Hegel’s historical dialectic

Hegel realizes that the principle of practice cannot be fulfilled starting out from the individual subject and a formalistic paradigm of knowledge. The dialectical unification of subject and object requires a subject that is also an object, a subject commensurate with the reality it knows. This is the demand that the “subject be substance.” Lukács explains:

Only if the subject (consciousness, thought) were both producer and product of the dialectical process, only if, as a result the subject moved in a self-created world of which it is the conscious form and only if the world imposed itself upon it in full objectivity, only then can the problem of dialectics, and with it the abolition of the antitheses of subject and object, thought and existence, freedom and necessity, be held to be solved.³²

In sum, the antinomies must be resolved not by a mythologized transcendental subject modeled on the individual, but by a principle immanent to the world.

To establish that principle, Hegel takes the Kantian construction of the subject–object relation and shatters its ontological basis in the traditional concepts of subject and object, which Kant and his followers presupposed.³³ If thought and things are no longer defined as ontologically independent domains of being, in what form can they be grasped? Hegel proceeds to “release” the correlated attributes of subjectivity and objectivity from their reification in the hypostasized individual subject and object. Once released from the grip of their traditional ontological base, the attributes of thought and things are thematized in new combinations in a dialectical ontology.

In this ontology, functions of the subject, such as reflection, appearance, synthesis, and abstract form are transferred to the real where they organize its dialectical movement. As Marcuse puts it, “Formulated paradoxically, human consciousness does not grasp objectivity, not even in its transcendental form; rather, conceiving is the doing and essence of objectivity itself. Conceptual activity and human concepts can be true and reach the essence of objectivity only because conceptual activity constitutes the essence of objectivity.”³⁴ The traditional subject and object no longer appear in antinomic opposition, but are now derived from a more basic unity.³⁵ Hegel was thus finally able to discover a way of uniting form and content, the rational categories of philosophy and their material substratum. This is the significance of the dialectic.

In contrast with the formalistic notion of explanation through classification under universal concepts, dialectical mediation unfolds the implicit meaning of its immediate starting point. In a sense, then, the immediate is always already mediated if only inarticulately. There are no things-in-themselves, “sense data” or other preconceptual entities that are given form for the first time by thought since the essential element in which thought moves, meaning, is already implicit in its “material” presupposition.

In Hegel the object of knowledge is neither an inert unreflected substance nor is it created by a transcendental subject. As Robert Pippin shows, Hegel’s project radicalizes

critical philosophy’s attempt at reason’s reliance on itself alone in accounting for experience or evaluating action, but it attempts to do so … by avoiding or denying any assumption that such self-determination should be understood as “imposing itself” on a foreign manifold or object … Whatever comes to count as a constraint or limit on thought’s self-determination is itself viewed as a kind of product or result, a higher or more comprehensive level, of thought’s self-determination.³⁶

Given this approach, the system cannot be exposited more geometrico because it depends on a process. That process is a mediation rather than a demonstration. It is narrated rather than deduced. History is the ontological region uniquely suited to such a process of mediation. In history the alterity of the object is time-bound rather than metaphysical. Time belongs to the unfolding process of meaning-making. It separates the implicit from the explicit meaning and the gap between them is overcome in time. Thus Hegel treats history as reality, as ontologically fundamental.

Hegel’s turn toward history marks a sharp break with rationalism. Rationalism finds in history its least suitable object because history involves newness and qualitative change. Formal reason can only grasp history in terms of a system of foreseeable possibilities derived from abstract, atemporal laws. But history as a process of concrete becoming escapes it. By contrast, history is the ideal object of dialectics. It embodies a type of objectivity that lends itself to explanation in terms of a non-formalistic concept of reason.

But, Lukács argues, for history to provide a solution to the problems of classical German philosophy, it would be necessary to discover the subject of history not only speculatively but in fact, to find the real “we” whose action is history. Hegel’s version of the historical subject is the Spirit of Peoples. But peoples do not understand the significance of their own action. They are not conscious of the truth of their deeds, which can only be comprehended once completed, once history has passed on to a new stage and the past is delivered over to philosophical reflection.

A mediation that transcends history stands between the activity of the historical subject and the meaning of its acts. Hegel conceptualizes this mediation as a second collective subject, the World Spirit, which uses the Spirit of the Peoples to attain ends the latter does not understand. (Hence the phrase “cunning of reason.”) Lukács concludes that Hegel’s subject of history can never claim its acts as its own. It is not the master of its own process, the “subject as substance” that, in achieving self-consciousness, transcends the antinomies of reified thought in the theoretical and practical transformation of reality.

History itself never achieves self-consciousness. Only the World Spirit can accomplish this as it comes to self-awareness in the head of the philosopher at the “end” of history. Reason thus fulfills itself in history only by transcending history. As a result, “History is not able to form the living body of the total system: it becomes a part, an aspect of the totality that culminates in the ‘absolute spirit,’ in art, religion and philosophy. But history is much too much the natural, and indeed the uniquely possible life-element of the dialectical method for such an enterprise to succeed.”³⁷

This, according to Lukács, explains why Hegel is obliged to confront the antinomies of classical German philosophy outside of history in the realm of absolute spirit. As soon as dialectics deploys itself in that timeless realm the problems of form and content arise once again. The dialectical categories continue to “develop” in the theory of absolute spirit and in pure logic, but as eternal forms detached from the real becoming of the world. This dialectical process is purely ideal, no longer corresponding to the real time of historical action.

Hegel’s work is the culmination of classical German philosophy, drawing the logical conclusions from its various experiments and discoveries. In spite of his limitations, Hegel did discover two essential conditions of the principle of practice, the dialectic, and the special affinity of dialectics for history. However, until the actual subject of this practice is also discovered reason cannot be founded rationally. This, Lukács believes, awaited the Marxist theory of history. Marxism arises directly on the soil of the Hegelian system, but informed by a far deeper insight into the empirical stuff of history. In Marxism the speculative character of the Hegelian approach is finally overcome in a correct understanding of history. “In this sense Marx’s critique of Hegel is the direct continuation and extension of the criticism that Hegel himself leveled at Kant and Fichte.”³⁸