Life: A Necessary Concept?

Hegel argues that we ultimately cannot explain intelligibility without presupposing Aristotelian/Kantian “internal” teleology, which in turn requires the concept of the distinction between living and nonliving beings.

With nonliving beings, events simply happen. A piece of iron may rust, for instance, and that is that. It is still iron.

A living being, however, is always subject to a normative comparison to its concept. For Hegel, a plant that is dying of thirst is a “failing” instance of what it is to be a plant. There is no comparable status for the rusting piece of iron.

Mechanistic explanation offers an allegedly complete system of causality. But for Hegel, it raises the same “problem of indifference” that the logic of being encountered.

In a similar kind of move to what he has been doing in the Logic as a whole, Hegel argues that mechanism implicitly presupposes a more comprehensive kind of explanation, that it cannot really solve its own problems when it is pursued as the only valid form of explanation. He then considers in succession “chemism”, which additionally takes into account internal properties of materials that affect how they may combine with one another; “external” teleology applicable to artificial things, which explicitly presupposes a designer; and finally the immanent “internal” teleology considered by Aristotle and Kant.

Pippin dwells extensively on the similarities and differences between Kant and Hegel in this area. On the Kantian side, this involves an important evolution of Kant’s thought that occurred while he was writing what became the Critique of Judgment.

“In early 1789 Kant began to formulate the new problem of reflective judgment, as well as a new a priori principle for such a faculty, the purposiveness of nature. What is important to notice for our purposes is that with that development, the shape of the entire critical project began to change dramatically” (Hegel’s Realm of Shadows, p. 290).

“Kant had realized that something like the deep structure of judgments like ‘this rose is beautiful’ actually contravened its own surface structure, that the predicate ‘beautiful’ was not really functioning as a standard predicate, as it appeared to. It referred to no objective property or mere secondary quality. Instead, he concluded, it involved a nonconceptually guided reflective activity on the part of the subject of the experience, whose novel logic required notions like a free play of the faculties, purposiveness without a purpose, disinterested pleasure, a commonsense and universal subjective validity” (pp. 290-291).

“The realization of the distinct features of this reflective activity was only the beginning of a series of more strikingly novel claims of interest to us…. [T]he reflective judging that resulted in aesthetic judgments, also constituted the basic structure of teleological judgments, and so could account for the unique intelligibility of organic beings” (p. 291).

“And then a number of other issues seem to be thrown into the same reflective judgment pot. The formulation of scientific theories not fixed or determined by empirical generalizations involved this activity and its logic, as did the systematizing of empirical laws necessary for genuine scientific knowledge. Finally, even the determination of ordinary empirical concepts now seemed to require this newly formulated reflective capacity…. So reflective judging and its a priori principle were now necessary not only for explaining the possibility and validity of aesthetic judgments, but in accounting for the necessary distinction between organic and nonorganic nature, the formation of empirical concepts, the proper integration of genera and species, the general unification of empirical laws into systems of scientific law, theory formation itself, and the right way to understand the attribution of a kind of necessity to all such principles, judgments, concepts, laws, and systems” (ibid).

“Kant continued to hold that such reflective judging was not constitutively necessary for there being objects of experience at all, and so could not be properly called cognition…. But Kant himself seems to be conceding that that result alone leads to an impoverished notion of cognition…. We wouldn’t know much… without empirical concepts, laws, systems, and distinctions between living and nonliving. So all the above products of reflective judgment must count as indispensable, and in a way that is not just convenient, but nevertheless remains merely regulative” (p. 292).

“Given their necessity and indispensability, given how much we would miss in the world if we could not claim to know that things fall into kinds (that there are empirical concepts), that nature is law-governed with necessity, that species fall under genera, and that some beings are alive, the Hegelian question is: Why does Kant persist, even after the expansion of his system in the third Critique, in claiming that we do not really know any of these things, that we just require them of ourselves and can’t see a way to abandon such commitments?” (ibid).

Kant seems to have held that in spite of its value for subjective understanding, teleology stands in conflict with scientific explanation; that the only objective causality is efficient causality; and that an objective teleology would imply a sort of “backwards” determination in time. Hegel contests all of this.

“For Kant, a living being requires us to think something we cannot, how the whole causes the parts that cause it” (p. 293).

Pippin, like Kant, seems to regard the last formulation as a reduction to absurdity. But he himself notes that in biological reproduction, parts and whole are produced simultaneously. And many processes in nature work by a kind of feedback, which involves circular dependencies that play out over time in an alternating or simultaneous way.

“[J]ust as Kant did not attempt to deduce the necessary existence of events in causal relations, but sought to show that any event that did exist must stand in a necessary relation to some prior event, and just as Kant did not try to deduce the necessary existence of living beings, but tried to show that any world that required mechanistic explanations of what exists, or any world in which change is a matter of efficient causation, must also allow, cannot rule out, that there are changes like gestation, birth, growth, reproduction, disease, and death, which cannot be accounted for by the logical form appropriate for nonliving beings, so Hegel is not out to deduce a priori the necessary existence of living beings, but has an ambition similar to Kant’s… but much greater because Hegel denies that teleological explanations are merely subjectively necessary” (p. 274).

“In terms of the logic of the Concept where the concept of life appears, [Hegel] means to show that there could not be adequate mechanistic and chemical and ‘external’ teleological explanations (say, the production of an artifact guided by a maker’s representation) without the contrasting distinction with living beings, without, following Kant, ‘internal’ teleology. (That is, a case where an element is for the sake of the whole without its being the — impossible — case that the element or part intends to be for the whole, and without reference to any designer’s intention.) His unusual thesis is that teleology is ‘the truth of mechanism’. That is, mechanistic explanations are domain specific, and so represent an abstraction from a more comprehensive and complex domain that includes subjective or intentional teleology and objective teleology in organic beings” (pp. 275-276).

“For Hegel, … the conceptual forms required for the unity of judgment are, at the same time, the forms necessary for any object determinacy. The forms of thought are the forms of being” (p. 276).

This is not because thought has magic powers, but because of the kind of thing that being has turned out to be in the investigations of the Logic. In my estimation at least, Hegel has convincingly shown that true being is inseparable from meaning and intelligibility. It is not some dumb and arbitrary “existence”.

“Life is said to be the ‘immediate’ manifestation of the Idea” (p. 277).

What this means is that “Life will reveal at an initial level the true unity of subjectivity and objectivity. This is said in the sense in which even plants, for Hegel, have ‘subjectivity’ even as objects. Their growth and nutrition cannot be comprehended adequately as just the product of mechanical forces. Each can be said to ‘direct’ the course of its life as it requires; each has an inner distinct from an outer, where this does not just mean inside as opposed to outside its surface” (ibid).

It was not clear to me that the Idea would even have an “immediate manifestation”. At this point, the Idea seems to me to be something that in itself would be purely mediate, even though experience always involves an element of immediacy. But at least within a human subjectivity, something purely mediate can always be represented, and the representation in itself does have a kind of immediacy. This case is a little different, but the argument that a plant has a kind of rudimentary “subjectivity” while also being a kind of object does, I think, suggest a way of understanding this simultaneous subjectivity and objectivity that could be seen as a simple instance of the union of subjectivity and objectivity that characterizes the Hegelian Idea.

“[H]aving shown the truth of the object in self-consciousness, in conceptuality, Hegel proposes to investigate the concept in that status, now understood as being-true, or in its being the ground of the intelligibility of the object. As he says, now ‘the concept determines itself as objectivity’…. This begins after a consideration of the concept in its formality, in the structure of concept, judgment, and syllogism. This then suggests the question of the world of objects, of ‘the truth’, of being-in-and-for-itself, already reflected in the truth-preserving inferential structure of such a syllogistic. To have reached this stage, presupposing everything that has gone before, is to see the logic of the relation among concepts in judgments and of judgments in inferential syllogistic relations as comprehending objects and their interrelations as explicable in a system” (p. 278).

