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It is the privilege of philosophy to choose such expressions from the language of ordinary life, which is made for the world of imaginary representations, as seem to approximate the determinations of the concept. There is no question of demonstrating for a word chosen from ordinary life that in ordinary life too the same concept is associated with that for which philosophy uses it, for ordinary life has no concepts, only representations of the imagination, and to recognize the concept in what is otherwise mere representation is philosophy itself. It must therefore suffice if representation, for those of its expressions that philosophy uses for its definitions, has only some rough approximation of their distinctive difference; it may also be the case that in these expressions one recognizes pictorial adumbrations which, as approximations, are close indeed to the corresponding concepts'.
GWF Hegel- Science of Logic
The concepts of Hegel's Science of logic (SOL) are not synthetic apriori, they are not apriori at all. This is the exquisite contradiction we begin the Logic with. To produce a Logic, a form of thought, without presupposing any guiding, apriori characteristics of this form. It is for this reason that I have chosen the Science of Logic to begin a more serious reading of Hegel. But also a reading of Dialectics as a method. As far as the book's index can scan its own text, it states that there is only one mention of the word dialectics across this text. This is of great value to my reading of Hegel. To jump into the encyclopedia would seem to repeat a kind of historical error, and the historical genealogy of the Encyclopedia that I have found relevant so far can be indexed across the SOL itself. And the Phenomenology of Spirit (POS) although marked as one of the two possible routes into the SOL in the SOL, has the issue of being greviously misread, sometimes by Sociologists, as a system that can be extracted without concernes for the grounds of its developement, and other times as quite simply a Doctrinal text that argues for some kind of 'essential' 'substance'.
Hegel is endlessly associated with fascicism, pro-statism, and just general parochialism on the basis of the POS. And most of all there is the difficulty of the popular part of Kojeve's reading of one section of the POS, which has become like a meme representing Hegel and German Idealism as such in the Social sciences: There is an inclusion of the particular form of the universal within the universal without which the universal could not exist as Universal, although the same goes for the particular. This as Graeber has pointed out in his article 'It is Value that brings Universes into being' had sometime back and is increasingly again becoming a hegemonic argument in Sociological thought, that masks its own simplicity with the facile claim of having discovered this thought all on its own.
Moreover, I am particularly concerned as I have already mentioned in my adjacent post on Marx with the Dialectic as a method of 'reading', rather than as a formal system, which I still doubt it can really be, however much one might try to draw 'essence' from it as the foundational category. The SOL provides a more typically Hegelian starting point, the dialectic as an irresolvable contradiction, a kind of tear in the fabric of intuitional experience. A sutured split within the ineseparability of Being-Thinking.
For Hegel thought thinks itself, we have to just 'let' it do so. The text I feel is usefully supplemented by Plato's supposed demonstration of Parmenidean Philosophy, Aristotle's startling text 'On the Soul', Descartes' Discourse on Method, the first two books of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason, maybe skipping the Metaphysical Deduction, and of course it would seem inevitable to query Spinoza, although that is a connection I am yet to make directly.
I am reading Hegel here as a non-metaphysician, a reading that has had some valence at least in traditions of reading the SOL, amongst which I would certainly count Marx's own reading, which I attempting to make apparent, as I have mentioned in my converging posts on Capital. So far at least I have found the SOL largely unproblematic going and am likely to get through it faster than I write the posts on capital, because in Capital there is the difficult task of applying and finding connecting texts with Hegel's method.
The single note I would like to make on Hegel's method before I start is that it seems to be precisely that, a method. Although if you run over the table of contents you will notice that he arranges his text in recursive threes, I still think we should take this introduction, as the preface to POS very seriously. What Hegel accomplishes first is a singular style in language, rather than a form, and it is for this reason I think we should read him and dialectics as a method rather than a system. Read dialectics as a method of reading itself.
