Hegelianism
Hegelianism
Hegel’s Dialectic
The present study requires familiarity with Hegel’s dialectic view which for a while dominated European philosophy and whose effect presides to the present day. As M.H. Abrams in Natural Supernaturalism defines Hegel’s dialectic by maintaining that Hegel’s thought has been constantly associated with motion: “The elemental units of his system, the concepts [Begriffe],” are themselves “self-movement, circles … spiritual entities… . The concept is the object’s own self which presents itself as its becoming… that moves itself and takes its determinations back into itself, and passes over into its own complement, or antithesis” (174). Hegel maintains that in science the “Concept” develops itself out of itself and is only an immanent progression and production of its own determinations; Hegel calls this moving principle of the “Concept” dialectic. He then applies the same dialectic—of immanent movement and self-induced passage of each element into its own contraries which press for reconciliation or synthesis—to the phenomenal world of objects, of people, and of institutions, just as he does to the systematic thinking of the philosopher:
Wherever there is movement, wherever there is life, wherever anything is carried into effect in the actual world, there dialectic is at work… . Everything that surrounds us may be viewed as an instance of Dialectic… by which the finite, as implicitly other than what it is, is forced beyond its own immediate or natural being to turn suddenly into its opposite. (175)
Then Hegel asserts that “the totality of the movement of the component concepts is philosophy, or ‘science’; and truth in this energetic and integral philosophic system does not inhere in any propositions served from the whole (for by severance they are at once rendered ‘dead and positive’) but in the entirety of the dynamic process itself: ‘this whole movement constitutes the positive and its truth’” (175). To avoid misunderstanding of
Hegel’s Dialectic
The present study requires familiarity with Hegel’s dialectic view which for a while dominated European philosophy and whose effect presides to the present day. As M.H. Abrams in Natural Supernaturalism defines Hegel’s dialectic by maintaining that Hegel’s thought has been constantly associated with motion: “The elemental units of his system, the concepts [Begriffe],” are themselves “self-movement, circles … spiritual entities… . The concept is the object’s own self which presents itself as its becoming… that moves itself and takes its determinations back into itself, and passes over into its own complement, or antithesis” (174). Hegel maintains that in science the “Concept” develops itself out of itself and is only an immanent progression and production of its own determinations; Hegel calls this moving principle of the “Concept” dialectic. He then applies the same dialectic—of immanent movement and self-induced passage of each element into its own contraries which press for reconciliation or synthesis—to the phenomenal world of objects, of people, and of institutions, just as he does to the systematic thinking of the philosopher:
Wherever there is movement, wherever there is life, wherever anything is carried into effect in the actual world, there dialectic is at work… . Everything that surrounds us may be viewed as an instance of Dialectic… by which the finite, as implicitly other than what it is, is forced beyond its own immediate or natural being to turn suddenly into its opposite. (175)
Then Hegel asserts that “the totality of the movement of the component concepts is philosophy, or ‘science’; and truth in this energetic and integral philosophic system does not inhere in any propositions served from the whole (for by severance they are at once rendered ‘dead and positive’) but in the entirety of the dynamic process itself: ‘this whole movement constitutes the positive and its truth’” (175). To avoid misunderstanding of