On Hegel’s ‘Science of Logic’ : A Realm of Shadows — part thirty five.
‘O Fortuna!’
O Fortuna
Velut luna
Statu variabilis
Semper crescis
Aut decrescis
Vita detestabilis
Nunc obdurat
Et tunc curat
Ludo mentis aciem,
Egestatem,
Potestatem
Dissolvit ut glaciem.
Sors immanis
Et inanis,
Rota tu volubilis
Status malus
Vana salus
Semper dissolubilis
Obumbrata
Et velata
Michi quoque niteris
Nunc per ludum
Dorsum nudum
Fero tui sceleris.
Sors salutis
Et virtutis
Michi nunc contraria,
Est affectus
Et defectus
Semper in angaria.
Hac in hora
Sine mora
Corde pulsum tangite
Quod per sortem
Sternit fortem
Mecum omnes plangite
O fortune
Like the moon
Changeable
Ever growing
Or you decrease
Hateful life
Now it’s hard
And then soothes
I play the game of the mind
Poverty,
Power
Like ice.
Fate
And empty
You are a rolling wheel
Bad status
Vain salvation
Always disintegrating
Overshadowed
And veiled
You are also looking for me
Now through the game
Back bare
I will bear your crime.
The fate of salvation
And of virtue
against me now,
It is an emotion
And failure
Always on duty.
In this hour
Without delay
Touch the heartbeat
That by lot
It spreads strong
All mourn with me
====
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, (1770–1831). ‘The Science of Logic’. Actuality.
Actuality is absolute form, with no content save that of being self-manifestation.
‘So, as the manifestation that it is nothing, that it has no content, save to be the manifestation of itself, the absolute is absolute form. Actuality is to be taken as this reflected absoluteness. Being is not yet actual; it is the first immediacy; its reflection is therefore becoming and transition into an other; or its immediacy is not being-in-and-for-itself. Actuality also stands higher than concrete existence. It is true that the latter is the immediacy that has proceeded from ground and conditions, or from essence and its reflection. In itself or implicitly, it is therefore what actuality is, real reflection; but it is still not the posited unity of reflection and immediacy. Hence concrete existence passes over into appearance as it develops the reflection contained within it. It is the ground that has foundered to the ground; its determination, its vocation, is to restore this ground, and therefore it becomes essential relation, and its final reflection is that its immediacy be posited as immanent reflection and conversely. This unity, in which concrete existence or immediacy and the in-itself, the ground or the reflected, are simply moments, is now actuality. The actual is therefore manifestation. It is not drawn into the sphere of alteration by its externality, nor is it the reflective shining of itself in an other. It just manifests itself, and this means that in its externality, and only in it, it is itself, that is to say, only as a self-differentiating and self-determining movement’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
The utterance of the actual is the actual itself.
‘Actuality is the unity, become immediate, of essence and existence, or of what is inner and what is outer. The utterance of the actual is the actual itself, so that the actual remains still something-essential in this [utterance] and is only something-essential so far as it is in immediate external existence’.
- ‘The Encyclopaedia Logic’
And what Actuality utters is its own self erasure. ‘Hegel does not understand manifestation as the ‘expression’ of something behind it or prior to it’, explains John F. Hoffmeyer. Actuality posits the unity of itself, its other, and the unity of self and other. Hoffmeyer emphasizes that the structure of this chapter precisely embodies this slogan. Actuality is ‘both the totality of the section and a moment within the section’. ‘…determinacy, determined determinacy and self-determined determinacy’, as Richard Dien Winfield puts it. Accordingly, the Actual is not drawn into the sphere of alteration by its externality, nor is it the reflecting of itself in an other. Yet Actuality has its moments, each ‘a further step in the logical breakdown between the internal and the external’, says Hoffmeyer. First, it is an immediacy with no essence — no reflection-into-self. The Actual thing just is. When immediacy is emphasized, Reflection is banished from Actuality. Hegel interprets banished reflection-into-self as Possibility (Möglichkeit). At this point, Essence is ‘capable of being actualized [and] is more precisely thought of as the possibility of the actual’, according to John W. Burbidge.
In Possibility, the Actual becomes other, but, since it is expressly the unity of itself, its other and the unity of these two, Actuality only becomes itself when it becomes Possible. The extremes will show that they cannot sustain themselves without the other. They are therefore imply a third term — Necessity. The moments of Actuality must undergo the usual development of immediacy, duality and unity. The first of these is formal. The second is real. The third is absolute.
Formal Actuality
_____________
‘To Fortune’
by Robert Herrick (1591–1674)
Tumble me down, and I will sit
Upon my ruins, smiling yet;
Tear me to tatters, yet I’ll be
Patient in my necessity.
Laugh at my scraps of clothes, and shun
Me, as a feared infection;
Yet scarecrow-like I’ll walk, as one
Neglecting thy derision.
_____________
Contingency. Formal Actuality is immediate and unreflected. It simply is — a phenomenon that ‘cuts itself off from the process that has led up to it … For this reason it appears as something that has no ground. Like anything that de facto is, it parades itself as self-sufficient. It has its own presence to guarantee for its possibility’, says George di Giovanni. Hegel denounces this common sense version of Actuality elsewhere. Actuality and thought are often absurdly opposed. How commonly we hear people saying that, though no objection can be urged against the truth and correctness of a certain thought, there is nothing of the kind to be seen in actuality. People who use such language only prove that they have not properly apprehended the nature either of thought or of actuality. Thought, in such a case is the synonym for a subjective conception just as actuality is made synonymous with external and sensible existence. This is all very well in common life, where great laxity is allowed in the categories and the names given to them; and it may happen that, e.g., the plan of taxation, is good and advisable in the abstract, but that nothing of the sort is found in so-called actuality… But when the abstract understanding gets hold of these categories and exaggerates the distinction they imply into a hard and fast line of contrast, when it tells us that in this actual world we must knock ideas out of our heads, it is necessary energetically to protest against these doctrines, alike in the name of science and of sound reason. For Ideas are not confined to our heads merely, nor is the Idea.. .so feeble as to leave the question of its actualization dependent on our will. The Idea is rather active as well as actual. Actuality is not so bad as muddle-brained would-be reformers imagine. So far is actuality, as distinguished from mere appearance, and primarily presenting a unity of inward and outward, from being in contrariety with reason, that it is rather thoroughly reasonable, and everything which is not reasonable must on that very ground cease to be held actual.
