HEGEL'S DIALECTICAL MYSTIFICATION

The normal title of this entry ought to have been Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis, but, at the moment, it remains at best my alternative title, which I am unlikely to return to, even though I find it more elegant than the new one. The point is that Hegel’s relation to the world-famous triad ascribed to him is highly questionable, to say the least. How questionable will be the subject of this entry, which will also reveal why I am so hesitant to write about Hegel under the false standard of this otherwise excellently to-the-point title.

There is a delightful joke hiding in the title of this entry, which, I am afraid, will be entirely missed, unless I clarify it myself. In one of his sharpest criticisms of Hegel, Schopenhauer called all Hegelian philosophy “a colossal piece of mystification.” The joke here is that the mystification that I am talking about happens to Hegel, so-to-speak, malgré lui. The rest will become clear from the entry itself.

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In an already quoted sentence from Bertrand Russell, Hegel’s philosophy is very difficult--- he is, I should say, the hardest to understand of all great philosophers.

Whether we may agree with Russell or not on his other Hegel points, on this one he utters a virtual truism. Because of this difficulty, and also because much of his philosophy was never published, but delivered in a series of University lectures, a lot of what we know of Hegel’s philosophy is either a mere retelling of it by his eager interpreters, or gleaned in its entirety from students’ notes of his lectures. Whenever calamities of this nature arise, the consequences can very well be unpredictable, or, better to say, sadly predictable.

I confess that in my youthful pursuits of philosophy I was convinced, like, perhaps, a million of unfortunate others, that the essence of Hegelian dialectics (later adopted by Karl Marx) consisted in the world-famous triad of thesis, antithesis, synthesis. My belief that it was so, was authoritatively confirmed by my earliest, and most trusted guide to world philosophy, which was Bertrand Russell’s History of Western Philosophy, where he explains Hegel’s dialectic method by using exactly these three by now intimately familiar words: thesis, antithesis, synthesis.

The truth of the matter however is that Hegel never used this famous triad in his own writings, mentioning it just once in an attribution of the terminology to Kant (whereas it actually belongs to Fichte). Tying Hegel to the dialectical triad was the work of the minor German philosopher Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus (1796-1862) who took it upon himself to be Hegel’s “interpreter” and popularizer, and from whose account of Hegel’s teachings the thesis-antithesis-synthesis triad was to become the trademark of Hegelian dialectics.

Ironically for the history of philosophy, this triad version is not even accurate. The problem with this triad is that it sends a wrong message about what Hegel intended to say. In popular Hegelian folklore, here is Thesis presiding over his household. Now suddenly he is challenged by his opposite rival Antithesis arriving on the scene. The two engage in a close combat to the death, from which Synthesis arises, like a fresh young flower from the battlefield’s old carnage.

But this is not at all what Hegel had in mind. The basic premise of his dialectics states that things and ideas all have internal contradictions within them, which can be discerned through careful philosophical analysis. The apparent unity previously observed can no longer rein in the inner contradiction; our thing or idea now collapses, and from the debris a more complex entity emerges at a higher level than the one before, which is now more capable to sustain the internal contradiction… until its own time comes to be dissolved and yield to an entity of a yet higher order.

The actual triadic forms, appearing in Hegel’s dialectics (being-nothingness-becoming, immediate-mediate-concrete, abstract-negative-concrete), refer to the process of transition of the thing from an insurmountable inner contradiction to a higher-level integration.

Returning to Russell, he obviously knows what he is talking about, when he thus describes Hegel’s theory as follows: A few examples of Hegel’s dialectic method may serve to make it more intelligible. He begins the argument of his logic by the assumption that the Absolute is a Pure Being. We assume that it just is, without assigning any qualities to it. But pure being without any qualities is just nothing; therefore, we are led to the antithesis. (Yes, the utterly wretched, but actually indispensable triad has stuck to Hegel for eternity!) “The Absolute is Nothing.” From this thesis and antithesis we pass on to the synthesis: The Union of Being and Not-Being is Becoming, and so we say: “The Absolute is Becoming.” This also, of course, won’t do, because there has to be something that becomes. In this way our views of Reality develop, by a continual correction of previous errors, all of which arose from undue abstraction, by taking something finite or limited, as if it could be the whole. “The limitations of the finite do not come merely from without; its own nature is the cause of its abrogation, and by its own act it passes into its counterpart…” The process is essential to the understanding of the result. Each later stage of the dialectic contains all the earlier stages; none of them is wholly superseded, but is given its proper place as a moment in the Whole. It is, thus, impossible to reach the truth except by going through all the steps of the dialectic.

Knowledge as a whole has its triadic movement. It begins with sense-perception, in which there is only an awareness of the object. Then, through skeptical criticism of the senses, it becomes purely subjective. At last, it reaches the stage of self-knowledge, in which subject and object are no longer distinct. Thus, self-consciousness is the highest form of knowledge. This of course must be the case in Hegel’s system, for the highest kind of knowledge must be that possessed by the Absolute, and as the Absolute is the Whole, there is nothing outside itself to know.

The Absolute Idea is something like Aristotle’s God. It is thought thinking about itself... Spirit is the only reality, and its thought is reflected into itself by self-consciousness. [Scottish philosopher William Wallace (1844-1897) interprets this rather obscure line of Hegel’s thought like this:] “The Absolute Idea. The idea, as unity of the Subjective and Objective Idea, is the notion of the idea, whose object (‘Gegenstand’) is the Idea as such, and for which the objective (‘Objekt’) is Idea: an Object which embraces all characteristics in its unity.” Hegel himself goes on to say: “This unity is consequently the absolute and all truth, the Idea which thinks itself.”

To bring the presumption of utter mystification to its climax, even the word dialectic is not Hegel’s per se, who prefers the term speculation. But there are several reasons why the question of mystification does not rise, in my opinion, to a level of scandalous revelation, a historical hoax perpetrated on philosophy for the last couple of centuries, one that now must somehow be exposed.

One reason is that much of Hegel’s philosophy comes to us second-hand anyway, so why should we object to the Chalybäus account and not to all others, which are demonstrably not Hegel’s own?! Another reason is that the usual thesis-antithesis-synthesis dialectical triad is a most indispensable tool of making the doctrine comprehensible, and it does not really clash with anything Hegel is saying on his own, except in one aspect, which needs to be clarified, namely, that there is a necessary unity and continuity in the course of history (or in the phenomenology of the Geist, for that matter), where the antithesis does not come from outside of the thesis, but from inside of it, constituting an internal contradiction, and, as long as this aspect is taken into consideration, Hegelian speculation proper can be easily reconciled with the “dialectics” attributed to him by others.

A third reason is certainly peculiar. The dialectical mystification of the thesis-antithesis-synthesis triad is by now such a firmly entrenched concept in philosophy, made essential by Marx and Lenin in particular, that it is most definitely destined to stay with us forever, and where the need for some harmonization between this pseudo-Hegelian dialectic and Hegel’s own speculation is paramount is, contrarily to our sense of propriety, in reconciling Hegel proper to what has been attributed to him! Luckily, this is not a difficult thing to do.