The Logic of Hegel · Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
THIRD ATTITUDE OF THOUGHT TO OBJECTIVITY.
72.] A _second_ corollary which results from holding immediacy of consciousness to be the criterion of truth is that all superstition or idolatry is allowed to be truth, and that an apology is prepared for any contents of the will, however wrong and immoral. It is because he believes in them, and not from the reasoning and syllogism of what is termed mediate knowledge, that the Hindoo finds God in the cow, the monkey, the Brahmin, or the Lama. But the natural desires and affections spontaneously carry and deposit their interests in consciousness, where also immoral aims make themselves naturally at home: the good or bad character would thus express the _definite being_ of the will, which would be known, and that most immediately, in the interests and aims. 73.] _Thirdly_ and lastly, the immediate consciousness of God goes no further than to tell us _that_ He is: to tell us _what_ He is, would be an act of cognition, involving mediation. So that God as an object of religion is expressly narrowed down to the indeterminate supersensible, God in general: and the significance of religion is reduced to a minimum. If it were really needful to win back and secure the bare belief that there is a God, or even to create it, we might well wonder at the poverty of the age which can see a gain in the merest pittance of religious consciousness, and which in its church has sunk so low as to worship at the altar that stood in Athens long ago, dedicated to the 'Unknown God.'
74.] We have still briefly to indicate the general nature of the form of immediacy. For it is the essential one-sidedness of the category, which makes whatever comes under it one sided and, for that reason, finite. And, first, it makes the universal no better than an abstraction external to the particulars, and God a being without determinate quality. But God can only be called a spirit when He is known to be at once the beginning and end, as well as the mean, in the process of mediation. Without this unification of elements He is neither concrete, nor living, nor a spirit. Thus the knowledge of God as a spirit necessarily implies mediation. The form of immediacy, secondly, invests the particular with the character of independent or self-centred being. But such predicates contradict the very essence of the particular,--which is to be referred to something else outside. They thus invest the finite with the character of an absolute. But, besides, the form of immediacy is altogether abstract: it has no preference for one set of contents more than another, but is equally susceptible of all: it may as well sanction what is idolatrous and immoral as the reverse. Only when we discern that the content,--the particular, is not self-subsistent, but derivative from something else, are its finitude and untruth shown in their proper light. Such discernment, where the content we discern carries with it the ground of its dependent nature, is a knowledge which involves mediation. The only content which can be held to be the truth is one not mediated with something else, not limited by other things: or, otherwise expressed, it is one mediated by itself, where mediation and immediate reference-to-self coincide. The understanding that fancies it has got clear of finite knowledge, the identity of the analytical metaphysicians and the old 'rationalists,' abruptly takes again as principle and criterion of truth that immediacy which, as an abstract reference-to-self, is the same as abstract identity. Abstract thought (the scientific form used by 'reflective' metaphysic) and abstract intuition (the form used by immediate knowledge) are one and the same.
The stereotyped opposition between the form of immediacy and that of mediation gives to the former a halfness and inadequacy, that affects every content which is brought under it. Immediacy means, upon the whole, an abstract reference-to-self, that is, an abstract identity or abstract universality. Accordingly the essential and real universal, when taken merely in its immediacy, is a mere abstract universal; and from this point of view God is conceived as a being altogether without determinate quality. To call God spirit is in that case only a phrase: for the consciousness and self-consciousness, which spirit implies, are impossible without a distinguishing of it from itself and from something else, _i.e._ without mediation. 75.] It was impossible for us to criticise this, the third attitude, which thought has been made to take towards objective truth, in any other mode than what is naturally indicated and admitted in the doctrine itself. The theory asserts that immediate knowledge is a fact. It has been shown to be untrue in fact to say that there is an immediate knowledge, a knowledge without mediation either by means of something else or in itself. It has also been explained to be false in fact to say that thought advances through finite and conditioned categories only, which are always mediated by a something else, and to forget that in the very act of mediation the mediation itself vanishes. And to show that, in point of fact, there is a knowledge which advances neither by unmixed immediacy nor by unmixed mediation, we can point to the example of Logic and the whole of philosophy.
76.] If we view the maxims of immediate knowledge in connexion with the uncritical metaphysic of the past from which we started, we shall learn from the comparison the reactionary nature of the school of Jacobi. His doctrine is a return to the modern starting-point of this metaphysic in the Cartesian philosophy. Both Jacobi and Descartes maintain the following three points: (1) The simple inseparability of the thought and being of the thinker. '_Cogito, ergo sum_' is the same doctrine as that the being, reality, and existence of the 'Ego' is immediately revealed to me in consciousness. (Descartes, in fact, is careful to state that by thought he means consciousness in general. Princip. Phil. I. 9.) This inseparability is the absolutely first and most certain knowledge, not mediated or demonstrated. (2) The inseparability of existence from the conception of God: the former is necessarily implied in the latter, or the conception never can be without the attribute of existence, which is thus necessary and eternal.[2] (3) The immediate consciousness of the existence of external things. By this nothing more is meant than sense-consciousness. To have such a thing is the slightest of all cognitions: and the only thing worth knowing about it is that such immediate knowledge of the being of things external is error and delusion, that the sensible world as such is altogether void of truth; that the being of these external things is accidental and passes away as a show; and that their very nature is to have only an existence which is separable from their essence and notion.
