On Hegel’s ‘Science of Logic’ : A Realm of Shadows — part twenty four.
‘I look into my glass’
by Thomas Hardy, (1840–1928)
I look into my glass,
And view my wasting skin,
And say, ‘Would God it came to pass
My heart had shrunk as thin!’
For then I, undistrest
By hearts grown cold to me,
Could lonely wait my endless rest
With equanimity.
But Time, to make me grieve,
Part steals, lets part abide;
And shakes this fragile frame at eve
With throbbings of noontide.
Determinations of Reflection in Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s, (1770–1831), ‘Science of Logic’. A Determination of Reflection (Reflexionbestimmung) has a dual structure. It is a positedness, which implies a relation with otherness. It is also an immediacy, which perseveres in impious stubbornness even after it negates its other and hence itself. Because of this double structure, a Determination of Reflection is infinite return-into-self and negative simplicity.
‘Reflection is determined reflection; accordingly, essence is determined essence, or it is essentiality’.
‘Reflection is the shining of essence within itself. Essence, as infinite immanent turning back is not immediate simplicity, but negative simplicity; it is a movement across moments that are distinct, is absolute mediation with itself. But in these moments it shines; the moments are, therefore, themselves determinations reflected into themselves’.
‘First, essence is simple self-reference, pure identity. This is its determination, one by which it is rather the absence of determination’.
‘Second, the specifying determination is difference — difference which is either external or indefinite, diversity in general, or opposed diversity or opposition’.
‘Third, as contradiction this opposition is reflected into itself and returns to its foundation’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
By now Hegel’s meaning should be clear. The True Infinite sends its being elsewhere while remaining what it is. Determinations of Reflection behave in just this way. Being is sent off when Essence announces, I am not that, but the bad penny of Being infinitely returns. Essence is mediated yet paradoxically simple — a negative non-simple simplicity. Accordingly, a Determination of Reflection has a positive and negative bearing, each being posited as exclusive, and only implicitly identical with the other.
‘This transition is founded on the relation of the extremes and on their connection in the judgment as such. The positive judgment is the connection of the singular and the universal which are such immediately and each, therefore, is not at the same time what the other is. The connection is therefore just as essentially separation, or negative; for this reason the positive judgment was to be posited as negative. There was no need, therefore, for the logicians to make such a fuss about the not of the negative judgment being attached to the copula. In the judgment, the determination of the extremes is equally a determinate connection. The judgment determination, or the extreme, is not the purely qualitative one of immediate being that only stands over against an other outside it. Nor is it the determination of reflection, which, in accordance with its general form, behaves positively and negatively, posited in either case as exclusive, only implicitly identical with the other. The judgment determination, as the determination of the concept, is a universal within, posited as extending continuously in its other. Conversely, the judgment connection is the same determination as the extremes have; for it is precisely this universality and continuous extension of each into the other; in so far as these are distinguished, the connection also has negativity in it’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Hegel previews the fate of the Reflexionbestimmungen. First, immediacy is taken up — the concept of Identity. Identity already contains Difference. Second, mediatedness is considered — Difference as such. Difference has two natures -Diversity (i.e., complete and utter difference) and Opposition (dependent or mediated difference). The middle term between Identity and Difference is Contradiction — the Ground of all things.
Identity is the province of the Understanding. Dialectical Reason champions Difference. Speculative Reason sees the identity of Identity and Difference, or Ground. Meanwhile, all Determinations of Reflection have a double structure (including the Understanding’s account of Identity). The double structure fits in with the fact that we have before us the second, dialectical chapter of Reflection. Whereas chapter ten stood for immediacy, this chapter stands for mediation. The next chapter — Ground — stands for reconciliation. According to Stanley Rosen, (1929–2014), Identity stands for the ‘in itself — the merely implicit. Being strives for Identity, but fails. Identity remains merely an ought-to-be. Difference is ‘for itself’. Reflection is the statement, ‘I am not that’ It is the pose of negative Difference. Essence is identity after self-differentiation. It is in-and-for-self when it is the unity of Identity and Difference. ‘In order to bring together the in-itself and the for-itself, we require a reconciliation of identity and difference within the ground . . . When this is achieved, being may be said to have recollected itself, or accomplished its truth. This accomplishment may also be described as the reconciliation of essence with its appearances …’
A. Identity According to the Understanding, Identity — one of the moments in a Determination of Reflection — already has Difference within it. In this guise it is Absolute Difference. Though negative, Absolute Difference is Essence’s moment of “simple immediacy.
‘Essence is simple immediacy as sublated immediacy. Its negativity is its being; it is equal to itself in its absolute negativity by virtue of which otherness and reference to other have as such simply disappeared into pure self-equality. Essence is therefore simple self-identity’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
As we are well past the doctrine of Being, immediacy is now mediated. Identity is therefore self-equal in its absolute negativity. Negativity, as always, Identity (Absolute Difference) implies mediatedness. Hence this Identity identity is the self-identity of a True Infinite. Identity ‘is an equivalence to itself that is maintained through a process of change’, explains John Burbidge. True infinite is that which endures while becoming something different. Accordingly, Identity is itself and its other, but with the accent on endurance. We do not have an abstract Identity but an Identity that has brought itself to unity, not a restoration of itself from an other, but this pure origination from and within itself.
‘This self-identity is the immediacy of reflection. It is not that self-equality which being is, or also nothing, but a self-equality which, in producing itself as unity, does not produce itself over again, as from another, but is a pure production, from itself and in itself, essential identity. It is not, therefore, abstract identity or an identity which is the result of a relative negation preceding it, one that separates indeed what it distinguishes from it but, for the rest, leaves it existing outside it, the same after as before. Being, and every determinateness of being, has rather sublated itself not relatively, but in itself, and this simple negativity, the negativity of being in itself, is the identity itself. In general, therefore, it is still the same as essence’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Thinking that keeps to external reflection i.e., common sense) never gets past abstract identity.
‘Thought that keeps to external reflection and knows of no other thought except that of external reflection does not attain to identity as we have just grasped it, nor does it recognize essence, which is the same. Such a thought will always have only abstract identity in mind, and, outside and alongside it, difference. In its opinion, reason is no more than a loom intertwining warp (say, identity) and woof (say, difference), joining them externally; or, if it turns to analysis, now specifically pulling out identity, and at the same time also obtaining difference alongside it; now a comparing, and also a differentiating at the same time — a comparing in that it abstracts from difference, and a differentiating in that it abstracts from the comparing. — One must completely dismiss these assertions and these opinions concerning what reason does, since they are, as it were, of merely historical interest; it is rather the consideration of all things that are that reveals, in them, that each is self-unlike and contradictory in its equality with itself, and each self-identical in its difference, in its contradiction: that everything intrinsically is this movement of transition of one of these determinations to the other, and that everything is this transition because each determination is itself, within it, the opposite of itself. The concept of identity, a simple negativity that refers itself to itself, is not the product of external reflection but derives from being itself. Contrary to this, the identity that stays distant from difference, and the difference that stays distant from identity, are the products of external reflection and of an abstraction that arbitrarily clings to this point of indifferent difference’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Identity / Absolute Difference
In its opinion, reason is nothing more than a loom on which it externally combines and interweaves the warp, of say, identity, and then the woof of difference. If it proceeds analytically, it isolates identity here and difference there, failing to see that Identity and Difference are interdependent. Charles Taylor, (1931 — ), can be criticized for limiting this truth: ‘Hence the identity of a thing with itself — so long as we are not talking about an entity which is defined in terms of a single property, but rather about something which can bear many properties — properly understood bears on the underlying substrate which not only can undergo change, but is the necessary source of change itself. This identity thus has difference as an essential moment…’ For Taylor, some things are self-identical — things with only one property. But even here the thing with one property has more than one property. There is (1) the thing and (2) the one property of the thing, from which the thing is distinguished. Even uni-proprietal things are not self-identical.
Of Identity in its speculative form, Hegel observes as absolute negation it is the negation that immediately negates itself, a non-being and difference that vanishes in its arising, or a distinguishing by which nothing is distinguished, but which immediately collapses within itself.
