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Hegel’s logic of finitude

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Abstract

In “Violence and Metaphysics” Jacques Derrida suggests that “the only effective position to take in order not to be enveloped by Hegel would seem to be…to consider false-infinity…irreducible.” Inversely, refuting the charge of logocentrism associated with Hegelian true infinity (wahrhafte Unendlichkeit) would involve showing that Hegel’s speculative logic does not establish the infinity of being exempt from the negativity of the finite. This paper takes up Derrida’s challenge, and argues that true infinity is crucial to Hegel’s understanding of ideality as a question of normative authority, which does not fall prey to logocentrism. Through an exposition of the dialectic of the finite and the infinite in Hegel’s Science of Logic, I argue that true infinity is not an ontological category that eliminates division, but rather refers to the metalogical standpoint involved in a philosophical account of determinacy. Although fully achieved at the end of the Logic, the metalogical standpoint that Hegel elaborates in the Seinslogik under the banner of the true infinite already clarifies that determinacy is a product of normative authority that is itself precarious.

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Notes

  1. For a Fichtean response to Hegel, see Martin (2007).

  2. See Gasché (1994); see also Gasché (1986).

  3. Hegel (1969a, p. 149; 1969c, p. 164).

  4. Derrida (1980, p. 119). See also, Derrida (2004, p. 253): “Finitude becomes infinitude, according to a non-Hegelian identity.”

  5. See, e.g., Derrida (1997, p. 24): “Hegel…undoubtedly summed up the entire philosophy of the logos. He determined ontology as absolute logic; he assembled all the delimitations of philosophy as presence; he assigned to presence the eschatology of parousia, of the self-proximity of infinite subjectivity.” See also Derrida (1982a, p. 74) and (1997, p. 27).

  6. Derrida (1982b, p. 74).

  7. Hegel (1988, p. 88). See Derrida (1982b, p. 121), where he argues that Hegel’s notion of infinite reason is precisely what “coordinates teleology with an eschatology, a theology, and an ontology.” See also Derrida (1982b), esp. the discussion of Hegel and Husserl.

  8. Derrida (1982c, p. 11).

  9. Hägglund (2008).

  10. Ibid., p. 18.

  11. In addition to Pippin (1989, 2008), Pinkard (1996, 2002), Brandom (1991, 2005, 2009), and Houlgate (2006), to whom I refer throughout, important contributions to the debate concerning the status of Hegel’s idealism include Düsing (1976), Hartmann (1977), Fulda (1988), White (1983), Westphal (1989), Stern (1990, 2009), Duquette (1990), Siep (1991), Horstmann (1999, 2006), Longuenesse (2007), de Boer (2004), Winfield (2006). For an overview of the debate, see Kreines (2006).

  12. Cf. Pippin’s use of “metalogical” in (1989, p. 248).

  13. Hegel (1975, p. 140; 1969a, p. 154; 1969c, p. 171; 1969e, p. 202).

  14. Hegel (1975, p. 140; 1969a, p. 155; 1969c, p. 171; 1969e, p. 202).

  15. Hegel (1969a, p. 155; 1969c, p. 171); my emphasis.

  16. Ibid.

  17. Ibid. Translation follows Di Giovanni, Hegel (2010, p. 124).

  18. Ibid.

  19. Robert Pippin insightfully argues that “Hegel’s theory of concepts is a theory of ‘ought’s,’ rules telling us how to make categorical distinctions, principles that govern material inferences, that prescribe what ought or ought not to be done, and so forth” (2008, p. 97). Cf. Pippin (1989). For an assessment of shifts in Pippin’s interpretation of Hegel, see Zambrana (2010b). See also Brandom (1991, 2005, 2009).

  20. On the paradoxical structure of Geist as a “product of itself” and its roots in Kant’s notion of autonomy as self-legislation, see Pippin (2008) and Pinkard (2002).

  21. The Phenomenology of Spirit is accordingly a theory of modernity, and the specifically modern idea of freedom as self-determination. Similarly, the Philosophy of Right is an account of right in light of Hegel’s contemporary institutions. See Habermas (1990), Pippin (1997), and Pinkard (2002). See also Zambrana (forthcoming).

  22. Hegel (1991, p. 21).

  23. Pippin (2008, pp. 13, 19, 49, 53).

  24. Zambrana (2010a).

  25. Now, the Logic itself is also metatheoretical. That reason is understood as self-authorizing is part of the legacy of modernity. That is to say, an understanding of determinacy as a result of reasons rather than appeal to an unquestionable authority is part of the legacy of modernity. In the Logic, however, Hegel is providing a formal or structural account of this claim. See Pinkard (2002).

