Jacques
Maritain Center
1 The Way towards the Blessed Life, Lecture XI, in The Popular Works of Johann Gottlieb Fichte, trans. by W. Smith, 4th ed., London, 1889, Vol. 11, p. 494. Cf. p. 445 (Lecture IX): "So long as man still desires to be something on his own account, the True Being and Life cannot develop itself within him, and hence he likewise remains inaccessible to Blessedness; for all personal, individual Being is but Non-Being, and limitation of the True Being."
2 Preface to The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. by J. B. Baillie, 2nd ed., New York: Macmillan, 1931, p. 79; London: Allen and Unwin, 1931. As a general rule, the title of the work to which we will refer in the following notes will be given in English when the citation is taken from the English translation, and in German when the citation is taken from the German text. Unless otherwise specified, these latter are taken from Hegel, Sämtliche Werke (hereafter called Werke), ed. G. Lasson, 21 vols., Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1920-1940.
"The Absolute is Mind (Spirit) -- this is the supreme definition of the Absolute. To find this definition and to grasp its meaning and burthen was, we may say, the ultimate purpose of all education and all philosophy: it was the point to which turned the impulse of all religion and science and it is this impulse that must explain the history of the world." The [121] Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences, Hegel's Philosophy of Mind, # 384, trans. by W. Wallace, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1894, p. 7.
See also the Preface to The Phenomenology of Mind, on the true as subject, pp. 80 ff. (cf. below, ch. VIII, p. 150, note 1).
At this point we meet a great difficulty in vocabulary. Hegel says that the Absolute is der Geist; now in the English translations of Hegel's work, it is customary to translate geist by mind. This is in my opinion quite questionable. In reality geist means both mind and spirit.
As James Collins observes in his excellent A History of Modern European Philosophy, "The very term Geist enjoys a strategic ambivalence, since it signifies what we mean by both 'mind' and 'spirit'. As Hegel employed the term, it is not so one-sidedly cognitive and contemplative in import as 'mind', and not so exclusively associated with the immaterial and religious spheres as 'spirit'. Geist includes will and the passions, along with the knowing powers; it embraces the structure of the material world and the whole range of man's secular interests, as well as his religious attitude and his direction toward immaterial goods. The term has the further advantage of applying to both the human mind and the divine spirit. It suggests both that the human mind is an aspect of the divine spirit and that the divine spirit is fully rational and self-conscious." A History of Modern European Philosophy, Milwaukee: Bruce Publishing Co., 1954, pp. 609-610. Yet the metaphysical connotation of spirit has more importance in the Hegelian system than the psychological connotation of mind. So that James Collins himself, and quite rightly in my opinion, uses the word spirit preferably to the word mind. And so shall I.
1 At least assuming that the thing-in-itself may ever be truly liquidated -- I am speaking in regard to the real functioning of the intellect. Here is the root of ambiguity in every idealist metaphysics. In the exercise (repressed) of the intellect the Hegelian Thought itself, even as it abolishes the thing-in-itself in the system, plays the part, despite all, of that same thing-in-itself, which the intellect, be it against its will or without admitting it, cannot get along without.
2 Thus the absolute Idealism of Hegel returns in a way to realism (in this sense that nature, history and the world -- but as manifestations of the development of Thought -- have a consistence independent of our knowing activity as thinking subjects). What the spirit of the Sage (or the Spirit in the Sage) thinks is just what the Spirit, in the circular process wherein it thinks itself discursively, does as nature, history and the world, and is as Logos.
1 For a detailed discussion, which would be out of place here, of the relation between the Hegelian Reason and the Kantian "unity of apperception", and more generally between the positions of Kant and those of Hegel, cf. The Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences , The Logic of Hegel, # 40-60, trans. by W. Wallace, 2nd ed., Oxford Univ. Press, 1892, and Jean Hyppolite, Logique et Existence, Essai sur la Logique de Hegel, Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1953 (especially pp. 69-118 and 167-208). Some very just observations on this question are to be found in James Collins' A History of Modern European Philosophy.
2 This is why finite reason and infinite Reason can be reconciled. Cf. R. Kroner, Von Kant bis Hegel, Tübingen, 1924, II, p. 403: "The finite or phenomenal spirit is itself only the becoming of the absolute spirit, the absolute spirit becoming conscious of itself." -- The reference to the God-Thought of Aristotle was underlined by Hegel himself, who concludes the Encyclopaedia with a citation from Book XII, ch. 7, of the Metaphysics.
