For the past few days I’ve been completely inundated with marking, along with ongoing contentious “political engagements” that have been eating up a good deal of my time. Unfortunately it doesn’t look as if my schedule is going to let up until mid-April, so I’m not in the best of moods at present. To make matters worse, it’s been four weeks since the job interview and I’ve still heard nothing. At this point I have no idea what to think and am thoroughly perplexed. This week is Spring Break for the University, so I suspect I won’t hear anything for at least another week. I’m trying to tell myself that I just didn’t get the job so I don’t think about it.
During this time I’ve been vaguely thinking about Hegel’s critique of Kant’s thing-in-itself and his discussion of grounds, conditions, and existence in the doctrine of essence. I am not quite sure why I find this particular moment of the Science of Logic and Phenomenology so significant, though I do believe that it resonates with a good deal I’ve written about individuation with regard to Deleuze and interactive constructivism in biology. More intriguing yet, Hegel’s account of essence rejects all transcendence in favor of appearances. For Hegel there isn’t one thing, essence, and another thing, appearance. Rather it is appearance all the way down and there is no further fact “beyond” the appearances that is hidden and that must be discovered or uncovered. Hegel will say, “Essence must appear” (EL, paragraph 131). The real surprise is that the mediation of essence is a reference to another appearance, not a distinct ontological entity to be contrasted with existence. As Hyppolite recounts, “The great joke, Hegel wrote in a personal note, is that things are what they are. There is no reason to go beyond them” (Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, 122).
This is a striking claim that immediately draws my thought to Lacan’s discussion of objet a in The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis. There Lacan recounts the story of two artists named Zeuxis and Parrhasios, locked in competition with each other to see who is the better artist.
In the classical tale of Zeuxis and Parrhasios, Zeuxis has the advantage of having made grapes that attracted the birds. The stress is placed not in the fact that these grapes were in any way perfect grapes, but on the fact that even the eye of birds was taken in by them. This is proved by the fact that his friend Parrhasios triumphs over him for having painted on the wall a veil, a veil so lifelike that Zeuxis, turning towards him said, Well, and now show us what you have painted behind it. By this he showed that what was at issue was certainly deceiving the eye (tromper l’oeil). A triumph of the gaze over the eye. (103)
The lesson to be drawn from this little parable is that the cause of desire– not the object desired –is precisely this engima of what is behind the veil or curtain. As Lacan will recount elsewhere in The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, we can be naked precisely because we wear clothing. “Doesn’t that woman know she’s naked under those clothes!” (Incidentally, it’s amusing to note that in Descartes’ second meditation, he describes the faculty of judgment as that faculty that distinguishes the superficial appearances of an object or its outward garb, from the object rendered naked and revealing its true nature. I suppose these metaphors suggest themselves when you’re locked in a snowed in cottage for days on end. I sympathesize). It is easy to see how this functions at the level of the political and even pedagogy, where the leader and the teacher are experienced as containing some enigma that evokes desire. Many of us, for instance, are familiar with that student who obsesses over what it is that we desire, asking endless questions regarding what we’re looking for. The truth of the matter is that we ourselves aren’t entirely sure what we’re looking for. That aside, we’re here seen as containing some precious and hidden object that evokes desire.
Metaphysics, too, has its veils. These veils can be the inaccessible transcendent beyond of God or the Infinite, revealed in experiences of the sublime, perhaps, that can never be reached, or essence beyond appearances, or Kant’s thing-in-itself that can never be known, the Levinasian Other, etc. Philosophy since its inception in Thales has been a-theistic in the precise sense that it has been premised on a militant rejection of these fetishes, instead approaching the world immanently and explaining it in its own terms. Even the God of Descartes or Spinoza is a shining moment in the history of a-theism, a rendering immanent of what superstition posits as big-daddy in the sky. Kant represents a regression with regard to his antinomies and his limitation of knowledge to make room for faith. Of course, this project has only ever been imperfectly realized and the mystics and peddlers of the fetish always return with new beyonds, but philosophy marches on and explodes the fetish. Right now we just happen to live in a particularly dark period of the fetish… At least in the United States.
