A note on reification in Hegel's logic

Hegel was a late developer. He was 37 when the Phenomenology of Spirit was published; and his Science of Logic followed only when he was 42. It was his third book, written in serious professional difficulties. He still had no university position, and was not really suited to the Gymnasium directorship he currently occupied. The reception of the Phenomenology, on its publication in 1807, was disappointing; indeed, this book will not achieve the centrality it has for us today until the work of Dilthey in the late nineteenth century. It was rather around the Logic that what we call Hegelianism began to be organised, it was the Logic that underwrote his eventual professorships at Heidelberg (1816) and then Berlin (1818). The Science of Logic– the so-called greater logic – was in fact only the first of Hegel's publications on the subject. A second, smaller version appeared in the three-part Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences in 1817. These works were meant to be student handbooks, and to accompany the professor's lectures on the subject; fortunately the modern editions contain many of Hegel's oral commentaries on the individual entries, and offer a more accessible approach to them than the monumental Greater Logic itself (in what follows, it will essentially be the Encyclopedia Logic that is referenced, in William Wallace's attractive Scottish translation). Today, however, after the emergence of symbolic logic and all the complexities of modern mathematics (whose discovery by Boole in 1847 Hegel did not live to see), the originality of Hegel's transformation of traditional logic may not be so apparent. Still, the flavour of what happened to Aristotelian logic in the schools may be conveyed by the way in which all the possible forms of the syllogism were given proper names in the Middle Ages; thus, Derit or Cemestres, Featino or Darapti, Patiat, Bocardo, Ferison and Fesapo, all name specific syllogistic formulae (one readily imagines the pedagogical practices learning such a list encouraged!). Hegel hit on the idea of translating the elements of the Aristotelian logical mechanism back into genuine philosophical conceptualities. So successful was this operation indeed that Hegel is scarcely ever mentioned in the history of logic, as though he had somehow suppressed the method and the mechanics which made it ‘logic’ in the first place. These various elements (or aspects, in German, Momente) are then lined up in what looks like a sequential or even teleological series. To see what is really at stake here we would have to take into account the issue of ‘presentation’ or Darstellung– how to lay all this material out; but also to come to terms with the concluding term of the notion – the Begriff or Absolute Spirit – which is not, I would argue, a temporal idea or a historical stage (the German word Moment is ambiguous: when masculine, it has the temporal sense of the English moment; but when neuter, it simply means an aspect). What is sequential in Hegel's series of categories is their progressive enlargement, and the degree to which each ‘moment’ cannot stand on its own, but is dependent on another feature or ‘seme’ outside itself which has to be factored back into the process of thought. The ultimate ‘notion’ or Begriff is then a fully self-sufficient concept which is a kind of ‘causa sui’ or cause of itself; Spinoza's ‘god or nature’ would be an appropriate analogy, and indeed Hegel thought of himself as a competitor of Spinoza who attempted to factor subjectivity and consciousness (‘system or subject’) into the latter's extraordinary vision of totality. However we wish to see Hegel's progression of forms, the more general outline of both Logics is clear: the three parts – entitled Being, Essence, and the Notion (Sein, Wesen, Begriff) in his terminology – designate dimensions of life and thought we might describe as follows. The categories of Being are those of common sense or a daily life among objects, in which the law of non-contradiction holds sway; this is the world of Verstand or Understanding (in the philosophical jargon of the day), and it will be more thoroughly dealt with in what follows, inasmuch as it is a thought of extension and objectivity, a reified thought which must reify itself in order to grasp its reified objects. The realm of Essence is, then, the way in which categories act and react upon each other within the mind; this is more properly the realm of the dialectic itself, in which we become aware to what degree ‘definition is negation’ (Spinoza again) and each thought is linked to its opposite. This area may be said, in current philosophical language, to be that of reflexivity or self-consciousness. There remains, finally, the Notion itself, which is divided into two zones: the Syllogism and Life. I propose to translate the first of these Hegelian figures into the language of the logos, whose movement and dynamism organises the world itself and its time. The idea of life, then – we are still in a pre-Darwinism context, in which reference to vitalism or the Bergsonian life force would be anachronistic – is I believe Hegel's way of rescuing the world of matter from mechanical materialism and designating the organisation of the objective universe (or Nature in its largest sense). The Absolute is then the Deleuzian ‘fold’ between these two parallel dimensions, which in my opinion correspond to what Spinoza called the two ‘attributes’ of cogitatio (thought) and extensio (extension), two co-terminous and parallel dimensions or codes into which all realities can be translated back and forth. This seems to me what one might want to call the ‘metaphysics’ of Hegel, the sense in which he has attempted to give ‘content’ to the abstract form of his thinking: or ‘meaning’ to its grammar and syntax. That he himself knows this may be deduced from his insistence on calling this third section of the Logic‘speculative thought’, rather than dialectics: by which he seems to have meant that the affirmation of the identity between thinking and its object could never be proven but only asserted by way of a leap of reason. It is that leap (or its figural content) which we must designate as metaphysical in all its contemporary senses. These notes on the Encyclopedia Logic need to be prefaced by three observations, on my repeated use of the term ‘category’ to characterise the structures at stake in this text, as well as on my treatment of that temporality traditionally imputed to the way in which those categories, in the Logic, are supposed to produce themselves and to generate their own succession in some kind of dialectical time; to which I add a remark on idealism. The first, or terminological negligence results from my assumption that the Logic is Hegel's continuation of the great Kantian insight about the deeper organisation of Aristotle's haphazard list of categories. Kant's insight was essentially a spatial one, in which the categories were sorted out in four groups: quantity, quality, relationship and modality (Hegel deploys the first two groups in the Doctrine of Being, the second two in the Doctrine of Essence). It would be of much interest to examine Kant's arrangement in its own right (its fourfold organisation cries out for interpretation). All we can do here is to take note of Hegel's extraordinary modifications in the scheme, which in effect project Kant's spatial groups onto temporality itself (of which more in a moment). Although he does not use the term as such, it seems fair to describe the moments of the Logic– which range from topics like Being or Necessity to seemingly more minor matters, such as Limit, Reciprocity, Accident, and the like, as a greatly enlarged list of categories on the Kantian or Aristotelian mode. In that case, should there not be a category of the Category itself (a popular idea during the structuralist period which Derrida repudiated with some contempt in his essay on Benveniste)? The difficulty perhaps lies in their evolution and transformation in the very course of the Logic, such that Being – if a category at all – is not meant at all to be the same kind of category as the Notion which concludes the series; thus, to impose this term or classification on the moments from the outset would be to force this development into a rigid and uniform mould. But if these moments cannot be ranged under the classification Category, then what are they exactly? It is a question which raises even more general questions about the space in which such ‘categories’ develop, questions we did not have to pose for Kant or Aristotle. For the latter, they are simply the various things that can be ‘said’ about a being or a phenomenon. In this way, Aristotle paradoxically rejoins his modern semiotic critics (Benveniste, Eco) who have maintained that his ‘categories’ are merely the projections and hypostases of a local Indo-European grammar. Yet Aristotle did himself already locate them in speech (even if he failed to raise the issue of the epistemological relativity of languages as such). As for Kant, not yet being a Habermassian or feeling the sway of any structuralist or postmodern doxa about the primacy of language and communication, he sticks to the mind itself and grasps the categories as so many ‘concepts of the understanding’ which operate both judgements and those perceptions understood to be mental ‘syntheses of representations’. Still, he disposes of some fairly recognisable traditional ‘space’– the mind – in which, as in Aristotle's ‘speaking’, the categories can comfortably be housed and find their field of efficacity. Whatever Hegel thinks about mind or language, those are not the ‘places’ in which his categories evolve; and to call those Spirit or even Objective Spirit is to beg the question, insofar as it is precisely the space of the categories which will be called on to define Spirit in the first place. So they seem relatively placeless and disembodied: they are not the thoughts of a Mind, even a transcendental one (since for one thing, they are not yet even thoughts as such); whatever Absolute Spirit may be, or however Hegel's combination of Substance and Subject may be understood, it is not an omniscient and anthropomorphised narrator of some sort. In fact, I tend to think it would be better to imagine the ‘space’ of Hegel's categories in the absence of all such modern container notions of subjectivity or of element, in a kind of spacelessness. This makes the categories in Hegel far more situation- or event-specific; all the while acknowledging the evident fact that whatever ‘space’ or ‘context’ may be invoked, it will always also itself be precisely one of those categories it was alleged to have governed or contained. Thus once again here we confront the well-known paradox of the ‘class which is a member of itself’, something ‘solved’ by the attempt to imagine a state of things – or better still a type of