A Brief Reflection on Hegel

 

   I want to reflect on Hegel today. I confess what little I read of Hegel as a student I had a hard time understanding. I had a great professor thought, Dan Breazeale,  from whom I learned most of what I know. And the book by Charles Taylor, Hegel. I would put what I find important like this. Reality is transcendent to our understanding it, which takes place in history and is always partial. I reject absolute knowledge aspect of Hegel’s thought, the end of history. But since reality is intelligible (in part at least), it follows that "the real is the rational," and that any truth uncovered in the past will be preserved (aufgehoben) in any deeper understanding in the future. That -minus the Absolute stuff – means for me there is something of the hermeneutic circle/Heidegger in Hegel. I will briefly try to unpack this.

 

    The key point in Hegel is not just that “everything is rational” in the sense that everything is justified or good. Rather, “the real is the rational” means something closer to this: reality is not sheer chaos or brute unintelligibility. Human reason is not alien to being. Thought can progressively penetrate reality because reality itself has intelligible structure. That does not imply omniscience at any given historical moment. I think it is important to qualify this. Reality is intelligible, at least in part. It is also intelligible in some sense to a gorilla but not fully. We cannot ever in principle say within our finite horizon that we have attained absolute knowledge. If Hegel meant this, I disagree with him. Hegel seems to believe he had transcended our radical finitude and attained a view of Being as if from no place within in given that he believed the historical process culminated in philosophy’s self-comprehension. But like many later thinkers I value the developmental and historical insight while rejecting the final closure.

    All metaphysical truth is partial. If Being discloses itself to us in its truth, this truth cannot be cancelled though it can, because partial, be understood from within a deeper or more insightful framework. Aufhebung/Sublation does not merely cancel the earlier stage of understanding. It preserves it within a wider, richer understanding. A later truth does not simply prove the earlier false. Rather, it reveals both its truth and its limitation. I think Hegel avoids simple relativism (“every age has its own truth”) and static absolutism (“the truth was fully completed once and for all”). Instead, earlier understandings can be partial yet real. They are not merely discarded but deepened.

  

     I think it deepest in Hegel the way he discovered a deep aspect of understanding that transcended the rationalist, empiricist, and Kantian philosophy of his time. An example is how he recognizes the movement from sense-certainty to more mediated forms of knowledge in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Hegel discovered that what looked immediate already depended on concepts, language, universals, history, and social forms of recognition. He begins with what seems like the most certain and immediate kind of knowledge imaginable: simple sensory awareness. “Here is a tree.” “Now it is night.” “This is red.” It appears that consciousness is simply receiving raw reality directly, prior to concepts or interpretation. This is what he calls “sense-certainty.” At first glance, this seems like the purest knowledge because it is immediate. No theory. No abstraction. Just direct encounter. But Hegel then examines what actually happens when we try to express this supposedly immediate knowledge. Suppose I say: “Now is night.” But a few hours later, “now” is day. So what exactly was the “now” I meant? The supposedly immediate “now” slips away. The word “now” does not refer to one utterly unique moment. It is a universal term applying to indefinitely many moments. The supposedly immediate truth has changed. Yet the word “now” remains. Hegel concludes that what seemed utterly particular is actually a universal structure capable of applying to indefinitely many moments. Or “Here is a tree.” But if I turn around, “here” is now the house behind me. Again, “here” is not a pure immediate particular. It functions as a universal relational concept. Even more concretely, imagine a child pointing and saying: “That!” The meaning only works within an already shared world: shared language, shared attention, bodily orientation, social practices, implicit concepts of objects and identity. The “immediate” experience already presupposes a background world of meaning. This is why Hegel thinks consciousness gradually discovers that what appeared utterly direct was already conceptually structured. And he was right. The point is that the moment we try to articulate immediate experience, we discover that language already mediates it through universals. We never actually possess a pure, uninterpreted “this.”

    

    And the argument goes deeper still. Suppose I say: “I simply see a tree.” Hegel would ask: Do you really see merely raw sensation? Or do you already see “tree,” “branch,” “shadow,” “distance,” “living thing,” perhaps even “oak,” “beautiful,” “dangerous,” or “useful”? i.e., Perception is already shaped by learned categories and human practices.

A botanist, a carpenter, a painter, and a child do not see the “same” tree in the same way. Their worlds of meaning differ. This does not mean reality is subjective or invented. Hegel is not saying we fabricate the world arbitrarily. Rather, consciousness always encounters reality through historically and socially developed forms of intelligibility. That seems irrefutable. 

