Hegels_Logic_Identity_Difference_chapter4_part2.mp3

This method takes as its beginning a content that is “an immediate something assumed, found already in existence, assertorical.” Since the beginning in question belongs to thought rather than to sensation or representation, it is simple and abstractly universal, and in its immediacy “has equally the significance of being, for being is precisely this abstract relation-to-self.” One progresses from such a beginning by discerning that while it is initially present in an immediate way, it is nonetheless a locus of inner differentiation in which “the absolute method finds and cognizes the determination of the universal within the latter itself.” The articulation of the differences that comprise this determination is analytic insofar as it restates the content that the abstract universal subsumes into its immediacy, and synthetic in that this articulated content “exhibits itself as an other” to the initial immediacy. The moments of this dialectical determination in one sense amount to a diversity: The differentiated moments are simply different from each other. But it also is the case that the universal, at first in its immediacy, holds them together, occurs in its own self-relatedness as the unity of these differentiated moments. This indicates a third moment in the dynamic of pure, self-determining thought, whose result is “equally immediacy and mediation,” because it attains a grasp of the different moments that belong to the dialectical determination of the abstract universal in their differentiated unity. Throughout the discussion that I have just summarized, Hegel is very clear that the dynamic conceptualized through the Absolute Idea belongs to “pure thought, in which difference is not yet otherness, but is and remains perfectly transparent to itself.” This is of fundamental importance. The differences that receive articulation and integration within pure thought are not different from pure thought, not other than it. Within the range of logical categories, those differences include terms such as “other, different, external, particular, objective” that are “contrasted with and even opposed to something, identity, internal, universal, subjective,” but also integrated with the latter. The integration of the two sets of terms refers pure thought to its other but does not bring about the relationship between pure thought and that other. The occurrence of the former set of terms in those integrations indicates, as John Burbidge points out, that any external reality opposed to pure thought “can be represented by these negative, or determining, characteristics,” and consequently, “that which is other than thought will not remain impervious to it. . . . Whatever can be characterized as other than thought will yet remain comprehensible.” These comments make an important contribution to an account of the connection between pure thought and its other, and of the status of that other in this connection, and I will return to them. But they do not give a complete account of that connection or status. One can extend that account by turning to the final chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit. The relationship of “Absolute Knowing” to the phenomenological inquiry that this standpoint concludes is not unlike the relation of the “Absolute Idea” to the scientific exposition of pure categories that its discussion completes. The Phenomenology aims at providing a warranted conception of knowing in which truth and certainty coincide, through an immanent examination of the content and necessary relations among forms of consciousness, structures constituted by determinate definitions of the object of consciousness, consciousness itself, or the relation between them. Absolute knowing is not another and final form of consciousness because it surpasses the determinate character of such forms. Absolute knowing entails the realization that fully warranted knowledge follows not from any determinate structure of consciousness but from the self-determining activities of self-consciousness, rational thought. Absolute knowing comes about through a recollection  and gathering together  of transformations that determinations of the object of consciousness undergo on account of the activities of conscious and self-conscious thought. Variously throughout the Phenomenology “the object is in part immediate being or, in general, a Thing . . . in part an othering of itself, its relationship or being-foranother,” and in part “essence, or in the form of a universal. . . . It is, as a totality, a syllogism or the movement of the universal through determination to individuality, and also the reverse movement from individuality through superseded individuality, or through determination, to the universal.” In part, the recollection and gathering together of these determinations of the object is something that we do. But those determinations also come together in the experience of consciousness itself, specifically in the community of conscientious selves that concludes the consideration of morality, and of revealed religion. The integrated occurrence of these determinations, along with the insight that they follow ultimately not from any determinate structure of consciousness but from the autonomy of self-conscious thought, enables that same thought to liberate itself from any dependence on determinate structures and to attain a warranted definition of the conditions of the possibility of knowing that refers to its own self-determining activities. Hegel characterizes absolute knowing as a reconciliation of consciousness and self-consciousness. This reconciliation supersedes any and all epistemic relations between consciousness and an “object” or a determinacy that is given and in at least that sense external to consciousness, and that is supposed to guarantee knowledge on account of its externality. But this reconciliation does not only surpass the externality of the object in relation to the activities of self-conscious thought, it also entails that those activities comprise “the externalization of self-consciousness that posits the thinghood [of the object].” Moreover, this has a negative and a positive meaning. It means that the object belongs to the unity of self-consciousness with itself. And it means that the unity of self-consciousness with itself preserves and does not annul objectivity, so that