  26. Hegel (1969a, p. 155; 1969c, p. 171).

  27. Thus in the first pages of the last chapter of the Logic—“The Absolute Idea”—Hegel writes that “[p]hilosophy has the same content and the same end as art and religion, but it is the highest mode of apprehending the absolute Idea because its mode is the highest mode, the Notion. Hence it embraces those shapes of real and ideal finitude as well as those of infinitude and holiness, and comprehends them and itself” (1969a, p. 824; 1969b, p. 548). I will say more about the absolute idea below.

  28. The dialectic is, Hegel says, a “detailed example” of the “nature of speculative thought,” given that it elaborates the status of ideality as inseparable from reality. See Hegel (1969a, p. 152; 1969c, p. 167). Cf. Lau (2006, p. 57), who also speaks of the true infinite as “meta-theoretical,” and as a “comprehension of finitude from within finitude.”.

  29. Throughout his philosophical career, Hegel’s favorite critical target is Kantian formalism and its metaphysics of Verstand, which he argues underlies notions of individual freedom that distort the fundamentally intersubjective and hence social nature of freedom. Indeed, time and again Hegel launches trenchant critiques of what in his early work he called “positivity,” and ties his critique not only to Kantian Moralität but also to a Kantian Verstandeslogik. See, e.g., Hegel (1971, 1977, 1991). See also, e.g., Lukács (1975), Ormiston (2004), Honneth (1996, 2000, 2010), Nuzzo (2007), and Comay (2010).

  30. Houlgate (2006, p. 440).

  31. See Houlgate (2006, chap. 3). Cf. Winfield (1989) and Maker (1994).

  32. The literature on the opening of the Logic is vast. Hegel’s insistence on presuppositionlessness has been a critical target since Schelling. As will become clear below, I maintain that it is rather the end of the Logic that allows us to asses the status of Hegel’s idealism.

  33. Ibid., pp. 115, 135, and also 9: In providing “an analysis of the basic categories of thought,” Houlgate maintains, Hegel’s Logic “presents being itself in its immanent logical self-determination.”.

  34. Houlgate (2006, p. 438). “Finitude is what every something itself proves to be,” Houlgate also maintains, “and infinity is what finite being itself turns out to constitute” (ibid., p. 436).

  35. Houlgate certainly stresses the centrality of negativity in Hegel’s philosophy. Yet he sees negativity as establishing that being is self-relating. Houlgate insightfully analyzes what he calls Hegel’s critique of categorial purity. However, he suppresses the thought of categorial impurity, arguing that the constitutive impurity of logical categories establishes the rationality of being in itself. See Houlgate (2006, pp. 285ff., esp. 302–303).

  36. Houlgate (2006, p. 425).

  37. Ibid.

  38. The Logic as a whole, I suggest, is an account of determinacy via an immanent critique of realist and foundationalist accounts of determinacy. Accordingly, Hegel begins the Seinslogik with the opposite of the absolute idealist position that he defends in the Logic, namely, a metaphysical realism that affirms the possibility of unadulterated access to being. Hegel’s exposition in the Doctrine of Being establishes that implicit in realism is transcendental idealism. The failures of a realist model show the irreducibility of the structures of reflexivity involved in determinacy. In the Doctrine of Essence, Hegel specifies the limits of the transcendental-idealist position implicit in realism. Transcendental idealism thematizes the irreducibly mediated character of determinacy, but does not acknowledge that determinations of reflection, a logic of ground, or the notion of force, for example, do not entail metaphysical dualism. In the Doctrine of the Concept, Hegel makes explicit what is implicit in the two previous philosophical models. A logic of the concept makes explicit that determinacy implies the inseparability of reflection and its objects. However, a logic of the concept does not establish the ontological reality of actuality (Wirklichkeit). It rather makes explicit the normative structure of actuality. See Pippin (1989) and cf. Houlgate (2005).

  39. Hegel’s theory of determinacy makes no concessions to empiricist, realist, or transcendental idealist appeals to the given: whether raw sense data, rational principles, manifold of intuition, and so on.