This kind of use of “system” simply expresses the coherence in real intelligible being, and does not have the objectionably pretentious character that was all too common in talk of philosophical “systems” in Hegel’s Germany. Since Hegel does use “system” in this more benign and substantial sense, I am inclined to be forgiving of his rhetorical participation in the enthusiasm for philosophical “systems”.

“At such a point, we will have fleshed out considerably the ‘object’s being its concept’ in a much fuller logical system of judgmental interrelations, systematically, and a modally robust one, prescribing what must and cannot happen under this or that condition. In this fuller systematic picture, we need a determinate characterization of the norm, comprehensibility, as such. Such a norm or pure concept of genuine understanding will tell us what a thing is in terms of its relevant relational properties” (pp. 278-279).

With the concept, we have explicitly entered the territory of normativity. A concept for Hegel is never just a representation. Every Hegelian concept has a normative character.

“That determinate norm of comprehensibility is what is introduced by the pure concept Mechanism — more broadly in the claim that true comprehensibility is and is only mechanistic, paradigmatically Newtonian mechanics. Yet again, it is this sort of overreach that reveals the limitations and incompleteness of such a norm of comprehensibility. This is the first, immediate, simplest manifestation of the a priori claim to a norm for determinate explicability…. This is essentially a ‘billiard balls’ model of moving and inertial forces, in which there is what Hegel continually calls ‘an indifference’ in the relation among objects. And therein will lie its chief problem” (p. 279).

The concept of mechanism now shows a dynamic very similar to what we saw before with the concept of Being. In both cases, Hegel wants to extract as much insight and value as possible from their respective failures.

“That is, the indifference of objects external to each other, or comprehended only as matter moving and colliding in space, means there is no real explanation of what happens, just a formalization of what happens. There is no way (except pragmatically or ‘subjectively’ for Hegel) to select in or out the relevant relations among such indifferent objects, and we will find instead that we are awash in infinite contingency, with no real ground for our isolation of the relevant units of comprehension” (pp. 279-280).

“Chemism does make such an appeal to internal properties, the chemical properties, to explain why some chemical compounds are possible and others are not. Objects considered chemically are not ‘indifferent’ but determine their relationality as dependent on the kind they are” (p. 280).

“When we say that average acceleration over a period of time is its change in velocity divided by the duration of the period, or when we say that the hydrogen and oxygen molecules combined to form water, or when we say that that clock functions poorly, or that wolf is deformed, these are not empirical distinctions within a common notion of comprehensibility. In Hegel’s language, they are objective aspects of the logical distinctions between immediacy, mediation, and self-mediation necessary for all objective intelligibility” (p. 281).

Hegel in the Logic aims to develop a kind of universal logical meta-language for explaining the more concrete concepts we use to explain the world.

“A living being’s concept is not external to it as a particular being. That particularity is essentially nothing other than the becoming of its concept. The concept is internal to its nature, and that nature is self-determining, not determined from without. (Hence the claim that life is the first, immediate manifestation of the Absolute Idea, the unity of subjectivity and objectivity.)” (ibid).

“Now, a simple way to sum all of this up, however misleading, would be to say that for Hegel life is an objectively necessary pure concept because we know that mechanism is such a concept, and that chemism is, and that artifactual teleology is, and that these pure concepts are incomplete without teleological concepts, ultimately the concept of living organisms” (p. 282).

“As we have already seen, Kant distinguishes, and Hegel praises him for doing so, between an element in a complex that is purposive because it satisfies the ends of the designer or maker, like a radiator in a car, or external purposiveness, and an element the purposiveness of which is determined not by any appeal to an external designer, but rather ‘internally’ in an organic self-organizing and self-maintaining whole. We explain the parts by reference to this whole, which itself is, reciprocally, the reason the parts are as they are; and all of this without any intention of the parts, such as organs, to represent anything as their end. So, for example, we can say what leukocytes, white blood cells, are for, without reference to a designer of the system, but by reference to the internal ends of the living being, such as maintaining health by attacking foreign invaders like bacteria or parasites. As Kant says, we can show that the parts of a living being ‘as far as their existence and their form are concerned are possible only through their relation to the whole'” (pp. 283-284).

“But, again, [for Kant] this is all a matter of what we must think for the sake of a satisfying explanation…. It must be merely that because… teleological causality makes no sense in the scientific terms Kant considers himself to have established…. ‘Strictly speaking, therefore, the organization of nature has nothing analogous to any causality known to us'” (p. 284).

“But all of this is supposed to be consistent with the unavoidability of teleological explanations, that is, with their necessity…. He asserts as a philosophical truth that we will never be able to [reduce life to mechanistic principles], and even that it is ‘absurd’ to imagine that we could. (No ‘Newton for a blade of grass’, ever.) He says clearly that we can no more give up the teleological principle and the idea of final causality than we could give up the universal causal principle itself” (pp. 284-285).

“One brief reason [Kant] gives for this is that this abandonment would leave us without anything ‘for guidance in observing’…. While we have the possibility of a physical and chemical account of cell division, we are not observing a mere series. With that account alone, we would have no way of understanding that these processes are part of one series, no way to isolate anything like ‘what comes next’ and so no language to explain what happens when it does not” (p. 285).

“What [Hegel] tries to show is that mechanism as a principle, as a pure or logical principle…, already amounts to, implicitly, what is most distinctive about teleology, an ‘explanation by concept’, how a thing ‘matches up’ to its concept, although in mechanism this concept is only ‘in itself’, not ‘for itself’…. [H]is claim is that while mechanism posits a radical independence among objects in motion, the results of mechanism itself reveal a regular dependence, fixed and unvarying, among such putative independent objects, and it must transform itself into a position that can do this justice, not treat it as an astonishing accident” (p. 288).

Final installment in this series: The Logic’s Ending

Unconditioned Knowledge?

Kant speaks of reason’s dissatisfaction with “conditioned” knowledge, and of a practical necessity for us to posit the existence of some unconditioned knowledge (e.g., about God, the soul, and the world), even though we can only posit it and it remains finally unavailable to us as knowledge.

Hegel, though well aware of the limits of the knowledge we have, wants to decisively reject the idea that “knowledge” could exist that is in principle beyond the capabilities of finite beings. Leibniz had already suggested that if we take the universality of reason seriously, this means there ought to be nothing, even in divine understanding, that would be in principle beyond the ability of finite rational beings to understand. Hegel claims that such a view ought to be compatible with Kant’s critical principles, even though Kant does not seem to think it is.

“In the realm of finite objects, any specification of determinate intelligibility, even if relatively successful, is still limited, or in Kant’s sense ‘conditioned’…. Since any such rendering intelligible must be self-conscious to be such a judging, such conditionedness and limitation are inseparable from determinate intelligibility itself, and so can be said to ‘demand’ completion in an unconditioned…. With this established, however, we seek a higher degree of intelligibility (one not subject to such limitations), indeed the highest. And so the concept itself, or conceptuality itself, the truth of finite objectivity, is now our object. In this sense, pure thinking’s determination of itself, not just qua the truth of objects, but qua itself as its own object, represents, ultimately, Hegel’s unconditioned” (Pippin, Hegel’s Real of Shadows, p. 252).

