On Hegel’s ‘Science of Logic’ : A Realm of Shadows — part forty two.
‘Within my Garden, rides a Bird’
by Emily Dickinson (1830–1886)
Within my Garden, rides a Bird
Opon a single Wheel -
Whose spokes a dizzy Music make
As ‘twere a travelling Mill -
He never stops, but slackens -
Above the Ripest Rose -
Partakes without alighting -
And praises as he goes,
Till every spice is tasted -
And then his Fairy Gig
Reels in remoter atmospheres -
And I rejoin my Dog,
And He and I, perplex us
If positive, ‘twere we -
Or bore the Garden in the Brain
This Curiosity -
But He, the best Logician,
Refers my clumsy eye -
To just vibrating Blossoms!
An Exquisite Reply!
The Positive Judgment.
In the Positive Judgment, the individual is universal.
‘The first pure expression of the positive judgment is, therefore, the proposition: the singular is universal. This expression must not be put in the form of ‘A is B’, for A and B are totally formless and hence meaningless names, whereas judgment in general, and therefore already the judgment of existence, has determinations of the concept for its extremes. ‘A is B’ can stand just as well for any mere proposition as for a judgment. But what is asserted in every judgment, even one more richly determined in form, is the proposition that has this determined content, namely, ‘the singular is universal’, for every judgment is in principle also an abstract judgment. (Regarding the negative judgment, how far it likewise comes under this expression, of this we shall speak presently.) — However, if no thought is given to the fact that with every judgment, the positive at least, the assertion is made that the singular is universal, this happens either because no attention is given to the determinate form differentiating subject and object — for it is taken for granted that the judgment is nothing but the connecting of two concepts — or also likely because the further content of the judgment, ‘Gaius is learned’, or ‘the rose is red’, comes drifting in before the mind, and the latter, busy with the picture of Gaius etc., fails to reflect on the form — even though, at least, such a content as ‘Gaius’, which is the one that usually has to be dragged in as an example, is much less interesting than the form, and is indeed chosen because it is uninteresting, not to divert attention from the form to itself’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
The subject is assumed to be an abstract, determinate Individual. The predicate is an abstract Universal. Mediation between subject and predicate is only presupposed. Because this Judgment contains no mediation (the copula being invisible), Hegel names it the Positive Judgment. Positive Judgment’s immediacy is rather illegitimate at this stage of the Logic. As Hegel points out, in the sphere of the Notion there can be no other immediacy than one in which mediation is essentially and explicitly a moment and which has come to be only through the sublating of that mediation.
‘The subject and predicate, as we have just said, are names at first that receive their actual determination only as the judgment runs its course. However, as sides of the judgment — the judgment being the posited determinate concept — they have the determination of moments of the concept, but, on account of their immediacy, this determination is as yet quite simple, still not enriched by mediation and also still caught up in the abstract opposition of abstract singularity and abstract universality. — The predicate, to speak of it first, is the abstract universal; this abstract is conditioned by mediation, by the sublation of singularity and particularity, but so far such a mediation is here only a presupposition. In the sphere of the concept there can be no other immediacy than the one that contains mediation in and for itself and has arisen only through its sublation; this is the immediacy of the universal. Thus qualitative being also is in its concept a universal; as being, however, the immediacy is not yet posited as such; it is only as universality that immediacy is the concept determination in which it is posited that negativity essentially belongs to it. This connection is given in the judgment in which universality is the predicate of a subject. — Similarly the subject is an abstract singular, or the immediate which is supposed to be such and therefore the singular as a something in general. The subject constitutes, therefore, the abstract side of the judgment, the side in it according to which the concept has passed over into externality. — As these two concept determinations are determined, so is also their connection, the ‘is’ or the copula; it too can have no other meaning than that of an immediate, abstract being. It is because of this connection, which still does not contain any mediation or negation, that this judgment is called ‘positive’.’
- The Science of Logic’
Because the subject in the Individual is Universal is abstract, it is nothing — ‘simply a point of reference’ as John W. Burbidge puts it. It is only the point to which the Universal predicates adhere. Only the predicate ‘persists in thought and is common to a number of individuals. On this basis it could be considered to be primary — the subject’, continues Burbidge. Dialectical Reason therefore asserts the opposite proposition from that of the Understanding. For Dialectical Reason, the universal is individual.
