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Hegelian DialecticsTony McKenna

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To cite this article: Tony McKenna (2011): Hegelian Dialectics, Critique: Journal of Socialist Theory,39:1, 155-172

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Hegelian DialecticsTony McKenna

This article is an attempt to trace the development of modern dialectics. George W.F.

Hegel brought the method of dialectics to fruition through an analysis of the history of

philosophy beginning with the ancient Greeks and ‘Oriental’ thought, before traversing

the various stages which would eventually culminate in the philosophy of Hegel himself.

The author of this article concentrates on the modern epoch in particular, whereby the

rationalism of Descartes and the empiricism of Hume are opposed by Kant. Subsequently

Kant is fiercely critiqued, by Fichte and Schelling among others, and the Hegelian

philosophy emerges, to some extent, as the critique of this critique.

Dialectics is the method of Marxism but it is the contention of the author that

dialectical materialism (Marxism) cannot be appreciated without reference to Hegel,

who was the first thinker to consciously apprehend the movement and interconnection of

both thought and being � as totality. Marx made reference to Hegel as ‘that mighty

thinker’ in the preface to his Magnus opus while Lenin was later to comment that it is

impossible to understand Das Capital without ‘having thoroughly studied and

understood the whole of Hegel’s logic’. There is certainly a great deal of difference

between Hegel and Marx but dialectics is the method, the thread, which runs through

both.

Keywords: Dialectics; Hegel; Kant; Fichte; Schelling; Totality

This article aims to give an outline of the philosophy of Hegel, specifically the

dialectical method. In order to do this it remains necessary to understand Hegel’s

development from the context of some of the key philosophies which came before,

and how they are part and parcel of what he would call a dialectical unfolding.

Hume

David Hume elaborated his philosophical ideas with rigour and fearlessness. He

begins in his investigations by dissolving all that we experience, by breaking reality

down and atomising it, allowing it to collect anew in a series of building blocks which

he describes as ‘impressions’. The impressions form the basis of cognition: they are

ISSN 0301-7605 (print)/ISSN 1748-8605 (online) # 2011 Critique

DOI: 10.1080/03017605.2011.537458

Critique

Vol. 39, No. 1, February 2011, pp. 155�172

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everything. They might originate from within the subject as with things like anger or

tiredness or they can be generated from the outside as colours or sounds etc. In

addition we human beings are able to recollect older impressions or to use our

imagination to anticipate ones we have not directly encountered. The impressions

themselves when mediated by the faculties of imagination or memory become more

complex and Hume refers to these mediations as ‘ideas’.

How might we distinguish between ‘the impressions’ and ‘the ideas’? Hume replies

that the ideas never reach the force level and the intensity of the original impressions.

A memory is the pale and melancholy reflection of the actual event. Hume goes on to

explain that ‘ideas’ are linked by the principles of resemblance, contiguity and

causality. Ideas are connected by the resemblances that lie between them � for

example when one looks at a photograph one must consider the object or the person

the photo has captured. ‘Ideas’ are linked by their contiguity in time and space. When

someone thinks of night, the thought of day quite naturally follows. Finally ‘ideas’ are

associated on the basis of causality. If one considers a fire, it is impossible not to dwell

on the heat and the light that the flames create.

It is the principle of causality which comes to preoccupy Hume most of all.

Causality is the idea that A is the cause of B, but moreover that A must necessarily

give rise to B, always and in every case. Now the empiricists, proceeding from a

number of empirically verifiable phenomena, had great problems establishing the

universality of this. Certainly they could show that in this or that particular case, A

did give rise to B. They might record many such occasions when A leads to B in

experiments: experience could yield the same result over and over and thus B would

be registered as being the corollary of A. The more certain the empiricists wished to

be of this, the more they could tally the various manifestations of the A causing B

event: hundreds, thousands, or perhaps even millions of times.

However, such numbers, as large as they seem, are unrepresentative before the

eternity of all that has yet come to be. The small pocket of time and matter we inhabit

remains pithy in the face of forever. The empiricists might believe they have

established the causal principle in a particular case, but this could never be anything

other than vain illusion; for however large the battery of their tests, it would remain a

mere vanishing point on the horizon of everything that will come to be. To put it

another way, we might imagine a future occasion when A won’t cause B; but such a

future is beyond the tactile grasp of those who relate only to that which is

immediately given. Such a future is something that simply cannot be empirically

tested.

Hume went further still. He noted, with relentless logic, that not only can

particular events which seem to stand in a causal relation to one another not be tested

ad infinitum, and that consequently, the necessity of their connection is impossible to

establish. He also noted how the underlying principle of causality itself, i.e.

the principle that � ‘every event must have a cause’ � now becomes victim to the

same reasoning. We cannot know that every event must have a cause because we quite

simply cannot experience every event.

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In Humean terms we might have an ‘impression’ of ‘burning flesh’ and we might

have an impression of ‘pain’, these things embodying real and visceral experiences,

but there is no real and visceral ‘impression’ of the ‘necessity’ with which one event

flows into the next. There is no definitive impression that corresponds precisely

because we cannot deduce ‘necessity’ from experience.

Why, then, do we have an almost autonomic sense that this particular event is

caused by that one? Hume would argue that this is a result of a caprice, of some quirk

of mind, which is excited in and through the process of repetition. We are pattern

seeking creatures; once we see the same thing re-occur in a given series of instances,

we begin to anticipate its future appearance. However, there is no philosophical

justification for this.

The absence, or indeed the nonexistence, of ‘necessity’ as an objective fact is a

theme which crisscrosses the whole fabric of Hume’s thought. For common sense it is

a given that there is a subject � an I � the coherent self which pervades the somewhat

random array of experiences a person is exposed to during the course of a life.

