On Hegel’s ‘Science of Logic’ : A Realm of Shadows — part three.
‘Ninth Elegy’ (excerpt)
by Rainer Maria Rilke (1875–1926)
Earth, isn’t this what you want: to arise within us,
invisible? Isn’t it your dream
to be wholly invisible someday? — O Earth: invisible!
What, if not transformation, is your urgent command?
Earth, my dearest, I will. Oh believe me, you no longer
need your springtimes to win me over — one of them,
ah, even one, is already too much for my blood.
Unspeakably I have belonged to you, from the first.
You were always right, and your holiest inspiration
is our intimate companion, Death.
Look, I am living. On what? neither childhood nor future
grows any smaller… Superabundant being
wells up in my heart.
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I. Largo. In a dark, shabby room, a man lies dying. The silence is disturbed only by the ticking of a clock — or is it the beating of the man’s heart? A melancholy smile appears on the invalid’s face. Is he dreaming of his happy childhood?
II. Allegro molto agitato. A furious struggle between life and death, at whose climax we hear, briefly, the theme of Transfiguration that will dominate the final portion of the work. The struggle is unresolved, and silence returns.
III. Meno mosso ma sempre alla breve. He sees his life again, the happy times, the ideals striven for as a young man. But the hammer-blow of death rings out. His eyes are covered with eternal night.
IV. Moderato. The heavens open to show him what the world denied him, Redemption, Transfiguration — the Transfiguration theme first played pianissimo by the full orchestra, its flowering enriched by the celestial arpeggios of two harps. The theme climbs ever higher, dazzlingly, into the empyrean.
- Alexander von Ritter, (1833–1896), program for ‘Death and Transfiguration’
‘Death and Transfiguration’ (‘Tod und Verklärung’), tone poem for orchestra, 1890, Richard Georg Strauss, (1864–1949)
Becoming, the unity of Being and Nothing:
‘Pure being and pure nothing are therefore the same’.
- Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, (1770–1831), ‘The Science of Logic’
Or, pure Being and pure Nothing is the same. Das reine Sein und das reine Nichts ist also dasselbe. Perhaps Hegel commits a a grammatical mistake with purpose, namely, to stress the inability of ordinary grammar to account for speculative philosophy that requires simultaneous immediacy and mediation and the singular verb reinforces the content of the sentence to suggest that there is not movement between pure Being and pure Nothing at all but simply a single identity:
‘The truth is neither being nor nothing, but rather that being has passed over into nothing and nothing into being — ‘has passed over’, not passes over. But the truth is just as much that they are not without distinction; it is rather that they are not the same, that they are absolutely distinct yet equally unseparated and inseparable, and that each immediately vanishes in its opposite. Their truth is therefore this movement of the immediate vanishing of the one into the other: becoming, a movement in which the two are distinguished, but by a distinction which has just as immediately dissolved itself’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Pure being and pure Nothing are the same. It began with pure Being but it was pure Nothing and the two moments (Hegel calls them moments but to speak strictly the indeterminate moments of Becoming are not genuine moments for they cannot be concretely specified in virtue of such moments forever changing into each other and reciprocally cancelling each other) would appear to be the most opposite of opposites as they are not without distinction and yet equally unseparated and inseparable and each at once disappears in its opposite, which is to say, that the spectators for whom the Logic enacts itself out ponder the first two steps and observe that being two steps they are distinct from each other but this is a merely fancied or imagined difference in fact the two steps are but one. And yet change is apparent but what is changing into what? It is not the case that pure Being changes into pure Nothing if these are the same and not different for change requires difference. Pure Being fails to materialize once we try to fix it in thought and what determines the mode of the seeming changes is the resolve to think pure Being and the failure to have a thought at all. According to Terry Pinkard, (1947 — ): ‘The opposite of nothing turns out not to be being, but determinate being (a such and such). Only as determinate being is being not nothing’. It is true that Being is not Nothing when Being is Determinate but it is wrong to say that Nothing and Determinate Being are opposites. Nothing has no opposite, it is the same as Being. We observe movement for the concept of change as such can be distinguished from its predecessor, change is a complex entity that it mediates Being/Nothing and what precedes it and is simultaneously different from them.
