Commentary on the Logic, Chapter 7
The Transition and the New Form of Movement
Hegel’s thesis: “The truth of being is essence.” That sounds cryptic, but it means something simple: if you think through any apparently immediate determination consistently, you run into mediation structures — not behind the surface, but within it. Hegel insists: essence is “not behind appearance,” it is “out.” Essence is not a thing behind things, but the mediation structure inherent in everything that appears. “Essence is the shining of itself within itself” — translated: what appears as mere surface (the shine, Schein) is not less than essence, but the way in which essence shows itself. Shine is not deception, but manifestation. As a smile is not hidden behind joy but is the joy showing itself. Hegel puts it in the lecture course in four words: “To essence, shine is essential.” And more fully: “To essence, the inessential is not inessential; it exists only through its negative relation to being.”[1] Essence has nothing to consist of except its relation to what it is not.
What happens when one forgets this, Hegel demonstrates with an example that makes visible the entire stake of the logic of essence. If one takes essence by itself — “the identical-with-itself, where all other determinations vanish” — then only “the simple shining” remains. His judgment on this: “That is only caput mortuum; one still knows very little of God with that.”[1:1] The expression comes from alchemy and designates the worthless residue left after distillation. An essence from which all determinations have been withdrawn is precisely that: the residue, not the result.
Carry out the distinction: In the logic of being, being passed over into nothing — one vanished, the other came. Now try something different: think identity. To think identity, you must know what something is identical to — so you need difference. But difference is only difference from an identity. Neither vanishes! Both remain, both need each other, both shine into one another as in a mirror. This is the most important methodological turning point of the entire work.
That the logic of essence is at the same time the most difficult part, Hegel states in the lecture course without embellishment: “This is the hardest part of the logic, because here there are no such resting points among these categories.” And he gives the reason: “Being, determinate being [Dasein], is immediate, at rest; here, however, there are always two things at once, something identical with itself and at the same time its relation to an other — that is the difficulty.”[2] Whoever finds this part harder than the logic of being is thus right — the categories can no longer be held fast individually.
A linguistic feature accompanies the shift. In being, the word was is: something is red, is large, is a house. In the logic of essence, as Hegel notes, “the category of having” enters: the thing has properties, the substance has accidents.[2:1] Having separates and connects at once — the property is not the thing, but belongs to it; it has its being “in an other, it is had.” Watch for this word in what follows; wherever it appears, a structure of reflection is at work. [KF]
The Correspondence Problem
The classical question “How does my thought (inner) reach the world (outer)?” is resolved as a relation of reflection. Inner and outer are not finished opposites but constitute each other reciprocally by way of resistance. What resists in experience is the criterion of distinction. Correspondence turns out to be a special case of coherence — namely, coherence with the resistant moments of experience.
Carry this out (Experiment 30): Try to draw a sharp boundary between inner and outer. Where does your thinking end, and where does the world begin? Every attempt at a sharp demarcation fails — but the distinction between what you can manipulate and what resists you becomes immediately clear.
The Three Forms of Reflection — The Heart of the Logic of Essence
This passage is decisive for the whole work. Whoever understands the three forms of reflection can navigate any Hegelian triad. Reflection passes through three forms:
Positing reflection: self-reference, empty. Thought at home with itself, turning in a circle without content. Tautology. “A = A” — not false, but saying nothing.
External reflection: reference to something other, external. Thought runs up against something presupposed that it has not itself posited — a resistance. It brings categories to bear on what is given, but the connection remains contingent. The natural scientist who applies a scheme to nature — why this one in particular?
Determining reflection: the unity of both. It recognizes: what was presupposed is itself something posited — but necessarily posited. Insight into necessity. Reflection comes “under the dominion of its own positedness” — bound to what it has itself brought forth.
Why exactly three? Hegel does not justify the number as such; it emerges from the movement of the matter itself. In retrospect, one can say what sustains it: positing reflection on its own remains empty, external reflection on its own remains groundless — two alone do not amount to a stable determination. And the order cannot be reversed: reference to the other presupposes self-reference, and the unity presupposes both.
Whether there are really three or more is, in fact, a worse question than it sounds. Each of the three moments can be further subdivided, yielding five, seven, or nine; whoever splits the middle moment, because two opposed standpoints stand there, arrives at four. Where what is at stake are kinds — the organs of an animal, the parts of a machine — there can be any number at all. The number three designates the form of the movement, not the count of members; replacing it with another number is just as possible as it is inconsequential, so long as the movement remains the same. What actually serves as the measure of a genuine articulation is developed in Systematisches Denken, Kapitel 12.
Scope — and a warning. The same threefold shape recurs at several points: in the moments of method (understanding, dialectical, speculative), in the division into the logic of being, of essence, and of the concept. This makes the forms of reflection a useful point of access.
