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CHAPTER 6
WESTERN PHILOSOPHY (5)
HEGEL
We are going to repeat with Hegel the same operation we did with the previous philosophers. Initially Hegel moves within the same horizon of Descartes, Leibniz and Kant. Hegel explicitly says he wishes to apprehensibly obtain the radical structure of things; and he detects that radical structure in the fact that things are created, in the horizon of creation. After all, we must not forget that the great intellectual formation of Hegel was theology and that he was a theologian before he became a pure philosopher. Theology, on the one hand, and the philosophy of Kant on the other, weighed on his spirit in different proportions, with an advantage always on the side of theology.
Hegel places himself, therefore, on this horizon of creation. From this vantage point we have to ask, above all, what was the problem of Hegel. Afterwards, we shall have to ask how did Hegel unravel this problem.
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§ 1
THE PROBLEM OF HEGEL. HORIZON OF NOTHINGNESS.
THE ABSOLUTE AND REASON.
On the horizon of creation, on the horizon of nothingness medieval philosophy and theology underlined in the first place the intrinsic finitude of being. In Descartes we saw something different, the uncertainty of the knowing subject. Somewhat later, Leibniz placed possibility ahead of reality. Kant places objectuality first, ahead of things-themselves.
Facing this development of philosophy, which Hegel knows quite well, he is fully aware that this way of facing things on the horizon of nothingness is quite inadequate. First, because in all these conceptivations what draws our attention immediately is the moment of production of things since, actually, things is what has been produced by the divinity out of nothing. But the very moment of production is always left behind, since things are there. For Hegel this is improper, with respect to things or with respect to God.
With respect to things, because they are not just what they are. Hegel simply affirms that what belongs to things formally and intrinsically is their characteristic of being produced, the fact that they come from God. One might think that this is a gratuitous affirmation on the part of Hegel. But perhaps it may not be so much if we consider that traditional theology, which Hegel knew, has had schools of thought where they considered that in created being the relation of creation belongs categorially to {249} created entity as such. Regardless whether he knew it or not, what is certain is that Hegel agrees with this thought. Created things do not leave behind their moment of production, but rather their having been created. Therefore, the one that produces them belongs in one form or another to the type of the very entity of things.
Hegel will think the same way about God, something much more problematic. For Hegel, God is the beginning of things, and as such in one way or another the things of which He is the beginning belong to Him. We do not know God except as Creator and as such He does not receive His concretion except with respect to the things He has created. Therefore, in a sense that at the same time is different and unitary, things belong to God as much as it belongs to things to have been produced by God. Consequently strictly speaking what Hegel sees on the horizon of Creation is the unity of God and things. This is what Hegel calls the absolute (das Absolute). This is the horizon of finitude Hegel sees.
However, there is a difference. While for the previous philosophies the horizon of nothingness discovered something for them —the intrinsic finitude of entity, uncertainty, etc.—, the horizon of Creation discovers nothing special for Hegel, except that the very horizon is formally the absolute. With this, Hegel installs himself on this horizon with a radicalism not equaled by the previous philosophies, at least apparently.
Putting it in Hegelian terms, the absolute is at the same time beginning and resulting end. If it were not this way, the beginning would be a vague generality. Nothing is beginning —and much less in the case of God— unless by being the concrete beginning of these particular things; anything else as Hegel says would be a vague generality similar to pretending having already written a zoology {250} when we say “all animals”. The absolute is beginning as much as resulting end, and therefore, this absolute is the all (das Ganze).
In the second place, Hegel wants to apprehend that all in its truth. He expressly tells us that philosophy when facing the absolute has to avoid the temptation of being edifying; philosophy has to be a rational and intellectual apprehension of this, which is the absolute and the all. Truth is the all, and the all is truth.
Therefore, a limine Hegel is going to orient the problem of truth towards the problem of reason. While truth in Descartes was left oriented towards evidence, in Leibniz towards unity, and in Kant towards objectuality, Hegel is going to orient the problem of the truth of everything towards reason. Therefore, the absolute reverts upon truth and the truth reverts upon reason. What Hegel wishes to apprehend is the all in its rational truth. That apprehension of the all in its rational truth constitutes the entire problem of his philosophy.
