Thought and Reality in Hegel's System

Thought and Reality in Hegel’s System/39incompatibility and absolute opposition; to all appearances, the critic isinnocent of the fact that negation or contradiction, as Hegel is at greatpains to define it, is just the doing away with bare negation, abstractopposition, and that the term embodies Hegel’s unwearied insistencethat formal contradiction has no significance when applied to reality.Naturally the criticism is no more significant than the assumption uponwhich it leans for support. The same oversight is at the basis of ProfessorJames’s criticism of this Hegelian conception, in a characteristicdiscussion “On Some Hegelisms,” in his volume of popular lectures onphilosophy entitled The Will to Believe. At a very dramatic point in thisessay Hegel is presented to us, standing amidst a jarring, jolting worldof incoherent facts, frantically lifting ‘vain hands of imprecation’ at thewild and tumultuous scene before him. “But hark! What wondrous strainis this that steals upon his ear? Muddle! is it anything but a peculiar sortof transparency? Is not jolt passage? Is friction other than a kind oflubrication? Is not a chasm a filling? — a queer kind of filling, but afilling still. Why seek for a glue to hold things together when their veryfalling apart is the only glue you need? Let all that negation which seemedto disintegrate the universe be the mortar that combines it, and the problemstands solved.” 101 These strictures are apparently supposed to be areal criticism of Hegel, but the absurdity against which they are directedfirst saw the light when they themselves were penned. It is certain thatsuch an absurd position as the one here criticized cannot justly be attributedto Hegel; it is a caricature of Hegel’s real position. The ‘glue’ thatbinds the world together is, in Hegel’s view of the matter, not the eternalfalling apart of objects, but simply their necessary interconnectedness;if you attempt to separate them, they will not stay put. Nor is it thatnegation which disintegrates the universe that Hegel uses as the ‘mortar’to combine it; it is that negation which, because it is as much positiveas negative, does actually combine it. After all, it would appear thatone is forced to admit that Hegel is more than a superficial thinker tryingto palm off on a long-suffering public palpable absurdities.Trendelenburg’s criticism of Hegel on this point is more seriousand, one is inclined to say, more significant than the preceding criticisms,but it seems no less fallacious. This critic triumphantly forcesHegel into the following dilemma: “Either the negation, through whichthe dialectic development to the second and third moments is mediated,is logical negation (A, not-A) — in which case nothing determinate isproduced in the second moment and no synthesis is given in the third; or