The Philosophy of Hegel as a Doctrine of the Concreteness of God and Humanity: The Doctrine of God [1]

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THE PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL AS A DOCTRINE OF THE CONCRETENESS OF GOD AND HUMANITY

Topics in Historical Philosophy General Editors

David Kolb John McCumber

Associate Editor

Anthony J. Steinbock

THE PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL AS A DOCTRINE OF THE CONCRETENESS OF GOD AND HUMANITY Volume One: The Doctrine of God

I. A. Il’in

Translated from the Russian and edited by Philip T. Grier

Northwestern University Press Evanston, Illinois

Northwestern University Press www.nupress.northwestern.edu Copyright © 2010 by Northwestern University Press. Published 2010. All rights reserved. The Philosophy of Hegel as a Doctrine of the Concreteness of God and Humanity is a translation of Filosofiia Gegelia kak uchenie o konkretnosti Boga i cheloveka (1918). Printed in the United States of America 10

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Il’in, I. A. (Ivan Aleksandrovich), 1883–1954. [Filosofiia Gegelia kak uchenie o konkretnosti Boga i cheloveka. English] The philosophy of Hegel as a doctrine of the concreteness of God and humanity / I. A. Il’in ; translated from the Russian and edited by Philip T. Grier. v. cm. — (Topics in historical philosophy) Includes bibliographical references. Contents: v. 1. The doctrine of God ISBN 978-0-8101-2608-4 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 1770–1831—Religion. 2. God—History of doctrines—19th century. I. Grier, Philip T., 1942– II. Title. III. Series: Northwestern University topics in historical philosophy. B2949.G63I4513 2010 193—dc22 2010008160 o The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.

Dedicated to Ella Fedorovna, my wife, without whom it truly would not have been possible

Contents of Volume One

Foreword

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Acknowledgments

xv

Translator’s Introduction

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Preface

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Part 1. The Doctrine of the Essence of the Divinity 1

The Concrete-Empirical

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The Abstract-Formal

32

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On Speculative Thinking in General (The Doctrine of Reason)

46

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The Reality of Thought

71

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The Universality of Thought

91

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Dialectic

113

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The Concrete-Speculative

134

Part 2. The Doctrine of the Divine Path 8

The Concept and Science

163

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Logic

180

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The Universe

204

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On Actuality

225

12

The Shapes of the World

243

Bibliographic Appendix

263

Table of Page Equivalents for the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion

299

Glossary

303

Foreword Philip T. Grier

The attempt to retrieve a work of scholarship buried under as much historical debris as was I. A. Il’in’s original two-volume commentary on the philosophy of Hegel presented distinct challenges, as well as possible satisfactions. In 1918 the universe of Russian intellectual life within which and for which this monumental study was produced stood on the brink of destruction. The Civil War, commencing just as Il’in undertook the academic ritual of a formal defense of his work, would shatter that world irretrievably. By the end of four years of savage conflict many of the surviving principal actors in the rich drama of pre-Revolutionary intellectual life would be scattered around various European capitals and the Far East. A substantial number, including Il’in, would have been forcibly exiled in the autumn of 1922. After that date a new Soviet Russian culture dominated by the categories of a Marxist proletarian ideology relentlessly displaced most remnants of the previous intellectual order. Groups of Russian exiles in various countries made notable efforts to preserve some of the distinctive traditions of discourse that had defined their lives in pre-Revolutionary Russia, but after a decade or two, these became increasingly difficult to maintain, especially beyond the first generation of émigrés. A fuller appreciation of Il’in’s achievement required not only that the work itself be brought to light, but that the specific intellectual milieu within which it was produced be at least partially restored to view; that is one of the principal aims of my translator’s introduction. In the first instance, that milieu was woven from the varied strands of Russian cultural preoccupations emerging during the first two decades of the twentieth century, a dizzying tapestry of such new themes as Freudian psychoanalytic theory, empirical psychology, theosophy, Stanislavsky’s innovations in the theater, the metaphysics of Sophiology, Husserlian phenomenology, the “God-seeking” movement, Nietzscheanism, cosmism, the modernist movement in art and architecture, and several others. Intermixed with these developments were radical political movements ranging from anarchism to Marxism to terrorism. All of these played out against the

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background of a traditional Russian culture of Orthodoxy and conservatism that proved increasingly helpless to contain them. Il’in was an active participant in a number of these developments, but the one that mattered most for his reading of Hegel was Husserlian phenomenology. Il’in insisted upon a methodological parallel between Hegel’s speculative logic and Husserl’s eidetic intuitionism that governs several elements in his interpretation of Hegel. Without some more detailed understanding of Il’in’s views on the connection between these two projects, significant aspects of his commentary on Hegel may well remain opaque to a contemporary reader. The prevailing state of Hegel scholarship as of 1918 in Europe generally, and in Russia specifically, forms another context, some knowledge of which is necessary for the proper assessment of Il’in’s achievement. Although the text of Il’in’s commentary itself is not framed as a dialogue with competing interpretations of Hegel’s philosophy, one can obtain a fairly detailed sense of Il’in’s understanding of the state of contemporary Hegel scholarship through an attentive reading of the extensive bibliographic appendices contained in each of the two original volumes. These appendices consist of detailed chapter-by-chapter surveys of the available secondary literature in several languages relevant to the topic of each, in which Il’in is quite free with his critical judgments. The impression that emerges from these essays is of a general decline in the comprehension of Hegel’s philosophical project over the preceding two generations to a level frequently approaching caricature, relieved only occasionally by some exceptional acts of insight by individual commentators. Il’in believed that this general decline in comprehension, traceable to several causes, was just beginning to be reversed in his own day. He thought it appropriate as of 1912 to speak of “a renaissance of Hegelianism” that, however improbable, was nevertheless under way in Germany. Il’in’s own work can be viewed in retrospect as an important contribution to that development. Moreover, in reading it now, one is provided with a unique window on the state of European scholarship on Hegel in the first two decades of the past century. Yet another context within which one must inevitably evaluate Il’in’s achievement would be the state of Hegel scholarship in our own time. The “Hegel renaissance” to which Il’in believed he was contributing did not obtain truly substantial momentum until nearly another half-century had gone by. However, the second half of the twentieth century witnessed a genuinely astonishing resurgence of interest in Hegel, marked not only by large numbers of important commentaries in several languages, but by a remarkable collaborative effort of scholarship in his native land devoted to a definitive edition of the collected works (the

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Gesammelte Werke of the Rhenish-Westphalian Academy of Sciences). The combination of exacting textual scholarship, much-intensified discourse among specialists, plus an impressive and steadily growing library of new learned commentaries, has advanced the prevailing level of comprehension to unprecedented heights. Against the background of this achievement, one is naturally impelled to attempt some judgments as to how well or poorly Il’in’s interpretation stands up to contemporary scrutiny. In my opinion, there are several major aspects of Il’in’s work that should continue to inspire admiration and interest, as well as some others that, inevitably, may seem outdated or mistaken. The important insights that Il’in achieved in the interpretation of Hegel significantly outweigh the questionable elements of his reading, in my view. On balance, Il’in’s work still amply rewards careful study. Had it not been so thoroughly eclipsed by historical forces, and had it been fully translated much earlier into German (or French or English), it is likely that it would have exerted a significant influence on the development of Hegel interpretation in the twentieth century (especially in France, as I argue below). Reading it now, nearly a century after its creation, one has a sense of seeing an important missing piece of a puzzle of which we were only dimly aware, a key element of a possible alternative history of twentieth-century Hegel interpretation, had history taken a slightly different turning. In the translator’s introduction I have attempted to sketch only very briefly what appear to me to be some of the most striking successes, and possible failures, of Il’in’s commentary. I have not attempted any very detailed, systematic evaluation of his work as a whole in the light of contemporary scholarship; any competent Hegel scholar will reach his or her own conclusions as to the value of Il’in’s work. Instead, what I have primarily attempted in the introduction is to supply some appreciation of various crucial contextual matters not likely to be widely understood at present, and without which one is unlikely to grasp the full import of Il’in’s commentary. Many of these details must be drawn from the immediate time frame and context of Il’in’s intellectual career. Il’in was conspicuously a product of late nineteenth-century Russian high culture in the period between 1890 and 1917, marked by a significant lessening of state censorship over academic publications, especially in the area of philosophy. During this period, a growing number of Russian intellectuals were engaging as equals in debates prevailing among their counterparts in western Europe. In particular, many Russian philosophers were thoroughly at home in contemporary German philosophical thought and freely engaged in critical debate over its most recent developments, both among themselves and in foreign venues. Il’in’s command of German was such that he could, from a relatively

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early age, immerse himself deeply in German philosophical culture, and form his own well-developed opinions on the major questions of modern philosophy. At the same time Il’in was thoroughly rooted in Russian culture, solemnly Orthodox, and immersed in Russian literary, artistic, and musical traditions. He was an accomplished pianist, a devoted friend of the composer Nikolai Medtner, and a passionate advocate of the latter’s musical genius.* Il’in’s own contributions to Russian culture are unique. He was celebrated by his contemporaries as one of the most powerful writers (and orators) in the entire history of Russian culture. His command of Russian literary and philosophical idiom was so masterful as not infrequently to astonish the attentive reader (not to mention the translator). He also became a celebrated public speaker in emigration, giving lectures on Russian culture, frequently in German, to large audiences in many cities of western and central Europe during the 1920s and 1930s. (Il’in’s powers of oratory are visible in one slight oddity of his commentary on Hegel. In what one supposes was a gesture toward prevailing literary custom in the late nineteenth century, he introduces each of his chapters with a paragraph or two written in a distinctly high-flown oratorical style, following which he immediately settles into a more appropriate prose for the business at hand. However, if one were to leaf through either volume by glancing only at the opening paragraphs of each chapter, it would produce a very odd impression of the text.) So much for the challenges inherent in this project. As for the satisfactions, there are potentially several. First, Il’in’s commentary provides a valuable and distinctive formulation of some crucial dimensions of Hegel’s philosophical thought that should still stimulate the interest of contemporary Hegel scholars. Second, a knowledge of Il’in’s work broadens one’s understanding of the history of twentieth-century Hegel interpretation in significant ways. In particular, third, it reveals the foundation for a distinctive Russian approach to the interpretation of Hegel. That this foundation did not lead directly to the emergence of a distinct Russian school of Hegel interpretation was an accident of history; the foundation was well laid. Despite this regrettable turn of events, a detailed understanding of Il’in’s philosophical contribution remains essential for a full comprehension of the pre-Revolutionary Russian cultural scene. Fourth, in the work of Il’in (as well as that of his contemporary Shpet) one finds Russian philosophy reaching the stage of a fully developed profes* Il’in’s three essays (in English) celebrating the music of Medtner as a reflection of Russian spiritual culture are especially revealing; see Nicolas Medtner: A Memorial Volume, ed. Richard Holt (London: Dennis Dobson, 1955).

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sional maturity. It is particularly manifest in the professionalism of their treatments of Hegel, which serve as much-needed correctives to the long nineteenth-century Russian tradition of amateur “Hegelianism.” Finally, however belatedly, there is a certain satisfaction, even justice, in bringing into view for a much wider audience a deserving work so long suppressed by the malevolence of its Marxist-Leninist antagonists, as well as by various other lamentable accidents of history.

Acknowledgments

In an undertaking as large, daunting, and time-consuming as this translation has proven to be, there have been innumerable occasions when further progress depended upon being able to reach out for a helping hand from someone with superior expertise on the puzzling question of the moment. I have been the fortunate recipient of help from many generous individuals, to some of whom I have returned over and over for advice. While laboring on this project for nearly a decade and a half, I occasionally fantasized that in an ideal world, it would have been undertaken not by a solitary scholar, but by a commission of scholars, each of whom possessed a native’s command of English, Russian, and German, an entire mastery of Hegel’s and Husserl’s philosophical projects, and an intimate knowledge of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century intellectual history, including that of Russia, plus exemplary skill at translation. Such a commission (certainly including George Kline, who among my friends and colleagues comes closest to fitting this description) would presumably have been able to complete this translation with confidence and dispatch. In the real world, however, the process has been rather different. The chain of events culminating in this translation project can be traced back to a suggestion made sometime during the mid-1980s by that same George Kline, now professor emeritus of Bryn Mawr, among whose many scholarly distinctions is an exceptionally thorough knowledge of the history of Russian philosophy. Observing that I had been working on the problem of the abstract and the concrete in Hegel’s Logic, he inquired whether I had ever run across I. A. Il’in’s commentary on Hegel. He thought it should be of interest because its central theme was the concrete universal in Hegel. The information intrigued me, but it soon emerged that there was only a single registered copy of Il’in’s work in the United States, and that copy was not permitted to circulate or be copied, rendering it inaccessible for practical purposes. Some five years went by during which I made occasional fitful efforts to locate a copy of the work. These efforts finally produced a phone number in Moscow supposedly xv

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belonging to a mathematician, one Yurii T. Lisitsa, who was said to be organizing the publication of Il’in’s collected works. When contacted, Professor Lisitsa generously turned over his only personal copy of Il’in’s commentary (a Xerox) to me. I devoted the following summer to a careful reading of both volumes of that original (1918) Russian text, and realized that it was a major scholarly achievement, essentially unknown in the West. (More precisely, it was known only to a rather limited circle of Hegel scholars, and only in the form of a significantly shorter German translation, a single volume, under a different title, produced by Il’in during World War II.) Eventually, with the encouragement and support of George Kline, I resolved to attempt a translation of the work. At that point the very experienced translator of numerous works of Russian religious thought and philosophy, Boris Jakim, stepped in and generously volunteered his help. Our original plan (long since abandoned) was that Boris would lead the assault on the mountain, working as rapidly as possible to produce a first draft of the translation, establishing the route along which I would then follow, pondering and refining the nuances of Il’in’s Hegel interpretation and vocabulary. The thought was that George would then further refine the results of our joint labors before turning over the whole to a publisher. In the event, Boris Jakim forged valiantly ahead just as promised, completing a draft translation of the whole of volume 1 in record time. However, I soon found my assigned task, sorting out the nuances of Il’in’s interpretation of Hegel, with its concomitant vocabulary, much more challenging than anticipated. Several questions of translation seemed unresolvable on the basis of volume 1 alone (indeed, certain crucial questions of translation were resolved only in the concluding chapters of volume 2). Il’in’s views concerning Hegel’s philosophical method, the significance of his frequent references to Hegel’s “thought act,” the intersection of Husserlian phenomenology with his reading of Hegel, the justifiability of his claim that Hegel was ultimately forced to “compromise” his philosophical project, were just a few of the fundamental questions that had to be answered before I could be confident of the translation. In practical terms, the existence of Boris Jakim’s preliminary translation did not notably accelerate my progress, because the questions I confronted required very detailed scrutiny of the Russian text and close comparisons with Il’in’s German text, along with frequent references to Hegel’s texts, both in German and in English translation. Finally, some of these questions could only be resolved through a close study of the intellectual history of the period. In view of all these circumstances, I suggested to Boris that he suspend his effort following the completion of volume 1, while I

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undertook the translation of volume 2 alone (admittedly at a much more laborious pace, with substantial interruptions dictated by other duties). During this multiyear process I gradually found answers to most of the more puzzling questions that had arisen, came to terms with the more unusual features of Il’in’s interpretation of Hegel, and gradually formed my own convictions about the most appropriate English style with which to render Il’in’s Russian. During this period the support of two learned, Russian-speaking Hegel scholars proved vital: George Kline, a past president of the Hegel Society of America, and Marina Bykova, a leading Russian Hegel specialist, now resident in the United States (professor of philosophy at North Carolina State University). A third consultant on Hegel, Errol Harris (professor emeritus at Northwestern University), also a past president of the Hegel Society, though non-Russian-speaking, was a crucial resource for me at various junctures as I attempted to assemble the pieces of my understanding of Il’in’s interpretation of Hegel into a coherent whole. These three scholars were consulted at regular intervals. On the other hand, I consulted my wife Ella Fedorovna, a native Russian speaker and very experienced professional translator/interpreter, continuously (sometimes every few minutes). Though her background is in physics, not philosophy, she was able to come to the rescue innumerable times when I was stuck or in doubt about the translation of some phrase or word. Some of her more rare, but particularly vital interventions took the form of declaring that, as a native Russian speaker, she did not recognize some particular term as part of the standard Russian lexicon at all. On these occasions we knew to start considering other avenues altogether, such as dictionaries of Old Church Slavonic, or terms marked “obsolete” in Dal’, the great nineteenth-century dictionary of the Russian language. Not only did I confer with her continuously throughout the entire translation process, but, as each chapter was completed, she went over the whole, word by word, searching for possible mistranslations, ambiguities, or alternative translations that I might have overlooked. When she had thus worked over a chapter, we would sit down together and go carefully through all of her observations, debating each one until we were both satisfied that the correct translation had been chosen (or at least until one of us proved unable to convince the other of the need for a further change). The reliability of the translation is thus due in large measure to her efforts. Further vital support for the translation came from Yurii Lisitsa in Moscow. He and his wife Olga have worked indefatigably for many years editing the (currently twenty-eight) volumes of Il’in’s Collected Works, and have accumulated an unmatched store of knowledge concerning Il’in’s

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life and works, on which I have drawn numerous times. We first met in 1993, the year in which the first volume of the Collected Works appeared, and have been in communication ever since. All of these individuals formed the essential network of support upon which I relied as I progressed with the translation. Having completed a draft of volume 2, I then turned back to volume 1, refining Boris Jakim’s original translation in the light of what I had learned in the multiyear process of completing the translation of volume 2, and at the same time rendering it stylistically consistent with the practices that I had gradually evolved through that experience. Since he did not participate in this second working-over of the volume 1 translation, carried out many years after the initial effort, Boris Jakim is in no way responsible for any infelicities that may remain; however, he should be recognized as the author of many of the successful solutions to translation puzzles that have been retained. By the time that I was in possession of a completed draft translation of both volumes, many years had passed since the original decision to undertake it, and George Kline was no longer in a position to assume the enormous burden of vetting the translation as a whole. His role has instead been one of responding to a steady stream of inquiries from me over the years concerning best translation practices, suggesting solutions to particular translation puzzles, and advising on various aspects of the project. Indeed, evidence of his helpful interventions of various kinds can be found in notes throughout both volumes. In addition to the individuals named above, I also wish to thank Professor Alex Klimoff of Vassar for sharing his extensive knowledge of Il’in with me on many occasions and supporting the project in a variety of ways. I have also profited from enlightening conversations with Professor Robert Williams of the University of Illinois at Chicago on Hegel’s theological doctrines and Il’in’s interpretations thereof. Thanks are also due to a number of other individuals for helpful discussions, the supply of texts, or other kinds of assistance. These include Jan Broekman, Jay Lampert, Tom Nemeth, Pavel Rowek, Vladimir Strelkov, Andrei Tashchian, and Viktor Troitskii. Colleagues in the German and the classics departments at my home institution, Dickinson College, have kindly advised me on various translation problems. I wish to thank Dickinson College for supporting this work through its sabbatical program, involving one complete sabbatical and parts of two others. And I also wish to thank the NEH for a travel grant to Moscow (#RI-20675, 1993) that assisted me in launching the project. Finally, I am grateful for the willingness of Northwestern University Press to undertake the publication of such a large and complex project as the present one. In particular I wish to thank Henry Carrigan, senior

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editor and assistant director of the Press, John McCumber, the series editor, and Jenny Gavacs, assistant acquisitions editor, for their commitment to the project, and Serena Brommel, senior project editor, and Paul Mendelson, philosophy copy editor, for their exceptionally meticulous editing of the typescript. Philip T. Grier March 2009

Translator’s Introduction

In the early afternoon of May 19, 1918, members of the Faculty of Law of Moscow University were assembling for the purpose of conducting the formal defense of the thirty-five-year-old Ivan Aleksandrovich Il’in’s master’s dissertation, scheduled to begin at 2:00 p.m.1 The dean of the Faculty of Law, Professor I. T. Tarasov, was to chair the proceedings.2 Political tensions were extreme: seven months earlier the Bolsheviks had seized power in the October Revolution, and some early military skirmishes of what was soon to become an extraordinarily savage civil war had already broken out. Individual Russians were being forced to make fateful decisions about their allegiances in the swiftly spreading political and military chaos. Il’in, along with his principal mentors on the faculty, P. I. Novgorodtsev and E. N. Trubetskoi, had chosen to stand against the Bolsheviks. Il’in had been arrested by the Cheka a month earlier, on April 15, and held in the cellar of the Lubianka.3 An outcry by associates at Moscow University and other institutions where he was teaching had persuaded the Cheka to release him for the defense of his dissertation, pending trial.4 The previous day Il’in had learned that the name of Professor Novgorodtsev, who was to serve as his “first official opponent” in the disputation (Prince Trubetskoi was to be the second opponent), had been placed on a list of suspects to be arrested immediately. Il’in had gone to Novgorodtsev’s apartment and begged him to take various measures of self-protection, including not sleeping at home that night. After much persuasion Novgorodtsev had finally agreed to take some precautions; consequently, when the Cheka arrived to search his apartment and arrest him in the middle of the night, he was not found. However, his family was placed under house arrest and all of his manuscripts and notes were seized.5 Thus, when the faculty assembled at 2:00 p.m. the following afternoon, no one knew whether the defense would take place. Professor Trubetskoi was present, but according to university regulations the defense could not be conducted with only a single opponent, and Professor Novgorodtsev had not appeared. It was entirely possible that he had xxi

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been arrested that day attempting to reach the Faculty of Law. However, at 2:30 Novgorodtsev entered the room, properly attired in a frock coat, alert and composed, and at about 3:00 commenced delivering his objections. Il’in finished his replies to both sets of objections by 6:00 p.m., and by 7:00 the defense was successfully concluded.6 Such were the dramatic but unpropitious circumstances in which Il’in’s remarkable commentary on Hegel made its appearance. The defense was formally conducted for the master’s degree. However, his dissertation was in the form of two very substantial volumes (301 and 356 published pages, respectively), and Il’in was immediately awarded the doctoral degree for the second volume, in recognition of the extraordinary philosophical depth as well as the extent of his work.7 Il’in’s dissertation was published in 1918 in Moscow as Философия Гегеля как учение о конкретности Бога и человека (The Philosophy of Hegel as a Doctrine of the Concreteness of God and Humanity). It consisted of two volumes, Учение о Боге (The Doctrine of God) and Учение о человеке (The Doctrine of Humanity).

The Hegel Commentary and Its Fate Among Russian philosophers the two volumes of Il’in’s Hegel commentary have acquired a semi-legendary status: they remained unquestionably the high-water mark of Russian writing on Hegel for many decades. At the time of its publication in 1918, Il’in’s commentary also represented one of the more important commentaries on Hegel to have been published in any language up to that date. Until quite recently, however, the number of Russian-speaking or other philosophers who have had the opportunity to read it has been artificially limited by a variety of constraints. First, the timing of its publication on the eve of the Russian Civil War meant that very few people would have been in a position to take note of its appearance.8 By the time the immediate military and political crises were more or less resolved (1922), the Bolsheviks were fully in control, and they soon resolved to limit the influence of “bourgeois idealist” philosophers such as Hegel. In that same year Il’in was exiled abroad under threat of execution as an irreconcilable anti-Bolshevik, and all of his works were subsequently viewed with extreme hostility by the Soviet authorities.9 The number of copies originally published was evidently quite small as well, so that after the collapse of the Soviet state in 1991, the two tomes remained a bibliographic rarity even in Russia.10 Non-Russian-speaking readers know of the work only in the form

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of an abridged German translation, produced by Il’in himself during the years of World War II, and published in 1946 in Switzerland under a different title.11 For reasons that will be examined below, that Germanlanguage edition omitted eight of ten chapters from volume 2 of the original Russian text. It consists of the twelve chapters of the original volume 1, plus the two concluding chapters only of the original volume 2 (renumbered as chapters 13 and 14 in the German translation), presented as a single volume. The present English translation is being published in two separate volumes, as was the original Russian edition; hence the numbering of the chapters reverts to the original sequence. Despite its age, the full text of Il’in’s original two-volume commentary deserves to be more widely known and to take its rightful place in the history of major studies of Hegel’s philosophical system. Hegel scholarship has of course made many significant advances in the more than eight decades that have elapsed since the publication of Il’in’s original work, and especially so over the last three or four decades. However, Il’in’s contribution was part of that early twentieth-century resurgence of interest in Hegel’s philosophy in several countries that overcame the neoKantians’ and the positivists’ neglect of Hegel, and laid the groundwork for the remarkable revival of Hegel studies that was to take place later in the century. Moreover, despite the presence of one or two central claims that might now be questioned by many Hegel scholars,12 Il’in’s interpretation of Hegel contained a number of elements that appear remarkably insightful from the standpoint of the most recent Hegel scholarship. In his own words, Il’in’s ambition was to produce “a synthesizing constructive explication” of Hegel’s philosophy, rather than a mere analytical commentary.13 Instead of the standard procedure of a paragraphby-paragraph commentary on one or more of Hegel’s major texts, Il’in sought to identify, and present in sequence, the fundamental categories and stages of the entire argument, deriving the system’s ultimate conclusions from Il’in’s own restatement of its essential logical structure.14 In his presentation of Hegel’s argument, Il’in drew widely upon the entire first edition of Hegel’s collected works, as well as upon texts that had been made available subsequently.15 He included an extraordinarily great number of references to Hegel’s writings, amounting in places almost to a concordance, in the form of highly abbreviated references to the collected works at the bottom of the page. In Il’in’s view, one of the principal achievements of his commentary was the consistent presentation of Hegel’s entire system from the standpoint of the speculative concrete (the concrete universal) as its ultimate criterion of the real. He recognized that a few previous Hegelians had correctly identified this criterion, but claimed that none had attempted

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an exposition of the entire system from that standpoint, which he had in fact accomplished.16 Il’in was also one of the earliest commentators to carry out a sustained and convincing critique of the interpretation of Hegel’s system then reigning in many quarters as a “panlogism” that ultimately absorbed all putatively independent “other-being” into the all-encompassing dialectical logic of the Concept. To be sure, Il’in still attributed to Hegel (if somewhat ambiguously) the original ambition of constructing just such a panlogism. However, Il’in also extensively documented the presence of an “irrational” element of other-being, explicitly acknowledged in Hegel’s texts, that permanently defied assimilation into the system of the Concept, and thereby rendered the project of a panlogism impossible. Il’in’s treatment of this problem can be usefully compared with some of the best recent commentary on this issue.17 Indeed, Il’in was clearly aware of the doctrine of double transition in Hegel’s conception of the dialectic, which is a key element in the argument for the necessary irreducibility of the other in Hegel’s system.18 Nevertheless, Il’in was in most moods inclined to attribute to Hegel an original (“extreme”) intention of creating precisely such a “panlogistic” system (despite Il’in’s own acknowledgment at one point that Hegel himself knew that it was ultimately impossible). Il’in therefore regarded the presence of this “irrational” other as the source of what he judged to be the ultimate “failure” of Hegel’s system, or more precisely, an inevitable “compromise” of its original intentions. Understanding precisely what Il’in meant by Hegel’s “compromise” requires a very attentive reading of the text. Il’in’s talk of “compromise” turns out to be the conclusion to an extended meditation on the notorious problem of the relation of the Logic to nature, or of the Concept to the sensuous element. In what is probably Il’in’s most succinct statement of his view (chapter 11), he declares that “Hegel depotentiates the Idea and potentiates the concrete empirical” in order to relate the Logic to nature (and conversely). However, this issue is explicitly or implicitly under consideration in chapters 9, 10, 11, and 12 of this volume, as well as in much of the separate volume 2. In Il’in’s view the “compromise” emerges repeatedly—in the relation of the Logic to nature (or of the Idea to the concrete empirical), in the relation of the idea of the Ethical State to human history, and in the relation of God to the world. Whatever opinion one ultimately adopts toward the various aspects of Il’in’s talk of Hegel’s “compromise,” his extensive documentation of the presence of an ineliminable “other” in the system, and hence of the impossibility of reading it simply as a panlogism, represented a major step forward in Hegel scholarship of his day. Indeed, in this respect Il’in’s

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interpretation of Hegel can be viewed as superior to many that followed much later. Il’in saw the construction of a theodicy as one of the ruling motivations for Hegel’s system. This aspect of Hegel’s thought, and the theological context in which it was situated, attracted a great deal of Il’in’s critical attention. His principal criticism was that Hegel had been forced to “compromise” his original project of theodicy, precisely, again, because of the realization that an irreducibly contingent “irrational” element of other-being could never be incorporated into the system of the Absolute. This entailed the introduction of an element of tragedy and suffering into Hegel’s depiction of the Absolute (God) that, in Il’in’s eyes, represented the failure of that doctrine. From a contemporary perspective, Il’in’s particularly clear discussion of the element of tragedy and suffering in connection with the Divine constitutes a distinct virtue of his commentary. However, Il’in was not personally persuaded by Hegel’s assertion of a tragic element in the Divine life, rejected it in favor of the traditional assumption of Divine impassibility, and concluded that the presence of tragedy in Hegel’s theology was more evidence that Hegel had been forced to “compromise” his original philosophical project in the face of this irrational and ineliminable element of other-being. Whatever one makes of Il’in’s talk of Hegel’s inevitable “compromise,” many of the issues he gathered under that head remain at the center of philosophical discussion.19 What may still seem remarkable to contemporary eyes is Il’in’s very extensive and detailed documentation of the presence of the element of “irrational other-being” in Hegel’s system, in particular his documentation of a tragic impotence in the Divine to effect an ultimately complete reconciliation with this other-being. Il’in’s systematic exposure of the recalcitrance of other-being may still be regarded as an extremely important accomplishment, which, had it been more widely appreciated, might have substantially influenced the course of Hegel scholarship in the twentieth century.20 In the course of re-creating and criticizing what Il’in took to be the essential stages of Hegel’s attempted construction of a theodicy, he produced an impressive account of what one might term Hegel’s “ontotheology,” the depiction of the stages of becoming in the life of the Divine, prior to the creation of the world. This aspect of Il’in’s work has been commented upon in some detail by Cyril O’Regan in his pathbreaking work The Heterodox Hegel, which is discussed in greater detail below.21 In this light, Il’in’s preoccupation with the question of Hegel’s theodicy can be regarded as of enduring interest. A full assessment of the significance of Il’in’s original commentary on Hegel, which is made available in English translation for the first time

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here, would require systematic investigation of several topics, including its relation to previous Russian writing on Hegel; its relation to early twentieth-century interpretations of Hegel elsewhere; its distinguishing features as an interpretation of Hegel when seen against the spectrum of more recent interpretations; and its role in the development of Russian philosophy more broadly construed. None of these investigations has been fully carried out as yet: the study of Il’in’s development as a philosopher and an interpreter of Hegel is only in its preliminary stages, and the tale of his influence on other philosophers has been only partially documented for a variety of reasons; nor is that influence necessarily yet at an end. There is a further circumstance hindering a fuller assessment of Il’in’s work in contemporary philosophical perspective. A defining feature of Il’in’s interpretation of Hegel is his insistence that Hegel’s philosophical method is to be understood as grounded fundamentally in a form of philosophical intuition, as opposed to the dialectic. He further held that such intuition could best be comprehended in connection with Husserlian phenomenology (understood in terms of eidetic intuition), a development with which Il’in had early familiarity, given his study with Husserl in Göttingen. Il’in was not alone in this attitude: it was shared in one form or another by his near contemporaries G. G. Shpet and A. F. Losev.22 (It can also be found in French commentaries on Hegel from the 1930s up to the mid-twentieth century.)23 This double claim, that intuition must be conceived as fundamental for philosophical method, and that Hegel’s speculative logic can be assimilated to Husserl’s eidetic intuitionism, raises a number of complex issues that have yet to be fully explored in contemporary philosophy. A preliminary examination of them will be undertaken below.24 The absence of sustained attention to Il’in’s commentary on Hegel up to now, as well as to his other philosophical works published in Russia between 1910 and 1922, means that a significant thread in the fabric of Russia’s rich intellectual life of that period has yet to be adequately explored. Il’in was a forceful presence in the philosophical life of Moscow during this period, with active interests in a variety of areas, including Husserlian phenomenology,25 Freudian psychoanalysis,26 the “God-seeker” movement,27 and the innovations of Stanislavsky in the theater.28 In addition to his work on Hegel during this period, he published a substantial article on the philosophy of law,29 another on Stirner,30 two on Fichte,31 plus another on the concept of courtesy,32 and yet another on philosophical method.33 During the same period he also published several articles conveying the results of his research on Hegel, a number of book reviews, and a significant number of political pamphlets.

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Il’in was admitted to membership in the Moscow Psychological Society 34 in 1910 and published his first article in their journal Вопросы философии и психологии (Problems of Philosophy and Psychology) in the same year. He would go on to publish a total of ten major articles in that journal during this period (1910–22), plus five more in two other journals.35 The Moscow Psychological Society was the most prominent association in Russia for philosophers and psychologists, and was also the main meeting ground for a wide range of other scholars from the social and natural sciences. Its journal was the leading Russian philosophy journal of the day, and was also a widely read and influential venue for discussions of contemporary social and political topics. Upon the death of L. M. Lopatin, the longtime chairman of the society, in 1920, Il’in was elected to succeed him, a measure of the influence he had earned among philosophers and other intellectuals of Moscow. His situation abruptly changed two years later, when, following his sixth arrest by the GPU, he was permanently exiled abroad, under threat of execution. Il’in’s subsequent fate was no less touched by drama. Having been exiled from Soviet Russia in 1922, he and his wife Natalia settled in Berlin, where he soon joined the faculty of the Russian Academic Institute, in effect a university for the sons and daughters of the Russian émigré community. Shortly after arriving in Berlin, Il’in also began to develop a close association with the White general Wrangel’, who greatly valued his abilities as a political and legal theorist. Il’in wrote extensively on behalf of the political aims and outlook of the White emigration for a number of years, eventually coming to be regarded as the chief “theorist of the White Idea.”36 He continued teaching in the Russian Academic Institute until 1934, when he was fired from his position by the Nazis, newly arrived in power, for refusing to cooperate with their propaganda aims in his teaching and writing.37 Between the years 1934 and 1938 Il’in and his wife were in difficult circumstances, ultimately trapped in Nazi Germany, denied the right of employment in any form as of early 1938, and listed by the Gestapo as persons who were not to receive exit visas. Il’in was repeatedly summoned for interrogation by the Gestapo during these years, at one point being threatened with arrest and imprisonment in a concentration camp.38 Through the extraordinary intervention of a sympathetic local police official, they were nevertheless able to escape from Germany to Switzerland in 1938, settling in the village of Zollikon, just outside Zurich.39 There Il’in continued his extremely prolific career of writing on a wide variety of topics—political, religious, aesthetic, and philosophical—until his death in 1954.40 He was buried in Zollikon, and his wife, who died nine years later, was buried beside him. At the end of September 2005, the remains of Il’in and his wife

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were exhumed at the request of the Russian government and brought to Moscow. There, on October 3, 2005, they were reburied with honor, along with the remains of the White general Denikin and his wife, on the grounds of Donskoi Monastery, in a service conducted by Patriarch Alexei II. The White general and the “theorist of the White Idea” were repatriated as an act of the Russian state to symbolize a reconciliation of the Whites and the Reds, eighty-seven years after the commencement of the Civil War.41

Il’in’s Educational Background and Early Career Il’in had entered the Faculty of Law of Moscow University in 1901, directly following graduation from gymnasium, to study for the five-year diploma. As an undergraduate he had soon come under the spell of the legal philosopher P. I. Novgorodtsev, head of the Moscow school of Russian jurisprudence.42 Under Novgorodtsev’s leadership that school was noted for its opposition to the reigning positivism of much contemporary western European legal philosophy. Novgorodtsev’s thought was neo-idealistic, strongly influenced by Hegel as well as Kant, and aimed at demonstrating the independent value of law as a regulative ideal for society, as well as the importance of the rule of law. Novgorodtsev and his associates promoted a revival of natural law concepts as a means to distinguish their outlook from that of the positivists. The necessity for developing “legal consciousness” (правосознание) in society as a prerequisite for the achievement of the rule of law was another prominent theme of Novgorodtsev’s work.43 He was a leading influence in liberal political circles from the beginning of the century, and was elected to the First State Duma in 1906. Although he took an active part in the political affairs of the Kadet Party for many years, also serving on its Central Committee, his true passion was scholarship, in which he set an outstanding example of seriousness and zeal. This passion was communicated in a very lively and infectious way to students such as Il’in. The other most influential teacher and mentor for Il’in was Prince Evgenii N. Trubetskoi.44 He joined the Moscow University Faculty of Law just six months before Il’in finished his studies for the diploma, but was destined to make a strong impression upon Il’in during the period of his graduate studies. Like Novgorodtsev, Trubetskoi was responding to the contemporary neo-Kantianism that was well represented by a variety of philosophers in Russia. Also like Novgorodtsev, Trubetskoi was

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strongly and consistently opposed to legal positivism, advocated a revival of natural law doctrine, and was very active in public political life (though only very briefly associated with the Kadet Party, at its founding). He adhered to a position of moderate liberalism embracing significant elements of social democracy, also known as the “New Russian Liberalism” in contradistinction to the conservative liberalism of Chicherin in the previous generation.45 Trubetskoi and other New Liberals emphasized the necessity for the rule of law and legislation for social welfare measures. He was a learned historian of the philosophy of law, as well as the principal authority of the day on the philosophy of Vladimir Solov’ev. He was a member of the Russian State Council (1916–17) and deputy chairman of the national Church Council (1917–18). Trubetskoi was a staunch Russian patriot, and devoutly Russian Orthodox. After the Bolsheviks seized power in 1917, he was active in the anti-Bolshevik underground in Moscow.46 Novgorodtsev was the primary pedagogical influence on Il’in during his diploma studies. However, after Il’in finished his diploma examinations in 1906 with a First, it was Trubetskoi who formally proposed to the Faculty of Law that Il’in be retained for graduate studies to prepare for the professoriat.47 Both professors served as active mentors throughout his formal graduate work.48 His graduate studies extended over three years, concluding with examinations for the master’s degree in the law of the state in spring 1909. In November of that year he delivered two trial lectures and was granted the status of privatdocent in the kafedra of the Encyclopedia of Law and the History of Legal Philosophy at Moscow University. The following year he gave his first course in the Faculty of Law at Moscow University.

Genesis of the Commentary on Hegel Although Il’in had completed the examinations for the master’s degree in the spring of 1909, his dissertation had yet to be written. In the fall of 1909 he began making preparations for an extended period of academic work abroad during which he would study with some of the most prominent philosophers in Germany, familiarize himself with methods of teaching in Western universities, and carry out the necessary research for his dissertation. The original topic of his research was to be “The Crisis of Rationalist Philosophy of Law in 19th-Century Germany.”49 After a year’s delay Il’in and his wife departed for Germany at the end of 1910. During the following year Il’in studied with Jellinek in Heidelberg, with Husserl

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and Nelson in Göttingen, and with Rickert in Freiburg. He also studied with Simmel in Berlin, while simultaneously working on his dissertation. He was also invited to give talks at certain universities. Subsequently Il’in narrowed the focus of his dissertation to Hegel alone. In a letter from Germany to his cousin and close confidant Liubov’ Iakovlevna Gurevich, Il’in explained that he had developed very substantial ambitions for his dissertation; far from merely performing an “academic exercise,” he was attempting an original “intellectual achievement” which would be written in German and published in Germany, where it might make more of a difference.50 Moreover, he announced that he had grown weary of the comfortable routine of mere scholarly analysis, and instead planned to produce “a synthesizing constructive explication” of Hegel’s doctrine.51 This ambition seems to have taken control of him; what was originally planned as a master’s thesis, at one point restricted to the topic of Hegel’s doctrine of concrete ethical life, began to grow about this time into what would become a far broader investigation of Hegel’s philosophical thought as a whole, organized around the theme of the concrete and the abstract.52 Il’in’s stay in Germany was extended a further six months, through the spring of 1912, after which he and his wife returned to Moscow. He resumed his teaching duties in the Faculty of Law at Moscow University in the fall term, and would continue teaching there, save for periods of arrest, until he was exiled from Soviet Russia in the fall of 1922.53 Despite his active participation in a wide variety of intellectual pursuits, ranging from Stanislavsky to Freud, during the period 1912–14 he also appears to have worked fairly steadily on the first volume of the dissertation. He presented his major conclusions on Hegel’s doctrine of speculative thought (the content of volume 1) at a meeting of the Moscow Psychological Society in February 1914.54 In the spring and summer of 1914, Il’in and his wife once again traveled abroad, this time to Vienna. On this trip Il’in continued to pursue his research into Hegel, but the trip was also motivated by his interest in psychoanalysis. He sought out Sigmund Freud in person and requested a course of psychoanalysis. Owing to the shortness of the Il’ins’ stay in Vienna, they agreed upon a regime of daily psychotherapy which lasted six weeks before being brought to a halt by the outbreak of World War I. At that point Il’in and his wife became enemy aliens and were required to leave Austria. Upon returning to Moscow, he began a steady stream of publications on Hegel. In 1914 he published the first of a series of six articles presenting much of what would later appear as volume 1 of his dissertation.55 This, despite the fact that his work on the two volumes was set back significantly when, upon leaving Austria in the summer of 1914, the Aus-

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trian customs authorities seized a trunk containing very extensive notes he had made on recent and contemporary Hegel literature from several European countries, along with a completed portion of his manuscript, which was never returned.56 As a consequence, in the published dissertation he was forced to limit his bibliography of secondary sources to those available in Moscow libraries.

Il’in on Method: The “Philosophical Act” One of the most striking features of Il’in’s interpretation of Hegel is his claim that Hegel’s method of philosophical inquiry should be viewed as fundamentally intuitionist rather than dialectical. In Il’in’s account, the role actually played by the dialectic remains no less crucial to the structure of the system as a whole than is commonly assumed. However, Il’in believed that most accounts of the dialectic tended to locate it in the wrong place, treating it as a characteristic style of thinking attributable to the philosopher, rather than as a characteristic of the concept itself in its self-development, a process merely observed (intuited) by the philosopher, who remains in a “passive” role, merely letting the concept develop itself before him. Such a conception of intuition is obviously not to be confused with the intuitionism to which Hegel constantly objected, that is, a process whereby immediate “knowledge” was claimed to be available, either in terms of a direct experience of the sensuous particular, or of the immediate intuition of feeling. Rather, Il’in’s is a meta-level use of the term, pertaining to philosophical method: the object of intuition in his sense is not the sense-particular or the particular feeling, but the concrete universal in its process of self-development. Knowledge of the concrete universal as such necessarily constitutes a mediated as well as an immediate knowing, and is properly philosophical. Il’in incorporated his theory of the central role of intuition in philosophical knowing as a component in a three-step process of philosophical thinking he termed the “philosophical act.” He credited the explicit development of this conception of the philosophical act to Husserlian phenomenology; however, he also viewed it as the method of all genuine philosophical thinking, and assimilated Hegel’s procedure of speculative logic to this same pattern. Il’in’s account of the philosophical “act” was thus the crux of his linkage between Hegelian and Husserlian philosophical methods. Il’in’s interest in phenomenology was strengthened by his personal

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contacts with Husserl himself in Göttingen, as well as the courses Il’in took with him during the summer term of 1911. Il’in derived from Husserl a notion of philosophical method grounded in a specific conception of intuition centered in an elaborately structured “philosophical experience” brought about through the “philosophical act.”57 In Il’in’s view this method, first fully explicated in Husserl’s work, constituted the actual method of all genuine philosophy, and was therefore inevitably the actual method employed in Hegel’s own philosophical activity, notwithstanding the fact that Hegel did not himself explicitly describe his own method in these terms.58 Il’in does not hesitate to attribute this method to Hegel, however, and a major dimension of his commentary remains obscure if one does not take Il’in’s specific, Husserl-inspired doctrine of philosophical method into account. Similarly, there are terms employed by Il’in in the discussion of Hegel that are much more explicitly connected with Husserlian phenomenology (at a certain period of Husserl’s development) than with Hegel’s own language, and this must also be clearly recognized. The earliest, informal account of Il’in’s emerging doctrine of philosophical method is provided in a letter to his cousin Liubov’ written at the conclusion of his work with Husserl during the summer of 1911.59 He explains that recently a so-called “phenomenological” method is being worked out, the essence of which (at its root it is as old as philosophy itself) consists, in a couple of words, in the following rule: “an intuitive immersion in the experience of the object being analyzed must precede the analysis of this or that object.” This means: first of all fix on what is to be investigated . . . and having closed one’s eyes to 1. prejudices, 2. any already available theories of it, 3. one’s own biases, 4. oneself, as the experiencing or refracting medium—to lose oneself completely in the experience of this [object].60

Continuing in the same letter to Liubov’, Il’in further characterizes the philosophical act in the following terms: I outlined this schema briefly and in a compressed way. But the essence of these operations that Husserl characterizes, “sich etwas zur Gegebenheit bringen” and “schauen,” are grasped best of all in immediate, independent experiences. In them repeated returns to one and the same experience, verifications and resumptions of the process are possible and necessary; in these experiments isolating this or the other aspect is im-

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portant, [as is] a gradual ascent from elementary [examples] of artistry in terms of structure, to the investigation of more complex, profound, and debatable examples; a certain energy and persistence in the selection of material is needed; interactions and mutual verification with like-minded others may be terribly useful. The latter can provide a great deal: spiritedness in moving forward, corrections, clarifications. And this is possible because each one can schauen [see] one and the same essence [сущность] given in experience.61

The “philosophical act” described here by Il’in is a deliberately cultivated experience of a richly complex content that can be rendered objective by leaving aside one’s theories and biases concerning the content of the experience, as well as the role of one’s own consciousness as the medium in which the experience occurs. Such experiences are constructable (involving the creation of more complex experiences out of more elementary ones),62 repeatable (in subsequent philosophical acts by the same thinker), duplicable (in the experience of like-minded thinkers), susceptible of “experimental” variation, and corrigible (by the original thinker alone, or with the assistance of others). Through all of these exercises it is possible for more than one thinker to arrive at an experience of essentially one and the same content.63 When the “philosophical act” is properly carried out, the resulting content is something given, open to intuitive contemplation (intuition, inspection). Philosophical analysis takes place only following the enactment of the experience through the philosophical act, and its intuitive contemplation as something given. Il’in’s first published reference to this emerging doctrine of philosophical method occurred in 1912, in his review of Schleiermacher’s On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers, newly translated into Russian by S. L. Frank (1911). He claims there that the object under investigation must be genuinely present in the soul of the investigator, and not merely in “consciousness.” . . . One must have the ability to arrest the experience being investigated in the moments of its birth and development, to internally break away from it, to perceive it as if it were an alien given, to penetrate it by thought, and, having exposed it, to find a precise and flexible form of words in which to fix the result.64

He was particularly concerned to insist that only one who has the capacity for the experience in question (artistic, moral, religious, etc.) is qualified to make reliable judgments on the matter, and that the capacity for

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such experience must be supplemented by a distinct capacity for rational reflection as well, if the objective nature of the experience is to be communicated to others.65 A few years later Il’in published a more substantial article in the journal Русская мысль (Russian Thought) summarizing his conception of philosophical method at greater length, and in so doing he also took a significant step beyond the strictures of Husserl’s increasingly precisely formulated phenomenological method, incorporating a further element in his own account of philosophical method that was unquestionably inspired by his reading of Hegel.66 In that article he provided a still more detailed account of the three stages of the philosophical act. These are: first, the framing of the object in experience; second, the intuiting of its content; and third, the analysis of that content. In the first stage, the philosopher contemplating the object concentrates on his own directly encountered content of experience and becomes self-enclosed, separated from other persons, left entirely to his own devices. In such a state the philosopher must evoke in himself the real experience of that object that he wishes to investigate. Only in this manner can the philosopher put himself in the position of a scientist studying the objective nature of the object.67 In the second stage, the philosopher enters into the content of the object being studied, engaging in a systematic intuitive perception of it. In this process attention is concentrated not on the subjective experience, the state or disposition of the experiencing psyche, but on the essence of the experienced object.68 In the third stage the philosopher undertakes the “analytical description and rational-logical explication of the experienced and inspected content.”69 In doing so he must scrupulously attend to the purity and faithfulness of the description he supplies; it must contain no subjective distortions of the content. When all of this is assured, the philosopher can provide “an unbiased, precise description and logically clear formulation of that objective content.”70 Thus philosophy always has but a single task: “to explicate with the power of rational self-evidence the genuine content of the object systematically experienced and discerned by the philosophizing soul.”71 In Il’in’s view, the object thus systematically cognized is ultimately the Divine; hence, the philosopher who succeeds in this quest for knowledge ultimately stands before God as a consequence of that success. “And if a sincerely religious person accepts only that, and believes only in that which is revealed to him with self-evidence in personal but authentic spiritual experience, then philosophy in its content is religion.”72 The claim that God could be the object of philosophical intuition

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is in one sense a fairly uncontroversial one in the context of Hegel’s Logic;73 on the other hand, from Husserl’s point of view, to speak of God as the object of an act of philosophical intuition would pose a series of essentially insurmountable difficulties.74 In this particular outcome of his analysis of the philosophical act, therefore, one must conclude that Il’in has tacitly shifted his attention entirely to Hegel, for whom such a conclusion would be congenial. If further confirmation of the plausibility of this claim should be needed, Quentin Lauer has pointed out that Hegel speaks of a “speculative reason” which is intrinsically connected with his conception of dialectical thinking. Lauer argues that there is a special kind of (philosophical) “seeing” (intuiting) in thought (speculare) the God or objectivity who is there present, which is not to be confused with framing thought about the God who is only represented by such thoughts (i.e., discursive thinking).75 Lauer too thus points to a sense in which speculative reason for Hegel is not purely discursive or dialectical, but also intuitive. Similar support for Il’in’s treatment of this issue can also be found in the work of William Earle in his phenomenological analysis of the presuppositions of objectivity.76 Earle argued that no account of objectivity is possible without reference to reality or Being itself. If I have an idea, he asserts, “it is an idea of something, and that something is not itself the idea nor anything subjective. It is a part of reality, something independent of my mind, and having its own distinctive mode of being.”77 But this presupposes that we have an adequate idea of reality.78 To suppose that every idea is an adequate idea of its object would be absurd. But equally, the attempt to claim that all our ideas of reality are inadequate would be incoherent. Hence it must be the case, that we do have an adequate idea of reality, which apprehends reality with absolute clarity, apprehends reality, and not an image of it. . . . Without such a supposition, we could never suppose that any idea of ours was either true or false, or had any truth or falsity in it. The entire problem would collapse into meaninglessness.79

The idea of reality which we have must be a formal one only. It is “nothing but the formal idea of Being, which is explicated by the laws of thought. It is the idea therefore of Being, which is discursively rendered as self-identical, non-contradictory, and absolutely determinate.”80 Such an apprehension of reality serves as the only possible criterion of any claim to objectivity. This idea of Being, according to Earle, “is the cognitive appearance of what is called in religious language, ‘God’; and the idea of Being is one image of God in man.”81

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This culmination of Il’in’s account of the philosophical act shows that, however much he may have been indebted to Husserl for his sketch of philosophical method (the “philosophical act”), as well as some of the terminology he used to describe it, he plausibly concluded that Hegel was practicing the fundamental elements of the “Husserlian” eidetic phenomenological method under the notion of “speculative thinking” long before Husserl.82 Il’in’s conception of the philosophical act should thus be understood as a reflection of an early stage of Husserlian phenomenology. When he referred to the method of Husserlian phenomenology he evidently had in mind the method of eidetic intuition, including eidetic reduction and variation,83 and not the more fully developed transcendental phenomenology, much less the “genetic” phenomenology of Husserl’s later years. As if to underscore the seriousness with which he maintains this assimilation of speculative logic to phenomenological intuition, Il’in claims that Hegel’s method must be understood to be fundamentally intuitive and not dialectical, as the more usual view would have it: Thus, according to the method of his philosophizing, Hegel must be recognized not as a “dialectician,” but as an intuitivist, or, more precisely, as an intuitively thinking clairvoyant. If by “method” is meant the “type and mode” of cognizing subjectively practiced by the philosopher, then one may regard Hegel as a “dialectician” only in a completely superficial, abstractly rationalistic approach. He neither “searches” for contradictions in concepts nor “strives” to reconcile them afterward; he doesn’t think “analytically” and then “synthetically.” He continuously intuits in a concentrated way and intensively describes the changes taking place in the object itself: he intuits by means of thought. In this consists his “subjective” method of cognizing. It is not he who practices “dialectic” but the object.84

To judge the appropriateness of Il’in’s view, one may compare Il’in’s quotation with any number of similar ones from Hegel (here quoted from Stephen Houlgate’s commentary): Hegel writes that pure knowing must “stand back from its content, allowing it to have free play (gewähren zu lassen) and not determining it further” (SL 73/1: 72 [179]). In the preface to the Phenomenology we are told that “what is looked for here [in philosophy] is the effort . . . to sink [one’s] freedom in the content, letting it move spontaneously of its own nature (ihn durch seine eigene Natur . . . sich bewegen zu lassen), . . . and

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then to contemplate this movement” (PhS 35–6/56). In the Encyclopedia Logic, Hegel further states boldly that “when I think, I give up (gebe auf ) my subjective particularity, sink myself in the matter, let thought follow its own course (lasse das Denken für sich gewähren); and I think badly whenever I add something of my own” (EL 58/84 [§24 Add. 2]).85

Further support for this claim can also be found in a frequently cited article by Kenley Dove on “Hegel’s Phenomenological Method.”86 Dove states that “Ivan Iljin was, so far as I am aware, the first to develop the insight that ‘Hegel in his philosophical method was no dialectician.’ (Die Philosophie Hegels als kontemplative Gotteslehre [Bern, 1946], 126).”87 Inquiring into the nature of Hegel’s method, on the assumption that it is not dialectical, Dove declares, “Insofar as it can be characterized in a word, it is descriptive.”88 In the remainder of the passage, it is clear that Dove is focusing on the same fundamental account of Hegel’s method that Il’in has supplied: “The study of science, in Hegel’s sense, requires that the student, through a tremendous effort of restraint, give himself completely over to the structural development of that science itself.”89 By this point it should be evident that Il’in has emphatically not joined the legions of Hegel interpreters who mistakenly believe that Hegel possesses some (dialectical) method of intellectual procedure specifiable independently of the content of his philosophical system, independently of the actual course of the self-development of the concept. In that sense, as William Maker argues, Hegel “does not have a dialectical method.”90 Hegel’s claim is rather that he observes (intuits) the self-development of the concept. What he observes is a dialectical development, but the “authority” of that dialectic, such as it is, remains entirely grounded in, always dependent upon, the “spontaneous” selfdevelopment of the concept. Hence no conception of an independent “dialectical method” could ever stand as a criterion by which the “success” or “failure” of that process of self-development of the concept could be judged. Il’in himself was quite clear on precisely this point. The import of the idea of “method” for Il’in in the case of both Hegel and Husserl is of a deliberate “letting be,” a taking care not to import intellectual presuppositions, prejudices, previously existing theories, biases, and so on into the analysis of the experienced object. It is this aspect of “method,” I believe, that led Il’in to describe Hegel and Husserl as intuitionists. A final point concerning Il’in’s discussion of the “philosophical act”: it simultaneously presents itself as the core of a hermeneutic theory. As Il’in repeatedly affirmed in many places, in order to truly comprehend another thinker, one must be able to reproduce for oneself the philo-

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sophical act of that thinker. Given the account that Il’in has supplied of the philosophical act, in principle it should always be possible for a later thinker to reproduce for herself the original philosophical act of another thinker, supposing only that the second thinker possesses the requisite talent and the relevant experience of the philosophical content in question. Il’in was confident that he had reproduced for himself Hegel’s original philosophical act, and derived the confidence necessary to write his commentary on Hegel’s philosophy from that conviction. He was equally convinced that the majority of two previous generations of would-be commentators on Hegel had in fact failed to duplicate Hegel’s philosophical act, and that consequently by the turn of the century comprehension of Hegel’s philosophy had reached a nadir.

Russian Philosophy: Between Hegel and Husserl The impulse to draw actively upon both Hegel and Husserl was not Il’in’s alone, but was common to other Russian philosophers in this particular period. Gustav Shpet (1879–1937) and A. F. Losev (1893–1988) both drew freely upon Hegel and Husserl simultaneously, treating Hegel’s speculative logic and Husserl’s phenomenology as complementary or commensurate in various ways.91 In order to understand more fully the intellectual context within which Il’in so insistently connected the philosophical methods of Hegel and Husserl, it is necessary to supplement the investigation of Il’in’s own philosophical path with a brief consideration of the work of these two near contemporaries.92 All three of them were working at a very particular juncture in the history of Russian philosophy, marked by a decided interest in the newly emerging phenomenological method of Edumund Husserl. Outside the borders of Germany, Russian philosophers were among the very earliest to take an active interest in the work of Husserl and his predecessor Franz Brentano. For example, N. O. Losskii made several detailed references to Husserl’s Logical Investigations (1900–01) as early as 1906.93 Additional early responses to Husserl were supplied by G. E. Lantz and B. V. Iakovenko.94 A Russian translation of Logical Investigations (vol. 1 only) appeared in 1909, and Husserl’s Philosophy as a Rigorous Science appeared in Russian translation in 1911. Shpet was widely regarded as the most important Russian representative of Husserlian phenomenology, following the publication of his

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work Явление и смысль (Appearance and Sense) in 1914.95 He was also viewed (and viewed himself) as the senior and the “strictest” disciple of Husserl in the Russian context.96 Shpet and Il’in were well acquainted professionally, though they appear to have maintained a certain distance from one another in personal terms. In 1909 Shpet was one of the three established members of the Moscow Psychological Society who sponsored Il’in for membership in the society. In the summer of 1911, during which Il’in was formally engaged in study with Husserl, Shpet appears to have visited Göttingen at least briefly, making contact with Il’in and Husserl. (Shpet himself was to return a year later for formal study with Husserl.) Shpet and Il’in were both very active contributors to the life of the Moscow Psychological Society, and would presumably have been aware of some of each other’s work, if only from the papers each presented in that venue. Despite the rather close interweaving of their careers, however, relations between Shpet and Il’in were apparently never close.97 Relations between Il’in and Losev ( junior to Il’in by ten years) were apparently more congenial. In a review of new works in Russian philosophy appearing in 1917–18, Losev congratulated Il’in effusively on the publication of his two-volume Hegel commentary, praising him for “the resurrection of Hegel from the dust of the libraries, and the ardent affirmation of eternal truths. . . . Neither the study of Hegel, nor the study of contemporary Russian philosophical thought is any longer thinkable without this book of I. A. Il’in.”98 We also know from TakhoGodi’s biography of Losev that Losev initially presented some of the more substantial results of his own research in the form of papers read to the Moscow Psychological Society, now headed by Il’in, in the years 1921–22. These materials eventually appeared among the contents of the eight famous “privately printed” volumes, appearing between 1927 and 1930, upon which Losev’s extraordinary reputation was originally formed. In particular she points out that his research on “ ‘Eidos’ and ‘Idea’ in Plato” as well as his work on “The Theory of Abstraction in Plato” were presented to the society during this period. She adds that Il’in “highly valued [his] young colleague in philosophy” [i.e., Losev].99 Losev for his part revealed a very positive attitude toward Il’in’s interpretation of Hegel’s dialectic, specifically endorsing the link with intuition, and crediting Il’in with being the first to give “an objective-vital and intuitive interpretation” of Hegel’s dialectical method.100 There is further textual evidence that even in works that do not contain explicit references to Il’in, Losev had in fact adopted some of the specific terminology derived from Il’in’s interpretation of Hegel’s philosophical method.101 Shpet, Il’in, and Losev all contributed to and reinforced the suppo-

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sition that Hegel’s method of speculative (dialectical) logic and Husserl’s method of phenomenological intuition, as well as their respective larger projects, were commensurate in some sense. Shpet on Hegel and Husserl Shpet studied with Husserl himself in Göttingen during the years 1912–13. The two developed very close personal relations, attested by the correspondence between them (interrupted by World War I). Shpet’s Явление и смысл (Appearance and Sense), published in 1914, was based in part on Husserl’s Ideas 1, published only the preceding year in Germany. Shpet’s book represented the beginning of a new, more substantial phase in the Russian reception of Husserlian phenomenology. In this first major presentation of transcendental phenomenology in the Russian language, Shpet defended it as the latest and most advanced form of “positive philosophy,” the tradition which included Plato, Plotinus, the seventeenth-century rationalists, and Hegel. This tradition, within which Shpet also located himself, was committed to the study of the real, or being, in all of its forms. Shpet contrasted it with the tradition of “negative” philosophy, essentially identical with Kantianism in the modern period, which was limited to the study of the cognizing subject, and committed to determining the limits of reason or knowledge, with the implication that being itself, the real, was beyond the limits of possible human cognition. In Appearance and Sense Shpet advanced this distinction between positive and negative philosophy as one ultimately justified by Hegel’s arguments in his introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit. For Shpet, Hegel was thus not only the greatest representative of the tradition of positive philosophy in the modern period prior to Husserl, but also the authoritative source of the distinction between positive and negative philosophy itself. Notwithstanding his energetic defense of Husserl’s phenomenological method in Appearance and Sense, Shpet also displayed there an interest in going beyond the strict bounds of transcendental phenomenology, in the direction of a hermeneutic of signs that might eventually serve as the basis for a scientific account of social being and of historical reason.102 In subsequent works attempting to develop such a hermeneutical phenomenology as an extension of Husserlian method, at various critical junctures Shpet invoked elements of Hegel’s system as integral parts of his own project, revealing by this practice a conviction that elements of Hegel’s and Husserl’s systems were commensurate. Shpet’s next major published work was his master’s thesis on the topic of История как проблема логики (History as a Problem of Logic), which

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appeared in Moscow in 1916. That work was originally conceived in four parts, the first of which alone was completed and published during his lifetime. A group of researchers working with the Shpet archives in the Russian State Library recently reconstructed the previously unpublished part 2 from manuscripts on deposit there and published it together with part 1 in 2002.103 Still more recently, the scholar T. G. Shchedrina, working in the Shpet family archives as well, has reconstructed an outline of part 3, along with hints of the planned contents of part 4, from notebooks found there.104 She points out, appropriately, that most of Shpet’s subsequent publications in the years 1918–27 dealing with hermeneutics, aesthetic theory, and the theory of language appear to have been intended ultimately as elements of the never-completed four-part project on the logic of historical cognition.105 Thus one should view History as a Problem of Logic as Shpet’s master project, and its deepest philosophical motive as his idée maîtresse. That motive indeed appears to have been the development of a hermeneutical phenomenology, drawing substantially on both Husserl and Hegel, in an attempt to supply a philosophical grounding for historical science. Shpet’s enduring interest in a dialectical, historical examination of the shared structures of conscious experience may also be part of the background of his decision to undertake a new translation of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit during the period of his internal exile, which turned out to be his final scholarly contribution.106 Shpet: An Unfinished Review of Il’in’s Commentary Given the importance of Il’in’s commentary on Hegel, one would like to be able to consult some substantial contemporary responses to Il’in’s project as a measure of its impact and reception within the specific context of Russian philosophical thought. However, until quite recently it had appeared that no detailed responses to Il’in’s commentary on Hegel were produced in the immediate aftermath of its publication. These were after all the years of the Russian Civil War, which concluded with the exile of the majority of those philosophers who might have been expected to be interested in Il’in’s work. Moreover, very little reaction to it appeared among the Russian immigration in western Europe (prior to the publication in Switzerland of an abridged German edition in 1946, which was indeed widely reviewed at the time).107 Astonishingly, the notes for a fairly detailed, but by no means finished review of Il’in’s book by Gustav Shpet, evidently written in 1918, shortly after the publication of Il’in’s work, have only just come to light.108 These notes offer the only significant contemporaneous response to the publication of Il’in’s commentary, other than Losev’s brief published

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reference to it in the same year. Unfortunately Shpet’s unpublished “review” is unfinished, makes references only to the first six chapters (out of twelve) in volume 1, none to volume 2, and demonstrably misrepresents Il’in’s project in significant respects. The review consists primarily of an extended complaint over the inadequacy of Il’in’s treatment of the dialectic in Hegel. For all these reasons Shpet’s “review” must be treated with considerable circumspection. The review begins with two introductory pages fully written out, elaborating on the thesis that Russian philosophy is marked by the curious phenomenon of significant numbers of lawyers (graduates of the Faculty of Law) undertaking to write “philosophical” works, the result of which is nothing more than a kind of “dilettantism” by comparison with the work of genuine philosophers. Having pronounced this rather scornful judgment on the dilettantism of the “philosopher-lawyers,” Shpet immediately makes an exception for the work of Novgorodtsev and his “school,” in which he includes V. V. Saval’skii, N. N. Alekseev, B. P. Vysheslavtsev, “and the new work by I. A. Il’in.” He set a higher value on Vysheslavtsev’s Ethics of Fichte than on Il’in’s Hegel commentary for various reasons. Unfortunately, at this point the manuscript breaks off into a set of highly compressed notes by Shpet to himself, with abbreviated references to a significant number of other texts.109 Taken together, these notes produce a curious impression. They appear quite preliminary and unsettled, containing varying (and sometimes mutually contradictory) judgments on several points. In these notes Shpet focuses particularly on Il’in’s apparent “demotion” of the dialectic to the status of a result of Hegel’s intuiting of the philosophical object, which Il’in represents as Hegel’s primary method. Shpet points out (rightly) that in the absence of the dialectic, one could make no sense of the concrete universal in Hegel. However, Il’in ordered his entire commentary around the concrete universal as the ultimate criterion of reality in Hegel’s thought; had he actually eliminated the dialectic from his account, it would have spelled the collapse of the entire enterprise. Shpet’s accusation of a diminished appreciation of the dialectic in Il’in is obviously very wide of the mark, and is somewhat puzzling given the evidence that Shpet had read at least as far as chapter 6, which is entirely devoted to the dialectic (and in other passages he seems to acknowledge that Il’in’s entire commentary is structured around the dialectic after all). Shpet, in his cryptic notes, vacillates inconsistently between accusing Il’in of having eliminated the dialectic (a major blunder attributable only to pure “dilettantism”) and the lesser charge that he has “deemphasized” the dialectic. Mixed in with such passages, on the other hand,

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are clear acknowledgments by Shpet that Il’in has nevertheless set out the whole of Hegel’s philosophy dialectically.110 Notwithstanding these acknowledgments, Shpet returns somewhat later to the insinuation that Il’in ignored the dialectic in his exposition of Hegel.111 In still another place, Shpet acknowledges that Il’in has provided an “original” summary of the dialectic in terms of four moments.112 In a particularly interesting mark of grudging respect for Il’in’s accomplishment, Shpet penned the following somewhat convoluted thought: Il’in wanted Hegel without the dialectic; took him without his history; poured all the water into a single dish; turned out murky; Hegel lost [his] sharpness and brilliance; but nevertheless, if for one reason or another one needs to and can do this, to perform this like an experiment, then one must recognize that it was done splendidly by Il’in, and because—and rather . . . The energy spent would be regrettable, if the desire to repeat the experiment came to someone.113

Shpet was obviously dismayed by what he inaccurately took to be a suggestion by Il’in that the dialectic could be relegated to a secondary significance in an account of Hegel’s thought. He kept returning to this theme despite his acknowledgment that Il’in’s exposition of Hegel was nevertheless dialectical. Struggling to articulate precisely what was wrong with Il’in’s approach, Shpet appears to flounder somewhat. He feels compelled to agree with Il’in’s claim that the dialectic itself is neither the content nor the main achievement of Hegel’s philosophy: It is completely accurate that the dialectic is neither the content nor the achievement of Hegel’s philosophy; but as a method of exposition, a conducting to the “truth,” the dialectic is undervalued by Il’in. —There is no opposition, therefore, of intuition and dialectic, “intuition” is not a method at all, but precisely eine Unmethode as a German would say; only as a joke can one call intuition a method!114

However, a few pages earlier, Shpet had written the following: There is a contradiction between the very intention of the book and its content. Hegel without the dialectic, that is the Hegel of the result. To throw out the path, means to destroy the whole philosophy, because the philosophy of Hegel is not only the last word of philosophy, but also all-embracing, containing everything previous in itself. But that is a contradiction not only in relation to Hegel, but also to all philosophy. Intuition is not a Hegelian means, but a general philosophical one.115

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This last remark, of course, coincides very well with Il’in’s declaration that the method of Husserl’s phenomenology, the “intuitive immersion in the experience of the object being analyzed,” is “as old as philosophy itself.”116 In short, though Shpet regards Il’in’s statements about the role of the dialectic in Hegel as a provocation, when Shpet at intervals tries to come to grips with Il’in’s actual depiction of the dialectic in his exposition of Hegel, he seems unable to say precisely in what Il’in’s offense consists, and reverts to his clearly unsupportable claim that Il’in has eliminated the dialectic. In the end one can only acknowledge that Shpet did not complete, and of course did not publish, the unfinished draft.117 We may at most speculate about the explanation inconclusively. Perhaps external circumstances (the outbreak of civil war) prevented Shpet from completing his review in 1918. Perhaps he recognized the numerous inconsistencies in his account of Il’in’s work and gave it up; perhaps he came to appreciate more clearly that Il’in had in no way diminished the centrality of the dialectic in his account of the self-development of the concept in Hegel’s system. The most interesting speculation lies in a quite different direction, however: it is possible that Shpet abandoned his critique of Il’in in midstream because it may have dawned on him that he himself would have to provide a somewhat similar account of the relation of Hegel’s method to Husserl’s in the course of his own philosophical project. Given the freedom with which Shpet drew upon elements of Hegel’s system at crucial junctures in the elaboration of his own (Husserlian) hermeneutic phenomenology, he could scarcely have treated the two philosophical projects as fundamentally incommensurate. The foundations of Shpet’s own account of the connection of intuition and discourse (dialectic) are to be found in his Эстетические фрагменты II (Aesthetic Fragments II), written just four years after the abortive critique of Il’in.118 Shpet argues there that discourse and intuition are but two activities or functions of one and the same intellect. “Since ancient times more observant philosophers have distinguished two functions within the activity of the intellect: a ‘higher’ and a ‘lower.’ ” The lower one Shpet identified as the understanding, the function of which was abstractly rational conceptualizing—that is, discourse. The higher one he identified as reason, the function of which was intuition. But he also argued that to insist upon an absolutely clear distinction between the two functions is artificial. Upon reflection it becomes clear that these are but two expressions of one and the same act of comprehension: “intuition” refers to an isolated act of comprehension, while “discourse” refers to that same act of comprehension presented in communicable form in its

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interconnections with other such acts. Shpet cites Hegel as the enduring authority for this conclusion in the modern period. Losev on Hegel and Husserl During the 1920s the astonishingly erudite philosopher A. F. Losev emerged as a major creative force in Russian philosophy. He graduated from Moscow University in 1915 with degrees in both philosophy and classics.119 While attending that university he studied with, among others, Gustav Shpet. Between the years 1927 and 1930 he published his famous collection of eight major “privately printed” volumes on a variety of topics in ancient philosophy and Neoplatonism, on the philosophy of the name, on aesthetics and the theory of meaning, on the theory of music, and on symbol and myth in the ancient world.120 ( Just beneath the surface of some of these works—disguised so as to confound the censors—there was also a strong concern with themes in Russian Orthodox theology.) In these works Losev presented himself as a student of Husserlian phenomenology, but, again, with the attitude that Husserl’s phenomenology requires supplementation by Hegelian dialectic. In Losev’s account of his own “phenomenologo-dialectical” method the two “distinct” methods of phenomenological intuition and dialectical analysis could be seen as rather tightly linked:121 One can assign oneself the goal of a simple semantic description of the phenomenon, without getting into an explanatory analysis of its categorial structure as something whole and singular, in particular in its connections with other wholes. Such a method is essential for establishing the initial starting viewpoints of dialectic, for the latter is precisely occupied not only with “meanings” but also with “facts.” And one must first see these facts, and only then construct their dialectic. Hence I find it possible to speak of a phenomenologo-dialectical method, proposing that, although both of them—as methodological structures—are entirely distinct, nevertheless they presuppose and ground one another as blood relatives, and the truth lies only in their unity.122

As Zenkovsky remarked in commenting on the first seven of Losev’s works, “Losev is a follower of Husserl, but he supplements Husserl’s doctrines with those of Hegel; his originality lies in the application of dialectic to the data of phenomenological analysis.”123 Zenkovsky quotes the following compilation of abridged passages from multiple sources in Losev’s early work:

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Husserl went only halfway; he has no relational eidetics. . . . I must admit that there are points at which my methods will never tally with those of pure phenomenology . . . ; I consider the purely dialectical method my principal method. . . . “Meaning” must be explained in its own semantic relations, in the structural interconnection and self-generation of meaning.124

George Kline commented that “Losev’s dialectical phenomenology—as Zenkovsky aptly called it—is more dialectical than phenomenological, more indebted to Plato, Plotinus and Hegel than to Husserl.”125 In a useful discussion of the formulation of Losev’s distinctive philosophical method in the early work, S. S. Khoruzhii observes that “the philosophical method of Losev is that of the construction126 of the philosophical object in terms of the logic of meaning.”127 According to Losev the philosophical object, phenomenologically construed, is the eidos, treated as “the highest intellectual abstraction which is nevertheless given concretely, to the [inner] eye [наглядно].”128 However, rejecting a purely descriptive notion of phenomenological method, he asserted that the task of philosophical method was not merely to describe the meaning structure in determinate categories, but along with that also “to explain one category by means of another, so that it would be obvious how one category gives rise to another, and all together, each other.”129 Khoruzhii points out that this last aim is a classic formulation of the task of dialectic, of dialectical method, “and in this way our author strives to supplement phenomenology with dialectic, Husserl with Hegel.”130 At this point, according to Khoruzhii, we have reached the essence of Losev’s mature philosophical method: “to apply the dialectical method to the phenomenologically treated philosophical object.”131 Khoruzhii reminds us that “Hegel’s dialectic is also in a broad sense a phenomenology, a ‘phenomenology of spirit,’ the observation, the description of its categories in their movement.”132 And this combination, this mutual supplementation of the two phenomenologies, the Hegelian and the Husserlian, provides what Losev terms the “construction of meaning” referred to above.133 Despite Losev’s confident announcement of a “phenomenologodialectical method,” there is an emerging consensus that, as Khoruzhii has argued, Losev failed to implement fully either the principles of Husserlian phenomenology or of the Hegelian dialectic properly.134 Similarly, Andrei Tashchian has argued that Losev’s attempt to treat both the eidos and logos as fundamental categories was unsuccessful.135 In these various ways, Shpet, Losev, and Il’in were all apparently possessed by a similar impulse: to develop a connection between Hus-

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serl’s philosophical method and Hegel’s. Their attempts met with varying degrees of success; and none of them could be said to have explicated their understandings of the connection between these projects fully. Of the three, Il’in developed his account of the overlap of Hegel’s and Husserl’s methods the most fully.

Hegel and Husserl: Dialectic and Intuition The problem of the commensurability of Hegel’s and Husserl’s philosophical projects posed by these three Russian philosophers is quite complex. Only a few of its many aspects can be addressed here, and these only in a preliminary way. One of the standard, but perhaps misleading, approaches to the problem relies upon the contrast between dialectic (discourse) and intuition: however incorrectly, Hegel’s intellectual procedure is commonly characterized as dialectical, and Husserl’s as intuitionist. (Though the first point to be made here is that, as Shpet suggested, there may be less than meets the eye in the alleged distinction between dialectic and intuition, a point which will be further considered below.) However, if we do not question the fundamentality of that distinction for the moment, then the problem would appear to have two prongs: if the two projects are to be shown to be commensurate, then we might take the path of showing either that Hegel’s intellectual procedure can be understood as intuitionist in some significant sense, or that Husserl’s intellectual procedure can be understood as dialectical in some significant sense, or both. For present purposes, I shall take Il’in’s conclusions concerning the role of intuition in Hegel’s intellectual procedure to be sufficiently well established, and turn to the question of the possibly dialectical nature of Husserl’s intellectual procedure. There is in fact a substantial body of literature on Husserl arguing for the presence of a dialectical element in his thought, both early and late. The most thorough and authoritative overview of that literature of which I am aware is to be found in Jay Lampert’s Synthesis and Backward Reference in Husserl’s “Logical Investigations.” 136 In a previous work, Lampert himself argued “that Husserl’s phenomenology is dialectical in just the senses usually attributed to Hegel, particularly in the sense that ‘experiences are self-interpreting’ within a self-propelling dialectic of mutually mediating interpretations, constituting both the parts and the whole of consciousness.”137 The locus of the problem in Lampert’s view is to be found in the concept of synthesis: the process whereby momentarily

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changing appearances apprehended in consciousness can be synthesized into relatively more stable intentional objects. Characterizing his project of Synthesis and Backward Reference, Lampert states: This project is a speculative-exegetical Husserlian analysis of the ground, the mechanisms, and the results of synthesis. Focusing on Husserl’s Logical Investigations, I argue that synthesizing consciousness must be a self-propelling, self-explicating system of interpretative acts driven by ongoing forward and backward references, grounding its structures as its proceeds, and positing its origins as that which must have been given “in advance.” To this end, I develop a dialectical reading of Husserl’s largely untreated category of “referring backward” (zurückweisen).138

Lampert points out that most of the existing literature on the concept of synthesis in Husserl has concentrated on Husserl’s later work on passive synthesis. However, he undertakes to show that the concept of synthesis is central to the earlier Logical Investigations, and thus “demonstrate the continuity of descriptive categories that run through both the early and the late Husserl.”139 A second approach to the question of a dialectical element in Husserl’s thought can be found in the multiple paths to the transcendental reduction identified by Iso Kern and others in Husserl’s writings. Englishlanguage commentaries on Husserl in particular were dominated for many years by the supposition that the “Cartesian way” was the only proper understanding of the method of the transcendental reduction. That way is supposedly grounded in an absolute beginning which consists in an evidence (Evidenz) that is absolutely indubitable. That evidence presents itself in the immediacy of an intuition structured as the ego-cogitocogitatum. It seems to imply that the evidence is acquired all at once, precisely in the immediacy of the given content.140 To the extent that such a conception of the transcendental reduction should prevail, the Hegelian and Husserlian projects would appear to be simply incommensurate. As Robert Williams pointed out, Hegel’s philosophy can be described as a determined and systematic attack upon the Cartesian primacy of the cogito. Hegel undermines the entire Cartesian structure of consciousness (or subjectivity) as the foundation of knowledge, and particularly its presuppositions of immediacy and “givenness” as the basis of truth.141 For Hegel, all truth is mediated, and that mediation is of course a dialectical process. Seen in this perspective, the fundamental issue would appear to be one of immediate intuition versus

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mediated dialectic, and the choice of one would appear to exclude the other as a possibility. But as Iso Kern has argued, the Cartesian way to the transcendental reduction is not the only way explored by Husserl, nor does it ultimately prove to be successful. Husserl provided at least two other accounts of the way to the transcendental reduction: the way through intentional psychology, and the way through ontology. In the emergence of this third way, through ontology, Husserl himself can be seen moving in a somewhat Hegelian direction.142 In this third way, the absolute evidence sought by philosophy is not something given at the outset, and hence not a question of immediacy, but rather a result to be achieved through a process of increasingly more radical reflection and self-critique.143 In this conception, the transcendental reduction “appears . . . as breaking through limitations, namely the limitations of natural objective cognition.”144 Kern refers to that “breaking through” as a transition (Übergang), a term he explicitly traces back to Hegel.145 Kern presents this third way to the transcendental reduction, through ontology, as the only fully successful account of the reduction to be found in Husserl’s work. In this third way, no single cognition, separate from all other cognitions, could be absolute. “For absolute philosophic truth is the whole.”146 This conclusion points very much in the direction of Hegel and a conception of knowledge as mediated, hence dialectical, and away from the immediacy of Cartesian certainties.147 Thus the rejection of a rigid separation between the intuitionist and the dialectical models of knowing can also be supported at least indirectly from Husserl’s texts themselves. This absence of a clear separation between the intuitive and the discursive models of knowing has deep roots in the history of philosophy, as Shpet claimed. Plato originally made use of the familiar “spectator” model to describe our knowledge of the Forms. However, as Henry Teloh has pointed out, beginning with the Phaedrus and continuing in several of the late dialogues, Plato also employed a discursive or dialectical account of our knowledge of the Forms instead of the spectator model. Teloh observed that “[Plato] frequently combines and interweaves both the visual and the discursive routes to knowledge and the different conceptions of Form that connect with these routes.”148 The implication would be that Plato also rejected any ultimate distinction between the two. Thus the views of quite a few philosophers appear to be convergent on this point. Il’in suggests an explanation of the importance of the distinction between intuitive and discursive knowing in chapter 7. Remembering that Hegel held the rational to be rational “precisely because it contains

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both of the opposites as ideal moments within itself,” Il’in insisted that such opposing moments cannot be grasped (discursively) by abstract thought alone.149 “One must represent it to oneself with one’s eyes, visually, establishing with the power of imagination the presence of two real essences, opposed in terms of content.”150 To approach the issue in yet another way, one can think of what is immediately known as directly involving intuition, and what is mediately known as a matter of dialectical reasoning. Hegel discusses the issue of the relation between intuition (the allegedly immediately known) and mediation at some length in the Encyclopedia Logic, in section C under the “First Part” (“The Third Position of Thought with Respect to Objectivity: Immediate Knowing (§§ 61–78)”).151 The conception of immediate knowledge Hegel discussed there belonged to certain theologians and anti-rationalist philosophers who equated immediate knowledge with faith, viewing it as a potentially superior kind of knowledge of the Infinite, uncontaminated by the finite categories of human reasoning. Hegel’s point can be extended to apply to the present problem, however, especially as he there generalizes the discussion to include Descartes’ conception of intuitive knowledge as well. This standpoint is not content when it has shown that mediate knowing, taken in isolation, is inadequate for the [cognition of] truth; its peculiarity is that immediate knowing can only have the truth as its content when it is taken in isolation, to the exclusion of mediation. —Exclusions of this kind betray that this standpoint is a relapse into the metaphysical understanding, with its Either-Or; and hence it is really a relapse into the relationship of external mediation based upon clinging to the finite; i.e., to one-sided determinations beyond which this view mistakenly thinks that it has risen.152

In criticizing this standpoint, Hegel points out that “the entire second part of the Logic, the doctrine of Essence, deals with the essential selfpositing unity of immediacy and mediation.”153 More specifically, he asserts that what is asserted from this standpoint154 is that neither the Idea, as a merely subjective thought, nor a mere being on its own account, is what is true; for being on its own account, any being that is not that of the Idea, is the sensible, finite being of the world. But what is immediately asserted by this is that the Idea is what is true only as mediated by being, and, conversely, that being is what is true only as mediated by the Idea.155

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Concluding that paragraph, he observes that it is “only the ordinary abstract understanding that takes the determinations of immediacy and mediation to be absolute . . . and thinks that it has an example of a firm distinction in them.”156 All knowledge is thus both immediate and mediated, and the supposition that either of them in isolation could be held to be a means of obtaining the truth belongs to the abstract understanding. From this perspective, the very suggestion that either intuition or dialectic alone might ultimately prove to be a separate path to the truth would seem to be suspect.157

A Historical Footnote: Il’in and Shpet as Students of Husserl The possibility should not be overlooked that Il’in and Shpet were initially exposed to somewhat different versions of Husserlian phenomenology, from Husserl himself, during their respective stays in Göttingen. Il’in arrived in Göttingen in late spring of 1911, presumably some time before the start of the summer term at the university, and departed sometime in August.158 It appears that Shpet also visited Göttingen at some point during that same summer and made contact with Husserl, but was apparently not there long enough to follow a formal course of studies that summer.159 For his official period of formal study Shpet arrived in Göttingen in the autumn of 1912, slightly more than a year after Il’in departed, and remained through the summer term of 1913.160 These dates may have much more significance than it would be reasonable to expect. According to Husserl, it was in the winter term of 1911 that he presented for the first time a complete account of the way to the transcendental reduction through ontology referred to above, and, more particularly, presented it as entirely distinct from the Cartesian way.161 Thus, when Il’in arrived in Göttingen, Husserl was just completing the first public presentation of that conception of the transcendental reduction which is most amenable to connection with the Hegelian dialectic. On the other hand, when Shpet attended Husserl’s lectures beginning a year later, Husserl was apparently presenting material on Nature and Spirit, as well as on the theory of science, drawn from his notes for Ideas II, which was not published in Husserl’s lifetime.162 But during that same academic year Ideas I appeared in print, and in that work the Cartesian way to the transcendental reduction was once again dominant

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(though not clearly distinguished from the way through ontology, which was also present in that work).163 Though it is difficult to know precisely what transpired in their respective exposures to Husserl’s lectures, and their personal conversations with him, it must be borne in mind that Il’in and Shpet may well have encountered rather different presentations of the fundamental method of his phenomenology from Husserl himself, only a year or so apart. This alone might explain some significant continuing differences between them in their respective understandings of the relation between Husserl’s and Hegel’s projects.164 Beyond these possible differences, however, there lies a striking convergence of larger philosophical intentions on the part of Il’in and Shpet, as well as Losev; each in his own way was attempting to establish a connection between Hegel and Husserl. (And of course we don’t know what the final form of either Shpet’s or Losev’s projects would have been, since both were denied the opportunity to complete them as intended.)

The Relation of Il’in’s German Version of the Commentary to the Original Russian Text Around the end of World War II, Il’in completed a translation into German of part of his original two-volume commentary on Hegel under a new title: Die Philosophie Hegels als kontemplative Gotteslehre (The Philosophy of Hegel as a Contemplative Doctrine of God ). In the process he dropped chapters 13–20 of the original volume 2, incorporating from that volume only the final two chapters, 21 and 22 (now renumbered 13 and 14), as a fourth and concluding part of the new single-volume German version of the text. In the preface to the German edition, written in February 1946, Il’in supplies the full table of contents of the original volume 2, indicating clearly which chapters were missing in the new edition. There is no indication that Il’in viewed the abridged version of the text as in any way an improvement over the original; on the contrary, he suggests that he had long-standing doubts about the validity of the interpretation of Hegel that emerged from the shortened form of the commentary. By way of explanation of the missing chapters, he offers only the following rather brief statement: After long deliberation and inner struggle I have decided to leave out chapters 13–20, to indicate Hegel’s theo-anthropology [i.e., the content

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of the missing chapters] only summarily, and publish the entire work as a Contemplative Doctrine of God. Along with that I still hesitated for years—first from philosophical reservation, second from a desire to devote the so-meagerly reckoned span of life to an independent view and to new writing; for life is coming shortly to an end, and I have the feeling of only having just begun. Probably I would have hesitated still longer, if friends had not prevailed upon me.165

Doubtless his friends had been pointing out for some time that given its original fate in Russia, one of his major achievements, the commentary on Hegel, would in effect be lost to the world if he did not undertake to put it before the public again, preferably in German. In particular, we know that as early as 1924 the Russian philosopher F. A. Stepun, having come to visit Il’in in Berlin directly from a meeting with Husserl, conveyed to Il’in Husserl’s desire to be able to read a German translation of Il’in’s commentary on Hegel.166 In the later years of his exile, the cost that would be incurred in terms of time lost to other projects clearly troubled Il’in whenever he contemplated the translation project. To return to the commentary meant to take up once again a project he had completed over a quarter of a century earlier, in a world that no longer existed. One can readily appreciate that he might have hesitated to divert his time and energies to a renewal of this project from his past. But the fact remained that if the translation were not undertaken, his previous work might indeed be effectively lost to the scholarly world forever. Judging from the letter he wrote to the publisher proposing the translation project, two further developments appear to have swayed him. First, he had attended a Jubilee Hegel Congress and listened to numerous presentations by prominent Hegel scholars, and had concluded that most of them had not really penetrated to the core of Hegel’s thought, but were merely “trying to swim in the stream of Hegel’s phraseology, without having first assimilated his philosophical act.”167 He still felt strongly that his own interpretation of Hegel compared very favorably with most of what he heard at the congress. Second, Professor Arthur Luther of Leipzig (a well-known literary translator) had already translated the first two chapters of the text, which Il’in had then taken over himself and corrected thoroughly.168 Il’in had basically completed the manuscript of his original commentary in 1916. By the time he somewhat reluctantly began to work on the German translation himself, nearly three decades of further Hegel scholarship had appeared. The obvious question therefore arises, to what extent is the German version of the text a reworking of his interpretation of Hegel in the light of subsequent scholarship, and to what extent

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does it remain essentially a translation of the Russian original? Il’in does observe in his introduction to the bibliographic appendix of the German edition that whereas in his Russian text he named around seventy works of other Hegel scholars “in six languages from nine or ten countries,” in the present edition he names about twice that number. These references to other Hegel scholars, however, are primarily to be found in the chapter-by-chapter bibliographic essays that are appended to each volume of the original Russian edition, as well as to the German edition. These bibliographic essays in the German edition are indeed significantly enlarged. They enabled Il’in not only to recover the sources that had so long ago been taken from him by the Austrian customs authorities at the outbreak of World War I, but they also revealed some acquaintance with more recent work on Hegel. At the same time he comments that he was unable to make any use of Herman Glöckner’s valuable Jubilee edition (Stuttgart, 1927) of Hegel’s complete works “since my work (in Russian) was completed in the year 1916.”169 Nor are there any significant references to the more recent secondary literature in the text itself. The evidence suggests that while Il’in monitored the newly appearing Hegel literature to some extent, he made no serious attempt, or saw no need, to work it into his German translation of his commentary. Comparison of the German text with the Russian original makes it clear that the German edition is essentially a translation and not in any significant sense an expansion, development, or reworking of the original. That said, however, it must also be acknowledged that in many places the translation is a very free one, and it suggests that Il’in still maintained a lively engagement with Hegel’s own texts. On occasion he revises the division of paragraphs, reorders the content of several sentences together, and not infrequently makes minor changes to a word or phrase in the interest of greater clarity.170 There are also occasional passages where Il’in has added further sentences to provide a short elaboration or clarification of points contained in the Russian text. In such instances it might be more appropriate to speak of rewriting rather than simply translating. Despite the presence of such occasional significant variations between the two texts, however, the vast majority of the paragraphs of the German text are simply literal translations, sentence by sentence, of the Russian. One significant exception to this conclusion must be noted, however. A definite shift of critical perspective takes place between the Russian and German versions of chapter 3 on speculative thought. As of 1918 Il’in appeared to be significantly under the spell of Adolf Trendelenburg’s criticisms of Hegel’s Logic. He made several approving references to Trendelenburg’s criticisms there, and spoke matter-of-factly of

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“Hegel’s fundamental phenomenological error,” which he treated in the 1918 Russian text as an evident failing. He used the term “error” several times in this connection, and appeared to regard the failing as a serious one, the reality of which was beyond dispute. However, in the 1946 German version of chapter 3, each occurrence of the term “error” has been carefully replaced with a more neutral term such as “peculiarity” or “characteristic,” when it was not dropped altogether. Trendelenburg is still mentioned, but simply as a well-known critic; Trendelenburg’s criticisms are no longer explicitly endorsed by Il’in as valid. The changes in the text are not extensive, but they are consistently and precisely made, and clearly signal that Il’in had distanced himself from Trendelenburg’s critique significantly in later years. (These changes are noted in my endnotes to chapter 3.) Indeed, the severity of the criticisms endorsed by Il’in in the original Russian text of chapter 3 appears aberrant by comparison with the general tenor of his treatment of Hegel in the remainder of the two volumes. The impression one receives from the 1946 German text is thus one of greater consistency in Il’in’s attitude toward Hegel. Otherwise I noted no evident development or extension of the interpretation first presented in its complete form in 1918; the only significant changes are those consequent upon dropping eight chapters from volume 2 of the original text, concerning which Il’in himself expressed prolonged reservations. The other source of differences between the Russian and the German texts stems from the obvious point that in the German text it was no longer necessary to find Russian equivalents for Hegel’s rich and subtle philosophical vocabulary; Hegel’s own words could simply be quoted or used. Among other things, this meant that a great many German phrases previously included in footnotes could now simply be employed in the text itself, obviating the need for the footnotes. At the point when Il’in was writing the original Russian text, in many cases the most appropriate conventions for translating Hegel’s philosophical vocabulary into Russian were still unsettled. Il’in frequently seemed to be engaged in stretching and experimenting with the Russian philosophical lexicon in order to find the most successful equivalents for various terms of Hegel’s German vocabulary. Working in German, especially given Il’in’s command of that language, obviously eliminated all these sorts of challenges.171 The German edition of the commentary also contains a curious appendix of twelve pages’ worth of “Illustrative Drawings” of Hegel’s “thought act” in its basic form, as well as in a succession of forms appropriate to the Logic, the Philosophy of Nature, the Philosophy of Right, and finally the Philosophy of Religion. Each of these depicts the eye of

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the philosopher (inner, or inner and outer), thus graphically depicting the “intuitive” nature of the thought act, along with the content intuited in each of these thought acts. There are also diagrams of the universal according to the understanding, the universal according to speculative reason, and the process of speculative concretion. The diagrams will not be reproduced here, as they were not included in the original Russian edition.172

Main Influences of Il’in’s Commentary The history of Il’in’s influence on subsequent Hegel interpretation naturally falls into two more or less distinct narratives: one tracing the influences of the original Russian text (basically confined to his fellow countrymen in exile or in Soviet Russia), and a second examining the influences of the shortened German-language text, primarily abroad. The possibility of a third phase of his influence, once again in his native land, has opened up since the first reprinting, in 1994 in St. Petersburg, of the original Russian text. First Narrative: The Original Russian Text As noted above, Il’in’s commentary originally appeared literally on the eve of the Civil War, in what was apparently an extremely limited printing. Even had the work been widely available, the chaos and dislocations of the Civil War would have prevented any considered response to it. Shortly after the military conflict ended, many of the same intellectuals who might have been expected, in the pre-Revolutionary world, to have embarked upon an informed discussion of Il’in’s work, now found themselves confronted with arrest and deportation by the Bolsheviks in the autumn of 1922. Subsequently scattered among several European capitals and the Far East, the émigré intellectuals initially did whatever they could to preserve their own culture and to keep alive some of its defining traditions of discourse. Inevitably they found themselves confronted by the additional necessities and challenges of surviving as foreigners in a world initially recovering from the horrors of World War I, and then drifting toward a renewal of global war. Further complicating matters, shortly after his arrival in Germany, Il’in made himself into a figure of particularly intense controversy among the Russian émigrés by the publication in 1925 of a highly provocative attack upon Tolstoyan pacificism, О сопротивлении злу силою (On Resistance to Evil by Force).173 He identified

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the attitude of pacificism among the pre-Revolutionary intelligentsia as one of the chief reasons for the victory of the Bolsheviks, and seemed to be urging his fellow émigrés to renew the armed offensive against the now triumphant Bolshevik government. Such sharply divisive political stances made him a continuing figure of controversy within the Russian emigration, and may well have deflected some attention from his more scholarly philosophical works such as the commentary on Hegel. Within Soviet Russia, following Il’in’s deportation in 1922, it would have become increasingly dangerous to be associated with his works, and for that reason one would not expect any continued public discussion of them. Therefore it is intriguing to discover that in 1927, as mentioned above, A. F. Losev published some favorable comments concerning Il’in’s commentary on Hegel in his Диалектика художественной формы (The Dialectic of Artistic Form), crediting Il’in with being the first to give “an objective-vital and intuitive interpretation” of Hegel’s dialectical method.174 As also mentioned earlier, in Losev’s 1930 work on Plato’s use of idea and eidos, Очерки античного символизма и мифологии (Essays on Ancient Symbolism and Mythology), one finds the repeated use of technical terms almost certainly derived from Il’in’s commentary.175 Losev’s interest in Il’in’s interpretation of Hegel’s philosophy was evidently an enduring one. According to the recently published reminiscences of one of his students at the time, when Losev was at last allowed to teach once again at a major institution (Moscow State University), during the war years of 1942–44, he taught two courses, one a “special course” on logic, and the other a seminar on Hegel’s Encyclopedia Logic. In the seminar he suggested a list of seven topics “of a historical character” from which the students were to choose for their seminar presentations. The fifth of these topics was “Hegel’s Logic in the Understanding of I. A. Il’in.”176 (The seminar on Hegel’s logic was interrupted when Losev was abruptly dismissed from Moscow State University during 1944 as an “Idealist.”)177 Outside of Soviet Russia, there is reason to believe that Il’in’s commentary may have had some indirect influence on the development of French Hegelianism during the 1930s. In his monumental history of the phenomenological movement, Herbert Spiegelberg included a brief, separate section on “Phenomenology and Hegelianism” in the section on the French phenomenological movement. He described as one of the “surprising peculiarities of French phenomenology . . . the unquestioning ease with which it takes it for granted that Husserl’s phenomenology belongs together with Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and even originated from it.”178 Spiegelberg denies that there is any adequate foundation for believing in such a historical connection as far as the German phase of

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phenomenology is concerned, and attributes the appearance of the doctrine in France to a piece of “misinformation” traceable to Alexandre Kojève, “a Russian Marxist, who had studied in Germany under Jaspers but apparently not under any of the phenomenologists.”179 He traces the misinformation to Kojève’s famous commentary on Hegel’s Phenomenology, where Hegel’s method was described as “by no means dialectical; it is purely contemplative and descriptive, i.e., phenomenological in the Husserlian sense of the term.”180 Spiegelberg was apparently unaware of Il’in’s work (the name does not occur in the book’s “Index of Names”), and so of course could not have traced the idea back to its probable source in Il’in’s commentary. Spiegelberg also failed to note that this same thesis was advanced by Alexandre Koyré about the same time, or slightly earlier than Kojève’s lecture series.181 In his 1934 article “Hegel à Iéna” Koyré observes that “we are employing this term [phenomenological] in the sense that Husserl gave it. In effect—something very curious and unexpected—Hegel’s method is above all phenomenological.”182 He goes on to assert that beneath Hegel’s dialectic of the finite and the infinite “one can with difficulty understand the phenomenological substructure that subtends it, the actual path by which Hegel was able to write it.”183 Later he describes the idea of the Phenomenology of Spirit as, “in its best parts at least, nothing other than a visionary description of spiritual reality.” These cryptic remarks by Koyré provide no more than hints of what he intended in referring to aspects of Hegel’s Phenomenology in Husserlian terms. Since Koyré published only three articles on Hegel in his career, all in the early 1930s, these hints were never developed at any greater length. An echo of Koyré’s and Kojève’s claim of the convergence of Hegel’s and Husserl’s phenomenologies can also be found in Hyppolite’s famous commentary on Hegel’s Phenomenology (originally published in 1946). He remarks on the same aspect of Hegel’s method—its merely “descriptive” rather than “constructive” character—and comments that “this characteristic could lead us to compare Hegel’s phenomenology to the phenomenology of Husserl if the differences between the two were not much deeper than their similarities.”184 Notwithstanding Hyppolite’s more cautious and limited reference to it, this same claim of a consonance between Hegel’s and Husserl’s methods was firmly asserted for a fourth time in the history of twentiethcentury French Hegel interpretation several years later by Jean Wahl, in his 1959 Sorbonne lectures La logique de Hegel comme phenomenologie.185 In the opening paragraph of those lectures he asserts, “I do not wish to say the logic of Hegel as Hegelian phenomenology, but at bottom, the logic of Hegel as a Husserlian phenomenology.”186 Despite the prominence of

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this opening claim, however, reiterated in some fashion at least fifteen more times in the course of the work, it would be difficult to say precisely what Wahl takes the claim to involve. His references to the theme remain allusive and tentative, and when challenged to defend the thesis during a question period, he seemed prepared to retreat rather than to insist upon any definite implications of the claim. Mid-twentieth-century French Hegelians were thus demonstrably influenced by the idea of a consonance between Hegel’s philosophical method and Husserlian phenomenology. However, on the whole they tended to treat it more as an academic insider’s rumor, or an important presupposition already established elsewhere, than as a thesis needing to be fully developed and defended. None of the three most prominent proponents of the view ever took the trouble to spell out and defend in any detail precisely what they took the thesis to entail, certainly not on the same level that Il’in did. Kojève’s assertion of the thesis reads almost as though he might have been quoting Il’in directly. On the other hand, neither Koyré nor Kojève nor Wahl makes any reference to Il’in’s work. In the case of Kojève this need not be taken as particularly significant, given the general absence of appropriate scholarly apparatus in the text of his Lectures, and the same remark would apply to the stenographic record of Wahl’s later Sorbonne lectures; however, Koyré was a notably careful and sophisticated scholar, and the absence of such a reference in his texts should certainly give us pause. Counterbalancing these considerations, there are some other facts to be taken into account. First, Koyré and Kojève were not only close acquaintances, but both were Russians who emigrated to France in adulthood. During the 1930s, they were two of the most influential Russian-speaking philosophers in France. Second, Koyré was personally acquainted with Il’in, having spent some time together with him in Göttingen in 1911, when they were both studying with Husserl. Following his forced exile from Russia to Berlin in the fall of 1922, Il’in explained in a letter to Husserl (April 12, 1924) that “after hard spiritual and political struggles I was exiled in 1922 to Germany, desperately in need of solitude and peace, so as to gather my strength. Only A. Koyré sought me out, from old friendship, and we with heartfelt warmth recalled together the time spent in Göttingen.”187 Since this meeting took place just a few years after the publication of Il’in’s work on Hegel, it would seem improbable that the subject of Il’in’s interpretation of Hegel would not have come up in conversation between the two philosophers. A third pertinent piece of information is contained in a personal letter from Kojève to George Kline (March 30, 1967). Kojève’s letter was written in response to the

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page proofs of the portion of Kline’s 1967 essay “The Existentialist Rediscovery of Hegel and Marx” devoted to Kojève’s course and book on Hegel’s Phenomenology that Kline had sent him.188 In his letter Kojève confirmed that “I read Il’in’s Hegel, but without comprehending much (I was too young then).” He also mentioned that he had frequent conversations with Jean Wahl during the period in question. Since both of the most influential Russian émigré philosophers in France during the 1930s had direct personal knowledge of Il’in’s work, this would seem to be the most obvious explanation of how his view of the commensurability of Hegel’s and Husserl’s projects came to influence French Hegel interpretation. Kojève’s “frequent conversations” with Wahl, the third most important advocate of the view in question, might also explain the latter’s commitment to it. At least one contemporary Russian scholar is also convinced that the circumstantial evidence of Il’in’s indirect influence upon French Hegelianism in the 1930s renders it more probable than not.189 The last remaining piece of the puzzle— why such a careful scholar as Koyré failed to cite Il’in by name when presenting this thesis—may also have an obvious answer. As shown above, this thesis was not exclusive to Il’in; it was also held in one form or another by Shpet and by Losev as well, two other very prominent Russian philosophers with whose works Koyré was likely to have been familiar. It is entirely possible that Koyré may have thought of the thesis as common to all three, and (especially if he did not have access to a copy of Il’in’s commentary in Paris) he may have simply regarded it as a view sufficiently well established in contemporary Russian philosophy that he could refer to it without attaching a specific name to it. Apart from the brief approving references to Il’in’s work by Losev in the 1920s, and his use of Il’in’s commentary in his seminar on Hegel’s Encyclopedia Logic at Moscow University in 1943, there is no evidence of further influence by Il’in in his homeland until the late 1950s. In 1958 a substantial commentary, Система и метода в философии Гегеля (System and Method in the Philosophy of Hegel ), was published in Russian by K. S. Bakradze (1898–1970), a prominent Georgian philosopher, member of the Georgian Academy of Sciences, and a professor at the University of Tbilisi. Bakradze had spent three years (1922–25) studying in Germany with Husserl, Kroner, and others and was one of the Soviet Union’s most prominent authorities on the history of German idealism, to which he was quite sympathetic.190 His book includes substantial discussions of Il’in’s interpretation of Hegel, which he compared in many respects to that of Nicolai Hartmann. Bakradze’s treatment of Il’in’s work was respectful, accurate on the whole, and he referred to Il’in repeatedly as “one of the greatest authorities on Hegel.”191

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This rather thin record of the influences of Il’in’s original Russian text on subsequent discussion is evidence of the dislocations brought about by the Bolshevik seizure of power, the Civil War, the subsequent forced deportation of Il’in and many of his associates, plus the effectiveness of the Soviet system of ideological censorship. These effectively denied Il’in’s original Hegel commentary the scholarly attention it deserved. Second Narrative: The German Translation The second narrative of influence stems from the publication in 1946 of Il’in’s shortened German translation of the commentary, under a different title. It was fairly widely reviewed, as compared to the fate of the original publication, and for the most part favorably.192 Over the years a number of other Hegel scholars have been inspired by various aspects of the German version of Il’in’s commentary. Among the more prominent was Wilhelm Seeberger, who in his Hegel: Oder die Entwicklung des Geistes zur Freiheit (Hegel: Or the Development of Spirit Toward Freedom) (1961)193 credited Il’in with being one of the first to fully appreciate the distinctiveness of Hegel’s use of the term “concrete,” distinguishing between the “empirically concrete” and the “speculatively concrete”; and also with developing a consistent interpretation of Hegel’s project that focused explicitly upon this distinctive conception of the “concrete” as a central organizing principle of his philosophy.194 He refers to Il’in’s commentary at intervals throughout his own work as one of the more important influences upon his interpretation of Hegel. The theologian Hans Küng, in his Menschwerdung Gottes (The Incarnation of God ),195 described Il’in’s commentary (as of 1970) as “far and away the most thorough introduction to Hegel’s thought process and theology” published since the end of Word War II.196 Küng used the German edition of Il’in’s work as a source of penetrating insights into the motives and method of Hegel’s philosophical project as a whole. More recently the philosopher Cyril O’Regan, in an insightful and innovative study of Hegel’s “onto-theological” project, in its relation to traditional Christian theology as well as to numerous more heterodox “mystical” influences, has directed particular attention to Il’in’s distinctive contribution to the interpretation of this problem. In The Heterodox Hegel 197 O’Regan argues that narrative, or narrative becoming, “can be predicated of the divine in a truly radical way.”198 This is clearly recognized by Iwan Iljin and is axial in his Die Philosophie Hegels als kontemplative Gotteslehre (1946). For Iljin, the narrative thrust

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of Hegel’s texts extends beyond the economic order. Indeed, read in one way Iljin suggests that the immanent-economic distinction no longer applies, since all elements of the divine are touched by becoming. On the basis of this insight, Iljin elaborates his epochal view of the divine. An epoch is a narrative phase of becoming. Iljin is persuaded that, even before the creation of nature and finite spirit, the divine undergoes a species of narrative development, i.e., development of an atemporal kind.199

The conception of narrative singled out by O’Regan, relying in part upon Il’in’s work, transcends the standard Christian narrative of the entry of God into human history. That narrative is subsumed within a more radical onto-theological project well described by Il’in: The essence of the Hegelian ontotheology, [Iljin] implies, is nothing more than a theogenetic narrative trinitarianly subsumed, or, as we would prefer here, trinitarianly configured. This configuration presents a divine movement of three dominant epochs, the epochs of divine self-manifestation, divine differentiation, and divine return. In his use of the language of “epoch,” Iljin intends to underline not only the narrative commitment present in the Hegelian rendition of the Christian doctrine of the Trinity on the plane of representation but also, and especially, in the conceptual translation of Christianity and its pivotal theologoumenon.200

In O’Regan’s view, Il’in’s project was “the general philosophical one of indicating the ontotheological and narrative essence of Hegelianism,” and in this, “he succeeds admirably.”201 O’Regan refers to Il’in frequently, treating him as one of the more important precursors of his own ontotheological interpretation of Hegel’s project, developed in impressive detail in The Heterodox Hegel. O’Regan’s book has proven to be a milestone in recent scholarship on Hegel’s philosophy of religion. Among its many other accomplishments, it offers an insightful reading of one of the most important aspects of Il’in’s interpretation of Hegel.

Notes on the Translation Translating Il’in’s Russian text into English posed a substantial number of challenges (some of which I may not have solved in an optimal way, to be sure). Many of these challenges originate in the fact that Il’in was

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an exceptionally precise writer. An associate of Peter Struve, K. I. Zaitsev (later the archimandrite Konstantin at Holy Trinity Monastery in Jordanville, New York), grouped Il’in together with Pushkin and Metropolitan Filaret of Moscow as the three greatest masters of language in the history of Russian culture.202 Peter Struve himself offered an equally extravagant judgment of Il’in’s prowess as a writer: I. A. Il’in is an interesting and major phenomenon in the history of educated Russian culture. In the formal sense, he is a specialist in law, but in essence he is a philosopher, that is, a thinker, and in form he is an astounding orator or rhetorician in the best ancient sense of that word. When he writes, he is speaking. And when he speaks, he captures the mind, charms the ear, enters the soul with some special power present in the living, firm, measured, and forged human word. This is not simply “golden oratory.” Here not everything is pleasant, not everything is even pretty in the usual sense of the word, but everything is powerful and sharp. This speech is a sharp chisel precisely driven by a strong hand that, whether the listener desires it or not (for Il’in is above all an orator and not a writer!), somehow inscribes something on your soul and carves it in, like an engraver carving on wood. Il’in is an orator-engraver, that is, a genuine artist with the living word that carves into the soul. Russian culture never before produced one such as he, and he with his face, particular and inimitable, with his original gift, strong and sharp in every sense, will enter its history.203

Il’in’s power and precision as a writer are clearly reflected in the very nuanced Russian vocabulary that he devised in order to convey some of the subtleties of Hegel’s German. The evidence suggests that his reading of the German was very sensitive; he was possessed of something very close to complete mastery of literary German by the time he began the serious study of Hegel in 1908 (the second year of his graduate studies). He immersed himself in Hegel’s German until he felt that he had duplicated Hegel’s “thought act,” that is, come to see the same ultimate object of philosophical inquiry just as Hegel had seen it. At that point he reports that most of the apparent difficulties presented by Hegel’s philosophical language fell away, and he felt capable of translating Hegel’s thought directly into Russian without significant difficulty. One of the numerous devices Il’in employed to accomplish this, when nothing else could quite precisely duplicate the distinctive moves of Hegel’s speculative thinking, was to adapt an older Slavic form no longer in use. As a consequence of his skillful employment of this particular

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device, one may discover that the precise form of an innocuous-looking Russian term in Il’in’s text cannot be found in Dal’, Ushakov, or any other commonly used dictionary, and one’s only hope for understanding it is to retreat to Hegel’s German and try to understand the precise philosophical function of his corresponding term. Sometimes this proves to be the only available solution. On a few occasions it proved possible to locate the appropriate meaning for a term used by Il’in only in a dictionary of Old Church Slavonic. The ease and fluidity with which Il’in on occasion thus “reworked” the Russian language is remarkable. In other cases, one is forced to recognize that Il’in has appropriated a familiar term to express a less familiar meaning. For example, созерцание is a key term in Il’in’s interpretation of Hegel. The most obvious dictionary definition would be “contemplation”; that, however, would be too broad an idea to convey Il’in’s use of the term. He employs it specifically to designate the middle stage of the “philosophical act” that is comprised of three stages: (1) “to summon in oneself the real experience of that object which [the philosopher] wishes to investigate,” (2) “to set about the solitary, intensive inner scrutiny into the essence of the internally given content,” and (3) to provide “the analytical description and rational-logical disclosure of the experienced and observed content.”204 When Il’in insists that Hegel is primarily an “intuitivist” rather than a dialectician, he is drawing attention to the philosopher’s inspection of the object with the inner eye during this second phase of the philosophical act, thus asserting a strong connection between Hegel’s and Husserl’s philosophical methods.205 Finally, Il’in’s translations of созерцать and созерцание into German are consistently anschauen and Anschauung, and not something less specifically “ocular” such as betrachten/ Betrachtung. (One must not be misled by the title Il’in chose for the German version of his commentary: Die Philosophie Hegels als kontemplative Gotteslehre. The term kontemplative nowhere figures in the text itself as a translation of созерцательный, though when the German title is translated back into Russian, созерцательный does appear as the translation of kontemplative.) As a general guideline for the translation, like a number of other recent translators of Hegel texts into English, I have tended to follow the recommendations of Geraets, Suchting, and Harris in their translation of Hegel’s Encyclopedia Logic, especially where they were unanimous.206 Initially I was uncertain whether the “latest” English-language conventions for the translation of Hegel would prove appropriate for a Russian text from 1918; however, to a perhaps surprising extent many of the main distinctions insisted upon by Geraets, Suchting, and Harris seem to have been consistently observed by Il’in.

