Absolute Idealism

Absolute Idealism

Seen from a broad historical perspective, Hegel’s philosophy was the last great attempt since Kant to rehabilitate metaphysics, that is, the attempt to know through pure reason the absolute or unconditioned. Through his dialectic, Hegel believed that he could overcome the limitations of traditional metaphysics, surpass the Kantian critical limits of knowledge and provide a new rational foundation for moral and religious faith. It is striking that Hegel himself defined his own philosophy in these terms. In the introduction to his Encyclopedia of Philosophical Science (Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften)

he characterized his philosophy by its opposition to three major currents of his age: the old metaphysical rationalism, the critical philosophy of Kant and the philosophy of feeling of F.H.Jacobi and the Romantics. While the old metaphysical rationalism was correct in postulating a rational knowledge of the absolute, it did not have the proper dialectical methodology but remained stuck in the old deductive model of demonstration. Though Kant was right in his critique of this model of demonstration, he went too far in concluding that there could be no rational knowledge whatsoever of the absolute. Jacobi and the Romantics were justified in rebelling against the Kantian constraints upon knowledge, but they went astray in thinking that they could be over- come by replying upon aesthetic or religious feeling and intuition alone. In agreement with the older rationalism, Hegel stressed that knowledge of the absolute would have to

be rational, conceptual or demonstrative, but he recognized that there could be no return to the old deductive methodologies of classical rationalism, which had been under-mined through the Kantian critique of knowledge. Hegel therefore saw the distinctive contribution of his philosophy as his new methodology for metaphysics: the dialectic. In

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stressing the need for a rational comprehension of the absolute, Hegel attempted to restore the sovereign role of reason in philosophy against the Romantic faith in aesthetic experience. His philosophy was therefore an attempt to restore—through a new means— the legacy of the Enlightenment against the currents of Romanticism.

Like Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz, Hegel stresses that metaphysics is the foundation of the sciences, and it indeed provides the basis for every part of his system. Hegel first sketched his meta-physics in his late Frankfurt years (1799–1800), then developed it during his collaboration with Schelling in his early Jena years (1800–4); he gave it its first mature exposition, only after breaking with Schelling, in his 1807 Phenomenology of Spirit (Phänomenologie des Geistes) . The chief exposition of his metaphysics is his Science of Logic (Wissenschaft der Logik) (1812–13), a more condensed form of which appears in the first part of his Encyclopedia.

Hegel himself described his metaphysics as absolute Idealism. Put very simply, the central thesis of absolute Idealism is that everything in nature and history is an appearance or manifestation of the absolute idea. Hegel understands the absolute idea in teleological terms: it is the single self-realizing and self-organizing purpose or end of all things. To say that everything is an appearance of the idea therefore means that everything acts or exists for the sake of this purpose or goal. This goal or purpose is the realization of spirit (Geist), where spirit consists in mutual or inter-subjective self- awareness, where the self knows itself through the other as the other knows itself through the self. Spirit is ‘an I that is a We and a We that is an I’.

There are three more specific theses behind absolute idealism. The first thesis is monism: that the universe consists in not a plurality of substances but in a single substance. Such monism opposes not only pluralism, the doctrine that there are many substances, but also dualism, the doctrine that there are two kinds of substance, the mental and the physical, the ideal and the real. For Hegel, the mental and physical, the ideal and real, are simply different appearances or manifestations of the single universal substance. The second thesis is organicism: that reality forms a living whole, or consists in a single living process. According to Hegel, this process consists in three basic moments or movements: inchoate unity (identity), differentiation (difference) and the unity of the two previous moments in a more organized and differentiated unity (identity- in-difference). The third thesis is rationalism: that this living process has a purpose, or conforms to some form, archetype or idea. Putting all these theses together, absolute idealism is the doctrine that everything is a part of the single universal organism, or that everything conforms to, or is an appearance of, its purpose, design or idea.

Although Hegel’s absolute Idealism is monistic, it does not maintain that reality is pure oneness, an undifferentiated unity without difference within itself. Hegel was critical of any definition of the absolute as pure identity, as if it could be an identity that excludes difference. He insisted that absolute Idealism had to explain the reality of the finite world, the fact that there are differences between things. Accordingly, the absolute had to be conceived not simply as unity but as the unity of unity and non-unity. Such a conception of the absolute is expressed in his organicism: If the absolute is life, then it must realize itself through self-differentiation.

What, more precisely, makes absolute Idealisn? The Idealist dimension of absolute Idealism comes from its rationalism. The ideal does not refer to something mental or subjective but to the arche-typical or intelligible. Hence the absolute Idealist’s claim that

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everything is ideal does not mean that everything is an appearance of some cosmic mind or super-subject. Such an interpretation of Hegel’s absolute Idealism is a serious misrepresentation, since it understands the absolute in one-sided subjective or mental terms. Since Hegel understands the idea as an archetype or form, it manifests itself in both the subjective and objective, the mental and material.

There are two fundamental differences between Hegel’s absolute Idealism and the transcendental Idealism of Kant and Fichte. First, Hegel’s absolute idealism is much more realistic since it is compatible with the existence of material objects independent of the awareness of them. Even if nothing subjective yet exists, it still manifests the absolute idea. Second, absolute Idealism is much more naturalistic, explaining all subjectivity as one part or manifestation of nature. The realization of spirit is indeed the goal of all nature and history, the highest organization and development of all the powers of nature, but it still does not transcend nature and history, existing in some self-sufficient noumenal or intelligible realm.