What Is Essential?

Distinguishing the essential from the nonessential is one of the most fundamental kinds of interpretive judgment. It has to do with what we treat as important, which provides the justifying frame for all our more particular values.

Just what is essential is often regarded as necessary and as somehow pre-given. I think rather that judgments of essentiality are relative to the complete context in which they occur, and are always provisional based on our current understanding. They guide our interpretation of what is right and what is true. But on all concrete matters, the last word is never said.

Determinations of what is essential are neither crudely objective nor crudely subjective. They are not simply given to us, and neither are they subordinate to our arbitrary will (if indeed there were such a thing). They have to do with how things are interrelated.

I identify the essential with “meaning” or ethical substance, as contrasted with mere logistics. Logistics have to do with the arrangement of accidents.

We cannot live on essence alone. Some involvement with worldly logistical details is unavoidable, and whatever we do ought to be done well in a comprehensive sense. There is even a deep lesson from Hegel that from what begins as accidental, something essential may emerge.

Flasch on Eckhart

“What is essential is the ability of the soul to give itself a form, to shape itself. It does not stand there fixed, like a tree; it knowingly and willingly throws itself upon others, it becomes what it takes up” (Flasch, Meister Eckhart, pp. 35-36; see Eckhart as Philosopher: Background for introduction).

“The eye, opened and cast on the wood, is, within itself, over there with the wood” (p. 44).

With this example taken from visual perception, Eckhart illustrates the essence of the Aristotelian theories of perception and intellect that, according to Flasch, are at the core of Eckhart’s thought. At the heart of both perception and intellectual knowing, Aristotle posits a kind of fusion of what modern people call subject and object.

Also central to Eckhart’s thought is the neoplatonizing medieval notion of “intellectual soul”, which fuses together the separate Aristotelian notions of intellect and soul, emphasizing their status as an operational whole. For the many medieval writers who attribute such a strong unity to the operational whole of soul and intellect, all the unique attributes of Aristotelian intellect may then also be said of the human soul, though it is far from clear that Aristotle himself would agree with this.

Eckhart also upholds a unitary interpretation of the “substantial form” of hylomorphic unities, which aims to be a completely univocal kind of form. Elsewhere, Flasch notes that this late and specialized version of the more general (and not entirely univocal) notion of form in Aristotle is already present in Averroes’ Long Commentary on the Metaphysics. Albert the Great and Thomas Aquinas used it to argue against the sharp soul-body dualism defended by some medieval Augustinians. Substantial form poses a stronger unity in the forms of things than I want to claim for a reading of Aristotle, but that seems to be a relatively separate issue that does not greatly affect Eckhart’s argument here.

“[L]ike the seeing eye that casts a glance at the wood and becomes one with the wood, man, through active performance, through seeing and loving, becomes that which he sees and loves in the mind…. We retroactively separate eye and wood from the eye-wood unity. Is the wood-eye union the truer reality? Or is it merely an image, or simply a thought? Seeing things clearly in this regard, according to Eckhart, is the necessary precondition for understanding everything he says — not study of the Bible or dogmatic theology. First and foremost, we need to occupy ourselves with understanding this unity. It is our daily life. It is not a thing of nature, but rather the having of natural things” (p. 38).

We become that which we contemplate and love, that toward which we direct our attention. For Eckhart, the intellectual soul is not just a theoretical construct, but a part of everyday experience and of the basic ways of human being. Where the modern “subject” is usually considered to stand aloof from its objects, Aristotelian soul and intellect actively find or develop their content in and by means of what modern people would call their objects. Though we may marvel at it, this kind of fusion is not a mystical ecstasy, but part of the normal working of everyday life. It is not passivity, but a kind of fused activity. It seems to be this fusion at the heart of human experience that for Eckhart involves the divine giving birth to itself.

Eckhart uses philosophical senses of logos (word, speech, discourse, relation, ratio; what distinguishes the human from other animals) to explain its religious sense associated with Incarnation. We might say he uses logos as a name and descriptor for the intellectual soul’s fused active relationality.

“Why is ‘Word’ the keyword? It signifies relation. The Word unifies the speaker and the spoken content” (p. 36).

“‘Word’ in its essence refers to the intellect; the one who speaks and that which is spoken occur in the Word. The Word has a relational character; it unifies within itself those that are separate as natural things…. Eckhart conceives of man as Word, not primarily as a thing of nature” (p. 37).

It seems that for Eckhart, the Biblical Word and the Incarnation refer to the fused activity of the intellectual soul.

“[R]eason conceives of itself as an image identical to its exemplar, which is within it in eidetic fashion, that is, as actual intellectual being, uncreated and uncreatable” (p. 43).

As in Plotinus, for Eckhart the intellectual soul has a direct link with the divine, and may be said to contain metaphysical realities within itself.

“The unity of reflective self-consciousness and ethical orientation follows from this. The way reason — always in the qualified sense — is, it has nothing in common with anything else” (ibid).

“Eckhart does not say: ‘Until now, you have misunderstood Christianity.’ He says: ‘You have misunderstood yourselves, and as long as you persist in this error, you cannot provide Christianity with the intellectual and ethical form which is possible today, in 1300′” (p. 44).

Eckhart makes the astonishing claim that Aristotle, the Old Testament, and the New Testament all teach the same thing. According to Flasch, he even says that the Bible contains all natural philosophy. A first clue to what such sayings mean is that he says he will explain the Bible using nothing but the natural reasons of the philosophers. He will not appeal to revelation to justify what he says. This is not entirely atypical among medieval theologians. Flasch notes that even Anselm of Canterbury, a rather cautious thinker who precedes the main development of Latin scholastic philosophy, considered it a theological best practice to minimize the use of conversation-ending appeals to revelation.

“What previous readings of Eckhart often lack are linguistic discipline, semantic specification, and a philological basis: the way we have labeled and interpreted Eckhart and the categories into which we attempt to squeeze him even today were created at a time when his Latin works were still unknown. And yet they far outnumber his German works, and their tradition is more secure” (p. 46).

Flasch highlights Eckhart’s systematic use of the qualifier “insofar as”, an Aristotelian device that picks out and distinguishes one sense of something that may be considered in several ways. This he combines with a radical notion of what he calls primary determinations. These include the traditional four “transcendentals” Being, Oneness, Truth, and Goodness, as well as Idea, Wisdom, Love, and Justice. In a rather Platonic way, Eckhart will say things like “Insofar as we are just, Justice itself operates through us.”

“If something is, the primary determination is completely present within it. Then not only is the primary determination’s product or its similarity within us; the primary determination itself is present…. Everything that the primary determination itself effects, it effects not toward the outside, but rather into itself. Being has no outside. Again, those imaginative ideas taken from the working methods of craftsmen are problematic. The effecting of the primary determinations is not a producing…. Their effecting consists of making what has been established resemble them, of making what has been established into a being. Eckhart teaches elementary concepts of reciprocity…. Someone who has not learned from the prologues that the active pulls the passive toward itself, that is, that it makes it active, cannot interpret Eckhart’s birth cycle in the proper Eckhartian sense” (p. 80).

