accurate. There is a dialectic movement in things, if such it please
you to call it, one that the whole constitution of concrete life
establishes; but it is one that can be described and accounted for in
terms of the pluralistic vision of things far more naturally than in
the monistic terms to which Hegel finally reduced it. Pluralistic
empiricism knows that everything is in an environment, a surrounding
world of other things, and that if you leave it to work there it will
inevitably meet with friction and opposition from its neighbors. Its
rivals and enemies will destroy it unless it can buy them off by
compromising some part of its original pretensions.
But Hegel saw this undeniable characteristic of the world we live in
in a non-empirical light. Let the _mental idea_ of the thing work in
your thought all alone, he fancied, and just the same consequences
will follow. It will be negated by the opposite ideas that dog it,
and can survive only by entering, along with them, into some kind
of treaty. This treaty will be an instance of the so-called 'higher
synthesis' of everything with its negative; and Hegel's originality
lay in transporting the process from the sphere of percepts to that of
concepts and treating it as the universal method by which every kind
of life, logical, physical, or psychological, is mediated. Not to the
sensible facts as such, then, did Hegel point for the secret of what
keeps existence going, but rather to the conceptual way of treating
them. Concepts were not in his eyes the static self-contained things
that previous logicians had supposed, but were germinative, and passed
beyond themselves into each other by what he called their immanent
dialectic. In ignoring each other as they do, they virtually exclude
and deny each other, he thought, and thus in a manner introduce each
other. So the dialectic logic, according to him, had to supersede the
'logic of identity' in which, since Aristotle, all Europe had been
brought up.
This view of concepts is Hegel's revolutionary performance; but so
studiously vague and ambiguous are all his expressions of it that one
can hardly tell whether it is the concepts as such, or the sensible
experiences and elements conceived, that Hegel really means to work
with. The only thing that is certain is that whatever you may say of
his procedure, some one will accuse you of misunderstanding it. I make
no claim to understanding it, I treat it merely impressionistically.
So treating it, I regret that he should have called it by the name of
logic. Clinging as he did to the vision of a really living world, and
refusing to be content with a chopped-up intellectualist picture
of it, it is a pity that he should have adopted the very word that
intellectualism had already pre-empted. But he clung fast to the old
rationalist contempt for the immediately given world of sense and all
its squalid particulars, and never tolerated the notion that the form
of philosophy might be empirical only. His own system had to be a
product of eternal reason, so the word 'logic,' with its suggestions
of coercive necessity, was the only word he could find natural. He
pretended therefore to be using the _a priori_ method, and to be
working by a scanty equipment of ancient logical terms--position,
negation, reflection, universal, particular, individual, and the like.
But what he really worked by was his own empirical perceptions, which
exceeded and overflowed his miserably insufficient logical categories
in every instance of their use.
What he did with the category of negation was his most original
stroke. The orthodox opinion is that you can advance logically through
the field of concepts only by going from the same to the same. Hegel
felt deeply the sterility of this law of conceptual thought; he
saw that in a fashion negation also relates things; and he had the
brilliant idea of transcending the ordinary logic by treating advance
from the different to the different as if it were also a necessity of
thought. 'The so-called maxim of identity,' he wrote, 'is supposed to
be accepted by the consciousness of every one. But the language which
such a law demands, "a planet is a planet, magnetism is magnetism,
mind is mind," deserves to be called silliness. No mind either speaks
or thinks or forms conceptions in accordance with this law, and no
existence of any kind whatever conforms to it. We must never view
identity as abstract identity, to the exclusion of all difference.
That is the touchstone for distinguishing all bad philosophy from what
alone deserves the name of philosophy. If thinking were no more than
registering abstract identities, it would be a most superfluous
performance. Things and concepts are identical with themselves only in
so far as at the same time they involve distinction.'[1]
The distinction that Hegel has in mind here is naturally in the first
instance distinction from all other things or concepts. But in his
hands this quickly develops into contradiction of them, and finally,
reflected back upon itself, into self-contradiction; and the immanent
self-contradictoriness of all finite concepts thenceforth becomes the
propulsive logical force that moves the world.[2] 'Isolate a thing
from all its relations,' says Dr. Edward Caird,[3] expounding Hegel,
'and try to assert it by itself; you find that it has negated itself
as well as its relations. The thing in itself is nothing.' Or, to
quote Hegel's own words: 'When we suppose an existent A, and another,
B, B is at first defined as the other. But A is just as much the other
of B. Both are others in the same fashion.... "Other" is the other by
itself, therefore the other of every other, consequently the other of
itself, the simply unlike itself, the self-negator, the self-alterer,'
etc.[4] Hegel writes elsewhere: 'The finite, as implicitly other than
what it is, is forced to surrender its own immediate or natural being,
and to turn suddenly into its opposite.... Dialectic is the universal
and irresistible power before which nothing can stay.... _Summum jus,
summa injuria_--to drive an abstract right to excess is to commit
injustice.... Extreme anarchy and extreme despotism lead to one
another. Pride comes before a fall. Too much wit outwits itself. Joy
brings tears, melancholy a sardonic smile.'[5] To which one well
might add that most human institutions, by the purely technical and
professional manner in which they come to be administered, end by
becoming obstacles to the very purposes which their founders had in
view.
