Plato: The Ideas as Thought’s First Kingdom
The second volume of the Haldane–Simson translation opens on the ground Hegel treats as Greek philosophy’s coming of age. Philosophy as science, he writes, begins with Plato and is completed by Aristotle, and the two of all others deserve to be called teachers of the human race. Plato’s achievement is to have taken the principle Socrates raised — that ultimate reality lies in consciousness, that the absolute is in thought — and carried it out of the sphere of individual will into the sphere of science, so that the Ideas stand as philosophy’s first developed kingdom of the supersensible, the universal grasped as the sole reality. Hegel is careful that this is no subjective idealism turning to contemplate itself against the world; it is thought embracing reality and thinking in one movement. He reserves his highest praise for the dialectic, and for the Parmenides above all, which he calls the most famous masterpiece of Platonic dialectic and reads as the ancient anticipation of speculative method.
Two judgments in the Plato lectures repay close attention because each marks a boundary. The Republic Hegel refuses to dismiss as an empty ideal: he answers directly the charge that it is a chimera, arguing that a true idea is not idle or powerless but the real, and that Plato’s state is the idealized ethical substance of the Greek world rather than a utopia hovering above it — justice there is freedom in the subjective sense, each individual brought into actuality by taking his place in the whole. The verdict on myth cuts the other way. Where Plato reaches for a myth, Hegel sees thought confessing a limit: the myth introduces sensuous images directed to imagination and not to thought, it belongs to the pedagogic stage of the human race, and in it the activity of thinking is suspended and so is “not yet free.” When the Notion attains its full development it has no more need of the myth. That is the exact fork at which a psychology staking everything on the cognitive worth of the image departs from Hegel’s road; the departure is worth studying because Hegel states the opposing case with unusual precision.
Aristotle: Energeia and the Rescue from the Empiricist Caricature
The volume’s center of gravity, and perhaps its most consequential act, is the rehabilitation of Aristotle. Hegel confronts the inherited picture head-on — the Aristotle whose soul is a tabula rasa receiving its determinations passively from without, whose philosophy is therefore mere empiricism, Locke’s philosophy at its worst — and sets out to show how little of it survives contact with the texts. In fact, he insists, Aristotle excels Plato in speculative depth, for he was acquainted with the deepest kind of speculation, idealism, and held it together with the most extreme development of the empirical. The pivot is the pair of terms Hegel says one must master to read Aristotle at all: potentiality (dynamis) and actuality (energeia), the latter more closely specified as entelechy, free activity that has its end in itself and is the realization of that end. Against the empty thing-in-itself Aristotle has nothing to do; it is only in energy — more concretely, in subjectivity — that the actualizing form, the self-relating negativity, is found.
From this Hegel draws the summit. In Aristotle’s account of thought that has itself for object — thought that thinks itself, where what is thought and the activity of thinking are the same — he locates the nearest ancient approach to his own absolute Spirit, and finds Aristotle standing at the highest standpoint. The treatment of the soul is read in the same key. The graded soul of the De Anima — the nutritive or vegetative, the sensitive, and the intelligent — Hegel treats not as a classification but as a speculative insight: there is no single soul in which all are found side by side, for the lower is present in the higher only as its object or its potentiality, the nutritive implicit in the sensitive, the sensitive in the intelligent, each carried up rather than set alongside. He compares it to the triangle among figures — a particular figure that is at the same time the truly universal one — and calls the observation a mark of genuinely speculative as against merely formal thought. This is the hierarchy of stratified psyche that survives in every later psychology of levels, and Hegel gives its logic with unusual exactness: what is for itself is the never-ceasing return into itself, to which actuality belongs.
The Second Period: Philosophy Withdraws into Self-Consciousness
With the Stoics, Epicureans, and Skeptics the lectures pass from the great constructive systems to what Hegel frames as thought’s withdrawal into self-consciousness. He organizes the whole period as a single dialectical figure. Stoicism takes the principle of thought or universality as the criterion of truth; Epicureanism opposes to it the determinate, the principle of individuality, sensation and perception; each is one-sided, and each, made positive, hardens into a science of the understanding. Skepticism is then the negation of both — the active negation of every criterion, sensuous or reflective, arriving at the result that nothing can be known, and folding the New Academy into itself. What unites the three, across their quarrels, is the common end Hegel names precisely: an imperturbability and uniformity of mind that suffers through nothing, affected neither by enjoyment, pain, nor any other bond. The content has become fixed and the world external, and the labor of philosophy has turned inward to secure a self that no longer looks to find itself in what is outside it. However gloomy Skepticism may seem, Hegel grants, and however low the common view of Epicureanism, these too have been philosophies — necessary stations on the road by which self-consciousness comes to take itself as reality.
The Neo-Platonists: Antiquity’s Concrete Totality
The volume does not end with Aristotle, and it does not end with the Skeptics; it ends, against the common assumption, in Alexandria. The third and final period is given to the Neo-Platonists — Philo, the Cabala and the Gnostics, and then the Alexandrian philosophy proper: Ammonius Saccas, Plotinus, Porphyry and Iamblichus, Proclus and his successors. Hegel derives the chief knowledge of the school from Plotinus, whose works, by his master Ammonius’s desire withheld from writing until late, were published after his death by Porphyry. What Hegel presses on his hearers is that this is no philosophic freak but a forward advance of the human mind: in the Neo-Platonist school the absolute is set forth in its concrete determination as a trinity, indeed a trinity of trinities, each moment itself grasped as a totality, ever continuing to emanate. The Alexandrians, he judges, represent concrete totality and have recognized the nature of spirit, even if they have not yet gone forth from the depths of infinite subjectivity or grasped the abstract freedom of the “I” as the infinite value of the subject.
The lectures close on one of Hegel’s characteristic reversals of altitude. What looks, in the study, like dry and abstract dispute over emanations is in truth concrete — the deeds of the world-spirit, and therefore of fate. Philosophers, he tells the room, are the initiated, those admitted to the inmost sanctuary, reading and writing the orders as they receive them in the original; the hundreds and thousands of years the world-spirit requires to reach a point are what later thought attains more quickly, having the advantage of dealing with what is past and with abstraction. On that note — the Neo-Platonic synthesis standing as antiquity’s concrete summit and the threshold of what follows — the volume is marked, in the copy itself, END OF VOL. II.
As with its companion volumes, the copy is a primary record: Hegel judging antiquity, with the architecture and exclusions of that judgment fully visible.