{281} (cont’d)
D) Dialectic
It is not enough to say there is a conceptivizing thinking that conceives things. How does it conceive them?
Let us start with an example, the example with which The Science of Logic of Hegel begins and we shall see what we must say about it; this will allow us to make a less arduous presentation. Hegel says that I think with my logos, with my reason and have the concept of being; if I think what being is I find out it is not this, not that; that it is not heavy, not hot, not red, not sonorous, not triangular, not good, not bad... What is it? It is absolute indetermination; {282} in other words, to think being is really equivalent to think of nothing. Because of this, Hegel will say being and nothingness are the same. However, this is impossible, which means that the concept in which I have conceived being has to reassume, in one form or another, the moment we call nothing. The “result” of this resumption —let us use the term “result” at this point in order not to complicate matters— is the occurrence. This motion is what Hegel calls dialectic. The structure of conceptivizing motion is dialectic precisely.
Hegel now has to say with precision what is understood by that dialectic. The life of the logos is dialectic. What does dialectic mean here?
Clearly, dialectics is not what it was, for example, during the whole of medieval times and even just prior to Kant. Dialectics was a kind of discussion of the reasons (dia-légein) through which everyone expressed his own point of view, his own reasons, and one would maintain the “pro” while the other the “contra”. It is said that Abelard was the first one to introduce dialectic in this sense —ut sic et non— within the traditional philosophy of the Middle Ages. But then, dialectic in Hegel is not contraposition of reasons, it is not contraposition of being and nothingness because in every contraposition of reasons there is always the possibility —supposing there is a reason sufficiently potent— able to show that only one of the termini is the truth. The intention of classical dialectics supposes that one of the terms is true and the other is not, and it is a case of eliminating the latter. However, this is not what happens in the dialectic of Hegel.
A second concept of dialectic is the one Hegel has inherited with all the weight of the philosophy of Kant. We saw that in the Kantian philosophy the intent of speculative transcendent metaphysics, proceeds not through practical reason, but as {283} Kant says, through speculative interest, and leads to insoluble antinomies. For example, whether the world is finite or infinite, whether it has had a beginning in time or not, whether matter is infinitely divisible or not. This is dialectic, and for Kant dialectics is formally antinomic. However, this is not the concept Hegel has of dialectic. In the preceding and merely formal example of dialectic, we have the subjacent idea that one of the terms is false and has to be eliminated in favor of the other one that is true. In that case, the purpose of dialectic would be to do something to get rid of the contraposition of reasons. On the other hand, the Kantian dialectic is a kind of intellectual attitude facing the result of the logos, facing the result of reason by pure concepts leading to a contradiction, which leads to an antinomy that cannot be resolved. The antinomy is something designed to remain locked in it.
But Hegel neither eliminates nor remains in the antinomy and precisely here is the origin of the Hegelian dialectic. He does not remain in it, but rather in a certain way he steps out (Sp. se sale) of its termini. Steps out, towards what? We shall soon find out. That “stepping out” is what can be expressed in Spanish when Hegel uses the term Aufhebung. The contradiction is aufgehoben. What does the Hegelian Aufheben mean here? In order to answer it will be necessary to ask the following three questions.
In the first place, what is the beginning of that stepping out?
In the second place, what are the moments of that stepping out?
In the third place, what is the internal structure of that stepping out?
In the first place, what is the beginning of that stepping out. Is contradiction the beginning of that stepping out? We have just seen it, yes and no. Contradiction is the expression of the unsustainable in the determinations of reason, and it is unsustainability by inadequacy. Here the moment of non-being intervenes, the mé ón {284} as Plato would call it; that negativity of the real, as Hegel calls it, is what forces reason to continue its conceptive process. It is a negativity that consists in reality not being adequately conceived by the predicates of reason and Hegel calls this “the enormous power of the negative” (Die ungeheurige Macht des Negative). Contradiction is nothing but the radical expression of that restlessness, but it is not that which formally constitutes the motion of conceptivizing thinking, as we have seen. Contradiction only appears when the steps become static moments, and therefore, they appear as sufficient realities each one in itself. Let us recall this is somewhat similar to what happened with the paradoxes of Zeno. Zeno thinks that we cannot go from here to there in a continuum because first I have to pass through the middle point. Being a continuum, before passing through the middle point I must pass through another middle point between this point and the initial point, and so on. Since the continuum is divisible ad infinitum I would never be able to take the first step. This is true if we assume the continuum is a series of pillars and assume we take a first step from here to there; the second from there to the next, and so on. But the continuum is not that, it is precisely the opposite; we just go through without stopping on the middle point, which is clearly passed over. Zeno’s paradox appears when the continuity of the motion is converted into an addition of each of the points that constitute that trajectory. Indeed, the same thing happens here, the contradiction only appears the moment I consider as quiescent and static termini those things that are only but aspects and moments of the motion.