“Hegel… goes on to note the many Kantian affinities of his project. The concept of the concept, or conceptuality, or conceiving as the truth of being, is the ‘”I” or pure self-consciousness‘… and he notes Kant’s own version of the truth of any object: Kant defined the object as ‘the concept in which the manifold is united’…. Being as such a ‘positedness’, which is nevertheless being-in-and-for-itself, means that the objectivity of any concept is ‘none other than the nature of self-consciousness, has no other moments of determination than the “I” itself'” (p. 253).

We could equally say that for Hegel, it is the concept of the concept — or the self-referentiality in apperceptive judgment — that says “I”.

Objectivity is not a matter of conformity to something given that could serve as a standard. It is ultimately a matter of good judgment that can be recognized as such and shared by others. It is up to us rational beings to work out the detail of what that means.

Hegel’s approach to the unconditioned is enabled by his removal of the qualifications Kant had placed on his revival of Aristotelian teleology in the Critique of Judgment. Implicitly in his works overall and more explicitly in the logic of the concept, Hegel seems to follow the same kind of top-level explanatory strategy as Aristotle, combining teleology and hypothetical necessity.

“[I]f we understand the structure of [Hegel’s] Logic as some kind of ascent or progress, and if we think of that progress as measured by degrees of any rendering intelligible, the former stage always requiring the latter as a condition, then the essential predicative forms we study in the Logic‘s three books will be (i) S is P, (ii) S is essentially P, and (iii) S is a good P. Teleological explanation (for artifacts, actions, and organic beings) is the beginning of wisdom about such a higher degree of intelligibility…. (On this scale the ‘absolutely’ intelligible would be, to use Aryeh Kosman’s phrase for a similar claim in Aristotle, ‘thinking thinking thinking’)” (pp. 254-255).

We should not be put off by the apparent impersonality of “thinking thinking thinking” or the Hegelian “concept”. The very abstractness of the Kantian “I” serves to make it a transparent vehicle for our most deeply held (i.e., most “actual”) values. Aristotle and Kant and Hegel are bypassing the petty foibles and opacity of an empirical ego in order to bring to the fore what I would call our deep ethical essence.

“Hegel tells us that, with the topic of the concept as such, we are entering ‘the realm of subjectivity and freedom’…, a language that has an unmistakable but mysterious practical air…. [H]e moves immediately to explain that metaphor with several other metaphors…. There is, he notes, a textbook understanding of concepts and their roles in judgments and the role of judgments in syllogisms. But he complains that such ‘material’ is not only ‘finished’… and ‘entrenched’… but ‘ossified’…. His task, he says, is to introduce a ‘fluidity’… into such material and to spark or ignite or animate… a living concept in such dead matter…. He then complains about the difficulty of his task, switching metaphors again, and compares his project to building a new city in a ‘devastated’ land…, a task rendered all the more difficult when the land is occupied by an ancient and ‘solidly constructed’ city. One must decide above all, he insists, not to make use of what is already there, ‘not to make use of much otherwise valued stock” (p. 255).

There is a great deal that is perfectly unobjectionable from the point of view of common sense that turns out to be incompatible with the self-determination of reason.

“[B]eing is conceptuality, not a material ‘made’ intelligible by the exercise of a subjective power…. What a thing is, in truth, is its intelligibility…. In the Logic, the question is dual: What is being such that it is intelligible? What is the intelligibility of being? For us, Hegel complains, the question seems to live on only in religion” (p. 257).

“The chief task of philosophy is to account for this conceptuality” (p. 258).

This accounting — a kind of articulation — is key. Philosophy does not make mere assertions.

“[Hegel] will say things like: philosophy (and he seems to be thinking of philosophy as exhibited in the Phenomenology of Spirit) is interested not in a simple factual narrative of what happened but instead in what ‘is true in what happens’, where that seems to mean what, in what happened, reveals something about what it is to be Geist [spirit]” (ibid).

“In [Kant’s] sense a cognitive mental act is neither mere ‘activity’, in the sense in which we might speak of a computer’s processing as its current activity (cognitive activity is norm responsive), nor an intentional action (one does not perceive or believe ‘on purpose’)…. We may intentionally or ‘on purpose’ take up the task of trying to understand why something happened, but as we gather evidence and test hypotheses, we are not — in, say, perceiving, or in judging on the basis of perceiving — intentionally doing something for the sake of something. The power of perceiving or the power of knowing (or their failure) is what it is (has its distinct end) in independence from whatever else we may also be trying to accomplish. According to Aristotle, for example, the actuality of an axe, its formal and final cause, is cutting, the actuality of the eye is seeing. None of this implies that the axe or the eye is purposively acting in its proper actualization. Cognitive activity is an actualization in that sense. But it is also true that the capacities of the eye are for an end, its distinct end as what it is, or qua eye. And in that sense the capacities for knowing are for an end which knowing has, qua knowing. (The spontaneous capacity too has a formal and final causality, not serial or successive, but immanent and simultaneous.)” (p. 259).

Individual perceptions, judgments, and thoughts thus occur in us “spontaneously”, even though at a higher level reason is purposeful. For long I’ve been mystified by Kant’s choice of the term “spontaneity” for our self-conscious doings. (As I am accustomed to using the word, it seems more to apply to something like the pre-conscious syntheses of imagination.) Pippin provides a valuable clue to Kant’s thinking about spontaneity here, when he points out that perceiving and judging are not doing something for the sake of something in the way that ordinary actions are for the sake of something.

“The understanding and reason (and finally, reflective judgment) are manifestations of one capacity, thinking, the spontaneous faculty…. There is understanding, Verstand, or thinking, considered with respect to what is the case, or in terms of the possible objects of thought, in the basic sense of claiming or judging about objects other than thought, objects that must be provided to such thinking, cannot be self-given, all on the one hand; and, on the other, reason, Vernunft, thinking considered without restriction, or thinking in so far as it is purely self-determining, thinking whose object is itself. In this latter sense, one thinks first, of course, of pure practical rationality, self-determining both in the sense that only reason can determine what the exercise of practical reason consists in, and in the sense that to act is to have a maxim one must give oneself, or it is to have a reason for the action that one counts as a reason. But reason in its theoretical use, what Kant calls its ‘hypothetical use’, is also self-determining” (p. 260).

“And in general, reason in this hypothetical use results in descending or ascending specifications…. But understanding… cannot be a distinct object for or to reason, as such objects are normally understood. That would be psychology. Reason’s determination of the unity of the ‘manifold cognitions’ of the understanding is the determination by thought of itself, of its own unity. (This perfectly parallel’s the Analytic’s claim that experience, the possible representation of an object at all, requires a unity that cannot be supplied by experience. Thinking provides this unity for itself, by itself.) Any such higher unity can never be an object of experience, but it is also the case that such postulations are not mere heuristic posits, dispensable or alterable as practical needs dictate. Every exercise of reason qua reason is a necessary self-determination” (p. 261).

Such a necessity of reason is still hypothetical, not categorical — if this, then that, never simply “that” as a conclusion out of the blue.

“All thinking is a spontaneity, an activity, not a perceiving or grasping. This is true for reflective judging as well” (ibid).

“Kant is interested in the Critique of Pure Reason in what he says our ‘cognitive faculty… provides out of itself’…. Hegel will ask why we should not also say that the categorical structure of experience is what reason requires of itself, with no threat of subjectivism if understood properly; why not say that the moral law is what reason requires of itself?” (p. 262).

Hegel is using deeply Kantian principles to question Kant’s conclusions about the inaccessibility of the unconditioned for us.

