On Philosophical Synthesis

Abstract

Hegel has long been a name to conjure against. His version of history as a waltz of ideas moving irregularly from to has suffered from his own insistence that the historic process is an embodied logic, whereas in his version it is rather an embodied poetry. poetic element appears in his intuitions of unity of Idea in world regions, such as wherein with increasing knowledge we become aware not only of immense inner diversity, but also of radical oppositions. To find the true China, Hu Shih, for example, would have us excise as alien all that vast and fertilizing flow of Buddhist thought with which so much of Chinese speculation and art has been identified: even so, what is left presents most of the oppositions familiar to metaphysics. If China and India can become ideal unities only in a poetic haze, how much more so The as a whole! And I raise the question whether all effort, Hegelian and other, to find an East and a West to synthesize is or is not likewise committed to the poetic onset? To Hegel there was a clear answer. In the Greek world-and here I think we must agree with him-something was born! If so, that something, lacking in the earlier East, and persisting through the later West, would give us the essential discriminant. only question for him would be, What is that something? Here Hegel's poetic genius shines bright. transition is from the Absolute-as-mystery, typified by Isis, whose veil hath no man uncovered, to the Absolute-as-humanized, typified by the Greek god-realm in which man can see some reflection of his own face. mystery is not all dissolvedMoira is there-but man's reason is not on principle repelled-he may begin to think his way through his destiny. There is thenceforward a continuity between man's science and his theology which encourages his scientific devotion. In Egypt, geometry is still empirical; in Greece it becomes deductive, i.e., man-possessed. Here, thinks Hegel, we have the justified selfconfidence of human reason, in science and in philosophy; the ground is ready for the Logos-God born within man; here is The West. Now, I am no subscriber to the Hegelian poetry of history--one does not subscribe to poetry. language of symbol admits a variety and therefore