HEGELIAN ABSOLUTE IDEALISM - SHIJIN PULIMOOTTIL B09032

-- 

HEGELIAN ABSOLUTE IDEALISM

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel is one among those German philosophers whose dialectical system has been called idealistic. Hegel's Absolute Idealism could be vividly understood in his arguments in his books entitled The Difference between Fichte's and Schelling's System of Philosophy and Phenomenology of Spirit. While in the first he criticizes Fichte's "subjective idealism" in the latter he even criticized Schelling's system which led to the development of his own version of absolute idealism.

 Hegel called his philosophy absolute idealism, in contrast to the "subjective idealism" of Berkeley and the "transcendental idealism" of Kant and Fichte's philosophies, which were not based on the critique of the finite, and a dialectical philosophy of history. Infact in his Science of Logic, Hegel argued that finite qualities are not fully "real," because they depend on other finite qualities to determine them; and hence any doctrine, such as materialism, that asserts finite qualities or merely natural objects are fully real, is mistaken.

Hegelian dialectics had dealt in a wider sense about the Being. According to him Being is characterized in its development by three stages: being (thesis), non-being (antithesis), and becoming (synthesis). In other words, the preceding entity (being) is affirmed with its opposite (non-being) in a higher entity (becoming). It is in this that Hegel's system of triads consists. Hegel believed that he had found a confirmation of this dynamic development, in which nothing is nullified but everything is revaluated in a higher development, in the growth of our stable ego. At every moment of the development of our personality we pass from state to state, and yet the preceding reality is not nullified, but is affirmed in a richer and more conscious ego.

The fundamental notion of Hegel's dialectic is that things or ideas have internal contradictions. From Hegel's point of view, analysis or comprehension of a thing or idea reveals that underneath its apparently simple identity or unity is an underlying inner contradiction. This contradiction leads to the dissolution of the thing or idea in the simple form in which it presented itself and to a higher-level, more complex thing or idea that more adequately incorporates the contradiction. The triadic form that appears in many places in Hegel, being-nothingness-becoming, is about this movement from inner contradiction to higher-level of integration or unification.

He further found that the important characteristic of the primordial reality is its rationality. Primordial Being is essentially thought, idea, and logos. Hence logic is the rule of the entire series of its developments; the entire unbroken series, in which Being divides itself and recomposes itself in thesis, antithesis and synthesis, is rational. In the primordial Being, thought is identified with reality, so that the order of ideas coincides perfectly with the order of beings. Thus Hegel asserts "Any real being is rational and the rational being alone is real."

The guiding ideal behind Hegel's absolute idealism is the scientific thought, which he shares with Plato and other great idealist thinkers, that the exercise of reason and intellect enables the philosopher to know ultimate historical reality, which in the Hegelian system is the phenomenological constitution of self-determination. By giving this ideal a central role in his philosophy, Hegel made a lasting contribution to that part of the Western mindset which makes Idealism the basis of civilization and progress in the world.