ULTIMATE REALITY AND THE MEANINGFUL LIFE – A.N. WHITEHEAD – PART I (end)

CREATIVITY

For Whitehead, creativity is the universal of universals, the ultimate metaphysical principle which underlies all things without exception, including God.19 His description of the categories, interdependency, nexūs, process, and the divine formulate the matrix which establishes the defining feature of reality, its dynamism or creativity.

On the one hand there is a physical component of creation. At this level God is the principle actor, initiating a continuous process of potentiality becoming actuality, wherein elements are synthesized into new unities or “concrescences”. On the other hand, within the universal organism (and guided by divine wisdom), nexūs undergo process leading to novelty. Whitehead calls the emergence of the new the “creative advance.”

However the creative advance is more than the novel; it includes the objectification and harmonization of feelings. While intellect and consciousness arise in higher forms of concrescence, feelings are more fundamental and pretheoretical or precognitive. They are of three types – physical, conceptual, and transmuted. The creative advance integrates these various types of feelings in a process called “satisfaction.” Every phase in the creative, interdependent progression is qualified by past, present, and future leading to a final coordinated whole, that is, organism.

SUMMARY

Whitehead attempts to create a comprehensive metaphysical system that accounts for modern scientific cosmology by replacing traditional philosophy of substance with a philosophy of organism and creativity. Whitehead’s cosmos is fluid and changing, but in an orderly, deified fashion – a virtual self-creation. His system foreshadows chaos and complexity theory which were developed later chronologically, but Whitehead would surely add that a divine agency and integration of the subjective are required in his understanding of the universal organism and the creative advance. Next time we will examine his thoughts on human participation in this new vision of the world.

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19Magill, Frank N. and McGreal, Ian P. (editors), Masterpieces of World Philosophy in Summary Form. Harper & Row, Publishers, New York, 1961. Page 923.

ULTIMATE REALITY AND THE MEANINGFUL LIFE – A.N. WHITEHEAD – PART I (second continuation)

INTERDEPENDENCY/PROCESS

Whitehead  asserts science and experience inform us that each event in the universe is a factor in every other event such that “all things ultimately inhere in each other”12 – there are no isolated events. The real world then is an interdependency of interrelated parts more descriptive of an organism than a machine. Moreover all occasions develop within the spatio-temporal continuum and are qualified in past, present, and future. New actual entities arise from prior occasions and eventually themselves perish, but not before being objectified by still later occasions.

Each “actual entity is that which it can become”13 and thus ‘being’ is constituted as ‘becoming’ or in other words is a ‘process.’ Process leads to novelty and the emergency of novelty which may inhibit or delay creativity or may lead to a creative advance. The inhibition or delay in creativity represents an evil, but the final creative advance that follows is better by virtue of that evil.  This dynamic actualization, interdependence, process, and creativity concord with the primary data of our immediate experience of the universe.

ORGANISM

Whitehead’s philosophy of organism springs from his analysis of Bergson’s default to reality as partly mechanistic and partly  elan vital or ‘vitalism.’ Whitehead feels this is an unsatisfactory compromise whereby “mechanism is partially mitigated within living bodies” while in fact, “the gap between living and dead matter is vague and problematical to bear the weight of such an arbitrary assumption, which involves an essential dualism somewhere.”14

Instead he suggests all “concrete enduring entities are organisms, so that the plan of the whole influences the very characters of the various subordinate organisms which enter into it.” Consequently “this doctrine involves the abandonment of traditional scientific materialism, and the substitution of an alternative doctrine of organism.”15 He justifies this further by pointing out how modern science has replaced the primacy of ‘mass’ with that of ‘energy.’ Energy, it turns out, is fundamental, but energy “is merely the name for the quantitative aspect of a structure of happenings: in short, it depends on the functioning of organism.”16

Whitehead’s goes on: “The notion of ‘organism’ is combined with that of ‘process’ in a twofold manner. The community of actual things is an organism, but it is not a static organism. It is an incompletion of process of production. Thus the expansion of the universe in respect to actual things is the first meaning of ‘process’; and the universe in any stage of expansion is the first meaning of ‘organism.’ In this sense, an organism is a nexus.”17 He concludes: “The Cartesian subjectivism in its application to physical science became Newton’s assumptions of individually existent physical bodies, with merely external relationships. We diverge from Descartes by holding that what he has described as primary attributes of physical bodies are really the forms of internal relationships between actual occasions, and within actual occasions. Such a change of thought is the shift from materialism to organism, as the basic idea of science.”18

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12Magill, Frank N. and McGreal, Ian P. (editors), Masterpieces of World Philosophy in Summary Form. Harper & Row, Publishers, New York, 1961. Page 924.

