Hegels_Logic_Identity_Difference_chapter3_part1.mp3

Chapter 3

Identity as a Process of Self-Determination in Hegel’s Logic

One of the striking aspects of Hegel’s category of identity is that he thinks it involves a process of self-determination: the identical has established its own unity . A second striking aspect of Hegel’s concept of identity is that it is a relation between semblances or guises of an essence. I will argue that with this concept Hegel grasps identity erotetically, that is, in terms of the kinds of questions and answers that are relevant to identity claims, and that these two aspects of his category are necessary to account for our everyday practice of asking about identity.

1. A Brief Sketch of Hegel’s Category of Identity As is well known, Hegel’s category of identity is not intended as an analysis of a merely formal concept but is instead the basic articulation of what it might mean for something to be an essence where Wesen is being used in a sense related to the classical notion of substance. The notion of an essence is just the notion of something that remains self-identical in qualitative change. In this sense even mathematical and logical notions have an essence that can be expressed in various ways, so ‘essence’ is not equivalent to ‘substance’ if the latter is taken to involve spatiotemporal continuity. Of the traditional aspects of substance, Hegel’s usage of ‘essence’ involves the notion of a unity remaining the same through change but a unity of “semblances,” not of properties. Hegel’s Wesen is not Locke’s ‘somethingI-know-not-what’ behind or in addition to the semblances. It does not involve active or passive powers, although it does involve tendencies to change in certain ways. Power over attributes is involved in Hegel’s category of Substanz, which is much richer than that of Wesen. Substanz involves the notion of an inner essence which manifests its own nature by causal power to create and destroy outer forms of itself. It also involves a relation between inner potential and outer expressed force that is missing in the bare notion of a Wesen. Wesen is the notion of something that abides in change, whereas the developed notion of Substanz brings to bear additional conceptual resources to explain how this abiding actually works. Neither Wesen nor Substanz can easily be translated by the English philosophical ‘substance’ the former because it is more abstract, and the latter because it is more concrete. Hegel understands the structure of essence to be “the seeming of essence within itself [das Scheinen desWesens in sich selbst]” .5 That is, to be an essence is to be the kind of a thing that appears in various guises (semblances) such that no particular guise exhaustively expresses the nature of that thing. The identity of essence is the very process of the guises revealing themselves as mere guises. There is no object behind these guises, but the guises are not self-sufficient either. Instead of being independent states transformed by outside forces, the guises are dynamic, the very process of transition between themselves and another guise. For example, the tree appears in one guise in the spring and another in the fall, and although the essence of the tree is present in both guises, neither guise exhaustively expresses that essence. Some guises for example, leaflessness due to the application of defoliant or even a toy plastic leaf left by a tree climbing child need not directly express the essence of the tree, although indirectly the nature of the tree is involved in explaining why the defoliant has the effect that it does or how the toy came to be there. The notion of a guise or semblance is different from the notion of an appearance in that it does not wear its expression of a determinate essence on its face, as it were. Rather, a guise or semblance presents itself problematically as dependent on a process that may constitute a number of different essences. Identity is, however, the resolution of this problem in the connection of the guises together as parts of a determinate process. The identity of the tree is found in the fact that the differences between its guises do not make a difference to the essence of the tree this is what it means to be the same tree through change. That is, although they are different guises, the insignificance of their differences expresses the essential identity of the tree. The tree just is the series of these transitions, whether past, present or merely potential. Furthermore, the essence of the tree is the process through which this takes place, that is, the process of development whereby guises are substituted for each other. On pain of circularity, the insignificance of the differences between the guises must be understood in terms of the nature of the process involved, and not in terms of a static essence that would provide the touchstone for the authenticity of each guise. The tree is self-identical because the process of transformation is governed by coherent and intelligible principles that allow rational reconstruction of the transitions between the guises. The presence of sufficient explanatory regularities is what makes for the (relative) insignificance of the differences and makes the sequences of guises not a series of independent trees but the process of a single tree’s development. This process of development is equally attributable to the tree as such as to the tree at a particular time, but it is attributable to both in an attenuated sense. The minimal self-determination required by identity as such obtains when a change of guises is in some basic sense due to the nature of the guises themselves. This is different from the richer self-determination of activity, which would seem to require in addition that one of the guises initiate the change.9 The differences between the semblances need not be temporal in addition to being qualitative. We might see a certain shape of leaf on one side of the tree and another shape on the other side. We might then ask whether they were leaves of the same tree or one was the leaf of a vine or another plant growing on the tree. Answering the question in principle and not just for us will depend on whether the tree was subject to processes that involve its growing leaves of a different shape and/or subject to the process of being overgrown by vines. Hegel’s notion of identity provides a minimal analysis of the identity of even abstract objects such as logical statements. Consider if A then B, if not B then not A, not on A and none B), and none A or B. On the face of it, all four seem to be different, but one can easily show that they are equivalent and thus intersubstitutable without loss of truth value and such intersubstitutability salva veritate constitutes formal logical sameness. Although we could subjectively establish their unity by deducing each from the others, it is no less natural to say that they entail each other objectively and on their own regardless of whether any particular logician performs the relevant derivations. This is just to say that the very nature of logical statements is bound up with entailments, whether potential, actual, or past. If one thinks of entailment as the process proper to logical statements though not of course their activity then this their mutual identity is a product of their own processes, processes that show their differences to be inessential. The case of the identity of numbers is a bit more complex, primarily because quantity represents a less developed category than identity. On the one hand, a minimal analysis can be given that parallels the analysis of logical forms. Instead of entailment, calculation is the process that transforms quantitative guises. Thus one can show by addition that ‘2+3’ and ‘1+4’ are insignificantly different guises of ‘5.’ Hegel himself claims that the different forms of calculation can be derived from the concept of number . On the other hand, Hegel also claims that quantity is closely associated with sensation, and that this association makes quantity abstract. He further claims that abstract objects are only potential, and not actual. Thus it should not be surprising that Hegel’s conception of identity is much more illuminating when applied to concrete objects such as trees. Quantitative states may take on actuality in virtue of their inclusion in objects that can also be thought through more developed categories (e.g., a quantitative state may be a property of a thing, or a term in a judgment), but part of the deficiency of the pure notion of quantity in the Logic is its inability to provide the resources for determinate identifications of numbers. Thus Hegel seems to think that identity conditions for numbers are parasitic on their involvement in more developed categories. According to Hegel, identity is “the equality-with-self that has brought itself to unity [sich zur Einheit herstellende ist], . . . this pure origination from and within itself, essential identity” (emphasis in original). This means that it is not only the process but also the result of the process, or the process considered as completed. It is self-identity through change, a process whereby the unity of different semblances is established through the undermining of their independence. Hegel claims that this process is the content of the notion of identity, that is, it is equally what we are actually doing when we think about identity, and what essences are actually “doing” when they are self-identical.