“Being, Oneness, and Goodness are active primary determinations, not abstractions. Thus, one has to say that this is God. As Aristotle saw the being of green in the being of the tree, so Eckhart sees the being of things in Being itself” (p. 82).

“I must not speak of Being or of ens in general in the same way that I can speak of this or that individual being…. In substance, they are in each other. This is what pious people mean when they say the world is created. This needs to be explained. Otherwise, the imagining thinking, that is, thinking that creates mental images, edges forward and makes us believe that the creation of the world consisted of God externalizing things from within himself” (pp. 82-83).

“In Eckhart’s time, the concept of pantheism… did not exist. Eckhart removed the issue… by differentiating… between primary determination and individual thing, but he made it clear that Being was not distinguished in the way that individual things were differentiated” (p. 83).

“This theology is short and clear. And it argues philosophically. It easily solves all or almost all questions that can be asked about God, and it does so in the light of natural reason…. There is nothing here of the abyss, nothing of the blinding darkness of Dionysius…. Moses says that God created the world in six days, but he said this for simple people; we know that Being is directly present in self-positing. People say that God created the world, but we know that Being continually posits itself anew in the present” (ibid).

“Placing his Biblical interpretation… before the doctrine of primary determinations — that means contradicting Eckhart” (p. 85).

“[T]ruth, Eckhart says, belongs to the intellect; it indicates relation or includes it within itself. Then follows a strange sentence […]: ‘A relation, however, has its entire being from the soul and as such is a real category, just as time, although it has all its being from the soul, is nonetheless a subspecies of quantity, that is, of a real category'” (p. 89).

“This sentence is strange for several reasons. It shifts from the statement ‘I am the Truth’ to a general theory of relations. Truth, Eckhart says, either is a relation or includes a relation, but a relation stems entirely from the soul and as such is an actual ‘predicament’. Every philosopher admitted that there existed relations purely of thought…. But no one who argued for real relations claimed that they were entirely derived from the soul” (ibid).

This is in Eckhart’s Parisian Questions. Here he rejects the argument of Aquinas that being comes before life and knowing, saying, “I, however, believe the exact opposite” (quoted, p. 91). Eckhart indeed explicitly puts knowing before being.

“[H]e reminds us in good Aristotelian fashion that mathematical objects cannot be considered according to intent or good, and that something that has being is identical [sic] to the good. Good and evil exist in the things themselves, but true and false only in the soul” (p. 91).

“Eckhart successfully describes the special status of the image. It still has, so to speak, a foot in the world of natural things; it consists of wood or stone or canvas; it has an efficient cause and often also an aim. But as an image, it does not have being; rather, it is the relation to the thing it represents…. Insofar as it is knowledge, it belongs to a different world. In questions such as this one, philosophical analysis has to be detached from the imagination” (p. 92).

“Properties are not beings; only their substance has being” (ibid).

“The intellect must not be a specific physical nature if it is to be able to comprehend all physical natures. The knower is the living negation of the known” (p. 93).

Eckhart makes the implicit “negativity” of Aristotelian intellect explicit, and applies it also to the soul.

“Our intellect is nothing, and our intellectual knowledge is not being…. This means that we are talking about the intellect as the actual having of universal objects, and about perception as the grasping of perceivable things. Not about the eye as a sensory organ, not about the equipment of the soul with the faculty of knowledge. Eckhart has transformed the question of an angel’s knowing and being into a general negative theory of sensory and intellectual recognition and claims. The intellect as such and also perception as such are neither here nor now, and insofar as they are neither, they are nothing, but insofar as they are natural faculties of the soul, they are something” (pp. 95-96).

“Here, in what appears to be an excessively dry critique of the Aristotelian ontology of the schools of the time, Eckhart lays the foundation of his thinking. He is looking for the special condition of the intellectual being, its nonmateriality, its energeia-like unity of knower and knowledge” (p. 99).

“Thus, intellectual knowledge is being God’s form or becoming God’s form, since God also is intellectual knowledge and is not being” (p. 100).

In different contexts, Eckhart says both that God is being and that God is not being.

“In summary, the first Parisian questions seem to be concerned with God and angels, but they are actually exercises in the search for intellectual being. They lead us to the edges of ontology, which cannot grasp image and knowledge. Its consequence is that we imagine God and the soul as thing-like. But that way is best forgotten” (p. 101).

“[W]isdom is infinite. Within it, everything always continues. Where it actually is, it is continually re-created. It is not born once and for all; its eternity is perpetual becoming” (p. 103).

Eckhart clarifies that creation is not meant as an occurrence in time.

“Eckhart, we must remember, permitted everyone so inclined to call God being. Now he proposes to say ‘Being’ (esse) and ‘Justice’ (iusticia) instead of ‘God'” (p. 104).

“God is Being. This tenet remains. But since Heidegger, the sentence has had a different ring to it from what Eckhart intended it to mean” (ibid).

“The human mind is the eagle that ascends to the origins of things” (ibid).

“What Eckhart calls Being is the productivity of the primordial mind, which produces images of ideas that the human intellect grasps as the immanent origin of the experiential things. Being is defined through the intellect, not through presence, not as a whole of facticity” (ibid).

“Being” taken in a positive sense especially means “intelligible being”.

“Primordial mind” is intellect outside of space and time. In this regard, Eckhart is closer to Augustine’s strong emphasis on eternity than to Hegel’s valorization of becoming.

“The philosopher, like the lover, does not look for the origin from which something developed, that is, its efficient cause, nor for what it is good for, that is, its purpose. Analyzing efficient and final causes is indispensable for investigation into natural things, but Eckhart is searching for the pure form as the true Being. He construes the divine life and the life of the deified man, the homo divinus, as a disclosure of form outside efficient and final causes…. [P]hilosophy was the eagle-like ascent to the realm of the grounds of being, the return to living substances that have their purposes within themselves, the elimination of thing-oriented ways of thinking, and the path to a proper life…. The proper human life is the aimless settling into the perpetually new Wisdom that is also Justice and Godhead” (p. 105).

Flasch points out numerous Platonic-sounding phrases in Eckhart, like the “pure form as the true being” above.

That efficient causality has no role in first philosophy is how I read Aristotle. But the neoplatonic commentator Ammonius (a student of Proclus, and teacher of Simplicius, Philoponus, and Damascius) argues that the first cause is also an efficient cause, and not only “that for the sake of which”, as Aristotle says. Most medieval writers (certainly Aquinas) follow Ammonius on this, and assume that the first cause is an efficient cause. Eckhart is an important exception.

Eckhart’s negative conclusion about “final causes” applies to external ends of a utilitarian sort, but ignores Aristotle’s emphasis on entelechy, which involves precisely an end that is intrinsic to a being’s being what it is. I want to say that we are our ends, as confirmed by our actions. In Eckhart as in many medieval writers, the later construct of univocal “substantial form” takes over most of the large role that Aristotle assigns to entelechy. It is admittedly hard to see entelechy as completely independent of time, which I think is what leads Hegel to reverse the traditional order and make eternity dependent on becoming.

“Eckhart’s God sheds the regalia of otherworldly imperial honors and endorses man as his own kind” (ibid).

Eckhart develops a theology that clearly rules out what Brandom rightly decries as the “command-obedience model” of normativity. As in Plotinus, a human’s connection to the Good instead involves an intimate sharing, and even a kind of reciprocity.

