McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic

10/John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart
in that case the conclusion of the process could, if it were valid, have no
greater content than was contained in the starting point. All that can be
done with a single premise is to analyse it, and the mere analysis of an
idea could never lead us necessarily onwards to any other idea incompatible
with it, and therefore could never lead us to its contrary. But the
dialectic claims to proceed from the lower to the higher, and it claims to
add to our knowledge, and not merely to expound it. At the same time it
asserts that no premise other than the validity of the lower category is
requisite to enable us to affirm the validity of the higher.
The solution of this difficulty, which has been the ground of many
attacks on Hegel, lies in the fact that the dialectic must be looked on as
a process, not of construction, but of reconstruction. If the lower categories
lead on to the higher, and these to the highest, the reason is that
the lower categories have no independent. existence, but are only abstractions
from the highest. It is this alone which is independent and
real. In it all one-sidedness has been destroyed by the successive reconciliation
of opposites. It is thus the completely concrete, and for Hegel
the real is always the concrete. Moreover, according to Hegel, the real is
always the completely rational. (“The consummation of the infinite
aim...consists merely in removing the illusion which makes it seem as
yet unaccomplished.” 3 ). Now no category except the highest can be completely
rational, since every lower one involves its contrary. The Absolute
Idea is present to us in all reality, in all the phenomena of experience,
and in our own selves. Everywhere it is the soul of all reality. But
although it is always present to us, it is not always explicitly present. In
the content of consciousness it is present implicitly. But we do not always
attempt to unravel that content, nor are our attempts always successful.
Very often all that is explicitly before our minds is some finite
and incomplete category. When this is so, the dialectic process can begin,
and indeed must begin, if we are sufficiently acute and attentive,—
because the ideal which is latent in the nature of all experience, and of
the mind itself, forbids us to rest content with the inadequate category.
The incomplete reality before the mind is inevitably measured against
the complete reality of the mind itself, and it is in this process that it
betrays its incompleteness, and demands its contrary to supplement its
one-sidedness. “Before the mind there is a single conception, but the
whole mind itself, which does not appear, engages in the process, operates
on the datum, and produces the result.” 4
4. The dialectic process is not a mere addition to the conception