    Martin Heidegger radicalizes this insight by arguing that we do not first perceive meaningless objects and then add meaning afterward. We always already inhabit a meaningful world. A hammer first appears as “something-for-hammering,” within a practical world of purposes and relations, not as a neutral bundle of sense data. Hans-Georg Gadamer then extends this historically. Understanding always arises within tradition, language, and inherited horizons. There is no presuppositionless standpoint outside history. And one can even connect this to Ludwig Wittgenstein: the meaning of “this,” “pain,” “tree,” or “red” depends upon public language-games and forms of life, not private immediacy. Hegel’s brilliance here is that he does not simply deny immediacy. We really do encounter reality directly in one sense. The child really does point. We really do see the tree. But philosophy discovers that even immediacy has many conditions: language, embodiment, memory, concepts, social recognition, history, practices of attention, etc. Pure immediacy turns out to be an abstraction. This is why Hegel’s movement is called dialectical. Consciousness discovers contradictions within its own claims about itself. Sense-certainty claims to grasp the utterly particular and immediate, but in trying to say what it knows, it inevitably uses universals.

   And Hegel does not conclude that reality is unreal or that everything is merely constructed. The logical implication is that human knowing is mediated participation in intelligibility. That is very close to my own philosophical instincts: truth is real,reality exceeds us, understanding is historical and partial, yet thought genuinely reaches reality because reality itself is intelligible. That is  close to the hermeneutic circle. We never begin from nowhere. Understanding always starts within a horizon. Yet the horizon itself can expand and be revised through encounter with what resists us. This is why there really is a line from Hegel to Heidegger and Gadamer, even though both criticize him. Gadamer especially preserves something deeply Hegelian: truth unfolds historically through dialogue with tradition, and understanding is never simply subjective projection. We belong to history before we master it.

        Heidegger thinks Hegel still remains too committed to the metaphysics of total presence, i.e., is too confident that being can ultimately become fully transparent to thought. I think he is right. Heidegger radicalizes finitude. For him, concealment is not merely temporary ignorance awaiting conceptual completion. Reality exceeds disclosure in principle. My own position respects the insights of both, I hope. Reality is genuinely intelligible but human understanding is historical and finite; thus truth is progressive but never complete whereby later understanding preserves rather than annihilates earlier insights and transcendence prevents closure into “Absolute Knowledge.”

     I learned from Dan Breazeale and Charles Taylor that Hegel is far richer than the textbook caricature of “thesis-antithesis-synthesis.” Much of his importance lies in his attempt to think truth historically, reason socially, consciousness relationally, and contradiction as potentially revelatory rather than merely destructive. Since I found the original texts extremely difficult to understand, I gratefully acknowledge my dependence on Dan Breazeale and Charles Taylor.

. . .

 

I have read criticisms of Hegel as denying the law of contradiction, of introducing irrationality into German culture, as even helping prepare the ground for the nazis. That I reject as ignorance of his work. He is not saying 2+2 and equal 4 or 5. He is saying that our concepts, like love, or reason, or reality, or justice, can be deepened over time such that previous understandings are not so much refuted or contradicted but understood from different perspectives, perhaps deeper ones that reveal more.

      The accusation that Hegel “denied the law of contradiction” is a caricature. Hegel is not saying that logical contradictions are true in the ordinary sense that, say, 2+2=4 and 2+2=5 are both correct. Nor is he advocating irrationalism. He examines tensions, incompletenesses, and self-undermining tendencies within concepts and forms of life. A concept can reveal internal limits that force thought toward a richer understanding. That is very different from saying contradictions are simply acceptable. Hegel thinks contradiction is productive precisely because reason seeks intelligibility and unity. Contradiction in conceptual or metaphysical thought is a sign that our understanding is inadequate or partial.

    Take something like freedom. An early understanding of freedom might define it negatively: freedom means absence of restraint. “I am free if no one interferes with me.”

There is real truth in this. Hegel would not dismiss it as simply false. But problems emerge.

A person addicted to gambling or drugs may have no external restraint and yet be profoundly unfree. Likewise, a society without institutions, laws, education, or mutual obligations may maximize arbitrary choice while destroying the conditions for meaningful agency. So consciousness (that is, people thinking) discovers limits within the original concept itself. A deeper conception emerges: freedom is not merely the absence of constraint but participation in rational forms of life that make self-development possible. The earlier understanding is not simply erased. External liberty still matters. Protection from tyranny remains essential. But it becomes “sublated” (aufgehoben), which is to say,

preserved, limited, and incorporated into a richer conception. There is nothing irrational about this; to the contrary, it is a picture of reason at work.

