A Short History of Modern Philosophy: From Descartes to Wittgenstein, Second Edition (26 page)

This notion becomes a little clearer if we examine the beginning and the end of the dialectical process, and say something about the course between them. The starting-point of logic is, for Hegel, not arbitrary. Modern conceptions of logic have tended to the view that logic is an instrument whereby the consequences of some premise are derived. Logic is powerless to give knowledge until the premise is determined. This was emphatically not Hegel’s view, who thought that the premise of logic is determined by logic itself. The premise of logic is ‘pure indeterminate being’—being conceived without any of the particular determinations through which it makes itself manifest to the understanding. Being is the single great
a priori
concept, from reflecting on the nature of which we arrive at an
a priori
theory of reality. (The modern logician will be reluctant, as we shall see, to admit that there is any such concept as that of pure being: this only shows that Hegel’s metaphysics can no longer be so easily disguised as a logic, with all the incontestability which that label implies.)

Logic begins, then, from ‘being’, and advances towards its conclusion, which is the ‘absolute idea or truth itself’. This absolute idea is thought and reality at once: it is like the God of Spinoza, who comprehends the whole of things and, being identical with that whole, exists thinking Himself. Each concept in the dialectical process that leads to this supreme conception is obtained from that of being by a sequence of dialectical transformations.

Imagine a kind of impersonal dialectical ‘thought’, or thinker, attempting to understand the world. It has nothing available to it but thought and so must put forward, as its sole instrument of knowledge, the ‘concepts’ which enlighten it. Of necessity it begins from the single most indeterminate concept—that which is contained in all concepts and yet which is logically precedent to them, the concept of being. But what is being, considered as ‘unmediated’ by reflection, and as free from extraneous determinations? It is, surely, nothing, or (as the English translators of Hegel prefer to write it) Nothing. (Cf. Berkeley’s arguments against the Lockean substratum.) Hence the concept of being contains within itself its own negation—nothing—and the dialectical opposition between these two concepts is resolved only in the passage to a new concept. This concept is ‘becoming’, which captures the truth contained in that previous opposition, the truth of the
passage
of being into nothing and nothing into being. To our impersonal thinker the world now appears as becoming rather than as being, and this perception is ‘truer’ than the preceding one, although as yet far short of that absolute truth in which all such oppositions will be resolved.

Becoming seems to be a specifically ‘temporal’ characteristic, but we cannot assume at this stage that the ‘temporal’ character of Hegel’s logic is anything more than a metaphor. From the point of view of logic ‘becoming’ suffers from the same defects as ‘being’; it generates its own contradiction out of ‘the equipoise of arising and passing away’. So it gives way to a higher truth, which is that of ‘determinate being’, in which being and nothing are finally reconciled. Determinate being is that more familiar, less abstract, form of existence of which our world presents us with examples: being becomes determinate by being limited and so, as it were, incarnate in a certain identity. From this ‘limitation’ further oppositions arise and the process continues, until our ‘thinker’ is brought by a seemingly ineluctable process to the absolute idea itself, so perceiving the whole of reality as ‘coming forth’ from that indispensable concept from which all thinking must begin.

It would not be unfair to say that Hegel’s metaphysics consists of an ontological proof of the existence of everything. The character of this, as of any ontological proof, is that it proceeds from concept to reality, arguing moreover that the discovery of reality and the ‘unfolding’ of a concept are one and the same. In Hegel’s metaphysics this aspect is to some extent concealed by his reluctance to specify the nature of the abstract ‘thinker’ for whom the dialectical succession of concepts unfolds. His genius for abstractions leads us always away from the subject of thought, to thought itself. And the nature of the resulting metaphysics is such as to abolish the distinction between thought and reality altogether, thus displaying the principal characteristic of idealism.