“The active above attracts the initially passive below. The below becomes the eagle that flies up to the hidden grounds of the world. It is our reifying contemplation that does not recognize the coincidental dynamic in the process between the above and the below” (ibid).

The active above works as an attractor. This is important. Though Eckhart doesn’t seem to explicitly talk about the teleology that Kant called “internal” and that on my reading is the mode of operation of the first cause in Aristotle, he nonetheless seems to come to a similar conclusion. For both Eckhart and Aristotle, the “below” is attracted to the “above”. But Eckhart is closer to Plotinus and the monotheistic mainstream in his insistence that the First is a source as well as an end.

“Eckhart declares… that he intends to proceed as a philosopher, and he adheres to this stated method. He aims to answer all or almost all questions about God with philosophical arguments, and in clear and simple terms…. This aspiration appears so impracticable, so immoderate that some Eckhart scholars have felt the need to understate it in order to present Eckhart in a better light. But Eckhart asserted this claim sharply and clearly. We can choose to reject it, but we should refrain from reinterpreting and changing it” (p. 109).

“The intellect is supernature. Plato’s intellectual world will become Leibniz’s ‘realm of grace'” (p. 111).

“Every reader of Eckhart has to fight his own imagination, which presents justice to him like an additional property of a person that is dependent on the person” (ibid).

“Eckhart’s God is Being and Unity, Justice and Wisdom. He is the all-encompassing attraction or love…. God is the original formal act, the primus actus formalis…; he discloses the having of form.” (ibid).

Again we have attraction, rather than a making, a push, or a command.

“The primary determinations attract to themselves everything that follows” (p. 112).

And again we have attraction. By this description, Eckhart’s primary determinations are after all what Aristotle would call ends that are sought for themselves, and not for the sake of something else.

“What matters in the context of moral actions is the intention, not the external act…. This justice is before and outside external actions” (ibid).

Eckhart is not the only medieval philosopher to say something like this. Peter Abelard similarly emphasizes the importance of intentions in ethics.

“Justice, in Eckhart’s writings, becomes the life of the mind. Thus, the just man finds peace in works and does not expect rewards; his ethical actions have value in themselves” (p. 113).

One of the charges against Eckhart was that he denied the importance of external works and ritual observances. But the context was implicitly things done for the sake of something else. That, I presume, is what Eckhart meant. But ethical actions have value in themselves. They have their end in themselves. They are not done for the sake of something else. And, he says according to Flasch, the just man finds peace in works. Whatever may be said about his relation to orthodoxy, Eckhart is on firm Platonic and Aristotelian ground here.

“Eckhart does everything he can not to construe God’s relation to the world as having developed arbitrarily, although there are people who imagine that this is precisely what proves the freedom of a personal God” (p. 119).

Like Albert the Great as previously discussed by Flasch, Eckhart puts intellect decisively ahead of will in his theology. To my layman’s eye Aquinas seems to formally maintain the same, but to make more concessions to voluntarism.

“Only thinking overcomes the false imagination to which many people succumb: they imagine God and the world as separate and relate the two as efficient cause and effect” (p. 121).

So there is someone else besides Aristotle who agrees that the first cause is not an efficient cause.

“[I]n divinis, that is, in the nature of God, but also in the homo divinus, in grace and salvation, there is no place for the category of causality, only the category of the ideational ground of reason, of ratio, which shows itself as disclosure of form. Aquinas described grace in man as the presence of God as efficient cause…. Eckhart’s philosophical reform consisted also of silencing the voice of efficient causality. Only grounds of an ideational-formal kind are at once wholly immanent and wholly transcendent…. They make possible the qualified concept of the living that has its telos within itself, just as Aristotle conceptualized it in the twelfth book of his Metaphysics” (p. 122).

Aha, now we even get living with a telos within itself, and a reference to book Lambda. Previously we saw him exclude external “final causes”, while remaining silent about the “internal” kind that are of far greater interest. But here the internal kind seems to be affirmed.

Eckhart’s first commentary on Genesis “rests on the combination of the Neoplatonizing metaphysics of Being and Oneness with the doctrine of intellect as presented by Anaxagoras, Aristotle, and Averroes and as corresponding with Augustine’s theory of mens. Eckhart’s anthropology, like his philosophical theology, is also a theory of intellect. This becomes especially clear when Eckhart speaks of man as God’s image. The Platonizing metaphysics of Being joins the philosophy of intellect and produces an ethics. Eckhart’s ethics presents the concept of the homo divinus” (ibid; see also The Goal of Human Life; Properly Human, More Than Human?).

“Eckhart writes that the reader should take the Biblical narrative as parable. He is supposed to let go of the narrative as events and facts” (p. 125).

“If someone says that God commands, then his commanding is to be interpreted in the light of his intellectual nature: his is not an external commanding. He is not ordering about. His ordering consists in providing things with their form” (p. 127).

Those who have understanding do not need to be commanded to be good. Commands are for those who lack understanding.

“The intellect is the root of freedom…. The goal of acting freely is to become a deified man, homo divinus. Within the deified man, the just man and justice are one. For him, the Good itself is the goal and in itself is its own reward. He does not look for external reward. Punishments, too, are intrinsic to acting. The good life consists of a consequent inner orientation, of inner being, not of doing. Action implements the way to being and life. God does not order any external act” (pp. 128-129).

In his commentary on the Book of Wisdom, Eckhart “continues his battle against the advancement of reified ideas, as though Being were a retrospective abstraction of many things or as though it were added to things in the form of a property. It is a rejection not so much of the representation of things in the imagination as of their dominance within philosophical thought” (p. 132).

“Eckhart recommends substituting primary determinations’ names for one another as a method. We may as well say Being instead of ‘God’ or Oneness or Justice or Wisdom. This was not uncommon among philosophers; Plato said ‘the idea of the Good’ instead of ‘God’ when he was not referring to the gods of popular religion; Aristotle, ‘the prime unmoved mover’, Avicenna, ‘the necessary being’, Aquinas , ‘being that exists by itself'” (p. 135).

“As we have seen, other primary determinations, such as Oneness, Wisdom, and Justice, are supposedly uncreatable. If God is called the esse, it is also uncreatable. Different meanings of ‘esse’ are operating here. Readers of Eckhart have to learn how to handle the flexibility of the concept” (p. 136).

“‘Many,’ Eckhart says, imagine creation as an effecting, as it were, toward the outside” (p. 137).

“Eckhart also rejects the idea that man should act well in order to receive earthly and heavenly rewards. The ethical good is an intrinsic value, not a means to an end” (p. 192).

“The sermons criticize the theology of the time, not just the wrong kinds of living. They correct the dominance of the imagination of stable, ontologically autonomous things, which hinders man from understanding himself and God and from grasping that his ‘neighbor’ lives beyond the ocean, too” (p. 198).

“The humble man compels God so that God must give himself according to his nature, and indeed must give himself wholly, for he is indivisible. God must: that is the message. His grace is not a random selection of blessed individuals out of a mass of sinners. God must; this motif appears again and again, not in the sense of an external compulsion, but rather from his nature, which he follows freely. Thus, he gives me everything that he gave Jesus, without exception; he gives the soul the power to birth; and thus it births itself and all things” (p. 200).

