hegel today || the legacy of hegel

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THE LEGACY OF HEGELAuthor(s): H. S. HarrisSource: The Monist, Vol. 48, No. 1, Hegel Today (January, 1964), pp. 112-128Published by: Hegeler InstituteStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27901539 .

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THE LEGACY OF HEGEL

I. Almost fifty years ago now Josiah Royce summed up the essential legacy of the Hegelian tradition thus:

It is not the most important feature of idealism that it appears to be committed to an insistence . . . that the being of things, whether

God or man or the physical world, is a being in the mind of some thinker. . . . The really most important feature is exactly the issue

here concerned: does the essence of anything make any difference

to its existence? is it any part of the essence of a thing that it exists?1

He made this claim in his last course of lectures at Harvard

only a few months before his death in 1916. The rising tide of

pragmatism and naturalism was on the point of engulfing Hegelian idealism on this continent; in Britain the older traditions of scien tific empiricism and critical common sense were once more in the

ascendant, although the idealist school survived for a generation largely through blood transfusions from Italian sources. Even in continental Europe, where the study of Hegel's philosophy has never ceased to be a living concern, the nature of the interest in him and the identification and estimate of what is most valuable and significant in his work has changed and shifted considerably. The older idealists focussed their attention on Hegel's mature

system, especially the Logic; the new generation prefers the looser fabric of the Phenomenology and even the fragmentary early

writings. Hegel's "system" is in disrepute even among some of those who can fairly be called his best friends at the present time; and I suppose there is almost no one, except among his avowed

enemies, who would cheerfully agree with Royce's verdict as to

"the really most important feature" of Hegel's idealism. Royce's

i Quoted from a transcript of students' notes at Harvard by W. E. Hocking in

Barrett (ed.): Contemporary Idealism in America (New York: Macmillan, 1932), p. 45. Royce was discussing R. B. Perry's famous article "The Egocentric Predica

ment" Journal of Philosophy (1910): 6-14.



THE LEGACY OF HEGEL 113

rhetorical questions would be answered on all sides-by linguistic analysts, by existentialists, and by phenomenologists-with a firm

negative and not with the affirmative that he clearly expects from all friends of idealism.

As a student of Hegel's work, however, I find myself obliged to agree with Royce, because I think that Hegel would have agreed

with him. The conception of a rational system, which necessarily reveals itself in our actual experience, is the legacy that he

deliberately bequeathed to us. Any other lessons we may learn from him, however important they may seem to us, are merely incidental benefits. It is of course quite possible that Hegel's Ab solute Idea is a wind-egg and that incidental benefits really are

more valuable. But I think not. I believe that a conscientious examination of the relation of Hegel's system to the earlier tradi tion of speculative philosophy will show that this widely held view is an error arising partly from certain prevalent misunder

standings of what Hegel claimed to have proved, and partly from the fact that he does sometimes make, or at least imply, mutually inconsistent claims.2 His inconsistencies are not, I think, incurable; and when the mistakes have been identified and accounted for, what remains is certainly more valuable than Hegel's critics, from

Kierkegaard and Marx to Carnap and Sartre, have allowed. What follows may seem altogether too cursory to count as a "conscien

tious examination" of such an enormous topic. But, if I am not mistaken, the ultimate source of most of the difficulty in assessing Hegel's achievement lies in a failure to see the wood for the trees, which becomes almost unavoidable when one begins to study the

system in detail. For this reason I have deliberately chosen to focus attention on a few general points which are, I hope, non-controver sial, and have referred as far as possible to passages in his works which are so familiar as to be virtually clich s.

II. If the crucial feature of all idealism is the doctrine that the essence of things somehow makes a difference to their existence,

2 Many of the prevalent misunderstandings have now been collected, identified

and fairly conclusively refuted by J. N. Findlay in his book Hegel: A Re-exami nation (London: Allen and Unwin, 1958). The present paper is concerned mainly with the problem of resolving the inconsistencies and ambiguities in Hegel himself.



