Introduction
Recently the rising interest in Hegel's relation to pragmatism has primarily focused on his connection with and influence upon John Dewey Footnote *and C. S. Pierce.Footnote 1 However, others — including Richard J. Bernstein, Timothy Sprigge, Robert Stern, and Bruce Wilshire — have already noted various parallels between Hegel's thought and that of James.Footnote 2 Together these authors’ observations signal that James's relationship to Hegel needs to be investigated more deeply and suggest that there is much to be gained from a more pointed comparison of their positions on specific issues. Given James's well known aversion to Hegelianism and idealism more generally, it is not surprising that James has not been the focus of the rising interest in Hegel's relation to pragmatism. But as interpretations of Hegel's philosophy have evolved, his insights into the processual nature of self-consciousness and the historicity of knowledge have allowed him to re-enter pragmatist thought. The time is now ripe for a reexamination of his relationship to James, who himself displays a curious ambivalence towards the master whom he loved to hate.
In an article from 2005, Don Morse provides one such reexamination. This article summarizes and evaluates James's various critiques of Hegel and concludes, wrongly I believe, that James levels a devastating critique of Hegel's intellectualism that exposes its claims of ‘false unity’. Morse's attempt to corroborate James's critiques is less convincing than his demonstrations of the ways in which James misunderstands Hegel. When the finer points of James's critique of intellectualism and monistic idealism are examined alongside Hegel's own critique of the logic of Verstand (Understanding) and his treatment of the one and the many in the Science of Logic, we find that their respective critiques share a mutual enemy, and that their thinking through classic metaphysical problems have more in common than one would expect. Hegel's rejection of the logic of Verstand in favour of Vernunft (Reason) actually parallels James's critique of intellectualism, and Hegel's own dialectic of the One rejects the same sort of static ‘block universe’ monism rejected by James. In fact, both James and Hegel mediate between metaphysical extremes providing accounts of the dynamic continuity of the world and experience.
Hegel's dialectical method and speculative reason will be the key to illuminating what he has to contribute to pragmatist discourse. For Hegel, Vernunft is superior to Verstand because it enables thought to make sense of what appear to be logical inconsistencies. Where Verstand breaks down attempting to comprehend what it takes to be insoluble conflicts, Vernunft provides the means for expressing the movement of contradiction permeating life and experience. One of James's main criticisms of intellectualism and the rationalist ‘religious’ philosophy of his day is its tendency to explain away the dark and disorderly aspects of experience for the sake of maintaining the coherence and the elegance of one's theory, making philosophy ‘a kind of marble temple shining on a hill’.Footnote 3 While Hegel's system is often cast as a prime example of just this sort of philosophy, such a view overlooks the tensions his dialectic demands be preserved. The movement of Aufhebung is not a totalizing mechanism operating according to a thesis-antithesis-synthesis formula.Footnote 4 Rather, dialectical sublation expresses the movement of Reason that transpires within the dynamics of lived experience. Dialectic is not applied to things externally; it emerges from the content of experience itself, a point which will be discussed in detail below. Thus, dialectic will prove to be a mode of thought able to make intelligible the tangled knots and contradictions necessary to ‘preserve the richest intimacy with the facts’.Footnote 5
James's desire to remain faithful to the messiness of lived experience is motivated by his tough-minded empiricism. His radical empiricism and doctrine of pure experience maintain that adherence to experience requires that one also acknowledge the inseparability of subject and object. The subject-object relation is constituent of the very fabric of experience. Moreover, recognizing that relations themselves are real and able to be experienced is essential to James's view. James rejects the rationalist and idealist belief that a ‘higher unifying agency … represented as the absolute all-witness’ is required to hold the universe together.Footnote 6 Rather, according to his view, the continuity of relatedness is a fact of the world that philosophy can grab hold of and work on. It is one thing to hold this view; it is another to describe how it is logically possible. For this reason, dialectic deserves a closer look. Hegel was keenly aware of the reality of relationships. In fact, one could say that, for Hegel, relatedness is the primary mode of existence insofar as all determinations are mediated through their relationships to their opposites. Nothing exists, in the active sense, without enduring contradiction, that is, without enduring its negative relation to that which it opposes. In other words, all existents move both literally and figuratively, and dialectic is precisely what enables speculative reason to comprehend these movements as intelligible relationships.Footnote 7
In addition to providing a rational account of the experience of relations, dialectic will also prove useful for articulating the nature of James's pluralism. It is well known that James rejects a rationally ordered universe in which the many particulars of existence are brought together and organized within an ‘all-form’. And yet, he still maintains that individuals are continuous parts of a greater whole. Attempting to characterize the ambiguity this creates for James's position, some have characterized his view as a ‘monistic pluralism’Footnote 8 and ‘dynamic holism’.Footnote 9 James adopts a position that neither denies the whole nor reduces the plurality of the many into an encompassing absolute. Thus, it is clear that James's pluralism is not absolutely pluralistic.Footnote 10 His pragmatic conception of truth precludes him from making absolute metaphysical claims, and his critique of intellectualist logic demonstrates that there can be no conceptual conclusions that decide definitively whether the universe is essentially plural or essentially one.Footnote 11 However, this does not prevent him from articulating his own metaphysical vision.Footnote 12 In fact, the pluralistic universe he envisions is quite compelling precisely because it seeks to avoid the pitfalls of either ‘excessive monism or excessive pluralism’.Footnote 13