Or alternatively translated, this is important:
‘Actuality and thought-more precisely the Idea-are usually opposed to one another in a trivial way, and hence we often hear it said therefore that, although there is certainly nothing to be said against the correctness and truth of a certain thought, still nothing like it is to be found or can actually be put into effect. Those who talk like this, however, only demonstrate that they have not adequately interpreted the nature either of thought or of actuality. For, on the one hand, in all talk of this kind, thought is assumed to be synonymous with subjective representation, planning, intention, and so on; and, on the other hand, actuality is assumed to be synonymous with external, sensible existence. These assumptions may be all very well in common life where people are not very precise about categories and their designation; and it may of course happen to be the case that the plan, or the so-called ‘idea’, of a certain method of taxation, for example, is quite good and expedient in itself, but that nothing of the sort can be found in what is called (in the same ordinary usage) ‘actuality’ — and that in the given circumstances it cannot be put into effect. All the same, when the abstract understanding takes control of these categories and exaggerates their distinction to the point of regarding them as a hard and fast antithesis, such that in this actual world we must knock ideas out of our heads, then it is necessary, in the name of science and sound reason, to reject such stuff decisively. For, on the one hand, ideas are not just to be found in our heads, and the Idea is not at all something so impotent that whether it is realised or not depends upon our own sweet will; on the contrary, it is at once what is quite simply effective and actual as well. On the other hand, actuality is not so bad or so irrational as it is imagined to be by ‘practical men’ who are devoid of thoughts or at odds with thinking and intellectually derelict. As distinct from mere appearance, actuality, being initially the unity of inward and outward, is so far from confronting reason as something other than it, that it is, on the contrary, what is rational through and through; and what is not rational must, for that very reason, be considered not to be actual. This agrees, for that matter, with the usage of educated speech, in that, for example, we would object to recognising someone who does not know how to bring about something valid and rational as being ‘actually’ a poet or a statesman.
- ‘The Encyclopaedia Logic’
Yet it is ‘the essence of the actual to be always more and other than what it is at any point’, says Herbert Marcuse. So dialectical Reason proposes that Formal Actuality is less than the totality; it points to the Possibility of totality. Possibility is here revealed to be the in-itself of Formal Actuality. ‘Far from being made subordinate to actuality, possibility is actuality’s essence’, says Hoffmeyer,
What is actual is possible, Hegel observes.
‘Actuality is formal inasmuch as, as a first actuality, it is only immediate, unreflected actuality, and hence is only in this form determination but not as the totality of form. And so it is nothing more than a being, or concrete existence in general. But because by essence it is not mere concrete existence but is the form-unity of the in-itselfness or inwardness and externality, it immediately contains in-itselfness or possibility. What is actual is possible’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Actuality proves Possibility. In Possibility Possibility and Actuality are in a relation. Before, they were in unity. Formal Actuality signals the realization that the Possible can only be derived retroactively from Actuality, explains Jeanne L. Schroeder. Possibilities never actualized are empty talk. Hegel memorably denounces foolish possibilities elsewhere. Any content, however absurd and nonsensical, can be viewed as possible. It is possible that the moon might fall upon the earth tonight; for the moon is a body separate from the earth — and may as well fall down upon it as a stone thrown into the air does. It is possible that the Sultan may become Pope; for, being a man, he may be converted to the Christian faith, may become a Catholic priest, and so on. In language like this about possibilities, it is chiefly the law of the sufficient ground or reason which is manipulated in the style already explained. Everything, it is said, is possible, for which you can state some ground. The less education a man has, or, in other words, the less he knows of the specific connections of the objects to which he directs his observations, the greater is his tendency to launch out into all sorts of empty possibilities.
‘It is usually said that possibility consists generally in thinkability. But thinking is here understood to mean just the apprehending of a content in the form of abstract identity. Now, since any content can be brought into this form, providing only that it is separated from the relations in which it stands, even the most absurd and nonsensical suppositions can be considered possible. It is possible that the moon will fall on the earth this evening, for the moon is a body separate from the earth and therefore can fall downward just as easily as a stone that has been flung into the air; it is possible that the Sultan may become Pope, for he is a human being, and as such he can become a convert to Christianity, and then a priest, and so on. Now in all this talk of possibilities it is especially the principlea of ‘grounding’ that is applied in the way discussed earlier: according to this principle, anything for which a ground (or reason) can be specified is possible. The more uneducated a person is, the less he knows about the determinate relations in which the objects that he is considering stand and the more inclined he tends to be to indulge in all manner of empty possibilities; we see this, for example, with so-called pub politicians in the political domain’.
- ‘The Encyclopaedia Logic’
Possibility
Possibility isolated from Actuality is empty. It is posited as negative.
‘But because the determination is here totality of form, this in-itself is determined as sublated or essentially only with reference to actuality; as the negative of actuality, it is posited as negative. Possibility entails, therefore, two moments. It has first the positive moment of being a being-reflected-into-itself. But this being-reflected-into-itself, since in the absolute form it is reduced to a moment, no longer has the value of essence but has rather the negative meaning that possibility is (in a second moment) something deficient, that it points to an other, to actuality, and is completed in this other’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
As negative, Possibility has two moments. First, it is a positive concept unto itself. As the in-itself of Actuality it is b, but b always implies the immediacy of c. As , Formal Possibility is the relation-less, indeterminate receptacle for everything whatever. In the sense of this formal possibility everything is possible that is not self-contradictory; hence the realm of possibility is a boundless multiplicity.
‘According to the first, merely positive side, possibility is therefore the mere form determination of self-identity, or the form of essentiality. As such it is the relationless, indeterminate receptacle of everything in general. — In this formal sense of possibility, everything is possible that does not contract itself; the realm of possibility is therefore limitless manifoldness. But every manifold is determined in itself and as against an other: it possesses negation within. Indifferent diversity passes over as such into opposition; but opposition is contradiction. Therefore, all things are just as much contradictory and hence impossible’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
The definition of possibility as the non-contradictory is Aristotle’s. G.R.G. Mure claims that the last part of the Actuality chapters ‘closely follows Aristotle’s analysis in terms of potential and actual, contingent and necessary’. Possibility isolated from Actuality is Diverse. Diverse things negate themselves and pass into opposition. In isolation, Possibility is contradictory and turns into its opposite. Possibility is therefore in its own self contradiction, or it is impossibility. Michael Inwood overlooks this passage when he writes, ‘If the contradictory is not impossible, then what is? Hegel provides no satisfactory answer to this question’. (If you have been following this series you will have picked up by now on the fact that Inwood is a bit of an old grouch).