114 THE MONIST

then the crucial feature of Hegel's idealism is his doctrine of

actuality (Wirklichkeit). Hegel often reiterates that it is of the

essence of what is rational that it should exist; and Royce's remark

must inevitably remind us of the famous tag: Was vern nftig ist, das ist wirklich; und was wirklich ist das ist vern nftig.^ But if this

is so then the truth about any rational essence must include an

explanation of the existence or non-existence of its object and in

this way if in no other way the truth about anything will be

bound up with the truth about everything else in the total com

plex of actualities and real possibilities. Truth is thus only possible as a system of statements describing the actual development of the

existing "world."4 If the connection between essence and existence were denied at

least two unacceptable consequences would follow. First, we

should have to admit that the actual world is not completely intelligible; and, secondly, it would be theoretically possible to construct a completely rational system of ideas without even con

sidering whether or not such a system was, or could be, existentially realized-indeed this problem could not legitimately arise for the

theorist, since it could never be resolved by purely rational means.

Hegel regarded these consequences as irreconcilable either with

philosophy or with sound common sense. In his view it simply did not make sense to suggest that the world may not ultimately "make

sense," or to suggest that something could be imagined which does

completely "make sense" and yet is not realized in the world.

Thus Hegel's philosophy can fairly be characterized as a gigan tic effort to conquer, transcend and rightly understand the dualism

between idea and fact, universal and particular, thought and

reality, which is so fundamental and familiar in our everyday discourse about the world in which we live.

If . . . the Idea passes for 'only an Idea/ for something repre sented in an opinion, philosophy rejects such a view and shows that nothing is actual except the Idea.5

3 Philosophy of Right, Preface (Knox, p. 10); Encyclopaedia Sec. 6; Philosophy of History, Introduction (Sibree, 1944, p. 9, Hartman, p. ll); Phenomenology, Preface (Baillie, p. 105), etc.

4 Cf. Encyclopaedia, Sec. 14; Phenomenology, Preface (Baillie, pp. 70, 81). & Philosophy of Right, trans. T. M. Knox (Oxford, 1942), p. 10.




The whole problem of philosophy was to discover and exhibit the inherent rational structure of the world, the structure that lies behind the mere surface "show" of passing events-"to apprehend in the show of the temporal and transient the substance which is immanent and the eternal which is present.''^

The presence of the eternal in the temporal and the immanence of the permanent in the transient has been one of the main themes of our philosophical tradition from its first beginnings. Within the context of this philosophia perennis the Aristotelian inspiration of

Hegers doctrine of "actuality" is immediately apparent. He agrees with Aristotle, as against Plato, that essences do not subsist in themselves but must have some kind of existence in the world; and he ends his own discussion of the Absolute by quoting Aristotle's definition of God as pure actuality.7 This quotation at the end of the Encyclopaedia is an acknowledgement of his debt and of the source of his inspiration, of course, but he intends it also as the index of his achievement. For when we read this passage in Hegel

we are supposed to be able to enter and share in the pure self

contemplation which is the eternal life of God; whereas when we read it in Aristotle's Metaphysics we are supposed to see why we

must postulate a type or level of experience which remains always and necessarily beyond our ken. Aristotle's God is the last link in a chain of beings which we reconstruct in our thought by analogical extrapolation from that part of it which is available to us. But

Hegel's Absolute is the last link in a chain of experiences that men in society go through, and its ultimacy is proved not by logical reasoning but by the actual comprehension and under

standing of our life in this world.8

6 Ibid.

7 Encyclopaedia, section 577.

8 Perhaps this interpretation of Absolute Spirit is more controversial than I

think and hope. I realize that long study of the Italian Hegelians, especially Gentile, may cause some lines of interpretation to seem more obvious to me than

they are. I do not think it is controversial, however, to say that in Hegel's view we "share God's life" when we engage in philosophical speculation. This expres sion preserves all the ambiguity that can legitimately be claimed to exist in

Hegel's view. It is possible to interpret this 'sharing' more or less in the way in which I have interpreted Thomism and traditional Christianity. But I do not

myself believe that Hegel thought we share God's life with God, as with another

person. Rather we share, or we can share, God's life with one another. In the



116 THE MONIST

If Hegel himself directs our attention to Aristotle, Royce's statement of the issue directs us hardly less explicitly to St. Thomas.

