The field in which Hegel first worked out this theory was that of human affairs. The human world may be said to be mind made objective because it consists of a series of structures—examples would be a language, a set of moral or political procedures, a science, a practical art such as medicine—that constitute mental achievements. The mind involved in structures of this kind, however, is collective rather than personal. An art such as medicine or a science such as mathematics is not the invention of any particular individual; and although individuals have contributed and are contributing to the advancement of each structure, they do so not in their personal capacity but as embodying impersonal intelligence.
Because the human world thus embodies mind, or spirit, it needs to be understood in a special way—in terms of what Hegel called “concrete universals.” Concepts of this kind are in order when it is a question of grasping a particular sort of subject matter—one in which there are intimate connections between the data under consideration. Connections in nature are, on the surface at any rate, of a purely external character; striking a match, for example, has nothing internally to do with producing a flame. When, however, a historian considers the different stages of some movement or process, or when an anthropologist studies the various aspects of the life of a society, the material they confront is internally related just because it represents the work of mind—not, of course, of mind working in a vacuum but of mind facing and reacting with greater or less intelligence to particular situations. It is not surprising in these circumstances to find that the conceptual structure employed by the student of human affairs is, in important respects, profoundly different from that employed by the student of nature. In the latter, what are in question are constant conjunctions, observed but not understood; in the former, men have insight into what happens or obtains because they can reenact in their own minds the thought behind the material they study.
All this is, or should be, comparatively uncontroversial; it represents the truth behind the claim of Wilhelm Dilthey, a German philosopher and historian of ideas, that human affairs can be understood, as it were, from within, by means of what he called Verstehen (“understanding”). But of course it is one thing to say this and another altogether to argue that the universe at large should be construed as if it were mind writ large. What makes Hegelianism intriguing to some and totally implausible to others is precisely that it makes this extravagant claim. As has already been mentioned, the world of nature for Hegel is in one way independent of mind: its being is certainly not its being perceived. It is, nevertheless, relevant to mind in all sorts of important ways: in providing a setting in which mind can act, in constituting an obstacle that mind can overcome, in presenting mind with something seemingly alien in which it can nevertheless find itself insofar as it discovers nature to be intelligible. If Hegel were asked why there was a world of nature at all, his answer would be “for the sake of mind.” Just as man’s social environment affords opportunities to the individual to come to full knowledge of himself by realizing his differences from and dependence upon others, so the world of nature affords similar opportunities. By transforming the natural scene, men make it their own. In so doing they come to know what they can do, and thus what they are.
There is, perhaps, more to this doctrine than appears at first sight. It is, however, easier to assent to it in general terms than to follow Hegel over it in detail. According to the Idealist account, there is in the end only one true description of the universe, namely that which is couched in terms of the concrete universal. Reality is a single self-differentiating system, all the parts of which are intimately connected; it is spirit that expresses itself in the natural and human worlds and comes to consciousness of itself in so doing. Any other account of the matter—for example, that given by the scientist in terms of experienced uniformities—must be dismissed as inadequate. To Hume’s objection that there is an absolute logical difference between propositions expressing matters of fact and existence and propositions expressing relations of ideas, Hegel replies brusquely that the distinction is untenable. At a certain level, perhaps, facts are taken as “brute.” Even the scientist, however, never abandons his aspiration to understand them—it is only provisionally that he talks in terms of “ultimate inexplicabilities”—and the philosopher knows that the demand to incorporate all knowledge in a single system is not to be denied. It is a demand that, as Hegelians are willing to admit, can in practice never be met but that, nonetheless, ceaselessly makes itself felt. That such is the case is shown by the extraordinary fascination exercised by this strange but remarkable type of philosophy.
To try to understand the universe in terms of spirit is characteristic of philosophers whose main extra-philosophical interests are in the humanities, particularly in historical studies. Relatively few scientifically minded thinkers have followed this line of thought, and many Idealists of repute, including Bradley and Benedetto Croce (an Italian philosopher and literary critic whose major philosophical work was published in four volumes between 1902 and 1917 under the general title La filosofia dello spirito (“The Philosophy of the Spirit”), have been least convincing when writing about science. Hegel himself, perhaps, had less sympathy with scientific than with historical aspirations; this is not to say, however, that he was ill-informed about contemporary science. He knew what was going on, but he saw it all from his own point of view, the point of view of one who was entirely convinced that science could not produce any ultimate answers. He valued science but rejected the scientific view of the world. Types of metaphysical theory
To complement and, in a way, to correct this brief survey of the problems of metaphysics it will be useful at this point to insert a short summary of a number of overall metaphysical positions. Metaphysics, as already noted, professes to deal with “the world as a whole”; the thoughts of a metaphysician, if they are to make any impact at all, must be connected in a system. The object in what follows will be to present in outline metaphysical systems that have exercised and, indeed, continue to exercise a strong intellectual appeal. In all cases but one, these systems were given classical shape by particular philosophers of genius. Relatively little attention, however, will be paid to this fact here because the present concern is with types of view rather than with views actually held. Thus, reference will be made to Platonism instead of to the philosophy of Plato, and so on in other cases. Platonism
The essence of Platonism lies in a distinction between two worlds, the familiar world of everyday life, which is the object of the senses, and an unseen world of true realities, which can be the object of the intellect. The ordinary man recognizes the existence of the former and ignores that of the latter; he fails to appreciate the extent to which his beliefs both about fact and about values are arbitrarily assumed and involve internal contradictions. The philosopher is in a position to show him how insubstantial is the foundation on which he takes his stand. The philosopher can demonstrate how little thought there is in popular conceptions of good and evil, and he can show that the very concept of sense knowledge involves difficulties because knowledge presupposes a stable object, and the objects of sense are constantly changing. The claim, however, is that he can do more than this. Because of the presence in him of something like a divine spark, he can, after suitable preparation, fix his intellectual gaze on the realities of the unseen world and, in the light of them, know both what is true and how to behave. He will not attain this result easily—to get to it will involve not only immense intellectual effort, including the repeated challenging of assumptions, but also turning his back on everything in life that is merely sensual or animal. Yet, despite this, the end is attainable in principle, and the man who arrives at it will exercise the most important part of himself in the best way that is open to him.