TWENTY-ONE
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831) accuses Immanuel Kant of contradicting himself. Kant opens by announcing that things in themselves (noumena) are unfathomable causes of appearances (phenomena). But Kant later says that we actually impose a causal scheme on phenomena. Experience must take place within a constructed arena of space and time. If the noumenal self is unknowable and other noumenal things are unknowable, then how could Kant know what is solely contributed by the noumenal self? It is self-defeating, writes Hegel, to judge that one cannot make judgments about noumena:
It argues an utter want of consistency to say, on the one hand, that understanding only knows phenomena, and, on the other, assert the absolute character of this knowledge, by statements such as “Cognition can go no further”. . . No one knows, or even feels, that anything is a limit or a defect until he is at the same time above and beyond it.
(1959, section 60)
Hegel rejects the idea that reality is something which underlies appearance. He says that reality is manifest in appearance. Characteristics that we normally think apply only to our representations of reality actually apply to reality itself. For instance, we tend to think that vagueness is a property of our descriptions of clouds. But Hegel insists that the clouds are themselves vague. The difference between the word “cloud” and a cloud in the sky is less drastic than “precise” philosophers contend. The affinity between an object and its representation is ensured by Hegel’s retention of Kant’s theme that reason constructs appearances. Reason dictates the structure of reality. Since reason is the ground for what is real, the real is what is rational.
Kant believed there were only four antinomies because he thought there were only four ways to misapply transcendental ideas to phenomenal reality. Hegel rejects Kant’s assumption that the contradictions are products of transcendental illusion. Hegel takes them to be accurate perceptions of an inconsistent reality. It is possible to view the Penrose triangle (fig. 1.2) and other impossible figures as consistent patches of ink. But the correct way to see them is inconsistently. “Square circle,” “many-sided circle,” and “straight curve” are self-contradictory. Yet geometers regard circles as polygons composed of very short sides. In an era when arithmetic was taken to be the science of quantity, mathematicians struggled to explain the usefulness of negative numbers and imaginary numbers such as 
If multiplying a negative with negative number yields a positive number, then -1 cannot have a square root. Yet applied mathematicians were finding all sorts of uses for 
Hegel was not mystified. If a judgment is true when it corresponds to the facts, then when the facts are inconsistent, a true judgment of those facts must be inconsistent. If we keep an open mind, we discover that contradictory phenomena are wrongly dismissed as illusions.
According to Kant, . . . thought has a natural tendency to issue in contradictions or antinomies, whenever it seeks to apprehend the infinite. But Kant . . . never penetrated to the discovery of what the antinomies really and positively mean. The true and positive meaning of the antinomies is this: that every actual thing involves a coexistence of opposed elements. . . . The old metaphysic, . . . when it studied the object of which it sought metaphysical knowledge, went to work by applying the categories abstractly and to the exclusion of their opposites. Kant, on the other hand, tried to prove that the statements issuing through this method could be met by other statements of contrary import with equal warrant and necessity.
(1880, section 48)
Hegel therefore accepts the contradictions. His idealism makes this less shocking. Hegel has no direct quarrel with the principle that all mind-independent things are free from contradiction. He just thinks the principle misleadingly suggests that there are mind-independent things. If everything is mind-dependent, then things are free to have properties that at first seemed limited to representations of things.
Our beliefs shape up under the prodding of inconsistencies. If reality is idea-like, then this developmental pattern should extend to history. Hegel’s popularizers simplified the logic of history as a triadic progression of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis: History is a dialogue in which thesis confronts antithesis. This conflict is resolved by a synthesis which incorporates the elements of truth in the thesis and antithesis. This synthesis constitutes a new thesis that comes to be opposed by a new antithesis. A yet higher synthesis occurs and the dialectic continues. Although each thesis and antithesis fails to be fully true, the syntheses are more comprehensive and so have a higher degree of truth. Thus, there is progress toward the absolute truth.
Progress is hard to see from a local perspective. Up close, events seem to meander through our lives without purpose. But this is because reason often accomplishes its ends through indirect means. This does not mean that the historian can predict the future. We can only appreciate “the cunning of reason” in hindsight.
At times, Hegel seems to even express doubt about that. Echoing the Socratic contradiction that he knows only that he knows nothing, Hegel says, “We learn from history that we learn nothing from history.” But whether we realize it or not, everything fits in with the absolute truth.