After this is understood we have a question, what are the internal and structural moments of this stepping out from the restlessness or the {285} contradiction? We can use the term “contradiction” in order to simplify the problem, because after what we have just said there will be no confusion. All manuals of the History of Philosophy say that Hegel “placed” as moments the thesis, the antithesis and the synthesis; in accordance with this, there is a thesis, afterwards we have something contrary to it such as the antithesis, and there is a third moment, which is the synthesis. It is to the synthesis that Hegel actually aims with the term aufheben, “stepping out of”. Now is the time of making this term more precise, which does not have a univocal sense in German and here is where the difficulty resides1. In the first place, there is a first sense according to which aufheben consists in eliminating or removing whatever is in the way. This is what happens in the logical dialectic; if there are two postures, the thesis and the antithesis, it is assumed that the one with the right reason removes the other, and in that sense aufheben means tollere, to remove. But, as we have seen, this is not what Hegel intends in his dialectic.
The term aufheben has a second sense. It consists, for example, that if there is incompatibility between two functions, aufheben would consist in suppressing the incompatibility, and with this the two terms would be preserved in the new situation. In this case aufheben does not mean tollere it would mean conservare. But this is still not the full sense of the Hegelian dialectic, which is something more than that.
Now the third sense of the verb aufheben appears, which means to raise, to lift up, heben auf. It is precisely elevare, the sense of “elevating”, and here is where the “surmounting” resides. This is the moment of the Hegelian dialectic, aufheben as “to surmount”. The two terms, the thesis and the antithesis {286} are not eliminated in the sense of tollere, are not preserved purely and simply in the sense of the Kantian quiescent antinomy, but they remain after having been surmounted. Where? Precisely in the synthesis. Aufheben is to surmount; we step out of the antithesis with respect to the synthesis by surmounting.
Then the third question appears. It is necessary for Hegel to tell us what he understands by that synthesis. It is not that simple to explain what a synthesis is. Probably this idea may have come to Hegel from the Kantian philosophy. Against the Leibniz position, Kant has used ad nauseam the idea that reason is essentially and constitutively synthetic. Yes, but what does Hegel understand by synthesis and what did Kant understand by it?
Independently of Kant —we shall immediately return to this point—, one thing is clear, that the synthesis of Hegel is not a deduction. It is not the case of establishing two premises —a thesis and a synthesis— and making a conclusion from them, whatever it may be. That would not be aufheben, but to deduce, and the Hegelian dialectic is not a deductive synthesis, rather in a certain way it is just the opposite.
The opposite has been part of philosophy since the time of Plato. When Plato talked about the knowledge of ideas he understood that ideas separated from things can be studied intellectually in two ways. One way is to take ideas as the suppositions on which the real world is resting. Then, trying to see —here the deduction appears— as a dianoeín, and by a kind of review of the intelligence through these ideas, what the structure of real things in the world is, the structure of the world that can be known through the senses. Here the ideas are precisely hypóthesis, that is, hypothesis, not in the logical sense of scientific hypothesis, but insofar as primary suppositions from which {287} the real world is understood. However, internal problems of the Platonic metaphysics —this is not the place to consider that— force Plato to move to a second point of view. After all, ideas are many, although Plato may not say how many or which ones, but certainly many. Then, we can think about things, not by taking ideas as points of departure in order to understand things, but can do just the opposite, to think about multiple ideas as problematic termini of the ideal constitution of things. In this case, it is not a question of descending from ideas to things, but of returning or ascending from ideas to that which constitutes the supreme reason for the ideas, to something that will be absolute. In the Republic of Plato there is the idea of toû agathoû, the idea of the good. In some other dialogs the question is handled differently —it makes no difference—, but it is always the case of ascending from ideas to that which constitutes the ultimate reason for that absolute characteristic they possess. This is what Plato called dialectic, dialégein; it is not a dialectic that descends from ideas to things, but the difficult process that starting with some ideas leads us through these ideas to that which is absolute, to that which constitutes their primary and radical unity. The dialectic here is ascensional and not descendent.