13Ibid., page 925.

14Whitehead, Alfred North, Science and the Modern World. The Free Press, New York, 1969. Page 79.

15Ibid., pages 79-80.

16Ibid., page 102.

17Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality. The Free Press, New York, 1978. ISBN 0-02-934570-7, pages 214-215.

18Ibid., page 309.

ULTIMATE REALITY AND THE MEANINGFUL LIFE – A.N. WHITEHEAD – PART I (continued)

‘CATEGOREAL’ SCHEME

Whitehead believes that philosophy serves to explain the abstractions that we develop from our interaction with the concrete world. These abstractions originate from a framework of “generic notions inevitably presupposed in our reflective experience,”5 specifically actual entities, prehensions (cogitation or ideas), ‘nexūs’ (plural of nexus – involvement of actual entities with each other through prehension), and ontological principles.6 This intuitive base leads to his second major philosophical principle: we bring the abstract and the concrete together using a ‘categoreal’ scheme comprised of four categories: (1) Categories of the Ultimate (creativity), (2) Categories of Existence (eight items), (3) Categorical Explanations (twenty-seven items), and (4) Categorical Obligations (nine items).7

The foundations of reality are the categories of existence: (1) actual entities (particular substances), (2) prehensions, (3) nexūs, (4) subjective forms, (5) external objects, (6) propositions, (7) multiplicities, and (8) contrasts (opposites). Of these, most important are actual entities which include living and nonliving things, humans and God. Actual entities, also termed ‘actual occasions’ (exclusive of God – more on this to follow), are the building blocks of the organic universe making them the ultimate facts. They are in a continuous process of becoming and perishing, but taken up in the creative advance. Because actual entities also pass into other actual entities through prehension, a kind of immortality is realized by all actual entities.8

A set of actual occasions in a unity of relatedness constituted by reciprocal prehensions leads to a nexus. Nexūs are thus societies of actual occasions that grow together through a process of integration of prehensions or feelings to a final phase he calls “satisfaction” or “concrescence.” Throughout this process is reflected two key doctrines: (1) the doctrine of self-constituting identity wherein each actual entity identifies itself as an individual constituent, and (2) the doctrine of cosmic order wherein all prehensions contribute to a pre-established universal harmony.9

GOD

There is one exceptional actual entity, God, which (who?) alone is not occasioned by something else – i.e. God is an actual entity but not an actual occasion, but a (the) primordial fact lacking temporality. However, God has two natures, first as the primordial entity, the actual entity which envisages all eternal objects and the appertition for their actualization.10 Eternal objects are pure potentials and neutral within the temporal order. They are permanent, immutable, principles of determination fixed in the primordial vision of God. They are the structure of the organismic process in which process and structure are interdependent.

God’s second nature, consequent nature, wherein is God transmutes eternal potentials into each and every concrete actual entity or occasion through divine wisdom. God shares in the fullness of the physical feelings of the world as a conscious entity and God’s relation to the world, according to Whitehead, is one of love and care tending to the preservation of all. In part then God is “the great companion, the fellow sufferer who understands.” Nonetheless, Whitehead is clear, God is a part of the system and thus subordinate to the category of the ultimate.11

(further continued next post)

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5Alfred North Whitehead in Process and Reality. The Free Press, New York, 1978. ISBN 0-02-934570-7, page 18.

6Ibid.

7 Magill, Frank N. and McGreal, Ian P. (editors), Masterpieces of World Philosophy in Summary Form. Harper & Row, Publishers, New York, 1961. Page 923.