Hegel’s preferred reaction to a paradox is to acquiesce to the contradiction. Just as a judo master redirects his opponent’s blows instead of blocking them, Hegel merely shifts Zeno’s point of impact. In the case of Zeno’s paradox of the arrow, Hegel concedes that
If we wish to make motion clear to ourselves, we say that the body is in one place and then it goes to another; because it moves, it is no longer in the first, but yet not in the second; were it in either it would be at rest. Where then is it? If we say that it is between both, this is to convey nothing at all, for were it between both, it would be in a place, and this presents the same difficulty. But movement means to be in this place and not to be in it, and thus to be in both alike; this is the continuity of space and time which first makes motion possible. Zeno, in the deduction made by him, brought both these points into forcible opposition.
(1892, 274)
Zeno’s only mistake was his assumption that contradictory phenomena cannot be real. Zeno thought he was supporting Parmenides’ conclusion that all is one. But if becoming is more basic than being, Zeno’s paradoxes of motion really demonstrate the pervasiveness of change.
Hegel associates rest with the principle that everything is identical with itself. Change comes from the principle of contradiction. A cherry develops from a bud in the same manner that an amended theory develops from the refutation of an earlier view. “He who claims that nothing exists which carries in it a contradiction as an identity of opposed determinations is at the same time claiming that nothing alive exists. Indeed the force of life and, even more, the power of the Spirit, consists in positing the contradiction in itself, in enduring and overcoming it.” (1970, 162) With the exception of Heraclitus, the major Greek philosophers regarded permanence as real and change as illusory. This bias is clear from their use of reductio ad absurdum. They treat contradiction as a mark of unreality. Hegel thinks contradictions are more real because they control development:
But it is one of the fundamental prejudices of logic, as hitherto understood and of ordinary thinking, that contradiction is not so characteristically essential and immanent a determination as identity; but in fact, if it were a question of grading the two determinations and they had to be kept separate, then contradiction would have to be taken as the profounder determination and more characteristic of essence. For as against contradiction, identity is merely the determination of the simple immediate, of dead being; but contradiction is the root of all movement and vitality; it is only in so far as something has a contradiction within it that moves, has an urge and activity.
(1969, 429)
Everything changes and so everything is ultimately contradictory. Zeno’s great discovery is that
There is nothing at all anywhere, in which contradiction—i.e., opposed determinations—cannot and should not be exhibited. The abstracting activity of the understanding is a clinging on to one determinacy by force, and effort to obscure and remove the consciousness of the other one that is contained in it.—But if the contradiction is exhibited and recognized in any object or concept whatever, then the conclusion that is usually drawn is: “Therefore this object is nothing.” Thus Zeno first showed that movement contradicts itself, and that it therefore is not; likewise the Ancients recognized coming to be and passing away, the two kinds of becoming, as unique determinations, by saying that the one, i.e., the Absolute, does not come into being or pass away.
(1880, 89)
The fundamental law is that everything is inherently contradictory.
Many of Hegel’s countrymen viewed his logic as the culmination of two thousand years of thought. Reason was becoming self-conscious at the University of Berlin. Government ministers welcomed Professor Hegel’s nationalistic theme that Germany was at the apex of civilization. They rewarded his organic theme that the state has more reality than its citizens (just as a man is more real than his organs and his organs are more real than its cells). With the metaphysical primacy of the state came moral primacy; rights evaporated into the lofty state above, duties rained down on its sea of constituents.
But even some of Hegel’s friends suspected that his logic was a conjuring trick. Johann Goethe feared that Hegel was kicking up a dust storm of syllogisms that disinterred pre-Kantian metaphysics. Goethe probably had Hegel’s logic in mind when he has Mephistopheles recommend the Collegium logicum to an enthusiastic student:
Unseen the threads are knit together,
And an infinite combination grows.
Then, the philosopher steps in
And shows, no otherwise it could have been:
(Faust I, lines 1922ff.)
