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All previous parts here.
Absolute Idea
Last time, we were continuing our discussion of Hegel’s Logic and were just on the threshold of its third and final division, the Doctrine of the Concept. The Concept constitutes a dialectical third to the Doctrines of Being and Essence. This means that, in accordance with how the Hegelian dialectic usually operates, Concept will constitute the “reconciliation” of the antithetical terms Being and Essence.
We saw that the Doctrine of Being deals with the categories or ideas at work in perceptual experience. In other words, in the first third of the Logic Hegel is exclusively concerned with “being” as constituting the “objectness” (to use Heidegger’s term) of perceptual objects. These are the fundamental categories in terms of which we interpret sensory experience. They are also the categories that express, in partial form at least, the nature of objects, given that all the categories in the Logic have both a subjective and an objective meaning. What we found is that those categories cannot fully explain why the world appears to us as it does.
To go further, we are forced to look beyond the categories of bare perceptual experience, and to consider the possibility that the being of things has to do, fundamentally, with something that does not appear to us: the underlying essence or nature of things. As a result, in moving from the categories of Being to those of Essence we arrive at an appearance-essence, or appearance-reality distinction, with Being expressing mere “outward appearance” and Essence constituting the “inner” being or, we could say, the “true” being of things. This is a distinction most famously associated with Plato’s ontology, though it shows up in different forms throughout the history of philosophy. In the modern period it appears in all the varieties of “representationalism,” and in the philosophy of Kant.
What we discover by the end of the Doctrine of Essence, however, is that this appearance-essence distinction is highly problematic. It is one of Hegel’s great virtues to have seen that this is the case. Hegel argues that what appears in appearance is precisely the “inner” nature or essence of something. As an example, a dog appears to us in various ways: burying a bone, chasing a squirrel, chasing its tail, barking at the mailman, etc. Don’t all these “appearances” in fact display to us the dogness of the dog, i.e., what it is? Appearances are really the means by which essence displays itself or realizes itself. As I pointed out last time, Heidegger is in complete agreement with Hegel in rejecting the idea that appearances somehow cut us off from the being of things.
Thus, since the standpoint of the Doctrine of Essence proves untenable, the dialectic moves beyond it to the Concept. Concept will, as I have already suggested, transcend the dichotomy of Being and Essence by constituting, in effect, the essence of being. This essence is not, however, something that persists beneath the surface level of being – i.e., beneath or behind phenomenal display. Instead, the Concept, as essence of being, will be constituted entirely through its manifestations. Hegel is, in many ways, strongly influenced by Aristotle, and the position he has taken here is fundamentally Aristotelian. For Aristotle, contra Plato, the forms of things have no being apart from their manifestation in the world. In other words, the being of the form is constituted through or by means of its expression in the world of particulars.
We have spoken in previous installments of how the Logic engages in absolute knowing, which knows the Absolute. The reader may have been wondering when we will encounter the Absolute. We are now about to, for it is the purpose of the Doctrine of the Concept to get us there. The Absolute, as we have said before, is the whole. It is not some kind of abstract coincidentia oppositorum beyond the appearances. Like Aristotle’s forms, it is constituted in and through its appearances. Thus, while we can say that the Concept (or, indeed, the Absolute itself) is the essence of being, it is also the being of essence, in the sense of its manifestation or realization.
However, one thing may be troubling the reader at this point: isn’t “the Concept” something subjective? It certainly sounds subjective, as we tend to think of “concepts” as notions in our minds. A modern-day Anglophone Platonist might say, for example, that our concepts of the ideas (forms) are never fully adequate, expressing a distinction between Platonic Ideas and our “ideas” of them. It does seem like “concept” is a term we reserve exclusively for subjective ideas. How, therefore, can Hegel’s Concept constitute the being of beings? How can the Doctrine of the Concept culminate in the Absolute (or, to be more precise, the Absolute Idea)?
Unsurprisingly, the answer is that Hegel is using “concept” [Begriff] in a very special and idiosyncratic manner, just as he used “being” in the Doctrine of Being in an unusual manner. In a sense, the Concept is subjective. Indeed, Hegel stipulates that the categories dealt with in the Doctrines of Being and Essence constitute “objective logic,” whereas the Concept gives us “subjective logic” (meaning a logic of the subject, or a logic of concepts). But matters are complicated. It is true that in discussing the categories of Being and Essence, Hegel treats them primarily as categories of things (i.e., categories of “the objective”). Nevertheless, to state the obvious, all of these categories are concepts, they are thoughts. And in the Logic we think them.
