Summary
Hegel begins by demonstrating that the categories of thought through
which the mind grasps objects are not as stable or certain as his
predecessor Kant seems to assume. This instability even applies to
that apparently fundamental, universal category, “being.” To be able
to say that something “is,” that it exists, implies another category:
nothingness, or not being. Being always implies nothingness, and
vice versa, such that one cannot call to mind one category without
invoking the other. Being and nothingness are understood as both
opposed and identical, a unity of being and nothing. Consciousness
experiences this unity of opposites as contradiction, which it seeks
to resolve by invoking a third category called “becoming,” which
captures both nothing and being at once. This dialectical process
is how thought moves, according to Hegel’s model. Consciousness
posits a basic category that engenders a contradiction, is “negated,”
and falls apart, creating a need for a more complex category that
smooths over the contradiction. This new composite category in turn
reveals its own contradiction and points to another category, and
so on.
Essence, the subject of book II, is a higher, more complex
mode by which consciousness grasps objects. Consciousness of being
tries to get at objects through the simple binary of being/not being
and through the outcome of the tension between these two categories, namely,
becoming. Essence, on the other hand, points to qualities beyond
mere existence or nonexistence, to particular qualities of the object.
These qualities manifest themselves in the appearances of objects.
Instead of being or not being, objects appear to have different
natures. Being and essence are both features of objective logic—that
is, they pertain to qualities of objects themselves. Subjective logic,
on the other hand, gets at ideal properties of knowledge, those emanating
from products of the mind—namely, concepts or notions—which make
up the third and highest level of consciousness. It is at the level
of concepts that subjective and objective are considered together.
This is the domain of philosophy or metaphysics, where the concern
is the interrelation of consciousness and inputs from the world
of material objectivity.
Analysis
The Phenomenology of Spirit is regarded
as Hegel’s “first shot” at establishing his own unique philosophical
approach. He covers a lot of ground and introduces many of the major
themes that reappear in his later philosophical writings, but the
work is very confusing. His Science of Logic, published
in stages beginning in 1812, is no less difficult for the uninitiated,
but it benefits from the five intervening years Hegel had to reflect
carefully on his ideas. The latter book is widely understood to
be a more systematic treatise on ontology, which is the study of
being, and epistemology, which is the study of knowledge. Here Hegel
explicitly lays out his famous dialectic, the concept that, along
with the equally challenging concept of Geist,
is most frequently associated with his name. The slogan “thesis
– antithesis – synthesis” has long circulated as a useful shorthand
for understanding the basic idea of Hegel’s dialectical method.
However, Hegel himself never uttered this construction, and most
Hegel scholars agree that it is both helpful and potentially misleading.
In the Science of Logic, Hegel sets out
to show that the process by which consciousness assimilates objects
into mental concepts is more dynamic and, one might say, messier
then Kant describes it. Just as he does in the Phenomenology,
Hegel traces here the movement of consciousness, or the idea, from
basic categories to more complex ones. Consciousness attempts to
grasp objects at a most basic level, finds this first attempt somehow
unsatisfying as exposing inadequacies or contradictions, and proceeds
to a higher level, and so on. In the Phenomenology and
elsewhere, Hegel seems to imply that this dialectical unfolding
is an inherent feature of the world we inhabit, governing history
and culture. In Logic we see that the dialectic
is a phenomena of ideas. But the two dimensions of reality (i.e.,
history, culture, and the world in general) and our ideal, mental,
or conceptual grasp of things are not really separable. The world
we live in is a world created by ideas. But our ideas do not emanate
from the mind of a single individual, as other idealists such as
Kant seem to imply. Concepts have an objective status. They exist outside
of any individual as taken-for-granted reality. They belong to common
cultural understanding.