Of course, this is quite an obscure formula. To clarify it is the stepping march of the problem of the philosophy of Hegel.
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§ 2
THE STEPPING MARCH OF THE PROBLEM
Hegel is forced to explain to us:
1) what does he understand by reason, that towards which the very structure of the absolute and the all point to;
2) what is the internal structure of that reason;
3) how is reason actually the beginning of things;
The first question is the subject of Phenomenoloy of Spirit. The second is the subject of The Science of Logic. The third is the way he undertakes in the Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences. Let us follow, then, this triple step of Hegel, not in order to make a summary of his philosophy, but to search, in a very synthetic way, the essential concepts of the matter.
I. The discovery of reason.
From conscience to absolute knowledge.
What is reason? We have seen that the formula in which Hegel frames his problem is “everything in its rational truth”. Therefore, if Hegel wishes to tell us what is truth he must present in first place what is the truth of the absolute. In the second place, what is the reason that holds that truth. In the third place, how do we reach that concept of truth.
Therefore, let us take the first point.
In his Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel tells us that the answer is, at first sight, quite simple. After all, it has been more or less the way traditional philosophy, including Kant’s, has posed the problem of {252} knowledge. On the one hand, we have the known thing; on the other, the subject that knows it. In other words, on the one hand, we have an absolute; on the other hand, an act of knowing —of any type— in which we know the truth of that which is absolute; on the one hand, then, the absolute; on the other hand, reason.
But then, Hegel estimates this is absolutely false. It is so, for a variety of reasons, which are basically two. In the first place, it is false because of something general. No act of knowledge, according to Hegel, is structured by that dualism we have just described.
In the act of knowledge those two factors are always involved, the thing and the knowledge (or the intellectual activity, regardless of how it is called). Depending on the preponderance we may give to one or the other, we shall have an idealist philosophy or a realist one. For example, Hegel does not doubt in qualifying the entire Kantian philosophy as a grand idealism, and in his Science of Logic primarily he repeats ad nauseam that Kantian philosophy is moving in pure subjectivity (Kantische Philosophie ist die reine Subjetivität). The reason is because the thing in itself (Ding an sich), according to what Hegel clearly says, is a phantasm (ist eine Gespenst). This phantasmagoric characteristic of the thing in itself is what Hegel wishes to overcome in the stepping march of his whole philosophical enterprise. Truth not only involves the thing, but also my knowledge of it. It is not enough that a thing may materially and brutally be true, but it is necessary that the understanding, which has understood something with truth, may know that this is actually true. Therefore, truth involves, at one and the same time, things and the knowledge of them; and truth is at one and the same time —not because of an external coupling— thing and knowledge. This is something that concerns every knowledge, regardless of the type.
{253} But the issue becomes more difficult if what we wish to know is precisely the absolute. Then Hegel has to reject two concepts of the knowledge of the absolute1.
Above all, Hegel tells us there is a conception according to which whoever thinks he can know the absolute, believes he has a mental organon with which to achieve knowledge of the absolute. It is an organon, that is, an instrument (Werkzeug) by which we apprehend that which is there, precisely the absolute. According to Hegel, this instrumentalist theory of reason is completely insufficient in the case of the absolute, much more so than in the case of any other knowledge. If it were the case of an organon that captures the absolute and extracts the truth for the sake of reason, then reason would not have the absolute, but only the elaboration of the absolute by that instrument, which my reason is. It will be possible to load on the result as many notes as desired to account for the known; that will never be the absolute, but that which has been elaborated as absolute by a reason conceived as instrument in order to know the absolute.
There is another conception by virtue of which reason would not be an instrument, but the medium by which the thing is known. It would be like a light under which one sees things and knows them; in this particular case, reason would be the light under which we know the absolute. But Hegel replies that, in this case, we would not know the absolute, but just that light; that is, it would cease being the absolute.