‘The objective meaning of the proposition stating that the singular is universal conveys, as already incidentally noted, both the perishableness of singular things and their positive subsistence in the concept in general. The concept itself is imperishable, but that which emerges from it in its division is subjected to alteration and to falling back into its universal nature. But the universal, conversely, gives itself a determinate existence. Just as essence goes out into reflective shine in its determinations; or ground into concrete existence in appearance; and substance into manifestation in its accidents, so does the universal resolve itself into the singular; judgment is this resolution of the universal, the development of the negativity which, implicitly, it already is. — This last circumstance is expressed by the converse proposition, ‘the universal is singular’, which is also equally spoken in the positive judgment. The subject, the immediate singular at first, is in the judgment itself referred to its other, namely the universal; it is thereby posited as the concrete — according to the category of being, as a something of many qualities; or as the concrete of reflection, a thing of manifold properties, an actual of manifold possibilities, a substance of precisely such accidents. Because these manifolds here belong to the subject of the judgment, the something, the thing, etc., is in its qualities, properties, or accidents, reflected into itself, or continues across them, maintaining itself in them and them in itself. Positedness or determinateness belongs to being which is in and for itself. The subject is therefore inherently the universal. — The predicate, on the contrary, being this universality not as real or concrete, but as abstract, is in contrast to the subject the determinateness; it contains only one moment of the subject’s totality to the exclusion of the others. On account of this negativity, which as an extreme of the judgment is at the same time self-referring, the predicate is an abstract singular. — For instance, in the proposition, ‘the rose is fragrant’, the predicate expresses only one of the many properties of the rose; it isolates it, whereas in the subject the property is joined with the others; likewise in the dissolution of the thing, the manifold properties that inhere in it become isolated in acquiring self-subsistence as materials. From this side, then, the proposition of the judgment says: the universal is singular’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Dialectical Reason sees that subject and predicate reciprocally determine each other. Two results follow: (a) The subject simply is as an immediacy. It is Individual; the predicate is Universal. But, since the subject is determined by the predicate, the subject too is Universal — a concrete Universal. A concrete Universal, a phrase Hegel uses heavily in this chapter, is the particularized expression of a universal by an Individual as Deborah Chaffin outlines. In the Introduction, Hegel identifies the concrete Universal with Speculative Reason.
‘The understanding determines, and holds the determination fixed. Reason is negative and dialectical, since it dissolves the determinations of the understanding into nothing; it is positive, since it generates the universal, and comprehends the particular therein. Just as the understanding is usually taken as something separate from reason in general, so also dialectical reason is taken as something separate from positive reason. In its truth reason is however spirit, which is higher than both reason bound to the understanding and understanding bound to reason. It is the negative, that which constitutes the quality of both the dialectical reason and the understanding: it negates the simple, thereby posits the determinate difference of the understanding; but it equally dissolves this difference, and so it is dialectical. But spirit does not stay at the nothing of this result but is in it rather equally positive, and thereby restores the first simplicity, but as universal, such as it is concrete in itself; a given particular is not subsumed under this universal but, on the contrary, it has already been determined together with the determining of the difference and the dissolution of this determining. This spiritual movement, which in its simplicity gives itself its determinateness, and in this determinateness gives itself its self-equality — this movement, which is thus the immanent development of the concept, is the absolute method of the concept, the absolute method of cognition and at the same time the immanent soul of the content. — On this self-constructing path alone, I say, is philosophy capable of being objective, demonstrative science. — In this fashion have I tried to portray consciousness in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Consciousness is spirit as concrete, self-aware knowledge — to be sure, a knowledge bound to externality, but the progression of this subject matter, like the development of all natural and spiritual life, rests exclusively on the nature of the pure essentialities that constitute the content of the logic. Consciousness, as spirit which on the way of manifesting itself frees itself from its immediacy and external concretion, attains to the pure knowledge that takes these same pure essentialities for its subject matter as they are in and for themselves. They are pure thoughts, spirit that thinks its essence. Their self-movement is their spiritual life and is that through which science constitutes itself, and of which it is the exposition’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
This means that the subject is a complex entity with many qualities, (b) The predicate is determined in the subject — not on its own. Yet, as an immediacy, the predicate is an Individual — an abstract Universal. It contains only one moment of the subject’s totality to the exclusion of the others. Predicates are as much Individual as the subject is.
Positive Judgement
Any predicate can be made into the subject of a Judgment. Just as the properties in the thing became self-subsistent Matters, the predicates of the Universal subject are Individualizable. Hegel has, by now, put forth two formulations of the Positive Judgment: (1) the Individual is Universal; and (2) the Universal is Individual. The first, Hegel says, is the form of the Judgment of Existence. The second is its content. The subject’s content is the totality of all predicates. But a given predicate is merely one that has been singled out by an external reflection for determination. The above two formulations must be kept separate, for the moment. If they are united, so that subject and predicate are each Individual and Universal, then each of the extremes would be Particular. Indeed, this is their inner determination. Yet, if this were asserted straight out, we would no longer have Positive Judgment, but mere tautology.
Positive Judgement Reversed
Subject and predicate must remain in opposition, if their moment is to be recognized. We cannot, for now, say that the subject and predicate are both Universals. Such a statement would not be a Judgment but merely the sequential assertion of two Individuals. To say, the Universal is Universal is also to say the Individual is an Individual and the Particular is Particular. In such statements, subject and predicate cannot be distinguished. Both (1) and (2), as immediacies, are contradictions. If the Individual is Universal (form), the Individual posits itself as immediate and therefore not as Universal; its predicate is of wider scope and therefore does not correspond to it.