‘This identity is, in the first instance, essence itself, not yet a determination of it; it is the entire reflection, not a distinct moment of it. As absolute negation, it is negation immediately negating itself — a non-being and difference that vanishes as it arises, or a distinguishing by which nothing is distinguished but which immediately collapses within itself. But the non-being of the other is the sublating of the other and hence of the distinguishing itself. Here, then, distinguishing is present as self-referring negativity, as a non-being which is the non-being of itself — a non-being which does not have its non-being in an other but has it within itself. What is present, therefore, is self-referring, reflected difference, or pure, absolute difference’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
These should be familiar sentiments about Essence by now. In its moment of unity, a Determination of Reflection is an absolute negation — a negation rendered immediate (when negations are by nature correlative). Its other moment — positedness — arises but immediately collapses, leaving the Determination of Reflection an immediacy that contains difference within it. ‘Identity is not something given or derived: it is something that has to be continually achieved and reaffirmed, involving the anxiety of non-identity and self-negation’, explains Michael Kosok.
With regard to the other moment of the Determination of Reflection — the moment of positedness, in which difference can be discerned — Hegel remarks the distinguishing is the positing of non-being as nonbeing of the other. But the non-being of the other is sublation of the other and therewith of the distinguishing itself. These last quotes are from a mysterious paragraph 2. There is no paragraph 1 in this Remark. This problem stems from the German original. as Burbidge explains. Possibly this paragraph was not intended to be part of the Remark but was the second paragraph to the general section on Identity. A. V.. Miller illegitimately assigns a numeral 2 to the paragraph just above the Remark.
In other words, Reflection is the statement, I am not that. It is always a reference to an other. This other is, by now, a negative non-being. But, in its announcement, Essence erases or sublates the other and returns to itself.
‘The Pool’
by H.D., (1886–1961)
Are you alive?
I touch you.
You quiver like a sea-fish.
I cover you with my net.
What are you — banded one?
Meanwhile, the other is the self of Essence. Essence distinguishes itself from itself. Identity, then, is reflection-into-self and internal repulsion. It is difference that is identical with itself. But difference is only identical with itself in so far as it is not identity but absolute non-identity. In short, we have a version of Hegel’s key slogan — the identity of identity and difference, the bond that holds together opposites in the very activity of opposing them or holding them apart,
The First Original Law of Thought. ‘Few topics have occasioned more irritated criticism of Hegel than his views on the Laws of Thought in formal logic, not least what he says about the Law of Identity’, claims Errol Eustace Harris, (1908–2009). The identity of identity and difference is a Schellingian slogan, but, for Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, (1775–1854), the Absolute, which mediates between identity and difference, is a complete indifference, which leads Hegel to characterize the Schellingian absolute as a night in which all cows are black.
‘To pit this single insight, that in the Absolute everything is the same, against the full body of articulated cognition, which at least seeks and demands such fulfilment, to palm off its Absolute as the night in which, as the saying goes, all cows are black — this cognition is reduced to vacuity’.
- ‘The Phenomenology of Spirit’
Audaciously, Hegel attacks the very notion of A = A — the presupposition of self-identity. Self-identity is taken as one of the universal laws of thought that lie at the base of all thinking, that are absolute in themselves and incapable of proof.
‘The determinations of reflection have customarily been singled out in the form of propositions which were said to apply to everything. They were said to have the status of universal laws of thought that lie at the base of all thinking; to be inherently absolute and indemonstrable but immediately and indisputably recognized and accepted as true by all thought upon grasping their meaning. Thus identity, as an essential determination, is enunciated in the proposition, ‘Everything is equal to itself; A = A’, or, negatively, ‘A cannot be A and not-A at the same time’.
Hegel sees no reason why thinking should begin with -4 is -4. Why not begin with the proposition ‘A is’? We would then begin, as Hegel had done, with all the determinatenesses of the sphere of being.
‘On the face of it, it is difficult to see why only these simple determinations of reflection should be expressed in this particular form and not also the rest, such as the categories that belong to the sphere of being. We would then have, for instance, such propositions as, ‘Everything is’, ‘Everything has an existence’, etc.; or again, ‘Everything has a quality, a quantity, and so on’. For being, existence, etc., are as logical determinations the predicates of everything in general. A category, according to the etymology of the word and Aristotle’s definition of it, is what is said and asserted of every existent. — But the difference is that a determinateness of being is essentially a transition into the opposite of it; the negative of every determinateness is just as necessary as that determinateness itself; as immediate determinacies, each determinateness immediately confronts the others. If any of these categories is therefore expressed in a proposition, the opposite proposition comes up just as well, both offering themselves with equal necessity and, as immediate claims, each has at least equal right. Each would therefore require a proof as against the other, and both claims would no longer possess the character of immediately true and indisputable propositions’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Being is the universal predicate. Of course, Being turns into its opposite, implying that negative Being is just as necessary as affirmative Being. If A = A, it is likewise true that A ≠ A. Neither Identity nor Difference, then, can assert a privilege over the other.
Determinations of Reflection have two moments: Identity and Difference. As relational and therefore determinate, they contain the propositional form (i.e., A = A). A proposition expresses a relation. But the other moment of the Reflexionbestimmungen is self-identity, to which the propositional form is superfluous. Even within their proper domains, propositional forms are retrogressive. They simply privilege affirmative Quality at the expense of Negation. Judgment, in contrast, transfers the content to the predicate as a universal determinateness which is for itself and is distinct from its relation, the simple copula.
‘The determinations of reflection are, on the contrary, not qualitative in kind. They are self-referring and consequently abstract from the determinateness of others. Further, since as determinacies they are self-references, they therefore already have the propositional form in them. For proposition and judgment differ mainly because in the former the content constitutes the connection itself of the terms, or is a specific connection. Judgment, on the contrary, converts the content into a predicate which is a universal determinateness by itself, distinct from its connection which is the simple copula. Whenever a proposition is to be transformed into a judgment, the determinate content — if, for instance, it resides in a verb — is transformed into a participle in order in this way to separate the determination itself from its connection with a subject. The propositional form is instead more closely allied to the determinations of reflection which are immanently reflected positedness. — Only, when they are enunciated as universal laws of thought, they are in need of a subject of their connection, and this subject is the everything, or an A which equally means ‘all being’ and ‘each being’.’
- ‘The Science of Logic’
This presages Hegel’s analysis in the Subjective Logic. See chapter twenty. Hegel suggests that judgement transforms verbs into participles. For instance, she sleeps becomes she is sleeping. But Determinations of Reflection are propositions, not judgments. In them, the propositional form itself lies immediately at hand. In propositions, the subject and the predicate are diverse, but in judgement they are not. In any case, the so-called laws of thought — everything is the same, everything is different — contradict each other. If everything is identical, then nothing is different, and nothing has any ground. ‘The result is a universe of nonarticulated monads, each indistinguishable from the others. Hence each collapses into the others, and the result is . . . the Parmidean One’, explains Rosen.
Or, if no two things are the same, everything is different from everything else. Then A ≠ A, but A is not opposed to A either. That is to say, if A is completely diverse from/l, they are not opposed but are self-identical (and hence not different from each other).This was the lesson of Being-for-self at the end of chapter three. Also, I am borrowing from Hegel’s critique of Diversity and Opposition in his Jena system: ‘The self-equivalent is something other’.
Either one of these laws rules out the other. They can only be enumerated one after the other.
A = A is supposed to be an empty tautology. It has therefore been rightly remarked that this law of thought has no content and leads no further.