The reason James is not an absolute pluralist can be best understood when his position is viewed as a response to the age-old problem of the one and the many, which James admits has haunted him throughout his career. In fact, he states, ‘I have come, by long brooding over it, to consider it the most central of all philosophical problems.’Footnote 14 This perennial philosophical problem exhibits the irreducible tension structuring the relation of unity and plurality, or more broadly, identity and difference. Hegel, too, takes up the problem of the one and the many in his Logic and provides a more nuanced metaphysics than the common caricatures of his ‘absolutism’ allow. In this discussion Hegel illustrates how dialectic provides the means for expressing the tension inherent within the flow of experience as well as the continuity holding together its many concatenations. Both James and Hegel work through the problem of the one and the many as an example for demonstrating the inadequacy of one-sided accounts of reality. In attempting to describe the necessity of both unity and plurality, James struggled to give a logical account of the continuity of experience without reducing it to a seamless unity like he perceived intellectualism to have done. Through an examination of how Hegel negotiates the irreducible relation at the heart of this problem, I will demonstrate that dialectical thinking is not an ally of intellectualism but a tool against it thereby contributing to the growing acknowledgement of the pragmatic elements of Hegel's thought.
I James's Mediated Pluralism
James's professed preoccupation with the problem of the one and the many demonstrates his struggle to account for the continuity of experience in spite of his commitment to pluralism. It is true that he doggedly renounces the ‘block universe’ monism envisioned by his intellectualist enemies. However, his appreciation of the subtlety of the problematic at the heart of this issue leads him to articulate an account of experience that satisfies the basic need for continuity while avoiding the distortions of which he perceives intellectualist logic to be guilty. In A Pluralistic Universe, James develops a vision of reality concordant with his radical empiricism wherein ‘cynical materialism’ and ‘old fashioned dualistic theism’ are dismissed in order to make room for a more intimate experience of the divine as ‘indwelling’, suffused in the field of experience.Footnote 15 In expounding his vision of a more intimate universe, he aims to give an account of the interconnectedness of the many facets of experience while remaining true to the real disjunctions and opacities of the world's particularity.
As James develops his pluralistic vision, he strives to give an account of how the experience of relations is logically possible. He rejects the intellectualist approach that relies on an absolute consciousness to bind disparate individuality together since this view displaces the divine to some nether realm outside of experience. James's negotiation of the problem of the one and the many as it presents itself in this context hinges on making the continuity of life in the world intelligible without falling prey to the abstract identity leveled in some lofty absolute.
Throughout A Pluralistic Universe, James launches a stringent critique of intellectualist logic from various angles arguing that its tactics make our actual experience unintelligible. This critique is developed most acutely in his lecture ‘The Compounding of Consciousness’ wherein he takes on what he finds to be the most disturbing aspects of intellectualism. Even though intellectualism is the branch of thought associated with monism and the compounding of multiple consciousnesses into one, its logic is incapable of accounting for actual relatedness. It presumes the reality of many distinct minds, but it simultaneously holds that all are one in an encompassing absolute. The absolute, therefore, functions as an umbrella subsuming all the disparate facts of the universe into one. Yet, the absolute is claimed to be a combined consciousness of all the individuals contained within it, and it is this notion that James cannot abide. Asserting that individual consciousnesses are distinct yet identical in one absolute consciousness presents a glaring contradiction.Footnote 16 Summarizing the paradox of the intellectualist monist position, James explains that
The particular intellectualist difficulty that has held my own thought so long in a vise was … the impossibility of understanding how ‘your’ experience and ‘mine,’ which ‘as such’ are defined as not conscious of each other, can nevertheless at the same time be members of a world-experience defined expressly as having all its parts co-conscious, or known-together. … You see how unintelligible intellectualism here seems to make the world of our most accomplished philosophers.Footnote 17
Yet, even if we reject the monist compounding of consciousness, the alternative we are left with is equally problematic. James concedes that a pluralism that leaves the many asunder is equally inadequate. ‘Our intelligence cannot wall itself up alive, like a pupa in its chrysalis.’Footnote 18 But given the violence and contradiction of subsuming many distinct intelligences into one supreme Mind, the problem of how consciousness may be continuous without erasing difference remains.
