Intermission: On Hegel’s Speculative Sentence
‘Take the dative with his oblative for, even if obsolete, it is always of interest, so spake gramma on the impetus of her imperative, only mind your genderous towards his reflexives Old Gavelkind the Gamper and he’s as daff as you’re erse.such that I was to your grappa (Bott’s trousend, hore a man uff!) when him was me hedon and mine, what the lewdy saying, his analectual pygmyhop’.
- James Joyce, (1882–1941), ‘Finnegans Wake’
Before pressing on with the ‘Doctrine of Essence’ in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s, (1770–1831), ‘Science of Logic’ I thought it a good idea to say something regarding the Hegelian speculative sentence. Hegel’s conception of language and the role it plays in his thought requires careful study not simply because of the linguistic turn so-called in philosophy in the early twentieth century (linguistic turn: a radical re-conception of the nature of philosophy and its methods, according to which philosophy is neither an empirical science nor a supra-empirical enquiry into the essential features of reality but rather an a priori conceptual discipline aiming to elucidate the complex interrelationships among philosophically relevant concepts as embodied in established linguistic usage, and by doing so dispel conceptual confusions and solve philosophical problems … that was the plan anyway), but because of the possibility it affords us to construct a more comprehensive framework within which to re-integrate what became departmentalized philosophical concerns and hence to unearth the springs of a deeper understanding of language than that generally functioning in linguistic philosophy or in phenomenology.
Despite the linguistic turn metaphysics is still with us albeit as always the problem of its legitimization still has to be confronted especially given a century or so of reflections upon language that has had as a consequence an avouchment of the radically finite character of linguistic expression and there is a case to be made for recognising Hegel as perhaps the first thinker in the Western philosophical tradition to take on directly and affirmatively the question of the possibility of systematic metaphysical reflection expressed through what are certainly the finite capacities of natural language. We do find however that philosophers addressing Hegel’s conception of language often direct their attention to one of these concerns to the exclusion of the other. Theodor Bodammer, Josef Derbolav (1912–87), and Daniel J. Cook have come at the problem with a general concern to collect together Hegel’s somewhat scattered statements about language and to trace the development of his thinking about language and to draw from this particular general insights into its nature, while Werner Marx, (1910–1994), and Josef Simon, (1930–2016), have endeavoured to get on top of the more general concern of the relation between metaphysical reflection and language utilising Hegel’s own views on language as the place to begin in their reflections.
While both approaches to Hegel’s conception of language are of value to a broader understanding of Hegel’s thought and there is certainly some degree of overlap between them neither appears to confront the point at which their differing concerns converge in a manner that follows and explicates Hegel’s own suggestions concerning the basis of this issue. Hegel’s conception of the speculative sentence is what I refer to which he discusses in the Preface to the ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’ and it can be demonstrated that Hegel’s analysis of the most elementary form of language, that is to say, the subject-predicate relation, provides the ground for the dialectical mode of unity of Hegel’s system while simultaneously delivering a way forward to the possibility of an an access to an ultimate metaphysical reflection from within the finitude of human language and such can only be attained by in fact explicating the structure and meaning of Hegel’s conception of the speculative sentence.
Given how such concerns occupy a central place in Hegel’s philosophy the relationship between the subject-predicate structure of language and the possibility of expressing the truth in the sense in which Hegel conceives it is a persistent theme running through the Preface to the Phenomenology, it is returned to again and again and with good justification for Hegel has to if only in a very general way to render comprehensible how it can be that the most fundamental structure of language can disclose the movement of the negative within it and can thence possess even the possibility of expressing that which Hegel insists is the true nature of thought which is development, self-unfolding, the power of the Negative and how can it be that the copulative proposition the very form of which appears to be simple identity carries with it the dialectical movement of reflection and disclose within this structure thought in its true form? If this cannot in some manner be cleared up it would appear to cast a shadow over Hegel’s most fundamental thesis and indeed over the possibility of Wissenschaft as system altogether, while on the other hand the ability to deliver a positive response to such a question would provide not only a ground for Hegel’s dialectical mode of discourse but a pre-systematic way of facilitating entrance into the system itself.
The solution to such an issue if there is one can only be wholly explicated in the context of the ‘Science of Logic’ discussion of which I will take up again after this intermission but the initial endeavour to make kind sort of response to this is of the utmost importance because of the very fact that it is made from a pre-systematic standpoint which is to say one must strive for clarification that apprehends the concern even prior to consciousness being raised to the standpoint of Science and it is more than anything else in his discussion of the speculative sentence that Hegel endeavours to deliver an initial degree of cogency to his argument, to provide at least a preliminary theoretical reason why natural consciousness can undertake the journey of despair which is the Phenomenology. (See my article Intermission: On the Threshold of the System).
Hegel at once sets himself apart from much of the tradition and a good deal of subsequent reflection upon the same issues when he claims that the primary unit of linguistic meaning is the proposition taken as a whole and drawing upon his earlier reflections in the Jena writings Hegel contends that in a proposition such ‘God is the eternal’ or ‘God is being’ it is only the whole proposition which can be said to have a meaning. In a proposition of that kind we begin with the word God and by itself this is a meaningless sound, a mere name and the predicate declares afterwards what it is and gives it content and meaning and the empty beginning becomes real knowledge only when we thereby reach the end of the statement.
‘To illustrate what has been said: in the proposition ‘God is being’, the Predicate is ‘being’ ; it has the significance of something substantial in which the Subject is dissolved. ‘Being’ is here meant to be not a Predicate, but rather the essence; it seems, consequently, that God ceases to be what he is from his position in the proposition, viz. a fixed Subject. Here thinking, instead of making progress in the transition from Subject to Predicate, in reality feels itself checked by the loss of the Subject, and, missing it, is thrown back on to the thought of the Subject. Or, since the Predicate itself has been expressed as a Subject, as the being or essence which exhausts the nature of the Subject, thinking finds the Subject immediately in the Predicate; and now, having returned into itself in the Predicate, instead of being in a position where it has freedom for argument, it is still absorbed in the content, or at least is faced with the demand that it should be. Similarly, too, when one says: ‘the actual is the universal’, the actual as subject disappears in its predicate. The universal is not meant to have merely the significance of a predicate, as if the proposition asserted only that the actual is universal; on the contrary, the universal is meant to express the essence of the actual.-Thinking therefore loses the firm .objective basis it had in the subject when, in the predicate, it is thrown back on to the subject, and when, in the predicate, it does not return into itself, but into the subject of the content’.