Thomas took the idea of pure actuality and reworked it into the

conception of esse per se subsistens, the being whose very essence is

simply to exist. The life of God is something which, according to Thomas and to Christian doctrine, all men share in a quite primi tive sense of the word, though it is one which is not at all the or

dinary or natural sense of the word "share" in this context. For we share in God's life, roughly speaking, as we share the atmosphere: "In Him we live, and move and have our being." Thus Thomism is by Royce's criterion a type of idealism for it asserts that there is

something whose essence involves existence, and this essence "makes a difference" to all existing things.

In knowing Himself the Christian God necessarily knows the world He has created. He is necessarily involved with the world in a

way in which Aristotle's God is not, just because the existence of His world is contingent in a way in which the existence of Aris totle's world is not.9 But it is not logically necessary that any created thing should know God in the mode of direct acquaintance.

We can of course have rational knowledge about Him as Aristotle

did, but it is only through His grace that those who have faith can "share life" with Him-in a more or less ordinary sense-in this

world, and enjoy the promise of a full and literal sharing and

knowing in another world. "Then shall I know even as also I am

known"; but in the here and now Thomas remains strictly Aris totelian in respect of the possibilities and limits of rational knowl

edge.

ordinary sense we do not share God's life, we constitute its existence, we live it,

by sharing our lives with one another in a certain way and establishing a certain

community. Hegel does seem to have held that only philosophers could really be

members of this community and that their exclusive community could be self

sufficient as the life of God obviously must be. On both points (supposing that

he did hold them) I think he is demonstrably mistaken. Spinoza could (and per

haps did) hold that the community of fully rational men constitute the conscious

life of God; but in a system founded on the historical development of God's life

in time, pure contemplation sub specie aeternitatis ceases to be completely pos sible; or, to put the point another way, so far as it is possible it is not self

sufficient.

9 It would be logically possible (perhaps) for Aristotle to agree with St. Thomas

that God intelligendo se intelligit omnia alia. But it is surely not logically

necessary.




The situation of the human philosopher does not seem to be so very different in St. Thomas therefore, from what it was in

Aristotle-with whose work Hegel was undoubtedly much more familiar. But the nature of Hegel's problem and the distant pos sibility of his solution is for the first time clearly visible in Thomas, because Hegel, like Thomas was both a Christian and an Aristo telian. He had to incorporate the fundamental doctrines of the Christian revelation-the Creation, the Fall, the Incarnation, the

continuing presence of the Holy Spirit-into his essentially Aris totelian metaphysics of actuality and substance.

Once it was generally admitted that God made us, sustains us and a fortiori knows us, His knowledge was bound to become both a standard and a challenge. Descartes' doctrine that the existence of God is the ultimate guarantee of all certain knowledge, and the view of Malebranche that we see all things in God, revived the

Platonic-Augustinian tradition in which mathematical intuition

provides a sort of bridge between divine and human knowledge. Spinoza is as it were the Aristotle of this Platonic revival in that he denies the existence of the standard apart from the world. He

anticipates Hegel in many obvious ways; but he is not a Christian. The dogmas of the Creation and the Incarnation are not present in his thought in any form. Leibniz tried to Christianize Spinoza; but his attempt merely made the impossibility of explaining and ex

pressing the creative activity and redemptive power of the Holy Spirit in terms of mathematical necessity patent.io The preten sions of pure reason were duly exploded and chastized and Kant restored the Thomistic Aristotelian balance between faith and reason.

But in Kant there is a difference: faith has become itself a new mode of reason. Theoretical reason is confined to the world of sense

experience even more strictly than it was by Aristotle. Only the

possibility of God, not His actual existence can be proved theoreti

cally. But in place of the older analogical use of pure reason we have a new mode of reason altogether-practical reason-and a new mode of necessity-moral necessity. The history of German

io Hence Hegel's antipathy towards and continual polemic against the "math ematical method" in philosophy. This polemic must always be remembered when one seeks to understand the "necessity" of his logic and of the progressive devel

opment of the Spirit in his system.



118 THE MONIST

idealism from Kant to Hegel is the history of this new moral

rationalism.

