system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Truth for Hegel

As I understand it, truth for Hegel is something like: congruity between an intelligible substance and the thing in which it inheres, between concept and external existence, essence and being. Taken at face, this seems to leave open the possibility that, should all members within the set of all things *not* match up with their corresponding concepts, there would be only a kind of truth in potentia, or, put differently, no proposition could be truthfully said about an existing state of affairs. But in Phil of Right, section 104, we see: “It is [a necessary] part of the truth that the concept should exist, and that this existence should be in conformity with the concept.” At other times (I think in the phenomenology) he subscribes to a correspondence theory of truth. I think most interestingly, he sometimes describes truth as a state obtained only after the completion of the speculative moment of logic/thought, which contains and supersedes the abstract and negative moments; truth here only obtains in toto, not in each moment separately.

So what’s the deal? How does he see explain the necessity of truth and how does he reconcile all the different ways he talks about truth? Am I reading it wrong? I feel like I’m reading it wrong.
gpt
Asking about Hegel on truth gets a wall o' text in response. 

Hegel doesn't just mean one thing by "truth" throughout all of his writings, or even throughout the same piece of writing. As you note, in the PhG he endorses a correspondence theory of the truth of (naive) empirical statements. At other times -- especially the big, weighty moments -- he talks of truth in what seem like ontological terms. It has seemed fair to many commentators to gloss that theory as: truth is correspondence between a thing and its concept. That's *mostly* right, but that formula doesn't quite capture what Hegel means when he uses his favored phrase, "the truth of [x]". The truth of a thing (its correspondence with its concept) is what a thing should be, and according to Hegel, truth (conceived this way) is such as to realize itself. 

This can *seem* very spooky and hand-wavy, and it has certainly figured in classical readings of Hegel as invoking the World Spirit who guides all history to its necessary completion etc. But there's a reason Hegel's favorite way of explaining what he means by "truth" in this sense is by reference to organic unity (or more simply, the organism): an organic unity is one in which its parts are the parts they are in virtue of their collective effort to achieve and maintain the whole. 

Think of a life form or species: a rabbit is what it is in virtue of its effort to achieve and maintain the existence of the species, i.e., to nourish and reproduce itself. By this token, a rabbit's species is also the measure of whether it is being as it should be: if it is not able to nourish and reproduce itself, it is defective. (The truth of a rabbit is its species.) We could also say: what is is for there to be the species Rabbit is for there to be individuals that attempt to maintain the species Rabbit by nourishing and reproducing themselves. Or as Hegel would put it, the species brings itself about. 

This is what Hegel means in the section of the PhR you quote: "It is [a necessary] part of the truth that the concept should exist, and that this existence should be in conformity with the concept." A concept is such as to bring itself into existence by bringing into existence individuals that conform to it (which means, individuals which strive to maintain themselves *as* instantiations of that concept). As we saw in the rabbit example, this doesn't mean concepts are things with some kind of metaphysical agency, anymore than the species Rabbit is some metaphysical Spirit-thing out there acting on individual rabbits. It just means that the kind of real unity that we're calling "concept" here is the kind of thing that has the explanatory power an organic unity does with reference to its parts.