{269} (cont’d)

II. The internal structure of reason

The first step was Phenomenology of Spirit, which lead us to the notion of absolute reason. The second step {270} must determine the internal structure of reason and is the subject of Science of Logic.

Here we must repeat some things, such as it happened before. The first of them, of the four I am going to select for my analysis is, from my perspective, the internal structure of reason for Hegel.

The first is what we have just covered, that reason is the unity of the objective and the subjective. A unity that, as Hegel has shown to us is not dead but alive. It is not the case that they may continue being two (the thing and the subject) and that a more or less universal concept may be elaborated that may encompass the thing as much as the subject. That is not the point, it is the case of a living unity because the contrary —this is how Hegel opposes Schelling— would be the philosophy of identity. That would consist in saying that radically nature is the same as spirit, understanding by that sameness that it is something indifferent to nature and spirit. Out of this, Hegel says, nothing can ever result since that is like the night when all cats are black. It is not the case of an empty and vacant identity, but of a living unity (eine lebendig Einheit) and in that unity the two moments are inseparable. It is not the case that they may not be different, but that they are inseparable. Because in the abstract unity each element continues to be by itself, while here it is not that they may be equal because actually they are different, but that their unity, and their difference, is the internal product of the very unity. Therefore, that difference is not abolished, but contained within the unity. The unity itself is the one that contains their difference, and their essence precisely consists in di-ffering.

In a second moment we shall have to ask Hegel, in what does that life of the concept consist? Hegel will tell us that the life of the concept is logos, by which he intends to take up {271} the Greek tradition. Hegel recalls that Aristotle had told us —we covered this further above— that in the act of true knowledge, in the epistéme, from the beginning they are tautón, the thing and the knower are the same, the logos. The epistéme and the epistetón are tautón. What did Aristotle understand by this tautón? Aristotle understood that the perfect actuality of the act of knowledge (entelécheia) is the presence of the actuality itself in which the thing consists in act. It is a tautón in that order, not that it may be a tautón of the reality of the intelligence and of the reality of things. On the contrary, Aristotle expressly says that the eínai of what is heard, the eínai of the eyes, the eínai of the voûs is different than what the eînai of a bell ringing is. When I listen to a bell ringing, I have an act whose actual entelécheia on my part is precisely the same than the entelécheia in which the pure sonority of the thing emitting the sound consists. But Hegel goes much further.

Hegel quickly understands that this tautón of the Greek means the total unity of the légein and the ón, and therefore, the logic of Aristotle is a logic of the ón, and reciprocally, the ón of Aristotle has to necessarily adopt the form of a logos. It is not that Aristotle had no responsibility in this conception of Hegel since we already saw that the transcendental order, the order of being, is viewed from the logos not as something external. It is the case that in one form or another that structure of the légein belongs to the structure of the ón. It is here, in Hegel, where this idea brings forth one of its last fruits, by virtue of which Hegel is given the possibility, on the one hand, and is forced, on the other, to incorporate into ontology the doctrine of the ón, the moment of the lógos. Because of this it constitutes for Hegel the very life of the concept, the very structure of absolute reason.

{272} We then proceed to a third moment. This life of reason, this living unity in which the logos consists is an occurrence (eine Bewegung) for Hegel. Why and in what does this motion of the logos consist? For Hegel, what is conceived —we return to look at this from the point of view of the speculative phrase— is what continues to determine the subject, but never adequately. That is the problem. Hence, the result of the fullest conceptiveness of something is always inadequate and insufficient for the constitution of that thing. Consequently, the logos will also have to return upon itself in order to rectify its first positions one way or another and acquire new ones. Is this a doing or an undoing? Hegel will say no. In all this motion of the logos there is something that remains identical. What is the identical? Hegel appeals to a comparison; I take an acorn, the acorn is the oak, but in a form different from the tree; it is the oak, but in a germinal form. Out of the acorn a small shrub begins to grow and flourishes. It is the same as the acorn, but now with another form and that way it reaches the oak. At first glance it does not resemble the acorn, however, it is the same acorn in another form. It is not the case that now it may be and was not before, and the whole process cannot be ignored when we say “oak”, because the truth is the whole. Precisely that which is the same in its apparently different and opposed phases is what the unity and sameness of the logos is. This sameness of the logos is what worries Hegel most; it is the internal motion of the concept, which is always an unsustainable motion. What is the reason for this unsustainability, and above all, why does this unsustainability constitute in a positive way the life of the concept and reason?