‘Yet the possible amounts to more than just the principle of identity. The possible is reflected immanent reflectedness; or the identical simply as a moment of the totality, hence also as determined not to be in itself; it therefore has the second determination of being only a possible and the ought-to-be of the totality of form. Without this ought-to-be, possibility is essentiality as such; but the absolute form entails this, that essence itself is only a moment and that it has no truth without being. Possibility is this mere essentiality, but so posited as to be only a moment, to be disproportionate with respect to the absolute form. It is the in-itself, determined as only a posited or, equally, as not to be in itself. — ‘
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Possibility implies its own lack. It points to an other — Actuality — needed to complete itself. Possibility is ostensibly merely a moment in a totality. It is merely the ought-to-be of the totality of form. In effect Possibility confesses that its content might be impossible. It is possible that the Huddersfield Town might win the F.A. cup. This implies it is equally possible they might not. Possibility relates these two otherwise indifferent remarks. Possibility is therefore the unity of the possible and the impossible. It is a contradiction and hence an impossibility. A contradiction, Possibility sublates itself. It announces, I am not Actuality. But by this very act of self-effacement, Possibility actualizes itself. For Speculative Reason, Possibility is an Actuality and vice versa. Stephen Houlgate writes, ‘Hegel thus agrees with the tradition that necessity lies in the foreclosing of possibility; but the twist he adds to this is that necessity lies in the foreclosing of the possibility that possibility itself might not be something actual’. In fact, the foreclosure (or actualization) of Possibility is more directly Contingency in Figure Contingency, which the Understanding, in Formal Necessity, will rename Necessity.
Taken as immediate, Actuality also implies that it is not Actual, only Possible. Speculative Reason names this self-renouncing activity to be Contingency.
‘Necessity’
by Thomas Love Peacock, (1785–1866)
My steps have pressed the flowers,
That to the Muses’ bowers
The eternal dews of Helicon have given:
And trod the mountain height,
Where Science, young and bright,
Scans with poetic gaze the midnight-heaven.
Yet have I found no power to vie
With thine, severe necessity!
_____________
Contingency has two sides. First, it is immediate (Formal Actuality g). As such, it has no ground. It simply is. It is only Existence.
‘This unity of possibility and actuality is contingency. — The contingent is an actual which is at the same time determined as only possible, an actual whose other or opposite equally is. This actuality is, therefore, mere being or concrete existence, but posited in its truth as having the value of a positedness or a possibility. Conversely, possibility is immanent reflection or the in-itself posited as positedness; what is possible is an actual in this sense of actuality, that it has only as much value as contingent actuality; it is itself something contingent’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Second, Contingency is a positedness d, e, f. As such it is grounded. So the Contingent is simultaneously grounded and ungrounded (According to Hoffmeyer).
Contingency
Causes may conspire to bring the Contingent into existence (in which case it is grounded). Or perhaps no cause precedes the Contingent; it may never be actualized. If not it is ungrounded. Contingency is the name of the movement of Actuality into Possibility and back — the posited unmediated conversion of inner and outer, or of reflectedness-into-self and being.
‘It is the posited, immediate conversion of inner and outer, or of immanently-reflected-being and being, each into the other — posited, because possibility and actuality both have this determination in them by being moments of the absolute form. — So actuality, in its immediate unity with possibility, is only concrete existence and is determined as groundless, something only posited or only possible; or, as reflected and determined over against possibility, it is separated from possibility, from immanent reflectedness, and then, too, is no less immediately only a possible. Likewise possibility, as simple in-itself, is something immediate, only an existent in general; or, opposed to actuality, it equally is an in-itself without actuality, only a possible, but, for that very reason, again only a concrete, not immanently reflected, existence in general’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Reflectedness-into-self refers to the act of Possibility renouncing its Actuality and Actuality renouncing its Possibility. By so renouncing, each brings Actuality into unmediated Being. Since Contingency is this movement, it cannot properly articulate unity. By now, however, each extreme is itself, its other, and the unity between these extremes. Accordingly, Actuality and Possibility are Contingent as well as immediate. Each is nothing but the act of manifesting itself. So the Understanding proposes that Contingency is Necessity: ‘Contingency is the matrix out of which necessity arises’, as Di Giovanni puts it. Formal Necessity is a rebuke to those who see Hegel as a philosophical totalitarian. Contingency is part of the totality. It is what’s Necessary.
Formal Necessity
It is built in the system. Our future is not in the stars but in ourselves to rough-hew as we will. It is necessary that we be free, i.e., contingent. Necessity stands for the proposition that what is ain’t necessarily so. Perhaps things are what they are through happenstance, or perhaps they are necessarily so. What is necessary is that things be subject to this very ambiguity. Burbidge thinks that there are three necessities for Hegel. ‘This sense of an immediate necessity is implicit in any appeal to self-evidence’. The second Necessity is that produced by a complete set of all Conditions — Real Necessity (Formal Necessity). The third, most adequate Necessity is what exists when its contrary is self-contradictory. ‘Such a self-referential, negative determination specifies inherent (rather than external) conditions sufficient to rule out its own falsity’.
For want of a nail the shoe was lost.
For want of a shoe the horse was lost.
For want of a horse the rider was lost.
For want of a rider the message was lost.
For want of a message the battle was lost.
For want of a battle the kingdom was lost.
And all for the want of a horseshoe nail.
Hegel’s point is somewhat different. The proverbial nursery rhyme traces the loss of a kingdom to the loss of a nail. From history’s perspective, the kingdom’s loss required the loss of the nail, which, at the time, was a highly contingent matter. Everyone’s actual state is brought about by a series of improbable circumstances. But this is not what Hegel means. Rather, he means that the determination of a finite thing (today’s lost kingdom) is itself a contingency. Maybe it is lost, maybe it will come roaring back, like the Angles in England. What simply is, is not itself the necessary.
‘The necessary is an actual; as such it is immediate, groundless; but it equally has its actuality through an other or in its ground and is at the same time the positedness of this ground and its reflection into itself; the possibility of the necessary is a sublated one. The contingent is therefore necessary because the actual is determined as a possible; its immediacy is consequently sublated and is repelled into the ground or the in-itself, and into the grounded, equally because its possibility, this ground-grounded connection, is simply sublated and posited as being. What is necessary is, and this existent is itself the necessary. At the same time it is in itself; this immanent reflection is an other than that immediacy of being, and the necessity of the existent is an other. Thus the existent is not the necessary; but this in-itself is itself only positedness; it is sublated and itself immediate. And so actuality, in that from which it is distinguished, in possibility, is identical with itself. As this identity, it is necessity’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
This is lost on everyone’s favourite grouch Michael Inwood, who thinks that necessity and contingency are mutually exclusive categories. Inwood reads Hegel as trying to compartmentalize contingency, so that mostly there is necessity.