Alexandre Kojève has understood very well that the Spirit for Hegel is Discourse and Power of abstracting or separating (Scheiden) just as the human spirit (cf. A. Kojève, Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, Paris: Gallimard, 1947, pp. 538-549, dealing with a very characteristic passage from the Preface to the Phenomenology). The Spirit "implies human discourse" (p. 536), because Hegel has put Discourse into things; "the Spirit is the Real revealed by Discourse" (p. 546; ef. pp. 528-529). Kojève concludes from this that in reality the Spirit for Hegel is nothing other than Man. "The Spirit, that is to say the Being which manifests itself to itself, is not God but Man-in-the-World" (p. 548). This interpretation, which makes Hegel the great founder of modern atheism, throws a good deal of light on the system; and it has the merit of putting things in an eminently clear and univocal perspective. But just because of this -- without mentioning other considerations (see below, ch. X) -- we cannot regard it as authentically Hegelian. It is in fact essential to Hegelian thought to refuse the simple yes and the simple no (this is why, as soon as it is a matter of a truly philosophical position, Hegel feels assured of the truth of what he expresses only while experiencing the rending and the power of the Negative in his own mental word, and while using a language so stretched by the expanding emphasis as to maintain the No under the Yes and the Yes under the No).
The Spirit for Hegel is the human Reason, yes, but the human Reason deified. It is Man-in-the-World, but it is also and at the same time God; it is God, the Thought of Thought, becoming Himself through and in the Man-in-the-World.
A special difficulty, which deals with the language, must be mentioned immediately. in Latin, in German, in French, there are two different words, cognoscere and scire, kennen and wissen, connaitre and savoir, to designate, on the one hand any kind of more or less imperfect knowing or awareness, and on the other hand that "perfect" or consummate knowing which is demonstrative knowledge. Now in English there is only one word for the two things, namely to know. And this is especially embarrassing in the present case, for our discussion of Hegelian dialectic presupposes the distinction between the act of knowing in the most general sense (sense-awareness, tentative approach, opinion, belief, etc.) and the [123] act of knowing in the strict sense of demonstrative or unshakeably established knowledge, scientia, genuine science. As a result, I would like to stipulate (it's a mere matter of conventional vocabulary) that in the first, broad or undetermined sense, we shall say simply knowing, whereas in the second, strict, or consummate sense, we shall say knowledge, or genuine knowledge.
1 Encyclopaedia, Logic, # 181 (Wallace trans.), p. 271.
One would doubtless see this point of doctrine better if one tried to understand why, in a healthy Aristotelian philosophy, it is in logic, not in metaphysics, that the treatise on the supreme genera or categories is to be found. (Substance, quantity, etc., are real beings; but [124] as supreme genera or considered precisely in the condition of generality which they have in the mind, they are the object of the science of discourse, not of the science of the real. And whereas to know the real is to know it through its proper or specific causes, to approach a problem of the real on the contrary by means of a genus generalissimum is to attack the real from the outside, to assay or survey it dialectically, not to know it.)
It is one of the misfortunes of modern philosophy to have forgotten or misconceived this distinction between true knowing and simple dialectical surveying or assaying. Many of Bergson's criticisms of the intelligence bear in fact not on the intelligence but on the purely dialectical use of it. And, to tell the truth, it is with this difference between knowledge and dialectics that the opposition which he so likes to insist on between the thing cut to measure and the ready-made coincides.
1 Should we push this comparison into greater detail? We might say that the fixed equipment of the cabin (logica docens) serves to control the proper functioning of the rational instruments (logica utens), which savants and philosophers make use of at the base of the tower, at the level of the real, to scrutinize things. But some of the apparatus in the cabin is portable and can be taken out on the balcony by the logician, who aims it at things when he wishes (dialectica) to test his ciphers on them and thus to know them in his fashion.
2 In Metaphys., IV, lect. 4, Cathala ed., nos. 573 ff.
1 Cf. our work, A Preface to Metaphysics, New York: Sheed & Ward, 1939, pp. 33 if.; London: Sheed & Ward, 1939.
1 "The Idea in and for itself" (Encyclopaedia, Logic, # 18, p. 28); "the pure Idea; pure, that is, because the Idea is in the abstract medium of Thought" (ibid., # 19, p. 30).