This has not generally been understood, and perhaps it is not

even generally recognized; nor is it difficult to see why this should

be the case. For while everyone can see what is meant by, and will

readily assent to, the proposition that Kant and Fichte are moral

rationalists, Hegel appears to be decisively and absolutely opposed to rationalism in almost all of his scattered pronouncements on

ethical subjects.10a But if one examines what Hegel himself says about the Absolute (without preconceived notions derived from

what some of his successors say about it) one finds that what he, as a philosopher, declares to be absolute is a certain form or mode

of reasoning; and the object of this mode of reasoning is moral

justification in the sense of the earlier theodicies. 'Religion within

the bounds of Reason alone' is the ultimate aim of philosophy for

Hegel as it was for Kant. But Hegel is not a rationalist of the

Cartesian type. He believes that there are no self-evident first

premisses, that rational progress is always through the criticism of

one's premisses, and that only the method or form of the critical

process can ever be apprehended as an eternal truth. This is the

main contrast between theoretical and moral rationalism. Whereas

for Descartes and all of the theoretical rationalists-and also for Kant and Fichte-true reasoning must begin from first truths which are self-evident, for Hegel there are no first truths and only the last truth brings anything like self-evidence along with it.

10a lt may be as well to indicate briefly here what is meant by moral as opposed to theoretical rationalism. Several of the theoretical rationalists (notably Plato

and Leibniz) were concerned to argue that their view could provide a distinc

tively moral justification for the state of things (in terms of the principle of suffi

cient reason); and Hegel often presents his own view as the logical outcome of

this tradition. But this tradition is not what is here meant by 'moral rationalism'.

The contrast between theoretical and moral rationalism can best be summed up and illustrated by saying that whereas a theoretical rationalist holds that moral

freedom is subservience to the rational order of things (which is thought of as

already established) a moral rationalist is one who holds that the rational order

is one that has to be established by action (which may or may not be moral-it is

here that there is room for something resembling theodicy) but which is judged to be rational precisely because it subserves and promotes the development of

moral freedom.




III. I hope to show that once we recognize that all that Hegel as a philosopher asserts to be absolute is a certain form of reasoning which leads to practical understanding or moral justification-and also to practical or moral progress-we shall be able to resolve some

of the most prominent paradoxes or seeming paradoxes in Hegel's system. To this end, there are two lines of objection or criticism

which it will be helpful to consider briefly at this point. First it may be argued that Hegel is not a rationalist at all. This

is partly a matter of terminology and I for one would be quite prepared to concede that the label "moral rationalist" is more

misleading when it is applied to Hegel than when it is applied to Kant and Fichte for example. Certainly "reason" in Hegel's system is far removed from "reason" in the systems of Spinoza and Leib niz. I have tried to indicate what the major contrasts are and how

they came about, while retaining the terminology which is more or

less common to the whole tradition and which exhibits the con

tinuity that Hegel believed to exist between his work and that of his predecessors. As long as my points are taken I do not think it matters if the terminology is abandoned. But all too often the critics who insist on the contrast between Hegel's "reason" and that of his predecessors end by declaring that the rational form of

Hegel's philosophy is a fake and a sham, not deserving, and perhaps not even intended, to be taken seriously. The burden of these critics is that whereas Spinoza, Leibniz and Kant really try to prove their assertions (even though they may fail to do so), Hegel just gives "a wave of the dialectical wand" and laughs up his sleeve at the solemn asses who try to introduce rational connections into his

work where none were intended.!! I do not think that anyone who reads carefully the short chapters on "absolute knowledge" in the Phenomenology, the Science of Logic and the Encyclopaedia can possibly accept this view of Hegel's system. We may expect to find weak points and difficult-not to say dubious-transitions in the celebrated dialectic, as we do in the work of other system-builders. But when we seem to find nothing but jokes and arbitrariness we must assume that we have not rightly understood either the proof or the thesis to be proved or both.

The second line of criticism cannot be disposed of in quite such a summary fashion for it takes Hegel at his word, and is aimed

ll Cf. Findlay, op. cit. p. 109.



120 THE MONIST

directly at the ideal of moral rationalism as I have described it. It

is the complaint raised by William James against Hegel and other

theorists of the Absolute such as Royce, that the only result and hence the only presumable purpose of their theories was to procure a sort of "moral holiday" for the authors and their disciples.