Becoming reflects ‘both the indistinguishability and the intended distinction of being and nothing’ as Pinkard put it.We encounter distinction and from the beginning Hegelian logic is a play between stasis, movement, and the unity of stasis and movement. ‘The double process by which being vanishes into nothing and nothing vanishes into being itself vanishes and leaves a tranquil but comprehensive result’, said John W. Burbidge, past president of the Hegel Society of America. ‘Their unity is thus a perpetual oscillation, a perpetual timeless activity or discursus, which requires the self-identity of each, their mutual opposition and their mutual identity, all at once’, stated Errol Eustace Harris, (1908–2009)). Truth is ‘simple rest as well as bacchanalian revel. This very duality is constitutive of the dialectic’, pondered Jean Hyppolite, (1907–1968), (in the ‘Phenomenology of Spirit’ Hegel had said: ‘The True is thus the Bacchanalian revel in which no member is not drunk; yet because each member collapses as soon as he drops out, the revel is just as much transparent and simple repose’).
Unsurprisingly Hegel invokes the spirit of Heraclitus:
‘The Eleatics were the first to give voice to the simple thought of pure being — notable among them Parmenides, who declared it to be the absolute and sole truth. In his surviving fragments, he did it with the pure enthusiasm of thought which has for the first time apprehended itself in its absolute abstraction: only being is, and nothing is not absolutely. — In the oriental systems, essentially in Buddhism, it is well known that nothing, the void, is the absolute principle. — Against that simple and one-sided abstraction, the profound Heraclitus proposed the loftier, total concept of becoming and said: being is no more than nothing; or also, all flows, that is, all is becoming. — The popular proverbs, particularly the oriental ones, that all that exists has the germ of death in its very birth, that death is on the other hand the entrance into a new life, express at bottom the same union of being and nothing. But these expressions have a substrate in which the transition takes place; being and nothing are held apart in time, represented as alternating in it; they are not thought in their abstraction and also, therefore, not so that they are the same in and for themselves’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
And elsewhere Hegel writes:
‘The next step from the existence of the dialectic as movement in the subject, is that it must necessarily itself become objective. If Aristotle blames Thales for doing away with motion, because change cannot be understood from Being, and likewise misses the actual in the Pythagorean numbers and Platonic Ideas, taken as the substances of the things which participate in them, Heraclitus at least understands the absolute as just this process of the dialectic. The dialectic is thus three-fold: ( α ) the external dialectic, a reasoning which goes over and over again without ever reaching the soul of the thing; ( β ) immanent dialectic of the object, but falling within the contemplation of the subject; ( γ ) the objectivity of Heraclitus which takes the dialectic itself as principle. The advance requisite and made by Heraclitus is the progression from Being as the first immediate thought, to the category of Becoming as the second. This is the first concrete, the Absolute, as in it the unity of opposites. Thus with Heraclitus the philosophic Idea is to be met with in its speculative form; the reasoning of Parmenides and Zeno is abstract understanding. Heraclitus was thus universally esteemed a deep philosopher and even was decried as such. Here we see land; there is no proposition of Heraclitus which I have not adopted in my Logic’.
- ‘Lectures in the Philosophy of History’
Pure being and pure nothing are the same. Becoming is the first name of that unity. Becoming reflects both the indistinguishability and the intended distinction of Being and Nothing.
And how does time feature in this? Or does it? Of this failure to hold the poles of Being and Nothing apart Hegel says: ‘The truth is neither being nor nothing, but rather that being has passed over into nothing and nothing into being — ‘has passed over’, not passes over’. That sounds rather temporal. Since logic moves of its own accord it already moved into pure Being/Nothing and it cannot ever be observed at a point called now in virtue of it always already having happened. But one must be one’s guard against the concept of time for logic does not occur in time, logical relations are atemporal, every step occurs simultaneously with every other step, everything is present. And yet human beings do live in a world of time, the time it takes to accomplish the steps is brought to the table by finite thinking beings. Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg, (1802–1872), accused Hegel of having smuggled time into the system along with Becoming. But as Harris points out: ‘Time presupposes becoming; becoming does not presuppose time. Time does not become, and in pure time there is neither change nor movement, for it is change that generates time and not vice versa … [T]ime is but the measure of change’. And note that time is not an official category of the Logic, it is in the ‘Philosophy of Nature’ that Hegel theorizes time:
‘The Notion [is] free from the power of time, but is neither within time, nor something temporal. It can be said on the contrary that it is the Notion which constitutes the power of time, for time is nothing but this negation as externality’.