‘In its positive formulation, A = A, this proposition is at first no more than the expression of empty tautology. It is rightly said, therefore, that this law of thought is without content and that it leads nowhere. It is thus to an empty identity that they cling, those who take it to be something true, insisting that identity is not difference but that the two are different. They do not see that in saying, ‘Identity is different from difference’, they have thereby already said that identity is something different. And since this must also be conceded as the nature of identity, the implication is that to be different belongs to identity not externally, but within it, in its nature. — But, further, inasmuch as these same individuals hold firm to their unmoved identity, of which the opposite is difference, they do not see that they have thereby reduced it to a one-sided determinateness which, as such, has no truth. They are conceding that the principle of identity only expresses a one-sided determinateness, that it only contains formal truth, truth abstract and incomplete. — Immediately implied in this correct judgment, however, is that the truth is complete only in the unity of identity and difference, and, consequently, that it only consists in this unity. When asserting that formal identity is incomplete, there is vaguely present to one’s mind the totality, measured against which that identity is incomplete; but the moment one insists that identity is absolutely separate from difference and in this separation takes it to be something essential, valid, true, then what transpires from these two contradictory claims is only the failure to reconcile these two thoughts: that identity is as abstract identity essential, but that, as such, it is equally incomplete. What is lacking is the awareness of the negative movement as which, in these claims, identity itself is displayed. — Or when this is said, that identity is identity essentially as separation from difference or in the separation from difference, then right there we have the expressed truth about it, namely that identity consists in being separation as such, or in being essentially in the separation, that is, it is nothing for itself but is rather moment of separation’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
It is the favourite slogan of those who think identity and difference are different (and not the same). They do not see that in this very assertion they are themselves stating that identity is different; for they are saying that identity is different from difference. That is to say, it is in the nature of identity to be different. Many will say of A = A that it is merely a formal truth, which is abstract, incomplete. But such an assertion implies that complete truth requires the unity of Identity and Difference. In other words, if A = A is only formal, then truth must have a form like A = B. This is obviously the assertion that A is different from B — they have different names, shapes, positions on the page, etc. Yet the equal sign signifies that these different symbols are nevertheless the same. In effect, what people mean by identity is absolute separation. Identity is nothing for itself but is a moment of separation. In other words, identity cannot even be expressed except in terms of difference.
‘Mirror’
by Sylvia Plath, (1932–1963)
I am silver and exact. I have no preconceptions.
Whatever I see I swallow immediately
Just as it is, unmisted by love or dislike.
I am not cruel, only truthful‚
The eye of a little god, four-cornered.
Most of the time I meditate on the opposite wall.
It is pink, with speckles. I have looked at it so long
I think it is part of my heart. But it flickers.
Faces and darkness separate us over and over.
Now I am a lake. A woman bends over me,
Searching my reaches for what she really is.
Then she turns to those liars, the candles or the moon.
I see her back, and reflect it faithfully.
She rewards me with tears and an agitation of hands.
I am important to her. She comes and goes.
Each morning it is her face that replaces the darkness.
In me she has drowned a young girl, and in me an old woman
Rises toward her day after day, like a terrible fish.
A = A is taken as self-evident, and its truth is established by an appeal to universal experience. But this appeal is a mere manner of speaking. For it is not pretended that the experiment with the abstract proposition A = A has been made on every consciousness. The appeal, then, to actually carried-out experiment is not to be taken seriously; it is only the assurance that if the experiment were made, the proposition would be universally admitted. In fact, what people experience, Hegel says, is A = B , and from this the proposition A = A is abstracted. But this abstraction does not leave experience as it is, but rather alters it. The experience of A = B, Hegel says, is the immediate refutation of the assertion that abstract identity as such is something true, for the exact opposite, namely, identity only in union with difference, occurs in every experience.
‘As to the other confirmation of the absolute truth of the principle of identity, this is made to rest on experience in so far as appeal is made to the experience of every consciousness; for anyone presented with this proposition, ‘A is A’, ‘a tree is a tree’, immediately grants it and is satisfied that the proposition is self-evident and in need of no further justification or demonstration’.
‘On the one hand, this appeal to experience, that every consciousness acknowledges the principle universally, is a mere manner of speaking. For nobody will want to say that the abstract proposition, ‘A is A’, has actually been tried out on every consciousness. The appeal to actual experience is therefore not in earnest but is rather only an assurance that, if the said experiment were made, universal acknowledgment of the proposition would be the result. — And if it is not the abstract proposition as such that is meant, but the proposition in concrete application, from which application the abstract proposition would then have to be developed, then the claim to the universality and immediacy of the latter would consist in the fact that every consciousness assumes it or implies it as foundation, and indeed does so in its every utterance. But the concrete and the application are precisely in the reference that connects simple identity with a manifold which is different from it. Expressed as a proposition, the concrete would be first of all a synthetic proposition. From this concrete itself, or from the synthetic proposition expressing it, abstraction could indeed extract the principle of identity through analysis; but, in actual fact, it would not then leave experience as is but would have altered it, since in experience the identity was rather in unity with difference. And this is the immediate refutation of the claim that abstract identity is as such something true, for what transpires in every experience is the very opposite, namely identity only united with difference’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
The abstraction of A = A as a universal rule of thought is disappointing. If anyone opens his mouth and promises to state what God is, namely God is — God, expectation is cheated, for what was expected was a different determination; and if this statement is absolute truth, such absolute verbiage is very lightly esteemed; nothing will be held to be more boring and tedious than conversation which merely reiterates the same thing.
‘On the other hand, the experiment with the pure principle of identity is also all too often made, and it demonstrates clearly enough how the truth contained in the principle is regarded. If, for instance, to the question, ‘What is a plant?’, the answer is given, ‘A plant is… a plant’, the whole company on which this answer is tried out would both grant it and at the same time unanimously declare that the statement says nothing. If anyone opens his mouth and promises to announce what God is, and says that ‘God is … God’, expectation is cheated, for a different determination was anticipated; and though the proposition is absolute truth, very little is made of such absolute verbiage. Nothing will be held to be more tedious, more aggravating, than a conversation which only chews the cud, however true the cud might nevertheless be’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
When someone says, ‘A plant is — ‘, the listener expects some real information. The expectation is that the plant as such will disappear and some essential predicate will take its place. The propositional form can be regarded as the hidden necessity of adding to abstract identity. Hence, if instead of plant we substitute identity, identity will disappear and become something different.
How legitimate is this line of argument? Hegel is referring to the attempt to ground A =A in experience. Since his unnamed opponents rely on experience, Hegel feels equally licensed to examine what experience requires — that identity requires difference. Of course, Hegel in general thinks experience to be a poor source for truth. Identity, Hegel says, is the pure movement of Reflection. It identifies what it is by announcing what it is not. A is enunciated: it is not ‘not A’ — a negation of the negation. ‘Not A’ appears only to vanish immediately. A and ‘not A’ are thus distinguished. Distinguishedness is the identity that A and ‘not A share. In short, Identity in its speculative sense already contains difference within it — as Identity (Absolute Difference) shows. A is as much not A as it is A.
The law of identity, then, does not express a law of thought. The opposite is true. A = A violates the way thought really functions. These laws contain more than is meant by them, to wit, this opposite, absolute difference itself. The point is precisely the opposite of what Justus Hartnack attributes to Hegel: ‘Nevertheless, Hegel’s point is clear enough … ‘A = A’ is a tautology, and from a tautology nothing but tautologies follow’. In fact, tautologies have surplus content yielding speculative progress. Tautology wins a special place in the logical progress in chapter twelve.
Difference. Even the Understanding saw that simple Identity is really a complex identity of Identity and Difference. The difference (Unterschied) between Identity and Difference is now the two hour traffic of our stage. The discussion is divided into three parts. The point of the three sections is to show that Difference is properly located first in a — in its Identity with Identity. This is absolute difference. So far, this is a continuation of Understanding’s account of Identity. Next, Difference is diverse from Identity. This dialectical moment locates Difference in c, where it is radically other to Identity. Hegel calls this moment Diversity (Verschiedenheit). Finally, Speculative Reason relocates Difference in the middle term b, where it is called Opposition.
Absolute Difference. In Identity (Absolute Difference) , the Understanding saw that Reflection has two moments — the moment of positedness (which implies Difference) and the moment of immediacy (which implies Identity). If Reflection has said, I am not Difference, the Understanding emphasizes that it is Difference by virtue of this very enunciation. Difference is the negativity which reflection has within it.
‘Difference is the negativity that reflection possesses in itself, the nothing which is said in identity discourse, the essential moment of identity itself which, as the negativity of itself, at the same time determines itself and is differentiated from difference’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
When Identity speaks (i.e., announces what it is not), Difference is the language spoken. Difference is internal to Identity and is to be located in a, along with Identity. It is not difference resulting from anything external, and for this very reason is difference in and for itself.
