McTaggart, Studies in the Hegelian Dialectic

16/John McTaggart Ellis McTaggart
synthesis in the dialectic process that the place of negation in that process
is only secondary. The really fundamental aspect of the dialectic is
not the tendency of the finite category to negate itself but to complete
itself. Since the various relatively perfect and concrete categories are,
according to Hegel, made up each of two moments or aspects which
stand to one another in the relation of contrary ideas, it follows that one
characteristic of the process will be the passage from an idea to its
contrary. But this is not due, as has occasionally been supposed, to an
inherent tendency in all finite categories to affirm their own negation as
such. It is due to their inherent tendency to affirm their own complement.
It is indeed, according to Hegel, no empirical and contingent fact,
but an absolute and necessary law, that their complement is in some
degree their negation. But the one category passes into the other, because
the second completes the meaning of the first, not because it denies
it.
This, however, is one of the points at which the difficulty, always
great, of distinguishing what Hegel did say from that which he ought in
consistency to have said becomes almost insuperable. It may safely be
asserted that the motive force of the dialectic was clearly held by him to
rest in the implicit presence in us of its goal. This is admitted by his
opponents as well as his supporters. That he did to some extent recognise
the consequence of this—the subordinate importance which it assigned
to the idea of negation—seems also probable, especially when we consider
the passage quoted above, 13 in which the element of negation appears
to enter into the dialectic process with very different degrees of
prominence in the three stages of which that process consists. On the
other hand, the absence of any detailed exposition of a principle so fundamental
as that of the gradually decreasing share taken by negation in
the dialectic, and the failure to follow out all its consequences, seem to
indicate that he had either not clearly realised it, or had not perceived its
full importance. But to this point it will be necessary to return.
10. What relation, we must now enquire, exists between thought as
engaged in the dialectic process, and thought as engaged in the ordinary
affairs of life In these latter we continually employ the more abstract
categories, which, according to Hegel, are the more imperfect, as if they
were satisfactory and ultimate determinations of thought. So far as we
do this we must contrive to arrest for the time the dialectic movement.
While a category is undergoing the changes and transformations in which
that movement consists, it is as unfit to be used as an instrument of