Real Actuality, Possibility, and Necessity. Jean Hyppolite calls this section ‘perhaps the most illuminating of all the dialectics of essence’. In Formal Necessity, Necessity’s moments were formal; Actuality and Possibility constantly turned into one another. Formal Necessity was indifferent to its differences.
‘The necessity which has resulted is formal because its moments are formal, that is, simple determinations which are a totality only as an immediate unity, or as an immediate conversion of the one into the other, and thus lack the shape of self-subsistence. — The unity in this formal necessity is therefore simple at first, and indifferent to its differences. As the immediate unity of the form determinations, this necessity is actuality, but an actuality which, since its unity is now determined as indifferent to the difference of the form determinations, has a content. This content as an indifferent identity contains the form also as indifferent, that is, as a mere variety of determinations, and is a manifold content in general. This actuality is real actuality’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
It confirmed that things are contingent, but it could not say whether a thing is possible or actual. It merely named the flux of formal moments, unable to distinguish between them. As flux, Formal Necessity did not have the form of self-subsistence.
Real Possibility
Dialectical Reason remembers that Necessity is one with Possibility. Formal Necessity is now renamed Real Actuality and is paired with Real Possibility. Real for Hegel connotes mediation and determinability according to Burbidge. In chapter 1, reality was Quality paired with Negation. Real Measure in chapter 8 signalled Measure specifying the specified. Real Ground stood for the realization that Ground and Grounded define each other. In Real Possibility, Necessity is negated Possibility and Possibility is negated Necessity. No term makes sense without its other. According to Dialectical Reason, if Formal Necessity is isolated as a, its content b is likewise isolated, on the side of Being. b is therefore Possibility. In conjunction with a, b stands for the diverse determinations of the Actual thing and is a manifold content in general. Real Actuality a, b is therefore the thing of many properties, the existent world.
‘Real actuality is as such at first the thing of many properties, the concretely existing world; but it is not the concrete existence that dissolves into appearance but, as actuality, it is at the same time an in-itself and immanent reflection; it preserves itself in the manifoldness of mere concrete existence; its externality is an inner relating only to itself. What is actual can act; something announces its actuality by what it produces. Its relating to an other is the manifestation of itself, and this manifestation is neither a transition (the immediate something refers to the other in this way) nor an appearing (in this way the thing only is in relation to an other); it is a self-subsistent which has its immanent reflection, its determinate essentiality, in another self-subsistent’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
This notion ties into Hegel’s view, presented in chapter 1, that knowledge is a collaboration between the subject and the object. Each of these is a force contributing to the middle term of knowledge. Thus, Real Actuality is the forceful object.
What is actual can act; something manifests its actuality through what it produces. Real Actuality is more advanced than Existence as proto-thing. Actuality preserves itself in the manifold (whereas the thing of Existence dissolves). Actual externality is authentic. Its relationship to another something is the manifestation of itself. No mere appearance, it is exempted from transition.
‘Actuality is the unity, become immediate, of essence and existence, or of what is inner and what is outer. The utterance of the actual is the actual itself, so that the actual remains still something-essential in this [utterance] and is only something-essential so far as it is in immediate external existence’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Meanwhile, Possibility is the in-itself b of Real Actuality. ‘Possible is only that which can be derived from the very content of the real’, explains Marcuse. This in-itself, Hegel says, is pregnant with content.
‘This possibility, as the in-itself of real actuality, is itself real possibility, at first the in-itself full of content. — Formal possibility is immanent reflection only as abstract identity, the absence of contradiction in a something. But when we delve into the determinations, the circumstances, the conditions of a fact in order to discover its possibility, we do not stop at this formal possibility but consider its real possibility’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Pregnant with content (inhaltsvolle) is Hegelese for unity of Outer and Inner. Therefore, Real Possibility is an immediacy, but it also suffuses through Real Actuality. When so taken, Real Possibility constitutes the Totality of Conditions. ).
Real Necessity (Totality of Conditions)
When all the conditions of something are completely present, it enters into actuality.
‘What is really possible is, therefore, something formally identical according to its in-itself, free of contradiction because of its simple content determination; but, as self-identical, this something must also not contradict itself according to its developed and differentiated circumstances and all else connected with it. But, secondly, because it is manifold in itself and in manifold connection with others, and variety inherently passes over into opposition, it is contradictory. Whenever a possibility is in question, and the issue is to demonstrate its contradiction, one need only fasten on to the multiplicity that it contains as content or as its conditioned concrete existence, and from this the contradiction will easily be discovered. — And this contradiction is not just a function of comparing; on the contrary, the manifold of concrete existence is in itself this, to sublate itself and to founder to the ground: in this it explicitly has the determination of being only a possibility. — Whenever all the conditions of a fact are completely present, the fact is actually there; the completeness of the conditions is the totality as in the content, and the fact is itself this content determined as being equally actual as possible. In the sphere of the conditioned ground, the conditions have the form (that is, the ground or the reflection that stands on its own) outside them, and it is this form that makes them moments of the fact and elicits concrete existence in them. Here, on the contrary, the immediate actuality is not determined to be condition by virtue of a presupposing reflection, but the supposition is rather that the immediate actuality is itself the possibility’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
This is Hegel’s second Necessity, according to Burbidge. One Actual thing implies an entire world of actual determinate things, and every thing is necessarily what it is. It is now ‘impossible to distinguish possibility and actuality’, says Burbidge. Real possibility no longer has over against it such an other, for it is real in so far as it is itself also actuality.
‘In self-sublating real possibility, it is a twofold that is now sublated; for this possibility is itself the twofold of actuality and possibility. (1) The actuality is formal, or is a concrete existence which appeared to subsist immediately, and through its sublating becomes reflected being, the moment of an other, and thus comes in possession of the in-itself. (2) That concrete existence was also determined as possibility or as the in-itself, but of an other. As it sublates itself, this in-itself of the other is also sublated and passes over into actuality. — This movement of self-sublating real possibility thus produces the same moments that are already present, but each as it comes to be out of the other; in this negation, therefore, the possibility is also not a transition but a self-rejoining. — In formal possibility, if something was possible, then an other than it, not itself, was also possible. Real possibility no longer has such an other over against it, for it is real in so far as it is itself also actuality. Therefore, as its immediate concrete existence, the circle of conditions, sublates itself, it makes itself into the in-itselfness 11.388 which it already is, namely the in-itself of an other. And conversely, since its moment of in-itselfness thereby sublates itself at the same time, it becomes actuality, hence the moment which it likewise already is. — What disappears is consequently this, that actuality was determined as the possibility or the in-itself of an other, and, conversely, the possibility as an actuality which is not that of which it is the possibility’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
‘Necessity’
by Letitia Elizabeth Landon (1802–1838)
We know not of its presence, though its power
Be on the gradual round of every hour,
Now flinging down an empire, now a flower.