Regardless of the way we approach the question, we cannot start from a separation of reason and the absolute, whether we {254} suggest an instrumentalist conception of reason or produce a conception where reason might be considered as mediating. In none of these two cases we would be reaching the absolute. Hegel could have concluded that then we do not know the absolute. But what Hegel says is just the opposite; the case is that there is no such dualism, that the absolute is its own truth. Anything that is absolute is true by being absolute and inasmuch as it is absolute; at the same time only the true is absolute. Here we have a conversion, which is not the conversion of intelligibility with being or the conversion of truth with unity or otherness. It is something more; it is not conversion, but the radical and unitary constitution at one and the same time of the thing with my knowledge about it. In other words, the result will be that my knowledge of the absolute —the truth— is not the truth about the absolute, but is the absolutely true, truth in its absolute characteristic.
This is fine, as long as Hegel tells us what “at one and the same time” is. That is the second step.
What is “at one and the same time”?
In order to answer this question, Hegel examines the problem with brevity and precision from two perspectives. On the one hand, doing it from the part of the thing, that is, the very absolute; on the other, doing it from the part of what my certainties and my certain knowledge are with respect to that absolute.
Let us take the question from the part of certainties. When do we say that my certainty is true, i.e., that I have a knowledge or a certainty that is authentic, true, and may respond precisely to what it has to be as knowledge? The answer is clear, when actually that certainty responds in its internal structure to the very concept we have of what a true knowledge has to be.
Let us examine the question from the part of things. When {255} do we possess or say we possess the absolute truth with respect to something? When that thing is actually authentic in the sense that responds to its own essence. But then, the essence in this case is the concept.
Taking the question from any position we come to the same point, the intrinsic unity between certainty and reality, that is to say, the formal structure of truth as absolute is the concept. The two moments are identical; in the concept there is an identity between certainty and truth (zwishen Gewissheit und Wahrheit), as Hegel has been saying constantly in all his works. True certainty is true because it gives me what an object has to give me that manifests itself in its truth. The object is true precisely because it responds to its concept. In both cases, the unitary identity of truth and certainty is the concept. Due to this, Hegel will affirm that to say that to things belongs “at one and the same time” their truth and their certainty is equivalent to saying that the absolute truth is the concept. For Hegel, the concept is formally the verum transcendentale, the transcendental truth. Precisely because of that transcendental characteristic, we have “at one and the same time” the truth of my certainty and the truth of the thing. The concept is the identity of certainty and truth, and this identity in the concept is what for Hegel defines reason.
Reason is at one and the same time reason for the identity of the thing and reason for my knowing it. It is not an organon, but the seat of conceptivation, of the concept. Consequently, for Hegel, reason is the very absolute truth, the very all in its truth. Here, it is not the case of the reason “of” the absolute, but of “the” absolute reason, which is a different thing. As he says in his Phenomenology of Spirit, the concept is the certainty {256} that reason is the whole reality2. This affirmation may seem somewhat exorbitant and although perhaps it is not that much it needs a clarification.
Hegel tells us, as we have just seen, that reason is the whole reality, that is, that it is at one and the same time the concept of thing and my certainty of its truth. Then, it will be necessary for Hegel to tell us what he understands by concept. What concept is he talking about? Afterwards, he will have to explain what does it mean that the concept is the reality, not only of the thing, but also of my certainty.
After this, no one will find it strange that for Hegel a concept is not a representation. All the way up to and including the philosophy of Kant the idea that concepts are intellectual representations of things was still circulating. Clearly, a representation is a second presentation of a thing that already present in a first presentation, returns to be present in a second act; this way, the intelligible and intellectual re-presentation of something would be the concept. However, this has nothing to do with the Hegelian idea of concept because it is not the case of knowledge about the absolute, but of absolute knowledge in itself. Again, therefore, what does Hegel understand by concept?