“Since, according to Kant’s apperception requirement, any judging is also the consciousness of judging (no one can be claiming something without knowing what she is doing), judging must be implicitly a subscription to the requirements of any such judging (thus including a commitment to be able to provide reasons for the judgment, to be denying anything inconsistent with the judgment and so forth, to be able to integrate the judgment in a consistent whole of other beliefs held), and more broadly, any putative act of knowing involves apperceptively a putative realization of what knowing should be. In this sense the attempt to know, as centrally a judging, is also a self-consciously purposive activity, end-directed (it aims at knowledge, unqualifiedly and unconditionally knowledge) and self-constituting (only reason can determine what the removal of such qualifications would amount to). In the case of the understanding, or judging informed by sensible intuition, this means that any instance of judging is an awareness that judgment is a piece of conditioned knowledge, and no such awareness, since it is an awareness of an attempt to know, can avoid in the completion of the pursuit of such an end this ‘need’ to seek the unconditioned. Such an end is inseparable from any pursuit of the end of knowing itself” (pp. 263-264, parenthesized German words omitted).

“[Kant] is suggesting that our relation to these issues is not a relation of knowing in the experiential or empirical sense…. The relation is some sort of practical relation, … which carries with it its own sort of practical necessity, one that can be said to have a priority — again a practical priority — over the capacities and limitations of reason in its theoretical use” (p. 264).

With respect to the strict self-determination of reason and the reality of this practical necessity to seek the unconditioned, Pippin says he cannot see any essential difference between Kant and Hegel. But “Hegel certainly has a different evaluation of the results…. He sees them not as self-imposed limitations on reason, but as constituting the intelligible structures of reality, and there is a radical boldness in his rejection of the idea of a reality or truth beyond any ability of ours to determine what it is” (p. 268).

“If we keep in mind this Kantian context, recall the essentially practical and productive character of the power of reason, recall that the sense-bearing unit of intelligibility for both Kant and Hegel is the judgment, and that judgments are necessarily self-conscious judgments, and so claimable only in the context of some awareness of their finitude or conditioned nature, then claims like these by Hegel look less mysterious” (ibid).

Pippin says the biggest difference between Kant and Hegel in this area is Hegel’s idea that the progress of the self-determination of reason is somehow driven by contradiction. But “the contradiction that Hegel is referring to is always an essentially practical contradiction, an activity’s contradiction of its own end, something that gets clearer, I hope, if we recall Kant’s account of the inherent purposiveness of reflective judgment and the hypothetical use of reason” (ibid; see Reflection and Dialectic).

“[Hegel] will often say things that seem outrageous [, for instance] that philosophy gives the form of necessity to what would otherwise appear merely contingent…. This can sound as if Hegel wants to say that the actual course of that development, philosophy can prove, could not have happened otherwise, as if, in science as well as philosophy (logic), there is a development over time that could not have been otherwise. If that sort of claim is supported by a claim about a self-transforming, underlying metaphysical entity, ‘cosmic spirit’, or ‘God’, developing according to some necessary law of internal teleology, then the claim seems hopeless” (p. 269).

I thoroughly agree that this kind of necessity — a purely deterministic unfolding of events in the world — is as foreign to Hegel as the idea of unlimited free will.

“At a more modest level, though, (and this is very much how I think he wants to be understood), he could mean that a significant transition in art history, or political history, or religious history, a shift in collective ethical commitments, or a development in a speculative logic (that the content of some determinate concept cannot be fixed without reliance on a successor, more comprehensive concept) can all be rendered intelligible by a philosophical account” (ibid).

“This account is based on a form of practical contradiction that introduces a more familiar form of necessity and one different from logical necessity or material necessity, the form appropriate to ‘he who wills the end must will, or necessarily wills, the means’ (otherwise we have evidence that he has not truly willed the end)” (ibid; see Hegel on Willing).

Any kind of historical interpretation — indeed any interpretation whatsoever, insofar as it aims to reach firm conclusions — ultimately faces the “problem” of the unconditioned. Pippin’s previous example of interpreting the actuality of a person’s character helps to bring all this down to earth. Hegel’s argument is that we do this kind of interpretation all the time, so whatever that necessarily presupposes must be possible.

Next in this series: Life: A Necessary Concept?

“The” Concept?

Whenever we are deeply engaged in reflection, we tend to “lose ourselves” in the subject matter. At the same time, what we are thinking about becomes a part of “us”. This kind of immersive unity that we can experience affords a glimpse of what Aristotle and Hegel are talking about when they speak of “thought thinking itself”.

This kind of inquiry will not directly answer any questions about how things are in the world, but Hegel implies it has the potential to make us wiser, in the same sense in which Aristotle associates first philosophy with wisdom.

Pippin has been arguing that Hegel’s Logic really is fundamentally about the kinds of questions Aristotle associated with first philosophy, and especially “What is it to say what something is?” (Hegel’s Realm of Shadows, p. 251).

This is an example of what I would call a “higher-order” question, as opposed to a relatively lower-order question like “What is that thing?”. What makes it higher-order is its reflective or self-referential character, here a “saying about saying”.

We have now reached the third and final part of the Logic, the “logic of the concept”. The logic of the concept is about “thinking about thinking” (and implicitly, I think, aims to address a yet higher-order concern for an account of higher-order questioning).

In short, “the” concept, or the Concept with a capital “C”, is for Hegel the concept of the concept, or conceptuality itself. Here we will be concerned no longer with the conditions of possible intelligibility of objects, but with conditions of the possibility of intelligibility as such.

The logic of being through its failure indirectly showed the conditions of possibility for merely identifying objects. The logic of essence asked what makes it possible to know or judge what something really is. Now that we are turned toward thought itself, the concern is how to judge well, and correlatively, what makes something a good whatever-it-is.

At the level of what Hegel calls the concept, we have left the subject-object split behind, and rejoined Aristotle’s perspective that what makes “pure” thought pure is that it “just is” what it is “about” — the thought is “identical” with what it thinks. (Recall again the experience of being immersed in reflection.) At the same time, Hegel’s Kantian “I” is something that emerges out of the self-reference in thinking about thinking, as a kind of name for the implicit unity of apperception in thinking about thinking.

Instead of a pre-existing substantive “I” entity confronting a pre-existing substantive object entity, the “I” and the object become meaningful signs both associated with what I would call the real or true “substantiality” that fills the whole space that is figuratively “in between”, while reaching vertically and horizontally far beyond any direct relations of “I” and object.

(That substantiality, I would say, is grounded in mutual relational articulation and in processes of constitution and synthesis of meaning, value, and form that cumulatively define what I really care about, as shown in my actions in the overall course of a life, which in turn defines who I am. At the same time, nothing that is is really external to it. Spinoza, Leibniz, and Fichte each in their own very different way are Hegel’s partial precursors in developing this kind of insight.)

Next in this series: Unconditioned Knowledge?

Reflection and Dialectic

As with dialogue, reflection provides a kind of model for dialectic. Reflection can be understood as an either metaphorical or literal dialogue with ourselves. We “question ourselves”, which is to say we examine and potentially criticize or refine the basis of our own commitments. Further, actual dialogue is always implicitly dialogue among fellow rational beings, all of whom are engaged at least to some extent in their own reflective activity, just by virtue of being rational beings, so dialogue implicitly presupposes reflection.

Pippin quotes Hegel: “But at issue here is neither the reflection of consciousness, nor the more specific reflection of the understanding that has the particular and the universal for its determination, but reflection in general…. For the universal, the principle or the rule and law, to which reflection rises in its process of determination is taken to be the essence of the immediate from which the reflection began…. Therefore, what reflection does to the immediate, and the determinations that derive from it, is not anything external to it but is rather its true being” (Hegel’s Realm of Shadows, pp. 238-239).

