Identity, Difference, Reflection

Reflection is also the key to Hegel’s often misunderstood views on identity and difference.

“Reflection is the shining of essence within itself. Essence, as infinite immanent turning back is not immediate simplicity, but negative simplicity; it is a movement across moments that are distinct, is absolute mediation with itself. But in these moments it shines; the moments are, therefore, themselves determinations reflected into themselves” (Hegel, Logic, di Giovanni trans., p. 354, emphasis in original).

He goes on to discuss identity, difference, and the notorious “contradiction” as principal moments or determinations of reflection. Sometimes he uses these terms in the conventional way — of which he is highly critical — and sometimes he gives them his own meaning.

On Aristotelian grounds, I have long had doubts about appeals to an implicitly immediate simplicity or “identity” of substance in traditional metaphysics. I take these to be a form of Platonizing that originated in the neoplatonic commentaries on Aristotle. Hegel’s alternative suggestion of a “negative simplicity” seems much more plausible generally, as well as more consistent with the Aristotelian texts. We just have to get past the difficulty of Hegel’s idiosyncratic metaphorical straining of language about “negation”, and recognize that he is inventing ways to talk about the limits of representation, rather than grossly abusing the “classical” negation of formal logic.

Hegel’s remarks about identity are actually pretty clear, and worth quoting at length. As with negation, in Hegel identity, difference, and “contradiction” only have the meanings that they have in classical logic when he is pointing out their limitations. The alternative meanings that he actually endorses deeply reflect his critique of representationalism.

“In its positive formulation, A = A, [the principle of identity in classical logic] is at first no more than the expression of empty tautology. It is rightly said, therefore, that this law of thought is without content and that it leads nowhere. It is thus to an empty identity that they cling, those who take it to be something true, insisting that identity is not difference but that the two are different. They do not see that in saying, ‘Identity is different from difference’, they have thereby already said that identity is something different. And since this must also be conceded as the nature of identity, the implication is that to be different belongs to identity not externally, but within it, in its nature. — But, further, inasmuch as these same individuals hold firm to their unmoved identity, of which the opposite is difference, they do not see that they have thereby reduced it to a one-sided determinateness which, as such, has no truth. They are conceding that the principle of identity only expresses a one-sided determinateness, that it only contains formal truth, truth abstract and incomplete. — Immediately implied in this correct judgment, however, is that the truth is complete only in the unity of identity and difference, and, consequently, that it only consists in this unity. When asserting that formal identity is incomplete, there is vaguely present to one’s mind the totality, measured against which that identity is incomplete; but the moment one insists that identity is absolutely separate from difference and in this separation takes it to be something essential, valid, true, then what transpires from these two contradictory claims is only the failure to reconcile these two thoughts: that identity as abstract identity is essential, but that, as such, it is equally incomplete. What is lacking is awareness of the negative moment as [that by] which, in these claims, identity itself is displayed. — Or when this is said, that identity is identity essentially as separation from difference or in the separation from difference, then right there we have the expressed truth about it, namely that [formal] identity consists in being separation as such, or in being essentially in the separation, that is, it is nothing for itself but is rather moment of separation.”

“As to the other confirmation of the absolute truth of the principle of identity, this is made to rest on experience in so far as appeal is made to the experience of every consciousness; for anyone presented with this proposition, ‘A is A’, ‘a tree is a tree’, immediately grants it and is satisfied that the proposition is self-evident and in need of no further justification or demonstration.”

“On the one hand, this appeal to experience, that every consciousness acknowledges the principle universally, is a mere manner of speaking. For nobody will want to say that the abstract proposition, ‘A is A’, has actually been tried out in every consciousness. The appeal to actual experience is therefore not in earnest but is rather only an assurance that, if the experiment were made, universal acknowledgement of the proposition would be the result. — And if it is not the abstract proposition as such that is meant, but the proposition in concrete application, from which application the abstract proposition would then have to be developed, then the claim to the universality and immediacy of the latter would consist in the fact that every consciousness assumes it or implies it as a foundation, and indeed does so in every utterance. But the concrete and the application are precisely in the reference that connects simple identity with a manifold which is different from it. Expressed as a proposition, the concrete would be first of all a synthetic proposition. From this concrete itself, or from the synthetic proposition expressing it, abstraction could indeed extract the principle of identity through analysis; but, in actual fact, it would not then leave experience as it is but would have altered it, since in experience the identity was rather in unity with difference. And this is the immediate refutation if the claim that abstract identity is as such something true, for what transpires in experience is the verry opposite, namely identity only united with difference” (pp. 358-359, emphasis in original).

“Identity, instead of being in itself the truth and the absolute truth, is thus rather the opposite; instead of being the unmoved simple, it surpasses itself into the dissolution of itself.”