Philosophers generally regard the principle of contradiction as a core rule of debate. Once you drive your adversary to a contradiction, he is obliged to give up. But there is Hegel assuring us that a contradiction is “not, so to speak, an imperfection or a defect in something . . . On the contrary, every determination, every concrete thing, every notion is essentially a unity of different and distinctive moments, which by virtue of their clear and essential differences passover into contradictory moments.” (1969, 422) This struck many of Hegel’s colleagues as more alarming than poor sportsmanship. If contradictions were permitted (indeed celebrated), then people could not be rationally criticized. Dangerous thinking could not be brought to heel by a reductio ad absurdum. When reason is no longer restrained by fear of contradiction, anything can be “justified.” Kantian loyalists worried that the Enlightenment would be rolled back by this debased reason. In 1795, Kant had argued eloquently in “Perpetual Peace” for an international federation that would eliminate war. Hegel spoke up for war:
War is not to be regarded as an absolute evil and as a purely external accident, which itself has some accidental cause, be it injustice, the passions of nations or the holders of power, etc., or, in short, something or other which ought not to be. . . . War is the state of affairs which deals in earnest with the vanity of temporal goods and concerns. . . . War has the higher significance that by its agency, as I have remarked elsewhere, the ethical health of peoples is preserved in their indifference to the stabilization of finite institutions; just as the blowing of the winds preserves the sea from the foulness which would be the result of a prolonged calm, so also corruption in nations would be the product of prolonged, let alone “perpetual” peace.
(1973, 324)
Hegel adopts Heraclitus’s theme that war is a catalyst of change integral to the human condition. How does one argue against Hegel if he regards his inconsistencies as signs of a dynamic reality?
Hegel’s junior colleague, Arthur Schopenhauer, denied that Hegelianism should be dignified with a rebuttal. Schopenhauer tried to expose Hegel as a charlatan. Schopenhauer felt Hegel was robbing Germans of their Kantian heritage. Instead of honestly conveying critical reason’s bad news for metaphysics, Hegel treated Kant’s doctrines as periscopes to a more splendid metaphysical realm.
Hegel’s reactionary rationalism was epitomized by his 1801 dissertation De Orbitis Planetarum. He criticized Newton and tried to find an a priori justification for Kepler’s laws. On numerological grounds, Hegel supports Plato’s opinion in the Timaeus that there could be no planet between Mars and Jupiter. But in the beginning of 1801, astronomers discovered the asteroid Ceres between the two planets—and subsequently a few other such anti-Hegelian asteroids. Instead of abandoning a priori astronomy, Hegel tried to show that these asteroids fill a gap that would have otherwise been unreasonable.
Astronomers who try to debunk astrologists with more science are often chagrined by the astrologer’s ability to incorporate counterexamples into a super-pseudoscience. Schopenhauer believed that Hegel was coopting Kant in the same fashion. Kant’s strictures about the inaccessibility of noumena were being used to frame a “little window opening into the supernatural world.” Hegel’s abuse of Kant put Schopenhauer in mind of the Greek custom of enacting farces over the graves of the great.
To oppose this massive fraud, Schopenhauer scheduled his lectures to compete with Hegel’s. Students would be forced to choose between Schopenhauer’s independent, clear, consistent development of Kant and Hegel’s state-sanctioned, obscure, unabashedly contradictory debasement of the great master.
Schopenhauer lectured to nearly empty rooms. Hegel’s students overflowed large lecture halls. Disgusted, Schopenhauer left the academic field to the peddlers of sophistry and rhetoric. As Heraclitus said, “Asses prefer garbage to gold.”
Alone in his boarding room, the brooding Schopenhauer continued to oppose Hegel. Hegel’s optimism was countered with Schopenhauer’s pessimism. Hegel’s acceptance of contradictions was countered by Schopenhauer’s claim of perfect consistency: “To seek contradictions in me is completely idle: all is from one gush.” (Letter to Johann August Becker, March 31, 1854) Whereas Hegel said history is the unfolding of reason, Schopenhauer made blind will the central force of the universe. Schopenhauer’s emphasis on irrational forces may have been precipitated by awareness of his susceptibility to irrational fears and compulsions. He took excessive precautions against disease and always slept with a loaded pistol nearby.