And again: “In general, this means nothing but this: Anything which is, is to be considered to exist not as an immediate, but as a posited; there is no stopping at immediate determinate being [Dasein] but a return must rather be made from it back into its ground, and in this reflection it is a sublated being and is in and for itself. What is expressed by the principle of sufficient reason is, therefore, the essentiality of immanent reflection as against mere being” (p. 239).

In the first quote, Hegel is again emphasizing that what he means by reflection is not just looking in a figurative mirror, but rather something more like finding an orientation among (or building a synthesis of) the potentially infinite mutual reflections in a hall of mirrors. Reflection “in general” is a name Hegel gives to reflection with this kind of potentially infinite dimension. (That the infinity here should be called potential is my friendly Aristotelian interpolation.)

In the second quote, he is saying that this kind of reflection — lifted out from the distinction between reflective activity and what it reflects upon — is what he would call the “truth” of everything that appears to be immediately determinate.

The principle of sufficient reason as formulated by Leibniz effectively says that for everything that is in some definite way, there is a reason why it is that way. Hegel is saying more specifically that such “reasons why” emerge immanently from the reflective grounding of what he is in a nonstandard way calling essence. What Leibniz cannot show is how a particular essence or monadic point of view results in certain predicates and not others; despite great sophistication, he is still to some extent using essence and monads as unexplained explainers to avoid what Hegel calls the “problem of indifference”. Hegel on the other hand explicitly makes essence and explanation interdependent.

“[T]he ‘principles’ of identification and differentiation are deeply intertwined, not independent of each other” (p. 240).

“[A] thing’s determinate properties are not, cannot be, a mark of that thing’s unlikeness from other things, just by being those properties…. If one thing is red and another square, we do not thereby know one is unlike the other; they are just two different things. A locomotive has nothing to do with a melody; it is not unlike a melody. We are trying to account not for determinate otherness, as in the logic of being, but for how objects that share properties (are like) could be, even with an extraordinary degree of such likeness, still unlike” (p. 241).

“Some of this anticipates topics in the logic of the Concept. Two trees are alike in being trees but unlike in being two individual trees. The idea will be that just in their likeness, their way of being alike, that they are unlike (different trees), just in the way each distinctly instantiates ‘treeness’ that they are unlike. Such a different ‘way of being a tree’ is not another property but the way the tree-properties are ‘had’ by the individual” (p. 242).

“Hegel is thinking of the way in which the specifying work of ‘unlikeness’ cannot be a matter of individual properties, atomistically conceived, but unlikeness within likeness is best understood as some content, the unlikeness of which is strict, even within such likeness. Some charge can be both positive and negative; some number, 4, can be both +4 and -4; some quantity of money can be an asset and also a debt pending; some force can be attractive and repelling; some distance marched east is canceled by the same distance marched west, and all these are ‘opposed’ only within some common likeness” (ibid).

I find “either-or” language more appropriate to these cases than the “both-and” language above, but the intent is the same. The distinctions in each sub-case are concrete “opposites” applicable to some specific context, and each definable only in reference to the other. In each case, it is possible to abstract an indifferent thing being measured or assessed — “positive-or-negative-quantity” for the one, and “virtue-or-vice” for the other.

“The ‘world’s being contradictory’ means nothing more than that, as he says, virtue cannot be virtue just by being other than, different from, in comparison with, vice, but only by ‘the opposition and combat in it’ against vice” (p. 243, emphasis in original).

Pippin complicates the matter with this example, because “relative” seems to have a different significance in the context of virtue and vice than it does in, say, that of positive and negative numbers. But the intended point is a very abstract one about constitution of meanings that is common to both cases. Whatever the difference between the two “oppositions” (positive/negative, virtue/vice), in each case the two sub-terms are somehow measured or assessed “against” one another.

“Hegel is trying to specify how affirming contrary predicates (‘in opposition’) does not amount to a logical contradiction. That is the point of his discussion, to make this distinction, not to treat such oppositions as if they were logically contradictory and then to affirm them anyway. As [Michael] Wolff puts it, Hegel’s orientation… is not from sentence or predicate negation, but from developments in the understanding of negative numbers and from Kant’s defense of Newton on positive and negative magnitudes. In general, then, mathematical, not logical negation” (pp. 243-244).

This is extremely important. The status of negative numbers was still controversial in Hegel’s time. Kant and Hegel contributed to their acceptance. Hegel struggled to invent new language to distinguish ambiguous cases in his Logic and to say reasonable things about them, but readers (certainly including myself) have found his unique idioms very hard to follow. Most of the ink spilled over “contradiction” in Hegel has been based on fundamental misunderstandings. (See also Negation and Negativity.)

“To use an empirical example, if the question is something like ‘Why did the ball fall to the ground?’ we want to avoid two kinds of answers: ‘because whenever a heavy object is dropped from a height, it falls’; and ‘it is in the nature of heavy things to fall’. Doing so, avoiding these alternatives, will allow us to see that the relation between a ‘ground’ and ‘what it grounds’ must be understood as a dynamic relation, one whereby the determinacy of the ground and that of the grounded cannot be fixed in isolation from each other” (pp. 245-246).

He quotes Hegel: “But the being that appears and essential being stand referred to each other absolutely. Thus concrete existence is, third, essential relation; what appears shows the essential, and the essential is in the appearance. — Relation is the still incomplete union of reflection into otherness and reflection into itself; the complete interpenetrating of the two is actuality” (p. 246).

“The general point [Hegel] keeps making is: a strict separation of the two moments, and an insistence that the nature of an appeal to an essence, or to a causal law, or to someone’s reason for acting cannot be understood as punctuated moments on the billiard-ball model of causation, but involve a kind of unity, the development of a kind of unity, much closer (yet again) to Aristotle on energeia. This essential-being-as-activity, manifesting itself in its appearances, is what should count as ‘actuality’. This has the implication that many existing things have no actuality, are not really ‘anything’. A lump of dirt, a cough, a strand of wire” (ibid).

“The question for Hegel is the question of ‘actuality’, not ‘existence’, or the sensibly apprehensible, just as for Aristotle, the question is the ‘really real’, to ontos on.” (p. 247).

Pippin quotes from the Encyclopedia Logic, “The logical is to be sought in a system of thought-determinations in which the antithesis between subjective and objective (in its usual meaning) disappears. This meaning of thinking and of its determinations is more precisely expressed by the ancients when they say that nous [“intellect”, or thought in a non-psychological sense] governs the world” (p. 248).

Here “governs” is meant in a constitutive sense. The important point is that the “thought-determinations” here are indifferent to the ordinary distinction between a subjective “thinker” and an objective “thought content”.

In this context he speaks of “this dynamical relation, this Ur-relation of all relations” (ibid).

“I have tried to show in another book that the most important, most clarifying implications of this Ur-relation occur in Hegel’s practical philosophy, both in his account of human agency, and in the implications of that account for the practical theory of freedom in his Philosophy of Right and theory of objective spirit in general (ibid).

“[T]he full demonstration of the truth of this Ur-relation lies in what it actually illuminates, in the cogency and credibility of, for example, an account of agency based on it” (p. 249).

It was the outstanding (and very Aristotelian) account of Hegel’s view of agency in Hegel’s Practical Philosophy that first attracted me to Pippin’s work.

In his own idiom, Hegel says “thus the inner is immediately the outer, and it is this determinateness of externality for the reason that it is the inner; conversely, the outer is only an inner because it is only an outer” (quoted, ibid.)

