III.3. The Idea

The Idea is the adequate Notion: objective truth, or the truth as such. If anything has truth it has it through its Idea; or something has truth only in so far as it is Idea.—Elsewhere in philosophy and in ordinary life the expression “idea” has often been used for Notion and even for a mere image. “I have no idea yet of this law-suit, building, or region” signifies no more than image. Kant has claimed the expression “idea” again for the Notion of reason.—Now according to Kant the Notion of reason is to be the Notion of the unconditioned, and, with respect to phenomena, to be transcendent which means that it is impossible to make any adequate empirical use of it. Notions of reason are to serve for the conceptual comprehension, and Notions of understanding for the bare understanding, of perceptions.—But in fact, if the latter really are Notions, then they are Notions,—conceptual or notional comprehension takes place through them, and a process of understanding perceptions through Notions of understanding will be such a process of comprehension. But if understanding is only a determining of perceptions through such determinations as, for example, whole and parts, force, cause, and the like, then it signifies only a determining through reflection; and similarly by understanding only determinate imagining of a fully determinate sensuous content can be meant: as one who, having been told the road and that he must turn to the left at the end of the wood, replies “I understand” means nothing more by those words than an apprehension into imagination and memory.—“Notion of reason” too is a somewhat clumsy expression; for the Notion is altogether rational; and, in so far as reason is distinguished from understanding and the Notion as such, it is the totality of the Notion and of Objectivity.—In this sense the Idea is the rational;—it is the unconditioned because only that has conditions which essentially relates itself to an objectivity—an objectivity not determined by that itself, however, but remaining in the form of indifference and externality against it, as was the objectivity which belonged to the external End.

The expression “Idea” being thus retained for the objective or real Notion, and being distinguished from the Notion itself, and, still more, from the mere image, that valuation of the Idea is even more to be rejected which takes it for something merely unreal. It is said of true thoughts that they are merely Ideas: now if thoughts are merely subjective and contingent they certainly have no further value; but in this they are not inferior to the temporal and contingent actualities, which also have no value except that which is proper to contingencies and phenomena. And if conversely the Idea is not to be rated as true because, with respect to phenomena, it is transcendent, and no object can be assigned to it, in the sensuous world, to which it conforms, this is a strange lack of understanding,—for so the Idea is denied objective validity because it lacks that which constitutes appearance, or the untrue being of the objective world. With respect to practical Ideas Kant recognizes that “nothing could be found more harmful or more unworthy of a philosopher than the vulgar appeal to an experience which is asserted to conflict with the Idea. Such an experience would never exist if, for example, political institutions were made at the fit moment in accordance with Ideas,—in the place of which rough notions, just because they were drawn from experience, frustrate every good intention.” Kant looks upon the Idea as necessary and as the goal, which, as the prototype, should be set up as a maximum, and to which it should be the object of endeavour to cause the condition of actuality progressively to approach.

But, the result having been reached that the Idea is the unity of the Notion and Objectivity, or the truth, it must not merely be considered as a goal which must be approached while it still remains a kind of beyond: it must be held that whatever is actual is only in so far as it contains and expresses the Idea. The object, and the objective and subjective world, not merely ought to conform to the Idea, but are themselves the conformity of Notion and reality: that reality which does not correspond to the Notion is mere appearance, or that subjective, contingent, capricious entity which is not the truth. If it is said that no object is found in experience which completely conforms to the Idea, then the latter is opposed to the actual as a subjective criterion. But it is hard to say what an actuality is supposed in truth to be, if its Notion is not in it, and if its objectivity is quite inadequate to this Notion; for it would be Nothing. The Mechanical and Chemical Object, like the non-spiritual subject and the spirit which is conscious only of the finite and not of its Essence, have their Notion existing in them, according to their respective natures, but not in its own free form. But altogether they can be true only in so far as they are the union of their Notion and reality—of their soul and their body. Wholes like the State or the Church cease to exist when the unity of their Notion and their reality is dissolved. Man, the living entity, is dead when soul and body are severed in him; dead nature, the mechanical and chemical world (if the dead is taken as equivalent to the inorganic world—it has no other positive significance), if separated into its Notion and its reality, is just the subjective abstraction of a form which is the work of thought, and a formless matter. A spirit which is not Idea, or unity of the Notion with itself,—a spirit which would be the Notion having the Notion itself for its reality, would be dead or spiritless spirit, a material object.

Being has reached the significance of truth, since the Idea is the unity of Notion and reality; so that now Being is only what is Idea. Finite things therefore are finite in so far as they do not fully possess the reality of their Notion in themselves, but require something further for that end,—or, conversely, in so far as they are presupposed as objects, and thus have the Notion applied to them as an external determination. The highest development which they reach according to the side of this finitude is external adequacy to an End. The fact that actual things do not conform to the Idea is the side of their finitude or untruth, according to which they are Objects, determined according to their several spheres and in the relations of Objectivity either mechanically, chemically, or through an external End. It is possible that the Idea should not completely have leavened its reality, and should have subjected it imperfectly to the Notion, for this reason, that it itself has a restricted content, and that it is as essentially the distinction between as it is the unity of the Notion and reality; for only the Object is immediate unity, that is, unity which is only in itself. But if an object—for example, the State—were to be wholly inadequate to its Idea (that is, rather, were not to be the Idea of the State), if its reality, which is that of the self-conscious individuals, in no way corresponded to the Notion, then its soul and its body would have parted: the former would fly into the various regions of thought, the latter would have fallen apart into the single individualities. But the Notion of the State so essentially constitutes their nature, and therefore is so powerful an impulse in them, that they are forced to translate it into reality (even if only in the form of external adequacy to an End), or to submit to it as it is, or else perish. The worst State, whose reality least corresponds to the Notion, is still Idea in so far as it exists; the individuals still obey a ruling Notion.

