THE SECRET OF HEGEL. III. THE SECTION, QUALITY, AS TRANSLATED IN II., HERE COMMENTED AND INTERPRETED. DEFINITENESS (QUALITY). THE language just encountered must appear very strange to the uninitiated English reader, and, perhaps, he may be inclined to attribute the circumstance to imperfection of translation. Let him be assured, however, that in German, and to the German student who approaches Hegel for the first time, the strangeness of the initiatory reception is hardly less repulsive than it has just proved to himself. There is no valid reason for despair, then, as regards intelligence here, because it is a translation that is before one, and not the original. To due endeavour, the Hegelian thought will gather round these English terms quite as perfectly, or nearly so, as round their German equivalents. Comment nevertheless is wanted, and will facilitate progress. Bestimmen and its immediate derivatives constitute much the largest portion of the speech of Hegel. The reader, indeed, feels for long that with Bestimmung and Bestimmung he is bestimmt into Unbestimmtheit; and even finds himself, perhaps, actually cursing this said Bestimmung of Hegel as heartily as ever Aristotle cursed the Idea of Plato. Stimme means voice, and the action of Bestimmen is to supply voice to what previously had none. As already said, then, Hegel's Bestimmung is a sort of naming of Adam: it is a process of Logical Determination-a process in which concrete determinateness, or determinate concretion, grows and grows in organised complexity up from absolute abstract indeterminateness or from absolutely indeterminate abstraction to a consummate Absolute. To Hegel what is, is Thought; and the life of Thought can only be Logical Determination, or the distinguishing (differentiating) of indefinite abstraction (the beginning of Thought) into ultimate concrete definiteness (the end of Thought) by means of the operation of the faculties of Thought (Simple Apprehension, Judgment, and Reason), to the resolution of the Begriff (the An sich, the indefinite Universal) through the Ur-theil (the Für sich, the separation into Particulars, into Many, as against One), and the production of the Schluss (the concrete Singular,) which is the All of Thought, Thought elevated into its ultimate and complete concretion as the absolute Subject (which again is the ultimate An und für sich).-This is a very complete expression for the industry of Hegel.-Bestimmen, then, is to develop in abstract Thought all its own constitutive, consecutive, and co-articulated members, or elements, or principles. Bestimmen attaches or develops a Bestimmung, and produces Bestimmtheit. Bestimmen is to be-voice, to vocify, voculate, render articulate, to define, determine, or distinguish into the implied constitutive variety: even to accentuate will be seen to involve the same function; or we may say modulate, then |