2 "Logic therefore coincides with Metaphysics, the science of things set and held in thoughts -- thoughts accredited able to express the essential reality of things." Ibid., # 24, p. 45. Cf. Hegel's Philosophy of Right, # 31, trans. by T. M. Knox, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1942, p. 34.
3 Jean Hyppolite, Genèse et Structure de la Phénoménologie de l'esprit de Hegel, Paris: Aubier, 1946, p. 554. Cf. ibid., p. 562: "This Logic which is the Absolute's thought of itself is therefore an onto-logic; it reconciles Being (hence its ontic character) and the Logos (hence its logical character); it is Being as Logos and the Logos as Being."
4 Thus "a corpse," Hegel will say for example, "is still an existent, but its existence is no true existence; the concept has left it; and for this reason a dead body putrefies." Philosophy of Right, Addition to # 21 (inserted by Gans from the philosopher's oral teaching), Knox trans., p. 232.
5 Synonym of notion (noêma, conceptus). The Hegelian meaning of Concept (Begriff) is much more specialized. See below, 145-146.
6 Nothing is more suggestive from this point of view than the way Hegel transforms the logical process of the syllogism into the basic "ontic" process of the real in development. Cf. Science of Logic, Book III, last chapter, trans. by W. H. Johnston and L. G. Struthers, London: George Allen & Unwin, 1929, Vol. II; Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, ed. J. Hoffmeister, II, pp. 410-415, in Werke , XVa. A similar operation was performed at the start on the theory of judgment (see below, p. 129, note 2).
1 The great precursors whom Hegel recognizes here are Zeno, Heraclitus, Plato, Kant, Fichte and Schelling. He notes (cf. Encyclopaedia, Logic, # 48) that in the preparation of his own conception of dialectics the Kantian theory of the antinomies of reason played a specially important role. (And in fact Kant had thereby already introduced contradiction into the heart of reason.) But now the antinomy is no longer only in the reason speculating on the object, it is in the object itself, and it completely impregnates both being and knowledge.
Would that an author animated with a true philosophic spirit may some day give us a good History of Dialectics! There are few questions more controverted, and more obscured by the quantity of confused ideas, than those which touch on the nature of dialectics and on the varying conceptions which have been made of it. To limit ourselves to a few very summary remarks, let us say that before coming to no matter what particular theory or conception of it, dialectics can be described in a formula designedly very indeterminate and one whose unity is purely analogical, as a discipline which takes ideas or concepts as its object according as they are linked together and opposed to each other in discourse and which proposes to judge the real by this means.
For Plato, since the separate ideas were the true reality, dialectics was not only, in a very general way, "the reasonable conversation of the mind which has an eye to truth in ideas", as Mr. Blackmur says so well (The Lion and the Honeycomb, New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1955, p. 177; London: Methuen, 1957); dialectics was identified with philosophy and philosophic knowledge. But the reality attained by this knowledge was not itself dialectical, in this sense at least that it was not itself submitted to the logical becoming and to the movement of discourse (the archetypal Ideas were eternal and immutable). And the supreme knowledge was not dialectics, being rather the supra-conceptual union to the One and to the Good.
Aristotle's realism obliged him to distinguish between the idea or the concept as pure sign of the real and pure means of grasping it (prima intentio mentis) and the idea or the concept as object itself reflexively grasped by the mind (secunda intentio mentis). As a result dialectics is no more than a part of logic, and the sort of knowledge of the real which it achieves remains at an impassable distance from true understanding. Aristotle's own texts underline only the more or less secondary aspects of this Aristotelian conception of dialectics (logic of controversy, of critical argumentation, of refutation, reasoning based on the opinion of competent judges or on commonly accepted opinions . . .); it is Thomas Aquinas who has exposed its absolutely essential and characteristic core (commentary on the Metaphysics, Book IV, eb. 2, 1004 b 19-27). We have expounded above this Aristotelian conception as rethought by Saint Thomas. This, in our opinion, is what illumines the whole discussion.
Kant refers to the classical conception of dialectics (logic of controversy). But for him dialectics becomes consubstantial with the activity of Reason. It is the only way whereby judgments can be formulated on the subject of the Ideas of Reason, and this way leads to fundamentally necessary and inevitable antinomies.
With Hegel these antinomies are no longer mere antinomies of Reason, they belong to the real itself (which is Thought). Whence the Hegelian revolution: dialectics is no longer identified simply with philosophical knowledge as in Plato, it passes over to the object, becomes the essence of Reality, which is logical self-movement.