‘In first place, then, the meaning of the judgment when considered according to its form is that the singular is universal. But in fact such an immediate singular is definitely not universal; its predicate is of wider extension, does not correspond to it. The subject is a being existing immediately for itself, and hence the opposite of that abstraction, of that universality posited through mediation that was supposed to be predicated of it’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
In terms of Positive Judgement, the predicate c is an immediacy beyond Universality a. Since Universality is predicate, the predicate c is wider than the subject a, b and does not correspond to it. Subject and predicate ‘outflank each other’, as G. R. G. Mure puts it. ‘To the extent that judgement can capture the ontological basis of things … it must be inter alia a judgement of identity, one in which the terms it links are in an important sense identical. This we plainly do not have in judgements of quality like ‘the rose is red.’ Hence they still suffer from incommensurability’, explains Charles Taylor. In Mure’s phrase, the predicate is a what outrunning a that. The same is true for the Universal is Individual (content). In Positive Judgement Reversed, the subject a, b is a concrete that is infinitely determined.
‘In second place, if the judgment is considered according to its content, or as the proposition, ‘the universal is singular’, then the subject is a universe of qualities, an infinitely determined concrete universe, and since its determinacies are as yet qualities, properties, or accidents, its totality is the bad infinite plurality of them. Such a subject, therefore, is not at all the one single property that its predicate declares. Consequently, both propositions must be united, and the positive judgment must be posited as negative instead’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
In other words, the Universal is a Spurious Infinity of individual qualities. As such, the Universal is never fully present. Such a subject therefore is, on the contrary, not a single property such as its predicate enunciates. The rose is fragrant, but it is a lot more than just fragrant. Otherwise, Burbidge asks, how could the subject be distinguished from the predicate? The problem is that the copula is inadequate to express the relation between subject and predicate. Fragrance isolated (at the expense of other qualities) is notionless. It exhibits the opposition of being and reflection or the in-itself.
‘As regards the further determination of the subject and predicate, we have remarked above that it is in judgment that they must first receive their determination. But since judgment is the posited determinateness of the concept, this determinateness possesses the given differences immediately and abstractly as singularity and universality. — But inasmuch as judgment is in general the immediate existence or the otherness of the concept that has not yet restored itself to the unity through which it exists as concept, there also emerges the determinateness that is void of concept, the opposition of being and reflection or the in-itself. But since the concept constitutes the essential ground of judgment, these determinacies are at least indifferent in the sense that, when one accrues to the subject and the other to the predicate, the converse relation equally holds. The subject, being the singular, appears at first as the existent or as the one that exists for itself with the determinate determinateness of a singular on which judgment is passed — as an actual object even when it is such in representation only — as for instance in the case of bravery, right, agreement, etc. The predicate, which is the universal, appears on the contrary as the reflection of this judgment on that object, or rather as the object’s immanent reflection that transcends the immediacy of the judgment and sublates its determinacies as mere existents — appears, that is, as the object’s in-itselfness. — In this way, the start is made from the singular as the first, the immediate, and through the judgment this singular is raised to universality, just as, conversely, the universal that exists only in itself descends in the singular into existence or becomes a being that exists for itself’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Reflection is what underwrites subsistence. In short, the Positive Judgment, in content and form, does injustice to the Universal Contrary to its form, it really announces that the subject is not the predicate. This is Positive Judgment’s speculative result. Its form in general is incapable of holding within its grasp speculative determinations and truth. The direct supplement to it, the negative judgment, would at least have to be added as well.
‘So what we now have, taken first or also immediately, is the mediated, also a simple determination, for the first has perished in it, and only the second is therefore at hand. Now since the first is contained in the second, and this second is the truth of the first, this unity of the two can be expressed in the form of a proposition in which the immediate is placed as the subject but the mediated as its predicate; for example, ‘the finite is infinite’, ‘one is many’, ‘the singular is the universal’. The inadequacy of the form of such propositions and judgments is however obvious. In connection with judgment it was shown that its form in general, and most of all the immediate form of the positive judgment, is incapable of holding within its grasp the speculative content and the truth. Its closest complement, the negative judgment, would have to be brought in at least in equal measure. In judgment the first, as subject, conveys the reflective semblance of an independent subsistence, whereas it is in fact sublated in the predicate as in its other; this negation is indeed contained in the content of the above propositions, but their positive form contradicts the content; consequently, what is contained in them is not posited — whereas this was precisely the intent behind the use of a proposition’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Because the Positive Judgment is in contradiction, we pass to the Negative Judgment. The rose is not so fragrant after all.
The Negative Judgment.
For those who claim that judgments are true whenever they do not formally contradict themselves, Hegel has already shown that the Positive Judgment inherently contradicts itself. Nor should truth be reserved for the correspondence of a proposition to outside reality. Whoever gives the name of truth to the correctness of an intuition or perception, or to the agreement of the picture-thought with the object, at any rate has no expression left for that which is the subject matter and aim of philosophy. The truth of Judgment is the relation it establishes between subject and predicate. All other content that appears in a judgement (the sun is round, Cicero was a great orator in Rome, it is day now, etc.) does not concern the judgement as such.