James's imperative is clear — he seeks a pluralism that can account for the continuity of experience without appealing to an abstract identity of the many-in-one. Yet, he struggles to give a rational account of the reality in which he believes. James concludes that it is a mistake to try to make reality conform to the logical relations imposed upon it by the intellectualists. Intellectualist logic distorts our understanding of how things actually are by carving the world up into pieces according to concepts. ‘When we conceptualize, we cut out and fix, and exclude everything but what we have fixed. A concept means a that-and-no-other.’Footnote 19 James explains that ‘Conceptually, time excludes space … unity excludes plurality … “mine” excludes “yours” … and so on indefinitely.’Footnote 20 However, ‘in the real concrete sensible flux of life experiences compenetrate each other so that it is not easy to know just what is excluded and what is not’.Footnote 21 In other words, the changing flux of experience is at odds with the conceptual framework of the logic of identity that maintains the exclusiveness of entities by nature of their definitions. Life violates our logical axioms. Thus, James can say with confidence that, ‘Without being one throughout’, the universe in which we live is continuous. ‘Its members interdigitate with their next neighbors in manifold directions, and there are no clean cuts between them anywhere.’Footnote 22
Despite intellectualism's failure to give a rational account of the continuity of the world and its relations, James expresses a curious ambivalence toward Hegel and his peculiar logic. James includes Hegel as one of the most notorious members of the intellectualist camp, but he also acknowledges his break with its narrow logic of identity. James acknowledges that when faced with the dilemma of whether or not to abandon the logic of identity and embrace an irrationalist worldview, ‘Hegel was the first non-mystical writer to face the dilemma squarely and throw away the ordinary logic, saving a pseudo-rationality for the universe by inventing the higher logic of the “dialectical process”.’Footnote 23 Though James unequivocally states that he does not ‘take Hegel's technical apparatus seriously at all’,Footnote 24 he also, perhaps surprisingly, acknowledges that: ‘Roughly, [Hegel's] “dialectic” picture is a fair account of a good deal of the world.’Footnote 25 In contrast to the intellectualist logic that divides and isolates facets of experience, Hegel offers a view of concepts that James considers ‘revolutionary’. ‘Concepts’, James writes, were in Hegel's eyes not the ‘static self-contained things that previous logicians had supposed, but were germinative, and passed beyond themselves into each other by what he called their immanent dialectic’.Footnote 26 Thus, from a dialectical standpoint, unity and plurality, for example, are co-implicating and must be understood as necessitating one another.
Given James's positive appraisal of Hegel's view of concepts and his admission that there is, indeed, dialectical movement in things, we are led to wonder why James fails to take Hegel's dialectical method seriously. James's ambivalence towards Hegel deserves a closer look since it is by no means clear that what James rejects of Hegel is an accurate portrayal of his philosophy. Don Morse, in ‘James's Neglected Critique of Hegel’, recounts the ways in which many of James's criticisms of Hegel are ‘talking at cross purposes’, and fail to provide an actual argument against any aspect of Hegel's philosophy.Footnote 27 Despite Morse's (2005) admission that ‘there is a good deal of truth in the idea that James has in some way or another misunderstood Hegel’, his main argument concludes that James did advance some criticisms that ‘penetrate deeply into the Hegelian system and threaten to destroy it’.Footnote 28 Morse claims that James's most forceful criticisms are ‘the charge of vicious intellectualism’ and ‘the charge of false unity’. These criticisms are linked in that they both rest upon the view that Hegel has privileged concepts and universals at the expense of direct apprehension of reality through sense experience. To see whether James is justified in rejecting Hegel, an examination of the validity of these criticisms is in order.
In his lecture, ‘Hegel and His Method’, included in A Pluralistic Universe, James hones in on a particular dialectical formulation in order to test its validity. James agrees with Hegel that ‘to be true a thing must be in some sort its own other’, but he mistakenly believes that for Hegel this is only true at the level of concepts, claiming that for Hegel, ‘several pieces of finite experience themselves cannot be said to be in any wise their own others’.Footnote 29 According to James, this qualifies Hegel as a ‘vicious intellectualist’, that is, a philosopher who champions concepts at the expense of sensibility. As mentioned above, Morse corroborates James's critique of Hegel's supposed intellectualism and reiterates James's assessment that ‘everything hinges on whether [Hegel] is right’ in believing that finite experiences cannot be their own others. Attempting to prove that James's assessment of Hegel is correct, Morse analyzes the ‘sense-certainty’ chapter in the Phenomenology of Spirit.
As James clearly sees, this point is crucial to the development of Hegel's entire position. It is only because Hegel can point to the inability of finite, sensible experience to supply its own other that he can discover the universal as that which does so … And it is only because he can introduce the universal that he can then move on to perception (in which we can make universal judgments) and then surpass it through the understanding, … and so on up to the Absolute.Footnote 30
From here, Morse goes on to show that James can indeed provide an account of how finite experiences are their own others and, therefore, concludes that James has refuted Hegel by exposing a crucial error at the foundation of his system.
