Hegels_Logic_Identity_Difference_chapter1_part1.mp3

Chapter 1

Identity, Difference, and the Logic of Otherness

It is in this dialectic as it is here understood, that is, in the grasping of opposites in their unity or of the positive in the negative, that speculative thought consists. It is the most important aspect of dialectic, but for thinking which is as yet unpracticed and unfree it is the most difficult. The advance of culture generally, and of the sciences in particular, gradually brings into use higher relationships of thought... It is a matter of infinite importance that in this way an advance has been made beyond the form of abstraction, of identity, by which a specific concept ...acquires an independent self-subsistence, and that prominence and currency have been given to the determinate form, the difference, which is at the same time an inseparable element in the identity. More often than not, Hegel is understood and criticized as the consummate Identitätsphilosoph, disparaged for propounding an ontotheological, authoritarian metaphysics that has swallowed everything into the Absolute Idea. Of late, as postmodernists have railed ceaselessly against grand metanarratives and taken pen in hand to defend difference and otherness against the depredations of Western logocentrism, Hegel has faced increased obloquy as the systematic philosopher who brings the reductionistic, devouring quicksand of rational thought to the abyssal depths of its nadir of completion. While this view of Hegel's system as an intolerant omnivore has a pedigree going back at least to Kierkegaard, it suffers from one defect. It is altogether wrong. In what follows I will contend that Hegel is not guilty of the charge of reductionistic absolutism with which he is so frequently smeared. Hand in hand with this, and on a positive note, I will indicate how he in fact crafts a philosophy that may successfully comprehend difference (the nonidentical or otherness) in a radically nonreductionistic manner. In short, my thesis is that Hegel may fairly lay claim to being the philosopher of difference, otherness, and nonidentity. The usual basis for charging Hegel with reductionism has been his very idea of philosophy as a rational system that promises to be unconditional, comprehensive, and complete. Conventional wisdom holds that such a system must manifest a totalizing logocentrism that betrays the inescapable finitude and incompleteness of our knowledge and denies the genuine independence of a reality given apart from thought, even as it offers an unavoidably distorted account of it. The crux of the criticism seems to be that the systematic demand for comprehensive completeness must privilege an idealistic notion of identity that cannot abide the truly different and nonidentical, that which is radically other than thought itself. Hegel's critics hold that thought that purports to be unconditionally true and complete must be totalizing, allowing only for the truth, reality, and value of that which it can grasp in terms of its own primal and definitive identifying features; according to them, whatever else systematic thought may even attempt to conceive must be construed in terms of the identical, or ignored altogether. The lust for finality and inclusivity mandates a homogeneity of thought that denies, devalues, and denegrates the heterogenous.The view I will present is diametrically opposed in holding that the key to appreciating Hegel as the philosopher of difference lies precisely in his notion of philosophy as a comprehensive systematic science. So just what his critics see as the source of Hegel's monological, totalizing, and authoritarian abrogation of difference I will present as the basis for his multifaceted, differentiated, and liberating celebration of it. As Hegel frequently insists, the logic first establishes and articulates the scientific character of the whole system. Throughout the system, Hegel refers us back to the logic as the resource for understanding and justifying what he presents elsewhere only, as he says, "in outline" form. Thus the logic and its notion of science are definitive for understanding any further treatment of identity and difference in Hegel. What we will see generally is that the fundamental nature of Hegel's conception of science necessarily and unequivocally precludes reductionism. Hegelian philosophical science will be shown to necessitate a mode of logical conceptualization and development that engenders a conceptual framework where difference, the nonidentical, is given full and undistorted acknowledgment, insofar as this is attainable in thought. So what are the distinctive features of Hegel's conception of philosophical science? First I will discuss Hegel's concept of science in a general way, focusing on how and why it shapes the system as a philosophy of difference. Next I will show how difference is crucial to the very opening of logical development and will sketch its role in the logic of essence and the logic of the concept. In conclusion I will consider how logic's completeness requires a further differentiating in the conceiving of nature as a radical other to thought. As is well known, Hegel asserts that science must begin without any presuppositions regarding either its form or its content. Instead, it must commence in and with what he refers to as the indeterminate immediate, that which is devoid of determinacy both within itself and in reference to anything else. It is easy to see why Hegel insists on just such a beginning for philosophical science. For one thing, if science opens with some determinate content given from outside, then the completeness of what comes to be systematically articulated as its subject matter could never be vouchsafed. (It could always be asked whether that given content has been adequately conceived and whether other unincorporated contents may have been omitted altogether.) Furthermore, were science to start with any determinate notions either about its method or its subject matter, these predeterminations would stand in need of further demonstration, since philosophy is precisely that discourse which aims, unlike all others, to provide a complete justification for what it asserts. If philosophy begins with anything determinate as the given, determining ground for what follows, then the requisite attempt to justify these predeterminations must lead either to bad circularity or an infinite regress, and philosophy would have to jettison its definitive claim to be self-grounding and to offer unconditional truth. And if these ideals must be abandoned, then any and all truth claims would only be true relative to the ungrounded assumption(s) on