It is in relation to this project that Hegel’s critique of the Kantian thing-in-itself is of particular interest. David Gray Carlson does a nice job recounting this critique in A Commentary to Hegel’s Science of Logic.
According to Hegel, both Being-in-itself and Being-for-other are intrinsically bound up with one another. This portends that the inner is outer. The in-itself as isolated, however, is Kant’s noumenal thing-in-itself, of which Hegel is a sharp critic. “[T]he proposition that we do not know what things are in themselves,” Hegel complains, “ranked as a profound piece of wisdom” (SL, 121). Things are “in themselves” if all Being-for-other is purged. We perceive in a given thing only its Being-for-other, “the indeterminate, affirmative community of something with its other” (126). Therefore, Kant insisted, we can have no idea what the thing-in-itself is. Hegel strongly disagrees.
Things are called “in themselves” in so far as abstraction is made from all being-for-other, which means simply, in so far as they are thought devoid of all determination, as nothings. In this sense, it is of course impossible to know what the thing in itself is. For the question: what? demands that determinations be assigned; but since the things of which they are to be assigned are at the same time supposed to be things in themselves, which means, in effect, to be without any determination, the question is made thoughlessly impossible to answer, or else only an absurd answer is given. (SL, 121)
The thing-in-itself is absolute, and furthermore, it is one. That is, once appearance is abolished, but there is but one thing-in-itself in its indeterminancy– not many: “What is in these things in themselves, therefore we know quite well; they are as such nothing but truthless, empty abstractions” (SL, 121). In contrast, Hegel’s analysis has shown the thing-in-itself is concrete. It is the same as being-for-other. (Carlson, 75)
In the Phenomenology, Hegel shows that the distinction between the unkowable thing-in-itself as conceived by Kant and appearances is itself a distinction of understanding, and therefore a product of thought (paragraphs 145-148). It is nothing but the ego’s reflection of itself. That is, the thing-in-itself is identical to the ego, as a substrate divested of all concrete properties or qualities, a pure void as Hegel puts it, and therefore a phantasm of thought much like Zeuxos asking what is behind the veil.
It seems to me that Hegel’s argument here applies to a wide variety of skepticisms common to thought today. Thus, for example, there are versions of linguistic philosophy that argue that we are unable to know reality as it is in itself beyond language. In making this claim, these linguistic philosophies unwittingly reveal their Kantian commitments. Social constructivist thinkers such as Niklas Luhmann claim that we can only ever know the world as a function of our distinctions (which are not in the things themselves), and never the world as it is in itself. Others, perhaps vulgar forms of cognitive psychology and neuropsychology, will claim that we can only ever know the world as we perceive it, not as it is.
Hegel’s entire point is that there is no world as it is, but rather there is only these inter-relationships between being-in-itself and being-for-other. That is, being-in-itself only discovers what it is in relation to being-for-other; for it is being-for-other that evokes the properties of being-in-itself. For instance, iron only reveals its oxidation properties in relation to oxygen. Why should it be any different with mind and world?
The epistemological question is thus poorly posed, abstractly posed, stupidly posed, so long as we think of it as a question of how an independent mind (a mind-in-itself) can know an independent object as it-itself is (a being-in-itself). It is in these interrelations that both the properties of subject and the properties of object come-to-be. Hegel’s conception of the in-itself will thus be one of becoming or coming to be. As Hegel puts it in an important Zusatzen from The Encyclopedia Logic,
If we are to understand by “cognition” the apprehending of an ob-ject in its concrete determinancy, then the assertion that the “thing-in-itself” is beyond cognition must be admitted to be correct, since the thing-in-itself is nothing but the completely abstract and indeterminate thing in general. But, with the same right that we speak of the “thing-in-itself,” we could also speak of “quality-in-itself,” “quantity-in-itself,” and similarly of all the other categories, and this would be understood to mean these categories in their abstract immediacy, i.e., apart from their development and inner determinancy (my italics). So we must consider the fixating of the thing as the only “in-itself” to be a whim of the understanding. But we also have the habit of applying the term “in-itself” to the content both of the nature and of the spiritual world. Hence we speak, for example, of electricity “in-itself” or a plant “in-itself,” and similarly of man or the State “in-itself;” and by the “in-itself” of these obj-jects we understand what they rightly and properly are.