“More is entailed, therefore, in the form of the proposition expressing identity than simple, abstract identity; entailed by it is this pure movement of reflection in the course of which there emerges the other, but only as reflective shine, as immediately disappearing…. The propositional form can be regarded as the hidden necessity of adding to abstract identity the extra factor of that movement…. Consequently, if appeal is made to what appearance indicates, then the result is this: that in the expression of identity, difference also immediately emerges” (p. 360, emphasis in original).

“From this it is clear that the principle of identity itself, and still more the principle of contradiction, are not of merely analytical but of synthetic nature” (ibid, emphasis in original).

Here he uses Kant’s distinction of analytic from synthetic judgments. Analytic judgments are purely formal and tautological; canonically, the predicate is considered to be literally implied by the subject. Synthetic judgments on the other hand go beyond what is already implied by the subject or premises. This includes most judgments in ordinary experience. Synthetic judgments involve the material inference that Robert Brandom has particularly expounded in recent times.

“Thus the result of this consideration is this: (1) the principle of identity or contradiction, when meant to express merely abstract identity in opposition to difference as a truth, is not a law of thought but expresses rather the opposite of it; (2) these two principles contain more than is meant by them, namely this opposite, absolute difference itself” (p. 361, emphasis in original).

The Human in Siger of Brabant

Those whom modern scholars called Averroists were supposed to be unoriginal, dogmatic followers of Averroes. This turns out to be as inaccurate as the supposition that the Latin scholastics as a whole were unoriginal, dogmatic followers of Aristotle.

At issue here is what it is to be human, and in particular how the difficult Aristotelian concept of “intellect” relates to human beings. There were not just two but a wide variety of nuanced and well-argued positions on this.

Among the so-called Averroists, Siger of Brabant (1240-1280) is the best known name, but no full book has yet been devoted to his work. According to Alain de Libera, in his later works Siger developed original responses to Thomas Aquinas’ famous critique of Averroes.

Siger argued against Aquinas that the act of thought is not purely immanent but simultaneously immanent and transitive. That is to say, for Siger it is immanent in the human, but transitive in the separate intellect. While affirming a “separate” intellect, Siger emphasized against Aquinas that the total act of thinking is attributable to the whole human, and not just to the human’s intellective soul. Intellect is an “intrinsic operation” in the human that in a way does, and in a way does not, make it the “substantial form” and perfection of a material body. According to Siger, Aquinas’ claim that the intellective soul unequivocally is the substantial form of the body cannot be reconciled with Aquinas’ other claim that intellect as a power of the intellective soul is entirely independent of the body. Siger adopts Albert and Thomas’ term “intellective soul”, but for Siger only the animal and vegetative soul are united with the body in being. Intellective soul is naturally united with the body in operation but not in being, whereas Aquinas says they are united in being.

According to de Libera, Siger in his Questions on the Book of Causes argues that the form of the human is not simple, but is rather a composite comprising an intellect that “comes from outside” (in Aristotle’s phrase), and a vegetative and sensitive substance that is “educed from the power of matter” (de Libera, Archéologie du sujet vol. 3 part 1, p. 411, my translation). Intellect is said by Siger to be a “form subsistent in itself”. It is not a “substantial form” in the proper sense, which would imply that it was inherent in the human body. It is not in the body “as in a subject”. However, intellect has need of the human body (specifically, the phantasms of the imagination) as an object, and intellect is in turn attributable to the human as a whole, though it is not reducible to the biological organism. Intellect for Siger is neither the inherent form of the human nor a separate, external mover of the human, but a separate form with an operation that is intrinsic to the whole human, in which it participates by composition.

De Libera remarks in passing that the act of thought owes more to intelligible objects than to “intellect”. I would suggest that it is through language and culture and ethical practice that Aristotelian intellect “comes to us from outside”. We talking, encultured animals then acquire a spiritual essence that comes to be intrinsic to us, through our ethical practice, in which acquired intellect and animal imagination cooperate.

According to de Libera, for Siger “The ‘intelligent whole’ is composed of many psychic parts, which are not of the same nature, or of the same origin, or of the same ontological status” (p. 362).

Siger objects that Aquinas’ notion of intellect as united with the body in being “makes the act of thought a perfection of matter” (ibid). This makes the body intellect’s “subject of inherence”. But at the same time, applying Thomas’ own axiom that nothing is accomplished by a power separated from itself, Siger reproaches Thomas for being unable to account for “the integrality of the known” (p. 378), and specifically the knowledge of material things.

For Aquinas, establishing that there is an operation proper to the soul is essential to the possibility of the soul’s existence independent of the body, and thus to his philosophical argument for personal immortality. But Siger argues that in making intellect an operation proper (i.e., uniquely attributable) to the soul, Aquinas implicitly negates its attributability to the whole human. Intellection for Siger is “an operation common to the human composite as an integral whole” (p. 377). In other words, I think with my whole being, not just my “mind”.