A curious displacement (which doesn't help to clarify ideas) then took place: it is through the notion of internal opposition in the world of things, of self-contradiction of the extramental real, and of self- movement in which the antagonisms immanent to exterior nature are surmounted and reconciled that dialectics will be above all characterized for Hegel's non-idealist heirs. It is thus that Marxism will present itself as a dialectical materialism (see below, ch. X). To be sure, it always uses the oppositions of discourse to account for [128]
the real. But for it the oppositions of discourse are only the "reflection in our brain" of the oppositions of matter.
Let us add that if the formula submitted at the beginning of this note (a discipline which takes ideas or concepts as its object according as they are linked together and opposed to each other in discourse and which proposes to judge the real by this means) satisfactorily expresses the most general idea which one may have of dialectics, one ought to say that it was Descartes, from the fact that for him ideas are the immediate object of the mind (theory of the idea-pictures), who effectively, although without knowing it, impressed a dialectical orientation on his own thought -- and on modern philosophy in general. More and more one will look at the real through the opera glasses of some idea-object (secunda intentio mentis).
1 John, XII, 24.
2 Let us note here, by way of parenthesis, that in the simplest case of logical movement, in the judgment, subjectum et praedicatum sunt idem re, diversa ratione: the subject and the predicate, which are different with respect to the concern or notion, are declared by the mind to be identical with respect to the extra-mental reality, of which these different notions each grasp an aspect. (See our works The Degrees of Knowledge, new trans. by G. B. Phelan, New York: Scribners; London: Geoffrey Bles, pp. 97-98 -- p. 97, last line read "Lask" instead of "Locke" -- and Réflexions sur l'intelligence, Paris: Nouvelle Librairie Nationale, 1924, pp. 68-74.)
If now one abolishes the extra-notional being and makes the world of the real enter the world of logic, one must maintain that in the judgment the subject and the predicate, originally posited as different with respect to the notion, are declared identical with respect to the notion itself as well. In other words the subject will alienate or deny itself in the predicate in order to identify and then to reintegrate the predicate in itself. Thus the Hegelian Concept will be the universal which denies itself while remaining itself -- hence the restlessness which Hegel attributes to it, when he speaks of the "notions in restless activity, which are merely in being inherently their own opposite, and in finding their rest in the whole" (Phenomenology, p. 767). Cf. Hegel, Encyclopaedia, Logic, # 167, p. 300: "all things are a judgment"; and # 171, p. 302: "At first, subject, predicate, and the specific content or the identity are, even in their relation, still put in the judgment as different and divergent. By implication, however, that is, in their notion, they are identical."
3 An-sich-sein.
4 Anders-sein or Für-sich-sein.
5 An-und-für-sich-sein.
If we are looking for more complete elucidations of the famous triad, one of the commentators imbued with the thought of the master who can help us is Alexandre Kojève. The concrete real Being, he writes, "is not only Identity-or-equality-with-itself (Sichselbstgleichheit), but also Being-other (Anderssein) or negation of itself in so far as given and creation of itself in so far as other than this given. . . . Now, to be other than one is (Negativity) while remaining oneself (Identity), or to identify oneself with another while distinguishing oneself from it -- this is at once to be (and to reveal by discourse) as much what one is as what one is not. To become other than one is -- this is to take a position vis-à-vis itself, it is to exist (as one was) for itself (as one is now). . . . The being simply identical, on [130] the contrary, exists only in itself and for others, that is to say, in its identity with itself and by the relations of difference which bind it to the rest of the identical beings in the bosom of the cosmos: it does not exist for itself, and the others do not exist for it.
"Thus, the Being which is at once Identity and Negativity is not only Being-in-itself (Ansichsein) homogeneous and immutable and Being-for-another (Sein für Anderes) fixed and stable, but also Being-for-itself (Fürsichsein) divided into real being and revelatory discourse, and Being-other (Anderssein) in perpetual transformation which liberates it from itself in so far as given to itself and to others."