which they rest. So truth and the necessary philosophical account of it require that philosophical discourse be radically autonomous and self-grounding. Only thought that is independent of all given external determination may be complete and final both in terms of its subject matter and its justification. For Hegel's critics, it is just such completeness and finality that require a discourse which is self-grounding in the totalizing sense that everything addressed in it is ultimately reducible to and incorporated in the all-determining ground from which it begins. But in fact, with Hegel, just the opposite is the case. The inescapable demand for self-grounding inherent in a coherent notion of truth, the demand that thought be autonomous and self-determining, requires philosophical science to systematically conceptualize nonidentity and articulate difference. In a nutshell, autonomy and self-grounding necessitate conceptual self-determination and such self-determination may only transpire through a conceptual dynamic-dialectic-where identity and difference are mutually implicated and neither is a privileged, originary determining ground. Why is this? Why must such discourse entail the genuine acknowledgment of the other rather than a reductionistic incorporation where the determinacy of the other is parasitical upon an original determinacy? If the system is scientific in virtue of its autonomy, the absence of any presuppositions in terms of which the determinacies of the system are determined, then this means that there can be no foundational determinacies of form or content given from outside. Thus the only way in which determinacy could emerge from indeterminacy must be through a process of strict, autochthonous self-determination. But insofar as there is nothing already present as determinate in reference to which determinacy could be determined, how indeed may any determination arise? What I shall explicate generally is this: Hegelian self-determination takes place as a forward-moving process whereby what is determinate comes to be determined in and through a mutually constitutive determining relation to its other. Broadly speaking, for Hegel, there can be no thought of what is without thinking its opposite or negation; there can be no thought without difference. In addition, the primal demand that thought be autonomous and self-determining, and that form and content be one also means that self-determination denotes both the methodological procedure and the subject matter. The system is about the many modes of autonomy. What we will see as a consequence is that thought's completion of its autonomous selfdetermination, its comprehension of itself as a self-determining totality, requires that it conceptualize its difference from what is other than itself by the acknowledgment of an autonomous, radically different other-nature as that which is different from and autonomous of thought, and which is autonomous in its own fashion, different from the manner of thought's autonomy. Having self-determination as its method and content means that Hegelian science comprehends autonomy- what it means for something to be determined in its own right-and such comprehension can only take place as thought progressively differentiates itself, both within itself, and, finally, from itself altogether; not the elimination but the proliferation of difference is the heart of Hegel's system.The autonomy of self-sufficient self-identity is impossible without the articulation and sustaining of irreducible, nonderivative difference. What this signifies generally is that Hegelian thought turns the traditional notion of identity inside out. Unlike traditional metaphysicians, he does not fetishize identity, and unlike postmoderns, he does not fetishize difference. Thus he may avoid altogether the heteronomous, hierarchical, and hegemonic logic of reductionism that is found throughout the history of thought in the manifold attempts to find some primal, privileged determining ground from which all else is derived. Rather than reverting to a foundational determining ground, the minimal requirement of scientific systematicity for presuppositionless self-determination requires a process of thought that cannot appeal to the antecedently given and thus must come to think the other just in order to first determine itself. Thus ab initio the demands of scientific philosophy for self-grounding self-determination preclude just that mode of thinking whereby difference, nonidentity, and otherness come to be thought as secondary, as derivative of some primal, originary determinacy whose legitimacy and authority are neither established nor questioned. In stark contrast, in Hegelian discourse, nonidentity and difference are not secondary and derived, mere variations upon an originary determinacy. Since there is literally no originary determinacy here, identity and difference will be seen to emerge together inescapably at the very start and to remain inextricably involved with one another in the further development of the process and its march toward completeness. The general Hegelian view is this: To be is to be determinate, and being may come to be fully and finally determinate only insofar as a manifold variety of differentiating relations to others is both realized and brought to thought. Self-sufficiency and autonomy are not attainable in isolation, by excluding or incorporating difference, but rather only by establishing and sustaining it. In broad terms, how can we find the logic revealing and developing the notion that identity without difference is unthinkable, as the process of logic's conceptual self-determination unfolds in each of the three logics of the logic and culminates in logic's attaining completeness through the transition from thought to nature? In considering the general nature of the logic of being, the logic of essence, and the logic of the concept, I will focus on highlighting how each of these illustrates my central claim that self-determining discourse is a differentiating process, requiring an other-emergent, forward moving from the indeterminate to the determinate, rather than an other-subsuming, backward moving return to an already determinate ground. The beginning is crucial here, for if the process of self-grounding selfdetermination is compromised by the involvement of an originary determinacy as determining ground, then no conceiving of difference in its genuine autonomy would be possible. According to Hegel, the logic proper begins when we make "the resolve" to think purely and take up the indeterminate immediate. Such resolve means that we will not invest any determinacy in the indeterminate simply