What is Speculative Dialectics?

As we have explained in the first video, philosophy is a way of understanding without presumptions. According to Hegel there is a necessary assumption though, without which philosophy cannot even begin. And that assumption is the fact of thinking itself. When we express this assumption we need to use the concept of “being.” In that way the assumption of philosophy is not outside philosophy, but an integral part of it, it is actually the beginning of our philosophical system. Now we may analyze the assumption of being. The necessary assumption is made consciously and it is examined.

Philosophy should be knowledge that demonstrates the necessity of what is being thought. Everyone can formulate opinions about truth. Everyone can pretend to have found a truth. But in that manner philosophy is not yet a real form of knowledge, it is not a real science.

Hegel does not mean to say that philosophy has a formal necessity. That would mean that a philosophical discourse is formally valid and does not transgress against the rules of logic. Now of course it should indeed be formally coherent and conceptually precise. But these demands are merely the necessary conditions of a true philosophy, not yet the sufficient condition. Hegel wants to maintain that philosophy should demonstrate the necessity of its contents, not merely abide by formal rules.

We can give an example in order to clarify this idea.

Let us take the concept of freedom, the most important idea in social philosophy. There are several ways of defining the concept of freedom. One might say that freedom consists in the ability to make choices between contradictory options. (Freedom of choice.) One might say that freedom is defined by the ability to act without being restrained by something external. Freedom might also be truly social, so that the ability to choose is embedded in society. To be able to choose is then less important than the values that we ought to choose – and then we prefer to use the word liberty. How does philosophy “normally” deal with this? After having made a definition, it analyzes the definition itself and expresses the implications of the definition systematically. But does that demonstrate the necessity of thought?

When we think like this, we have constructed some idea of freedom and analyzed its contents, But we have not demonstrated that we really had to think like this and that no other way of thinking was possible. In other words, the definition is still taken at random, probably from our experiences and prejudices, and we have not demonstrated why it is necessary to define it like this. The question still needs to be asked: how must freedom be thought?

When we combine these two basic ideas about the nature of philosophy, we must come to the conclusion that philosophy can only exist as the exposition of a whole, a systematic totality of thoughts en propositions. The idea of freedom must be shown to be necessary by demonstrating the necessity of all other categories and ideas that are the presuppositions of freedom. The exposition of truth is therefore the exposition of a systematic whole. This exposition of the whole is expressed by the word “speculative”. It is this basic insight that has led Hegel to state that “the True is the Whole.”

Of course in this course on Hegel’s Social Philosophy we cannot even begin to present this whole. Any introduction to Hegel’s philosophy will fall short in comparison to Hegel’s systematic philosophy. That is however the fate of all introductions.

We still need to explain how philosophy can achieve this demonstration of the necessary character of its statements. It is not enough to argue that it must exposit truth as a whole. So we must talk about the method of dialectics.

Hegel states that:

the method is the awareness of the form in which the contents of thinking moves itself.

Philosophical knowledge is not an instrument that we apply externally to a given reality, but an expression of what moves a content. By content we mean a thought, a concept or a proposition. Examining and analyzing a concept like freedom shoukld follow the inner movement of that content. Any idea should be allowed to develop itself, to go through the various stages of its ultimate shape. We should allow it to exposit its inner determinations. That is how we might achieve to demonstrate its necessity. Philosophy’s method is not some form of thought that is applied to a randomly given set of thoughts. What we call method is the self-movement of a thought.

This movement of a thought by itself, that philosophers need to affirm and epress, is what Hegel calls dialectics. Dialectic is not a form that we can decide to use or not. It is the inner character of any thought. Rationality can only exist in the shape of dialectics. It is an internal characteristic of thinking. Every determinate thought has this dialectical character. So we must ask the question: what is dialectics?

Hegel defines it as follows:

The dialectic moment or stage in the movement of thought, is the moment in which finite thoughts turn into their opposites.

Finite reason, that is the rationality that is commonly presupposed and applied in philosophy, sets up definite thoughts and is content with making distinctions between these thoughts. Every one of these thoughts is finite, has a limit and a steady identity within these limits. The red ends where blue begins, the good ends where evil begins etcetera. All thoughts are understood to be a complex infinite series of determinations that are set side by side without touching each other. To focus on the differences implies the notion that one thought is indifferent to another.They are separated by their limit. The only way to bring them together is therefore by connecting them into a proposition. When I say that the table is red, I am combining two separate and finite concepts into one statement about reality. This connection between finite concepts is external and needs a reference to experience to be true.

