Georg Hegel (1770-1831) had two major ideas that became very influential for later thinkers. The first is historical explanation or explanation by process. Hegel argues that things are not simply what they are at once, but evolve through stages to become what they are, and the process by which they evolve show us how the things essentially work. Things are also not simply what they are in themselves but are what they are in a situation with other things in which they become what they are (very like the Buddhist concept of co-dependent arising). After Hegel, Marx, Darwin, Freud, Weber and Feuerbach were major thinkers who overturned old theories of static order with new theories of process to explain the workings of the mind and society. Consider that Newton thought God made the earth at the very beginning in an instant, while most believe today that there was a process by which our planet, the solar system and the galaxy formed. Consider the controversy about evolution and Darwin.
Hegel’s second major idea, the mechanism or motion of evolution over time, is dialectic. Dialectic is a Greek term for arguing back and forth, for and against a position, to come to greater understanding. Plato believed dialectic was the superior method of acquiring knowledge, and his dialogue plays show Socrates arguing against others and himself in this way. Hegel argues that all things are made of oppositions or contradictions (contra-diction means “arguing against”, like arguing both sides, the pros and cons, of a particular thing). This is not only similar to Laozi’s wheel (made of both solid and empty together), but Newton’s idea that for every force there is an equal but opposite force.
Hegel’s dialectic works in a three stage pattern of positive, negative and synthesis. Hegel often presents our ideas (which live in the world as politics and our shared expectations) as starting out positive, flipping and becoming negative, and then reaching a resolution of positive and negative as a joined whole. Remember Laozi’s wheel leads us through this three stage process (solid at first, then empty, then both), as does the famous Zen quote that first a rock is a rock, then a rock isn’t a rock (it is in the mind, as a concept) and then a rock is a rock (real rock and concept together as the rock).
Hegel argues that by looking at things as evolving over time in a situation, not immediate and isolated, and looking at things as two sided and in opposition to themselves and others, rather than categorical and without tension, we can come to understand how things actually are, which is a union (while an opposition) of how they are in the mind and how they are in the world.
In his first major work, The Phenomenology of Mind/Spirit (1806), Hegel gives us his social history of society and philosophy evolving by stages to the present day. In his second major work, The Science of Logic (1816), Hegel gives us his psychology. We will look at the overall structure and some key ideas of each, spending more time on the Logic which has become one of my favorites. Americans have only begun studying Hegel, because Hegel had a student named Marx who took Hegel’s concept of dialectic and used it to father communism. Communists like Hegel’s Logic very much, and so American and British universities did not teach much Hegel and when they do they often teach the Phenomenology but not the Logic. This is unfortunate, because while Hegel’s ideas about history in the Phenomenology are quite antiquated today I have great hope that there is more to be discovered by looking at the Logic in the light of the discoveries of modern psychology, especially the work of Piaget the child psychologist.
After writing the Phenomenology, Hegel came to realize that he had not described the inner workings of the dialectical process of history to his liking. Hegel believed the world consisted of ideas, so he leaves history behind and turns to the workings of ideas in the mind. To show the inner psychology at work in every stage of historical development, he wrote his Logic which like the Phenomenology unfolds in three stages as positive, negative and synthesis, but instead of Orientals, Greeks and Germans, the three stages of the Logic are Being, Essence, and Concept.
Thought has to gather everything up such that all categories become modes or branches of the same thing. It does this with Understanding which holds things fast in sameness and Reason which divides things against each other and against themselves, opposing the Understanding. Understanding wants to keep ideas as they are and separate from each other, while Reason wants to change ideas and unite them all together as a whole. The mind craves unity, objectivity as the all-view, which pulls it in two directions. First, it wants to hold on to the unities of the understanding and keep them away from reason tearing them apart. However, reason wants to dissolve everything and return it all to the Absolute, or the undivided One. Thus, the motions rock back and forth in stages. It would thus be correct to say that, the way Hegel describes it, conservatives would rather understand than reason and liberals would rather reason than understand.
At each stage, the Understanding comes to change its shape and provide the ground for the back and forth positions of reason which share the same understanding(s). Philosophies, political positions and scientific theories reason against each other even as they share the common understandings of the time and place. Thus, Hegel says there really is only one philosophy which is ‘thought’ itself, and the philosophies are views, perspectives within the one dialectical course of things which is thought.
