2
On Content in the Thought of G. W. F. Hegel (1947)
The Content is always young.
G. W. F. Hegel
Introduction*
1. The problem of the content in Hegel’s philosophy is, first of all, an historical problem. If truth is nothing apart from its becoming, then the becoming of truth appears as the truth of truth, and the development of truth as the manifestation of what truth is in itself. In a certain sense, history provides Hegelianism with the moment it lacks: the test of the for-itself. Hegel was enveloped in his own thought as a child is wrapped up in his growth, ignorant of the law that makes him grow or the contradictions slumbering within him. We need to revive the dialectic of the ages of man, and to seek, in the maturity of history, the truth of Hegel, a philosopher who died young: it is we who are living his manhood.
For, by way of history, Hegel’s thought escapes the prison of a dawning age and the confines of a civil servant’s mentality, offering itself to our gaze in the freedom of its realization and its objective development. In a sense that is not un-Marxist, our world has become philosophy, or, more precisely, Hegel come to maturity now stands before us – is, indeed, our world: the world has become Hegelian to the extent that Hegel was a truth capable of becoming a world. We need only read: fortunately, the letters are there before our eyes, writ large in the text of history – letters become men.
But the lesson of history is unequivocal: Hegel come to maturity is the decomposition and decay of Hegel. Ten years after the Master’s death, his work was already coming undone, spurting apart, developing in opposite directions, turning into a battlefield. Indeed, it was itself a battle: Ich bin der Kampf [I am the battle]. Those famous words, uttered long before, in Jena, found a strange sort of posthumous confirmation in the struggles of the Young Hegelians. With the peace of the final system, in the absolution of Spirit, opposites seemed to be reconciled. But the simple stroke of death was enough to set them free, as the fall of the Prussian despot unleashed the deep-seated forces of the opposition. Is this not a sign that the bond which held them at rest was external to them?
Engels distinguishes two basic elements in Hegel’s thought: in his words, the dialectical method, adopted by the young revolutionaries, and the system, the set of political, religious, and aesthetic truths the young conservatives laid claim to. One and the same loyalty to the Master united his warring disciples, who professed to derive from Hegel himself ‘the real consequences Hegel did not dare work out’.1 In the course of the nineteenth century, the decomposition process grew more intense: the adverse parties abandoned, one by one, most of the truths of the Hegelian corpus, retaining only a certain spirit or general tendency. Although it can be argued that philosophy has not gone beyond Hegelianism, and that the struggles of our recent history are merely the conflict of Left against Right in Hegel himself, the fact remains that no-one is now fighting over the body of the system, over the logic or the aesthetics, the philosophy of nature or the philosophy of religion. Advanced Hegelianism has disintegrated in two ways: by abandoning a major part of its contents, for which contemporary thought has no use, and by revealing that the spirit which has survived this body is divided and antagonistic.
In the history of Hegel’s philosophy, this double externality – of life to death and of life to life – raises the question of the nature of the body that is thus going to wrack and ruin before our very eyes. Marx did not rule out the possibility that history could decay; we are discovering in the dead Hegel the decay of truth. Improbably, Hegel announced in advance what the decomposition of his own thought signified: ‘truth in philosophy means that the concept corresponds to reality … A dead body therefore still has an existence, but no longer a true one, for it is a conceptless existence; that is why the dead body decomposes.’2 Life slips with ease from one body to another, it is survival:† Hegel survives in Marxism, in the existentialisms and fascisms, but the corpus of Hegelian truths is merely a corpse in history which displays its decay as does ‘an existence without a concept’, a content without form, a content abandoned by an alien form.
2. This historical experience brings us back to Hegel. The development of Hegelianism points to what its beginnings concealed. Hegel’s decomposition is his truth, but it would be futile to seek the truth of this decomposition outside Hegel himself. The problem of the content of Hegel’s thought is posed in Hegel; the dormant contradictions slumber in this undeveloped in-itself. It is there that the externality of soul to body or of form to content must manifest itself. Otherwise, the revelation of history would be nothing more than the revelation of an error – not the development of Hegel’s truth, but the exhibition of a mythical, misunderstood, falsified Hegel. Hegel’s thought must furnish us the truth by itself, appear in its profundity or its formalism, resolve, at last, the debate that divides his commentators, by teaching us whether the dialectic represents a form which is imposed from without, or one which emerges from its content, whether it is formal or real, whether its schematism is purely mechanistic or the very soul of things.
We might content ourselves with a classificatory method here, like that Nicolai Hartmann recommends we adopt to sift real from formal dialectics in Hegel, the authentic from the schematic. But that would be to treat Hegel’s thought as a fully formed historical object held up to our critical judgement, i.e., subject to a criterion of discrimination from without that would permit us to distinguish, on the basis of certain presuppositions, the good sides of a given philosophy from the bad. Thus it would be enough to retrace, in thought, the decomposition of the system, sort the true from the false, and mime, from outside, the historical breakdown of the system. But that would be to transform Hegelian truth into something external, to convert the system into an object analytical judgement could reduce to its constituent elements – without noticing that such analysis destroys its object, arrogating unto itself the truth of the object thus decomposed, and, in essence, discovering in the object only the truth of its decomposition, i.e., the externality of this apprehension itself. To treat Hegel as an object is, then, to presuppose the externality in question. The only way to throw off the shackles of this judging consciousness is to penetrate to the heart of the truth by plunging into its content, by coming into existence and growing with it. We must treat Hegel as, literally, a subject.
3. Just as the historical evolution of the content directed our attention back to the content itself, so the fully formed content of Hegel’s thought directs our attention back to its development. Now, however, we have gone beyond historical externality and the externality of the judging consciousness: what we have in view is the externality of the content itself, and – as it is still development that is in question – what we must take as the object of our analysis is the development of the content in itself, in its concept, or, to put it another way, the development of the concept of the content. Indeed, in the system of Hegel’s thought it is impossible to treat an element as a given, since Hegel’s basic way of proceeding is to abolish givens. A given points back to that which establishes it as a given; what is a given content for the judging consciousness points back, within the system, to the process that produces it as its result, i.e., to its own internal development. The fully developed content that Hegel’s work represents for us is, for Hegel, the moment of an immediate internality made explicit; in other words, the manifestation of the concept of that content. If, in Hegel, results are nothing apart from the process of their becoming, we need to examine the becoming of this concept in order to obtain the truth of the content as our result, and to distinguish between the truth and the error of this truth. Perhaps it will then be possible to say in what sense Hegelianism genuinely thinks its content, or is merely a formalism without depth; and to account for the paradox that this most rigorous of systems legitimized the least rigorous of institutions, and then underwent a natural decomposition process, as if its very rigour had been borrowed.
It is the emergence, growth, and decay of the concept that we shall attempt to describe in the course of this study.
I
Origins of The Concept
Nach dem Gehalte der Wahrheit
war mithin eine Sehnsucht vorhanden …
(Geschichte der Philosophie)
Hegel’s philosophy presents itself not only as a corpus of truths, a finished whole we can consider in its place in the history of thought, but also as a totalizing whole; not only as an attempt to grasp reality, but also as the act by which truth is ’fulfilled or accomplished, sich vollzieht, achieves plenitude. The expression must be taken literally to mean that the plenitudo temporum is accomplished with Hegel, that his work is not merely the revelation of this event, but the event itself: in it, event is absorbed by Advent. Hence its ambiguity: it is both that by virtue of which the whole is accomplished, vollzogen, full, that which constitutes the whole as such – but, at the same time, it is that through which the lack it serves to fill is exposed. It is that which the whole lacked, and that which unveils this lack. It fills a void it discloses in the very act of filling it, revealing it to be, precisely, the void it is summoned to abolish. Thus it is impossible to separate the movement by which Hegel takes cognizance of the import of his thought from the development of his thought. At every instant, more or less clearly, the void which has been revealed calls for a content; but the void is also, in some sort, the revelation that this content already exists, as the unlimited is already present in awareness of the limit.3 It is this appropriation of its own genesis as a fulfilment, in the very consciousness of the void, which the meditations of the young Hegel already put before us. There is, perhaps, no better introduction to his thought than its beginnings, which, in a sense, are already a fulfilment for us, but which, considered as an event, are for Hegel’s phenomenological consciousness initially only the experience and horror of the void.
A. Hegel’s Life
One might here be tempted to reduce the import of Hegel’s work to its author, by showing that this fulfilment represented, first and foremost, personal fulfilment for Hegel.
His life, one of extreme self-effacement and unremitting effort, is remarkable in this regard: his work made up the whole history of his existence and provided its real content. It unfolded without setback or pause until the day death caught him by surprise as he was revising the first pages of the Phenomenology for a new edition: the end of his life had carried him back to his beginnings. Of the three great encylopædists the history of philosophy has known, Hegel alone confined himself to pursuing his written work and oral teaching. Aristotle travelled the length and breadth of the world, and meddled in the teaching of politics. Leibniz simultaneously immersed himself in administration, political counselling, diplomacy, polemics, and reflection. Hegel simply developed his thinking, and drew sustenance from it. He appears in his thought as if it were his real existence: it was the realm in which he was free, because nothing in it was alien to him, because he was ‘at home’ in it, bei sich. If he explained that the fulfilment of any content was freedom, he first demonstrated what he meant in the way he conducted himself vis-à-vis his thought: through it, he assimilated everything, stayed abreast of everything, kept pace with history as it moved towards fulfilment. The divine service known as philosophy did not estrange him from the world, but, on the contrary, trained his attention on events and made him an inhabitant of the present.4 This ‘journalist-metaphysician’5 appropriated history and the world by means of thought, seized and assimilated them in an act he did not hesitate to compare to chewing and swallowing; indeed, he called on that simile to construct an astonishing variety of images. Here we might perhaps be permitted to suggest that this mastery through thought was, for Hegel, a means of conjuring away the fate history tells us befell his classmate Hölderlin – a means of escaping the extreme solitude of a system of thought stalked by madness, as if madness were its natural culmination or standing temptation.6
Yet if Hegel was saved from the isolation of absolute subjectivity by the richness of his work, he also used that work, to some extent, to conjure away everything his situation as a professor made it impossible for him to engage in personally. Prior to Nietzsche, Hegel was the severest judge of all who ever passed sentence on professors, those ‘intellectual animals’ evoked in the chapter of the Phenomenology about the spiritual animal kingdom and deceit. In the encounter with men of action, the professor’s consciousness ‘interferes … in the action and work of others, and, if it can no longer take the work out of their hands, it at least shows an interest in it by passing judgement on it.’7 To be sure, Hegel surpasses the judging consciousness. However, to the extent that he reaches the level of the consciousness that acknowledges the other and is capable of recognizing itself in its opposite, the content of his consciousness becomes, because that content is his own and yet other, the living mediation between himself and the other. Better still, it becomes the reconciliation between the active consciousness and the consciousness that offers recognition:
the reconciling Yea, in which the two ‘I’s let go their antithetical existence, is the existence of the ‘I’ which has expanded into a duality, and therein remains identical with itself, and, in its complete externalization and opposite, possesses the certainty of itself: it is God manifested in the midst of those who know themselves in the form of pure knowledge.8
We need to decipher this passage, which closes the dialectic of the Beautiful Soul, in order to understand that Hegel is here describing himself vis-à-vis Napoleon, as an ‘I’ matured by discourse confronting an ‘I’ matured by action; and to understand as well that the reconciliation of the professor and the emperor, or, in other words, the reconciliation of Hegel with the demiurge he would never become, comes about through mutual recognition. The professor reveals to the emperor the meaning of his own actions. Napoleon has forged the unity of Europe without knowing it; because Hegel does know it, he gives the man of action his own truth back, is reconciled with him, and, in this way, gives rise to the manifestation of God. Thus Hegel’s work represents not only the fulfilment of its author’s existence, but is also presented as the fulfilment of a destiny more extraordinary than any a Prussian civil-servant could have dreamt of in 1806, amidst the defeats and in the schools. Not only did it fulfil the existence of G. W. F. Hegel, but it also brought history to fulfilment by conferring its meaning upon it. It was thus truly the living revelation among men, der erscheinende Gott. This excess of plenitude is for Hegel, if not for men in general, the revelation of himself in and by his work – an extravagant attempt at self-justification, which, in its extremity, may well bear witness to the temptation to madness that haunts any solitary individual, even a thinker.
In a well-known phrase, Marx called Hegel ‘the thinker alienated from his being’, who was acquainted with ‘ennui, the longing for a content’.9 Remarkably, this idea of ennui occurs in Hegel himself, in a curious passage about the Stoics, whose ‘general terms’, because they ‘cannot in fact produce any expansion of the content … soon become tedious’.10 The similarity between the two ideas would seem to indicate that the reason for such ennui is to be sought in the vacuity of a certain abstract mode of thought: ennui appears to consciousness, negatively, as the desire for content, so that the movement by which the philosopher ‘plunges into the content’ is, in some sort, a reconciliation with the very source of his desire, i.e., with his alienation.11 Taken as a whole, Hegel’s work may accordingly be regarded as his reconciliation with his own destiny, now understood as a mission of divine revelation. Consciousness of alienation, however obscure, can be borne only with the help of a mediation that justifies this alienation: Hegel has to paint a dignified portrait of himself if he is to bear looking himself straight in his professorial face. This maker of revelations makes revelations not only about the world, but also about himself. It is in this capacity, and thus in his work, that Hegel can think his own alienation, and it is thanks to the mediation of his work that he comes to accept it – because, so conceived, it appears to him to be the very opposite of alienation. Here language has the same magical function in Hegel’s work which Hegel shows it has in the Phenomenology – that of inverting and then negating the forms of immediate experience. But we have come back round to Hegel’s work, which, detached from the context of what it meant for him personally, will now come before us in its own right – to begin with, in the pure universality of thought.
B. Hegel’s Times
It was not the particular but the universal individual Hegel who discovered the import of his work. He did so at the very moment when his work was about to crystallize, not only in him, but also in the historical context of the late eighteenth century. Remarkably enough, Hegel took cognizance of this historical moment, on the religious, political and philosophical plane, as the moment of vacuity.
This void had a name: the Enlightenment. Hegel experienced it before coming to understand it and then going on to give the extraordinary description of it found in the Phenomenology of Spirit. In his early works, this void had not yet become an object for him; it was the element in which his consciousness was immersed, and in which the young generations of Romantics felt they had no place. ‘I discovered within me an inexplicable void that nothing could fill,’ wrote Rousseau.12 Not only did Hegel’s contemporaries discover this void within themselves; it loomed up before them and hemmed them in on all sides – a world without content or depth. In one of his Xenien,13 Goethe makes Nicolai a luckless fisher for knowledge who catches nothing because he fishes on the surface. Such is the Aufklärer. Novalis puts the same indefatigable (unverdrossen) Schreiber before us in a curious passage of Heinrich von Ofterdingen.14 Interminably, the Schreiber covers sheets of paper with notes, then hands them to a divine lady (Wisdom); she bends over an altar on which stands a basin of pure water (Truth). What the Schreiber writes cannot, however, withstand the test of Truth: only blank pages emerge from the developing bath. How, indeed, could the Enlightenment accept this trial, since it claims to be in sole possession of the truth, and, at the same time, regards it as non-existent?
It is the same opposition as that which existed in the decadence of Roman public and political life under Augustus, and subsequently when Epicureanism and indifference set themselves up against Philosophy. Under this influence, when Christ said, ‘I came into the world that I should bear witness unto the Truth,’ Pilate answered, ‘What is Truth?’ That was said in a superior way, and signifies that this idea of truth is an expedient which is obsolete: we have got further, we know that there is no longer any question about knowing the Truth, seeing that we have gone beyond.15
In this world emptied of its truth, the young Hegel and his friends in Tübingen, Hölderlin and Schelling, longed to reconquer plenitude. But the perfect richness they sought was not to be had in a period that reduced reality to an exercise in pure intellection, a pure extension of all-devouring light, and that worshipped, in the form of the Supreme Being, the very void to which it had reduced the world. This tension between two conflicting terms, each of which was simultaneously the complement and truth of the other, and, because it was alien to the other, ultimately appeared to be alien to itself, this fundamental insight of Hegel’s maturity had already begun to take shape in the analyses and reflections of his youth. When he turned toward the world the Enlightenment held out to him, what he found was a figure of pure utility: everything was external to itself and subordinate to the other, in an endless series that spirit ran through to the sole end of negating it. Such criticism robbed every individual thing of its meaning, reducing it to its relationship to another thing, and annulled even relationship in a movement in which spirit turned back upon itself in the satisfaction of the void: ‘the Enlightenment … is satisfied.’16 When Hegel turned toward faith, as if toward the truth of this world divested of its truth, he discovered that the Enlightenment had emptied faith of all content, reducing its significance to that of immediate sense-certainty (bread is bread, stone is stone), and leaving only an abstraction in its place, the Supreme Being of contemporary Deism, which the Phenomenology calls ‘empty’, a ‘vacuum’,17 ‘stale gas’.18 The Hegel of Tübingen and Bern has not yet grasped the essential relation between Deism and the understanding in the Enlightenment, but he ‘lives’ it insofar as he rejects or refuses this satisfaction, seeking, after his own fashion, to recover a lost Paradise and original plenitude.