12 If

the height of wisdom is the recognition that everything actual is

part of a system of practical rational necessity-the "block Universe" as James called it-what incentive for action can the wise man

have? I do not think that Hegel can be altogether exonerated from

the charge of seeking to procure for himself a "moral holiday." He

certainly held that a philosopher need not, and even should not, become embroiled in the practical problems of political and social

reform; and the contrast between him and John Stuart Mill whose example was so much preferred and lauded by James-is evident. But on the other hand, Hegel definitely assigned a revolu

tionary role to philosophy itself. The antithesis is clearly visible in his treatment of Socrates-almost the archetype of the philosopher -who is presented as a great destructive force within the fabric of Greek society in spite of his political quietism. Hegel does not and he explicitly holds that he cannot-consider his own revolu

tionary role; but when we find the young Karl Marx proclaiming, almost at the moment of his break with orthodox Hegelianism, that

"Philosophers hitherto have only tried to understand the world: our business is to change it,"i3 we may reasonably ask ourselves

whether, in this respect at any rate, he has not drawn the correct

moral, and proved himself an apt pupil of Hegel. Marx, of course, thought he could use the Hegelian dialectic to

predict, or perhaps we ought rather to say to establish, the course

which rational change must follow. Hegel made no such claim and disavowed all such pretensions. All he claimed was that his sytem

expressed the actuality of the Idea down to his own time. The

philosopher could not in his view usurp the role of the political hero or the prophet. His task-which may well seem pretentious enough in all conscience-was only to interpret what they had

already done and to say "this is the point which consciousness has

12 Cf. A Pluralistic Universe, Lecture 3, especially pages 113 to 118. 13 The last of the famous "Theses on Feuerbach."




attained." 14 But this modest deference of the philosopher to the man of destiny, which was Hegel's equivalent of Locke's reverence for Huyghens and Newton, is hard to reconcile with the com

pleteness of his system. If at some definite time between 1797 and 1807 the light of a genuinely absolute knowledge broke in upon the consciousness of the actual historical individual Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, then in some metaphysical sense history is now

complete. This event was in fact viewed by Hegel himself as the

philosophical fulfilment of the Christian mystery of the Incarna tion. Must the future of this world lose all meaning and value for his followers as it did for those of Jesus? If so why be shy about it? If not, if the future holds new developments and discoveries which

will supersede earlier knowledge, how can Hegel claim that his

knowledge is really absolute? What we have to do is to find a viable sense in which eternal

value can be ascribed to what Hegel calls "Absolute knowledge" without either claiming to predict the future or depriving it of all

significance. If we deny there is any such viable sense we shall be left with what is now commonly called "cultural relativism"-which is indeed one form of the legacy of Hegel. If we think that a

Hegelian must hold that the future can and should be forced into the mould of the dialectic we must recognize the Marxists as Hegel's true heirs. If we go to the limit and ascribe to the Absolute the sort of full ontological independence that Plato accorded to the Ideas, the eternal truth escapes from us, and we in this world of historical time are left with only a "moving image." This return to Plato is the logical outcome of the "theological" interpretation of Hegel given by the socalled "Hegelians of the right." That legacy is one which has been liquidated altogether, by critics as diverse as Kierke

gaard, William James and G. E. Moore. Thus in the battles of "right" and "left" Hegel's system suffered

shipwreck in two opposite ways. But I do not think this fate was inevitable. A way between Scylla and Charybdis can be found. All the unsatisfactory alternatives mentioned above can be avoided if

we will but follow Hegel himself. The concept of the Absolute first appears (both logically and historically) in his writings as the

"spirit" of a certain type of human community-the model or

14 Philosophy of History, trans. Sibree (New York: Willey Book Co., 1944), p.

456; cf. the penultimate paragraph of the Preface to the Philosophy of Right.