Pippin comments, “He does not mean here anything as obvious as: when I do something, my ex ante intention is fulfilled and so becomes something outer, just as what was done, the bodily movement, counts as an action because it expressed this ex ante intention. The passage does not say that the inner becomes the outer, nor that the outer is the expression of the inner. It says: there is no ex ante intention except as outer. It is the outer. And there is no outer except as what must count as inner, nor that it expresses a separable inner. There is no such separation” (pp. 249-250; see also Hegel on Willing).

This concludes Pippin’s chapter on the logic of essence. Unsurprisingly, we have not uncovered any magic formula that would tell us which appearances manifest the essence in particular cases. Such a thing seems completely impossible to me; we should not expect to be able to find any general formula covering an unspecified collection of particulars. Any judgments involving particulars must in part at least come back to something like Aristotelian deliberation and practical judgment, which yield only particular results.

Nonetheless, in discussing the logic of essence we have ruled out some important classes of misunderstandings, and we have set the stage for the climax of Hegel’s Logic in the “logic of the concept”. The logic of the concept will take as a starting point the non-separation of “inner” and “outer” that has been shown in the logic of essence.

Next in this series: “The” Concept?

Reflection and Higher-Order Things

It is in discussing reflection that Hegel implicitly introduces what might be called higher-order “things”.

In mathematics, multiple simultaneous dimensions give rise to “higher order” terms. Higher-order terms may evaluate to a constant value or a first-order function in particular cases, but when they do, they intrinsically provide rationale for the shape of the constant value or simple function that is not available by inspecting the constant value or simple function alone.

The multiple “dimensions” or analytically distinguishable iterations of self-reference in Hegelian reflection, I would suggest, can be similarly considered as giving rise to higher-order terms. A general slogan for Hegel’s Logic might be, higher-order terms have explanatory priority over simple ones. To explain a simple term, look for the higher-order term(s) that comprehend it.

No simple term or assertion is self-explanatory. But the self-referentiality of higher-order terms begins to capture some actual explanation, which is then internal to the term in question.

Hegel on Reflection

Continuing a walk-through of Robert Pippin’s Hegel’s Realm of Shadows, we are now trying to understand what grounds the possibility of non-misleading appearances of an essence or ground or reality, which is to say those in which aspects of the essence or ground or reality are said to be genuinely made manifest.

It seems to me Hegel is suggesting that what distinguishes actual knowledge is its reflective, “mediated” character. This is what makes knowledge more than just mere appearance or mere assertion. Real knowledge is not just a one-off that “happens” sometimes, by a sort of happy coincidence.

On the side of judgment, reflection corresponds to the self-relation and self-referentiality on the side of content that were mentioned before. In terms of Hegel’s Phenomenology, it corresponds to self-consciousness. There, it involves a very nonstandard kind of “infinity” that Hegel insists is a “result” and not anything pre-existing. In the Logic, Hegel very sharply distinguishes such an infinity of reflection from any one-dimensional infinity of magnitude or quantity, as “good” infinity from “bad” infinity.

Hegel’s “good” infinite is infinite in dimensionality, not in extension or even in intensity. Extension and intensity both apply only to single dimensions. The good infinite is not a kind of pseudo-quantity that is beyond measure, not something that is not a number that we nonetheless use in place of a number. It is intended to be compatible with definiteness in any given dimension.

This, I think, is what earns it Hegel’s characterization as “good”. A “bad” or one-dimensional infinite “swallows up” and makes to be as nothing any definite determination within its scope; Hegel’s “good” infinite multiplies related dimensions but preserves distinctions in each dimension. Indeed, by combining determinations across dimensions, it not only preserves each determination but potentially strengthens their robustness and resilience. (See also Reflective Grounding.)

Pure relation or pure negativity has its correlate in “absolute” reflection, or reflection as a single act of “self-conscious” synthesis spanning potentially infinite dimensions of meaning, any one of which is in principle subject to definite characterization. With the caveat that the dimensional infinity is potential in an Aristotelian sense, this puts partial realizations of “absolute” reflection within the reach of us rational animals. (See also “Absolute” Knowledge?.)

The potentially infinite dimensionality of reflection is thus what grounds the possibility of real knowledge for Hegel. The next level of detail will concern Hegel’s notion of the identity of contents of possible knowledge in this reflective context.

Pippin notes that “Plato, Kant, Locke, Spinoza, and others can all be cited in various ways as expressive of the reflective logic of the appearances of essence, the manifestation of something substantial that is nevertheless not manifest as it is in itself. To understand how this is possible, Hegel argues that it has become necessary to understand the content of and relation among the ‘determinations of reflection’ by means of which essence can be established (qualitative identities fixed and differentiated from others) and a proper relation to appearances established: ‘identity, difference, and contradiction'” (p. 231).

“It would be wrong to say that Hegel will ‘derive difference from identity’…. This is basically a deductive model of systematicity and it is not Hegel’s” (ibid).

“He argues that [the ‘A’ in ‘A = A’] can be understood in its self-identity only determinately, and that means by something not-A, and the context makes clear that he means, not the mere repetition of A itself as that determination, but determinate predicates that, we would say, do not mean the same thing as A. So not ‘human being is human being’, but something like ‘human being is rational animal’, where ‘rational animal’… has a different meaning” (pp. 231-232).

According to Pippin, Hegel very clearly distinguishes the “is” of identity from the “is” of predication.

“We have not derived ‘difference’ in this sense from ‘identity’, but the exposition has shown that identification (identity at work, one should say) requires already, in itself, just by being thought through, an appeal to differentiating factors. Otherwise, nothing is determinately identified” (p. 232).

Pippin’s phrase in the style of Aristotle, “identity at work”, captures the background of a Kantian unity of apperception. We are headed toward Hegel’s notion of apperceptive judgment, which Pippin has already characterized in a preliminary way.

To say identity at work “requires… an appeal to differentiating factors” is not only not to derive difference from identity. It is to explicitly say that identity depends on difference, just as much as vice versa. Pippin says that for Hegel, identity and difference are equally primordial. I think it is impossible to have one without the other.

“‘The pure movement of reflection which identity is‘ (identity understood actively as the power to successfully identify) is to be understood by reference to ‘the simple negativity which is contained in a more developed form by the just stated second formulation of the principle‘ (A’s being A by already not being ~A, such that the determinate predicates by which A is specified actually do specify it)” (p. 233, Pippin’s emphasis).

Identity itself for Hegel is a “movement of reflection”. Unities at the level of thought arise out of apperceptive judgment, rather than coming to us ready-made.

As to A being A only by also not being anything materially incompatible with A, Pippin says this is one version of the most important thought in Hegel’s Logic. The logic of being’s lesson of the inseparability of affirmation and negation is one version of it. In the part of the logic of being Pippin skipped over, he notes there is a related development of the “co-definability of qualitative independence and dependence (substance independence and relational dependence” (p. 234). Also related are “the identity within difference of essence and appearance, and so ultimately of ground and what is grounded in the logic of essence; and the way in which Hegel understands the concrete universal, that is, the inseparability of particular and universal in the logic of the Concept” (ibid).

“Hegel’s suggestion that Kant’s concept-intuition distinction should be understood as primarily a logical or conceptual problem, that we do not yet know how to think together their inseparability with their distinctness, reaches its most crucial turning point in the logic of essence in his account of reflection. The ‘immediacy’ of Schein as nevertheless also mediated, determinate even when the skeptic insists on the absence of a determining essence, is a pivot of the book” (ibid; see Toward Essence).

“If we think of the account in terms of our example of the relation between a person’s character/essence and her particular deeds, the character or essence must be in some way ‘posited’ (rather than apprehended or seen). But the positing cannot be arbitrary; what guides our positing is what we think the deeds must ‘presuppose’ to be the deeds they are” (p. 235).