In the Doctrine of the Concept, the nature of the concept or of thought as such becomes our new preoccupation. As a result of this, “subjective logic” is fundamentally self-referential: it treats concepts about concepts. The Doctrine of the Concept has three subdivisions: Subjectivity, Objectivity, and Idea. We can expect that the third term, Idea, will “sublate” the first two: in other words, it will be the unity of subjectivity and objectivity or the overcoming of the distinction itself. While the Concept, as we have said, is, in a sense, subjective, ultimately the Concept (as Idea) turns out to be both subjective and objective – and, just because of this, neither.
Idea is subjectivity that has made itself into its own object. It is subject become object, or object as subject. The final category of Idea, of the Doctrine of the Concept, and thus of the Logic itself is “Absolute Idea” which is an idea that is entirely self-referential. It is not an idea of anything other than itself. This is the logical outcome of a “subjective logic” in which thought thinks about thought: eventually we arrive at an idea that is literally the idea of idea. But what are we to make of this strange notion? What is the point of a “logic” that ends with such a seemingly vacuous notion?
To see the point, let us take a couple of steps back remind ourselves of what the Logic is supposed to accomplish. As we have already noted, the Logic is an ontology: it gives an account of the being of beings; it gives an account of the being of the Absolute. And as we have said repeatedly in this series, the Absolute for Hegel is all of existence conceived as a whole or, we could say, as a One. As an account of the Absolute, the Logic is effectively the idea of the whole. Throughout, Hegel has been articulating the nature of the whole – or of wholeness as such.
The categories of the Logic form an organic system. Each category presupposes every other. Each is what it is by means of its relation to the whole, and the whole is defined in terms of the total system of the categories. Dialectical transitions from one idea to another occur because each is offered as a “provisional definition” of the whole. Each, however, proves partial or inadequate because at every point in the dialectic Spirit has a presentiment of the whole itself, and sees that these categories do not fully or completely describe the whole. This is also how Platonic dialectic works. Socrates’s interlocutors in the Republic know that Cephalus’s definition of justice as “returning what you have borrowed” cannot suffice, because they already have a pre-reflective insight into justice and know intuitively that Cephalus’s definition cannot express the whole of what justice is.
As an account of the whole or wholeness as such, the Logic presents us with the formal structure of reality. Because Absolute Idea is the outcome of the entire dialectic, Hegel considers all the preceding categories of the Logic to be immanent within it. Each, as we have said, was Idea’s provisional definition; each succeeds in articulating some aspect or moment of the whole. The entire dialectic of categories has as its outcome a self-reflecting idea. Why? Because to be truly whole, to be truly complete, the whole must comprehend itself. It must, in effect, know itself. The Logic presents us with a whole of ideas, and the consummating moment of this whole is an idea that comprehends idea; idea, as we said, of idea.
In one of his lecture courses (surviving only in fragmentary notes) Heidegger makes the following enigmatic remarks about Absolute Idea: “The absolute – as absolute knowing – the absolute idea. The present that is present to itself, the presence that mirrors itself in the presencing. (Parmenides: “sphere”).” Then he quotes Thomas Aquinas (in Latin) quoting from a medieval mystical text, The Book of the 24 Philosophers, attributed to Hermes Trismegistus. The translation of the quote is as follows: “Hence, Trismegistus says: ‘God is an intelligible sphere, whose center is everywhere, and whose circumference is nowhere.’”[1]
Near the end of the Encyclopedia Logic, Hegel describes Absolute Idea through an allusion to Aristotle that is equally strange: “Up to this point the Idea in its development through its various stages has been our object; but from now on, the Idea is its own object. This is the noesis noēseōs, which was already called the highest form of the Idea by Aristotle.”[2] Noesis noēseōs can be translated as “thought thinking thought,” and it refers to Aristotle’s concept of God as “unmoved mover.” God, for Aristotle, is the most perfectly self-sufficient and invulnerable being in the universe. Thus, he is purely formal, possessing no material properties, and he is, in accordance with the Aristotelian conception of form, pure act.
