Hegel's Philosophy of Mind - Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (different ereaders .txt) 📗
- Author: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
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Under such metaphysical or extra-empirical presuppositions all investigation, whether it be crudely empirical or (in the physical sense) scientific, is carried on. And when so carried on, it is said to be prosecuted apart from any interference from metaphysic. Such a naïve or natural metaphysic, not raised to explicit consciousness, not followed as an imposed rule, but governing with the strength of an immanent faith, does not count for those who live under it as a metaphysic at all. M. Jourdain was amazed suddenly to learn he had been speaking prose for forty years without knowing it. But in the present case there is something worse than amazement sure to be excited by the news. For the critic who thus reveals the secrets of the scientist's heart is pretty sure to go on to say that a good deal of this naïve unconscious metaphysic is incoherent, contradictory, even bad: that it requires correction, revision, and readjustment, and has by criticism to be made one and harmonious. That readjustment or criticism which shall eliminate contradiction and produce unity, is the aim of the science of metaphysic—the science of the meta-physical element in physical knowledge: what Hegel has chosen to call the Science of Logic (in the wide sense of the term). This higher Logic, this science of metaphysic, is the process to revise and harmonise in systematic completeness the imperfect or misleading and partial estimates of reality which are to be found in popular and scientific thought.
In the case of the run of physical sciences this revision is less necessary; and for no very recondite reason. Every science by its very nature deals with a special, a limited topic. It is confined to a part or aspect of reality. Its propositions are not complete truths; they apply to an artificial world, to a part expressly cut off from the concrete reality. Its principles [pg lxii] are generally cut according to their cloth,—according to the range in which they apply. The only danger that can well arise is if these categories are transplanted without due reservations, and made of universal application, i.e. if the scientist elects on his speciality to pronounce de omnibus rebus. But in the case of psychology and ethics the harmlessness of natural metaphysics will be less certain. Here a general human or universal interest is almost an inevitable coefficient: especially if they really rise to the full sweep of the subject. For as such they both seem to deal not with a part of reality, but with the very centre and purpose of all reality. In them we are not dealing with topics of secondary interest, but with the very heart of the human problem. Here the questions of reality and ideals, of unity and diversity, and of the evaluation of existence, come distinctly to the fore. If psychology is to answer the question, What am I? and ethics the question, What ought I to do? they can hardly work without some formulated creed of metaphysical character, without some preliminary criticisms of current first principles.
The German thinker, who has given perhaps the most fruitful stimulus to the scientific study of psychology in modern times—Johann Friedrich Herbart—is after all essentially a philosopher, and not a mere scientist, even in his psychology. His psychological inquiry, that is, stands in intimate connexion with the last questions of all intelligence, with metaphysics and [pg lxiii] ethics. The business of philosophy, says Herbart, is to touch up and finish off conceptions (Bearbeitung der Begriffe)22. It finds, as it supervenes upon the unphilosophical world, that mere and pure facts (if there ever are or were such purisms) have been enveloped in a cloud of theory, have been construed into some form of unity, but have been imperfectly, inadequately construed: and that the existing concepts in current use need to be corrected, supplemented and readjusted. It has, accordingly, for its work to “reconcile experience with itself23,” and to elicit “the hidden pre-suppositions without which the fact of experience is unthinkable.” Psychology, then, as a branch of this philosophic enterprise, has to readjust the facts discovered in inner experience. For mere uncritical experience or merely empirical knowledge only offers problems; it suggests gaps, which indeed further reflection serves at first only to deepen into contradictions. Such a psychology is “speculative”: i.e. it is not content to accept the mere given, but goes forward and backward to find something that will make the fact intelligible. It employs totally different methods from the “classification, induction, analogy” familiar to the logic of the empirical sciences. Its “principles,” therefore, are not given facts: but facts which have been manipulated and adjusted so as to lose their self-contradictory quality: they are facts “reduced,” by introducing the omitted relationships which they postulate if they are to be true and self-consistent24. While it is far from rejecting or ignoring experience, therefore, psychology cannot strictly be said to build upon it alone. It uses experimental fact as an unfinished datum,—or it sees in [pg lxiv] experience a torso which betrays its imperfection, and suggests completing.