The situation here is no different than it is in respect to the thing-in-itself generally; that situation is, more precisely, that if we halt at ob-jects as they are merely in-themselves, then we do not apprehend them in their truth, but in the one-sided form of mere abstraction. Thus, for instance, “man-in-himself” is the child, whose task is not to remain in this abstract and undeveloped [state of being] “in itself,” but to become for-himself what he is initially only in-himself, namely a free and rational essence. Similarly, the state-in-itself is still undeveloped, patriarchal State, in which the various political functions implied by the concept of the State have not yet become “constitutionalised” in a way that is adequate to its concept. In the same sense the germ, too, can be regarded as the plant-in-itself. We can see from these examples that all who suppose that what thingers are in-themselves, or the thing-in-itself in general, is something that is inaccessible to our cognition are very much mistaken. Everything is initially “in-itself,” but this is not the end of the matter, and just as the germ, which is the plant-in-itself, is simply the activity of self-development, so the thing generally also progresses beyond its mere in-itself (understood as abstract reflection-into-itself) to reveal itself to be also reflection-into-another, and as a result it has properties. (EL, Geraets, Suchting, Harris trans, 194)
Hegel’s use of the language “reflection-into-itself” and “reflection-into-another” is unfortunate as it implies cognition. However, what he is here referring to is relationships among beings in the emergence of qualities or the nature of things. This becomes clear in his analysis of the category of Existence in the Doctrine of Essence. Hegel begins by pointing out that,
Existence is the immediate unity of inward reflection and reflection-into-another. Therefore, it is the indeterminate multitude of existents as inwardly reflected, which are at the same time, and just as much, shining-into-another, or relational; and they form a world of interdependence and of an infinite connectedness of grounds with what is grounded. The grounds are themselves existences, and the existents are also in many ways ground as well as grounded. (EL, paragraph 192)
Reflection-into-itself thus refers to the internal potentials of things, whereas reflection-into-another refers to the manner in which these potentials are evoked or “brought forth” in relation to others. Hegel clarifies this point in another Zusatzen, when he writes that,
The term “existence” (derived from existere) points to a state of emergence, an existence is being that has emerged from the ground and become reestablished through the sublation of mediation. As sublated being, essence has provied in the first place to be shining within itself, and the determinations of this shining are identity, difference, and ground. Ground is the unity of identity and difference, and as such it is at the same time the distinguishing of itself from itself. But what is distinct from the ground is not mere difference anymore than the ground itself is abstract identity. The ground is self-sublating and what it sublates itself toward, the result of its negation, is existence. Existence, therefore, which is what has emerged from the ground, contains the latter within itself, and the ground does not remain behind existence (my italics); instead, it is precisely this process of self-sublation and translation into existence.
What we have here is therefore to be found in the ordinary consciousness: when we consider the ground of something, this ground is not something abstractly inward, but is instead an existence again. So, for instance, we consider ground of a conflageration to be a lightning flash that set a building on fire, and, similarly, the ground of the constitution of a people is their customs and circumstances of life. This is the general shape in which the existing world is presented initially to reflection, namely, as an indeterminate multitude of existents which, being reflected simultaneously into themselves and into something else, are in the mutual relationship of ground and grounded with regard to each other. In this motly play of the world, taken as the sum total of existents, a stable footing cannot be found anywhere at first, and everything appears at this stage to be merely relative, to be conditioned by something else, and similarly as conditioning something else. The reflective understanding makes it its business to discover and pursue these all-sided relations… (EL, 193)
Elsewhere Hegel argues that it belongs to ground to erase itself. Returning to my previous example of rusted iron, this simply means that the specific interrelation among existents that produced this property disappears in the result. However, Hegel’s point is that if we wish to understand the being of the existent at all, we must understand its “reflection-into-another” or concrete interrelationships with other existents in a world. In short, Hegel’s conception of essence is not that of an abstract and unchanging form common to a plurality of diverse instances (what all particular dogs share in common, for instance), but rather is a theory of individuation conceived in terms of the concrete contextual embeddedness of existents and the manner in which this situation actualizes these potentialities.