Germany’s political disarray made, perhaps, as deep an impression on the young Hegel as did the formalism of its religious life; interestingly, it is only with difficulty that we can distinguish his political from his religious thought amongst the concerns of his early years. In a letter to Schelling, dated from Bern, as well as in the 1802 essay ‘On the German Constitution’, Hegel paints a picture of contemporary political society. Two contradictions in particular preoccupy him: first, the political fragmentation of Germany; and, second, the contradictions of the law, torn between an unrestrained absolutism and egoistic individual interests. In the separate existence of a multitude of states, absorbed in quarrels as petty as their rulers and bent on destroying the larger state that alone could confer authentic cohesion and stability upon them, Hegel sees nothing but the absence of a state: ‘As a result of contemplating this pitiful reality, of living in patience or despair, of accepting a crushing destiny, souls run toward dreams and pure longing with such ardour as is left them.’19 Political unity cannot simply be represented in dreams or conceived in thought; cannot, that is, be conceived in its absence. What is to be expected of such political atomism, if not the anarchy that ensues when the parts all try to escape their truth, i.e., the whole?
What the German Empire does as such is never an act of the whole but only of an association with a greater or lesser scope … Associations of this sort are like a heap of round stones which are piled together to form a pyramid. But they are perfectly round and have to remain so without any dovetailing, and so, as soon as the pyramid begins to move towards the end for which it has been built, it rolls apart.20
An implicit reality is already beginning to come into view here, which alone makes it possible to conceive absence as absence, the void as void – the reality of a plenitude that resides in the totality. It is this intuition which inspires the critique of the absolutism of these petty German states. Absolute power stolidly confronts the citizens of the state as an alien force that imposes its alien will on men and creates ‘an unbridgeable gulf between reality and men’s minds’.21 They therefore seek to outwit it; they live in dependence upon it, and in the hope of escaping it by its own consent; they wrest rights from the state that are the very negation of Right, and elevate them into privileges, instituting injustice where justice should hold sway. And, just as the petty states decimate their truth, so the citizens demolish their own polity:‡ empty power stands over against a social life emptied of its meaning, dead legality confronts illegal life. The contemplation of this spectacle guides Hegel toward the intuition of an organic totality exemplified, for him, by the Greek city-state. This fundamental intuition, which here manifests itself negatively, is a constant in Hegel’s thought: we shall encounter it again in his reflections on religion. Here it finds confused expression in something like nostalgia for a primordial age when the City actually embodied the law, when public life and the life of civil society were made of the same substance. This unity has, however, been lost, and consciousness knows it only in its loss; it does not yet experience it as present in its very loss.
Hegel’s examination of the religious problem enabled him to develop these initial considerations. He began by taking a position on the Enlightenment. There are doubtless passages in the texts of his Tübingen period in which he seems to echo the Enlightenment’s criticism of the positivity of religion – i.e., the content of revelation – which one of his professors, the theologian Storr, had presented as inaccessible to the understanding, in an argument inspired by Kant.22 This can only be seen as one of the features of the early work that anticipates Hegel’s mature thought: content, religious content included, is even at this early stage felt to be something other than a mere given. Yet the negation of the given is not conflated with the negation of its content: even as he criticizes a conception of faith as irrational, the young Hegel rejects a religion that would separate man from God, a religion that would not be life. Therein lies the basic problem of the Theologische Jugendschriften. We can trace it through a number of different forms, especially the notion of good positivity, that of Volksgeist, and the conception of mediation through love.
Those three subjects of reflection simply make explicit a certain intuition of religious plenitude in the midst of fragmentation; this is one of the profoundest thoughts in all Hegel. At stake is an attempt to recover the meaning of authentic positivity, to recover, that is, the practical uses of the content of revelation and its concrete implications for the conduct of action. This meaning has been lost with the passage of time, which has transformed maxims into dogmas and so walled truth off from life. Also involved here is an attempt to think this true positivity as a concrete historical reality, i.e., as bound up with the organic totality known as the Volksgeist. This notion of a total religion embodied in the people must be understood as the transposition of an image of Greece that haunted Hegel and his friends; we find its poetic translation in Hölderlin. The Greeks knew nothing of the transcendence of an alien God; no revelation rose up before them; they had no morality outside themselves. Religion was simply the exercise of life itself; the gods came and went in a familiar world, as men among men. Men themselves were worthy of the gods; with a pang, Hegel recalled the time wo jeder die Erde streifte wie ein Gott23 as a time of lost intimacy and harmony. It is noteworthy that this idea, which recurs constantly in the early writings,24 should recall a time now dead and gone or a lost original unity: this only exposes the more cruelly the void left by its disappearance. Greece is present as a potentiality [est en creux] in Hegel; its place in his soul would always be that of a void to be filled.25
Hegel was not, then, duped by history; he was not unaware that this form of religious plenitude had itself disappeared under the blows of Christianity. This development explains the ambiguity of his judgement of Christ. On the one hand, Christ appears as the destroyer of the happy unity of the Greeks. Unlike Socrates, who lives on a friendly footing with men, revealing them to themselves, Christ is at once the separated and the separator: he descends from on high, bearing a transcendent truth; he is not of this world and must leave it; thus he sows the seeds of division in the world of men, putting an end to its spontaneous freedom and social instinct in order to preach the pernicious virtues of suffering and weakness (which Hegel denounces before Nietzsche).26 The Christian is like an exile in this world; ‘he finds relief in every tear shed, in every mortification. He is urged on by the thought, “here Christ walked, here he was crucified for me”, a thought from which he gains renewed strength.’27
Yet, if Christ destroyed Greek harmony, he brought reconciliation to another fragmented world, that of the Jewish people. Here there reappears, obliquely, as it were, the concrete historical reality Hegel observed with love and yearning in pagan religion: Christ restores plenitude to a particular people, amidst the greatest imaginable fragmentation. Admirable analyses of the condition of the Jews and the unhappiness of consciousness are to be found here. This arid consciousness is represented by Abraham, who follows his herds beneath an empty sky, under the eye of a hostile God; his consciousness is itself the other of this absolute other, which crushes it beneath the weight of its alien power. Thus man’s relationship to God, experienced as the greatest possible separation (that between the Almighty and man’s nothingness), in fact turns out to be a relationship of affinity between man’s nothingness and God’s. (God, as He is Almighty, no longer represents anything more than the sheer, absolute other for man.) This is why Judaism ultimately evolves into an empty legalism. Christ’s mission is precisely to reconcile man with the Law, to infuse the Law with a living content: Christ comes to fulfil the Law, he is himself the Law fulfilled; he reconciles God with his people, and the people with its destiny, by means of Love.
Here the notion of a totality informed by love comes into play; the totality is, however, no longer represented as a given, but as something gained through effort. It is essential to note this point in the development of Hegel’s thinking. Whereas the organic totality of Greek religion has, in some sort, no past, and is reflected less as a result than as an origin which takes its place within a pre-reflexive immediacy. Love is the end result of a process, the overcoming of dismemberment. It is, as Plato would have it, at once very young and very old; it has a history – and its past is no stranger to it (if it were, we would once again find ourselves amidst dismemberment), but rather rests within it, in division and appeasement. Love is Aufhebung,28 a supersession which embraces contraries and expresses their truth. Here it appears to Hegel for the first time that the totality is not primary, but ultimate; that it cannot be in the beginning, but must be at the end; and that it is therefore necessary to pass beyond consciousness of the void as the mere consciousness of a lost content, in order to attain to the consciousness of the void as a content that must be conquered.
At this point, the perspective is inverted in Hegel’s meditation itself. There is a negativity of the void known to guilty consciousness, which mourns innocence and Paradise lost. Such consciousness is pessimistic and despairing, experiencing its condition as the very opposite of life: Hölderlin singing of a Greece that is dead and gone. But there also exists, in some sort, a positive side to the void; it teaches us that fulfilment lies in the future, that nothingness is the Advent of being, that dismemberment is the anticipation and coming of totality. In these inward stirrings of a consciousness in quest of itself, we can already detect the emergence of the idea that dismemberment is necessary to ultimate fulfilment; we can discern something like a necessity of the void. After experiencing the void as, simply, the immediate context of his existence, and then as the painful loss of an original plenitude, Hegel, in his dialectic of love, anticipates the idea that the void is the promise of a fulfilment, the moment requisite to this fulfilment. The consciousness of the void is enriched; it can already discern a certain content in the emptiness it feels. Once Hegel has understood this transfiguration, which comes about in his own thinking without his being aware of it, insensibly transforming the void into fullness and nothingness into being, he utters the great, profound cry of joy of the Phenomenology about the spirit’s tarrying with death: ‘This tarrying with the negative is the magical power that converts it into being.’29 Even for us, who know that this discovery lies ahead, it comes as an astonishing revelation to see the dynamic of the consciousness of the void as it develops in Hegel’s thought – to watch this consciousness as it gradually works out the meaning and, in a sense, the content of vacuity, at a time when Hegel does not yet say ‘for us’; when, in other words, he is still unaware of the significance of his own intellectual quest.
But love is not the endpoint of his religious reflections. Hegel cannot separate the advent of love from the concrete historical context; he regards it as something that has come into being, but disappeared as well. The totality disintegrated in Christianity as it did in pagan times. The plenitude of fulfilment in the Christian sense is therefore conceived as something now past or annulled; its absence even from consciousness simply bespeaks the destiny of modern Christianity. With this, Hegel has returned to the starting point of his reflections, the state of contemporary Christianity, but by way of a development that has transformed this starting point into a culmination, the origin into a result. It is, indeed, the fate of Christianity to bear within itself a defect inherited from Christ himself, who failed to accomplish in history the reconciliation he had announced. In The Spirit of Christianity and Its Fate, Hegel dwells on this failure of Jesus’ destiny, which was the failure of the first Christian community as well; it explains the emergence of the bad kind of positivity. Instead of accepting his destiny for himself – as, at the end of his days, in pain, his eyes destroyed, Oedipus accepts his human portion – Christ accepts death and the Cross as his divine portion: the Father’s will be done. This choice transfigures his destiny, but also sets it apart from the common lot of mankind. Christ’s return to the Father is also his disappearance from the world of men, and a refusal to share his people’s future:
The fate of Jesus was that he had to suffer from the fate of his people; either he had to make that fate his own, to bear its necessity and share its joy, to unite his spirit with his people’s, but to sacrifice his own beauty, his connection with the divine, or else he had to repel his nation’s fate from himself, but submit to a life undeveloped and without pleasure in itself. In neither event would his nature be fulfilled …30
Christ’s purity, his sense of his divine filiation, and the significance of his mission ultimately mattered more to him than actually reconciling his people with God. Thus he did not consent to share the fate of his people as a people, but simply to submit to the fate his people subjected him to; this cut him off from them. In a sense, Christ found, in death, the separation he had come to abolish.
Here, however, the positive aspect of his failure appears: this is not the same separation as before. If Christ cannot re-establish the familiarity in which Abraham originally lived with the divine, before being charged with his mission by Yahweh, if he cannot establish an all-embracing, organic religion among the Jewish people through the mediation of love, he does at least teach that a form of reconciliation is possible within historical division – the reconciliation of subjectivity. With the discovery of this depth, he transforms the purely objective dismemberment of Jewish consciousness into subjective dismemberment.
Hegel traces this development through the evolution of the first Christian community: confronted with the empty tomb, it internalized Christ, living on his love31 as if in pure interiority amidst a hostile world. But, with the passing of time, this memory itself was inevitably objectified and set over against Christian consciousness as a content alien to love; it mediated love itself, inasmuch as it precipitated its emergence. This marked the return to the bad kind of positivity, the return, that is, to an element which now lost its concrete quality, to be transformed into a given posed before religious consciousness. The life of Christ became a transmitted story: it was situated in a remote past, assigned a fixed, determinate form, and recomposed in a manner unrelated to the life of the believer. Revelation, codified in dogmatic form, took the place of Abraham’s alien God; it stood over against love, which took refuge in subjectivity. This internal alienation once again sundered the terms that were to be joined. It had its historical counterpart in an objective phenomenon, the disintegration of what had once been a total religion: subjectivity now found itself counterposed not only to the given of revelation, but also to the concrete history of peoples. At this point, Hegel again takes up the thread of his criticism of Christianity – that it is the religion of a sect, a small group of people who live in an isolation imposed by a rule, without seeing that this rule, if applied to society as a whole, would destroy it; without seeing, again, that the society Christians take their distance from is the very condition of their isolation. We find an echo, here, of the bitter language of The Life of Jesus, and of this astounding running commentary on the Lord’s Prayer: ‘ “Thy kingdom come, hallowed be Thy Name”: this is the wish of an isolated individual; a people cannot form such a wish. “Thy Will be done”: a people conscious of its honour and strength executes its own will and regards any other as an enemy … “Forgive us”: this too is the prayer of an isolated individual.’32 The further development of Christianity manifests this twofold contradiction between subjectivity and the content of revelation, and between subjectivity and concrete history; Hegel could observe it in the society of his day, in the form of the division between Church and state, world and God, virtue and sensibility. Religion had become formalistic, had been emptied of its life and content. This development would seem to lead us back to our point of departure; certain formulae Hegel uses to describe the servile nature of Jewish legalism and Christian formalism tend to confirm the idea that we have come full circle.
However, the opposition no longer has the same form: whereas the Jews had conceived their solitude as that of an object confronted by another object, so that they existed, in some sort, over against themselves, as nothingness in the face of God’s omnipotence, Christians would henceforth internalize one of the terms, and conceive division in the form of subjectivity. In other words, the Christians experienced and conceived their own inner selves as one of the terms of the division, and their religious consciousness was simultaneously separation and the consciousness of separation, the void and consciousness of the void; the unhappiness of consciousness had become the unhappy consciousness, and the object of consciousness was now no longer the void, but the void as constitutive of consciousness, or empty consciousness. Or, if one prefers, consciousness would henceforth be its own object.
This kind of phenomenological development of the religious meditations of Hegel’s youth thus leads up to a sort of transition from consciousness to self-consciousness; it prefigures the analyses of the Phenomenology. We set out from the void of consciousness that manifested itself first as a lost plenitude, and subsequently as the engendering of plenitude; it has finally revealed itself to be the essence of consciousness. This new-found consciousness of subjectivity as such has a name in contemporary thought: Kantianism.
C. Hegel and Kant
At this point, there occurs an event of the first importance: Hegel encounters Kant. The significance of this encounter emerges from the obscure evolution of Hegel’s earlier investigations. Hegel encounters Kant in the latter half of the eighteenth century, not as a stranger who was accidentally born a German and a philosopher, but as the truth of his own malaise. 
, the truth is what is unveiled; for Hegel, Kant is the Enlightenment without veils,33 and, simultaneously, the truth that unveils for him the meaning of his own reflections. What seemed, for us, to emerge from Hegel’s meditations on Christianity – the idea that the void is the very essence of consciousness – is a conclusion Hegel, for his part, finds expressed in Kant. Having acquired this truth by dint of personal experience, Hegel now finds it put before him. Indeed, these two movements – that through which Hegel discovers the truth of his consciousness in Kant, and that through which Kant is invested with his truth – are one and the same. This encounter affords us the opportunity to come to grips with one of the profoundest reactions in the Phenomenology, one that attests to its authenticity. At the point to which, as we have just seen, the development of Hegel’s consciousness has brought it, it grasps itself in Kant as if in itself, discovering its truth in him. It beholds itself in Kant as if beholding its own self in the other, and, cognizing the other as itself, sets about bringing itself forth out of its cognition of Kant. The cognition [connaissance] of Kant is the birth [naissance] of Hegel.34
The importance of the critique of Kant lies wholly in this phenomenon of the generation of the self in the other. Accordingly, this critique will, as it unfolds, reveal itself to us as an Aufhebung: what is negated in Kant is also preserved and restored to its proper place. Thus Kant’s chief merit, in Hegel’s eyes, is to have represented the moment of subjectivity; Kant invested thought with a new dimension, which overturned the relations between things, transformed the reflexive relations of being into reflexive relations of the subject, and replaced a philosophy of the world with a philosophy of the self – in short, Kant revealed the depth of the inner self. But (it is here that the negative aspect comes into play) Kant did not conceive this dimension in its truth; he described it in purely formalistic terms, as an identity without plenitude. Kant discovered depth, but his was an empty depth, because he simply transcribed in terms of the inner self, as if transferring them to a form prepared in advance, the reflexive schemes of the classical philosophical systems. This discovery of the emptiness of depth is already, in Hegel, the cognition of a depth without emptiness; its reflexive emptiness and visible depth are merely its manifestations. Truth suddenly passes over into its error, which just as suddenly passes over into its truth. It is in the critique of Kant that this Umschlagen [sharp reversal] is first presented to us as the very process by which nothingness is converted into being and the thought that negates itself in fact constitutes itself. Thus Hegel’s critique is, in the very process of its unfolding, a cognition becoming cognizant and taking possession of the truth.