Peter Abelard, who was interested in safeguarding divine goodness, had argued more generally that God can only do what he does. Albert the Great had argued for the possibility of purely natural beatitude.

“Someone who speaks of God but does not talk about his oneness with the ground of the soul is not speaking of the true God. The ground of the soul has nothing in common with anything; it is not like anything else and is thus like God” (p. 201).

Here again we have Eckhart’s version of the intellectual soul. The “ground of the soul” would presumably be intellect, since it is described in the same terms.

“The soul exists more in Justice than in the human body” (p. 210).

The human soul carries intellect and the One within it, Eckhart might affirm with Plotinus. Plotinus is the only other writer I can think of who has as exalted a view of the soul as Eckhart.

“One does not learn the correct understanding of the world from the Bible; one must have developed this understanding in order not to read the Bible mindlessly” (p. 212).

“‘Reason’ needs to be conceptualized differently than a ‘power’. It is by no means a sort of mental hand that grasps something and thereby comprehends it” (p. 213).

The Reason he wants to call upon is about the interpretation of form.

“The truly wise life consists not in contemplative joy, but rather in the directing of external action to the best thing that love demands (p. 222).

Here we see how he does make a place for external action.

“The just man exists in Justice. No vision or intuition tells us this is possible, but only the philosophical analysis of the concrete’s containedness within the universal (abstractum) — with a realism of universals taken for granted” (p. 229).

Realism about universals here seems to acquire both a distinctive ethical dimension, and something like a neoplatonic “procession” from the universals in the soul that I have not encountered before in discussions of realism and nominalism.

“In pre-nominalist fashion, Eckhart takes it for granted that Justice (Truth, Wisdom, Goodness) is the common and real determinant shared by all just men and then proceeds by eliminating the idea of making regarding the activity of Justice (Truth, Wisdom, Goodness)” (p. 227).

Eliminating the idea of making in thinking about the activity of justice makes sense as part of a program of de-emphasizing efficient causes and accidents in favor of substance and internal telos, such as it now seems Eckhart supported.

The Scope of Reflection in Hegel

It now seems to me that reflection turns out to be the driving concept in Hegel’s Logic, and indeed perhaps in Hegel overall. This is fairly amazing, given the prevalence of accounts that do not even mention reflection, or do so only incidentally. True, the ambivalence with which Hegel treats most of his key terms is strongly in evidence here, insofar as he also makes many remarks about the limits of merely “external” reflection. But reflection seems to be a central orienting concept that says many of the same things as Hegelian “mediation” or “dialectic”, says them a bit more clearly, and thus expresses more.

What has particularly captured my interest is the reflection Hegel specifies as “general” or “absolute”. Merely external reflection correlates with the way that he characterizes mere “Consciousness” in the Phenomenology, in which subject and object are mutually exclusive terms, each defined in opposition to the other. But what he calls “general” reflection seems to precisely name a perspective that is at home in what the Phenomenology‘s Preface calls “otherness”, and in which the polarity of subject and object things is replaced by a continuum of relational distinctions. And indirectly, reflection names that otherness itself.

As the last couple of posts have begun to evidence, reflection plays an explicitly central role in the “logic of essence” that Hegel develops in book II of his Logic, which in contrast to the results of the logic of being in book I is said to represent a permanent acquisition. And although the term “reflection” is no longer literally at center stage in book III’s “logic of the concept”, the work done with it in book II is incorporated into the very “concept of the concept” at the beginning of book III.

“[T]he concept is at first to be regarded simply as the third to being and essence, to the immediate and to reflection” (Logic, di Giovanni trans., opening of book III, p. 508, emphasis in original).

He had begun book II by saying essence is the “truth” of being. In just the same way, then, Hegel is saying here that reflection is the “truth” of the immediate.

“Hence the objective logic, which treats of being and essence, constitutes in truth the genetic exposition of the concept…. The dialectical movement of substance through causality and reciprocal affection is thus the immediate genesis of the concept by virtue of which its becoming is displayed. But the meaning of its becoming, like that of all becoming, is that it is the reflection of something which passes over into its ground, and that the at first apparent other into which this something has passed over constitutes the truth of the latter” (p. 509, emphasis in original).

For immediacy, then, reflection is this other that Hegel calls its truth. Immediacy itself is untrue, but it “has” a truth in reflection. Mere being or immediacy by itself is sterile, but reflection makes it fruitful.

I haven’t yet treated Hegel’s discussion of substance and causality within the logic of essence. For now, what I want to draw attention to is his more general point that the logic of essence — which could equally be termed the logic of reflection — already shows, and indeed primarily deals with, the genesis and becoming of the concept. By contrast, what he calls the logic of the concept treats the concept of the concept as already achieved, and focuses on a suitably expansive treatment of its use in judgment and inference.

“The concept is now this absolute unity of being and reflection whereby being-in-and-for-itself only is by being equally reflection or positedness, and positedness only is by being equally in-and-for-itself” (ibid).

Previously, we left simple being, subjects and objects, and existence claims behind, but now being returns, as relatedness and in the content of what we affirm.

For Kant and Fichte, any unqualified reference to being or to what “is” can only be dogmatic. All that we can undogmatically talk about are judgments about what is, and all judgments are subject to questioning about their reasons. (Fichte characteristically speaks of judgments that we affirm as “posited”.)

Hegel regards Kant and Fichte’s effective ban on direct talk about what is as making an extremely important point, but also as overly fastidious. In effect, he wants to suggest that the deeper meaning of “is” coincides with what can reasonably be judged to be the case, and I think Plato and Aristotle would agree.

At the level of what Hegel calls the concept, we have achieved a kind of indifference with respect to talk about being or the immediate. What this means is that what a truly universal community of rational beings would reflectively judge to be the case is constitutive of what we should say “is”.

Perhaps surprisingly, Hegel defers all consideration of normativity and teleology to the logic of the concept in book III, whereas the more explicit discussion of reflection is in the logic of essence in book II. But Hegel’s Logic is ordered as a successive uncovering of presuppositions: in order to successfully claim this apparently simple and straightforward thing, we discover that we must also presuppose that more subtle thing. So the true order of dependency he means to affirm is the opposite of his order of presentation. He also saves his discussion of the “tedious” traditional-logical topics of forms of judgment and syllogisms for book III, but this is with the intent of radically transforming them.

What he really wants to advocate in this last context is a view of judgment and inference — simultaneously very Aristotelian and very nontraditional — as fundamentally reflective and normative, rather than fundamentally formal and quasi-mechanical in nature. The apparent textual separation of reflection from normativity is thus only an appearance. (See also Apperceptive Judgment; Hegel on Reflection; Reflection and Dialectic.)

The Universe

“From the first lines of Lambda 10, the question of the good and of its relations with the universe is explicitly posed: should the good and the best (to agathon kai to ariston) be conceived as something separate (kekhorismenon), existing in itself and by itself, or as the very order (taxin) of the whole?” (Aubry, Dieu san la puissance, 2nd ed., ch. 5, p. 200, my translation throughout).

