The Nature of Reality

 Hegel looked upon the world as an organic process. For Hegel the truly real was what he called the absolute. In theological terms, this absolute is called God. But Hegel was particularly concerned to indicate that he was not here referring to a Being separate from the world of nature or even from individual persons. Whereas Plato made a sharp distinction between appearance and reality, Hegel argued in effect that appearance is reality. Nothing, said Hegel, is unrelated. For this reason, whatever we experience as separate things will, upon careful reflection, lead us to other things to which they are related until at last a process of dialectical thought will end in the knowledge of the Absolute. Still, the absolute is not the unity of separate things. Hegel rejected the premise of materialism, which held that there are separate, finite particles of hard matter, which, when arranged in different formations, make up the whole nature of things. Nor did Hegel accept the extreme alternative put forward in the ancient world by Parmenides and more recently by Spinoza, namely, that everything is One, a single substance with various modes and attributes. Hegel described the Absolute as a dynamic process, as an organism having parts but nevertheless unified into a complex system. The absolute is therefore not some entity separate from the world but is the world when viewed in a special way.

Hegel believed that the inner essence of the Absolute could be reached by human reason because the Absolute is disclosed in Nature as well as in the working of the human mind. What connects these three, the Absolute, Nature, and the mind, is Thought itself. A person’s way of thinking is, as it were, fixed by the structure of Nature, by the way things actually behave. Things behave as they do, however, because the Absolute is expressing itself through the structure of Nature. Thus, a person thinks about Nature the way the Absolute expresses itself in Nature. Just as the Absolute and also Nature are dynamic processes, so also human thought is a process, a dialectic process.

Logic and the Dialectic Process

 Hegel laid great stress upon logic. He understood logic to mean virtually the same thing as metaphysics. This was inevitable in his case inasmuch as he believed that knowing and being coincide. Still, it was Hegel’s view that we can know the essence of reality by moving logically step by step and avoiding all self-contraction along the way. Descartes had advocated a similar method, whereby certainty in knowledge would follow from the movement from one clear idea to the next. Unlike Descartes, however, whose emphasis was upon the relations of ideas to each other, Hegel argued that thought must follow the inner logic of reality itself. That is, since Hegel had identified the rational with the actual, he concluded that logic and logical connections must be discovered in the actual and not in some “empty ratiocination.” He argued that “since philosophy is the exploration of the rational, it is for that very reason the apprehension of the present and the actual, not the erection of a beyond, supposed to exist, God knows where.” Logic, then, is the process by which we deduce, from our experiences of the actual, the categories that describe the Absolute. This process of deduction is at the very heart of Hegel’s dialectic philosophy.

Hegel’s dialectic process exhibits a triadic movement. Usually this triadic structure of the dialectic process is described as a movement from thesis to antithesis and finally to synthesis, after which the synthesis becomes a new thesis, and this process continues until it ends in the Absolute Idea. What Hegel emphasized in his dialectic process was that thought moves and that contraction, rather than bringing knowledge to a halt, acts as a positive moving force in human reasoning.

To illustrate Hegel’s dialectic method, we can take the first basic triad of his logic, namely, the triad of Being, Nothing, and Becoming. Hegel said that the mind must always move from the more general and abstract to the specific and concrete. The most general concept we can form about things is that they are. Although various things have specific and different qualities, they all have one thing in common, namely, their being. Being, then, is the most general concept the mind can formulate. Also, Being must be logically prior to any specific thing, for things represent determinations or the shaping of what is originally without features. Thus, logic (and reality) begins with the indeterminate, with “the original featurelessness which precedes all definite character and is the very first of all. And this we call Being.” Hegel’s system begins, therefore, with the concept of Being, and this is the thesis. The question is now, how can thought move from such an abstract concept to any other concept? More important still is the question, how is it possible to deduce any other concept from such a universal idea as Being?

It was here that Hegel believed that he had discovered something new about the nature of thought. Ever since the time of Aristotle, logicians had thought that nothing could be deduced from a category that was not contained in that category. To deduce B from A requires that in some way that B already be contained in A. Hegel accepted this. But what he rejected in Aristotelian logic was the assumption that nothing could be deduced from a universal term. For example, Aristotle argued that everything is a distinct thing and that logic, therefore, provides us only with specific universal terms from which no other universal terms could be deduced. Thus, for example, there is either blue or not blue; there is no way to deduce any other color from blue. If blue is blue, you cannot at the same time say that it is something else, a non-blue. This principle of non-contraction is very important in any formal logic. Still, Hegel believed that it is not true that a universal does not contain another concept. Returning, then, to the concept of Being, Hegel said that we have here an idea which contains none of the particular qualities or characteristics of the many things that have being. The idea of Being has no content, for the moment you give it some content, it would no longer be the concept of Being but the concept of something. Unlike Aristotle, however, Hegel believed that from this concept of Being it is possible to deduce another concept. He argued that because pure Being is mere abstraction, it is therefore absolutely negative. That is, since the concept of Being is wholly indeterminate, it passes into the concept of not-Being. Whenever we try to think of Being without any particular characteristics, the mind moves from Being to not-Being. This, of course, means that in some sense Being and not-Being are the same. Hegel was aware, as he said, that “the proposition that Being and Nothing are the same is so paradoxical to the imagination or understanding, that it is perhaps taken for a joke.” Indeed, to understand Being and Nothing as the same, said Hegel, “is one of the hardest things thought expects itself to do.” Still, Hegel’s point is that Nothing is deduced from Being. At the same time, the concept of Nothing easily leads the mind back to the concept of Being. Of course Hegel is not implying that we can say of particular things that they simultaneously are the same as nothing. His argument is limited to the concept of pure Being, which, he says, contains the idea of Nothing. He has, then, deduced the concept of Nothing from the concept of Being. The antithesis, Nothing, is contained in the thesis, Being. In Hegel’s logic, the antithesis is always deduced from, because it is contained in, the thesis.