- ‘Philosophy of Nature’
Nonetheless the very notion of negation refers to a past for to say that Being is not is to say Being once was in virtue of negation always working upon some posited entity that preceded it and dialectical reason recollects, hence Logic entails sequence, a chimerical time is in operation one might say that is something else entirely from chronological time. And movement? (Justus Hartnack, (1912–2005), criticized the use of the term movement preferring process instead, and it is ‘misleading if taken to imply the dislocation of tangible objects over time, movement must somehow be understood in a non-temporal sense, it stands for instability of a concept, but does not a process need time in which to proceed?) Becoming is before us as a middle term and Becoming represents movement and movement can be perceived only because it has as background the static passive non-movement of pure Being and pure Nothing and yet upon contemplating movement it is frozen in a thought. Hence Becoming has a dual nature arising as it does as the relation between Being/Nothing and Absolute Knowing which precedes it and as a relation it is composed of simpler parts, a complex entity and in its complexity Becoming moves yet thinking of Becoming as such it is frozen so that it does not move. (Apparently, although it is not my area of expertise but the paradox of rendering movement static is a necessity of which modern physics is very much cognizant and Arkady Plotnitsky has written upon the connections between Hegelian philosophy and quantum theory in physics, I must look into it some time).
Suppose a poor goalkeeper lets in a goal he should have saved and holds his head in his hands and drops it (his head that is, ok it’s an old joke) and a photograph is taken of the drop, according to classical mechanics the photograph freezes, obliterates and yet is part of the motion, in quantum mechanics the collapse of the wave function is an oft cited instance of the incompatibility of stasis and movement (I am just the messenger at this point I don’t know what I just said) such an instance demonstrating that a phenomenon cannot be and be perceived or measured at the same time. However, as Andrew Haas points out, ‘being is a result of measurement; that is, ‘to be’ means ‘to already have a measure’ — for being is merely an abstraction from concrete measurement, or a reduction and fixing of immeasurable singularity’. Such a principle is present in Becoming. It moves and yet it does not move. Becoming is Being’s ‘continuing instability … captured by [a] category’, explains Robert Buford Pippin, (1948 — ). We cannot focus upon these moments simultaneously, each side of Becoming is inadequate to the whole, the concept of Becoming is in a profound condition of contradiction.
‘The Horse in Motion’, 1878, Eadweard Muybridge
This record always takes me back to the 1980s, when I bought it, my introduction to Philip Glass.
Time for some modelling to assist with the explication being here presented, although remember this is just a model, and of something that in principle cannot be represented at that.
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‘That’s another thing we’ve learned from your Nation’, said Mein Herr, ‘map-making. But we’ve carried it much further than you. What do you consider the largest map that would be really useful?’
‘About six inches to the mile’.
‘Only six inches!’ exclaimed Mein Herr. ‘We very soon got to six yards to the mile. Then we tried a hundred yards to the mile. And then came the grandest idea of all! We actually made a map of the country, on the scale of a mile to the mile!’
‘Have you used it much?’ I enquired.
‘It has never been spread out, yet;, said Mein Herr: ‘the farmers objected: they said it would cover the whole country, and shut out the sunlight! So we now use the country itself, as its own map, and I assure you it does nearly as well’.
- Lewis Carroll, (1832–1898), ‘Sylvie and Bruno Concluded’
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If we have a map on a 1 to 1 scale of what it is a map of we would need another map to find our way around the map!
In my diagrams all middle terms such as Becoming are made up of three ellipses (the shape is of course insignificant, it is a model), the first of which will place the stress upon the positive, qualitative side, and it inclines to the left side of the diagram, the second places the stress upon the negative side as it inclines to the right side of the diagram, and in virtue of negation always presupposing something to negate the negative moment is always a double, dialectical coupling. Finally the two dialectically opposed entities are reconciled by a central ellipse that incorporates aa excess, something left over, which is to say the whole is always greater than the parts and the middle term incorporates material that exceeds that which is provided by the two extremes and this excess secures the dialectic progress growing in complexity and sophistication with each step. ‘As a synthesis something new is added; the new conception does not follow analytically from the preceding terms’, explains Burbidge. ‘Self-thinking thought is synthetic in that each new category is not contained in those that precede it’, elucidates Richard Dien Winfield, (1950 -).
Together the three ellipses now resemble a Borromean Knot.
The Borromean knot, so designated because the figure is to be found on the coat of arms of the Borromeo family, is a group of three rings linked in such a way that if any one of them is severed,all three become separated. (Jacques Marie Émile Lacan, (1901–1981), used the Borromean knot as, among other things, a means of illustrating the interdependence of the three orders of the real, the symbolic and the imaginary, as a way of exploring what it is that these three orders have in common, but I have already pointed out the issue with modelling in this way). In my diagram using letters to refer to the regions set forth in the Borromean Knot three overlapping ellipses create seven distinct regions, the regions marked a, c, and g are static, these portions do not suffer from overlap, the regions marked b, d, e, f, are dynamic and these regions have at least two natures, they are subject to more than one regulatory authority so to speak and the region marked d is subject to all three regulatory authorities. Only d is present in every single step of the Logic for d is that which Hegel will designate being-within-self.