8Ibid., pages 923-924.

9Ibid., page 924.

10Ibid.

11Ibid.

ULTIMATE REALITY AND THE MEANINGFUL LIFE – ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD – PART I

“But that which is conceived by opinion with the help of sensation and without reason, is always in a process of becoming and perishing and never really is.” – Plato, Timaeus1

In our quest for a comprehensive philosophical understanding of ultimate reality we have reviewed the ancient Greek and Hellenic sages and our first four modern thinkers: Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, and Schopenhauer.2 We come now to our last major modern philosopher who describes a vision of the ultimate nature of reality, the twentieth century philosopher, Alfred North Whitehead. Whitehead’s interpretation, although remarkably complex, can be distilled to a single word – organism – by which he means the universe is ultimately a unity, not a multiplicity; a process, not a state; a becoming, not a being. He lines up with Heraclitus, Plato, and Leibniz, in contrast to Parmenides, Aristotle, and Descartes.

He develops his theory chronologically in three texts – Science and the Modern World, Process and Reality, and Adventures of Ideas – for a combined 800 pages, some of which is quite dense, even inscrutable. I will try to extract his basic concepts and arguments in this first part and explore the opportunities for participation by humans in the second part. I will divide my summary of his system into six sections: Empirical foundation, ‘Categoreal’ scheme, God, Interdependency/Process, Organism, and finally Creativity.

EMPIRICAL FOUNDATION

In his essay, Science and Philosophy,3 Whitehead offers the starting point for understanding his system. He begins contextually; whereas science seeks to understand the stark particulars of reality and disregards or denies meaning, philosophers seek to explain universal principles and mutual references, eliminate arbitrariness, and demand meaning. Traditionally ancient philosophers focused on the “drama of the universe” while modern thinkers emphasize the “inward drama of the soul,” but Whitehead wants to revert to the former.

Next Whitehead argues that a purely rationalist or intuitional approach (for example that of Kant and especially the idealists) is fundamentally flawed. He is an avowed empiricist – that is, experience should guide our approach. For Whitehead, the fundamental situation of experience is not “subject-object”, but “ego-object amid objects.” As such any philosophy of Nature notes the interdependency of existing substances or in his words, “the primary fact is an impartial world transcending the ‘here-now’ which marks the ego-object, and transcending the ‘now’ which is the spatial world of simultaneous realization. It is also a world including the actuality of the past, and the limited potentiality of the future, together with the complete world of abstract potentiality, the realm of eternal objects, which transcends, and finds exemplification in and comparison with, the actual course of realization.”4

Whitehead argues then that Nature, as organic, is the appropriate starting point for understanding ultimate reality. He further believes this is confirmed in physics as demonstrated by electromagnetic field theory, the flux of events in space-time, and energy transmission.

(continued next post)

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1Quoted by Alfred North Whitehead in Process and Reality. The Free Press, New York, 1978. ISBN 0-02-934570-7, page 82.

2I am omitting Leibniz (monads) and Nietzsche (Will to Power and The Eternal Recurrence) which I discussed in some detail in earlier blogs.

3Whitehead, Alfred North, Science and the Modern World. The Free Press, New York, 1969. Pages 139-156.

4Ibid., page 151. (I am reminded of Heidegger’s ‘being-in-the-world.’)

ULTIMATE REALITY AND THE MEANINGFUL LIFE – SCHOPENHAUER (final continuation)

In concluding Schopenhauer’s thoughts on relationship to his vision of ultimate reality as Will – the thing-in-itself for each thing including us, and for everything, i.e. Nature and the Universe – I will extract liberally from his own writings some tasty morsels for the reader’s intellectual palate, with the hope it may lead you to his very readable, even poetic prose.