122 THE MONIST

paradigm case being the primitive Christian communion which the

great German reformers claimed to be restoring. But a community is a particular historical set and sequence of facts and events, so the

community itself cannot be absolute or eternal. Hence once Hegel had overcome his early romantic exaltation of "feeling" and

"living" as the only path to comprehension of the absolute spirit, we find him claiming from the Phenomenology onwards that there is a certain "logic" which the development of any such community

must follow and that the only really absolute truth is the knowledge that such a community will have of itself, its mode of life and

thought, and the stages of its own earlier development, when it arrives at full self-awareness. Actual communities develop in their own way and at their own pace: they may become arrested, they may get side-tracked, or go backwards, or round in circles, through failure to find the right path. Only, in order for Hegel the philos opher to exist at all, it is necessary for some community somewhere to find the path. It is not really a necessary condition of the truth of Hegel's doctrine that the society into which he was born should be the most advanced or most perfect. Hegel believed it to be the case; and looking round the world as it was in 1820-excluding the U.S.A. which was not in Hegel's view mature enough for a valid

philosophical estimate-I cannot see how one can honestly say he was wrong. 15 But actually it was the Reformation which was the essential historical advance that made his philosophy possible.

A philosopher who wishes to arrive at this absolute knowledge of the stages of development and final structure of the ideal com

munity must not shrink from the task of evaluating all of human

history. As Hegel wrote in the Preface to the Phenomenology:

15 Hegel has been much criticized and jeered at for his exaltation of Prussia;

and it is a fact that Luther and the Reformation are much more important to his

philosophy than the reform of the Prussian Constitution in the period of the

Napoleonic wars, so his patriotic fervour is perhaps a bit excessive. But when we

consider that in 1820 one could reasonably say that it was only in Prussia that the

French Revolution had borne any lasting fruit at all, I think the basic reason

ableness of Hegel's judgement is apparent. There are many fantasies in Hegel (and some of them helped him to arrive at judgements that now seem exceptionally

prescient-for instance his geographical or astronomical fantasy about the prog ress of the Spirit following the Sun from East to West helped to lead him to the

view that America was "the land of the future") but his judgement of the Prus

sian monarchy is not one of them. The superstitious excess is rather on the side

of those who judge the Prussia of 1820 in the light of the Germany of 1940.




Because the substance of individual mind, nay, more, because the

universal mind at work in the world (Weltgeist), has had the

patience to go through these forms in the long stretch of time's extent, and to take upon itself the prodigious labour of the world's

history, where it bodied forth in each form the entire content of itself, as each is capable of presenting it; and because by nothing less could that all-pervading mind ever manage to become con

scious of what itself is-for that reason, the individual mind in the

nature of the case, cannot expect by less toil to grasp what its own

substance contains.16

But in the body of the work his treatment of human history is

extremely selective as it obviously had to be.17 He had to pick out the clearest thread of "actuality" that he could find. His choices of historical examples or models was conditioned in many places by his own educational and cultural background and by the in evitable limitations of his historical knowledge. But he did exercise choice within those limits, and even allowing that someone with a

different background and limits might have chosen differently, while arriving at the same conclusion and going on to write some

thing like Hegel's Logices, we are bound to ask what the criterion of choice is. The honest answer in Hegel's own case seems to be that he knew the conclusion to be arrived at before he began and this

IQ Phenomenology, trans. Baillie (London: Allen and Unwin, 1931), pp. 90-91.

17 "lt would seem as if history were treated as a mere illustrative footnote to a

typical movement of experience, instead of being, as it is, the substance of the

movement analysed." (Baillie in his own Introduction, p. 47). Royce, whose dis

cussion in the Lectures on Modern Idealism remains the best introduction to the

Phenomenology in English, resolutely cuts the Gordian knot that is here alluded

to by claiming that history does indeed have properly the value of a "mere illus

trative footnote." But I think it can and must be shown that he is mistaken,

though such a demonstration is no part of my present purpose. 18

Hegel did not regard anything in his own work as absolute. In a passage in

the introduction to his Logic, which has not been much attended to by his critics

he says: "I could not of course imagine that the Method which in this System of

Logic I have followed-or rather which this System follows of itself-is not

capable of much improvement, of much elaboration in detail, but at the

same time I know that it is the only true Method"-Introduction to the

Science of Logic, trans. Johnston and Struthers (London: Allen and Unwin),

p. 65.

It was in this spirit that he went on to write the Encyclopaedia and in the clos

ing days of his life began revising the Science of Logic itself.



124 THE MONIST

served as a guiding light. But in that case we must raise the ques tion of how one can tell beforehand that the conclusion is right.

