THE STORY OF PHILOSOPHY2 The Lives and Opinions

HEGEL 223
day after Goethe's; and proud Germany made a double holiday for them
every year.
A Frenchman once asked Hegel to put his philosophy into one sentence;
and he did not succeed so well as the monk who, asked to define Christian-
ity while standing on one foot, said, simply, "Thou shalt love thy neighbor
as thyself." Hegel preferred to answer in ten volumes; and when they
were written and published, and all the world was talking about them, he
complained that "only one man understands me, and even he does not." 62
Most of his writings, like Aristotle's, consist of his lecture-notes; or, worse,
of the notes taken by students who heard his lectures. Only the Logic and
the Phenomenology are from his hand, and these are masterpieces of
obscurity, darkened by abstractness and condensation of style, by a weirdly
original terminology, and by an overcareful modification of every statement
with a Gothic wealth of limiting clauses. Hegel described his work
as "an attempt to teach philosophy to speak in German." 63 He succeeded.
The Logic is an analysis not of methods of reasoning, but of the concepts
used in reasoning. These Hegel takes to be the categories named by
Kant Being, Quality, Quantity, Relation, etc. It is the first business of
philosophy to dissect these basic notions that are so bandied about in all
our thinking. The most pervasive of them all is Relation; every idea is a
group of relations; we can think of something only by relating it to
something else, and perceiving its similarities and its differences. An idea
without relations of any kind is empty; this is all that is meant by saying
that "Pure Being and Nothing are the same": Being absolutely devoid
of relations or qualities does not exist, and has no meaning whatever.
This proposition led to an endless progeny of witticisms which still breed;
and it proved to be at once an obstacle and a lure to the study of HegePs
thought.
Of all relations, the most universal is that of contrast or opposition,
Every condition of thought or of things every idea and every situation
in the world leads irresistibly to its opposite, and then unites with it to
form a higher or more complex whole. This "dialectical movement" runs
through everything that Hegel wrote. It is an old thought, of course, foreshadowed
by Empedocles, and embodied in the "golden mean" of Aristotle,
who wrote that "the knowledge of opposites is one." The truth
(like an electron) is an organic unity of opposed parts* The truth of
conservatism and radicalism is liberalism an open mind and a cautious
hand, an open hand and a cautious mind; the formation of our opinions
on large issues is a decreasing oscillation between extremes; and in all
debatable questions veritas in media stat. The movement of evolution is
^Ruthless critics, as we might have expected, challenge the authenticity of this
rtory.
^Wallace: Prolegomena to the Logic of Hegel, p. 16.