‘We spoke earlier of the common notion that whether the content of a judgment is true or false depends solely on the content itself, since logical truth concerns only the form and its only requirement is that such content shall not contradict itself.58 Nothing else is reckoned as the form of judgment except that the latter is a connection of two concepts. But we have seen that these two concepts are not just the relationless determination of a sum, but that they relate to each other as singular and universal. These are the determinations that constitute the truly logical content and also, abstracted in that way, the content of the positive judgment; whatever other content is in a judgment (‘the sun is round’, ‘Cicero was a great Roman orator’, ‘it is daytime now’, etc.) does not concern the judgment as such; the judgment only says that the subject is predicate, or, since these re only names, that the singular is universal and vice versa. — It is because of this purely logical content that the positive judgment is not true but has its truth in the negative judgment. — In judgment, so it is required, the content simply ought not to contradict itself; but it does contradict itself in the positive judgment, as we have just seen. — At any rate, it makes absolutely no difference if that logical content is called form, and by content is understood only the remaining empirical filling, for even then the form would not contain a mere empty identity outside which the content determination would then lie. The positive judgment has in fact no truth through its form as positive judgment; whoever calls truth the correctness of an intuition or a perception, the agreement of representation with the subject matter, has for a minimum no expression left for that which is the subject matter and the aim of philosophy. We should at least say of these that they are the truth of reason, and it will surely be granted that such judgments as ‘Cicero was a great orator’, that ‘it is daytime now’, are definitely not truths of reason. But they are not such truths, not because they have an empirical content as it were contingently, but because they are only positive judgments that can have, and ought to have, no other content than an immediate singular and an abstract determinateness’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Its form is inadequate to its content. ‘The immediate display of the judgment ‘B is A’ — that A, the predicate, is something determinate and subsumed under the subject B … is the positing of A as not-A’, explains Burbidge. Being contradictory, Positive Judgment has its truth in the negative judgement. The Understanding interprets the Negative Judgment as asserting that the Individual is not subject as an immediacy. An immediate subject cannot be Universal; Universality — absolutely fluid continuity must effortlessly continue into its other.
‘The just stated transition from the form of the connection to the form of the determination has the immediate consequence that the not of the copula must just as equally be attached to the predicate and that the latter must be determined as the not-universal. But, through a no less immediate consequence, the not-universal is the particular. — If the focus is on the negative according to the totally abstract determination of immediate non-being, then the predicate is the totally indeterminate not-universal. This is the determination which is normally treated in logic in connection with the contradictory concepts, and the further point is made — a point considered important — that in the negative of a concept one should only focus on the negative, taking it as the mere indeterminate extent of the other of the positive concept. Thus the mere not-white would be just as much red, yellow, blue, etc. as black. White, however, is an unconceptualized determination of intuition; the not of white is equally, then, unconceptualized not-being, the abstraction that came in for consideration at the very beginning of the Logic where becoming was recognized to be its closest truth. To use as an example, in the consideration of judgment determinations, an unconceptualized content of this sort, drawn from intuition and the imagination, and to take the determinations of being, and of reflection, as such judgment determinations, is the same uncritical practice as when Kant applies the concepts of the understanding to the infinite idea of reason, the so-called thing-in-itself; the concept, to which the judgment proceeding from it also belongs, is the true thing-in-itself or the rational; those other determinations belong to being and essence; they are not yet forms developed into the shape where they are in their truth, in the concept. — If we stop at white, red, as representations of the senses, then we call concept what is only a determination of pictorial representation. This is common practice. But then, surely, the not-white, the not-red, will be nothing positive, just as the not-triangular will be something totally indeterminate, for a determination based as such on number and quantum is essentially something indifferent, void of concept. Yet, like non-being itself, such a sensuous content ought to be conceptualized; ought to shed that indifference and abstract immediacy with which it is affected in the blind immobility of pictorial representation. Already in the sphere of immediate existence, the non-being which is otherwise void of thought becomes limit, and by virtue of this limit the something refers to an other despite itself. In the sphere of reflection, on the other hand, it is the negative that refers essentially to a positive, and is thereby determined; a negative is no longer that indeterminate non-being, for it is posited to be only to the extent that the positive stands over against it, and as third comes their ground; the negative is thus held circumscribed in a sphere within which the non-being of one is something determinate. — But it is all the more in the absolutely fluid continuity of the concept that the not is immediately a positive, and the negation is not just determinateness but is taken up into universality and is posited as identical with it. The non-universal is therefore directly the particular’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Sticking to its guns, the Understanding now expresses the noncontinuity of the subject into the predicate. Although Burbidge thinks that the Negative Judgment does not deny the copula but according to the Understanding, this is precisely what the Negative Judgment does.
Negative Judgement
But this does not mean that the Negative Judgment is mere mistake. It too is part of the process. Later, we shall see that the Negative Judgment of Idea is the genetically defective Individual. Because Idea makes Negative Judgments, empirical observation proves inadequate for notional Cognition. What we observe may be non-notional. Positive Judgment, in its dialectical phase, had two formulations; so does Negative Judgment. If the Understanding says the Individual is not-Universal Dialectical Reason says that the Individual is a Particular.
As established in Chapter 19, the abstract Universal is the Particular. Dialectical Reason remembers this. It points out that, if the predicate is only an abstract not-Universal, it is perforce a Particular. According to Hegel, this predicate, just because it is a predicate, or because it stands in relation to a universal subject, is something wider than a mere individuality, and the universal i.e., predicate is therefore likewise in the first instance a particular.