‘This difference is difference in and for itself, absolute difference, the difference of essence. — It is difference in and for itself, not difference through something external but self-referring, hence simple, difference. — It is essential that we grasp absolute difference as simple. In the absolute difference of A and not-A from each other, it is the simple ‘not’ which, as such, constitutes the difference. Difference itself is a simple concept. ‘In this’, so it is said, ‘two things differ, in that etc.’ — ‘In this’, that is, in one and the same respect, relative to the same basis of determination. It is the difference of reflection, not the otherness of existence. One existence and another existence are posited as lying outside each other; each of the two existences thus determined over against each other has an immediate being for itself. The other of essence, by contrast, is the other in and for itself, not the other of some other which is to be found outside it; it is simple determinateness in itself. Also in the sphere of existence did otherness and determinateness prove to be of this nature, simple determinateness, identical opposition; but this identity showed itself only as the transition of a determinateness into the other. Here, in the sphere of reflection, difference comes in as reflected, so posited as it is in itself’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Absolute Difference endures. Unlike the otherness of Determinate Being, which was inherently internal, otherness is now overtly internal. In the realm of Being, Absolute Difference revealed itself only as the transition of one determinateness into the other. Now Reflection moves within a totality. Difference may be different, but it is just as much Identity and holds itself together as such. It is not transition into an other, not relation to an other outside it: it has its other, identity, within itself.
‘Difference, thus as unity of itself and of identity, is internally determined difference. It is not the transition into another, not reference to another outside it; it has its other, identity, within, and in like manner identity, in being included in the determination of difference, has not lost itself in it as its other but retains itself therein — is the reflection-into-itself of difference, its moment’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Difference is not different from an other, but is different from itself And that which is different from Difference is Identity. Identity is as much Difference as it is Identity, and vice versa. Each is a genuine moment of the other. Absolute Difference is the Understanding’s moment, but dialectical dynamism exists in the two moments of Identity and Difference. The Understanding cannot distinguish between them; all things are the same and different. This dialectical modulation is to be considered as the essential nature of reflection and as the specific, original ground of all activity and self-movement. It signifies that the Understanding is beginning to merge with Dialectical Reason.
Diversity. Because Absolute Difference is a positedness, it a determinate difference. This leads to Diversity, a key moment for the Logic. In Diversity, ‘close relative of … atomism’, says Robert M. Wallace. ‘Each partial and provisional element, therefore, fails to maintain itself in isolation, because its true and only nature is as a moment in the whole, so that it demands and goes over into its other to unite with it and to constitute a more complete and adequate exemplification of the ultimate universal principle of wholeness’.
Difference is isolated from Identity. When Difference is absolutely isolated and held to have no relation to its other, it is a finite Being. Finite Beings erase themselves. Difference needs otherness to endure; it needs to be part of an Opposition. When a moment is merely Diverse, it has already vanished. Michael Inwood, (1944–2021), proclaims the rule of diversity invalid, because there is such a thing as immediate awareness or unmediated knowledge: ‘Any thing has a definite nature of which one might be aware without being aware of the processes and interactions responsible for it. We can, for example, easily know that Hegel is in Berlin without knowing how he got there … One can be aware of the determinate character of a thing while ignoring the physical and/or logical relationships which underlie it’. This objection constitutes a faith in the self-identity of objects and in the possibility of unmediated knowledge of them, which separates Inwood from Hegel, Kant and the entire speculative tradition.
Diversity
Diversity is a dialectical moment. Whereas the Understanding proposes the identity of Identity and Difference, Dialectical Reason asserts their difference. Identity falls apart within itself into diversity.
‘Identity internally breaks apart into diversity because, as absolute difference in itself, it posits itself as the negative of itself and these, its two moments (itself and the negative of itself ), are reflections into themselves, are identical with themselves; or precisely because it itself immediately sublates its negating and is in its determination reflected into itself. The different subsists as diverse, indifferent to any other, because it is identical with itself, because identity constitutes its base and element; or, the diverse remains what it is even in its opposite, identity’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Difference is to be isolated in c of Diversity, where, for just a moment, it stands over against Identity in a. In Diversity, there is no relation-to-other, only self-identity. Identity and Difference are not different in themselves. The irony is that difference is external to them. Accordingly, Difference is merely imputed to them by a third — an intelligence that takes concepts to be self-identities but nevertheless proclaims them alike or not alike. There is no inner standard or principle that could apply to them, simply because diversity is the difference without unity in which the universality, which in its own self is absolute unity, is a merely external reflection.
‘The particular contains the universality that constitutes its substance; the genus is unaltered in its species; these do not differ from the universal but only from each other. The particular has one and the same universality as the other particulars to which it is related. The diversity of these particulars, because of their identity with the universal, is as such at the same time universal; it is totality. — The particular, therefore, does not only contain the universal but exhibits it also through its determinateness; accordingly the universal constitutes a sphere that the particular must exhaust. This totality, inasmuch as the determinateness of the particular is taken as mere diversity, appears as completeness. In this respect, the species are complete simply in so far as there are no more of them. There is no inner standard or principle available for them, for their diversity is just the dispersed difference for which the universality, which is for itself absolute unity, is a merely external reflex and an unconstrained, contingent completeness. But diversity passes over into opposition, into an immanent connection of diverse moments. Particularity, however, because it is universality, is this immanent connection, not by virtue of a transition, but in and for itself. It is totality intrinsically, and simple determinateness, essential principle. It has no other determinateness than that posited by the universal itself and resulting from it in the following manner’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
‘To be Written on the Mirror in Whitewash’
by Elizabeth Bishop, (1911–1979)
I live only here, between your eyes and you,
But I live in your world. What do I do?
— Collect no interest — otherwise what I can;
Above all I am not that staring man.
Since c or a is as much Difference as Identity, and since these self-identities are (by heritage) Reflections, reflection has become, in general, external to itself; difference is merely a posited or sublated being.
‘In diversity, as the indifference of difference, reflection has in general become external; difference is only a positedness or as sublated, but is itself the whole reflection. — On closer consideration, both, identity and difference are reflections, as we have just established; each is the unity of it and its other, each is the whole. But the determinateness, to be only identity or only difference, is thus a sublated something. They are not, therefore, qualities, since their determinateness, because of the immanent reflection, is at the same time only as negation. What we have is therefore this duplicity, immanent reflection as such and determinateness as negation or positedness. Positedness is the reflection that is external to itself; it is negation as negation and consequently, indeed in itself self-referring negation and immanent reflection, but only in itself, implicitly; its reference is to a something external’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Posited means that Difference says, I am not Difference. I am a self-identity. Yet Difference is the very being of this self-identity. Hence, Difference — a or c — sublates itself and deposits its own being in a third b. Diversity, then, is just a pose. When considered more closely, both identity and difference are reflections, each of which is unity of itself and its other; each is the whole. Diversity’s two moments. Determinations of Reflection are dualities — the union of positedness (otherness) and equality-with-self (immediacy). Diversity reflects this duality. Diversity is a reflection-in-itself.
‘Reflection in itself and external reflection are thus the two determinations in which the moments of difference, identity and difference, are posited. They are these moments themselves as they have determined themselves at this point. — Immanent reflection is identity, but determined to be indifferent to difference, not to have difference at all but to conduct itself towards difference as identical with itself; it is diversity. It is identity that has so reflected itself into itself that it truly is the one reflection of the two moments into themselves; both are immanent reflections. Identity is this one reflection of the two, the identity which has difference within it only as an indifferent difference and is diversity in general. — External reflection, on the contrary, is their determinate difference, not as absolute immanent reflection, but as a determination towards which the implicitly present reflection is indifferent; its two moments, identity and difference themselves, are thus externally posited, are not determinations that exist in and for themselves’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
And b External Reflection. Reflection-in-itself [a, b, stands for Identity; it is determined as being indifferent to difference c, not as simply not possessing difference. It is Diversity proper. Yet immediacy in the absence of otherness self-erases; a and crepresent the same reflective movement of self-erasure.
The second moment of Diversity — External Reflection — stands for the determinate difference” between Identity and Difference. According to External Reflection, c and a are different. The first moment (implicit Reflection), however, is indifferent to External Reflection’s opinion. For this reason, the posture of Diversity is that Identity and Difference are externally posited determinations, not determinations in and for themselves. Likeness and unlikeness is Hegel’s term for external Identity and Difference. These are positednesses which lack being-in-and-for-self In this moment, the identities are indifferent to whether they are deemed like or unlike some other identity. Whether or not something is like something else does not concern either the one or the other; each of them is only self-referred, is in and for itself what it is; identity or non-identity, as likeness or unlikeness, is the verdict of a third party distinct from the two things.