Here Hegel shows, very surprisingly, a tremendous proximity to Deleuze’s account of individuation. Indeed, later in the Doctrine of Essence, Hegel will discuss these interrelationships in terms of relations of force, thereby foreshadowing Deleuze’s discussion of force in relation to Nietzsche in his brilliant Nietzsche and Philosophy. Hegel goes on to remark that,
…the reflection-into-another of what exists is not separate from its inward reflection; the ground is the unity of these two, out of which existence has gone forth. Hence, what exists contains relationality and its own manifold connectedness with other existents in itself; and it is reflected within itself as ground. Thus what exists is thing. (EL, paragraph 124))
And what is thing?
The thing is the totality as the development of the determinations of ground and of existence posited all in One. According to one of its moments, that of reflection-into-another, it has in it the distinctions according to which it is a determinate and concrete thing.
(a) These determinations are diverse from each other; they have their inward reflection not in themselves, but in the thing. They are properties of the thing, and their relation to it is [its] having [them]. (EL, paragraph 125)
There is thus nothing behind or beyond the thing, but rather the thing, as Hegel will go on to show, is a negative unity of these properties evoked or summoned in and through dynamic and ongoing interrelations among things. The question of epistemology now becomes a question of immanent ontology, and that of how actualities are evoked in and through interactions in webs of related existents, producing this specific state of affairs here. To overcome abstraction is to think these interrelations in their historical and present contextualities. Things become events and emergences, rather than static substances. But perhaps most importantly, any approach that would heirarchialize one element of these interconnections such as signs, power, economy, language, history, the social, system, technology, nature, brain, etc., is here undermined insofar as each of these moments only discovers what it is in being reflected-into-its-others.
Larval Subjects . 
March 21, 2007 at 7:09 am
Strangely enough, this is what I mean when I talk about history:
So “history”, for me, doesn’t operate as something with reference to which then tries to explain other things. The term “history” simply references immanence, but a particular immanent situation whose self-understanding posits itself as having been realised in time – and thus as differentiated from other possible immanences… Like Hegel (and, following him, Marx), I also think that the joke is that things are what they are – or, that they appear as what they are. I find it difficult to communicate, though, some of the truly bizarre things this implies about practice and thought, if we take this position seriously, and attempt to work through its implications in detail.
Lovely post, by the way :-)
March 21, 2007 at 8:44 am
“Hegel’s entire point is that there is no world as it is, but rather there is only these inter-relationships between being-in-itself and being-for-other. That is, being-in-itself only discovers what it is in relation to being-for-other; for it is being-for-other that evokes the properties of being-in-itself. For instance, iron only reveals its oxidation properties in relation to oxygen. Why should it be any different with mind and world?”
Isn’t this Deleuze’s logic concerning the actual and the virtual as well?
March 21, 2007 at 1:03 pm
Anthony, I think so, though I would have to do some digging to determine their differences. I suspect that Hyppolite’s Logic and Existence played a pretty decisive role in the formation of Deleuze’s Logic of Sense. Deleuze reviewed this book very favorably and it’s pretty clear he studied it closely. There Hyppolite argues that Hegel’s ontology is a logic of sense that rejects any transcendence in favor of absolute immanence.
