Reading :: Hegel

Hegel

By Frederick Beiser

I’m continuing to avoid reading Hegel by reading Hegel commentaries. Next up is this 12-chapter overview of Hegel’s thought by Frederick Beiser. 

Beiser includes, among other things, a short chronology of Hegel’s life from birth to death (p.xix) and a discussion of relevance. He clarifies that he treats Hegel in historical context rather than as a contemporary philosopher -- that is, Beiser explores Hegel’s thought as it related to his time rather than mobilizing it in current debates (a choice that seems appropriately Hegelian) (p.5). 

The book includes the obligatory biography, then covers 5 parts:

• Early ideals and context

• Metaphysics

• Epistemological foundations

• Social and political philosophy

• Philosophy of culture

Rather than thoroughly reviewing these, I’ll just note some things that caught my attention.

In discussing Hegel’s grounding in Plato and Aristotle, Beiser notes:

Third, Plato and Aristotle understood nature in organic terms, as ‘a single visible living being’. In all these respects Plato and Aristotle presented the sharpest contrast with the modern worldview, whose self is divided into soul and body, whose state is a contract between self-interested parties, and whose concept of nature is mechanical. It was the great achievement of Hegel and the romantic generation to have reaffirmed the classical ideal of unity against the modern worldview. (p.38)

That ideal of unity, of course, is at the root of Hegel’s dialectic. Related (at least in my estimation):

It is indeed noteworthy that Hegel, along with Hölderlin and Schleiermacher, explicitly denied personal immortality and excoriated the entire ethic of salvation based on it. From his early Berne manuscripts to his 1831 lectures on the philosophy of religion Hegel attacked the ethic of salvation for its self-centered concern for the fate of the soul.

True to his immanent ideal of the highest good, Hegel believed that the meaning of life could and should be achieved in the community alone. We find satisfaction and purpose in our lives, he argued, when, like the ancient Roman and Greek, we contribute to the common good and help to create its laws. The ancient Greeks found immortality and meaning in their lives by living for the polis, which was a whole greater than themselves, and which they knew would survive them; they had no concern for their individual salvation, for the fate of their soul after death. In Hegel’s view, the Christian ethic of personal salvation was only a cry of desperation, a feeble Ersatz, after the loss of community. (p.43)

In terms of unity, Hegel (and Schelling) sought grounding in Spinoza:

Schelling and Hegel greatly admired Spinoza for his monism, for showing how to overcome dualism when Kant, Fichte and Jacobi had only reinstated it. True to Spinoza, their principle of subject–object identity essentially means that the subjective and the objective, the intellectual and the empirical, the ideal and the real –however one formulates the opposition – are not distinct substances but simply different aspects, properties or attributes of one and the same substance. (p.64)

But, Beiser points out, unity creates a problem:

In the end, the problem of contingency presents Hegel with a dilemma. The realm of contingency must be inside or outside the system. If it is inside the system, then contingency has only a subjective status, so that there is no explanation of real contingency. If, however, it is outside the system, it has an objective status; but it then limits the absolute and introduces a dualism between form and content. (p.79)

Hegel addressed this question via organicism, in which

The goal of subject–object identity contrasted sharply with the reality of a dualism between subject and object in ordinary experience. These dualisms can be overcome, Hegel maintains, only if we accept an organic concept of nature according to which the subjective and the objective are only different degrees of organization and development of a single living force. (p.105)

Recall that Hegel was a big influence on Vygotsky (which is why I’m reading about Hegel). Beiser describes Hegel’s use of the familiar terms of internalization and externalization:

In some striking passages from The Spirit of Christianity Hegel calls what both produces and results from love, the whole process of self-surrender and self-discovery, of externalization and internalization, spirit (Geist). He first uses the term in a religious context, in writing about how the spirit of Jesus was present at the Last Supper. He wrote that the spirit of Jesus is the spirit of love, which first makes itself objective, externalizing itself in the bread and wine, and then makes itself subjective, internalizing the bread and wine through the act of eating. Hegel likens the process to that of understanding meaning from a written word; the thought is first objectified in the sign, and it is then resubjectified when the sign is read as having a specific meaning. (p.115)

And 

The opposing movements involved in the experience of love – its externalization and internalization, self-surrender and self-discovery – Hegel will later call ‘dialectic’. Hegel will later use the term in this sense to describe the process of spiritual development. It is important, however, to distinguish at least two meanings of this concept: the ontological, whereby it defines something happening in reality; and the methodological or epistemological, whereby it signifies a method of doing philosophy. (p.115)

Dialectic, of course, is one of Hegel’s primary contributions (and the contribution that most interests me). Beiser explains it further:

Hegel’s term for his own anti-methodology is ‘the concept’ (der Begriff), which designates the inherent form of an object, its inner purpose. It is the purpose of enquiry to grasp this inner form, Hegel argues, and it is for this reason that he demands suspending all preconceptions. If the philosopher simply applies his a priori ideas to the subject matter, he has no guarantee that he grasps its inner form or the object as it is in itself; for all he knows, he sees the object only as it is for him. When Hegel uses the term ‘dialectic’ it usually designates the ‘self-organization’ of the subject matter, its ‘inner necessity’ and ‘inherent movement’. The dialectic is what follows from the concept of the thing. It is flatly contrary to Hegel’s intention, therefore, to assume that the dialectic is an a priori methodology, or indeed a kind of logic, that one can apply to any subject matter. The dialectic is the very opposite: it is the inner movement of the subject matter, what evolves from it rather than what the philosopher applies to it. (p.160)

Like everyone else who writes about Hegel, Beiser cautions us that Hegel did not use the schema thesis-antithesis-synthesis (p.161). He also argues that dialectic is not some sort of alternative logic (p.161). Rather, it’s about the unity of the subject matter: “Indeed, the point of the dialectic will be to remove contradictions by showing how contradictory predicates that seem true of the same thing are really only true of different parts or aspects of the same thing” (p.162). Regarding contradictions, Beiser adds:

The dialectic arises from an inevitable contradiction in the procedures of the understanding. The understanding contradicts itself because it both separates things, as if they were completely independent of one another, and connects them, as if neither could exist apart from the other. It separates things when it analyzes them into their parts, each of which is given a self-sufficient status; and it connects them according to the principle of sufficient reason, showing how each event has a cause, or how each part inheres in a still smaller part, and so on ad infinitum. Hence the understanding ascribes both independence and dependence to things. The only way to resolve the contradiction, it turns out, is to reinterpret the independent or self-sufficient term as the whole of which all connected or dependent terms are only parts. (p.164)

Beiser adds:

Hegel states that there are three stages to the dialectic: the moment of abstraction or the understanding; the dialectical or negatively rational moment; and the speculative or positively rational moment. (p.167)

Beiser covers many other aspects of Hegel’s thought as well, but let’s stop there. I found this discussion to be helpful for understanding Vygotsky, but also Marx. If you’re trying to understand Hegel but, like me, are trying to either work up to or avoid reading the original, Beiser has written a clear summary that you should check out.