Why is it opposed to itself? Where did this come from? Interestingly, Hegel writes that we need to start with ‘legend’ of the fall of man, of Adam falling out of the Garden of Eden. Hegel says the inner meaning is what is important (a similar reading to Deists of his time in Europe, who see the bible as true psychologically but not literal). When Adam, or consciousness, falls into the world out of unity with all, it falls into oppositions and tensions, polarities that present one side and hide the other. Today, we can describe the fall from unity either in physics as the Big Bang or in psychology as the infant mind learning to discern itself and others in the world (Piaget).
Hegel calls judgment ‘the one-sided acid’. Categories are thus gathered, assumed, by the Understanding: (Being)(Is), (You)(Are), (This)(Is). However, these are inadequate. First, they are one sided, and so dogmatic, stuck. They are divided from each other and the All, so reason is not satisfied and tries to figure out how all of these separate categories are one in reality, or the big One or All. Second, they are almost entirely empty of content, making them almost no different from empty. This is exactly how Hegel is critical of Kant’s categories and the gap he leaves between mind and world.
(68) “That true and positive meaning of the antinomies is this: that every actual thing involves a coexistence of opposed elements. Consequently to know, or, in other words, to comprehend an object is equivalent to being conscious of it as a concrete unity of opposed determinations. The old metaphysic, as we have already seen, when it studied the objects of which it sought a metaphysical knowledge, went to work by applying categories abstractly and to the exclusion of their opposites.”
(118) “However reluctant Understanding may be to admit the action of Dialectic, we must not suppose that the recognition of its existence is peculiarly confined to the philosopher. It would be truer to say that Dialectic gives expression to a law which is felt in all other grades of consciousness, and in general experience. Everything that surrounds us may be viewed as an instance of Dialectic.”
Hegel writes that the feeling of being alive is to feel contradiction within oneself, at rest in itself but at the same time moving itself beyond itself. It both wants to stay and go at once, and does. Similarly, the Soviet literary critic and thinker Bakhtin said that when we think we are in dialogue with ourselves, are opposed to ourselves on opposite sides.
In the Phenomenology, Hegel argues that Heraclitus realized the unity of Being and Non-Being as ceaseless Becoming, as the flux of the cosmic fire. Hegel says that some say no one is capable of understanding contradiction, but Hegel points to Heraclitus and argues that to come to the next level in your understanding your reason has to see both sides and unite them in the cement of the understanding. Hegel says that if we imagine any transformation or change or motion, we are seeing being and non-being as one like Heraclitus. It is merely recognizing it that is the hard part. Hegel says that this is the hurdle that prevents the common person from being a philosopher, and the reason that the great thinkers and revolutions in thought are rare. In fact, often it takes decades after the thinker’s death for their ideas to become accepted, further proof that the great thinker must unite the old with the opposite direction of the new and this is the barrier between the new idea and the common understanding of the people.
Once thought realizes becoming as the unity of the being of things and their non-being (their temporary being in time and their not being other things), thought still does not have enough to understand each and every thing or how they fit into the All as one. Thought tries to understand the individual beings of the world and the world itself as constant becoming, like Heraclitus, but this does not show us how things are interrelated. This is exactly how Kant was frustrated with Hume, because everything being an assumption does not tell us what things are specifically.
Thought must explore two opposite directions to try to find the meaning of individual things. First, it tries to understand things by their qualities (such as green, square, closed), but this moves away from the things themselves towards abstract ideas. Second, thought tries to understand things by their quantities, with each thing being a one itself and being a quantity of many parts and being in a group of many members. Unfortunately, this leaves each being as merely a thing, and tells us nothing about the specific differences between types of things. Notice that quality and quantity are the two opposite sides to our abstractions of things, the two ways we isolate and abstract, through thought, the parts and ways of things. Consider that your hand is not explainable simply by its shape, or color, or texture, any more than its being one hand with five fingers, though all of this together tells me much about my hand. To understand your hand, you have to see it in context, in the world used with other things, as well as understand the qualities and quantities of the hand.
Thought now tries to understand things in terms of essences, and these essences in terms of their qualities and quantities. Hegel in his Phenomenology saw Plato as the union of Heraclitus and Parmenides, that Plato thought things have ideal essences in the stars that cause them to be what they are, and that Platonism was the major school of thought in middle-age Europe to which Hegel acknowledges he owes many insights.
Because thought could not understand things in their qualities and quantities, it tries to understand things by putting them in groups and then understanding the qualities and quantities of these groups. It puts these as essences outside the world as Plato put them up in the stars, in another more modern way “in” things and their groups as their “nature”. The problem with this stage is that this still puts things as isolated and does not understand them in a situation as mutually interdependent. It seeks the meaning of the thing in the group where it could not find it in the individual, but this still isolates things even as it puts them in groups. Hegel is very aware that modern science is often in this mode, isolating things and finding new truths about their exclusive natures. For Hegel, Plato’s forms, Kant’s categories and scientific theories are good but they are not complete because they do not understand how things cannot be separate from each other if we want our knowledge to be like the world, in which everything fits together.