     Or take love. A childish conception of love may identify it purely with immediate feeling or desire as in “I love someone because they make me feel happy.” Again, there is genuine truth here. Love does involve feeling, attraction, delight. But over time contradictions emerge. Feelings fluctuate; desire alone proves unstable. Love may demand sacrifice precisely when pleasurable feeling weakens. A deeper conception develops such that love includes commitment, recognition of the other as a person, mutual formation, shared history, fidelity, perhaps even willing the good of the beloved independently of immediate satisfaction. The earlier conception was not simply wrong. Romantic feeling remains part of love. But it is no longer treated as the whole essence. Again preserved, negated as sufficient, and integrated into a deeper understanding. For Hegel that is a  “dialectical” development. He thought that reality revealed itself progressively in this manner. I think progress is a matter of good fortune rather than necessity and I don’t think the concept of “dialectic” helps me much. Mistakes occur when we take one aspect of the truth and elevate it to dogmatic status at the expense of other or future understandings. That is how I would put it. But it is a good understanding of the finitude of our reason and our limited relation to reality. And this is why reducing Hegel to irrationalism misses the point. Hegel is trying to explain how rational understanding develops through confronting the inadequacies of its own partial formulations. The more serious criticism of Hegel is that he overestimates the extent to which history culminates in reconciliation or intelligibility. That is where thinkers like Søren Kierkegaard, Martin Heidegger object to. They think finitude, tragedy, ambiguity, and transcendence resist final synthesis, and I do too.

       Here an attempt to apply Hegelian logic to the concept of marriage. A concept is not simply abandoned when a deeper understanding emerges. Rather, earlier truths are preserved, limited, and integrated into a richer whole. A child may first understand marriage externally: two people live together, have a wedding, share a home. This is superficial, but not false. These visible forms really belong to marriage. Later, marriage may come to be understood primarily as romantic love: a union grounded in affection, attraction, intimacy, and personal happiness. Again, this discloses something genuine. Without love in this sense, marriage loses an essential human dimension. But experience gradually reveals tensions within identifying marriage simply with feeling. Feelings change. Passion fluctuates. Marriage often demands fidelity, sacrifice, forgiveness, endurance, and responsibility precisely when immediate emotion weakens. A deeper understanding emerges in which marriage is seen not merely as emotion or contract, but as a shared ethical life: a union involving commitment, mutual formation, shared memory, responsibility toward children and community, and participation in a larger social and moral order.  From a Hegelian perspective, none of the earlier dimensions are simply discarded. Romantic love remains essential. Personal intimacy remains central. The public and social aspects remain real. But they are now understood within a fuller conception.

     The modern debate about same sex marriage can also be understood through this lens. Traditionally, marriage was strongly connected to sexual complementarity, procreation, kinship, inheritance, and the continuity of family life across generations. These were not arbitrary features imposed from outside. They expressed real dimensions of marriage as historically lived and understood. But modernity increasingly brought another dimension of marriage to the foreground: mutual recognition between free persons. Marriage came to be understood more deeply as a union grounded in love, fidelity, equality, companionship, and the shared formation of a life together. Supporters of same sex marriage – including myself – argue that these latter dimensions disclose something essential about marriage and indeed homosexuality that earlier historical forms did not fully recognize. Above all, that homosexuality does not preclude serious love and commitment. From this perspective, same sex marriage extends principles already implicit within it: faithful commitment, mutual recognition, and shared ethical life.

    Conservative critics argue that sexual difference and the generational structure of family are not merely historical appendages but essential elements of the institution itself, and that removing them changes marriage at a fundamental level. I take that argument seriously. A Hegelian understanding would not reduce this disagreement to mere irrationality or arbitrary social construction. It would ask whether newer understandings preserve and deepen the genuine truths contained in earlier forms, or whether something essential is lost in the process. That seems a fruitful way to approach the disagreement.

    The deeper point is that concepts such as marriage are not static abstractions grasped once and for all outside history. Their meaning unfolds through lived human experience, institutions, practices, tensions, and reflection. Yet this unfolding is not pure relativism, because the development is constrained by reality itself and by the enduring human goods the institution seeks to embody. I do not think this is inconsistent with Thomism, given the agreement that our understanding of key concepts is finite and fallible. Only God stands outside of history and is absolute.