The Antepenultimacy of the Beginning in Hegel's Science of Logic

• Author: David Gray Carlson
• Position: Professor of Law, Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law
• Pages: 225-244

Page 225

I Introduction

Perhaps the single most perplexing problem in Hegel's Science of Logic is the status of its beginning.

Hegel famously insisted that philosophy must be self-grounding. It cannot start from givens. For Hegel, presupposition is the enemy of science. "[S]tupid-I can find no other word for it," he remarked.¹ Accordingly, if Hegel's own beginning rests on unjustified presupposition, then his project is defeated at the start. This is a problem Hegel worried about and claimed to have solved.²

Hegel is usually read as excusing his presuppositional beginning by making his first step the very last step of the Logic. On this interpretation, the beginning is admittedly a contingency or a choice by the subjective will of the philosopher,³ but the first step is proven when it becomes the last step in the logic. As Hegel puts it, "The essential requirement for the science of logic is not so much that the beginning be a pure immediacy, but rather that the whole of the science be within itself a circle in which the first is also the last and the last is also the first."⁴Page 226

I would like to propose a refinement, however. I wish to defend the proposition that the last, ultimate step of the Science of Logic is not the first step. Rather, the first step of the logic is the antepenultimate step-the third from the last-in the Science of Logic as a whole.

This interpretation allows for an answer to a question that has bothered readers of Hegel's first chapter on pure being. There, Hegel emphasizes the identity of being and nothing. If these are identical, how can their difference be discerned? The question boils down to this: Where does difference come from?⁵ If one thing is clear, the result of the identity of being and nothing is becoming-a concept that depends on a difference between being and nothing. Becoming, Hegel emphasizes, is "a movement in which both [being and nothing] are distinguished . . . . "⁶ Yet, in the obliterative regime of pure being, how can difference be accounted for?

If we see Hegel as beginning with the antepenultimate step in his logical system, we can provide a ready answer to the origin of difference, on which becoming depends. On my interpretation, difference is presupposed, as Hegel's critics have alleged. What is different in becoming is absolute knowing (the ultimate step) and pure immediacy (the antepenultimate step). Becoming summarizes the difference between these two-not the difference between being and nothing as such. To state this point in slightly different terms, pure being was supposed to be absolute knowing-the Understanding's propositional summary of it.Page 227

But it ended up being nothing at all -a failure.⁷ If there is a difference between being and nothing, it can only be discerned from a perspective that remembers absolute knowing and compares pure nothing as the result of the attempt to summarize absolute knowing in an immediate way.

To see how Hegel's Anfang is antepenultimate, we begin-in the style of Harold Pinter or the film noir Memento-at the end. To turn the tables on Leonard Nimoy, only by recalling the future may we comprehend the past.

II Hegel's Last Chapter

Hegel's last chapter in the Science of Logic is entitled "The Absolute Idea." Generally speaking, idea is the negative unity of subject and object. Throughout the last third of the Science of Logic-the Subjective Logic-the notion or concept (Begriff) theorizes itself. It produces an objective account of its subjective self by transporting itself from subject into predicate. This occurs in the chapter entitled syllogism (Schluft), which is perhaps better translated as "inference."⁸ In effect, the subject infers its own objectivity. Yet, it finds itself alienated from its self-inference and enters into a subject/object relation.

Idea is the dynamic quality that both subject and predicate share: each on its own logic has no right against the other. Each sacrifices itself on behalf of the other, pointing to the other as the source of its being. Idea is the common element of self-sacrifice-the inability of any posi-tivized concept to maintain itself against its other.

Absolute idea arises when both the true (or thinking) and the good (or doing) give up their pretensions. What ends up being true is that Kantian philosophy is a failure. The truth is that there is no thing-in-itself; it is just an illusion that passes away like any other appearance.⁹ The good (or practical) idea, in contrast, is the obliteration of anythingPage 228 that stands in the way of the subject's freedom. The good is action, and "[a] 11 action presupposes a reality 'alien5 to the doer . . . . "¹⁰ [A]ction," in addition, "treats the world as an empty receptacle for the actualization of its subjective purposes . . . . "¹¹ The true good, then, is the realization that the only obstacle to the subject's freedom and self-knowledge is the very falsehood that the subject manufactured in theorizing about itself. The good and the true each sacrifice themselves; this commonality shared by the true and the good is absolute idea.