‘Now this external identity is likeness, and external difference is unlikeness. — Likeness is indeed identity, but only as a positedness, an identity which is not in and for itself. — Unlikeness is equally difference, but an external difference which is not, in and for itself, the difference of the unlike itself. Whether something is like or unlike something else is not the concern of either the like of the unlike; each refers only to itself, each is in and for itself what it is; identity or non-identity, in the sense of likeness or unlikeness, depend on the point of view of a third external to them’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
A thing’s indifference to what I think it is like is the prejudice of scepticism. Likeness and unlikeness are but the mediocre tools of subjective comparison (Vergleichung). In comparison, the diverse thing passes to and fro between likeness and unlikeness. But this relating to likeness and unlikeness is external to these determinations themselves.
‘External reflection connects diversity by referring it to likeness and unlikeness. This reference, which is a comparing, moves back and forth from likeness to unlikeness and from unlikeness to likeness. But this back and forth referring of likeness and unlikeness is external to these determinations themselves; moreover, they are not referred to each other, but each, for itself, is referred to a third. In this alternation, each immediately stands out on its own. — External reflection is as such external to itself; determinate difference is negated absolute difference; it is not simple difference, therefore, not an immanent reflection, but has this reflection outside it; hence its moments come apart and both refer, each also outside the other, to the immanent reflection confronting them’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
This modulation between a and c portends dialectical Reason. We can think of this alternation occurring within b, which participates in both a and ceven as it is external to them. Robert Wallace finds an optimistic note in comparison, wherein objects are indifferent to what external reflection thinks. If things are indifferent to being like other things, they are at least open to comparison, and they imply, in general, consciousness capable of comparison.
In their alternation, each extreme stands forth immediately on its own. The alternation that occurs is external to the extremes. We can view the alternation occurring in b, taken as external to a or c. But b in truth is just as much internal to a, b or b, c. For this reason, when b is posited as external to c or to a, Reflection is external to itself. In effect, b is a Diversity, just as a and c are, and so it must self-erase. Because they stand apart from the process of reflection-into-self, the moments of Identity and Difference fall asunder and are related also as mutually external to the reflection-into- self confronting them.
Three Diversities now face each other. Reflection has now alienated itself from itself. The very thing that was supposed to hold off contradiction and dissolution from them, namely, that something is like something else in one respect, but is unlike it in another — this holding apart of likeness and unlikeness is their destruction.
‘Because of this separation from each other, they sublate themselves. Precisely that which should save them from contradiction and dissolution, namely that something is like another in one respect but unlike in another — precisely this keeping of likeness and unlikeness apart, is their destruction. For both are determinations of difference; they are references to each other, each intended to be what the other is not; the like is not the unlike, and the unlike is not the like; both have this connecting reference essentially, and have no meaning outside it; as determinations of difference, each is what it is as different from its other. But because of their indifference to each other, the likeness is referred to itself, and similarly is unlikeness a point of view of its own and a reflection unto itself; each, therefore, is like itself; difference has vanished, since they have no determinateness to oppose them; in other words, each is consequently only likeness’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Identity a has no meaning separate and apart from Difference b. Nor do like and unlike have meaning apart from each other either. Like is simply not unlike and no more than that. Yet, according to External Reflection, likeness is only self-referred, and unlikeness similarly self-referred and a reflective determination on its own; each, therefore, is like itself; the Difference has vanished. Each therefore is only likeness. The claim of like-unlike simply blows up — as sceptical External Reflection knows. Any external difference discerned is the negativity that belongs to the comparer in the act of comparing.
‘Accordingly, this indifferent viewpoint or the external difference sublates itself and it is in itself the negativity of itself. It is the negativity which in comparing belongs to that which does the comparing. This latter oscillates from likeness to unlikeness and back again; hence it lets the one disappear into the other and is in fact the negative unity of both. This negative unity transcends at first what is compared as well as the moments of the comparing as a subjective operation that falls outside them. But the result is that this unity is in fact the nature of likeness and unlikeness themselves. Even the independent viewpoint that each of these is, is rather the self-reference that sublates their distinctness and so, too, themselves’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
The comparer him or herself is the negative unity of both likeness and unlikeness. The comparer lies beyond the compared and also beyond the moments of the comparison. Comparison is a subjective act falling outside them. But, Hegel suggests, the very fact that likeness and unlikeness do not function is their negative unity. Like and unlike, held apart by and from External Reflection, are mere finite beings that cease to be. If likeness ceases to be, then likeness is not like itself. Unlikeness, which also ceases to be, is therefore, in its finitude, just like likeness. In this process, Diversity c expels and so unifies its positedness a, b. This is the same as saying that External Reflection unifies likeness and unlikeness. Likeness and unlikeness, Hegel asserts, formed the side of positedness a, b as against the compared or the diverse c. And the compared/diverse cis implicitly the very Reflection that likeness and unlikeness posited as external to themselves. But, given the exercise of showing that likeness is unlikeness and vice versa, this positedness has equally lost its determinateness. That is, a and c are precisely alike and cannot be distinguished. They are invisible.
‘Likeness and unlikeness constituted the side of positedness as against what is being compared or the diverse which, as contrasted with them, had determined itself as implicitly existent reflection. But this positedness has consequently equally lost its determinateness as against this reflection. Likeness and unlikeness, the determinations of external reflection, are precisely the merely implicitly existent reflection which the diverse as such was supposed to be, its only indeterminate difference. Implicitly existent reflection is self-reference without negation, abstract self-identity and therefore positedness itself. — The merely diverse thus passes over through the positedness into negative reflection. The diverse is difference which is merely posited, hence a difference which is no difference, hence a negation that negates itself within. Likeness and unlikeness themselves, the positedness, thus return through indifference or through implicitly existing reflection back into negative unity with themselves, into the reflection which is the implicit difference of likeness and unlikeness. Diversity, the indifferent sides of which are just as much simply and solely moments of a negative unity, is opposition’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Meanwhile, a, b, though expelled, is still a genuine moment of Diversity c — the implicit Reflection. Now that a , b is identified with an indeterminate like-unlike, Hegel can say that like-unlike is the genuine moment of Diversity after all. But likeness and unlikeness, the determinations of external reflection, are just this merely implicit reflection which the diverse as such is supposed to be, the merely indeterminate difference of the diverse. Scepticism is defeated. The merely diverse, therefore, passes over through positedness into negative reflection. Speculative Reason observes that Diversity defeats itself and embraces what (supposedly) External Reflection says of it. The diverse is the merely posited difference, therefore the difference that is no difference, and the negation of itself. Thus likeness and unlikeness themselves, that is, positedness, returns through indifference or the implicit reflection back into the negative unity with itself Diversity, whose indifferent sides are just as much simply and solely moments of one negative unity, is opposition.
So Diversity abolishes itself because of its indeterminacy. It transports its being into the positedness it thought to exclude. It needed that otherness to be determinate. ‘External reflection must see its contradiction in the content itself. It does this by considering the transition from diversity to opposition, no longer subjectively but objectively. Subjectively, the reflection of similarity in dissimilarity, and, reciprocally, the reflection of dissimilarity in similarity, is the opposition of the self to the self, but this opposition is also immediately the opposition in the thing; the [thing] is similar in its dissimilarity, dissimilar in its similarity. The things reflect one another, and this reflection is opposition’, explains Jean Hyppolite, (1907–1968).
This leads us to Opposition. The Law of Diversity Identity expressed itself in the law of A = A. Diversity too has its law: All things are different.
‘Diversity, like identity, is expressed in a proposition of its own. But the two propositions otherwise remain indifferent to each other, each valid on its own irrespective of the other. ‘All things are different’, or ‘No two things are alike’. — This principle is in fact opposed to the principle of identity, for it says: ‘A is something distinctive, therefore A is also not-A’; or, ‘A is unlike another, hence it is not A in general but rather a distinctive A’. In the proposition expressing identity, the A can be replaced by any other substrate, but when A is something distinctive, it cannot be interchanged with anything else. Of course it is not supposed to be different from itself, but only from some other; but this diversity is its own determination. As self-identical, A is indeterminateness; but as determinate it is the opposite thereof; it no longer has only self-identity but also carries a negation within, and hence a difference within it of itself from itself’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Hegel proposes that the law of diversity is opposed to the law of identity. If A is distinctive, it is so on its own principle. That means A has Difference within itself: A is distinctive, therefore A is also not A. The law of diversity, however, does not go so far as to say that A is different from itself. A is supposed to be different from some other and so is still self-identical. But Hegel has shown that self-identical (diverse) things are indeterminate. If A is determinate, then A must have negation inside it — a difference of itself from itself. Ordinary thinking, Hegel suggests, is struck by the proposition that no two things are like each other.
