Hegels_Logic_Identity_Difference_chapter3_part2.mp3

On McGinn’s view of identity as just the relation of an object to itself, it seems like we cannot raise the question of the applicability of an identity predicate without presupposing the answer.To raise the question we need to have an object that may or may not be self-identical, but once we have the object we know that it is self-identical. And if we have two objects, then the question is already decided in the negative. Every mistake in predication reflects at least some correct comprehension for we must grasp the subject as a subject even in order to predicate falsely. But on McGinn’s view that identity comes with even the most abstract and tenuous grasp of the subject of predication, it is incomprehensible that we could ever be in doubt, since the knowledge required to raise the question answers it as well. This problem is not primarily temporal but rather arises from the need for a certain gap in our understanding to motivate questions at all. The same problem would arise if we took the question to come after the answer. Thus it appears that Hegel’s internalization of the differences between semblances in the identity relation itself is required to account for our practice. The other distinctive component of Hegel’s conception of identity that it is a process of the self-establishment of unity is also required for an adequate erotetic analysis of individuation. To see that some sort of process is involved, consider briefly Hume’s view of identity. Due to precisely the problem just discussed with respect to McGinn’s view, Hume makes a distinction between the unity of a thing at any given time as opposed to its identity across time. To say that something is identical is to say “that the object existent at one time is the same with itself existent at another,” which means to say that it is invariable or unchanged throughout that time. What Hume acknowledges, then, is that some kind of change namely, temporal change is required in order to make sense of the identity relation. In our common practice of individuation, however, more than mere temporal change is required in order to raise the question of identity. In order to avoid Hume’s rejection of this practice of individuation, it is necessary to see identity itself as the process of remaining the same through qualitative and not merely temporal change. Once one allows qualitative diversity, the issue of temporality becomes secondary. This is true whether one takes identity in the epistemological mode (i.e., as the process of connecting diverse representations) or in the metaphysical (i.e., as the process of the essence staying the same through change). But this only shows that identity has to involve some process of change. To see the necessity of specifying that the process is the self-establishment of unity through change, consider David Wiggins’s neo-Aristotelian view of identity. Wiggins thinks that we individuate objects according to principles of the normal activity, behavior, or functioning of kinds of objects. When we identify things, we say that “a is the same F as b,” where F is a sortal or kind term that specifies such a principle of activity for a and b. On Wiggins’s view, if we did not have such a principle then we would be unable to specify what changes an object could undergo and nonetheless remain self-identical, and so we would be unable to individuate objects either in the world or across possible worlds. For example, even the individuation of a rock across possible worlds or qualitative changes within a world requires an understanding of what kind of changes in state are consistent with the normal processes of rocks (e.g., that they resist outside pressure but can be broken down gradually, that they cannot transform themselves into donkeys). Like Hegel, Wiggins’s view does not essentially involve temporal change but does try to model our everyday practice of individuation in time and space. Also like Hegel, Wiggins’s approach emphasizes the closeness of ontological and logical questions about identity, but there are important differences in how this closeness and the ontological import of identity are construed. First, Wiggins’s notion of identity entails essentialism, but identity is not itself the model of essence. The identity of objects does not have even a structural isomorphism to the processes that subjects consider when identifying objects. For Hegel, identity is not just the abstract self-relation of the thing but includes the sortal specification within itself:The identity of a thing is an answer to the question of what it is, and so identity essentially includes the processes a thing undergoes (either actually or potentially). I take this to be an interesting though nondecisive advantage for Hegel’s view, since it connects the abstract notion of identity to our use of “identity” in social contexts. When we are posing the question of gender or racial identity, for instance, we are asking whether the question “Who is Jane?” has to be answered in terms of race and/or gender. Second, the terms of Wiggins’s identity statements (‘x is the same F as y’) are objects, substances, or continuants, not Hegel’s semblances. Thus although the point of knowing the kind of an object to be individuated is to know what sorts of changes it typically and possibly undergoes, the identity of the object is not the process or result of such change. Identity is not mere continuity, as Hume or McGinn would have it, but it is nonetheless an absolute relation between objects. There are no differences in Wiggins’s identity relation, which is crucial to his rejection of relative identity. These first two points are closely related to a third difference, which is that Wiggins denies that the practice of individuation has any metaphysical equivalent. As Wiggins puts it, “The object does not single itself out. . . . [E]dges [in nature even causally effective ones] mark out imperfectly or scarcely at all the boundaries that are drawn by the singling out of continuants or substances.” Although our tracking of objects requires “a dialectic of same and other,” this subjective dialectic must be regulated by an objective principle of identity in the classic sense. Furthermore, Wiggins holds that there is an essentially deictic element in individuation (the this of the ‘this such’) that seems ineliminably subjective. Hegel, however, thinks that objects individuate themselves in roughly the same way that we individuate them. For Hegel, the activity of an essence is in part the self-establishment of its identity in roughly the same way that we would establish its identity for ourselves. For example, in discussing Leibniz, Hegel claims that the more intimate sense [of the maxim of the identity of indiscernibles] is, however, that each thing is in itself something determined, distinguishing itself from others implicitly or in itself. . . . The difference must be a difference in themselves, not for our comparison, for the subject must have the difference as its own peculiar characteristic or determination, i.e., the determination must be immanent in the individual. Not only do we distinguish the animal by its claws, but it distinguishes itself essentially thereby, it defends itself, it preserves itself. . Thus the identity of ontological and conceptual structures reaches higher up for Hegel. Although the ontological picture of processes rooted in the nature of the object is similar in Wiggins and Hegel, the conceptual structure of Hegel’s category of identity maps onto the structure of those processes, whereas Wiggins’s notions of identity and individuation do not. Leaving Hegel’s vocabulary for a moment, we might call the common structure of both identical essences and our practices of individuation “discrimination,” which is a more complex process than Wiggins’s “edges,” which are the extent of common structure on his view. I take it that the Hegelian position is that discrimination becomes “singling out” when it is interpreted in terms of the subject and object distinction. Then designation becomes an appropriate, partial way of making the connection between something subjective and something objective. But the Hegelian point must be that this is only possible because the same basic process of discrimination operates objectively as well as subjectively. Hegel’s view is preferable as an analysis of our practice of individuation because it avoids a certain counterintuitive result of Wiggins’s view that is at odds with that practice. Specifically, Wiggins thinks that there can be two objects in the same place at the same time, as long as the objects are of sufficiently different kinds. For example, Wiggins thinks that there can be both a tree and a collection of wood cells, with different persistence conditions, in the same location. But Hegel can accommodate our intuition that, in this case, constitution is identity, and there is only one object.To put Hegel’s point in a slightly different way, we might say that the conditions of the nonpersistence of the collection of cells are precisely the persistence conditions of the tree. Without the mobility of cells that would eliminate one collection and establish another, the tree could not remain the self-identical entity that it is. Furthermore, a quantitative state of a tree such as a collection of cells does not present itself to us as an independent entity but as dependent on the lifecourse of the tree. Perhaps a better way of expressing this dependence is to say that the collection of cells does not present itself to us at all but is a theoretical abstraction away from the tree that does present itself. On Wiggins’s view, the only way to accommodate our practice of saying that there is only one object there the tree is to identify the tree with the collection of molecules. This, however, would require the abandonment of Leibniz’s Law, since the two objects have different persistence conditions and thus different properties. As I have suggested, Hegel’s ontology need not countenance the object status of the collection of wood cells. Thus there need not be any violation of Leibniz’s Law, since the involvement of the wood cells in the identity of the tree is more complex than simple coincidence as objects. Any given collection is just an aspect of the identity of the tree and subordinate to it. This is related to the metaphysical status of individuation because the nonself-sufficiency, and thus nonobjecthood, of the collection of cells follows from the objectivity of the process of discrimination as Hegel describes it. Thus what might look like a minor point based on a strange (if not tendentious) understanding of ‘identity,’ ‘discrimination’ and ‘individuation’ does have substantial weight, since it is connected to Wiggins’s counterintuitive result and Hegel’s avoidance of the same. This is a kind of inference to the best explanation: The best explanation for why we are able to individuate objects the way we do is that objects individuate themselves. What I think all of this shows is that Hegel’s model or concept of identity though it at first seems far fetched in fact does a better job than the competition of matching our conception of identity, that is, the range of our practice of asking and answering identity questions and the range of the objects identified. To transpose an important Hegelian reminder from another context, one might say that Hegel’s category of identity is so complicated precisely because “philosophy does not waste time with . . . empty and unworldly stuff. What philosophy has to do with is always something concrete and strictly present”.