‘The positive judgment first attains its truth in the negative judgment: the singular is not abstractly universal — but rather, the predicate of the singular, because it is such a predicate, or because, if considered by itself without reference to the subject, it is an abstract universal, is for that very reason itself something determinate; from the start, therefore, the singular is a particular. Furthermore, with respect to the other proposition that the positive judgment contains, the meaning of the negative judgment is that the universal is not abstractly singular but that this predicate, ‘singular’, by the very fact that it is a predicate, or because it refers to a universal subject, is more than just mere singularity, and the universal, accordingly, is from the start equally a particular. — Since this universal, as subject, is itself in the judgment determination of singularity, the two propositions both reduce to one: ‘the singular is a particular’.’
- ‘The Science of Logic’
In terms of Negative Judgement Reversed, a was Individual and c was Particular. The Particular is pictographically wider than the Individual. In different words, nothing is, after all, something, and the Negative Judgment must necessarily have its positive version. ‘A thought ‘not’ inevitably introduces a transition to something positive’, explains Burbidge.
Negative Judgement as Not Universal
Judgment implies that ‘something is to be predicated of the individual subject. Therefore the abstract isolation is not maintained’, adds Burbidge. Even though the Individual is a Particular is expressed in positive form, it is no mere Positive Judgment: Positive Judgment had immediate abstractions for its extremes. In contrast, Particularity is a mediated term. Negative Judgment negates the immediacy of the Positive Judgment and presupposes a mediated relation of the two Judgments. Accordingly, the Negative Judgment continues itself into the Positive Judgment and also stands for the relation between the two extremes. ‘The heterology of experience has become a tautology by transforming itself into a unity of opposite terms, by grasping difference as self-difference’, explains Jean Hyppolite.
Negative Judgement
In the dialectic version of Negative Judgment, subject and predicate are back in relation; they are genuinely Universal. What Negative Judgment negates is abstraction. The distinction between subject or predicate nevertheless persists. What then does it mean, then, to judge that a rose is not red? The Negative Judgment merely negates the given predicate — red. Red is thus separated from the Universality that belongs to the predicate. The rose, however, continues to have a predicate — a colour. All we know is that this colour is not red. In its preservation of predication, the Negative Judgment is positive after all. Negative Judgment, however, is flawed. It concedes that the Individual is a Particular, but which? In order to determine what the rose is, Negative Judgment leaves us with the need to investigate all predicates of the rose. Negative Judgment, disappointingly, represents merely the moment of alteration of the accidents — or, in the sphere of existence, of the isolated properties of the concrete.
‘The particularity that has resulted as the positive determination of the negative judgment is the term mediating singularity and universality; so the negative judgment is now that which provides in general the mediation for the third step, that of the reflection of the judgment of existence into itself. This judgment is according to its objective meaning only the moment of the alteration of accidents, or, in the sphere of existence, of the singularized properties of the concrete. Through this alteration, the full determinateness of the predicate, or the concrete, emerges as posited’.
- The Science of Logic’
Predicates there must be — infinite in number — but what are they precisely? So far, this can be known only positively — not immanently. Negative Judgment has criticized Positive Judgment for its positivity but has not succeeded in sublating positivity. For this reason, the rose is not red is a proper Negative Judgment, but so is the red rose is not just red as Butler explains. This is not the only defect. Perhaps the Individual is Particular — a positive assertion. But the individual is also not a particular, for particularity is of wider extent than individuality.
‘’The singular is particular’ is what the positive expression of the negative judgment says. But the singular is also not particular, for particularity is of wider extension than singularity; it is a predicate, therefore, that does not correspond to the subject, one in which the latter, therefore, does not as yet have its truth. ‘The singular is only a singular’: this is a negativity that refers to nothing else, be it positive or negative, except itself. — The rose is not a thing of some colour or other, but one that only has the one determinate colour which is the rose-colour. The singular is not an indeterminate determinate but the determinate determinate’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
In other words, the predicate in Negative Judgement Reversed is a mediating Particular b but it is also an immediate not-Universal c. As in Positive Judgment, predicate does not correspond to subject, to the extent the predicate is not-Universal. From this perspective, we must concede that the Individual is not Particular. The Negative Judgment’s negativity is therefore aimed, not at an other, but at itself. But this is what Individuality is — the negation of the Particular. Individuality (a second negation) is restored. ‘The double negation implies that what is predicated of the individual subject is neither an abstract universal, nor the particular universal mentioned in the predicate, but instead the individuality that inherently qualifies [as] the subject’, explains Burbidge.
Speculative Reason therefore infers from the Negative Judgment that the Individual is an Individual — an isolated Individual adds Burbidge. With this derivation accomplished, Judgment once again mediates itself, according to its notional heritage. The relation of subject and predicate purified of all positivity is the Infinite Judgment. What is posited in the Negative Judgment? A widening of the predicate. In the Positive Judgment, the predicate was too narrow for the subject. In Positive Judgement, c, taken as an Infinite Judgement immediacy, did not subsume the subject, as it infinite judgment was supposed to. Now the predicate has widened itself in the negative judgement from abstract Universality] into particularity.