Just as qualities are non-beings within beings, essences are also non-beings within beings, but a core is sought beyond and opposed to outer qualities or bunches of quantities. Thought has turned on itself yet preserved itself, trying to understand the real as merely the idea. It would be like saying that the hand is really the ideal hand, rather than a hand in the real world which we idealize. Thought is struggling to grasp the unity of the mind and the world, of our ideas of things and the real things themselves. Just as beings were opposed to themselves and others, Hegel says that essences, if they remain many and are not gathered into a trunk of the All still have contradictions in themselves and against each-other and so they are opposed to unity.
The idea and the thing are realized as one in the Concept, which includes the thought and thing. When we see that the world is in our minds and in itself together as one, that things are our ideas about them and themselves for us as one that is also many, this is for Hegel Actuality, the final stage. It is grasped by the mind, but in extension is the view of the real world and all that it is or could be. Interesting for Chaos Theory and Quantum Theory, the most recent developments of mathematics and science, Hegel writes that seeing the unity of necessity and freedom is the final hurdle. To see that no part of reality is absolutely necessary, but no part is absolutely free, and the two hang together as opposites always like light and darkness, this is the final stage that lets us see things as they are. This would be the final and total grasp of the wheel as solid and empty, or the rock as thing and perception/assumption. Now, Hegel believes, reason goes forth as true science and simply Nature itself, with a ground to continue to investigate and understand things with all the branching of the Idea by which we could ever understand them to be. All becomes a single Idea, that is one with the world.
FALLACIES
Fallacies are common errors or problems in reasoning, like those we studied in the Indian Nyaya Sutra. There is no set list of fallacies, nor is there a complete understanding of how they relate to logical or correct reasoning. The more dogmatic believe that truth and false are exclusively separated, while the more skeptical believe that the reasonable and the unreasonable, the rational and the irrational, are interrelated. Myself, being skeptically inclined, believe that fallacies occur when reason and rationality do not fit or overshoot their particular situation. The rationality of an argument and its component pieces depends on how it is used or abused in context, not abstractly with regard to its form. We are going to talk about some of the common fallacies that logic texts discuss, even though there is not one set list of these fallacies nor a system of their structures. I found three different but overlapping lists in the three texts I reviewed for the class.
Appeal to Emotion
There are many types of appeals that cater to positive emotions we wish to sustain such as happiness and status, and negative emotions we wish to avoid such as pain, fear, pity, and ignorance. Advertising, of course, appeals to both desires and insecurities frequently. The recent khaki pants ad that says, “Wear the pants”, is appealing to male desires for dominance and status as a strong and respected man.
An Appeal to Authority is repeating something said while citing its source, either an individual, an institution or a culture, to support an argument by appealing to a sense of security and trust. For example, “The chief of police said crime is up”, “9 out of 10 scientists (that we hand picked) say you should brush your teeth with Happy Time Toothpaste”, or “Native American Shamans used tobacco to cure diseases”. Notice that an appeal to authority is a fallacy if it is misleading, and whether or not it is misleading or informative is debatable. For example, if the chief of police is untrustworthy or there is good evidence that she wants to increase her budget this year, we may argue that the first example is a fallacy, an improper appeal to authority, but if we trust her then her testimony could be valid and it is not a fallacy but a proper and justified appeal to authority.
An Appeal to Force is threatening that if a position is not supported there will be harmful and dangerous consequences. For example, “If you don’t believe me and build a giant wall, Islamic extremists will eat your baby”, or “If I am wrong about this, may God help us all”. Notice that an appeal to force is a fallacy if the threat is unjustified, but perfectly reasonable if the threat is justified, and that this is often debatable.
An Appeal to Pity is like an appeal to force, but emphasizing sadness and pain inflicted on the poor, unfortunate and defenseless. For example, “If we don’t do it like I say, small children will cry”, or “This particular country has been poor for hundreds of years, so we should totally sell them a bunch of weapons to make them feel better about themselves”. Like other appeals, it can be debatable whether or not an opponents position will hurt the unfortunate, as well as whether or not the harm is an unfortunate but necessary consequence.
