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BECOMING XI:Â Â EXISTENCE
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Existence then appears at just this place in the Logic as a category in the Doctrine of Essence, succeeding upon
Ground, as described at the end of Chapter X here, where we cited 122. Essence is “intermediation in
itself” and Ground, correspondingly, is the totality of possibility which is, indeed, the very ground of Mind
or Thought, ad opposita or not determinatum ad unum or determined to one thing, as is the case with or in
Nature. Nature, thus, is the Idea, this Idea, in an alienated state. There, in nature, this web of inter-relation
is, so to say, abstracted from, in that the intermediation, the circle, the opposite including the one and its
other and the other of this other and beyond, “is annulled”.
This “going forth as nature”, however, inevitable since it is possible, yet for all that freely chosen, since
Freedom is one with this necessity of the Ground, as will be shown, is first conceived and hence posited within
the dialectic itself, just here. It is after this that it is represented as a kind of journey out of the dialectic, the
Logic, into a new mode (of what, nonetheless, will remain dialectical). Thus Hegel tells us that the Logic
represents the divine or absolute Mind in itself. There is, therefore, also in the Logic itself, necessarily, a
moment of the “Idea freely going forth”, viz. the very idea, the category, of this. There, however, it is
not represented absolutely as an Idea going forth, since it remains, along with every other element of thought,
within this logic as simply a stage in the dialectic.
This version of the “emanation” we here consider, therefore, is closer to the absolute conception of it
than its later representation, in this Encyclopaedia, as a passing out from the logic into a “philosophy of
nature”. Hegel had thus to offer a philosophy of nature even though he had in a sense forestalled it. Within
the divine mind, in other words, there is not found this absolute cleavage between what is and what is not.
Absolute Mind is ad opposita and there also the Negative is. Still less could there be such an absolutisation of
this category, in Essence, which is Existence. In religious terms, “In God we live and move and have our
being.” That is to say, apart from this one infinite existence anything else is false, as Hegel baldly and
frequently asserts. “In”, however, should rather be expanded to Identity and this as a general rule.
For really, Hegel implies, existence (in other philosophies actus essendi, being) is not contradistinguished
against thought. Nothing is. In the Phenomenology he relates this to the Gospel saying “He is not here, he
is risen”, coming “after” the “Golgotha” of spirit which is precisely this self-realisation of
contradiction as “the very moving principle of the world” though not, of course, of the dialectic itself as
finally surmounting all contradiction in the union of all opposites and of opposition itself. Existence is not
contradistinguished against thought because it is conceived and hence realised within it, within Mind as the
necessity which is spirit. The going forth as nature should later be seen in this light. Quite obviously the Idea
never literally went forth but remains ever the same as originating Result which is in no sense “preoriginating”, apart, that is, from the categorical priority contained in the very notion of Result freed from
all considerations of time and change.
Immediacy was “intermediated” by annulling the intermediation in, so to say, the flat formality,
effecting nothing, of the Ground (122). The Being this returns us to is Existence. This says Hegel is the explicit
putting of Essence’s “unity with itself” when (he says “when”) “it has completed the circle
of intermediation”. This “when” refers though and must refer to a purely dialectical advance. Nor
should we interpret this as the dialectical or absolute conception of existence as a possibility in distinction
from being freely actualised or not in a separable creation. This is precisely to deny or annihilate the dialectic
as Absolute Mind. Mind itself could then never be absolute or, hence, Mind, reduced thus to a mere
epiphenomenon in our speculation. Rather, the dialectic is itself the overcoming of this opposition between
possible and actual. Thus in the very doctrine of the Divine Ideas as earlier developed (Augustine, Aquinas,
Bonaventure) we find it stated and fully argued that any and every divine idea is one with the divine essence,
or with the most real of all.[1] This is why Existence is a “poor” category to apply exclusively or definingly
to Mind, “our true and essential self” (194, Zus.). The development is implicit when it is first conceived
that a man is God, “not by conversion of the godhead into flesh but by taking of the manhood into
God”.[2] Man too, however, the composite, disappears in this process in favour of mind or spirit[3], as in
confirmed by the Aufhebung, in the dialectic, of the category of Life in favour of the Idea. In a later idiom, all
else is a “cultural posit”, including culture itself. We posit culture. Who then are, or is, the “we”
that posits? The question has been sufficiently answered in preceding pages here.
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The ground
Is the unity of identity and difference; and because it unifies them it has at the same time to
distinguish itself from itself (123, Zus.).