This is perhaps one of Hegel’s most un-Kantian ideas, for Kant conceives critique as purely negative. For Hegel, Kant is the philosopher who wants to acquire knowledge of his knowledge before knowing, and who assumes that, by acquiring knowledge of his knowledge, he will come to know its limits. This retreat before knowledge provokes biting sarcasm on Hegel’s part: it is, he says, quite as if one needed a theory of digestion before risking a meal, or had to learn how to swim before diving into the water.35 Reflection on knowledge is itself a kind of knowledge: if the mind is not already in knowledge when it begins to question knowledge, it will never attain it. Critique that takes the form of prolegomena is, in some sense, the very act whereby the mind refuses to acknowledge that it is already in the element of truth; it is the mind’s ignorance in actu constituted as, or raised to the rank of, a system – a written, published confession that spirit has gone looking for itself where it is not, and failed to find itself where it is. The critical philosopher falls victim to the same misadventure as the Jewish people: God is amongst his people and his people knows him not.36 But it is also because he does not recognize the truth that he invents it, converting his ignorance into truth. The truth of critique is its ignorance, which it worships as truth. This reflection reveals one of the key conceptions informing Hegel’s relationship to Kant – namely, the notion that there is no need to seek the truth about Kant outside Kant, that Kant’s thought is the essence of Kantianism, i.e., already contained its own truth for Kant himself. The whole of Hegel’s reflection on Kant consists in showing that the Kantian system reveals itself, unbeknownst to its author, as contradiction actualized or objectified in a philosophical system. This is the very theme of alienation: Kant thinks within contradiction, and because he does not know that he is in contradiction, his thought, once formed, is contradiction given form; it reflects his own image, his essence, his truth back to him.37 Thus God dwells in§ his people in a double sense; not only is he amongst his people, he also hovers before them, like a phantom. Truth is the very element of Kant’s meditations – but he knows it not. Yet it also hovers before him; he encounters, in his system, his own truth: but he recognizes it not. Kant looks at himself without seeing himself. His thought thereby becomes the very essence of non-recognition.
Thus the mistrust characteristic of the thought that seeks to put itself to the test before cognizing anything is contradictory from the outset. ‘If the fear of falling into error sets up a mistrust of Science, which in the absence of such scruples gets on with the work itself, and actually cognizes something, it is hard to see why we should not turn round and mistrust this very mistrust. Should we not be concerned as to whether this fear of error is not just the error itself?’38 This formal contradiction, which leads to an infinite regress, merely shows that there is an unresolved contradiction in the content of the thought. This fear is not its own raison d’être, but rather presupposes a certain conception of both truth and cognition. ‘It takes for granted certain ideas about cognition as an instrument and as a medium, and assumes that there is a difference between ourselves and this cognition. Above all, it presupposes that the Absolute stands on one side and cognition on the other, independent and separated from it, and yet is something real.’39 The formalism of the Kantian conception consists, for Hegel, in this absolute separation or basic dualism. Kantianism is merely a vain attempt to think the unity of two terms originally posited as entirely alien to one another: it is the impossible wish to evacuate the void.
The artificiality of Kant’s description resides entirely in the operation by means of which he thinks the separation of these terms. Whereas the subject is in fact revealed by the object, form by content, the constitutive by the constituted; whereas the given relates to the I of apperception, and the manifold to unity, as the conditioned to its condition – that is, in virtue of a reflexive operation which is meaningless in the absence of the reflected term – Kant conceives the two terms outside the relationship constituting them: he conceives the condition without the conditioned, and the conditioned without the condition, in a pre-reflexive state. This ‘without’ becomes an in-itself that is supposed to pre-exist the operation which justifies conceiving it as an in-itself. The thing-in-itself and the I, although they are given in cognition, are nevertheless assumed to preexist it as if they were two separate in-itselfs. On the one hand, we have the form, and on the other, the content, waiting to come together in a reflexive relation as if they were not the very products of reflection. Thus Hegel describes Kantian time and space, comically, as forms patiently awaiting their Erfüllung [fulfilment]; they pre-exist it, much as ‘the mouth and teeth, &c., as conditions necessary for eating’, wait for their food.41 Yet they are already there, a priori, given outside of all experience. This ambiguity, by which the reflexive product of experience is described as if it existed a priori, outside of all experience, is the essential feature of abstraction. It thus appears that the essence of these abstractions is the void. The I is a pure form, and, as Hegel profoundly says, ‘pure unity is not an original unity’,42 is not a pre-reflexive unity, but merely the abstraction of the act by which the I purges itself, emptying itself of all it is not. By Kant’s own admission, the I conceived separately is, accordingly, an empty unity abstracted from its content; it knows its content only as the other, as an alien entity which, in cognition, comes to inhabit it [vient l’habiter] as the result of an incomprehensible operation.
But the abstraction which isolates the subject from the object also isolates the object from the subject. In its abstraction, the given, present outside any and all determination by thought – this unformed content or transcendental matter, in a word, the thing-in-itself – is an image projected by the I: ‘This caput mortuum is still only a product of thought, such as accrues when thought is carried on to abstraction unalloyed … it is the work of the empty “Ego”, which makes an object out of this empty self-identity of its own.’43 The thing-in-itself and the I are consequently posited as estranged44 from one another, although each is, in reality, the other’s truth; and, precisely because they are nothing but this emptiness, even their opposition is an empty one. At the point of abstraction it has reached, Kantian consciousness is still phenomenological, and fails to recognize itself in the object with which it provides itself. It conceives the I and the thing-in-itself as empty, without realizing that it thinks itself in the emptiness of its object. At every turn in his reflections, Kant butts up against the truth. He postulates it unawares, and moves on without recognizing it. In so doing, he merely gives expression to the alienation of the Enlightenment, which fails to recognize, in the content of faith reduced to the emptiness of its Supreme Being, the essence of the impulse of spirit that subordinates all reality to purely utilitarian considerations.
This alienation also appears in the form in which Kant conceives the subject/object opposition: in terms of master and slave, i.e., dependence. Kant simply internalizes the conflict of Jewish religious consciousness, positing content in its dependence on form: Begreifen ist Beherrschen [to understand is to dominate]. But this dependence is reversed. Just as the Phenomenology shows that the master’s truth resides in the slave, so Kantian philosophy reveals, upon analysis, that the dominated is the truth of that which dominates; i.e., it shows that that which dominates is dominated by the dominated. The same reversal occurs in Fichte’s philosophy. Fichte too can conceive content only in terms of domination: but the self that dominates the non-self is in fact dominated by it, inasmuch as this non-self is the very condition on which the power of the self is exercised. To remain within the relationship of master and slave is to inhabit the contradiction without thinking it – and hence to be subjected to it. Purity is an unwitting form of servitude. Thus the Kantian moral subject, who opposes duty to the senses and the law to the manifold of concrete experience, is in fact the slave of the content which he has banished from his mind and which yet dominates its master. Thus content is the truth of form. It yields up its truth when examined apart from all relation to form; yet the truth thus liberated is simply that of the form which has been separated from it. Hence the truth of the content actually lies outside the content; content is therefore defined, in the realm of Kantian abstraction, by its externality to itself. However, in Kant this externality is merely postulated, not thought as the essence of content. Accordingly, Kant’s thought is situated in externality; it is not externality thought. It thinks content in terms of externality while refusing to think the content of externality. It is itself dominated by its object, trapped in a relation of servitude of which it is merely the phenomenological description. Hence Hegel repeatedly says that Kant has produced a philosophy of perception,45 and that he limits himself to analysing contradictions without thinking them; or, again, that he has produced a phenomenology46 which discovers only the truth of self-consciousness – the abstraction of the void.
Similarly, when Kant sets out to think objectivity, he counterposes it, certainly, to the subjectivity of opinion, conceiving it as the universal and necessary; but these qualities belong to it only to the extent that they are ours, and ours alone. Mediation here is simply the mediation of one of the terms taken as the middle term between itself and its opposite. The I and the thing-in-itself are ‘identical only as sun and stone are in respect to warmth when the sun warms the stone. The absolute identity of the subject and the object has passed into this formal identity, and transcendental idealism into this formal or more properly, psychological idealism.’50 This explains the insubstantiality of the objective, which is a pseudo-middle term: not a synthetic unity in which two extremes are posited, but rather the simple recurrence of these extremes at a point between them. ‘If the subjective is point, then the objective is point; and if the subjective is line, then the objective is line. The same thing is regarded, first as idea, then as existing thing: the tree as my idea and as thing … and the category, similarly, is posited once as a relation of my thinking and then again as a relation of the things.’51 The substantiality of a Mittelding of this sort depends entirely on the extremes; it is a dummy, a third figure which mimes two figures that unwittingly mime one another.52 It reminds Hegel of an episode in Goethe’s Das Märchen; he appropriates the passage, down to its very language,53 in order to compare objectivity to a composite being whose substantiality derives solely from its neighbours, so that it collapses when they withdraw, just as objectivity collapses when the categories are withdrawn. All that is left after its collapse is an inchoate, unspeakable mass: ‘The world is, inherently, something that falls apart.’
But it is in connection with reason that contradiction appears in all its innocence – without, however, being recognized for what it is. Reason is either marked by the empirical character that presides over the choice of categories in the table of judgement (‘Kant rummages in the bag of the soul and finds reason there’, as if it were a faculty among other faculties in a purely psychological ego); or else it is quite simply an abstract version of the understanding (‘reason … is in reality no better than empty understanding’),54 a unifying, regulatory power alien to its contents, as is demonstrated by the antinomies. In Hegel’s eyes, the discovery of the antinomies was one of Kant’s merits; but, as with everything else Kant achieved, the fact is that he did not recognize his discovery for what it was: he did not accept the idea that contradiction constitutes the very being of the content. His tender regard for humankind led him to displace contradiction onto the mind; he thus transformed it into a kind of misunderstanding, the fruit of an illegitimate use of reason. The consequence is that reason, in the antinomies, is obviously sundered from its object: in taking this division upon itself, it merely takes back what belonged to it in the first place. Within this division, the fundamental dualism of the I and the in-itself can only come up against insubstantial middle terms, or else division itself. The abstract cannot escape its essence, which is posited within separation, whatever the power one might think one has assigned it. Hegel’s analysis shows that what is here divided in two cannot escape its fate, because its fate is simply division actualized. Thus in the Critique of Practical Reason, reason may well come forward as absolute autonomy (clearing a path for Fichte), as unconditioned infinity; but the fact remains that this verbal travesty cannot restore its original independence: ‘This infinitude, strictly conditioned as it is by its abstraction from its opposite, and being strictly nothing outside of this antithesis, is yet at the same time held to be absolute spontaneity and autonomy.’55 Whence the paradoxes of legalistic morality, in which spontaneity, incapable of attaining being, survives as duty.
One sees, then, what it meant for Hegel to grasp the formalism of Kantian thought. For him, Kant’s thinking captured the very element in which his own phenomenological consciousness had developed: Kant was the Enlightenment’s vacuity translated into thought, and thought as void. In Kant, Hegel encountered the truth of the element in which his own consciousness had developed; retrospectively, Kant lent meaning to the confused aspirations of the young theologian who had rejected the religion of his day, and of the young political thinker who had turned his back on the modern polity. In Kantian and Fichtean formalism, Hegel encountered the principle that animated the obscure impulses of his early consciousness. The void which he had initially apprehended as a lost plenitude, and then as a plenitude to be reconquered, but which lay, in some sort, in front of him, as if it were other – as if, that is, it were invested with the externality of consciousness – this void emerged for him, in Kantian philosophy, as the truth of self-consciousness: not an in front of, but an inside; that is, not as an object of his thought, but as his thought as such.
For Hegel, this discovery could no more be detached from its historical context than its context could be detached from it. The vacuity he had observed in the world, the inner vertigo of the years of his youth also found expression in Kantian philosophy, which was their truth. This inner dynamic of Hegel’s developing thought was also a moment of historical development. What Kant showed Hegel was thus simultaneously Hegel’s truth and the truth of his times. In taking cognizance of Kant, Hegel simply appropriated and explained the historical moment in which, by thinking the void, human thought had already become the desire for a plenitude it could not conceive, yet longed for. Nach dent Gehalte der Wahrheit war mithin eine Sehnsucht vorhanden [‘hence there existed a yearning for the content of the truth’]. Incontestably, Hegel had detected in Kant the ambiguous point at which satisfaction with the void had become unbearable and demanded to be transcended. One is reminded here of the astonishing passage in the Wissenschaft der Logik [Science of Logic] in which Hegel shows that philosophy is ‘the need of the already satisfied need’.59 It is perhaps not illegitimate to imagine that, in taking cognizance of the satisfied Enlightenment, Hegel precisely took cognizance of the need to transcend this satisfaction, do away with it as satisfaction, and derive from dissatisfaction the truth it required to attain fulfilment – namely, the content of the truth. From the nothingness of the formal thinking it had tarried with, Hegelian spirit drew forth the plenitude of being; it abided in Kant as in death, and this ‘abiding’ was indeed ‘the magical power which converts the negative into being’.
Here again, then, we find the remark that opened this chapter: Hegelian thought can be the thought of the content only if it fills the void it exposes, and can overcome the fundamental dissatisfaction it reveals only by becoming the thought of the content. We have now described the first – phenomenological – aspect of this operation. We need to go on to describe the second aspect as it unfolds, that is, the constitution of Hegelian philosophy as a philosophy of content.
II
Cognition of The Concept
Elle est retrouvée,
Quoi? L’éternité.
C’est la mer mêlée au soleil.
A. Rimbaud
Philosophy, according to Hegel, is not a rhetorical art that treats of all and sundry by proxy, reproducing, in language, everything that exists. Nor is it the endless chatter of a conversation that floats with detachment over the subjects of its choice, and, thinking to preserve its freedom, in fact destroys it. The power to dominate by means of language is, first of all, a cultural inheritance of which one can have the use without realizing its significance: this accounts for the prejudice, pervasive at all times, that philosophy is within anyone’s reach, that it is not something to be learned, that it is not a science:
There seems to be a currently prevailing prejudice to the effect that, although not everyone who has eyes and fingers, and is given leather and a last, is at once in a position to make shoes, everyone nevertheless immediately understands how to philosophize, and how to evaluate philosophy, since he possesses the criterion for doing so in his natural reason – as if he did not likewise possess the measure for a shoe in his own foot.60
In fact, such instant philosophy is to philosophy proper what ‘chicory is [to] coffee’.61 Still more deceptive would be the pretension, on philosophy’s part, to be what its name suggests it is, a love of knowledge content to desire knowledge without attaining it, remaining outside it as, in Platonism, understanding remains outside the idea of the Good: a science on the threshold. Hegel, for his part, claims to fulfil this unsatisfied love, closing the distance between philosophy and scientific form, so that ‘it can lay aside the title “love of knowing” and be actual knowing’.62 For Hegel, thought must not remain on the threshold, but should rather step into the house; it has to dwell ‘at home’, bei sich, that is, in its object, its own content: ‘Philosophy is the thought of the content.’63
There nevertheless exist a good many types of knowledge that fail to create this intimacy of subject and object. Analysing them makes it easier to understand the specificity of the philosophical method by way of contrast. The mathematical method, though highly esteemed by a great many philosophers, cannot legitimately claim, on Hegel’s view, to be philosophically useful. Hegel offers a hostile description of it in the Preface to the Phenomenology: the geometer knows his proofs from the outside, auswendig, not inwendig, inwardly, in a manner reflecting their own genesis. If, in hope of defending himself against this charge, the geometer sets out his proofs, there appears a curious phenomenon of mechanical disjunction between the mathematical object and its transformations: certainty in mathematics is a personal relation between the mathematician and his object. This relation is, however, such that it seems to produce the truth of its object rather than emerging from it: ‘the movement of the mathematical proof does not belong to the object, but rather is an activity external to the matter in hand.’64 Consider the mathematician: his knowledge stems from his own activity, by means of which he takes the entire truth of the object into himself; the object is little more than a pretext in his hands. Consider the mathematical object: before our very eyes, it undergoes a series of amputations, sutures, and dislocations that alter it beyond recognition. One is reminded of Gestalt psychology’s analyses of mathematical proof: Hegel’s remarks are direct anticipations of them. ‘The triangle is dismembered and its parts are consigned to other figures, whose origin is allowed by the construction upon the triangle.’65 The original object is ultimately reconstituted, the same triangle appears before us; yet it is another triangle that has materialized from God knows where, inasmuch as the first triangle has disappeared in the course of the proof. ‘Insight is an activity external to the thing; it follows that the true thing is altered by it.’66 If we turn back to the person who works out the proof, we observe the same external relation between necessity and content in him. The proof is carried out in obedience to an idea external to it:
As regards [the cognitive process], we do not, in the first place, see any necessity in the construction. Such necessity does not arise from the notion of the theorem; it is rather imposed, and the instruction to draw precisely these lines when infinitely many others could be drawn must be blindly obeyed, without our knowing anything … except that we believe that this will be to the purpose in carrying out the proof.67
We understand why we have made certain moves only in retrospect, just as someone who has fallen into an ambush discovers the trap only after the fact. A mathematical proof is thus a ruse in a twofold sense: a ruse as far as the object it destroys and reconstitutes is concerned; and a ruse with regard to the truth it establishes by detours that are not dictated by any law. The necessity of the matter resides solely in the subject who knows where he is going, lays out his course of action, and transforms the object so as to achieve his goal. The content merely bears witness to his adventure.
