Thought and Reality in Hegel's System

Thought and Reality in Hegel’s System/17endeavor to work with; reality is a realm ‘whose margin fades foreverand forever’ as we move. According to the other, we are never out oftouch with reality, since to know is ipso facto to know the essentialnature of the objects of knowledge. To the former, truth is nothing morethan consistency within a given set of ideas; to the latter, truth is nothingless than reality itself. In a word, on the theory of Lotze thought is afterall still subjective, still confined to the abstract realm of bare universals,impotent to overtake the phantom reality it pursues: Hegel teaches, onthe contrary, that thought is essentially objective, that form and contentinterpenetrate, that the process of knowledge is the process of things.And this conception of the objectivity of thought, Hegel would urge, is anecessary presupposition of experience, unless indeed we are willing toabide by the consequences of an epistemological dualism.But if thought expresses the essence of its object, then thought ipsofacto comprehends its object and so exhausts reality. This implicationof his doctrine of the objectivity of thought Hegel not only recognizesbut insists upon. “Conception is the penetration of the object, which isthen no longer opposed to me. From it I have taken its own peculiarnature, which it had as an independent object in opposition to me. AsAdam said to Eve, ‘Thou art flesh of my flesh and bone of my bone,’ sosays the Spirit, ‘This object is spirit of my spirit, and all alienation hasdisappeared.”’ 28 This same idea Hegel has in mind when he speaks ofthought as begreifendes Denken. “Begreifendes Denken,” says ProfessorMcGilvary, “is grasping, clutching thought, thought that grips itsobject as its own inalienable possession. Perhaps we might translate dasbegreifende Denken by the phrase ‘object-appropriating thought’; forthe logical relation of such thought to its object is analogous to the legalrelation of the master to the slave; the slave had no independent status;he stood only in his master, who engulfed him.” 29 Again, the one distinguishingfeature between what Hegel terms ‘finite’ and ‘infinite’ thoughtis that the latter destroys the opposition between form and content, whichopposition the former never transcends; as Hegel puts it, ‘finite’ thoughtis “subjective, arbitrary, and accidental,” while ‘infinite’ thought is whatalone “can get really in touch with the supreme and true.” 30 And, ofcourse, it is ‘infinite’ thought with which Hegel has to do in his categoryof absolute knowledge. Furthermore, in the Introduction to the largerLogic Hegel argues that to separate the form and content of knowledgeis to presuppose an external objective world which is independent ofthought; and this, he objects, is unjustifiable. 31 And later in the same