2. An Erotetic Interpretation Rather than being a set of necessary and sufficient conditions or of criteria for identity, Hegel’s discussion of identity presents it as a problem. My suggestion is that we can better understand the nature of this problem if we understand it erotetically. “Erotetic” logic is the logic of questions and answers, and within erotetic logic particular attention is paid to the presuppositions of a question, that is, the conditions under which a question arises or can be meaningfully posed. To understand a notion erotetically is connected to understanding it pragmatically, since one can identify the notion so grasped with our interrogative practice or use of the notion. When I say that Hegel grasps identity erotetically, I mean that he grasps it in terms of the whole complex of presupposition, question, and answer. Now one might think that this is overly broad, and that identity is really just the answer to the question, but on the erotetic analysis, the answer (or at least the direct answer) takes its form from the question. Furthermore, in answering the question, the answer asserts that the presupposition is true (i.e., that the question is answerable) otherwise the question is rejected, not answered. On this view, then, the answer includes the structure and content of both the question and the presupposition, so it is a matter of indifference whether we identify the notion of identity with the answer or with the whole complex. One can see that Hegel grasps identity erotetically by looking at the normal context in which identity is a problem for us, that is, in which the question of identity arises. This is the context in which we have different appearances and want to know whether they are appearances of the same thing or of different things. Differently shaped leaves are on different sides of a tree, or a number of logical statements may have the same truth table or value. Or, yesterday, a white car was parked in my neighbor’s driveway, but today a red car of the same make and model is there, and I want to know whether this is the same car repainted or a different car altogether. Although we would usually ask, “Is that the same car as yesterday?,” a more perspicuous way of phrasing the question would be, “Were those appearances (or sightings) of the same car?” Expressed in this way, the question determines its own direct, positive answer, namely, “Yes, those are appearances of the same car.” The presupposition of the identity question is that there is a plurality of qualitatively different appearances or guises. No one asks if the red car is identical to the red car, unless there is some significant difference. If faced with such a question without the necessary presupposition, then we would struggle to understand what the questioner meant. In answering a question about identity, then, we assert that the presuppositions are true, that is, that a plurality of guises does obtain. This is part of what we are doing when we assert identity, and thus part of the identity claim itself.The subject matter of the identity claim is primarily the guises, and a positive answer is an identification of the different guises as guises of one essence. To be guises of one essence involves the existence of certain processual pathways from one to the other (e.g., differential growth of leaves, logical derivations, or repainting the car). Hegel’s concept of identity, then, is the problem of identity taken as presupposition, question, and answer. In the epistemological mode, this is an articulation of the core of our practice of identification. So far my argument for attributing an implicitly erotetic concept to Hegel has been grounded on the way in which this erotetic framework organizes the different aspects of Hegel’s concept of identity and connects them to the practice of individuation. It is, of course, true that Hegel does not make this connection himself. In the one remark where he does seem to use an erotetic framework, there appear to be two problems for my view. First, he seems to focus on what questions, as opposed to the yes no questions that I have taken to be paradigmatic. Second, the what question he poses “What is a plant?” does not obviously call for an individuation as an answer. How can these be reconciled with the interpretation I have just offered? The solution to the first problem is to see that yes no questions are contained in what questions in the sense that each answer to the latter entails an answer to the former. For example, the answer to “What is a plant?” that “A plant is a young tree, vine, shrub, or herb planted or suitable for planting,” entails the answer “Yes” to the question, “Is a plant a young tree vine, shrub, or herb planted or suitable for planting,” and it entails the answer “No” to the question, “Is a plant a fence?”. What questions represent the breadth of identity questions, but yes no (and whether) questions represent more specific and perspicuous forms of identity questions. This is because in most everyday contexts there is a fairly limited range of possible answers to the what question of identity. The second problem also is easily solved. “What is a plant?’ does not seem to call for an individuation, because we normally associate individuation with the discrimination of physical objects. But if we broaden the notion of individuation to include concepts as well, then “What is a plant?” does call for an individuation, the individuation of the concept “plant.” The way we individuate concepts is to define them and thereby differentiate them from other concepts. Hegel objects to the proposed answer “A plant is a plant” because it will not individuate the concept of a plant for the questioner, who legitimately expected a different kind of response, namely, a response that would contrast the topic “plant” with other concepts.