‘That everything is different from everything else is an altogether superfluous proposition, for in the plural of things there is already implied a multitude and totally indeterminate diversity. — The principle, however, ‘There are no two perfectly like things’, expresses more than that, for it expresses determinate difference. Two things are not merely two (numerical multiplicity is only the repetition of one) but are rather differentiated by a determination. The proposition that there are no two things which are like each other strikes the imagination as strange — as in the anecdote about the court where Leibniz propounded it, occasioning the ladies to search among the leaves of trees to see whether two alike could be found. — Happy times for metaphysics those, when it was practiced at court and no greater effort was called for to demonstrate its propositions than to compare the leaves of trees! — The reason why the principle strikes us as strange lies in what has just been said, namely because ‘two’, or any numerical plurality, does not yet contain a diversity which is determinate, and because diversity as such, taken in abstraction, is at first indifferent with respect to likeness and unlikeness. Ordinary thinking, when it goes on to determine it, assumes that these two moments are themselves indifferent to each other, so that each is sufficient for the determination without the other, the mere likeness of things sufficient without their unlikeness — as if the things would be diverse even if only numerically many, diverse in general without being unequal. The law of diversity, on the contrary, proclaims that things are diverse from each other by virtue of unlikeness, that the determination of unlikeness belongs to them just as much as that of likeness, for only the two together constitute determinate difference’.
- The Science of Logic’
Hegel elsewhere invokes an anecdote which he tells in a slightly more charming way. The story is told that when Leibniz propounded the maxim of Variety, the cavaliers and ladies of the court, as they walked round the garden, made efforts to discover two leaves indistinguishable from each other, in order to confute the law stated by the philosopher. Their device was unquestionably a convenient method of dealing with metaphysics — one which has not ceased to be fashionable. All the same, as regards the principle of Leibniz, difference must be understood to mean not an external and indifferent diversity merely, but difference essential. Hence the very nature of things implies that they must be different.
‘We are told that on one occasion Leibniz propounded the principle of diversity [i. e., of the identity of indiscernibles] when he was at court; and the ladies and gentlemen who were strolling in the garden tried to find two leaves that could not be distinguished from one another, in order, by exhibiting them, to refute the philosopher’s law of thought. This is doubtless a convenient way to busy oneself with metaphysics and one that is still popular today; but with regard to Leibniz’s principle it must be noted that being distinct must not be conceived as external and indifferent diversity, but as inner distinction,’ and that to be distinct pertains to things in themselves’.
- The Encyclopedia Logic’
‘The Other Side of A Mirror’
by Mary Elizabeth Coleridge, (1861–1907)
I sat before my glass one day,
And conjured up a vision bare,
Unlike the aspects glad and gay,
That erst were found reflected there -
The vision of a woman, wild
With more than womanly despair.
Her hair stood back on either side
A face bereft of loveliness.
It had no envy now to hide
What once no man on earth could guess.
It formed the thorny aureole
Of hard, unsanctified distress.
Her lips were open — not a sound
Came though the parted lines of red,
Whate’er it was, the hideous wound
In silence and secret bled.
No sigh relieved her speechless woe,
She had no voice to speak her dread.
And in her lurid eyes there shone
The dying flame of life’s desire,
Made mad because its hope was gone,
And kindled at the leaping fire
Of jealousy and fierce revenge,
And strength that could not change nor tire.
Shade of a shadow in the glass,
O set the crystal surface free!
Pass — as the fairer visions pass -
Nor ever more return, to be
The ghost of a distracted hour,
That heard me whisper: — ‘I am she!’
This anecdote can be traced to Fourth Letter from Gottfried Wilhelm von Leibniz, (1646–1716), to Samuel Clarke, (1675–1729).
Opposition
Yet, to the extent ordinary thinking believes in self-identity, it is committed to the proposition that all things are the same, since selfidentical things cannot be distinguished. If the law of diversity is to hold, then diversity must pass from likeness into unlikeness. This involves the dissolution and nullity of the law of diversity.
‘In this lies also the dissolution, the nothingness, of the law of diversity. Two things are not perfectly alike. So they are at the same time alike and unlike — alike, by the very fact that they are things, or two in general, for each is a thing or a one just as well as any other, and each is therefore the same as the other; unlike, however, ex hypothesi. What we then have is this determination, that the two moments, likeness and unlikeness, are different in one and the same thing, or that their differentiating difference is at the same time one and the same reference. Here is where we have the transition into opposition’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
If no two things are alike, then they are alike at least in this: they are at once alike and unlike.
‘The ‘at the same time’ of the two predicates will indeed be held fragmented by means of the ‘in so far’: two things are in so far like, in so far unlike; or they are alike from one side and viewpoint, but unlike from another. In this way, the unity of likeness and unlikeness is kept away from a thing, and what would be the thing’s own reflection and the immanent reflection of likeness and unlikeness is fixed as a reflection external to the thing. But it is this reflection which, in one and the same activity, distinguishes the two sides of likeness and unlikeness, by the same token contains them in one activity, and lets the one shine reflected into the other. — The ordinary tenderness for things, the overriding worry of which is that they do not contradict themselves, forgets instead, here as elsewhere, that contradiction is not thereby dissolved but is rather shoved elsewhere, into subjective or external reflection; forgets that the two moments of this reflection, of which it speaks as assumed facts in its effort at removing them or displacing them, are in fact contained in it as sublated, and each referring to the other in one unity’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Likeness and unlikeness are held asunder by ordinary thinking. The device that holds them asunder, Hegel says, is the phrase in so far (das Insofern). Thus it is said that two things are alike in so far as they are not unlike. One side of the relation is privileged at the expense of the other. Ordinary thinking thus relies on the implicit Reflection — a, b in Diversity — to which the unity of likeness and unlikeness is removed from the thing, leaving the thing b a self-identity. In a, b, likeness and unlikeness turn into each other. Nevertheless, ordinary thinking is happy to have exported contradiction from the thing to the subjectivity of thinking. But the usual tenderness for things, whose only care is that they do not contradict themselves, forgets here as elsewhere that in this way contradiction is not resolved but merely shifted elsewhere, into subjective or external reflection generally, and this reflection in fact contains in one unity as sublated and mutually referred, the two moments which are enunciated by this removal and displacement as a mere positedness. This tenderness toward things and fear of contradiction echoes remarks quoted supra at 179.
Opposition. Difference was at first absolute and indistinguishable from Identity. Then it was diverse and, ironically, equally indeterminate. Once again, Dialectical Reason thought to improve upon the Understanding but only succeeded in repeating its mistakes. In Opposition (Gegensatz), the determinate reflection, difference, finds its completion. Opposition is the unity of identity and difference; its moments are different in one identity and thus are opposites. In Opposition, the moments of difference are held within. Its moments — Identity and Difference — are said to be reflected moments.
‘In opposition, the determinate reflection, difference, is brought to completion. Opposition is the unity of identity and diversity; its moments are diverse in one identity, and so they are opposites. Identity and difference are the moments of difference as held inside difference itself; they are reflected moments of its unity. Likeness and unlikeness are instead the externalized reflection; their self-identity is not only the indifference of each towards the other differentiated from it, but towards being-in-and-for-itself as such; theirs is a self-identity that contrasts with identity reflected into itself, hence an immediacy which is not reflected into itself. The positedness of the sides of external reflection is therefore a being, just as their non-positedness is a non-being’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
That is to say, each moment states what it is not — Identity is not identical, Difference is indifferent. By confessing what it is not, each moment establishes what it is. ‘In an opposition … two things are explicitly antithetical to each other within a single framework . . . There difference is subordinate to, and governed by, their identity; it explicitly breaks up the general picture into incompatible particulars. So whatever opposes one body to another assumes some basic identity that they share’, explains John W. Burbidge.
These moments in Diversity were mere immediacies not reflected into themselves; rather, they were indifferent towards being-in-and-for-self as such.The External Reflection that stood against them was a positedness — a unity of likeness and unlikeness. This positedness has Being, Hegel says. lf their non-positedness is a non-being, that is to say, the diverse moments posit their other — External Reflection (which is on the side of Being). The Diverse moment itself is a non-positedness which is not, Self-identical moments, then, sublate themselves and pass over into External Reflection — and vice versa: e — d, f and f — d, e. Each Diverse moment was therefore, in the end, a positedness reflected into itself or determination in general.