If philosophy does not consist in simply applying a method, neither does it consist in mechanically imposing a schema on the rich plenitude of an external content. Yet this is precisely the fate Kantian triplicity suffers in Schelling’s philosophy, where it has become ‘a lifeless schema’.68 Kant’s profound anticipation of the truth has been transformed into ‘a mere parlour trick’69 in the universe of identity; all it has to recommend it is that it can be performed time and again. But this very advantage grows tiresome: ‘once familiar, the repetition of it becomes as insufferable as the repetition of a conjuring trick already seen through’. The procedure involved consists in dressing up every difference discovered in the real world in a pair of determinations inspired by polar magnetism – in literally pasting this schema onto everything the way one pastes labels on tins or cardboard tags on a skeleton.70 But Schelling’s monotonous formalism can no more be expected to generate the diversity of the content than bones can be counted on to generate flesh and blood. To be so christened, the content must be ready and waiting: otherwise, its reality itself would vanish into the ‘emptiness of the absolute’ in which all differences fade, like cows into the German night. Thus conceived, necessity does not inhere in the content, whilst necessity has no grasp on the content from the moment it is pure necessity. If necessity is only an outer covering, the content ‘cannot escape the fate of being thus deprived of life and Spirit, of being flayed and then seeing its skin wrapped around a lifeless knowledge’.71
To this ‘superficial’ knowledge, to this method alien to its object, to Schelling’s mechanical schematism, Hegel counterposes a vision of philosophy deeply immersed in the life of its object. ‘Scientific cognition, on the contrary, demands surrender to the life of the object … Thus, absorbed in its object, scientific cognition forgets about that general survey, which is merely the reflection of the cognitive process away from the content and back into itself.’72 True knowledge must ‘tarry with [the object], and lose itself in it’,73 abandoning itself to it rather than to itself. The only way for thought ‘to be reconciled with the solid content [confronting it]’74 is to overcome this opposition, sacrifice the pseudo-freedom of distance, and renounce itself in order to find itself again in the other. Thought must ‘sink this freedom in the content, letting it move spontaneously of its own nature, by the self as its own self’;75 in this way, the operations of knowledge, ‘absorbed in the content’, can become the very movement of the content, its own development, ‘the immanent self of the content’.76 But the very movement that reconciles thought with its object, enabling it to tarry with the richness of the content, also reconciles that object with necessity, which is thus no longer a form external to the object, but the object’s self-transformation. It follows that the necessity which surrenders itself to the content thereby surrenders itself to necessity; it witnesses its own birth in the generation of the content and provides the developed content with the assurance that its necessity is not its enemy, but is rather indistinguishable from its own freedom. It is this genesis of the content that we would now like to trace, by way of an examination of three moments: the given, reflection, and the Self.
A. The Content as Given
When the naive consciousness attempts to imagine the content, it conceives it as a given. Thought is naturally inclined to picture its own operation as an encounter or a reaching-out-towards [geste]. What I come upon was already there; the continent whose shores I land on was waiting for me from the beginning of time. What I seize in an action (Handlung), or, simply, with my hand (Hand), was already there, even if my act revealed its presence and detached it from its usual context. The fact that it was to hand (its Handgreiflichkeit, to use the nice expression of the Preface to the Wissenschaft der Logik) implies a certain priority. In a sense, the apple I grasp is older than my hand; even if it was picked last October, it is 
, more ancient in years, more respectable by virtue of its condition, inasmuch as it was already present when I started to stretch my hand out towards it. Similarly, the food I eat or the meat a dog devours, even if it can be said to ‘be devoured’ only in the belly of the hungry one, nevertheless possesses a dignity his voracity does not. It was there before his hunger; if it were not for this presence, the act of eating could only feed on itself. Thus the given is loaded, and, indeed, overloaded with significance, since an already is superadded to a simple in front of, and since the before belongs not only to the order of time, but also to the order of being, designating the very origin of what is.
We can sense the depth of the content in this naive representation of the given; this explains the benefits reaped from it by canny philosophies that set out from the evidence of intuition and the obvious, i.e., pure receptivity. Thought need only open, like an eye, and look at what is put before it, whether directly, in the world, or, still more directly, in God. Thus, for Descartes – if we put aside everything in his method involving merely psychological preparation, intended to train the attention – intuition is plainly a state of mind in which truth is given to the mind in its purity, in which the simple natures are offered to it in their original discreteness, in which mind takes action only to prevent itself from acting, and prejudges only its own prejudices. Here Descartes merely falls back on the old idea that reason is contemplative, as simple and passive as the gaze; that it is Plato’s ‘eye of the soul’, open to a world of eternal verities. This notion of the possibility of direct access to the eternal is also the defect of the Romantic thought of Hegel’s day, the illuminism or Schwärmerei which claimed to replace scientific conceptions with mystic intuitions, thereby absolving itself of the obligation to make any conceptual effort whatever. Finally, the deductive and analytical philosophies are also elaborations of an initial given: they need only hold fast to a first principle, given in intuition, in order to establish the ordered body of their propositions. Somewhat as Spinoza begins with God and simply develops an already given content, or as Descartes begins with intuition and goes on to construct his chains of proofs, dogmatism too sets out from a first principle. As this principle has not been deduced, it can only be given; as it has not been posed, it can only be presupposed. Here again we find the philosophical expression of the priority of the given, always conceived, more or less straightforwardly, as an origin. Reinhold wanted to perfect Kantianism by seeking, like Archimedes and Descartes, a fixed point to which to anchor the deduction of the categories;77 Fichte too began, in a certain sense, with a primordial intuition, I = I, from which all the rest followed; as for Schelling, the intellectual intuition of the aesthetic totality is not only the origin, but also the very subject-matter of his thought. We can see, then, what is at stake in the naive notion of the content-as-given, as well as the multiple prospects it opens up. We need to keep them in mind if we are to grasp the import of Hegel’s analysis.
The myth of the Fall is at the heart of Hegel’s thinking on this subject;78 it may serve as an illustration here. The innocence of thought’s experience of the given is that of the first people in the first garden. It is also that of animals, who simply come upon their lives and unquestioningly accept them: paradise is joyous animality. In Eden, Adam and Eve could eat of the tree of life, but were forbidden to touch the tree of knowledge. Then Eve sinned. The act of reaching out to take the apple, which was, like all apples, handgreiflich (to hand), was also the act by which she acquired knowledge of the apple, and, with it, of everything that had been given until then. Thís revelation brought the end of innocence, the end of the happy meaningfulness of things, and the discovery of the true essence of the immediacy of life: once it had become an object of cognition, the given revealed itself to be divided from itself and different from itself. Its truth now appeared in its destruction, and scission came into the world.79
This profound figure re-emerges in ordinary perceptual knowledge. What transpires when naive consciousness pictures its own way of apprehending an object in sensory intuition? The perceptual content is transformed into its opposite through a sudden leap. I believe that I have grasped what is given to the senses in its infinite variety, I direct my attention to it as it is, and it eludes me: thus I direct my attention toward a tree or a house or the sun at high noon, but all I come away with is a here and now. ‘Our “Meinung” [opinion], for which the true content of sense-certainty is not the universal, is all that is left over in the face of this empty or indifferent Now or Here.’80 I expected to attain fullness and being, but came away with no more than nothingness and the void. With this begins the long detour that cognition must make in order to take possession, in truth, of what eludes its certainty. For what I direct my attention to and miss at the outset is nevertheless there, is already there; but this already-there is also experienced as something not yet there: being is immediately nothingness, and yet my attention was directed, not to nothingness, but to the concrete entity that will only be given to me at the end.
Such is the lesson of the Phenomenology: the given content is destroyed in the very act by which I seek to take possession of it, but it does not elude me qua content, it eludes me only qua given. And the very act by which I destroy what is given in the content is the initial moment of a dialectic at the end of which the content I aimed at will be restored to cognition – not, this time, as an original given, but as a mediated result. That is why the origin appears as the end; even in the humble experience of sense-certainty, we can discern the outlines of Hegelian circularity. This circularity has as its sole basis the twofold paradox of an original content that is destroyed as original content, yet subsists amidst its destruction, and has therefore to be conquered, developed, and revealed before being possessed in its own result. However, if the content had not been, in a sense, already present at the beginning of its adventure, it would not be there at the end; in truth, it is already contained in the movement by which it destroys the form of immediacy in itself and undertakes its self-conquest, as the man is already in the child who has to destroy the child in himself to be worthy of the man. Again, the result in which it conquers its plenitude can only be the original content itself, though divested of the innocence that enabled it naively to coincide with the form of the given, and developed to the point of becoming for itself what it is in itself. It is for this reason that the end is the beginning and the beginning the end. The content is thus a circle; it is the discovery of the self in the other extreme, now recognized as the self’s very essence. Whence the Hegelian images which depict the content as youth and maturity at once, somewhat as Plato depicted love: ‘the content is always young’ because what it sets out in quest of is its own innocence, because it destroys its given nature only in order to make it yield up its truth. Yet this stubborn youth is at the same time indistinguishable from the essence of its given nature, a dignity which already makes it older than itself, and which, in its youth, already reveals that its maturity is its truth. That is why the content also resembles an old man who, in his old age, truly knows the child he once was, and who therefore possesses his true youth precisely because he has lost it. Such are the meanings that emerge on a preliminary examination; further analysis of the given will enable us to expand upon them.
For Hegel, the philosophical experience of the sudden destruction of the given was that of empiricism. ‘From Empiricism came the cry: “Stop roaming in empty abstractions, keep your eyes open, lay hold on man and nature as they are here before you, enjoy the present moment …”.’81 This profound cry of emancipation, whose only equivalent in the history of thought is Husserl’s appeal ‘to things themselves’, rang out in the silence and then faded away. Doubtless the principle underlying empiricism’s intuition was a fruitful one: ‘The everyday world, what is here and now, was a good exchange for the futile otherworld – for the mirages and the chimeras of the abstract understanding. And thus was acquired an infinite principle, that solid footing so much missed in the old metaphysic.’82 But, on closer examination, it appears that the infinite determination of the concrete passes over into its opposite as soon as we try to apprehend it. If we do not wish to destroy it, we have to abandon the attempt to cognize it; we have, that is, to contradict our own act. I can, of course, refrain from performing that act; but then what I had taken as my object no longer means anything for me, and disappears from my universe. The given of empiricism is transformed into my cognition of it from the moment I take cognizance of it: perception dissolves the concrete, reducing it to properties that are no longer givens, but abstract universals. Perception tries to discover the truth contained in the given by operating an analytical reduction; it peels the object ‘like … an onion’,83 and fails to notice that that object disappears into its properties as an onion does into its peeled layers: ‘Analysis starts from the concrete … it establishes the differences in things, and this is very important; but these very differences are nothing after all but abstract attributes, i.e. thoughts.’84 The consequence is that empiricism cannot overcome the twofold temptation besetting it: this form of thinking either allows itself to be benumbed by matter, subjected to the given, in which case it is nothing more than a form of bondage; or else it falsifies the given by presenting as a given what is precisely destroyed qua given when it is apprehended, in which case empiricism sinks back into abstraction. The lesson empiricism teaches is thus the same as that offered by perceptual knowledge. To grasp the content as a given is to destroy it as given. It is, therefore, to reveal the nothingness within it as its very essence, to define it in terms of what it is not, and to relegate it to externality. But this also shows us the positive significance of such destruction, which is not mere annihilation without a sequel, but an Aufhebung – a supersession by which the object negated is also preserved. The end, here, is not an absolute end; it is the true beginning. In its own end, the object begins to be what it is.
However, this end is not the true end, in which the object will be actualized as that which it is now just beginning to be; it is merely the end of immediacy, the annihilation of the given. It is thus also an end cast in the form of immediacy, in the form of the beginning itself. At this point we know only that the given is nothingness. Not until the moment of reflection will we see the being of this nothingness emerge; only then will the original void, experienced in the given, endow itself with its own content.
The abolition of all presuppositions, which the phenomenological dialectic shows us in the fate of empiricism, nevertheless poses the problem of the place of presuppositions in Hegel’s thinking. Does Hegel not re-establish, in his Logic, the ontological anteriority he goes to such lengths to suppress in his concrete analyses? If he eliminates the given from cognition in the process of emerging, does he not reinstate it in the Logic? Hegel accuses Plato of having treated the Ideas as if they were objects set before the mind that contemplates them in the divine understanding, where they exist prior to any vision. But did he himself not claim to have made the Logic die Darstellung Gottes, a representation of God’s understanding ‘as he is in his eternal essence before the creation of nature’?85 Is his Logic not, on his own description, what the 
of Greek dogmatism was – die Wahrheit ohne Hülle86 in its eternal truth?
Passages suggesting this abound. They authorize a theological interpretation of the Logic: it is itself the original, primordial content out of which all truth, nature or spirit, has proceeded, just as, in Platonism, all that exists emanates from the world of the Ideas, or, in Leibnizian dogmatism, every event originates in the mind of God. The Logic is a third Testament87 in which we can read not only the Word of God, but also his calculations, his thinking, his manifestations. It might therefore be argued that Hegel only gives us an elaborate transposition of the attitude of the first dogmatists, who set out from some primary term – water, fire, earth – or of the attitude of religious thought, subject to a revelation whose content it merely develops and clarifies. Approached by way of the Phenomenology, no doubt the Logic too appears as a result, and this result is doubtless ‘nothing apart from its becoming’; otherwise it would be a carcass left lying on the ground. But this result is the crowning stage of its emergence, which shows that it is its raison d’être: at the end of the Phenomenology, in Absolute Knowledge, consciousness discovers that it is not its own truth and law, but rather the manifestation of absolute Spirit; it thus discovers that its truth stands outside it, preexists it and manifests itself in it, and that the highest point it can attain is to contemplate and cognize Spirit’s law. The Phenomenology too is its own undoing; it destroys itself qua form, and, after abolishing the difference between consciousness and its object, considers only its truth in its eternal content. This content is that of the Logic in which Spirit contemplates itself. Are we not thus brought back round to a contemplative, innocent philosophy in which the object is given in the very element in which it is given, in which its being and meaning coincide, in which the eye need no longer question itself in order to see, and the hand no longer fear what it grasps? This seems all the more plausible in that Hegel eventually stopped thinking of the Phenomenology as the first part of the system of knowledge and simply made it a chapter of the Philosophy of Spirit [of the Encyclopædia]; he thus put manifestation back in its place as manifestation, subordinating it to the Logos, which is clearly, as in the Gospel of St. John, ‘in the beginning’, and constitutes that from which everything else proceeds. It could even be shown that Hegel’s conception of things, which breaks with traditional formal logic, reinforces this interpretation. For, in Hegel, the Logos is not divided into an objective and a subjective Logos, and the truth is not torn between the given and that which confers its necessity upon the given, i.e., the forms of unifying thought; if it were, we would be dealing with a reflexive essence of logic, analogous to the essence of the laws derived from the ordinary objects of science (Kant never got beyond this conception). In that case, the Logic would itself be conditioned, its content presupposing another that would act as its foundation. Hegel, however, conceives the Logic as the unity of form and content, in the profound sense of classical metaphysics, for which the Logos was simultaneously the substance that manifests itself and the form that reveals it. He is happy to cite Anaxagoras, for whom the 
is the principle that governs the world: thought refers to nothing but itself when it thinks the world. The Logic, it would follow, is clearly an ontology, an absolutely constituted content, the original Kingdom of Truth.