March 21, 2007 at 1:28 pm
Thanks N.P., I look forward to seeing those implications worked through in detail. I think one of these implications is going to be that there isn’t any absolute starting point for critique, but rather that critical consciousness is always going to be a function of the field in which it has emerged and the self-understanding at work within that field of individuation. I take it you’re saying something along these lines when you remark that The term “history” simply references immanence, but a particular immanent situation whose self-understanding posits itself as having been realised in time – and thus as differentiated from other possible immanences… One of the problems I have with what I sometimes call “historicism”– which I’m not attributing to you –is that it strikes me as changing the subject. Rather than talking about the thing itself, discussion is instead turned to the history of that thing, impeding the development of that thing itself through its elaboration. I need to articulate what I have in mind here when I’ve actually gotten some rest and am not bleery eyed.
March 21, 2007 at 1:36 pm
Anthony, one further point. I’m not the first to notice this parallel. In his book Genealogies of Difference, Nathan Widder very convincingly shows strong parallels between Deleuze’s account of force and Hegel’s account of force by focusing on a close reading of Nietzsche and Philosophy and Hegel’s “Force and Understanding” chapter in the Phenomenology. Like Deleuze, Hegel’s understanding of actualized phenomena refers back to a play of forces. Further, like Deleuze, Hegel’s conception of force necessarily involves a play of at least two forces, where one is the soliting force (active force) and the other is the solicited force (passive force) that produces the actualization. Much of the Doctrine of Essence is a careful working out of these relationships between appearances and their grounds, where interrelationships among existents, plays of forces, complexes of causality (Hegel distinguishes a number of different types of causality), etc., are mobilized to account for actualized phenomena in their specificity. I haven’t read the entire book, only what he shared with me, but Widder’s work is well worth a look. He does an especially good job with the relationship between Deleuze and Scotus.
March 21, 2007 at 2:15 pm
My immediate intution is that the difference is one of degree, i.e. Deleuze’s ontology of the virtual and the actual is an attempt to go ‘further back’ into being. But it’s been awhile since I’ve done much with Hegel and I’ve never read his Logic, so that is just a guess. Thanks for the suggestions.
March 21, 2007 at 2:27 pm
I’ve always taken this as a direct logical implication of the attempt to work within an immanent framework:
Here I pause just over the issue of whether I’m interpret the vocabulary in the same way you do, but my assumption is that we’re talking about something fairly similar:
In terms of this:
As I’ve mentioned in other contexts, my interest has always been in understanding what something is, and in the potentials available within that existent phenomenon. I don’t specifically then mind if someone then wants to try to explore how that phenomenon came into being – it’s just that (1) I think this is rather difficult to do, until you know what the thing is, whose origins you want to explore; (2) (as I gather you would also argue?) there is no specific reason to assume that the processes that bring something into being – that the story of the origins of a thing – have anything necessarily to do with the logic of that thing once it exists in some coherent form; and (3) on a more meta level, I think that the ways in which we tend to narrate origins themselves often can fall into the pattern of projecting what I would regard as moments within the present, into the past, so that, when people are trying to talking about origins, they may easily find themselves talking about something else entirely… – but this last argument gets very complex, very quickly, and isn’t really relevant here.
Where we’re most likely to differ, as I see it, isn’t in relation to any of these issues. There might be some tensions between our approaches around the issue of things that I’ve recently been talking about in terms of the “notional content of practice” (this is a terrible term, and probably says nothing useful to anyone – I’m also struggling with both sleep and conceptual clarity at the moment, and I mention this in the spirit of a placeholder) – but my gut instinct is that this will prove to be more of a vocabulary issue than anything substantive – that, when I start talking about practice, I express myself in ways that lead you to think I’m talking about a reduction of something to its context, where what I’m struggling to express is something more like how we can begin to understand the… sameness of something that tends to be perceived as split into parts… (Sorry for the convolution…)
