Hegel and the Metaphysical Frontiers of Political Theory by Eric Lee Goodfield

Author:Eric Lee Goodfield [Goodfield, Eric Lee]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Political Science, General
ISBN: 9781317665236
Google: 49npAwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2014-06-27T09:50:37+00:00

Being

The Parmenidean origins of the dialectic

The history of philosophy for Hegel is a series of successive understandings of the absolute, and this narrative represents the development of the Idea towards its consummation. As each emerges and surmounts the last it does not deny its core, but rather transforms it and absorbs its content in the process of negation and speculative affirmation. “The One” of the Eleatics is the first thought phase of this evolution in the understanding of absolute being. This is the absolute of immediacy and indeterminacy and therefore remains wholly abstract; the universal understood only in terms of its universality. This represents not only the beginning of thought but the beginning itself. The serial development of philosophy therefore witnesses not the fossilized remains of the corpses of the ideas of the past for Hegel, but rather vital and necessary stages on the way to the present, and as such, the intellectual past is always present:

the history of philosophy deals not with the past, but with what is eternal and absolutely present, and its result must be compared not to a gallery of errors of the human spirit, but rather to a pantheon of divine figures [Gottergestalten]. These divine figures are the various stages of the idea as they emerged successively in the dialectical development.105

This “pantheon” of the Idea, one which the structure of the Logic mirrors in its recapitulation of the dialectical phases of the historical and active Idea, begins with this development and especially with Parmenides’ first thesis in his On Nature: Being alone is, and Nothing is not. Where the dialectic moves from the wholeness of the universal to the particular and completes its cycle in the individual, the initial phase of being presents the universal in its isolation as the starting point of the logic.106 The search for the meaning and ultimate status of universals is thus a point of departure for Hegel. The Eleatic conception of “the One” as absolute being is herein taken as the first philosophically coherent utterance, within the putative Western tradition, as it directs itself to the problem which phenomena present for the stability of universal ideas themselves. Thus for Hegel as for the Eleatics, the problem of universals runs to the heart of the philosophical project, and, for Hegel at least, unites the partisans of philosophy in a timeless dialog—his Pantheon of the mind—seeking to ameliorate the controversy of the whole and the part, the mind and the senses, for thought.

Despite the fact that the Eleatics remained in a static and abstract conception of pure being in metaphysical understanding, Hegel recognized that to admit of an “other” to being, that there is being and its other, is absurd. What remains for being, he claimed, is precisely to confront nothing and to sink into it as opposite so as to gain the fixity of determinacy and become concrete. That is, in Hegel’s elaboration, being must become something other than itself, and that is precisely the diversity of the concrete and real.

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