“Hegel implies that the way Kant has described the situation — given a particular, find the universal — is misleadingly ‘external’. For what we are supposed to ‘ascend to’ and discover is not really external to the instance being reflected on…. There is no credible way to understand the particular as ‘external’ to the power of reflection like this. As… ‘waiting’ for its universal, it isn’t anything determinate at all; as provoking a universal-search, on the assumption that it has not been classified as a kind, it has nothing determinate to guide us or direct such a search. It could be said to have scores of properties. Which are relevant?” (p. 236).

He continues, “What Hegel calls ‘reflection in general’ must rather be characterized as ‘determining reflection’, a term he wants to cover both determining and reflective judgment. This is to be understood, in his terms, as the unity of positing and external reflection. What is external, say, the deeds in our example, are not just uniform repetitions of the self-same essence; they are all other than essence” (ibid).

“Yet again we encounter a mutually presupposing relation, here in ‘determinate reflection'” (p. 237). “If we don’t know how to connect in any determinate way the deed with the inward character being manifested (or not), then our positing/presupposing is just a form of ‘external’ reflection” (ibid).

In summary then, non-misleading appearances will be those that are understood reflectively in this mutually determining way. The inter-relations of many appearances taken together — e.g., in a unity of apperception — are what ground the robustness and resiliency of any given appearance.

He quotes Hegel, “Essence as such is one with its reflection, inseparable from its movement. It is not essence, therefore, through which this movement runs its reflective course; nor is essence that from which the movement begins, as from a starting point. It is this circumstance that above all makes the exposition of reflection especially difficult, for strictly speaking one cannot say that essence returns into itself, that essence shines in itself, for essence is neither before its movement nor in the movement: this movement has no substrate on which it runs its course” (p. 238).

This “movement that has no substrate”, I would say, is also the movement of the Aristotelian potential intellect that “is nothing at all before it begins to think”.

Next in this series: Reflection and Dialectic

From Imagination to Reflection

It seems to me that for both Aristotle and Kant, something called “imagination” is the very root of what Locke and Hegel call “consciousness”. As a result of pre-conscious processes of synthesis, we get the feeling and appearance of immediacy in experience that already has richly differentiable content.

Whatever levels of transcendental reflection we may ascend to, for us rational animals every new apprehension gets reflected back into a new synthesis of imagination that enables us to simply “experience” it along with the rest of our experience, somewhat in the way that we “know” how to ride a bicycle. As long as we live, we never leave imagination behind, any more than we leave breathing behind. (See also Meaningful “Seeing”; Animal Imagination; Imagination, Emotion, Opinion.)

Reflective Grounding

In Essence and Explanation, I introduced Hegel’s generalization from essence to “ground”, which is anything that explains something else and could be said to metaphorically “underlie” it.

Essence and ground in Hegel’s sense are not simply definable once and for all. Instead, he emphasizes dynamic relations of “grounding”, in accordance with his unusual notion of truth as a process. These dynamic relations correlate with movements of the reflective judgment that Kant discusses in the Critique of Judgment.

Kant distinguishes “determinative” judgment — corresponding to ordinary predicative assertions like “S is P“, and to the subsumption of individuals under universal concepts — from “reflective” judgment, which open-endedly looks for universals appropriate to the individual. Pippin suggests there is a kind of reciprocal dependency involved in the actual working of these two kinds of judgment.

It seems to me that reflective judgment has a great deal in common with the deliberation that lies behind Aristotelian practical judgment, even though Aristotle speaks of these as concluding in action rather than knowledge or opinion. Perhaps we might also say with Brandom that undertaking a commitment about how things are is a kind of action.

Hegel argues that even determinative judgments presuppose a reflective component, and speaks at length of “reflective determination”.

This use of “reflective” has nothing to do with the immediate inspection or direct consciousness of some content, or even with any single stage of reflection, or indeed any kind of move that could be completed all at once.

Paul Ricoeur’s works make a similar point, in tying the term “reflective” closely to his other notion of the “long detour” needed for philosophical understanding, which is itself very Hegelian in spirit. This is anything but a rabbit-out-of-hat “reflexivity at a glance”.

If there is a metaphor here, it is not gazing in a mirror to see something, but finding an orientation within the potentially infinite reflections of a hall of mirrors. Note also that we see the potentially infinite reflections in an “immediate” representation, even though each layer of reflection is an additional mediation when we interpret what we are seeing.

At the level of nature, similar potentially infinite reflection occurs in biological and ecological processes that achieve stability through feedback cycles.

“Relation” in Aristotle’s Categories

Something that gets translated as “relation” (ta pros ti, literally “the toward something”) is one of the ten categories Aristotle discusses in the Categories, which was traditionally treated as a kind of introduction to Aristotelian logic, and indeed to Aristotle’s thought as a whole.

In the order of the sciences laid out by al-Farabi, for instance, I believe the Categories is treated as a source of primitive definitions along the lines of the definitions with which the systematic development of Euclid’s Elements of Geometry begins. This is to substitute a very different — straightforwardly deductive — method and pedagogy for Aristotle’s own more fluid approach. See Demonstrative “Science”?.

Plato and Aristotle devoted extraordinary attention to questions of definition, and in doing so greatly devalued the importance of any assumed definitions.

Aristotle always recommended that we begin with that is more familiar and close at hand, and then expect our beginning to be substantially modified as we move toward what is clearer and more intelligible. This is the original model for Hegel’s logical “movement”.

The “what is toward something” of the Categories is quite simply not equivalent to more modern notions of “relation” — neither to its use in Kant and Hegel, nor to its mathematical use. Whether in Kant or Hegel or in mathematics, relation in the modern sense is fundamentally bi-directional. If a has a relation R to b, then b by definition has a relation R-inverse to a. In the same sense in which Hegel points out that the positive and negative signs on numbers assigned to measure, e.g., physical forces, can be systematically reversed without changing the physical meaning, any directionality in relations in the modern sense is a superficial matter of setup, and not anything deeply meaningful.

On the other hand, Aristotle’s “what is toward something” has an irreducibly directed (i.e., unidirectional) character. If x is oriented “toward” y, it does not follow that y must have a corresponding inverse orientation toward x. The semantics of x‘s “being toward” y imply a material dependency of x on y, and thus implicitly a kind of subordination of x to y.

This is certainly an important kind of construct to have in our toolbox for explaining things, but it simply is not what is meant when Kant says we know phenomena in a purely relational way, or when Hegel adds that essence is purely relational. It would also be a serious error to assume that according to Aristotle, the subordinate or subordinating aspect of the pros ti category would apply to the different concept of “relation” used by Kant and Hegel (or to mathematical relations).

Once again, this whole confusion arises due to the influence of the Latin translation, in this case of pros ti by relatio. For Latin readers, relatio had not yet acquired the importantly different meanings that “relation” has in Kant and Hegel, or in the mathematical theory of relations pioneered by C. S. Pierce and Ernst Schröder. Thus its use did not create serious misunderstanding. But for a general modern audience, “relation” is a terrible choice to translate pros ti, for the reasons mentioned.

I think that Aristotle does also implicitly operate with a concept like that of “relation” in Kant and Hegel, but he does not give it a name, and it is certainly not the pros ti of the Categories. Rather, it comes into play in the way Aristotle uses notions like unity, diversity, identity, and difference.

Essence and Explanation

Hegel’s Logic comprises what Robert Pippin calls three separate “logics” — a logic of being, a logic of essence, and a logic of the concept. The first of these, the logic of being, was characterized by Pippin as an out-and-out failure that Hegel deliberately embarks on in order to make an indirect point. Broadly speaking, that failure consists in attempting to explain things or make them intelligible solely by means of simple assertions. The logic of being also shows the impossibility of grounding philosophical explanation in a simple immediacy of sense-certainty or intuition, or in any notion of pure Being or being qua being. It seems to me that what these results have in common is the impossibility of explaining any definiteness or determinacy in terms of what is indeterminate.