It is not to be expected that such a logic can readily be made intelligible, or that a philosophy which is able cold-bloodedly to announce (for example) that ‘Limit is the mediation through which Something and Other is and also is not’ should be altogether different from arrant nonsense. Nevertheless, a
picture
of the dialectic is not hard to form, and this picture is important to bear in mind as we turn to that part of Hegel’s philosophy—the philosophy of mind and of politics— which seems now to be most worthy of study and most likely to contribute to the pursuit of knowledge. The picture I have in mind is one that can be seen at its clearest in Leibniz’s theory of time. According to Leibniz, ours could be the best possible world only if it were also the richest—the richest in the number and variety of monads that it contains. For this to be possible some monads must contain predicates which cannot—from our limited point of view—co-exist. For example, a thing cannot be both red and green at once: these two attributes seem to contradict each other. But it
can
be red and green successively. So that, in the order of phenomena, the dimension of time enables monads (whose reality is timeless), as it were, to display their abundance of predicates in succession. In perceiving the world under the aspect of time we thereby reconcile what might otherwise have seemed to be contradictions pertaining within it. As Leibniz put it
(Réponse aux réflections de Bayle
): ‘Time is the order of possibilities which are inconsistent, but which nevertheless have some connexion.’ In some such way it is the dialectic of contradiction which squeezes the Hegelian concept out of its logical changelessness into the order of succession, replacing being by becoming, and logical stasis by ontological evolution.

The constant slide between logical and temporal relations is of the very essence of Hegel’s philosophy and preceded the official formulation of his doctrine of logic, exemplified in what is probably the greatest, and certainly the most intricately suggestive of his works,
The Phenomenology of Spirit.
This was written in 1806 and completed in Jena on the eve of the Napoleonic battle outside that town. The complexity and range of the
Phenomenology
defy description: it covers all subjects from art to theology, from science to history, and contains some of the most suggestive examples and intellectual parables in the whole of literature and philosophy. I shall content myself with a résumé of what I take to be its central argument.

It will be remembered that Kant’s positive philosophy in the
Critique of Pure Reason
was delivered by the ‘Transcendental Deduction’. According to this, the pure ‘subject’ of Descartes and the empiricists is capable of knowing itself as subject only because it also knows the world as object, disciplining its experience in accordance with the
a priori
categories of the understanding. From the epistemological point of view Hegel did not so much advance beyond as dance around this master thought of Kant’s, but he danced in a fascinating way. In the Hegelian whirlwind epistemology melts into ethics, metaphysics into the philosophy of mind, and theoretical understanding into practical reason. This amalgamation of practical and theoretical reason partly explains the temporal emphasis of Hegel’s logic. For it is of the essence of practical reason to
advance
towards
decisions,
and not to be detachable from the circumstances of the reasoner. Conclusion and argument are here inseparable, yet neither can be represented in the wholly a-temporal manner demanded by traditional theoretical logic.

Let us allow ourselves, then, as Hegel allows himself, full use of the temporal metaphor. We explore the relation between subject and object in the manner laid down in Fichte’s primeval drama (see pp. 156-8). We show how the pure subject
advances towards
self-consciousness through successive postulations of the objectivity of his world. Now Hegel’s ‘pure subjectivity’ is an abstraction, and he goes on to argue, both in the
Phenomenology
and elsewhere, against any view of the ‘I’ that does not grant universal status to its subject matter. Nevertheless, we can without distortion regard him as referring also, and primarily, to the individual subject, and laying down, in parabolical, quasi-historical terms, the conditions which must be fulfilled if that subject is to rise to the self-consciousness that fulfils his nature.

Like Kant, Hegel recognised that the existence of the self in any form brings with it a peculiar immediacy—the immediacy of Kant’s Transcendental Unity of Apperception. And Hegel took over from Kant one of the major conclusions of the
Critique of Pure Reason
(established in that part of the Dialectic called the Paralogisms, where the rationalist theory of the soul is demolished). This is that the ‘immediacy’ with which our mental states are presented to us can provide no clue as to the nature of those states. It is the mere surface glow of knowledge, wholly without depth. The immediacy of the pure subject is, as Hegel would put it, undifferentiated, indeterminate and so devoid of content.