self-consciousness is “in communion with itself in its otherness as such.” Heidegger offers an interesting gloss on this understanding. Noting that “the term absolute means initially ‘not relative,’” he observes that “For knowledge to be qualitatively other than relative knowledge . . . it must remain bound but also liberate and ab-solve itself from what it knows and yet, as so absolved, as absolute, still be a knowledge. To be absolved from what is known does not mean ‘abandoning’ it, but ‘preserving it by elevating it,’” Heidegger later adds, “What is known absolutely can only be that which knowledge knowingly lets emerge and which, only as emerging thus, stands in knowledge; it is not an object, but an emergence.” Knowledge that falls short of that standpoint of absolute knowing is, in Hegel’s own words, “a disclosure or revelation which . . . is in fact concealment ,” because that which is known “is still selfless being and what is disclosed to it is only the certainty of itself” with regard to the capacity of thought to grasp truth. Absolute knowing discloses thought as the power of disclosure, the power that allows what is known to emerge or present itself in the selfdetermining activity of knowing. For this reason, Hegel can say that the absolute standpoint exhibits knowing as the power “which empties itself of itself and sinks into its substance, and also, as Subject has gone out of that substance into itself, making that substance into an object and a content at the same time as it annuls the difference between objectivity and content.” Self-conscious thought grasps intelligibility through its own determination of the categories that conceptualize the radical necessities that determine its own processes and the actuality of things. At the same time it immerses itself in, “sinks” into, considerations of those actualities as they present themselves in order to grasp their intelligibility through its own categorically selfdetermined considerations. I am maintaining, in other words, that the standpoint of Absolute Knowing presents an understanding of autonomous rational thought for which autonomy means the capacity to allow the intelligibility of what is real or actual, and in that sense other than thought, to appear and be grasped in and through the self-determined activities of thinking, thus indicating the rationality of what is actual. To employ a Kantian idiom, I am maintaining that the standpoint of Absolute Knowing presents an understanding of autonomous rational thought that interrelates and preserves the notions of spontaneity and receptivity, rather than supposing that receptivity excludes autonomy, or that autonomy requires that spontaneity be maintained to the exclusion of receptivity. The conclusion of the Logic refers pure thought to its other through the distinction between differences within thought and the other of thought, and the consequent insight that categories having to do with the other of thought are yet on their own terms only differences within thought, thus directing pure thought beyond its immanent considerations and toward its other. The conclusion of the Phenomenology shows that the relation of fully adequate knowing to that which is known is such that the otherness of the other not simply maintained and not simply annulled but surpassed and preserved insofar as knowing in a fully adequate sense means grasping the integral intelligibility of that which is. Intelligible actuality distinguishes itself from thought, presents itself as an other whose intelligibility is realized in self-determining rational processes, offers itself as an other in which thought can “sink” and immerse itself, and as something to be known through the categories that thought itself determines, such that, in knowing its other, thought as it were knows itself.

III. Of the many questions that suggest themselves at this point, I find that two are most prominent. First, is the reading of Hegel’s position on the identity in difference, or the mediated unity, of thought and reality or being that I have offered an accurate account of what he actually does hold? Second, allowing for an affirmative answer to the first question, does this position adequately account for the difference and otherness that arguably obtain in the relation that binds being and thought together, and that needs to be preserved in any understanding of that relation as a mediated unity? Or is difference and otherness, as Taminiaux says, finally swallowed up and eliminated by Hegel’s account of the unity of self-consciousness or of pure thought in its final self-comprehension? I want in no sense to deny that there may be a great deal to be said about the first question. Nonetheless, I want to focus on the second. I believe that the textual resources on which I have drawn for my account of Hegel’s position on the relevant issue indicate that my account is at least as plausible as its competitors. I want to focus on the second question in order to discuss an important contribution that Hegel, given the reading I have presented, makes to philosophical truth. William Desmond offers one of the most informed and substantive criticisms of Hegel’s position on the mediated unity of thought and being. He says, in a summary of his critique, that because Hegel understands mediation as self-mediation, “being as immediate is completely self-mediated by dialectical self-determination. Autonomous thought, the Idea, is autonomous being, the absolute whole. . . . Being in its otherness is the self-othering of thought thinking itself; this otherness is dialectically overreached by the process of thought completely determining itself. Transcendence is the self-transcendence of the Idea and also its self-return when it knows itself as self-transcendence in otherness.” Desmond finds the problem that these statements indicate to be present at the conclusion of the Phenomenology and of the Logic. In the case of the Phenomenology, dialectical progress follows in all cases from a failure of self-mediation. “The telos is the goal of absolutely self-mediating thought. This goal is reached in absolute knowing when the otherness of the immediate is completely mediated, in its being dialectically subsumed in a self-knowing that is absolutely selfmediating.” Absolute knowing entails thoroughgoing self-comprehension. This self-comprehension or “Being self-mindful completely overcomes any thinking that