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

by William Wallace

CHAPTER XXIII.

FIGURATE OR REPRESENTATIVE THOUGHT.

The compensating dialectic whereby reason, under the guise of imagination, overthrows the narrowness of popular estimates, makes itself observed even in the popular use of the terms abstract and concrete. Terms like state, mind, wealth, may from one point of view be called abstract, from another concrete. At a certain pitch these abstractions cease to be abstract, and become even to popular sense very concrete realities. In the tendency to personification in language we see the same change from abstract to concrete: as when Virtue is called a goddess, or Fashion surnamed the despot of womankind. In such instances, imagination, more or less in the service of art and religion, upsets the narrow vulgar estimates of reality. But it upsets them, so to speak, by giving to the abstraction (through its creative power) that sensuous concreteness which the mere abstract lacks and which the ordinary mind alone recognises as real. It 'stoops to conquer.' Such a representation is, as Hegel says[1], 'the synthetic combination of the Universal and Individual': 'synthetic,' because not their free, spontaneous, and essential unity, but the supreme product of the artistic will and hand, which, rather than let the universal perish by neglect, build for it, the eternal and omnipresent, 'a temple made with hands.' In mythology we can see the same process: by which, as it is phrased, an abstract term becomes concrete: by which, as we may more correctly say, a thought is transformed into, or rather stops short at, a representative picture. The many gods of polytheism are the fixed and solidified shapes in which the several degrees of religious growth have taken 'a local habitation and a name': or they bear witness to the failure of the greater part of the world to grasp the idea of Deity in its unity and totality apart from certain local and temporary conditions. So, too, terms like force, law, matter,—the abstractions of the mere popular mind—are by certain periods reduced to the level of sensuous things, and spoken of as real entities, somewhere and somehow existent, apart from the thinking medium to which they belong. Such terms, again, as property, wealth, truth, are popularly identified with the objects in which they are for the time and place manifested or embodied.

In these ways the abstract, in the ordinary meaning, becomes in the ordinary meaning concrete. The distinction between abstract and concrete is turned into a distinction between understanding and sense, instead of, as Hegel makes it, a distinction in the adequacy and completeness of thought itself. Thought (the Idea), as has been more than once pointed out, is the principle of unification or unification itself: it is organisation plus the consciousness of organisation: it is the unifier, the unity, and the unified,—subject as well as object, and eternal copula of both. An attempt is at first made in two degrees to represent the thought in terms of the senses as a sort of superior or higher-class sensible. When the impossibility of that attempt is seen, common sense ends by denying what it has learned to call the super-sensible altogether. These three plans may be called respectively the mythological, the metaphysical, and the positive or nominalist fallacies of thought. In the mythological, or strictly anthropomorphic fallacy, thought is conceived under the bodily shape and the physical qualities of humanity, as a separate unifying, controlling, synthetic agent, through whose interference the several things, otherwise dead and motionless, acquire a semblance of life and action, though in reality but puppets or marionettes: that is to say, it is identified with a subject of like passions with ourselves, a repetition of the particular human personality, with its narrowness and weakness. The action of the Idea is here replaced by the agency of supposed living beings, invested with superhuman powers. In the metaphysical or realist fallacy we have a feeble ghostly reproduction of the mythological. The living personal deity is replaced by a faint scare-crow of abstract deity. The cause of the changes that go on in nature is now attributed to indwelling sympathies and animosities, to the abhorrence of a vacuum, to selection, affinity, and the like: to essences and laws conceived of as somehow existent in a mystic space and time. In the positive or nominalist fallacy, the failure of these two theories begins to be felt: and the mind, which had only heard of unifying reason under these two phases and is meanwhile sure of its sense-perceptions, treats the objective synthesis as a dream and a delusion. Or, at best, it regards the synthesis as essentially subjective—as a complementary idealising activity of ours which ekes out the defects of reality, and brings continuity into the discontinuous. Our thought—(it is only our thought)—is but an instrument, distinct from us and from the reality: yet acting as a bridge to connect these two opposing shores—a bridge however which does not really reach the other side, but only an artificial image, which simulates to us, and will for ever simulate, the inaccessible reality. This last view is the utterance of the popular matter-of-fact reason, when in weariness and tedium it turns from the attempt to grasp thought pure and simple, and instead of reducing the metaphysical antitheses to the transparent unity of comprehension, relapses into mere acceptance of a given reality.

