Hegel’s Logic: An Essay in Interpretation. John Grier Hibben 1902
Der Begriff ist das Princip alles Lebens und damit zugleich das schlechthin Konkrete. Der Begriff ist das den Dingen selbst Innewohnende; wodurch sie das sind, was sie sind. Die Idee ist die Wahrheit; dem die Wa heit it ist diess, class die Objektiviät dem Begriffe entspricht. – Hegel
We have followed the dialectic movement through the various stages of the categories of being and of essence, and have found the development logically continuous and progressive. Its most complete expression, as reached by our investigation thus far, has revealed a fundamental factor which is not merely a determining factor, but a self-determining factor as well. Hegel’s Begriff which we will translate by the word notion, is nothing more or less than this complete expression of all that is contained in the categories of being and of essence. Hegel calls the notion the truth of being and of essence. It is the underlying substratum of all things, needing no support itself because self-supporting; requiring no further explanation of itself because self-explanatory; dependent upon no external determination because it is self-determined.
We have already discussed the category of form, and have seen that Hegel uses this term always to signify a constructive formative principle essentially dynamic in its nature. By the term notion he means not only that which is the source of this dynamic principle, but also that which is at the same time a self-sufficient source. He has advanced from the conception of form as the principle of activity to that of form as the principle of self-activity.
The notion, moreover, is not to be conceived as merely a form of the understanding, ranking as a logical concept such as our idea of a universal class or group of objects, as of man, dog, horse, and the like.
Such a group or class idea, ranking merely as a formal concept, is the veriest skeleton of thought. It is dead, empty, – wholly abstract, as Hegel would put it. The notion, on the contrary, is most thoroughly concrete, – that is, it is thought as an active constructive and productive force. It has more than a mere subjective value. It is not a mere idea in the mind.
The true thought is a force, and the true force is self-determining and self-active; all other thoughts and all other forces are but the shadows of reality. The true thought manifests itself in some external manner, in the inventions of the mechanician, in the institutions of the state, in the charities of the church, in the paintings and statues of the artist, in the deeds great and small of human beings, who think, and plan, and act withal. Hegel regards the notion as the living spirit of all that is actual, pervading and dominating all forms of life and all phases of activity, from the simplest to the most complex, and from the lowest to the highest.
The standpoint is evidently one of absolute idealism. The chief and most characteristic feature of the doctrine of the notion is that of subjectivity, for Hegel says again and again that the underlying sub- stance of the universe as conceived by Spinoza should be a subject and not a substance. The notion he calls, therefore, the Ego, – that is, the underlying power beneath, and in all things is also a personality. It is essentially self-conscious. It is not merely an intelligent force, but it is an intelligent force working both consciously and purposefully. There is in the Hegelian system no place for a force, as conceived by von Hartmann, which works intelligently but unconsciously, and therefore blindly.
The element of necessity, moreover, which lies at the basis of the concept of substance and of causation, is in the doctrine of the notion transmuted into freedom, inasmuch as the necessity is regarded as a self-imposed necessity. The self-determining power of the notion is to be conceived, therefore, as essentially a free activity. It is an activity not merely an sich, – that is, possessing the potentiality of activity, nor is it merely für sich, – that is, the explicit realization of the potential activity; it is both an sich and für sich, – that is, it possesses the self-sufficient power and capacity for self-determined activity, an activity which consciously transmutes its potential into the actual.
Thus conceived, the notion, being spontaneous and unconditional, may be regarded as the final and most complete characterization of the Absolute. The Absolute, therefore, may be most adequately defined as the notion. This is not only the highest expression of the nature of the Absolute, it is the all-comprehensive definition as well. The notion embodying the truth of all phases both of being and of essence, it follows that all the characterizations of the Absolute contained in the categories of being and of essence which the successive stages of the dialectic movement have manifested, may now be completely summed up in the all-embracing nature of the notion. Hegel, therefore, defines the notion also as the totality of all things (die Totalität). It represents the fulness of all content, being both self-contained and all containing. The moments of all forms of activity are embraced within it. It is the great unifying principle of the cosmos. It forms both the whence and the whither of all things. It must, therefore, be immanent in all things. The notion, moreover, contains all the earlier determinations of thought as conserved in itself. The contradictions which have been necessarily involved in the earlier stages of the development have been overcome by being sublimated in its higher unity.
The dialectic movement from the standpoint of the notion is essentially one of development (die Entwiekelung). That movement in respect to the earlier category of being we found to be that of a transition, the passage from definite being to its corresponding other. In the category of essence, the dialectic process is mediated by the idea of reflection which marks no transition from definite being to its other but rather an illumination of definite being by the light cast upon it by its other.
