From: cyrilsmith-at-cix.compulink.co.uk (Mr C Smith)
Thank you, Tristan for the OED entry. But, useful as this is, it can't resolve our problems. After all, the book is about the use of the English language, not about philosophy as such. So it is not surprising that the entry contains hardly any direct quotations from Hegel, and none at all from Marx. The Hegel bits are really an expression of Olde Englyshe Hegelianism. Those Victorians liked Hegel because they thought he was mysterious, and they wanted to be mystified.
We all come into this discussion from different angles. Let me summarise mine. I am engaged in an attempt to regenerate the conceptions of revolutionary socialism. This starts with the archeological work of carefully disinterring Marx from layer upon layer of bureaucratic rubble, 'Marxism', 'Marxism-Leninism', and so on. Clarifying the relation between Marx and Hegel is an important part of this operation, and one bit of that task is to rescue Hegel from 'Hegelianism'. (On this point and others, see the essay appended to Chapter 4 of my 'Marx at the Millennium', Pluto, 1996, price 12.99, and also a piece called 'Marx's Concept of Science', in International Socialist Forum, Number 2.)
It seems obvious to me that Hegel cannot be understood except in relation to human social life. Critically following Kant's completion of the Enlightenment, he saw that it was impossible to answer any questions about the world without examining the problem: 'Who's asking?' Since the answer was surely: 'Human beings', this led to problems of self-knowledge and self-consciousness. Kant had decided that, while the subjective faculty of thinking can be investigated, the objects in themselves had to remain unknowable, because our knowledge was moulded by the categories with which we got hold of them. Thus, to try to know them always led to fatal contradictions. But Hegel couldn't accept this.
'The original hidden and reserved essence of the universe has no force which could withstand the courage of knowing; it must expose itself to that courage, bring its wealth and depths to light for our enjoyment.' (Inaugural Lecture on the History of Philosophy, 1816. Great stuff!!)
There are obstacles standing in the way of this knowledge, and Hegel has to show that they can be overcome by Reason, because they have been put there by Reason itself. This is the way to Freedom, the movement from consciousness to self-consciousness, from in-itself to for-itself, from implicit to explicit, etc. To be free is to be self-determined, so if philosophy is to find the way, it must discover how to explain everything. That includes both everything outside itself and itself. Nothing less will do. This is how Hegel's Absolute unfolds from being implicit to being explicit.
'Mind is the infinite Idea, and finitude here means the disproportion between the concept and reality, but with the determination that reality is what shines within the notion - an appearance which Spirit in itself posits as a barrier to itself, in order, by its transcendence to have and know freedom for itself as its very being.' (Philosophy of Mind, para 386. [Sorry, but I've tried to re-translate this.] C.)
Although Hegel called himself a Lutheran, he was not really a Christian at all. When he identifies 'the dialectic of the finite' with 'the goodness of God', and 'the notion of God's might', he is making big trouble for Jehovah. (Smaller Logic, para 81, Remark, where he talks about 'the dialectical moment'. Immediately after this comes the stuff about the movement of planets, the chemical elements, etc.) (To see Hegel examined in a humanist light, get hold of Ute Bublitz's Beyond Philosophy. See the foot of this message for details.)
This is idealism, all right, but if you try to cram Hegel into a box marked 'idealism', you miss the whole point. Similarly, to imagine that Marx's critique of Hegel meant hitching up Hegel's dialectic to something called 'materialism', is to make a big mistake. Marx broke with Hegel's notion that philosophy can reconcile the contradictions thrown up by history and philosophy. That implied breaking with Hegel's understanding of contradiction. Since Marx was not a philosopher, he knew that the job is not to reconcile contradictions in your head. Their origins had to be traced to the inhuman form taken by human life itself, and then that form of life had to be revolutionised and humanised through social practice. That is why Marx never got that university chair, but instead was an exile living in poverty.
At every stage of its career, Hegel's Absolute develops by setting up an Other, and then revealing it to be Spirit itself. Nature is the Other of Spirit, an obstacle to Freedom. Reflection overcomes that obstacle when it finds that Nature, 'like mind, is rational, divine, a representation of the Idea. But in nature, the Idea appears in the element of asunderness, is external not only to mind but also to itself.' (Philosophy of Mind, para 381.) The 'truth of Nature' is Mind or Spirit (Geist).
'Nature is to be regarded as a system of stages, one arising necessarily from the other and being a proximate truth of the stage from which it results; but it is not generated naturally out of the other, but only in the inner Idea which constitutes the ground of Nature.' (Philosophy of Nature, para 249.)
So, when people like Annette try to 'use' Hegel to illuminate natural evolution, I want to answer them as I do those guys who say that Marx 'applied' the Hegelian dialectic to political economy. If the dialectic works in that way, how come that Hegel himself reached quite opposite conclusions? (See my contribution to 'History, economic History and the Future of Marxism: Essays in Memory of Tom Kemp', called 'Hegel, Economics and Marx's Capital'.) The 'stages' of Hegel's Philosophy of Nature are not a sequence in time. Indeed, 'time 'is one of those stages! They are moments of the Absolute in its otherness.
'Nature exhibits no Freedom in its existence, only necessity and contingency'. (PhN, para 248) 'The land animal did not develop naturally out of the aquatic animal, nor did it fly into the air on leaving the water, nor did perhaps the bird again fall back to earth.' (Para 249.) 'To seek to arrange in serial form the metals or chemical substances in general, plants and animal and then to ascertain the law of the series is a fruitless task.' (Ibid., Remark.) And don't tell me that Hegel never had the opportunity to read Darwin: he knew Lamarck's stuff, and that had the basic notion of natural evolution clearly in it. No, Hegel's opposition to evolution was a matter of principle.
In general, I believe that Hegel showed what philosophy had to do if it were to be able to show the way to Freedom. It is wrong to extract bits of the system, to be re-cycled for some other purpose, like nicking parts of old cars.
Marx did not disagree with Hegel's account of what philosophy would have to do to complete the task of human liberation. Concealed in the movement of Hegel's Absolute, Marx found a reflection of humanity's history of self-creation through labour. Only he argued that the job could not be done by philosophy at all. Something quite different was required to free that history from alienation - the communist revolution!
Anyway, our question still stands unanswered: what has Marx's standpoint to say about Nature and natural science?
Maybe, one day....
Cyril
________________________________________________________________________
by Ute Bublitz
Introduction:Definition and Friendship:War and Abstraction:Art and Life
The meaning of philosophy is deeply linked to reconciliation. And reconciliation to the world as it is today is no longer possible. Living unreconciled opens the way for rejection. Yet, rejection can never carry out what it implicitly requests: a thorough transformation of life. Without the element of the general, rejection is doomed to certain failure. Only philosophy has been able to develop that generality. On the other hand, mere philosophical knowledge of how to grasp the whole, dies the moment it is faced with a world to which reconciliation is impossible. Today, then, we can neither reject the way we live, nor reconcile ourselves to it. In this book, reconciliation and rejection confront and illuminate each other, with the hope that, in their combined light, we can see our path into the future.
Reconciliation is best summarised in Hegel's dictum that what is actual is reasonable and what is reasonable is actual. Rejection on the other hand aims at creating a new life. A life in which I freely go out into the world and freely give, where I don't require your thanks and don't keep an account.
The book is written in a clear and gripping language, which avoids philosophical jargon, without losing the stringency of the deepest thoughts of philosophy. No previous knowledge of either Aristotle or Hegel is required.
Published May 1998
183 pp - A5 - paperback - £10.00 - ISBN 0 9533099 0 8
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