We might then think that this is the Hegelian dialectic. Yes, but only as long as the synthetic reason of Kant does not interfere. Because actually, Kant not only would not deny what we have just said, but explicitly hints to it in the last part of The Critique of Pure Reason. However, the synthesis of Kant, in good measure, above all for most of what concerns us here, is exactly what the term synthesis says, that it is a reunification; in other words, the unity of synthesis is the result of the reunification of the synthesized things. Nevertheless, the Hegelian ascension does not share that characteristic. It is not {288} a synthesis by association or by reunification, but is a regression with a completely different characteristic. Because it is not a resulting synthesis of the termini that it synthesizes, but the germinal and previous unity that has expanded naturally into two termini, which are the termini that in quiescence appear to us as antithetical. It is an originative and originating synthesis. This is the reason why the synthesis of Hegel is not a resulting synthesis, but an originative and starting synthesis. It is not the case of a kind of trick by which this unity is hidden under these termini, but that these termini are absolutely necessary. For what? Precisely to have that the originative synthetic unity may formally exist as such a synthetic and originative unity. In other words, dialectic thinking is “circular thinking” and here Hegel would repeat what he told us at the beginning of his philosophy, the absolute is at the same time beginning and resulting end. The synthesis is the primary principle of the diversity of the termini, thesis and antithesis. It is through the thesis and antithesis that the synthesis returns. To what, to result in a synthesis that did not exist before? No, to be more fully what it was before, to be precisely a result of itself. Consequently, the synthesis, a dialectic motion of Hegelian thought consisting in being the beginning and the resulting end, is an idea that although not formulated entirely this way really constitutes the quintessence of the whole metaphysics and the whole philosophy of Hegel. The dialectic motion is an auto-conformation, a kind of enormous auto-morphism in which a form is auto-conforming itself. Therefore, it is not the result of those termini in which it conforms itself; but without them it would not have the fullness of what it actually is.
That is why Hegel applies here the Aristotelian concept of entelécheia; it is the télos, but a télos that was already included in the arché. Therefore, the whole motion does nothing {289} but explicate and expose the entelechical (Sp. enteléjico, Zubiri neologism) characteristic, the characteristic of entelécheia, which precisely has the fullness of the origin of synthesis. The conceptivizing thinking of Hegel is not lineal thinking, but essentially circular, cyclic and in this resides the auto-morphic characteristic of everything the thinking contains.
Because of this, the essence of dialectic is the type of motion of absolute reason. We should understand that this motion of absolute reason is precisely that constant position of the different termini, that by differentiation of the unity —here the first characteristic surfaces— begin appearing as thesis and antithesis and remain aufgehoben, that is, remain surmounted. Surmounted in what? In that from which they never separated, that is, in the primary and original unity from which they proceeded. This is why Hegel tells us that being and nothingness are two abstractions; the only thing that is concrete is the occurrence. Motion itself is the motion in which the absolute consists.
All this is a somewhat monotonous effort, but I believe it is necessary in order to understand what this man attempted, one of the few in history that have been capable to live with the experience of conceptivizing thinking. This man must have lived a life of pure continuous joy because at every moment he must have had the intimate, unquestionable fruition of intellective knowing; that he made some errors is a different question.
Having said in what the structural characteristic of reason consists, we now must ask Hegel, in what does the structural characteristic of the dialectic motion consist?
{290}
2. The processable characteristic of reason. From being to idea.
The structural stepping march of reason —Hegel tells us— is logic, which for him is not a philosophical discipline together with the rest of them, but the very essence of the logos, the essence of reason insofar as it is precisely absolute reason. Because of this, logic is not a science of the absolute, but is the absolutely absolute, the absolute form of the absolute. The absolute, as we shall see, may assume very diverse forms, but the absolute will always be the absolute, which does not mean logic may have always known it. To know the absolute as absolute is not to have in front of my logos a thing that may be the absolute, but is that the absolute may acquire that full form of identity with itself, which absolute “knowledge” is. That is why Hegel will say that logic is nothing but the exposition of the spirit of God.
Therefore, to ask what the absolute is, for Hegel it only has one reply, to expound logic per longum et latum. Logic is precisely the exposition, the answer to the question of what the absolute is. Of course, this logic has to address the fact that it has a beginning, a development, and a final point.