And what role is the understanding to play here? Logic progresses by way of propositions about the middle term and in the first step the middle term is deposed from its central position through abstracting the immediate part of it, g, suppressing the mediated part, and shifting this mangled being over to the left of the diagram to create the category Coming-to-be’. (This is not to say that Hegel’s distinction of coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be are official steps in the Logic but rather Hegel is merely discussing aspects of Becoming without moving the process along, hence he later declares that Something, c, is the first negation of the negation. If ceasing-to-be were an official step then c would be the second negation of the negation. Coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be ‘define the process of becoming more precisely’ explains Burbidge). This first move belongs to the understanding, the intuition that perceives a concept as an immediate, uncomplicated entity. On the left, the accent is upon being, a, and Becoming becomes Coming-to-Be (Entstehen) one of the two terms that make up Becoming. (The idea of accent derives from Hegel himself: ‘Both [Being and Nothing] are an existence, but in reality, as quality with the accent on being an existent, that it is determinateness and hence also negation is concealed; reality only has, therefore, the value of something positive from which negating, restriction, lack, are excluded. Negation, for its part, taken as mere lack, would be what nothing is; but it is an existence, a quality, only determined with a non-being’). Thus conceived Becoming is taken in accordance with common sense, it began from nothing and has come into being.
Elsewhere and as a consequence of a somewhat more psycho-analytical understanding of the Understanding Hegel displays an inclination towards the Understanding that is initiallly situated on the left in the model, angst in favour of Being:
‘If the opposition in thought is stated in this immediacy as Being and Nothing, the shock of its nullity is too great not to stimulate the attempt to fix Being and secure it against the transition into Nothing. With this intent, reflection has recourse to the plan of discovering some fixed predicate for Being, to mark it off from Nothing. Thus we find Being identified with what persists amid all change … But every additional … characterization causes Being to lose that integrity and simplicity it has in the beginning. Only in, and by virtue of this mere generality is it Nothing, Coming-to-be something inexpressible, whereof the distinction from Nothing is a mere intention or meaning’.
- ‘The Encyclopedia Logic’
In brief the Understanding fearing its own demise wishes to fix its preservation in a unified proposition about the past truths it has been compelled to accept and in a shuffle to the left the Understanding, that which passes as common sense, (Menschenverstand) is to begin with obliviousness to the mediatedness of concepts. ‘Philosophy has adopted, Hegel states, the point of view of the ‘intellect’ [i.e., the Understanding], the principle of non-contradiction or of the mutual exclusion of opposites’, expatiates Lucio Colletti, (1924–2001). ‘The understanding considers all encountered beings … to be at peace, fixed, limited univocally defined individual, and positive’, enlucidates Herbert Marcuse, (1898–1979). And Burbidge stresses that the Understanding does not self-consciously abstract a part from the whole, it thinks it has grasped the whole as a self-identity.
‘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’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
‘The logic of mere understanding is involved in speculative logic, and can at will be elicited from it, by the simple process of omitting the dialectical and ‘reasonable’ element’.
- ‘The Encyclopedia Logic’
Burbidge and Harris think that the Understanding distinguishes as well as abstracts. ‘Understanding is to define [a new category] more clearly and distinguish it from other concepts’, sermonizes Burbidge. ‘It has two main characteristics, which are intimately connected with each other, abstraction and sharp, rigid distinction’, confuses Burbidge. Is the Understanding’s initial function connected with distinction? Understanding is the move that accepts self-identity while difference is the hallmark of dialectical Reason. The Understanding after all proposes a self-identical theory of the Absolute but it will develop Logic that progresses and eventually the Understanding will resemble dialectical Reason that does indeed make distinctions. And so the unmediated portion of the Borromean Knot, g, becomes a self-identical entity, a, in virtue of the the immediacy of the concept being taken as the whole truth of it and hence the Understanding abstracts a part and calls it the whole. But what is meant by abstraction?
