Hugh Adam Reyburn

“ If logic is to maintain itself as the science of the principles of the content of knowledge, it must cease to diminish its stature to the measure of the merely subjective, and must advance to an analysis of the structural principles of a thought which can apprehend any object. ”

“ Being which is not existence in some place and time, and under some special circumstances, and so forth, is as good as non-existence—it is the same as non-existence. Hegel’s contention is that if we are in earnest with our thought and carry it as far as it will go, such a category changes in our hands and shows a meaning which we try to exclude from it. This state of things can be mended only when we adopt a more concrete principle which includes both aspects as part of itself. ”

“ We live before we reflect on life, and a wide experience is necessary for the ingathering of the meaning of experience. Indeed, one of the more striking characteristics of Hegel’s own thought is its persistence and perseverance; and his contempt for fanciful speculation and for formalism is unbounded. [5] Experience, or fact, is the basis of all thought and all science; and a philosophy which cannot cover life and is built in abstraction from the considerations of practice is a futility of the understanding. ”

“ Kant found an a priori element in experience, a universality which transcended the given; but he wrongly identified it with the subjective, the mind-made. Hegel swept this identification aside. These principles, he argued, apply to the known as such, subject as well as thing; they are doubtless principles of thought, but they are no less principles of the world; they go beneath the opposition of subjective and objective, they characterize all experience, and are not more truly called mental than are particular laws of nature—nor less so. ”

“ The final note of tragedy, however, is not loss. Over and above the confusion and destruction of that which is imperfect and by the nature of things transitory there is the assertion of the full and rounded character of reality. ”

“ Contradiction itself is the immediate opposition of one phase of an object by another; but at the back of it is the power of the whole. We may use Hegel’s theory of tragedy to throw some light on his Logic at this point. Hegel finds the essence of tragedy to lie in a conflict between spiritual forces which belong to one system and which ought to be in harmony. The catastrophe is the assertion by the whole of its complexity against the one-sidedness of some imperfect aspect. ”

“ Logic is not encumbered by the actual living man, and the dialectic is not a history of personal sufferings which cannot be made good. Although at first dialectic changes are external and unintelligible to the mind which uses elementary principles, yet these changes themselves are seen by fuller knowledge to be a self-evolution of the complete truth. In its higher stages thought has to include the lower categories, and the elements of perfect knowledge are known by it as opposites. [12] But although tragedy and the dialectic differ in completeness, the power is the same; it is the whole. ”

“ It may rest on the assumption that reason and the truth fall apart, and that a theory may be wholly rational and yet untrue. From this point of view, to evolve the world out of one’s inner consciousness means simply to exercise a rational and critical activity. It is only in this sense that Hegel would admit the truth of the statement, and his whole theory is a denial of the accompanying supposition that apart from and beyond reasonable knowledge there is anything with which knowledge is in any way concerned. ”

“ Hegel is quite aware of the activity of thought here, but he recognizes the objective side also. The laws and principles in question are those which constitute the world; they are those which things must contain if they are to form an intelligible world at all—and what is not intelligible is not a world. But it is not enough that there should be a variety of laws discernible in the objects of knowledge. A number of separate principles would give us, not one world, but as many worlds as there are special forms of unity. ”

“ If a student seeks to go beyond these introductions, he speedily discovers that the postponed logical problems contain the very substance of logic, and that the boundary wall between logic and metaphysics falls when he approaches it.
It may be taken for granted that logic deals with true thought. If so, is it possible to analyse the nature of true thinking without reference to the object of knowledge? The word, thought, is without doubt an ambiguous one, and covers a fatal tendency to confuse the act of thinking, a psychological subject-matter, with the object or content known. ”

“ The positive side, of course, is not fully developed in tragedy, but if it be utterly lacking the tragedy is imperfect and inartistic—it is merely a pitiful tale. Behind the sympathy with the fallen there must be a feeling of the greater good which the agent himself was unable to grasp, and his fall is a vindication of the deeper truth. ”

“ When we force reality, as it were, into one of these primitive categories and try to take it abstractly, it avenges itself by turning into another form. The neglected aspects appear in spite of us, and the despised unity of the system as a whole reveals itself by forcing a half idea to turn into its opposite. This change, however, is not part of the category itself. That is to say, the change is immediate for the thinker who uses such principles; he does not apprehend the inner nexus which produces the conversion, and each term is, for him, unmediated by its opposite. ”