This is the fourth point. That motion is dialectical. What does Hegel understand by dialectical? After which we shall have the right {273} to ask him, what reason are we dealing with? Who has that reason? Is it mine or is it an absolute reason, the divine reason? Truth is that Hegel would say it is both things at the same time. Not for the motive Leibniz claimed that human reason is an image of the divine, but because at bottom it is not the case of an image, since substantially human reason is divine reason and divine reason is human reason. In a certain way, it is clear that divine reason is more than human reason, because it is infinite while human reason is finite. But, in what does the finitude of something consist for Hegel? That is the question.

Hegel tells us thematically in a remote text —Hegel always says the most important things in remote texts— of his The Science of Logic, “Finite things are finite insofar as they do not have in themselves the full reality of their concept”, but need other concepts. Hence, for Hegel, the finitude of human reason would consist in actually not being the fullness of that which is involved in the concept of reason. But inasmuch as human reason is a realization, although fragmentary of that concept, it is the same as divine reason.

For Hegel, there is another profound difference between human reason and divine reason. Human reason is something, which divine reason lacks because it does not need it, namely, “conscience”. Divine reason is not conscience; it is absolute reason that knows itself, a thing that in Hegel is always something much more than conscience. Conscience is the manifestation of absolute reason and in this sense human reason, insofar as it manifests itself in its own conscience, is definitely the manifestation of divine reason. Consequently, it is the case of the same reason, but one that has, so to speak, two moments, one is the absolute {274} that divine reason is, and another, the non-absolute that human reason is. We shall have to ask in another context what it is that Hegel understands by this non-absolute. Nevertheless, let it be clearly understood that insofar as human reason is reason, in that measure, an investigation about reason is really and effectively an investigation that connects with what absolute reason is, the divine reason.

That is what Hegel understood by reason. Now Hegel will have to tell us what is the internal structure of reason, in order to explain afterwards how with that internal structure of reason he does not see things simply as something conceived by acts of reason, but finds things effectively real.

It is the case, therefore, of the internal structure of reason. Since this reason, according to what Hegel tells us, is a living reason, the answer will have to center on two points. In the first place, Hegel will have to say in what the formal structure of reason as such consists. In the second place, in what the internal life consists, the structure of the internal life of reason.


1. Formal characteristics of reason

Of course, Hegel does not tell us everything in one place, and it will be necessary to review the different levels of his thought, a thing made particularly indispensable since Hegel pretends that in him the Absolute Spirit has acquired its first formulation in history. Consequently, we have the right to carefully analyze what Hegel understands by Reason and what its internal structure is.

{275}

A) Living unity

The first characteristic this reason has is unity, the unity of the objective and the subjective. If this were not so, there would be a split between truths on one side, and certainties on the other. Indeed, we are told that this unity is not a dead unity (ist keine tote Einheit), but a living unity (eine lebendige Einheit). Hegel understands by dead unity the unity of two termini that remaining distinct from each other can be subsumed by an act of abstraction into a single concept more or less general. For example, with regard to different men we can elaborate the general concept of man; with regard to the diverse living beings, we can elaborate the general concept of living, and so on. This, Hegel says, is a dead unity because it is the subsumption of unities, separated from each other, under a common concept. The unity viewed from this point of view would be the unity so dear to Schelling, the unity of indifference; it would amount to saying that spirit and nature are one, that they are an undifferentiated unity. But Hegel maintains that the objective and the subjective are precisely differentiated and that insofar as differentiated is how they are one.