- ‘The Phenomenology of Spirit’
And it is evident enough that it is not merely the particular example selected of which this is the case for later on Hegel will state it in general terms and it is primarily the mere name in the capacity of name that denotes the subject pure and simple, the empty unit without any conceptual character and a question arises as to why we do not dispense with this meaningless sound entirely and instead simply say the eternal since on the ordinary understanding of the subject-predicate form that was what was meant in the first place. The answer is because in even the naive understanding of this structure there is a positive indication yet this word merely indicates that it is not a being or essence or universal in general that is put forward but something reflected into self, a subject and since in this context there is a suggestion that a subject taken in abstraction can also be called thought we can declare that the grammatical subject which is the name waiting to be further determined already discloses the mediating activity of thought and reflects the fact that it is not simply the universal that we want directly given but the universal is manifested in a concrete manner.
For this very reason a need is felt to maintain the subject despite its seeming emptiness when confronted with its predicate but Hegel discards the traditional Aristotelian, (Aristotle, (384–322 BC)), account of this apparent asymmetry between subject and predicate for to account for the fact that certain words seem to be appropriate only as subjects and others only as predicates we suppose it must be so that subjects refer to substances and predicates refer to the attributes of substances this fails to come to grips with the problem at its most fundamental level for so long as the copula is regarded as indicating a simple affirmation or denial of an accident to a substance, a relation which is purely external, the question still lingers as to how or if we can further characterize this ontological relationship beyond the sort of identity immediately indicated by the copula.
The real form which Hegel’s objection against the traditional view of the subject-predicate relation takes is not so much that the subject-predicate form requires a more complex metaphysical theory grounding it as the substance-accident relation would seem to provide but rather that the subject-predicate form of itself already contains a complexity beyond that which any metaphysical theory could provide as an explanation. Which is to say if we merely focus upon the wealth hidden in the apparently simple basic form of language itself the notion of a theory of predication in either metaphysical or formal terms must prove inadequate to what is presented to us as developing out of the form of language. By no means does Hegel conceive of his his thought as the rejection of the traditional notion of what it means to speak intelligibly, in particular as a rejection of the subject-predicate form of language but rather, his claim is that by attending to the simplest form of our language quite apart from any theories we may have concerning it its true nature will disclose itself to reflection.
Hegel characterizes the movement (Bewegung) implicit in the subject-predicate form as follows. It is a process that constitutes what formerly had to be accomplished by proof, the internal dialectical movement of the proposition itself and in his endeavour to characterize the true nature of the subject-predicate form Hegel starts out by utilizing an analogy grounded upon a semantic peculiarity of language. In German as well as English a word that denotes individual consciousness is the same as the word that denotes the grammatical unit of which something is said to be predicated, that is, Subject, and in the traditional view of the subject-predicate form the grammatical subject is understood solely as indicating not what the name suggests but substance which is then held to support accidents or qualities given by the predicate. We have to take language seriously, we have come to call this grammatical unit subject for a reason which is obfuscated by the traditional theory of predication.
Important consequences come hot on its tail through taking the word itself with all due seriousness for if we permit the other meaning of subject to cast some light upon the subject understood in a grammatical sense we will realize that activity, Bewegung, is included in the very notion of our grammatical distinctions and in virtue of the concept or notion being the very self of the object, manifesting itself as the development of the object, it is not a quiescent subject, passively supporting supporting accidents but it is a self-determining active concept that takes up its determinations and makes them its own. In the course of this process that inert passive subject in actual fact vanishes as it enters into the different constituents and pervades the content and rather than remaining in inert antithesis to determinateness of content it constitutes indeed that very specificity, that is to say the content as differentiated along with the process of making this so.
‘But in view of the fact that such thinking has a content, whether of picture-thoughts or abstract thoughts or a mixture of both, argumentation has another side which makes comprehension difficult for it. The remarkable nature of this other side is closely linked with the above~mentioned essence of the Idea, or rather it expresses the Idea in the way that it appears as the movement which is thinking apprehension. For whereas, in its negative behaviour, which we have just discussed, ratiocinative thinking is itself the self into which the content returns, in its positive cognition, on the other hand, the self is a Subject to which the content is related as Accident and Predicate. This Subject constitutes the basis to which the content is attached, and upon which the movement runs back and forth. Speculative [begreifendes] thinking behaves in a different way. Since the Notion is the objects’s own self, which presents itself as the coming-to-be of the object, it is not a passive Subject inertly supporting the Accidents; it is, on the contrary, the self-moving Notion which takes its determinations back into itself. In this movement the passive Subject itself perishes; it enters into the differences and the content, and constitutes the determinateness, i.e. the differentiated content and its movement, instead of remaining inertly over against it’.
- ‘The Phenomenology of Spirit
Hence if we are to begin to penetrate the ultimate form of our language we have to take seriously the fact that the grammatical subject can reflect what is otherwise also understood by subject, consciousness as a process of self-articulation and development, and particularly critical here is the suggestion that the manner by which we comprehend our language and the manner by which we comprehend our own selves as possessed of consciousness reflect one another which is to say our self-comprehension and our comprehension of our language are co-ordinated while by the Aristotelian conception of consciousness there is a receptive knowing by virtue of the fact that forms are received by and actualized in the soul. Hegel sees the Aristotelian notion of predication as strictly paralleling this receptivity whereby predicates are externally and passively received by the grammatical subject that appears to play no role in the development of the determinations themselves.
Furthermore only if the grammatical subject itself is understood as reflecting the meaning of subject taken as consciousness can we then articulate the structure of our own consciousness, which is to say only thus can anything like a phenomenology be possible and Hegel thereby wishes to comprehend the grammatical inflection and the consciousness-implicating inflection of subject as forming a complex unity of meaning and in his discourse upon this problem he indicates this by moving from speaking of subject in the grammatical sense to the substitution of the conscious subject in the subject-place of the propositional form and normally the subject is first set down as the fixed and objective self and from this fixed position the necessary process passes on to the multiplicity of determinations or predicates and here the knowing ego takes the place of that subject and is the function of stitching together or combining the predicates one with another and is the subject holding them fast.
‘Usually, the Subject is first made the basis, as the objective, fixed self; thence the necessary movement to the multiplicity of determinations or Predicates proceeds. Here, that Subject is replaced by the knowing ‘I’ itself, which links the Predicates with the Subject holding them. But, since that first Subject enters into the determinations themselves and is their soul, the second Subject, viz. the knowing ‘I’, still finds in the Predicate what it thought it had finished with and got away from, and from which it hoped to return into itself; and, instead of being able to function as the determining agent in the movement of predication, arguing back and forth whether to attach this or that Predicate, it is really still occupied with the self of the content, having to remain associated with it, instead of being for itself’.