in virtue of its being an object of thought; to proceed in that fashion would be to introduce determination from without and thus to void the scientific character of this discourse. We need to think it just as it is in its nature as the indeterminate immediate, as being. Hegel explicates this thinking as follows: "In its indeterminate immediacy it is equal only to itself. It is also not unequal relatively to another; it has no diversity within itself nor any with a reference outward. It would not be held fast in its purity if it contained any determination or content which could be distinguished in it or by which it could be distinguished from another." So, according to Hegel, thinking the indeterminate immediate just as what it is as thoroughly and purely indeterminate is the thinking of that which lacks any determinate characteristics either within or in reference to an other, and, thought just as utterly devoid of determinacy, being is (or has become) indistinguishable from and is the thinking of nothing: "It is pure indeterminateness and emptiness. There is nothing to be intuited in it... Just as little is anything to be thought in it, or it is equally only this empty thinking. Being, the indeterminate immediate, is in fact nothing, and neither more nor less than nothing." Before considering the next forward movement, a few observations are in order to bring Hegel's nonreductive approach into relief. The determinacy of being's other, nothing, is not grounded in or derived from being as its determining source, since being cannot even be distinguished successfully from nothing, nor vice versa. Since neither being nor nothing is thinkable either in isolation or in a stabile determinate relation to its other, neither can stand authoritatively as "that in terms of which" the other is determined. Difference and otherness cannot be swallowed up into being here, or even be said to be derived from it, simply because there is no stable determinate being present for them to be swallowed up in or derived from. On a more positive note, being can only be initially thought as inextricably and dynamically conjoined with its radical other, the (seemingly) absolutely different nothing. At the crucial beginning of Hegel's science, difference is not denied, diminished, or derived but is equally originary with identity, as the two can be thought neither as at one nor as separate. Note also that the movement of thought is inexorably forward, since there can be no retreat to an already determined self-identical ground that could sustain the contrasting difference as an identifiable contrasted pole. Pure being simply cannot be thought without this thinking being the thinking of nothing. And nothing is initially no more determinately distinguishable from being than being initially is from nothing. Thus what emerges is thinking as a forward moving into a vanishing contrast between being and nothing; what is initially fundamental in this project is difference, or a certain mode of differentiating (insofar as talk of difference presupposes a stabile relation between determinate differentia). "But it is equally true that they are not undistinguished from each other, that, on the contrary, that they are not the same, that they are absolutely distinct, and yet that they are unseparated and inseparable and each immediately vanishes in its opposite." Hegel's last words are telling: The thinking of pure being, that which in its limitless, totalizing generality is all encompassing and allinclusive, cannot take place without conceiving the negation, the radical other of being, as that into which being vanishes or disappears, and so too, the nothing into which being disappears cannot be thought without disappearing into being. Also, since this is a vanishing contrast, neither self-sameness, identity, or being, on the one hand, nor difference, nonidentity, nothing, on the other, is privileged; identity and difference are equiprimordial.The radical inextricability of identity and difference could not be more fundamentally asserted:We neither start with identity and move to difference, nor vice versa. Neither is thinkable, except for the dynamic oscillation between identifying and differentiating, and this very oscillation is something inseparable from the thinking of being and nothing while yet now emerging as a new and different determinacy that is other than both: becoming. "But the third in which being and nothing subsist must also present itself here, and it has done so; it is becoming. In this, being and nothing are distinct moments; becoming only is, in so far as they are distinguished. This third is an other than they; they subsist only in an other, which is equivalent to saying that they are not self-subsistent." Rather than being derived from a given determinacy that proceeds it, the emergence of becoming out of the dynamic instability of being and nothing first bestows a minimal and newly attained stability on being and nothing as distinct moments.Yet becoming does not incorporate, swallow up, the being and nothing with which we began, for being and nothing, as distinct moments, are now different from what they were. But what is the relation of becoming to what has come before? Becoming here does and does not depend upon what precedes it. Logically, it does depend on what comes before in that it has come after and as a logical consequence of what precedes it; importantly, however, becoming does not depend substantively on what comes before, in the sense that its determinacy is not derived from and as a variation of an already established determinacy. In logic generally the development of determinacy is more prospective than retrospective: Something comes to be and is yet transformed in its other and its other in it, and the modes of transformation are themselves transformed- differentiated-as we move through the three logics. We find this forward-moving, prospective development in which determinate negation- difference and otherness-is driving, because, in accordance with the minimal requirements for scientific philosophy, we began without a given determinacy as a point of reference. So for Hegel it is the system's fundamental scientific character as presuppositionless and self-determining that demands and which makes it a logic of difference, otherness, and determinate negation, rather than identity, sameness, and simple affirmation.

Disclaimer: This article was obtained from Internet and intended for private and personal use only to study Hegel's philosophy. The original auhers and publishers own its copyright, and if this post invokes any copyright infringement, I will take the article off Inernet immediately.