An Appeal to Ignorance is a special kind of ‘sharing the fault’, one of the fallacies of the Nyaya school of India. When we argue, “There are things about X we don’t know, so my opponent can’t be sure”, we are saying something that is true about every human position, including our own. For example, during Bush Jr.’s presidency the head of the American Academy of Sciences said, “Global warming is just a theory”, which is true but does not say anything about how justified a theory it is compared to any other alternative. For the skeptically inclined like myself and the Jains, all human truth is “just a theory”, so it is improper to use this against an opponent in argument to try to particularly associate their position with ignorance.
Straw Man
The ‘straw man’ refers to setting up a scarecrow as a fake person. In debate, we say, “That is a straw man” when our opponent presents our own position in an oversimplified way to make it easy to argue against, like setting up a straw dummy to knock down. This is one of the most common fallacies that people accuse each other of doing: “My opponent is misrepresenting my position on the issues”. Wittgenstein says that this is what both sides of the objective truth versus subjective truth do too often to each other. For example, if I am arguing against a war, and I say that my opponent always loves each and every war and blood thirsty people are untrustworthy, I can be accused of setting up a straw man. My opponent need only site one example when they disapproved of a war to show that I have oversimplified their position. In debate, we are often arguing to convince not our radical opponents but moderates who are on the fence. While it is useful to simplify an opponent’s position to highlight its faults, it carries the risk of being accused of oversimplification.
Slippery Slope
The slippery slope is a particular kind of overly simple straw man which involves a domino effect over time, taking a consequence of the opponent’s position and blowing it out of proportion over the course of several steps. For example, “If we legalize marijuana, more people will try it, then more drugs will be legalized, and then everyone will be shooting heroin and civilization will collapse”. It is most likely true that if marijuana were legalized, then more people would do it, but it is doubtful that the majority of the population would end up heroin addicts as a consequence regardless of whether marijuana should be legalized or not. This person took the consequence of some new users and it slides all the way down the slippery slope of over-simplifying judgment to everyone becoming an addict. Another example: “If we to legalize homosexual marriage, then people will want to marry their family members, and then marry animals and clock radios”. Because my examples are quite progressively biased, we can give another: “If we let people own concealable hand guns, people will develop a taste for heavy artillery and begin stock piling their own personal arsenals”.
Red Herring
To say, “That’s a red herring” is to say that an opponent has missed the point by focusing too much on an insignificant detail. There are two competing explanations of the origin of this expression. The first is that hunting dogs were trained by dragging a fish behind a horse to see if they would be easily thrown off the true prey’s trail. The second is that a food scare occurred in the 1920s just after the Russian Revolution when a company spraying red dye into sardine cans to make them look fresh sometimes made one sardine dark red, starting rumors that Communists were secretly poisoning Americans. I found a good example of red herrings in an article about fallacies that examined child custody court transcripts. A parent would often accuse the other of being irresponsible in general, and then site a particular example (such as a time when they were too busy to pick up a child). The parents would then argue about the single event and lose sight of the overall issue of irresponsibility. If there are examples and counter examples for many things, sometimes we argue particular examples are marginal and other times that they are critical. If the example is marginal and insignificant, focusing on it could bring the charge of misleading oneself and others with a red herring.
Personal Attack
One particular type of red herring, certainly the most popular, is the personal attack, when one attacks the opponent and not the opponent’s argument. In a way, it is the opposite of an appeal to authority. For example, “You cannot believe a word my opponent says, because she is a communist, Mormon, atheist, aquatic bird, etc”, or “His scientific theory is questionable, because he is a gambler”. Like with any red herring, it can be debatable whether or not a person’s character has any relationship to their argument, but a genuine and fallacious personal attack occurs when there is an unjustifiable appeal to fear based on the distrust of the group a person belongs to or a particular trait of the person.
Fallacy of Composition & Fallacy of Division
The fallacy of composition is wrongly attributing the property of a part to a greater whole. For example, “If water is wet, and humans are three fifths water, then humans are wet”, or “If San Francisco is progressive, then all of California is progressive”. Notice that this fits with Wittgenstein’s analogy of the oven and how it is always ignorant of the complex situation to simplify things into a single component or essence.
The fallacy of division is wrongly attributing the property of the greater whole to a particular part, the fallacy of composition in reverse. For example, “If water is wet, and water has two hydrogen molecules, then hydrogen is wet”, or “If San Francisco is progressive, then my conservative uncle who lives there must be progressive”.
Notice that bigotry and prejudice are types of fallacious composition and division. If I say, “He is a Hindu, and he is a jerk, so all Hindus are jerks”, I have committed the fallacy of composition. Likewise, if I say, “All atheists are immoral, she is an atheist, so she is immoral”, I have committed the fallacy of division.