The living unity consists in the fact that the unity, by its own and internal disposition makes the termini “di-ffer” from itself, the termini by which it is distinct and different. This way the unity is not an abstract concept that hovers over each of the termini that are separated, but is just the opposite. It is the unity of the termini, which will never be separated, but are different with a distinction achieved by an internal motion of the very unity from which they proceed and in which they are constituted.

{276} But then, we shall have to ask Hegel, in what does this unity consist? It is, from my perspective, the second characteristic of reason.


B) Logicality

Hegel will tells us in a very clear way that this unity is the logos. For the modern, the logos was alien to the contents, and logic, insofar as science of the logos, was merely formal science. Hegel thought that modern logic (in a certain way he was right) was concerned with the forms of the logos, of the logical forms regardless of their contents. I say that A is B, for any A and for any B. I say that it is universal or particular, regardless of the type of this universality and particularity.

However, for Hegel this is chimerical and incorrect. In the Greek world the logos was not empty of content, but just the opposite. Of the logos —for example, of Plato and Aristotle— Hegel considers that in one way or another it forms part of reality. In Greece the logos was the reason for the thing. Without doubt that was the case, except that —I make this observation— in Greek there is no term reason different from logos. But let us accept, in this case as in many others, the Hegelian version of the Greek concepts. After all, the philosophy of the XIX and XX century is rich with translations of Greek philosophy to particular philosophies. Hegel, therefore, tells us that reason is the logos of things, and actually, that “of” did have a formal expression in Parmenides and Aristotle, the tautón. In the act of knowing, the actuality of knowing, inasmuch as I know this object, and the actuality of this object insofar {277} as object known by my reason, is just the same, they are tautón, and in that sameness clearly consists its alétheia, its truth. Of course, Aristotle says that it is a tautón that refers to the entelécheia of the known insofar as known, and therefore, it is outside of tautón as its own reality, the eînai of the logos as such, and of the thing as such. But then, Hegel inverts the terms of the question. He starts precisely from that tautón that the logic and metaphysics of Aristotle has established. He sees both terms —the logos insofar as something that would belong to me, and the thing insofar as it has its own reality independently from me— as two moments whose unity is precisely the tautón. And the tautón is that sameness they possess when a reason knows a thing, exhaustively in the case of Hegel, or fragmentarily in the case of Aristotle. Hence, instead of going from things and the logos to their tautón in which the content of the truth would be, Hegel starts from the tautón, and alétheia. He does this to see how the internal development of this alétheia and of this reason is what constitutes the differences between the logos and things. Consequently, Logic as science of the logos belongs formally to Metaphysics. It is logos toû óntos and now we understand why, precisely because they are tautón inasmuch as there is truth. If there is no truth, there is nothing that can be done, neither with the logos nor with the ón since they would not belong to each other mutually in a tautón.

Hence, logic is not a philosophical discipline together with the rest of the disciplines, but is a structural moment of the very reality. It is the structural moment of the concept, involving in the concept these two dimensions, subjective reason, and objective reality. Logic is, at one and the same time, logic of the thing and logic of my own reason, of my own logos. This {278} is clearly the truth, it is the tautón. The living unity of reason is, for Hegel, the truth as concept, as tautón.


C) Motion

We can still prod the thought of Hegel in order to ask him, in what does it consist, not just that living unity, but its very living experience (Sp. viviencialidad), its life? Since it is the case of a thought that is quite central to the whole of his metaphysics, the expressions of Hegel multiply. The life of the logos does not consist in being a combination of lógoi; it does not consist in reasoning. Quite properly he warns against the excess of reasoning. The life of the logos is something different. Because, as we have seen in the speculative proposition, which for Hegel is the conceptivizing thinking (begreiffendes Denken), we are trying to see how the activity of the concept, which we express with a predicate, is really that which in an active way is constituting what the subject is. In the case of the dog, life taken in the abstract (with the predicates we would have to add) would constitute that canine reality I have in front of my eyes.