Though I might have learnt more things, or I might have more wrinkles, I am

nevertheless in essence the same person at 60 that I was at 25. This week I might

choose to take a holiday in Spain or I might go to Germany, and in each country my

set of experiences would be different; in Germany I eat sausage, in Spain, paella, but

the ‘me’ returning home in either scenario would remain essentially unaltered.

However in Hume the complex of ‘impressions’ that constitute ‘me’ have no

necessary connection. The multiplicity of experiences which collide at any given

moment are not mediated by an underlying ‘self ’; there is no substratum through

which all these experiences are filtered. The notion of a personality is a misnomer;

consciousness is nothing more than the relentless and perpetual cascade of disjointed

and random ‘impressions’. Again we feel the psychological need to impose order on

this chaos; to arrange these impressions such that they seem to form a visible pattern

or unity, and it is this which we choose to label ‘myself ’. However, there can be no

philosophical justification for such a claim. One might encounter an ‘impression’ of

colour or shape, feeling or mood but there is no corresponding ‘impression’ of ‘self ’

to be encountered.

Thus the notion of a central subject seems to bubble and then melt, disappearing

into the ghostly and never-ending flux of impressions and ideas. Indeed the notion of

the object undergoes a similar dissipation. The plurality of elements or ‘impressions’

that constitute any given object have no necessary connection. A lion is yellow, has

sharp teeth and is fierce. Beyond these ‘impressions’ and ‘ideas’ � which incidentally

belong to various other so called ‘objects’ as well � there is no universal and abiding

impression of ‘lionish-ness’ to be encountered. This is powerful stuff indeed for we

are being made witness to the vast edifice of our reality in the process of collapse; all

structures, all delineation, everything that we hold sacred including our own sense of

self, teeters and falls asunder before the irresistible tide of scepticism Hume has

unleashed.

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Hume’s philosophy and its plunge into scepticism can be seen to be the logical

result, an inevitable unfolding, which comes from the inability of the empiricists to

derive a universally valid conception of necessity.

Kant

Immanuel Kant, whose philosophy is in part a response to Humean scepticism,

makes of necessity one of the cornerstone foundations of his own system. Kant agreed

with Hume that a necessary connection between cause and effect is not given in

experience. But Kant thought that Hume’s analysis of necessity as the by-product of

some psychological foible was entirely misplaced. Kant argued that necessity as ‘strict

universality’ did exist, and if it wasn’t derivable from experience then the great

German philosopher reckoned it must be in some way prior to experience. Such a

deduction was a product of the starkly imaginative Kantian approach to the subject�object dilemma more generally.

Philosophers had often tended to assume, rather dogmatically in fact, that there

were a class of objects existing independently of consciousness, an external world so

to speak, and that the task of knowledge was to depict or reflect those objects in

consciousness as truly and accurately as possible. The act of cognition was thereby an

essentially passive thing. With a bravura twist, Kant turned this assumption on its

head; he argued that the object should not be conceived of as constituting knowledge

but rather that knowledge should be conceived of as in some way constituting the

object:

Hitherto, it has been assumed that all our knowledge must conform to theobjects . . . the experiment therefore ought to be made whether we should notsucceed better with the problems of metaphysic, by assuming that the objects mustconform to our mode of cognition.1

Kant wants to ‘assume’ that objects must conform to our knowledge but this

assumption is not entirely dogmatic. In fact it is linked inexorably to the role of

necessity in Kant’s philosophy more generally. Kant looks at the sciences as they stand

as providing evidence of the possibility of real knowledge; he then goes on to pose the

question: what are the conditions necessary for the possibility of such knowledge?

Cause and effect, space and time are some of the elements that prove essential to

cognition and the subsequent development of knowledge, but Hume had already

demonstrated that the universality of such things could not be elicited from

experience itself. Such forms and categories were necessary for knowledge but as they

were not derivable from experience, they must therefore be discovered in that which

was logically prior to experience, in that which was of nature a priori.

Kant deduced that forms like space and time, and categories like cause and effect,

are not properties that belong to an external world, but are instead the universal

1 I. Kant, Critique of Pure Reason (New York: F Max Muller, Doubleday & Company, Inc, Anchor Books,

1966), p. xxxiii.

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forms and categories of mind, of every mind, which persist prior to experience. The

forms and categories are the means by which the mind is able to go to work on a

given content, to constitute the object according to its own parameters, as something

self-created, so to say. Indeed to speak of experience or even an object means already

to consider it (in Aristotelian terms) as a synthesis of form and matter, or to express

the same thing in a Kantian manner � the very idea of ‘experience’ as an idea is one

which has already been constituted by the categories.

Does that mean Kant denied the existence of an external world? Does his method

once more sink philosophy in nirvana, in a welter of subjectivity wherein the things

we experience are nothing more than the phantasmagorias, the distortions and

refractions of a particular mental solipsism? Not exactly. The Kantian theory is

demarked from crude subjectivism precisely through the way in which Kant was able

to universalise the categories: they are not the subjective thoughts of this or that

particular mind, they are not even thoughts as such; they are the conditions for the

very possibility of thought which inhere in and through every mind. They are visible

objectivities if you like. Kant certainly didn’t deny the possibility of an objective

external world, but this was to become the pivot around which his philosophy began

to falter and then break apart. According to Kant there was something; a raw other of

some type perhaps, which the forms and categories would then work upon in order

to constitute objects. It was massively problematic to say anything more about this

thing. For as soon as we try to describe its properties, we are immediately using the

categories to generate concepts that (as concepts) have already and automatically

been infused by the activity of categorical thinking. That which exists as other to the

categories and forms, the base material, if you like, which is at some point alloyed

with thought, belongs in its unadulterated state to the realm of the noumenal; an

unknowable realm, for in order to know it, we must think upon it, and in doing so

we instantaneously pervert the very thing as it truly is. All that we might say about

such a thing is that it remains in itself before we even constitute it as a thing; all we

might say about it is, in fact, that we can say nothing about it whatsoever.