- ‘The Phenomenology of Spirit’
In this manner Hegel also makes clear his rejection of the Kantian, (Immanuel Kant, (1724–1804), take upon the subject-predicate relation, the notion of a transcendental subject synthesizing the pre-given contents of consciousness is as inadequate an account of the subject-predicate structure as the Aristotelian notion of attaching accidents to a passive substance as in either case the critical issue is that any adequate account of the basic form of language must reflect the essentially active and self-developing nature of consciousness. If the subject-predicate form incorporates within its own structure a Bewegung or dynamic complexity which is hidden by the traditional understanding of this form Hegel must then be able to articulate it and for this he employs an example God is Being but take note that this example is deliberately chosen in accordance with the argument outlined thus far whereby the grammatical subject is itself a name for that which we ordinarily understand as a conscious subject and when Hegel speaks of a loss of the subject he means equally the loss of the grammatical and of the actual subject named by the grammatical subject and furthermore the predicate is one generally taken as belonging essentially to the subject named and is not immediately open to the question of the correctness or truth of the predication itself for indeed this question arises only on the basis of the articulation of the Bewegung incorporated in the proposition and is not the essential question to be asked at least to begin with about the example.
The standing of Hegel’s example requires further scrutiny. God is Being sets itself up for the immediate objection that it is the content of the sentence rather than its form that provides the dialectical or speculative element and one could well allow that such notions as God and Being cry out for a further complex even dialectical, mode of explication while denying that this has anything to do with the subject-predicate form in which they manifest themselves and furthermore we may wonder what is dialectical or speculative about such sentences as ‘the cat is on the mat’, or ‘my lemman is the most beautiful woman alive’, and so on. Indeed one may even reject the very notion that the subject-predicate form is in fact the basic form of intelligible discourse.
Well as for the second objection Hegel does indeed makes this supposition of the primordiality of the subject-predicate form a supposition which has become a point of dispute in our own time in the wake of advances in logic and the explanation for his supposition rests in the fact that Hegel’s starting-point in such reflections is the Kantian notion of judgment that itself presupposes the subject-predicate form of expression and it is characteristic of Hegel that his reflections begin with the preceding tradition as it is given in order to subvert or sublate it from within and insofar as this was a presupposition of the tradition which Hegel addressed he also should be justified in making such an supposition. Hegel goes on to contend nonetheless that precisely the traditional understanding of this subject-predicate form of language must be annihilated in order to have access to speculative truth while n the other hand faithful to his conception of Aufhebung such annihilation not only indicates a letting-go but also a preservation at a higher higher level of thought and only thus will it be possible for Hegel’s thought to transcend the tradition from which he starts out while remaining intelligible to someone approaching his thought from within that tradition.
‘To sublate and being sublated (the idealized ) constitute one of the most important concepts of philosophy. It is a fundamental determination that repeatedly occurs everywhere in it, the meaning of which must be grasped with precision and especially distinguished from nothing. — What is sublated does not thereby turn into nothing. Nothing is the immediate; something sublated is on the contrary something mediated; it is something nonexistent but as a result that has proceeded from a being; it still has in itself, therefore, the determinateness from which it derives. The German ‘aufheben’ (‘to sublate’ in English) has a twofold meaning ‘to cease’, ‘to put an end to’. Even ‘to preserve’ already includes a negative note, namely that something, in order to be retained, is removed from its immediacy and hence from an existence which is open to external influences. — That which is sublated is thus something at the same time preserved, something that has lost its immediacy but has not come to nothing for that. — These two definitions of ‘to sublate’ can be cited as two dictionary meanings of the word. But it must strike one as remarkable that a language has come to use one and the same word for two opposite meanings. For speculative thought it is gratifying to find words that have in themselves a speculative meaning. The German language has several such words. The double meaning of the Latin ‘tollere’ (made notorious by Cicero’s quip, ‘tollendum est Octavium’) does not go as far; its affirmative determination only goes so far as’ lifting up’. Something is sublated only in so far as it has entered into unity with its opposite; in this closer determination as something reflected, it may fittingly be called a moment. In the case of the lever, ‘weight’ and ‘distance from a point’ are called its mechanical moments because of the sameness of their effect, in spite of the difference between something real like weight, and something idealized such as the merely spatial determination of ‘line’.” (See Encycl. of the Phil. Sc., 3rd edn, §261, Remark.) — We shall often not help but observe that the technical language of philosophy uses Latin terms for reflected determinations, either because the mother tongue has no terms for them, or, if it has as it does here, because in expressing them it is more likely to call to mind the immediate, whereas the foreign tongue recalls the reflected. in the language: it equally means ‘to keep’, ‘to ‘preserve’, and ‘to cause’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
[Note: ‘Caesar [Octavianus], he says, made no complaints against you to be sure, except as to a remark which he attributed to you: ‘the young man must be praised, honoured, and lifted up [tollendum]’. Brutus (2001), Letter 401, to Cicero, p. 307. Tollendum can also be translated as ‘immortalized’. Of course, to be made into a god one must die first].
As to the first objection referred to above Hegel appears to be contending in his discussion of the speculative sentence that the subject-predicate form itself has a more complex dialectical structure than it immediately appears to possess nonetheless he also appears to make his point merely by utilizing an example the content of which is itself obviously internally complex a matter that still appears to leave unresolved the character of the form taken simply in itself. Though the subsequent analysis will disclose that Hegel’s discussion of the speculative sentence is not dependent upon the example which he gives this objection is sufficiently significant to require a decent response. Hegel recall sees in even the most elementary sorts of sentences a speculative element and in the Introduction to the ‘Encyclopedia of Philosophical Sciences’ he explains that in our ordinary consciousness thinking is involved and united with sensually and spiritually familiar materials, (Stoffe), and in thinking, reflecting, and rationating we mix feelings, intuitions, and representations with thoughts. In every sentence of entirely sensual content: ‘This leaf is green’, categories, Being, individuality are already mixed in.
‘… it is one thing to have thoughts and concepts, and another to know what the representations, intuitions, and feelings are that correspond to them.-One side of what is called the unintelligibility of philosophy is related to this. The difficulty lies partly in the inability (which in-itself is just a lack of practice) to think abstractly, i. e., to hold on to pure thoughts and to move about in them. In our ordinary consciousness thoughts are affected by and united with the sensible and spiritual material with which we are familiar; and in thinking about something, in reflecting and arguing about it, we mix feelings, intuitions, and representations with thoughts. (Categories, like being, or singularity, are already mingled into every proposition, even when it has a completely sensible content: ‘This leaf is green’.) But it is a very different thing to make the thoughts themselves, unmixed with anything else, into ob-jects.-The other aspect of the unintelligibility of philosophy is an impatient wish to have before us, in the mode of representation, what is in our consciousness as thought and concept. There is a saying that, when we have grasped a concept, we still do not know what to think with it. But there is nothing to be thought with a concept save the concept itself. What this saying means, however, is that we long for an ordinary notion, one that we are already familiar with; consciousness feels as if, together with the mode of representation, the very ground, where it stands solidly and is at home, has been pulled from under it. Finding itself displaced into the pure realm of the concept, it does not know where in the world it is.-Hence the writers, preachers, orators, etc., who tell their readers or listeners things that they already knew by heart, things that are familiar to them and even self-explanatory, are the ones that are most readily ‘understood’.