‘This negation of the negative judgment appears, when one starts from its positive form, to be again a first negation. But this is not what it is. The negative judgment is again, in and for itself, already the second negation or the negation of negation, and this, what it is in and for itself, is to be posited. To wit: the judgment negates the determinateness of the predicate of the positive judgment, its abstract universality, or, considered as content, the singular quality that it possesses of the subject. But the negation of the determinateness is already the second negation, hence the infinite turning back of the singularity into itself. With this, therefore, the restoration of the concrete totality of the subject has taken place, or rather, the subject is now for the first time posited as singular, for through the negation and the sublation of that negation it is mediated with itself. The predicate, for its part, has thereby passed over from the first universality to absolute determinateness and made itself equal to the subject. Thus the judgment says: ‘the singular is singular’. — From the other side, since the subject was equally to be taken as a universal, and since in the negative judgment the predicate, which as against that subject is the singular, expanded into particularity; moreover, since now the negation of this determinateness is equally the purification of the universality contained in the predicate, this judgment also says: ‘the universal is the universal’.
-’The Science of Logic’
Now c subsumes b and a. Furthermore, in negating the immediacy of the Positive Judgment, the Negative Judgment is no less the purification of the universality contained in the predicate. Recalling that the subject is the Universal (on the law of sublation), by virtue of its self-widening, the predicate is now also Universal. This restoration of the Universal in the predicate, however, is merely for us. Universality, invisible in Infinite Judgement, must posit itself in the course of Infinite Judgment. Both Positive and Negative Judgment depend on external reflection. Both express the predicate in positivized form. But Negative Judgment has undergone a transition from external relation (the Individual is not Universal) to determination (the Individual is Particular). The transition from a non-relation to determination means that the not-Universal is the Particular. And finally, since all we know from the predicate is what the subject is not, the predicate is completely indeterminate. Thus the mere not-white would be just as much red, yellow, blue, etc., as black.
Infinite Judgement
Only external reflection can tell what the predicate really is. The indeterminacy of the predicate hearkens back to the realm of Being, where the meaningless nothing becomes the limit. Nevertheless, just as Particularity mediated between Universality and Individuality in chapter 19, so Negative Judgment, by which predicate becomes Particular, mediates between Positive Judgment and Infinite Judgment. The result — Infinite Judgment — will stand for the proposition the Individual is Individual. Predicate, which has advanced from Universal to Particular, is about to become Individual. All the moments of the Notion will be actualized in the predicate when we are done with the Infinite Judgment.
The Infinite Judgment.
Dialectic Negative Judgment has negated the immediacy imposed by the Understanding, but has not entirely escaped it. In effect, Dialectical Reason interprets Negative Judgment as announcing, I am not an immediacy; I am the Particularity of the subject. Speculative Reason now points out that Dialectical Reason is contradictory. By announcing that it is not an immediacy, Negative Judgment proves that it is an immediacy. Negative Judgment is merely reflective — an immediacy coupled with a positedness. Reflection at this point, however, is regressive. For this reason, the negative judgement is as little a true judgement as the positive.
‘The negative judgment is as little of a true judgment as the positive. But the infinite judgment which is supposed to be its truth is, according to its negative expression, the negative infinite, a judgment in which even the form of judgment is sublated. — But this is a nonsensical judgment. It ought to be a judgment, and hence contains a connection of subject and predicate; but any such connection ought not at the same time to be there. — The name of the infinite judgment does indeed occur in the common textbooks of logic, but without any clarification as to its meaning. — Examples of negatively infinite judgments are easy to come by. It is a matter of picking determinations, one of which does not contain not just the determinateness of the other but its universal sphere as well, and of combining them negatively as subject and predicate, as when we say, for example, that spirit is not red, yellow, etc., is not acid, not alkali, etc., or that the rose is not an elephant, the understanding is not a table, and the like. — These judgments are correct or true, as it is said, and yet, any such truth notwithstanding, nonsensical and fatuous. –Or, more to the point, they are not judgments at all. — A more realistic example of the infinite judgment is the evil action. In civil litigation, when a thing is negated as the property of another party, it is still conceded that the same thing would indeed belong to that party if the latter had a right to it. It is only under the title of right that the possession of it is challenged; in the negative judgment, therefore, the universal sphere, ‘right’, is still acknowledged and maintained. But crime is the infinite judgment that negates, not only the particular right, but the universal sphere, the right as right. It has correctness, in the sense that it is an effective action, but since it stands in a thoroughly negative fashion with respect to the morality that constitutes its sphere, it is nonsensical’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
‘In the Negative Judgment there still remains a positive relation of the subject to the predicate. In these two judgments, which were earlier obtained through external reflection, the predicate is already expressed in its positivity. But the negation of the negative judgment must itself first appear in the form of a negative judgment. It has just been shown that there still remained in this judgment a positive connection of subject and predicate as well the universal sphere of the latter. From this side, the negative judgment thus contains a universality which is more purified of limitation than was contained by the positive judgment and is for this reason all the more to be negated of the subject as a singular. In this manner, the whole extent of the predicate is negated, and there is no longer any positive connection between it and the subject. This is the infinite judgment’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
This residuum of positivity must be Negative infinite renounced, so that Notion can recapture its self-judgement (Crime) sovereignty. When positivity is finally defeated, the whole extent of the predicate is negated and there is no longer any positive relation between it and the subject.The relation of subject and predicate, purified of all positivity, is the Infinite Judgment. This is reflected in Hegel’s early essay, ‘The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate’, there Hegel writes of the necessity and the impossibility of the subject setting aside the positivity of the law and of the subject’s inability to escape the punishment the law demands.