However, "the (revealed) concrete real Being is neither pure Identity (which is Being, Sein) nor pure Negativity (which is nothing, Nichts), but Totality (which is becoming, Werden). Totality then is the third fundamental and universal onto-logical category. . . . The Being which reaffirms itself in so far as Being identical to itself after having denied itself is neither Identity nor Negativity but Totality. . . . In other words . . . Being is neither Being-in-itself only nor Being-for- itself only, but the integration of the two in Being-in-and-for-itself (An-und-Für-sichsein). This is to say that Totality is Being revealed for Being conscious of itself (which Hegel calls 'absolute Concept', 'Idea', or 'Spirit'). . . . In spite of the Negativity which it includes and presupposes, the final Totality is wholly as one and unique, homogeneous and autonomous, as the first and primordial Identity. ln so far as Result of the Negation, the Totality is just as much an Affirmation as the Identity which has been denied in order to become totality." (A. Kojève, op. cit., pp. 473-475.)
In the course of this process of mediatization of the immediate and of suppression-sublimation (Aufhebung) the Negativity suppresses that which it denies and at the same time conserves it (since it is A, and not anything else, which is denied in non-A) and superelevates it -- according to the three connotations of the word aufheben.
Thus is built the dialectical Knowledge of the Real -- because the Real itself is dialectical, the process of positing itself (Sichselbstsetzens) or . . . mediating (Vermittlung) with its own self its transitions from one state or position to the opposite (Sichanderswerdens). True reality is merely this process of reinstating self-identity, of reflecting into its own self in and from its other (Anderssein). . . . It is the process of its own becoming, the circle which presupposes its end as its purpose (Zweck), and has its end for its beginning; it becomes concrete and actual only by being carried out (Ausfuhrung), and by the end it involves." Preface to the Phenomenology, Baillie, pp. 80-81 (Hoffmeister ed., Werke, Vol.11, p. 20).
1 See below, p. 145, and note 3, p. 145.
[131] 1 Hegel's Science of Logic, trans. by W. H. Johnston and L. G. Struthers, London: George Allen and Unwin, 1929, I, p. 94. "Das Sein, das unbestimmte Unmittelbare, ist in der Tat Nichts, und nicht mehr noch weniger als Nichts" (Lasson ed., I, p. 67 in Werke, III).
2 Cf. E. Gilson, L'être et l'essence, Paris: Vrin, 1948, ch. VII, "The Deduction of Existence." Citing article 51 of the Encyclopaedia (Logic, Wallace trans., p. 109: "For, if we look at the thought it holds, nothing can be more insignificant than being. And yet there may be something still more insignificant than being, -- that which at first sight is perhaps supposed to be, an external and sensible existence, like that of the paper lying before me. However, in this matter, nobody proposes to speak of the sensible existence of a limited and perishable thing.") Gilson correctly writes (op. cit., p. 210): "This doctrine which recognizes nothing more lowly than being, unless this be existence itself, seems to announce the most extreme devaluation of the act of existing that is conceivable."
3 Encyclopaedia, Logic, # 87, p. 162. Ibid., # 87, p. 161.
4 This principle is henceforth only a law of formal thought operating on the empirical level; it still has value for the finite understanding and for the specialized sciences, but in the face of being and concrete thought (which is reason itself, cf. Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, Einleitung, J. Hoffmeister ed., in Werke, XVa, p. 95) its power vanishes.
1 Cf. Encyclopaedia, Logic, # 81, p. 147: "But by Dialectic is meant the indwelling tendency outwards by which the one-sidedness and limitation of the predicates of understanding is seen in its true light, and shown to be the negation of them. For anything to be finite is just to suppress itself and put itself aside (sich aufheben). Thus understood the Dialectical principle constitutes the life and soul of scientific progress, the dynamic which alone gives immanent connexion and necessity to the body of science."
He himself notes in the Encyclopädie (Einleitung, # 5, Lasson's 4th ed., Werke, V, p. 35) that what he proposes is "the translation of the true content of our consciousness into the form of thought and concept". As Emile Bréhier writes (Histoire de la philosophie, Paris: Presses Universitaires, 1949, II, 3, p. 757), "let us not forget that Hegel's philosophy is a 'translation' into speculative language; there must be a text to translate, and this text can be provided only by experience."
3 Encyclopaedia, Logic, # 81, p. 147.
1 On Logic as philosophy of knowledge not yet alienated from itself in nature and history, or as philosophy of the Logos which is the Spirit or the Whole abstracting from itself insofar as Logos, cf. the conclusion ("Phenomenology and Logic"), especially pp. 580-582, of the already mentioned work of Jean Hyppolite, Genèse et structure de la phénoménologie de l'esprit de Hegel.