Kant, deduces the categories and the forms of mind as the necessary pre-conditions

for knowledge, but we now come to discover that it is a knowledge of the

phenomenal world alone which we might attain � i.e. a knowledge of the world as it

is having already been subjected to the thought activity of the categories. There is

another separate and impenetrable realm; a realm of ‘things in themselves’ that

remains necessarily undisclosed and which stands before the philosopher in much the

same way as heaven stands before earth � invisible and unperceived. The ‘things in

themselves’ thwart the activity of knowledge by their very nature for as soon as they

enter into knowledge they cease to be what they are.

The error of the old metaphysics was precisely that it tried to grasp the

unconditioned (the things in themselves) using the categories which can only

constitute experience. In doing so the old metaphysicians found themselves

embroiled in the most surreal contradictions. They ascertained, for example, that

time was infinite but as well it must have an initial beginning. If it had no beginning

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then an infinity of time would have already passed at the point when we reach the

present moment. However, an infinity of time cannot, by definition, said to be

capped off by a particular limit within time itself. In fact both positions are entirely

rational but for Kant they form in an irreconcilable contradiction. It is this type of

contradiction which Kant labelled an ‘antinomy’ and it emerges from the faulty

attempt to address metaphysical concerns more generally; the soul, God, heaven etc.

(all allegories pertaining to things in themselves).

Although it was true for Kant, we could not directly derive the categories (as Hume

before him had demonstrated) from experience; nevertheless the categories are the

mode through which experience is to be had. A consciousness that apprehends things

directly as they are in themselves might indeed be possible; a consciousness which can

grasp an object without resorting to the forms of space and time for instance, but

such an act is impossible for us because our consciousness is bound inexorably with the

categories that generate and constitute it. If you doubt this, try to imagine a single

object, a book, or a chocolate bar, that doesn’t exist in space and time! The attempt to

grasp things in themselves necessarily yields the antinomies in much the same way a

computer processer, given a calculation which exceeds the capacity of the microchip,

will inevitably produce a screen of fuzz and static, broken and incoherent.

The singular brilliance of Kant’s approach is what separates him from the

rationalists who came before. The rationalists, the chief of whom was Renee

Descartes, had argued for a priori truths also, but they claimed such truths received

their tenure from the simple fact that they were self evident. It is self evident that two

plus two will always equal four, for example. However, Kant had now managed to do

something infinitely more sublime in order to sidestep such dogmatism. For Kant,

the constitution of things by the forms and categories � such as cause and effect or

time and space, etc. � is not something irrefutable by experience merely because it is

self-evident. The forms and categories cannot be refuted by experience because they exist

as the very conditions which allow experience to become. For the Kantian deduction to

be proved incorrect, experience would have to perform the rather fantastic feat of

refuting itself. Kant described this, his own rather brilliant deduction, as being

‘transcendental.’

He was thus able to transcendentally deduce experience as a moment of synthesis; a

fusion of form and content, in which the subject organises and totalises various

objects in a unified ensemble, their qualities necessarily allied by the action and

activity of the categories. Such a deduction provided a powerful refutation of the

Humean position, the assertion that experience is the never ending barrage of

fleeting, disjointed impressions. Hume had worn away the notion of universality and

in doing so it was not only the cohesiveness of objects which was made to disappear

but as well the notion of a coherent subject (an object in its own right, and one of

particular relevance to us) that would endure dissipation. As with any other object,

Kant was then compelled to establish the subject as being something which persisted

beyond the momentary coincidence of the qualities which presented empirically; the

subject necessarily ‘transcended’ these such that a unified set of categories, subsumed

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in the self or the ego, might begin working on the things in themselves, thereby

constituting experience. However, once more such logic inevitably resulted in a fissure;

the subject or ego that was the necessary source of the categories, and which was

therefore transcendental, could not thus be ‘subjected’ to the activity (thought) of the

categories themselves. The ego was in someway prior to them (though prior is the

wrong word because it implies something temporal�spatial � something generated by

the categories). In fact the transcendental ego is transformed into a thing in itself; we

are able to ascertain that it is the source of the very possibility of thinking (the forms

and categories), but beyond this we are able to say nothing more about it, for we

cannot apply the process � the categories and forms of thought � to it.

All this is beautiful, brilliant, topsy-turvy stuff! It is so much more as well. It is

more than a clever exercise in subtle thinking. From the perspective of later Hegelian

dialectics, we are able to see just how the Kantian theory necessarily transcends the

rationalist perspective that raises an empty universality couched in the idea that truth

is self evident, an idea evinced by Descartes. In the same moment Kantian thought is

able to overcome the scepticism of David Hume who expressed the opposite, who

endeavoured to demonstrate that the notion of categories, and furthermore the

objects of experience, is nothing more than an illusion; a manifestation of pure and

absolute subjectivity (sin subject!). Kant synthesises both these moments: the one of

abstract objectivity, and the one of abstract subjectivity, by mediating them with a

higher logic he himself describes as ‘transcendental.’ This transcendental activity then

goes on to generate a rupture; it splits the world into two exclusive and mutually

antagonistic parts � the noumenal and the phenomenal.