- ‘The Encyclopedia Logic’
It is evident enough that Hegel conceived language in even its simplest occurrences as already penetrated through and through by the dialectical universality of thought and this being the case an example simpler than God is Being may have need of a preliminary discussion to disclose the more complex determinations that it implicitly employs this does not affect its ultimate acceptability as an example but merely makes the work of its analysis more complex. And furthermore in the example God is Being the subject term indicates the most universal representational content while the predicate indicates the emptiest and most abstract conceptual determination. If the Phenomenology demonstrates the development of all less complex representational contents toward God as the most concrete representational determination, and the Logic articulates the development of all more complex thought-determinations out of Being, then Hegel’s example seems to be the most universal and comprehensive case of predication, which includes all other possible examples within it as more abstract version of itself, a well chosen example then, even if for an igtheist the word God really is empty noise or so they assert. Speaking generally we can declare concerning the relation of form to content in any example which Hegel might have otherwise chosen that albeit particular contents may themselves be more dialectically complex than others there must be a fundamental dialectical structure involved in the common form of their expression by virtue of which the contents can be seen as dialectically related to one another over and above their own internal complexity and it is this structure of the subject-predicate form that Hegel endeavours to articulate in his discussion of the speculative sentence.
So, the subject is put forward simply as an empty name a further undetermined sound and must be determined by the predicate and only in the complete proposition is something meant, a name taken simply alone has no meaning (discuss), Upon the determination being added however it seems that if the name was standing all on its tod meaningless then the determination is now the sole locus of the meaning of the proposition. The predicate is Being has substantive significance and thus absorbs the meaning of the subject within it and Being is intended here not to be (?) not predicate but the essential nature hence God appears to desist from being (?) what he was when the proposition was put forward, on the face of it a fixed subject. The locus of meaning of the proposition thus at first seems to be the predicate since the initial response to the example is to declare that what is meant by it is that Being is the essential nature of God but already through expanding the meaning of the copula to ‘has the essential nature of’ we have already introduced an asymmetry into the predication which does not appear to be strictly warranted by the simple identity suggested by the external form of the proposition. If for instance the meaning of God is Being can be expressed by a simple identity then the statement is merely a substitution rule directing us to substitute the word Being at every place at which the word God occurs and yet the consequence of this interpretation would be that nothing meaningful was communicated beyond the tautology itself and just as a name standing alone has no meaning so in addition a substitution rule is meaningless as it merely states a permissible symbolic operation and hence if such a statement is to have any further meaning the copula must indicate something more than simple identity and the first response is to say that the predicate in question expresses the essential nature of the subject.
We need to delve further into what is meant by essential nature here. Within the Hegelian perspective only sentences, compounds of names or words which stand in relation to one another in the unity of the proposition, have meaning though we can speak of the meanings of words if we understand that this is possible only by virtue of their already standing in relation to other words in propositions and hence we might say that albeit the primary sense of meaning indicates the proposition taken as a whole since only thus do the words receive their meaning we can subsequently speak of the meanings of words in a derivative sense which presupposes a multiplicity of possible propositions into which they can enter and by which they can be explicated and hence when asking for the meaning of essential nature, we are in fact asking for further propositions by virtue of which its own meaning can be articulated and this is an extension of the Hegelian notion that what is is comprehensible only as dialectically articulated, that is, only as an opposition which sublates itself. When we ask for the meaning of the predicate Being as essential nature, we intend this always as over against another word here the subject God and the notion of essential nature thereby arises as the first mediation of the opposition of the subject and the predicate in the original sentence.
As such it must not be understood as external to the statement but as entering into the articulation of the copula itself and what we mean when we say that Being is to express the essential nature of God could now be put in the form which discloses the increased complexity of the copula. God receives the determination of his essential nature in Being. And the result of this transformation of the copula is the loss of the subject and what is indicated by the transformed copula is that the meaning of the predicate in relation to the subject has exhausted the meaning of the subject which is to say the meaning of the subject is included in the meaning of the predicate because the apparent substantiality of the predicate is now claimed to be itself the essential reality and as such seems to dispense with the need for a separate indicator occupying the subject-place of the proposition and if the meaning of the subject is taken up in its entirety into the predicate as our new copula claims then we appear to be able to dispense with the empty subject-word altogether, and the essential meaning should still be present but were this to occur we would merely be left with another empty word which would itself demand further explication further propositions by virtue of which it could have a context in which to be meaningful.
Thinking is blatantly not satisfied with such a consequence for there is a loss involved that goes beyond the fact that the predicate can encompass the meaning of the subject in itself and furthermore there is a progressive sense in which one meaning can be said to subsume another and in addition a regressive sense that insists that the subject be preserved, albeit the subject was initially held to be an empty sound it was nonetheless fixed by virtue of its apparent concrete reference. Thinking therefore loses that fixed objective basis which it had in the subject, just as much as in the predicate it is thrown back on the subject, and therein returns not into itself but into the subject underlying the content.
‘Similarly, too, when one says: ‘the actual is the universal’, the actual as subject disappears in its predicate. The uniyversal is not meant to have merely the significance of a predicate, as if the proposition asserted only that the actual is universal; on the contrary, the universal is meant to express the essence of the actual.-Thinking therefore loses the firm .objective basis it had in the subject when, in the predicate, it is thrown back on to the subject, and when, in the predicate, it does not return into itself, but into the subject of the content’.
- ‘The Phenomenology of Spirit’
The moment at which the predicate seems to take up within itself the meaning of the subject is likewise the cancelling of the very basis by which both had meaning, the proposition in which they are related, indeed we could certainly proceed to take the predicate of our first proposition as the subject of another, the new predicate again as subject of still another, and so on, but this will not resolve the issue for the entire series will still depend upon the original subject which initially provided the fixed point of reference for the original proposition and what is at issue is the relation of our original subject to the original predicate never mind how further complex in its articulation the predicate itself may be and if the original subject is dispensable and lost in the process then there is no reason why the subject would not be lost in every proposition of the series in which case the net result would still be an empty word with no final proposition within which to function as meaningful.