“Any willing arises from want, therefore from deficiency, and therefore from suffering. The satisfaction of a wish ends it; yet for one wish that is satisfied there remain at least ten which are denied. Further, the desire lasts long, the demands are infinite; the satisfaction is short and scantily measured out. But even the final satisfaction is itself only apparent; every satisfied wish at once makes room for a new one; both are illusions; the one is known to be so, the other not yet.”7

“But when some external cause or inward disposition lifts us suddenly out of the endless stream of willing, delivers knowledge from the slavery of the will, the attention is no longer directed to the motives of willing, but comprehends things free from their relation to the will, and thus observes them without personal interest, without subjectivity, purely objectively, gives itself entirely up to them so far as they are ideas, but not in so far as they are motives. Then all the peace which we were always seeking but which always fled from us on the former path of the desires, comes to us of its own accord and it is well with us…the state …as necessary for the knowledge of the Idea, as pure contemplation, as sinking oneself in perception, losing oneself in the object, forgetting all individuality…it is this blessedness of will-less perception… The world as idea alone remains, and the world as will has disappeared.”8

For Schopenhauer the surest way to such a state is the contemplation of art. He tells us that while “science… can never reach a final goal…art, on the contrary, is everywhere at its goal. For it plucks the object of its contemplation out of the stream of the world’s course, and has it isolated before it. And this particular thing, which in the stream was a small perishing part, becomes to art the representative of the whole, and equivalent of the endless multitude in space and time. It therefore pauses at this particular thing: the course of time stops; the relations vanish for it; only the essential, the Idea is its object.”9

Schopenhauer’s definition of art is a bit problematic – in some sense he seems to mean anything aesthetic – in fact he starts with human physical beauty and the beauty within Nature. Nonetheless he seems to designate a special place for the created arts in his expansive sense. These include not just the visual arts, but poetry, drama (especially tragedy), perhaps even history, at least as the artist anticipates “by so great a degree of intelligence that he recognizes the Idea in the particular thing, and thus, as it were, understands the half-uttered speech of nature,  and articulates clearly what she only stammered forth.”10

However, Schopenhauer reserves his highest regard for music which in his words “is as direct an objectification and copy of the whole will as the world itself, nay, even as Ideas, whose multiplied manifestation constitutes the world of individual things. Music is thus by no means like the other arts, the copy of the Ideas, but the copy of the will itself, whose objectivity the Ideas are. This is why the effect of music is so much more powerful and penetrating than that of the other arts, for they speak only of shadows, but it speaks of the thing itself. Since, however, it is the same will which objectifies itself both in the Ideas and in music, though in quite different ways, there must be, not indeed a direct likeness, but yet a parallel, and analogy, between music and the Ideas whose manifestation in multiplicity and incompleteness is the visible world.”11

So, it seems to me, Schopenhauer is not, in the end, a pessimist, but the opposite. It is in the contemplation of human artistic creation that we encounter and synchronize with the ultimate. I know of no greater advocacy of humanism in all of philosophical literature… I leave you now for a little Mozart!

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7Mann, Thomas (editor), The Living Thoughts of Schopenhauer. David McKay Company, Philadelphia, PA, 1939. Pages 106-107.

8Ibid., pages 107-109.

9Ibid., page 102.

10Ibid., page 111 (Schopenhauer’s italics).

11Ibid., page 117 (Schopenhauer’s italics).

ULTIMATE REALITY AND THE MEANINGFUL LIFE – SCHOPENHAUER (continued)

Last time I discussed how ultimate reality for Schopenhauer is Will and also that the world is an Idea arising within the human mind. Schopenhauer is, for many, the greatest philosophical pessimist in history because on his account: the all-controlling Will is a purposeless, striving and yearning without rhyme or reason. It is insatiable or only briefly satiable, and is seemingly inescapable. Free will then can be reduced to the dubious freedom to suffer from an unquenchable will.

Schopenhauer must have thought long and hard about this dilemma seeking an exit. For instance he considers and rejects suicide since that too is merely the playing out of Will (the desire to be free of the torment). He eventually discovers the solution in the ancient Eastern tradition of the Upanishads, while adding a distinctly Western flavor. Instead of the esoteric practice of meditation, Schopenhauer thinks we can neutralize the will by deep identification with objects and the Ideas or Forms.