The philosophers who follow Kant are extremely concerned with this. Theirs is

very much the endeavour to overcome the dualistic contradiction at the heart of

Kantian philosophy; a specific manifestation of the subject-object question which had

already occupied Hume and Descartes, and which comes to generate the pulse that

runs through classical German philosophy.

Fichte

Fichte wanted to create a unified system of philosophy. He wanted to in some way

assure the identity of both subject and object. The only way to do this would be to

begin from a single unified principle, a principle from which all other science might

be addressed. By discovering such a principle, Fichte sought to elaborate philosophy

as a unified whole: to demonstrate that it was ‘the science of sciences.’ Immediately

one can see that Fichte is attempting address the dualistic contradiction inherited

from Kant; it is very early on in his career that he contrives this notion of a unifying

principle from which all else is attained.

This initial principle (Wissenschaftslehre) would not involve the opposition

between things as they are and things as they appeared in consciousness for such

dualism would inevitably result in two different sciences that could not exist in

combination. In Fichte it is the transcendental ego which becomes this first principle

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of philosophy. As in Kant the ego is the source of thought activity. Fichte shows that

one ‘objectifies’ in and through the activity of thinking � you can think about various

objects, a chocolate bar or a wall, etc., but behind these objectifications there is always

an ‘I’ or an ego, the necessary precondition of objectification itself. However, unlike

Kant, Fichte didn’t argue that the categories of thought went to work constituting an

object from the raw substratum, the mysterious and discrete realm of things in and of

themselves. Rather Fichte argued that the concept and its object were actually

synonymous. Fichte believes he is able to abolish the contradiction, the mire, which is

opened between the two things in Kantianism, by coming to recognise what he

describes as ‘the absolute ego’ as a dynamic activity. The activity of the ego is initially

spontaneous, and from it is produced a second basic proposition in which the ego

‘posits’ a non ego. The ego produces a general objectivity, an externality, (the non

ego) which is necessary for its movement, if you like; the condition or plane across

which its creative activity is cast. The ultimate source of both knowledge and reality

must inevitably postulate the conditions in which its principle might operate. Thus it

is important to note that the general objectivity (the non ego) is a production, a

manifestation of the ego itself, though the form the ego assumes under the guise of

the non ego is finite and limiting. It limits the infinite principle of the ego in order

that the ultimate principle, the source of all, might necessarily be specified and made

ever more concrete.

The Fichtean philosophy involves process � it begins to collect in a history, the

series of moments by which the ego posits its own being. In fact Fichte was able to

argue that the Kantian dualism between the noumenal and phenomenal was a result

of a misinterpretation; in Kant the ego was observing a form of itself, as something

that seemed distinct and entirely separate. It was like a cat which, upon seeing its own

image reflected back to it in a mirror, immediately coils and hisses, because it regards

the reflection as something hostile, a creature other to itself. The noumenal is the

word Kant (without realising) uses to describe the production by the ego, of the non

ego; it is the philosophical vision in which a particular manifestation of the ego’s

activity comes to be seen as something strange, distinct and ultimately unknowable.

That the notion of a thing in itself results from a peculiar refraction of the activity

of the absolute ego is quite obvious, Fichte notes. To say that the ego was conscious of

the existence of the thing in itself was to say quite paradoxically that the ego was

conscious of a thing outside consciousness.

The absolute ego posits the conditions necessary for its own activity. Having

produced the non ego that is still largely indeterminate, it goes on to become ever

more determinate; to manifest in specific and distinguishable objects, objects which

in order to be objects must mutually exclude each other. Hence the ego through the

power of the ‘imagination’ is required to create space. The acts of intuition that take

place in consciousness itself form in a series, and to facilitate this the ego must

engender time. The activity of the absolute ego as a self generating principle that

underpins and delineates the conditions and forms of everything, conditions like

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space and time, limitation, etc., is spontaneous and not something deliberately

posited by this or that mind.

The ego is absolute; its existence cannot be deduced for deduction itself is merely

one of the strands of its own manifold activity. Neither is the absolute ego a thing in

itself � as the Kantian ego is eventually revealed to be. In fact though we cannot prove

the existence of the absolute ego (we cannot objectify the ego which necessarily

transcends objectification as it is its very pre-condition), nevertheless this is of little

consequence to the philosopher. As Fichte says, we can intuit the presence of the ego

through its activity, because in actual fact we ourselves are nothing more than a

moment in its manifestation. The means by which the absolute ego comes to

constitute itself through a dynamic (which the philosopher is later able to consciously

re-trace) is at the same time the essence of what the ego is. Fichte says, rather more

concisely � ‘To posit itself and to be, as said of the ego, are completely the same’.2

Fichte sees the task of the philosopher as reproducing consciously (reflection), that

which the absolute ego had produced previously. The absolute ego is able to give a

transcendentally reflective account of itself by re-creating the forms and moments of

its own activity (reflection) and thereby developing and raising an entire system of

self consciousness.

Now one might debate the specific way in which Fichte does this � the deduction

of non-ego from ego and the resultant stages. The details of this debate are beyond

the scope of this particular essay. However some features of the Fichtean philosophy

more generally should be emphasised in order to better illuminate what had come

before, and place in context that which must necessarily follow.

Fichte fearlessly took the bull by the horns when he seized on the opposed poles in

Kantian philosophy and endeavoured to draw them together in a unified whole. His

philosophy maintains a certain superiority over the Kantian approach precisely

because of this. Kant himself was never able to fully awaken from those ‘dogmatic

slumbers’. The opposition between the noumenal and the phenomenal is entirely

dogmatic in as much as Kant asserts it to be irreconcilable. Kant recognises the

principle of logical contradiction (first elaborated by Aristotle), which presents in the

antinomies as an absolute: there is no way for the contradiction to be superseded

without violating or ignoring one of the cornerstone principles of logic. However,

Kant is bringing the principle of contradiction to bear from the outside and hence he

goes on to assume its inviolability, meekly and dogmatically. He does not at any time

subject it to his own transcendental logic.