My money would be on the real substantive point of disagreement revolving around the concept of “development” (particularly if understood in terms of phenomena having an internal “logic” that sets up a coherent (though not necessarily predetermined) pattern in which phenomena will unfold through time), where I suspect I’m far more cautious about extrapolating this concept as a broad ontological principle – more likely to think that the term “development” in this specific sense might be a useful way to describe certain kinds of phenomena, but actively agnostic about the relevance of the concept when taken to be a much broader ontological principle. But this may also be a vocabulary issue: I may hear you to be meaning “stronger” things by the vocabulary of development, and references to the unfolding of an internal logic, etc., than what you mean: it wouldn’t be difficult to define “development” in such a way that my wariness would vanish. It’s just that I would then likely articulate what I’m doing in terms of an exploration of a very specific form of development, whose implications are particularly interesting for our understanding of self-reflexivity and of non-pessimistic critique…
Apologies if this is ill-formed – it’s very late on my end of the world…
March 21, 2007 at 2:56 pm
[…] his work), I wanted to point readers over to Larval Subjects, where Sinthome has posted a very nice reflection on among other things, Hegel’s attempt to move beyond the dichotomy of appearance and […]
March 21, 2007 at 4:01 pm
As I’ve mentioned in other contexts, my interest has always been in understanding what something is, and in the potentials available within that existent phenomenon. I don’t specifically then mind if someone then wants to try to explore how that phenomenon came into being – it’s just that (1) I think this is rather difficult to do, until you know what the thing is, whose origins you want to explore; (2) (as I gather you would also argue?) there is no specific reason to assume that the processes that bring something into being – that the story of the origins of a thing – have anything necessarily to do with the logic of that thing once it exists in some coherent form; and (3) on a more meta level, I think that the ways in which we tend to narrate origins themselves often can fall into the pattern of projecting what I would regard as moments within the present, into the past, so that, when people are trying to talking about origins, they may easily find themselves talking about something else entirely… – but this last argument gets very complex, very quickly, and isn’t really relevant here.
I think we’re largely in agreement here. Your second point hits the mark perfectly. Last night I was discussing exactly this issue with a friend of mine with regard to the work of Walter Ong. Ong argues that the Greek event was made possible through the invention of writing and the phonetic alphabet which made possible new ways of thinking that aren’t possible in oral narrative (it’s difficult to imagine, for instance, Euclid without writing due to how proofs work). I am extremely sympathetic to these sorts of analyses and suspect that new forms of cognition are emerging today as a result of internet communication. However, what concerns me is that analyses like these sometimes seem to be advanced to delegitimate what it is that they’re accounting for, as if Euclid or philosophy, for instance, is tarnished by being dependent on graphe. Moreover, the demand for these analysis can shift attention away from directly working with the potentials made possible by these emergences. For instance, it might very well be true that Euclid is not possible without the invention of phonetic writing but focusing on this doesn’t get us very far in developing plane geometry itself.
By contrast, I would see the value of an Ong style analysis as consisting in rendering available the potentialities of new emergences through their analysis, thereby allowing us to more strategically unfold certain forms of praxis. For instance, I hear a number of my fellow colleagues in the humanities complain about how students can’t read, how unreflective they are, how poor their critical skills are, etc., all with the implicit suggestion that perhaps they’re stupid. I think this sort analysis fails to take into account the field of individuation in which students have emerged, glossing over how cognitive development now occurs in a mediatized space and is structured in terms of these technologies. We are shifting from one “shape of consciousness” to a new shape of consciousness that functions according to different principles. Students might be quite adept in this new space. The question then becomes one of how to maximize the potentialities of this new field. The issues shouldn’t be one of “how can I get my students to read Hegel’s Science of Logic well?) (or any other philosophical text, for that matter), but rather, “what does it mean to practice philosophy within this new structure of cognition?” Of course, I would be the last to suggest we should somehow sacrifice textual traditions, but am just suggesting that we need to be sensitive to how these forms of thought are transformed through new fields of individuation. We can imagine “Homerites” complaining that Greek youth can’t recite the sacred texts as they used to be able to after the invention of writing (indeed, Plato himself complains about this in Phaedo). But the real issue is not how to return to narrative recitation in song, but rather how to make use of these writing technologies. Careful historical analysis of these emergences and their shifts allows us to release these potentialities for new forms of practice and subjectivity, and to pose better, less reactionary, questions with regard to challenges we encounter in our praxis.
