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Hegel's “Science” and Whitehead's “Modern World”

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  25 February 2009

Robert C. Whittemore
Affiliation:
Tulane University of Louisiana.

Extract

“I have never been able to read Hegel: I initiated my attempt by studying some remarks of his on mathematics which struck me as complete nonsense. It was foolish of me, but I am not writing to explain my good sense.”—A. N. Whitehead.

Type
Articles
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1956

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References

page 36 note 1 Essays in Science and Philosophy (New York, Philosophical Library, 1948), p. 10.Google Scholar

page 36 note 2 This is, of course, not true as regards his status as a social and political philosopher. In these realms he is, if anything, too alive!

page 36 note 3 See, for example, Kroner's, Richard Introduction to Hegel's Early Theological Writings (Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1948).Google ScholarLoewenberg, J. suggests a similar interpretation in his Introduction to Hegel Selections (New York, Scribner's, 1929).Google Scholar

page 37 note 1 That Hegel's philosophy does possess affinities with modern science is, of course, not my discovery. The idea is to be found in the form of scattered hints throughout the various works of R. G. Collingwood, and Professor Harris, E. E. has discussed it at some length in his recent Nature, Mind and Modern Science (New York, Macmillan, 1954). However, the specific affinities between Hegel and Whitehead have never, to the best of my knowledge, been explored in any detail.Google Scholar

page 38 note 1 Process and Reality (New York, Social Science Book Store, 1941), p.viii. The nine “habits” repudiated are (i) “The distrust of speculative philosophy”; (ii) “The trust in language as an adequate expression of propositions”; (iii) “The mode of philosophical thought which implies, and is implied by, the faculty-psychology”; (iv) “The subject-predicate form of expression”; (v) “The sensationalist doctrine of perception”; (vi) “The doctrine of vacuous actuality” (vii) “The Kantian doctrine of the objective world as a theoretical construct from purely subjective experience”; (viii) “Arbitrary deductions in ex absurdo arguments”; (ix) “Belief that logical inconsistencies can indicate anything else than some antecedent errors.”Google Scholar

page 38 note 2 According to Professor Errol Harris, “The philosophical theory demanded by the modern outlook must... maintain five main theses: (i) that mind is immanent in all things; (ii) that reality is a whole, self-sufficient and self-maintaining, and that coherence is the test of truth of any theory about it; (iii) that the subject and object of knowledge are ultimately one—the same thing viewed from opposite (and mutually complementary) standpoints; (iv) that events and phenomena can adequately be explained only teleologi-cally, and (v) that the ultimate principle of interpretation is, in consequence, the principle of value.” Nature, Mind and Modern Science, p. 206. “That Hegel's theory embodies the five principles... as characteristic of the modern conception of nature needs,” he remarks somewhat later (p. 229), “no argument. The reader may even suspect that I have derived them from Hegel and then transplanted them into the modern context.” With the addition that the test of truth is not simply coherence, but coherence plus correspondence (this, in order to insure adequate representation of the empirical element), I would agree completely with Professor Harris.

page 39 note 1 The Phenomenology of Mind, translated by Baillie, J. B. (New York, Macmillan, 1949), 2nd revised edition, p. 159.Google Scholar

page 39 note 2 A detailed discussion of the corrigibility of the categories is to be found in Mure's, A Study of Hegel's Logic (Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1950), pp. 323–9, 355. 366.Google Scholar

page 39 note 3 Cohen, , Morris, , “Hegel's Rationalism,” Philosophical Review, Vol. 41 (1932), p. 286.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 40 note 1 Process and Reality, p. 227. My italics.

page 40 note 2 Ibid., p. 252.

page 41 note 1 The Philosophy of Right, translated by Knox, T. M. (Oxford, The Clarendon Press, 1942), pp. 34–5. My italics.Google Scholar

page 41 note 2 The Phenomenology of Mind, p. 157 f.

page 42 note 1 The Logic of Hegel, translated from The Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences by Wallace, William (Oxford, The Clarendon Press, 1892), 2nd edition, section 244, p. 379.Google Scholar

page 42 note 2 Ibid.