And so the predicate recoils upon the subject in order to recover the determinateness of reference that was lost in the subsumption of the subject in the predicate and this constitutes the second moment of Hegel’s articulation of the speculative sentence and gives rise to a new explication of the copula in the effort to capture what was lost beyond the subsumption of the meaning of the subject in the higher unity of the predicate and so the sentence can be reformulated thus: God is the ground for predicating Being. The predicate returns the subject because it discovers itself searching for the ground for its own meaning as derived from its opposition to a subject in a proposition. It was was possible to predicate Being at all only because the subject could serve as the concrete point of reference for the predication itself and the emptiness of the collapse of the subject into the predicate is recognized by thought as the loss of the ground for the meaning of the predicate and thus demands that the subject be reinstated as this ground of the predication.
Once this point is arrived at the full force of what has been found to be a double sense of subject comes into play for the first moment involved the loss of the subject which is to be understood in the twofold sense that both the significance of the grammatical subject is lost and that the consciousness which must perform the act of predication in asserting a proposition is likewise lost. The destiny of the grammatical subject is tied in a very special albeit strange way to the destiny of the subject understood as the locus of conscious activity.
Or to put it another way since the time of Hegel words of themselves do not refer any more than do ladies, tables, word-processors, but words can refer if they are employed by a being capable of speaking a language in the act of communication and hence anytime one discourses upon a word’s referring even if it be a word like God which has traditionally been connected with difficulties in deciding whether indeed it successfully refers or not one must at the same time acknowledge the dependence of the act of referring upon that which can in fact be said to act which is to say a consciousness. Although this matter appears straightforward enough though assuming controversy when stated in such a manner the way in which it is taken up in the concrete analysis of language is of the utmost significance if we endeavour to situate Hegel’s approach to language in relation to both the pre-Hegelian view of language and a great deal of post-Hegelian reflection upon the same issues for the endeavour to reflect upon language immediately and necessarily involves us in an effort to reflect upon the nature of consciousness itself and as a matter of fact the dialectical structure of the proposition as it discloses itself in Hegel’s analysis of the speculative sentence reflects the fact that consciousness itself is essentially a dialectical activity.
Furthermore the converse of this is likewise true as consciousness or in general thinking has its true existence only when implicated with language and in the preface to the Phenomenology Hegel explains that speech contains this ego in its purity for it alone expresses I, I itself, its existence in this case is in the aspect of existence a form of objectivity that has in it its true nature:
‘But this alienation takes place solely in language, which here, appears in its characteristic significance. In the world, of ethical order, in law and command” and in the actual world, in counsel only, language has the essence for its content and is the form of that content; but here it has for its content the form itself, the form which language itself is, and is authoritative as language. It is the power of speech , as that which performs what has to be performed. For it is the real existence of the pure self as self; in speech — self-consciousness, qua independent separate: individuality, comes as such into existence, so that it exists for others. Otherwise the ‘I’, this pure ‘I’, is non~existent, is not there; in every other expression it is immersed in a reality, and is in a shape from which it can withdraw itself; it is reflected back into itself from its action, as well as from its physiognomic expression, and dissociates itself from such an imperfect existence, in which there is always at once too much as too little, letting it remain lifeless behind. Language, however, contains it in its purity, it alone expresses the ‘I’, the ‘I’ itself. This real existence of the ‘I’ is, qua real existence, an objectivity which has in it the true nature of the ‘I’. The ‘I’, is this particular ‘I’ but equally the universal ‘I’; its manifesting is also at once the externalization and vanishing of this particular ‘I’, and as a result the ‘I’ remains in its universality. The ‘I’ that utters itself is heard or perceived; it is an infection in which it has immediately passed into unity with those for whom it is a real existence, and is a universal self-consciousness. That it is perceived or heard means that its real existence dies away; this its otherness has been taken back into itself; and its real existence is just this: that as a self-conscious Now, as a real existence, it is not a real existence, and through this vanishing it is a real existence. This vanishing is thus itself at once its abiding; it is its own knowing of itself, and its knowing itself as a self that has passed over into another self that has been perceived and is universal’.
- The Phenomenology of Spirit’
The point is emphasised again elswehere:
‘Words thus attain an existence animated by thought. This existence is absolutely necessary to our thoughts. We only know our thoughts, only have definite, actual thoughts, when we give them the form of objectivity, of a being distinct from our inwardness, and therefore the shape of externality, and of an externality, too, that at the same time bears the stamp of the highest inwardness. The articulated sound, the word, is alone such an inward externality’.
- ‘The Philosophy of Spirit’
Only in language does the conscious subject have his or her existence as conscious and thus we can understand the disappearance of and backlash upon the subject for with the disappearance of the meaning of the grammatical subject into that of the predicate the initial place of manifestation of the conscious subject in the act connected with the determinate reference of the grammatical subject is also lost and it is thereby this mutual implication of the conscious subject with the grammatical subject that is fully disclosed in the loss itself which is to say the beginning was initially taken to be merely a word occupying the grammatical subject-place of the sentence but its loss guides us to the fact that the very basis of the predicate being predicate is itself lost, the act of the conscious subject makes it possible both for the subject to have some determinate reference and for the predicate to have a determinate ground upon which to be predicated.
The backlash of the predicate against the subject in its effort to reinstate its own meaning by reinstating its ground now bears this double meaning explicitly within its movement and the ground of the predication proves to be as well the conscious subject as the grammatical subject, as well the active character of consciousness displaying itself in language as the explicit linguistic determination. If the grammatical subject, and with it the conscious subject can be said to be lost in the first moment of Hegel’s analysis the activity of consciousness reasserts itself at just that point at which the subject is consumed in the predicate and the predicate likewise is a word and as such insists upon a further act of consciousness for the maintenance of its meaning for it too must occur in the totality of a proposition which is asserted.
If however its force as predicate is to be maintained it is the original subject that must be returned to but now with its explicit meaning as involving both consciousness and the original grammatical subject. This movement is the return of the predicate into its ground but ground explicitly understood as already complex within itself and the proposition ought to express what the truth is, in its essential nature the truth is subject and being so, it is merely the dialectical movement this self-producing course of activity maintaining its advance by returning back into itself and this alone is the concrete speculative element and only the explicit expression of this is a speculative systematic exposition.