March 21, 2007 at 7:43 pm
I hear a number of my fellow colleagues in the humanities complain about how students can’t read, how unreflective they are, how poor their critical skills are, etc., all with the implicit suggestion that perhaps they’re stupid. I think this sort analysis fails to take into account the field of individuation in which students have emerged, glossing over how cognitive development now occurs in a mediatized space and is structured in terms of these technologies.
Levi, this is a really interesting and I believe correct observation about the new forms of individuation and cognition we are seeing in these waning days of the Guttenberg galaxy, as it were. The paradigm is shifting. In Deleuze’s “Pourparlez 1973-1990” he describes his own attempts (often failed) at creating and treating text as a stream, and not as a code. In other words: reading and creating are exercises in intensities. As he writes in “Spokesmen”, taking his analogy from the world of sports (Olympian and Greek) which was characterized by effort and resistance from a fixed point, as in running, discus and javelin throwing, shot putting the new forms of sports today like surfing, paragliding and windsurfing are about riding on an already existing wave. The fundamental thing now is how to be incorporated into the movement which is performed by a wave or an ascending stream of air – whereby you “enter” a movement rather than being the starting point of an effort. The same goes for philosophy today which still returns to the “fixed” values and to the concept of the intellectual as the guardian of eternal values. As soon as philosophy finds itself in a vacant period it takes refuge in the reflection “on” something like the eternal or the historical. If it can not create movement or ride it philosophy starts impotently reflecting.
March 21, 2007 at 10:32 pm
Yes: this is exactly it (and also captures a great deal of the spirit in which “history” both is, and is not, important in my conception of what I’m fumbling toward):
The idea – as you indicate well in your reflections on teaching – is, among other things, to shift things from the terrain of a kind of abstract negation that is too caught up in the sense of crisis and tragedy over what has faded away, but instead seeks to understand and seize the potentials constituted in the present moment.
Sorry for the drive-by post: I’m off to preschool (maybe I’ll learn there how to understand Hegel better… ;-P).
March 21, 2007 at 11:32 pm
Things become events and emergences, rather than static substances.
Nice. Really nice. Great commentary all round.
Cheers (and apologies for responding with contentless praise rather than the more substantial comments the post deserves)
March 22, 2007 at 9:37 am
I’m with Rob – really great post, which I feel the need to ruminate on further and then maybe respond to, as it deals with many of the issues in the Logic that I think are absolutely vital to understanding the continuing significance of Hegel.
Two remarks for now: on the logic of Deleuze’s actual/virtual distinction as raised by Anthony above, I seem to remember that in the Existence section of the Logic of Essence, Hegel says that the the existent necessarily ‘augments’ itself (ergänzt in the German) through the other; determination is therefore presented as +ve, not -ve.
As for his review of Hyppolite, D says (if I recall correctly) that Hegel’s problem is his attempt to immanentize sense/meaning, which constitutes a residual transcendence. Therefore for D it’s necessary, as Anthony suggests, to go further into being – to excise by a more stringent critique all the Cartesian ghosts.
March 22, 2007 at 9:41 am
[…] excellent, lucent post over on Larval Subjects, another of Sinthome’s semi-regular series on Hegel’s Logic. […]
March 22, 2007 at 3:52 pm
[…] to Sinthome’s post I mentioned earlier, although I really have time now for no more than a gloss on it. Hegel’s […]
March 22, 2007 at 8:02 pm
[…] Smokewriting has written an excellent post offering some of his thoughts in relation to my recent post on Hegel: The ‘Logic of Essence’ in the Science of Logic attempts to carry this forward by […]
May 16, 2007 at 4:31 pm
[…] – and this will hardly surprise Sinthome, who has referred often to Hegel’s critique of abstract thought – this critique of classificatory […]
March 10, 2008 at 6:22 pm
[…] questions of political change is concerned. The problem here is that these theories are often so abstract, in the Hegelian sense, that they end up with overly simplistic schema that then make any change […]
April 24, 2010 at 8:40 pm
yes beautiful post – and particularly useful for this novice reader of the Phenomenology in making sense of the concepts of “reflection into self” and “reflection into another” – thank you!