In what does the beginning (Anfang) consist? The beginning can be extrinsic to a thing, but Hegel tells us that something cannot be expounded, as those who have to explain things do, when we forced to assume a starting point that perhaps is extrinsic to what we are talking about. On the contrary, Hegel understands by beginning that particular start, which is the one that responds to the principial (Sp. principial, Zubiri neologism from Lt. principium) and intrinsic characteristic. We should start from that, which is the very beginning of things. This is more complicated than the former. It presupposes a search for the very beginning of thinking, for the {291} conceptivizing thinking (des begreiffenden Denkens). Since the logical is something that belongs to this conceptual thinking we can say it is pure knowing (ein reines Wissen)2. Then, it will be necessary to ask what it is. In what does that first step of pure thinking consist?
Hegel expounds this question from different angles. For example, the first step, which is the one he is concerned with consists in saying that reason (Vernunft), conceptivizing thinking, conceives something that is. This is being precisely. We have already seen how this eventually leads to saying that being is the same as nothingness. Not because they may be formally identical (Hegel has never said this), but because they are the two motives, which remain surmounted (aufgehoben) or were surmounted precisely in their concretion, which is the occurrence. Being and nothingness are contradictories taken as separated termini, something that never happens in the logos because there they are only moments of something superior and primary, which is the occurrence. And actually, Hegel tells us it will be sufficient to think that being is not a determination yet and in that sense it is nothingness. We could also begin with nothingness, but then it would not be the nothingness that is simply nothing, but the nothingness of Creation, a nothingness out of which something is going to come out, out of which being is going to come out. In other words, a nothingness ordered towards being. In the end, regardless how we take the question we find that being and nothingness are the two concrete moments of something unique which is the occurrence, “the occurrence is the first concrete thought, and therefore, the first concept with respect to which being and nothingness are empty abstractions”3. Hegel {292} remains, therefore, in the dialectic of being and non-being, in the internal and dialectic concretion of the occurrence. Out of this dialectic he is going to bring out by the same procedure everything that has been called metaphysics, ontology and classical metaphysics for which Hegel uses the Kantian expression “the metaphysics of the objective concept” although applied to a different object. Here metaphysics strictly speaking is not the transcendent metaphysics of Kant, but ontology. Through an inner course, which we shall not cover here, we get to a point in which the whole world, being, essence, reflection, the set of objective forms and the set of objective concepts appear in a subjective way in the form of subjective concept. This has only been taken up by formal logic as something different from reality.
What does Hegel understand from the point of view of dialectic by the appearing of the subjective world? Hegel is very clear and very thematic, never starts from a dualism, but follows the dialectic motion and if the subjective concept appears it is because of an internal and dialectic motion of the objective concept. This internal and dialectic motion is something very precise and particular, it is interiorization, the concept is interiorized. The process of “interiorization” is called Er-innerung, which has the general meaning of “remembrance”, but for Hegel it does not have the meaning of remembrance, but the etymological sense of interiorization. Precisely in that interiorization there is a moment of remembrance and here Hegel might appeal to the Platonic anámnesis, that to know is to remember. He might appeal to a Platonic anámnesis because in that interiorization the subjective concept manifests itself as remembrance, in other words, as something it originally {293} was and the very subjective concept does not apprehend it yet in its totality. Because of this, it has to continue the dialectic motion until this concept reaches its final terminus.
This final terminus is precisely the concept, which knows itself adequately that it is not only identity of truth and certainty, but also knows adequately that it is that identity. The concept that knows itself in that manner is precisely what Hegel calls “idea”. Having reached this point, let us think about what we had mentioned above when referring to the difference between the formal concept and the objective concept, which we did not explain at that time leaving it for this moment. Suárez —if I remember correctly repeating Fonseca4— says that to know all possible and real things by only one formal concept is exclusive to the divinity5. This is exactly the absolute reason of Hegel. The idea of Hegel is the reason that knows itself as formal conceptivizing act of its own reality and that of things6. From this point of view, the metaphysics of Hegel certainly involves a moment of identity of human reason with divine reason, but also a moment of diversity. The finitude of human reason resides in the fact that it is not the idea yet. It reaches the idea painfully in an intellective act, and in addition, this reason has a manifestation in the form of conscience. Absolute thinking is not conscience, but the full and absolute reality of conceptivizing thinking. In such fashion, general metaphysics —die eigentliche Metaphysik as Hegel says— is the metaphysics that involves the ultimate and radical structure of entity and reason in its absolute unity, {294} which is what constitutes the concept. This is precisely general metaphysics, which has always attempted to constitute itself as absolute science and has always been in aporía, in difficulty (Verlegenheit), with which we return again, as it did with Kant, to the Aristotelian idea of aporía. Hegel has the presumption, renewed soon after Kant, that his logic is precisely the absolute knowledge. In a more modest way Kant had attempted something similar when he wrote Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Come Forward As Science. Hegel thinks this was realized with absolute knowledge.
