Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Truth… lies in the coincidence of the object with itself, that is,
with its notion. That a person is sick, or that someone has
committed a theft, may certainly be correct. But the content is
untrue. A sick body is not in harmony with the notion of body,
and there is a want of congruity between theft and the notion of
human conduct… the untruth of the immediate judgment lies in
the incongruity between its form and its content.1
Hegel says here that finite things perish as untrue, out of harmony with
their notion. We actually die because life is a finite and contradictory
category. So we were never really alive. "Oh life that is no life at all," as St.
Teresa had less formally put it. Life is not our act, not what we "keep unto
life eternal", keep by losing, in Christian terms. Religious paradox
challenges philosophical elucidation. Hegel's idea of evil too, as
disharmony with its notion, so that evil in a thing is an untruth, a non-
existence, is in striking harmony with Aquinas.
Experience, on the other hand, "has no intrinsic value of its own." We can
agree that everything depends upon the mind "we bring to bear upon
actuality", which may be great and noble or less so. We all concur in this
with respect to the insane. So Hegel will quite naturally urge an a priori
dialectic of categories as the necessary matter of thought. This dialectic is
an emergence from the Understanding, which is conditioned by finite
categories, to Reason, which is unconditioned and free.
3
Ibid. 24 (subtext).