HCJ 2 – Hegel

Hegel, possibly one of the most difficult philosophers to understand. Trying to learn his philosophy was truly an effort, so I will try to break it down as simply as I can.

It is said that if Kant didn’t exist, then Hegel’s system wouldn’t have ever been. Now that is something to think about.

All joking aside – Kant was the teacher of both Hegel and Schopenhauer, and so it is said that Kant’s thinking is sprinkled across their theories.

Hegel

There are two things that distinguish Hegel’s philosophical arguments: the strong and almost confusing emphasis on logic, and ‘the dialectic’.

The dialectic can be described as the process of opposing and resolving until we come to the ‘Absolute Idea’.

Hegel only believed in the whole – ‘The Absolute’. He believed that everything leading up to the whole is partially untrue, but they are all needed to come to the whole. We must use our logic to reevaluate until we arrive at the Absolute.

But what does this mean?

Hegel created a triadic structure to show how we may arrive at the Absolute:

 

THESIS

This is our first proposition, but this is incomplete and untrue.

ANTITHESIS

This is a reaction to the thesis, but is also incomplete.

SYNTHESIS

Both the thesis and antithesis are brought together as a new whole.

 

This system is repeated until we can arrive at the final conclusion – the ‘Absolute Idea’. We compromise until we reach the absolute truth. This makes him a teleological philosopher as he believes that all aparts lend themselves to the ends, the conclusion of life. Now, that’s a familiar word – ends. Kant’s Kingdom of Ends can be thought of when considering this.

An example given in Bertrand Russell’s ‘History of Western Philosophy’ is:

Thesis – the uncle is reality.

However, this implies the existence of a nephew. This now commits us to the existence of a nephew, so:

Antithesis – the newphew is absolute.

But this is not complete, as there is no uncle in the proposition, so:

Synthesis – the absolute is composed of both the uncle and nephew as a whole.

However, there are many other incomplete aspects to this absolute whole, so we may repeat the triadic system until it is satisfactory with no holes in it.

There is, however, an assumption that every proposition has a subject and a predicate. For example – there is an assumption that the proposition ‘the uncle and nephew are the absolute’ has to contain a subject – the uncle and nephew individually, and a predicate – they have to have necessary conditions for it to be so (the uncle himself must be related in some way, and so on). Hegel says that we must consider the whole uncle-nephew composition. Relations cannot be real.

A and B are not two. They are one in the same whole. The whole, the unity, the absolute, is considered alone to be real.

Schopenhauer

Schopenhauer is a peculiar one. He believed that the life we are living is suffering, and we are suffering from the original sin. He also believed that women were evil because they cause life. We must commit suicide in order to escape this life. I see Schopenhauer as Hegel’s evil twin.

Hegel believed that we are suffering in this life because of the original sin, but believed that we could redeem ourselves from it.

In comparison with Kant, Schopenhauer believed that there was only one big noumena, which is the universe itself. Everything had a will – a will to be, the force. The force is strong. There is no consciousness.