‘’It is only a concept’, people are wont to say, contrasting the concept, as superior to it, not only with the idea, but with sensuous, spatial and temporal, palpable existence. For this reason the abstract is then held to be of less significance than the concrete, because so much of this palpable material has been removed from it. In this view, to abstract means to select from a concrete material this or that mark, but only for our subjective purposes, without in any way detracting from the value and the status of the many other properties and features that are left out; on the contrary, by retaining them as reality, but yonder on the other side, still as fully valid as ever. It is only because of its incapacity that the understanding thus does not draw from this wealth and is forced rather to make do with the impoverished abstraction’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Enter dialectical Reason that puts to shame the Understanding through recollection of the history of the concept. ‘[F]or Hegel, thinking — and especially philosophical thinking — is basically a highly sophisticated way of remembering — or, as Hegel puts it, intelligence is cognitive only insofar as it is recognitive’, remembers John McCucumber, I mean John McCumber, (1956-). Dialectical reason remembers. And it remembers that the supposedly immediate concept was mediated after all and it charges the Understanding with ignoring the negative component that dialectic reasoning is able to comprehend. Dialectical Reason ‘criticizes and supersedes the fixed oppositions created by the [Understanding]’, asseverates Marcuse. It has been suggested that Dialectical Reason equates with experience while the Understanding adduces a proposition concerning the universe. Through recollecting the past dialectical Reason inverts it and discloses it to be the opposite of what it was supposed to be. Dialectical Reason is like experience in that theory is demonstrated to be inconsistent with the actual world known to exist beyond theory. As Hegel explains elsewhere:
‘Experience is … the conjoining of concept and appearance — that is, the setting in motion of indifferent substances, sensations, or whatever you will, whereby they become determinate, existing only in the antithesis’.
- ‘The Jena System. 1804/5: Logic and Metaphysics’
According to dialectical Reason Becoming has a second aspect, it is ceasing-to-be (Verstehen) which starts from Being and ends at Nothing while it concedes the Understanding’s point that Nothing turns into Being yet it shames the Understanding by pointing out that the opposite is just as true and Being turns into Nothing, it has ceased to be and so we situate in our model ceasing to be over on the right and regard it together with coming to be, and this is the step undertaken by dialectical Reason.
‘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’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
As its name implies dia-lectic Reason reasons in a double manner, a positive concept forever omits and thereby forever implicates its opposite that dialectical Reason makes explicit.
‘’Now this is the very standpoint … from which a universal prius, considered in and for itself, proves to be the other of itself. Taken quite generally, this determination can be taken to mean that what is at first immediate is therewith posited as mediated, as referred to an other, or that the universal is posited as a particular. The second universal that has thereby arisen is thus the negative of that first and, in view of subsequent developments, the first negative. From this negative side, the immediate has perished in the other; but the other is essentially not an empty negative, the nothing which is normally taken to be the result of dialectic, but is rather the other of the first, the negative of the immediate; it is therefore determined as the mediated — contains as such the determination of the first in it. The first is thus essentially preserved and contained also in the other’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Dialectic Reason introduces dynamism in place of stasis, which is to say a modulation between the two sides.
‘Wherever there is movement, wherever there is life, wherever anything is carried into effect in the actual world, there Dialectic is at work’.
- ‘The Encyclopedia Logic’
‘The affirmation of ¬A already affirms A in order to deny it’, asserts Stanley Rosen, (1929–2014). Slavoj Žižek, (1949 — ), refers to this as oppositional determination, when the universal, common ground of the two opposites ‘encounters itself in its oppositional determination’. Žižek’s example is the political party that criticizes the other party for acting out of partisanship. In this critique the critic meets itself in its criticism and is doing the very thing it criticizes. Likewise dialectical Reasoning accuses the Understanding of resting upon abstraction when it too rests upon abstraction. Oppositional determination means that Hegel’s entire system could be viewed as a triad, Understanding, dialectical Reason, speculative unity, or as a quadrad. In the triadic case, dialectical Reason is taken according to its self-perception, singular and self-identical. In the quadratic case dialectical Reason is counted twice from the perspective of speculative Reason that regards dialectical Reason as self-alienated. Tetrachotomy a logical division into four parts will prove to be a principle concern in Hegel’s theory of Judgment. For Theodor W. Adorno, (1903–1969), the double nature of dialectical Reason is an error that delegitimates the Logic. ‘At each new dialectical step, Hegel goes against the intermittent insight of his own logic, forgets the rights of the preceding step, and thus prepares to copy what he chided as abstract negation: an abstract — to wit, a subjectively and arbitrarily confirmed — positivity’, complains Adorno. However and as it happens such a fault if fault it be in dialectic reason is an integral part of the system.