Stepwise relief (salvation?) comes first from knowledge of the world as the stage of suffering and second by transcending the world of necessity via the intellect which may “wrench itself free from will.” Under  happy circumstances “the subject ceases to be merely individual and becomes the pure, will-less subject of knowledge.”5 This is most demonstrable in ‘the aesthetic state’ because aesthetic gratification is pure and leads us to the Ideas. Art, by the genuine artist, and perhaps Beauty in general, is as Kant taught us, “what happens without interest (Schopenhauer thinks this means ‘without reference to the will’). By concentration on the aesthetic we can reach “a state of selfless resignation, where reference was [is] to things as sheer ideas, no longer as purposes; and a peace…the painless state praised by Epicurus.”6 And finally, Schopenhauer believes the most pure of all art is music and therein may be the greatest escape available.

(further continued next post)

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5Mann, Thomas (editor), The Living Thoughts of Schopenhauer. David McKay Company, Philadelphia, PA, 1939. Page 13.

6Ibid., page 14.

ULTIMATE REALITY AND THE MEANINGFUL LIFE – ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER

“It is us he inhabits, not the underworld, nor the stars in the sky. The spirit who lives in us makes those.” – Agrippa von Nettesheim, Epistle V.1

In our consideration of ultimate reality presented by modern philosophers, we have examined the thoughts of Spinoza, Kant, and Hegel whose emphases are on Substance, Reason, and Spirit or Mind respectively. Chronologically we next come across Arthur Schopenhauer who distills from Kant’s ‘thing-in-itself’ a wholly novel, but enduring concept he names ‘Will.’ His reasoning is simple, but elegant – Kant may be correct that for an object of the world we cannot know directly (by perception) the ‘thing-in-itself,’ but there is one exception – oneself. After careful contemplation Schopenhauer determines that for himself, the interior ‘thing-in-itself’ is pure Will.

What is Will? It is “a striving, yearning, force which takes various forms according to its inclinations.”2  We recognize it as the origin of the movements of the body and of the desire to continue to exist. The body then is objectivized Will. Schopenhauer projects the Will in himself onto the other objects of the world concluding that for all of them, noumenal reality – the ‘thing-in-itself’ – is also Will, which at a minimum is the sheer inclination or determination to continue to exist. “The world of noumena is nothing but a world of Will.”3 Will is ultimately groundless, but rather the ground of everything.

Paradoxically however, the world is also merely “my Idea” – that is, the world of things of perception depends for its existence and character on the mind that consciously perceives it. By virtue of our human understanding, we form the world of phenomena, and moreover, by our reason we have the power to achieve harmony and a stoic calm in a world full of suffering. By losing ourselves in objects, i.e. by knowing them as they are in themselves, we come to know the Will as Idea, and thus as an eternal form (analogous to Plato’s ‘Forms’). The Idea for Schopenhauer then is manifest in the immutable universals which are not subject to causal law.4

Next time we will see how Schopenhauer suggests we embrace Will and Idea.

(continued next post)

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1Schopenhauer’s epigraph to Book 2 of The World as Will and Idea. Heinrich Cornelius Agrippa von Nettesheim was a German Renaissance polymath and physician who published three books of occult philosophy in 1533 (from Wikipedia).

2Magill, Frank N. and McGreal, Ian P. (editors), Masterpieces of World Philosophy in Summary Form. Harper & Row, Publishers, New York, 1961. Page 582.

3Ibid., page 585.

4Ibid.

ULTIMATE REALITY AND THE MEANINGFUL LIFE – HEGEL (final continuation)

HISTORY

For me the most intriguing part of Hegel’s philosophy of ultimate reality is his integration of human history with his first three components – Geist, Idea, and Nature – creating a then unprecedented intersection of philosophy and history. Briefly the logical power of Spirit or Mind – the Idea – enters and guides mortal men in historical events and learning. “All dialectical thought-paths lead to the Absolute Idea and to a knowledge of it which is itself.”8 As such, the Begriffe, or universal notional shapes are evinced in the facts of history and the ways in which they align themselves leading one to the next, ultimately means they are distinguishable facets of a single all-inclusive universal.9 That is “what must be conceived as realizing itself in what is individual and empirical, and as responsible both for the being and intelligibility of the latter.”10

In brief then, human history is the ‘self-development’ of Spirit, the actualization of the divine Idea or  cosmic plan.11 When the historical process ends, Spirit will have fully realized itself within a state of ‘global reason’ of all of mankind – at which point, “historical and spiritual greatness will coincide.”12,13 Moreover this actualization will extend beyond the terrestrial globe.14 In that history, Hegel believes is the progress of consciousness of freedom.15 Thus the goal for us as participants in history is to create a fully rational organization of the world and a truly free community where duty and self-interest harmonize.