Hegel argues against this form of rationality by stating that the difference between two concepts is vital to the meaning of each of them. The difference between thoughts actually constitutes their meaning. What something is, can only be expressed by relating it to what it is not. In the famous dictum by Spinoza: every determination is a negation. If the good would be the only thing that existed, and bad would not exist, we would not be able to think the good. An individual that would totally be conformed to the collective it belongs to, would no longer be an individual. To be an individual requires an act of negation: the act of differentiating oneself from the collective, while being part of it at the same time.

It is this insight that defines Hegel’s way of thinking from the start. Reality and thought are both finite. Negation permeates reality and thought, so that without negation there would not be any determinate thought. Reality is a whole of opposites, that include and exclude each other. That is why every determinacy is in movement. It is always in transition to something other than itself. Thoughts are characterized by an inner contradiction. That is because they are what they are in distinction to other thoughts, and yet they have derived their determinacy from the very thoughts that they exclude.

Take for instance the idea of a human being. Man is a living being and therefore mortal.This mortality is not an additional characteristic of man by way of external circumstances. Mortality is essential to what is alive. Everything that lives contains within it the possibility of death. The living have an essential connection to their own deaths which determines what life actually means. To live means to live as mortals. So the concept of life transits into something else, because of this inner contradiction. Nothing is eternal, nothing is set in stone but every thought and every reality is in movement and loses its identity and turns into something else.

If all thoughts are essentially contradictions or negations, why not argue in favor of scepticism? For a sceptic the contradiction does not have a positive meaning. He would conclude that every thought and every reality is destroyed by its inner contradiction. Contradictions in Hegel’s thought however, are moments or stages that lead to a higher truth. The movement of a contradiction, such as that between being and nothing, leads to a new positivity, and that is the concept of becoming. In that concept, the meaning of both being and nothing is maintained and preserved. But becoming also expresses their contradiction. Becoming indeed is both the idea of nothing as the negation of being, and being as the negation of nothing. Becoming means both at the same time: what is, transits into nothingness; what is not, transits into being.

In our everyday way of thinking this would be an absurdity. What is contradictory is destroyed and turns into zero. That is the meaning of the principle of non-contradiction that is presupposed in almost every kind of philosophy. It states that formally, when two propositions contradict each other only one or none can be true. Hegel contends that actually both sides of a contradiction are true. Contradiction is not the last thing that happens to a thought, but that it is a mediation, a transition to a higher unity. This unity is called the “speculative synthesis”, the positively rqational, that expresses the unity out of which the contradictory thoughts actually came forth. At the same time the “speculative synthesis” also expresses the result of the movement of contradiction. In our last example we might say that “becoming” is both the result and the origin of the contradiction between being and nothing.

On this bais we can now tun to the infamous definition of Hegel’s dialectics as a simple formality. That is how unfortunatly his way of thinking is characterized. The mnost formal way of explaining dialectics runs according to a very well known argument.

We have an expression of a thought, A.

We must formulate its contradiction, B, that is non-A.

We can formulate their synthesis: A plus B then becomes AB.

And then we start with AB that we rewrite as something positive: C.

We must formulate its contradiction, D that is non-C.

And then the synthesis: C plus D becomes CD.

Why is it neecessary to formulate its contradiction? Because that is the necessary way to determine what any thought actually means.

Etcetera, etcetera. But on the basis of our introduction to this dialectics it is now clear, that it is not an external and formal way of thinking. In this manner, Hegel tries to describe the inner momentum of every thought and proposition. It is a sense applied scepticism, because every thought can be contradicted, every proposition loses its truth in the confrontation with its opposite. The only reality that truly exists is the reality of this moving whole, that exposits and expresses itself. For Hegel that means that the whole of reality, including thought, is “Spirit.”

Preface to a Renewed Political Philosophy

From the preface to the Philosophy of Right by Hegel

What is rational is actual; and what is actual is rational.