4. Conclusion Once Hegel’s conception of identity is understood as articulating the problem of identity along with its direct answer, good sense can be made of the notion that identity involves differences between semblances and the tendency of those semblances to undermine the significance of their own differences. Although I will not argue for it here, I think that the erotetic interpretation is confirmed by the fact that the architectonic function of identity in Hegel’s Logic is to articulate a problem bequeathed to it by the preceding Doctrine of Being. Briefly, the category of identity rephrases the problem left to the Doctrine of Essence by the Doctrine of Being in terms of a new form of determination, namely, “reflection.” The remainder of the Doctrine of Essence is, on this view, an attempt to work out exactly how this form of determination must be filled out in order for it to provide the basis of a more substantial solution to the problem of identity, namely, criteria for the concrete identity of essences. For this reason, my argument here has been limited to showing that the characteristics of Hegel’s category of identity are necessary for an erotetic understanding. Hegel himself does not think that they are sufficient the sufficient conditions are only provided in the further development of the Logic. In closing, I briefly point out two aspects of this further development. The first is that Hegel immediately turns from the problem of identity to what he calls “Ground” relations, that is, relations in virtue of which one state of an essence is explained by another state on which it is dependent. So the summer state of the tree is dependent on the spring state of the tree, by which it is explained. Hegel thinks that for essences to be independent in any significant sense they have to be self-dependent. This points the way to a criterion of identity that involves a richer notion of self-determination. The second point is that the Doctrine of Essence culminates in just such a notion of self-determination, a real substantial freedom in the reciprocal interaction of substances. This in turn becomes the model for what Hegel calls the “freedom of the concept,” which is in turn the model for freedom of the will. The whole Logic, then, can be read as a transcendental defense of the inescapability of that form of independence that the human will exemplifies.

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