But the Idea has not only the more general meaning of true Being, or of the unity of Notion and reality, but also the more definite meaning of the unity of the Subjective Notion and Objectivity. For the Notion as such is already identity of itself and reality, since the indeterminate expression “reality” means just determinate Being, and this the Notion has in its particularity and individuality. And further Objectivity equally is the total Notion which out of its determinateness has collapsed into self-identity. In the former Subjectivity, the determinateness or distinction of the Notion is a Show which has been transcended immediately and has passed back into Being-for-Self or negative unity, or is inhering predicate. But in this Objectivity the determinateness is posited as immediate totality, or external whole. The Idea has thus shown itself as the Notion, liberated again into its subjectivity out of the immediacy into which it is immersed in the Object, distinguishing itself from its Objectivity, which, however, is equally determined by it and has its substantiality only in the Notion. This identity has therefore rightly been determined as the Subject-Object, since it is the formal or Subjective Notion as much as it is the Object as such. This however must be apprehended in a more closely determinate manner. The Notion, having veritably reached its reality, is this absolute Judgment, whose Subject, as self-relating negative unity, distinguishes itself from its Objectivity and is the Being-in-and-for-Self of the latter, but essentially relates itself through itself to it, and consequently is its own End and impulse. But for this very reason Objectivity is not applied immediately to the Subject, for then the Subject would only be this totality of the Object as such wasted into Objectivity. In fact Objectivity is the realization of the End, an Objectivity posited through the activity of the End, which, as positedness, has its persistence and its form only as penetrated by its Subject. As Objectivity it has in it the moment of the externality of the Notion, and consequently is, in general, the side of finitude, variability, and appearance, which however perishes in the return to the negative unity of the Notion; that negativity in which its indifferent mutual externality of elements shows itself as unessential and as positedness, is the Notion itself. Hence in spite of this Objectivity the Idea is utterly simple and immaterial, for externality is only as determined by the Notion and is taken up into the latter’s negative unity; in so far as it persists as indifferent externality, it is not only laid open to Mechanism, but exists only as the perishable and untrue.—Although then the Idea has its reality in some kind of matter, still this is not an abstract Being persisting for itself against the Notion, but is only as Becoming, through the negativity of indifferent Being as simple determinateness of the Notion.

From this result the following closer determinations of the Idea.—First it is simple truth, the identity of the Notion and Objectivity as a universal, in which the opposition and the persistence of the particular is resolved into its self-identical negativity and exists as self-equality. Secondly it is the relation of the Subjectivity, which is for itself, of the simple Notion to the Objectivity which is distinct from it: the former is essentially the impulse to transcend this separation; the latter is indifferent positedness, or persistence which in and for itself is null. In this relation the Idea is the process in which it sunders itself into individuality and its inorganic nature, and again brings the latter back under the power of the subject, returning to the first simple universality. The self-identity of the Idea is one with the process; and the thought which frees actuality from the show of purposeless changeability and transfigures it into the Idea must not imagine this truth of actuality as a dead repose or bare picture, spent and without impulse or motion, or as a genius, number, or abstract thought. In the Idea the Notion reaches freedom, and because of this the Idea contains even the harshest opposition; its repose consists in the security and certainty with which it eternally creates and eternally overcomes it, coinciding in it with itself.

But again at this point the Idea is merely immediate, or merely in its Notion; objective reality is indeed adequate to the Notion, but is not yet freed so as to be Notion, and the Notion does not exist for itself as Notion. In this manner the Notion is Seele, but the Seele is in the fashion of something immediate, that is, its determinateness is not as itself, it has not apprehended itself as Seele, or its own objective reality in itself; the Notion is as a Seele which is not yet filled with Seele.

Thus the Idea first is Life’, the Notion which, distinct from its Objectivity and simple within itself, penetrates its objectivity and, as its own End, has its Means in this and posits it as its Means, but is immanent in this Means and in it is the realized and self-identical End.—Because of its immediacy this Idea has individuality for the form of its existence. But the intro-Reflection of its absolute process is the transcendence of this immediate individuality; hence the Notion, which in it and as universality is the inner, makes externality to be universality or posits its Objectivity as self-equality. Thus the Idea is, secondly, the Idea of the True and of the Good, as Cognition and Volition. At first it is finite Cognition and finite Volition, where the True and the Good are still distinct and each is only a goal. So far, the Notion has only freed itself into itself and has given itself only an abstract objectivity by way of reality. But the process of this finite cognition and action makes the universality (which at first is abstract) into a totality, whence it becomes perfect objectivity.—Or, considered from the other side, finite, that is, subjective Spirit presupposes to itself an objective world; Life has such a presupposition; but its activity is that of transcending this presupposition and of making it something posited. Thus for Spirit its reality is the objective world, or, conversely, the objective world is the ideality in which it recognizes itself.

Thirdly, Spirit recognizes the Idea as its absolute truth, as Truth which is in and for itself; the infinite Idea in which cognition and action balance, an Idea which is absolute self-knowledge.