Furthermore, Hegel supports his conception of metaphysics on the whole of history. He begins with Thales of Miletus and reviews the whole history of philosophy. After all, Hegel is the first philosopher that has formulated a history of philosophy and has made of the history of philosophy a part of his own system. Hegel will tell us that philosophy began with spirit in Thales of Miletus, and that in the end (this in the end is his own philosophy) the absolute spirit has reached the point of knowing itself. It has cost the absolute spirit twenty five hundred years of labor because, Tantae molis erat se ipsam cognoscere mentem7.
Nevertheless, that rigorous science Hegel tells us about is not a science of the absolute, but is the absolute form of the absolute itself, it is its own internal occurrence.
Hence, the transcendental order for Hegel, as he explicitly tells us, “is nothing but the very spirit of God, in its eternal essence, before the creation of nature and any finite spirit”8. Logic is purely and simply {295} metaphysics and together with it, it is theology, primary and radical theology, that theology in which the very transcendental order is precisely constituted. In the second place this transcendental order is a system of concepts, it is precisely the concept as system. In the third place, this transcendental order as conceptive system is formally mover, and its motion consists in dialectic. In the fourth place, this transcendental order, precisely because it is the order of the absolute, is something anterior to particular things. In the fifth place, these particular things are nothing but something conformed by this absolute order, by that primary and antecedent order.
While for St. Thomas the transcendental order did nothing but express the most common characteristics created things have as created; while for Kant it was something more, it was constituting the object as such object; in Hegel it appears as something more profound and also much more problematic. The transcendental order appears as internal conformer of reality. Again we encounter the presence of the idea that the entire order of being and reality is an auto-conformation; this is an enormous auto-morphism and this auto-morphism consists in the reality of the idea, the reality of absolute spirit.
It is necessary, of course, for Hegel to question not only this idea, but also these two things he has just mentioned, the creation of nature and finite spirit. What is the transcendental order as conformer of these two great zones of reality? Are nature and spirit really “two” zones of reality or are they simply stages of a singular process? Perhaps nature is not only {296} prior to spirit but also necessarily leads to spirit?
The answer to this emerges in the way he has undertaken in his Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences.
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1 Cf. Wissenschaft der Logik, op. cit., (Erstes Buch, Erstes Kapitel, Anmerkung “Aufheben”), pp. 93-95.
2 Cf. G. W. F. Hegel, Wissensachft der Logik, op. cit., (Erstes Buch, “Die Lehre von Sein”), p. 53.
3 Zubiri translates quite freely the following passage in Hegel, “Das Werden ist die Ungetreuntheit des Seins und Nichts, nicht die Einheit, welche von Sein und Nichts abstrahiert”, Wissenschaft der Logik (Erstes Buch, Erster Anschnitt, Erstes Kapitel, C. Werden, 2. Momente des Werdens. Enstehn und Vergehen), p. 92.
4 [Tr. note: Pedro da Fonseca, S.J. (1528-1599), brilliant Portuguese Jesuit philosopher and theologian]
5 Cf. F. Suárez, Sobre el concepto de ente (On the concept of entity), tr. Xavier Zubiri, Madrid, Rev. de Occidente, 1935, p.24.
6 “Die Idee ist der adäquate Begriff, das objektive Wahre oder das Wahre als solches”, G. W. F. Hegel, Wissenchaft der Logik, op. cit. (Drittes Buch, Dritter Abschnitt, “Die Idee”), II, p. 407.
7 [Tr. note: Hegel’s adaptation of Virgil’s text from Aeneid I, 33, Tantae molis erat Romanam condere gentem]
8 “Dieses reich ist die Wahrheit, wie sie ohne Hülle an und für sich selbst ist, Man kann sich deswegen aus drücken, dass dieser Inhalt die Darstellung Gottes ist, wie er seinem ewigen Wessen vor der Erschaffung der Natur und eines endlichen Geistes ist”, Wissenschaft der Logik, op. cit., I, p. 31.