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Among these would be the distinction between Objekt and Gegenstand. Unlike English, Russian does have a corresponding pair of terms for “object,” объект and предмет. Geraets, Suchting, and Harris point out that whereas Hegel uses Gegenstand for the ordinary object of experience, the object of consciousness, he reserves Objekt for the logical concept of the object (the counterpart to the logical “subject”).207 Il’in employs the pair of Russian terms in such a way as to respect this distinction the overwhelming majority of the time (though not with complete consistency). Once one has decided to mark this distinction between two concepts of “object” in English, one is faced with adopting some arbitrary device to signal it in the text, none of which is an entirely happy choice. I have not followed the example of Geraets, Suchting, and Harris on this point, but have chosen the (mis)spelling “objekt” in English whenever it translates the Russian объект (or the corresponding adjectival or adverbial forms). The normal spelling, “object” (and its corresponding forms), is used to translate предмет (and its various forms). This device seems to me the least obtrusive of the available alternatives. Another point on which I have been guided by the recent translators of the Encyclopedia Logic concerns the famous triplet of allgemeine (всеобщий), besondere (особенный), and einzelne (единичный). They have rejected the traditional translation of these as “universal,” “particular,” and “individual ” in favor of “universal,” “particular” and “singular.” They point out that “individual” is needed to translate individual and Individuum, as well as to characterize the concrete thinking of the logician who unites the separate moments and comprehends them in their unity.208 Thus единичный and related forms have been translated as “singular” here. Dasein (either бывание or наличное бытие in Il’in’s text) presents some difficulties in that the three translators of the Logic are not in agreement concerning the best policy for translation. Geraets and Harris rejected the traditional translation of “determinate being” in favor of “being-there” or “thereness” for several reasons, none of which was found compelling by Suchting. In addition, as a general policy he wishes to observe a distinction between technical and nontechnical uses of many of Hegel’s terms (a policy rejected by the other two translators), and he points out that in the nontechnical sense, which he would use on occasion, Dasein just means “existence.” I have chosen to follow Suchting in this respect, and have occasionally translated бывание as “existence.” For the most part, however, I have chosen to use the painfully literal “therebeing,” on the grounds that no one is ever likely to fail to grasp the connection with Dasein.209

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Geraets, Suchting, and Harris also insist that the German terms wissen and erkennen must always be distinguished. They opted to translate wissen and related forms as “know” or “knowledge” and erkennen (in its various forms) as “cognize” or “cognition,” notwithstanding the inelegance of the latter term in English. I have followed them in this, translating знать and знание as “to know” and “knowledge,” but познать and познание as “to cognize” and “cognition.” Il’in’s interpretation of Hegel focuses importantly upon the concept of the “concrete universal” as the criterion of reality in the system. Therefore the terms “concrete” and “concretion” (and numerous related variants) play a critical role in the text. As Il’in observed in chapter 1, “the term ‘concrete’ derives from the Latin word ‘concrescere.’ ‘Crescere’ means ‘to grow’; ‘concrescere’ means to grow together, to arise through growing together. According to this, ‘concrete’ in Hegel means, first of all, ‘grown together.’ ”210 Throughout the text Il’in continually draws attention to this more basic meaning, “grown together,” underlying the technical term “concrete.” Thus сращивание might legitimately be translated in most contexts as “concretion” or “concretizing” (the process), and not “growing together”; сращенность might be translated as “concreteness” or “concretizedness”(!) and not “grown togetherness,” and so on. However, it is unmistakably clear that Il’in in most contexts wishes to emphasize the underlying notion of “growing together.” Thus, even at the cost of occasional awkward English locutions, I have almost always preferred some version of “grown together” rather than “concrete.” And of course, when Il’in simply wishes to say “concrete” he has available the various forms of the Russian term конкретный, which he also employs on occasion. A parallel set of terms often used by Il’in in the same contexts involving references to concretion are the noun слияние (1. confluence. 2. [fig.] blending, merging, amalgamation; merger) and the verb forms сливаться (слиться) (1. to flow together. 2. [fig.] to blend, mingle; to merge, amalgamate)—both definitions from the Oxford Russian-English Dictionary —and occasionally слитость (a noun form referring to the state of having flowed together, being blended, merged, etc.). Thus Il’in closely associates the two (figurative) actions of “growing together” and “flowing together” as means of indicating the process of concretizing. What is thus “grown together” or has “flowed together” (blended, merged, joined, fused) is not a simple identity, but an identity-in-difference in which the new unity can only be accounted for by also referring to the (previously separate) identities that have now entered into the makeup of the new unity. The absence of a precisely equivalent noun form in English that would indicate “the state of having flowed together” presents

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a continuing challenge for the translator; neither “blended,” “merged,” “joined,” nor “fused” conveys quite the right meaning, but one is usually forced to make do with one of these terms. Il’in’s use of слияние poses another special problem for the translator. He also treats it as the Russian equivalent of the German term Schluß (“conclusion”), which is also a standard term in the German philosophical lexicon for “syllogism.” At numerous points in the text, Il’in uses слияние straightforwardly as a synonym of силлогизм. (The plausibility of this can perhaps be seen when one recalls that the conclusion of a syllogism is produced by a “flowing together” [blending, merging, fusing] of two premises into a unity.) To introduce yet another layer of complication: Il’in also on occasion employs yet another Russian term— умозаключение (“deduction,” “conclusion,” “inference”)—as a more or less exact equivalent of the German Schluß, hence as yet another possible term for “syllogism.” Thus a “syllogism” for Il’in may be a силлогизм, a слияние, or an умозаключение. (For examples of all these occurrences, refer to the endnotes for chapter 7.) Another challenge for the translator arises not from Il’in’s philosophical lexicon in particular, but from the fairly standard Russian philosophical convention in which the German Verstand (“the understanding”) is translated by the term рассудок (rassudok). The standard dictionary definition of the latter term is simply “reason”; however, in ordinary usage рассудок tends to be distinguished from another widely used term for “reason”: разум (razum). Рассудок tends to be used as a synonym of “common sense,” and is understood to refer to an ability to exercise prudential considerations in discursive judgments, on the basis of knowledge that is readily available. Разум, on the other hand, tends to refer to a higher form of creative intellectual activity, involving the ability to originate new knowledge.211 The Russian philosophical convention is to translate Verstand by рассудок (with the implication of abstract reason), and Vernunft by разум (e.g., as in Hegel’s sense of speculative or concrete reason). In an English translation one is then faced with the choice of translating рассудок as “the understanding” or as “abstract reason.” One can make an excellent case for the first option; however, in practice one encounters a further complication: Il’in very frequently employs the adjectival form рассудочный, and places it in longer phrases that would often be awkward to render using the term “understanding,” since “understanding” does not have an adjectival form in English. There is the further philosophical point that, as Hegel insisted, Verstand is itself a form of reason (though an abstract form), and hence there is a good justification for the Russian convention of translating it as рассудок. Accordingly, I have adopted the

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policy of most often translating рассудок as “abstract reason” (Verstand), and thus distinguishing it from разум—“reason” (Vernunft). However, there are occasional contexts where “the understanding” is decidedly preferable, and I have used it in a limited number of cases. Accordingly, the reader should always keep in mind that “abstract reason” and “the understanding” are essentially equally valid translations of рассудок. A further difficulty arises in connection with the Russian term дурной (1. bad, evil, nasty . . . 2. ugly, 3. foolish, stupid [from the Oxford Russian-English Dictionary]). Дурной is one of the standard dictionary terms used to translate the German schlect (“bad,” “wicked,” “evil,” “base,” “mean,” etc.). This is of course the term Hegel uses in such phrases as “the bad infinite” (das Schlect-Unendliche), sometimes also translated as “spurious” (e.g., by Miller in his translation of the Science of Logic). The simplest policy would be to invariably translate дурной as “bad” and leave it at that. However, other considerations intervene: first, Il’in appears to use дурной rather more frequently than Hegel employs schlect in some contexts. In particular, when discussing the merely external, empirical “other” which is ultimately incapable of being absorbed into the Concept, and which thus forms a basis for evil or tragedy in the world, Il’in constantly describes such elements as дурной. In such contexts one is drawn to other dictionary meanings of the term rather than “bad,” such as “foolish” or “stupid,” and by extension to the idea of “senseless.” What is senseless is incapable of attaining meaning, and hence impossible to assimilate into the Concept. Thus, in addition to “bad” I have also used “senseless” in many instances to translate дурной. In consultation with George Kline and Marina Bykova, I have translated самобытность as “distinct being” in preference to the more usual “originality.” I have also followed Professor Kline’s recommendations in frequently using “self-sufficiency” rather than “independence” for самостоятельность, and “self-activity” for самодеятельность.212 Finally, the Russian language, unlike most European languages, possesses a term (снять) quite close in meaning to the ordinary German term aufheben. Thus, Russian translators do not have to strain over this particular bit of Hegelian terminology. Unfortunately, this does not help English translators, who still have to deal with the tortured problem of what to do with both pairs of terms. I have followed Geraets, Suchting, and Harris in using the quite artificial but by now traditional “sublate” and “sublation,” the chief and perhaps only virtue of which is surely their familiarity to English-language readers of Hegel. Numerous other particular issues of translation throughout the text are addressed by means of lettered endnotes following each chapter.

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A Note on Il’in’s System of Citation for Hegel’s Texts Any reader of Il’in’s commentary will soon come to appreciate the remarkable number of references that he produced to relevant passages in Hegel’s texts scattered throughout the entire original Gesammelte Werke edition, plus a few additional sources, all confined to very abbreviated footnotes on the appropriate pages. (The abbreviations used are spelled out in part 1 of the bibliographic appendix at the end of this volume.) Until quite recently the original Werke edition was no longer readily accessible in printed form, and none of the most recent print editions maintained the same pagination as the original. Therefore it would have been highly desirable to convert all of the page references to a modern edition of Hegel’s collected works, or, yet more ambitiously, to an English translation of each text. However, the sheer number of such references makes that goal unrealizable; there are on occasion as many as fifty to one hundred separate citations at the bottom of a single page of Il’in’s commentary. Not only would the labor involved have greatly delayed the publication of the translation, but it would be very difficult not to introduce numerous errors in the process. Quite recently, many of the main volumes of the original Werke edition have become readily accessible again as full-text reproductions online in googlebooks.com. This may now be the simplest way of tracking down most of Il’in’s citations. Another solution that I have found workable requires access to the Jubiläumsausgabe in twenty volumes edited by Hermann Glockner as the Sämtliche Werke (1957–71). It is a facsimile edition of the original Werke edition, and although it introduced its own page numbers, the original pagination of the Werke edition is preserved at the top (inner edge) of each page. These numbers correspond exactly to those used by Il’in, and can in the overwhelming majority of cases be used to locate the precise Hegel passage that Il’in is citing without difficulty. This device fails to work only in the case of the two volumes of The Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (11 and 12 in the Werke edition), including the “Lectures on the Proofs for the Existence of God,” contained in volume 12, to which Il’in sometimes refers. Il’in used the first (1832) Werke edition of these lectures edited by Marheineke (often labelled W1), considering it superior to the 1840 edition (W2) that later replaced it in the Werke collection. The latter edition was also issued under Marheineke’s name, but actually edited by Bruno Bauer.213 After 1840, W2 was the edition of volumes 11 and 12 standardly reproduced in the Werke

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collection, and is also the one reproduced in Glockner’s Sämtliche Werke. Consequently, the pagination for volumes 11 and 12 in the Glockner edition does not match Il’in’s page references for these two volumes, which are to Marheineke’s W1 edition. The latter is much harder to obtain. (A guide to page equivalences for these two volumes is provided in an appendix to this book.) Another device that can be used where Il’in has quoted a phrase from a Hegel text in German (as he often does in footnotes) is an electronic search of the Intelex CD-ROM database, which contains the complete Suhrkamp edition of the Werke.

List of Abbreviations The following abbreviations are used to cite basic sources in the notes for the translator’s introduction.

Books IAI:SS

I. A. Il’in, Собрание сочинений (Collected Works), ed. Iu. T. Lisitsa (Moscow: Russkaia kniga, 1993–). The collected works in ten numbered volumes (twelve tomes), the final volume of which is double-numbered: 9–10. These have been supplemented by another sixteen unnumbered volumes (at latest count) belonging to the same series of collected works, making a total of twenty-eight books. The most recent of these supplementary volumes (2006 and 2008) have been published by the Orthodox St. Tikhonov Humanities University.

FG I

I. A. Il’in, Философия Гегеля как учение о конкретности Бога и человека (The Philosophy of Hegel as a Doctrine of the Concreteness of God and Humanity), vol. 1, Учение о Боге (The Doctrine of God ), ed. Iu. T. Lisitsa (Moscow: Russkaia kniga, 2002), 448 pp. (Unnumbered supplementary volume in IAI:SS.)

FG II

I. A. Il’in, Философия Гегеля как учение о конкретности Бога и человека (The Philosophy of Hegel as a Doctrine of the Concreteness of God and Humanity), vol. 2, Учение о человеке (The Doctrine of Humanity), ed. Iu. T. Lisitsa (Moscow: Russkaia kniga, 2002), 601 pp. (Unnumbered supplementary volume in IAI:SS.)

DPD

I. A. Il’in, Дневник, письма, документы (1903–1938) (Diary, Letters, Documents [1903–1938]), ed. Iu. T. Lisitsa (Moscow: Russkaia kniga, 1999). (Unnumbered supplementary volume in IAI:SS.)

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I. A. Il’in, Теория права и государства (Theory of Law and State), ed. V. A. Tomsinov (Moscow: Izd. Zertsalo, 2003), 399 pp. (Two works by Il’in, with an introduction by Tomsinov.)

Journals: VFiPs

Вопросы философии и псикологии (Problems of Philosophy and Psychology)

VF

Вопросы философии (Problems of Philosophy)

RM

Русская мысль (Russian Thought)

Notes 1. Ivan Aleksandrovich Il’in, Философия Гегеля как учение о конкретности Бога и человека (The Philosophy of Hegel as a Doctrine of the Concreteness of God and Humanity), vol. 1, Учение о Боге (The Doctrine of God), 301 pp.; vol. 2, Учение о человеке (The Doctrine of Humanity), 356 pp. (Moscow: Leman and Sakharov, 1918). In 1994 the two volumes were reprinted together as a single tome, with modernized orthography, and with an introductory essay by I. I. Evlampiev (St. Petersburg: Nauka), making the text much more easily obtainable. The two separate volumes have subsequently been reedited, annotated, and republished with additional supporting materials in 2002 as supplementary volumes in I. A. Il’in, Собрание сочинений (Collected Works), ed. Iu. T. Lisitsa (Moscow: Russkaia kniga, 1993– ). 2. N. P. Poltoratsky, Иван Александрович Ильин: Жизнь, труды, мировоззрение: Сборник статей (Ivan Aleksandrovich Il’in: Life, Works, Worldview: An Anthology of Articles) (Tenafly, N.J.: Hermitage, 1989), 12. 3. Il’in was charged with offering his services to the counterrevolutionary White forces gathering in southern Russia, and specifically with accepting 8,000 rubles from an American agent, Vladimir Bary, for distribution to the Petrograd branch of an underground organization, the “Volunteer Army,” to which he allegedly belonged in Moscow. Il’in apparently did receive the funds from Bary; his motives and the ultimate disposition of the money were never fully clarified. Il’in would be arrested by the Cheka twice more in 1918 in connection with this matter (August 11 and November 3), being held by them for a total of about two months during that year. His case was brought before the Moscow Revolutionary Tribunal on December 28, but he was acquitted for lack of sufficient evidence. Recent investigations have confirmed a rumor persisting since 1918, that Lenin himself intervened with the tribunal on Il’in’s behalf, out of admiration for Il’in’s commentary on Hegel. See the excellent “Биографический очерк” (“Biographical Essay”) by V. A. Tomsinov in TPiG, 26–27. Il’in would be arrested by the Cheka (GPU) three more times, once in 1919, once in 1920, and finally again in 1922. Having been arrested in February 1920, Il’in was released quite unexpectedly just two days later. It appears that he was

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saved from execution a second time by the direct intervention of Lenin, again motivated by Lenin’s respect for his work on Hegel. (In his file at the GPU there was apparently a notation to the effect that he was a “Hegelian” and for that reason was to be treated with care!) See TPiG, 27–28. Following his sixth arrest in September 1922, Il’in was exiled from Soviet Russia under threat of execution, along with a significant number of other prominent intellectuals, all of whom were exiled to western Europe on the famous “philosophers’ steamship” (there were actually two such ships, one that sailed at the end of September 1922 and a second in mid-November). For more information on the exile of the intellectuals, see note 9 below. For details on the arrests, see “Иван Александрович Ильин: Историко-биографический очерк” (“Ivan Aleksandrovich Il’in: Historico-Biographical Essay”) by Iu. T. Lisitsa in IAI:SS, 1:18–27. 4. The “Society of Junior Lecturers” at Moscow University was particularly active on Il’in’s behalf, sending repeated demands to the Cheka that he be released into their custody on grounds of his ill health, the importance of his teaching and research, and the need to prepare for the upcoming defense of his dissertation. See the materials collected in DPD, 373–78. 5. See the account provided by Il’in in “Памяти П. И. Новгородцева” (“A Commemoration of P. I. Novgorodtsev”), in IAI:SS, 9–10:249–54. 6. Ibid. Il’in recounted that Novgorodtsev’s self-composure and forcefulness of spirit were astonishing under the circumstances. As Il’in bade him farewell with foreboding after the defense, knowing from personal experience what might await him in the cellars of the Lubianka, Novgorodtsev reminded him of Socrates’ claim that no evil can come to the individual who fulfills his duty, either in life or in death. They were never to meet again; Novgorodtsev died in exile in Prague in 1924. 7. Academic regulations required that if both volumes were to be accepted for the award of degrees, both would have to be published prior to the defense. In the event, the second volume was hand delivered to the Faculty of Law by its publisher Leman-Abrikosov in several copies, direct from the press, just as the defense was about to begin. See G. A. Leman-Abrikosov, Воспоминания (Memoirs), 1900–1920s, part 1 (excerpt reprinted in DPD, 590). 8. There were almost no reviews or discussions of Il’in’s commentary published in the immediate time frame of its appearance, save for a laudatory mention by A. F. Losev in a review he published in 1918, of new publications in Russian philosophy appearing in 1917–18, in the journal Жизнь (Life) (no. 24; May 1918). See below p. xxxix. Sergei Bulgakov wrote a short response as an appendix to something he wrote in 1920–21, but it was not published until many years later. Similarly, Nikolai Bubnov wrote two short paragraphs on Il’in’s commentary that were not published until 1927. These are reprinted in the appendix to FG II, 468–69. A. F. Losev made positive references to Il’in’s commentary in 1927, and may have been influenced by Il’in’s interpretation of Hegel’s dialectic. See in this translator’s introduction the section “Main Influences of Il’in’s Commentary, First Narrative: The Original Russian Text.” Quite unexpectedly, an unfin-

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ished draft of a contemporaneous review of Il’in’s commentary by Gustav Shpet, apparently undertaken in 1918, was published for the first time in 2004. See note 108 below. 9. Il’in’s exile occurred as part of a roundup by the secret police (GPU) of approximately 225 intellectuals in several Russian cities during August and September 1922. A substantial fraction of these were shortly sent into exile aboard the “philosophy steamers.” Many of the remainder were required to leave Soviet Russia by their own means, prior to an agreed deadline. Still others were sentenced to internal exile, but the fates of a significant portion of the arrestees are still unknown. There is a growing literature dealing with this event. See in particular L. A. Kogan, “ ‘Выслать за границу безжалостно’ (Новое об изгнании духовной элиты)” (“ ‘To Be Exiled Abroad Without Pity’ [New Material on the Expulsion of the Spiritual Elite]”), VF 9 (1993): 61–84; and S. Khoruzhii, “Философский пароход” (“The Philosophy Steamer”), Литературная газета (Literary Gazette), May 9 and June 6, 1990. An excellent documentary history has been published recently: Высылка вместо расстрела: Депортация интеллигенции в документах ВЧК-ГПУ 1921–1923 (Exile Instead of Execution: The Deportation of the Intelligentsia in Documents of VChK-GPU, 1921–1923) (Moscow: Russkii put’, 2005). See also the work by Lesley Chamberlain, The Philosophy Steamer: Lenin and the Exile of the Intelligentsia (U.K.: Atlantic Books, 2006); as well as Stuart Finkel, On the Ideological Front: The Russian Intelligentsia and the Making of the Soviet Public Sphere (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 2007). 10. In the late 1980s when, upon the recommendation of George Kline, I first became curious about Il’in’s commentary on Hegel, I could discover records of only a single copy held in any American library, and that copy was not permitted to circulate or be copied. The problem of access to the Russian text was significantly eased by the republication of the complete text of the original two volumes (bound in a single tome) in 1994, with an introductory essay by I. I. Evlampiev (St. Petersburg: Nauka, 1994). A fully annotated and corrected edition, edited by Iu. T. Lisitsa, with a substantial appendix of supporting materials, and an index of names, was published in two volumes in 2002 as unnumbered supplementary volumes in the Collected Works (FG I and FG II ). 11. Iwan Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels als kontemplative Gotteslehre (Bern: A. Francke, 1946), 431 pp. 12. I have in mind above all Il’in’s claim, central to his interpretation, that Hegel was forced to “compromise” his original intention in carrying out his philosophical project. Also, most contemporary Hegel scholars and many contemporary theologians would probably regard Hegel’s introduction of the themes of tragedy and suffering into the life of the Divine as of greater interest than Il’in’s insistence on the impassibility of the Divine. Ironically, one of the points of greatest value in Il’in’s interpretation—his painstaking documentation of the presence of an ineliminable element of irrational other-being, incapable of being absorbed into the absolute—constitutes, in Il’in’s view, the basis for his claim that Hegel was forced to compromise his original project. 13. I. A. Il’in, letter to Gurevich, August 13 ( July 31), 1911, in DPD, 56.

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14. For example, the seven chapters constituting part 1 (“The Doctrine of the Essence of the Divine”) of volume 1 are as follows: 1. The Concrete-Empirical, 2. The Abstract-Formal, 3. Of Speculative Thinking in General (The Doctrine of Reason), 4. The Reality of Thought, 5. The Universality of Thought, 6. Dialectic, 7. The Concrete-Speculative. This categorial sequence doesn’t correspond to the table of contents of any of Hegel’s major works, but rather constitutes Il’in’s judgment of the “backbone,” so to speak, of Hegel’s doctrine of the real. 15. See Il’in’s account of the Hegel texts he used in the “Works by Hegel” section of the bibliographic appendix in the present volume. 16. For a fuller discussion of this and other aspects of Il’in’s commentary, see my essay “The Speculative Concrete: I. A. Il’in’s Interpretation of Hegel” in Hegel, History, and Interpretation, ed. Shaun Gallagher (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1997), 169–93. See also the very valuable article by Pavel Rojek, “Three Trope Theories,” in Axiomathes 18 (2008). 17. See, for example, William Maker, “Identity, Difference, and the Logic of Otherness,” and Robert R. Williams, “Double Transition, Dialectic, and Recognition,” in Identity and Difference: Studies in Hegel’s Logic, Philosophy of Spirit, and Politics, ed. Philip T. Grier (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 2007). 18. See the latter half of chapter 9 of Il’in’s text. See also double transition in note 19 just below. 19. These issues have been raised anew in some important recent publications. For example, William Maker has argued that the very demand for systematic completeness of thought, usually regarded as the source of the “privileging” of identity over otherness, can in fact be realized only through the presence of an ineradicable otherness or difference. Hegel may therefore “lay claim to being the philosopher of difference, otherness, and non-identity.” Similarly, Robert Williams has recently argued that our familiar understanding of dialectical transition in Hegel must be substantially revised to take into account clarifications that Hegel introduced into later editions of some of his major works. According to Williams, Hegel insisted that all dialectical mediation must be understood to involve a double transition in which both the subject and the other are mutually implicated, and in terms of which neither the one nor the other could be “absorbed” or wholly transcended. See their essays in Grier, Identity and Difference. Such an understanding of dialectical mediation, and of the necessity for ineliminable otherness or difference for the completion of the system, might have deflected Il’in from his fundamental conclusion that Hegel had been forced to “compromise” his original project of theodicy. One need hardly refer to the very latest developments in Hegel scholarship for an apt response to Il’in’s critique, however. For example, one can find a cogent response in Errol Harris’s An Interpretation of the Logic of Hegel (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1983), 287–306. There he defends Hegel’s doctrine of the Absolute Idea against a criticism by G. R. Mure that parallels Il’in’s. Moreover, in a personal communication (1993), Harris made the following observation: “The mistake clearly is to undervalue the importance of difference in unity (and/or identity). These critics all forget Hegel’s protest against

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‘the night in which all cows are black.’ His absolute is never a bland (abstract) unity. So how can Il’in, after so admirably grasping the nature of speculative concreteness, complain that the Absolute fails to abolish the reality (not ultimate) of tragedy, death, etc.? The Absolute just would not be concrete if the Other were lost in it without trace. Surely the whole point of Hegel’s argument is that the Self, God, the Idea is at home with itself in its Other. The identity of the One and the Other in the Absolute preserves death, and neither is totally submerged even if and when transcended (übergriffen or aufgehoben)” (quoted with permission of Professor Harris). 20. I have in mind the very widespread assumption, particularly in twentiethcentury “Continental” philosophy, that Hegel’s dialectical system, followed through to the end, culminates in a conception of the absolute in which all genuine difference, the other, has been eliminated, swallowed up in a conception of the real as simply self-identical. 21. Cyril O’Regan, The Heterodox Hegel (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1994). See in this translator’s introduction, the section “Main Influences of Il’in’s Commentary, Second Narrative: the German Translation.” For a further insightful discussion of Il’in’s theological views, in a somewhat different perspective from O’Regan’s, see the work by Robert R. Williams: Tragedy, Recognition and the Death of God: Studies in Hegel and Nietzsche (forthcoming). Il’in’s presentation of Hegel’s system in terms of “onto-theology,” to which O’Regan draws attention, also finds support in Adriaan Peperzak’s Modern Freedom: Hegel’s Legal, Moral, and Political Philosophy (Dordrecht and Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 2001), esp. 69– 72. Peperzak there criticizes several recent interpreters such as Pippin who have argued that Spirit (Geist) should not be viewed “as a thing at all, either material or immaterial, but as a category required within any full account of the mind’s capacity to give accounts at all” (Peperzak, Modern Freedom, 71n40). Obviously Il’in’s commentary significantly antedates this particular controversy. 22. For a more detailed study of this development, see my chapter “Adventures in Dialectic and Intuition: Shpet, Il’in and Losev,” forthcoming in A History of Russian Philosophy, 1830–1930, ed. Gary Hamburg and Randall Poole (Cambridge University Press). 23. For a discussion of this development, see the section “Russian Philosophy: Between Hegel and Husserl” of this translator’s introduction. 24. See the section “Hegel and Husserl: Dialectic and Intuition” of this translator’s introduction. An insightful approach to the solution of these issues can also be found in the work of William Earle. In a series of books and articles published from the 1950s through the 1980s, he mounted a systematic and vigorous defense of the claim that philosophical knowledge is necessarily grounded in an intuition of reality. Moreover, Hegel and Husserl were the primary inspiration behind Earle’s own distinctive presentation of his philosophical position. 25. Il’in worked with Husserl especially intensively during the summer of 1911, according to his letters to Gurevich. (See especially the letter of August 13 [ July 31], 1911, in DPD, 51ff.) During this period he adopted significant elements of Husserl’s phenomenology in his own conception of philosophical

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method which he termed the “philosophical act.” Il’in appears to have retained that conception of method more or less until the end of his life. See also the section “Il’in on Method: The ‘Philosophical Act’ ” in my introduction. 26. Il’in was very active in the intense discussions of Freudian psychoanalysis in Moscow from about 1912, when most of Freud’s major works were translated into Russian (though Il’in seems to have read them in the original German beginning somewhat earlier). He was a regular participant in the “Little Fridays” discussion group at the Moscow University Psychiatric Clinic. In May 1914 Il’in traveled to Vienna to undergo daily therapy sessions with Freud himself for six weeks. These were brought to an end by the outbreak of World War I, at which point Il’in became an enemy alien in the view of the Austrian authorities. See Magnus Ljunggren, “The Psychoanalytic Breakthrough in Russia on the Eve of the First World War,” in Russian Literature and Psychoanalysis, ed. Daniel RancourLaferriere (Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, 1989), 174, 179–80. See also Magnus Ljunggren, The Russian Mephisto: A Study of the Life and Work of Emilii Medtner (Stockholm, Almqvist and Wiksell: 1994), 64, 82, 84. 27. Il’in was active in the Moscow Religious-Philosophical Society in Memory of Solov’ev, one of the principal venues for discussions of “God-seeking.” There he played the role of a very skeptical critic of the various branches of this loosely organized “movement,” both in its literary and its philosophical manifestations. He was a particularly severe critic of the anthroposophists. The grounds of his critique of these movements can be found in “Философия как духовное делание” (“Philosophy as a Spiritual Undertaking”), RM, no. 36 (1915), no. 3 (March): 112–28; reprinted in a volume entitled Религиозный смысл философии: Три речи 1914–1923 (The Religious Meaning of Philosophy: Three Speeches 1914–1923) (Paris: YMCA, 1925), which was republished in IAI:SS, 3:15–88. See esp. 30–35. 28. Il’in was a great devotee of the theater, and especially of Stanislavsky’s innovations in dramatic method, then making a strong impression upon theatergoers in Moscow. Il’in’s cousin Liubov’ Gurevich was a friend of Stanislavsky’s, and introduced the two. In October 1912 Il’in approached Stanislavsky with an offer to supply a philosophically well-grounded aesthetic, to provide a theoretical context for Stanislavsky’s work. Stanislavsky was uninterested in the proposition, leading Il’in to explain to Liubov’ ruefully that “this brilliant man is much more needed by me, and gives me much more, than I him.” Il’in, letter to Gurevich, October 25, 1912, in DPD, 68. 29. I. A. Il’in, “Понятия права и силы” (“The Concepts of Right and Power”), VFiPs 101(2) (1910): 1–38. Also published in German translation in 1912 as “Die Begriffe von Recht und Kraft” in Sonderabdruck aus dem Archiv für systematische Philosophie. 30. I. A. Il’in, “Идея личности в учении Штирнера” (“The Idea of the Person in Stirner’s Doctrine”), VFiPs 106(2) (1911): 55–93. 31. I. A. Il’in, “Кризис субъекта в наукоучении Фихте Старшего” (“The Crisis of the Subject in the Wissenschaftslehre of Fichte”), VFiPs 111(2) (1912): 1–39; and “Философия Фихте как религия совести” (“Fichte’s Philosophy as a Religion of Conscience”), VFiPs 122(2) (1914): 165–85. 32. I. A. Il’in, “О любезности” (“On Courtesy”), RM 33, no. 5 (1912): 1–36.

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33. I. A. Il’in, “Философия как духовное делание” (“Philosophy as a Spiritual Undertaking”), RM 36, no. 125 (1915): 112–28. 34. Having been formally proposed for membership by Trubetskoi, Lopatin, and Shpet at the end of 1909. See IAI:SS, 1:11, and note 55 (p. 365). 35. For a complete bibliography of Il’in’s publications, as well as of some early unpublished essays, see И. А. Ильин: Сочинения в двух томах (I. A. Il’in: Works in Two Volumes), ed. Iu. T. Lisitsa and E. V. Antonova (Moscow: Izd. Medium, 1993), 2:513–59. 36. For a detailed examination of that history, see Paul F. Robinson, The White Russian Army in Exile, 1920–1941 (Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). 37. In 1932 the Russian Academic Institute ceased to be able to pay its instructors, and is widely reported to have ceased functioning as of that date. However, it appears that in reality it continued operating in some fashion up until fall 1937. See Tomsinov, “Биографический очерк” (“Biographical Essay”), in TPiG, 41 and 54. 38. Ibid., 54–56. 39. Il’in and his wife were initially able to enter Switzerland only on a temporary basis, and were constantly threatened with being returned to Nazi Germany. It proved possible to convert their status to permanent residence only upon payment of a “Caution” to the Swiss government of 4,000 francs, which far exceeded any resources available to them. The composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, then resident in Switzerland, generously provided the funds that enabled them to remain in Switzerland, thus very possibly saving their lives. Some of Il’in’s letters to Rachmaninoff during this extremely stressful period are printed in DPD, 360–70. 40. For a more detailed account of these events, see my “The Complex Legacy of Ivan Il’in,” in Russian Thought After Communism: The Recovery of a Philosophical Heritage, ed. James P. Scanlan (Armonk, N.Y.: M. E. Sharpe, 1994), 165–86. 41. To be sure, there is a slight historical irony here, since Il’in was very strongly associated in life with General Wrangel’, and not with General Denikin. 42. For an excellent overview of Novgorodtsev’s contributions to legal thought, see Andrzej Walicki, Legal Philosophies of Russian Liberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1987), chapter 5. 43. The phrase “legal consciousness” is by no means an adequate translation of the complex notion of правосознание. It refers simultaneously to the concept of the rule of law in the state, and to awareness on the part of rulers as well as ruled of the authority of objective Right (Recht, Право) within the political community. 44. See my entry on E. N. Trubetskoi in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, online edition, as well as the article by Randall Poole cited in note 45 below. 45. See Walicki, Legal Philosophies of Russian Liberalism, chapter 2 and pp. 210ff. See also the excellent essay by Randall Poole, “Religion, War and Revolution: E. N. Trubetskoi’s Liberal Construction of Russian National Identity, 1912–20,” in Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 7, no. 2 (Spring 2006): 195–240.

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46. See the memorial tribute to Trubetskoi by Il’in: “Духовная культура и ее национальные вожди” (“Spiritual Culture and Its National Leaders”), in IAI:SS, 9–10:235–49. Trubetskoi was forced to flee Moscow later in 1918, reaching the temporary safety of Kiev. He died of typhus in January 1920, in southern Russia, still in flight from the Bolsheviks. 47. Lisitsa, “Историко-биографический очерк” (“Historico-Biographical Essay”) in IAI:SS, 1:8. 48. However, in 1910, just after Il’in’s formal graduate studies were completed, Professor Trubetskoi resigned from his position at Moscow University in protest over government repression of academic autonomy, and resumed it only in 1917. See Walicki, Legal Philosophies of Russian Liberalism, 296–97. 49. See Tomsinov, “Биографический очерк” (“Biographical Essay”), in TPiG, 13–14. 50. Il’in, letter to Gurevich, August 13 ( July 31), 1911 in DPD, 56. This ambition was ultimately to be realized in a way, though many years later and in the radically changed circumstances of his exile. 51. Ibid., 56–57. In its final form, Il’in’s commentary on Hegel certainly achieved this ambition. It is in fact a “synthesizing” reconstruction of Hegel’s philosophical system that doesn’t precisely duplicate the rhetorical structures of any of Hegel’s major works, but rather attempts to reproduce the logical stages of that system as a whole. 52. For a more detailed account of this, see my article “The Speculative Concrete” in Gallagher, Hegel, History and Interpretation, 169–93. (Also published in Russian translation and reprinted in English in FG II, 520–48 and 574–92.) 53. He also taught at a variety of other institutions of higher education in Moscow, including the Moscow Commercial Institute, where he taught for a number of years. 54. The twelve theses concerning Hegel defended by Il’in on this occasion (February 22, 1914) are reprinted in FG I, 395–97. 55. (1)“Учение Гегеля о сущности спекулятивной мысли” (“Hegel’s Doctrine of the Essence of Speculative Thought”), in Логос (Logos) 1, no. 2 (1914): 250–306; (2)“Учение Гегеля о реальности и всеобщности мысли” (“Hegel’s Doctrine of the Reality and Universality of Thought”), VFiPs 123(3) (1914): 413–76; (3)“Проблема оправдания мира в философии Гегеля” (“The Problem of the Justification of the World in Hegel’s Philosophy”), VFiPs 132, 133 (2–3) (1916): 280–355; (4)“Логика Гегеля и ее религиозный смысл” (“Hegel’s Logic and Its Religious Meaning”), VFiPs 13(1) (1916): 513–45; (5)“Учение Гегеля о свободе воли” (“Hegel’s Doctrine of Freedom of the Will”), VFiPs 137, 138 (2–3) (1917): 165–224; and (6)“Учение Гегеля о морали и нравственности” (“Hegel’s Doctrine of Morality and Ethical Life”), VFiPs 139, 140 (4–5) (1917): 151–227.

These six articles totaled about 361 pages, i.e., 50 pages more than the published first volume of the dissertation. In addition, the preface to volume 1 contained

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material originally published in 1912 as “О возраждении гегелианства” (“On the Renaissance of Hegelianism”), RM 33, no. 4 (1912): 35–41. 56. See the remarks near the beginning of the bibliographic appendix at the end of this volume (in the section “Literature on Hegel”). See also Il’in’s letter to Gurevich of February 19, 1915, in DPD, 86–87. There he complains that the Austrians also took from him a number of already completed pages of the Hegel manuscript which he is now forced to re-create. 57. The term “act” serves as a technical term for Husserl, gradually acquiring more specific and refined uses as his account of phenomenology developed from Logical Investigations through Ideas. The “Fifth Investigation” in the Logical Investigations begins the explicit, systematic treatment of this theme. 58. Indeed, Il’in refers to Husserl in a letter as the “reviver ” of the phenomenological method: “This phenomenological or descriptive method, with the conscious reviver of which (in logic) I have spent now the entire summer (Husserl) . . .” (DPD, 52). See also note 82 below. 59. See the letter to L. Ia. Gurevich of August 13 ( July 31), 1911, in DPD, 51–58. 60. He continues: “This phenomenological or descriptive method, with the deliberate reviver [возродитель] of which (in logic) I have spent the entire summer (Гуссерль, Husserl), unquestionably provides and can provide a mass of new, and in their significance, surprisingly, unimaginably valuable things. . . . But the main thing is that in the spheres of the humanities, and especially philosophy, it is the sole path to that ‘penetrating bite’ that I just referred to” (Il’in, letter to Gurevich, in DPD, 52). (Note Il’in’s disinclination to credit Husserl with the discovery of anything fundamentally new in the way of philosophical method; Il’in regards him as having “revived” a method as old as philosophy itself, while at the same time characterizing that method with unprecedented precision.) 61. Il’in, letter to Gurevich of August 13 ( July 31), 1911, in DPD, 52. The method that Il’in here attributes to Husserl is obviously that of eidetic intuition and variation. 62. “Constructable” here certainly does not mean that the object, the content of the experience, is produced by consciousness. Neither Husserl nor Il’in would have accepted any such implication. Husserl spoke rather of the object “constituting itself.” It is necessary to note that Il’in’s use of the term “experience” allows for a potential ambiguity: “experience” might be taken to refer simply to the act of apprehending an object given to the cognizing subject (presumably the appropriate sense), or it might be taken to refer to the self-reflexive act of the subject’s reflecting upon his own act of apprehending an object (presumably inappropriate, because it would necessarily involve the self-awareness of the subject as an element of the cognitive act). For a careful treatment of this distinction (as between a “prereflexive” and a “reflexive” act of cognition), see William Earle, Objectivity: An Essay in Phenomenological Ontology (Chicago: Quadrangle Books, 1968), 23–34. In Il’in’s more careful expositions of the point, he appears to make the appropriate distinction and observe it consistently.

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63. For a similar claim see Earle, Objectivity, 54: “Separate acts of apprehension may grasp the same object, as when I think twice of the same universal circle, or when two different subjects reason about the same circle.” 64. I. A. Il’in, “Шлейермахер и его ‘Речи о религии’ ” (“Schleiermacher and his Speeches on Religion”), RM 33 (1912), no. 2:41–46; reprinted in IAI:SS, 3:7–14. See esp. 7, 8. 65. Earle addresses this problem by implication in his discussion of the phenomenon of valuing as an intentionality of the self in Objectivity, 57–62 and 67–68, reaching a potentially different conclusion. He argues that valuation, appreciation, etc. “are not cognitive at all, give us no new object, ‘value,’ and do not reveal any new dimension of objective reality.” Therefore one presumes that he might dissent from Il’in’s claim that reliable judgments on matters artistic, moral, religious can be made only by one with appropriate capacities for the relevant types of experience. The issue would hang on the question of whether Il’in’s requirement of a distinct “capacity” for making the judgments in question is a matter of being able to experience the appropriate feelings, or whether he supposes that, say, the aesthetic object is indeed a different one for the competent judge of art. 66. I. A. Il’in, “Философия как духовное делание” (“Philosophy as a Spiritual Undertaking”), RM 136, no. 125 (1915): 112–28. This article was reprinted with two others on related themes in 1925 in Религиозный смысл философии (The Religious Meaning of Philosophy), which was republished in IAI:SS, 3:15–88. 67. IAI:SS, 3:26. 68. Ibid. 69. Ibid., 3:27. 70. Ibid. 71. Ibid. 72. Ibid., 3:30. 73. See, for example, Il’in’s chapter 9 in this volume. 74. See Louis Dupré, “Husserl’s Thought on God and Faith,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 29, no. 2 (December 1968): 201–15. 75. Quentin Lauer, Hegel’s Concept of God (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1982), 58. 76. See Earle, Objectivity. 77. Ibid., 73. 78. Ibid. 79. Ibid., 74–75. 80. Ibid., 75. 81. Ibid., 157. The entire paragraph is as follows: Our analysis finally is metaphysical. This does not mean that we begin with metaphysical assumptions, but that any descriptive analysis of awareness itself will uncover Being and its various modes as inherently and intrinsically involved. The mind, in its cognitive dimension, intends Being; and Being is found as the object of such intention if any object at all is given. The very notion of truth essentially involves Being, and no analysis of truth or of a logic

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which purports to assure us of the truth can be complete without the phenomenological discovery of Being as the actual content of our actual awareness. It is in this content and is nowhere else for us; but we have it only in part. Which part do we have? Precisely that which our limited existential conditions provide us. But we also have the idea of Being itself, in its pure formality. It is this idea of being which assures us of the finitude of our particular objects, but which is not itself finite. It is the cognitive appearance of what is called in religious language, “God”; and the idea of Being is one image of God in man.

82. “All of this can be expressed in the following way: in order to comprehend Hegel one must attempt to approach his philosophy phenomenologically, i.e., to reveal the internal structure of his thought act.” See Il’in’s chapter 3 in this volume. A page later he writes: “ ‘True objektivity’ is given precisely not in an ‘external’ manner, but only in an ‘internal’ one—such was Hegel’s view. Indisputably this view has a complicated history in the philosophy that preceded Hegel, but it was thought through and expressed by him with such power and completeness that it can truly be called ‘Hegel’s view’ par excellence.” 83. For a succinct account of these, see Rudolf Bernet, Iso Kern, and Eduard Marbach: An Introduction to Husserlian Phenomenology (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 77–87. 84. See chapter 6 of Il’in’s text. 85. Stephen Houlgate, The Opening of Hegel’s Logic: From Being to Infinity (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2006), 61. The entire subsection from which this quotation is drawn (“Passivity and Activity in Presuppositionless Thought”) is quite apposite, as is “Dialectic and Immanent Development” in the previous chapter of Houlgate’s work. (The first page numbers refer to the English translation of the Encyclopedia Logic by Geraets, Suchting, and Harris; the second number refers to the Suhrkamp edition of the German.) 86. Kenley Dove, “Hegel’s Phenomenological Method,” in New Studies in Hegel’s Philosophy, ed. Warren E. Steinkraus (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1971), 34–56. 87. Ibid., 35n1. 88. Ibid., 35. 89. Ibid. In the same paragraph Dove remarks: “The true philosopher must strenuously avoid the temptation of interrupting the immanent development of the subject matter by the introjection of interpretive models; he must, rather, give up this instinctively felt prerogative or ‘freedom’ and ‘instead of being the arbitrarily moving principle of the content,’ his task is ‘to submerge this freedom in the content and let the content be moved through its own nature, that is, through the self as the self of the content, and to observe the movement’ (Phän. 48).” (The page reference is to the Hoffmeister edition, Hamburg: Meiner, 1948.) 90. See Maker’s Philosophy Without Foundations: Rethinking Hegel (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1994), 99–100. For similar arguments, see Richard Dien Winfield, Reason and Justice (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1988), 142. See also Houlgate, The Opening of Hegel’s Logic, 29–35 and 54–59.

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91. For a detailed study of these developments, see Alexander Hardt, Husserl in Rußland: Phänomenologie der Sprache und Kunst bei Gustav Shpet und Aleksej Losev (Husserl in Russia: Phenomenology of Language and Art in Gustav Shpet and Aleksei Losev) (Munich: Fink, 1993). 92. G. G. Shpet was four years older than Il’in, and Il’in, in turn, ten years older than Losev. They all lived and worked in Moscow during the period of their most intense philosophical creativity, and knew one another personally; they were all associated with Moscow University at some point in their careers; and they all participated in some of the same intellectual venues, in particular the Moscow Psychological Society. 93. In his Обоснование интуитивизма (The Foundations of Intuitivism); available in English as The Intuitive Basis of Knowledge, trans. N. Duddington (London, 1919). 94. See G. E. Lantz, “Эдмунд Гуссерль и психологисты наших дней” (“Edmund Husserl and the Contemporary Practitioners of Psychologism”), VFiPs 8, no. 98. See also the discussion of the Logical Investigations by B. V. Iakovenko in the series Новые идеи в философии (New Ideas in Philosophy), 1913, no. 3. For a description of these and other early Russian publications on Husserl and Brentano, see the entry on “Феноменология в России” (“Phenomenology in Russia”) by V. Molchanov in Русская философия: Малый энциклопедический словарь (Russian Philosophy: Shorter Encyclopedic Dictionary) (Moscow: Nauka, 1995), 548–52. 95. G. G. Shpet, Явление и смысл: Феноменология как основная наука и ее проблемы (Appearance and Sense: Phenomenology as the Fundamental Science and Its Problems) (Moscow, 1914); available in English translation as Appearance and Sense: Phenomenology as the Fundamental Science and Its Problems, trans. T. Nemeth (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1991). 96. There is a personal letter extant in which Shpet writes to Husserl of his efforts to advance the cause of Husserl’s phenomenology in Russia. He reports on the response to a paper that he delivered to an audience of about 200 which included Il’in, Iakovenko, and Lopatin, all of whom got involved in the discussion afterward. Shpet complained to Husserl that nearly all the observations made by them and others were mere misunderstandings and showed an insufficient understanding of the task of phenomenology. He complained in particular that Il’in and Iakovenko refused to see the distinction between phenomenology and a theory of knowledge, calling Husserl’s phenomenology merely a “new” theory of knowledge. (However, Il’in and Iakovenko may have been closer to the truth on this point; see Bernet, Kern, and Marbach, An Introduction to Husserlian Phenomenology, 65.) Shpet further complained that Il’in in particular failed to see what the distinction between logic and phenomenology is, “since both speak of the eidos,” and that he failed to understand that even when he was in Göttingen! (Il’in would presumably have been referring to Hegel’s logic, and to his own theory of methodological parallels between Hegel’s theory of the speculative Idea and Husserlian eidetic intuitionism.) It should be noted that Husserl, in his reply, declined to react to the details of Shpet’s “complaints” about his fellow Russian philosophers, merely commenting that Shpet “had naturally answered them correctly.” At the end of the

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letter he asked Shpet to convey his compliments “an die Herrn Collegen Lopatin, Jakowenko, Iljin!” Edmund Husserl, Briefwechsel, 10 vols., ed. Karl Shuhmann and Elisabeth Shuhmann, Husserliana Documenta (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1994), 3:534, 538 and 540. For a fuller account of Shpet’s relations (and correspondence) with Husserl, see George L. Kline, “Meditations of a Russian NeoHusserlian: Gustav Shpet’s ‘The Skeptic and His Soul,’ ” in Phenomenology and Skepticism: Essays in Honor of James M. Edie, ed. Brice R. Wachterhauser (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1996), 144–163. 97. See the section of the introduction entitled “Shpet: An Unfinished Review of Il’in’s Commentary” and the section entitled “A Historical Footnote: Il’in and Shpet as Students of Husserl.” 98. A. F. Losev, “Русская философская литература в 1917–1918 гг” (“Russian Philosophical Literature in the Years 1917–1918”), published in Жизнь (Life), no. 24 (May 1918). Reprinted in Сборник “Вехи” в контексте русской культуры (The “Vekhi” Anthology in the Context of Russian Culture) (Moscow: Nauka, 2007), 404. (See also the discussion concerning this publication on 368–402.) 99. Aza Takho-Godi, Лосев (Серия биографий, Жизть замечательных людей) (Losev [The Series of Biographies, Life of Remarkable People]) (Moscow: Molodaia Gvardiia, 1997), 67. 100. See A. F. Losev, Диалектика художественной формы (Dialectic of Artistic Form), in Форма, стиль, выражение (Form, Style, Expression) (Moscow: Mysl’, 1995), 164. 101. Found in Очерки античного символизма и мифологии (Essays in Ancient Symbolism and Mythology). Examples of these would be конкретно-чувственный (the concrete-sensuous), 206; чувственно-конкретный (the sensuous-concrete), 144, 161, 198; and конкретно-спекулятивный (the concrete-speculative), 143, 148, 150, 152, 154, 164, 165, 167. (Page numbers refer to the 1993 reprinting of the work by “Mysl” in Moscow. It was originally published in 1930. I am very grateful to George Kline for locating these references in Losev’s works and supplying them to me through personal correspondence.) 102. During the period 1912–29, effectively the only years during which Shpet was allowed to work openly on Husserlian phenomenology, he could not have had access to the rich development of Husserl’s own thought in these very same directions, much of the evidence for which became available only much later from manuscripts in Husserl’s archives, published some decades after the end of Shpet’s life. Moreover, unfettered access in Moscow to contemporary German intellectual life ceased to be possible from the beginning of World War I, and was never substantially restored during Shpet’s lifetime, given the increasingly strict censorship imposed by the victorious Bolsheviks from 1918 onward. 103. G. G. Shpet, История как проблема логики в 2-х частях (History as a Problem of Logic, in 2 Parts), ed. V. S. Miasnikov (Moscow: Pamiatniki istoricheskoi mysli, 2002), 1,168 pp. 104. Published in T. G. Shchedrina, “Я пишу как это другого. . .”: Очерки интелектуальной биографии Густава Шпета (“I Write as the Echo of Another . . .”: Essays in the Intellectual Biography of Gustav Shpet) (Moscow: Progress-Tradition, 2004), 341–53.

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105. Ibid., 37. Shchedrina numbers among these Hermeneutics and Its Problems, Language and Meaning, Parts 1 and 2, The Internal Form of the Word, and An Introduction to Ethnic Psychology as well. 106. That translation, completed shortly before Shpet’s execution by the NKVD in October 1937, is widely regarded as a masterpiece. It has been recently reissued together with the notes on the Phenomenology produced by Wolfgang Bonsiepen and Reinhard Heede and taken from the Rhenish-Westphalian Academy (Gesammelte Werke) edition of the Phänomenologie des Geistes (1980) and translated into Russian by Marina Bykova, who also edited the volume. See G. W. F. Hegel, Феноменология духа (The Phenomenology of Spirit), trans. G. G. Shpet, ed. M. F. Bykova (Moscow: Nauka, 2000). See also the article by George L. Kline, “Shpet as Translator of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit,” in Gustav Shpet’s Contributions to Philosophy and Cultural Theory, ed. Galin Tihanov (West Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2009). 107. A number of these reviews are published (in Russian translation) in FG II, 480–504. 108. G. G. Shpet, “Опыт популяризации философии Гегеля” (“An Attempt at a Popularization of the Philosophy of Hegel”), in Shchedrina, “Я пишу как эхо другого . . .”: Очерки, 281–322. 109. The editor Shchedrina has performed an exceedingly valuable service by deciphering and tracking down all the various references, in each case printing the relevant passages directly after each of Shpet’s comments. 110. “Il’in, on the one hand, seems to ascribe a secondary significance to the dialectic, but, on the other hand, himself follows a dialectical presentation of Hegel. The actual significance of dialectic is characterized best of all by Hegel himself at the end of the logic: it is the method of exposition for ‘adults.’ See also Logic I, 11” (Shpet, “Опыт популяризации . . . ,” in Shchedrina, “Я пишу как эхо другого . . .”: Очерки, 306). 111. “A denial of the significance of the dialectic in Hegel: 1. as a characteristic style for him—would be stupid; 2. as a method of investigation—a special task of special logical investigation; 3. as a method of exposition, a ‘demonstration,’ a truism, for it is a priori clear that one can get to that by a different path. [In the Russian text, “truism” is рюизм, which is almost certainly a misprint for трюизм.] But in the exposition of Hegel, or in the study of Hegel, can one ignore the dialectic? a) in systematic study, having the goal of solving a problem set for himself by the author—of course one may! b) But in the study of Hegel, in the attempt to expound, to depict his doctrine—it is erroneous, and that must make itself known and penalize the corresponding attempt” (ibid., 312).

112. “The originality of Il’in: a reduction of Hegel’s dialectic to four moments: 1) the concrete-empirical; 2) the abstract-formal; 3) the abstract-speculative; 4) the concrete-speculative” (ibid., 305). 113. Ibid., 304. 114. Ibid., 307.

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115. Ibid., 300. 116. Il’in, letter to L. Ia. Gurevich of August 13 ( July 31), 1911, in DPD, 51–58. 117. In my view Shpet’s notes merit our attention only because of the dearth of other contemporaneous reactions to Il’in’s work by competent commentators. Shpet does not appear to have worked out a fully consistent response, nor does he appear to have dealt with the entire commentary. It is also worth remembering that during the period of his exile in Tomsk when Shpet was engaged in translating Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, one of the titles from his own library that he requested to be sent to him was Il’in’s commentary on Hegel. See Kline, “Shpet as a Translator,” in Tihanov, Gustav Shpet’s Contributions. 118. In section D of part 2, addressing the issue of “givenness,” Shpet writes the following: The givenness of pure and internal forms is an intellectual givenness. Conceptualization is normally regarded not only as the most characteristic act of the intellect, but even as its sole possible activity. From this follow the widespread complaints about the formalism of abstract rational cognition [the formalism of the understanding] and more or less hysterical attempts to “overcome” it. However, since ancient times more observant philosophers distinguished two functions within the activity of the intellect: a “higher” and a “lower.” By the latter was understood primarily conceptualizing, abstractly rational-formal activity. The former was designated by the term reason. By “reason” was almost always understood a “capacity” which was formally proximate to the “senses,” not merely in terms of its contrast with the understanding, but also because of its positive characteristics. Even Kant was unable to deprive reason of this. From among the essential characteristics of reason let us note only those needed for the question at issue. They reveal why the proper activity of reason is characterized precisely as “higher.” Reason was insistently, though inaccurately, contrasted with the understanding as the capacity for intuition as opposed to discourse. This is false, if only because the understanding also rests mostly upon intuition: conceptualization is just as inconceivable without intellectual intuition as sensuous perception is inconceivable without sensuous intuition, and rational comprehension is inconceivable without rational or intellectual intuition. On the other hand the counterposing of intuition to discourse as the superficial to the deeply thought appears to be justified only so long as we in abstracto sharply counterpose the process of comprehension, “cognition,” to the process of logical exposition, proof, the communication of what is cognized to others. But the more one ponders the fact that “comprehension” itself is conceivable only in “expressions,” the more it becomes clear that discourse is nothing other than that same intuition, only regarded not in the isolated separateness of each act, but in their interconnections, their flowing, their coursing. The only truth in the indicated opposition is that the understanding has to do with an abstracting givenness, while the intuiting [activity] of reason is directed at concrete objectivity. Hegel showed this with inextinguishable clarity. And thus in this way reason enters into an evident juxtaposition with sense.

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From G. G. Shpet, Эстетические фрагменты II (Aesthetic Fragments, Part II ), reprinted in Густав Шпет: Искусство как вид знания, Избранные труды по философии культуры (Gustav Shpet: Art as a Form of Knowledge, Selected Works on the Philosophy of Culture), ed. T. G. Shchedrina (Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2007), 237–38. 119. See the entry on Losev by George L. Kline (1998) in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. E. Craig (London: Routledge), accessed February 4, 2006, from http://www.rep.routledge.com/article/E026. 120. For a complete list of these, see the bibliography for Kline’s entry on Losev in the Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy cited in note 119 above. The only one available in English at this point is A. F. Losev, The Dialectic of Myth, ed. and trans. V. Marchenkov (London, New York: Routledge, 2003). 121. Compare the phrase “phenomenologo-dialectical” with Il’in’s description of Hegel’s philosophical method as “phenomeno-logical,” where by “logical” Il’in meant “dialectical” logic. He refers to Hegel as “having left as a legacy to subsequent philosophy the idea of ‘phenomeno-logical’ analysis (i.e., the penetration by intuitive thought through the appearance of a phenomenon to its essence).” See chapter 3 of this translation. 122. From note 1 of Losev’s Диалектика художественной формы (Dialectic of Artistic Form), 164–65. 123. V. V. Zenkovsky, A History of Russian Philosophy, authorized translation from the Russian by George L. Kline, vol. 2 (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1953), 833. 124. In the more recent edition of Losev’s early works entitled Бытие, имя, космос (Being, Name, Cosmos) (Moscow: Izd. “Mysl’,” 1993), the sources of these quotations can be found on 71–72 (Античный космос и современная наука [The Ancient Cosmos and Contemporary Science]) and 615–16 (Философия имени [Philosophy of the Name]). 125. Kline, Routledge Encyclopedia entry on Losev, section 1 (“Philosophy of Language, Myth and Symbol”). 126. Admittedly, the term “re-construction” might have served just as well here, since the primary aim of the method is presumably not the creation of new meanings, but the philosophical justification and possible revision of existing meanings. 127. In Khoruzhii’s “Арьергардный бой: Мысль и миф Алексея Лосева” (“A Rearguard Action: The Thought and Myth of Aleksei Losev”), VF 10 (1992): 112–38, 115; available in English translation in Russian Studies in Philosophy 40, no. 3 (Winter 2001–02), 30–68; see 35. 128. Khoruzhii, “Арьергардный бой,” 116 (English translation, 36). 129. Ibid., 117 (English translation, 37). The quotation is from Losev’s Philosophy of the Name, original edition, p. 8. 130. Khoruzhii, “Арьергардный бой,” 117 (English translation, 37). 131. Ibid. 132. Ibid. 133. Ibid. 134. Ibid., 123 (English translation, 45).

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135. See Andrei Tashchian, “Eidetics and Logic in Losev’s Methodology,” Russian Studies in Philosophy 44, no. 1 (Summer 2005): 57. 136. Jay Lampert’s Synthesis and Backward Reference in Husserl’s “Logical Investigations” is volume 131 in the series Phaenomenologica (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic, 1995); see the “Introduction,” especially 28–33 (section 3, “ ‘Dialectical’ Readings”). Some of the previous publications to which Lampert refers include Quentin Lauer, “Phenomenology: Hegel and Husserl,” in Beyond Epistemology: New Studies in the Philosophy of Hegel, ed. Frederick G. Weiss (1974), 174–96; Tom Rockmore, “Husserl’s Critique of Hegel,” in Hegel and His Critics: Philosophy in the Aftermath of Hegel, ed. William Desmond (1989), 203–13; and Frank M. Kirkland, “Husserl and Hegel: A Historical and Religious Encounter,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 16 ( January 1985): 70–87. According to Lampert, more systematic contributions have been made by George A. Shrader, “Hegel’s Contribution to Phenomenology,” Monist 48 (1964): 18–33; Errol E. Harris, Formal, Transcendental, and Dialectical Thinking: Logic and Reality (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1987); and Merold Westphal, “Hegel and Husserl: Transcendental Phenomenology and the Revolution Yet Awaited,” in Critical and Dialectical Phenomenology, ed. Donn Welton and Hugh J. Silverman (1987), 103–35. For additional references, see Lampert, Synthesis and Backward Reference, 28–33. 137. See Jay Lampert, “Husserl and Hegel on the Logic of Subjectivity,” Man and World 21 (1988): 363–93. The quotation is from Lampert, Synthesis and Backward Reference, 29. 138. Lampert, Synthesis and Backward Reference, vii. 139. Ibid. 140. See Iso Kern, “The Three Ways to the Transcendental Phenomenological Reduction in the Philosophy of Edmund Husserl,” in Husserl: Expositions and Appraisals, ed. Frederick A. Elliston and Peter McCormick (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1977), 126–49; see 126–34. See also Bernet, Kern, and Marbach, Introduction to Husserlian Phenomenology, 65–75. 141. Robert R. Williams, Recognition: Fichte and Hegel on the Other (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1992), 101. 142. See Williams, Recognition, 96; and Kern, “Three Ways,” 137–47. 143. Kern, “Three Ways,” 145. 144. Ibid., 144. 145. Kern, ibid. “To use words which hark back to Hegel, it is the transition (Übergang) from the limited character of natural consciousness, which sees objects only positively as static, fixed, foreign things standing over against, to philosophical thinking, which recognizes the world as the proper achievement of consciousness, changing and developing throughout various forms. This phenomenological reduction thus attains validity as a step into the ‘comprehension,’ the ‘concrete,’ the inner, the depths (which includes the ‘superficial’ in it). Its basic character consists of the reversal (Umstellung) of a radical reflection which breaks through the natural-objective life of the world. The epoche then emerges as a dependent moment: it follows the logical demand of the reversal which wants to remain faithful to itself and does not want to intrude into the

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newly opened dimension with views (‘categories’) which belong to the life of the natural-objective world.” 146. Kern, ibid., 146. He continues: “What an individual is ultimately is determined first by its relationship to the whole; thus an individual can only be recognized absolutely in the whole. For this reason philosophy does not have an absolute beginning but only an absolute end, which lies at infinity. The Cartesian concept of philosophy, which is mathematical (since it wants to begin with an absolute axiom), is just as contradictory as the scientistic.” 147. Quite interestingly, it turns out that the first time Husserl publicly developed an account of this third way of achieving the transcendental reduction, which Kern refers to as the way through ontology, was in the winter term of the 1910/11 academic year. In other words, precisely at the moment when Il’in arrived in Göttingen, Husserl was just completing the first public articulation of this third path to the transcendental reduction as a distinct one, exhibiting certain distinctively Hegelian overtones. See Kern, “Three Ways,” 139ff. 148. Henry Teloh, The Development of Plato’s Metaphysics (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1981), 145. 149. G. W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic (with the Zusätze), trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1991),133. 150. See chapter 7 of Il’in’s text in the present volume. 151. Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic, 108–24. 152. Ibid., 114 (§65). 153. Ibid., 115 (§65). 154. That is, from a correct comprehension of immediacy. 155. Hegel, Encyclopedia Logic, 117–18 (§70). 156. Ibid., 118 (§70). 157. For this particular way of formulating the problem I am indebted to Errol Harris. He further observed that “personally, I have always thought that (at any rate in practice) phenomenology has amounted simply to philosophical thinking. And although Husserl himself apparently failed to realize it, his own doctrine is pretty much the same as Hegel’s acknowledged procedure. What is the epoche other than Hegel’s refusal to begin philosophy from any unexamined presupposition? Further, Hegel asserts, in his preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit, that self-reflective consciousness criticizes itself and its own claims to truth, so that its progress from one configuration to another is a self-generating dialectic. This is precisely what he is illustrating by his comparison of it with a Bacchanalian revel” (personal communication, used with permission). 158. From a letter written by Il’in, in exile in Berlin, to Husserl in April 1924, we know in some detail what he did with Husserl during that period. In the letter (responding to the news brought to him by the Russian philosopher Stepun that Husserl was greatly interested in hearing from him and remembered him fondly), Il’in recalls the various connections he had with Husserl: “our first and last conversations, your seminar, your university course in ethics, your course in the history of philosophy, our excursions into the countryside with phenomenology and cherry pie, but especially the general atmosphere of love for the teacher of faith in the new, so simple and so deeply comprehended phenomenologi-

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cal word. . . . It was a school of philosophical honesty and objectivity; or as Hegel once said, ‘the seriousness, suffering, the work of the concept.’ And no one then would have guessed the awful future” (“Letter to Husserl” of April 12, 1924 [translated into Russian], in FG I, 400–401). 159. As reported in V. S. Miasnikov’s introductory essay “Густав Шпет: Труды и годы” (“Gustave Shpet: Works and Years”) in Shpet, История как проблема логики в 2-х частях (History as a Problem of Logic, in 2 Parts), 7. 160. Hardt, Husserl in Rußland, 67. 161. Kern, “Three Ways,” 139. According to Kern, Husserl made this claim in 1923 in the treatise “Weg in die transzendentale Phänomenologie als absolute und universale Ontologie durch die positvien Ontologen und die positive erste Philosophie” in Edmund Husserl: Gesammelte Werke, gen. ed. H. L. Van Breda, 8:225. 162. For a listing of the subjects of all of Husserl’s lecture courses and seminars, by academic year, see the “Chronology of Husserl’s Life, Work and Teaching” in the appendix to Bernet, Kern, and Marbach, Introduction to Husserlian Phenomenology, 235–49. 163. Kern, “Three Ways,” 140–41. 164. In addition to this possibly crucial difference in their exposures to Husserl’s thought, it would seem that Il’in and Shpet were fated not to achieve any genuine meeting of minds, despite belonging very much to the same milieu and very nearly to the same generation (Shpet was four years older than Il’in), as well as having roots in the same institution of higher education: Moscow University. Shpet was one of Il’in’s three official sponsors for membership in the Moscow Psychological Society in 1910. There was a still more remarkable connection between them: Liubov’ Gurevich, Il’in’s cousin and closest confidant (apart from his wife Natalia), was evidently also a close confidant of Shpet’s. (See Shchedrina, “Я пишу как эхо другого . . .”: Очерки, 51, 77, 191, 212.) Yet none of these coincidences (Husserl, Hegel, Göttingen, Moscow University, the Moscow Psychological Society, Gurevich, etc.) seems to have brought them together intellectually or personally. In the entire collected works of Il’in there appear to be only two or three passing references to Shpet. For example, in a collection of handwritten notes to himself that Il’in was preserving to assist in writing a memoir someday, there is one from 1921 with a short uncomplimentary reference to “G. G. Shpet (Latvian), a man known for his sharp mind, cynicism, lack of productivity, and hard drinking.” Had Il’in known Shpet even moderately well, he presumably would have known that Shpet was not Latvian (his father was Polish), and that Shpet was anything but unproductive intellectually. Analogously, in the recently published volume of Shpet’s extensive correspondence there are no references to Il’in in the index (T. G. Shchedrina, Густав Шпет: Ж изнь в письмах: Эпистолярное наследие [Gustav Shpet: A Life in Letters: Epistolary Legacy] [Moscow: Rosspen, 2005]). Despite the proximities of their professional lives, the two seem to have remained personally quite distant Some of their contrasting choices are perhaps most revealing. First, their attitudes toward the Bolsheviks and Soviet power were clearly distinct. Shpet’s name was originally included in the GPU’s list of intellectuals to be arrested and

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exiled from Soviet Russia in 1922. It was a foregone conclusion that Il’in under those circumstances would not strive (nor be permitted) to remain in Russia, given his attitude toward the Bolsheviks. Shpet, on the other hand, felt that he could accommodate himself to the Bolsheviks’ regime, and strenuously pleaded with Lunarcharsky (an old schoolmate) to be permitted to remain in Russia, a plea that was heeded and which was to cost Shpet his life fifteen years later. (See Chamberlain, Philosophy Steamer, 52.) Il’in was of course deeply committed to Russian Orthodoxy, whereas one does not have the impression that Shpet was religious in any conventional sense. Il’in was committed to an almost mystical sense of an older ideal of a Russian state, society, and church that might yet come to be, whereas Shpet seems to have anticipated a more modern version of Russia that might possibly have been taking shape around him. Finally, each of these two exceptionally strong but distinctive personalities seems to have resolutely pursued his own sense of individual destiny with remarkably little hesitation, an absence of regret, and a willingness to accept the element of tragedy inherent in each. 165. Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels, 12–13 (my translation). 166. Il’in, letter to Husserl, April 12, 1924 (translated into Russian), in FG I, 400–402. Il’in responds there that in principle he is quite willing to undertake the translation, if only publishers and booksellers could be arranged, but a bit later in the letter confesses, “I must in all honesty tell you one thing—I am poor as a church mouse. The revolution deprived me of everything possible: kafedra, property, citizenship, and health. I have preserved only what is left: my God, my Fatherland, my conscience, and my wife. Practically speaking, this means that I must worry about ‘earning money’ however and wherever possible, and could hardly pay a translator” (402). In tacit acknowledgment that the prospect of a translation in the foreseeable future was dim, Il’in appended a summary of the contents of both volumes of his commentary to the letter to Husserl. 167. I. A. Il’in, “Проект книги: Философия Гегеля как созерцательное учение о Боге” (“Book Proposal: The Philosophy of Hegel as a Contemplative Doctrine of God”), in FG II, 464. 168. He promises to complete the translation by “May” (presumably May 1945, since the foreword to the published Swiss edition was dated February 1946). 169. Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels, 385. 170. On several occasions when I had been wrestling unsuccessfully with the translation of an unusually obscure or ambiguous Russian term or phrase, I turned to the German text in hopes of further enlightenment, only to discover that Il’in had simply dropped the equivalent of the puzzling term altogether. In a few such instances he replaced the obscure term or phrase with a non-corresponding German one that altered the meaning of the sentence. Both sorts of occurence are relatively rare, and I have indicated the ones I discovered with endnotes. 171. Il’in’s mother was from a German-speaking family, the Schweikerts; her father was a physician, born in Saxony, who received his medical education at the University of Leipzig, graduating in 1831. A year later he moved to Russia and took up employment there. Il’in’s mother was born in Russia as Caroline Louise Schweikert, and was rechristened Elizaveta Iulievna Il’ina upon her marriage in

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the Russian Orthodox Church. She began teaching German to her son Ivan (and presumably to her other children as well) in early childhood. He reported much later that he was speaking and reading German from the age of seven, and that he had been studying literary German from the age of twelve. See FG I, 432. 172. They are available in the appendix to FG I, as well as in the German edition. 173. I. A. Il’in, О сопротивлении злу силою (On Resistance to Evil by Force) (Berlin: Presse, 1925). The uproar following the publication of this book, and Il’in’s continuing presentation of its main theses in the form of speeches in the various capitals of the Russian emigration, is fully documented in IAI:SS, 5:289– 556. See also the excellent account of these developments by Paul Robinson, “On Resistance to Evil by Force: Ivan Il’in and the Necessity of War,” in the Journal of Military Ethics 2, no. 2 (2003): 145–59. 174. See Losev, Диалектика художественной формы (Dialectic of Artistic Form), 164. 175. See note 101 above. 176. See A. A. Gareva, “Гегелевский семинар А. Ф. Лосева” (“The Hegel Seminar of A. F. Losev”), in СОФИЯ: Альманах: Вып. 1: Лосев: ойкумена мысли (SOFIA: Almanac: No. 1: A. F. Losev: The Oecumene of Thought) (Ufa: Izd. “Zdravookhranenie Bashkortostana,” 2005), 37–39. The list of seven “historical” topics was as follows: 1) 2) 3) 4) 5) 6) 7)

Three expositions of the Logic in Hegel Hegel’s Logic and the critical philosophy (Kant) Adolf Trendelenburg’s critique of Hegel’s Logic B. N. Chicherin and Hegel’s Logic Hegel’s Logic in the understanding of I. A. Il’in Croce—“The Dead and the Living” in Hegel’s philosophy Hegel and Feuerbach, etc.

Losev also suggested five “systematic” topics: 1) 2) 3) 4) 5)

The Hegelian triad and its types The role of negation in Hegel’s Logic The role of contradiction in Hegel’s Logic The principle of immediacy and mediation in Hegel’s Logic The moments of “in itself,” “for itself,” “at home with itself,” “within itself,” and “outside itself” in Hegel.

177. The students who had participated in Losev’s seminar were subsequently required to retake the course in dialectical materialism, to purge themselves of the taint of idealism (ibid.). 178. Herbert Spiegelberg, The Phenomenological Movement: A Historical Introduction, 3rd rev. and enl. ed. (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1982), 440–41. 179. Ibid., 441. 180. Ibid. Kojève’s remark appeared in his Introduction à la lecture de Hegel, ed. Raymond Queneau (Paris: Gallimard, 1947), 449. The passage in question continues, “In the Preface and in the Introduction of the PhG, Hegel insists at

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length on the passive, contemplative, and descriptive character of the ‘scientific’ method. He emphasizes that there is no dialectic of ‘scientific’ thought only because there is a dialectic of Being that this thought reveals” (my translation). This assertion parallels Il’in’s general view quite closely. 181. Koyré’s most explicit assertion of such a connection occurs in his article “Hegel à Iéna” published in the Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses, 1934. Kojève’s most extensive treatment of this theme was presented during lectures six through nine of his course on Hegel’s Phenomenology of 1934–35, published as “Appendix 1” of Introduction à la lecture de Hegel. That appendix is entitled “La dialectique du réel et la méthode phénoménologique.” 182. Koyré, “Hegel à Iéna,” in Études d’histoire de la pensée philosophique, by Alexandre Koré (Paris: Gallimard, 1961, 1971), 152n3 (my translations). 183. Ibid., 165. 184. Jean Hyppolite, Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s “Phenomenology of Spirit,” trans. Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 10. 185. Jean Wahl’s later lectures are published in typescript as Commentaires de la Logique de Hegel (Paris: Centre de Documentation Universitaire, n.d. [generally cited as 1959], Tournier & Constans, Paris). (This is a stenographic record in the form of a reproduced typescript of the lectures, including occasional sets of questions by auditors and responses by Wahl.) 186. That passage continues as follows: “That is to say that it will be necessary to discover in the logic of Hegel that there is an element of contemplation in it of some sort, of the things themselves, as Husserl says, and as Hegel says in certain passages, or otherwise stated of the phenomena, that is to say of the things as they appear to us” (Wahl, Commentaires de la Logique, 1). 187. FG I, 401. 188. Kline’s essay appeared in Phenomenology and Existentialism, ed. Edward N. Lee and Maurice Mandelbaum (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1967). Kline had sent a copy of the page proofs to Kojève, and the latter responded with corrections to some of the suppositions concerning his work made there, though these did not arrive in time to be included in the original publication. The essential corrections were then published in the preface to the revised paperback edition of the same work in 1969. 189. See V. N. Kuznetsov, Французское неогегельянство (French Neohegelianism) (Moscow: Izd. Moskovskovo universiteta, 1982). See 19, 35–36, 49, 51,76–77, 81–82. 190. See the entry on Bakradze by V. L. Abushenko in Всемирная экциклопедия философии (A Worldwide Encyclopedia of Philosophy) (Moscow: ACT, 2001), 81. 191. Though I would not accept as accurate one of the grounds Bakradze cited for ultimately rejecting some crucial aspects of Il’in’s interpretation of Hegel’s method, he is generally sympathetic. Intriguingly, the entry by Abushenko also contains the information that in 1936(!) Bakradze published a book with precisely the same title (System and Method in the Philosophy of Hegel ) in the Georgian language. Such a publication would have had no measurable impact on the course of philosophical discussion in Russia; however, for various reasons one

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would like to know the contents of Bakradze’s treatment of the same topic in Georgian, as it might be a truer indication of his personal views. In any event, such a publication in 1936 would signal a further recognition of the importance of Il’in’s work. 192. Twelve of these contemporary reviews are reprinted in FG II, 468–504. Among them, the Swiss Hegelian Gustav Mueller in particular turned out to be a strong, continuing supporter of Il’in’s work. 193. Wilhelm Seeberger, Hegel, oder die Entwicklung des Geistes zur Freiheit (Stuttgart: Ernst Klett Verlag, 1961), 639 pp. 194. For example, in his 1961 work Hegel, oder die Entwicklung des Geistes zur Freiheit, Seeberger describes one of Il’in’s particular contributions to Hegel interpretation in the following terms: As Iljin, who devotes great attention to the concept of the concrete, observes, Hegel has awakened this old, completely worn and colorless term to new life. Yet this concept, which according to Iljin reaches criterial importance within the Hegelian system, has remained unnoticed in the Hegel literature up to now. Only thus is it explicable that the concept of the speculative concrete is either overlooked or, in completely absurd fashion, confused with the empirical concrete, which leads Iljin to the harsh judgment that the philosophical descendants have simply passed over Hegel’s deepest conception and, as he indicates, the principal category of the Hegelian system. (100)

Seeberger’s reference is to pp. 400–401 of Il’in’s German text. There, to be sure, Il’in claims not to be the first to identify the speculative concrete as the criterion of the actual in Hegel’s system, but rather to be the first to apply this insight consistently in sustained fashion to an interpretation of Hegel’s system as a whole. 195. Hans Küng, Menschwerdung Gottes (Freiburg: Herder KG, 1970); translated by J. R. Stephenson as The Incarnation of God (New York: Crossroads, 1987). 196. Küng, Incarnation of God, 22n35. 197. Cyril O’Regan, The Heterodox Hegel (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1994). 198. Ibid., 9. 199. Ibid. 200. Ibid., 71. 201. Ibid., 9. 202. IAI:SS, 1:6. 203. From the Дневник политика (Politician’s Diary) of Peter Struve, quoted in Poltoratzky, Иван Александрович Ильин: Жизнь, труды, мировозрение—Сборник статей (A. I. Il’in: Life, Works, Worldview—An Anthology of Articles) (Tenafly, N.J.: Hermitage, 1989), 135. 204. IAI:SS, 3:26–27. 205. If further evidence is needed, one could point to the third meaning of созерцание given in Ushakov: “3. The same as intuition in the 1st meaning (philos.).” That definition in turn reads as follows: “INTUITION, fem. [Latin. intuitio—созерцание (literary). 1. Immediate cognition, perception of reality (philos.). Sensuous i., intellectual i., artistic i.” (my translations).

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206. G. W. F. Hegel, The Encyclopedia Logic (with the Zusätze), trans. T. F. Geraets, W. A. Suchting, and H. S. Harris (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 1991). 207. Ibid., xxii. 208. Ibid., xix. 209. It is interesting to note that Shpet chose to translate Dasein with наличное бытие (literally, “present being”) rather than Il’in’s бывание. 210. See chapter 1 of Il’in’s text in the present volume. 211. I am indebted to Marina Bykova for this more subtle clarification of ordinary Russian usage. 212. Personal communication. 213. According to Peter C. Hodgson, editor of G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: The Lectures of 1827 (One-Volume Edition) (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988), 8.

THE PHILOSOPHY OF HEGEL AS A DOCTRINE OF THE CONCRETENESS OF GOD AND HUMANITY

Dedicated to Nataliia Nikolaevna Il’ina

Preface

On the threshold of new quests and achievements, in the struggle for spiritual purity,a for authenticity of experience and objectivity of cognition, it is natural for philosophy to turn to its past in order to find inspiration, and a valedictory, in its greatest works. The genuinely great and significant always remains a hearth for spirit, capable of lighting new fires and giving a true sign of new, forthcoming triumphs. A work of genius functions like a door for anyone seeking access to the object itself, but one must know how not to screen oneself off from the object with this door, but rather to open it for oneself and for others; to open it in order to begin the struggle for independent and authentic experience and for true, objective knowledge. In this lies the supreme and fundamental task of the history of philosophy. A “renaissance” of Hegelianism might appear strange and incomprehensible at first glance, especially to those who have not followed the fate of German idealism. Indeed, it could appear even to a knowledgeable mind that after the destructive work of Bachmann, Trendelenburg, Haym, Hartmann, and McTaggart; after that profound cooling of interest in Hegel’s philosophy that gradually came to prevail in Germany during the second half of the nineteenth century; after the return to Kant took place; and in view of the clear tendency to divide a unified philosophy into a whole series of independent and special disciplines, it would have been difficult to expect a “renaissance” of Hegelianism. Nevertheless, there is such a renaissance, and moreover it is happening not in France, where its “nascence” remains in the future, nor in Italy or England, where interest in Hegel has been growing steadily and increasing in strength since the 1850s and 1860s, but precisely in Germany, which has entirely exhausted its philosophical heritage and is now searching for a creative way out of its objective emptiness. Having visited Germany a quarter of a century ago, the late Prince S. N. Trubetskoi, who placed a very great value on Hegel’s philosophy, pointed out that Hegel is little studied there and poorly understood. And it is hard not to recognize that even now little has changed for the better in this regard. Without even mentioning the multitude of wellknown scholars working in the field of philosophy to whom Hegel remains completely alien (such are the psychologists, the Kantians, the 5

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Fichteans, the Friesians, the empiricists, the relativists, and others), but even among those who write about Hegel, and talk about him still more, there are extremely few who have really immersed themselves in the historical-philosophical study of his system. The older generation consciously chose not to deal with him, although it absorbed much from the philosophical atmosphere of his time; while the younger generation was not yet able to find an independent approach to his philosophy and work their way into the structure of his ideas. That is why a “renaissance” of Hegelianism finds everyone in a certain state of helplessness, as it were: a deep and inwardly motivated attraction is not matched by a sufficient knowledge of that to which spirit and thought are drawn. People talk and write about Hegel, but they do not have a precise knowledge of what he taught and sought. The literature about him is full of the most curious judgments and confusions; evidently, no one notices that something has been omitted here, that a certain precious entryway has been lost, which must be located again without fail. And only Windelband, with the profound vision and intellectual honesty characteristic of him, pointed out that the new generation has yet to grow into an understanding of this philosophy. What has been lost is an immediate feeling for Hegel’s thought, a vital seeing, together with him, of his world and in his speculative categories and terms. And without such feeling and seeing it is difficult to speak of his ideas and views. For such is one of the fundamental features of all thought of genius, that it cannot be understood by thought alone. And with regard to Hegel this truth is encountered with special force. To quote Rosmini, Hegel invests every content with a “certain madness,” as it were; he speaks about everything, even the most ordinary, in such a way that it reveals to the viewer a side of itself that is new in some way, not seen before, a side that seems internally contradictory and scarcely graspable by the understanding: in the familiar is revealed the unprecedented; in simplicity, complexity; in unmoving tranquillity, agitation and chaos; in the accessible, insuperable difficulty; all usual concepts are displaced in an unaccustomed way; thought feels as though it has been shifted into a new dimension and is amazed, not trusting itself and its contents. Hegel sees the object in his own way; it is as if he sees it by thinking and thinks it by seeing, resembling in this Parmenides and Plato. He who speaks of the “renaissance” of Hegel must learn to see together with him; later on, one can renounce this mode of seeing, but one must master it first, in order to know precisely what it is that Hegel intended, what in that intention should now be rejected, and precisely why. All critique and all learning are necessarily preceded by the understanding of what is rejected and what is accepted: a historian of philosophy is

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first of all a historian, studying a given system of experience and ideas, and only afterward does he become a philosopher, independently intuiting the object and critically comparing the doctrine being studied with the objective content. Or more precisely, the historian of philosophy, remaining all the while a philosopher, intuits the object first through the experience and through the ideas of the philosopher being studied, and only then, independently and critically. This means that it is necessary for the philosopher to master the system studied from within: to take it into himself, lose himself in it, and to assimilate it as though it were his own personal creation, to assimilate its style, its act, and its content. Every philosophical doctrine is given to the student first of all in the form of a series of verbal formulas, in most cases written down by the thinker himself and then given for printing. In this initial verbal appearance is concealed a certain content implied behind each word expressed. In order for the work to be recognized as authentic, the connection between the signifying word and the signified content must be found and established by the thinker himself. The act of “vesting in words” is accessible only to one who has experienced the content immediately; and only on a secondary plane can one take into account formulas that are not immediate, issuing from another consciousness. The solitude of the creating soul—in experience and in thought, in intuition and in word— is ineliminable and inviolable by anything whatever; and given this state of affairs, it would appear that Gorgias’s affirmation of the impossiblity of conveying to others what is cognized (oύ δηλωτοv άλλoις)b must be accorded full recognition. Nevertheless, the path of the assimilation of others’ cognitive experience is possible, necessary, and real. This is the path of the imaginative identification of the historically studying spirit with the spirit which creatively intuited the object; the realizability of this path is guaranteed by the nature of thought, imparting to its content the character of identity and repeatability. And the criterion or sign that this identification has taken place will be that light of understanding which will illuminate both the essence of the doctrine and the depth of the objektive situation: affirmations and words that at first sight appear to distort the nature of a philosophical object that is common for all, are disclosed and received as generated by this object, as saturated by its presence and reflecting its features, even given the inexactitude and errors of these affirmations and words.c It is the task of the historian of philosophy to realize the mystery of imaginative transformation: to accept another’s intuition of the object and to assimilate it in order to visibly disclose its power and its limitations. To understand another’s doctrine does not mean to put one’s own

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content into another’s words; it means to find that same content which the thinker being studied experienced. What is necessary for this is, first of all, the readiness to renounce, temporarily and conditionally, one’s “own” stable and inflexible understanding of the words, or, rather, to “set this understanding aside,” as it were. It is necessary to impart to one’s “own” “categories,” to one’s own terms, to one’s own style, a certain soft pliancy, a certain perceptive impressionability and adaptability; the entire apparatus and mechanism of “personal” word-usage must be brought to a state of keen readiness to follow the indications and immediate disclosures of the philosopher being studied. The word-signification captured and noted must be checked repeatedly and then assimilated by means of concentrated attention; it is necessary to work out for oneself a second style as it were, a second word-usage, and moreover one that is adequate to the philosophical viewpoint of the thinker being considered. All this work is, however, only an auxiliary means for the solution of the main problem. Imaginative acceptance of style serves as a means for the imaginative reproduction of the philosophical act.d To penetrate through the word to the content that is revealed, and at the same time hidden, within it, and to grasp it adequately through the powers of one’s own spirit, is possible only through the reproduction of that act by which the philosophizing of the thinker being studied was realized. Every philosopher creates his cognition through thought, but besides this, he combines or even interweaves this thought in an original way with other psychic functions—of external sensation, imagination, feeling, and willing. Consciously or unconsciously, he forges for himself out of the combination of these functions: first, the original experience, if in general it is separated from thinking for him; and further, the intellectual “grasping” of the experienced content. In this way there arises a more or less complex and differentiated, holistic and flexible act, admitting and receiving into its makeup each of the component capabilities to a certain individually distinctive extent and to a certain subjectively creative intensity. Turning to a single, fundamental object, the philosopher intuits it, attends to it, and “seizes” it precisely by means of this act; and, as a result of this, he sees and cognizes that and only that which corresponds to its specific structure and nature. He who reproduces this act comes into direct possession of a content immanent to him and naturally begins to see the object with the eyes of the philosopher being studied. The power of the genius’s vision cannot be duplicated; the only thing possible here is a greater or lesser natural “faithfulness.” However, it is possible to imaginatively reproduce the spiritual composition of the act, and for the historian of philosophy it is truly mandatory. Only such a reproduction can open actual access to the content seen and at the same

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time provide confirmation to the studying historian that he is following in the footsteps of the philosopher being studied. And if the assimilation of the style facilitates the assimilation of the act, the reproduction of the act reveals the objective roots of the style. That is precisely how it always stands with the object-intuiting genius: the rhythm of the object becomes the living rhythm of the spirit attending to it, and finds for itself an adequate manifestation in the rhythmic sparkling of the style. In accordance with these requirements, my many years’ work on Hegel’s philosophy has been devoted, to the extent it has been within my powers, to an imaginative reproduction of his philosophical act and to an attempt to see that object which he saw and by which he lived. In essence this task is historical in character, for a descriptive reproducing of “what has taken place in the past” and an analytical cognizing of it, in the logic immanent to it, constitutes the task of the historian. However, this task also has a philosophical side, for the disclosing of a suprasensuous object, genuinely experienced in inner experience and seen by means of a consciously assimilated philosophical act, has always been and always will be the task of philosophy. This philosophical task of independent testing and formulation has received for me a historical limit, for the act by which I have consciously limited my intuition of the object in the present work has been the act described by Hegel and reproduced by me in accordance with his indications, within the limits of my abilities. But precisely for this reason I carefully distinguish between what Hegel saw in the object and what I myself see; and, remaining silent about the latter, I see myself forced to limit myself to only an inner, “immanent” critique of his doctrine: I touch upon the object only to the same extent that Hegel touched upon it, and to the extent that his philosophy, cognizing and making errors, found its fate in these discoveries and errors. To this extent the inner “critique” organically enters into the historical investigation and merges with the analytical description; whereas an external critique, based on an independent intuiting of the object, would have demanded a special dogmatic investigation and, in its absence, would have turned into a kind of petitio principii.e In undertaking such a historical work, I proceeded from the conviction that it must represent not only a historical interest but also a philosophically propaedeutic and objectively dogmatic one. To reconstruct the nature of the philosophical act realized by Hegel meant not only to turn to a page of the “past,” but also to uncover a certain classic method of philosophizing. It is necessary to translate this method, without simplifying or distorting it, into the language of contemporary concepts; to take it apart and put it together again, as it were, thereby revealing for everyone the possibility of assimilating

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Hegel’s vision. This means to demonstrate how a genuine, classic philosophy arises and grows; how it stands in relation to the object; how its method is formed; and, finally, what character its best creations have in the sense of spiritual purity, the compass of its tasks, and the depth of its penetration. Having this in view, I conceived my work on Hegel as a kind of “introduction to speculative philosophy.” But to show Hegel’s system in the form in which it grows out of its philosophical act, directed at the object, is to provide material for an objectively dogmatic critique. In order to separate the “living” from the “dead” in this doctrine, as Croce attempted to do, it is necessary to already have this work behind one. There can be no “renaissance” of a doctrine that is unclear and problematic in its method and content; it is not worth subjecting to a critique a system of views that is not justified in authentic, personal experience. Finally, only an intuitive penetration into the spiritual atmosphere of Hegel’s philosophy can insure this “renaissance” against, on the one hand, a tedious and sterile epigonism, impotently repeating what was already said with insignificant changes (“Modifikatiönchen,” according to Hegel’s expression) and thus filling in the entr’actes between genuinely philosophical accomplishments; and, on the other hand, against a random, external borrowing, against a breaking of the doctrine into inadequately understood pieces for a more or less extraneous and arbitrary use. A renaissance of Hegelianism either is not needed at all, or it must be something incomparably more than a mere “renaissance of Hegelianism.” Philosophy needs not a repetition of old errors, and not an imitation of a bygone method, but independent spiritual creativity, based on immediate and authentic objective experience. Time is evidently running out for that indecisive and somewhat intimidated philosophizing which took its point of departure from conventionally assumed and, in essence, arbitrarily chosen premises, or moved forward exclusively together with someone—leaning on Kant, or on Fichte, or even on those who themselves can, in turn, only exist as “leaners.” This philosophy proceeded not from the object itself but from another’s philosophy: the latter would then itself become the “object,” and, moreover, the sole object. A feature typical of all epigonism—the loss of immediate cognitive contact and union with the object itself—reigned in philosophy, and thought grew accustomed to moving only behind artificial partitions, created by a heightened academic f suspiciousness. Treatises were written on method, but silence reigned concerning the object. All that people did, in Simmel’s superb saying, was to scrutinize their eyeglasses, instead of looking through them; everyone was simply cleaning their weapons, instead of using them in battle. But now the opposite tendency is taking shape and gathering

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strength. Here and there is revealed a decision to break through the boundaries of the premises, methodological assumptions, authoritative formulae—to the object itself; to approach the latter immediately and independently, at one’s own risk and responsibility, without intermediaries, “supports” to “lean” on, and other hindrances, by no means breaking with science and the scientific spirit,g but also not quivering with anxiety about the preservation of the traditional and supposedly uniquely valid forms of the latter. Philosophy must enter on this path with quiet confidence, but with a lively sense of cognitive and spiritual responsibility. It must resurrect and restore its method—not in the sense of a system of more or less clearly differentiated “concepts” or “rules,” but in the sense of creative, systematically realized intuition, directed at the object itself. And then it will perhaps once again dare to recognize itself as a distinctive, universal mode of cognition, experiential in essence and metaphysical according to object; then it will stop being afraid of the “ultimate” problems, but will recognize and affirm that solving these problems is precisely its calling. Thus the systematic form of the doctrine cannot and should not be the object of deliberate researches. Philosophy should be a precise expression or adequate manifestation of the object itself, and meanwhile, prior to the study of the object, no one can know whether or not there is a systematic unity in it. There can be no such task as representing the object other than it is in actual fact; for example, there can be no such task as establishing a logic where none exists, or in depicting a multiplicity, thrashing about in chaos, as a holistic, organic unity. A philosopher must concern himself only with fidelity to the object, and a “unity” will either remain a unity of opinion, or will merge into the doctrine from the object itself, will descend, like a gift, like happiness, so that one who comes to know it will be certain that it is not from him but only through him. Perhaps no other philosophical doctrine can aid this creative ascent to the extent that Hegel’s doctrine can. One of the greatest intuitionists in philosophy, he insisted on the necessity of intuitive immersion in the object, brought not only to total self-forgetting, but even to the forgetting that this very self-forgetting had taken place; the story of what was seen in this immersion will no longer be an external descriptive account, but the report, as it were, of the object itself about itself, for itself, and from itself. And given such energy of attention and seeing, he did not know a single question that did not stand in the most lively and direct connection with the ultimate questions. The difficulty of understanding presented by his doctrine is explained partly by that overburdenedness with content that everything in him presents to the unaccustomed eye. In every cognition of his shines the uttermost depth; in every determination

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is seen the entire complexity of his intuitively thinking approach. One might say that, for Hegel, there are no questions that are not ultimate. And in the face of this energy and depth, all of his deductively dialectical art fades and moves to the background.h By itself, the attraction of contemporary thought to his doctrine is testimony to the fact that it needs something greater than what has nourished it up to now. That particular cautiousness, abstinence, and suspiciousness that have characterized the philosophizing of the last fifty years must be replaced in the near future by a greater confidence in one’s own powers, by the ability and desire to take upon oneself the “guilt” and responsibility of independent and immediate cognition. The troubles and sufferings experienced by humanity in recent yearsi will awaken in souls the ineradicable need for a creative, objective review of all the spiritual foundations of contemporary culture, and philosophy will have to satisfy this spiritual hunger. Philosophy will have once again to find access to a scientific knowledge of the essence of God and humanity. And in this respect the influence of Hegel, asserting with such power and insistence the objektivism and self-evidence of philosophical knowledge in opposition to subjective certitude, arbitrariness, and discretion, can be educational both in respect of a greater, intuitively thinking daring, and in respect of a greater cognitive renunciation of the subject from itself, from its empirical self-feeling, its diffuse subjective moods and imaginary “revelations,” which are not subject to objective justification. The philosophical significance of Hegelianism consists not in pupilage, but in learning a self-sufficient and objective knowledge of what is most important in the life of humanity.

Translator’s Notes a. “The struggle for spiritual purity” would seem to be an unusual topic to mention at the outset of a commentary on Hegel. However, it can perhaps be understood in the light of two presuppositions that are centrally involved in Il’in’s interpretation of Hegel. First, as Il’in’s preface will make clear, he believes that Hegel’s method of philosophy can only be understood as involving the intuitive apprehension of a “philosophical object,” the general process of which he describes as the “philosophical act.” For the explication of such a philosophical act he turns partly toward his contemporary Husserl. (For an account of this aspect of Il’in’s thought, see the section entitled “Il’in on Method: The ‘Philosophical Act’ ” in the translator’s introduction.) When Il’in speaks later in the preface of “a certain classic method of philosophizing,” he has in mind this conception of the intuitive apprehension of the philosophical object which takes place within the philosophical act. It serves as Il’in’s account of “classic” philosophical

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method in general, as his account of Hegel’s philosophical method, and as Il’in’s own central hermeneutic principle. To read another philosopher such as Hegel successfully it is necessary to first reproduce that philosopher’s philosophical act for oneself (which in Il’in’s view is possible, though it requires great care). The second relevant presupposition is that Hegel’s ultimate philosophical object is the Divine. (See “Il’in on Method: The ‘Philosophical Act’ ” in the translator’s introduction.) In explicating his conception of the “philosophical act,” Il’in insists that “the object under investigation must be genuinely present in the soul of the investigator, and not merely in ‘consciousness,’ ” and that only one who has the capacity for the experience in question (e.g., religious experience) is qualified to make reliable judgments on the matter. It would seem to follow in Il’in’s view that only the individual possessed of the capacity for genuine religious experience (purity of soul?) would be capable of making reliable judgments concerning the Divine as the philosophical object. b. “It is not shown to others.” From Gorgias’s treatise “On What Is Not, or On Nature,” on the impossibility of conveying one person’s sense experience to another person: 82B3, line 83. c. Il’in is here insisting that the criterion for successful identification of the philosophical object reproduced by the philosopher studying with that of the philosopher being studied, is that the description of that object provided by the original philosopher (including any imprecision or errors) appear to characterize the object as reproduced. This entails setting aside (temporarily) the second philosopher’s own independent judgment of the object to the extent it may differ from that of the first philosopher. The following paragraph sets out this technique (and criterion) in greater detail. d. For an account of Il’in’s doctrine of the “philosophical act,” see the section “Il’in on Method: The ‘Philosophical Act’ ” in the translator’s introduction. e. The fallacy of begging the question. f. Научной: “scientific” or “scholarly” would be more or less equally plausible readings. g. С наукой и научностью. “Science” is here being used in the more traditional European sense of systematic inquiry into any subject matter, and not being restricted to the empirical investigation of nature. h. Il’in here anticipates one of his more striking interpretive claims: that the dialectical aspect of Hegel’s method is of less significance than the intuitive aspect. i. Il’in worked on this commentary between the years 1908 and 1916, by which time it was essentially finished, and defended it in the spring of 1918. Obviously the “troubles and suffering” to which he refers will be those connected with World War I, the resultant anarchy in Russia, the collapse of the tsarist autocracy, and the Bolshevik Revolution. The Russian Civil War was just over the horizon. Il’in’s sense that philosophy had an obligation to respond to these crises of civilization brings to mind the last and most important work of his mentor E. N. Trubetskoi, The Meaning of Life, written during 1917–18 on explicitly theological issues, especially the problem of evil, as a response to the overwhelming evils encountered in the contemporary world.

1

The Concrete-Empirical

The first and most important thing that should be done by anyone striving to understand Hegel’s philosophical doctrine adequately and assimilate it intuitively is to clarify for oneself Hegel’s attitude toward the concrete empirical world. The doctrine of the concrete-empirical determines at once the whole force of Hegel’s speculative thought, the entire brilliant originality of his philosophical vision, the immensity of his fundamental task. This problem stands at the threshold of his positive views; by itself it serves only as a negative introduction to them. But if contemporary philosophizing is to restore an immediate feeling for Hegel’s thought, if it strives to live phenomenologically with the creator of the Phenomenology of Spirit, if it seeks that objectivea logical intuition that he realized subjectively and scientifically, if, finally, it desires to establish itself as a successor and to find instruction in the past, it must first of all grasp the negative passion of speculative philosophy. In Hegel’s doctrine this passion for negation is determined first of all and most importantly through his attitude toward the concrete-empirical. The idea of the concrete-empirical world is, perhaps, the least recognized, the most habitual, and, therefore, the most stable of all the scientific and everyday content inherited by philosophy. The conception of this real world of singular, finite things surrounding people and to a certain degree including them in its makeup, becomes so imperceptibly rooted in them, becomes so much of a second nature to them, so practically necessary and useful to them, that to part with this conception seems to them an impossibility. With this conception they wake up and fall asleep; they confirm its correctness every minute; with it they approach the construction of empirical science; with its aid they successfully live and attempt to imagine their own death. It is difficult to modify it in any of its essentials; its insolvency does not seem to them probable in the least; a fundamental breakup of it may be for the majority completely unrealizable. What people know, they know, seemingly, about precisely this world of our empirical conception; their science is a science of it; their “mind” is the mind of this world. To part with this mode of conception, to lose this mind, would apparently mean to lose one’s mind altogether. The empirical world apparently has its objektive particularities, and it is in adaptation to these particularities that the human conception 17

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of it is formed, the human mode of experiencing it, of cognizing it, of seeing things and approaching them. Hegel, in the natural and imperceptible evolution of his soul, parted for good from this mode of philosophically seeing things and understanding the world, having restructured this mode radically and organically. A consequence of this was the fact that, together with the mode of understanding, the very object being understood changed. In appearance, and for the extraneous glance, all remained the same; but philosophical speculation removed this appearance, extraneous to the real matter, to a place appropriate for it, and asserted itself, moreover not correcting the supposed object,b but philosophically abolishing it completely as untrue, inappropriate, distorting, and misleading. The concrete-empirical was so to speak “abolished” by Hegel not only as a peculiar mode of the awareness of, the cognition of, and the explanation of things, but also as a kind of objektive reality corresponding to this mode of consciousness. This deed is a negative but extraordinarily important stage of his philosophical journey. Entering upon this first stage of the speculative journey, one should keep in mind the fact that the verbal term in Hegel always stands in organic connection with the semantic content which this term fixes and conveys. Hegel not only has in mind something that adequately corresponds to the term; it is as though he intellectually intuits a certain real being, event, or relation which is designated by this word; he precisely articulates the same thing that his visualizing thought sees in the object. The term “concrete” derives from the Latin word “concrescere.” “Crescere” means “to grow”; “concrescere” means to grow together, to arise through growing together. Accordingly, “concrete” in Hegel means, first of all, “grown together.”1 The concrete invariably presents itself to him as something in its essence not simple, not uniform, not monotonic, not primitive, not wholly consisting of some one primordial element, in short—something not elementarily primary. Rather, it presents itself to him as something formed from a certain multiplicity of elements, or in any case from a certain duality. In order for “growing together” to take place, at least two principles that grow together must be present. Therefore the concrete is always conceived by Hegel as something complexly grown-together, as something composite, as something that has arisen from the combination of several quantities, principles, or elements.2 The 1. In this sense Kant, too, speaks occasionally of “concretion”; compare, for example, Kritik der Urtheilskraft, Acad. ed., 1913, vol. 5, p. 377. 2. Phän. 473; Niet. 337, 346; Log. II 79; Log. III 61, 78, 129; Enc. I 331, 360; Enc. II 301; Enc. III 346, 394; Recht 321–22, 428–29.

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concrete is “concrete” because in it a multiplicity of component parts has been united, combined, mixed, grown together. Therefore the concrete always has in it many sides or aspects; it is multifaceted, multiform, variously determined;1, c in itself, within its limits, inside itself, it is complex; manifold elements combined in it enter into various relations with one another, relate to each other, combine with one another.2 Consequently, concreteness is a principle of synthesis, a synthetic principle; the concrete contains within itself a multiplicity that is synthetically combined.3 Therefore it is not contentless but has content; the concrete is something that is filled with a determinate content,4 and this may be a content that is its own, particular content, specially, specifically determined.5 Precisely this latter property of concreteness provides a basis for speaking in the ordinary logic of the greater concreteness of the concept of a species compared with that of a genus, and, further, to bring the concrete closer to the individual, speaking of the lowest level in the classification of concepts.6 It is clear, finally, that the concrete as composite, complex, a synthesis of contents, is something that can be decomposed into its component elements, something that is subject to analysis and dismemberment, if only in the process of cognition.7 Analysis is counterposed to synthesis, decomposition to combination, disunification to growing together. Along with the term “konkret” Hegel uses the expressions “die Konkretion,”8 “konkrescieren,”9 “ein Konvolut”10 (from convolvere —to pile up, roll up, mix up), and, correspondingly, he opposes to them in terms of meaning that which is “discrete.”11 Thus, the concrete is a unity that has been formed or has grown together from a plurality. It is clear that these basic attributes of concreteness should also be revealed in the concrete-empirical, however, in such a sense and with such characteristics as make it a philosophically inappropriate medium. The concrete-empirical is something that has a distinctive being 1. Log. I 69, 114, 401; Log. II 101, 102, 103; Log. III 127, 282, 293, 306; Enc. III 145; Recht 161, 192, 382. 2. Log. I 70, 114. 3. Log. I 69; Log. III 161; Enc. III 296, 318; Recht 207, 256. 4. Phän. 22, 24, 45; Log. I 33, 130, 192; Log. II 99; Log. III 18, 26, 27, 40, 68, 170, 279; Enc. I xiii, 169; Enc. III 333; Ph. G. 20; Gör. 275. 5. Log. I 274, 401. 6. This last understanding seemingly derives its principle from as far back as Duns Scotus, in particular from his students. It is not characteristic of Hegel; although it also surfaces occasionally in his orienting notes and explanations, it is not essential. 7. Log. III 281; Enc. II 137; Recht 256. 8. See, for example, Phän. 473; Log. I 8; Log. III 40, 126, 127, 170, 261; Enc. II 149. 9. See, for example, Lass. 33. 10. See, for example, W. Beh. 375; Enc. III 145. 11. See, for example, Log. III 282.

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(Sein), a certain reality (Realität), actuality (Wirklichkeit), something existent (Existenz), a certain there-being (Dasein).1 In its entirety this reality forms a certain world, a whole world of things (Dinge, Sachen), existences (Existenzen), realities—the “objektive” world, the realm of “objektivity.”2 This real, objektive world is even a concrete world, but only an empirically concrete one. As concrete this world is a certain congeries, a multiplicity (Menge,3 Vielheit 4), a distinctive aggregate or mass.5 Both in itself and in its elements this aggregate is manifold (mannigfaltig), multiply complex (vielfach), and multipartite; each part of it has many properties, many individual aspects, particular determinations; each element of it stands in diverse relations with other elements, is surrounded by various factual circumstances which create for the world a great number of consequences and possibilities.6 All these aspects, parts, and circumstances, complexly interwoven and interacting, form an infinitely differentiating and fragmenting mass of events, a kind of indeterminate, endless and boundaryless, immeasurable, inordinately large quantity of existences and there-beings.7 In appearance this is a boundless, though chaotic, abundance of reality and, correspondingly, an ungraspable, unimaginable richness of cognitive material.8 That is the concrete-empirical in appearance. But only in appearance. In fact, the concreteness of this world is imaginary, and its empirical character turns out to be fatal for it. It would be a mistake to get carried away with this reality and its riches; analysis shows with convincing clarity what the character of this concreteness is, the nature of its fate, and in what consists its end. If the concrete is essentially “unity in multiplicity,” the concrete1. Comp.: W. Beh. 333, 336, 344; Phän. 27, 82, 241, 256; Glaub. 8, 10, 11, 125, 126, 127; W. Beh. 373, 375; Phän. 82; Log. I 30, 115; Log. III 50, 267; Glaub. 5, 84, 99, 111, 113, 119; Phän. 189, 246, 335, 423, 432, 524; Log. II 208; Enc. I 24; Log. I 31, 103; Log. II 155; Recht 60, 80; Diff. 198; Glaub. 7, 8; Phän. 27; Log. I 15, 115, 149, 150, 171; Log. II 125; Log. III 19; Recht 76, 153, 159. It is essential to bear in mind that all these definitions of the concrete-empirical are usually uttered by Hegel with quiet irony, and occasionally with open scorn. Compare, for example, Glaub. 101. 2. See Phän. 82, 83, 422; Log. II 208; Enc. I 111; Glaub. 98, 104; Log. III 323; Recht 60, 62, 153. 3. Krug. 64; Glaub. 139, 152; W. Beh. 336; Log. I 15; Log. III 126–27; Enc. II 37; Enc. III 460; Beweise 359. 4. W. Beh. 345, 377, 379; Phän. 332, 484, 501; Log. II 208; Enc. III 260, 459, 460. 5. “Sammlung,” “Masse”: Glaub. 125; Log. II 138. 6. Diff. 224, 262; Glaub. 9, 11, 47, 124, 128, 129, 135, 139, 149; W. Beh. 333, 336, 344, 373; Phän. 484; Log. I 335; Log. II 3–4, 72, 113, 125, 208; Log. III 19, 21, 29, 38–39, 45, 49, 78, 178, 323, 332; Enc. I 230, 324, 398; Enc. III 150, 263, 387; Recht 156–57, 157, 159, 226. 7. Diff. 162; Krug. 64; Glaub. 139, 152, 377, 377; Phän. 240, 484; Log. I 15; Log. III 126–27, 129, 136; Enc. III 458, 459, 460, 460; Recht 161, 263, 275, 280. 8. Diff. 162; Phän. 73, 85, 185–86; Enc. I 11–12, 18.

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empirical is a multiplicity deprived of unity. This multiplicity of things, of their aspects and properties, is no more than a simple collection, a conglomeration, an incoherently accumulated excess, “das Auch der Materien.”1 There is nothing here except mere multiplicity (“nur eine Manningfaltigkeit”),2 deprived of any unity (“einheitlos”);3 this is truly a realm of disunity and incoherence, whose elements are in a relation to one another of indifferent togetherness, in a relation of external, indifferent, purely quantitative co-presence.4 Here all is splintered, strewn about, scattered (“zerstreut,” “zersplittert”);5 all things are alien and external to one another; all is fixed in immobile deathliness and cold primness.6 Hegel characterizes this disunitedness of empirically-concrete things as “dis-creteness” and “abs-tractness.”7 Each of them affirms its being independently, for itself, in separation from the others.8 This world is similar to the world of atoms; their infinite number forms a sea of sand, as it were, given over to the will of the playful wind;9 here life is dead, and motion—even if ceaseless—is blind and chaotic. Therefore, the sphere of the concrete-empirical is a world internally opposed to itself; its things are not only different from one another, but are “infinitely” diverse;10 they are entirely non-identical, they diverge from one another, oppose and contradict one another.11 Each of these things, having alongside itself and in opposition to itself an infinite number of others, turns out to be something “limited,”12 conditioned,13 and finite 14 in all respects. The concrete-empirical is a realm of finite existence,15 a “collection of finite actualities”;16 it is the worst kind of finite, empirically finite being, “die endliche Endlichkeit.”17 This entire sphere consists of empirical singularities,18 of “merely” singular, “absolutely singular” things;19 they are alien to the universal20 and gravitate toward an abstract state, to the extreme limit of separatedness,21 to “singularity.”22 And all these “entirely” individual things23 are

1. Log. II 138. 2. Glaub. 139. 3. Glaub. 128; Log. II 113; Log. III 49. 4. Phän. 189; Log. I 335; Log. II 72, 138; Log. III 49, 86, 257; Enc. I 324; Enc. II 37; Enc. III 119; Recht 161. 5. W. Beh. 349; Phän. 186. 6. Phän. 162, 446; Log. II 113; Log. III 178, 313; Enc. I 18; Enc. III 123, 150, 259. 7. I.e., “disconnectedness, separation”; see Phän. 446, 507; Enc. III 317; Phän. 71, 507; Log. III 86, 129. 8. Glaub. 103; Log. III 103. 9. Glaub. 114, 152; Enc. I 35,36. 10. W. Beh. 377; Phän. 501. 11. Diff. 224; W. Beh. 328; Log. II 72, 125. 12. Diff. 198; Glaub. 49, 125; Krug. 64; Log. I 102, 139; Enc. I 113. 13. Log. III 120. 14. Glaub. 9, 9, 11, 49, 57, 103, 104, 133; Phän. 432; Log. I 137, 139, 149, 150, 171; Log. III 120; Enc. I 138; Enc. III 117, 460; Hinr. 286. 15. Glaub. 138. 16. Glaub. 113. 17. Comp.: Glaub. 109, but also Glaub. 10, 126; Rel. I 106–16; Hinr. 285. 18. W. Beh. 404; Phän. 74, 85, 86, 97, 241, 260, 261, 335, 507; Gymn. 154; Log. I 15, 171; Log. III 20, 112, 113, 126, 136, 150, 154–55, 297, 332; Enc. I 24, 260, 355; Enc. III 258, 261–62, 460; Recht 43, 90, 159, 161, 289; Bhag. 421–22. 19. Phän. 83; Log. III 21; Recht 290. 20. Enc. I 355 and others. 21. Log. III 129. 22. Log. III 95. 23. Glaub. 81; Phän. 83.

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distinguished by an infinite distinctiveness1 and irreproducible particularity of properties. This sea of finite and singular things, of their properties and component parts, is nothing other than an external spatiotemporal world, an effectual and skillful orientation within which many people take to be the very essence of life. Things that enter into the makeup of this world of external reality, external actuality, external being,2 stand indifferently external to one another, one next to the other,3 in a space constituting the form of their existence and predetermining their philosophical fate; for a thing that is external to another is thereby itself something only empirical,4 no more than an external concreteness,5 i.e., an infinite congeries of discrete singularities. However, the concretely-empirical world exists not only in space but also in time; and its temporality has, perhaps, an even more baneful effect on its fate than spatiality. If things, as spatial, stand in coexistence (nebeneinander) next to one another, then, as temporal, they stand in an order of succession (nacheinander, aufeinander folgend ),6 one after another. The temporal is subject to the empirical process; it is a transitory thing,7 no more than temporary and finite matter.8 Space and time, these necessary forms of the concrete-empirical, are something completely discrete and completely continuous.9 By no means does this continuity save them from quantitative divisibility, splitting, fragmentation. On the contrary; and because of this their true nature consists not in concreteness but in discreteness. Being spatial, this world divides infinitely; as temporal, it changes constantly and, as it disappears, it perishes. This is the sphere of the changeable,10 unstable,11 transitory and mortal;12 here every thing is broken;13 it bears within itself the seed of its doom, and the hour of its birth is the hour of its death.14 Ephemerality is the law of this world and, if there is anything unchangeable and eternal within these limits, it is the fact that its elements are doomed to perish, to come to an end.15 Such is the ontological essence of the concrete-empirical. In closest connection with its real determination is, further, its epistemological character as well. The simplest thing of all would be to designate the sphere of this lowest concreteness as “nature,” empirically perceived and studied. He1. Phän. 83; Log. I 17; Recht 224–25. 2. Phän. 82, 83, 256, 435, 524; Log. I 15; Log. II 125; Log. III 50, 50, 257; Enc. I 113; Enc. III 424; Recht 44, 60, 80, 153, 157; Bhag. 388. 3. W. Beh. 349; Log. I 248; Log. III 49; comp.: 267, 257; Enc. I 35, 36; Enc. III 150; Beweise 395–96. 4. Log. I 418. 5. Log. I 8; Enc. I 287; comp.: Enc. III 329. 6. W. Beh. 349. 7. Log. III 175. 8. Hinr. 286. 9. Enc. III 317. 10. Log. II 138; Enc. I 24. 11. Phän. 78, 79, 80. 12. Log. I 88, 139; Log. III 78, 175; Enc. I 113, 144; Enc. III 180, 461; Recht 17, 22. 13. Log. II 72. 14. Log. I 137–38. 15. Comp.: Log. I 137, 138, 138.