“ There is a sense in which we must begin with the whole. Until we become aware of the wholeness of being we are not on philosophic ground, and are unable to trace the interrelations of the principles of experience. The order of the dialectic process is guided by an ever present consciousness of the highest stages, and it is not until we reach the last of the three main divisions that we see clearly by what path we have come. ”

“ Each category, or determination, is a general principle by which we seek to make experience a consistent whole and render it a concrete universal; and each has its own way of relating the two root factors, viz., unity and difference. ”

“ Mind is a unity, intelligence is the same in principle in all its activities, and all the objects it can know must belong inherently to the one scheme of things. If the objective anarchy which we have suggested were the case, we should need as many minds as there were principles in order to apprehend them, and the mind would be shattered into fragments. ”

“ Their own inter-connexion is, on the one hand, the essence of the unity of the intelligible world, and, on the other, of the rationality of the knowing mind. We are not dealing with two quite differently organized things, a mind and a world; we are dealing with the fundamental principles of the intelligible content of rational thought; and the coherence of both aspects depends on the coherence of the principles themselves. ”

“ At first it is not explicitly known to us that the principle we use is that of single reality: we begin with the poorest possible way of characterizing things and pass upwards to more concrete attitudes of thought. ”

“ But when we have said this our meaning is indistinguishable from ‘nothing’. If we take away all the particular qualities of things, we abstract from them everything by means of which we distinguish what is from what is not. ”

“ And this will be taken into account if we describe the catastrophe as a violent self-restitution of the divided spiritual unity. The necessity which acts and negates in it, that is to say, is yet of one substance with both the agents. It is divided against itself in them; they are its conflicting forces; and in restoring its unity through negation it affirms them, so far as they are compatible with that unity. The qualification is essential, since the hero, for all his affinity with that power, is, as the living man we see before us, not so compatible. ”

“ As thought rises in the scale its principles become more concrete, they gain wealth and depth. That is to say, they express the object more truly. They present more adequately its relations to its context and to the whole system of which it forms a part; and that is why Hegel uses the word, concrete, in this connexion.
The other way of characterizing the movement gives us a point of transition to the discussion of its motive power. The lower categories are abstract because they are external. Most of reality lies beyond their grasp ”

“ When the conflict is between two individuals, each, from the tragic point of view, is dominated by some aspect of the whole good, perhaps an ethical claim such as the duty to one’s kindred, perhaps a wider end, such as natural justice, honour, or the ambition of a strong man ”

“ We need not discuss any of the details of the exposition; the only point of present importance is that the fate which destroys a tragic hero is not a mere external force, it is in him as well as about him. ”

“ At the same time the aspects are not to be identified in a crude and immediate fashion. Whether or not either attitude is capable of including the other—a point we need not determine at present—it is clear that in the ordinary case the process apprehended by the psychologist and the content apprehended by the subject are widely different; and one must avoid filling up gaps in the analysis of one side by material borrowed from the other without a definite justification. In our question the term, thought or thinking, refers to the content of thought, to that which is apprehended ”

“ If the objects of experience, he argued, are amenable to the universality which belongs of right to thought and which cannot be obtained empirically, then thought must have a share in the constitution of the objects of experience. ”

“ The devotion to this abstract ideal, good in itself but imperfect when set against the rest of life, brings the agent into collision with other factors and with the whole; and in the conflict the tragic hero is overthrown. ”

“ This throws into relief the community of spheres, and it is to these underlying principles of both realms that logic is limited. The philosophy of nature is the account of the principles as they appear in the outward world; the philosophy of mind exposes them in the shapes which they take in conscious life; logic is the discussion of them by themselves, without reference to their higher special embodiments.
We may now consider briefly the historical development of Hegel’s position from that of Kant. ”

“ Moreover these worlds would be absolutely out of relation to one another, and could have no commerce. Moreover, they could not be known to one and the same mind; indeed, to speak more accurately, we should have no right to call them all worlds, for to be a world is to possess a special type of unity, and ex hypothesi the types are all different. ”

“ This order may be regarded in two ways; it is a process from abstract to concrete, and it is a movement from the external to the internal. The effort of thought at first is to take one thing at a time; the unities which thought imposes on things are very loose, and express but few of their relations. ”