_____________
Real Possibility’s duality is now sublated. In this negation of Real Actuality and Possibility, identity-with-self is achieved. In its sublating it is thus within itself the recoil of this sublating, it is real necessity.
‘The negation of real possibility is thus its self-identity; inasmuch as in its sublating it is thus within itself the recoiling of this sublating, it is real necessity’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Yet Real Necessity is still merely relative — not free. Real Actuality as such cannot exist on its own. It depends on all the circumstances implied by Real Possibility. Real Actuality is still merely possible, as is Real Possibility. Real Necessity, the unity between the two, is likewise only possible — the totality which is still external to itself.
‘But this necessity is at the same time relative. — For it has a presupposition from which it begins; it takes its start from the contingent. For the real actual is as such the determinate actual, and first has its determinateness as immediate being in that it is a multiplicity of concretely existing circumstances; but this immediate being as determinateness is also the negative of itself, is an in-itself or possibility and so real possibility. As this unity of the two moments, it is the totality of form, but a totality which is still external to itself; it is the unity of possibility and actuality in such a way that (1) the manifold concrete existence is possibility immediately or positively: it is a possible, something self-identical as such, because it is an actual; (2) inasmuch as this possibility of concrete existence is posited, it is determined as only possibility, as the immediate conversion of actuality into its opposite — or as contingency. Hence this possibility which immediate actuality has within in so far as it is condition, is only the in-itself or the possibility of an other. Because this in-itself, as shown, sublates itself and this positedness is itself posited, real possibility becomes indeed necessity; but this necessity thus begins from that unity of the possible and the actual which is not yet reflected into itself — this presupposing and the movement which turns back unto itself are still separate — or necessity has not yet determined itself out of itself into contingency’. .
- ‘The Science of Logic’
It has not yet broken free of otherness. In form it is Necessary, but regards content it is limited. Contingent.
‘In actual fact, therefore, real necessity is in itself also contingency. — This first becomes apparent because real necessity, although something necessary according to form, is still something limited according to content, and derives its contingency through the latter. But this contingency is to be found also in the form of real necessity because, as shown, real possibility is the necessary only in itself, but as posited it is the mutual otherness of actuality and possibility. Real necessity thus contains contingency; it is the turning back into itself from the restless being-the-other-of-each-other of actuality and possibility, but not the turning back from itself to itself. In itself, therefore, we have here the unity of necessity and contingency; this unity is to be called absolute actuality’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
If only Contingent, because it depends on its own force and the presence of all the circumstances in which its force must be expressed, how is it a Necessity at all? The answer is that Real Necessity is not a thing. It is an event — the name of the self-erasing move of Real Actuality and Real Possibility. It is necessary that these diversities manifest their inability to sustain the thing on their own. Marcuse cites this moment as proof of Hegel’s left-wing political agenda: ‘The circumstances that exist in the old form are thus conceived not as true and independent in themselves, but as mere conditions for another state of affairs that implies the negation of the former … The concept of real possibility thus develops its criticism of the positivist position out of the nature of facts themselves. Facts are facts only if related to that which is not yet fact and yet manifests itself in the given facts as a real possibility’. Though Marcuse refers to Real Possibility, his point goes to Real Necessity.
Yet in this self-erasure, presupposing and the self-returning movement are still separate. ‘[D]ieses Voraussetzen und die in sich zurückkehrende Bewegung ist noch getrennt’. Miller’s translation corrects Hegel’s grammar here. Of the original, John Hoffmeyer remarks, ‘Hegel’s use of the singular verb ‘is’ anticipates the unity that will emerge from this externality’. Because of this separateness, Hegel says that necessity has not yet spontaneously determined itself into contingency. So far, Contingency is merely Possible. It must become Actual. Real Necessity therefore exhibits externality. Hoffmeyer calls attention to the parallel between Real Necessity (or, in its guise as Absolute Actuality (Absolute Necessity) and Determining Reflection in Determining Reflection. Determining Reflection stood for the acknowledgement that presupposition is all that there is. Likewise, Real Necessity stands for the absolute inability of anything to ground itself explains Hoffmeyer.
‘Whatever it is, it could have been otherwise’.(Burbidge on religion). Externality stands for form, and, to the extent it stands over against externality, Real Necessity has a content that is indifferent to its form. The Real Necessity of a thing is therefore some inner integrity, but the thing might have unessential forms that external reflection might perceive. The really necessary is therefore any limited actuality which, on account of this limitation, is also only a contingent in some other respect.
Absolute Necessity. The Understanding sees Real Necessity as a unity between the Actual thing and its entire context — the unity of necessity and contingency. This immediate unity is Absolute Actuality or Absolute Necessity. Absolute Actuality (Absolute Necessity) is Absolute because its being-in-itself is Necessity. It is actuality which can no longer be otherwise, absolute self-mediation.
‘Absolute necessity is absolute relation because it is not being as such but being that is because it is, being as the absolute mediation of itself with itself. This being is substance; as the final unity of essence and being, it is the being in all being. It is neither the unreflected immediate, nor something abstract standing behind concrete existence and appearance, but the immediate actuality itself, and it is this actuality as being absolutely reflected into itself, as a subsisting that exists in and for itself. — Substance, as this unity of being and reflection, is essentially the shining and the positedness of itself. The shining is a self-referring shining, thus it is; this being is substance as such. Conversely, this being is only the self-identical positedness, and as such it is shining totality, accidentality’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Nevertheless, as the unity of itself and Possibility, Absolute Actuality is only an empty determination, or, it is contingency.
‘But because this actuality is posited to be absolute, that is to say, to be itself the unity of itself and possibility, it is consequently only an empty determination, or it is contingency. — This emptiness of its determination makes it into a mere possibility, one which can just as well be an other and is determined as possibility. But this possibility is itself absolute possibility, for it is precisely the possibility of being equally determined as possibility and actuality. For this reason, because it is this indifference towards itself, it is posited as empty, contingent determination’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
It is ‘a unity that does not do justice to the difference of actuality and possibility’, says Hoffmeyer. In its Absolute Actuality immediate form, it is a mere possibility, (Absolute Necessity) something which can equally be otherwise. Whatever it is, it has the capacity to be determined absolutely as either an Actual or as a mere Possible. These Hegel refers to as free, inherently necessary actualities.