thinks the otherness of being as other to mind. Being self-mindful completes being as the pure self-mediating dialectical process of thought determining itself. Being is the pure self-determination of thought thinking itself.” With regard to the Logic, opposition is progressively understood as a “self-opposition or process of self-othering. . . . The equivocation of opposites in such a process is identical with one of reciprocal determination, which is really self-determination in the other; and again since the other here is the self’s own other, it is hence the self itself once again.” This means that Hegelian logic traces “the inclusive self-transcendence of thought itself, which appropriates the self-development of being-other. It will proceed, Hegel holds, to the all inclusive thought, which is the absolute Idea, the inclusive whole of thought absolutely determining itself. Hence Hegel’s Logic, like the Phenomenology, completes itself in a telos answering to the total self-determination of thought thinking itself.” These comments clearly follow from a careful meditation on difference and being-other. But one can still go farther, and Hegel himself indicates how. He points out in a telling passage that beingother “may be taken in the first instance as a simple determination, but in truth it is a relation or a relationship. . . . It is therefore the other, but not the other of something to which it is indifferent in that case it would not be an other, not a relation or relationship rather it is the other in its own self, the other of an other; therefore it includes its own other within itself and is consequently, as contradiction, the posited dialectic of itself.” For Hegel, what does it mean for y to be the other of x in its own self, or for x to have y as its own other? This condition obtains if y is not the other “of something to which it is indifferent.” If reality or being were not thought’s “own other” then it would be something “indifferent” to thought; it would be, at least in part but radically unintelligible. Hegel certainly claims to demonstrate that being is, as such, comprehensively intelligible. So he does not allow that being is the simple, indifferent other of thought. But this is hardly the only or most important sense of being-other. On account of its integral and demonstrated intelligibility, being is the other of thought in its own self, and qua intelligible includes “its own other within itself.” Thought also includes its own other within itself, insofar as activity of thought is, again integrally and demonstrably, the power of realizing, that is, rationally comprehending intelligibility through its self-determining activities and through the pure categories that those activities also determine. But these comments, which do specify the integral relationships that bind being and thought together in a mediated unity, do not all entail the denial of the otherness of each from the other, as Hegel’s distinction between two senses of being-other shows. One way of indicating this is to say that if rational thought “appropriates the self-development of being-other,” then this is still an appropriation that occurs in thought and points to and requires the self-development of “being-other” in being as its counterpart and its genuine other. Burbidge concludes that one should understand Hegel’s position about “thought overreaching that which is other than thought,” as presenting “an overreaching that must take account of the difference between concept and actuality of the nasty, broad ditch, as well as their similarity.” I can only register my assent. But still, Hegel requires that one understand thought as thoroughly self-determining. Does this not imply that the mediated unity of thought and reality or being finally amounts to a self-mediated unity of thought with itself that eliminates the otherness of being from thought? I believe that the plausibility of this claim depends on the questionable view that self-determination excludes mediation by the other or receptivity. I have already mentioned the criticism that the Hegelian understanding of self-determining thought entails, that “The self-surpassing of thought is not seen as, in part, shaped by a gift from being-other.” But if someone gives me a gift and if I accept it and then use or enjoy it, I am in all of those respects doing something, and my actions are selfdetermining. This homely illustration suggests that self-determination need not at all exclude receptivity and mediation by the other. Selfdetermination may in fact require both agency and receptivity and mediation by the other. This is possible only if the other is other in a genuine sense. I believe my discussion of absolute knowing indicates that just this requirement belongs to the mediated unity of thought and being, as Hegel understands this. If so, then even the position that thought is in a thoroughgoing way self-determining does not require that the mediated unity of thought and being be reduced to the selfmediated unity of thought with itself. It is entirely consistent to maintain that a mediated unity interrelates self-determining thought and being, where the latter presents itself as the other of thought insofar as it possesses an integral intelligibility that thinking comprehends through its own activities, and is also something that thinking receives, and is something that, in each of these two respects, mediates the self-determination of thought. If Western philosophy required two millennia to understand identity as mediated unity, then Hegel represents a culminating moment of that achievement. His most essential principles call for an understanding of identity and difference that determines each with reference to the other and that insistently preserves both in their reciprocal determination. His position on the mediated unity of thought and being defines thought as the self-determining power of comprehension that meets itself in an other that is nonetheless genuinely other. It defines being as determined by an intelligibility in virtue of which it is thought’s “own other,” and at the same time as that which presents itself to the receptivity of thought and mediates thought in its autonomy. In these respects, as in many others, Hegel presents contemporary philosophy with a resource upon which it draws to its profit, and ignores at its peril.

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