therefore, the faculty of ideas, the organ of Metaphysics, does not of itself 'constitute' knowledge, but merely 'regulates' the action of the understanding.

By this rigour of demonstration Kant dealt a deadly blow, as it seemed, to the dogmatic Metaphysics, and the Deism of his time. Hume had shaken the certainty of Metaphysics and thrown doubt upon Theology: but Kant apparently made an end of Metaphysics, and annihilated Deistic theology. The German philosopher, as Hegel has said and Heine has repeated, did thoroughly and with systematic demonstration what Voltaire did with literary graces and not without the witticisms with which the French executioner gives the coup de grâce. When a great idea had been degraded into a vulgar doctrine and travestied in common reality, the Frenchman met its inadequacies with graceful satire, and showed that these half-truths were not eternal verities. The German made a theory and a system of what was only a sally of criticism; and rendered the criticism wrong, by making it too consistent and too logical[1].

Science—such is Kant's conclusion—is of the definite and detailed, of the conditioned. It goes from point to point, within the enveloping unity of what we call experience, and which rests upon the transcendental and original unity of consciousness. But a knowledge of the whole—of the enveloping unity—is a contradiction in terms. To know is to synthetise: you cannot synthetise synthesis. Knowledge is of the relative: but an absolute and unconditional totality has no relations. We may therefore, possibly, feel, believe in, presuppose the absolute: but know it in the stricter sense, we cannot. It may be the object of a rational faith. But as for knowledge, we can get on in psychology without the invisible and immortal soul: we can carry out sciences of the physical universe, without troubling ourselves about the 'cosmological' questions of ultimate atoms or ultimate void, of first beginning and final end: and no proofs will ever prove the existence of that 'ideal' of reason—briefly termed God—which transcends and completes and creates all existence. Not that such Ideas are useless even in science. They represent—if not without risks—the faith and the presupposition which underlie the spirit of scientific progress, and set before it an ideal perfection which it will do well to strive after, though it can never get beyond approximations. What is perhaps more important: this faith of reason science is as little competent to disprove, as it is incompetent to prove it. Science is not all in all: we are more than mere theoretical and cognitive beings. The logic of science is not the sole code of our spiritual or higher intellectual life;

'We live by admiration, hope, and love.'

The sequel and development of the first Criticism are found in Kant's works on ethics, aesthetics, teleology and religion. Only in one supplementary chapter, and in casual indications as need arises, has Kant made any pronouncement on his view of Philosophy as a whole and as a system. That it is and can only be a system, when it really engages on reconstruction in theory, was of course his fundamental insight. But in his stage of Zetesis[2], of testing and sifting the sound from the professed, he has confined himself to breaking up the mass piecemeal, and leaving each result in its turn to corroborate and correct the other. Sense and intellect may spring from a common stem; but let us, he says, deal with them in their apparent separateness. Reason practical must no doubt be identical at bottom with reason theoretical: all the more convincing will be the undesigned coincidence between the results of an inquiry into the principles of science, and one into the principles of morals. We have seen that science ultimately rests—though it does not discuss it and would indeed be incompetent to do so—on a faith, a hope, a postulate of the ultimate supremacy of intelligence,—the faith of reason in its own power (not verifiable indeed by an exhaustive list of actual results)—or in the rationality of the world. For science—though a kind of action and a part of conduct—is a sort of inactive action: an enclave in the busy world, a period of preparation for the battle of life. In the field of conduct the ultimate presupposition, which was for the luxury of science called a reasonable faith or faith of reason, makes itself felt in the more forcible form of a categorical imperative.

Or, at least, so it seems on first acquaintance. The command of duty, addressed to the sensuously-conditioned nature, brooks no opposition and condescends to no reasons in explanation or promises by way of attraction. The moral law claims unconditional authority: towards its sublime aspect reverence and sheer obeisance is due, utter loyalty to duty for duty's sake. Nothing short of this absolute identification with the Ought and a willingly willed self-surrender of the whole self to it can entitle an agent to the full rank of moral goodness. Such is the form—the synthetic link which joins the sensuous will indissolubly with the will reasonable of moral law. Now for its explanation. Humanity, though in the world of appearance and experience always subject to sensuous conditions, is also a power of transcending these conditions. Man is more than he can ever show in visibly single act. He has in him the hope, the faith, the vision of absolute perfection and completeness: but has it not as positive attained vision, but as the perpetual unrest of unsatisfied endeavour, as the feeling and the anticipation of an unachieved idea. And that perfection, that completeness he believes himself to be; he even in some sense is. Lapses and ill-success cannot quench the faith: for so long as there is life, there is hope.

As he pictures out this invisible self, it may assume various forms more or less imaginative. At times it may seem a far away, and yet intimately near, being of beings,—the common father of all souls, the eternal self-existent centre of life and love, the omnipresent bond of nature, the omniscient heart of hearts,—on whom he can lean in closest communion; though he is only too well aware how often he lives as if God were not, and human beings were roaming specks in chaos. At other times, he looks up to it as to an inner and better self, his conscience, the true and permanent being, which controls his choices and avoidances, which approves and disapproves, commands and condemns: his soul of soul, genius, and guardian spirit. In such a mood to be true to his own self—to follow the very voice of his nature—is to realise his law of life. His Ego is the absolute ego—the reason which is all things. And lastly, there are times when he conceives this better self and true essence as the community of the faithful, as the congregation of reasonable beings, of all perfected humanity.