Because Fichte begins with the Wissenschaftslehre; the principle of identity and its

sibling (non contradiction) are not merely assumed, precisely because they are not

brought to bear on his philosophical system from the outside. In fact logic and its

forms are, like everything in Fichte’s system, immanent; that is to say they are part

and parcel of the unfolding of the absolute ego.

2 J.G. Fichte, Collected works, edition reprinted in 1971 (edited by Fritz Medicus, 6 vols 1912) p. 292.

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Herein lies the vital distinction between the two philosophies. Fichte’s philosophy

is lithe for it is a philosophy of movement, the moments that are generated, fluid and

relentless, from the single absolute principle (the ego). Thus for Fichte, logic is not

something which is external to his thought, it is not something which predates his

method. It is instead a particular aspect of the ego itself, and as such must be

considered as part of a unified whole, as a single moment in the overriding process by

which the ego becomes richer and more complete. That is not to say that Fichte

denies the principle of non contradiction. He certainly does not. But the principles of

logic cannot be said to determine the ego as is the case in Kantianism. It is rather the

ego that constitutes logic for logic is a mere facet of its own becoming.

What does this mean practically? Fichte is able to argue that what appears

impossible in the concept often does have purchase in and through the activity of the

ego more broadly. According to the concept, time cannot be without violating the

principle of non-contradiction: as Kant pointed out in one of the antinomies, both an

infinite and a finite period of time seem to persist simultaneously (and therefore in

logical contradiction). In this case Fichte says that our intuition of the ego shows that

the ego nevertheless posits time as a sphere necessary for it to operate, despite any

logical incongruity. It is the living conditions of the ego which have carte blanche �the principles of logic can and will be sacrificed, for logic is merely a minor moment

in the overarching activity of the life of the ego as a whole. In other words, it is not

simply Fichte who is arguing that we must at times forego the principle of

contradiction; it is the ego itself which demonstrates through its activity that the

principle of contradiction is sometimes forgone in practise, in order to realise life, for

reality to be and to continue to enrich.

The Fichtean philosophy has the great merit of adumbrating much of what would

later be expressed consciously and comprehensively under the banner of modern

dialectics. Fichte, in a response to Kantianism, creates a philosophy that addresses a

totalised and unified reality: a reality which is not ossified and frozen in a fixed logical

rictus, but instead forms a dynamic, whereby an immanent principle develops,

positing its own contradictions and superseding them, historically.

However the Fichtean philosophy is also tarnished by the conditions of its

emergence. In Kantianism the forms and the categories of the subject go to work

on things in themselves in order to produce experience. Fichte seeks to eliminate the

things in themselves by reformulating the categories (and the ego which permits

them) in and through a unified metaphysical absolute. Such an assertion � though

one might argue for or against it � is also highly speculative. Fichte endeavours to

dissolve the noumenal world by asserting his all-encompassing first principle, but

though his ego is absolute (it is not the individual ego as in Kant) he has in effect

imposed it artificially from the above and beyond. (One might quip with some irony

that he has plucked it from the world of the noumenal!) The fissure between the

thing in itself and the thought of the thing is resolved in a speculative manner only �in much the same way that Kant saw the metaphysicians of old resolving the

problems of the antinomies by resorting to the artificial unity provided by notions of

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God. Yes, Fichte is infinitely more sublime but nevertheless his initial principle fails to

escape a similar dogmatism. That is why Fichte is unable to resolve the contradiction

between the thought of things and things in themselves; instead he casts across them

an absolute cloak, whereupon Kantian dualism goes to ground before later being

reproduced on the level of the psyche: we discover that there now persists a dualism

in every mind involving an opposition of the ego and non ego.

The problem of the antinomies therefore re-emerges in the form of a subjective

idealism, and it is from this basis that Fichte performs his various transcendental

deductions. We can see clearly that subjective idealism was a point Fichte had not set

out to reach, and yet we can also see (and this is most fascinating) just how the

objectivities and processes of thought, attaining their own momentum, pulled him

toward a position which he himself might once have disavowed. There is in fact

already an objective substratum; a history of thought, which is at work behind the

scenes, at the same time that Fichte is making his bid to deduce the processes of

thought and reality from the absolute ego and, in the last analysis, from the structures

and attributes of consciousness as he finds them. The estranged and individualised

way in which he was semi-coherently but correctly coming to regard thought as

process, rather than a static system of opposed constants, was at the same time itself

nothing more than a moment in a higher progression: i.e. the process of thought

unfolding in the history of philosophy more broadly. It is this which is of particular

importance to the later development of Hegelianism.

Schelling

Schelling also takes up the problem of the antinomies in their various guises.

Schelling poses the problem of the antinomies in a different way to both Kant and

Fichte before him. In an important analogy, Schelling draws the contrast between a

mechanical creation and an organic one. In the case of the machine each of its

individual parts can be constructed separately before being attached one by one, until

finally there is the completed watch or car etc. Schelling notes that this is not the case

with a living body. We cannot build first a heart, and then a pair of lungs and the

brain and so on, before slotting all the organs together and sparking a new life. The

living organism (and natural processes more generally) begins from an undiffer-

entiated unity out of which everything else develops.