Negative Infinite Judgement (Crime)
In the Infinite Judgment, we have the reflection of the judgement of existence into itself. The Understanding now interprets the Infinite Judgment as negative, so that there is no positive connection between subject and predicate. The Negative Infinite Judgment is nonsense — a Judgment where the entire form of Judgment is set aside. It is supposed to be a judgement and consequently to contain a relation of subject and predicate; yet at the same time such a relation is supposed not to be in it.
The Negative Infinite Judgment asserts that the subject is not a predicate — but absurdly so. Some examples: Spirit is not red. The rose is not an elephant. The understanding is not a table. In these Judgements, determinations are negatively connected as subject and predicate, one of which not only does not include the determinateness of the other but does not even contain its universal sphere. These Judgments, correct but absurd, are not Judgments at all, because they cannot help the Notion re-establish a stable reality for itself. Why is it necessary to offer such examples as spirit is a table in the name of Infinite Judgment? According to Burbidge, the Infinite Judgment must bear the form of a judgment (‘the subject is predicate) while ‘expressing the fact that there is no relation at all between subject and predicate. But if there is no relation at all, the act of judging itself is absurd since it is supposed to couple the two … To couple them so as to indicate a lack of relation may produce a correct expression, but one that is so insipid that it abandons the rationale for judging altogether’. Justus Hartnack is mistaken in focusing upon the truth value of absurd statements, not on the relation absurdity presupposes between subject and predicate. According to Hartnack, ‘It is difficult to agree with [Hegel] when he says that what is absurd and nonsensical could have a truth-value. It seems to be without sense to try to verity that a spirit is not coloured’. Judgement is not about dividing true empirical propositions from false ones. It is about establishing a necessary, objective relation between subject and object, so that the reign of subjectivity can end and that of objectivity can begin. Subject and predicate now have a radically incommensurate qualitative relation. This was implicit in the earlier forms of judgment, where subject and predicate had positive difference. Now there is nothing but qualitative difference.
Crime. The Negative Infinite Judgment is a moment in the Logic that equates with crime. Crime negates the Universal sphere. Civil wrongs (i.e., torts) are merely Negative Judgments. A civil defendant negates some single predicate of the plaintiff, but, in doing so, recognizes the universal sphere of right in all other instances -just as the Negative Judgment (‘the rose is not red’) negated red but affirmed the Universality of the subject by implying that the rose has a colour. The criminal, however, goes further and denies any validity to the Universal sphere of right. More precisely, what is denied is the entitlement of positive law to determine the rights of the other.
According to Hegel this infinite judgement does indeed possess correctness, since it is an actual deed. Is this some sort of endorsement of crime? Yes. The Negative Infinite Judgment stands for the fact that the Notion is beyond positive law. The Notion (i.e., subjectivity) is criminal, in the eye of the positive lawyer, but such criminality is a necessary moment in the freedom of the subject. Nevertheless, Hegel is not endorsing psychopathic criminality. Subjectivity must still proceed onward from its freedom from positive law and re-establish its own reality in a positive law with which it has a genuine unity. When the law reflects the freedom of the subject, then the subject is at home in law and society. Mere positive law is an obstacle to the freedom of the Hegelian subject. But why is the Negative Infinite Judgment a deed? Perhaps Hegel means that it is an act of the subject — and subjects must act or, to be more precisely, legislate. The criminal is a legislator in Hegel’s logic. Elsewhere Hegel says that death is also the Negative Infinite Judgment, whereas disease is merely the Negative Judgment. In disease, merely this or that function of life is checked or negatived: in death body and soul part, i.e. subject and predicate utterly diverge.
‘The negatively infinite judgment, in which there is no longer any relation between subject and predicate at all, tends to be cited in formal logic only as a meaningless curiosity. But, in fact, this infinite judgment must not be considered merely as a contingent form of subjective thinking; on the contrary, it shows itself to be the proximate dialectical result of the preceding immediate judgments (the positive and the simply negative), whose finitude and untruth come to light explicitly in it. A crime can be considered as an objective example of the negative infinite judgment. Someone who commits a crime-for argument’s sake a theft does not merely deny the particular right of someone else to this particular thing (as in a suit about civil rights); instead, he denies the rights of that person completely, and therefore he is not merely obliged to return the thing that he stole, but is punished as well, because he has violated right as such, i.e., right in general. The civil law suit, in contrast, is an example of the simple negative judgment, because it deals with cases where only this particular right is negated, and right in general therefore remains recognised. So the situation is the same as in the case of the negative judgment, ‘This flower is not red’, where what is denied to the flower is merely this particular colour, but not colour in general, for the flower can still be blue, yellow, etc. In the same way, death is a negative-infinite judgment, too, whereas, in contrast, illness is a singular negative judgment. In illness, it is merely this or that particular life-function that is checked or denied, whereas in death-as we normally say-body and soul separate, in other words, they fall apart completely’.