God is, in short, a mind that thinks. But since he must be purely self-sufficient he cannot depend upon anything other than himself for an object of thought. Therefore, God thinks solely of himself. He is thought thinking thought; a perfectly self-related mind. For Aristotle, all beings in nature strive unconsciously to imitate the perfect self-sufficiency of God. Hence, Aristotle understands this being as the being of all beings. (Thus, falling into what Heidegger claims is “ontotheology”: the error of confusing being as such with the most exalted of the things that have being.) Hegel alludes to Aristotle at this point in the Logic because his own metaphysics is homologous with Aristotle’s.
The Circle of Circles
Understanding this point can give us a great deal of help in approaching Hegel’s strange and difficult concept of Absolute Idea. Aristotle envisions a scale of nature, or “great chain of being” with God, self-thinking thought, at the top and all else striving, as we have said, to imitate him. Hegel, too, envisions just such a great chain of being. The major difference is that at the top of Aristotle’s chain is a transcendent God existing outside or apart from nature. What Hegel does is to “immanentize” self-thinking thought; to locate it not in a transcendent God but within the world. Where do we find self-thinking thought in the world? We find it only in human beings, who are capable of reflecting on themselves; who strive, according to the injunction of the Delphic Oracle, to know themselves.
Pre-eminently, we find self-thinking thought in what Hegel calls Absolute Spirit, which has three moments: art, religion, and philosophy. In all three of these, human beings are, in one way or another, confronting themselves. The artist projects his own self into his artwork, and we reflect on humanity in reflecting on his work. Religion involves human beings projecting their ideals into how they conceive of God or the gods. Philosophy is just what we have seen so far in this series on Hegel (and in all my essays on the history of Western philosophy): it is mankind striving to know itself.
The difference from art and religion, however, is that those two make use of images, symbols, and myths to convey truth, whereas philosophy employs the pure idea or concept. And, as a result of this, philosophy, for Hegel, stands at a higher level than art and religion. After all, it is philosophical thought (broadly speaking) that is needed to interpret the meaning of art and religion, which do not interpret themselves. Hegel would argue that if it is philosophical thought that reveals the meaning of art and religion to us, then isn’t philosophy a higher-level form of discourse?
We said a moment ago that we find self-thinking thought in the world in the form of the human drive for self-knowledge. But there is a further dimension to this that needs to be spelled out. What is it that strives for self-knowledge? What are we? We are, first of all, natural beings – we are products of nature; we are animals. Thus, a crucial implication of Hegel’s position is that our self-knowledge is simultaneously nature knowing itself. Human beings are an outgrowth of nature. Thus, when we strive to know ourselves, we are nature striving to know itself. As one commentator puts it, “the Idea is Nature become conscious of itself as Spirit.”[3]
As we have said, Hegel believes that his Logic gives us the formal structure of all of existence. Just as the whole that is the Logic, to be truly whole and complete, must comprehend itself, must issue in an idea that comprehends idea, so existence itself must issue in a being that “completes existence” by bringing it to consciousness of itself. This self-consciousness is nature’s ultimate telos or goal, and human beings exist in order to realize it in the world. We can say, thus, that nature exists so that it can be known by human beings. If philosophy is supposed to give us the “meaning of life” or “purpose of existence,” Hegel’s point is that the purpose of existence, what gives the whole meaning, significance, and closure, is its achieving consciousness of itself. Again, human beings are the vehicle of this self-consciousness.
The Logic, however, only gives us the idea of the whole as issuing in a self-thinking thought. It ends, again, with Absolute Idea, not Absolute Spirit. There is obviously a difference between an idea that is idea of itself and a thought that thinks itself. Absolute Idea is the idea of Absolute Spirit, which “realizes” self-related idea in the world through self-thinking thought. Hegel understands all of nature as a scale of forms that are intelligible in terms of the degree to which they approximate to the self-thinking thought of humanity – just as Aristotle sees all of nature as a scale of forms approximating to the self-knowing, transcendent God.
How can natural forms approximate to self-thinking human thought? By exhibiting various degrees of self-relation, with the most complete and perfect self-relation achieved in the pure reflexivity of thought thinking thought. It is the task of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature to show how nature is a scale forms approximating to an embodiment of Absolute Idea. And it is the task of his Philosophy of Spirit to show how Spirit emerges from nature and issues ultimately in Absolute Spirit and thus in the fully adequate embodiment of Absolute Idea in self-thinking philosophical thought. We will have something more to say about these parts of the Hegelian system in a moment.
