Hegel's Conception of Reality

 

      I feel I have missed something.  Again, I don’t pretend to be a Hegel scholar. I am just trying to make sense of what little I know of his work, still guided by my teacher and Charles Taylor. I feel like a minor league baseball player critiquing Willie Mays, but what else can I do? For Hegel, I believe, it is not just that our conceptual understanding of Being – which is ‘out there’ – deepens in history. Being reveals itself to itself over time through concepts. I don't really grasp that. But it's like nature itself matures over time towards a telos not yet fully clear. This is the difficult and strange heart of Hegel.

     I have wanted to understand Hegel a relatively modest way: e.g., human understanding develops historically. But Hegel means something deeper and more metaphysical than merely our ideas change over time. For Hegel, reality itself is not static substance but living process. Being is not inert presence sitting there complete and finished apart from manifestation and development. Reality itself unfolds “dialectically.” This is where I lose my footing though it is fascinating philosophical-mythology at the same time.

    I guess the crucial thing is that Hegel rejects the sharp separation between thought and being, or concept and reality. The world is not merely a collection of dead objects externally observed by consciousness. Reality has an inner rational dynamism. This is why Spirit (Geist) becomes so important, though I have only the vaguest of notions of how to state in my own words what that means. I suppose one could say that “Spirit” does not simply mean ghostly substance or private mind. It means something more like:

living self-interpreting intelligibility becoming conscious of itself through nature, history, culture, institutions, art, religion, and philosophy. Thus Hegel sees history as metaphysically significant. History is not merely one thing after another happening externally in time. It is the gradual coming-to-self-consciousness of Spirit (God? Being?) I mean we are made of star dust, star dust being part of the universe/nature that has become self-conscious and can partially know a partially knowable universe.

    Perhaps human freedom as Hegel conceived it would help. Nature contains implicit possibilities (even they transcend natural science) such as life, consciousness, self-consciousness, reason, the ethical life, etc. These are not externally inserted into a meaningless universe. They emerge from within reality itself. I like that about Hegel for it is what I also believe. Matter gives rise to life. Life develops into consciousness. Consciousness develops into self-consciousness.Self-consciousness develops into ethical, artistic, religious, and philosophical forms.Reality increasingly becomes able to know itself. Human beings are therefore not accidental spectators standing outside Being. They are one way in which Being becomes self-aware.

     This is why Hegel sometimes sounds almost theological. The Absolute is not a static perfection existing outside history. The Absolute realizes or manifests itself through historical becoming. There is something like maturation here, something teleological. An acorn becoming an oak is a favorite kind of Hegelian image. The oak is not externally added to the acorn. The acorn contains the inner dynamism toward fuller realization. (recalls Aristotle). Analogously, Spirit unfolds historically toward fuller self-consciousness. Ancient societies embodied certain truths like unity with communal life,

ethical belonging, immediacy. Modernity develops other truths individual freedom, subjectivity, reflection. (I have often thought of Germany’s political parties like this: each contains a kernel of truth which they exaggerate at the expense of the whole truth to oppose each other.) Each stage both reveals and conceals aspects of Spirit.

     At this point, I hesitate. In some passages Hegel indeed seems to speak as though the universe itself strives toward self-consciousness. Before Hegel, “Being” was often thought as timeless presence. After Hegel, one can begin to think that Being reveals itself historically. That is revolutionary. But Hegel believes he has reached full philosophical communism, so to speak: full self-consciousness, the end of history, Being revealed in fullness. So – like many others – I am drawn to the historical disclosure of intelligibility, the developmental character of understanding, the embeddedness of reason in history, while resisting the stronger metaphysical claim that reality culminates in complete self-presence to thought. I acknowledge that Being is revealed or reveals itself historically but do not accept that it (through us) every becomes fully transparent.

