The Will to Believe, and Other Essays in Popular Philosophy · William James
ON SOME HEGELISMS.[1]
But I have tired the reader out. The worst of criticising Hegel is that the very arguments we use against him give forth strange and hollow sounds that make them seem almost as fantastic as the errors to which they are addressed. The sense of a universal mirage, of a ghostly unreality, steals over us, which is the very moonlit atmosphere of Hegelism itself. What wonder then if, instead of {293} converting, our words do but rejoice and delight, those already baptized in the faith of confusion? To their charmed senses we all seem children of Hegel together, only some of us have not the wit to know our own father. Just as Romanists are sure to inform us that our reasons against Papal Christianity unconsciously breathe the purest spirit of Catholicism, so Hegelism benignantly smiles at our exertions, and murmurs, "If the red slayer think he slays;" "When me they fly, I am the wings," etc. To forefend this unwelcome adoption, let me recapitulate in a few propositions the reasons why I am not an hegelian. 1. We cannot eat our cake and have it; that is, the only real contradiction there can be between thoughts is where one is true, the other false. When this happens, one must go forever; nor is there any 'higher synthesis' in which both can wholly revive.
2. A chasm is not a bridge in any utilizable sense; that is, no mere negation can be the instrument of a positive advance in thought. 3. The continua, time, space, and the ego, are bridges, because they are without chasm. 4. But they bridge over the chasms between represented qualities only partially. 5. This partial bridging, however, makes the qualities share in a common world. 6. The other characteristics of the qualities are separate facts. 7. But the same quality appears in many times and spaces. Generic sameness of the quality wherever found becomes thus a further means by which the jolts are reduced. 8. What between different qualities jolts remain. {294} Each, as far as the other is concerned, is an absolutely separate and contingent being. 9. The moral judgment may lead us to postulate as irreducible the contingencies of the world. 10. Elements mutually contingent are not in conflict so long as they partake of the continua of time, space, etc.,--partaking being the exact opposite of strife. They conflict only when, as mutually exclusive possibilities, they strive to possess themselves of the same parts of time, space, and ego. 11. That there are such real conflicts, irreducible to any intelligence, and giving rise to an excess of possibility over actuality, is an hypothesis, but a credible one. No philosophy should pretend to be anything more.
NOTE.--Since the preceding article was written, some observations on the effects of nitrous-oxide-gas-intoxication which I was prompted to make by reading the pamphlet called The Anaesthetic Revelation and the Gist of Philosophy, by Benjamin Paul Blood, Amsterdam, N. Y., 1874, have made me understand better than ever before both the strength and the weakness of Hegel's philosophy. I strongly urge others to repeat the experiment, which with pure gas is short and harmless enough. The effects will of course vary with the individual. Just as they vary in the same individual from time to time; but it is probable that in the former case, as in the latter, a generic resemblance will obtain. With me, as with every other person of whom I have heard, the keynote of the experience is the tremendously exciting sense of an intense metaphysical illumination. Truth lies open to the view in depth beneath depth of almost blinding evidence. The mind sees all the logical relations of being with an apparent subtlety and instantaneity to which its normal consciousness offers no parallel; only as sobriety returns, the feeling of insight fades, and one is left staring vacantly at a few disjointed words and phrases, as one stares at a cadaverous-looking snow-peak from which the sunset glow has just fled, or at the black cinder left by an extinguished brand.
What's mistake but a kind of take? What's nausea but a kind of -ausea? Sober, drunk, -_unk_, astonishment. Everything can become the subject of criticism--how criticise without something _to_ criticise? Agreement--disagreement!! Emotion--motion!!! Die away from, _from_, die away (without the _from_). Reconciliation of opposites; sober, drunk, all the same! Good and evil reconciled in a laugh! It escapes, it escapes! But---- What escapes, WHAT escapes? Emphasis, EMphasis; there must be some emphasis in order for there to be a phasis. No verbiage can give it, because the verbiage is _other_. _In_coherent, coherent--same. And it fades! And it's infinite! AND it's infinite! If it was n't _going_, why should you hold on to it? Don't you see the difference, don't you see the identity? Constantly opposites united! The same me telling you to write and not to write! Extreme--extreme, extreme! Within the _ex_tensity that 'extreme' contains is contained the '_extreme_' of intensity. Something, and _other_ than that thing! Intoxication, and _otherness_ than intoxication. Every attempt at betterment,--every attempt at otherment,--is a----. It fades forever and forever as we move. {297} There _is_ a reconciliation! Reconciliation--_e_conciliation! By God, how that hurts! By God, how it _does n't_ hurt! Reconciliation of two extremes. By George, nothing but _o_thing! That sounds like nonsense, but it is pure _on_sense! Thought deeper than speech----! Medical school; divinity school, _school_! SCHOOL! Oh my God, oh God, oh God!
The most coherent and articulate sentence which came was this:-- There are no differences but differences of degree between different degrees of difference and no difference. This phrase has the true Hegelian ring, being in fact a regular _sich als sich auf sich selbst beziehende Negativität_. And true Hegelians will _überhaupt_ be able to read between the lines and feel, at any rate, what _possible_ ecstasies of cognitive emotion might have bathed these tattered fragments of thought when they were alive. But for the assurance of a certain amount of respect from them, I should hardly have ventured to print what must be such caviare to the general. But now comes the reverse of the medal. What is the principle of unity in all this monotonous rain of instances? Although I did not see it at first, I soon found that it was in each case nothing but the abstract _genus_ of which the conflicting terms were opposite species. In other words, although the flood of ontologic _emotion_ was Hegelian through and through, the _ground_ for it was nothing but the world-old principle that things are the same only so far and no farther than they _are_ the same, or partake of a common nature,--the principle that Hegel most tramples under foot. At the same time the rapture of beholding a process that was infinite, changed (as the nature of the infinitude was realized by the mind) into the sense of a dreadful and ineluctable fate, with whose magnitude every finite effort is incommensurable and in the light of which whatever happens is indifferent. This instantaneous revulsion of mood from rapture to horror is, perhaps, the strongest emotion I have ever experienced. I got it repeatedly when the inhalation was continued long enough to produce incipient nausea; and I cannot but regard it as the normal and inevitable outcome of the {298} intoxication, if sufficiently prolonged. A pessimistic fatalism, depth within depth of impotence and indifference, reason and silliness united, not in a higher synthesis, but in the fact that whichever you choose it is all one,--this is the upshot of a revelation that began so rosy bright.
Even when the process stops short of this ultimatum, the reader will have noticed from the phrases quoted how often it ends by losing the clue. Something 'fades,' 'escapes;' and the feeling of insight is changed into an intense one of bewilderment, puzzle, confusion, astonishment. I know no more singular sensation than this intense bewilderment, with nothing particular left to be bewildered at save the bewilderment itself. It seems, indeed, _a causa sui_, or 'spirit become its own object.' My conclusion is that the togetherness of things in a common world, the law of sharing, of which I have said so much, may, when perceived, engender a very powerful emotion, that Hegel was so unusually susceptible to this emotion throughout his life that its gratification became his supreme end, and made him tolerably unscrupulous as to the means he employed; that _indifferentism_ is the true outcome of every view of the world which makes infinity and continuity to be its essence, and that pessimistic or optimistic attitudes pertain to the mere accidental subjectivity of the moment; finally, that the identification of contradictories, so far from being the self-developing process which Hegel supposes, is really a self-consuming process, passing from the less to the more abstract, and terminating either in a laugh at the ultimate nothingness, or in a mood of vertiginous amazement at a meaningless infinity.
Ideas discussed in this chapter
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