  40. Hegel (1969a, p. 129; 1969c, p. 138).

  41. The Logic begins with the following fragment: “being, pure being, without any further determination” (1969a, p. 82; 1969c, p. 81). The pure indeterminacy of being, he notes, is but pure emptiness; nothing is intuited in this empty thought. Pure being is “nothing more nor less than nothing,” Hegel continues. In trying to think pure being, we find ourselves thinking nothing. Nothing, however, has a “meaning”—it is, or rather is being thought. To think nothing is accordingly to think something that is, although something that is purely indeterminate, which is to say: pure being. “Nothing is, therefore,” Hegel writes “the same determination or rather absence of determination, and thus altogether the same as, pure being” (ibid.). This passing over of one into the other does not collapse one into the other, however. Being and nothing are distinct, though inseparable (untrennbar). Hegel describes this passing over as “vanishing” (Verschwindens) of one into the other (1969a, p. 83; 1969c, p. 82), and argues that “[t]heir truth is, therefore…becoming, a movement in which both are distinguished, but by a difference which has equally immediately resolved itself” (ibid.). Becoming—the inseparability of being and nothing—is a “determinate unity in which there is both being and nothing” (1969a, p. 105; 1969c, p. 85). Following Pippin, I maintain that Hegel is here rehearsing the main tenet of idealism: the incoherence of immediacy (1989, pp. 189, 183). Rather than the opening of a critical logical-ontology, the dialectic of being and nothing is the first move of Hegel’s systematic reductio of realism pursued in the Doctrine of Being.

  42. Hegel (1969a, p. 130; 1969c, p. 139).

  43. Ibid.

  44. Houlgate (2006, p. 395).

  45. Hegel (1969a, p. 130; 1969c, p. 139).

  46. Hegel (1969a, p. 143; 1969c, p. 56).

  47. Famously, in the Preface to the Second Edition of the Logic, Hegel writes: “The forms of thought are first set out and stored in human language” (1969a, p. 31; 1969c, p. 20). Further on he clarifies that in a science of logic the “forms of thought have been freed from the material in which they are submerged…” (1969a, p. 33; 1969c, p. 21). A science of logic leaves language behind and examines basic categories of thought, subjective and objective principles (from the principle of non-contradiction to mechanism as a principle of objectivity), practices of judging and inferring, the structure of normativity, and so on. These are distinguishable from particular languages on the basis of their universality. They are, indeed, a priori, since they are non-empirical constraints involved in determinacy. This is one strand of Hegel’s continuation of Kant’s idealism, though he extends Kant’s paradigm by arguing that a theory of determinacy concerns Geist rather than questions of knowledge narrowly construed. Accordingly, the dialectic of the said and the meant is part of Hegel’s philosophical strategy in the Logic. Indeed, it is a crucial component of Hegel’s insistence on immanent critique. See Bernstein (1991, p. 188) and Lau (2006, n. 16). Cf. Houlgate’s discussion of language in Houlgate (2006, chap. 4). Cf. also Di Giovanni (2010).

  48. Cf. Hegel’s discussion of sense-certainty in the Phenomenology of Spirit. Notice that in both texts Hegel is making explicit that immediacy—especially the immediacy of any beginning—is untenable.

  49. Hegel (1969a, p. 131; 1969c, p. 141).

  50. Ibid., p. 130; p. 140.

  51. Ibid., p. 131; pp. 140–141.

  52. See Rose (1981, chap. 6).

  53. Houlgate (2006, pp. 395ff.).

  54. See Taylor (1977); quoted in Houlgate (2006, p. 394).

  55. See Houlgate (2006, p. 196).

  56. In the Encyclopedia Logic, Hegel writes: “something becomes an other; this other is itself something therefore it likewise becomes an other, and so on ad infinitum” (1975, p. 138; 1969e, p. 198).

  57. Strictly speaking, this gives rise to the first version of the bad infinite as progress to infinity, namely, qua endless series (Hegel 1969a, pp. 142f.; 1969c, pp. 154f.). The second version, endless striving, is a consequence of this first version of the bad infinite, since the endless series leads to a qualitative different notion of being.

  58. Hegel (1969a, p. 130; 1969c, p. 140).

  59. Ibid., p. 137; p. 150.

  60. Ibid., p. 139; p. 151.

  61. Ibid.

  62. Ibid., p. 142; p. 154.

  63. Ibid., p. 144; p. 157.

  64. Ibid., p. 141; p. 153.

  65. Ibid. “In each,” Hegel also writes, “lies the determinateness of the other” (ibid., p. 143; p. 156).

  66. Ibid.

  67. Ibid. “In saying what the infinite is, namely the negation of the finite,” Hegel writes, “the latter is itself included in what is said; it cannot be dispensed with for the definition or determination of the infinite. One only needs to be aware of what one is saying in order to find the determination of the finite in the infinite.”.