In it one side is always becoming the other and what is true of one side is forever true of its opposite side. Dialectical reasoning, however, is somewhat too cunning for its own good for in creating duality and modulation between the extremes it actually replicates the error of the Understanding. Dialectical Reason sees double but to see double it must posit a second abstract entity, c, as opposite to the first, and this second extreme is quite the same thing as the understood entity, a, that dialectical Reason believes it is criticizing. This is something to be highlighted in virtue of having in front of us the quintessential move from Essence, the midpoint of the Logic. Dialectic Reason has in effect posited itself and discoursing from the b region it has declared: ‘I’m not. I concede that a is. But I [b, c] am not’. Dialectical Reason, b, is the voice of the Understanding itself, its negative, suppressed voice. As Burbidge characterizes the process we begin with the Understanding in its contemplation of pure Being, it changes to pure Nothing, pure Nothing is likewise the product of the Understanding and he modulation between them is thereby the sequential operation of the Understanding. Maybe a more felicitous way of stating the matter is that in the double aspect of dialectical Reason a second act of Understanding is forever present. Dialectical Reason has to understand the nothingness it has created.
When it speaks up against a, b claims autonomy from a and this autonomy is represented by c. In its negativity, c has created or posited itself by distinguishing itself, c, from itself, a. and the drive behind this distinction was b. Elsewhere Hegel laments about dialectical Reason:
‘Dialectic is usually considered as an external art, which arbitrarily produces a confusion and a mere semblance of contradictions in determinate concepts, in such a way that it is this semblance, and not these determinations, that is supposed to be null and void, whereas on the contrary what is understandable would be true. Dialectic is often no more than a subjective seesaw of arguments that sway back and forth, where basic import is lacking and the [resulting] nakedness is covered by the astuteness that gives birth to such argumentations’.
- ‘The Encyclopedia Logic’
Dialectical Reason generates a modulation that is withdrawn and mute between two identical extremes that leads to no place and focusses attention toward a lack in the Understanding while merely replicating the Understanding’s own error. The error of the Understanding was the claim to self-identity, a, and now dialectical Reason commits the same error, c. For this reason:
‘The two first moments of triplicity are abstract, untrue moments that are dialectical for that very reason, and through this their negativity make themselves into the subject. For us at first, the concept itself is both the universal that exists in itself and the negative that exists for itself, and also the third term that exists in and for itself, the universal that runs through all the moments of the syllogism; but this third is the conclusion in which the concept mediates itself with itself through its negativity and is thereby posited for itself as the universal and the identity of its moments’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Speculative Reason displays its wisdom through an intervention to call a halt to the modulating absurdities, speculative Reason is somewhat like an adult guardian mediating between bickering juveniles. The Understanding lapsed into error through a suppression or expulsion of the negative aspect of itself while its younger sibling determinate Being exploited this fault, but it thereby merely replicated a negative Reason version of the Understanding’s own fault. Non-Hegelians out there might well discern in Understanding, dialectical Reason, and speculative Reason the triad of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis, but concerning this triad of ill repute I suggest heeding the words of Allen W. Wood, (1942 — ):
‘The regrettable tradition of expounding this theme in the Hegelian dialectic through the grotesque jargon of ‘thesis’, ‘antithesis’, and ‘synthesis’ began in 1837 with Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus, a bowdlerizer of German idealist philosophy, whose ridiculous expository devices should have been forgotten along with his name. [T]o my knowledge, it is never used by Hegel, not even once, for this purpose or for any other. The use of Chalybäus’s terminology to expound the Hegelian dialectic is nearly always an unwitting confession that the expositor has little or no firsthand knowledge of Hegel’.
[Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus, (1796–1862)].
Hegel himself at least in one passage disavows the use of the word synthesis:
‘The synthesis which is the point of interest here must not be taken as a tying together of external determinations already at hand. Rather, the issue is twofold: one of the genesis of a second next to a first, of a determinate something next to something which is initially indeterminate, but also one of immanent synthesis, of synthesis a priori — a unity of distinct terms that exists in and for itself. Becoming is this immanent synthesis of being and nothing; but because the sense most closely attached to ‘synthesis’ is that of an external gathering of things externally at hand, the name of synthesis, of synthetic unity, has rightly gone out of use’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
On the other hand as Michael Inwood, (1944–2021), points out, an endorsement of thesis-antithesis-synthesis occurs elsewhere in Hegel:
‘But besides the general idea of synthetic judgments a priori, a universal which has difference in itself, Kant’s instinct carried this out in accordance with the scheme of triplicity, unspiritual though that was, in the whole system into which for him the entire universe was divided. This he not only practised in the three critiques, but he also followed it out in most of the sub-divisions under the categories, the ideas of Reason, &c. Kant has therefore set forth as a universal scheme the rhythm of knowledge, of scientific movement; and has exhibited on all sides thesis, antithesis and synthesis, modes of the mind by means of which it is mind, as thus consciously distinguishing itself. The first is existence, but in the form of Other-Being for consciousness; for what is only existence is object. The second is Being-for-self, genuine actuality; here the reverse relation enters in, for self-consciousness, as the negative of Being-in-itself, is itself reality. The third is the unity of the two; the absolute, self-conscious actuality is the sum of true actuality, into which are re-absorbed both the objective and the independently existent subjective. Kant has thus made an historical statement of the moments of the whole, and has correctly determined and distinguished them: it is a good introduction to Philosophy’.