Both James and Morse are incorrect, however, in claiming that Hegel's dialectic of sense-certainty implies that experience consists of ‘discrete, isolated atoms of sense that imply nothing outside of themselves’.Footnote 31 Contrary to Morse's analysis, such a position is, in fact, radically un-dialectical. In his discussion of ‘sense-certainty’, Hegel is critiquing the notion that immediate sense experience can count as knowledge without the mediation of concepts. He is not suggesting that finite sense experiences are, themselves, atomistic. Rather, Hegel demonstrates that there is no such thing as immediate sense-certainty, explaining that any reference to a particular sense experience cannot help but employ universals. When one attempts to point to a particular experience as ‘this-here-now’, and thereby affirm the immediacy of the experience, one has, in fact, created a context in which the experience is imbedded. This, in turn, evokes a web of related concepts. For example, Hegel explains that when one specifies a particular place as ‘here’, ‘The Here pointed out’ is actually ‘not this Here, but a Before and Behind, an Above and Below, a Right and Left. The Above is similarly this manifold otherness of above, below, etc.’Footnote 32 Thus, the experience of our immediate place can never be taken in isolation. The same is true when the present moment is identified as ‘now’. When a moment is pointed out as ‘now’, the particularity of this moment can only be understood within a greater temporal movement. ‘The pointing-out of the Now is thus itself the movement which expresses what the Now is in truth, viz. a result, or a plurality of Nows all taken together.’Footnote 33 The ‘now’ one may be referring to could be this day, but the day is a plurality of hours which are themselves a plurality of minutes and seconds. Affirming this point, Katharina Dulckeit explains that the proposed immediacy of sense-certainty ‘cannot consist of a simple and immediate pointing out of atomic instants of time and points in space. What constitutes the Here-and-Now-ness of a particular for consciousness is a function of the context in which both are situated.’Footnote 34 Since sense-certainty reveals itself to be embedded in a network of mediation, it is incapable of being taken in discrete, isolated instances as Morse suggests following James.
Robert Stern offers some additional insights on this specific issue that directly contradict Morse's argument. Stern explains that James's ‘dynamic holism’ which emphasizes the tangibility of relationships and rejects atomistic conceptions of being, was affirmed by F. H. Bradley to come quite close to the position held by Hegel.
While James himself was (perhaps not unnaturally) unwilling to recognize his closeness to Hegel in this respect, Bradley rightly insisted on making this point, commenting in a letter to James of 1910, ‘I don't think the fastening together of an originally discrete datum is really Hegelian. I think myself that Hegel is far more on your side.’Footnote 35
Timothy Sprigge makes a similar observation, in James and Bradley: American Truth and British Reality. When considering the relations among the constituents of experience, Sprigge writes, ‘They are their own others as [James] puts it echoing Hegel; there is a kind of identity between them in spite of their difference.’Footnote 36 If, as James says, the coherence of Hegelian philosophy hinges on whether finite experiences can indeed be their own others, then it must be concluded that James's critique of Hegel as recounted by Morse fundamentally misunderstands the movement of the dialectic at the outset of the Phenomenology.
James's vitriolic critique of Hegel in ‘On Some Hegelisms’ seems to preclude any possibility of their agreement when he writes: ‘The great, the sacred law of partaking, the noiseless step of continuity, seems something that Hegel cannot possibly understand.’Footnote 37 In spite of his strong condemnation of him in this essay, in A Pluralistic Universe James acknowledges that Hegel is not only ‘harmless, but accurate’ when ‘taken in the rough’.Footnote 38 James validates Hegel's dialectical vision, though he does not appreciate its rigor with regard to concrete experience. He mistakenly lumps Hegel in with the intellectualists who claim that an absolute mind is needed to unify experience, assuming that dialectic progresses by uniting contradictories into a higher synthesis similarly to the compounding of consciousnesses. Upon closer scrutiny, however, dialectic proves to be precisely opposed to the intellectualist logic James critiques. As will be demonstrated in the following section, Hegel not only rejects the feasibility of the compounding of consciousnesses into an absolute mind in his critique of Leibniz's system in his Lectures on the History of Philosophy, his discussion of the problem of the one and the many within the Science of Logic provides the means for comprehending how seemingly discrete entities are actually interdigitating, both conceptually and empirically.
II Hegel's Dialectic of the One
James criticizes the intellectualist perspective in which individuals are conceptualized as being mutually exclusive by definition. According to the intellectualist perspective, individuals are carved up into isolated monads incapable of experiencing real relatedness. Despite his acknowledgement of the accuracy of Hegel's claim that there is dialectical movement in things, James fails to see how dialectic is a concrete mode of thought that could avoid the logical impasse he articulates in A Pluralistic Universe.
