A Study On Hegel’s Speculative Concepts

It is to Hegel’s credit that the largest ever speculative metaphysicalsystem was accomplished, which is impressive for its grand and imposingspeculative concepts integrating difference and identity. For Hegel, it isnecessary to express the philosophical implication of “absolute” with aform of logical concept in order to transform philosophy into a genuinelyscientific metaphysical system. However, for a long time, people areaccustomed to equalize the speculative concepts to the intellectualcategories in traditional philosophy and to deliberate concepts in terms ofcommon sense, which leads not only to the misunderstanding of Hegel’sconcepts, but also to the reduction of Hegel’s philosophy to a shadowykingdom of logical concepts and a abstract world of spirits. Therefore, inorder to arrive at a true and thorough understanding of Hegel’s philosophy,it is necessary to first make a clear analysis about his speculative concepts. Standing in the position of speculative reason, this dissertation takestraditional western philosophy as a resource and makes an analysis aboutthe formation of Hegelian concepts. Specific ideas run as follow: there arethree ways in the grasping of metaphysical objects based on the functionof cognition, i.e., intuition, presentation and conception. From Hegel’spoint of view, conception is the best way through which metaphysics canascend up to logical truth. There are two forms of concepts, i.e.,intellectual concepts and rational concepts. Since the intellectual conceptsin the old philosophies can not grasp metaphysical object due to itsfiniteness, only by overcoming such deficiency and ascending up to aplatform of reason can the original aspect of absolute truth be fully aware.It is those speculative concepts which are brought up to the rationalplatform, which are not the generation of human-being, but themanifestation of concepts. Human-being and nature are all suchmanifestations. In the process of its manifestation, the totality, freedomand authenticity of concepts are revealed. This dissertation is divided into four sections to discuss the aboveideas.The first chapter expounds the starting point and the main task ofHegel’s speculative concepts, to expound why did Hegel chooseconception as the best way. In order to facilitate the study, this dissertationreveals the authentic nature of concepts by referring to Hegel’sdifferentiation of three forms of cognitive function of human-being and bythe description of the pros and cons of such three forms, combining withthe exhibition of his ideas about the progressive process of expressingabsolute by means of intuition, presentation and thinking containedrespectively in art, religion and philosophy. By analyzing and comparing,Hegel drew such a conclusion that conception is the most reasonable formof “absolute”.The second chapter mainly explains the differences between theconcepts of Hegel and those in traditional philosophy, and reveals theintellectual characteristics and deficiency in finiteness of concepts by elaborating Kant’s transcendental category theory. Hegel considers theconcepts in traditional philosophy as intellectual categories. What heestablishes are concepts of reason. The most significant characteristic ofintellectual categories are their finiteness, whose chief drawbacks are theirineptitude in grasping those infinite objects. The fundamental reason forthe past philosophies’ failing of establishing metaphysics as a form oftruth, is that they not only do not realize the limited nature of theintellectuality, but also try to grasp “absolute”, the infinite object, withfinite intellectual concepts, so they all fall into the dogmatism. It was notuntil Kant’s examination of human-being’s capacity of cognition that theintellectual characteristics of concepts and their dialectical consequenceswere found. However, Kant does not supply us a solution. Hegel is veryunsatisfied with Kant’s failure. The solution he furnishes us is the raisingof the intellectual categories to the level of rational concepts, which is theonly solution to overcome the limited nature of the former.The third chapter expounds Hegel’s ways of transforming the intellectual categories in order to cancel their drawbacks. Hegel does notachieve this simply by randomly or accidentally casting away or erasingthe intellectual concepts and their boundaries, nor does he try to create anew set of conception systems, but by revealing the concepts’ mechanismof self-denial and ways of evolvement according to his understanding oftheir nature. The speculative concepts and their systems are the directconsequences of the concepts’ self-denial and self-development. In thisprocess, Hegel on the one hand absorbs the theories of self since themodern times and establishes categories on the basis of self, thus makeconcepts active according to the principle of self-movement, and enablesthem to transcend the limits within themselves to realize the unity offiniteness and infiniteness. On the other hand, Hegel tries to ontologizethose intellectual categories in the field of epistemology. Since thosecategories are the products of human-being’s activities of cognition,whose limitation is that the concepts and objects are always external toeach other, the only way to completely eliminate the problem of finiteness, is to put the concepts on the platform of noumenon. In this way, theconcepts on the one hand acquire their determinacy while discarding thedeficiencies of determinacy and limitations in the process of beingdetermined, on the other hand, they become the form of thinking andnature of matter, and bring the speculative concepts in the sense ofontology into reality.The fourth chapter mainly reveals the characteristics of thespeculative concepts. The intellectual categories after transformationbecome the rational concepts, The rational concepts are concrete, whichis the unity of universality, particularity and individuality, rather than theabstract or empty form of speculative thinking. The rational concepts arethe manifestation of the absolute spirit, whose essence is freedomcontaining necessity. The unity of freedom and necessity contained in thespeculative concepts is the manifestation of absolute truth. By the study onthe characteristics of the speculative concepts, we can find that the truthrealized in these concepts is not the truth in the perspective of traditional philosophical epistemology; neither does it fully confirm the logicalprinciple of evidential clarity. Hegel’s unity of subject and object reflects akind of aesthetic harmony built upon the foundation of internal evidentialclarity. Although Hegel’s philosophical task is to establish a scientificmetaphysics, in fact his speculative concepts do not mange to set up asystem of metaphysics in the sense of positive science. His system ofmetaphysics is a philosophical realm of the unity of necessity and freedomwith some kind of mystery.