In some of these cases the full step into pure thought is never made. The creations of mythology, for example, display an unfinished and baffled attempt to rise from the separation of sense to the unity and organisation of thought. The gods of heathenism are only individuals—and individuals only meant to be, and by the act of faith and devotion set forth as reality before the worshipper: but they are individuals in which imagination embodies a unified and centralised system of forces or principles. They mean the powers of nature and of mind, but the sceptre in their hands is only a sign of power attributed by the believer; and far away, encompassing alike them and him, is the great relentless necessity. In other cases there is a relapse: when the higher stage of thought has been attained, it is instantaneously lost. Terms which are really thoughts are again reduced to the level of the things of sense, individualised in some object, which, though it is only a representation or sign, is allowed to usurp the place of the thought which it but partially and by extraneous institution embodies. The intuition of the sensuous imagination at every step throws its spells on the products of thought, and turns them into a representative picture, which in popular use and wont occupies the place of the notion. Instead of being retained in their native timelessness, the terms of the Idea are brought under the laws of Sense-perception, under the conditions of space and time.

The term 'representation,' which Hegel employs to name these picture-thoughts or figurate conceptions, corresponds to the facts of their nature. A 'representation' is one of two things: either a particular thing sent out accredited with general functions, or a universal narrowed down into a particular thing. Thus, as it has been seen, a general name implies or connotes a universal relation or attribute, but confines it to denote a particular object or class. 'Swift,' for example, was an epithet tied down to express the horse. In the first instance we may suppose the name to be a sort of metaphor: differing only by its simplicity and frequency of suggestion from those endless epithets, which in Norse or Arabic poetry veil and adorn the object which they are meant to designate. That is, we conceive the object as an embodiment or representation of the quality, as an eagle is the emblem of strength: only in the latter case we distinguish between the object and its metaphorical signification. In the second place, however, the object of experience is allowed completely to coincide with the aspect discriminated by the selective epithet, and we can no longer in ordinary thought separate the imaging object from the general relation which it images forth. This is the level of thought to which Hegel appropriates the term 'representation.' It includes under it the three fallacies of thought already noted and saves the trouble of comprehending the reality. In the Hegelian sense, a representation is abstract; because it solidifies, hardens, and isolates the term of thought, makes it a particular, and never rises above the single case to the general notion embodied in it.

The world of representative thought is a world of independent points in juxtaposition, which we arrange as seems best to us. It lies in an undefinable borderland between us and things. It is a would-be, but not an actual, reality. It is not like a true Idea—the unity of subjective and objective: but only a make-believe. We have put it there, and yet we credit it with an effective existence. When our mind moves amongst these picture-thoughts, it can only institute external relations between the terms. A judgment, in that case, is interpreted to mean the conjunction of two terms, which at once step into the rank of subject and predicate by means of the copula. A sentence is an arrangement of words ab extra in conscious or unconscious conformity with the rules of grammar. The world of knowledge, or the Idea, as a whole is turned into a plane surface with its typical terms,—the members of the organism of reason,—like dots put in co-ordination and juxtaposition, not spontaneously affected towards each other. Even if they are not embodied and reduced to a sensuous level of existence, they are held to be originally separate and unconnected. How they all came into being, and whether they do not all by gradations and differentiation-proceed from one root, are questions neither asked nor answered.

The level of representative thinking—thinking i. e. which is not the grasp (Begriff) of the reality, but only the apprehension of something which stands for and represents it—is the level on which we all come, more or less, to stand in our non-philosophic moments. It is, in essentials, the realm of what Plato called δόξα,—the level of consciousness which fails to rise to see the unity of essence in the many single goods and beauties, which holds its knowledge (such at is) at the mercy of accidents, not bound by the conclusions of reasoning,—the realm which is not without reality, but an immature and uncertain reality. It is, in essentials, the same as what, as opposed to intellectus, Spinoza styled imaginatio. Imagination, to Spinoza, is an understanding under the bondage of particular passions and temporary interests, which loses sight of the great bond of being or Substantia, and fixes its glance on the parts in subordinate and infra-essential relationships: which is always finite, i. e. never really comprehensive and self-sustaining in its view, but always limited by a tacit reference to something outside itself. The 'Representation' is the idea, in the loose and inexact use of that word, which goes with the phrase mere idea,—i. e. a mere mental image, which is not the reality, though it is believed to do duty for and to represent it[2]. Yet it is not a mere thought: rather its whole aim and meaning is to refer to reality, to suggest it, to bring it nearer us. Its fault is that it is an imperfect, partial, one-sided, or even one-pointed idea. It is really an instance and phase of the ignava ratio, to which a date or name serves as a ποῦ στῶ of explanation.