10. Hegel’s Revolution in Philosophy¶
Core Argument¶
Chapter 10: Hegel’s Revolution in Philosophy¶
Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (1807) traces the development of thought from its most abstract forms to the Notion, examining each stage dialectically within its own limits. Philosophy, unlike mathematics, must justify its own conceptions and presupposes nothing. Hegel’s idealism presents historical development as the development of self-conscious spirit, but Marx read him materialistically to extract the rational kernel: behind the abstract presentation lie real processes in nature, society, and mind. Engels praised Hegel for representing the whole world—natural, historical, intellectual—as a constant process of motion and development, making history appear as humanity’s own evolution rather than senseless violence. The dialectical method, not the arbitrary idealist system, was the revolution.
The initial grasp of any subject is a bare abstraction, lacking concrete content and detailed interconnections. Common thought relies on sense perception and ‘common sense’, sufficient for everyday life but inadequate for scientific understanding, which requires grasping hidden laws beyond deceptive appearances. Ordinary thought clings to the familiar and is conservative, accepting prejudices uncritically until profound change forces questioning. Dialectics opposes this conformism, challenging the law of identity by asserting that everything changes. Empiricist ‘common sense’ is the lowest form of knowledge; deeper analysis reveals contradictory tendencies underlying all things, which are the source of movement and development. Formal logic is sufficient within limits, but beyond them dialectics is essential as the logic of contradiction. Hegel demonstrates that sense-certainty’s ‘here’ and ‘now’ are unstable and false, revealing the contradictory nature of movement. The dialectical method demands objective immersion in the object to determine its inner contradictions, as in Marx’s Capital.
All things possess quantitative features—magnitude, number, volume, speed—which do not alter an object’s nature until a definite limit is reached, producing sudden qualitative transformation. The attempt to reduce quality to quantity, as mathematics does, is a fundamental error Marx and Engels called the metaphysical mode of thought, now termed reductionism. Everything in reality is the unity of quantity and quality, which Hegel called Measure. The Doctrine of Essence explains the dialectic in detail: identity presupposes difference, and contradiction lies at the heart of everything that exists. Essence is manifested through appearance; a thing is the sum-total of its properties. In essence, everything is relative, standing in relation to an Other. A given form of society is rational only to the degree it develops productive forces; once it fails, it becomes irrational and loses its right to exist.
Possibility and actuality are dialectical stages in development. Abstract possibility merely denotes an absence of excluding conditions, leading to confusion; real potential requires all necessary factors for a qualitative leap. Causality in isolation is an abstraction; every effect has a counter-effect, forming universal interaction. Hegel reintroduced accident, which mechanist philosophy had banned. Order emerges from apparent chaos: necessity reveals itself through accident, confirmed by natural selection and modern complexity theory. This law also applies to history, as Marx and Engels argued regarding the role of ‘great men’. Hegel’s supreme achievement was the Notion, a process from abstract to concrete, from implicit to explicit. However, his idealism led to the Absolute Idea, a contradiction with dialectics. His epoch-making merit was propounding the problem of historical evolution without final truth. His dialectic, limited to thought, contained the potential realised in Marxism, where philosophy enters the realm of practice. Socialism aims to create conditions for humanity to realise its potential.