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gel, incidentally, knows this designation as well. The singular,1 transitory,2 manifold facts of external nature;3 naturald existence;4 nature as encountered, “found already there” (vorgefunden)5—thus does he sometimes characterize this world of empirical6 existence and empirical knowledge,7 and thereby also the approach of human consciousness to this world. The concrete-empirical is given 8 to human consciousness a posteriori and immediately. We “find” this world of things in a ready form, as if already developed; we find it “already there.”9, e To naive “natural” cognition it is given as fundamental,10 as the original foundation,11 as “absolute a posteriority.”12 It enters directly into our soul in similar fashion as occurs with the soul of a child.13 Immediacy, intuition, and sensuousness —these in essence are the three fundamental features characterizing the relation of human consciousness to the world of the concrete-empirical. A relation is immediate when the related aspects comprise a unity,14 are not something mutually “other,” “alien,” separate, a kind of distinct other-being.15 In an “immediate relation,” strictly speaking there is no relation at all, for there are not two aspects here, but only a single, although perhaps complex, formation. Such a unity of object and consciousness is revealed, according to Hegel, both at the lowest level of the life of the spirit and at the highest; in the former case this is empirical immediacy, in the latter case, speculative immediacy. Empirical immediacy is a naive state of the soul, as yet unaware that the object is other-being; it has not yet found out that a yawning chasm lies between the object and consciousness, a chasm conventionally expressed by counting “one, two.” In the case of such an immediacy the “I” has not yet found itself and lives in the “not-I” in such a way as though there could be nothing besides this “not-I.” Consciousness is lost in the object and has not yet found itself— neither in itself nor in the object; strictly speaking, it does not even yet have a “not-I,” for it does not have itself, does not have an “I.” In contrast to speculative immediacy, developing already after the split and as a result of its healing, passing through mediation and including it in itself 16—the empirical immediacy of consciousness lives wholly “prior to” 1. Enc. III 361–62. 2. Enc. III 461. 3. Enc. I 398. 4. Recht 80, 95. 5. Recht 76. Comp.: Rel. II 23. 6. Glaub. 7, 8, 9, 10, 13, 17, 32, 84, 98, 99, 107–8, 124, 126, 128, 128–29, 136, 143, 149; W. Beh. 328, 333, 336, 342, 343, 377; Log. I 61, 93, 102, 103, 115, 335, 418; Log. III 25; Enc. I 24, 355; Enc. III 458, 459, 460, 460; Bhag. 414, 421–22; Ohl. 237. 7. Comp.: Gösch. 13. 8. Diff. 195, 262; Log. III 308; Enc. I 398, 403; Recht 290. 9. Log. I 171; Enc. I 18; Recht 72, 76. 10. Log. III 297. 11. Enc. III 294. 12. Diff. 162. 13. Comp.: Gymn. 140. 14. Phän. 494. 15. Comp.: Phän. 79, 494; Log. I 63, 200, 235; Enc. I 19. 16. For example, Phän. 17, 26, and many other pages.

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mediation and without it;1 therefore, empirical immediacy constitutes the sphere of primordial simplicity,2 the “unconscious repose of nature”3 and naivete. In such an immediate relationship empirical consciousness stands to the manifold, singular things4 of spatiotemporal nature,5 perceived by the soul, as if all of reality belonged to them and nothing existed besides them. Empirical consciousness lives in them and by means of them, as the supreme and indubitable certainty,6 and as a consequence of this it shackles its fate to their fate and together with them drinks the cup of nothingness and nonbeing to the bottom. The whole sphere of immediate existence7 and immediate presentations8 turns out to be essentially only a primitive insubstantiality,9 whose task is to cede its place to a higher reality and a higher form of consciousness. This immediate relationship of consciousness to empirical things is intuition; 10 however, it is intuition not in the best and highest, speculative, sense, but in the lower, banal (gemein)11 sense that Kant had in mind when he said that the object is given through empirical intuition.12 Hegel evidently inherits from Kant the idea that “experience” has a dual makeup: the immediate-intuitive and the intellectual-thinking. Indeed, such experiential intuition, alien to thought,13 immediately unconscious,14 blindly trusting, senselessly immersed in “the singularity of the objekt splitting apart into a variety of aspects,”15 characterizes “cognition” of the concreteempirical. Manifold being is perceived as an “infinite multiplicity of intuitions formed in an infinite variety of ways,”16 in their character always and invariably sensuous.17 In contradistinction to spiritual-speculative being, empirical being is cognized precisely in a sensuous way. This is so essential and characteristic that the entire objekt of cognition—the spatiotemporal world—turns out to be a sensuous reality, a “sensuous world.”18 “The existing world, as

1. Comp.: for example, Phän. 74, 79; Log. I 61, 62, 74, 92; especially Log. III 319. 2. Phän. 15, 17, 73, 74, 579; Log. I 74, 112. 3. Phän. 359. 4. Log. I 171; Log. II 113; Log. III 103, 126–27, 136, 154–55, 178; Enc. I 350, 355, 410; Enc. III 361–62; Recht 43, 81, 82, 85, 90, 289. 5. Log. I 8; Enc. II 9; Enc. III 117, 461; Recht 44, 60, esp. 76, 80, 95, 153; Ph. G. 41. 6. Comp.: for example, Phän. 73–84, 131, 133, 417, 424. 7. Log. II 4, 69; Log. III 103, 178; Enc. I 410; Enc. III 117; Recht 44, 60, 62, 85, 94, 95, 153. 8. For example, Glaub. 98. 9. Enc. I 287. 10. Log. II 155. 11. Phän. 39. 12. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, ed. B. Erdmann, 55, 65, 66 and others. 13. W. Beh. 404; Log. I 103. 14. Diff. 195. 15. Enc. III 318 [actually, 319]. Comp.: Beweise 336. 16. W. Beh. 377; Log. III 29. 17. Comp.: Phän. 34, 39; Log. II 155; Log. III 49, 332; Enc. I 404; Enc. III 258; Recht 290; Hinr. 302 and others. 18. Diff. 225; Glaub. 125, 137, 137, 138, 140, 144; Phän. 27, 189, 423, 423; Log. I 30, 31; Log. III 19, 267, 308; Enc. I 113, 138; Enc. II 271; Enc. III 445; Bhag. 421–22; Ohl. 236.

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sensuous . . . [exists] for intuition.”1 To the sensuous object corresponds also the sensuous state of the soul, sensuous consciousness,2 filled with sensuous presentations.3 The world of singular things outside of us is perceived4 by the five senses; it is felt (Emfindung),5 touched (handgreiflich, mit der Hand begriffen),6 is seen by the external—by no means the inner—eye;7 the things of this world can be indicated, shown (monstriren):8 “over here,” “this very thing,” “just now.”9 Empirical perceptions and intuitions, directed toward these endless “here’s” and “now’s,” in the best case compose themselves into merely subjective,10 sensuously representable11 appearances,12 superficial and fleeting.13 It is unfortunate if spirit, surrendering to the temptation of this illusion of a supposedly strictly determinate “show,” recognizes in sensuous perception the root of cognitive certainty: “here” and “this” can be said about everything that is in space; “now,” once uttered, has already been borne away in the stream of time, and in its place for a moment the deceptive face of a new “now,”14 also impossible to seize, establishes itself. The concreteempirical, as the object f of cognition, is constantly dispersing itself— both in the objekt and in the subject (both ontologically and epistemologically)—into a great multitude of singularities that slip away; at the first encounter with consciousness each of these sensuous singularities15 is fragmented into a new series of individual bits and this process has no end.16 It would be useless to try to describe this vortex, which incessantly mixes all the atoms of finite being and of sensuous consciousness: a thing that arose by being described will decay (vermodert) before the description can be completed;17 the process of description will inevitably stretch into infinity; however far forward it advances, what has been achieved will never be what is needed. The concrete-empirical as an object g of cognition discloses in itself a certain infinite scattering (Zerstreuung),18 rendering it inexhaustible and unsurveyable.19 All its elements are opaque;20

1. Log. II 155; compare Aesth. I 48. 2. Comp.: Phän. 22; Log. I 61; Enc. III 257. 3. Comp.: Phän. 39; Log. I 45. 4. Comp.: Glaub. 104; Phän. 332; Enc. I 108, 410; compare Enc. II 9. 5. Comp.: Phän. 520; Log. III 314; Enc. I 107; Enc. II 117, 143; Recht 181; Bhag. 414. 6. Log. III 19, 175. 7. Log. III 175; comp.: Phän. 261. 8. Log. III 64, 95. 9. Comp.: Phän. 73, 74, 75, 82, 185; Log. III 64, 95; Enc. I 37; Enc. III 258; Recht 112. 10. Log. III 238; Enc. III 361–62; Recht 290. 11. Comp.: Glaub. 81, 98; esp. Phän. 39; Gymn. 154; Log. I 45; Log. III 19, 292; Recht 43. 12. Glaub. 11, 133; W. Beh. 379; Gymn. 154; Log. III 20, 21, 238, 326, 326; Recht 22; Hinr. 293. 13. Log. III 20. 14. Comp.: Phän.“A. Bewusstsein. I. Die Sinnliche Gewissheit oder das Dieses und das Meinen”; Phän. 73–84; Recht 290, 290; Beweise 426. 15. Phän. 85, 86, 97, 335; Gymn. 154; Log. I 171; Log. III 21. 16. Comp.: Recht 161, 275, 280. 17. Comp.: Phän. 83. 18. Comp.: Phän. 186. 19. Phän. 185–86; Ohl. 236. 20. Phän. 162.

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here all is indistinct, obscure, and confused.1 The concrete-empirical is irrational: it does not submit itself to rationalization; in its very essence, it is alien to thought—and in this lies the root of its philosophical doom. The concrete-empirical perishes in the face of philosophy precisely because in its entire essence it is alien,h heterogeneous, with respect to thought. For philosophy, Hegel believes, is above all thought, and even more, it is knowing thought; and that which is uncognizable and unthinkable, and is itself neither knowledge nor thought—is uninteresting, indifferent for philosophy. It is uninteresting, of course, so long as what is alien does not get in the way of philosophical thought, does not encroach, does not usurp its calling and its cause, does not proclaim itself to be the pinnacle of knowledge and confidence. Then philosophy clearly exposes the cognitive barrenness of this outsider and sees in this negative accomplishment a matter of high and serious importance: the work of preparatory catharsis. But thought demands, first of all, complete clarity and universality. And in this it is adamant and knows no compromises. It does not admit chaotic and random variability, does not tolerate references to infinite regress, has nothing to do with the inscrutable and inexhaustible. In its object it sees something determinate and in its striving it moves in a completing and forming way. In this is its essence. But the essence of the concrete-empirical consists precisely in the opposite. Infinitely scattered, boundless, inexhaustible, and even beyond description, and, in addition to all this, ceaselessly changing and chaotically entangled; it does not submit to a completely clear forming, and therefore does not submit to thought. It is not even being thought, but only sensuously intuited. It can neither be deduced nor constructed,2 nor even comprehended, i.e., grasped by spirit.3 Thought thinks only what is “gathered up,”i “grasped”;4 but the makeup of the concreteempirical contains not only what has remained ungathered, but also what is in general ungatherable and inexhaustible. Thought does not know a bottomless pit, from which there is no return; an indication of infinite complexity might perplex and impede the thinker, but it will not change the nature of thought. However, thought requires, in addition, universality; but in the empirical world of discrete entities everything is singular. And that renders this world, one might say, qualitatively inaccessible to thought. Even if thought can grasp something of the sensuously 1. Comp.: Phän. 8; Recht 275. 2. Krug. 58; Phän. 78. 3. Glaub. 119, 127; Log. III 175. 4. Mathematics, in the doctrine of the “infinitesimally small,” could not constitute an exception, for it thinks not the infinite itself, but rather the essence of its unending object, method.

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given, it grasps it in its own form, which is intrinsic and immanent to it: in the form of universality. And this will no longer be what we had on hand in empirical givenness. To think “here” and “now” means to think “here in general” and “now in general,” whereas sensuous intuition perceived “here in particular” and “now in particular.”1 (For instance, “today, this moment, eight o’clock in the evening.”) Therefore, the concept and sensuous singularity are heterogeneous; the concrete-empirical cannot be expressed as a function of thought and the concept, and this impossibility is decisive for its fate. One could endlessly define it by the facets of thought;2 endlessly take it up in the concept,3 forever (perennierend ) approaching 4 but not arriving at anything: the empirical “totality” (Allheit) is unattainable;5 the solid, abstract determinacy of thought loses itself in sensuous individuality;6 and to top everything off, that which has been thought does not have empirical reality; rather, the empirically real remains unthought, for the infinitely complex material7 of given reality is “reduced” by reason to a certain essential but now unreal simplicity.8 As a consequence of this, sensuous knowledge—sensation, intuition, feeling 9—is wholly unscientific knowledge.10 Its object is the world of empirical contingency and arbitrariness;11 that external, empirical, banal necessity 12 which, apparently, is revealed in this world, does not have any scientific stability or significance: the sensuous world “opposes all conformity to law.”13 Sensuous subjective certainty is deprived of all philosophical value; it only leads to errors, illusion, and despair.14 There is no truth here,15 for the sensuous element only obscures and blocks the truth,16 presenting the truth as its own colorless, stale (schal) assertions.17 Therefore, the concrete-empirical can be the object not of knowledge but only of opinion: it is something supposed, supposed knowledge, supposed being.18 However, this opinion and this supposedness are so far from any rational likeness that they cannot even be expressed and formulated in words. Hegel is firmly convinced that language is an instrument and product of reason, thinking, thought, and that the word, when it is used in a law-governed way (and not in an arbitrary way, as in the nam1. Comp.: Phän. 73–84 and following chapters; Prop. 81–82. 2. Comp.: Glaub. 151; Recht 279. 3. W. Beh. 376. 4. Recht 280. 5. Log. III 98. 6. Comp.: Phän. 240. 7. Comp.: Phän. 423; Gymn. 140; Log. III 19, 20, 49. 8. Comp.: Log. III 20; Enc. I 230. 9. Recht 181; Hinr. 302; comp.: also Log. III 21; Enc. I 37. 10. Phän. 39; comp.: Enc. III 157(Z). 11. Comp.: Glaub. 8, 109; Phän. 520; Log. III 238; Enc. I 18, 24, 111, 144, 287; Enc. III 361–62, 424; Recht 22, 126, 171–72; Hinr. 298. 12. Glaub. 127, 128, 129; Recht 159, 159. 13. Phän. 207. 14. Comp.: Phän. 82; Enc. I 144; Recht 22. 15. Log. III 175, 238; Enc. I 37; Enc. III 295, 424; Recht 22; Hinr. 298. 16. Log. I 250. 17. Phän. 75. 18. Comp.: Phän. 83, 84, 85, 86, 241, 242; Recht 22.

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ing of singular objects), “expresses only the universal.”1 But since the concrete-empirical, both ontologically and “in cognition,” is only singular and cannot become universal,2 it is unutterable (unaussprechlich, unsagbar).3, j And the unuttered abides in a state of obscure fermentation, for clarity is given only by the word.4 Such is the extreme point of the epistemological insolvency of the concrete-empirical. Perhaps one can now understand the harshness with which Hegel pronounces his final verdict on the entire sphere of empirical being and sensuous cognition: this judgment establishes the metaphysical insignificance of the concrete-empirical. This entire sphere, this entire peculiar sensuous, spatiotemporal world of singular, contingent things is in appearance a grandiose, but in essence and in results, a pitiful and untenable attempt to fall away from the sole authentic divine center of all elements: the principle of pure spiritual speculative thought; to fall away and to undertake self-assertion in separation:5 “to step out into the periphery” (Baader), “to tear oneself away from the light or the universal will” (Schelling), “to proclaim selfwill” (Dostoevsky). But this separation and falling away deprives what has fallen away of reason, spirit, and meaning. According to Baader’s expression, the “䉺 is transformed into the 䊊.”k In opposition to reason only unreason is possible; in separation from speculative thought only blind anti-reasoning is possible.6 Therefore, the concrete-empirical is deprived of Reason and Spirit; it is not commensurate with Spirit, is abandoned by it,7 and, in consequence, it is alien to all that characterizes speculative reality (freedom, organicity, speculative movement, etc.).8 This world, remaining on this side (Diesseits),9 is basely banal,10 senseless,11 deprived of everything beautiful.12 More than that, it is deprived of the one most real essence, torn away from substance,13 and therefore inessential (wesenlos, unwesentlich).14 In appearance objektive and self-sufficient, in fact it is not objektive15 and not self-sufficient.16 In appearance it is the unique source of being, from which alone abstract thought can acquire reality;17 in fact this world is torn away at its root from all true being. The concrete1. Log. I 123; comp.: Enc. I 36, 37. 2. Comp.: Enc. I 355; Enc. III 390. 3. Comp.: Phän. 83, 83, 241, 242; Enc. I 37, 172; Enc. III 390. 4. Enc. III 349(Z). 5. Comp.: Glaub. 103; Log. III 103; Enc. I 138. 6. Comp.: Glaub. 133, 137, 140, 144; W. Beh. 375; Phän. 226, 422; Log. III 45, 50, 179, 238, 257; Enc. I 138, 144. 7. Comp.: Phän. 22, 432, 520; Recht 85. 8. Bhag. 388; Glaub. 144; Phän. 74. 9. Phän. 8, 139–40; Hinr. 293. 10. Glaub. 5, 8, 13, 98, 99, 99, 107–8, 112, 119, 125, 127, 143; Phän. 39, 417; Ohl. 237. 11. Phän. 181. 12. Enc. III 446. 13. Recht 99. 14. Phän. 432; Log. III 257; Enc. I 144, 287, 287; Recht 22. 15. Enc. III 290. 16. Bhag. 424. 17. Comp.: Log. I 93.

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empirical is neither true, nor final, nor absolute reality.1 It is worthless (werthlos),2 “untrue being,”3 deprived of genuine existence. The concreteempirical is, in the highest sense of the word, nonbeing.4 What could be more insignificant and negligible5 than this nonbeing? All its imaginary riches are of no use to it; they are the “heavy armor” that “sank” it. And the more excessive the pretensions of the sensuous “world,” the more obvious becomes its poverty,6 lack of content,7 and bustling futility (eitel).8 And every time that thought tries to hold on to and to cognize any of its elements, it sees before it a phantom, an illusion (Schein),9 and becomes convinced that the essence of this colorful appearance10 is nothingness.11 That is why the first task of philosophy consists in disclosing and overcoming the essence of this base point of view;12 to free oneself from it means to leave the “kingdom of darkness,”13 to put away the chains of finitude and doom,14 to enter onto the path of purification by the fire of thought. One can accept without question that, if the German language had a term corresponding to the Russian word “poshlost’,”l Hegel would have called this path the path of the “catharsis of spirit from poshlost’.” In this ascent from empirical senselessness to speculative thought, from opinion to knowledge, from the singular to the universal, from the discrete to concreteness, from the psyche to the Spirit, from the animal state15 to the divine, the concrete-empirical accomplishes its fate: it is overcome in the name of what is higher, and disappears utterly,16 returning, according to Anaximander and Hegel, to its foundation and essence, the one and unchanging. However, this path is not easy and not simple. Consciousness faces mountains of concentrated, suffering, patient labor over the concept and in the concept;17 it faces the task of apprehending the final doubts, of doubting all of its own content, of experiencing a veritable bacchanalia of doubt.18 And only from such a philosophical earthquake can the rebirth and renewal of consciousness come . . . And the first thing that consciousness faces is to pass through the purgatory of the formal-logical.

1. Log. I 171. 2. Log. I 115; Log. III 50. 3. Log. III 237–38. 4. Comp.: Log. I 137; Log. III 175; Enc. I 238, 386; Enc. III 150; Recht 81–82. 5. Comp.: Phän. 82; Log. III 178, 179, 325, 326, 326; Enc. I 37; Enc. III 340. 6. Phän. 73. 7. Enc. III 424. Comp.: Glaub. 136; Phän. 73–84; Enc. I 113. 8. Hinr. 293. 9. Enc. I 141; Recht 17. 10. Phän. 139–40. 11. Glaub. 57, 133; W. Beh. 336; Log. III 238. 12. Log. III 314. 13. Log. III 323. 14. Comp.: Glaub. 108–9. 15. Comp.: Enc. I 107. 16. Log. II 72. 17. “Der Ernst, der Schmerz, die Geduld und Arbeit des Negativen”: Phän. 15. 18. Phän. 37.

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Translator’s Notes a. The Russian text here reads “объективной, предметной” (objektiv, gegenständlich). However, at this point in the German version of the text Il’in chose to drop the first term, and I have done so in the English translation as well. (See Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels, 17.) In general, for the most reliable English translation of this particular chapter (for reasons partly explained in note c below), one is significantly dependent upon Il’in’s German version of the text. For an explanation of my convention for distinguishing the two forms of “objective” in English, see the section “Notes on the Translation” in the translator’s introduction. b. Relying on the German text, I take the ambiguous “it” in the Russian text to refer to the “supposed object” (vermeintlichen Gegenstand). See Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels, 18. c. The Russian term is многоразлично, which might be translated as “variously differentiated”; however, the German phrase in question, from Hegel’s Logic, is mannigfaltig bestimmt (variously determined), and I have used that phrase in the translation. In this chapter Il’in exercises to a conspicuous extent one of his characteristic interpretive techniques: searching for synonyms of a key term throughout Hegel’s Werke and listing them together (with references to all the textual sources). That technique on occasion requires producing lists of Russian synonyms to match a corresponding string of German synonyms, which must here be matched with an equally long list of English synonyms—all of which terms may be distinguished only by rather subtle nuances of meaning. (See, for example, the list of compound Russian terms in the Glossary beginning with много-.) Obviously the three languages do not match up perfectly in terms of the supply of synonyms for any given term, putting some strain on the translation at points (either into Russian or into English or both). d. The Russian text here reads “естественное, природное существование,” employing two synonyms for “natural” for which there are no exact parallels in English. e. The Russian here is преднаходим, literally, we “pre-find” it; Il’in seems to have been echoing the German verb form vorfinden/vorgefunden, which would normally be translated as “to be found” or “to be met with” (hence also “to be encountered [as already given]”). In the German text the corresponding phrase is finden sie vor (Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels, 24). In the preceding paragraph I have used “encountered” to translate another form of the same Russian term. f. Предмет in the Russian text, but changed to Objekt (not Gegenstand) in the German. g. Again, Il’in here translates предмет into German as Objekt, not Gegenstand. h. Il’in here employs two synonyms for “heterogeneous”: инородно and гетерогенно. I have rendered the first as “alien,” though “heterogeneous” would be more accurate for it as well. i. The Russian term is зачерпнутое, literally “scooped up,” “gathered up.” In the German text Il’in employed das Faßbare (the comprehensible) at the corresponding point (28).

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j. The Russian is literally “unuttered,” not “unutterable”; the latter would be a somewhat awkward locution in Russian, but clearly fits the passage best. k. Franz von Baader, 1765–1841. (See his Sämtliche Werke [Leipzig: Bethmann, 1850–60] in 16 vols.) l. Пошлость. Il’in finds this Russian term exceedingly apt for expressing a certain element of Hegel’s thought. Poshlost’ is difficult to translate into English by a single term, but the adjectival form may be translated as “vulgar,” “common,” “trivial,” “trite,” “banal,” or “philistine,” depending on the context. Vladimir Nabokov was no less fascinated by the word and wrote an entire essay on it. See “Philistines and Philistinism” (“Пошляки и пошлость”) in Vladimir Nabokov, Lectures on Russian Literature, ed. Fredson Bowers (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1981), 309–14. In that essay Nabokov observes that “poshlism is not only the obviously trashy but mainly the falsely important, the falsely beautiful, the falsely clever, the falsely attractive. To apply the deadly label of poshlism to something is not only an esthetic judgment but also a moral indictment” (313).

2

The Abstract-Formal

By virtue of its fundamental properties the concrete-empirical cannot serve as the object of cognition in general, nor as the object of philosophical cognition in particular. Before it lies a profound, all-renouncing and renewing regeneration. Its chaotic character must encounter the principle of strict measure and inert order; its unrestrainable processal character must either fall or fade away with the establishment of a new form; its immediacy will see splitting and complication; its sensuousness is destined to die away; its singularity will be transformed into universality. However, philosophy itself cannot assume this task; philosophy is a system of completed knowledge, a closed circle of fully developed ideas; it has nothing to do with incomplete material and does not prepare it; it does not know half-truths and does not include within itself what is immature. Therefore, between philosophy and the sensuous intuition of empirical things there turns out to be an intermediate realm, purifying and preparing consciousness and its object; this realm is composed of the empirical sciences, empirical philosophy, and ordinary, so-called “formal” logic, united by a common methodological mode of constructing and understanding its object. This mode or method of handling the content being cognized is precisely “formal abstraction.” This entire group of subordinate sciences, or semi-sciences, does not at all realize, or acknowledge, its intermediate, or mediating, position. Empirical investigators and formal-logical thinkers consider their task to be the only scientific one, their methodological modes to be the definitively true ones, their limit to be the achieved apex. But this in no way means, Hegel thinks, that such is the objektive significance of their constructions and their modes. On the contrary: their self-assessment is no more than an encroachment, their claim is mere pretension, their work is measured on the scale of utility, but not truthfulness. Philosophical knowledge begins precisely where they finish; the light flares up precisely where they grow blind; the truth is revealed precisely in the place access to which they have fenced off from themselves by their prejudices. The significance of these subordinate sciences, the essence of their cognitive approach to the object, and the philosophical inadmissibility of this entire direction of thought are formulated by Hegel with astonish32

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ing maturity and depth. All this is united and concentrated around the doctrine of the abstract-rationala or the formal. The most profound, fundamental vice of the concrete-empirical was its incapacity to become an object of thought, a thinkable objekt, and consequently an object of philosophical cognition. Indeed, what have thought and knowledge to do with what is not thinkable and not knowable? Such is the nature of this apparently epistemological difficulty. Hence, the first task of the abstract medium is to introduce thinkability into the subordinate, empirical sphere. The abstract-formal is, first of all, thought:1 subjectively, the process of thinking; objectively, the “something” that is being thought. One could say that there is a change here in the very organ of spirit that serves to deal with the object; and just as hearing lives by sound and does not hear color, so thought does not sensuously intuit the given of the external world, but performs its own specific work. Thought is, in general, something abstract.2 It is necessary that, in one who is beginning to think, “sight and hearing should first grow dark,” so that he is “abstracted from concrete representation and drawn into the inner darkness of the night of the soul”; and so that he “learns to see in this medium, to hold determinations fast, and to distinguish.”3 Abstract thinking is already an inner process, a movement of the soul into itself, and, moreover, precisely an intellectual process, directed toward something intellectual, thinkable,4 if you will, toward something “ideal.”5 In this state the soul rejects an immediate confluence with the continuous stream of empirical phenomena, or an intuitive dissolution in the complexity and continuity of the concrete-empirical. A unique attraction of consciousness toward its center is revealed; consciousness separates itself off, gathers its forces, and counterposes itself to sensuous immediate being.6 Now consciousness is no longer “within it” but “outside of it”; it does not live “by it” but rather asks questions “about it.” Consciousness desires an accounting and determinacy; it seeks simplicity and stability. Consciousness sees “itself,” its own “I,” and the opposing object given to it. This “givenness” is nothing other than the concrete-empirical.7 It is the first, primary basis, the historical beginning of all further knowledge.8 But in this givenness everything is continuous and entangled. There is no possibility of grasping it as a whole—neither in depth nor in breadth; in itself it is changeable and inconstant in the 1. Comp.: Lass. 496; Glaub. 68; W. Beh. 334; Phän. 26, 606; Niet. 345, 346; Log. III 175, and numerous others. 2. Niet. 346. 3. Comp.: Niet. 345. 4. Comp.: Glaub. 36. 5. Comp., e.g.: W. Beh. 336, 416; Enc. II 222: “a merely ideal [ideelle] Ideality.” 6. Comp., e.g.: Phän. 142. 7. Comp.: Phän. 185; Log. III 20, 21, 308; Enc. III 294–95; Enc. I 403. 8. Ibidem.

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extreme. And here consciousness enters onto the path of detachment and holding fast in fixation. Such is the birth of abstract thought. In this consists the fundamental meaning of “abstract” (abs-traho = “I de-tach from”): consciousness rips the living, immediate whole into parts, pieces, aspects, elements, or determinations, and operates, as with an objekt, with these, already rather new, objective formations. Having established in the material some sort of distinction,1 consciousness fixes on it, and this is its first act—analysis.2 As a result of the analysis one obtains (the classical case) a certain duality,3 two separate and mutually distinct elements, whose roles and fates are also distinct. In order to obtain something that submits to thinking, consciousness must retain by force (gewaltsam)4 one of the distinct aspects, concentrating its attention on it: only under this condition can the necessary determinateness in thought be obtained. The other part is subjected to a distinctive “oblivion”;5 the soul makes an effort to “darken and remove”6 that from which the thought content is abstracted; consciousness does not look at it,7 crosses it out,8 omits it,9 denies it,10 negates it,11 “thinks it away,”12 for it considers that it can do without it.13 All this, of course, is done so that, at the first necessity, one can “restore” what has been crossed out, and then find in it material for new abstractions.14 But at the moment of abstraction consciousness looks only at one aspect15 and it is precisely this aspect, as detached, abstracted, and abstract, that it retains.16 In contrast to the aspect that is omitted, the part retained is extracted,17 isolated from connection with the other elements,18 and is posited19 as the content of an abstraction.20 As a result, the abstract turns out to be always torn away, separated, isolated, and counterposed.21 Consciousness purchases determinateness and thinkability at the cost of incompleteness, deprivation,22 and limitation. However, there is no doubt that it is precisely in this exchange that, together with the completeness of the object, it also loses the concrete-empirical givenness itself. A 1. Comp. esp. Glaub. 65; Phän. 434; Niet. 345; and also W. Beh. 357; Phän. 132, 329; Recht 256. 2. Comp.: Glaub. 92; Phän. 329; Log. II 31, and others. 3. Phän. 127. 4. Comp.: Enc. I 178. 5. “Vergessen,” Diff. 256. 6. “Verdunkeln und entfernen”: Enc. I 178. 7. “Wegsehen”: Phän. 163. 8. “Abstreifen”: Niet. 345–46. 9. “Weglassen”: Log. III 19, 38, 38; Prop. 92; Enc. II 385. 10. “Läugnen”: Diff. 215. 11. “Negiren”: comp.: Glaub. 65, 125–26, 137; W. Beh. 370; Log. III 38, and others. 12. “Hinwegdenken”: comp., e.g.: W. Beh. 334. 13. W. Beh. 408. 14. Comp.: Glaub. 126; Log. II 31. 15. Diff. 214; Abs. 405, 405. 16. Comp., e.g.: Enc. I 178. 17. “Herausziehen,” “herausheben,” “herausnehmen”: Glaub. 131; Phän. 185; Log. III 21; Enc. I 230; Recht 161. 18. Comp.: Log. I 68, and also Diff. 209; Glaub. 87; Log. I 45, 124; Log. III 32, 40; Recht 27, 161. 19. W. Beh. 413. 20. Log. III 38. 21. Comp., e.g.: Diff. 209, 213; Glaub. 19, 35, 131; W. Beh. 413; Log. I 24; Log. III 65. 22. Glaub. 17, 122.

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content of this sort, prepared by abstract thought and isolated from all connections and interactions, exists nowhere in space and time.1 The “abstraction” of a separate “aspect” as such does not exist;2 it is “real,” “actual” only in its common connection with a multitude of empirical circumstances and properties,3 from which it was abstracted by the effort of consciousness. Already at the very first approach to thought and knowledge the concrete-empirical is broken down into abstract elements and perishes; science does not cognize it and cannot cognize it.4 Therefore, “abstracting thought should not be viewed as a mere moving to the side of sensuous material, which thereby” (supposedly) “does not experience a loss in its reality.”5 No. “Under the influence of intruding thought the richness of infinitely diverse nature suffers an impoverishment; its spring withers, its plays of color fade. Everything in it that was filled with sounds of life grows mute and silent in the quietude of thought; the fullness of nature, suffused with warmth, combining into a thousand diverse attractive marvels, is transformed into dry forms and shapeless universalities, like a dim northern fog.”6 Thought deforms and makes unreal the concrete-empirical; it liquidates not only its poetic continuous complexity, but also its apparent indifference toward the essential and the inessential. Thought seeks essence and sees it in that which is stable. It is to this stable essence that thought strives to reduce (Reduktion) the diverse empirical givenness,7 by omitting one of its parts and reducing the other to unity.8 The similar, abstracted from what is not similar, when compared, coincides and is thought as a unity.9 A multitude of abstract concepts is obtained which have, according to the law of formal logic, content and domain,b and are related to one another as genus, species, subordination, and sub-subordination. Abstractly rational thought c takes the content of these abstract concepts to be the sought-for aristocratic essence of the empirical phenomena,10 while the phenomena themselves are left to mill about in the lower level of the domain. The fundamental property of these “concepts” is that they are universal. “To think the empirical world is . . . to change essentially its empirical form and to transform it into something universal”;11 this universality, however, is far removed from that which Hegel calls true, speculative universality; rather, it consists only in the fact that the property isolated by thought is inherent (or “common”) to many (or all) things of the empirical world and can therefore be attributed to them as a predi1. Comp.: Phän. 25. 2. Phän. 217. 3. Comp.: Phän. 26, 287; Log. I 93, 228. 4. Comp.: Log. III 298–300; Skept. 76. 5. Log. III 20. 6. Enc. II 12–13(Z). 7. Log. III 20. 8. Hegel puts here a careless “or” instead of “and”; see Enc. I 230; Niet. 345–46. 9. Comp.: Enc. III 230, 330. 10. Comp., e.g., Log. III 292; Enc. III 356. 11. Enc. I 108.

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cate.1 However, this generic feature, present in many (or all) elements of the domain, at the same time is thought separately from the subordinate sphere; this feature is free of this sphere;2 it is in itself;3 it forms a self-sufficient 4 thinkable something, an abstract unity,5 something absolute6 (from absolvo, i.e., untied, detached). By no means does the abstract-formal merge with the multiple-singular, and it is not identical with the latter.7 It is introduced to it from outside, as “other-being” to “other-being.”8 It applies to it, relates to it, is superposed on it,9 subsumes it under itself,10 and, in the best case, submerges itself in it, descends into it,11 in order to become convinced that it is incommensurable with it;12 it can neither exhaust nor express it. Torn away in this fashion from the concrete, the singular, and left to itself and to its specific nature, abstract rational thinking unfolds its special structure, its order and its particularities. It strives to assert the independence of its concepts from the domain, from the singular, from random empirical material. Besides “crossing out dissimilar, conspicuous pieces of what is given,”13 it is always drawn upward: to jettison yet something else from the ballast of its content, to abstract itself from yet one more determination, to raise itself to yet a higher step of abstraction. The essence of rational abstractiond lies in the fact that it is always attracted toward the largest possible domain and the smallest possible content, for if the empirically given material resolves the question of stability, and stability (spurious universality)14 is defined as the inductive everywhere-found and by-everything-confirmed, and if precisely such a universality and stability is the criterion of essence and essentiality (as abstractly rational science is convinced), then it is understandable that abstractly rational thought e will be looking for the fundamental essence of all things in that which is most abstract of all, in the most abstract, in the most contentless,15 but then also in the most “stable” and “essential.” This is precisely that “something,” that “Etwas,” to which Kant16 pointed when he 1. Comp.: Log. III 96; Phän. 307, 308; and also: Log. III 64; Enc. I 79. 2. Comp., e.g., Phän. 307, 308, 313, and others. 3. Comp.: Glaub. 71; Phän. 253. 4. Comp.: Log. I 192; Log. III 200; Recht 352. 5. Diff. 193, 287; Glaub. 44; W. Beh. 378; Log. I 90; Enc. I 386. 6. Comp.: Glaub. 36; Log. I 63, 276; Enc. I 230; comp.: Glaub. 128, 129; Beweise 402. 7. Comp.: Glaub. 11, 39, 64–65, 92, 135–36; W. Beh. 345, 346, 357; Phän. 26, 97, 153, 163; Log. III 60, 60–61; Enc. III 257; Bhag. 414, and others. 8. Comp.: Phän. 96–97; Log. III 21, 61; Enc. I 14. 9. Comp.: Phän. 362; Recht 46; W. Beh. 357; Log. III 310. 10. Comp., e.g., Log. III 73; Enc. III 412; Abs. 404. 11. Phän. 6. 12. Comp.: Glaub. 151; Skept. 76; W. Beh. 337, 375, 377; Phän. 240. 13. Niet. 345–46. 14. Comp.: Phän. 190; Log. III 96–98, 149–50, 292–93, 330. 15. Comp.: Glaub. 11; W. Beh. 340; Log. I 165; Enc. III 251. 16. Kant, Logik, ed. Kirchmann, 1869, p. 103.

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spoke of higher abstraction, and to which the Hindu yogis pray, invoking Brahma.1 This is “formal indifference.”2 Having in mind such a tendency of abstractly rational thought, Hegel in fact characterizes the abstraction produced by it as something torn away from content, and therefore as indefinite3 and formal.4 Acquired by decomposition, analysis, this is a distinctive analytical unity,5 knowing degrees of greater and less abstractness,6 but not knowing a limit in its abstraction from content,7 in its flight from it as from what constrains and limits.8 Only death, it appears, could be a higher, the final, abstraction and detachment.9 At the same time, however abstract a concept may be, it does nevertheless have some content.10 And in this, even if meager, content it is, according to a fundamental law of formal logic, identical to itself, “equal to itself”;11 it is an abstract and formal identity,12 internally not contradicting itself,13 unchangeable and therefore repeatable ad libitum.14 This identity being thought does not have distinctions and diversity in itself;15 it is abstracted from diversity and is simple.16 And as such it is not real, does not have reality and existence,17 but, as has already been stated, participates in reality only through singular empirical things;18 the abstract-formal is “nur überhaupt seiend.”19, f It is these abstract, formal concepts, these unreal, identical, thinkable units that compose the corpus of empirical science, which is interested in them and in their content, and of formal logic, which investigates their form. To construct concepts abstracted from the empirically given into a classification system according to the scheme genus proximum et differentia specifica 20 in such a way that their content embraces and exhausts this given—such is the regulative (although “infinite” and therefore unrealizable) idea of empirical science. To establish universal and unchanging, and therefore “absolute” laws governing the elements of this abstract sys1. Comp.: Bhag. 392, 412, 413–26. 2. W. Beh. 377; see also other early essays of Hegel. 3. “Unbestimmt,” “bestimmungslos,” “inhaltslos”: Glaub. 34, 120; W. Beh. 350, 351; Phän. 217, 295–96, 563; Log. I 270; Log. II 4; Log. III 60–61, 92, 120, 140, 200, 282; Enc. I xxx, 73, 330; Enc. III 208, 306, 460; Recht 177, 178, 193, 207; Bhag. 418, 419, and others. 4. Comp.: Glaub. 157; W. Beh. 409, 416, 422; Niet. 346; Log. III 25, 32, 140, 143; Enc. I 20, 157, 386; Enc. III 251; Recht 75, 150. 5. Comp.: Glaub. 92; Phän. 329; Log. I 339; Log. II 31; Log. III 281, 281. 6. Comp.: Diss. 19; Krit. 44; Skept. 73, 109, 115; Glaub. 8, 11, 17, 38; W. Beh. 343, 360; Phän. 73, 451; Enc. III 406. 7. W. Beh. 370; Aphor. I 542. 8. Recht 38, 42. 9. Comp.: W. Beh. 392; Aphor. I 543. 10. Recht 41. 11. Phän. 86, 96, 185. 12. Comp., e.g., Diff. 225; Glaub. 118, 131; Log. II 69; Log. III 281, 306, 313; Enc. I 230; Enc. II 138, and others. 13. Comp.: Enc. I 28. 14. Comp.: Diff. 193; Phän. 162. 15. Comp.: Log. III 281, 306; Enc. I 230; Enc. III 264. 16. Phän. 86, 86, 246, 446; Gymn. 144; Niet. 346; Log. I 246, 249; Log. III 298. 17. Comp.: W. Beh. 367, 367, 397, 409; Phän. 25, 26, 36, 108. 18. Comp.: W. Beh. 372; Log. I 93. 19. Phän. 26. 20. Log. III 308.

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tem—governing concepts, their essence, and their interrelationships— such is the task of formal logic, understood and (according to the traditional view) nearly solved once and for all by Aristotle himself. If one also takes into account the “universal” and “necessary” “laws of nature,” about which Hegel does not like to speak with respect and acknowledgment, does not thought in fact stand here before the last pinnacles of knowledge that are accessible to man? Given a suitably broad understanding of “the empirically given,” the following question can arise: In what else can the ideal of scientific knowledge consist? Does this not say everything? According to Hegel’s conviction, lying at the very base of all his other convictions and his entire philosophical doctrine, true science and true philosophy have not yet begun here. Not a word has yet been said here about their object, or about the task, or about the method, or about the ideal of cognition. Moreover, one who refuses to imagine a different object and a different method of scientific cognition, has in general no part in a true scientific philosophy; he is as alien to it as a blind man is alien to visual perceptions, or, expressing it in the terms of the Critique of Pure Reason, as abstract discursive reason is alien to the capabilities of abstract intuitive reason. Between sensuous intuition, the abstract-empirical processing of its givenness, and the abstract-formal treatment of the concepts obtained on the one hand, and Hegel’s speculative philosophy on the other, lies a profound, essential, qualitative distinction: these are different means of cognitive life, different psychic-spiritual strivings, fundamentally different approaches to things and to knowledge. Hegel’s science and philosophy do not speak about the same thing or in the same way as empirical and formal science, and the philosophy nurtured by them, do. All this does not mean, however, that Hegel denied any meaning to science or logic; this should already be clear from the above. But their significance is extremely limited, and the defects of their scientific method are so serious that they produce great deviations and dangers in philosophy. The concrete-empirical, as the medium of dull thoughtlessness, as the chaos of random circumstances alien to the culture of thought, stands opposite to philosophy. The abstract-formal introduces into this sphere the first and elementary culture of thought. Empirical sciences, working into the sensuous material “universal determinations, generic concepts and laws,” prepare it for philosophy.1 They gradually cleanse this material of givenness and immediacy,2 raise it to abstract universality,3 and thereby liberate it from a rough and barbaric state.4 In this de1. Enc. I 20.

2. Enc. I 20.

3. Comp.: Glaub. 103; Log. I 87; Log. III 61.

4. Recht 55.

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composition into elements and in the cultivation of the universality of thought lies the “absolute value” of the education.1 Such an assimilationg of the sensuous material to the abstract leads, on the one hand, to its simplification, to its transformation into something comfortably intelligible, understandable,2 thinkable, while on the other hand it is a preparatory approximation of the content to the speculative, to Spirit, a distinctive spiritualization of it,3 a baptism by fire.4 The concentrated energy of the concept 5 forges in this effort the basic instrument of philosophy: abstract thinking, i.e., the art of holding pure thoughts and, moving in them,6 of measuring the whole depth of their difference.7 Practicing these efforts, the human soul breaks away from sensuous concreteness and learns to live in the concept and to cognize through the concept;8 it weans itself from “meaningless representation”9 and grows accustomed to intuiting the “pure spaces of transparent thought.”10 In the course of this pedagogic and propaedeutic initiation “the most astonishing and the greatest, or even absolute power”—abstract reason, or the negative energy of thought—acts in the soul and governs it.11 To break apart the cohesive co-belonging of material, to negatively cast aside the greater part of it, to kill its life, to create a non-living, already dead abstract “something,” to retain this dead thing and to transform it into something self-sufficient, independent12 and identically stable—for this a truly colossal creative power is needed; and its deeds speak for themselves. To carry out this catharsis, to baptize and purify the soul with the fire of abstract thought was the task of the ancient world:13 of Greece in the sphere of philosophy and of Rome in the domain of law. But the greatest of the Greek philosophers, Aristotle, already saw a higher task and knew a better, true speculative philosophizing.14 The idea of the modern period consists precisely in putting an end to abstractly rational and stable abstract thought, in revitalizing this valley of death and repose, in bringing it into motion and flux,15 and in disclosing the essence of true speculative abstractness and true speculative concreteness. In this lies the supreme task of modern philosophy, and Hegel takes upon himself the challenge of solving it. With this objective in mind he first exposes the fundamental vices of formal abstraction. True philosophy is concrete, both in its object and in its method.

1. Comp.: Recht 55, 257. 2. Niet. 346; Log. III 298; Enc. II 39(Z); comp. also: Enc. III 406. 3. Comp.: Enc. III 294–95, 316(Z). 4. “Befeuern”: Enc. II 166(Z). 5. “Der Ernst des Begriffs”: Phän. 6. 6. Enc. I 7. 7. Comp.: Log. III 49. 8. Comp.: Log. I 45. 9. Phän. 115. 10. Log. III 323. 11. Comp.: Phän. 25, 26, 26; Log. III 49. See also: Aphor. I 546. 12. Ibidem. Comp. also: Beweise 338. 13. Phän. 27. 14. Enc. I xxviii; Gesch. Ph. II 299. 15. Comp.: Phän. 27. Comp. also: Briefe I 172, 329.

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This means that the elements of its object do not remain a scattered multiplicity but enter into some special living synthetic connection, uniting them into a new, distinctive living unity. This concrete connection is not only a cognitive synthesis, conceptually ideal, constructed by subjective human thinking; but it is also a genuine, living synthesis of the elements themselves of the object itself. Of course, it is still unclear to the empirically thinking mind what this synthesis is and how it is possible; however, it is already apparent that formal-abstract concepts may turn out to be unadapted to such a synthesis. For Hegel these concepts are completely incapable of achieving such a synthesis. Every abstract concept is by itself identical and unchanging.1 It is either “A” or “not-A.” It is uniform,2 monotonous,3 monochromatic.4 Its content cannot change, for a different content is the content of a different concept. Therefore, the abstract-formal is solid,5 fixed,6 immobile,7 and immovable.8 It is as if it has dried out 9 and become ossified10 in its inner nature. Deprived of all flexibility,11 cold12 and colorless,13 it is lifeless14 and dead15 with the eternal and hopeless mortality of an entity that has never lived. This is a kind of caput mortuum of abstraction.16 There is indeed a certain connection between these concepts, a connection of a generic and specific character; but this connection is just as solid,17 dead, and immobile as the inner nature of the concepts themselves. It maintains all the connected elements in an unchanged form and in a fragmented state of subordination, but not in a state of coordination; it is a purely negative connection, for a generic concept is derived by a simple “negation” of a specific h feature;18 it may even be not a connection at all, but merely the “presence” of generic elements in all the specific formations . . . In any case, in this dead order of classification all the abstract formations remain disconnected and self-enclosed.19 Since abstractly rational concepts owe their origin to the rupture and separation that con1. “Unwandelbar”: Phän. 162. 2. “Gleichförmig”: Enc. II 87, 87, Remark. 3. “Eintönig”: Phän. 13, 394. 4. “Einfärbig”: Phän. 13. 5. “Fest”: W. Beh. 374; Phän. 27, 27, 240, 252, 253, 257, 258; Log. I 39, 183; Log. III 32, 67, 120; Enc. I 147. 6. “Fix,” “fixirt”: Glaub. 36; W. Beh. 329, 340, 342, 367, 409; Jac. 14. 7. “Unbewegt”: Phän. 13; Log. I 50. 8. “Unverrückt”: Log. I 39. 9. “Trocken”: Phän. 252, 253; Log. I 45; Würt. 240. 10. “Knöchern”: Phän. 252, 253. 11. “Unbiegsam”: Phän. 446. 12. “Kalt”: Phän. 446. 13. “Farblos”: Log. III 60, 61. 14. “Unlebendig,” “Leblosigkeit”: Phän. 36, 590; Log. III 60–61; Enc. I xxxiii. 15. “Todt”: Nohl 7; Phän. 26, 522; Log. I 50; Log. II 4. 16. Enc. I 224. 17. Comp.: Phän. 274, and also: Niet. 345; Enc. I 147. 18. Comp. all those places where Hegel insists on the negative essence of the abstract-formal, terming the latter “positively expressed negation”: W. Beh. 341; in particular: Glaub. 65, 123, 126, 137; W. Beh. 370, 397; Phän. 578, 600; Log. I 101; Log. II 4, 84; Enc. I 223; Enc. III 348–49. 19. “Verschlossen”: Log. III 200.

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sciousness has performed over the material, they always retain upon themselves the stamp of separatedness and disintegration.1 Each in relation to the other is a sui generis “other-being,” something “other,” external, standing consequently in an external relation.2 The abstract is invariably burdened by this “other abstract,” separate from it,3 not merging with it and not dissolving in it—whether this “other abstract” be the universal-thinkable torn away from it or the singular-sensuous4 opposing it. Precisely for this reason it is—according to the profound definition of the absolute given by Spinoza 5—by no means something unconditional or absolute;6 on the contrary, it is conditioned by this separation,7 it is something relative,8 limited,9 insufficient.10 It constitutes only one side, torn out of the real fullness of the object, and therefore it is one-sided.11 Abstractly rational knowledge boasts in vain that it attains cognition of the infinite; its “infinity” is the infinity of a regress moving into the distance, of an unrealizable task, of unattainable fullness; this is that infinite with which Fichte concluded his first Wissenschaftslehre: the spurious, supposed, eternally wandering infinity of wingless abstract reason. In itself the abstract-formal is finite,12 and it should not encroach upon the genuine attainment of speculative philosophy. It must now be clear in what sense Hegel insists on the singularity of formal abstraction: isolating and raising out of the entire complex givenness only one, singular aspect of the object, the concept remains fettered to it, and this fettering determines its content for good; it is powerless to correct anything in this; giving out the isolated singularity as something universal, torn away from other contents and other concepts, it is itself only a singular concept, clinging to the singular content. Therefore, through a singular abstractly rational concept one can cognize only a singular property of the sensuous world, rationally generalized, but not having acquired true speculative universality.13 In this fashion, formal abstractions, separated from one another, in1. “Getheilt,” “zerrissen,” “geschieden,” “getrennt,” “abgeschnitten,” “dirimirt,” “aufgelöst,” “zerlegt,” etc.; comp.: Diff. 252; W. Beh. 413; Phän. 25, 252, 288, 377, 446; Log. I 86; Log. III 122, 205; Enc. II 501; Enc. III 354; Recht 226; Ph. G. 50, and others. 2. Comp.: Diff. 243; W. Beh. 368, 371; Log. I 39, 90, 101, 127, 246, 249; Log. II 4, 4; Log. III 32, 46, 380; Enc. III 400. 3. Comp.: Log. I 129. 4. Comp., e.g., Glaub. 11; W. Beh. 345. 5. See: Spinoza, Ethics, Pars prima, Def. II: “Ea res dicitur in suo genere finita, quae alia ejusdem naturae terminari potest.” And further, “Si cogitatio alla cogitatione terminatur.” Opera, ed. Paulus, 1802, vol. 1, p. 35. 6. Comp.: W. Beh. 353, 367; Phän. 13. 7. “Bedingt”: comp. Diff. 193, 210; Glaub. 120; Enc. III 44. 8. “Relativ”: W. Beh. 378; Enc. III 44. 9. “Beschränkt”: Diff. 233; W. Beh. 340, 367; Enc. I 147; Recht 150, 207, 352. 10. “Mangelhaft”: Recht 41; Bhag. 415. 11. “Einseitig”: Diff. 191; Phän. 101, 50; Log. I 65, 90, 101, 148; Log. II 33; Log. III 129, 175, 334; Enc. I xv, xxi, 175, 354–55; Enc. III 362; Recht 41. 12. “Endlich”: Glaub. 22, 156; Enc. I xv; Recht 41, 207. 13. Comp.: Phän. 185; Log. III 61, 74; Recht 161, 256.

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differently1 juxtaposed, hostilely 2 and stiffly 3 oppose one another, and in this they are in no way better than concrete-empirical things. “Abstract” always signifies the same thing as “opposed.”4 Elements that are torn away from each other, that are mutually abstract,5 relate to one another negatively,6 exclude one another, stand mutually in a relation of “ideal” and “unconditional” oppositeness.7 The ununifiable rupture 8 formed between them transforms them unavoidably into irreconcilable polar extremes.9 The whole great army of abstract concepts turns out to be a fragmented, scattered,10 and discrete11 multitude of logical atoms.12 Their entire advantage over empirical atoms is in their conceptual-universal form, and that is their only advantage. It is natural that such a multitude of atomized abstractions, with a dead content and in a dead order, turns out to be incapable of the supreme speculative-living synthesis that Hegel sought. Formal concepts are not appropriate for the speculative order of relations, which rests, first, upon the contentfulness and, second, upon the concreteness of its elements. Meanwhile, formal abstraction, in the first place, is contentless and, secondly, it is discrete. This abstractly rational concept, merely abstract, not more than abstract,13 is a pure14 and empty 15 contentless thinkability. Borrowing its whole content from the material of the concrete-empirical,16 not having the power to enrich it creatively with anything from itself, formal abstraction does not even concern itself with this, but, as has been revealed, strives toward the abyss of contentlessness,17 toward that ill-starred emptiness18 in which nothing can be known19 except the formal20 and 1. “Gleichgültig ”: Phän. 77, 86, 86, 253; Log. I 86, 87, 90. 2. “Entfremdung”: Phän. 451; “Gemeinschaft . . . zurückstossen”: Log. I 174. 3. “Sprödigkeit”: Log. I 185. 4. Comp.: Diff. 193, 194, 233, 243, 289; Glaub. 19, 138; Phän. 96, 504; Log. I 264; Log. III 65, and others. 5. Glaub. 11, 135. 6. Comp.: Glaub. 123; W. Beh. 353; Log. I 129; Recht 352. 7. Diff. 255; W. Beh. 336. 8. Comp.: Glaub. 97; Log. I 29–30. 9. “Extrem”: comp. Phän. 258, 446; Log. III 120, 129; Recht 395–96; Bhag. 414. 10. “Diffus”: Enc. III 303. 11. Log. III 282. 12. W. Beh. 334; Enc. I 35. 13. “Nur,” “erst,” “bloss”: comp. Phän. 273, 287, 481; Log. I 47; Enc. I 157; Enc. II 222; Enc. III 44; Recht 22, 42–43, 177. 14. “Rein.” The understanding of this term is equivocal in Hegel: sometimes by “reiner Begriff ” he means the speculative concept, for example: Log. III 60–61 and others; however, not infrequently he uses “the pure concept” to refer to the (abstractly) rational abstraction scorned by him; thus, for example, Phän. 257, 567, 586; and also: Glaub. 129; W. Beh. 377; Phän. 258, 480, 485, 504, 563, 579, 586, 600; Log. II 84; Enc. I 146, and others. 15. “Leer,” “arm”: comp. Glaub. 34, 68, 90, 109, 131, 135; W. Beh. 327, 377, 422; Phän. 73, 77, 98, 180, 226, 257, 273, 274, 291, 295–96, 480, 495, 577; Niet. 346; Log. I 20, 127, 190, 270; Log. II 64; Enc. I 73; Enc. III 44(Z), 101(Z), 114(Z), 460; Jac. 16; Recht 38, 39, 200; Hinr. 283; Bhag. 414. 16. Comp.: Phän. 153, 423; Log. I 86; Enc. III 379; Recht 414. 17. “Leerer Abgrund ”: Phän. 65. 18. “Unseelige Leere”: Phän. 258. 19. “Im leeren wird nichts erkannt ”: Phän. 111. 20. “Formale Erkenntniss”: comp. Diff. 281; Glaub. 120; W. Beh. 375; Enc. III 294.

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the superficial.1 Abstractly rational subjective thinking,2 arbitrarily 3 and forcibly 4 composing its abstractions, and climbing higher and higher on them, becomes worse the more purity and emptiness5 there is in them. And finally, when concepts turn out to be capable of any content and indifferent to any content;6 when in essence there remains no content, for all distinguishability disappears;7 when the threat of utter nonsense8 and amorphousness9 appears, only then does abstract reason notice that it has been stolen by its own creations, abstractions, and has been whirled around until a loss of consciousness in their vortical circular dance;10 and perhaps, too late, it remembers that even dreams and reveries are better than abstract emptiness.11 Can speculative philosophy be satisfied with such a concept? Can it be reconciled with the fact that the greatest, absolute power of thought falls into such impotence12 and surrenders to the limitless boredom of empty being?13 Should one acknowledge that abstract rational thinking, decomposing and ruining any speculative synthesis,14 constrained by an abstract form,15 departing objectlessly into indeterminateness—is the pinnacle of knowledge and the instrument of the truth? Hegel’s entire philosophy is a great creative “no” pronounced by him out of the depths of the object in answer to these questions. It is necessary to place a limit to the collapse16 to which the dominance of abstraction has led, with its ungroundedness,17 with the absence in it of any unconditional center and substantial18 essence.19 It is necessary to acknowledge that the abstract-formal concept is imperfect,20 incomplete,21 and undeveloped;22 that it lacks inner organic purposefulness;23 and that precisely for this reason it is subject to rejection. All purely abstract rational thinking is alien to the concept,24 does not know speculative thought,25 is torn away from the philosophical idea,26 and, as a consequence, is irrational27 and unspiritual.28 Truth is not attained on this path, for the most fundamental element of this path—formal ab1. “Oberflächlich”: comp. Phän. 185; Log. III 60–61; Enc. III 406, 433; Recht 401. 2. Comp.: Log. III 32, 323; Enc III 251. 3. Comp.: Log. II 31; Log. III 302; Enc. III 387. 4. “Gewaltthäftig ”: Glaub. 17. 5. Phän. 257. 6. Phän. 485, 486, 486–87; Enc. III 208. 7. W. Beh. 413. 8. Enc. I xxx. 9. “Gestaltlos”: Phän. 162; W. Beh. 422. 10. Comp.: Phän. 99. 11. Phän. 111. 12. Glaub. 109. 13. Glaub. 109. 14. Comp.: Recht 38, 39. 15. “Fessel eines Abstraktums”: Recht 19. 16. “Unwesen der Abstraktion”: Log. I 96. 17. “Grundlos”: Recht 365. 18. “Keinen Halt, keine Substanz”: Phän. 495. 19. “Wesenlos”: W. Beh. 341, 342, 345, 367, 401; Phän. 291. 20. “Unvollkommen”: Log. III 40. 21. “Unvollendet”: Log. III 25. 22. “Nicht entwickelt ”: Enc. I 324. 23. Comp.: Glaub. 44. 24. “Begrifflos”: Phän. 432; Log. III 40, 47, 60–61, 145, 145. 25. “Gedankenlos”: Phän. 432. 26. “Ideenlos”: Recht 315. 27. Comp., e.g., Recht 263. 28. “Geistlos”: comp. Phän. 21, 257; Log. I 39; Log. III 60–61; Jac. 14.

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straction—is not true.1 Anything that this false “instrument” of cognition touches turns out to be fragmented, degraded, killed: reason,2 spirit,3 infinity,4 actuality,5 life,6 organism,7 concept,8 truth,9 morality,10 God11— everything is distorted, everything is cognized falsely, all is decomposed into empty and dead abstractions. That is why philosophy has nothing at all to do with the abstract-formal,12 but only uses its work, which prepares to a certain degree the lowly matter of sensuousness. Furthermore, if one approaches this abstractly rational nest from the higher, speculative point of view, one has to admit that its “concepts” not only do not have an empirical existence, but—what is incomparably more important—they are deprived of any metaphysical reality. These “most banal abstractions,”13 their reality removed by opposition,14 are only invented quantities,15 subsumed in the category of possibility,16 empty chimeras,17 pale shadows,18 a magician’s smoke.19 They are nothing 20 in the face of true philosophy, and their metaphysical nothingness21 no longer makes them the object of knowledge but rather only of opinion22 and superstition.23 Absolute abstraction and irreconcilable opposition are anti-speculative principles, opposed to philosophy and genuine metaphysical reality, and consequently they are hostile to the truth, spirit, and God: abstract isolation is a principle of evil.24 Therefore, devotion to this formal thought, the inability and unwillingness to part with it and to prove to oneself that it does not correspond to anything and distorts everything, the greatest obstinacy of the abstractly rational mind,25 driving it to insist on its being right and to give out its error as truth—all this leads the seeking soul into an abyss of nonsense, philosophical impotence, and metaphysical falsehood. In Hegel’s eyes abstractly rational philosophy is a manifestation of limited stubbornness and cognitive impotence. What is necessary, of course, is selfless courage and scientific unselfishness, in order, having grown into a certain opinion, having worked oneself into a certain point of view, to

1. Comp.: Diff. 193; Phän. 181, 290, 586; Log. I 127, 127, 228; Log. II 33; Log. III 40, 268; Enc. II 63; Enc. III 101; Ph. G. 50; Bhag. 415. 2. Comp.: Enc. III 412; Recht 19; Beweise 390. 3. Comp.: Phän. 418: Log. III 61. 4. Comp., e.g., W. Beh. 359. 5. Enc. III 412. 6. Comp., e.g., Log. III 61. 7. Comp., e.g., W. Beh. 330. 8. E.g., Log. III 61. 9. Enc. III 334, 354; Hinr. 283. 10. Comp., e.g., Phän. 265 and others. 11. E.g., Log. III 61; Beweise 306. 12. Comp.: Glaub. 131; Phän. 36; Niet. 346; Enc. I 157; Enc. III 464. Comp.: Beweise 427. 13. “Gemeinste Abstraktion”: Glaub. 131. 14. Comp., e.g., Glaub. 137. 15. “Gedankendinge”: comp. W. Beh. 367, 372, 401, 404; Phän. 226; Jac. 16. 16. Log. I 228. 17. Phän. 293–94. 18. Comp.: Jac. 16. 19. “Hexenräuche,” Jacobi’s expression: Jac. 16. 20. “Nichts”: Glaub. 131, 138; Phän. 65, 291; Log. I 165. 21. “Nichtigkeit ”: W. Beh. 371, 377; Phän. 132; Jac. 16. 22. Log. III 334. 23. Log. I 81. 24. Comp.: Phan. 586; Recht 185. 25. Comp.: Log. I 192; Enc. 228.

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renounce them as untrue; to undertake a radical breakup of the habitual foundations; to renew not only one’s theoretical premises and views, but even the fundamental philosophical structure of the soul. Perhaps what is needed for this is a special gift of philosophical art . . . But according to Hegel’s conviction, such a transition is the sine qua non of true philosophical cognition. In what must this renewal consist, and to what will the renunciation of abstractly rational thinking in the name of speculative thinking lead and bring us?

Translator’s Notes a. The phrase “abstract-rational” (абстрактный рассудочный) plays upon the distinction in Russian between two terms, both of which may be translated as “reason”: рассудок and разум. However, Il’in consistently uses the former to refer to the “abstract reason” associated with the understanding (Verstand), and the latter to refer to reason in the sense of “speculative reason” or Vernunft. Given the consistency of Il’in’s usage, the phrase абстрактный рассудочный (abstractrational) is somewhat redundant in his Russian text. I have consistently translated the term рассудок by itself as “abstractly rational” in order to point up the distinction between the two types of reason. Arguably, the proper translation of рассудок into English would simply be “the understanding” (Verstand). I have not followed this perhaps more usual practice for the reason that Il’in much more often employs the term in an adjectival form in some more complex phrase that could be rendered into English only rather awkwardly if locutions involving “the understanding” were to be employed. However, whenever the phrase “abstract reason” and its variants are encountered, the reader should make the connection with Verstand. (See the discussion of this issue in the “Notes on the Translation” section of my introduction.) b. The Russian term translated here as “domain” is объем. The same term has been translated as “compass” in subsequent chapters. Where the issue is the scope of the abstract formal concept, I have translated the term as “domain”; where the issue is the scope of the concrete universal, I have used “compass.” In the current chapter the issue is simply the scope of what can be brought within the abstract formal concept. c. Alternatively, “the understanding” (Verstand). d. The Russian here is рассудочной абстракции, so more literally it would be “abstractly rational abstraction,” or better, “the abstraction of the understanding.” e. Alternatively, the understanding. f. In effect, “something that barely exists” (or “exists only in general”). g. In the German text Il’in used the term Behandlung (treatment) here. h. That is, by a feature at the level of the species, not the genus.

3

On Speculative Thinking in General (The Doctrine of Reason)

Hegel’s doctrine of the essence of speculative thought, like his philosophy as a whole, is grounded in genuine psychic-spiritual cognitive experience. That experience revealed to him what he in essence asserted, and affirmed for him the truth of what had revealed itself to him. The reenactment of this cognitive experience is an essential condition for genuinely understanding what Hegel had in mind, for assimilating the object of understanding not merely in the form of an approximate and general notion of something unconvincing,a but in the form of immediate cognitive association with the essence of what is being studied, as with a genuinely given object. As should already be clear, no one can give such an experience to anyone from the outside; but an objektive analysis of its essence is possible. Hegel himself attempted to subject to such an analysis not only concrete-empirical and abstract-formal cognitions, which he rejected, but also speculative thought in its essential features. Hegel was not only doing, practicing speculative philosophy; he was making heroic efforts to reveal its essence to others, to unfold it before everyone’s eyes, to formulate its foundations, and to explicate its nature. True, despite all this, there remain serious difficulties requiring for their understanding and verification great efforts within the confines of individual cognitive experience. It is not without reason that Hegel has acquired the reputation of being one of the most difficult philosophical thinkers. However, there are fewer insuperable difficulties here than generally thought, and what is essential does yield to the understanding. Hegel’s philosophy, like any true philosophy, cannot be understood by thought alone; it requires the participation of the full complement of real psychic experience, especially the participation of the creative imagination. “Speculative thought,” which constitutes the element and mediumb of this philosophy, is thought so permeated with the work of imagination, so fused with it, that it cannot be understood by the usual logical-formal, and even critical-Kantian, thought. Reading Hegel, the theoretician trained in formal thought will experience an uncommonly distressing sensation that maximal mental exertion aimed at understanding what is being read remains fruitless, or virtually without result. A 46

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dilemma will soon confront him: that either what is being read lacks meaning, or the reader himself lacks an aptitude for philosophy; and the whole attempt will at best end in perplexity and the rejection of any further attempt at familiarization with Hegel. Perhaps all people fall victim to the unconscious prejudice that a tool that they have personally become used to using must be appropriate or correspond to every object and content. In any event, they sometimes pay dearly for the erroneousness of this opinion. Before writing or making judgments about Hegel, it is necessary to clearly take account of the essence of his cognitive approach to objects, i.e., one must attempt to grasp his mode of thinking in order to then reenact this mode with one’s own soul and assimilate it. Only after this can one begin the study of his works. In other words, in order for Hegel to be disclosed to the spiritual eye, it is necessary that it learn to see in a new way, or, still more simply: a renovation of the tool will make the object of study accessible. All of this can also be expressed in the following way: in order to comprehend Hegel one must attempt to approach his philosophizing phenomenologically, i.e., to reveal the internal structure of his thought act. Since, according to Hegel, “abstractness” constitutes the nature of thought, while “speculativeness” constitutes its fundamental property, such a phenomenological analysis can give a first, clear apprehension of the essence of the “abstract-speculative.” In order to obtain such an apprehension, one must begin by a forgetting of what was previously believed, and that toward which opinion had hitherto inclined:1 one must break with the objectless empty chiming 2 of abstractly rational thought and with the fogginess of warm feelings and moods.3 The first thing that a speculative thinker needs is humility 4 and the capacity for self-renunciation in knowledge—not only for the purpose of parting (if only for a time) from his “own” devices and inventions, or for the purpose of always being ready to admit “his” error as soon as the object discloses it; but mainly for the purpose of knowing how to eliminate and liquidate, or at least to isolate in one’s soul, the normal pulsation of personal inclinations and personal affective interest from the pure objektive situation disclosed in the object. One of Hegel’s fundamental convictions (which he, like Bolzano, took in from the philosophical atmosphere created by the Critique of Pure Reason) consists in the fact that thought “turned inward” deals with some objective objektivity,c an objektivity that is not only no less but incomparably more objektive than the sensuous reality of the external world. In our 1. Skept. 107; Ohl. 230. 2. “Das gestaltlose Sausen des Glockengelautes”: Phän. 164. warme Nebelerfüllung ”: Phän. 164. 4. “Demuth”: Beweise 483.

3. “Eine

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day this conviction might appear strange only to one who is completely inexperienced in philosophy, or to one who has become accustomed to not doubting the reality of external things, but instead regards with doubt that which does not yield to external perceptions and criteria. Contemporary psychology does not doubt the objektivity of its subject matter d —the internal, psychic reality investigated by it. Not only that: in contemporary logic —thanks to the works of Bolzano, Husserl, and, in part, Cohen—doubts are rapidly fading about the objektivity of the content being thought as such, of that which is thought in thought: of meaning. “Objektivity” is given not only in an “external way,”e but also in an “internal” one—that is the view which is more and more acquiring the right of citizenship. “True objektivity” is given precisely not in an “external” way, but only in an “internal” one—such was Hegel’s view. Indisputably, this view has a complicated history in the philosophy that preceded Hegel, but it was thought through and expressed by him with such power and completeness that it can truly be called “Hegel’s view” par excellence. One must acknowledge that none other than Hegel is one of the precursors of contemporary logical objektivism, although it is just as certain that scientific logic will not repeat his fundamental phenomenological error.f According to this view, Hegel strives first to disabuse the philosophizing soul of belief in the objektivity of the external world, and then to give it access to a new “internal” objektivity. Aversion from the former is an essential condition for penetration into the latter.1 Abstract rationality g had already been training the soul to think outside of vision and hearing, in order to concentrate the intensity of the inner life not on the centrifugal but on the centripetal tendency of the soul.2 This mobilization of spiritual energy, and the directing of it “into the self,” inward, now receives its positive justification: it was necessary to become accustomed to abstractly rational thought in order later “to learn to think speculatively.”3 For speculative thinking is not simply abstract thinking, but something more: thought that is combined in a distinctive way with intuition. Intuiting, as we already know, is an immediate relation of consciousness to its object. It is such already in poetic and mystical experience. There this immediate relation is characterized by a kind of forgetting of oneself; the conscious reflex with regard to what is taking place is lost;4 that which I called “my own” disappears; the soul lives “outside of time and space”; it immerses itself in the object being contemplated, surrenders itself to this object, fuses with it; the soul is wholly within the object, 1. Comp.: Glaub. 96; W. Beh. 357; Phän. 226; Log. III 267, 332. 2. Comp.: Niet. 345; Rel. I 198. 3. Niet. 348. 4. Comp., for example, Glaub. 103, 104.

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it is only this object.1 And returning from such intuiting, the soul experiences fear and astonishment, but without fathoming its depths.2 In an intuition so powerful, focused, and pure, but one that has already fused with thought, that has permeated, and in its turn been permeated by, thought, the genuine objektive essence of all—the “thing in itself,” to use Kant’s term—is disclosed to cognition. That fatal subjectivistic distortion of the “absolute” objekt which was noted and advanced by English empiricist philosophy, a distortion which Leibniz considered eliminable by means of thought, but which Kant deemed to be not eliminable by anything and to bar access by human cognition to the thing in itself—this subjectivistic defectiveness of everything cognizable falls away for Hegel as a result of his acknowledgment of intuitive thought. Intuitive thought thinks its object with that power of absolute immersion which liquidates the subjectively finite medium of the “refracting” consciousness, eliminates it entirely, annuls it. The form of time, to which for Kant inner sense and the category are “chained,” falls away here as a result of psychic tension, resolving itself in immediate fusion with the object. This immediate fusion of intuiting thought with the object was for Hegel’s philosophy the source of its greatest power as well as its greatest error.h Speculative thought is thought. Therefore, its object is not empirically, concretely singular, but pure, abstract, and universal. To be sure, speculative abstractness and speculative universality are already something other and new: but what is fundamental, what has been valued in thought since the time of Socrates and Plato and up to our own time—its suprasensuousness, determinability, and stability 3—turns out to be present in speculative philosophy as well. The aim of speculative thinking is that, extrasensuously and suprasensuously, it no longer cling to the concrete-empirical as the source of its content,4 that it should not need it, should not borrow from it, should not apply to it. Speculative thinking permits abstract reason to place at its disposal the “stable determinations” or, as Hegel usually puts it, the “abstract universalities”5 brought forth by it, and begins with them as with the element possessing minimal philosophical admissibility. This element is “the abstract in general,” a product of thinking, something thought, the concept in the most general meaning of this word. Abstractly rational thought approaches the “concept” as though from without, from the side, as to some empirically given content sub1. Comp. the poem “Eleusis”: Ros. 78, 79. 2. Ibidem. 3. In “stability” of thought Hegel valued, of course, not “unchanging identity,” but “repeatability” under lawlike mobility. 4. Comp.: W. Beh. 357; Phän. 226; Log. III 267, 332; Recht 280. 5. Characteristically, for example, Log. III 332. Comp. also: Briefe I 340.

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ject to processing, and itself remains in this a function of the subjective human soul.1 Speculative thinking, however, is not characterized by these features. Ordinary abstractly rational thought forms a “one,” while its object forms a “two.” The thinking of abstract reason is a convergence, a juxtaposition, a touching of two sides. This dual composition is preserved over the entire course of the thought process, which ends with an indifferent, unsorrowful parting of the ways. Thinking is fundamentally separated from the object, the subject from the objekt, the cognitive act from the content being cognized. The subject and the objekt are not one, although they enter into an ephemeral union. The subject is not dissolved in the objekt; the objekt does not coincide with the subject, is not fused or identified with it. “Human consciousness” is a distinct existence,i as is the “thing” studied or “measured” by it. In speculative thought the situation is reversed. Speculative thought is not only thought but in addition, as such, it is also intuition. This means that bifurcatedness, interaction, mediatedness2 give way to an unmediated unity, a unity beyond splitting, beyond duality, etc. In descriptive-psychological terms it can be imagined that a certain “convergence” of consciousness with the object is taking place for “the last time,” but this convergence is one in which the converging sides fuse into one, constituting a new intellectual-intuitive formation—a subject-objekt identity. This identity is, according to Hegel, the principle and essence of any true philosophical speculation.3 This identity must be understood from two sides: from the empirical-psychological side and from the metaphysical-ontological side. For the identity of the subject-objekt j signifies, coming from Hegel, first, the fusion of the single human consciousness with the content being thought; second, it signifies the cognitively unfolding (as a result of this) metaphysical directedness of absolute spirit on itself. The first is the ratio cognoscendi of the second; the second is the ratio essendi of the first. The fusion of the single human consciousness with the content thought by it is attained, as we have already said, as a result of the fact that thought acquires the power of intuition and intuition gives itself entirely to the work of thought. It is for this reason that Hegel insists on the complete abstraction of the intuitive power of the soul from the sensuous, external surroundings.4 Saturated with the power of imagination,5 thought

1. See, for example, Beweise 305. 2. Mediatedness is usually understood by Hegel as the conditionedness of an element “A” by means of a relation to “other-being”—to an element “B.” Comp.: Phän. 16, 74, 76, 79, 494; Log. I 63, 74, 92, 110, 200, 235; Log. II 3; Enc. I 19, 165. 3. Comp.: Diff. 162, 163, 276; Enc. III 284–85(Z), and others. 4. Comp.: Glaub. 96: “empirisches Bewusstsein zu Grunde geht in Vernunftanschauung.” 5. “Einbildungskraft”: Glaub. 42, 46, 92, 154.

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no longer merely fixes and combines its concepts, polishing their surface and perfecting their arrangement. No: it lives in them, lives by them, becoming penetrated by them and penetrating into them. Consciousness delivers itself to the object,1 surrenders to it,2 abides in it.3 Consciousness penetrates deep into the object,4 so deeply that the object becomes as though its own for it.5 Furthermore, it forgets about itself 6 and loses itself in this “unconscious”7 thought-penetration, this thinking-into the essence of the concept. The soul must hold its breath, as it were, and let the object rule within it,8 to govern it, to move it9 according to the object’s own internal laws. The soul should by no means interfere, or introduce anything arbitrary of its own, or disturb the independence of the object.10 The consciousness of the single soul must thus dissolve in the object to the point of self-forgetting, or even to the point of the complete forgetting that this self-forgetting was, in fact, undertaken by it for the purposes of cognition, as a sort of cognitive method. One who recognizes human consciousness (das menschliche Bewusstsein) to be a necessary ingredient of any cognition, to be something “absolute,”11 closes off for himself all access to speculative thought. Speculation requires the “annihilation” of consciousness itself,12 as finite and subjective. “Subjective finiteness, the sensuously and reflectively thinking I, my all,” “my finite all” perishes.13 Let all the stinging “mosquitoes of subjectivity”14 burn up in this consuming fire; let the very consciousness of this self-surrender and annihilation perish; but if there remains even one reflection on the annihilation of every reflection, or the “subjectivity” of the consciousness that subjectivity is annulled, then the “subjective” saves itself from death and the objektive essence of the object is distorted.15 Hegel, like Kant, considers sensuous subjectivity to be an obstacle and a distortion:16 that which is assumed to be something “subjective” is thereby recognized to be something not absolute.17 However, this obstacle, according to Hegel’s conviction, can be eliminated and the distortions can be avoided—not, to be sure, in external but in internal experience, and not in the life of feelings, emotions, and moods,18 but in the life of thought. This is attained not by thought which abstracts, but by the power of intuition, intuitive thinking. Hegel professes and establishes the possibility of overcoming, 1. Phän. 42–43. 2. Phän. 5; Enc. III 313(Z). 3. Phän. 5. 4. Enc. I 44; Enc. III 313(Z); Beweise 322. Comp.: Beweise 483. 5. Phän. 46, 47. 6. Phän. 5; Beweise 321. 7. Diff. 188, 199. 8. Enc. I 44, 45; Enc. III 313(Z). Comp.: Beweise 324. 9. Phän. 46, 47. 10. Phän. 46, 47; Recht 65, 66. Comp.: Beweise 319. 11. Glaub. 32, 57. 12. Diff. 188. 13. Glaub. 59. 14. “Alle Mücken der Subjektivität verbrennen in diesem verzehrenden Feuer”: Glaub. 103; “dieser Verstand behält die Mücke der Endlichkeit fest im Kopfe”: Beweise 426. 15. Comp. the critical remarks against Jacobi, for example, Glaub. 103, 104. 16. Comp., besides the indicated places, Glaub. 76, 97, 111; Enc. III 119(Z), 309, 310, 311. 17. Glaub. 32. 18. Comp.: Log. III 21; Enc. I 37; Enc. III 320; Hinr. 302. Comp.: Beweise 316–23.

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on this path, psychologism and anthropologism in cognition. That which still preserves some relation to the “human cognitive capability” is indisputably something finite and subjective.1 Accordingly, cognition of the absolute, of unconditionedk essence, requires a total absence of relation to the human and the subjective. Such a nonrelatedness, or immediacy, is revealed in thinking intuition,l in this “suprasensuous inner intuition”2, m which forms the basis of all philosophy.3 Thus, from the psychologically descriptive point of view the identity of subject and objekt consists in the victory of the objekt over the subject, so to speak, or, more correctly, in the voluntary fading away or self-annulment of the subject as such before the objektive situation to be revealed to it. Since the true energy of philosophical knowledge and subjectivity are incompatible,4 subjectivity liquidates itself, completely dissolving in the content being thought. The subject as such —this principle of all finiteness,5 distinctiveness, particularity,6 dependence, singularity,7 particularism,n randomness,8 and self-interest 9—no longer exists: it is all in the objekt. It attends to the voice of the object, as it were, to the music of ideas;10 or it looks at, examines (zusehen, betrachten)11 the essence of the objekt. In any case, it merely perceives that which is obviously present in the objekt;12 or it listens to the internal necessity of the object unfolding in it, later bringing this necessity to consciousness,13 formulating it in words.14 All of these expressions and formulas are, of course, not more than figurative characteristics used for popular and exoteric purposes. Inner intuition does not see or hear; it is suprasensuous. However, suprasensuous experience is still experience.15 Speculative thinking too submits itself to a distinctive observation, to an inner observation, accessible only to one who thinks;16 psychologically speaking, thinking will always have the form of the inner spontaneity of the subject17 that has broken away from the external world and withdrawn into itself. It is this inner speculative experience that Hegel attempts, through description, to approximate to the consciousness of the layman.o It is now clear that the “death” of the subject in the objekt is not in the strict sense of the word “death.” It can rather be likened to the periodic departure of the subject into the objektive sphere of logical content, where it associates for a time with a supratemporal state and

1. Glaub. 41. 2. Log. III 332. 3. Diff. 272. 4. “Unverträglich”: Krit. 38. 5. For example, Glaub. 14, 59. 6. For example, Glaub. 76. 7. E.g., Enc. III 119(Z). 8. E.g., Log. III 111; Enc. III 309; Beweise 320. 9. Enc. III 359. 10. Comp.: Glaub. 74. 11. Phän. 46, 47, 69, 101; Recht 65, 66. 12. “Nur aufnehmen, was vorhanden ist ”: Log. I 62. 13. Recht 66; Beweise 302. 14. Phän. 42, 43. 15. Comp.: Enc. I 14; “eine innere Erfahrung ”: Beweise 336. 16. Rel. I 125. 17. Enc. I 44; Niet. 344; Raum. 353.

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order. This departure into a state of dissolution in the objekt is replaced by a return to the usual empirical dualism, to the bifurcation between subject and objekt. But consciousness philosophizes only in dissolution; only speculative self-forgetting in the thought object is philosophical cognition. Thus, a soul that is mystically turned toward God experiences itself as coinciding with him, as it were, as entering with him into a certain identity despite the separateness that has not vanished. This soul does not vanish in God without a trace; rather, it retains its limited nature, remains a “soul,” and is identified with the Divinity only in its essential, absolutely real makeup. In this speculative identity with the objekt, consciousness is not extinguished, but is preserved. It is true, however, that consciousness is liberated from subjectivity, from individual distinctiveness, from its personal limitedness and its empirically determined psychic fabric, but it remains consciousness.1 It rises to objektivity, becomes objektive consciousness.2 It lives in the objekt as free from all particularity, and it “creates only the universal,” in which it is “identical”p with all individuals.3 This means that the “logical” itself or the object reigns in it. Apparently, Hegel was not noticing that a certain essential difficulty arises here, which poses a cardinal problem for any intuitivistic philosophy. Anyone who accepts the possibility of an intuitivistic departure from subjectivity, from its environment, its influence, its distorting effect on the process and result of cognition, must inevitably establish some indications or limits which are to serve as the starting point for this sphere of genuine objektivism, liberated from the “contingencies” and arbitrariness of the individual consciousness. This problem is usually left on the side; not, of course, because of faintheartedness in view of its difficulty, but because a truly gifted intuitivist is so preoccupied with the object that has been revealed to him, so immersed in the exhaustive practical-cognitive study of it, in the content-filled actualization of the intuition, that reflection on its character and composition, on its formal limits and competence, appears to him to be of secondary significance, not particularly important, perhaps even an esoteric matter, while a rationalistic circumspection and demarcation, a resolution of the question “how” prior to a resolution of the question “what, precisely?” are closer for the differentiating thought of the analyst. Thus, Kant remains an epistemologist both in ethics and in aesthetics, while Hegel intuitively lays bare the realia both in the Logic and in the Phenomenology of Spirit. He does not have a separate “theory of cognition”;q a doctrine of the essence 1. Comp. in particular: Diff. 270. 2. See: Enc. III 147–48(Z). 3. See: Enc. I 44; comp.: Beweise 320.

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of knowledge is scattered throughout his works, sometimes in the form of propaedeutic clarifications, but more often in the form of polemics, or separate indications given in passing. And the only thing that one can find in Hegel in the sense of a criterion of intuitivistic objektivism is a “forgetting of self-forgetting” and an “identity r with all individuals.” However, the presence of the first, even given all of its authenticity and completeness, can guarantee only the unmediatedness of the thought process and the integrity of the cognitive state, but not the truthfulness of the result obtained.s For holistic and unmediatedly fused thought can lead to error; and the heroic deed of higher self-renunciation of thought, even if it does provide a guarantee against subjective distortions graspable for consciousness, does not insure against hidden subjectivistic deviations: the whispers of the unconscious are sly and insinuating, and the forms of its calumnies are unexpected and manifold, especially when the reflective “Argus has departed and sleep has touched his eyes.”t Similarly, the second criterion does not solve the problem either. That “identity” of people to which Hegel refers and the “universality” of the creative element of thought cannot have for Hegel an empirical significance: i.e., the factual coincidence or “agreement” of the results of thought in all people. Too great was his scorn for baser, empirical “universality” as such, not to mention the fact that the vortex of temporality and contingency, swirling within itself everything empirical, makes such an agreement impossible in reality, and that the quality of “truthfulness” cannot be guaranteed by the agreement of many opinions (the empirical quantification of a criterion). The metaphysical significance of “identity”u and “universality” is already something from the unverified sphere of the transcendental object, something that is already cognized by that intuitive thinking whose criterion of truth is sought in vain by the questioning skeptic.v As a true and consistent intuitivist, Hegel prefers to these epistemological reflections the practice of intuitive thinking, and usually responds to the rationalistic demand for proof with a demonstrative indication of the essence of the object seen by him, by a “showing” of it, by an unfolding disclosure of the objektive situation revealed to him: let one who thirsts for truth verify what is unfolded through genuine cognitive experience. The preliminary doubts of the epistemologist do not trouble and do not detain Hegel; he proposes that one who seeks knowledge swim together with him in the element of the object, obediently surrendering to its waves.w The tendency to cultivate one’s unrealizable mastery in making distinctions, so typical of contemporary methodologists, is not characteristic of him. Hegel’s strength is in the heroically realized intuitive cognition of the object. But precisely in this heroic realization of speculative thought lies

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the source of Hegel’s fundamental error.x A scornful attitude toward epistemological reflectiony led to the circumstance that the author of the Phenomenology of Spirit—having intuitively suffered through that work all the basic forms of combination of consciousness and the object, having left as a legacy to subsequent philosophy the idea of “phenomeno-logical” analysis (i.e., the penetration by intuitive thought through the appearance of a phenomenon to its essence)—carried away from this speculative history of human errors a certain fundamental phenomenological biasz and lack of clarity in his approach to the object and its cognition. Hegel undoubtedly knew about this bias,aa but he did not consider it to be a bias.bb He consciously practiced this lack of clarity and consistently accepted its fruits; however, he supposed that everything was clear in it and that he saw to the bottom of everything here. His entire doctrine of the speculative concept rests upon this mixing-together; the entire essence of his dialectical method grows on this ground. Formally, but not in terms of content, Hegel’s doctrine stands or falls together with this confusion,cc and the understanding of his philosophy demands complete clarity on this point. Already when Hegel exposes the powerlessness of sensuous knowledge and the philosophical vices of the concrete-empirical, the attentive eye involuntarily notices that his arguments are, in the majority of cases, directed at so-called “external” experience, at the aggregate of things in space, and at perceptions “evoked by the influences of these things” upon the human soul. The sphere of “inner sense,” to use Kant’s term, often remains to the side; less frequently does Hegel censure the “temporal,” concentrating primarily on the “spatiotemporal”; the inner world acquires a certain privileged position, as it were. This is partly explained by the fact that purely temporal material is less to blame for the fundamental vice of sensuous existence and cognition: abstractness-discreteness. Time as such communicates to the elements belonging to it a certain— not speculative, but nonetheless mobile—fluidity, a mutual connectedness, even a fusedness. Let this mobility be irrational, chaotically complex, devoid of thought and immanent necessity. The purely temporal is nonetheless closer to Hegel’s soul than the spatiotemporal, just as the profundity of his thought is hopelessly silent in the face of the “eternally dead” mountain masses, and discovers the archetype of spirit in the movement of the “majestic” waterfall.1 But the primary basis of this preference is, of course, the fact that the “inner” realm includes within itself that special, exclusive sphere of speculative thought and knowledge from which, as from a most essential property of the spirit, Hegel waged his philosophical battle. According 1. See: “Reisetagebuch durch die Berner Oberalpen,” Ros. 474, 478, 483, 489.

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to this, his separate clarifications gradually isolate from the entire domain of the inner world those spheres that remain connected with time and share the fundamental fate of the concrete-empirical: such, first of all, are all sensuous sensations and perceptions as such; further, such are intuitions,1 representations,2 and the affective-emotional group of experiences.3 All this remains personal, subjective in the worst sense;4 this is that sphere which, although it has thinking as its metaphysical basis,5 does not itself rise to the objektive sphere of thinking, remaining alien to it primordially and qualitatively. Remaining in this sphere, the individual is not capable of rising to the higher levels of spiritual life. Feeling is always “something singular,” “lasting a single, isolated moment,”6 and belonging to a single empirical subject. And one who refers to feeling, to unmediated knowledge, to his own representation, to his own sensations, is “locked into his own particularity,”7 and enters onto the path of subjectivistic arbitrariness. It is precisely upon this path that spurious, false religiosity has always been formed. And it has always happened that, if the decisive voice has belonged to subjective “judgment and arbitrariness,”8 then religion has always been subverted9 at its root. For “unmediated sensation, not purified”10 by the power of reason, does not constitute anything holy.11 In themselves, feelings can lead only to the pretentious “auguries of an oracle” or to “subjective assurances.”12 Religion that is based on feeling degenerates into a subjective romantic striving 13 or, what is worse, into an oppressive and unworthy sense of one’s dependence upon some higher power.14 The loose,15 unpurified, unilluminated life of subjective moods and sensations cannot lead to true religion; a religion cannot be considered to be true merely because it is experienced “in feeling or in the heart,” because its content is based on faith or on “immediate” knowledge.16 “All religions, the falsest and most unworthy ones, have also been experienced by feeling and the heart.”17 No; “the content must be true from the very beginning, independently of feeling”; content is something “necessary in itself and universal.” It is the “object (die Sache) developing itself and forming itself into the realm 1. Comp., for example, Log. III 21; Hinr. 302. 2. Comp., for example, Phän. 200, 429, 445, 519; Log. I 136; Enc. III 322, 330; Briefe II 119. Representations, “Vorstellungen,” sometimes occupy in Hegel a middle position between the concrete-empirical and the abstract-formal. See, for example, Beweise B 473 and others. 3. “Gefühle”: see: Log. III 21; Enc. I 37; Hinr. 302; Rel. I 74. 4. Rel. I 74; Aesth. I 43. 5. See: Enc. III 111(Z). 6. Beweise 317. 7. Beweise 320. Comp.: Prop. 179. 8. “Belieben und Willkür ”: Recht 192. 9. “Untergraben”: Recht 192. 10. “Unmittelbare Empfindung,” “nicht gereinigt ”: Enc. III 260, 292(Z). 11. Ibidem. 12. “Orakelsprüche der Gefühle und Versicherungen eines Subjekts”: Beweise 372. See also: Phän. 43–44; Enc. II 15(Z). 13. Glaub. 5, 7. 14. Comp.: Hinr. 295. 15. “Ungebändigt”: Phän. 10. 16. Beweise 318. 17. Beweise 318.

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of truths and laws, as well as into the realm of knowledge of them and of their ultimate foundation—God.”1 Hegel does not wish to say thereby that the entire group of psychic experiences that he censures fails to merit any justification and should be eradicated. On the contrary, for all people who have not been able to rise to speculative thought and who have not gone beyond the limits of “feeling and representation,”2 the feeling and intuiting attitude toward truth and God remains the only possible path. Historically 3 and phenomenologically, religion necessarily precedes philosophical knowledge. But, in themselves, feeling and unthinking intuition 4 are powerless 5 in the matter of cognizing the truth. Credibility dd grounded in confidence does not guarantee the truthfulness of content.6 This entire path—the path of fantastic flights, of blind exaltation, of objectless ecstasies, of obscure ferment, of sudden inspirations, of “empty depth,” and “contentless intensity”7— leads to “superficiality,”8 prejudices,9 and spiritual emptiness. The followers of this path vainly deny reason, its “measure and determinateness,”10 its light and catharsis.11 They vainly give themselves out to be the elect,12 “to whom God gives wisdom in sleep,” for what they perceive in sleep is nothing more than human dreams.13 This lower and subordinate sphere of the “inner” world is sharply and distinctly opposed by the higher and dominant, substantial sphere of the soul—the sphere of thought. If sensations, perceptions, intuitions, representations, and affects are personal and subjective, thought in its essence is “objektive.” If the first sphere is permeated or infected with sensuousness, the second is suprasensuous14 and supraempirical. If the soul, living in the lower forms, dwells in the finite, attached to it, the ascent to the higher forms is the soul’s departure toward the infinite.15 The first sphere is the realm of contingency, of senseless empirical necessity, of unfreedom, of “psychological compulsion”;16 on the contrary, thought is free, unconditionally free, fully free,17 or, what is the same thing, it is 1. Beweise 319. Comp.: Beweise 320, 324. 2. Comp.: Beweise C. 482; Enc. III 453. 3. Enc. III 436. 4. Comp.: the polemic with Jacobi in Glauben und Wissen, in the review, placed in volume 17 and in Beweise für das Dasein Gottes. See especially: Enc. I 9; Enc. III 455; Beweise 421. 5. See, e.g., Beweise 369. 6. Comp.: Glaub. 123; Phän. 64, 602, and others: Beweise 314–15. In true philosophy “Gewissheit” and “Wahrheit” coincide: Log. I 28, 35. 7. Phän. 8, 9, 10; Prop. 184–85; Beweise 311; comp., on Böhme: “trübe Tiefe,” Log. I 119; Briefe I 315–316. 8. “Oberflächlichkeit ”: Phän. 8, 9. 9. “Aberglaube”: Hinr. 296. 10. Phän. 10. 11. “Reinigen,” “gereinigt ”: Log. I, 19; Enc. III 292(Z); Beweise 336–37, 482. 12. “Die Seinen zu sein”: Phän. 10. 13. Phän. 10; comp.: Enc. II 14(Z). 14. W. Beh. 306; Enc. I 107; Hinr. 302. Comp.: “ut a sensibus rebusque fortuitis animum avocemus.” 3 Lat. 308. 15. Comp., for example, Glaub. 70; Log. I 54, 148; Enc. I 107; Enc. III 452; Recht 73–74. 16. Comp., for example, W. Beh. 405; Log. I 19; Gymn. 170; Rel. I 74. 17. Comp.: W. Beh. 405; Gymn. 170; Log. I 61, 148; Enc. I 20, 22, 25, 44; Enc. III 163–64, 232, 322, 452; Ph. G. 16, and others.

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subject to a spiritual necessity that is exclusively its own and immanent to it. The first sphere is the sphere of the soul; thought transforms the soul into Spirit.1 The soul, dwelling in sensations and feelings, gravitates toward the animalistic; it is precisely thought that distinguishes humanity from the beasts.2 Furthermore, thought is a sign signifying the divine origin (Ursprung) of humanity;3 this determination is common to humanity and the Divinity.4 It is clear that the qualitative distinction of the two spheres of the inner world grows in Hegel into an abyss; on the path from soul to Spirit, consciousness must effect a certain separation (Abbrechung) and leap (Sprung);5 and as a result the inner life of the individual unfolds into a mysterious symbiosis of the infinite and the finite. What is remarkable in this general and fundamental conception of the soul advanced in Hegel’s doctrine is that certain real, living consciousnesses of real psychic fabric are, as such, introduced into and included in the makeup of the metaphysical spiritual substance. Without losing their characteristic properties of “life” and “consciousness,” they enter into the fabric of Spirit. Looking with the empirical eye from below, this is still the soul; however, in essence, in dignity, and in other, indicated properties, this is already Spirit. The boundary between the objektive and subjective elements of thought is drawn by Hegel within the limits of the real living consciousness of the human soul. The consciousness living in the object, if it is self-forgetfully immersed in the object, is already the realm of the object, it is itself already the object: the cognitively unfolding genuine spiritual situation. The self-forgetting consciousness, intuitively fused with the object being thought, is still consciousness, though not finite-empirical-human consciousness. True, it has forgotten about itself and its acts, but it has remained consciousness. The “unconsciousness” that is characteristic of speculative intuition is a liberation from “self,” from contingently personal, limitedly individual subjectivity; however, this is not the death of consciousness, but only its fusion with the object. All of this can be viewed as the object “flowing into” the element of consciousness liberated from meaningless subjectivity, as filling this element, taking it over, creating itself in it. The object lives in the form of consciousness, while consciousness lives in the form of the object. The object unfolds itself in the element of consciousness, in its medium, in its element, in its resources; the object expresses itself, as it were, in the function of consciousness. Given all this, there is no duality here; not two principles, but a single one: the object made conscious and consciousness made objective stand in an indissoluble mixture and fusion, in a state of “identity.” Having fused with the object, 1. See: Enc. I xxii. 2. Comp.: Phän. 55; Enc. I 4, 5, 107; Enc. III 111; Ph. G. 11; Rel. I 74; Beweise 318. 3. Hinr. 281. 4. Ph. G. 38. 5. Enc. I 107.

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consciousness receives from it objektivity, suprasensuousness, infinitude, freedom, spirituality, and divinity. Having fused with consciousness, the object receives from it the quality of being conscious,ee life, and “fluidity.” Something new, which had not previously existed, is formed as a result: objektive subjectivity or subjective objektivity, i.e., the identity of subject and objekt, the subject-objekt. Phenomenologically speaking, one should recognize that “selfforgetting life in the object” is precisely none other than the modus vivendi of the human soul. True, it is a modus vivendi such that it takes away from the term “human” and from the term “soul” all odious properties and nuances: “human” is no longer human-animal but human-divine; “psychic” is no longer psychic-temporal-personal but psychic-supratemporalsuprapersonal—psychic-spiritual. This means that, within the limits of the “human soul” (in the broadest sense of this word), there exists the “psychic-animal” and the “psychic-divine,” and that consequently, speculative thinking, intuiting abstract reason, scientific cognition, philosophy are all the spiritual modus vivendi of the soul. Or, in other words, this is the modus vivendi of Spirit in the “soul,” of the Object in consciousness. If we approach this new formation from the usual point of view, it will turn out to be the state of a soul that has gone into the object; if we determine it from the speculative side, it will turn out to be the state of the Object that has found itself in the element of consciousness. If we take all of this into account, Hegel’s fundamental phenomenological error,ff which Trendelenburg in his time labored so hard to uncover, will become clear. “To become conscious of the object” means, within the bounds of speculative philosophy, “to think the object.” But the object that is thought, the object of thought, is meaning.gg Therefore, all that was established in relation to the “object” and the “objekt” also essentially holds for meaning. The identity of “subject” and “objekt,” or of “consciousness” and “object,” is the fusion of thinking and meaning. The real psychic event, the act of consciousness, the live process of the living soul, fuses, according to Hegel’s fundamental principled definition, into a nondifferentiable metaphysical unity with the object that is thought—with meaning. The speculative philosopher rejects the separation of these two sides once and for all and categorically: the thinking of meaning and the meaning being thought are, for him, on principle, one and the same, a single, inseparable, spiritual something.1 The thinking of meaning, this modus vivendi of the human soul, is, according to his doctrine, nothing other than meaning itself being thought; any other, separating, understanding of “thought” is a product of spurious, abstractly rational reflection, 1. Comp., for example, Phän. 151.

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a mistake and a delusion. The state of the soul that has intensively and self-forgetfully immersed itself by means of thought in the content of meaning is meaning itself that has found itself in the element of the selfforgetfully thinking soul. Thinking cannot be considered separately from meaning, for then thinking will be pointless, subjective, limitedly personal thinking, while meaning will be a pointless, abstract, dead concept. The entire critique of formal abstraction given by Hegel rests on the necessity of the combination, the growing-together, the fusion of these elements which are usually torn apart from one another. The whole essence of speculative thought consists in the rejection of this rupture and in the avowal of a nondifferentiable unity of thinking and meaning. This avowal leads to unusually significant and profound consequences. It radically rejects the entire philosophical orientation of the intellect that has worked for centuries to adapt knowledge to the specific essence of the object; the psychology of thought and the logic of meaning are sciences that, in Hegel, are proclaimed to be false from the very beginning. Instead of them, Hegel attempts to create an extremely original metaphysical “psycho-logic of thinking forgetting itself in meaning.” The speculative philosopher decisively refuses to accept the categorial specificity of psychic experience on the one hand and the meaning situation on the other as the last word of scientific philosophy. Let this categorial peculiarity, according to which thinking is something psychic, subjective, temporal, real, found in process, concrete, singular, and unrepeatable, while meaning is something suprapsychical, objektive, supratemporal, ideal, identical, abstract, universal, repeatable —let this categorial peculiarity be acknowledged in the lower, subordinate sphere of the abstractly rational purgatory that prepares the elements and atoms for true philosophy. Let all this be true for the abstractly rational sphere and formal logic. For speculative philosophy this is no more than an error that has been rejected. Therefore there arises before Hegel the necessity of resolving in one way or another the question of the “pseudo-”universal significance of the laws of formal logic and of the categories that constitute the formal concept: the categories of ideality, universality, identity, and abstractness. The resolution of this question consists in the fact that it gives to them a new meaning of their own, determined by the fact that they are not any longer categories of abstractly rational, but of intuitive thought. They are formed into new, distinctive, higher categories, ruling over the oppositions and distinctions of abstract reason and reconciling each time in their content the two distinct sides. If thinking is real and meaning is ideal, then Hegel’s “concept” is both ideal and real, i.e., its ideality is such that it coincides with reality. If thinking is singular (as the temporal act of consciousness

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of a single individual), and meaning is universal, Hegel’s “concept” is both universal and singular, i.e., its universality is such that it includes singularity within itself. If thinking is a process, while meaning is identical to itself, then Hegel’s “concept” is both identical and a process, i.e., its identity is such that it does not exclude change. Finally, if thinking is concrete and meaning is abstract, then Hegel’s “concept” is both abstract and concrete, i.e., its abstractness is such that it participates at the same time in concreteness. Hegel’s “concept” is a distinctive, real ideality or an ideal existent; the universal in the singular, or singular universality; identity in process, or the process of the identical; a concretizing abstraction, or concreteness in the element of the abstract. All these apparently paradoxical definitions, which seem to be playing with words, should be taken with profound seriousness, as Hegel himself demanded. There is in them no invention, no malignant fogginess, but an integral and profound, though now no longer acceptable, theory of the concept.hh According to this theory, thinking and meaning, having fused into one, form a living, moving meaning, a concept changing in its content. While a contemporary logician is ready to admit process in thinking but not in meaning, intuitive thinking, having gone into meaning, introduces into it the principle of process. Hegel’s heroic intuitionii is right in its aspiration to become fixed in the intellectual intuition jj of meaning. However, it does not limit itself to this, but enriches meaning with itself, injects itself into meaning, with its own properties, attributes, and categories, thereby changing the nature of meaning. As a result, meaning, while preserving all of its apparent objektivity, reveals a series of properties that are completely unfathomable for the unprepared mind. Meaning begins to live in a way that is characteristic only of living thinking, while thinking acquires an objektivity and properties that are characteristic only of meaning. Moreover, in essence, one can no longer ask about thinking “whose” thinking is this? For the subjectively individual has died away and is absent in this sphere. The order of things in which someone is thinking something in his soul is rejected and liquidated. In the same way, about a “concept” one cannot ask “what is it abstracted from?” For a concept is “abstracted from something” only in abstractly rational thinking, but we are now done with that. Speculative thinking should, descriptively speaking, be viewed in the following way: a certain meaning is revealed to thought self-forgetfully immersed in an object; besides this meaning there is nothing; it alone exists; change is manifested in it, then more change, and still more change; meaning, like a plant or an animal, changes while remaining the same meaning and, in its change, exhibits a certain lawlike regularity. All this occurs in an objektive, supratemporal

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concept; not in the soul thinking about the concept but in the concept itself, in the meaning itself. In precise and adequate terms, the science tells us how a concept changes; and that is all. However, this does not exhaust the essence of the changes that are undergone by the nature of meaning in Hegel’s doctrine. Concepts not only are determined by other categories but are also represented and experienced in another way; this cannot fail to have profound metaphysical consequences. That peculiar combination of the intellectual and the imagining activity of the soul which Hegel calls “speculative thinking” can no longer remain satisfied with dry and pure thought content—with imageless meaning. Thinking’s capacity for intuition consists not only in the self-forgetting immersion of thought in its object; if all were reduced only to this, thought would remain thought and the categorial specificity of its object—“meaning”—could not fail to strike the eye. The logician of our day, once having observed and thought through with the necessary consistency the entire categorial difference between meaning and thinking, cannot doubt that, in itself, meaning does not “live” and does not “change,” and that, if “concept” is conceived precisely with these and analogous properties, then thinking is complicated by the work of other psychic forces, and meaning is burdened with ingredients that are alien to it (e.g., concretely intuitive or imagistic ones). Hegel not only does not think of denying this complication and burden, but on the contrary insists on their legitimacy and philosophical necessity. Thinking alone, as such, torn away from the power of imagination, from the “creative power of imagination,”1 is a false, abstractly rational thinking, and its product is dead, immobile abstraction. Of course, this creative power of imagination must be directed not at sensuous contents but at suprasensuous images: thinking is “suprasensuous inner intuition.”2 Thinking must by no means degenerate into the usual fantasizing that is practiced in life, and not infrequently in art as well as in religion. Thinking, while remaining thinking, must grow together with creative fantasy. But the power of imagination, once it is received into thinking, cannot fail to import its elements into the object which is revealed to it or in it. Meaning must inevitably lose its imagelessness and become something imagistic, something of the sort that Hegel calls “dem innern Auge Sichtbares.”3 If we take into account the rigorous intuitivistic objektivism that is so characteristic for Hegel, there can be no doubt that he really did see in the nature of the concept everything that he expressed about it. But in this case Hegel’s “concept” can only be imagistic meaning, i.e., a meaning that has grown together with that which is being imaged, with 1. Comp.: Glaub. 42, 46, 96, 154; Prop. 186.

2. Log. III 332.

3. Log. III 175.

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a perhaps “typical” real figure which corresponds to the content of this meaning and bears its name in everyday practice (e.g., the concept of a temple is a “temple,” and the image of a temple that is presented to the imagination is also a “temple”). This figure, intuited in the imagination, will probably display, given an appropriate development and fixing of its features, a resemblance and even a coincidence with the real perceived figures of sensuous objects: the general and indeterminate figure of a “temple” will turn out to be, e.g., an eclectic reproduction of the cathedrals of Mainz, Albi, and Palermo; the image of “obedience” or of the “family” will turn out to be composed of real representations, existing in the soul, of different cases of manifested submissiveness, or of the union of people on the basis of blood kinship. However, these imagined images or figures can remain beyond development and fixation, in some generality and indeterminacy, without losing their imagistically real character and remaining in strict correspondence to the essential features of the meaning content of the same name. Needless to say, Hegel has in mind not this simple correspondence, however strict and adequate it might be held to be, but the identity of meaning and image. Thinking and imagining, after their growing-together, possess a common object; and in this object meaning coincides with image; meaning is “vested”kk in the image; meaning is the image; the image is meaning. A completed science requires, as Hegel says, that intuition (Anschauung) and image (Bild ) be united with the “logical” (mit dem Logischen vereinigt)1 into a single formation. Philosophy, in thinking objects, sees them; it thinks them with its eyes, as it were. Speculative thought always has before itself in the form of the concept that “suprasensuous” (i.e., inaccessible to external senses, “dem aussern Auge”) image of the object that once captivated Plato. This image is present in thought, invisibly visible to the eye of imagination; meaning is dissolved in it, embodied in it, as in its inseparable element. In order to understand Hegel one must undertake in the soul a certain creative effort that saturates thought with the work of imagination: one must see with the imagination what the soul is thinking about. When Hegel speaks, e.g., at the beginning of the Logic, of “being” (Sein), one must not have in mind a category of extreme abstractness with a content that thought can barely grasp; but neither must one have in mind a combination of concrete-empirical “worldly” being. It is necessary to represent, to imagine for oneself some existent, real being, a being that exists but is deprived of any further properties. It has a minimum of speculatively logical content, a minimum which, in its emptiness, reveals itself in “nothingness” (Nichts). But this “nothing” must also be represented to 1. W. Beh. 324.

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oneself by the power of imagination as an existent nothing, as a nothing that is not totally and unconditionally the absence of the object, but is the existent meaning “das Nichts.” In these existent meanings of “being” and “nothing” is revealed a process of mutual disclosures of the one in the other, fusing them into “becoming” (Werden). Only given such an approach and understanding can thinking together with Hegel succeed, despite a fundamental avowal of its erroneousness.ll A peculiar aesthetization of thought occurs here, as Trendelenburg justly felt, and one cannot understand it without reproducing it. Only then will Hegel’s philosophy reveal not only its rationalistic side, turned toward the concept, toward meaning and toward the acknowledgment of its substantiality in being and in knowledge, but also its irrationalistic, intuitive-fantastical aspect, which brings him closer to the romantic philosophers of all ages. Only then will his philosophizing appear in its true character of thinking clairvoyance or mystical thinking, and will Hegel’s striving to unfold the logical revelation given to him into a genuine and all-embracing religion of thought become understandable. From this we clearly see the radical divergence that becomes apparent between contemporary logic, which has its origin in Kant, Herbart, and Bolzano, and Hegel’s logical conception. We also clearly see the nature of Hegel’s fundamental phenomenological error,mm growing thinking and meaning together into a single, indivisible metaphysical formation. As a result, entire layers of psychic states were experienced and treated by Hegel as bits or fragments of the logical “object” itself in its suprasensuous life, while meaning, having absorbed the life of the soul into itself, was viewed as a living spiritual principle, changing and developing on its own initiative. Consciousness became meaning that one has become conscious of, while meaning constituted the true fabric of consciousness, as it were. But precisely from this point of view it is natural that Hegel was completely ignorant of and did not accept transcendence as such. If the transcendent is something inaccessible to cognition, i.e., an object beyond consciousness, it is clear that the object under consideration in Hegel’s philosophy is not transcendent. Meaning and thinking are identical and inseparable; object and consciousness are not only subordinate to common categories but are something strictly unitary. Consciousness is the fundamental and inalienable element in which the object lives and unfolds. Not only is the object “open” or “known” to consciousness; consciousness is the modus essendi of the object. Throughout his doctrine Hegel shows that the object of philosophical cognition (the Concept, Spirit) has various forms of being, but that its highest form is the being of Spirit in philosophical consciousness. In this form the object is fused with consciousness, identical with it; more precisely, conscious-

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ness is fused with the object or: thinking is immanent to meaning. Adopting to a certain degree the formulation of the problem advanced by Kant, Hegel links the cognizability of the absolute, of the “thing in itself,” with the possibility of intuiting by means of thought or thinking intuitively. According to this, speculative thought must cognize the absolute or the thing in itself. But since speculative thought is first of all thought, and its object is the concept, meaning, then meaning turns out to be the “absolute” or the “thing in itself.” “The concept,” says Hegel, “is the true thing in itself or the Rational (das Vernunftige).”1 True cognition cognizes the object such as it is in itself,2 for the concept, thought, is the Absolute itself.3 These are already not those “things in themselves” which “lie like wild beasts behind the bush of the phenomenon,”4 as Kant had it. These are already not “abstract shadows torn away from all content.”5 Rather, they are the Absolute, open, revealed to consciousness precisely because it itself exists in the attribute (to use Spinoza’s term) of consciousness. Precisely for this reason it can neither be screened off from consciousness nor be made to approach it by any instrument-like or medium-like act of cognition.6 Cognition, if it is true cognition, is not torn away from the Absolute and does not oppose it;7 on the contrary, science is true science only through the presencenn in it of the Absolute.8 Thus, thought (i.e., thinking that is identical to meaning) is the genuine absolute “Object” of cognition. This is the objekt (meaning) which has included, absorbed into itself the subject (thinking) and therefore possesses in itself the ability to unfold its own content in the element of consciousness immanent to it. In other words, this is a meaning or a meaning-content that is no longer thought by anyone, but thinks itself and intuits itself.9 Consciousness is not outside of it, but in it, itself. Anyone who wishes to understand Hegel not only “from without” or exoterically, but also “from within” or esoterically, i.e., anyone who wishes not only to think about his philosophy, but to think in it and with it, must completely assimilate the notion that the withdrawal of consciousness into the object is not a cognitive contrivance of the human soul, not a methodological technique, not a trick of our consciousness, but something incomparably greater. It is not an empirical and psychical, but a metaphysical and spiritual event. As we have already said, the whole order of things changes. “My soul,” which has attempted and learned to think speculatively, is no 1. Log. III 85–86. Comp.: Log. I 35; Briefe II 117. 2. Log. I 31. 3. Comp.: Log. II 6; Log. III 213; and also: Enc. I 22. 4. Skept. 127–28. 5. Log. I 32. Comp.: Enc. I 95. 6. Phän. 59–60. 7. Phän. 61. 8. W. Beh. 324. 9. Comp. the characteristic formulas: Glaub. 15, 19, 44, 45, where Hegel insists on the necessity to unite not “Denken” with “Anschauen” but “Begriff ” with “Anschauen,” for example: “Anschauen in den Begriff aufnehmen.”

