Thought and Reality in Hegel's System

Thought and Reality in Hegel’s System/35and to exhibit their necessary interconnection. But the categories employedin doing so are of a wretched sort. Their ruling principle is thatthe sensible is taken (and with justice) as the prius or the initial basis,but that the later phases that follow this starting-point present themselvesas emerging in a solely affirmative manner, and the negative aspectof mental activity, by which this material is transmuted into mindand destroyed as a sensible, is misconceived and overlooked. As thetheory of Condillac states it, the sensible is not merely the empiricalfirst, but is left as if it were the true and essential foundation.” 88Now what does this criticism mean? Of course we are not concernedto inquire here whether it is a just criticism of Condillac’s theory.Apart from this theory, and expressed in general terms, the criticismmeans, it would seem, simply that, in the nature of the case, to think theworld is virtually to deny that its first immediate aspect is the ultimatelytrue. Thought is not exclusively affirmative; it is negative as well, andits negative function is to transform the immediately given. Expressedin Hegel’s own words: “To think the phenomenal world rather means torecast its form and transmute it into a universal. And thus the action ofthought has also a negative effect upon its basis: and the matter of sensation,when it receives the stamp of universality, at once loses its firstand phenomenal shape.” 89 That is, all thinking experience is a processof interpretation in which there is and can be no bare immediacy; forthinking ipso facto involves the transcending of the particular and thetransformation of it into the form of the universal. Such, then, is thenegative function of thought: and all thought is negative. To think theworld is to deny its reality in the form of abstract particularity; its purelyimmediate aspect is by thought negated.But, be it noted, the particular is not merely denied; in a very importantsense it is also affirmed. And this brings us to the second point, thatthought is positive as well as negative. As an abstract particular, quaabstract to think it is to negate it; as a universalized particular, quauniversalized, to think it is to affirm it. Reason, in short, is positive aswell as negative; and, what is more important still, is positive by virtueof the very fact of its negativity. “To hold fast the positive in the negativeis the most important aspect of rational knowledge.” 90 Hegel cannotbe accused of having neglected to state very definitely what he meansby this positive significance of negation. In the introduction to the largerLogic he tells us that what is needed to secure the dialectical movementof thought “is to realize that the negative is just as much positive, or that