Once catch well the knack of this scheme of thought and you are lucky
if you ever get away from it. It is all you can see. Let any one
pronounce anything, and your feeling of a contradiction being implied
becomes a habit, almost a motor habit in some persons who symbolize by
a stereotyped gesture the position, sublation, and final reinstatement
involved. If you say 'two' or 'many,' your speech betrayeth you, for
the very name collects them into one. If you express doubt, your
expression contradicts its content, for the doubt itself is not
doubted but affirmed. If you say 'disorder,' what is that but a
certain bad kind of order? if you say 'indetermination,' you are
determining just _that_. If you say 'nothing but the unexpected
happens,' the unexpected becomes what you expect. If you say 'all
things are relative,' to what is the all of them itself relative? If
you say 'no more,' you have said more already, by implying a region
in which no more is found; to know a limit as such is consequently
already to have got beyond it; And so forth, throughout as many
examples as one cares to cite.
Whatever you posit appears thus as one-sided, and negates its other,
which, being equally one-sided, negates _it_; and, since this
situation remains unstable, the two contradictory terms have together,
according to Hegel, to engender a higher truth of which they both
appear as indispensable members, mutually mediating aspects of that
higher concept of situation in thought.
Every higher total, however provisional and relative, thus reconciles
the contradictions which its parts, abstracted from it, prove
implicitly to contain. Rationalism, you remember, is what I called the
way of thinking that methodically subordinates parts to wholes, so
Hegel here is rationalistic through and through. The only whole by
which _all_ contradictions are reconciled is for him the absolute
whole of wholes, the all-inclusive reason to which Hegel himself gave
the name of the absolute Idea, but which I shall continue to call 'the
absolute' purely and simply, as I have done hitherto.
Empirical instances of the way in which higher unities reconcile
contradictions are innumerable, so here again Hegel's vision, taken
merely impressionistically, agrees with countless facts. Somehow life
does, out of its total resources, find ways of satisfying opposites
at once. This is precisely the paradoxical aspect which much of our
civilization presents. Peace we secure by armaments, liberty by laws
and constitutions; simplicity and naturalness are the consummate
result of artificial breeding and training; health, strength, and
wealth are increased only by lavish use, expense, and wear. Our
mistrust of mistrust engenders our commercial system of credit; our
tolerance of anarchistic and revolutionary utterances is the only way
of lessening their danger; our charity has to say no to beggars in
order not to defeat its own desires; the true epicurean has to observe
great sobriety; the way to certainty lies through radical doubt;
virtue signifies not innocence but the knowledge of sin and its
overcoming; by obeying nature, we command her, etc. The ethical and
the religious life are full of such contradictions held in solution.
You hate your enemy?--well, forgive him, and thereby heap coals of
fire on his head; to realize yourself, renounce yourself; to save your
soul, first lose it; in short, die to live.
From such massive examples one easily generalizes Hegel's vision.
Roughly, his 'dialectic' picture is a fair account of a good deal of
the world. It sounds paradoxical, but whenever you once place yourself
at the point of view; of any higher synthesis, you see exactly how
it does in a fashion take up opposites into itself. As an example,
consider the conflict between our carnivorous appetites and hunting
instincts and the sympathy with animals which our refinement is
bringing in its train. We have found how to reconcile these opposites
most effectively by establishing game-laws and close seasons and by
keeping domestic herds. The creatures preserved thus are preserved for
the sake of slaughter, truly, but if not preserved for that reason,
not one of them would be alive at all. Their will to live and our
will to kill them thus harmoniously combine in this peculiar higher
synthesis of domestication.
Merely as a reporter of certain empirical aspects of the actual,
Hegel, then, is great and true. But he aimed at being something far
greater than an empirical reporter, so I must say something about that
essential aspect of his thought. Hegel was dominated by the notion of
a truth that should prove incontrovertible, binding on every one,
and certain, which should be _the_ truth, one, indivisible, eternal,
objective, and necessary, to which all our particular thinking
must lead as to its consummation. This is the dogmatic ideal,
the postulate, uncriticised, undoubted, and unchallenged, of all
rationalizers in philosophy. '_I have never doubted_,' a recent Oxford
writer says, that truth is universal and single and timeless, a single
content or significance, one and whole and complete.[6] Advance in
thinking, in the hegelian universe, has, in short, to proceed by the
apodictic words _must be_ rather than by those inferior hypothetic
words _may be_, which are all that empiricists can use.
