A New Exploration of Hegel's Dialectics I

Origin and Beginning

Deng Xiaomang

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781000547382
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Philosophes

This volume reinterprets Hegelian dialectics via an exploration of the two origins of dialectics and illuminates how they constitute the inner tension at the heart of the philosophical system, developing into the forms of thought that fashion the history of western philosophy.
As the first volume of a three-volume set that gives insights into Hegel's dialectics and thereby his overall philosophical thought, the book considers the linguistics spirit of logos and the existentialist spirit of nous in Greek philosophy as the two origins of Hegelian dialectics. The author argues that the two spirits form a dialectical unity of opposites and constitute the inner tension at the heart of the belief system. Based on this tension, this volume explains Hegel's problem of beginning that has the sense composed of both the starting point of logic and that of consciousness. Beginning in this twofold sense shapes dimensions of his methodology: immediacy and mediacy, the path of doubt and the path of truth, the linguistics lever and the existential lever.
The title will appeal to scholars and students interested in Hegel and Marx's philosophy, German classical philosophy and Western philosophy.

Part IThe two origins of Hegel’s dialectic

When G.W.F. Hegel’s dialectic first appeared on the stage of modern European thought, it appeared as a wonder, an earthquake, an anomalous sign that fell from Heaven, for the German people and for the entire Western world of thought, which, at that juncture, considered itself as having reached the peak of human civilization. People struggled to grasp it, primarily in terms of its actual influence upon their real lives rather than to understand its theoretical origin. People saw Hegel as a genius. Since this genius had already self-consciously summarized the entire history of philosophy as the historical development of his own thought, his loyal followers did not need to spend time discussing the origins of his thought from the sidelines; rather, all they needed to do was immerse themselves in the atmosphere of his all-encompassing thought. On the other hand, more than half of those who opposed him regarded him with disdain and belittled him because they had adopted positions opposed to his and had never taken seriously his self-understanding of his own philosophy’s origins from the perspective of the logical genesis of history that he himself had already brought into the open.

In some sense, the task of thoroughly sublating Hegel’s philosophy still has not been fully accomplished. This not only refers to Karl Marx, who died before completing his planned book entitled “Dialectics,” but also refers to both contemporary philosophy’s inability to break free of Hegel’s massive shadow and the periodic popularity Hegel still enjoys in contemporary philosophy. The rational core of the Hegelian dialectic still has powerful vitality. Aside from the pioneering force it has in each field of the human sciences, it still demands further exploration. In many settings, precisely at that point when we think ourselves already capable of using the magical force of this talisman, we do nothing more than extract the most superficial, shallow and lifeless external forms of it. Just as we have no way of truly understanding Marx without first having understood Hegel, we cannot deeply understand Hegel without having researched the history of Western philosophy, and especially without having probed deeply into the historical origin of the Hegelian dialectic, that is, ancient Greek dialectics. Martin Heidegger once said of Hegel with respect to the logical structure of his dialectic that he is “the most radical of the Greeks.”¹ This is not only to say that we can find the historical basis of Hegel’s dialectic in ancient Greek dialectical thought, but also that we find the most intrinsic and profound moment for understanding Hegel’s dialectic through a close analysis of ancient dialectics as well as the necessity it produces, its mode of expression and the problems it encounters and aims to resolve.

Because of this, our exploration of the origins of Hegel’s dialectic cannot simply be a historical journey tracing it back in the written materials of thought, but it must itself be based on some understanding of Hegel’s dialectic, and also have the purpose of verifying and deepening this understanding, making it concrete. In this way, this part, where we discuss the origins of Hegel’s dialectic, has especially important methodological significance, and the thought that it expresses and reveals will weave its way throughout the entire book. We may briefly state this thought beforehand (even though it still awaits demonstration) as follows: Hegel’s dialectic has two origins in ancient Greece: one is what we would call the linguistic origin, which results in the logos-ist, rationalist and methodological tendencies in Hegel’s dialectic; the other we could call the existentialist origin, which imparts the spirit of nous to Hegel’s dialectic and renders it historicist and ontological. The first chapter discusses the linguistic origin.

Note

1. Gadamer 1976, 107.

1The linguistic origin

DOI: 10.4324/9781003269809-2

The pursuit of language

As is widely known, what those philosophers of early ancient Greece mainly explored were questions of natural philosophy, which is to say the search to find in Nature that arche, or origin of all beings, that from which in Nature all things are generated and to which all things ultimately return. What the first Greek philosopher, Thales, found was “water.” His student Anaximander thought it was apeiron (απειρον), namely “[that which is] boundless.” Anaximenes (Anaximander’s student) proposed “air” as the origin of all beings.

This complicated philosophical issue many interpretations and explanations by historians of philosophy. First, Thales’s thinking should be considered. Why did Thales regard “water” as the origin of the world? According to G.W.F. Hegel’s interpretation,

[t]his objective actuality is now to be raised into the Notion that reflects itself into itself and is itself to be set forth as Notion; in commencement this is seen in the world’s being manifested as water, or as a simple universal.¹

Hegel also pointed out the cultural source of this thought, “[the ancients] made Oceanus and Tethys the producers of all origination, and water […] the oath of the gods.”² However, Hegel did not focus on discussing the formation of this proposition from the perspective of this cultural origin. In his view, the mere worship of water or the Ocean was still not enough to constitute a philosophy. What he put his focus on was rather what distinguishes this proposition from the traditional worship of Oceanus, which was the speculative philosophical quality that this proposition contains. That is to say, “water” for Thales was no longer water in the average sensuous meaning of the term. He rather used it as a universal principle that constructs an overarching generalization of this richly diverse and colorfully boundless world and that comes to override the mythological sense of “Oceanus” and steer through the actuality of the immanent world. Water formulates the principle of Nature, the condensation and rarefaction element per se.