What James rejects as intellectualism is easily compared to the type of thinking discussed by Hegel as the logic of Verstand. Hegel explains that the understanding assumes its separation from sense-experience and bestows an inevitably abstract form of universality onto its content.Footnote 39 He critiques this way of proceeding as ‘hard and one-sided’ acknowledging that it, ‘if pursued consistently, leads to ruinous and destructive results’.Footnote 40 Thus, the logic of the understanding must be distinguished from speculative thinking, which is truly rational, since it has grasped the dialectical nature of its content. Ultimately, for Hegel, the content of thought, and the method and activity of thinking are inseparable. The ‘activity of the forms of thinking, and the critique of them, must be united within the process of cognition’.Footnote 41 The dialectical mode of thinking ‘is not brought to bear on the thought-determinations from the outside; on the contrary, it must be considered as dwelling within them’.Footnote 42 Hegel claims that dialectic is ‘the soul of all scientific cognition’ because it reveals and accounts for the self-negating character of what the understanding takes to be separate determinations. The understanding ‘begins by apprehending given objects in their determinate distinctions’ and advances ‘in accordance with the principle of identity’.Footnote 43 Dialectic, on the other hand, is the method through which these determinations can be seen to collapse into their opposites when pressed to the limits of their definitions.Footnote 44 In Hegel's terms, such determinations are ‘self-sublating’. To illustrate the difference between dialectical thinking and the logic of the understanding, he gives the example of how mortality can be viewed according to these different approaches. When we say a man is mortal from the standpoint of the understanding, we regard being mortal and being alive as separate properties; ‘and we regard dying as having its ground only in external circumstances’.Footnote 45
In this way of looking at things, a man has two specific properties, namely, he is alive and also mortal. But the proper interpretation is that life as such bears the germ of death within itself, and that the finite sublates itself because it contradicts itself inwardly.Footnote 46
We can see, therefore, that from a properly dialectical standpoint, life and death, which the understanding takes to be mutually exclusive, are really inseparable and co-implicating. However, Hegel is not claiming that life and death are one and the same as if there is no difference between them. Rather, by adopting a speculative viewpoint and demonstrating their inseparability, we can see that the movement of life includes death, thus achieving a deeper understanding of the nature of both.
The same dialectical movement operative in this example is at work in Hegel's treatment of the relation of the one and the many in the Science of Logic. Within this relatively short portion of text Hegel takes the reader through the stages of the one's internal dialectic showing how the various kinds of monistic and pluralistic perspectives are but stages in an ever-increasing comprehension of the basic relations shaping the problem of the one and the many itself. Hegel's dialectical approach to the one and the many demonstrates the inadequacy of simplistic claims of unity and plurality. A dialectical understanding of a problem recognizes that the conflicting sides at stake in an issue must be mutually determining. In short, manyness and oneness are two aspects of the same problematic. Therefore, championing unity over against plurality is a one-sided view. Any monism that has not been mediated by plurality is nothing but an abstract unity incapable of characterizing the change and becoming of our lived experience and the relations therein. Expressing the inadequacy of a ‘stable unity’, Hegel makes clear that the relation of the one and the many cannot be expressed in a single proposition such as ‘the many are one’.
It is an ancient proposition that the one is many and especially that the many are one. We may repeat here the observation that the truth of the one and the many expressed in propositions appears in an inappropriate form, that this truth is to be grasped and expressed only as a becoming, as a process, a repulsion and attraction—not as being, which in a proposition has the character of a stable unity.Footnote 47
The challenge of understanding Hegel's dialectical approach to a problem is the suspension of a definitive viewpoint in the midst of its progressive development. A stable unity of the many in one is a mere formal abstraction. Thus, maintaining the real differences that distinguish the many as a multiplicity is necessary for grasping the concrete becoming of life. Indeed, the many are inextricably tied according to Hegel — they are aspects of an organic whole. But he also maintains that the differences between them are rightly preserved. Though Hegel gives precedence to the unity of the whole, in dialectical fashion he assures the reader that ‘the difference will also come in again’.Footnote 48
The section in which Hegel examines the problem of the one and the many is contained within a larger section on ‘being-for-self’ within the first book of the Logic on the doctrine of being. Being-for-self is a technical term Hegel uses for a self-relation expressing a stage of becoming wherein self-consciousness and individuality begin to be established. Since being-for-self implies a degree of relative autonomy, the first step in his dialectical examination of the problem of the one and the many emerges at the nascent stage of being-for-one. His discussion proceeds to outline ‘the inner dialectic’ of the one taking the reader through its various stages of development. Through his outline of the progressive development of the one's becoming, Hegel shows that the very concept of one necessitates manyness, that the autonomy of the individual is derived through its relatedness to others. First conceived, the one is ‘the simple self-relation of being-for-self.’Footnote 49 At this stage the one has no internal differentiation and no content, thus it is the same as nothing. ‘In this simple immediacy … all difference and manifoldness has vanished. There is nothing in it.’Footnote 50 Viewed this way the one and nothing, or ‘the void’, are the same since neither has any definitive content. For Hegel, a unity that is self-same throughout is devoid of content because all determinations rest on relative distinctions that are mutually determining. Thus we can see, like in the example of the dialectic of life and death, how antithetical terms when pushed to the limits of their definitions transmute into their opposites. All entities, both real and ideal, become actual through their relatedness to that which they oppose. Therefore, we can begin to see that, for Hegel, difference is integral to dialectical becoming. In fact, it is the positing of difference that spurs the dialectic onward.
