Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 10, No. 1. (Sep., 1949), pp

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1 The Logics of Hegel and Russell A. Ushenko Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 10, No. 1. (Sep., 1949), pp Stable URL: Philosophy and Phenomenological Research is currently published by International Phenomenological Society. Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use, available at JSTOR's Terms and Conditions of Use provides, in part, that unless you have obtained prior permission, you may not download an entire issue of a journal or multiple copies of articles, and you may use content in the JSTOR archive only for your personal, non-commercial use. Please contact the publisher regarding any further use of this work. Publisher contact information may be obtained at Each copy of any part of a JSTOR transmission must contain the same copyright notice that appears on the screen or printed page of such transmission. JSTOR is an independent not-for-profit organization dedicated to and preserving a digital archive of scholarly journals. For more information regarding JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. Fri May 25 09:46:

2 DISCUSSION THE LOGICS OF HEGEL AND RUSSELL An outstanding distinction of A History of Western Philosophy (New York, Simon and Schuster, 1945),a history which is of course remarkable in many other ways, is Russell's generally successful application of formal tenets of modern logic (which owes much to his earlier work) to his favorites and victims alike in order to reach a definitive appraisal of their philosophical views, a masterful employment of logical analysis. This distinction, however, turns to disadvantage in the chapter on Hegel because Hegel's own logic, or dialectic, is utterly uncongenial to Russell's logic.' It would seem that psychologically Russell's misunderstanding of Hegel was inevitable. For while both men take logic to be the essence of philosophy, their understanding of the nature and function of logic has very little in common. How far they stand apart may be indicated at the outset. Formal logic, according to Russell, is the basis of philosophical analysis; to Hegel, on the other hand, formal logic and analysis are useful only within the limits of common sense and empirical science while a different logic, which is intensional and dialectical, dominates the higher level of philosophy. The purpose of my paper is to elaborate on this initial statement of two different conceptions of logic, and, in the course of elaboration, expose the points of Russell's misunderstanding which, once exposed, suggest a certain line of mediation. This line, let me emphasise an important point in advance, is neither an attempt to synthesise or integrate the two logics, nor a return to Hegel; and for this negative reason the exposition of my line of mediation forms an almost independent essay, i.e., the present paper falls apart into two loosely connected sections. Although I do not claim to be an expert on German idealism, I think I have a right to assert with finality that Russell has misunderstood Hegel. There is, of course, Russell's own admission that he finds Hegel "the hardest to understand of all the great philosophers." But this is not an admission of a failure to understand Hegel, even if it induces me to suspect such a failure. Three things, however, turn my suspicion into certainty. First, there is a general consideration concerning correct interpretation of the past. The widely accepted ideal of exact reproduction, according to which a great philosophy of the past can be accounted for in modern terms and idiom, is false and unrealizable. The past is dead unless viewed within the 'This paper is not concerned with, and does not question, the correctness of Russell's account of Hegel's Philosophy of History and Philosophy of Law. 107

3 perspective of a later generation, unless reconstructed, that is. History is never written because it requires to be incessantly rewritten. This consideration convinces me that I do not need an expert knowledge of Hegel to tell that his critic's interpretation is ineorrect when I know that his perspective is faulty. Second, Russell's perspective on Hegel is faulty. In the Preface to his History, Russell mentions one condition of a correct perspective when he says that he has aimed at "a sympathetic comprehension of philosophers," and I am sure that any impartial reader would recognize that his chapter on Hegel has missed the aim. In addition, we may expect Russell's perspective to be vitiated by Bradley's influence: the influence during the formative period of his mental development was so powerful that occasionally even now-as I shall show in what followswhen Russell writes "Hegel" he proceeds to exorcise Bradley. Finally, and this is the decisive reason for finding Russell at fault, an interpretation of a philosophy is inadequate when it conflicts with the interpreter's own exposition of that philosophy. I To be entirely fair to Russell, I must draw a distinction between his exposition (op. cit., pp. 7314) and his criticism of Hegel (ibid., pp ). As far as the exposition goes, I take it to be substantially correct. Nevertheless, Russell's use of emphasis in the expository part is sometimes misleading, in fact leading to certain misunderstandings that appear in the critical part. Let me illustrate. Russell begins his exposition with the words: "From Hegel's early interest in mysticism he retained a belief in the unreality of separateness...." A qualification follows within the same paragraph: "The apparently separate things'of which the world seems to be composed are not simply an illusion; each has a greater or lesser degree of reality, and its reality consists in an aspect of the whole, which is what it is seen to be when viewed truly." The qualification straightens the account, but the emphasis that goes with the introductory statement is undoubtedly responsible for such subsequent unguarded characterizations as the remark that Hegel believes that "time is merely an illusion," a remark which would characterize Bradley or McTaggart but not, with the evidence of The Philosophy of History to the contrary, Hegel. Russell, with his usual penetration, points out the main issue in his disagreement with Hegel: "The question at issue is much wider than the truth or falsehood of Hegel's philosophy; it is the question that divides the friends of analysis from its enemies." More specifically, the question at issue is the principle of atomicity which is the basis of analysis. According to the principle of atomicity, a single statement can be a complete unit of meaning and therefore completely true: if we know the logical structure,