So far, there is no indication that the logic of essence will ever be regarded by Hegel or Pippin as a failure like the logic of being. It will be further enriched by the logic of the concept, and we have yet to see the detail of this. But now we have at least reached the beginning of a true beginning, after having completed extensive due diligence toward claims of an easier, more direct kind of beginning that did not pan out. At the same time, the subject matter has changed from mere isolated assertions to what Kant in the Critique of Judgment called reflective judgments.

I have characterized the indirect positive outcome of the logic of being in terms of the primacy of relation and relatedness over discrete “things”. Pippin says that the logic of being also showed the impossibility of a completely presuppositionless beginning. Hegel’s reworking of Kantian reflective judgment now takes the primacy of relatedness as a starting point.

The logic of essence will thus effectively take the constitutive priority of intelligible relations over their respective “things” as its starting point. Relations will constitute things, at least to a greater degree than vice versa. This is what the Preface to the Phenomenology calls the perspective of “otherness”, and what Hegel also, in a special polymorphic sense that has been very badly misunderstood, calls “negativity”.

Rather than futilely trying to explain something determinate from something completely indeterminate, we have now turned to examining the conditions of the constitution of any possible determinacy. Additional normative considerations will be made explicit in the logic of the concept.

Essence is a Latin term that is read backwards into Greek philosophy, due mainly to its use as a translation of Aristotle’s “what it was to be” a thing. As treated by mainstream scholasticism, however, it had a meaning closer to that of Platonic form (see Platonic Truth). Platonic form is eternal, whereas form for Aristotle and Hegel has an irreducible dependency on manifestation and development in time. But Plato in his dialogues treats “essence” or what a thing eternally is as a matter of dialectical discovery subject to a kind of perpetual renewal, whereas the scholastics generally (and Leibniz) held it to be already finally established by God in the act of creation.

I think of human character as a sort of privileged example of Aristotle’s “what it was to be” some particular one. Pippin has given this an excellent development (see Toward Essence; Hegel on Willing). What makes human character a “privileged” example for me is that it makes many nuances visible that are not so applicable to “what it was to be” that chair, for instance. The nuances of interest here concern relations between essence and appearance, which form the main subject matter of the logic of essence.

Here we also have an instance of the Aristotelian and Hegelian point that we gain the most insight from considering the richest examples of anything, rather than the simplest ones.

The moderns learned from Descartes to privilege simple cases, and to aim to systematically reduce complex cases to simple cases. That is an admirable procedure in mathematics, with many applications. But in life more generally, there is no good reason for assuming that richer cases can be explained with no more resources than it takes to explain simpler ones. In mathematics, if we have a proof that some specific class of rich cases can be reduced to some set of simple cases without remainder, then we can make that sort of “reductionist” claim for that particular class of cases. Outside of mathematics, it seems to me that reductionist claims usually turn out to be mere assertions.

What Hegel calls the “problem of indifference” — how are we to judge which particular appearances show aspects of the “essence” or deeper truth of people or things and which do not — is brought to the fore here.

“We can be said to know the ‘what it was to be’ of a thing, neither by direct intellectual intuition (its being-at-work is a process, a way of being, not graspable punctually as itself some object) nor by just observing, say, the life of a living thing or the uses of an artifact” (Pippin, Hegel’s Realm of Shadows, p. 227).

As Pippin puts it, “if essence is to explain anything, it must be the ground of what immediately ‘shines’ or appears. Those seemings must be its own, and they are made sense of by reference to their essence” (ibid).

“In some sense, and it is the task of the logic of essence to explain in what sense, the thing’s actuality is both not its mere seemings, and yet nothing other than those seemings, rightly understood” (p. 228).

This is another very Aristotelian point.

“Determinate specification of something essential in an appearance requires essential predication or specification of some sort — some predicates, not others. But we know which predicates are essential only by already knowing what essence is. This is a problem that assumes different forms but is basically the same, whether posed in the language of classical essentialism and manifestations, or selecting from a large set of ‘grounding’ causal factors the genuinely explanatory one or ones” (Hegel’s Realm of Shadows, pp. 226-227).

Hegel develops the terms “ground” and “grounding” for discussing the generalization from essence to any sort of explanation.

He quotes Hegel: “On the one hand, the ground is ground as the immediately reflected content determination of the determinate being [Dasein] which it grounds; on the other, it is that which is posited. It is that on the basis of which that determinate being [Dasein] is supposed to be understood; but, conversely, it is inferred from the latter and is understood from it. The main business of this reflection thus consists in gleaning the ground from a determinate being [Dasein], that is, in converting the immediate determinate being [Dasein] into the form of reflected being; consequently the ground, instead of being self-subsisting in and for itself, is rather that which is positive and derived” (pp. 227-228, Pippin’s emphasis).

Once again, I would note a convergence with Aristotle. Aristotle says that in order to possibly know how things are in and for themselves, we should and do start with how things are “for us”, not with how they supposedly are, full stop. Hegel will eventually amplify this into what he calls the “subjective” (though anything but merely subjective) logic of the concept.

Aristotle and Hegel both want to say that the basis of knowledge and explanation is a partial overlap between how things are initially for us and how they really are. This notion of a partial overlap between essence and appearance is a sort of Aristotelian mean that eliminates the roots of the twin evils of “all is illusion” skepticism, and of foundationalism, or the claim of a certain starting point for knowledge.

“[Hegel] is in effect saying that a putative logic of being is, has shown itself to be, mere seeming, Schein [literally, “shine”]. As [Michael] Theunissen points out, this means that Hegel is actually invoking the notion of Schein in three different senses. There is the unacknowledged Schein that a logic of being has turned out to be. There is the Schein of the mere appearance that the skeptic and idealists claim are all we are able to know. And there is the result of the analysis, that this purported limitation of knowledge to mere Schein is itself Schein, unable to account for itself; what seemed to be mere Schein turns out to be the Schein of essence or Erscheinung [Hegel’s technical term for appearance that is more than just mere appearance]” (p. 229, emphasis in original).

That all appearance is only mere appearance must be itself only a mere appearance, if there is to be any knowledge or meaningful explanation at all.

“In other words, the illusion of any possible absolute presuppositionlessness is what has been demonstrated by showing that Sein [being] must be understood as Wesen [essence], just in order to be understood as Sein. ([Hegel says] ‘Being is as such only the becoming of essence’…)…. Wesen will show itself (and itself as the truth of Sein) as always already conceptually mediated determinacy” (p. 230, emphasis in original).

The brute “things” of mere assertion depend on the richer, subtler “things” considered by reflective judgment for any truth they may have. This is an archetypal Hegelian move.

Pippin points out that the logic of essence gives a new sense to Hegel’s very nonstandard notion of negation. Whereas before, “negation” served to express the dependency of meaningful relational distinction on what else something rules out in order to express what it is, now “Essence’s seemings are its own…, even though no seeming or set of appearances express in their immediacy what that essence really is” (ibid).

He quotes Hegel, “In the becoming of being, it is being which lies at the foundation of determinateness, and determinateness is reference to an other. Reflective movement is by contrast the other as negation in itself, a negation which has being only as self-referring” (p. 231, Pippin’s emphasis).

Rather than addressing an external other, in reflective judgment Hegelian “negation” is now turned on itself — seeking further clarification first and foremost through questioning itself and its own formulations.

Next in this series: Hegel on Reflection