SUMMARY

One is awed if not completely convinced by Hegel’s thinking. Spirit and Idea defy ontological speculation, but do in fact seem to fit our experience of the world and of our history as directional even if imperfectly so. While the things in the world may have independent existence, their nature and classification and the laws that govern them are only revealed conceptually in the minds of rational creatures. It is tantalizing to think of human minds as portions of or sharing in a larger mental entity. The hope that the progress and rationality manifest in the universe is recognized and advanced in the history of humanity is at a minimum a reason for optimism. Hegel, it seems, asks all of us to participate in ultimate reality via thoughtful involvement in human history through politics, science, and culture. If he is right, no more tangible relationship to ultimate reality is possible.

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8Miller, A.V. (translator), Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford University Press, Oxford, England, 1977. ISBN 978-0-19-824697-1, page vii .

9Ibid.

10Ibid, page viii

11There are some less becoming components of Hegel’s theory, such as the state as the culmination of world history and the great man (Napoleon in his lifetime) as mastering the world. His philosophy is later modified by Karl Marx into communism and by less virtuous individuals to justify tyrannical regimes.

12Hartman, Robert S. (editor), The Liberal Arts edition of Hegel, G.W.F., Reason in History. The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., Indianapolis, IN, 1953. Page xiv.

13Hegel goes even further, possibly too far, by identifying his book, Phenomenology of Spirit, as the very path that was taken by Spirit in past history and then “rehearsed in the consciousness of Hegel, in whom the notion of Science first became actual.” (Miller, A.V. (translator), Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford University Press, Oxford, England, 1977. ISBN 978-0-19-824697-1, page vi)

14Hartman, Robert S. (editor), The Liberal Arts edition of Hegel, G.W.F., Reason in History. The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., Indianapolis, IN, 1953. Page xv.

15Honderich, Ted, The Oxford Guide to Philosophy. Oxford University Press, 2005. ISBN 978-0-19-534093-8 pages 367.

ULTIMATE REALITY AND THE MEANINGFUL LIFE – G.W.F. HEGEL (continued)

IDEA

For Hegel the Idea is very tightly related to Geist, and I suspect some scholars might argue they are identical, but I understand the Idea as emanating from Geist as the abstract thought or logical power of the divine that enters and guides mortal beings. The Idea is absolute, and thus “remains untouched by the human passions which actualize it.”3 Idea includes the laws of logic coming from the divine mind that constitutes Reason. And the greatest principle of divine logic is that thoughts and events encounter counter-positions and events that resolve into new paradigms or situations wherein the process begins again; hence the unending cycle of thesis – antithesis – synthesis.

Idea develops in space and time; in space as Nature and in time as Spirit or universal history. The universal progression is logical and systematic or in Hegel’s words, ‘scientific history.’ The absolute Idea is fulfilled when historical and spiritual greatness coincide. Here we come upon one of Hegel’s great thoughts; since the rational comes from the divine, “all that is real is rational and all that is rational is real.”4

NATURE

Nature, or perhaps more accurately, the physical world, is the third manifestation of Hegel’s ultimate reality. Like Kant, Hegel believes things which we perceive are real, but unlike Kant he feels there is no undisclosed “thing-in-itself.” In fact Hegel takes a nearly opposite position that things are realized through our conceptions of them. In perceiving things of the world, we uncover the universals. For instance, for a tree in front of me it is Here and Now, but as I turn away, what I perceive changes but the Here and Now still apply to the next perception. Here and Now then are in Hegel’s thinking universals. Other universals include pure being, the ‘I,’ meaning, Truth, and the ‘Also’ (referring to the multiple facets manifest in a thing such as color or shape).5