The other thus functions as the complementary correlative of the original being in question, and gives to it point and significance. But when we come to the category of the notion, there is an actual development from that which is given into its other in such a manner that the unity of the two is completely preserved, and the former finds in its other only that which is the complementary part of itself. As such it forms the truth of the transition which characterizes the dialectic movement in being, and of the reflection which characterizes the dialectic movement in essence.
The evolution which is due to the activity of the notion is essentially a self-development. It is of the very nature of the notion that it should manifest itself, and that, too, in all the various phases of its manifold possibilities. The idea of development, the continuous unfolding of all that is potential in the notion, demands a single unifying principle in the midst of the super-abounding diversity of content, manifesting itself in a progressive process in which each succeeding stage is more completely realized than the one before.
The manifestation of this principle takes place in time, producing the present cosmic order; nevertheless, the truth of this principle in its fulness and in all the logically coordinated stages of its evolution must be regarded as unconditioned and undetermined by time. The essential nature of this evolution is primarily dialectic, – that is, each stage must be regarded as the necessary complement of the one before, in the sense that it overcomes its contradictions and supplies its defects. This is fundamentally a logical demand. As Hegel would put it, any given stage is gesetzt by that which precedes, – that is, from that which is contained in the former, the reason is necessarily constrained to infer the latter.
Thought is thus under compulsion, – the compulsion of its own nature to develop its concepts from the simplest to the more and more complex.
Each stage of such a development, because unsatisfactory as the complete expression of truth, demands a fuller and more satisfactory stage which lies just beyond, which will in a measure correct its errors and supplement its defects, but which in turn will cause new questions to arise which it cannot answer and new contradictions which it cannot resolve. And thus the onward dialectic movement proceeds not from one period of time to another so much as from the idea of imperfection to that of perfection, from the idea of incompleteness to that of completeness.
When the temporal process has been completed, it furnishes a completed product. You cannot go backward, rolling it up again, as it were, into its closed potentiality, and then repeat the process at will.
Movement in time is from the bud to the full-blown rose, but the rose cannot shut and be a bud again. But this reverse movement is always possible in reference to the thought relations which underlie any series of development. Given certain premises, the conclusion must develop itself out of them; and given the conclusion containing its major and minor terms, it is possible to work backward when once the proper middle term has been discovered to the original premises. It is the so-called process of reduction which reverses the forward movement of deduction.
Moreover, the development in time is essentially finite; the dialectic development of thought is essentially infinite. The development in time represents a gradual change from stage to stage; the dialectic development is a fuller and fuller revelation of that which, in spite of its indefinitely varied manifestations, is ever one and the same, – the absolute.
The temporal development falls within the dialectic movement, and may be regarded as a moment in the larger process[3] In the revelation of the full significance of the notion, or in other words, in its dialectic movement, three stages appear which are so related that either the first or the second taken by itself proves to be misleading and unsatisfactory, and has a final significance only when it unites with the other to form a complete synthesis which constitutes the third stage. These stages form the three divisions of the category of the notion. They are as follows –
(1) The Notion as Subjective. (Der subjective Begriff.)
(2) The Notion as Objective. (Der objective Begriff.)
(3) The Notion as the Synthesis of Subjective and Objective. (Die Idee.)
The fundamental thesis which Hegel endeavors to maintain is that the reality of thought consists in its productiveness. He regards thought, as we have seen, as a constructive, self-determining force underlying the universe of things, fashioning all creatures, and shaping all events.
Now, if thought is merely subjective, it appears, as regards its essential function as a force centre completely paralyzed. On the other hand, mere objectivity which is regarded as separated from any subjective thought whatsoever is essentially irrational, and such a state, from the Hegelian point of view, must be considered as unreal. The objective is not set over against the subjective, but the subjective is immanent in the objective; and it is of the very nature of the subjective as a thought activity that it should strive to realize itself in the objective. As Hegel puts it, our “thoughts do not stand between us and things, shutting us off from things; they rather shut us together with things.” The synthesis of these two moments constitutes the notion in its true form and function.
The notion thus in its highest expression is the Idea (die Idee) – that is, the supreme Reason, the Absolute. The subjective notion and the objective notion are each indeterminate and incomplete. In the synthesis of subject and of object, the world of thought and the world of reality, we find the true type of notion, – not merely formal and abstract, but concrete, dynamic, conscious, all-controlling, all-embracing, free.