The movement of the mind from Being to Nothing produces a third category, namely, Becoming. The concept of Becoming is formed by the mind when it understands that Being, for the reasons already mentioned, is the same as Nothing. Becoming, says Hegel, is “the unity of Being and Nothing.” It is, he says, “one idea.” Becoming is therefore the synthesis of Being and Nothing. If we ask how something can both be and not be, Hegel would answer that it can both be and not be when it becomes.

Throughout his vast and intricate system, Hegel employs this same dialectic method of logic. At each step, he sets forth a thesis from which is deduced its antithesis; this thesis and antithesis then find their unity in a higher synthesis. In the end, Hegel arrives at the concept of the Absolute Idea, which he describes in accordance with his dialectic method, as Becoming, as a process of self-development. Becoming, then, at the lowest level of knowledge, with the sensation of qualities and characteristics of particular things, Hegel sought to expand the scope of knowledge by discovering the ever-widening interrelationships of all things, always making sure that the mind takes no flight of fancy but rather moves rigorously by way of deduction from one concept to the other that the mind finds as categories in actuality. Single facts, for Hegel, are irrational; only when such single facts are seen as aspects of the whole do they become rational. Thinking is forced to move from one fact to another by the very nature of each concept that facts engender. As an example, which does not accurately illustrate Hegel’s point but does suggest how single facts acquire a rational quality, one can consider the parts of an engine. By itself, a spark plug has no rational character; what confers rationality upon it is its relation to the other parts of the engine. To discover the essence of the spark plug is, thus, to discover truth about the other parts and, eventually, the entire engine. The human mind, then, moves dialectically, constantly embracing an ever-increasing scope of reality, discovering the truth of anything only after discovering its relation to the whole, to the Idea.

The Idea of which Hegel speaks is deduced in his logic by the same method that yielded Becoming out of Being. The category of subjectivity is deduced from the fact that a person can have a notion of a thing, make a judgment about it and be able to reason out logical connections. But from subjectivity there can be deduced its opposite, namely, objectivity. That is, the notion of subjectivity contains the idea of objectivity. To say that I am a self (subjectivity) implies that there is a not-self (objectivity). Subjectivity consists of thought in its formal sense. Objectivity, on the other hand, is thought that is, as it were, outside itself and in things. Describing the objective character of a person’s notion, Hegel says that it consists of mechanism, chemism, and teleology. What a subject knows about nature as mechanical laws, for example, objects express in their behavior. The synthesis of the subjective and the objective, says Hegel, is their unity in the Idea. That is, in the Idea, the subjective (formal) and the objective (material) are brought together in unity. The Idea, however, contains its own dialectic, namely, life, cognition, and the Absolute Idea. Thus the Idea is the category of self-consciousness; it knows itself in its objects. The whole drift of Hegel’s logic, therefore, has been to move from the initial concept of Being finally to the notion of the Idea. But this Idea must also be understood as being in a dynamic process, so that the Idea is itself in a continuous process of self-development toward self-perfection.

The Philosophy of Nature

 From the Idea is derived the realm of Nature. As Hegel puts it, Nature represents the Idea “outside itself.” This expression is somewhat misleading, because it implies that the Idea exists independently of the world. In addition, Hegel ascribes “absolute freedom” to the Idea as it “goes forth freely out of itself as Nature.” Recalling, however, Hegel’s premise that the real is rational, it must follow that Nature is simply rationality, or the Idea in “external” form, somewhat the way a watchmaker’s Idea is found outside of himself in the watch. But Hegel’s view is more subtle than the relation of the watchmaker to the watch would suggest inasmuch as Hegel does not really refer to two separately existing things, Idea and Nature. Ultimate reality is a single organic and dynamic whole. Hegel’s distinction between the logical Idea “behind” all things, on the one hand, and Nature, on the other, is his attempt simply to distinguish between the “inner” and “outer” aspects of the self-same reality. Nature, in short, is the opposite, the antithesis of the rational Idea (thesis). Our thought moves dialectically from the rational (Idea) to the non-rational (Nature). The concept of Nature leads our thought finally to a synthesis represented by the unity of Idea and Nature in the new concept of Spirit (Geist, translated as either Spirit or Mind). What drives our thought from Nature back to Spirit is the dialectic movement within the concept of Nature. Just as logic begins as the most abstract concept, namely, Being, so the philosophy of Nature begins with the most abstract thing, which is, says Hegel, space. Space is empty (just as Being is indeterminate). At one “end,” then, Nature touches emptiness. At the other end, it passes over into Spirit. Between space and Spirit is the diversity of particular things, which is what Nature is. Nature exhibits the laws of mechanics, physics, and organics. Each of these aspects of Nature is in turn analyzed by Hegel into its dialectic terms.

Much of what Hegel says about Nature is somewhat outmoded by the developments of science since his day. But it was not his intention to take over the work of the scientists. He was concerned, rather, to discover through the philosophy of Nature a rational structure and pattern in all of reality. At the same time, he tried to show the difference between “freedom” and “necessity,” saying that Nature is the realm of necessity whereas Spirit is freedom. Nature, says Hegel, “is to be considered as a system of stages, of which one proceeds necessarily from the other.” Freedom, on the other hand, is the act of Spirit. There is, then, a dialectic opposition between Spirit and Nature, between freedom and necessity. Indeed, the “career” of reality, the teleological movement of history, represents the gradual and continuous unfolding of the Spirit, of the Idea of freedom.