Hegel's Critique of Essence
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Hegel's Critique of Essence

A Reading of the Wesenlogic

Franco Cirulli

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eBook - ePub

Hegel's Critique of Essence

A Reading of the Wesenlogic

Franco Cirulli

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About This Book

This volume shows how The Doctrine of Essence intersects with perennial philosophical questions including above all, the relationship between freedom and determinism. The Doctrine of Essence is of central importance, since it is a critical description of traditional categories which also functions as the justification of Hegel's speculative understanding of essence.

This study takes an historical approach to build upon Hegel's abstract argument, viewing it as a confrontation with his predecessors, inparticular - Fichte and Schelling.

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Publisher
Routledge
Year
2013
ISBN
9781135499990

Chapter One

Sein and Reflexion: The Historical Antecedents of the Logic

But we have only concepts of that which at one time has gone bad and has been made good again; of childhood and innocence we have no concepts
(Hölderlin, Hyperion).

1. THE IDEA OF A LOGIC OF ESSENCE

The logic of Essence is such a thicket of dense (and sometimes almost impenetrable) redescriptions of classical categories, that the reader, lost at the level of microanalysis, may forget to ask a very basic question: why is this central section called a doctrine of essence? If an essence is supposed to be an eminently intelligible structure which makes an entity the determinate thing that it is, it seems that also any category of the doctrine of Being should be entitled to be construed as an essence—after all, any category in the Logic does not concern “things, but their import, their concept” (SL 39).
An answer can be had by focusing on the particular object whose essence the Logic must spell out, and this object is nothing else but thought per se: a situation in which “nothing is either below or above us, and in such solitude we are only with ourselves” (E §31). The Logic seeks to answer this question: what categories are required if thought is to think itself, in the sense of grasping its own essence qua pure activity? This is not to be understood pictorially: a category is not a mere representation of a noetic Beisichsein (E §31), of the presence of pure thought to itself. A category which just reflects the being of thought would separate logic from metaphysics and fall short of the program of a “science of logic which constitutes metaphysics proper” (SL 27). To take literally the unity of the two can mean only one thing: a category is the presence of thought to itself. If qua pure thinker, I think of myself as—say—’something, ’ it also means that ‘something’ is thinking itself. But this is not a supine, unquestioning assumption: on the contrary, the need for justification is constant, since until the final shape of the ‘Absolute Idea, ’ each categorial shape reveals its incomplete status through its explicit failure to grasp completely that which it was intended to seize upon.
This does not mean that a category has failed to capture a plenitude of self-presence that was ripe from the outset, and that a new, more accurate category is required. No, the very postulate of the identity of thought and being, entails that an incomplete category is a defective presence of thinking to itself.1 Any resolution of the problem in categorial terms is not a more telling unveiling of a fact, but the simultaneous construction of a more complete self-presence—hence the emancipatory character of philosophy. In the case of the Logic, the emancipatory task is twofold. First, thought should be in full possession of itself, in the sense of being fully self-transparent; cate-gories used in ignorance of their origin in spontaneity makes us forget that they “are means for us” (SL 35), and makes us believe “that we serve them, that in fact they have us as our possession […] how shall I set myself up as more universal than they, which are the universal as such?” (ibid). Hegel’s nosce te ipsum invitation is at once a summons to be freed from self-slavery: “the loftier business of logic therefore is to clarify these categories and in them to raise mind to freedom and truth” (ibid). Second, if the essence of thought is freedom, this self-perspicuousness should not be a given, but rather a deed. The determinations of thought should be self-determinations, in the sense of their making thematic the dynamic character of thought: this is the gist of Hegel’s conviction that “these dead bones of logic can be quickened by spirit” (SL 53).