Having now reached the end of the Logic, Hegel promptly announces that in fact we have returned to its beginning. How is this the case? Hegel emphasizes the “circularity” not just of the Logic but of his entire philosophical system, and each of its parts. In a famous passage early in the Encyclopedia Logic, he writes:
Each of the parts of philosophy is a philosophical whole, a circle that closes upon itself; but in each of them the philosophical Idea is in a particular determinacy or element. Every single circle also breaks through the restriction of its element as well, precisely because it is inwardly [the] totality, and it grounds a further sphere. The whole presents itself therefore as a circle of circles, each of which is a necessary moment, so that the system of its peculiar elements constitutes the whole idea – which equally appears in each single one of them.[4]
There is much here that can help us understand the Hegelian system. The system as a whole is a circle, because it begins with Logic then, in a manner we will discuss, transitions to Philosophy of Nature, then, in the Philosophy of Spirit, shows how nature issues in self-conscious Spirit. The highest form of self-conscious Spirit, as we have said, is philosophy. And what is philosophy? It is the thought that thinks Logic, Philosophy of Nature, and Philosophy of Spirit. Thus, when in the system we reach “philosophy,” the system returns to the beginning.
But Hegel also says in this passage that “each of the parts of philosophy” is a whole unto itself, and each describes a circle. The final paragraph of the Encyclopedia Logic can help us understand how the Logic is a circle:
We have now returned to the Concept of the Idea with which we began. At the same time this return to the beginning is an advance. What we began with was being, abstract being, while now we have the Idea as being; and this idea that is, is nature.[5]
This statement confirms our assessment that the Logic is an ontology. We began with “abstract being” and we saw that this conception is so empty that it is indistinguishable from nothing. Every step the Logic takes after that abstract beginning is an elaboration on “being,” such that the Logic as a totality gives us an account of being. As we have mentioned, Hegel regards all the categories of the Logic as immanent within the final category, Absolute Idea. Collectively, they are the “definition” of Absolute Idea. And, collectively, they give us an account of being. Thus, Absolute Idea is Hegel’s fully developed answer to the question “what is being?”
Having said this, it may still be unclear to the reader why Hegel wants to say that Absolute Idea is being. How does Absolute Idea state the being of all beings, the being that beings have? Here, too, Hegel is very Aristotelian. For Aristotle, God, the self-thinking unmoved mover, is the being of beings because he is that for the sake of which all beings act and strive to realize their nature. Again, all things are, in one way or another striving, through the realization of their individual nature, to imitate the perfect self-sufficiency of God. God is the telos of all things; the ultimate answer to why things are the way that they are. Hence he is the being of all beings.
For Hegel also, self-thinking thought is the ultimate answer to why things are the way they are. Everything that exists in nature is intelligible as approximating to an embodied expression of the perfect self-relation of Absolute Idea. Absolute Idea, like Aristotle’s God, is thus the telos of all of existence. It is only adequately embodied in human Spirit: the idea that is idea of itself becomes something real – something more, in other words, than a mere idea – in a thought that thinks itself. Absolute Idea comes to full realization in the world through Absolute Spirit. Absolute Idea is thus the ultimate “reason for being” for all that exists; hence, it is the being of all beings.
From Logic to Nature – and Spirit
Let us recall the lines from Hegel quoted earlier about the “circularity” of his system. We have now seen how the system of the whole is a circle, and how the Logic is a circle; how Absolute Idea returns to being, as a higher-level account of what being is. In that quote, Hegel states not only that each of the “parts” of philosophy (i.e., Logic, Nature, and Spirit) is a circle but that in each the Idea “is in a particular determinacy or element” and that the Idea “equally appears in each single one of [the parts of philosophy].” In short, the Absolute Idea is present in each of the three divisions of the system, but in a different form.
In the Logic the Absolute Idea is purely idea; all it is, in other words, is an idea, and is not yet “real.” In the Philosophy of Nature, Idea reappears as “the animal,” which occurs under the third division of this branch of philosophy, “Organics.” An organism is a self-related whole in which each part (each organ) is what it is in relation to the whole, all are interdependent, and each part is necessary to the whole. In other words, the animal organism is an image of the Absolute, or Absolute Idea. The animal is not, however, the “highest” natural realization of Absolute Idea. That honor belongs, as we have already said, to philosophical man. The most adequate earthly “expression” of Absolute Idea is philosophy: which is a thought that thinks itself, thinking ideas about ideas. Hence, Absolute Idea resurfaces in the Philosophy of Spirit as philosophy itself.