  68. Houlgate (2006, p. 428).

  69. Hegel (1969a, pp. 149ff.; 1969c, pp. 165ff.).

  70. Ibid., p. 150; p. 165.

  71. Ibid., p. 146; p. 159.

  72. Ibid., p. 147; p. 161.

  73. Ibid., p. 149; p. 163.

  74. Ibid., pp. 149–150; pp. 163–164.

  75. Hegel (1969a, p. 149; 1969c, p. 163).

  76. Houlgate (2006, p. 426).

  77. Hegel (1969a, p. 154; 1969c, p. 170).

  78. Ibid.

  79. See Pippin (2008), Bernstein (1996, 1997), Speight (2001), Quante (2004), and Laitinen and Sandis (2010).

  80. Hegel (1977, p. 200; 1969d, p. 249).

  81. Notice the significance of the dialectic of the said and the meant in these sections. Again, it is central to Hegel’s strategy of making explicit what is implicit in a given concept or position on the basis of the commitments that they express.

  82. Hegel (1977, pp. 199–200; 1969d, pp. 248–249).

  83. Hegel (1977 pp. 185ff.; 1969d, pp. 322ff.). See Quante (2008) and MacIntyre (1976).

  84. See Hegel’s famous reference to Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “A variety of ideas may well occur to us in connection with a skull, like those of Hamlet over Yorick’s skull…” (1977, p. 201; 1969d, p. 250). The infinity of a life is called forth when Hamlet sees Yorick’s skull.

  85. Hegel (1977, pp. 193–195; 1969d, pp. 241–242). Translation follows Pinkard (forthcoming).

  86. See Pippin (2008, esp. pp. 265ff.).

  87. Bernstein (2010).

  88. For assessments of debates concerning Hegel’s critical targets in these sections (the Romantics, Sturm und Drang, Rousseau, Fichte, Goethe) see Harris (1997, esp. vol. 2, pp. 460 ff.) and Beiser (2009). See also Pinkard (1996).

  89. Hegel (1977, p. 387; 1969d, p. 468). Translation follows Pinkard (forthcoming).

  90. Hegel (1977, p. 397; 1969d, p. 480).

  91. See Beiser (2009, p. 221).

  92. Ibid.

  93. See, e.g., Verene (2007, p. 89).

  94. Hegel (1977, p. 390; 1969d, pp. 471–472).

  95. Ibid., p. 405; p. 489.

  96. Ibid., p. 407; p. 490.

  97. Beiser (2009, p. 222).

  98. See Pippin (2008).

  99. Houlgate (2006, p. 431).

  100. Ibid.

  101. Ibid., p. 425.

  102. Furthermore, becoming aware of the infinity of reason is crucial, Houlgate argues, since we should seek to become “willing agents of infinite self-determining reason” (ibid., p. 426).

  103. See Hegel (1969a, p. 824; 1969b, p. 547). See Zambrana (2010a, pp. 109–112) for a systematic reading of Hegel’s important engagement with Kant in the chapter on Cognition crucial to the reading of the absolute idea proposed here.

  104. Hegel (169a, p. 824; 1969b, p. 548).

  105. Ibid.

  106. See Hegel (1969a, p. 587; 1969b, p. 257) and Pippin (2008, pp. 34, 98ff.).

  107. It is crucial to understand that determinacy is ultimately a matter of normative authority. This is not to say that it is only a matter of normative authority, for Hegel’s idealism would indeed be spinning in a frictionless void, to borrow John McDowell’s famous phrase. As I have suggested, authority refers to concrete practices of authorization that respond and at the same time give determinacy to material and social reality. Reality and ideality are inseparable for Hegel, as we have seen. See, for example, Petry’s Introduction and explanatory notes to his translation of Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature (1970), where he shows Hegel’s consistent engagement with the scientific developments of his time.

  108. Method is the “self-knowing Notion” (1969a, p. 826; 1969c, p. 550). See Zambrana (2010a, pp. 112–118) for a systematic reading of the absolute idea as method. Cf. Nuzzo (1999, 2005).

  109. Derrida (1997, p. 24).

  110. Cf. Pippin (2008, p. 64).

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Acknowledgments

I am grateful to J. M. Bernstein, Richard J. Bernstein, and Angelica Nuzzo for insightful comments on early drafts of this work. I presented versions of this essay at the 2009 meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy and at the 2011 meeting of The Society for German Idealism held at the Pacific Division of the American Philosophical Association. I would like to thank Karen Ng and Matthew Congdon, my co-panelists at SPEP, for stimulating conversations about Hegel’s Logic, and Martin Donougho, who delivered an excellent response to my paper at SGI, for his thought-provoking comments. I am also grateful to comments by an anonymous referee, which helped me clarify my arguments at crucial junctures. Finally, I would like to thank Martin Hägglund, for the many insightful discussions about Hegel and Derrida that we have shared, and for his helpful comments on this essay.

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  1. University of Oregon, Eugene, OR, USA

    Rocío Zambrana

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Zambrana, R. Hegel’s logic of finitude. Cont Philos Rev 45, 213–233 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s11007-012-9219-8

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