But not the only one. There is a tendency in Hegel scholarship to make some basic operation the key to everything. There are many candidates: the three moments of method, the three forms of reflection, the in-itself and for-itself of the Phenomenology, the determinations of reflection, the moments of the concept — universal, particular, individual — the syllogism, the sequence of mechanism, chemism, and teleology, the idea of life. Each of these approaches can show that the whole logic is readable according to its pattern, and none of them is wrong. But three things are easily overlooked in the process: that the operations themselves first have to develop (whoever makes a later one the key to an earlier one is reading backward), that they do not coincide with one another (the forms of reflection are not the same as the moments of method), and that their relative weight shifts — in the logic of being, passing-over stands in the foreground; in the logic of essence, shining; in the logic of the concept, self-development.
The practical side of this structure — how to distinguish between empty self-reference, externally imposed categories, and an order that follows from the matter itself — is developed in Systematisches Denken, Kapitel 15 as the difference between living and mechanical systematicity.
The Determinations of Reflection — The Grammar of Essence
Here Hegel develops the “laws of thought” not as static axioms but as dynamic processes. Every determination of reflection has a double character: as positedness it points to others; as reflection-into-self it appears self-subsistent.
A. Identity: “A = A” needs difference in order to be determinate.
Carry this out: Think “A = A.” Hold the thought fast. What are you actually thinking? The proposition seems self-evident, but it says nothing. To understand what A is, you must already have distinguished A from not-A. Whoever says “A = A” has already differentiated — A as subject and A as predicate are not the same. Hegel turns this into a formal argument, and it already stands in the printed text: “The form of the proposition itself contradicts it, since a proposition also promises a distinction between subject and predicate, while this proposition does not deliver what its form demands” (Encyclopedia, vol. 1, § 115, Remark). In the lecture course he puts it more tersely: “Even the form of the proposition is here in contradiction, for the is requires making a distinction between subject and predicate.”[3]
Christian Iber has worked out the point of this critique as a contradiction between saying and meaning. Whoever defends the proposition of identity appeals to the claim that “identity is not diversity, but rather identity and diversity are themselves diverse.” What is meant by this is that identity is, taken by itself in isolation, something true. But what is said is that identity is different from diversity — that is, that it has a diversity within itself. [4] The understanding does not refute itself through what it asserts but through the way it must assert it. The statement of identity presupposes the difference it wants to deny — and does so simply by being a proposition.
For the law of contradiction, one example suffices for him: take “any existing thing” whatever, and it will be found to be “at once itself and an other — e.g., George IV is King of England.”[3:1] The same person is both himself and an office.
Hegel’s objection, however, is not directed against the laws of thought but against their form: “It is superfluous to make a form of laws out of this. These laws are untrue, for each such form is asserted on its own as essential, but this is one-sided.”[3:2] What they say is correct; what is false is taking each of them, on its own, as the whole. And he adds the condition under which identity holds: “If I say the absolute is identity, this is entirely correct, only difference must not thereby be abolished” — this, precisely, is the charge leveled against the system of identity. Practical relevance: consistency is necessary, but concepts develop. Absolutizing them leads to essentialism.
B. Difference in three stages: (1) Diversity — external, indifferent difference. (2) Likeness/Unlikeness — comparative difference, requiring a tertium comparationis. (3) Opposition — difference that relates to itself. Positive and negative define each other reciprocally.
Carry this out: Think of light — without any thought of darkness whatsoever. Impossible. The concepts are related to each other polarly: each is determinate only through its other. This is not a weakness of thought but the very structure of determinateness itself.
C. Contradiction: Not an error, but a motor. “All things are in themselves contradictory” (Hegel). Productive contradiction drives development; destructive contradiction leads to paralysis.
D. Ground: Resolution of contradiction through integration. Three forms: Formal ground — tautology, explains nothing (Molière’s virtus dormitiva). Real ground — distinct from what is grounded, but not sufficient on its own. Sufficient ground — the totality of all conditions: only when all of them are present together does what is grounded necessarily follow. Double movement: analytic (from the grounded to the ground) and synthetic (from the ground to the grounded).
Existence, Thing, and Matters
The complete ground presses toward appearance. “Essence must appear” — a truth that would in principle be inaccessible is no truth at all.
Carry this out (Experiment 36): Think away all the properties of gold — color, density, conductivity, melting point. What remains? Nothing. Gold is the unity of its properties. The “thing in itself” (without properties) is an empty abstraction.
Hegel’s warning against fictitious matters: caloric, electrical matter, the substance of the soul — hypostasized properties, not genuine stuffs. But: the form of the combination is just as real as the matters themselves. Water is H₂O in a determinate structure — properties emerge from the combination.
Libelt transcript, lecture course 1828, on §§ 112 and 114: GW 23.2, p. 498. ↩︎ ↩︎
Libelt transcript, lecture course 1828: GW 23.2, p. 499. ↩︎ ↩︎
Libelt transcript, lecture course of 1828, on § 115: GW 23.2, p. 500. ↩︎ ↩︎ ↩︎
Christian Iber, Metaphysik absoluter Relationalität. Eine Studie zu den beiden ersten Kapiteln von Hegels Wesenslogik, Berlin/New York 1990, on the section concerning identity. Iber’s commentary follows the Science of Logic; this commentary follows the Encyclopedia, whose architecture is the richer one. The matter is the same in both versions — Hegel presents the argument in Enc. § 115, Remark, and in the Science of Logic, TWA 6, 41 f. ↩︎