Hegel also says in the same quotation that “Every single circle [i.e., each of the parts of philosophy] also breaks through the restriction of its element as well, precisely because it is inwardly [the] totality, and it grounds a further sphere.” Each of the three parts of philosophy is, in fact, self-contained. This is precisely what we would expect if each is a “circle.” As we have already seen, the end of the Logic returns to the beginning. But each also “breaks through the restriction of its element” and “grounds a further sphere.” In other words, Logic “breaks out” of the restriction of the purely eidetic and conceptual into nature, and nature (i.e., pre-human nature) gives way to Spirit.
The three divisions of philosophy are a dialectical triad. As we have seen, dialectical transitions occur because one idea or element proves somehow inadequate to express the whole, so the transition is made to another. Applying this to the tripartite Hegelian system, this means that Logic or the purely eidetic or conceptual is not, ultimately, a complete account of the whole, nor does Philosophy of Nature offer such a complete account. This is actually a simple point to grasp. The “realm of idea” that is the Logic is obviously not the whole of reality. Reality is not just idea, it is also nature existing in space and time; it is embodied being. Thus, while the Logic closes with the supreme conception Absolute Idea, Idea is still merely idea.
If an architect draws up plans for an extraordinarily beautiful and functional house, that is quite wonderful in itself. But still more wonderful would be the actual house, built according to the design. Similarly, apart from nature Absolute Idea is effectively just an “abstraction” (though this is to speak very loosely). To repeat some more lines from Hegel quoted earlier, he ends the Encyclopedia Logic by saying that “What we began with was being, abstract being, while now we have the Idea as being; And this idea that is, is nature.”
This is Hegel’s enigmatic transition from Logic to Philosophy of Nature, which has been discussed and puzzled over for two hundred years. What we have quoted is perhaps his clearest expression of it. Hegel tells us here that Idea is being, then uses the phrase “this idea that is.” We are being told here, oddly enough, that being is. For this to be a meaningful statement at all, the “is” cannot refer to being in the sense of Idea. Instead by the “idea that is” Hegel is referring to the idea that ex-ists: that stands forth before us in the world. The idea ex-isting around us in the world is just what nature is: recall that we have said that nature is intelligible as an “expression” of idea.
“This idea that is, is nature” means that nature is the idea existing in embodied, concrete reality in the world. Hegel’s treatment of the transition from Logic to Nature in The Science of Logic is equally enigmatic. There, Hegel writes that “the Idea freely releases itself in its absolute self-sufficiency and stasis” (die Idee sich selbst frei entlässt, ihrer absolut sicher und in sich ruhend).[6] This language of “free release,” which is figurative, calls to mind the biblical idea of divine creation, as well as Plotinian emanation.
It has also confused countless readers, who come away thinking that Idea somehow “causes” nature, or that nature literally emerges from Idea. However, Hegel does not want to be taken literally. These statements, in both versions of the Logic, really just amount to saying that the purely conceptual realm of the Logic is only a partial expression of what the universe is – only one aspect of it. In order to move beyond Logic to develop our dialectical account of the whole of reality, we must therefore move beyond the realm of the purely conceptual entirely. We must enter into the realm of the other to Idea: the world of material, spatio-temporal objects; the world of nature.
Just as Logic points beyond itself to its other, so nature points beyond itself to Spirit. The Philosophy of Nature is a self-contained circle, just like the other parts of philosophy. And just as Logic, on its own, cannot stand as an account of the whole of reality, so nature cannot stand on its own but must issue in its other. Nature, as spatio-temporal reality, is the negation of Logic – nature is the negation of Idea. Yet at the same time Idea is the animating principle of nature (here we have an example of Hegel’s famous principle of “identity in difference”). So too is Spirit the negation of nature.