2 See below, p. 139; ch. VIII, pp. 153-155; ch. IX, pp. 194-196.
3 Cf. our work Raison et raisons, Paris: Egloff, 1947, pp. 95-96. The Range of Reason, New York: Scribners, 1952, pp. 45-46; London: Bles, 1953.
1 Hegel, Philosophy of History, Introd., trans. by J. Sibree [136]
1 Proverbs, VIII, 27.
2 "This content shows forth God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of Nature and of a Finite Spirit." (Wissenschaft der Logik, Lasson ed., I, p. 31, in Werke, III; trans. by W. H. Johnston and L. G. Struthers, Science of Logic, I, p. 60.) The word "creation" is here only a poetic or symbolic way of speaking, an imaginative representation, as Hegel himself says. For it would be "absurd to imagine any causality of the Logos whatsoever which would produce nature" (Jean Hyppolite, op. cit., p. 580).
3 Cf. Karl Barth, Protestant Thought: From Rousseau to Ritschl, New York: Harper & Brothers, 1959, ch. VII, Hegel. "Hegel's philosophy," Barth writes, "is the philosophy of self-confidence." And "Hegel's brand of self-confidence is also confidence in mind [137]
1 Siegfried Marek, "Dialectical Materialism", in A History of Philosophical Systems, edited by Vergilius Ferm, New York: The Philosophical Library, 1950, p. 307.
As Alexandre Kojève, candidly enough, explains in his own perspective of Hegelian atheism, "on first sight it is extremely simple. It suffices to read a handbook of Christian theology . . . in which God is in effect a total and infinite Being, and to say after having read it: the Being in question there -- it is myself. . . . However, even today . . . it is very difficult to affirm it (seriously, that is). And it is a fact that philosophic thought went on for several millennia before a Hegel came forward and dared to say it." (A. Kojève, op. cit., pp. 318-319.)
1 "Man, because he is Spirit, should and must deem himself worthy of the highest; he cannot think too highly of the greatness and the power of his spirit. . . . The Being of the universe, at first hidden and concealed, has no power which can offer resistance to the search for knowledge." Hegel, Lectures on the History of Philosophy, trans. by E. S. Haldane, London, 1892, I, p. xiii (translation modified). "There is only one reason; there is no second, super-human one. It is the divine in man. Philosophy is reason grasping itself under the form of thought . . . ." Vorlesungen uber die Geschichte der Philosophie, Einleitung, J. Hoffmeister ed., Werke, XVa, pp. 123 f. "What we call knowing is not merely knowing that an object is, but also what it is, and not knowing what it is only in general and having a certain knowledge or certainty thereof, but rather having knowledge of its determinations and content, being a knowledge which in its sound and achieved character is conscious of the necessity holding these determinations together." Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, Lasson ed., I, p. 50, in Werke, XII. And it is thus that philosophy knows God, it is thus that "reason is the place of the spirit where God reveals Himself to man". Ibid. , I, p. 49. "De Deo scire non possumus quid sit", said Saint Thomas Aquinas, Sum. theol., I, q. 3, prol. (Cf. our work The Degrees of Knowledge, new trans. by G. B. Phelan, New York: Scribners, 1959; London: Bles, 1959. Appendix III.)
2 Cf. Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, Hoffmeister ed., Werke, XVa, pp. 191-199.
1 Reason "seeks its 'other', while knowing that it there possesses nothing else but itself: it seeks merely its own infinitude". The Phenomenology of Mind, trans. by J. B. Baillie, 2nd ed., New York: Macmillan, 1931; London: Allen and Unwin, 1931, p. 281. "What is not rational has no truth, or what is not comprehended through a notion, conceptually determined, is not. When reason thus speaks of some other than itself, it in fact speaks merely of itself; it does not therein go beyond itself." Ibid., p. 566. It is with the same movement that Hegel renders the irrational consubstantial with reason and proclaims the empire of absolute rationalism.
2 Cf. Jean Hyppolite, op. cit., pp. 143-145; also Paul Asveld, La pensée religieuse du jeune Hegel, Paris: Louvain, 1953.
3 H. Marcuse, Hegels Ontologie und die Grundlegung einer Theorie der Geschichtlichkeit, Frankfurt, 1932. Whatever the value of Marcuse's general theses, this view which he expressed in 1932 is of central interest for us.