To be sure, philosophy is only philosophy insofar as it transcends the individual characteristics of the finite sensuous world with the advancement of an all-encompassing concept of the world that could unfold to explain it. Precisely because of this, we view a philosophy as being a “worldview.” But Thales, as the first philosopher, still could not find the ready-made concept that could summarize a worldview. Thales found that, for the time being, he could satisfy the need to express this concept by characterizing it with one concrete sensuous thing, “water.” As a matter of convenience, water also lends well to standing in for the concept by virtue of its “fluidity.” Water can permeate and dissolve the sensuous qualities of so many particular things possessing form, yet without itself changing, and this is identical with the universal characteristic of the “concept.” Water is colorless, odorless and is of no definite shape. Water is perfectly simple in terms of sensuous qualities, and this approximates the abstract nature of the concept. Clearly, choosing “water” to be the arche of the world, whether Thales noticed it or not, was due to a certain necessity. If the ancient Greeks were to create a philosophy to grasp all of the messy phenomena of the boundless world, if they could only arbitrarily pick one among many sensuous materials and the society in which they lived also had strong ocean worship as the cultural foundation of their ideology, then we could almost say, even without Thales, any other philosopher’s prime choice would be to view water as the origin of all beings.

However, we are still not finished with this problem. Another even more universal problem is, even if water has the characteristics of greater simplicity and fluidity in the sensuous world, it is still ultimately a concrete sensuous material. How could it transcend the entire sensuous world and reach the level of philosophy’s universal Notion or at the very least direct people toward this while relying merely on its own sensuous characteristics? How could it become the starting point and ground for people to later unfold this new level of thought, and not be misunderstood as mythology or witchcraft? In brief, how could a sensuous thing be used as a universal principle? This is necessarily tied to a universal phenomenon in linguistics, that is, any substance word (shici 实词) (a word with concrete referent) is itself already a universal concept. Words act as a social medium of mutual communication and mutual understanding between people. Words are memory’s tools for reliable communication between the I of today and the I of yesterday. Words act as the safeguards of human beings’ coherence of thought, and there is already a distinction, even a mutual separation and to a certain extent a tendency of mutual opposition, between the word itself and the content and meaning it expresses. Even for the most concrete thing, for instance, when we point to a book and say “this,” what we utter is really something of the greatest abstraction and utmost universality (everything is a “this”). Hegel gives repeated illustrations of this characteristic of language in the Phenomenology of Spirit. He remarks “[w]e also express [in language] the sensuous as a universal.”³ It is for this reason, in his view, language “itself has the divine nature of immediately inverting the meaning, then of making it into something else,”⁴ that is, into the universal.

We can see from this that in Thales, there is no unsurpassable barrier in principle to using a concrete sensuous thing to express a universal Notion, because what is involved here is not that sensuous thing itself but rather the word and concept of that thing. Thales just accomplishes raising the universality of this word itself (as a “universal”) to a higher philosophical level. This was of course a great, unprecedented undertaking, but it was not by any means totally groundless. It was rooted rather in the essence of language itself to grasp the particular and individual in the universal. Thales’s effort could be seen as that of pursuing a language, an effort to transcend everyday language and construct a philosophical language. This effort both succeeded and failed at the same time. It failed because “water” is ultimately the concept of a sensuous thing and does not possess that highest universality he gave to it, and it could not possibly have shouldered the mission of grasping the sensuous world that it was meant to undertake, so it was sublated by a further movement of thought. It was successful because this effort itself led to its own further sublation, for the reason that it indicated through its own intention a way of pursuing philosophical language and later philosophers continuously progressed along the pathway it pointed to. Therefore, this is a contradiction, that is, the contradiction of a word that is used to express a philosophical concept, the contradiction of mutual disagreement between the sensuous finitude of what it denotes (for instance, concrete “water”) and the universal mission that it undertakes (that is, becoming the origin of all beings). The development and movement of the entirety of early Greek natural philosophy could be considered effects of the continual growth of this intrinsic, basic contradiction in thought.

Anaximander’s philosophy proves precisely our analysis above. Historians, from Aristotle and Simplicitus to Hegel himself and to the hermeneuticians of modern times, have not revealed the above-mentioned contradiction intrinsic to early ancient Greek philosophy. In his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Hegel only elucidates such a crucial figure as Anaximander in four places, only slightly more often than he mentions a secondary figure such as Melissus, in the entire history of philosophy. Precisely because of this, Anaximander’s doctrine stood before them as an unsolvable riddle. According to the records, Anaximander called the origin of the world apeiron, b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title Page
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Part I The two origins of Hegel’s dialectic
• Part II The dialectical beginning of Hegel’s philosophy
• References
• Index