Yet, if this were indeed the case, it would be hard to understand the development of this content. If everything were already given, what internal necessity would oblige the ‘already’ to go forth from itself and manifest itself? If the Logos is the whole and the whole is present from the beginning, how are we to explain the emergence of the parts, nature and spirit? If Hegelianism were a variety of dogmatism, we would find in it the impotence of every dogmatic philosophy which posits the whole at the outset, presupposes it, and then finds itself unable to deduce its differences. Hegel, however, relentlessly attacked dogmatism; to assume that he reconstituted in the Logic the presupposition it was the mission of his thought to abolish would embroil us in a fundamental, unthinkable contradiction. If, for him, the given is nothingness, if the beginning is its own end, then the Logic must itself be its own negation, and must manifest, in the beginning, less the content than its absence. This is indeed what occurs, if we bear in mind not only the place of the Logic in Hegel’s system, but also the way the Logic itself begins. The movement by which Logic becomes Nature and Spirit is not an act of creation that would presuppose, in its turn, a subject who plays the role of creator; nor is it an analytic operation, an inventory. It is rather the process by which the logical Idea conquers its own content.
Discussing the Kantian categories, Hegel remarks that, in a sense, Kant was right to regard them as empty, adding that their emptiness is precisely the reason they evolve:
[the categories] and the logical Idea, of which they are the members, do not constitute the whole of philosophy, but necessarily lead onwards in due progress to the real departments of Nature and Mind. Only let the progress not be misunderstood. The logical Idea does not thereby come into possession of a content originally foreign to it: but by its own native action is specialized and developed to Nature and Mind.88
Taken by itself, then, the sphere of logic is abstract; it is not a given, but the primordial void that exists only by virtue of the content with which it endows itself. In the Logic, as in perceptual knowledge, the given falls prisoner to the void: ‘The nothing,’ Hegel says in Differenz, ‘is the first out of which all being, all the manifoldness of the finite has emerged.’89 And he recalls the theory put forward by certain ancient thinkers, who conceived the void as motor. This notion that the logical void generates its own contents explains why Hegelian logic is not a form counterposed to a given content, why the necessity of this generation is also the necessity of the content generated – and why the method is ‘the soul immanent in the content’. It also explains the reversal which relegates the totality to the end, instead of positing it at the beginning. If he is to rule out every possible presupposition, Hegel cannot start from anything other than nothingness. We can see this at the beginning of the Logic: Hegel begins with being as the most abstract determination, one that is inhaltlos, without content; he goes on to locate the truth of being in non-being. ‘All that is wanted is to realize that these beginnings are nothing but these empty abstractions, one as empty as the other. The instinct that induces us to attach a settled import to Being, or to both, is the very necessity which leads us to the onward movement of Being and Nothing, and gives them a true or concrete significance.’90 Finally, taking scrupulousness to an extreme, Hegel entertains the possibility, in Book 1 of the Science of Logic, that being itself might be considered a presupposition or original given; this would make it necessary to elucidate the notion of origin as such, in order to determine what the act one was beginning with signifies: ‘As yet there is nothing and there is to become something. The beginning is nothing, but a nothing from which something is to proceed.’91 Or, as Hegel even more explicitly says: ‘That which constitutes the beginning, the beginning itself, is to be taken as something unanalysable, taken in its simple, unfilled immediacy, and therefore as being, as the completely empty being.’92
Hegel thus destroys the old notion of the in-itself, whether it be taken at the level of perceptual knowledge, founding principle, or the logical notion of origin. Before Hegel, the in-itself, in the form of idea’s or the empirical, was the posing, in thought, of a constituted totality or original world which comprehended the whole of reality. The Platonic Idea was an in-itself, as was the Epicurean atom, for both comprehended all possible meanings, enfolding them within themselves, in the form of exemplarity, participation, or mechanical causality. This notion of truth as a world is also to be found in Descartes’ substance, and, especially, in Spinoza’s notion of God. Substance is posited as ens per se, that is, as a constituted totality which contains its own necessity within itself, but is unmarked by internal development, so that the substance is always already present, is itself the origin, and always precedes itself in its modes. Let us note that this in-itself can be either an a priori or an a posteriori, [depending on] whether one takes the world serving as reference point in its ideal or empirical totality. This notion of the in-itself had maintained its ontological primacy in Kant; but Hegel showed that this in-itself can be conceived as a fully realized totality in Kant only on condition that it be conceived as inaccessible, with the result that the in-itself is transformed into an inaccessible point of reference, an entity devoid of determination or content, pure nothingness: the plenitude of the in-itself is here the void. But it is a purely negative void: it plays a purely restrictive role with respect to the phenomenon, and does not even succeed in constituting itself as an authentic totality in the ideas of reason, which play a regulatory role and are a sollen. This failure of the in-itself once again reveals its pure negativity. Hegel’s merit is to have conceived the positivity of the void, or, if one prefers, the positivity of the negative, which enabled him to rule out every ‘substantialist’ [mondaine] conception of the in-itself, and to attend to its emergence.
Hegelianism is often characterized as a philosophy that regards the world sub specie aeternitatis, as an a priori system of reference. We shall see later in what sense this judgement is valid. Here, however, it must be understood that Hegel’s aim is to abolish every system of reference, to do away with every pure given, whether a priori or a posteriori, by exposing its abstract nature. The in-itself is not, for Hegel, a constituted whole: it is an original void which, through its own movement, constitutes itself as a whole. If one can speak of a totality here – and we shall see in what sense this is possible further on – the totality can be said to exist only at the end, which means that the in-itself is assigned the characteristics it produces in the course of its development only by anticipation. Hence one may say that it is merely something hidden, a germ, something non-existent which will emerge as something existent, something immediate, something yet-to-come [à-venir]; one discerns the promise of the Whole in the in-itself as one discerns the promise of the man in the child, or, in the acorn, the promise of the boughs of the oak. But this very anticipation accentuates the Hegelian reversal, in which the in-itself is no longer an already-there, but is rather a not-yet; it is its own absence, is contained within itself only latently [en creux]; and, let us note, it is not latent within something else, which would thus be the in-itself of reference,93 it is latent within itself, constituting itself only by way of the dialectical discovery of itself in its own nothingness. The in-itself has to conquer its own Self. We shall see that this in-itself, once conquered, is by virtue of that very conquest no longer an in-itself but a for itself; that the substance is no longer substance but Subject; and that the in-itself thus conquered is not – at any rate, Hegel does not intend it to be – the reconstitution of the original in-itself, but the annihilation of the fulfilled in-itself, and its elevation to Freedom.
B. The Content as Reflection
If the content is not a pure given, the ‘self-enclosed’ entity the Encyclopædia speaks of, if the content negates itself qua given, it nevertheless does not abolish itself qua content. The void Hegel expressly sets out to eliminate is not its own truth; if it were, thought would never succeed in emerging from nothingness; indeed, nothingness itself would be inconceivable. The truth of the void is the very being of the void; it is the content of what is negated. Hegel inverts the Spinozist axiom which says that every determination is a negation; for him, every negation is a determination.94 In other words, negation itself has a content, it is negation of, and so contains the term it negates. This is not the place to insist on the profundity of that insight, which expresses the revelation Hegelian consciousness anticipated in its meditations on the void: like Nature in classical philosophy, Hegelian thought abhors a vacuum, and delights in the discovery that the nature of the vacuum is to abhor itself, to recoil from itself, and to do away with itself upon discovering that it contains its own plenitude.95 Whence the cry of joy in Faith and Knowledge over the death of God, which is the beginning of life, over the meaning of the negative, which is life itself, and over the silent labour of nothingness in being.96
This positivity of the negative explains how the content can be preserved even as it is annulled. And, with that, we pass from the content as given to the content as reflection. The given points to its negation as to its truth; it thus ceases to be self-enclosed, opening onto the outside and the other that is its true nature. Here we have the transition of the in-itself to its own negation, which is not pure nothingness, but the opposite of the in-itself – literally, the outside-itself. The content attempts to find, in the given, its truth in itself, but in itself it discovers only its own nothingness. It is thus, in itself, something other than what it is; hence the truth of the given in Hegel’s sense, according to which truth is the revelation of what is hidden, is externality. The truth of the inside must be sought in the outside, the truth of the child in the grown man, the truth of the seed in the tree laden with fruit, the truth of Logic in Nature.
Here we discover the positive aspect of the myth of Eve (initially, we noted only its negative aspect): it signifies the division attendant upon the destruction of unmediated innocence. Paradise lost is not a return to the chaos that preceded creation, nor is it the establishment of the reign of nothingness on earth; it is the passage to the outside. In the intimacy of the beginnings, act and object coincided. Eve discovered the truth of this intimacy the moment she lost it: the truth of Paradise lies in the losing of it [la vérité du Paradis est d’être perdu]. The flight of the first human beings was merely the geographical emblem of this trial, as it were: henceforth, truth would be exile, would dwell outside, would itself be the outside. Hegel serenely adds that this misfortune was not a punishment, but rather an entirely natural discovery, inasmuch as it was the truth of what it destroyed. From this moment on, then, truth was not the inside, but the outside the first human beings were driven towards; it was, indeed, the outside of this outside, since it had to be conquered in the face of adversity, cold, and thorns, in travail and the sweat of man’s brow, and in the struggle in which man learned that he was not merely Nature’s other, but his own as well. It is this notion of the content as externality that we now wish to trace in the logical, natural, and human orders.
In this sense, the content reveals that it is inessential, taken by itself, and recognizes the other as being essential for it. This ‘for it’ provides the measure of its mediated character. Its being does not belong to it, is not per se; rather, its essential being lies outside it, so that it is what it is only in relation to this other, external being – only by its mediation or detour. The being of the inessential is a being only through the mediation of the essential. But what is the nature of the essential that confers its meaning upon it? Is the essential ens per se? If it were, it would be both an absolute reference point and ens per se; the straightforward conjunction of these two definitions is, however, unthinkable. ‘Reference point’ implies the existence of external terms that are reflected in it, whereas the ens per se has no outside. But what is inessential does not, as such, disappear in its confrontation with the essential, because it subsists, and because the essential is, from the standpoint of the inessential, the detour that endows it with subsistence. The essential does not, then, absorb the external terms in reflecting them; it is therefore not ens per se. At least to a certain extent, it is itself what it is by virtue of the other; its nature too is conferred upon it from the outside. Its status as essential is not its birthright, but rather accrues to it by the detour of the inessential. It is in reflecting itself in the inessential that it becomes aware that it is essential; thus it is through the mediation of the inessential that the essential finds inner confirmation. Whence a certain weakness of the essential, which in fact depends on the inessential, owing precisely to the relation through which it exercises its domination over it.
This dependence is, however, odious, from whichever end one regards it. The mediation required to reduce the alterity of the two poles simply reduces them to their own antagonism; such mediation is nothing more than the consciousness of their bitter hostility and dependence, and can only lead to utter exasperation. From the standpoint of the reflexive relation, mediation is not mediation with the other, but rather mediation with oneself via the other. Accordingly, it presupposes the antagonism and devouring domination of the other, whose presence is not acknowledged for its own sake, but put up with, under duress, as a hateful necessity. In order to reflect itself in itself, in order, that is, to discover itself as it actually is, the inessential has to endure servitude to the other, while the essential has to endure the humiliation of dependence. In the one case as in the other, then, the mediation (which is here immediate) is pure servitude, and alterity becomes an exercise in sheer constraint and impurity. The mediating relation appears in its truth, which is to be a non-relation; it annuls itself, leaving only the poles of the reflection to subsist in the ordeal of contradiction.
Such, in bare outline, is the schema of the dialectic of the content as reflection. As we can see, the other is not always equally harsh: initially, it is simple otherness, i.e., difference, as perceived by the pole in which the content is reflected. This position of the second pole becomes mediation when each of the two poles confers its nature upon the other and experiences the mutual dependence of itself and the other. The ordeal is, however, unbearable, for this mediate bond is merely the reflection of the reflection upon itself; and, as the element of reflection is externality, the reflection which reflects itself upon itself actually reflects itself outside itself, annulling itself (or degenerates into a middle term, a Mittelding that collapses in upon itself). The two poles of the content are thus left face to face in contradiction, which is pure non-relation in relation and conflict in the absence of mediation, for mediation through conflict has not yet been recognized. Thus contradiction here is the developed content of the reflection, the truth of the reflection. And contradiction remains its truth to the extent that it is considered to be simply the truth of the content, not what the content actually is – this for as long as contradiction continues to be the fate of the content without becoming its very nature.
The dialectic of form and content provides a good example of the nature of reflection. Once again, Hegel’s aim here is to banish any material substratum presumed to exist prior to its form, as the marble exists prior to the bust – even if this substratum is regarded only as a purely logical possibility. The form-matter relation involves two distended terms; at its two poles, one can admit the existence of raw material without form and of an ultimate form without matter. Too loose a statement of the problem of form and content permits the surreptitious return of the in-itself as reference point; Hegel formulates the problem rigorously, giving it appropriate expression in the dialectic of form and content, which is a dialectic of dependence.
The content has no subsistence apart from its form: ‘Content and matter are distinguished by this circumstance, that matter, though implicitly not without form, still in its existence manifests a disregard of form, whereas the content, as such, is what it is only because the matured form is included in it.’98 Similarly, it must be said that the form does not, for its part, have any consistency apart from its content, and that it is not possible to conceive a pure form without simultaneously imagining a certain content inside it. In short, Hegel’s treatment of the problem puts the accent on the dialectical relation between the terms involved, highlighting the sudden shift which brings about the transition from form to content and content to form: he calls this an Umschlagen. Thus the essence turns into the phenomenon when we focus our attention on it, the whole dissolves into its parts, the inside becomes the outside, force becomes the manifestation of force. Conversely, the same Umschlagen transforms the phenomenon into essence, the parts into the whole, the outside into the inside, the manifestation into force: ‘We are here in presence, implicitly, of the absolute correlation of content and form: viz. their reciprocal revulsion [reversal], so that content is nothing but the revulsion of form into content, and form nothing but the revulsion of content into form.’99
What we will here call the dialectic of the sandglass seems to us to bear a very close resemblance to the dialectical contaminations Gestalt-theorie has drawn attention to. The relations established between form and content, at the level of essence, are much the same as those that are established between figure and background in Gestalt psychology: when the mind ceases to concentrate on the figure as figure, it becomes the background, at least in certain ambiguous cases, whilst the background becomes a figure. Such, for example, is the case with force: when I try to determine what the content of force is, I find I must look to its manifestations, whereupon that in which I was seeking the content, i.e., force, becomes the form and is separated from its content. Similarly, if I examine the whole, I discover that it resides in its parts; the minute the accent is thus shifted from one term to the other, the term I wish to zero in on is transformed, becoming external to itself. Thus the whole that discovers its truth in its parts is henceforth mere form, an external bond that maintains the parts in their cohesiveness. Yet if, after reaching this point of division, I ask what the content of the parts is, I see straightaway that it can be found nowhere but in the whole, in which it once again seeks refuge as if this were where it belonged, eluding my gaze and leaving me confronting the parts in their isolation.
We can see, then, the basic ambiguity of the content qua reflection: this dialectic of the sandglass, this Umschlagen of form into content and content into form is not experienced as the very essence of the content, which discovers itself only in the externality that is one moment of this process. The content is here expelled, driven out of itself; but while it is plainly the same content that is simultaneously in- and outside itself, simultaneously inside and outside, it does not perceive itself as such. From the standpoint of reflection, the content encounters its truth in the other, but does not realize that it is this other. Whence the relations which spring up on the basis of this misunderstanding: the content struggles amidst indifference, alterity, and hostility, without understanding that it is merely struggling against itself. ‘Destiny,’ as Hegel profoundly says, ‘is consciousness of oneself as an enemy.’ The content cannot get the better of this enemy which it encounters in the process of reflection onto its other, unless it recognizes itself in it and ceases to tear itself to pieces. Yet it is in this conflict that it becomes cognizant of its own dependence and of the need to pass by way of an other – and thus of the need to contain mediation: ‘The content carries a mediation with it.’100 Here it discovers that this other is an alien force which has coercive power over it – which is what the slave discovers about the master, or the phenomenon about the essence.