Schopenhauer accepted Kant’s verdict about the inaccessibility of noumena but thought man’s hunger for general explanations was too strong to be put aside. Man is an animal metaphysicum, who compulsively raises questions about the fundamental nature and significance of the world. Religion attempts to meet this need but not in a fashion that can be rationally justified. Philosophers try to meet this demand for rational certification. Inevitably they overstep. The human intellect is designed to serve the will. Thus, it is “a quite abnormal event if in some man’s intellect deserts its natural vocation . . . in order to occupy itself purely objectively. But it is precisely this which is the origin of art, poetry and philosophy, which are therefore not produced by an organ intended for that purpose.” (1970, 127) Whereas Hegel objectifies paradoxes, Schopenhauer subjectivizes them. Paradoxes are symptoms of intellectual perversion. This clinical revulsion wafts through German literature. In The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann writes “Paradox is the poisonous flower of quietism, the iridescent surface of the rotting mind, the greatest depravity of all.” (1955, 221-222)
The Stoics associated what is natural with what is good. Schopenhauer thinks what is natural is bad. Nature is a stupid clash of wills. Schopenhauer’s only point in describing something as unnatural is to raise a doubt about its effectiveness. Our minds work in a largely automatic, unconscious fashion shaped by a drive to survive and reproduce. When we find ourselves puzzled by questions we cannot imagine how to answer, we have reason to doubt that the question is well formed. Even if the question is well formed, we should still doubt that we are competent to answer the question.
The Turks have many stories about the thirteenth-century character Nasreddin Hodja. As a judge, he was obliged to listen to a man who had come to his house to complain of a neighbor. After listening carefully, Hodja said “You are right.” The man left happily. But the news of Hodja’s judgment angered the accused neighbor; he marched to Hodja’s house and gave his side of the story. Hodja again listened carefully and said “You are right.” The second man left happily. Hodja’s wife had been listening to all this: “But Hodja, they both can’t be right.” Hodja listened carefully and said “You are right.”
If Hegel accepts contradictions, then mustn’t he be as agreeable as Hodja? Anything follows from a contradiction.
As noted in chapter 8, paraconsistent logicians try to engineer brakes for these runaway deductions. Classical logicians reply that the meaning of “contraction” is intimately connected with rules of inference such as reductio ad absurdum. You can only deviate from these rules of inference by changing the very meaning of contradiction. And if you change the meaning, you are just changing the topic. If Hegel does not mean what we mean by contradiction then his claim that there are true contradictions is just misleading advertising.
My own opinion is that Hegel uses “contradiction” in a conventional way; he just has an unconventional view of reality. Given idealism, reality is like a body of beliefs or a work of fiction. Such systems contain contradictions. We can consistently describe a contradiction in Thomas Hobbes’s belief system by saying “According to Hobbes’s political philosophy, citizens have an obligation to submit to the death penalty and yet the state has no right to require the citizen to submit to the death penalty.” The qualifier “According to Hobbes’s political philosophy” prevents the contradiction from infecting the description of the contradiction.
Contradictions are often inaccurately attributed to theoretical systems and movie plots. Hegel thinks that some of his followers make this sort of error; they lard reality with contradictions it does not possess. Hegel also thinks his students sometimes inconsistently describe reality and confuse the inconsistency of their description with an inconsistency they are describing. It is even possible to inconsistently describe inconsistency. In Hegel: A Reexamination, J. N. Findlay writes,
. . . a contradiction is for the majority of logical thinkers, a self-nullifying utterance, one that puts forward an assertion and then takes it back in the same breath, and so really says nothing. It can readily be shown that a language system which admits even one contradiction among its sentences, is also a system in which anything whatever can be proved. . . .
(1958, 76)
But a statement that says nothing cannot imply everything. Hegel has no more interest in these inconsistencies than other thinkers. For Hegel, the deep contradictions are the ones embedded in the realm of ideas constituting reality itself.
When we describe contradictions in a story, we sometimes leave the “In the story” qualifier unstated. That omission makes our description sound contradictory. Hegel often drops the qualifier in this way. However, Hegel has stronger grounds for dropping it than a concern for brevity. Hegel’s qualifier ultimately boils down to “In reality.” If he says “In reality, P and not P,” then he does not get the insulation afforded by “In the story, P and not P.” This loss of insulation is the real source of instability in Hegel’s philosophy.
Well, that is my interpretation. Many other scholars have tried to understand Hegel’s talk of contradiction as metaphorical or as a synonym for irony or as an equivocal allusion to opposed forces. Most are just puzzled as to what Hegel did mean. Hegel was disappointed by this incomprehension. There is a report that on his deathbed Hegel complained, “Only one man ever understood me.” Hegel fell silent for a while and then added, “And he didn’t understand me.”