For Hegel, Nature consists of forces interacting according to laws. The knowledge of these laws is a kind of self-knowledge since in penetrating the forces behind phenomena we become aware of what we devised and put there. Meanwhile, ‘thinghood’ and pure essence, are nothing else but what Here and Now have proved themselves to be, “a simple togetherness of a plurality.”6 Through these recognitions, the finite human mind progresses to see the world as part of itself.7

(final continuation next post)

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3Hartman, Robert S. (editor), The Liberal Arts edition of Hegel, G.W.F., Reason in History. The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., Indianapolis, IN, 1953. Page ix.

4Ibid., page xvi.

5Miller, A.V. (translator), Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford University Press, Oxford, England, 1977. ISBN 978-0-19-824697-1, pages 58-66 (sections 90-110).

6Ibid.,page 68 (section 113).

ULTIMATE REALITY AND THE MEANINGFUL LIFE – G.W.F. HEGEL

“Within the purposes of the Cosmos, and vivifying all meteorology, and all the congeries of the mineral, the vegetable, and animal worlds – all the physical growth and development of man, and all the history of the race of politics, religions, wars, etc., there is a moral purpose, a visible or invisible intention, certainly underlying all … That something is the All, and the idea of All, with the accompanying idea of eternity, and of itself, the soul, buoyant, indestructible, sailing space forever.” – Walt Whitman1

In the last several posts we saw that for Kant, ultimate reality is the transcendental or noumenal realm revealed as reason, the thing-in-itself, God as implicit in reason and the moral law, and absolute good will. All are at least partly accessible to humans although to different degrees. Unquestionably one of the greatest followers on Kantian philosophy was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) who was influenced by Kant, but rejected much of his thought. Hegel rejects the idea of a noumenal reality, and replaces Kant’s facets of the transcendental with four interlocking principles of his own: (1) Geist, or Mind (sometimes translated consciousness or Spirit), (2) Idea (perhaps also Logic), (3) Nature, i.e. the universe, and (4) History – specifically human history. Perhaps the most instrumental component of his system is his formulation of a final dialectic:  thesis –> antithesis –> synthesis. But most compelling for us is the pivotal place of humanity in the self-revelation of the divine mind. Let’s examine his metaphysics in more detail.

GEIST

In Phenomenology of Mind, his first major work published in 1807, Hegel develops his central theory of Geist, sometimes translated as Spirit, but more often and presumably more accurately as Mind. Some authorities believe Hegel chose the word Geist specifically because of its ambiguous or dual meaning – connoting both a spiritual being and an absolute intelligence.

For Hegel, Geist is the intelligent and spiritual underpinning of the universe, a kind of divine entity that set in motion the universe following a preconceived but gradually developing plan. He seems to avoid the question of whether there is an ontological basis for Geist, but agues it can be deduced from its apparent penetration of all of reality. He characterizes Geist as the unity underlying the distinct sides of all facets of the world – that which integrates everything into a rational totality. Geist expresses three modalities; universality, specificity, and singularity. It is a consciousness, a subjectivity, a self-active universal in specific form confronting its subjectivity and thereby achieving self.

Hegel also calls Geist the Thinking Ego connected with the categories used in the synthetic constitution of objects by the understanding. It is the equivalent of the form of self. But it is not a personal thinker rather the “logical function of universality” and the place of forms. It has an implicit existence in natural objects as a sort of being beneath the surface of natural objects as the essences or forces which explain them.2

(continued next post)

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1From Democratic Vistas. Quoted by Hartman, Robert S. in his introduction to The Library of Liberal Arts edition of Hegel, G.W.F., Reason in History. The Bobbs-Merrill Company, Inc., Indianapolis, IN, 1953. Page xv.

2Miller, A.V. (translator), Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford University Press, Oxford, England, 1977. ISBN 978-0-19-824697-1, pages x-xi. Also see Phenomenology Sections 18, 152, 235, and 803 for particular descriptions. (Hegel’s systematic approach is very evident in his use of numbered passages to compartmentalize his thinking.)