Schelling does not dispute entirely the way in which the Fichtean absolute ego

yields the non ego, or the way in which its Kantian precursor calls into being the

opposition between the noumenal and the phenomenal. However unlike Fichte,

Schelling in his later work does not treat the opposition between subject and object as

something which is, in the last analysis, a production of human consciousness. It is

true to say that in Schelling such an opposition becomes expressed in and through

consciousness, and the philosophy of Kant and then later Fichte, are early testaments

to this. Such opposition is not the creation of consciousness itself, and so it must be

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discerned within a first principle that is prior to consciousness, even if such a

principle does consciously become.

In other words the dualistic components of reality that in Kant had been expressed

mostly through the noumenal and phenomenal, and which in Fichte occurred in the

ego and non ego, were divisions that had actually been produced by a single unified

principle or substance, in much the same way that a body develops from the one cell,

or a plant emerges from a single seed. Schelling wanted to find the first principle that

had preceded the point at which thought was forced to divaricate. This was

something Fichte had also tried to do though he only succeeded in reproducing the

subject object division in terms of a subjective idealism. As it was therefore

impossible to discover that undifferentiated unity within the realm of the subject,

albeit a subject absolutised in the form of the Fichtean ego, then it was necessary to

locate the principle elsewhere. Just as an organic body has its genesis in the one single

cell, so too does the entire universe have its genesis in the one single, undifferentiated

substance; a substance which Schelling realises must necessarily pre-empt the ego and

the non ego, though it is the root source of both: a substance which must exist

unadulterated prior to the frenzied activity of thought wherein antinomy tears it

asunder.

We can clearly see how Fichte was compelled to absolutize the subject as a first

principle, and by right of reply Schelling was compelled to absolutize the object.

Previously Spinoza had explained the subject�object interrelation by arguing that it,

and all other interrelations that one might encounter, are the modifications of the

one ‘infinite substance’ he called nature. Schelling takes a similar approach.

He argued that natural science demonstrates the intelligibility of nature. Every

scientific experiment involves compelling nature to yield this pre-existing intellig-

ibility, though sometimes veiled, eventually comes to disclose a rationality that is

already at work in the objective and unadulterated sphere. Schelling’s absolute is this

rationality, or at least this rationality is the principle that pervades the absolute.

Schelling’s absolute is the ultimate organising principle which manifests itself in

nature and which becomes conscious of itself in and through the ego. Such a

teleological principle is not reducible to the activities of consciousness (though it

does indeed come to be realised consciously), nor is it a principle that produces

nature and consciousness from the outside so to speak. In other words it is not

divine. It is not separate from nature any more than it is separate from consciousness;

they are both elements of the identity, the overall intelligibility of the universe, as it

constitutes itself in and through various moments and according to its own pattern.

The appreciation and exposition of this pattern, which is at the same time a history of

consciousness, is that which Schelling attempts to elaborate. There is much of Fichte

here, albeit that the two philosophers begin their theoretical departures from opposed

absolutes; the subject as ego and the object as nature respectively.

Schelling describes how the movement of the absolute comprises three main stages.

In the first it objectifies itself in Nature (Natura naturata) while in the second stage

this objectivity is transformed into subjectivity in the world of ‘representation’,

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whereby the human mind endeavours to universalise the various sets of particulars it

encounters in nature by producing them conceptually. The final stage involves the

appreciation of the former stages and their mutual interpenetration; it is the point at

which the absolute principle dwells on its own manifestations and thereby arrives at a

systematic knowledge of itself.

It would not be fair to say that nature simply imprints itself on the human mind. It

is the principle of the (overall) identity of subject and object which means that both

nature and consciousness are made from the same stuff. Nature’s reflection in the

human mind presupposes this absolute principle; it presupposes an intelligible

universe, for the mind is orientated toward this intelligibility expressed in the various

moments of consciousness up to and including philosophical reflection. Yet there is

something profoundly fatalistic in this; the logic and movement of the absolute seems

almost mechanistic as a result of the iron-like necessity with which it unfolds its own

mysterious teleology.

Schelling develops the philosophy of nature and in doing so tries to demonstrate

how nature contains the immanent conditions and rationale, the ‘slumbering spirit’

that was realised consciously through the self-reflection of the ego. Fichte had it

upside down; it was not the case that the ego generated the non�ego from the

purview of self-consciousness. What actually took place was that a non ego, an

objective absolute came to realise itself in a moment of pure subjectivity; as ego, as

consciousness. In Fichte the creation of the absolute ego and the moment in which it

generates the non-ego (a self creation) is merely the dreamlike and inverted

appreciation of the way in which the original absolute substance separates;

manifesting first in the unconscious realm of external nature before falling in a

moment of pure subjectivity. For Schelling it was impossible to think this initial

substance, the unconditioned first principle, because the very attempt to think it was

the activity of the ego, something which was as well a point in the separation: that is to

say the ego or consciousness was already a particle in the conditioning of the

absolute. Though Schelling’s first principle assumed an unconditioned unity, it

necessarily rescinds in a dualism between knowledge and its original unconditioned

object. The primary identity of subject and object was true because the conditions of

reality pre-suppose such an initial point of departure in order that they might, in

themselves and their interconnectedness, be rendered intelligible, but from the point

of view of those conditions and their exhibition in consciousness, it is absolutely

impossible to retrace our steps, and to finally expose that first initial unity to the

strictures and analyses of thought.

In Kant, Fichte and Schelling, it remains impossible to think the unconditioned. In

Kant the absolute or the unconditioned is consigned forever to the realm of the

things in themselves. In Fichte the absolute or unconditioned becomes the first

principle � the absolute ego that is the pre-requisite of thought but nevertheless

remains unattainable as a thought object; it lies beyond the reach and scope of

thought itself and can only be experienced in terms of intuition. In Schelling too

‘intellectual intuition’ and not reason is the mode through which we are made aware

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of the absolute � in this case as an original, unconditioned absolute object. Schelling

in particular, whose philosophy changes quite radically in the course of his lifetime,

tends more and more to give to art and the aesthetic intuition pride of place; it is

through the work of art that the ultimate truth of the unity of subject and object is

experienced consciously; in aesthetic intuition alone the infinite substance resonates

and resounds within the finitude of a conscious subject. There can be no rational

means by which the two conditions might be merged.