4 Phänomenologie, Hoffmeister ed., in Werke, II, pp. 29-30; Baillie trans. p. 93.
1 Differenz des Fichte'schen und Schelling'schen Systems der Philosophie in Erste Druckschriften, G. Lasson ed. (Werke, I), p. 77. I note in passing that this formula, which marks the instant of the self-awakening of Hegel's thought and which signifies for him the irrational in reason, could, in the perspective of transcendence, signify at the summit of being the highest supra-rational truth (but free of all irrationality and able to be assented to by theology without any violation of the principle of contradiction; cf. John of Saint Thomas, Cursus Theologicus, I. P., disp. 12, a. 3, Vivès ed., IV, pp. 52ff.), namely the identity between the identity which is the divine Nature and the non-identity constituted by the three divine Persons, non-identical among themselves.
2 Jean Hyppolite, op. cit., p. 145.
3 Ibid., p. 145.
1 H. Glockner, Hegel, II, p. 566 (a study contained in the 21st and 22nd volumes of the jubilee edition of the Works of Hegel, Stuttgart: Frommann, 1929-1940, reprinted, 1954).
2 Thus R. Kroner has been able to say, op. cit., II, p. 271, that Hegel is "the greatest irrationalist that the history of philosophy knows".
3 In order, therefore, to comprehend Hegel's thought, we believe it necessary to insist on these two fundamental moments: (1) the primordial intuition of the mobility and unrest essential to human life; (2) the invention of dialectics (the dialectics of the Logos) -- that is to say, the transformation of dialectics into knowledge -- in order to express this intuition in the perspective of absolute rationalism.
1 Cf. Jean Hyppolite, op. cit., p. 525, note I.
1 And indeed is not all Begreifen, as stated in chapter VII of the Phenomenology, a species of murder?
2 And more basically (for this applies to the suppositum in general as well as to the person), because it is founded on subsistence, which is added to the essence without forming part of what reason can decipher therein, and which is that whereby the essence, under the creative influx, passes into the state of subject. Cf. our "Note sur la subsistence", Revue Thomiste, 1954, no. 2, 242-256; English trans. in The Degrees of Knowledge, op. cit., Appendix IV, 434-444.
3 Liberty of independence or of autonomy is not only a higher degree of the liberty of spontaneity (libertas a coactione) but differs by nature, essentially -- in virtue of the spirituality which it implies -- from simple liberty of spontaneity.
1 Cf. our work Principes d'une politique hunaniste, Paris: Paul Hartmann, 1944, chap. I, "La conquête de la liberté"; English trans. in Freedom: its Meaning, New York: Harcourt, Brace & Co., 1940, pp. 631-649; London: Allen & Unwin, 1942.
2 Phenomenology, p. 160.
1 For Hegel animal individuality is only a sort of betrayal of the genus (organic life in general being moreover irremediably inadequate for the thought which extraposes itself in it: "The immediacy of the idea of life has the result that the notion as such does not exist in life," Encyclopädie, Naturphilosophie, # 368, trans. from G. Lasson's 4th ed., Werke, V, p. 325). Speaking of the animal as individual, Hegel writes: "Its inadequacy for the universal is its original sickness and the innate germ of its death" (ibid., # 375, p. 331).
The self, on the other hand, is spiritual, it consists in thought. The self of each of us exists as finite and distinct from the universal Self, but it has its substance and its reality in the universal to which it returns, and in the final analysis in the universal Self. One might say that the individual Self is Thought or Subject not yet become concrete Self (God) by a supreme reflection of the fully actualizing and universalizing consciousness. While waiting, it is the veritable Self only insofar as thought thinking the necessary (cf. below, ch. VIII, p. 169, n. 5). Need one be astonished that Hegel accumulates obscurities when speaking of the Self? In fact this is one of the sore points of the system. Who really thinks when I think? If it is the universal Self who thinks in me, then I no longer have any distinct existence as a finite self. And if it is I who really think, then it is the individual Self insofar as finite and contingent which is subject, substance and reality. The two positions are equally untenable in the Hegelian system.
2 Jean Hyppolite, Genèse et structure de la phénoménologie de l'esprit de Hegel, p. 81. Cf. p. 143: "The concept is omnipotence but is such only while manifesting itself and affirming itself in its Other; it is the Universal which appears as the soul of the Particular and is completely determined in it as the negation of negation or authentic Singularity. . . ." See also Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Introd., # 1, trans. by T. M. Knox, p. 14: Philosophy shows "that it is the concept alone (not the mere abstract category of the understanding which we often hear called by the name) which has actuality, and further that it gives this actuality to itself".
