in type between the two negations. But if we grant this it is no longer
obviously the simple logical operation indicated. It is inferred then
that Hegel complements from the stuff of experience, and fails to make
good the pretension of his method to be by itself and of itself the
means of advance to higher and still higher concepts till it can rest in
the Absolute. He discards, as it were, and takes in from the stock while
professing to play from what he has originally in his hand. He
postulates his unity in senses and at stages in which it is
inadmissible, and so supplies only a schema of relations otherwise won,
a view supported by the way in which he injects certain determinations
in the process, e.g. the category of chemism. Has he not cooked the
process in the light of the result? In truth the Hegelian logic suffers
from the fact that the good to be reached is presupposed in the
beginning. Nature, e.g., is not deduced as real because rational, but
being real its rationality is presumed and, very imperfectly, exhibited
in a way to make it possible to conceive it as in its essence the reflex
of Reason. It is a vision rather than a construction. It is a
"theosophical logic." Consider the rational-real in the unity that must
be, and this is the way of it, or an approximation to the way of it! It
was inevitable that the epistemologists of the search for truth would
have none of it. The ideal in whatsoever sense real still needs to be
realized. It is from the human standpoint regulative and only
hypothetically or formally constitutive. We must not confuse [Greek:
ousia] with [Greek: einai], nor [Greek: einai] with [Greek: gignesthai].
Yet in a less ambitious form the fundamental contentions of Hegel's
method tend to find a qualified acceptance. In any piece of presumed
knowledge its partial or abstract character involves the presence of
loose edges which force the conviction of inadequacy and the development
of contradictions. Contradictions must be annulled by complementation,
with resultant increasing coherence in ascending stages. At each
successive stage in our progress fresh contradictions break out, but the
ideal of a station at which the thought-process and its other, if not
one, are at one, is permissible as a limiting conception. Yet if Hegel
meant only this he has indeed succeeded in concealing his meaning.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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