Is Hegel’s Philosophy of Right a form of political conservatism? Or, on the contrary, does it provide opportunities for a profound critique of society from a progressive or liberal point of view? This is a question with which one can try to approach the Philosophy of Right, although in doing so we risk using modern discussion as a matrix for Hegel’s work.

The statement above seems to say, we should affirm existing reality as rational. That is the primal form of conservatism you might then say. That existing rationality then lies in society a form of government from Hegel’s time after the French revolution and the downfall of Napoleon. But what exactly does Hegel mean by this statement? We read in the preface to Philosophy of Right:

As far as nature is concerned, it is readily admitted that philosophy must recognise it as it is, that the philosopher’s stone lies hidden somewhere but in nature itself, that nature is rational in itself, and that it is this factual reason present in it that knowledge must investigate and conceptually grasp – not the forms and coincidences visible on the surface, but the eternal harmony of nature, conceived, however, as the law and essence immanent in it.

Knowledge of nature, Hegel argues, is obtained from the principle that structures and laws are operative in that nature itself and must be discovered by observation and experiment. This contrasts with the laws of society, because they cannot simply be discovered, since they are, after all, created by human actions and must be applied in human-guided processes.

The laws of society are something established, something derived from human beings.

It is then obvious to think that society and also the system of law operating within it is ultimately based on total randomness. Human actions can possibly be explained psychologically from basic instincts and irrational motives, or using economic laws in which everyone is assumed to be determined mainly by their needs and by the will to survive.

Rather, the spiritual universe is assumed to be at the mercy of chance and arbitrariness, to be godforsaken, so that, according to this atheism of the ethical world, truth lies beyond it and, at the same time, since reason is also supposed to be present in it anyway, truth is nothing but a problem.

The only answer to such a dictatorship of arbitrariness then lies in cultivating a sense of community, so that people’s spontaneous actions can lead to mutual solidarity. The state then only expresses the original relations of friendship between its members. Only in this way is an ideal society possible, built from the bottom up.

A leader of this superficial brigade of so-called philosophers, Herr Fries, had the audacity to put forward the following idea [Vorstellung] in a speech on the subject of state and constitution at a now infamous solemn public occasion: ‘In a nation where there is a true spirit of community, all matters pertaining to public affairs would be lifted from below, from the people themselves; living societies, steadfastly united by the sacred bond of friendship, would devote themselves to every single project of popular education and popular service’; and so on.

Hegel’s project in his Philosophy of Law wants to distance itself from the idealist concept that provided the motive for Plato’s State as well as the emotional appeal of “Herr Fries”. It does not want to be an attempt to construct the state in its ideal form. It is not about the state as it should be, but about the rationality of society’s institutions. But on the other hand, that also does not mean a simple affirmation that society is what it is, to which is then attached a call for greater solidarity. To the extent that political conservatism would be nothing but the affirmation of the value and importance of what is, Hegel’s position cannot be labelled a conservatism. And neither is it certainly a political utopianism in which only the contours of an ideal state would be drawn. But what is it, then? Hegel describes his project as follows:

‘This treatise, therefore, insofar as it deals with political science, will be nothing but an attempt to understand and depict the state as an inherently rational entity. As a philosophical composition, it must distance itself as far as possible from the obligation to construct a state as it should be; the instructions it may contain cannot be aimed at instructing the state on how it should be, but rather at showing how the state, as the ethical universe, should be recognised.

What Hegel wants can be called description on the one hand, but on the other it is the development of the value or norm already at work in the described reality itself. The state is not an arbitrary power; its institutions are not accidental. When Hegel says that what is actual is also rational he is talking about the rationality or understanding that from within shaped the existing institutions. The concepts in Hegel’s political philosophy try to capture what is the inner motivation or cause of the existing social institutions. What is actual, actually present in society, is rational insofar as it expresses itself as goal-oriented behaviour, which – and this is the crux of the matter – does not coincide with its inner rationality. And only that which is truly rational is actual, that is: only the concept is the actually active element in social institutions. With this, it is the opposite of conservatism. Instead of simply identifying the existing with the rational, the rational is defined in such a way that it is the only actual and operative within actual reality. A distinction is employed between that which is simply given, and that which is real in the full sense. As is a distinction between the understanding of an institution and its actual effectiveness.

Understanding what is, is the task of philosophy, because what is, is reason.