In other words though these philosophers do stipulate that both the infinite and

the finite, the unconditioned and the conditioned, constitute reality, nevertheless that

reality remains, in the last analysis, split into two separate and fixed components.

There is no path by which thought might legitimately move from one sphere to the

other; the logical contradiction between the finite and infinite is upheld throughout

the various developments from the one philosopher to the next, even though, as we

have seen, they do their best to resolve it in one way or another.

Hegel

George W.F. Hegel addresses this same dualism. Hegel argued that the truth is what is

in itself ‘infinite’. Kant had shown that the error of the old metaphysics was that it

attempted to traverse the path from the finite to the infinite; that it had used the

categories (whose correct application � ‘the understanding’ � consisted in the

constituting of experience) improperly in order to comprehend things as they are in

themselves (by reason). However, for Hegel the dichotomy between the things in

themselves and the thought of the things, between reason and understanding, was

something which was, in a certain way, already the province of finitude. The fixed

opposition of the thing in itself and the thought of the thing was a finite one precisely

because it had already been conditioned (by formal logic). It is an opposition that is

conditioned, for the character of each term in the pairing is immediately related to

and entirely dependent on the other. Hegel says of the finite in the logic that ‘it is its

nature to be related to itself as limitation’.3

To be related to something else in terms of this fixed opposition is to be finite,

according to Hegel. The common place notion of infinity � a continuous unfolding

without end is, for Hegel, something which is actually finite, because it derives its

meaning from the notion of finitude to which it stands in opposition. It is what Hegel

described as a finitised infinite or bad infinite � ‘The infinite as thus posited over

against the finite, in a relation where they are as qualitatively distinct others, is to be

called the spurious infinite . . . it is entangled in unreconciled, unresolved, absolute

contradiction . . . the infinite is only the limit of the finite and is thus only a

determinate infinite, an infinite which is itself finite’.4

3 G.W.F Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic (New York: A. V. Miller, George Allen & Unwin Humanities Press,

1969), p. 138.4 Ibid., pp. 139�140

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From within this relation of fixed opposition, thought could not legitimately make

the journey to the infinite or unconditioned. The old metaphysicians had tried and

subsequently failed, and Kant’s brilliance lies in the fact that he brought the

opposition of concepts to the fore in a conscious schematic.

Hegel is in effect arguing that it is only everything � i.e. the totality which is

infinite for it has no logical point outside itself which provides its own frame of

reference, from which its nature is to be derived.

Now we come to a most important point: the point, in fact, which marks the

culmination of classical German philosophy. Hegel’s notion of the infinite isn’t

simply a cleverly contrived response to the problem of the infinite and finite, the

conditioned and unconditioned as posed by Kant, Fichte and Schelling among others.

Though this writer has outlined in brief Hegel’s conception of what the infinite is,

Hegel himself did nothing of the sort. His conception of the infinite was not a

schematic definition for such a definition would have been dogmatic. Fichte had

endeavoured to subsume Kantian dualism in the absolute ego � itself a totalising

principle � however the principle inevitably floundered for the unity it had provided

was artificial � the enforced union of the noumenal and the phenomenal by an all

embracing principle of consciousness � a principle that was simply asserted.

Likewise Schelling too yearned for a totalising principle and such a principle in his

work arose as a direct response to Fichtean subjective idealism. Schelling discovered

totality in the form of an absolute object � but this too was something which was

asserted externally and dogmatically.

Hegel understood something of great importance in regards to this. In their

attempts to grasp totality both Fichte and Schelling were guilty of neglecting true

totality. That is to say they asserted totalising principles by which they hoped to

dissolve the subject�object contradiction; a dissolution that each affirmed primarily

as a response to the philosophy that had gone before; i.e. in the case of Fichte, as a

response to Kant, and in the case of Schelling, as a response to Fichte. Both Fichte and

Schelling had the great merit of realising that a totalising and systematic approach

was the only way at that point; they did not derive the notion of totality from the

totalised body of thought activity as a whole; i.e. the history of human beings

embroiled in thinking, the history of philosophy (of the universal aspect and

development of consciousness).

In the Phenomenology of Spirit Hegel does not simply elaborate a set of ideas that

are particular to him as an immediate response to the problems posed by the

philosopher who came before. Hegel takes up the problem of totality from the

perspective of totality itself. He does not simply consider this or that philosopher, but

he considers philosophy as whole; all the philosophical systems that have arisen in

thought over the millennia: the various moments by which universal thought,

collective consciousness, posits itself in and through the vast nexus of individual

minds constantly at work within it. The history of philosophy was the history of

human consciousness; the series of stages or moments through which it was, of

necessity, compelled to pass.

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Hegel describes his approach as dialectical; it allows each moment in the history of

consciousness to unfold immanently, according to its own logic. Hegel in a sense

becomes a spectator; he looks on, as each stage in consciousness, through its own

internal movement, falls into a moment of negation. Consider the empiricist position

which Hume unravels so ruthlessly. At such a point consciousness is compelled to

posit what is, on a certain level, an opposed position. Once empiricism falls into self-

contradiction it becomes necessary to posit its opposite � rationalism. (But here one

must remember there is identity in difference for both empiricism and rationalism

proceed from immediacy � the empiricists in terms of the immediacy of matter, the

rationalists in terms of the immediacy, the self evidence, of the idea.)

