Thought and Reality in Hegel's System

Thought and Reality in Hegel’s System/29If we turn to the preface of the Phenomenology of Spirit, we findthere Hegel’s formal definition of the process of mediation. Mediation,he there tells us, is “nothing other than self-uniformity(Sichselbstgleichheit) developing itself; or it is reflection into itself, themoment of the Ego which exists for itself (des fürsichseienden Ich),pure negativity, or, degraded from its pure abstraction, simple becoming.”66 A page or two preceding this passage he asserts that, accordingto his view, the whole matter reduces to this: “Truth is to be conceivedof and expressed, not as Substance, but as Subject. At the same time itis to be noted that substantiality includes in itself both that which is theimmediacy of knowledge itself, namely, the universal, and that which isthe immediacy for knowledge, namely, Being....” 67The first of these passages gives us Hegel’s conception of the natureand characteristics of the process of mediation; the second emphasizesthe nature of the result of the process. Taken together, the meaning ofthe two seems to be this. If we define truth as substance, our definitionis so far right; both thought and being, both the particular and the universal,are included in the definition. But the inadequacy of this definitionlies in the fact that It fails to explain satisfactorily the relation ofthese two aspects of experiences. Thought and being are left existingside by side, as it were, in a blank identity devoid of differences, whichidentity, like Schelling’s, “is absolutely presupposed without any attemptbeing made to show that this is the truth.” 68 The attempt to showthat this is the truth inevitably leads us, Hegel thinks, to the standpointof subject, to the conception of identity in difference which is the centralfact of consciousness. Now the process of exhibiting this necessity isthe process of mediation, which, when the goal is once reached, appearsin its true light as the expression of the interrelation of the parts of anorganic whole which itself exists for itself. When viewed from the standpointof the lower stages of immediacy, mediation seems merely theexpression of an external relation among phenomena more or less independentof each other; but when it is looked at in its real nature, when itis viewed sub specie aeternitatis, it is seen to be the expression of thenecessary and vital interconnection of phenomena which themselves havesignificance only as parts of a comprehensive unity. Summarizing, then,we may say that the process of mediation is a development towardsgreater determinateness and the progressive substitution of necessaryand vital, for seemingly accidental and arbitrary, connections amongphenomena; and such a development is from the abstract to the con-