‘But this contingency is rather absolute necessity; it is the essence of those free, inherently necessary actualities. This essence is averse to light, because there is no reflective shining in these actualities, no reflex — because they are grounded purely in themselves, are shaped for themselves, manifest themselves only to themselves — because they are only being. — But their essence will break forth in them and will reveal what it is and what they are. The simplicity of their being, their resting just on themselves, is absolute negativity; it is the freedom of their reflectionless immediacy. This negative breaks forth in them because being, through this same negativity which is its essence, is self-contradiction; it will break forth against this being in the form of being, hence as the negation of those actualities, a negation absolutely different from their being; it will break forth as their nothing, as an otherness which is just as free towards them as their being is free. — Yet this negative was not to be missed in them. In their self-based shape they are indifferent to form, are a content and consequently different actualities and a determinate content. This content is the mark that necessity impressed upon them by letting them go free as absolutely actual — for in its determination it is an absolute turning back into itself. It is the mark to which necessity appeals as witness to its right, and, overcome by it, the actualities now perish. This manifestation of what determinateness is in its truth, that it is negative self-reference, is a blind collapse into otherness; in the sphere of immediate existence, the shining or the reflection that breaks out in it is a becoming, a transition of being into nothing. But, conversely, being is equally essence, and becoming is reflection or a shining. Thus the externality is its inwardness; their connection is one of absolute identity; and the transition of the actual into the possible, of being into nothing, is a self-rejoining; contingency is absolute necessity; it is itself the presupposing of that first absolute actuality’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Absolute Actuality (Absolute Necessity)
They may be compared to the Understanding’s interpretation of Something. In Something/Other, it took Something to be either Something or Other. Now the Understanding takes Actuality to be the unity of either/or — the very capacity to be actualized (or not). It is indifferently the one or the other. Since it is both, that indifference is ‘indifference over against itself. Absolute Actuality is an advance over Real Necessity, where Contingency was merely implicit. Nevertheless, the freedom of these actualities is a one-sided freedom that Hegel will soon criticize, as Hoffmeyer points out. Contingency for Real Necessity was the sublatedness of actuality in possibility and vice versa. John Hoffmeyer finds significance in Hegel’s use of a dative case. Actuality is sublated in Possibility, not into. This signals that Actuality stays what it is even as it is in (not moves into). The subtle grammar is a sign of Actuality’s True Infinity.
Now Contingency comes to be. ‘This new content of thought [Contingency] is what is actual period’, says Burbidge. Actuality, as Real Necessity, was an act of self-erasure. Seeing this, the Understanding names self-erasure Absolute Actuality, which, ironically, underwrites the Contingency of things. What is Absolutely Actual, then, is Contingency. For a different (and erroneous) interpretation, Giacomo Rinaldi interprets Absolute Necessity as the complete negation of Contingency). At this point, the distinction of content and form itself has vanished. Form has penetrated all its differences and made itself transparent.
‘Thus has form pervaded in its realization all its distinctions; it has made itself transparent and, as absolute necessity, is only this simple self-identity of being in its negation, or in essence. — The distinction itself of content and form has thus equally vanished; for that unity of possibility in actuality and actuality in possibility is the form which in its determinateness or in positedness is indifferent towards itself: it is the fact full of content on which the form of necessity externally ran its course. But necessity is thus this reflected identity of the two determinations as indifferent to them, and hence the form determination of the in-itself as against the positedness, and this possibility constitutes the limitation of the content which real necessity had. The resolution of this difference is however the absolute necessity whose content is this difference which in this necessity penetrates
itself’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Hoffmeyer warns, ‘Hegel does not mean by transparency that we see through the illusory surface of things to the reality behind them. The surface of things is their depth, and their depth is their surface’.
But dialectical Reason points out that the Absolutely Necessary is two things — Actuality and Possibility, each identical to the other. From this perspective, Absolute Necessity is blind — something merely inner. It cannot tell what it is. Its essence is light-shy, because there is in these Actualities no reflective movement, no reflex, because they are grounded purely in themselves alone. But whichever it is — Actual or Possible — it is necessarily so.
Free Actualities
‘The distinction between possible and actual is reintroduced, not as a relation of contradictory opposites where both cannot be present at the same time, but as a relation of subcontraries whose meanings are distinct and opposite yet explicitly related within a larger universe of discourse’, says Burbidge.
Actuality. Speculative Reason intervenes to observe that a Free Actuality is a diversity — an absolute negativity. It self-erases. Accordingly, Necessity sacrifices movement to fixity, which yields ‘illusory notions of freedom’ says Hoffmeyer. The absolutes perish, Hegel explains, and then their essence will break forth in them and reveal what it is and what they are. What we have is the freedom of their reflectionless immediacy. This is the third Necessity of Hegel according to Burbidge.
The Actualities (or beings) are identical with themselves in their negation. Hegel calls this unity Substance. The moral of Substance — the blind transition of necessity — is that Contingency is not beyond reason, as is usually thought, as Di Giovanni sees it. Absolute Necessity is Contingency itself. Absolute Necessity’s lesson is that the being and ceasing to be of finite, contingent things is absolutely necessary’, explains Houlgate, and ‘if being is only thought of as the realm of what is necessary, then … there is nothing that history can be except ‘the slaughter-bench on which the happiness of peoples, the wisdom of states and the virtue of Individuals have been sacrificed’, citing from Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of History there. Freedom, however, transcends necessity and is the very goal of history.
It is rational that irrationality should exist. ‘True knowledge can and must comprehend its contrary — excessive stupidity’, explains Burbidge. ‘[F]or Hegel there are many things in the world that are not explicable by philosophy because, from the perspective of absolute reason, they are ultimately contingent and without ground’, says Houlgate. Therefore, philosophy is condemned to “the endless process of overcoming the contingency Substance that reasserts itself at the end of any process of explanation’, said Di Giovanni. Hegel ‘started the attempt to explore the irrational and to integrate it in an expanded reason which remains the task of our century’, claims Maurice Merleau-Ponty.
Every necessity is a contingency. Substance is still flawed. It stands for manifestation — for self-erasure of a finite entity. It can only articulate the relation between the free actualities and itself by presupposing something external’, says Hoffmeyer.