Absolute idea is also called method. From the foregoing account of self-sacrifice and self-erasure, it should be clear that method is very, very negative. The method is that all affirmative propositions must obliterate themselves as inadequate to their own object. The Science of Logic, then, is thoroughly Spinozist in nature. For Spinoza, " [d]eterminateness is negation . . . ; this true and simple insight establishes the absolute unity of substance."¹² So it is for Hegel, with the key difference that Hegel's substance is so negative that it positivizes itself, only to dissolve its positive implication.

Like all concepts in the Science of Logic, absolute idea is put through the gauntlet of three logical steps. The first is the step of the Understanding. The Understanding makes immediate propositions. "The understanding considers all encountered beings ... to be at peace, fixed, limited, univocally defined, individual, and positive."¹³ To produce this stable, reliable account of reality and in order to make sense of the materials before it, the Understanding must always leave something out-reality is ultimately dynamic, but the Understanding is static.

Dialectical Reason is the critique of the Understanding. It emphasizes the omitted materials that the Understanding left out, in order to show that the Understanding's proposition is the opposite of what it ought to be. Dialectical Reason is in the business of remembering the logical sequence that the Understanding suppresses.¹⁴ Memory is thePage 229 stuff that dialectical dreams are made of.¹⁵ Dialectical Reason is tantamount to experience,¹⁶ in that theory is shown to be inconsistent with the real world known to exist beyond the latest theory.

Yet Dialectical Reason does not just negate a positive theory. With Hegel, nothing is always something; dialectical negativity is just as positive as that which it critiques. If, according to Dialectical Reason, the Understanding has suppressed materials in order to make a positive proposition, Dialectical Reason must positivize the suppressed materials. It therefore replicates the fault laid upon the doorstep of the Understanding.¹⁷

The third step-Speculative Reason-brings together the prior, diverse steps of Understanding and Dialectical Reason, pointing out that they share a commonality or identity as well as a difference. Indeed, their commonality is their difference. In other words, each side posi-tivizes material and so leaves aside, or expels, the negative, from which it purports to be different. It is this excluded negative (difference) that Speculative Reason exploits. Speculative Reason is constantly bringing this commonality to the fore.

The three-step process is then repeated. What Speculative Reason produces is interpreted by the Understanding. This interpretation is one-sided. Once again, something is always left out, which generates further steps in the Logic. The move from Speculative Reason to the proposition of the Understanding is always retrogressive. In Leninist terms, it is always two steps forward after one step back. "[A]dvance is a retreat into ground. . . , " as Hegel puts it.¹⁸ Nevertheless, as the Understanding interprets the material at hand, the propositions of the Understanding become more sophisticated as the Logic progresses. By thePage 230 time the Understanding reaches the mesne realm of Essence, all its propositions are negative and dialectical in nature. In effect, the Understanding transforms itself into Dialectical Reason. By the time the Understanding reaches the realm of Notion, it sees things speculatively. Understanding thus transforms itself into Speculative Reason.¹⁹ The Science of Logic ends when the Understanding, Dialectical Reason, and Speculative Reason converge in absolute idea. Taken together, they are method.

Because all that exists is the implosion of appearance, the major theme of the Science of Logic is that there is no mysterious "beyond" to the realm of appearances.²⁰ It is appearances all the way down, and appearance must erase itself in favor of a beyond that turns out not even to be there.²¹ As Hegel remarks in the Phenomenology, "behind the so-called curtain which is supposed to conceal the inner world, there is nothing to be seen unless we go behind it ourselves, as much in order that we may see, as that there may be something behind there which can be seen."²²

Aphanisis-disappearance of the subject-is the very idea of the Science of Logic. For Hegel, this aphanisis takes on a special meaning at the advanced level of idea. To see why, it is necessary to drop back and consider the very core of Hegel's system-the true infinite, which makes its official appearance in the second chapter of the Science of...