page 43 note 1 The Science of Logic, Vol. 2, translated by Johnson, W. H. and Struthers, L. G. (New York, Macmillan, 1951), pp. 485–6.Google Scholar

page 43 note 2 Alexander, , Samuel, , “Hegel's Conception of Nature,” Mind, Vol. II (1886), p. 499. “The logical Idea is the whole world of natural and intelligible things in its abstract form, but it is no mere reposeful conception: it is a process, the process of dialectic. It is not merely a process for us, with our habits of learning, but in itself a process, and therefore, like the Platonic dialectic after which it is named, identical with its method.”Google Scholar

page 43 note 3 Harris, Errol, E., “The Philosophy of Nature in Hegel's System,” The Review of Metaphysics, Vol. 3 (1949), pp. 224–5. “The mind first sees itself as the world come to consciousness and then sees the world as the process in and by means of which that coming to consciousness is brought about. Having found its own identity with the world in knowledge, mind goes back to the world as Nature to view it as the process in and through which knowledge comes to be, and which, at the same time, comes to be the object (or content) of knowledge. As the process is throughout one of growing self-consciousness, it is a process at once of the emergence of the knowing mind and of the world's (the process itself) becoming known. Mind, in short, discovers its own immanent presence in nature.... The much disputed transition from the Logic to the Philosophy of Nature is, therefore, simply the passage from one stage to the next in the development of self-consciousness. Mind comes to know itself even more fully and completely, and in the higher stages of the development it is constantly turning back upon itself, making itself in the prior phase its object. It makes itself, as knowledge, its own object in logic: it makes itself, as object identical with subject, as mind immanent in the ‘external world’ (the conception which forms the consummation of the Logic) its own object in Nature-philosophy; and it makes itself, as the emergent from Nature, its own object in the Philosophy of Spirit.”Google Scholar

page 43 note 4 “... what is the differentia of nature, the peculiarity which distinguishes it as a whole from the Idea on the one hand and from Mind on the other? Hegel's answer is that nature is essentially reality as external, the external world. Here external does not mean external to us.... What is meant by calling nature the external world is that it is a world pervaded and characterized by externality, a world in which everything is external to everything else. Nature, then, is the realm of outwardness; it is a world (or rather the world) in which things are outside each other. This outwardness has two forms: one in which everything is outside every other thing, namely, space; the other in which one thing is outside itself, namely, time. The idea of nature, according to Hegel, is the idea of a reality thus doubly broken up, spread out or distributed in space and time.” Collingwood, R. G., The Idea of Nature (Oxford, The Clarendon Press, 1945), pp. 126–7.Google Scholar

page 44 note 1 “In nature... mind actualizes itself only as its own other, as mind asleep.” Hegel, G. W. F., The Philosophy of Right, p. 279.

page 44 note 2 “But this next resolution of the pure Idea-to determine itself as external Idea-thereby only posits for itself the mediation out of which the Notion arises as free existence that out of externality has passed into itself; arises to perfect its self-liberation in the Philosophy of Spirit, and to discover the highest Notion of itself in that logical science as the pure Notion which forms a Notion of itself.” The Science of Logic, Vol. II, p. 486.

page 44 note 3 Hegel's Philosophy of Mind (translated from the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences by William Wallace). Oxford, The Clarendon Press, 1894, section 389, p. 13.Google Scholar

page 44 note 4 Science and the Modern World (New York, Macmillan, 1948, p. 106).Google Scholar

page 44 note 5 I pass by for the moment the collateral objection suggested by Hegel's denial of natural (temporal) evolution that there can be no synonymity, since, on Hegel's view, time is not, to use Whitehead's phrase, “taken seriously.” But on this topic, more below.

page 45 note 1 The Philosophy of Right, p. 283.

page 45 note 2 Process and Reality, p. 76.

page 45 note 3 Ibid., p. 230.

page 45 note 4 Phenomenology of Mind, pp. 151–60.

page 45 note 5 Philosophy of Mind, paragraph 384, p. 7.

page 46 note 1 “In my view-a view which the developed exposition of the system itself can alone justify-everything depends on grasping and expressing the ultimate truth not as Substance but as Subject as well.” The Phenomenology of Mind, p. 80.

page 46 note 2 Science of Logic, Vol. I, Introduction, p. 60.

page 46 note 3 Panentheism, and not pantheism, since this latter view is, on Hegel's view, properly descriptive only of those systems for which God qua Substance of the universe has failed to achieve individuality as Subject.

