A Pluralistic Universe · Character

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

The revolutionary who moved dialectic from percepts to concepts — and whose 'logic' James treats impressionistically, with admiration and regret in equal measure.

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Also known as Hegel

First appearance: Lecture III: Hegel and His Method

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Quoted on the illusion of the unaccomplished infinite aim and the true knowledge of God, representing the absolute idealist tradition.

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Hegel saw a real dialectic movement in things, and James grants that, taken in the rough, he is not only harmless but accurate. His originality lay in transporting the process from the sphere of percepts to that of concepts, making contradiction germinative and superseding the old logic of identity. But he clung to the rationalist contempt for the given world of sense, and his studious vagueness leaves James confessing he makes no claim to understand him — only to treat him impressionistically.

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Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel appears across 8 companion beats. Open any chapter in the free preview to see the notes beside the text.

Lecture II: Monistic Idealism
Quoted on the illusion of the unaccomplished infinite aim and the true knowledge of God, representing the absolute idealist tradition.
Lecture III: Hegel and His Method
James critiques Hegel's dialectical method as an example of vicious intellectualism, treating concepts as if they exclude their others, and dismisses his technical apparatus as grotesque.
Lecture IV: Concerning Fechner
Mentioned as a thinker who 'ran thick' in contrast to the thinness of English and American transcendentalists.
Lecture V: The Compounding of Consciousness
James mentions Hegel's method of establishing his system through logical consequences from definitions, and notes that Hegel spurns logic's veto to pursue a truer path.
Lecture VI: Bergson and His Critique of Intellectualism
Mentioned as one of the monistic successors who found empirical relations full of paradox and contradiction.
Lecture VIII: Conclusions
James notes that the Fechnerian view, like the Hegelian, sees the philosopher as taken up into the universe.
IV
Mentioned alongside Herbart and Spir as earlier thinkers who argued that a term can only be a punctiform unit, contributing to the denial of relations.
Endnotes
Cited multiple times, including references to 'Smaller Logic' and 'Wissenschaft der Logik'.

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See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in Lecture III: Hegel and His Method

See Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel in Lecture II: Monistic Idealism