‘On closer consideration, the moments of opposition are positedness reflected into itself or determination in general. Positedness is likeness and unlikeness; these two, reflected into themselves, constitute the determinations of opposition. Their immanent reflection consists in that each is within it the unity of likeness and unlikeness. Likeness is only in a reflection which compares according to the unlikeness and is therefore mediated by its other indifferent moment; similarly, unlikeness is only in the same reflective reference in which likeness is. — Each of these moments, in its determinateness, is therefore the whole. It is the whole because it also contains its other moment; but this, its other, is an indifferent existent; thus each contains a reference to its non-being, and it is reflection-into-itself, or the whole, only as essentially referring to its non-being’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
In plainer language, Essence requires external reflection for its determinacy.
Things do not determine themselves. Essence is ‘where determinacy is determined by a determiner that it thereby reflects’, explains Richard Dien Winfield, (1950 — ). In chapter one a schematic drawing of thought was outlined and in terms of Reflection, it can now be seen that the diverse object c sublates itself and transports itself into thought b. Likewise, the subject a sublates itself and transports itself to thought. In short, the subject is indeterminate unless it is thought. But once it is in thought, it is no longer subject as such. This vindicates the Lacanian criticism of the Cartesian cogito ergo sum. Properly, Descartes should have said, ‘I think, and I am not’, or, alternatively, ‘I do not think, therefore I am’. See Jeanne L. Schroeder, ‘Three’s a Crowd’.
If Diversity posits an external reflection — an implicit reflection — and if implicit Reflection is d, f or d, e, then d, e, f can be analyzed as the unity of like-unlike, each of which turns into its opposite. These moments of d, f or d, e Hegel calls the determinations of opposition.
Thought
Each moment is as much like as unlike. Each requires the other for its coherence. Therefore, each of these moments is, in its determinateness, the whole. Each contains reference to its non-being, and is only reflection-into-self or the whole, as essentially connected with its non-being. In terms of Opposition, the whole is d, and it is located fully within d, e and d, f. ‘In polar opposition, each term is such that its interaction with another opposed entity is constitutive of its own reality’, explains Charles Taylor.
‘Looking-Glass River’
by Robert Louis Stevenson, (1850–1894)
Smooth it glides upon its travel,
Here a wimple, there a gleam –
O the clean gravel!
O the smooth stream!
Sailing blossoms, silver fishes,
Pave pools as clear as air –
How a child wishes
To live down there!
We can see our coloured faces
Floating on the shaken pool
Down in cool places,
Dim and very cool;
Till a wind or water wrinkle,
Dipping marten, plumping trout,
Spreads in a twinkle
And blots all out.
See the rings pursue each other;
All below grows black as night,
Just as if mother
Had blown out the light!
Patience, children, just a minute –
See the spreading circles die;
The stream and all in it
Will clear by-and-by.
Positive and Negative. The Understanding proposes that Opposition is Positive and Negative. William Wallace, (1844–1897), sounds the wrong note in suggesting that Essence and ‘its determinateness (i.e., appearance) stand to each other in the same relation as positive stands to negative’. In my view, Essence b stands over against Positive and Negative a. Essence is neither Positive nor Negative but that which sustains this Opposition. The Positive is self-likeness reflected into itself that contains within itself the reference to unlikeness. If it is self-identical, it is so through excluding the negative. See Wendell Kisner, ‘Erinnerung, Retrait, Absolute Reflection: Hegel and Derrida’. The Negative is the obverse — unlikeness that contains within itself the reference to its non-being, to likeness. Both are positednesses.
In Positive and Negative, Positive d, e and Negative e, f refer to each other even as they refer to themselves. So each is (I) itself and (2) its other. Furthermore, (3) each is the whole.
‘This self-likeness, reflected into itself and containing the reference to unlikeness within it, is the positive; and the unlikeness that contains within itself the reference to its non-being, to likeness, is the negative. — Or again, both are positedness; now in so far as the differentiated determinateness is taken as a differentiated determinate reference of positedness to itself, opposition is, on the one hand, positedness reflected into its likeness with itself; and, on the other hand, it is the same positedness reflected into its inequality with itself: the positive and the negative. — The positive is positedness as reflected into self-likeness; but what is reflected is positedness, that is, the negation as negation, and so this immanent reflection has the reference to the other for its determination. The negative is positedness as reflected into unlikeness; but positedness is the unlikeness itself, and so this reflection is therefore the identity of unlikeness with itself and absolute self-reference. — Each, therefore, equally has the other in it: positedness reflected into self-likeness has the unlikeness; and positedness reflected into self-unlikeness, the likeness’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
We have before us a portentous moment — the beginning of the notional form. Notion is the unity of a itself, b its other, and c the unity of itself and other. Henry Marcuse describes these three moments as the ‘unity as the remaining and persisting self, unity as the process of unifying, and the united manifold’. Notional form is subject and predicate and ‘it is this ‘relation’ between subject and predicate and this conceptualization … of itself as the unity of subject and predicate’.
Positive and Negative
Positive and Negative are now posited as the unity of (1) themselves and (2) their other. Positive and Negative start to develop (3) — later to be identified as Individuality. Dialectical Reason remembers that Positive and Negative are Diverse — not just unified Opposites. As Diverse, they are indifferent to whether they are designated as Positive or Negative. Therefore, although one of the determinatenesses of positive and negative belongs to each side, they can be changed around, and each side is of such a kind that it can be taken equally well as positive as negative.
‘The determinations which constitute the positive and the negative consist, therefore, in that the positive and the negative are, first, absolute moments of opposition; their subsistence is indivisibly one reflection; it is one mediation in which each is by virtue of the non-being of its other, hence by virtue of its other or its own non-being. — Thus they are simply opposites; or each is only the opposite of the other; the one is not yet the positive and the other not yet the negative, but both are negative with respect to each other. Each, therefore, simply is, first, to the extent that the other is; it is what it is by virtue of the other, by virtue of its own non-being; it is only positedness. Second, it is to the extent that the other is not; it is what it is by virtue of the non-being of the other; it is reflection into itself. — The two, however, are both the one mediation of opposition as such in which they simply are only posited moments’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
In other words, Dialectical Reason points out that Self-Subsistence is beyond the precincts of the Positive or Negative. According to Dialectical Reason, each is the whole and each is as much the other as it is itself. So each is as much a sublated positedness as it is a positedness. As a, b, the Positive is a positedness — a reference-to-other. Taken as a, it is a Diversity and not a positedness. Positive and Negative, however, are not merely the like and unlike, which yielded their being to External Reflection. Even within the context of Self-Subsistence, Positive and Negative a, b each have self-subsistence b — reflection-into-self. They both have it b and don’t have it a.
But the Positive has this second moment — it negates the Negative. Thus the negating reflection of the positive is immanently determined as excluding from itself this its non-being. The third moment of Positive and Negative is that each is the unity of itself and other. Without this knowledge, not a single step can really be taken in philosophy.