Fig 1: Kant's Form of judgement that his concepts, both based on 4 Categories
So Called Presuppositions
Hegel's method in the introduction to the logic must be read as a critique/suspension of presuppositions, particularly those of Descartes and Kant. Descartes assumed a 'thinking thing' towards the end of his first meditation, and Hegel seems to contradict this claim by arguing that there is no 'I' that thinks, that is that there is no categorical distinction between thinking and being, but that they are torn apart by an immanent rift. Similarly there is a copius invective against Kant in this text which I feel has only been understated generally within the Sociology and Social Philosophy traditions. For Kant there is no such thing as 'unmediated thought' or 'unmediated experience'. Experieince of an object is only cognizable to us based on the concepts derived from the categories of our understanding which are drawn form the forms of judgement. There are four ground categories: quality, modality,totality,relation, which distribute judgement in 12 different ways. Many of the concepts of the pure understanding are derived from these judgements.
The hypothetical form of judgement 'If...Then..' for example will produce the concept of causality etc. Hegel asks where these forms of judgement come. In fact Kant relies on his larger schematization mostly on Aristotle's classification. In that sense the schema is arbitrarily chosen and yet metaphysically essential.
Moreover for Kant the 'I' and the Other are both assumed: the presence of the 'I' assures the presence of the capacity to distinguish a predicate, an Other. Hegel asks how and why this is even possible. Where is the necessity for such assumptions? For Hegel instead thinking isn't assuming the position of an 'I', it is thought emerging before our very eyes, it is a demonstratoin in writing.
What is perhaps the most distinctive about Hegel's thought in SOL is his question of the necessity of categories, he argues that while Kant's larger metaphysical presentation are formidable, he fails to describe the connection between understanding and the specific cateogires he chooses. This is a question I have asked a few times in my first experience teaching Sociology - in relation to Weber for example- how is it possible for Weber to derive the categories he does? What is the logical necessisity for thses cateogires?Hegel makes it clear that it is futile to produce a categorization or classification, that is a structure or a system, without some sense of their logical necessity and sufficiency. For Kant we cannot have sensatoins witout categorical thought, and we ahve nothing under sensations but that a pure void of a negative relata. Experieice thus for Kant does not come in stages. His task is to derive cateogries of thinking/being without presupposing anything. This demonstration, I am repeating again, in Hegel,occurs in language, it is a treatment of language, that produces the conditions for 'letting go' (lassen) thought emerge. What Hegel needs to begin with is pure, indeterminate being, but this can hardly be produced as a beginning. To begin in Hegel means to begin without beginning. In fact the whole effort in the introduction seems to be to forget that we are beginning at all.
Beginning without Beginning
Most of all Hegel's thinking is more method than system precisely because there is no Universal way of deriving all categories, each of his categories are singularities, producing their own forms of overdetermination (for more on this please see my detailed discussion of this in my adjacent Post on Section 1 of Capital).
That is the phrase beginning without beginning refers not to a pure cultural horizon as the past, but to the act, and if you read it as such you might see the problem with even the smallest fragment of Hegelian repetition.
Despite the obvious scope for confusion given the title of the POS, Hegel's setting aside of assumptions is not directly related to Husserl's method of 'bracketing' (epoche) judgement and existence. Husserlian Phenomenology continues to study experience from a first person point of view, the whole effort in Hegel is abandoning this point of view. From my own experience I would say this is not far from a basic Vipassana practice. After all both are hectic efforts for body and mind, until they are simply just not. But the point with Hegel of course is not the emptying of thought to enter hours of 'middle' mind states, or even using a more radical method to endlessly negate determinate content to arrive at a Universal method (which seems closer to Descartes). The whole point is the for thought to enter the conditions of an 'always already', to neither see or be seen by a thinker, and also to hold at bay through a kind of split, the discusrive reality of the the various arguments such thought passes through along the way, that is to split the mind, rather than repress discourse.