It is in otherness that we can observe the profound dismemberment characteristic of the understanding: the supreme example is provided by the philosophy of Kant, in which form and content, the given and necessity, the particular and the universal condition one another amidst mutual hostility. The result is an inability to reconcile, in conflict, adversaries sustained by the conflict itself: hence reflexive philosophy poses necessity over against content or the universal over against the concrete, while the only relations it succeeds in establishing between the terms it has thus torn asunder are those of the very reflection that engendered them. Even the problem that inspired Hume’s investigations – how to reconcile necessity with the content – could find only one issue, which again consisted in ranging the terms over against one another, in the very position in which the philosopher’s reflection had initially placed them: content without necessity over against a necessity that was nothing more than custom. Similarly, Kant, as we have noted, merely maintained the basic opposition within which his thought evolved, under cover of various intermediate artifices. With Fichte, Hume’s problem was inverted: but if the question was no longer to deduce the form of necessity from the content, the challenge was to introduce the form itself into the content. The result of this attempt, which remained in the domain of the sollen, proves that the antagonism between these terms cannot be overcome within their division; and that for as long as it does not recognize itself as itself in the other, the content cannot free itself of domination and dependence. The free man, according to Fichte, is in reality merely unaware that he is a slave, whereas, for Hegel, the slave begins to be free as soon as he becomes conscious of his servitude. Finally, this antagonism reaches its highest pitch in the contradiction in which content no longer confronts an indifferent form, a contingent externality, and encounters itself in its opposite instead.
Such is the paradox of Hegelian contradiction: it constitutes the highest form of relation at the heart of non-relation. In a well-known phrase, the young Hegel serves notice of his ambition to think ‘the relation between relation and nonrelation’. The concept of contradiction is the point where relation is conceived within non-relation, and this so intensely that, if matters were taken just a little further, non-relation would appear as the limit of relation, and be conceived as relation in its turn. Kant stopped short of this: in the antinomies, he encountered contradiction in the content, but chose not to maintain it there. He had come face-to-face with contradiction, but saw in it only a defect of reason, whereas it is in fact the very essence of the content. A great many texts treat this point: there is nothing in heaven or on earth that does not contain contradiction – such is the truth which the 1801 dissertation on the planets presented in the form of the contradictio regula veri, and which we find again in all of Hegel’s mature works: ‘everything is inherently contradictory.’101 We have come a long way, even from the merely logical standpoint, from the solid content that perceptual knowledge, in its innocence, assumed was its object. Negation, mediation, and contradiction have drawn the content out of itself and fixed it so firmly in externality that it ultimately fails to recognize externality as the sphere in which it exists: the content now literally contra-dicts itself [se contredit], i.e., declares what it is by repulsing its opposite.
It is not hard to grasp this externality in space, in which the content is, in some sort, juxtaposed to itself,103 so that universality is here a sheer abstraction. It is, however, perhaps more difficult to understand the externality of the organism, at the other extreme of the dialectic of nature. What is actualized in the organism, as various passages in the Phenomenology indicate, is a living totality in which each part subsists only in virtue of the whole, and the whole, in its turn, only in virtue of the parts. A part in isolation loses its significance: a hand that has been cut off, says Hegel, is no longer a hand. But the organism considered as a totality itself stands in a twofold relation to externality. To begin with, the organism subsists on its own only in a formal sense, inasmuch as it draws its substance from the ‘inorganic’; thus the organic totality points to an exterior which conditions it. If we regard living creatures from this angle, we can say either that they contain their objective within themselves – in which case the means lie outside them – or else that they possess these means, in which case their objective is outside them. The living creature is external to itself in another sense as well: it does not contain universality within itself. The developing individual produces another individual as its result, and effaces itself before its product. Commenting on the fact that, among certain primitive peoples, it is customary to kill one’s aged parents, Hegel observes that this is the very meaning of life: a child is, literally, the death of its parents. In other words – and this is no less true of plants than of animals – the genus manifests its externality in that it destroys its individual members so as to actualize itself as genus.
The original disease of the animal, and the in-born germ of death, is its being inadequate to universality. The annulment of this inadequacy is in itself the full maturing of this germ, and it is by imagining the universality of its singularity, that the individual effects this annulment. By this, however, and in so far as the universality is abstract and immediate, the individual only achieves an abstract objectivity … devoid of process, the individual having therefore put an end to itself of its own accord.104
This inability on the part of living creatures to acquire universality in the course of their individual development, and to preserve it even as they perish, means that they cannot become true totalities: the cycle undergone by the seed, which grows, acquires branches and leaves, and puts forth blossoms and fruit, terminates in a falling seed. This seed has no memory; it contains nothing more than the seed which enabled it to sprout and mature; it is not a history, but an adventure that repeats itself. Hegel here recurs to the old Aristotelian idea of a cyclical nature in which universality is an organic circle that produces its own point of departure at its point of arrival: ‘Nature is what it is; and so its alterations are therefore only repetitions, its movement is only circular.’105
This phenomenon of repetition, in which development cuts itself off from itself and naively resumes its course, as if, at every instant, the past were swallowed up in the void – in a word, this phenomenon in which development is juxtaposed – makes it impossible to regard Nature as an authentic totality. We are here at a point at which totality is still, at least in some measure, extensible, in which the parts have not been perfectly internalized, but are rather combined through a process of dispersion and repetition. Nature attains its highest degree of concentration in the reality of organic cycles, in which Hegel finds the same fundamental externality of the partes extra partes that is so obvious in space. The natural totality is external to itself; hence Hegel cannot be satisfied with the conception, inherited from Hellenism, of Nature as a Whole that includes all meanings within itself and realizes the reflexive unity of their differences. Here again we encounter the temptation to conceive the content as a whole, not original, this time, but reflexive, and yet so constituted that reflection is, as it were, annulled in it by an optical distortion which makes reflection appear as self-repetition. Earlier we noted the significance of the Umschlagen of the whole into its parts and the parts into the whole: the same phenomenon makes itself felt in the notion of natura naturans and natura naturata, or in the thought of a Giordano Bruno, which Schelling turned back to in his later works. Whether we represent Nature as an extensive totality, a vast living whole, or indifference, we posit the totality in its externality, with the parts outside the whole, and life outside the living creature; we restate in the one term what we posit in the other, since the terms make no sense apart from their reflection. Thus life is simply a universal standing over against individuals; it is, however, a destructive universal:
[Nature] falls from its universal, from life, directly into the singleness of existence, and the moments of simple determinateness, and the single organic life united in this actuality, produce the process of Becoming merely as a contingent movement, in which each is active in its own part and the whole is preserved; but this activity is restricted, so far as itself is concerned, merely to its centre, because the whole is not present in it, and is not present in it because here it is not qua whole for itself.106
Here, then, we can see the deficiency of the reflexive totality of Nature: Nature refers us, by default, to a totality which would be neither immediate nor reflected, neither a given nor a cosmos, but an interiority. ‘Organic Nature has no history …’,107 i.e., it does not possess the internal dimension thanks to which content ceases to be a reflection into another and becomes reflection into itself.
3. (Man). The same reflexive externality characterizes every anthropology founded at this level – that of the Renaissance or the Enlightenment, for example. In such an anthropology, man is no longer defined in and of himself: his nature is rather to be a reflexive determination of Nature, to depend on Nature even as he differs from it. Qua living creature, man is an organism who consumes an ‘inorganic’ Nature and converts it into his own nature; qua man, he negates his own nature. This negation also implies the negation of ‘inorganic’ nature, but the negation is not conceived as one which, turning back upon itself, absorbs its own precondition; it is a determinate negation, subordinate to the Nature which serves as its reference point, with the result that it is conceived as determined by Nature itself. Thus established within a determinate context and located within a constituted universe, human negativity returns to the state of nature, becomes an element of Nature: there are laws of human nature as there are laws of Nature tout court. Aristotle discerned, in human politics, the same circularity he found in Nature; the philosophers of the Renaissance conceived man as a little world. For its part, post-Cartesian science strove to show that man was a living clockwork machine which functioned in accordance with the laws governing bodies. Finally, the philosophers and jurists of the eighteenth century (from Montesquieu to Grotius [sic]) established the role of Nature in the direction of all human endeavour, and founded the theory of natural law.
Thus, when we consider man, we find ourselves referred to Nature. But, when we consider Nature, we discover only the contrary of man. Discussing Gall’s phrenology, Hegel points out the absurdity of any judgement that would reduce man to a skull-bone – ‘the spirit is not a bone’ – or, more generally, to any natural determination whatsoever. Curiously, the philosophers of the Renaissance had already envisioned this reversion of man to Nature and of Nature to man: confronting the little world with the big one, they sought, by turns, the meaning of man in the universe and the meaning of the universe in man. They thus revived the traditional Judeo-Christian notion of Adam’s pre-eminence108 and human negativity; we can find in some of them the idea that the significance of the world is exhausted by man,109 and that the universe exists only in order to be assumed, appropriated, and invested with its dignity and truth by human thought. This idea of the paramountcy of man found a place in the thinking of the seventeenth century, which held, with Pascal, that ‘the dignity of man resides entirely in thought.’ However, the non-natural nature of thought was soon reduced to the Cartesians’ substance, which was, although independent of extension, something of which thought was only an attribute. Hence the dialectic of the Umschlagen was internalized in the obscure notion of the unity of body and soul: the reversion from passion to will, natural determinism to freedom of action occurred in man himself. The Kantian antinomy of freedom and necessity was the truth of this conception of man, which pitted him, in the form of a wholly external negativity – that is, in the domination of servitude – against the universe and his own nature. It was the same external negativity which made it possible to conceive man’s negation of nature through labour on the model of organic transformation – as the modification of one common, universal substance, or even as the extension of biological and mechanical laws. Nature was subject to man, who ranged freely through it, tamed the animals, ploughed the fields and furrowed the seas, and ‘ensnared the birds in his nets’.110 But man was a king subject to the domination of dust. Animal nature was the ruse that triumphed over reason and took man to itself again in the decay of death – ‘and the fields sprout again in silence.’ The only escape available to this living contradiction, unaware that contradiction was the essence of his being, was to conceive the actualization of his negativity in the mode of the Beyond, just as Kant projects the resolution of the reflective contradictions onto the sollen, that is to say, God. At this level, man’s reflexivity prevents him from constituting himself as a totality; or, rather, the totalities he attempts to create are deficient and still-born.
The first of them is love, a totality in which the lovers exist only by way of each other, reflect back each other’s image, and attempt to fill the lack in their own nature through the nature of the other. The old theory of sex as division is implicit in this conception of love, which sees man as cut in two; the two halves strive to come together again, and are ordained to meet by virtue of their very division. But this totality in the form of externality does not, in natural love, rise above the level of animality: totality is achieved only outside it, in the child, the ‘beyond’ of love. This process merely serves to bring out the domination of the species, which utilizes love to perpetuate the genus: the universality engendered by man is not the universality of love, but that of the genus, which limits him and presides over his death. Here again, the mediation is immediate in that it destroys without preserving, and the negativity is external: death is, in the form of the corpse and the child, the truth of love, while the universal is brought back under the sway of natural law. The human race is an inhuman race‖.
The second still-born totality is that of political life. In the present perspective, it displays the same inversion of human particularity into inhuman universality – the universality of the state, whose essence is law. Here again, man is not reconciled with the universal, but submits to its domination. The sole reflexive bond established here is the transfer represented by the abrupt dialectical shift: man’s nature attests that law is his essence, but the law’s externality to man literally subjects him to his truth as to a form of servitude. Man’s truth is not his reality, because it is outside him; the law is not flesh of his flesh, but an alien force that destroys his flesh in his flesh. The Fichtean state actualizes the essence of this domination, in which a multitude of human atoms endure the dictatorship of the universal,111 which is literally intolerable, because it is the truth of man, and, at the same time, crushes him.
Finally, man’s attempt to recreate in his mind the totality he does not experience in reality culminates in failure. The developed consciousness of this failure takes the forms of realism and idealism: that is, universality passes from one extreme to the other. Sometimes the object is posited as universal, and the subject is subjected to it as if it were a particular content suddenly confronted with an external truth. Sometimes the ego, the abstract universal, posits universality over against all particular content; but the object can no more definitively free itself of the subject than the subject can free itself of the object. The alternating extremes are prisoners of their hostility; brothers, yet enemies, they are locked in perpetual struggle.112 This heterogeneity of form and content admits of only two ‘ideological’ resolutions – which are, in reality, merely simulacra of totality.
The first attempt, reflecting on reflection, leads to the progressive disappearance of reflection into the substance: here that negativity which is external to itself is reduced either to false difference (Spinoza), or to indifference (Schelling). Whether the substance involved is conceived as mind or matter, it is merely a compact, reconstituted universality which absorbs even the reflexivity that constituted it – with the result that the ideology thus constituted becomes a world which forcibly absorbs the world. Commenting on Spinoza’s system, Hegel says it is a form, not of atheism, but of a-cosmism; that in a system in which the world vanishes, man too is fated to disappear; and that, inasmuch as neither man nor the world disappear in reality (thus Spinoza is not really absorbed by the Ethics, which remains external to him; this constitutes de facto recognition of externality), ‘ideology’ in fact remains reflexive in its very desire to do away with reflection.
The impossibility of reducing reflection to substance inspires the second attempt. Rather than conceiving the reality of the totality as substance, it contents itself with noting that the totality is aborted by reflection, conceiving it as not realized. But the non-realization of the totality is itself a reflexive determination that refers us to the totality, conceived, simultaneously, as real and non-realized, or, in other words, as realized in a realm beyond natural reality. The Whole is accordingly a beyond in which all contradictions subside: ‘God is the stream into which all contraries flow,’ says Hegel; in him, the universal and particular are brothers, and the totality triumphs at last. But this mode of thought (classical philosophy down to Hegel – the religions) in fact establishes a new contradiction between this world and its beyond: the reality of this world becomes a term in this new reflection, in which real contradiction points to a fictive totality. On the one hand, we have reality without totality; on the other, totality without reality. In neither case is dependence surmounted, since the beyond remains the slave of this world, which conditions it, while this world finds itself dominated, in religion and thought, by a beyond that is its truth but not its reality. There is no such thing as happy nature.a
Yet its very unhappiness is the presentiment of a totality that would no longer be a simulacrum, but a reality. In reflection, content looks towards a beyond which is its truth: content must be reconciled with its truth and supersede external reflection. The truth such reflection announces is reflection’s own beyond: no other totality is possible, and it is the profound nature of reflection to abolish itself in its truth,113 or, rather, to bring the expression of its truth to the point of disequilibrium at which reflection tolerates only the image of its truth, or annuls itself in the actualization of its truth. Reflection holds its truth at a distance, contemplating it in painted images. It has a confused sense of the fact that this distance and these images are the margin of grace in which it subsists. If its truth were to be actualized or its images made flesh, reflection would be emptied out and reduced to an insubstantial form. This is the sense of the transition from religion to absolute knowledge in Hegel; in absolute knowledge, the content is internal to itself. God is the truth in which the contradiction of the content subsides; however, this truth is not actual in reflexive ideologies. Yet God is posited as being the beyond of reflection. This remark has a triple significance. To begin with, the truth of reflection, properly speaking, transcends and abolishes reflection. Secondly, the endb of reflection is the actualization of its truth, that is, in the proper sense of the word, God made man, Christian Revelation become a world. Finally, this actualization merely abolishes the externality of the form in which truth was given to reflection – as to the content, it is reflexive truth’s own content, but freed of its externality and restored to itself. With that, we have come to the end of this process: now the content is not reflected in the other, but in itself; it no longer endures the servitude of externality, but is free, and henceforth has to do only with itself: it is Self.
C. The Content as Self
The conception of the content as Self articulates a profound intuition of Hegelian thought, which sees in contradiction the advent of unity and in servitude the gestation of freedom. After abolishing the immediacy of the given in the otherness of reflection, the content realizes the truth of reflection in the Self, attaining peace and the totality. The nothingness of the beginnings at last conquers the element of truth and actuality, the authentic unity in which the totality finally coalesces, in which it ceases to be divided against itself and to look beyond itself for its own truth. The Self is itself in the other; it exists in virtue of itself and the other simultaneously, and, overcoming contradiction, recognizes itself in its adversary. The contrary is no longer merely the flesh of its contrary, but flesh of its own flesh, and the battle, once ended, becomes the meditation of brotherhood. The necessity thus revealed is not, however, a new form of servitude, but the exercise of freedom: the content is its own content, it is everywhere, like God, and everywhere at home with itself, that is to say, free. Free of external alienation, free of internal alienation, the content is the Absolute.