discourse – itself free of such representational homogeneity, and able to accommodate a series of ‘events’ without a frame or background. As this was, however, very precisely a central feature of allegory for us, we might thereby justify an allegorical look at Hegel's Logic from an unaccustomed standpoint. Add to this the characterisation of these moments as somehow related to pensée sauvage in that the Logic effectuates the construction of local universals out of particulars in a situation in which universals do not yet exist, and we have an even more paradoxical approach to Hegel opening up before us. (Perhaps, to anticipate, one might justify the approach by saying that, even though Hegel emerges long after the coming into being of universals – this is, after all, the very definition of Western philosophy – we may posit a deliberate suspension of universals in his new ‘speculative’ dramatisation of the categories themselves.) But other important questions associated with the notion of the category remain. In particular, there is the Kantian question of their number: can they all not be reduced to four groups of three? If not why not? And in view of Hegel's insistence on the ‘necessity’ of their unfolding (see below), are we to believe that he thinks he has given us a complete list? In other words, one way of testing (or ‘falsifying’) philosophically his programme is on the basis of its completeness: can categories be added that he has not thought of? If so, where and why? And to historicise all this even further, can we imagine the historical coming into being of new categories which did not exist in Hegel's time; or the disappearance of older ones? And what of pensée sauvage? Although Lévi-Strauss is very far from considering this tribal perceptual science as ‘primitive’– in fact he characterises it as ‘structuralist’ avant la lettre – he certainly argues for its radical difference from our own (Western, bourgeois) thinking, something that entitles us to wonder whether the same list of categories remains in force in tribal times (or in other modes of production). It is the Whorf–Sapir question, which turns very much on the matter of categories as such, and which is perhaps in the present case exacerbated by what is often enough considered to be Hegel's Eurocentrism. Now I come to my second preliminary observation, which has to do with temporality. Nor is this simply a matter of organisation or Darstellung (presentation, staging), according to which Hegel projects the narrative fiction of an unfolding series or sequence in order the more effectively to string the pearls of the categories one after the other. If it were merely a matter of organisation, one would expect the account of each category to be a relatively static affair, so that one might open up what is after all called an Encyclopedia and consult this or that entry, in case of need extracting the ‘definition’ of substance, say, or necessity, or limit, in order to find out exactly what Hegel thought. But we cannot do this, because the temporal sequence of the categories purports to stage the self-production, the self-development and self-unfolding of the Notion itself. We would therefore minimally expect any given category to require, for complete discussion, an account of what precedes and what follows it, in what we have seen to be the non-space of the text. This is to say that each conceptual item in effect produces its own context, which it equally well abolishes on its own transformation into something else. The categories are thus all situation- or context-specific, provided we understand that there is no overall situation or context, no overall conceptual landscape, given in advance. What this means for the reader is that the Logic is no traditional piece of philosophical discourse: it does not, even turgidly and laboriously, attempt to expound some idea which the reader then attempts, by retracing the steps of the argument, to recreate and thus to grasp or ‘understand’. Or rather, this does seem to happen at specific moments, and we certainly still do struggle to understand what Hegel meant by this or that; but the act of reading the Logic is a great deal more complicated than that, and requires, as with a complicated novel, that we dispose of larger units of memory in which to organise the individual episodes. Better still the Logic is like a piece of music, and its text a score, which we must ourselves mentally perform (and even orchestrate). As was so often said about the modernist texts, we can only reread it, and each reading performance brings out new and more subtle interrelationships (thematic repeats, details of the orchestration, harmonic ingenuities) which we had not heard or noticed before. And sometimes the rereadings also make us more receptive to the great climaxes, the melodramatic reversals (Adorno used to say that the great affirmation, ‘Essence must appear’, was like a hammerblow in Beethoven). The analogy does not perhaps fully bear out Greimas's hypothesis that the philosophical text is also, in its deeper structure, a narrative. In any case, the aesthetic set towards the text moves it away from philosophising and argument, let alone truth, and thereby risks depriving it of its most fundamental driving impulse and passion, indeed, its very justification. So the more we insist on the pleasure of rereading the Logic, the less in the long run we are tempted to read it in the first place. So let's now say all