The Absolute Idea (Part One)

First English edition of Hegel's Science of Logic (1929).

This is the first of three posts analysing Hegel's essay on the "Absolute Idea" in his Science of Logic (1816), in which he addresses the method of logical science in general and its place in his philosophical system.

The Absolute Idea

Preliminary Thoughts (Stephen Cowley)

I discuss here the last section of Hegel’s Science of Logic (1812-16), titled the Absolute Idea. This will allow us to review some key aspects of the project of Hegelian logic, as this section summarises the method of incorporating content applied throughout the work and the resultant structure. The Science of Logic is the longest and most obscure of Hegel's published works and reading it with attention is a sponge of spare time. However, it contains some valuable essays, despite its shambolic and repetitive style and structure. Hegel thought enduringly of Logic as a separate discipline within philosophy - like Kant’s Transcendental Logic. However, without the priority Kant gives to the limitation of knowledge by experience, there can be no preliminary critique of reason. We are left with a series of metaphysical essays whose content is in part drawn from the experience of nature and mind, but which discusses the higher and more general concepts applied in thinking the concrete sciences. For example, the logic of subjectivity  explains the experience of being a person with a capacity for negative judgement who encounters other such individuals. What is distinctive about these metaphysical essays is the stress on the unity of experience, the interrelatedness of concepts and the consequent threefold structure that arises from the comparison of two apparently distinct areas of experience. 

The final volume of Science of Logic was published by Hegel in 1816, at the start of the Restoration and as he was applying for academic posts while working as a teacher. In Germany, these were often in the hands of the political authorities. In light of this, this section can be read as a draft proposal for a project of academic reform that Hegel would soon implement in Heidelberg and Berlin. The language makes concessions to Christianity, but with an appeal to rationalism. Politically, he offers the state the authority of reason, in place of the paralysis of skepticism, the inward-looking chaos of the Romantic movement or a return to traditional Catholic authority. What he offers to Protestant Germany then is a secular reason that gives qualified deference to institutional authority and practical experience, with leanings towards a rational piety. This was an appropriate culture for the “universal class” of Prussia, which was then rising as a significant European power. 

The text describes what is universal in the accumulated wisdom of humanity. The following headings analyse the subject-matter of the 27 paragraphs: 

• On Philosophy; 
• On Method - 1. Beginning,  - 2. Progress and Development, with digressions on Plato’s dialectic and formalism; 
• On System, Totality and Personality; 
• The Incorporation of Content; 
• The Circular Structure of Philosophical Science.

As the “absolute Idea” is the culminating form of the Idea – the mature oak tree so to speak into which its previous forms have grown – it may be useful to recapitulate the preceding presentation. At the end of the previous section (“The Idea of the Good”), Hegel argues that reason is now placed not only in the active subject, but in reality itself. He cites the Phenomenology of Spirit (chapter 6C) for fuller elaboration of this thought. Thus knowing and doing are brought together. Reality hence gains the character of an end accomplished, not an outer world void of subjectivity, but an “objective world, whose inner ground and real staying power is the concept. This is the absolute Idea.” (J&S, 327) The reference to the absolute Idea as an “objective world” excludes its simplistic identification with God. It evokes the idea of Beauty, or the Word of God though.

 

Hegel illustrates his usage of “Idea” by reference to reason. He writes: “Insofar as reason is distinguished from intellect and notion as such, it is the totality of the notion and of objectivity. [...] In this sense the Idea is the rational;” (395) Essentially then, by the “Idea”, Hegel is talking about unconstrained reason of the kind we might attribute to God, with perhaps the reason of a universal class of the sort imagined by Aristotle as a feeble earthly correlate. Hegel’s vision of the Prussian civil service under Stein and Hardenburg would be a version of this. Hegel explains what this means for philosophy as bearer of the Idea:

“Nothing could be found more harmful or more unworthy of a philosopher than the vulgar appeal to an experience which is asserted to conflict with the Idea. Such an experience would never exist if, for example, political institutions were made at the fit moment in accordance with Ideas, - in the place of which rough notions, just because they were drawn from experience, frustrate every good intention.” (396)

In some situations then, reason dictates to experience rather than passively absorbing its lessons. “It is possible”, he writes, “that the Idea should not completely have leavened its reality” (397). It must however, have done so to some extent. Hegel writes:

“If an object – for example the State – were to be wholly inadequate to its Idea (that is, rather, were not to be the Idea of a State), if its reality, which is that of the self-conscious individuals, in no way corresponded to the concept, then its soul and its body would have parted; the former would fly into the various regions of thought, the latter would have fallen apart into the single individualities.” (397-98)

When he speaks of a state so corrupt that it dissolves into parts, we may take him to refer to the Holy Roman Empire, which Napoleon dissolved in 1806. In a striking expansion of his thought into a metaphysical key, he writes: “the thought which frees reality from the show of purposeless changeability and transfigures it into the Idea must not imagine this truth of reality as a dead repose or bare picture, spent and without impulse or motion, or as a genus, number or abstract thought.” (399) Our Lord is the true God, the living God, my mind echoes back. Hegel proceeds to discuss Life, Knowledge and Will as directed by the Idea of the True and the Good. These at first are severed (entscheidet), but in the final section on the absolute Idea are united again. 

I begin my reading and commentary without further ado. The Logic up to now has discussed the mechanical and organic aspects of experience and the logical components of the mind. The section opens by sketching the meaning of the term “absolute Idea”, then addresses the method of Logic. The notion of beginning and development and the extension of method into system are the subjects of the next two posts. I number the paragraphs 1 to 27. "J&S" refers to the Johnson and Struthers translation. "G" to Glockner's German edition.