'Now starting with this determination of pure knowledge,all that we have to do to ensure that the beginning will remain immanent to the science of this knowledge is to consider, or rather, setting aside every reflection, simply to take up, what is there before us. Pure knowledge, thus withdrawn into this unity, has sublated every reference to an other and to mediation; it is without distinctions and as thus distinctionless it ceases to be knowledge; what we have before us is only simple immediacy.' (Pg 47 SOL)
Perhaps the greatest temptation we can have is to equate the moment of 'beginning' the logic with a kind of abdication of logic itself, a brief leap. But Hegel sees it differently, a leap would still I suspect layout a moment from which thought begins its deconstructive project. It begins for Hegel with a 'resolve' 'which can also be viewed as arbitrary of considering thinking as such' (48). The point is not to arrive at a 'higher form of consciousness' but to suspend consciousness itself.
In fact at least in SOL Hegel thinks of the Consciousness as arbitrary and mediated, as producing a distinction between thought and being, whereas within thought there is a unity of thought and being.
Pure Indeterminate Being
Jean Hyppolite makes at least one useful point comparing Freud slightly wayward essay on Negation. In Lacan's frst Seminar he argues that there is close relation between the Freudian 'return of the repressed' which forms the basis for his later developement of the rules of condensation and displacement. In Freud what happens is precisely that some trivial detail of a troubling dream tends to reveal the sublated dimension of the dream, its form or to speak in Freudian terms, its Latent Content.
Hyppolite in a section where he engages in dialogue with Lacan during the first seminar compares this to Hegelian sublation, or Aufebung:
“It is Hegel’s dialectical word, which means simultaneously to deny to suppress and to conserve, and fundamentally to raise up. In reality, it might be the Aufhebung of a stone, or equally the stopping of my newspaper subscription. At this point Freud tells us: ‘negation is already an Aufhebung of the repression, though not of course an acceptance of what is repressed.’
Here again we have a kind of Overdetermination, the singular detail, 'overdetermining', producing the set that it comes to be both a part of and an exclusion from, the exception to the rule of the set which cannot be included or excluded from the set. Negation does not merely repress determinate content and allow it to surface later as a kind of 'fevered dream' but as the form of the dream. This is also the technical way of reading Freud's thought of return in general. A parituclar that overdetermines its own classification within a set.
However it is also worthwhile to restatethat right through in Hegel, concepts think themselves, and leave the naming and categorization to Hegel. Each of the concept that Hegel derives in the Logic produces its own style of thought, its own modality of thinking. Hegel however begins the SOL with pure indeterminate being.
'This pure being is the unity into which pure knowledge returns, or if this knowledge, as form, is itself still to be kept distinct from its unity, then pure being is also its content. It is in this respect that this pure being, this absolute immediate, is just as absolutely mediated. However, just because it is here as the beginning, it is just as essential that it should be taken in the one-sidedness of being purely immediate. If it were not this pure indeterminacy, if it were determined, it would be taken as something mediated, would already be carried further than itself: a determinate something has the character of an other with respect to a first. It thus lies in the nature of a beginning itself that it should be being and nothing else.There is no need, therefore,of other preparations to enter philosophy, no need of further reflections or access points' (5o)
How do we consider this 'pure unmediated being' that needs no other philosophical assumptions or 'access points'? What is purified or abstracted is the thinking of a thing, as outside thought, of an object. To suspend the object while simultaenously 'suppressing and conserving' the thought that is based on the notion of an exterior cognizable world. We can think of it quite simply as a form of radical skepticism without an object, that thinking thinks or is thought by.
That is in a very precise first forumlation of the basic Cartesian Forumla:
'But immediately upon this I observed that, whilst I thus wished to think that all was false, it was absolutely necessary that I, who thus thought, should be something; And as I observed that this truth, I think, therefore I am, was so certain and of such evidence that no ground of doubt, however extravagant, could be alleged by the Sceptics capable of shaking it, I concluded that I might, without scruple, accept it as the first principle of the philosophy of which I was in search.'
we might suggest a reformulation which might be:
'I think where I am not, therefore I am where I do not think I am'.
Thinking at the beginning is not distinct from being but rather is produced through of the presence of a constitutive lack that sutures thought and being.
References:
Hegel, GWF. The science of logic. Trans George di Giovanni. Cambridge. 23-43.
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