this in a very different way by insisting on the failures which constitute the Logic's deeper record; most philosophical discourse claims a certain conceptual success it hopes to record successfully, and even to convey. Hegel's moments are by definition moments of failure: the failure to think, to win through to the concept, to achieve even a limited but complete act of intellection. The task of his writing will therefore be paradoxically self-defeating: to demonstrate (successfully) how completely we must necessarily fail to think this or that category. But in order for it to be meaningful, the failure must be a very basic and fundamental one, it must come as the result of loyally attempting to think, and at the end of a strenuous and absolute assault on the category in question. And it is to be sure a frustrating matter: who can find it in them to act out a cause lost in advance, an experiment conducted with a view to proving itself impossible? What saves the matter, no doubt, is the simple fact that, however much they may be intellectual or conceptual failures, the categories are the stuff of daily life and daily speech, rehearsed over and over again, and quite impossible to replace with anything better, purer, more utopian; nor does Hegel try to do so, even though he does seem to posit ‘philosophising’ as some activity not altogether accessible to the masses. In any case, we will still need to ward off the impression that all these failures are somehow ‘the same’, just as we will have to guard against the supposition that all the transitions from one category, one failure, to the next are somehow ‘the same’, let alone the implication that the so-called categories themselves are in their form somehow comparable, if not identical. The terms for all these things fatally reinforce such implications and illusions: if use the word ‘category’ for a of them all under this have not a fundamental in And if we call Hegel's conceptual movement through the text and its moments do we not also a certain a a of the same the same This may be why Hegel like truth, the text itself characterises the of and in this very they are the of of of an and spatial it is to with the more modern still no term of Verstand is thinking, its is the world of Being, of objects, which we in I of the Logic But already we can make a about and the very thinking of daily life itself, is the of the We cannot say that the Logic, Hegel the like a but we can certainly say that he and that always and the form of The Logic is therefore not a where the Notion up and about the and and that could be, the narrative of the of and can still be in various the Verstand is the great the of the the of itself, and of all the – to in one for and to make the however, if there is a there are no of the not the not not nor nor even the Notion itself, to do with this force it might perhaps be that is itself such a which, Hegel, also means all those other And this may have something to do with the fact that Verstand also has its as we have and can not only not be away with for it would be to do so, it is the and proper use of this rather than its that is and in are no equally to or to imagine fully but the or mind to wish for such an and to for a realm in which something of the might be Whatever the of Absolute Spirit might be, it would not seem to that; nor could that be the of the of even there is such a in I can be about Hegel's a relatively insofar as there do not seem to be any any more in the first (even though to about I there would be some about from something called which, all of does not seem to me to be any in some more and in a away from the and a of that could be associated with we are on and it is certain that the fundamental movement in Hegelianism in a not only of the perceptual (the and of the opening of the but of the as But can there be a a which would what we still call the Yet there are to be and it is important to or to understand in the first that of is not some materialism but on the a kind of in its own As for in Hegel's in the text, however, its proper lies very far from all such and simply means the of in all those to to the to metaphysical and to with a of common sense and The was in the by all the of who in with that all these which our then discourse were if at their and that thinking was to the with was already Hegel's with the and the other of the is the of and for that genuine philosophy is The of such (or at the very of what seems to be or of the the and the like, is of is a stage of the and as such it must have its is the very of such or from the dialectic between the and the its are philosophical is therefore up the he has added his own in the German word This of the the categories, our more seemingly and is somehow of Kantian for it does not seem to all our back the individual to be into thoughts and Hegel's is not in this Kantian sense insofar as the frame of the individual is from his He from the historical of an absence of which can be or the of that the individual emerges only at the end of his with the relatively of the of a has a without the transcendental and we have also among the of the all Hegelian might be thought of in a we see and think by definition through our and and so even are in this Yet at the end of the series of categories, the thought of the Notion or the by the identity between the at this Hegel has again become an in the traditional but not until

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