The starting-point, it may be said, of Herbart's psychology is a question which to the ordinary psychologist (and to the so-called scientific psychologist) has a secondary, if it have any interest. It was, he says, the problem of Personality, the problem of the Self or Ego, which first led to his characteristic conception of psychological method. “My first discovery,” he tells us25, “was that the Self was neither primitive nor independent, but must be the most dependent and most conditioned thing one can imagine. The second was that the elementary ideas of an intelligent being, if they were ever to reach the pitch of self-consciousness, must be either all, or at least in part, opposed to each other, and that they must check or block one another in consequence of this opposition. Though held in check, however, these ideas were not to be supposed lost: they subsist as endeavours or tendencies to return into the position of actual idea, as soon as the check became, for any reason, either in whole or in part inoperative. This check could and must be calculated, and thus it was clear that psychology required a mathematical as well as a metaphysical foundation.”
The place of the conception of the Ego in Kant's and Fichte's theory of knowledge is well known. Equally well known is Kant's treatment of the soul-reality or soul-substance in his examination of Rational Psychology. Whereas the (logical) unity of consciousness, or “synthetic unity of apperception,” is assumed as a fundamental starting-point in explanation of our objective judgments, or of our knowledge of objective existence, its real (as opposed to its formal) foundation in a “substantial” soul is set aside as an illegitimate [pg lxv] interpretation of, or inference from, the facts of inner experience. The belief in the separate unity and persistence of the soul, said Kant, is not a scientifically-warranted conclusion. Its true place is as an ineffaceable postulate of the faith which inspires human life and action. Herbart did not rest content with either of these—as he believed—dogmatic assumptions of his master. He did not fall in cheerfully with the idealism which seemed ready to dispense with a soul, or which justified its acceptance of empirical reality by referring to the fundamental unity of the function of judgment. With a strong bent towards fully-differentiated and individualised experience Herbart conjoined a conviction of the need of logical analysis to prevent us being carried away by the first-come and inadequate generalities. The Ego which, in its extremest abstraction, he found defined as the unity of subject and object, did not seem to him to offer the proper guarantees of reality: it was itself a problem, full of contradictions, waiting for solution. On the other hand, the real Ego, or self of concrete experience, is very much more than this logical abstract, and differs widely from individual to individual, and apparently from time to time even in the same individual. Our self, of which we talk so fluently, as one and the self-same—how far does it really possess the continuity and identity with which we credit it? Does it not rather seem to be an ideal which we gradually form and set before ourselves as the standard for measuring our attainments of the moment,—the perfect fulfilment of that oneness of being and purpose and knowledge which we never reach? Sometimes even it seems no better than a name which we move along the varying phenomena of our inner life, at one time identifying it with the power which has gained the victory in a moral struggle, at another with that which [pg lxvi] has been defeated26, according as the attitude of the moment makes us throw now one, now another, aspect of mental activity in the foreground.
The other—or logical Ego—the mere identity of subject and object,—when taken in its utter abstractness and simplicity, shrivels up to something very small indeed—to a something which is little better than nothing. The mere I which is not contra-distinguished by a Thou and a He—which is without all definiteness of predication (the I=I of Fichte and Schelling)—is only as it were a point of being cut off from all its connexions in reality, and treated as if it were or could be entirely independent. It is an identity in which subject and object have not yet appeared: it is not a real I, though we may still retain the name. It is—as Hegel's Logic will tell us—exactly definable as Being, which is as yet Nothing: the impossible edge of abstraction on which we try—and in vain—to steady ourselves at the initial point of thought. And to reach or stand at that intangible, ungraspable point, which slips away as we approach, and transmutes itself as we hold it, is not the natural beginning, but the result of introspection and reflection on the concrete self. But with this aspect of the question we are not now concerned.
That the unity of the Self as an intelligent and moral being, that the Ego of self-consciousness was an ideal and a product of development, was what Herbart soon became convinced of. The unity of Self is even as given in mature experience an imperfect fact. It is a fact, that is, which does not come up to what it promised, and which requires to be supplemented,
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