- ‘Lectures on the History of Philosophy’
‘This second term is the pivot of the dialectical movement; it is doubly negative. It is at first the other, the negation of the first; but, taken by itself, it re-establishes the first’, portends Hyppolyte.
To continue, this other extreme, c, shares an identity with the Understanding’s extreme, a, and c likewise suppresses its own negative b. Neither side can account for its lack by itself and speculative Reason is able to bring forth this lack into the light of day, demonstrating that each side has a surplus — its own lack, b, which is beyond itself and hence indeed an excess, a leftover. In brief, the leftover, g, is the positivized version of the negative material, b, expelled by a and c. Coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be ‘collapse of themselves, leaving a unity in which being and nothing are contained not sequentially but in an abiding relation to one another’ explains Winfield. In the context within which we have tried to follow all this coming-to-be, a, denies that its own being, b. Yet if coming-to-be, a, insists upon abstracting itself from b it cannot claim to be a sequence of Nothing and Being. ‘The movement of becoming comes to a halt because the being that follows from nothing is indistinguishable from the latter just as the nothing that follows from being is indistinguishable from it’ elucidates Winfield. Coming-to-be thereby ceases to be. Ceasing-to-be does the same, which is to say, a destroys itself and what remains is b. And yet b is properly part of both coming-to-be and ceasing-to-be. ‘Having lost its dual sequential movements, this whole [b] now simply consists in a unity of being and nothing that contains them as component terms mediated by their identity’, adds Winfield.
Speculative Reason emphasizes that between the two extremes, a and c, there is difference b. (Burbidge considers speculative Reason as incorporating three separate steps. It develops the relation that unifies the extremes (synthesis). Then it names (or positivizes) the relation (mediation). Then it integrates the whole in a simple unity). And this difference is articulated as g. It is the leftover and constitutes additional content, a static addition to the dynamic opposition. Speculative Reason, working only with the materials implied by the extremes, produces a new middle term and its nomenclature is Determinate Being, Being that is distinguishable from Nothing. This is not to draw an official step of the Logic for Determinate Being is merely another nomenclature for Becoming.
In terms of the Borromean knot the middle term is both dynamic, d, e, f, and static, g, and upon considering the parts d, e, f, it is dynamic, a modulation of birth and death that never stops, and upon considering the dynamic modulation as such we name the activity and thereby add a static dimension to the dynamic parts and this static equilibrium, g, in turn will be understood when it is shuffled off to the left and made into a new self-identical concept, a. Speculative Reason yields an excess, g, hence it is designated speculative, and g is reason’s assessment of the value of what it has gained in terms of the price it paid for it, the beyond of what was ventured in previous steps. Speculative Reason is the act of synthesis always remembering that Hegel disapproves the term the process of uniting different representations to each other and of comprehending them in one cognition, far from affirming the identity of the extremes it affirms their difference which somewhat paradoxically is the same identical lack, b, in each of the subordinate regions. The Logic moves forward (non-temporally) thereby through series of withdrawals from b:
‘Each new stage of exteriorization, that is, of further determination, is also a withdrawing into itself, and the greater the extension, just as dense is the intensity. The richest is therefore the most concrete and the most subjective, and that which retreats to the simplest depth is the mightiest and the most all-encompassing’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
‘The word determination (Bestimmung) can mean either the act of determining or the outcome of such an act. Hegel is making use of this ambiguity to emphasize that the act of determining and what is determined are parts (or moments, as he calls them) of a single process’ declares Rosen. The Logic grows richer and richer and more and more concrete as it withdraws deeper and deeper into itself. ‘Sometimes in [Hegel’s] work we find something I am tempted to call a ‘downward synthesis’, sprays Slavoj Žižek. ‘After the two opposed positions, the third one, the Aufhebung of the two, is not a higher synthesis but a kind of negative synthesis, the lowest point’. As a matter of fact in virtue of the middle term being always what is lacking from a and c, it is possible to view the entire path of Speculative Reason as a downward collapse:
‘The highest and most intense point is the pure personality that, solely by virtue of the absolute dialectic which is its nature, equally embraces and holds everything within itself, for it makes itself into the supremely free — the simplicity which is the first immediacy and universality’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
The highest, most concentrated point, that is to say, is subjectivity, the most concrete of things. Absolute Idea, the end of the Logic will be pure personality that solely through the absolute dialectic that is its nature, no less embraces and holds everything within itself. The convention we have developed of moving the middle term to the left, generating its opposite and then deriving a new middle term, is designed to represent the movement of spirit in expelling its dependence on otherness, something that it will not achieve until the end of the book. This movement deriving the middle term has been labelled ‘the lumpy, bumpy triangular wheel’ by Hegelian wag Burbidge. Walter Kaufmann, (1921–1980), dissents from the notion that Hegel’s Logic proceeds in this triadic form albeit he concedes ‘a very decided preference for triadic arrangements’. But these are not deductive relations, Kaufmann alleges. ‘[H]is dialectic never became the ritualistic three-step it is so widely supposed to be’. Instead the Logic is supposed to be organized by ‘a sidelong glance at the history of philosophy’ and such a position denies that Hegel has written a Logic. Question: did Hegel intended the ritualistic three-step that Kaufmann denies?
