The Evolution of Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of Things (45 page)

Now whenever we are confronted with a philosopher who departs from common sense in this way, with evidently serious intent, we seem to have a choice: either to accredit the philosopher in question with a non-standard view of things or to accredit him with a non-standard way of talking. I myself am attracted to the idea that, when the philosopher goes as far as to accept a contradiction, then strictly speaking only the second alternative makes sense; for unless the philosopher in question has his own idiolect, he is violating certain basic linguistic rules (as I said earlier Hegel appears to be doing) and is not strictly speaking saying anything at all.
⁶⁵
Nevertheless, I am far from suggesting that, in order to interpret Hegel, we must simply forget the standard meanings of (some of) his words and seek suitable ways of translating them back into the vernacular. Even if it is true that what he says does not, strictly speaking, count as part of standard linguistic practice, ‘strictly speaking’ is the operative phrase. What he says is sufficiently closely related to standard linguistic practice, in sufficiently relevant ways, to gain its own admittance on a looser way of speaking. (An analogy: we may be quite happy to describe two people as playing chess even though they are oblivious to the rule that precludes castling through check and even though they often violate that rule, indeed even if they are aware of the rule and have agreed to ignore it; but
strictly
speaking, they are not playing chess.)
Strictly
speaking, when Hegel says that pure being and pure nothing are the same and are not the same, he is violating rules that govern the workings of some of the words he is using: he is not using those words with their standard meanings. But this is not to deny that he may have discovered compelling reasons for changing the rules; nor to deny that, if he has, saying this thing in the context of everything else he says may be the best way of getting the rest of us to acknowledge these reasons; nor to deny that, if the rules are accordingly changed, the words in question may retain their meanings on a looser way of speaking. (Another analogy: it was when the pawn was first
allowed to move forward two squares, some time in the fifteenth century, that chess strictly speaking came into existence, although on a looser way of speaking chess had already existed for a long time and merely underwent a change then.) So given that I do
not
say that a strict way of speaking is the only correct way of speaking, I am happy to grant that Hegel’s toleration of this contradiction, and of others, is more than just a linguistic quirk. It is a genuine heterodoxy, couched in this way because the difficulty and unfamiliarity of the ideas require an assault on our standard ways of thinking, or on our standard ways of making sense of things.
⁶⁶

Such deliberate breaking of linguistic rules, to let a concept evolve into something previously beyond the expressive power of the language, is a device that I think we see frequently at work, not only in philosophy but also in the natural sciences. (A prime example, I would argue, is the rejection of basic principles of Euclidean geometry to allow for the development of the non-Euclidean concepts needed to describe physical space.
⁶⁷
) However that may be, it is precisely the sort of device which, on a Hegelian conception, should be expected to mark transitions in our sense-making from lower stages of development to higher stages of development. For precisely what it does is to bring about the
Aufhebung
of previous forms of sense-making, the eruption of new conceptual resources from old, exhibiting both change and continuity. It is through such metamorphoses that reality eventually attains to the full infinite system of concepts required for its own ultimate sense-making.
⁶⁸

Hegel is in any case well aware that he is challenging standard ways of thinking. Of course he is.
⁶⁹
This is part of what he has in mind when he distinguishes, as he frequently does, between reason and understanding.
⁷⁰
The processes of conceptual development described above are processes of
reason
. Indeed, ‘reason’ can be thought of as yet another name for reality, the infinite, the absolute, the true. But
understanding
is the faculty at work in standard ways of thinking, or in standard ways of making sense of things. Its power, which is ‘the most astonishing and mightiest of powers, … the tremendous power of the negative’ (
Phenomenology
, Preface, ¶32), is a power
of analysis. Understanding breaks its objects up into component parts. It treats of them in isolation from all else and without regard to the whole. It arrives at ‘thoughts which are … familiar, fixed, and inert determinations’ (ibid., emphasis removed). This is why it cannot tolerate contradiction, whose resolution is always part of the active processes of reason at work in the whole and is
ipso facto
beyond its purview. It cannot make sense of contradiction. Nor can it make sense of
Aufhebung
. It must, as it were, yield to
Aufhebung
. That is, it must itself be
aufgehoben
. (This is not to deny that understanding has all sorts of practical uses, nor even that it has all sorts of theoretical uses, for instance in mathematics (
Encyclopedia
I, §80
Z
). But in
metaphysics
, the most general attempt to make sense of things, it must be
aufgehoben
.
⁷¹
)

Reason, unlike understanding, does tolerate contradiction.
⁷²
But, as I have been urging, tolerating contradiction in this context is not the same as acceding to the possibility that a proposition and its negation should both be true, on a standard conception of what a proposition is, of what negation is, and of what truth is.
⁷³
On a standard conception of these matters, nothing of the sort
can
be acceded to. The point is rather that the standard conception must itself be
aufgehoben
. ‘The abstract “either-or”’ of understanding (
Encyclopedia
I, §80
Z
, p. 115) must be overcome. And make no mistake: this is a restless and bloody matter. As Hegel puts it, ‘the battle of reason is the struggle to break up the rigidity to which the understanding has reduced everything’ (ibid., §32
Z
, p. 53).

