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

by William Wallace

THE RANGE OF PERSONALITY.

The difference between the conceptions of reality held by Aristotle and Plato respectively is that where Plato said Being, Essence or Substance (οὐσία), Aristotle said Activity (ἐνέργεια). To be is to act, to be active. To the outsider—the plain man of philosophic legend, it seems at first that a thing must be before it can do: that you must have an agent before you get an action. And, in a way, Aristotle admits this not quite satisfactory criticism. Every activity presupposes, he allows, a power to act, a potentiality: every actual presupposes an implicit or a mere possibility. Existence seems, as it were, to be doubled; or the mere surface-being is turned into a subject which has a predicate. But if the existence is to be real, it has to include both elements, and with the latter or the actuality, as its crown. Nor is this all. The possibility which issues forth in action may be fairly called self-realisation. That is to say: A—the hypothetical agent—acts, does something: and in so doing, seems to go forth and beyond itself, to externalise itself. Or, A is acted upon, and thus seems to be diminished. But what it externalises, or puts forth, is after all what it is: it puts forth itself: and, on the other hand, if it be a patient, it is no less an agent and self-limitative. What a thing really is, is what it makes itself be: what it allows itself to be made, that it really is. Yet further, if the word self-realisation be taken in its fullness of meaning,—if there be really a self, and it be realised, then this self-realisation, which is the truth or more developed conception of being, seems to imply or postulate in it a self-consciousness, an awareness of the process of completed being,—completed in its return from utterance of possibility to self-fruition or in its re-assumption of itself.

To us, of course, as beings aware of what we do and achieve, this is simple enough: but it is also true of things, that we only understand them, in so far as we put them in, or invest them with, the same activity and apperception of activity as we are familiar with in our own experience. The veriest materialist cannot help speaking of things as agents, as behaving, as having a function. He would, no doubt, if he were to be cross-examined, refuse to identify himself with the primitive anthropomorphism, or at least zoömorphism of the natural man who sees the river run and the clouds sweep the sky; and he would probably mutter something referring to people who cannot see when they ride a metaphor to death. Still less, perhaps, would he be inclined to adopt the spiritualistic or animistic hypothesis of philosophising physicists, like Fechner, who would accredit even the plants at our feet, and the stars in the sky, with souls, or soul-like centres of their life. But, however he may shrink from what we may call the ontological consequences of his language, there is no doubt that for him the meaning of the world, its reality and truth, is obtained by an interpretation in terms which, rigidly employed, imply their environment by a self-consciousness to which they are relative. Take from him the tacit assumption (which he often finds it difficult to realise just because it is the foundation of all his language) that reality is in the last resort a self-conscious reality, and his words become meaningless, or what he might think worse, metaphorical.

To Bacon, who, though not without a strong speculative impulse, approached philosophic dicta from the standpoint of an average intelligent Englishman (and it is on that account that his remarks are often so instructive), it seemed a grave fault of the Stagirite to define the soul, that 'most noble substance,' by words of the second intention. Without substance—a solid something as basis of act and event—the reality of the soul seemed likely to fare badly. Behind consciousness he, like many others, felt there must be a something of which consciousness is the state, act, or predicate and attribute. The thinking must come from a thinker. There must be a permanent subject of thought—a persistent substance which does not disappear when thinking for the nonce stops. And thinking is according to common experience very liable to stops and interruptions. Both Bacon and Locke felt that without this refuge to fall back upon, personal identity was in a bad way, or personality itself little better than a delusion. And therefore when Aristotle, and his modern followers, treated soul and mind as essentially definable by the terms activity, self-realisation, it has been freely urged against them that they are tampering with the pearl of great price which all our hopes and aspirations fondly guard.

And this is a subject on which there is inevitably a good deal of misunderstanding. And the misunderstanding will probably last so long as one set of writers flaunts over it that blessed word Personality as a holy, a sacrosanct thing, like the visionary cross with its inscription In hoc signo vinces: and as another set treats it as a mere fetish, under which is hidden nothing better than stock or stone, or a heap of old bones. Perhaps some concessions might well be made on both sides. And the first of them would be to try to come to some clearer understanding what the term in question means. And, on that point, if we follow the example of Aristotle and examine popular usage, to see if it can help us to any consistent use of the term, we shall find that by personal as opposed to real we mean something peculiarly attached to the individual, of which he cannot divest himself as of other outward things, though it also is an outward thing[1] The person in this narrowest sense means the body; and if the epithet is further extended it still expresses what is directly manipulated through the members of the living agent, and is more or less closely attached to it. Yet if it means the body, we must be careful to add that it is the body, regarded not as such but as the representative, the outward manifestation, the inseparable sign or symbol of a spirit, an intelligence and a will. The person is the visible or tangible phenomenon of something inward,—the phase or function by which an individual agent takes his place in the common world of human intercourse and interaction—his peculiar and definite part in the general or universal world and field.