‘The opposition of positive and negative is normally taken in the sense that the former (even though its name conveys positedness) is to be supposed as objective; the latter, instead, as something subjective that only belongs to an external reflection and has nothing to do with what exists objectively in and for itself, even is for the latter nothing at all. And in fact, if the negative only expressed a subjectively arbitrary abstraction or a determination of external comparison, then it would indeed be for the positive nothing at all, that is, there would be no reference in the positive to such an empty abstraction; but then its determination, that it is a positive, would equally be only external to it. — As an example of the fixed opposition of these determinations of reflection, take light in general to be the solely positive, and darkness the solely negative. But light has, in its unending expansion and power to suscitate and vivify, the nature of absolute negativity. Darkness, on the other hand, as a non-manifold or as the non-self-differentiating womb of generation, is simple self-identity, the positive. In the way it is taken, it is only a negative, in the sense that it is the mere absence of light, nothing at all for itself, so that light, in referring to it, would not be referring to another but purely to itself, would therefore simply disappear before it. But surely light is dimmed to gray by darkness; and, besides this merely quantitative alteration, it also suffers the qualitative one of being determined as colour by referring to darkness. — So also virtue, for example, is not without struggle; it is rather the highest, the perfect struggle, and thus not only a positive but rather absolute negativity; virtue is virtue, not just by comparison to vice, but for the opposition and the combat in it. Or again, vice is not only the lack of virtue — innocence too is such a lack — and distinct from virtue not just in the eyes of an external reflection, but is opposed to virtue in itself; it is evil. Evil consists in maintaining one’s own ground as against the good; it is positive negativity. Innocence, on the other hand, as the lack of both good and evil, is indifferent to these determinations — is neither positive nor negative. But at the same time this lack must be taken also as a determinateness and, as such, on the one hand it is to be considered as the positive nature of something just as, on the other, as referring to an opposite. And thus all natures fall from innocence, from their indifferent self-identity; because of what they are in themselves they refer to their other, and therefore they cause themselves to founder, or, positively expressed, they return to their ground. — Truth also is the positive as the knowledge that agrees with the object, but it is this likeness to itself only in so far as knowledge has related itself negatively to the other, has penetrated the object and sublated the negation which the latter is. Error is something positive as the self-aware and deliberate assertion of something which has no existence in and for itself. Ignorance, for its part, is either something indifferent to truth and error — hence neither positively nor negatively determined, its determination a lack and thus the domain of external reflection — or, objectively taken as the defining determination of a nature, an instinct that is directed against itself, a negative containing a positive direction within it. — To perceive and to be mindful of this nature of the determinations of reflection is among the most important steps in cognition: that their truth consists only in their reference to one another, and hence that each contains the other within its very concept. Without this recognition, no proper step in philosophy can be made’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
The point here is that the Positive (and hence the Negative) are in and for self. They are not merely diverse. Yet they are nothing in isolation from their other. This implies that the in-itself of Positive or Negative is relation. When taken in this way, Positive and Negative are in and for themselves. Hegel says that, isolated, the Positive is an implicit Contradiction — a positedness that is not a relation to an other, a sublated positedness. As a sublated positedness, it is a relation without parts — an impossibility. It therefore cannot be, and is nothing. And, being negative, it refers to its other — to that which it negates. It is thus this contradiction that, in positing identity with itself by excluding the negative, it makes itself into the negative of what it excludes from itself, that is, makes itself into its opposite.
If the Positive is implicitly Contradiction, the negative is the contradiction posited.
‘Difference as such is already implicitly contradiction; for it is the unity of beings which are, only in so far as they are not one — and it is the separation of beings which are, only in so far as they are separated in the same reference connecting them. The positive and the negative, however, are the posited contradiction, for, as negative unities, they are precisely their self-positing and therein each the sublating of itself and the positing of its opposite. — They constitute determining reflection as exclusive; for the excluding is one act of distinguishing and each of the distinguished beings, as exclusive, is itself the whole act of excluding, and so each excludes itself internally’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
The Negative is a reflection-into-self and therefore in and for itself. It is a Negative with self-subsistence. It is therefore determined as a non-identical, as excluding identity.
‘This is the absolute contradiction of the positive; but it is immediately the absolute contradiction of the negative; the positing of both in one reflection. — Considered in itself as against the positive, the negative is positedness as reflected into unlikeness to itself, the negative as negative. But the negative is itself the unlike, the non-being of another; consequently, reflection is in its unlikeness its reference rather to itself. — Negation in general is the negative as quality or immediate determinateness; but taken as negative, it is referred to the negative of itself, to its other. If this second negative is taken only as identical with the first, then it is also only immediate, just like the first; they are not taken, therefore, as each the other of the other, hence not as negatives: the negative is not at all an immediate. — But now, since each is moreover equally the same as what the other is, this reference connecting them as unequal is just as much their identical connection’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
It excludes itself from itself while remaining identical to itself.
Self-Subsistence
Nothing illustrates this point better than a bar magnet, one side of which is positive and the other negative.
‘In the positive and the negative we think we have an absolute distinction. Both terms, however, are implicitly the same, and therefore we could call the positive ‘the negative’ if we liked, and conversely we could call the negative ‘the positive’ as well. Consequently, assets and debts are not two particular, independently subsisting species of assets. What is something negative for the debtor is something positive for the creditor. The same applies to a road to the East: it is equally a road to the West. Thus, what is positive and what is negative are essentially conditioned by one another, and are [what they are] only in their relation to one another. There cannot be the north pole of a magnet without the south pole nor the south pole without the north pole. If we cut a magnet in two we do not have the north pole in one piece and the south pole in the other. And in the same way, positive and negative electricity are not two diverse, independently subsisting fluids’.
- ‘The Encyclopedia Logic’
Can the positive or negative side be isolated? If one snips the end of off a bar magnet in an effort to isolate the positive or negative, one replicates a new bar magnet. The small piece now has its positive and negative extremes. These moments of the bar magnet cannot be isolated. Each requires the other for its existence. Positive and Negative are as much the entire bar magnet as they are themselves or the mere non-being of their other. Each therefore is, only in so far as its non-being is, and is in an identical relationship with it.
‘The positive and the negative are thus the sides of opposition that have become self-subsisting. They are self-subsisting because they are the reflection of the whole into itself, and they belong to opposition in so far as the latter is determinateness which, as the whole, is reflected into itself. Because of their self-subsistence, the opposition which they constitute is implicitly determinate. Each is itself and its other; for this reason, each has its determinateness not in an other but within. — Each refers itself to itself only as referring itself to its other. This has a twofold aspect. Each is the reference to its non-being as the sublating of this otherness in itself; its non-being is thus only a moment in it. But, on the other hand, here positedness has become a being, an indifferent subsistence; the other of itself which each contains is therefore also the non-being of that in which it should be contained only as a moment. Each is, therefore, only to the extent that its non-being is, the two in an identical reference’.
- ‘The Science of Logic’
Hegel compares the Negative to the early idea of Negation. The Negative is correlated with the Positive — part of a pair. Like the Positive, it is a positedness; it states what it is not — the Positive. But its being is in the Positive. Hence, the Negative is unlike itself. It transfers its quality to the other and hence to itself. Therefore its reflection into its unlikeness is rather its relation to itself. Each extreme is the same as its opposite. Primitive Negation, in contrast, is immediate determinateness. It is not related to an other and not, strictly speaking, an opposite. But have we not been emphasizing that negation is always a correlate — a negation of something? How can this be reconciled with Hegel’s claim that primitive Negation is an immediacy? The answer is that negation is correlative for us at the level of Quality and Negation. For itself, Negation stood for Dialectical Reason’s positivization of what the Understanding left out in proposing that the absolute is Determinate Being. As such, Negation is considered different from Determinate Being. The conclusion that it is also the same as Determinate Being only comes later. This is Speculative Reason’s conclusion in Something.
‘A Hand Mirror’
by Walt Whitman, (1819–1892)
HOLD it up sternly! See this it sends back! (Who is
it? Is it you?)
Outside fair costume — within, ashes and filth,
No more a flashing eye — no more a sonorous voice
or springy step,
Now some slave’s eye, voice, hands, step,
A drunkard’s breath, unwholesome eater’s face, ve-
nerealee’s flesh,
Lungs rotting away piecemeal, stomach sour and
cankerous,
Joints rheumatic, bowels clogged with abomination,
Blood circulating dark and poisonous streams,
Words babble, hearing and touch callous,
No brain, no heart left — no magnetism of sex;
Such, from one look in this looking-glass ere you go
hence,
Such a result so soon — and from such a beginning!
Dedicated to my lady and muse, my mirror, in whom I saw reflected an image of myself I had not seen before ..
I’ll be your mirror
Reflect what you are, in case you don’t know
I’ll be the wind, the rain and the sunset
The light on your door to show that you’re home
When you think the night has seen your mind
That inside you’re twisted and unkind
Let me stand to show that you are blind
Please put down your hands
’Cause I see you
I find it hard to believe you don’t know
The beauty that you are
But if you don’t let me be your eyes
A hand in your darkness, so you won’t be afraid
When you think the night has seen your mind
That inside you’re twisted and unkind
Let me stand to show that you are blind
Please put down your hands
’Cause I see you
I’ll be your mirror
The Velvet Underground and Nico, ‘I’ll be your mirror’:
Coming up next:
Opposite Magnitudes in Arithmetic and Ethics.
(And contradictions! One of my favourite topics. I can’t wait to get into it, maybe that is why I have been rushing these last couple of articles).
To be continued ….