How? Hegel writes that “The goal of nature is to destroy itself and to break through its husk of immediate, sensuous existence, to consume itself like the phoenix in order to come forth from this externality rejuvenated as spirit.”[7] Through this highly figurative language, Hegel is saying that within nature arises mankind, whose relation to nature is effectively negation. Our relation to nature is to transform it: we take what is, what we find in nature, and transform it according to our idea of what ought to be. This transformation takes place not just in terms of the nature around us, but in terms of nature within us: to be a human being is to learn how to channel, moderate, or thwart the natural impulses within us.
In addition to the nature within me I have second nature: all the culturally situated habits and practices I have learned which allow us, unlike other animals, to shape natural impulses. I can even wholly negate them, as when a man chooses to be celibate, or when an ascetic starves himself to death. To develop our ability to transform or negate nature is to become civilized; and no man who has not been civilized or who is incapable of civilization can claim to be truly human. Once we have learned to control the nature within us, we can then free ourselves from a life in which our attention and our abilities are exclusively deployed in the satisfaction of base desires. We can, for example, do science and philosophy.
In knowing nature, we do not “negate” it in the same way we do when we transform trees into paper or dynamite our way through a mountain. But to know nature is to raise oneself above it. It is to temporarily say “no,” in effect, to the “call of nature” – to unthinking involvement with its powers – and to make it an object of contemplation. And yet, as we have seen, though the scientific and philosophical study of the world raises us “above it,” at the same time understanding that world involves seeing ourselves within it: seeing Spirit as the telos of nature itself. Hegel states that “the purpose of all true science is just this, that Spirit shall recognize itself in everything in heaven and on earth.”[8] Spirit, Hegel says, “the aim of these lectures has been to give a picture of nature in order to subdue this proteus: to find in this externality only the mirror of ourselves, to see in nature a free reflex of spirit.”[9]
The foregoing has offered a sketch of Hegel’s philosophical system. Obviously, a great deal has been left out. We have primarily focused on the Logic, because it is the key, for Hegel, to understanding nature and spirit. The Logic, Hegel says, is “the all animating spirit of all sciences.”[10] There would be no point in going through the Philosophy of Nature and Philosophy of Spirit in comparable detail, for we have now effectively achieved our goal: an understanding of Hegel’s account of being. In our next installment, we must turn to an evaluation of the Hegelian system, and to the Heideggerean critique of it.
Notes
[1] Martin Heidegger, Hegel, trans. Joseph Arel and Niels Feuerhahn (Bloomington, IN: Indian University Press, 2015), 25. The Aquinas quote appears in The Disputed Questions, trans. Robert W. Mulligan, S.J. (Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1952), 68.
[2] G.W.F. Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic, Translated by T.F. Geraets et al. (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 303. (Henceforth, EL.)
[3] E.E. Harris, An Interpretation of the Logic of Hegel (Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1983), 218-219.
[4] Hegel, EL, 39.
[5] Hegel, EL, 307. Italics in original. This paragraph is actually an “addition” culled from student notes, but it appears in most editions of the text.
[6] G.W.F. Hegel, The Science of Logic, trans. A.V. Miller (Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1989), 843.
[7] G.W.F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970, 444. (Henceforth, PN.)
[8] G,W.F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Mind, trans. A.V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1971), 445.
[9] Hegel, PN, 445.
[10] Hegel, EL, 59.
6 comments
Two in a row! Fantastic. I’ll get to reading now.
Speaking of reading, I submitted a $10 donation through EntropyLive and emailed the proof to the orders email to receive membership. But I have not gotten a response yet and can’t access the article. Please forgive me for the late reply and any ignorance of what has been previously explained!
I… am at a loss of words. I don’t have much to say except this is extremely lucid and of course interesting.
A few thoughts. First, what would it mean for something to self-relate, especially outside of a strict and well-defined formalism? When I usually think of a self-relation, I often think of problems such as what is the form of forms, does the set of all sets contain itself, etc. And usually that’s seen as a problem
Is “self-reference” to be understood in a Fichtean sense, in which we (being the embodied of nature trying to understand itself) make our “mark on the world” and thus have it “in reference” to us? That does open up an interesting paradox, in which nature understanding itself leads to nature remaking itself, but then, like the development of the Logic which returns to its beginning, we are merely left with nature which was the beginning that we started with. Or perhaps that is completely off the mark. Feel free to indulge in both the original question as it should be answered and my attempt to answer it!