77.] There is however a distinction between the two points of view: (1) The Cartesian philosophy, from these unproved postulates, which it assumes to be unprovable, proceeds to wider and wider details of knowledge, and thus gave rise to the sciences of modern times. The modern theory (of Jacobi), on the contrary, (§ 62) has come to what is intrinsically a most important conclusion that cognition, proceeding as it must by finite mediations, can know only the finite, and never embody the truth; and would fain have the consciousness of God go no further than the aforesaid very abstract belief that God _is_.[3] (2) The modern doctrine on the one hand makes no change in the Cartesian method of the usual scientific knowledge, and conducts on the same plan the experimental and finite sciences that have sprung from it. But, on the other hand, when it comes to the science which has infinity for its scope, it throws aside that method, and thus, as it knows no other, it rejects all methods. It abandons itself to wild vagaries of imagination and assertion, to a moral priggishness and sentimental arrogance, or to a reckless dogmatising and lust of argument, which is loudest against philosophy and philosophic doctrines. Philosophy of course tolerates no mere assertions or conceits, and checks the free play of argumentative see-saw.
78.] We must then reject the opposition between an independent immediacy in the contents or facts of consciousness and an equally independent mediation, supposed incompatible with the former. The incompatibility is a mere assumption, an arbitrary assertion. All other assumptions and postulates must in like manner be left behind at the entrance to philosophy, whether they are derived from the intellect or the imagination. For philosophy is the science, in which every such proposition must first be scrutinised and its meaning and oppositions be ascertained. Scepticism, made a negative science and systematically applied to all forms of knowledge, might seem a suitable introduction, as pointing out the nullity of such assumptions. But a sceptical introduction would be not only an ungrateful but also a useless course; and that because Dialectic, as we shall soon make appear, is itself an essential element of affirmative science. Scepticism, besides, could only get hold of the finite forms as they were suggested by experience, taking them as given, instead of deducing them scientifically. To require such a scepticism accomplished is the same as to insist on science being preceded by universal doubt, or a total absence of presupposition. Strictly speaking, in the resolve that _wills pure thought,_ this requirement is accomplished by freedom which, abstracting from everything, grasps its pure abstraction, the simplicity of thought.
Thus in modern times, travellers have found tribes (as Captains Ross and Parry found the Esquimaux) which, as they tell us, have not even that small modicum of religion possessed by African sorcerers, the _goëtes_ of Herodotus. On the other hand, an Englishman, who spent the first months of the last Jubilee at Rome, says, in his account of the modern Romans, that the common people are bigots, whilst those who can read and write are atheists to a man. The charge of Atheism is seldom heard in modern times: principally because the facts and the requirements of religion are reduced to a minimum. (See § 73.) [2] Descartes, Princip. Phil. I. 15: _Magis hoc (ens summe perfectum existere) credet, si attendat, nullius alterius rei ideam apud se inveniri, in qua eodem modo necessariam existentiam contineri animadveriat;--intelliget illam ideam exhibere veram et immutabilem naturam, quaeque non potest non existere, cum necessaria existentia in ea contineatur._ (The reader will be more disposed to _believe_ that there exists a being supremely perfect, if he notes that in the case of nothing else is there found in him an idea, in which he notices necessary existence to be contained in the same way. He will see that that idea exhibits a true and unchangeable nature,--a nature which _cannot but exist,_ since necessary existence is _contained in it._) A remark which immediately follows, and which sounds like mediation or demonstration, does not really prejudice the original principle.
In Spinoza we come upon the same statement that the essence or abstract conception of God implies existence. The first of Spinoza's definitions, that of the _Causa Sui_ (or Self-Cause), explains it to be _cujus essentia involvit existentiam, sive id cujus natura non potest concipi nisi existens_ (that of which the essence involves existence, or that whose nature cannot be conceived except as existing). The inseparability of the notion from being is the main point and fundamental hypothesis in his system. But what notion is thus inseparable from being? Not the notion of finite things, for they are so constituted as to have a contingent and a created existence. Spinoza's 11th proposition, which follows with a proof that God exists necessarily, and his 20th, showing that God's existence and his essence are one and the same, are really superfluous, and the proof is more in form than in reality. To say, that God is Substance, the only Substance, and that, as Substance is _Causa Sui,_ God therefore exists necessarily, is merely stating that God is that of which the notion and the being are inseparable. [3] Anselm on the contrary says: _Negligentiae mihi videtur, si post-quam confirmati sumus in fide, non studemus, quod credimus, intelligere._ (Methinks it is _carelessness,_ if, after we have been confirmed in the faith, we do not _exert ourselves to see the meaning of what we believe._) [Tractat. Cur Deus Homo?] These words of Anselm, in connexion with the concrete truths of Christian doctrine, offer a far harder problem for investigation, than is contemplated by this modern faith.
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