Now Hegel found that his idea of an immanent movement through
the field of concepts by way of 'dialectic' negation played most
beautifully into the hands of this rationalistic demand for something
absolute and _inconcussum_ in the way of truth. It is easy to see how.
If you affirm anything, for example that A is, and simply leave the
matter thus, you leave it at the mercy of any one who may supervene
and say 'not A, but B is.' If he does say so, your statement doesn't
refute him, it simply contradicts him, just as his contradicts you.
The only way of making your affirmation about A _self-securing_ is by
getting it into a form which will by implication negate all possible
negations in advance. The mere absence of negation is not enough; it
must be present, but present with its fangs drawn. What you posit as A
must already have cancelled the alternative or made it innocuous, by
having negated it in advance. Double negation is the only form of
affirmation that fully plays into the hands of the dogmatic ideal.
Simply and innocently affirmative statements are good enough for
empiricists, but unfit for rationalist use, lying open as they do to
every accidental contradictor, and exposed to every puff of doubt.
The _final_ truth must be something to which there is no imaginable
alternative, because it contains all its possible alternatives inside
of itself as moments already taken account of and overcome. Whatever
involves its own alternatives as elements of itself is, in a phrase
often repeated, its 'own other,' made so by the _methode der absoluten
negativität_.
Formally, this scheme of an organism of truth that has already fed as
it were on its own liability to death, so that, death once dead
for it, there's no more dying then, is the very fulfilment of the
rationalistic aspiration. That one and only whole, with all its
parts involved in it, negating and making one another impossible if
abstracted and taken singly, but necessitating and holding one another
in place if the whole of them be taken integrally, is the literal
ideal sought after; it is the very diagram and picture of that notion
of _the_ truth with no outlying alternative, to which nothing can be
added, nor from it anything withdrawn, and all variations from which
are absurd, which so dominates the human imagination. Once we have
taken in the features of this diagram that so successfully solves
the world-old problem, the older ways of proving the necessity of
judgments cease to give us satisfaction. Hegel's way we think must
be the right way. The true must be essentially the self-reflecting
self-contained recurrent, that which secures itself by including its
own other and negating it; that makes a spherical system with no loose
ends hanging out for foreignness to get a hold upon; that is forever
rounded in and closed, not strung along rectilinearly and open at its
ends like that universe of simply collective or additive form which
Hegel calls the world of the bad infinite, and which is all that
empiricism, starting with simply posited single parts and elements, is
ever able to attain to.
No one can possibly deny the sublimity of this hegelian conception.
It is surely in the grand style, if there be such a thing as a grand
style in philosophy. For us, however, it remains, so far, a merely
formal and diagrammatic conception; for with the actual content
of absolute truth, as Hegel materially tries to set it forth, few
disciples have been satisfied, and I do not propose to refer at all to
the concreter parts of his philosophy. The main thing now is to grasp
the generalized vision, and feel the authority of the abstract scheme
of a statement self-secured by involving double negation. Absolutists
who make no use of Hegel's own technique are really working by his
method. You remember the proofs of the absolute which I instanced in
my last lecture, Lotze's and Royce's proofs by _reductio ad absurdum_,
to the effect that any smallest connexion rashly supposed in things
will logically work out into absolute union, and any minimal
disconnexion into absolute disunion,--these are really arguments
framed on the hegelian pattern. The truth is that which you implicitly
affirm in the very attempt to deny it; it is that from which every
variation refutes itself by proving self-contradictory. This is the
supreme insight of rationalism, and to-day the best _must-be's_ of
rationalist argumentation are but so many attempts to communicate it
to the hearer.
Thus, you see, my last lecture and this lecture make connexion again
and we can consider Hegel and the other absolutists to be supporting
the same system. The next point I wish to dwell on is the part played
by what I have called vicious intellectualism in this wonderful
system's structure.
Rationalism in general thinks it gets the fulness of truth by turning
away from sensation to conception, conception obviously giving the
more universal and immutable picture. Intellectualism in the vicious
sense I have already defined as the habit of assuming that a concept
_ex_cludes from any reality conceived by its means everything not
included in the concept's definition. I called such intellectualism
illegitimate as I found it used in Lotze's, Royce's, and Bradley's
proofs of the absolute (which absolute I consequently held to be
non-proven by their arguments), and I left off by asserting my own
belief that a pluralistic and incompletely integrated universe,
describable only by the free use of the word 'some,' is a legitimate
hypothesis.
