Thought and Reality in Hegel's System

Thought and Reality in Hegel’s System/43diacy of reality with the abstractions of science. For the process of mediation,as Hegel defines it, is a process of determinate negation whichreduces experience to an ordered and systematic whole; it affirms aswell as denies, and indeed affirms by denying. In short, it is the principlewithin experience which makes of experience a cosmos and not a chaos.A completely mediated immediacy, that is, reality, is, therefore, justcompletely organized experience. This negative within thought is notmerely negative; it is a negative which annuls the false immediacy onlybecause it is ever leading us onwards to the true immediacy. The manycriticisms which are directed against Hegel on this point overlook thisfact, and unwarrantedly assume that he means by negation abstract contradiction.Chapter III.Ontology and Epistemology.The conclusions of the two preceding chapters have led us to a furtherproblem which we shall here be forced to face. If it be true that thoughtdoes in point of fact express the nature of things, then it would seem tofollow that the science of thought is the science of things, that ontologyand epistemology coincide. In this connection two questions arise: DoesHegel identify the two? And if so, what does he mean by the identificationand what justification is there for it? It is to the task of answeringthese questions that we now address ourselves.To the first of the above questions there can, I think, be only oneanswer. Hegel does identify logic and metaphysics. In the first place, wehave his own explicit statement on the point. Since thoughts are “ObjectiveThoughts,” he says, “Logic therefore coincides with metaphysics,the science of things set and held in thoughts — thoughts accreditedable to express the essential reality of things.” 106 Besides such an explicitstatement, one might offer as evidence the whole logical bias ofthe Hegelian philosophy which is unquestionably towards this identification.Since the categories “really are, as forms of the Notion, the vitalspirit of the actual world,” 107 and since things or objects which do notagree with them are accidental, arbitrary, and untrue phenomena; 108since the universal aspect of the object is not something subjective attributedto it only when it is an object of thought, but rather belongs toand expresses its essential nature, it follows that the science which hasto do with these universals is ipso facto the science of reality. This sci-