Personality thus mingles or unifies in it an universal and an individual aspect or element: it hints that the universal work always has in reality an individually-determinate tone,—that nothing in the world, even if it be called the same, is really and actively the same. Si duo idem faciunt, non est idem quod faciunt. Thus, what separates personality from individuality is simply that in the narrower or abstracter use of the latter term there is an absence of the due subordination of all individuality to universality, and of all universality to individuality. Personality, in short, is an individuality which is not a mere freak, not merely different from other things, but also in itself charged with a universal meaning or function. Yet even this is not enough to describe it. It is the individuality of an intelligence: the flesh and blood, and, in a secondary degree, the outward things, stamped with intelligence. Every member of a kind, every natural existence, has this double character; this convergence or union of universal and individual. In being this individual object, it is at the same time a universal, and vice versa. But in the attribution of personality there is involved something beyond what is common to all creatures. And that something, we may first of all say, is this. Whereas in the case of other things the individuality is distinctly subordinate, and each is reckoned primarily by its kind, in the case of persons we can almost declare that the universality is subordinate to the individuality. This union of individuality and universality in a single manifestation, with the implication that the individuality is the essential and permanent element to which the universality is almost in the nature of an accident, is what forms the cardinal point in Personality. And one can understand, when the distinction is thus put, the obvious and palpable antagonism in which the view stands to the central principles of Spinoza[2] We speak of a man as a Personality when we wish to note the fact that he is no mere manufactured article, the representative of a common type, with nothing to choose between him and a thousand others, but that he is, as it were, one of a thousand, one 'Whom nature printed and then broke the type,' that he has in the highest sense 'distinction,' the nobility of nature's own patent. Other things exist, so to speak, for the sake of their kind, and for the sake of other things; a person, in the strictest sense, is never a mere means to something beyond, but always at the same time an end in itself or himself. Other things are mere examples in illustration of a law that rides superior to them and overrules them: the person is a law unto himself. He has the royal and divine right of creating law—of starting by his exception a new law which shall henceforth be a canon and a standard. For in such a personality when he claims his full rights there is the visible immanence of the divine and universal—or there is the visible unity of the eternal and the temporal. He rules as the natural king, the great ruler whose judgment and authority are better than the complex code of common laws: he guides as the artistic genius who sees truth steadily in a single intuition and in that single picture sees it whole[3].

But when we ask if such a personality is found in the field of actual experience and history, there arises a divergence of opinions. It is at any rate matter of common experience that there is a good deal of unjustified identification of the self with the universal—identification in which the universal suffers violence and is taken by force. There are only too often cases where the personal interest is allowed to disguise itself under a semblance of zeal for the common good, and that even without conscious intent or act of deception. No good and noble deed, Hegel has said, can ever be done without faith in its goodness, and zeal for its attainment: without a holy passion and fervour of devotion, which exceeds the cold service of duty rendered for duty's sake[4]. But it is equally true and equally to be remembered that this interference of personal passion and disinterested interest has defaced the noblest causes and made flow endless torrents of fanaticism and persecution. A personality in which the universal was perfectly incarnated in the individual would be in truth a God amongst men. And it is probably a more likely occurrence that where the individual as such arrogates to himself the privilege of the universal, there should be seen not the deeds of the god, but the ebullitions of the beast that is in man.

A personality, then, in popular language, and perhaps also in popular philosophy, is the living and conscious individual in whom general forces, truths, or ideas become real, active, efficient forces, truths, and ideas. And the importance of the conception resides in the safeguard thus supposed to arise, which will prevent the realities of the world from being dissipated away into the endless and restless flux of the terms of thought,

'La bufera infernal che mai non resta.'

To such a common frame of mind ideas, truths, forces are vacant, ghostly forms, devoid of true life and reality: to get such they need blood and flesh to clothe them, to give them substance and power. Now Hegel, no less than those who offer this criticism, regards ideas (in the ordinary sense of that term), truths and forces, also as abstractions which need something to make them powers in the real world of nature and the ideal world of mind. Hegel, like Schelling, has a sublime contempt for mere universals. But as to the something else, there is a divergence of view. Two well-known answers are given by the popular philosophy known as materialism or spiritualism: two systems which are probably not so wide apart as the contrast of their names might imply. According to the former, thinking, ideas, truths, goodness and beauty are special functions (the grosser materialists say secretions) of a special kind of matter—of something which is accessible to ordinary mechanical and chemical tests, but which exhibits also, in certain cases, the exceptional phenomena of consciousness. Here the essential reality is a something, permanent and essentially indestructible,—something which no man has seen, nor indeed can see,—but which is called Matter. The spiritualistic philosopher (as distinguished from the idealist) regards as the essential realities in the universe what he calls spirits. What these are, also, nobody has as yet (any more than in Kant's time[5]) given any very authoritative account, but so far as the quasi-scientific expositions in regard to them throw any general light on the subject, we may say that they suggest only a differently-constituted matter, a matter e. g. of less or more dimensions than that we are most familiar with.