It is distinguished not only from intuition, but also from the concept in the ordinary sense of the word. If, very schematically, we discriminate between philosophies of intuition and philosophies of the concept, then Hegel’s philosophy resolutely intends to be a philosophy of the concept. Thus it denies the primacy of intuition and the obvious, the Cartesian virtues thanks to which the mind gains direct access to the universal. Intuition in Descartes is a divine gift; the sole human contribution to it consists in severe self-discipline: we have only to clear away prejudices and impure images through doubt in order to reach, in intuition, the terra firma of truth. We reach it, in some sort, by right;114 in Descartes as in Plato, the whole problem consists in approaching the truth by a kind of creeping or climbing of the mind, until we arrive at the point at which the face of the Eternal emerges. At that point, doubtless, sensory intuition is no longer any more than an occasion for the intellectual intuition which is its model – yet both are conceived on the same pattern, as a vision in which we behold truth without distance or detour. It is this direct apprehension of the universal that Hegel combats in the Schwärmerei of his contemporaries or the religious philosophy of Jacobi. Indeed, the philosophies of intuition are always more or less knowingly religious, in that man participates in the truth only negatively; he is entirely submissive and passive before Revelation (‘in intuition we can become unfree in the highest degree’),115 before the content it unveils. Thus intuition in Descartes, as in St. Augustine, delivers the imperfect up to the perfect, putting creation in God’s hands: the universality attained without detour is a universality that brooks no appeal. Hence the ambiguity of intuition, which turns the intransigent purity of man’s gaze against him: the truth is literally blinding, like the sun when we look at it with open eyes. To philosophize with open eyes is to philosophize in the dark. Only the blind can look straight at the sun.116
Since Aristotle, the philosophies of the concept have developed in opposition to this tendency. They hold that there can be no direct revelation of the truth, that it is the detour, rather, which is rewarded with the universal. They observe that the path laboriously carved out by thought is the price of its vision, that the goal has no meaning apart from the path leading to it, or, better, that the mediation of the path is the condition of universality – that the truth offers itself less in the content of what is grasped than in the very act of grasping, considered as the content at last seized and repossessed in its absolute truth. ‘Concept’117 and Begriff both express this idea of capturing the truth: truth is seizure – but in the concept, it seizes itself. The ambiguity of the concept comes into view here: for the difference and unity of the concept are posited simultaneously, and the conflict between them is not clearly resolved. Any capture wears a double aspect: it presupposes the taker and the taken. The concept rises above intuition in that it recognizes and respects this duality, betrayed without qualms in intuition. But that respect is the tragedy of the concept, which is unable to think the unity of this real duality. This explains the fact that the concept was, before Hegel, an imperfect mediation which did not succeed in overcoming the externality of the truth to its content, of the act of seizing to the seized. The concept was the other of its content, an abstract universal which negated the content, or preserved it in fact while negating it in the word; it was negated in its turn in yet other words, without preserving for itself this preservation of the content in its very negation. Ultimately, the pre-Hegelian concept posits a truth that is universal but emptied of its content, over against a content that is full but contingent. Such is the genus, the Aristotelian concept, an external universality without inner mediation, which plunges directly into the opposite extreme, the particular; such is the Kantian concept, an empty category dependent on an external content that is a pure given: ‘Concepts without intuition are empty.’ The general idea cut off from its origins and the content cut off from its truth confront each other as if they were strangers. This is the image we encountered in discussing the moment of reflection. This is the contradiction the Hegelian concept internalizes and thus transcends.
The Hegelian concept can be reduced neither to one absolute term (intuition), nor to two contradictory terms (general, formal ideas/concrete content). Rather, it is accomplished in the third term. This is the famous triplicity or triadic structure, generally conceived in terms of the thesis/antithesis/synthesis schema, a concatenation of words which has no real meaning. There are not three terms, for Hegel, but one: the concept. The two terms that reflection posits as external to one another are not suddenly flanked by a third that acts as their intermediary (like the demiurge in Plato, or the transcendental imagination in Kant). We know that the intermediary is a provisional entity which disappears once its mediation has been achieved; the demiurge is a discreet accessory; the third term of an Aristotelian syllogism is nowhere to be found in the conclusion, just as the constructions used in mathematical demonstrations or the unknown quantity in a solved equation disappear from the result. Before Hegel, triplicity was a game, and, in the end, the third term clearly showed itself for what it was: a nonentity [non-être] that had been reabsorbed. Having accomplished his task, the god ascended again into heaven in his machina; one sought him in vain on earth.118 Hegel completely overturns this schematism: his third term is not a nonentity and does not disappear,119 for a good reason: it is its own stage, it does not find itself by anyone’s side because it is the whole, it is the only entity endowed with being [le seul à être]. The Hegelian concept is not ‘third’ at all, because three presupposes one and two; or, rather, this three is a three without one or two, it is an absolute three. Thus nonexistence descends upon the two previous terms: the one and the two do not exist in the true sense of the word, but are ambiguous entities which receive their truth – that is, nothingness – from the three. Thus far the reversal clearly seems to be a simple for-or-against, except that nothingness now affects two terms instead of one. And, upon examination, these two terms clearly seem to play the same discreet role vis-à-vis the third that the third plays with regard to them in the dialectic of mediation discussed above. Are they not temporary, twin demiurges? Do they too not vanish in their result? It is here that the paradox appears: the gods do not ascend again into heaven, they remain on earth; the two terms continue to dwell within their result, they are abiding gods. Such is Hegel’s solution;120 it shows that the three is the truth of the one and the two, shows the three to be the only place where the one and the two are at home. This is the true resolution of the problem of the externality of the concept, the resolution which finally leads to totality, since there is nothing outside the three: the concept is the Absolute Whole. That is why the concept is the ‘kingdom of subjectivity’ for Hegel, negativity in positivity, content in truth. We now need to develop the significance of this perfected totality.
The Hegelian concept is pure interiority. This feature of the concept has a twofold significance. It implies, to begin with, that the concept is the totality in the absolute sense, which not only leaves no determinate term outside itself, of course, but also reabsorbs externality itself qua element. In other words, this whole is not a cosmos, a clearly delineated figure suspended in the void, a compact entity standing out against nothingness. Here the totality does not emerge against any background whatever, or draw its substance from any ‘inorganic’ nature foreign to it. It is a figure that serves as its own background: the concept is its own element.121 Secondly, the concept’s intimate relation with itself implies that even the element in which we might be tempted to situate it can in fact only be the concept itself – externality and the void, in particular, are the stuff of which the intimacy of the Self is constituted. The concept reaches out to draw everything within its embrace: any grasping of the concept in whatever form is nothing but the grasping of the Self by itself. ‘The Self has no outside’ means, then, that the outside is the inside of the Self.
To put it differently, externality is not annulled, but is internalized. Kroner122 points out that, in Hegel, ‘reflection’ becomes Selbstreflexion [self-reflection]. Here we may recall what we said about triplicity: the two and the one are present in the result; reflection is internal reflection; and, as the Self is omnipresent, reflection in the Self is reflection of the Self into itself. Such is the significance of the Selbst – of the Self which, linguistically, designates pure movement back towards the subject. This reflection is not abolished, but is rather aufgehoben, that is, preserved but subjected to its own truth. Thus the unity of the Self is not the undifferentiated solidity of an entity which is simply given; it is a unity wrested from division through the reciprocal conversion of opposing terms. Contraries subsist in the content qua Self; they are, indeed, its reality, because they have recognized one another in it and found their truth there. They are not forced to accept a dictated peace or outside arbitration; nor are they reconciled pro forma or in a certain form: rather, they find their truth by being converted to their truth.
Conversion must be understood in the sense it has in Plato, who says, in a lovely phrase, that the warring elements of the content turn toward their true nature 
, with all their soul, with all their substance, for it is there that they acquire their soul and their substance. Thus the Self recaptures reconciled enemies by means of this internal reflection: the speculative syllogism represents, in Hegel’s thought, the inwardly directed gaze that enables the Self to make the circuit of its own diversity and reappropriate it, without going forth from itself. We have an example in the cosmological syllogism according to which the existence of God follows from the existence of the world even as it explains it. Prior to the revelation of the concept, what was proven necessarily depended on the proof: God was the world’s royal slave. But then how was God’s reflexive nature to be reconciled with the other attributes conferred upon him by thought: omnipotence and freedom? The Hegelian concept is the movement through which the result recovers its origins by internalizing them, by revealing itself to be the origin of the origin. This process of envelopment implies that the initial term and the reflected term are aufgehoben in the result:
The demonstration of reason no doubt starts from something which is not God. But, as it advances, it does not leave the starting-point a mere unexplained fact, which is what it was. On the contrary it exhibits that point as derivative and called into being, and then God is seen to be primary, truly immediate, and self-subsisting, with the means of derivation wrapped up and absorbed in himself.123
Similarly, Hegel shows that the concept is the true infinity, that it absorbs and posits the pseudo-infinity which emerges from simple reflection on the finite. In general, everything is a syllogism and the Self is the Absolute Syllogism in which the reflexive moments of particularity and universality are absorbed and founded in an individuality that is no longer an external middle term, but rather a totality resulting from its own mediation by itself. Externality as such is thus the mediation of interiority in the content considered as Self.
Externality inevitably brings us to negation. To say that the Self is its own mediation comes down to showing that negativity is the soul of the whole. Indeed, the totality constitutes itself by means of negativity, which is supersession of the supersession, that is, negation of the negation. It is impossible to miss the creative, positive role of [negativity] in the process that preserves the annulled content in the form of negation, and re-establishes it in its authentic truth in the negation of the negation. It is tautological to say that the essential being of the Self is contradiction and that the essential being of the Self is negativity. But this leads to an important idea: if the totality is in fact the mediated recuperation [reprise] of the original content, and if this content has, for us,124 revealed itself to be nothingness, then, in a certain way, this recuperation can only be the recuperation of nothingness in the totality, that is, the recuperation of the totality by itself in the form of nothingness. In a sense that we shall have to pin down, we have here reached the point at which the Self reveals itself to be a substantialization of the void. In any case, this reflection unambiguously clears up two points: the Self is no longer external negativity defined in opposition to a second term. It can only be internal negativity – and the positivity of nothingness is finally evident in this totality, which has come about as a result of the ‘tarrying with death’ and the ‘silent labour of the negative’ that mark the course of its development.
Our analysis of the Self thus brings us to a third point: the totality is neither given nor reflexive; it is the syllogism of the given and reflection in the Self. It is, then, a result. ‘The True is the whole … the true [is] a result … The result [is] the result together with the process through which it came about.’125 These sentences from the Phenomenology delineate the problem and show clearly that conceptual truth is, for Hegel, capture, not grace. Yet this capture is not forgetful; the truth is not ungrateful. A result which was not the memory of its becoming would be a carcass left lying on the ground,126 a lifeless concept. Thus the content is not only its own inside, it is also its own internalization, Erinnerung, whose other name is, in French, souvenir. The concept is the memory of itself – it is in this sense that, in man, it is history – but it is a strange memory which remembers itself only in the strangest forms, and conquers the truth of its childhood only at the end of its history: the most astonishing thing is surely that the remotest memory surges up only at the end, so that, in this sense, childhood is a gift of maturity. This is how that profound remark of Hegel’s, ‘the content is always young’, must be understood; for the Self finds the truth again, that is, the revealed reality of its beginnings, only in its end. The end is the meaning of the beginning, while the beginning, considered in isolation from the ultimate, meaningful totality, is mere nothingness – yet the beginning is the reality of the end, or, in other words, the reality of the content is won back in the end (by virtue of the double negation); far from being expelled from the result, it is its soul and body: the Self is nothing other than this reality in the movement of its own mediation. That is why Hegel says that the Self is something immediate; but it is such in the element of the concept, not, as before, in the element of reflection or of a posited absolute. The circularity of the concept is its own youth set free; it is, literally, a ‘second childhood’.127 This circularity is the sign that the concrete has been redeemed and transfigured: it invests the totality of the preceding moments with their truth.
At the end of the dialectic of the content, then, we see the generosity of the immediate, and even the grace of intuition, re-emerging in the liberty of the self. But the immediate is simultaneously a universal here; the given is charged with all the meaning it has acquired throughout its history, and intuition is now no longer the fruit of blindness. ‘[T]he eyes of the Spirit and the eyes of the body completely coincide’ – or again, as Hegel puts it, just as ‘the husband sees flesh of his flesh in the wife’, the Self henceforth contemplates ‘the Spirit of his Spirit’ in simple being.128 This connaturality at the level of substance, this profound homogeneity of universality conquered at last, this substance become Self, and this domain pervaded by negativity are, for Hegel, freedom.
The conversion of the content into its truth – freedom – explains why Hegel simultaneously defines the concept as the kingdom of subjectivity and the truth as the substance become subject. For the Self never has to do with anything other than itself in the guise of the other. Not only is I an other, but, in the element of the concept, the other is I: the Self recognizes itself in the other. The content is bei sich, truth at last dwells in its own abode, God, descended from Heaven, dwells amongst men; this is no longer the Jewish God, whom his people do not recognize,129 ‘a stranger in his own land’,130 but the truth become man in a human world that has become truth, a native land reconquered, the profound unity of the Self and the totality. In this sense, freedom is no longer conceived in terms of domination and servitude, that is, as simple external negation. Freedom is not purity, for the pure individual is only a blind slave; nor is it deliberate impurity, for impurity is Night’s empire. Freedom in Hegel is neither the rejection of necessity nor its acceptance, neither a straightforward no nor a straightforward yes – it is rather the no of the no and the yes wrested back from the no. Freedom is circular, and this circularity is the advent of the subject. In a reflexive dialectic, the subject is not at home amidst his attributes, but subjected to them. Not only is the slave a slave; the master is too. Thus the God of the old metaphysics was merely a desolate solitude waiting for the metaphysician to restore him his nature, with the attributes of being, power, and freedom. This God was a Subject-King,131 which is to say, a Slave-King. Hegelian freedom precisely delivers the subject from his subjection, and converts his servitude into a kingdom. The concept is the kingdom of subjectivity, that is, the realm of the subject become king. The slave-subject and the Subject-King find, in the King-Subject, the fulfilment of their truth, in which the attribute is no longer domination by truth; the attribute is the tribute of truth, the recognition [reconnaissance] of the truth by itself and a denunciation of its ingratitude (in Hegel, recognition is always a phenomenon of gratitude). Such is the circularity of freedom in the concept: it is the transformation of servitude, the transformation of the subject into his reign.
The meaning of the transformation of the substance into subject thus becomes clear. The substance is the whole, but it is the reign of necessity, and freedom at the level of the substance is merely consciousness132 of this necessity – that is, resignation to servitude. Hegelian freedom is a circle only because the substance is liberated: the subject cannot freely consent to the necessity of the substance unless this necessity is of its own devising; unless, that is, it commands it, and the substance is merely its own essence become substance; unless, by commanding the substance, it at last commands itself. This brotherhood in truth is accordingly the movement by which the substance becomes subject; but this movement is not a pure Umschlagen that simply puts someone new in command, placing the slave on the throne and banishing the monarch to the galleys; it is also the movement by which the subject becomes substance, that is, appropriates its own truth and makes it its own kingdom: ‘… this movement of the Self which empties itself of itself and sinks itself into its substance, and also, as Subject, has gone out of that substance into itself, making the substance into an object and a content’.133 The totality of the Self is, then, this twofold movement by which the substantiality of the subject and the subjectivity of the substance are constituted as a ‘resultant identity’.134 For Hegel, this dialectical totality is Spirit, or Absolute Totality.