‘As a matter off act, non-speculative thinking also has its valid rights which are disregarded in the speculative way of stating a proposition. The sublation of the form of the proposition must not happen only in an immediate manner, through the mere content of the proposition. On the contrary, this opposite movement must find explicit expression ; it must not just be the inward inhibition mentioned above. This return of the Notion into itself must be set forth. This movement which constitutes what formerly the proof was supposed to accomplish, is the dialectical movement of the proposition itself. This alone is the speculative in act, and only the expression of this movement is a speculative exposition. As a proposition, the speculative is only the internal inhibition and the non-existential return of the essence into itself. Hence we often find philosophical expositions referring us to this inner intuition; and in this way they evade the systematic exposition of the dialectical movement of the proposition which we have demanded.-The proposition should express what the True is; but essentially the True is Subject. As such it is merely the dialectical movement, this course that generates itself, going forth from, and returning to, itself. In non-speculative cognition proof constitutes this side of expressed inwardness. But once the dialectic has been separated from proof, the notion of philosophical demonstration has been lost’.
- ‘The Phenomenology of Spirit’
In this connection we can speak of the speculative sentence, Hegel uses the word Satz here rather than speaking of the speculative Begriff or of speculative Denken and as a matter of fact the relationship between the implication of the speculative element with Sätze and the notion of Satz with which we started is stressed by Hegel’s contrasting the speculative sentence with the sentence of simple identity and it should be immediately observed that conceived merely formally the speculative sentence differs not a whit from the sentence of simple identity for both share the subject-predicate form. The sentence God is Being is just as much a sentence from the speculative viewpoint as it is from the ordinary view of it as expressing simple identity, there is no mystery in the speculative sentence it does not insists upon a rejection of the usual way in which we speak intrinsically but the relationship between the form of our language and thought is more complex than the former providing the structure of discourse and thought providing the content expressed in the particular words utilised and furthermore by attending simply to the for itself without importing any further theories of predication the complexity of this relationship will disclose itself. If an extra-ordinary way of speaking philosophically is to arise from Hegel’s concept of philosophical reflection it is not such that it opposes itself to ordinary language but rather can arise only when we take in its full complexity the ordinary form of language itself.
The speculative element appears in the form of a sentence and a question arises as to what the notion of speculative add to this in particular if the first moment was an endeavour to perform a predication resulting in the loss of the subject, and the second was a return to the subject as the ground of the predication, what then is involved in the final moment, the speculative? One must understand the characterization of the first two moments in the sense that speculative is a characterization for the third and the first moment involved the subsumption of the meaning of the subject in the greater generality of that of the predicate and without addressing the loss of the subject we can proceed to form further sentences employing our original predicate in the subject-place, the new predicate of these sentences in the subject-places of further sentences, and so on. In each case, a greater degree of generality will be acquired and if we reject the notion of an infinite progression of sentences, the final result will be a sentence or sentences containing predicates which express the most comprehensive generalities or genera of what could be said to be. In Aristotelianian terms, these would be the Categories hence in accordance with what is generally understood by this approach to philosophy the first moment may be designated the metaphysical moment.
Upon it becoming necessary to raise the question of the ground of the initial predication itself however with the return upon the subject in search of the locus in which all the subsequent determinations must have their fixed basis reflection becomes redirected for now the concern is not at all one of generality of universality in terms of inclusiveness but of the ground of this progression toward greater inclusiveness and the determinateness involved in the capacity of the subject to give a particular is lost in this progression and insists to be reinstated but this reinstatement cannot be accomplished merely by a return upon the grammatical subject for also at issue is the act of consciousness by virtue of which the grammatical subject could be said to refer and not simply be an entity alongside others and if the grammatical subject must be posited by an act of consciousness as standing in a certain sort of relation to that which can be determinately referred to this ultimately raises the question of what can be merely, a question which is involved in any answer to its co-ordinate question of what can be said to be in the most fundamental sense and this is clearly what has traditionally been intended by the notion of ontology and for this reason we can call the second moment the ontological and this being the case we can speak of the speculative moment in a preliminary way as the unity of the metaphysical and ontological moments of the form of the proposition.
Let us delve into this further. In the metaphysical moment the predicate was affirmed at the expense of the subject and in the ontological moment the subject was reaffirmed as the ground not only of the grammatical predicate but also of the entire predication itself and the issue arises as to what there is about this grounding relation that compels the analysis a step further because it would appear that now both subject and predicate are affirmed in a relation to one another more complex than simple identity. The Logic contains several discussions of particular relevance to this question, the discussion of the forms of judgement in the section entitled ‘Der Begriff’ perhaps spring to mind here for the issue is what could be absent from the analysis of the form of the proposition once the process by which subject and predicate restate themselves has been elucidated. An answer immediately presents itself. The copula. So far the copula has appeared in the analysis as the plastic element by means of which the propositions in which the first two moments were reformulated were articulated.
The stress has been initially upon the predicate and then back upon the subject and the articulation of the copula has been merely a consequence of these respective focal points but once the two moments have been fully articulatedthe fact only then emerges that the real locus of the articulation of the movements between subject and predicate has been the plasticity of the copula itself for recollect how this works. Metaphysical moment: God receives the determination of his essential nature in Being. Ontological moment: God is the ground for predicating Being. These more extended articulations of the copula were initially preferred in virtue of it being more obviously in line with Hegel’s own exposition of his example but the complexity of the copulae may be reformulated thusly: Metaphysical moment: S meaning of included by P. Ontological moment: S ground of P. And in order to finally state the meaning of the speculative sentence it is apparent enough that these statements must in some manner be apprehended as a unity. At this moment two alternatives offer themselves, first we may merely combine these two propositions additively and the consequential complex could then be taken to present the meaning of the speculative element and in this way the generative order of the two propositions which is to say the fact that the second can be stated only after the analysis of the first can be preserved if we do not uncritically import a notion of commutation into the addition of the two propositions but contrariwise we may rather combine the two copulae into a single complex copula occurring in a single proposition thereby yielding S meaning of included by and ground of P that would also appear to constitute a formulation of the speculative sentence.
Nonetheless neither formulation completely corresponds to Hegel’s own intention for both ways of expressing the unity disclose something about the notion of the speculative but both are to an equal degree defective and by means of the first additive formulation we can state the distinctness of the moments so that the element of generation is also stated which is to say in the first formulation the two propositions retain their significance as autonomous moments of a process of reflection and can present in their linear expression the fact that one has been generated from the other and the double occurrence of S and P on the other hand has the disadvantage that their self-identify is not disclosed in the articulation itself for they are in both instances merely variables and an additional action of thought is needed manifesting itself in a further stipulation that what is substituted for the same variable in one case must be so substituted in the other and this is external to the propositions themselves yet discloses the more comprehensive role of thought in the case of the first articulation.
