Hegel and the Language of Philosophy

Abstract

This dissertation attempts to give an account of philosophical language in Hegel, with particular emphasis on his claim that a philosophical exposition must be living and self-moving. Since Hegel did not provide an extended, thematized account of philosophical language, my primary approach is to take the resources of his thought in general and attempt to construct an account which is consistent with his philosophy as a whole. Thus, a large portion of this dissertation is not directly about philosophical language, but about other determinations such as becoming, indifference, contradiction, life, the understanding, reason, etc., which lay the groundwork for discussing philosophical language in the final chapter. As a preface to all of this, however, I devote Part I of the dissertation to an investigation of Hegel's view of how one should go about comprehending philosophical determinations, i.e., those things which are the subject matter of philosophy (e.g., the determination 'plant' but not 'poison ivy'; the determination 'art' but not 'Flemish Baroque painting'). Chapter 1 deals with his critique of the formalistic approach which attempts to comprehend things by 'applying' categories to them (e.g., applying 'thinking' and 'animal' to comprehend 'human being'). In Chapter 2 I discuss Hegel's alternate view of comprehension, describing this view in terms of the idea of 'expression': later categories in his encyclopedia are comprehended not by applying earlier ones to them, but by grasping the later ones as developmental expressions of the earlier ones. Thus, expression is not only a linguistic but also an ontological category, a point which is investigated in more concrete detail in Chapter 3 through a close reading of the statement "being and nothing are one and the same." As it turns out, this linguistic expression of being plays an essential role in being's ontological expression and development. In Part II, I explore the logical determinations of 'mechanism' and 'life' in the Science of Logic. To set the stage for this, Chapter 4 gives an account of the relation of 'indifference' (present between the 'parts' of a whole) and the relation of 'reciprocity' (present between the 'moments' of a whole). These two kinds of relations allow us in Chapter 5 to see more clearly why Hegel views the logical determination of mechanism as involving a movement of thought whose source is external to it, and the logical determination of life as involving self-movement and self-determination. To further clarify what Hegel means by calling philosophical thought 'living,' I discuss what he might mean by the word 'movement' in the Logic, along with his view of the relation between becoming, contradiction, and self-movement. In Part III I argue that, regarding the logical determinations of mechanism and life, the former finds particularly vivid expression in the operations of the understanding and its 'ordinary language' (Chapter 6), while the latter finds such expression in the operations of reason and its 'philosophical language' (Chapter 7). The faculty of the understanding, whose nature it is to have objects standing over against it (Gegenstände) and to operate according to the category of formal identity, is characterized by finitude and abstract thinking. As such, the ordinary language which it produces is characterized by these same qualities. This entails a.) that this language is incapable of expressing the interdependence of identity and difference, b.) that it thus views the copula ('is') as containing merely formal identity, and c.) that it tends to define its words in abstraction from each other. Another result of ordinary language being produced by the understanding is that it is incapable of providing a genuinely philosophical account of anything, insofar as such an account requires a level of self-reflexivity which the faculty of the understanding, in isolation, renders impossible. The faculty of reason, on the other hand, both includes the understanding (with its abstracting powers) and goes beyond it, particularly in its rejection of identity as merely formal (i.e., identity as independent of difference). Crucially, it is this rejection which allows reason to comprehend the dissolutions of the contradictory logical determinations which move thinking forward. Directed not toward 'objects' but toward its own self, the goal of reason is self-knowledge via the concrete experience of thinking through its own thinking, a 'thinking through' which is necessary and self-moving insofar as its internal contradictions propel it down one (and only one) logical path. The language of reason - philosophical language - is an essential part of this process. Philosophical language, qua language, possesses a contingent dimension, e.g., the way the words sound and the letters are shaped. But this contingency, I argue, does not compromise philosophical language's ability to mediate the non-contingent nature of philosophical thought; for, the nature of logic is that it can reach its full expression only through the determinations of spirit, and all such determinations (with the exception of philosophy itself) necessarily contain contingencies. Philosophical language belongs not to the logical sphere (i.e., the sphere which is wholly 'within itself' and thus wholly necessary), but rather to the spiritual one (i.e., the human realm). As a result, this language must possess contingent dimensions, for it is precisely its 'not-being-within-itself' which allows it to be other to the realm of logic, and thus to be its expression. In contrast to ordinary language, philosophical language is able to give expression to the interdependence of identity and difference, and to create the meaning of its words not as isolated 'parts' but rather as 'moments' which depend on the meanings of all the other words which it has generated. Because of this, philosophical language engages in a continual diaeresis (division) and synagoge (collection) of its meanings, splitting the meaning of a term into an opposed meaning which contradicts the previous one and leads to a new word with a new meaning, containing the remnants of the previous ones. This dialectical process is a living one insofar as the oppositions and contradictions which move the exposition forward are immanent to the exposition itself. Operating throughout the entire encyclopedia (Science of Logic, Philosophy of Nature, Philosophy of Spirit), the self-moving linguistic diaeresis and synagoge reaches its conclusion in the final definition, that of the term 'philosophy,' thereby bringing together in one word the living remains of the meanings of all prior determinations. Because philosophy and philosophical language constitutively determine one another, neither can be, or be comprehended, apart from the other. In Hegel's view, although one is doing philosophy from the very first words of the Science of Logic, one can only account for philosophy at the 1,500-page encyclopedia's very end; my claim is that, in the same way, although one is using philosophical language from the very beginning, one can only account for this language at the very end. Philosophical language receives its determinateness from philosophy, and vice versa. As a result, only at the encyclopedia's end can one fully comprehend what one has been doing and saying for the last 1,500 pages.