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more; only meaning itself, the concept itself, exists. This concept in itself, as such, needing nothing and not dependent on anyone, absolutely (from absolvere)—lives, changes, and develops. It is not only an object for consciousness; it is an object together with consciousness. It itself is its own subject and its own objekt. It becomes conscious of itself as changing and developing itself. In this it differs from the “Absolute I” advanced by Fichte in the Wissenschaftslehre of 1794: the “Absolute I” initially only posits itself,1 without possessing consciousness; it remains in the pre-conscious sphere of the human spirit, for from Fichte’s point of view the act of consciousness, reflection, would condition it and deprive it of absoluteness. In Hegel it is otherwise. The “concept” is absolutely self-activeoo and in this it is similar to Leibniz’s monad and Fichte’s absolute subject; but its selfactivity is conscious, self-conscious self-activity, and despite all this it remains a “concept.” Similar to that act of self-consciousness which is known to everyone from inner experience, when the object of “my” thought is something immediately related to the sphere of my “I,” the “concept” as such abides constantly in a state of directedness to itself. As will become clear later, it is in this non-possession of another objekt, other than itself, and of another subject, other than itself, in this non-possession of other-being, that its absoluteness, its infinitude, and its freedom consist. The empirico-psychological identity of subject and objekt retreats to the background, fades away, and loses all its importance. To the foreground moves the metaphysico-ontological identity of the subject-objekt. In it lies the center of gravity of Hegel’s entire philosophy; it is the principle and essence of this philosophy. It is because of and through this identity that life is life and philosophy is philosophy. The essence of this principle and the content of this essence are formulated in the term “Concept”: the speculative concreteness of the subject-objekt, of consciousness and object, of thinking and meaning. It is clear, finally, what profound changes must be disclosed in the metaphysical structure and character of the Concept, if it is gifted with self-consciousness and self-activity. It would be no exaggeration to say that understanding the speculative concept demands, first of all, a total renunciation of what is called the “concept” in ordinary logic. It would perhaps be best of all to orient oneself in this understanding to Aristotle’s idea of “form,” especially since Hegel more than once expresses profound sympathy for the philosophical doctrine of the Stagirite. In any case, in order to understand Hegel’s doctrine it is necessary to restruc-

1. See I. G. Fichte, Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre, Tübingen, 1802, p. 9.

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ture in one’s consciousness all the fundamental categories that together define the logical essence of the concept. These are the categories of ideality-reality, universality-singularity, identity-processality, and abstractness-concreteness. We must necessarily address ourselves to these categories in what follows.

Translator’s Notes a. Literally, “unacceptable” (неприемлемом). The corresponding sentence in Il’in’s German version of the work reads “Anyone who wishes to actually make his way through to the fact of the matter intended by Hegel, and objectively see into it, must independently think through this inner experience” (Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels, 48). b. Стихия is the term translated here as “medium”; in most contexts it would itself be translated as “element,” but that is not possible in the phrase Il’in used here (элемент и стихия). c. Il’in retained this formula in the German version of the text: gegenständliche Objektivität (Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels, 50). d. Предмет. e. The Russian term translated here as “way” is образ, normally “shape” or “image”; however, in the German text Il’in used Weg as the corresponding term. f. In the original Russian text of this chapter Il’in repeatedly referred to Hegel’s “fundamental phenomenological error,” evidently under the influence of Adolf Trendelenburg’s then widely read critique of Hegel’s dialectic. Il’in’s adoption of Trendelenburg’s criticism at this point in the dissertation presents some puzzles, however. He endorsed it there without much explanation, as though it were largely self-evident. On the other hand, this particular criticism seemed somewhat inconsistent with the tenor of most of the rest of Il’in’s dissertation. Interestingly, when he translated this chapter into German many years later, sometime in the early 1940s, he retracted the term “error” (ошибка) or “confusion” (заблуждение) every time it occurred in the original text, usually replacing it with Eigenart (special characteristic, peculiarity), modifying every such passage in some way so as to remove the implication that he was simply endorsing Trendelenburg’s rejection of the dialectic. For example, the sentence corresponding to the present one in the German text would be translated: “Thus Hegel could be called one of the most profound and influential of the forerunners of modern logical Objektivism, notwithstanding the fact that contemporary scientific logic is scarcely inclined to repeat and accept his thought act” (Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels, 50). As of the years 1914–18, Il’in was obviously under the influence of F. A. Trendelenburg, whose Logische Untersuchungen (1840, 1862, 1870) was widely viewed as one of the more important critiques of Hegel’s Logic in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For example, it apparently played a significant role in turning some of the original American pragmatists away from a full acceptance

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of Hegel’s thought. (An excerpt from a separate, shorter critique of Hegel’s logic by Trendelenburg, The Logical Question in Hegel’s System, is available in English translation in Robert Stern, ed., G. W. F. Hegel: Critical Assessments, 4 vols. [London: Routledge, 1993], 1:182–216.) Trendelenburg’s criticisms have not stood up as well in more recent studies of Hegel’s Logic. See, for example, Errol E. Harris, An Interpretation of the Logic of Hegel (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1983); Giacomo Rinaldi, A History and Interpretation of the Logic of Hegel (Lewiston, N.Y.: Edwin Mellen, 1992); and Stephen Houlgate, The Opening of Hegel’s Logic: From Being to Infinity (W. Lafayette, Ind.: Purdue University Press, 2006). In his bibliographic appendix to the individual chapters, Il’in lists Trendelenburg among those critics who “know Hegel only from without,” though he does credit Trendelenburg elsewhere with a few helpful insights into Hegel’s logic. See the appendices to chapters 3 and 6. By the 1940s, it is clear that Il’in was distinctly less under the spell of Trendelenburg’s critique. g. Рассудочная абстракция, i.e., abstractly rational abstraction. h. The term “error” disappears in the German translation. The corresponding sentence in the latter text would read as follows: “This immediate ‘fusion’ of intuiting thought with the object was in fact decisive and creatively fruitful for Hegel’s philosophy; it went to the source of his entire system, which stands or falls together with this thought act” (Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels, 51–52). i. The Russian term is самобытно. j. The term “objekt” is missing in the original, and in all subsequent Russian editions of the text. Il’in inserted the term in his German version of the text, and on that basis I have included it here. k. The Russian term is беэусловной; the preceding term is абсолютного. l. Интуиции. m. Созерцание. n. In this list of descriptors, Il’in includes особливость (particularity), based on a Slavic root, and партикуларизм (particularism), a foreign borrowing. o. Literally, “of the profane” (профана). p. Il’in’s term here is идентично. q. The “difficulty” to which Il’in alludes here, the alleged absence of an explicit epistemology, seems finally (on the following page) to come down to the absence of a “criterion of truth” in Hegel’s philosophy, for which the “questioning skeptic” would seek in vain. Il’in here manifests the conviction, more or less universally shared among Hegel interpreters in his time, that Hegel had no explicitly developed epistemology. Very much later (primarily over the last two decades) interpreters of Hegel have grasped that the entire structure of the argument of the Phenomenology was in fact dictated by Hegel’s attempt to overcome the challenge of genuine, Pyrrhonian skepticism. For example, see Michael Forster, Hegel and Skepticism (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989) or his Hegel’s Idea of a Phenomenology of Spirit (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); see also Kenneth Westphal, Hegel’s Epistemological Realism (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1989), and his Hegel’s Epistemology (Indianapolis, Ind.: Hackett, 2003). r. Идентичность.

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s. Only on the (generally no longer accepted) supposition that Hegel has not explicitly or systematically confronted the skeptical challenge. t. A line from Pushkin’s early poem “To Delia” from the Poems of Unknown Years: 1813–1817. u. Идентичность. v. See note q above. w. This implicit reference to Hegel’s introduction to the Phenomenology of Spirit (via §10 of the Encyclopedia Logic) is not so much incorrect as incomplete. Like most commentators of this period, Il’in failed to recognize that Hegel was in that same place simultaneously outlining a complex and ambitious alternative strategy for responding to the skeptic’s challenge to the possibility of knowledge. x. Once again, the implication of confusion or error is distinctly softened or qualified in Il’in’s later German translation. In English translation, that text reads: “But precisely in this heroic realization of speculative thought lies also the source of the peculiar [eigenartigen] phenomenological confusion [mixingtogether: Vermengung] that he knowingly accepted and systematically realized, which determined the special character of his entire mode of thought, and which must appear unacceptable to modern logical science” (Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels, 59). y. See note q above. Hegel’s “scorn” was reserved for the failed epistemological strategies of the Cartesian, empiricist, and Kantian traditions. z. In his German version of the text Il’in abandons the first of these terms, сдвинутость (bias)—more literally perhaps “shiftedness” or “skewedness”— leaving only “lack of clarity” as the focus of the discussion, which is otherwise unchanged (Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels, 60). aa. Replaced in the German version with “lack of clarity” (Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels, 60). bb. Сдвиг, more literally, “shift.” cc. The Russian term here is эаблуждение (more literally, “to lose one’s way”). In the German translation there is no equivalent term. Instead, the sentence reads: “Hegel’s entire doctrine stands and falls with this fundamental shift; and he who would understand Hegel’s philosophy must struggle through to complete clarity on this point” (Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels, 60). dd. Достоверность. Il’in used Gewissheit in the German text. ee. Il’in’s term is сознаность (the property of being conscious), not the more usual сознание (consciousness). ff. Again, “error” disappears in the German translation. The corresponding sentence in the latter text reads: “With that is Hegel’s phenomenological peculiarity [Eigenart]—on the discovery of which Trendelenburg in his time labored so earnestly—made clear” (Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels, 65). gg. In the German edition, the term “meaning” becomes “logical meaning” (der logische Sinn), and the latter phrase is retained throughout. hh. In the German edition this sentence became: “No, one has to do with a mature and profound theory of the concept, and those who do not want to change their thought and viewpoint, or who do not want to recognize this new

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field, will understand scarcely anything in Hegel” (Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels, 67). There is no longer any reference to a “now no longer acceptable theory of the concept.” ii. Интуиция. jj. Созерцании. kk. That is, robed. ll. In the German edition this sentence was substantially altered to read: “Only the actual renunciation of abstract-formal, non-intuitive [nicht schauende] thinking opens access to Hegel’s thought-world; only thus can one understand Hegel, even without having granted the objective correctness and necessity of his thought act” (Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels, 70). mm. Yet again, the term “error” (ошибка) in the Russian is replaced with “peculiarity” or “special feature” (Eigenart) in the German. The sentence now reads: “Hegel’s phenomenological peculiarity also becomes clear: the fusing together and identification of thought and meaning, of meaning and image, from which a new metaphysical form arises for him” (Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels, 71). nn. Il’in employs here in Russian both of two exceedingly close synonyms for “presence”: наличность или присуствие. oo. Самодеятельно.

4

The Reality of Thought

As we enter into the realm of speculative thinking, a new structure of life and a new order of relations are revealed.a The soul recognizes the possibility of ascending to “objektive” life, without, evidently, abandoning its own limits and, in any event, without surrendering to the will of all-fragmenting and all-dispersing sensuous intuition. Within the limits of the soul itself, a new sphere full of extraordinary content and significance is revealed, allowing the soul to throw off the fetters of personal limitedness and spurious subjectivity, and to give itself over to the authentic life of the objektive, of the object, of meaning. In this sphere the soul becomes filled with the feeling of Jesus, who said: “I do nothing on my own.”b The soul is already not itself, though it becomes assured later that it did not perish in the object but was enriched by it; having come to “hate” itself as such in self-renunciation, it opens for itself the possibility of living as Spirit. Speculative thought gives to the soul the happiness of self-renunciation,1 preserving for it the best of what it has renounced and leading it through what has been preserved to what is most perfect. In this is revealed not only that vitally creative knowledge of Hegelianism which is intrinsic to every true and noble form of philosophizing, but also the deepest root of Hegel’s doctrine of the ideality and reality of thought. Of course, the definition of “thought” as an “ideal” principle sounds completely different on his lips than on the lips of a contemporary logician, insisting that “meaning” has only to do with pure thought, insisting on its complete (both empirical and metaphysical) unreality, and on the necessity of establishing a particular, “purely logical” category of the “meaning situation.”c Hegel begins and ends with the categorical rejection of the entire tendency that has led in our time to these, from his point of view, “dead” and “abstractly rational” distinctions. He uses the terms “ideality” and “reality” in approximately the sense that he inherited from the progenitors of modern philosophy, and only then, within the 1. Comp: Enc. I 378, on the negation of “eigener Subjektivität” in the elevation of spirit to Divinity; Gösch. 131: “Process der Selbstentäusserung des natürlichen Seins und Wissens des Menschen” is a “Process der geistigen Wiedergeburt”; Briefe I 261: “wahre Befreiung des Menschen von ihm selbst.” 71

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limits of dialectic, i.e., completely esoterically, does he give to the term “ideell” a specific meaning.d Speculative thought is “ideal” in the most general sense insofar as it belongs to the psychic, inner world, insofar as its element is not external, sensuously empirical being, but the psychic medium. From this point of view, gravitating toward the primacy of the “inner in general” over the “external in general,” all that is “subjectively psychic”1 as such relates to the “ideal”: representation,2 sensation, feeling, memory,3 and thought. And if everything psychic is “ideal,” then formal, abstractly rational thinking will also turn out to be “ideal.” However, already within such a naive understanding of “ideality” is hidden the possibility of recognizing the immediately given psychic medium as something primary, as taking precedence over external things, as something possessing a “greater” and “better” reality than they. The “ideal” (the inner) turns out to be more real than the “real” (the external); philosophizing thought effects one of the most remarkable shifts of the ontological center of gravity, and the term “ideal” (present only in the soul and therefore “not existing” in external reality), uttered by the naive realists with a hint of scorn, falls back on their heads as a censure. There arise two “idealities” and two “realities.” The inner world, the “ideal” one, is real; the external world, the “real” one, is ideal. This means that external things, perceived by naive realists as the genuine reality, are deprived of it; they are only “subjective phenomena”; they are “merely ideal”; whereas inner, immediately given states of the soul are not “merely ideal,” but are undoubtedly real. Long before Kant, in the philosophy of English empiricism, there commenced this gradual doubting of the genuine reality of “external” things and the striving to focus upon and fortify oneself in the immediate data of inner experience. In this general tendency of modern philosophy, Descartes’ audacious intuition, recognizing the identity (not the syllogistic deduction at all) of being and thinking,4 Berkeley’s avowal of the exclusive reality of the spiritual principle, the heroic spiritualism of Leibniz’s monadology, Kant’s Copernican feat, and Fichte’s metaphysical subjectivism constitute the successive stages that lead through the whole of modern philosophy to Hegel. Thought was learning to seek genuine, unconditional reality precisely in that which is experienced as inner. The ideal is the focal point of absolute reality. However, parallel to this, under the influence of the doctrines of English skepticism absorbed by Leibniz and 1. Comp.: Log. I 172; Enc. III 149. 2. Comp.: W. Beh. 405; Enc. III 149. 3. Comp.: Log. I 172; Enc. III 149. 4. On this point in Hegel, comp.: Enc. I 132, 133; Gesch. Ph. III 340–44, where references are introduced to the explanations of Descartes himself; Hegel borrowed these references in part from Hotho’s dissertation.

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later by Kant, within the limits of the soul itself, this extensive sphere of “the ideal in general,” there appears and gradually develops a province of sensuously compromised psychic states. In search of absolute reality, penetrated by the certainty that this reality has a psychic-spiritual nature, philosophy gradually gives away the periphery of the soul, renouncing it as sensuously finite, obscure, passively perceived, etc., and concentrates its attention on tracking down the “pure” and “free” elements of spirit. Kant goes no farther than pure intuition, pure thinking, ideas; Fichte of the first period goes no further than the “pre-conscious,” self-positing, absolute acts of the Subject. Hegel is not satisfied with either. Together with Kant, he believes in the power of thought, and at the same time he does not share Fichte’s apprehensive attitude toward the determining significance of reflection.e Therefore he sees the sought-for sphere of absolute reality in thinking; none other than thought is that centerpoint of ideality that guarantees absolute certainty and genuineness, absolute reality. At the same time, together with Fichte he acknowledges this ideal principle as creatively self-positing and intellectually intuitive, and does not share Kant’s cautious doctrine of the discursive and merely discursive abstract reason characteristic of humanity. Therefore, in Hegel, thought, this preeminent ideal or spiritual foundation, is an intellectually intuitive, self-creating, metaphysically real principle. Finally, in counterposition to both Kant and Fichte, this first principle is no longer subjectively human but subjective-objektive, Divine. Thus, if we understand “ideality” as “inwardness,” in opposition to “externality,” as “psychicality-spirituality” as opposed to “materialitynaturalness,” and finally as “pure thinkability” in contrast to “sensuous perceivability,” then speculative thought is ideal. But if we understand “ideality” as “unreality,” as formally subjective “critical” (in the Kantian sense), abstractly rational thinkability, as the relative f limitedness of empirical formal thinking,1 then speculative thought is not “ideal” but “ideally real.” It is clear that the recognition of thought as reality was always facilitated in the history of philosophy by the fusion of thinking with meaning, as was the case in Hegel. He repeatedly pointed out that the abstract-formal, abstractly rational concept is detached from reality, opposes it, and therefore is chained to it as though hypnotized, not merging with it, and abiding in its own abstract emptiness. Therefore, not abstractly rational ideality but speculative ideality is real. As a result, the situa1. Comp. all of Hegel’s polemical and condemnatory remarks against the assertion that it is “bloss ideell,” “formelle Idealität,” and so forth; for example: Diff. 212, 213, 230, 237, 254, 254, 254, 255, 267; Glaub. 14, 135–36; W. Beh. 328, 336, 345, 368, 408, 416; Enc. II 222, and others.

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tion is such: sensuous reality is not ideal, i.e., is not part of thought, and therefore is not real with the higher speculative reality; abstractly rational ideality is not real, i.e., is not part of being, and therefore is not ideal with the higher speculative ideality. In other words, the concrete-empirical, both external and internal,1 is real with spurious reality and is not at all ideal in the speculative respect; the abstract-formal is ideal with spurious ideality and is not at all real in any respect. Some third, new, speculative thing is necessary: something ideal in the sense of “subjectivity” and “thinkability,” and therefore “universal” and “abstract”; and at the same time real in the sense of objektivity and intuitability, and therefore “singular” and “concrete.” Speculative thought preserves everything that chains empiricists to the sensuous world, and formal thinkers to the world of abstraction. However, it preserves everything not in its original form, but in a state of mutual fusion and mutual rectification. Reality is objektive and intuitable; but it is no longer sensuous, no longer temporal; it is part of thought, itself is thought. Ideality is subjective (psychic-spiritual) and bears within itself the gifts of thinking: suprasensuousness, determinability, universality, and stability; however, it is no longer detached, not contentless, not dead, not irreal; it itself is being. From the ordinary point of view the situation is such that Hegel offers up logically objective thinking as metaphysical reality; from the point of view of speculative philosophy the matter must be formulated in this way: that to Hegel was revealed the essence of absolute reality as finding for itself an adequate element in logically objective (imagistic-meaning)g thinking. For a correct understanding of the thesis concerning the “reality of thought,” it is therefore necessary to keep in mind what “reality” and what “thought” are being identified in it. This thought is by no means abstract-rational thought; rather, it is the speculative growing-together of thinking and meaning, the concept becoming conscious of itself. This reality is by no means an empirical-temporal reality; rather it is supratemporal, metaphysical, absolute. But in what, however, does its essence consist? When Hegel speaks of “being” or of “reality” without further provisos and explanations, he usually means metaphysical being or absolute reality. It is natural that for people of another epoch and another cognitive temper, it is difficult to become accustomed to such an ontological maximalism, and this circumstance did not delay in manifesting itself with unusual swiftness in the critical thrusts of the first adversaries of Hegelianism. However, Hegel’s philosophy arose in an atmosphere that did not take into account, or almost did not take into account, the other, 1. Comp., e.g., Aesth. I 12.

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the relative, the empirical aspect of reality. Hegel himself firmly believes that only that is worth philosophizing about which absolutely is or, in any event, which participates in absolute reality. The accidental, completely torn away from substance,1 cannot be an object of scientific knowledge. Being is essential, substantial being in the full meaning of this word. Something that is deprived of substantial being is deprived of being altogether; it is simply not real at all, a misunderstanding, a phantom, an illusion. This sense of absoluteness and substantiality is so grown together in Hegel with the idea of reality that it is often understood by him as something self-evident. If we do not keep in mind this grown-togetherness, much in his doctrine will turn out to be completely incomprehensible. Participation in substantial being is the necessary minimum outside of which philosophy has nothing to talk about and nothing in which to interest itself. The very categoricity and consistency of such a statement of the problem could indicate the path that leads back to Hegel’s philosophical predecessors and spiritual teachers. Aristotle already pointed out that the problem of being is the problem of substantiality,2 and that the essence of substance lies in its distinctive centripetal self-activity.3 This conception of substance as something that is “per se” or “in se” was repeatedly developed by the scholastics and was then adopted by one of Hegel’s most influential inspirers, Spinoza. “By substance,” he writes, “I understand that which is in itself and is conceived through itself.”4 Substance is self-sufficient and single;5 it is determined only itself through itself,6 is not subject to stimuli from without, and, in its singularity and self-activity, is directed wholly at itself. It is this metaphysical “self-activity in solitude” that Hegel has in mind when he speaks of substantial reality. Without yet touching upon the full and developed conception of substance, one can say that, according to Hegel, the minimal and most determinationpoor fragment of “being” already participates, in its inner nature, in the fundamental properties of substantiality. To be is to be centripetally, to be directed at “oneself,” to stand in a simple,7 immediate,8 abstract9 relation to oneself. This distinctive “egocentric” conception of being must, of course, by no means be understood or interpreted ethically. In the same way, one should not think that in Hegel the world of reality consists of Leibniz’s self-enclosed, self-active, singular monads which, though 1. Comp., e.g., Beweise A 463. 2. Comp.: Metaphysica VII 1, 1028b. 3. Comp., e.g., Met. V, 8, 1017b; VII, 1, 1028a; VII, 3, 1029a, and others. 4. Spinoza, Opera, ed. Paulus, 1802, vol. 1, Ethica, p. 35. 5. Ibid., Prop. V, p. 37; Prop. VIII, Schol. II, p. 40, etc. 6. Ibid., Prop. VI, Corollar., p. 38; comp.: Prop. XVII, p. 51, etc. 7. Log. III 352; Enc. I 362; Beweise 314. 8. Log. I 150; Enc. I 113; Beweise B 473, 474. 9. Log. III 332, 333; Beweise 393, 414.

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combining into various wholes, are essentially solitary. No; as will become clear later, “being” is a single, “universal” element, tirelessly stirring within itself in a directedness at itself. This element is everywhere one and the same; it is substantial, i.e., self-sufficient, self-sufficing, does not have a metaphysical other-being that opposes it, and therefore is directed exclusively at its own self. Therefore, all that which participates in this element, which participates in being to that extent, has the substantial principle in itself, and therefore is stable, and this precisely as a result of a “simple and immediate relation to itself.” This “relation to itself,”1 in the case of stability, naturally acquires the character of “equality with itself ”: the essence of the stability consists precisely in the fact that something, through all possible changes, remains the same, “remains stable,” maintains itself, remains equal to itself: “for inequality with itself would be its dissolution.”2 That is why the essence of being can be expressed in a single word: “Sichselbstgleichheit,” equality with itself.3 From this point of view it is not difficult to understand how convergence and identification between thought and reality take place. After all, “stability” and “equality with itself” (strictly speaking, identity) are precisely those features of meaning which are known also to the formal-logical thinker. It is precisely these features that, from time immemorial, have compelled philosophers and scientists to concentrate on the “concept” as something promising strict internal constancy and unshakable external order. But in this case the essence of substantial being consists in the same thing as the essence of the concept in general. However, for Hegel this essential coincidence goes much farther and deeper. The fact of the matter is that in his conception “thinking” is an essence not with a static but with a dynamic character, and, furthermore, not with an external, mechanical dynamics, but with an internal, self-causing dynamics.h Adopting openly, and with high praise, the fundamental definitions of substance established by Spinoza,4 Hegel does not tire, at the same time, of pointing out Spinoza’s, for him, unsatisfying abstractness, the immobility and the static deadness of Spinoza’s conception.5 The German spirit, in the persons of Leibniz and Fichte, had already introduced into the idea of substance an indication of absolute and inexhaustible creativity, originating exclusively in the depths of substance itself, and Hegel sees profound and invaluable progress in this. Therefore, he sees in the “self-sufficiency” of being not only the ele1. Comp., e.g., Log. II 185. 2. Comp.: Phän. 43. 3. Comp. in particular the fundamental formulas: Phän. 42, 43; comp.: Beweise 448. 4. Comp.: Log. II 194, 195, 229, 230, and others. 5. Comp., e.g., Log. I 178, 396, 466; Log. II 194–97; Log. III 47; Enc. I 109; Gesch. Ph. 377, 378, 409, 410; Beweise 447.

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ment of identity and self-satisfaction, but also the moment of active creativity, starting within itself, taking place within itself, and returning to itself. According to Hegel, substantial being is a kind of creative boiling within itself, by no means aimless, but lawfully and rhythmically progressing to a determinate end and to a predestined completion. “To be” means to carry within oneself the principle of self-active creativity directed at oneself; it means to create oneself from oneself. In creativity “being” is self-sufficient, for it is determined by nothing other than itself and its inner properties, motives, and laws. It is one, natural in its kind, and, encompassing everything, it is identical. In all these fundamental properties it is stable and unchangeable—equal to itself. Here the essential coincidence of thought and reality is revealed for the first time in all its significance. Those same cardinal properties of being from which its most authentic essence is composed, constitute the essentialia of speculative thought. Creative directedness at itself is as much the essence of thought as the essence of substance, i.e., of absolute reality, of metaphysical being. Self-activity in self-creativity is that third thing which establishes the reality of thought and the logical nature of the real. In the same way that “thought” or the “concept” is a principle creating itself in itself and from itself, “substantial essence” in its active self-creation has no other-being opposing it. This essential sameness is not, however, merely a resemblance, a similarity, or a mere “coincidence” of properties. It is rather a coincidence of the aspects themselves, a complete mutually overlapping unity, an identity. Speculative thought is nothing other than absolute reality; substantial being is nothing other than speculative thought. That which participates in speculative thought participates eo ipso in absolute reality as well; and conversely, that which “truly is,” that which is genuinely real is speculative thought. “That which has been thought is; and that which is, is to the extent that it is thought.”1 “Thinking unites with itself the being of substance”;2 “reason has at the same time absolute reality”;3 “thinking is being”;4 “that which has been thought, because it is that which has been thought, includes . . . being in itself”;5 in the sphere of reason “thinking and being are one”;6 the “concept is at the same time something that exists.”7 The “logical” coincides with the “metaphysical”8 and the doctrine of thought coincides with the doctrine of reality: logic is thereby ontology. In establishing this doctrine of the absolute,9 immediate10 “identity of being and thinking,” Hegel thinks it through consistently to the end, 1. Enc. III 353. 2. Phän. 15. 3. Glaub. 48. 4. Enc. III 354(Z). 5. Skept. 108–9. 6. Skept. 109. 7. Phän. 151. 8. Comp.: Log. I 6, 55, 436, 437, 438; Enc. I 45; Beweise 398. 9. Comp., e.g., Skept. 113; Glaub. 48. 10. Comp., e.g., Phän. 606.

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accepting the conclusions and not retreating before the apparent paradoxicalities. These paradoxes, however, cease to astonish one with their apparent intense contradictoriness as soon as their terms are filled with living and meaning-giving intuition of the object. Thus, for example, when Hegel says that everything is real “only to the extent it is thought,” and that that which is not rational does not have truth, or, put differently, “that which is not understood does not have being,”1 it is sufficient merely to attempt to free oneself from an intuitive approach to these theses in order to see before oneself a strange and pretentious play on words, not submitting to any understanding: for the world is filled with not-understood and not-comprehended “realities,” to which fact the living and unceasing progress of empirical knowledge bears witness. One should call “comprehended” that which is permeated with the “concept,” that which is “com-prehended ”i (be-griffen, whence Be-griff ) by reason; in other words, that which in its essence participates in speculative thinking or, more accurately, that the essence of which is speculative thought. But since speculative thought is the absolute and sole reality and, consequently, all that is alien to it is devoid of reality in general, that which is “not understood” is truly an illusion, based on misunderstanding. Hegel also expresses this thought this way: the “nature” of that which is, consists “in being its own concept in its Being” (“in seinem Sein—sein Begriff zu sein”).2 Or, put still differently, “everything that is actual, insofar as it is true, is the idea and has its truthfulness exclusively through the idea and by the power of the idea.”3 All these definitions express in different words one and the same “truth,” intuitively revealed to Hegel, fundamental for the entire doctrine: the “truth” of the identity of speculative thought and absolute reality. Detachment from the former is detachment from the latter; the presence of the former is the presence of the latter. If we call speculative thought the concept (remembering its speculative nature), the concept will turn out not only to be real itself, but also the general and sole principle of reality in any being and becoming. It is impossible to be, without being the concept. The concept is essence 4 itself, the object itself (“die Sache selbst ”);5 the concept itself is the “true thing in itself,”6 absolute reality, the Absolute itself.7 Such is the peculiar fate of the idea of the “thing in itself,” placed by Kant at the center of philosophical attention. The fundamental conception of the idea is renewed: Fichte and, following him, Schelling and Hegel, radically break with the “material”j conception of the “thing in it1. Comp.: Phän. 412; and also Enc. III 353. 2. Phän. 45. 3. Enc. I 385. 4. Phän. 34; Log. III 20, 75, 115. 5. Phän. 34, 247; Log. I 16, 20, 21; Log. II 103; Log. III 33. 6. Log. III 86 and others. 7. Log. II 6; Log. III 213, and others.

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self” and turn wholly to its “noumenal-spiritual” conception. Here Fichte has in mind the “noumen of the human soul,”1 while Schelling understands absolute being as the first principle raised above the spheres of the “natural” and the “human” and actualizing itself in them. Both of these thinkers transpose “process” into the confines of absolute reality and attempt to understand this process as “dialectical” in form and progressive in direction and results. However, in both thinkers substance, named “spirit,” retains the character of a “living soul.” In Fichte this is the peculiarly understood “human soul ” with its fundamental creative functions: will, thinking, imagination, memory, intuition, etc. In Schelling, this is a kind of “world soul,” ascending from unconscious life in nature to human consciousness. Hegel was the first to posit the essence of reality not in the activity of the living soul (not in the objektive function of the subject) but in the very content being thought itself (in the subjectivity of the objekt), in the suprasensuous, rationally determinable, and stable (despite its processual character) concept, in meaning, thereby reviving the tradition of Plato and Aristotle. His fundamental thesis concerning the “reality of thought” has precisely this significance: speculative thought is the essence of any being as such. Or put differently: the thing in itself, absolute substance, is living meaning itself. A new doctrine of objektivity arises; however, this is now not an “objekt-thing” but “objektive meaning,” not an objekt hidden in the darkness of irrationality but “objektive reason.” According to Hegel’s design, absolute being has not the structure of a “soul” in all its irrational complexity,2 but the structure of “thinking”; furthermore, not thinking as a “subjectively human” process but thinking as a suprahuman process in the objektive concept. Hegel in principle cannot acknowledge any other being than this one. All that exists is real because its essence is living meaning creating itself. It is clear that one of the most complex conclusions on this path, fraught with difficulties, is the necessity of giving a rigorously universal significance to the identity of speculative thinking and substantial being. Indeed, if the situation revealed is in fact an absolute identity of thought and reality, it becomes impossible to speak of any other reality. Anything that pretends to being or existence must either exhibit in itself the presence of speculative thought or renounce its pretension; tertium non datur.k However, the principle of speculative thought is initially given 1. This relates in any event to the Wissenschaftslehre of 1794. Comp., e.g., “eines Jeden Ich selbst die einzige höchste Substans ist.” Grundlage der gesamten Wissenschaftslehre, Tübingen, 1802, pp. 44, 45. 2. Here it is appropriate to recall that Schelling, for example, in his mature mystical treatises of the beginning of the nineteenth century spoke of an irrational “nature” or “ground” in God.

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only internally, only in personal inner thought experience; it is precisely there that a way out to absolute being through thinking opens up: a certain form of inner thinking activity is already a suprapersonal state of meaning, in possession of the fabric of consciousness and living out in it immediately and adequately the rhythm of its own life. Thinking, having absorbed the intuitive capacity of the soul, leads the soul into the sphere of Spirit. But if, as it now turns out, speculative thought must be discovered in everything that rightfully pretends to being, this discovery can present special difficulties with respect to those spheres which are not given in inner experience. The entire external world, the world of spatial objektivity, having disintegrated in its sensuous aspect and having dispersed without trace before the eyes of the speculative thinker, apparently cannot be given in inner experience in the way that the life of meaning gives itself and reveals itself. However, to strike out as devoid of reality everything that “flows in” from outside in the form of a multiplicity of “independent” things would be to impoverish to an extreme degree the wealth of the object, and to liquidate all the sciences dedicated in one way or another to the “external.” For Hegel, this would mean to confine his entire doctrine to the Logic and to some sections of the Philosophy of Spirit. Hegel might in fact have been reduced to this had he not believed in the possibility of thinking the spiritual essence of the external. Despite its nonphilosophical character, empirical natural science revealed this possibility; for, although it studies singular and finite sensuous phenomena and things, its task nevertheless consists not in limiting itself to their description, to a description of the material, but in raising the singular to the universal, the sensuous to the abstract, the phenomenon to the concept; in a word, in thinking the external. To be sure, this thinking does not go or lead beyond a system of abstractly rational concepts; but the possibility of a speculative transformation and animation of these abstract universalities had already been actualized within the confines of logic. Thus, if the abstract-formal is the “truth” of the concrete-empirical, the abstract-speculative is the “truth” of the abstract-formal, and the chasm between the “external” and the “internal” is apparently sublated. This relation, by virtue of which one side is the “truth” of the other side, should be viewed as though the first side were the true and genuine essence of the second, though “concealed” in the second and not immediately accessible to judgment and comprehension. It is necessary that consciousness ascend to the height of the first side in order for it to be able to cognize this relation of “truth” or essentiality. As long as it dwells on the lower level, not only is it ignorant of this relation, but perhaps it does not suspect at all the presence or even the possibility of the higher level. Thus, consciousness, chained to the concrete-empirical, does not suspect that

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there are laws of nature “operative” in its medium; and only by ascending to the level of empirical knowledge does it become convinced that experimental science, in studying the abstract universalities in the singular phenomena of the sensuous world, cognizes the essential in them. In just the same way, the empiricist and the formal logician may have no suspicion of the higher speculative order lying in the foundation of their categories; however, the “speculative” is the essence of the “formal.” And only by ascending to the level of speculativel philosophy can consciousness become convinced that speculative m thought is genuine reality, representing the essence of both the external and the internal world; whether it was studied by human consciousness or not studied by it. It follows that, with respect to the external spatial world, speculative thought can be considered as the essence of its essence, or the “truth” of its “truth.”1 The critical mind, having been brought up on Kant’s ideas, will perhaps be inclined to see in this conception more audacious intuition, or even fantastical inventiveness, than logical clarity and scientific persuasiveness. However, Hegel’s doctrine of the logical essence of all of the real stands in the closest relation of spiritual succession, precisely with the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason first, and with the teleological part of the Critique of the Faculty of Judgment, second. The last part of this thesis can be uncovered only later; but the first part should already be clear. In the Analytic Kant establishes that the categories, the pure concepts of abstract reason, constitute that a priori condition without which not a single object is possible in experience.2 According to this, the mere presence of the object in experience witnesses to the fact of its having been given form through the categories. The “objekt ” is that “in the concept of which is united the multiplicity of the given intuition.”3 But this unitedness is necessarily the result or product of abstractly rational thinking, a product produced by a self-initiated, self-active act of the subject.4 Any object in experience as such is already something that has been thought, irrespective of whether we are aware of this creating act of synthesis by thought, or not.5 Being given form through the categories6 is the condition for anything subsisting for us as an object or an objekt.n We can express this by saying that anything whatever as a phenomenon is, according to the Critique of Pure Reason, a thought-formed fragment 1. Comp., e.g., Diss. 21; Glaub. 152–53; Log. III 50, 270. 2. Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, ed. B. Erdmann, 1900, pp. 5, 118. 3. Kant, ibidem, pp. 130, 131, 132. 4. Comp.: ibidem, 105, 106, 121, 122. 5. Ibidem, 121–22, 125. 6. Here one must understand, of course, not a conscious subsumption under a category of the manifold analyzed, realized systematically in natural science, but an unconscious synthesis of the sensuously given manifold, taking place in the habitual and, so to speak, “mechanically” realized act of “perception” of something as an object.

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of sensuously intuitive material. In the most essential foundations of its being this fragment is determined by thought, is subsumed under the categories, is permeated by their form, is transformed in them, is expressed in their language. A “thing” does not “exist” but stands under the category of being; it is not a “substance” and not a “cause”; it is not “one” and not “multiple,” but is determined by thought as a substance, as a cause, as a unity or as a multiplicity. Its “properties” are its “inherences” produced through thought; its real fate is its categorial “possibility” and “necessity.” Furthermore, in the capacity of object—precisely insofar as it is an objekt really present in experience—a thing created by thought, it is a creation, something born, a product of the logical self-activity of the subject. There is absolutely no doubt that this “critical” conception of Kant’s differs essentially from Hegel’s metaphysical conception. The “thing,” the logical nature of which Kant discovered and recognized, is a phenomenon cognized in experience and therefore essentially including material of sensuous intuitions. On the contrary, if in Hegel one can still speak of some “thing,” then this is a part of absolute reality, a living fragment of the speculative-meaning element, free of any sensuously empirical character.1 Kant establishes the thought character of the objekt as a result of the cognitive process in which the sensuously perceived given is logically formed; for Hegel the object has a “logical” nature in itself, not in the order of cognition, but in the order of being; not in the sense of a merely logical form, but in the sense both of content-containing and of formal, qualitatively substantial determination. That which for Kant is a cognitive process, for Hegel is an ontological existenz-minimum, fundamentally real. Finally, Kant’s entire conception remains within the limits of human subjectivity and its rational acts; these acts introduce into the object a thought synthesis and then ascend to synthetic a priori judgments. Hegel’s conception is free from such an anthropologism grounded in principle, and the element of “subjectivity” acknowledged by this conception in the object has the character of a suprahuman creative vitality, immanent to the object itself. Nevertheless, despite these and other, less essential, differences, the fundamental idea of the logical nature of being, having, as we can already see, a complex history in pre-Kantian philosophy as well, was directly suggested to Hegel by the Critique of Pure Reason. Kant’s heroic attempt to uncover the element of the rational in the very essence of the real was so convincing, and at the same time marked out such broad and still incompletely revealed perspectives, that philosophical thought naturally proceeded in that direction. The non-appearing thing was excluded by Kant from scientific knowledge; and the appearing thing was 1. Comp. the doctrine of the speculative world in chapter 11.

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transformed into a givenness through thought. The logical became the necessary form of the real. Furthermore, Kant himself dreamed of something greater. To be sure, in human knowledge there always remains an ingredient of sensuously passive givenness as well as an ingredient of the intuitive activity of the subject, giving to the material the form of temporality, and partly, over and above that, also the form of spatiality. But one need only consider these two ingredients inessential, or eliminated in intellectually intuitive cognition, and a “thing” is resolved into pure thought. Kant lovingly cultivated the idea of this abstract reason which through thought creates givenness itself, the “matter” of cognition, and resolves all into the rational product of pure reason. Such an abstract reason could accomplish the infinite task of science: the inexhaustible comprehension of the object; however, such reason is, once and for all, inaccessible to humanity, is not inherent in it, and therefore can be held in mind by it only in the form of a “regulative” idea. And this impossibility, this unrealizable idea, was placed by Hegel at the foundation of his entire philosophical conception. Intuiting abstract reason, i.e., creative thought, actively producing both the matter and the form of every object, of every reality, is no longer Kant’s regulative idea and not the “pre-consciously intuiting creativity of the absolute, but a hidden center in the human spirit,” as Fichte attempted to comprehend it in his first Wissenschaftslehre. It is rather a self-sufficient suprahuman principle which consciously thinks-intuits-creates itself, the speculative concept itself, living meaning as primary reality. Thought now not only “enters” into the composition of the being “cognized” by man, but is the essence of any being whatever; for there is not and cannot be any reality inaccessible to cognition. All cognition is self-cognition; but not self-cognition of the “human subject,” rather the self-cognition of the “logical objekt.” In the logical objekt, precisely because of its nature as meaning, there cannot be any essentially inaccessible spheres, any “remnants” not submitting to rationalization, any transcendent entities, etc. Self-thinking meaning can only be manifestly open to itself, for it itself is the objekt, rational in its essence; and it itself is the subject, rational in the character of its activity. Intellectual intuitiono is reason that creates and reveals itself and, in this sense, it is itself existent primary-reality. The understanding of this conception naturally demands a total renunciation of the abstractly rational “point of view.” So long as we still only connect thinking with meaning, and by the word “consciousness” we understand only subjectively human thought experiences, functions, or states, the universal character of thought as primary reality can be neither understood nor critically examined. Speculatively speaking, a concept is a self-thinking (eo ipso intuiting) spirituality, and thereby a power creating itself from within. It is not the case that “meaning” waits for human con-

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sciousness to perceive it, but until then dwells in “nonbeing.” Rather, the concept itself is an intuiting of itself; it is by no means “being thought” because, and insofar as, human consciousness deigns to perceive it and give it “being.” On the contrary, happy is he who has managed to see the objektive life of the concept through his own inner world: his lot is “the blissful enjoyment of eternal intuition.”1 But it would be unacceptable and completely incorrect to consider the concept as begging for alms at the gates of the human soul. One should not think that “being actualizes the concept in itself,” or that “the soul possesses the concept.” On the contrary, the concept actualizes in itself all being whatever; the concept possesses the existent, for it itself is primary reality; the concept also possesses the soul, but is not its “product,” or “possession,” or an object of its rule: the human soul itself is a modus of the concept.2 Once intuition is received into the concept,3 the concept as itself thinking itself, turns out to be eo ipso intuiting itself; the concept is itself the intuitive intellect, for which “thinking itself” is equal to “intuiting itself” and to “creating itself.” That is why Hegel says that intellectual intuition is equal to “all”;4 that it is all, the totality;5 that human consciousness (Ich) is “subjective transcendental intuiting,” while nature (Natur) is “objektive transcendental intuiting”; both the one and the other as phenomena of absolute self-intuiting reason.6 The human soul is not the sole bosom of the Concept. Remaining everywhere and always living creative meaning, the Concept as such is not fastened to the form of human consciousness, as though to its sole medium and necessary sphere. To be sure, in this element it lives in a manner most adequate to and worthy of itself;7 however, it is not enslaved by the empirical determination of human consciousness and its finite limitation, but reigns in it, actualizes itself through the inclusion in its own makeup of its spiritually vital and creative powers. There is no doubt whatever that a whole series of subtle metaphysical difficulties will arise before this general conception as soon as it attempts to fix its ideational outlines and to formulate with complete clarity its principles and conclusions. However, before addressing these difficulties, it is necessary to completely assimilate the fundamental premise of this doctrine according to which speculative thought is not only a reality, but absolute reality, primary reality, total-reality. And, perhaps, in order to assimilate this premise it is most important to realize what, in general, has been recognized, and is recognized, in philosophy as really existent. If it is agreed that the very acknowledgment of something as “real” or “unreal,” as having being or not having being, is a matter of philosophical 1. Comp.: Glaub. 9. 2. Comp.: Enc. I 391; Enc. III 150. 208. 5. Ibidem. 6. Diff. 272. 7. Comp., e.g., Enc. II 29.

3. Glaub. 15.

4. Comp.: Diff.

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reflection, thinking that verifies and professes, it will be necessary to admit that this acknowledgment is carried out on the basis of certain data or indications that provide to philosophical thinking content-containing material for acknowledgment or rejection. All of these indications are inevitably acquired on the path of real experience, which, in consequence of its being directed at something determinate in its content, can be called experience. In this experience as such one can always distinguish the function or state of experiencing from the experienced content. It is precisely this experienced content which can be acknowledged as real. It is possible that the epistemologist who is seeking an immediate approach to what is known will be inclined to acknowledge as “existent” every experienced content; however, for him too the problem of distinguishing what is genuinely real from what is not genuinely real will arise, even if only within the limits of what has already been acknowledged as “existent” in the broad sense of this word. One must never fail to acknowledge that in the very “idea of being”—be it experienced in the form of a vague, perhaps purely muscular, sensation, or in the form of a mature logical category—is contained an element of “certainty,” “genuineness,” or “indubitability”: “to be” means to be in actual fact, to be “in reality,” to be “objektively”; to be means not only to appear to exist; to be “not certainly” means to be only in possibility—it means “perhaps not to be.” Humanity’s everyday abstract reason finds peace more rapidly in the experiencing of reality at a lower level of awareness, being satisfied with a primitive, perhaps purely pragmatic “assurance.” But it too finds peace only when it feels certain that something is “in actual fact.” It is clear that scientific cognition—be it an empirical investigation or a philosophical construction—ex officio cannot come to a halt at non-genuine being; therefore, since time immemorial, it has worked to establish that criterion or those methodological approaches which could give it a grounded guarantee of the genuineness of an asserted being. Whatever these approaches might consist in, and however such a criterion might be defined, the “being” or “reality” of anything is acknowledged when the objective treatment of the experiencing medium (i.e., the soul in one or another of its functions, in one or another of its “approaches” and degrees of consciousness) gives a stable indication of the certain presence of some independent content, i.e., of a content that does not coincide with and is not reducible to the experiencing medium itself. The stability of such an indication can be realized in the form of discontinuous multiple repetitions, or in the form of a single, uninterrupted, continuous experience. In any case, the presence of the given content must be experienced with force and a lack of ambiguity, not leaving any room for doubts. However, what is most essential in this question is the independence of the experienced

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content, i.e., its qualitative, content-filled otherness, indissolubility, irreducibility to the qualitative makeup and mode of being of the experiencing medium. And since the experiencing medium is always the inner immediate element of the soul, the “real” is always a distinct being with respect to the subjective experiencing psychic act. Expressing this in common words, one can say that the soul, in acknowledging something as real, experiences, as it were, a sort of “resistance” from something that is not the soul itself; this “resistant other” which does not submit to a leveling dissolution, manifests a sort of self-sufficiency in its fate and a distinctive lawfulness of its own, which in the future could acquire the character of categorial specificity. All this does not inevitably mean that, between the experiencing soul as a whole and the independent content experienced by it, there must be present an active opposition (though this too is possible), or the impossibility of creative symbiosis, or at least a sharp qualitative distinction; after all, the object experienced may also be the life of the experiencing soul itself, the nature of the all-permeating and all-encompassing Divinity, or another’s psychic manifestation. The independence of the real must be experienced as an irreducible content-filled otherness only with respect to the experiencing act of the “psychic medium.” It is clear that under this most general and abstract definition of “being” would go all the varieties of “real” objects, beginning with the existence of the spatiotemporal thing and concluding with the suprasensuous reality of spirit and the “ideal being” of the logically subsisting concept.p If we designate this generic nest with a single term, we would have to speak of “a self-sufficiently other content” or of the “objektively existent.” And here the understanding of reality that was put forward and developed by Hegel turns out to be one of the varieties, one of the generic concepts that belongs to the compass of this single genus. Together with it, the concept of “being,” which is habitual to the quotidian human consciousness, belongs to the compass of the same generic formation. If humanity’s everyday abstract reason speaks of “being” where the soul, adhering with its attention and striving to the “body” and filled in content with indications of “external feelings,” experiences a certain “independent other content” of a material character, the consciousness of the philosopher, for whom from time immemorial, it has been characteristic to move from external perceptions to a nonsensuous object, professes “reality” there where the soul experiences the indubitable presence of the nonmaterialq being of a content which is self-sufficient and obeys its own law.r Navigating among spatial things, ordinary consciousness recognizes “being” where its sensuous directedness encounters some “resistant other,” and when it sees itself as “assured” of the presence of this “resistant other,” this corporeal suprasubjective newcomer, so to speak. The

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philosopher’s consciousness also deals with “suprasubjective newcomers”; however, the “other-contents” studied by him do not have, in their resistant distinct being, the character of material or sensuous independence. In its nonsensuous directedness the philosopher’s consciousness seeks, finds, and experiences those contents that, by their qualitative irreducibility and indissolubility, by their special modes of subsisting and differentiating themselves, eradicate in the soul any doubt concerning the genuine presence of some particular object, some “reality.” Such in the given case is the subsisting logical concept, developing in accordance with its own law,s in its fundamental categories an entirely distinct being, and not reducible to the experiencing act of the subjective soul. Here it goes without saying that the philosophical consciousness seeks and finds in this recognition that (in terms of its meaning) suprasubjective selfevidentness with which the “attestation” of everyday empirical consciousness has very little in common. However, the most essential point of distinction between the two levels of ontological assertion lies, according to Hegel, in the fact that empirical consciousness, by the very character of its directedness toward the “object,” is forever disconnected from it. Its object is always separated from it in the order of spatial disjunction, as body is separated from body, thing from thing. For empirical consciousness, its object is always “other-being”; and it itself always remains only a “coknowing,” i.e., something adjunct, adventitious, some secondary addition to the self-sufficing visibility of the thing. Here the actual dissolution of consciousness in the object, realized in practicet and brought to completion, is impossible.u The whole task and the whole power of philosophical thinking lie, on the contrary, precisely in the self-forgetting and the total dissolution of the experiencing consciousness in the experienced object, as shown above. Hegel’s successor must follow the same path that Hegel did. His successor must first become convinced that the concept, meaning, the logical, have an independent “ideal being,” which “insists” on its distinct being and does not submit to dissolution in the experiencing soul; further, not being satisfied with this “ideal being” in all of its abstract deadness and emptiness, he must effect the reverse dissolution: he must give his experiencing soul over to the concept, dissolve it in the self-forgetful thinking of meaning, objektivize it in this act of speculative departure, and thereby come to know true and absolute reality. Thus, the speculative philosopher seeks “objektive being” in the same way as every living, acting, thinking human; but he finds it on the pathways of a distinctive “penetration deep into himself,” which, however, is not a penetration into “himself,” but a penetration into the content that is being thought, into the object being thought. Dissolution in the distinct being of the life of speculative meaning does not simply

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“give the soul the possibility of knowing” a special “aspect of reality”; such a form of “intercourse” between the soul and the speculative concept would reproduce the usual relation between subject and objekt, in which the objekt is conditioned by the subject and therefore cannot be cognized in its absolute independence. The speculative concept is revealed to human consciousness in all its unconditioned genuineness precisely because it takes in, absorbs, includes, the thinking soul in its makeup. Here the subject cannot condition the objekt, because it itself is absorbed by the objekt (absorbirt); the “subject” turns out to be an organic ingredient of the “object” and, as a result of their “meeting” and “intercourse,” the object, the concept, turns out to be the sole reality. That is why speculative thought is absolute reality and the sole reality. Speculative thought is not only “independent and self-existing content” in the presence of which all of its doubts have been extinguished, together with human subjectivity; it is also the totality of content, pregnant with all and every abundance of objective varieties. In the life of the speculative concept, specifying its own law of development,v human consciousness sinks like a small boat in the ocean, or like the light of a terrestrial flame in a ray of the sun; and precisely for this reason this consciousness cannot fail to recognize the speculative concept as its real element. However, this does not yet say all: the sinking consciousness sinks because it is a fragment or state of the element of the speculative concept that is absorbing it. A kind of cosmic encounter of two “halves” of a single substance that have been torn apart takes place here, as a result of which the living creativity of the concept acquires the form of rational consciousness. That which is revealed (the life of speculative meaning in the rhythmicity of its own law), and that to which it is revealed (the objectively directed and experiencing human consciousness), are states of one and the same absolute primary reality, and their encounter is a speculative holiday of cosmic healing. If, in this way, any “proofs” that speculative thought is genuine reality can still be presented, then this can be accomplished only through the uncovering and disclosure of the distinct being, obeying its own law, immanently inherent in it. The basic form and basic goal of the life of the Concept are everywhere one and unchanging. The Concept everywhere determines itself; in this self-determination it is always directed negatively at itself; and it ascends to wholeness and richness of content. In its self-determination it moves from the universal to singularity; the negative relation to itself compels it to evolve according to the laws of the dialectic characteristic of it. The achievement of wholeness and richness forms it into a distinctive state of higher speculative concreteness. The Concept introduces these forms and properties into everything that it participates in; or, more accurately, into everything that has reality thanks to its pres-

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ence: through the Concept everything acquires the form of the universal, everything moves dialectically, everything ascends to a concrete state. Such are the fundamental laws of Spirit and of its life. Therefore, in what follows it is necessary, first of all, to reveal their philosophical essence.

Translator’s Notes a. In the German translation the title of this chapter became “The Reality of the Concept.” b. The Gospel of John, 8:28. c. Обстояния. Il’in uses this term and the related verb form in connection with objects of thought that may more properly be said to subsist rather than to exist. d. According to Inwood, Hegel uses ideell (in contrast to ideal) in connection with Idee (not Ideal), where the Idee designates the unity of the ideal and the real, the unity of the Concept and its reality. Thus to refer to something as ideell is not to contrast it in simple fashion with the real. The term ideell may be applied to anything that exemplifies the Idee. See Michael Inwood, A Hegel Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell, 1992), 126–27. e. The last phrase is к обусловливающему значению рефлексии. The corresponding sentence in the German edition is substantially altered: “Fichte in his first period asserts a “pre-conscious” self-positing of the subject and is inclined to expound the thing in itself as spiritual and to transfer it to the depths of the subject” (Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels, 79). f. Il’in’s term here is релятивистискую. g. This phrase in Russian is образно-смысловом, and the proper translation of образно is problematic. An образ in this context would evidently be a (logical) image (Bild ); or minimally, an appearing. The corresponding sentence fragment from the German edition is: “das Wesen der absoluten Realität findet in gegenständlichen spekulativen logischen Schauen sein adequätes element” (Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels, 81). Thus logischen Schauen might be translated as “logical images” or “logical appearings,” i.e., that in virtue of which the speculative Concept could be intuitable. h. In the German, this phrase became “ein spontanes, organisch-dynamisches Wesen” (Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels, 83). i. Il’in here plays on the Old Church Slavonic root ять, to take in one’s hand, to grasp, writing по-ято, analogous to be-griffen. The modern Russian verb “to comprehend,” “to grasp (intellectually)” differs by one letter: понять; and the Russian term for “concept” is понятие (Begriff ). j. The Russian term is вещественным, equivalent to dinglichen, which Il’in uses in the corresponding place in the German text (Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels, 86). There is no English equivalent (and “material” is only an inexact substitute at best).

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k. No third (possibility) is given. l. Умозрительной. m. Спекулятивная. n. In the corresponding sentence of the German text, Il’in speaks only of Objekt, not of Gegenstand (Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels, 89). o. Интуиция. p. In the German text this last phrase is rendered as “dem ‘ideellen Sein’ des logischen Inhaltes” (Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels, 94). q. Невещественного. (See note j above.) r. The phrase in Russian is самозаконного содержание; in the German, eigentümlich gesetzmäßigen (Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels, 94). s. The Russian term is самозаконно. t. Il’in used the Latin term actu in the Russian text here. u. For a tangentially related but illuminating argument, see William Maker, “Hegel and Rorty, or How to Save Pragmatism from Itself,” Owl of Minerva 37, no. 2 (Spring/Summer 2006): 105–6. v. В самозаконной жизни спекулятивного понятия.

5

The Universality of Thought

Perhaps nowhere is the difference between Hegel’s logic and conventional formal logic so sharp and clear as in the idea of the “universal” (Allgemein). The doctrine of the reality of thought established by him leads to this with iron necessity; for, together with this fundamental change, the entire inner structure and order usually ascribed to the concept are reformed. The entire tendency of the formal-logical doctrine of the concept is reducible to establishing that particular, specific structure and that particular, specific order of relations that are inherent in an “ideal concept” in contradistinction to a “real phenomenon.” The ordo et connexio idearum is sharply and precisely distinct from the ordo et connexio rerum.a Things cannot be generic and specific; things are not universal and abstract; things are not subject to the law of identity; they cannot be “defined” and classified. But on the other hand, concepts do not have spatial form or temporal duration; concepts are devoid of intuitable appearance and form; they are not subject to process and change; they require different cognitive modes, are determined by other categories, are subordinate to particular laws. Hegel’s philosophy makes an attempt to rise above these boundaries and distinctions and, as already explained, to establish categories into which any content must fit. Such categories can only be categories of speculative thought or, more precisely, only forms of life of the Concept itself. For any content, if it “means” anything and is worth anything, participates in substantial reality, i.e., in speculative thought. A speculative concept is an essence, and its forms are therefore the forms of any content—not because “we” are only “able to cognize” any content in them, as the “abstractly rational” theory of knowledgeb would say, but because the speculative categories are the actual modes of the actual life of everything that is real. Therefore, to investigate the life of speculative thought in its fundamental forms is to investigate the essence of any genuine process. A thought or concept does not have, according to Hegel, its own special, specific categories and forms, differing from the categories of the “real” world. Thought is real in itself and is the principle of reality in all. The law of thought is the law of everything real; its pulse is the pulse of any accomplishment; its word is indisputable and knows no competition. 91

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It directly follows from this that, in speculative philosophy, thought imparts to everything real the forms of universality, dialectical development, and concreteness; and that the significance of these categories must be completely different by comparison with the similarly named categories of formal logic. The essence of the idea of the “universal” (Allgemein) in any conception and from any point of view is formed in the qualitative combining of multiplicity and unity. Universality is always understood to mean the presence of some multiplicity of elements, differing from one another, and the necessity of forming, in one way or another, some unity given the participation of these elements. Universality is always a unity formed from a multiplicity, even in the case when attention is absorbed by the unity to such a degree that the moment of multiplicity grows pale or appears to be annulled completely. The question of the further definition and understanding of the “universal” is decided in dependence upon what the elements of this multiplicity represent and in what relation they stand to one another and to the unity formed from them. A systematic analysis of all possible combinations and understandings requires a special investigation, of course. Hegel for his part indicates three different understandings of universality, two of which he rejects as false and unphilosophical, while establishing the third as true. The “universal,” as the word itself indicates, is always something that is “common to all” (allgemein —allen gemein) in which, in one way or another, all the elements of the given multiplicity “participate.” These elements are usually called “singulars,” and that unity in which they are participants is usually called a “universal.” Thus, the relation of the universal to the singular consists essentially of a multiplicity of similar relations of a single universality to each of the singular elements of the diversity. In this series of relations there turns out to be a “constant” moment and a “changeable” moment: the universal is the constant moment, while the singular is the changeable moment. In the face of the multi-sided multiplicity, universality is something constant and stable. The elements may be different; however, the universality is not different, but identical, equal to itself. The elements are multiple; universality is one. Therefore, the universal in its most general definition is a certain stable, constant unity situated in lawlike relations with the manifold multiplicity “subordinate” to it. All three forms of universality noted by Hegel come under this definition, are variants of it. However, two of them are rejected on the grounds that in them the essence of the “lawlike relations” between the universality and the singulars does not have a speculative character. In the worst of these cases the content that is observed in many or in all singular empirical phenomena is “universal”; by means of a com-

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parison1 of these “real” things or phenomena one can ascertain that a given content is “stable” and therefore “universal.” This stability may, for example, possess the character of temporal duration of some property in relation to the comparatively rapid vanishing of other, more transitory, properties. Or, a more frequent case, the stability may consist in the fact that some property is identically inherent in many or in all empirical things;2 moreover, these things, preserving their separated (abstract) and singular existences,3 are joined into unity by this ephemeral “spurious”4 universality (Gemeinschaftlichkeit).5 In the case of such a superficial unification (Zusammenfassung)6 or grouping, the “common” property is not abstracted from “concrete” things, and the singular things themselves7 are the content of the arising sensuous,8 empirical 9 universality. Reflection is confined to comparison and does not pass to abstraction; the only important thing for it is to embrace multiplicity (die Vielen)10 or, in the best case, the all (Allheit);11 and here the “universal” acquires the significance of a concretely empirical sensuous “whole” (Aggregat).12 Such a universality is a manifest product of empirical knowledge at its first stages: a discrete multiplicity of sensuous things, their superficial unification in contingent and ephemeral groupings, an absence of the work of thought—all this makes empirical universality a property of the rejected sensuous stage of “knowledge.” Comparatively better is the second kind of universal, also rejected— the rationally abstract universal. It is formed on the same path as the first, but completing its work by means of abstraction.13 A stable, repeating property of empirical things is fixed by abstractly rational thought c and is transformed for the elements of the multiplicity into an abstract praedicabile. The generic feature that arises is counterposed to the elements of the domain, is posited outside of them, is placed on the other side of them, as it were, in the form of an abstract rational identity.14 The universality of this spurious concept consists in its ability to be applied to, attached to, ascribed to, predicated of, all the elements of the subordinate sphere.15 Here the universal is no longer an aggregate of singularities; it is separated out from them, placed above them; singular things do not enter into it, are not contained in it,16 as in the first case, but relate to it as to something external. It is clear that such a universality is nothing 1. Log. III 96, 97, 292. 2. Comp.: Rel. I 212. 3. Log. III 96, 97; Rel. I 54, 268. 4. Recht 115; 5 Rec. 211. 5. Log. III 96, 97, 292; Enc. I 338; Recht 59; 5 Rec. 211. 6. Log. III 96, 97; Rel. I 54; 5 Rec. 215. 7. Rel. I 54. 8. Comp.: Phän. 90; Enc. I 332. 9. Log. III 98; Recht 392. 10. Recht 392. 11. Log. III 96, 97, 98, 150; Enc. I 338; Recht 59; Rel. I 54, 212, 268; Ph. G. 44; 5 Rec. 211. 12. Enc. I 128. Comp.: Phän. 572. 13. Log. III 335. 14. Comp.: Recht 59. 15. Comp.: Recht 56, 280, and also references in the chapter on formal abstraction. 16. Diff. 260.

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other than the abstractly rational, formally abstract concept itself and that it possesses all of the defects and vices of this concept. The fixed,1 formal identity 2 of this universality gives it the character of deadness and lifelessness;3 its total separation from the particular 4 and its indifferent 5 opposition to the singular 6 material plunges it into emptiness7 and transforms it into superficial contentlessness.8 This universality is burdened with and conditioned by this opposition;9 diverse phenomena remain in a discrete form,10 outside of concept,11 while the universal itself, firm and unchangeable,12 remains an analytic unity,13 an unreal and non-actual14 abstract universality,15 deprived of determinations.16 Here, the genericuniversal does not include subordinate species,17 but rises above them into emptiness. Into the very concept are mixed elements of sensuous immediacy,18 and as a result it cannot even be called a concept.19 It is a “Begriff als Begriffloses,”20 a truth of sensuous certitude,21 no more. Such a universality is obviously a product of formal thinking; it shares its cognitive utility, its limitedness, and its general fate. Philosophy does not accept this universality, any more than it did the first, and constructs its own special, third kind of universality, distinctively combining in itself the virtues of the first two, but free of their defects. Speculative universality determines in itself the nature and character of speculative thought: it is speculative thought itself, reason, rational cognition, the speculative concept itself.22 Universality is a mode of “being” characteristic of the concept;23 it is the concept’s atmosphere, which it carries everywhere with itself, its immanent form. Therefore, everything that is already known about the speculative concept characterizes this form of the universal. Thus, speculative universality is something that is conscious of itself;24 it is self-knowing reason.25 It is as much an objekt, the object given to consciousness, as a subject, consciousness. It is an objekt “grasping” the subject, and a subject “grasping” its objekt,26 a subject-objekt identity. That which the concept thinks is universal, for the object of the concept is thought; but also the concept itself as thought is universal.27 The concept thinks itself; this means that the universal is directed toward itself; it 1. Glaub. 26. 2. Glaub. 97. 3. Comp.: Nohl 390; Phän. 5, 152–53, 313. 4. Glaub. 97, 129; W. Beh. 413. 5. Phän. 77, 86, 88; Log. I 87. 6. W. Beh. 350; Phän. 97; Log. III 98. 7. Glaub. 116; W. Beh. 340; Phän. 77, and others. 8. Log. III 60. Comp. also: Phän. 41, 185 9. Comp.: Phän. 96, 97. 10. Phän. 446. 11. Log. III 21. 12. Log. III 48. 13. W. Beh. 350. 14. Phän. 13, 108; Log. III 78. 15. Log. I 47; Log. III 21, 22, 137, 279. 16. Log. III 120. 17. Phän. 313. 18. Log. III 64. 19. Log. III 30. 20. Log. III 47. 21. Phän. 76, 84. 22. Comp.: Phän. 14, 15, 559; Log. I 148; Log. III 332; Enc. I 66; Enc. III 362, and others. 23. Phän. 192. 24. Phän. 356. 25. Enc. III 469. 26. Comp.: Enc. III 286–87. 27. Comp.: Phän. 14.

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is a “reflection” (from reflectere—to direct back) on itself.1 In this turning toward itself, accessible only to speculative vision,2, d the universal is not merely “ideal,” like a rational abstraction, but also real,3 coincides with being.4 That which is actual, real, is universal,5 for the universal is the essence of actuality.6 Universality is the substantial7 principle. Therefore it itself is its own content, its own object and end.8 It is a living,9 free10 creative force,11 fluid12 and mobile. It itself moves itself within itself,13 as the self-developing concept.14 However, all of these successive conclusions from the coincidence of universality with thought acquire a living and intelligible content only after the posing and resolution of the central question: of the essence of the relations uniting the universal with the singular. Hegel himself sees the center of gravity in the character of these relations. He considers a correct understanding of these relations to be of the highest importance, inasmuch as access to the understanding of the “speculative” and to cognition of the truth is closed to one who errs in this question.15 Indeed, it is necessary to acknowledge that the entire doctrine of the speculative concept is revealed for the first time only after the idea of the “universal” is clarified and that, further, an analysis of this idea provides the key to a correct understanding of the relation of God to the world and of the state to the individual. This relation is reduced to the fact that the singular enters into the universal as its living part, while the universal enters into the singular as its living essence. Both the one and the other are in the order of speculative thought. Speculative universality, including in itself the singular, thereby marks out a sharp boundary between itself and abstractly rational universality, but on the other hand, apparently converges with empirical, sensuous universality. However, this convergence is, of course, only an external appearance. The abstract opposition of a subordinate multiplicity to a dominant unity that is characteristic of an abstractly rational concept is sublated and annulled: the multiplicity is not “outside” of the unity, but is within the unity itself. The concept is not outside of its “compass”; the “compass” is not outside of its concept; the concept is such that its entire “compass” enters into it and is identified with it. The universal resembles a whole; the singular resembles its part. However, in contrast

1. Comp.: Phän. 209. 2. Comp.: Recht 59. 3. Comp., e.g., Phän. 27, 226, 356; Log. III 78; Enc. III 353, and others. 4. Log. III 332, 333; Phän. 292; Enc. III 353. 5. W. Beh. 396; Phän. 374. 6. Phän. 50. 7. Comp., in particular: Log. III 162; Enc. I 340, 394. 8. Recht 56. 9. Comp.: Log. III 41–42, 247; Enc. I 121. 10. Comp.: Log. III 39, 42; Enc. 396. 11. Log. III 39, 42. Comp. also: Enc. III 104. 12. Comp.: Phän. 548. 13. Phän. 226. 14. Enc. III 357(Z). 15. Comp.: Ph. G. 29–30.

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to empirical, sensuous universality, the two sides possess the nature of thought: the “singular” is not a “singular sensuous thing,” while the “universal” is not a “sensuous aggregate” encompassing all sensuous things. No; both the universal and the singular are living meanings, speculative thoughts, spiritual quantities, substantial realities. A single living meaning includes within itself a series of other, subordinate living meanings and itself enters into them, is dissolved in them in the way that an essence, for instance, is dissolved in its appearances. Here, as before, thinkers accustomed to Kant’s categories will gain the most enlightenment from the idea of intellectual intuition. If, according to Kant’s doctrine, the “singular” is an object of sensuous intuition, while the “universal” is an object of abstractly rational thought, for Hegel intuitive thought must inevitably fuse the singular with the universal. In intuiting, intuitive thought deals with the singular, but as thinking, it is directed at the universal. If thought coincides with intuition, the universal must coincide with the singular. Further, according to Kant, the singular—the material content-bearing principle—passively gives itself to human cognition, whereas the universal—the principle of categorial form—is actively introduced by the subject. In an understanding which is itself capable of intuiting,e which it can be supposed is permitted for Divine reason,1 thinking self-consciousness alone would be sufficient, for through it “the entire manifold”2 would eo ipso be given.f This would be a distinctive creative thinking, self-actively creating the entire manifold material of singular contents. So stands the matter with Hegel:3 the speculative concept creatively produces from itself the entire subordinate sphere of the singular. Sensuous singularity becomes a singular of meaning; the purely “ideal” universal loses its character of spurious abstractness and becomes “real” universality. In other words, an ideal-real universality produces and grasps an ideal-real singular. Truth, speculativeness, reason consist precisely in this “interpenetrating unity of the universal and the singular.”4 Through attentive analysis the entire problem of the “universal” unfolds into a series of subordinate questions about the essence and interrelation of three elements: the “universal” (Allgemein), the “particular” (Besonder), and the “singular” (Einzeln). The “particular” occupies the mediating position between the universal and the singular, and basically shares the fate of the singular in relation to the universal. All three elements, as stated above, possess the character of speculative thought, with 1. Comp., e.g., Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, ed. B. Erdmann, pp. 128, 139, 245, 260. 2. Comp.: Kant, Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 128, 132. 3. Comp., e.g., Lass. 468; Glaub. 42, 43, 44, 64–65; W. Beh. 413; Enc. I 117, 396. 4. Comp.: Recht 313; Ph.G. 29–30.

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all of its properties, attributes, and virtues; and their relation, as is already clear, has the character not of static immobility but of dynamic creation. In order to gain a clear idea of the whole series of relationships, it is necessary to pass through this series mentally from top to bottom—from the universal to the singular, and then from the bottom to the top—from the singular to the universal. In this passage, as Hegel himself usually expounds it, elements of propaedeutic and pedagogically motivated clarifications are interwoven with that objektive content of the speculative process which, everywhere and invariably, is reproduced in the life of the Concept. This is explained by the fact that Hegel constantly seems to have in view that exoteric point to which he must descend and from which he must begin his exposition, in order that ordinary consciousness not only understand and absorb the essence of speculative life, but also see itself as inevitably grasped and drawn into its objektive creative flow. Ordinary consciousness, resisting speculative insight and attempting to keep its hold on the level habitual to it, insists, first of all, on the abstract emptiness of its own concepts and, secondly, on its own subjective and self-sufficient isolatedness. This means that it clings to the spurious abstractly rational universality of the concept, and to its own concrete empirical singularity. It tears universality away from singularity and does not unite them, because it does not see their true and real interrelation. It is clear that this resistance is powerless to change anything in the true, i.e., speculative, interrelation and state of affairs. The relation of the universal to the particular and to the singular and, vice versa, of the singular to the particular and the universal, cannot depend on the arbitrariness and judgment of some subjective consciousness or other. The delusion in which it abides and the false point of view on which it insists cannot remove “singularity” from the life of “universality” or overturn the divine order of the world. Truth does not stop being truth because someone asserts something contrary to it; absolute reality does not change because someone falls into delusion and professes what is false. However, the task of the philosopher, cognizing the truth, consists in bringing those avoiding it to an acknowledgment of it. And thus, if the speculative identity of “universality” and “singularity” is depicted exoterically, each time the beginning of the path will be like a “conversion of Saul,” after which the true relation of the elements will begin to unfold. The path from the universal to the singular is a path from the less determined to the more determined; from that which has less content to that which has more; from the more simple to the more complex; from the more uniform to the more multiform; from a self-enfolded, potential unity to an unfolded, actual unity in multiplicity. It is already known that the universal torn away from the particular

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and the singular is an indeterminate, contentless abstraction, an empty universality,1 opposed by living “particularity.”2 Dead “abstraction” and living “concreteness” are hopelessly torn apart from each other, and the universal remains “deprived of life, spirit, colors, and content.”3 Abstraction, “scorning” the singular and not descending to it, turns away from that “depth” in which the concept can find itself 4 and turns out to be powerless to comprehend the essence of life, spirit, God, and the speculative concept.5 Universality becomes more and more superficial and contentless.6 The universal cannot remain in this lamentable state. It comes to its senses, as it were, and decides (entschließt sich)7 to set out on the path of self-determination. It is natural that, on this path, its first act is the negation of its own meager and dead content; its attitude toward itself is negative; it negates itself. From this moment there comes an end to formal thinking with its abstractly rational limits: the concept is turned toward itself; speculative independence and objektivity have been revealed in it; it has entered on the path of self-activity. True universality is a “creative force in respect of absolute negativity, which relates itself to itself.”8 This negativity is immanent to the universal.9 The concept, glorified by its formal identity, subjects itself to speculative self-negation, and this act enters into the very essence of the universal.10 The self-negation of the universal divides it into “A” and “not-A”; the concept divides itself.11 That state of the concept arises which Hegel designates with the term “Urteil” (properly, “judgment”): “original dividing” (Ur-teil).12 The universal is divided into independent moments,13 not identical with one another;14 the “neutral” turns out to be “split apart into different extremes,”15 but in such a way that the opposing sides created by the concept within itself remain within its limits: the concept unfolds into the judgment, into the “first dividing,” containing the “totality” of its own determinations.16 The universal, remaining itself, is broken up into opposing determinations, just as, in Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre, the “Absolute I” was divided within itself into the hostile sides of the “lesser subject” (humanity) and “nature.” Speculative thought, this subject, creating itself as an objekt, acquires the form of universality, which, differentiating itself,17 remains a unity of the differentiated sides.18 1. Besides the references introduced above, comp., e.g., Glaub. 116. 2. Ibidem. 3. Log. III 61. 4. Comp.: Log. III 60. 5. Comp.: Log. III 61. 6. Comp.: Log. III 60. 7. Rel. I 183. 8. Log. III 42. 9. Recht 41. 10. Comp., e.g., Log. III 37, 107; and also Log. II 242; Log. III 12, 39; Phän. 308. 11. Rel. I 183. 12. On such an understanding of Urteil, in the sense of “ursprüngliche Teilung,” “Diremtion,” “Entzweien,” in general, “differentiation,” see: Log. III 68; Enc. I 326, 374; Enc. II 641; Enc. III 355, 440, 469. 13. Log. III 34, 34. 14. Enc. I 326. 15. Comp.: Enc. I 374. 16. Comp.: Log. III 65, 67. 17. Log. III 42, 44, 107, 120; Enc. III 25(Z). 18. Comp.: Log. III 335.

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Precisely owing to this, i.e., owing to the unity of what has been differentiated, the universal has entered upon the path of self-determination.1 The primary simplicity of the universal, this first moment in the concept,2 is replaced in its first speculative act by a complication and expansion of content. Here the content not only expands but is also differentiated, and therefore becomes more determinate. The concept is deepened, as it were, enters into itself,3 unfolds its content, which had been potentially frozen at an abstract height. In this creative self-filling the concept does not go out of itself, does not receive anything from anywhere outside;4 differentiation is effected by the universal within itself 5 and is determined “entirely only by it itself.”6 The first negation imparts a kind of determinateness to the universal: the universal becomes a “determinate universal” or, what is the same thing, a “particular.”7 “Particularity” (die Besonderheit) is nothing other than “determinate universality.”8 In other words, this transition is a transition within the limits of universality itself from a less determinate state to a more determinate state.9 This already clarifies a number of essential features. If we stipulate that the universal is a “generic concept” while the particular is a “specific concept,” it will inevitably turn out that the specific is a modification of the generic, a modification distinguished by a greater determinateness. Such a conception is also not foreign to formal logic, which teaches that a specific concept has all the features of the generic one plus one or more special (from species) features. In just the same way, the presence of the “universal” in the “particular,” i.e., of all generic features in the content of a specific concept, will turn out to be acceptable for the formal-logical thinker as well: the content of concept A will turn out to be present in all the species subordinate to it—AB, AC, AD, etc. The content of the concept AB will also figure in all the elements of its compass—ABa, ABb, ABc, etc. On the other hand, the doctrine that the “particular” is contained in the “universal,” that it is created by the latter, and that the universal is not only thought in the particular but really constitutes its inner substantial essence—this doctrine is completely uncharacteristic of formal logic. However, Hegel defines the relation under investigation precisely this way. The universal has been broken down precisely within its own limits; therefore, the particular has arisen in it and remains in it10 as its attribute. The universal and the particular do not need to conform to 1. Comp.: Log. III 333, 334; Enc. III 71. 2. Comp.: Log. III 298. 3. Comp., e.g., Log. III 115. 4. Comp.: Log. III 40. 5. Log. III 42, 120. 6. Log. III 44. 7. Comp.: Log. III 40, 43, 60. 8. Log. III 60. 9. Comp.: Log. III 66, 87. 10. Log. I 7; Log. III 311, 328; Enc. III 388; Recht 40.

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each other 1 as something external to something external;2 the particular is not something independent,3 subsumable4 under generic universality. All of these conceptions are formal and false. Intuitive thought does not exclude the particular,5 but it itself, as objektive universality, creates the particular out of itself, or, if you will, posits itself in it: the universal imparts to itself a determinateness characteristic of the particular.6 In other words, the particular develops from the universal7 toward greater determinateness. Meanwhile, the particular, remaining within the limits of the universal, is not only a member of its “compass,” “logically” subordinate to it: that would be a relation of the formal subsumption of one abstract concept under another. The particular enters not only into the compass but also into the content of the universal, for it itself is a member of its content: the content of the universal is the content of all particular concepts produced by it within itself. The particular is, so to speak, bone of the bone and blood of the blood of the universal; however, remaining within the makeup of the universal, the particular can be likened not to a child separated from its mother, but to a branch having life only in connection with a tree that is whole. That is why Hegel explains that the greater scope or broader compass (weiterer Umfang) of the universal should by no means be understood only in the sense of a greater quantitative extent.8 No; this distinction between the universal and the particular is just as qualitative as quantitative.9 The doctrine of formal logic to the effect that the content of a concept is the less, the greater is its domain, is refuted on principle and definitively: to a greater compass necessarily corresponds a greater content, for the latter includes in itself the content of all the subordinate specific concepts. The “particular” does not have its own separate property, which would belong to it and only to it; its entire content-bearing wealth thus belongs, as such, to that universal from the depths of which it was grown. Therefore, the more highly developed is the inner life of the universal, the more differentiated is its content, the more numerous the particular and the singular concepts it has created in itself, the broader will be its compass, but eo ipso thereby also the richer will be its own content, for its entire “logical” specification remains within its limits. The particular enters into the universal as its living part. It is natural that, given such an order of things, the universal turns out to be a “totality,” composed of the elements of its compass: the “universal,” says Hegel, “is the totality of its own particularizations.”10 1. “Nur erst hinzutreten, hinzukommen”: Glaub. 97; Rel. I 183. 2. Comp.: Glaub. 97, 97, 116; also: W. Beh. 414; Log. III 40; Enc. I 14. 3. W. Beh. 323. 4. Log. I 47. 5. Glaub. 64– 65; Recht 325. 6. Comp.: Enc. III 357(Z). 7. Log. III 40. 8. Log. III 58. 9. Log. III 58. 10. Comp.: Log. III 109, 167; Recht 108, 112.

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It is clear from this that the “particular” is the principle of determinate differentiation: “das Unterschiedene, oder die Bestimmtheit.”1 It is characterized by having in itself a content-bearing determinateness and by being differentiated from other particular concepts.2 Particularization (Besonderung) or differentiation3 leads to the creation of a multiplicity of heterogeneous4 and one-sided5 specific concepts; they stand in external relation to one another,6 but are equally only moments of a common concept.7 They belong to a common universality,8 enter into it, “represent” it,9 each by its own specific determination, and, being distinguished from each other, are not distinguished from it.10 This “absence of distinction” of the particular from the universal is explained not only by the fact that the former enters into the living tissue of the latter, but also by the fact that the latter constitutes the living essence of the former. Having descended into a state of specific determinateness, the universal does not change at all, but maintains itself (erhält sich)11 and remains identical,12 unobscured, and equal to itself.13 The generic concept maintains itself unchanged in its species;14 it is, as it were, only populated with distinctions which it creates itself from itself.15 The universal enters into the particular as its essence;16 the particular, for its part, contains the universal in itself (enthält)17 and finds its own substance in it.18 As a result of this interpenetration between the “universal” and the “particular,” i.e., between the generic whole and its species-parts, a unity,19 or even an identity,20 is disclosed. This relation is a relation of absolute identity.21 “Universality” in itself is immediately, as such, “particularity” and knows itself as such (an und für sich selbst);22 the “particular,” for its part, is itself the “universal.”23 Hegel himself sometimes expresses this relation by saying that the universal “penetrates,” “saturates” (durchdringt) its specific parts.24 By no means should this term be taken in a metaphorical or figurative sense. A substance penetrates into its attributes, saturates them, and itself represents their totality.25 This idea is frequently encountered in Hegel and expresses his conception with complete accuracy. The relation between the universal and its species is a relation of real interpenetration or, according to Hegel’s expression, identity. Once again, this identity should be understood not formally-logically but speculatively-realistically, in the sense of an essen1. Enc. I 323; comp. also: Log. III 56, 254, 255. 2. Comp.: Log. III 36. 3. Enc. I 374. 4. Comp.: Recht 127. 5. Comp.: Enc. I 383. 6. Comp.: Enc. I 142; Log. III 36, 43. 7. Comp.: Enc. I 325. 8. Log. III 43. 9. Comp.: Log. III 43. 10. Comp.: Log. III 43. 11. Log. III 349. 12. Enc. I 323. 13. Enc. I 320. 14. See: Log. III 43. 15. Comp.: Log. III 43. 16. Log. III 46. 17. Log. III 43. 18. Log. III 43. 19. Glaub. 43; Recht 325, 346. 20. Skept. 109; Glaub. 44, 92, 117, 149–50; W. Beh. 400, 413. 21. Glaub. 97. 22. Log. III 51. 23. Log. III 43. 24. Comp., e.g., Log. III 181. 25. Comp., e.g., Recht 108.

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tial coincidence of two real quantities. The universal, creatively producing a new content in itself through self-negation, is itself dissolved in this new content without itself being changed; it grasps and includes this new content in the same way that a tree includes all of its branches; it constitutes the substantial essence of its own species in the same way that the real quality of general treeness constitutes the single living tissue of its branches. In Hegel’s logic the order of concepts combines the features of intuitive-real relations with the features of the discursive-formal:g the former acquire the significance of the latter, while the latter are interpreted and constructed in the same manner as the former. However, the movement of the universal does not stop with the creation of the particular, but continues further and descends to the singular. In general, this descent has the same features and leads to analogous results, but not without complications. In the creation of the particular it was discovered that the universal is its essence. However, the essence of the universal itself consists, as has already been explained, in being directed toward itself in creative negativity. Whence the necessity of a new “reflection” and a further, “second” negation.1 The particular, having in itself universality or, what is the same thing, the universal in a state of particularity, the particular again turns toward itself 2 and accomplishes a new separation and determination. That which had already been determined once is determined anew; a specification of the “special” (from species) is produced; a “determinate determinateness,” i.e., a singularity,3 arises. Descending onto this new level in its self-creation, the concept naturally acquires the burden of new determinations. A lower series of already specifically determinate species-meanings, i.e., singular concepts, is formed. The singular as the final, lower level in the self-specification of the concept is an opposite 4 for neighboring singular formations and a foundation 5 for the higher levels. The singular is the principle of singularity,6 of separation, of the opposition of itself to another. If differentiation has already been discovered within the limits of the particular, in the sphere of the singular it is a necessary condition of being. The sphere of the singular is a multiplicity of content-determinate meaning-figurations, separate, not coinciding with one another, standing one against the other. Entering this sphere, into the realm of the singular, the object in itself disperses (auseinander gehen),7 as it were, into a multiplicity of apparently independent formations, but which essentially preserve their speculative nature

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1. Comp.: Log. III 40. 2. Comp.: Enc. I 320. 3. Comp.: Log. III 60. 4. Comp.: Log. III 5. Comp.: Log. III 56; Enc. I 323. 6. Log. III 61. 7. Log. III 304.

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and, accordingly, their link among themselves and with the higher levels of the series. The concept leads here a manifoldly separate life; it has a plural form and in this disintegration there is a “loss of oneself,” as it were. Every singular meaning has its determinateness; in a new and distinctive manner it modifies and represents the developing essence of the universal. Singularity is rich with determinations: it is full of living colorful content,1 combined in it in a distinctive manner into a singular meaning-concreteness.2 Such is singularity in itself and its own apparent relation to other singularities. However, its true inner essence is revealed only by its innermost connection, in the first, with the higher levels of the particular and the universal, and in the second, with neighboring singular formations. The singular relates to the particular just as the particular relates to the universal. This essentially says it all. In relation to the singular, the particular is an “indeterminate determinateness” or a “universal determinateness.”3 A formal logician would suggest here the term “nearest generic concept.” Therefore, between the particular and the singular are discovered those relations that link the speculative genus with the speculative species. By a negative reflection toward itself, the particular negates itself, breaks itself down, and sinks to the state of the singular. It turns out that the presence alone of the particular already posits the being of the singular,4 and that “particularity” is “just as immediately in and for itself” singularity as universality was immediately in and for itself already particularity.5, h In the particular the universal and the singular find their mediating term,6 and through it they enter into contact and union.7 On the other side, the singular turns out to have absorbed into itself and to contain in itself 8 both higher formations: it is that ground (Grund,9 Grundlage 10) into which genus and species extended themselves and through which the ground comes to share the essence, and itself becomes substantial as a consequence.11 The universal and particular are moments or stages in the process of the formation of the singular.12 The attainment of the latter signifies that the concept has unfolded its life into orderly frames of determinate, content-bearing, concrete, and manifold meaning-singularities. It is natural, however, that these frames of singular meanings are linked with the particular and the universal as with their genuine essence. Descending into the state of singularity, the universal and the par1. Comp.: Log. III 61. 2. Comp.: Log. III 63, 40. 3. Comp.: Log. III 87. 4. Comp.: Log. III 60. 5. Comp.: Log. III 51. 6. Comp.: Log. III 87–88. 7. Comp.: Log. III 81. 8. Enc. I 324. 9. Log. III 56; Enc. I 323. 10. Enc. I 324. 11. Enc. I 324. 12. Log. III 60.

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ticular do not by any means pass into something other, but posit only that which they are in themselves and for themselves.1 On the one hand, the singular remains within the limits of the particular and, speaking broadly, of the universal; the latter, maintaining its own nature in an unchanging and identical form, contains the spheres of the particular and the singular.2 On the other hand, the singular obtains its fundamental and essential properties from the presence in it of the universal, of the principle of substantiality.3 Once again, an interpenetration of the spheres is discovered:4 the universal and the singular are penetrated by each other through the mediating element of the particular. The singular is a living part of the universal; the universal is the living inner essence of the singular. The usual doctrine that the universal “inheres in” (inhärirt) the singular acquires a deepened interpretation in the sense of a “real inner presence” in something. Once the universal stands to the singular in a relation of “Inhärenz,” then the singular itself is universal.5 In just the same way, the usual doctrine that the singular is subsumed under (subsumirt) the universal acquires a new interpretation in the sense of “entering into the makeup” of something. Once the universal stands in a “Subsumtion” relation to the singular, it includes it within itself, becomes it, is itself the singular.6 All singularities enter into the compass of the universal, not into the “formally logical” compass, but into the speculatively real compass. All determinations of singular meanings are determinations of the universal itself which grasps and includes them. The singular is permeated with the universal, and the universal is permeated with the singular, in the same way that branches and leaves make up a tree and also get from it their living essential juices. And here it is revealed that the traditional opposition between the universal and the singular is something merely apparent.7 The truth is that the two sides are united,8 and the essence of rationality consists in the interpenetrating unity of the singular and the universal.9 Here is present a true coincidence, an immediate speculative identity.10 The “singular,” as a combination of meaning-singularities, is the aggregate, the totality of the concept,11 the entire compass of its content, i.e., universality itself; and vice versa. To understand and utter the universal means eo ipso to understand and utter the singular, and vice versa.12 The true

1. Comp.: Log. III 60. 2. Comp.: Enc. I 323. 3. Comp., e.g., Enc. II 640, 641. 4. Comp.: Phän. 310; Recht 313. 5. Log. III 144. 6. Log. III 144; comp. with this: Enc. III 410, 412, where the usual formal-logical understanding of subsumption is sharply criticized. 7. Log. III 12–13; comp. also: Phän. 110. 8. Comp.: Ph. G. 29–30. 9. Comp.: Enc. II 640, 641; Recht 313. 10. Comp.: Log. III 12, 155, and others. 11. Comp.: Log. III 12; Enc. I 320. 12. Log. III 12–13.

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speculative universal is thereby immediately particularity and singularity;1 it permeates particularity and, in it and together with it, turns out to be singularity.2 Therefore, if one can accept that the universal is characterized as identity, the particular as distinction, and the singular as opposition and ground,3 then it is only with the essential addition that the particular and the singular are contained in the universal,4 i.e., that identity contains distinction and opposition, or, in other words, that identity is the living essence of distinction and opposition. Thus, dialectic is the true modus vivendi of speculative thought, uniting into one the entire multiplicity of singular formations. In consequence of such an identity, precisely owing to the fact that universality constitutes the essence of each singularity, the latter acquires its fundamental properties and features. Not to mention the fact that singularity always lives in the element of thought and is itself thought; the universal communicates to it the capacity for self-reflection, selfnegation, and self-activity. Accordingly, singularity is nothing other than a negative unity entering into relation with itself;5 it returns to itself, negates itself,6 and through this acquires the capacity for the renewal and reproduction (Reproduktion)7 of its content and its determinations. Singularity is therefore a creative, self-active principle, acting in and upon itself.8 This self-activity, taking its origin in self-negation and moving toward self-enrichment by means of new determinations, is the principle and essence of all life. That is why Hegel says that all that is alive is an identity of the universal and the particular,9 implying the inclusion of singularity in particularity. He also expresses this idea in another way: “life,” he says, “is absolute universality,”10 i.e., a universality that has fused with singularity, having been purified from opposition to it,11 etc. It is not difficult to understand what this lower level of the Concept, called the “singular,” consists in. It is an individually determined fragment (or, as will become clear later, an “organ”) of a single meaning-substance. Every ens, having an inner content-bearing determinateness, is a singularity consisting “qualitatively” of attributes of substance and included “quantitatively” in its all-encompassing makeup. From this it follows of itself that no singularity torn away from universality exists in the world, just as no universality torn away from singularity exists. These abstract formations are found only among the illusions of the empirically limited and stubbornly resistant consciousness. But since in the speculative, i.e., 1. Log. III 42. 2. Log. III 181. 3. Log. III 56; Enc. I 323. 4. Enc. I 323. 5. Comp.: Log. III 51, 60, 123, 165. 6. Comp.: Log. III 14, 88. 7. Comp.: Log. III 254, 255. 8. Enc. I 320. 9. Comp.: W. Beh. 414, 415, 419, 420. 10. Comp.: Log. III 247. 11. Comp.: Phän. 110.

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in the solely real and absolutely real world, everything moves toward maximal content-bearing determinateness, that process accomplished by the concept from the universal to the singular is the prototype of all speculative movement. The state of “speculative singularity” is always a higher state of the Concept. Here, to complete the picture, one should view it not only as a single separate individuality, as a single determinate fragment of substance, included in it and including it in itself, but also as an entire multiplicity, an entire system of individually determined singularities, abstractly-rationally fixed in the form of “separate fragments of reality,” but essentially standing in a speculative grown-togetherness with the universal. Given such an understanding, the doctrine of the universal actually clarifies the relation of God to his modes, and the relation of the state to the individual. For God is the Universal, while the fragments of the world are singular; and the state is the Universal, while the human individual is singular. Speculative science, in discovering the identity of the universal and the singular, reveals the essence of the cosmic and, in particular, the sociopolitical situation. All this will become still clearer and more obvious if we mentally follow the same path in the reverse direction: from the singular to the universal. If the path downward began with abstract universality, torn away from the particular and the singular, and led to its self-immersion in content, to its growing-together with singularity, the path upward begins with abstract singularity, torn away from the particular and the universal, and leads to its self-raising and inclusion in the higher spheres, to its growing-together with universality. Singularity in itself, as a principle of separation, specification, and opposition, is something tending not only to particularization from other singularities, but also to opposing itself to the higher levels of the concept. Torn away from the particular and the universal, isolated and closed, singularity turns out to be something “limited,”1 devoid of living connections, a sort of “ineffectual and impotent selfhood” (Selbst).2 Taken in itself it is a part 3 that does not acknowledge itself as a part; a product 4 that does not desire to know that it has been produced; it is like a tramp who does not remember his ancestry, and thinks of undertaking self-affirmation in this guise. However, precisely in this state it distorts its own true essence and “does not correspond to its own concept.” Such a lack of correspondence, such a limit to its being makes it finite and leads it to ruin.5 Singularity, asserting its independence from the universal, is a principle of arbitrariness and evil.6 The entire abundance of its determi1. Comp., e.g., Nohl 293. 2. Comp.: Phän. 363. 3. Comp.: Glaub. 17; W. Beh. 330, 341, 381, 385. 4. Enc. I 374. 5. Comp.: Enc. I 385. 6. Comp.: Recht 184, 185.

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nations cannot save it, for separation from substantial life deprives it of an inner focus and of logicality i in self-development. Like an empirical thing, it is threatened with vanity and disintegration. Singularity cannot remain in such a state of self-deluded insignificance. It must turn toward itself with profound dissatisfaction, reject itself, and be reborn out of this negation to substantial life. Self-negation leads it to the division of its concrete1 nature into its constituent elements and to their subsumption under particular, generic concepts. However, in these “judgments,” which reveal that the “singular” is the “particular,”2 there takes place not a mere subsumption (Subsumtion) but a distinctive expansion (“Erweiterung ”)3 of the singular to the particular. The singular, transformed through self-negation into a living speculative-meaning quantity, becomes convinced that its determinations are not manifestations of its specific, distinctive limits, but are fragments of broader meaning-realities. Each of its determinations appears before it in living connection, in immediate unity with a qualitatively identical but broader meaning-formation—the “particular.” The singular reveals the particular in itself and finds itself in the particular. The particular penetrates it the way an essential tissue penetrates its singular fragment; at the same time, the particular includes it and, alongside it, also many other modifications of the same nature. Singularity is convinced that it is the particular, that it forms, together with other singularities similar to it, a broad field of the “singular,” constituting the entire “content” and the entire “real compass” of the particular. The singular enters into the particular as its living part; the particular enters into the singular as its living essence. This movement of self-negation and ascent 4 is essentially an ascension of the singular to Spirit,5 the process of its spiritualization.6 Once having begun, this process draws the singular farther and raises it to the universal, to a consciousness of its connection, its unity, its identity with the universal. For singularity this path is a path of renunciation (Entsagung) and self-sacrifice (Aufopferung).7 In the capacity of a torn-away, immobile, “stable”8 principle, it ceases to exist and, in this its own death, it finds its own essence, becomes its own concept, fuses and becomes identical with the universal.9 Singularity becomes convinced that universality is its truth10 and that it itself in its own life and in the fulfillment of its task was unconsciously realizing the universal task.11 In this self-cognition singularity acknowledges that, as a particular meaning-figuration, it enters 1. Comp., e.g., Log. III 63: “Concretes, Inhalt, Einzelnes.” 2. Comp., e.g., Log. III 87, 89. 3. Log. III 89. 4. Comp.: Log. III 75. 5. Log. III 270. 6. Enc. III 133(Z). 7. Phän. 390, 397. 8. W. Beh. 384. 9. Comp.: W. Beh. 370. 10. Comp.: Recht 161. 11. Comp.: Phän. 266.

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into the compass of the universal, and that its content, the entire combination of its determinations, is a fragment of the fundamental, unified, substantial content of universality; in other words, that the singular enters into the universal as its living part, while the universal enters into the singular as its living essence. In such an identical fusion with the universal, all that is singular, as something self-sufficient and independent, ceases to exist; it has been completely absorbed into the substance of the universal; it is “dissolved” (auflösen)1 by the latter in its life-process. The universal “sublates” (aufheben)2 every singularity, which, in Hegel’s terminology, signifies: “negates it in its pretended self-sufficiency, but preserves it in the measure of its truth, including it in a higher union.” This relation of raising up, coinciding with the relation of “truth,” is possible here precisely because universality is the objektive essence of all that is singular, of every singular formation,3 an essence in relation to which no resistance is possible.4 This relation can also be expressed by saying that singularity, raised into the Universal, acquires the capacities of the Universal, while Universality, having descended to the singular, acquires features of the singular. Singularity is permeated by thought, is itself speculative thought; it lives by self-negation;5 it participates in abstractness;6 it is something inwardly substantial. Universality is filled with content; it itself is all possible content; it is living, concrete7 Universality, or a living, all-encompassing substance. Dissolving in the Universal, the singular absorbs into itself and assimilates even all the content of the Universal. However, such a higher fusion is accessible only to the intelligence8 or human reason. The Universal, for its part, includes in itself even the attraction of singularity to solitary, exclusive self-assertion; of course, such a self-assertion is accessible only to higher speculative Universality, which coincides with Substance. Thus is composed the order of relations among the Universal, the particular, and the singular. The Universal is a “free equality with itself in its determinateness”;9 the particular is a “determination in which the Universal remains unobscured, equal to itself”;10 the singular is a “reflection in itself of the determinations of the Universal and of the particular, a negative unity with itself, determined in itself and for itself and, at the same time, identical with itself, or the Universal.”11 All these three stages together form a single whole, enveloped or “grasped” into one, 1. Comp.: Phän. 548; Log. III 99. Comp. with this: Rel. I 268. 2. Comp.: Phän. 390; Recht 59. 3. Comp.: Glaub. 7; Phän. 136, 229; Log. III 187. 4. Comp.: Log. III 187. 5. Comp., e.g., Log. III 14, 51. 6. Comp. the not entirely successful formula of abstraction as “the soul of singularity”: Log. III 63. 7. Comp., e.g., Log. III 63; Enc. I 374. 8. Comp.: W. Beh. 394. 9. Enc. I 320. 10. Enc. I 320. 11. Enc. I 320.

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i.e., the Concept.1 However, strictly speaking, from the esoteric point of view there are no special independent stages whatever: the singular is permeated by the Universal and included in it; the Universal grasps the individual and constitutes its inner substantial nature. In such an immediate identity they constitute a single “grasping” or “genus” (Gattung),2 i.e., the Concept itself. To be sure, “genus” does not coincide with the usual “generic concept.” Rather, it “contains in its substantial maturity all singular determinations in a dissolved form.”3 It is a “universality of species,”4 their “immanent and concrete unity”;5 it constitutes such a Universality as is filled with the content of all the different extremes.6 A genus is a “concrete universality.”7 Further, a genus is not an unreal product of subjective thought, but a real, objektively existent quantity. This real universality is the essence of all actuality;8 it is objektive and essential, both in the psychic and in the corporeal;9 it is the inner nature of a thing, existing in itself and for itself;10 it is the “penetrating immanent essence of objekts.”11 A genus is an “objektive universality.”12 Finally, this Universality, in the capacity of speculative thought itself, with which it coincides, is absolute reality itself, or, what is the same thing, the one substance. A genus is a “substantial universality.”13 It is clear that a genus, or, what is the same thing, speculative Universality, acquires the form of the whole, the form of “totality.”14 All that is “particular” and all that is “singular” are included in it; it consists, as it were, of “partial” meanings, constituting them. A genus is a concrete, objektive, substantial totality, rich with determinations in the highest degree.15 It includes within itself everything that is real; and nothing can avoid16 being included. Speculative Universality is something ubiquitous17 and all-encompassing. A genus is a kind of all-encompassing “pan”; outside of it there is nothing. Precisely for this reason the Universal is

1. Enc. I 320. 2. Comp.: Log. III 149, 155. Occasionally Hegel, to the detriment of the unity and stability of the terminology, means by “Gattung” universality, not absorbing into itself the subordinate sphere; this can seriously hamper the reader. For example: Enc. I 341. 3. Log. III 99; comp.: Log. III 167. 4. Log. III 106; comp.: Log. III 162; Enc. I 394. 5. Log. III 106. 6. Comp.: Log. III 160. 7. Log. III 105; Enc. I 340; Enc. II 639; Enc. III 334(Z); comp. also: Log. I 7; Log. III 40, 78, 99, 107, 108, 114; Enc. I 66, 117, 118, 126, 374; Enc. III 71(Z), 427; Recht 41, 43, 59, 64; 5 Rec. 213. 8. Comp.: Phän. 50. 9. Comp.: Log. III 187. 10. Comp.: Log. III 100, 160. 11. Log. III 195; comp. 202; Phän. 136. 12. Log. III 99, 155, 156, 159, 160. 13. Log. III 106, 162; Enc. I 394; comp.: Log. III 167; Enc. I 340; Enc. II 640, 641; Recht 59. 14. Comp., e.g., Log. III 40, 44, 49, 109, 166, 167, 334; Enc. I 341, 342, 360; Recht 108, 112; 5 Rec. 213. 15. Comp.: Log. III 334; Log. III 37. 16. Comp.: Enc. I 36. 17. “Allgegenwärtig”: Phän. 126; Enc. II 153, 269; Enc. III 52.

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infinite with true infinity; having nothing outside of itself, it is not limited by anything; that which is limited and finite is not universal.1 In speculative Universality “all limitation whatever is sublated”;2 all that is is within it. Therefore, it can freely determine itself,3 developing from within and unfolding its wealth.4 Universality, in this its inner, centripetal creativity, is infinitude itself,5 perfecting itself in its circular movement. It is clear, furthermore, why Hegel characterizes speculative Universality as a “free force.”6 The Universal is a creative force, not afraid of selfnegation,7 and producing all content through the latter. As a substance, it is an “absolute force”8 in relation to its accidents and determinations. Speculative Universality, in its separate spheres and representatives, appears as an entire series of “imponderable” (imponderable), nonmaterial “agents” (Agentien), which permeate and “penetrate in an unconscious manner” people and things, and “actualize their own meaning in them.”9 Nothing can resist these forces, for they are essential, and everything else before them is inessential.10 Such self-communicating 11 spiritual forces, in various spheres of being, are laws, customs, rational representations in general (in the sphere of spirit), movement, heat, magnetism, electricity (in the sphere of nature).12 Free from materiality, these forces acquire the determination of “materiality”13 only at the stage of the “singular,” and, all together, as “particular universalities,” bear within themselves the breath of one spirit, one universal substance. To one who takes the trouble to delve deeply into an understanding of all these definitions formulating the point of view of speculative philosophy, the essence of the Universal will appear with the same immediacy and simplicity in which it appeared to Hegel himself. The nature of the Universal is to be itself and, at the same time, its own other-being.14 It overcomes and captures,15 as it were, all “other-being,” and forms with it a unity.16 Nothing can avoid this fate:17 the Universal penetrates into everything, passes through18 everything, not knowing any boundaries and not permitting any interruption to its activity.19 It constitutes a single substantial continuity and continuum20 that extinguishes,21 in the “insuperable elasticity of its unity,”22 the entire visible scatteredness and multiplicity of 1. Comp.: Skept. 103. 2. Comp.: Recht 59. 3. Comp.: Log. III 42, and also: Log. III 40, 43, 44, 333, 334; Enc. III 71; Recht 56. 4. Log. III 349. 5. Comp.: W. Beh. 343, 355; Recht 41, 73. 6. Comp.: Log. I 39. 7. Comp.: Log. III 42. 8. Enc. III 104. 9. “Sich in ihnen geltend machen”: Log. III 187–88. 10. “Ein Unwesentliches”: Log. III 187–88. 11. “Mitteilbare”: Log. III 187–88. Comp.: Log. III 349. 12. Log. III 187–88. 13. Log. III 187–88. 14. “Sein Anderes”: Enc. I 36; comp.: Log. III 259, 261. 15. “Übergreift”: Comp.: Log. I. 48; Log. III 39; Enc. III 53(Z), 353. 16. Comp.: Enc. III 353; Log. III 104. 17. Enc. I 36. 18. Comp.: Phän. 209; Log. III 118; Enc. III 275(Z). 19. Enc. III 275(Z); Rel. I 53. 20. “Kontinuum”: Phän. 389, 504, 506; Log. III 38–39, 292, 293. 21. “Auslöscht”: Phän. 548. 22. Phän. 548.

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active principles. Therefore, the Universal, being on the face of it in “another,” in fact remains with itself; it does not pass into anything “other,”1 and does not coerce another nature,2 dissolving the latter in itself, taking it in, assimilating it to a full fusion into identity. The Universal grows unhindered3 into everything, into every multiplicity that, on the face of it, is alien to it, lives in this multiplicity,4 and, at the same time, remains wholly equal to itself,5 identical with itself 6 and essentially immutable. In this fashion, the Universal, continuously and without obscuration extending itself through all content, reveals a capacity for “undying self-preservation.”7 Having before it some “other-being” or “difference,” it knows that it, the Universal itself, constitutes the essence of this other; and therefore it relates to the other as to itself: the Universal is love, freedom in love.8 It can therefore also be called “boundless blessedness.”9 From this comes the simplicity of the Universal. Its life is formed with high inner purposiveness.10 A genus is an organic Universality,11 progressively unfolding itself as an all-embracing unity. This organic development reveals as a result that the Universal is the one all in which all isolated existence is sublated. Therefore, acquiring in the all only itself, the Universal relates only to itself; its entire complexity, fullness,12 and wealth13 live in harmony with the greatest simplicity 14 and immediacy.15 And in this it is revealed with the greatest clarity that true Universality is itself speculative thought or absolute Substance. Its life is integral and peaceful;16 it resembles an organic, all-filling creative trembling.17 Such is the character and such is the significance of true18 Universality. As speculative thought, it, with all of its properties, is as much the objekt, penetrating and encompassing the subject,19 as it is the subject itself, overcoming and seizing every objekt, and containing it within itself just as a pure form contains its content.20 In the language of everyday understanding, this means that to live in the forms of the Universal is characteristic not only of the essence of the world and the soul being cognized, but also of cognizing reason: reason, living in the manner proper to itself, fuses with the object (“nature,” “soul,” the “state,” “art”) being cognized, which lives in the same manner; for the essence of the subject 1. Comp.: Log. III 42, 60. 2. Log. III 39. 3. “Ungehindert ”: Log. III 38. 4. “Inwohnt”: Log. III 38–39. 5. Log. III 12, 14, 38–39, 46, 218; Enc. I 320. 6. Log. II 242; Log. III 36; Enc. I 323; Recht 41. 7. Log. III 38–39. 8. “Freie Liebe”: Log. III 39–40. 9. “Schrankenlose Seligkeit ”: Log. III 39–40. 10. Phän. 199, 200, 201; Enc. I 117, 118. See chapter 7. 11. Phän. 221; comp.: Phän. 209, 446. 12. Log. III 160. 13. Log. III 37. See chapter 7. 14. Comp., e.g., Log. III 37, 37, 108, 160, 166, 332, 345. 15. Comp.: Log. III 46, 166, 332, 333, 335; Enc. III 353. 16. Comp.: Log. III 39. 17. “In sich selbst erzittern”: Log. III 253. 18. Comp.: Phän. 56; Log. I 48; Log. III 42; Enc. I 126, 390; Enc. III 353, 357(Z). 19. See chapter 3. 20. Comp.: Enc. III 286–87.

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is speculative thought and the essence of the objekt is also speculative thought. Meaning cognizes itself; the Universal is real both “in itself” and “for itself.”1 In this sense the Universal is absolute: Spirit ascends to the light of its own thought;2 it is knowing Spirit and, in its truest essence, it is “absolute Spirit.”3 All that exists and all philosophy 4 live and move in this element. Philosophy has from time immemorial been directed at Universality, creating itself in thought, and exists either in the process of self-cognition taking place in the Concept, or in the accomplished peace of actualized cognition; it exists normally in both the one and the other. In this its life the Universal has its own special, immanent rhythm of “movement” and its own absolute “end.” This rhythm is the dialectic and this end is speculative concreteness.

Translator’s Notes a. A reference to Spinoza’s Ethics, Part II, Proposition 7: “The order and connection of ideas is the same as the order and connection of things.” b. Alternatively, “as that theory of knowledge appropriate to the understanding [Verstand] would say.” c. Alternatively: “by the understanding.” d. The Russian term умозрение translated here as “vision” would usually be translated as “speculation,” except that in this case it is preceded by the adjective “speculative.” e. In the translation I have expanded slightly upon the Russian text, which states simply “В интуитивном рассудке” (in [an] intuitive understanding). Il’in’s corresponding German phrase is “der intuitive Verstand” (Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels, 104). See the following note also. f. Kant’s treatment of this point is taken from the Second Section, “Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts of the Understanding,” §21, 2nd paragraph, of the B edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (page 253 of the Guyer/ Wood translation, Cambridge University Press, 1998). g. More literally, “with the thinking-formal” (мыслительно- формальными). h. This sentence has been expanded slightly from Il’in’s text by employing the Hegel text that he cites, taken from The Science of Logic, trans. A. V. Miller (Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Press International, 1969, 1989) p. 612. i. Закономерность (or: lawfulness).

1. Comp.: Log. III 97–98, 117, 159, 181, 187; Recht 59; Ph. G. 29–30. Phän. 418. 4. Comp., e.g., Phän. 3.

2. Log. I 148.

3.

6

Dialectic

Intrinsic to the concept as such is a certain inner dialectic: it is intrinsic to the concept to enter into an “inner contradiction” with itself, to divide into new concepts which exclude one another. In this lies its universal, fundamental, and specific property: there is no concept that does not conceal within itself its own “contradiction.” There is no concept that does not break apart within itself into mutually “negating” formations. And this property of the concept not only does not have a fatal effect on cognition and on philosophy, but on the contrary: it serves their affirmation and flourishing. Accordingly, the task of philosophy evidently consists not in battling with contradictions and overcoming them, but in seeking them and dwelling in them. “Logical contradiction” is practically the essence of all philosophy. To find the logical contradiction, to affirm it, and to cultivate it; to discover in everything this distinctive internal breakdown, and cognitively to enjoy it—that is the task of the “true philosopher.” One incapable of this is incapable of philosophy or of scientific cognition. Hegel’s “contribution” consists in the fact that he discovered and affirmed forever this “dialectical nature of philosophy.” It has long been thought that precisely in this consists Hegel’s most important “discovery.” Moreover, nearly the entire essence of his doctrine has been reduced to the cultivation of logical contradictions. Even now one can sometimes find a thinker who is superficially captivated by this distinctive aesthetic of “contradiction”: he “likes” this capricious but nonetheless lawlike game of breaking down thought, and in the person of Hegel he attempts to find a brother-in-arms for himself in this fruitless philosophizing. On the contrary, one must establish that “dialectic” is neither the main content nor the highest achievement of Hegel’s philosophy, and that the “search for and cultivation of logical contradictions” will never be the task of his true follower. The dialectical state of the concept was not devised by Hegel but was intuitively perceived by him in the very nature of the object being cognized. He did not “discover it,” accidentally stumbling upon its manifestation; rather, it “revealed itself to him” in that systematic speculative intuition that had lost the character of spurious subjectivity and 113

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empirical arbitrariness. Thought, having merged with intuition, without having ceased to be thought; and intuition, having permeated thought with itself, without having lost its gifts, revealed for him access to that object which displayed “internal contradictoriness” within itself.a That structure of the cognitive act that was worked out and mastered by him, led him of necessity to the “perception” of the dialectic. One can say with certainty that this “objektive revelation” first taking place before his mental gaze threw even him into doubt and confusion; that a systematic repetition of the splitting produced more than once in his soul a state of tormenting perplexity and awakened in him a most painful spiritual tension, directed to overcoming the contradiction that had been revealed. And what kept bringing him out of this state was always a new “objektive revelation,” bearing witness to the fact that, in the object itself, contradiction is already being overcome, and, behold, is overcome. Hegel never experienced dialectic as a “subjective” or, still less, an “arbitrary” play of concepts. What he perceived in thought as “negative” lifted his thinking spirit to the height of tragic experience and gave him the sense of participating in cosmic suffering. More than once he speaks of the “suffering,” of the “infinite suffering” of the object itself,1 struggling with itself in these “contradictions.” He insists on that “intensely serious, agonizing, patient labor”2 that is carried out by the Concept in its development, and which must be adequately reproduced by the cognizing soul. And indeed, there is no doubt that the seeking mind, suffering intensely in the search for truth, experiences that touch of madness that affected Hegel in the period of the initial discovery. When thought, still accustomed to abstractly rational categories, first becomes associated with speculative intuition, and the “negative” side of the dialectic unfolds before its spiritual eye; when stable and “supposedly fixed” concepts begin to dissolve and “disappear”;3 when “finite determinations” begin to “sublate themselves and pass on”;4, b when “contradictory concepts” begin to “annihilate themselves”5 and in this “universal dissolution”6 the most certain contents begin to “wobble”;7 when, finally, the “perversion of all concepts and realities”8 and their “resolution into nothing”9 seizes the entire compass of what is being thought, and the “fury of vanishing”10 begins to reign over the world of objects; then the human soul, which has 1. Comp.: Enc. III 25, 451. 2. Comp.: Phän. 15. 3. Phän. 33. 4. Comp.: Enc. I 151. 5. Comp.: Phän. 104. 6. “Allgemeine Auflösung ”: Phän. 136. 7. “Wankend geworden”: Phän. 150. 8. “Verkehrung”: Phän. 393–94. 9. “In nichts auflöst”: Log. I 7, 30–31. 10. “Furie des Verschwindens”: Phän. 445.

