Thought and Reality in Hegel's System

Thought and Reality in Hegel’s System/23misconception of Hegel’s doctrine of universality. The misconceptionconcerns Hegel’s supposed identification of thought and being, and is,perhaps, one of the most prolific sources of adverse criticism of theHegelian philosophy. I refer to the prevalent view, implied in the abovequotations from Mr. Bradley and Lotze, which Professor Seth Pringle-Pattison expresses thus: “The result of Hegel’s procedure would reallybe to sweep ‘existential reality’ off the board altogether, under the persuasion,apparently, that a full statement of all the thought-relationsthat constitute our knowledge of the thing is equivalent to the existentthing itself. On the contrary, it may be confidently asserted that there isno more identity of Knowing and Being with an infinity of such relationsthan there was with one.” 55Now this idea that Hegel tried to reduce things to pure thought aboutthings, or that he for a moment maintained that thought could possiblybe the existent thing, seems to me a monstrous misinterpretation of hisreal meaning. It is inconsistent with the presupposition of his wholephilosophy, namely, that reality is essentially a subject-object relation.It is also inconsistent with the explicit statements quoted above concerningthe universality of the Notion, which always involves particularity.And, as we shall see in the next chapter, he emphatically repudiatessuch a view in his account of mediation and the function of the negativein thought. But, apart from these facts, it seems that we might creditHegel with sufficient acumen to see the inherent absurdity of such aposition. Surely he saw the contradiction involved in an attempt to attainby thought an ideal which would result in the annihilation of thoughtitself. Indeed, was it not Hegel who first impressed upon us the fact thatknowledge always requires an object, and that, if that object be takenaway, knowledge itself ceases to be? As Professor Jones has said: “It isinconsistent with the possibility of knowledge that it should be the realityit represents: knowledge is incompatible alike with sinking the real inthe ideal, and the ideal in the real.” 56 And I think we are safe in sayingthat Hegel was well aware of this truth; his essential disagreement withSpinoza is that in the Spinozistic philosophy object is reduced to andidentified with subject.Hegel seems to have taken special pains that he should not be misunderstoodon this point. The passages already quoted might be paralleledwith others just as positive. I shall content myself, however, withadding only two which show, as plainly as words can show, that theauthor was not an advocate of the theory of abstract identity. The first