The key role that difference plays in the movement of the dialectic is important for understanding where Hegel stands on the problem of the one and the many because it challenges the popular caricature that casts his philosophy as a simple monism which reduces all differences to a seamless identity. William Maker in ‘Identity, Difference and the Logic of Otherness’ maintains that Hegel's systematic philosophy is radically opposed to the kind of reductionism that it is frequently charged with. Maker argues that the autonomy and self-determination that Hegel's method of philosophizing seeks to establish ‘may only transpire through a conceptual dynamic—dialectic—where identity and difference are mutually implicated and neither is privileged’.Footnote 51 In the context of our discussion of the one and the many, this means that neither the differences that distinguish and characterize manyness, nor the self-identity of a seamless unity, are adequate to Hegel's dialectical view. According to his speculative logic, neither manyness nor oneness are granted absolutely.
Hegel's mediation between the extremes of unity and plurality is evident in the next stage of his dialectic of the one following his discussion of the void's equality with a one that is undifferentiated. Hegel explains that due to the dialectic internal to itself, ‘the one repels itself from itself” giving rise to a plurality of ones.Footnote 52 So, according to the dialectic he develops, there is a movement from the one to the many such that the ‘one is consequently a becoming of many ones’.Footnote 53 He explains that ‘the plurality of the one is its own positing’. Moreover, ‘the one is nothing but the negative relation of the one to itself, and this relation—and therefore the one itself—is the plural one’.Footnote 54 With this Hegel has attempted to show that the very conception of the one necessitates plurality by tracing the movement of the dialectic from an abstract, undifferentiated one, the void, to the becoming of many ones.Footnote 55 From here he proceeds to discuss the movement of the one's many determinations as the simultaneous forces of attraction and repulsion, explaining how this logic is played out in the concrete relations among existing entities. The counter movements of repulsion and attraction constitute the irreducible difference that enlivens the dynamic content of life. This irreducible difference is also what differentiates the one from itself, giving rise to the problem of the one and the many as it has been historically conceived.
The forces of attraction and repulsion express the dimensions of the dialectic immanent to the problem of the one and the many and the one's own internal dialectic.Footnote 56 According to Hegel's account, repulsion is what distinguishes the one within itself; it is what creates plurality by continually asserting the difference required for the one to be an individual which already implies that it is one among many. Attraction is what binds the dispersed many, the plurality of ones, together allowing them to be seen as reflecting into one another. Attraction is what allows the many ones to be seen as one one, that is, the self-determination of the one. However, attraction is mediated by repulsion such that the unity of the one never involves the absorption of the many into a non-differential sameness. Hegel explains that the one one of attraction ‘does not absorb the attracted ones into itself as into a center, that is, it does not sublate them abstractly. Since it contains repulsion in its determination, this latter at the same time preserves the ones as many in it.’Footnote 57
In this discussion we can notice two senses of the idea of oneness that when distinguished can help to clarify the transition from one one to many ones in Hegel's account. First, the notion of oneness implies wholeness and completeness. This notion of oneness is associated with an absolute One into which everything is combined. And second, the notion of ‘a one’ implies singularity and particularity; it implies a plurality in which one is just the first in a series. Hegel's dialectic of the one begins with the idea of one in the abstract, as a simple, unmediated, nascent being-for-self. But this is not its complete truth because to be one also has the meaning of being an individual, and being an individual, like the second sense of being ‘a one’, means to be one among many. Therefore, inherent within the very notion of one is plurality, which is why Hegel describes the one's repulsion from itself as the transition to manyness. But it must be noted that, for Hegel, the repulsion of the ones is a force that binds them together at the same time. He says ‘their repulsion is their common relation’, and the other side of repulsion is attraction.Footnote 58 As noted above, the simultaneous attraction of the many ones does not lead to the negation of them as individuals. Hegel explains, ‘If there were no ones there would be nothing to attract. … If attraction were conceived as accomplished, the many being brought to the point of one one, then here would be present an inert one and no longer any attraction.’Footnote 59 This leads him to conclude ‘attraction is inseparable from repulsion’.Footnote 60 Both must exist in order for either to exist. Again, it must be stressed that even though the unity of the system takes precedence for Hegel, it is a dynamic unity in which difference must be real and existent. The reality of the many ones must be maintained. Otherwise, we are left with a sterile ‘inert one’ in which there is no movement or vitality. It seems that Hegel's vision of the continuity of life is not as far away from James's as one might have expected.