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come into contact with truth but is halted in perplexity, truly experiences horror at the sight of “reason” perishing. All that is “rational” loses its form. All concepts are wobbling and staggering like drunken bacchantes.1 All truths are resolved into a sort of “universal deception”2 and philosophy begins “in shamelessness”3 to pronounce this deception to be a higher, objective truth. The object, having mastered thought and filled it with its own content, creates in it that musical chaos of a lunatic fiddler 4 behind whose mad commotion the ear has not yet learned to discern the melody of a new, higher revelation. Subsequently, now at the highest stage of cognition, the human soul becomes convinced that in this process of confusion what perished was not reason but abstract reason,c and that this perishing of abstract reason was not a perishing but a renewal and regeneration. Thought becomes convinced that “dialectic” is not an “illusion” and not “madness,” but the genuine state of the object itself; that it is not “thought up” by the subject, but revealed in the objekt; that it takes place in the objekt also when the subject has no suspicion of it; in a word, that dialectic is the objektive situation. All of this can be expressed by saying that the dialectical change of the concept was grasped by Hegel in intuitive thinking, and for that reason it can be grasped and verified only by independent but congenial intuitive thought. It is futile to “demonstrate” the dialectical change of the concept; it must be shown to the mental eye. It is not worth trying to “refute” the dialectic; one must see it intuitively, and then to uncover analytically the cognizing act and the object being cognized. It would be futile and hopeless to “criticize” dialectic without having experienced it in intuitive seeing: scientific philosophy can only be created objectively. It would be insufficient to “describe” the dialectical process without revealing the paths leading to comprehension of it: one who understands not only understands but also knows how to understand and explain. And only objective mastery of the process and possessing the ability to explain it make for a justifiably critical rejection. Thus, according to the method of his philosophizing, Hegel must be recognized not as a “dialectician” but as an intuitivist, or, more precisely, as an intuitively thinking clairvoyant. If by “method” is meant the “type and mode” of cognizing 5 subjectively practiced by the philosopher, then one may regard Hegel as a “dialectician” only given a completely superficial, abstractly rationalistic approach. He neither “searches” for contradictions in concepts nor “strives” to reconcile them afterward; he doesn’t 1. Comp.: Phän. 37. 2. “Der allgemeine Betrug”: Phän. 393. 3. “Schamlosigkeit”: Phän. 393. 4. “Diese Rede ist die Verrücktheit des Musikers”: Phän. 393, 394. 5. Comp.: Log. III 329, 330.

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think “analytically,” and then “synthetically.” He continuously intuits in a concentrated way and intensively describes the changes taking place in the object itself: he intuits by means of thought. In this consists his “subjective” method of cognizing. It is not he who practices “dialectic” but the object. Therefore, dialectic is not a method of the human subject applied to or used on the object; no, first and foremost, it is the method of the objekt being cognized. It belongs to the objekt independently; however, in the process of cognition, it also fills the soul of the cognizing subject with itself, masters the soul, realizes itself in it, and, as a result, becomes a method of both the objekt and the subject. In cognizing, the human soul begins to live “dialectically,” only because that is how the object lives, only to the extent that the object itself lives that way, only in the way it is done in the object. One could say that the soul contracts a “dialectical infection” from the object, if such a description were not too superficial. It would be more correct to say that dialectic, as the rhythm of the object, lives out its life in the powers and means of the human soul when the latter is raised to adequate thinking. Hegel never tires of describing the dialectic as the objektive rhythm of the object. What is accomplished in this process is the “proper immanent activity of thought,”1 the “immanent development of the concept,”2 the inner, autonomous “becoming of content.”3 The method is the “movement of the concept itself,”4 its “proper” sequential self-determination.5 That which moves is the “nature” of the content itself,6 and that negativity which induces this motion is hidden in the concept itself,7 is its “own negativity.”8 All that occurs in this process, “hesitation,”9 “differentiation,”10 “negation,”11 “repulsion from itself,”12 “the going out of self,”13 “relation to self,”14 “reflection,”15 “withdrawing into itself,”16 “inwardization”17 — the entire process of “movement” and “self-movement,” all this “unfolding”18 and ascending, progressive creativity,19 is the living activity of the objectively existent concept itself. All this is its “own dialectic.”20 Moreover, this dialectic is not a mere empty form, abstracted from content.21 It does not exist “outside the object” and “is not distinct from 1. Log. I 10. 2. Log. I 7, 245. 3. “Einheimisches Werden des Inhalts”: Phän. 45. 4. Log. III 330. 5. “Fortbestimmung ”: Log. I 43; “immanentes Fortschreiten”: Recht 65. 6. Log. I 7; Enc. I 17. 7. Log. I 43. 8. Log. II 4. 9. “Innerliche Hemmung ”: Phän. 51. 10. Phän. 16; Log. I 456; comp.: Phän. 35, 136, 427; Log. I 7, 242. 11. Comp.: Log. I 43, 467; Log. II 16; Log. III 335; Enc. I 232. 12. Log. I 421; Log. II 32, 172; Enc. I 232. 13. “Immanentes Hinausgehen”: Enc. I 152. 14. Comp.: Log. I 456, 467; Log. III 352. 15. “Eigne Reflexion des Inhalts”: Log. I 7. 16. Comp.: Log. II 3; Log. III 208. 17. Comp.: Log. II 3; Log. III 208; Enc. I 163. 18. Enc. I 163: “Entfalten.” 19. Comp.: Phän. 52; Log. I 7. 20. Enc. I 224. 21. Comp.: Phän. 45; Log. I 42; Log. II 81.

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its own becoming.”1 This is not method qua means, but method qua life, method qua actualization. The name “dialectic” should at one and the same time be given to the path of movement, the movement itself, and that which moves in this movement along this path. In speculative cognition that which moves does not exist outside of and apart from the movement: the movement is itself the living essence of that which moves.2 And there is no movement apart from the path on which it occurs: a path is a realized direction. Thus, the essence cannot fail to move, and the movement cannot fail to be directed in a necessary and lawlike manner. The method is a law in actu or, what is the same thing, lawlike life. The method is a means of life immanent to the content, outside of which there is no content and cannot be any content. Or, still better, the method is the creatively pulsating object itself. It is intrinsic to the concept to live. This life consists in the fact that the concept creates itself. This creativity is not arbitrary and not contingent, but lawlike, i.e., in accordance with law. But this law exists only in a living, realized form.d Therefore, the concept is, in itself, a sort of “necessary development,”3 “an unrestrainable, pure”4 path of life, faithful to its rhythm5 both in the parts and in the whole. Dialectic as a “scientific method”6 is nothing other than “the structure of the whole raised in its pure essentiality.”7 It is “the course of the object itself”8 taken in its entirety, in its result. Or, more simply put, dialectic is the object itself, the concept itself.9 That is why Hegel defines the dialectical method as a force,10 as “infinite power,”11 or, also, as the immanent “selfhood,”12 the “soul of the content”13 and of the object,14 as “the substantiality of all things.”15 Dialectic is the “higher,” “sole and absolute force of reason,” its “higher and sole urge,”16 its “formative creativity,”17 clearly revealing the “omnipotence of the concept.”18 It is clear that “content” and “form” can be separated in dialectic only from the “abstractly rational point of view.”e For a speculative thinker there is only their unity: the content forming itself, or, what is the same thing, the form filling itself with content through self-determination. The unified speculative object, having absorbed the subject’s soul, lives, changes, branches out, and creates itself in this change. Human consciousness later experiences these changes and describes them, depicting their genuinely experienced necessity.19 1. Beweise 307; comp.: Log. I 42. 2. Comp.: Log. I 42; Log. III 330. 3. Comp.: Log. I 8. 4. Log. I 41. 5. “Rhythmus”: Phän. 45, 49; Log. I 42. 6. Phän. 45. 7. Phän. 37; comp.: Log. I 45; Log. III 332. 8. “Gang der Sache selbst”: Log. I 42. 9. Log. III 352. 10. “Kraft,” “Macht.” Comp.: W. Beh. 379; Phän. 26. 11. Log. III 330; Recht 249. 12. “Das Selbst”: Phän. 31. 13. Comp.: Phän. 29; Log. I 7, 45; Log. III 335; Recht 65. 14. Log. III 335. 15. Comp.: Log. III 330, 330. 16. Comp.: Log. III 331. 17. Phän. 148. 18. Log. III 116; comp.: Log. III 330. 19. “Notwendig”: Log. I 8.

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Hegel often designates this “process”1 or this “development”2 as the “movement”3 or “self-movement”4 of the concept. However, one should not understand this “movement” to mean a spatial process, a process characteristic of extended bodies and expressed in terms of “now here, but later there.” Dialectical movement cannot be spatial if only because a speculative concept does not possess extension: a concept is not located anywhere and therefore cannot be located in different places at different times. It does not occupy any part of space, and therefore it cannot successively occupy different parts of it. According to Hegel, spatial movement is a lower and perhaps distorted variety of dialectical process.5 The true form of this kind of movement is examined in the Philosophy of Nature. However, dialectical “movement” must be present, according to the project, at all stages of speculative development, for it constitutes the very generic essence of the “thinking” process. Finally, movement taking place in space is, by its very nature, a process of a thing burdened with other-being and indebted to its external medium for the possibility that it can change: spatial movement always relates what moves to material other-being. However, dialectical “movement” does not burden the “concept” with an extended other-being and does not relate it to an external medium:6 it runs exclusively within self-enclosed unified-being; it is entirely immanent and determined by itself.7 By this “movement” should be understood a process of lawlike change in the content of speculative thought. However, this change should not be viewed as a temporal process, a process intrinsic to empirical contents and expressed in terms of “first, then, lastly.” The dialectical process cannot be temporal, if only because a speculative concept does not have duration in time: a concept does not burst into being within time, or fade away; it has neither a beginning nor an end; it does not exist “only now,” or “sometimes,” or “always.” Therefore, it is not at all temporal, though, in its manifestation, it can have duration and exist for a certain interval of time. But, according to Hegel, a temporal process is a lower and perhaps distorted kind of dialectical process.8 It is considered in its true form in the “concrete sciences” devoted to the “universe” and is first discovered after the falling away of the logical Idea.9 Upon entry into the speculative sphere, time burns away and falls away,10 extending a higher freedom to subjective spirit.11 The dialectical

1. “Process”: comp., e.g., Phän. 33. 2. “Entwicklung ”: comp.: Log. I 7, 8, 10; Recht 65. 3. “Bewegung”: Phän. 33, 33, 35, 51, 52, 127, 400, 586; Log. I 7, 69, 90; Log. II 3, 4, and others. 4. “Selbstbewegung ”: Phän. 35, 51; Log. I 8, 186, and others. 5. Comp.: Enc. II 61–67; Gesch. Ph. I 309–27. See chapters 1 and 10. 6. Comp., e.g., Log. III 349. 7. Comp.: Phän. 45; Log. III 332, 352. 8. Comp.: Enc. II 52–67; see chapters 1, 10, and 22 (vol. 2). 9. See: Enc. II 52–67. 10. Comp.: Glaub. 152; Diff. 225, 225; Phän. 604, 605, 607. 11. See chapter 3.

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“process” must be present, according to the project, at all the stages of speculative development, for it constitutes the very generic essence of the “thinking” process. Finally, a process taking place in time runs according to the schema of empirical succession: a temporal moment and its content are mortal. That which follows replaces and pushes out the preceding, and one moment is another moment’s mortal enemy. The continuity of the temporal process is combined with a distinctive discreteness, and the temporal, subject to abstract extinction, is powerless to rise to eternity, to realize the mysterious “at once” of the speculative concept. However, dialectical movement generates deathless contents; they do not replace or exclude one another, but, becoming reconciled, are combined, and, accumulating, ascend to concreteness. They thereby actualize the mysterious “at once” of speculative thought. Therefore, the dialectical process is accomplished not in space and not in time.1 And despite its supratemporality, it remains a process, i.e., a series of changes. In this, of course, there is hidden a not insignificant difficulty for the human mind, which is capable of intuiting a process only in time. However, the power of imagination can introduce essential corrections in this intuition and especially in its mature result. It is necessary to keep in mind, first of all, that speculative self-forgetting in the object extinguishes the consciousness of time and perhaps any “sense” of temporal duration, concentrating in brief moments the richness of content and intense pungency of life; second, that a dialectically thought content is retained in each “successive” state of the object and the subject, so that the speculative “passing over” acquires a particular nontemporal character that does not coincide with “passage” in time; and finally that the entire dialectical process as a whole can be successively thought through by an individual in time, but, in itself, does not begin at the beginning of this “thinking through” and does not end with its ending, but “lives always and at once,” i.e., is real in every—both supratemporal and temporal—reality. According to this, all that exists conceals in itself a dialectical process, which turns out to be a truly all-penetrating “method” of substance. Everything lives dialectically: every object and every thing has in dialectic its “own method”2 because the concept is the source of all activity whatever and all life whatever, and the concept lives dialectically. Therefore, everything turns out to be subordinate to its necessary and lawlike rhythm: the rhythm of the concept is the rhythm of everything that exists. The dialectical process determines the fate of all reality whatever: through this process all reality shares in supratemporal development. 1. Comp.: “nicht zeitlich”: Enc. I 389; “zeitlos vergangen”: Log. II 3; “Keine Reihe und Folge”: Glaub. 152. 2. Comp.: Log. III 330.

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In what consists the nature of this supratemporal process and passing over that forms the universal law of cosmic life? Everything is a speculative object or, what is the same thing, a speculative content.1 Every speculative content conceals in itself a certain combination of attributes or, if you will, determinations (Bestimmungen). Every content has more of these determinations implicite than explicite. The dialectical process consists in a progressive revelation of these potentially living, concealed determinations. It is clear that they come to the object not from outside, not from other-being, but blossom in the object itself, within its own limits, as a result of its self-activity. No action from outside is possible here, for it would transform the substantial and universal element of the Concept into a limited, conditioned, and passive entity. That is why the dialectical process is a strictly immanent development. Revealing its hidden, latent determinations, the Concept begins with self-negation and self-splitting 2 and ends with the negation of this self-negation and the reunification of what had been split into two. In this is a brief schema of the dialectical “method.” In order for the Concept to enrich itself with a new determination it must relate to itself “negatively,” reject itself; for if a new determination is absent in the Concept explicite, this means that its present state is insufficient, meager, unsatisfactory, and deserves to be “negated.” But to reject a present determination, to say “no” to it, is to affirm a contrary determination; within the limits of the concept it is to affirm something “contradictory.” But since the “negation” of a present determination does not annihilate it, but only recognizes it to be unsatisfactory, then there naturally arises an internally contradictory state: within the limits of a single concept are asserted two determinations “contradicting” each other. Each of them encroaches on essentiality and necessity. Neither is reconciled with the other; neither allows itself to be ousted. A struggle begins between the enemies: internal “contradiction” is not only not a final state, but in its transitional inevitability it is tormenting and intolerable. But precisely in this torment and anguish lurks its creative power and its task: the contradiction must be overcome on the pathway of a subtle “symbiosis” and cede its place to a higher state—concreteness. Thus, any concept suffers from “internal contradictoriness.” 3 But this 1. A careful comparison convinces one that Hegel often uses the terms “Gegenstand,” “Sache,” “Inhalt,” and “Gehalt” promiscue, meaning the speculative “Concept.” 2. Comp.: “Verdoppelung ”: Phän. 15; “entzweit”: Phän. 126 and so forth. 3. Comp.: “das denken des Widerspruchs ist das wesentliche Moment des Begriffs”: Log. III 342; in particular: Enc. I 178; Ohl. 235.

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does not mean that, as a consequence of this, it suffers from an irreparable logical defect,1 depriving it of any meaning or any value. It “suffers,” of course; but its suffering is a normal, necessary, creative suffering. Logical “contradiction” is not a devaluing defect but an achievement that increases the truthfulness of a concept.2 True, this achievement is not yet a final, higher, or complete one; a higher achievement consists in the elimination and overcoming of contradiction; it does not have a bifurcated nature, but one that is reunited and reconciled. But this reunification and reconciliation are possible only as a result of “contradiction,” as its conclusion or result. A logical, internal “contradiction” is a necessary and precious state of the concept: without this contradiction the whole process of dialectical development is inconceivable. However, the process cannot linger or stop with contradiction. Logical “contradiction” is realized by the concept only as reconcilable and for the sake of reconciliation. The pledge of this is already given in the fact that the entire “contradiction” is extracted by the concept from its own depths, where until now it had been concealed in folded-up form.3 Internal “contradiction” is not produced newly and for the first time; it is merely discovered and posited in itself by the concept itself. From this it is already clear that Hegel considers logical “contradiction” to be a philosophically necessary state of any concept; and he considers any such “contradiction” as essentially yielding to reconciliation. Upon this all dialectic is constructed, and without this it would turn out to be impossible. Meanwhile, that contradiction about which formal logic speaks has always been, and will always remain, philosophically inadmissible and essentially not yielding to reconciliation. And if, according to Hegel’s wording, Spirit is so strong that it is capable of “tolerating and resolving”4 contradictions, it remains to assume that Hegel puts his own, special content into this concept. In speaking of contradiction and the law of contradiction, formal logic has in view that particularity of meaning by virtue of which meaning becomes unthinkable as soon as thinking attempts to unite in it at the same time two mutually exclusive meaning-situations. However one formulates the law of contradiction, whether one refers it to theses (“two contradictory theses cannot both be true”) or to concepts, and if one refers it to 1. Comp.: on “Widerspruch” as not “Zufälligkeit,” not “Abnormität,” not “vorübergehender Krankheits-Paroxysmus”: Log. II 68; “Kein Schaden, Mangel oder Fehler einer Sache”: Log. II 72. 2. Comp.: “Contradictio est regula veri, non contradictio falsi”: Ros. 156. 3. Comp., e.g., “nur die Entwicklung der darin vorhandenen Widersprüche”: Phän. 89; “was . . . vorkommt, . . . schlief ”: Phän. 301 and others. 4. Log. I 279; Recht 249; Beweise 382–83.

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concepts, whether it is a question of a single attribute (“a concept cannot both include and not include a certain attribute in its content”) or two attributes (“two mutually exclusive attributes cannot enter into the content of the same concept”)—in all of these formulas one has in view a specific particularity of meaning, inherent only in it, but that is inherent in it immutably and inalienably: meaning-elements (attributes, concepts, theses) have their laws according to which they subsist, are correlated and connected. The distinctive determinateness of their content is one of those laws; the capacity for absolute incompatibility is another. This capacity for incompatibility is expressed experientially in the fact that a lively attempt to grasp incompatible elements by a single act, or to think them in two successive acts while referring them to a single logically objective formation, systematically suffers failure. No attempts succeed here as long as they are made in acts of pure (i.e., abstract and imageless) thinking; and the “determinateness” of meaning-contents (the law of identity), entailing their unchangeability, makes a “synthesis of the incompatible” impossible in the order of succession as well. Thus, contradictoriness is one of the specific traits of pure meaning. Contradictoriness is essential and characteristic of pure meaning; but precisely for it and only for it. All that subsists in other categories, and not in the categories of pure meaning,1 is not subject to the law of identity and the law of contradiction, and does not display “absolute incompatibility.” Things and images, real properties and psychic states, despite all their possible oppositions, despite all their mutual hostility, are not subject to the law of contradiction and can always display “conditional compatibility” in objects and in acts. Only that which is subject to the law of identity is subject to the law of contradiction, and therefore, all that is not pure meaning must be recognized as not being subject to the law of contradiction. A logical contradiction, if it is present, cannot be reconciled, eliminated, or “sublated” by anything (within the limits of pure thinking). What is absolutely incompatible cannot be combined in any way. If some two aspects can be combined, this means that there is no absolute incompatibility between them. These two aspects can then be either elements of pure meaning which are distinct but not opposite; or objects subsisting in other categories, which, in general, are not subject to the law of contradiction and do not have the capacity for absolute incompatibility. Thus, for example, two elements “A” and “B” are always free from absolute incompatibility both in the case when they are two distinct meanings and in the case when they are two opposed images. But the two 1. See chapter 3.

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elements “A” and “not-A” will be free from absolute incompatibility only in the case when they are two real formations, for, within the limits of pure, ideal meaning, “A” and “not-A” will give a mutual contradiction. “Pleasant” and “unpleasant,” “long” and “not long” are compatible as real, empirical properties and states; but the concept “pleasant” cannot coincide with the concept “unpleasant,” and one and the same concept of a “thing” cannot simultaneously have the two attributes “weightiness” and “weightlessness.”f Thus, a logical contradiction is absolutely inconceivable and irreconcilable. And the “law of contradiction” cannot be altered or refuted. And here, despite this, Hegel is certain that the dialectic of speculative concepts that was revealed to him revokes and refutes the “law of contradiction” as a universal law of thought. It is not difficult to understand to what extent he is right and to what extent he is wrong in this certainty of his.1 If by a “universal law of thought” we understand an unalterable and irrefutable law of pure, formal thought, Hegel would, of course, be wrong. But if we attempt to extend the “universality” of this law to speculative thought as well, it will turn out that, in its formal significance, this law is inapplicable to speculative thought and that the “contradiction” upon which dialectic is based is not a contradiction of meaning in its pure and strict form. In fact, in speaking of dialectical “contradiction,” Hegel could not have had in mind the absolute incompatibility of the elements of meaning. He could not have meant that, if only because speculative concepts are not subject to the formal “law of identity.” For it to be possible for two concepts to stand in a mutually “contradictory” relation, they must possess their own particular, determinate, unchangeable content: a relation of contradictoriness is conceivable only given the determinateness of the concept (it is impossible to “contradict” an indeterminate content) and given its unchangeability (it is impossible to “contradict” a changing content). Indeterminateness and changeability always lead to a formal concept’s ceasing to be itself and to the disappearance of absolute irreconcilability in the obscure aspects and changeable properties of a changing reality. What is not subject to the formal law of identity also cannot be subject to the formal law of contradiction. But a speculative “concept” is not subject to the formal law of identity. It is something real, living, changing, and producing new determi1. Comp. the mistaken and incorrect formulas of the law of contradiction: Log. I 19, 27, 67, 203.

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nations within itself and from itself. It therefore cannot be subject to the formal law of contradiction either. What is changeable cannot stand in a relation of contradictoriness or absolute incompatibility to another. Such is the a priori consideration which does not permit one to recognize a right of dialectical opposition to contradictoriness. This consideration is fully confirmed a posteriori as well. An attentive analysis of dialectical “contradiction” convinces one that this “contradiction” is actually alien to true contradictoriness. If a contradictory relation of a pure type can be constructed using the method of the negation of a substantial attribute, Hegel does not turn to this method. In the breakdowns involving two terms described by him, one aspect does not negate, or exclude by its essence, the logical content of the other aspect. Both aspects always retain some higher, generic bosom in which they find their genus and through which they are made kindred. Thus, “being” (Sein) by no means excludes or negates the logical content of its opposing term “nothing” (Nichts), for “nothing” remains a certain reality, an existent “nothing,” while “being” in its indeterminateness and emptiness approaches this “existent nothing,” forming together with and alongside it two different variants of “most indeterminate reality.” In the same way, “finitude” (Endlichkeit) by no means excludes or negates the logical content of its opposing term “infinitude” (Unendlichkeit): both sides remain a kind of “determinate being” (Dasein), a qualitative becoming “in itself” and “for itself,”g and consequently possess, in their generic nature, the very same essentialia. We find the same thing in every dialectical dyad: the presence of a common generic source and the absence of logical negation characterize all of dialectic. The two contradictory concepts “being” and “nonbeing” do not have a generic concept for their contents, for a corpus of common “attributes” is absent in them. It is precisely the same with “finite” and “not finite,” “an appearance” and “not an appearance,” “life” and “not life,” “consciousness” and “not consciousness,” “a right” and “not a right,” “a family” and “not a family,” etc. One side affirms as its essentiale that which is wholly and radically negated by the other; and as a result a content-containing genus is impossible. But “appearance” and “essence,”1 “life” and “cognition,”2 “consciousness” and “self-consciousness,”3 “right” and “morality,”4 “family” and “civil society”5—these dyads are not connected by a contradictory negation and can indeed have a generic bosom. In Hegel they are connected, moreover, by a common creative source and by a common, higher result, arising through “concretization.” 1. Comp.: Log. II 1–239; Enc. I 223–307. 2. Log. III 236–27; Enc. I 385–408. 3. See: Enc. III 257–66. 4. Enc. III 376–93; Recht 72–211. 5. Enc. III 393–403; Recht 221–313.

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Hegel, for his part, does not at all insist on the contradictoriness of dialectical dyads in the strict sense of “absolute incompatibility” that has been adopted by formal logic. He does not at all see a distinction in principle between the “contrary”h and the “contradictory.” Even more, Hegel brings into proximity and sometimes even lumps together the ideas of “distinction,” “opposition,” and “contradiction.” Among these ideas there are established some sort of imperceptible nuances and transitions, some sort of “gradualness,” which even admits of terminological substitutions. Thus, “distinction (Unterschied) is in general contradiction (Widerspruch) in itself,”1 while “essential contradiction” is already “opposition” (Gegensatz).2 Hegel directly explains the term “contradiction” through the presence of “opposed determinations,”3 and for him “determinate opposition” is “thereby contradiction.”4 Along with this, he is inclined to equate the terms “distinct” and “contrary” and “opposite” and “contradictory,” explaining that “contradictory” elements “exclude one another.”5 However, “distinction” conceals a contradiction within itself. The whole question here is a matter of degree. “Thinking reason sharpens, so to speak, the dull distinction of differing” elements, bringing “mere diversity of representation to essential distinction, to opposition. Diverse elements become mobile and lively in relation to one another only when they are raised to sharp contradictions.”6 Thus, “determinate,” “essential distinction”7 is already opposition and contradiction, while contradiction is nothing other than a “stable non-identity of thoughts.”8 It is enough for a distinction to be fixed for “opposition and therefore antagonism” (Widerstreit)9 to arise from it. Opposed elements, on the other hand, “contain contradiction insofar as, in one and the same respect, they relate to each other negatively or sublate each other, and remain indifferent to each other.”10 However, this “negation” and this “sublation” do not at all lead to the absolute incompatibility of aspects. On the contrary, speculative mutual negation is already an incipient process of combination. What Hegel calls “contradiction” clearly has a special meaning. He himself describes this state in terms that do not leave any doubt concerning its speculative, by no means formal, nature. When two “concepts” diverge in the dialectical order and form a 1. Log. II 57; comp.: Log. II 31. 2. Log. II 71. 3. Enc. I 178. 4. “Damit als Widerspruch”: Enc. I 285; comp.: Log. II 71. 5. Comp.: Log. III 56, 107. 6. Log. II 71 (Hegel’s emphasis). 7. Comp.: Log. I 7; Log. II 72, 149; Log. III 208; Phän. 35. 8. “Feste Nichtidentität der Gedanken”: Enc. I 17. 9. Comp.: Beweise 351. 10. Log. II 70: “sich gegenseitig aufhebende und gegeneinander gleichgültige.”

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classic “contradictory” dyad, their mutual relation manifests a “distinction”1 that can be designated as “non-identity,”2 “difference,”3 “opposition,”4 or as qualitative,5 “essential”6 “absolute oppositeness.”7 These two concepts remain in a certain “sundering,”8 “isolation,”9 and a certain “disjunction.”10 They mutually “distinguish themselves” from one another11 and remain “absolutely torn apart,”12 in a state of “separation.”13 Between them is found a mutual “repulsion,”14 “irreconcilability and nonunifiability.”15 They are linked by “antinomy”16 or “contrast,”17 if you will. They “remain external to one another,”18 and each is “only the other for an other.”19 These are two “extremes,”20 standing in “original division”21 and waging “hostilities”22 against each other, and “struggle.”23 Such a state is by no means intrinsic only to the “pure concept,” as formal logic asserts. Both things and institutions can “contradict” each other.24 “Contradiction” can be observed both in matter,25 and in the living soul. Thus, “external, sensuous movement” is the “immediate existence (Dasein) of contradiction,”26 because space is, in itself, contradictory.27 “Nature” itself is an “unresolved contradiction,”28 just as every impulse,29 every suffering of a living being 30 contains some deficiency, i.e., a negative relation to itself or, what is the same thing, internal contradictoriness.31 It is sufficient to say “above and below,” “to the right and to the left,” “father and son,”32 and the object will display its dialectical opposition and antagonism before our eyes. “Every finite being and thinking is a contradiction” and “there is nothing” in which it doesn’t exist.33 Contradiction is the “root of all movement and life, of all selfmovement.”34 Contradiction constitutes the “most inward, most objektive moment of life and spirit, through which being is possessed—by a subject, a person, and all that is free.”35 In such a usage the term “contradiction” cannot have a strict, for1. “Unterschied ”: Phän. 136, 427; Log. I 242, 456. Concerning the “essential” and “indeterminate” distinction, see above. 2. “Ungleichheit”: Phän. 31, 121, 126; Log. II 31. 3. “Differenz”: W. Beh. 379; Log. I 393; Log. III 335. 4. “Gegenteil”: W. Beh. 379, 393, 408; Phän. 400. 5. Comp.: Log. I 273–74. 6. “Wesentliche Entgegensetzung”: Phän. 35. 7. “Absoluter Gegensatz”: Phän. 427. 8. “Dirimiren”: Log. III 112; Enc. II 419. 9. “Sich zu besondern”: Enc. II 419. 10. “Disjunction”: Log. III 206. 11. “Abscheidende Negation”: Log. I 152. 12. “Absoluter Zerrissenheit”: Phän. 391. 13. “Absolut trennt”: Phän. 427. 14. Comp.: “Abstossen”: Log. I 421; Log. II 32, 172; “Gegenstoss”: Log. II 74. 15. “Unverträglich und unvereinbar”: Log. I 139; comp.: Log. I 90. 16. Enc. I 103. 17. “Im Kontraste”: Enc. II 188. 18. “Aussereinander Bleibende”: Log. I 150. 19. Log. II 70. 20. “Extreme”: Log. III 112, 206. 21. “Urteil”: Log. III 335. 22. Comp.: “Feindschaftlichkeit”: Enc. II 263. 23. “Widerstreit”: Beweise 351. 24. “Dinge,” “Einrichtungen”: Log. II 69. 25. Enc. II 202. 26. Log. II 69. 27. Enc. II 61. 28. Enc. II 28. 29. Comp.: “Trieb”: Log. II 69. 30. “Schmerz”: Log. III 257; Enc. I 121. 31. Log. III 256–57. 32. Log. II 70. 33. “Widerspruch”: Ohl. 235. Comp.: Enc. I 178. 34. Log. II 68, 69. 35. Log. III 342–43.

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mal meaning. Two elements standing in a “contradictory” relation are living 1 elements, or, as Hegel expresses it, elements that are “in flux.”2 Their “mutual exclusion” is a real process of confrontation, because they themselves are realities, speculative concepts, whether in their pure form or clothed in the form of empirical things, or psychic or spiritual states. These realities are subject neither to the formal law of identity nor to the formal law of contradiction. They are objects not subsisting in categories of formal meaning, but in other categories. Thus, the dialectical process as such contains not contradictions of ideal meaning but oppositions and distinctions of real meaning. This process is constructed not on contradictoriness but on the “essential and determinate” difference of speculative determinations. And the most important consequence of this construction turns out to be the reconcilability of antagonistic sides. Dialectic does not “refute” the law of contradiction but only limits its competence to the lower, abstractly rational sphere. Dialectic reveals a new sphere, as it were, a new type of cognitive act, a new land of distinctive objects. And in this sphere, the normal law of contradiction is not a constitutive law; it does not formulate a mode of “subsisting” that is intrinsic to objects, and that, in projection, generates a “norm of thinking.” Here is a realm of other objects and other laws: the speculative. However, such a restriction on the competence of formal laws does not by any means signify the total revocation, or “overturning,” of these laws. These laws maintain their competence, but this competence is no longer recognized as being universal. Or, if you will, they remain “universal” for one who cannot—or does not desire to—rise spiritually to speculative thinking. One can say that objects of speculative philosophy are not subject to the laws of identity and contradiction. But the concepts of these objects and the theses of this philosophy fully retain their formal noncontradictoriness. Thus, “Being” is one and internally opposed, but the formal concept of that which is “internally bifurcated but nonetheless unified Being” is identical to itself and internally noncontradictory. One has only to suppose for a moment that the essentialia of this concept combine in themselves logically contradictory attributes, and one discovers the direct impossibility of thinking it. In the same way, the speculative “Concept,” as its own kind of intuited reality, combines in itself the internal difference with the unitedness intrinsic to the Universal. But the formal theses that give to the “subject” (to the concept of the Concept) the “predicates” of internal dividedness and unitedness are constitutively subordinated to the 1. Comp.: Phän. 38; Log. I 8.

2. Comp.: “Flüssigkeit”: Phän. 136.

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law of contradiction. The two theses, “The Concept is the unity of that which is divided” and “The Concept is not the unity of that which is divided,” cannot both be true at the same time. From this it becomes clear why Hegel prohibited thinking about speculative Concepts and demanded a self-forgetting thinking in them and together with them. Thinking that has not realized a speculative “detachment” and “flowing-together” inevitably remains abstracted from the object being thought: it thinks not in it but about it, and in this abstractly rational reflection, it does not leave the sphere of abstract reason and its formal laws. In order to see the meaning-realities and to become convinced of their dialectical nature, it is necessary to begin to live by means of the speculative Concept and to give one’s psychic powers over to the authority of the self-legislating process.i Only an adequate intuition of the dialectical process reveals to cognition the possibility of leaving the abstractly rational sphere and becoming “convinced” that the competence of the formal-logical laws is limited. The irreconcilability of contradictory attributes is powerless to refute the reconcilability of opposed speculative determinations that have risen from the depths of the one Concept; and vice versa. This means that any dialectical rupture is essentially healable. Even more, it is precisely its healing that constitutes the higher task in whose name the rupture took place and from the resolution of which it acquires meaning and significance. The divergence of the speculative Concept into opposed aspects constitutes only the first, properly dialectical stage of the entire process. This divergence manifests only the negative, not yet the positive, side of rationality.1 Without the former, the latter is impossible, but without the latter, the former is deprived of its true meaning. The point is that the divergent aspects cannot remain in a state of mutual negation and hostility. If each dialectical dyad retained its bifurcatedness, the speculative sphere would be subordinated in its entirety to the empirical law of abstractness and discreteness. It would then turn out that chaos also reigns within the bounds of the Concept, whose elements would dwell in a state of disconnected multiplicity. And this would signify the complete death or, more correctly, the primordial nonbeing of the speculative concept. Therefore, a dialectical “contradiction” not only can be reconciled; it cannot fail to be reunified. A dialectical “contradiction” inevitably reestablishes its unity every time. 1. Comp.: W. Beh. 356, 360; Phän. 19, 26, 29, and others.

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This reunification takes places in such a way that each of the sides “negates its negation” directed at the opposed aspect, and this gives it the possibility of directing its negation at itself as the negating aspect. But a “rejected negation” does not result in emptiness, or pure absence without result.1 The “negation of negation” produces a new synthesis, a positive, creative outcome or “result.”2 Therefore, Hegel calls this second “negation” “perfect,” “concrete,” “infinite,” or “absolute” negation.3 This negation is perfect because it brings the Concept into a higher, perfected state: the “speculative” consists precisely in grasping “the opposite in its unity, or the positive in the negative.”4 This negation is concrete because it is precisely through it that “con-cretization” arises, i.e., the growing-together of opposite sides, having stood up to now in a state of antagonism and abstraction. This negation is infinite because it returns the Concept to itself through reunification. Liberated from its internal split, the Concept again finds itself, affirms itself—and moreover, it affirms itself as affirmed precisely through the overcoming of the faded internal conflict. Finally, this negation is absolute because it reestablishes an absolute system and order, that order in terms of which reality is unified and one, so that its oneness determines the law of its internal unity, while its internal unity feeds and supports its freedom from any other-being, i.e., its oneness. The negation of negation, leading to the negation of the negating side as such, could lead to pure “nothing” only in case it had an abstractly rational, formal character. The categoricity and completeness of the abstractly rational “no” would impart to it, as always, a devastating and destructive character, because abstract reason always stands before a dilemma, before a faceted opposition that obeys the inflexible, immobile, deadening law of identity. But the speculative “negation of negation” has another nature—living, creative, productive. Strictly speaking, it should not even be called “negation,” for this term conceals behind itself the ordinary abstractly rational content that became akin to formal contradiction. Speculative “negation” should rather be understood starting from the idea of “real opposition.” This “negation” is in its essence a living, creative nonacceptance, precisely thereby drawing the object into a living, creative acceptance of what is unacceptable. Creative rejection in itself is a living relation of the rejecting to the rejected. This relation, however sharp its negative slope, forces the acceptance of what is rejected, if only to reject it. For creative rejection will, in essence, always be objective, i.e., determined in its content by the genuine 1. Phän. 65, 71; Log. III 335. 2. Comp.: W. Beh. 356–57; Phän. 9, 47; Log. I 105; Recht 65, and others. 3. Comp.: Log. I 120, 273. 4. Log. I 44.

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nature of what is rejected. Such a nonacceptance is always a manifestation of objective selection: the rejected is rejected precisely because its objektive content was accepted and turned out to be unacceptable. Thus, creative nonacceptance, even that which is most consistent and uncompromising in form, is, in essence, a version of acceptance. However, speculative “negation” in no wise has such a purely negative character. Both the first, imperfect “negation” and the second, perfect “negation” negate not as complete and absolute nullification and annihilation but as limitation and fulfillment. What is rejected by them is not thought content itself, but rather this content’s excessive claim to exclusiveness. Thus, the Concept “splits into two” because out of its depths arises a new, up to now hidden content, which stands apart and negates the claim of the first content to completeness and exclusiveness. The mutuality of this “negation” initially sharpens the antagonism and nonacceptance. But precisely in this mutual rejection is hidden the inevitability of mutual reconciliation, because the profound, substantial unity of Universality cannot submit to a hopeless sundering. The second “negation” rejects, in turn, not mutually antagonistic thought contents but rather only the excessive claims of each side to exclusiveness and distinct being. And as a result of this not only is acceptance for the sake of rejection discovered; but rejection itself is conceived as a condition and an instrument of true, speculative acceptance. It is clear that in this mysterious, speculative process of mutual acceptance, constituting the very deepest essence of all dialectic and, in general, of all of Hegel’s philosophy, neither of the sides perishes or vanishes without a trace. No; between them arises a kind of speculative symbiosis, in which each, having renounced antagonism and having rejected its own self-sufficiency, preserves itself and guards the entire wealth of its content. What perishes is only each side’s invalid claim to complete distinct being and exclusiveness, and with that disappears also the selfsufficiency of each side’s content and the isolatedness of its position. The way Hegel expresses it is that, in the dialectical process, each determination is preserved “in the measure of its truthfulness.”1 He expresses this special state by the term “aufheben.”2 This term conveys both the negative and the positive character of the given state. On the one hand, a determination is “removed,”j i.e., negated, or annulled, in its excessive claim. On the other hand, a determination is “raised up.” In 1. Comp.: Phän. 71. 2. Comp., e.g., W. Beh. 356, 379; Phän. 144, 488; Log. I 110; Enc. I 254, and others.

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other words, not only is it not lost (like anything that is “raised up” and “taken away”), but it is raised, intact, to a higher level of being. What is “raised up” in this way turns out to be both “rejected and preserved.”1 What “disappeared” is retained.2 It experiences3 its “raising up” and accomplishes a kind of “disappearance while staying here.”4 To be sure, it loses its self-sufficiency and, as something “raised up,” turns out to be only a “moment”5 of a new, positive, real unity.6 But preservation and ascent are guaranteed in this process to every determination formed in the movement of the Concept. Precisely for this reason the dialectical process turns out to be a progressive development and ascension. The possibility of preserving every new determination and including it in the overall progressively growing result lies at the base of all of dialectic and reveals its fundamental lawlikeness. In other words, this possibility is the necessity of speculative growth that is immanent in the Concept. Renouncing isolated self-assertion, the sides reveal and affirm their submission to the higher law of the concept and, preserving themselves, produce a new, higher state of Universality. The dialectical rupture ends each time with the attainment of its goal: the speculative growing-together of the sides that have diverged. In this growing-together, both sides are preserved and continue their creative life. That is why Hegel describes the dialectical process as the actualization or “realization of the Concept.”7 The speculative Concept is, of course, always real as such: it is reality itself,8 it is itself the substantial element of being. But the reality of the speculative Concept consists in the distinct being, the objektive subsistence, of the speculative thought-determination, and there can be more or fewer of these thought determinations in the Concept. Therefore, the Concept will possess more “reality,” the more thought determinations that are disclosed and affirmed in it, or, what is the same thing, the further it will have progressed in the dialectical process of self-actualization. Every disintegration is crowned by a new synthesis, and a new disintegration in no wise returns the Concept to the old irreconcilability. The synthesis attained after the “contradiction” is so integrated, so inwardly welded together and one in content that a renewal of the dialectical process is powerless to break it apart into its former elements and return it to the old synthesis.9 1. Phän. 86. 2. “Verschwundenes . . . aufbewahrt”: Phän. 611. 3. “Überlebt”: Phän. 144. 4. “Aufgehaltenes Verschwinden”: Phän. 148. 5. “Nur als Moment ”: Phän.; comp.: Phän. 33, 34, and others. 6. Comp.: W. Beh. 356–57, 379; Log. III 208. 7. Comp.: Phän. 63, 301; Log. III 206, 208, 208. 8. See chapter 4. 9. Log. I 50, 51, 109.

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The process of realization does not know delays, returns, reverse movement, or repetition. To be sure, the Concept, until the very end, is not satisfied with any preliminary reconciliation, with any relative, less-thanexhaustive achievement. Again and again, it keeps “spoiling its limited satisfaction”1 and keeps surrendering to “infinite division into singularity,”2 drawn by the “unrest” of speculative self-movement.3 But the nature of speculative synthesis is such that this process of tireless disintegration keeps producing newer and higher states, while preserving all the earlier stages in the latest actualizations and attainments. The Concept, tirelessly ripping the garments of its being, not only does not lose the very basis of its fabric, but for the first time produces it, with renewed strength and unprecedented abundance. It is now quite clear that the progressive nature of dialectic, which constitutes the very essence of Hegel’s entire philosophy, is determined by the conditionality of its contradictions and the unconditionality of its concrete synthesizing. Where subjective abstract reason insists upon the absolute contradictions of formal logic, the object reveals the conditional, i.e., reconcilable opposites of speculative determinations. And conversely, where abstract reason governs the conditional, mechanical synthesis of attributes, reasonk reveals an unconditional, indissoluble, concrete synthesis of the antagonistic contents. Precisely in this lies the entire essence of dialectic: the unity and victoriousness of its process rest precisely upon the fact that its contradictions are not contradictory and its reconciliations are indissoluble. This guarantees to each rupture the possibility of being healed and to every healing the impossibility of falling into the old rupture. Precisely because of this the Concept in its single movement continuously grows richer with speculative determinateness. Every dialectical link reveals to the eyes an insufficiently determinate universality, as it were, a universality that divides into its particularizations and ascends to a new, richer determination. At the same time, the process as a whole manifests one Universality, attaining for itself the entire series of included singular determinations through suffering in dialectical ruptures. Each given stage of dialectic discloses this work of the one, all-penetrating Universality: an earlier determination moves the process of disintegration and unification from within and asserts itself in a new synthesis, but only in an “objektified” form.4 Each dialectical link is the act of the one, universal Concept, and each new, dramatic episode is completed by a new, concrete synthesis that consolidates all that has been attained and reveals to the Concept a new, indissoluble level of self-determination. 1. Phän. 66.

2. Phän. 532.

3. Comp.: Log. I 186.

4. Log. III 206.

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The concreteness of speculative synthesis lies at the foundation of the entire life of the Concept, of its development, its fate, and its victory. In what does the nature of this higher “concreteness” consist?

Translator’s Notes a. Il’in here implicitly acknowledges Hegel’s crucial rejection of the Kantian distinction between (non-conceptual) sensuous intuition on the one hand, and (sensuously empty) concepts on the other. One of the ultimate consequences of such a move is the possibility of a form of intellectual intuition which had been ruled out by Kant as unavailable to the human mind. For a recent discussion of these issues, see Paul Redding, Analytic Philosophy and the Return of Hegelian Thought (2007), esp. chapters 1 and 3. See also John McDowell, Mind and World (1994), especially the introduction and Lectures I and II. b. In this quotation from Hegel’s Encyclopedia Logic, Il’in omitted the remainder of the relevant phrase: “supercede themselves, and pass into their opposites.” See §81. (English translation taken from the Wallace edition, 147; Geraets, Suchting, and Harris provide a slightly different translation: 128.) c. That is, what perished was not Vernunft but Verstand. d. Here and in the preceding paragraph Il’in supplies perhaps the fullest and clearest account of what he understands by the frequently used term “lawlike” (закономерно) in reference to the activity of the Concept. It refers to the living, rhythmic process of self-development exhibited by the Concept. At times Il’in’s references to the “lawlike” nature of the process appear to be more or less interchangeable with references to the “rhythmic” nature of the process. e. See note a above. f. Ponderabilität and Imponderabilität in the German; весомость and невесомость in the Russian. g. The Russian terms used here for “in itself” and “for itself” are somewhat ambiguous; my translation relies upon the German text for these two phrases. h. Контрарно. i. In the German edition, this phrase becomes: “und die eigenen seelischen Fähigkeiten seinem Rhythmus zur Verfügung stetten.” The “self-legislating” quality of the process simply becomes its “Rhythmus” (Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels, 142). See also note d above. j. The Russian term is снимается, which is very close in meaning to the German aufheben, meaning both a “raising up (preserving)” and a “canceling” or “negating.” k. In an alternative, equally valid translation: “And conversely, where Verstand governs the conditional, mechanical synthesis of attributes, Vernunft reveals an unconditional, indissoluble, concrete synthesis of the antagonistic contents.”

7

The Concrete-Speculative

Every great and mature philosophical doctrine has a fundamental idea concealing in itself that “main,” that essential, thing in name of which this doctrine was brought forth, matured, and acquired a garment of words. This idea consolidates through itself that situation that was revealed to the philosophizing mind, captivated it, and determined through itself the entire further fate of that mind’s philosophical vision. The objective situation, consolidated in such a “fundamental” idea, once it is apprehended by the subjective spirit of the philosopher—usually by virtue of a “preestablished harmony” between the spiritual experience of the thinker and the rhythm of the object itself—becomes that content the adequate expression of which turns out to be the life task of the philosophizing mind. That for the sake of which the philosopher bears the burden of his spiritual experience, that to which are dedicated his cognitive and expository exertions, that by which his spirit, sometimes unconsciously, is “possessed,” constitutes the content of this fundamental idea and, accordingly, of this “experience.” The philosopher serves this objective situation, sometimes for his entire life. He devotes all the powers of his spirit to making what has been received into the property of reason, to watching over the ray of objective revelation, and illuminating with this ray the cognition of every living human. From this we obtain the prophetic passion of every great philosophy; from this its unself-confident confidence, its attraction to universality; and sometimes its single-minded genius. A great philosopher lives in the genuine ray of the object, but sometimes not more than in one, single ray. “Everything real is subordinate to the law of speculative concreteness”— that is the content of that cardinal experience, and of that fundamental idea, to which the entire philosophy of Hegel is dedicated. “Concreteness” constitutes not only the fundamental character of speculative thought, its “essential attribute,” its essentiale; it not only determines the outcome of every dialectical splitting, and the higher result of all dialectical movement; but it also turns out to be the main “motive force” and at the same time the “supreme end” of all being and becoming. “Concreteness” is the essential, immanent rhythm of all life, moving all objects from within; it moves them to realize submissively and adequately its own breathing, its word, its law. Speculative concreteness determines the start134

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ing point a and the conclusion, the beginning and the completion. Everything breathes and lives to actualize speculative concreteness, to become its living hymn. Every logical category seeks within itself and in suffering creates the rhythm of concreteness. The chaotic disorder of nature is also dedicated to this rhythm. The individual soul and the human spirit also forge this rhythm for themselves. It is created as an achievement by the virtuous will, by beautiful images of art, by religious belief, and by philosophical vision. Speculative concreteness can be designated as the hidden living soul of all “logical” and all “worldly” categories. And if one keeps in mind that every logical category is a “soul of the world,” as it were, then concreteness will be the soul of the soul of the cosmos. Concreteness can be viewed along with this as the criterion of all reality and all value.1 Whatever partakes of concreteness is real and valuable; that which is completely alien to it is a negligible illusion. The more speculative concreteness there is in some “determination” or “state,” the more real and valuable it will be. One can establish that the recognition of this criterion of reality and value as fundamental and universal makes a philosopher a follower of Hegel. And conversely: regardless of how much a thinker may borrow from the wealth of ideas of this great intuitivist, regardless of how much he imitates Hegel’s “manner,” indifference to Hegel’s fundamental idea would make this thinker alien to the fundamental experience of the “master.” We can recognize as Hegelian only one who consciously professes that the dialectical actualization of speculative concreteness by real thought is the essence of any being and any value. It is remarkable that Hegel did not give the category of the “concrete,” as a self-sufficient mode of being, a special place in any science: not in logic, and especially not in the subordinate sciences. This is explained precisely by its central and universal significance. As the category of categories, it would not have been able to find a place for itself among the ordinary “determinations.” This category is everywhere and, in particular, nowhere.b It is not a “content,” as it were, but the most profound nature of all contents. One could say that this category is not a “that which” but a “that how.” However, to this we must make the essential addition that this manner of being always changes the very content of the categories subordinate to it and is the measure of the degree of their reality and value. It is perhaps precisely this deep-lying and concealed “secondariness” of the idea of the “concrete” that has until now prevented Hegel’s commentators and critics from recognizing and revealing it. 1. Comp., e.g., “besser, wahrer”: Log. I 99, 248; Enc. I 67, 170; “tiefer”: Beweise 365; “vollkommner ”: Enc. I 311; Enc. I 311; “das letzte, höchste”: Log. I 64; “das Mächtigste, Uebergreifendste”: Log. III 349, and so forth. Comp.: W. Beh. 402.

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It is clear that such a utilization of the idea of the “concrete” is possible only given the condition that Hegel should have “caught sight of” the “original” and at the same time “new” significance behind this ancient term, worn out from constant use. All the power of his intuitive vision was necessary to “restore” the profound content named by this apparently colorless word. And in reality Hegel precisely revived this term, uncovering behind it a circumstance of the greatest significance: what is “concrete” is in a special manner “grown-together,” arisen from duality or multipliticy. In reviving the idea of the “concrete” and giving it a new, more profound, “speculative” significance, Hegel placed it in a series with other, epistemological categories as the final and highest term of this series. This series consists of the categories of the “concrete-empirical,” the “abstractformal,” the “abstract-speculative,” and, finally, the “concrete-speculative.” This entire series is arranged from the worst and lowest, in ascending order, to the best and highest. The similarly named correlates are connected in pairwise fashion at the center and disconnected at the ends. The whole ladder, consisting of four steps, is divided into two parts: the “lower” (“empirical” and “formal” cognition)1 and the “higher” (“speculative” cognition).2 Here, true, speculative knowledge realizes two states: “abstractness” and “concreteness.” To rise up to them the cognizing individual must overcome the two lower modes of cognition rejected by Hegel; however, he must also combine the “concreteness” of the first with the “abstractness” of the second. The catharsis of cognition consists in the fact that the “empirical” character is swept out of the “concrete-empirical,” while the idea of the “concrete” is preserved; and the “formal” character is separated from the “abstract-formal,” but the idea of the “abstract” is preserved.3 The higher sphere is formed through the speculative renewal of both preserved ideas and their distinctive mutual penetration. Hegel himself does not give such a clearly delineated schema consisting of four steps; nor does he consistently reveal such a schema anywhere. It is especially difficult to find in Hegel a mature delineation of the two types of “abstraction.” Nevertheless, following his indications, it is fully possible to establish the nature of “speculative abstractness.” “Speculative abstractness” is that mode of cognition that is defined as “the self-forgetting intuition of the objektive concept.”4 According to this, speculative, intuitive thinking is precisely the path that reveals the “abstract-speculative” state of the object itself. The state of the object itself 1. See chapters 1 and 2. 2. See chapters 3 and 4. 3. Comp.: on the presence of three sides in each concept: the abstractly rational, the dialectical, and the speculative, Enc. I 146–47. 4. See chapter 3.

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is “abstract,” in the first place, to the extent that “the form of the concept”1 constitutes its “element”: it is intrinsic to the speculative object to be thought c and to be known in thought.2 However, the speculative concept is no longer a “formal” concept with all its defects and vices, but is the objektive, living Concept with all its virtues and capabilities. The state of the object itself is “abstract,” secondly, to the extent that it has, in the process of self-determination, not yet unfolded all its content, and not yet become “Idea.”3 In this sense, the speculative object is “abstract” as an unrevealed potential of perfection, i.e., as an imperfect state of the Concept. This means that in the object is discovered a certain “lack of difference,”4 a kind of “folded-up” or “unrevealed” character.5 The object suffers from an insufficient determinateness6 in its content: the Concept is already speculative, but it is still “simple,” “poor,” “meager,” “immediate,” and unfilled.7 But this “simplicity” and poverty of content no longer conceal that danger that was hidden in formal abstraction: the living creativity of the objektive concept is capable of overcoming this deficiency but not capable of preserving it. However, the overcoming of this poverty of content takes place only gradually, in the process of dialectical dispersal and speculative concretization. And then this process reveals the true interrelation between the “abstract” and the “concrete” in the sphere of speculative life. The “abstract” and the “concrete,” on the one hand, are constantly combining and coincide, for the rhythm of speculative concreteness is the rhythm of thought itself, of the objektive concept itself, i.e., of “speculative abstraction” itself. Where there is no “abstract-speculative,” i.e., no objektive concept, there, naturally, its distinctive rhythm, its immanent law is impossible; i.e., concreteness is impossible. On the other hand, the “abstract” and the “concrete” exclude each other to a certain extent: the more “abstractness” there is in an objektive concept, the less “concreteness” there will be in it; and conversely: the concretization of the concept fills up its emptiness and saturates its indeterminateness, thereby liberating it from “abstract” unsatisfactoriness. In the process of the development and determination of the Concept, the abstract itself blossoms with new determinations, is enriched with content, and is “concretized.” It is clear that “speculative abstractness” in this second sense possesses different degrees: the beginning of the dialectical process manifests the maximum of it and the minimum of concreteness, whereas the 1. “Form des Begriffs”: Glaub. 103, 106. 2. Comp.: Glaub. 103, 116, 156–57; Enc. I 7, 28, 142, 324. 3. Comp.: Enc. I 324. 4. “Mangel der Differenz”: W. Beh. 399. 5. “Als ein Eingebülltes unentfaltetes”: W. Beh. 399. 6. Comp.: Log. III 347; Recht 214, 215. 7. Comp.: Log. III 5, 333; Enc. I 113, 362; Enc. III 309, 354, and others.

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end of the speculative series has the maximum of “concreteness” and the minimum of “abstractness.” This interrelation means that, in the initial category of “Being,” concreteness is contained in a potential form, while, in the concluding category of the “Idea,” it is abstractness that is completely potential in character. In other words, at the beginning, the Concept has a maximum of indeterminateness, in the depths of which the possibility of a “future” richness of content is concealed; while in the end, the Concept possesses its entire content, reveals the maximum of its riches, while “immediate meagerness” is preserved only as a possibility of the “past” that has been overcome. It is thus clear that speculative concreteness has different gradations and degrees.1 But this capacity for gradation characterizes not the nature of the growing-together itself but only the compass of the revealed content. The concept can be “less concrete” or “more concrete,” but not in the sense that its elements grow together now “less,” now “more,” now remaining in an external connection, in a mere juxtaposition, now entering into a close, inner relation. No; the nature of the growing-together itself remains the same everywhere: at all stages, this nature preserves its unitary, speculative character. A lesser concreteness of the Concept means only a comparative lack of fullness of its content; it can include a greater number of different determinations than it contains in a given “less concrete” state. But the connection of these determinations among one another always remains equally speculative and equally concrete. Speculative concreteness therefore has two meanings: first, it points to the compass of the speculative content; second, it points to the inner relationship of the elements of this content (more precisely, to the degree of their “grown-togetherness”). An increase of content doesn’t increase, but also doesn’t decrease, doesn’t distort, but also doesn’t perfect, this inner grown-togetherness. However, the presence of inner grown-togetherness does not, in itself, guarantee the fullness of content of the Concept. According to a fundamental law, the compass of the speculative Concept is nothing other than the composition of its content, and its content consists of all the determinations that enter into its compass. For the Universal includes all of its own variants as its own living parts.2 And so the broader the compass of the Concept, or, what is the same thing, the fuller its content, the more concrete the Concept will be. Speculative concreteness always points to the fact that the Concept is not empty 3 in its internal composition, that it has a certain “content and 1. Comp., e.g., Log. I 71, 99, 100; Log. III 349; Enc. I 21, 60, 169, 311, 324, 350; Enc. II 247; Enc. III 3, 428; Ph. G. 71; Beweise 365, 366. 2. See chapter 5. 3. “Nicht leer”: comp.: Log. III 40; Recht 402.

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filling.”1 This means that the Concept contains in itself at least one relation, i.e., two different determinations.2 But this split into two already indicates that, in itself, the “concrete” is “developing”3 and “unfolding,”4 that it is increasing its “extent,”5 becoming “broader” and “richer.”6 One can therefore say that the “concreteness” of the Concept bears witness to the multiplicity concealed with its compass, and to the diversity of its content. That which is concrete possesses “many qualities,”7 or “determinations.”8 The greater is its compass, the more concrete it will be.9 But at the same time this abundance is distinguished by diversity. The concrete is determined not only multiply but also manifoldly: it contains many different determinations,10 properties,11 and connections,12 and it therefore possesses a “wealth”13 of content. The concrete is a kind of “rich,” “variegated fullness,”14 a living,15 content-containing wealth of thought determinations. The more concrete the Concept, the richer it is; and, reaching the apex of being, the Concept becomes “the most rich,”16 i.e., “the most highly developed,”17 “the most complete” in the composition of its determinations.18 One can therefore say that speculative concreteness is always a manifold that has grown together into a unity. And it is precisely a manifold of determinations of speculative thought. This wealth of real meanings arises not all at once but in a long process of dialectical suffering. Living, objektive meanings are accumulated only gradually, as a result of many “bifurcations” and “unifications.” Every dialectical “dispersal” ends with a reconciliation, i.e., a synthesis, that preserves both opposing sides. As a result, the composition of determinations keeps increasing. Thus, speculative concreteness arises not “all at once from a multiplicity,” as in the empirical world, but always from a disconnected dyad. The sides that enter with each other into the concrete synthesis are combined not by accident and not in the order of the external juxtaposition of heterogeneous quantities, as is the case in the world of appear1. “Mit Inhalt und Erfüllung”: Phän. 41, 42, 43; Log. I 130; Log. III 40, 68, 352; Enc. I 60; Recht 402. 2. Comp.: Log. I 70; Enc. I 170. 3. Log. III 149; Recht 324. 4. Enc. I 22. 5. Log. III 349; Enc. I 331: “Ausdehnung.” 6. “Reicher,” “weiter”: Log. I 41, 73, 248; Log. III 349; Enc. I 331; Recht 64; Ph. G. 63; Beweise 364. 7. “Von vielen Qualitäten”: comp.: Log. III 78, 129; Enc. I 331; Enc. II 301. 8. “Mehrere Bestimmungen”: Log. I 114. 9. “Desto mehrere Seiten”: Enc. I 350. 10. “In sich mannigfaltig Bestimmtes”: Log. I 69, 71; Log. II 101; Log. III 73; “in sich verschiedene Bestimmungen enthaltend”: Log. I 73, 114; Enc. I xvi, 69, 157; Enc. II 247. 11. “Mannigfaltige Beschaffenheit”: Recht 4. 12. “Mannigfaltiger Zusammenhang”: Enc. I 98; comp.: “innere Verhältnisse”: Log. I 246; “Beziehung ”: Log. I 248. 13. Comp.: Phän. 16, 58, 436, 551; Log. I 47; Ph. G. 53; Beweise 343. 14. “Reiche Fülle”: Phän. 6; “bunte Fülle”: Phän. 551. 15. “Der Reichtum des entfalteten Lebens”: Phän. 42; Log. I 33; Recht 402; Beweise 458. 16. “Das Reichste”: Log. III 37, 58, 349; Enc. I 21. 17. “Entfalteste”: Enc. I 21. 18. “Vollständige Bestimmtheit”: Log. III 88; Enc. I 361; “vollendet”: Enc. I 284.

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ances. No; the sides arise from a single, common womb, from original Universality, and they are produced by Universality through necessary self-negation.1 Thus, the sides that are growing together are always connected by a blood relation, as it were, by the commonality of an identical origin. In consequence, dialectical splitting always turns out to be situated between two syntheses: the original, initial unity—by underdetermined Universality—and the succeeding, concluding unity: by selfdetermining Singularity. However, the fate of this enriched Singularity lies in asserting itself anew as underdetermined Universality and renewing, through self-negation, the dialectical quarrel. But this renewal is impossible before the process of the concrete growing-together of the sides is completed: a new disintegration occurs only after the complete growing-together of the enemies, only after the establishment of their true, holistic “concreteness.”2 This entire process of self-enrichment being accomplished in the Concept flows in a single, unique channel. In the empirical world, processes are multiple and parallel. The speculative series is a strict, bound unity, a gradual, progressive growth. With regular alternations of growing-together and splitting, the Concept periodically renews in itself the drama of internal bifurcation and, each time, resolving this drama, renews itself in its content. Each time the force of concrete synthesis extinguishes not only the hostility of the opposing determinations but also those determinations themselves in their disobedient originality; and, in extinguishing, it also preserves. Their extinguishing guarantees development against regression; their preservation ensures development against barrenness. Thus, the speculative process always grows together what is “dual” in the order of “coexistence” and what is “multiple” in the order of “succession.” “Concretization”3 preserves these formal features at all stages of the process. The speculative Concept, not going outside itself within the limits of science, is developed in its own, inner content, splitting itself within itself and reuniting itself within itself. The speculative Concept becomes rich within its own limits like an internally differentiating monad and, at the same time, remains one, all-encompassing Universality, like a completed substance. The richness of its determinations finally reaches maximal fullness, and the Concept ascends to a higher level: as before, it remains one, substantial Universality, but now it also possesses all of its own content. The concept becomes an aggregate or “totality”4 of thought determinations. 1. See chapters 5 and 6. 2. See chapter 6. 3. “Konkretion”: Phän. 473; Log. I 8, 33; Log. II 40, 126, 127, 170, 261; Enc. II 149, 247; Enc. III 46. 4. Comp.: Log. III 73, 150, 352, and others.

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To be a “totality” is to realize a mode of life that is accessible only to the speculative order. The concrete-empirical cannot form an exhaustive, completed synthesis: only reason can grasp the all. Only the rational can be united into an all-encompassing 1 unity. But speculative concreteness is precisely the concreteness of “reason and the idea,”2 and an “exhaustive totality” is realized by means of its forces by necessity. In the process of speculative self-enrichment, the Concept inevitably becomes the totality of living meanings: its compass reaches maximal size, or, what is the same thing, its content exhausts all possible “essential distinctions” and “oppositions.”3 There are no essential determinations that were not produced and posited in themselves by the Concept. The Concept becomes a great speculative whole: a creative unity in living multiplicity, or, in other words, one Meaning, woven of all the essential determinations of meaning. Such is the compass of speculative concreteness. It always includes within itself all the contents that are growing together, and at the highest level, it includes all possible essential variants of speculative meaning. But the most profound meaning of concreteness is revealed only in an investigation of the inner co-relation of the determinations that are growing together. In the very nature of this “growing-together” is hidden the ideational root of all of “speculative” philosophy. The essence of this “concretization,” as of all of Hegel’s philosophy, cannot be understood by abstract thought alone. One must represent it to oneself with one’s eyes, visually, establishing with the power of imagination the presence of two real essences, opposed in terms of content, but capable of a certain conciliated-creative interrelation. All that will then be expressed about these essences must also be imagined as a real, living state intrinsic to these realities. It must be clear from the very beginning that the synthesis that is to unite the two sides cannot bear a superficial, external, or mechanical character.4 A concrete synthesis cannot be a mere “aggregate,”5 or “formal unity,”6 of different parts that remain “alongside one another”7 and only “combine”8 like atoms9 into a formless,10 and external,11 dead,12 immobile13 order.14 This kind of “union” is present in empirical elements as such, but it has no place among speculative realities. Here, determinations are united in an essential, inner manner, and this inner union takes its origin from their necessary oppositeness. A concrete synthesis begins in the fact that the two opposite deter1. “Allumfassend”: Glaub. 157; “gleich Allem”: Diff. 208; Log. II 155. 2. Enc. I 404. 3. See chapter 6. 4. See chapter 1. 5. Glaub. 23; Enc. III 303. 6. Glaub. 29; Diff. 230. 7. Diff. 197, 259. 8. Diff. 281; W. Beh. 334; Log. I 185, 239; Enc. I 257. 9. Glaub. 114. 10. W. Beh. 337. 11. W. Beh. 337; Log. I 39, 96, 239; Enc. I 36, 187. 12. Log. I 50. 13. Log. I 50. 14. W. Beh. 334; Enc. I 23.

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minations produced by the self-negation of the Concept renounce centrifugal attraction and attempts to assert themselves in opposition and self-sufficiency. They “negate” their mutual “negation,” and as a result of this the constitutive connection that connected them in their very oppositeness comes to the fore.1 A certain constant and necessary “relation”2 is revealed between the two sides. This relation consists in the fact that each side possesses in the other its “premise,”3 its correlate. Each side asserted itself in “abstractness,” but both “abstractions” were relative4 and co-relative: neither side could be “asserted” or “taken” without the other.5 Each side strove toward independence, but it is precisely this that essentially linked it with the other side,6 upon which the first side desired not to depend. Each side limited the other 7 and thereby determined it. As a result, each side asserted itself through8 its relation to the other, through the negation of its own oppositeness.9 It turns out that, in their very negation, the sides were necessary for each other,10 and therefore inseparable.11 Each side represented itself as something distinctive12 and a distinct being; nevertheless, from the very beginning, both sides were designated by fate for each other. Now the sides must accept this destiny and impart to their connection a mature, complete, positive13 character. Thus, both sides must “accept” each other and creatively consolidate this mutual “acceptance.” This acceptance begins directly with the “second” negation.14 Each side “negates” itself.15 But it negates itself not wholly, but only to the extent of its pseudo self-sufficiency. To reject its own self-sufficiency is to recognize what does not allow it to blossom. It is to assert something “other” as acting upon me and determining me. And so, each side becomes convinced that it is compelled to recognize its dependence upon the other side, to recognize that the “other” side determines 16 it. In other words, it is compelled to recognize that, in the other side, it has its own essential property. It turns out that “concerning each determination its opposite must be expressed.”17 In other words, each determination turns out to be inherent in its “opposite,” intrinsic to it, present in it, “entering into” it. Expressing this “presence” dynamically, one can say that “each side passes into the other.” Thus Hegel describes this stage of concretization. Having re-

1. See chapter 6. 2. “Beziehung”: comp.: Log. I 30. 3. “Voraussetzung”: Log. I 196. 4. “Als relative”: Log. I 99. 5. Log. I 156. 6. “Wesentlich Zusammenhängen”: Log. I 195. 7. “Schranke”: Log. I 196. 8. “Vermittelst”: Log. I 197. 9. Comp.: Log. I 191–92. 10. “Unentbehrlich”: Log. I 386. 11. “Untrennbar ”: Log. I 90, 108, 182, 196, 386. 12. “Eigene . . . Bestimmung ”: Log. I 182. 13. “Das Affirmative der Beziehung”: Log. I 90. 14. See chapter 6. 15. Log. I 159. 16. Comp.: Log. I 153: “Wechselbestimmung.” 17. Log. I 182.

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nounced self-sufficiency, each side “sublates itself”1 and “posits itself” in its opposite,2 and its opposite in itself. Each “in itself and according to its determination,”3 “through itself,”4 and “out of itself,”5 “passes into,”6 or is, as it were, “turned into,” the other.7 Self-sufficiency is turned into this mutual “transition,”8 and both sides are “dissolved”9 into this “alternating determination from one to the other and back again.”10 The enemy affirms itself in its enemy, or, what is the same thing, it turns itself into its own enemy.11 And so it is from both sides: the two opposites pass into each other, and this “double transition”12 puts an end to their hostility. The hostility of opposites ends because their very oppositeness disappears. Their content is subjected to speculative assimilation and the dialectical discord is silenced as a result. The essence of this speculative assimilation consists in the fact that, in a living creative fashion, each of the sides receives into itself all the content of the other side and entirely assimilates it to its own content. And conversely: each side wholly gives all its content to the other side, is received by the other side, and is assimilated into its hitherto self-sufficient content. Each side translates the other into its own language, and is itself translated into the other’s language. In other words, each side expresses the other’s content in its own “concepts” and allows the other to express its determinations in its “concepts.” A distinctive exchange of logical contents, or of speculative gifts, if you will, takes place. Each side gives itself and each side receives. The other’s content becomes a new mode of life, as it were, or a material that is to be assimilated. Each side experiences a “distinctive, immediate beginning”13 or birth within the limits of the other: each side “appears,”14 or is revealed, in it; “steps forth”15 as a new pattern in the other’s life. As a result of this speculative symbiosis between the two sides, a new, distinctive, and refined relation is formed. Each of the two opposite sides—A and B—acquires a dual being: first, it is “in itself”; second, it is “in the other.” Insofar as each side is “in itself,” it is not alien and not opposite to the other, because it has accepted the other side into itself: it has in itself its own opposite; it has included its opposite in itself and has become its own opposite. A is already B in A, i.e., not only A and not merely A + B (an arithmetical sum, a mechanical coexistence), but an A that has

1. Log. II 62. 2. Log. II 59; Beweise 341–42. 3. Log. I 152. 4. Log. I 108; Log. II 112. 5. Log. I 198. 6. “Übergehen”: Log. I 108, 108, 198, 256, 400; Log. II 59, 112; Enc. I 157. 7. “Umschlagen”: Log. I 153. 8. Log. I 400. 9. “Auflösung ”: Enc. I 157. 10. Log. I 155. 11. Comp.: “Sich als das Andere ihrer selbst zu setzen”: Log. I 198; “Sich zu dem Anderen seiner macht ”: Log. II 62. 12. “Notwendigkeit des doppelten Uebergangs”: Log. I 392. 13. “Entstehen an dem Andern”: Log. I 153. 14. “Erscheint”: Enc. II 142. 15. “Hervortritt”: Log. I 153.

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creatively implanted B into itself. It is A, but an A that has worked B into itself. It is B but a B whose content is implanted in A. In other words, A is B in A. To the extent that each side is “in the other,” it is also not alien and not opposite to the other, because it has been received and assimilated by the other. Each is found in its own opposite; it is included by, and transformed into, its opposite. A is A in B, i.e., not only A and not merely A + B but an A that is creatively implanted in B: it is A but an A whose content is incorporated in B. It is B but a B that has worked A into itself. In other words, A is A in B. The result obtained at this stage can be conditionally expressed as: A is (B in A) + (A in B), while B is (A in B) + (B in A). Hegel describes this state of former opposites as follows: each side “is, in itself, its own opposite,”1 because it has, “in itself”2 and “in its own right,”3 the determinations of “its other.” Each “contains”4 the other side and, in its turn, each is “that which it is in the other.”5 The content of one is “included” in the other,6 and each “contains in itself itself and its opposite.”7 In other words, each side becomes “the unity of itself and its other.”8 The relation of “oppositeness” gradually cedes its place to the relation of “similarity”: both sides contain A and both sides contain B. Therefore, one can say that each side “is the same as the other.”9 In other words, “each side is, in itself, the unity of both.”10 This is the stage of speculative assimilation. It begins with each side continuing11 itself in the other, and it ends with their content becoming identical. “Each is” now “itself and its other.”12 As before, we have before us two unities,13 but they are both qualitatively similar to each other, i.e., they have one and the same content.14 Hegel describes this relation as “identity with itself and with the other” side.15 However, speculative assimilation should not be understood in such a way that it extinguishes all distinction between the two sides. This mutual likening has its necessary and natural limit in the fact that, from the very outset, the sides were both distinct and opposite. Each side, in receiving the content of the other side as a speculative gift, does not thereby lose its own, distinctive content, but preserves it and places it at the foundation of the creative assimilation. Its own content remains

1. Log. I 109; Log. II 157. 2. “In jedem”: Log. I 156. 3. “An ihm selbst ”: Log. I 153, 167, 226; Log. II 160. 4. “Enthält”: Log. I 226, 386; Log. II 66, 152; Enc. I 243. 5. Log. I 380. 6. Comp.: “schliesst in sich”: Log. III 341. 7. Enc. I 243; comp.: Log. I 167. 8. Log. I 153, 157; Log. II 26. 9. Log. II 173. 10. Log. I 157, 458. 11. “Kontinuiren,” “Kontinuation.”: comp.: Log. I 458; Log. II 159, and others. 12. Log. II 49. 13. Log. I 157, 458. 14. “Dieselbigkeit der Qualitäten”: Log. I 458. 15. Log. II 160.

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that medium that receives and refracts in itself the content that is given from outside. Each side “radiates into the other,” but each side has its distinctive determinateness.1 And so, two different “points of departure” produce two different “results.”2 Both sides contain in themselves A and B, and they contain them in the form of a speculative unity. But this unity is determined within each in its own way.3 The distinction is determined by the fact that, in one of them, the determination A turns out to be “existing in itself,” while the determination B is only “posited” in it.4 In the other side, the determination B turns out to be “existing in itself,” while the determination A is given to it for assimilation. As a result, on one side, determination A predominates,5 and it constitutes B in A. On the other side, determination B predominates, and it acquires the character of A in B.6 This means that A is present in itself not in the same sense 7 that it is present in its former opposite. “B in A” is not the same thing as “A in B.” Each of the determinations is now an “accepting womb,” now an “accepted gift.” And depending on this, the assimilated unity acquires different features. One could also say that the dialectical oppositeness is “sublated” and “resolved” doubly and besides, differently. The first overcoming is accomplished within the limits of A, by its means, its powers, and its creativity: as a result, B turns out to be included in A, creatively worked into A, entering into unity with it. But in this process, A, as the accepting womb, does not disappear, or perish. On the contrary, it survives and is asserted in a new wealth and with new power. It has prevailed, overcome, and, having given to itself a new content, continues its life as before as A. “B in A” is, as before, A, or A1, if you will. The second overcoming is accomplished within the limits of B by its means, its powers, its creativity; as a result of this, A turns out to be included in B, entering into unity with B. This time the task of the accepting womb was performed by B. Therefore, it is now B that overcomes and resolves the oppositeness within its own depths and continues its life as before as B. “A in B” is, as before, B, or B1, if you will. Thus, speculative assimilation concludes not with the destruction of the sides, and not with the loss of their distinctiveness, but only with a likening in content. A has turned itself into B in A, or A1. B has turned itself into A in B, or B1. The oppositeness has been “resolved,” but in its resolved form it has been asserted in each side. As before, we have before us two 1. Log. II 110. 2. Log. I 162. 3. Comp.: Log. I 158. 4. Comp.: Log. I 230. 5. “Überwiegend”: Log. I 458. 6. Comp.: “verendlichtes Unendliches,” “verunendlichtes Endliches”: Log. I 158. 7. Comp.: “Ihr Unterschied ist so der Doppelsinn, den beide haben”: Log. I 162.

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sides, which are assimilated in content but formally self-sufficient and, in their inner mode of life, distinctive.1 However, their mutual relationship is not as before: they are bound together by new fetters, and the unity of their fate is revealed with new force. Hegel expresses this link in this way: the two sides are “only moments.”2 To be a “moment” means to be a necessary, real correlate for something “other.” A “moment” is, first of all, something not self-sufficient.3 A moment is real not in itself but through its link with its opposite.4 Its being is determined not through a relation to itself and only to itself, but through a relation5 to the other. One can say that “a moment” is “ideal.”6 In order to attain reality a moment needs concrete fulfillment; it must become a moment of the “whole,”7 i.e., a living and necessary part of the whole. In itself, a “moment” is not true: its truth is found only in a living relation to its opposite,8 in the “sublation” of it and union with it.9 Furthermore, one “moment” torn away from another is devoid of “all meaning” and significance.10 They communicate their determinations to one another, are affirmed one “through”11 the other, and thereby attain completion.12 This reveals in a new light the indissolubility of the sides, beginning with proud mutual negation but then “sinking”13 to the rank of “moments.” However, the establishment of such a link does not complete the “speculative concretization,” for the sides are not yet united by it in an appropriate way. The process of “assimilation” is renewed and continues uninterruptedly. For both sides, this process becomes a stable, constant mode of life, and only as a result of this does a true, concrete synthesis arise. This signifies that an exchange of “speculative gifts” proceeds not only between A and B but also between A1 and B1, between A2 and B2, and so forth. Everything with which each side has been enriched in the process of mutual reception is transmitted by it to the other side: “B in A” passes into B1 and creatively penetrates into its renewed content. And conversely: “A in B” passes into A1 and encounters a living, creative reception there. The dynamic uninterruptedness of this exchange pro1. Comp.: “der aufgehobene Gegensatz, aber als Seite des Gegensatzes selbst”: Log. II 50. 2. “Nur momente”: Log. 1 161, 162, 400, and others. 3. Beweise 343, 344. 4. Log. I 161, 460. 5. “Beziehung ”: Log. I 460; Beweise 343. 6. Comp.: Beweise 343, 344. 7. Log. I 161, 229, and others. 8. Comp.: Log. I 125, 229. 9. Comp.: “Einheit”: Log. I 125, 129, 229, 400, 460; Log. II 87, and others. 10. “Keinen Sinn”: Beweise 341–42. Comp.: Log. I 460. 11. Comp.: Log. I 161; Log. II 175; Beweise 343. 12. Log. I 229. 13. “Herabsinken,” “herabsetzen”: Log. I 108, 455.

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duces a continuous interaction between the sides: each moment effects a tireless “incarnation”1 of the other moment in itself and of itself in its correlate. Speculative assimilation becomes more and more whole and profound and finally leads to a “complete interpenetration”2 of the sides. Then the content of each moment in completion is likened to the content of the other and is fastened with it into a kind of “mature, uninterrupted continuum.”3 The sides “continue”4 themselves one in the other in such a way that each of them “dissolvesd itself and loses itself in the other.”5 Each moment finds itself both in itself and in its correlate.6 When one moment penetrates into the other, it thereby effects a return or “reflection” into itself,7 and conversely: “reflection in itself” is thereby an action upon the other moment. This loss of oneself in the other and the finding of the other in oneself leads to both moments ceasing to be “other-being” for each other. And this means that each moment, in asserting itself through “the other, is asserted eo ipso through itself.”8 “Different-being” cedes its place to “same-being,” and the sides “flow together,”9 or “close up,”10 into a single, holistic formation. Speculative assimilation, as a stable modus vivendi, unites real meanings into a living unity, into an “interpenetrating identity.”11 Both moments turn out to be “perfectly united,”12 “one in the highest degree,”13 and their differences no longer burden each other, but produce a joyful fulfillment. It turns out that the former disunitedness and oppositeness14 have completely ceded their place to union. The same thing that lives in one of the moments also lives in the other, but only in a different order and a different form. United with the other, each moment is united with itself, but itself creatively renewed and transfigured. In each of the moments the other moment has “shown through” and revealed itself, and both moments are grasped in a unity and unification of content. This means that within each lives an indifference, or “identity” of content, that also produces its law in both. The reconciliation of the opposites was possible only because both opposites arose from an original, single womb and never lost their living, immanent link with it. Each of the sides growing together was a modification of one, initial Universality that was present in both with its genu1. Comp.: “einverleibt”: Log. I 130. 2. “Volkommene Durchdringung beider”: Log. II 120. 3. “Gediegene, ununterbrochene Continuität”: Enc. II 227. 4. “Kontinuiren”: Log. I 198, 391, 458; Log. III 187. 5. “Aufgelöst und in ihre Andere verloren”: Log. III 62. 6. Comp.: Log. I 161; Log. II 161; comp.: Log. I 391. 7. Comp.: Log. I 167, 380; Log. II 206. 8. Comp.: Log. I 197. 9. Comp.: “konfondirt sich”: Log. III 62. 10. Comp.: “Zusammenschliessen”: Log. III 141, 216, and others; “zusammengeschlagen”: W. Beh. 395. 11. Comp.: Log. II 178. 12. “Vollkommen Zusammengeeint”: W. Beh. 395. 13. “Aufs höchste Eins”: W. Beh. 395. 14. See chapter 6.

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ine nature.1 Speculative assimilation creates a kind of unified content in which dialectical opposites are combined, fulfill each other, and are neutralized. This unified content, which could best be called a monogram composed of A and B, unites in itself both “differences” without falling into either of them. Therefore, this content can be called an “indifference.”2 However, not in the sense that difference has been lost without a trace in it; on the contrary, difference has not only been preserved but has also been transformed into a higher, richer content. And not in the sense that the two moments, distinctively shaped and ordered as distinct beings, have ceased their “being.” On the contrary, both moments have been preserved and “concretized,” have grown together into a single totality. “Indifference” is a unity not prior to difference and not without difference, but a unity after difference and with the preservation of it. Otherwise, speculative enrichment would be impossible. The composition of “indifference” is complex, both in relation to content and to quality, and in the sense of form and compass. In it are preserved not only opposite “determinations,” but also different, already assimilated moments: speculative indifference is a concrete whole 3 of living meanings, while moments of meaning are its living parts.4 Thus, concrete synthesis is subordinated to the law of Universality; it is the realization and affirmation of this law. This means that the “indifference” created by this synthesis is the very same thing that it itself produced, and that was creating the speculative assimilation: the causa finalis in its mature, realized form, is nothing other than the causa efficiens, having attained its triumphant manifestation. The entire process of “concretization” should be thought of as occurring within the limits of a certain underdetermined Universality, by its powers and in the name of its end. This Universality is that ground (Grund) that creates within itself a splitting into two, that is immanently present in each of the sides, and afterward moves them from within toward mutual acceptance and growing-together. The completion of concrete synthesis reveals, or exposes, this ground as a creative force and at the same time as a result that has been freely asserted where the quarrel reigned. The fog 5 of dialectical appearance is dispersed, and behind it is revealed the original “ground” of the Concept in all its “transparent clarity,”6 “depth,”7 and content-bearing maturity. The point here is not only that “in the result is essentially preserved 1. See chapter 5. 2. Comp.: W. Beh. 356–57, 357, 393; Log. I 400, 458, and others. 3. Comp.: W. Beh. 357; Log. I 458. 4. See chapter 5. 5. Comp.: “jeder Unterschied keine Unterbrechung, Trübung macht”: Enc. I 324. 6. “Klarheit,” “durchsichtig”: Enc. I 364. 7. “Der tiefe und reiche Gehalt ”: Enc. I xxxiii.

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that from which it results”;1 but lies in the substantial, creative unity of beginning and end. The unity created is the “original essence of both” sides,2 their “substance and soul.”3 This unity has been enriched in the process, but, in itself, it has remained the same Universality that produced in itself the initial split into two. All this “disintegration” and “unification” is nothing other than a manifestation of the “ground” itself. “The oppositeness itself” was nothing other than the actualization of this ground,4 and in just the same way, the process of mutual “mediation” was its “own action.”5 And finally, when the growing-together was realized, it turned out that the “resolved contradiction” was nothing other than the ground itself, which “contains and bears” in itself its own determinations.6 Concretization consists in the fact that “the oppositeness returns into its ground”7 and that the “mature,” “interpenetrated” unity of the sides8 is created by the ground itself, now filled with new content.9 The final synthesis substantially coincides with the presupposing 10 ground, and the original essence, revealed in the form of the totality of determinations, coincides with the ground itself.11 Thus is confirmed Hegel’s formula, which says that concrete synthesis is only “the convergence of the object with itself.”12 This convergence of the object with itself takes place in such a way that the “moments” take possession of the same content, which is essentially a single, common content. Speculative concretization can be described as a gradual subordination of the opposites to a similarity of content, and then as a transformation of this similarity by way of a continuous exchange of speculative gifts into a grown-together, indissoluble unity, welded together by a single, common content. Hegel often characterizes this process as “syllogism”e (Schluss),f or as a “joining together” or “fusing” of concepts. Then the single, common content that, at first, has the form of two mutually similar or identical contents, acquires the significance of the “middle term,” or simply the “middle” (Mitte).13 In speculative concretization, two “opposite” concepts, “S” and “P” (subject and predicate), grow together, are fused, or “enter into a union,” if you will. This fusiong takes place through the mediation connecting them, the “content” common to them—“M” (medius terminus).14 “M” is revealed in both “S” and in “P,” takes possession of them, and as-

1. Log. I 41; comp.: Log. I 69; Log. III 340, 341. 2. Beweise 354. 3. “Deren Substanz und Seele”: Beweise 342. 4. Comp.: Log. II 62. 5. “Vermittelung . . . das eigene Tun des Grundes”: Log. II 107. 6. Comp.: Log. II 62, 72, 184; comp.: Log. I 458. 7. Log. II 61. 8. Comp.: Log. II 178. 9. “Inhaltsvolle Grundlage”: Log. II 178. 10. Log. II 112; Beweise 343. 11. Enc. I 243. 12. Comp.: Log. II 114. 13. Comp., e.g., Glaub. 37; Phän. 223, 379; Log. III 141, 148, 167; Enc. II 246, 367; Enc. III 380. 14. Comp.: Log. III 141.

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serts itself as the “concrete unity” of both concepts.1 In this consists the essence of the “speculative syllogism”: “the original division” of the judgment (Urteil) divides2 the initial Universality into two extreme opposites.3 The “fusion”h of the syllogism (Schluss) reunites this rupture through the mediation of the creative “middle” term.4 As a result, it is revealed that the “antinomy of this inference”5, i is overcome and that the conclusion stating that “S” is “P” signifies the inner unity 6 and concrete identity 7 of the warring opposites. This syllogism consists, in turn, of three syllogisms.8 The same terms participate in each of them, but each time they form a particular combination of growings-together. Thus, first, the moment “A” (the “subject”) is fused with the moment “B” (the “predicate”) through the mediation of the middle term “M.” This fusion takes place within the limits of “A.” Second, the moment “B” (the “predicate”) is fused, through the mediation of the same middle term “M,” with the moment “A” (the “subject”). This fusion takes place within the limits of “B.” Third and last, the middle term “M” (the essence and ground) is fused with itself 9 through the mediation of moments “A” and “B,” mediating them one through the other. This fusion takes place within the limits of the middle term “M.” All these syllogisms j can be represented separately, in sequential order: first is the process of speculative assimilation within the limits of one side; this is followed by the same process within the limits of the other side; finally, the two syllogisms are completed in the “concrete identity” of the result. These three syllogisms are linked by a mutual necessity, so that no one of them is possible without the other two. They form a kind of “circle of mutual presuppositions.”10 However, in essence, they are not only necessary for one another, but also constitute a single syllogism, which consists of three “inwardly mutually penetrating syllogisms.”11, k The process of speculative assimilation that takes place in both moments is nothing other than a process of the middle term, which is united with itself through those two syllogisms. That which takes place in “A” and in “B” is the creation and revelation of “M.” The assimilation of the sides is thus already a uniting of the ground with itself, and all three processes form a single one: the life of the particular and singular is the life of Universality itself. It is thus clear that speculative inference is concentrated in its terminus medius, which turns out to be its beginning, its creator, and its result. This result establishes for the original Universality a new, enriched 1. Log. III 141. 2. Comp.: “Diremtion”: Log. III 112. 3. Comp.: Phän. 379; Log. II 20; Log. III 120, 141. 4. Comp.: Phän. 379. 5. Log. II 169. 6. Phän. 379. 7. Comp.: Glaub. 24. 8. Comp., e.g., Log. III 141, 344; Enc. I 372; Enc. II 413, 468; Enc. III 451. 9. Comp., e.g., Enc. I 346; Enc. III 273, 411. 10. Log. III 141. 11. “Dreiheit von innigst ineinander greifenden Schlüssen”: Enc. II 413.

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content: the Concept turns out to be “fully”1 determined, “filled with content,”2 real3 and actual;4 “developed and objektive Universality.”5 The richness of this result is guaranteed by the fact that the middle term includes in itself both moments and asserts itself as their “identity” and “totality.” The idea of “identity” that lies at the basis of formal logic shares in Hegel the fate of all other ideas: it is transformed and renewed in its content and acquires a new, speculative significance. “Speculative identity”6 is not “stability outside of process” but “stability in process.” It does not exclude the formation of new differences and oppositions, but on the contrary, includes them within itself and, being enriched by them, remains faithful to its own original nature. On Hegel’s lips, “identity” means a concrete unity of two real meanings that are assimilated in content and formally grown-together. Attaining a concrete synthesis and entering into identity with one another, the sides are “annihilated”7 in their one-sidedness and “extinguished”8 in their self-sufficiency: “indifference” swallows them up, but preserves their original difference.9 Identity is a result of speculative “sublation” and “raising up.”10 Therefore, the “identical” moments do not entirely vanish, but neither do they stand in “relation” to each other. If they remained in “relation” to each other,11 they would not enter into the necessary speculative “fusing” and unity; and then the “identity” would remain “relative.”12 But “true identity”13 is not relative but “absolute”:14 it establishes a concrete, indissoluble15 union between the sides, a union that is intrinsic only to the speculative “totality.” The speculative totality is distinguished from a simple “empirical whole” not only by its exhaustive compass, but also by the inner connection of its parts among themselves and of the parts with the whole. This inner connection determines the deepest nature of speculative concreteness and compels us to recognize its organic character. Thus, the nature of concrete unity, or, what is the same thing, the nature of organic totality, is determined, first of all, by the fusing of its parts among themselves, and, secondly, by the fusing of its parts with the totality itself. This can already be considered to have been established by the essence of speculative “inference,” for organic totality is nothing other than the result of the speculative, triune syllogism.16 The union of concrete parts one with another is a union of creative 1. “Vollständig ”: Log. III 34. 2. “Inhaltsvoll”: Log. I 397; Log. III 120. 3. Comp.: Enc. I 345. 4. Comp.: Log. I 397. 5. Log. III 167. 6. Enc. I 363. 7. Glaub. 117. 8. Glaub. 16. 9. “Unterscheidet sich, aber ist zugleich identisch”: Enc. I 329. 10. Comp.: Diff. 203, 251, 252. 11. “Verhältniss”: Glaub. 70; W. Beh. 347. 12. “Relativ Identität”: Glaub. 129; W. Beh. 347, 359. 13. “Wahre Identität ”: Glaub. 7, 137. 14. Glaub. 21, 23, 29; Diff. 198, 223, 251, and others. 15. “Schlechthin unzertrennlich”: Glaub. 29. 16. Comp., e.g., Enc. II 557; and also: Phän. 223; Log. III 145, 148, 167, 169, 216, 218; Enc. I 372; Recht 396.

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mutual nourishing. It is precisely this union that transforms the “moments of the identity,” or, what is the same thing, the “parts of the whole,” or, what is the same thing, the “terms of inference” into “members of an organic unity,” or into “organs of a unified totality.” Dialectic cedes its place to speculative concreteness from that moment when the illusoriness of the mutual exclusion of enemies is revealed and their correlativity, their mutual belonging, is affirmed. It turns out that “contradictory” determinations are not only possible in each other’s presence but are impossible without each other, and further, that on the path of mutual transitions and assimilation, this impossibility acquires the significance of a positive, creative connection. The sides acquire the significance of “moments,” or, what is the same thing, non-self-sufficient modifications, of a single Universality. These modifications work themselves into one another, are likened to one another, and finally, are united with one another, thanks to the uninterrupted continuity of their interaction. In this concretizing,l each of the “moments” retains its appearance, its name, and even the distinct being of its internal structure: between them there remains a difference that cannot be annihilated by any assimilation of content. Each of the “parts” brings forth a content that is inherent in the other part as well. But once having begun with the “opposite” determination, each inevitably retains the originality of its own internal structure and the particularity of its own appearance and compass. Each side brings forth the same thing, although in its own way, and it turns out to be irreplaceable, both for the other part and for the entire whole. One part is related to the other by the “essential relation”1 of mutual nourishing. Having received into itself its own “opposite” and having made for itself a creative modus vivendi out of its content, each of the sides is a constant source of living content for the other. Each act, each renewal of one of the sides, is inevitably transferred to the other, involving it through speculative acceptance, and through a distinctive, assimilative response and reenactment. The life and content of one moment condition the life and content of the other;2 each needs the other in order to live and sustain itself. And this connection already possesses a “teleological” and “organic” character. The living connection of the two parts, mutually in need of each other, is a teleological connection: each part has in the other both its own “means” and its own “end,”3 because it sustains the other for itself and itself for the other. The parts cease to be merely “parts”; they become “members”4 and “organs.”5 “Each member, sustaining itself for itself, sustains thereby 1. “Wesentliche Verbindung”: Log. II 182. 2. Comp.: “Sich bedingende Momente”: Recht 379. 3. Enc. I 118. 4. “Glieder”: W. Beh. 380; Log. III 251; Enc. I 118; Recht 363, 416, 423. 5. “Organe”: W. Beh. 380; Beweise 457, and others.

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the other members in their distinctiveness”;1 it already sustains them by the mere fact that it “fills its own sphere”;2 and each organ, nourishing another, thereby sustains itself.3 For an organ, another organ is simultaneously an end, a product,4 and a means: each is produced and affirmed by another,5 and in nourishing itself, it nourishes its “co-member.”6 This means that the “members” organically grow into one another and acquire a single “instinct of self-preservation,” as it were. They are “present” in one another; they are speculatively concrete; they are immanent to one another. Each guards in itself the fate of the other: its life, its content. Each serves the other and is served by it. The speculative members of a concrete unity are linked to one another like the organs of a natural organism or like friends who live in true intimacy. This mutual union of concrete members is revealed with particular force in their joint union with the “organic totality” itself.The speculative union of a “member” with the “totality” essentially differs from the usual relation of a “part” to a “whole.” Usually, the “whole” is conceived in such a way that the parts preserve their self-sufficiency from one another and from the whole.7 There arises a conception of mechanical unification, of an arithmetical sum, or of an empirical aggregate. In such a conception a “part” is viewed as existing even apart from the whole;8 it is attached to the whole from outside and remains less than the whole in all respects. The inner union of the “totality” and “its members” differs sharply from this “meaningless relation.”9 In a concrete synthesis, a “part” is in a certain sense equal to its whole. This, at first glance paradoxical, assertion should be understood not in the sense of “compass,” but in the sense of “content.” By the very nature of speculative “concretion,”m the identity of the moments arises as a result of the creative efforts of the “middle” term, producing in each of them its own single content enriched through synthesis. Therefore, the content of the totality itself is present in each of the grown-together moments: each of them contains in itself indifference in all its totality of content,10 and a smaller compass of the part does not prevent it from possessing all the content of the whole. Hegel expresses this in the following way: “a part has in itself the whole of the Concept”;11 such that “the singular stands in a relation of absolute indifference to the universal and the whole”;12 “each part is itself the whole, or each determinateness is the totality, i.e., the determinateness has become, in general, an utterly transparent show, a difference which has vanished in its positedness.”13, n According to the fundamental law of Universality, totality enters 1. Recht 378. 2. Recht 379. 3. Beweise 457. 4. Comp.: Recht 379. 5. Comp.: Beweise 343. 6. Comp.: Phän. 374. 7. Comp.: Enc. I 269. 8. Glaub. 71. 9. Log. II 170; Enc. I 269. 10. Comp.: Log. I 458. 11. Log. III 247. 12. W. Beh. 398. 13. Log. III 187.

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as a whole into its parts and asserts itself as their living essence. Totality thereby establishes an equality of content between itself and them, such that each member is a “simple universality, in which all determinations are dissolved.”1 In its content, each part is equal to the whole, or, what is the same thing, it is the whole itself.2 The nature of the totality is represented in each part,3 is contained in it,4 creatively controls each part.5 The “middle” term, fighting for its realization in each of the growingtogether sides, brings all its members to a homogeneity of content and an assimilated richness of determinations. In this lies the essence of speculative concreteness. This presence of the totality in its members has the character of creative dominion and determining creation. The totality “penetrates in a living way”6 into its parts, dissolves them7 by its nondifferentiated content, and transforms them into ongoing processes.8 As a result, the “dominion of the whole”9 over the parts is revealed. The “members” of an organic totality, or, what is the same thing, its “moments,”10 “parts,”11 “potencies,”12 or “organs,”13 are subordinate to it: they are conditioned by it,14 wholly determined by its end,15 and are dependent upon it.16 Not one part of the totality exists in itself;17 all of them exist only in the totality and through it.18 An organ has “meaning and significance only through its connection”19 with the organism: each feature, each detail of the organ “has been produced through the whole” and remains subordinate to the whole.20 The life of the members is possible only in the totality,21 such that the “equilibrium” of parts in the whole22 is a genuine condition of their being. This correlation can be expressed in the following way: the organic totality produces itself through its parts and produces its parts for itself. The members of a concrete identity arise because the totality introduces difference23 into itself, isolates,24 divides itself,25 thereby producing for itself a living and organized tissue of being. Each member produces and affirms

1. Phän. 209. 2. Comp.: Diff. 182–83; Glaub. 71; Log. I 156; Enc. I 315; Enc. II 470. 3. W. Beh. 392, 392–93. 4. Recht 351. 5. Comp.: “wirksam”: Recht 351. 6. “Lebindig durchdringt ”: W. Beh. 416. 7. “Auflöst”: Phän. 357. 8. “Fliesendes Moment ”: Phän. 208; “durchlaufende Processe”: Phän. 209. 9. “Herrschaft des Ganzen”: W. Beh. 410. 10. Comp.: Phän. 4, 209; Recht 363, 419, and many others. 11. Comp., e.g., W. Beh. 412, 412; Enc. II 470; Log. II 187; Log. III 247; condemnation of this term and conception: Log. III 251; Recht 363, 379. 12. Comp.: W. Beh. 410, 412. 13. Comp.: W. Beh. 380 and others. 14. W. Beh. 410. 15. Recht 364; comp.: Glaub. 125. 16. Ibidem. 17. Glaub. 126 18. Diff. 265; Log. II 165. 19. Diff. 183. 20. “Untertänig”: W. Beh. 417. 21. “Ihr Leben nur im Ganzen zu haben”: Phän. 338. 22. “Gleichgewicht”: Phän. 344. 23. “Unterscheidet”: Enc. III 405; Recht 263, 331, 356. 24. “Sich besondert”: Enc. III 396 and others. 25. “Gliederung”: Phän. 446; Enc. II 590; application to dialectical contradiction: Phän. 136.

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the total tissue of being. Each member is produced and is affirmed by the totality as assimilated in terms of content, but distinctive in its internal structure, and irreplaceable in its compass, as a living and necessary 1 ingredient of the whole. As a result of this, it turns out that the true distinctiveness of the parts is formed only by virtue of speculative assimilation. Outside of the totality, only an abstract, dead distinctiveness is possible, or rather an empty encroachment upon distinct being. In an organism, the parts are not independent; they abide in “idealism,”2 i.e., deprived of selfsufficient reality. But through their connection with the organic totality, they participate in true being and genuine distinctiveness. Thus, concrete totality is a living meaning-substance, producing itself, dividing,3 and sustaining itself.4 This substance, as true Universality,5 lives and “moves” exclusively according to its own “inner necessity,”6 realizing its end and subordinating its parts to it. Organic totality lives according to its inner purposiveness.7 It is a true, speculative “organism,”8 or, what is the same thing, a living “system”9 of meaning determinations. Organic totality produces a process of self-active development, revealing its own essence and proceeding wholly within its limits: it produces itself out of itself and for the sake of itself. Therefore, it must be defined as “the real end itself,”10 in the creativity of which the “first,” “producing” thing coincides with the “final” thing, with the “result”:11 the causa efficiens is nothing other than the causa finalis. This means that the activity of the concrete totality proceeds in a turning toward itself: it determines only itself and, consequently, “returns into itself”12 with all of its creativity. “Reflection into itself” forms its very essence,13 and this direction of activity gives it the character of “circular” rotation.14 In the life of concrete substance, the “beginning” is the same thing that is revealed in the “result” and that constitutes the “end” of all motion: “the end is the beginning, the consequence is the ground, the effect is the cause.”15 Only that which is already real16 is realized, and the totality appears as the true causa sui.17 That is why the image of an “endlessly rotating circle” conveys the fundamental nature of the totality. 1. “Gleich notwendig”: Phän. 4. 2. Comp.: Recht 363. 3. “Sich gliedern”: Enc. II 464, 550, 590; Beweise 458. 4. “Erhält sich”: Phän. 196, 197, 198, 446; Enc. II 419; Beweise 457. 5. Comp.: Phän. 198, 199, 200–201, 209; Enc. II 550; Enc. III 396. 6. “Innere Notwendigkeit”: W. Beh. 330, 335; Phän. 195; Recht 416. 7. Phän. 199; Log. III 251; Enc. I 117, 119. 8. Comp.: Glaub. 92; Diff. 182, 183, 188, 199; W. Beh. 369. 9. Diff. 188, 188, 200; W. Beh. 406, 416. 10. Comp.: Phän. 195, 197–98. 11. Comp.: Phän. 196, 196, 196; Beweise 457. 12. Comp.: Phän. 196, 196, 198; Log. III 224, 226, 233; Beweise 457, 461. 13. Phän. 210, 215, 226. 14. Comp.: “Kreis,” “Kreislauf,” “in sich kreisende Bewegung ”: Phän. 15, 295, 577; Log. I 65, 65, 163; Log. III 350, 351; Enc. I 23, 26; Beweise 457. 15. Log. III 228; comp.: Phän. 17; Enc. I 376. 16. Log. III 228. 17. Log. III 218.

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A concrete totality is infinite not because its process continues “without end,” never reaching completion, always suffering from incompleteness.1 It is infinite because its process is always characterized by creative completeness. This process is always self-sufficient; it is always directed toward totality itself, returns into it,2 affirming its “being for itself.”3 By its very nature, this process is “free from other-being” and creates out of itself all distinction.4 Concrete totality has no end,5 i.e., a point where other-being would begin for it: neither in activity—for it itself is pure activity, for which to receive an action is to receive an action from itself;6 nor in being—for it is unique reality, substance itself. Therefore, the meaning-organism possesses true infinity: it is infinitum actu, i.e., it is “actually infinite, because it is complete and present in itself.”7 A speculative organism can therefore be described as “a whole borne in itself and complete”;8 it “does not have a ground outside itself; rather, it is grounded through itself, in its beginning, in the middle, and in the end.”9 A speculative organism is a “completed self-formation,”10 moving from a single “focus,”11 and “flowing together” and “converging with itself”12 in three syllogisms.13 This is a whole self-actively differentiating itself into necessary organs that are assimilated in content, but distinctive in internal structure. This whole needs its organs and therefore summons them to life; and having produced them, the whole lives not outside of them but within them, in their shape, by means of them. A speculative organism is a developed and grown-together totality of its organs in their living unity; for this organism is Universality, consisting of its singularities,14 or, what is the same thing, “substance as the totality of its accidents.”15 And each of these members lives by the immanent rhythm16 of its totality, receives into itself its single content, modifies this content in its own way, and, reproducing in itself the life of substance, reveals itself in a special, subordinate “individual totality.”17 Such is the nature of concrete synthesis. It always forms a kind of “synthetic unity,”18 “true,”19 “positive,”20 “inner,”21 “living,” and “concrete.”22 This “original and absolute unity,”23 full of content,24 is a “living 1. Such is the “bad” “empirical” infinity of incompletable progress. Comp., e.g., Glaub. 37, 66, 130, 135, 153; Log. II 239; Enc. I 120, 184, 207–8, 219, 269; Enc. III 113, 397, 399, and others. 2. Comp.: Log. I 147, 174, 183, 262, 380, 396, 467; Recht 43, 366; Beweise 393. 3. Log. I 174, 175, 282. 4. Phän. 125; Log. I 397. 5. Comp.: Log. I 163. 6. Log. II 177; Recht 43. 7. Log. I 297. Hegel’s emphasis. 8. Diff. 199. 9. Ibidem. 10. Diff. 248. 11. “Fokus”: Diff. 250. 12. Log. I 468; Log. III 240; Enc. II 619. 13. Enc. II 557; comp.: Phän. 223. 14. See chapter 5. 15. Comp.: Enc. I 300. 16. Comp.: “Rhythmus des organischen Ganzen”: Phän. 45. 17. Comp.: Enc. II 360; Enc. I 23, 359. 18. Comp.: Log. I 69, 229; Log. III 68; Enc. I xv, 22, 69, 157; Beweise 341. 19. “Warhafte Einheit ”: Glaub. 45; W. Beh. 331, 339, 356–57, 378; Phän. 4. 20. Comp.: W. Beh. 420. 21. W. Beh. 420. 22. Log. I 33, 50, 50. 23. W. Beh. 335. 24. Log. I 397.

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image”1 that is inwardly welded together by “undivided continuity”2 and absolute fluidity.3 It is a perfect organism, surrendering itself to “tranquil”4 and “harmonious”5 “self-enjoyment”6 and penetrating with the beating of its pulse all the arterial pathways of its organs.7 Always equal to itself, always directed toward itself,8 it compels its parts to lead a “joint and rich life”9 and to combine into a creative functional unity. Therefore, the life of this synthesis can be described as a closed pulsating of self-asserting, absolute individuality, as a closed system that conducts its “living motion”10 in many grown-together systems; or as a real end creating in itself an abundance of concrete content; or, finally, as the selfdetermining power of thought. Intrinsic to precisely this power of thought is the ability to “heal” dialectical wounds in such a way as “not to leave scars,”11 and to bring opposites to “living connection,”12 “to inner identity,”13 qualitative indifference,14 and tranquil equilibrium.15 Nor does this capacity for combining and growing-together abandon the Concept over the entire course of its ascending path. Wherever thought lives, its laws are realized, its mode of living is accomplished, and its rhythm is revealed. But since thought is reality itself,16 the living substance of all that exists, then all that exists realizes in its life the law of thought and reveals its subordination to the rhythm of thought. This means that all that exists must participate in dialectical division and speculative synthesis. According to Hegel, that is the way it actually is. That is why he says, “the true is concrete,”17 or, in other words, “all that is true is concrete.”18 “In every content, since it is concrete, determination can be understood as determinate oppositeness and therefore as contradiction.”19 But the peak and achievement are not in contradiction: “the content of the speculative idea consists in reconciliation,”20 and the essence of philosophical knowledge consists in the comprehending of unity.21 For all that is “rational”22 and “all that is spiritual”23 are concrete, like the “absolute Concept” itself.24

1. “Lebendige Gestalt ”: W. Beh. 391. 2. “Ungeteilte Kontinuität ”: Phän. 446; “durch keine Grenze . . . unterbrochen”: Log. I 212. 3. “Flüssigkeit”: comp.: Phän. 4, 193, 357. 4. Comp.: Phän. 210, 246. 5. “Harmonie”: Phän. 49; Recht 11; Beweise 458. 6. “Selbstgenuss”: W. Beh. 380. 7. “Jeder Pulsschlag ist durch all Pulsadern”: Beweise 446. 8. Comp.: “die Einheit des sichselbstgleichen Sichaufsichbeziehens”: Phän. 219–20; comp.: Log. I 212. 9. Diff. 242; Log. III 251. 10. W. Beh. 380. 11. Phän. 505. 12. Comp.: W. Beh. 420. 13. Comp.: Diff. 263; and also: Glaub. 87; Diff. 197, 296; Log. II 166; Log. III 117; Enc. I 324. 14. Comp.: W. Beh. 393; and also: W. Beh. 356–57, 357; Log. I 400. 15. Comp.: Log. I 109. 16. See chapter 4. 17. Enc. I 67. 18. Recht 43. 19. Enc. I 285; Enc. I 69; Ohl. 235. 20. “Versöhnung”: Enc. I xviii; Log. I 398; “Idee des Concidirens”: Ham. 87. 21. Comp.: Diff. 177, 180, 253; Log. I 44, 167. 22. Comp.: Recht 89; Enc. I 404. 23. Comp.: Beweise 296; Ph. G. 71; Log. I 33, 64. 24. Comp.: Log. III 41; Beweise 352.

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But the “concrete” arises always through a fusing o of concepts. Therefore, “all things,” according to their rational nature, are a “syllogism”;1, p or, what is the same thing, “everything rational is a syllogism.”2, q Such a concrete unification constitutes the creative “soul of the object,”3 or its ground, if you will. Therefore, “the syllogismr is the essential ground of everything true,”4 and philosophy, in cognizing the true, must always have in view that “the syllogisms is the principle of idealism.”5 The concrete syllogism, filling one determination with another, always produces a single whole, or totality. Therefore, one can say that “the true is whole,”6 or, what is the same thing, “absolute truth” has the form of “totality.”7 The real can subsist only in this form, for reason, in its “mysterious activity, raises” everything existing to it.8 “Reality is reality because it is totality and itself the system of potencies.”9 This holistic unity of meaning determinations always leads the purposeful, organic life of “infinite,” circular self-determination. That is why Hegel identifies the Concept with the end 10 and logical necessity with organic necessity.11 “True unity” is “organic unity,”12 and this synthesis is the law of all being whatever. That is why “every grain of dust is an organization.”13 This organic nature of thought is present in everything and compels us to recognize that everything “true and real is precisely . . . movement circling within itself.”14 The movement of thought issues from thought itself, and produces the concreteness of determinations out of itself. That is why “infinity” constitutes the “true character of thought”15 and forms the “ultimate source of all activity, life, and consciousness.”16 Infinity is the “light of thought”; it is universality and freedom;17 it is “the absolute Concept,”18 sustaining itself 19 and composing its form20 “out of itself.” In this consists the “eternity”21 of the absolute Concept; its being is “absolute presence,”22 self-active and therefore “immortal,”23 duration that is reflected in itself.24 It is always “concrete in itself”25 and creatively raises itself to absolute concreteness. Absolute concreteness is realized at the final and highest stage of the speculative process; it unfolds in the form of the “greatest extent,” i.e., the richest content,26 and at the same time in the form of the “highest intensity.”27 The entire multiplicity of accumulated speculative deter1. “All Dinge sind der Schluss”: Log. III 126. 2. “Alles Vernünftige ist ein Schluß ”: Log. III 119; Enc. I 344. 3. “Seele der Sache”: Log. III 117. 4. Enc. I 345. 5. “Syllogismus est principium Idealismi ”: Ros. 157. 6. Phän. 16. 7. Comp.: Glaub. 123. 8. Diff. 179. 9. W. Beh. 402. 10. Comp.: Phän. 34, 193, 199; Log. II 77; Log. III 210, 216, 218, 218, 227; Enc. I 118. 11. Comp.: Phän. 45. 12. Glaub. 45. 13. Diff. 253. 14. Phän. 577. 15. Glaub. 70. 16. Recht 43. 17. Log. I 148. 18. W. Beh. 343. 19. Enc. I 188. 20. Log. II 82. 21. Log. II 82. 22. Enc. II 55. 23. Beweise 427. 24. “In sich reflektirte Dauer”: Enc. II 55. 25. Enc. II 56. 26. Comp.: Log. III 349, 352; Enc. I 21. 27. Comp.: Log. III 349, 352.