The Absolute Idea

Summary and Discussion

[1] Hegel begins the section by bringing together the previous sections on the Idea of the True and the Good: 

“The absolute Idea, so it has turned out, is the identity (Identität) of the theoretical and the practical, each of which, for itself is one-sided: [i.e.] the Idea itself only as having a Beyond sought after and an unattained goal within it.” (J&S466; G327) 

In other words, held apart we drift back and forth between partial truths and the field of action, but are beset by their mutual limitations.  The term “Beyond” takes us back to the self-consciousness chapter of the Phenomenology. Hegel further characterises the absolute Idea in terms of Life: “The absolute Idea as the rational concept [...] is [...] on one side the return to Life.” (466, G327) The concept is not only soul, but free subjective concept, and hence has personality. It contains universality alongside individuality. Hegel says:

“All else is error and gloom, opinion, striving, caprice and transitoriness (Vergänglichkeit). The absolute Idea alone is Being, imperishable (unvergängliches) Life, self-knowing Truth, and the whole of the Truth.” (446, G325)

This is religious language. The absolute Idea is something the mind finds lighting its way, rather than a transient mental product of its own making. Yet he does not appear to be describing God, but at most a divinised Reason or Word/Logos to which the mind has access through its natural faculties. The unity of theory and practice bespeaks the ideals of harmony and beauty espoused by Schiller and Goethe. 

On Philosophy

[2] Hegel now turns to the relation of the absolute Idea to philosophy as such, which he divides into parts on Logic, Nature and Mind. He writes:

“The absolute Idea is the only object and content of Philosophy. [...] Nature and Spirit are different ways of presenting its existence [Daseyn]; Art and Religion different ways of its comprehending itself and giving itself an appropriate existence. Philosophy has the same content as Art and Religion, but it is the highest manner of comprehending the absolute Idea, because its manner is the highest – reason (der Begriff). Consequently, it comprehends within itself these phases of real and ideal finitude, as well as infinitude and holiness, and understands both them and itself.” (G328; 466)

The remark about nature and spirit appears metaphysically extravagant. Hegel attributes self-comprehension and activity to the absolute Idea. These are attributes of minds, not Ideas, however exalted and this introduces confusion. We need to know what, in Hegel’s view, the content and ends of Art and Religion are. For the latter, we can turn to the Religion chapter of the Phenomenology, then his main publication on the subject. Here we read that religion is “consciousness of the absolute Being” (para 672). The function of Art may be similar: a novel can fill out our fragmentary experience of other people by telling their stories, for example. Hegel’s tone in setting out his philosophical programme is confident. Like his contemporary James Mylne in Glasgow, he makes reason the sovereign mental power. He continues:

“The derivation of these particular modes is the further business of the particular philosophical sciences. [...] the logical [mode] is the general mode in which each [mode] severally is transcended and enfolded (aufgehoben und eingehüllt). [...] Hence Logic presents the self-movement of the absolute Idea as the Original Word, that is an utterance (Aüsserung), but such a one that, as something outward (Aüsseres), has again immediately vanished, while it [the Idea] is. (indem sie ist). (267, G328)

This evokes the theology and Genesis 1 and John 1.1 through the metaphor of the Word. However, where there is Word, utterance or expression, there is implicitly one who expresses it, and this seems to be overlooked. He continues: 

“The Idea then is to hear itself speak (sich zu vernehmen) only in this self-determination; it is in pure thought wherein difference is and remains still no other being, but is fully transparent to itself. – The logical Idea therewith has itself as infinite form for its content.” (G329)

 Hegel observes that the absolute Idea is characterised by form rather than content. Hence, what is now to be considered is “not a content as such, but the universal element of its form – that is, Method.” (G329, 467) Method must be both rational and appropriate to what it is applied to.

On Method

[3] Hegel starts: “Method can appear at first as the mere manner and fashion of knowledge, and it has in fact the nature of these.” (467) If content is taken as given before method is applied, then method is but an external form, but Logic has shown that form is an absolute foundation and ultimate truth. Method knows itself as both subjective and objective, as a pure correspondence of concept and reality.

[4] Hence, Hegel says, by method we mean the movement of reason itself, but now with the significance firstly that reason is all and its movement is the absolute universal activity.” (G330) Reason is a self-realising movement, a force that nothing can resist that presents itself as alien to it. Thus the method too is universal, without borders or limits; it is unimpeded (schlechthin) infinite power, against which nothing not subject to reason can stand, nor fail to be steeped in it. It is both soul and substance. Hegel says of method: 

“It is not only the highest, or rather the sole and absolute force of reason, but also its highest and unique drive, to find and to recognise through itself, itself in everything.” (G331, 468-9)

 This is stirring prose, with its imagery of military power. What does not come across so clearly is the reason for this confidence, this rationalistic monism or absolutism. This is perhaps because it is a first principle and so not susceptible of proof, but even here, it would be susceptible of illustration. 

Secondly though we must distinguish what reason does via method from reason as such, i.e. identify its particularity. Reason, Hegel explains, is not just object but activity, with method an instrument of this activity. A methodical person is armed with self-knowledge. He writes:

“Method is this knowing itself, for which it is not only as object, but as its own subjective activity. […] In inquiring cognition, the method is likewise in the position of a tool, of a means which stands on the subjective side, whereby the method relates itself to the object.” (469)

There is a three- term syllogism here of Subject – Method – Object. The extremes remain distinct, because the terms are not posited as one identical Concept. The term "concept" here can be identified with reason (though with reservations discussed elsewhere). Hence the conclusion remains formal: the Subject applying a Method contains form, definition, classification etc as facts in the Subject. In true knowledge (Erkennen) though, the method is not only such a mixture, but the determinate being (Daseyn) of reason. It is a process with a beginning and its subsequent development, to which we turn in Part Two.