Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Volume 1 (of 3)Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Philosophy
Hegel's Lectures on the History of Philosophy: Volume 1 (of 3)
Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Philosophy -- History
We may now proceed to give examples of sensuous things, which will help
us further to explain this Notion of the concrete. Although the flower
has many qualities, such as smell, taste, form, colour, &c., yet it is
one. None of these qualities could be absent in the particular leaf or
flower: each individual part of the leaf shares alike all the qualities
of the leaf entire. Gold, similarly contains in every particle all
its qualities unseparated and entire. It is frequently allowed with
sensuous things that such varied elements may be joined together, but,
in the spiritual, differentiation is supposed to involve opposition. We
do not controvert the fact, or think it contradictory, that the smell
and taste of the flower, although otherwise opposed, are yet clearly
in one subject; nor do we place the one against the other. But the
understanding and understanding thought find everything of a different
kind, placed in conjunction, to be incompatible. Matter, for example,
is complex and coherent, or space is continuous and uninterrupted.
Likewise we may take separate points in space and break up matter
dividing it ever further into infinity. It then is said that matter
consists of atoms and points, and hence is not continuous. Therefore
we have here the two determinations of continuity and of definite
points, which understanding regards as mutually exclusive, combined
in one. It is said that matter must be clearly either continuous or
divisible into points, but in reality it has both these qualities. Or
when we say of the mind of man that it has freedom, the understanding
at once brings up the other quality, which in this case is necessity,
saying, that if Mind is free it is not in subjection to necessity, and,
inversely, if its will and thought are determined through necessity, it
is not free—the one, they say, excludes the other. The distinctions
here are regarded as exclusive, and not as forming something concrete.
But that which is true, the Mind, is concrete, and its attributes are
freedom and necessity. Similarly the higher point of view is that Mind
is free in its necessity, and finds its freedom in it alone, since
its necessity rests on its freedom. But it is more difficult for us
to show the unity here than in the case of natural objects. Freedom
can, however, be also abstract freedom without necessity, which
false freedom is self-will, and for that reason it is self-opposed,
unconsciously limited, an imaginary freedom which is free in form
alone.
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