The Secret of Hegel’s System: The Concrete Universal in Perspective

Abstract

Questions concerning the philosophical study of universals include: Is a universal a thing or not? Does it exist separately from our minds and the world of daily experience? Is it abstract or concrete? And is knowledge of the universal even possible? Understanding universals enable human thought and language grasp the world they live in. For this reason, philosophers such as Plato, Aristotle and Kant, to name a few, have explored the existence, nature and function of universals. Considered indispensable, their knowledge is the very key to figuring out each philosopher’s system. For example, Plato’s separate world of universals, Aristotle’s participating universals within the apparent world as well as Kant’s universals, the mental categories of human knowledge and the unknown world of the thing-in-itself. This article aims to situate Hegel’s own view in dialogue with these earlier thinkers, in order to arrive at the analysis of the concrete universal. By doing so, it reveals the central key to Hegel’s philosophical system—one in which the universal is not static or abstract, but a singular, living and immanent reality that comes to know itself through the particulars it composes and contains.