These remarks go some way towards answering a question that naturally arises, at least from the point of view of understanding, about Hegel’s dialectic. If reason, or reality, tolerates contradiction, why must contradiction be resolved? Why should it not survive, in all its raw primitive inconsistency, into the final synthesis of the absolute idea?
⁷⁴
To ask this question is to miss the point that
what
reason tolerates just is something that must be resolved. Or, to put the point in a suitably contradictory way, what reason tolerates is something that cannot be tolerated. ‘The so-called world,’ Hegel insists, ‘… is never and nowhere without contradiction’ (
Science of Logic
, I.i.ii.2C(
b
), Remark 2, p. 238). ‘But,’ he straightway adds, ‘it is unable to endure it’ (ibid.; cf.
Encyclopedia
I, §11). Contradiction is the motor force of change. By its very nature it propels reality to a higher stage of development in which it is
aufgehoben
. Without it, there would be no
movement, no activity, no purpose, nothing (see
Science of Logic
, I.ii.2C, Remark 3, p. 439).
⁷⁵

One of the best ways to make sense of all of this is in terms of the relation between the finite and the infinite. For a thing to be finite, recall, is for it to be negated by an ‘other’. That is as much as to say that, by its very nature, the finite invokes its own negation. And that in turn means that the finite has an inherently contradictory nature.
This
is why there is contradiction everywhere. For there is finitude everywhere. The finite invokes its own negation, not only in thought, but also,
eo ipso
, in reality, since thought and reality are ultimately one on Hegel’s conception. For a finite thing to invoke its own negation, however, is for it to bring about its own end in such a way as simultaneously to be true to itself. In a word, then – in the word that Hegel himself unsurprisingly uses – the finite
aufhebt
⁷⁶
itself (
Encyclopedia
I §81, p. 116). As Hegel proceeds to explain,

everything finite, instead of being stable and ultimate, is rather changeable and transient; and this is exactly what we mean by that dialectic of the finite, by which the finite, as implicitly other than what it is, is forced beyond its own immediate or natural being to turn suddenly into its opposite…. All things … – that is, the finite world as such – are doomed…. (
Encyclopedia
I, §81
Z
, p. 118; cf. ibid., §§28
Z
and 214)

But such
Aufhebung
is the resolution of the contradiction. And the infinite, as I have repeatedly said, is not opposed to such finitude; it embraces it, in all its contradictoriness, and along with its nisus towards the resolution of that contradictoriness. The infinite, or reality, is the integrated whole in which this resolution is played out: ‘the living unity of the manifold,’ as Frederick Copleston puts it (Copleston (
1963
), p. 165), or ‘the Bacchanalian revel in which no member is not drunk,’ in Hegel’s own evocative image (
Phenomenology
, Preface, ¶47).

All of this is beyond the grasp of understanding.
⁷⁷
That is why it has the air of the mystical. But, Hegel insists, there is mystery here ‘
only …
for the understanding’ (
Encyclopedia
I, §82
Z
, p. 121, emphasis added). This ‘mystical’ is ‘the concrete unity of those propositions which understanding only accepts in their separation and opposition…. [It] may be styled mystical – not however because thought cannot both reach and comprehend it, but merely because it lies beyond the compass of understanding’ (ibid.). It lies beyond the compass of
understanding
. It does not, on the broad conception of metaphysics with which I am operating, lie beyond the compass of metaphysics.
See further §9 below.

8. Hegel
Contra
Kant Again. Absolute Idealism

We began this account of Hegel’s system with his rejection of Kant’s transcendental idealism (§2). It will be instructive, in the light of what has emerged since, to reflect on other more specific parts of Kant’s philosophy with which Hegel both must and does take issue.

First, although Kant drew a distinction of his own between understanding and reason, it was but a faint adumbration of the distinction that Hegel urges on us. For Kant, understanding was the faculty of concepts whereby we think about objects of experience. In particular, it was the source of the twelve fundamental
a priori
concepts whereby we do so (Kant (
1998
), A19/B33 and A79–80/B105–106). Reason was a higher faculty, a faculty that on the one hand enables us to recognize systematic interconnections between the deliverances of understanding (ibid., A130–131/B169–170 and A302/B359) and on the other hand frees the concepts of understanding from their restricted application to objects of possible experience, thereby enabling us to think about things in themselves and indeed to determine fundamental principles of morality (e.g. ibid., §II,
Ch. 2
, passim). Reason was thus a faculty that we can use to step back from understanding and to make sense of, around, and beyond understanding in ways that understanding itself could never equip us to do. And it was motivated by the demand for the unconditioned. As Kant put it, ‘reason is driven by a propensity of its nature to go beyond its use in experience … and to find peace only in the completion of its circle in a self-subsisting systematic whole’ (ibid., A797/B825).

That last clause might have been written by Hegel. But there is much else here that is an anathema to Hegel. For one thing, the principal contrast that Kant recognized between understanding and reason made no sense without the further Kantian distinction between appearance and reality which Hegel abjures. Furthermore, Kant cast reason as just another faculty. In fact it was the faculty that we use, plunged as we are in the midst of things, to make sense of that very distinction, the distinction between appearance and reality. For Hegel, reason
is
reality. Again, Kant took reason to be no less bound by principles of standard logic than understanding – which is why, when reason’s demand for the unconditioned issued in arguments both for the finitude of the physical universe and for its infinitude, Kant concluded that there had been a malfunctioning of some sort, specifically a failure to draw that same distinction between appearance and reality. For Hegel, Kant’s very presumption that something had gone wrong showed that he was assimilating reason to what he (Hegel) calls understanding (
Encyclopedia
I, §45
Z
; cf.
Science of Logic
, Introduction, ‘General Notion of Logic’, p. 46).

On Hegel’s conception, we can
both
reject the distinction between appearance and reality
and
acknowledge that this leaves us with a rational demand for the unconditioned that is unmeetable without contradiction, simply by
acquiescing in the contradiction. Kant would have found this unintelligible.
⁷⁸
Relatedly, on Hegel’s conception, we can regard as constitutive various uses of concepts, such as the use of the concept of the complete physical universe in cosmology, that Kant would have regarded, on pain of contradiction, as regulative. For Hegel there is no such pain; or better, perhaps, there is such pain, but it is to be endured for its corresponding gain.