The second articulation, that is S meaning of included by and ground of P has the advantage of revealing the self-identity of S and P since no extra stipulation would be needed as there is only one occurrence of S and one of P and yet it has the defect of failing to retain the generative relation of the propositions which become united by the more complex copula. Here thought would disclose itself by recalling that the total copula has as a matter of fact a greater complexity that may be designated as generative than the way in which it is expressed suggests and hence in the final analysis it seems that there is no way to explicitly state the speculative sentence in a manner which would capture its full dialectical complexity.
Is there no way out of this impasse? It would appear that there simply is no speculative sentence that can in actual fact be articulated in ordinary language which may be so if one assumes that what is in question is a distinct class of sentences that can be called speculative as opposed to others that cannot be so characterized and yet Hegel assumes with the tradition that the subject-predicate structure is fundamental to any intelligible use of language and the ground for such a distinction could rest only in the content and yet it is the subject-predicate form itself that Hegel has analyzed through a discussion that does not appear to be restricted to any particular content and because neither the content of the proposition nor the subject-predicate form can serve to differentiate a speculative from a non-speculative sentence the distinction which the notion of speculative adds to the notion of a sentence must be looked for in another place.
Regarded merely as an objective linguistic entity or, in a somewhat different mode of discourse (returning to dull linguistic philosophy) a sentence-token the sentence of simple identity is in no whit different from the final result of Hegel’s analysis and the sentence God is Being can express both simple identity and the dialectic of the speculative. But the manner in which we regard and reflect upon such a sentence is precisely what is at issue for the same sentence becomes speculative by virtue of the very manner in which we comprehend and reflect upon it and considered merely in its immediate, objective occurrence there is no external difference between the specuIative sentence and any other kind of sentence. Language is so related to our reflection upon it that such a purely objective and external view of a sentence is impossible to maintain in the face of the activity of reflection and any sentence is a combination both of a particularized external articulation in the medium of language the occurrence of the sentence-token and of the universality of thought which is expressed in and constitutes the basis of language itself. Therefore the speculative sentence does not refer to any particular sentence distinguished upon the basis of some special content or extraordinary form but rather to the comprehended concrete unity of objective articulation and subjective comprehension which lies at the basis of any occurrence of language.
The relation of thought and language must be conceived as fully dialectical as a concrete mode of identify-in-difference and because thought only achieves objective existence and reality when articulated concretely in language and language is possible as a medium of expression only because it is infused with the universality of thought thought and language must be understood as identical in their mutual implication and since we apprehend another’s thought only in his or her use of language and attribute significance to language only because it expresses thought can we say that they are identical. What we directly apprehend in understanding language is the immediate objective existence of thought the immediate identity of thought and language and yet language and thought must nonetheless be different and distinguishable inasmuch as thought can never be totally exhausted in any particular instance of language or linguistic formulation. In particular any occurrence of language incorporates in both the determinations employed as its content and the form in which it is expressed further possibilities for reflection according to Hegel’s analysis of the speculative sentence.
Let us consider more closely the structure of the identity-in-difference of language and thought. Hegel begins his discussion with a concrete example of a use of language, all we are presented with is an objective linguistic entity but Hegel’s example immediately negates itself in the face of our reflection upon it since a necessary element of the sentence as the fundamental unit of meaning is annulled and hence the sentence-token itself summons the activity of thought in order to apprehend that which it only partially expresses when taken as indicating a simple identity and the self-identity of the initial example divides itself in the face of reflection into its factic occurrence and the apprehension of it as meaningful and the initial identity of thought and language thus immediately becomes a necessary difference.
But the process of reflection which immediately distinguishes itself from the factic and given linguistic entity has its own further articulation in language which is to say it is possible to articulate the internal complexity of the copula in further sentences in the process of which the original difference of thought and language becomes mediated by further articulations and upon the sentences expressing the metaphysical and ontological moments being expressed the activity of reflection is again summoned to unify them and thought on its side can attain this unity only by a return to the original sentence albeit now invested with a further significance for having undergone the dialectical process of explication that it originally evoked. This concrete unity which is constituted upon the return to the origin of the analysis is made possible on the one hand because the further reflection which it evokes has itself a linguistic dimension and on the other hand because this further process of articulation must be unified by the activity of thought in its return to the original unity hence we can say that the notion of the speculative sentence is the linguistic corollary of a dialectically developed understanding of language in its relation to thought.
Hegel’s analysis of the speculative sentence permits him to reply to two principal issues regarding the possibility of systematic reflection, first, on what basis is even a propaedeutic to Wissenschaft accessible in experience and, second how is a finite articulation of the absoluteness demanded by Hegel’s notion of philosophical reflection possible as system? The first question can be answered by virtue of the fact that the very capacity to speak a language and reflect upon it provides the basis upon which we can start on the road to Science and the most elementary form of speaking and reflecting upon the meanings implicit in language provides the the framework for that moment with which the Phenomenology begins, the moment of Sense-Certainty.
The answer to the second question is suggested by the manner in which the relation of thought and language proves itself to be a concrete unity a dialectical identity-in-difference, for system to be possible language must be able to express the true dialectical character of thought and for system to lay claim to ultimacy that which discovers its expression in language must be distinguishable from any sum of its particular expressions and it is the dialectic which discloses itself in Hegel’s analysis of the speculative sentence that delivers the ground for the dialectical mode of explication that he utilizes in the system itself and it is this latter which constitutes his particular contribution to the business of reflecting metaphysically.
You may be wondering why I opened up this article with a line from ‘Finnegans Wake’. Well, my own research is about giving an Hegelian reading to the Wake which includes as part of my thesis that a Joycean sentence is a speculative sentence par excellence but this article is now too long so I will take that up in some future article while for now I end with a quick summation of a simpler exposition of a speculative sentence thereby at least hinting at where I am coming from in taking Joycean sentences to be speculative sentences.
A common grievance expressed against dialect thought (going all the way back to Plato) is that it lacks focus, in my own case I like to slip in a joke now and then, and of course there are the pictures too, as it moves from one idea to the next idea while never properly tying them together. There are two different rhetorical devices, parataxis, literally the placing of clauses or phrases one after another without words to indicate coordination or subordination, tell me my dear lady what is it like being beautiful? while in literature it refers to an apparently linear sequence of ideas and events such as we find in Ernest Hemingway, (1899–1961):
A paratactic order of events which works so well in Hemingway’s hands, blunt and direct and down to Earth, very moving as it would not be so much were it written in flowery over-the-top purple prose. This is from Hemingway’s greatest work, simple writing considerably more difficult to pull off than may be supposed:
‘Please go out of the room’, the doctor said. ‘You cannot talk’. Catherine winked at me, her face gray.
‘I’ll be right outside’, I said.