4 or syntax, of the statement together with the dictionary meanings of its connotative constituents, we have the necessary and sufficient equipment for the understanding of the statement as a whole without the aid of a wider context; and, conversely, a wider context, or cognitive complex, can be fully understood by analysis into elementary statements, i.e., by translation into a set of single statements, each of an elementary logical form, and all interrelated within a specifiable logical pattern. If our concern is knowledge, or true propositions alone, the principle of atomicity is summed up by the dictum that a single true statement is completely true even though it can never be the complete truth. Another way to state the dictum is to observe that the oath which binds a witness to tell "the whole truth" forces him into perjury, although he can, if he wants to, tell the court "nothing but the truth." Russell proceeds to argue that Hegel and the a enemies of analysis cannot account for the beginning of knowledge, since knowledge must begin with a single sentence, and continue through a sequence of single sentences. He illustrates his point by means of the statement "John is the father of James," and remarks that Hegel would contend that this sentence cannot be understood without knowing everything about John, James, and fatherhood, and that the required extension of knowledge is inevitably progressive so that it cannot be arrested short of a complete knowledge of the whole universe. Similarly, with meaning. "In fact, if Hegel were right, no word could begin to have a meaning, since we should need to know already the meaning of all other words in order to state all the properties of what the word means." This remark, together with Russell's illustrations, would be pertinent against Bradley's Hegelianism. But Hegel himself does not deny that a fact, of the kind that would be expressed by the statement "John is the father of James," can be understood, and known to be a fact, without extending the context of knowledge. Hegel's point is that the truth of an empirical statement is not a metaphysical truth, and his logic is hostile to analysis only because of being the logic of metaphysics. This is to say that Hegel recognizes the usefulness of analysis within the competence of common sense, mathematics, and empirical science, but he does not think that it has any competence in the field of philosophy. In his expository part, Russell actually agrees with my observation, only to drop the point without sufficient emphasis. Let me quote: "Such a question as 'Where was Geasar born?' has for Hegel a straightforward answer, which is true in a sense, but not in the philosophical sense. For philosophy, 'the truth is the whole,' and nothing partial is quite true." The appropriate emphasis, however, is so important that we must turn to Hegel himself. In the Preface to The Phenomenology of the Mind we read: "To questions like 'When was Caesar born?', 'How many feet make a furlong?', etc., a straight answer ought to be given; just as it

5 a is absolutely true that the square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the other two sides of the right-angled triangle. But the nature of a so-called truth of that sort is different from the nature of philosophical truth." Whether or not there is philosophical truth over and above the truths of common sense, empirical science, and mathematics is a different question. The point is that Hegel, whose answer to the question is "Yes," construes his logic, or philosophy, as the science of the whole, of the absolute, i.e., of reality which all things have, or constitute, in common regardless of their particular nature, and not as a concern mith John or James or any other finite and limited individual or thing. Hence Russell's illustrations, and the associated criticism of Hegel insofar as it depends on the nature of the examples, are beside the point. On the other hand, a part of Russell's criticism, to the effect that there can be no knowledge which does not begin mith a single meaningful and true sentence, remains relevant even if we grant the existence of, and confine our consideration to, the philosophical knowledge of the whole. To meet this point of his criticism, let me try to explain the difference between a philosophical truth of Hegel's logic, such as "The Absolute is Being," and an ordinary empirical truth, such as "The earth is round," by analogy with the difference between a perceptual judgment directly about a sense datum and an ordinary empirical statement. Let the reader consider the complex visual sense datum which he perceives while reading this page, and, as an illustration of a perceptual judgment, his assertion "This is a white rectangle, with black letters set within it along parallel lines," where "this" is used as a demonstrative symbol or logical proper name. We have already agreed, and Hegel is a party to the agreement, that the ordinary empirical statement "The earth is round" can be understood, and known to be true, without knowing everything about the earth. With a perceptual judgment, however, the case is different. For example, the reader's perceptual judgment contains, as a constituent designated by the demonstrative symbol "this," his whole sense datum, and therefore, implicitly, everything that can be known about the latter. At the same time, the judgment is only the beginning of knowledge, since more can be learned concerning the sense datum by means of additional perceptual judgments of specification: we may specify the size of the white rectangle, the number of lines and letters, the first letter of the first paragraph, and so on. Thus we can begin our knowledge of the whole sense datum even though this beginning presupposes a knowledge of this whole. Of course we must qualify and admit that the sense in which we begin and develop our knomledge is different from the sense in which there is complete knomledge at the outset. We may, to borrow from Russell one of his epistemological distinctions, say that the initial knowledge of the sense datum is by acquaintance or presentation,

