The position of the search for truth, for which knowledge is a growing
organism in which thought needs, so to speak, to feed on something other
than itself, is conditioned in the post-Kantian period by antagonism to
the speculative movement which culminated in the dialectic of Hegel. The
radical thought of this movement was voiced in the demand of
Reinhold[140] that philosophy should "deduce" it all from a single
principle and by a single method. Kant's limits that must needs be
thought and yet cannot be thought must be thought away. An earnest
attempt to satisfy this demand was made by Fichte whose single principle
was the activity of the pure Ego, while his single method was the
assertion of a truth revealed by reflection on the content of conscious
experience, the characterization of this as a half truth and the
supplementation of it by its other, and finally the harmonization of
both. The pure ego is inferred from the fact that the non-ego is
realized only in the act of the ego in positing it. The ego posits
itself, but reflection on the given shows that we must add that it
posits also the non-ego. The two positions are to be conciliated in the
thought of reciprocal limitation of the posited ego and non-ego. And so
forth. Fichte cannot be said to have developed a logic, but this rhythm
of thesis, antithesis and synthesis, foreshadowed in part for Fichte in
Spinoza's formula, "omnis determinatio est negatio" and significantly in
Kant's triadic grouping of his categories, gave a cue to the thought of
Hegel. Schelling, too, called for a single principle and claimed to have
found it in his Absolute, "the night" said Hegel, "in which all cows are
black," but his historical influence lay, as we have seen, in the
direction of a parallelism within the unity, and he also developed no
logic. It is altogether otherwise with Hegel.
Hegel.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
Reviews
Reviews
No reviews yet
Be the first to share your thoughts on this work.
Elsewhere in the archive
Join the Discussion
Join the discussion
Sign in to leave a comment or review.
Sign InorCreate an account