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minations appears in absolute concreteness with the “identical stability”1 and with identical necessity. All the essential oppositions turn out to be exhausted and brought, by means of assimilation, to immediate simplicity 2 and clear tranquility.3 The concrete, in its final stage, is a certain “simplest depth”4 of thought, creating itself through self-contemplation. This is itself “real reason,”5 or the intuitive intellect,6 having achieved, in self-determination, the highest richness of meaning and the highest complete unity. And so this objektive thought, as creative subjectivity,7 this “unconditional concreteness,”8 complete and self-sufficient,9 this “fully concrete truth,”10 in all its supreme force and power,11 this self-produced absolute organism of meaning is the nature of Divinity itself.

Translator’s Notes a. Исход (outcome, issue, end) in the usual Russian meaning; but Ausgangspunkt in Il’in’s German translation (Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels, 148). b. For a study of this issue in Hegel’s Logic, see Philip T. Grier, “The Abstract and the Concrete in Hegel’s Science of Logic,” in Essays on Hegel’s Logic, ed. George di Giovanni (Albany, N.Y.: SUNY Press, 1990). c. “Thought” is here in the noun, not the verb form. d. The Russian here is разрешает себя (resolves itself); however, the German is aufgelöst, and “dissolves itself” fits the context better. e. Умозаключение, which would normally be translated as “deduction” or “conclusion.” f. Il’in explicates the Russian term умозаключение by the German term Schluß (in parentheses). Since Schluß standardly means “syllogism” as well as “conclusion” in the German philosophical lexicon, in principle the pair of terms (Russian and German) could still be read either as “syllogism” or “conclusion.” However, note that just below, Il’in also equates Schluß with the Russian term силлогизм (syllogism), leaving no doubt that “syllogism” is intended throughout. g. Слияние: more literally, “flowing together.” h. Слияние. i. The German phrase is “Die Antinomie dieses Schlusses”; Miller translates it as “the antinomy of this inference” (Science of Logic, 518). j. The term used for “syllogism” throughout this paragraph is not силлогизм but слияние.

1. Log. II 101. 2. “Einfach”: Phän. 17, 17, 18, 45, 209, 225, 568, 574; Log. I 70, 22; Log. III 349; Enc. II 685; Enc. III 326. 3. Phän. 37; Log. I 109–10; Enc. I 324. 4. Log. III 349. 5. Glaub. 44; Enc. II 36. 6. Comp.: Enc. I 117; see chapter 3. 7. Comp.: Log. III 349; Enc. I 324. 8. Enc. I 324. 9. Enc. I 361. 10. Beweise 366. 11. “Das Mächtigste und Übergreifendste”: Log. III 349.

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k. See G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Philosophy of Nature, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon, 1970), 266. l. The Russian term is слияние; however, in the German text (169) Il’in uses the term Kon-kretion. m. Слияние. n. Translation adapted from Miller, Science of Logic, 531; his “illusory being” was replaced with “show” (Schein). o. Слияние. p. Умозаключение: here certainly a “syllogism,” and not a “conclusion.” q. The Russian term here is слияние, which translates Schluß. r. Слияние. s. Силлогизм.

8

The Concept and Science

Philosophy is adequate cognition of the absolute Object. Philosophy is possible because the absolute Object enters undistorted into the sphere of the human soul, masters the soul’s powers and living tissue,a and genuinely realizes itself in it, filling it with its own living presence. Not extinguishing consciousness, but extinguishing its subjectivity, the human soul lives by the Object, doing its will and following its rhythm. And the Object lives by means of the soul, opening itself up in the soul’s consciousness as in its own consciousness, cognizing itself by means of the soul, and allowing the soul to cognize itself. And in this coincidence, the soul cognizes the Object as its own absolute essence, and the object is present in the soul as its living part. Such cognition is accomplished by the power of self-forgetfully intuitive thought; and therefore, the Object that is revealed to thought is the Concept. Hegel’s doctrine consists in the claim that the Concept, revealing itself to speculative thought, is Divinity itself, and that this Concept is the sole reality. This conception lies at the basis of all that Hegel acknowledged and professed. It constitutes the speculative Universality, as it were, of all his assertions. However paradoxical this conception may appear to the casual glance, it must be accepted and reflected upon with the greatest and most intense seriousness. Outside of this conception it is impossible to understand Hegel’s philosophy, and criticism directed against this conception is pointless.b One who rejects it must first master what he rejects, and if he does master it, he will become convinced that the internal difficulties of this conception have a classic character, and that they concentrate within themselves the living threads of all the great philosophers in history. He will also see how these difficulties that are produced by the doctrine of the essence of Divinity open up into a doctrine of the path of God. In what consists the essence of the divine Concept? This Concept is ideal reality, Universality, dialectically unfolding itself toward organic concreteness. Such is its “speculative meaning”;1 the “speculative concept of the Concept”2 reduces to this. 1. Enc. I 15.

2. Beweise 342: “der spekulative Begriff des Begriffes.” 163

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To grasp the essence of the Concept means to realize in oneself a “rational state,” because “the Concept is, in general, something rational.”1 Reason is a special form of thought.2 It is synonymous with “idea”3 and at the same time it expresses “that which is.”4 This means that it is at once ideal and real,5 i.e., that it is “the absolute identity of the highest idea and absolute reality.”6 Reason is a creative, “primally productive” power: it thinks, and that which is thought receives being, as such.7 For reason is intuitive abstract reason.c It is power in the form of thought: it creates, and what is created as such turns out to be meaning; for reason is thinking intuition. If the Concept is something rational, it unites in itself the ideality of meaning with genuine reality. That is what Hegel has in mind. In speaking of the Concept, one should think of the element of meaning. One should think not of chaos but of cosmos,8 not of a formless element but of a formed one, such that its form is necessary for its mode of being. With the power of imagination, one should convert speculative meaning 9 into a universal modus essendi, everywhere introducing its lawlike regularity and its forged rhythm. And here this strictly formed, rhythmic element of meaning is the Concept itself. The speculative Concept is nothing other than being. Not only is this Concept “something existent,”10 but it stands in a simple and immediate unity with being as such.11 The Concept, or what is the same thing, the “logically real,”12 is “true being.”13 It is “objektive thought,”14 existing “in itself” and “by itself.”15 The Concept is unconditioned and “selfsufficient,”16 and one who has cognized it “has reached the beyond.”17 In this, its sense, the Concept is not multiple but one.18 Different concepts are “only one and the same Concept,”19 “sustaining itself in all transitions”20 and unfolding itself into a whole system of determinate ideas that have grown together into one.21 And so, whatever philosophical thought cognizes, it will see in everything the Concept, as the unconditioned and sole element of meaning. The Concept is the “principal”22 and “essential”23 thing. It is the essence 24 1. Log. III 237. 2. Comp.: Ph. G. 16; see chapters 3 and 4. 3. “Synonym”: Recht 17–18. 4. “Das, was ist ”: Recht 19. 5. Comp.: Enc. I 388; see chapter 4. 6. Glaub. 38; comp.: W. Beh. 346; Phän. 151; Enc. I 381. 7. Comp.: Enc. III 353. 8. Comp.: on the rationality of the organic: Glaub. 44; Enc. I 117; Enc. II 36; see chapter 4. 9. See chapter 3. 10. “Ein Seiendes”: Phän. 151; comp.: Log. I 35. 11. Comp.: Phän. 439, 568; Enc. I 113, 312. See chapter 4. 12. Enc. I 147. 13. Log. I 50. 14. Comp.: Log. I 16; Enc. I 45, 59. 15. “Ansichsein”: Phän. 151 and others. 16. Comp.: Enc. I 361, 389. 17. Comp.: “das erreichte Jenseits”: Log. III 97. 18. “Nur Einer ”: Log. I 21; Log. III 52. 19. Log. III 52; Enc. I 229. 20. Log. III 227. 21. Comp.: Enc. I 385. 22. “Die Hauptsache”: Phän. 40. 23. “Das Wesentliche”: Phän. 186; Enc. I 39. 24. “Das Wesen”: Phän. 34, 41, 45, 126; Log. I 29, 36; Beweise 420.

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of what exists, “the true nature of things.”1 It is the “Logos,” “the reason of what is,” “the truth of what bears the name of things.”2 The Concept “contains the value of the object,” its “inner.”3 The Concept constitutes the “object’s own self.”4 Therefore, one can say that “thought is the principle and essence of the world.”5 But since philosophy recognizes as real only what is essential, “nature,” “value,” or “selfhood,” the Concept turns out to be the object itself 6 and the sole 7 object of true knowledge. One could say, “the objektive Concept of things constitutes the object itself,”8 or otherwise: “the Concept in its objektivity is the object existing in and for itself.”9 The identity of the object and the Concept means not only that every object, in its inner essence, is equal to its speculative meaning,10 so that the method of this meaning, or “the activity of the Concept,” is “the proper method of every object,”11 its “simple living pulse.”12 But it also means that the Concept is, itself, its own object: it is not merely thought, but thinks itself. “The absolute Concept makes itself its own object.”13 The essence of the absolute Concept lies in the fact that “knowledge and the object of knowledge are one and the same,”14 so that the Concept is “self-thinking” and “self-intuiting,” and the “subject” coincides with the “objekt.” Thus, the absolute Concept is the genuine, objektive essence, the Object that is real and one in all things. This means that the absolute Concept is “substance.” The element of meaning is not only “essential”; it is also “substantial in all things.”15 The concept is “one, universal Substance,”16 or in other words, “reason”17 is “the substantial ground”18 of all being and “life.”19 That is why philosophy asserts that speculative meaning is the “omnipresent soul.”20 The absolute Concept is the “simple essence of life, the soul of the world, the universal blood, so to speak,” which “omnipresent, . . . pulsates within itself, not setting itself into motion, and vibrates within itself without falling into unrest.”21 The substantiality of the Concept is expressed in the fact that besides it there is nothing. “The absolute Idea alone is being, everlasting life, self-knowing truth, and moreover, all truth whatever.”22 “The Idea itself is all.”23 In other words, “the Concept is the only actuality.”24 All that “truly is” is the Concept;25 “everything else” is only “error, obscu1. Log. I 29. 2. Log. I 21. 3. Enc. I 39. 4. Phän. 48. 5. Log. I 36. 6. Phän. 247. 7. Comp.: “der einzige Gegenstand”: Log. III 328; Enc. III 464, 465. 8. Log. I 16. 9. Log. III 33. 10. Comp.: Log. III 339. 11. Log. III 330. 12. Log. I 18. 13. Phän. 434. 14. Phän. 412. 15. Comp.: Enc. I 229. 16. Comp.: Enc. I 386; comp.: Phän. 307; Enc. I 315. 17. Ph. G. 12. 18. Log. I 21. 19. Log. III 247. 20. “Allgegenwärtige Seele”: Log. III 247. Comp.: Phän. 41–42, 46, 126. 21. Phän. 126. 22. Log. III 328. 23. Krit. 34. 24. Phän. 404; comp.: Log. III 238; Enc. I 385; Recht 17, 22. 25. Log. III 318.

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rity, opinion, striving, arbitrariness, and transitoriness.”1 Substance cannot fail to be the sole reality. Otherwise, it would be limited by otherbeing, passive, and then it would lose its substantiality. It is characteristic of substance to preserve in itself the source of its being, i.e., to be a living power. The absolute Concept is not only the “substance of life,”2 or the “essence of life,”3 but it is itself the genuine power of life. Speculative meaning is “that which is most alive and most active,”4 or, what is the same thing, “the idea is eternal vitality.”5 That which participates in the Concept participates in life itself; and conversely: all that is alive lives by the power of meaning. For reason is “infinite power,”6 harboring within itself its primal source. The Concept is something “powerful”7 and “ruling”;8 it is all power; it is “all-powerful.”9 This living power of the Concept is wholly expressed in its selfdetermining: 10 the Concept “relates to itself,”11 “returns into itself,”12 “moves itself,”13 and, in distinguishing itself from itself, determines itself.14 In all of this, the Concept exclusively follows its own initiative and its own necessity: it creates itself according to its own law. This autonomy d of reason is a new expression of its substantiality. Speculative meaning obeys only its own immanent, self-specifying,e or what is the same thing, absolute, necessity. Apart from this necessity, there is no other necessity, nor can there be any. “Necessity as such is implicitly the Concept that relates itself to itself,”15, f or in other words, “necessity is the Concept itself.”16 The immanent necessity of the Concept consists in the fact that the Concept has in itself “its own beginning”17 and “its own conditions.”18 The Concept is conditioned only by itself and its own nature; it does not subsist “in another,” “from another,” or “through another.”19 The Concept wholly “rests upon itself,”20 abides “at home with itself,”21 and potentially 22 preserves in itself the whole “inner possibility.”23 The life of the Concept proceeds in “harmony with itself”24 and in inner “peace.”25 This means that the Concept is free, for freedom is nothing other than pure, complete inner autonomy,g unfettered by any other-being. That is why Hegel says that freedom is the “truth” of necessity,26 1. Log. III 328; comp.: Recht 22. 2. Log. III 247. 3. Phän. 126. 4. Log. I 248. 5. Enc. I 389; comp.: Log. III 243, 345, 249, 249; Enc. I 391. 6. Ph. G. 12. 7. “Machthabender Begriff ”: Log. III 240. 8. “Das Herrschende”: Phän. 393. 9. “Allmacht des Begriffes”: Log. 116. 10. See chapters 4, 5, 6, and 7. 11. Comp.: Log. III 249, 345. 12. Phän. 51. 13. Phän. 27, 45, 177, 193. 14. Comp.: Log. I 49; Log. III 208, 249; Enc. I 386, 389; Enc. III 427; Recht 352, 365; Ph. G. 16, 38, 63; Beweise B 473. 15. Enc. I 405. 16. Enc. I 293. 17. Beweise 381. 18. Beweise 379. 19. Beweise 403. 20. Beweise 403. 21. Beweise 404. 22. Enc. III 326. 23. Comp.: Phän. 254. 24. Beweise 404. 25. Beweise 404. 26. Beweise 367.

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and explains it thus: “The Concept itself is for itself a force of necessity and actual freedom”;1 it is something “free, as a substantial force existing for itself.”2 Thus, the Concept is a free,3 rational force self-actively producing its own form4 and its own content.5 This means that the Concept is not only a “substance” but at the same time a “subject.” The meaning-substance is a subject because this substance is not dead and does not stagnate in immobility, but rather always remains in its essence a living self-activity. The subject is a principle of creative restlessness:6 it “moves itself,”7 relates to itself 8 negatively,9 and produces itself 10in this reflection.11 The subject lives in itself 12 and its life is its “own activity”;13 it carries out a dialectical process within itself;14 calls forth contradictions within itself 15 and through them penetrates into itself.16 The subject thereby communicates to itself a “form of selfhood,”17 a form of creative, infinite18 self-sufficiency 19 and at the same time of “self-certain”20 concrete singularity.21 But precisely the absolute Concept, and only it, has all these properties, and moreover has them in the highest degree, such that it is “in itself, through and through subjective.”22 “Reason is substance, infinite force, infinite matter, infinite form,” and at the same time the creative production of “this its own content.”23 Or, in other words, the Concept, as subject, is nothing other “than a series of its own actions”24 that are creatively concentrated in a single, all-encompassing,25 most rich, most concrete result.26 Single and substantial, the Concept can be defined as “universal selfhood.”27 The absolute Concept, as “universal Substance” and at the same time as “subject,” is Spirit.28 This means that the fundamental property of the Concept—“self-activity in self-creation”29—constitutes its spirituality.30 “Spirit” is the Concept having itself as its objekt;31 precisely such is always in essence its speculative meaning. Therefore, one can say that 1. Enc. I 313. 2. Enc. I 315. 3. Comp.: Log. III 209, 318, 318; Enc. I 22, 386, 390, 396; Enc. III 427; Ph. G. 16, 38, and others. 4. Ph. G. 12. 5. Phän. 602; Ph. G. 12. 6. Comp.: Phän. 18, 17, 48. 7. Phän. 15, 17, 45, 19, 35, 36. 8. Phän. 18. 9. Phän. 15. 10. Phän. 15, 20, 36; Beweise 459. 11. Phän. 18, 18, 43, 48; Enc. I 386; Enc. III 385. 12. Phän. 36. 13. Phän. 29; comp.: Phän. 45, 602. 14. Phän. 52. 15. Log. III 342, 343; Enc. II 602; comp.: Enc. I 390. 16. Phän. 48, 608; Beweise 343. 17. Phän. 402, 609; Enc. II 423; comp.: Phän. 29. 18. Enc. I 391; Enc. II 237, 598; Enc. III 437, 451. 19. Log. I 55. 20. Phän. 442. 21. Log. III 345. 22. “Durch und durch”: Phän. 52. 23. Ph. G. 12. 24. Comp.: Recht 166. 25. Comp.: Log. III 349; Enc. I 324. 26. Comp.: Log. III 349; Enc. I 324. 27. Phän. 572; comp.: Phän. 442, 602. 28. Comp.: Phän. 19; Enc. I 386. 29. See chapter 4. 30. Comp.: Phän. 20. 31. Enc. III 47.

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speculative concepts are “spiritual essences,”1 or that the Concept is the “pure element” of spiritual being,2 the “pure selfhood” of Spirit.3 One can say that Spirit is the self-thinking Concept: in it the “subject” coincides with the “objekt”;4 “essence” is in unity with “selfhood”;5 and “matter” is identical with “form.”6 Spirit is the element of thinking,7 of reason,8 whence Spirit’s universality,9 its inner negative10 unrest 11 and its true infinity.12 Spirit always remains “in itself” and “at home with itself”;13 it possesses its center in itself 14 and its life is pure self-determination. Spirit “is only that which it makes itself and it makes itself only that which it is in itself.”15 Spirit “takes as its starting point only its own being and has a relation only to its own determinations”;16 in this consists its substantiality and its freedom.17 For Spirit, to live is “to be for itself”18 and to disclose its own essence. It is “substance or real spiritual being,”19 whose essence lies in the fact that it reveals itself to itself.20 In these its properties, Spirit is itself “knowing truth”21 and the criterion of every essence whatever: “all that possesses value and validity has a spiritual nature.”22, h Thus, the absolute Concept is a living and self-active, and therefore subjective Substance, a creative spiritual being. In it lies the source of all and every activity whatever. All to which “the Concept is immanent”23 lives and acts. The Concept is “eternal creativity,”24 and its movement is “universal absolute activity.”25 In this activity, the Concept reveals itself from its depths, unfolds its content, or what is the same thing, “realizes itself.”26 Such is the meaning of the inner negativity of the Concept, of its “contradictions” and of all its dialectical sufferings. The Concept is that spiritual subject which produces in itself an inner dialectical disruption, grows together its opposites, and heals its ruptures in such a way that no scars remain. That is why the Concept has both a “dialectical”27 and a “concrete”28 nature. It is always concrete and rich because it remains “the

1. Phän. 27. 2. Phän. 609. 3. Log. III 59. 4. Comp.: Enc. III 13, 283, 436. 5. Phän. 541. 6. Comp.: Enc. III 427, 436. 7. Comp.: “das Denken überhaupt”: Recht 34. 8. Log. I 7. 9. Ph. G. 143. 10. Enc. III 24. 11. Phän. 539. 12. Comp.: Enc. III 35; Ph. G. 55; Beweise 427. 13. Ph. G. 21. 14. Ph. G. 21. 15. Ph. G. 52. Comp.: Phän. 605. 16. Enc. III 288. 17. Comp.: Ph. G. 20, 21, 23, 53. 18. Comp.: Phän. 406; Enc. III 447. 19. Phän. 323; Enc. III 440. 20. Comp.: Enc. III 27, 29, 294; Enc. III 447, 451, 452; Ph. G. 13. 21. Comp.: Enc. III 287. 22. Enc. I xl. 23. Comp.: Phän. 53. 24. “Ewige Schöpfung”: Enc. I 398. 25. Comp.: Log. III 330, 330, 342. 26. Comp.: Phän. 63; Log. III 239; Enc. I 386, 413; Enc. III 427; Recht 208. 27. Comp.: Phän. 601; Log. I 217; Log. II 72; Log. III 340, 342; Enc. I 389, 390; Enc. II 604; Ph. G. 63. 28. Comp.: Log. I 127; Log. III 41, 58, 206; Enc. I xv, 69, 323, 324, 324, 361, 386; Enc. III 464–65; Beweise 352, 366; comp. on the concreteness of spirit: Ph. G. 71; Beweise 296, 427; Bhag. 417, 419; 5 Rec. 172, and others.

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ground and totality” of all the preceding determinations;1 and, maturing gradually to absolute concreteness and supreme richness, the Concept manifests, finally, “the highest intensity of the subject in the ideality of all concrete determinations.”2 In this state of the greatest saturation with content, the Concept asserts itself as “concrete Universality,”3 or as all-encompassing “organic totality.”4 Reason sums up its “purposive activity,”5 and the goal appears in the form of “the active Concept.”6 The meaning-substance completes its revelation, and Spirit appears in the form of the absolute richness of grown-together meanings. The revelation is completed, and the Concept has disclosed its divinity. The Concept is divine because it combines in itself absolute reality and absolute perfection. It possesses absolute reality even when it has not yet fully realized itself; it possesses absolute reality still more when it reaches the heights and reveals all its potential content. It possesses absolute perfection even when it mysteriously conceals this perfection in its depths. It possesses absolute perfection still more when organic concreteness becomes its actualized form. In this state of supreme and absolute concreteness, the Concept appears as truly actualized infinity:7 it creates itself, drawing all its force and all its content from its own depths. The infinity of the Concept is a manifestation not of poverty but of richness, not of negation but of affirmation, not of hunger but of possession, not of defect but of presence and completeness. This is the “process” of Heraclitus, closed up in the “sphere” of Parmenides. The Concept therefore possesses the eternity,8 the nontransitory presence, or, what is the same thing, the immortal9 duration of the primordial ground. The rational element is “causa sui,” and therefore it “non potest non esse.”i This is the “substance” of Spinoza converted into Fichte’s “spiritual activity,” but asserted in the form of “objektive meaning.” The process of concretization brings this living substance of meaning to the point that it embraces all, while preserving the greatest simplicity 10 of content. With all its richness, the Concept remains “clear” and “transparent”;11 and with all its simplicity, it remains absolutely complex and profound. The Concept manifests that great simplicity of universal

1. Log. III 58. 2. Beweise 344. 3. Comp.: Log. III 99, 105; Enc. I 66, 340, 374, 398; Recht 40–41, and others. 4. Comp.: Log. III 240; Enc. I 28, 315. 5. Phän. 17. 6. Comp.: Enc. I 118; Phän. 34; Log. III 227, 233; Log. II 77. 7. Comp.: Glaub. 9, 9, 70, 71; W. Beh. 343, 359; Phän. 126; Log. I 148, 297; Log. III 213, 277, 318; Recht 40–41; Beweise 393. 8. Comp.: Enc. I 389; Enc. II 51, 55; on the eternity of Spirit: Enc. III 37; Ph. G. 13, 107; Beweise 427. 9. “Der Begriff selbst ist unsterblich”: Log. III 78. 10. Phän. 8, 45, 574. 11. Enc. I 324.

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qualitativeness that appeared to the ancient thinkers in their primordial ground.j In reaching this height, the Concept achieves the title of Idea, which signifies its “adequacy,”1 or, if you will, the fullness of its objektivity and reality.2 The Idea is the highest status k of the Concept,3 and it reaches this status independently. It thus reveals that it is the Absolute itself,4 or Divinity. In and for itself, the Concept is the Infinite and the Absolute.5 There is nothing that would be more real, higher, or more perfect than the Concept; it is the highest and the most final. Everything comes from it and through it; everything is the Concept. “The Concept is everything,”6 or conversely: “everything is the Concept.”7 The absolute idea is “all truth,”8 or in other words: “every determinateness” in its true makeup is the Concept itself.9 The Concept is nothing other than “knowledge of itself” and knowledge of “everything as itself.”10 In this lie its absoluteness and substantiality, for “the Absolute is the universal and one idea” transforming itself through self-active “original divisionsl into a system of determinate ideas.”11 Precisely in these its properties, the Idea is the Divinity itself. “God in his essence is thought, thinking as such”;12 he is “supreme thought,”13 or, in other words, God is the “ultimate depth of thought, the absolute Concept,” the “Object” itself.14 This absolute thought coincides with reality itself,15 this rhythmically living element of meaning is divine. God is one;16 he is not only “substance” but also “subject”:17 he is something “living,”18 and His life consists in self-active revelation.19 “God is activity—activity that is free, self-referring, and remaining with itself.”20 In realizing this activity, Divinity reveals itself, manifests itself,21 or in other words, “shows itself,”22 “expounds itself.”23 By this is determined the “content of the Absolute”:24 “its exposition is its own work,”25 and in its tranquil self-creation is revealed the “activity” of substance itself.26 God is self-active thought; he is free because he is a “force” capable of remaining itself.27 In conforming to the “absolute necessity” of its 1. Log. III 236. 2. Comp.: Log. III 237; Enc. I 413. 3. Comp.: Log. III 277, 239; Enc. I 386; Enc. III 468. 4. Enc. I 22. 5. Log. III 213; comp.: Log. I 36; Log. II 6; Log. III 175; Enc. I 22. 6. “Der Begriff is Alles”: Log. III 330. 7. “Alles ist Begriff ”: Enc. I 345; “Alles an sich ist der Begriff ”: Log. I 242. 8. Log. III 328. 9. Comp.: Enc. I 324. 10. Comp.: on method, Log. III 348. 11. Enc. I 385. 12. Beweise 420; comp.: Ph. G. 38. 13. Beweise 301. 14. “Gott, das Tiefste des Gedankens, der absolute Begriff, der Gegenstand ist”: Beweise 342. 15. Comp.: Glaub. 134; Enc. I 112. 16. Beweise 350. 17. Enc. I xvii. 18. Comp.: Beweise 462. 19. Comp.: Solg. 485. 20. Beweise 312; comp.: Phän. 57. 21. Comp.: Log. II 193, 200, 219; Beweise 330. 22. Log. II 193. 23. Log. II 189, 218, 219. 24. Log. II 193. 25. Log. II 189. 26. Log. II 221. 27. Gösch. 132; comp.: Beweise 313.

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self-determination,1 the Divinity, as creative thought, creates itself as a function of self-cognition,2 thereby affirming its spirituality.3 God is Spirit;4 he is more than a living subject;5 he is self-thinking Universality,6 the infinite and eternal7 Concept, raising itself to the level of “concrete totality.”8 In these his properties, “God is the truth and he alone is the truth”;9 in them he is “the actual itself, and he alone is truly actual.”10 All philosophy leads to this cognition.11 All philosophy establishes that, for God, there is nothing “external.” “Besides God,” philosophy does not acknowledge “any subsistence or any thing.”12 “The absolute idea . . . is the sole object and content of philosophy.”13 This means that true philosophy professes pantheism. According to the usual understanding, “pantheism” is a doctrine that identifies God with all and every reality whatever. “God is all”—that is the generally accepted expression of this doctrine; and in this expression, the depths of the conception remain in an obscure, unclarified state. To clarify the essence of this conception is to fill the abstract “identity” with a living, determinate intuition, both metaphysically genuine and religiously life-giving. If we agree that the term “world” signifies all and every reality whatever excepting the Divinity itself, the assimilation of “pantheism” will consist in an adequate experiencing of a certain particular relation between the “world” and God. This interrelation of Divinity and the world can be viewed in various ways. First, one can take as one’s point of departure the reality of the world as such, in order then to acknowledge its divinity. This means that the soul receives the being of the world, with all its properties and in all its content: the world exists; it is as it is—in space and in time, under conditions of material multiplicity and causal interaction, in all its chaotic lawlikeness. This world is all, for in itself it exhausts the whole aggregate of reality. Thus the religiously intuiting soul comes to know that, apart from this “world,” there is nothing and no one, and that the world as such, by itself, is divine. The world is all, and this “all” of the world is divine. Hegel decisively rejects such a form of “pantheism.” It is impossible and absurd to acknowledge the genuine and sole reality of the concrete, 1. Comp.: Log. II 219; Beweise 410. 2. Comp.: Phän. 571; Enc. I 141–42; Enc. III 448; Beweise 301. 3. Comp.: Enc. I 141–42; Beweise 301. 4. Comp.: Phän. 571; Log. III 174; Enc. III 29; Beweise 301, 330; Beweise B 470. 5. Comp.: Enc. I 111. 6. Comp.: Enc. III 456. 7. Enc. I 14; Beweise 309. 8. Enc. I 113; comp.: Phän. 551. 9. Enc. I 3. 10. Enc. I 10. 11. Comp.: Glaub. 15, 19–20; Recht 20. 12. Glaub. 134. 13. Log. III 328.

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empirical world and to deify this world in all its ill-fated properties and imperfections. To say that “God is all” and to mean by this “all” “all things in their existing fragmented singularity,”1 the entire “infinite multiplicity of empirical existences”2 without distinction;3 to say that “God is the world,” to attribute to this empirical world “being and substantiality”4 and to acknowledge that this “being of worldly things is God,”5 means truly to realize a supreme “meaninglessness and perversion of concepts.”6 It is to deify the “finite”7 as such, to “drag the divine into the external and sensuous,”8 and to effect an “infinite fragmentation of divine reality into infinite materiality.”9 It would be absurd10 to attribute divinity to every individual thing in the form in which it exists. On this path, thought arrives not at pantheism but at its opposite, for the finite is affirmed and preserved as positive and, at the same time, it is given out as infinite; and evil, remaining evil, is professed as good.11 Pantheism is not reducible to the blasphemous perversion of objects. It does not assert the reality of evil in order to give it out as something divine. On this path, perhaps, “all-satanism” may arise, or thought may arrive at some absurd “alldivinity,”12 professing that all singular empirical things are divine or directly constitute Divinity.13 But all that would be completely alien to pantheism. It would have been appropriate even so “to ascertain, simply as a fact, whether any philosopher or any individual has actually attributed to all things a reality, a substantiality, existing by-itself-and-in-itself, and regarded them as God.”14 One can say with certainty that such an absurdity has never entered anyone’s head.15 Such a “pantheism” is possible only so long as one’s conception of the world hovers in some indeterminate void.16 For when a true pantheism asserts the “universality” of the Divinity, then, in speaking of “all,” it does not have in view “every existence in its finiteness and singularity.”17 For this pantheism, “God’s omnipresence” remains incompatible with the “true reality of sensuous things.”18 A metaphysically distinct concept of the world liberates the soul from “the pathetic conception that all is God and God is all,”19 and prevents man from degrading the Divine. Thus, on this path, the doctrine acquires the character of a monism, but only of a senseless, empiricistic monism, the objective unity of which disintegrates into an infinite multiplicity. However, this unity establishes, in essence, not “pantheism” but empiricistic “pancosmism,” coinciding in its 1. Beweise 441. 2. Enc. III 460. 3. Enc. III 456. 4. Enc. III 456. 5. Enc. III 456. 6. Enc. III 456. 7. Beweise 441. 8. Enc. III 462, Remark. 9. Enc. III 467. 10. “Ungereimtheit ”: Beweise 441. 11. Comp.: Bhag. 422. 12. “Allesgötterei”: Bhag. 422. 13. Bhag. 422. 14. Enc. III 457, Hegel’s emphasis; comp.: Enc. III 460. 15. Beweise 441. 16. “Im unbestimmten Blauen”: Enc. III 460. 17. Beweise 441. 18. Enc. III 466, 467. 19. Enc. III 459.

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inner meaning with atheism: the world exists; as such it is, by itself, divine; consequently, God does not exist. Second, one can take as one’s immediate point of departure the reality of the world and God, coexisting in parallel, but in such a way that their being does not exclude the possibility of identical coincidence. This coincidence can present itself as a potential state capable of realizing itself at the culmination of all development; or, finally, as a state characteristic both of the starting point and of the end. In all these conceptions, the “identity” of God and the world presupposes the possibility of their essential diremption: the “world” can be found in Divinity, but it can also exist independently. Divinity can be dissolved in the world, but it can also stand in focused opposition to it. The union of the two sides signifies the highest state, but this state is not the only possible one. The identity of the world and Divinity is a result of their union, but it is not a necessary and constitutive law of their being. Divinity, by itself, is not the world and is not immanent in it; and the world, by itself, is not Divinity and is not immanent in it. The world can also exist outside of God, remaining an “other-being” for Him; Divinity retains its divinity even when the world opposes it, is not seized by it, and does not include it in itself. Such a conception must be acknowledged as “dualistic,” for it admits the possibility of other-being for the Divinity. And even if this conception attempts to rise to pantheism and to establish the “identity of God and the world,”1 it imparts “stable substantiality”2 to both sides and unites them in a new, “indeterminate” identity,3 having a higher divinity. In the best case, one obtains the false conception that “God is composed of God and the world,”4 and dualism is introduced into the very essence of Divinity. Thus, on this path, the conception acquires the character of dualism, and the doctrine of “total unity”5 cedes its place to the doctrine of the great bifurcation: the world is separated from Divinity and Divinity is broken up within its own limits. This conception asserts that the identity of God and the world is higher than their non-identity; but it is powerless to demonstrate the genuine reality of “pantheism.” In this interpretation, Divinity itself loses its divinity and is transformed either into a limited reality, into lost bliss, or into an unrealizable ideal. Pantheism becomes a doctrine of that which does not exist, or, as applied to genuine reality, a bankrupt doctrine. Third, and last, one can take as one’s point of departure the reality of God as the sole true reality, in order then to perceive God’s genuine rela1. Enc. III 465. 2. Enc. III 465. 3. Enc. III 465. 4. Enc. III 466. 5. “All-Eins-Lehre”: Enc. III 467.

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tion to the world, i.e., to recognize the world as real only to the degree that God is present in it. This is the true conception of pantheism. True pantheism professes God’s existence: God exists: he is such as he is—reason, substance, subject, infinite self-activity, absolute Concept, spirit producing itself by thought. In these its properties, Divinity “is all,” i.e., Divinity exhausts the whole aggregate of reality. The religiously intuiting soul thus comes to know that nothing exists and nothing can exist besides God known and professedm in this way. In this lies the essence of the pantheistic doctrine. It is clear that, in such a conception, Divinity is one and unique; every true pantheism, like the doctrines of the Hindus, Parmenides, and Spinoza, is a monotheism.1 Such a doctrine inevitably acknowledges that the world is either a state of the Divinity itself, or something nonexisting. The being of God as the one, unique substance signifies thereby the nonbeing of the world as a particular, self-sufficient existence. The “absolute selfsufficiency of the Divinity does not permit it to go out of itself”2 and set a principle of distinct being for some world. Therefore, whatever bears the name “world,” and is not an illusion, is the genuine tissue of the being of God; and this means that the world as such does not exist. That is why every true pantheism, such as the doctrine of the Hindus, Parmenides, and Spinoza, is an acosmism.3 Thus, true pantheism teaches the negation of the concreteempirical world and the recognition of the exclusive reality of the Divinity. In the depths of the Divinity, “the being of external things has no truth.”4 These things “do not preserve their being.”5 “The empirical totality of the world disappears” in God:6 everything accidental is swallowed up by substance;7 everything finite turns out to be infinite;8 there stands revealed the “sublation of finite things,”9 their “nothingness,”10 their nonbeing.11 The “sole existent”12 turns out to be the “absolutely one”13 “infinite and eternal.”14 “Only substance,”15 as being that is hidden in existence,16 “is divine and is God.”17 Only substance is real. “There is God and only God,” and there is no world.18 All of this can be expressed thus: “God’s essence” is an abyss into which all that is finite sinks and in which it perishes.19 Or, otherwise: “Only the absolute is true and only the true is absolute”;20 everything else 1. Enc. III 463. 2. Beweise 339; comp., in particular: Phän. 584. 3. “Akosmismums”: Enc. I 110; Enc. III 463; comp.: Bhag. 422, 423; Beweise 442. 4. Enc. III 456, 463. 5. Enc. III 456. 6. Enc. III 459. 7. Comp.: Enc. III 459. 8. Comp.: Beweise 442. 9. “Aufgehobensein”: Jac. 9: “als negirte”: Bhag. 423. 10. “Ein Nichtiges”: Beweise 442. 11. “Kein Sein mehr”: Beweise 442. 12. Hinr. 282. 13. Beweise 442. 14. Hinr. 282. 15. Enc. III 459. 16. “Nur das Sein ihres Daseins”: Bhag. 421; comp.: Enc. I 109–11; Enc. III 459, 463. 17. Enc. III 459. 18. Comp.: Enc. I 110. 19. “Untergang,” “Grund,” “Abgrund”: Log. II 123. 20. Phän. 61.

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is decay and nothingness.1 Or, still more simply: “Thinking is real, in fact, the only real thing.”2 A profession of pantheism on Hegel’s lips signifies that he regards all reality as being in the absolute Concept and its life, and that the absolute Concept, or, what is the same thing, speculative Meaning, is in its conception Divinity itself. But the life of the absolute Concept unfolds itself into a system, and this system is nothing other than Science. From this arises the extraordinarily bold system of panepistemism. In fact, the pantheism asserted by Hegel has a “panlogistic” character. His doctrine that all reality belongs exclusively to Divinity is disclosed only to one who has trained his inner gaze to an intuiting of the absolute Concept as the source of divine revelation. The absolute Concept is divine not because it “participates” in Divinity’s power and grace but because it is Divinity itself: it is substance, and subject, and the infinite, and the universal, and Spirit. Therefore, the “pantheism” of Hegel can most precisely be expressed by the theses: “the Concept is all”;3 “all is the Concept”;4 “all is, by itself, the Concept”;5 “the one Concept is the substantial in all”;6 “the Concept is alone the actual”;7 “only the absolute Idea is being”;8 “that which is, is only insofar as it is thought”;9 the nature of all that exists consists in “being its own Concept in its being,” and in this consists “logical necessity,”10 and so forth. Pantheism asserts that there is nothing besides speculative Meaning, for it is the sole reality. Thus, all that is real is truly God; God is the absolute Concept; the absolute Concept is all that is truly real. Pantheism was conceived by Hegel in terms of panlogism. However, the absolute Concept is not something dead and static; on the contrary, it is a living subject, itself creating and disclosing itself. In this creativity, the Concept obeys its own inner necessity, both logical and organic; it obeys this necessity exclusively, and therefore it is free. The concept discloses itself as an organic whole of concrete contents, as a grown-together unity of many determinations. Disclosing itself more and more but always remaining concrete, this series of determinations is nothing other than speculative Science, or, what is the same thing, philosophy. When a speculative philosopher speaks of “Science,” it is necessary to let go of the usual understanding of it as a “collection of plausible assertions thought out by humans.” According to Hegel, science is not something “subjective” and “anthropological”; on the contrary, it is objektive and divine. It is the unfolded, actualized system of the genuine being of God. 1. See chapters 1, 3, and 4. 2. Ohl. 243. 3. Log. III 330, 330, 348. 4. Enc. I 345. 5. Log. I 242. 6. Enc. I 229. 7. Phän. 404. 8. Log. III 328. 9. Enc. III 353. 10. Phän. 45.

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Science is just as little “subjective” as the absolute Concept, because it is precisely the Concept that constitutes the pure “element” of its being,1 its “ether,”2 its modus essendi. The Concept is the objektive and pure “essence” of meaning. The Concept moves and develops itself; it is this movement, taken as a systematic whole, that is Science.3 “Science is the self-development of the Concept,”4 its “organic movement, rooted in the Concept itself.”5 If you will, Science can be defined as a system of “cognitions,” with the essential explanation added that “knowledge” is not a subjective state of the soul, and not a content assimilated by human thought, but the objektive state of the Concept itself. An individual who has devoted himself to the life of the Concept 6 participates in cognition no longer as an individual human but as a genuine, living, subjective modus of the Concept. Therefore, in cognition, it is not the individual human who cognizes the Concept or the Object, but the Object itself that cognizes itself, or, what is the same thing, the Concept itself realizing its own self-cognition. Scientific cognition is the “self-cognition of Reason,”7 or the “self-comprehension of the Concept.”8 Therefore, Science itself is a system of acts of cognition accomplished through “objective reason’s own work.”9 It is organized exclusively “through the Concept’s own life”10 as a function of its “self-consciousness.”11 Science is produced “by the content’s immanent selfhood,”12 self-sufficiently “determining its own rhythm.”13 In the scientific process, “knowledge and the object of knowledge are one and the same thing, i.e., the absolute Concept.”14 The absolute Concept is itself the subject and itself its own objekt 15—the Object, rational by itself 16 and subjectively cognizing itself.17 In other words, Science is the genuine life of Spirit, its existence,18 its developed self-realization,19 the crown of its being.20 Science is truth that has come to know itself 21 in its own completed revelation; it is a manifestation22 of Divinity to itself. Therefore, Science is the genuine tissue of God’s life. Science is genuine reality. It is made up entirely of speculative meaning, and this meaning is the true “thing in itself.”23 Science is absolute essence: its “definition” contains “the most essential, most proper nature” of the object.24 Science, and only Science, is the “absolute truth,”25 the “organic whole”26 consisting of speculative determinations of Divinity. “The 1. Phän. 22, 603. 2. Comp.: Phän. 20, 609. 3. Phän. 27, 37, 56; Log. I 8. 4. Enc. I xxviii. 5. Phän. 609. 6. Phan. 42–43. See chapter 3. 7. Phän. 412. 8. Log. III 244; comp.: Phän. 20. 9. Recht 81. 10. Phän. 41. 11. Comp.: Phän. 20; Log. I 35. 12. Phän. 44. 13. Phän. 45. 14. Phän. 412. 15. Comp.: Log. III 245, 331; comp.: Log. III 262. 16. Recht 66. 17. Log. III 331. 18. Enc. III 294; comp.: Phän. 693. 19. Phän. 20, 418, 606, 612. 20. “Krone”: Phan. 11. 21. Comp.: Phän. 541. 22. Comp.: Enc. III 447. 23. Comp.: Log. I 35, 127. 24. Log. I 37. 25. Log. I 35. 26. Phän. 27, 39; comp.: Enc. I 26.

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moving soul” of the dialectic1 unfolds all of the states of God, and the force of concrete unification links them into the “totality” of the divine Idea.2 Only Science is true; only Divinity is true.3 This is clear because science becomes true Science only through the presence of the Absolute,4 for God is Science. This means that the Concept’s self-determination is at once a theogonic and a scientific process; that every scientific “law” is thereby a mode of the being of God; that the system of scientific philosophy as such unfolds the living “history” of divine suffering and ascension. In fact, every scientific category is a special classic state of the Divinity; not because it “faithfully” “depicts” or “conveys” this state but because it itself is this state. The content of every scientific category is thereby the content of Divinity itself; and one who thinks this category adequately is possessed by the genuine presence of the divine Substance, which, in him, by the powers of his soul, has attained self-cognition. God is living Meaning; and besides this living Meaning, there is in general nothing, and Science is the system of living Meaning. Therefore, every change of living Meaning in Science is a change produced by Divinity in its own genuine tissue. And when an individual human devotes himself to speculatively scientific thinking, this process has an objektivemetaphysical significance: this Divinity cognizes through him, as through its own organ, itself in its pure essence, i.e., in the form of the pure, dialectically evolving, concretely self-enriching scientific Concept. That is why dialectic is not just a “scientific” law but a divine-scientific law: a form of divine revelation. In just the same way, universality is not simply a “logical” category but a divine-scientific mode of being: a form of divine subsistence. And concreteness is not simply a variety of “synthesis” but a divine-scientific attainment: a form of God’s perfection. It is clear that the process of scientific self-cognition accomplished by the absolute Concept is one and unique because Divinity is one and unique. In this lies the essence of monotheism and pantheism. The repeated recognitions of this process in human souls do not disrupt this unity because the very separateness of human souls, and therefore their multiplicity, are an empirical illusion: every ascent of every human soul into the sphere of Science is the work of the Concept itself, which is one and unique in essence. This is one of the “acts” of the one self-revelation of God. Science is one; in this lies the essence of monotheism. Besides 1. Comp.: Phän. 41–42; Enc. I 152. 2. Comp.: Beweise 399. 3. “Gott und er allein ist die Wahrheit ”: Enc. I 3; “Gott ist allein das Wahre”: Hinr. 302; concerning science: “dass ihr Inhalt vielmehr allein das absolute Wahre”: Log. I 35; “die wahre Gestalt in welcher die Wahrheit existirt, kann allein das wissenschaftliche System derselben sein”: Phän. 6. 4. Comp.: W. Beh. 324.

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Science, there is nothing; in this lies the essence of pantheism. But Divinity is not only Substance, but Subject; and for that reason Science is a living, systematic process: a system of self-disclosure, supratemporally realized by Divinity. This system of life has its particular succession, not temporal but metaphysical.1 Science develops in a strict dialectically organic order, from poverty to riches, from simplicity to complexity, from immediacy to a mediated result. It has its own structure, dividing it into a system of separate sciences, and each of these subordinate spheres of divine being repeats through itself the rhythm of the whole. Each Science returns through its final act to its starting point, repeating its content, but now in a completely open and realized form. And the entire cycle of Science affirms in its highest link only that which was placed as the beginning of all the beginnings: the one and solely real, creatively living Divinity remains itself also at the highest stage, and all its changes do not distort and do not change its nature. Science is an organic unity because it is characteristic of Divinity to be an organic totality. At the same time, divinity is a system of ideas, because it is characteristic of Science to be a logical system. In this organic system, the beginning is the potential of the end and the conclusion is the unfolded beginning. Divinity is “infinite,” or, what is the same thing, Science is a “circle” consisting of a system of “circles” organically belonging to each other.2 If all Science as a whole is nothing other than a process of divine development, realized by Divinity itself, each of the subordinate sciences is one of the stages of this theogonic process. This great process “was” not, “will” not be, and does not “persist”: it eternally is and cannot fail to be. This process does not begin, does not end, and does not vanish. But all that is bears this process within itself, concentrates it within its real makeup. That which people call the world is its manifestation—the manifestation of God, the manifestation of Science; and the trouble lies only in that not all people grasp the truth of this situation, nor do they grasp it all at once. God is the genuine, living essence of the world, and the reality of the world is determined entirely by his presence. Therefore, it is necessary to acknowledge that besides God there is nothing; and in this lies the essence of pantheism. This means that Science is the genuine, living essence of the world, and the reality of the world is determined wholly by its presence. Therefore, philosophy affirms that besides Science there is nothing, and in this way transforms pantheism into panlogism or into a distinctive panepistemism. 1. See chapter 6.

2. Comp.: Log. I 65; Log. III 351; Enc. I 23.

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God is Philosophy, i.e., the system of scientific Knowledge; and besides Philosophy nothing is real. Such is the great daring of Hegel’s metaphysical project.

Translator’s Notes a. The Russian term used here is ткань, the first and most obvious meaning of which is “fabric” or “cloth.” However, there is a secondary meaning of “tissue” (in the biological sense), and that second meaning generally fits the context of Il’in’s use better, since he frequently modifies the term with “living.” b. Беспредметна. c. Or: the understanding as intuitive. d. In the German version of the text Il’in wrote “ ‘Auto-nomie’ der Vernunft,” to emphasize the underlying meaning of “following its own law” (Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels, 185). e. The Russian term is отрешенной, literally meaning “aloof,” “estranged,” or “detached.” The equivalent term in the German edition is selbstherrlichen, which may be a typo. The intended meaning may have been “self-ruling” or “selfmastering.” In choosing to use “self-specifying” I have been guided more by the context than by either the actual Russian or German term. See Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels, 185. f. Using the Geraets, Suchting, and Harris translation of the Encyclopedia Logic (301). g. In the German edition Il’in again chose to print the term as Auto-nomie, which he then explicated in parentheses as (Eigen-Gesetzlichkeit). See Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels, 186. h. The German phrase in question is “Alles . . . was Wert hat und gilt, ist geistiger Natur . . .”. From “Hegel’s Anrede an seine Zuhörer bei Eröffnung seiner Vorlesungen in Berlin am 22. October 1818” (last page) (Werke, vol. 6, Berlin: Duncker und Humblott, 1832–45, p. xl). Il’in rendered this as “все, что обладает ценностью и значением, имеет духовную природа.” i. Non potest non esse: “it cannot fail to exist.” j. Il’in might be referring here to a doctrine such as Anaximander’s apeiron, or the boundless, which gave rise to all of the pairs of oppositions manifest in the cosmos, as encountered in sense experience, while itself remaining undifferentiated. k. Il’in used the term “status” in the Latin form. l. The Russian term here is перворазделов, literally “original divisions,” which is a reference to Hegel’s account of judgment (Urteil ) as an “original division” (Ur-Teilung), for example in the Science of Logic (Miller translation), 625. Hegel’s own term in the passage quoted by Il’in is urteilend sich. m. Or: “confessed in this way.”

9

Logic

Hegel’s entire philosophical doctrine is devoted to an adequate exposition of the essence of Divinity and to a description of that creative path that is accomplished by the Substance of Divine Meaning. This path is a path of continuous ascent and self-enrichment, a single great process not subordinated as a whole to the laws of empirical time, but nevertheless proceeding in a certain sequence and therefore falling into definite “epochs.” Each of these epochs is described in a special science, such that the pure essence of the theogonic process, depicted in the series of scientific categories, is not only adequately depicted in them and reproduced in the consciousness of the philosopher, but with its own reality and power, is genuinely present and constitutes itself in his soul. Science is the living essence of God, and the first of these sciences, Logic, forms the first epoch of divine life. Logic is the first “epoch” of Divine life. According to the fundamental conception, each speculative event of the scientific series is an act of self-determination, accomplished by living meaning. Logic is an entire system of such events; it is a system consisting, in appearance, of a multiplicity of acts of self-determination. These acts, however, grow together into a single monumental event: they are united by a common subject, which acts in them, by a common medium in which they occur, by a processual continuity in which they are accomplished, and finally, by a common result, into which they flow. The subject that accomplishes the logical acts in itself is God. The logical series, like all other being, is a creative manifestation and state of self-active Divinity.a Only the one God, the living meaning-substance,b unique, all-embracing, and creatively all-penetrating, can be this subject. God accomplishes his self-determination here in the “element” or “medium”c of the pure concept. The “pure concept” should be understood to mean speculative meaning that is free from any empirical admixture, that is “unmixed”1 with and not complicated by other, lower forms of being, that is “independent” of them.2 The “pure concept” is a concept that preserves its genuine speculative form, that remains true to its fundamental speculative nature. This is the concept in its primary, classic 1. Comp.: Enc. I 28. 180

2. “Unabhängig ”: Log. III 18, 19.

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simplicity, the concept that is true to itself. Precisely thanks to this, all the fundamental forms of life that were established above are inherent in the pure concept. It starts in a nondifferentiated, so to speak, “rolled-up,” state. It moves dialectically, generating inner oppositions within itself and preserving them to the degree of their truthfulness. The pure concept determines itself, developing from the universal to the singular. It grows its determinations together organically, forming a wealth of determinations and ascending to a speculatively concrete organic totality.1 In the Logic, Divinity realizes this mode of life in its “pure,” i.e., unmixed, uncomplicated, unburdened, form. The logical tissue assumes these forms with that ease which characterizes a movement that is free in its necessity and necessary in its freedom. This is possible precisely because the “pure concept” is a stable and necessary ingredient that is present at all the stages of logic. Logic does not abandon its level. It does not leave the element of the pure concept. But within the limits of the latter, Divinity successively and continuously passes through all possible states and closes up into a harmonious circular completeness. The entire movement of the Divinity is toward a single goal: the realization in itself of speculative concreteness, i.e., of the highest, organically grown-together, maximal wealth of pure thought-determinations. But the logical process is not completed and the concept is not ready until it gives itself the entire fullness of determination. It is clear that the first terms of the logical chain will be distinguished by the greatest speculative “abstractness,” while the last will be distinguished by the greatest speculative “concreteness.” Beginning with the first (“poorest”) category and finishing with the last (“richest”) category, a continuous accumulation of categorial riches takes place. Each logical category is sui generis, a “pure concept,” i.e., a special state or modification of the pure concept.2 As such, each category is a special metaphysical ens reale, for “being and the pure concept” simply coincide.3 At the same time, each succeeding category is a new state that is produced by the preceding category in itself and that now, working together in unity with the preceding category, turns out to be included in it and enriching it with itself. All the links that have been passed through “lie at the foundation” of the new link.4 They represent in themselves that “element,”d that necessary inner element,e of which the new category consists. All the categories that are formed after the first contain this first category as an actual foundation. Every succeeding category is “Being,” for the first category is precisely the category of “Being”; and “Quantity,” and “Measure,” and “Essence,” and “Actuality,” and “Concept,” and 1. See chapters 4, 5, 6, and 7. 2. Comp.: Log. III 244. 3. Log. I 50. 4. Comp.: Log. I 82.

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“Idea,” and in general all the concepts of philosophy 1 are in essence varieties of “Being.” Likewise, all the categories that are formed after the second contain as their actual basis this second category, which is the closest and most general variety of the first category. All the succeeding categories are states, complicated modifications, or “examples”2 of the preceding category. They are its necessary states, into which this category “really passes,”3 in which it is itself actually present. Accordingly, the preceding category is always the grain or seed of all that follows. It contains within itself from the very beginning, in potentiality, all the further determinations that it is to produce in itself or “posit.” The beginning is the potentiality of the process and of the end, while the end is the revealed, unfolded, self-actualized beginning. It is natural that, in this series, every category must be regarded as “Being” that has revealed itself and enriched itself to a specific height and degree. Every category is the organically grown-together totality of all the preceding categories,4 which have been preserved in it and are necessarily present in it. And if we discard the division of the Logic into chapters and paragraphs that do not have systematic significance,5 it will turn out that the arrangement of categories in the Logic is determined by the degree of their speculative concreteness and depends on the richness of content present in each. The later a category blooms, the more perfect it is in its organic concreteness. “Being,” becoming more and more enriched, becomes “determinate Being”6 and indeed to an ever higher degree and in an ever more concrete sense.f And then “Being” reaches the end and receives the significance of the “Absolute Idea.” Consequently, the “Absolute Idea” is “Being” that has unfolded all its content, revealed all its nature, fully realized its potential in the element of the pure concept. All that was concealed and potential has become revealed and actual. The concept has run through and encompassed “the whole totality of its determinations”7 and appears to the eye in the form of their organic, grown-together unity. The Logic depicts the path of “Being” (Sein), whose “Quality” (Qualität) has found in “Quantity” (Quantität) its “Measure” (Maß). The “Essence” (Wesen) of this “Measured Being” has found in its “Appearance” (Erscheinung) its “Actuality” (Wirklichkeit). The “Concept” (Begriff ) of this “Appearing Essence of Measured Being,” in determining itself, has let itself descend from indeterminate “Universality” (Allgemeinheit) to a flowing-together g with “Singularity” (Einzelnheit), has achieved, by suffering through the “OriginalDivision” (Urteil), a speculative “Syllogism” (Schluss), and has unfolded on 1. Ibidem. 2. Ibidem. 3. Comp.: Log. II 124. 4. Comp.: Log. III 58, 66. 5. Log. I 42–43. 6. Comp.: Log. III 66. 7. Log. III 352.

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this path its “Organic” nature (Teleologie), in which the “ideal” coincides with the “real.” Thus, the “Idea” (Idee) was formed as the identity of the ideal and the real. The “Idea” is real “Life” (Leben), coinciding with ideal “Knowledge” (Erkennen), i.e., a living, all-embracing system of meanings, or “Truth” (Idee des Wahren). Living, real “Truth” is obviously the supreme “Good” (Idee des Guten), and their coincidence produces the final crowning of the process: the “Absolute Idea” (Absolute Idee). All this wealth of categorial determinations1 is created and generated by “Being” within its own limits; or, in other words, “Being” has determined itself out of itself as the totality of all these categories. Therefore, if the Absolute Idea is revealed as the supreme good, i.e., as the real truth, living in the form of an organically dividing and confluent system of meanings forming together a single actuality, or, what is the same thing, the revealed essence of measured being, then this Idea is nothing other than primary Being itself. Primary Being is the measured, manifested essence of the actual concept, or of universality that has flowed together through original-division with singularity, and organically living in the form of realized truth, i.e., of supreme goodness, coinciding with the Absolute Idea. The Absolute Idea is therefore the organic summing up of the logical development that has sorted through all the determinations.2 The Absolute Idea concentrates in itself the entire result of that continuous process in which the Logic moves. The Idea can be determined therefore as actual Being, or as revealed Reason. It is simply a synonym of the “rational,”3 and therefore one can say that logic discovers that Reason is the substantial and absolutely concrete unity of all categories.4 Such are the fundamental elements of the logical process, which turn it into a holistic unity, into a simple meaning-situation, yielding to an immediate and exhaustive encompassing in a single act of thought. Anyone who wishes to actually understand Hegel must necessarily develop in himself this simple and immediate act of thought encompassing the whole of the Logic at once. The whole of the Logic is contained, both explicite and implicite, in the “Absolute Idea,” as if in the simple and organically holistic result of the entire process. From the end to the beginning there is no interval or distancing; “Being” does not go away into the deep background but is wholly present in the foreground of the all-completing totality. This also holds for all categories without exception. The whole of the Logic must somehow be expressed in two dimensions: its end is like a wheel that has gathered into itself all the colors of the rainbow and combined them by rotation into the classic simplicity of white light. 1. Here are adduced only the most important categories. 3. Recht 17. 4. Log. I 33.

2. Comp.: Log. III 329.

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What is the philosophical significance of this event and where does the necessity immanent in it lead? According to Hegel, the logical process has a threefold significance: religious, systematic, and cosmological. All three aspects flow together, in essence, into one, and yield to separation only in analysis. The religious significance of the logical process consists in the fact that logic is nothing other than the first self-revelation and self-presentation of God, taking place before the creation of the world and humanity. The content of the logic is “the exposition of God as He is in his eternal essence, before the creation of nature and finite spirit.”1, h Logic is a science that reveals “only the Divine concept,”2 directly portraying in its “logical flow” “God’s self-determination to being.”3 All the categories of the logic are “definitions of the Absolute, metaphysical definitions of God.”4 But the exposition of that “which is the Absolute” “is the proper presentation of the Absolute and only a showing (ein Zeigen) of what it is.”5 Therefore, the logical process is the genuine tissue of the Divine essence, and the philosopher, having submitted his thought to the “movement” of logical categories, is filled with the real presence of God. However, in the first selfrevelation of God, there is as yet no human consciousness. There is no world and no finite spiritual entity, i.e., humanity and its subjective selfconsciousness. God lives and determines himself, or, what is the same thing, creates his own nature, in its pure form, not yet mixed and not yet complicated by “veils.”6 The pure concept “is the absolute Divine Concept itself,”7 the speculative character of which is present in every category as immanent to its nature.8 Disclosing his essence in this system of pure concepts, God as it were for the first time finds His nature in them, realizing them and himself in them. And they for the first time begin “to be” in their simple and crystalline essence.9 This means that God “posits” himself, or “asserts” himself, as “Being,” “Quality,” “Quantity,” “Measure,” “Actuality,” and so

1. Hegel prints these words in italics: “die Darstellung Gottes . . . , wie er in seinem ewigen Wesen vor der Erschaffung der Natur and eines endlichen Geistes ist”: Log. I 36. 2. “Die Wissenschaft nur des göttlichen Begriffs”: Log. III 352. 3. “Jener logische Verlauf die unmittelbare Darstellung der Selbstbestimmung Gottes zum Sein wäre”: Log. III 175. 4. According to Hegel’s further explanation, this is true only of the first and third stages of the logical dialectic, while the second stages, being in a state of “differentiation,” are “definitions of the finite”: Enc. I 163. Comp.: Enc. I 170. 5. Log. II 186, 189, 218, 219. 6. “Ohne Hülle”: Log. I 35; or otherwise, “von aller sinnlichen Konkretion befreit”: Log. I 47. 7. Log. III 175. 8. “Es ist eine Bedeutung,” says Hegel, “mit der man vor der Logik im reinen sein muss”: Log. III 18, 19. By this he means, of course, the Phenomenology of Spirit. 9. This also relates, by the way, to the concept of “method,” and to the concept of “science.” See, e.g., Log. I 6 (Remark), 26, 41, 42; Log. III 329, 330.

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forth, in order, after having recognized himself as existent in each one of these states, to preserve it, but then to pass from it to a greater one. Logic contains modes of being and acting created by God for the first time and henceforth immanent to him. Logic is as it were the initial creative word of divine self-determination. “I am Being and Quality. And moreover, I am Quantity. And Measure. And Essence. And Actuality. And moreover, I am the Concept. And Universality. And Syllogism. I am Truth. And the Good. I am Idea. And the Absolute Fullness of All.” Logic is the genuine and first revelation of God to Himself in the element of pure thought. From this the entire logical process acquires a religious significance. In the beginning of all beginnings, by virtue of his natural essence alone, God is Being. This identity of his with Being relates to his most genuine, though still hidden, nature: to say “Being” means to say “substantial being.” It means to name God himself. Precisely for this reason, the first state of God in the Logic is not subject to proof and does not need proof, just as the very being of God is not subject to proof at all. It is necessary to achieve a speculative seeing, to ascend through spirit to this first truth, and to see it, that it subsists. Hegel achieves this ascensioni through suffering in the Phenomenology of Spirit. God is Being. This is God’s first, inalienable definition; more precisely, a state primordially immanent to him. But this being of God dwells in a certain “formlessness and void.” “Potentially” containing all that is possible and is to come, the entire further process, all forms and states, this primary Being suffers from absence of determination and absence of revelation. This Being is saturated with its future possibilities, with all its future riches. But all this is found in it in a nondifferentiated form; and not one of the later determinations is actually present in it. To unfold these determinations means for God to actualize himself, to give himself a developed form, to “realize” himself, to create for himself an appropriate, worthy, objektive reality; it means “to begin to be” actually, in all his own significance, to blossom in all his own content. One could say that the logical process is the primary “self-determination of God to being,”1 or to “reality.”2 This process of divine self-actualization, self-realization, the manifestation of its nature,3 is accomplished in such a way that Divinity “leaves” its initial state,4 unfolds it,5 and at the same time eo ipso “withdraws into itself,”6 “becomes absorbed into itself”;7 and from this is “exposed” its inner structure:8 from the “less perfect ” arises the “more 1. Log. III 175. 2. Comp.: on the concept: Enc. I 386; Log. III 66. 3. “Aufzeigen”: Log. III 333. 4. “Ein Heraussetzen”: Enc. I 163. 5. “Entfalten”: Enc. I 163. 6. “In sich gehen”: ibidem. 7. “Vertiefen in sich selbst”: ibidem. 8. “Enthüllen”: Enc. I 311.

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perfect,”1 or, in other words, from imperfect being arises perfect reality. In the beginning, God is “existent Divinity, potentially perfect”; in the end, he is “real Divinity, actually perfect.” With each new category, i.e., with each new “determination of the Absolute,”2 with each one of its new “forms”3 or with each new, acquired “mode of being and creating,” God’s reality keeps growing and becoming more perfect. Finally, it attains completed speculative reality in the Absolute Idea, which is inevitably “the ground and totality” of all “previous determinations,”4 the completed speculative reality. Here the “concept” of Divinity and its “reality” are adequate to each other,5 for the idea is nothing other than the objektive and real concept,6 or “the unity of the concept and objektivity.”7 The actualization of the Idea signifies that Divinity has found itself, created itself, realized itself; it is itself the object that has created itself, and now it fully coincides with this object.8, j From this it is clear that this process in which Divinity creates its own “reality” consists precisely in the creation and actualization of the speculative concreteness of thought-determinations. The realization is nothing other than speculative concretization, i.e., the progressive enrichment and organic growing-together of the created riches. Divinity attains a perfected state when it is transformed into an organic totality, i.e., into a single, all-embracing, living organism of categories. Speculative concreteness is the highest goal and highest form of the life of God; God’s path is determined precisely by this concreteness and directed toward it in its everlasting beginning and completion. It is clear that the doctrine of the “realization” of Divinity in the logical process cannot be interpreted to mean that God arises in this process from nonbeing to being; or, that in “the beginning of the Logic,” God does not exist, but only his “concept.” God cannot fail to be, for “being,” in the true meaning of the word, is nothing other than God Himself. The denial of true, absolute being is no more than an abstractly rational fiction.k But in Divine being there are lower and higher stages and states; therefore, without losing its divine nature, the Divinity can “be” in lesser perfection or greater perfection. Hegel often calls the degree of this perfection the degree of “reality” and sees its essence in speculative concreteness, which gradually transforms Divinity into an all-embracing organic totality. Precisely in this understanding is it revealed with particular clarity that, from the very outset, Hegel was compelled to enter onto a path that is 1. “Hervorgang des Vollkommnern aus dem Unvollkomnern”: Enc. I 311. 2. Comp., e.g., Log. I 147, 163; especially Enc. I 170; comp. also: Log. II 3 and others. 3. Comp.: Log. III 25. 4. Comp.: Log. III 58, 66. 5. Comp.: Log. III 236. 6. Log. III 237. 7. Comp.: Log. III 238. 8. Comp.: Log. III 249, 352.

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inevitable for all pantheists. The recognition of God as the all-embracing substance entails either the rejection of the idea of “value” altogether, or the transposition of imperfect states into limits of Divinity itself. And if Spinoza, inclining more to the first outcome, was compelled to admit the second as well, then Hegel chose the second alternative openly and from the very beginning. This does not mean that Hegel liberated himself completely from the first possibility. Nor does it mean that he categorically recognized the presence of evil in the depths of Divinity, as Schelling was inclined to do in the doctrine of “the dark ground,” or “nature in God.” But Hegel placed the admission of the possibility of “less perfect” states in God at the very basis of his pantheistic philosophemel and rested his conception on the doctrine that God’s path is a path of progressive self-perfection. The more “abstractness” there is in it, the more imperfect is the state of Divinity; the more “concreteness” (i.e., grown-together richness) there is in it, the more perfect it is. At the pure, high level of being that is intrinsic to Divinity, there exists the possibility of a certain “better and worse”; and the inner meaning of this qualification is revealed most clearly when we consider that, for the world and humanity, the criterion of perfection and imperfection remains the same.m It is precisely on this point, at this depth of metaphysical speculation, that one must seek the roots of Hegel’s doctrine of ethical life, the state, and historical development. For the higher meaning of God’s path consists precisely in the fact that it is God’s path: the very nature of the great Subject of life affirms and ensures the character, direction, and radiant result of the development that has been dialectically achieved through suffering. Such is the religious meaning of the logical process. This meaning determines through itself both the systematic significance of this process and its cosmological content. God is the substantial essence of all that has any being and significance. And if the Logic reveals and realizes the necessary categories of his nature, this means that the concrete unity of these categories is present as the essence in all being and becoming. One could also say that “thought is the principle and essence of the world”; Logic contains the pure form of this “intellectual view of the universe.”1 Logic consequently reveals the inner content of thought that is actually found in any reality: for thought cannot fail to introduce this content into each of its “modes.” In its essence each fragment of the world is inevitably a concreteness of logical categories, a harmoniously adjusted conglomeraten of “pure” determinations of Divinity. To be sure, in “nature,” a series of “natural” determinations is joined to this conglomerate of pure logical 1. Log. I 36.

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categories, while in the sphere of the human “spirit,” an entire network of “determinations of consciousness” is joined to it. But these “natural” and “spiritual” determinations always have at their basis a central nucleus that is formed by logical categories. All succeeding states of God, all parts of the world’s being, are saturated, first and foremost, by all these categories, which constitute the substantial core of these states. And if we call that element which is “stable,” or “present in everything,” the formal element, then logic is indubitably a “formal ” system of meanings.1 This does not mean, of course, that the categories are formal in the usual, abstractly rational sense of the word: on the contrary, the categories are always real, and moreover real with true, absolute reality.2 But this means that the “Absolute Idea,” being the organic totality of all logical categories, has the significance of all-penetrating and all-permeating speculative universality. In fact, this is the only way it can be in reality. Logic, as a system of categories, according to the fundamental scheme, must have the character of substantial universality: it must include in itself all subordinate spheres and systems as its living parts, and it must enter into them itself as their living essence.3 Of all the “modes of being” inherent in the Absolute Idea, Logic is precisely “the universal mode in which are sublated and enfolded all particular (modes).”4 The “logical” is that universal which “embraces within itself the wealth of the particular.”5 The Logic contains the essence of “all remaining content,” the “universal truth”6 that penetrates everything, is present in everything, intrinsic to everything. If one recognizes that the soul is the essence of the body, and that, in separation from the body, it is similar to its “substantial shadow,” then one can call logic the “realm” of substantial “shadows,” or “simple essences, liberated from all sensuous concreteness.”7 Logic discloses the substantial “essence of that wealth” which is called “nature and spirit,” their “inner nature.”8 Logic expounds not things (Dinge)9 and not separate shapes (Gestalten)10 of subordinate, complicated, “particular” spheres, but the thing itself (die Sache), the essence of things, their Concept.11 Logic sets out that most essential tissue of the world, that “pure” logical element of any being that genuinely, actually grounds every ens reale, and in relation to which everything is no more than a “modus,” i.e., a complicated, “specific” modification. Therefore, every category of the Logic is (according to the fundamental scheme) not only a particular definition of the Absolute, a 1. Comp.: Log. III 27. 2. Comp.: Log. III 27. 3. See chapter 5. 4. Log. III 328. 5. Log. I 47. 6. Log. I 47; Log. III 27. 7. Log. I 55. 8. Log. I 46. 9. Log. I 20. 10. Log. III 18, 26. 11. Log. I 20; comp.: Log. I 435–36.

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particular state of God, but at the same time and in this way a universal predicate that is applicable to all that is real. Every category can be formulated in a twofold way: first, in the form of a predicate intrinsic to God and expressing his real state; and second, in the form of a predicate intrinsic to everything and expressing the concealed substantial state of all reality.1 Thus, the category of “Being” signifies, as such, God is Being and moreover, everything is Being. And that is the case for every category. For example: “neither in heaven nor on earth is there anything that does not contain the two determinations, i.e., Being and Nothing”2 (i.e., “Becoming”). This means: “God is Becoming” and moreover, “everything is Becoming.” All the categories: Quality, Quantity,3 Measure, Essence,4 Actuality, Universality, and so forth are predicates of everything. “The absolute determination of Essence must be found in any experience, in any actuality, and also in every concept.”5 “Everything is the Concept.”6 “All things are the original division (Urteil).”7 “Everything is a syllogism (Schluss).”8 In this way, each of the logical determinations included in the substantial nucleus of the Absolute Idea then turns out to be necessarily inherent in every reality, in every new state of Spirit and the world. According to the fundamental law of speculative concretization, not one iota of the accumulated wealth disappears, or is lost, in the further development, and the entire totality of the thought-determinations enters into all the newly arising states. This means that all the stages of the world and all the stages of the philosophical sciences are saturated and permeated by the categories of logic, which form their essence. Logic produces the living ground of the world. It weaves that canvas that will inevitably be present on all further paths, as substance, becoming surrounded by new, content-filled determinations. In the systematic respect, one can say that, in the series of the sciences, logic occupies the position of the generic element whose content is present in all subordinate specific formations. The Logical Spirit occupies the “highest place,” as it were, in the systematic classification, in order to appear as “nature” and “spirit,” in a content-burdened form. This formal conception must, of course, be corrected in the speculative sense: the “universal generic” must not only be “present” in all the elements of its compass, but it must also permeate them with the rights of living substance and include them in itself as its living parts: the “particular” cannot be “outside” of the universal, and “independent” of it, just as the “universal” cannot depart into the emptiness of detached abstraction.9 1. See: Log. II 27, 28, 68, 120. 2. Log. I 81. 3. Comp., e.g., Log. II 27–28. 4. Comp.: Log. II 68; Enc. I 230. 5. Log. II 68; comp. also: Log. II 120; Log. III 18, and others. 6. Enc. I 345. 7. Enc. I. 329. 8. Enc. I 344, 345. 9. See chapters 2 and 5.

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Here too, the concept must inevitably maintain its nature and preserve the mode of life immanent in it. Thus, before Hegel there arises the iron necessity not only of recognizing the logical categories as the living substance of the subordinate spheres, but also of including the content of these subordinate spheres into the organism of the logical process. The recognition of the first is given directly and unambiguously in Hegel. The categories of the Logic are truly living forces, motors, producing, from within, the basis of “nature” and “spirit.” The logical forms of the concept are “indeed the living Spirit of the actual, and of the actual only that is true which is true by virtue of these forms, through them and in them.”1 “Everything that is not this actuality, asserted by the concepts themselves, is transitory existence, external contingency, opinion, inessential appearance, untruth, deception, and so forth.”2 Categories that have organically grown together into the Absolute Idea are that absolute unity, that substance, that is the creative subject of the world. The idea is “the soul of every objektivity,”3 the substance of all “other-being” whatever, i.e., the world soul. The idea actually saturates every reality with itself, as its living essence. Nature and the Philosophy of Nature, the human soul and the Philosophy of Spirit, are its creative self-modifications, its own modes of being. The matter stands otherwise with the second part of the task. Here before Hegel arose a significant difficulty: the path bifurcated, and he had to compromise. On the one hand, the fundamental nature of the Concept requires the inclusion of the entire compass into the essence of the generic formation: 4 Logic must absorb and assimilate into itself the entire content of the Philosophy of Nature and the Philosophy of Spirit, for “species” cannot fail to be organic, living parts of the “genus.” The content of the “universal” cannot fail to coincide with the content of the particular. The members of the compass cannot merely be “subordinate” to the generic essence; they not only “bear” the essence in themselves, but they themselves are part of it, and besides, they “are included” not only in its “compass” (as happens in abstractly rational Logic) but specifically in its content. Such is the mode of living that is immanent to the speculative Concept. But had Hegel entered this path in a consistent fashion, he would have had to recognize Logic as the sole, all-embracing science. The Philosophy of Nature and the Philosophy of Spirit would have been absorbed by the Logic; they would have turned out to be organically identical to it. And this would have meant that, between Logic and the so-called 1. Enc. I 319. 2. Recht 22. 3. Comp.: Log. III 329–30. The absolute idea is itself a “method.” 4. See in particular: Log. I 47, 47, 55, where Hegel himself recognizes the necessity of it.

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“concrete” sciences,1 there was established that “exchange of speculative gifts”2 that lies at the basis of all organic grown-togetherness and which leads to all the members and parts of the organism acquiring a single content, common to all of them. But such a consequence would have been completely unacceptable, for it would have inevitably destroyed the entire conception of the Absolute in its essential foundations. In the systematic respect, this would have meant introducing into the Logic a content not belonging to the sphere of the pure concept, not distributable into its categories and not fitting into them. Cognitively speaking, this would have meant introducing that “lower” content which presupposes not only an “inner thought-based” but also an “external intuitive” approach to the object. In the religious respect, this would have meant depriving the Logic of its pure, originarily divine character, mixing up all the epochs and stages of Divine life, and revealing in the Logic the categorial makeup of such realities as are “not yet real.” It would then have turned out that God lives in the elements of “space,” “time,” and “human consciousness” where there is as yet no space, time, or human soul. The organic coincidence of the Logic with the subordinate “spheres” would mean not only the mixing and the growing-together of the sciences and the ways of cognition, but also something much bigger. In Hegel, the transition from the Logic to these spheres is a creative act of Divinity, creating the world of nature and of humanity and thereby renewing its own substantive makeup. This renewal is so essential, so pregnant with consequences, has such a perturbational character, that it is impossible to speak of the speculative identity of content on both sides of this creative act. Hegel himself recognizes this, openly declaring that Logic does not reveal the “concrete” content of the subordinate spheres.3 But in this case it remains merely to recognize that the speculative mode of life intrinsic to the Concept is not realized in the relation of the Logic to the subordinate spheres, or realized only one-sidedly. To be specific, the universal enters with its content into the particular and singular 4 as their living essence. But the particular and the singular do not enter with their content into the universal and do not achieve identity o with the universal in an organic unity. In other words, Logic is the substance of “nature” and “spirit,” but “nature” and “spirit” remain unassimilated to the pure 1. Hegel calls the Philosophy of Nature and the Philosophy of Spirit, and also those sciences systematically included in the latter—the Philosophy of Right, the Philosophy of History, the Philosophy of Religion, and Aesthetics—“concrete” sciences precisely because their content is complicated and burdened by comparison with logical content. 2. See chapter 7. 3. Comp., e.g., Log. I 201; Log. III 18; especially: Log. III 26. 4. By “particular” here one should understand the categories of the “concrete” sciences, and by “singular,” the appearances of the world.

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concept. The speculative concept turns out to be untrue to the speculative order and mode of life, and moreover in its most central and essential point: in the question of the relation of the world-creating God to the world created by Him. To reveal this deep systematic defect in Hegel’s philosophy means to pass to the cosmological—or, more precisely, the cosmogonic—significance of the logical process. Logic obtains its cosmogonic significance in consequence of the fact that it is proclaimed by Hegel to be a distinctive “a priori of the universe.” When subjected to analytical scrutiny, this a priori character of the Logic exhibits a complex nature. According to the fundamental intent, the a priori character of the Logic relative to the world can have only a speculative character: to be precise, the Logic is organic Universality and Substance, while the subordinate spheres are its organic parts, or members; moreover, the two sides stand in a relation of concrete mutual interpenetration. In this conception, Logic is a priori in the same sense that, in Aristotle, the “whole” was prior to its “parts” and the state was prior to the individual. However, as has already been shown, a speculative relation between Logic and the lower spheres is not realized. This creates a profound and subtle difficulty, which Hegel attempts to eliminate by means of a compromise. It is precisely the religious significance of the logical process that permits him to find a compromise here, which doesn’t eliminate the difficulty but only somewhat obscures it. This compromise consists in the fact that the logical process acquires the significance of a creative preformation of the world in its fundamental essence. The order of the world, structured successively from the lowest level (empty space) to the highest level (the ethical life of the nation), unfolds already in the Logic, as it were, providentially created by the pure Divine Concept. Logic already contains the order of the world, as it were; however, not actually, but potentially. The pure concept lives in Logic as though by a mystical presentiment of its coming ways and fate. Logic is mysteriously populated by shadows of the future world. The pure concept, opening itself up, sees its own later fate as if in a prophetic dream. Therefore, the order of the Logic prefigures, as it were, the development that is to be realized in the future. This is expressed in the fact that the logical categories unfold in an order that corresponds to the future development of the world. Logic does not merely reveal the “inner nature of spirit and the world”1 in Logic’s essential categories; it reveals this nature precisely in that same succession in which it is destined to unfold in actuality. The concept pre-forms 2 the “concrete sciences” in the Logic since it forms them from within,3 in their 1. Log. I 46.

2. “Vorbildner ”: Log. III 27.

3. “Innerer Bildner”: Log. III 27.

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own sphere. The course of logic and the course of the concrete sciences are in accord. Thus, the first part of the “objektive” Logic (“Sein”) investigates precisely the categories of inorganic nature: being, determined qualitatively and quantitatively.1 The second part of the “objektive” Logic (“Wesen”) reveals the categories of “transitional” states, leading from the immediate unconsciousness of nature to the gradual formation of inner life (das Innere):2 “essence” is separated out of “phenomenon,” grows together with it into a single “actuality,” and “being” turns out to be beingwithin-self (zum Insichsein),3 mediated,4 and capable of reflection (Reflexionsbestimmungen).5 The third part of the Logic, the “subjective” Logic, already deals with the “subject,”6 i.e., with the life of the concept reflecting into itself, existing “for itself.”7 Such are the first glimmers of the life of the “concept” in “organic individuality in general,” in “animal sensation,” and finally in “thinking humanity.”8 All these “concrete” formations live already with an inner life, and moreover precisely in the form of unity (“grasping,” Begriff ), submitting to the “original division” (“Urteil”) and syllogismp (“Schluss”). Further, they produce for themselves an “objektive composition,”9 i.e., a material substrate adequately conforming to the form of their inner life. In this task, these concrete formations overcome “mechanism” and “chemism,” rising to the teleological life of “organism.” Organism as the “identity” of the real-objektively external structure with the ideal-subjectively inner state, is the Idea. The Idea determines itself, in the first place, as a living individuality, which then flows together into an identity with the universality of the genus,10 and is dissolved in it. Out of this dissolution arises Spirit, as the identity of the singular (e.g., of man, of a meaning fragment) with the universal (e.g., with the nation, with a system of ideas), as a known truth, which, in its realization, is the “good.” Thus is formed the “objektive world, whose inner ground and actual subsistence is the Concept.”11 From this it is clear that, if the first part of the Logic unfolds the categories for the lower spheres of the world’s being, the final part, the “subjective” Logic, contains the categories that constitute the highest spiritual state being realized in the world: the nation living in a state of 1. Comp.: Log. I 51. 2. Log. I 52. 3. Log. I 52. 4. Log. I 51. 5. Log. I 52. 6. Log. I 52. 7. Log. I 51. 8. Log. I 51. Comp.: Log. III 18: “Das Leben oder die organische Natur ist diese Stufe der Natur, auf welcher der Begriff hervortritt; aber als blinder, sich selbst nicht fassender, d. h. nicht denkender Begriff; als solcher kommt er nur dem Geiste zu.” 9. Comp.: Log. III 25; in the “Subjective Logic”: “der Begriff bildet in und aus sich die Realität, welche in ihm verschwunden”; and also: Log. III 33: “der Begriff in seiner Objektivität . . . der aus seiner Innerlichkeit hervorgetretene und in das Dasein übergegangene reale Begriff.” 10. Log. III 262: “Der Process der Gattung nämlich, in welchem die einzelnen Individuen ihre gleichgültige, unmittelbare Existenz ineinander aufheben und in dieser negativen Einheit ersterben.” 11. Log. III 327; comp.: Enc. I 385.

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philosophical virtue. One can also say that the first categories of the Logic unfold in the presentiment of the simplest natural being, but they are preserved as the implicit foundation in all further stages of the world. The final categories of the Logic prefigure the higher stages of God’s life in the world (the ethical life of the nation), but they cannot fail to be contained in an embryonic form also in the lower stages of the world’s being 1 (this is required by the fundamental speculative law of the all-preserving growth of determinations). Thus, the Logic is the real foundation of the entire world and at the same time, it is the potential shape of his own coming growth in the World prefigured by God in his pre-mundane state.2 By the distinctive introduction of the “potential universe” into the genuine tissue of the Logic, Hegel revives in a subtle form the ancient idea that, before their creation, “things” existed in God in the form of His “eternal ideas.” The concrete sciences and the created world do not enter into the Logic actually, but are present in it potentially, determining its course to a certain degree and secretly burdening it with themselves. That which is yet to become is already realized in God, in the form of an “original word,”3 in the form of that sort of “utterance” (Äusserung) that “has being” but in this being “has unmediatedly vanished again.”4 “In principio erat Sermo ille, et Sermo ille erat apud Deum, eratque ille Sermo Deus.”q Even prior to its realization, the world abides in God, in unity, in “identity” with him, just as, before his descent into the world, God the Word abides in “identity” with God the Father. Both the lowest, simplest limit of the world and its highest, most concrete limit are foreseen and preestablished by God before the creation of the world. Both the essence of the world, the mode of its life, and its goal are all prefigured in the Logic. The Logic categorially prepares the possibility of this highest achievement in the world, so that the final stage of the logical process potentially contains in itself the highest stage of the world’s development. That is to say, the ethical life of the nation is that substantial ens the categories of which the Logic discloses as the world’s richest and most concrete state of God. Not without reason, Hegel insisted that God’s life in the world is his ascent to a state of speculative concreteness and that precisely the state is the actualization of God’s life on earth.r 1. Comp., e.g., the orientation of the category “Maaß ” on politics, psychology, economics: Log. I 400–402, 421–22; comp. also the indication that the objektive logic investigates “das Ens überhaupt ”: Log. I 55, and also the explanation that the second part of the objektive Logic, “Wesen,” contains “vornehmlich die Kategorien der Metaphysik und der Wissenschaft überhaupt:” Enc. I 229. 2. Under such an interpretation of the logic it is not difficult to understand how such categories as “There-being,” “Appearance,” “Mechanism,” “Chemism,” and others which, strictly speaking, would be appropriate only in the concrete sciences, could find a place there. 3. Log. III 328. 4. Log. III 328.

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In fact, if the “substantial shadows” constituting the corpus of the logical process anticipate and preestablish the entire coming system of world “potencies”1 in the order of their speculative succession, it is natural that the beginning of the Logic outlines the lowest state of the world, while the end of the Logic prefigures its highest state. And if precisely the Absolute Idea, in its completeness and perfection, manifests God’s being in its full and adequate significance, then, in “earthly” being, this significance and this role of the adequate “representation” of Divinity evidently fall to the lot of the state. In naive terms, one can say that the Absolute Idea is “in heaven” the same thing that the State is “on earth”; or in other words, the Absolute Idea is the prototype of the earthly State, while the State is the actualization of the heavenly Idea on earth. Both in the systematic and cosmogonic respects, Hegel’s Logic hides a profound similarity to Platonism. This necessity of understanding the logical process as a prophecy concerning the earthly and its highest attainment is manifested with particular force when one considers that the “heavenly” and the “earthly” constitute a strict substantial unity as successive states of one Divinity. If the process of Divine self-determination does not end in the Logic, but moves further, through new states and epochs, then the logical epoch inevitably acquires the significance of something primary and preparatory. It is clear that, according to the fundamental speculative laws disclosed above, the “preceding” is always realized exclusively for the sake of the “succeeding,” and Logic’s entire intense creative labor has before it some higher goal and task. The “heavenly” achievement is preceded by a higher crowning “on earth,” and this crowning is none other than speculative concreteness in the life of humanity. Precisely the State, as the idea of the good, or truth realized on earth, is that organic totality, or singular universality, having flowed together through original division, which constitutes earthly actuality, i.e., the essence of measured being manifested on earth. Of all that exists on earth, only the State is constituted by categories of Logic as a whole, and moreover precisely by all, and only by all, of its categories, being combined, of course, with the categories of a specific series. In this compromise to which Hegel turns, a new violation of the fundamental speculative law is thus revealed. According to this law, every “succeeding” category contains in itself all “preceding” determinations, having grown together in it into an organic totality. Every “loss,” however insignificant it might be, is a falling away of the Concept from its structure, or what is the same thing, a divergence of Divinity from its own nature. And so, if the order of the “world” is prefigured by the order 1. Schelling’s term.

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of the “Logic” such that the lower states of the world can be satisfied, apart from their “specific” determinations, only by the first categories of the Logic, not including the higher logical determinations (e.g., “teleology,” “life,” the “idea of good”) in its makeup, then the law of speculative continuity and succession, i.e., the fundamental law of speculative concretization, is essentially distorted, or violated. But the cosmogonic significance of the Logic cannot be exhausted or grasped outside of the aforementioned compromise. Thus, if the Logic actually prefigures the series of the world’s development, and the categories of the Logic must be consistently distributed among different potencies of the world, then this violates the fundamental mode of life of the speculative concept. But if one rejects the “prophetic” significance of the Logic, then, together with the falling away of the compromise, the content of the “particular” spheres will turn out to be excluded from the content of the Logic: however, the “universal” will be included in the “particular,” as its living essence, but the “particular” will be excluded from the “universal” and will lose its significance as an “organic part.” In this way another fundamental law of speculative life will be violated: the law of “the universality of thought.” Hegel finds a way out of this series of subtle metaphysical difficulties by giving, together with a speculative interpretation, a “formal-logical” and even “chronological ” interpretation to the “a priori” significance of the Logic. The “a priori” character of the Logic gets a “formal-logical” interpretation insofar as the fundamental division into “Logic,” “Philosophy of Nature,” and “Philosophy of Spirit” is taken in the sense of a cognitive, philosophical classification of the object. Logic is a generic science;s investigating the general, generic content of all scientific concepts, i.e., that content which is inherent in all scientific determinations but that does not include in its makeup the content of specific modifications. Other sciences, however, are specific sciences,t investigating the particular, special content of individual groups of concepts, taking shape invariably in the form of an addition to the “substantial” generic content. A genus is present in the species, but a species is not contained in the genus. The “concrete” sciences are impossible in the systematic respect apart from Logic. Logic is the necessary ground of the “concrete” sciences. But Logic itself is fully possible without the “concrete” sciences and prior to them; for the content of the Logic, as generic, is autonomous and is not permeated with the content of the “concrete” sciences. In this interpretation, the entire division of philosophy acquires a formal and abstractly rational character. This is no longer a “dialectically speculative” original division of a single metaphysical substance, inevitably concluding with the speculatively assimilated growing-together of the sides. Instead, it is an abstractly rational, schematic classification of

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the sciences, in which they are no longer “growing-together.” u Precisely in this schema, Hegel’s philosophy acquires its systematic division into “individual” philosophical sciences. Further, the “a priori” character of the Logic acquires a “chronological” interpretation, as it were, insofar as the fundamental division into “Logic,” “Nature,” and the “Human Spirit” is taken in the sense of a completed succession of living, real events. In such an interpretation, the “Logic” turns out to be that real “at the beginning” in relation to which “Nature” is some real “then, after that” and the “Human Spirit” is the final, living “in the end.” The entire division appears as a sort of historical succession. The principle of this division appears to be no longer a relationship of internal contents that arranges these stages in an order of genera and species, but an actual order, in which “development” takes place and is realized. In this interpretation, the relative and allegorical terms “earlier,” “later,” “before,” “not yet,” etc., acquire a more ordinary and non-figurative meaning, and the schema of time intrudes into the speculative series. “Time” extends its competence beyond the limits of the finite world; the whole of God’s path begins to be viewed as a temporal succession. The speculative process acquires the character of an empirical process, as it were, and the doctrine of the speculative path of God becomes a historical retelling of events. Theology borrows its schema from cosmology, and God is transformed into a “part of the world,” or an “epoch of the world,” as it were. The “formally rational”v and “concretely empirical” interpretation of the “a priori” character of the Logic becomes possible and even necessary because the universal can not be combined with the particular in the speculative order. The exclusion of the lower spheres from the “Logic” violates and revokes the speculative interrelation between them. It becomes necessary to interpret them in such a way that the “universal,” i.e., the logical, is included in the lower spheres but does not, in turn, include these lower spheres in itself. The logical must have independence1 from the lower spheres; it must be “possible” without them, as well. This is explicable precisely not in the speculative order but either in an “abstractly, formally rational” order (the independence of genus from species, given the inclusion of the “content” of the former into the content of the latter) or in a “concretely empirical” order (the independence of a preceding event from succeeding events, given the inclusion of the “influence” of the former in the composition of the latter). And thus occurs an extremely instructive and peculiar re-gradation of the speculative order: the structure of this order splits apart and the whole conception begins to bifurcate 1. “Unabhängig ”: Log. III 18.

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and to oscillate between rejected modes of knowledge and being. The speculative interrelation between Logic and the lower spheres is not rejected fundamentally: on the contrary, this interrelation is professed as before, as the only true one, and it is supported with all powers.1 However, under careful analysis this relation time and again falls into the style of one of the ingredients that are grown together in it: either acquiring a rationally formal significance or unfolding into an empirical-temporal series. It is natural that, given the formally logical interpretation of the fundamental division, the elements of the division turn out to be concepts and their systems, i.e., the sciences; but given the empirical-temporal interpretation, the elements of the division turn out to be epochs and the real events that fill them up. But, according to the fundamental speculative scheme, the scientific process is nothing other than the genuinely and uniquely essential real fulfillment; science is the sole substantially real system of events; or, in other words, an event that is treated in philosophy is thereby a creative self-modification of the scientific concept. Breaking down the speculative order creates two different series: Logic as a science, systematically, and according to the content of its concepts, connected with the Philosophy of Nature and the Philosophy of Spirit; on the opposite side, Logic as the process of Divine life proceeding before the creation of the world, is connected historically and in the living succession of events, with real Nature and the real life of the Human Spirit. This dual or dualseries perspective is indicated already within the limits of the Logic, despite the fact that the logical series fully preserves its unity. Both series— the systematic-scientific order and the cosmic-historical order—diverge out of the Logic, as from their single source or womb. These divergent strands are woven in the Logic into a single strand, and trace their origin from it. But they do not form an organic unity in the Logic either. After all of the foregoing, it is clear that Hegel’s Logic is an attempt to solve the same metaphysical problem that is posed by Fichte’s Wissenschaftslehre: to be precise, to construct a doctrine of the categories in such a way that the philosophical content of this doctrine at once expresses the real life of Spirit and establishes the nature of the real universe. Hegel approached this problem and solved it much differently: he liberated the problem from the anthropocentric formulation; he identified the life of Spirit with the scientific-logical fabric of the concept; he sharpened the dialectic, objektified it, and established completely new laws of “universality” and “speculative concreteness.” Nevertheless, that internal splitting of the problem and its resolutions which arose before the Wis1. Comp.: Recht 66, where “Begriffliches vorangehen” is distinctly counterposed to the temporal succession, “zeitliches Vorangehen.”

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senschaftslehre became prominent in the Logic as well, as soon as the question of the systematic significance and position of the Logic was raised. And if a single answer is nonetheless possible here, it will be as follows: the relation of the Logic to the “lower spheres” is the relation of speculative “universality” to speculative “particularity,” which has been acknowledged and created by speculative “universality” but not included by the Logic in itself. Nevertheless, this relation does not coincide either with the formally rationalw relation, because the “generic concept” remains a vital and substantially real force, or with the empirically temporal, first, because the “preceding” is implicite and really present in the “succeeding,” and, second, because neither of them can be definitely localized in the temporal series. The overburden of content of the problem itself allows and requires here an extremely complex and subtle solution that hardly lends itself to consolidation in a single act of thought. Such in its essence is the first “epoch” of Divine life: it realizes for the first time the reality of God in modes of creativity intrinsic to him. At the same time, this epoch prepares the organically growing-together system, or “concrete totality,” of categories that are to constitute the metaphysical “omnipresent” substance of the world. Finally, in this “preliminary” process of self-realization, God prefigures in the element of the pure concept his further path, creating in himself the potency of the world from the lowest stage to the highest. It is clear that all of the complex, restless activity of the Concept is nothing other than the “thinking” of itself 1 realized by the Concept. The Concept, as in other sciences, is self-sufficient objektive thinking.2 And since in the Logic God lives before the creation of humanity, and the life of human consciousness is not yet assimilated and not “absorbed” in this process, it clearly follows that thinking is inherent in the Concept even apart from man. The process of living meaning takes place in God even “then, when there is not yet” either nature or man. God thinks himself also outside his state in the world. Meaning is identical to thinking even apart from human consciousness and thinking. And if Hegel asserts that the “spirit that is conscious of itself is not examined in logical science,”3 and that, in the Logic, the concept is not “an act (Aktus) of self-conscious Understanding,”4 the speculative character of the logical concept is by no means negated thereby.5 Thought lives speculatively even before the creation of the world and man. But this speculativeness has the character of unconscious, immediate6 self-immersion. This means that “Logic” is a state of God that is realized twice in a general and continuous process: first, at the very beginning and, sec1. Comp.: Enc. I 408 and others. 2. Comp.: Log. I 35. 3. Log. III 18. 4. Log. III 18. 5. Comp., e.g., Log. III 244. 6. Comp.: Enc. III 468.

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ond, at the very end. Logic is the “first” and the “last”:1 “the Logic of the beginning” and “the Logic of the end.”x The divine process begins with immediate life in the element of the pure concept and ends with the realization of that very same life, but now in a state of mediatedness. Logic is the first science, or, what is the same thing, the first epoch of Divine life, “from which the idea first passes into nature.”2 Logic has not yet entered the sphere of the phenomenon, has not yet shone in its own specific determinations.3 The distinctions of the Logic do not yet constitute other-being.4 The content of the Logic has not yet developed from itself the entire system of its singular modifications: the world is as yet created only in potential. In “the Logic of the beginning,” the concept thinks itself immediately, not yet tearing itself away from itself; not yet stepping away from itself; not yet having fallen apart into that duality of “subject” and “objekt,” “soul” and “object,” from which alone “consciousness” can arise. The Idea at this stage is the completion of Divine life in its immediate self-thinking, but is not the highest state of Spirit in its general process. In “the Logic of the beginning,” Spirit is real “in itself” (as a genuine essence) and “for itself” (for it is pure self-determination). It is causa sui and, as thought, it is immediate self-knowledge. But it does not yet exist in the element of con-sciousness y and self-con-sciousness.z Therefore, its primary logical “being-in-itself-and-for-itself” is by comparison with the higher possibilities only still an immediate primitiveness, not genuine “being-for-itself.” Spirit has yet to follow the path that ascends to self-consciousness. The essence of spirit consists in revelation: it is inherent to its inner nature to reveal itself; the entire activity of spirit consists in its disclosure of its own essence. This process of revelation takes place in such a way that, in “the Logic of the beginning,” God reveals himself immediately to himself: the subject revealing itself and the subject receiving the revelation coincide immediately, not being separated and not having passed through separateness. Eventually, “the logical becomes nature, and nature becomes spirit.”5 In this new process, a new subject is created, capable of receiving the Divine revelation. This subject exists in the element of bifurcation, or other-being, and possesses “con-sciousness.” And it is to this subject, enriched and burdened with the form of other-being, that the essence of Divinity is revealed anew. Human consciousness, speculatively dissolved in the concept, cognizes the path of God and rises through this to the final moment of the reunification of that which had been frag1. Log. III 272. 2. Log. III 272–73. 3. “In das Scheinen in einer Formbestimmtheit noch nicht eingetreten ist ”: Log. III 328. 4. “Noch kein Anderssein”: Log. III 328–29. 5. Enc. III 468: “das Logische wird zur Natur und die Natur zum Geiste.”

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mented. God is revealed to man in the element of the “pure concept,” in the form of an organism of logical categories, which has already suffered through the entire process of world-creation and fragmentation and, consequently, is now “mediated.” In the realization of the “Logic of the end,” speculative cognition purifies human thinking of the “anthropological and psychological side”1 and establishes again the immediate identity aa of human thinking with the objektive process in the concept.2 But this immediacy exists already in the element of “consciousness” and “self-consciousness”; it is realized as the true, completed “being-for-self,” as a new and higher speculative concreteness of subject and objekt. Thus, the highest revelation that takes place in “the Logic of the end” is the revelation of God to humanity. But in itself, humanity is no more than a modification, or state, of Divinity, existing in other-being. This means that the highest revelation is the revelation coming from God and is received by God himself, but in his mediated state, for Divinity, receiving its own revelation in “the Logic of the end,” exists in the form of human consciousness. The process in God completes the cycle, and the “logical” is the last and highest result.3 For the “Logic of the end” has, by comparison with “the Logic of the beginning,” a new and more perfect significance: it is “universality, having justified itself in concrete content, as in its actuality.”4 This doubling of the logical process and its attribution to the beginning and to the end, openly formulated by Hegel, gives a special weight to the “temporal” conception of the Divine path. It is hard to consider supratemporal that which is limited and determined by the real life of nature, by the appearance of human consciousness and its subjective act of speculative self-renunciation. “The Logic of the end” is the crowning of God’s path, occurring as a result of the world’s development, and the speculative “path” acquires the character and significance of the historical process in God. Such are the internal philosophical difficulties that flow from the religious and philosophical nature of the logical process. A further development of the doctrine should reveal these difficulties with even greater power and determinateness.

Translator’s Notes a. One could argue perhaps that Il’in has a tendency to conflate discourse concerning God perhaps too easily with discourse concerning the Concept given 1. Log. III 244.

2. Enc. III 468.

3. Enc. III 468.

4. Enc. III 468.

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that he also tends to treat God unambiguously as supersensuous substance, or transcendental reality. On the other hand, it is clear that Il’in did this quite deliberately, arguing that it is the correct way to read Hegel’s system.These tendencies are still more strongly on display in chapter 10, and are discussed in endnotes there. See especially endnote k. b. In the German text (Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels, 204), this phrase became “the living Logos.” c. The Russian terms are элемент and стихия, both of which would normally be translated into English as “element.” d. Элемент. e. Стихия. f. I have relied on Il’in’s German text (206) to translate this last phrase; the Russian reads, somewhat confusingly, “and besides, in the highest degree and in the most concrete sense.” g. К слияние: flowing together so as to form an identity-in-difference. h. Il’in’s decision to translate Geistes with the Russian духа doesn’t rule out the possibility of translating it as “finite mind,” though “spirit” is more likely to be what he intended here. i. Il’in employs an Old Church Slavonic form here: подъятие. j. In the German version of the text (210–11) Il’in modified this sentence as follows: “Now the Idea is realized; and this signifies that the divine Subject has found itself, created itself, revealed itself: it is ‘the Concept whose objectivity corresponds to it.’ ” k. An equally valid alternative reading would be: “no more than a fiction of the understanding.” l. Философема (Philosophem in German). From the Greek Φιλοσοφημα, an apodictive syllogism in Aristotelian logic. The term has been used in Russian philosophical literature to designate the central idea or principle of a system or theory, or sometimes a particular philosophical concept or postulate. The usage has become much more frequent in recent years. (Information supplied by Marina Bykova.) m. This claim is elaborated somewhat by Il’in in the German translation (212): “and the criterion of this ‘perfection’ and ‘imperfection’ remains the same in all spheres (‘epochs’ or ‘levels’) of divine life: in the ‘Logic,’ in ‘nature,’ and in ‘human life.’ ” n. The Russian term here is конгломерат, a foreign borrowing. o. Сливаются: literally, “do not flow together with the universal.” p. Слияние. q. “In the beginning was the Discourse, and the Discourse was with God, and the Discourse was God.” The use of the term Sermo (discourse), rather than Verbum (word) as found in the Vulgate, to translate John 1:1 occurs in the Codex Bezae (the D source known to biblical scholars), as well as in Tertullian and in Erasmus. Il’in’s choice of this translation may have been in support of the point that the categories of Hegel’s Logic form the “bones” of a connected discourse articulating the logical structure of being. (However, at the corresponding point

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in the German translation [221], Il’in replaced this Latin quotation with the original Greek.) r. This assertion pertains, of course, not to the “strictly political state” (as is so often mistakenly alleged) but to the state conceived as the much broader concept of Sittlichkeit, containing the strictly political state merely as one of its moments. s. Gattungs-Wissenschaft in the German translation (223). t. Art-Wissenschaften in the German translation (223). u. The syntax of Il’in’s sentence in Russian suggests that it is the classification which is “no longer ‘growing-together,’ ” but I have chosen the slightly altered translation. v. Рассудочное: the abstractly rational, hence literally “the formally, abstractly rational.” w. Again, more literally, “the formally, abstractly rational.” x. Il’in here introduces a distinction, to which he will return frequently, between the “Logic of the beginning” (Логика начала) and the “Logic of the end” (Логика конца). He discusses or explicitly invokes this distinction in chapters 9 (pp. 274–78 in FG I ), 10 (290–92 in FG I ), 11 (318, 321 in FG I ), 12 (353 in FG I ), 13 (9 in FG II ), and 22 (318, 332, 333, 343–45 in FG II ). The distinction is taken from Hegel’s discussion of “The Idea of Cognition” at the beginning of chapter 2 of section 3 of the “Subjective Logic” in the Science of Logic. There Hegel remarks, “The Idea of spirit already has this progress behind it, or what is the same thing, still before it—the former when logic is taken as the last science, the latter when logic is taken as the first science, out of which the Idea first passes over into nature” (Science of Logic, Miller trans., 782). Il’in labels these two sequences the “philosophico-systematic” and the “cosmological”: “There is no doubt that in the philosophico-systematic series the Logic is followed not by nature but by the Philosophy of Nature. However, in the cosmological order the Idea ‘passes’ precisely not into the science of nature, but into nature” (chapter 10, FG I, p. 293). Elsewhere he adds a third order, the religious, but acknowledges that these constitute three readings of one and the same logical process and can be separated out only in analysis: “According to Hegel, the logical process has a threefold significance: religious, systematic, and cosmological. All three aspects merge, in essence, in a single aspect and can be separated only in analysis” (chapter 9, FG I, 254). y. Со-знания. Breaking the Russian word up as Il’in does produces the phrase “co-knowing.” z. само-со-знания: “self-co-knowing.” aa. Слитость: literally, “flowed-togetherness.”

10

The Universe

Among the problems that a historian of metaphysical doctrines must deal with, the problem of the “coming into being of the world” occupies a special place.a The great transition from the “absolute” and “infinite” to the relative and finite, clothed in the living form of “historical” cominginto-being, is an extremely rewarding theme for uncovering, through its treatment, the fundamental conception of the “absolute.” Seemingly, the situation is such that the very existence of the relative and finite world makes the being of the Absolute impossible, for such a world clearly places a limit on the absoluteness of the Divine first-cause, differing from it and opposing it in all respects: in quality, compass, structure, mode of life, and, finally, in terms of its past and future fate. The problem thus consists precisely in showing not only the compatibility of the “Absolute” and the “relative,” i.e., of God and the world, but also their essential connectedness and mutual necessity. In the solving of this problem, the “Absolute” is studied, unfolded, and affirmed at the most heroic, the most critically intense moment of its being, namely, when it itself places itself in a “non-absolute” position and, still more, reduces itself to a state of relativity,b while none the less preserving its divine absoluteness. The “Absolute” evidently establishes a relation to something “other,” to “other-being.” It “relates” to it, and thereby participates in relativity and limitation; but its power is such that because of this its “absolute” character simply begins to glow from a new light. To disclose this clearly and convincingly is truly to resolve one of the most difficult problems of metaphysical cosmology, a problem that concentrates within itself all the systematic threads of the doctrine. The correct resolution of this problem first of all requires a correct posing of it. That is, the compatibility of the “absolute” in its genuine and undistorted nature with the “relative world,” taken in its actual features and properties, must be shown. For if, on the one hand, the relative world is not taken as it is, then the danger of simplifying the problem arises: that specific poison of relativity the toxicity of which constitutes the very essence of the problem would be diminished or completely lost. If, on the other hand, the “absolute,” in the creation of the world, and coexistence with it, changes and loses its absoluteness, the problem will

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remain unresolved: it will be revealed that the coming into being of the world places a limit on the being of God. In the first case, the empirical world in all its finiteness and relativity will remain beyond consideration, but the absoluteness of Divinity will be affirmed. In the second case, the empirical world will be taken into account and examined in all its illstarred chaoticity: but it will be conclusively affirmed that it is not divine and that God’s being is incompatible with it. The solution of the problem evidently lies somewhere between these two extremes. However, to find it is by no means an easy matter. A manifold of temptations arises before the investigator on this path: to dissolve and lose “quality” in the gradualness of the process;c to take the “concept” to be the “object of the concept”;d to impoverish the essence of the “absolute”; to schematize the actual world; to identify “meaning” and “goodness,” “goodness” and “end,” and “end” and “meaning” . . . And all these temptations enticing the investigator compel him to reveal with maximal clarity the inner nature of the “speculative thinking” carried out by him. Hegel’s philosophy intensively worked its way through the entire complexity of this problem. It realized the first extreme in its fundamental project; it was drawn into the second extreme in its approach to implementation; it strove to find a middle solution, and evidently attained it in certain domains. Here it partook in all the aforementioned temptations, experienced the great crisis of “panlogism,”e and reached its completion in the doctrine of the “actuality” and of the “shapes” of the world. It is remarkable that Hegel realized all these solutions at once and in parallel, thus greatly hampering an adequate understanding of his doctrine. For example, he always dreams of the maximal perspectives of the project but speaks of them in the tone of attainment; he repeatedly falls into the pessimistic conclusions of the second extreme and vainly attempts to set things right by referring to the fact that the concrete-empirical world does not have its own self-sufficient reality; and finally, he slowly, and not without vacillations, clears a path for himself to the middle outcome, which forms the tissue of the Philosophy of Nature, Ethics, Aesthetics, and the Philosophy of Religion. The very presence of several parallel solutions to the problem shows that none of them provided the sought-for satisfaction. To the very end, the middle outcome gravitated toward the maximal absolutism of the first extreme and concealed in itself the destructive poison of the second extreme. In this state of affairs, only the realization of the aforementioned temptations could create some refuge for the philosophical justification of “theodicy.” Hegel’s speculative project (the first extreme)f takes the distinctive

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form of “panepistemism” (science is all ).1 According to this project, it is necessary to show that the entire series of scientific speculative categories forms the “universal” substance of the world, that all that is called “nature” in the broad sense of this word is actually a real modification (modus) of the Concept. The element of “speculative meaning,”2 forming in its “consciously scientific” development a closed circular dance of scientific categories, creates nature and the world in its “cosmically complicated” and modified life. To reveal and affirm that God is the Concept and Science, and that the system of individual modifications of the Concept is the world, means to “justify the world.” According to this project, Science is the living and absolute essence of the world. This means that the speculative Concept, which is itself the true and absolute reality, has, besides the scientific form, still another worldly form of being. However, in this complicated form of being as a world, the Concept in no wise loses its essence 3 and its speculative mode of life. Nature is the “living expression and image of reason”;4 despite its finiteness, nature stands higher than the finite and abstractly rational forms.5 Nature’s structure is rational;6 it is “immanent ideality.”7 “Reason and nature are in absolute harmony; they are blessed in themselves.”8 It is a mistake to think that nature is no more than an “aggregate of worldly things,”9 a collection of many indifferent accidents.10 On the contrary, nature is the system of life,11 the organically living “universum,”12 the κόσμοϚ.13 It is a certain “systematic whole,” a system of “orders, stages, and laws.”14 It has its “primordial, unborrowed, real beauty.”15 And in this its life, nature is something true, living, and holy.16 Nature develops according to the law of its end immanent within it.17 Precisely for this reason it lives as a single organism, freely determining itself 18 and “placing itself as a whole” in each of its creations.19 Nature moves in “uniformly accelerated motion” and “enjoys” every one of its new creations.20 Nature itself determines itself; it is a subject-objekt;21 it is “absolute selfintuition.”22 “Just as the totality of life is contained to an equal degree in the nature of the polyp and the nature of the nightingale and the lion, so too the world spirit revealed in each shape (Gestalt) its absolute self1. See chapter 8. 2. See chapters 3 through 7. 3. Comp.: Aphor. I 548. 4. “Rationis vivam expressionem ejusque imaginem esse voluit natura”: Diss. 26. 5. “Über die Endlichkeit und den Verstand erhaben”: Glaub. 33. 6. Glaub. 49. 7. Diff. 264. 8. “Absolut harmoniren und in sich selig sind ”: Glaub. 49. 9. Beweise 359. 10. Beweise A 463. 11. “Ein System der Lebendigkeit ”: Beweise A 463. 12. Comp., e.g., Glaub. 113, 148; Enc. I 396; Beweise A 462, 463; Beweise B 469. 13. Beweise B 470. 14. Beweise 359. 15. “Ihre ursprüngliche ungeborgte reelle Schönheit ”: Glaub. 148. 16. Comp.: Glaub. 142, 143. 17. Log. III 210. 18. “Natur hat freiheit”: Diff. 265, 266. 19. Diff. 265. 20. W. Beh. 421. 21. Diff. 257, 258, 261. 22. W. Beh. 395; Aphor. I 548.

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feeling (Selbstgefühl)—be it more obscure or more developed—and enjoyed its own essence and its own self in each nation, in each ensemble of mores and laws.”1 Given such a rational and organic structure of natural and worldly being, the conception of “panepistemism” composes itself without further difficulties. The world is the realm of Reason, i.e., of the speculative Concept, and philosophical science formulates the same thing that takes place in the world and nature. Every “natural thing” is nothing but a modus of the Concept, i.e., it is, essentially speaking, the Concept itself. “A body is nothing other than a manifestation of physical force, or, what is the same thing, of the true Idea.”2 Things are “Concepts insofar as they are first manifested to representation and reflection in the form of something other”3 (i.e., other-being). Both the body 4 and the soul5 are in essence modifications of the speculative Concept, “populated” or “animated” by it. The law of the Concept is the law of the world; the reality of the Concept is the reality of the world. Speculative science not only “cognizes” but contains within itself the absolute reality of nature and the world. Given such a conception there remains, of course, an evident distinction between the “world” and philosophical “science”; but this distinction is not a qualitative one, but rather only one in terms of the mode of being. A “thing” is that state of the Concept in which it only creates itself, but as yet is not conscious of itself in this self-creation. But precisely for this reason the world and nature fully yield to philosophical cognition, for scientific knowledge is only the Concept becoming conscious of itself. Cognition is nothing other than the liberation of the objektive Concept by the subjective Concept from an unconscious form. The speculative Concept, having imparted to itself in the world an unconscious form (e.g., of a planet, of a plant), attains consciousness through the creativity of speculativescientific thought. And since the Concept both in its unconscious life and in its conscious state remains one, this cognition is self-cognition. The thing as a “modus” of the conscious life of the Concept coincides with the thing as a “modus” of the unconscious life of the Concept. The former is the true and genuine essence of the latter, its “truth”; the latter is no more than the lower stage, the lower potentiality of the former. The speculative meaning living unconsciously in an actual organism is that same meaning of the organism that is posited within itself by the Concept revealing its content in science. Intuiting thought sees in everything only itself; and it is right to do so. For besides itself, there is nothing; besides intuiting thought, there is only intuiting thought in a speculatively not-fully-liberated 1. W. Beh. 415. 2. “Nihil enim aliud est corpus, quam vis physicae, sive verae ideae phaenomenon”: Diss. 21. 3. Log. III 330–31. 4. Enc. II 344. 5. Enc. III 150.