De Libera concludes that Siger does preserve the possibility of personal immortality, which was a principal concern of Averroes’ critics. However, he finds that the texts do not support the claims of some recent scholars that Siger in his later works abandoned “Averroism” in favor of Thomism.

The phrase “form subsistent in itself”, according to de Libera, does not have the same meaning for Siger that it does for Thomas. Albert the Great had analyzed three logical possibilities for an “intermediate” kind of form that is neither fully separate nor inseparable from matter. According to de Libera, Siger’s work is consistent with this. Siger aimed at a mean between a Platonist excess of separation between form and matter, and what he perceived as a Thomist excess of union with respect to so-called substantial forms. De Libera does find, however, that Siger, like other authors, is too anxious to simplify the issues at stake, and that he goes too far in identifying the position of Aquinas with that of Alexander of Aphrodisias, who was regarded as having a “materialist” view of the human soul. He also says Siger goes too far in reducing Aquinas’ notion of form to the simple analogy of a stamp in wax.

De Libera meanwhile also raises doubts about Aquinas’ insistence on the absence of any intermediary between the intellective soul and the body. He notes that in a very different context, the Franciscan Augustinian Peter Olivi argued that the intellective soul is united with the body via the intermediary of the sensitive soul. Olivi’s position was rejected by the Council of Vienna in 1312.

De Libera accepts the notion of “substantial form” as genuinely Aristotelian, but appears to endorse the argument of Bernardo Carlos Bazán that Aquinas’ notion of intellective soul gives it a privileged ontological status that makes it more than a substantial form. According to Bazán, Aquinas’ anthropology from the very start goes beyond the Aristotelian hylomorphism that Thomas generally endorses. The form of a human in Aquinas — unlike anything in Aristotle — is such that it could not be the result of any natural generative process, but could only be created by God. Siger comes across as closer to Aristotle.

De Libera notes that in the wake of the English theologian Thomas Wylton (1288-1322), later so-called Averroists “invested massively” in a distinction between an inherent form and an assisting form, and regarded human intellect as an “assisting form”. (See also “This Human Understands”; “This Human”, Again; Averroes as Read by de Libera.)

Place of a Preface

The preface to Hegel’s Phenomenology famously maintains that the conventional notion of a preface (e.g., “say what you are going to say”) is inapplicable to serious work in philosophy. There is an air of paradox about this, because in some sense he goes on to do what he just said was impossible. Hegel’s preface does summarize key conclusions of the book, but Hegel wants to make it clear that any such summary can at best be what Kant would call a dogmatic anticipation of real philosophical work yet to be done (in Brandom’s phrase, a “promissory note”).

I would note that this also reflects Hegel’s deep Aristotelianism. The way ideas are developed counts for much more than the way in which they are introduced. Aristotle did not follow the “say what you are going to say” model. Instead, he would begin with broad orienting remarks, a preliminary demarcation of subject matter, and a survey of common or leading views on the subject. Beginnings are the least certain part of a work; real substance emerges — if at all — from extensive development.

Of course it is possible to refer to an extensive development without producing or reproducing it in-line, but the relative soundness of such references depends on the soundness of the development and its applicability.

Simplicity is a pedagogical virtue that helps us on the uptake, but ultimately it cannot be the criterion of clarity. Real clarity comes from manifest interlinkages in a development that can be assessed independent of asserted conclusions (see Aristotelian Demonstration).

In his commentary, Harris says “The most important part here is Hegel’s insistence that the results of a science — whether it be philosophical or empirical — cannot be separated from the process (the Ausführung, or ‘execution’) by which they are reached” (Hegel’s Ladder I, p. 36). One of Hegel’s minor headings in the preface reads: “The principle is not the conclusion — against Formalism” (quoted on p. 48).

“We have a paradox here. The philosophical truth is absolute; but we have to hear it from one who is like ourselves. In this sphere, all particular situations are equally contingent. The philosopher, addressing her peers, will begin with this problem of how someone who accepts the finite human status can claim to say what is absolutely true — because that was precisely the problem that philosophy faced when the Phenomenology of Spirit was conceived. The philosopher and her peers, however, are not ‘in the midst of things’ in the way that the rest of us are. When she writes a book, she must take account of how we, the literate audience, are in medias res [in the midst of things]. Yet neither her situation nor ours is of any concern to philosophy as a systematic Science. For philosophy itself it is only the pure structure of ‘being in the midst of things’ that can be a possible starting point” (pp. 33-34).

Next in this series: Indistinct Cows, Pistol Shot