The ordinary process of learning by experience illustrates somewhat Hegel's meaning. An individual finds himself, for instance, in the presence of a wholly new situation that elicits an immediate, definite reaction. In his ignorance, he chooses the wrong mode of behavior. As a consequence, trouble ensues; feelings are hurt, pride is wounded, motives are misconstrued. Embittered and disappointed with himself, he experiences great mental sorrow. But he soon learns to see the situation in its true light; he condemns his deed and offers to make amends. And after the wounds begin to heal again, the inner struggles experienced commence to assume a positive worth. They have led him to a deeper insight into his own motives, to a better self-comprehension. And he finally comes forth from the whole affair enriched and enlightened. Now in this formal example, to which any content may be supplied, three phases can be distinguished. First, we have the person as he meant to be in the presence of the new situation, unaware of trouble. Then, his wrong reaction engendered a hostile element. He was at war with himself; he was not what he meant to be. And finally, he returned to himself richer and wiser, including within himself the negative experience as a valuable asset in the advance of his development.
This process of falling away from oneself, of facing oneself as an enemy whom one reconciles to and includes in one's larger self, is certainly a familiar process. It is a process just like this that develops one's personality. However the self may be defined metaphysically, it is for every self-conscious individual a never-ceasing battle with conflicting motives and antagonistic desires—a never-ending cycle of endeavor, failure, and success through the very agency of failure.
A more typical instance of this rhythmic process is Hegel's view of the evolution of religion. Religion, in general, is based on a dualism which it seeks to overcome. Though God is in heaven and man on earth, religion longs to bridge the gulf which separates man and God. The religions of the Orient emphasize God's infinity. God is everything, man is nothing. Like an Oriental prince, God is conceived to have despotic sway over man, his creature. Only in contemplating God's omnipotence and his own nothingness can man find solace and peace. Opposed to this religion of the infinite is the finite religion of Greece.
Man in Greece stands in the centre of a beautiful cosmos which is not alien to his spirit. The gods on high, conceived after the likeness of man, are the expression of a free people conscious of their freedom. And the divinities worshiped, under the form of Zeus, Apollo, Aphrodite—what are they but idealized and glorified Greeks? Can a more complete antithesis be imagined? But Christianity becomes possible after this struggle only, for in Christianity is contained both the principle of Oriental infinity and the element of Hellenic finitude, for in a being who is both God and man—a God-man—the gulf between the infinite and finite is bridged. The Christian, like the Greek, worships man—Jesus; but this man is one with the eternal being of the Orient. Because it is the outcome of the Oriental and Greek opposition, the Christian religion is, in Hegel's sense, a higher one. Viewing the Oriental and the Hellenic religions historically in terms of the biological "struggle for existence," the extinction of neither has resulted. The Christian religion is the unity of these two struggling opposites; in it they are conciliated and preserved. And this for Hegel is genuine evolution.
That evolution demands a union of opposites seems at first paradoxical enough. To say that Christianity is a religion of both infinity and finitude means nothing less than that it contains a contradiction. Hegel's view, strange as it may sound, is just this: everything includes a contradiction in it, everything is both positive and negative, everything expresses at once its Everlasting Yea and its Everlasting No. The negative character of the world is the very vehicle of its progress. Life and activity mean the triumph of the positive over the negative, a triumph which results from absorbing and assimilating it. The myth of the Phoenix typifies the life of reason "eternally preparing for itself," as Hegel says, "a funeral pile, and consuming itself upon it; but so that from its ashes it produces the new, renovated, fresh life." That the power of negativity enters constitutively into the rationality of the world, nay, that the rationality of the world demands negativity in it, is Hegel's most original contribution to thought. His complete philosophy is the attempt to show in detail that the whole universe and everything it contains manifests the process of uniformly struggling with a negative power, and is an outcome of conflicting, but reconciled forces. An impressionistic picture of the world's eternal becoming through this process is furnished by the first of Hegel's great works, the Phenomenology of Spirit. The book is, in a sense, a cross-section of the entire spiritual world. It depicts the necessary unfolding of typical phases of the spiritual life of mankind. Logical categories, scientific laws, historical epochs, literary tendencies, religious processes, social, moral, and artistic institutions, all exemplify the same onward movement through a union of opposites. There is eternal and total instability everywhere. But this unrest and instability is of a necessary and uniform nature, according to the one eternally fixed principle which renders the universe as a whole organic and orderly.
Organic Wholeness! This phrase contains the rationale of the restless flow and the evanescent being of the Hegelian world. It is but from the point of view of the whole that its countless conflicts, discrepancies, and contradictions can be understood. As the members of the body find only in the body as a whole their raison d'être, so the manifold expressions of the world are the expressions of one organism. A hand which is cut off, as Hegel somewhere remarks, still looks like a hand, and exists; but it is not a real hand. Similarly any part of the world, severed from its connection with the whole, any isolated historical event, any one religious view, any particular scientific explanation, any single social body, any mere individual person, is like an amputated bodily organ. Hegel's view of the world as organic depends upon exhibiting the partial and abstract nature of other views. In his Phenomenology a variety of interpretations of the world and of the meaning and destiny of life are scrutinized as to their adequacy and concreteness. When not challenged, the point of view of common sense, for instance, seems concrete and natural. The reaction of common sense to the world is direct and practical, it has few questions to ask, and philosophic speculations appear to it abstract and barren. But, upon analysis, it is the common sense view that stands revealed as abstract and barren. For an abstract object is one that does not fully correspond to the rich and manifold reality; it is incomplete and one-sided.
Precisely such an object is the world of common sense. Its concreteness is ignorance. There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of by common sense. Its work-a-day world is not even a faint reflex of the vast and complex universe. It sees but the immediate, the obvious, the superficial. So instead of being concrete, it is, in truth, the very opposite. Nor is empirical science with its predilection for "facts" better off. Every science able to cope with a mere fragmentary aspect of the world and from a partial point of view, is forced to ignore much of the concrete content of even its own realm. Likewise, art and religion, though in their views more synthetic and therefore more concrete, are one-sided; they seek to satisfy special needs. Philosophy alone—Hegelian philosophy—is concrete. Its aim is to interpret the world in its entirety and complexity, its ideal is to harmonize the demands of common sense, the interests of science, the appeal of art, and the longing of religion into one coherent whole. This view of philosophy, because it deals with the universe in its fulness and variety, alone can make claim to real concreteness. Nor are the other views false. They form for Hegel the necessary rungs on the ladder which leads up to his own philosophic vision. Thus the Hegelian vision is itself an organic process, including all other interpretations of life and of the world as its necessary phases. In the immanent unfolding of the Hegelian view is epitomized the onward march and the organic unity of the World-Spirit itself.
The technical formulation of this view is contained in his Logic. This book may indeed be said to be Hegel's master-stroke. Nothing less is attempted in it than the proof that the very process of reasoning manifests the same principle of evolution through a union of opposites. Hegel was well aware, as much as recent exponents of anti-intellectualism, that through "static" concepts we transmute and falsify the "fluent" reality. As Professor James says "The essence of life is its continuously changing character; but our concepts are all discontinuous and fixed … When we conceptualize we cut out and fix, and exclude everything