Now Hegel himself, in building up his method of double negation,
offers the vividest possible example of this vice of intellectualism.
Every idea of a finite thing is of course a concept of _that_ thing
and not a concept of anything else. But Hegel treats this not being a
concept of anything else as if it were _equivalent to the concept of
anything else not being_, or in other words as if it were a denial
or negation of everything else. Then, as the other things, thus
implicitly contradicted by the thing first conceived, also by the same
law contradict _it_, the pulse of dialectic commences to beat and the
famous triads begin to grind out the cosmos. If any one finds
the process here to be a luminous one, he must be left to the
illumination, he must remain an undisturbed hegelian. What others feel
as the intolerable ambiguity, verbosity, and unscrupulousness of the
master's way of deducing things, he will probably ascribe--since
divine oracles are notoriously hard to interpret--to the 'difficulty'
that habitually accompanies profundity. For my own part, there seems
something grotesque and _saugrenu_ in the pretension of a style so
disobedient to the first rules of sound communication between minds,
to be the authentic mother-tongue of reason, and to keep step more
accurately than any other style does with the absolute's own ways
of thinking. I do not therefore take Hegel's technical apparatus
seriously at all. I regard him rather as one of those numerous
original seers who can never learn how to articulate. His would-be
coercive logic counts for nothing in my eyes; but that does not in
the least impugn the philosophic importance of his conception of the
absolute, if we take it merely hypothetically as one of the great
types of cosmic vision.
Taken thus hypothetically, I wish to discuss it briefly. But before
doing so I must call your attention to an odd peculiarity in the
hegelian procedure. The peculiarity is one which will come before us
again for a final judgment in my seventh lecture, so at present I only
note it in passing. Hegel, you remember, considers that the immediate
finite data of experience are 'untrue' because they are not their own
others. They are negated by what is external to them. The absolute
is true because it and it only has no external environment, and has
attained to being its own other. (These words sound queer enough, but
those of you who know something of Hegel's text will follow them.)
Granting his premise that to be true a thing must in some sort be its
own other, everything hinges on whether he is right in holding that
the several pieces of finite experience themselves cannot be said
to be in any wise _their_ own others. When conceptually or
intellectualistically treated, they of course cannot be their own
others. Every abstract concept as such excludes what it doesn't
include, and if such concepts are adequate substitutes for
reality's concrete pulses, the latter must square themselves with
intellectualistic logic, and no one of them in any sense can claim to
be its own other. If, however, the conceptual treatment of the flow of
reality should prove for any good reason to be inadequate and to have
a practical rather than a theoretical or speculative value, then an
independent empirical look into the constitution of reality's pulses
might possibly show that some of them _are_ their own others, and
indeed are so in the self-same sense in which the absolute is
maintained to be so by Hegel. When we come to my sixth lecture,
on Professor Bergson, I shall in effect defend this very view,
strengthening my thesis by his authority. I am unwilling to say
anything more about the point at this time, and what I have just said
of it is only a sort of surveyor's note of where our present position
lies in the general framework of these lectures.
Let us turn now at last to the great question of fact, _Does the
absolute exist or not_? to which all our previous discussion has been
preliminary. I may sum up that discussion by saying that whether
there really be an absolute or not, no one makes himself absurd
or self-contradictory by doubting or denying it. The charges of
self-contradiction, where they do not rest on purely verbal reasoning,
rest on a vicious intellectualism. I will not recapitulate my
criticisms. I will simply ask you to change the _venue_, and to
discuss the absolute now as if it were only an open hypothesis. As
such, is it more probable or more improbable?
But first of all I must parenthetically ask you to distinguish the
notion of the absolute carefully from that of another object with
which it is liable to become heedlessly entangled. That other object
is the 'God' of common people in their religion, and the creator-God
of orthodox christian theology. Only thoroughgoing monists or
pantheists believe in the absolute. The God of our popular
Christianity is but one member of a pluralistic system. He and we
stand outside of each other, just as the devil, the saints, and the
angels stand outside of both of us. I can hardly conceive of anything
more different from the absolute than the God, say, of David or of
Isaiah. _That_ God is an essentially finite being _in_ the cosmos,
not with the cosmos in him, and indeed he has a very local habitation
there, and very one-sided local and personal attachments. If it should
prove probable that the absolute does not exist, it will not follow in
the slightest degree that a God like that of David, Isaiah, or Jesus
may not exist, or may not be the most important existence in the
universe for us to acknowledge. I pray you, then, not to confound the
two ideas as you listen to the criticisms I shall have to proffer.
I hold to the finite God, for reasons which I shall touch on in the
seventh of these lectures; but I hold that his rival and competitor--I
feel almost tempted to say his enemy--the absolute, is not only not
forced on us by logic, but that it is an improbable hypothesis.