“We know from now on that there exists a separate substance, that it is act and not form, that it is identical to the good, and that it acts as an end: from this, it is already apparent that the universe can be neither totalized via its reduction to a unique material principle, as the [Ionian] holists maintain, nor conceived [in the manner of the Platonists] in an episodic manner as a disjunctive series…. The universe indeed constitutes a totality, but this is not exclusive of an order that admits of degrees…. It remains to know whether the good is to be identified with this taxis or is separate from it” (pp. 200-201).

“But these options are not exclusive: the good can be conceived at once (amphoteros) as the very order of the universe and as separate from it, in the way that the good of an army resides in its order as well as in its strategy. It is nonetheless necessary to recognize between these two modes of the existence of the good a relation of anteriority, such that the order depends on the strategy, and not the strategy on the order” (p. 201).

“The problem is thus posed to know in what such an order consists, which is at the same time determined by the principle and serves as its manifestation. Already applied in Lambda 8 to the hierarchy of the spheres and their movers, the term taxis is from now on applied not only to the eternal sensible substances, but also to the perishable sensible substances (animals, plants)” (ibid).

“This order receives a triple characterization: first, it operates in a horizontal way between the different substances…; all these are then ordered in relation to something unique…; but finally, they are not so related in the same way…. We have indeed a relation at the same time univocal and diversified…. It tends nonetheless toward one same end, and proceeds from one same principle” (ibid).

“But we discover now that it is just insofar as [the unmoved substance] is separated that it is the principle of the order and of the distinctive movements of sensible substances…. And we can think the principle or the Good at once as separate and as constituting a taxis, an ordered and related totality” (pp. 202-203).

The universe is held together by the good or the ideal — a principle separate in both the Aristotelian and the Platonic sense, but acting only as a final cause or object of desire — and by the desires and aims of all beings — which in themselves indirectly also aim at the ideal. But nothing “enforces” the good or the ideal at a cosmic level. As a consequence, no evil in the world is cause for doubting the reality of ultimate good.

This concludes my direct treatment of Gwenaëlle Aubry’s detailed analysis of Aristotle in her second edition. When I first encountered her work, I was delighted to see someone vigorously arguing that the first cause is indeed just a final cause, and putting major emphasis on potentiality and act. In the course of working through this, I have improved my own understanding of numerous details. Her book has another 100 pages on what happens to all these issues in Plotinus, which I will pass over for now.

For Itself

Hegel’s distinctive phrase “for itself” (für sich, literally “for self”) always seemed a little mysterious to me. It seems to refer to a self-aware being’s taking itself to be this or that, following a more or less Kantian model of judgment. That part is clear enough. But what in the world is something like “the concept in and for itself”?

Once again, the simple Kantian/Hegelian notion of reflection sheds a great deal of light on this. It applies on two levels.

First, there is a purely relational one that applies to anything that may be conceived as having characteristics that are mutually related to one another. These in turn may be construed in terms of a kind of self-relatedness of the underlying thing. In this sense, “for itself” would apply to things that have self-relatedness. This means practically everything, except perhaps some abstractly simple things like points in geometry.

Second, there is the level of self-relatedness that is internal to a reflective judgment or unity of apperception, and to the value-oriented self-consciousness arising from mutual recognition. Self-consciousness is not a detached spectator beholding multifarious relations, but has its very being within and amidst all those relations. We might say, then, that in this context the relations themselves are “self-conscious”. Similarly, concepts involved in reflective judgment are in a way necessarily “self-conscious” concepts.

In a way, our essence as human beings is the integral whole that results from — or is teleologically aimed at by — the self-consciousness of our concepts. This whole would be the totality of our commitments — everything we hold to be good, true, or beautiful.

For Hegel as for Aristotle, what count as “our” commitments and “our” concepts are not just whatever we assert are ours. The measure of what commitments and concepts are truly ours lies in what we do in life. And what we really did in any particular case is not just what we say we did or meant to do, but also what others can observe and evaluate.

In this way, to be “for oneself” is simultaneously to be for others, because what counts as one’s deed — and ultimately as oneself — is partly up to all those others who experience us. This doesn’t mean we are not entitled to make contrary assertions of our own that may be right; maybe in some particular case, the others affected by our deeds are prejudiced. For Hegel, the bottom line is that everyone affected gets a hearing in such cases, and the outcome — what is ultimately right — is not subject to a predetermined formula, but rather follows from all the fine details of each case. This is characteristic of the openness by which Kant first distinguished reflective judgment. It is also characteristic of Aristotelian practical judgment.

To be “for itself” or “for oneself” is to be a subject of reflective judgment. For humans, it is also to be a subject of mutual recognition.

At least in the first instance, “subject” here need not imply a self-conscious subject, just a thing with properties with which the judgment is concerned. But perhaps the human case suggests something about how a self-conscious subject could be thought of as a special case or elaboration of a simple Aristotelian “subject” or underlying thing.

What distinguishes Aristotle’s view of the higher levels of subjectivity (and, I think, Hegel’s too) from typical modern ones is that self-consciousness inheres not in the subject per se as a special kind of entity, but rather in the activity of reflection (contemplation, thought thinking itself, deliberation) in which the subject is involved.

New State Not a Change?

“Of all cases it would be most natural to suppose that there is alteration in figures and shapes, and in states and in the process of acquiring and losing these; but as a matter of fact in neither of these two cases is there alteration” (Aristotle, Physics book VII ch. 3, Collected Works, Barnes ed., vol. 1, p. 412).

What the translator calls a matter of fact, I would call a matter of terminology. All specialties tend to develop their own terminology, and philosophers do likewise. Aristotle uses many Greek terms with meanings that were already specialized in his day. Modern disciplines and common speech have evolved their own choices using different criteria.

“[T]here is alteration only in things that are said to be affected in their own right by sensible things…. For when anything has been completely shaped or structured, we do not call it by the name of its material: e.g. we do not call the statue bronze or the candle wax or the bed wood, but we use a paronymous expression and call them brazen, waxen, and wooden respectively. But when a thing has been affected or altered in any way we still call it by the original name: thus we speak of the bronze or the wax being fluid or hard or hot…, giving the matter the same name as the affection” (ibid).

Aristotle makes his usual semantic distinction between the matter, the form, and the composite of both. He wants to specialize the term that is translated as “change” or “alteration” to apply only to the matter, and to use different locutions with regard to the form and the composite.

“Again, states, whether of the body or of the soul, are not alterations. For some are excellences and some are defects, and neither excellence nor defect is an alteration: excellence is a perfection (… since it is then really in its natural state: e.g. a circle is perfect when it becomes really a circle and when it is best), while defect is a perishing of or departure from this condition. So just as when speaking of a house we do not call its arrival at perfection an alteration…, the same holds good in the case of excellences and defects and of the things that possess or acquire them” (ibid).

As we might also anticipate, he strongly emphasizes a teleological and normative perspective on these matters.

“Further, we say that all excellences depend on particular relations. Thus bodily excellences such as health and fitness we regard as consisting in a blending of… elements in due proportion, in relation either to one another within the body or to the surrounding; and in like manner we regard beauty, strength, and all other excellences and defects. Each of them exists in virtue of a particular relation and puts that which possesses it in a good or bad condition with regard to its proper affections” (pp. 412-413).