It follows that the pure subject we have imagined can gain no knowledge of what he is, and still less any knowledge of the world which he inhabits. Nevertheless, as Kant saw, his existence presupposes a
unity,
and that unity requires a principle of unity, something that holds consciousness together as one thing. Spinoza had spoken in this regard of the
conatus,
or striving, that constitutes the identity of organic beings. Hegel has recourse to a similar notion, the Aristotelian
orexis,
or appetite. Through this, the subject is launched forth in a manner which is void of knowledge and uninformed by the prospect of success. Consciousness exists only as the primitive ‘I want’ of the infant, the contumacious screeching of the fledgling in the nest.

But desire cannot exist without being desire
for
something. As Hegel puts it, adopting Fichte’s jargon, desire
posits
its object as independent of itself: our primitive subject has already made a step towards the conception of another, and hence towards a conception of itself as differentiated from the other. Its ‘absolute simplicity’ is on the point of being sundered. But consciousness is not yet an
agent
: it has no conception of the nature of itself, or of the value of its primitive desire. It remains the slave of appetite and impulse. This is, roughly, the state of animal consciousness, which explores the world purely as an object of appetite, and which, being nothing
for
itself, is without genuine will. At this stage the object of desire is conceived only as a lack
(Mangel),
and desire itself destroys or consumes the thing desired.

There follows a peculiar ‘moment’ in the consciousness of the primitive subjectivity. This is the moment of opposition. The world is not merely passively uncooperative with the demands of appetite: it also actively resists them. The otherness of my world forms itself into opposition. It seems to remove the object of my desire, to compete for it, to seek my abolition as a rival.

The self has now ‘met its match’, and there follows what Hegel poetically calls the ‘life and death struggle with the other’, in which the self begins to know itself as will, as power, confronted with other wills and other powers. Full self-consciousness is not the result of this—for the struggle is one that arises from appetite, and brings no conception of the value of what is desired. Hence it does not create the consciousness of the self as standing in definite relation to the world, fulfilled by some things, denied by others. As Hegel would put it, it does not generate the concept of the self
in its freedom.
On the contrary, the outcome of this struggle is the mastery of one party over the other. Conflict is resolved only in the unstable relation of master and slave.

This new ‘moment’ of self-consciousness is the most interesting, and Hegel’s account of it was destined to exert a profound influence on nineteenth-century ethical and political philosophy. One of the parties has enslaved the other, and therefore has achieved the power to extort the other’s labour. By means of this labour he can satisfy his appetites without the expenditure of will and so achieve leisure. With leisure, however, comes the atrophy of the will; the world ceases to be understood as a resistant object, against which the subject must act and in terms of which he must labour to define himself. Leisure collapses into lassitude; the otherness of the world becomes veiled, and the self— which defines itself in contrast to it—becomes lost in mystery. It sinks back into inertia, and its newly acquired ‘freedom’ turns into a kind of drunken hallucination. True freedom requires self-consciousness, without which there can be no conception of how one is bettered by an action, and therefore no conception of its value. But the selfconsciousness of the master is fatally impaired. He can acquire no sense of the value of what he desires through observing the activities of his slave. For the slave, in his master’s eyes, is merely a means; he does not appear to pursue an end of his own. On the contrary, he is absorbed into the undifferentiated mechanism of nature, and endows his petty tasks with no significance that would enable the master to envisage the value of pursuing them.

But now let us look at things through the eyes of the slave. Although his will is chained, it is not removed. He remains active towards the world, even in his submission, and while acting at the behest of a master, he nevertheless bestows his labour on objects, and imprints his identity upon them. He makes the world in his own image, even if not for his own use. Hence he differentiates himself from its otherness, and discovers his identity in the act of labour. His self-consciousness grows, and although he is treated as a means, he unavoidably acquires both the sense of an end to his activity and the will to make that end his own. His inner freedom intensifies in proportion with his master’s lassitude, until such time as he rises up and enslaves the master, only himself to ‘go under’ in the passivity that attends the state of leisure.