Commentary: Hegel

There is no truth without understanding, but can there be understanding without truth?

Hegel’s argument concerning the Understanding and Dialectic is built on it’s first premise stating the importance of Understanding in relation to truth. According to Hegel, understanding is imperative (92/80). There is no truth without understanding. This premise makes a strong claim that leads us to question what warrants Hegel’s right to even make it. Is it not that case that a thing can remain a truth even without it having been understood? Can we not believe a thing to be true without actually understanding it? It seems we are forced to answer “yes” to both of these questions. For example, I can know and believe that a Bison exists without understanding the biological characteristics of it. Or, to keep it more relevant to today, I can know and believe that binary codes play a central role in how information is stored on computers, without actually understanding how binary codes work. In other words, given these examples, it seems it will be safe to say that the truth of a thing does not depend on whether or not we understand it. My lack of understanding of a thing does not make it any less true.

A second question stemming from this premise refers to the reverse of Hegel’s statement. If there is no truth without understanding, does this mean there is no understanding without truth? If one answers “Yes”, then it seems there will exist a logical problem. Is it not possible to understand a thing that isn’t truth? If we examine this question further we are forced to agree that it IS possible to understand a “non-truth”. I can understand 1) the fact that it isn’t true, 2) why it isn’t true and 3) what this non-truth is. For example, I can understand the fact that the phrase “Pigs can fly”, isn’t true. Hence I have understood this as a non-truth, leading to the fact that there can exist understanding without truth.

One of the main problems people find with Philosophers is their use of language. Hence, this is why there exist Philosophers of language, who believe that most of the confusion and problems with the grasping of certain concepts would be solved if we studied and learned exactly what is meant by the “language” or word used in a given argument. In this case, a Philosopher of language would probably say that perhaps these discrepancies found in Hegel’s argument are due to our lack of knowledge or understanding of the “High Redefinition” Hegel has applied to the word “Truth.” A high redefinition according to Paul Edwards is best described as a high sense of a word. For example, given the word athlete, referring to my 2 year old nephew as an athlete just because he happened to catch a ball would be a low redefinitional statement, but if I said that someone who has won a Gold Medal at the Olympics is an athlete, this would be a high redefinitional statement. In other words, a high redefinition would consist of more than just the ordinary definition of the word.

Given this idea of high redefinition we can then begin to understand what is meant by Hegel’s strong claim in his first Premise. The statement “There is no truth without understanding” would be categorized as a high redefinitional statement. His use of the word “truth” here does not merely refer to things that are true. Premise 2 of Hegel’s argument states that the Dialectical stage is used by the understanding.  (95/81b).  In short, the Dialectic stage consists of the negation of a thing which in turn will lead to speculative or positive reason. If we apply this idea to a non-truth, simply put, the dialectic process will create a positive from a negative, a truth from a non-truth. If we go back to the idea that that we can understand a “non-truth”, and apply the idea of the dialectic we will find that the fact that we understand a thing to be untrue IS true. The negative has become a positive. In other words, a thing can be truly untrue. Hence, Hegel’s use of the word “Truth”, refers to both, things that are truly true and things that are truly untrue, all existing ideas. Furthermore, because the dialectic is part of the process of understanding, it will follow that understanding IS a necessary factor in the existence of any idea.

Given this idea, we can then reconcile with Hegel’s concept of the necessary relationship between Truth and Understanding. For it isn’t a matter if whether or not we can understand non-truths or that a thing can remain true even without our understanding, but that the very act of understanding itself, makes sense of things and allows us to know a truth of a thing, whether it is or it isn’t. Therefore, Hegel's premise stating that "There is no truth without understanding", will necessarily be true, since it is the process of understanding that will validate a truth. Finally, the answer to the question "Can there be understanding without truth?" will have to be "no", for wherever there is understanding (dialectic), there will always exist truth.