The coherence of the results does not prove anything when it is

guaranteed a priori in this way; a satisfactory answer can only be found by showing that the acceptance of the conclusion makes a

difference of a desirable kind to the pattern and conduct of one's life in the future. Philosophical contemplation of the truth is thus not a self-sufficient ideal or program for life. Philosophers can claim to have absolute knowledge without claiming special knowledge of either past or future because they are only claiming to know what rational men always and everywhere must live and strive for; and in fact Hegel claims that what must be lived and striven for is a

certain way of living and striving, and in particular a certain way of thinking. But then they can only establish the value of what they say by showing how it applies to the circumstances of their own

time; and whether or not it is absolute it will be recognized as absolute only when and for as long as someone sees its relevance and applicability to his circumstances. In the light of his own

theory of actuality Hegel was right in claiming on the one hand that his Logic was in principle the last word, while insisting on the other that no man can overleap his time, and resting content in his Philosophy of History with a provisional judgment of the point of highest present advance. But his theory of actuality was a death blow to the old contemplative ideal of the philosophic life.

IV. The real legacy of Hegel, therefore, is a new conception of

philosophy itself, a conception which Hegel himself never com

pletely grasped. He saw that many philosophers before him had

sought "absolute knowledge"; and he knew that he was offering a new view of the relation between the absolute or eternal truth and the flow of temporal events. But he never quite realized that in

doing so he was revising the whole conception of speculative wis dom and the philosophic life. A serious student of his doctrine of absolute knowledge cannot simply ignore the future as Hegel does.

He is bound to recognize that he has not escaped into an Olympian realm of contemplation. He remains a particular historical indi vidual who must make choices and take sides. He cannot be a

"spectator of all time and all existence" because it is not all available to him, and for him there is no sufficient sample. Whether




he likes it or not, he knows that his thought is not simply "reflec tion" (on the past). It is the creation of ideals that other men will

adopt and oppose, and other philosophers will challenge (in the

future). Hegel professed to discover the will of God in history. To the

extent that he was believed it was no wonder that he became,

willy-nilly, a prophet. His paradoxical claim that in his work the Absolute had achieved self-consciousness was bound to be taken to

imply that in future mankind would know where it was going better than it had before. From the moment when history was

proclaimed to be the phenomenology of the spirit, it was no longer absolutely inevitable that historic agents should be "unconscious tools and organs of the world-spirit."

19 The way was open for the

making of an intelligent guess at least as to what the central prob lem of a new age would be, and for rational choice of a more or less self-conscious role in its solution. Aware as he was, of the tremen dous complexity of the problem, and of the need for an overall

perspective that could only be provided by lapse of time, it is not

surprising that Hegel refused to admit this. In any case, he was too much obsessed by the classical ideal of contemplative knowledge to

regard such a use of philosophical insight as anything but a

degradation. But it was only along such lines that a genuine mean

ing could be restored to "future time" by Hegelians. With Hegel, as with Christianity, the old world ended; but only because a new world began.

Furthermore, even from a theoretical point of view, this

ignoring of the future, this seeming humility was in actual fact

Hegel's worst fault. If he had seriously considered his own thesis that no man can overleap his time, in its particular application to his own case, he would have seen that only the future could decide whether his analysis of the actual world was correct. If he had

admitted, even to himself, that any synthesis of essence and exist ence, any theodicy, must be tentative and problematical, he would not have talked quite so apodictically in the name of "Philosophy"; he would perhaps have foreseen something of the ruin that has overtaken his Naturphilosophie; and his achievement would not have given rise to such intellectual monstrosities as dialectical materialism and fascism, or, at least, these things would be clearly

1 Philosophy of Right, Sec. 344.



126 THE MONIST

recognizable for what they are-cancerous growths upon the Hegel ian tradition, rather than genuine products of it.