Let us orient ourselves in traditional philosophy. Traditional philosophy (primarily the medieval, but not only this one) always distinguished in concepts two distinct and perfectly separable aspects. On the one hand, we call concept, for example, to a circumference, and we say we have the concept of circumference. Here, concept means “objective concept”, what the terminus of the intellectual act is whereby we conceive what a circumference is. Obviously, this {257} objective concept is identical in all men, in all that understand these words and agree about their thinking in such fashion that all geometers of the planet essentially have the same concept of circumference. This is what a scholastic would call conceptus objectivus, but the term also has a different sense in traditional philosophy. With respect to this second sense, concept is the act of conceiving, and then, it is not the case of an objective concept, but of the act by which my mind is conceiving the objective concept. It is what scholastics called the formal concept, which obviously, is multiplied in each of the minds and each time a mind produces that same objective concept. They are, therefore, two completely different things; one is the formal concept and the other the objective concept. The circumference is not part of me, but the act of conceiving it is definitely part of me. Therefore, is Hegel talking about objective concepts or formal concepts?
The truth is that he is not talking about them because he is talking about both of them at one and the same time. Here is where the question may appear to be quite artificial and perhaps it is not that much. Suárez, who is not a Hegelian, at the beginning of his metaphysics, and talking about the concept of entity, distinguishes between the formal concept and the objective concept. He affirms we do not know things except through objective concepts, although some can be known through formal concepts because to know things through formal concepts —and by just one formal concept— is something exclusive to God3. Hence, this is the idea that is going to provide unity to the thought of Hegel. It is not the case of {258} taking, on the one hand, the formal concept and on the other the objective concept, but the objective concept insofar as emerging precisely from the very type and the very act of the formal concept. This is what Hegel calls —at least this is the way I interpret his phrase— the conceptivizing (Sp. concipiente) thinking (das begreiffendes Denken)4. Conceptivizing thinking is formal thinking, not simply as act of my mind, but as producing the objective terminus, the objective stepping out of the formal. Conceptivizing thinking is, at one and the same time, what is going to draw us nearer to God. It is the case of the objective concept, of what objects are, insofar as they step out of my conceptivizing activity. Because of this, to conceive is not for Hegel simply a formal act of neither the subject, nor also a creation ex nihilo of things. “To conceive —he tells us— is the activity of the very concept”5. This is what the case is all about, not that a subject may have the activity of conceiving, but that the concept, taken unitarily, is in itself a living thing, whose activity is precisely to conceive (das begreiffendes Denken).
Concepts are, for Hegel, something provided with life, each one partially, but authentic. Hegel is not the man that plunges into the depths of the great formal abstractions, the supreme abstractions; that would be to observe the philosophy of Hegel from the outside, the saddest thing that can happen to any philosophy. For Hegel, concepts are living units, moments of an organism that is molding itself precisely in its conceptivizing characteristic, in its characteristic of begreiffende. Hegel is the master who has given life to concepts, {259} who has seen concepts as life, as vital units.
The concept, in that unity of his, is precisely what Hegel understands by reason. Reason is the life of the concept, a life that does not consist in only enunciating abstract characteristics of the apprehending act, but in something more radical and profound, which is what Hegel calls “the effort of the concept” (Die Anstrengung des Begriffes). The concept has an inner “effort”, to reach what?
This is the second moment of the question. Hegel will have to tell us not only what he understands by concept, but also what he understands by is when we say that the concept “is” the absolute and the reality. What does Hegel understand by being?
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1 G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, Hrg. G. Lasson, 2nd. Ed., Leipzig, Meiner, 1921, pp. 52 ff. (Sp. tr. by X. Zubiri, Hegel, Fenomenología del espíritu: Prólogo e Introducción. Saber absoluto, Madrid, Rev. de Occidente, 1935, p. 104)
2 “Die Vernunft ist die Gevissheit des Bewusstseins”, G. W. F. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes, ed. cit. p. 156.
3 F. Suárez, Sobre el concepto de ente (On the concept of entity), tr. by X. Zubiri, Madrid, Rev. de Occidente, 1935, pp. 17 ff.
4 Cf. G. W. F. Hegel, Wissenschaft der Logik (Philosophy of Logic), Hrg. G. Lasson. Erster Teil, Leipzig, Meiner, 1923, “Einleitung”, p.23.
5 “Hier ist begreiffen, die Tätigkeit des Begriffs selbst”, G. W. F. Hegel, Die Vernunft in der Geschichte. Einleitung in diePhilosophie der Weltgeschichte, Hrg. G. Lasson, 3 Aufl., Leipzig, Meiner, 1930, p. 3.