6 whereas the subsequent sequence of perceptual judgments accumulates knowledge by description. We also must contrast the designatum of the symbol "this" as an instance of implicit knowledge with explication and specification arrived at with the aid of the descriptive contents of perceptual judgments. The contrast is based on the fact that the subject of a perceptual judgment, the constituent designated by the demonstrative "this," is, unlike any other constituent within a statement af empirical knowledge, an extralinguistic entity, a sense presentation. Suppose now that a metaphysical statement about reality is analogous to a perceptual judgment, rather than to an ordinary empirical proposition, and disregard for the moment the difference between the inclusive whole of the universe and such a limited whole as a sense datum. The analogy means that the subject of a metaphysical statement, the "absolute," must be construed, at the very beginning of Hegel's logic, as an implicit presentation of the logical structure of the whole, as a datum, that is, although it takes all the statements of the dialectic to make this structure explicit. It remains to show that this analogy expresses Hegel's own conception, and that therefore Hegel has an answer to Russell's criticism. Let us observe that Hegel's Science of Logic takes for granted, and assimilates, the conclusion of his earlier work The Phenomenology of the Mind. The Phenomenology exhibits the logic of human experience, of cognitive and practical attitudes, where "logic" stands for the necessity of progress (which is neither chronological nor dialectical but a transformation in the order of successive approximations to the "truth" of objective idealism) from sense certainty of radical empiricism to the philosopher's conviction that the world is an embodiment of the Spirit. The ultimate unity of the thought with the object of experience, the endbf the heno omenology, is the starting point for Logic. This is to say that the term "abso- ' lute" in the Science of Logic presupposes the logical conditions of ultimate unity, and that categories are predicated of the absolute one after another in the course of explication of what has been presupposed. "And this is the true business of logic: to show that those thoughts (categories), which as usually employed merely float before consciousness neither understood nor demonstrated, are really grades in the self-determination of thought" (The Logic of Hegel, tr. by W.Wallace, Oxford University Press, $121). The fact that, according to Hegel, total thought engaged in self-determination, or explication, is present at the first step of the dialectic, in his own words, "implicitly, and as it were in germ," explains why the predication of being must be the beginning of his logic. For the only correct characterization of what is implicit is that it is undifferentiated being. At the same time, since the intension of any dialectical statement is differentiation and explication, the identification of the absolute with being is inadequate.

7 To say that the reality of things is their being, without further specification, is to indulge in an empty abstraction that conveys nothing. This criticism of abstraction, and therefore of analysis, starts the dialectical process, and the underlying insight, that reality cannot be an abstract entity but is concrete process or becoming, is thereby made explicit. Thus the dialectical triad, being, nothing, becoming, exemplify the mechanism of Hegel's logic. The mechanism is simply this. A definition, which identifies the implicit whole with a would-be inclusive specification, is proposed. The proposition is examined by matching the implicit definiendum against the explicit definiens. There is a discrepancy, and the living thought within the implicit whole forces another attempt, at a better definition. A modern logician might object that this procedure involves a confusion between the levels of language and metalanguage: While statements about the world belong to an object-language, criticism of such consists of statements about statements. Hegel could reply by observing that thought which is really alive moves on two levels at once. The very point of dialectical criticism is that it involves the duality of self-criticism: the single-level subject-predicate form of a metaphysical statement is to be corrected by the implicit dynamics of thought. Accordingly, the opening paragraphs of Hegel's Logic already contain a criticism of the subject-predicate form. "Being itself and the special types of it which follow, as well as those of logic in general, may be looked upon as definitions of the Absolute.... Compared however with its predicate (which really and distinctly expresses in thought what the subject does not) the Absolute continues to be merely an intended thought, a substratum which has no explicit characterization of its own. The thought, which is in our case the matter of sole importance is only contained [i.e., explicitly contained] in the predicate: and hence the propositional form, like the subject, vix., the Absolute [i.e., the word "Absolute"], is reduced to a meaningless phrase" (ibid., $84). This is to say that, according to Hegel, a metaphysical idea expressed in the form of a subject-predicate proposition is just as incomplete as would be the locution "This is rectangular" if the word "this" were taken to be the subject term in abstraction from any actual presentation or sense datum.2 2Hegel's disapproval of the subject-predicate form of classical logic is so emphatic that I am surprised at Russell's opinion (expressed in the 2nd Lecture of Our Knowledge of the External World) that Hegel's doctrine "that philosophical propositions must be of the form, 'The Absolute is such-and-such,' depends upon the traditional belief in the universality of the subject-predicate form." The truth is that the subjectpredicate form is appropriate in a definition, and the recurrence of the form "The Absolute is such-and-such" throughout the dialectic depends on Hegel's intention to construe each member of a dialectical triad as a definition. "Being itself and the special types of it which follow, as well as those of logic in general, may be looked upon as definitions of the Absolute...."If Russell merely means that knowledge