In ‘On Some Hegelisms’, James did recognize that, for Hegel, ‘the truth refuses to be expressed in any single act of judgment or sentence’.Footnote 61 And so, ‘the world appears as a monism and a pluralism’. But James explains that the reason that keeps him and Hegel ‘from ever joining hands over this apparent formula of brotherhood is that we distinguish, or try to distinguish, the respects in which the world is one from the those in which it is many, while all such stable distinctions are what he most abominates’.Footnote 62 With this James is implying that Hegel's philosophy lacks specificity, that it does not involve any real distinctions. This opinion is further maintained in a note appended to the end of the essay in which James concludes that ‘the identity of contradictories, far from being the self-developing process which Hegel supposes, is really a self-consuming process, passing from the less to the more abstract’ terminating in a meaningless infinity. James, however, provides no argument for this view; and when we consult the details of Hegel's philosophy, we see that James is mistaken. It is true that, for Hegel, ‘The truth is the whole’; but the absolute, in his view, is not the ‘night in which all cows are black’.Footnote 63 The absolute is the collective movement of all moments that comprise it. It has a definite content, which is the result of the progress of thinking that is revealed in its development.
Though the philosophical temperaments and styles of Hegel and James are radically different, Hegel's dialectical approach to the problem of the one and the many provides a logical framework for understanding continuity and the interdigitation of phenomena within James's radical empiricism. Recall that one of James's main criticisms of intellectualist logic is its inability to explain how the experience of relations is possible. According to intellectualist logic, experience gets carved up into discrete entities such that it becomes impossible to cogently explain how individuals can interact with each other. He states the problem as follows:
To act on anything means to get into it somehow; but that would mean to get out of one's self and into one's other, which is self-contradictory etc. Meanwhile each of us actually is his own other to that extent, livingly knowing how to perform the trick which logic tells us can't be done. […] Distinctions may be insulators in logic as much as they like, but in life distinct things can and do commune together every moment.Footnote 64
It is true that once objects are conceived according to their definitions as being exclusive to one another, giving a logical explanation of how one thing can interact with and have an influence on another becomes virtually impossible. However, according to Hegel's dialectical approach, the objects of investigation must always be conceived through their relationships to each other because it is only through their relationship to these others that they acquire their own self-identity. One of the hallmarks of dialectical thought is its ability to express the interrelatedness of the objects in question. As opposed to the approach taken by the logic of identity, a dialectical understanding of a problem allows for apparently contradictory viewpoints to be taken together as successive moments within the process of understanding. James asks how the world can be both many and one. By following Hegel through his dialectic of the one, it becomes clear that it is precisely through the movement of repulsion and attraction that the many are both held apart and bound together. Conceiving the relation of the many in this way allows them to be understood as ‘interdigitating’ in James's sense, since the repulsion and attraction of the many implies that ‘no clear cuts’ can be decisively drawn between things such that they are mutually exclusive.
The compatibility of James and Hegel's views on this issue can be further demonstrated by looking at Hegel's critique of Leibniz's conception of the monad. In Hegel's discussion of Leibniz's monad, he highlights the same inadequacies of conceiving individuals as completely insular discussed by James above. Since Leibnizian monads are ‘windowless’ they are unable to interact with one another and have no actual shared relationship. For Hegel this lack of relation precludes them from being actual individuals. Individuals can only exist through their relationships to others such that one's identity lies partially outside of oneself.Footnote 65 Hegel explains that within Leibniz's system, the monads ‘do not limit one another and do not affect one another’.Footnote 66 ‘They are not in themselves others to one another; the being-for-self is kept pure, and is free from the accompaniment of any real being. But herein lies, too, the inadequacy of this system.’Footnote 67 Leibnizian idealism ‘possesses plurality only on the side of abstract externality’ meaning that the multitude of monads are not grasped within the framework of repulsion and attraction which Hegel takes to be the governing principles of the many. Instead they are simply left in disparate isolation. Even though Leibniz does claim that God serves as the ‘monad of monads’ holding his system together, Hegel rightly points out that ‘there is an unresolved contradiction’ in Leibniz's system because if God is the absolute substance, ‘then of course the substantiality of the other monads comes to naught’.Footnote 68 Hegel's critique of Leibniz parallels James's critique of intellectualist logic and the supposed ‘compounding of consciousness’ in that they both recognize that once the discreteness of individuals is posited conceptually, there is no possibility of putting them back together again in a way that is logically coherent. James will not abide an image of consciousness walled up ‘like a pupa in its chrysalis’, and a true individual only exists for Hegel through its interrelation with others.