3. The Value and Necessity of Hegel’s Concept of Identity One important way in which Hegel’s concept of identity articulates the core of our practice of identification is to provide a solution to the common puzzle about how questions of identity are possible in the first place. Many philosophers have noted the paradoxical nature of identity. To take two well known examples,Wittgenstein writes, “To say of two things that they are identical is nonsense, and to say of one thing that it is identical with itself is to say nothing at all,” and Hume writes, “As to the principle of individuation; we may observe, that the view of any one object is not sufficient to convey the idea of identity. . . . On the other hand, a multiplicity of objects can never convey this idea.” For reasons connected to this problem, both the early Wittgenstein and Hume reject identity as either unnecessary or largely fictitious. From a Hegelian perspective, this puzzle is generated by thinking of the identity relation as a relation only between objects, not between states or semblances. If differences between semblances are allowed into the identity relation itself, then both the possibility and importance of identity questions become clear. The greater the difference between the semblances, the more significant the identity is:The identity between the caterpillar and the butterfly is fascinating for the young child, precisely because it expresses an identity relation between very different appearances. Even more than this, I argue that the specific characteristics of Hegel’s category of identity are in fact required for an erotetic understanding of individuation.The best way to see this is to explore the consequences of their denial for this project. To begin with, one might think that it is unnecessary to import the presupposition of a question into the very answer itself, even if the answering implicitly endorses those presuppositions. If one distinguished this presupposition from the pure identity relation between objects (as the answer proper), then one could still account for the practice of individuation without introducing differences between semblances into the identity relation itself. To see why this will not work, consider the consequences of such a maintenance of the absoluteness of identity in the view of Colin McGinn. McGinn holds a common view that identity is a unitary, indefinable, reflexive, symmetrical, and transitive relation that satisfies Leibniz’s Law (the indiscernibility of identicals). Although McGinn acknowledges that identity is importantly correlated with difference, the unity of identity excludes difference from the identity relation itself. Thus he characterizes identity as “simply the relation x has to y when x is nothing other than y, when there is no distinction between x and y, when x is y.” This exclusion of the differences of states results in a conception of identity that is incapable of articulating the structure of our practices of individuation. This exclusion results in a virtual identity (or at least coextension) of identity and objecthood broadly construed: “Whenever we have a subject of predication existent, merely possible, non-existent we have an application of the concept of identity to that subject.” Questions about identity arise and are significant “because we don’t always know the truth about distinctness and identity . . . If we were omniscient about identity, then indeed identity truths would not inform us of anything; but the same could be said of any kind of truth.” While this is certainly true, there remains an important difference between the problem with identity truths and other truths, namely, that we do not have to know about the applicability of other predicates in order to raise the question of their applicability.

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