That is, it is the third (after identity and difference) of those "categories of reflection", of "shining or showing
in self", which is Essence, or "Being gone into itself". It unites these two categories, identity and difference,
as they are themselves found to be identical. So the ground includes absolutely everything, each thing and its
other and the other of this other, but formally only. But just in virtue of this power of uniting of opposites it
must itself be united with its opposite, must "distinguish itself from itself". Yet this that is distinguished
cannot, by the same reasoning, itself be mere difference, or the ground itself mere abstract self-identity.
Rather,
The ground works its own suspension: and when suspended, the result of its negation is
existence. Having issued from the ground, existence contains the ground in it… the ground
does not remain, as it were, behind existence, but by its very nature supersedes itself and
translates itself into existence.
The conception of ground precedes, conditions and indeed grounds causality, motive and so on. Hegel
therefore, taking account of the Humean and Kantian critique of causality, supplies what should take its place
as necessary ground-axiom. At the same time he overcomes certain contradictions in the unreflected notion
of divine creation of a world. To be sure, this forms no part of the dialectic here but is rather, in McTaggart's
terminology, a cosmological consequence of it, too striking for us to avoid mentioning it.
The ground is alone proportioned to infinite Essence as infinite Being. It is the sufficient ground for all things,
which Leibniz had already made into a logical principle. Those who imagine that he therefore intends merely
to say that everything must have its own cause and explanation misread Leibniz, Hegel argues. "On one hand
any ground suffices" or is "sufficient", since otherwise it is no ground at all. On the other, "no ground suffices
as mere ground;… it is yet void of a content, and is therefore not self-acting and productive."
A content thus objectively and intrinsically determined, and hence self-acting, will hereafter
come before us as the notion: and it is the notion which Leibniz had in his eye when he spoke
of sufficient ground… It is unfair to Leibniz to suppose that he was content with anything so
poor as this formal law of the ground."
Hegel identifies this formalism with adopting a "mechanical" principle of explanation. He thus sees finite
causality as itself a mere matter of moving a problem one step backwards. One claims to sufficiently explain
the circulation of the blood by the contractions of the heart, or claims punishment's purpose "to lie in
deterring people from crime, in rendering the criminal harmless, or in other extraneous grounds of the same
kind." Elsewhere he shows how he conceives getting behind this extraneousness when he explains
punishment as what crime itself requires for its conceptual completion. My point here is that he sees
mechanical causality as merely a describing of the same phenomenon in other terms which, he elsewhere
argues, may as well be represented backwards or reciprocally, cause and effect being one.
Here we should note that ground is represented, as it should be, as a preliminary "stab" at the content, which
is indeed the notion. This is the Content that he claims philosophy and religion both set forth, as indeed does
art, but imperfectly in the two latter cases. We are on central Hegelian "ground".
The ground "translates itself into existence." This is the next point to make. It cannot "abide alone". The
Absolute cannot have knowledge of or commerce with unrealised possibilities. All possibility, which is ground,
is merely Actuality as abstracted from. Hence existence is just one such actuality. Rather, every non-existence
is itself existence too, is actualised, is itself, though fundamentally and reciprocally related to its other, to its
Negative, in this case the Negative of its Negative, though it applies equally in the opposite direction since
also, we have seen, all opposites are one. Reason is ad opposita indeed, as was said, but actually so and not
merely as a kind of unpre-judiced preliminary, as one might have been tempted to take it. Reason does not
just stand at the beginning between two opposites as if preparing to exercise its indeed unique but subsidiary
or immediate freedom to choose between alternatives. Reason takes in both opposites, the opposition itself,
whole.
"The ground works its own suspension" into Existence. Even "in our ordinary mode of thinking… we look
upon the ground of a thing… as itself also an existent" and not "something abstractly inward". This would
mean, in context, that even existence is as it were formal or "ideal". Or, the one existent is grounded in
another.
Such indeed is the ordinary aspect in which the existent would originally appear to reflection,
- an indefinite crowd of things existent, which being simultaneously reflected on themselves
and on one another are related reciprocally as ground and consequence (my stress).
Anything then is also ground of itself. But simultaneously
In this motley play of the world… there is nowhere a firm footing to be found; everything
bears an aspect of relativity, conditioned by and conditioning something else… the question
touching an ultimate design is so far left unanswered.
This is the pure possibility which is the ground, the absolute potentiality. Indeed the proof of an Absolute is
not ultimately "design" but the world itself, any world and, what is more, the Ground is one with such an
Absolute as being genuinely if momentarily predicated of it. We will, that is, pass "beyond this position of
mere relativity".