In Kantian phraseology, man under one visible form is the union of an intelligence and a sensibility, of a noümenal with a phenomenal being. He is, indeed, says Kant, the former only in idea: it is only a standpoint which he assumes. But it is a standpoint he always does assume, if he is to be practical, i. e. if he is to move and modify the world he finds around him. And what standpoint is that? What is the law that has to govern his action, the law of the spiritual world? Its supreme law is the law of liberty; and that law is autonomy. Action—always under law—but that law a self-imposed one. So act that thy will may be thy law, and with thy will the law of all others whatsoever; so act that no other human being may by thy act be deprived of full freedom and treated merely as a thing: so act as to respect the dignity of every human being as implicitly a sovereign legislative. In other words, Morality is a stage of struggle and of progress which bears witness to something beyond. The 'I ought' represents a transition stage towards the 'I will,' or rather it is the translation of it into the language of the phenomenal world.[3] Morality, in a sense-being, always presents itself as a contest between the good and the evil principle: but in the transcendent and noümenal being which such a being essentially is,—in the reasonable or good will, the victory is already won by the good. Good is the law which governs the world, and which is the strength of the individual life. To the sensuous imagination, indeed, which here is apt to usurp the place of reason, things appear under a somewhat different aspect. There the certainty of self-conquest is forced by the difficulties of apparent failure to veil itself under the picture of a perpetual approximation through endless ages towards the standard of perfect goodness: the confidence that the world is reasonable is presented under the conception of a God who makes all things work together for good to the righteous: and the autonomy of reason presents itself as the postulate of freedom to begin afresh, absolutely untrammeled by all that has gone before. Thus the kingdom of reason is represented as having its times and seasons; as making determinate starts, and working up to a consummation in the end of ages. But implicitly Kant's idea of reason's autonomy,—of the 'I ought' as in its supreme truth an 'I will,'—is an eternal truth. The 'standpoint,' so to call it after Kant, is the standpoint which explains life and conduct and which makes conduct possible. It is the assertion that the completeness is, and is my inmost being, the source of my action, my chief good, and that chief good not a gratification or satisfaction to be looked forward to as reward, but essential life and self-realisation. And this joy is what is hidden under the austere gravity of the categorical imperative.

The Criticism of the Judgment-faculty is Kant's next step towards providing a completer philosophy. Ostensibly it owes its origin to the need of supplementing the treatment of Understanding and Reason by a discussion of Judgment, and of considering our emotional as well as our cognitive and volitional appreciations. What it really does is to minimise still further the gulf left between the intellect and nature—between the natural and the spiritual world. The intellect, said the first criticism, makes nature: it makes possible the general outlines of our conception of the world around us as a causally-connected system, in which a permanent being undergoes perpetual alteration, and manifests phenomena subject to mathematical conditions. Intellect, in short, has staked out the world which is the object of the practical man, and of his adviser the scientist. But there is another world—the world of beauty and sublimity—the world which art imitates and realises. The interpretation Kant gives to the aesthetic world is as follows. The fact of beauty is a witness to the presence in the mere copiousness of sensible existence of a sub-conscious symmetry or spirit of harmony which realises without compulsion and as if by free grace all the proportion and coherence which intellect requires. Nature itself has something which does the work that intellect was charged with, and does it with a subtle secret hand which does not suggest the artificer. The fact of sublimity, on the other hand, indicates the presence of an even greater spirit. For beauty may seem—from what has been said—to be only an unbought accrement to the commodities of life—facilitating the task of the practical intellect. But the sublime in nature speaks of something which is greater than human utilities and practical conveniences. It reveals a something which is in sympathy with our essential and higher self, and therefore stirs within us the keen rapture of the traveller who sees from afar his home in 'rocky Ithaca,' but a something which is cold to daily wants and vulgar satisfactions, and therefore strikes upon us a gelid awe.

Another world yet remains, which appeals neither to our utilitarian science, nor to our higher sentiments of artistic perfection. This is the world as the home of organic life, and perhaps itself an organism. The organism is apt to be a poser for the ordinary categories of mechanical science. Here the part contains the whole, not less than the whole contains the part: the cause is an effect, as well as cause, of its effect. One thing is in another, and the other in it: 'the present is charged with the past, and pregnant of the future,'—as the great founder of modern teleology often said. In the plant and the animal the natural world has to a certain degree reached an ideal unity which is also real. Reason—the syllogism—is here not merely introduced from without, as when man manipulates, but is the immanent law of a natural life,—the end working out itself by its own means and act. The fact admitted in these creatures suggests extending the conception of organism (or teleology) to nature as a whole. From this point of view Nature may almost be said to have a history—because it is almost conceived as having one abiding self which in apparent unconsciousness wonderfully simulates the purposive adaptation of conscious life. The older vulgar teleology was somewhat mechanical: it regarded the natural world outside of—or as it said, below—man as having no end of its own, but in its series subserving man's commodities. In the teleology of Kant the supreme end is still in a way man, and still there is a little of the mechanical about it: but it is not to promote man's happiness, understood as that probably must be in a selfish sense, but to produce in him the worthiest agent to carry on to its highest the rational process of development. The struggles and pains of natural existence, the laws of life, the competition of rivals, are all means in the hands of nature to produce an autonomous being. Kant says, a moral agent. But a moral agent has been already explained as an intelligence certified unto truth and a self-centred will whose law is the law of the cosmos,—whose plan of life, if we so put of it, is essentially a concentration in miniature and in individuality of the system ordained by the all-present God.