8 Let us suppose that, for the sake of argument, Russell concedes the points that I have made in defense of Hegel's position against his criticism thus far. He can still argue in favor of the ultimate supremacy of formal logic and analysis, even within the field of metaphysics, along the following line. He might say this: "There is at least one subject-predicate statement which is a complete definition of the whole in the sense that it does not require further dialectical enlargment and explication. For since the absolute whole must differ from any particular finite being, there must be a quality, or a set of qualities, which distinguishes the former from the latter. And the required definition, which should arrest the dialectical movement, is a statement which attributes to the absolute the distinguishing qualities, while the enumeration of the latter is a matter of logical analysis." To show the actual basis for this imaginary argument let me quote Russell himself: "To put the matter abstractly: we must distinguish properties of different kinds. A thing may have a property not involving any other thing, this sort is called a quality. Or it may have a property involving one other thing; such a property is being married. Or it may have one involving two other things, such as being a brother-in-law. If a certain thing has a certain collection of qualities, and no other thing has just this collection of qualities, then it can be defined as 'the thing having such-and-such qualities.' From its having these qualities, nothing can be deduced by pure logic as to its relational properties. Hegel thought that, if enough was known about a thing to distinguish it from all other things, then all its properties could be inferred by logic. This was a mistake, and from this lpistake arose the whole imposing edifice of his system'' (ibid.,pp. 745f.). What could Hegel say in reply? The simplest answer would be that the collection of qualities which distinguishes the absolute whole from particular things is not a simple aggregate of isolable qualities which may be of his (Russell's) relational logic would enable Hegel to dispense with the predication of qualities, and therefore with the inadequate definitions of the Absolute, he is no doubt right. Hegel himself, in his theory of Essence, points out that the category "relation" is more adequate than the category "quality"; in fact, he makes it clear that nothing short of the relational structure of his logic as a whole can adequately express the nature of the Absolute. Russell's additional evidence for Hegel's dependence upon the tradition of classical logic, viz., Hegel's conviction that "the nature of Reality can be deduced from the sole consideration that it must be not self-contradictory," is equally flimsy. Hegel is at pains to explain the limitations of the principle of contradiction. And if the contradiction exhibited by the lower pair in a dialectical triad leads to a synthesis, the progress requires intervention on the part of the dynamic implicit thought: contradiction alone is not enough. On the other hand, when Russell points out, in a footnote in the same Lecture, that Hegel's argument, concerned with the doctrines of formal logic, "depends throughout upon confusing the 'is' of predication... with the 'is' of identity," Russell's point is well taken.

9 enumerated each in detachment from others through analysis, but that the collection in question is a unique order or structure, and that nothing short of the dialectical system can exhibit that order. This answer means, among other things, that a distinguishing quality of a whole is also a relation, and that it would not be what it is if it were entertained by means of a subject-predicate proposition of analysis, i.e., in isolation from the context of interrelated qualities. The issue thus raised is independent of the peculiar form of Hegel's contextualism. And the question is not whether there is one world in which everything is interrelated with everything else. I believe Russell would be ready to concede the existence of a unified world; at any rate, in the course of his argument against Hegel, and apropos of his illustration "John is the father of James," Russell remarks: "No doubt he [John] has relations, near or remote, to everything in the universe...." The question is whether an entity of metaphysics can be identified without the aid of contextual relations. Thus the issue is the familiar issue of contextualism versus atomism: can analysis detach an element from its context without falsification? Not if the element is a category within the total system of the absolute whole, says Hegel. Obviously there is no reason why we should accept Hegel's answer unless we have already committed ourselves to his type of metaphysics. Ultimately, to do justice to Hegel and defend him against Russell's criticism, we must face the issue on independent and empirical grounds. We must consider whether there are wholes other than the would-be absolute, limited wholes within human experience, which resist, or are recalcitrant to, ordinary analysis. And, of course, this consideration leads us to the problem of esthetic analysis and esthetic experience. A. USHENKO.