Substance
Sustance still remains dependent on externality and hence is Contingent. ‘The movement beyond substantial otherness can only be a movement beyond necessity. For Hegel, to move beyond necessity is to move to freedom’… Hoffmeyer suggests that Substance — the result of the chapter — is ‘not deterministic for two reasons. First, the content of the determination is contingency. Second, the determination is not a process of unfolding from some prior given. The absence of any such given is what distinguishes freedom from necessity’. In fact, Substance is determined and not determined. It still depends on externality — the totality of conditions it faces. Substance will graduate into the Subject not entirely free but not entirely determined. The matter will leave off ambiguously. For this very reason, Actuality is not the end of the Logic.
‘Queen Mab’ (excerpt)
by Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822)
Spirit of nature! all-sufficing power,
Necessity! thou mother of the world!
_____________
Some further thoughts on Necessity, Possibility and Contingency.
Notwendig and Notwendigkeit mean necessary and necessity. They contrast with möglich (possible) and Möglichkeit (possibility), from the verb mögen (can, may, might, like, etc.), and with Zufall (chance, accident), zufällig (fortuitous, contingent) and zufälligkeit (contingency). In non-Hegelian philosophy, the words are related roughly as follows. If something is possible, it may, or may not, be Actual (wirklich). If it is not actual, it is merely possible. If it is actual, it may be contingent (i.e. such that it is possible for it not to be actual, as well as to be actual) or necessary (i.e. such that it is not possible for it not to be actual). But what is necessary is not always actual: something may be a necessary (i.e. indispensable) Condition of something else, e.g. of the truth of a theorem or of the actuality of a state of affairs, but not be realized (in which case, what it is a condition of cannot be actual, or true, either). Hegel’s uses of the words are influenced by Aristotle’s contrast between what is actual (energeiai) and what is merely potential (dunamei). He examines necessity, etc., at length in the Logic. The briefer account in the ‘Encyclopaedia Logic’ runs as follows.
1. Hegel begins with formal (or logical) possibility. Something is formally possible, according to the Wolffian logic of the time, if it involves no Contradiction. What is possible is regularly equated with what is thinkable. Hegel’s examples are: it is possible that the moon will fall to the earth tonight; it is possible that the Sultan will become the Pope. Unlike orthodox logicians, who held, e.g., that the sentence ‘This is both square and circular’ expresses an impossibility, Hegel affirms that everything is formally possible. There are three reasons for this: (a) The claim that something is formally possible involves Abstracting an entity from its present circumstances (e.g. ignoring facts about the moon which are logically incompatible with its falling to the earth). Someone who claims that it is impossible for something to be both square and circular is not abstracting sufficiently. For even if it is actually square, it is possible for it to be circular.
(b) Hegel is thus concerned with the possibility of events or states of affairs rather than of Propositions. © He is concerned, as his examples suggest, with future possibilities: it is possible for this, which is now square, to become round. Not only is everything possible, but conversely, since anything Concrete involves Opposition and contradiction (e.g. Matter involves both attraction and repulsion), everything is formally impossible. Formal possibility is thus, on Hegel’s view, a singularly vacuous notion.
2. Orthodox logicians (e.g. Kant) had a notion of formal necessity co-ordinate with that of formal possibility: the formally necessary is that which cannot possibly not be, or whose negation is formally impossible. But Hegel’s belief that everything is formally possible deprives him of this notion. Hence he proceeds to the notion of formal actuality, of actuality not in Hegel’s preferred sense, but in the sense of simply being or existing, in contrast to being merely possible. The formally actual is the contingent (Zufälliges): it is possible for it not to be, as well as to be. That it is actual is thus a matter of chance (Zufall). But the concept of Zufälligkeit is complex: it contrasts with what is essential, necessary or intended, but it also suggests dependence on, or being contingent upon, something else: the Zufällige in general is what has its Ground not in itself, but in an Other.
‘Being just the inwardness of actuality, possibility is, precisely for that reason, merely external actuality or contingency as well. The contingent is generally what has the ground of its being not within itself but elsewhere. This is the shape in which actuality first presents itself to consciousness, and which is frequently confused with actuality itself. But the contingent is only the actual in the one-sided form of reflection-in to-another or the actual considered as what is merely possible. We consider the contingent, therefore, as what either can be or can also not be, as what can be thus or otherwise too, i. e., as that whose being or not being, being thus or otherwise, is grounded not within itself but in another. It is, on the one hand, the general task of cognition to overcome the contingent, whilst, on the other hand, in the domain of the practical, the point is not to remain at the stage of the contingency of willing or of [simple] freedom of choice. All the same, it has often happened, particularly in modem times, that contingency has been improperly elevated, and a value that it does not have has been ascribed to it, both in reference to nature and to the spiritual world as well. To begin with nature, it is very often admired chiefly on account of the richness and the multiplicity of its configurations alone. But, apart from the unfolding of the Idea that is present in it, that wealth (taken as it stands) offers nothing of higher rational interest; and the great multiplicity of inorganic and organic configurations affords only the intuition of a contingency that loses itself in indeterminateness. In any case, the motley play of single varieties of animals and plants, the ever-changing figures and groupings of clouds and so on, all conditioned by external circumstances, should not be rated higher than the equally contingent brain waves of a spirit that indulges itself in its own arbitrariness; and the admiration devoted to these phenomena is a very abstract mode of behaviour, from which we ought to advance to a closer insight into the inner harmony and lawfulness of nature’.
- ‘The Encyclopaedia Logic’
_____________
‘Song of Destiny’
by Johann Christian Friedrich Hölderlin, (1770–1843)
Ye wander gladly in light
Through goodly mansions, dwellers in Spiritland!
Luminous heaven-breezes
Touching you soft,
Like as fingers when skillfully
Wakening harp-strings.
Fearlessly, like the slumbering
Infant, abide the Beatified;
Pure retained,
Like unopened blossoms,
Flowering ever,
Joyful their soul
And their heavenly vision
Gifted with placid
Never-ceasing clearness.
To us is allotted
No restful haven to find;
They falter, they perish,
Poor suffering mortals
Blindly as moment
Follows to moment,
Like water from mountain
to mountain impelled,
Destined to disappearance below.
_____________
Hegel infers that the contingent is not simply an Immediate actuality, but also serves as the possibility or condition of a new actuality. (Here, as elsewhere, he exploits the verb voraussetzen, to presuppose, but literally to posit in advance, pre-posit: the contingent is posited by something else, but it is posited in advance or presupposed.)
3. The conditions (Bedingungen) of something and their interaction are the real (reale), not simply the formal, possibility of it. It is a formal possibility that there should be a statue, that this block of unshaped marble should be or become a statue; but when the sculptor sets to work on the marble with his chisel, this is the real possibility of a statue. But the real possibility of something is also its real actuality, since if all conditions are present, the Thing (Sache) must become actual.