What emerges from our examination of Hegel in the light of

Royce's thesis about essence and existence is this: if the actual world is rational, then any claim to have discovered the pattern of that rationality can and must be tested in action. It is not enough to buttress the intuitive certainty of rational insight by systematic coherence; the systematic pretensions of speculative idealists will

always provide a butt for their less optimistic empiricist colleagues, and all too often the scoffing is vindicated by events. The absolute truth which is an und f r sich is by definition, the essence which has the power to bring itself to actuality. When an idealist claims to have grasped any aspect of this truth therefore, it is clear that his speculative commitment to it as a philosopher involves a com

mitment to action. Like Plato's Guardians he must "go back to the Cave."20

Judged by this criterion which his own philosophy establishes,

Hegel does not come out too badly. In spite of his rejection of the

role, he proved quite a good prophet. He saw history as the "story of liberty" for individuals, through the creation of national states; and the nineteenth century to a large extent bore out his optimism. His followers, Royce himself among them, recognized a need to put their philosophy to the test in practice: and it is notable that they

were, for the most part, leaders of liberal (or even radical) thought and not, like Hegel himself, conservatives. Hegel's conservatism was the logical corollary of his conviction that philosophy was

reflection, that "the owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the

falling of the dusk": for him, as a philosophical pioneer, even this

20 lt will scarcely escape the notice of the attentive reader that my interpreta tion of Hegel leads naturally to the view that most of the prominent pragmatists deserve to be counted among his heirs. I have not pursued the topic of the "legacy of Hegel" in pragmatism, however, because the historical affiliations of the move

ment are so complex. One might reasonably say, for example, that Dewey was

being a good Hegelian in reacting against his Anglo-Idealist education; and the

way in which Royce was drawn to Peirce's theory of interpretation and of the

rational community is another sign of the affinity. But in the case of Peirce him

self I think it is clear that his legacy of moral rationalism comes directly from

Kant, and that his occasional polite comparisons of his view to the Hegelian dialectic are merely concessions to fashion. Whether James owes anything much

to Hegel I cannot presume to judge with any certainty. But I doubt it.




conviction itself was reasonable and appropriate enough. But

philosophers who began with his achievement behind them were bound to look forward rather than back. Hegel himself summed

up the past for them; their problem was to apply the methods and results of his philosophy to the problems of the new era. Those who did this as far as possible in the spirit of Hegel himself were

bound to be tentative about it rather than dogmatic, anxious not to

trample on the claims of experience, not to go beyond the world as it is into any kind of Utopian ideal world.

The opposition between Hegelian idealism and what is loosely called "empiricism" must therefore be seen as a family quarrel between two types of empiricism which can very roughly be charac terized as "holistic" and "atomic," or "systematic" and "analytical" respectively. On the one side there is the urge to make sense of the world as a whole without denying its capacity for further develop ment; on the other there is the urge to discover the metaphysical elements of the world, to reduce it to its ultimate parts. Obviously there is no sharp division here, any more than there is a sharp division between the historical and the scientific disciplines within which these attitudes are nurtured. But it seems to me that this is the dichotomy that is ultimately put before us, when we are asked to take a position on the question of whether essence is prior to existence or vice versa. We are being asked what kind of knowledge we want to have, and believe we can get, about the world. Clearly the intelligent answer is that we want both. If there is to be any rational knowledge of values within a strictly empirical frame of reference, then we must be able to make sense of human history and human culture in a way for which Hegel provides at least a

primitive model. While, on the other hand, the control of our environment on which all of our values depend for their realiza tion, obviously requires that we should be able to treat the world as

made up of parts which can be manipulated more or less indif

ferently. The brute stubborn "existence" of natural facts, their

apparent essential surdity is vitally necessary to a world in which the free creation of values is to be possible. Thus the problem about essence and existence, like most metaphysical problems, has no solution or answer because it ought not to be put in the form of a

question or a choice at all. The "solution" of such a problem comes about when the different schools come to understand more

clearly what their opponents are doing: when this happens a more



128 THE MONIST

cooperative kind of criticism results, and a synthesis of the two

attitudes becomes at least conceivable. What this synthesis would be like in the present instance, I am quite unable to say. But it is clear that Royce in shifting the emphasis away from the question "whether things are dependent on mind or vice versa" and onto the

question "whether existence makes any difference to essence or not" was at least turning his back decisively on such irrelevant types of criticism as Moore's "refutation of idealism" and laying the founda tions for a more fruitful kind of communication.

H. S. HARRIS

YORK UNIVERSITY, TORONTO



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