With the ground, then, we as it were dismantle finite causality in the very act of "grounding" it. Insofar as the
ground "suspends itself" to existence, to a world, the world remains within the ground and never goes out
from it. This is Essence" or "Being gone into itself". There is not and cannot be, as a mere matter of logic, any
"ontological discontinuity" between the Absolute and something else. Hegel is thus far in agreement with
what he elsewhere calls Spinoza's "acosmism".
Hegel's solution to the problems posed by Kantian dualism is thus in certain respects or, which is the same, a
qualified return to the monistic position of Spinoza and, above all, Leibniz. Of Spinoza he says that he
"defrauds the principle of difference or finitude of its due" (151, Zus.)."It is true that God is necessity, or,…
he is the absolute Thing." Yet that "he is the absolute Person… is a point which the philosophy of Spinoza
never reached." This is important as showing that such theistic utterances belong for Hegel in philosophy,
whatever his not very well observed reservations about use of the name "God" there. Spinoza has an "Oriental
view of the unity of substance" from which Hegel here distances himself, despite his stress on the falsity of
"everything finite". One does not immediately see how contradiction is avoided with positions already
outlined here, according to which indeed "the nature of the finite world seems frail and transient". The
solution, however, lies in Hegel's dialectical Aufhebung of the category of Substance itself, based as it is upon
the "abstract" identity that "each thing is itself and not another thing", his opposition to which has been
abundantly demonstrated here. Substance "is not the final idea". It lacks "the principle of individuality, which
first appeared under a philosophical shape… in the Monadology of Leibniz."
This is a very striking concession, or rather attribution, on Hegel's part, appearing to compel us to view his
philosophy, a logic, as an elaboration and development of such Monadology. This, Hegel will go on to say,
"represents contradiction in its compete development" (194), contradiction as "the moving principle of the
world" and, differently, of dialectic. Leibniz, however, stops at stating "that the Absolute is the Object", a
position Hegel claims to "put by" or "transcend" in his Notion which is "the absolute Idea" and which is also
seen as transcending or fulfilling (rescuing?) "rationalist metaphysics" in general. Of course this will not be
merely a matter of overcoming unreflected importation into philosophy of the in turn unreflected name,
"God". What's in a name? Essential though to understanding his position regarding Leibniz's and similar
systems is especially his view of identity, difference and the ground as set forth just here. His view of Kant
and the Kantian Thing-in-itself comes out particularly in the very next section in the Logic of the
Encyclopaedia, "The Thing" (125).[4] This, after Existence and "The pure… categories of Reflection" (divided
into Identity, Difference and Ground), is the third and final section of "Essence as Ground of Existence" (where
"Ground" and "Existence" appear at a more basic or higher level of the dialectic). After it we come to
Appearance and Actuality as completing Essence, leading on into the Notion.
What is clear now is that the world of existents are not separate from the Ground. In just the same way, in
the doctrine of the divine ideas, inseparable from Aquinas’s system of thought concerning the Absolute
vis à vis “the world”, each idea, each “ground”, is identical with the Essence (of God, although it
follows that God is essence as such). Again, God, Aquinas argues, has no knowledge of the individual or of any
other finite thing, but only of its idea as found within God as one with him. That is, God has no relation with
men, who yet are all the same in relation with him. What is this but to say, concurring with Hegel, that
“Everything finite is false”? At the same time, that persons in idea have a certain infinity, as known by
the Inifnite and as one in essence (with it). Further, a question is raised implicitly about the composite
“man” which recalls even Aristotle’s Metaphysics VII. There it is concluded that it is the ultimate
specific difference which stands for and determines the “whole” (which is now, when so viewed, no
longer a whole or composite) as being in no sense a mere part of it (unicity of the “substantial form”;
cf. Hegel on form and matter under “The Thing” at Enc. 128).[5] As knowing the Absolute we are each
absolute and infinite, since only Thought “thinks itself”.
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[1] Aquinas, Summa Theologica, Ia Q XV.
[2] From the document (8th or 9th century) known as the Creed of Athanasius.
[3] Cf. Aristotle, Metaphysics VII, on the ultimate and hence specifying difference.
[4] I am of course prescinding, here as in this whole work, from the introductory chapters on attitudes "of Thought to
Objectivity", such as c. IV, II, "The Critical Philosophy".
[5] Cf. F. Inciarte, ”Die Einheit der aristotelischen Metaphysik”, Philsophisches Jahrbuch 101 (1994), pp.1-22.
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