Truth is a scientific system: a well-ordered totality of knowledge. At present (1807), there are several competitors to this understanding of truth as a science. They are: poets, artists, pietists, mystics, and ordinary common-sense reasoners.* In their own way, they each consider the true to be something non-conceptual or unsystematic; either through the immediacy of the truth, or our mystical or felt awareness of it, or through divine revelation, or by means of our poetically inspired insight into being, or in some further and yet similar way. So, as the position of the present remains, history is still anticipating the advent of a genuine science of truth. The French Revolution, with its burst of freedom onto the stage of human time, is but one among the many signs of unrest and unease signalling that the new dawn of spirit is close at hand.
Due to its systematic and total nature, the truth cannot be expressed in the form of assurances about its nature, summaries, tables of contents, reviews or prefaces to philosophical works. Truth is an organic self-developing sequence. Those who think according to common sense take the opposition [Gegensatz] between truth and falsehood to be total, and so presume that prefaces will contain a simple contrasting of the latest and ‘most true’ system of philosophy to the detriment of the older, false ones it will now overturn. Hegel refuses to use his preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit in such a way, and rebukes such behavior as nothing more than a disingenuous attempt to seem as if one is wholly concerned with the truth. As long as one conceives of truth and falsehood as absolutely opposed, and thus all historically existing systems of philosophy as succeeding refutations of one another, one will remain forever bound up in superficialities and conflicts between them: paralyzed at the door to truth without entering into it.
Hegel supplants the image of the interrelationship of philosophies as one of anatomical dissection and dry lifelessness–“a skeleton with tickets stuck all over it” (§51)–with the metaphor of the rhythmic life-cycle of a flowering plant. Philosophical systems do indeed supersede one another, and in a sense expose the falsity of those that precede them. When this is understood in an atemporal way, it is easy to become fixated on this simple fluctuating process of constant annulment, without seeing the necessary and intimate interrelationship of the parts. Even though one can likewise with some truth say that the blossom, in its being a higher development than the bud, shows this earlier stage to be incomplete and ‘false’, this but a a one-sided grasp of what is really a continuum. What Hegel wants to present to us with this image is the idea that each of the systems of philosophy are a gradual unfolding of the truth. The ‘falsity’ they each contain is not absolute, but relative to the way in which they realize the purpose of philosophy (to know truth systematically, to be science) and so each system is intimately interconnected in the way that they harmoniously contribute to the development of the truth as a whole. If the achievement of a proper understanding of truth (a valid concept of truth) is something that has happened within human history, then this implies that each of the ‘false’ strivings of previous systems of philosophy have in fact helped to weave the continuous progress of the one whole truth and are an essential part of it. So, stated speculatively, the false is a necessary moment of the true.
“To comprehend the truth as a scientific system”: this could be said to be a very impoverished and abstract presentation of what will nonetheless amount to Hegel’s idea of the absolute. This absolute is a fully articulated horizon, which, brought to include its own horizonality in itself, transcends itself. This is but the meanest concept of the absolute, and is nothing but the bare skeleton of it. For Hegel, this systematic totality of truth cannot find its expression in the simple statement of its concept, any more than an acorn can pass for an ancient oak or a fetus for an adult human. They may be ‘identical’ in a limited way, but the absolute can only be grasped when it has consummated itself through its own living growth or process of becoming. Against this, the philosophers of intuition, sentiment and fervor assert that through our feeling of a of unity of this absolute kind, or by the mere thinking of this concept, the absolute reality has already been revealed. Hegel will have none of this. For the mere repetitive application of the Parmenidean idea of an identity (the A=A) underlying a reality which yet seemingly manifests itself in all sorts of oppositions (e.g., subject and object, substance and accident, cause and effect, self and other, duty and inclination, etc.) cannot possibly bring such a concept of the absolute to the kind of fulfillment necessary for its authentic realization.
Hegel describes this attempt at demonstrating the idea of an absolute unity of opposites by means of its application to sundry examples as like a painter who only uses two colors to paint: such work can only be totally drab and lifeless. This style of ‘demonstration’of the concept of absolute identity, historically, was how the idealists and romantics actually carried themselves about, picking out various examples mostly drawn from the natural sciences like magnetism, electricity, or plant growth and trying to show how they actually demonstrate that A=A. Schelling, and the disciples of his Naturphilosophie, are in Hegel’s estimation supremely guilty of this sin against the hard work of science. Such thinkers want to escape what they take as the formalism of all modern philosophy, and flee into the tranquil and indifferent unity of an absolute whose presence they feel in art and nature. In an ironic twist, the very attempt to demonstrate an absolute identity in which all differences are cancelled and simultaneously transcended exposes the concept such thinkers have of the absolute to be completely bankrupt and formalistic–the very kind of philosophy they so hate. The only way to escape this formalist approach to the absolute as a given, and yet unexpressed identity of opposites is through the “cold march of necessity”: the patient and laborious working-out of the ever-developing shape of the absolute. The philosopher must, in a sense, let go of his desire to impose categories and methods of investigation onto the material with which he works: that is, the true, the real, the absolute; and instead submit himself without reservation to the internal maturation of the absolute as it unfolds itself as a living, breathing whole.
*Hölderlin, Schelling, the Schelegels, Jacobi and Reid (and with Reid, all ordinary folk).
reason is purposive activity 