‘When it is developed in this way, this externality is a circle of the determinations of possibility and immediate actuality; the reciprocal mediation of these determinations is real possibility in general. As this circle, moreover, it is the totality, i. e., the content, the matter [i. e., thing in question] that is determined in and for itself; and, according to the distinction of the determinations within this unity, it is likewise the concrete totality of the form for-itself, the immediate self-translation of the inner into the outer and of the outer into the inner. This self-movement of the form is activity, activationc of the matter [itself], as the real ground, which sublates itself into actuality, and the activation of the contingent actuality, i. e., of the conditions: their inward reflection and their self-sublation into another actuality, the actuality of the matter. When all conditions are present, the matter must become actual, and the matter is itself one of the conditions; for, as what is inner, it is at first itself only something-presupposed. Developed actuality as the coincident- alternation of what is inner and what is outer, or the alternation of their opposed movements which are united into One movement, is necessity’.
- ‘The Encyclopaedia Logic’
But it is not only actual; it is necessary. This is relative (or hypothetical) necessity, necessity in relation to certain conditions. But since the emergence of the thing from its conditions involves the Sublation of those conditions, the sublation of Mediation into immediacy, it is also Absolute or unconditioned necessity. Kant had denied the possibility of anything absolutely necessary in the phenomenal world, but Hegel reinterprets the notion of unconditional necessity, so that it is exemplified by any relatively self-contained and self-sustaining entity that absorbs the conditions of its emergence: a work of art, an Organism, a person, a State, etc. Hegel’s account is intended to apply not only to the emergence of entities in the world, but also to human Cognition. The world presents us with a mass of empirical contingencies. These form the conditions of the work of the natural scientist, but he does not simply accept them as they are: by observation and experiment he extracts their common features or Essence and expresses it in universal Laws that do not contain low-level empirical terms such as stone,, but only more general terms such as body, attraction, repulsion. At a higher level still, Hegelian logic, though conditioned by empirical contingencies as well as by the results of the natural and other sciences, abstracts from these conditions and operates at the level of pure Thought. At this level, Hegel believes, many of the results of the sciences that were originally arrived at empirically can be shown to be necessary.
‘The coming into being of philosophy out of the need that has been mentioned has experience, the immediate and argumentative consciousness, as its starting point. With these needs as its stimulus, thinking conducts itself essentially so as to raise itself above the natural, sensible, and argumentative consciousness into its own unadulterated element; and it gives itself initially a self-distancing negative relationship to this beginning. Thus, thinking finds its first satisfaction in itself-in the Idea of the universal essence of these appearances; this Idea (the Absolute, God) can be either more or less abstract. Conversely, the experiential sciences carry with them the stimulus to vanquish the form in which the wealth of their content is offered only as something that is merely immediate and simply found, as a manifold of juxtaposition, and hence as something altogether contingent. They are stimulated to elevate this content to [the level of] necessity: this stimulus pulls thinking out of its abstract universality, and out of the satisfaction that is only warranted implicitly; and it drives thinking on to develop itself by its own means . ‘On the one hand, this development is just a taking up of the content and of the determinations that it displays; but, on the other hand, it also gives these determinations the shape of coming forth freely (in the sense of original thinking) in accordance with the necessity of the matter itself alone’.
- ‘The Encyclopaedia Logic’
Logic, on Hegel’s view, involves no contingency: any given category has a unique successor. Nevertheless there is, Hegel believes, an ineliminable element of contingency in the world, not only in Nature (where, e.g., the number of species of parrot is contingent and has to be simply accepted, not derived or explained), but in History, Art and Right. This is problematic for several reasons: 1. The concept of contingency is unclear: The claim that something is contingent may mean that (a) it is a matter of sheer chance, so that there is no reason for it; (b) there is a reason for it (since, after all, the contingent ‘has its ground … in an other’), but this reason is inaccessible to us; © the reason for it is accessible to the natural sciences, but the phenomenon cannot be shown to be necessary and a priori by philosophy. 2. Equally unclear is the concept of ‘overcoming’ contingency (e.g. überwinden). If the contingency of the number of species of parrot cannot be overcome, overcoming must mean explaining, either in the sense of showing that, given certain other (non-contingent) facts the number can be neither more nor less than, say, 193, or in the sense of showing that 193 parrot-species serve some Purpose that no other number would. But in other senses of overcoming contingency, such as abstracting from the parrot-species and doing logic instead, or making them serve some higher purpose by, e.g., eating them or stuffing them and placing them in a museum, their contingency can easily be overcome. The accounts in the Logic and Encyclopaedia Logic do not discriminate sufficiently between these different ways in which contingency can be overcome. 3. Hegel’s Logic implies that contingency, like other categories, must be exemplified in the world. But he gives no satisfactory account of (a) where the line is to be drawn between the contingent and the non-contingent; (b) why it is to be drawn at that, rather than some other, point; or © how the existence of sheer contingencies is compatible with other features of his thought, e.g. his thoroughgoing theism and his denial of any distinct, formless Matter or Content.
=====
Dedicated to the One. Hegel wrote in the ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’: ‘Scientific cognition demands surrender to the life of the object, or, what amounts to the same thing, confronting and expressing its inner necessity’. The German word for necessity is Notwendigkeit, from Not = need, and Wendig = flexible enough to react appropriately to a situation, or to turn around. The purpose of Hegelian philosophy is to transforming our understanding of that which in the first place seems to be merely coincidental or contingent to that of something which one recognises in its necessity, it was only a matter of time before we were to encounter, a moment seemingly grounded in contingency, a critical moment when everything changes for once the love takes hold our entire past lives can be seen as leading up to that very moment and all that was contingent is transformed into something that makes sense, as though the event were a logical conclusion, think of it as destiny if you prefer but it was always going to happen that we would meet one day.
You are my destiny
You share my reverie,
You are my dream come true
That’s what you are
You are my destiny, you share my reverie
You are my dream come true, that’s what you are
You share my sweet caress, you feel my loneliness
You are my dream come true, baby that’s what you are
Heaven, I love you so
The emptiness
Can’t take your love from me
I stay alone and think of you
You are my destiny,
You share my reverie
You’re more than life to me
That’s what you are
Heaven and heaven alone
Can take your love from me
Cause I’d be a fool to leave you
And a fool I’ve never been
You are my destiny, you share my reverie
You are my dream come true, that’s what you are
- ++
Coming up next:
The Absolute Relation.
To be continued…