Therefore, categories in Hegel cannot be static eidetic structures: they are instead eidetic structures of the active comportment of self-relating thought—in a way, they are descriptions of a doing. Following the Hegelian metaphor that one can get at the logos of swimming only by actually swimming, the Logic is (if I may say so) a pool in which the full meaning of any category is tested only by seeing if the latter can indeed swim the laps it purports to be able to handle. That is, the point is to see if its initial definition manages to exhaustively cover the structure of its actual ‘doing.’ An example: we will see that the category of “Absolute Identity” fails to cover its actual ‘doing’ precisely because the category turns out to be more than just ‘identity’: it is a self-contradictory stipulation of identity and difference. In light of this, the meaning of a category is not a static logos, but something that needs to be adjusted and enriched any time that the ‘saying’ of that category is at loggerheads with its ‘doing.’
If we combine the two desiderata of theory and practical spontaneity, we can conjecture that the Logic is the narrative of thought spontaneously raising itself to the freedom of self-transparency: metaphysics and the Bildungsroman coalesce into one. Thus, we should be able to detect in the categorial sequence a cumulative process of growth: each category should, while retaining the strengths of its predecessors, thematize more fully self-possession and the active character of such self-presence. This is a strongly Fichtean component: we are who we make ourselves to be; to suppose a static nature is to relapse into the dogmatism that equates reason with a bone unveiled by the work of the anatomist. Hegel, like Fichte, sees praxis operating at the very heart of theory: to understand oneself is to be engaged in the systematic, non-arbitrary construction of one’s identity qua pure thinker.2
Thus, if we have to flesh out the essence of a pure, self-reflexive thought, it stands to reason that this essence, whatever it may turn out to be, must minimally thematize the subject-object bidimensionality of this noesis noeseos, and the self-producing nature of this pattern. In light of this, the Doctrine of Being does not articulate essences, since it fails to consider exhaustively the bi-dimensional noetic ‘import’ of the object, as can be deduced from the monodimensional constitution of its categories: the Seinslogik lays upon itself the constraint that pure thinking can only take place through one category. This is not from a willful Ockhamian thriftiness, but from the desire to understand oneself as a unity. One may read, in the underlying spirit of the Seinslogik, Hegel’s immanent critique of Romanticism’s deep mistrust of the bifurcations of the raison raisonnante, and its concurrent nostalgia for an archetypal state of integrity. Hegel himself feels the force of this critique of Enlightenment rationality, but he also sees it doomed to failure precisely because of its uncompromising monism. The Doctrine of Being is the systematic attempt to rethink the Romantic desire for unity, by eliminating its self-defeating, crude categorial conception via an immanent critique. To think of A is also to demarcate it from ~A. However, since Being-categories refuse the concept of relationality and internal difference, they are not able to capture the diremption attending any determinate thought. Less abstrusely: since the A/~A diaresis is an act of thinking that makes possible the thought of A, it too should achieve categorial status. That is, not only the form of self-presence, but also the determinate aspect of self-determination should be thematized.
Thus, if we ask the perfectly sensible question: ‘What is the benefit of proceeding as Hegel does, i.e. instead of assuming a fixed essence to be logically analyzed, why does he insist on a ‘dynamic, ’ self-determining essence?, ’ a very elementary answer would run as follows. If thought had a fixed essence which can become the object of a thinking self-apprehension, it would turn out that essence and self-apprehension would be external to each other, and thus that the alleged essence fails to capture an absolutely crucial dimension of pure thought, its constitutive Beisichsein. Thus, whatever it may turn out to be, the essence of pure thinking should minimally be a category including the subject/object structure of self-consciousness, and the absolute, non-formal unity of the two poles. Yet this is not enough: this absolute identity cannot be taken to be a fact, but must be cast in relief as the product of spontaneity: the determinate being of thought exists in and through the self-determination of thought itself. It is in this sense that the essence should be ‘dynamicized’: it should thematize also the positively self-constituted character of thought.3
