Hegel in 60 Minutes

Great Thinkers in 60 Minutes

Walther Ziegler

• Publisher: Books on Demand
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN:
  9783741227677
• eBook ISBN:
  9783741230097
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

Already as a student Hegel was often reprimanded for excessive drinking and gambling and he is surely one of the most unconventional – today, one might say "coolest" – thinkers of all time. He is sometimes mockingly accused of having been drunk when he hit on his key idea of a "World Spirit". Nevertheless, his philosophy remains fascinating and highly relevant even today. Hegel was the first philosopher to realize the full implications of the dimension of "becoming". Human life has as much the character of a process as do Nature and History. A human being comes into the world as a baby and becomes a child, an adolescent and finally an adult. Likewise, human history marches onward from small beginnings. One epoch follows another. The expression "spirit of the times" that we use so casually today is in fact one we owe to Hegel's great discovery that every epoch possesses a specific spirit that completely permeates it. This "spirit of the age" – or, as Hegel also called it, "World Spirit" – manifests itself in all the ideas held by this age's people regarding morality, justice, art, music and architecture. A second contention central to his great philosophical discovery was that these different epochs and their "spirits" do not follow one another merely randomly and by chance but rather obey a logical principle of movement: the so-called "dialectic". The pendulum of history swings, "dialectically", first in one direction, then in the other. But human history is nonetheless steering its way, slowly but unstoppably, toward a great final goal. The book "Hegel in 60 Minutes" explains, how this "dialectic", and thus the motor of human history, is argued by him to function. All the exciting questions raised by Hegel's fascinating philosophical vision are answered here: at what point do we reach "the end of History"? Are we only spectators of this History, or actors in it? What is the meaning of life? The book forms part of the popular series "Great Thinkers in 60 Minutes".

Hegel’s Central Idea

Dialectics – The Motor of Thought

For Hegel, what he calls “dialectics” is the true motor of all developments occurring in the world. Like a torrent it carries everything with it: the individual consciousnesses of human beings; the events that mark epochal changes in whole societies; and even Nature itself. Everything follows this same dynamic of thesis, antithesis and synthesis.

In the case of the individual consciousness this goes as follows: first, one forms an opinion; then a contrary opinion; until finally a third stance takes form which proves to be free of contradiction. But eventually even this initially non-contradictory synthesis which emerges as a third step takes on the role of a thesis to another antithesis and the process of thought begins anew.

In Hegel’s view the individual has no choice but to think dialectically. Ever since the Stone Age, Man’s learning has proceeded via errors and contradictions; it is only in this way that the species has acquired the experiences necessary for its survival. If a Stone Age man ate a poisonous toadstool and found himself crippled with stomach pains, both he and those who observed him in this state had necessarily to draw the conclusion not to eat mushrooms – or at least to eat them only in very small quantities until they were able to distinguish the poisonous from the non-poisonous types. The “thesis”, then, in this case would run: “mushrooms taste good and satisfy hunger”. The “antithesis” would run: “mushrooms are poisonous and must on no account be eaten”. And finally, the resulting “synthesis”: “It is possible to distinguish edible from poisonous mushrooms and, choosing carefully, enjoy the edible ones.” Likewise in all other areas of life, says Hegel, we need to constantly renew our knowledge, so that our lives are indeed a long dialectical process of negating ideas while at the same time preserving them in a higher form.

Our reason, then, operates constantly in this dialectical “three-step” form. Whether it is a matter of the more or less painful eventualities of daily life, great scientific steps forward, or general personal learning-processes, dialectics always plays a role. The result, moreover, of such a dialectical process of thought need not be anything purely theoretical. All that we call experience is in fact acquired dialectically in Hegel’s sense:

In the light of the toadstool example Hegel’s meaning here is clear. Hegel says that the dialectical movement is also called experience. This is so inasmuch as the synthesis which emerges from the process of knowledge represents, however painful the eating of the poisonous mushrooms may have been, indeed a valuable experience which benefits future nutritional behaviour. In this light it is also clear what Hegel means when he says that the dialectical movement is one “which consciousness exercises on itself” so that this movement “affects both its knowledge and its object” to such a point that a “new true object issues from it”. The “object”, in our example, is the (poisonous) mushroom. The man who eats it, being hungry, initially “knows” the mushroom as nourishment which will sate his hunger and “knows” himself as someone in search of such nourishment. After the painful experience that the “object” here – i.e. the mushroom – is not nourishing but rather poisonous, the man finds not just his knowledge of the “object” altered but also his knowledge of himself. He no longer thinks of or defines himself as a being capable of digesting any and every mushroom, just as he no longer thinks of or defines mushrooms as edible objects, now thinking of them cautiously and provisionally as generally dangerous and potentially poisonous.

