Commentary on Subjective Spirit, Chapter 9
Five Determinations, in Advance
This volume uses five logical determinations so often that explaining them at each place would interrupt the course. They therefore stand together here, briefly and only so far as they are needed. The detailed version stands in each case in Hegels Logik.
The bad and the true infinite. Where a determination oversteps its limit and in doing so only runs into another limit, the endless progression arises: always one more, and none is the last. That is the bad infinite — no solution, but a repetition of the problem. The true infinite is not going on without end but being at home with oneself in the other: a relation in which the other is no longer a barrier. The distinction bears twice in this volume, at desire and at happiness; both fail at the same figure, and recognition is the shape in which it is overcome. At length in Die Qualität.
Measure and the nodal line. Quantity is indifferent to the matter so long as it keeps within limits; beyond that it turns over into quality. Hegel calls the series of such turning points a nodal line of measure relations. For this volume that is the logic of habit: repetition that seems to change nothing until it changes the relation to one’s own bodiliness as a whole. At length in Das Maß.
Real and abstract possibility. Abstractly possible is whatever can be thought without contradiction — an empty determination with which nothing can be done. Something is really possible when its conditions are present; once they are completely there, it steps into existence. When this volume determines the soul as possibility, the passive nous that is potentially everything, the real one is meant. Otherwise the transition of anthropology would not be grounded but merely asserted: out of the soul, spirit arises not possibly, but because its conditions lie within it. At length in Die Wirklichkeit.
The idea of the true and the idea of the good. At the end of the logic the idea stands divided in two. In cognition the concept is with the matter, but it does nothing; in willing it does something, but it does not have its content with it. Each lacks what the other has, and because the two defects are complementary, they call for a third member. The same relation returns in this volume as theoretical and practical spirit, and it is the substantive reason why Hegel added free spirit — a stronger reason than the editorial observation that the section first appears in 1827/28. At length in Erkennen und Wollen.
What is not being said by this. These five determinations are tools, not a blueprint. The volume follows no schema, and logic supplies it with no articulation that it would merely have to fill in. Where the order is grounded, that happens at the matter — in the fact that a stage fails at its own determination. How far the parallel between the articulation of this volume and the articulation of the logic carries at all is a question of its own; Chapter 28 pursues it and finds it limited. Chapter 26a draws the balance at the end, of how far each of the five determinations has carried.