We can see that the life of the logos is a motion, but not the motion of combining reasons, but the internal motion of constituting and conforming reality, starting precisely from determinations that, insofar as as they are in the predicate, are in some way anterior to its reality. Because of that, the motion Hegel is talking about is the one that constitutes the very own and formal life of the logos.

Whose motion is it? Is it a motion of my thinking insofar as different from the object or of the object insofar as different from thinking? {279} No, it is a motion of the concept, and therefore, is at one and the same time a motion of the object and of the logos itself. It is a motion of the conceptivizing thinking.

Continuing on this line we can ask Hegel, why is there such a motion? Is it simply a postulate, something arbitrary? Hegel will tell us that if I enunciate a predicate of a subject in our average logic, it turns out that this predicate is not enough to constitute the subject. To say that the living hic et nunc is a dog, is true as long as it may have millions of predicates between the living being and the dog I have in front of me. Therefore, Hegel would be quite ready to say that, in the end, every judgment, from this point of view, involves a contradiction. Because, on the one hand, I affirm that the living hic et nunc is a dog, but on the other, that the dog is many other things, which the mere living is not. In a certain way this would negate what the dog is as a living dog. Can we say then, as it has been repeated many times, that what constitutes the internal motor of thinking, of the conceptivizing thinking, is contradiction? I have never shared that opinion, and not because Hegel has not said that many times and in widely quoted texts. It seriously makes us think about it and also to consider that in the philosophy of Hegel, thematically, above all in the concepts, there is something like the principle of contradiction. But then, Hegel would never admit this circumstance; every concept is necessarily motoring, self-motoring if you will, by its very reason of conceptivation, insofar as it is concept. Why and how, if it is not contradiction?

The truth is that underneath the contradiction and before it, there is a moment of the logos, of the motion of the logos, which is the one that constitutes the motorizing, the internal motion of the logos. The fact is that, in the end, the logos is constitutively {280} restless, it is the restlessness (ist die Unruhe) of reason. Why is the concept restless? Simply because it does not fully realize that which is. In other words, because no system of predicates can adequately and totally constitute the reality of the subject from the point of view of the speculative proposition. Because of that, reason is in constant motion because it is the thought of conceptivizing thinking, which never reaches the final terminus of what is conceived and its conceptivation.

Hence, when Hegel says that the life of reason is motion, he is not talking of the many concepts, of each one of them by itself and each as an example of one concept. That is not the thought of Hegel. The thought of Hegel is that the multitude of concepts does not represent anything but aspects of just one thing, to conceive the singular concept. The one that is motoring. In what measure and in what form can this involve a contradiction?

It involves a contradiction the moment we consider this motion as finished, fixed, reaching a repose. In that case, we would have something alive —let us say a dog here— that would be nothing but something alive, which is a contradiction because there are many living things that are not dogs, in addition to the non-living. It ceases being a contradiction in the measure in which motion does not cease, because the contradiction is the abstraction that a motion makes of itself to hold in static terms that which it intrinsically is: the dynamic unity through which the concept conceives its own subject as conceptivizing thinking. The reality of conceiving is a motion that constitutes a process and in that process there is an internal unity. Let us consider an example; we were referring above to the acorn and the oak. Hegel will say —and this is a solid idea in his head— that, for example, the {281} oak refutes the acorn. There is the form of acorn, there is the form of flower, there is the form of oak, there is the form of tree, and it is true that each one refutes the previous one. But at the bottom of all this there is only one thing, which is what I have called, to expose the thought of Hegel, the “oakhood process”¹. And this process is the same one that produces the acorn, the flower, and the tree. In that dynamic unity there is no refutation whatsoever and what is true is the whole, precisely its process. Its conceptivizing thinking (begreiffendes Denken) consists in just that. Really, the termini in which there is an apparent contradiction only surge when they are considered as resulting termini and split from the motion in which they exist, and with respect to which these termini would only be abstractions, as we shall immediately see.

Nevertheless, we may still consider this is not enough and ask Hegel, in what does the entire structure of this motion consist?

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¹ [Tr. note: Sp. “proceso encinil”, Zubiri neologism from encina, oak]