Second, if the Logic is seen as merely abstract being, whose existence would be better if actualized in Nature, then is it right to call Hegelian an idealist? I think this may have been a convenient way to situate Hegel versus other thinkers, but there seems to be some kind of ontological pluralism or modalism in his system, one where the idea is not the only operative principle. The more I learn about Hegel, the less it makes sense for me to think that others were strictly “reacting” to him due to the obscurity of his thought, e.g. that Marx somehow “flipped” the dialectic instead of just doing his own thing without much of a logical relationship to Hegel other than having read Hegel and has his own “Rorschach test” reaction to him.
Finally, the scare quotes word appeared, “ought”. “Our relation to nature is to transform it: we take what is, what we find in nature, and transform it according to our idea of what ought to be.” Where is this “ought” coming from? Does it come from the Absolute Idea? I suppose this is better fleshed out in Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, but I was always of the persuasion that ethics and ontology rhyme more often than we give it credit.
I appreciate your thoughts as always Mr. Cleary. Thank you for returning to us, and with a blistering salvo
Thank you very much for all of your kind words about my essay. I can only respond very briefly to a few of your points, some of which raise important and complex matters.
You ask what it would mean for something to self-relate. But aren’t you yourself an example of this? Your body relates to itself but it maintains itself in being through such processes as growth and self-repair. You also relate to yourself in terms of understanding yourself; In terms of self-knowledge. The human subject is self-related and human subjects are self- knowers.
The absolute idea, which is idea of itself, is certainly very much like a form of forms. Indeed, in Plato’s so-called “unwritten doctrine,” reported on by Aristotle and other ancient commentators, it turns out that the Good — the idea we met with in the Republic — is a form of forms. This makes it being. The being of a thing is its own form, such as the dogness of dogs. The form of forms is therefore the beingness of beings. A very interesting idea.
Hegel’s notion of self-relation is a development of Fichte’s, but at the same time it is quite different from Fichte’s conception. Fichte is exclusively concerned with the cancellation of the subject-object distinction through our remaking nature. For Hegel, the cancellation of the subject-object distinction occurs through philosophy, preeminently. It is in philosophy that we realize that the object is subject, insofar as the telos of nature is human subjectivity.
Yes, Hegel is very much an idealist — precisely because he sees idea as the being of nature, in the sense that idea is the telos of nature, that for the sake of which nature exists. As I have stated nature is very real for Hegel; He is not a subjective idealist. However, since idea explains all of existence — all of existence existing so as to express idea — then idea is absolutely central to reality. Thus, Hegel’s unique form of objective idealism.
When I referred to our transforming nature as transforming what is into what ought to be, I was referring to all of our efforts to transform nature according to our own ideals or our own conceptions. Thus, even something as simple as transforming trees into pencils is an example of transforming what is into what ought to be. We see a tree. It is. But we want it to be pencils, so we chop it down and turn it into the objects of our desire. What is is transformed into what ought to be.
I hope that the above is somewhat helpful to you. And I hope that you will keep reading! The next installment will appear in a week or two. Thank you for being a faithful reader!
Hello Counter-Currents! This is my first post.
These essays on philosophy by Mr. Cleary have come to be my favorite articles on this website. I always look forward to them. I always feel like I’m learning “something deep”.
This one threw me for a loop, and I’ll have to go back and read it again. Not because of any difficulty in the writing style of Mr. Cleary (his writing style is actually as clear as can be), but rather because of the intricacies of Hegel’s philosophical system. For someone like me who is not trained in philosophy, but only has a layman’s interest, it all seems rather complicated (but in a good way).
I look forward to reading the next part of the series on Heidegger’s interpretation of Hegel.
Keep up the great work, Mr. Cleary! These essays are challenging to me in understanding unfamiliar concepts in philosophy, but at the same time they are fun.
Thank you for your comment! If you will click on my name (at the top of the article) you will find page after page of essays I’ve written on the history of philosophy (and other matters), going back about 5 years. I started with Plato. I’ve attempted to write all these essays in an accessible way, and hopefully I succeeded. Thank you for kind words! And do keep reading!
Here’s to hoping for the release of the next part soon. 🙂
Mr. Cleary, if you have the spare time, do you have any thoughts on the top-level comments I had left on Part 6 under the name “RR”, chiefly: 1) the prospect of reconciling Being and Nothing (you can skip the rest of the conversation I had), and 2) the Hegelian equivalent to zuhanden (if there is any)?
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