By shifting the middle term to the left, the bias for the moment, is in favour of being over negation or death and this is the bias of intuition that takes things in their immediacy and desires not to think about the finite nature of its ideas, such a bias however that will change upon reaching Essence about which I will deal with in a future article. In the penultimate paragraph in the ‘Doctrine of Being comments, Hegel remarks:
‘But as so repelled, the determinations are not self-possessed — do not emerge as self-subsistent or external but are rather as moments: first, as belonging to the unity whose existence is still only implicit, they are not let go by it but are rather borne by it as their substrate and are filled by it alone; and, second, as determinations immanent to the unity as it exists for itself, they are only through their repulsion from themselves. Instead of some existent or other, as they are in the whole sphere of being, they now are simply and solely as posited, with the sole determination and significance of being referred to their unity and hence each to the other and to negation — marked by this their relativity’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
The being of the determinations is no longer simply affirmative as in the entire sphere of being. At this point Hegel marks a fundamental shift in the attitude of the Understanding as the Understanding contemplates what is not. To summarize the Borromean knot represents Logic as a circle comprised of circles in accord with Hegel’s remark made elsewhere:
‘Each of the parts of philosophy is a philosophical whole, a circle rounded and complete in itself. In each of these parts, however, the philosophical Idea is found in a particular specificality or medium. The single circle, because it is a real totality, bursts through the limits imposed by its special medium, and gives rise to a wider circle. The whole of philosophy in this way resembles a circle of circles. The Idea appears in each single circle, but, at the same time, the whole Idea is constituted by the system of these peculiar phases, and each is a necessary member of the organization’.
- ‘The Encyclopedia Logic’
Coming up next:
Well, I will still be at the beginning actually (but is pure Being even a beginning anyway?) This may take some time. Once I get it started though things should then move more quickly.
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‘Transfigured Night’
by Richard Fedor Leopold Dehmel (1863–1920)
Two people are walking through a bare, cold wood;
the moon keeps pace with them and draws their gaze.
The moon moves along above tall oak trees,
there is no wisp of cloud to obscure the radiance
to which the black, jagged tips reach up.
A woman’s voice speaks:
‘I am carrying a child, and not by you.
I am walking here with you in a state of sin.
I have offended grievously against myself.
I despaired of happiness,
and yet I still felt a grievous longing
for life’s fullness, for a mother’s joys
and duties; and so I sinned,
and so I yielded, shuddering, my sex
to the embrace of a stranger,
and even thought myself blessed.
Now life has taken its revenge,
and I have met you, met you’.
She walks on, stumbling.
She looks up; the moon keeps pace.
Her dark gaze drowns in light.
A man’s voice speaks:
‘Do not let the child you have conceived
be a burden on your soul.
Look, how brightly the universe shines!
Splendour falls on everything around,
you are voyaging with me on a cold sea,
but there is the glow of an inner warmth
from you in me, from me in you.
That warmth will transfigure the stranger’s child,
and you bear it me, begot by me.
You have transfused me with splendour,
you have made a child of me’.
He puts an arm about her strong hips.
Their breath embraces in the air.
Two people walk on through the high, bright night.
‘Verklärte Nacht’ (‘Transfigured Night’), 1899, Arnold Schoenberg, (1874–1951)
To be continued …
