Summary: The Phenomenology of Spirit (page 6)

First of all, although Schelling formulates the general principle of the system – ‘all is one’ – he does not develop it.

In other words, he provides the concept of the system, but not the system itself, in its concrete and detailed development.

What remains, then, is a kind of abstraction that cannot truly satisfy:

This novelty [Schelling’s contribution] has no more actual reality than a newborn child; and this is a point that must not be overlooked. The first appearance is nothing more than its immediacy or its concept. No more than a building is complete when only its foundation has been laid, is the concept of the whole already the whole itself. When we wish to see an oak tree with the robustness of its trunk, the spread of its branches, and the mass of its foliage, we shall not be satisfied if, instead, we are shown an acorn. In the same way, science – whose crown of leaves completes a whole world of spirit – is not complete in its beginning. ¹

Yes, Schelling proposes truths upon which a systematic knowledge can be built, and which Hegel takes up himself: ‘all is one’, ‘in the Absolute, A = A’. But since the system to which they point has not been constructed, these truths remain abstract, formal, and ultimately empty – and such formalism cannot convince:

To oppose this One knowledge – that in the Absolute, all is identical – to the differentiated and accomplished knowledge […], or to present the Absolute as the night in which, as one says, all cows are black, is the naïveté of the void of knowledge.

This metaphor is particularly striking: an abstract idea, not unfolded into its concrete significance, fails to differentiate itself from others. If one says ‘all is one’ without explaining precisely what this ‘All’ and this ‘One’ refer to, it amounts to saying that nothing is One – or to saying nothing at all. In this formal abstraction, all ideas merge together, like cows indistinguishable in the darkness of night.

This is precisely where Hegel’s contribution lies: he sets out to develop the system concretely, to lay out its various stages, and to establish the necessity of the transition from one form to the next. Such is Hegel’s relation to Schelling – a movement that leads from the abstract to the concrete, and thereby to truth presented in its proper form: that of a systematic science.

Here, another essential trait of Hegel’s thought becomes apparent. Why do we move, in the dialectical process, from one form of truth to another? Why is each form only a moment in the development of the Whole, and not its final truth? What limitation reduces it to this subordinate status? This depends on the form in question, but often, Hegel will point to its abstraction: it is frequently because the previous form remains abstract, at the level of mere concept, that one must pass on to a new form.

This progression towards the concrete, the actual, is one of the main drivers of the dialectical process, and Hegel invokes it regularly to show why a given form must be surpassed.

Abstraction, for Hegel, constitutes a form of error: it separates what is in reality united. Abstraction clings – mistakenly – to difference and separation.

Hegel does not deny difference or separation; on the contrary, they are integral to his method. But they represent only a moment in the dialectical process – the second moment – which is followed by the final movement of reconciliation, the synthesis, wherein identity is rediscovered within difference, forming a Whole.

Hegel summarises this process as follows:

Only that identity which reconstitutes itself, or reflection into otherness within itself – and not an original or immediate unity […] – is the true.

This is perhaps the clearest formulation of the dialectic, which can be broken down into its three moments:
a) The moment of immediate identity: A = A
b) The moment of difference: the thing differentiates itself from itself and seeks itself in its opposite
c) The moment of synthesis: the thing rediscovers its identity with itself, incorporating its opposite, in a reconciliation of opposites

It is through the dialectical process – the concrete development of the Whole across History, a development that is slow and at times painful – that the Absolute is truly realised. Not through an abstract formula in a book of philosophy. This is the essential limitation of Schelling’s doctrine, which Hegel is likely targeting when he states that an idea falls into insipidity when it lacks seriousness, pain, patience, and the labour of the negative.

Moreover, Hegel opposes his own approach to Schelling’s on a crucial point: the Whole – the Absolute that gradually forms itself throughout History – is not only substance, but subject; that is, spirit: In my view […], everything depends on grasping […] the true not only as substance, but equally as subject.

In this respect, Hegel also distances himself from all forms of Spinozism. This is important, as Spinoza’s doctrine still caused scandal in Hegel’s time, particularly among many thinkers and theologians. For by defining God (or the Whole) as an infinite substance with an infinity of attributes, Spinoza identifies God with Nature; but if God is nothing other than Nature, then there is, in effect, no God – and this pantheism becomes a form of atheism.

¹ Our translation. The references for the quotations are available in the book Hegel: A Close Reading