‘Don’t worry, darling’, Catherine said. ‘I’m not a bit afraid. It’s just a dirty trick’.
‘You dear, brave sweet’.
I waited outside in the hall. I waited a long time.
The nurse came to the door and came over to me. ‘I’m afraid Mrs. Henry is very ill’, she said. ‘I’m afraid for her’.
‘Is she dead?’
‘No, but she is unconscious’/
It seems she had one hemorrhage after another. They couldn’t stop it. I went into the room and stayed with Catherine until she died. She was unconscious all the time, and it did not take her very long to die.
Outside the room, in the hall, I spoke to the doctor, ‘is there anything I can do to-night?’
‘No. There is nothing to do. Can I take you to your hotel?’
‘No, thank you. I am going to stay here a while’.
‘I know there is nothing to say. I cannot tell you’.
‘No’, I said. ‘There’s nothing to say’.
‘Good-night’, he said. ‘I cannot take you to your hotel?’
‘No, thank you’.
‘It was the only thing to do’, he said. ‘The operation proved .. ‘
‘I do not want to talk about it’, I said.
‘I would like to take you to your hotel’.
‘No, thank you’.
He went down the hall. I went to the door of the room.
‘You can’t come in now’, one of the nurses said.
‘Yes I can’, I said.
‘You can’t come in yet’.
‘You get out’, I said. ‘The other one too’.
But after I had got them out and shut the door and turned off the light it wasn’t any good. It was like saying good-by to a statue. After a while I went out and left the hospital and walked back to the hotel in the rain.
- ‘A Farewell to Arms’
Parataxis is juxtaposed with hypotaxis, grammatically the subordination of one clause to another, a rhetorical device in which clauses become embedded within each other think of a Proustian, (Valentin Louis Georges Eugène Marcel Proust, (1871–1922)), sentence where a sentence starts at one point and there are multiple strands of thought developed within one single sentence and by the end of the sentence the beginning emerges in a different or new light:
‘When from a long-distant past nothing subsists, after the people are dead, after the things are broken and scattered, still, alone, more fragile, but with more vitality, more unsubstantial, more persistent, more faithful, the smell and taste of things remain poised a long time, like souls, ready to remind us, waiting and hoping for their moment, amid the ruins of all the rest; and bear unfaltering, in the tiny and almost impalpable drop of their essence, the vast structure of recollection. And once again I had recognized the taste of the crumb of madeleine soaked in her decoction of lime-flowers which my aunt used to give me (although I did not yet know and must long postpone the discovery of why this memory made me so happy), immediately the old gray house upon the street, where her room was, rose up like the scenery of a theatre’.
- ‘In Search of Lost Time’
Parataxis occupies a position within the Western Anglo-American scientific tradition, not so much the French/German tradition, whereby there is a paratactic delivery of ideas and thought that structures a scientific paper, this is my hypothesis, this is how I have tested it, these are the ideas I wish to put forth, these are my results and conclusions. Within continental philosophy particularly of the German and French variety there is a hypotactic stress upon the development of thought within writing as such. While I am thinking I am in addition developing my thought and the structure by which I add subservient clauses that will lead to a different acknowledgement or conclusion by the end of the sentence. Hypotactic thought is a key rhetorical device within dialectical thought and has a format by which we have to be invested in the entire sequence of thought in order for it to make sense. This is why I like to joke. Upon telling a joke one is presenting what seems to be a linear paratactic sequence of ideas and yet there is a fundamental inversion by which at the end the beginning is skewered in a different light which is to say a joke undermines the paratactic synthesis from within thereby becoming hypotactic with the surprise element in a joke whereby the beginning emerges in a retroactive different light and thereby jokes are dialectical.
Hegel is the fundamental and most significant thinker of dialectical thought in this precise sense and at the beginning of his preface to his Phenomenology he writes that he cannot write a preface to a philosophical work because it would undermine the very premise of the philosophical project which is to articulate the idea in its own becoming which for Hegel is a metaphor for the idea’s own becoming in human reason and history as such, otherwise known as Spirit, so the very idea of having a preface that would summarise in bullet points what is yet to come would be impossible within the Hegelian project, a point he makes before writing his preface, an exquisite beautiful reflection upon the futility that becomes necessary in constructing the Hegelian edifice.
Note: in my experience in studying philosophy at BA and Masters level I was often criticised for long sentences that need breaking down. Well, b******* to them. Who was the comedian who said they said that they laughed when he said he wanted to be a comedian but they are not laughing now?
Notes to ‘Finnegans Wake’ passage:
1.dative case: a grammatical case generally used to indicate the noun to whom something is given.
2. ablative case:name given to cases in various languages whose common characteristic is that they mark motion away from something, though the details in each language may differ.
3. spake: obsolete, poetical, or archaic, from the past tense of speak.
4. gramma: (Latin) — a writing, drawing, letter of the alphabet.
5. impetus: moving force, impulse, stimulus.
6. gender : Grammar. Each of the three or in some languages two grammatical kinds.
7. reflexive: a reflexive verb or pronoun; Grammar and Linguistics, of pronouns, verbs, phrases, and their signification. Characterized by, or denoting, a reflex action on the subject of the clause or sentence.
8. gavelkind: From the 16th c., often used to denote the custom of dividing a deceased man’s property equally among his sons, whether as an incident of the Kentish tenure or otherwise; and Irish, Gavelkind, custom by which land, on owner’s death, went into common use.
9. daff: one deficient in sense or in proper spirit; a simpleton, a fool; a coward; also Taff.
10. Erse: Irish, deaf as your arse.
11. grappa: a brandy distilled from the skins, pips, and stalks of the grapes after they have been pressed for wine-making; also grandpa.
12. bott: colloquial abbreviation of bottom; also bod (bud) (Gaelicl), penis; also Potz tausend! (German), (expletive); also Butt/Taff.
13. hore: dirt, filth, defilement, foulness; also hear
14. uff:An exclamation as of someone panting with exertion or difficulty; also hor emal uff! (German), stop it!
15. hedone: (Greek), enjoyment, pleasure.
16. frech: (German), impudent; ‘French Devil’, Jean Bart, 17th century privateer.
17. lappy: resembling a lap or lobe ; also ALP.
18. leap: (Slang) — fuck; also on entering confessional: ‘Bless me, father, for I have sinned’.
19. Lochlaun or Locklaun: Irish name for Norway.
20. lady and was die Leute sagen: (German)what the people say.
21. analect: the select part, the choice essence; the ‘cream’ or marrow, also analecta (Latin), slave who picked up food crumbs; also intellectual.
22. pick-me-up.
Dedicated to the One, my muse, for whom everything I pen is a love letter.
THE END