The task of philosophy can then be expressed accordingly. The task of philosophy is to bring to understanding (to express in the form of the concept) what really is, that which is really and effectively determined by its concept. That is Reason – rationality in reality, and not reality proclaimed as, or identified with rationality. Here lies the possibility of approaching Hegel’s philosophy in its critical potential. To understand not the affirmation of the institution in its factuality, but in its actuality, is the goal of Hegel’s political philosophy. The actuality of a social institution is its conformity to its inner cause, that is, its inner understanding.

As far as the individual is concerned, every individual is at least a child of his time, and so philosophy too is his own time, understood in the form of the concept.

Hegel made the important observation here that the task of philosophy, since it must focus on the actuality of Reason, is also limited by history. One is only capable of understanding one’s own time. A political philosophy, therefore, has no prescriptive meaning because it cannot extend into the future. The Philosophy of Law is therefore not a blueprint for an ideal state, nor one to be established. According to Hegel, the critical dementia of political philosophy does not lie in the conception of certain norms or in the affirmation of definite structures. The critical potential in Hegel’s political philosophy lies in the method, and in the premise that precisely because social institutions have and inner rationality, those institutions could be “addressed” in terms of their immanent rationality. It is not the institution itself – by this we mean things like property, contract, citizenship et cetera – but the purposeful action operating in it, or again put differently, its inner function, or in Hegel’s terms the inner understanding, that is the true subject of philosophy here.

This is also what constitutes the more concrete meaning of what was described above in more abstract terms as the unity of form and content. For form in its most concrete sense is reason as conceptual cognition, and content is reason as the substantial essence of both ethical and natural actuality; the conscious identity of the two is the philosophical Idea.

In the above formulation, Hegel describes precisely too particular a nature of the philosophical concept. Abstractly, we are then dealing with a unity of form and content. When it comes to the definition of philosophy, the word form refers to the rationality of the concept, or what he calls conceptual cognition here: the understanding of the concept’s own nature. We are not then talking about a purely subjective attempt to describe, analyse or explain reality. In sciences such as political science or sociology, form and content are explicitly distinguished. The system by which reality is understood is not in itself that reality. In contrast, with Hegel, there is a more immanent consideration of reality. If the form refers to the concept, then that content is that concept itself but seen as arising from the natural given reality, and the reality of the “ethical attachment close, that is, of human behaviour determined by values and norms. When both the ethical and the natural actuality are brought to understanding, that is, fully set forth in its intelligible structure, and it is also recognised as such, then we speak of the “philosophical Idea.” That Idea is nothing but the full understanding of reality, and at the same time the full reality of understanding.

One more note on giving instructions on how the world should be: in any case, philosophy always comes too late to fulfil this function. As the thought of the world, it appears only at the moment when actuality has gone through its formation process and reached its completed state. This lesson of the concept necessarily emerges from history too, namely that the ideal appears in the face of reality only when actuality has reached its maturity and reconstructs this real world, which it has grilled into its substance, in the form of an intellectual realm. When philosophy paints its grey in grey, a form of life has grown old and cannot be rejuvenated, but can only be recognised, by the grey in grey of philosophy; Minerva’s owl begins its flight only with the coming of dusk.

With this last quote from Hegel, we want to underline once more, that the task of political philosophy is not to change the world. The understanding of present society is only achieved wheren reality has reached its final and perfect form. Philosophy is thus limited not only because it must grasp its own time in understanding, but also because it’s own time always appears as a vanishing, as a – paradoxically said – future past. Philosophy always arrives too late to change the world. This is the background to the famous statement that Minerva’s owl begins its flight only with the coming of dusk.

This has implications for our relationship to Hegel’s philosophy. For for us, the actuality that his philosophy sought to bring to understanding is a past state. The state that Hegel brought to understanding is no longer there. And at the same time, the rationality of that state is also ours. Indeed, Hegel’s political philosophy describes and analyses the modern state that has now gone through a history of two centuries. Minerva’s owl is beginning a second flight in our time, and our task is to intellectually reconstruct what our actuality concerns. In doing so, we follow Hegel’s conviction that even the present reality of the state is intrinsically rational and cannot be described externally, cannot be morally affirmed, nor can it be confronted with an equally arbitrary and emotional construction of its ideal form.