- ‘The Encyclopaedia Logic’
The Negative Infinite Judgment, like its predecessors, is not notional; in the negatively infinite judgement the difference [between subject and predicate] is, so to speak, too great for it to remain a Judgment; the subject and predicate have no positive relation whatever to each other.
‘Now through the reflection of the judgment determinations into themselves, the judgment has sublated itself; in the negatively infinite judgment, the difference is, so to speak, too great for it still to remain a judgment; subject and predicate have no positive connection whatsoever to each other; in the positively infinite judgment, on the contrary, only identity is present, and because of this total lack of difference there is no longer a judgment’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Mure complains, ‘Hegel should not … have suggested that crime and disease, because they assert the failure of a man to conform to his notion, have no truth at all as Judgement’. But if Judgement represents the performative investiture of notionality into outward manifestation, then neither crime nor sickness can serve to manifest mankind’s notionality in the outward universe. Nevertheless, the Negative Infinite Judgment still has its place in the logical progression and so it has some truth. It simply doesn’t have truth as a performative Judgment.
Positive Infinite Judgement
Dialectical Reason intervenes to remind criminal Understanding that positivity is a necessary moment in the development of Judgment. Dialectical Reason asserts what the positive moment of the Negative Judgment also asserted — that predication is generally necessary. This is also the conclusion of ‘law-testing reason’ in the ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’ according to Slavoj Žižek. The subject (Individual) is the predicate (Individual). Accordingly, the positive moment of the Infinite Judgment is “the reflection of individuality into itself, whereby it is posited for the first time as a determinate determinateness.
‘The positive element of the infinite judgment, the negation of the negation, is the reflection of singularity into itself by virtue of which the singularity is first posited as the determinate determinate. ‘The singular is singular’ is what the infinite judgment said according to that reflection. In the judgment of existence, the subject is as the immediate singular, hence more of just a something in general. Through the mediation of the negative and infinite judgment, it is posited as singular for the first time’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Though both assert the necessity of the predicate, the Positive Infinite Judgment is an advance over the Negative Judgment. In the Positive Infinite Judgment, the individual is hereby posited as continuing itself into its predicate.
‘The singular is thus posited as expanding into its predicate, which is identical with it; to the same extent, therefore, universality is also no longer anything immediate but a summing of distincts. The positively infinite judgment equally says, ‘the universal is universal’, and in this the universal is posited also as a turning back into itself’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Of course, the Positive Judgment started with the proposition, the Individual is Universal. But that individual was the immediate, non-notional, Individual. It was the product of an external reflection — not a positedness. Now the Individual is notional. And, since the Individual is Universal, the positive infinite judgement equally runs: the universal is universal, and as such is equally posited as the return into itself.
Tautology is ‘the positive opposite pole of the [negative] infinite judgment … ; from ‘The rose is not an elephant’ follows only that ‘The rose is a rose’. The tautology expresses in the positive form only the radical externality to the subject of the predicate .. [T]he only adequate predicate for the subject is the subject itself!’ ejaculates Zizek. Yet, Hegel warns, even the Positive Infinite Judgment is no true Judgment. There is identity here, but no difference. Zizek complains that, in addition to senseless negation and tautology, there should have been added senseless affirmation: ‘the rose is an elephant’, standing for the inherent lack within subject or predicate that prevents either from becoming a self-identity. But Speculative Reason has pointed out that self-identical entities (which the subject and predicate purport to be) erase themselves and send their being into the copula. The copula itself is sundered, while subject and predicate have failed to complete themselves. Therefore Zizek’s amendment is already implied when the copula is presented as the Notion sundered again.
‘Therefore once again the act of judging collapses’, claims Burbidge. Speculative Reason ends the lengthy tale of the Positive Judgment. It posits what the copula of the judgement contains, namely, that the qualitative extremes are sublated in this their identity.
‘More precisely, it is the judgment of existence that has sublated itself and, consequently, there is posited what the copula of the judgment contains, namely that in its identity the qualitative extremes are sublated. But since this unity is the concept, it is immediately torn apart and is a judgment, but one whose terms are no longer immediately determined but are reflected into themselves. The judgment of existence has passed over into the judgment of reflection’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
The Judgment of Existence has imploded. Subject and predicate erase themselves and withdraw to the copula explains Burbidge. But the copula is no dead unity of the extremes. Since this unity is the Notion, it is immediately sundered again into its extremes and appears as a judgement, whose terms however are no longer immediate but reflected into themselves. This new notional sundering is the Judgment of Reflection.
Dedicated to the One, my Muse, my judgement upon whom is that I love her infinitely. Crime may be endorsed indeed on occasion if like Orvon Grover ‘Gene’ Autry (1907–1998) we are good Hegelians believing in the dialectical uniting of opposites whereby stealing isn’t stealing and dreaming isn’t dreaming ….
‘You Stole My Heart’
You stole my heart
But it wasn’t stealing,
Right from the start,
It belonged to you.
I had some dreams
But it wasn’t dreaming,
Because it seems,
That they’ve all come true.
I don’t know why
I don’t know when
You wandered by
And darling I knew then
You stole my heart
But it wasn’t stealing,
I found my love
When you stole my heart.
Coming up next:
The Judgement of Reflection
To be continued …