Most fascinating of all is this emphasis on particular relations. Good and bad conditions are explained in terms of these.

“Since, then, relatives are neither themselves alterations nor the subjects of alterations or of becoming or in fact of any change whatever, it is evident that neither states nor the process of losing and acquiring states are alterations, though it may be true that their becoming or perishing, like that of form and shape, necessarily involves the alteration of certain other things…. For each defect or excellence involves a relation with those things from which the possessor is naturally subject to alteration: thus excellence disposes its possessor to be unaffected or to be affected thus and so, while defect disposes its possessor to be affected or unaffected in a contrary way” (p. 413).

Relations in themselves are static abstractions of conditions. But some of the things involved in these relations are subject to change or alteration. This is a sophisticated way of approaching the matter.

“And the case is similar in regard to the states of the soul, all of which too exist in virtue of particular relations…. Consequently these cannot be alterations either, nor can the process of losing and acquiring them be so, though their becoming is necessarily the result of an alteration of the sensitive part of the soul, and this is altered by sensible objects…. Consequently, although their becoming is accompanied by an alteration, they are not themselves alterations” (ibid).

States of the soul are to be viewed in this relational way. Their becoming is said to be accompanied by an alteration, not itself to be an alteration.

“And again, the states of the intellectual part of the soul are not alterations; nor is there any becoming of them. For the possession of knowledge most especially depends on a particular relation” (ibid).

Knowledge also “most especially” involves being in a particular relation. It is not just the possession of some content.

“It is evident, then, from the preceding argument that alteration and being altered occur in sensible things and in the sensitive part of the soul and, except accidentally, in nothing else” (p. 414).

“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.

Toward Essence

What does it mean to really explain something, as opposed to just making claims about it? According to Robert Pippin, this question underlies what he calls the key transition of Hegel’s Logic, between the “logic of being” addressed in several recent posts and what Hegel calls the “logic of essence”.

The logic of essence will itself eventually be superseded by the logic of the concept. With very broad brush, it seems to me one might expect that the logic of essence will be a representation of important insights Hegel attributes to Aristotle, whereas the logic of the concept is supposed to be a representation of what he claims as his own (and Kant’s).

“[Hegel’s] general approach [is] to begin with the least ‘mediated’, least theoretically committed determination and argue for the further determinations, further theoretical commitments, without which even these relatively simpler determinations would not be possible” (Hegel’s Realm of Shadows, p. 211).

Hegel assimilates all simple predications or assertions to the logic of being, the inadequacy of which we have seen in some detail. Every word, phrase, or assertion taken in strict isolation reduces to meaningless noise, just like the attempt to “say” indeterminate Being. Only taken together and in some sort of context do words and assertions begin to mean something.

According to Pippin, “a mere list of contingent properties and quantitative measures cannot count as having determined any subject of those determinations as such” (ibid). Hegel “summarizes this problem by calling it the problem of indifference” (ibid). We still lack any even quasi-stable things to talk about.

An explanation is more than just a generalization. Explanation requires distinguishing the essential from the nonessential.

Hegel thinks that even something as sophisticated as the use of Newton’s inverse square law to account for the elliptical shape of planetary orbits is still only a compact way of making a complex assertion about relational properties, and does not give us a reason. This corresponds to the level of the “force and understanding” chapter of the Phenomenology, which reaches a purely relational point of view on mathematical physics, but still lacks the features Hegel associates with self-consciousness.

“[A] distinction between what is truly real or essential and what appears, or that way of thinking, is now on the Logic‘s agenda…. A practice exists, and we want to know not merely what happens or whether it exists but whether the practice is actually a religious practice. Or a computer wins at chess, but is it actually thinking? Something is displayed in a gallery, but is it actually art?” (p. 218).

“These questions are just examples. The Logic is not concerned with them, and, we should say, is concerned with actuality as such, the possible actuality of anything intelligible” (ibid). “These example questions… depend on ‘the logic of actuality’ as such, which simply means: how we think about what anything ‘really is’. As we have seen, the determinations of such conceptuality cannot be empirical; they must be understood, according to Hegel, as ‘products’ of thought’s self-determination of itself, a process that continually realizes thought’s apperceptive nature. Or: the concept gives itself its own actuality. Hegelian conceptuality has this subjective dimension (‘thought’s autonomy‘), even while also being the articulation of the conceptual structure of reality. This has nothing to do with spinning every actual, contingent species-form out of thought’s self-examination. The topic… is logical or categorical formality as such, not ‘what are the existing species-forms?’ ” pp. 218-219).

“The very title of a ‘logic of essence’ suggests (yet again) immediately the philosopher whom Hegel seems most to admire, Aristotle” (p. 219). “We found in the logic of being that, according to Hegel, it was not possible to specify a thing’s ‘actual’ being by qualitative and quantitative markers…. Since Hegel accepts the Aristotelian premise that actually to be is to be a this-such, where that means it is identifiable by being an instance of a kind, this means we have failed with respect to the question of actuality. We are thereby compelled, in the prosecution of the original task, to consider that, ‘actually’, a thing is not how it simply appears, looks, sensibly manifests itself, however regular or predictable. We have to say that in some way, what a thing actually is lies hidden, must be uncovered, posited, a product of thought, not a simple empirical apprehension as such” (p. 220).

The “original task” is the determination of meaning, which didn’t get very far in the logic of being, even though in the parts Pippin has skipped over, Hegel did develop resources for making broad classes of simple assertions or claims about appearance.

“What we will need is a comprehension of the difference… between the ‘essential’ and the ‘unessential’, and the basis for this differentiation” (p. 221). “[W]hatever seemings are, (in not ‘actually’ being), they exist and are determinate, a determinacy inexplicable, Hegel claims, by the ‘skeptics and idealists’ who claim that the distinction cannot be made, and therefore say, ‘everything is illusory'” (ibid).

Whoever claims that “everything is only mere appearance” turns out to have no basis for making any distinctions within the so-called appearance.

“Someone who had understood everything said onstage, the plot of Shakespeare’s King Lear, and the basic motivations of the characters, as those characters and others voice them, and had understood only that, would not, we feel entitled to say, have understood ‘the play’. Put in the simplest possible way, to understand the play, one has to do more than listen to it; one must think about it, or we can say, using the word most important for Hegel, ‘reflect’ on it, understand what lies ‘beneath’… these facts about plots and characters…. There is no such thing as a hidden meaning in King Lear; there are just the words spoken or found on the page. How we get from this clumsy metaphor to the ‘concept’ of King Lear in itself is the underlying story of the logic of essence” (pp. 223-224).

All meaning that is worth talking about has this same kind of non-thing-like character. It is constituted from relations of connection and disconnection.

“It would be a mistake to sum a person up, attempt to ‘understand’ her in the distinct way persons should be understood, simply by adding up or listing everything she did, from what she had for breakfast to volunteering for a dangerous mission. A person would not be properly understood by attention to such ‘immediacy’ alone (or her qualitative/quantitative/measured appearances, as in the logic of being). We need to understand her deeds as ‘mediated’ by what Hegel calls her ‘inwardness’…, something (and now in the most important difference with the logic of being) that we cannot see, that does not simply present itself” (p. 224).