 

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  Hegel’s philosophy sounds like a kind of “cosmicized Incarnation.” Not in the orthodox Christian sense, where the Incarnation is a unique historical event in which God becomes man in Jesus Christ, but in the sense that Spirit externalizes itself into finitude, history, nature, and human consciousness in order to come to self-manifestation and self-knowledge. Hegel places enormous importance on Christianity, especially the doctrines of Incarnation, Crucifixion, and Resurrection, which may have served as the guiding metaphor for his dialectical conception of reality. For Hegel, these are not merely supernatural events accepted by faith alone. They express profound metaphysical truths about reality itself. God is not a remote static substance outside history. Spirit “goes out” into otherness, finitude, suffering, and alienation. Through this estrangement, Spirit returns to itself at a higher level of reconciliation and self-consciousness. That movement is dialectical.

      The Incarnation becomes, in Hegelian terms, a revelation that the infinite is not opposed absolutely to the finite. Spirit manifests itself in and through historical existence, i.e., the universe becoming conscious of itself through humanity. Human history becomes the theater of Spirit’s self-revelation talk about philosophical drama! While I am attracted to the ideas that reality is not dead mechanism, that history genuinely discloses meaning, that spirit and intelligibility belong to Being itself, and the human relation to truth has something participatory about it, I cannot follow the idea that all alienation is ultimately aufgehoben (cancelled, preserved, and raised into a fuller form at the same time) into total self-conscious reconciliation. (I am following many others in this, starting with Kierkegaard.) But there is something attractive (romantic!) about Hegel’s imaginative philosophy. Spirit is not alien to reality. History matters metaphysically. Finite existence somehow participates in the disclosure of the infinite. Meaning!

. . .

Often the word “Providence” pops into my head when I think about Hegel, though transformed from the Christian meaning. History is not merely accidental succession. There is an intelligible movement running through it, though not usually visible to individuals from within their own limited standpoint. This is why Hegel sometimes speaks of the “cunning of reason” (List der Vernunft). Human beings pursue their finite aims involving the standard motives -  ambition, love, conquest, reform, wealth, glory, survival etc. But through these partial and often selfish actions, larger historical transformations occur that no individual fully intended. Napoleon sought power; the Protestant Reformers sought religious renewal; capitalists always seek profit; revolutionaries seek liberation, etc. Yet history as a whole moves in directions exceeding individual consciousness. That feels providential but at the level of peoples, civilizations, or humanity rather than at the level of individual happiness.

    Hegel can feel simultaneously profound and chilling. Individuals suffer, perish, and are often sacrificed within larger historical development. Hegel seems so detached when writing in this vein. World-historical figures become instruments through which Spirit advances, often without understanding the larger significance of their own actions. Hegel’s “Providence” is not usually the intimate providence of biblical religion: God caring personally for each sparrow, each child, each suffering soul. It is something more like the rational intelligibility of the historical whole unfolding through time, which he sees from a perspective outside the movement. What seems to get lost in all of this is the irreducible dignity and mystery of the individual person. Or to put it another way, tragedy that cannot simply be justified retrospectively, or suffering that resists absorption into historical necessity. I think of Dostoevsky’s Ivan Karamazov again and the discussion with his brother Alyosha.

    So I feel a tension with Hegel. On the one hand, history is not meaningless, human consciousness participates in something larger; on the other, I resist sacrificing the concrete person to the species or historical process. I am a father who loves his children after all. So I am more on the side in this of Hegel’s most ferocious critic, Kierkegaard, who rejected root, tree, and branch the notion that the single individual before God is dissolved into world-history. Also on the side of Weil, who wrote that attention to the afflicted person interrupts all grand historical rationalizations. And of Raimond Gaita and Iris Murdoch, who write of the absolute significance of the individual human being against reduction to social function or historical abstraction. But I also think Hegel is right in his belief that history matters, that consciousness develops, that humanity can deepen morally, that truth is not static repetition. There may indeed be a providential or meaningful movement within history but it never abolishes the transcendence and irreducible reality of the individual person.