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form. The Concept in its lower state is revealed to the Concept in its higher state, for the world and science are states of one and the same single and absolute self-determining substance: living and creative thought. It is sufficient for speculative philosophy to turn toward nature, and the veil of Isis “melts away”:1 thought recognizes in everything the blood of its blood2 and sees only its own determinations.3, g And since as a general rule the higher stage of the speculative process is the truth and essence of the lower stage, the Concept that has been formed in speculative science is the truth and essence of the correspondingly named fragment of the world. We can conceive this relation in the following way: the Concept, always and unrestrictedly preserving its nature (in this lies its “freedom”!), creates each thing twice, as it were:h one time unconsciously, positing it as meaning “in other-being”; the second time consciously, positing it in scientific knowledge as meaning that has returned to itself. Therefore, the apparently miraculous meeting of the “objekt,” or “thing,” with the “subject,” or “concept,” a meeting that reveals their “identity” and ends with their “coincidence,” is a meeting of “two” sides only in a superficial view. In essence, in the depths of substantial life, this is an act of self-liberation. Using ordinary language, one can say that the speculative essence of the phenomenon is really contained in the concept formulated in speculative science. The scientific Concept is not an “abstract representation” but a living metaphysical force, an “imponderable agent”4 creating itself first in the form of the “world” and then in the form of the “scientific category.” The concept of the organism that has been formed in speculative science does not merely “correspond” to the life of the real organism, or “faithfully express” it: no; the philosopher, “having constructed” the idea of the organism, is moved in his consciousness by the same genuine real essence of the organism, by that living organic power of the Concept that creates itself unconsciously in the phenomenon of the organism, without yet having the possibility of becoming speculatively conscious of itself. That which strives and struggles and suffers in a living organism realizes itself in the consciousness of the philosophizing soul, and sees itself as liberated, transfigured, and risen in the form of the scientific category. The living creative Concept itself has cast a spell on itself that gives it the shape of a thing, and it yearns to be liberated. And it does liberate itself to a higher life. The meaning of the speculative concept “thing” and the meaning hidden in the phenomenon “thing” are one and the same real meaning, having produced 1. Enc. II 17(Z). 2. Comp.: Recht 35(Z). 3. Enc. II 271; comp.: Enc. II 695(Z) [corrected from 995(Z) in all Russian editions of the text], 696(Z). 4. Comp.: “Imponderable Agentien”: Log. III 187.

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for itself through creative struggle a worthy form of life. The world and science form a single speculative order of ascent, accomplished by the Concept. Science is the result of this struggle, its culmination, its victorious crowning. From this results its peace.1 “Scientific truth is the tranquil, all-illuminating, all-gladdening light, and at the same time the warmth in which everything sprouts, blossoms, and discloses its inner treasures in the wide expanse of life.”2 Scientific truth is that Universality that actually “penetrates into all things,” fills and quickens all things: it is the living essence of the world, including it in itself and filling it with its “power” and “love.” Reason as it were simply “tells all things that it is,” thereby affirming itself as the sovereign of the world.3 Science is the consciously self-unfolded essence of the being of the world and this essence is the all-blessed substance—Divinity. Once it had captivated Hegel’s soul, the dream of the divinity of the world, of the cosmic organism, never left him to the end. Traces of this dream, formulated with great ardor in his first-ever published articles, can be found in his very last works, on which he worked in the final years of life.4 This dream, having found expression in the conception of “panepistemism,” evidently seemed to him sometimes to have been realized in his system, or at least capable of being realized through speculative philosophy. However, even if his doctrine sometimes attempts to recognize in the world a qualitatively genuine speculative order (i.e., that the world dialectically moves toward organic universality), it does not attempt to assert this order for the world as a whole.i Strictly speaking, Hegel never believed in the possibility of “accepting” and “justifying” all the empirically finite things and states of the world. Even in the most optimistic period of his philosophizing, when he published his first articles, filled with a mature intuitive vision and revealing an apparently limitless perspective, he did not consider a holistic, empirically exhaustive justification of the world to be possible. One cannot “deduce,” “ground,” or “construct” all that is given in the finite, sensuous world.5 That is not achievable even for true, all-seeing speculative philosophy. The “deduction” and “construction” of singular, concretely empirical things are not included in its task; and moreover, not only because this is cognitively unrealizable, but also on more profound, ontological grounds. 1. “Ruhe des Erkennens”: Aphor. I 541. 2. Aphor. I 541. 3. Comp.: Aphor. I 541. 4. Comp.: the authentic text of the lectures “Beweise für das Dasein Gottes”: 359, 383, 390, 412. Comp. also: Beweise A 462–63; Beweise B 468–69, 469, 470. Information on this text is given by Marheinke in the preface to the first volume of Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. 5. Comp.: Krug. 58; Phän. 78. See chapter 1.

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Hegel apparently never attempted to realize consistently, to the end, the conception of “panepistemism,” and even when the philosophy of history set before him the task of thinking through the empirically singular as speculatively unique, Hegel did not take up the challenge of articulating the whole and accepting all the conclusions. But precisely because of this one cannot attribute to him even the intention of the speculative acceptance of the empirical world as a whole, as such. Hegel’s panepistemism, in his most decisive and consistent moments, does not accept “discrete chaos” for speculative justification. This signifies that Hegel intuits the “finite world” not in its most difficult or most evil makeup, and omits the poison of relativity from the solution of the fundamental problem. Formally, this omission does not hamper his intention of preserving the character of “panepistemism”: abstracting himself from all the difficulties that are disclosed in the makeup of the objective material, Hegel exhibits a tendency to depict the empirical world, in its specific features and properties, as the product of a simple cognitive error of human consciousness. This “world” is neither “objektive,” nor “self-sufficient,” nor “real.” Cognitively, it is an illusion; ontologically, it is “nothing.” It does not participate in the “cosmos” and does not enter into that great “pan” concerning the scientific character and rationality of which philosophy speaks. The “world” is speculative and divine. The problem is resolved at the cost of a renunciation of the “empirical world.” And so the daring and profound dream of “panepistemism”—an originally and profoundly revived Spinozism in the spirit of the romantics— had to suffer a collapse. It was inevitable that the poison of empirical relativity would remind us of its objektive existence and force us to take account of its not illusory, not imaginary, but real anti-rational power. In fact, how is a harmonious and joyous “self-consciousness” of the concept of the world in science possible if an anti-rational element of distinct being is revealed in the world itself? j If the harmony between “reason” and “nature” is disrupted by the fact that one of these sides preserves its divine order while the other is mixed up with, lost in, or whirled about in, chaos? If it turns out that the world, even if produced by divine necessity, has all the same become a victim of senseless contingency? If in the depths of the world there flares up a thirst for disunification? If the mode of its being rises up against reason, and behind the “beauty” and “blessedness” of the world opens up an unending chain of evil, ugliness, and suffering? Then a senseless, finite, singular, sensuous world will oppose a perfected, infinite Universality, the supersensuous, speculative substance of Divinity.k Then theogony will not include the world in its path, and cosmogony will be expelled from the divine sphere.

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The attempt to realize philosophically the great transition from the absolute to the relative put Hegel face to face precisely with this rebellion of chaos. The beginning of this “transition” is described in Hegel at the conclusion of the “logical” process. According to the fundamental law of concreteness, requiring a continuous enrichment of the Absolute, the Idea cannot rest content with the state that it has attained in the Logic. Further progress is also demanded by the law of “universality,” according to which Substance must unfold itself to the end and, while not leaving its confines, appear in the form of the all-exhaustive system of the “singularities” of the world, produced by and permeated by Substance. However, further “movement” and enrichment, descending to the singularities of the world, cannot be accomplished in the same element of the “pure concept,” because all the possible states and determinations of this concept are already realized, revealed, and concentrated in the order of dialectical accumulation and organic growing-together. The further path of God demands a renewal of the element itself, i.e., of that level, or of that material, from which or in which the states of Divinity are formed. According to the law of “dialectic,” this renewal must carry Divinity into the “opposite” state, in order that there should further be realized a state of higher reconciliation between these opposing states. And thus if the first (in the systematic respect) science, Logic, “depicts God as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature and finite spirit,”1 the succeeding sciences must depict the being of God in its “natural” and “anthropomorphic” state,2 in such a way that the life of the speculatively mature and philosophically thinking human consciousness, applying its powers to the intuitive thinking of Divinity, becomes the worthy crowning of the whole “process.” Whence the possibility and necessity of speaking about “Logic” twice: at the beginning of the world (“the Logic of the beginning”) and at the end of the development of the world (“the Logic of the end”).3 In “the Logic of the beginning,” the Concept “moves,” as it does everywhere, by an inner, creative process; in doing so it remains faithful to its “pure” nature, and its process is a process of “self-thinking.”4 However, this “self-thinking” takes place in it without any sort of consciousness whatever and before any self-consciousness, in the unconscious “immediate immersion” of the Concept in its own essence.5 The entire “Logic 1. Log. I 36. Hegel’s emphasis. 2. Comp., e.g., Enc. III 468. 3. Log. III 272. 4. Comp.: Enc. I 408; Log. I 35; Log. III 244. 5. Comp.: Log. III 18; Enc. III 468; Log. III 272–73; Log. III 328, 328–29.

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of the beginning,” compared with the higher achievement yet to come, is only an unconscious, naive primordiality that is immediately realized within itself by the Divinity. And thus in order to realize within itself a “knowing-with”l and “self-knowing-with,”m the Idea, living in “the Logic of the beginning” through pre-known-with n or extra-known-with o thought (i.e., in a state of dissolution in speculative thought that has not yet found itself ), creates in itself a completely meaningless and unknowing state. The immediate “self-thinking of the Concept” realized in “the Logic of the beginning” must be replaced by the mediatedly immediate “self-thinking of the Concept” realized in “the Logic of the end” and in mature philosophy. This “mediation” consists in the separation of the objekt from the subject. The objektive, objectivep element of Divinity (that which is being thought in “the Logic of the beginning”) is torn away from Divinity’s subjective, thinking element (from that which thinks in “the Logic of the beginning”) and posited as self-sufficient. The subjective element—“thinking meaning”—is “sublated”1 and extinguished, as it were. Solely the objektive element remains—“thinkable meaning”—“bare objektivity,”2 “external objektivity,”3 the ob-jectum, i.e., what is thrown into opposition and, therefore, which lies opposite; it is a kind of ἀντικἑιμενον,q an ob-ject (compare [e]-ject),r in its self-sufficiency and distinct being. Divinity, hitherto creating itself by means of pre-conscious self-thinking and raising itself on this path to maximal richness, now gives itself over to pre-conscious s unthinking self-creation in order, through the loss of all thinking, to realize conscious t thinking and then speculatively self-forgetting, objektive consciousness in philosophy in general, and in “the Logic of the end,” in particular. This renewal of the element u acquires, in Hegel, the significance of the “creation of the world.” It takes place in such a way that in the Idea is realized a certain act, produced by the Idea itself, which Hegel describes as a “free letting-go”4 of itself into a state of “other-being.”5 From an external viewpoint, the matter reduces to the fact that the “Absolute Idea,” as the last stage of the Logic of the beginning, must be understood, or regarded, in a certain new sense: the power of reasoning imagination must substitute another meaning in those same attributes and properties. But in the metaphysical respect, this change signifies the initial act of world-creation. Toward the end of the logical process, the Idea reaches an exhaustive and concrete (i.e., organically grown-together) completeness of being. It attains a complete “unity with itself,”6 or, what is the same thing, 1. Log. III 352. 2. Log. III 353. 3. Enc. III 13. 4. Log. III 353; comp.: Phän. 610; Log. I 64; Rel. II 47; comp. also: “ausgleitet,” “fällt”: Aphor. I 540. 5. “Anderssein”: comp., e.g., Log. I 124; Log. III 27, 328–29; Enc. I 26; Enc. II 23; Beweise 392, and others. 6. Enc. I 413.

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an immediate1 relation to itself, or, what is the same thing, an “intuition” of itself.2 In this intuitive immediacy of being, the Idea must move farther, i.e., it must move from the universal to the particular,3 impart to itself more specific determinations, taking all the riches it has gained to be a poor, empty, indeterminate “totality.” 4 The Idea must “release itself” onto a new “purely objektive path”; it must “resolve”5 on a new self-negation. The riches already realized by the Idea in itself guarantee it an eventual victory and give it in this “free”6 self-release an absolute certainty and inner “peace.”7 The Idea preserves its “perfect transparency”8 and only creatively changes the form or mode of its being. More precisely, the “subjective” falls away, and the “objektive” remains; the “intuiting” is extinguished, and only “the intuited” remains. What arises is a certain “simple being”9 accessible to immediate intuition; a kind of indeterminate, quiescent, transparent totality; an empty space, the first and poorest stage of natural life. From this stage commences all that follows: the Idea begins to live in the form of the objekt; it acquires the aspect of “the externality of space and time, existing without subjectivity.”10 “That which follows” is, first of all, not the speculative order of a scientific development, but the empirical order of world-creation: of nature and the human soul.v This could be clear from the mere fact that the Idea requires the dialectical renewal of its element, i.e., removal from its own primordial speculative (i.e., thinking, “subjective-objektive”) state. The task of this removal consists precisely in producing a really existent other-being. In order that a conscious identity of subject and objekt could be realized, it is necessary first that the “objekt” acquire a separate existence, isolated from the “subject,” in order that the “subject” should be able to arise out of it subsequently and make of it the “object” of its “coknowing.” w Hegel describes this process with the words: “The logical becomes nature, and nature becomes spirit.”11 There is no doubt whatever that, in the philosophically systematic order, Logic is followed not by nature but by the Philosophy of Nature. However, in the cosmological order, the Idea “withdraws” precisely not into the science of nature but into nature. And with this withdrawal, the Concept loses its speculative-thinking aspect, and is robed in the form of a

1. Comp., e.g., Enc. I 414; and also: Log. I 64–65; Log. III 26–27, 352–53. 2. Enc. I 413. 3. Enc. I 414; Beweise 449. 4. Comp.: Log. III 352–53. 5. Enc. I 414. 6. Log. III 353; Enc. I 413. 7. “Ihrer absolut sicher und in sich ruhend”: Log. III 353. 8. “Vollkommen durchsichtig ”: Log. III 353. 9. “Das einfache Sein”: Log. III 353. 10. “Die absolut für sich selbst ohne Subjectivität seiende Äusserlichkeit des Raums und der Zeit”: Log. III 353. 11. “Das Logische wird zur Natur, und die Natur zum Geiste”: Enc. III 468.

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non-thinking, unconscious, spatiotemporal thing. What is produced is not a new science dwelling in the element of speculative consciousness, but a material medium, the world of finite existence. Letting itself go, the Idea as it were “turns around” and is transformed into “the immediacy of external and singularly shaped becoming.”1 The Concept represents itself in the form of materiality and sensuous being;2 it gets clothed in mortal garments and assumes the form of the concrete-empirical. Such is the cosmological significance of this transition, drawing with it extremely serious and profound metaphysical consequences. These consequences are expressed in the fact that the Idea is immersed in a non-thinking, powerless, and confused state. The Idea exists in nature in an unconscious form. However, this “unconsciousness” no longer has that innocent, harmless character that Hegel had in mind at the initial stage of his project. In a series of natural stages3 ascending from space, as the simplest element of nature, to the human soul, immersed in philosophical intuition, as the highest moment of the being of the world, consciousness and thinking are a significantly “later” product of the idea: even within the limits of psychic life, all natural, psychophysiological, and sensuous life stands below that level4 on which the “awakening of the soul”5 to consciousness and selfconsciousness takes place. At all the lower levels, consciousness as such is in no wise characteristic of the Concept: it leads a life of meaningless immersion in its own other-being. “The sun, an animal” “do not have a concept”;6 that is to say, they do not possess in thought their meaning-essence. For them, the Concept does not become an object;7 it does not exist in them “for itself.”8 It exists in them only in an “internal,”9 i.e., in an essentially hidden manner, and it therefore dwells in them not in its true form.10 On all these levels, the Concept is only the “inner,” in-itself-existing essence of nature, an “unconscious creator,”11 an unconscious telos,12 an unconsciously penetrating agent.13 Here the Concept is “blind.” It “does not grasp itself,” i.e., “it is the unthinking Concept.”14 “Not conscious” of anything, “unknowing,”15 it is as though “asleep in nature”;16 and even “obscure self-feeling”17 is awakened in this Concept only at the level of the “animal organism.” Thinking, this absolute force and power, betrays the Concept, which 1. “Umschlagen der Idee in die Unmittelbarkeit äusserlichen und vereinzelten Daseins”: Enc. III 30(Z). 2. Comp.: Phän. 189. 3. Enc. II 22. 4. Comp.: Enc. III 388–417. 5. Comp.: Enc. III 246–47, 249. 6. Beweise B 475. 7. Ibidem. 8. Enc. II 636(Z). 9. Comp.: Log. II 182. 10. Ibidem. 11. “Nur der bewusstlose Werkmeister ”: Enc. II 636(Z). Comp.: Enc. III 30(Z). 12. Comp.: Enc. II 607; Enc. III 105. 13. Log. III 187–88. 14. “Blind,” “sich selbst nicht fassend,” “d. h., nicht denkender Begriff ”: Log. III 18. 15. “Nicht als bewusster, noch weniger als gewusster Begriff ”: Log. I 51. 16. Enc. III 30(Z). 17. W. Beh. 415.

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has fallen into other-being. This betrayal delivers a heavy blow to the life and structure of the Concept: the Idea is deprived of its speculative power. The new “element” masters the situation; it overcomes the power of the Concept, draws it into the eddy of its own discrete life and flouts the Concept’s steely rhythm. Hegel not infrequently speaks with undisguised confusion and helplessness of that helplessness and confusion in which the Concept suddenly finds itself. Having entered into “external existence,”1 having descended into the “sensuous element,”2 the Concept “covers its core in a motley crust”3 and finds itself under its power. The life of the Concept loses its higher, harmonious unity. Multiplicity gains the throne; multiplicity acquires a positive, predominant significance.4 What is revealed is “a blind multiplicity deprived of the Concept,”5 “an infinite wealth of forms, phenomena, and formations.”6 The Concept actually “goes out of itself”7 and is dispersed;8 the Concept is stretched out,9 scattered,10 dispersed.11 “Since nature is the being of the Concept external to itself, it is left free to disperse itself in this variety,”12 to throw itself about13 in a stream of entangled14 singularities.15 It is natural that, in the case of such an “infinite differentiation,”16 nature turns out to be “powerless to retain and exhibit the rigor of the Concept,”17 while the Concept turns out to be too weak18 to hold together the multiplicity of natural phenomena and to subordinate them to its order. But that is precisely why “indifferent chance” and “indeterminate disorder”19 reign in the empirical world. Nature is “the loss of the Concept,”20 “the falling away of the idea from itself.”21 In the form in which “it is, its being does not correspond to its Concept.”22 In nature, the idea remains unharmonized with itself, incommensurate with itself,23 for “natural things exhibit rationality in only a completely external and singular form.”24 This lack of correspondence to the Concept transforms nature into the sphere of the finite,25 into an “untrue, spurious object,”26 into an “unresolved contradiction,”27 into something “opposed to the Concept.”28

1. “Äussere Existenz”: Recht 17–18. 2. “Das Sinnliche Element”: Enc. III 32(Z). 3. Recht 18; comp.: Breife II 37. 4. “Das Viele—das Erste, das Positive ist”: W. Beh. 347, 395; comp.: Enc. III 51(Z). 5. Log. III 45. 6. Recht 18. 7. Log. III 63. 8. Comp.: “treibt sich herum”: Log. III 45. 9. “Sich ausbreiten”: Phän. 9. 10. “Sich zerstreuen”: Beweise 438. 11. “Sich verlaufen”: Log. III 45. 12. Log. III 45. 13. “Auseinandergeworfen”: W. Beh. 395. 14. “Bunte verworrene Gesellschaft ”: Breife II 37. 15. Log. III 63; comp.: Enc. III 32(Z). 16. “Unendlich differentiirte Vermittelung ”: W. Beh. 395. 17. “Ohnmacht der Natur . . .”: Log. III 45. 18. “Schwäche des Begriffs in der Natur überhaupt ”: Enc. II 651. 19. “Gleichgültige Zufälligkeit,” “unbestimmbare Regellosigkeit ”: Enc. II 36. 20. “Verlust des Begriffs”: Log. III 63; comp.: Phän. 9. 21. “Abfall der Idee von sich selbst ”: Enc. II 28. 22. Enc. II 28. 23. “Unangemessenheit mit sich”: Enc. II 28. 24. Recht 212. 25. Comp.: Beweise B 476. 26. Briefe II 79. 27. “Der unaufgelöste Widerspruch”: Enc. II 28, 36. 28. “Das Gegenteil des Begriffs”: Niet. 341.

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In nature, a direct resistance to the Concept and its speculatively controlling unity 1 is revealed, and therefore the events and fragments of nature are often devoid of speculative significance. The diverse “genera and species” produced by nature should be viewed as arbitrary inventions and fantastical representations, which are also encountered in the life of the soul.2 And the Philosophy of Nature should in no wise3 take into account all the, often completely incomprehensible,4 phenomena of nature. In this world it is true of course, that not everything has life; but what does not conceal life within itself is not the Concept,5 and has only “the semblance of being.”6 It is “only a corpse of the living process,”7 nothing more than a “real possibility.”8 It would be pointless to think that things stand better in the empirical life of the soul. Here too, spirit is dispersed in an infinite multiplicity of contingent and arbitrary representations,9 in a chaos of psychic phenomena,10 withdrawing into an incomprehensible and “obscure”11 labyrinth of the psychic.12 The life of the soul is a “dark sphere” where there is nothing “stable, determinate, and true,” where deceptive lights and reflections glimmer everywhere, where all the threads get lost and truncated.13 Here too, as in the entire empirical world, all “the activities, directions, goals, and actions” of spirit are torn apart14 and tangled. The soul lives in confused interactions with nature and with the body, sacrificed to “external influences” and “singular circumstances,” doomed to dreams, premonitions, and the play of subjective representations.15 Irrational16 existence reigns here. However, the empirical world, encompassing nature and man, not only refrains from following the speculative laws, and from the realization of the true structure of things; it brings about its own structure, very nearly a complete absence of structure, its own order, spewing forth in the absence of a true order. This structure and order differ sharply from speculative lawlikeness. The speculative series is one and unique; the empirical world is woven of a multiplicity of intersecting and truncating series.17 Speculative development is realized, being moved by “absolute necessity”;18 empirical evolution19 knows only external,20 banal,21 mechanical 22 1. Comp.: Enc. II 696(Z); Briefe II 37. 2. “Als die willkürlichen Einfälle des Geistes in seinen Vorstellungen”: Log. III 45. 3. Enc. II 124. 4. Enc. II 93(Z). 5. Enc. II 602; comp.: Enc. II 40(Z). 6. “Nur den Schein des Seins”: Beweise A 461. 7. “Nur der Leichnam des Lebensprocesses”: Enc. II 423; comp.: Phän. 259, 260, and others. 8. Log. III 335. 9. Log. III 45. 10. Briefe I 264. 11. Briefe I 263. 12. Comp.: Briefe I 264. 13. Comp.: Briefe I 263–64. 14. Beweise 351. 15. Comp.: Log. III 271. 16. Ibidem. 17. “Gestört,” “unterbrochen”: Beweise 397. 18. Comp.: Log. II 215, 216; Enc. I 293, 299–300; Beweise 438. 19. Comp.: “Entstehungsweisen”: Enc. II 300. 20. Log. III 46. 21. “Gemein”: Glaub. 127; W. Beh. 368. 22. Ros. 481; Log. III 213, 241; comp.: W. Beh. 332, 368.

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necessity, which is nothing other than the abstractly rationalistic expression for blind contingency.1 Members of the speculative order are connected dialectically and concretely, i.e., by an inner, organic bond of grown-togetherness.2 Fragments of the empirical world stand in external interaction3 and are subject to the law of causality.4 Time, powerless in the speculative series, is the essential form of the finite world;5 therefore, the fragments of the world are mortal and are subject to disintegration.6 The life of the Concept is free, for it knows only its own inner law;7 but nature in its own existence does not know freedom,8 dwelling in external interactions and “unconscious torpor.”9 The speculative order is disrupted in nature most often by the fact that nature’s “particular stages and determinations” are left behind in the form of self-sufficient existences (Existenzen) and are not included organically in higher, or what is the same thing, “deeper,” formations.10 This leads to such an abundance in nature of repetitions and “boredom” from fruitless, unnecessary excess.11 The idea turns out to be powerless to “work through”12 this abundance of chance events and circumstances, and as a result of all this the “development of individuality” turns out to be subject to “external contingencies” and monstrous deformations (Monstrositäten), illnesses, “threats and dangers.”13 The singularities of the empirical world are not included organically into the universality of the divine substance: “physical nature” has “its own course and its own laws,”14 while humanity’s natural makeup compels it to serve “particular goals” and disinclines it from the higher speculative law of goodness.15 Lost in this world and torn away from Divinity, humanity leads an “uncertain, fearful, and unhappy” life.16 All this clearly shows that the Idea’s letting go of itself plunges it into the ill-fated abyss of the “concrete-empirical.” The “falling away” of the Idea turns out to be its “fall,” and everything that Hegel formulated and expressed about empirical concreteness must be referred and applied to the new state of the Idea. And, first of all, this world of sensuous becoming turns out to be speculatively unacceptable. The Concept faces here the inescapable necessity of rejecting itself because it has fallen away from itself. The world cannot be “justified.” 1. Comp.: Diff. 265; Glaub. 146; W. Beh. 358; Enc. I 24; Enc. II 28, 36; Beweise 397, 398, 400, 437–38. 2. Comp.: as applied to the Philosophy of Nature: Enc. II 32, 32, 38–39, 423– 24. 3. Enc. II 36; Beweise 438. 4. Glaub. 142; Briefe II 117, and others. 5. Enc. II 54; Enc. III 89; Recht 66: see also the Phenomenology of Spirit and the Philosophy of History. 6. Beweise 351. 7. See chapter 8. 8. Enc. II 28; Recht 87; Ph. G. 58. 9. “Bewusstlose Stumpfheit”: Ph. G. 58. 10. Comp.: Enc. III 12–13. 11. Comp.: Ph. G. 51. 12. “Nicht vollkommen durchgearbeitet ”: Log. III 239. 13. Enc. II 651. 14. Beweise A 465. 15. Comp.: Beweise A 464–65. 16. Enc. II 651; Aesth. I 194, 199.

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This is the second outcome to which Hegel was led: taken in its genuine makeup, the relative world does not live by the life of speculative rationality. This world has its own distinct being, its own structure and its own fate. The rhythm of the divine process is not its rhythm, and the attainment of a “concrete” state turns out to be beyond this world’s powers. Cosmogony cannot be included in the line of God’s path, and theogony cannot be enriched by states of the world. It is clear that, in this case too, the great transition from the absolute to the relative remains ungrounded and undisclosed. In the first outcome (the project of “panepistemism”), Divinity and the world stood in a state of harmonious reconciliation, but the world was liberated from the specific poison of relativity, and consequently, the “transition” from the absolute to the relative simply “did not take place.” Divinity remained the higher absoluteness; nature was the lower absoluteness. The eye of speculative philosophy did not see empirical relativity, and therefore access to the fundamental problem of the “transition” was closed to the philosopher. In the second outcome (the realization of empirical confusion), the poison of relativity turned out to be included in the world: the eye of speculative philosophy spotted the essence of the concrete-empirical and thereby opened access for itself to the problem of the “transition.” Philosophy even attempts to tell how this “transition” is accomplished, but the results of the “transition” put philosophy in a helpless position. The Absolute, having released itself into the world, submits to chaos and is carried away by its lawlessness. It is not that God created the world and shone in it; rather, the world rose against God, absorbed him, and carried him into the abyss. If a “transition” took place, it was the collapse of the “absolute.” But the “absolute” as such cannot suffer collapse, because what undergoes diminution, or degeneration, is not the “absolute.”x Therefore, if a “transition” took place, it was a transition not of the absolute but of something other. But this means that the fundamental problem remains unsolved. This philosophical difficulty can also be expounded in the following way. If it be assumed that the “absolute” actually accomplished this “transition,” one must acknowledge that after the transition it lost its absoluteness. For there arose the finite world, distinct and autonomous in its being—“other-being” for the absolute. But the absolute cannot have other-being; in that consists its fundamental essence. Therefore the Idea, being at a loss in the sensuous empirical world, is no longer the Idea: the Concept perishes in the chaos that it itself has produced. And it is left to Hegel to play the role of the sorcerer, saving his apprentice from the forces of unruly darkness that he called into being.

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The speculative dream, having inflamed Schelling and been tenderly nourished by Hegel, evidently suffers a great collapse. Hegel’s entire philosophical doctrine must be considered under the sign of this collapse, for every stage of it is saturated, visibly or invisibly, with this dream. Every new work saves what remained after this collapse and makes distinctive concessions. Hegel ends up without that with which he began. And he does not bring this to full awareness. This gives him the opportunity to interweave in an odd way several different solutions of the problem into one, uttering essentially at once, in one breath, his dream, its collapse, and the middling, compromised outcome. There is formed a single, multi-voiced solution, which can at times be decoded only with great difficulty. And this inner disharmony is combined with a certain profound, vital evolution in relation to the concrete-empirical, rooted in and often proceeding in half-conscious currents and nuances. The dream that the world is splendid in its entirety encounters the stubbornness of empirical multiplicity and leads the philosopher to irate attempts to repudiate the being of the sensuous world. To liberate himself, to purify himself, to separate himself from it in one way or another, was one of his fundamental aspirations. In this lies the negative passion of his philosophy,1 and Hegel remained faithful to this negative passion from beginning to end. With exceptional tirelessness, which witnesses to the intensity and depth of the emotion concealed here, Hegel uses every occasion to compromise the being of the concrete-empirical and to remove from this being all determinations and all decorations given to it by a naively realistic perception of the world, and a biologically pragmatic attitude.2 The purpose of all these attacks is the revelation that the concrete-empirical as such does not have being, that it is essentially nothing.3 That which has the appearance of the anti-rational is in fact empty appearance. The task of the human spirit consists in not yielding to this sensuous appearance, permeating the soul, infecting it with its nature, and dissolving it in animal-like immediacy. Rather, the human spirit must turn away from this appearance and liberate itself from its power. The concrete-empirical is that which does not exist, but only seems to. The being of God and the being of sensuous chaos are incompatible. But God’s being is evident by virtue of a higher, ultimate evidentness, and the philosopher prefers not to believe his earthly eyes. He often explains and openly insists upon the fact that true pantheism is acosmism.4 And this “world-negation” should be understood not only in the sense that the speculative makeup of the “world” is not the “world,” but the genuine 1. See chapter 1. 4. See chapter 8.

2. Comp., e.g., on “Begierde”: Aesth. I 48, 49, 51.

3. See chapter 1.

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tissue of Divine life: still more in the sense that God’s being is equivalent to the nonbeing of the concrete-empirical. It is clear that, despite its speculatively pedagogic significance and its epistemological profundity and productivity, such an irate attempt to reject the world does not solve the fundamental problem of the “transition from the absolute to the relative” but cancels y this problem, leaving it unresolved. If the concrete empirical world is “nothing,” then the problem of God’s relation to this world is an imaginary problem. Thus, if the “project of panepistemism” did not notice the empirical world, the outcome of “empirical confusion” strives to expose and reject it. But a great perplexity arises here: how could it have happened that the speculatively necessary and absolutely real creativity of the Idea resulted in an empty illusion? If the empirical world in its distinct being and autonomy is actually a product of the Idea, then it is impossible to admit its illusoriness. But if it is not a product of the Idea, then it would be better for speculative philosophy to be silent, for then its fundamental revelation of the unity and goodness z of the existing is radically undermined. All these difficulties reach their apogee precisely when Hegel sees that the philosophical sciences are chained by their content to empirical being. In the early period of his inquiries, Hegel proposed that one could at least place speculative “deduction” above empirical investigation as a higher court: “that in relation to which philosophy will prove (erweist) that it is not real cannot truly be encountered (wahrhaft vorkommen) in experience.”1 After this proof, let there remain a contrary “opinion,” but “only philosophy can decide (ausmachen)”2 about the “truthfulness of opinions” and the “objektivity of representations.” However, with the passing of the years and with the transition to the realization of the “concrete sciences” devoted to the world, Hegel became convinced that the philosophical disciplines obtain their “material” from empirical investigation.3 Then he began to speak not about the rejection of empirical opinions, but about the wise organization of the symbiosis between philosophy and empirical knowledge. “Not only must philosophy accord with the investigation of nature (Natur-Erfahrung), but the development and formation of philosophical science has ‘empirical physics’ as its presupposition and condition.”4 “The philosophy of nature takes that material (Stoff ) which physics prepares for it from experience . . . and transforms it,” without, however, positing “experience as the foundation, as the final confirmation,”5 but rather, having in mind

11.

1. W. Beh. 403. 2. W. Beh. 403. 5. Enc. II 18(Z).

3. Comp., e.g., Ph. G. 13, 14, and others.

4. Enc. II

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the laws of the speculative concept. Hegel openly acknowledges that only a “senseless prejudice” can lead to the view that philosophy is in confrontation “with meaningful (sinnig) empirical cognition”; on the contrary, philosophy “recognizes” and “even justifies” it.1 It is necessary that “concord and friendship”2 be established between philosophy and the empirical sciences, for philosophy needs precise, objektive knowledge about being, about the properties and connections of the empirical world. Hegel sometimes does not even insist upon the circuitous path that leads from the sensuous-empirical through formal abstraction to speculative knowledge.3 Inspired by Goethe’s artistic method, Hegel speaks of thinking “observation” as the rightful path in the cognition of nature4 and art. This is already not contemplative thinking, directed at “living meaning,” but “thinking contemplation,”aa which deals with the sensuously embodied Concept 5 and ascends directly from empirical “concrete givenness” to speculative “concrete universality, to the genus”6 in its metaphysical significance. It is clear that, given such an attitude toward the concreteempirical, it is impossible to deny its being and significance. If the empirical world has being, and if this being is so distinctive and autonomous a being that philosophy is compelled to admit a special method, or even several methods,7 for its disclosure, then the exclusion of it from God’s path will oppose the distinctive being of the “relative” to the “absolute,” and pantheism will decompose into this ontological dualism. And if philosophy attempts to avoid this collapse by including the concrete-empirical in the genuine tissue of God’s path, then the conception of pantheism will be saved, but the essence of the absolute substance will accept into itself a great irrational sphere called the sensuous world. The rejection of the empirical world will turn out to be unrealizable, first of all, because its immediate presence, intensity of existence, distinct being, and abundance of content will compel us to acknowledge it; and, secondly, because Hegel’s metaphysical task consists precisely in the nonnegation, in the acceptance of it. And so the deepest power of things—the voice of the objective situation and the impossibility of justifying the fundamental metaphysical revelation—compels philosophy to seek a new resolution of the problem. 1. Enc. I xiii, from the preface to the second edition of the Encyclopedia, signed in 1827. 2. “Neutiquam repugnare illi consensui et amicitiae, quam inter philosophiam et eas scientias, quae uno vocabulo empiricae nuncupari solent, revera obtinere reputamus”: 3 Lat. 308, from 1829. 3. See chapter 2. 4. “Begreifende Betrachtung ”: Enc. II 11. 5. “Denkende Betrachtung ”: Aesth. I 16. 6. Comp.: Enc. I 398. 7. See: Enc. I 227.

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Translator’s Notes a. In the German text, the title of this chapter became “The Necessity of the World” (“Die Not der Welt”). b. That is, of relatedness. c. “To lose quality” presumably means here to lose sight of the qualitative difference between the Absolute and the world, through positing a gradual transition which ultimately is no transition. d. Presumably, to erase the distinction between the Concept and the world of which it is (in part) the Concept. e. The reader will recall that in the section of my introduction on “The Hegel Commentary and Its Fate” I suggested that Il’in’s attribution to Hegel of an original intention to create a “panlogism” should be treated with circumspection. f. Beginning with this paragraph, and extending through the following six paragraphs, Il’in is expounding a hypothesis about an underlying conception driving Hegel’s philosophical project which Hegel himself, according to Il’in, has not brought to “full awareness.” Il’in’s assertion of this viewpoint as an interpretation of Hegel’s thought is thus qualified. Il’in seems to believe that Hegel was more than half-committed to it despite himself. The hypothesis being advanced here is the first of the two “extremes” that Il’in has depicted in the opening pages of the chapter, each of which Hegel supposedly recognized as an “extreme” and sought to avoid (but not fully successfully, according to Il’in). g. The reference in this footnote to “Enc. II 995(Z)” (i.e., to p. 995 in the first edition of the Naturphilosophie) in all Russian editions of the text is obviously mistaken, as that text ends on p. 696. It is probable that the correct reference was to 695(Z), which would be appropriate. However, Il’in dropped that reference entirely in the German edition, leaving only the first citation: Enc. II 271 (Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels, 236). h. A mark of the “extremism” of this interpretive hypothesis might be seen in a too-ready identification of the Concept with God. Such an identification would naturally be reflected in a tendency to speak in too straightforward a fashion of the Concept as “creating” the world. i. Beginning here, and extending through the three following paragraphs, Il’in argues for the inevitable failure of the first “extreme” in the face of the reality of the empirical world encountered in the transition from the Logic to Nature (or from the Absolute to the world). j. In this plus the following eight paragraphs, Il’in is outlining the essential features of the “transition” (from the Absolute to the empirical world of nature) as the essential problem confronting both the first and the second “extreme” responses. k. We are dealing with an admittedly “extreme” interpretive hypothesis here. Even so, it is worth nothing that Il’in’s characterization of the Divinity under this hypothesis as “supersensuous, speculative substance” would not be acceptable to many contemporary Hegel scholars. For example, according to Peter Hodgson, “Hegel’s God is not a supersensible entity, a ‘supreme being,’ but

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rather the ultimate condition of possibility for the totality of experience and for religious experience in particular, the experience of the ‘religious relationship’ of finite and infinite. . . . But to say that Hegel’s God is not a supersensible entity is not to say that God is not actual (wirklich). God is actual, ‘absolute actuality’ (absoluter Wirklichkeit), ‘actual being in and for itself’ (das Anundfürsichseiende)— but only in and through worldly reality, not as a separated, supersensible entity. Apart from the world, God’s actuality remains abstract, unrealized; in and through the world, of which God is the ideal condition of possibility, God becomes concrete, living, true actuality—or absolute spirit” (Hegel: Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, One-Volume Edition, The Lectures of 1827, ed. Peter C. Hodgson [Berkeley: University of California Press, 1988], 12). On the other hand, it would be an interesting exercise to ask oneself how far Il’in’s interpretation would have to be modified to accommodate a view such as Hodgson’s: the answer might be less than one might be inclined to suppose at first glance. l. The Russian term for consciousness, сознание, is literally a “co-knowing” (со-знание) or a “knowing-with,” and Il’in is here playing on that literal meaning by inserting the hyphen. m. Similarly, the term само-со-знание, “self-consciousness,” could more literally be rendered as “self-co-knowing” or “self-knowing-with.” n. That is, pre-conscious. o. That is, extra-conscious. p. Both the Russian and the German texts contain both forms of “objective” here: i.e., “Das objecktive, gegenständliche Element Gottes” (Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels, 241). q. That is, “something lying opposite.” r. This works better in Il’in’s Russian: предмет (from метать [since метать means “to throw”]). s. That is, “pre-knowing-with” or “co-pre-knowing.” t. That is, “knowing-with” or “co-knowing.” u. That is, the shift from the Logic to nature. v. Here, and in the following eleven paragraphs, Il’in outlines the second “extreme” possible response to the problem of the “transition,” which Hegel allegedly also saw and sought (with less than complete success) to avoid. Again, Il’in’s assertion of this viewpoint as an interpretation of Hegel is therefore a qualified one. w. That is, “consciousness.” The translation of this sentence was particularly challenging, and the one offered is derived from the German edition as well as the original Russian. In the Russian Il’in employed the verb привзойти, which is now obsolete and was apparently never more than very rarely used, mainly in theological contexts, one of which concerned the relation of the personhood of Christ to the Logos. x. Arguably, this assertion by Il’in that the Absolute as such cannot undergo collapse, diminution, or degeneration may be viewed as one of the fundamental premises determining Il’in’s entire interpretation of Hegel’s thought. Compare with the concluding lines of the penultimate paragraph in chapter 22 of the separate volume 2.

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y. Il’in uses the verb стять (снимает) here, which is the standard term used to translate Hegel’s aufheben, and which I usually translate as “sublate.” However, in the particular criticism of Hegel being developed in this passage, perhaps the best rendering would be simply “cancel” or “remove,” implying a failure of the proposed transition. z. The term used is благодатность, and more literally would mean “manifestation of Divine grace.” aa. This is perhaps the sole point in the text where Il’in uses созерцание to translate Betrachtung (here paralleled with denkende) rather than Anschauung. It might be preferable to use the English “consideration” here, but that term does not work in the translation of Il’in’s inversion of созерцающее мышление (begreifende Betrachtung) to мыслящее созерцатие (denkende Betrachtung). See Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels, 253.

11

On Actuality

Hegel’s philosophy finds its fate in the necessity of accepting what is unacceptable for its fundamental vision and creed. To reject the empirical world does not mean to transform it into nothing: it remains immediately present for the most sharp-sighted and objective philosophical consciousness. This world maintains a relentlessly intense existence, summoning to itself and drawing into its life not only the sensuously confused but also the speculatively liberated human consciousness. This world reveals everywhere a distinctive course and a distinct law, demanding recognition and scientific comprehension. Finally, this world conceals in itself an abundance of objective content, robed in this world and so grown together with it that a thinker who denies the visible mode of the world’s being also closes off access for himself to the very treasure of spiritual content. To repudiate the empirical world is to commit the life of the Idea to impoverishment or self-deception, for what is repudiated will nonetheless be accepted and used imperceptibly. To repudiate the empirical world is to deem it not good, alien to God’s power and doomed to its ill-fated ways; it means to radically undermine the revelation of pantheism. This necessity of accepting the finite, relative world and including it in philosophy cannot be unexpected for a psychologically insightful historian of philosophy. That from which the soul or philosophy turns away with such an intense, or stubborn, affect can be recognized a priori as the real, essential side of the object.a The very radicalness of the negation provides a basis for foreseeing that that which is killed and eliminated will rise in the form of a philosophical “revenant,” and that the fate of the negating doctrine is formed in an essential relation to that which is negated. The essence of nature, ethical life, and history, art, and religion reveals with perfect clarity the impossibility of excluding the concrete-empirical from God’s path. To accept the concrete-empirical is to include it in the makeup of God’s path. It means to sublate the fundamental dilemma by virtue of which the world is either “speculative” or “empirical.” The task confronting Hegel came down to overcoming this mutual exclusion. It was necessary to show that the world is not only empirically concrete but also rational, not only chaotic, but also speculatively concrete. By the power of things,

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the solution to this problem acquired a central significance for Hegel’s entire metaphysical conception. The world combines in itself the power of speculative thought and a sensuous-empirical element: that is the thesis that was Hegel’s to unfold. This combination could be constructed in two ways: either monistically, if Hegel could show that, under closer scrutiny, the concrete-empirical lawlessness wholly reduces to a particular interlacing of speculative laws; or dualistically, if it were discovered that the world actually does have a dual makeup, concealing in itself two coexistent, or symbiotic, principles. The first outcome would signify an acceptance of the concrete-empirical that would be a true and complete overcoming of it, and would realize the dream of panepistemism, dethroning the distinct being of the irrational. Hegel apparently did not even think about such a complete, triumphant acceptance of the world. The element of “other-being” remained alien for him, and the doctrine of actuality acquired a determinately dualistic character. Hegel’s indication that the Concept “nevertheless” deals only with itself remains a philosophically unjustified, religious postulate, and attempts in vain to conceal a Platonic dualism behind a Spinozistic appearance. Thus, to accept the empirical element is to show that the rhythm of the speculative Concept has actually been realized in the tissue of the empirical element, mastering it and subordinating it to itself; and that conversely, the speculative Concept achieves its disclosure precisely within the resources of sensuous existence. This means that within the world there must be discovered a triple concretization: first, the genuine organicity of the Concept; second, the capacity of the empirical fragments for organic symbiosis with each other; and third, the possibility of a true “growing-together” of the two opposing elements. Any other combination would have shown that the taking-up of the sensuous element had failed and did not take place, that the conflicting elements stand side by side in an inadmissible discreteness, and that, consequently, the empirical element had shaped the encounter with the Concept in its own way, and thereby achieved superiority over it. And meanwhile, the victory of the higher element consists precisely in not letting the lower element impose upon it the lower form of life and relation: the encounter must take place at the higher level; otherwise, a victory of the lower element will result. The acceptance of the empirical presupposes, accordingly, the realizability of the law of speculative concreteness in the relation between the two opposite elements. It must be discovered that they are truly capable of interpenetration, despite their distinct being and the fact that they answer to different laws. The concrete-empirical must manifest the capability of realizing in itself speculative lawlikeness and thereby the capability

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of organically growing together with the Concept. The growing-together of the elements will consist precisely in the fact that the living, creative rhythm of the higher element will shine forth in terms of the lower element, and in this way all three concretizations will turn out to be a single event: the earthly will begin to blaze with heavenly light. In order to understand this reconciling, middle conception, it is important to keep in mind the relation that is formed between science and the world. To wit: the world in a certain sense coincides with speculative science, but in a certain sense does not coincide, for science has a simple, unitary makeup, whereas the world has a complex —a dual—makeup. This entire interrelation should be understood as follows. Every “concrete” science (i.e., every science of the world) is a series of categories or states of the speculative Concept. The Idea “first” produces these its states in an unconsciously empirical form, in the form of “things of the world,” and “then” recognizes them through humanity’s conscious spirit, and is convinced that the categories of the world form a speculatively connected and progressively ascending chain.1 These same categories speculatively thinking themselves (in the human soul), which are woven into the scientific series, are also manifested in the form of living, real powers in the world of empirical becoming as well. The categories of science and the categories of the world are one; they are the same creative essences that have ascended from unconscious self-actualization to conscious selfdisclosure. But in the sensuous world these “category-powers” are not in the same, or rather not only in the same, progressively ascending chain in which philosophy discovers them. On the one hand, their speculative connection is preserved in the world, for it is determined by their basic, unchanged content; on the other hand, these “category-powers” are submerged in the disorder of the sensuous world and in the struggle for self-actualization. In this they are like the Valkyries, who preserve their individuality and their seniority when they fly about the earth in search of heroes for Valhalla. Further, in the lower empirical reality, the “category-powers” live and act not in their classically speculative form but in a form complicated by sensuous determinations. Thus, if the first category of Philosophy of Nature is “empty space,” this does not mean that in the empirical world empty space actually exists. In the world there exists not “space in general” but singular, filled pieces of space, which, as such, are permeated with spatial universality. In precisely the same way, “the universal element of air,” “the universal element of fire,” “electricity,” “organicity,” “vegetalness,” “animalness,” and the “soul” are not found in the sensuous world in their 1. See chapters 4 and 10.

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categorial purity, but always only in the form of singularly determined modifications found “here and now.” The element of the Concept forms the speculative universality that is submerged in empirical singularities, complicated by them and sometimes degraded by them. Thus, insofar as the world participates in the “category-powers,” to that extent one can speak of an “identity” between them and science. But this identity too has its limits: only the victories of the categories are registered in the scientific series, whereas their defeats stay expelled. A Valkyrie who returns without a hero is supposedly not received in Valhalla. In consequence of this, the compass of speculative science and the compass of the world do not coincide,1 just as their qualitative makeups do not coincide. The compass of the world contains within itself a multitude of speculatively “uncomprehended” things and states. It is clear that what is usually called the “world,” i.e., the entire ensemble of spatiotemporal things and events, has a dual makeup: “internally speculative” and “externally empirical.” Insofar as the speculative makeup of the world overcomes the empirical medium, the world is included in the path of divine ascent. But insofar as the irrational element has the upper hand, God’s path does not encompass the world. It is necessary that there be in the world a holiday of speculative reconciliation and a growing-together of the two elements, and only then will the singularity of empirical becoming become the singularity of speculative being and be “constructed” in the “universal” form of speculative science. One can express this by saying that the “world” is divided twice into two parts: once according to makeup, and once according to compass. First, in terms of content, all things and fragments of the world consist of two elements: a speculatively internal one and an empirically external one. Everything in this world is a struggle between the noumenal power of the “logical” substance and the phenomenal power of the “sensuous” element. This struggle has before it an indeterminately vast prospect of future ascent. Hegel gives no indication as to whether the world will ever be completely liberated from the sensuous element. He supposes that this can be realized only by humanity, and moreover, only internally, and only in speculative thinking; whether it is possible that the “world” can someday be wholly transformed into a “totality” of individual, speculatively thinking “spirits” remains unknown.b The opposite question also remains incompletely clarified: whether such fragments and states as consist of a single empirical element alone, exist in the world. On principle Hegel cannot admit this, and when philosophical intuition leaves him powerless in the face 1. See chapter 9.

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of some world fragment, he invokes, with the power of religious selfevidence, a fundamental revelation: a thing in which God’s power is not present is objektively impossible, and if it exists, God’s power does not exist. He is ready to undertake the greatest effort of speculative “explanation,” to undertake the most unexpected minimalization of his task, and finally to negate the present situation. But he is not ready to admit “pure chaos.” It is natural that, given such a conception, one should understand by the “concrete-empirical”1 that is being expelled, precisely these stubborn remnants that tease the philosopher with the mask of pure chaos. The philosopher responds to them by reducing them to a cognitive illusion. Secondly, the entire compass of the world is divided into those fragments in which the “speculative element” is victorious, and those fragments in which it has suffered defeat. The former represent a pure and triumphant type of the “Idea in other-being”; they easily submit to speculative “construction” in science and form a series of speculative singularities, included in the compass of scientific categories and understood through them, in the perspective of the world. Thus, for example, every true work of art is a “singularity” that modifies one category of Aesthetics or another; every realization of ethical life is a “singularity” with respect to the corresponding category of the Philosophy of Right, and so forth. Only their empirical form of existence can hinder their complete inclusion in science. Alongside such fragments of “speculative victory,” one should place fragments bringing about the complete defeat of the Concept. Hegel avoids speaking of such fragments, apparently not noticing them or not believing in their possibility. But then he has to take into account a multitude of “middle” states in the world, in which the elements stand in prolonged confrontation, each realizing a partial victory and a partial defeat. In essence, the overwhelming majority of appearances should be included precisely in this middle group, and their fate will correspond to their nature: they can be “accepted” only “in part.” To the extent that the “Concept” has overcome the element of other-being in them, to that extent science takes them into account, comprehends them in its constructions, and constructs them in its categories. Philosophy has in view not everything that will happen or be revealed in the world, but only that which has accomplished the growing-together of the elements. Only this is called actuality. Within time, the world thus represents an infinite multitude of “appearances,” which are not reducible to an empty concrete empirie. An “appearance” as such stands higher than that which is merely “sensu1. See chapters 1 and 10.

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ous,”1 for it is an appearance of something, i.e., of an appearing essence.2 An appearance is a speculative essence in an empirical guise. The divine principle has in the world a “dual nature,”3 and this dual nature of the appearance inevitably makes it participate in two orders: the speculative-noumenal4 and the empirical, chance-chaotic order.5 The Idea “shines” (scheint),6 as it were, into the sphere of other-being, thereby forming in it a “positive” side (das Affirmative).7 Such a “radiation” of the Idea produces in the world an enormous empirical material, which philosophy cannot study,8 for it investigates only the speculative. Philosophy studies not things but the “Logos,” the “object” (Sache) hidden in them, i.e., “the truth of that which bears the name of things.”9 Philosophy clearly sees “behind the veil” of earthly things “the other world” of the infinite Concept and strives to adequately express this “being of their becoming.”10 Just as human beings (and perhaps things too) had a dual character (empirical and intelligible) in Kant’s doctrine, so, according to Hegel, every appearance stands “at the threshold of a dual being.” Thus, Hegel usually calls “formations” or “shapes” (Gestaltungen, Gestalten) those appearances that realize in themselves the speculative growing-together of both elements.11 These “shapes”—the speculative singularities of the world—exist through the external form of their being in time and are subject to temporal development.12 However, creating a speculative law, realizing their hidden noumen, they participate in the speculative order and are involved in the speculative “metamorphosis”13 breaking through the density of “existence.”14 It is natural that this metamorphosis, taking place in the inner, noumenal depths of the appearances, draws into these depths also the empirical makeup that is subordinated to the Concept, and to this extent moves it in such a way that it corresponds to God’s 1. Comp.: Phän. 112, 115; Enc. I 263. Hegel was far from consistent in this “high” evaluation of appearances; comp., e.g., Log. III 237–38, 241, 270; Enc. II 17(Z); Hinr. 302, and others. 2. E.g., Ideas; comp.: Diss. 21. 3. “Gedoppelte Natur ”: W. Beh. 386. 4. Comp.: the counterposing of the “transitorisches Phänomen” and the “Noumen”: Enc. II 17(Z). 5. Comp., e.g., Enc. II 36–37; Enc. III 119(Z), and others. 6. Comp., e.g., Recht 18; Enc. II 32(Z). 7. Enc. II 32(Z); comp.: “positives Bestehen”: Log. III 78; comp.: W. Beh. 387. 8. See: Recht 18; Krug. 58; Phän. 78, and others. 9. Log. I 21. 10. Bhag. 421. Hegel’s emphasis. 11. Comp., e.g., W. Beh. 386, 396; Phän. 513; Log. I 64–65; Log. III 245, 271; Enc. III 12–13; Recht 18, 66, 346, 355; Ph. G. 75; Aesth. I 106, and others. The terms “Stufe” (e.g., Enc. II 32) and “Bildung ” (e.g., W. Beh. 394) have a more neutral, descriptive sense and, reinforcing the well-known prominence of “appearance” in the order of spiritual ascent, do not express the presence of any sort of speculative grown-togetherness adequate to the Idea. Moreover, behind all of these terms one must understand not only singular exemplars or fragments of the world, but also common, typical modes of being, able, in turn, to be realized or to take place in a multitude of individual, empirically existing exemplars. 12. Recht 66. 13. Enc. II 32. 14. “Existirende Metapmorphose”: Enc. II 32. Hegel’s emphasis.

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path. To this extent the Idea raises nature by speculative stages1 to its selfovercoming, “idealization,” and transition to spirit,2 “creating” it 3 and inwardly sustaining it.4 The Idea thereby reveals that it is “the eternal essence (das Ewige) of that which is manifested in the sensuous world in the form of a series of changes.”5 By now it should already be clear what Hegel calls actuality. According to the fundamental logical definition, the actual is that which consists of essence (Wesen) and existence (Existenz).6 Correspondingly, that which consists of pure essence —philosophical science in general and Logic in particular—retains for itself the higher title of “reality,” or “being.” The actual will be termed a fusion (“convolute”) of essence and existence. But not every union of essence and existence deserves the “elevated” (emphatisch)7 name of “actuality.” Only that which is powerfully governed by the Concept is “actual” in the world, i.e., first of all, in their entirety, those appearances that are fully subordinated to the Concept’s speculative order and law; secondly, in part, all remaining appearances, but only to the extent of their compass, which is drawn into the life of the speculative element.c Everything that remains in the world, after subtracting “actuality,” is not reality, and not actuality, but existence. This does not mean that “existence” is completely torn away from the Concept and deprived of essence; if so, it would merge with nonbeing and be transformed into an “illusion.” The “existing” is, as it were, the direct continuation of the “actual,” attached to it in empirical juxtaposition and sharing its fate in temporal life; it is not entirely deprived of hidden rationality, but it has not yet been able to overcome its empirical, distinct being. The “existing” stands, as it were, in a certain “unity of being” with the Concept, but not in concrete “identity” with the Concept. Hegel’s ontology therefore recognizes four different levels:8 reality, or the pure speculative Concept (science); actuality, or essence, which has accepted and triumphed over the element of other-being (everything that is rational in the world); existence, or the element of other-being, which harbors in itself and has overwhelmed the power of the Concept (everything that is irrational in the world); and finally, pure chaos, which in no wise conceals within itself the power of spirit (illusion). If we disregard the last level, which is based on a “misunderstanding” (“nonbeing that is deprived of being” in contradistinction to the “existent” μὴ ὄν), then three ontological levels will remain. The last two levels constitute the “world”; the first constitutes “science.” 1. Enc. II 32. Hegel’s emphasis. 2. Comp.: Enc. III 22(Z). 3. Log. III 26. 4. Enc. II 26(Z); comp.: Beweise 344. 5. Glaub. 152–53. 6. Log. II 184, 201; Enc. I 281–82, 320. 7. Enc. I 10. 8. See especially: Enc. I 10; Recht 22, 347(Z), and others.

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“Reality,” “actuality,” and “existence”—all three levels participate in the path of Divinity, though each distinctively. The categories of the Logic, the Philosophy of Nature, and the Philosophy of Spirit, forming the level of “reality,” constitute in themselves a pure theogony, as a supratemporal, perfected system of speculative ascent. The “formations,” arising in the world, and the speculative element of “appearances,” comprising together the level of “actuality,” constitute in themselves a cosmic theogony as a temporal, non-perfected order of speculative-empirical ascent. Finally, the unilluminated remains of other-being, forming the level of “existence,” compose together a theogonic cosmogony as the temporal sphere of an up-to-now failed, but potential future, ascent. Each unsuccessful singularity has a task: to overcome its empirical, finite nature, reject itself, give itself over to the speculative power calling it from within, and having transformed itself into a speculative singularity, raise itself to the order of actual being.1 Hegel’s doctrine of the “rationality of the actual” and the “actuality of the rational” will be seen in its true significance if the entire complexity of its ontological basis is properly disclosed. In all that “is” and “lives” in the world, the Concept is the active, creative power. The Concept is that which “acts” (das Wirkende).2 According to this, that in which the Concept has performed its action turns out to be actual (wirklich). The “actual” is the creative result of the action performed by the Concept. Hegel expresses this as follows: “All that is actual is only insofar as it has in itself the Idea, and expresses it.”3 But if all that is “actual” is produced by the Concept as immanent, inner essence, and the Concept is Reason itself, the substantial element of rationality itself, then “all that is actual” is necessarily “rational.”4 To say that all that is actual is rational is not to recognize the whole world as rational,d for, besides actuality, the world includes existence,5 which is not completely illuminated and “not worked through” by the Concept. But this means to recognize that, “in the semblance of the temporal and transient,” its own law is created by “the substance which is immanent, and the eternal which is present,”6 and is yet to come. Rea1. Comp. the remarkable explanation by Hegel: Enc. I 320, the whole of the second paragraph. 2. Enc. I 320. Hegel’s emphasis. 3. Log. III 238. Comp.: Enc. 319, 385; Hinr. 302; Briefe II 117. In these formulas the term “actuality” sometimes acquires the significance of that which we usually call “actuality”; at other times, e.g., Recht 17, it acquires, on the contrary, an exceptionally narrow interpretation. In any event, undoubtedly the not always correct terminology of Hegel is responsible for many later misunderstandings. 4. Comp.: Recht 19. 5. See: Enc. I 10 on the distinction between “Dasein,” “Existenz,” and “Wirklichkeit,” with a reference to the Logic. 6. “Darauf kommt es dann an, in dem Scheine des Zeitlichen und Vorübergehenden die Substanz, die immanent, und das Ewige, das gegenwärtig ist, zu erkennen”: Recht 17 [corrected].

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son is spread throughout the entire world; but this does not mean that the entire world is “rational,” for only that which realizes in itself the law of reason is rational, i.e., that which is “actual.” The Concept is present in everything; but this does not mean that it predominates in everything, that everything is “grasped” by it, for only that is “grasped,” and included in the path of theogony, which has subordinated itself to the law of the Concept, i.e., that which is actual. The thesis establishing the rationality of all that is actual was put forward by Hegel only after he had tasted to the end the poison of empirical chaos. But precisely for this reason in this thesis there is not and cannot be any speculative optimism, characteristic of the naive initial project. It is necessary to assimilate and remember that that which “has being (das Dasein) is partly appearance (Erscheinung) and only partly actuality (Wirklichkeit)”;1 that only God is “truly actual,”2 and that philosophy cannot recognize as actual “just anything that comes into one’s head,” any “delusion or evil,” “any stuntede and transient existence.”3 Side by side with the actuality that is “posited by the Concept itself,”4 the world harbors entire strata of “transient becoming” and “external,”5 “irrational”6 chance, indifferent and “indeterminate disorder,”7 drawing the creation and humanity onto the path of unhappiness and evil. Not everything in the world is actual; and what is non-actual in the world is non-rational. Not everything in the world is rational; and that which is non-rational in the world is not actual. From this it is clear that “the rationality of the actual ” necessarily presupposes “the actuality of the rational.” In order for reason to be actively and triumphantly revealed in the world, it is necessary that reason “release itself” into the state of other-being. If reason shunned the world, the world could not become, at least in part, rational. The Concept must necessarily enter into symbiosis with the empirical element; otherwise, this element will not be and cannot be “grasped” by the power of the speculative law. However, Hegel asserts something more. He is convinced that “all that is rational is actual” without limitations or exceptions. Not only is reason immanent in the world; it is also present in its entirety in the world; all that reason has created in itself in its pre-mundane being, it has released into the world, and implanted in its own other-being. All the wealth gained by the Concept in the Logic of the beginning was concentrated by it in the “Idea” in the same way that white light in its simplicity contains 1. Enc. I 10. The authentic addition of 1827. 2. “Dass man wisse, nicht nur das Gott wirklich —dass er das Wirklichste, dass er allein wahrhaft wirklich ist”: Enc. I 10. 3. “Jeden Einfall, den Irrtum, das Böse und was auf diese Seite gehört, so wie jede noch so verkümmerte und vergängliche Existenz”: Enc. I 10. 4. “Durch den Begriff selbst gesetzte Wirklichkeit”: Recht 22. 5. Recht 22. 6. Enc. III 100(Z). 7. Enc. II 36.

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all the rays of the spectrum. And all this wealth has passed into the world at the moment of “the falling away of the Idea.” Just as in the Logic the Concept “prefigures” the world, so the Concept then forms the world from within; and if, in passing into the world, the Concept loses even an iota of its wealth, then the law of speculative concretization would lose all significance: the uninterrupted continuity of organic growth would be irreparably damaged. Precisely for this reason Hegel can establish, without making any exceptions, that “what is rational is actual.”1 All the categories are “released” into the world and work toward the creative construction of it. Reason has wholly dedicated itself to the tasks of Hercules. This does not mean that everything in which there is reason is wholly actual. The world is more than “actuality” (in terms of compass); this is the case precisely because the world is partly less than actuality (qualitatively). Reason is also hidden in the “existing ” fragments; however, these fragments are “not yet actual.” Speculative philosophy arrives here at a view that also characterizes the “unbiased”2 consciousness as well: “The reason of things cannot be alien to the things themselves; rather, it is implanted in them in some divine manner”;3 and despite this, the world is not free from chaos, from evil, or from unhappiness. Given such an understanding of the relation between reason and actuality, this third, middle conception of the “world” reconciles the extreme optimism of the speculative project with the extreme pessimism of worldrenunciation. The world is not accepted in its entirety; nor is it rejected in its entirety. If panepistemism consists in the assertion that “the entire world is good the way it is,” then panepistemism can be considered not to have been justified. If acosmism consists in the assertion that “the empirical world is totally unacceptable and is reducible to a dangerous illusion,” then this conception must be considered to have been rejected. But panepistemism is justified in the sense that “the whole world is permeated with categories, with powers,” although it is not worked through to the end by these categories-powers.4 And acosmism is sustained in the sense that the world, not overcome by the Concept, and not having overcome within itself its own empirical, distinct being and autonomy, is not received into the makeup of God’s path. And, if you will, it is also sustained in the sense that a world completely torn away from God’s power is an illusion. This middle, reconciling conception rests, accordingly, on the possi1. Comp.: Recht 17; Enc. I 10. 2. “Unbefangen”: Recht 17. 3. “Ratio rerum ab ipsis rebus aliena esse non potest, sed illis divinitus est insita”: 3 Lat. 313. 4. “Die Idee ihre Realität nicht vollkommen durchgearbeitet, sie unvollstendig dem Begriffe unterworfen hat”: Log. III 239.

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bility of a speculative symbiosis between the Concept and the concrete-empirical. Here, naturally, serious difficulties arise. In fact, that “form,” or that mode of being, that shell, in which the Idea has robed itself and which must be “accepted,” negates and rejects the speculative structure and the speculative mode of life immanently intrinsic to the Concept. How is it possible that the Concept, while remaining itself, has changed its path, “adapted” its rhythm, given up its ascent? On the other hand, the Concept halts powerlessly before the chaotic abandon of this element. How is it possible that the sensuous element has abandoned its distinct being and its stubbornness and has given itself up to transformation into a pure “spiritually inner” essence? Evidently, the state of affairs is such that if the world is speculative, it cannot have a concrete-empirical form; and if it actually has such a form, then it cannot be speculative . . . But these two elements meet and find a way to live in harmony in the world—two opposites that, in their very coexistence, threaten to remain either in open hostility or in a state of concealed mutual negation. The mysteriousness of their symbiosis is increased by the fact that the very mode of their reconciliation and combination is a true mode, i.e., organically concrete. To demonstrate the presence of their symbiosis in the world and to express it philosophically meant, for Hegel, to enter onto the path of compromise. What he meant by the “Concept” and what he meant by the “sensuous element” truly were in a relation of irreconcilability. But precisely for this reason both terms had to reveal their inadequacy to the objective situation of the world. In order to enter into creative symbiosis with its opposite, each of them had to open within itself the capacity for new, higher or lower, states and modifications; each of them had to “go out to meet” the other, as it were. This means that the idea of reason necessarily had to be reduced from that maximal level upon which Hegel had placed it, while in the “concrete-empirical” it was necessary to perceive at least the rudiments of speculativity. There is no doubt that, for “rationalism” and “panlogism,” this is a grandiose concession and compromise. But it is just as indubitable that this concession and this compromise had profound objective grounds. This great compromise in which the Idea “descends” to the sensuous element while the concrete-empirical “rejects itself” for the sake of what is higher, must, in the epistemological aspect, be expressed as follows: Hegel depotentiates the Idea and potentiates the concrete-empirical. To depotentiate the Idea means to reduce it to its elementary foundations, which enter into it at a higher level as well, but as subordinate moments. It means to recognize that the Idea, while remaining itself, can lose the entire series of features and properties that characterize its higher

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essence, and descend to a lower state. In this descent of the Idea, no new properties are attributed to it; the Idea is not enriched in its content. On the contrary, it is impoverished in its content, but the compass of its supremacy is expanded. It turns out that even such appearances of the world in which it is impossible to find the higher speculative features of the Idea are nonetheless subject to the power of the Idea; the Idea is “present” in them with its genuine power all the same. The descent of the Idea turns out to be a necessary consequence of the fact that the world, by its nature, is not speculative thought. The Idea’s perfect mode of life, which is sustained at the highest level, is not revealed in the world. Speculative thought is a living, dialectically organic process, created in itself by the objektive Concept as a function of thought (pre-human, pre-conscious, in the Logic of the beginning and human, conscious, in the Logic of the end). From the point of view of the theory of cognition, speculative thought is the coincidence of human imaginative thinking and objektive meaning.1 Hegel thus sets about a gradual diminution of speculative thought and an expansion of its dominion. One can foresee, however, that this impoverishment of the Idea must have a strictly determinate boundary beyond which it is impossible for his doctrine to go. This boundary is the idea of organic life. Even in psychic life itself not everything is conscious speculative thinking, although Hegel is firmly convinced that precisely philosophical thought is the state in which the deepest essence of the soul is realized and blossoms. Alongside thought is the nearest stage: entirely inner but already half-conscious and half-speculative feeling,f the principle of the “heart.” Objectively inadequate, feeling often turns out to be helpless, moving confusedly, inconsistently, uncertainly. It lacks the power to speak in the divine language of the object itself, Logos, i.e., in the language of meaning. It always remains subjective and cannot wholly sink into the life of the objekt. Correctly feeling the truth, though sometimes having only a presentiment of it, feeling is by its very essence inclined to subjectivistic distortion and wanders about without a criterion. In this element religion is realized. Further, leaving the sphere of the purely inner and turning to the external senses and external “matter,” there operates unthinking or halfthinking imagination. This is already not that suprasensuous imagination that merges with thought in philosophy. This inwardly brought forth, but externally actualized creativity intuits Divinity in a sensuous form;g it preserves a deep, subterranean union with speculative thought, is nourished by the spiritual content of this thought, but pours this content 1. See chapter 3.

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into the matter of the external world. It is in this element that art comes to light. Together with feeling and imagination, and perhaps even more deeply than they, there is rooted the practical, striving power of the soul—will. Will is born inside, in the soul that is fettered by its bodily existence, and breaks out of these fetters with the help of thought. Therefore, somewhere, in the inmost recesses, will is akin to thinking, needs it, and seeks union with reason. Will has the ability to overcome its individual form and, going out into universality, to realize the speculative law. In this new element ethical life and the state are realized. Further, thought is revealed in the unconscious natural life of the soul by vague, muffled echoes and random glimmers. But the soul reveals a capacity for higher life: it forms an organic unity with the body. The soul grows into the body in the same way that speculative content grows into the tissue of thinking, feeling, and imagination, and into the material of an aesthetic image. The soul is the speculative content of the body and, at the same time, the body is the empirical mode of being, inherent to the soul. The soul is the “inner” that pours into the “externality” of the body; the body is the external expression of the inner soul. The body is the empirical “object,” created by the soul as by a speculative power. Into this element of “psychic-corporeal symbiosis” the life of the higher natural organism—humanity,1 flows. The natural organism is the lowest stage of the disclosure of the Idea. Here the inner process appears on its speculatively minimal level and acquires the significance of an elementary organic living force. The life of the organism is a process of self-asserting subjectivity;2 this is the first manifestation of selfhood,3 the beginning of the victory of the “inner,” the speculative, over the “outer,” the empirical. This is the point at which “the Concept enters into existence,”4 and the Idea acquires “truth and actuality.”5 The natural organism is the first “shape,”h the initial, simplest, and most imperfect. Beneath this organism there are no “shapes”; there are only “appearances.” There is no “inner, organic, subjective” life there; there is only “the corpse of the life process.”6 However, the power of the objective situation compels Hegel to go even deeper. To be sure, he goes deeper not in order to retreat from the organic growing-together of multiplicity into unity as the final criterion of “rationality” and “actuality,” but in order to track in the remaining “appearances” of the world the traces of organicity bearing witness to the presence of the Concept in them. 1. Enc. II 558(Z); Log. III 208. 2. Comp.: Enc. II 423. See chapter 12. Enc. II 423. 4. Enc. II 423, 602. 5. Ibidem. 6. Enc. II 423.

3. “Selbstisch”:

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Even in the organic realm, not everything stands on the same level. Not every organism in nature is a “true” organism, for not in every organism do the “parts” relate to the “whole” as “members.”1 The “inner” gradually fades in the descending series and cedes supremacy to the outer. The connection of the parts is weakened in the plant, the organicity of which is more “external-objektive” and the subjectivity of which is “immediate.”2 Mold, mushrooms represent a transitional, “inorganic-organic” stage,3 and the body of the earth is only the “presupposition” for subjective totality,4 an external5 organism, lying as if dead.6 It is no more than a “crystal of life.”7 Below this “dead life,” the Concept truly becomes scarcely recognizable. Hegel has to be satisfied with “traces” and “presentiments”; he has to seek analogies, value distant hints, pick up atoms and grains of speculative essence. He points to the “indifference” of various elements in chemical compounds,8 an indifference that is reminiscent of the “content assimilation” of the speculative organs. He sees in heat a “continuous propagability” and a capacity to “reduce to homogeneity spatially scattered bodies”;9 and sees in this its similarity to substantial Universality. He discovers a hint at speculative synthesis in gravity, construing it as “the search for a unifying point” in diversity.10 He considers water as a “neutral fluidity,” fusing opposites, as “continuous” internal equilibrium, limited only from without.11 He finds satisfaction in the fact that fire is active “agitation,” “devouring,” “negative universality”;12 that air is transparent like thought, “all-penetrating universality,” volatilizing in itself everything that is individual;13 that light is “pure identity” with itself, “the universal selfhood of matter”;14 that motion has a “dialectical nature”;15 that time is self-intuiting “becoming”;16 and that space is “indeterminately transparent totality.”17 Descending to the emptiest, most contentless content, he drives to the end the “construction” of the world, applying, like Schelling, now abstract analysis, now romantic “living into” the object, but reducing everything to unity by the power of speculative seeing. This speculative “depotentiation” of the idea, which theoretically stops at the “natural organism” (strictly speaking, at the human organism), but actually going into empty space, sometimes acquires in Hegel the character of a true regress into the empirical. The terms “inner,” “subjec1. Enc. II 548. 2. Enc. II 470. 3. Enc. II 463. 4. Comp.: “vorausgesetzte . . . Totalität ”: Enc. II 430. 5. Enc. II 464. 6. “Der todtliegende Organismus”: Enc. II 455. 7. Enc. II 455. 8. Enc. II 360–61, 366–67, 369–70. 9. Enc. II 224. 10. Enc. II 187. 11. Enc. II 167. 12. Enc. II 165, 165(Z). 13. Enc. II 162. 14. Enc. II 129–30. 15. Enc. II 62. 16. Enc. II 53. 17. See chapter 10.

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tive,” and “unity” more than once change their meaning, thus facilitating this regress. Hegel, like a true romantic, usually calls the genuine, but hidden essence of anything “inner.” It is clear that “the force of gravity” is “inner” and “hidden” in another sense (spatial introjection) than the “soul” is for the “body” (phenomenological introspection), or than metaphysical Universality is for its Singularity (speculative, ontological identity). That fundamental delimitation of the empirical (the sensuous-temporal and especially the sensuous-spatial-temporal) from the metaphysical, upon which Hegel knows how to insist with such force, melts away and disappears in this regress. That “subjective” (the active, self-asserting focal point of empirical individuality) which, for speculative philosophy, is synonymous with spurious discreteness, contingency, and lawlessness, gradually becomes a precious sign of the presence of the Concept. That “unity” of empirical fragments (unconnected, indifferent, purely quantitative co-presence), which is usually rejected by Hegel as degraded, is sought after in the world as a sign of Divine spirit. In Hegel’s “constructions” the hylozoism of ancient Greek metaphysics is revived, the hylozoism which did not know the distinction between the “empirical” and the “metaphysical,” and the rigor of rationalism is replaced by the romantic acceptance of the irrational. “Reason,” “speculative self-thinking,” is gradually transformed into “religious self-awareness” and the “unconscious psychic life” in man, into “indistinct self-awareness” in animals, into “organic selfcreation” in the animal and the plant, into the blind attraction of things, into the restlessness of fire, the fluidity of water and air, the motion of matter, the “becoming” of time. That which is not “rational” by means of organic thought can turn out to be “rational” by means of organic psychic life, or at least by means of organic self-creation. That which is not “rational” in its entirety (“shape”) is “rational” in part (“appearance”). The unconscious has within itself the potency of consciousness; the inanimate contains the embryo of animation; the inorganic possesses at least one of the features of the organism: “fluidity,” or “identity,” or “totality” . . . Precisely to this extent, and only to this extent, will philosophy, which “constructs” actuality, have in mind also the lower appearances of the world. To this depotentiation of the Idea corresponds the potentiation of the concrete-empirical. In principle, it is acknowledged that in the irrational element of the world not everything is subject to rejection, that, in this element, a kind of differentiation must be performed, which separates the acceptable states of this element from the unacceptable ones, seeks the rudiments of the higher in the lower, and concludes with the organic inclusion of that

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which submits to the power of the Concept. To potentiate the sensuous element is to discover in it the “acceptable” states and to arrange these states according to ascending steps of “speculative metamorphosis,” beginning with the simplest element, “space,” and ending with the complete absorption of the irrational in philosophical thought. The rational element of the world is revealed both in the lower, not entirely actual “appearances” and in the higher, entirely actual “shapes.” These “shapes,” which have fully taken up and actualized speculative form and divine content, are recognized as actual singularities and are included (“encompassed”) in the sequence of God’s path. Thus, the doctrine of actuality genuinely introduces the irrational element of the world into the life of Divinity. The concrete-empirical is introduced into the life of Divinity not wholly, and not on equal rights with the Concept, but in subordination to it, and moreover in proportion to its own rational power (“potency”). In consequence, God’s path expands both in terms of its internal makeup or structure, and also in terms of its compass. For the sensuous element does not disappear in the worldly states of Divinity, but is preserved. Neither the organic life of nature and man, nor the ideational depth of beauty, nor the content of absolute religion, nor the objektive spirit of the state and ethical life can “exist” other than in the affirmed, though spiritualized, element of sensuousness.i The victory of the higher element does not annihilate and does not revoke the existence of the lower, but it forces the lower element to accept the speculative law and organizes an encounter at a higher level of being. However, if the “actual” is “rational” and if, at the same time, it unfolds in a series of speculative singularities, Hegel should have had to acknowledge that the irrational element carves a path for itself into all the “concrete” sciences. In fact, every “actual formation” includes the organically sensuous element, and at the same time is included, as a “speculative singularity,” in the “universality” of a scientific category. Thus, if in the relation between science and the world, or at least between the concrete sciences and the speculative singularities of the world, the law of “universality” is realized, then the content of the “shapes” of the world must be wholly included in the content of the universal categories of science. For the singular is included in the universal as its living part, while the universal is included in the singular as its living essence.1 The content of singularity must be assimilated to the content of universality. In the opposite case, the relation between the two acquires the character of “abstractness” and “discreteness.” 1. See chapters 4 and 5.

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Hegel could not acknowledge that the irrational element is organically introduced into speculative science, because this would give philosophy itself a sensuously complicated and empirically degraded character. If the concrete sciences, which form the “universal” tissue of the life of God in the world, move in a semi-irrational element, then they fall out of the sphere of speculative thought and cease being philosophical sciences, for speculative thought, in its makeup, is completely free of the sensuousirrational element. But in such case the interrelation between the singular “shapes” of the world and the categories of the concrete sciences is formed not according to the law of speculative universality, but according to the schema of abstractly rational universality. The speculative Concept cannot abstract itself from the content of the singular; this is characteristic not of the Concept, but of the abstractly rational concept: abstractly rational thinking begins with the sensuous and ascends to the nonsensuous, tears apart the content of the “concrete appearance” and registers only one side of it, rises above it, does not include it in itself, and establishes its own self-satisfied content. The speculative Concept, on the other hand, preserves within itself the entire content of the elements of its compass. All this means that the potentiation of the concrete-empirical is accomplished by Hegel only within the limits of the world, within the limits of the “appearances” and “formations” of the world, but that it is not brought to the level of speculative science. Between the speculative singularities of the world and science, there remains a certain hiatus that is filled in by an abstractly rational leap. The universal categories of the sciences turn out to be included in the tissue of the world, but the shapes of the world turn out not to be included in science; they are only “understood” within the compass of the categories and are schematically constructed from their content. The concrete sciences speak of the sensuous irrational element; they do not speak through it or within it. This should not be taken to mean that the shapes of the world are excluded from God’s path; but rather in the sense that God’s path remains in a bifurcated state, moving at once and in parallel along two lines: within the world and within science. The series of actuality and the series of reality do not coincide; the latter is genuinely present in the former, but the former is not included in the latter. Science does not encompass the world, either in its disobedient parts or in its speculatively lawlike shapes. The conception of panepistemism must be considered definitively unjustified. Therefore, the path of God in the world must be examined not only in the categories of science, into which it does not fit and by which it is not exhausted, but in its distinctly existent structure and compass. The

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“category” of concrete science is not a shape but only its schema; and it is perhaps precisely for this reason that not a trace of the rigor of the dialectical method remains in the concrete sciences. Such is the hidden victory of the irrational element over the Concept.

Translator’s Notes a. Il’in would have regarded himself, of course, as just such a “psychologically insightful historian of philosophy who takes an interest in psychology.” As explained in my “Introduction,” Il’in had an abiding interest in Freudian psychoanalysis, knew Freud personally, and here seems to be hinting at a “Freudian” account of a repression by Hegel on this point. b. This is a revealing bit of speculation on Il’in’s part. It suggests that Il’in at least entertained the possibility that Hegel’s doctrine of the Concept was to be interpreted as a continuously active principle of creation operating in pure freedom from the contingencies and constraints of the empirically given world, and ultimately capable of transforming it entirely. c. “Compass” here refers to that portion of the appearance that contains the Concept, or within which the Concept is able to exert itself. d. Perhaps it would have been more accurate to say: “not to recognize everything in the world as rational.” e. Being guided by the German verkümmerte; the Russian term is неудачливое (unfortunate). f. “Gefühl.” See Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels, 270. g. “Sinnlicher Gestalt.” See Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels, 271. h.“Die erste ‘spekulative Gestalt’ der Welt.” See Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels, 272. i. The end of this sentence is significantly altered in the German text: “. . . und der Sittlichkeit können nun im anerkannten und sanktionierten Elemente der Sinnlichkeit ihre irdische Existenz fristen” (“. . . and ethical life can now in the recognized and sanctioned element of the sensuous barely maintain its Earthly existence”). See Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels, 276.

12

The Shapes of the World

The philosophical receptiona of the world can consist neither in rebelliously convicting the world of “lying in wickedness” (Plato) nor in an enthusiastic depiction of its supposed perfection (Leibniz). A doctrine of the world must first of all be objective. In response to the summons of speculative thought, the world itself must accomplish its own exposure, conviction, and ascension. The world will fulfill this without concealment and distortion, in strict simplicity and adequacy, for its innermost essence—the speculative Concept—cannot respond otherwise to its own summons. There can be no place for pessimism here. The Concept, languishing in the thoughtlessnessb of its own worldly states, will rush joyously and as a wholec toward cognizing reason, which comes to liberate it. Everything that has accepted the law of the Idea in the world will be “justified” at this court through a simple disclosure of its nature and will leave room neither for exaggerations nor for dejection. But neither can there be room here for optimism: that which has not incorporated into its “existence” a “real” order will itself not enter into the course of God’s path and will continue its hidden struggle for purification among the appearances. “Pessimism” and “optimism” are no more than contingent “points of view,” flashes of subjective opinions, tendentious conceptions of the interested human soul. Speculative philosophy reveals only that which is, because this philosophy lets the object itself reveal what is true about it. That is how Hegel understands his doctrine of actuality. None other than the voice of the objective situation, which has led him to acceptance of the irrational element, also guides him in the very mode of treating the “shapes” of the world. Hegel strives to purify and liberate his “method” from everything that does not appear to him as a real mode of life that is realized by the object itself. He strives to “convey” about the object only what he genuinely sees in it. He strives to “expound” the object precisely as the object itself lives. In heeding the object, he changed so much in his initial views that he truly acquired the right to that wise irony with which he often speaks of “opinions,” “subjective sympathies,” “idle exhortations,” “ideals,” and so forth. The object forced Hegel to acknowledge that not one but two elements are hiding in it. The actual world is composed of sensuous, temporal, irrational existence and suprasensuous, supratemporal, rational 243

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reality. Neither element can be removed, or liquidated, by the other within the limits of actuality, though the lower element is definitively “sublated” and absorbed by the higher in the sphere of reality (philosophical thinking). The relation of these elements in the world is a relation of struggle, connecting the two sides in a speculative symbiosis, or a relation of symbiosis that takes the form of a struggle. The struggle between them is waged for supremacy and self-realization. It is not for exclusivity of being, but for the subjugation of the opponent to one’s own law. This struggle is waged in order to fully realize a higher mode of life. The confrontation of these symbiotic elements naturally leads to a permanent compromise. However, it leads not to a compromise of arbitrary self-limitation, but to a transient equilibrium of the forces in conflict. Compelled to be reconciled with the permanent presence of the irrational element, the Concept also remains in the world as an active, creative, conquering principle and wages a “hard, endless struggle”1 against other-being, continuously unfolding into the distinctive calm of attainment. But all the appearances of the world are not final; they all realize only a “truce” of the elements. The Concept needs these “compromises” or “truces” in order to manifest itself; but its inner nature experiences here only a transient calming and resolves it again and again into a restless self-negation. Even the appearances of higher calm that occur on the earth—the sleeping sea, a blooming flower, a Greek sculpture, a Romanesque cathedral, free ethical life2—are grasped only as states of unreconciled reconciledness. The level of this compromise depends upon the extent to which the Concept has succeeded in “working through” the element of other-being and subordinating this element to itself. Depending upon this, every world fragment is either an “appearance,” which realizes the speculative law only to a certain extent, or a “shape,” which realizes it wholly. However, not all “shapes” are of equal value; their position in the ordering of Divine ascent is determined by the purity and freedom with which they realize in themselves the law of the speculative Concept. In terms of perfection, a “shape” stands higher than an “appearance” and can be viewed as its ideal limit, as the level of perfect “imparted reason”d to which the “appearance” is supposed to, and if you will, should rise. Depending on their character, “shapes” and “appearances” are divided into “levels,” orderings, or groups, and each group bears the appropriate name that belongs to both the “appearances” and the “shapes” included in the group. Therefore, a deformed, sick, or imperfect organism can be called an “organism.” A “work of art” can be both an “ap1. “Harter, unendlicher Kampf ”: Ph. G. 53.

2. Comp., e.g., Enc. III 429; Recht 68, 172.

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pearance” and a “shape.” A political state in decline is still a “state,” and a perverted religion will continue to be called a “religion.” But only a “perfected” organism can be numbered among the shapes. Only a “true” state, only a work of “beautiful” art,e only a religion of “revelation” should be included in the ascending order of “shapes of the world.” “Shapes” actualize in themselves what “appearances” do not. An “appearance” is as if a “shape” that is not yet fully realized or one that has already turned out to be unsuccessful. A “shape” is an “appearance” that has attained its ideal limit or that has realized its immanent purpose. It is thus clear that a “shape of the world” is not “ideal” if by “ideal” we mean that which should be, but is not, realized in fact. In just the same way, a world shape is not a “reality” if by “reality” we mean that which, though it has been realized empirically, should not be or might possibly not be. A “shape of the world” is neither the one nor the other; rather, it is both the one and the other together and at once. It is an “ideal” for “appearances” of the same name and, at the same time, a realized “actuality,” i.e., a reality that has taken existence. It is that which should be and, at the same time, that which cannot not be. It “should” be not in the sense that its realization is a desired and joyous but chance success. Rather, it “should” be in the sense that it is an end and an achievement of divine creativity. It “cannot not be” not in the sense that preceding empirical circumstances were the necessary cause of the succeeding event, but rather in the sense that Spirit cannot fail to triumph in the world, in the struggle with the irrational element that Spirit itself has created. The “world shape” is a speculatively necessary event, the realization of a spiritual victory, an ideal achievement in the world, something “real” and at the same time “existent,” i.e., “actual.” A characteristic feature of every “shape” is a total and indissoluble interpenetration between its form and content. If by form we mean that “element” in which a certain force is revealed and realized, while by “content” we mean that force which realizes and reveals itself in this element, then in every formation the irrational element will be the form, while the speculative Concept will be the content. If by “form” we mean that lawlike order on which the internal and external unity of the “shape” is based, while by “content” we mean that matter which this law forges into unity, then in every formation the speculative Concept will be the form, while the irrational sensuous element will be the content. But it would be more correct not to apply the terms “form” and “content” to the sensuous element. The power of the concept is the true content and the true form of the “shapes,” while the sensuous element remains only a means of expression, or a “medium,”f i.e., a mode of “appearing,” not a mode of “being.” The power of the Concept brings its own content and discloses it in an actual

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“shape.” This content is divine, for it is God’s being itself. The power of the Concept also brings its own form, and it realizes this form in an actual “shape.” This form is divine, for it is the dialectically organic rhythm of the Idea. In God there is no form that is separate from content, and there is no content that could break away from its form. Speculative content is something living; it lives and creates itself in its own way, and it cannot do otherwise. Its living depth carries a rhythm within itself and with itself, and this living rhythm is its sole form. That fragment of the world which does not accept the speculative content together with the speculative form immanent in it is not a “shape.” But a fragment that does accept this content and form sublates to a significant degree the distinction between the “empirical” and the “metaphysical” that was so definitively established by Kant and so acutely felt by Hegel. The distinctive depotentiation of the Idea to which Hegel was led in the philosophical “reception” of the world already gave to the Concept the significance of an organic and even simply “physical” force.1 The “metaphysical” vanished in the primordial, elemental depth of the “physical” and disappeared in indistinguishability. The ascending order of “shapes” realizes this indistinguishability in another manner: the empirical is transformed into an adequate expression, into a “sign,” of that metaphysical content which it is given to the empirical to contain and reveal. This means that not every “empirical” fragment of the world can contain and “manifest” every speculative content, for a certain strict correspondence is realized here. But within the limits of this correspondence, a sensuous element of the world can and must accept the speculative content that has fallen to it, in such a way that every corner, every atom, of its existence would be saturated and permeated with present rationality and would “actually” manifest the genuine presence of God’s power. To be truly a “sign” of the highest means to be not “from itself” and not “through itself” but only “in a show of itself.” g A “sign” that is saturated with that depth which it signifies, blazes up as with the “inner,” innermost fire of its Divine significance and becomes its necessary and adequate appearance. But this appearance loses all the odious character that is intrinsic to every “appearance” as such. The appearance ceases being a distorting, darkening, concealing mask, and acquires the significance of a compliant, radiant, revealing show.h The show i does not come from falsehood, or from darkness; it comes from light. It does not separate; it associates. And it is necessary for self-evidence and revelation. Not only does the sensuous become the “medium” of the rational content; it is also included in 1. Comp.: Diss. 21.

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its true modification. The sensuous turns out to be the organic tissue of rational content, a genuine state of the latter. A “shape” is not an essence in the process of being realized; rather, it is an essence the realization of which is complete: God who has received other-being into the organic makeup of his actuality. As a result of such a combination of the two elements, every shape is a grown-together unity, in which it is impossible to distinguish the “purely empirical” from the “purely metaphysical.” And to the extent this would be possible, a given formation would diverge from true speculative organicity. The mode of existence of a shape is empirical, sensuous, and often, over and above that, material. But this mode of existence in itself, as such, does not have being. Taken in abstraction from the metaphysical essence, this mode of existence is an unreal, conditional “abstraction,” a creation of that subjective imagination and that subjective thought that permitted this act of arbitrary abstraction. To the extent that something in the structure of a given shape actually corresponds to this abstraction, this shape is imperfect. A sensuous fragment is permeated and sanctified by rationality in such a way that in this fragment Divine power is explicitly present.j Reason pours into the element of other-being, seizing it and creating itself in it in such a way that the Divine power receives sensuous being. In the “shape” there is no “purely empirical.” But there is also no “purely metaphysical.” Here one can still speak of the difference between two “laws,” or “orders,” though one of them, the lower, has been overcome and extinguished in its self-existence. But in reality the two elements already do not differ. The higher element has robed itself in the lower and become “now” and “here” “this existence.” The lower element has received the higher into itself and become an eternal and universal essence. The connection between the two is such that the one that creates the empirical tissue of the “shape” creates the “actuality” of the substance. And the one that destroys the sensuous appearance of the “shape” destroys the spiritual revelation. In this lies the tragedy of the shapes: the actuality of Divine life on earth is subject to the fate of temporary, transient things and is exposed to mortality and termination. The immortal is clothed in mortality, and only the eternal essence of a “shape”—“the being of its there-being”k—is spared this fate. The entire development of the so-called “concrete” sciences in Hegel is dedicated to the disclosure and grounding of the fact that there are such shapes in the world: “actual” shapes, because they consist of “essence” and “existence”; victorious shapes, because they realize the speculative symbiosis between the two elements; divine shapes, because they contain God’s authentic power; temporal and finite shapes, because they

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have been realized in the sensuous-empirical tissue of the world; and finally, shapes ascending level by level to the highest and final spiritualization, to absolute freedom. Such, first of all, is the Philosophy of Nature’s doctrine of the natural organism that for the first time realizes the higher law of spiritual life in natural matter. The natural organism is the first and simplest “shape” of the world’s actuality. It is sensuously material, spatially temporal, and therefore empirically irrational in the external mode of its existence. At the same time, this shape is a creation of the inner subjectivity and selfhood of the Concept, for the first time pouring itself into the material medium.1 In this lies its actuality. However, this “actuality” has the character not of an “appearance” but of a “shape,” for it manifests the victory of the “inner” over the “outer.” By virtue of its material nature, the natural organism inevitably encounters substantiall other-being in the form of the surrounding medium, enters into external struggle with it, and asserts its own actuality. Individual aspects of this organism enter into relation with “other things” and, through this, into a prolonged process of changes.2 But the organism turns against influences flowing from outside, “infects” with itself that which comes from outside,3 transforms it,4 associates it tom its own subjectivity, and identifies it with itself and makes that which is “alien” its own property,5 “idealizing” it 6 and thereby sustaining in itself its own “unity of self.”7 In this way, the organism overcomes its interwovenness with other-being 8 by assimilating it,9 and in this “external process” the organism converges or “merges” with itself.10 It does not rest with counteracting the external objekt;11 but strives in general to free itself of the external process12 and to turn inward. Therefore, the organism transforms the external process into its opposite and directs it at sustaining its own shape.13 The organism thereby creates for itself the possibility of relating “completely indifferently”14 to the other-being, and the possibility of forming a closed, self-sustaining “thing.”15 The organism asserts itself as a corporeally living individuality, as a concrete whole,16 bearing within itself its own universality, in contradistinction to inorganic things, which have their universality outside themselves.17

1. See chapter 11. 2. Ph. G. 52; Aesth. I 155–59, 177, 190–91; Beweise A 457, 461. 3. Comp., e.g., Enc. II 502(Z): “inficiren.” 4. Enc. II 531(Z): “verwandeln.” 5. Enc. II 502(Z). 6. Aesth. I 153, 157, 158. 7. “Selbstische Einheit ”: Enc. II 549–50. 8. Enc. II 630(Z), 631(Z). 9. Log. III 228; Enc. II 596(Z); Beweise 462. 10. Enc. II 619. 11. Enc. II 619. 12. “Diesen Process von sich wegschafft”: Enc. II 619; Aesth. I 159. 13. Ph. G. 52. 14. Phän. 210–11. 15. Phän. 199. 16. Log. III 253. 17. Enc. II 278(Z).

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Thus, the natural organism relates to the things that surround it in the same way that the Concept relates to the irrational element of the world in general. Therefore, the natural organism is the first disclosure, or revelation, of God’s power in the world. The natural organism is the actualization of the Idea in the world of there-being,1 the manifestation of the Idea in nature.2 It is “the sensuously objektive Idea.”3 The natural organism is the first shape and therefore the proto-shape of the higher. Without going beyond the limits of material thinghood, the organism bears witness to the fact that both elements can grow together into an “animate totality,”4 that an objektively existing “idealism”5 is possible in the world. With all this, the organism maintains a temporal and finite existence. The materiality characteristic of the organism subjects it to the fate of things, and the process of its self-assertion will come to an end at some point. The inevitable interaction with other things makes the organism limited and dependent. Its unconscious nature6 indicates the limit of its self-sufficiency and freedom.7 It is already substance but not yet substance, already independence but still dependence, already an organism but still a sensuous thing. This is the first substantialization n of the speculative law. The natural organism finds its completion in the psychic-corporeal life of humanity. Here the “internal force” acquires a psychic character: the soul actualizes itself in a body, while “external materiality” is transformed into a body. The soul creates a body for itself in order to reveal itself first through this body, and then independently of and perhaps despite it. “Humanity” is a new “shape,” higher than the natural organism, and revealing a new prospect, now not of “natural” but of spiritual ascent. The “actuality” of the human being lies in the fact that he consists of an “essence,” i.e., a soul, and an “existence,” i.e., a body. His belonging to “the world’s shapes” is determined by the fact that the soul, as an inner speculative force, conquers the sensuous-empirical sluggishness of matter and forms for itself a living and beautiful body, manifesting the higher lawfulness of the soul’s being. The soul’s victory over the body and its departure into self-sufficient and independent rational activity reveal the soul’s divine power: external “nature” is taken through “death,”8 “sublation,”9 and “negation”10 so that “the lightning of spirit could strike”11 the sensuous materiality of the body. Nature “consumes itself in fire like a phoenix” so that spirit can exit into life from this fire.12 Such a heroic “negation,” 1. “Dasein der Idee”: Aesth. I 153. 2. “Naturerscheinung der Idee”: Aesth. I 154, 155. 3. “Die sinnlich objektive Idee”: Aesth. I 160. 4. Aesth. I 161. 5. Aesth. I 160. 6. Comp., e.g., Enc. I 377. 7. Aesth. I 193. 8. Comp.: Enc. II 691, 693. 9. Enc. II 693. Comp.: Enc. III 43(Z), 46, 175(Z), and others. 10. Enc. III 13. 11. Diff. 268. This expression belongs to Schelling. 12. Enc. II 695(Z).

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which concludes with self-consciousness and “being for self,”1 is an authentic manifestation of God’s power. Nevertheless, a human being as such maintains his sensuous-material existence, his temporality, finitude, and bodily mortality, and the final practical task of his life consists in giving his own death a speculative significance. The highest “shape” leading the human being out of his singularity and finitude and revealing to him the path to “universal” life and speculative death is the state. The state is “actual,” for it consists of “essence” (the universal, substantial national spirit) and “existence” (the sensuousempirical element comprising territory, climate, nature, economy, and a multiplicity of corporeal-psychic individuals). The state belongs among the “shapes of the world” because it brings about organic “concreteness” in the empirical conditions of earthly interaction. The essence of the state consists precisely in the fact that a multiplicity of apparently selfsufficient and disunited human monads leads a unified, grown-together life. Citizens abide in the “concreteness” of the national Spirit, and the national Spirit lives in the speculatively sanctified and surmounted medium of the empirically disunited wants and interests of the citizens. Participation in a mature and perfected state requires psychic maturity and ethical perfection from the citizen. The individual spirit must first of all overcome the concrete-empirical form of its existence: this spirit must gain mastery over its body and over its soul. Only then will this spirit be able to realize in itself the process of spiritual and ethical self-deepening that is necessary for entry as a whole into speculative life. This process consists in the individual finding in himself a mysterious suprapersonal sphere of infallible, rightful will and merging himself with it, giving to it his life and his powers. The individual spirit then becomes a living manifestation of right.o And in its acts this spirit begins to be guided by infallible, beneficent custom, leading it into the sphere of concrete ethical life. This spirit is ruled and moved by the will to spiritual freedom, and this will is nothing else but the authentic power of Divinity itself. Guided by this power, the individual spirit becomes speculatively sighted and discovers in every other individual spirit the same substantial Divine will, which is common for all and all-unifying. Fusion with the Divine power that it finds in itself leads every individual spirit into the sphere of substantial unity and allows every such spirit to find itself in all, and all in itself. Every citizen becomes convinced of his spiritual unity with all other citizens and with the spirit of his nation, i.e., with Divinity itself in its national selfdetermination. This organized unity of the speculatively grown-together nation is the state. 1. On this transition, comp.: Enc. II 693; Rel. II 50; and also the chapters on “consciousness” and “self-consciousness” in the Phän. and Enc. III.

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The state is organically living Universality. It is the totality of individual spirits, a totality that is dissolved in these spirits and that has dissolved them in itself. It is a spiritual organism that inwardly divides itself into separate functions, forces, and circles. The essence of the state lies in the speculative identity of the “universal” (the national spirit), the “particular” (estates), and the “singular” (family groups and individual spirits). This identity constitutes freedom, for none of these elements has other-being in another. In this freedom lies the spiritual power and speculative height of the state, for this freedom asserts its Divine nature: the state is divine as the actuality of God in the human community. The state is the organized life of the ethical, and the power of the state is the Good itself as the immutable essence of all consciousnesses. This determines the order and actions of the state. Every citizen lives simultaneously in three states of the ethical: familial, social, and political. The family trains the individual in substantial unity and selfrenunciation. Civil society gives the individual independence within the limits of a law that he himself recognizes. Political life is realized by the higher flight of self-sufficient spirit, freely determining itself toward selfrenunciation. Nourished by such a civil spirit, the state is a totality of family cells and, at the same time, of the great system of needs, labor, and propertied estates. The state is an organic unity of mutually nourishing corporations, the life of which is served by the police and restrained by corporate organization. At the same time, the state is a unity of separate but mutually supportive organs of power.p The state is an organic system of institutions permeated by a common consciousness and a common will. The actions of this system are guided by the monarch, creating the law together with the corporations and executing it together with the government. Thus is grounded the sovereignty of the state, which is determined by the fact that the state is the highest and the self-sufficient end of life. This end, the organized blossoming of the national spirit, yields to nothing higher. The state asserts itself and its independence by war unto life and death, defending itself and ensuring for its people a unique intuition of the Divinity in art, religion, and philosophy. Thus, the state is the shape of the divine Idea appearing in the temporal ordering of history. From this follows its absoluteness and temporality, its spiritual significance and its limit.1 In art there is actualized a new, higher growing-together of the Concept with the irrational element, a growing-together in which the “internal” no longer strives to free itself from the “external,” as this takes place in the life of the organism, the human being, and the state, but matures in a closed way, according to its own law, and only then does it freely go 1. See the second volume.

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out into the sphere of other-being, in order to manifest the revelation that has taken place. Works of art are “actual” as sensuous manifestations of spirit. Artistic creativity has its own special mode of comprehending and depicting the object, and precisely this mode takes artistic creativity into the bounds of the empirical-sensuous sphere. Serving as the element of Spirit are “intuition and image,”1, q “sensuous there-being,”2, r “external given material,”3 and “external existence.”4, s Even the “very highest” art depicts “sensuously,”5 i.e., in a form that is “clearly opposed to thought.”6 The depicted content exists in the form of a natural,7 unmediated8 appearance.9 Precisely the “sensuously imagistic form makes” something a work of art.10 This mode of “disclosure”11 or “representation”12 constitutes the very nature of art. Universality is here “quite individualized”;13 it is “set before the eyes in a sensuously singular” aspect,14, t as an “individual” formu of “actuality,”15 as an “embodiment of spirit.”16 It is precisely “Spirit” that is embodied in the imagesv of fine art and that gives to this art the significnce of spiritual self-knowledge. “Truth” itself,17 the Idea,18 i.e., Divinity itself, is the object and content of art and aesthetic creation. Art is a particular means of “uttering the divine,”19 or, what is the same thing, of “depicting the Absolute.” Like speculative philosophy, art is “divine service,”20 a “living intuition of absolute life and therefore a dwelling in unity with it.”21 That which works of art depict, that which the artist’s soul struggles over, in suffering and in rejoicing, is the “speculative Concept” itself, i.e., Spirit in its essential nature. This is the “true Universal, or the Idea,”22 “metaphysical Universality”23 itself, “the Rational” itself,24 real concrete spirituality.25 Every work of genuine art grasps and reveals some “classic” state of Spirit determining itself on its path, i.e., some “ideal, universal world state”26 expressing the nature of Divinity and realizing itself in “the inner nature of things.”27 Art is born 1. Recht 430. 2. Enc. III 335(Z). 3. Enc. III 442. 4. Aesth. I 39, 105, 106, 206. 5. Aesth. I 8, 11, 47, 73, 91, 94, 102, 317; Aesth. II 91, 92, 111, 115, 229, 243, 272, 354, 383, 465; Aesth. III 15, 27, 127, 133, 146, 150, 222, 227, 243, 253, 274, 289, 311, 419. 6. “Dem Gedanken ausdrücklich gegenübersteht”: Aesth. I 17. 7. Enc. III 441; Aesth. I 60. 8. Aesth. I 52–53, 94. 9. Aesth. I 60, 206. 10. Aesth. I 67. 11. “Enthüllt die Wahrheit in Form sinnlicher Kunstgestaltung ”: Aesth. I 73, 132, 197. 12. “Sinnliche Darstellung”: Aesth. I 91. 13. Aesth. I 68, 92–93, 96, 232; comp.: Aesth. I 255, 316. 14. Aesth. I 68, 92–93. 15. Aesth. I 96. 16. Comp.: der “Geist sich verleiblicht”: Aesth. I 215; comp.: Aesth. II 365, 372; Aesth. III 220, 438, 518. 17. Aesth. I 73. 18. 5 Rec. 213; comp.: 3 Lat. 313; Enc. III 335(Z); Aesth. I 94, 96, 97. 19. Aesth. I 11, 225. 20. “Gottesdienst”: Diff. 270. 21. “Lebendiges Anschauen des absoluten Lebens und somit ein Einssein mit ihm”: Diff. 270. 22. Enc. III 335(Z); comp.: Aesth. I 68. 23. Aesth. I 30; comp.: Aesth. III 15, 20, 580. 24. Comp.: Aesth. I 82. 25. Comp.: Aesth. I 93, 103, 325. 26. See Aesth. I 229–52; “der ideale Weltzustand”: Aesth. I 252; “einem allgemeinen Weltzustand”: Aesth. I 253. 27. Comp.: Aesth. I 232.

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of Spirit and in spirit, and its roots are therefore intertwined with nature, religion, ethical life, and philosophy.1 Revelation is the content of art, and the aesthetically creative human being is “God’s artist.”2 Such is the dual structure of the “shapes”w of art. It is clear that it is brought to unity only thanks to the fact that the sensuous and physical material turns out to be capable of spiritualization. Thus, in a true work of art, the concrete-empirical is “only a sign of the Idea,”3 a sign that is deprived of independence4 and self-sufficiency. Born in spirit and abiding in the bosom of Spirit,5 the work of art receives a “spiritual baptism”6 and depicts only what corresponds to the divine nature. Art removes from its works the “deceitful appearance of a false, transitory world” and communicates to them a “higher, spirit-born actuality.” It associates them with a “higher reality.”7 Spirit subordinates sensuous matter to itself, purifying 8 and spiritualizing it. Attending the call of the divine Spirit, the human spirit negates, “sublates,” and removes everything that is brought in by meaningless accident and the self-lawfulness of the irrational element.9 Everything that remains is “idealized,”10 saturated with the meaningfulness of God’s being, formed according to his law, begins living his life. The sensuous presence is preserved,11 but is freed from the fetters of naked materiality,12 led out of the thickets of finite being and random misfortune.13 A work of art remains a thing 14 and an external singularity,15 but it loses its false self-existence16 and its indifference to the spiritual.17 The sensuous is spiritualized, and the spiritual appears in sensuous form.18 The eye sees “the pure body of inner beauty.”19 The achievement of art is that a sensuous fragment, “illuminated”20 by Spirit, becomes a bearer of Spirit. It becomes an actualized “shape” of Spirit, a “shape” in which there is nothing that does not come from Spirit,21 a shape which is “conceived and born” unsullied by meaningless subjectivity.22 This means that, between the Idea and the irrational element, a great reconciliation23 based on mutual acceptance and penetration is brought about. 1. Comp.: Enc. III 440–46; especially 444–45; and also: Log. III 328; Aesth. I 108–16, and the chapters on nature. 2. “Meister des Gottes”: Enc. III 443. 3. “Nur Zeichen der Idee”: Enc. III 441. Comp.: Aesth. I 215. 4. Comp.: Enc. III 445; Aesth. I 144, 325. 5. Aesth. I 18. 6. Aesth. I 39. 7. Aesth. I 13. 8. Aesth. I 200. 9. Comp.: Aesth. I 113, 200, 200, 206, 206, 227. 10. Aesth. I 51, 111–12, 113, 215. 11. Aesth. I 51, 65. 12. Comp.: Aesth. I 51, 65; comp.: Aesth. II 66, 74, 137, 383; Aesth. III 580. 13. Comp.: Aesth. I 51, 102, 109. 14. Aesth. I 51. 15. Aesth. I 51. 16. Comp.: Glaub. 7; Aesth. I 150. 17. Aesth. I 211. 18. Aesth. I 52, 115. 19. “Der reine Leib der inneren Schönheit”: Glaub. 7. 20. “Verklären”: Enc. III 441; Aesth. I 204, 205. 21. Enc. III 441; Aesth. I 110, 195. 22. “Von subjektiver Besonderheit . . . und von deren Zufälligkeit unbefleckt empfangen und herausgeboren . . .”: Enc. III 443. 23. “Versöhnt”: comp.: Aesth. I 91, 115; Enc. III 443.

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In the shapesx of “fine art,” neither the sensuous element nor the spiritual essence constitutes something external and self-sufficient:1 the sensuous is not “merely the shell”2 of the spirit; it not only “corresponds to,”3 or is “commensurate with,”4 spirit. On the contrary, the sensuous is also “permeated”5 with speculative content; it is “completely assimilated” by this content 6 such that even the “contingency” of the finite world turns out to be spiritualized and preserved, for there is present in a shape of art “the appearancey of unintentional contingency.”7 “Matter” becomes “adequate”8 to Spirit. Matter exists completely through Spirit: it is its “expression,”9 its “emanation,”10 and its “manifestation.”11 Just as the eye is “the seat of the soul” and the entire soul shines out of the depths of the eye, so art “makes its every shape a thousand-eyed Argus so that the inner soul and spirituality” shine from every “point” of its surface,12 and furthermore in such a way that the entire soul shines from everywhere.13, z Then a unity arises between Spirit and sensuousness:14 the two sides work into each other,15 grow into each other;16 their harmony,17 accord,18 consonance19 are transformed into an intimate 20 and indissoluble,21 indistinguishable 22 grown-togetherness, into a “completed interpenetration,”23 into dissolvedness24 and absorbedness.25 A speculative identity of the sensuous-individual and suprasensuous-universal arises: “The Universal gains a concrete existence through singularity to the same extent that the subjectivity of the singular and particular finds only in the Universal an unshakable basis and a genuine content for its own actuality.”26 Absorbing singularity, the Universal introduces into it its own higher speculative coherence 27 and transforms the sensuous shape into a totality;28 and vice versa: the sensuous shape gives Universality an adequate realization and an individually determined being.29 In this higher speculative symbiosis, the “true shape” is true because “the Idea expressed by it is true.”30 The sensuous is sanctified by the radi-

1. Aesth. I 68. 2. “Blosse Hülle”: Aesth. I 67, 68. 3. “Entsprechen”: Aesth. I 92–93, 94, 103. 4. “Gemäss”: Aesth. I 93, 196, 199, 201. Comp.: Aesth. III 128. 5. “Durchdrungen”: Aesth. I 18. 6. “Vollständig angeeignet ”: Aesth. I 107. 7. Aesth. I 150. 8. Aesth. I 200; Aesth. III 129. 9. Enc. III 445. 10. “Scheinen”: Aesth. I 144. 11. Aesth. I 107. 12. Aesth. I 197. Comp.: Aesth. II 384, 392–96. 13. Aesth. I 197. 14. “Eins sein,” “Einheit,” “Ineinsbildung”: Aesth. I 53, 82, 94, 103. 15. “Ineinander gearbeitet ”: Aesth. I 94. 16. “Ineinander verwachsen”: Aesth. I 68. 17. “Harmonie”: Aesth. I 200. 18. “Zusammenstimmung”: Aesth. I 149, 199– 200. 19. “Einklang ”: Aesth. I 201. 20. “Innigkeit”: Aesth. I 94, 203. 21. “Trennungslos”: Aesth. I 232. 22. Aesth. I 185. 23. “Vollendete Durchdringung ”: Aesth. I 149; comp.: Aesth. I 188. 24. “Verschmolzensein”: Aesth. I 103. 25. “Verschlungen”: Aesth. I 201. 26. Aesth. I 185, 231, 232. Comp.: Aesth. II 9, 333; Aesth. III 249. 27. Aesth. I 199–200. 28. Comp.: Aesth. I 302 29. Comp.: Aesth. I 252–313. 30. Aesth. I 97.