The relations that constitute meaning do not themselves directly appear. This applies as much to things in general as to human character.

It is certainly ubiquitous that people and things also respond differentially to direct appearances, without anything deeper than a qualitative or quantitative appearance being involved. Mid-20th century behaviorism claimed that was all there is, that the meaning at issue here was a mere figment or conceit.

Pippin continues his previous example, “For example, we can’t really understand what she did except by some attention to her own formulation of the act description and to her avowed motive (her ‘intention’). Sometimes what happens should not count as a deed because there is not the proper connection of inner and outer. An accident happens. Something prevents her from realizing her intention; that is, something happens to her. She does not do something. What happens is not an expression of her character. On the other hand, as Hegel states the central claim of the entire logic of essence in a phrase, we must concede that any such inner self-construal can ‘prove itself’… only in what manifests that outwardly, in the deeds. (It is immediately important that this ‘test’ can fail.) Too radical a separation and we have someone trying to disown what she in fact did, to fabricate excuses. (‘Mistakes were made’; ‘It was never my intention to deceive/hurt/offend anyone’, etc.) We need this distinction, but we can’t establish which deeds are true manifestations of essence and which are merely aberrations by any statistical analysis of frequency, any simple inspection of what happens. We need to understand how ‘what shows’, ‘what manifests itself’ (Schein), can be said to reflect these deeds’ essence when it does (if it does, then as Erscheinung, appearance), even if, as appearance, no one deed is ever a manifestation or simple representation of essence as such ” (pp. 224-225).

It was this sort of point about the ethical meaning and use of actuality in Hegel’s Practical Philosophy that initially greatly impressed me in Pippin’s work (see especially Hegel on Willing). According to Pippin, this kind of question about the relation of actuality to appearances is just what Hegel’s “logic of essence” is all about.

Unexpectedly for me at least, this now provides the occasion for Pippin to tell us more specifically what he thinks “mediated immediacy” means in Hegel. As I mentioned before, I have always thought first of things like the experience of riding a bicycle or recognizing an object, which properly speaking are examples of “immediatized mediation”, bridging the gap between the intrinsic emptiness of immediacy in itself and our undoubtedly non-empty “immediate” uptake of things in ordinary experience. In other words, my attention was drawn to the way in which complex results of some previous synthesis can be pre-consciously associated to what we experience “immediately” in a new synthesis of imagination.

Hitherto, in thinking about the term “mediated immediacy”, I have focused on ordinary appearances of meaning, in contexts that according to Hegel are not adequate to “immediately” support the constitution of that apparent meaning. This is admittedly to disregard the surface grammar of the phrase.

Pippin here starts to give “mediated immediacy” a sense that is aligned with the surface grammar, and is also closely aligned with what he has just said the logic of essence is all about.

He continues, “Understanding this relation properly is what Hegel thinks allows him to speak of a mediated immediacy. The appearances are not denied as unreal. They ‘shine’ in their immediacy. But they can be understood in their determinate immediacy only as the manifestation of the thing that they are appearances of, and so are always mediated…. We can’t derive the appearances from a mediated (‘posited’, ‘reflected’, ‘thought-over’) essence. That would be a denial of their immediacy. But we don’t apprehend such appearances on their own, in pure immediacy, and then infer what appears. What appears is appearing in what manifests itself…. What a person does is tied to that person’s character, whatever it is. And understanding that character is nothing other than rightly understanding what that person has done. With respect to all the reflected dualisms introduced in the logic of essence, this thought in various forms remains the kernel of that logic throughout” (p. 225).

This is Hegel’s recovery of something like Aristotle’s qualified common-sense realism about experience. We say that we experience not just phenomena but also things, even if we are wrong about them sometimes. At the simplest level, though not itself thing-like, essence is what enables the distinction of things from arbitrary collections of appearances.

“This is also why essence is a retrospective reflection of what has been made manifest, why it is rooted in gewesen, the past participle of sein [to be] or ‘what has been’, a feature somewhat counterintuitive in an account of action. It is also why Hegel is happy to accept the Wesen/gewesen suggestion of temporality. It links his account with one he admired, Aristotle’s, whose term for what has often been translated as essence is to ti en einai, something like ‘the what it was to be’ of a thing” (p. 226).

Essence, I would suggest, subsists independent of time once constituted, but the constitution of essence for both Aristotle and Hegel has a dependency on appearances in time. It therefore could not be pre-given. We have to actively discover or construct it, often taking into account long sequences of appearances in time. These may wander in various directions or sharply reverse our previous expectation. Parts of them we will judge to be irrelevant. This is only the beginning of the story of essence, not the end.

“Ultimately on Hegel’s account, if we want to know whether this lie reveals a person to be a ‘liar’, what we need is not to have deeper insight into some thinglike essence, but to observe what else the person does over time and to understand the relation among these deeds, to interpret them or ‘think them over’ in their relation to each other. This will be a crucial point throughout the logic of essence, and it obviously raises the question of how to make, what guides us in making, this relational connection.”

It is relatively easy to express the openness of Aristotelian practical judgment. But we still have to do the work of judgment in each case, and due to the openness we will have committed to with Aristotle, there could not be a precise roadmap telling us how to do the work. But Kant already argued that at least at a sufficiently high level of abstraction, universals can meaningfully guide practical judgment, so perhaps something more could be achieved. Any such progress on how to judge what is essential would be priceless indeed.

“Finally, it is important to stress that this topic is being introduced very broadly. No particular theory of ‘essentialism’ is being entertained, and as already noted, making the general distinction just discussed could be achieved even by an account of the difference between transcendental and empirical subjectivity, or between categories and empirical concepts” (ibid).

Essence as such need not be taken as a specific “ontological commitment”. It means what is reasonably, reflectively judged to be important. That is part of the hermeneutics of things and of life, which we encounter as soon as we begin asking if someone or something is really or actually something-or-other. (See also Essence and Explanation; Hegel on Reflection.)

Next in this series: Essence and Explanation

A Logic of Being?

We’ve reached part 2 of Robert Pippin’s important Hegel’s Realm of Shadows. Despite recently mentioned peripheral caveats, I’m enormously impressed with the way he makes sense of Hegel’s Science of Logic, possibly the most difficult philosophical work ever written.

He now begins a high-level survey of the three separate “logics” Hegel develops. It is essential to Hegel’s scheme that the first two will be regarded as failures in the explanation of what is involved in making things intelligible. For Hegel, failures of thought play an essential, irreducible role in the attainment of new insights. The perspectives achieved by thought are not “refuted” by other perspectives external to those achieved; instead, the achieved perspectives metaphorically “discover” their own inability to solve their own problems.

We’ve already seen the first move of the first of these failed accounts of what it is to be intelligible, the logic of being.

Hegel uses the further development of this account as a vehicle for discussing the Kantian categories of quantity and quality. If his first point was that being qua being is utterly sterile because intelligibility depends on the ability to make definite determinations, the elaboration begins to show the relational character of all determination, and at the same time the failure of any simple assertion of properties of things (“judgment”, in the severely truncated early modern form that reduces it to predication) to adequately make those things intelligible.