This means that a monodimensional category eo ipso cannot capture thinking in its entirety, and therefore that it is unsuited for the purposes of freedom (understood as unitary, exhaustive self-presence). Since a monodimensional category is not ‘strong enough’ to sustain the unavoidable rela-tionality that is at its basis, pure monism condemns itself to an endless wavering between two categorial opposites: thought thematizes itself now as A, now as ~A, because the unavoidable dialectic that leads one pole to its other cannot accomodate their synthesis, and can only result in the suppression of the former in favor of the latter. Only the categorial thematization of relationality can save pure thought from the ceaseless oscillations between two poles. It also follows that the Seinslogik not only fails to categorize the subject/object relationality, but also the spontaneous root of that relation: the movements from one pole to the other are taken to be the arbitrary movement of opinion.4
And it is precisely the categorial thematization of relationality and of its spontaneous root that characterizes the concepts of the Doctrine of Essence. The Wesenslogik aims to accomodate the desideratum of unity with the inescapable Urtheilung (division) attending determinate thought. Here, oppositionality is thematized through bi-dimensional categories: that is, each category is explicitly described as a unit standing in a relation to its other—whereas Being-categories suffered no relationality. Unity, on the other hand, is accounted for by describing difference as a mere illusion, a Schein. That is, each category is thematically related to an other, but this other appears to be lacking an ontological self-standing status, and appears only as a posit of the first category itself. Spontaneity is thematized through the vocabulary of a ‘positor’ and a ‘posited.’ Yet, the Wesenslogik does not quite achieve a genuine synthesis of all the moments involved. Let us see how.
The necessary relation to a completely dependent other is the paradoxical pattern of Reflexion, an acknowledgement of necessary relationality, but as an inessential side of the category under consideration: an essential positor is related to an inessential posited. But on the other hand, even the determinacy of the first (allegedly primary) category is parasitic upon the contrast with the (putatively secondary) posited category: even the determinate nature of the first category turns out to be a posit, and thus a Schein. There is thus a reciprocal determination between categories (a clear echo of Fichte’s Wechselbestimmung), a mutual dynamic that in the Seinslogik appeared only as opinion’s ceaseless transition between static poles. More in general, then, all determinacy within the Doctrine of Essence is posited.
This means that all determinate presence of thinking to itself is constructed, and thus its ostensibly immediate nature is only a Schein, an illusion. The only locus of genuine unity appears to be the positing activity itself which carves out two mutually opposed categorial fields: i.e. only the activity of reflection is unitary. However, the resolution of self-standing determinacy (Sein) into the activity of positing (Reflexion) is not complete. Indeed, the separating and interrelating activity of reflection cannot account for the difference between the two opposed determinacies. That is, there is no indication as to how two opposed contents (say, ‘cause’ and ‘effect’) find in reflection an all-inclusive content that is their genuine synthesis. Reflection cannot provide more than a mechanical unity of different categorial determinacies: there is, in the Doctrine of Essence, an imperfect unity of Sein and Reflexion. Hegel is giving us the pure logical form of a Fichtean scheme: the divisive and synthetic operations (reflection) of the transcendental imagination cannot be genuinely unified—they do not achieve Being (cf. Rosen 1974, 102–103).
Only if we can show that there is an intimate link between the content of a determinacy and the movement of positing another determinacy will we overcome the indifference (Gleichgültigkeit, L II 5) of reflection vis-à-vis being. This means that we want a dynamic in which the posited content is not only the negation, but also the self-constituting fulfillment of the first—we want a dialectic of development, not of mere positionality. The shift from the latter to the former is clear only to the extent that we can intelligibly reinterpret position of the other as a self-position, without deconstructing the other as a mere illusion.
Given this desideratum, the Doctrine of the Concept is called upon to capture explicitly and exhaustively in one category this bifurcation of categories and activity. Less abstrusely, we should begin with one category thematizing the self-directed activity of a content, which spontaneously establishes difference within itself; and which yet in so doing determines itself to a more perfect unity. Very crudely, this consists in inverting the sequence of the Fichtean triad, and beginning instead with the third principle, moving to the second as subject-object difference, and ending with ...

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