In and through the history of philosophy oppositions are synthesised or ‘sublated’

in a higher moment � the negation of negation � which in turn goes on to generate its

own internal contradictions.

It is not Kant who created the antinomies � he merely brings them to light in a

logical schema. It would be more accurate to say that thought itself produces the

antinomies. Likewise it would not be exact to say that Hegel resolves the antinomies;

he allows the process of thought to unfurl as a living totality in which contradiction

and negation is the driving force; contradictions are posed and also overcome before

re-asserting themselves in a newer and more concrete way.

Hegelianism is the moment at which thought has developed in and through the

history of consciousness such that it is able to consider the series of its own

manifestations; as Hegel writes the phenomenology, thought is actively becoming

conscious of itself in and through the writer. That makes the phenomenology one of

the most audacious, exciting and revolutionary texts you will ever read. Because when

you read it, when you read about the history of thought and the various moments or

stages of its phenomenology, those moments are not merely an external list which

exist separate to and outside of the reader as a descriptive; those moments in the

history of philosophy have always been moving inexorably toward this book itself and

it is at this point that thought reaches its most sublime peak, the point at which

thought becomes conscious of itself and its life’s activity through Hegel

and . . . through you (a concrete identity of subject and object).

The contradiction between the finite and the infinite, the conditioned and the

unconditioned, is resolved by Hegel because his system represents consciously

the living totality. The infinite is not a principle that is adduced externally and in

advance as in Fichte or Schelling; it is instead the conglomeration of the various finite

moments of the history of consciousness more generally. That is to say the infinite

manifests in the finite; no longer do the two terms stand in an ossified opposition as

an antinomy; instead they become interlinked in the process of the unfolding totality

(the true infinite) of the history of thought. In a way this couldn’t happen in Kant or

Fichte or Schelling, because thought itself had yet to pass through those moments, on

the path to self-consciousness, the consciousness of itself as both subject and object.

Plato, Aristotle, Spinoza, Schelling and others weren’t wrong with their various

philosophies; they were in fact entirely necessary for thought to move through the

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various stages that were needed in order for it to complete itself, and in Hegel the

process and the end result are unified dialectically; what thought is, is as well the

history of its own becoming.

The Phenomenology of Spirit is actually related to the third part of Hegel’s system

after the science of logic and the philosophy of nature, which are both logically prior

to the phenomenology. The system begins with the science of logic that itself begins

with the category of being. The category of pure being is the most logically prior

concept because it is the most undetermined or abstractly unconditioned. In fact the

concept of pure being finds philosophical representation in Schelling among others.

Pure being is that infinite substance that is the logical pre-condition of all reality, but

it is formless and empty of all content. Schelling superimposes this abstract emptiness

such that it casts a shadow across all determinations, swallowing them in its own

indistinction. He calls forth, as Hegel so memorably phrases it, ‘the night in

which . . . all cows are black’.5 There is no organic relation between the totality and

finitude.

As we have already seen Hegel does not take this approach. He does not raise pure

being up on a plateau from which it loftily surveys but does not partake in the life of

the finite. Instead Hegel unfolds pure being dialectically; he brings out its own

immanent characteristics; he allows thought to elicit the inner life of the concept. In

the case of pure being its key characteristic is that it lacks all determination other than

the fact that it is; to be something that simply is with no other qualities is to

be . . . nothing. From being is generated the concept of nothing; but nothing too has

being � it is therefore a something. The contradiction that opens up by these two

logical determinates is ‘sublated’ in the category of becoming. Becoming is neither

being or nothing and yet at the same time it preserves the characteristics of both; it

contains an identity in its difference.

Hegel endeavours to dialectically unfold the life of the absolute, i.e. the true totality

which in Kant, Fichte and Schelling had only ever existed as manifestations of the

individual consciousness where, through the best and most intelligent individuals, it

would be brought to self-consciousness through sheer individual will and

industriousness. In Hegel’s Science of Logic the categories are deduced immanently,

dialectically, and in the Phenomenology of Spirit they are deepened and concretised,

revealing themselves to be the modes and forms through which collective

consciousness is realised. In Schelling one might ask the question � what is the

absolute? The simple and non-dialectical answer is that the absolute is that infinite

substance, that pure being about which nothing more can be known. In Hegel too the

absolute is pure being; but it is also every other category in between right up until

consciousness, where pure being (concretised and determinate now) becomes being

that can think itself and eventually being that acts in accordance with its own

determinations in thought and in the world. It is a self mediated totality.

5 G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind (New York: J.B Baillie, George Allen & Unwin Humanities Press,

1966), p. 79.

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It remains necessary to emphasise once more that the history of consciousness

forms the third and most concrete part of Hegel’s system in as much as it contains the

former distinctions and levels of being within itself, and indeed begins to transform

them in accordance with its rules. Being quite clearly premises consciousness in the

Hegelian system, even if it reaches its most concrete form in and through universal

consciousness or spirit. But even here Hegel is not idealist in the limited sense of the

word. For Hegel observes that spirit, in its most concrete manifestation, is that which

is both subject and object; the absolute spirit revealing its true power and its full truth

precisely in the way in which it infuses sensuous matter with its own determinations;

the practical activity of people shaping the world through their physical and spiritual

labour. This is no small point because even today many critics of Hegel insist, rather

obtusely, that he was an idealist who believed that consciousness directly determined

the character of the external world; the latter was somehow dissolved by the former.

The better critics of Hegel’s objective idealism have often had cause to mention that it

stands closer to materialism than one might at first realise.

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