Progress of the Absolute
Progress of the Absolute
Hegel: The progress of consciousness towards Fichte
Despite the opposition between Kant and Fichte’s attempts to autonomize human existence, they both maintained an essentially dualistic point of view. In Kant this was a dualism between the contingency of the world of sense and the necessary forms of the intellect, and between duty and nature in man; In Fichte it was the dualism of duty and reality, which is a permanent condition of the development of the mind and is prolonged endlessly in an infinite movement of progress. However, neither Kant not Fichte overcame the dilemma: either the mind comes to grips with the contingency of existence, and in cognizing it is, so to speak, infected with contingency and thereby does away with the manifoldness of existence.
Hegel’s majestic system was intended, among other things, to interpret the nature of Being in such a way as to deprive contingency of its effect while at the same time preserving the richness and variety of the universe. Contrary to Schelling’s idealism, Hegel did not wish to reduce Being to the undifferentiated identity of the Absolute, in which the variety and muplicity of finite reality must be lost or dismissed as an illusion; and again, in opposition to Kant, he refused to regard the thinking subject as abandoned helplessly to the experience of the variety and multiplicity, presented to him endlessly as a datum without reason or meaning. His purpose was to interpret the universe as entirely meaningful without sacrificing its differentiation. This required, as he wrote, ‘a self-origination of the wealth of detail, and a self-determining distinction of shapes and forms’ (Phenomenology of Mind, Preface).
But a Mind free from contingency is the same as an infinite Mind. For in so far as the object is something alien to the subject it is a limitation of it, a negation; a limited consciousness is finite, and the object, as foreign, is, so to speak, its enemy. Only when the
Hegel: The progress of consciousness towards Fichte
Despite the opposition between Kant and Fichte’s attempts to autonomize human existence, they both maintained an essentially dualistic point of view. In Kant this was a dualism between the contingency of the world of sense and the necessary forms of the intellect, and between duty and nature in man; In Fichte it was the dualism of duty and reality, which is a permanent condition of the development of the mind and is prolonged endlessly in an infinite movement of progress. However, neither Kant not Fichte overcame the dilemma: either the mind comes to grips with the contingency of existence, and in cognizing it is, so to speak, infected with contingency and thereby does away with the manifoldness of existence.
Hegel’s majestic system was intended, among other things, to interpret the nature of Being in such a way as to deprive contingency of its effect while at the same time preserving the richness and variety of the universe. Contrary to Schelling’s idealism, Hegel did not wish to reduce Being to the undifferentiated identity of the Absolute, in which the variety and muplicity of finite reality must be lost or dismissed as an illusion; and again, in opposition to Kant, he refused to regard the thinking subject as abandoned helplessly to the experience of the variety and multiplicity, presented to him endlessly as a datum without reason or meaning. His purpose was to interpret the universe as entirely meaningful without sacrificing its differentiation. This required, as he wrote, ‘a self-origination of the wealth of detail, and a self-determining distinction of shapes and forms’ (Phenomenology of Mind, Preface).
But a Mind free from contingency is the same as an infinite Mind. For in so far as the object is something alien to the subject it is a limitation of it, a negation; a limited consciousness is finite, and the object, as foreign, is, so to speak, its enemy. Only when the