Georg Hegel's Philosophy

 

Hegel is probably more quoted than read today, but his dialectic is a forerunner of contemporary interest in metaphor, schemas and the mechanisms of abstract thought. His approach continues to be central to political thought, and in fact provides a useful contrast to science and the preoccupations of the analytical schools of philosophy.

Hegel was a phenomenologist. He thought that categories of being must be developed directly from what appears in our experience (i.e. rather than from supposed a priori structure of the human mind) and he dealt with the antinomies differently from Kant. The latter said these problems arise because we confuse categories of mind with things in themselves. But we can't conceive a finite body, for example, without at some time thinking of an infinite one which forms its boundary, said Hegel, and then we're stuck with an infinite body being limited to a location, which is a contradiction in terms. But it is the mind which conceives of an infinite body, said Kant, and which imposes on nature its own categories of thought. No, thought Hegel: there are many antinomies, which are real but capable of being resolved by combination in a higher category, in this case Being. But since Being is everywhere in one sense, but is by the same token absent everywhere as a distinguishing feature, we must also talk of Nothing. Combining Being and Nothing generates Becoming. So, whereas Kant allowed a rational faith in God who is the author of the world and phenomena as a transcendental hypothesis — hypothesis only, note, since we could never prove his existence — Hegel argued that the transcendental was known to be true.

Kant allowed God as a hypothesis, to reconcile the categorical imperative (treat men as ends rather than means) with the goal of happiness (complete satisfaction of all our inclinations.) An all-powerful and all-knowing God will cause happiness to come to the morally worthy — in time of course, making a soul and/or immortality clearly necessary. Immortality becomes a practical postulate. Soul is the ground of our active and phenomenal life, though we cannot prove its existence. From this we must go on to make the whole of nature purposive. Man alone can act on the conceptions of principles, i.e. direct his behaviour to his own ends, by rules of his own devising. As a moral being man might be the final end of nature, thus acquiring dignity and self-respect which protected him from mere materialism. It was a hypothesis only, but one that captured the imagination of Romantic artists and writers.

Hegel disagreed. He claimed to have shown that the world was teleologically ordered, not as hypothesis but necessarily, logically. How else could the marvellous complexity of the world have originated? But then came evolution, natural selection of the fittest. Hegel had foreseen this, arguing that nature is conditioned by outward circumstances, contingency losing itself in vagueness. But the damage was done: evolution was a much simpler way of looking at things, and idealism gradually faded from the Anglo-Saxon scene, disappearing in England around the time of WWI.

In Europe, however, Hegel continues provides the starting point for many of the twentieth century schools of thought. Before Nietzsche, and perhaps more broadly, Hegel understood the fragmentation and alienation of modern societies. He sympathized with Hölderlin and the classical revival, but also saw that the aesthetic harmony of the Greek city state was not to be recaptured. Like Kant, Hegel based freedom on human reasoning and self-restraint, but felt that Kant's categories of thought were a new Cartesianism, which separated man from his emotional nature. Thought in Hegel is rather abstract, and in reaction to this developed the ideas of Kierkegarde, Heidegger and the French Existentialists. But man's outlook is also a product of his society, and the means by which it supports itself: an outlook Marx was to develop.

 

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Hegel's Philosophy

 

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