Pippin does not go into detail on Hegel’s lengthy discussion of quantity and quality, so for instance there is no more mention of the issue about good and bad infinity, though this is where Hegel treats it. Pippin reserves the most space for the final logic of the concept that is supposed to be successful, and gives the least to the logic of being, which according to Hegel is the least adequate.

In discussing the logic of being, Pippin is mainly concerned to extract takeaway points relevant to understanding the high-level “movement” of Hegel’s logic as a whole. I have been highlighting his suggestion that this notorious “logical motion” is teleological in a genuinely Aristotelian sense, rather than being either deductive, or somehow univocally driven forward by contradiction. It is all oriented toward the merely hypothetical necessity of what is required if we aim to reach a deeper truth. Pippin is at pains to point out that for Hegel as for Aristotle, every teleological actualization involves contingency.

“The idea is to begin with the thought of anything at all, in its immediate indeterminacy, simply being, Sein. But the thought of anything at all is not the thought of anything…. Nothing is excluded, so nothing is included…. It is a failed thought, not the thought of this failure or even just the enactment of the failure. This is the beginning of everything of significance in the Logic; it (the thought of Sein being nothing other than Nichts [nothing]) is the reflective relation to what is being thought that is inseparable from anything possibly being thought. It is thought’s apperceptive moment…. Just thereby, thinking is thinking its failure to be thinking, not thinking of a strange object, Nichts. It is only in this sense that the first moment has a second moment, a realization of what thinking must be to be thinking of anything” (p. 186).

“Such a reflective determination reveals both that such putative immediate indeterminacy must itself already be a determination, and that such a putative content, anything at all in its immediate indeterminacy, has not been transformed, has not ‘become’ Nichts, but that it always already was” (p. 187).

“Hegel here is doing something like making a case for, or at least in some way showing us, the apperceptively discursive nature of any possible discursive intelligibility. This also means that in judging anything, I am always also implicitly holding open the possibility of the self-correcting of judging…. Or, any judgment always implicitly applies, is implicitly applying, the concept of judgment to itself” (p. 189).

That apperceptive judgment always implicitly applies the concept of judgment to itself follows from its apperceptive, reflective nature. To be apperceptively reflective is to be self-referential, Pippin has been saying.

“As Kant insisted, in any such case I must be able to ‘stand above’ what I judged and what I now judge correctly and take the latter to be a correction of the former in order for it to be that, a correction. Otherwise, there is just a succession of episodes. This is why he could say that the understanding, the power of claiming, is the synthetic unity of apperception (in the same way, I am ultimately claiming in this book, Hegel is claiming that what he calls the concept is the synthetic unity of apperception)” (ibid).

“This also means, as we have been stressing, that given certain concepts of the power of knowing — say, a knowing that must be indeterminate and immediate, a ‘resolve’ to begin with such a notion — we already have thereby the concept of the object of such pure knowing, Being. If we are talking about a case of knowing, as we are, the two are, must be, inseparable…. There is no question, here or anywhere in the Logic, of the need to ‘move’ from the order of knowing to the order of being. If that were claimed to be necessary, how would we have begun with a case of knowing?” (pp. 189-190).

This intimate connection between the form of knowing and the object of knowing is Hegel’s alternative to the difficult “transcendental deduction” by which Kant in the Critique of Pure Reason aims to establish that the categories of thought really are relevant to experience. Pippin suggests that Hegel generally reinterprets Kantian dualities as cases of Aristotelian hylomorphism, and notes that even Kant occasionally makes remarks tending in this direction. In this particular case, reinterpreting the duality as a hylomorphism eliminates the “gap” between thought and being that in Kant creates the need for the transcendental deduction.

I confess, though, that it was not obvious to me that we had begun with a case of knowing. I have trouble identifying any kind of failed thought or thought that fails to have a content with knowing; I am not used to recognizing the possibility of an empty “knowing”.

But we are at least implicitly talking about an instance of thought here, even if it is a degenerate instance. Pippin is arguing that even that failed, empty thought must still be self-referential, just in being a case of thought in Hegel’s sense at all. By virtue of its form as thought or apperceptive judgment, it is already reflectively turned back on itself. I think Pippin is suggesting that that turning back on itself counts as a kind of knowing at the meta level, even though the thought failed at ground level.

“[T]here is no objection in Kant or among the relevant post-Kantians, in their denial that thinking is a kind of perceiving or primarily receptive, to the general form of such claims as ‘I know it because I saw it’, especially because that is the invitation to establishing that it can be seen by anyone…. But for thinking as such, there is nothing like: ‘I know that is the essence because I had an essence-intuition…'” (p. 190).

I am more reserved about claims like “I know it because I saw it”. Plato would not accept this as an instance of knowledge, and I am inclined to follow suit. I would say, “I believe it with confidence because I saw it”. But Pippin makes a good point here about the implicit invitation to treat this as the claim that it could be seen by anyone.

As I have noted before, what I prefer to call belief and others call a form of immediate, noninferential empirical “knowledge” are not just arbitrary assertions. Though we arrive at such beliefs “spontaneously” (in the ordinary sense, which is nearly the inverse of the Kantian sense), after the fact it is always possible to ask about the reasons for them.

I am claiming that after the fact, it should always be possible to express something of why we believe what we do. “Because I saw it” is not a reason, but a reiteration that it appeared that way to me. Intrinsically, it has no more value than “because I said so”. The kind of reasons that can be provided in this case will be persuasive (or, in Aristotle’s usage, “probable”) to some degree or other, but also potentially refutable. Typically they will take the form of more detailed claims about what we saw.

“Fichte insists on the same point that is made in the first move in the Logic… by pointing out the difference logically between ‘A’ and ‘A = A’. For the latter, we need… an ‘I’ that is ‘= I’…. But this identification is something done, a Tat [deed], the equivalent here of ‘bringing contents to the unity of apperception’ in Kant’s account, an active unifying necessary for the I to be continuously that I in experience” (p. 191).

As Aristotle pointed out, merely saying something (“A”, “Being”, or whatever) is not yet saying something about something, which turns out to be the minimal condition for truth or falsity. This formulation points to some kind of self-relatedness in the attitude toward content that seems to be a minimal condition for any kind of assertion. This self-relatedness in the content of assertions seems to be related to the inherent self-referentiality of thought for which Pippin is arguing, as if the one were a sort of hylomorphic reflection of the other.

I used to misunderstand the above argument of Fichte as additionally requiring the existence of an “I” like a rabbit out of a hat, but again we are only dealing with hypothetical necessity here. If I want to be able to conclude “A = A”, then I need to be able to apply the same identification “A” twice within the context of one judgment. That the two identifications of “A” must be combined within the context of one judgment is the sole import of Fichte’s “I = I”. If there is any existence of an I involved here, it is by hypothesis.

Pippin stresses that although Hegel speaks of logical “movement” in temporal metaphors, each part of the “movement” has always already occurred. Once again, Hegel is not talking about what drives the course of events, but something like the conditions of possibility of the constitution of intelligibility and normativity.

He goes on to discuss more problems related to immediacy, and the transition to the logic of essence, each of which I’ll address separately.

Next in this series: Problems of Immediacy