3 This concrete Universal, often regarded as Hegel's great discovery, is, to tell the truth, only a being of reason made up of mutually repugnant elements. It is a being of reason cum fundamento in re, its extra-mental foundation is something eminently real: an idea as incarnated in history, more precisely an idea (a universal, but abstract) insofar as by both conscious and unconscious modes it animates and directs concrete and singular (but extramental) formations, for example this or that collective whole (this people, as when one speaks of the spirit of a people; this religious communion, as when one speaks of the genius of Christianity; etc.). It nevertheless remains that the Hegelian concrete Universal itself, conceived as it is in an entirely intra-notional manner, is a patent self-contradiction [146] (the universal-singular), a being of reason of the unthinkable type erected into the rational-and-real, just as the Concept in the Hegelian sense ("That which remains itself in its being-other").
For minds curious about fortuitous rapprochements one may note that there is in Thomism also, but in a wholly different sense, a sort of concrete universal -- that which the angelic intellect uses, and which is not, as ours, a universal abstracted and drawn out of things. Rather it contains in act all its singulars and takes knowledge directly to the singular, because it represents things according as they proceed in their very individuality from the universal causality of God, inasmuch as the infused ideas of the angel are participations of the creative Ideas and attain things by the very ways which make them be, i.e. by the confidence of the Artist (cf. John of Saint Thomas, Cursus Theologicus, disp. 21, a. 3, # 29, Vivès ed., t. IV, p. 755b). But the concrete universal of the angel makes the singular known, while the Hegelian concrete universal is the singular.
1 Cf. Encyclopaedia, Logic, # 164, Wallace trans., p. 295.
2 Jean Hyppolite, op. cit., p. 53, n. 1.
3 In fact, for Hegel, in the epoch of the Roman Empire.
4 Phenomenology, p. 501. "The person is the self devoid of substance" (ibid., p. 645). Cf. Philosophy of History, Sibree trans., Collier, 1901, p. 406: "The living political body -- that Roman feeling which animated it as its soul -- is now brought back to the isolation of a lifeless Private Right. As, when the physical body suffers dissolution, each point gains a life of its own, but which is only the miserable life of worms; so the political organism is here dissolved into atoms -- viz, private persons." [147]
1 Phil. of History, p. 409. Cf. Philosophy of Right, # 35 ff.
2 Phil. of History, p. 420.
3 Ibid., p. 366.
4 Cf. Philosophie der Religion, Lasson ed., in Werke, XII, p. 211. (On contingency, Zufälligkeit, see Encyclopaedia , Logic, # 145, pp. 263 ff.; Wissenschaft der Logik, Lasson ed., in Werke, IV, pp. 171 ff. and Johnston and Struthers trans., II, pp. 174 if.; Beweise vom Dasein Gottes, Lasson ed., in Werke, XIV, lectures 11 and 12.)
5 Phenomenology, p. 227.
1 Phil. of History, Introd., p. 61.
2 "Spirit is self-contained existence (Bei-sich-selbst-seyn). Now this is Freedom, exactly. For if I am dependent, my being is referred to something else which I am not; I cannot exist independently of something external. I am free, on the contrary, when my existence depends upon myself." Ibid., p. 62. "The Will is Free only when it does not will anything alien, extrinsic, foreign to itself (for as long as it does so, it is dependent), but wills itself alone -- wills the Will." Ibid., p. 552.
3 Encyclopaedia, Phil. of Mind, # 381, Wallace trans., p. 6.
4 Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion, Lasson ed., I, p. 170, in Werke, XII.
5 Likewise it is only if one relates it to the aseity of the infinitely transcendent Pure Act and to its infinite liberty of independence, that Hegel's formula -- "Liberty is the truth of Necessity" -- finds a decidedly true meaning. Cf. Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie, Einleitung, ed. J. Hoffmeister in Werke, XVa, p. 116: "We have to say that the spirit is free in its necessity and only in it does it have its freedom, as its necessity consists in its freedom." Is there any need to observe that the attribution of aseity, or the equivalent of aseity, to the self-movement of a spirit which engenders itself and everything else through its losses and recoveries of self is pure absurdity?