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ance of the Idea1 and represents a “triumph of freedom concentrated in itself.”2 From here flows that higher state of satisfaction3 and liberatedness4 which is inherent in works of “fine art.” The shapes of this art are full of blissful repose,5 radiant rejoicing,6 self-sufficing 7 completeness.8 “The ideal shape of art stands before us like some blissful God,”9 inwardly free in external being,10 without concern for the other,11 sensuously spiritual. This ideal shape of art is beauty realized in the world,12 the “absolute Idea.”13 Nevertheless, in spite of the fact that art is a host of actual “shapes” of Divinity on earth, it is not the highest mode14 of life proper to Spirit. The very form of existence, which is opposite to thought,15 acquires a limiting significance: the Concept lives here not in the form aa of a concept;16 it is alienated from its own genuine atmosphere17 in the direction of the sensuous and external much more than even, for instance, in religion.18 In fine art Divinity commits itself to an imagistic and intuitive existence. It robes itself in a finite and evanescent fabric, in visible and tangible appearances. It creates itself as an embodied bb spirituality, i.e., not in its true element.19 Precisely for this reason, embodied beauty remains a reconciling middle, which combines both elements, though according to the law of the higher element. Religion that is based on revelation is the final stage of actuality; it is woven organically of Reason and the non-rational element. It is the highest stage in the ordering of “formations”cc because it not only matures but, having matured, dwells in the element of the “inner,” in the element of “cognizing intuition.” Externally, it is manifested only in the stage of the confessional cult. As an effective “shape,” religion includes, on the one hand, nonrational states: the soul, religiously turned toward God, feels and senses Him.20 There is no religion outside of feeling;21 but precisely for this reason, religion is always linked to the empirical life of the soul, for feeling remains subjective, random, and non-rational in its nature. 1. Comp.: “Sinnliches Scheinen der Idee”: Aesth. I 144. 2. Aesth. I 202. 3. “Befriedigung”: Enc. III 446; Aesth. I 202; Aesth. II 129, 137. 4. “Befriedigung”: Enc. III 446; Aesth. I 65. 5. “Selige Ruhe”: Aesth. I 202, 203, 204; Aesth. II 76. 6. “Heiterkeit”: Aesth. I 202, 203. 7. “Sichselbstgenügen”: Aesth. I 202. Comp.: Aesth. II 297; Aesth. II 91, 58. 8. “Beschlossenheit”: Aesth. I 202. 9. “Wie ein seliger Gott ”: Aesth. I 202. 10. Aesth. I 218. 11. Comp.: Aesth. I 218. 12. Comp.: Aesth. I 107. 13. Aesth. I 120. 14. “Weise”: Log. III 328; comp.: on the speculative “rank” of art: Aesth. I 14, 93, 94, 102, 123, 124, 131, 132, 133, 134, 135, 136, 201, 225, 226, and others. 15. Comp.: Aesth. III 117. 16. Aesth. I 8, 51, 51, 34, 201. 17. Aesth. I 18. 18. Ph. G. 39. 19. Aesth. I 103, 104; comp.: Aesth. I 186. 20. See chapter 3. 21. “Die Religion muss gefühlt werden, muss im Gefühl sein, sonst ist sie nicht Religion”: Beweise 317.

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But in the religion of revelation, subjective and non-rational feeling receives the genuine power of God. This is true religion, and it therefore consists in God’s actual disclosure of His nature to humanity. God is Spirit, and revelation is the very essence, the very meaning (Sinn) of spirituality.1 This means that “God exists and gives Himself” precisely “in his relation to man.”2 On the part of Divinity, there are no obstacles,3 and there can be none, to the achievement of the knowledge of God in humanity, for it belongs to the very essence of God to be in the element of consciousness and cognition. But consciousness belongs only to humanity,4 and therefore God can reveal Himself only to him who is “spirit.”5 It would be absurd and grotesque to attribute to God a wary, jealous concealment of his gracious nature from humanity. According to legend, there was long ago in Athens a law according to which an individual who did not give another individual a light from his fire was condemned to execution.6 It is a property even of physical light or flame to communicate itself, to propagate, to give itself up to “other-being” without losing its own nature and not being diminished in its power. It is all the more proper to the nature of Spirit to remain faithful to itself and not be distorted in the revelation bestowed upon humanity.7 All this can be clear even to the nonphilosophical consciousness. God’s Spirit is free of all jealousy and envy whatsoever.8 Envy is an attitude of one subject to another. It is the hostility of one who has not toward one who has, the unloving, isolated opposition of a creature that is suffering from its meagerness. Thus, all this is dead in God’s life and inapplicable to the one and only all-embracing substance. God is being that is not meager and not limited. God is the richest totality. He does not “oppose” anything and does not dwell in isolation. On the contrary, in everything, he sees and knows only himself, deals only with himself; and even his “other-being,” created by him himself, he returns to himself by a mighty summons and a creative, conquering effort. The very revelation that emanates from him is received by him himself: God is a self-revealing subject, and God is a subject that receives, in the guise of the human essence, his own revelation.9 Revelation is God’s self-cognition, i.e., his becoming aware of himself in the human soul.10 This means that the human soul, when experiencing the religion of revelation, is filled with God’s presence. Religion is life, and “only 1. Enc. III 447. 2. Beweise 328. The emphasis is Hegel’s. 3. “Von Seiten Gottes kann . . . nichts im Wege stehen”: Beweise 330. 4. Comp., e.g., Beweise 300, 318. 5. Comp.: Beweise 330 and others. 6. Beweise 329. 7. Beweise 329–30. 8. “Gott nicht neidisch ist”: Beweise 329, 330. Comp.: Enc. III 447. 9. See chapters 3 and 8. 10. See: Enc. III 448 and others.

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through life can God be grasped and accommodated”;1 for God is life itself. But the mystery of revelation consists in the fact that, when through his soul the human being lives “in God,” it is God himself who lives in his soul and through his soul. True “faith in Divinity is possible only if the Divine is present in the believer himself,”2 for “only a modification of Divinity can know Divinity.”3 “In every human” there is this “light and this life.” And the soul of every human is not only illuminated by this light like “a black body that holds on itself only the radiation of others,” but also ignites and burns with its own fire.4 And this fire is life itself, “love” itself,5 Divinity itself, for Divinity is the all-permeating power of love.6 God actually lives in the human soul in the same way that the Vinedd is present in its branches,7 in the same way that the Universal enters into its singulars, and himself awakens faith in the human soul and the ascent 8 to knowledge of God. Nevertheless, in spite of this speculative identity of the “feeling soul” with God, the religion of revelation remains in the sphere of actuality and does not enter into the bounds of pure reality. Religion is a “shape” of actuality that unites in itself the authentic being of God and the empirical-irrational form of God’s life. Religion is the life of God in the subjectivity 9 of the feeling soul. To be sure, “the natural feeling of the heart” turns out here to be “bound” and subordinated to the “free Spirit,”10 but the essence of Divinity is nevertheless expressed by religion in the nonDivine language of “people.” 11 Therefore, even in the religion of revelation, the soul lives in truth and by means of the truth, but it lives untruly. To be sure, the religion of revelation and philosophy have the same content.12 To be sure, religion as “trustworthy certitude,”13 as consciousness of “the objektive content of truth,”14 bears within itself elements of knowledge,15 requires thought,16 leads to philosophical knowledge.17 But the true passage of religion from feeling and “the heart”18 to thought makes it already philosophy: except that for thought “the content of religious feeling is not sensuous intuition and sensuous representation.”19 Thus, in “the shapes of the world” there is revealed the possibility of reconciliation between the two elements, the possibility of their interpenetration, their concrete symbiosis, constituted according to the law 1. Nohl 318. 2. Nohl 313. 3. Nohl 313. 4. Nohl 313. 5. Nohl 391. 6. Comp.: Log. III 39–40; Nohl 391. 7. Nohl 391, 314. Comp.: Prop. 203. 8. Beweise 356. 9. Enc. III 440. 10. Hinr. 296. 11. Enc. I xxi. 12. Comp.: Phän. 419, 509; Log. III 328; Enc. I xxi, 3; Enc. III 429, 430, 438, 446, 453; Recht 333; Briefe II 77; Prop. 203, 205. 13. Enc. III 441; Beweise 335. 14. Comp.: Enc. III 429, 441; Recht 333; Hinr. 299; Briefe II 75–77. 15. Nohl 289; Diff. 185; Glaub. 103; Phän. 419, 509, 511; Enc. III 440; Beweise 311, 324; Prop. 203. 16. Enc. I 5, 14, 35, 107; Enc. III 117–18, 359, 366; Beweise 324, 373; Beweise C 482. 17. Phän. 512, 578; Beweise 297; Prop. 203. 18. Enc. III 117–18. 19. Beweise 301.

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of the Concept. The sensuous-empirical is permeated with the life of the Concept to such a degree that it enters with it into an organic identity. Attending to the voice of the object, Hegel was forced to acknowledge that Spirit can become a thing and introduce into this thing the law of its own life, and that Spirit can gain mastery over the non-rational forces of the soul and reveal in and for these forces its own divine nature. “The shapes of the world” present the two elements not “next” to one other but one in the other. Thus, the shape of beauty is not a “sum,” nor an “aggregate,” of the sensuous and the suprasensuous. It is rather the self-substantialized Idea, or Spirit existing in the shape of the thing. The shape of “the soul that has received revelation” does not bring about the “convergence,” “contact,” or “communion” of God and the soul. Rather, this shape is God vesting himself in a feeling soul or the intuiting by the soul of its own divine nature. A soul that has received revelation is a divine soul. Such was the spirit of Christ. Jesus manifested to feeling and sensuous intuition the actualization of the process in which God’s path in its entirety is formed:1 Reason became flesh and took on a sensuous-empirical, individually human aspect; it brought about in this subjective soul the self-awarenessee of its own divinity and, having cast off in its bodily death (“negation”) the form of finite and individual existence, dissolved into the Universality of Spirit that permeates and spiritualizes the life of the religious community, the church.2 Christ, this “singular person, in whom the absolute essence was revealed,” performed upon himself the entire “movement of sensuous being.”3 He realized through himself the “unmediated” and “sensuous existence of the absolutely concrete,”4 and in him the world intuited “the unity of the divine and human nature.”5 The religious essence of the Christian religion, as the “absolute” religion,6 is determined precisely by the good news of the realizability of the “organic identity” of humanity and God. This “gospel” was made manifest not by word alone but by a real actualization, actu, and in a form accessible to earthly sight. To disclose this revelation in a rational form, adequate to the Reason that is being revealed, and to affirm the divine essence of what is usually called the “world,” but should be called the “actual world,” became the task of philosophy. 1. Comp.: the metaphysical interpretation of the Trinity: Enc. II 22–24(Z); Enc. III 449– 50; Rel. II 181–288. 2. See: Phän. 566, 567, 568, 569, 570, 571, 572, 573, 577, 583, 584, 585, 587, 589, 590, 592. 3. Phän. 573. 4. Enc. III 450. Comp. Aesth. II 142, 145, 151. 5. Phän. 570. It is noteworthy that in his first work, dedicated to Christianity (“Das Leben Iesu,” Nohl 73–136), Hegel tried to exclude the metaphysical and mystical element in the understanding of the personality of Christ, but after several years he became convinced of the insufficiency of a purely moral conception. 6. Phän. 569; Rel. II 181–288.

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In resolving this problem, philosophy develops the doctrine of the threefold “reality” of the Idea. First, the Concept as such is already identical with reality.1 In itself, the Concept is a living creative force, the sole living thing, creativity itself, absolute force.2 The presence of the Concept is equivalent to being and reality. Its absence signifies objektive nothingness. Second, the Concept imparts “reality” to itself in the “Logic of the beginning,”ff pre-eternally revealing its own essence in unmediated self-thinking and ascending to an exhaustive categorial richness. The Concept becomes the absolute Idea.3 And then, third, growing together into one with the irrational element,gg the Concept acquires “objektive reality.” The element hh of sensuous other-being acquires the significance of a certain “objectivity,”4 in which the “subjectivity” of Spirit is incorporated; or it acquires the significance of a certain external “reality”5 over which the inner “ideality” of the Concept gains mastery. It turns out that the sphere of “actuality” is more real than the sphere of pre-eternal “logical reality,” that the Idea that has created itself prior to the world is not yet the “true” and “genuine” Idea, that the true Idea arises only as a result of a third realization: the growing-together of the Concept with irrational there-being.6 The absolute Idea in this manner arises from the organic growing-together of Reason with irrational sensuousness. The irrational element is necessary for Spirit, and a nourishing ingredient for it: the realization of Spirit consists in the gradual assimilation of the irrational element, in a growing-together that overcomes its lawlessness, while receiving its quality. Such is Hegel’s final and most profound attempt to depict the “transition” of the Absolute to the relative. This attempt leads him to the processualization of their interrelation, and his entire philosophy thereby acquires that character of historicism which can be considered as generally recognized. However, Hegel’s historicism acquires its true character neither from a temporal sequence of non-rational and contingent empirical circumstances nor from a juxtaposition of semi-rational, bifurcating appearances; but rather, from the speculatively necessary and lawful ascent of rational “shapes of the world.” Hegel’s historicism is determined by an ascending ordering of victories of reason “on earth.” This history is a supratemporal, metaphysical history; it tells of the theogonic process in the cosmos, and the sequence of events about which it speaks remains always a speculative sequence of spiritual events. This history depicts all the possible forms of the organic growing-together of the two elements and their symbiosis according to the law of the Concept. 1. See chapter 4. 2. See chapter 8. 3. See chapter 9. 4. See, e.g., Enc. I 45; Aesth. I 121, 144, 150. 5. See, e.g., Recht 148; Aesth. I 138, 148, 149. 6. Comp.: Recht 20, 22, 22(Z), 66, 78; especially Recht 132, 366; Aesth. I 138, 185, and others.

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This sequence is determined by the principle of freedom. Freedom is the highest measure and criterion of all the world’s “shapes.” And in this doctrine of the world as a process of God’s self-liberation it is disclosed that humanity, with its will and its ethical life, concentrates in itself the Gordian knot and crisis of speculative pantheism.1

Translator’s Notes a. In the German version of the text, Il’in changed “reception” to “justification” (Rechtfertigung). Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels, 279. b. Il’in’s term here is not the usual бессмыслие (meaninglessness), but безмыслие: i.e., без (without) joined to мысль (thought). c. The Russian term translated here as “as a whole” is цельно. In the German text Il’in employed in its stead aufrichtig (sincerely). Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels, 279. d. The Russian term is вразумление, an abstract noun taken from the verb вразумить/вразумлять: to make someone understand (more literally: to make rational), to teach, to clarify. e. “Beautiful” (прекрасное) is the term Il’in normally employs in the phrase I have chosen to translate as “fine art” (прекрасное искуство), presumably derived from the German model of die schönen Künste (the fine arts). However, “beautiful” appeared to fit best in this particular context. f. Il’in employs two synonyms for “medium” here, one directly after the other: среда and медиум. I have chosen to translate only one of them. g. In the German text the term Schein corresponds to the Russian term used here, вид, which I have accordingly translated as “show.” h. Il’in is evidently playing with the pair вид - видимосить in the same way that Hegel uses the German Schein - Erscheinung (show - appearance). The relation of one to the other is described by Errol Harris in summary form as follows: “In the Greater Logic Hegel begins by setting out the sphere of Essence as a triadic series of degrees of reflection. Being with all its determinations is aufgehoben, but now seen to be, not the truth, but mere outward show, in which on reflection we find no truth. ‘The truth of Being is Essence,’ or what is essential to it. Merely immediate being is thus, first der Schein, show, illusion, in Berkeley’s words, ‘a false imaginary glare.’ But, secondly, this is recognized as the outward appearance, die Erscheinung, of the truth: its phenomenal being, proceeding from a ground which is its essence. Finally, it ranks as manifestation, die Offenbarung, the actual revelation of the essence concretely embodied in being, or Actuality.” Errol Harris, An Interpretation of the Logic of Hegel (Lanham, Md.: University Press of America, 1983), 158. i. In Hegel’s Logic, the category “show” develops into the category “appear1. See volume 2: “The Doctrine of the Meaning of Human Life.”

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ance,” i.e., from something false and misleading to something which may be a genuine outward appearance of the essence, and in that sense true. Il’in is evidently presupposing that connection, but here retains the first term “show” (now in the sense of a show which is no longer false—i.e., one that has become an appearance). Looking at both the Russian and German texts, Il’in appears at this point to be using the two terms more or less interchangeably. The corresponding German text reads as follows: “So wird das irdische Ding zum wahren ‘Zeichen’ des Höhren, des Allerhöchsten: nun ist es nicht von sich aus, und nicht durch sich selber, sondern es behält bloß den äußeren ‘Schein’ des Selbstseins. Es ‘be-deutet’ das in ihm verborgene und hervortretende, tiefe innere Wesen; es wird von der heiligen Lohe des Göttlichen erfaßt und das göttliche Licht leuchtet aus ihm in die Welt. Der ‘Schein’ des Selbstseins, der noch in jeder ‘Er-scheinung’ zu finden ist, verliert nun den letzten Strich, die letzte Spur des Unwahren, des nur ‘Scheinbaren’: dieser ‘Schein’ ist nicht mehr trügerisch, nicht mehr das trübe Medium, nicht mehr die trennende Hülle; hell und klar bricht das scheinende Licht des göttlichen Wesens durch die sinnliche Hülle des Dinges.” Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels, 283. (“Thus the earthly thing becomes a true ‘sign’ of the Highest, of the most High: it is now not from itself, and not through itself; rather, it retains merely an outer ‘show’ of self-being. It ‘sig-nifies’ that deep inner essence hidden in it and stepping forth; it is seized by the holy flame of the Divine and the divine light shines forth from it into the world. The ‘show’ of self-being, which is still to be found in every ‘ap-pearance,’ now loses the last stroke, the last trace of untruth, of the merely ‘seeming’: this ‘show’ is no longer deceptive, no longer the obscuring medium, no more the isolating veil; the shining light of divine Being breaks bright and clear through the sensuous cover of things.”) j. Correcting the plural form (присутствуют) in the original text to the singular form. k. The Russian term is бывание; in his German version Il’in translates this as Dasein, which has traditionally been translated as “determinate being” (e.g., Science of Logic, Miller trans.); however, more recent translators have advocated “being-there” or “there-being” (e.g., see the discussion/debate in Encyclopedia Logic, trans. Geraets, Suchting, Harris, pp. xx–xxi and xxxvi–xxxviii). In a nontechnical sense, it can be used to mean simply “existence.” l. The Russian term is вещественный (substantial, material), derived from вещь (thing) and вещество (substance, matter). m. Il’in’s use of the verb приобщать here seems most precisely rendered by the archaic form “associate to” (see the Oxford English Dictionary, first definition of the verb form). (And it would be vain to object to the use of an archaic form in a translation of Il’in, given how frequently and skillfully he employs archaic Slavic forms.) n. The Russian term is овеществление. o. The Russian term право used here translates the German term Recht, and like that term, has a much broader range of meaning than the English term “right.” Право/Recht means both “law” (in the sense of what is in accord with

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justice, natural law, or an ideal of rational law) and “right.” Право (Recht) is to be contrasted with закон (Gesetz), meaning positive law, enacted law. p. The Russian term (in the prepositional) is власти, which can be translated either as “power” or “authority”; hence either “organs of power” or “organs of authority.” q. The Russian term here is образ, but in this case Il’in translated it into the German Bild rather than Gestalt. Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels, 291. r. The Russian term is бывание; however, Il’in simply dropped this particular phrase from the sentence in the German version. Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels, 291. s. The corresponding sentence in Il’in’s German text appears to alter the proposition significantly: “Das Element des Empirischen ist in der Kunst durch ‘Anschauung und Bild,’ durch das ‘äusserlich gegebene Material,’ durch die ‘Seite äusserlicher Existenz’ vertreten.” (“The element of the empirical in art is represented through ‘intuition and image,’ through the ‘externally given Material,’ through the ‘side of external existence.’ ”) Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels, p. 291. t. Translating вид here as “aspect.” u. Gestaltung in the German. Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels, 292. v. В образах in Russian; Bildern in German. Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels, 292. w. Russian: образов; German: Gestalten. Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels, 293. x. Russian: образах; German: Gestalten. Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels, 294. y. The Russian term here is видимость, earlier in this chapter treated by Il’in as equivalent to Erscheinung. In the corresponding German sentence here, Il’in employs Schein. However, as indicated in endnote h above, Il’in appears to treat the two as essentially interchangeable in certain contexts. Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels, 294. z. There is a typo in the footnote numbering at this point in the original Russian text: in order to maintain the proper sequence, this should have been number 25, not 23 (repeated). The notes themselves are numbered consecutively and do contain a note number 25, which corresponds to the incorrectly given number 23 in the text. aa. Gestalt in German, вид in Russian. Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels, 295. bb. Овеществленную. cc. Образований in the Russian text, but Weltgestalten (world-shapes) in the German. Iljin, Die Philosophie Hegels, 296. dd. Presumably a reference to John 15:5: “I am the Vine, and you the branches; who dwells in Me, and I in him, that one will bear much fruit; for without me you can do nothing.” ee. The term here is самоосознание, not самосознание (self-consciousness). ff. See the discussion of the “Logic of the beginning” and the “Logic of the end” in endnote x, chapter 9. gg. Стихия (element). hh. Элемент (element).

Bibliographic Appendix

Works by Hegel

In developing and substantiating an interpretation of Hegel such as this, which is not widely accepted, I considered it necessary to pay particular attention to the textual corroboration of every characteristic and, where possible, to use the actual expressions of the philosopher himself. The method of attentive reading and careful gathering of materials that provided such fruitful results in Vaihinger’s commentary on the Critique of Pure Reason seemed to me necessary to apply to Hegel, and the results produced by my work are supplied in footnotes. Unfortunately, the restrictions of a published edition did not permit me to replace everywhere the dry page numbers with the living and authentic words of the original, or to at least indicate for each page the intended line reference. The method of citation is the following. References are to the basic edition of the complete collected works of Hegel: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Werke. Vollstandige Ausgabe durch einen Verein von Freunden des Verewigten: D. Ph. Marheineke, D. J. Schulze, D. Ed. Gans, D. Lp. v. Henning, D. H. Hotho, D. K. Michelet, D. F. Förster. Verlag von Duncker und Humblot. Berlin, 1832–1845. This edition is divided into 18 tomes, distributed in 21 books. To this is added a nineteenth tome in two books containing Hegel’s correspondence: Briefe von und an Hegel. Herausgegeben von Karl Hegel. In zwei Teilen. Verlag von Duncker und Humblot. Leipzig, 1887. Further references are to the edition by Nohl of Hegels Theologische Jugendschriften nach den Handschriften der Kgl. Bibliothek in Berlin, herausgegeben von Dr. Hermann Nohl. Verlag von Mohr (Siebeck). Tübingen, 1907. In this edition are included all the fragments printed in Rosenkranz under the heading “Fragmente zur Kritik der Theologie aus der Tübinger Periode” (pp. 462–69), “Fragmente theologischer Studien” (pp. 490–514), and under the heading “Begriff der Positivität der Religion, 1800” (pp. 532–37). Reference is made also to two treatises printed originally by Mollat and then issued in their entirety by Lasson: “Die Verfassung Deutschlands” and “System der Sittlichkeit.” In view of the fact that Mollat, according to his own simple-hearted admission (comp.: “Kritik der Verfassung Deutschlands,” p. vi), ascribed no particular importance to “fidelity to original sources” (urkundliche Genauigkeit) and was not embarrassed “to simply correct errors in meaning” encountered by him in Hegel’s manuscripts, and also in view of the fact that he did not publish the second treatise in its entirety, I quote both works from Lasson’s edition: Hegels Schriften zur Politik und Rechtsphilosophie. Herausgegeben von Georg Lasson. Phil. Bibliothek. Bd. 144. Verlag von Felix Meiner. Leipzig, 1913 (pp. 3–149, 419–503). Lasson also introduces the excerpt “Über die neuesten innern Verhältnisse Wür265

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tembergs,” relating to the year 1798. I refer also to all the excerpts, poems, and documents collected by Rosenkranz in his Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegels Leben beschrieben durch Karl Rosenkranz. Verlag von Duncker und Humblot. Berlin, 1844; and in particular to “Hegels Tagebuch aus der Gymnasialzeit” (pp. 431–48), “Arbeiten aus der Gymnasialzeit” (pp. 448–61), “Thesen der Dissertation pro candidatura examinis consistorialis, 1793” (pp. 469–70), “Reisetagesbuch Hegels durch die Berner Oberalpen, 1796” (pp. 470–90), “Fragmente historischer Studien” (pp. 515–32), poetry (pp. 78–80, 83–84, 84–85, 260–62, 359, 420), the short excerpt on a prison (pp. 85–86), “Thesen zur Habilitations disputation am 27 August, 180l” (pp. 156–59), “Aphorismen aus der Jensener und Berliner Periode” (pp. 537–60), and the short entry on the Dresden exhibition (pp. 351–52). Finally, in the Hegel-Archiv, herausgegeben von Georg Lasson, Band I, Heft 1 and 2, are printed “Hegels Entwürfe zur Enzyklopädie und Propädeutik nach den Handschriften der Harvard-Universität,” 13 unpublished letters of Hegel, and 6 unpublished excerpts. The historical excerpts of 1790–1800, omitted by Rosenkranz, “Kritik von Kants Tugend- und Rechtslehre” and “Kommentar zu Stewarts Staatswirtschaft,” remain unknown to me. Evidently, they were included in Rosenkranz’s papers, together with many other manuscripts of Hegel. Later these manuscripts came into the possession of Arnold Gente, who took them to San Francisco, where they evidently perished during the 1906 earthquake. In the texts of the complete collected works bearing the name of Hegel as the author, not all actually come from his pen. Thus, first, the essay under the title “Über das Verhältnis der Naturphilosophie zur Philosophie überhaupt,” reprinted from the Kritisches Journal der Philosophie, and placed by Michelet in the first volume, does not belong to Hegel, which is obvious not only from its spirit and style, but also from the curriculum vitae put together in 1804 for the Weimar ministry by Hegel himself, which makes no mention of this essay (see Nohl’s preface to Hegels Theologische Jugendschriften, pp. viii–ix). In the literature there is also the open declaration by Schelling himself, made by him in a letter to Weiss of October 31, 1838: “There is not one letter from H. (sic) in it; prior to being printed he had not seen it.” Compare S. Michelet, Schelling und Hegel oder Beweis der Echtheit der Abhandlung: Über das Verhältnis, etc., pp. 6–7. None of the considerations adduced by Michelet in this polemical brochure are in any degree convincing. In just the same way, the review “Über Friedrich Heinrich Jacobi’s Werke, Erster Band,” etc., composed by Fr. von Meyer and published by him in no. 50 of the Heidelbergische Jahrbücher der Literatur for 1813, is incorrectly attributed to Hegel. This review was included in the sixteenth volume of the complete collected works of Hegel due to insufficient knowledge on the part of the editors of this volume, Förster and Boumann. Finally, all those additions (Zusatze) by students of Hegel which were included in his Encyclopedia and Philosophy of Right cannot be recognized as strictly authentic. The text of these additions was compiled for the most part on the basis of notes made by various students of Hegel in different years of his lectures.

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The pedagogical and explicative task of the lectures, the oral exposition with its frequently imprecise and accidental turns of phrase and expressions, the shaky and not always sufficiently high level of understanding of those who took the lecture notes—all this makes these additions a less than reliable source. Further, the compilers of these additions themselves either acknowledge that the choice of words (Auswahl der Worte) belonged not to Hegel but to the editor (see the preface by Gans to the Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, vol. 8, p. xvi); or they openly declare that they did not strive for “diplomatic exactitude” and were not embarrassed to amend defects according to their own memory: “aus seiner Erinnerung zu vervollständigen” (see the preface of von Henning to the Encyclopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften, part 1, vol. 6, pp. vi–vii). In view of this, I made use of these additions with great care, and entirely excluded from quotation the additions to the first volume of the Encyclopedia compiled by von Henning. That the texts of von Henning do not merit trust can be seen if only from the addition to section 151 of the Encyclopedia, where, in the definition of God, “Subject” is replaced by “Person.” A point of contention between the “right” and the “left” Hegelians thus receives a completely non-authentic illumination. Everywhere that I refer in footnotes to the text of additions, I signify this by means of the letter (Z). The absence of such critical rigor on the part of the editors forces one to approach with caution all the parts of the doctrine presented in lectures and reworked. One can never fail to be astonished at the inadequacies of critical and literary-philosophical tact on the part of those students of Hegel who did not consider it necessary to separate out what was original and authentic from their own additions and importations, all the more because at their disposal were the original manuscripts of Hegel from which he spoke at the lectern (comp.: the prefaces to volumes 9, p. xx; 10, p. vii; 11, p. v; 13, p. vi). It is necessary, by the way, to keep in mind that the lectures on the Philosophy of History (vol. 9) possess an advantage in this respect: first, pages 1–73 belong to Hegel’s own pen (manuscript, 1830); and second, the editor of this volume, Eduard Gans, exercised great care in this matter (comp. “Vorrede,” pp. xviii–xix). However, he also, unfortunately, failed to separate the original text from lecture notes and additions. From the lectures on the philosophy of religion (volumes 11 and 12), to the pen of Hegel belong only the Vorlesungen über die Beweise vom Dasein Gottes (vol. 12, appendix, pp. 291–449) and the “Kritik der Kantischen Kritik der Beweise für das Dasein Gottes” (vol. 12, “Einschaltung,” pp. 368–94); comp. vol. 12, “Vorrede,” p. vii. These lectures, in terms of their maturity of thought and simplicity of exposition, belong among the most remarkable works of Hegel and provide, together with the brilliant and profound teleological treatises published by Nohl, authentic material for judging Hegel’s views on the essence of religion. In my footnote references the following conventions are used (works are indicated almost always in chronological order, in which, to the degree it may be subject to dispute, I follow Rosenkranz).

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Works 1. All works published from Rosenkranz, except those specifically singled out 2. Theologische Jugendschriften herausgegeben von Nohl 3. System der Sittlichkeit herausgegeben von Lasson 4. Differenz des Fichteschen und Schellingschen Systems. Opera Bd. I 5. Dissertatio philosophica de Orbitis Planetarum. Opera Bd. XVI 6. Über das Wesen der Philos. Kritik, etc. Opera Bd. XVI 7. Wie der gemeine Menschenverstand die Philosophie nehme, etc. Opera Bd. XVI 8. Verhältnis des Skepticismus zur Philosophie, etc. Opera Bd. XVI 9. Glauben und Wissen. Opera Bd. I 10. Über die wissenschaftlichen Behandlungsarten des Naturrechts. Opera Bd. I 11. Aphorismen aus der Jenenser Periode. Rosenkranz. S. 537–55 12. Die Verfassung Deutschlands herausgegeben von Lasson 13. Phänomenologie des Geistes. Opera Bd. II 14. Philosophische Propädeutik. Opera Bd. XVIII 15. Fünf Gymnasial-Reden, gehalten zu Nürnberg. Opera Bd. XVI 16. Aus einem Briefe Hegels an Niethammer. Opera Bd. XVII 17. Wissenschaft der Logik. Opera Bd. III 18. Wissenschaft der Logik. Opera Bd. IV 19. Wissenschaft der Logik. Opera Bd. V 20. An den königlich preussischen Regierungsrat und Prof. F. v. Raumer. Opera Bd. XVII

Year ——

Abbreviation Ros.

1790–1800

Nohl

about 1800

Lass. II

1801

Diff.

1801

Diss.

1802

Krit.

1802

Krug.

1802

Skept.

1802 1802–03

Glaub. W. Beh.

1801–06

Aphor. I

1806–08

Lass. I

1807

Phän.

1808–11

Prop.

1809–15

Gymn.

1812

Niet.

1812–16 1812–16 1812–16 1816

Log. I Log. II Log. III Raum.

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21. Encyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grudrisse. Die Logik. Opera Bd. VI 22. Encyklopädie, etc. Naturphilosophie. Opera Bd. VII Erste Abteilung 23. Encyklopädie, etc. Die Philosophie des Geistes. Opera Bd. VII. Zweite Abteilung 24. Über Fr. Heinr. Jacobi’s Werke. Dritter Band. Opera Bd. XVII 25. Beurteilung der im Druck . . . Landstände . . . Würtemberg. Opera Bd. XVI. 26. Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie. Opera Bd. XIII 27. Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie. Opera Bd. XIV 28. Vorlesungen über die Geschichte der Philosophie. Opera Bd. XV 29. Aphorismen aus der Berliner Periode. Rosenkranz S. 555–60. 30. Grundlinien der Philosophie des Rechts, etc. Opera Bd. VIII 31. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion. Opera Bd. XI 32. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Religion. Opera Bd. XII 33. Vorrede zu Hinrich’s Religionsphilosophie. Opera Bd. XVII 34. Vorlesungen über die Philosophie der Geschichte. Opera Bd. IX 35. Vorlesungen über die Aesthetik. Opera Bd. X. Abt. 1 36. Vorlesungen über die Aesthetik. Opera Bd. X. Abt. 2 37. Vorlesungen über die Aesthetik. Opera Bd. X. Abt. 3 38. Wer denkt abstrakt? Opera Bd. XVII

1817–27–30

Enc. I

1817–27–30

Enc. II

1817–27–30

Enc. III

1817

Jac.

1817

Würt.

1805–31

Gesch. Ph. I

1805–31

Gesch. Ph. II

1805–31 1818–31

Gesch. Ph. III Aphor. II

1820–21

Recht

1821–31

Rel. I

1821–31

Rel. II

1822

Hinr.

1822–30

Ph. G.

1823–29

Aesth. I

1823–29

Aesth. II

1823–29

Aesth. III

between 1825 and 1831

Abs.

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39. Rezension der Schrift: Über die unter dem Namen Bhagavad-Gita, etc. Opera Bd. XVI 40. Über Solgers nachgelassene Schriften, etc. Opera Bd. XVI 41. Über Hamann’s Schriften. Opera Bd. XVII 42. Vorlesungen über die Beweise vom Dasein Gottes. Opera Bd. XII 43. Ausführung des teleologischen Beweises, etc. Opera Bd. XII 44. Ausführung des teleologischen und ontologischen Beweises, etc. Opera Bd. XII 45. Ausführung des ontologischen Beweises. Opera Bd. XII 46. Über Aphorismen über Nichtwissen . . . von K. F. G. I. Opera Bd. XVII 47. Rezension der Schriften: 1 . . . 2 . . . 3 . . . 4 . . . 5 . . . , etc. Opera Bd. XVII 48. Drei lateinische Reden, etc. Opera Bd. XVII 49. Über: Der Idealrealismus . . . Ohlert. Opera Bd. XVII 50. Rezension der Schrift . . . von J. Görres. Opera Bd. XVII 51. Über die englische Reform-Bill. Opera Bd. XVII 52. Briefe von und an Hegel. Opera Bd. XIX. Abt. 1 53. Briefe von und an Hegel. Opera Bd. XIX, Abt. 2

1827

Bhag.

1828

Solg.

1828

Ham.

1828–29

Beweise

1831

Beweise A

1827

Beweise B

1831

Beweise C

1829

Gösch.

1829

5 Rec.

1829–30

3 Lat.

1831

Ohl.

1831

Gör.

1831

Engl.

——

Briefe I

——

Briefe II

Works of Hegel not included in this detailed list are not quoted by me.

Literature About Hegel

Ein grosser Mann verdammt die Menschen dazu, ihn zu explizieren. —Hegel, Aphor. II, p. 555.

The present overview of the literature is, unfortunately, far from complete. In the libraries of Paris, Berlin, and Göttingen I succeeded in gathering a very much more complete collection of judgments on the philosophy of Hegel. Owing to the war, these collected materials were seized abroad, and now I have had to limit myself to the library holdings of Moscow University. That is why I do not refer here to many significant works, or in any event, works deserving of attention, devoted to Hegel: here one will not find either Bachman, or Weisse, or Ulrici, or Bruno Bauer, or Sterling, or Vera, or Spaventa; I was not able to make use of either the numerous journal articles or the newest essays devoted to my subject, briefly characterized by me in the note “On the Renaissance of Hegelianism” (Русская мысль for 1912 [vol. 33, no. 4]). The materials for all the judgments gathered here are divided by me according to chapters, and each assertion is accompanied by a brief opinion, for which the content of the corresponding chapter serves as the major premise, as it were.

Chapter One On the distinction in principle between the concrete-empirical and the concrete-speculative one can find only very little in the literature. The majority of writers use the term “concrete” in the indeterminate sense of “living actuality.” Such mistakes as are to be found in Wundt are of interest: according to Hegel, “the sensuous, empirical world is the sole actual world”a (Einleitung in die Philosophie, p. 330), and behind his panlogism is hidden “a frank acknowledgment of empirical actuality”b (ibidem). Rogers (Введение в философию, pp. 99, 102, 107)c can in no way believe in the rejection of the concrete-empirical. Even in Windelband (Die Blütezeit der Deutschen Philosophie, p. 313)d one can find the assumption 271

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that Hegel recognized the being of the world in that form in which it “presents itself for our empirical knowledge.”e On the contrary, Exner already noted in Hegel a certain “contempt for experience” (Die Psychologie der Hegelschen Schule, 1842, p. 112),f while the divergence in principle of the speculative path from the empirical was noted already in French literature (A. Lebre, “Crise actuelle de la philosophie allemande,” Revue des deux mondes, 1843). Hermann was right, comparing Hegel’s attitude toward the sensuous world with Plato’s attitude (Hegel und die logische Frage der Philosophie in der Gegenwart, pp. 50–51),g while later, Eduard von Hartmann with his usual subtlety observed that the concrete-empirical is in the eyes of Hegel no more than a “false, deceptive show” (Geschichte der Metaphysik, part 2, p. 281),h which presents neither interest nor authenticity (Neukantianismus, Schopenhauerianismus und Hegelianismus, p. 284).i Anton Springer expressed this best of all: the sensuous world provides only “obscurations”; j one must also “in the antechamber to a system, reproach oneself for its pitiableness”k (Die Hegelsche Geschichtsanschauung, 1848, p. 9).l

Chapter Two Hegel himself is partly guilty for the fact that later criticism insufficiently distinguished the abstract-formal from the abstract-speculative: he analyzed this concept only in its first meaning, not rising to the genus (“the abstract as such”) and not establishing the specific distinctions. That, however, provides no foundations whatsoever for confusing “abstract reason” with “reason.” Rogers is entirely mistaken in asserting that “Hegel himself never took the trouble to define precisely . . . in what way his viewpoint is distinguished from that which so-called sound reason has assimilated” (Введение в философию, pp. 98, 99, 114).a In fact, Hegel never called for “entirely submerging oneself in abstraction” (Lewes, История философии, p. 614),b and on the other hand, never identified “evil,” “diremption,” and “the second moment of the method” (Ott, Hegel et la philosophie allemande, p. 127).c Wallace dimly distinguishes in a vague way the two abstractnesses when, on the one hand, he says, “the attribute is forcibly withdrawn from its context and made an independent entity in the mind” (Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel’s Philosophy, p. 292),d and on the other hand, “an abstract notion is one withdrawn from everything that naturally goes along with it, and enters into its constitution” (ibidem, p. 304). Andrew Seth also interprets abstracting in the sense of a tearing-away of the part from the whole: “Abstraction, as Hegel uses the term, is the tendency to take the parts of anything out of relation to the whole, and to substantiate them in that character as res completae” (The Development from Kant to Hegel, p. 83).e In Russian literature the tradition has been established of interpreting Hegel as a partisan of the “abstract concept”; to this tendency are inclined, apparently, V. S. Solov’ev, Prince S. N. Trubetskoi, L. M. Lopatin, and Prince E. N. Trubetskoi, who traces this tradition via the Slavophiles to Schelling (Миросозерцание В. С. Соловьева, vol. 1, pp. 54–55, 57).f This doesn’t prevent V. S. Solov’ev (Философия Гегеля: Приложение к книге Кэрда, pp. 283–84)g and L. M. Lopatin (Положительные задачи философии, vol. 1, p. 387)h from cor-

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rectly defining the attitude of Hegel himself to “abstract reason.” Paulsen correctly distinguishes the “thought” of Hegel from rationalistic abstraction (Einleitung in die Philosophie, p. 318).i Lask deals with this entire question superlatively (Fichtes Idealismus und die Geschichte, particularly pp. 57–58). j E. von Hartmann exhaustively treats the relation of the speculative concept to the abstractly rational: “as in Homer the speech of the gods to men”k (Geschichte der Metaphysik, vol. 2, p. 231).l

Chapter Three The phenomenological analysis of Hegel’s philosophical act has not been carried out in the literature. Usually the two aspects of this matter—the speculative vision and the critical analysis—are split apart and not united; those who see together with Hegel, see only in that way; they, as it were, swim behind him in his current (Rosenkranz, Michelet, Kuno Fischer);1 those who approach him critically, remaining within their own, and moreover, usual point of view and retaining for the most part a loyalty to “formal” logic, know Hegel only from without and deconstruct that mode of vision, which is alien to themselves and never experienced by them (Fries, Bachman, Herbart, Trendelenburg, Haym, Exner, and others). The former, even if they themselves do see, cannot explain; the latter, if they explain, explain what they themselves have not seen. Between the Hegelians and their opponents arises an abyss, understanding is lost, philosophical communication deteriorates in a pile of misunderstandings and critical, mutual scorn, and the cause of understanding does not profit. Standing in the most favorable circumstances are either the “left” Hegelians, such as Feuerbach, having made their own transition from Hegelianism to a more usual point of view, or those more intuitively gifted thinkers such as Eduard von Hartmann and Dilthey. The diametrically opposed evaluations of Hegel’s philosophy are explained by the extraordinary structure of his thought act. On the one hand Zeller recognizes that Hegel’s doctrine is “the most perfected form of German idealism, the ripest fruit of the development”a (Geschichte der deutschen Philosophie seit Leibniz, p. 775);b and Willm says that Hegel “is at once the most subtle and the most profound of the modern philosophers”c (Histoire de la philosophie allemande depuis Kant jusqu’a Hegel, vol. 3, p. 383).d Windelband points to Hegel’s strictness with himself and his hostile attitude toward any and all “philosophizing from genius”; this is “the greatest logician in history since Aristotle and Kant”: “a through and through matter-of-fact personality”;e a thinker in whom “ruled victoriously the true philosophical spirit”f (Die Blütezeit der Deutschen Philosophie, pp. 303, 308, 322, 332, 314).g However, alongside this the literature is filled with angry and even malicious judgments of this great philosopher. Some speak of his “conceptual fantasies and scholastic sophisms”h (Noack, Schelling und die Philosophie

1. On the blindness of the “right” Hegelians, see Prince S. N. Trubetskoi: Preface to [the translation of] Caird’s book, p. xxx.

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der Romantik, vol. 2, pp. 409, 412);i others are angry at his “turmoil of drunken phrases”j (Hermann, Hegel . . . , p. 2);k a third group complains of his “crushing tediousness, and an all-thought-negating headache”l (Kahle, Darstellung und Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie, p. 115);m while James, not fearing accusations of vulgarity and banality, compares the genuine expressions of Hegel with the recorded mutterings of a man intoxicated due to nitrous oxide (Зависимость веры от воли и другие опыты, pp. 338–42).n There are others who compare Hegel with the “Roman pope” (Bluntschli, История госуд. права, p. 491)o or with an oracle (Der Gedanke, Berlin, 1861, pp. 185, 187, 188, 189, 190).p Lewes goes still farther and calls Hegel “abnormal,” “madly ambitious,” asserting that his doctrine is “just Humean skepticism” (История философии, pp. 618, 619, 623);q and Schopenhauer exceeds in his abuse everything known in the history of philosophy, asserting that Hegel is no more than a “gross, spiritless charlatan”r (Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik, Brockhaus, 1881, p. 147, xviii–xxx). The inability or unwillingness to assimilate Hegel’s thought act has a decisive significance in these disagreements. Already in 1842 Exner expressed the wish for someone to write “a psychology of Hegelian thought, of Hegelian consciousness”s (Die Psychologie . . . , p. 26);t the need for that is understandable, for as Rogers says, “Hegel’s philosophizing” is too “destructive for our usual mental habits” (Введение, p. 122).u Without this, his doctrine may actually remain for us “a sealed mystery” (Wallace, Prolegomena, p. 8),v and no one will believe in Hegel’s inherent “soberness of spirit” (Noack, Schelling . . . , vol. 1, p. 418).w That Hegel’s philosophy rests upon a certain inner experience is recognized by Windelband (Blütezeit, p. 315)x and Chlebik (comp. “thinking experience”y in Die Philosophie des Bewussten nach Hegel und Michelet, p. 14);z Losskii confirms this particularly clearly (Обоснование интуитивизма, p. 159).aa Participation in this experience of intuition, of seeing in thought bb is rightly pointed out by Falckenberg (История новой философии, pp. 408–9)cc and Jodl (“intuiting cognition”;dd История этики, vol. 2, p. 124).ee Lask directly speaks of “intellectus intuitivus” (Fichtes Idealismus, p. 57).ff Feuerlein accurately defines: in the logic—“intuiting thought,”gg and in the concrete sciences—“thinking intuition”hh (“Über die kulturgeschichtliche Bedeutung Hegels,” Historische Zeitschrift, 1870, no. 4, p. 331).ii In Russian literature independent of the Schellingian tradition, P. I. Novgorodtsev expresses the view: “in place of abstract determinations is placed concrete intuition”jj (Кант и Гегель, p. 190).kk V. S. Solov’ev rejects intuition in Hegel (“Философия Гегеля,” pp. 280–84, 298).ll L. M. Lopatin expressed himself with particular definiteness: Hegel “wanted to ignore intuition completely” (Положительные задачи философии, vol. 1, p. 367).mm The nature of this experience Rosenkranz sees in abstraction from subjectivity and a raising of it “to a pure, reflectionless vessel of the Concept”nn (Hegels Leben, p. 323).oo Giliarov-Platonov supposes that it is impossible either “to destroy the individual” or to “part with him,” and protests against this undertaking in the name of “sensible people” (“Онтогология Гегеля,” Вопросы философии и психологии, vol. 8, pp. 18–19; vol. 10, pp. 29–30). Caird recognizes the supra-subjective character of speculative thinking (Гегель, pp. 178–79),pp as does Prince S. N. Trubetskoi (Основания идеализма [in the Collected Works], vol. 2, p. 184).qq Jerusalem

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simplifies the problem in vain, reducing everything to “the mental reproduction of the development of the concept itself” (Введение в философию, p. 166).rr Janet and Séailles describe this state much more delicately: “to abandon oneself to the dialectical movement of thought”ss (Histoire de la philosophie, p. 161).tt E. von Hartmann defines it even better: “the individual consciousness looks passively at the spectacle which the active and productive spirit presents before him”uu (Geschichte, p. 218).vv It is also well expressed by Rehmke: “to this progress of selfmovement, the Idea thinkingly attends”ww (Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie, p. 281)xx; and by Seth: “The true speculative method consists in allowing this function free play . . . It must be looked in the face” (Development, p. 74).yy The result of speculative self-renunciation is depicted variously in the literature. Windelband, with his usual clarity, speaks of “evidence of immanent objectivity”zz (Erneuerung des Hegelianismus, p. 12).aaa It is well put by Trendelenburg: thinking becomes “creative like the Divine and thus far is it the Divine thinking itself”bbb (“Zur Geschichte von Hegels Logik,” Neue Jenaische Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, 1842, no. 97, p. 406). Willm understands it in the same way: “it is divine thought itself”ccc (Histoire . . . , p. 317).ddd Michelet equates philosophical thinking with the perception of Divine revelation (Entwicklungsgeschichte der neuesten deutschen Philosophie, p. 241),eee while Springer compares the movement of the concept with the Greek mysteries (Die Hegelsche . . . , p. 8).fff On the contrary, Prince S. N. Trubetskoi continues even here to speak of “our” human thinking (Соч., vol. 2, pp. 334, 335, 336, 339),ggg and V. S. Solov’ev doesn’t see in such thinking any content at all (Кризис западной филисофии,1874, p. 116);hhh in this connection he in a strange fashion identifies the “concept” with “the act of understanding itself,” “i.e., with this my thought,” and as a result of this completely loses access to Hegel (Кризис . . . , pp. 54, 109). Others, on the contrary, ascribe to Hegel the divinization of his own empirical personality and in this way betray the limits of their own philosophical penetration; such is the case for Janet and Séailles: “God is Hegel” (Histoire . . . , pp. 877, 771),iii or for M. M. Rubinshtein: “Hegel wanted to be absolute spirit” (“Логические основы системы Гегеля и конец истории,” Вопросы философии и психологии, vol. 80, p. 759). Haym evidently saw in Hegel a romantic cult of genius (Hegel und seine Zeit, p. 185), jjj but failed to see the identity between thinking and intuiting, and thereby to a certain degree lessened the value of his own subtle and at times brilliant critique (comp. pp. 104, 173, 193, 244).kkk

Chapter Four Hegel presupposes in what follows that his reader has actually carried out the act of speculative self-renunciation and has seen that object which is revealed to the “speculatively newly seeing” glance. Therefore he is certain that his assertions will be adequately apprehended in an intuitively justified form and will encounter a deeply serious attitude. And then “everyone will see” that thought is something objektive, real, that it is itself reality and the sole reality. The absence of such an intuitive “justification” brings, of course, an entire system of misunderstandings.

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Höffding superbly describes the change taking place in this way: “when we think being, then being thinks in us; in our thinking beats the pulse of being itself; moreover, that rhythm which is everywhere characteristic of it is maintained” (История новейшей философии, pp. 149, 150).a Noël also recognizes the ontological character of the categorial movement (La logique . . . , p. 18):b to subjective spirit is opened access to the thing in itself: “the definite truth resides in the noumen”c (ibidem, p. 152). Hinkel characterizes “pure thought” as “the original basis of the world”d (Die spekulative Analysis des Begriffs Geist . . . , 1840, p. 42).e Hermann calls Hegel “a dramatist of the objektive thought-content, or of the spiritual essence of the things themselves”;f this doctrine is “idealrealism” (Hegel . . . , pp. 39, 49, 50).g On the contrary, a whole series of writers try to understand this state epistemologically. Thus, even Trendelenburg sees here “only a history of subjective cognition”h (Logische Untersuchungen, pp. 92, 94–95)i and besides, interprets the “pure thinking” of Hegel as the opposite of the “imagistic and impure” (Zur Geschichte . . . , p. 409). j Rogers assures us that Hegel completely fails to “recognize the reality of pure thought alone” (Введение, p. 109),k and Lewes tries to reduce Hegel’s doctrine to the claim that “our thoughts” are “the reality of objects” (История философии, p. 618).l The formula of Prince S. N. Trubetskoi seems to be insufficient: “without thought and outside of thought nothing is thinkable” ([Collected Works], vol. 2, p. 184).m One cannot agree with L. M. Lopatin either when he writes: “the absolute idea of Hegel is only thought, only an abstraction of reason” (Положительные задачи . . . , vol. 1, p. 360), “only an abstraction of abstract reason” (p. 361).n Willm fails to drive the issue to the conclusion, sketching it in this way: “my thought . . . is the faithful reproduction of the thought which has produced the universe”o (Histoire . . . , vol. 4, p. 152),p while Ott converts Hegel’s doctrine into some sort of extreme relativism: “the idea is the report,” “itself”; “Hegel . . . makes of the world a game of reports”q (Hegel . . . , pp. 66–67).r Hermann also comes to rest on the “unanimity” between thinking and being (Hegel . . . , pp. 35, 36).s One can find in many an assertion of the convergence of Hegel with Aristotle, for example in Trendelenburg, Haym, Heyder (Kritische Darstellung und Vergleichung der Aristotelischen und Hegelschen Dialektik, Erlangen, 1845),t also in Paulsen, Seth, and others.

Chapter Five The idea of the “universal” has failed to attract special attention to itself in the literature. Ed. von Hartmann formulates the problem very well, albeit quite briefly: Hegel “despises the common conception, coming about through abstraction from the particular, . . . as a hollow and empty phantom and shadow”;a the concept is “the self-specifying concrete universal”b (Geschichte . . . , p. 231).c Lask with perspicacity notes that the universal is, according to Hegel, “a real whole,” (ein reales Ganzes), and that Hegel recognizes an “identity of compass and content”d (Fichtes Idealismus, pp. 58, 61).e Hermann (Hegel . . . , p. 294)f and V. S. Solov’ev

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(Кризис . . . , p. 99)g point to the affinity between the “concept” of Hegel and the “essences” of the scholastics. Willm doesn’t quite definitely distinguish between “merely common”h and “the true general, the universal”i (Histoire . . . , vol. 4, p. 187). j The same reticence remains in Kuno Fischer (Geschichte der neueren Philosophie, vol. 8, part 1, p. 530).k Michelet (Entwicklungsgeschichte . . . , p. 273)l and Stahl (Geschichte der Rechtsphilosophie, p. 425)m recognize the “unity” of the universal and the particular, but don’t perceive the identity of content between them. Noël completely failed to appreciate the significance of the category of the Universal in Hegel’s philosophy (La logique . . . , pp. 89–90),n and Geyer vainly tries to ascribe to Hegel the view that “the singular is nothing” (Краткий очерк истории философии права, p. 101).o Ott commits the crudest mistake: “For Hegel the word generality or universality never refers to the relation of the whole and the parts”p (Hegel . . . , p. 73);q it is interesting that the very same author a few pages later subtly explains the term “Urteil” in the sense of “a primitive division,” and the term “Begriff” in the sense of “a complete idea” (ibidem, pp. 79, 90).

Chapter Six It can be considered that the age of overestimation of the significance of the dialectical method in Hegel’s philosophy is past. When still in 1835 Weisse characterized this system with the words “the genuine excellence of the method”a and “the desolate barrenness of its results”b (Grundzüge der Metaphysik, “Vorrede”),c this was natural; the dialectical “development” of the concept at first blinded the minds outright. But already then the situation concealed in itself a certain inner humor; according to the observation of Windelband (Blütezeit . . . , p. 313),d that same Weisse succeeded in depicting the “objective content” of Hegel’s doctrine “without the method,” and moreover, in such a way that “the object nevertheless, to much astonishment, not only didn’t lose, but often even gained.”e Of course, it was possible later to encounter in the literature the same blind overestimation of the dialectic, for example in Stahl: “the dialectical law, namely, is the sole content of the system”f (Geschichte . . . , p. 455; comp. p. 442),g or, in our own time, in M. M. Rubinshtein, suggesting that “the dialectical” is in Hegel’s doctrine the criterion of all “value” whatever (Логические основы . . . , pp. 734, 749).h An unforgettable service of Trendelenburg was his critically well-grounded call to throw out “the false amazement before the dialectical methodology”i (Zur Geschichte . . . , p. 414). j The generally negative conclusions of Trendelenburg, previously indicated by Schopenhauer, were soon joined in by Kopp, H. Ritter, E. Reinhold, Strümpel, and later Stahl, Wirth, and even Weisse (comp. Trendelenburg, “Die Logische Frage in Hegels System,” Neue Jenaische Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung, 1843, nos. 45, 46, 47); while later Überweg turned that tendency into a principle with his splendid formula, stating that one must crititicize Hegel’s doctrine “through strictly maintained distinctions”k (Grundrisse der Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. 2, part 3, p. 49, Remark).l Chalybäus (Historische Entwicklung der speculativen Philosophie, 1837)m still earlier spoke ironically of “the disease of couplings” with which Hegel’s philosophy is infected, and Kahle devel-

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oped this image as follows: “the Non-method according to which he [Hegel] first broke apart the limbs of sound reason, in order to put them together crookedly, and again broke them, in order to count them together again out of sequence”n (Darstellung . . . , p. 110).o Later negative reactions in the literature become frequent (comp., for example, Bluntschli [История гос. права . . . , 486],p or Feuerlein [Über die kulturgeschichtliche . . . , p. 314, etc.])q The subtle analyses of McTaggart and Ed. von Hartmann conclude this matter. Hartmann speaks outright of “the absurd dialectical method”; its “single-fruit-bearing, monotonic rattling”r leads to the consequence that “by no single step of Hegelian logic is any more achieved than a clever or unclever Sophistic”s (Geschichte . . . , pp. 212, 236).t Trendelenburg’s criticism is, of course, not convincing in every respect; thus, he wrongly interprets Hegel in an abstractly rational manner and converts his metaphysic into a simple logic (comp. Alexis Schmidt, Beleuchtung der neuen Schellingschen Lehre von Seiten der Philosophie und Theologie, pp. 110–27, 161–213);u mistakenly depicts the “movement” of the concept in an intuitive-spatial sense (Logische Untersuchungen, vol. 1, pp. 38–42, 47, 108, and others);v and mistakenly leaves out of account that Hegel consciously left the sphere of formal contradictions for the sphere of real oppositions (comp. Barth, Die Geschichtsphilosophie Hegels und der Hegelianer, p. 6).w Nevertheless, the critical service of Trendelenburg is indubitable, and the wrath of Gabler, reproaching him for “murderous savagery,” is psychologically understood (comp. Trendelenburg, Die Logische Frage . . . , p. 186).x That circumstance, that the dialectic of Hegel possesses not only a purely logical but, perhaps, a properly organic character has been remarked upon several times in the literature. Thus, already Stahl wrote that the dialectical method is found “not on a logical path” (Geschichte . . . , p. 427).y Kuno Fischer placed Hegel in this respect near to Heraclitus, Nicholas de Cusa, and Giordano Bruno (Geschichte . . . , vol. 8, part 1, p. 497).z McTaggart indicates that “there is only development, the rendering explicit what was implicit, the growth of the seed to the plant” (“The Changes of Method in Hegel’s Dialectic,” Mind, 1892, pp. 70, 71); and Hartmann insistently emphasizes “the immanent unlogic of Hegel’s dialectical idea” (Neukantianismus . . . , p.308).aa Opinions diverge as to Hegel’s attitude to the law of contradiction. Many turn out not to be competent on this question because, following in Hegel’s footsteps, they confuse the law of contradition with the law of identity (thus in Michelet, Entwicklungsgeschichte . . . , p. 267;bb in Giliarov-Platonov, Онтология . . . , first essay, p. 23).cc V. S. Solov’ev seems to believe that Hegel succeeded in repudiating the law of contradiction, and supposes even that the philosopher insured himself in that way from “inner contradictions” (Кризис . . . , p. 55).dd On the contrary, Lewes (История . . . , pp. 614, 616),ee Hermann (Hegel . . . , p. 268),ff and Noël (La logique . . . , p. 15)gg think that Hegel actually succeeds in thinking contents that are logically contradictory. But on the other hand, Willm correctly observes that Hegel himself judges no other than by the laws of ordinary logic (Histoire . . . , vol. 4, p. 314).hh Höffding (История . . . , p. 151)ii and Rogers (Введение . . . , p. 121)jj mistakenly try to interpret the dialectical process subjectivistically, as though every-

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thing were reduced to “arbitrary” alterations “in the sphere of our ideas.” On the contrary, Prince S. N. Trubetskoi ([Collected Works], vol. 2, p. 337)kk and Caird (Гегель . . . , pp. 155, 158)ll openly recognize the objektive character of the dialectical process; and in this they are entirely correct. Zeller also points to the “objektive movement of the concept” (Geschichte . . . , p. 781).mm L. M. Lopatin excellently notes in Hegel “the absence of a distinction in principle between the subjective and the objektive dialectical process” (Полож. задачи . . . , vol. 1, p. 383).nn Michelet formulates what is most substantive: “the divine thought goes forth for itself in the philosophical subject, as its substrate; and this objektive movement of the matter itself, which we have only looked upon, is the method of Hegelian philosophy”oo (op. cit., p. 243).pp Rosenkranz informs us that in the Jena lectures of 1806 Hegel himself characterized the dialectical movement of the Concept as the “course of God’s life”qq (Hegels Leben, p. 192).

Chapter Seven The nature of “speculative concreteness” remains almost unexplained in the literature. The majority of writers speak of the “concrete” as of something selfevident and in no need of further explanation. Thus the matter stands even for Ed. von Hartmann; perhaps precisely for that reason, he protests the fact that “the positive goal of the logical, which is to be produced purely from within itself, remains unclear in Hegel”a (Neukantianismus . . . , p. 268).b Rosenkranz speaks somewhat obscurely of “the concrete in the narrow sense” (Hegels Leben . . . , p. 287);c also Lask: “the metaphysico-concrete” (Fichtes Idealismus . . . , p. 63).d Caird more determinately refers to the fact that “the idea is the organic unity of all other categories,” but for some reason he doesn’t characterize that state by the term concreteness (comp.: Caird, Гегель . . . , pp. 43, 47, 157, 164, 183, 190, 191, 227, 228, 229).e P. I. Novgorodtsev correctly employs the term “concreteness” in the sense of a “completeness of determinations” (Кант и Гегель, pp. 201, 202);f however, this still doesn’t touch on the problem of the character of their inner connections. A whole series of writers connect the idea of the concrete with the highest stages of a process. Thus it stands with Überweg (Geschichte . . . , part 3, vol. 2, p. 55);g and also in Lask (Fichtes Idealismus, p. 62);h in Miraglia “procedere dall’asttratto al concreto” (I principii fondamentali dei diversi sistemi di filosofia del Diritto, p. 85).i Wallace determines that “the same self-identical thought is set forth from its initial narrowness and poverty on to its final amplitude and wealth of differences” (Prolegomena . . . , p. 380). j Noël has an accurate presentiment of the true situation: “The synthesis is united in the thesis and the antithesis, but a unity which preexists its elements and in a certain sense contains more than them”k (La logique . . . , p. 16).l Unfortunately, the author does not develop this conception. Höffding correctly notes: the richer concept “contains within itself the preceding” (История . . . , p. 150).m Kahle ironically and indignantly gives a completely accurate definition, identifying “objektive universality” with “concrete totality” (Darstellung . . . ,

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p. 12, Remark, 28, and 30).n Wallace also gives in passing a correct definition: “A concrete notion is a notion in its totality, looking before and after, connected indissolubly with others: a unity of elements, a meeting-point of opposites” (Prolegomena . . . , p. 304).o Along with this, the literature also contains quite a few misunderstandings. Trendelenburg saw in Hegel’s logic “not a powerful unity of the concrete, but a flat sameness of abstraction”; that becomes understandable if one takes into account that under “concreteness” the author understood the wealth of the world’s content (Logische Untersuchungen, vol. 1, pp. 66, 94–95, 108).p Haym repeats the same mistake (Hegel . . . , pp. 237, 289, 290, 315, 319, 322, 324, 409, 410, 428, 429).q Giliarov-Platonov definitely confuses the “concrete-empirical” with the “concrete-speculative” (Онтология . . . , essay 1, p. 3).r Ott sees the most complete emptiness in Hegel’s logic: “God and the universe are nothing, determined by a series of no’s”s (Hegel . . . , p. 112; comp. p. 72).t Fester is wrong in asserting that in Hegel only the form, but not the content is developed (Rousseau und die deutsche Geschichtsphilosophie, p. 272).u One cannot agree with L. M. Lopatin, when he says that in Hegel “the more concrete” determinations are “the more particular” (Положит. задачи . . . , vol. 1, p. 345).v Ehrenberg considers it possible to reduce the concreteness of the concept to its “determinateness” and “uniqueness” (Die Parteiung der Philosophie: Studien wider Hegel und die Kantianer, 1911, p. 38).w The interesting book of J. Hutcheson Stirling, The Secret of Hegel,x is known to me, unfortunately, only secondhand and from journal reviews.

Chapter Eight Hegel’s doctrine of the divinity of the concept is so unusual, and, given an inadequacy of intuition, so unimaginable and incomprehensible that scarcely any of the commentators are willing to take it seriously or, still more, to systematically uncover it. Precisely for that reason, concerning the doctrine of God, the communis opinio doctorum is yet to come. Thus, on the question of the “subjectivity” of the Divine, disagreements have existed since the division of Hegelianism into the “right” and the “left.” Rosenkranz classically resolved this problem: Divinity, according to Hegel, is not a “Person,” i.e., “limitation, spatiotemporal finitude,” but is a creative “subjectivity” and in the sense of an indivisible wholeness—“in-dividuum” (Hegels Leben . . . , pp. 206, 401).a Erdmann, Sr., spoke favorably of such an understanding: “the universal Spirit, this great individual”b (Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie, vol. 2, p. 597).c Kuno Fischer acknowledged that the Absolute is Subject in the sense that it is “self-distinguishing,” “self-active” (Geschichte . . . , vol. 8, part 1, p. 291);d or in other words: “self-knowing reason or spirit”e (ibidem, p. 305); “self-actualization of the Concept” (p. 292); the “moral world-order” as “love”f (p. 293). Hartmann formulates it equally correctly: “the Concept, an absolute subject of the logico-dialectical process”g (Geschichte . . . , pp. 241, 245).h Seth also puts it well: “the determination of the Absolute as Subject or Spirit”; “a process of self-creation” (Development . . . , pp. 68, 78).i Inclining in this question

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more to the left Hegelians, L. M. Lopatin refuses to see in Substance a certain living “essence” (Полож. задачи . . . , vol. 1, p. 358). j Stahl develops an analogous view with particular insistence: reason is “substantial thinking without a thinking Subject,” “a non-personal world-spirit,” “subjectless thinking,” “a dreamworld . . . though without a dreamer”k (Geschichte . . . , pp. 415, 424, 433, 456).l Geyer rejects the Absolute even in “activity” (Краткий очерк . . . , p. 100).m On the question of “pantheism” in Hegel, there are also quite a few disagreements in the literature. A large group of writers definitely recognize Hegel as a pantheist, although not all agree on the basis for such a characterization. Closest of all to the truth are those who speak of a logical pantheism, or panlogism. For example, in Prince S. N. Trubetskoi we read: “is there anything at all in the world other than logic? According to Hegel, strictly speaking, one should answer decisively ‘no’ ” (Сочuнения, vol. 2, p. 340).n In the opinion of P. I. Novgorodtsev, Hegel sees in logic “the very essence of absolute spirit”: “science” is the essence of spirit, “that kingdom that it creates by its own nature” (Кант и Гегель, pp. 200, 199).o Paulsen characterizes the philosophy of Hegel as a “logical pantheism” (Einleitung . . . , p. 317).p Janet and Séailles join this viewpoint: “it is panlogism” (Histoire . . . , pp. 161, 877, 878);q others also share this view (see in the second volume of the present work the notes to chapter 22). Bluntschli (op. cit., p. 493)r and Gradovskii (“Политическая философия Гегеля,” Журнал Министерства Народного Просвещения, 1870, July, p. 42)s speak of the “pantheism” of Hegel without specifying anything further. Willm entirely correctly characterizes Hegel’s doctrine as “idealistic pantheism,” according to which God is not “the ensemble of finite things” (Histoire . . . , vol. 4, p. 326).t In contrast to this thoughtful approach, other commentators ascribe to Hegel precisely that vulgar “pantheism” which he rejected under the name of “Allesgötterei.” Wundt incomprehensibly ascribes to Hegel both “panlogism” and a crude empirical cosmism: “the sensuous, empirical world is the actual world”u (Einleitung . . . , pp. 328, 330).v Ott suggests that Hegel, together with Schelling, professed “the identity of God and all things”w and, in consummation, “fatalism” (Hegel . . . , p. 65).x Stahl expresses himself especially pointedly: “God is the All, the entire fulfilled world, as it is”;y accordingly, the efforts of Hegel are directed to “making the world in itself without God comprehensible”z (Geschichte . . . , pp. 415, 424).aa Incorrectly expounding sections 50 and 537 of the Encyclopedia, Stahl insists in this connection that Hegel firmly defended himself against the accusation of pantheism (ibidem, pp. 464–65). Further careless formulations are supplied by Hinkel (Specul. Analysis . . . , p. 107)bb and Jodl: “the power of God is all and everything” (История этики, vol. 2, p. 124).cc Hegel more than once, and unambiguously, reckoned Spinoza and himself among the true pantheists, i.e., the acosmists. For that reason, Lask is wrong in asserting that Hegel was avoiding and did avoid “metaphysical acosmism” (op. cit., p. 60).dd Hartmann is also wrong when he says, “he shares Spinoza’s monism, but not his acosmism”ee (Geschichte . . . , p. 207).ff In just the same way, Michelet wrongly rejects the pantheism of Hegel on the ground that in his philosophy the category “whole-part” is not the highest (op. cit., p. 270);gg and Noël, on the ground that Hegel “equates” God not with the world, but with reason (La logique . . . ,

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pp. 141, 146).hh Finally, Lebre declares that Hegel’s system, “with its sacerdotal vestments and the religious pomp of his speech is . . . only an emphatic atheism”ii (“Crise . . . ,” p. 15). jj

Chapter Nine Despite all Hegel’s efforts to show the authenticity and contentfulness of the reality he intuited, a whole series of writers complains of the formalism and emptiness of his Logic. This was expressed most sharply of all in V. S. Solov’ev: he reduces the doctrine of Hegel to the claim that “the forms of our thinking are the truly existing,” and further, finishes by claiming that Mill and Hegel are identically formalists in Logic, except that one acknowledges the “priority” of “logical categories,” and the other, of “sensuous states of consciousness” (Соч., vol. 1, p. 127; comp. pp. 99, 128, 129).a The emptiness of the former “Being” is recognized by Giliarov-Platonov as well: it is a “nothing,” about which “there is nothing to be said” (Онтология . . . , essay 1, p. 12).b Hermann also comes close to this conception: the Logic is nothing more “than an expanded doctrine of categories”c (Hegel . . . , pp. 29, 199, and others).d On the contrary, Erdmann, Sr., emphasizes that the Logic examines not merely “the form of the real,” but also “the true and only actual”e (Grundriss . . . , p. 601).f Haym defines the Logic of Hegel excellently, but not exhaustively, as a doctrine of “the thing in itself” (Hegel . . . , p. 295);g its religious significance remains undisclosed. Wallace wrongly tries to reduce this religious content of the Logic to the point that it gives “only a phantom Deity—the bare possibility of a God or of absolute reality” (Prolegomena . . . , pp. 380, 381).h Noël is much closer to the truth when he reduces “the entire content of the Logic” to a “dialectical demonstration” of “the existence of God” (La logique . . . , p. 99).i For that reason P. I. Novgorodtsev is entirely right when he speaks of the “pantheistic significance of the Logic” (Кант и Гегель, p. 203). j Rosenkranz describes the content of the Logic superbly: it is a speculative theology (Hegels Leben, p. 286).k The connection between the Logic and the “concrete” spheres evokes still more divergence of opinions. Caird wrongly insists that Hegel “merely” examined the categories themselves, rather than apply them to objekts (Гегель . . . , p. 182).l Falckenberg commits an even greater distortion: “the Logic examines the idea in the abstract element of thinking, only in the form in which it is thought, and not as it is intuited” (История . . . , p. 411).m V. S. Solov’ev reduces the relation between the Logic and the concrete spheres to “logical priority” (Соч., vol. 1, pp. 110, 111),n while Janet compares it to the relation of a “plan” to a “city” ( Janet and Séailles, Histoire . . . , p. 546).o Wundt definitively simplifies the entire problem, perceiving here “a classification of the totality of sciences”p (Einleitung . . . , p. 53);q given such an understanding, nothing remains of Hegel’s philosophy. It is interesting to note Rosenkranz’s comment that in the 1806 lectures Hegel himself called the Idea “the night of the divine mysteries, out of which the unobscured denseness of nature and conscious spirit were released into exis-

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tence for themselves”r (Hegels Leben . . . , p. 192).s Nonetheless Zeller wavers in recognizing the mystico-historical nuance here (Geschichte . . . , pp. 792–93);t Noël rejects it outright (La logique . . . , pp. 133–34);u while Michelet asserts that Hegel meant the exclusive and complete immanence of Divinity in the world and spirit (op. cit., pp. 243–56, 282–83, 303, 304).v Certain writers point to the fact that the Logic “reflects” or “constructs” something; almost no one wishes to seriously believe that according to Hegel, the Logic is reality itself: genuinely present Divinity. Trendelenburg thinks that the categories of the Logic construct the concrete-empirical thing (Zur Geschichte . . . , p. 411).w Hinkel takes it to be the “image of life”x (Speculative Analysis . . . , p. 55);y Ehrenberg takes it for “an image of self-consciousness” (Parteiung . . . , p. 9);z Höffding, for “the ground of being” (История . . . , p. 152);aa and so forth. Hermann makes another mistake, interpreting the categorial series of the Logic as temporal, being revealed “one after another,” “according to one single dimension, that of time”bb (Hegel . . . , p. 306).cc On the contrary, Kuno Fischer entirely correctly sees that the categories “are all contemporaneous, thus timeless or eternal”dd (Geschichte . . . , vol. 8, part 1, p. 444).ee The twofold appearance of the Logic in the beginning of the theogonic process and at the end of it is noted by Stahl (Geschichte . . . , pp. 415–16)ff and Chicherin (История политических учений, vol. 4, pp. 577–78).gg It is clear that one can speak of knowledge only in relation to the Logic of the end. However, Frank considers it possible to hold that Hegel identified “the absolute with knowledge as such” (Предмет познания . . . , pp. 502, 503).hh Only Noël approaches the problem of the conjugation of the various parts of the Logic with the separate spheres (La logique . . . , p. 22);ii but unfortunately, in an uncertain and indefinite fashion.

Chapter Ten Speaking out on the problem of the “deduction” or the “disclosure” of the empirical world from the depths of the Idea, individual thinkers are dissatisfied with the innermost-mystical descriptions of Hegel. Höffding calls this transition “one of the most difficult points of Hegel’s method” and after that reduces the matter to “the elimination of abstraction” and “a return to the data of experience” (История . . . , p. 152).a Rehmke indicates more cautiously that the definition of nature as “the Idea in other-being” is only “a new puzzle-word” (Grundriss . . . , p. 283).b Lask characterizes Hegel as an “emanationist”: “the empirical actuality, as the emanation of its” (of the Concept’s) “supersubstantial essence”c (Fichtes Idealismus . . . , pp. 25, 56, 60–61);d however, he doesn’t dwell on the mystical side of this event. This deduction is excellently expounded by Kuno Fischer, who has in mind the Frankfurt period works of Hegel: absolute being is absolute spirit; i.e., self-cognition; i.e., self-distinction; i.e., self-bifurcation (comp. Geschichte . . . , vol. 8, part 1, p. 53).e Noack characterizes the rationalistic dream of Hegel, that nature does not distort the Concept, as follows: “the real work of art of the Universe, the beautiful

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living cosmos”f (Schelling . . . , vol. 1, p. 425).g Lask also notes in Hegel a “longing after the absolute conceptuality of all singulars”h (op. cit., p. 62).i McTaggart writes: “in the universe is realised the whole of reason, and nothing but reason” (“Changes of Method . . . ,” Mind, 1892, p. 205). j Alexis Schmidt expresses the same with a not quite precise epistemological turn of phrase: “Nature had for Hegel only so much value and meaning as thought itself therein recognized”k (Beleuchtung . . . , p. 120).l However, even Erdmann, Sr., noted that Hegel was “angry” at nature for its irrationality (Grundriss . . . , p. 601).m Janet and Séailles correctly state that the idea “finds in nature only an imperfect, inadequate expression”n (Histoire . . . , p. 741).o Wallace also recognizes “the inevitable imperfection of reality” (Prolegomena . . . , p. 477).p Exner ironically notes: “it is certainly an original turn to treat objects as a burden because the concepts of thought don’t fit them well”q (Die Psychologie . . . , pp. 70–71).r In connection with this, one must acknowledge that that respectful attitude toward the empirical sciences which Rosenkranz ascribes to Hegel (Hegels Leben . . . , p. 153)s appeared in him only in a later period. Aversion to the irrational was for Hegel so great that it drove him to a certain blindness; for this reason, Lask’s assertion that no other philosophy was so far from a “Misunderstanding of Irrationality” as Hegel’s should be recognized as a significant exaggeration (op. cit., p. 67).t Ott makes another mistake, insisting that the world is converted by Hegel into an empirical chaos, or, in other words,u into an abstract emptiness: “abstract being,” “nothingness,” “a movement of going and coming in the void,” “it is not a question here of the purpose, of anticipation, of harmony”v (Hegel . . . , p. 130).w This is undoubtedly one of the most curious misunderstandings of all to be found in the literature on Hegel.

Chapter Eleven Perhaps no other concept in Hegel’s philosophy has called forth so many misunderstandings as the concept of “actuality.” The majority of writers did not pay attention to the distinctive and profound significance that Hegel invested in this term, and as a consequence this term was interpreted in an ordinary, everyday sense, and the polemic lost all meaning. Above all Haym is guilty of such a pseudo-polemical distortion, going so far as to assert that Hegel professed the rationality of empirical actuality (Hegel . . . , p. 368).a Rosenkranz was entirely correct, noting that Haym interprets the phrase “the rationality of the actual” “entirely in the vulgar sense of a deification of common empirical existence, as a baptismal formula of restoration . . .”b (Apologie Hegels gegen Dr. R. Haym, p. 45).c P. I. Novgorodtsev provides a sophisticated and convincing defense of Hegel (Кант и Гегель . . . , pp. 29–42).d In contrast, Bluntschli moves in the footsteps of Haym and sees in Hegel’s doctrine the source of “a flabby quietism,” “a selfless subordination,” “a deceptive idealization,” and so forth (История . . . , p. 492).e “In this way, in the center of world spirit sat Hegel enthroned”—he concludes his supposed criticism—“upholding an equilibrium

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between the rational and the actual. An extraordinary, limitless pretension” (ibidem, p. 501). Shershenevich (История философии права . . . , pp. 568–69 and others)f gives the most vulgar interpretation of Hegelian “actuality.” Paulsen commits the opposite mistake, identifying, according to Hegel, “actuality” with “truth” (Einleitung . . . , p. 29).g A similar mistake can be found in Rehmke: “pure thinking” (rationality) and “true being” (actuality) in terms of content coincide with one another (Grundriss . . . , p. 282).h In connection with this, one cannot fail to notice that Nöel (La logique . . . , p. 75ff.)i and Willm (Histoire . . . , vol. 4, p. 178ff.)j mistakenly translate the German “Wirklichkeit” by the French “la réalité.” An extreme simplification in the interpretation of Hegelian “actuality” can be found in M. M. Rubinshtein (Rubinshtein, “Das Wertsystem Hegels . . . . ,” Kantstudien, 1910, p. 264). Some wavering in the interpretation of this term can also be found in Ed. von Hartmann, which is explicable, however, by the fact that Hegel himself occasionally used “Wirklichkeit” instead of “Realität” (Hartmann, Geschichte . . . , p. 243).k Willm correctly approaches the distinction between actuality and empirical existence (Histoire . . . , vol. 4, p. 114).l Miraglia also correctly explains: “for Hegel what is ideal is not everything that happens, but rather what happens is just what is ideal”m (I principii . . . , 87).n Kuno Fischer correctly indicates that “Wirklichkeit” is the result of “the efficacy of reason” (Geschichte . . . , vol. 8, part 1, p. 516).o It is well put by Gradovskii: “Actuality is the unity of being and the concept, when the idea is realized in the appearances, and the appearances fully correspond to the idea in concepts” (“Полит. фил. Гегеля.,” pp. 67, 51).p P. I. Novgorodtsev contrasts speculative and empirical actuality extremely well, emphasizing the distinct and often outright opposite attitude of Hegel to the one and to the other (Кант и Гегель, pp. 183, 210).q

Chapter Twelve The speculative optimism of Hegel, expressed in the fact that he intuits only the perfected actualizations of the Divinity, found recognition in the literature more than once. It is not simply that “optimism of culture” of which R. Eucken speaks (Die Lebensanschauungen der grossen Denker, pp. 462–64);a but that optimism in consequence of which Hegel sees only “the ideal realized, transported into facts, incarnated in matter”b (Emil Beaussire, “Le centenaire de Hegel,” Revue des deux mondes 1871, p. 149). The essence of his object, according to the excellent definition of P. I. Novgorodtsev, is in the fact that “the norm presents itself as already realized in the eternal shape of the absolute” (Кант и Гегель . . . , p. 182).c Hegel’s philosophy is dedicated precisely to those perfected actualizations of the Divinity which Erdmann, Sr., calls “spiritual shapes” (Grundriss . . . , p. 612; comp. p. 598);d Kuno Fischer compares them with Schelling’s “potencies” (Kuno Fischer, op. cit., vol. 8, part 1, p. 229),e while Jodl calls them “ideal stages” (История этики, vol. 2, p. 98).f Bearing in mind that wealth of content that Hegel unfolds, ascending by

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those stages, it is impossible to understand or to approve Stahl’s declaration, according to which Hegel recognizes only a deductive dialectic, “ignores the essence of things themselves,” and creates this “monotony and an inner lack of life”g (Geschichte . . . , p. 432).h Similarly to this, Hermann’s assertion, according to which Hegel seeks everywhere only “a formal definition or abstract concept-determination” (Hegel . . . , pp. 161, 164),i also corresponds to nothing. Eduard von Hartmann is also wrong when he says: “In Hegel’s optimism the world has in fact scarcely any interest developing itself, since it finds itself in every moment entirely satisfied” j (Schellings positive Philosophie als Einheit von Hegel und Schopenhauer, p. 34);k in actual fact, a progressive dynamism lies at the very roots of Hegel’s doctrine. The concepts are creative powers, struggling for adequate being: “concepts are the eternal souls of things”l (Hinkel, Speculative Analysis, p. 43).m Precisely for this reason, the panlogism of Hegel leads not to static constructions, but to the disclosure of a living spiritual process.

Translator’s Notes Chapter One a. “Die sinnliche, empirische Welt . . . die einzig wirkliche Welt.” Wilhelm Wundt, Einleitung in die Philosophie, 4th ed. (Leipzig: Englemann, 1904), 328. The original edition of Wundt’s Introduction to Philosophy was published in 1901, and went through at least nine editions through 1922. It was also published in Russian translation in 1903. Il’in’s citations throughout these bibliographic essays are abbreviated and incomplete. (Nor did he provide more complete information in the German edition.) For example, there is no explanation of which edition of Wundt he used; he may have been using the 6th edition (1914), since the next edition was in 1918, the year of his dissertation defense. It was evidently not the 4th edition, as the pagination he supplies (330) is slightly different from that in the 4th edition (which is available in a full-text edition online). When no information is supplied concerning the edition of a source used by Il’in, I have endeavored to identify the original edition. It should be noted that a substantial number of these sources cited by Il’in have been digitized and are now available in full text on line through google.books and other services. (All translations into English in this appendix are mine.) b. “Eine rückhaltslose Anerkennung der empirischen Wirklichkeit.” Wundt, Einleitung in die Philosophie, 329. c. A. Rogers, Краткое введенеие в историю новой философии, trans. S. S. Zelinskii (Moscow, 1903); a translation of Arthur Kenyon Rogers, A Brief Introduction to Modern Philosophy (Macmillan, 1899). d. The publication in question is the second volume of Wilhelm Windelband’s Die Geschichte der neueren Philosophie in ihrem Zusammenhange mit der allgemeinen Kultur und den besonderen Wissenschaften: Band II: Von Kant bis Hegel . . . Die Blütezeit der deutschen Philosophie (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1880). There were subsequent editions in 1899, 1911, and 1922. The second volume also appears to have been published as a separate volume under the title Die Blütezeit der

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deutschen Philosophie (Leipzig: Breitkopf und Härtel, 1904), 409 pp. This appears to be the edition that Il’in was consulting. e. “Sich vor unserer empirischen Erkenntniss darstellt.” f. Franz Exner, Die Psychologie der Hegelschen Schule (Leipzig: F. Fleischer, 1842). g. Conrad Hermann, Hegel und die logische Frage der Philosophie in der Gegenwart (Leipzig: M. Schäfer, 1878), 630 pp. h. Eduard von Hartmann, Geschichte der Metaphysik, 2 vols. (Leipzig: Haacke, 1899–1900). i. Eduard von Hartmann, Neukantianismus, Schopenhauerianismus, und Hegelianismus (Berlin: C. Duncker, 1877). j. “Trübungen.” k. “Im Vorzimmer des Systems ihre Erbärmlichkeit sich zu Gewissen führen.” l. Anton Springer, Die Hegelsche Geschichtsanschauung: eine historische Denkschrift (Tübingen, 1848). Chapter Two a. See endnote c for chapter 1. b. История философии от начала ея в Греции до настоящаго времени (St. Petersburg: A. S. Semenova, 1892); a translation of George Henry Lewes, The History of Philosophy from Thales to Comte, 2 vols., 5th ed. (London: Longmans, Green, 1880). There was also an earlier Russian edition: St. Petersburg, N. Tiblena, 1865, vii + 816 pp. c. Auguste Ott, Hegel et la philosophie allemande (Paris: Joubert, Libraire de la Cour de Cassation, 1844). d. William Wallace, Prolegomena to the Study of Hegel’s Philosophy, and Especially of His Logic (Oxford: Clarendon, 1894). e. Andrew Seth, The Development from Kant to Hegel, with Chapters on the Philosophy of Religion (London: Williams and Norgate, 1882), 174 pp. f. E. N. Trubetskoi, Миросозерцание Вл. С. Соловьева (The Worldview of V. S. Solov’ev) (Moscow: Put’, 1913). g. V. S. Solov’ev, “Философия Гегеля” (“The Philosophy of Hegel”), appendix to Э. Кэрд, Гегель, ed. S. N. Trubetskoi (Moscow: I. N. Kushnerev, 1898); a translation of Edward Caird, Hegel (Edinburgh: William Blackwood, 1883), 224 pp. h. L. M. Lopatin, Положительные задачи философии (The Positive Tasks of Philosophy), vol. 1 (Moscow, 1886). i. Friedrich Paulsen, Einleitung in die Philosophie, 2nd ed. (Berlin: W. Hertz, 1893). (Between the two publishers Hertz [Berlin] and Cotta [Stuttgart and Berlin], this volume was published with at least thirteen different dates, and there is no way to know which publication Il’in used.) j. Emil Lask, Fichtes Idealismus und die Geschichte (Tübingen: J.C.B. Mohr, 1902). k. “Wie bei Homer die Sprache der Götter zu der der Menschen.” l. See endnote h for chapter 1.

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Chapter Three a. “Die vollkommenste Form des Deutschen Idealismus, die reifste Frucht der Entwicklung.” b. Eduard Zeller, Geschichte der deutschen Philosophie seit Leibniz (vol. 13 in the series Geschichte der Wissenschaften in Deutschland Neuere Zeit) (Munich: R. Oldenbourg, 1873), xviii + 924 pp. c. “Est á la fois le plus subtil et le plus profond des philosophes modernes.” d. Joseph Willm, Histoire de la philosophie allemande depuis Kant jusqu’à Hegel, 4 vols. (Paris: Ladrange, 1846). e. “Eine durch und durch sachliche Persönlichkeit.” (Note that the first two phrases quoted from Windelband are given in Russian; only the latter two are in German.) f. “Waltete siegreich der wahrhaft philosophische Geist.” g. See endnote d for chapter 1. h. “Begriffsphantasmen und scholastischen Sophismen.” i. Ludwig Noack, Schelling und die Philosophie der Romantik: Ein Beitrag zur Kulturgeschichte des deutschen Geistes, 2 vols. (Berlin: E. S. Mittler, 1859). j. “Berauschender Phrasen Getümmel.” k. Conrad Hermann, Hegel und die logische Frage der Philosophie in die Gegenwart. See endnote g for chapter 1. l. “Vernichtende Langeweile und ein alles Denken negierender Kopfsmerz.” m. Carl Moritz Kahle, Darstellung und Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie (Berlin: Voss, 1845), 118 pp. n. William James, Зависимость веры от воли и другие опыты (The Dependence of Faith on Will and Other Essays) (St. Petersburg: M. V. Pirozhkov, 1904), 375 pp. o. Johann Caspar Bluntschli, История общего государственного права и политики (A History of the General Law of the State and Politics) (St. Petersburg: O. I. Baksta, 1874), 579 pp. A translation of Geschichte des allgemeinen Staatsrecht und der Politik (Munich: J. G. Cotta, 1864), 667 pp. p. Der Gedanke: Philosophische Zeitschrift: Organ der Philosophischen Gesellschaft zu Berlin. Published from 1861 to 1884. q. See endnote b for chapter 2. r. “Plumper, geistloser Scharlatan.” s. “Eine Psychologie des Hegelschen Denkens, des Hegelschen Bewusstseins.” t. See endnote f for chapter 1. u. See endnote c for chapter 1. v. See endnote d for chapter 2. w. See endnote i for this chapter. x. See endnote d for chapter 1. y. “Denkende Erfahrung.” z. Franz Chlebik, Die Philosophie des Bewussten und die Wahrheit des Unbewussten in den dialektischen Grundlinien des Freiheits- und Rechtsbegriffes, nach Hegel und C. L. Michelet (Berlin: O. Löwenstein, 1870), 90 pp. aa. N. O. Losskii, Обоснование интуитивизма: пропедевтическая теория

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знания (The Grounding of Intuitivism: A Propaedeutic Theory of Knowing) (St. Petersburg: M. M. Stasiulevich, 1906), viii + 368 pp. bb. The Russian phrase here is “Участие в этом опыте интуиции, созерцания . . .” One might attempt to translate созерцания here as “contemplation,” but that would not be appropriate, as it is being used appositively with “intuition”; hence my decision to translate it as “seeing in thought.” By way of confirmation, Il’in renders the same passage in German as: “die Beteiligung der Intuition, des Anschauens an dieser Erfahrung . . . .” cc. Richard Falckenberg, История новой философии от Николая Кузанского до настоящаго времени (A History of Modern Philosophy from Nicholas Cusanus to the Present) (St. Petersburg: Skorokhodova, 1894), viii + 587 pp. The same work was also published in Moscow: Moskovskoe knigoizdatelstvo, 1910, xxiii + 573 pp. A translation of Geschichte der neueren Philosophie von Nikolaus von Kues bis zur Gegenwart (Leipzig: Veit, 1886). dd. “Anschauende Erkenntniss.” ee. Friedrich Jodl, История этики в новой философии Фридриха Йодля (Moscow: K. T. Sodatenkov, 1896). A translation of Geschichte der Ethik in der neueren Philosophie, 2 vols. (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1882–89). ff. See endnote j for chapter 2. gg. “Anschauendes Denken.” hh. “Denkendes Anschauen.” ii. Emil Feuerlein, “Über die kulturgeschichtliche Bedeutung Hegels,” Historische Zeitschrift 4 (1870): 314–68. jj. Созерцание. kk. P. I. Novgorodtsev, Кант и Гегель в их учениях о праве и государстве (Moscow: Universitetskaia, 1901), 245 pp. ll. See endnote g for chapter 2. mm. See endnote h for chapter 2. nn. “Zum reinen, reflexionslosen Gefass des Begriffs.” oo. Karl Rosenkranz, Hegels Leben (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1844), xxxv + 566 pp. pp. E. Caird, Гегель, ed. S. N. Trubetskoi (Moscow: I. N. Kushnerev, 1898); a translation of Edward Caird, Hegel (Edinburgh: William Blackwood 1883), 224 pp. qq. S. N. Trubetskoi, Собрание сочинений, 6 vols. (Collected Works) (Moscow: G. Lissner and D. Sobko, 1907–12). rr. Wilhelm Jerusalem, Введение в философию (St. Petersburg: K. Birkenfeld, 1902), vii + 224 pp. A translation of Einleitung in die Philosophie (Vienna, 1899). ss. “S’abandonner au mouvement dialectique de la pensée.” tt. Paul Janet and Gabriel Séailles, Histoire de la philosophie: les problèmes et les écoles (Paris: Ch. Delagrave, 1887), 1084 pp. uu. “Das individuelle Bewusstsein schaut passiv dem Schauspiel zu, das der aktive und produktive Geist vor ihm auffuhrt.” vv. See endnote h for chapter 1. ww. “Diesem Gange der Selbstbewegung der Idee denkend nachgehen.”

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xx. Johannes Rehmke, Grundrisse der Geschichte der Philosophie (Berlin: C. Duncker, 1896), 308 pp. yy. See endnote e for chapter 2. zz. “Evidenz der immanenten Sachlichkeit.” aaa. Wilhelm Windelband, Erneuerung des Hegelianismus (Heidelberg: C. Winter, 1910), 15 pp. bbb. “Schöpferisch wie das Göttliche und insofern ist es das Göttliche Denken selbst.” ccc. “Elle est la pensée divine elle même.” ddd. See endnote d for this chapter. eee. Karl Ludwig Michelet, Entwicklungsgeschichte der neuesten deutschen Philosophie (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1843), 400 pp. fff. See endnote l for chapter 1. ggg. See endnote qq for this chapter. hhh. V. S. Solov’ev, Кризис западной философии (The Crisis of Western Philosophy), in Собрание сочинений (Collected Works), 2nd ed., vol. 1 (St. Petersburg, 1911). iii. See endnote tt for this chapter. jjj. In the German version (394) Il’in commented: “Anscheinend hat auch Haym ein romantisches Kokettieren mit der Idee des ‘Gott-Seins’ bei Hegel angenommen . . .” kkk. Rudolf Haym, Hegel und seine Zeit (Berlin: R. Gaertner, 1857), 512 pp. Chapter Four a. Harald Höffding, История новейшей философии (St.Petersburg: Obrazovanie, 1900), 496 pp. Danish original, 1894. A translation of the German edition: Geschichte der neueren Philosophie (Leipzig: O. R. Reisland, 1895). b. Georges Noël, La logique de Hegel (Paris: Alcan, 1897), viii + 188 pp. c. “La véritée definitive reside dans le nouméne.” d. “Urbasis der Welt.” e. Carl Hinkel, Die Speculative Analysis des Begriffs “Geist” (Leipzig: C. Bösendahl, 1840). f. “Ein Dramatiker des objektiven Gedankeninhalts oder des geistigen Wesens der Dinge selbst.” g. See endnote k for chapter 3. h. “Nur eine Geschichte der Subjektiven Erkenntniss.” i. Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg, Logische Untersuchungen (Berlin: Gustav Bethge, 1840). j. Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg, “Zur Geschichte von Hegels Logik,” in Neue Jenaische Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung 97 (1842): 409. k. See endnote c for chapter 1. l. See endnote b for chapter 1. m. See endnote qq for chapter 3. n. See endnote h for chapter 2.

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o. “Ma pensée . . . est la reproduction fidéle de la pensée, qui a produit l’univers.” p. See endnote d for chapter 3. q. “L’idée, c’est le rapport,” “lui même”; “Hegel . . . fait du monde un jeu de rapports.” r. See endnote c for chapter 2. s. See endnote g for chapter 1. t. Carl L. W. Heyder, Kritische Darstellung und Vergleichung der Aristotelischen und Hegelschen Dialektik (Erlangen, 1845). Chapter Five a. “Verachtet die allgemeine Vorstellung, durch Abstraktion vom Besonderen entstanden, als hohlen und leeren Schemen und Schatten.” b. “Das sich selbst Spezifizierende konkret Allgemeine.” c. See endnote h for chapter 1. d. “Identität von Umfang und Inhalt.” e. See endnote j for chapter 2. f. See endnote g for chapter 1. g. See endnote hhh for chapter 3. h. “Simplement commun.” i. “Le général véritable, l’universel.” j. See endnote d for chapter 3. k. Kuno Fischer, Geschichte der neueren Philosophie (Mannheim, 1860). l. See endnote eee for chapter 3. m. Friedrich Julius Stahl, Geschichte der Rechtsphilosophie (Heidelberg: J.C.B. Mohr, 1856). n. See endnote b for chapter 4. o. August Geyer, Краткий очерк истории философии права А. Гейера (A Brief Outline of the History of the Philosophy of Right) (St. Petersburg: N. Tiblena, 1866), 149 pp. A translation of Geschichte und System der Rechtsphilosophie in Grundzügen (Innsbruck, 1863). p. “Pour Hegel le mot de généralité ou d’universalité ne se rapporte jamais a la relation du tout et des parties.” q. See endnote c for chapter 2. Chapter Six a. “Gediegene Trefflichkeit der Methode.” b. “Trostlose Kahlheit ihrer Resultate.” c. Christian Hermann Weisse, Grundzüge der Metaphysik (Hamburg, 1834). d. See endnote d for chapter 1. e. “Der Gegenstand dabei zu vieler Erstaunen nicht nur nichts verlor, sondern oft noch gewann.” f. “Das dialektische Gesetz nämlich ist der alleinige Inhalt des Systems.” g. See endnote m for chapter 5.

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h. M. M. Rubinshtein, “Логические основы системы Гегеля и конец истории” (“The Logical Basis of Hegel’s System and the End of History”), Вопросы философии и психологии, vol. 80. i. “Das falsche Staunen vor dem dialektischen Methodismus.” j. See endnote j for chapter 4. k. “Durch scharf festzuhaltende Unterschiede.” l. Friedrich Überweg, Grundrisse der Geschichte der Philosophie (Leipzig: E. S. Mittler, 1863). (Twelve editions of this work were published between 1863 and 1928.) m. Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus, Historische Entwicklung der speculativen Philosophie von Kant bis Hegel (Dresden, 1837). n. “Der gesunden Vernunft die Glieder erst entzweibricht, um sie schief zu heilen, und wieder sie zerbricht, um sie wieder ungrade zusammenzurechnen . . . .” o. See endnote m for chapter 3. p. See endnote o for chapter 3. q. See endnote ii for chapter 3. r. “Einfruchtbares, eintoniges Geklapper.” s. “Bei keinem einzigen Schritt der Hegelschen Logik ist mehr geleistet, als eine geschickte oder ungeschickte Sophistik.” t. See endnote h for chapter 1. u. Alexis Schmidt, Beleuchtung der neuen Schellingschen Lehre von Seiten der Philosophie und Theologie (Berlin: T. Scherk, 1843). v. See endnote i for chapter 4. w. Paul Barth, Die Geschichtsphilosophie Hegels und der Hegelianer bis auf Marx und Hartmann (Leipzig: O. R. Reisland, 1890), 148 pp. x. Friedrich Adolf Trendelenburg, “Die Logische Frage in Hegels System,” Neue Jenaische Allgemeine Literatur-Zeitung 45, 46, 47 (1843). y. See endnote m for chapter 5. z. See endnote k for chapter 5. aa. See endnote i for chapter 1. bb. See endnote eee for chapter 3. cc. Giliarov-Platonov, “Онтогология Гегеля” (“Hegel’s Ontology”), Вопросы философии и психологии, vol. 8, pp. 18–19; vol. 10, pp. 29–30. dd. See endnote hhh for chapter 3. ee. See endnote b for chapter 2. ff. See endnote g for chapter 1. gg. See endnote b for chapter 4. hh. See endnote d for chapter 3. ii. See endnote a for chapter 4. jj. See endnote c for chapter 1. kk. See endnote qq for chapter 3. ll. See endnote pp for chapter 3. mm. See endnote b for chapter 3. nn. See endnote h for chapter 2. oo. “Der Göttliche Gedanke ergeht sich für sich selbst in dem philosophischen Sub-

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jekte, als seinem Substrate, and diese objektive Bewegung der Sache selbst, der wir nur zuzusehen haben, ist die Methode der Hegelschen Philosophie.” pp. See endnote eee for chapter 3. qq. “Lebenslauf Gottes.” See endnote oo for chapter 3. Chapter Seven a. “Der positive Zweck des Logischen, den es rein aus sich selbst erzeugen soll, bleibt unklar bei Hegel.” b. See endnote i for chapter 1. c. See endnote oo for chapter 3. d. See endnote j for chapter 2. e. See endnote pp for chapter 3. f. See endnote kk for chapter 3. g. See endnote l for chapter 6. h. See endnote j for chapter 2. i. Luigi Miraglia, I principii fondamentali dei diversi sistemi di filosofia del diritto e las dottrina etico-giuridica di Giorgio W. F. Hegel (Naples: Giannini, 1873), 211 pp. j. See endnote d for chapter 2. k. “La synthèse est l’unitè de la these et de l’antithèse, mais une unitè qui preexiste a ses éléments et en certain sense contient plus qu’eux.” l. See endnote b for chapter 4. m. See endnote a for chapter 4. n. See endnote m for chapter 3. o. See endnote d for chapter 2. p. See endnote i for chapter 4. q. See endnote kkk for chapter 3. r. See endnote cc for chapter 6. s. “Dieu et l’univers, c’est le rien, déterminé par une série de non.” t. See endnote c for chapter 2. u. Richard Fester, Rousseau und die deutsche Geschichtsphilosophie (Stuttgart: G. J. Göschen, 1890), 340 pp. v. See endnote h for chapter 2. w. Hans Ehrenberg, Die Parteiung der Philosophie: Studien wider Hegel und die Kantianer (Leipzig: F. Meiner, 1911), 133 pp. x. James Hutchison Stirling, The Secret of Hegel: Being the Hegelian System in Origin, Principle, Form, and Matter, 2 vols. (London: Longman, 1865). Chapter Eight a. See endnote oo for chapter 3. b. “Der allgemeine Geist, dieses grosse Individuum.” c. Johann Eduard Erdmann, Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie, 2 vols. (Berlin: W. Hertz, 1866). d. See endnote k for chapter 5.

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e. “Selbstunterscheidung,” “Selbsttätigkeit,” “selbstbewwusste Vernunft oder Geist.” f. “Selbstverwirklichung des Begriffs,” “moralische Weltordnung,” als “Liebe.” g. “Begriff, das eine absolute Subjekt des logischdialektischen Prozesses.” h. See endnote h for chapter 1. i. See endnote e for chapter 2. j. See endnote h for chapter 2. k. “Substantielles Denken ohne denkendes Subjekt,” “Subjektloses Denken,” “Traumwelt . . . noch ohne einem Träumenden.” l. See endnote m for chapter 5. m. See endnote o for chapter 5. n. See endnote qq for chapter 3. o. See endnote kk for chapter 3. p. See endnote i for chapter 2. q. See endnote tt for chapter 3. r. See endnote o for chapter 3. s. Gradovskii, “Политическая философия Гегеля” (“The Political Philosophy of Hegel”), Журнал Министерства Народного Просвещения ( Journal of the Ministry of Public Education) ( July 1870): 42. t. See endnote d for chapter 3. u. “Die Sinnliche, empirische Welt ist die wirkliche Welt.” v. See endnote a for chapter 1. w. “L’identité de Dieu et de toutes choses.” x. See endnote c for chapter 2. y. “Gott ist das All, die ganze erfüllte Welt, wie sie ist.” z. “Die Welt in ihr selbst ohne Gott begreiflich zu machen.” aa. See endnote m for chapter 5. bb. See endnote e for chapter 4. cc. See endnote ee for chapter 3. dd. See endnote j for chapter 2. ee. “Spinozas Monismus teilt er, aber nicht seinen Akosmismus.” ff. See endnote h for chapter 1. gg. See endnote eee for chapter 3. hh. See endnote b for chapter 4. ii. “Avec son vêtement sacerdotal et la pompe réligieuse de sa parole, n’est . . . qu’un athéisme emphatique.” jj. A. Lebre, “Crise actuelle de la philosophie allemande,” Revue des deux mondes (1843): 15. Chapter Nine a. V. S. Solov’ev, (Collected Works), 10 vols., 2nd ed. (St. Petersburg: Prosvieshchenie, 1911–14). b. See endnote cc for chapter 6. c. “Als eine erweiterte Kategorienlehre.” d. See endnote g for chapter 1.

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e. “Das wahrhaft und einzig Wirkliche.” f. See endnote c for chapter 8. g. See endnote kkk for chapter 3. h. See endnote d for chapter 2. i. See endnote b for chapter 4. j. See endnote kk for chapter 3. k. See endnote oo for chapter 3. l. See endnote pp for chapter 3. m. See endnote cc for chapter 3. n. See endnote a for this chapter. o. See endnote tt for chapter 3. p. “Eine Klassifikation der Gesamtheit der Wissenschaften.” q. See endnote a for chapter 1. r. “Die Nacht des Göttlichen Mysteriums, aus dessen ungetrübter Dichtheit die Natur und der Bewusste Geist zum Bestehen für sich freigelassen würden.” s. See endnote oo for chapter 3. t. See endnote b for chapter 3. u. See endnote b for chapter 4. v. See endnote eee for chapter 3. w. See endnote x for chapter 6. x. “Abbild des Lebens.” y. See endnote e for chapter 4. z. See endnote w for chapter 7. aa. See endnote a for chapter 4. bb. “Zu einem Nacheinander,” “nach einer einzigen Dimension, der der Zeit.” cc. See endnote g for chapter 1. dd. “Sind alle zugleich, also Zeitlos oder ewig.” ee. See endnote k for chapter 5. ff. See endnote m for chapter 5. gg. Boris N. Chicherin, История политических учений (A History of Political Doctrines), 5 vols. (Moscow: Grachev, 1869–1902). hh. Semen Liudvigovich Frank, Предмет знания (The Object of Knowledge) (Petrograd: R. G. Shreder, 1915), xii + 504 pp. (Il’in referred to the title Предмет познания, though he presumably intended to refer to Предмет знания, the title of Frank’s well-known book.) ii. See endnote b for chapter 4. Chapter Ten a. See endnote a for chapter 4. b. See endnote xx for chapter 3. c. “Die empirische Wirklichkeit, als Ausfluss seines” (des Begriffs) “überwirklichen Wesens.” d. See endnote j for chapter 2. e. See endnote k for chapter 5.

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f. “Das reale Kunstwerk des Universums, den schönen lebendigen Kosmos.” g. See endnote i for chapter 3. h. “Verlangen nach absoluter Begreiflichkeit alles Einzelnen.” i. See endnote j for chapter 2. j. J. M. E. McTaggart, “The Changes of Method in Hegel’s Dialectic,” Mind (1892): 205. k. “Die Natur hat für Hegel nur sofern Werth und Bedeutung, als der Gedanke sich darin erkennt.” l. See endnote u for chapter 6. m. See endnote c for chapter 8. n. “Dans la nature ne trouve qu’une expression imparfaite, inadéquate.” o. See endnote tt for chapter 3. p. See endnote d for chapter 2. q. “Es ist gewiss eine originelle Wendung den Gegenstanden es zur Last zu legen, wenn die Begriffe des Denkens auf sie nicht passen wollen.” r. See endnote f for chapter 1. s. See endnote oo for chapter 3. t. See endnote j for chapter 2. u. The question mark is Il’in’s. v. “L’être abstrait,” “le néant,” “un mouvement de va et vient dans le vide”; “il n’est pas question ici de but, de prévision, d’harmonie.” w. See endnote c for chapter 2. Chapter Eleven a. See endnote kkk for chapter 3. b. “Ganz in dem vulgaren Sinn einer Vergötterung des gemeinen empirischen Daseins, als eine Taufformel der Restauration . . .” c. Karl Rosenkranz, Apologie Hegels gegen Dr. R. Haym (Berlin: Duncker und Humblot, 1858), 55 pp. d. See endnote kk for chapter 3. e. See endnote o for chapter 3. f. G. F. Shershenevich, История философии права Г. Ф. Шершеневича (G. F. Shershenevich’s History of the Philosophy of Right) (St. Petersburg: Brothers Bashmakovykh, 1907), 588 pp. g. See endnote i for chapter 2. h. See endnote xx for chapter 3. i. See endnote b for chapter 4. j. See endnote d for chapter 3. k. See endnote h for chapter 1. l. See endnote d for chapter 3. m. “Per Hegel non è ideale tutto cim che accade, bensi quello che accade.” n. See endnote i for chapter 7. o. See endnote k for chapter 5. p. See endnote s for chapter 8. q. See endnote kk for chapter 3.

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Chapter Twelve a. Rudolf Eucken, Die Lebensanschauungen der grossen Denker (Berlin, 1890). b. “L’idéal réalisé, transporté dans les faits, incarné dans la matière.” c. See endnote kk for chapter 3. d. See endnote c for chapter 8. e. See endnote k for chapter 5. f. See endnote ee for chapter 3. g. “Ignorirt das Wesen der Ding selbst,” “diese Monotonie und den inneren Lebensmangel.” h. See endnote m for chapter 5. i. See endnote g for chapter 1. j. “In Hegels Optimsmus hat die Welt in der Tat gar kein Interesse daran, sich zu entwickeln, da sie sich in jedem Moment ganz befriedigt findet.” k. Eduard von Hartmann, Schellings positive Philosophie als Einheit von Hegel und Schopenhauer (Berlin: O. Löwenstein, 1869), 62 pp. l. “Die Begriffe sind die ewigen Seelen der Dinge.” m. See endnote e for chapter 4.

Table of Page Equivalents for the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion

As Il’in implied in the bibliographic appendix, he evidently used the original 1832 Werke edition of the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, edited by Marheineke, as opposed to the 1840 Werke edition also issued under Marheineke’s name, but actually edited by Bruno Bauer. The former is commonly referred to as the W1 edition, and the latter, as the W2 edition. However, after 1840, the W2 edition became the standard one; consequently the original 1832 edition is now very much more difficult to obtain. For the reader’s convenience, I have supplied the page equivalents in the Suhrkamp edition for the W1 references that Il’in made, given that the Suhrkamp edition is the one most widely available. However, because the Suhrkamp edition, like the Glockner Jubiläumsausgabe, reproduces what is basically the W2 edition, there are occasional variations between the 1832 text and these modern ones, even where the page equivalents can be identified more or less accurately. Note: Given that the topic of theodicy is central to Il’in’s commentary, one might expect him to make extensive use of Hegel’s Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion. However, this is not the case; Il’in opines that “Hegel succeeded in giving a well thought-out and mature expression only to the doctrine of human ethical life, and left the systematic doctrine of religion in the form of rough sketches” (chapter 15 of volume 2). On the other hand, Il’in made very extensive use of Hegel’s sixteen “Lectures on the Proofs for the Existence of God” and the three separate essays from 1831 on the proofs (all of which were appended to the second volume of the Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion), as can be seen from the tables below. Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Volume One W1 edition (vol. 11) 56 57 75 76 125 153

Suhrkamp edition (vol. 16) 99–100 100–101 129 bot.–30 130–31 text altered 195–96 213–14

W1 edition (vol. 11) 163 170 173 174 175 176

Suhrkamp edition (vol. 16) 233–34 text altered 236–37 239 bot.–40 text altered 240–41 241–42 242–43 text altered 299

300 TA B L E

W1 edition (vol. 11) 177 179 183

O F

PAGE

E QUI VALE NT S

Suhrkamp edition (vol. 16) 243–44 text altered 246 text altered 251–52 text inserted

W1 edition (vol. 11) 195 199

Suhrkamp edition (vol. 16) 265–66 270–71

Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Volume Two W1 edition (vol. 12) 50

Suhrkamp edition (vol. 17) 63–64 text altered

Appendix Vorlesungen Über Die Beweise vom Dasein Gottes* (“Beweise”) W1 edition (vol. 12) 294 1st Lecture 296 297 300 301 2nd Lecture 306 307 309 311 3rd Lecture 312 313 314 315 316 317 4th Lecture 318 319 320 321 322 324 5th Lecture 328 329 330 335 6th Lecture 336 337 7th Lecture 339 341 342

Suhrkamp edition (vol. 17) 349–50 351–52 352–53 355–56 356–57 361–62 362–63 364–65 366–67 367–68 368–69 369–70 370–71 top 371–72 top 372 373 373 bot.–74 374–75 375–76 376–77 378–79 382–83 383–84 384–85 389–90 390–91 391–92 393–94 395–96 396–97

W1 edition (vol. 12) 343 344 345 8th Lecture 350 351 354 9th Lecture 356 359 10th Lecture 360 364 365 366 367 369 The Insertion 373 379 381 382 383 388 389 390 392 393 395 11th Lecture 396 397 398 399 400

Suhrkamp edition (vol. 17) 397–98 398–99 399–400 top 404 405–6 top 407–8 409 bot.–10 412 bot.–13 413 bot.–14 417–18 418–19 419–20 420–21 422–23 426–27 432–33 434–35 435–36 436–37 441–42 top 442–43 top 443–44 top 445 446 top–47 top 448 448 bot.–49 449 bot.–50 450 bot.–51 451 bot.–52 452 bot.–53

301 TA B L E

O F

W1 edition (vol. 12) 403 12th Lecture 404 410 13th Lecture 414 420 14th Lecture 421 424 426 428 15th Lecture 429

PAGE

E QUI VALE NT S

Suhrkamp edition (vol. 17) 455–56 456–57 462–63 466–67 472–73 473–74 top 476–77 top 478–79 top 480–81 481–82 top

W1 edition (vol. 12) 431 433 434 437 16th Lecture 438 441 442 447 448 449

Suhrkamp edition (vol. 17) 482–84 top 485 486 488 bot.–89 489 bot.–90 492–93 493–94 498–99 499–500 500–501

*[Note: The lecture numbers supplied indicate the first page to which Il’in referred within that lecture and may not indicate the text page on which that lecture begins.]

Ausführung des teleologischen Beweises (“Beweise A”) W1 edition (vol. 12) 457 458 459 461

Suhrkamp edition (vol. 17) 508 bot.–9 509 bot.–10 510–11 512–13

W1 edition (vol. 12) 462 463 464 465

Suhrkamp edition (vol. 17) 513–14 514–15 515–16 516–17 text altered

Ausführung des teleologischen und ontologischen Beweises (“Beweise B”) W1 edition (vol. 12) 468 469 470 473

Suhrkamp edition (vol. 17) 519 bot.–20 520–21 521–22 524–25

W1 edition (vol. 12) 474 475 476

Ausführung des ontologischen Beweises (“Beweise C”) W1 edition (vol. 12) 482 483

Suhrkamp edition (vol. 17) 533–34 534–35

Suhrkamp edition (vol. 17) 525–26 526–27 527–28