Introducing Hegel: A Graphic Guide (Graphic Guides)

by Lloyd Spencer

For Hegel, only the whole is true. Every stage or phase or moment is partial, and therefore partially untrue. Hegel’s grand Idea is “totality” — which preserves within it each of the ideas or stages that it has, overcome or subsumed.

Overcoming or subsuming is a developmental process made up of “moments” (stages or phases).

The totality is the product of that process which preserves all of its “moments” as elements in a structure, ...

— the opposed pairs immediately imply one another. The Inner and the Outer, for example: to define one is at the same time to define the other.

In classical logic, this double negation (“A is not non-A”) would simply reinstate the original thesis. The synthesis does not do this. It has “overcome and preserved” (or sublated) the stages of the thesis and antithesis to emerge as a higher rational unity.

Freedom has to take shape in the individual consciousness and will. But having been developed in the form of the individualization of the modern age, it must still develop its social side.

Only as a final result does freedom become aware of itself as having a history and a social dimension.

Property is not something natural — as it is for John Locke — but founded on convention. “Private” property is a social or public relation which depends on recognition by others. While possession relates to the individual, property relates the individual to society.

Civil society involves the production, distribution and consumption of products to meet the variety of needs and wants. This system of needs answers natural impulses and needs, but at the same time modifies and multiplies those needs.

The state is no work of art; it stands on earth and so in the sphere of caprice, chance and error. For any state, world history represents the last judgement.

“The past is preserved by the present, as reality, but the future is the opposite of this, or rather it is the formless… no form whatsoever can be discerned in the future.”

It is not the philosopher’s business to prophesy. As far as history goes, we must rather deal with what has been and with what is — in philosophy, on the other hand, with what neither merely has been nor merely will be, but with what is and is eternally: with Reason, and with that we have enough to do.”

God (Truth) posits the Other: he begets and recognizes himself in the Son, a relationship which is mediated by the Holy Spirit.

Religious consciousness has three main moments or phases. God is the “universal”, initially infinite and undifferentiated, associated with various forms of paganism and pantheism. The second moment is that in which I distinguish myself from God. The finite and the infinite appear disunited. My consciousness of God “outside” involves my consciousness of myself as separated or alienated from him as a sinner. The third moment is that of individuality — the return of the particular to the universal, the finite to the infinite.

If religion in a human being is founded only on a feeling, the latter has no other function than to be the feeling of his dependency, and thus a dog would be the best Christian… A dog even has feelings of “salvation”, when its hunger is satisfied by a bone.

“It may be that life can only be understood backwards, but it has to be lived forwards.”