page 47 note 1 Since many thinkers would hold the phrase “open system” to signify a contradiction in terms, it is best that we lose no time in defining what we mean by it. By “open system” I mean, and I understand such exponents of the open system as Alexander and Whitehead to have meant, that system which (i) contains within its categoreal scheme provision for the modification or transcending of that scheme or any part of it. For example, Whitehead's view of natural law as subject to the vagaries of process; (2) allows for integration of the data of the future-considered as future. For example, Alexander's conception of God as in the making.

page 47 note 2 Philosophy of Right, p. 11.

page 48 note 1 “Hegel states clearly that the Philosophy of Nature depends for its material upon the results of natural science. ‘Not only,’ he writes in the Philosophy of Nature (section 246), ‘must philosophy agree with the experience of Nature (Natur-Erfahrung), but natural science (Physik) is presupposed by and conditions philosophical science....’ The passage must, I think imply that although the Understanding and the apercus of Nature which constitute its content are Begriffsbestimmungen on the ascending scale of Nature and Concrete Spirit, yet they are not sublated without residue in the dialectic of that scale, and so must appear as a never ending source of material for philosophy to reconstitute.” A Study of Hegel's Logic, pp. 323–4. See also pp. 316, 329–68.

page 48 note 2 “That is as far as consciousness has reached.”

page 48 note 3 Phenomenology of Mind, pp. 800–1.

page 49 note 1 Section 249. Quoted by Stace, W. T., The Philosophy of Hegel (London, Macmillan, 1924), p. 313.Google Scholar

page 50 note 1 Science and the Modern World, p. 135. My italics.

page 50 note 2 The Concept of Nature, pp. 127–8.

page 50 note 3 Alexander, Samuel, “Hegel's Conception of Nature,” Mind, Vol. II (1886), P. 502.

page 50 note 4 Ibid., p. 518.

page 50 note 5 The Concept of Nature (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1920), p. 65.Google Scholar

page 51 note 1 Science and the Modern World, p. 183.

page 51 note 2 Ibid.

page 51 note 3 Process and Reality, pp. 195–6.

page 51 note 4 The Phenomenology of Mind, p. 800.

page 51 note 5 Ibid.

page 51 note 6 The hegelian conception here is, I think, close enough to that of Bradley to warrant quoting the latter as explanation of what is implied by the statement that “Time is appearance.” “Time,” Bradley remarks in Appearance and Reality (Oxford, The Clarendon Press, 1951), p. 185, “is not real as such, and it proclaims its unreality by its inconsistent attempt to be an adjective of the timeless. It is an appearance which belongs to a higher character in which its special quality is merged. Its own temporal nature does not there cease wholly to exist but is thoroughly transmuted. It is counterbalanced, and, as such, lost within an all-inclusive harmony. The Absolute is timeless, but it possesses time as an isolated aspect, an aspect which, in ceasing to be isolated, loses its special character. It is there, but blended into a whole which we cannot realize.”Google Scholar

page 52 note 1 As Sidney Hook remarks in an article on “The Contemporary Significance of Hegel's Philosophy,” Philosophical Review, Vol. 41 (1932), p. 249, “Although Hegel officially denies the reality of time, he recognizes its existence whenever he uses the words ‘finite’ and ‘appearance.’ Under the aspect of time the world confronts man as an ever-enduring process. Under the aspect of eternity the world is a completed system. But to the process belongs metaphysical primacy.”

page 52 note 2 “The Contemporary Significance of Hegel's Philosophy,” Philosophical Review, Vol. 41 (1932), pp. 256 ff.

page 52 note 3 Croce, Benedetto, , What is Living and What is Dead in the Philosophy of Hegel (London, Macmillan, 1915).Google Scholar

page 52 note 4 “The Contemporary Significance of Hegel's Philosophy,” Philosophical Review, Vol. 41 (1932), p. 259.

page 53 note 1 As Errol Harris so pertinently remarks,“... those who have revolted completely against idealism and have set their faces firmly against anything with the least suggestion of Hegelianism have succeeded only in repeating, in modern guise and in a new technical jargon, the philosophical position appropriate to an age of scientific progress prior to Hegel's time-a position which in our own day is utterly outdated and has long been obsolete.” Nature, Mind and Modern Science, p. 255.