Conclusion
Our discussion has shown that neither Hegel's ‘monism’ nor James's ‘pluralism’ are simple, unmediated accounts. Both James and Hegel recognize that the entwinement of unity and plurality gives rise to the irreducible tension at the heart of the problem of the one and the many. James sincerely tries to do justice to the complexity of the problem, and in doing so he develops a pluralistic vision that is, at the same time, sympathetic to the desire for unity.Footnote 69 In this regard, James shares Hegel's knack for mediating between extremes. Jean Wahl notes, ‘Of course James will never accept complete monism. He rallies to the idea of “monistic pluralism.” In A Pluralistic Universe he appears to wish to keep himself half-way between pluralism and monism.’Footnote 70 Bruce Wilshire makes a similar observation noting that despite the apparent disdain James had for Hegel's thought, we can also see certain affinities between their views that James was reluctant to admit.Footnote 71 ‘With regard to Hegel, [James] bristles with contempt. … [But] he inched over the decades toward the views he ridiculed. He tried to retain a vision of the individual's intimate inclusion in a whole, but a whole construed pluralistically.’Footnote 72 Richard J. Bernstein has also noted that there are ‘several ironies in the caricature of Hegel that James created for us.’ Bernstein states, ‘If we look at what James did—and not so much at what he said he was doing—we discover that James is much closer to Hegel … than he realized.’Footnote 73
Though James and Hegel negotiate the problem of the one and the many along similar lines, the differences between their wider perspectives must not be deemphasized. Hegel is a systematic thinker, and the unity of his philosophical system has a rational structure, whereas the radical empiricism of James maintains that the parts that comprise the universe are not rationalistically bound in a necessary relation. The unity of James's universe is a ‘concatenated’ one whose parts ‘“hang together from next to next,” with no single strand of identity, no absolute mind pulling everything together through their necessarily connected essences.’Footnote 74 The metaphysical positions of James and Hegel are similar in their deeply felt need for unity, but what most strongly distinguishes them is James's rejection of a teleological and logically driven vision of the universe like that found in Hegel's philosophy of history.Footnote 75
In light of the differences between their metaphysical positions, it remains to be clarified what is significant about the similarities between Hegel and James, and more generally, what Hegel's philosophy has to contribute to pragmatist discourse. I am not proposing that Hegel's absolute idealism be resurrected, nor am I suggesting that many of Hegel's views will prove consistently satisfactory within the context of contemporary debates. Rather, I am suggesting that it is Hegel's method that is most pertinent, and it is on this point that pragmatists would benefit from taking a closer look at Hegel's philosophy. Insofar as intellectualist logic fails to give a faithful account of experience, Hegel's dialectical approach offers a way to make sense of the affronts of a contradictory world. It provides tools for unraveling the vectors of competing arguments by showing how the standpoints of perceived enemies are often inflections of a common point of view. Others have already pointed out that Hegel has inspired a number of pragmatist thinkers, most notably Dewey.Footnote 76 In The Pragmatic Turn, Bernstein writes that Dewey ‘approaches philosophical problems in a Hegelian manner by delineating opposing extremes, showing what is false about them, indicating how we can preserve the truth implicit in them, and passing beyond these extremes to a more comprehensive solution’.Footnote 77 This approach, as Bernstein describes it, captures in a nutshell what is most advantageous and pragmatic about Hegel's method — its ability to mediate between extremes, preserve the kernel of truth in an otherwise false position, and situate a viewpoint within the context of a wider historical landscape in order to promote a fuller understanding of an issue and inspire more effective engagement with the world and others.
Even though Hegel understood his philosophy as a rational science recounting the necessary phases of Spirit's development in culture and history, his method of philosophizing need not be bound to his rarified conception of philosophy. Hegel's most valuable contribution to philosophy is not his architectonic system, but a mode of thinking that does not shy away from the contradictions of reality. In 1960 Herbert Marcuse wrote, ‘Today, this dialectical mode of thought is alien to the whole established universe of discourse and action’,Footnote 78 but the same could be said of the present. Dialectic remains obscure because its logic runs counter to the presupposed ‘laws of thought’. James was aware that philosophy has the tendency to make itself into a temple at the expense of grappling with the messiness of the mundane. He was aware that intellectualist logic distorts the facts of experience rendering them unintelligible. Dialectic, however, is activated by discordance within experience and generates knowledge from out of what begins as confusion. In so doing, dialectic brings what appear to be incompatible perspectives ‘into a dynamic living relationship’.Footnote 79 Had James better appreciated this aim of dialectic, perhaps he would have incorporated the notion of dialectical movement into his own empiricism.