All the totalities we have reviewed thus far have confessed their insufficiency and come undone by themselves. The in-itself revealed that it was nothingness; the reflexive totality of nature showed itself to be a two-dimensional totality lacking totalizing mediation, and obscurely solicited the concrete mediation of the Self. Doubtless it would be possible to find, in organic life, processes that are a kind of first approximation of the actualized concept; Kant was not wrong – although he attributed the reality of the concept to ‘transcendental accident’ – to focus on the purposefulness of the living organism. The spectacle of the germ, in the form of the egg or seed, has always fascinated the human mind. Today’s acorn is tomorrow’s tree, a future of leaves and branches, an accumulated necessity, waiting to be born and to provide its own content, wood and sap – and, ultimately, to produce its own beginning in the acorns of autumn. The acorn is a little concept that develops and reproduces itself unaided: ‘The germ of the plant, this sensuously present Notion, closes its development with an actuality like itself, with the production of the seed. The same is true of mind; its development, too, has achieved its goal when the Notion of mind has completely actualized itself.’135
But the resemblance is imperfect, for three reasons: first, because the seed is in externality, drawing sustenance from an earth which is foreign to it; second, because ‘the seed produced is not identical with the seed from which it came’;136 finally, because this ovular schema is simple repetition: the seed has no memory, and the content it internalizes is its own past, which, since it repeats itself, is, rather, a present. Nature has no future because it has no history. There is literally nothing new under the sun; the oak is old before it sprouts, whereas the content of Spirit is ‘always young’. Biological circularity is one eternity juxtaposed to another; it reproduces itself because the content is subject to an unmastered necessity. The circularity of the Spirit, in contrast, is a memory that cannot reproduce itself, because it transforms its own law as it gains mastery over it: the developed in-itself produces, not the in-itself pure and simple, but an undecaying totality which absorbs the initial in-itself in its ultimate movement, and does not repeat itself. Spirit is an acorn that produces, not another acorn, but the very tree it fell from a moment ago. This circle is infinite inasmuch as it endlessly completes its own circuit,137 but it produces itself unaided, and is a circle because the truth is revealed only at the end – when the seed (the in-itself) discovers it is the fruit of the tree which emerges from it. The tree of truth has only ever produced a single seed, the one it sprang from – and the seed learns this only when the tree is full-grown. It is in this sense that the Spirit is Self, that is, auto-development, creation of self by self; and it is in this sense that it is an absolute totality, inasmuch as it is a whole which depends on nothing, and itself posits the origin it springs from.138 In this sense, if Spirit presupposes Nature (just as self-reflection presupposes reflection tout court), one cannot say that it is engendered by Nature, for it is ‘rather … Nature which is posited by mind, and the latter is the absolute prius.’139 Thus ‘Mind which exists in and for itself is not … mere result … but is in truth its own result; it brings forth itself from the presuppositions which it makes for itself.’140
This, in turn, explains the nature of those presuppositions themselves. Spirit is the concrete totality, the absolute content, the signifying totality. Logic and Nature, and all the separate elements that presuppose Spirit, are merely parts of it, i.e., moments or constituent elements which have no raison d’être outside it. To the extent that the totality has not yet been revealed to the constituent elements, these moments are posited by themselves in pseudo-independence: they merely represent the abstraction that has given rise to them, but, because the totality does not exist for them, they experience it only negatively, in insubstantiality and suffering. The anticipated totalities of the Logos and Nature are suffering, unhappy totalities, because they give obscure expression to their limitations and the depth of their solitude. Yet, for that very reason, they supersede themselves in their very effort to constitute themselves as totalities, for it is precisely when they reach their limit and seek to grasp it that they actualize the infinity within them: consciousness of the limit is the advent of the limitless.141 Hence the ambiguity of the isolated moments of the totality – in themselves they are deficient: Logic is the ‘kingdom of shadows’ and Nature a ‘fallen Spirit’; they subsist, not by themselves, but solely by virtue of Spirit. However, Spirit restores the solidity of these moments; they become the body and substance of the Spirit which arises from their development.
If one considers these moments in isolation, then Spirit may be said to transcend them; it is the God of the old metaphysics, the Absolute Other which casts them out into nothingness. But if one considers Spirit, then it appears to bear them within itself as if they were what gave it birth. Such is the paradox of Hegelian Logic and the Hegelian Philosophy of Nature: if we do not treat them as abstract moments whose truth is Spirit, if we seek their truth or the absolute truth in them, we fall into the classical errors of post-Hegelian interpretation and make Hegel’s philosophy over into a form of panlogism or naturalism. But there is a paradox to Hegelian Spirit as well: if we treat it as a term external to the Logos and Nature, if we regard it as something transcendent, without noticing that it is the very content of the Logos and Nature, which engender their truth within it, such that the Logos and Nature are its very substance and reality, then we misunderstand Hegelianism as a mysticotheological, creationist philosophy. Hegel’s absolute is not the restitution of a transcendent in-itself which, whether in the form of the Word, Nature, or Spirit, produces and presides over the world; it is the concrete, immanent totality in which the content of its moments attains its truth; it is the absolute content born and brought to fulfilment in its own history. If we view this totality as the development and, simultaneously, internalization of the Self, Spirit is History. Let us examine this point a bit more closely.
With Hegel, history becomes the kingdom of the absolute and its manifestation, that is, a theodicy in the true sense. The expression is ambiguous, and might incline one to think that Hegel merely reworks the notion of a history directed from on high by a Providence which manifests itself in history for the good of men and its own glory; or of a history that simply reveals an inner law established from all eternity, just as canine exploits disclose the essence of the species dog; or, finally, of a history that manifests a linear development through the play of an evolutionary causality operating on a given content. But Hegelian history is neither biological nor providential nor mechanistic, for these three schemas all entail externality. The negative dimension by virtue of which history constitutes itself through and for itself (projected onto Providence from the outside, this distance becomes God, or the pure, watching eye) does not lie outside history, but within the self: the nothingness by means of which history is engendered and then takes possession of itself as it evolves is in history. This nothingness is man.
In the Philosophy of Nature, Hegel strikingly describes the advent of man as the birth of death. In nature the universal exists in itself only in the individual, but the individual is not the universal for itself: the concept is external to itself, and death is the price exacted by this contradiction. The universal is undying (the genus is eternal), but it attains itself only through the death of individuals. Conversely, from the standpoint of the individual, any attempt to seize the universal (by way of the coupling that produces the child – ‘the death of his parents’ – or through disease, or the struggle of species for survival) is resolved in death. In death, contradiction in actu, universality erects itself upon a corpse:142 the advent of the universal is the death of the individual. This servitude can be overcome only if the individual does not disappear in his death, but lives on and ‘tarries with death’, since, for the individual, death is the fatherland of universality. Disease – ‘an anticipation of death’ – represents the animal’s supreme effort to possess death even while alive, and to actualize universality for itself. That is why Hegel sees it as the birth of Spirit. But disease is a living contradiction; it can be no more than an anticipated universality, since it is only an anticipated death that persists in being. True universality does not suffer anticipation, which is why the sick individual gets better or dies. In reality, the individual can only attain and possess the universal by tarrying with the universal in actu, that is, with death in actu. From a natural point of view, man is a living death.
Hegel was not the first to conceive the essence of man as death. Platonism had early come forward as a meditation on death; but it made death an object. Hegel, recurring to the Christian tradition, treated it as a subject. If, however, Christianity placed human death against the background of divine life, claiming that the old Adam had died and that the new man had been born in the image of Christ – if, that is, it seized on the negativity and mediating capacity of death – Hegel was above all concerned with the positive function of death, with, that is, the positivity of the universality preserved in death. For Hegel, life stands out against a background of death, as the particular stands out against the background of the universal – and it is clearly because of the absence of death that nature is insufficient. The Kingdom of God is, for Hegel, the kingdom of death; what he announces in the birth of man is the advent of death, the making of nothingness into a kingdom – in a word, the death of God (not as event, but as substance: death is henceforth God’s essential being). For Hegel, the Spirit is nothingness that has become being, or, in his romantic language, ‘night become day’.143 This night is the universal in actu in man: ‘the human being is this Night, this empty nothing’,144 an empty nothing posited as not-being in its very being. ‘We see this Night when we look a human being in the eye’,145 this death which affects the very nature of man. Man is the one creature who can deliberately choose his own life,146 and, in the form of suicide, his own death. This will in actu is man standing on his own two feet, upright in a world bent earthwards. This nothingness is not in itself an external negativity brought to bear on a pre-existent something; its human desire is not desire for a thing, but desire for a desire. We see this in love, where the lover seeks his own night in the eyes of the beloved; in struggle, where man wants the other to accord him recognition of his irreplaceable individuality; in knowledge, where consciousness sets out to rediscover the universality of the I think in the object. History is nothing other than this profound struggle for the recognition of nothingness by self, that is, of the universal individual by the totality of individuals. In other words, history is the realization of that human essence which is the Self. This realization implies that the universal, which is, in itself, the human individual in his negativity, must become the reality of the whole. That is, it must become the substance, not only of the individual as such, but of the very element in which he exists, so that man may be not only the desire of nothingness, but its actualization, consubstantial with the world of fulfilled Spirit. Spirit desires its own freedom; Spirit is freedom realized, not a vague desire for it.
This is the first movement of the Self in the absolute syllogism through which the subject becomes substance: history is the realization, through struggle and labour, of the universal individual or concrete universal. This is a long and painful process; it is ‘the labour of the negative … seriousness … suffering … patience’.147 For man, who seeks to compel direct recognition of himself in struggle, confronts the depth of his own negativity. If he joins the struggle, he must accept the risk of death and control his trembling body, which shows that his arms and heart are not of the same temper he is; if he kills the adversary from whom he seeks recognition, he kills his own will, and remains alone, as before – from which he understands, confusedly, that he himself is the other; if he vanquishes and subjugates the adversary, forcing him to work for his own pleasure, he subjugates himself, for he is none other than the slave who grants him recognition, and even his pleasure is in the slave’s hands. If he himself is vanquished, then he is compelled, because he preferred his body to his death, to work in voluntary submission – but he gradually discovers that the master is the slave of his own work, which feeds him, and that the nature he kneads, forges, and ploughs becomes his freedom in actu, his kingdom, and the means of his emancipation. The subject becomes substance through the mediation of his labour: first, because he thereby negates nature and reconstitutes it in the image of man; second, because the slave’s labour is his emancipation: it permits him to dominate, not the master, but the master’s domination, realizing human totality in the truth of its contents. The history of the transformation by which the unmediated, contradictory totality that man creates in struggle becomes the self is the history of the development of the state into the universal state, in which the citizen realizes the truth of master and slave. In the total state, which is Spirit in actu, the individual is ‘immediately universal’, and his universality is universally recognized. The universal, which ‘repossesses’ itself in death, has imposed its law: negativity is the very substance of the homogeneous state. The Spirit triumphant is indeed the triumph of death.148
Yet this fully accomplished totality can only engender itself in the circle of Spirit. Man as ‘sick animal’ or ‘living death’ makes sense only in contrast with the nature he stands out against, even when he posits himself as his own negation. One can only triumph over an adversary; the triumph of death implies the adversity of natural life, which is merely one moment of Spirit. In fact, Spirit triumphs over nothing but itself in death, and the production of the Self as substance in real history, the revolutions and wars, are simply the production of the totality by itself. All the moments of universal history take the form of ‘free contingent happening[s]’149 when considered in isolation; as far as their content is concerned, however, they are simply moments of the fully accomplished totality. In this sense, history is a ruse that yields up its secret only at the end; it dupes the individuals who make it amidst toil and suffering. It is truly the triumph of Night and Death, for it is in the night that men die uncomprehendingly. It would be pure deception if it were nothing more than this brutal, unrevealed totality, this self-contained, silent divinity, a blind galley human slaves propel only God knows where. This totality would be a monstrosity if to make it were not also to reveal it, if the movement by which Spirit constitutes itself were not also that by which it apprehends itself. With this, we approach the second aspect of absolute content, in virtue of which ‘Substance [is] equally Subject,’150 in virtue of which, in other words, Spirit takes cognizance of itself in history.
‘Spirit is self-knowing Spirit.’151 And, from this standpoint, history is nothing but the phenomenology of Spirit, the development of the forms of self-consciousness in which Spirit grasps itself: ‘The movement of carrying forward the form of its self-knowledge is the labour which it accomplishes as actual History.’ Considered from this angle, history becomes the production of the for-itself of Spirit in the various concrete forms (Gestalten) of consciousness, all the way up to Absolute Knowledge, the ultimate Science whose content is pure self-knowledge, a sich wissen without internal distantiation. This conquest is possible only if the contradiction that is the essence of knowledge is resolved: all knowledge takes the form of consciousness, and first presents itself as the content of consciousness. The emergence of the self-consciousness of Spirit therefore involves converting the form of consciousness into its content and this content into consciousness, so that this ‘education’ ultimately issues in the connaturality of consciousness and its objects, so that consciousness is not only bei sich in its object, but also knows it is, discovering that the spiritual totality can be fully accomplished only through this act by which the whole becomes conscious of itself.
Again we see Hegel’s desire to ‘reveal’ depth and hold it captive. ’The goal [of the historical succession of ‘Spirits’] is the revelation of the depth of Spirit.’152 The spiritual totality would be stolid and dull if it did not recognize the presence of its own depth, which is self-consciousness; it would be a totality for someone absent, that is, a totality for an outsider, whether God, Hegel, or nobody at all – i.e., for someone who was purely and simply a witness for the other side [pur témoin contradictoire]. It would, in that case, be absurd even to speak of spiritual totality. Discourse is in itself this triumphant depth, because it is the realm of speaking consciousness, but it represents only a partial conquest: Spirit must overcome its own distance from itself in the process of becoming victorious discourse, must speak, that is, of itself and not of something else. It must, then, be for itself, must lead the totality toward self-consciousness, releasing the individual from the stifling world of primitive Morality in which he finds himself enmeshed in a dense network of unexplained obligations (the constraint of the universal, the human law of the polity – and the demands of mute particularity, the divine law of the family). It must lead the subject toward the new awareness constituted by the abstract self-consciousness of the Stoics’ freedom, toward the revolutionary demands of Christianity by way of the lived contradiction of the unhappy consciousness, i.e., of a subject who knows he is universal in himself, but is crushed by a hostile world; alienation, in that case, is the domain of the self-consciousness of Spirit. The Spirit which speaks of the alienated world in the philosophies and religion is unaware that it is speaking of nothing but itself, for it has not yet overcome the contradiction between consciousness and its content: the totality is here conceived as unrealized, and the new awareness of alienation is not yet alienation conscious of itself, inasmuch as its truth is its beyond. The content of the truth is, without doubt, the totality of Spirit (that is, resolution: Spirit is plainly the resolution the historical totality is pregnant with), but this content is not yet for itself; Spirit is still trapped in the form of external consciousness, up to the moment when self-consciousness reappropriates this absolute content as its own essence. This final stage is the transition from Religion to Absolute Knowledge, in which Spirit contemplates God in itself, freedom takes the form of freedom,153 and self-consciousness is at last realized.
Viewed from this angle, then (substance becoming subject), history is the progressive development of the forms of self-consciousness; it is the history of the various ‘ideologies’. These abortive attempts at the emancipation of self-consciousness make up the history of doctrines; we can thus see why Hegel proclaims that history ultimately boils down to the history of philosophy. This formulation would be shocking if considered in isolation. It is, however, only the second aspect of the absolute totality, for Spirit is not only the becoming-subject of substance, but also, as we have seen, the becoming-substance of subject: it is not only ‘ideological’ History, but also real history – and the totality is the encounter between these two movements, in which subject and substance are transformed into one another in the absolute content. History is the concrete third term, the place where this transformation is actually brought about. It is nothing other than this transformation, and it is this transformation which is its motor, down to the smallest details: the circularity of history is real in the sense that self-consciousness (that is, ideological history) is the effect of the contradictions of the totality and the driving force behind the revolutions of real history. Truth is merely reality revealed, but it is truth that haunts reality, that prevents it from sleeping, and that spurs it on until reality has conquered its due. Truth is the remorse of the real;154 forgiveness is simply remorse realized. One closed circle is another open circle which the contradictions between the real and the true close in their turn, until the advent of the absolute circle, in which the extremes are at home, actually dwell in their own truth, are at last transformed into their eternal content. In this divine kingdom, freedom is at once reality (substance) and self-consciousness (subject); the state is homogeneous, inhabited not by masters and slaves, but by citizens who grant one another recognition. This real freedom is also freedom realized: if the essence of self-consciousness is freedom, freedom sees before it the freedom it wills;155 object and subject are homogeneous, and thought, having reached the end of its Calvary, at last finds itself in its own element. Ideology has found its truth in Absolute Knowledge – and concrete development has conquered its truth in the Absolute Content of the universal state. Absolute Knowledge is no longer a form opposed to Absolute Content, but is Absolute Content conscious of itself; and Absolute Content is no longer dependent upon Knowledge, but contains its own self-consciousness in itself. History is well and truly the conquest of the total content by itself, fulfilled and revealed by itself, contemplating itself in its endlessness.156
between the understanding and the sensibility,