But this new “antithesis”, or new “truth” regarding both himself and the object of his knowledge, is “set in motion” once again when he himself, or others, establish, after careful tasting of small quantities, that not all mushrooms cause nausea and stomach cramps, but only a few. In this way, in Hegel’s phrase, there “issues forth for consciousness” yet a third (provisional) truth regarding both mushrooms and the awareness of mushroom-eaters: namely, that not the whole class of such plants, but only certain definable instances thereof, are poisonous and unfit for human consumption.

Dialectics and the Idea of Aufheben

Some pages back, in our general description of Hegel’s great discovery, we met with a German word – Geist – which we described as both key to Hegel’s philosophy and untranslatable into English. In order to fully explain Hegel’s notion of “dialectics” we need to look at another such word: aufheben.

Like Geist, aufheben is a word that is philosophically useful to Hegel because it combines ideas that may at first seem unconnected, and even unconnectable, with each other. The word itself, one might say, is a kind of compressed philosophical argument. But this is not to say that it is a technical term understood only by philosophers. Aufheben is a word that is used daily, in many simple practical contexts, by German-speakers still today. Most, however, probably do not notice that they use this word in three senses that are quite distinct and even contradictory. Now, it is just this feature of the everyday German term aufheben that makes it the ideal term for Hegel to use in his explanations of his philosophy of “progress through contradiction”.

One everyday sense in which Germans use aufheben is the merely negative sense of “putting an end to” or “removing”. This sense certainly applies to the three-term process Hegel describes. On one level, the contradiction between “thesis” and “antithesis” is simply “removed” in and by the “synthesis”. Thus “I cannot eat mushrooms” as a contradiction of “I can eat mushrooms” is removed by the “synthetic” stance of “I can eat some mushrooms but not others”. Put another way, the contradiction between the initial assumption of mushrooms` general edibility and the second assumption of their general inedibility simply vanishes when the insight is achieved that some mushrooms are edible but others are not.

But, to the puzzlement of the non-German-speaker, Germans can also be heard every day using aufheben in the very opposite to this: the sense of “saving” or “preserving”. Hegel explicitly refers to this odd feature of the German language in his lectures on logic:

This double meaning, of course, serves Hegel’s philosophical purpose perfectly. Because, in the “dialectical” philosophical vision he develops, the knowledge achieved through “thesis” and “antithesis” is decidedly not just “put an end to”, or “removed”, in and by the “synthesis” but rather, on the contrary, carefully preserved as well:

Even if the experience of stomach cramps and nausea ceases after some years, when the capacity has been acquired to distinguish healthy from unhealthy mushrooms, to be of any direct significance, this experience is not completely forgotten. It is preserved in the form of the knowledge which anyone who goes looking for mushrooms in the woods now applies The experience of the dangerousness of certain plants belonging to the class of fungi persists in the care with which the inedible mushrooms are now avoided, along with the experience of the fine taste of the edible ones.

The third – and most literal – sense in which German-speakers use the word aufheben is that of “raising” (heben) “up” (auf). This third sense is clearly also essential to Hegel’s idea of “dialectics” because the “synthesis” certainly “raises up” knowledge onto a higher level of consciousness vis-à-vis “thesis” and “antithesis”. The knowledge represented by the “synthesis” has, in a certain respect, a higher truth, inasmuch as a differentiated knowledge of the discriminability of fungi from one another in terms of edibility is a knowledge of much greater value and rank than either the first assumption that they were all edible or the second that they were all inedible. This dialectical process of the Aufhebung of human knowledge in all these three senses – “removing”, “preserving”, and “raising up onto a higher plane” – ensures that reason steadily increases its share in this knowledge. People and whole societies acquire experience in just this way, through dialectics pursuing its course within the individual, global history, and Nature. The philosophical system that Hegel established can thus be understood as the ambitious attempt to comprehend the whole of reality as the process of the self-unfolding of just such a dialectical principle of Reason: a Reason, that is to say, which follows its own experiences and drives itself onward by the motor of its own contradictions:

Hegel believed that traditional logic had made a serious error in underestimating the force of contradiction.

The Logic of Becoming

Foundational to classical philosophical logic is the law of identity: A = A. But this law, argues Hegel, leads to a dead, schematic way of thinking which pays attention only to whether an object does or does not accord with the category ascribed to it. If A = A applie...

Table of contents

• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• Hegel’s Great Discovery
• Hegel’s Central Idea
• Of What Use is Hegel’s Discovery for Us Today?
• Bibliographical References
• Already published in the same series
• Coming soon in the same series
• The author
• Copyright